This is a people’s movement. The only party affiliation is the American Tea Party.

How can you say that “the only party connected with the tea parties is the American Tea Party” is not at all what you said?

You may complain that I acknowledge the fact that the only partisan elected officials that made any attempt to participate with the tea parties were Republicans. Of course that does not ensure that the tea parties were a Republican movement – in fact I fully agree that they were a conservative movement (not that liberal talking heads would ever recognize or acknowledge such a distinction).

The problem here is that I believe that we don’t do ourselves any favors by burying our heads and shouting “No, you’ve got it wrong” when the pundits start trying to fit the movement into one of their pre-defined little boxes. We have to instead put forth accurate information instead of arguing among ourselves about how accurate their representation was. We don’t need to draw fine lines about how this is not a Republican movement. Instead we need to respond to their questions such as “why did you never protest taxes under Bush but now you do when Obama has lowered taxes?” with facts – such as the fact that many of us were protesting the spending policies of the Bush administration but the MSM wasn’t listening then because it didn’t make the same kind of “Opposition Party” headlines that they like to use to sell their stories.

Reread my post- I took care to say that I could only speak in terms of my own experience, which is a “grass roots” experience to which the Speaker of the House is totally occluded as she pays attention only to big power and big money. She can stand there before the American public and assert that the grass roots movement wasn’t the motivating force behind the Tea parties, as she pleases. I guess it is better that she doesn’t know about us, lest we all be named on a “terrorist” watch list.

David said “You say that the only party connected with the tea parties is the American Tea Party ‘

This is not at all what I said and in fact there is currently no political party that is called “The American Tea Party”- I was suggesting that maybe that this will come about- if the Republican Party continues to stray from it’s conservative principles based in the conservation of the United States Constitution.

David says “and yet you are aware that some of the parties had some very Republican ties.” =

OH horrors! I guess that makes them Republican Parties as defined by the left wing liberal propaganda spin. Why should the American tea party movement be permitted to define itself when we have such a high profile entrenched BS spin machine rushing to do it instead? If Republicans are represented it is because there is a strong conservative movement within the Republican Party that wants a return to our constitutional roots. The tea party movement (in my grass roots experience- which by definition is a local experience) is unhappy with BOTH political parties. – The Democrats because they are literally trying to push our country into socialism- and the Republicans because they have strayed from their conservative roots. It is false to say this is a Republican movement. It is fair to say it is a conservative movement- a movement to conserve the United States Constitution,- and there are former Democrats – and some that voted for Obama in it is well. The policies that Obama is instituting is not the “change” that they voted for.

If you were at a tea party, which clearly you were not, you might have seen as I saw that when a man who is a representative in our state legislature took the mike a vocal minority booed him just because he is in politics. The tea party movement does not kick people out just because they have political affiliations. That would make the Department of Homeland Security happy- since then the tea party movements would be very small and remain that way.

As far as I can see I have done nothing to defend any move toward socialism in this country.

Cheney is a private citizen who is concerned for the safety of our country due to various actions taken by the Obama administration, as am I. One of the scary aspects of the Obama administration is its propensity to go after private citizens and to even go so far as identifying those who criticize the policies of the administration as “terorists”.

Do you have a problem with Obama selectively declassifying security reports while selectively keeping other parts secret? Are you opposed to Cheney’s request, now that Obama has already done damage to our national security by releasing the selective parts of the report, that he also release the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in regards to that report? It appears to me that Obama placed his obsessive competition with George W Bush, and his own political gain, above our national security by releasing the parts of the report that he so chose. Now he is planning on releasing photos as well, which will only further endanger Americans.

Cheney should speak up- and this should not be politicized as a republican take-over- It is the security of the United States that is at stake and that is not a partisan issue.

And please stop perpetuating the intentional misrepresentation of Republicans through the use of an out-of-context remark by a private citizen that the Obama team attempted to portray as the leader of Republican Party. Quotes taken out of context are just as fundamentally dishonest as declassification of selective parts of top security reports taken out of context.

Let be honest here. Rush Limbaugh, speaking as a private citizen, said (in so many words) that if Obama’s intentions are to transform The United States into a socialist society them Limbaugh wants that goal to fail.

There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that this is indeed Obama’s goal- as it is clear if you consider Obama’s political past from which he rapidly rose to power – which some of us though should have been an important issue BEFORE the election.. Even Obama has admitted that he is indeed a socialist, in so many words, when he said “We are not going to call what we are doing socialism”- obviously Obama knows that what he is doing can be called socialism and Obama also believes that he can pull the wool over American words just by changing language terms. It doesn’t change the underlying real meaning- no matter what words you use. A socialist is a socialist is all too often a communist and then too easily a fascist. Some would argue that we are already entering the fascistic stage as per all the stipulations mandated by the “stimulus” bill and attached to the distribution of freshly printed money that the federal government simply prints ‘as needed” – as per the recent report issued by the Homeland security department identifying those that the administrant labels as “right-wing extremists’ as “terrorists” Now that the Obama administration has won the “War on Terror” by simply renaming it in a vague terminology that could have many different meanings, it seems our department of homeland security has nothing better to do than to go after American citizens who disagree with their policies.

Obama took an oath to preserve and protect and defend the United Staes Constitution. Go back and re-read Federalist paper #10 – in which it is made perfectly clear that the philosophical founding principles of the United States constitution are diametrically opposed to the political philosophy of socialism – a plitical philosophy to which Obama has adhered throughout his political career.

If we are to measure any administration against the past we should do so as Mackenzie said by measuring against the Constitution.

If Cheney has any part in shifting America back to Republican control I just may lose all hope for our society. If we are to return to Republican control it had better be a result of following a new breed of Republicans who recognize and loudly denounce the vast failings within the Bush administration and return to the idea of the rule of law rather than the rule of those in power.

P.S. There are 537 elected members of our government not to mention elected representatives with no vote in Congress (such as from D.C.) and a vast army of appointed positions within our government. Did you just pick 240 out of the air?

I have been very happy to see and hear that the ideas I have been discussing about the need to do more than stage a protest are consistent with the messages at many of the tea parties. I think to some extent that you may be generalizing your specific tea party experience to all the tea parties, but from what I hear there was less of the partisanship and short-sightedness than I feared might be the case.

You say that the only party connected with the tea parties is the American Tea Party and yet you are aware that some of the ta parties had some very Republican ties. Perhaps you can say that because you recognize that some who bear the Republican label really do believe in the principles that the tea parties were promoting.

Some of us who were wary of the tea party movement were wary not because we could not visualize the full grown plant but because it was hard to see at times whether the tea parties would actually result in a sustained effort. I’m happy with the prospects that it will.