The Secret Service was responding Tuesday night to an escalating protest that may have involved one or more smoke bombs being thrown over the White House fence.

An estimated 1,000 protesters have gathered. No arrests have been made, but authorities are on alert.

…

Organizers had touted the rally, known as Occupy Congress, as the largest national gathering of Occupy protesters to date and secured a permit that would have allowed up to 10,000 people to participate. By mid-afternoon, the protest appeared to have fallen far short of those goals.

On 9/12/2009, more than a million Tea Party supporters peacefully protested on the mall. They got virtually no media coverage, and every media outlet downplayed the numbers, including Fox News. One thousand OWS protesters show up at their biggest demo yet, and they attack the White House with smoke bombs?  They are going to get media coverage but it won’t be favorable. They are the creation of the hard-left. The President is one of them, based on his history and track-record. I don’t get it. I don’t think they get it, either. That’s when you jump the shark.

But I do know the Tea Party movement gets it. No more demos; lots more grass roots organizing. We ain’t jumping no shark!

What I do recognize is that Western civilization developed under Judeo-Christian principles and found its ultimate expression in the founding documents of the United States of America.

In Elizabethan times, atheism was punishable by death. In Muslim countries, it still is. I respect the Judeo-Christian tradition of tolerance and forbearance that lets me not believe. But I respect belief and I hate all those atheist asshats who try to banish our Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs from the public square. Atheists live because Christianity won its long battle against Islam. Had the hordes from Mecca breached the gates of Vienna, the world would have been plunged into true dark ages where science and rationality could not exist.

Christianity and Judaism allow the exploration of God’s universe. Islam does not. Atheists, be grateful.

The Healthcare Freedom bill was strongly supported by the  Tea Party Patriots and other liberty groups in Ohio. This was a direct challenge to Obamacare and it passed overwhelmingly. From a 2012 perspective, that is probably the more important result.

Justice Thomas’s two decades on the bench show the simple power of ideas over the pettiness of our politics. Media and academic elites have spent the last 20 years trying to marginalize him by drawing a portrait of a man stung by his confirmation, angry at his rejection by the civil rights community, and a blind follower of fellow conservatives. But Justice Thomas has broken through this partisan fog to convince the court to adopt many of his positions, and to become a beacon to the grass-roots movement to restrain government spending and reduce the size of the welfare state.

larence Thomas set the table for the tea party by making originalism fashionable again. Many appointees to the court enjoy its role as arbiter of society’s most divisive questions—race, abortion, religion, gay rights and national security—and show little desire to control their own power. Antonin Scalia, at best, thinks interpreting the Constitution based on its original meaning is “the lesser evil,” as he wrote in a 1989 law journal article, because it prevents judges from pursuing their own personal policies. Justice Thomas, however, thinks that the meaning of the Constitution held at its ratification binds the United States as a political community, and that decades of precedent must be scraped off the original Constitution like barnacles on a ship’s hull.

Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has a long and distinguished career as an academic economist and is one of the most widely read conservative columnists. He is a  proponent of free markets and opponent of government intervention in the market. He has a unique talent for explaining complex issues clearly and succinctly. In a recent column, he explained why rules against banks having multiple branches proved so disastrous during the last depression:

At one time, many state banking laws forbad a bank from having multiple branches. The goal was limited and local — namely, to prevent big, nationally known banks from setting up branches that many locally owned banks could not successfully compete against.

But, limited and local as such state banking laws were, their impact was both national and catastrophic, when thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The vast majority of the banks that failed were in states that had laws against branch banking.

Why? Because, when there is a single bank in a single place, the fate of both its depositors and its borrowers depends on what happens there. If it is a wheat-growing region, a drop in the price of wheat means people deposit less money in the bank at the same time when more borrowers are unable to repay their loans.

He notes that no Canadian banks failed during that period because they were not so restricted.

Economist Walter Williams is another popular conservative economist. He brings unique insights to economic and social issues. Here he is explaining why the government has no business requiring you to wear seat-belts. And here he is explaining the role of profits in a free market in terms almost anyone can understand:

The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it’s not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.

Free market capitalism is unforgiving. Producers please customers, in a cost-minimizing fashion, and make a profit, or they face losses or go bankrupt. It’s this market discipline that some businesses seek to avoid. That’s why they descend upon Washington calling for crony capitalism — government bailouts, subsidies and special privileges. They wish to reduce the power of consumers and stockholders, who hold little sympathy for blunders and will give them the ax on a moment’s notice.

When he asks “Who owns you?”, he asks a very important question. His answer is that you own yourself.

U.S. Congressman Tim Scott won his primary against Strom Thurmond’s son in a largely white district in South Carolina. He has become a hero to the Tea Party movement for his steadfast resistance to the growth of Big Government. Unlike many Republicans swept into office by Tea Party momentum in the 2010 mid-terms, Tim Scott stayed true to his principles.

Ken Blackwell’s resume is solidly conservative:

Ken Blackwell is on the board of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and is a Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council, as well as the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow for Public Policy at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio. He is a visiting fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the American Civil Rights Union. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union and Pastors Retreat Network. Mr. Blackwell is also the Chairman for the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, and a member of the National Rifle Association’s Public Affairs Committee. He is a columnist for the New York Sun, a contributing editor and columnist for the conservative news and opinion site Townhall.com, and a public affairs commentator for the Salem Radio Network.

In this column  Blackwell talks about America’s economic options in terms that any Tea Party Patriot would approve:

To be clear, there are two distinct paths:

We can go the route which President Obama favors, which includes an ever-increasing debt ceiling which will continue to crush economic activity.

Or, we can force government to “eat their peas” and use the force of law to handcuff legislators to policies which spur economic growth and job creation.

And the time to choose a path is today, before August 2, when the Federal government will officially run out of money to pay outstanding obligations.

According to Michael Tanner of CATO, the Treasury Department will collect roughly $203 billion in taxes during August, but have liabilities totaling more than $307 billion. You certainly could not run your family budget with this type of recklessness. And as America runs at lightning speed toward a Greek-like financial catastrophe, as our debt is on the verge of consuming our nation’s entire output.

Throughout American history, we have never failed to increase the debt ceiling. And as irresponsible politicians grow government for their own political gain, they have left us with a financial cancer which is metastasizing rapidly.

Therefore, conservatives must act boldly and proactively. Not only must we sit at the bargaining table and demand cuts, but there must be cuts in all levels of government which amount to an immediate reduction in the deficit. Anything less is unacceptable.

I could add Larry Elder, Star Parker, Deroy Murdock, Allen West to the list. I could also go back through American history and add Martin Luther King, Booker T Washington and Frederick Douglass.

Perhaps it is because the GOP establishment has become Democrat-lite that it fails to recognize its proud history as the anti-slavery party. It would do well to remember what Frederick Douglass said and remind the black community of what he said:

I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.

I suspect Douglass and his intellectual companions would find more in common with the Tea Party than the GOP establishment.

For some strange reason, the left cannot point to such a star roster.  Perhaps this article by Norman Kelley, entitled “The Curious Case of the Missing Black Liberal Thinkers”, provides some perspective. After looking at a list of the 50 most influential liberal thinkers/intellectuals, Kelley writes:

What struck me was the paucity of blacks on the list. As a matter of fact, if one reads the responses from others, the only blacks that did appear were Bob Herbert, Oprah Winfrey, and Cornel West.

Now, I really don’t consider Herbert or Winfrey “influential liberal thinkers.” I don’t find Herbert to be an engaging writer or thinker. Certainly not Winfrey; however, I do consider her to be a force for good.

West shoulder qualify as one, but I’ve always considered him a very slick con artist who gives the appearance of being intellectual; he performs as one, without offering anything of substance (see below).

If you have to come up with a black intellectual, West fits the caricature of what a “progressive” or “liberal” thinker is suppose to be.

Seems to me that Conservatives are color-blind and Liberals are quota-racists. Conservatives say all men are equal and Blacks can succeed on their merits. Liberals say Blacks need special help to succeed, and Asians need handicapping. I suspect none of the Black conservatives I’ve mentioned would agree with the Liberal position.