A Tea Party Rally for Change in SETX?

While on our trip to Turkey my father (State Representative Joe Deshotel) received an invitation to speak Monday, September 12th at a Tea Party rally billed as a “‘Return to Community-Making a Difference,’ a Southeast Texas TEA Party rally to remember 9-11 and refocus attention on the local community honoring 9/11”.  The invitation was from former Jefferson County Republican Party Chair and current Tax-Assessor collector Shane Howard. I happen to have a personal relationship with Shane as I served myself as Executive Director of the Jefferson County Democratic Party and we debated weekly on Fox 4.

That First Step – Citizens REunited

I’ve been wanting to restart my blog again for a while now. Many factors have led to my procrastination not excluding the hours berating pundits on cable news.

I think my point of view is fair and balanced but not just because I say it is. I do my best to site my sources but the biggest obstacle in writing more is the research involved. I will try and keep my posts focused and short.

My main motivation for writing is the void of reasonable voices in popular media. I hear them among friends and in public so I know they are out there. I see ideological bubbles forming even though American’s have more access to information than any other point in history. Today our ability to seek out content that merely reinforces our own prejudices and preconceived notions is disturbing. Its a trend that goes past our instincts to group ourselves but is in fact part of the algorithms used by Google and Facebook to “suggest” content to you. Ultimately this limits choice (aka freedom) and is largely unrepresentative of the diversity of ideas in the market place.

I think buzz words are important and as long as Democrats, liberals, progressives et. al. choose policy explanations over soundbites, Republicans’ message will continue to be effective. As a friend said, if we are explaining we are losing. We must find a constructive way to fight the scorched earth policy towards institutions that represent human progress and personify “we the people”. Democrats will never win as the “anti-government” party and until they remind folks of what good government has done you can bet it all on red.

I’m proud of the fact that I frequently come to agreeable solutions with conservatives because we are generally given false choices that force us to take opposing sides on non-issues.  Non-compromising liberals and conservatives feed the gridlock and prevent government from actually being an aset to the people.

Our challenge now is to define the role of government and cut out the rest. The real tyrant we face is corporate money in our elections. Corporations are not immoral but they are amoral and do not represent real human interest. The government has been a defenseless whipping boy in our recent political discussions regarding “class warfare”.

The Supreme Court was supremely wrong in Citizens United when they decided to treat companies like people. Just know when you hear its beneficiaries say “private sector” they really mean “big business” and when they say “government” they really mean “the people”. So start listening closely because this is an all out battle for the hearts, minds and the soul of our nation.