Obama '08?

School vounchers no. Most Tea Partiers are in favor of the federal government getting out of public education....

We affirm the principles of inherent individual rights upon which these United States of America were founded:

That each individual is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are the rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness;

That the freedom to own, use, exchange, control, protect, and freely dispose of property is a natural, necessary and inseparable extension of the individual's unalienable rights;

That the legitimate function of government is to secure these rights through the preservation of domestic tranquility, the maintenance of a strong national defense, and the promotion of equal justice for all;

That history makes clear that left unchecked, it is the nature of government to usurp the liberty of its citizens and eventually become a major violator of the people's rights; and

That, therefore, it is essential to bind government with the chains of the Constitution and carefully divide and jealously limit government powers to those assigned by the consent of the governed.

The Constitution Party is currently not viable. But the principles it puts out there are definitely principles I can mostly support. If it was viable, I think the Republicans would be put out of business for good, and the Democrats would find themselves in the spot the GOP is in now.

You think a passionate speech by one guy is typical of the Tea Parties or even all the people gathered in that room? Do you see great enthusiasm and appreciation for what he is saying there?

Nope. To be viable there has to be a reasonable expectation of ability to achieve a particular goal.

The only way it would happen would be if they ran unopposed or if their opponent was so unsavory and unlikable or unacceptable that they were the best choice available.

Bad government creeps up on us in much the same way. [..]
But one day we wake up and the gorilla has grown to 800 pounds so we finally notice it in the living room.

Foxfyre wrote:

Bad government creeps up on us in much the same way. [..]
But one day we wake up and the gorilla has grown to 800 pounds so we finally notice it in the living room.

Yeah, it just kinda creeps up on you when a Republican president spends profligately while cutting taxes, turning surpluses into gaping deficits - somehow, you just hardly noticed! It just kinda happened. But then this Democrat gets elected president and spends more money still and whoa! Suddenly it's, like, right there, in your face! Suddenly there it is, you notice and you get really, really angry, and you go out in the streets in tea parties declaring that the very character of the country hangs in the balance!

Odd how that happens.

The Constitution party?

I could have swore that you guys were Republicans. Have you been fooling us this whole time?

Cycloptichorn

His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

* * *

Obama is the first President in history to have voted against the confirmation of the Chief Justice who later administered his oath of office. In his Senate speech on that vote, Obama praised Roberts’s intellect and integrity and said that he would trust his judgment in about ninety-five per cent of the cases before the Supreme Court. “In those five per cent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision,” Obama said. “In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions . . . the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.” Obama did not trust Roberts’s heart. “It is my personal estimation that he has far more often used his formidable skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak,” the Senator said. The first bill that Obama signed as President was known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act; it specifically overturned the interpretation of employment law that Roberts had endorsed in the 2007 case.

nimh wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:

Bad government creeps up on us in much the same way. [..]
But one day we wake up and the gorilla has grown to 800 pounds so we finally notice it in the living room.

Yeah, it just kinda creeps up on you when a Republican president spends profligately while cutting taxes, turning surpluses into gaping deficits - somehow, you just hardly noticed! It just kinda happened. But then this Democrat gets elected president and spends more money still and whoa! Suddenly it's, like, right there, in your face! Suddenly there it is, you notice and you get really, really angry, and you go out in the streets in tea parties declaring that the very character of the country hangs in the balance!

Odd how that happens.

Not odd at all. You completely ignored the rest of my post explaining in some detail how that happens.

It takes a truly radical event and major upheaval such as the financial collapse in the last half of 2008 and a new President who tries to solve financial problems by creating more on a previously unimaginable scale to stir peaceful people to activism. And that is what happened. Fiscal irresponsibility was bad enough under President Bush and the Republicans and it cost them elections in 2006 and 2008. But the gorilla has now grown to a truly scary size and the people have finally been alarmed and angered to the point that they are organizing to fight back before it takes their last ability to do so.

Fiscal irresponsibility did not cost the Republicans the '06 and '08 elections. Wherever did you get that idea?

Instead, it was corruption and incompetence. Recognizing this fact is the first step to making the necessary changes your party needs to drag itself out of the gutter.

Cycloptichorn

Very odd! LOL