Every now and then it happens to all of us. You hop online to check your bank account balance, sit there in stunned silence as you look at a number you thought should be much larger, and go “Hey, our bank account is kind of empty, and it’s another week till payday. DAMN… I forgot about a couple charges I had made and that one check that I wrote.”

And we all do the same thing in response to this situation: we reel in spending until the next payday.

Our government? Erm, not so much.

See, there are lots of signs that we’re spending money too fast:

• In Tracy, California, residents will now be required to pay $48 a year for the privilege of being able to call 911, or else they’ll be billed $300 to call 911 and report their neighbor’s house is on fire, or their spouse is having chest pains.
• In Los Angeles, California, the Department of Animal Services is trying to track down unlicensed dogs, hoping the $15 licenses ($100 for non-spayed/neutered dogs) will bring in $3.6 million.
• In Illinois, where they are facing a $12.8 billion budget deficit, they’re considering “historic” tax increases across the board, including raises in income taxes, corporate taxes, and cigarette taxes.
• The Congressional Budget Office is reporting that — surprise! — Social Security is taking in less than it’s paying out. Not coincidentally, Obama’s health plan contains language that allows funneling money from healthcare taxes to Social Security.

So it’s obvious there’s a problem. (Or at least it should be.) So what is our government’s response to the bleeding of money at all levels? Build a $1,000,000,000 embassy in London, and propose a $1,000,000,000,000 government healthcare program.

Can someone please explain to these politicians the fine art of balancing a checkbook?

On February 23rd, 1945, five Marines and One navy corpsman were asked to raise a flag. They looked at the flag that was already flying and grumbled, like all men in the infantry do. Some officer in the rear didn’t like the flag that was flying from the top of Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima. He wanted a bigger one raised. So they grumbled and found a length of pole, affixed the bigger flag to it, and sent it skyward as the first flag was being lowered. (more…)

Back in the day (as in “back when this country was founded”), the politicians had to be very, very careful not to make their constituents too angry. Back during the days of the Stamp Act, if a politician was perceived to have gotten a little too… shall we say “out of touch”… with his constituents, the townsfolk had a way of dealing with them. They would start by hanging an effigy of the offending politician from a tree in the town square (such as the Liberty Tree in Boston.) Once a crowd formed, the effigy was either beaten down with sticks, or set on fire. From there, the crowd would all descend upon the house of the politician, and tear it to the foundation, board by board. Some politicians who were caught were literally tarred and feathered. (For the uninitiated, this is not just uncomfortable; the tar used is heated to boiling, and since it sticks to the skin, the burns are horrific.)

It seems some of the Tea Partiers in New Hampshire (who’s state motto is “Live Free or Die”), are getting back to our nation’s roots. Well, sort of. They’re not exactly tearing down the houses or preparing barrels of tar, but they are bringing their anger to the doorsteps of their Congress Critters.

We applaud them for their actions. And we encourage more behavior such as this, so long as its within the limits of the law. We’re not encouraging anyone to do anything illegal, but it’s time to get personal with the people who are supposed to be representing us. It is time to ensure that they cannot slip out of their districts to the security of their Washington D.C. offices and ignore us. They need to see our faces. They need to hear the anger in our voices, and see the outrage in our eyes. They need to be stopped, interrupted, questioned, put on the spot, and held accountable for their actions. They need to be followed, and their present location tweeted, emailed, texted, facebooked, and IMed. Every thing they do, every word they say, needs to be recorded and posted on YouTube.

So long as they refuse to listen to us, so long as they continue to ignore the will of We the People, so long as they continue to pretend that we don’t exist, they shouldn’t be allowed to get a cup of coffee from McDonald’s without a swarm of people around them asking them why We the People are being ignored.