By Mr. Curmudgeon

Like so many on the soft-headed left, James Jay Lee just wanted to save the planet. So, he stormed into the Discovery Channel television headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, took three hostages at gunpoint and demanded that the cable network produce environmental documentaries showing that, “Saving the Planet means saving what’s left of the non-human Wildlife by decreasing the Human population.” A Montgomery County SWAT sharpshooter helped to bring Lee’s dream alive by shooting him dead, reducing the world’s human population by one. It’s a start.

The hostage situation in Silver Spring is something of a morality play. The mouth-breathers of the environmental movement would love nothing better than to take us all hostage. They may not have the ability to save the planet (not that it’s under any real threat), but they are trying like the dickens to take it hostage. First came the Kyoto Treaty. Now the Copenhagen Treaty, with Obama’s impending Cap-and-Trade legislation to help fund a UN administered global wealth redistribution scheme.

In the end, it’s an exercise in futility at best and self-destructive at worst. That is why this November’s elections are so important. With two years left in our one-term president’s tenure in office, voters need to send genuine opposition representatives to Washington to curb the wild-eyed enthusiasm of Obama and his environmental policies before they dash all hope for America’s economic recovery.

To put it in perspective, think of James Jay Lee as the personification of Cap-and-Trade, and the Tea Party as the Montgomery County SWAT team.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

And another R-I-N-O bites the dust. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who during the ObamaCare debate said she did not have a problem with a government run health care scheme, was denied the Republican nomination to serve another six years as Alaska’s Senator. Instead, Tea Party and Sarah Palin-supported challenger Joe Miller will face down the Democratic challenger this November.

When Murkowski realized defeat was in the cards, she let it be known she would like to run as the Libertarian candidate, which was news to the Libertarians. The five-member executive committee of the Libertarian Party hastily convened an emergency meeting to decide the issue. Emerging from the powwow, Alaska’s Libertarian Party Chairman Scott Kohlhass said, “Let’s put this to rest; it’s not happening.”

How brain dead does one have to be to believe Libertarians would allow a big-government Republican to highjack a political party that takes its small government principles seriously? What did she take them for, Republicans?

Murkowski’s desperation is understandable. She first landed the Senate seat when appointed to it by her father, Gov. Frank Murkowski, in 2002. She just hated giving back the gift daddy so graciously awarded his precious little princess. It was Murkowski’s sense of entitlement that drove her to seek another political party to front her ambitions. There’s always Alaska’s Green Party.

Here in Florida, milquetoast Gov. Charlie Crist is equally clueless. When it became clear Florida voters would reject Crist’s Obama-friendly bid for the Republican Senate nomination, he bolted his party to run as an independent. The latest Rasmussen poll reports the Tea Party-supported Republican Marco Rubio leads Crist by 10 points (40 to 30 percent). Of Crist’s “supporters,” Rasmussen finds only 45% are certain to cast their vote for him. Wow, now that’s what I call “leadership we can believe in.”

This begs the question: “Will these Republican milquetoasts ever go away?” It appears not. So, it remains for us – the long-suffering Republican voter – to relentlessly sucker-punch these gutless hangers-on at the polls.

Go Tea Party!

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Today, the Huffington Post printed an apology on behalf of one of its bloggers, Beau Friedlander – former editor-in-chief of the now defunct left wing Air America Radio. In a posting, Friedlander wrote, “It is time to pop the tea bagger’s favorite balloon (so what if it will be replaced by another?), and with that in mind I hereby offer to negotiate a $100,000 payday to the person who will come forward with a sex tape or phone records or anything else that succeeds in removing Glenn Beck from the public eye forever. I am not offering the cash myself, but I will broker the deal and/or raise the money for what you bring to the table. (And it better be good.)” Friedlander ended the post by encouraging readers to contribute money to a “slush fund” to entice would-be Beck blackmailers.

The Huffington Post pulled the post and replaced it with an editor’s note, “This piece was published directly to the Huffington Post by the author. It didn’t meet our editorial standards and has been removed from the site.”

Friedlander posted an apology to Glenn Beck, no doubt at the insistence of his employer. “It was supposed to simply make the point that the right does not hesitate to play rough with the left, and the right is far better financed,” whined Friedlander. Really? The Obama campaign raised a half billion dollars in 2008. Maybe Friedlander needs to ask the community organizer to throw a little cash into his slush fund. Or ask Obama supporter and billionaire Warren Buffett for financial assistance. Who knows, there may even be a provision in the “financial reform” package passed by the Democratic Congress earmarking funds for enterprises like Friedlander’s in the name of “stimulus.” I mean, if they can pay researchers to feed cocaine to monkeys, they can certainly pay for this.

Beck and the Tea Party are getting under the left’s skin. The radical bomb builders of the 60s finally have one of their own in the White House and as Speaker of the House. What they couldn’t achieve with explosives, violent demonstrations and sit-ins, they accomplished at the ballot box, thanks mostly to a majority of sleep-walking Americans. The comatose have since wiped the sleep from their eyes.

In early August, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report titled “Analysis of the First Year of the Obama Administration: Public Relations and Propaganda Initiatives.”

According to the report, “In several cases, federal employees have used agency resources to disseminate propaganda touting certain aspects of the President’s agenda…In every case, the White House and the agency whose resources it is co-opting attempt to create the impression that grassroots support for a particular policy exists when in fact it has been fabricated using taxpayer dollars.”

The reason Beck so terrifies the lunatics is that his rally proves the left has millions of real grass-roots opponents. Obama’s friends, on the other hand, are taxpayer funded fabrications, what Nancy Pelosi calls “Astroturf.”

On his Monday evening Fox News program, Beck discussed the 500,000 strong “Restoring Honor” rally he organized last weekend in the nation’s capitol. Beck recounted how he and the niece of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, pro-life advocate Alveda King, prayed before delivering their remarks to the gathering. Beck said King became concerned when she noticed he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Beck told his Fox audience he wore it at the insistence of his wife. Smart woman.

The massive Beck rally got Beau Friedlander a little scared and hot under the collar. And he impetuously tipped his hand. But it shows that the left is growing increasingly desperate as it sees Obama’s power slipping.

You see, the left has never had the numbers. But the one thing it does have – mafia like – is organization. The right, thanks to the Tea Party, is showing just how few the left have on their side. The Rev. Al Sharpton’s pathetically puny counter Beck rally was proof of that.

It will be interesting to see what desperate rear-guard actions the left attempts in the months leading up to the elections. And the attempt to blackmail or discredit Glenn Beck is just the beginning. In many ways, what the left does this election cycle is just a warm up for much worse to come when Obama faces disaster in 2012. You can count on things getting ugly, even violent – you know what they say about wounded animals.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

They tried calling them Astroturf. They tried calling them racists. But the Tea Party continues to grow as does the country’s admiration for them. The left, and their mouthpiece the New York Times, is elbow deep in their bag of tricks to find just the right slur that will stick to the growing small-government cross-party coalition, and think they have it. We all must hate the Tea Party because – are you ready – they are rich. No, really.

“Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich,” says the desperate and wild-eyed Paul Krugman.

And there’s even a conspiracy theory to go along with the charge. “Three heavy hitters rule [the Tea Party]. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans,” says New York Times theater critic turned political commentator Frank Rich.

“And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far?” asks Krugman. They are losing their Congressional seats in Republican Party state conventions and in the primaries to Tea Party-friendly candidates. The rest, like the milquetoast John McCain, will remain mum until after the elections. By then, it will be too late for even the media-loved Arizona maverick to be of much help to his “friends across the aisle.”

If, as the Times suggests, we wealthy Tea Partiers (I for one am still waiting for my check from Rupert Murdoch) pose such a threat to our new and improved hope-and-change nation, why not form a counter Tea Party?

The aforementioned multi-zillionaire Warren Buffett backed Hillary Clinton before switching to Obama. If all it takes is a little cash to start a game-changing mass movement, why not lean on the “Oracle of Omaha” for some scratch?

Soulless materialists on the left can’t believe people are moved more by principle than money. In the Chicago mindset of community organizer Obama and his personality cult, everyone is on the take. It’s just the way business is done. And that has turned out to be their Achilles heel.

They cannot fathom why any American would not wish to have his life (and death if Obama’s health care monstrosity is allowed to survive) micromanaged by Washington Czars and bureaucrats. And that Americans should fear that Obama’s phenomenal debt threatens generations yet unborn, is beyond their comprehension.

That the citizenry should be up in arms just because Obama’s Justice Department is suing Arizona for attempting to prevent Mexico’s millions from becoming the nation’s largest welfare dependent is beyond them.

And they are still scratching their heads at the full-throated opposition to a 13-story Muslim monument to mass-murder two blocks from Ground Zero.

In their minds, the $800 billion in “stimulus” was a payoff for us to look the other way. And it’s the left’s obsession with money (mostly yours) that goes to the heart of the problem.

The crowd at the Glenn Beck “Restore Honor” rally totaled over 500,000 because the cause they gathered for involved God and Honor, two intangibles. You can’t put a price on invisible realities.

The counter gathering held by the race hustler and shakedown artist, the Rev. Al Sharpton, only mustered a few hundred. His “Reclaim the Dream” rally was more about reclaiming the momentum for Obama’s graft-laden dream than Martin Luther King’s. After all, King said men should not be “judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Rev. Al is unfamiliar with the concept of character because there’s no money in it.

Over 200 years ago, American’s declared their independence based on intangible truths; the Unalienable Right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

They pledged their fortunes to win our freedom; an intangible truth they felt was worth the price to secure their greatest possession, and what the impoverished materialistic left so desperately lacks – “sacred Honor.”

By Mr. Curmudgeon

In Tuesday’s primary, hapless Arizona rank-and-file Republican voters elected the pea-brained brontosaur John McCain to lead the GOP charge in November. Pathetic. What were they thinking?

McCain spent much of the primary campaign telling Arizonans he wasn’t that “maverick” so loved and admired by the New York Times. As Michael Stickings wrote at the HuffingtonPost, “I mean, the guy must be losing his mind, or must have lost a good chunk of it already. Either that, or he’s so stupid or arrogant as to think that no one actually remembers all the maverick talk during the ‘08 campaign.” John McCain certainly knows his constituents.

“I’m convinced that Republicans will win in November and we will regain the majorities in both the Senate and the House,” McCain said in his victory speech. “And when we do, we will stop the out of control spending and tax increases and repeal and replace ObamaCare.”

McCain uses the phrase “repeal” to give hope to a majority of Americans angry over Obama’s totalitarian health care monstrosity. But it’s the “replace” portion of McCain’s statement that should send a shiver up the spine of every freedom-loving American. McCainCare can only mean ObamaCare-Lite.

If Republicans win a majority of seats in the United States Senate, it will be the task of conservatives and Tea Party members to marginalize the brontosaur.

The McCain victory signals a more ominous trend within the GOP. It’s a sign that moderate Democrats, having bolted their party over the decades because of its hard-left lurch, are diluting what little conservative testosterone remains in the Grand Old Party.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The new Pew Research Center poll that found 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim (up from 11% in 2008), has the administration in a panic. “The White House said on Thursday that President Obama is a Christian who prays daily as it looked to tamp down growing doubts among Americans about the president’s religion,” the New York Times reported. During the president’s flight to Martha’s Vineyard for a little R&R, presidential spokesman Bill Burton told reporters, “…They [the American people] are not reading a lot of news about what religion the president is.” Burton then attempted to cover his bases, “The president is obviously a Christian. He prays every day.”

And the president and his party need all the prayers they can get. According to the Pew poll, “…even among many of his [Obama's] supporters and allies, less than half now say Obama is Christian. Among Democrats, for instance, 46% say Obama is a Christian, down from 55% in March 2009.” This must cause the secular populations of Europe and our media elites to scratch their heads.

After the president gave his unqualified support for the construction of New York’s Ground Zero mosque, Time magazine conducted its own poll. “24% said they [Americans] think he is Muslim,” Time found.

The Democrats thought America was ready for change; that, as a nation, we were geared up to make the transformation into a secular socialist state. Stalin thought the same of Poland. He never thought the Polish people’s Christian faith would give them strength to withstand the onslaught of dehumanizing socialism for over half a century. “How many divisions has the Pope?” Stalin once quipped. The Solidarity movement proved that number to be in the millions.

Obama doesn’t have a Muslim identity crisis. He has a secular socialist crisis. But America is still a religious country, and the smoldering Judeo-Christian collective consciousness obliges them to view the world in moral and not political terms. Therefore, Americans have pegged Obama’s “otherness” (the New York Times’ description) as Islamic.

This is the worst kind of news for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Having risen to power on the coattails of Chicago’s Islamic scourge of God, they are seen as The Prophet’s imams. And the draconian methods they employed to pass The Prophet’s stimulus and health care bills were as unyielding as any fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Then Imam Pelosi made things worse for Democrats by announcing her intention to investigate opponents of New York’s Ground Zero mosque – many of whom are survivors of the 3,000 victims who perished on 9/11.

The upshot of all this is that the Democratic Party has shown itself to be so dramatically outside the mainstream of American thought and tradition that a growing number of citizens see them as foreign and as hostile as Osama bin Laden.

And the Tea Parties are proving themselves to be the noble Crusaders who can sweep the scourge from our lands.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

“There is no question that there’s a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of the controversy surrounding the Ground Zero mosque. She then added ominously, “I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded.” Interesting that Madam Speaker isn’t all that interested in who is behind the funding of the mosque at Ground Zero.

Forget for the moment the issue of a triumphal 13-story Islamic monument built to shadow over Ground Zero, the Democratic majority is concerned with all the opposition to their rule in our democratic republic. Leaders such as Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro don’t have such concerns, making all their community organizing simpler and more streamlined.

The debate over the mosque is not a question of totalitarian Islamic ideology at odds with a pluralistic and free society. Its merely “a zoning issue in New York City.” And isn’t that a matter best left to an unelected zoning commission? Nancy didn’t like being confronted by questions concerning zoning. It’s beneath her.

Democrats have had to deal with a lot of uncomfortable questions: at health care town hall meetings and at anti-ObamaCare rallies outside the Capitol Building. Average Americans can’t possibly be that jealous of their liberties, can they? There must be some evil agency working against our betters. Hillary Clinton once called them the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” And every counter revolution has a leader and financiers, don’t they?

The millions of Americans turning out for Tea Party rallies across the country, says Nancy, are nothing but Astroturf – paid agitators like ACORN activists. When reporters ask Nancy uncomfortable questions concerning her Constitutional authority to micromanage our lives, she asks back, “Are you kidding, are you kidding?”

Nancy doesn’t know anybody in San Francisco who disagrees with her.

Opposition to Democratic rule must be the work of racists, right-wing domestic terrorists or wild-eyed crazies, right? And Nancy must save sane San Franciscans, er, Americans from the millions of mentally challenged opponents of America’s transformation into a bankrupt Castroite paradise.

By Mr. Curmudgeon

The Obama recovery isn’t all the mainstream media assured us it’s cracked up to be. “The Federal Reserve will meet on Tuesday faced with a pivotal decision about whether to abandon its presumption that the economy is gradually picking up steam and begin to consider new steps to keep the recovery from sputtering out,” reports the New York Times.

Worse still, the crisis Obama didn’t want to go to waste seems to be worsening. “A string of developments, including the weak jobs report last Friday, has altered the sentiment within the central bank, leading Fed policy makers to stop worrying for the moment about the increasingly remote prospect of inflation. Instead, they are increasingly focused on the potential for the economy to slip into a deflationary spiral of declining demand, prices and wages.” In other words, hello Great Depression II.

As the nation completes the initial two year shock of what is shaping up to be another economic depression, the Fed needs to re-examine the Keynesian presumptions that said massive government intervention in the economy is what got us out of the last one. Bush and Obama’s bailouts and “stimulus” didn’t jumpstart the economy, stop the loss of jobs or stabilize the housing market. The reason? Because the economic ills now besetting us are the result of government interventions.

Obama would have us believe “Bush policies” alone caused the crash. The reality of our situation is that our two-party political system failed the nation by burdening society and the economy with entitlements. The housing bubble, and the financial crisis that resulted from the bust, occurred because of a government policy that declared home ownership an entitlement. Isn’t that why banks were forced to make sub-prime loans? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought those sub-prime loans in order to keep the Ponzi scheme rolling.

When the crisis hit, Rep. Barney Frank – who kept telling us Freddie and Fannie were solvent – blamed capitalism and championed financial reform so government could increase the scope of its economic intervention.

A year ago last June, President Obama held the first in a series of White House summits on health care reform…the same day the trustees for Social Security and Medicare announce the federal entitlement programs were nearing bankruptcy. Now, the Congressional Budget Office warns us that the nation’s entitlement spending is “unsustainable.” Gee, you think?

Thank you two-party system.

As the economic crisis deepens, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called Congress back from recess to pass a $26-billion “jobs bill” to bailout teacher and state public employee unions. Big government sure takes care of the little guy…big-government little guys. More insidiously, it signals that our big government ruling class is circling the wagons. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Olympia Snowe and others among Washington’s bipartisan big-government establishment seem to be consolidating their political base in advance of our worsening depression. And that base is not “We the People” but the bureaucratic class…America’s permanent and unelected rulers.

Abraham Lincoln said, “…as a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.” Free men, it appears, chose suicide.

Americans may not be able to articulate why they are angry with Washington or why they have an especially strong anti-incumbent rage this election season. But they need reminding that our melting entitlement nation is all their doing…no one in big-government Washington, Republican or Democrat, shot their way to power. You put them there.

However, in the elections to come, the nation has a chance to redeem itself and start to dig out of the financial and political hole we find ourselves. Americans need to wake up to the disaster we face and remedy it by rejecting the destructive status quo with the Constitutional tools the Founders gave a free and not dependent people.

Tea Party! Tea Party! Tea Party!

By Mr. Curmudgeon

Andrew Breitbart posted a video on his website that has gone viral. In it, angry members of the Obama media confront African-American conservatives defending the Tea Party against the NAACP’s declaration that the grass-roots movement is racist.

A question concerning an incident alleged to have occurred last March 20th, the day the House passed ObamaCare, was asked. On that day, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House members went among the anti-ObamaCare “Code Red” rally outside the Capitol Building to rub ObamaCare stink in the face of the crowd. Rep John Luis (D-Ga) claimed demonstrators spat on him and yelled the “N” word.

Joyce Jones of Black Enterprise asked, “John Luis put his life in considerable risk and danger so that you could stand here and talk about freedoms. And I want to know why it’s so impossible for you to think that…somebody actually did spit on him or call him the ‘N’ word. Why would he lie about that when he’s experienced so much worse?”

Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, replied, “John Luis is a hero, okay, I may disagree with him on a verity of ideological questions…he refused to press charges. Why? Because it is a fraudulent issue. Stop playing with racism. A man in Connecticut just killed nine people playing the victim card and alleged racism. It’s a powder keg, folks. And you should not play games with it in our country. We’ve come a long way and we don’t want to look back.”

Innis was referring to the murder-suicide in Manchester, Connecticut, on August 8th. Omar Thornton, an African-American employee at a Manchester beer distributorship, had just left a hearing where video footage proved he had stolen beer from the company, and was told to quit or he would be fired. Instead, Thornton pulled a handgun and shot eight fellow employees dead before turning the weapon on himself.

According to the Associated Press, Thornton “had complained of racial harassment…but a union official said Thornton had not filed a complaint of racism to the union or any government agency.” A Teamster official told the AP, “It’s got nothing to do with race. This is a disgruntled employee who shot a bunch of people.”

When ObamaCare passed, it’s obvious that Nancy Pelosi hoped against hope for a racial incident when she marched Rep. Luis, her sacrificial lamb, before the Tea Party protestors. And there’s no doubt that a friendly Obama media was alerted to Pelosi’s stunt to capture the moment on video and photos. Instead, the triumphant Democrats were met with jeers and justifiable shouts of condemnation, but to Nancy’s disappointment, no racial slurs.

On Pelosi’s orders, Luis made the charge anyway.

The race card, in other words, was cynically played by a White Liberal to discredit the only credible movement opposed to what she sees as big government’s “essentially unlimited” power. That Luis, a man who was beaten during the civil rights struggle, should stoop so low is breathtaking.

But the race card is wearing thin with most Americans because it is used to excuse a multitude of sins — from the monstrosity of totalitarian ObamaCare to an angry man’s thirst for free beer and his willingness to kill for it.