Looks like Hobo Joe isn’t the only American getting his Jamboree amputated. According to The Minnesota Independent‘s  Tea party convention featuring Bachmann, Bradlee Dean cancelled:

Organizers for the Freedom Jamboree, billed as the national tea party straw poll convention, announced on Wednesday that the event has been canceled due to low attendance. The conference had pulled in two of Minnesota most controversial figures, presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and rightwing preacher Bradlee Dean, the leader of a religious group from (Bachmann’s) district that advocates the incarceration of gays and lesbians and (who) once described Muslim countries that execute gays as “more moral” than American Christians.

Innocent fruit from my grocery store. The cherries, though bagged, are not popped. The oranges may be tending towards promiscuity as I caught them winking at the pears. The blueberries have announced they are celibate.

The Tea Party event “was also being organized by Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, whose organization The Family Leader sparked an uproar in the state after it released a presidential pledge on marriage.” As noted by The Minnesota Independent’s Bachmann signs pledge to ban pornography, same-sex marriage as president: “The pledge contains 14 vows and several pages of footnotes. Vow nine states that GOP presidential candidates must ‘support human protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy’ and protect them from ‘seduction into promiscuity and all forms of pornography.'” Not only does the Tea Party want to take governance back to the 18th century, it seems they are intent on returning our lexicon to days of yore. I mean really: “the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy.” To date, only two of the 2012 Republican contenders have refused to sign the pledge: Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty.

I’d love to hear a Tea Party explanation on how all this pledge signing and prohibition lines up with the U.S. Constitution and FREEDOM. I’d also love to know if our new prohibitionists are aware of a national survey that revealed: “states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption” and “eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year’s presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favored Barack Obama.” Perhaps the Tea Party should reconsider its stance on porn — it may need widening.

Kudos to spacegoddess.net for photo of grass roots

If you look at the Freedom Jamboree website, you will notice that this group puts the term “grassroots” in quotes. If only the Tea Party had been so forthcoming about their ALEC-driven legislative agenda in 2010 perhaps Wisconsin wouldn’t be in the midst of Recall Fever, and access to both abortion and the ballot box would not have diminished drastically in Republican-held states across the country. Maybe our public schools wouldn’t be up on the auction block and maybe we wouldn’t be in a “debt ceiling crisis” after years of a Bush-led Republican credit card spree in Afghanistan and Iraq. And maybe our economy wouldn’t be languishing in the crapper as Republicans try to poison the well for 2012, putting visions of total power ahead of the best interests of 98% of Americans.

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