The Freedom Bulletin

Photo by Paul Weiskel

There has been something of a brouhaha, in the Boston area at least, about the above picture, showing a confrontation between a police officer and an Occupy Boston member who was protesting against the Massachusetts Tea Party Coalition‘s tax day rally. For a cop to grab someone by the neck seems extreme at first. But when you think about what the protesters were doing, it actually doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

There is a difference between voicing your views and preventing anyone who disagrees with you from voicing theirs. I am all for protesting – holding up signs, chanting, circulating petitions, holding sit-ins, etc. But I am not in favor of protests that are so disruptive that they effectively take away the freedom of speech of the people they are protesting. I admit that I did not attend this year’s Tea Party rally. And I admit that this is a fine distinction. But judging by photos, videos, and news reports, I think the anti-tea-party protesters were on the wrong side of it. They certainly were last year, when they pushed their way between the audience and the stage and held up signs and banners to deliberately block our view of the speakers that we had gathered to watch. Contrast this with a protest that I was a part of, against President Obama’s visit to Northeastern University to support Martha Coakley’s senate campaign in 2010. We lined the streets, held up signs, chanted, and marched around, but we did not, for example, burst into the hall where Obama was speaking, drown out his words, or hold up signs blocking his face.

This is not just about keeping order, it is about protecting the freedom of speech of minorities against a majority who would drown them out. And in Boston, conservatives are certainly a minority. It is heartening that the Boston Police acted to protect the rights of Tea Party activists to hold a rally in a political climate where their views are unpopular among the majority of people.

Tonight’s Tea Party debate was an exciting one. The candidates seemed to treat Texas Governor Rick Perry as the frontrunner, and like at the last debate, they hammered him about his 2007 executive order requiring all sixth-grade girls in his state to be vaccinated against HPV.

Moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Perry point blank if that order was a mistake. He replied, “It was, and indeed, if I had it to do over again I would have done it differently. I would have gone to the legislature and worked with them.” But then he defended his decision, saying that he was just trying to prevent cancer and that, “I am always going to err on the side of life.” So Perry’s position on mandatory HPV vaccination seems to be that it is wrong to implement such a policy through an executive order, but it’s perfectly fine if the legislature does it.

Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was not happy about this. ”To have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong,” she said. “That should never be done. It’s a violation of a liberty interest.” Later she also brought up Perry’s ties to Merck, the company that produces the vaccine. Perry’s former chief of staff was a lobbyist at the company, and it donated to Perry’s re-election campaign.

Former senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) wasn’t too happy about Perry’s stance either. “I believe your policy is wrong,” he said. ”This is big government run amok. It is bad policy and it should not have been done… Let them opt-in but do not force them to have the inoculation.”

Thank you Wolf, thank you Bachmann, and thank you Santorum!

Some of my other favorite pro-liberty quotes from the debate:

“People are tired of spending money we don’t have on programs we don’t want.” ~ Rick Perry

“They say, ‘You don’t know how Washington works.’ Yes, I do. It doesn’t.” ~ Herman Cain

“An executive order should never be used to legislate.” ~ Ron Paul (on whether he would issue executive orders as president)

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do… That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks… We should actually legalize alternative healthcare. We should allow people to practice what they want.” ~ Ron Paul (on what a person who decides not to purchase health insurance should do if he gets sick and incurs large medical expenses)

“No state has a constitutional right [to force a person] as a condition of citizenship, to buy a product against their will… It’s unconstitutional, whether it’s the state government or whether it’s the federal government.” ~ Michele Bachmann

“This whole ‘Muslim world is attacking us because we are free and prosperous,’ it is just not true… We’re under a grave threat because we occupy so many countries.” ~ Ron Paul (he got booed for this remark but he handled it well, and it makes sense to me)

“There’s no authority in the constitution to be the policeman of the world.” ~ Ron Paul

At a private meeting today, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) reportedly said, referring to the Tea Party movement, “We have negotiated with terrorists. This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” Vice President Joe Biden allegedly agreed with him.

Expressing a slightly different but similar sentiment, the New York Times laments that the debt ceiling compromise “demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion.” Robert Kuttner complains, in a long-winded editorial at the Huffington Post, about the “extortionate terms of the far-right,” the ”politics of extortion by the Tea Party,” and the “perversity” of their policies. In an interview on CNN, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin concurred, saying, ”it’s political extortion.”

Terrorism, extortion, and perversity are awfully strong words to describe a movement that believes in a smaller government that spends less and provides fewer services. After all, our nation is over $14 trillion in debt. Even the most conservative proposals that have been put forth for increasing the debt ceiling merely involve cutting the deficit, which means that the debt will continue to get bigger, only more slowly than before. In order to actually shrink the national debt, we will need to have surpluses each year, and that will require adopting more radical proposals than the one that just passed the House. And when considering whether to create these surpluses by raising taxes or cutting spending, its is important to consider that the social programs that Democrats support so strongly are based upon the idea of giving free things to people who (usually) did nothing to earn them while forcibly taking money from people who (usually) earned it. In my opinion, the policies favored by the Tea Party movement are a good start toward solving America’s financial woes. I can think of a few words for the Tea Party: rational, reasonable, just, brave, and correct.

August 2 update: And the Tea Party bashing continues. Joe Nocera at the NY Times takes the cake, claiming that the Tea Party has “waged jihad on the American people.” This letter to the editor in the Baltimore Sun calls them “thugs.”

I managed to create the above video of Friday’s Boston Tea Party. Thanks to the counter-protesters, I wasn’t able to get all of the speeches, and the ones I did get aren’t in as good quality as I had hoped for. I hope you enjoy it anyway!

Today I attended the 3rd annual Boston Tea Party at Boston Common. The awesome (as usual) event featured music, speeches, and booths to celebrate fiscal conservatism and individual liberty. The speakers included radio hosts Michael Graham, Todd Feinberg, and Jeff Katz, as well as guest of honor Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota. Hundreds of pro-liberty people of all sorts were in attendance.

Unfortunately, however, about a dozen counter-protesters showed up, too. And they decided to push to the front of the crowd, yell into megaphones that we were sexist, racist, and anti-gay and should get out of Boston, and worst of all, hold up a huge banner and signs so that almost nobody could see, photograph, or record any of the speeches. I have no problem with people demonstrating and gaining attention for their views, no matter what those views may be. But to physically impede people from seeing, enjoying, or participating meaningfully in an event is not acceptable. How dare they tell us to get out when they are the ones blocking our view of our own rally?

As a result of their rude, inconsiderate, unethical, mean-spirited, and heartless actions, I (along with countless other people) was unable to take very good pictures or videos of this once-a-year event that I had been looking forward to for months. Although I was unable to take as many as I would have liked, below are some pictures that I managed to take:

Late Friday night, barely averting a government shutdown, President Barack Obama, Speaker John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reached a compromise budget deal which included $38.5 million in cuts. While this is not as much as the $62 million that Tea Party members pushed for, or the $100 billion that Speaker Boehner mentioned after the 2010 election, it is a victory for small government.

The good things about the budget:

• The $32 billion in cuts that Boehner originally proposed were called “extreme” and “draconian,” yet Democrats ended up agreeing to even more
• The budget bill requires audits of many of Obama’s programs, denies additional spending on the IRS, and cuts $2 billion from the Department of Defense
• It is the largest spending cut in American history

The bad things about the budget:

• It does not cut Pell Grants, medical research, the Race to the Top initiative, PBS, or NPR
• It only slightly cuts foreign aid
• $18 billion of the cuts come from programs whose budgets “run largely on autopilot” and might not actually be spent anyway
• The debate about cutting funding to Planned Parenthood still has to be resolved

Considering our national debt of $14 trillion, the budget deal might be a baby step toward solving America’s money woes and restoring freedom and justice, but baby steps are better than nothing. Instead of our leaders arguing about how much additional spending to add, they are arguing about how much to cut. Now that is an encouraging change.

Yesterday, Congressman Mike Capuano (D-MA) told a union rally…

“Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.”

Just last month, he said in an interview about the shooting in Tucson, AZ that left six dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords seriously wounded…

“Many of us were afraid for a long time that something like this would happen, with the level or the tone of the discourse over the last several years. It’s gotten violent and personal.”

And he said in another interview…

“Everybody knows the last couple of years there’s been an intentional increase in the degree of heat in political discourse. If nothing else good comes out of this, I’m hoping it causes people to reconsider how they deal with things.”

So much for toning down the rhetoric. So much for the Tea Party and Sarah Palin being responsible for the heated political climate.