Want to protest your government by going to a Tea Party event? DENIED!

Remember this report from our nation’s history?

CNN (Continental News Network) Boston, 1773: The city of Boston canceled a proposed protest over tea taxes today, citing the fear that too many people dressed as Indians would be gathered near the wharves. Organizers expressed sadness over the cancellation, but meekly returned to their homes fearful of upsetting the officers of the Crown. Taxmen breathed a sigh of relief as the tar and feathers were put away not to be used this day.

You don’t remember that pre-revolutionary history? I should say you shouldn’t, because it didn’t happen. But flash forward a few hundred years and you’ll find it is happening today in Cape Coral, Florida where city officials canceled a tax day tea party gathering because they “feel too many people could show-up.”

That’s right, folks, the God-given, long-held American right to assemble and protest the actions of our government has been canceled due to too much popularity of the protest.

And what does it come down to? Money. You see, the city officials want an insurance policy taken out so that organizers can cover any loss that might occur as a result of the rally. And those insurance policies cost hundreds of dollars.

The tea party organizers of Cape Coral, though, aren’t the only ones to find this restriction of their free speech and rights to assemble. Tea party organizers all across the country have begun to find out just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to be “allowed” to exercise their God-given right to speak their minds against government excess and criminality. City governments all across the country are charging fees for “permits,” forcing organizers to pay out huge sums for “insurance policies,” and binding tea party organizers in all sorts of government red tape.

In many instances, organizers are being told that they aren’t “allowed” to hold rallies on government property. Imagine that? We, the taxpayers of the city/state/federal government aren’t “allowed” to gather on property that our own taxes paid for.

And then there are the “permits” required to reserve the day, arrange the police protection, and clean up afterward. Often those “permits” can only be applied for at certain times a year, precluding any spontaneous assembly. Also, these “permits” can be denied with no reason stated quashing at birth any plan to exercise the right of assembly.

Here one might wonder how it is that we so often see those lefties appearing on our TV sets engaging in their many organized protests? Don’t the flotsam and jetsam of the far left seem to have large protests all the time? One might be drawn to imagine that the government is involved in some sort of grand conspiracy to allow those with anti-American sentiment, the moonbats of the left, to march with impunity. But, hold the tinfoil hats, won’t you? Because the wackjobs of anti-war ilk and the shrill, circus acts of the Code Pinkos are expected to cut through the same red tape the tea party organizers have been confronted with. The lefties are just better at it.

You see, contrary to popular conception, the far left has some deep-pocketed backers (your George Soros types, unions and even government funds) and a raft of organizations that do “protests” as a full time job. Their protest marches and rallies are far from spontaneously organized. These groups are thoroughly knowledgeable about the red tape and governmental hoops through which they must jump to carry off a successful protest assembly. After all, the hatemongers of the left are intimately intertwined with city governments all across the country. They understand what needs to be done because, by and large, city officials used to belong to, or belong still to the sorts of groups that plan lefty protests. Your new president is one of them. Being part of government, these leftie protest marchers help write the rules, being intimately associated with government they are quite well informed about what is required and how to get around or satisfy those rules.

But the obstacles are coming as a shock to the average citizens that love this country. For their whole lives peace-loving, work-a-day Americans have taken for granted that there exists the freedom to assemble completely unaware that those rights have been eliminated by stealth regulation by governments all across the land.

And now the folks in Cape Coral, Florida have learned their lesson.

Americans do not have the rights they always thought they did. There is no right to protest government. There is no right to assemble. The people have no rights at all to voice their displeasure. Shut up people. Go home. Nothing to see here. Go quietly back to your IPods and DVDs. Big daddy government will take care of you. The Obemmessiah will decide what’s best for you. Don’t worry your little heads. Oh, and thank you for your payments on April 15th.

Put away the tar and feathers, won’t you? There’s a nice fella.

-Warner Todd Huston

Everyone knows that at the end of a US President’s term, he (or she to be PC) usually rips out a whole string of pardon’s and sentence commutations.

Clarence Aaron, convicted of conspiracy and drug charges in 1993, has been in prison for 15 years.

All well and good, no problem with me.  Until FoxNews decided to push Pres. Bush to pardon a certain Clarence Aaron. (Read the Fox Story here)

Three life sentences, without parole.

That’s how long Calvin Smith — part of the notorious Murder Inc. drug gang which terrorized Washington, D.C., in the 1990s — will be in jail for the cold-blooded murder of three people and for dealing drugs.

It’s how long Erick John Llorance will be in jail for three holiday-season armed robberies and a shooting in Houston in 2007.

It’s how long high school shooter Michael Carneal will be in jail for murdering three girls and injuring five other students while they were standing with their youth prayer group outside Heath High School in Kentucky in 1997.

Three life sentences, without parole, is also how long Clarence Aaron will be in jail — because he introduced two drug dealers, so that one could buy cocaine from the other.

Here’s my issue…

Drugs – a scourge of our country. One of the biggest issues IN our country.

Fox News – a SUPPOSED independant voice – “We report, You Decide”

Fox News calling for Pres. Bush to pardon someone who was convicted by a jury of his peers for involvment in a drug deal.

Sad background story? Yes.

Should the American people care about that story? No.

What about the families of those affected by the original drug deal that Aaron initiated? Is there something that Pres. Bush should do for them?

Plain and simple – Clarence Aaron did the crime. Let him do his time. PERIOD

Fox News has lost me as a supporter for this article…  This is Fox News advocating putting a criminal back out on the street. We don’t have enough out there already?  I don’t CARE that it was his first conviction – he’s lucky he wasn’t in China… he’d be dead already!

President-elect to formally unveil his team of economic experts to battle the most severe U.S. financial crisis in eight decades

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama names his economic team Monday and may call for the next Congress to quickly pass a massive stimulus plan that would dwarf even his campaign proposals to salvage the country’s financial wreckage.

Timothy Geithner, left, and Larry Summers (AP Photo).

Obama speaks at a Chicago news conference against a backdrop of increasing calls for him to assert himself well before he takes office Jan. 20 in the midst of the most severe U.S. financial crisis in eight decades.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod confirmed that the president-elect would name Timothy Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve president, as his treasury secretary. Wall Street stocks jumped on Friday when word of Geithner’s appointment began to leak. Geithner will team with Lawrence Summers, a treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton and former Harvard University president, who will take over the National Economic Council. Both Geithner and Summers will appear with Obama at a Monday news conference in Chicago.

Democratic officials also said Obama plans to name New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as commerce secretary, adding a prominent Hispanic and one-time Democratic presidential rival to his Cabinet. Richardson served as U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and later as energy secretary.

The troika will confront an economic crisis that continues to deepen in spite of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal emergency spending in recent weeks.

Top aides said Sunday that Obama also wants Congress to use its large Democratic majority when it convenes Jan. 6 to prepare tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners as part of the massive government intervention designed to pull the country out of its frightening economic nosedive.

Some economists have endorsed spending up to $600 billion to revive the economy. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and former labor Secretary Robert Reich, a member of Obama’s economic advisory board, both suggested $500 billion to $700 billion. Before winning the presidency Nov. 4, Obama had said he looked to create a $175 billion stimulus package. While the new plan will be significantly larger, it was expected to incorporate his campaign other ideas for new jobs in environmentally friendly technologies and tax cuts.

“I don’t know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be a big number,” Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said on Sunday. “It has to be. The point is to, kind of, get people back on track and startle the thing into submission.”

Over the weekend Obama directed his team to erect plan to create 2.5 million new jobs by the end of 2010, and aides said his broader economic program was designed to quickly offer tax relief to lower- and middle-income earners. Significantly the plan would not offer an immediate tax increase on wealthy taxpayers. During the campaign, Obama said he would raise taxes on people making more than $250,000.

Axelrod unambiguously voiced Obama’s overall expectations.

“Our hope is that the new Congress begins work on this as soon as they take office in early January, because we don’t have time to waste here, ” he said on Sunday. “We want to hit the ground running on January 20th.”

Congress will have two weeks to hold hearings and write legislation between its return to Washington in early January and Obama’s inauguration.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, acknowledged a readiness for quick action.

“We expect to have during the first couple of weeks of January a package for the president’s consideration when he takes office.”

Axelrod also warned executives of the U.S. auto industry to draw up plans to retool and restructure their industry if they want the billions of dollars they are seeking from Congress. Otherwise, Axelrod said, “there is very little taxpayers can do to help them.”

Obama also delved into one of the most pressing foreign policy issues facing his presidency, calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai by telephone and telling him that fighting terrorism there and in the region would be a top priority, Karzai’s office said on Sunday.

The Saturday conversation between Obama and Karzai was the first reported contact between the two leaders since the Nov. 4 U.S. election. The United States has some 32,000 American troops in Afghanistan, a number that will be increased by thousands next year.

Fighting terrorism and the insurgency “in Afghanistan, the region and the world is a top priority,” Karzai’s office quoted Obama as saying during the conversation.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/11/24/obama-set-unveil-new-economic-team/

AP photographer tracks down family of terrified children split by war

This photo of an 11-year-old girl carrying her 3-year-old niece as she looks for her parents in the village of Kiwanja, eastern Congo, drew reaction from people around the world wanting to help them.

Eleven-year-old Protegee carried her sobbing niece on her back as they searched for relatives in a sea of people in eastern Congo.

An Associated Press photograph of the girl — using her filthy T-shirt to wipe the tears from her face as 3-year-old Reponse clung to her neck and wailed — prompted hundreds of e-mails from people around the world hoping to help them.

I returned to Kiwanja on Sunday to try to reunite the girls with family and even succeeded in finding them. But it turned out that not all problems in Congo can be solved by an outsider’s sympathy.

When I first photographed Protegee on Nov. 6 in a crowd of thousands in the town of Kiwanja, she told me only her first name and that she was looking for her mother.

I learned later that she and Reponse had wandered alone for three days after being separated from Protegee’s mother on Nov. 3 as the family fled on foot from their village of Kiseguru, about 12 miles away.

Protegee had spent one night sleeping in a church, huddled with Reponse under a flimsy scarf. “I had no food or water,” she said, speaking in the Kiswahili language.

Hundreds of children have been separated from their families since fighting flared in eastern Congo in August and more than 1,600 children in the province were seeking their parents last week alone, according to UNICEF. The children’s young ages and inability to give detailed information — plus the lack of official records in the Congolese countryside — make it even more difficult to track down their families.

Faces of desperation
When I set out to search for Protegee, I had little certainty of success but I was determined to try to help. As a journalist, I’ve photographed war and refugees all over the world since the early 1980s.

But I was particularly moved by readers’ reactions to this photograph of two little girls, their faces wrenched in fear and desperation. I knew that the chances of finding them again were slim, as I see children walking alone on the roads every day. But I found myself imagining how it would feel if I were searching for my own daughters — and having two, that was not difficult.

Years of sporadic violence in eastern Congo intensified in August, and fighting between the army and its allied militia on one side and fighters loyal to rebel leader Laurent Nkunda on the other has displaced at least 250,000 people since then — despite the presence of the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world. Some fear Congo’s current crisis could again draw in neighboring countries. Congo’s devastating 1998-2002 war split the vast nation into rival fiefdoms and involved half a dozen African armies.

Reaching Kiwanja meant crossing an uneasy front line just a few miles north of Goma, with hundreds of heavily armed rebels and government troops deployed on either side. Then it was a bone-jarring two-hour drive on what was once a paved road, and is now one giant pothole.

In the name of hope
Kiwanja is a typical African town, with one strip of dirt road as the main drag, a few small shops on each side, one roundabout, one crossroad, and huts sprawling to infinity on the hills to the east and the valley to the north.

Armed with the photograph of Protegee and Reponse, I started asking around. Women frowned — they did not know the girls. I traveled to the school yard, to the clinic. No luck.

As I was about to head back to Goma, I stopped near a U.N. base. Just a few days earlier its outskirts were refuge to thousands. But now it was a nearly empty lot with the skeletons of makeshift huts and a white UNHCR tent.

I ventured inside the tent. There, Maria Mukeshimani’s eyes lit up at the sight of the photo — the woman, who had been displaced herself by the violence, knew these children. She had seen them in that very tent five days earlier. And she knew Protegee’s mother: Her name is Esperance Nirakagori.

Esperance — the French word for hope.

Esperance had taken refuge at the local Catholic church in Kiwanja. When I arrived there, I was greeted by the sounds of a choir. It was evening Mass.

“Does anyone know if Esperance is around?” I asked.

An elderly man replied that she was in a small house nearby.

Wearing a yellow and red dress, Esperance greeted us. She had sweat dripping from her headscarf and spoke softly.

‘Happy to see your mother’?
I showed her the picture and she smiled at the sight of the girls. Then, to my surprise, she said they had already found her, but she had sent them back to their village, alone and on foot. She feared for their safety in Kiwanja and believed they would be more secure in the care of her elder daughter; she was too weak to make the journey herself.

She kept staring at the photo. Only when I told her I would return the next morning and drive her to rejoin the girls in Kiseguru did her face light up in a wide, genuine smile.

We set off the next day after stopping for food at a restaurant in town. Esperance was quiet as we drove the 20 minutes to the village. She clutched the girls’ photo as she walked through the streets, a trail of excited children in her wake.

The reunion with Protegee and Reponse, in a small mud hut, was brief. They smiled at each other. No one spoke. I prompted Protegee, a shy girl who was only 2 months old when her father was killed in Congo’s last bloody war.

“Are you happy to see your mother?” I asked.

She answered, in a soft voice: “Yes.”

Protegee told how she had arrived exhausted in Kiseguru on Nov. 12. But when she did, she found her family’s hut empty — her sister and other relatives had already fled toward Uganda. For five days she waited for an adult to come for her. No one did. She was planning to set off for Kiwanja that very day to rejoin her mother, when I arrived instead.

Rather than remain in their village, Esperance asked me to take them all back to Kiwanja.

‘When the war is over’
In the streets of Kiseguru, we had seen 20 men wearing civilian clothes and toting Kalashnikovs. When I asked her who they were, her answer was swift and certain: “Mai Mai.”

Earlier this month, Kiwanja residents were terrorized by the pro-government Mai Mai militia, who the U.N. said killed people accused of supporting the rebels. Then the rebels won control and killed those they claimed had supported the militiamen.

And now the Mai Mai were in her family’s village.

Protegee, Reponse and Esperance are back in Kiwanja now. They have set up a cot in the corner of a room on the Catholic church grounds. Outside, the U.N. World Food Program is distributing food, but the situation in the town remains volatile.

Before I left, I gave Esperance the photograph of her daughter and granddaughter. She handed it to Protegee, who, with Reponse in her lap, gazed at the image. I left them there on their cot, clutching the photo, one of their few possessions.

Asked when they would return to their village, Esperance replied: “When the war is over.”

Jerome Delay is AP’s chief photographer for Africa. Associated Press writer Anita Powell contributed to this report from Kiwanja, Congo.

Read more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27790850/?GT1=43001

In his first television interview since his historic election, President-elect Barack Obama said he will do “whatever it takes” to stabilize the economy, restore consumer confidence and create jobs to getting sound health care and energy policies through Congress, and developing a national security team is priority one.

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama said that selecting his national security team is a top priority.

“I think it’s important to get a national security team in place because transition periods are potentially times of vulnerability to a terrorist attack,” Obama told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview broadcast Sunday. “We want to make sure that there is as seamless a transition on national security as possible.”

Sunday: Barack and Michelle Obama are interviewed on '60 Minutes' in First Interview Since Election (AP Photo).

In his first television interview since his historic election, Obama said he has spent the days since the election from doing “whatever it takes” to stabilize the economy, restore consumer confidence and create jobs to getting sound health care and energy policies through Congress.
The president-elect also said that as soon as he takes office he will work with his security team and the military to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq, shore up Afghanistan and “stamp out Al Qaeda once and for all.”

While investors are still riding a rollercoaster on Wall Street, Obama said the economy would have deteriorated even more without the $700 billion bank bailout. Re-regulation is a legislative priority, he said, not to crush “the entrepreneurial spirit and risk-taking of American capitalism” but to “restore a sense of balance.”

“There’s no doubt that we have not been able yet to reset the confidence in the financial markets and in the consumer markets and among businesses that allow the economy to move forward in a strong way,” Obama said. “And my job as president is going to be to make sure that we restore that confidence.”

Obama comes to the Oval Office with an ambitious list of campaign promises that will require Capitol Hill’s cooperation and approval, and the team he has been announcing in recent days is heavy on the legislative experience that Obama is lacking.

Obama resigned his Illinois Senate seat Sunday after just under four years of service, half of which he spent out on the presidential campaign trail.

During the campaign, Obama had Pete Rouse as his Senate chief of staff to take care of his business on Capitol Hill. On Sunday, Obama named Rouse to be a senior adviser in his White House. Rouse has 24 years of experience as a top Senate aide, also running the offices of former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Obama’s Illinois colleague, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin.

Other names that have begun to roll out recently come with varying degrees of Washington experience. Obama is drawing on accomplished Chicago friends, longtime congressional aides and former Clinton administration officials, including some with ties to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The new chief of staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, combines the Chicago roots and the legislative connections. Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain held the same role for Vice President Al Gore.

Obama has picked Mona Sutphen and Jim Messina as his deputy chiefs of staff. Like Rouse, Messina has served as chief of staff for three different lawmakers and has a vast network of relationships to show for it that he can tap on Obama’s behalf.

Philip Schiliro, who has more than 25 years experience working for Congress, is Obama’s liaison to Capitol Hill.

Biden, a longtime senator from Delaware, has said he intends to be a frequent voice on the Hill and use his 36 years of experience as a lawmaker to promote the administration’s agenda. That’s a departure from Vice President Dick Cheney, who only appeared occasionally on the Hill to meet with Republican members and cast a tie-breaking vote.

In the CBS interview, Obama also said Americans shouldn’t worry about the federal deficit for the next couple of years.

“The most important thing is that we avoid a deepening recession,” he said.

He said there hadn’t been enough done to address the plight of homeowners facing foreclosure.
“We’ve gotta set up a negotiation between banks and borrowers so that people can stay in their homes,” Obama said.

The president-elect also urged help for the auto industry.

Obama also confirmed reports that he intends to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and “make sure we don’t torture” as “part and parcel of an effort to regain America’s moral stature in the world.”

Obama also said he plans to put Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden in the crosshairs.

“I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out Al Qaeda,” Obama said. “He is not just a symbol, he’s also the operational leader of an organization that is planning attacks against U.S. targets.”

Read more at : http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/11/16/security-economy-precedence-obama-tells-cbs/