It would be really funny if it weren’t so scary.  The tea baggers scream about their liberties being taken away – but they support the party that wants to do away with our 4th amendment rights to privacy, that wants to control who can marry whom, what a woman does with her own body, that wants to squelch voter’s rights, that support the truly anti-democratic idea that corporations are people and money equals free speech… and many more liberty killing laws the right is trying to foist upon us.

I’ve experience the assault on our freedoms personally. Arrested after attempting to ask a question of my congressional representative at an event billed as a “town hall meeting” by a cop who lied on his arrest report, and abused while in custody by a Broward Sheriff’s Deputy who lied on his incident report… and I have no recourse to make these people take responsibility for their serious abuses of power — not to mention the sorry excuse for a Congressman who stool by and condoned by arrest for committing democracy.

Last night I found out that the situation is even worse.

Recently, photos of Central Florida citizen activists were distributed at a Rep Tim Griffin’s government-sponsored Town Hall by his staffers in Arkansas. The packets that are being distributed include photos of local activists, including some Organize Now supporters, along with a list of questions about their personal and professional backgrounds.

Most of the people featured in the packets are constituents of Rep. Dan Webster (R-FL) and were outspoken at the Representative’s Town Halls.

“It seems clear that the presentation of these materials is intended to encourage harassment of these citizen activists and to intimidate other citizens from speaking out across America by attacking those who have already spoken out,” said Tamecka Pierce, President of Organize Now, who is also profiled in the document. “This behavior is unfitting for any member of Congress or their Congressional staff and represents a threat to the First Amendment rights of all citizens. This type of state sponsored intimidation, is a troubling, direct danger to our democratic process.”

“Citizens everywhere should be concerned as to whether or not tax payer dollars and resources were used to profile fellow Americans in an attempt to silence their voices and what role Congressional offices or campaigns played in disseminating state-sponsored intimidation of private citizens,” said Mike Cantone, Political Director for Organize Now, who was also profiled.

Those paragraphs begin a press release from the Central Florida-based Organize Now, whose Political Director, Mike Cantone, will join me on the show this morning to tell us all about it.

We witnessed the damage to the democratic process in Wisconsin this week, with $30 million injected into nine state senate recall races.  Today, Public Citizen is organizing an online protest to call attention to the fact that Dollars don’t equal Democracy!  I’ll speak with online organizer Rick Claypool about it.

And John Fugelsang will make us laugh during a very sad time in US history.