State officials ban tea from Tea Party
Via Snapped Shot and STACLU comes news that Iowa state officials have banned the use of tea by Tea Party protesters holding an event tomorrow in Cedar Rapids.
The tea violates environmental standards because it will discolor the water:
A Cedar Rapids group will do a symbolic tea dumping into the Cedar River on Saturday because state officials won’t let them use the real thing.
An anti-tax group wanted to pitch in real tea like the Bostonian revolutionaries opposed to England’s tea taxes.
Tea, although natural and quite tasty, is considered a pollutant that can’t go into a body of water without a permit, said Mike Wade, a senior environmental specialist at the DNR’s Manchester field office.
“Discoloration is considered a violation,” Wade said.
What would our Founding Fathers say?
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Would Cheerios be allowed? Cheerios look like big O’s, right?
I wonder if the original Boston Tea Party participants asked the British for permission to dump tea into the harbor? What kind of protest is this?
Doesn’t the Cedar turn the river red?
Environmentalists are idiots. Do the tea dump anyway!
Nobody asked my permission before spending more money than ever before in history. Dump the tea!!!
Yes, but what about GREEN TEA !!!
LMAOWTIME
LOL! All the more reason to use tea anyway!
It’s ironic that the same a-holes who ban tea at this thing have nothing to say about the sh!thole lib protesters consistently make when they have their massive protests. (Trash all over the place, piss in the streets, effigies and anti-american signage in the streets.)
Bring on the tea, I say!
Dump it!
Civil disobedience…
But when a liberal burns a flag, where are the carbon police?
Kids used to pull pranks and put Fizzies in backyard pools. Maybe that would work.
It’s ok to put tea and fizzies in your body but can’t put it in the local river water along with the chlorine, pig and chicken farm runoff, ammonia and all the other pollutants. Sssh!
That’s easy: our founding fathers would have ignored the fools and done it anyway. That’s the whole point. With the way the state is tromping all over the individual of late, it’s about time the individual tells the state to go to hell.
what’s funny about this is the fact many variety of trees bark color leeches into rivers in concentrations heavier than any tea bags would do to a river…. Iowa has leftists in every city that has a college.
How about covering some real news, instead of flinging snark in random directions?
Here’s a story that got missed, after being buried by CNN and other outlets:
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/02/26/dem-blasts-obamas-budget/
Or would he simply be booed off the stage because of the (D) after his name? Like a certain media critic at CPAC who dared to tell the truth about PJM?
Praise for supporters, respect for the opposition’s right to speak and general polite decorum, of course, don’t draw eyeballs or boost ad clicks, do they?
The whole point of the Boston Tea Party was to protest against government. What kind of pansies need a government permit to reenact it? Conservatives just don’t quite get this whole “civil disobedience” thing.
Easy question.
They’d say dump the tea.
Would be better to dump the environmentalists into the river….dump the tea!!
Well, the protest could hold off until the spring flood season. With all the toxins that end up in the Cedar River, dicoloration from teabags will seem quite trivial if not completely irrelavent.
Screw it. I couldn’t go, but I dumped my morning tea on the busy street this morning.
Oh, we get it. We just often can’t bring ourselves to do what is contrary to our beliefs. “Civil Obedience” is just so ingrained in us
The US Army Corps of Engineers dumps TONS of raw sewage in the Potomac River every year in clear violation of laws and regulations.
And Iowa won’t let people dump ground up leaves in a river?
I know I keep saying it but we have already had a revolution and the governments have reduced us to serfs.
This is INSANITY!
Our founding fathers would have dumped the tea anyway.
That humming vibration under your feet is the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves so rapidly, the energy crisis could be solved if you hooked up their bodies to electric turbines.
I’m sorry… maybe I missed something in whackjob school.
LEAVES are now considered pollutants? We can’t put LEAVES in the river because they pollute the water? Are we going to arrest fish for peeing in the river? What about animals who walk the river’s edge with dirt on their hooves? Are we clearcutting trees within fifty yards of every body of water in the country?
THROW THE DAMN TEA IN THE RIVER!
People urinate in the Cedar River for goodness sake.
Assaulting military recruiters = Ok
Sabotaging military supply lines = Ok
Endlessly harassing prop 8 supporters until they are compelled to surrender or jeopardize their business = Ok
Putting tea into water which already has plant and soil runoff in it = Not Ok
Yeah, that makes sense. /sarc
Putting a few teabags into the mail today addressed to Mike Wade at the DNR’s Manchester office. People should dump tons of it on his doorstep. Maybe this is his lame attempt at humor.
What a stupid a$$.
Yeah, dump it.
Let’s see … pouring concrete over railroad tracks okay. Putting children in the street with big-rig traffic is okay. Vandalizing Public facilities and privately owned homes is okay. Blowing up government buildings is okay … but only if you are a leftist activist seeking qualifications for becoming an educator or a community activist.
Pouring a natural substance into a river bad … because it has natural tannic acid much the same as do many trees … yet another natural occurrence along the rivers.
Wow! Ya gotta love the logic huh?
I have been around the Cedar River most of my life. You could dump 100,000 tea bags into that river and if the color changed at all, it would only be for the better since the color naturally varies betwen coffee and cocoa colored.
It is your basic silty Midwest River.
Perhaps herbal or decaf woul be okay?
Now, if it had been a protest against Bush and the Republicans, I sense an approving silecnce from the authorites would likely have been the case.
Your comment reminds me of W.C. Fields stated reason for never drinking water…
I don’t know. There actually might be something to this tea and the water thing. Look at what happened in Boston. Do you really think anyone living there would go against the one?
It must have been the long term effects of the Boston Tea Party, right?????
I just read the article. The organizer is a weenie too. “We don’t want to hurt the river.” What the heck has this country come to? I hope some real protesters are there to dump real tea.
I agree with the symbolism, but because my background is um, ‘colonial’, I also see the waste of good tea involved here.
Mind you, if you just use rubbish tea–dump away! It is an abomination.
Mike, dude, seven of your 15 minutes of fame are now gone. Use the last eight carefully.
Leave it to the envirowhackos to put “discoloration” above the people!
Urinate.
What could be more natural than that?
Seems we were on the same page.
The original Tea Party wasn’t announced beforehand. No permission was requested. In fact, serious crimes were committed, and the participants were taking serious risks.
That’s what made it so effective.
And yet here we have people who can’t place tea bags that they purchase into a river that’s already polluted. I’m at a loss to see where the “anger” comes in.
It’s like John Paul Jones asking “Do I have your permission to continue fighting?”
I know of no protests being considered that contain actually risky behavior such as throwing real tea into a body of water, or tying a protest sign to a tree without permission, or perhaps referring to a member of congress as a “Doody Head.”
But I do know one thing: if extreme activities such as this are being contemplated, they aren’t going to be published on the web beforehand, or at all. They won’t be discussed over cell phones, or regular phones, or any other electronic means. Signals intelligence is simply too strong these days.
I bet they let boats with motors on the river ’cause you know, they do not dump crap into the water (or vent exhaust into it either).
They should file a complaint when the first boat passes by.
The stench emanating from most “environmentalists” armpits is a “pollutant” as well.
Any of them get sent to the hoosegow for that?
They wouldn’t have bothered to ask. They would’ve been too busy dumping tea.
ironman: Given the hygiene of most environmentalists, that would cause even greater damage to the river!
I will donate to the defense fund if the tea is dumped. Even if you dump Mr. Wade (I can think of a few puns here).
LOL. Reminds me of what I heard about the filming of “The African Queen” on location. Virtually all cast and crew members came down with disentary except Bogart and director John Houston. Why? Unlike everyone else, they abstained from drinking the local water, preferring whiskey instead : )
Okay, showing my crude vulgar side here, but my suggestion is drink the tea and then pee in the river. If they arrest you then they’d have to arrest every living creature that’s anywhere near that river.
This has got to be a joke. Or maybe these knuckleheads really ARE as stupid as all that. Ever look at pictures of the Cedar?
http://www.cedarrivergardencenter.com/flood/index.htm
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicolletdesign/2576526297/
Do they really think tea will “discolor” that mess?
… and just imagine how the MSM will cover this.
It won’t be: “Americans by the tens of thousands stood together across the nation in protest today against the new administration’s reckless tax and spend policies…”
It will be: “A hundred or so of Rush Limbaugh’s evil cult workshipers grabbed their torches and pitchforks and commiserated together today in what can only be described as a most dastardly mass act of environmental sabotage. Shame, shame, shame on those eeee-villl conservatives…”
You’re right nail49….dumping the environmentalists into the river would cause a massive outbreak of E-coli and Staphococcus!!!!
Damn the officials…dump the damned tea!!
How long before any form of conservative protest is disallowed?
Won’t be long at all. I’m sure it’s one of the next few things on the agenda. The Unfairness Doctrine is already on the stage.
So they consider dumping dried leaves from a bush polution. Doesn’t this happen every day????
Discoloration???
Screw them, dump the tea and damn the econazi scum.
excuse the language but F$$#K the msm
How many St. Patty’s Day celebrations in Chicago have liberals attended…. y’know – where they dye the Chicago River green?
Just askin’…..
They should do it tonight, dressed as Indians, true founding father style.
That’s laughable. Dump the tea AND the State Officials in question.
Seriously, who else here is sick of all the politicaly correct crap shoved down our throat every day???
HAND GOES UP!!!!
Other commenters are right, we’re too nice for own good. The original tea party participants didn’t even own the tea they dumped, they stole it. They were willing to risk punishment to make their point. This is why libs don’t take us seriously. They can pass any law they want and we’ll sit around and b***h about it, but we’ll still abide by it. I wouldn’t perceive us as much of a threat either if I were them.
We said it was wrong for the Dems to dump on us with a stimulus bill and they did it anyway. Dump the tea. That is the whole point of the protest. If you don’t dump it, then they win.
Do we even have proof that what that official is saying is accurate? Is tea mentioned specifically in the law books as a pollutant? Are there precedents where a court has determined tea to be a pollutant? Or is it the official himself who’s declaring it a pollutant on his own as a means to intimidate the protesters?
They want to form a union and go on strike from spinning in their graves, citing that they have been spinning non-stop since January 20th. Ben Franklin is just waiting for card check to pass…
What do you call a smurf at night? A Blue Moon!
So paint your bums blue and moon a politician for the good of the country.
On second thought, forget the tea, just dump a few sea marker dye packs instead go for the day glow green effect!
GSP
“This is Sparta!
How dirty would the river be if they dumped the state officials in there instead?
That sounds racist to me…
Well, if CO2 is a pollutant then tea must be really, really bad stuff.
Is “Mike” aware that,if there are any fish still living in that silty quagmire, they are cr*pping in the water? Fine the b*stards I say, ban fish.
Environmentalists are just stupid. They are the penultimate control freaks. Probably had problems with potty training as infants.
Dump the tea.
Errah it probably on the list of pollutants right after Evian and potting soil.
Errah, I’m keeping a list of all this illegal dumping of tea into our natural watersheds so I can get a grant from the EPA to clean up these new superfund sites.
Get bent?
The founding fathers would be too busy shooting every memebr of the government to say much, but that was a differnet time.
Errah
There’s maritime laws against that!!! They float and would hinder navigation. I believe if this were to happen they would be reclassified as “effluent”.
This coming from the same people who use kool aid to give strange color streaks to their hair.
It would be OK as long as they break into a foreclosed house along the river, then dump the tea from there.
There is such a thing as white tea. Why not mix it with black tea and proclaim that the tea party is a combination of tax protest and racial solidarity. Then the idiots in the EPA would be pitted against the idiots in the EEOC.
Also, what is the actual color of the Cedar River. If I recall, cedar has a reddish brown color that varies in accordance with the season. You could always bet some red easter egg dye to mix with the tea until matches the color of the river. You could then claims it was a religious event to honor the American Indias. Then the idiots in the EPA would be pitted against people of religion expressing their freedoms and also be pitted against the idiots in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Maybe the best idea of all is to use Green Tea to honor mother natures emerging spring. Then the EPA would be pitted against mother nature which is what they are supposed to protect.
There is no end of ideas here as tea comes in many different colors. The stupidity of all this is a truck load of tea would be rapidly dissipated in the river assuming that it has any flow to it. The EPA is no longer an organization that understands anything like its mission. It is just another lazy bureaucratic organization with people who love to throw their weight around.
The leftists have demolished the constitution, the concept of limited government and usurped powers they do not lawfully possess and they use those unlawful powers and our own tax dollars against us to further enslave us. This is the way revolutions start.
I can’t believe what I see happening to my country and the great American experiment.
I suggest that the enviro terrorist scum be thrown into the river with the tea, just sayin’
After all these years, who knew there’d eventually be a need for Pepsi Clear?
Dump The Tea!
And this is a state that has a HUGE say in who we get to vote for in the Presidential elections.
The authorities would have banned the use of tea from the original Boston Tea Party, too. That’s why the partiers went in disguise.
They weren’t just protesting. They were fighting back.
Time to tell the bureaucrats to take a flying you know what. DUMP THE TEA and let the “chips” fall where they may. Why aren’t leftist, anti-American demonstrators treated this way? They leave behind garbage and where are the environmentalists then? Enough of the hypocrisy! Please, someone – dump the tea in the damn river.
OT
Obama begins removing legal protections that would protect pro-life doctors and nurses from being forced to perform abortions.
Of course, doctors morally opposed to abortions who stopped practicing medicine couldn’t be forced to perform abortions.
And this is just a first step, ending the Bush Administration safeguards on forcing pro-life doctors and nurses, and nobody will be forced to lose their job or kill against their concience, yet.
Of course, the end result, every OB/GYN practicing in America will be pro-abortion.
This only applies to doctors working at practices receiving federal funds, which, of course, under Obama’s socialized health care plans, will be all of them.
I’d guess 99% of the ‘senior environemntal specialists’ living off the tax-payers dollar, who see business as the enemy of Mother Gaia, are rabidly pro-Obama anyway, and any excuse to prevent blasphemy against the Chosen One will be used.
If only there were some sort of disguise that tea-dumping protesters could wear.
Dump the Tea!
The worst it could do is change the hue of the river to a pleasant shade of crap from what I see in the pictures of the river.
Say there are 200 demonstrators all dump their tea within a few minutes of each other, and police will arrest them all? How about court congestion when all ticketed claim to be innocent.
If that doesn’t work throw Dud the Dude Wade in the river. In the clip he did not quote a rule or law violation, so, dump the tea.
Listening to Mark Levin last night.
Obama promises to cut his budget deficits in half in ten years (actually QED, starting with the Porkulus inflated baseline, and assuming we indeed cut and run from Iraq and Afghanistan) mainly by raising taxes on the richest one percent.
The richest one percent pay 40% of all income taxes. Actually, not the richest, the highest earning. Rockefeller of West Virginia, The DWI Killer, are certainly among the top 1% richest, but inherited wealth, once past the death tax, is free.
The top 5%, pay 60%. The top half earning, pay basically all the income tax. The bottom 50% get a free ride, and part of Obama’s tax ‘cuts’ are increased money from the earned income tax credit given to those who pay no taxes.
50% get a free ride from the governmet, it would seem natural the party giving away the goodies, even without voter fraud, will have a hard time losing elections.
BTW, my boss told me yesterday that if Obama does raise his taxes, and perhaps lifts the income limits on social security taxes, meaning well over 50% of his income goes straight to the Feds, he may shut down the company. Oil and gas is a risky business; commodity price swings, environmental liabilities, risks on drilling dry holes.
I asked him about Ayn Rand and the whole John Galt notion. He had never heard of it. But he has independently arrived at the concept of maybe ‘going on strike’, and living on his savings, if the tax regime gets much more confiscatory.
Dump the damn tea!!- it’s good for the soul – To hell with Mr Wade. If the sanfran libs can march in the nude and burn my flag, a little tea in the river is a good thing. DUMP IT PLEASE.
Not using real tea is a minor set back, but fighting the revolution with squirt-guns is going to be just plain hard.
iamsaved said:
This is a sissified, whiny, cutesie gimmick where rich people pretend they give a d–n about the country.
This is a protest that no one cares about and will have no results.
We need some people who are willing to go beyond whining about things and do something to change them. Barry Soetoro (aka Barack Obama)must be deposed along with his regime. It’s going to take more than dumping trash into a river!
““Discoloration is considered a violation,” Wade said.”
Green tea! Problem solved.
People, People, come on. So who cares if we can’t dump tea. It’s not about dumping tea. It’s about standing up for what we believe. And for those of you talking about protesting without permits or “civil disobedience”, then think about whom you are referencing. We are conservatives. We are law-abiding citizens. We can and will disagree, but we will not do so unlawfully. We will not make spectacles of ourselves like those on the left do. We are not like them, and let our actions show how much we are not like them.
Bruce,
I beg to differ. I am far from rich, and I care a great deal for this country. This is not a gimmick, but if you wish to stay home and talk trash on the computer, you may. If you actually want to do something, then get off your butt and join a protest.
A major problem in the United States is NOT the runoff from plant residue that contributes to fertilization of plant life (one just needs to look at the nutrient-rich waters of the Amazon River), it is the continued employment of idiots placed in positions of importance, telling us what we can do or not do! Enough!!!
I guess the rivers/waters that are downhill from the tea plantations are devoid of life in those areas of Asia, since this idiot (Mike Wade) deems Camellia sinensis residue a pollutant, right?
Here’s a hint, moron…if it is drinkable, and not banned for human consumption, then it is not a pollutant!
Does this mean, “I was only following my orders,” is now a legitimate defense?
When are we going to pay reparations to all of the Nazis we apparently unjustly convicted for crimes against humanity who did not want to kill but had to follow their orders from Der Furher?
Ed, thanks for that link. Welcome to Germany 1938.
#92
Believe it or not, and maybe this is just tin foil hat black helicopter conspiracy theory, Obama wants all the pro-life/religious OB-GYNs to eventually change careers.
Then all the OB-GYNs left will either be pro-abortion, or at least willing to kill babies to keep their jobs.
Remember, with 50% (roughly) of Americans already sucking the taxpayer teat, a built in Dem advantage, and some true believers in Global Warming (along with those who see a clever way to advance communism in the name of protecting polar bears), I can see a Chinese style 1 or 2 child policy, with forced abortions, coming down the pike.
Remember, Obama is nationalizing health care. Your records will be electronic.
This is distant future, and it may be Obama’s chosen successor who implements the policy (assuming Obama doesn’t suspend elections to remain in power).
BTW, if I lived in Iowa, what, if 500 people throw teabags in the river, what are they going to do? Arrest them all? Unlikely, and worst case, a misdemeanor littering charge.
How about if a state official bans the tornado sirens currently going off in my neck of the woods?
Standing idly by while liberals fly to ECO-Conferences in private jets, drive to the conference in SUVs converted to limos and leave the engine running because they’re just making an entrance, and then go to their 5 star hotel and use lots of electricity produced by coal power plants for hottubs and such.
Montgomery, AL,
Strong tornadic rotation noted approaching
Ed Mahmoud abu al-Kahoul:
We are right in the midst of it — getting VERY dark outside, wind is getting pretty blustery! Only a little rain, lightning within 5 miles, buckle your seat belt, hang onto your hats!
Throw the damned tea in anyway.