Great Video Invitation to Richmond Tax-Day Tea Party

Terri Schiavo, Four Years Later

I remember walking into the room, looking at Terri and, in a rage, thinking, Look what they've done to my beautiful sister. It's hard watching someone dear to you being killed.

The sight of Terri was awful. Her skin was discolored, and there was blood pooling in her eyes, which were darting wildly back and forth. Her cheeks were hollowed out, and her teeth were protruding. She looked like a skeleton from a horror movie.

She was gasping for air. Earlier when I'd seen her, she was moving spastically, like she was in extreme pain and suffering. This night she lay almost still, but you could see she was scared and in pain.

...

I thought of how happy we all were growing up, of the vacations we took together, of the birthdays and holidays, the parties. I thought of the times Terri and I danced together and of our grandparents, whom we loved so much. ...

--Bobby Schindler, A Life That Matters: The Legacy of Terri Schiavo--A Lesson for Us All, p. 4.

Please take a moment to remember Terri Schiavo today, on the fourth anniversary of her murder. Thank you.

Obama to Wagoner: "You're Fired!"

Wow. General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has resigned in obedience to an Obama administration directive, a condition of the company's receiving additional plundered tax dollars. The government has also given GM 60 days to present a cost-cutting plan; the company will of course continue during that time to be kept afloat by the taxpayers, the human safety net for arrogant losers. On the other hand, the government has decided that Chrysler cannot be saved as a stand-alone company and ordered it to merge with Fiat by April 30 before it will be allowed to suck any further on the taxpayers' teat.

There's something deeply, disturbingly unAmerican about the federal government controlling companies to such a degree, and the notion that government can do a better job than experienced businesspeople of managing corporations and whole industries would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous. If the auto industry really is as vital as so many think, anybody who's ever mailed a letter should be downright terrified by the government's power grab du jour. And the precedent that it sets--that government can actually force CEOs out--is absolutely chilling.

On the other hand, this isn't all bad. Bail-outs should hurt. I mean really, really hurt. They should make the survival of the companies that take them less likely, not more likely (as surely federal control can accomplish). Every corporate executive and union boss, every socialist politician and pundit, responsible for the transfer of billions upon billions of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars to loser companies should suffer, as the incompetency of government merges with their own incompetency into some kind of super-incompetency. They should never again enjoy one good night's sleep. They should writhe. They should scream, scream deep, loud screams that echo through the decades in the ears of any would-be moral felons, who seek to rebuild failing companies on the backs of hard-working taxpayers.

Rick Wagoner deserves to go; having accepted ill-gotten tax dollars, he has displayed himself as a morally reprehensible person unfit to lead a once-great company. And if what's happenning to him discourages one CEO from trying to plunder the taxpayers, then that's a welcome corrective to the gross moral hazard created by bail-outs.

That's not the only silver lining. President Obama is clearly positioning himself as a greater defender of taxpayers than President Bush XLIII was during the disastrous final quarter of his presidency. (Granted, that isn't hard, but it is more than we might have expected.) Now, I'm not so naive as to think this positioning is sincere; certainly this regard for the taxpayer is notably absent from President Obama's other policies.

But it's a sign that he's running a little scared of the populist outrage that's been building ever since XLIII and his water boys in Congress bailed out the banks on the backs of taxpayers. As The New York Times notes this morning, "Mr. Obama is well aware that he cannot afford to give the appearance of using tax dollars to reward executives who have done a poor job." Of course, that's exactly what he is doing in allowing these bail-outs to continue at all. But hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

We're getting to 'em. Let's keep the pressure up!

More Virginia Tax-Day Tea Parties

The list of April 15 tea parties in Virginia continues to grow. Check out this page for updates.

Tonight's Show

Due to a killer cold that has me sounding like Marlon Brando, my 10:00 show tonight on Radio For Conservatives will be a rebroadcast of last week's.

How to Hold a Tea Party

The Grizzly Groundswell has posted a helpful step-by-step guide to organizing a tea party. If you're hosting a tea party or thinking about doing so, I encourage you to check it out.

Punch-Drunk POT(57)US?

Giggling like a schoolgirl is apparently President Barack Obama's latest tactic to project "confidence" in America's economic future.

Tonight on RFC

Please tune in to Radio For Conservatives tonight at 10:00 (EDT). I'm chatting about the AIG bonusses, bail-out backlash, and one of the fatal flaws of modern-day Keynesianism.

Frederick Should Stay

I hate when I have good friends on opposing sides of a bitter fight. But I've been around long enough to know that's part of the price.

Since I first learned from my friend Jim Hoeft at Bearing Drift that some members of the State Central Committee had formally asked Jeff Frederick to step down as Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia, I have thought long and deeply about where to side, asking questions of friends on both sides of the issue.

After considering the charges against Mr. Frederick, his responses, and the comments of my friends and acquaintances, I have decided to support Mr. Frederick. He is a pro-life, anti-tax, non-establishment conservative, and I do not find the charges against him compelling. Mr. Frederick has responded in detail to each of them, and called them "false and without merit".

Silly seems more like it to me. Consider #9: "Damage to the reputation and effectiveness of the Republican Party of Virginia through refusal to coordinate activities, including campaign messages, with Republican nominees for public office".

Are they joking? "Damage to the reputation and effectiveness of the Republican Party of Virginia"? RPV has been a disaster for years. To cite just a couple of examples from my own experience: In the fall of 2006, I contacted RPV to volunteer for the Allen campaign, and never heard back. Last year, RPV's convention was such a logistical disaster that they were about 100 seats short for my (Fairfax County) delegation, and ours was not alone. Mr. Frederick has had less than a year to clean up this mess. Any organization that's either well-managed or has any class gives someone in a complicated position at least a year before showing him the door.

More to the point, do they really think that the Republicans had their heads handed to them in November because of Jeff Frederick's failures? This would be the Republican Party that nominated John McCain, that pushed through the unpopular bank bail-out weeks before the election, that had betrayed conservative principles for 19 years.

This isn't to say that Mr. Frederick hasn't made notable missteps. Responding to criticism of RPV's social-media efforts, for example, Mr. Frederick commented, "As you may know, I rarely read blogs," thus lending credence to every suspicion that he's arrogant and out of touch. And the behavior of some of his supporters in the current brouhaha has been nothing short of infantile.

But the movement against him, what my friend and SCC member Jim Bowden calls a "political lynching", has all the hallmarks of an insider cabal against an elected leader. Consider Mr. Bowden's assessment of the Soviet-style secrecy under which he was asked to join the lynching party:

If there were a real crisis - I would have been allowed to see the charges as a member of SCC. Instead, I was told I couldn’t have a copy unless I agreed to sign in advance. I would have been told who will replace Jeff. Instead, I was told a male and female “are being looked at.”

And that leads to another concern regarding the effort against Mr. Frederick: Who will replace him? A conservative populist or an establishment RINO? Well, gee, who are insiders likely to pick?

The Republican Party desperately needs to return to its conservative roots. An insider-led political lynching of an elected conservative isn't the way to do it.

This is not an eternal endorsement. It is still possible that something compelling will emerge to change my mind. But for now:

Jeff Frederick should remain as Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia.

Virginia Tea Parties

In 1767, the British Parliament adopted the plan offered by Charles Townshend, chancellor of the exchequer, to levy import duties on a range of items used in the American colonies, including paper, lead, glass, dyes, and tea.

The American colonists were outraged. This was an attempt by the Parliament to tax them without their consent. As even Royalist moderate John Dickinson wrote in his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, “[W]e cannot be free without being secure in our property . . . we cannot be secure in our property if without our consent others may as by right take it away . . . taxes imposed on us by Parliament do thus take it away.”

The colonists were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to boycott the goods and break the yoke. Merchants in every colony refused British imports. Many products, tea in particular, were smuggled in from other countries.

The British were in a quandary. The colonial boycott reduced exports to America by nearly ₤1,000,000 during 1768-69, but to repeal the duties would mean to back down. Finally, in 1770, Parliament repealed most of the Townshend taxes, but retained the tax on tea. The smuggling of that product continued.

By 1773, 15-20 million pounds of unsold tea languished in British warehouses. British Prime Minister Lord North decided to reduce—but not repeal—the tea tax, thus underselling the smuggled Dutch tea, and export it to colonial merchants.

The gesture was more than insufficient; it was offensive. The financial cost of the tax was not the issue inflaming the colonists. The true issue was the moral question of whether or not Britain had the right to tax the colonists at all without their consent.

Attempting to undersell the smuggled tea was seen as an attempt at bribery. As one writer explained 20 years later, “[A] free people will not be amused by financial palliatives.”

Seven tea-carrying ships set sail; four for Boston and one each for New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Most of the New York merchants refused to stock the tea. The people of Philadelphia adopted resolutions declaring that since “the duty imposed by Parliament upon tea landed in America is a tax on the Americans, or levying contributions on them without their consent, it is the duty of every American to oppose this attempt.” The intimidated importers in those two cities sent the tea back. In Charleston, the tea was unloaded and then sat unsold in warehouses.

As usual, the patriots of Boston were rowdier. On the evening of December 16, 168 Sons of Liberty, disguised as Mohawks, rowed out to the anchored tea ships, boarded them, split open the cargo chests, and dumped their contents—-approximately ₤15,000 worth—-into the harbor.

Americans today face similar tyranny. We made it crystal clear that we do not consent to the ersatz financial palliatives offerred in the form of the bank bail-out, the auto bail-out, and the so-called stimulus. Government made it clear that it doesn't care whether we consent or not, and blew billions of dollars on each of these outrages, billions that we don't have, meaning that the money has been borrowed from Americans yet unborn, the ultimate taxation without representation.

Just as it did in the middle of the 18th century, popular resistance to this kind of tyranny is building. And some of it is finding expression in "tea parties" across the nation. Picking up on Rick Santelli’s call for a “Chicago Tea Party”, the DontGo Movement, Smart Girl Politics, and Top Conservatives on Twitter organized more than 50 protests, attended by more than 30,000 people, across the nation on February 27. Building on the success of those tea parties, similar protests are being planned for April 15 in more than 120 cities. Michelle Malkin, Dana Loesch, GOPUSA, and American Solutions are co-sponsoring the movement.

Three of those cities are in Virginia. The schedule for Virginia Tea Parties on April 15 is:

Virginia Beach: Virginia Beach Town Center, 11 am - 1 pm

Charlottesville: Downtown Mall by City Hall, 3 pm – 5 pm

Richmond: Kanawha Plaza, 6 pm – 8 pm

If you are a Virginian, I hope you will make it to one of them.

What do you think about the Frederick Fracas?

Okay, I've read the correspondence back and forth. I've asked some questions and received some answers. And I still don't know what to think about the movement to remove Jeff Frederick as chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. Last year, I asked for your guidance regarding how to cast my delegate vote at the convention. The responses leaned toward Frederick (and were soon buttressed in my mind by the disastrous job that incumbent chairman John Hager's people did in managing the convention). So I'm asking for your input once again. What do you think? Should Mr. Frederick stay or go? Why?

Tonight's Show

Please tune in to Radio For Conservatives tonight at 10:00 (EDT). I'm chatting about the misuse of federal tax dollars to fund the destruction of embryonic human life, the continuing troubles of the bank bail-out, the potential ouster of the chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia and what really ails the GOP, and the biggest Ponzi scheme of the last century.

Tonight on RFC

Please tune in to Radio For Conservatives tonight at 10:00 (EST). I'm talking about Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party movement, and why we should all be grateful that government's efforts to plunder America's way to prosperity are doomed to fail. If you miss my show tonight, you'll have another chance at 4:00 (EST) Friday afternoon. And while you're listening, feel free to join the chat!

By the way, I do plan to resume regular posting in the near future. Learning how to do my new show, keeping up with client work, and marketing Slaying Leviathan have been edging out blogging lately.