On Memorial Day.

There are 1,541 American men buried in Suresnes, France. In the cemetery at Meusse-Argonne, 14,246. At St. Mihiel, there are 4,153, and in Lorraine lie 10,489 of our military dead.

There are others in France: in Somme, in the Rhone valley, in Aisne-Marne and in Brittany, all hallowed ground where the mortal remains of fathers, sons and husbands sent by their countrymen to defend freedom, lie under stark, white crosses, a silent testament to the goodness and greatness of the United States of America.

They died in Sicily - almost 8,000 are buried there, and in Florence over 4,400; men who fought to liberate Italy from the tyranny of fascism. And there are more than 5,000 American dead in Luxembourg.

At Henri-Chapelle lie the bodies of 7,992; in Ardennes, 5,329, and to end this incomplete list, 528 Americans are buried where they fell – in Flanders fields, where poppies grow. These three cemeteries are in Belgium.

All are in Europe. I have not even touched upon the war in the Pacific. To do so would be almost incomprehensible; in total, American military deaths during World War II alone numbered over 400,000.

Let the numbers wash over you – don’t permit yourself to be so overwhelmed that they become meaningless. Think hard, concentrate on the magnitude of the sacrifice, feel the pain of so many tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands - of mothers who watched their little boys answer the call to defend freedom everywhere – because that’s what Americans do. And make no mistake, no matter what their age, to those mothers they were all just little boys.

Close your eyes for a few moments and think about these things, and you will find when you open them that Memorial Day will mean something just a little different than it did before.

There are almost no words to describe the debt we owe to those men and women who gave their last full measure of devotion to the cause of liberty, a debt that is owed by free men and women everywhere, because without the armed forces of the United States, there would be freedom nowhere.

Reflect on the magnitude of America’s sacrifice to the world. We were not fighting for our own liberation – we were fighting for others bound to us by a single tie: a belief that freedom and liberty are the natural state of man, and that tyranny is to be fought and defeated no matter the cost.

We can honor them in no greater way than to dedicate ourselves to those principles. We can never forget them, we can never lose our way, and we can never permit anyone to tell us we are the problem, not the solution.

We must condemn and reject those who suggest it, whether the calumny be uttered by a foreign potentate or, sadly and inexplicably, a member of our own government.

And above all, we must never, never apologize for America’s role in the world, and we must vow to never let freedom slip through our fingers. To do so not only cheapens the lives of those we honor today, it condemns them to the pure hell of having died in vain.

The Staten Island CONSERVATIVE Party?

The Staten Island Conservative Party has accelerated its rush to irrelevance with its Executive Committee’s endorsement of a liberal Democrat in the race for New York's 13th Congressional District. In a bizarre move eerily similar to the Republican Executive Committee's decision to endorse the non-candidacy of Vito Fossella, it proves once again that principle has very little to do with the "good ol' boy" decision-making process.

How any party that calls itself "Conservative" could endorse the continued majority status of a Democratic Congress that is bankrupting our country, trampling our individual liberties, crushing private enterprise and expanding the powers of the federal government far beyond ANY interpretation of the Constitution, is a complete and utter mystery. The Staten Island Conservative Party Executive Committee has shown that they are not forward-thinking individuals interested in conservative principles and values, but rather are the sad, old remnants of an incestuous club.

Statement's like Carmine Ragucci's "he can deliver for the district" sound more like the acceptance of a Tammany-era bribe than political astuteness, and represents the most reprehensible sort of political quid pro quo. The Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress, of which Rep. McMahon is part, are stealing the wealth of America, and America's children, and America's grandchildren, and giving it to their disciples to distribute in return for endorsements and votes. This represents “crony governance” more at home in a banana republic than the United States, and bears little resemblance to the representative republic founded by our forefathers over 200 years ago.

In the ossified thinking of Staten Island Conservative leadership, pork trumps principle every time.

Though he does so roughly 90% of the time, Representative McMahon is to be commended for not voting in complete lockstep with Nancy Pelosi. However, he unfortunately lacks the clout to either change or derail any draconian legislation. If voting against his party’s leadership is merely symbolic and cannot change the outcome of the Obama administration’s far-left legislative agenda, he may “get it,” as Mr. Ragucci has said, but has little to show for it except pork-barrel projects funded with money pinched from the pockets of taxpayers, stolen from the treasury or borrowed from future generations of Americans.

I would urge any and all members of this "party" who are rightly disgusted by the decision of your Executive Committee to act on the courage of your convictions and denounce this disgraceful endorsement.

What It Means To Be a Democrat Today...

It means that in a joint session of Congress, you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and bash the Governor and the citizens of one of your states - a state under attack from that same foreign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and lecture you about putting the interests of foreign criminals ahead of the interests of citizens of the United States. A man whose own country has some of the strictest immigration laws in the world - which are methodically and brutally enforced. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and mischaracterize a law that protects the sovereignty of the United States, in essence telling you that your borders no longer exist, and therefore, your country is no longer a sovereign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

We will remember in November.

We will remember this sickening image.

Gotta Love Governor Christie...

Free Speech In the Crosshairs

Do you remember what it was like before the internet and talk radio and Fox News?

Do you remember the suffocating cocoon in which we felt wrapped and trapped, desperate for someone, anyone, to simply tell the unspun truth about the direction in which our country was headed? To express an understanding of the love we felt for a proud America who need not apologize to any nation or people, unashamed of its independence, vitality and free markets?

The Obama Administration remembers those days; so does the Left; so does the Mainstream Media.

They long for those times – times when they could empower the march to Marxism on a daily basis, news cycle after news cycle after news cycle. They are desperate to return to that era of control over the shaping of the political agenda, and as their electoral prospects dim, their anxiety grows.

The Tea Party Movement is their worst nightmare.

It is becoming a mighty river of public opinion and voting trends, flowing from the confluence of talk radio, cable news and the internet; it is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Heritage.org writ large; it is, indeed, the awakening of the sleeping giant . It is the message of conservatism gone viral; it is a longing to return to constitutional principles that is sweeping that portion of the populace that reveres and believes in the documents that are the foundation of this great country.

The Tea Party Movement empowers people who wish to halt the “fundamental change” being wrought upon this nation. Fundamental change? Why would any person who believes in the sanctity of human life and liberty want to fundamentally change a nation that has done more good for more people than any country in the history of the world?

Because of these things: the internet, talk radio, Fox News and Tea Party rallies, the silent majority now has a voice and feels empowered to push back. Worse for the left, it appears that we don’t merely wish to keep the statists in check – we mean to make fundamental changes to our government by disabusing it of the insane "entitlement-as-a-right" atmosphere that has pervaded Washington since the sixties.

And so, for the march to Marxism to continue, we must be stopped.

A seed was planted back in the ‘90s, when Bill Clinton tried to lay the impetus for Oklahoma City bombing at the feet of Rush Limbaugh, a seed which has been fertilized and watered by Democrats, the mainstream media and the Left countless times over the years.

It was nurtured again last week by Mayor Bloomberg, whose first instinct was that the as-yet-unidentified Times Square bomber was someone who was unhappy with the recently-passed health care legislation - code words for a disgruntled Tea Partier.

Then a few days ago at a graduation ceremony, President Obama said, “Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter...[snip]...Information becomes a distraction, a diversion...”

Information a distraction?

These are not isolated events; these are puzzle pieces which the Left hopes to fit together, and I can guarantee you that we will not like the picture that emerges after it is assembled.

Right now, the Tea Party movement stands atop a three-legged stool that is comprised of talk radio, cable television, and the internet. From this vantage point, at rallies throughout the country, grassroots groups espouse an obedience to the Constitution that is anathema to this Democratic Congress and their radical agenda – but all attempts to collapse this stool have thus far failed.

The collective wheels of the Left continue to spin, however, and therein lie my worst fears.

There is one thing which will give the Left, championed, as it is, by this Democratic Congress and the media, a shot to silence once again the silent majority: a major domestic terrorist attack that can be hung around the neck of the Tea Party movement.

Forget, for a moment, that a single kook with deranged purpose can erupt within ANY ideology – that truth that will be ignored. The sad truth is that the agenda of the Left is advanced by any act of violence that can plausibly be connected to an American that has expressed or implied Tea Party connections.

And if that happens – watch out.

Expect the Left to drag out the Fairness Doctrine, and use it as a cudgel to beat conservative voices into silence. ALL conservatives will be blamed for the attack, even humble bloggers, and all will be condemned as the enablers, the instigators, the progenitors of a deranged, right-wing monster.

They will shout that under such circumstances political candidates must disavow the Tea Party movement at every turn, that rallies must cease – or even be outlawed as an incitement to violence – and that mainstream America is obligated to turn away from the conservative principles in which we so passionately believe.

Say goodbye to Limbaugh, Levin, Malkin, Krauthammer and the rest if the Left finally gets the inaccurate and disingenuous "hate speech" moniker to stick.

To ensure that a movement such as ours will not rise again, they will systematically cut off every leg of the stool, every voice of the movement, and they will do it through legislation or simply by fiat. All they need is one kook.

My fear is that they, the Left, will provide him.

Already, one outlier has exhorted “infiltration” of the Tea Party movement to discredit it – but that was a single nut without a real plan, and without the brains to keep his intentions secret. There are other, smarter and more dangerous individuals out there, to whom a human life – or a hundred, or a thousand – is a small price to pay to quash a Constitutional movement that threatens to unravel decades of planning for "fundamental change."

The disturbed individual that tried to exhort his followers to infiltrate and discredit the April 15th Tea Party events with racist and violent signs became neutralized when a bright light was shone on his shadowy plot. That one was easy. The next one might not be.

The next one may carefully infiltrate the movement, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary Americans at rallies, may carry the appropriate signs, talk the talk, walk the walk - and then strike. His Tea Party bona fides will appear to be impeccable, but his heart will be filled with duplicity, hatred and death.

Be vigilant. Stay strong. And if, God forbid, such a thing were to happen, stand firm in your commitment to our country, our flag, our Constitution and the goodness of America. We cannot let the actions of a madman, whatever his motivations, be the excuse this Administration is seeking to marginalize - and worse, criminalize - this movement of free Americans.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Fair To Whom, Mr. President?

It’s becoming abundantly clear, and incredibly sad, that the sympathies and concerns of the President of the United States far too often lie with our enemies.

Witness his incredible statements regarding the self-defense measures recently passed by the duly-elected legislature of the state of Arizona. The day after the measure was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer (who would have deserved impeachment had she not signed it) the President said that the law “threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.”

It seems to me odd that the man sworn to protect and defend our nation has such an magnanimous sense of fairness when it comes to criminals and enemies, but seems little concerned with the plight of the good citizens of Arizona.

In making this statement, he slanders, seemingly without concern or even an awareness that he is doing so, the peace officers of an entire state. In a clearly-worded sixteen page bill, which is much more restrictive in its structure than the law which guides federal agents in the same circumstances, the officers are instructed that they may not stop anyone without clear probable cause, and then must have reason to believe that the person is undocumented before even asking for proof of citizenship.

It is a cumbersome two-step burden, neither of which federal agents would be forced to bear - should they actually be sent to the border in sufficient numbers to get the job done.

Apparently, to our President, peace officers are not to be trusted with these basic instructions, and so, employing a twisted and misguided logic, he stands in defense of the lawbreaker and smears the defenders of peaceful citizens.

The new law expressly states that race or ethnicity cannot be the sole reason for stopping a person and questioning the legality of his presence here, yet the President demagogues the law as racial profiling, and ponders a court challenge. Any sane American must wonder exactly whose side he is on.

Mr. President, the federal government was not instituted to rule over the populace, it was instituted to govern by the consent of the governed. Its primary purpose is to protect its citizenry, not to uphold the mythical “rights” of foreign nationals who sneak onto our soil, knowing that the instant they do they are here in violation of federal law.

When the principle raison d’etre for the federal government is security, and a fundamental requirement of security is the defense of our borders, federal agents need no warrant or probable cause to stop and search, or demand documentation from, anyone entering the country. Yet the Arizona law insists upon it, making it less prone to abuse than the federal law.

But never let it be said that common sense plays a role in this administration.

Tell me, sir, what the good people of the state of Arizona are to think when their neighbors are murdered or kidnapped by what are essentially foreign invaders, while their federal government cannot take time out from systematically encroaching on their individual liberties to perform the most basic function of a government?

The President does this time and time again – and now we have come to expect it from him. His sense of fairness seems to have been seriously warped by his leftist upbringing and influences, as he continues to heap indignity upon indignity on the citizens of his own nation during this most divisive Presidential term in the history of our United States.

I am struck by the number of Americans that now look upon Barack Obama as a PINO: President In Name Only. For many of us, his brief time in office has been an almost unbearable litany of apologies and appeasement coupled with harangues against decent American citizens who dare to speak out against him or his radical Congress.

The President has called the Arizona law “misguided” and “irresponsible.” One can only wonder when he will deliver the lecture on responsibility to those who purchased homes they couldn’t afford with mortgages they were unable to pay. But that’s for a different discussion.

It sickens me to suspect that the President of the United States does not have the best interest of the citizens he has sworn to defend at heart - but what else are we to think?

Do you want to know what sickens me even more? Thinking of the men who, to protect our sovereignty, gave their last full measure of devotion at Bunker Hill, Yorktown and on filthy prison ships anchored in the East River; at Gettysburg and Sharpsburg and in Andersonville prison; on the decks of the Maine and on San Juan Hill; in the Ardennes Forest and at Verdun; on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, in Bastogne, in Sicily, on Okinawa, in Leyte Gulf; in Inchon and Seoul, at Ia Drang, the Mekong Delta and in pestilent, stinking pits in Hanoi; on dusty roadsides in Iraq and on bleak mountains in Afghanistan and in countless other slices of hell around the globe.

Dead because they believed in this nation and its Constitution; dead so that they would endure. They believed, and we believe, in the goodness of America and the greatness of America, and before this is over we will have set things right again or we will go to our graves trying.

Letter to the SI Advance

April 4, 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen;

When I turned to your Sunday Perspective page and read the hit piece on the Tea Party movement, I could only sit in stunned silence.

Whatever possessed those of you who make these decisions to run such a horrible, demeaning and FALSE story? Your concern for responsible journalism has been shown, in one simple stroke, to be non-existent - and I am a person that has defended your newspaper time and time again.

Many of you know many of us in the Staten Island Tea Party - does this race-baiting drivel reflect your opinion of us? You have covered our events; you have seen the folks who participate: they are your relatives, neighbors and friends. They are the constituents of our elected officials. We are invited to the offices of our Congressman and Councilmembers to discuss policy and politics. We have been invited to YOUR offices to discuss political matters. We are invited to political clubs from all over the island to discuss the meaning of the Tea Party movement in America. We are well-received wherever we go, and discuss issues of the day in a reasonable and knowledgeable fashion.

Do we look and sound like racists to you?

Colbert King's observations are grounded in NO reality - the essay is a poorly-reasoned mess of race-baiting and inaccuracies. The author makes fantastic connections between us and Southern racists from fifty years ago, and yet your screaming headline purports it to be the real, eye-opening truth.

He states as fact that "some shouted racial and homophobic epithets at members of Congress," yet not one single shred of evidence exists to support these charges. Then, further on, he writes that because many have pointed out that the charges were patently untrue and probably hurled for political reasons, the Tea Party movement is suddenly akin to the 60's Klansman who accused the "nigras" of bombing themselves to attract attention.

Apparently, Colbert King believes that we should listen to these outright lies and smears and just sit down and shut up? So Colbert King believes that speaking up to defend ourselves, to point out that these accusations are false, somehow proves that we are no better than the Ku Klux Klan?

What could have possessed you to print this calumny? You have smeared thousands of your own readers. You have fed into this nonsense that we are racist, homophobic extremists (millions of us!), and what most upsets me is that you all know better - at least, those of you that were journalistically responsible enough to get to know us.

My disappointment knows no bounds. At every turn since the inception of the Staten Island Tea Party one year ago, my response to verbal attacks on your newspaper and your reporters is to say that, with few and minor exceptions, you have been fair and balanced with us. And now this travesty - a smear on good and patriotic Staten Islanders whose sole crime is that they believe in individual liberties for all, and that those liberties are being threatened by a bloated federal bureaucracy. Somehow, this equates to racism.

Yes, the piece was in the Perspective section, and yes, it is the opinion of the author; but try as I might I cannot find a disclaimer on the part of the Staten Island Advance. To a man, you should be ashamed of yourselves for printing this dangerous and false libel.

Frank Santarpia
The Staten Island Tea Party

The Argument of Tyrants.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.”

Those familiar with this quotation from William Pitt the Younger, who was the British Prime Minister around the time our Founding Fathers were penning the Constitution, might shake their heads sadly when contemplating the uncanny relevance of his words some 227 years after they were delivered in a speech to Parliament.

It would have been apt had he spoken them in the United States Congress in 2010.

After forcing us to witness the parade of unfortunate victims of medical insurance horror stories, used so despicably by Democrats as political props, we are being cajoled into believing that the intrusion of the federal government into our health care system is a “necessity.”

Now, go ahead and read the quote again.

How stupid do they suppose us to be? The current administration, with the help of its adoring media, harangues us daily with the necessity of dealing with the “crisis” of uninsured Americans. Of course, their big-government preferences for dealing with any problem, large or small, triggers a huge and inevitably malformed growth on the body politic – one with a trillion dollar price tag, a price tag the United States can ill afford in this time of the one true crisis: a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Lost in the wailing and hysteria during this latest power-grab by an Administration of elitists so smug as to believe that we, the unwashed masses, cannot possibly merit the freedom to pursue life, liberty, property and happiness without their guidance and direction, is the fact that the American free-market system would make this problem disappear if left to its own devices.

Simply put, markets work much better than manipulation.

If freed of the heavy hand of mandates and regulation, and if they wish to survive, health insurance companies would by necessity be more responsive to the needs of health consumers - in the same manner as an automobile manufacturer, or indeed, an automobile insurance company. They would be forced by consumer demand to be sensitive to the price and quality of the goods and services they provide to their customers.

All the things that free-market companies do to win and keep customers, coupled with common sense reforms including tort reform, competition across state lines and the lifting of the ridiculous anti-competitive mandates, would certainly result in lower premiums and hence, more coverage for more Americans.

But that does not feather in with the goals of this administration and the Democratic majority in Congress; goals which include dramatically expanding the power of the government over every aspect of our lives.

And so it has come to pass that those of us who oppose government-run health care because we find the abridgement of our individual liberties to be a crushing oppression are labeled as heartless.

Soon, we will be labeled as dangerous.

American men and women have died beneath a flag of stars and stripes for over 200 years, not for kings or presidents, but for the ideals represented by that flag – the recognition that the natural state of man on earth is freedom, and that no government has may impinge upon that freedom under any guise, including that of a perceived “necessity.”

Necessity does not give anyone a “right” to anything, a fact often obscured in debates such as this.

The rights given to us, according to the Declaration of Independence, by “nature and nature’s God” include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, take notice, are rights to action, not rights to the fulfillment of needs or desires.

Rights cannot impose obligations upon other people, except the obligation to leave us to pursue our own interests unimpeded. Basically, we have the right to be left alone, so that free from obstructions, we can work for what we want, need and desire.

My right to life does not oblige my neighbor to feed and clothe me or my family – it merely gives me the right, no matter how hard the struggle may be, to feed and clothe my family by the sweat of my own brow.

My right to liberty ensures that I may act for my own benefit, keep the fruits of my labor, and that my neighbor – or my government – may not steal them from me. Conversely, I have no right or claim to the actions or property of another.

And finally, I have the right to pursue happiness, but may make no claim on others to provide me with it. If a “right” were to impose a duty upon another, it would be a violation of that person’s basic rights; we would become a society of master and slave.

When something is given for nothing it is charity; let’s not be afraid to call it what it is. Even if such charity is provided by the government, they must confiscate the wealth of others to do so, and so within the framework of our moral code in the United States, charity is not a right – no matter how much those in Congress wish to portray it that way.

Our country of free men and women has been wounded by this incursion into our liberties, and so this is a time for action; we have an obligation to our forebears, ourselves and our posterity. We’ve been asleep for far too long; we need to get up, get educated and vow to educate others. We must pledge to teach our children that entitlement programs such as the one being rammed down our throats are a curse, and in the long run a tool of enslavement.

Like those brave men and women of colonial America, we need to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of liberty – because without freedom, without our rights, what do we really have?

We will rally again my friends, on April the 15th. We will use our strong hearts and our strong voices to tell this government that we will not be cowed, that we will never give up, and that we will put this right again.

And finally, I leave you with the final, breathtaking words of William Pitt, uttered on his deathbed in 1806. I would ask you to never forget them. I know I won't.

“My country! Oh my country! How I love my country.”

A Statement by the Staten Island Tea Party

With the passage of the health care reform bill, the United States Congress took an extraordinarily reckless first step on the path to socialized medicine, and set the stage for a federal takeover of 1/6^th of the American economy.

In doing so, Democrats in Congress who voted for this bill showed their contempt for the public by ignoring the wishes of the majority of the American people, who told them not only with the election of Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but in poll after poll, that this bill was too large in scope, too intrusive on our personal liberties, and simply too expensive.

Instead of achieving the noble goal of bringing affordable health insurance to additional millions of Americans through the application of traditional American ideals, such as free markets, innovative thinking and competition, Democrats have signaled a new era in America - an era in which United States citizens will find themselves dependent for their very lives upon government agencies and bureaucrats to a degree never before seen in the history of this great country.

This bill will ultimately result in the degradation of the greatest healthcare system in the world, and eventually make it impossible for private insurers to remain viable. Its goal is to eventually saddle us with the single-payer system President Obama has so often said he believes in and supports, and yet has been a failure wherever in the world it is implemented.

This bill is a power grab that has only a passing acquaintance with the rule of law, little to do with health care, and everything to do with an expansion of the reach of the federal government into our lives far beyond those powers enumerated by the United States Constitution.

This bill will add a trillion dollar entitlement to an economy that is already groaning under the weight of extraordinary debt - a debt so large that is almost impossible for us to grasp, incurred by massive spending without regard to the burden it will place on American taxpayers for generations to come. This unprecedented debt had put our credit rating at risk even before the passage of this bill, and so we are now put in much greater, imminently catastrophic, fiscal jeopardy.

This bill mandates that every person born in the United States must purchase insurance under the threat of fine, imprisonment, or both. Those who write and pass such laws cannot be said to truly understand the concept of individual liberties, and it seems incredible to think that they can in fact appreciate what it is to be free – indeed, the likelihood is that they no longer care.

This bill was purchased with backroom bribes and deals that would put any businessman, banker or broker behind bars for the rest of his natural life, and this despicable display causes the American people ask themselves if they want any laws to be created under such circumstances. The answer to that question is most obviously no; yet, deaf to the will of the people, Democrats will soon make this horribly flawed legislation the law of the land.

This bill, at the moment it is signed by the President, will signal the beginning of the end of the greatest health care system in the world, and it will show us the true and ugly face of the change that our President promised us as a candidate. Whatever we thought that might be, it has turned out to be a radical shift in the relationship of the government to the people. With arrogance and disregard for our Constitutionally-mandated liberties, these elitists are telling us once again that they know better than we how to run every aspect of our own lives.

In November of this year, we will see if this is indeed the change that voters wanted or expected.

America’s Slow Descent Into Insanity: Part 13,457

The incident eventually came to be known as “The Boston Massacre.” It happened on March 5th of 1770, and history buffs will remember that the British officers and soldiers charged with murder in that case were defended in court by nascent Founding Father John Adams.

Mr. Adams, later to become our second President, was vilified by fellow Bostonians for his spirited defense - which was ultimately successful for 6 of the 8 accused. Naturally, anyone defending the despised “lobster-backs” would become unpopular in colonial bean-town, and indeed Adams’ law practice suffered badly after the trial. Still, Adams considered his legal performance to be "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country."

How ironic that those who chose to defend Gitmo terrorists called themselves “The John Adams Project,” since what they have done goes far beyond mere "defense." John Adams may have been many things, but traitor was not one of them.

Yes, I know that branding these attorneys as anything less than noble is to incur a firestorm of criticism from the left: I’m beyond caring. When our Congress can use stealth, manipulation, fraud and illegal rules to create new law by fiat, of what importance is a bit of inelegant language?

The men who defended the Gitmo terrorists acted in a manner that I consider to be traitorous, and that they are now part of Obama’s Holder-led Department of Justice is a travesty of the highest order.

Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the Blind Sheik responsible for the first Trade Center bombing and writer for National Review Online, asks the question: What’s a modern day John Adams to do? He answers:

Why, hire private investigators to take surveillance photos of CIA agents and hand them off to other latter day Adamses, who then showed them to top members of al Qaeda — thereby identifying for the terrorists the agency's interrogators and, potentially, tipping the terrorists off to the locations where the agents' families live. [snip]

Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers, as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act, which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs "of anything connected with the national defense").

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more…[t]o summarize, a cabal of the enemy's volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the "John Adams Project," is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators.

The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.

The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they've evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards... [snip]

In any event, look on the bright side: No matter what happens to this investigation, the Left's lawyers now have photos they can use for the reckoning Holder promised against the Bush administration. Anyone doubt that the Center for Constitutional Rights, among other modern John Adamses, will try to use the photos to buttress its efforts to get some foreign tribunal to charge the CIA and Bush officials with "torture" and other war crimes?

Debra Burlingame writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

We obtained Justice Department accounts of some of those incidents under a Freedom of Information Act request. Examples included an incident in which a lawyer sent his detainee client the transcript of a virulently anti-American speech that compared military physicians to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz, called DOJ lawyers "desk torturers" and suggested that the "abuses carried out by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib . . . could involve the President in the commission of war crimes.

Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp's layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that "we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing" and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with "interviews" of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

Patently despicable – but surprising? Of course not. This is the Obama Administration we’re talking about. And the Eric Holder Department of Justice. Are you shocked to know that 7 of these attorneys are now Holder hires, and are working on, get ready for it...detainee cases? Holder refuses to identify them or their jobs, but it really doesn’t matter.

America’s descent into madness continues, but American outrage grows.

The Left is racing to the finish line now, but to get there they’ll have to come through me – and you.

To the Gallows.

America is slowly being marched to the gallows. Step by agonizing step, this administration and its complicit Congress is leading our country to a crossbeam, a noose and a trapdoor.

It is sometimes surreal to watch, isn't it? I keep thinking that someone will come forward to stop this unnecessary tragedy - after all, it is not being accomplished through stealth or deceit, it is happening in plain sight of the entire world.

The Democratic Party is inexplicably and blindly following its radical President into strange, uncharted, and extra-Constitutional territory. For their part, the Republican Party seems ineffectual, at times even complacent, and in any event often appears too weak and damaged to mount a strong defense. It seems now that only the Tea Party movement, the great silent majority, has any hope of bolstering the opposition to the Obama administration and halting our country's seemingly inevitable slide into oblivion.

Like our founding fathers, we too make an appeal to heaven; but we must do more. We must appeal to the hearts and minds of our neighbors and friends. We can work hard to fix what is becoming broken in America, we can help to right the wrong, we can educate and inform. We can, at least in the short term, use our voices, and finally our vote, to rebuild our great country.

November looms. The last, best chance of America rests with a single election; we will either cast off a Democratic Party that has become blind to the principles that made America great, or we will condemn ourselves to generations of debt and darkness, wherein free Americans will be at first a fond memory, then a distant one, then a relic to be gradually forgotten.

But we can win. We can take the country back - the country for which our fathers fought and bled and died. We can recapture an America that believes in the paramount importance of individual liberties, an America comprised of citizens who recognize and honor the natural rights bestowed upon us by our Creator, and who recognize that NO rights can be conferred upon us by any government. An America of pioneers, entrepreneurs, risk-takers and patriots. An America of men and women who want to work hard and keep what they've earned, and make the best life they can for their families without apology and without guilt.

We want to once again be a country in which the government exists only to ensure a level playing field - not to own and control it.

In November we can smack the Democratic Party - hard, Cagney-style. Once, twice, three times, and keep smacking until they come to their senses and cast off the mantle of hard-left Progressivism that has so damaged both their party and their country - and so angered those who remember what America is supposed to be, and who refuse to forget it.

So let's rouse ourselves, let's use all the strength and will at our disposal. Let's pay attention. Let's vow to make a difference. Let's talk to our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers. Let's support the candidates who support the Constitution.

November seems like a long way off. It is not. Start rolling up your sleeves, because we have much work to do.

Dems speak out on the "nuclear option..."

Our Unsustainable Debt

I am posting an essay by one Joseph Lupo, an executive in the financial industry who is part of our Tea Party staff. Joe is our go-to guy in all matters of fiscal and monetary policy - he writes today of the most recent bit of fiscal insanity:

Congressman McMahon did our country a great disservice this week. Our Congressman yielded to Nancy Pelosi's arm-twisting and voted with other liberal Democrats to increase the federal national debt limit by $1.9 trillion to an astounding $14.3 trillion. This partisan vote demonstrates a complete lack of fiscal responsibility and an utter disregard for the economic and monetary consequences of unrestrained spending.

Our great country is nearly bankrupt. The federal government is exacerbating a painful recession by pursuing economic policies that threaten the stability of our fiscal and monetary system. Instead of encouraging fiscal discipline and curbing the growth of discretionary spending, the Democrats in Congress have chosen to exponentially increase the crushing debt burden that will be inherited by the next generation of Americans. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects that deficits over the next 10 years will total $6 trillion. Where does the insanity stop?

Congressman McMahon should take heed of the current fiscal crises currently spreading throughout the Eurozone. In the past two weeks, the economies of Greece, Spain and Portugal have been severely damaged as international investors increasingly doubt their ability to fund massive budget deficits via the public debt market. As a means of comparison, lets consider the debt-to-gdp ratios of these countries (Debt to GDP ratio measures total outstanding government debt divided by gross domestic product, expressed as a percentage). Portugal is currently projected at 90%, Greece at 125% and Spain at 50%. So where does the United States stand - projected at 94%! This simple statistic should concern every American and our Congressional representatives should be mindful of the tremendous risks associated with uncontrolled government spending.

What typically happens when this ratio eclipses 100%? Many economists argue that debt-to-gdp ratios above this figure represent an economic "point of no return" whereby future gdp growth is permanently constrained by the insurmountable costs associated with debt interest payments and higher interest rates. Should our country permanently sacrifice an ever improving standard of living to fund an insatiable Congressional appetite for tax dollars and a proven proclivity for wasteful spending? Congressman McMahon should understand that no country can spend their way to prosperity.

Sustainable economic growth is fostered through sound fiscal and monetary policies, a low tax burden, free market competition and productivity improvements. However, the Democratic Congress has pursued exactly the opposite. The proof is everywhere - the US dollar is trading at decade lows, gold (an inflation hedge) is near all time highs, liabilities on the Federal Reserve balance sheet total over $2 trillion, unemployment is hovering around 10%, income and capital gains tax rates are going higher, and the federal government is re-regulating every industry from banking to energy.

The federal government has kept interest rates artificially low by essentially becoming the largest securities buyer in the public market. For example, the Federal Reserve now owns more than $1 trillion in mortgage backed securities and agency debt. This intervention has kept mortgage rates and treasury rates low - but these quantitative easing measures are short term and extremely difficult to reverse. Once these programs run their course, our economy will once again be subject to natural market forces and the laws of supply and demand.

Massive federal deficits only make the eventual transition to a fully private market all the more risky. Furthermore, the federal necessity to auction billions of dollars in treasury securities every month essentially "crowds out" private borrowing - that is to say private corporations have increased difficulty competing for capital since the US government is issuing billions of dollars in treasuries and forcing interest rates higher.

In a year that has already seen Dubai essentially declare bankruptcy and the state of California once again contemplating the issuance of IOU's, Congressman McMahon and his Democratic allies should read the tea leaves - stop the uncontrolled spending lest our great country end up like some third world banana republic. The American public is watching.

The State of the President

The President used the occasion of his first State of the Union address to appeal for unity in our country, but true to his proclivity for avoiding blame, he refused to take responsibility for the nation’s great divide.

In the mind of Barack Obama, of course, the culpability lies with the Republicans; when our dear leader speaks of “unity,” what he really means is “acquiescence.” Failure to rubber-stamp his agenda is considered to be the chief component of disharmony in Obama-world - daring to stand firmly in opposition to his schema borders on disloyalty.

Never mind that what is offered by his lapdog Congress is terrible - and terribly radical - legislation. Most of his programs have not been passed, despite a Democrat super-majority in the Senate, simply because the bills are so bad that the American people have risen up to voice their outrage at almost every turn.

It seems that for each budget-busting, job-killing, government-expanding proposal that comes along, the Tea Party movement gains another hundred thousand followers.

So to a man (and woman), Republicans are voting “no,” and when they are not voting “no,” they are voting “HELL no.” Who can blame them? They are accused of blind partisanship, but they are merely listening to their consciences and their constituency – a pretty damned good approach to representative government, I would think.

Voting for a bad bill for the sake of Barack Obama’s definition of unity is just plain wrong, just as it would be wrong to vote for a bad bill to avoid being called an obstructionist.

There was a time, during his campaign and in the early part of his administration, that when the President would make statements that defied credulity, he would get away with it. Not anymore; he exhausted his supply of free passes long ago. He continues to defy credulity, to be sure – but now there is a real-world price that must be paid.

The American public told him as much when given the opportunity in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts.

Until now, Barack Obama has had a career in which he never actually had to perform, as one would if running a business, or a town, or an agency. Every “job” he has ever held involved only two things: offering his opinion and running for the next highest office. Now, however, he’s bumped into highest ceiling of them all – there’s nothing else to run for and he’s got to be, for the first time in his adult life, a decision-maker. And also for the first time in his adult life he’s going to be graded on his performance, not his oratorical and campaign skills.

He’s not getting very high marks - and for all the reasons we knew he wasn’t going to: his upbringing was radical and far left, and when he brought those values to the White House, they turned out to be well beyond the threshold that the majority of the American people could find palatable. He’s surrounded himself as President with the same kinds of people he’s surrounded himself with for his entire life: leftist ideologues with no real-world experience.

Obama is now being held accountable by the world’s media for his every decision, and many of those decisions are turning out to be poorly conceived, illogical and strongly driven by partisan politics. Rather than seek the haven of most Presidents – the political center – his hubris caused him to believe that such a shift was unnecessary.

So we find ourselves trying to make sense of oxymoronic policy statements, which is what we get when instead of actually offering a firm and cogent position, he tries in vain to please both the left and the right.

Epic fail. Witness a strategy (and I use the term loosely) in Afghanistan that has us surging, and then pulling out without regard to the result of the surge, a policy I like to call belli interruptus. This is no way to govern, and the people of the United States know it; some admit it more readily than others, but the realization is certainly seeping into the broader American consciousness – Chris Matthews notwithstanding.

Decision-making for the most powerful country in the world cannot be done Chinese-takeout-menu style. One from Column A and one from Column B just isn’t getting it done, and not surprisingly we find ourselves hungry for a new policy a few hours later.

Bit by bit, like a mosaic, a picture of this Administration is slowly coalescing, and it is not a pretty one. Incompetence abounds, sometime on a scale so huge (think Napolitano, Geithner and Holder) that we peer intently at the facts in order to discern some master plan so incredibly intricate that we mere mortals cannot discern it.

But that’s not it, is it? It is just plain incompetence. So when the President calls for a “change in tone,” by which he means that everyone must sing in his key, I have to say no, I don’t think so, Mr. President.

You’re not good for America, and unless you have an epiphany of the highest order, you never will be. And I’ll never stop saying so. Now that you’ve done what no other President in MY lifetime has been able to do – get me up off my butt and behind a keyboard – you’ll have to deal with me until you go away.

Ready. Aim. FIRE CONGRESS!

This past November, a tsunami swept ashore with a vengeance; an anti-Obama, anti-Reid, anti-Pelosi wave that wiped out big-government Democrat governors in deep blue New Jersey and purple Virginia – both states having been won easily by Barack Obama only a year before.

And like a tsunami, its energy was not spent at the beaches.

It continued to push on, and last night it engulfed what Democrats had smugly taken to calling the “Teddy Kennedy Seat.” Indeed, the defining moment in this campaign would be when Scott Brown reminded David Gergen during a debate that it was, despite the Left’s best efforts to re-shape reality, what it had always been – the people’s seat.

And those of you that have been active in the Tea Party movement – born less than one year ago – should know that last night’s results had more to do with you than the Republican Party.

I am proud of you all; when you had to do it, when it was all on the line, after you got knocked down by the media and academia and the effete snobs of the chattering class you got up, wiped off the slime, and punched back. Hard.

For years, for decades, while you were educating yourselves, building your future, raising your families, and paying your taxes, you – ordinary, hard-working Americans – were demonized, insulted, taken for granted and told to shut up and like it. Those who spoke up against the politically-correct insanity that slowly crept over our society like a fungus were labeled as racists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes and worst of all, ignorant, bitter people clinging to your guns and bibles.

They thought they had you beaten. They did not.

Having no real grasp of the history of this country, they underestimated you, and they underestimated the intensity of the fire that burns within Americans who believe that they should be free from the burden of nanny-state regulations and a controlled economy; free from the burdens of misguided wealth-redistribution; and free from the insulting left-wing drumbeat that somehow the United States of America, the greatest force for good in the history of the world, was somehow to be blamed for all that was wrong with the planet.

And so you rose up and did what you had to do. Not the Republican Party, not your elected representatives, not the slick media-men, not the well-funded think-tanks – you. And me. And millions of other plain folks who had had enough.

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." These words were attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. How ironic that an enemy of America understood this country better than the man who occupies the Oval Office today.

The victory in Massachusetts last night belongs to the Tea Party movement far more than it belongs to the Republican Party, who lately seems to be hesitant to enter the fight until the little guy has softened up the bully for them. But for a small handful, no Republican was quick to embrace the Tea Party movement, frightened, as they were, that we were unacceptably politically incorrect.

Our work has paid off, but of course our work is not yet done; we should be encouraged, but not complacent. Do NOT be fooled into thinking that an astounding victory in January guarantees a sweeping victory in November – it does not. We cannot let up – now is the time to push harder and harder; as long as there is an attempt to pass radical, anti-free-market legislation, the pressure must be intensified, not relaxed.

This Democrat Congress has been an unmitigated disaster for America, and they must be recalled.

November looms.
Mary Jo Kopechne July 26, 1940 – July 18, 1969