|
Tea Party groups set town hall meeting Saturday |
|
Wednesday, 16 December 2009 |
By PAUL SIMS
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Tea Party movement is working to put “America back on track” as a majority of elected officials are doing “great damage to this nation,” one organizer of a local group says.
The Starkville and Columbus Tea Party groups will gather Saturday in Starkville in a public town hall meeting at the Starkville Sportsplex from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. The event is free.
In explaining the Tea Party movement, Robert J. Allen, who co-founded with Gary Chesser the Starkville Tea Party, said:
“We have happening in our country right now something that has never happened before, at least to the degree it is happening. A majority of our elected officials have literally turned against us and are using the positions we elected them to fill to do great damage to this nation to the point of even threatening our existence, economically and politically.”
Allen said: “We have expressed concern and alarm and disagreement with what’s happening and these same elected officials have refused to stop what they’re doing.”
He listed such actions as:
• Raising taxes.
• Borrowing money, “putting our country in greater and greater debt.”
• Destroying businesses.
• The “so-called fairness doctrine in which our freedom of speech is being taken from us.”
• “Taking war criminals and treating them as respectable citizens and ultimately, they’re all going to be set free because of legal technicalities.”
Allen said: “That’s a short list of things we have been telling them ‘Stop doing that.’” He said: “This is all part of taxation without representation. We remind them that America is a government of the people, by the people and for the people, but in ignoring us they show us that they consider America to be of the politicians, by the politicians and for the politicians. We don’t accept that and we are doing what we can to put America back on track.”
Allen says: “They ignore our instructions to them. They work for us. They not only ignore us, they mock us.” He referred to a comment by U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. – the House speaker – calling the Tea Party movement “Astroturf” instead of grass roots. Pelosi was recorded making the comment in an interview with KTVU-TV.
“We are the grass roots. Nancy Pelosi calls us ‘Astroturf’ which is fake grass,” Allen said.
One element of the forum will focus on health care reform.
Allen says one provision in legislation to reform health care includes a “legal requirement that people of a certain age would be denied medical treatments and medicines because they don’t have enough lifetime left to justify the expense.”
Currently, “no one is denied care based on age,” Allen said.
The audience will hear from three speakers, including Dr. Phillip Ley,
a surgical oncologist from Jackson.
Ley will address such issues as the death provision and “other bad parts of the government health care push,” Allen said.
Those who attend will hear two other speakers. These are:
• Angela McGlowan, a FOX news analyst for several years and a native Mississippian. “We expect her to talk about the broad spectrum of issues,” Allen said.
• Grant Sowell, with the Tupelo Tea Party, will be the last speaker. “We have asked him tie everything together and give people counsel on what they can do with this information that they just heard and how they can be more effective in standing up for our country,” Allen said.
Allen says there are are sworn affidavits from people in and close to the Obama family who swear that they know he was born in Kenya. “That makes him ineligible to be president of the United States,” Allen said, alleging officials “have covered for (Obama) all along.”
A Dec. 4 Associated Press story reported former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said on a radio show to host Rusty Humphries on a that voters “rightfully” have questions about the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. The so-called birther conspiracy around Obama’s U.S. citizenship has been widely discredited, and state health officials in Hawaii have repeatedly confirmed that the president was born there in 1961.
Palin later backed off the comment on her Facebook page, saying she had never questioned Obama’s citizenship but believes that voters and reporters had a right to ask candidates whatever questions they wish.
Allen said: “We’ve had crooked politicians all along but we’ve never had this many who are in your face doing these things against us.”
Organizers plan to reserve about a third of the program for questions and answers from the audience. “It’s another opportunity to get informed. We want this to be a service to the community. This is not a political party thing. We’re not promoting a party. We’re promoting America,” Allen said.
For information on the event, call 418-8115 or 323-8764 or send an e-mail
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 December 2009 )
|
