I am sitting here listening to the rebroadcast of the 9/11 attack, hearing the agony in the voices of the witnesses and remembering just how I felt that morning as I was feeding my son breakfast in his high chair.
I hear the broadcasters say now, as I did then, how there was a horrible breakdown in intelligence. How our nation missed the warning signs.
I am not going to go back over all the recent warning signs we've seen over the past months about the threat to our President and the threat to anything that stands in the way of a small, but dangerous movement that seems to me, determined to bring another attack on our country.
Yesterday, standing with the teabaggers on their way to a march on Washington DC tomorrow, a man screamed out:
Kill Them! Get your guns out! Communist bastards!
He didn't know there was a reporter standing next to him.
Whoops. Nevermind.
I'll get right to the news. Then we'll have pictures and video.
As one local organizer of the event, Laureen Cummings of Old Forge, railed against Mr. Obama's health-care address, she asked, "Why would a president do this to the American people?"
"He's a tyrant," one woman shouted. "He's a communist," another wailed.
As Ms. Cummings suggested Mr. Obama's support of living wills amounted to allowing people to die rather than resuscitating them, Tom Zenker barked "Kill them!" and "Get our guns out" and "Communist bastards" while standing unknowingly next to a Times-Tribune reporter.
In an interview later, Mr. Zenker, 65, a certified public account from Scranton, said he doesn't want to kill anyone.
"You get passionate, that's all," he said.
Again, like with Rep. Joe Wilson here we see the mentality that you can just scream out whatever you want where ever you want at whomever you want just because you get passionate. In the past two days I've seen this bullshit twice - to excuse some pretty serious CRIMES
"This evening I let my emotions get the best of me," he said in a statement.
How long until someone takes a shot at our President or blows up a building in Rockefeller Center because he or she just "got passionate" or let their emotions get the best of them? This is bullshit.
Can't some Constitutional law expert weigh in on this? I could use some help to understand why it is okay to threaten and incite violence like this.
Last week, I participated in a public reading of HR 3200 in a nearby city. The reading took nearly 12 hours, and it was a peaceful, proud day for those who read, and those who listened. We got good, positive media attention.
I brought home a Health Insurance Reform yard sign for my yard and proudly stuck it in the ground. A few days later I discovered my sign was stolen and I had dog crap literally smeared all over my garage door.
It was sickening. I did contact the police chief in my small town, who declined to make a report, but told me to get a hose on it.
At the teabagger rally yesterday, I saw the chief's best friend walking down the sidewalk, all dressed up in teabag.
It was even more sickening.
I put another sign out. But I feel a little like a sitting duck. This is small terrorism, but terrorism just the same. I am now living in fear that next time will be worse.
But for now, let's get to yesterday's pictures. They might get our minds off how dangerous this is for a while...
Here's one of the first signs I saw. Ha. Ha. I get it. Exodus 2013. I get it. Pretty witty.
This sign caught my eye. Glad he isn't my son's grandpa.
You can imagine the comments evoked by this sign. More on spanking later.
Yea. Yea. We got it.
This guy had two signs. One of them was worth a closeup. I would have just taken a photo of the sign, but I liked having his face too.
But here's the closeup...hmmm. Wonder who the parasitic creatures are?
Isn't that what a psychopath does to be able to hurt, torture and kill his victims? I think they call it de-humanizing. Yea, that's it. Make them less than human, that makes it easier to abuse them.
And holy crap. I was just about to put a metal roof on my house. I knew these guys looked wingy. One commercial I saw by these guys was of a man being pretty pretty abusive to his wife, asking the company to take his wife as a downpayment. (I guess wives are still property in wingnutland.)
This company is part of the FOX Home Improvement (but ruin the country) Network. Oh, and they do jokes too, but I'm not even going to link. I can imagine what kind of jokes are there.
And I had the distinct pleasure of watching a gentleman writing out his sign. The teabaggers were all gathered around, helping him to spell. Yea, who needs to know how to spell words correctly on a teabag sign. No one can read them anyway. (I almost feel bad for this old guy, he was probably a really nice man before he started watching FOX.)
And Kossacks, you won't like these buttons. Those big meanies.
And I had no idea that once healthcare is reformed, the government will own your organs, and will harvest them from you when you are alive...Yikes!
I've seen this group again and again at the town halls, and now again at the tea party. Watch the video where the woman on the left from the parent group talks herself into a box and the woman on the right, well, is just a complete loon.
The papers in the video are from a group called "Parental Rights" and as a believer in Alice Miller's
theories about the harm done to children for their own good - I think the group is a subject for a diary in itself. they are fighting the evil forces that would say parents would no longer be able to administer "reasonable spankings" to their children.
We can define "reasonable" in that diary.
For now, as long as this diary is full of pictures and videos, I got one yesterday that made me smile after a long day of abuse.
But now that we've had our fun, let's get back to the serious nature of what is going on here. I just came across an article in The Nation, of all places, that everyone here should probably read today.
****UPDATE: Get your Healthcare for America Now yard signs here