The Staten Island Tea Party

The Inconvenient Republican

2012-01-22T13:20:00.002-05:00

Donkeys and elephants alike -- indeed, political junkies of every stripe -- have been watching the Republican primary process with the kind of morbid fascination previously reserved for first-century Roman citizens. This sort of carnage is not for the squeamish.

The process has also been likened to the arcade game whack-a-mole; every time a candidate pops his head above the rest of the pack, he gets malleted down. Mitt Romney has been the most enduring of the labor, but the Mitt-whackers have industriously pounded away with great fervor at the Cayman Island-shaped bull’s eye on the top of his head, and he suffered the ignominious distinction of losing two contests in a 24-hour period. Iowa, in a failed attempt to mitigate its incompetency, declared Rick Santorum the winner of its caucus late last Friday evening, and South Carolina resurrected a beleaguered Newt Gingrich with a stunningly convincing victory on Saturday.

As of this writing, it appears to be shaping up as a two--mole, er…man, race between Romney and Gingrich, with Mitt holding a decided edge in organization and fundraising. Time will tell if either of the two have the resources and the stamina to cross the finish line before the Republican conclave in Tampa in late August, but at this juncture it behooves us to take a look at the hysteria surrounding the resurgence of Newt Gingrich.

I’m far from the most experienced political observer on the scene, but I have been paying attention to one degree or another since Kennedy recognized the wisdom of a close shave and a blue suit in the first televised debate in 1960. I’ve seen them all, casting my first vote in 1972 -- for Richard Nixon -- but never, no, not ever, have I witnessed the degree of vitriol that is daily being hurled at Newt Gingrich.

It comes from all quarters and it’s not just edgy, it is downright vicious. It hints of some underlying panic -- as if what is being challenged is not just the bloated federal bureaucracy or unsustainable entitlements, but the very underpinnings of our republic. It seems to go deeper than just a fear of down-ticket disaster; critics hint darkly at the permanent destruction of the Republican brand.

But what this really is, I think, beneath the strident accusations of decades-old misdeeds and betrayals, is a struggle for control of the Republican Party.
The Democratic wave election of 2006, the nomination of John McCain, the election of Barack Obama, the bipartisan bailouts and TARP -- all functioned as alarms that, when combined into one jarring cacophony, served as a wakeup call to the sleeping conservative majority in America. It led, directly, to its coalescing around a movement called the Tea Party.

Originally a welcome ally to a Republican Party still reeling from its disastrous losses in 2006 and 2008, the Republican establishment started to realize they had climbed on the back of a young and exuberant colt, one that they could and would ride to victory in race after race in 2010 -- but there was a caveat. Occasionally their mount would veer uncontrollably off the track to pursue its own objective, oblivious to the pleadings of its rider to for-God’s-sake get back on course. And so the tea party movement gave the Republican establishment Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, and so demolished liberal GOP candidate Deidre Scozzafava in NY-23 that she suspended her campaign mere days before the election -- and threw her support to the Democrat. Since it was a special election, Ms. Scozzafava had been appointed by Republican Party bosses; there had been no primary, and hence no opportunity for the conservative/tea party wing to push for a more conservative standard-bearer.

Which brings us back to Newt Gingrich and the inconvenient Republican.

It’s no secret that when Newt debates, Newt scores. In the aftermath, he invariably rises -- and rises quickly -- in both state-wide and national polls, and when deprived of a debate platform he falls. This phenomenon was never more apparent than it was in the period between Monday, January 16th and Friday, January 20th.

On Monday, facing a South Carolina primary in five short days, he trailed Mitt Romney in polls by as much as fifteen points. They debated Monday night and Gingrich’s “food stamp President” defense brought the crowd roaring to its feet with the first debate standing ovation in recent memory. By Thursday morning, he led the polls by three.

On Thursday evening Gingrich faced potential disaster in the form of a looming interview with his second ex-wife, who promised to expose the lurid details of their 2000 divorce. When debate moderator John King served up the first question of the night on that very subject, the former Speaker took dead aim and fired -- on the media.

Nothing thrills tea party-types more than seeing a candidate calling out the media as the progressive shills that most of them are; the best of the lot hide behind only the thinnest veneer of objectivity -- the worst are open and unapologetic about their disdain for the right wing in general, and the tea party movement in particular.

At 7:00 pm on Saturday night, within seconds of the polls closing, Newt Gingrich was declared the winner of the South Carolina Republican primary. He had beaten Romney by a dozen points.

When it comes to defending conservative beliefs, nobody talks the talk quite like Newt Gingrich. Believing that he will walk the walk is a different matter -- a matter of faith -- but so many tea partiers and conservatives have decided they can live with the uncertainty that as of this writing, the nomination is as much in Newt’s grasp as anybody else’s.

So who is this inconvenient Republican? He is the Gingrich supporter. He is the Gingrich supporter who refuses to listen to “establishment” reason. He is the rooter for the underdog, the defender of the paunchy and mussed in his battle against the slick and coiffed. This inconvenient Republican is defying the old guard, refusing to listen to the dire warnings -- perhaps at his own peril, but he no longer cares. He is looking forward, refuses to look back, and cares nary a whit about the man Gingrich was in his scufflin’ days.

He turns a blind eye to the quirkiness and the quicksilver temper; he applauds the high road Gingrich attempted to walk through the early part of the campaign, which is why he forgives Newt now for going so disappointingly negative when it was either that, or, as the former Speaker himself put it, “unilaterally disarm and…drop out of the race.”

Establishment types will have to live with, and eventually be forced to accept, this inconvenient Republican. He is sucking in great lungfuls of fresh air after decades of inhaling stale platitudes about compassionate conservatism. He is awake and alert and Gingrich makes him feel so alive. He knows Newt has a puncher’s chance -- but only a puncher’s chance, no more -- and yet still he hangs on to every politically-incorrect word that’s uttered.

He also knows that if Newt wins, he wins, too. This inconvenient Republican is delivering a message to the establishment GOP from Capitol Hill to his local county committee: you may beat us, or you may not. But I’m not going anywhere, and sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with me.

Not In Their Vocabulary

2011-12-12T07:15:00.004-05:00

Sunday, December 11, 2011

My Dear Fellow Patriots:

Christmas Day is coming.

It won’t be long before I’ll be opening my eyes on that magical morning for the 60th time - a force majeur of a statistic that nudges one into a rather reflective state of mind. Right now it’s Sunday morning. My wife is on the second floor chasing one of our granddaughters, Emma; I know the game is afoot because I hear the rapid thumping of padded footsies and the squeal of delighted laughter. From both of them. This Christmas will be Emma’s third. Yesterday, Sadie was here - it will be her second.

I am sitting at the kitchen table, where I do most of my keyboard-pecking. I have a dedicated workspace upstairs, decked out in all the typical home-office accoutrements: fancy desk, hunting prints, sports memorabilia, a CD tower that is becoming rapidly obsolete, piles of files and clutter; all those things you might expect. But truth be told it is in a rather dreary corner bedroom that makes me feel cut off from the ebb and flow of things. Rather than helping me focus, it lends itself to drift and navel-gazing; besides, it hasn’t been the same room since, one-by-one, the occupants who gave it light and life left to make their own way in the world, ultimately, happily, giving us the aforementioned Emma and Sadie.

No, the kitchen is the place: the warm, beating heart of the house, and like a heart, it beckons the weary and depleted in, infuses life, and sends the healthy and rejuvenated out. It is a great place to write and reflect. About Christmas; about anything.

It is a testimony to our founders and our ancestors that when I was growing up, almost two hundred years after the signing of our Declaration of Independence, celebrating Christmas in a free and open America was the natural order of things. The rights endowed to us by our Creator were rarely pondered by us Boomers, because they were never questioned in the first place. They were rarely challenged, and if they were, the unconquerable might of the United States military, those “rough men” who stand ready to do violence on our behalf, would inevitably uphold our determination to exist as free and independent people.

Sadly, we no longer seem to live in such idyllic times; the future of those liberties has indeed come into question. And, almost unbelievably, the threat comes not from without - our military is far superior to any in the world - but from within. When Newt Gingrich says that we face the most important election in this country since 1860, he is not mouthing campaign hyperbole; we are truly fighting a battle in which the survival of our Constitution itself is at stake.

As we ponder the state of the United States come Christmas morning, 2011, we can take heart because we are engaged in a great push-back. So appalling to the American electorate was the radicalism of this President, so abhorrent were his policies, so offensive his czars, so antithetical to the American spirit his bowing and scraping to foreign potentates, so disgusting his cloying apologies for the power and greatness of our nation, that his party was soundly rejected in the 2010 elections. But that was just a 10-round fight on the undercard; the main event will take place in November of 2012, and the outcome of that brawl will determine whether or not this Christmas morning will be the last one in which you can smile at the prospects of your children - and their children - growing up in a country where every man is free, his property sacrosanct, his future liberties secure.

This will require a massive effort. It will require a coming-together of often disparate interest groups. It will require unification around an ideal - much as so many of us coalesced around the ideals of the Tea Party movement; petty squabbles be damned, we have a country to save!

There was a play - it was called the Melting Pot and it was first staged in 1908. Its protagonist was a Jewish immigrant who proclaimed:

"Understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, your fifty languages, and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to – these are fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American."

I say the same to you: a fig for your feuds and vendettas! We must come together if we wish to beat back the “progressivism” that threatens our free markets, buries our children under a mountain of debt, and wishes to suffocate our grandchildren under a blanket of a nanny-statism where faceless bureaucrats, devoid of any speck of American spirit, smugly dictate from a marble office paid for with the sweat of formerly-free Americans how you may live your life, what you may eat and drink, where you may travel or work and eventually, inevitably - what you must read and what you may say.

And I’m guessing that the Bible isn’t on their bookshelf, and Christmas is not in their vocabulary.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

And We Will Never Quit.

2011-10-15T08:46:00.005-04:00

October 15, 2011

My Dear Fellow Patriots:

It was 222 years ago on this date that George Washington, who had been inaugurated as our nation’s first President some months earlier, noted in a diary entry dated October 15th, 1789, that it was a miserable, rainy morning. It was a Thursday, and he was embarking on his first official tour as the duly-elected Chief Executive under the recently ratified United States Constitution.

His party of eight left the official residence at 3 Cherry Street in New York City, near the river, and proceeded north along Broadway. After passing the old City Hall at the corner of Wall and Nassau, where the Federal Building is today, they entered the Post Road - which would take them all the way to Boston. Milestone #1 was on the Bowery, near Canal Street.

Sometime later, somewhere between Milestone #5 and #6, they would have passed a public house at a location we know as the intersection of 3rd Avenue and 66th Street. The tavern was called The Dove. We can only wonder if Washington was aware, as his carriage rolled slowly up the muddy thoroughfare, of how near he passed to the spot where, thirteen years earlier, a young soldier in civilian clothes died for a country that was barely two months old, in service to the man who was now President.

Let us part with that entourage and watch it wend its way north without us; we’ll linger near this spot, this Dove tavern. In 200 years, it will be occupied by a fine restaurant called The Sign of the Dove, but here in the 18th century it is a rude structure in rural Manhattan a few miles beyond the northern edge of the city. Adjacent to it is a British artillery park, cannon lined up in neat rows, with rough sleeping quarters for the men who fire them and wagons to carry their ammunition. Here is the office, too, of Captain John Montresor, the chief engineer of General William Howe, commander of the British forces.

It is the morning of September 22nd, 1776, and a young man is marched up the Post Road and into the park. He swollen feet are bare, his hands are tied behind his back, the day is sweltering, and Montresor takes pity on him and has him escorted into his tent and orders his hands untied. The young man is there to die; he is to be hanged as a spy. He is 21 years old.

He was a schoolteacher, he tells Montresor, a graduate of Yale College, and he asks, pleads, for some paper and ink. He fears being buried in an unmarked grave, his fate unknown, his family forever waiting and hoping, his mission unfulfilled. He pens two letters: one to his mother, the other to a fellow officer. He has no way of knowing if they will ever be delivered. Montresor is deeply moved by the young man, and wonders about his motivations. We see them speak, but of what we cannot know; their conversation is lost in the swirls and eddys of time. Perhaps they speak of honor, or morality, or eternity, or God, or country.

A voice barks outside, and Montresor looks at his charge and nods. The young man rises and moves to the opening of the tent. Montresor follows him out, watches sadly as the provost marshal once again binds the teacher’s wrists behind his back. He requests a clergyman, but he is denied. He requests a bible, and is denied yet again. His legs lose strength and buckle, and so he is dragged the few yards to the place of his execution. There, a boy, a thirteen-year-old former slave named Bill, has tied a rope to the branch of a tree with a stout knot, and has fashioned a noose.

Connecticut and family likely flash through condemned man's consciousness, and perhaps his thoughts turn to his General, and he hopes that in some way he has been helpful to the glorious cause as he is dragged onto the bed of a wagon that sits next to the tree, and is made to stand on its shaky boards. He can see that Montresor is watching, his face etched with sadness and compassion, and now the coarse noose is fitted snugly around his neck. He has little time. He feels the baking heat of the sun. He breathes; he looks again at the engineer; he speaks for the last time.

The next day Captain John Montresor, with a small party of men, under a flag of truce, will travel on horseback to Harlem Heights and deliver word to the rebel Captain William Hull of the hanging of a spy. He will tell Hull of the young man’s noble comportment and dignity. And he will tell Hull of the young man’s final words.

“My only regret…is that I have…but a single life to lose for my country.”

Nathan Hale died, his mission incomplete, not knowing if he had served his General and his country well. He did. He had no way of knowing that he would inspire generations of Americans, that he would teach us about the true essence of courage and love of country.

If we know his story, if we heed his lesson, we will never quit this fight. We will suffer the aspersions that are cast our way and then shed them because they do not matter, and we will never quit this fight. We will accept defeat if comes, disappointment if it comes, disillusionment if it comes and even abandonment if that is our fate.

But if we know the story of young Nathan Hale, we will never quit this fight. Never.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Out of the clear blue.

2011-09-12T12:51:00.000-04:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

Days that you remember for the rest of your life come out of the blue, just like those two jets on a crisp September morning ten years ago. The memories leave you permanently altered; a portion of your brain is scarred with the tragedy - a permanent repository for the disbelief, the horror, the sadness and the anger.

So when we hear the words “never forget” it is a warning most of us don’t need, simply because we are incapable of forgetting that day and that date, and will forever remember the last moments of existence for those two towers. When they were built, gleaming steel thrusting skyward as a monument to American capabilities and American exceptionalism, such was their majesty that they redefined the skyline of the greatest city in the world. We let our guard down and paid a terrible price.

But in the end they were just steel and glass and mortar, and we would sacrifice a thousand of those buildings if it could bring back just one human being we lost that day. If it could bring back a single bond trader, or busboy, or secretary, or flight attendant, or maintenance worker, or banker, or cop or fireman; a son, a daughter, a mommy or a daddy, a dear friend or a total stranger. If we could reclaim just one, just one, there is no material possession we would not offer in sacrifice - because in the end, the spark of life given to us by our Creator has a value that is beyond calculation and cannot be balanced on any scale.

Each of us uses the occasion of the anniversary of that day to cope in his own way - and damn those who presume to tell us how to feel, what to think, or to dedicate this day to “service.” And damn those who tell us that we cannot fly the American flag alone in commemoration of this attack on United States soil, that we must fly the flags of many nations, that we must be reminded that we are part of a “global” community. I am not interested in your politically-correct spew - least of all on this day.

I am interested in the cars that sat in a parking lot at a ferry terminal for days, the keys that would start them having taken a horrific journey from a high floor to the ground; eventually to be transported by truck to a final resting place in a burial mound near a body of water known as the Arthur Kill.

And I will reflect upon the barbarians that committed the deed, who fired the opening salvo in this existential war, whose deranged brains triggered filthy tongues into shouting the two words which I will not repeat, but which exposed them as beasts in service to a monstrous strain of religion. Just as there are no words that will return to us the innocents whom these animals destroyed, there are no words to describe the hell in which they must now dwell.

And today I will vow again that they will not beat us, they will never defeat us.

And finally, although a small man has decided that a memorial ceremony to thousands of dead innocents is not a proper place for prayer, I hope we will all speak to God today in our own way. I, for one, will thank Him for my humanity, my free will, and for blessing me with the greatest gift of all - the gift of being born free in the United States of America.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Thoughts on pork...

2011-07-11T11:15:00.003-04:00

According to a story in yesterday's Advance, the amount of money doled out to the three Staten Island City Council members totaled $2.8 million; funds that were then distributed by Ignizio, Oddo and Rose to local organizations of all types.

It speaks to the heightened level of public awareness that a story like the one published yesterday brought not a round of cheers for a job well done, as it might've in the past, but jeers and catcalls from both ends of the political spectrum.

These are tea party times, and though not everyone is a devotee, everyone seems to be sensitized to the problems that ride on the coattails of profligate spending. So when we live for months with the drama of firehouse closings and teacher layoffs, holding rallies and meetings in protest, we expect that a last-moment reprieve would have left the cupboard bare, as our representatives dutifully hunted down the last morsel of sustenance to feed these essential services.

And what do we find? Enough bread to dole out $2.8 million to our three council members, and though I don't know the exact figure, that amount extrapolates to over $47 million when spread out over the entire 51-person council - an sum that would have rendered the entire firehouse-closing discussion moot.

Councilman Oddo is, of course, correct when he says that nobody knows the wants and needs of his district better than he does - I now get to see that first-hand. And he is correct in his assessment that funds flowing into his district are more properly directed when filtered through his office, rather than through the sometimes myopic, often tone-deaf offices of Manhattan-centric council leadership.

But to the average person it grates. Granted, most of us don't know the ins and outs of the NYC budget, and $47 million is less than a thousandth of the total budget. And yes, to many charitable, cultural and civic organizations these are funds without which they cannot survive. Still – in times of budget crisis, it seems to defy logic.

I suppose we could argue all day long about the proper role of government in our lives, but in these cases we all recognize that we are not talking about true essential services. It is human nature for taxpayers to resent being forced to fund organizations that in times past would have depended on their own fund-raising abilities to survive, their ability to convince the community that they were worthy of a charitable contribution.

Our council members, like our Congressman, are saddled with a burdensome dilemma. On the one hand, they want to avoid being accused of having done nothing for their district - on the other, they want to avoid being accused of being pork-addicts who are contributing to our fiscal woes. Too, in real terms, $47 million is such a small drop in the bucket that had every council member in the city returned the money to the general fund it would barely be noticed, whereas some of the organizations that would be deprived of a grant or contribution would be forced to shut their doors.

It is ironic that such relatively small sums (in government terms) receive so much attention, considering that they contribute such a tiny fraction to our tax burden. The truth is that like an iceberg, most of the city's fiscal danger floats out-of-sight beneath the waterline: pensions, debt service, Medicaid and health care costs. But it just seems so incongruent that scant weeks ago we were biting our nails over firehouse closings and teacher layoffs, and yesterday we were supposed to celebrate charitable and civic contributions made with taxpayer dollars – but without taxpayer approval.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Changing America - One County at a Time

2011-06-11T09:21:00.001-04:00

June 10, 2011

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

It's in the first paragraph of our Mission Statement, written more than two years ago, before I even knew what a Mission Statement was supposed to be. The words flowed from the heart; the anger from the gut, a reaction to a man who had a dagger pointed at the heart of the American economy and our way of life - where it remains poised today as we continue to work to pry it from his fingers.

What it says is this: "The Staten Island Tea Party was organized to give ordinary American citizens a platform from which their voices could be heard by their government..."

In those hectic and highly emotional days, as we together gingerly waded into the turbulent waters of political activism, our voices were heard by projecting them through a bullhorn, or an amplifier and a pair of speakers. Tea party fervor took to the streets, swept the country, and ultimately, the passion and energy of the movement swept the liberals out of Congress as we flipped the House in November of 2010.

Those were heady days, but we also knew that it wouldn't do to stand still. The platform from which we spoke on that first rainy April day was cobbled together and wouldn't last through the years of hard work required to make a lasting difference - sooner or later it would grow rickety and weak, lose its strength, collapse beneath us.

If we were to remain a viable presence on the American political scene, if we were going to have a truly permanent platform from which our voices could be heard, we had to cement for ourselves a more permanent solution - we needed a seat at the table. We needed to be heard without shouting, to present our case without demonstrating, to advance our cause from within.

The County Committee Project represented that effort, because it is through local county committees that America will be transformed. Yes, the national scene gets the attention - but it all starts at the grass roots; it all starts with us, right here, on our soil, on our streets, in our county.

And we have succeeded. In a victory no less stunning than last year's congressional race, the Staten Island Tea Party has accomplished the goal of placing hundreds of its members on the Republican County Committee - a large bloc of independent committee members who share tea party values. Our goal? To support those men and women who support those values.

Make no mistake. Our success in navigating this confusing, convoluted and contorted process would not have been possible if we had, as we had originally envisioned, attempted it completely on our own. Without Bob Scamardella and his support team, who asked nothing in return except that we nominate thinking, intelligent people who would vote their conservative consciences, this would not have come to pass. Working with them did not represent compromise - it represented a courageous willingness to unite for a cause, a concept firmly rooted in our history and tradition.

Many of the faces you've seen at tea party rallies you will now see sitting at the decision-making table. What we - WE - have accomplished in just over two years almost defies description. Yes, it is happening all over the country, but nowhere with greater success than right here on our Island. You guys are nothing short of magnificent - I don't think there's another tea party in the country that has accomplished more than you have.

So congratulations, Staten Island Tea Party. Together we have come a long, long way - and I pledge that we will continue to look for opportunities to expand our membership and our influence, and to remain a viable and vocal force in local politics. God bless you all.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

Enough Land To Bury Our Dead.

2011-05-29T07:49:00.004-04:00

"The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead. And that is the kind of nation we are." -General Colin Powell

Memorial Day, 2011

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

They came from the countryside, in the beginning, many of them carrying muskets they used for hunting game or chasing varmints, and shortly after the sun dawned on a bright April day one of them fired the shot that was heard 'round the world.

At that precise moment, as a puff of smoke and the smell of spent powder still wafted in the early-morning spring breeze, notice was given: Americans were free people; they would fight to defend their liberty and would sacrifice their lives to discard the yoke of tyranny.

And fight they did. A bedraggled army of citizen-soldiers, mostly poor and poorly trained, battled and died until, in the end, they chased the British to the city of Yorktown, in the colony of Virginia, and forced the surrender of the occupying army.

What was perhaps most remarkable was that they were, and we still are, a people united not around racial or tribal identities, but around an idea and a faith - a belief that our destiny, and the destiny of mankind, is to be free. We began our nation's history by defending that premise with our lives, and we do so to this day.

Memorial Day is not about ideas, though - it is about people. It is about the men and women who left their homes and loved ones but never returned; their mortal remains interred in a simple grave, their headstone a simple cross. It is about the people who gave, as Abraham Lincoln described it, their last full measure of devotion. What makes America unique - and exceptional, President Obama - is that no member of our military ever died in a war of conquest. Every American who ever fought, who ever perished on the field of battle, did so in the cause of freedom.

Greed, misguided religious fervor, lust for power - any one of these diseases can grip the minds of men and hang on tenaciously, and that is why the American military exists and that is why we fight. We are blessed to be defended by such magnificent men and women - ordinary Americans with extraordinary souls. History has never seen the likes of the American fighting man - and probably never will again.

At some time during the course of this weekend, I ask you take just a moment to say a silent prayer of thanks to those fallen Americans. They died not for kings or potentates, not for plunder or riches. They died conquering tyrants and occupiers, and when those Americans who survived completed their task they laid down their arms and helped the vanquished rebuild, because that is what Americans do.

That is the kind of nation we are.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

On the death of bin Laden

2011-05-06T08:20:00.001-04:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

There are times when we who live in these United States are able to feel a special thrill of nationalistic pride. If you're anything like me you felt it on Sunday, when you heard the news of the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the American military.

He hid, because he was a coward, for ten years - until a member of the U.S. Navy SEALS put a bullet over his left eye into what passed for a brain, and put him out of his miserable existence. Are we surprised at either of these facts? Hardly. We knew he was a coward anyway, and a warrant for his death was signed in blood on a crisp September morning almost ten years ago. When the towers went down, they killed bin Laden, too. It just took longer.

I think that America, as a nation, proved something last Sunday. I think we proved that if we really want you, we will get you. It doesn't matter who you are or where you hide; it doesn't matter if you're protected by a nation-state or a savage ideology; and it doesn't matter if you are hidden behind twelve-foot-high walls in a "mansion" so decrepit that it would be condemned by any building inspector in any city, town or hamlet from New York to L.A. And Osama - we wanted you.

It speaks volumes about the character of America that even though we knew you were there and we could have killed you with a bomb or missile fired from a drone - we didn't. We wanted to offer to the families of the victims of your atrocities proof of your demise and with it, some closure. So Americans helicoptered into foreign airspace and took you out in a body bag, and now those families know that the murderer of their loved ones was shot down like the mad dog that he was.

Osama bin Laden, if you can hear me in that special hell you now call home, here's a message from America: We got you, you bastard, and we will get the rest of your deranged crew of murderous demons. With you, they have perverted a religion into a death cult, and we will not stop until every last one of them is forced to slink back into the slimy 7th century caves where they were spawned.

You killed Americans, Osama, but you could never kill the American spirit - not you and not your pathetic minions. We have fought better than you and beaten them, and we always will. We are a nation that respects courage, and that is why you and your comrades disgust us. Do you fancy it courageous to take your own life while murdering innocents in the name of jihad? You shouldn't. Real courage is the willingness to face your enemy before you meet your maker. Every homicide bomber shares one thing in common - they refuse to actually confront their foe and they are never willing to look him in the eyes. They fear that more than death.

Let me close with a special thank you to the President who made this possible, the President who had the courage to do what needed to be done, the President who made the hard decisions, the President who put the lives of Americans above fragile sensibilities of the Brie and Chardonnay crowd and the wails of indignation of the media elites - George W. Bush.

To the current occupant of the White House I ask this question: would you have had your moment on the world stage, your poll spike, if the man who preceded you shared your hatred of the military and your squeamish loathing of "enhanced interrogation techniques?" Your capacity for hypocrisy never ceases to astound me.

Feh. Enough of you. You will be gone soon.

Let me end this missive with a request. Please, each and every one of you, take a moment to close your eyes, bow your head, and offer up a prayer of thanks for the American military - the pride of the United States and the envy of the world. With their blood they have paid for and defended our freedom for more than two centuries, and they are now, and always have been, the greatest force for good in the history of mankind. May God bless them all.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Words Matter

2011-03-17T14:30:00.004-04:00

March 16, 2011

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

Barry Goldwater had wrestled the presidential nomination from the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party, at a time when the Republicans had a liberal wing and the Democrats had a conservative one. Goldwater had, in fact, wrestled the nomination from Nelson himself, and thus was the modern conservative movement born. Reagan's famous speech, "A Time For Choosing," so copiously quoted in tea party circles, was a campaign speech he made in support of the Arizona senator.

It was 1964, and those of us old enough to remember that election cycle remember the "daisy commercial"; the one that pictured a little girl standing in a field of tall grass, haltingly counting from one to ten as she plucked petals from a flower - until her reverie is shattered by a nuclear explosion. It was a very effective tool for incumbent Lyndon Johnson, playing on the fears that Goldwater, who had advocated a policy of "rollback" of the Soviet Union rather than containment, would recklessly lead us into a nuclear war.

It was at the Republican National Convention, in San Francisco's Cow Palace, that Goldwater spoke the words for which he is most famous. Knowing that he would come under attack for his muscular foreign policy in an era that would spawn the failed "Great Society," he said:

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Defending against charges of extremism is difficult. Defining it, however, is even more difficult by a full order of magnitude. One man's extremism is another man's common sense.

And so when Congressman Michael Grimm decries the "extremist" elements of the two major parties and the tea party, he exhibits a flawed understanding of where extremism ends and common sense begins.

To his credit, he made a very adept and logical explanation for his vote to pass the Continuing Resolution - you may buy it, or you may not. Either way, there is certainly room for debate and differences of opinion. However, in labeling the opposing argument "extreme," he is incorrectly placing more than half of the modern conservative movement - not to mention 54 fellow Republicans - out on the fringes of political thought and that is just plain wrong.

Our country is on the brink, and the time for bold and decisive measures is upon us. To demonize those who are ready to take such action, including a shutdown of the federal government, is a mistake and a misreading of the mood not only of a good portion of his district - but a good portion of the American electorate.

Those who would vote against the CR are fully aware of the implications of doing so, but are of the belief that drawing a line in the sand is long overdue. Grimm's approach, which is essentially that not only is charging $6 billion for a three week hiatus a good deal, but that by going the extra mile (or 21 days, in this case) he gives the Democrats the rope by which to hang themselves when the budget clock ticks down to zero, has merit, too.

But the issue is not so black-and-white that opponents should be labeled "extreme."

Words matter. How many times have we heard that in the past few years? Representative Grimm is a freshman - as was our former Congressman Mike McMahon. But McMahon had been a politically savvy politician for years before he went to DC, Michael Grimm had not. Indeed, that unjaded freshness was one of the things that made his candidacy so attractive.

But in this case his use of the word "extreme" was insulting - especially so to tea partiers who have been eating, sleeping and breathing drastic - even draconian - spending cuts since Bush's first TARP.

"Extreme" implies "fringe." What the Congressman needs to know is that there is a rising tide of conservatives out there who believe that allowing the federal government to shut down 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished - a belief held by not just a few radical kooks living on the edge, but by serious, intelligent people numbering in the millions all across the country.

Get Serious About Deficit Reductions

2011-02-14T20:19:00.004-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

This evening, I sent the following letter to Representative Michael Grimm. Some of you may agree with these sentiments, some of you may not.

No matter how you feel about the issue, I urge you to contact Rep. Grimm by email or phone and to make your feelings known:

Dear Congressman Grimm:

Though you have not indicated that you would vote against the proposed $100 billion in cuts proposed by your leadership, I am disappointed that you have co-signed a letter with Rep. Peter King which asks for more than $750 million to be restored to the Republican budget bill.

If you wish certain programs to be spared the axe, you are certainly entitled to make that request - but to do so without identifying other areas in the budget that might be cut in their stead is to simply place the burden once again on the backs of the taxpayers. In a budget that is measured in the trillions, finding $750 million to pay for these programs shouldn't be that hard to do.

In fact, I would be disappointed under any circumstances if you voted for a bill in which any more taxpayer dollars are used to support the money-pit that is Amtrak, and I would further suggest that if you wish to mitigate the burden of the high cost of heating oil that you introduce legislation that would allow for more domestic drilling. To spend taxpayer money on LIHEAP while the President enforces a ridiculous moratorium on drilling in the Gulf is unconscionable.

These are exactly the type of hard choices we need to make as a nation, and if we start to craft fiscal policy based on local interests or regionalism, any attempts to rein in the deficit are doomed to fail.

You ran and were elected to cut spending, as were 86 other freshman Republicans. We, your constituency, were ready, willing and able to support you as you made the hard choices. We still are, but asking your leadership to go easy on you because you think we're shouldering a disproportionate amount of cuts is not what I would consider to be "making those hard choices."

As part of the tea party movement, I have no desire to be less vigilant in observing the actions of my elected officials simply because they may be Republican; Republicans have helped to get us into this mess and are no more deserving of blind trust than Democrats.

As one who lives in the affected area, I am ready to take the hit for the greater good of our nation. You should be, too. By setting such an example, perhaps legislators in every part of the country will realize that their district is not immune to the pain either, and we can put this country back onto the road to fiscal sanity and prosperity.

Thank you.

Your in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

Bright Lines and Bold Colors

2011-02-07T16:17:00.002-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

When the Staten Island Tea Party got its start, in an attempt to codify the reasons for its existence, I wrote a Mission Statement that can still be found today on our website. It is much too long for a Mission Statement, and I smile when I read it because it reminds me of how green we all were back in March of 2009. The sentiments expressed in it still represent my beliefs, however, and it's worth remembering that there was no charted course, the tea party "movement" did not yet exist and we were all just feeling our way in the dark.

Without realizing it when it was written, I stumbled blindly into the three principles that other organizers throughout the country would find, and would become the legs of the stool upon which the entire movement sits: fiscal sanity, free markets, and a constitutionally-limited federal government. These three beliefs, as simple as they are, have sustained this movement - and the Staten Island Tea Party - through its explosive growth. Why? Because they are so simple and so universal. If you aspire to these three principles you have a home, a comfortable one, in the tea party movement.

If you've ever wondered why you feel so "in sync" with everyone at tea party rallies and events - whether you've stood with 350 people on New Dorp Lane or a million people in Washington, D.C. - it is because everyone shares those three common beliefs. That simplicity, and our unwillingness to try to do your thinking for you on ANY issue, has sustained us.

So it is with some trepidation, but mostly optimism, that I point out the first issue that we cannot ignore and over which we may, as a group, find ourselves divided.

Last year, when freshman Democratic Congressman Mike McMahon voted with his party's leadership to raise the debt ceiling, I referred to it as fiscal insanity. It was a snap declaration, born of the belief that raising the debt ceiling, like raising the credit limit on the plastic in your wallet, would lead to evermore spending and would simply be feeding our addiction to finding uses for money we didn't have.

This year, freshman Republican Congressman Michael Grimm has indicated his intent to vote with his party's leadership to raise the debt ceiling. Does such a vote still represent fiscal insanity?

It depends on how you look at it. Newly-elected House Speaker John Boehner warns that we have to make an "adult" decision about this, as he tries to herd Republican freshman into voting in favor of raising the debt ceiling. Overlooking his insulting choice of words directed to those candidates who promised on the campaign trail that they would slash the budget and never vote to raise the debt limit, he warns that shutting down the government - and risking defaulting on the debt - is not an acceptable outcome.

Then along comes the Republican Study Committee, who introduces legislation that would give the Treasury Secretary (yuck!) the power to prioritize spending as a way of protecting the full faith and credit of the United States government - thereby taking default off the table as a downside risk when making a decision on raising the ceiling.

Congressman Grimm and some other freshman Republicans are siding with Boehner and attempting to tie their votes to a balanced budget amendment. Dozens of others, however, are sticking to their guns - and their promises - and vowing to vote against their leadership. Their tough-love approach has the potential to be very painful; look no further back than 1995, when the government shutdown stalled the Gingrich Revolution and had the unintended consequence of boosting President Clinton's popularity.

Who's willing to risk this outcome now?

Republicans are split over this, and so the first fault lines in GOP unity have appeared. It was not unexpected, and the fact that even though they had months to prepare for the vote they have not been able to formulate a strategy acceptable to 100% of Republicans, speaks to how daunting the conundrum is.

Not surprisingly, divisions exist within the tea party movement, too. Many accept as perfectly rational the explanation that the interest on our debt alone will push us through the ceiling sometime this spring, even if not one penny of additional spending takes place. Or that this is, as the congressman alludes, a great opportunity to advance a much-desired balanced budget amendment.

Other tea partiers are not buying it. Many are taking a "damn-the-torpedoes" approach, believing that there is no point in further propping up this house of cards, that we should blow it down and build it up again on a foundation of fiscal sanity.

In the meantime, those on the left are gleefully waiting to pounce. "Grimm has thrown the tea party under the bus," they will crow. They will say he's a hypocrite who ran as a tea party candidate (he did not, by the way) and is now becoming the same kind of Washington go-along guy as the rest of them.

Let them have their fun. If Congressman Grimm votes in accordance with my beliefs 90% of the time, I think it's a helluva lot better than the former Congressman, who voted with Nancy Pelosi 90% of the time.

But you make up your own mind. I urge you to call both the district (718- 351-1062) and the DC offices (202-225-3371) of Congressman Grimm and let them know how you feel - whether you're for or against a vote to raise the debt ceiling, or what conditions you might put on it.

Me? Personally? I think it stinks, and I don't feel like being "adult" about it. The tea party movement should be about bold strokes and bright lines, and I am loath to see the debt ceiling raised because it's too hard not to, and I long to see Rand Paul's "modest" $500 billion in cuts instituted, which will leave 85% of the government in place without touching Social Security or Medicare.

But I am not the Congressman, and he must find his own way to do the best job he knows how for his district and his country.

If he believes that raising the ceiling is a fait accompli and that he can use his vote to further the cause of the elusive balanced budget amendment, then go ahead, Representative Grimm - hold your nose and vote to raise the limit one more time. But I would counsel you to put your colleagues, your leadership and your constituents on notice - this will be the last time you vote for it.

Your in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

Results of the SITP 2011 Survey

2011-01-21T15:06:00.004-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

A majority of our membership has responded to the survey we distributed last week; some of the results were predictable - some were not. There isn't room to display the entire survey here, but we are working on exporting the numbers to a coherent spreadsheet, and when we're done we'll post it up on our website. Results of the presidential straw poll are at the end of this email.

It comes as no surprise that a bit over 90% of the respondents hail from Staten Island, and most of the rest are from Brooklyn, the other boroughs and New Jersey. We do, however, have SITP members in AZ, CA, FL, MO, PA, SC, TX and even one in Okinawa, Japan - a little island about which I've done some writing.

Our group skews older - but perhaps not as old as you might expect: 38% are under the age of 46. I'd like to do better in this category, but we have to recognize that many folks in their 20's and 30's are wrapped up in raising young families and making a living, and hence not quite as able to pay attention to political activism.

Perhaps surprisingly to those who view the tea party movement as a bunch of ignorant yahoos, results reveal that fully 78% of our group attended college, and 22% of those did post-graduate work.

Party registrations broke down this way:

Republican - 68.4%

Democrat - 8.1%

Conservative - 9.4%

Independent - 8.8%

Unaffiliated - 5.1%

However, when asked to describe their political leanings on a right-to-left scale, regardless of party affiliation, respondents answered this way:

Libertarian - 18%

Conservative - 72%

Moderate - 8%

Liberal - 1%

Progressive - 1%

John McCain received the presidential vote of a bit more than 94% of our group, Obama just 1.62%., which I assume tell us that those who identify themselves as registered democrats don't always vote that way. The rest checked off "Other" or "Did Not Vote."

Reaffirming the core principles of the tea party movement, upwards of 96% of respondents consider themselves Very Conservative or Conservative when asked about fiscal and constitutional matters - no surprise there. But when asked about their views on social issues, more than 15% identified themselves as Middle-of-the-Road or Liberal, eclipsing both Republican/Conservative party affiliation and political leanings. From this we can infer that some who consider themselves staunch conservatives are less rigid when it comes to social issues.

When asked to identify the two issues that are of most concern, the majority (67%) of respondents chose "Reduce Federal Spending and National Debt" and 68% chose "Stop the Slide into Socialism" - once again echoing core issues of the TP movement.

In what I consider to be the most gratifying revelation of the survey, fully 42% of the respondents said that they had done volunteer work on a political campaign in 2010. However, even more importantly in my mind, of those that did work on a campaign an astounding 77% of them did so for the first time. That is a remarkable statistic, and I like to think that the SITP played some small role in this. Our mantra - almost our motto - from the beginning has been to keep people "informed and engaged," and the proof that we have been successful in both areas lies in these numbers.

Most of you, 80%, get your television news from FOX; 55% listen to Rush, Sean or Mark Levin on an almost daily basis; 47% listen to or watch Glenn Beck.

When presented with the proposition that there is too much government in our lives, 97% agreed; but when asked if government should promote traditional values, only 72% answered in the affirmative. This reinforces the Libertarian skew within the group, as do the responses to questions about the relative importance of specific issues like taxes, spending, earmarks, Obamacare and immigration, in which over 85% of respondents said these were "Extremely Important" issues. However, when asked about social issues such as gay marriage and moral direction, these numbers dipped into the low 70's, and when asked about the number of abortions performed in the United States, only 55.3% considered this to be extremely important as an issue.

What can we take away from this? You be the judge. It may be that in light of such pressing economic issues, and in the presence of such a left-leaning administration, social issues have been relegated to a back burner, or it may be that the Staten Island Tea Party is not quite as socially conservative as other groups around the country. Either way, I think it reinforces the decision we made very early on - that is, to keep the SITP away from social issues, and narrowly focused on three core principles: fiscal sanity, free markets and a constitutionally-limited government.

The presidential straw poll was all over the map, with every one of the 17 names getting at least one vote - including Barack Obama. I was shocked by the results, to say the least - and I intend to do another straw poll within a week or so to see if they bear up. The clear winner was Chris Christie of New Jersey, though since the results were so spread out his plurality was only 16%. Finishing second with 15% was..."None of the Above." I cannot account for this, except to say that left off the list were the names Jim DeMint, Michelle Bachmann and Hillary Clinton. In the next poll we will add those names and remove the possibility of voting for NOTA. We'll see where that takes us.

Other candidates (or non-candidates, as the case may be) to receive double digit votes were Palin and Huckabee, followed by Romney and Gingrich. One tier down sat Rubio, Pence and Paul - even Bolton got a fair share of votes.

All in all, it was a valuable snapshot of our group and we'll continue to evaluate results as they trickle in. What it does not - and cannot - show is what a great group of people make up the Staten Island Tea Party, and what a unique opportunity we've been blessed with. I'm speaking of the opportunity to see and hear and interact with other ordinary Americans who love liberty and rejoice in their freedoms, right here in our little corner of the world. To be able to have this and still call ourselves citizens of the greatest city in the greatest country in the world is quite a gift, quite a gift.

Now, who thinks we should support secession?

Your in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

Thoughts from Jonah Goldberg

2011-01-13T12:56:00.003-05:00

Prior to last night, the Left, the liberal establishment, the mainstream media, Hollywood -- I know, I know: This strikes some as a redundant list, like a rabbi talking about how you can't eat ham, or pork, or bacon, or swine -- were determined to push a palpably false storyline.

As I mentioned in the Corner, I was on Fox yesterday debating some woman named Nancy Skinner who couldn't get her brain around the idea that if there is no evidence confirming her position and ample evidence disproving her position, then her position must be untenable.

This was of course just one minor example. No doubt everyone reading this "News"letter knows what I'm talking about. We say, "Two plus two is four," and they respond, "Yes, but a vest has no sleeves."

It's all so incredibly exhausting, like trying to explain trigonometry to a fern. No, scratch that. Trigonometry is hard to explain to anybody. It's like trying to tell a fern it shouldn't buy the premium cable package, with Cinemax and Showtime and all that, since it doesn't really watch much TV. Okay, maybe that doesn't work perfectly either, because the point I'm getting at here is that it's impossible to explain anything to a fern once it's decided that it isn't going to change its status as a non-sentient vascular plant.

Likewise, it is impossible to have a serious conversation with people who have locked onto an interpretation of reality that isn't dependent on facts.

But at the same time, if you don't push back, a false conventional wisdom concretizes. Not only does this completely ruin an already ludicrous extended arguing-with-a-fern analogy, but it also does massive damage to the country. The idea that Kennedy was killed by a "climate of hate" survives to this day, despite the fact that it's a complete lie. The early success of that lie made the Great Society possible. If left unopposed, the lie pushed by the asshat chorus this week could easily have dealt a mortal wound to the new GOP House, conservatism, never mind the whole country.

That's one reason why conservatives should be very reluctant to buy the "discourse" discourse. Yes, it's absolutely true that folks on our side -- and every other side -- say things they shouldn't say from time to time. It happens. And it's worth criticizing, condemning, or excusing, depending on the substance and the context. But often what the Left calls hate speech is really simply unwelcome honesty.

Before the age of the Internet, talk radio, and cable TV, the establishment could have gotten away with turning Loughner into a tea partier, just as it turned Goldwater into a psychopath, Father Coughlin into a right-winger, and the Soviet genocide into an accounting error.

They still try, but there's room to push back now.

On the Arizona Shootings

2011-01-09T09:34:00.000-05:00

January 9, 2011

A STATEMENT BY THE STATEN ISLAND TEA PARTY

The organizers and staff of the Staten Island Tea Party asks its members and followers to pray for the victims of yesterday's senseless shootings in Tucson, AZ. As are all Americans, we are shocked, saddened and horrified when confronted with senseless violence of any kind, in any place.

We are, and must remain, a nation of laws, but we also recognize that an implied social contract exists among every citizen of this great country. This contract recognizes that disputes of any and all natures must be settled through civil discourse and debate, in the courtroom or at the ballot box, and that violence is never the answer.

We also caution against attaching political motives to the act of a madman, as do we caution against blaming political or ideological opponents. It is a sad fact, but true, that this is indeed happening now, and has been happening since the tragic event took place. This type of misguided finger-pointing is beneath contempt, and we condemn this destructive rhetoric in the strongest terms.

Fair and honest Americans will not engage in such accusations - those with hate in their hearts might.

As we go about our business today, let us direct our thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. Let us spend some time in solemn reflection on their loss and pain, and finally, say a prayer of thanks for the gift of life given to us by God, and for blessing us with this magnificent nation.

THIS is the next step for the SITP

2011-01-03T19:35:00.003-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

The Staten Island Tea Party, like so many thousands of tea party groups throughout the country, has been evolving.

Indeed, those groups that do not evolve, that remain stuck in time and place, are destined to become obsolete and will watch their influence slowly die. Those who believe that their ultimate goal is to act as noisemakers, forever shaking their fists at the powers-that-be while they stand on the outside looking in, are doomed to a future of irrelevance.

With our passion and our numbers, we have garnered tremendous attention - however, our ability to shape events and policies as outsiders is inevitably going to wane. That is my belief.

But from the inside - we can transform the way politics is done.

In a little over a year-and-a-half, we have seen our numbers grow from 2 to 2,000. But if we are to maintain our relevance we must be ready and willing to take a bold next step: we are going to fundamentally change the Republican Party on Staten Island.

We are instituting a project that will transform the Staten Island Republican County Committee into a group that reflects the conservative ideals and principles espoused by the tea party movement: fiscal sanity, free markets and a constitutionally-limited government.

In order to do this we need volunteers who are willing to move beyond rallies and campaign work, and who are ready to actually step into the process. We need men and women who are willing to take seats on the committee, in order to make sure that the reins of control are returned to the hands of the people, and to make sure that the era of “good-ol’-boy” cronyism is ended.

It is our intention to transform the committee so that we may nominate candidates not because they are next in line, or because they have friends in high places, but because they represent our core beliefs. We want to institute fresh and aggressive ideas to pro-actively grow a NEW Republican Party on Staten Island, one that will reach out to college campuses and minority communities, to show them that free-market Republican and Conservative values are the best way to achieve the American dream.

In short, we need you - hundreds of you. And because there are two seats in each Electoral District, husband-and-wife teams are especially welcomed.

You will not be asked to speak in public or to any groups; it will cost you no money; you will need to do no public campaigning and you will not become a public figure.

You will be asked to attend TWO meetings a year. That's it - two meetings a year to transform the way politics works on Staten Island.

With your help we will get this thing done; we will take this first step toward once again being a Republic of the people, by the people and for the people – and we will do it one district at a time.

I cannot stress this enough: you need no prior knowledge of the inner workings of the committee system - only a belief in the core principals of the tea party movement.

Simply visit www.teapartyinfo.com/administrators-only.html for more information and a registration form. If asked for a password, it is: constitution

Thank you for your time and dedication. Within a few days or weeks after you register, you will receive notification about a meeting at which we will explain the process in much greater detail.

When we say that we have much work to be done - these are not merely words. Thomas Paine said "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country."

I hope to hear from many, many of you soon. If it is at all possible for you to help, please do not be a sunshine patriot, and do not shrink from the service of our country.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

A Message to Michael

2010-12-31T15:23:00.001-05:00

New Years Eve, 2010

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

To say that we've had quite an eventful year would be an understatement, wouldn't it? Those of us in the tea party movement, and right here in the Staten Island Tea Party, have dipped our toes into the river of history and altered its course.

We never planned to do it - we scarcely knew what we getting into at all - but we heard the call of our country and responded. I feel good about that. America was tested, and if the results of the last election were any indication, we passed. But make no mistake (and I know you don't need me to remind you) we will face more tests in the future, and we will have to be well prepared for them.

Though we elected a terrific representative in Mike Grimm, and many others who espouse the tea party values of fiscal sanity, free markets and a Constitutionally-limited government, we need to remember that words are cheap, especially so during campaigns. Washington is a fearsome place; it oozes power, and power is a virus to which few are immune.

So here's a New Year's message to our new Congressman: We believe in you - don't be afraid to make the hard choices, because we've got you covered. The 13th Congressional District of New York sent Michael Grimm to Congress to be Michael Grimm, not, as you have said many times, just another vote in the go-along-to-get-along gang. All the "cover" you will ever need to justify your voting record is right here in the hearts and minds of your constituents - and if you fight for us, we will fight like hell for you.

I think you know that if you ever become more devoted to your leadership than you are to your consituents and your country, you will lose us. We didn't walk the district, ring bells, pass out literature and spend hours on the phone to elect a party - we did all that to elect a man; a man we will continue to believe in unless he gives us reason not to.

Make a difference, Michael, make a difference. We've got your back.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T15:22:00.000-05:00

"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day." - Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Trashing the Constitution

2010-12-28T09:24:00.004-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, this guest editorial was written by Paul B. Skousen for The Daily Caller. It is re-printed with his permission.

It is important that we document - and never forget - the way the 111th Congress has re-written the constitution, chiefly by ignoring it. This should serve as a serious reminder that we have much work to do, and that occasionally "compromise" is not a good thing...

*******************************

At the close of the 111th Congress, America is deeply in the bog of Thomas Jefferson’s prophetic warning: “The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” Unfortunately, the broken chains of the Constitution have failed to contain the federal government.

By way of review, let’s take a stroll through the junkyard of constitutional violations that have been painted fresh by President Obama and the 111th Congress. Here’s my top-ten list, highly abbreviated for length.

#10. — 9/11 Responders Relief Fund: We love and honor those who put themselves in harm’s way for our security. However, giving the 9/11 first responders money after the fact violates the Constitution. Article 1.8 gives Congress the right to expend funds for all the purposes itemized, provided it is done for the general welfare, NOT for individuals or preferred groups. The states may reward heroes if they so choose.

#9. — Checks and Balances Failure: The Chairmanship of the UN Security Council: Where was Congress when President Obama became the chairman of the powerful UN Security Council in 2009? The normal monthly rotation for that chair goes to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. because Article 1.9 of the Constitution forbids the president (and all other office-holders) from accepting any present, foreign office or title from a foreign country or a foreign potentate unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. The Founders wanted to prevent deal-making, corruption, and foreign influence from affecting America’s internal affairs.

#8. — Net Neutrality: The government is trying to stop Internet providers from blocking or slowing some web traffic and prevent providers from showing favoritism. The FCC thinks it should be able to regulate the Internet like it regulates utility companies. This violates the property rights of Internet providers and interferes in the market’s free choice of which services receive funding. Article 1.8 makes it clear that the FCC is not constitutionally authorized to pass laws, especially those disguised as regulations.

#7. – Czars: The moniker for appointees who report to no one but the president has taken on a new and eerie resemblance to the dusty Russian tsars of old. Article 2.2 grants the president leeway to appoint managers, but those managers may not have any regulatory, legislative or law-making powers — such powers are reserved to the legislative branch. Today’s “czars” have the power of cabinet members without having to go through a vetting process or the confirmation process prescribed for cabinet members. Czars are unelected and untouchable political decision-makers — in violation of Article 1.1.

#6. — Cap and Trade: The Clean Energy and Security Act mandates greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, 42 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and 84 percent below 2005 levels by 2050. By 2020, this tax will extract an estimated $160 billion from the economy, or an average $1,870 per family. Once again, had the chains of Article 1.8 not been broken, America would be spared such tomfoolery. Cap and trade masked in any disguise whatsoever cannot be justified as a general welfare activity.

#5. — Cash for Clunkers: The government offered $4,500 rebates to people turning in their clunkers for more fuel-efficient vehicles. When the first program quickly ran out of the $4 billion allotted to it, another $2 billion was added. Follow-up analysis showed the program did nothing to stimulate the economy and put many people into additional debt by encouraging them to purchase cars that they otherwise would not have bought during these hard economic times. The government has zero authority to selectively give individuals tax money for purchases of vehicles, according to Articles 1.2 and 1.8 — and common sense.

#4. — TARP Funding: The original 2008 act authorized $700 billion to bail out banks and other institutions. The government has no business rescuing private financial institutions from bad judgment and risky ventures. Article 1.8 excludes permission for Congress to grant financial aid or loans to private companies. Any use of Treasury funds must go toward the general welfare, not to specific groups.

#3. — Illegal Immigration: Arizona is being invaded. When that state passed SB 1070 to stem the flow of violent illegals into its sovereign territory, a derelict federal government turned around and sued. At issue was the Feds’ failure to control the border, so Arizona took it upon itself to do just that — to uphold existing federal immigration laws. It didn’t add new laws; it simply gave local authorities the power to enforce federal responsibilities. The federal government claims the right to manage immigration, but when it refuses to carry out that obligation, thereby jeopardizing the security of border states, it is derelict in its duties. Arizona should haul the federal government before the Supreme Court for malfeasance. Article 4.4 clearly states that the U.S. shall protect states from invasion — more than 400,000 illegal aliens (est.) in Arizona is, by definition, an invasion.

#2. — Economic Stimulus Bill: The $814 billion stimulus is the most backward-thinking proposition to come along since human sacrifice. Dumping borrowed money into an over-fed, bloated and out-of-control ogre doesn’t solve anything, it simply temporarily props up with blocks of melting ice cream a failed and failing government of extravagance. Not only does it illegally take money out of the economy that could be used to provide jobs, but it’s using borrowed money — with interest due.

And the worst violation of the Constitution over the past two years is …

#1. — Health Care Reform: Health care reform was the last lever needed to lift the lid off the pot of American gold and empty it out for socialism. It required all Americans to have health insurance whether they wanted it or not. Earlier this month, Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson said that the government has no power “to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market.”

The string of constitutional violations supporting the judge’s rejection is long and shocking:

For purposes of regulation, Congress invoked Article 1.8 and claimed insurance may be controlled because it falls under Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce. But insurance is not interstate commerce — you can’t buy insurance across state lines.

Language in the bill says the health care law may NOT be changed or amended by anyone once signed into law. This violates the role of Congress. Article 1.1 makes it clear that only Congress is authorized to make law, meaning it has every right to alter, amend and change the health care law. To restrict Congress is to change its constitutional duty. The 111th Congress must think it can change the Constitution without amending it — a violation of Article 5, which outlines the amendment process.

The health care bill also violates the 10th Amendment because it coerces states into complying with a new national program that reaches far into state jurisdiction.

So, what do you do when you’re navigating through a blizzard of political white-out where visibility is reduced to zero, the road is slick and slippery, and disaster is strewn about in all directions? You come to a complete stop — and put on the chains.

Paul B. Skousen is a former analyst for the CIA, an intelligence officer in the Reagan White House, and staffer for Senator Orrin Hatch.

A Christmas Message

2010-12-20T08:21:00.003-05:00

He who has not Christmas in his heart
will never find it under a tree. ~Roy L. Smith

December, 2010

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

For a few days let's put all thoughts of politics and world affairs aside, and simply appreciate the joy that a loving family and close friends can bring.

It's a time to reflect and take comfort in the knowledge that each of us has the unspoken love and support not only of those close to us, but of people of good will everywhere across this great land -- and of a loving and merciful God.

Let's celebrate not only Christmas and Hanukkah, but the greatest gift of all - the wondrous liberty with which we were endowed by our Creator. No power on earth can take it away, because that liberty exists in our hearts and minds and souls.

I tell you that we are a great nation because we are a free and loving people - and we will prevail because free men and women of good will always do.

All of us here at the Staten Island Tea Party would like to wish you and your family a joyous and blessed Christmas and a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia

Staten Island, NY

"A fine pleasant evening for your Indian caper..."

2010-12-16T16:45:00.008-05:00

"Friends! Brethren! Countrymen!--That worst of plagues, the detested tea, shipped for this port by the East India Company, is now arrived in the harbor."

-Handbill posted 29 November, 1773 in Boston

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

I couldn't let the day pass without remarking on its import. On 16 December, 1773, a group of citizens in Boston sought clearance from the British Customs Commissioner to send three ships of the British East India Company back from whence they came.

The chief cargo on board these vessels was tea - but to the colonists, the commodity, though it was much in demand, was tainted with a small but unpalatable duty charged by the British crown. Though the duty was merely a token, to the colonists it represented Parliament's attempt to prove that it had, indeed, the right to tax the American colonies - though their subjects were afforded no representation.

The Commissioner turned down the request for clearance because the duty had not been paid.

The rest, as they say, is history - at least to every schoolchild of my generation. Two hundred men, dressed as Mohawk Indians and brandishing hatchets and pistols, marched to Griffin's Wharf where the ships Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver were at anchor. When they were done, all 342 chests of tea aboard the three ships were broken open and dumped into Boston harbor.

Thousands stood on shore in silence and watched as the Sons of Liberty made their emphatic statement. According to eyewitness accounts, when done they marched past the home of British Admiral Montague, who had been watching discreetly from a window.

Legend has it that he yelled as they passed, "Well boys, you have had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven't you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet!"

What the Admiral could not have known was that the debt owed to the fiddler would be paid by the British at a terrible cost of blood and treasure, and that the actions taken by those patriots on that "fine, pleasant evening" would prove to be the spark that lit the fuse of revolution.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank

A Guest Editorial

2010-11-30T08:29:00.003-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

The following essay was written by Shmuley Boteach for the Jerusalem Post, and it falls under the category of "I wish I had written that..."

He captures succinctly and completely the reasons why conservative values surpass progressive values not only in a practical sense, but in a moral sense, and he gives us a blueprint for building a stronger bond with minority and underprivileged communities. This is something I have targeted for quite some time, and I, for one, intend to use his insight in an attempt to increase awareness and support in those communities.

The link to the original column is here. Please read and enjoy, and I welcome your comments and suggestions at taxdayteapartysiny@gmail.com

Yours in Liberty,

Frank

Why the Tea Party Resonates With Human Dignity

The Tea Party movement is far from perfect, but it taps into a hidden human desire to live a life crowned with self-esteem.

One Friday night at my home, a dear friend who runs a large charitable foundation raised his glass to toast the demise of the Tea Party, which he branded a group of racists, xenophobes and bigots. Taken aback, I responded that to my knowledge the Tea Party is focused simply on more limited government and the reduction of government spending. I didn’t know racism was part of the platform, I said.

But he was adamant that the Tea Party’s small-government rhetoric was an attack on low-income minorities.

Lost in the debate about the morality of the Tea Party is any discussion about its underpinnings in human nature. The principle purpose of government is to provide the optimal conditions under which human beings can acquire their most important necessities, the highest of which is dignity.

Governments provide many essentials for their citizens, from law and order to social services, from good roads to education. If it’s a socialist government, it may even provide cradle-to-grave benefits, or if it’s a more Right-leaning government, it may emphasize robust national defense. But the one human essential that government cannot provide is human dignity.

Dignity is something acquired through personal effort. Dignity is the human aura that comes through self-reliance.

Its underlying premise is independence. A dependent life is a fundamentally undignified life. Self-respect is earned through the sweat of one’s brow. An heir to a great fortune may travel the high seas in a 100-foot yacht and soar through the air in a Gulfstream V. But he will remain without dignity so long as he is living on someone else’s dime.

Yes, people want to pay their bills. They want nice houses and material comforts. But more than anything else they seek an existence infused with a sense of relevance and purpose. We seek redemption, but wish for it to come through our own devices.

IN MANY cultures the loss of dignity, or face, becomes a reason to terminate life itself. The Talmud states that shaming someone in public is worse than murder, because the public humiliation makes them wish they were dead.

America’s rapid rise to global economic power was not an accident, but the direct result of a fierce individualism and rugged self-reliance on the part of its citizens.

Where European populations were content to live under anointed rulers, Americans threw off the yoke of a foreign sovereign and tamed a vast wilderness. For Americans, divine right translated as manifest destiny – the ability of an immigrant nation who arrived on these shores with nothing, to spread their accomplishments from sea to shining sea. In so doing, Americans claimed a level of independence and dignity that had few historical precedents.

The welfare state claims it is more moral than capitalism, which it sees as selfish and materialistic. There is some truth to this claim, especially when capitalism is allowed to run rampant, becoming soulless and deadening. But for all its flaws, capitalism fosters an independence that promotes dignity while socialism creates a reliance that subverts self-esteem. Yes, the government must provide a safety net for a rainy day, but only selfreliance creates a sunny life.

I recently heard a philanthropist tell of visiting a soup kitchen that had asked for his support. He was skeptical that the people eating there were actually in need; perhaps they simply came because the food was free. But the rabbi who ran the facility asked him: “Are you capable of asking someone for food?”

The philanthropist answered that he was not. “Well then,” the rabbi responded, “if someone is forced to ask me to eat, I have to believe he is truly hungry.”

The story illustrates both the necessity of providing essential social services for those in need, while always being mindful never to allow that need to become a permanent dependency. True, socialist governments provide without people having to ask. But the effect is the same – a corrosive dependence on the hand that feeds. The effort to recapture the dignity that springs from selfreliance is what the Tea Party should be all about.

Countries like Britain, Greece and Spain are undertaking drastic austerity measures to rescue themselves from economic collapse. In truth, however, their move away from reckless entitlements and wholesale capitulation to organized labor has less to do with their inability to afford vast social services than it has to do with reversing the corruption these services were fostering in their populace. My progressive friends speak to me about how a compassionate society takes care of its citizens. That is true. But it must also take care to ensure that it never robs its citizens of the nobility of spirit which is their birthright.

Does having your job preserved by a union when you consistently underperform induce pride? Can you feel good about yourself when you’re in a profession in which only collective pressure keeps you receiving a paycheck?

Maimonides famously lists levels of charity, with the provision of a vocation being the highest. The Tea Party is far from perfect, but in emphasizing self-reliance, it taps into a hidden human desire to live a life crowned with self-esteem.

""Resolved: That Two Battalions of Marines Be Raised..."

2010-11-10T13:08:00.003-05:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

It was a brew house built in 1693 at the intersection of Water Street and Tun Alley near the docks, and so the wooden structure built by Samuel Carpenter and his brother Joshua was ultimately known simply as Tun Tavern.

Over the decades, while fires of independence were being stoked that would eventually enflame all thirteen colonies, it became a favorite gathering place in that part of colonial Philadelphia known as Carpenter's Wharf, attracting the likes of Jefferson, Washington and Franklin. So it was that when Captain Samuel Nicholas was commissioned by the Second Continental Congress on November 10th, 1775 to raise two battalions of Marines, he appointed Robert Mullen, the proprietor of the establishment, to the position of Chief Marine Recruiter.

It must have been a raucous scene in that watering hole, night after night, as Mullen set out to attract able-bodied volunteers, though he was instructed that “no persons be appointed to office, or enlisted into said Battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so acquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea when required…”

The newly-established Continental Marines were to provide on-board security for the ship's Captain and crew, and during naval engagements Marine sharpshooters were dispatched to the top of the fighting masts. From there, they targeted enemy officers, gunners and helmsmen.

They wore green coats with white lapels and a distinctive high collar made of leather, designed to protect against sword and cutlass slashes. Even today, the Marine Corps dress uniform features a high collar in commemoration of those first two battalions - and they are still known as “Leathernecks.”

I could not let this date go by without asking you to think of them. I am, as you are, intensely and rightly proud of ALL branches of our military, but I must admit that I experience a little surge of adrenalin when I read the words, "The Marines have landed!"

They have defended our flag in God-forsaken, pestilent jungles across the globe. They have defended our liberty and independence with glory and honor, engaging and defeating enemies who may have had the advantage in numbers and guns, but could never surpass them in heart and courage.

They have been fighting and dying for our freedom since the days when the fate of our Republic may have depended upon the outcome of the next battle. They are symbolized by men like Sergeant Dan Daly, exhorting his Marines up and over the top against overwhelming odds in bloody Belleau Wood with the words "C'mon you sons-of-bitches, do you want to live forever?"

They are the stuff of legends.

Happy 235th Birthday, Marines. We couldn't have made it without you. May God bless you and keep you, and from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

_____________________________________________________

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they've made a difference. The Marines don't have that problem."

- President Ronald Reagan
_____________________________________________________

The Great Debate

2010-10-28T07:53:00.002-04:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

At one point during Tuesday night's debate at Wagner College, incumbent Michael McMahon smugly told challenger Michael Grimm that he was going to "school him." By the time it was all over, however, it became clear that it was McMahon who needed to learn a few things.

I arrived early. Outside the doors of Main Hall, a beautiful old building, dramatically lit, were a few hundred people holding McMahon signs - and virtually nobody displaying Grimm signs. Apparently the Congressman's campaign staff did a much better job of whipping up the volunteers than did the Grimm folks - at least, that's what I thought. Not an auspicious start.

Then I noticed that all the men in the crowd who were over the age of a typical college sophomore, were wearing matching shirts - crisp, new, white sweatshirts. Remembering what I was taught by never-ending commercials, I looked for the union label - and sure enough, emblazoned on the back was the logo of a labor organization which I shall not name. Those that were not wearing the sweatshirts were, well, college sophomores.

It was quite clear that this was an Astro Turf crowd; it was also quite clear that the McMahon camp had put a lot of effort into ginning up enthusiasm for their candidate. Unfortunately, they had to settle for manufactured sizzle. Truthfully, when you see all those robotic zombie-types dressed alike and taking orders from their leaders ("OK, everybody walk over here!") it smacks more of desperation than anything else.

Inside the theater we took the first empty seats on the aisle we could find - in about the ninth or tenth row - which meant that about 80% of the room was behind us.

At 7:30 the candidates walked in - McMahon first. As soon as he entered the room there was enthusiastic applause, and as he got closer to the stage virtually everybody sitting in front of me - all 8 or 9 rows - stood up and cheered. I thought it was going to be a long night with a packed McMahon crowd, until I turned around and saw that nobody behind me was standing, and only a scant handful was even applauding.

Then Grimm walked in and the room erupted. If this race was decided by an applause-meter, it would have been all over right then and there; if you were at the Healthcare Town Hall Meeting last October, it was deja vu all over again.

As for the debate itself, Grimm won handily, in my opinion. He spoke smoothly and confidently, hit all the right notes, came off as a regular guy with a passionate love of country and liberty, showed good humor, and scored multiple points.

He was obviously well-prepared. His poise and tone were quite remarkable when you consider that he has never been involved in politics in his life - another factor in his favor.

His biggest gaffe of the evening? In a question about immigration, he referred to "immigrants" when he obviously meant to refer to "illegal immigrants," and apparently didn't notice the slip. We all knew what he meant - it was quite obvious in the context of his remarks. McMahon, however, tried to pounce on him when it was his turn, pontificating about how this country was built on immigration. It was his "gotcha" moment, and hardly worthy of the mention.

However, McMahon's major gaffe was a beauty. During his response to the same question, and while defending the Administration's policy on illegals - which is to say, no policy at all - he stated that he supports deporting illegal aliens - if they commit a crime!

Mr. Grimm then pointed out that his opponent, the incumbent, might want to reflect upon the fact that "illegal" immigrants have by definition committed a crime the moment they crossed the border. Oops. Was his face red.

This is a horse race, my friends. McMahon and Grimm are driving down the stretch to the finish line; either one could win, and despite the Advance's attempt to marginalize the importance of this election (according to their editorial: "To hear some people around here talk, the fate of the republic hinges on the outcome of the election for the seat in the 13th Congressional District. Of course, all over the country, similarly outlandish claims are being made...") you and I know better: this year there are NO unimportant races. Let's make it happen.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

On the second day. On a small hill.

2010-10-23T13:07:00.012-04:00

My Dear Fellow Patriots:

In a few days our beloved Republic, the dream of our forefathers, will be saved – or it will be lost.

Seldom in its history has a battle been fought upon which the future of the country so soundly rests; never has its fate been more assuredly determined as it will be when the last polls close in the far western reaches of the United States of America on November 2, 2010.

The closest we’ve ever come to political extinction, to being just a noble experiment in democracy wherein free men were the rulers and not the ruled, was in July of 1863 - when the Army of the Republic came within a whisker of defeat at a bloody battle in a small Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.

There, on the second day of the three-day battle, on a small hill that came to be called Little Round Top, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain was tasked with defending the extreme left flank of the Union Army with a handful of men known as the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

They were citizen soldiers, barely trained, hardly battle-hardened, and could not have known when they enlisted that upon their simple shoulders would rest the fate of a nation, and because of their courage, and their courage only, a nation would endure.

Politics played no less a role in America in the 1860’s than it does today; support for the war in the North was waning as the Union Army was dealt a series of stinging defeats; now, the Army of Northern Virginia, led by the seemingly invincible Robert E. Lee, had advanced further north than at any time since the war’s inception, and defeat in Pennsylvania would put Philadelphia, Baltimore and even Washington, D.C. in jeopardy. Fear was spreading; panic was waiting in the wings. A defeat here would force Lincoln much closer to a compromise with the Confederacy, and the very real possibility of military disaster loomed. It was not a far stretch to say that the preservation of the Union was at stake.

So it was that on June 30, 1863, one of Lee’s officers sent a foraging party into that small crossroads town – in search of shoes. And because upon such tiny hinges do the doors of world-historical events open and shut, the Rebels spied elements of Union cavalry arriving south of town, and reported back to their commanding officer, General A.P. Hill. Hill decided to send a reconnaissance-in-force, about two brigades, into the town the next day, to see if he was dealing with nothing more than a troublesome Pennsylvania militia, or perhaps something else - something unexpected.

It would require a great deal of time, space and most importantly research, to properly recount the events of July 1st, 1863 in the ridges and hills west of Gettysburg, and those events are not to the purpose of this writing. What happened the following day is, because it illustrates how a small band of determined men, armed with little more than a belief in their cause, rose up to defend the nation and Constitution in which they so firmly believed.

That Thursday morning the Union army, under General George Meade, found themselves strung out in a defensive position along a line of high ground ominously known as Cemetery Ridge. They faced west, and the ridge was anchored on the southern end, their left flank, by Little Round Top, where the defensive line was arrayed in such a way as to resemble a fishhook. The last element at the end of that hook was the 20th Maine. Should they be dislodged from that position, the entire Union line could be rolled up and occupied by the Confederates, and it is unlikely that they would ever be removed. A loss at Gettysburg, and the history of this nation would be forever altered.

Starting at 4:00 PM, the rebels pounded away at that left flank, led by the 15th Alabama. Over and over they charged up that hill, and over and over they were repulsed by blistering fire from the 20th on the Union flank; so thick was the shot that the tens of thousands of rounds of Minie balls cut down swaths of trees – and swaths of men fighting and dying for their cause. Death did not choose a side.

After ninety minutes, the 20th Maine was worn out, and worse, without ammunition. But still there was fight in them – still they would refuse to surrender the cause. Knowing that they could not withstand another assault, with desperation the word went up and down the line, which had now been stretched to single file along the prow of the hill: “Fix bayonets!”

In one of the most improbable counter-attacks in the history of the United States military, the 20th Maine charged down the hill towards the Rebel line without bullets: armed with nothing but raw courage and sharp steel. As shocking as the charge was to the enemy, equally shocking was the result – the Confederates could not withstand the surprise attack, and slowly, then more quickly, began to give ground. It turned into a rout, and by daybreak the stage had been set for the final act in the battle that changed the course of the war.

Unable to dislodge the Union army from the left flank of the line, Lee decided that on the third day he would attack the center, in a desperate winner-take-all gambit. The charge would be led, with pride, by General George Edward Pickett.

We all know the outcome.I wish we knew the outcome of the battle that will be fought on the first Tuesday of November - but we do not. Like the 20th Maine. we are running low on ammunition; like the 20th Maine, we face a determined foe; and like the 20th Maine, we refuse to lose.

We refuse to allow those who would attack our freedoms and our Constitution to take the high ground. We refuse to become discouraged, to lose heart, to succumb to the relentless attack on our beliefs. We, like the 20th Maine, must find the courage and determination to rise up, to exhort our neighbors to join our common cause as if the fate of the Republic were at stake - because it just might be.

The battle is in scant days. Fix bayonets.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Really Extreme.

2010-10-16T08:58:00.003-04:00

2010-10-14T22:25:00.003-04:00

Why We Vote..

2010-10-06T19:07:00.001-04:00

Mourning this morning....

2010-09-23T09:51:00.003-04:00

In 1984, a group called Citizens for the Republic produced one of the most famous television campaign ads ever. It was called "It's morning in America..." and was done for the re-election campaign of Ronald Reagan.

That same organization has produced a new commercial, and it's called "Mourning in America..." Here 'tis:

And here's the original:

You can't make this stuff up....

2010-09-23T09:32:00.004-04:00

From the SITP "No Kidding" Department: Carl Paladino does not like Sheldon Silver. In fact, he appears to like him even less than he does Andy Cuomo.

So when Mr. Silver stated that he would move out of the state if Mr. Paladino won the gubernatorial election, Mr. Paladino, ever the gentleman, facilitated the move by buying Mr. Silver a ticket on Amtrak from Albany to Washington.

ALL ABOARD!

Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a wild ride...

2010-09-23T09:25:00.003-04:00

September 16, 2010

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

There can no longer be any way to spin it otherwise - the tea party movement is poised to force a paradigm shift in American politics.

The primary election results Tuesday night were, in a word, shocking. We saw outsider candidates upset party regulars not only with the trouncing of RINO Mike Castle in Delaware by underdog Conservative Christine O'Donnell, but here in New York we saw outsider Carl Paladino destroy the candidacy of the anointed mainstream Republican, Rick Lazio.

And right here on Staten Island, the man who was NOT the choice of the party bosses, Michael Grimm, garnered 69% in the district, which includes all of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn. On Staten Island alone he earned 73% of the vote. Grimm's victory was so stunningly lopsided that it could only be interpreted as a complete repudiation of politics as usual.

If you needed any further proof that the tea party movement is not married to a party, Tuesday night's butt-kicking of the Republican establishment should have provided all the proof you could ever need.

Now my question is this: what are you going to do about it? What can I do to convince you that making a real difference this November is going to take more than your emotional support, and more than simply your vote? In order to create real change you must provide your candidate with the one thing that is as vital to him as the air he breathes, and without which he can never win the battle against his opponent this fall. And no, I am not talking about your money, though he needs that, too - I am talking about your time and effort.

Taking back America will take work. Real work. Are you ready, willing and able to roll up your sleeves? I know we are not all capable of devoting a lot of time - we have lives to live, families to feed and jobs to keep. But when working for a candidate the hours are flexible, the chores are varied - and the payoff just might be the restoration of our country.

You can man a phone bank or pass out literature on your block. You can stuff envelopes or distribute lawn signs. You can do something.

You can also tell me that your vote is all you can give. What I'd ask you to think about, though, is what can be accomplished when you contribute a few hours of your time and leverage your one vote into ten votes, or twenty votes or a hundred votes. That is how elections are won.

If you have recognized that we have reached a crossroads in America, if you are ready to work for change, please contact me. Time is short and the hours are long - but the moment is now. I got off my couch one afternoon about 18 months ago and started on a journey to make a difference. I'll be gone as long as it takes. You come too.

Yours in Liberty,

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

UPDATE: A NY Post poll has Carl Paladino pulling to within 6 points of the once heavily-favored Andrew Cuomo.

All It Took Was the Pledge

2010-08-31T07:33:00.001-04:00

I spent Saturday with a group of friends - about three or four hundred thousand of them.

Together, shoulder-to-shoulder, we gathered for a few hours on the National Mall in our nation's capitol. We were there to hear well-known and charismatic people speak about restoring honor and hope to our nation. I expected to be inspired, and I was, but I found that I was moved not as much by those who spoke as I was by those who didn't.

There was a kind of power in that crowd; a passion for freedom that was palpable and electric. Husbands and wives, parents and children, young and old talked quietly amongst themselves as we moved towards the Lincoln Memorial; crowding every trail and pathway in a swath a half-mile wide, resting on benches or a shady patch of ground when the heat became too oppressive.

I walked silently among them, alone in a crowd, absorbing the energy that crackled in the air around me. And as I walked, I was transported; I was no longer on the mall, no longer in Washington, D.C., no longer on the East Coast - I was in America.

You may summer in Maine or winter in Florida or Arizona. You may cruise to Alaska or take the kids to Disneyland. You may gamble in Las Vegas, party in New Orleans, explore the Grand Canyon, hike the Appalachian Trail, honeymoon in Hawaii or swim in the Gulf of Mexico. But to really experience America, you have to experience her people.

This is what I have learned about my country in the past year: our true beauty and greatness lies not in purple mountains and fruited plains - but in our people. Good, hard-working, charitable and uncomplicated people - who believe profoundly, who know, that the content of a man's character means everything and that the color of his skin means nothing. Because we believe in the sanctity of the individual, and because we measure a man by what's in his brain and in his heart, we're not the ones who need to be lectured to about civil rights.

We know that being American is a state of mind. We look through clear glass at a clear reality; others hold a prism before their eyes and see only separate bands of colors. I pity them.

On Saturday in Washington D.C., we the people, we Americans, stood up - taller than any monument, prouder than any statue, and more durable than the tall trees that surrounded us.

We crossed 14th Street and circled around the Washington Monument, within earshot now of the massive speaker systems, and we trampled the hot grass as we migrated towards the National World War II Memorial. Beyond that was the Reflecting Pool, flanked by monuments to two excruciating wars - Korea and Viet Nam. My goal was to get close enough to have a good view of the Lincoln Memorial and the stage set before it.

I never got that far. I didn't need to. In the middle of a field, with Washington's white marble obelisk now a hundred yards behind us, everyone stopped. Those on the ground stood up. Hats were removed, veterans snapped to attention, right hands covered pounding hearts - we were halted by the words that boomed from the speakers: "I pledge allegiance..."

Now hundreds of thousands of voices spoke in unison: "...to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

With tears streaming down my cheeks I realized that I didn't need to hear from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin; all I needed to hear that day I heard in those few moments. All I needed to learn that day I was taught not by celebrities or politicians, but by those who were just like me - ordinary people living ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

I knew then that OUR voices, the voices of free and independent Americans rising up by the millions, would be the only voices that mattered in this struggle, and that our unwavering commitment victory in November would be the only true way to reclaim the honor and greatness that is America's destiny.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Attention: This is NOT a depiction of Rep. McMahon

2010-08-25T07:54:00.009-04:00

Do not be confused! Appearances can be deceiving!
Here are the Top 5 reasons this is NOT our Representative:

5. OUR Congressman has an older staff.
4. OUR Congressman is not Ron Howard's brother.
3. OUR Congressman did not vote for the health care takeover (though he did not vote for its repeal, either).
2. OUR Congressman has already been to Africa with Oprah and Bono.

And the number one reason that this is NOT Congressman McMahon...

1. OUR Congressman has more hair!

Guilty!

2010-08-19T07:59:00.003-04:00

Nancy Pelosi, who once called ordinary folks in the tea party movement Nazis - because they dared to demonstrate against the ruling class who would run our lives - has decided that a proper role of government is to investigate dissent.

In calling for a probe of those who protest the location of the Cordoba House - a Muslim community center and mosque to be built in the shadow of Ground Zero - Ms. Pelosi has shown a tone-deafness that is almost beyond description, but is sadly typical of the entire Obama administration.

However, on a positive note, it does rip the mask off this regime's true feelings about about just what the limits of free speech ought to be in their Bizarro-world.

Here is Pelosi's statement in a radio interview yesterday:

There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded, how is this being ginned up...?

Ms. Pelosi, I am guilty. I have ginned. I have not, however, been funded. Am I doing something wrong? Should I be sending out an invoice?

Yes, I was guilty of exercising my right to free speech - a.k.a. "ginning" - when I wrote that I believed the construction of the Cordoba House in lower Manhattan was insensitive, insulting and provocative. What is the penalty for opposing a project, policy or piece of legislation an American citizen finds abhorrent? I await my sentence.

I also await my check. Since I somehow missed the offer to fund my ginning-up activities, I feel that is is only right that I be reimbursed as soon as possible. And while you're at it, can I please get paid for my tea party activities? I work very hard to lay this astroturf, Ms. Pelosi, and if I'm going to be accused of being funded by various - and nefarious - right-wing cabals, should I not see at least some of this money? Right-wing, radical, racist, I've-got-mine Nazis like to take their wives to dinner, too.

Nailing It.

2010-08-18T08:28:00.002-04:00

The Mosque That Cannot Be Ignored

2010-08-08T10:08:00.021-04:00

After six U.S. Marines fought their way to the peak of Mt. Suribachi in February of 1945, I doubt that there were any citizens of Tokyo who viewed the raising of the American flag over Iwo Jima as a form of "community outreach."

Triumphant armies have always planted their symbols and standards at the conclusion of battle, and I believe that even the most progressive and tolerant elements of Japanese society would have averted their eyes from that symbol to avoid the pain of loss, to avoid a constant reminder of the horrible death suffered by a loved one.

So it will be that we in America must avert our eyes to avoid the pain of loss, because of the cowardice and political correctness of a ruling class that has removed all impediments to the construction of a mosque within yards of Ground Zero.

Indeed, the building over which the mosque will rise is in such close proximity to the World Trade Center site that a piece of landing gear crashed through its roof on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The construction of this mosque will be a heinous act of triumphalism on a scale so massive that it is almost unimaginable.

Over the killing field of 3,000 Americans, men and women who were guilty on the morning of their deaths of nothing more than simply getting up and going to work, the Islamists will smugly plant their flag of victory. Such is the degree of effrontery on the part of its sponsors that it was scheduled to have been opened on September 11, 2011, and was to have been called the Cordoba House, referencing the seat of the Islamic caliphate in Spain in the 8th century, which Muslims consider to be symbolic of Islamic rule in the West.

There is something terribly wrong with the people who would want to do this, and there is something terribly wrong with the people who would allow it to be done when they had the means to prevent it. To desecrate the site of the worst attack on American soil by a foreign enemy, and to do so with a structure glorifying the religion in whose name the terror was perpetrated, staggers the imagination and defies logic.

There is no question that the location is symbolic in a way that sickens most Americans.

The leader of the Cordoba Initiative is one Imam Feisal Rauf, who in the days after the attacks called the United States an accessory to the crime, and said that for all intents and purposes Osama Bin Laden was made in the U.S.A. He has steadfastly refused to condemn Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. He has dodged questions about the massive funding required to complete the project.

Still, freedom of religion and speech are the basic principles upon which this country was founded, and I'll fight to the death to defend both them and the constitution in which they were enumerated. However, opposition to this mosque isn't about inhibiting religion or speech - there are thousands of mosques in New York - and I recognize that when something can be built “as of right,” meaning that there are no legal obstacles to the construction, we have no right to prevent it. Not liking the builder – or what he’s building - does not trump his right to build.

This case, however, is simply about common decency. If, as the Imam states, the construction of an Islamic Community Center is about building bridges between the cultures, I would think a good way to start would be to be mindful of the sensitivities of a community, a city and a nation that mourns still. There are dozens of sites upon which to build this project. Why here? Why so close to an open wound? We see through you, Imam Rauf, we are not blind, unlike the cowards and quislings that sit on commissions and inhabit City Hall.

The ruling class may have removed the last legal obstacle to your project, but the souls of 3,000 dead Americans cry “NO!” The families of 3,000 dead Americans cry “NO!” The vast majority of New Yorkers are outraged and cry “NO!”

It may mean nothing to you, but there are millions – no, tens of millions – of ordinary Americans who remain deeply wounded by the cowardly attack that killed 3,000 innocents, and who have not forgotten that the pilots of those planes shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they successfully concluded their insane mission.

We will never know peace if a mosque lords over the site of that murderous act of war, Imam Rauf, but know this: you may never know a moment of peace within it.

An American Heart

2010-08-07T09:04:00.006-04:00

I saw this song performed live in Philadelphia, at the Unit-Tea rally. It was written and sung by Jon David, an L.A.-based writer/producer/artist whose real name is Jonathan Kahn.

Jonathan explained to the crowd that when he first started to perform the song, he did so incognito - hiding his features behind a hat and sunglasses and his identity behind a nom de plume; the L.A. scene would not tolerate a conservative. He came out of the closet with an article in the Wall Street Journal in May of this year. He said: "Being a conservative is the kiss of death in Hollywood..."

Here is his song:

Lyrics:

They say our reputation
Needs a new coat of paint
and a delicate melody
But I say I like the bruises,
And a melody don’t mean a thing
If we don’t have the strength to sing

I won’t be made to ever feel ashamed…
…that I’m American made
I got American parts
Got American faith
In America’s heart

Go on raise the flag
I got stars in my eyes
I’m in love with her
And I won’t apologize

They say that we need changin’
As if all the Founding Fathers
seem to get it wrong
But I say I still believe in
The greatest Liberator, Innovator, Cultivator
Freedom knows

So I suggest you take a look inside
I think you changed already
You went and lost your pride

But I’m American made
I got American parts
Got American faith
In America’s heart

Go on raise the flag
I got stars in my eyes
I’m in love with her
And I won’t apologize

Dress her up so you don’t recognize her
She’ll still be there if you wake up in the night
‘Cause a mother can always find her child
Even when that child don’t know he’s lost

I’m American made
I got American parts
Got American faith
In America’s heart

Go on raise the flag
I got stars in my eyes
I’m in love with her
And I won’t apologize
I’m in love with her
And I won’t apologize
I’m in love with her
And I won’t apologize

"The Great Anniversary Festival"

2010-06-27T09:06:00.008-04:00

The manuscript that launched this country on its journey to greatness was written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and we can only wonder if, as he scratched his quill pen across a clean sheet of parchment, he knew the extent to which he would be shaping the history of the world.

By early June of 1776, the Second Continental Congress had decided that a formal document needed to be created, one that would inform the King, the people of Great Britain, and the governments of the world that the will of the American people was unshakeable and unmistakable: the thirteen American colonies, united, would have nothing less than complete independence from the British crown.

The declaration that Jefferson produced a scant month later shook the foundations of Europe - and signaled the rise of what would become the greatest nation in history.

Today, as we have on every fourth of July since 1776, we celebrate that Declaration of Independence and the nation that was born on the day it was affirmed. Of the adoption of the declaration by Congress, John Adams wrote to his wife “I am apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the Great Anniversary Festival."

All too often we take for granted the men who signed that parchment, but we should always be mindful that in the eyes of King George and the British Parliament – rulers of a nation that possessed the most formidable military in the world – the signers were nothing more than traitors, deserving of nothing less than execution. By his affirmation of the declaration each man knew he might be signing his own death warrant – so we would do well to remember that our nation was born because men of steel nerves and raw courage made it happen.

We were never meant to be a country of the timid – we were destined for boldness and greatness from the beginning, because those were the traits of our founders and forefathers. They apologized to no man or monarch; they ran from no fight; they defended their rights - and ours - to the moment of their death.

Ironically, for two of the men responsible for the creation of the declaration, John Adams and Jefferson himself, that moment of death came 50 years later to the day; they passed into history within hours of each other on July 4th, 1826.

So as we bask in the happy company of family and friends today, let’s reflect on the courage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Most of them were many days travel from hearth and home for months at a time, suffering and debating through two hot, pestilent Philadelphia summers. All of them, to a man, risked their lives for their principles - because they believed, as you believe and I believe, that the natural state of man on Earth is freedom and that there is no higher cause than liberty.

As much as anything else this day, we should remember and celebrate their courage, those men of the Second Continental Congress, and the bravery and dedication of all the men who gave their lives for that glorious cause.

We are honor-bound, too, to acknowledge that they bestowed upon us a responsibility we cannot shirk and cannot ignore: America, the last, best hope of man on earth, must be defended at all costs against those who would destroy her by force of arms - or enslave her with the stroke of a pen.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

McMahon: Free Speech Be Damned

2010-06-27T09:03:00.003-04:00

June 25, 2010

My Dear Fellow Patriots;

Yesterday, my Congressman voted to stick a knife into the heart of free speech.

He voted for a bill that carries a cruel joke of an acronym: DISCLOSE. That stands for Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light On Spending in Elections. Never has there been such a misnomer.

He voted for a bill that has only a single reason for its existence: to thwart the ruling of the Supreme Court in the case of Citizens United vs. FEC, which unshackled corporations from the restraints on political speech imposed upon them by McCain/Feingold.

When the SCOTUS ruled that private citizens, of which corporations are comprised, have the freedom to speak their political minds, Democrats went into a panic. How could they silence these newly-freed voices? First, they denied that corporations are composed of individual human beings with a right to free speech. Then, they demonized them as soulless entities with no shred of humanity – never mind that corporations are comprised of nothing BUT people like you and me.

Finally, behind closed doors, Chris Van Hollen and Chuck Schumer, the two men in charge of getting Democrats re-elected in the House and Senate respectively this fall, crafted DISCLOSE. In doing so, they reminded us once again that what Nancy Pelosi promised would be “a new era of honest, open, and transparent government,” is simply an epic fail.

The bill, which will have a tremendous effect on this November’s campaign, received a total of one hour of debate. This was determined by the same Democratic rules committee that had allotted 41 hours of debate to the naming of post offices.
What does the bill mean? This from Mark Hemingway of the Washington Examiner:

So unions now get nearly unrestricted, undisclosed political spending. Further, the restrictions in the DISCLOSE Act only cut one way — against business. If you took TARP funds as a business, express political advocacy is now verboten. So GM has very limited first amendment rights, but even though arguably primary beneficiary of the auto bailout was the United Auto Workers union which got government guaranteed billions directly as a result of the TARP funding — UAW can spend almost whatever it pleases, and it has a history of spending millions on Democratic campaigns.

Further, under the DISCLOSE Act if a company has more than $7 million in government contracts, it has no right to political speech. But public sector unions can spend millions of recycled tax dollars campaigning for Democrats, no problem. All this will likely do is make business spend more money on lobbyists rather than campaigns. Of course, campaign spending is much more transparent than lobbying, but when it comes to the DISCLOSE act, clean elections and free speech seem to be secondary considerations to getting Democrats elected.

And what are we to make of the fact that this bill - unlike all other campaign finance bills - has NO provision for expedited judicial review? It's just more evidence that this is a desperate move, by a desperate majority, desperate to hold on to power. They know that this law will likely fail to pass constitutional muster - but not before Election Day, 2010.

Instead of a bill that applied restrictions fairly to all entities, it contained loopholes (called "carve outs") to help the Democrats friends and silence their foes. I am disappointed that my representative would try to pull the wool over our eyes in this way - and worse, that he would try to silence our voices.

I suspect he still hasn’t gotten it. We are no longer asleep, Congressman McMahon – we are awake, alert, very concerned, informed and engaged. In the old days, you could double-talk your way around this vote and count on it being forgotten in a few short days. You'd probably be right if you thought that nobody was even paying attention.

Not anymore, Congressman. There are about 1,500 people on our mailing list, and these missives are forwarded to thousands of others, and they all have friends, relatives and neighbors. They may not call and they may not write, but now they are paying attention, and now they DO NOT forget - they watch and listen and read, and will remember when it's decision-making time in November.

Every vote like this one, every vote that makes us less free, every vote that brings us further under the thumb of this administration – every one – will energize us.

We will not rest, Congressman. We will take it to the streets and we will take it to Capitol Hill, and most importantly, we will take it to the voting booths.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

On Memorial Day.

2010-05-30T09:07:00.008-04:00

There are 1,541 American men buried in Suresnes, France. In the cemetery at Meusse-Argonne, 14,246. At St. Mihiel, there are 4,153, and in Lorraine lie 10,489 of our military dead.

There are others in France: in Somme, in the Rhone valley, in Aisne-Marne and in Brittany, all hallowed ground where the mortal remains of fathers, sons and husbands sent by their countrymen to defend freedom, lie under stark, white crosses, a silent testament to the goodness and greatness of the United States of America.

They died in Sicily - almost 8,000 are buried there, and in Florence over 4,400; men who fought to liberate Italy from the tyranny of fascism. And there are more than 5,000 American dead in Luxembourg.

At Henri-Chapelle lie the bodies of 7,992; in Ardennes, 5,329, and to end this incomplete list, 528 Americans are buried where they fell – in Flanders fields, where poppies grow. These three cemeteries are in Belgium.

All are in Europe. I have not even touched upon the war in the Pacific. To do so would be almost incomprehensible; in total, American military deaths during World War II alone numbered over 400,000.

Let the numbers wash over you – don’t permit yourself to be so overwhelmed that they become meaningless. Think hard, concentrate on the magnitude of the sacrifice, feel the pain of so many tens of thousands – hundreds of thousands - of mothers who watched their little boys answer the call to defend freedom everywhere – because that’s what Americans do. And make no mistake, no matter what their age, to those mothers they were all just little boys.

Close your eyes for a few moments and think about these things, and you will find when you open them that Memorial Day will mean something just a little different than it did before.

There are almost no words to describe the debt we owe to those men and women who gave their last full measure of devotion to the cause of liberty, a debt that is owed by free men and women everywhere, because without the armed forces of the United States, there would be freedom nowhere.

Reflect on the magnitude of America’s sacrifice to the world. We were not fighting for our own liberation – we were fighting for others bound to us by a single tie: a belief that freedom and liberty are the natural state of man, and that tyranny is to be fought and defeated no matter the cost.

We can honor them in no greater way than to dedicate ourselves to those principles. We can never forget them, we can never lose our way, and we can never permit anyone to tell us we are the problem, not the solution.

We must condemn and reject those who suggest it, whether the calumny be uttered by a foreign potentate or, sadly and inexplicably, a member of our own government.

And above all, we must never, never apologize for America’s role in the world, and we must vow to never let freedom slip through our fingers. To do so not only cheapens the lives of those we honor today, it condemns them to the pure hell of having died in vain.

The Staten Island CONSERVATIVE Party?

2010-05-27T13:51:00.002-04:00

The Staten Island Conservative Party has accelerated its rush to irrelevance with its Executive Committee’s endorsement of a liberal Democrat in the race for New York's 13th Congressional District. In a bizarre move eerily similar to the Republican Executive Committee's decision to endorse the non-candidacy of Vito Fossella, it proves once again that principle has very little to do with the "good ol' boy" decision-making process.

How any party that calls itself "Conservative" could endorse the continued majority status of a Democratic Congress that is bankrupting our country, trampling our individual liberties, crushing private enterprise and expanding the powers of the federal government far beyond ANY interpretation of the Constitution, is a complete and utter mystery. The Staten Island Conservative Party Executive Committee has shown that they are not forward-thinking individuals interested in conservative principles and values, but rather are the sad, old remnants of an incestuous club.

Statement's like Carmine Ragucci's "he can deliver for the district" sound more like the acceptance of a Tammany-era bribe than political astuteness, and represents the most reprehensible sort of political quid pro quo. The Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress, of which Rep. McMahon is part, are stealing the wealth of America, and America's children, and America's grandchildren, and giving it to their disciples to distribute in return for endorsements and votes. This represents “crony governance” more at home in a banana republic than the United States, and bears little resemblance to the representative republic founded by our forefathers over 200 years ago.

In the ossified thinking of Staten Island Conservative leadership, pork trumps principle every time.

Though he does so roughly 90% of the time, Representative McMahon is to be commended for not voting in complete lockstep with Nancy Pelosi. However, he unfortunately lacks the clout to either change or derail any draconian legislation. If voting against his party’s leadership is merely symbolic and cannot change the outcome of the Obama administration’s far-left legislative agenda, he may “get it,” as Mr. Ragucci has said, but has little to show for it except pork-barrel projects funded with money pinched from the pockets of taxpayers, stolen from the treasury or borrowed from future generations of Americans.

I would urge any and all members of this "party" who are rightly disgusted by the decision of your Executive Committee to act on the courage of your convictions and denounce this disgraceful endorsement.

What It Means To Be a Democrat Today...

2010-05-22T03:55:00.007-04:00

It means that in a joint session of Congress, you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and bash the Governor and the citizens of one of your states - a state under attack from that same foreign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and lecture you about putting the interests of foreign criminals ahead of the interests of citizens of the United States. A man whose own country has some of the strictest immigration laws in the world - which are methodically and brutally enforced. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

It means that you permit the leader of a foreign nation to come before you and mischaracterize a law that protects the sovereignty of the United States, in essence telling you that your borders no longer exist, and therefore, your country is no longer a sovereign nation. And then you give the man a standing ovation.

We will remember in November.

We will remember this sickening image.

Gotta Love Governor Christie...

2010-05-15T19:37:00.001-04:00

Free Speech In the Crosshairs

2010-05-10T13:12:00.008-04:00

Do you remember what it was like before the internet and talk radio and Fox News?

Do you remember the suffocating cocoon in which we felt wrapped and trapped, desperate for someone, anyone, to simply tell the unspun truth about the direction in which our country was headed? To express an understanding of the love we felt for a proud America who need not apologize to any nation or people, unashamed of its independence, vitality and free markets?

The Obama Administration remembers those days; so does the Left; so does the Mainstream Media.

They long for those times – times when they could empower the march to Marxism on a daily basis, news cycle after news cycle after news cycle. They are desperate to return to that era of control over the shaping of the political agenda, and as their electoral prospects dim, their anxiety grows.

The Tea Party Movement is their worst nightmare.

It is becoming a mighty river of public opinion and voting trends, flowing from the confluence of talk radio, cable news and the internet; it is Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Heritage.org writ large; it is, indeed, the awakening of the sleeping giant . It is the message of conservatism gone viral; it is a longing to return to constitutional principles that is sweeping that portion of the populace that reveres and believes in the documents that are the foundation of this great country.

The Tea Party Movement empowers people who wish to halt the “fundamental change” being wrought upon this nation. Fundamental change? Why would any person who believes in the sanctity of human life and liberty want to fundamentally change a nation that has done more good for more people than any country in the history of the world?

Because of these things: the internet, talk radio, Fox News and Tea Party rallies, the silent majority now has a voice and feels empowered to push back. Worse for the left, it appears that we don’t merely wish to keep the statists in check – we mean to make fundamental changes to our government by disabusing it of the insane "entitlement-as-a-right" atmosphere that has pervaded Washington since the sixties.

And so, for the march to Marxism to continue, we must be stopped.

A seed was planted back in the ‘90s, when Bill Clinton tried to lay the impetus for Oklahoma City bombing at the feet of Rush Limbaugh, a seed which has been fertilized and watered by Democrats, the mainstream media and the Left countless times over the years.

It was nurtured again last week by Mayor Bloomberg, whose first instinct was that the as-yet-unidentified Times Square bomber was someone who was unhappy with the recently-passed health care legislation - code words for a disgruntled Tea Partier.

Then a few days ago at a graduation ceremony, President Obama said, “Meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t rank all that high on the truth meter...[snip]...Information becomes a distraction, a diversion...”

Information a distraction?

These are not isolated events; these are puzzle pieces which the Left hopes to fit together, and I can guarantee you that we will not like the picture that emerges after it is assembled.

Right now, the Tea Party movement stands atop a three-legged stool that is comprised of talk radio, cable television, and the internet. From this vantage point, at rallies throughout the country, grassroots groups espouse an obedience to the Constitution that is anathema to this Democratic Congress and their radical agenda – but all attempts to collapse this stool have thus far failed.

The collective wheels of the Left continue to spin, however, and therein lie my worst fears.

There is one thing which will give the Left, championed, as it is, by this Democratic Congress and the media, a shot to silence once again the silent majority: a major domestic terrorist attack that can be hung around the neck of the Tea Party movement.

Forget, for a moment, that a single kook with deranged purpose can erupt within ANY ideology – that truth that will be ignored. The sad truth is that the agenda of the Left is advanced by any act of violence that can plausibly be connected to an American that has expressed or implied Tea Party connections.

And if that happens – watch out.

Expect the Left to drag out the Fairness Doctrine, and use it as a cudgel to beat conservative voices into silence. ALL conservatives will be blamed for the attack, even humble bloggers, and all will be condemned as the enablers, the instigators, the progenitors of a deranged, right-wing monster.

They will shout that under such circumstances political candidates must disavow the Tea Party movement at every turn, that rallies must cease – or even be outlawed as an incitement to violence – and that mainstream America is obligated to turn away from the conservative principles in which we so passionately believe.

Say goodbye to Limbaugh, Levin, Malkin, Krauthammer and the rest if the Left finally gets the inaccurate and disingenuous "hate speech" moniker to stick.

To ensure that a movement such as ours will not rise again, they will systematically cut off every leg of the stool, every voice of the movement, and they will do it through legislation or simply by fiat. All they need is one kook.

My fear is that they, the Left, will provide him.

Already, one outlier has exhorted “infiltration” of the Tea Party movement to discredit it – but that was a single nut without a real plan, and without the brains to keep his intentions secret. There are other, smarter and more dangerous individuals out there, to whom a human life – or a hundred, or a thousand – is a small price to pay to quash a Constitutional movement that threatens to unravel decades of planning for "fundamental change."

The disturbed individual that tried to exhort his followers to infiltrate and discredit the April 15th Tea Party events with racist and violent signs became neutralized when a bright light was shone on his shadowy plot. That one was easy. The next one might not be.

The next one may carefully infiltrate the movement, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary Americans at rallies, may carry the appropriate signs, talk the talk, walk the walk - and then strike. His Tea Party bona fides will appear to be impeccable, but his heart will be filled with duplicity, hatred and death.

Be vigilant. Stay strong. And if, God forbid, such a thing were to happen, stand firm in your commitment to our country, our flag, our Constitution and the goodness of America. We cannot let the actions of a madman, whatever his motivations, be the excuse this Administration is seeking to marginalize - and worse, criminalize - this movement of free Americans.

Frank Santarpia
Staten Island, NY

Fair To Whom, Mr. President?

2010-04-30T13:09:00.010-04:00

It’s becoming abundantly clear, and incredibly sad, that the sympathies and concerns of the President of the United States far too often lie with our enemies.

Witness his incredible statements regarding the self-defense measures recently passed by the duly-elected legislature of the state of Arizona. The day after the measure was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer (who would have deserved impeachment had she not signed it) the President said that the law “threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.”

It seems to me odd that the man sworn to protect and defend our nation has such an magnanimous sense of fairness when it comes to criminals and enemies, but seems little concerned with the plight of the good citizens of Arizona.

In making this statement, he slanders, seemingly without concern or even an awareness that he is doing so, the peace officers of an entire state. In a clearly-worded sixteen page bill, which is much more restrictive in its structure than the law which guides federal agents in the same circumstances, the officers are instructed that they may not stop anyone without clear probable cause, and then must have reason to believe that the person is undocumented before even asking for proof of citizenship.

It is a cumbersome two-step burden, neither of which federal agents would be forced to bear - should they actually be sent to the border in sufficient numbers to get the job done.

Apparently, to our President, peace officers are not to be trusted with these basic instructions, and so, employing a twisted and misguided logic, he stands in defense of the lawbreaker and smears the defenders of peaceful citizens.

The new law expressly states that race or ethnicity cannot be the sole reason for stopping a person and questioning the legality of his presence here, yet the President demagogues the law as racial profiling, and ponders a court challenge. Any sane American must wonder exactly whose side he is on.

Mr. President, the federal government was not instituted to rule over the populace, it was instituted to govern by the consent of the governed. Its primary purpose is to protect its citizenry, not to uphold the mythical “rights” of foreign nationals who sneak onto our soil, knowing that the instant they do they are here in violation of federal law.

When the principle raison d’etre for the federal government is security, and a fundamental requirement of security is the defense of our borders, federal agents need no warrant or probable cause to stop and search, or demand documentation from, anyone entering the country. Yet the Arizona law insists upon it, making it less prone to abuse than the federal law.

But never let it be said that common sense plays a role in this administration.

Tell me, sir, what the good people of the state of Arizona are to think when their neighbors are murdered or kidnapped by what are essentially foreign invaders, while their federal government cannot take time out from systematically encroaching on their individual liberties to perform the most basic function of a government?

The President does this time and time again – and now we have come to expect it from him. His sense of fairness seems to have been seriously warped by his leftist upbringing and influences, as he continues to heap indignity upon indignity on the citizens of his own nation during this most divisive Presidential term in the history of our United States.

I am struck by the number of Americans that now look upon Barack Obama as a PINO: President In Name Only. For many of us, his brief time in office has been an almost unbearable litany of apologies and appeasement coupled with harangues against decent American citizens who dare to speak out against him or his radical Congress.

The President has called the Arizona law “misguided” and “irresponsible.” One can only wonder when he will deliver the lecture on responsibility to those who purchased homes they couldn’t afford with mortgages they were unable to pay. But that’s for a different discussion.

It sickens me to suspect that the President of the United States does not have the best interest of the citizens he has sworn to defend at heart - but what else are we to think?

Do you want to know what sickens me even more? Thinking of the men who, to protect our sovereignty, gave their last full measure of devotion at Bunker Hill, Yorktown and on filthy prison ships anchored in the East River; at Gettysburg and Sharpsburg and in Andersonville prison; on the decks of the Maine and on San Juan Hill; in the Ardennes Forest and at Verdun; on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, in Bastogne, in Sicily, on Okinawa, in Leyte Gulf; in Inchon and Seoul, at Ia Drang, the Mekong Delta and in pestilent, stinking pits in Hanoi; on dusty roadsides in Iraq and on bleak mountains in Afghanistan and in countless other slices of hell around the globe.

Dead because they believed in this nation and its Constitution; dead so that they would endure. They believed, and we believe, in the goodness of America and the greatness of America, and before this is over we will have set things right again or we will go to our graves trying.

Letter to the SI Advance

2010-04-19T07:17:00.001-04:00

April 4, 2010

Ladies and Gentlemen;

When I turned to your Sunday Perspective page and read the hit piece on the Tea Party movement, I could only sit in stunned silence.

Whatever possessed those of you who make these decisions to run such a horrible, demeaning and FALSE story? Your concern for responsible journalism has been shown, in one simple stroke, to be non-existent - and I am a person that has defended your newspaper time and time again.

Many of you know many of us in the Staten Island Tea Party - does this race-baiting drivel reflect your opinion of us? You have covered our events; you have seen the folks who participate: they are your relatives, neighbors and friends. They are the constituents of our elected officials. We are invited to the offices of our Congressman and Councilmembers to discuss policy and politics. We have been invited to YOUR offices to discuss political matters. We are invited to political clubs from all over the island to discuss the meaning of the Tea Party movement in America. We are well-received wherever we go, and discuss issues of the day in a reasonable and knowledgeable fashion.

Do we look and sound like racists to you?

Colbert King's observations are grounded in NO reality - the essay is a poorly-reasoned mess of race-baiting and inaccuracies. The author makes fantastic connections between us and Southern racists from fifty years ago, and yet your screaming headline purports it to be the real, eye-opening truth.

He states as fact that "some shouted racial and homophobic epithets at members of Congress," yet not one single shred of evidence exists to support these charges. Then, further on, he writes that because many have pointed out that the charges were patently untrue and probably hurled for political reasons, the Tea Party movement is suddenly akin to the 60's Klansman who accused the "nigras" of bombing themselves to attract attention.

Apparently, Colbert King believes that we should listen to these outright lies and smears and just sit down and shut up? So Colbert King believes that speaking up to defend ourselves, to point out that these accusations are false, somehow proves that we are no better than the Ku Klux Klan?

What could have possessed you to print this calumny? You have smeared thousands of your own readers. You have fed into this nonsense that we are racist, homophobic extremists (millions of us!), and what most upsets me is that you all know better - at least, those of you that were journalistically responsible enough to get to know us.

My disappointment knows no bounds. At every turn since the inception of the Staten Island Tea Party one year ago, my response to verbal attacks on your newspaper and your reporters is to say that, with few and minor exceptions, you have been fair and balanced with us. And now this travesty - a smear on good and patriotic Staten Islanders whose sole crime is that they believe in individual liberties for all, and that those liberties are being threatened by a bloated federal bureaucracy. Somehow, this equates to racism.

Yes, the piece was in the Perspective section, and yes, it is the opinion of the author; but try as I might I cannot find a disclaimer on the part of the Staten Island Advance. To a man, you should be ashamed of yourselves for printing this dangerous and false libel.

Frank Santarpia
The Staten Island Tea Party

The Argument of Tyrants.

2010-03-24T13:39:00.004-04:00

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.”

Those familiar with this quotation from William Pitt the Younger, who was the British Prime Minister around the time our Founding Fathers were penning the Constitution, might shake their heads sadly when contemplating the uncanny relevance of his words some 227 years after they were delivered in a speech to Parliament.

It would have been apt had he spoken them in the United States Congress in 2010.

After forcing us to witness the parade of unfortunate victims of medical insurance horror stories, used so despicably by Democrats as political props, we are being cajoled into believing that the intrusion of the federal government into our health care system is a “necessity.”

Now, go ahead and read the quote again.

How stupid do they suppose us to be? The current administration, with the help of its adoring media, harangues us daily with the necessity of dealing with the “crisis” of uninsured Americans. Of course, their big-government preferences for dealing with any problem, large or small, triggers a huge and inevitably malformed growth on the body politic – one with a trillion dollar price tag, a price tag the United States can ill afford in this time of the one true crisis: a faltering economy and high unemployment.

Lost in the wailing and hysteria during this latest power-grab by an Administration of elitists so smug as to believe that we, the unwashed masses, cannot possibly merit the freedom to pursue life, liberty, property and happiness without their guidance and direction, is the fact that the American free-market system would make this problem disappear if left to its own devices.

Simply put, markets work much better than manipulation.

If freed of the heavy hand of mandates and regulation, and if they wish to survive, health insurance companies would by necessity be more responsive to the needs of health consumers - in the same manner as an automobile manufacturer, or indeed, an automobile insurance company. They would be forced by consumer demand to be sensitive to the price and quality of the goods and services they provide to their customers.

All the things that free-market companies do to win and keep customers, coupled with common sense reforms including tort reform, competition across state lines and the lifting of the ridiculous anti-competitive mandates, would certainly result in lower premiums and hence, more coverage for more Americans.

But that does not feather in with the goals of this administration and the Democratic majority in Congress; goals which include dramatically expanding the power of the government over every aspect of our lives.

And so it has come to pass that those of us who oppose government-run health care because we find the abridgement of our individual liberties to be a crushing oppression are labeled as heartless.

Soon, we will be labeled as dangerous.

American men and women have died beneath a flag of stars and stripes for over 200 years, not for kings or presidents, but for the ideals represented by that flag – the recognition that the natural state of man on earth is freedom, and that no government has may impinge upon that freedom under any guise, including that of a perceived “necessity.”

Necessity does not give anyone a “right” to anything, a fact often obscured in debates such as this.

The rights given to us, according to the Declaration of Independence, by “nature and nature’s God” include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, take notice, are rights to action, not rights to the fulfillment of needs or desires.

Rights cannot impose obligations upon other people, except the obligation to leave us to pursue our own interests unimpeded. Basically, we have the right to be left alone, so that free from obstructions, we can work for what we want, need and desire.

My right to life does not oblige my neighbor to feed and clothe me or my family – it merely gives me the right, no matter how hard the struggle may be, to feed and clothe my family by the sweat of my own brow.

My right to liberty ensures that I may act for my own benefit, keep the fruits of my labor, and that my neighbor – or my government – may not steal them from me. Conversely, I have no right or claim to the actions or property of another.

And finally, I have the right to pursue happiness, but may make no claim on others to provide me with it. If a “right” were to impose a duty upon another, it would be a violation of that person’s basic rights; we would become a society of master and slave.

When something is given for nothing it is charity; let’s not be afraid to call it what it is. Even if such charity is provided by the government, they must confiscate the wealth of others to do so, and so within the framework of our moral code in the United States, charity is not a right – no matter how much those in Congress wish to portray it that way.

Our country of free men and women has been wounded by this incursion into our liberties, and so this is a time for action; we have an obligation to our forebears, ourselves and our posterity. We’ve been asleep for far too long; we need to get up, get educated and vow to educate others. We must pledge to teach our children that entitlement programs such as the one being rammed down our throats are a curse, and in the long run a tool of enslavement.

Like those brave men and women of colonial America, we need to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to the cause of liberty – because without freedom, without our rights, what do we really have?

We will rally again my friends, on April the 15th. We will use our strong hearts and our strong voices to tell this government that we will not be cowed, that we will never give up, and that we will put this right again.

And finally, I leave you with the final, breathtaking words of William Pitt, uttered on his deathbed in 1806. I would ask you to never forget them. I know I won't.

“My country! Oh my country! How I love my country.”

A Statement by the Staten Island Tea Party

2010-03-22T00:52:00.007-04:00

With the passage of the health care reform bill, the United States Congress took an extraordinarily reckless first step on the path to socialized medicine, and set the stage for a federal takeover of 1/6^th of the American economy.

In doing so, Democrats in Congress who voted for this bill showed their contempt for the public by ignoring the wishes of the majority of the American people, who told them not only with the election of Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but in poll after poll, that this bill was too large in scope, too intrusive on our personal liberties, and simply too expensive.

Instead of achieving the noble goal of bringing affordable health insurance to additional millions of Americans through the application of traditional American ideals, such as free markets, innovative thinking and competition, Democrats have signaled a new era in America - an era in which United States citizens will find themselves dependent for their very lives upon government agencies and bureaucrats to a degree never before seen in the history of this great country.

This bill will ultimately result in the degradation of the greatest healthcare system in the world, and eventually make it impossible for private insurers to remain viable. Its goal is to eventually saddle us with the single-payer system President Obama has so often said he believes in and supports, and yet has been a failure wherever in the world it is implemented.

This bill is a power grab that has only a passing acquaintance with the rule of law, little to do with health care, and everything to do with an expansion of the reach of the federal government into our lives far beyond those powers enumerated by the United States Constitution.

This bill will add a trillion dollar entitlement to an economy that is already groaning under the weight of extraordinary debt - a debt so large that is almost impossible for us to grasp, incurred by massive spending without regard to the burden it will place on American taxpayers for generations to come. This unprecedented debt had put our credit rating at risk even before the passage of this bill, and so we are now put in much greater, imminently catastrophic, fiscal jeopardy.

This bill mandates that every person born in the United States must purchase insurance under the threat of fine, imprisonment, or both. Those who write and pass such laws cannot be said to truly understand the concept of individual liberties, and it seems incredible to think that they can in fact appreciate what it is to be free – indeed, the likelihood is that they no longer care.

This bill was purchased with backroom bribes and deals that would put any businessman, banker or broker behind bars for the rest of his natural life, and this despicable display causes the American people ask themselves if they want any laws to be created under such circumstances. The answer to that question is most obviously no; yet, deaf to the will of the people, Democrats will soon make this horribly flawed legislation the law of the land.

This bill, at the moment it is signed by the President, will signal the beginning of the end of the greatest health care system in the world, and it will show us the true and ugly face of the change that our President promised us as a candidate. Whatever we thought that might be, it has turned out to be a radical shift in the relationship of the government to the people. With arrogance and disregard for our Constitutionally-mandated liberties, these elitists are telling us once again that they know better than we how to run every aspect of our own lives.

In November of this year, we will see if this is indeed the change that voters wanted or expected.

America’s Slow Descent Into Insanity: Part 13,457

2010-03-15T09:48:00.007-04:00

The incident eventually came to be known as “The Boston Massacre.” It happened on March 5th of 1770, and history buffs will remember that the British officers and soldiers charged with murder in that case were defended in court by nascent Founding Father John Adams.

Mr. Adams, later to become our second President, was vilified by fellow Bostonians for his spirited defense - which was ultimately successful for 6 of the 8 accused. Naturally, anyone defending the despised “lobster-backs” would become unpopular in colonial bean-town, and indeed Adams’ law practice suffered badly after the trial. Still, Adams considered his legal performance to be "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country."

How ironic that those who chose to defend Gitmo terrorists called themselves “The John Adams Project,” since what they have done goes far beyond mere "defense." John Adams may have been many things, but traitor was not one of them.

Yes, I know that branding these attorneys as anything less than noble is to incur a firestorm of criticism from the left: I’m beyond caring. When our Congress can use stealth, manipulation, fraud and illegal rules to create new law by fiat, of what importance is a bit of inelegant language?

The men who defended the Gitmo terrorists acted in a manner that I consider to be traitorous, and that they are now part of Obama’s Holder-led Department of Justice is a travesty of the highest order.

Andrew McCarthy, prosecutor of the Blind Sheik responsible for the first Trade Center bombing and writer for National Review Online, asks the question: What’s a modern day John Adams to do? He answers:

Why, hire private investigators to take surveillance photos of CIA agents and hand them off to other latter day Adamses, who then showed them to top members of al Qaeda — thereby identifying for the terrorists the agency's interrogators and, potentially, tipping the terrorists off to the locations where the agents' families live. [snip]

Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers, as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act, which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs "of anything connected with the national defense").

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more…[t]o summarize, a cabal of the enemy's volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the "John Adams Project," is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators.

The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.

The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they've evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards... [snip]

In any event, look on the bright side: No matter what happens to this investigation, the Left's lawyers now have photos they can use for the reckoning Holder promised against the Bush administration. Anyone doubt that the Center for Constitutional Rights, among other modern John Adamses, will try to use the photos to buttress its efforts to get some foreign tribunal to charge the CIA and Bush officials with "torture" and other war crimes?

Debra Burlingame writes in today’s Wall Street Journal:

We obtained Justice Department accounts of some of those incidents under a Freedom of Information Act request. Examples included an incident in which a lawyer sent his detainee client the transcript of a virulently anti-American speech that compared military physicians to Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz, called DOJ lawyers "desk torturers" and suggested that the "abuses carried out by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib . . . could involve the President in the commission of war crimes.
Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp's layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that "we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing" and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with "interviews" of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees.

Patently despicable – but surprising? Of course not. This is the Obama Administration we’re talking about. And the Eric Holder Department of Justice. Are you shocked to know that 7 of these attorneys are now Holder hires, and are working on, get ready for it...detainee cases? Holder refuses to identify them or their jobs, but it really doesn’t matter.

America’s descent into madness continues, but American outrage grows.

The Left is racing to the finish line now, but to get there they’ll have to come through me – and you.

To the Gallows.

2010-03-08T15:04:00.009-05:00

America is slowly being marched to the gallows. Step by agonizing step, this administration and its complicit Congress is leading our country to a crossbeam, a noose and a trapdoor.

It is sometimes surreal to watch, isn't it? I keep thinking that someone will come forward to stop this unnecessary tragedy - after all, it is not being accomplished through stealth or deceit, it is happening in plain sight of the entire world.

The Democratic Party is inexplicably and blindly following its radical President into strange, uncharted, and extra-Constitutional territory. For their part, the Republican Party seems ineffectual, at times even complacent, and in any event often appears too weak and damaged to mount a strong defense. It seems now that only the Tea Party movement, the great silent majority, has any hope of bolstering the opposition to the Obama administration and halting our country's seemingly inevitable slide into oblivion.

Like our founding fathers, we too make an appeal to heaven; but we must do more. We must appeal to the hearts and minds of our neighbors and friends. We can work hard to fix what is becoming broken in America, we can help to right the wrong, we can educate and inform. We can, at least in the short term, use our voices, and finally our vote, to rebuild our great country.

November looms. The last, best chance of America rests with a single election; we will either cast off a Democratic Party that has become blind to the principles that made America great, or we will condemn ourselves to generations of debt and darkness, wherein free Americans will be at first a fond memory, then a distant one, then a relic to be gradually forgotten.

But we can win. We can take the country back - the country for which our fathers fought and bled and died. We can recapture an America that believes in the paramount importance of individual liberties, an America comprised of citizens who recognize and honor the natural rights bestowed upon us by our Creator, and who recognize that NO rights can be conferred upon us by any government. An America of pioneers, entrepreneurs, risk-takers and patriots. An America of men and women who want to work hard and keep what they've earned, and make the best life they can for their families without apology and without guilt.

We want to once again be a country in which the government exists only to ensure a level playing field - not to own and control it.

In November we can smack the Democratic Party - hard, Cagney-style. Once, twice, three times, and keep smacking until they come to their senses and cast off the mantle of hard-left Progressivism that has so damaged both their party and their country - and so angered those who remember what America is supposed to be, and who refuse to forget it.

So let's rouse ourselves, let's use all the strength and will at our disposal. Let's pay attention. Let's vow to make a difference. Let's talk to our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers. Let's support the candidates who support the Constitution.

November seems like a long way off. It is not. Start rolling up your sleeves, because we have much work to do.

Dems speak out on the "nuclear option..."

2010-02-24T15:50:00.003-05:00

Our Unsustainable Debt

2010-02-06T12:31:00.003-05:00

I am posting an essay by one Joseph Lupo, an executive in the financial industry who is part of our Tea Party staff. Joe is our go-to guy in all matters of fiscal and monetary policy - he writes today of the most recent bit of fiscal insanity:

Congressman McMahon did our country a great disservice this week. Our Congressman yielded to Nancy Pelosi's arm-twisting and voted with other liberal Democrats to increase the federal national debt limit by $1.9 trillion to an astounding $14.3 trillion. This partisan vote demonstrates a complete lack of fiscal responsibility and an utter disregard for the economic and monetary consequences of unrestrained spending.

Our great country is nearly bankrupt. The federal government is exacerbating a painful recession by pursuing economic policies that threaten the stability of our fiscal and monetary system. Instead of encouraging fiscal discipline and curbing the growth of discretionary spending, the Democrats in Congress have chosen to exponentially increase the crushing debt burden that will be inherited by the next generation of Americans. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects that deficits over the next 10 years will total $6 trillion. Where does the insanity stop?

Congressman McMahon should take heed of the current fiscal crises currently spreading throughout the Eurozone. In the past two weeks, the economies of Greece, Spain and Portugal have been severely damaged as international investors increasingly doubt their ability to fund massive budget deficits via the public debt market. As a means of comparison, lets consider the debt-to-gdp ratios of these countries (Debt to GDP ratio measures total outstanding government debt divided by gross domestic product, expressed as a percentage). Portugal is currently projected at 90%, Greece at 125% and Spain at 50%. So where does the United States stand - projected at 94%! This simple statistic should concern every American and our Congressional representatives should be mindful of the tremendous risks associated with uncontrolled government spending.

What typically happens when this ratio eclipses 100%? Many economists argue that debt-to-gdp ratios above this figure represent an economic "point of no return" whereby future gdp growth is permanently constrained by the insurmountable costs associated with debt interest payments and higher interest rates. Should our country permanently sacrifice an ever improving standard of living to fund an insatiable Congressional appetite for tax dollars and a proven proclivity for wasteful spending? Congressman McMahon should understand that no country can spend their way to prosperity.

Sustainable economic growth is fostered through sound fiscal and monetary policies, a low tax burden, free market competition and productivity improvements. However, the Democratic Congress has pursued exactly the opposite. The proof is everywhere - the US dollar is trading at decade lows, gold (an inflation hedge) is near all time highs, liabilities on the Federal Reserve balance sheet total over $2 trillion, unemployment is hovering around 10%, income and capital gains tax rates are going higher, and the federal government is re-regulating every industry from banking to energy.

The federal government has kept interest rates artificially low by essentially becoming the largest securities buyer in the public market. For example, the Federal Reserve now owns more than $1 trillion in mortgage backed securities and agency debt. This intervention has kept mortgage rates and treasury rates low - but these quantitative easing measures are short term and extremely difficult to reverse. Once these programs run their course, our economy will once again be subject to natural market forces and the laws of supply and demand.

Massive federal deficits only make the eventual transition to a fully private market all the more risky. Furthermore, the federal necessity to auction billions of dollars in treasury securities every month essentially "crowds out" private borrowing - that is to say private corporations have increased difficulty competing for capital since the US government is issuing billions of dollars in treasuries and forcing interest rates higher.

In a year that has already seen Dubai essentially declare bankruptcy and the state of California once again contemplating the issuance of IOU's, Congressman McMahon and his Democratic allies should read the tea leaves - stop the uncontrolled spending lest our great country end up like some third world banana republic. The American public is watching.

The State of the President

2010-01-29T16:28:00.009-05:00

The President used the occasion of his first State of the Union address to appeal for unity in our country, but true to his proclivity for avoiding blame, he refused to take responsibility for the nation’s great divide.

In the mind of Barack Obama, of course, the culpability lies with the Republicans; when our dear leader speaks of “unity,” what he really means is “acquiescence.” Failure to rubber-stamp his agenda is considered to be the chief component of disharmony in Obama-world - daring to stand firmly in opposition to his schema borders on disloyalty.

Never mind that what is offered by his lapdog Congress is terrible - and terribly radical - legislation. Most of his programs have not been passed, despite a Democrat super-majority in the Senate, simply because the bills are so bad that the American people have risen up to voice their outrage at almost every turn.

It seems that for each budget-busting, job-killing, government-expanding proposal that comes along, the Tea Party movement gains another hundred thousand followers.

So to a man (and woman), Republicans are voting “no,” and when they are not voting “no,” they are voting “HELL no.” Who can blame them? They are accused of blind partisanship, but they are merely listening to their consciences and their constituency – a pretty damned good approach to representative government, I would think.

Voting for a bad bill for the sake of Barack Obama’s definition of unity is just plain wrong, just as it would be wrong to vote for a bad bill to avoid being called an obstructionist.

There was a time, during his campaign and in the early part of his administration, that when the President would make statements that defied credulity, he would get away with it. Not anymore; he exhausted his supply of free passes long ago. He continues to defy credulity, to be sure – but now there is a real-world price that must be paid.

The American public told him as much when given the opportunity in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts.

Until now, Barack Obama has had a career in which he never actually had to perform, as one would if running a business, or a town, or an agency. Every “job” he has ever held involved only two things: offering his opinion and running for the next highest office. Now, however, he’s bumped into highest ceiling of them all – there’s nothing else to run for and he’s got to be, for the first time in his adult life, a decision-maker. And also for the first time in his adult life he’s going to be graded on his performance, not his oratorical and campaign skills.

He’s not getting very high marks - and for all the reasons we knew he wasn’t going to: his upbringing was radical and far left, and when he brought those values to the White House, they turned out to be well beyond the threshold that the majority of the American people could find palatable. He’s surrounded himself as President with the same kinds of people he’s surrounded himself with for his entire life: leftist ideologues with no real-world experience.

Obama is now being held accountable by the world’s media for his every decision, and many of those decisions are turning out to be poorly conceived, illogical and strongly driven by partisan politics. Rather than seek the haven of most Presidents – the political center – his hubris caused him to believe that such a shift was unnecessary.

So we find ourselves trying to make sense of oxymoronic policy statements, which is what we get when instead of actually offering a firm and cogent position, he tries in vain to please both the left and the right.

Epic fail. Witness a strategy (and I use the term loosely) in Afghanistan that has us surging, and then pulling out without regard to the result of the surge, a policy I like to call belli interruptus. This is no way to govern, and the people of the United States know it; some admit it more readily than others, but the realization is certainly seeping into the broader American consciousness – Chris Matthews notwithstanding.

Decision-making for the most powerful country in the world cannot be done Chinese-takeout-menu style. One from Column A and one from Column B just isn’t getting it done, and not surprisingly we find ourselves hungry for a new policy a few hours later.

Bit by bit, like a mosaic, a picture of this Administration is slowly coalescing, and it is not a pretty one. Incompetence abounds, sometime on a scale so huge (think Napolitano, Geithner and Holder) that we peer intently at the facts in order to discern some master plan so incredibly intricate that we mere mortals cannot discern it.

But that’s not it, is it? It is just plain incompetence. So when the President calls for a “change in tone,” by which he means that everyone must sing in his key, I have to say no, I don’t think so, Mr. President.

You’re not good for America, and unless you have an epiphany of the highest order, you never will be. And I’ll never stop saying so. Now that you’ve done what no other President in MY lifetime has been able to do – get me up off my butt and behind a keyboard – you’ll have to deal with me until you go away.

Ready. Aim. FIRE CONGRESS!

2010-01-20T09:11:00.007-05:00

This past November, a tsunami swept ashore with a vengeance; an anti-Obama, anti-Reid, anti-Pelosi wave that wiped out big-government Democrat governors in deep blue New Jersey and purple Virginia – both states having been won easily by Barack Obama only a year before.

And like a tsunami, its energy was not spent at the beaches.

It continued to push on, and last night it engulfed what Democrats had smugly taken to calling the “Teddy Kennedy Seat.” Indeed, the defining moment in this campaign would be when Scott Brown reminded David Gergen during a debate that it was, despite the Left’s best efforts to re-shape reality, what it had always been – the people’s seat.

And those of you that have been active in the Tea Party movement – born less than one year ago – should know that last night’s results had more to do with you than the Republican Party.

I am proud of you all; when you had to do it, when it was all on the line, after you got knocked down by the media and academia and the effete snobs of the chattering class you got up, wiped off the slime, and punched back. Hard.

For years, for decades, while you were educating yourselves, building your future, raising your families, and paying your taxes, you – ordinary, hard-working Americans – were demonized, insulted, taken for granted and told to shut up and like it. Those who spoke up against the politically-correct insanity that slowly crept over our society like a fungus were labeled as racists, bigots, xenophobes, homophobes and worst of all, ignorant, bitter people clinging to your guns and bibles.

They thought they had you beaten. They did not.

Having no real grasp of the history of this country, they underestimated you, and they underestimated the intensity of the fire that burns within Americans who believe that they should be free from the burden of nanny-state regulations and a controlled economy; free from the burdens of misguided wealth-redistribution; and free from the insulting left-wing drumbeat that somehow the United States of America, the greatest force for good in the history of the world, was somehow to be blamed for all that was wrong with the planet.

And so you rose up and did what you had to do. Not the Republican Party, not your elected representatives, not the slick media-men, not the well-funded think-tanks – you. And me. And millions of other plain folks who had had enough.

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." These words were attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who led the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. How ironic that an enemy of America understood this country better than the man who occupies the Oval Office today.

The victory in Massachusetts last night belongs to the Tea Party movement far more than it belongs to the Republican Party, who lately seems to be hesitant to enter the fight until the little guy has softened up the bully for them. But for a small handful, no Republican was quick to embrace the Tea Party movement, frightened, as they were, that we were unacceptably politically incorrect.

Our work has paid off, but of course our work is not yet done; we should be encouraged, but not complacent. Do NOT be fooled into thinking that an astounding victory in January guarantees a sweeping victory in November – it does not. We cannot let up – now is the time to push harder and harder; as long as there is an attempt to pass radical, anti-free-market legislation, the pressure must be intensified, not relaxed.

This Democrat Congress has been an unmitigated disaster for America, and they must be recalled.

November looms.
Mary Jo Kopechne July 26, 1940 – July 18, 1969

Healthcare Reform Bill: Nothing Will Change - Neither Should McMahon's Vote

2010-01-05T16:40:00.009-05:00

Back in 2006, Democrats self-righteously mourned the "death of deliberative democracy," amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

"Republican leadership abused the Rules of the House to block Members, both Republicans and Democrats, from legislating in an informed and thoughtful manner. House-Senate conferences are a critical part of the deliberative process because they produce the final legislative product that will become the law of the land."

Now, at a time when the party that trumpeted their intention to be the most transparent in the history of government adjourns to reconcile the two healthcare bills in smoke-filled back rooms with blacked-out windows, sans even the slightest whiff of opposition, we should all be mindful of what a politician's word is worth. Spit.

And please bear in mind that some pledges are worth even less than others:

"We'll have the [healthcare] negotiations televised - on C-SPAN - so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituencies and who ise making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies..."

Thus spake Barack Obama on the campaign trail. Spit, again.

The Democrats have decided to "ping-pong" the bill, which means that there won't be any bicameral horse-trading, and that the House will merely take the Senate bill, tweak it, and return it. So at this juncture, and with the expectation that the complete removal of any dissenting voices will quicken the pace of negotiations mightily, we need to take a brief look at Congressman McMahon's statement after he voted "nay" on the House version of the healthcare plan:

"I believe that we need to reform the healthcare system, reduce spending, cut waste, fraud and abuse and expand coverage for more Americans. Unfortunately the bill that passed the United States House tonight does not do that.

The cuts to Medicare will affect seniors in my district, the cuts to the Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH) will make it harder for hospitals to service Staten Island and Brooklyn and the cost containment doesn't go far enough. There is no guarantee that this bill will reduce the cost of healthcare premiums for Staten Island and Brooklyn families."

Now that we have seen what the Senate version contains, there seems to be little hope that many, if any, of the Congressman's quite appropriate concerns could possibly be alleviated. No matter what parts of either bill are kept or dumped, no matter how they are ultimately reconciled, he is bound to find the final product of the Pelosi/Reid tete-a-tete offensive, obligating him to vote no yet again.

That is, as long as he meant what he said and is a man that stands by his convictions. And unless and until he proves us wrong, we believe that he is.

This Insanity Must End

2009-12-22T17:06:00.003-05:00

I think I lack the writing ability needed to describe the range of emotions I’ve been experiencing in the last 48 hours or so; starting about the time Senator Nelson sold his vote to Harry Reid.

I’m probably having so much difficulty because what I’ve been seeing and hearing is so remarkably alien to me. It’s like a poorly constructed plot line from a bad novel – you know, the kind you stop reading because it’s just too improbable.

Well, the highly improbable seems to be happening right before our eyes; I can scarcely believe that this isn’t a nightmare from which I’ll eventually awaken - sweaty, but none the worse for wear. But I am not asleep, and this is not a dream.

It seems that what couldn’t be accomplished in 233 years by the mightiest armies in the world - the subjugation of the American people and their Constitution - is being accomplished by a Chicago punk and a radical Democrat Congress.

The reality of what we’ve actually been witnessing has become abundantly clear after the 60 majority members of the Senate, in the wee hours of Monday morning, voted to shut down debate on the federal takeover of 17 percent of the economy. It is nothing less than the non-violent shackling of the citizens of the United States by their own government.

It is the shredding of the Constitution by those who have sworn to protect it.

The final indignity was an insult to our intelligence known as the Reid amendment. That’s the one that, among other things, bought off Ben Nelson by agreeing that Nebraska would be indemnified against all Medicare increases caused by the bill in perpetuity!

Now, mind you, that’s not the Senators’ money we’re talking about here – it’s your money and mine.

See how this works? If you or I were to try to bribe a public official we’d obviously be breaking the law and would wind up in jail, but at least we’d be using our own money in the attempt. If you’re the Senate Majority leader, not only are you not prosecuted – you don’t even have to foot the bill for the bribe. The suckers will pick up the check.

The unmitigated effrontery of it leaves me breathless. The sheer insanity of it has me spinning.

And now comes news that there are provisions in the bill that would illegally change Senate rules – making it virtually impossible for the new law to be repealed or changed. This is what is meant by the tyranny of the majority.

The more I think about it the angrier I get. The reaction to this abomination should transcend party lines – lovers of America, of any political denomination, should be decrying this legislation for the constitution-killing piece of socialist dogma that it is. What we get instead are lies, spin and distortions, which they really don't care if we buy into it or not. Such is the level of their arrogance.

You know what? We’ll take a break to celebrate Christmas, we’ll let the New Year ring in, we’ll let the House/Senate conference make their changes – none of which will be able to prevent this bill from being a complete disaster - and then we'll pick a date and we will hit the streets.

Maybe I’ll be by myself. Maybe there’ll be a hard core of a hundred or two joining me. And maybe, just maybe, there will be thousands of you out there - because there damn well should be.

So go dig out your thermal underwear, your ski caps and your woolen socks.

It could be cold on New Dorp Lane.

The Contempt of Congress

2009-12-12T10:15:00.017-05:00

When pollster and pundit Pat Caddell was asked recently why our elected officials seem to ignore the will of American citizens, his response was that Congress has “nothing but contempt for the very people they are supposed to represent.”

Sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Surely, the good men and women of the United States Senate and House of Representatives have faults and make mistakes, but do they have “contempt” for their constituents?

Or, perhaps, is it merely that they see us as sheep; a flock of tiresome animals, possessing a bleating sameness, unable to determine what is really best for ourselves and our families, and incapable of making rational decisions about our own future?

Indeed, given the scope of recent legislation – all designed to take whatever decision-making autonomy we might have had out of our own hands and place it into theirs – it’s hard to dispute that they view themselves as our shepherds.

Here is what's in store now, or in the very near future, and in no particular order: they will tell us how much we can pay our executives; they will tell us what kind of cars we can drive; they will enslave us to the religion of global climate change; they will tell our bankers to whom they should lend money and on what terms; they will control the air you breathe by EPA fiat; they will tell your doctor how much he will earn and what treatment he may provide to you; they will force you to buy a product you may not need or want; they will usurp the majesty and wisdom of your creator and re-define the rights with which you were endowed – and worst of all, they will render impotent the ink and parchment we call the Constitution of the United States of America, making it an archaic relic of a glorious, but distant, past.

Caddell is right – it is contempt. When government elites pass, or attempt to pass against our will, various pieces of legislation that are so radical, so antithetical to our free market, capitalist roots, what else can we call it?

I find myself wondering what the breaking point will be for the American people, when it will come, how it will manifest itself.

And in my nightmares, I find myself wondering if there is a breaking point for the American people, or are we going to allow ourselves to be, like sheep, herded and penned up, oblivious to our fate, powerless to prevent the slaughter of our rights and the butchering of our future as free Americans.

We have always believed that we could never be defeated, that no foe could steal our liberty, that no army could bend our will, that we would know freedom not only for the rest of our lives, but for the lives of our children and grandchildren, and for future generations as of yet undreamed.

Today that is not so certain - so insidious has this radical administration and complicit Congress proven to be.

In April of 1775, when the shots rang out by the rude bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, the people of America knew they were at war and must fight to defend their freedoms.

In December of 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the people of America knew they were at war and must fight to defend their freedoms.

In September of 2001, as the towers fell, the people of America knew they were at war and must fight to defend their freedoms.

Now, as the first year of the Obama Administration draws to a close, our Constitution has come under assault by our own government - and even though no musket was fired, no bombs were dropped, and no buildings destroyed, once again the people of America must realize that we are at war.

And once again, we must fight to defend our freedoms.

A Short Course on Brain Surgery

2009-12-04T07:54:00.001-05:00

Living in a DC Comic Book World.

2009-11-27T09:51:00.009-05:00

During a Q&A session at one of the Meet and Greet events a few weeks ago, a young lady on our staff stood up and said she felt like she was living in Bizarro World, an expression I've used myself on many occasions.

For those of you too young to remember, Bizarro World was an invention of the fruitful minds of the writers of DC Comics, originally introduced in their Superman series in the early 60's. On Bizarro World, everything good is bad, everything right is wrong, everything beautiful is ugly.

Those who live on Bizarro World are hideously disfigured clones of their counterparts on Earth. As enunciated so clearly by Bizarro, the character after which the planet formerly known as Htrae (Earth spelled backwards, of course) is named, their credo is as follows:

"Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!"

It doesn't take a terrific leap of the imagination to see where this is going: the Obama Administration and the Democratic Majority have transported us magically, in less than one year, to what seems to be a bizarre alternate universe. Only, unlike the product of some comic book writer's imagination, this is all too horrifyingly and sickeningly real.

What makes this Administration bizarre? One scarcely knows where to begin.

What we as Americans have revered for centuries our own government now reviles. Our free-market, capitalist system, which made us the greatest nation in the history of the world, is in the process of being crushed under the boot-heels of radicals. Do you realize how successfully this Administration has made "capitalism" a dirty word?

They and their minions work day and night strip all the goodness and morality from it, to portray it as greedy and selfish - all the while ignoring that it is a system of true equality for all men, a system under which the poorest among us can rise - not simply to mediocrity - but to great heights, by the virtue of our own minds and our willingness to work hard for ourselves and our families.

Think about how far this President and the Democrats have come in denying you the right to keep what you earn. Think about how far this President and the Democrats have come in their fight to convince Americans that they, the bureaucrats in Washington, know better how to spend your money than you do - you, who have actually earned it.

Bizarre, indeed.

We are a country that, since its inception, bent at the knee before NO foreign power, yet now Obama bows and scrapes in a sickening display of groveling as if WE were the cause of the world's ills - not the best hope for a cure. Forgotten by Obama, or perhaps never fully understood or appreciated, are the sacrifices of 25 generations of America's youth, who died as protectors of liberty for freedom-loving people everywhere on the planet.

Yes, I would call it bizarre for an American President to refer to his own country as "arrogant."

And what would you call it when a country rewards terrorists with the finest legal representation in the world, and all the Constitutional benefits of the citizens of the country they despise and would destroy - yet imprisons three Navy SEALs, who bloodied the lip of an murdering jihadist during his capture, and now await a Court Martial.

What would you call it when, after an Islamic jihadist murders 13 American soldiers about to be deployed, in a blatant act of terrorism on American soil, the President of the United States reminds us immediately that we should not blame his Muslim faith, that we should not jump to conclusions as to his motives, and that we must not let "diversity" be a casualty. This is the same President that labeled the Cambridge Police "stupid" when they responded to a breaking and entering call while he knew none of the facts and only one side of the story.

He and the Democrats are so quick to blame America, and so quick to excuse those who would destroy us.

Almost since Inauguration Day we have had inflicted upon us crisis after crisis, all followed by a flurry of multi-thousand paged legislation, incomprehensible bills to be rushed through Congress - because, of course, there is no time to waste.

And yet our media, those brave watchdogs of democracy, sit mutely on the sidelines, their silence painfully indicative of their lack of objectivity, their rare questioning of policy a bone flipped to the masses, their smug belief in their own superiority barely concealed.

Yes, we live in bizarre times, but more than that we live in dangerous times. Those who are not on the inside of the strategy, all of us, are coming to the horrifying realization that the destruction of the America we know and love is imminent not because of the actions of some foreign dictator, but because of a dangerous and duplicitous rogue regime.

And because we are now living in Bizarro World, the rogue regime that would destroy America sits in the White House, and walks the halls of Congress.

The Way It SHOULD Be Sung

2009-11-16T14:29:00.004-05:00

The Obama Administration: God DAMN America

2009-11-13T19:38:00.010-05:00

Late on a Friday afternoon, with the President out of the country, the Attorney General of the United States announced that the mastermind of 9/11, and four of his cohorts, will be brought to New York for trial. In a courtroom that would be in the shadow of the Twin Towers - were they standing - will be the vilest America-haters in the world, and sadly, not all of them will be members of al-Queda.

At the forefront of these will be Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

This sub-human piece of garbage will be accorded the same rights granted to the American citizens whose lives he snuffed out, because he so believed in the twisted drivel that is radical Islam.

This sub-human piece of garbage will be granted a hearing in a way that his victims never were.

This sub-human piece of garbage will get a bully pulpit from which to publicly bash our country after killing thousands of its innocent citizens, and from the very place where those Americans died.

This sub-human piece of garbage will get to plead for his life in front of a magistrate, and with legal counsel.

I have some questions.

When the passenger on those jets realized that they had no alternative but death, to whom could they make a plea? When those poor souls working in the Towers - forced to choose between leaping out of a window or facing an inferno of burning jet fuel - had to decide how they wanted to die, who was there to give them counsel?

There is only one way to describe this decision by the Obama administration: sick and demented. Perhaps as sick and demented as the men they are bringing to New York to face the justice guaranteed to American citizens by a Constitution they so despise.

We have elected a diseased group of America-hating radicals, and must be turned out of office.

Interpreting McMahon

2009-11-10T19:37:00.002-05:00

We can all feel very much gratified, for a number of reasons, when considering the vote of Congressman McMahon on HR3962 this past Saturday evening.

First and foremost, from my perspective, is the apparent affect your tireless work had on the outcome, forcing him to examine the roots of our opposition to the bill, and helping him to understand the reasonableness of our objections.

For his part, he listened, and that is big, and ultimately he voted against his party’s leadership. We’ll take as an act of faith that he voted his conscience.

But what if he didn’t? Should the Congressman be condemned if his vote was merely an act of political expediency? The more cynical among us will point out that Ms. Pelosi had 40 votes to play with – to pass, the bill needed a majority of 218 votes, and there are 258 Democrats in the House. This gave her, ostensibly, a pocketful of dispensations which could be doled out to nervous Blue Dogs - or other vulnerable Democrats. Michael McMahon is one of these, since he is a freshman D in a district that is reliably Republican - 28 years worth - in a district that voted comfortably for John McCain in the last Presidential election.

To be sure, Congressman McMahon listed a goodly number of appropriate reasons for voting against the bill – indeed, had he gone a little further, he might have been able to justify supporting the Republican version of healthcare reform, which came to be known as the Boehner Amendment.

In a statement, the Congressman said:

"I believe that we need to reform the healthcare system, reduce spending, cut waste, fraud and abuse and expand coverage for more Americans. Unfortunately the bill that passed the United States House tonight does not do that.

The cuts to Medicare will affect seniors in my district, the cuts to the Disproportionate Share Hospitals (DSH) will make it harder for hospitals to service Staten Island and Brooklyn and the cost containment doesn't go far enough. There is no guarantee that this bill will reduce the cost of healthcare premiums for Staten Island and Brooklyn families."

To summarize, Congressman McMahon’s objections to HR3962 are as follows:

1. The bill does not reduce spending.
2. The bill does not cut waste, fraud and abuse.
3. The bill does not expand coverage for more Americans.
4. Medicare cuts will affect seniors in the district.
5. Cuts to Disproportionate Share Hospitals will affect service to Staten Islanders.
6. Cost containment does not go far enough.
7. There will be no guaranteed reduction in the cost of healthcare premiums.

A quick look at the Boehner amendment reveals that it would address many of these concerns; certainly the fiscal ones, according to the scoring by the Congressional Budget Office.

However, Congressman McMahon dutifully, and to no one’s surprise, voted against this Republican amendment, even though it would have overcome nearly all the hurdles that caused him to vote NO on the version that came to the floor. That may cause one to wonder if the stated reasons for voting against the bill were the real reasons he voted against the bill – or might he have voted NO to take political cover in his Republican district.

That would be known as having your cake and eating it, too.

(We should note that there is a distinct possibility that the bill will be back again for another vote, if and when the Senate passes its version. Having set a high bar, a bar any reconciled bill may not be able to hurdle, Congressman McMahon will be forced to vote NO once again. We certainly live in interesting times.)

Despite all of this, Congressman McMahon has voted the right way on HR3962, and in the end that’s all that we asked for. So kudos to the Congressman, and great big kudos to the tireless work of the hard-working, ordinary citizen-members of the Staten Island Tea Party.

We never stopped letter-writing, phone-calling, e-mailing, sign-making, trip-taking and generally being a tenacious bunch of pains-in-the-asses - and in the end, we learned that yes, we can make a difference.

I’m very proud of you all.

They Are Voting Us Into Slavery.

2009-11-06T09:56:00.007-05:00

I don’t know what else you would call it. Nancy Pelosi’s version of HR3200, which is called HR3962, would essentially make slaves of us all.

Sounds dramatic, I know, but consider that never in the history of American law-making has the federal government ever mandated the purchase of anything.

Until now.

Passage of this bill will force every American to buy health insurance. For most of us reading this, the money that we use to “buy” something comes from our labor – OUR labor, not someone else’s. We trade the work product of our muscles or intellect for money, in a free exchange with our employer or employees. If the federal government forces you to buy something, it is compelling you to wake up and go to work some morning not to earn money for your own purposes, but to satisfy a bureaucrat’s vision of what he thinks is in the best interests of you and the nation.

Of course, you can choose not to make the purchase and pay a fine of 2.5% of your total income. Further, you can choose not to pay the fine. I don’t need to carry this exercise to its final conclusion, which I’m sure you have realized means, ultimately, being taken at the point of a gun to trial and eventual incarceration.

Your crime? Failure to turn your property, the sweat of your brow, over to a federal bureaucrat. In an earlier part of our country’s history, when a man was compelled at the point of a gun to work for the benefit of another, it was called slavery. It is still slavery today.

We expect our government to protect us from those that would enslave us.

How’s that for irony?

I have never asked anyone to send something I wrote to another, but I think it would be a good thing to make as many Americans aware of this as possible; if you agree, forward this to your email list.

If you’re a Staten Islander, or a Brooklynite living in parts of Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst, your Representative is Michael McMahon. Congressman McMahon has indicated lately that he is leaning towards voting for the bill. We have little time to persuade him not to. Here is where to contact him:

Congressman McMahon in D.C.:
Phone (202) 225-3371
Fax: (202) 226-1272

Congressman McMahon in Staten Island:
Phone (718) 351-1062
Fax: (718) 980-0768

Please call and fax.

Let him know that if he votes in favor of this bill, he will be supporting a massive intrusion of government into our lives.

Let him know that if he votes in favor of this bill, he is voting to forever change America – not to become a greater country, but to become a lesser one.

Let him know that if he votes in favor of this bill, he is voting to kill the rugged individualist spirit of Americans.

Let him know that if he votes in favor of this bill, he will be complicit in the bankrupting of the United states of America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world.

Let him know that we do not want any form of socialized medicine – it has failed wherever it has been tried – and it will fail here.

And finally, let him know that he will be held accountable for his votes.

The Stuff of Nightmares.

2009-10-29T07:49:00.006-04:00

It is the stuff of nightmares.

I’m standing outside my own home, my wife and children are huddled alongside me, and my precious baby granddaughter is asleep in the arms of my eldest.

I am peering through the window, and in the house - my house - are faceless thieves. They are methodically stealing everything I have worked for in life – stuffing it into a sack that is bottomless and seemingly able to hold anything they are capable of lifting. I don’t know why, but I am powerless to stop them, frozen in place and mute.

All my life I thought that I was protected from this. I thought that what I was witnessing was impossible; after all, I worked hard, I saved, I was a good citizen, charitable and community-minded. I was, along with my neighbors, my fellow Americans, enjoying the bounty of a carefully planted and nurtured garden. What did I do wrong?

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. There were locks on the doors, defenses in place. There was a magical document (I had seen it!) which guaranteed that what I was witnessing could never, ever happen in this country. My father, and countless other fathers, sons, brothers and loved ones, fought to defend that document, and far too many paid the ultimate price to ensure its safety for all future generations.

They didn’t want to die, but they did. For a few lines of ink on an old piece of paper.

I'm confused. I don’t understand why the ones who are supposed to be protecting me from this crime are instead standing guard at the door, so that I cannot stop the looting, stop the destruction. I chose those protectors, and I pay them – very well. They are supposed to look out for us, especially for my grandchild, so vulnerable, so trusting, and with her entire life ahead of her. Her name is Emma, and she sleeps on, blissfully, with no idea that I am watching them steal her future.

What will Emma have if they take everything?

I realized as I watched in stupefied horror that they are snatching up all the things that made the house my house. Little by little, into that cursed sack has gone the precious freedoms that made me unique, that made me an individual before the eyes of God and man, the freedoms that guaranteed that I could take care of my family – I, not the thieves – to the best of my abilities, the freedoms that guaranteed me the right to make my own choices in life, according to the dictates of my values and my conscience.

In stunned silence, I watch them as they substitute their cheap, ugly and degrading ideas for mine. As they work, they mumble about my "greed."

After a while, I cannot recognize my house – oh, the foundation is still there, but it’s cracked and all manner of damp mold is forming. The frame is racked and worm-holed, the roof leaks, the plumbing's rusted, the wiring frayed and dangerous.

It has become ugly. There is no secure life there anymore. There is no presence of God; no grace.

The house, once so strong and safe, is now vulnerable. Unlocked as it is, vagrants wander in and out, gleefully stealing what they can. The protectors tell me that these strangers, the ones who had no part in building the house or working to make it what it was, have as much right to be there, to help themselves to the fruits of my labor, as does the peacefully-sleeping child in the arms of my son.

I wonder when I will wake up. I will wake up, won't I? This is, after all, just a nightmare.

Michael McMahon's Time for Choosing...

2009-10-24T13:29:00.010-04:00

Sooner, rather than later, there will be a bill before Congress that addresses health insurance reform in the United States, and when it happens, it will be Congressman McMahon's time for choosing.

If he utters the word "YEA" on any of the bills now before the various committees, it will be the Congressman's way of telling us that he supports his party's thinly-veiled contention that the age of rugged individualism is dead. His yes vote will indicate his belief that the Age of Statism has come, because, grown fat and lazy both physically and intellectually, the American voter is less concerned with hewing his own path to success and prosperity than he is with being led down the gently-sloping paved road created by his federal government, replete, as it is, with low-hanging fruit to be effortlessly plucked from trees planted by stealing the labor of others.

This is not the excuse that will be given, of course, but make no mistake, it is the underlying truth. We will be told that the cost of doing nothing is greater than the trillion-dollar cost of another government boondoggle - oddly enough, however, no free-market solutions will be entertained. To the current administration, the only road to problem-solving runs through Central Planning City, loops around Entitlement Town and terminates at Dependency Depot.

All Congressmen wear two hats; that is understood. And when it comes to delivering the requisite tonnage of pork to his district, Congressman McMahon pulls into Staten Island driving a fully-loaded semi with admirable regularity. Bringing home the bacon requires skills, to be sure, but little tough decision-making.

However, when the Congressman dons his other cap, he becomes a legislator voting on issues that affect not only every individual in his district, but every individual in the country. It is then that a choice must be made; whether he will vote to uphold the liberties endowed by our Creator and guaranteed to us by our Constitution, or whether he will vote for the marginalization of those rights, and that document, by the moral busybodies of the left - who wish to substitute their best judgment for our own. There really is no middle ground.

The country is more divided now than it has ever been in my lifetime, and that includes the era of the Vietnam War. This great rift has not occurred because the Right has moved further right - Conservatives want what they have always wanted, to be left alone to earn for themselves and their posterity the best life possible, and to enjoy the freedoms that our Constitution was created to protect.

And as always, Conservatives continue to believe that capitalism is the single most moral political and cultural system in the history of the world, allowing, as it does, for the possibility that the individual who is the least among us can to soar to unimaginable heights - an opportunity no other system could have afforded him.

The Left, however, is a different story. This chasm between us has become immeasurably vast because the Left has drifted so far from our founding principles that it has rendered Democrats unrecognizable. They are clearly no longer a party that believes in the liberty of the individual; they have become naked collectivists and re-distributionists - indeed, such ideas were enshrined by our current President in his college thesis.

Liberalism is beginning to reek with the stench of the oppressor, and it tries to cover it by bathing in the sweet-smelling perfume of government handouts. It requires no great leap of imagination to see this for what it is - a systematic approach to creating a permanent underclass, so dependent upon government largess that they will unthinkingly supply enough votes to keep Leftists in power for generations to come.

So a simple "NAY" vote by our Congressman will not do; not if it is based on some minor funding technicality, or other innocuous and transparent bit of cover.

What it is necessary is a resounding repudiation of the underlying philosophy.

Congressman McMahon is now charged with taking a real stand. Will he vote to uphold our Constitution and protect the liberty of the individual men and women who made this country great and strong? Or will he vote to give it up to the collectivists?

Will he have the courage to demand free-market solutions, or will he vote to continue the headlong rush into American decline? The 13th Congressional District of New York waits and wonders.

Time to check the moral compass, Congressman McMahon, and let us know in which direction it is pointing.

The U. S. Marines: Tellin' it like it is since 1775

2009-10-23T08:14:00.003-04:00

"I'd like to go somewhere where I can be free..."

2009-10-19T09:15:00.005-04:00

"I’d like to go somewhere where I can be free."

That’s what I said to my wife this morning at the kitchen table, after hearing the news that the New York City Council passed a law banning the sale of flavored tobacco products.

I’m much more sensitive to that kind of thing now – this willy-nilly diminishment of my freedoms - and that’s what’s really at the heart of the Tea Party movement; a last-minute, almost desperate attempt to protect what’s left of our individual liberties. I guess, in our hearts, we know this is going to be an uphill battle, because the barbarians are not only at the gates – they're inside the fortress walls.

In a sense, we owe Barack Obama and his administration a debt of gratitude. The chip, chip, chipping away of our individual liberties had been going on for quite some time - we just slept through it. Because of their ham-handedness, though, we’re awake now; maybe even in time to do something about it.

Sneak thieves in the night, camouflaged as our elected representatives, have been stealing our liberties while we slumbered, filching a little independence here, a little autonomy there – hey, after a while it adds up. But here comes the Obama administration, stumbling and bumbling and crashing around like the novices that they are, grabbing everything in sight, stuffing it into their sacks, and making no attempt to be the least bit quiet about it.

Now, the rule is if you don’t make a lot of noise, and you only take the small stuff, I’m probably gonna keep sleeping. However, when you’re clumping around like a bunch of asses wearing cement shoes, trying to stuff the baby grand into a pillowcase, or the triple-dresser into a tall kitchen can bag, I’m pretty sure I’m going to sit up and take notice. Probably even raise an alarm. Call the cops.

It’s when the cops turn out to be the thieves that you know you’re in big trouble.

So, what’s the upshot of all this? And why the big fuss over flavored tobacco products? I don’t use them, and frankly don’t know who does – though the law is ostensibly on the books to protect children. I guess, when the synapses in my brain (aided by my morning coffee) really started firing, I came to understand that the City Council had decided that I couldn’t do a proper job teaching my children about the dangers of tobacco products – at least not to their satisfaction. So they took that right away from me and assumed it for themselves.

Along the way, they trampled the rights of the smokers who might have used and enjoyed the products, the retailers who sold the products, and, in essence, they mandated lower revenues for the companies that produce the products. Additionally, it’s not too great a leap to imagine that down the line this will lead to some measure of increased unemployment. But what chance do these “rights” have when there’s social engineering to be done?

If you’re reading this I’m pretty sure you’re not sleeping anymore, though you may still be sitting up in bed rubbing your eyes – probably in disbelief. And maybe, like me, your first reaction is to want to pack up and go to that mythical place – that place where we can be really free again. But, sadly, that place doesn't exist. In a famous speech, Ronald Reagan related this story:

“Not too long ago two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are! I had someplace to escape to."
In that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth.”

That speech was delivered on October 27, 1964, 45 years ago next week, on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It is perhaps the most famous of his speeches, certainly one of his most beloved. The title given to those remarks is A Time for Choosing; how much more prescient that speech could have been I cannot imagine.

It is, indeed, a time for choosing in America, because I believe that very shortly, meaningful “choice” in the manner in which we are governed might well disappear.

So we, the Tea Party movement, suffer the ridicule of our more “enlightened” friends and neighbors. We are routinely insulted, mocked, denigrated, vilified and marginalized as a fringe group. Did you ever imagine that people who believe in the Constitution of the United States, and the individual liberties it guarantees, are now a “fringe” organization?

But still we do it, and if you ask yourself why, the same great man can provide the explanation:

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here.

We did all that could be done.”

You're In the Army Now.

2009-10-11T12:26:00.010-04:00

Maybe you’ve already served, and thought you were done. You’re not.

Or maybe, like me, you were caught up in traveling life’s highway and took America for granted, believing that the United States was the greatest country in the world and always would be - with or without our help. America didn't need us to do any fighting...

Well, guess what? We’ve been conscripted.

Think about how your personal world – and your country – has been flipped on its head in the last eighteen months or so, starting around the time you realized that Barack Obama could indeed become the Democratic nominee, and hence, might very well assume the helm of the ship of state - the most powerful state in the history of mankind. I suspect that the term for what you felt is “icy shivers.”

It was the stuff of political potboilers: "Our government falls under the control of nefarious characters - bent upon the destruction of the Constitution and the moral tenets that made us great..." This might be the subject of a “gripping” Cold War-era novel, but any such plot rooted in these constructs was purely fictional and always would be. That's what we believed, anyway.

So we slumbered. And worked. And raised kids. And shook our heads in wonderment as one-by-one, the institutions, morals and values with which we were raised became corrupted and politically incorrect.

“My, my, are they allowed to say that on television? Are they allowed to show that in a movie? I can’t say what without offending anyone? Am I really a racist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, unenlightened, misogynistic, uncaring, selfish and condescending? I hadn’t realized…”

While we slept, they crept. While we were engaged in out-of-hand dismissals of their attacks on the innate goodness of our country and political system, or watching the “counterculture revolution” happen from afar with bemused smiles, they worked insidiously and studiously to change our world. We accommodated them by staying busy with just plain making a living, and naively handed over our most precious legacy – our children – to their influence and instruction.

So now we find ourselves under the control of statists, socialists, a few communists, some failed 60’s revolutionaries, radical academics, revisionists, race-baiters and entitlement agitators. And that’s just in the White House.

Congress is really bad, because to all those characters listed above you must add another group: cowards. Lord knows there are plenty of those on Capitol Hill.

At the head of this motley collection sits a man with no qualifications for the job he holds – actually, he wasn’t even qualified for his previous job, and only barely so for the one before that, which was, as Mark Levin calls it, as a back-bencher in the State Senate of Illinois.

He came to office with no accomplishments other than a solid radical upbringing, nurtured by mentors and friends for whom the destruction of the United States was a consummation devoutly to be wished. And devoutly is the way he is following the script.

The time-honored premise that the government which governs least governs best has been shredded in less than a full year. In choosing to believe that human self-interest is greed, our President feels justified in subjecting such self-interest to a test: does it benefit the greater good? That such a philosophy will inevitably lead to a diminishment of personal freedoms and a country ruled by political elites does not concern him. Indeed, it is the goal.

These radicals, who have hijacked the Democratic Party, have already started to put in place the mechanisms by which they will perpetuate their power, including slowly but surely dismantling the guarantees of liberty Americans have taken for granted for more than 200 years. To get their way they will legislate if they can, but if they cannot they will regulate, tax, harass, restrict and intimidate.

They will expand the single, ever-growing constituency that will insure their elections in perpetuity: the entitlement class; the slaves that are beholding to the federal government for their food and shelter, insuring a permanent underclass that will go to the polls as instructed and vote for he or she who will provide their next meal.

Worse still, they will defend their actions by couching them in moral terms. C.S. Lewis said:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

To get their way they will spin the judiciary, ignore the Constitution, and make great use of the mainstream media to convince the people that their goals are lofty, enlightened and necessary.

They will demonize the right and try to control or silence its voices.

They will engage in census shenanigans – in full view of the American public – to re-shape electoral boundaries in a way that will ensure their party’s continued electoral dominance.

They will hammer away at the second amendment and completely bury the tenth.

They will try to create a two-party system in name only, with the Republicans merely providing a convenient cover for their one-party rule.

They will continue to use our own freedoms against us. Inherent in a democracy is the right to dissent, and within that right fulminates the cancer that gave rise to current Administration. Indeed, the free Americans they wish to subjugate are, in many cases, actually trumpeting the rights of the destroyers to do so.

We have met and defeated foreign enemies, and American blood has been spilled for the cause of liberty since the birth of our nation – but we now fight an enemy of a different stripe, an enemy within, and our military cannot help us now. Shouldering the burden of this battle is a task that falls to the citizens.

That would be you. And me. And while this war will not be fought with guns, or by force of arms, it will nevertheless be long, exhausting and brutal.

The challenge we face is real, and it is immediate. The 13th Congressional District of New York is currently represented by a Democrat, a good man but a man who will, when the chips are down, vote with his party on a preponderance of issues. I will not besmirch Congressman McMahon by accusing him of casting his votes for political expediency; I will trust that he has told us the truth when he said his votes are guided by his moral compass.

But his compass and mine point in different directions far too often for me to be comfortable with his continued representation. We are obligated, unless the Congressman does a philosophical about-face, to work against his re-election.

We have laid the groundwork. We have held the Tea Parties, marched on Washington, read the blogs, and watched our numbers grow. That was the easy part; the hard part is yet to come – translating our beliefs into concrete actions, actions that will make a real difference.

Be prepared.

Swamp Replaces Dump to Assault Our Nostrils.

2009-09-15T12:31:00.013-04:00

We don’t generally get involved in local politics, but this is too much.

Those of you in Republican Jim Oddo’s 50th Council District – you know who you are – should be aware that he has accepted the endorsement of the Working Families Party, a coalition of ACORN, SEIU and other community activist organizations.

This “party,” besides having been accused of numerous campaign violations, and dirty dealings involving its for-profit company Data and Field Services, hardly represents the principals one would expect a Republican elected official to espouse; that they would offer Councilman Oddo their endorsement, and that he would accept it, can only be described as bizarre. It reeks mightily of quid pro quo.

So, while the country is focused on national politics and the healthcare debate, Councilman Oddo has quietly waded deep into the Staten Island political swamp; a festering, stinking amalgam of rotting cross-endorsements, murky deals, and, well, inbreeding.

As a Republican/Conservative, I always thought it absurd to have a Borough President - himself a Conservative - actively campaigning for a Liberal Democrat in a Congressional race. Did Big Jim not realize that Mike McMahon would not only bring home the bacon, but that he'd be part of the cabal to shove it down our throats as well? I guess we can't all look at the big picture, especially when doling out the goodies is what it takes to get you re-elected to yet another term.

Well, our Borough President no longer swims alone.

By accepting the endorsement of the Working Families Party, Oddo is effectively thumbing his nose at, and making fools of, the loyal base of GOP voters in his mid-Island district. That’s right - we now have a Republican Councilman who shares a soiled mattress with a party that's synonymous with ACORN and SEIU, the poster children of election fraud, hooliganism and intimidation. In fact, the WFP shares offices in Brooklyn with the ACORN group that turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to prostitution and sexual slavery, and is now under investigation by the Brooklyn DA's office.

Strange bedfellows, right? No, not the WFP and ACORN - the WFP and Oddo.

It’s hard to believe that he would take informed Island Republicans for granted that way – but that’s just what he’s done. He thinks he has his Republican/Conservative base locked up, and that they wouldn’t consider voting for any Democrat opponent he may face - so the swamp of Staten Island politics just gets a little deeper, and Councilman Oddo is the one doing the digging.

I mean, if he doesn't think you're well-informed, what does that mean he does think? That you're dumb? Or ignorant?

Well, Jimmy, there are Republicans who can look past the end of their noses, and who don't like being taken for granted while you play footsie with a party that is anathema to all they hold dear. We have to ask ourselves if a Democrat could be much worse - at least Pocchia is consistent, and true to his core beliefs, such as they are.

You? Well, maybe not so much. You're either being disingenuous by accepting the WFP endorsement, or disingenuous by calling yourself a Republican. I can hardly see any middle ground.

Is pulling the lever for whichever candidate is NOT endorsed by the WFP an impossible thing for Republican voters? I'm curious to know the answer. Are you?

Some acts of political expediency can be swept under the rug, some cannot. This one cannot

A Day That Can Only Be Described As Inspiring.

2009-09-14T23:43:00.002-04:00

Rev C.L. Bryant, from Shreveport, Louisiana speaks to America on 9/12 in Washington, DC.

"You Lie!"

2009-09-10T07:47:00.012-04:00

Yesterday, before a joint session of Congress, the Fearmonger-In-Chief took to his bully pulpit for the 112th time, in another attempt to sell his health care program to the American people. This is a piece of legislation that, if it were expressed in oil paint, would resemble a Jackson Pollock original.

Informed Americans realize that this is no more about health care than Cap-and-Trade was about global warming; it is merely a manufactured crisis designed to scare us into expanding the powers of the federal government - yet again. Of course, credit must be given to the spirit and innate intelligence of Americans everywhere, since Obama's poll numbers show that he is fooling fewer and fewer of us each and every day

The rate at which the President of the United States has spent his political capital rivals the rate at which he's spent us into trillions of dollars of debt; it can only be described as dizzying.

But more importantly, he continues to burnish his credentials as a man who has only a passing and fanciful acquaintance with the truth. That he dissembles so easily and breezily is a testament to the man's oratorical skills, though that particular facility is not one we usually look for in a leader of any kind, let alone the leader of the free world. But he sure can tell a whopper. Sort of Clinton-esque, but without the likability.

Last night's effort was a mother-lode of such gems - if you found yourself sputtering with indignation early and often, you were in plenty of good company. One after the other they came, these pearls before swine: waste and fraud will be eliminated from Medicare; the plan will not add "one dime" to the deficit; only 5% of Americans will be on the government plan, and so on and so on.

Finally, after President Obama put on his best poker face and said that illegal aliens would absolutely NOT be covered under his plan, and when he could stand it no longer, Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC) channeled the disbelief and frustration of millions of viewers, blurting out the words, "YOU LIE!" in a moment so priceless I must offer it to you here and now:

Go ahead. Play it again. And this time, pay particular attention to the expression on Nancy Pelosi's face: she's shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you! Here, indeed, is a moment to rival Rick Santelli's plaintive and angry cry, "Are you listening, President Obama? Do you hear us?"

Of course, Wilson has since dutifully apologized and issued his mea culpa. But the damage has so deliciously been done; I relish the moment.

Penn and Teller Explain the Obama Administration in One Minute

2009-09-09T07:36:00.001-04:00

Vets Do Have A Way With Words, God Bless 'Em

2009-09-04T15:37:00.002-04:00

"That's God Giving Us an Amen"

2009-08-28T00:13:00.002-04:00

The speaker is Kevin McCullough: columnist, author and radio-show host.

The occasion is the August 2nd Staten Island (NY) Tea Party held at historic Conference House Park. Despite dangerous weather, almost 700 patriots came out to make their voices heard.

Kevin makes a reference to Jesus Christ, and then...

Our Incredible Vanishing Congressman

2009-08-20T08:44:00.004-04:00

Congressman McMahon admitted the other day that he has no intention of holding a Town Hall meeting during this summer’s recess. He did so after a particularly hard-hitting set-to with a group of bingo-playing seasoned citizens at the Assumption Senior Center in New Brighton.

Despite a withering verbal assault in between the calling of N37 and B15 (BINGO!) our fearless leader stuck to his principles – no matter how much they threatened, cajoled, browbeat and bribed, he would not take a stand.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to vote.

Now the skeptical among us might think that indecision would be a good reason to speak to a wide swath of your constituency, especially when you have all this down-time back in the district. Perhaps a strong, healthy dose of what ordinary, hard-working, tax-paying Staten Islanders are thinking might help to clarify the mind a bit, right?

Wrong. In a post-Bingo interview with NY1, our Congressman made the following statement, verbatim and in toto:

“When you have some Town Hall meetings of this sort of ‘new version’ where this certain group comes in, hijacks the meeting and tries to drown out any thoughtful discussion, then I don’t think those meetings are helpful. So I will continue having dialogue in meetings like this….”

Apparently he’s met with civic leaders, community leaders, business leaders, and, as we know, a certain demographic of Bingo players, but I guess “meetings like this,” do not include you and me. And when we’re excluded, deliberately excluded, this story stops being funny.

Mr. McMahon, I suggest you take a step back and recognize that “this certain group” you refer to so disdainfully is YOUR constituents, and voicing their opinion to their Congressman is their right in a representative democracy. That you lack the fortitude to hear what they have to say because they speak in strong and passionate voices is very telling black mark on your re-election resume. Or do you, like President Obama, feel that we should just “stop talking and get out of the way?”

Personally, I don’t hear people “drowning out” thoughtful discussion – I simply hear people drowning; drowning in a sinking ship of ill-conceived, budget-busting, socialistic legislation. I hear people who perceive these meetings as a last chance to stop our country from plummeting into the murky depths of socialized medicine.

Please understand that the reason we are not interested in debating the minutiae of the various bills is because they all share the same titanic gash below the waterline; no matter how the deck chairs are arranged, any one of these bills will sink our healthcare system.

It's time to come out of hiding and face your constituents, Congressman. Leave the "Where's Waldo" games to the kids.

The Rage and the Pride.

2009-08-12T08:50:00.009-04:00

It seems as if this administration has taken dead aim on our freedoms - starting on Inauguration Day - and has hit the mark just about every time. Is it any wonder that the steady drumbeat of frustration has been growing ever-louder and more insistent over the months?

We watched Congress pass, and the President sign, a "stimulus" package that stimulated virtually nothing, but included big payoffs for his cronies and enablers, like ACORN. We watched them take over GM and Chrysler, trampling both the rules of law and contracts in the doing. We watched them barge into corporate boardrooms, fire CEOs, threaten ruinous taxation on legally contracted bonuses, and cap corporate pay.

We watched them take the first steps towards gaining control of our energy industry, using manufactured crises and tissue-thin excuses, all of which are based on junk-science and pie-in-the-sky "green" technological breakthroughs that are not even on the horizon.

And now, healthcare. They are trying to portray it as a system that is hopelessly broken and in need of complete overhaul. It is nothing of the kind - they know it and we know it. It needs fixes, yes, but fixes of the American kind, not the European kind. It needs free-market reforms, it needs to let competition work and it needs the government to stay out of it.

The truth is that health care reform is not about health care any more than cap and trade is about energy - the beating heart of all of this legislation is government control.

Those of us that disdain and resist this quicktime march to socialism are the ones who watched the Left demonize the former administration for 8 years - and we just kept our mouths shut and took it. Nobody said a word. Nobody pushed back. Nobody fought back. That's when the drumbeat really started.

And then along came Rick Santelli, and when he shouted those fateful words - "President Obama, are you listening?" - the fuse was lit. Because we knew the President wasn't listening, and if he was, we knew he didn't care. His agenda became perfectly clear, and the drumbeat quickened yet again, the frustration began to harden into anger, and finally, the anger into action.

We are tired of being called compassionless cretins because we don't support bailing out the irresponsible. We're tired of being called kool-aid drinking racists because we support the vigorous defense of our borders. We're tired of snide remarks that allude to us as relics of the past because we love and revere the Constitution.

We're sick and tired of the sneering condescension that drips from the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and Henry Waxman, who exult in their super-majority even as they dance on the graves of our Founding Fathers. We're tired of it all.

And so here comes August and we're stewing with this pent up rage. At the same time, the health care issue - the latest assault on our liberty - advances to the fore. This is the big one.

After the stimulus, the budget, the Detroit shakedowns, the Wall Street takedowns, the energy-industry hijacking, the finger-pointing, the demonizing, the disdain, the scolding and the ridicule, we get a chance to say our piece at a Town Hall meeting. Is it any wonder that voices are raised?

We are witnessing the rage and pride of the free citizens of the United States of America.

I am filled with the heart-breaking image of ordinary Americans struggling to decipher the legalese in a thousand-page bill so that they can debate their elected representatives, in the hope that they can slow, stop or divert this march to socialism.

I am filled with the heart-breaking image of ordinary Americans trying, with sputtering indignation, to formulate a question that will convey their feelings to a smooth-tongued politician who has been thoroughly schooled in all the answers.

I am filled with the heart-breaking image of ordinary Americans shouting and gesticulating because they are nervous and not practiced in public speaking, because they know they are not getting through to politician in front of them, because they are afraid to give up and sit down, to give up on their country, to give up on their belief that they will somehow, if they keep talking, right the ship they feel is listing so badly and in danger of sinking.

I am filled with that rage and pride - aren't you? Aren't you enraged at those that would put good, hard-working American men and women through this hell? Aren't you proud that those same Americans will not go down without a fight?

Those who demonize Tea Party protesters and Town Hall activists are blaming some nefarious plot by Republican obstructionists, or talk radio, or insurance company misinformation - because they cannot fathom the truth.

The truth is that people such as we - groping for an answer, searching for a tactic - are desperately trying to figure out a way to stop the enemy from disgorging its minions from the Trojan Horse we have allowed inside our gates.

The truth is that without the media to voice our concerns, Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings are the only way we can be heard.

This is the rage and pride of Americans, pure and uncut, pouring out in actions we never thought we were capable of taking, in words we never thought we were capable of uttering. This is the rage and pride of Americans who will sit still for these indignities no longer.

*The title of this piece has been borrowed from an essay written by the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci after the events of 9/11/01. "La Rabbia e l'Orgoglio" is an inspiring piece which can be found here.

The Obama Administration: Thugs and Slugs

2009-08-07T16:04:00.007-04:00

Not long ago, Barack Obama exhorted his troops to use an "in your face" style when debating those who dared to disagree with his agenda of false hope and radical change. Sharpening the point, the White House set up a "snitch line," encouraging citizens to forward emails opposing Obamacare, or even report "casual conversations" that "smelled fishy."

If anything smells in this country, it is this inexperienced, radical, hateful and divisive administration - easily the most dangerous in the history of the nation. And this particular fish is most certainly rotting from the head down.

After senior White House adviser David Axelrod and deputy chief of staff Jim Messina met with Democrat senators, and promised them that "If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard" using the party and its allies, things started to get dicey. Apparently, these "allies" include union thugs and goons.

Here is the future of free speech and dialogue in the United States of Barack Hussein Obama:

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.

“It just seems there’s no freedom of speech without being attacked,” he said.

Downplaying the meeting with Axelrod and Messina, Senator Harry Reid told reporters “They are just helping us understand the fringe that is trying to mess up our meetings.”

Sorry, Senator, but it is we who are trying to understand. We're trying to understand how and why this fringe administration is trying to mess up the greatest healthcare system in the world. Of course, we're doing it the American way, through informed discourse and making our feelings known. Your Thug-in-Chief seems to prefer a different way, one he learned on the streets of Chi-town, I suppose. There's an old union phrase: "If we can't win with the power of persuasion, we'll win with the persuasion of power."

BHO seems to have learned that lesson well.

Running for Cover. And Not Finding Any.

2009-07-23T09:16:00.008-04:00

As predicted, Congressman McMahon has taken refuge in a tough guy approach to the radical health care proposal being bullied through Congress. It is to be expected, since he doesn't want to be seen as a cheerleader for what will prove to be an extraordinarily painful and destructive initiative.

It won't work, though. Not as long as we vow to stay informed and engaged.

This from the Staten Island Advance (SILive) today:

Said McMahon: "... I am concerned that the proposed health care bill will be paid for at the expense of our small business owners ... essentially penalizing (them)." [snip]

But Staten Island Rep. Michael McMahon predicted there will be a new way of providing health care in this country, and paying for it, by year's end, if not by Congress' August recess..."

Sound familiar? It should. Last week we wrote:

Do not be surprised if you see the Congressman expressing "deep concerns" about the health care bill, insinuating that he may not vote for it until he knows how it will be paid for. Ultimately, though, after some minor tweaks and fixes, he will toe the Obama/Pelosi line.

Now under normal circumstances this tactic would work quite well; it makes it seem as if he is putting the well-being and interests of his constituency before party loyalty - but that's all smoke and mirrors. The truth is that we are fools if we let him shape the message this way.

The underlying theme here is that despite the "tweaks and fixes," our Congressman is in favor of socialized medicine. McMahon - along with all the other politicians who will vote for this bill but are not personally bound by it - is ultimately going to vote to dump the greatest health care system in the history of the world.

Detractors (and there are many) will say that I'm being picky, that even when the Congressman does work for the benefit of his constituents I am looking for and finding fault. This is not true. The reality is that no matter what portions of socialized medicine McMahon objects to, he will still, in the end, support socialized medicine.

As I have said before, will say here, and will say again on August 2nd in Conference House Park: "Time and time again our Congressman votes us into the twilight world of soft tyranny..."

Think Nobody's Listening?

2009-07-20T19:07:00.004-04:00

If any of your friends, neighbors or relatives roll their eyes when you tell them you're involved in the Tea Party movement, mention this piece from today's Wall Street Journal:

...on Friday a busload of freshmen Democrats went to the White House to plead their case against sharp tax increases with the president and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. The organizer was Rep. Gerald Connolly, the president of the freshman class whose Northern Virginia district is the richest in the U.S. as measured by median household income.

"There could come a time," said Rep. Michael McMahon, a freshman Democrat from New York City's borough of Staten Island, when Democrats are in open rebellion. "We will certainly see in the next few weeks where we are going." [snip]

For now, most freshmen aren't saying how they will vote on the House health-care bill. Mr. McMahon, whose New York district also includes parts of Brooklyn, said there is no open revolt, but there have been two meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and there was the White House meeting Friday with Messrs. Obama and Emanuel. Taxes dominated what Mr. Connolly described as a cordial but inconclusive discussion.

"I spend all my time here making the case that the profile of the rich doesn't stand in my district," Mr. McMahon said. "People feel that they're getting hit from all sides."

Skeptics will say that you and I had nothing to do with it. Don't buy it. This was predicted in an email you received a few days ago if you are on the Tea Party mailing list:

This is Congressman McMahon's worst nightmare - an informed electorate who cares and is energized.

Do not be surprised if you see the Congressman expressing "deep concerns" about the health care bill, insinuating that he may not vote for it until he knows how it will be paid for. Ultimately, though, after some minor tweaks and fixes, he will toe the Obama/Pelosi line.

Think nobody's listening?

On the Death of a Hero.

2009-07-13T16:52:00.007-04:00

Never having experienced the hell that is war, it exists only in my mind; I often wonder if I am capable of conjuring, in my imagination, the real sights, smells and sounds of it, the true depths of the fear and horror that must accompany battle. I think that I cannot, and that only makes those who have been in harm's way all the more worthy of my gratitude and honor. I'm sure many, many of you share my feelings.

Recently, we lost a man that is a true America hero, and he is worthy of our recognition. That his story would be taken to his grave untold and uncelebrated, ignored by a culture that worships an entertainment-industry freak but gives nary a passing thought to a true American, is a sad but not shocking commentary on our priorities, which puts a premium on pop-stardom, but publicly cares nary a whit for true courage.

At least that's true of some of us. Not all. I believe it's not true of you and I know it's not true of me.

Ed Freeman was a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam, second-in-command of Company A, 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile). On November 14th, 1965, he was supporting Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, where elements of the 5th and 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army engaged elements of the regular army of North Viet Nam in one of the first major battles of the war, an apocalyptic event that would last 4 days, and be memorialized in the book and movie "We Were Soldiers." [The photo above was taken in the morning at LZ X-Ray, before the battle started, as Alpha Company was being helicoptered into the zone. Little did they know of the hell they would endure before the sun set that day.]

Within hours of being helicoptered in, the landing zone became so "hot," under withering enemy fire, that Medivac flights were called off. Wounded American soldiers lay where they were shot, their life forces ebbing unchecked, and the living were quickly running out of ammunition and supplies. Into this inferno of chaos and death flew a single, unarmed HUEY - piloted by Ed Freeman. Freeman brought in water and ammunition, and brought out wounded American boys.

Not once. Not twice. Fourteen separate times, Major Freeman set down his chopper in that deadly cauldron, and fourteen times he flew out. The men he rescued numbered about 30; the men whose lives he saved by re-supplying them, probably in the hundreds.

These are the words of President George W. Bush as he awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to Major Freeman:

In a moment, we will hear the full citation in all its heroic detail. General Eisenhower once observed that when you hear a Medal of Honor citation, you practically assume that the man in question didn't make it out alive. In fact, about 1 in 6 never did, and the other five, men just like you all here, probably didn't expect to.

Citations are also written in the most simple of language, needing no embellishment or techniques of rhetoric. They record places and names and events that describe themselves. The medal itself bears only one word and needs only one, valor.

As a boy of 13, Ed Freeman saw thousands of men on maneuvers pass by his home in Mississippi. He decided then and there that he would be a soldier. A lifetime later the Congress has now decided that he's even more than a soldier because he did more than his duty. He served his country and his comrades to the fullest, rising above and beyond anything the Army or the nation could have ever asked.

It's been some years now since he left the service and was last saluted.

But from this day forward, wherever he goes, by military tradition, Ed Freeman will merit a salute from any enlisted personnel or officer of rank. Commander Seevers, I'll now ask you to read this citation of the newest member of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and it will be my honor to give him his first salute.

An email has been circulating recently which incorrectly dates Major Ed Freeman's death to coincide with the probable drug overdose of a major entertainment figure - I assume to make a valid point about the priorities of the mainstream media and their pop culture minions. But such fudging of the truth is not necessary.

At the time this hero actually did pass on, in August of 2008, there was little or no public mention or notice, and though in the grand scheme of things not many people read this blog, it was important to me that now you know his story.

Thanks for listening.

ANOTHER Question for Congressman Mike.

2009-07-11T09:11:00.006-04:00

Sorry to bother you Congressman, I know you're busy, but I have to ask: Do you think we're stupid, asleep, or both?

In your one-size-fits-all, canned response defending your vote on Cap and Trade, you said:

This bill uses the same, market-based, American solution which was successfully put in place to fight Acid Rain in 1990 for carbon emissions. As a result of the Acid rain program, electricity rates fell 10 percent and 16 million new jobs were added to the American economy.

Well, sir, that seemed like quite an achievement, so I took it upon myself to do a little research. I found a decidedly left-wing website called the Center for Progressive Reform and came up with this:

This reality is demonstrated by looking at U.S. economic performance in recent years. From 1990 to 2000...the U.S. economy added a whopping 16 million new jobs.

Umm, Congressman? We have a disconnect.

You claimed that the Acid Rain program added all those jobs, but the CPR (correctly) attributes that job growth to the entire U.S. economy. Was every job created in the United States during that period the result of the Acid Rain program? No, sir, that would be a ...mischaracterization.

Oh, those inconvenient truths. Real "butt-biters" sometimes, aren't they?

I'm telling you, Congressman, if you can't be straight with your constituents they have a right not only to be angry, but to flat-out kick you out of office. You're already too comfortable by miles in Washington.

Don't get used to it - it may be a short stay.

A Question for Congressman Mike.

2009-07-06T07:01:00.004-04:00

Umm, Congressman, according to Section 431 of the ACES Act, “The Secretary (of Health and Human Services) shall formulate and administer the program provided for in this section, which shall be known as the ‘Energy Refund Program’, and under which eligible low-income households are provided cash payments to reimburse the households for the estimated loss in their purchasing power resulting from the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.”

How is it then that, in your canned response to those who took you to task on your vote, you can say, "New York households will save on average $5.58 per month in electricity costs and $8.00 a month in fuel costs within the next 10 years under the Energy Bill."

Oh, my.

Congressman, your canard was directly contradicted by the language of the bill. If you don't believe in private enterprise and the free-market system, why don't you just say so? If you believe that the ideal way to run the United States economy is through a central planning commission populated by a collection of inept federal bureaucrats, why don't you just say so?

Don't you know that it insults us when, and I hate to be crude, you pee on our legs and tell us it's raining?

You're not being straight with us, Congressman, and the word is getting out. These votes are defining you, and WILL NOT be forgotten, even when you occasionally vote against your leadership as a sop to your center-right constituents.

Happy Fourth of July!

2009-07-03T09:01:00.003-04:00

Today's a good day to put Washington, D.C. out of our minds, and think a bit about Washington - the original.

And John Adams, and Tom Jefferson, and Ben Franklin, and James Madison, and all the great men who pledged their lives and fortunes to create the single most unique and productive society in the history of history.

So many generations removed from the planting of the seed of independence, we who were born post-WWII grew up taking our rights for granted, didn't we? We believed freedom and individual liberty were the rule, not the exception. Until now.

Now we have to channel the passionate beliefs and determination of our founders in order to save the republic once again. If we lose it - or allow it to be taken from us - we cheapen the memory of hundreds of thousands of men and women who paid for our freedom with their lives.

And will it have been taken from us by a nefarious foe who defeats us through strength, determination and force of arms? No. In that there would be a certain honor.

Rather, we will have lost it to a gang of slugs and thugs, without a shot being fired.

Today would be a good day to think about the sacrifices made by those originals; that unique collection of men who were not asked to spend a few hours at a rally in the summer sun in a beautifully manicured park, but were asked to put their very lives on the line in the cause of freedom. When Ben Franklin said "We must all hang together, or we most assuredly will all hang separately," he wasn't just quipping - he was dead serious. For those men, failure meant certain death.

They put their lives on the line for themselves and their posterity - and we are their posterity. We speak of our fathers and grandfathers as the Greatest Generation. If we allow it all to slip away - what will they label this generation?

What's That Stench?

2009-06-28T07:33:00.010-04:00

I don’t know the technical definition of Marxism, but I know it stinks. In fact, I bet it smells a lot like the putrid odor that is wafting out of Congress these days.

Something in those hallowed halls has gone terribly...rotten.

The House of Representatives, once populated by great men, great thinkers, great lovers of individual freedom and protectors of private property, is now, through its Democrat majority, a fully-baked product of the Obama Administration – a cesspool of radical thought, and even more radical legislation.

That we sent to Congress an individual who so comfortably swims in those foul waters is a measure of our gullibility. Gullibility and simple trust that this man would go to Washington and fight the good fight – fight to keep us free, as he is supposed to do. Fight to protect and defend the Constitution, as he is sworn to do.

Instead, time and time again he votes to enslave our economy, and by extension enslave us, to a gaggle of federal bureaucrats.

Worse yet, he votes with liars and America-haters. He votes with thugs and sneaks. He’s part of a majority that promised transparency, yet rams bills through with 300-page amendments issued in the blackest part of night, bills that are so impactful that they transform the basic relationship between government and private industry; bills that are passed before they are even presented in their final form, and hence, cannot even have been read.

I cannot call this representation, and I cannot sit idly by and pretend that a few bucks and a few jobs is a fair tradeoff for the destruction of the country that I love. American men and women have died to defend our rights and liberties for over 200 years, but now the ghosts of those brave soldiers must look on in horror, as our current so-called “representatives” filch those liberties, piece by piece, in the middle of the night like a gang of sneak-thieves.

Reprehensible. I don’t know whom you represent, Michael McMahon, but it sure ain’t me.

I cannot promise that you will be defeated in 2010, Congressman, but I do promise you this: by the time Staten Islanders march into that voting booth, they will be educated. They will know how you are voting, and what the real impacts of those votes will be – not the fluffy spin you will put on them in a four-color brochure.

No, I cannot reach everyone in the 13th, I don’t have the money or the platform - but I won’t stop trying. Your votes, and your often-insulting defense of them, have succeeded in creating a small, tough core of activists on Staten Island. Probably nothing for you to worry about – yet. But every day, the word seeps out to more and more people, and more and more people become aware and alert…and engaged.

To whatever extent I have anything to say about it, Congressman McMahon, Staten Islanders will not be sleep-walking into the voting booths in 2010. They will be voting with their eyes wide open.

We are paying attention, now. House by house, block by block, Staten Islanders are being roused from their slumber.

Gotta love it. Gotta.

2009-06-26T13:10:00.003-04:00

"Three things taught me conservative love,
Jesus, Ronald Reagan and Atlas Shrugged"

Yup. That pretty much covers it.

Some Words on Father's Day

2009-06-21T10:41:00.012-04:00

Happy Father’s Day, everybody. Even if you, personally, are not a Dad, the fact is we all have one, so we should all celebrate the day.

My Dad is 84, and I consider myself blessed, and more than a little lucky, that he is still with us and enjoying life; I'm 57, so very few of my friends and relatives can say the same. But I remember them all, all the Dads of my youth; so many different personalities and styles, all of them patriotic Americans, most only a generation removed from the old country.

They all, to a man, believed in the greatness of America, taught us to work hard, taught us that there is no free lunch, taught us to have compassion for those less fortunate and to be generous with them, taught us to struggle for a better life, and told us that having achieved it, no man could take it from us.

Would that the men who now run this country been taught the same way.

My father enlisted in the Marine Corp the day he turned 18, in 1943, and after a year of stateside training was shipped overseas. There, on Guam and Iwo, he trained for amphibious landings. By that time, the United States Navy and Marine Corp had island-hopped almost all the way across the Pacific – almost. There was still one to go before the invasion of Japan, and that was Okinawa.

PFC Frank Santarpia, Company I, 3rd Battalion, 29th Marine Regiment, 6th Marine Division, 20 years old, went ashore with the first wave on the morning of April 1, 1945: Easter Sunday.

There’s no time or space here for the details, but suffice it to say that Okinawa, which was in such close proximity to the home islands of Japan that it was within the prefecture of the city of Tokyo, was the most heavily defended island of the entire war.

By the time the island was secure, 12,513 brave American men were dead. Mull that number over in your mind for a moment. Twelve thousand, five hundred and thirteen. In an action that took less than six weeks.

The wounded numbered 38,916, and my father was one of them; he was shot two weeks after the landing, at the Battle of Sugar Loaf Hill. He received a Purple Heart, spent three weeks in a makeshift island hospital, and was sent back to his platoon before the operation was completed.

And as brave as he was, as unbelievable as his story is, he was far from unique. He did his job alongside tens of thousands of other Marines and soldiers. In the same mold as any other American fighting for freedom, his actions represented the norm, not the exception – and every single detail about that battle had to be coaxed from him; he never talked about it voluntarily, and never thought it was anything special.

So here’s a salute to our fathers. May we celebrate the ones that are with us, and never forget those who are not. I remember you all: Al, Gerard, Sebastian and Ralph Santarpia, my father’s brothers; Ed Coyle, my father-in-law; Joe Graziano, Dan Rago, Frank Guigno, Russ Sabatino, Tony Muccio – the fathers of my friends, and all important, in their own way, in shaping my life.

I hope, dear readers, that you were as lucky as I - to have known such men.

We are what they made us.

It is time.

2009-06-19T13:14:00.007-04:00

Something must be done.

We are already, in a few short months, past the point of hoping that our Congressman will awaken from his Obama-induced slumber and start voting to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Instead, we, his constituents, are less and less free every day, while our government grows larger and larger, loots our life savings, bankrupts the treasury, and spews ever-more fantastic lies about "hope" and "change."

There is no hope for the individual, only for the collective. And the change? The change is that now the looters are accepted in the halls of Congress, and usurpers are installed as "czars."

Congressman Michael McMahon votes us into the twilight world of soft tyranny, time and time again, and I am done asking why. Each week brings a new crisis, a dire threat – and always the only solution is to give up a little more of our freedom. With every new crisis and new "solution," the economy shrinks, our liberties evaporate, our options dwindle - but the government never shrinks, it expands and grows ever larger and more powerful.

With the transparency of a heavy fog, bills are rammed through committee, rammed through Congress, and every one, every one, makes us less free, gives us less choice, makes us less independent, makes us less American. That is always their solution – it is the solution of the tyrant.

I'm sick and afraid, but my sickness and fear is hardening into anger and resolve. We will rally again this summer, my dear fellow patriots, we cannot wait for 9/12.

Will you join me?