Tag Archives | TEA Party

Nothing to Worry About on Indefinite Detention? Guess Again

As mentioned in Friday’s feature article about the Feinstein-Lee Amendment by Tenth Amendment Center Legal Analyst Blake Filippi, it did absolutely nothing to rectify the loss of rights Americans faced from the indefinite detention provisions in the 2012 NDAA that we are working to nullify throughout the country. However, Senator Mike Lee disagrees about the effectiveness of the amendment and is using quite a bizarre rationale to defend it.

Lee released a press release on Friday in an attempt to clarify concerns with the Feinstein-Lee Amendment (http://www.lee.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/blog?ID=142f4fe6-3446-4d1a-b82b-df9503db1952). He stated that the 2012 NDAA did not actually authorize indefinite detention of American citizens. If this is the case, then why even pass the amendment in the first place? If the 2012 NDAA was so hunky dory and didn’t authorize indefinite detention of Americans, why propose an amendment to supposedly ensure that Americans wouldn’t be indefinitely detained (which was assumed by everyone to be a response to last year’s Act)?

Lee could not deny that last year’s NDAA would be the ‘Act of Congress’ needed to allow for indefinite detention of Americans. In his press release, he did not quote the provisions of the NDAA which are cause to alarm and we are working to nullify. He omitted this information while assuring us that since a sentence within the Act said that the government would never use the powers that they usurped against citizens that we are supposed to have no fears and feel protected thanks to his work. I’m not buying that the same gang that extra-judicially kills American citizens is going to have restraint in their interpretation of the 2012 NDAA, as Mike Lee apparently does.

Libertarian Republican Congressman Justin Amash agrees with the Tenth Amendment Center interpretation of Lee’s amendment saying, “The Feinstein amendment to the 2013 NDAA does NOT protect you from indefinite detention without charge or trial. In fact, it explicitly permits such detention so long as the detention is approved by an Act of Congress . . . such as the 2012 NDAA.”

This just goes to show you that even people who do a good job of talking the talk might not always walk the walk. Whether he’s simply misguided in an attempt to protect the Constitution for Americans or he’s working to push something he knows will have no effect to quell push-back against federal power grabs, tea party Senator Mike Lee is doing no favors for liberty working with Senator Feinstein and releasing misleading press releases about it. It’s become more obvious than ever that federal bureaucrats aren’t going to protect our liberty, and we’re going to have to work at the state and local level to circumvent the D.C.vers through nullification to protect our sacred rights.

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NY Times Alarmed: Tea Party Reading Unapproved Texts

Thanks to Bud Bronstein for this piece by Kate Zernike from the NY Times, “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts.” Catch the ideological presentism. Instead of just reading the latest approved tomes and today’s issue of the Times, people are learning from “obscure” old books by dead people.

The Tea Party “has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted everywhere from protest signs to Republican Party platforms.” The idea of a movement animated by ideas rather than leaders is just right. BastiatHayek, and Mises are magnificent, and also just what one would expect from a movement born in Ron Paulism. Continue Reading →

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What category do you fall into?

I think the problem is that most of the people in the tea party movement are not true believers in liberty. They are neo-con statist Republicans.

They are also ignorant of the meanings of the words and quotes they use.Remember, I say all this as a founding member of the Orlando Tea Party and someone who has spent the past year and a half of his life fighting in this movement.

This is how I see it: there are two different kinds of tea partiers. There are the younger, more libertarian, Ron Paul tea partiers. We were having tea parties in December 2007.

This is something that Tom Tillison argued with me about. He didn’t believe that Ron Paul supporters were having tea party rallies more than one year before the rest of the country. We were doing it before Obama was elected-during the Bush years. If you don’t believe me, use Google and find the articles for yourself. Continue Reading →

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Nullification: Your State’s Duty

“When states pass laws to nullify unconstitutional mandates, it’s not rebellion, it’s duty.”

Michael Boldin interviewed by Phil Russo and Jason Hoyt of Tea Party Patriots Live – 660AM WORL in Orlando – on July 24, 2010.

See Michael in person in Ft Worth, Orlando, and Chattanooga. Phil Russo will be the MC for Nullify Now on 10-10-10 in Orlando

click here reserve your seats today!

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Free and Total Reign Over the States? Absolutely Not!

“The US are sovereign on their side of the line dividing jurisdictions, the States on the other. Each ought to have the power to demand their respective sovereignties.”

Andrew Nappi, Florida State Coordinator of the Tenth Amendment Center speaking on the 10th Amendment, State Sovereignty, the Founders and Nullification, on April 17th, 2010.

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Tea Party Crashers

From reading this article on the “crash the tea party” movement, http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/13-7  it seems obvious what Mr. Levin thinks about the population at large. 

It seems that he believes we all walk around wearing Nazi uniforms and spewing racial hatred.  He can’t have been to a Tea Party rally before because he would have had to have noticed that no founding members of the German National Workers Socialist Party have been imitated (unless it was to denigrate Fascism). 

It is truly sad that this bozo is a homegrown Oregonian.

The Tea Party protests represent grass roots in America waking up and being disgusted with the state in which we are leaving this country to our children.  I will be at the Tea Party, and I will be handing out leaflets on the Tenth Amendment Movement.  I would ask this school teacher his views on free speech.  Is he against free speech altogether, or is it just advocates of smaller government who don’t deserve to speak?  Does he also teach his children that unlimited submission to the will of a sovereign is the price we pay for “freedom?”  Does he, as he tries to stem the rising unpopularity of the unconstitutional plans of this administration (in the same fashion as the brown shirts of Nazi Germany), feel he is somehow defending liberty? 

There are many who will view this as just what it is, an attempt by an extreme statist activist to silence dissent.  Just my 2 cents.

cross-posted from the Oregon Tenth Amendment Center

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What Do We Do About It?

Here’s video from my recent speech at the Palm Desert Tax Day Tea Party – April 15, 2010. Much of the crowd had never heard what I had to say, and I was glad to hear loads of positive feedback after the event…

Part I:

Part II:

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Ron Paul at the DC Tea Party

(h/t Lew Rockwell)

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Dick Armey Praises Hamilton, Inserts Foot in Mouth

In its ongoing attempt to take over the “tea party” movement the Republican Party recently dragged out Dick Armey, who promptly placed his right foot directly into his mouth by claiming that all those statist liberals out there do not support the ideas in The Federalist Papers. A member of the audience who I suspect has read my book, Hamilton’s Curse, asked Armey how the tea party movement could support The Federalist Papers when their chief proponent, Alexander Hamilton, was such a statist. And he was, of course: He advocated a permanent president who would appoint all the governors, who would in turn have veto power over all state legislation, thereby destroying state sovereignty and centralizing all political power; he was the founding father of constitutional subversion who invented the idea of “implied powers” of the Constitution along with the perversion of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses; and he was a British-style mercantilist on economic policy, favoring protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, a large public debt, heavy taxation, central banking, and central planning in general.

This is not surprising. The Jeffersonian, states’ rights view of the Constitution has been all but whitewashed from American history, and continues to be whitewashed by such GOP/neocon propaganda organs as the Claremont Institute, which runs conferences and other programs on Hamilton’s Federalist Papers and the centralizing nationalist view of government that they promote. Claremont is also known for its charming policy of waging campaigns of character assassination against anyone who dares to resurrect the Jeffersonian decentralist, states’ rights philosophy (Their biggest joke is to claim that Lincoln was a “Jeffersonian”!). A couple of decades of conservative political activists have been mis-educated by them, and Armey is apparently one of them. (Thanks to Lew and Bob Murphy for bringing the Armey episode to my attention).

Cross-Posted from the LewRockwell.com Blog

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Tenthers are Obstructionists!

First we were called racists, now we’re something else because we demand that the government follow the constitution – every issue, every time. No exceptions, no excuses.

Brian Melendez, head of the DFL party in Minnesota, has this to say in a recent interview with MN public radio:

“The tea party tends to identify themselves with the movement that some have called ’10th-ers,’ people who support the 10th Amendment as a vehicle for obstructing programs sponsored by the federal government, like health care reform.” [emphasis added]

Well, he’s right about one thing – as a Tenther, I’m proud to say that I’d like to obstruct everything that D.C. does that’s outside the scope of their constitutionally-delegated powers. Like, say, the drug war, national health care, bankster bailouts, cap and trade, federal definitions of marriage, waging war without congressional declaration, federal education standards, and the list could go on and on….and on.

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