It’s still difficult to believe that last week President Obama actually celebrated Feb. 17 as the first anniversary of his stimulus plan (a.k.a. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), in which Washington borrowed $862 billion on American taxpayers’ credit. Celebrating the piling of $1 trillion on the backs of our posterity?

Call me clueless, but I’ve never considered easing present circumstances by going into massive amounts of debt as an answer to anyone’s economic recovery and longevity.

But I bet there’s one date the president definitely won’t be celebrating: this Saturday, Feb. 27, which marks the first anniversary of the tea-party movement.

To think, last year at this time, the mainstream media and Washington politicians were either completely overlooking them or labeling those patriot gatherings as extreme and wacky fringe resistances. WorldNetDaily was virtually alone in reporting the tea parties as a legitimate patriotic movement, like the original 1773 protest in Boston Harbor.

Today, just one year later, tea-party patriots have proven themselves as a collective and formidable force and foe against big government power and corruption. Even according to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly one in five adult Americans identifies with the tea-party movement.

Tea-party patriots cross all partisan lines. What unifies us is our fundamental belief that what America’s founders established was good and right, that we’ve largely abandoned their vision, and the only recourse to reawaken America is to return to their principles and values. But that is easier said than done, as progressives have worked double-time to discredit and undermine them and the very pillars of their republic.

A few years back, an editor at the New York Times wrote, “The Founding Fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents.” He’s not alone. Many liberals in media and higher education share his sentiments, labeling our Founding Fathers as racists, bigots, chauvinists and charlatans, among other things. This is not only ungrateful – it’s wrong. It’s their contributions, not their character flaws, that we should be highlighting. As Samuel Adams said in 1771, “Let us first see it prov’d that they were mistakes. ‘Till then we must hold ourselves obliged to them for sentiments transmitted to us so worthy of their character, and so important to our security.”

Thomas G. West, professor of politics at the University of Dallas, rightly acknowledged our founders’ worth in his excellent book “Vindicating the Founders” by pointing out that they “set up a government that did what no democracy had ever done before: It combined majority rule with effective protection for minority rights. It enabled a larger number of men and women to live in prosperity and liberty than any other nation has ever done.”

Of course, the founders weren’t perfect, but they were far better than what leftist professors and progressives make them out to be. We know that most of the founders regarded slavery as a wrong that would have to be addressed.

They knew that equal rights applied to all: men, women and children – slave and free. They did not achieve all they wanted, but what they did achieve was miraculous. That miracle is our heritage. As Joseph Ellis stated in his narrative masterpiece, “Founding Brothers,” the Constitutional Convention should be called “the miracle of Philadelphia …”

America’s Founding Fathers gave us the framework and foundations to experience freedom and liberty for all. But we can’t do that unless we know who they were, what they stood for and what they achieved. To restore America, we need to reclaim our past and learn from it. It is only by turning back and examining the past that we can reawaken or (if you will) reboot our country.

Unfortunately, those who want to reconstruct our constitutional government, redefine our founding documents and revise our history according to their ideological whims are being allowed to do just that because of the apathy of too many well-meaning Americans. If we don’t care about our past, if we don’t learn our history, if we don’t cherish the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then just as we have allowed ourselves to be robbed of our past, so too will America be robbed of its rightful future.

The first thing we need to do to restore America is to insist that our government officials abide by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and that they rightly interpret their tenets. If, like most people, you’re a little rusty on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, here’s a quick primer or reminder of what our government was meant to be – and should be.

In 1776, by an act of the Second Continental Congress, the original 13 colonies of North America adopted a Declaration of Independence, dissolving their relations with England. America would be a confederation of independent countries (“states”). In 1777, the Articles of Confederation (our first Constitution and governing document) was written and adopted by the Second Continental Congress, though not ratified until 1781.

The Federalists soon recognized the deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation, and so they called for a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. By the end of their four-month convention, the United States Constitution was adopted, though not completely ratified until 1790. It has been amended 27 times since. (The first 10 amendments constitute the Bill of Rights.)

The whole point of the Constitution is to provide a framework for our government, to set its rules, and to protect our rights by limiting government power. The Constitution requires that the president and members of Congress “be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.” In other words, every elected member of the federal government is accountable for abiding by the Constitution.

We the people must hold them accountable. But how many of us hold our elected leaders to account? And how far have we allowed the federal government and federal courts to take powers that the Constitution doesn’t give them? When we do, we let them rob us of our own freedom, and of the rights to self-determination that our forefathers wanted us to have.

It’s time to bombard the White House and congressional leaders with copies of our Constitution and remind them that we the people are going to hold them accountable to it or we’ll vote them out.

America’s greatest problem is that we have forgotten our roots. Too many of us don’t know or don’t feel connected to those who founded our country.

Case in point, in 2007, a national survey commissioned by the U.S. Mint found that only 30 percent of Americans knew that Thomas Jefferson was our third president, and only 7 percent could name the first four presidents in order.

If you’re a part of the 93 percent, then you know that they were George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The fact is most Americans don’t have a clue why our founders created this country, what principles motivated them or why they framed our Constitution the way they did.

As citizens of this great country, we need to renew our understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. We need to go back and study the debates between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, to understand why many founders like Thomas Jefferson were very concerned about a run-away federal government.

We need to examine other important documents of our history, like the Articles of Confederation, the Bill of Rights and the Northwest Ordinance. We need to sit down and learn all the important American history we should have learned in school – and probably didn’t.

You might not have thought it mattered then. But you have to understand that it matters now. If Americans don’t know their constitutional history, then they won’t care, or even acknowledge, that our Constitution of liberty is being transformed into a charter for big government, which is exactly what has happened over a period of decades.

Clearly, the government we have today is not the government outlined in the Constitution. It’s grown far beyond the limits the Constitution sets – and as a result we are facing dangers from which the Constitution’s framers tried to preserve us.

The framers set out a path for us, and we’ve strayed from it. And the first thing any rational man does when he’s lost his way is to look at a map. If you think, as I do, that America has taken a wrong turn, studying America’s Revolutionary history is the first step to helping us find our way back. Just like millions of tea-party patriots have already done.

To find a tea-party birthday celebration in your area this Saturday, Feb. 27, check out the various gatherings under “events” at Teaparty.freedomworks.org.

Happy first birthday tea-party patriots! If participants in the Boston Tea Party of 1773 laid the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence just three years later, imagine what impact you can have by the time you celebrate your third birthday.

And to think they thought you were just fleeting fringe fanatics!

(For more on how to reawaken America to our founder’s vision and plans for this country, check out Chuck Norris’ brand new – January 2010 – expanded paperback version of his New York Times best-seller, “Black Belt Patriotism.”)

Get More Chuck Norris Here

The Glenn Beck’s and Sean Hannity’s of the Republican party have been trying to capture the momentum created by the truly independent outrage of the average American. Big government and big corporations have teamed up on both sides of the aisle and now there are people who want to profit from the backlash.

Our growing discontent sewed it’s seeds under the Bush administration, but America has been off course for much longer than just ten years. The promises of perpetual war and an ever increasing size and scope of government has led to such great things as the “Patriot” Act, warrantless wiretapping, and the loss of more freedom and liberty since Orwell wrote 1984.

Homeland Insecurity

Today snapping a photo on the sidewalk can land you not in jail with a court date and trial of your peers, it goes much further than that. You will be indefinitely detained, questioned and held without recourse, only to be released on your way with no charges or record your encounter whatsoever. Until the next time you try to board a plane when you will find out that photography lands you Homeland Security watch list A.

My own father has been identified to be on one of these list, when he was pulled out of line for an enhanced search. A Caucasian, conservative, tax-paying american, who has never even left the country, and never drove over the speed limit is pulled aside to be put through the full spectrum of interrogation and harassment, because the lists must be “balanced”. Meanwhile an Islamic African national with no passport, luggage, or identification, and who had been identified as extremists by his own family, is waved through security with a wink and a nod. Oops looks like that guy was actually the one who had the bomb.

For a brief moment there was Hope that war in the middle east may be coming to an end, but now we are seeing the beginning of a new war in Yemen, and the civil unrest in Iran is only the beginning. Obama had campaigned on a promise to return freedom and liberty to America, he promised Change from the Bush policies, but today we have seen things only become worse. Full body scans are needed to enter an airport, no one may use the restroom the last hour of the flight, and we are made to fear water bottles, toothpaste, books, and all forms of boxes in general.

We are made to fear the great “Al Qaeda” ghost and pray that our we can be saved from these terrorist by our loving government. Both parties are playing this card to its fullest extent, but those who cannot run a used car exchange program certainly cannot deliver us from evil.

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The Two ‘Party’ Party

The champions of the Tea Party movement, posing as conservatives and libertarians, are doing their best to stop the “Obama Socialism Express” but meanwhile boast the greatness of Bush administration. Regular guests and friends on the Sean Hannity show include Karl Rove and Darth Vader himself, Dick Cheaney. The same ones who brought us the Haliburton war’s and backwater “contractor” assassins.

Now people are led to believe that they have a “Plan” for victory.

The neo-cons are trying desperately to reign in those who stray from the two party system. Every day on every program the fox radio broadcasters stress how important it is to keep our beloved 2 party system intact. Without it there will be the complete destruction of American values and morals and the other team will win.

Communism or Fascism; those are you choices, don’t think for a minute that you could have anything different.

The kind of victory they have in mind is quite different from what I have in mind.

Obama’s team of Mao loving communists are just as deadly to the constitution as Bush was. Obama’s team is possibly even more dangerous. Obama is more authoritarian, more ego-centric, and far more persuasive than Bush could ever have dreamed of being. A combination that makes for a Supreme Dictator.

The Train Has Been Derailed

The neo-cons have championed the Tea Party Train and have now derailed it completely. The movement was grown out of the Ron Paul 2008 “Campain For Liberty”. We are the people who wanted neither their “prosperity nor security” at least not in the ways our two parties have proposed to give it to us.

The left promises prosperity by giving us everyone else’s money, and the right promises security by taking away everyone else’s liberty.

We can only have prosperity AND security where there is Freedom and Liberty.

NO REPRESENTATION WITHOUT TAXATION

GOP party organizers are now throwing extravagant “Tea Party” fundraisers, dinners with a pricetag of $1600 dollars per plate.

Many of us who had no money had created a true populist movement that swept across the country. Now in the course of just a few months we have allowed all of that power to be taken from us and given back in to the hands of those who rightfully deserve it. The wealthy elite, who can afford to buy their freedom.

Enemy Of My Enemy

Every Fox News pundit now miraculously has been converted, they now claim to be either “conservative” or “liberterian” but somehow are also for bombing countries that have fewer people than we have cars and may God help you if you speak poorly of Mr. Bush on one of their shows.

Do not confuse the enemy of our enemy for a friend. They will point out with professional accuracy the flaws on the other side of the aisle, in an attempt to bring you back to theirs.

We are now left with only two choices, grow or die. Every living organism exists in only two states, growth or decay. We must increase our size until we outnumber both parties or disband and assimilate back into the two parties and hope and pray we can steer the ship back to sanity.

2010 is here, and the deadline is coming upon us very fast. 11 months to create a real third party movement or be assimilated into your choice of Globalist Commie’s or War Hungry Neo-Con Fascistas.

It’s time to get off your computer, go out of your house, campaign, organize, raise money, grow the party, and make lots of noise. Victory goes to whoever wants it the most, which is why we have allowed our movement to be hijacked.

The theme for 2010 is GROW OR DIE.