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According to Douglas J. Hagmann, writing for Northeast Intelligence Network, a "federal intelligence source" revealed that "high-level discussions between top lawmakers and agency heads are 'exploring the application of the Patriot Act against any right-wing individual or group that poses a danger to government operations.'”
The "source" reported in an interview on March 26 that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have been called in to “actively investigate incidents of violence and threats” made to at least ten Democrats and one Republican lawmaker since Sunday.
According to this source, “a ‘watch list’ has already been created that specifically names and turns their focus on various pro-life and tea-party organizations and individuals who are considered a threat to domestic security, continuity of government operations, and to the lives of lawmakers and their families.”
Whether or not Congress people were subjected to taunting and racial slurs, bricks or bullets penetrating their office windows, or having a sibling's gas line cut is not the issue I wish to examine here. The issue is poetic justice.
While any anonymous "source" quoted in media should be taken with a grain of salt, I hope this one is credible because the tea partiers deserve the same treatment that true libertarians and progressives were subjected to during the eight years of the Bush administration. Remember when people were arrested for wearing objectionable tee shirts, or removed for having anti-war bumper stickers in the parking lot at Bush rallies? Remember when crowds were herded into free speech zones behind chain link fences and barbed wire? Now it is your turn to experience oppression, right-wingers, conservatives, Republicans, tea baggers, or whatever you want to call yourselves.
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Where were the tea partiers when the Bush administration was shredding our constitution? Where were they when Bush was spending billions on unnecessary wars? Where were they when Bush was running up a deficit by giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas? Where were they when Bush was mortgaging our future to China? Where were they when Bush was creating a torture state to deal with a fake war on terror?
A lot of the tea baggers were probably cheer-leading the entire mess on. They were the ones calling anti-war activists “terrorist sympathizers.” They were calling 911 truthers “conspiracy freaks.” They were calling anyone who questioned Bush’s tax breaks to corporations and the ultra-rich “communists.” And they would not get their butts off the couch, turn off Fox News and do anything to stop the Bush administration from moving the U.S. a few steps closer to a corporate fascist state.
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and non citizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs."
So what is different now that Barack Obama is the President? What finally made the former cheerleaders of the war, the ones who ignored reckless spending, ignored unconstitutional laws, ignored the deregulation and tax cuts that put trillions into the pockets of Wall Street bankers, while jobs were getting shipped overseas? What turned the passive couch potatoes into tea party activists and motivated them to protest with eloquently worded signs expressing outrage at the direction this country has been moving in for the past 10 or 30 years?
When Obama took office, the deficit was already at $1.2 trillion. Obama's "big" spending increased it by roughly $600 billion to $1.8 trillion. While that is a lot of money, keep in mind that the Obama administration had to finance the military budget and the TARP bailout that were begun under the Bush administration, as well as new domestic spending programs such as the recovery act. Yet the tea partiers have this new found concern with fiscal responsibility.
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The dreaded "socialist" government takeover and regulation of private enterprises simply did not occur. Bailing out banks and industries with tax dollars, with little or no new regulation, yet allowing the same CEOs to remain in control of the companies they nearly bankrupted while continuing to collect huge bonuses is not a government takeover. The impending catastrophe of "socialized medicine" was little more than a gift to the health insurance industry. While forcing some of those who are uninsured to buy private health insurance without offering a competing public option may not be a great policy, that did not force anyone who is already insured to change their plans, face "death panels" or abort their babies.
Letting industries dictate policy with unlimited campaign funding and more than four lobbyists for every congressperson, letting Wall St. bankers buy congress, occupying foreign countries and controlling their natural resources, the national ID card, the corporatization of the media in the U.S. to the point where it is nothing more than the propaganda arm of corporate America, and racking up an enormous debt with communist China were things that began with Republican administrations.
While Obama continues many of the same policies of his predecessors and is by no means a true progressive or even a liberal, one difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is throwing a few bones to middle class consumers in America by trying reign in some of the worst corporate abuses. The other difference is far more obvious - there’s a black man in the white house!
So now the tea partiers scream about a health bill that is nothing more than another handout to corporate America, but is a pittance compared to how much money the Bush administration spent on unnecessary wars and allowed ultra-rich individuals and corporations to withhold from the treasury. Now they scream about the same laws that they were silent about for eight years, which were enacted while Bush was in office.
Tea partiers now can reap what they have helped to sow. True libertarians and progressives are the ones that tried to stop this mess while it was happening. They were the ones protesting against the wars before they began and trying to wake Americans up to the infringements on their constitutional rights and the rule of law. Right-wing tea baggers are the ones that cheered it on and silenced any dissent.
Have fun in the America you helped create. Enjoy the McCain-Lieberman Police State Act (S. 3081: Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010). Hopefully the government will lock up all of the racists, hypocrites and arm chair warriors that are part of the tea party movement the minute they step out of line.
You've earned it. Happy tea-partying!
Comments
Good one, Greg! While not all the tea partiers are racist idiots, they are being driven out of the movement by the racist idiots, & the astroturfers & GOP hacks sent there to do their master's bidding.
It's ironic that the whole teabag movement was introduced by a wealthy commodities trader & CNBC analyst in Chicago named Rick Santelli in Feb. 2009. (Google it.) It was astroturf to begin with & run by wealthy corporatists. And Santelli would have been an anti-American 'Tory' back in the days of the Boston Tea Party.
It's true, these honky teabag oldsters were laying in their La-Z-Boys, watching Fox News & collecting Social Security & making appts with their Medicare-paid doctors while raging against welfare & applauding torture & jail for non-whites until a black guy had the audacity of hope to get legally elected president. I recall in 2000 when conservatives told me to 'Get over it' after Bush was illegally made president by the Supreme Court. That's my advice to them now.
I suspect that Hagmann is a disinformationist and instigator trying to keep the teabaggers as riled up as possible. Google turns up little about him or his group.
Riling up the teabaggers might seem unnecessary, but they are the way the are because various media people have been throwing them raw meat for decades. If I've guessed right about Hagman, he's just one player in the big, non-centralized, free lance hysteria-marketing culture. Worldnett Daily features his stuff, and he seems to run a small time private eye operation.
wwwDOThagmannpiDOTcom/
No matter how much real money people come up with to build their state the way they want the government can just print up fake money and get their way.
Maybe this will help make the danger of fiat money clear.
Imagine you and me are setting across from each other. We create enough money to represent all of the world's wealth. Each one of us has one SUPER Dollar in front of him.
You own half of everything and so do I.
I'm the government though. I get bribed into creating a Central Bank.
You're not doing what I want you to be doing so I print up myself eight more SUPER Dollars to manipulate you with.
All of a sudden your SUPER Dollar only represents one tenth of the wealth of the world!
That isn't the only thing though. You need to get busy and get to work because YOU'VE BEEN STIFFED with the bill for the money I PRINTED UP to get YOU TO DO what I WANTED.
That to me represents what has been happening to the economy, and us, and why so many of our occupations just can't keep up.
These are the rantings of an Obama shill in disguise. If, as you complain, the Tea Partiers were inattentive to all the ills from the Bush years that you find so outrageous and now have awaken and are joining you in protest, then you should be welcoming them with open arms to the struggle. Instead, you are happy to use your perceived abusive measures against them. Stalin would have been proud of you. Of course, those tea partiers deserve it. After all, they flew a bunch of planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Oh, wait, that was someone else.
Interesting article -- Be ready, there's more to come! Unfortunately, there's a bunch of insane folks out there who have been allowed to carry GUNS INTO PUBLIC PLACES here in Georgia! Whatever happened to The Art of Politics? It's beginning to resemble the WILD, WILD WEST of yester-year!
Wow, what a load of misinformation here!
The first modern day resurgence of the Tea Parties took place on December 16th 2007, were primarily opposed to Bush & Co, and hed as one of the primary violations, the despicable PATRIOT Act. I know, because I was there. This was well before Santelli had his now-famous rant, and Glenn Beck was still calling us "terrorists."
Greg Patin wrote:
"So what is different now that Barack Obama is the President? What finally made the former cheerleaders of the war, the ones who ignored reckless spending, ignored unconstitutional laws, ignored the deregulation and tax cuts that put trillions into the pockets of Wall Street bankers, while jobs were getting shipped overseas? What turned the passive couch potatoes into tea party activists and motivated them to protest with eloquently worded signs expressing outrage at the direction this country has been moving in for the past 10 or 30 years?"
Their guy is out, your guy is in.
Red team, blue team.
It's why your guys are now cheering the wars from the bleachers and more than happy to see your fellow citizens rounded up and rendered.
Well, some of us opposed all of this from the start: we oppose you, we opposed the neo-cons and Bush and we'll keep on opposing, until the structure of government once again works under and respects the constitution.
Assination Imagery
You know what Sarah Palin believes:
"Every communist must grasp the truth,
political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Oh wait it's not Sarah who said that
I confused her with Chairman Mao.
Sarah uses the same exact rhetoric as Chairman Mao.
She pushes assination imagery by using the power of suggestion to:
"Don't Retreat, Instead RELOAD!"
Many people are still fooled by the left/right paradigm and/or haven't woken up yet. Republicans = Democrats. Vote them ALL out.
Please vote NO to S 3081 Enemy, Belligerent, interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010.
Enemy, Belligerent, interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010 introduced in the U.S. Senate is an attempt to assert that an interrogation squad established by the President of the United States of America is consistent with and satisfies the requirement of a competent tribunal required for those individuals not classified under article 4 of the Geneva convention relative to the treatment of prisoners of war done at Geneva August 12 1949 (6 UST 3316). Furthermore, Sect (5) is an attempt to assert, that during times of hostilities against the US, to include acts of terrorism, and/or support of such acts, the international law of war would supersede and subordinate the rights of citizens of the United States granted by US Constitution of the United States of America. By linking a Presidential interrogation squad, AKA High – Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HVDIG), to th
), to that of a competent tribunal establish in GC III ART 5 coupled with the denial of due process and trial for those US citizens determined to be Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents (UPEB) into this law would put Americans at the mercy of world law.
Sect 2 (a) postulates that a War crime, AKA violation of a law of war, or suspension of , would result in a Citizen of the United States, who is being detained under Article III, AKA under effective control of the United States, being removed and placed in Military custody. Hence, the mire probability of a war crime would allow the executive branch to extract and hold indefinitely {sect 5, sect 2 (b)} without due process and trial, Reducing an individual’s status from that of United States citizen to that of war criminal
Glen Bradley, you're partially right. There was indeed a Ron Paul Tea Party in Dec. of 2007, but there was also an anti-war peace and freedom march on Oct, 27, 2007 at the Boston Common that was called the Boston Tea Party Freedom Rally. They received limited media attention and were not the astroturf affairs most of the current tea party groups are.
The attendees at these early rallies were not, for the most part, the same people who were stirred into action by Santelli's rant on CNBC. Paul's supporters are not, by and large, racists, nor are they usually stupid, and I have heard they are being hounded out of the current GOP-Fox-FreedomWorks tea party movement, so the two groups are similar only in name.
Bias, just because I agree with a couple of the things the tea partiers advocate doesn't mean I'm going to line up with a bunch of ignorant racists. The Ron Paul tea partiers are fine, as I noted above; the astroturf teabaggers are mainly dumb rednecks.
Greg,
What you fail to realize is that many of the groups being "targeted" by this are the same libertarian (not to be confused with Libertarian) non-partisans citizens who also rallied during the bush years.
RS Janes, actually, the Tea Party inception came well before Rick.
The first time I became aware of it was pre primary 2008 when it was used as a term for rallies where more than one non partisan group gathered for the same cause.
The Tea Party Patriots spawned off of that.
The Tea Party Express was actually created by Sal Russo who is highly involved in running Republican Campaigns from behind the scenes and the Express is funded by a GOP PAC called "Our Country Deserves Better." This is the GOP Teajacking.
The Express has nothing to do with the Patriot Movement to clean up Congress by utilizing our numbers to vote.
Examiner is a sham site, I hope google buries this crap
Buddaroll, what you say is true, but did you read my post of March 29th? I said that the early Ron Paul tea party's happened in 2007.
Some of the targeting of certain tea partiers is, I understand, being done by GOP operatives to rid the movement of anyone who won't support Republicans and the corporate agenda. They are trying desperately to make the tea party movement an arm of the GOP, as you know. These people are snakes.
Blomo, is the Examiner a sham because its presents opinions with which you don't agree? And I have no idea what you're talking about with Google 'burying' the site. Do you know what you're talking about?
I'm not a tea-partier but I sympathise with them just as I sypathised with the people thrown in rat-infested store rooms for rallying against the war in New York during Bush visits. Anything that makes the government bigger is wrong and to wish evil big govt whether it be under bush or obumba is completely wrong. I swore an oath in 2001 that if I were ever on a jury where evidence was gathered through the use of the patriot act, I would vote not-guilty even if the person on trial was the worste kind of bisectual satinist sacrificing children to his heathen cockroach. The patriot act is that evil.
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