Good morning Boys and Girls.

So, nice little scare this week here at tBlog, huh?

Don't think there's anything to worry about. Heck, this was nothing compared to some of outages we used to go through a few years ago on a fairly regular basis. (Reminds me of the Burt Lancaster line from the movie "Atlantic City", as he tries to impress a youngster as they walk along the boardwalk together. "You should have see the Atlantic Ocean in my day...")

So, Last night I watched a couple of hours of coverage from some of these "TEA Parties" held around the country yesterday; this after hearing about how great the one here in Grand Rapids was going to be first thing yesterday morning from one of the guys I do a little work for. He's a guy who fancies himself a "real" American, unlike, for instance - according to him - that Kenyan Muslim Socialist, President Obama. He assured me he was taking his kids and grandkids so they could be a part of history, and encouraged me to come too. (This is the start of the second American Revolution, says he.)

Whenever this guy goes into one of his predictable rants, I just smile and nod, try to keep my mouth shut and then get myself out of his office as soon as I can.

I noticed the videos from all the "TEA party" protests I saw yesterday showed that the people involved were almost all of middle aged white people, along with the kids they dragged with them, and a few teenagers who seemed entirely clueless. Over the course of the evening's coverage, I read at least a hundred protest signs - probably far more - not one of which made any sense to me. There were the expected variations on "America is a Christian country" signs - which, apart from being non-sequitors, considering the supposed purpose of these protests, were, in every case, held by people with honest-to-God bitter hateful looks on their faces. Then there were dozens of variations on the "America is becoming a Socialist country." Whatever, I thought. It's so far from true it's laughable, but the subtleties would be lost on these simpletons anyway... Oy. But, the ones that really got me were the signs comparing Obama to Hitler, of which I saw at least a dozen. My brow furrowed and I tried to stretch my mind around this particular claim, and I looked at a cardboard cutout atop a wooden pole of Adolph Hitler's body with Barrack Obama's face glued over Adolph's face, and with the trademark Hitler mustache drawn in over President Obama's upper lip. I can't remember the caption - it was too absurd to bother trying to make sense of anyway, and there were lots of variations on that theme too - (ya know, sometimes these clever people portrayed Obama as Osama bin Laden instead of Hitler.)

So, let's see. The Boston Tea party was a protest against a foreign government imposing taxes on us. We had no say. Seems reasonable. This protest was about the fact that our Government, which we elect, is supposedly not responding to our frustration with the fact we pay taxes to... us. Except, of course, these people think that THEY'RE the only "real" Americans.

Oh. Now I get it.


Be good to everyone.