Andy Horning's take on July 4th protest at the Governor's Mansion

Andy Horning led this year's 4th of July Rally and has the following to say on his WE DECLARE blog:

"I know that major media are financially squeezed and short-staffed. I know that most of those remaining are the left-of-Lenin J-school acolytes. But there is no excuse for twisted, biased and just-flat-wrong reporting.

I wrote this in response to one newspaper’s faulty reporting. Please write and send off your own. We need to get the media on our side. Currently, they’re on the other side, you know…

There was no “property tax protest” on July 4.

It’s true enough that some people (not enough) are still mad about unconstitutional property taxes. This may have motivated about five of the fifty who showed up on the Governor’s Mansion lawn in the pouring rain. But tax policy was never billed as any part of the purpose of this year’s Independence Day protest. In fact, in all five press releases, two radio spots and dozens of emails and internet postings related to this event, I specifically insisted that we were protesting our politicians’ defiance of state and federal constitutions, and not just a specific tax policy. Politicians’ illegal abuse of power is what created our curent problems with debt, spending, education, prices, jobs and, OK, property taxes. Politicians are breaking crucial, protective laws, in other words, and we were protesting lawless lawmakers, or what I call anarchy.

The disease is ungoverned government. That’s what we were protesting. It’s wrong to report just one symptom like property tax when that wasn’t the core issue last year either. Last summer’s popular “Tea Party” protests that followed were solely about property tax. And yes, I first advocated constitutionally eliminating property tax back in 1998 and haven’t changed my tune on that subject. But I never had anything to do with a “property tax protest.”

We have much more serious threats to our life, liberty and property.

While the rest of us are tightening our belts and surrendering our rights to keep them fed and happy, our politicians are engorging themselves on money and power with no end but total collapse in sight. It is of course your choice what you want to say about what really happened on July 4. It’s your paper. But I hope you offer me the opportunity to set things right.

Constitutions are the laws that protect us from politicians. Politicians, by their nature, break those laws when we let them. It’s time we say “whoa” and end the anarchy.

Our protest was really just one, simple, basic plea: It’s time for politicians to honor their oaths of office and obey written laws, as written.
If you’d like to read those laws, they’re all posted at my campaign website, www.horningforgovernor.com "