Medicaid Petition
We need as many signatures as possible on a petition to transfer the cost of Medicaid from the counties to the State, who buries us under impossible mandates, ASAP.
We have created an on-line petition here.
Please share it with EVERYONE, not just your fellow Reformers!! Your one signature is appreciated, but what is really needed, is for you to strap your boots on, and email it to as many New Yorkers as you can. The deadline is February 23rd.
The petition has been updated with a note about the Opt-Out Plan, and a link to NYSAC’s explanation, who is the originator of the petition.
There are only 82 signatures on it as of now — but I think it’s because people are not sharing it, or they’ve stopped. On the petition itself, it allows you to really easily share it on Facebook — but it caps you at about a dozen. Then you can do it again the next day, and every day thereafter. We Got People! ..around the State — let’s put a push on!
If you’re really feeling energetic, you can print up hard copies and take them to work, or do as Ellie did and get 50 signatures by standing in the Mall! You can download it here. Please gather as many as you can, from anywhere in the State, and get them to Ellie Corcoran by February 23rd. Contact her for her mailing address at ecorcoran1@roadrunner.com.
Thank you!!
Without you, the status quo reigns
A Message from Rus Thompson:
There comes a time when all of us have to take a stand and the time is now. For a couple years now, we have been talking about the Elections of 2012, how finally we will have our chance to influence the political process and get our candidate, not the “party” candidate to run for President. Well the Party, the status quo, the political elite are pushing Rino Romney on us and only with the TEA Party help will we be able to finally fend them off and get our candidate to go one- on- one with the absolute worst president this country has ever seen.
There are only 4 candidates left in the primary and it is time for New Yorkers to pick one and ride them to victory in the NY Primary that is being held April 24th so we have to build a infrastructure here, now in New York. During the Paladino for Governor campaign we made history. Never before had a grassroots movement totally destroyed the Party choice, never. We can do it when we put our heads together and work in unison as we did for the Republican Primary two years ago. You showed it can be done. We need to show them that we still have it here in NY.
Carl Paladino and I have decided to join the Newt campaign. We feel Newt is the only real chance we have to defeat Obama and the status quo in the republican hierarchy. We are asking that you join us and help us build the grassroots, TEA Party momentum to help Newt win here in New York State. If you’re with us, please respond and join us. If you are uncommitted, please consider getting behind Newt and join us. If you’re a leader of a TEA Party, ask your group… who supports who… and help us build an organization to defeat the status quo candidate Romney in NY.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks for all you’re doing. Without you, the status quo reigns.
Rus Thompson
Please wish Rus Thompson a Happy Birthday — His Bday is Saturday, February 11th!! You can do so on Facebook, or send him an email at rusthompson@roadrunner.com.
Have we been Rick Rolled?
Yipes!
Check this out, on YouTube. Rick Santorum suggesting the Tea Party has “re-fashioned” conservatism, and committing to vocally and publicly oppose it. True conservatives are just so few and far between.
Feel free to send Rick a note, to info@ricksantorum.com, as I did:
I thought I was most closely aligned with you, largely because of your socially conservative values — but for the life of me I can’t understand why you didn’t seem to fully grasp the gravity of the debt limit, and how essential it is to scale back — which, among other things, renders your fiscal conservatism null and void. And then to learn of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irxKyVmprBc&feature=player_embedded is just disappointing, and I have to wonder why you are asking for our help.
We are not “re-fashioning” conservatism. We are trying, with great difficulty, to restore it.
Has there been a retraction to this statement?
Signed,
XXXXX
P.S. I just now heard him on the radio giving deference to conservatives and Tea Party folks…
Judgment is upon us
The politicians who quoted Isaiah 9:10 after the 9/11 terror attacks probably meant it as encouragement. But the new book “The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future” explains that the verse actually is a statement of defiance to God — a nation essentially thumbing its nose at the Almighty… [In the aftermath of 9-11, Tom Daschle] thinks he’s offering comforting words to a grief-stricken people, but he is actually embracing the spiritually defiant and arrogant words of the children of Israel, proclaiming the ancient and ominous vow of the leaders of that nation. He doesn’t realize it, but he is actually inviting more judgment on the nation.
It might be of some significance that Daschle, one of the most powerful men in the nation when he spoke those words, later fell into disgrace – to the point where he couldn’t even serve in Barack Obama’s cabinet.”
Then on the third anniversary of 9-11, VP nominee John Edwards makes the same mistake. Read about it here,
at WND faith: Hottest Christian Book in the Land Gets Hotter
~Provided by Linda Weyand
The White House announced today that, instead of forcing religious employers to pay for birth control, it will force insurance companies to offer the drugs free of charge to all women, no matter where they work.
Read it here on LifeSiteNews:
Pro-life leaders slam WH ‘accommodation’ on birth control mandate
Coming up
Erie County Patriot Meeting
This Monday, February 13th, 6:30pm at the Grand Island Library
Part I & II: The Free Market Warrior Economic Literacy Seminar
March 6th and 7th, 6pm at the Gateway Building
Mark your calendar! ~Sponsored by the 9/12 Project Buffalo
TEANewYork
The Site
The Blog
The Meetup
Contact: Jul at infoteany@gmail.com
I’ll praise you in this storm
Casting Crowns
…as Your mercy falls
I raise my hands and praise the God who gives
And takes away…
TEANewYork 
I still don’t understand how the Moon guy is a conservative or if your big ideas are something other than cutting spending, programs, and agencies that you are a conservative. I thought we want the Federal gov’t to do less, respect the 10th Amendment, and butt out of state issues.
From Jim Robinson at FreeRepublic: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2835082/posts
..and here seems to be a pretty good assessment of “the Moon guy’s” platform:
http://www.decodedscience.com/newt-gingrich-economic-financial-business-strategy-proposals-decoded/5519
It looks like he plans to cut spending, programs and agencies. None of the candidates are as exciting and consistently honest as Ron Paul on domestic policy, but he seems to want to share his death wish on foreign policy.
My problem with Newt is demonstrated perfectly in his unemployment “insurance” plan. Most conservatives would agree that federal unemployment “insurance” is both unconstitutional and bad for the economy (and not even insurance). So does Speaker Gingrich say “We need to phase out federal unemployment insurance because it is unconstitutional and if you want unemployment insurance then you can buy private unemployment insurance or you can petition your state lawmakers because it is not a federal function.” Instead he wants to make it “better” by requiring job training.
Does Newt Gingrich think that as a young person I should be able to opt-out of Social Security, another unconstitutional and bankrupt program? No, but I can “put a portion of their Social Security contributions into personal Social Security savings accounts.”
Ok, well how is Speaker Gingrich going to save money? By slashing spending? No, “we can save $500 billion a year in spending through proven waste-cutting and value-enhancing techniques from the private sector, such as Lean Six Sigma… IBM’s Business of Government consultancy makes a more conservative estimate, suggesting that the federal government could save $100 billion annually by implementing commercial best practices.” Because we all know that the problem in the federal government isn’t that it’s spending too much money on too many unconstitutional things, no, it’s just not efficient enough and we need Speaker Gingrich at the helm to make a historically inefficient, wasteful, and counterproductive institution into the opposite of its nature.
As Frederic Bastiat wrote “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
Finally on the most important issue of the day, the institution that controls one half of every transaction, the Federal Reserve. Based on his plan he gets it that the Federal Reserve is a danger to the economy, that it cannot positively affect employment, part of its dual mandate, and that manipulated interest rates are bad for the economy. Unfortunately he is also short on solutions. He does not get to the heart of the matter. Do we need a public/private centralized entity controlling the supply of money? Is there an optimum supply of money? Well then how are we to escape the damaging effects of this entity? Does Speaker Gingrich allow for Americans to conduct commerce with the Constitutional money, gold and silver, free from capital gains and sales tax burdens? Unfortunately no. No transition to a free society is expressed.
And I know I’m not going to convince many people who are set in their ways on nation building, going against the founder’s advice of getting involved in entangling alliances, getting in bed with totalitarian regimes around the world, subsidzing the defense of Japan, Europe, South Korea, etc. and sanctions that just harm the citizens of countries while strengthening the hold of tyrants, but I don’t see how these methods are conservative or how they add to the security of our fellow citizens. If it is the role of the federal government to protect the life, liberty, and property of Americans then those foreign policy adventures that do not fall under those guidelines, or worse are counterproductive to those ends must be trimmed. Our Founders were not pacifists, but they did fear standing armies, the temptation for executive to start wars, and a chief executive with the power to start wars. I think we would do well to heed their warnings.
Well said, and most of us I imagine, couldn’t agree with you more. There are no perfect candidates, and Newt has his share of problems. I don’t know how we as a country developed the idea that entangling alliances was ever a good thing, unless we are abiding by a biblical mandate to bless Israel or “liberate the oppressed.” But those that favor such alliances are not conservative, at least not in the strict constitutionalist sense — though I think for some, the lines get blurred when considering rogue states with ICBM’s with a mission to annihilate whole civilizations. Self-preservation becomes a first line of defense, where unholy alliances and pre-emptive maneuvers that resemble imperialistic conquest become matters over which they are willing to compromise.
Well, it appears we haven’t been Rick roll’d after all. Santorum was actually saying he was opposed to the LIBERTARIAN influence in the conservative movement — and it’s the libertarian influence he would oppose. Considering the efforts of some libertarians here, who are all too willing to throw good conservative candidates under the bus in favor of liberals, simply to send a message to the Republican Party, it’s a point well made. Unfortunately, it was distorted in the ad for Newt.
Here is the transcript: http://www.therightscoop.com/definitive-proof-santorum-does-not-have-concerns-about-the-tea-party/
If Sen. Santorum is talking about the 14th Amendment well that’s one thing. But when the “when the local and state level are in cahoots with the injustice” and the injustice is outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Government per the Constitution (Article 1 Section 8), then as Bob Schultz was talking about you can’t just do whatever you want, you still have to follow the law (The Constitution) and pass an amendment if you want the Federal Government to have jurisdiction over an issue.
I think the other clear distinction that Sen. Santorum makes is that he sides more Alexander Hamilton than Thomas Jefferson. I always thought that conservatism was a ground up type thing, that sovereignty rests with the individual, they cede some of their authority to the state governments, and the state governments cede some of that authority by creating the Federal Government. Jefferson (and I thought conservatives) believed in decentralized power so that power was as close as possible to the individual and that the individual would be able to have as much influence over their government as possible.
I feel like Sen. Santorum would not be comfortable with 50 diverse states, but hey it seems many conservatives apparently do not agree with the principle of decentralized power. It seems like a no brainer for me. Which would you prefer: power concentrated in one city, DC, ruling over 300+ million people with no resistance to it’s powers other than petitioning a branch of that entity (the Supreme Court) and changing representation or 50 diverse governments which must compete with one another for tax revenues, that you have greater influence over just by simple math (1 out of 300 million vs. 1 out of 10 million), that has less power over you (again just by comparing size), and where you can “vote with your feet” a term popularized by none other than Ronald Reagan. If you want to find out more about the compact theory of the Union, the idea that the states created the Federal Government, see Tom Woods’ book Nullification. http://www.amazon.com/Nullification-Resist-Federal-Tyranny-Century/dp/1596981490/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329917759&sr=1-6
And please do not disregard the intellectual arguments of libertarians and classical liberals and the rich tradition of conservatives and libertarians working together based on guilt by association. There are still plenty of libertarians and classical liberals willing to act with civility and to cooperate in areas where conservatives are skeptical of government power.
I don’t know of any conservatives that don’t agree with the principle of decentralized power — unless they are CINO’s~! I think conservatives have long enjoyed a comfortable camaraderie with libertarians as the two ideologies are very closely aligned. I’ve often said libertarians are liberals with common sense, or conservatives without a deep abiding faith. But at least in our experience, there is a “wing” of libertarians who I affectionately refer to as the PLO or PLA — Progressive Libertarian Oligarchists/Anarchists, who made us their enemy, fought very hard against us (which unfortunately included fabricating outrageous lies as a means to a nebulous end), wasted millions of dollars in the process, then celebrated when the Obama clone won the race. I’m pretty sure those are the kinds of “libertarians” to whom Santorum refers.
If you read the site you posted it is pretty clear that Sen. Santorum is making an argument against decentralized power and for the Federal Government stepping in to right “injustices.” He makes no mention of the delegated powers and from what I’ve seen from him he doesn’t support the idea. Take his outlandish remark about the 10th Amendment and polygamy. (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ccZ0Qby1U) There is nothing I can find in the Constitution that outlaws polygamy in the states. When the states treat individuals differently under the law you can make an argument to invoke the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but the Constitution by it’s silence on marriage and the 10th Amendment reserves marriage law to the states. Now clearly Sen. Santorum is trying to frame the issue by coming up with an outlandish and absurd hypothetical, but the principle of limited powers remains the same no matter the ridiculousness of the hypothetical.
I cannot speak for the aforementioned libertarians, but even though I am young I have little patience for Republicans who spout great rhetoric, but have done little to challenge the corporate/welfare/warfare state and who are afraid to speak the truth because it will hurt their election chances. I care not to support Republicans who talk about limited government, but come up with government solutions when as Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” I do not want to get involved in personal disagreements and personal attacks are always out of bounds for anyone involved, but I assume that that “wing” will always disagree with some of the TEA party folks because of differences on foreign policy and does not want to see a Republican Party ceded over to the Neoconservatives. In general libertarians tend to oppose compromise, hence the saying “Organizing libertarians is like herding cats.”
Finally it saddens me that you would think “libertarians are liberals with common sense, or conservatives without a deep abiding faith” when there are nationally known libertarians such as Judge Andrew Napolitano who are devout Christians and who’s Christian worldview informs and essentially results in their libertarian beliefs. Google search for Christian libertarian https://www.google.com/search?q=christian+libertarian
My “deep abiding faith,” a Christian understanding of human nature, my belief in the Imago Dei, and the personal God, who “so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that WHOEVER (emphasis added) believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” inform my support for the concept of natural rights. That our rights come not from government, or granted by a tyrant, but stem from our humanity and are inalienable. That since God has granted us ownership (some people use the term stewardship, but I don’t want to get too far into the weeds) of ourselves, our lives, our talents, and by extension stewardship and responsibility over property when we mix our lives, labor, and talent with natural resources. Romans 13 lays out the role for government as punishing wrongdoers. Romans 13:4 (Amplified) “For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, [you should dread him and] be afraid, for he does not bear and wear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant to execute His wrath (punishment, vengeance) on the wrongdoer.”
Continued (Sorry if this results in multiple posts, but it did not post 30 minutes after submitting)
I am a great fan of Frederic Bastiat. He put it this way in his book “The Law”
“Life Is a Gift from God.
We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life — physical, intellectual, and moral life.
But life cannot maintain itself alone. The Creator of life has entrusted us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it. In order that we may accomplish this, He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By the application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. This process is necessary in order that life may run its appointed course.
Life, faculties, production–in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it.
Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.”
He goes on to describe what the law ought to be: “Since law necessarily requires the support of force, its lawful domain is only in the areas where the use of force is necessary. This is justice. Every individual has the right to use force for lawful self-defense. It is for this reason that the collective force—which is only the organized combination of the individual forces—may lawfully be used for the same purpose; and it cannot be used legitimately for any other purpose. Law is solely the organization of the individual right of self-defense which existed before law was formalized. Law is justice.”
You can find the full text at bastiat.org
Just to be clear, I was not saying ALL libertarians are liberals with common sense, or lacking deep faith. But most (not all) of the people that I know who call themselves libertarian fall into either of those two categories.* When considering those that don’t, I have to wonder what really distinguishes them from conservatives — unless of course, people identify conservatism with certain public figures that call themselves conservative, but are only either socially OR fiscally conservative — like Bush and Santorum. I think one has to be both to be considered “authentic.”
*By the same token, I know that some libertarians that have a deeper level of faith than a few “authentic” conservatives I know. So It was a general statement — I’ll be sure to preface it as such in the future~!
Words like liberal and conservative are so mushy and have so greatly changed over time that I tend not to use them. Plus they mean different things to different people. In the traditional sense conservative just means resistant to change and at one time meant supporting monarchies or constitutional monarchies. I’m personally socially conservative, but I don’t believe in using government force to change other people’s minds on issues not involving natural rights, so this separates me from the way the media and politicians tend to use the word conservative.
I can’t think of any ways in which conservatives favor govt force against natural rights — except maybe drug use, in some people’s view. Maybe you could provide some examples, Nick.
Well take the marriage issue. Conservatives tend to oppose same-sex marriage, when in my opinion the conservative position is to oppose government license, regulation, and control of marriage. Also to the extent that conservatives don’t understand that taxation is theft and support subsidies to certain industries, military adventurism, and favoritism in the tax system. It seems like you are more fiscally conservative or libertarian and have a better understanding of natural rights than most people who call themselves conservatives.