Hello, my name is Barb and I've been a fan of Arlo and his music for years. I just found this site last week and have been reading all everyone has had to say - but what actually got me to register and post something was Arlo's announcement entitled "2 Cups Of Coffee or My 2 Cents". I see that I just missed out on being able to add my 2 Cents, so I though I'd add them here:

I’m a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are . Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you’re willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me?
Well, these are briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:

One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I’m not a racist. This isn’t to be confused with legal immigration.

Two, the TARP bill, I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you no, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.

Three: Czars, I want the circumvention of our checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution and honor it.

Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over. There is more to say.

Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision. Don’t you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night and then go on break. Slow down!

Six, growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to take care of with your real obligations. Why don’t you start there.

Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes. Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census over with our taxpayer money. I don’t trust them with our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.

Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person. Why do you want me to hate my employers? Why — what do you have against shareholders making a profit?

Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.

Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we’ll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid? We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let’s have it. Let’s say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please try — please stop manipulating and trying to appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now.
Take a breath. Listen to the people. Let’s just slow down and get some input from some nonpoliticians on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I’m busy. I’m busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.

I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should t rust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all of the recent spending.

From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop.. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington . Our president often knows all the right buzzword is unsustainable. Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don’t want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we’re morons.

We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented. You think we’re so busy with our lives that we will never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work , pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone and we are now looking up at you. You have awakened us, the patriotic spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured.. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We have cancelled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn’t ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us when he will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don’t care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back.. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you. If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.

Barb B, Hello and welcome! If a super-majority of citizens took the effort to educate themselves about the issues you've described, as you obviously have, and then used "critical thinking" techniques to analyze and wade through them, as you have, instead of allowing the media and political rhetoric to implant opinions in them, restoring our country to one which embraces the founders' philosophy of a well-oiled government maintained by the essential checks and balances layed out in our constitution, we would not be engaged in many of the silly and petty arguements in which we now find ourselves. It is my dream that this could be so, but I see those of us who educate ourselves on the issues and don't take everything said on CNN or Fox or by our elected officials as gospel truth without a second thought as a minority. Your post is extremely insightful and in my opinion the goal which we should aspire toward, and I work everyday to do my part to help it come to fruition......I share your frustration......but in our country, based upon civil liberties (of course you know that the Bill of Rights is misnamed; it spells out our liberties, ones which our government cannot infringe upon; "civil rights" are another matter), how do we deny a large portion of our citizens the freedom to behave like stupid, ignorant idiots??? (I don't like referring to them as "sheep", or "sheeple", because sheep behave the way they do for a very specific reason, i.e., survival). Thanks for your post!!!

Some of the stuff we are NOW forced to do concerning the banking system rubs most of us thr wrong way, but is needed to correct prior mistakes and oversight(or lack thereof). The thing we NEED is to correct the system after we avert a further crisis. Ignoring that and basing opposition to some of the bailout and tarp concepts based on ideaology is just as wrong as the free market law of the jungle ideaology that created the mess in the first place. Pragmatism is often a bitter pill.People talk about learning from mistakes more than it seems to be practiced.Clean it up and FIX it.

And welcome Barb! btw , that was more than 2 cents, I think it was about a buck three eighty or so!

Let me put this here for your consideration.



It's seldom a one problem problem except for the problem where we fail to pull together and run to our own silos.

Hello Barb B! I didn't read your entire post, will later when I figure out how to use that STUPID disk I have at home to get my internet there, anyway I agree with what you've said. thank you thank you thank you and of course welcome

Welcome the site. I bet Arlo would love reading your comments...

Wow... Good stuff!!! Very well written, and in fact, I wish I could claim this as my own as it does a very good job of summarizing my position on things. Well, the bit about global warming could be left out, but otherwise, pretty much dead on!

Because you ask for all processes to grind to a halt because your team lost the last election is no reason to treat you like a moron. Moron's aren't that devious.

Sending a list of the Republican opposition talking points is not exactly thinking through the problems.



Are you willing to support a National ID program? Are you willing to increase the military budget to patrol the Canadian borders? Will you endure even more stringent check point procedures at the ports of entry including Puerto Rico?



Call your congressman and governor. Tell them to refuse the money. Then raise your local taxes to pay for services such as fire, police, emergency response, etc. There is no free lunch. As for bailing out Wall Street, I agree.



Are you still beating your children? Appointment of executives to run Federal programs is well within the constitutional powers for the executive branch. You're over the top.



Tell that to the overwhelming majority of environmental scientists who have been warning us for decades. Or just wait until ice melt is severe enough to explain to your grandchildren what that more you had to say was and why it didn't matter because in order not to feel like a moron, you acted like one. High school chemistry tells you all you actually need to know.



Good idea. I assume you have insurance. That said, try not to be one of the bots screaming at the congress without listening. We are the only advanced industrial nation without a decent public health care option. I think we may be as right about that as we were about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. The health care issue is being used cynically not to make those decisions, but simply to destroy credibility and it is being done with lies so pernicious they would be french farce if not so real. It's as disgusting a display as I've seen since Wallace was our Governor.



You do realize the South lost the Civil War, yes? These issues were settled in blood.



You might want to understand Community Development programs in general before you go after ACORN because you'll be going after HUD. Good luck with that one. Note that Congress and not the Executive Branch is in control there.



Is that what Bernie Madoff calls it? Do you enjoy being a sharecropper? See Warren Buffet.



Issue? Butt out of what?



I agree, but please give me time to sell the clunker first.



Good practices. Simply remember that you aren't allowed to choose the facts to suit the argument once the facts are on display.



It seems we just did that. It's called an election. A significant minority was unhappy with the results.

I hate to say it but a lot of that diatribe reads like a John Birch Society manifesto, a group most notable for the fact that it was composed mostly of the downwardly mobile. It might be time to take stock of what you are doing to improve the state of the nation instead of threatening. It is easy to join a party; it can be tough to live with its leadership's decisions. It is hard to become a citizen unless one is born to it and then it is too easy to take it for granted. Citizenship requires cooperation and compromise. Today 40 million citizens cannot afford health care. That's a problem we need to solve.

Thank you, Len.

The people are coming! The people are coming! The people are coming!

Man, I wish I had the pitchfork concession.


mikey

I wish I still had my Up With People songbook, Mikey.

At least I don't have to learn the words to Dylan songs in one evening although I think I'll learn "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" now that I have Arlo's version. He really has a touch for old jazz/blues in the 20s style. I wonder if he ever learned "Whispering".

I gotta check the dates for the GC in October and see if they are still solid before I start booking reservations. Unless this job goes kerplatz, it's time to take my God and wife and go visit the Dammed Yankee Hippies in Massachusetts.

Well said, well put, Len. I can't type fast so I would have still been at it! My favorites are the global warming debate being over (She's right there. There really is no debate on global warming because it's here, although a more accurate term would be global climate change) and slowing down on health care reform (I mean, it's only been 60 years! Let's not rush into anything tha might actually help people!).

By the way, are they employing immigrants to build "The Wall"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkAoosV ... re=related

I remember the John Birch Society. Way back in the 70's when I was a teenager they came to the private school I went to, to talk to us kids. They claimed they were good Christian people who wanted to talk to us about God. So I thought that's cool we get to hear about Jesus.

They come and instead of telling us about Jesus, they start on this what's wrong with youth today spiel. They start putting down young people saying they do nothing but sex & drugs. Put down hippies & folks protesting Nam, put down folks with long hair and put down rock music saying it was evil and the beats in it would make kids have sex. The kids didn't dig it of course. Finally one dude with long hair stood up & told them I thought you were supposed to be telling us about Jesus and not putting down people & rock music. He told them they were being judgmental instead of showing love & that not all young people were bad. A teacher fearing the John Birch folks might get upset, asked him to please don't speak out at them like that. You don't want to upset them when they came over here to tell you about Jesus. I don't remember Jesus ever being mentioned by them. Hope the whole group isn't like that, but that's how the Richmond ones were.

I have news for them, I have listened to rock & roll music for many many years and have not been corrupted. It did not make me have sex, heck I was a virgin when I married Mike. I don't drink or do drugs and go to church every Sunday. So the John Birch Society was wrong lol. Oh yeah, I go to see certain folks with long hair in concert. And yes there are Republicans with Long hair <g>. Anyway the mention of the John Birch Society reminded me of that.

If you can find a copy, the John Birch Society scree was a book titled "None Dare Call It Treason". This was my favorite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pG6taS9R1KM

The Chad Mitchell Trio at their best if a bit long in the tooth referentially.