Our friends in the Iowa and Nebraska 912 groups are staging the 911 Freedomstock at the Onawa, IA – Monona County Fairgrounds this weekend.  Michael Jablonski of the 912 Advisory Board will be a featured speaker. There will be entertainment, food, fun for the kids and so much more. We encourage all who can attend to do so. http://www.freedomstock.net/

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On September 12, 2009, grassroots activists from coast to coast flooded the streets of Washington D.C., making history in protest of a wasteful and oversized government. This year, FreedomWorks and our fiscally conservative allies will assemble once again on September 12th to renew our commitment to a constitutionally limited government, and to remind Washington in one, strong, united voice that we will “Remember in November.” We’re happy to announce that we will be welcoming Andrew Brietbart to the stage on the West Lawn of the Capitol as part of this year’s event. Andrew will be joining Erick Erickson, Deneen Borelli, Rep. Mike Pence, and many other leaders in the liberty movement to speak out against the out of control spending and the growing size of government. All of the details are listed on our website. We hope that you can join un in our fight to take America back. We’ll see you in Washington this weekend.

&cat=1&pid=14383&cache=true">&cat=5&pid=14383&cache=true" class="alignleft" alt="Andrew Breitbart to Speak at the 9/12 March on DC" />

On September 12, 2009, grassroots activists from coast to coast flooded the streets of Washington D.C., making history in protest of a wasteful and oversized government. This year, FreedomWorks and our fiscally conservative allies will assemble once again on September 12th to renew our commitment to a constitutionally limited government, and to remind Washington in one, strong, united voice that we will “Remember in November.” We’re happy to announce that we will be welcoming Andrew Brietbart to the stage on the West Lawn of the Capitol as part of this year’s event. Andrew will be joining Erick Erickson, Deneen Borelli, Rep. Mike Pence, and many other leaders in the liberty movement to speak out against the out of control spending and the growing size of government. All of the details are listed on our website. We hope that you can join un in our fight to take America back. We’ll see you in Washington this weekend.

From Stephani Scruggs, National Co-Chair of The 912 Project; Get a sneak peak at the full program of events at the FREE Liberty XPO being held at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, DC; September 9 & 10! Unite In Action is holding events in Washington, DC this weekend, you can also get great information here .

&cat=1&pid=14280&cache=true">&cat=5&pid=14280&cache=true" class="alignleft" alt="Restoring Honor Rally Changes Hearts and Minds" />

Saturday, August 28, 2010, my husband, two daughters, and I attended the Restoring Honor rally in Washington D.C. It was a wonderful experience for us all. The crowd was huge (500,000 + people), very peaceful, and individuals were kind and patient. You might think that the important part of the weekend was the three and a half hours (or more) that we spent together during the rally. When I was sitting under the bright, hot sun with my friends from Texas, I thought so too. But I was wrong… During the first leg of our trip from D.C. to Chicago, our two daughters, ages 22 and 16, sat next to an African-American gentleman wearing an Obama inauguration t-shirt. After take-off, he mentioned to them that he had travelled to D.C. to attend Al Sharpton’s Reclaim the Dream rally. Our older daughter told him that they were in D.C. for the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, and the conversation took off from there. The gentlemen told my daughters that he went to the Restoring Honor rally with several friends because Al Sharpton told them that we were holding a negative protest that was against MLK’s message and against those who had gathered for Rev. Sharpton’s rally. He said that when he and his friends arrived that they didn’t see anything that they expected, so they stayed a bit to listen. They realized that Restoring Honor was not anything like what Rev. Sharpton told them to expect. They then returned to the Sharpton rally to try to tell several people that what Rev. Sharpton was saying about our rally was not true. He saw that our rally was not a political or hateful rally, and that it was not meant to divide Americans. He tried to get a message to Rev. Sharpton prior to his speech, but either he didn’t get the message or he ignored the message. Rev. Sharpton went forward with his original speech as planned. This kind gentleman then told my daughter some things that amazed us. He told them multiple times that he was a Democrat, and that the tide had turned since MLK’s day, and that the civil rights movement had not changed with it. He asked the girls to watch Al Sharpton on CNN. He thought that Sharpton looked ridiculous on CNN because it was the perfect opportunity to say that he was sorry for his criticism of the Restoring Honor rally. Then they discussed the media. He and the girls agreed that the lack of truth in the media and the lack of individuals’ willingness to do their own research would be our country’s downfall. He followed up by saying that Glenn was something special and possibly the modern day MLK. He said that from now on when Glenn spoke he would take the time to listen, and that Glenn or someone like him would be the next great President. The girls told him that they felt sure that Glenn would never run. The girls asked if he would come to the rally if we had another one. He said maybe, it depended on what was going on in his life but, he would be with us in spirit for sure. During the last few days I talked with folks and I came to understand two things: First, the event wasn’t for or about 9-12ers, Tea Partiers, or those of us who have become politically active during the last year and a half. It was for ALL of America — every single person that we hope will be inspired to put God, integrity and honor first in their lives. It was for the majority of Americans who may even be watching from the sidelines, but who believe that the priorities of Faith, Hope (Trust), and Charity. Second, there is REAL hope that Americans of all ethnicities and faiths can peacefully unite around our common desire for truth in our lives and in our country. We cannot give up and we must continue to build relationships, one person at a time through kitchen table conversations. We must help every American know that they are not alone and that there are many folks who will unite with them around our honorable founding principles. Pretty strong stuff. Our 16 year old told me that the weekend experience changed her life.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is the latest victim of the Tea Party insurgency that’s trying to take over the Republican Party. Tea Party favorite Joe Miller defeated Murkowski in The North Star State’s primary by hammering away at (among other things) her support for TARP and lack of zeal for overturning Obamacare. Miller joins a new breed of anti-spending candidates such as Maine’s Paul LePage, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Florida’s Marco Rubio, and South Carolina’s Nikki Haley, who promise to bring a new passion for shrinking government to D.C. and state capitals. Here’s how Freedom Works’ Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe sum up what the Tea Party stands for in their new book,  Give us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto : “It doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we don’t infringe on the same freedom of others.” Armey and Kibbe say that the Tea Party coheres around spending and that other issues are not central to its mission. Perhaps. Joe Miller is also pro-life, pro border fence, and wants to outlaw the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research. Maine gubernatorial hopeful LePage believes the “traditional definition of marriage should be preserved.” Haley, who will probably be South Carolina’s next governor, has campaigned on tough enforcement against illegal immigrants. And the closest thing to a Tea Party spokesperson is Sarah Palin, the former “Bridge to Nowhere” supporter who oversaw a 16 percent increase in spending during her time as governor of Alaska. Can this coalition stay together, stick to its anti-spending message, and actually change American politics? Or will it be co-opted by the very party upon which it seeks to perform a “hostile takeover?” Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Armey and Kibbe to discuss these issues and more. The interview was shot by Jim Epstein and Meredith Bragg, and edited by Epstein and Joshua Swain. Approximately 9.30 minutes Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to  Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

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We have come a long way in the last twenty months. The President of the United States, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate have done for the Republican Party what no Republican could have accomplished. Just as rigor mortis was about to set in, they brought the old corpse back to life. For their efforts on our behalf, we should be forever grateful. It is easy to lose perspective. It is easy to forget the dire straits in which the Republicans found themselves in and for some time after November, 2008. On the first Tuesday of that month, they were soundly defeated. The Democrats controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress. In time, when Al Franken was seated and Arlen Specter turned coat, the Democrats would attain El Dorado – a commanding majority in the Senate capable to bringing a filibuster to a screeching halt. The Republicans initially thought that to get along they would have to go along. Had Nancy Pelosi thrown a little patronage their way when the so-called “stimulus” bill was being put together, had Barack Obama intervened to insist that she include earmarks for compliant Republicans in the House, a great many of them would have voted for the measure. It is to her that we owe their solidarity on the occasion of the vote. She is responsible for the fact that on that occasion they presented themselves to the world as a party of principle. If the Tea-Party Movement, which sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the bill’s passage, was not as resolutely hostile to the Republicans as it was to the Democrats, it was because Pelosi and her minions wanted vengeance, sought it, and got it. Even when the Tea-Party Movement had emerged, the Republicans were not quick to realize what was in the offing. On 2 May 2009, some six months after the election, Jeb Bush emerged from a meeting with Mitt Romney and House Republican Whip Eric Cantor to announce that it was time for the Republicans to give up “nostalgia about the past” and to leave Ronald Reagan and all that he stood for behind. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” he observed, “and the other side has something. I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that.” Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Eric Cantor may have been slow to grasp what was going on, but it would be a mistake to assume that they are dopes. It was not until early August in that year that I was willing to admit to myself that a political realignment in the Republicans’ favor was a serious possibility; and, as I noted in a piece posted in the aftermath of the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in early September, I was even then almost entirely alone. At that convention, I had attended a panel on Barack Obama’s first year as President at which not one of the distinguished students of American politics on the panel had in their prepared remarks even mentioned the Tea-Party Movement. And when I asked a question about it, I received a perfunctory answer. It was odd, my interlocutor remarked, that such a movement had emerged in the absence of institutional support. It was, I thought, very odd, very odd, indeed. Now, thanks to Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, the Republicans appear to be on the verge of an historic victory. I would not be surprised in the slightest if they were to gain more than seventy seats in the House of Representatives and to retake the Senate as well. But, as I intimated in a recent post entitled John Boehner’s Testing Time , nothing is certain, not even now, and Jeb Bush was certainly right about one thing. You cannot beat something with nothing, and in recent years the Republicans have stood for next to nothing. If they are to effect a lasting political realignment — a possibility for which I have argued repeatedly in the last twelve months (first here in August 2009 , then in posts linked here and archived here , here , and here ) – they must give the American people reason to put their faith in them. In an earlier post, entitled Patronage, Principles, and Political Parties , I explored the history of American political parties, their propensity to oscillate between being parties of patronage and parties of principle, and the manner in which the American constitution with its separation of powers both requires and subverts parties of principle. In John Boehner’s Testing Time , I drew on this earlier post and suggested that Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and their associates would be well-advised to draft a new Contract with American designed to nationalize the midterm elections and to transform the Republican Party – which has in recent years tended to be a party of patronage oriented towards the needs of particular, local constituencies – into a party of principle capable, at least for the time being, of genuinely governing these United States. This end, I contended, can be achieved only if the Republicans appropriate for their own use a claim falsely but effectively advanced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 which – thanks to our current President, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate — now rings all too true: that today the American republic is threatened by a conspiracy, that “a small group” of individuals, lead by Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, and Reid, is intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor — other people’s lives.” If they wish to effect a realignment, I argued, all that the Republicans have to do is to complete the task of unmasking begun by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel and make it clear that they really do intend to repeal Obamacare, to balance the federal budget without enacting permanent tax increases, to roll back the scope and size of the administrative state, and to restore within these United States limited, constitutional government. To this end, they not only need to spell out in some detail what they intend to do; they need, as I argued in that earlier post, to justify their proposals in terms of constitutional principles. To grasp what this entails, they will need to specify what these principles are. Here is how this can be done. As I argued in an earlier post and, in much greater detail, in my recent books Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift , the American regime is an experiment of a particular kind. In the late eighteenth century, it was almost universally agreed that a republic cannot be sustained on an extended territory. Such was the argument that Montesquieu advanced in the first part of his authoritative book The Spirit of Laws , and he had good reason for advancing such a claim. Athens and Sparta were situated on territories of no great size, and the same could be said for early Rome and for Lucca, Florence, and Venice in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Late republican Rome was an exception to the rule, to be sure. But – as both Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy and Montesquieu in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and Spirit of Laws pointed out — Rome was also the exception that proved the rule. It was a republic that, by dint of conquest, came to be situated on an extended territory and then collapsed. The Framers of the American constitution faced a great challenge, and this they knew. The challenge was straightforward. Polities situated on extended territories sit at a great distance from the vast majority of the people whom they rule. This is consistent with despotism; and if the distance is not too great, it is consistent with legitimate monarchy and the rule of law as well. But for republics it poses a problem. Governments at a distance from the people they rule tend to be invisible; and when human beings are invisible, they tend rightly to suppose that they can get away with a lot. Moreover, large polities tend to face emergencies more often than small polities, and emergencies require from rulers vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness of the sort most easily provided by a man who can act alone. The challenge facing the American Framers was to devise a constitutional structure capable of producing a government fit for meeting emergencies but unlikely to become, as James Madison once delicately put it, “self-directed.” To meet this challenge, they turned to the second and third parts of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws – where he sketched out two different ways in which a republic can overcome this limitation on its magnitude. It was, he realized, necessary that it do so because – at least in modern times – no small republic could hope to marshal the resources necessary for its self-defense when attacked by monarchies of intermediate size or despotisms immense in size. The first expedient suggested by Montesquieu was federalism. By means of federalism, a group of republics could project power in the manner of a monarchy while remaining small enough to be genuinely self-governing. Montesquieu’s second expedient was the separation of powers. By distinguishing along functional lines between the executive power, the legislative power, and the judicial power and by distributing these three powers to different bodies in such a fashion as to render them separate and quasi-autonomous, the English had managed to transform a monarchy into a republic capable of sustaining itself on an extended territory. For emergencies, they had an executive capable of vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness. To prevent that executive from becoming a tyrant, they had a House of Commons responsible to the electorate and capable of calling the executive’s servants to account. To avoid populist excesses, they had a House of Lords capable of checking the House of Commons; and to protect the liberty of the citizens, they had judges who could not easily be removed from office and juries selected from among the peers of those accused. The Americans combined both expedients. To begin with, they instituted a federation, building on the remnants of the old colonial system and on the structure that existed under the Articles of Confederation. At the center, they established a government of limited powers – capable of defending the nation, of guaranteeing to every state a republican government, of regulating commerce between the states, and of responding to emergencies. To the states and local governments, where the territory was comparatively small, they left all other legitimate powers. To make the federal government in some measure independent of the states, they provided for direct popular election of the House of Representatives; and to enable the states to protect their own prerogatives from federal encroachment, they had the state legislatures elect the federal senate. At both the state and federal level, the American founders instituted a separation of powers, giving to the executive, the legislators, and the judiciary the means by which to defend their own prerogatives and the motives for doing so – and, by dividing and separating the powers, the Founders sought to make the government and its operations visible to the citizens. Each branch served the general public as a watchdog with regard to the others. The measures undertaken by the Obama administration and by its supporters in Congress that gave rise to and sustained the Tea-Party Movement all have this in common. They constitute an assault – evident to anyone who cares to look – on our inherited political order. They transgress on the two great principles constitutive of that order. They are inconsistent with federalism and the separation of powers, and nothing speaks to their character more eloquently than the fact that they were crafted in camera behind closed doors, that those who voted on them had not read them, and that they were of such a length as to be incomprehensible even to their putative authors. Let me be a bit more precise. The two great measures passed since January, 2009 – the healthcare reform bill and the financial-regulation reform bill – presuppose that the federal government can do anything. Both run roughshod over the prerogatives of the states. Neither is consistent with federalism as a principle of governance. The same can be said with regard to the separation of powers. Both bills presuppose a massive delegation of legislative power to executive agencies. Both presuppose that appointed officials can and should be empowered to issue regulations having the force of law. Both presuppose on the part of both houses of Congress an abdication of the legislative power. Both require a concentration of executive, legislative, and judicial power within a single agency that operations, in effective, behind closed doors. Both promise to give rise to a government that is invisible and unaccountable. The combination of these powers is, Montesquieu asserted, the very emblem of despotism. My critics will respond that this is nothing new, and they are very nearly right. The administrative state is now nearly a century old. It has existed since the days of Woodrow Wilson. It assumed gigantic proportions under the New Deal and the Great Society. But never was its expansion brazenly and arrogantly thrust upon the American people until now. By the methods that they have employed to secure its aggrandizement, Obama, Emanuel, Pelosi, and Reid have unmasked the administrative state and have made visible its tyrannical potential. It is the task of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and their associates to unite their brethren behind a common program designed to roll back the administrative state and to hold them to their commitments. To do this successfully, they must make use of what the Democrats have done in the last few years in such a way as to educate the American people with regard to the roots of the present discontents. What those who joined the Tea-Party Movement sense must in the course of the midterm campaign be made manifest in all of its horror. I have said it before, and I will say it again. What we need is a return to first principles.

912 Editor At Large Mike Opelka took the photos and Gregg Opelka wrote the song for this slide show.

&cat=1&pid=14014&cache=true">&cat=5&pid=14014&cache=true" class="alignleft" alt="Glenn Beck Is Bad For Al Sharpton’s Business" />

Al Sharpton is not happy with Glenn Beck .  On  The O’Reilly Factor yesterday he took umbrage with Beck’s desire to “take back the Civil Rights movement .”  Now, as I see it there are several reasons a so-called Black Community leader like Sharpton could find that language offensive. It could be that be Al believes that the Civil Rights movement – one in which Americans of all races, creeds and backgrounds came together to forge a new national character that elevated previously down-put groups to equal legal and social footing with the majority population as a whole – is the exclusive property of African-Americans.  He said so much during his counter-rally when he commented on the date being the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King ’s “I Have A  Dream” speech on the mall. “This is our day!” Sharpton bloviated.  “And we ain’t giving it away!” I guess the idea that those on the mall this Saturday had no right to that day came as a surprise to Dr. Alveda King who is the niece of Dr. King and was a featured speaker at Beck’s rally.  It may have even come as surprise to the late MLK himself were he alive.  He was, after all,  the man who referred in his speech to “All God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics…” coming together.  And isn’t that what made King’s speech so special?  That his was a message of inclusion.  Not an “us versus them” but a gigantic national ”we.”  King understood that the cancer of racism destroys the entire body (America), not just the organ (minorities) it specifically targets.  In comparison, Sharpton’s comments seemed so beneath the memory of King.  So petty.  So small as to make one shake his/her head and ask what happened to this most noble of movements that began when a woman on a bus refused to give up her seat to a white man so many years ago? And this really gets to the heart of Sharpton’s problem with Beck’s incredibly successful gathering. When Mr. Beck speaks of “taking back” the C ivil Rights movement , he is not using code language for returning to the days of Jim Crow and “separate but equal.”  Sharpton knows this of course.  And for so-called religious leaders like Al Barnum to imply as such is nothing more than a cynical act rooted in self-preservation.  What Beck means by this is that the Civil Rights movement that arose from the mist of exclusion and bigotry came to champion the ideals of racial harmony, equality, and overcoming our divisions (“we shall overcome”).  But somewhere along the way to the promised land it was effectively hijacked by a band of self-promoting charlatans, self-righteous statists,  and shake-down artists, urged on by their enablers in the left wing literati, for whom agitation and protest has become a lucrative cottage industry. The movement has also become synonymous with a certain political agenda that stresses affirmative action, cradle-to-grave government hand-outs, and patronizing attitudes towards personal responsibility.  In other words, a litmus test somehow came into being whereby one’s commitment to racial equality is measured by one’s level of assent to the Democratic Party ’s social platform. I argue that the policies that so many left-leaning self-proclaimed minority advocates have implemented (which have imprisoned great numbers as permanent wards of the welfare state while financially rewarding socially destructive behavior) have done more damage to the very fabric of minority communities since that great speech on August 28, 1963 than any klansman would have ever dared hope for.  70% Black babies born out-of-wedlock.  Inner-cities racked in poverty, despair, gang-banging and drug violence.  Homicide now the leading cause of death among young Black males. Millions imprisoned.  And looming over it all, a haze of political correctness that stifles honest and productive dialogue about the true causes of the plight so many African-Americans still endure despite an ocean of entitlements courtesy of stubborn adherence to defunct leftist dogma and funded by the American taxpayer. This state of disharmony suits P.T. Sharpton just fine.  So long as he has a fight to fight, real or fabricated, so long as so many of his people remain in a state of second-class citizenship (despite the root cause) his career will be secure and his income steady.  Indeed, for men like Sharpton, a truly color-blind society, ie. getting to the real promised land for which Dr. King dared to pine  on the very grounds of the Beck rally, would be the worst thing that could possibly happen.  It would make him and his professional protest machine irrelevant and thus would he be a has-been on the political scene as well as drain his coffers.  Worst of all, he would be a nobody.  Just another city preacher in a tailor-made suit.  No wonder the Reverend Al is all tied in knots over of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who rallied in peace under a clear blue sky to reaffirm the dream that King so eloquently relayed to another just as peaceful group 47 years before.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and without the ever diminishing shade of the MSM’s loosening hammer-lock on information framing the discussion on race, it is becoming quite apparent that Dr. King’s dream realized, the one that Glenn Beck wishes to re-claim for all Americans, would put Al Sharpton out of a job. In any other business but the grievance industry that is called a conflict of interest.  I think it’s time for the Reverend Al to recuse himself from  this discussion once and for all.

&cat=1&pid=14000&cache=true">&cat=5&pid=14000&cache=true" class="alignleft" alt="You’re a Bigot, Now Vote for Me! The Progressive’s Plan for November." />

Are you opposed to Obamacare or illegal immgration? You’re a racist. Are you opposed to gay marriage? You’re a homophobe. Did you oppose Elana Kagan’s appointment to the Supreme Court? You’re a sexist. After less than two years of complete Democrat control of government, there aren’t many Americas progressives haven’t accused of some sort of bigotry for simply having an opinion different from theirs. The politics of “hope” and “change” have devolved into exactly what those espousing them claimed they would end. Is this really Democrat’s plan to win votes in November? Barack Obama campaigned under the banner of unity and ending the “politics of division.” But that banner was swiftly furled and the true banner of progressive politics began flying over our country. Progressivism leaves no room for debate or disagreement. To paraphrase former President Bush, to progressives you’re either with them or you’re with the enemy. During the Obamacare debate, opponents were compared to opponents of civil rights legislation. The ethically challenged Congressman from New York, Charlie Rangel, said “The group that were in Washington fighting against the health bill and fighting against the President, [they] looked just like and sounded just like those groups that attacked the civil rights movement in the South.” Left-wing blogs ran with this mantra and agenda-driven media outlets like MSNBC dutifully followed. They still advance the lie that African-American Members of Congress were pelted with racial slurs as they walked to cast their vote, something even the New York Times has acknowledged there is zero evidence of. The ends justify the means, no matter how sickening and divisive the means. When a judge in California overturned Proposition 8, a ballot measure that defined marriage as being between one man and one woman which was passed by voters, these self-appointed champions of democracy cheered its undermining. Whatever your opinion on the issue, it was a rather ironic turn for people who use the word “democracy” as though they respect it. When Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court without much of a record, opposition to this life-time appointment was called sexist all across the left-wing echo chamber. Blogs were replete with this unfounded charge, with headlines like “Not-So-Subtle Sexism at the Kagan Hearings” from the blog at Ms. Magazine. The bigotry arrow has become the default weapon in the progressive’s quiver, only it’s lost its sting. When Arizona passed a state law allowing police to enforce federal law on immigration, progressives cried racism. It couldn’t be that a majority of Arizonans, and Americans, simply support forcing immigrants to enter the country legally – opponents needed to be painted as bigots. When 9/11 families expressed discomfort with building a Mosque two blocks from where Muslin extremists senselessly murdered their loved ones they were ignored by Progressives. Why? Because attacking them is a losing proposition. So they attacked those who sided with them, many of whom are Republicans, as bigots. They’ve basically ignored Democrats, including Howard Dean and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who’ve said the same things. Opponents are not trying to “block” the Mosque, Progressives claim, yet no law to stop it has been proposed. They’ve made appeals to sensitivity, nothing more. Progressives, who act as sensitivity police for others, attack Republicans for standing with people who have every reason to be sensitive. The difference between right and left on these issues is the right attempts to change hearts and minds; the left simply accused opponents of bigotry. This makes sense when you realize how unpopular their initiatives have been; if you can’t get people to vote for you, try to discourage them from voting at all. It’s a strategy – if you can’t win someone’s vote, convince them the alternative is a bigot, because who wants to vote for a racist, homophobe or sexist? They’re hoping people will stay home on November 2 nd . Progressives show little concern for the will of the people. They have an agenda, and nothing is going to stand in the way of achieving it. They will lie, they will demonize, they will do anything to achieve it. In their zeal to advance that agenda they’ve gone farther than they ever have before and thus exposed their true nature. Progressives have accused about 90 percent of the country of bigotry, in one form or another. On every one of the issues listed above polls show the American people are unambiguously not buying the spin and siding with their opponents. That’s a fact progressives will learn the hard way when it comes time for these “bigots” to vote.