“This election will be a referendum on the direction of our country,” he said. “This election will be a referendum on whether America continues to go down the path of socialism or down the path of a free-enterprise system.”

Coffman likened this year in politics to 1776. He said Republican voters would rise up against “the forces” of Obama like the American colonists rose up against King George to win independence from the British.

“Come election time when Barack Obama has lost the Congress of America and his march of socialism in America is halted and his assaults on individual liberty in America are stopped, you will hear him say ‘Where did all these people come from?’ ”

Coffman holds the seat formerly held by anti-illegal immigration firebrand Tom Tancredo, and Coffman on Saturday placed immigration politics close to the center of his talk. He said that Obama’s administration embraced defacto policies that granted sanctuary in this county to illegal aliens. He said Denver and Boulder were “sanctuary cities” in Colorado that defied the law of the land by not seeking to deport undocumented residents.

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration has told the Colorado Independent that the city complies with all federal and state laws to refer illegal aliens to immigration and customs authorities.

Coffman said he was planning to travel to Arizona in support of that state’s recent controversial immigration laws.

Candidates for office dotted the room at the Centennial Center where the Denver and Aurora parties fundraiser was held, including U.S. Senate candidates Jane Norton and Ken Buck, Seventh-District Congressional candidate Ryan Frazier and gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes. Conspicuously absent was Maes’s primary opponent, front-runner Scott McInnis, who is reeling from revelations that he plagiarized articles he was commissioned to write four years ago by the conservative Hasan Family Foundation.

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DENVER– The Tea Party Express tour (part three) has rolled into town and is holding a rally at the capitol here. The tour is hitting states where Congressional seats are in play and those include seats held by Colorado Democratic Reps Betsy Markey and John Salazar, both called out after their votes in favor of health care reform by Sarah Palin, who seems lately to be solidifying her place at the top of the Tea Party celebrity heap. There are rumors in the crowd here as there were in the capitol hallways today that Palin might speak to the Denver crowd even though it’s not one of the two stops on the tour at which she is scheduled to appear.

There’s a buzz rippling through the crowd and the sun has come out. There is a helicopter circling somewhere above. There are roughly 300 of us on the lawn around the west steps under the dome. There’s a lot of media.

One of the speakers is saying how fantastic it is that the Tea Party Express is getting so many hits on YouTube. Here’s a YouTube from the kickoff day in Nevada for those who haven’t seen it yet:

The Tea Party Express III website captures the mood pretty well:

At each stop the tour will highlight some of the worst offenders in Congress who have voted for higher spending, higher taxes, and government intervention in the lives of American families and businesses. These Members of Congress have infringed upon the freedom of the individual in this great nation, and its time for us to say: “Enough is Enough!”

Earlier, a small group of counter protesters was ousted by the police because they didn’t have a permit. This is a permit-only protest. Tea Partiers watching the counter protesters being hauled away were yelling at the police to stop violating First Amendment rights. They thought the police were dragging away Tea Partiers.

It wasn’t necessarily a senior moment, though. A notable thing about this Denver crowd is that, although it’s all white people and a few Asians– Colorado’s a white state anyway– there’s a fair number of late thirty- and forty-somethings. Look at the photos from Utah and you’ll see a difference.

St George Utah (TPX blog)

As the Colorado Independent reported from a Loveland Tea Party CD4 debate last month, the Tea Party crowds here have gotten a shade younger. Not all white hairs but salt and pepper. That’s a change from the summer and fall.

A speaker– no one around me can tell me who he is– just said that Pres. Obama is turning the country socialist but that if he wants to live in a socialist country, all he has to do is follow the smell in the air of dead bodies and that will bring him to a socialist country. Did I hear that right? We’ll have to check the YouTube trail after the fact.

An even-tempered man tells me he’s new to politics but that he just felt like he wasn’t being represented in Washington and so he came out to the rally. He doesn’t have the money to go to the Tax Day stop in Washington. He is utterly sincere but his words are the same words spoken by people in countless Tea Party YouTubes, people quoted in countless stories like this one. The Tea party and its media channels have given him the words for how he feels– or told him how he feels– about politics or maybe even about life, it’s hard to tell.

First-term Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman just addressed the crowd. “Vote the Democrats out,” he said. Take back your country.

Tea Party stars making appearances on the tour have or will include Palin, Sam “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, right-wing media guru Andrew Breitbart, brassy shock columnist Ann Coulter, comedian-turned-wingnut Victoria Jackson and right-wing activist and Acorn-sting faux-prostitute Hannah Giles.

The Tea Party Express III will wend its way in the Tea Party Express luxury bus from today to Sunday through towns in Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. On April 15, they arrive in Washington, for another Tea Party rally in the capital.

Update: Reportedly former Congressman and anti-illegal immigration hawk Tom Tancredo just spoke, fresh from a dramatic Tea Party tour of the borderlands in Arizona, where rancher Robert Krentz was killed by smugglers, Tancredo tweeting updates of the ultimately failed pursuit of the murderer. More updates to come.

–
As told to TCI Editor John Tomasic

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Congressional Republicans had a lousy night. Obamacare, the grand American socialist experiment, passed. In the months preceding the vote and on the floor of the House last night, GOP lawmakers ratcheted up the end-times rhetoric so high it became hard to determine when they were voicing their own legitimate concerns or when they were doing Glenn Beck imitations or just having fun with the circus. Georgia’s Paul Broun last week danced in the realm of the tragi-comic when he descended into mock Civil War speak, referring to the reform legislation as another “Yankee aggression.” So, when House Minority Leader “John A. Boehner” tweeted that America was now a socialist country and that he was crying himself to sleep, who could be faulted for believing it was the real John Boehner?

The phony Boehner twitter account, “GOPBoehner,” is really artful work. Or it’s all real. You decide:

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“I don’t care if these quotes are made up. I know Obama thinks it.”

Video after the jump.

Here’s the blog that created the hoax thesis excerpts.

Here’s the blog where poor fuming winger Michael Ledeen reported the thesis as real and where Limbaugh’s researchers came upon it. The laughs stack up near the bottom where Ladeen lashes the liberal press for criticizing Limbaugh for saying things Limbaugh never actually said. Pure gold.

[This is from] Obama’s college thesis, written when he was at Columbia. The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein–who wrote about it for Time–was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:

“… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate. I wonder if the prof–and I’d like to know who the prof was–made an appropriate marginal comment, something about historical context, about the Constitution’s revolutionary status in the history of freedom, and about the separation of powers in order to make the creation of any “shackles” as difficult as possible.

Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write. Maybe he’d like to parse “the so-called Founders,” for example.

Where’s the long form version of the thesis?!

Friday happy hour fun from the wingnut web.

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Poring over the text of Obama’s speech, published by the White House on Monday, Rossputin pointed out that the only people Obama mentions by name in the speech are minorities:

A couple things of note: Although leftists will claim that I’m just a racist or xenophobe, I find it interesting that the three people he mentions by name are Jazmin, Aldoni, and Shantelle. When you have a president who surrounds himself with people like Van Jones and Jeremiah Wright, it’s not too far afield to suspect he seems himself President of Minority Groups but not truly President of the United States.

On the other side, 9News published this anonymous email it received from a Centennial eight-grade student who claimed his fellow students had called him “racist” after he refused to listen to the speech:

One eighth grader from Centennial, who didn’t want to be identified, told 9NEWS other students had called the student a racist after he or she said they weren’t going to watch the speech.

“My family and I are personally against Obama, and I will not be allowed to go to school on Tuesday. I don’t want to be called racist again, it hurts,” the student wrote in an e-mail to 9NEWS. “We don’t know what President Obama will say, and a lot of us just don’t want to hear.”

To date, most of the controversy surrounding the speech has revolved around socialism, namely whether or not the President would use the speech to proselytize to children about his alleged socialist agenda. On Monday, though, Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, one of those credited with initiating the socialism controversy, reversed his position after reading the text of the speech.

“My kids will be watching the president’s speech,” Greer told CNN, “as I hope all kids will.”

But Greer defended his initial concern, alleging that the text of the speech released Monday had been scrubbed of its socialist agenda.

“Is it the [speech] the President was originally going to give?” he asked.

Greer admitted he had no evidence for this accusation.

Here’s the video:

And here perhaps is a clue to the so-called socialist agenda that, according to Greer, may have characterized an early draft of the speech. It’s a section that remains on how smart American kids who study and work hard might help solve vexing social problems:

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

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