Tea Party Running the Show in Georgia County

Most of Fayette County’s elected leaders are Tea Partiers, shedding light on how Tea Party reformers -- if given full control -- might shape public policy and overhaul Republican politics at the local level.

Fayette County, Ga., is exactly what you think of when you think of the exurban South. It’s technically part of the Atlanta metropolitan area -- the county’s northwest corner lies just six miles from the runways at Hartsfield International Airport -- but Fayette rolls south from there over the gentle hills of central Georgia. With just over 106,000 residents, it’s the second least densely populated county in the region, full of rural woodlands, artificial lakes, grassy fields and affluent pockets of modern suburbia. Most of the roads have no more than two lanes in either direction. The planned community of Peachtree City, with a population of 35,000, is the county’s largest town. (Crisscrossed by a 90-mile network of bike and golf-cart paths, the town routinely shows up on national “best places to live” lists.) You can walk your dog through the middle of Peachtree City and still spot deer and raccoons.

But there’s one thing that distinguishes Fayette County, one aspect that makes it different from other exurban enclaves throughout the Sun Belt. Fayette County is run entirely by the Tea Party. All five county commissioners are Tea Party members, as is the entire county school board, along with a sheriff, a mayor and several city council members.

It’s a nascent political experiment, to be sure: Most of the Tea Partiers on the county commission were only voted into office in November. And it’s certainly too early to know exactly what impact the new guard will have on the area’s future. But what’s already happening in Fayette County illuminates how Tea Party reformers -- if given full control -- might shape public policy and overhaul Republican politics at the local level. It poses a fundamental question about Tea Party leadership: What happens when some of the biggest critics of government end up being the ones in charge?

Fayette County has long been a conservative bastion. Locals have voted decisively for every Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan’s first election. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Congressional district once included Fayette County. Fayette is overwhelmingly white and mostly well off (the median household income is about $81,000, significantly higher than the national median and nearly 40 percent higher than the rest of Georgia).

Through the 1990s and most of the 2000s, Fayette enjoyed rapid growth as Atlanta commuters moved farther and farther out, seeking big houses on leafy streets. The new development was fueled in part by the brand of pro-business, pro-growth Republicanism that rose to prominence across the South. With the vast majority of county revenue coming from property taxes, Fayette’s coffers rose along with home values. A bullish housing market allowed the county commission to pay for more roads and a few public amenities, including a senior center, which paved the way for even more development. The elected body didn’t do much else: It levied taxes, controlled county property and oversaw county roads. The county raised more money than it spent each year.

Then the Great Recession hit, and the political and economic climate changed. The local unemployment rate jumped from under 5 percent in 2008 to over 8 percent in 2010. As housing prices plummeted, so did property tax collections. Money from the county’s sales-and-use tax took a nosedive as well. In 2012, after several years of rising expenditures and declining revenues, the commission had to dip into its reserve fund to balance the budget.

That’s when the Tea Party stepped in. “People were suddenly in a position where whatever worked before was no longer working,” says Pat Cooper, the managing editor of the Fayette County News. “When things went from bad to worse, the Tea Party became a guiding star for residents.”

Two Tea Party candidates won commission seats in 2010. In a post-election analysis that year, local Tea Party co-founder Bob Ross detailed the ways he believed the old-guard GOP had failed local residents: Commissioners had supported a costly road project, backed a sales tax increase and failed to officially reprimand a fellow commissioner for criminal behavior (a DUI involving marijuana). Ross’ words echoed the frustrations of conservatives nationwide, who have attacked expensive new public programs under the Obama administration, such as the economic stimulus package and the universal health-care law. Local Fayette Tea Party challengers promised to be frugal, transparent and persistent in trying to block further construction of the costly and unpopular road.

In 2012, the party swept the three remaining seats. All of the candidates ran on the same platform, vowing to uproot “corruption” and restore order to the local budget. (Their accusations of fiscal malfeasance warrant some skepticism. True, the county had begun spending slightly more than it was taking in, but the commission still had more than $8 million in reserves and a rainy day fund.)

Ever since, the Tea Party in Fayette County has been on a roll. As the party has sought control of the commission, the school board and other local seats, its record has so far been a sterling 14 wins in 14 races. “Anything we’ve gone after,” says local party co-founder Harold Bost, “we’ve gotten it.”

The schism in the local Republican Party mirrors the GOP soul-searching that’s currently taking place in the states and Washington. The Tea Party candidates portrayed Republican incumbents as left-leaning moderates who were wasting taxpayer dollars. “They tried to say they wanted to cleanse the party, but what they really wanted to do was control the party,” says county Republican Chairman Lane Watts. “It was mind-blowing.”

At the national level, the Tea Party movement has rallied around federal budget cuts, a stronger check against executive power and a pledge against any new taxes. In Fayette, the focus is somewhat shifted. (Herbert Frady, who retired from the Fayette County Commission last year after serving five terms, counts himself as a member of the national Tea Party. The local party, he contends, isn’t the real thing.) The local party supports limited government and fiscal conservatism, yes, but it also is waging battles against high-density growth and investments in mass transit.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the old-style Republicans and their successors is their respective appetites for new development. After the pro-growth GOP of the past 20 years, the Tea Partiers in Fayette can almost sound like environmental protectionists. “The county commission is a big part of what kind of future you’ve got,” says local party leader Ross. “Are you going to be a county full of strip malls? Are you going to pave over the county?”

That’s a major distinction, says University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock. Republican leaders in rural counties accept tradeoffs, such as sales tax increases, in order to maintain roads and high-quality schools, so long as they attract private-sector investment. “Your Tea Party people can’t make that kind of assessment,” Bullock says. “Their top priority is to maintain low taxes. They would say, if you have a very low tax structure, that alone is enough inducement to private industry coming in.”

The development question was a big part of what galvanized the Tea Party takeover in Fayette. The former commissioners approved a six-mile road project to relieve traffic congestion that mostly doesn’t exist yet, plus a new fee for stormwater maintenance. They also supported a failed statewide referendum last summer on a one-cent sales tax that would have paid for new roads in Fayette County, plus bus and light rail in other parts of the metro Atlanta region. Until late last year, the incumbents backed a regional transportation plan that included potential mass transit segments in Fayette by 2040.

Supporters of those plans -- particularly the statewide referendum, a measure that would have brought nearly $7.2 billion in new transportation investments to 10 counties around Atlanta, but which voters throughout the entire region overwhelmingly rejected -- said they were necessary to meet the area’s future growth challenges. In Fayette County alone, the population more than tripled from 1980 to 2010. The Atlanta Regional Commission, a metropolitan planning organization, projects that another 54,000 people will reside in the county by 2030.

But the local Tea Party saw those sorts of long-term plans as tantamount to urbanization and a betrayal to residents’ preferred way of life. It prompted accusations that commissioners were in developers’ pockets, and paying more attention to interest groups in Atlanta instead of the voters in Fayette County. “No one moved to Fayette County to be close to anything,” said Tea Party Commissioner Steve Brown at a public meeting in 2011. Fayette residents, he argued, chose a rural setting with long commutes over the conveniences of urban life. “Many of us are refugees from the current mass transit counties in metro Atlanta.”

“You do see an idealism around the suburban lifestyle that they’ve created,” says Ashley Robbins, president of the Atlanta-based Citizens for Progressive Transit and an advocate of the failed sales tax referendum. “That county has always gravitated that way. It has always been exclusive and I think that will continue.”

Even before the party’s sweep of the county commission last fall, the two Tea Partiers who had won election in 2010 had given an indication of how they would run things. Brown and his colleague Allen McCarty have championed a menu of policy changes to reduce the cost of government, impose stricter ethics rules and discourage high-density development. Between the two of them, they’ve proposed outsourcing the county’s building inspections, opening more contracts to competitive bidding and diverting some transportation funds to pay for stormwater maintenance (rather than imposing new fees).

One change that’s already taking place? More direct access from citizens. As the new chairman, Brown has revised the rules for public meetings so that citizens have more opportunities to speak to the commission, not just those residents who sign up at the start of a meeting. The new commission is looking into posting online videos of its meetings. They’re also making an effort to be more open and transparent in the process of appointing citizens to advisory boards. “We’re really striving to be a representative government,” says Brown.

Now the Tea Party must translate campaign rhetoric into the work of governing the county. Some of their actions already seem to invoke the more mainstream Republicans they ousted. The commissioners, for example, are already discussing ways to connect the county to an interstate highway, which would shorten the commute time to Atlanta and could result in expanding development in Fayette once again. One commissioner is even talking about finding money for employee pay raises.

Ultimately, it may not even be that paradoxical that a party that frequently rails against the government is in charge of running one. True, national Tea Party leaders such as retired Texas Rep. Ron Paul and his son Rand, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, have advocated for the elimination of entire federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Education. But the issues at the local level are different. Tea Partiers -- at least the ones in Fayette County -- aren’t seeking to dismantle the local school system or eliminate the sheriff’s office. Government does have a legitimate, if limited, role in public life, they argue -- to protect individual rights provided under state and federal constitutions, such as access to affordable education and public safety.

Still, if the commissioners stray too far from Tea Party ideals, the local party operatives will be watching. “If they don’t do it right,” says Bost, “we’re going to be right down their backs.”

Source: Read the April issue of Governing magazine. bY: J.B. WOGAN | APRIL 2013

Local Govt. Debt $7.3 trillion

The Debt Bomb That Taxpayers Won't See Coming State and local governments owe $7.3 trillion in promises they've made that were never approved by taxpayers.

By STEVEN MALANGA

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Illinois officials with making misleading statements to bond investors about the state's pension system. The agency detailed a long list of deceptive practices including failure to tell investors that the system was so underfunded that it risked bankruptcy. Illinois taxpayers, as well as the holders of its debt, will ultimately bear the burden of the officials' misdeeds. But there is nothing unique about the Prairie State. For years, elected officials in states and municipalities across the country have been imprudently piling up obligations that are imposing serious strains on budgets, prompting higher taxes and cutbacks in services.

In January, city officials in Sacramento, California's capital, reported the results of a study they had commissioned on all the debt that the municipality had incurred. At a City Council meeting that the Sacramento Bee reported as "sobering," the city manager explained that Sacramento had racked up some $2 billion in obligations (mostly pensions and retiree health care). All this for a municipality of 477,000 residents with an annual general fund budget of just $366 million. Sacramento finances are already stretched—the city has cut some 1,200 workers, or 20% of its workforce, in the past several years. Servicing its debt in years to come will only add more woe, especially given the intractability of public unions. The budget report noted that "While reducing staff is clearly not the preferred method for reducing costs, the city has a very limited ability to reduce the cost of labor absent cooperation from the city's employee groups."

According to studies by the Pew Center on the States, states and the biggest cities have made nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in promises to pay for retiree health-care insurance. Yet governments have set aside only about 5% of the money they'll need to pay for these promises.

This year a Chicago city commission reported that retiree health-care expenditures would soar from $109 million in this year's budget to $541 million in a decade. After concluding that the expenditures were unaffordable, one member of the commission proposed that retirees be required to sign on to the Illinois Health Insurance Exchange being created under President Obama's Affordable Care Act. Health insurance would be cheaper if it is subsidized by the federal government. A December report by the States Project, a joint venture of Harvard's Institute of Politics and the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government, estimated that state and local governments now owe in sum a staggering $7.3 trillion. Incredibly, the vast majority of this debt has never been approved by taxpayers, who are often unaware of the extent of their obligations. Most state constitutions and many municipal charters limit borrowing and mandate voter approval. No matter. Politicians evade the limits, issuing billions of dollars in municipal offerings never approved by voters, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Courts have rubber-stamped many of these schemes.

The debt incurred by New Jersey for school projects is a case in point. In 2001, legislators in Trenton hatched a scheme to borrow a shocking $8.6 billion for refurbishing school buildings. The reaction to their plan in the press and among taxpayer groups was so negative that the politicians knew that voters would never approve it. So the legislature created an independent borrowing authority.

Since it, and not taxpayers, would take on the debt, politicians claimed that there was no need for voters' consent. Taxpayer groups challenged the maneuver. The state Supreme Court brushed aside their objections, arguing that there was already precedent for such borrowing. New Jersey's Schools Construction Corp. quickly squandered half of the money on patronage and inefficient construction practices, so in 2005 the state borrowed another $3.9 billion. All of the debt is being repaid by taxpayers. The authority, which was dissolved several years ago, had no revenues of its own.

Next door, in New York, a scant 5% of the Empire State's $63 billion in outstanding debt has ever been authorized by voters, according to the state comptroller. The rest has been engineered through independent authorities such as the Transitional Finance Authority. These authorities are designed to circumvent voters. Of the seven bond offerings that have gone before New York voters in the past 25 years, four have been defeated. But thanks to unsanctioned debt, New Yorkers bear the second-highest per capita debt burden in the nation, $3,258, according to a January report by the state comptroller. New Jersey is No. 1, at $3,964.

To prevent the pile-up of hidden debt, taxpayers need to spearhead a revolt that will narrow the ability of officials to mortgage their future. Any such revolt will first of all seek an end to government sponsored defined-benefit pension plans, through which politicians promise benefits years hence to current employees in a manner that potentially leaves taxpayers on the hook for unlimited liabilities. Simpler, defined-contribution plans featuring individual retirement accounts would make government pension systems less expensive and their accounting more transparent. Similarly, reformers will have to rein in borrowing by independent authorities and other government entities created to circumvent current debt limits. No state or municipality should be allowed to issue any debt for which taxpayers are ultimately liable without voter approval. Without such reforms, many states risk becoming like Illinois, where a $7 billion tax increase in 2011 was largely gobbled up by rising pension costs, leaving the state with a $9 billion backlog of unpaid bills and the prospect of new taxes to pay off its $271 billion in debt.

This is a future in which rising taxes don't provide citizens new services but merely go to pay off hidden debts.

Source: Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2013, 6:28 p.m. ET Mr. Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This column is adapted from a forthcoming issue of City Journal, where he is a senior editor. A version of this article appeared March 30, 2013, on page A11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Debt Bomb That Taxpayers Won't See Coming. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324077704578362101467799948.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Global Warming Hoax Emails

Climategate Leaker: Civilization is Being Destroyed by Lying “Science” Elitists

Posted By Sharon Rondeau On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 @ 2:50 PM In Editorials 

ANONYMOUS HERO WHO EXPOSED THE GLOBAL WARMING EMAILS TELLS THE WORLD WHY HE DID IT – AND RELEASES A HUGE FINAL TROVE OF SECRET CONVERSATIONS    by Ron Arnold, ©2013

The University of East Anglia opened in October 1963 and is located in Norwich, UK

(Mar. 26, 2013) — “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.”

This private musing between two climate scientist colleagues first surfaced along with a whole raft of embarrassing material in 2011, when the anonymous Climategate leaker who calls himself “Mr. FOIA” leaked his second set of emails from Britain’s disgraced Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Now, Mr. FOIA has emerged for a third time, sharing with the world not only his entire batch of 220,000 encrypted emails and documents but also, for the first time, his thoughts.

Mr. FOIA had previously released two batches of 5,000 files each in 2009 and 2011. This enormous third batch went to a network of friends for decoding, sorting and publication.

The first and second email batches contained conversations among “scientists” who appear to have dishonored a once respectable discipline, documenting that their claims of a “man-made global warming crisis” look exactly like deliberate contrivances for academic career gain, research funding and positions of political power in “the cause.”

Some big-name players are playing games with people’s lives and livelihoods.

Biggest Player. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the scientific panel whose reports contain the work of Climategate figures – and are highly politicized and publicized to increase fear of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW): “imminent catastrophic man-made climate change.” Many horrendously expensive and needless local, state, federal and international policies have flowed from IPCC’s flawed reports.

Most Powerful Symbol. Professor Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick Graph” was featured prominently in the 2001IPCC Third Assessment Report. It alleged that global temperatures were flat for a thousand years before 1900, but then radically increased because of AGW. The chart looks like a hockey stick, a long straight line that bends sharply upward at the end. With recent IPCC admissions that temperatures have not increased for at least the past 16 years, the curve has now plunged downward to become as flat as the rest of the hockey stick, which is where public trust in climate science is headed.

The Game. “The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it,” says an astounding, horrifying UK government-funded booklet leaked by Mr. FOIA titled “The Rules of the Game: Evidence base for the Climate Change Communications Strategy.” Written by the UK public relations firm Futerra for six UK agencies – including The Carbon Trust – for use by ethics and public relations tone-deaf scientists.

“The Rules” teaches sophisticated behavior change tactics, including: “Climate change must be ‘front of mind’ before persuasion works” … “Link climate change mitigation to positive desires/aspirations” … “Beware the impacts of cognitive dissonance” and “Use emotions and visuals” (e.g., scare people with the Hockey Stick Graph). It treats the public like gullible idiots who can be frightened and manipulated by seemingly trustworthy scientists to believe in AGW. For a long time, it worked.

The Team. Phil Jones, head of the CRU; Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office (the national weather service, originally the Meteorological Office) was joined by Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis section head of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Tom Wigley, also of NCAR; and the litigious Penn State University Hockey Stick originator, Michael Mann.

James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute, sums their actions up this way. The team consciously distorted and actively suppressed critical knowledge, then furiously tried to hide their actions by conducting a vicious smear campaign to discredit critics.

Consciously distorted: NCAR’s Wigley once complained to Mann, “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.…”

Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office warned Phil Jones, head of the CRU: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere, unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary.… I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”

Suppressed critical knowledge: Phil Jones wrote, “I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working on the IPCC 5th  Assessment Report would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder [the U.S. Department of Energy] in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.” The U.S. government was colluding with the hiders, who received tens of millions of dollars over the years.

Jones wrote to Mann, “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith Briffa re AR4 [the IPCC 4th Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. … We will be getting Caspar Ammann to do likewise.”

Tom Crowley, a key member of Mann’s global warming hockey team, showed crass disregard for the lying and hiding: “I am not convinced that the ‘truth’ is always worth reaching, if it is at the cost of damaged personal relationships.” It’s more important to keep the career back-scratching team happy.

The distortion, spin, suppression and smear campaign went on for years. In fact, the revelations sparked a furious “hide the lies” denial campaign that ironically calls skeptics “deniers.” What the skeptics actually deny is that there has been much honest science involved in the IPCC process; that there is any evidence to support claims that we face an imminent climate crisis; and that humans are primarily responsible for weather and climate variations that have always been controlled by hundreds of complex, inter-related natural forces and processes.

“Hide the lies” generated lawsuits between climate science “believers” (what kind of real science requires belief?) and skeptics of “dangerous man-made planetary warming” – along with ridiculous conspiracy theories such as “Big Oil hired evil hackers in a plot to discredit angelic climate scientists.”

Mr. FOIA denies these absurd allegations in his 3.0 message. “I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again,” he said. “That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil. The Republicans didn’t plot this. USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK. There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.”

“The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to garner my trust in the state of climate science – on the contrary,” Mr. FOIA continued. “I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.” Reveal what he had discovered, or keep it to himself and let the lies continue?

Didn’t he fear discovery? “When I had to balance the interests of my own safety, the privacy and career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades … millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc. … the first two weren’t the decisive concern.”

Why did he do it? His answer was both angry and anguished: “Climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material ‘might’ …. The price of ‘climate protection’ with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations,” he wrote. “We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not [taking] away from something and someone else.”

That’s the most important statement so far in the decades-old climate debate: You’re forcing us backward into poverty and ignorance – for nothing, except to further your careers, funding and power.

Less than a week later, London’s Mail on Sunday newspaper ran an outraged feature based on the British Meteorological Office’s recent admission that global surface temperatures haven’t risen in more than 15 years. Citing a chart of predicted and actual temperatures, the Mail noted: “Official predictions of global climate warming have been catastrophically flawed. The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. The chart shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. Yet those forecasts have had a ruinous impact on the bills we pay, from heating to car fuel to huge sums paid by councils to reduce carbon emissions. The eco-debate was, in effect, hijacked by false data.”

Is it improper to label the people responsible for this costly, miserable catastrophe as “eco-thugs”? And should we worry that the latest no-real-energy “energy security” proposal from the White House is telling us that Mr. Obama has become America’s “Eco-thug in Chief,” who will continue to peddle fraudulent science and nearly worthless renewable energy to further his agenda? It’s worth pondering.

A set of pro forma “investigations” claim to have exonerated PSU’s Mann. The internal PSU inquiry – with no impartial truth-seekers involved – was not going to harm their grant-getting cash cow Mann; instead, it whitewashed the evidence to ensure the preferred conclusion. Professional science groups that relied upon public funding for their financial survival fell in line behind a huge Tom Sawyer campaign of “exoneration.” There was no exoneration.

Summaries presented in court filings for the case of American Tradition Institute v. University of Virginia and Michael Mann – which demands release of Michael Mann’s emails – say, “Mann has never been exonerated…. Exoneration requires investigation; investigation requires pursuit aimed at discovering material facts.  Mann’s employer since 2005, Penn State University, has conducted no such thing. Neither has the University of Virginia.”

The same conclusion applies to the UK’s Muir Russell and Oxburgh inquiries, which didn’t even mention Mann, because they were “investigating” only employees of the CRU.

I asked Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and attorney in the ATI v. UVa/Mann lawsuit for his take on the leaker’s message. He told me, “Whatever prompted ‘Mr. FOIA,’ I take it as a statement that, so far, the courts have failed us, as have our political institutions – and he has concluded that those in the public who have resisted the climate industry agenda should now have a chance to review these taxpayer-financed records, which are the subject of a remarkable campaign to subvert transparency laws.”

We ourselves can’t avoid blame for the science disaster uncovered by Mr. FOIA. As Peter Foster of London’s Financial Times noted, we didn’t heed President Dwight Eisenhower’s warning. “Most people are aware of Ike’s warning in 1961 about the military-industrial complex,” Foster wrote. Our fatal error was to ignore what he said next: “In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” [emphasis added]

Americans won’t take captivity. It’s time to demote our climate masters to our humble servants. We won’t kill them. But we should sentence them to prison – or Siberia, where they’ll wish the climate was warming.

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Examiner columnist Ron Arnold is executive VP of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. Portions of this article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner and are used by permission.

© 2013, The Post & Email. All rights reserved.

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Article printed from The Post & Email: http://www.thepostemail.com

URL to article: http://www.thepostemail.com/2013/03/26/climategate-leaker-civilization-is-being-destroyed-by-lying-science-elitists/

Our DHS Gestapo

Time To Fix America – Our government is taking up arms against its own citizens.

 (Bob Russell – TeaParty.org) – The Democrat leader of the Colorado State Senate, John Morse, recently stated, publicly, that he just ignores his constituents, and tells his fellow State Senators to do the same, because he doesn’t like their stand on gun control.  Now isn’t this just the height of arrogance and tyranny?  He is a “servant of the People” who swore to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”?  That dismissive and disgusted tone in his voice when referring to “some people” should be an alarm to anyone, including voters registered as Democrats.

Americans, this is what we are facing with increasing frequency from elected officials at all levels and in both political parties.  This is truly a “bi-partisan” power grab we are facing. The increasing degree of arrogance on the part of elected officials shows how far they have gone in their plan to take total control over our lives.  It is one thing to have “discussions behind closed doors” and another thing altogether when they just come out and brazenly boast about their actions against We the People.   This man and his entire party are trampling on the Constitution and making no attempts to hide it any longer.  They are taking an “in your face” stand, daring We the People to do something about it.  The bully has thrown down the gauntlet for everyone to see.  He is openly challenging citizens to put a stop to tyranny, his tyranny.

The entire Democrat Party, and the Republican Party as well, are telling We the People that they can do as they wish and the Constitution means nothing. 

Republicans posture and beat their chests for a while and then compromise on “common sense gun control measures”, meaning they sign off on taking away our right to own firearms as stated in the 2nd Amendment.  The straw argument that “no one should have the right to own a nuclear missile” just doesn’t fly with citizens.   There are some in Congress, and in state legislatures around the nation, that are standing up for us and for the Constitution.  They are being pilloried by the political class of both parties and the lame stream media for doing so.  Anyone who has the temerity to challenge their “all-knowing wisdom” is declared an “enemy of the state” and subject to a drone strike at any moment because, according to Attorney General Eric Holder, “if the President does it, it is legal”!!!!

This is the stuff of dictatorships not a Constitutional Republic.   I wrote a couple of articles last month that address the problem of politicians and their handlers who deny the rights of We the People.  In the first one I appealed to people with name recognition and/or immense wealth to “put their money where their mouth is”, and challenged conservative voters to stand behind them in this battle for liberty.  In the second one I appealed to citizens who are registered Democrats to think about what their party is doing to their nation, and to their individual liberty.

This attitude of “we know better and will ignore you peasants” has passed the point of concern and has come to the point of outright danger.  If they no longer feel any necessity to hide their contempt for American citizens and for our way of life, We the People are facing imminent subjugation. Our rights to self –defense are being gutted by a government that holds the opinions of its citizens in disdain and total disregard.  They see themselves as the only ones capable of making decisions that are “in our best interests”.

Our government is taking up arms against its own citizens.

The Department of Homeland Security (sic) is buying billions of rounds of hollow point bullets, designed for maximum damage to the human body (these aren’t for “target practice”); tens of thousands of full automatic rifles, the true “assault rifles”, not the semi-automatic kind you and I possess; are re-fitting thousands of armored “Urban Rescue Vehicles”, the kind with gun ports, for use in American cities; and helicopters fly through our skies shooting machineguns in simulated “domestic unrest” scenarios.   Martial Law is right around the corner.

They will isolate citizens and confiscate their firearms, or kill the citizen who refuses to surrender their protection, over little or nothing, mostly “imagined offenses” as is happening in California right now.  They like to throw the mental health issue out into the arena because they know Republicans will hide behind the need to “keep the guns out of the hands of the mentally deranged”.  Of course, that category now applies to any veteran, whether they have seen combat or not.  And who will define “mental illness”, Sen. Diane Feinstein?  Even now people who believe the Constitution is the law of the land and the basis for our nation are called “extremists” by those in power in both political parties.

How much of a step is it to declare these same “extremists” as mentally ill for the purpose of denying them their 2nd Amendment rights?   The Democrat Party, and their allies in the Republican Party, have this all designed to destroy the Constitution and to subjugate We the People.  Establishment operatives in both political parties have joined forces to impose their will on the citizens of America.  They don’t care what we think, what we want, or what is lawful.  They desire the power to dictate our lives to us and this Colorado State Senate president has come right out in the open and stated as much.  The message to We the People is “agree with us voluntarily or we will impose agreement on you”.

Nanny Bloomberg is doing the same thing in New York City, telling people of the nation that he will impose our best interests on us if we refuse to acquiesce voluntarily.

This has to stop, and We the People must stop it, if liberty is to be re-established.

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Bob Russell is a retired Vietnam veteran having served in Special Forces Operations during his military career.  Bob is a member of your Tea Party Research Team.

Source: www.teaparty.org

Comments:

The practical reason for citizen gun ownership is deterrence to home invasion by criminals.  Countries who have banned gun ownership are now breaking crime records and their citizens are demanding their gun rights be returned (fat chance). Our 2^nd Amendment Rights simply say that our government cannot disarm us.  Gun legislation is by definition unconstitutional. We have reached the point where we need to roll back unconstitutional laws that affect our liberty and our ability to be productive and self-supporting.  If we don’t do this, we will continue to see our needless economic decline accelerate  

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Your Government Needs Your Help

Your  Government Needs Your Help
 

Norbert T. Leahy

Dear Citizen,

We hope you think that we in government are doing a good job.  We know that life isn't perfect and, therefore, we have made that our philosophy.  We are doing the best we can with the little money we have.  We have been  busy worrying about our society.  That's our job.  We would like to share some of our concerns.  We are having some problems funding our criminal justice and education systems, and our environmental protection and health programs and could use more money.  Most of all, we want you as citizens to do your part by volunteering to help us implement our newest program ideas.

Our parole boards are having to let violent criminals out of jail because there aren't enough jail cells.  We would like for you to initiate a petition to increase your state and federal taxes so that we can set up a fund and study it and maybe build some more prisons in 10 or 20 years.  In the meantime, we are excited about using the money to start our new "adopt a felon" program, where you can adopt a released convict and keep him in your home and be the family he never had.

Our immigration service is concerned that illegal immigrants are streaming across our borders and have given up trying to catch and deport them because they all claim political asylum.  We passed a law that prevents companies from hiring them, so some are selling drugs and the others are going on welfare.  We are currently planning an "adopt an illegal Immigrant" program so that you can keep one in your home and learn a second language and a different culture.

Some time ago, we let all of the crazy people out of the mental institutions because we were afraid that we were violating their civil rights and besides, we needed the money we spent to keep them there for other things.  We need a "crazy person neighborhood watch" program so that if these people wander into your neighborhood, we will know what they are doing.  Remember, we can't do anything unless they kill somebody, so if they do, make sure to call and let us know.

Our police officers are unable to stop the violent crime associated with drug gangs and crazy people.  Drugs flow freely over the border, and crazy people are everywhere.  We need money so we can hire 100,000 police officers who can get out into bad neighborhoods where these drug gangs and crazy people live so they can get to know them.

Our teachers are having to teach kids about safe sex, hand out condoms, check kids for weapons and teach classes in self esteem, environmental protection, diversity, homosexuality, child abuse, and political correctness.  Consequently, we no longer have the time or money to teach them to read, write, or do math.  We would appreciate it if you could go over reading, writing, and math with your kids at home in your spare time.  We would like to avoid any further decline in their SAT scores.

Our nuclear production sites are a mess.  We can't clean them up.  This stuff could be leaking into your drinking water soon.  We need money to throw at this until somebody figures out what to do.

Our Medicare and Medicaid programs were a big success, and the demand for health care skyrocketed.  Giving free health care to old and poor people was much more expensive than we thought, and there's no end in sight.  We are continuing to spent much more on these programs than we take.  Rather than raise your taxes, we decided not to pay the providers what they charged.  These providers then raised their charges to make up for what we didn't pay.  Insurance premiums got so high that 37 million people didn't buy health insurance and really sick people couldn't get it.  Providers treated them anyway and raised their charges to make up for what they didn't pay.  Well, now we have to fix this mess and make everybody buy health Insurance.  We need your support to make these 37 million people pay premiums to the insurance companies.  It's an outrage.

On a more positive note, we want to share our excitement with you over some of the ideas we have to help families through government programs and create more non-manufacturing jobs.  We are excited about our health reform, foreign trade, and gun control initiatives as well as our plans to purchase more land.  We plan to issue everyone a national health card and a national ID card and perhaps give everyone a tattoo with their number on it for a small fee.  In addition, we are excited about our plans to help the former Soviet Union, South America, Africa, Asia, certainly all of the third world countries, and let's not forget about Europe.  I hope you are as excited as we are about our ideas for new programs, and we know you'll agree that increasing taxes, so that we can begin to cook up new things to try on our many problems and fund many worthy projects, is the answer.  We need to hire a lot more government employees, because you taxpayers will be demanding a lot more government services, and it's our job to see that you get them.

Warmest regards,

Your Government

 

Source:

Mr. Leahy Is President of NTL Human Resources Maragement Consulung, 1312 Wynterceek Lane, Dunwoody, GA 30338, phone/fax 404-394-1284.

THE JOURNAL OF THE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION OF GEORGIA Volume 84 FEBUARY 1994

Page 93

 

Saving the U.S. Economy

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
The Federal government has been spending twice what it takes in taxes.  This should never have happened, Too many Republican politicians have allowed themselves to be intimidated by critics and bribed by federal grants.  Democrats seem totally comfortable moving the U.S. into full-blown, private sector crippling, European socialism.  Now, unless Constitutional Republicans win the Senate in 2014, and vote correctly, our economic demise will continue to accelerate. 

Republican administrations have made serious mistakes.  George H.W. Bush signed on to UN Agenda 21, justified by the global warming hoax.  Bill Clinton activated it with an Executive Order and the federal bureaucracy began implementing it.  It has turned into a nightmare of EPA overreach, federal land and water grabs, draconian planning and zoning at the local level, wide-spread private property abuses and Gestapo style Department of Homeland Security building internment camps.  George W. Bush established DHS, ran up the debt to 9 trillion and failed to repeal the laws that created the 2008 Meltdown and failed to cancel the Orders that enabled UN Agenda 21 implementation. 

Democrats disgraced themselves with the passage of Obama-care and the addition of $1 trillion a year in spending.  Democrats have been eager to take on debt from everywhere, including $1 trillion in student loans, virtually all home mortgages and the sand hole they call alternative energy. 

Both Republicans and Democrats have been irresponsible in allowing record contributions to foreign military aid and failing to reduce legal immigration, now at 1.8 million a year, when real unemployment is over 20%.  We have left no jobs available for U.S. citizens.  We are funding our enemies at the UN and have allowed a global Marxist cabal to take over the Whitehouse. Our own laws allow the government to remove all of our Constitutional rights by Executive Order.

The opponents of freedom include the U.N. and its cabal of global corporations, banks, investors and communists supporting carbon capture to weaken the U.S. private economy and cut our U.S. standard of living in half.  

Our only hope is to clean house and restore the private sector free market system.  Government has allowed the Constitution, its Amendments and the Bill of Rights to be progressively ignored for over 100 years.  Federal encroachment into the private sector has ruined healthcare and education and is continuing to spread.  Regulatory overreach, uncompetitive corporate tax rates and bad trade agreements have left us with little manufacturing and off-limits oil and gas reserves.   

We need affordable energy and right now that is limited to coal, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, natural gas and gasoline. Alternative energy sources cost 5 times more.  Carbon is not a pollutant and we need to stop closing coal plants. We need the Federal Reserve to be able to pull back the trillions of dollars it has given to the large global banks or we will have hyperinflation. We need to expand our water supplies to enable farmers to water crops. 

We don’t need government involvement in economic development.  We don’t need bike lanes, “green space” and new retail space.  We don’t need “wildlife preserves” and more national parks. We are in the 5^th year of the 2^nd Great Depression and we’d better cut government spending and concentrate on increasing private sector production.  It’s the only way to dig ourselves out of this hole.

Voters need to know how each of their politicians have voted, to determine who to elect in 2014 and beyond. The website: “elect the right candidate. us”, gives voters access to how their State and Federal politicians voted on each Bill.  The website: “Numbers” allows voters to send free emails on immigration issues to elected officials. Both websites include updated scores for each candidate.  There are several more websites that score politician’s votes. 

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Benghazi Investigation Witnesses Missing

SOS at CPAC: "Where's Admiral Gaouette?" and the "Benghazi CBA"

New organization of former US Special Ops officers issues distress calls about urgent high-profile questions,  by Mark Langfan, at CPAC

"SOS" is a naval emergency distress call meaning "Save our Ship", but at the CPAC, (Conservative Political Action Committee) convention, "SOS" stands for SpecialOperationsSpeaks.com, a new organization of former US Special Ops officers who are issuing distress calls about urgent high-profile questions, and critical  unanswered mysteries about the 2012 Obama Benghazi debacle.

CAPT Larry Bailey, USN (Ret.), a former senior SEAL commander and co-founder of Special Operation Speaks, demands to know, "Where the heck is Admiral Gaouette?" ADM Gaouette was the commander of the USS Stennis Carrier Strike Group on station in the Persian Gulf area who was mysteriously summarily stripped of his command during the attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered. 

Several days afterward, it was reported that ADM Gaouette was summarily relieved of his command during a major operational contingency event during the Benghazi attacks for the alleged claim of "inappropriate leadership judgment. " ADM Gaouette's detention and total disappearance weeks before the November 2012 presidential election was a story that CAPT Bailey says "disappeared into a black hole of silence."

CAPT Bailey, as a "Brother-in-the-Navy" of ADM Gaouette, has some urgent and vital questions:

Where is ADM Gaouette now, and where has he been for over 4 months?

Why hasn't Congress called ADM Gaouette to testify about the 2012 Benghazi fiasco, when he clearly was a key operational senior commander in-theater?

If ADM Gaouette is under some type of detention, what does "inappropriate leadership judgment" mean, what is he specifically charged with, and does he have proper legal counsel?

CAPT Bailey urges anyone who heard or saw anything, or has even the smallest most innocuous piece of the puzzle, to tell them what that piece is. He says, "The more questions SOS asks, the bigger the black hole of silence becomes."

Col. Richard F. (Dick) Brauer, Jr, USAF (Ret.), SOS Air Commando Coordinator co-Founder of SOS, has a slightly different, but still vital question: "Where was President Obama's CBA (Cross Border Authority) for the Benghazi ‘rescue’ attempt when US Defense Secretary Panetta claimed Obama told him, ‘Do whatever you gotta do to save American life.’?”

Col. Brauer explains that an insertion of any US forces into Benghazi, Libya, or across any international border into a country where US forces were not deployed, would have required a special US Presidential CBA authorization to be issued. So, in effect, Obama's telling Secretary Panetta to "Do whatever you gotta do" without simultaneously issuing a specific CBA enabling such action is like "telling a fire station to extinguish a 5-alarm blaze while the firemen were not legally allowed to even leave the fire house, go to the fire, or douse the burning building." 

So, Col. Brauer's point is that President Obama may have known that verbally telling Secretary Panetta to "do whatever you gotta do" without his also issuing the legally necessary CBA was "passively ordering USSECDEF Panetta to ‘do nothing.’" 

Col. Brauer says his group is considering filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all the documents and emails surrounding the ADM Gaouette and "missing" CBA questions.

Stay tuned; these soldier sailors have never left a man in the field, and they will never leave Admiral Gaouette in the field.  They see the Admiral as a "man down," and are doing everything they can to help a fellow sailor who may be in trouble.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ First Publish: 3/16/2013, 9:31 PM

Tags: Route 443 ,Benghazi ,Mark Langfan ,Chris Stevens ,Admiral Gaouette ,CPAC