R3volution: We're Caring Americans, Thank You Very Much!

As I said yesterday, on Tuesday I was at the Albuquerque stop for the Tea Party Express.

The event was actually held at Rio Rancho's Haynes Park, just to the northwest of ABQ.

As has been their habit, both the Albuquerque Journal and KRQE News 13 got it wrong.

KRQE News 13 showed up at about 11 AM, two hours before the event, and reported that the Rio Rancho DPS stated that 300 people were there. The Journal must have got their news from the TV station. Such great reporting!

When the Tea Party Express Caravan arrived shortly after 1 PM, I estimated many more people than that. Using grid method of estimation common to field biologists (I am a trained field biologist), I estimated at least 900 people. Pretty good for a Tuesday, work-day afternoon.

But we do not have to rely on my crude count. Organizers of the Tea Party were placing sticky dots on people's shirts, so that they would have a pretty good estimate of the crowd.

They began this practice after the local media woefully underestimated the number that attended the Tax Day Tea Party on April 15, for which the Albuquerque Journal originally said there were a few hundred--such great precision, that!--at least a half-hour prior to the beginning of the event. Do I detect a pattern of misrepresentation here?

In any case, the Albuquerque Tea Party organizers, prepared for about 1200 people, had purchased 1350 sticky dots. They ran out of dots prior to the end of the event, and people continued to arrive. So total attendance was more 1350 people.

The misrepresentation of the numbers was unprofessional, but what KRQE News did on their blog was positively juvenile. Here is the original headline (which was changed today--though so far they have not changed the numbers) screen-captured by my friend and fellow NMPA member, who was also an organizer for this event:

Tea Bag Express rallies protestors

This headline gives implicit insult to the people who were there, using a now well-known sexual innuendo to describe what is actually called The Tea Party Express. After a great deal of protest in the comments to their blog, found here, during the first 24 hours, KRQE changed the headline. However, the link continues to bear the derogatory term seen above.

As commentor and Tea Party organizer Gayle Bacon wrote yesterday:

"Tea baggers is an obscene and derogatory expression used by a biased media with a liberal agenda. You may yank this, because you ARE biased, but I must try. Your reporter showed up very early, before the Tea Party Express even showed up! We put stickers on everyone and counted the stickers beforehand, so we know we had well over 1,000 because they ran out of the stickers! People also signed their names. Too bad KRQE is missing out. That's the way to lose viewers."

And Pat, who was in charge of estimating the numbers wrote this yesterday:

"KRQUE [sic] showed up at around 11:00 when the event was just being set up. So if as you say we had 200 people there at 11:00 by1:00 we had count of over 1350 . We had purchased 1350 stickers to help with our head count and all were passed out. That is how we can say we had over 1350 people. If your news crew had come to report the news they would have showed up around the time the event started instead of before the event started. I am glad you removed the derogatory term, but it should never have been used in the first place."

Others who were there wrote to express their disgust about the derogatory language and about their frustration with the so-called professional media. My friend, Corky wrote:

"Lovely, just lovely. I am truly impressed with your reporting. Who's your editor? Bozo the clown? I loved the earlier wisecrack about the editor making poot sounds with his hands. LOL! I was there. There were well more than 1000 and you can bank on it. Well behaved, caring Americans, not Tea Baggers, thank you very much. I have a screen shot of the original headline which I'm sending to many patriots across the country, along with the station's contact info. You'll be famous."

Hey, Corky, I am doing my part to pass this on! Another attendee has captured a PDF of the original story and has passed it on to Glenn Beck. I wrote the following comment:

KRQE: Ours is another household that will boycott both your television station and your sponsors. The original article has been saved as a screenshot and a pdf, and patriots like Corky and Joe have seen to it that patriots all over the United States will see it. The derogatory title was inexcusable and the juvenile reporting is unprofessional. This may have passed in Pleasantville, but it certainly will not in the age of the internet. If this article is an example of professional media, no wonder newspapers and TV stations are failing by the thousands. Patriots Unite! If our opponent is this stupid, we should win handily.

Of course, those who wish to destroy the Republic and replace it with some version of collectivist statism are not that stupid.

But the media is. They have to use a neologism, "misunderestimated" us.

This story will be told no matter how hard they try to insult it and suppress it.

Nevertheless, we must out the media bias and bad reporting wherever we see it.

And one final word to the media: Don't forget, we older folks are the ones that buy the things your advertisers are selling. And we're the generation from the draft-card burners of the 1960's.

Don't mess with the Gray Champions!

R3volution at the Town Hall Meetings (Don't Stop Yelling)

On Saturday I mentioned that I am reading Naomi Wolf's Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries. It is an interesting and frustrating experience. As I read through the middle of the book, I find myself in agreement with Wolf in many of her assertions, and with her core values, but at odds with her big picture. She does not clearly connect the increase in the size and power of the federal government with the decrease in the engagement of ordinary citizens with our government, and its increasing encroachment upon our ability to exercise the rights guaranteed us in the Bill of Rights. Thus she advocates direct democracy, whereas I want a return to federalism, in order to decrease the power of the federal government over our lives. I believe that direct democracy will only increase the erosion of our individual rights, for what is democracy except mob rule by the ballot box? I want to restore the Republic safeguarded to us by our founders; I do not believe that any majority can vote away the rights of individuals.


Nevertheless, one of the more exciting aspects of the middle of the book is that Wolf outlines core values and illustrates them with examples. I had cause to ponder one of them this morning, when I opened The Albuquerque Journal and read the Up-Front Headline:


"Health Care Debate Rx: Stop Yelling" (by Leslie Linthicum).


I have problems with this idea of opinion on the front page, but I am a stick-in-the-mud.
More to the point, Leslie is simply wrong about the yelling, as are all of those who are trying to shut down the real anger that citizens are feeling at their non-representing representatives. We have been shut out of the discussion for a long time, as those inside the beltway make decisions about what to do with OUR MONEY without reference to those who earned it and pay it out in taxes. This year, the average taxpayer worked until August 13 to pay the government. That means that the taxpayer works involuntarily for the government for more than half the year. There is going to come a point where it won't be worth it to work at all, and then what will the leeches in Washington do?


It is about the "yelling", though, that Linthicum is dead wrong. Citizens should be yelling, protesting and doing whatever it takes to get our supposed public servants to pay attention. In doing so, we are in the grand tradition that goes back to those first American Revolutionaries, and further, to England. Has Linthicum never watched a video of a meeting of the House of Commons? (And this one is rather tame. The parliamentarian hardly had to raise his voice to get order, for a little while).


In her book, Naomi Wolf points this out in her discussion of Core Value 2: We have a Duty to Rebel Continually Against Injustice and Oppression: Personal Risk in Defense of Liberty. Here she outlines the rude and disorderly protests of the colonists on their way to declaring independence, and she points out that the tradition continued after the revolution as well. About the Stamp Act Crisis and the Boston Tea Party she says:


"During the 1760's the colonists had engaged in dozens of mass protests and daring, even provocative crowd actions as part of the Stamp Act Crisis . . . crowds hung stamp distributors in effigy; staged mock funerals of stamp distributors; leveled to the ground the buildings that housed the stamps . . . and wreaked havoc in this way with the plans of the crown." (p. 106)


"The Boston Tea Party is usually taught to us as if it were an isolated incident--daring to be sure, but not part of years of a massive eruption of street protest exploding through the colonies . . .


. . . But in fact it was a culmination of dozens of outbursts, protests, and confrontational street theater that colonial people from all walks of life had learned to use as a powerful tool for speaking up against the oppression of the crown." (p.107)


Wolf then goes on to describe the stormy protests and debates over Jay's treaty with Britain in 1790, during which the people burned so many effigies of Secretary Jay, that he remarked that he could walk from one end of the colonies to another by their light alone. Eventually, the treaty was passed, but because of the protests, the debate was had in the full light of day, and the people's insistence that their voice be heard obviated any attempt at secret deals and kitchen cabinets.


Wolf's conclusions about rough, demanding and difficult protest are worth reading:


"These are the American people when they are in alignment with the ideal: while violence is never acceptable, Americans should and must be free to be angry, disruptive, outraged, loud, confrontational, and obnoxious in expressing their views--especially if their views are being trammeled or overridden in secret. [Like passing the stimulus in the middle of the night?]. They must be free to shout loud enough for their representatives to hear--and disruptive enough so that the president himself may fear public perception if the crisis they are provoking is not dealth with . . . If the people can't precipitate a crisis through protest, what voice do they actually have when their leaders make secret treaties, or wholly override their will, or act in ways entirely without consulting them? (p. 109; emphasis mine).


We've been good little do-be's for far too long.
It is past time to take back the First Amendment loudly, passionately, obstinately. We must reclaim the grand Patriot tradition.

The Big Lie

"Saying so don't make it so."

--Mark Twain

"A (member of the press) young man with years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of twice his age said suddenly, 'I know what I'd like to be:

I wish I could be a man who covers news!' "

--Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (empahsis in original).

NOTE: This post is specifically about the news media. I am not talking about talk radio, "news-lite" programs such as The View or Fox and Friends, nor Internet sources like the Huffington Post or World Net Daily.

It has been noticible for some time that newspapers and the network news have become increasingly irrelevant to people in their quest for real news in this country. The reason that is usually given is that the Internet has become more useful to people because it is available to them anytime, and they can search for information that targets their interests. One problem that is frequently brought up in the mainstream media is that the veracity of the information on the internet can be difficult to ascertain, and that much of the news that people view on the internet has not been "vetted" by professional journalists.

"You need us," the Fourth Estate claims. "Because we are professionals and we will tell you what is true."

Except when they don't. Except when what really happens does not fit into their predominantly east-coast understanding of what the people of this diverse country value and want. Except when reporting gets in the way of being opinion-shapers, vetters of presidential appointees, and those running for office. (For more on the media's extremely rude and virulent attacks on certain presidential candidates, see the film Media Malpractice). And this is, I believe, the main reason that many ordinary Americans find the so-called Fourth Estate increasingly irrelevant.

Consider the stunningly incompetent reporting of CNN "reporter" Susan Roesgen, who interrupted a man at the Chicago Tea Party who was discussing Lincoln, telling him (and her viewers) what to think: "Do you know that the 'state of Lincoln' gets 50 billion dollars . . ." She did not let the man finish, and she ended her confrontation with Tea Party goers by saying that they were all anti-government and anti-CNN. At the end, you hear the crowd chanting at her: "You are not a reporter." And this is true. She moved from reporting to confronting, from telling viewers what was happening, to telling them what to think about it. She ended that particular discussion by becoming a salesperson for the "stimulus" package.

(For a better, if not "professional" look at the Chicago Tea Party, see The Chicago Tea Party that Susan Roesgen Missed, by the guy who wants her job).

It was clear that Ms. Roesgen went to Chicago with an agenda, and that agenda was not to report on what was actually happening (good, bad and ugly), but rather to obtain footage for a particular point of view: that the Tea Parties were "anti-government and anti-CNN." Whether this was her own agenda or that of her bosses, she is nevertheless responsible for her unethical behavior. She was not reporting on news, she was, rather, creating propaganda.

This is incompetent reporting.

It was also clear that Ms. Roesgen went to Chicago, the largest city in the "Land of Lincoln" in complete ignorance of that great president's economic views. Any Illiniois school child could have educated her about this, since she failed to prepare herself for her day's work. This is stunningly incompetent.

FYI Ms. Roesgen: The man you interviewed--the one whose child was "already in debt"--was refering to this statement made by Abraham Lincoln:

"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." Reply to New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association (March 21, 1864).

It took this former Illiniois schoolgirl exactly 40 seconds to pull it up on the Internet. I simply googled the italicized phrase along with the word "Lincoln." Susan, the next time you go to Chicago, and you are dealing with real people--those who can both walk and chew gum at the same time (unlike the Pols) and who (unlike the Pols), do not tell you exactly what you want to hear--be sure to do your homework.

I suppose one could argue that neither CNN nor Fox are real news outlets because they have to foment controversy in order to produce 24 hours of nonstop "news" every day. So, should we consider "responsible" newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times? In an editorial in that paper, Marc Cooper had already labeled the Tea Parties this way: "Anti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Parties steeped in insanity." That was before the Tea Parties had even happened.

And then there's my hometown paper, The Albuquerque Journal. I tend to be partial to it because it is independent and published right here. But they have gotten a new breed of reporters lately, ones who are so lazy that they go out to an event for 15 minutes, quote liberally from the AP, and believe they have a story. Thus they told us that "a few thousand" attended the Albuquerque Tea Party, even though there were official numbers that could have been obtained with one phone call to the police. From the AP, they got the idea that all of these Tea Parties were anti-Obama rallies promoted by Dick Army. With a few phone calls and some additional leg work (there's that word again, the one that the lazy reporters avoid), the reporters could have interviewed the five housewives who organized the Tea Party here, and they could have found out that none of them had even talked to Senator Army, and that all funding was local and private, and all the work was done by volunteers.

Instead the Journal has piled on to the Big Lie: The Tea Parties were partisan, about taxes, and poorly attended. And therefore not very important. In fact, they were so unimportant that the President of the United States had a press release put out saying that he didn't know about them. (Consider the logic of that!) Because according to Janet Napolitano of DHS, Tea Party goers are all insane nutjobs that are a threat to the United States. Right up there with war veterans and those of us who understand that the Constitution limits the powers of the Federal government in the 9th and 10th amendments.

This is the strategy of the Big Lie. It is a propaganda technique first defined in Nazi Germany, but it has been in use since Pericles. It means to keep repeating an untruth over and over again, baldly, and without evidence, until it is believed by most people.

President Bush used it to sell the War in Iraq. (We have evidence of weapons of mass destruction . . .)

The press used it to smear Sarah Palin during the last election. (That baby isn't hers. It was conceived by space aliens and implanted . . .).

The President is using it to sell his budget. (Yes, he's going to cut the deficit by cutting entitlements AND provide us all with a chicken in every pot and universal health care ).

Congress used it to sell the Patriot Act and now the so-called Stimulus Bill. (Gee, I didn't know that was in the bill 'cause, well, it was too long to read).

The Press is using the Big Lie now to try to convince us that our concerns are ridiculous and that they "know better" what is good for us. They know more than we do. They are from New York City.

We have gotten to the point where the Executive, both houses of Congress, and the so-called Fourth Estate lie to us with impunity. In fact, like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's 1984, I think they have lied so much that they actually believe it all.

And they wonder why the rest of us have begun to see them as increasingly irrelevant to our daily struggles with reality.

In the meantime, the circulation of The Albuquerque Journal is about to be decreased by at least one household. Why should I pay those reporters good money to tell me what to think about events they were too lazy to actually cover?