THE DAILY BLADE: The Sleeping Giant Has Been Awakened
According to various estimates, between 70,000 and 450,000 people attended the 9/12 March on Washington in what The Washington Times described as “a muscular political demonstration against big government spending, budget deficits, taxes and President Obama's sweeping health care plan.”
Without putting an estimate on crowd size, The New York Times reported that “[a] sea of protesters filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office … with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.”
As with the Tea Party rallies on April 15th, most of the signs carried by parents and their children were hand-lettered, noted The Washington Post. Slogans on posters, banners and T-shirts included:
† Bury Obama Care With Kennedy
† Don’t Tax Me, Bro!
† From Tiny Acorns, Mighty Socialists Grow
† Grandma’s Not Shovel-Ready
† I'm Not Your ATM
† King George Didn't Listen Either!
† Terrorists Won't Destroy America, Congress Will!
† The Constitution: The Other Document They Never Read
† We Came Unarmed (This Time)
† We Need Problem Solvers – We Got Power-Grabbers
The New York Times also acknowledged that this was a bona fide grassroots protest (“Many came on their own and were not part of an organization or group”). And Nancy (“I think they're Astroturf”) Pelosi should take note of this article by The New Republic reporter-researcher Lydia Depillis:
One of the 9/12 Project organizers’ primary claims is that their participants are political neophytes, not seasoned activists. That, at least, appears to be true: Almost everyone I talked to was doing this for the first time, and most were tremendously excited. Donna Cohen, a Pennsylvanian with short red hair, was one exception; she had marched against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but later apologized to the troops. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you were right,’” she told me. “But this is as much fun as I’ve had since the ‘60s!”
The Washington Times adds that “[m]ost of the speakers were local grass-roots tea party activists like coal miner Greg Harrell, who said that lawmakers who ignored the tea party movement's appeals for smaller, more limited government would be thrown out of office by the voters.”
Byron York, chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner captured the mood of the protesters:
[I]n dozens of interviews with marchers, the picture that emerged was of people who believe things are racing out of control along a whole range of fronts in Washington, and that no one is representing their interests. Obama and the Democrats in Congress, they believe, are simply pushing too hard on too many things. It's unlikely that there would have been a rally this size just about the stimulus, or just about cap-and-trade, or just about the takeovers of the auto companies, or even health care. But put them all together, and there is an enormous and growing fear that Obama and his allies are rushing to wreck the system. …
Some of the protesters had traveled farther than just the distance between their home town and Washington. Dr. David Levine, a psychiatrist from Rockford, Illinois, was Ramsey Clark's volunteer press secretary when the ultra-liberal former U.S. attorney general ran for the Senate from New York in 1976. Now, Levine, wearing a faded NEWT GINGRICH 2008 t-shirt, was on the streets of Washington in a crowd of conservatives. What accounted for the change? "It started when liberals just stopped making sense to me," Levine said. "I was listening to NPR, and nothing was making sense. So I started reading more and more conservative things, and here I am." …
No one I met expressed hatred for the president. A few had voted for him, and others … said they were deeply moved when he was elected. Many others opposed him all along. But now, the predominant mood is deep distrust. They believe Obama will raise their taxes, that he will blow up the health care system, that he will weaken America's defenses.
And they wonder who he is as a person. "The company you keep tells a lot about who you are," says Tres Berden, a truck driver from Newark, New Jersey. "With all of those associations of his, from Rev. Wright to Van Jones - you don't know those kind of people without being one." Berden, one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, is a Democrat who now considers himself a libertarian. He voted for Obama, but quickly became disillusioned. "He isn't the person he sold us," Berden says.
Perhaps President Barack Hussein Obama could not, in fact, hear the crowd as he flew over the scene aboard Marine One on his way to a carefully stage-managed rally in support of healthcare “reform” in Minnesota, but he surely did see the multitudes.
Afghan Enemy Combatants Have More Rights Than Afghan Women Do
The Washington Post reports that “[h]undreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week”:
The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration. …
Under the new rules, each detainee will be assigned a U.S. military official, not a lawyer, to represent his interests and examine evidence against him. In proceedings before a board composed of military officers, detainees will have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is "reasonably available," the official said. …
Most Bagram detainees are Afghans, considered battlefield prisoners taken in a war zone. An unspecified number, said to be fewer than 30, are non-Afghans, many of them captured in other countries.
Thanks to a law signed by President Hamid Karzai in the run-up to the tainted election, Afghan terrorists and enemy combatants now have more rights than Afghan women, who must remain in indefinite detention in their own homes until a husband or father gives them permission to leave (sixth item). Needless to say, these women are powerless under Sharia law to question their imprisonment, and cannot fight for their habeas corpus rights in any U.S. civilian or military court.
In Memoriam
Patrick Swayze, August 18, 1952 - September 14, 2009
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