UPDATE: The headline of this post has been corrected since publication.

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The Tea Party community and its ethos of decentralized leadership and individual freedom is under an orchestrated attack from left-wing apparatchiks, elected Democrats, and their cheerleaders in the liberal media.  Having suffered through bomb scares, hostile abuse, death threats, and racial slurs, we are now called every epithet in Webster’s, from “phony,” to “astroturf,” “redneck,” “racist,” “domestic terrorist,” “mentally retarded,” “seditionist,” and “potential killer.”All this because we choose to petition our government in peaceful protest for a redress of policy grievances?  For practicing our First Amendment rights, they smear our moral character.  It’s as if they are afraid to debate their big government ideas on the merits.

Its time to draw a line in the sand. Its time to call out the bad actors, the crashers, and the haters.  We judge people as fellow individuals, based on the content of their character, and based on their individual actions. We will self-police our community and let openness, sunlight, and transparency shine the spotlight on individuals behaving badly. (more…)

Corrected: The federal enforcement agency involved in the incident with Mr. Yon at Sea-Tac was previously misidentified as the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).  The article has been updated to reflect that it was Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents who questioned and detained Mr. Yon.

Award winning war correspondent Michael Yon was detained and handcuffed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Yesterday by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.

Yon was returning to the United States from Hong Kong to visit family when CBP officials stopped him during a routine security checkpoint.  “Officials asked me what was in my bag—nothing wrong with this question,” Yon said in an interview with BigGovernment.com.  “I told them it was normal stuff, clothes and toothbrushes.”

At this point the Customs officials escorted Yon to a designated screening area where they examined the contents of his bag.  “Then they asked me how much money I make,” Yon said.  Yon suggested to the Customs officials that the question was inappropriate and unrelated to transportation security.  The award-winning blogger noted another CBP officer approached Yon: “he asked who do I work for.”  ”I did not answer the question which clearly was upsetting to the [CBP] officers.”

Yon was escorted to a room elsewhere in the airport where he said he remained silent during much of the questioning.   According to Yon, “they handcuffed me for failing to cooperate.  They said I was impeding their ability to do their job.”

(more…)

From the Wall Street Journal:

The conservative Internet entrepreneur on bringing down Acorn, Hollywood liberals, and embarrassing the mainstream media.

By JAMES TARANTO

Hollywood

Dressing up as a pimp and prostitute in order to seek Acorn’s help in starting a child sex-slavery ring wasn’t Andrew Breitbart’s idea. But without the Internet entrepreneur’s flair for publicity, the hidden-camera sting might not have produced such impressive results. Within days of his publishing the video exposé, government agencies were cutting ties with the left-wing advocacy and community-organizing group, Congress was voting to end its federal funding, and news organizations were rushing to catch up with a sensational story they had initially resisted or ignored.

James O’Keefe, the 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker who played the pimp in the Acorn meetings, came to Mr. Breitbart in early August with his videos. They showed Mr. O’Keefe and his putative partner in crime, 20-year-old Hannah Giles, asking Acorn counselors for advice on how to evade the authorities while setting up a business offering the sexual services of underage girls smuggled into the U.S. from El Salvador. It was a shocking and outlandish tale, but employees in at least five Acorn offices fell for it and offered to help. (more…)

Chairman Rocco Landesman
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),  Washington, D.C.

Dear Chairman Landesman:

With all this fuss on Big Hollywood.com, Big Government.com and elsewhere over the NEA’s government-funded forays into partisan political propaganda, I thought maybe we could help each other out. 

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Right now, you probably want to support some art that addresses vital current issues from a right-wing perspective in order to demonstrate your impartiality (ha ha!), and I just want to cash in your organization’s evident willingness to spend good tax money on any kind of nonsense that can be passed-off as “art” (ca-ching!)   

Well, I am uniquely suited to provide you with just what you’re looking for!  As a college student, I got a “B” in my Visual Arts 1 class for dressing up a juniper bush in one of my Hawaiian shirts to draw attention to man’s essential oneness with nature while providing a stinging critique of America’s consumerist culture.  Sure, my black-clad, Bauhaus-loving classmates protested that I was a fraud who was more concerned with collecting four easy credits than internalizing our professor’s commie insights about how expressionism equals imperialism, but hey – aren’t all great artists rebels?   Or, at least, weren’t they before last January 20th? (more…)

It was so much fun watching the ACORN people try and spin their way out of oblivion for the last couple of weeks.  After the first video was posted on Big Government.com they, of course, claimed it was an isolated incident and that the filmmakers were kicked out of numerous other ACORN offices.  When that proved to be false, they tried in vain to claim that the videos were faked and that their employees were the victims of CGI or something and not of their own stupidity and corruption.  When that didn’t work they claimed that the filmmakers, Andrew Breitbart and the entire Fox News network were racist.  Yawn.

NEA’s Yosi Sergant

Monday, we have the NEA under the microscope.  The Obama Administration was caught red-handed (is that “racist”?) funneling tax payer dollars into an official propaganda department.  I can’t wait to see what the excuse will be this time.

These people have mastered the art of defending the indefensible.

Let’s set aside the stupidity of this move.  Anyone familiar with the NEA knows that it pretty much exists to fund leftist propaganda disguised as art.  Officially coordinating it is a bit redundant. (more…)