"I Am Compelled to Fight"

“I volunteered to fight in this war.  I have risen through the ranks and now find myself on the front lines with an army of New Media warriors following me into the fray.  It is no longer a choice to fight; I am compelled to fight.”  -Andrew Breitbart

I did volunteer to fight in this war, fifteen years ago when I began my involvement in politics.  It happened this way: there was a meeting at my church talking about how to attend political conventions and learn the political process to promote prolife views.  I definitely wanted in on that.  So I did more than vote in the general election for the first time that year.  I voted in my first Republican primary, and attended my first Republican convention.  And it was like crack.

In the years since, I’ve had opportunities to work on campaigns, attend candidate forums, walk blocks and make phone calls, and meet a ton of dedicated people who love this country and want to see it governed well. 

Then the financial crisis threatened us.  Then the bailouts happened.  Then THIS happened.

So then I had an opportunity to start a tea party, organize protests and rallies, become a media spokesperson, and give speeches and presentations.  Oh, and meet, educate, and train a ton MORE people who love this country and want to see it governed well.

My philosophy has always been, since I started in politics, that I had a responsibility to share my knowledge.  If I knew how to do something, I wanted to teach others how to do it too.  If I learned about an issue on the ballot, I wanted others to have the same information. 

Sometimes that has made me a challenge to people who just don’t eat and breathe and sleep politics.  I get that.  In fact, my own family blocks me on social media because they know what my feed looks like.  But by the same token, I get phone calls asking for information about candidates.  I have people who drive by my house before each election to check the signs in my yard.  Being a political junkie has that upside: the ability to influence others.

People have urged me to run for office for years.  My stock answer: “No.  Never.”  I’ve seen how difficult elections are.  I’ve seen some great people chewed up and spit out by the stress and the strain of running.  Campaigns are often brutal, nasty, frustrating, and draining.  I’ve never felt called to run for any office; I much prefer being in the campaign, working behind the scenes.

Until now.

As a tea party leader, I’ve wanted to be independent of the Republican Party for many reasons.  I wanted to be free to hold Republicans accountable.  I wanted to avoid the charge of being a Republican auxiliary.  I wanted to focus on the core beliefs of tea party: fiscal responsibility, free markets, following the Constitution.  I handed the precinct over to another passionate volunteer so as not to shortchange either the tea party or the Republican Party.  But I’ve stayed involved in Republican politics, even serving on the Rules Committee at the Republican Party of Texas’s State Convention last summer.

But my county is in trouble.  The largest county in the largest Red State has been turning blue before my eyes.  I’ve seen what progressive policies are doing in other states, in other counties in my own state.  I’ve seen what they’re doing to us as a nation.  And I can’t watch from the sidelines anymore. 

I don’t have the confidence required to believe the current leadership in the Harris County Republican Party is able to handle the Battleground Texas assault, the technology gap, the lack of strategic partnerships or the messaging shortcomings we face.  And I refuse to sit through another election cycle wishing I could do more.

It is no longer a choice to fight.  I am compelled to fight.

I’m announcing that I am going to run for Harris CountyRepublican Party Chair in 2014. 

There will be a more formal launch coming soon, but I wanted to let all of you know my intentions and ask for your support with tackling the issues we face.  As I put together the campaign organization, I’ll be asking for your help, whether you live in Harris County or across the country.  This county is rapidly becoming Ground Zero in the political struggle against progressive policies, and it is going to take a massive effort to fight them back. 

It’s going to take an army.

#WAR

Weary

This week was a kick in the gut.  

Boston. West, TX. Boston again. Other events that didn't get so much publicity.  I lost sleep and had my heart repeatedly broken all week long.  It's hard being a news junkie.  

And I didn't have anyplace to put my frustration, my ache, my anger.  Then I remembered this old place, and so here I am.  I know I'm a fail for letting it go five months without posting, but I've been kind of busy writing elsewhere.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, speculation ran wild on the type of perpetrators who may have done this evil.  Various media asshats showed their true colors this week.  This is the one that finally sent my rage nuclear.

Andrew Breitbart's book isn't titled "Righteous Indignation" for nothing.  He was livid that the good, decent, hard-working Americans who embraced tea party values were maligned time and again.  It infuriated him that people like us were blamed, vilified, lied about, and marginalized in the mainstream media, all with the aim to defeat our efforts to make this country better.  His mission was to take on the mainstream media, call them out, expose them, and rob them of their power to define us.  He encouraged us to become citizen journalists, citizen ombudsmen, citizen activists.  And people are answering the call.

I just wish it were more.  

Every day I fear that there aren't enough of us doing enough to fight back at everything they're throwing at us.  I already know there's never going to be a day when this fight is over, not in my lifetime.  I'll never retire from this, not really.  And I am not saddled with a full-time job around which I have to work my activism, so I'm able to absorb more than a lot of people.  

My heart is broken for all those people lost this week, and their families and friends.  But at the same time (and I don't think it diminishes anything the victims are going through) my heart is also battered and weary over the uphill battle the rest of us face.  We shouldn't have to fight so hard just to keep a good name, but we do, and there's no amount of wishing that will change it.  

Saul Alinsky was a pretty awful bastard, but I do find this quote helpful:

As an organizer I start where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.

So that's where I think my head is going to be for the next few weeks.  I need to think about the stark reality we face.  I need to come to terms with exactly what the situation is on the ground in America.  And then, God willing, I'll be able to start thinking of ways to change it.

Spit-balling Post-Election

I'm just scribbling notes here on the loss of the election.  It sucks because I'm finding it very difficult to concentrate through the fog.  So I've collected a lot of other people's opinions HERE, and posted my initial thoughts HERE.  

But just to highlight the magnitude of the problem ahead of conservatives, I wanted to throw some things I've been thinking about on the blog here and see where things went.  I don't know about you, but until I've tried to list the factors, I can't think effectively about the problem.  And from the lists below, it's clear we have a lot of thinking to do.

Remind me of anything I've overlooked in comments, and I'll add it in.


WHERE BLAME IS FALLING

GOP Establishment
The Mainstream Media
Voter Fraud
Mitt Romney
Demographics
GOP Branding
Libertarians
Hurricane Sandy
Social Conservatives
Donation Fraud
Messaging
GOTV Efforts
Mitt Romney's Consultants


THEORIES ON WHAT TO DO

Go hard right
Perfect microtargeting
Go libertarian
Improve social media
Fracture the Democrat coalition
Go local
Infiltrate the Mainstream Media
Go after Minorities 
Build alternate institutions - Bill Whittle plan
Go after Youth
Go Galt
Opt Out/ Walk Away 
Take over the GOP
Try to pass stricter Voter ID bills
Infiltrate Hollywood


ANSWERS TO MY NON-SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE THE COUNTRY FACES RIGHT NOW

Economy
Lack of Values
Tyranny
Debt/Deficits
National Security
Attack on Founding Principles
Jobs
Lame-Duck Session Legislation
Family Values
Military Disenfranchisement
Losing Freedoms
Animosity towards Christians
Educational Indoctrination
Ignorance of the Electorate
Entitlement Mentality in the Culture
The Coming Fiscal Cliff
Lack of Wisdom
Immigration
Border Security
EPA Regulations
Loss of Religious Liberty
The Mainstream Media
Lack of Morality
Abortion
Credit Rating Downgrade
Supreme Court Justices
Entitlement Programs

Remember

Everyone who was alive and old enough to be aware remembers what they were doing on September 11th, 2001.  Everyone has a story, and though it breaks my heart to read them, I do it anyway.  Especially Allahpundit's account.

I still have issues of Time, Newsweek and other magazines from those days right after the attacks.  I don't know why I kept them; I'm rather famous in my house for purging the closets, tossing things that once meant something to me.  Still, I can not bear to throw them out.

Nothing remarkable happened early that morning.  We lived in a duplex near IAH.  The Bigun was twelve, the Little Critter, just three.  The morning routine consisted of waking both girls and hustling them to the car to get the Bigun to her private school on time.  We were almost late that morning, due to a bus on fire in the HOV lane.  We laughed at being able to predict the next day's headline in the paper, the lead stories on the evening news.

A kiss and a wave, and then the Little Critter and I drove home, a little less hurried this time.  Nothing pressing awaited us but a date with some children's television so I could get some housework done.

Now we lived on the edges of the 'hood on the north side.  It wasn't the worst place, but the nickname for the area across the freeway was "Gunspoint" if that tells you anything.  So when there was a furious pounding on my door that didn't cease, I was startled and a little paranoid.  One hears home invasion stories that begin like that, and I was armed with nothing more lethal than a plastic broom.  I'm also too short to see out of any peephole created for any door, so I dragged the footstool over to see who was breaking my door down.

It was the neighbor who shared the duplex, Robert.  A huge, friendly, burly black guy, he often sat outside with me telling stories and watching kids play.  I couldn't imagine what had worked him up, and I'd only seen him really agitated once before, when he'd been drinking quite a bit more than was good for him.  I didn't think he looked drunk, so I opened the door.

He yelled at me "Turn on the TV - they flew a plane into the World Trade Center!"

The Little Critter was quickly displaced to her sister's room to watch her shows, and Robert sat beside me on the couch for over an hour, our faces mirror images of horror and shock as we watched the second plane hit, then the towers fall - one, then the other.  Then news of the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania where so many others perished.

The morning held so much horror.  It was all I could do to keep it together in front of the LC, and it was all I could do to keep her otherwise entertained.  In what I am sure was a boon to her three-year-old thought process, she got anything she asked for - eating in her sister's room, playing with her sister's things, watching Blue's Clues and Veggie Tales videos without end.  Anything to keep her out of the den and away from those images.

Somewhere before noon, I remembered that Houston has a vast array of petrochemical facilities, ones that would likely make enticing and explosive targets.  I urgently needed to get to the Bigun, just to see her face and hold her close and bring her home.  Into the car again we went, racing to the school, arriving to chaos as other parents rushed in compelled by the same urgency.  I hadn't cried at all until I saw her, hugged her to me.

One friend had parents coming, but unable to get there right away.  I remember we stayed with her.  They didn't ask much, they were told a little bit of the story in class.  I wanted to get away, but I knew the Bigun had to stay with her friend.  Once the parents arrived, we drove home at a more reasonable speed; the panic was beginning to wear off.  But I spent the rest of the day letting the kids take care of themselves as I watched the horrible images on the television.

And though I was struck mute often by the images and stories and suppositions, I think the thing that finally drove it all home for me was the silence the next day.  Living so close to the airport we were accustomed to planes flying over several times an hour.  But for days, as I'd sit on the front porch and watch the skies, nothing flew over at all.  Every plane grounded, the sky left empty.

When they started flying again, I wanted nothing more than to go to New York to do something.  Anything.  I felt helpless to help.  I had nothing to give.

I wondered if anything would ever be the same again.

Things aren't.  They never are after events of this magnitude.  There's Before, then there's After.

This Guy is Teaching Children. Sigh.

Chadwick Harvey is lazy.  

In his recent piece “Tea Party Uses Religion to ManipulateWorking Class Americans Into Buying Their Dogma” Harvey makes a number of unsupported assertions, attempting to cast the tea party phenomenon as an elitist con-job perpetrated on ordinary religious Americans. 

Harvey begins with his interpretation of what seems to be Marx’s quote regarding religion being “the opiate of the masses.”  He claims that Marx believed religion was used as a tool of oppression by the wealthy classes.  Harvey states: “…society seemed to be defined by a class struggle in which the wealthy brainwashed the working class with religion to influence them to work hard and produce more goods so that the rich could continue to get richer.”  But a quick search of Marx’s ENTIRE quote provides a different view:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.

Now, I’m no fan of Marx, but even I can see that Marx said nothing like the words Harvey is putting into his mouth.  Mischaracterizing a quotation in order to balance an entire argument upon it is no way to begin a serious conversation about the role of religion in tea party politics. 

In his full quote, Marx is referring to religion as (in his view) a coping mechanism for the suffering that the lower classes undergo at the hands of the wealthy class, not a tool of those elites; a balm, not a yoke. 

Harvey goes on, building from his error, to cast the tea party as a vehicle for elites to manipulate middle-class religious conservatives:   “In America today, one need not look any further than the Tea Party and its influence on middle class evangelicals to find Marx's theory proven correct.”  So Harvey sets up his thesis: The Elitists cooked up Tea Party to mollify those losing economic ground every day by distracting them from the serious economic issues of the day and diverting them to social issues with far more light, but less heat. 

However, Harvey immediately begins to “prove” his assertions with unsupported statements:

When the movement burst onto the scenes of American politics in 2009, it was a group of unpatriotic typical elite Americans complaining that they had been taxed enough already. As the movement grew, a large number of middle class evangelicals joined. In addition to the fiscal issues and national debt concerns that led to the formation of the Tea Party, the movement has adopted a strong focus on social issues that is more typical of religious right-wing evangelicals.

• ·         “unpatriotic” offered with neither definition nor explanation
• ·         “typical elite” also offered with neither of the above
• ·         “a large number of middle class evangelicals joined” as opposed to evangelicals being intimately involved in the origins of the movement

As one of the original organizers of the February 27^th 2009 tea parties, I was a participant on the organizing conference calls moderated by Michael Patrick Leahy.  Those recorded calls constitute a historical record that documents the type of people responsible for launching this movement.  They weren’t rich people.  They weren’t elitists.  They had no connection to agenda-funding billionaires or vast troves of financing (such as exists on the Astroturfed Left).  The organizers were instead stay-at-home-moms, small businessmen, professionals – the middle class, in short.

But the proof Harvey attempts to cite concerning elitists is the establishment of the Tea Party Caucus in the U.S. Congress by Rep. Michelle Bachmann in July of 2010, an event that took place a full SEVENTEEN MONTHS after the beginning of the nationwide tea party movement.  He compounds his error with citing the names of wealthy congressmen with religious ties.  He names:

1) Trent Franks, wealthy oil businessman from Arizona who is a faithful member of a Baptist Church.

2) Joe Wilson, a wealthy Real Estate attorney from South Carolina who is a faithful attender of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia.

3) John Fleming, a wealthy businessman and long time Sunday school teacher who last year on MSNBC infamously complained that he has only $400,000 left over at the end of each year.

I hate to remind Mr. Harvey, but a good number ofRepresentatives and Senators are very wealthy including:   

• ·         Sen. John Kerry
• ·         Sen. Dianne Feinstein
• ·         Rep. Nancy Pelosi
• ·         Sen. Claire McCaskill

All of these are, by the way, higher on the list in terms of wealth than Franks, Wilson or Fleming.

But it isn’t merely wealth that’s disturbing Harvey; apparently all of these are (gasp) religious people.  And what’s worse, OPENLY religious people.  THAT’S the issue he seems to have.  However, he doesn’t take this objection anywhere:

While the overwelming (sic) majority of congressmen and congresswomen are affiliated with some religion, not all choose to share their religious dogma openly. Not surprisingly, the percentage of those in the Tea Party caucus who share their religion openly is more than double that of the rest of Congress.

They SHARE THEIR RELIGION OPENLY.  MORESO than the REST of Congress.  Scary religious people, talking about their religion.  That’s all he has. 

Or is it?  He continues:

The motive is not hard to figure out. Members of the Typical Elite Americans Party have little else to offer the middle class, so they use religion as a toy to create a culture war. This leads to working class evangelicals voting against their personal best interests due to their reliance on a religious dogma that gives them hope that although they are the losers in the class struggle, they can be winners in the next life. 

Harvey renames tea party with “Typical Elite Americans” in an attempt to be cute, and then claims the tea party has little else to offer the middle class except religion, the means of perpetuating a culture war.  He doesn’t explain how this works at all, how a movement devoted to lower taxes and spending, following the Constitution, and personal responsibility is cleverly being used by elites to manipulate working-class evangelicals into “voting against their personal best interests due to their reliance on a religious dogma that gives them hope that although they are the losers in the class struggle, they can be winners in the next life.”  

Harvey essentially charges that religious tea party members are being spoon-fed a social issue narrative designed to distract them from the real economic issues facing the nation.  Or something.  He really never even gets around to addressing the economic situation at all.

Ironically, at the same time, Harvey takes the mainstream-media-driven narrative about the tea party straight, no chaser; he swallows the spoon-feeding that the MSM have been doling out for years, and attempts to regurgitate it.  And he doesn’t even do that skillfully or originally.

His piece ignores the tea party involvement in the Health Care Town Hall meetings where average citizens quoted the Constitution at their representatives; the massive tax-protest rallies around the country and in Washington D.C.; the nationwide effort to support Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts; and innumerable other issues unrelated to social issues and religion.

Essentially the only thing that Harvey does seem to be offering, when you wade through all the nonsense, is this single huge revelation:

Harvey thinks religion is for stupid people. 

That’s his entire complaint – that the tea party has religious people in it.  I could have slept in; I can get that anywhere, from much smarter and more articulate people.

Learn More About SWATing

For those who got to my blog through the KTRH interview on SWATing and other tactics, here are a list of links that may help you learn more:




KTRH Interview




Seven Ways Conservative Activists are being Harassed by the Left


Original Brett Kimberlin Write-up by Liberty Chick


Patterico (Patrick Frey) story of his SWATing - WITH AUDIO


Red State's Erick Erickson's SWATing


House to call on Department of Justice to investigate SWATing


"LAWFARE" and the Aaron Walker case 





-f 


P. S. This article is also worth reading about Google rankings and the importance of fighting for dominance in the search engine world in order to get out a story:


Brett Kimberlin and the Justice of Google

Operation Original Velvet Revolution

Taking back the name "Velvet Revolution" from the jackwagons using it for their own jerkwad purposes...

From OriginalVelvetRevolution.com: 

If one searches for the Velvet Revolution on Google, the first result is a rather uninformative Wikipedia article. We have no quarrel with Wikipedia, or not much of one anyway.

The second result and most of its successors lead to Brett Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution, a badly designed, garish website where Kimberlin seeks to separate you from your hard-earned money through sale of a bad dvd about peace love, and hippies, and to peddle his half-baked conspiracy theories.

This is unacceptable. 

AND...

If you link to this post, this site rises to the top of a search for Velvet Revolution. If you add this site to your blogroll, this site rises even further. And Brett Kimberlin’s site falls.

And when the time comes for George Soros to write the annual check to Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution, maybe the due diligence lackey will enter the Great Man’s office, saying, “Mr. Soros, I think you ought to read this…”

Because we’re going to talk about Brett Kimberlin, as long as he keeps filing his frivolous lawsuits. Which by the look of things isn’t going to stop, until Kimberlin slips up and goes back to prison. Even then he won’t stop.

Just doing my part in my little corner of the blogosphere.  This isn't over, not by a long shot.