A Tea Party Manifesto

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[keep your powder dry]

The movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party. It is aiming for a hostile takeover.

On Feb. 9, 2009, Mary Rakovich, a recently laid-off automotive engineer, set out for a convention center in Fort Myers, Fla. with protest signs, a cooler of water and the courage of her convictions. She felt compelled to act, having grown increasingly alarmed at the explosion of earmarks, bailouts and government spending in the waning years of the Bush administration. President Barack Obama, joined by then-Republican Gov. Charlie Crist, was in town promoting his plan to spend a trillion dollars in borrowed money to "stimulate" the economy.

Mary didn't know it, but she was on the front lines of a grass-roots revolution that was brewing across the nation. More than 3,000 miles away, Keli Carender, a young Seattle school teacher and a member of a local comedy improv troupe, was feeling equally frustrated. She started to organize like-minded citizens. "Our nation's fiscal path is just not sustainable," she said. "You can't continue to spend money you don't have indefinitely."

Today the ranks of this citizen rebellion can be counted in the millions. The rebellion's name derives from the glorious rant of CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who in February 2009 called for a new "tea party" from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. By doing so he reminded all of us that America was founded on the revolutionary principle of citizen participation, citizen activism and the primacy of the individual over the government. That's the tea party ethos.

[Iron Munro]

Republicans and the Republican Party of today are a big part of the problem.

They are just another division of the BIG GOVERNMENT PARTY.

The basic difference between democrats and republicans is this:

Democrats want to take our money and give it to their frinds and relatives while republicans want to take our money and give it to their friends and relatives.

[radioone]

“The tea party movement has blossomed into a powerful social phenomenon because it is leaderless—not directed by any one mind, political party or parochial agenda.” Hopefully next January Boehner and McConnell get a Rude Awakening. The Dems “play for keeps”, and we need congressional leaders with some “FIRE in their belly”, and quit “reaching across the aisle”.

[neverdem]

Why any conservative wants to remain with the very party that has tossed Conservatives to the side for decades defies logic. It is the political version of battered wife syndrome.

IMHO, any talk of a third party that has the true conservatives defies common sense. The majority of the GOP is conservative. Big government pubbies and RINOs need to be eliminated in primaries. A conservative third party movement will hand the White House to the rats just like Perot did.