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I received a series of WWII posters the other day and this one really set me to thinking. Yes, about freedom … but also about patriotism. We’ve been reading and hearing a lot about patriotism – being a patriot. Patriot is defined as a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country. That covers a whole bunch of us … we all say we love our country. 

But what about supporting? And defending? You may say that you pay taxes – that’s supporting our country. Yes, that is true. You’re a member of many patriotic groups – sorry, you lost that argument. Simply being a member of many groups doesn’t qualify. When’s the last time you actually DID something patriotic? Have you carried the flag in a parade? Have you stood at your local airport and welcomed home our military members returning from service abroad? Do you even fly the flag at your home? Do you know the proper way to dispose of a tattered United States flag? See, there are all kinds of things we never even think about but that we should know. Millions of us marched on Washington in early September 2009 … because we are so concerned about what’s happening to our country … because we are so concerned about what seems to be corruption within our government … because we are scared and feel helpless to stop our country’s plunge into depression … Socialism … Communism … take your pick!.

Let’s back up 200-and some odd years to the first patriots – the men who founded our country and discuss what a patriot really is. The Founding Fathers of our country … the signers of the Declaration of Independence and some interesting facts about them. Most of them were just like you and me – concerned about their country. But, you see, their country was England. And when they decided to found a new nation, they became traitors to their own country. How is that we now defend these men so vigorously?? They were traitors – no, they were patriots.

Here’s a few interesting facts about the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence:  Twenty-four were lawyers / jurists; eleven were merchants; nine were farmers and large plantation owners; five were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died.  Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned; two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured; nine fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War.  They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

While we all know of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, John Adams, and other famous signers . . . here is what happened to several of the lesser known ones … Carter Braxton of Virginia, a wealthy planter and trader, saw his ships swept from the seas by the British Navy … he sold his home and properties to pay his debts, and died in rags; Thomas McKean was so hounded by the British that he was forced to move his family almost constantly … he served in the Congress without pay, and his family was kept in hiding … his possessions were taken from him, and poverty was his reward; Dillery, Hall, Clymer, Walton, Gwinnett, Heyward, Rutledge, and Middleton had their properties looted by vandals or soldiers; Francis Lewis had his home and properties destroyed … the enemy jailed his wife, and she died within a few months.

Thomas Nelson Jr., at the battle of Yorktown, noted that the British General Cornwallis had taken over the Nelson home for his headquarters.  He quietly urged General George Washington to open fire.  The home was destroyed, and Nelson died bankrupt.

John Hart was driven from his wife’s bedside as she was dying.  Their 13 children fled for their lives.  His fields and his gristmill were laid to waste.  For more than a year he lived in forests and caves, returning home to find his wife dead and his children vanished.  A few weeks later he died from exhaustion and a broken heart. Norris and Livingston suffered similar fates.

These are the stories and sacrifices of the American Revolution.  These were not wild-eyed or war hungry men … but soft-spoken men of means and education.  They had security, but they valued liberty and freedom more.  Standing tall, they pledged … “For the support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection of the divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Now let’s talk about patriotism. Are you a patriot? Are you willing to sacrifice as did these early patriots? After some soul-searching and squirming, for or most of us … the answer is no. We’re willing to raise our fists and make signs and march with a million other people … but by ourselves, what are we willing to do to save our country?

Lucky for us, we aren’t by ourselves! We’re in an organization called Change the Congress in 2010 – where we can be part of a larger group and have our voices heard far and wide. We’re in an organization where we all send faxes to our Senators and Representatives telling them to represent US – the voters who elected them. We’re in an organization where we learn how to make our voices heard … where we learn how to find candidates to run against career politicians … where we can talk and discuss the best ways to bring about change … where we can actually take a vote and send our message off to Congress, to the media, to the White House.

What did you do today … for freedom? Freedom is priceless. Its cost is the many lives given for us to have it …lives given in wars … in the fight to found our nation … in battlefields across the world where Americans bravely march for freedom. What I want from you is a pledge: “We won’t let another day pass without doing something for freedom. It is our fight … and our right.”

http://www.changethecongressin2010.com/html/article_2.html

Charter member of Team Obama’s Dirty Dozen

Tom Daschle is a busy, busy bee. He and fellow swamp creatures Bob Dole and Howard Baker — his colleagues at law and lobbying firm Alston & Bird — will “debate” the SEIU’s Andy Stern and others at a joint health care conference. Then it’s off to another speaking gig in L.A. The Sunlight Foundation exposes Daschle’s conflicts of interest that Team Obama doesn’t care about anymore. And my column today reminds readers about the K Street tax cheat who’s lobbying to save Obamcare.

The K Street tax cheat who’s lobbying to save Obamacare

by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2009

Tom Daschle is the human toe fungus of Washington – a persistent infection that may disappear from time to time, but always comes back with a vengeance.

Despite abandoning his Secretary of Health and Human Services nomination in disgrace in February 2009, the K Street tax cheat who evaded IRS rules for years remains a top White House confidante and policy strategist. In fact, he’s leading the drive to save Obamacare. He climbed up from under the bus back into the Oval Office and onto the sets of Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos to offer his rescue plan.

It’s Daschle’s idea to morph the unpopular “public option” into non-profit “health care co-ops” that will almost certainly receive government funding, support, and tax advantages over private insurers. Old colleagues on both sides of the Senate aisle are now promoting his alternative. Last week, he penned a Do It For Teddy Kennedy pep rally op-ed in the Wall Street Journal urging Democrats to go it alone and depend on the backroom Senate reconciliation process if necessary to get a deal done.

The White House told the Washington Post that Daschle is simply a trusted “sounding board” and “friend” offering invaluable assistance as an experienced individual with a passion for health care reform. But Daschle is the dictionary definition of a self-interested Washington lobbyist and Beltway swamp creature. Married to heavy-hitting aviation lobbyist Linda Hall Daschle, the former U.S. Senator from South Dakota has earned more than $5 million as a professional back-scratcher since leaving life as an entrenched incumbent. In the parlance of self-exempting Team Obama members, Daschle is merely a beneficent “resource,” as he described himself to the New York Times, serving the Public Interest.

The truth: Daschle is cashing in mightily on his role as “the architect of President Obama’s health care plan” in the private sector – and evading lobbyist disclosure by reinventing himself as a highly paid “senior adviser” to D.C.-based law firm/influence-peddling shop Alston & Bird.

Daschle represents mega-insurer United Health, which opposes the pure public option, and Alston & Bird represents a total of 31 clients from the health care sector. According to D.C. watchdog OpenSecrets.org, “of the $2,730,000 reported income received from clients, nearly 50% of that, $1,070,000, comes from these 31 health care clients.” Senate ethic rules forbade Daschle from officially lobbying for one year after he was defeated by GOP Sen. John Thune in 2004. Now, it’s 2009. Daschle has raked in millions in speeches and consulting gigs for health care industry clients. He has unfettered access to the White House, which is stuffed to the gills with his former employees – including his former legislative affairs director Phil Schiliro and his former top Senate staffer for 20 years, Pete Rouse, who serves as an Obama senior adviser.

Daschle quacks, talks, and walks like any other federal registered lobbyist. But somehow, the rules don’t apply. And Barack Obama, ultimate agent of Hope and Change, has no problem embracing his interest-conflicted, ethics-challenged dear “friend.” Let’s not forget: Daschle the Dodger lost his Senate seat after asserting a bogus property-tax homestead exemption claim on his $1.9 million D.C. mansion – which he listed as his primary residence despite voting in South Dakota and claiming it as his primary residence in order to run for re-election.

Let’s not forget: Daschle was aware as early as June 2008 that he might have to pay back taxes for the use of a car and driver provided by a private equity firm, but he failed to inform Obama transition team until weeks after Obama designated him the HHS nominee in mid-December 2008. The donor and personal friend who provided the chauffeured services, Leo Hindery Jr., had also made Daschle chairman of the executive advisory board of InterMedia Advisors, a high-flying investment firm. Daschle collected a million-dollar salary from the arrangement in addition to his private chariot.

Asked why he hadn’t disclosed the cozy arrangement, Daschle “told committee staff he had grown used to having a car and driver as majority leader and did not think to report the perk on his taxes, according to staff members.” It was a perfect expression of the culture of Beltway entitlement.

And let’s not forget: In February, Daschle groveled before his former Senate colleagues to explain away the back payments he owed as well as dubious charitable deductions worth an estimated $146,000, including interest and penalties. Team Obama downplayed it as a “tax glitch.” When Daschle finally withdrew, Obama told the country he had “screwed up” and promised not to repeat the mistake again. But they never left each other.

And now, Obama is trusting this man’s judgment to salvage his government health care takeover. Remember this as the president delivers his joint address to Congress. Obama and Daschle are serving each other’s interests. Not yours.

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/09/09/the-k-street-tax-cheat-who%e2%80%99s-lobbying-to-save-obamacare/

These are the people who immediately declared it their fervent hope that the new presidency fail, the ones who cheered when the governor of Texas raised the specter of secession, the ones who went online to rechristen the executive mansion the “Black” House, and to picture it with a watermelon patch out front.

On tax day they were the ones who, having apparently just discovered the grim tidings April 15 brings us all each year, launched angry, unruly protests. In the debate over health-care reform, they are the ones who have disrupted town hall meetings, shouting about the president’s supposed plan for “death panels” to euthanize the elderly.

Now, they are the ones bringing firearms to places the president is speaking.

The Washington Post tells us at least a dozen individuals have arrived openly — and, yes, legally — strapped at events in Arizona and New Hampshire, including at least one who carried a semiautomatic assault rifle. In case the implied threat is not clear, one of them also brought a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s quote about the need to water the tree of liberty with “the blood of … tyrants.”

It remains unclear, once you get beyond the realm of Internet myth, alarmist rhetoric and blatant lie, what the substance of the president’s supposed tyranny might be. “Socialized health care?” Given that our libraries, schools, police and fire departments are all “socialized,” that’s hard to swallow.

When and if the implied violence comes, perhaps its author will explain. Meanwhile, expect those who stoked his rage — i.e., the makers of Internet myths, alarmist rhetoric and blatant lies — to disdain any and all moral responsibility for the outcome.

These are strange times. They call to mind what historian Henry Adams said in the mid-1800s: “There are grave doubts at the hugeness of the land and whether one government can comprehend the whole.”

Adams spoke in geographical terms of a nation rapidly expanding toward the Pacific. Our challenge is less geographical than spiritual, less a question of the distance between Honolulu and New York than between you and the person right next to you. Such as when you look at a guy who thought it a good idea to bring a “gun” to a presidential speech and find yourself stunned by incomprehension. On paper, he is your fellow American, but you absolutely do not know him, recognize nothing of yourself in him. You keep asking yourself: Who “is” this guy?

We frame the differences in terms of “conservative” and “liberal,” but these are tired old markers that with overuse and misuse have largely lost whatever meaning they used to have and with it, any ability to explain us to us. This isn’t liberal vs. conservative, it is yesterday vs. tomorrow, the stress of profound cultural and demographic changes that will leave none of us as we were.

And change, almost by definition, always comes too fast, always brings a sense of stark dislocation. As in the woman who cried to a reporter, “I want ‘my country’ back!” Probably the country she meant still had Beaver Cleaver on TV and Doris Day on “Your Hit Parade.”

Round and round we go and where we stop, nobody knows. And it is an open question, as it was for Henry Adams, what kind of country we’ll have when it’s done. “Can” one government comprehend the whole? It may be harder to answer now than it was then.

The distances that divide us cannot be measured in miles.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

© 2009, The Miami Herald 

http://www.yankton.net/articles/2009/08/24/opinion/editorials/doc4a91e370cf91e537621991.txt

Tribune Media Services

What if America transcended race, and Barack Obama wasn’t invited?

The question comes to mind as cries of racism grow ever louder from Obama’s supporters.

No one should be surprised. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, liberal Democrats have to accuse their opponents of racism. Indeed, somewhat to their credit, fighting racism — alas, even where it doesn’t exist — is one of the reasons they became liberal Democrats in the first place.

And that’s the great irony of the Obama presidency. It was Obama’s supporters who hinted, teased, promised or prophesied that Obama would help America “transcend race.” But now, it is they who shrink from their own promised land.

After all, it was not Obama’s detractors who immediately fell into the comfortable groove of racial grievance and familiar “narratives” when Henry Louis Gates insisted that a police instructor in racial sensitivity had to be a racist. That was Obama and his choir of heralds.

From day one, Obama’s supporters have tirelessly cultivated the idea that anything inconvenient to the first black president just might be terribly, terribly racist.

This was always the nasty side of Obama’s implied hope for unity. Obama gave oxygen to the idea that disagreement with him amounted to obstructing his mission to “transcend race.” During the campaign, that meant anyone who got in his way was wittingly or unwittingly abetting racism (just ask Bill Clinton). A writer for Slate magazine insisted journalists must not call attention to the fact that Obama is “skinny.” Such observations fuel racism by highlighting his physical appearance, and that in turn might suddenly alert racist American voters to the fact that Obama is … wait for it … black.

Now that he’s president, if you question his tax policies, energy plans or health-care ambitions, you are “hoping he will fail” — and that, with the help of roundabout reasoning, is tantamount to hoping we cannot transcend race.

Loading the deck in such a way is a gift of Obama’s. Time and again, he pre-empts dissent by claiming he’s open-minded, pragmatic and non-ideological, and therefore if you disagree with him, you must be some sort of zealot.

His shock troops make the same argument about race, sometimes with sophistication, sometimes with the kind of lucid clarity only profound stupidity can provide. For instance, actress Janeane Garofalo summed up the tea parties thusly: “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

A more sophisticated version comes from Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who finds racism in complaints that socialized medicine would result in fewer Americans “taking responsibility” for their own health care. “What we know over the past 25 years,” she told NPR, “is that language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.” In an ABC News story about how racist white militias are somehow connected to town hall protests, Mark Potok of the dismayingly left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center insists Obama has “triggered fears among fairly large numbers of white people in this country that they are somehow losing their country.”

Two weeks ago, town hallers were supposed to be members of the Brooks Brothers brigade, AstroTurf division. Now they’re well-armed anti-government militias. At this rate, they’ll soon be android ninjas with laser vision. Wait, strike that. They’ll be really racist android ninjas with laser vision.

Suddenly, if conservatives want to transcend race, we have to agree to massive increases in the size of government and socialized medicine.

That’s not transcending race, it’s using Obama’s race to bully the opposition into acquiescence. Actually transcending race would require treating Obama like any other president. Which is pretty much exactly what conservatives have been doing. Seriously, if Hillary Clinton were president, would conservatives really be rolling over for the same healthcare plan because she’s white?

Sure, racists don’t like Obama (in less shocking news, bears continue to use our national forests as toilets). But that doesn’t mean everyone who dislikes Obama is therefore a racist.

What’s dismaying is how the press and Democrats are so desperate to obscure this point. The only notable political violence at a town hall was against a black man, roughed up by pro-Obama toughs. The assault weapon carried to a lawful demonstration was carried by a black man. That supposedly racist poster depicting Obama as the Joker? (An LA Weekly writer fumed, “The only thing missing is a noose.”) That was created by a Palestinian-American supporter of left-wing garden gnome Dennis Kucinich. Whoops!

Never mind. They’ll keep trying until they find a scapegoat that works, because that is what they do.

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/1552363.html

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, August 10, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Free Speech: The White House and Congress claim the anti-ObamaCare uprising is artificially organized. But the violent — even racist — union counterattacks, urged on by Democrats, are the real Rent-a-Mobs.

IBD Exclusive Series: Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure

Clift is right to warn that the president’s plans for a health care revolution in America are in political peril, but notice her self-contradictory description of the current populist revolt. If those many millions of Americans happy with their health insurance are unconvinced that ObamaCare will make things better for them, doesn’t that suggest that the widespread opposition we’re seeing this summer already is “the real thing”?

They’ve heard what’s being planned. They know that the president’s promise that they can keep their present coverage will mean little when the government-run “marketplaces” start dictating private insurers’ coverage, killing who knows how many current plans and giving employers the incentive to stop offering medical insurance altogether.

They’ve heard about Section 1233 of the House health care bill, in which the federal government will “recruit doctors to sell the elderly on living wills, hospice care and their associated providers, professions and organizations,” as the Washington Post’s Charles Lane described it last week, adding: “You don’t have to be a right-wing wacko to question that approach.”

You also don’t have to be goaded on by insurance companies or talk radio hosts to express your worries to politicians at town halls.

Indeed, it is the opposition to this opposition that is aggressively and meticulously organized.  White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina last week gave the order to “push back twice as hard.”

And the national field director of the union-backed Health Care for America Now (HCAN) on Aug. 4 apparently sent out a four-page, single-spaced, 2,500-word-plus “how to bully” memo. 

The document, featured on the Talking Points Memo Web site, says “it’s important that you take away right-wingers’ opportunities to talk with reporters.” It tells operatives to “confiscate signs or leaflets” of those opposing ObamaCare. It adds: “Make sure that you assign marshals to take care of moving the crowd.”

Human Events recently exposed a memo from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stating that congressional Democratic leaders and the White House are “working in close coordination with” HCAN and other union-backed groups in organizing a pro-ObamaCare PR blitz this month.

The White House-ordered push-back has extended even to racist violence. Thugs at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s St. Louis town hall meeting last week beat and knocked down a black man, Kenneth Gladney. One called him the N-word, according to Gladney — all because he was distributing “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.

There’s no evidence behind the wild claims of Pelosi and other ObamaCare proponents that the grass-roots protests against them are artificially manufactured.

But there is well-documented proof of the coordinated planning that has led to violent White House/Pelosi-backed thuggery.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=334799734876274 
]]> http://politicsoutsidethebox.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/the-real-astroturf/feed/ 0 politicsoutsidethebox http://politicsoutsidethebox.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/obama%e2%80%99s-tone-deaf-health-campaign/ http://politicsoutsidethebox.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/obama%e2%80%99s-tone-deaf-health-campaign/#comments Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:39:55 +0000 politicsoutsidethebox http://politicsoutsidethebox.wordpress.com/?p=483 ]]> The president shouldn’t worry about the protestors disrupting town hall meetings. He should worry about the Americans who have been sitting at home listening to him.

It wasn’t “sabotage” when the Democrats did it.

By Andrew G. Biggs

During the August congressional recess, elected officials conduct “town hall” meetings to gauge their constituents’ opinions on a range of issues. This month, the dominant subject is health-care reform — and Democratic lawmakers aren’t happy about what they’re hearing. Democrats and their allies in the press are complaining about unruly members of the public yelling their opposition to the Obama administration’s health plans. The Left is now treating public protest as — to use Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s word — “sabotage” of the democratic process. They seem to forget how their own side acts when confronted with a policy it opposes. The Social Security reform debate of 2005 provides some welcome reminders.

Back in 2005, I attended a number of town-hall meetings on Social Security reform, appearing on stage with President Bush at several events and traveling to a number of other meetings sponsored by the White House and by members of Congress. While President Bush’s town-hall meetings — like those held today by President Obama — were orderly, at least inside the buildings, things would sometimes get rowdy outside the White House events and at the less-scripted congressional town halls.

The Left now acts as if this never happened. For instance, in a recent television appearance, liberal commentator Bill Press argued that — rather than noisy disagreement — “Americans want discussion” on health-care reform. Who could disagree with that sentiment — except, perhaps, the Obama administration, which pushed Congress to rush through legislation by early August? This timeline was clearly aimed at preempting discussion and presenting the public with a “done deal” on health reform. As one protester put it, the president spent more time choosing a dog than he did discussing health-care reform.

Likewise, Mr. Press complained that opponents hadn’t put their own reform plans on the table. “The people who are there to protest — what are they for? Are they for the status quo? The Republicans haven’t put any other plan on the table.” But did congressional Democrats offer their own alternative to President Bush’s 2005 Social Security plan? When a fellow Democrat asked Rep. Nancy Pelosi when their party would offer its own Social Security plan, her answer was “Never. Is that soon enough for you?” Democrats would not even negotiate until personal retirement accounts were taken off the table. Why should Republicans act differently today, regarding the “public option”?

Yet even so, Press is wrong: Republicans have put several health reforms on the table, from the bipartisan plan sponsored by Sens. Robert Bennett (R., Utah) and Ron Wyden (D., Ore), to Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R., Wisc.) comprehensive entitlement- and tax-reform plan, to Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R., S.C.) plan to allow consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines. These Republican plans would do more to “bend the cost curve” than congressional Democrats’ proposals, all of which push costs in the wrong direction.

Perhaps the richest complaint of all comes from Daily Kos editor Greg Dworkin, who grumbles, “I live in New England, where town halls are a way of life. The idea that hired, organized disruptors are playing ‘ordinary spontaneous citizen’ when they are planted to disrupt and that the media isn’t always covering them as such is rather horrifying, as is the amount of money being spent to defeat health reform.”

Oh, please. In 2005, busloads of union members swarmed Social Security events, and these folks weren’t doing it on a volunteer basis either. Labor unions and the AARP financed millions of dollars in ads attacking Bush’s Social Security plans. I don’t recall liberals — or the press, for that matter — being particularly upset at the time. And, to be honest, neither were reformers: We simply took it for granted that the Left would agitate against reform, as is their right.

Last I checked, the right to protest government policies — to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment quaintly puts it — was still protected. It remains standard operating procedure on the Left to shout down conservative speakers. Yet on health care, these same activists complain of “mobs,” even if from television coverage protesters appear to be armed with walkers rather than pitchforks. Democrats until recently considered dissent “patriotic.” But it seems that’s only when they are doing the dissenting.

— Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously he was the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration and, in 2005, he worked at the White House National Economic Council on Social Security reform.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTIwZDRlMDkzMTA5NTdiMTlkZjhjZjMwZTdkNjhiYzM=

By Toby Harnden in Washington
Published: 9:46PM BST 06 Aug 2009

US President Barack Obama

On the eve of Mr Obama’s 200th day as president, his ratings slumped to 50 per cent, while a series of public meetings called by Democrats to promote the reforms have degenerated into mob scenes and a congressman received a death threat.

With progress of a health bill – which the White House had hoped for in July – stalled on Capitol Hill and rising concern over Mr Obama’s handling of the economy, his national approval rating fell by seven per cent from last month. The new low is a far cry from the stratospheric ratings of his heady first days in office.

 Democratic congressmen charged with selling Mr Obama’s controversial plans to reform the US health care system have become a target of public anger over fears that middle income Americans will be hit hardest by rising insurance premiums to cover the cost of improving care for the poor.

They have been confronted by jeers, catcalls and accusatory rhetoric at the start of the summer recess – and worse.

Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina said he would not be hosting any “town hall” events this month and would instead make himself available to constituents for private one-on-one discussions about health care reform after his life was threatened.

“The call to the DC office was, ‘Miller could lose his life over this’,” LuAnn Canipe, Mr Miller’s communications director, told the Talking Points Memo website.

“Our staffer took it so seriously, he confirmed what the guy was saying. He said, ‘sir is that a threat?’ and at that time our staffer was getting the phone number off caller ID and turning it over to the Capitol Police.”

Mr Miller’s move came as a bitter political fight escalated between Democrats, who argue that the vitriolic demonstrations were staged by political activists backed by powerful special interests groups, and Republicans, who portray them as spontaneous expressions of opposition to Mr Obama’s plans.

Miss Canipe said: “Our point is, we’re not going to be bullied into having a town hall so it can then be interrupted by the fake grassroots folks.”

Which side wins in what has become a war of perception will hold a crucial advantage in the autumn, when Mr Obama had pledged to deliver a new health care law that will massively extend coverage to the uninsured.

Representative Frank Kratovil of Maryland was faced with a life-sized cutout picture of himself with a noose tied around its neck.

The Democratic National Committee has broadcast an advertisement claiming that “desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organising angry mobs” in an attempt to “destroy President Obama”.

Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee Chairman, dismissed as a “bunch of baloney” the charge that his party was orchestrating the protests. In a fundraising appeal sent out party supporters, he said: “They’re using this fear-and-smear tactic to silence ANY American who disagrees with their risky scheme … It’s a page out of their standard playbook of name calling and outright lies to stifle all debate.”

A separate CNN poll found that more Americans consider Mr Obama’s administration a failure than those who delivered a similar verdict on the administration of his predecessor President George W. Bush, who left office with a disastrous approval rating of just 34 per cent, at the same point in 2001.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5985199/Barack-Obama-faces-revolt-over-health-care-overhaul.html