UPDATE:
They took the video down between midnight last night and 2pm today. It was a "Tea Party" montage from Murfreesboro, TN, that struck me as the most useless, unreflective, straight-up strange attempt to convert the viewer into a follower of "the movement".
Really, though, if you've been paying any attention to coverage of these protests, you'll have noticed the populism at work. At many times it's been directed in ugly ways, and at most times it's been either strongly supported or lambasted by media networks, depending on which one you watch. The fact that our media is skewed is no big news, but it's interesting to watch the feedback loop at work
Watch Glenn Beck and feel the fear:
Now, I agree that it's scary as hell the amount of power our government has been wielding during the past months, and perhaps they've been overstepped their bounds in some instances. But isn't that why we held an election in which we brought to power a man who pledged to use the awesome power of our government to try to combat the financial crisis. It seems rather selective to preach about the abuse of our liberties in a tax situation and not in the policy decisions made by Bush during his 8 years in power (Patriot Act, Guantanamo). So there's hypocrisy.
But if we look at this whole situation from a global perspective, not worrying about which side the protest comes from, left or right, there is the troubling idea of liberty lost. It's that we've ceded a vast amount of power to a national government that we are only in control of come election time. Between elections, the president has the power to make his actions secret, as we saw during the Bush administration. Good that we trust Obama to be transparent, but still we don't have mush control over his actions now, only the threat of voting him out in 4 years.
This is concern was debated at length in the Federalist Papers. Many argued that a strong central government would alienate the population. A couple centuries later, our national government is much more powerful, much more distant from Mr. Everyman, and this is scary. We need to seriously rethink how our government is organized. Remember, guys, it's for the people and by the people, which we forget, like, all the time.
So in that vein, here are some suggestions to bring our government more in line with "The People" and thus to reduce anxiety (and, hopefully, policy that endangers our rights):
http://amoreperfectconstitution.com/23_proposals.htm
Check it out, bro.
Fuck this guy man. He's stringing together a host of unrelated issues that that can be spun as un-american, blaming obama for it, and then dragging us along with him on the hate train.
ReplyDelete"The dollar is the world's currency".
Duh. He says this shit without any thought or debate, knowing that his audience will eat it up. Take to the streets? Please in our virtual empire where connections between us are so thin and withered we all want to be part of something greater- even if we have to buy in to fox news reality that is just conjuring up its own narrative, from our REAL EVENTS.
"The government's not listening to us, enough emails lets take to the streets"
To protest what? From this youtube video its ann assortment of either non-issues, like community service indoctrination, or long-term problems, like debt. FUCK FOX NEWS.