About 35 people were on hand this past Saturday in Corbin for a "Tea Party" to protest government bailouts of private businesses, increased federal spending and a general sense that freedoms are being lost.
The event, held at city hall from noon until 2:00 p.m. was one of 1,504 similar events planned nationwide for July 4 mainly organized to protest what many consider wasteful government spending.
Vicky King, of Pineville, said she traveled to Corbin to attend the first protest she’s ever been to in her life because she is "scared about what [U.S. President] Barack Obama is doing."
"It seems like with every stroke of his pen he is taking away more rights," King said. "I believe he is leading us into a socialist state. I am against everything he stands for."
King said she is a Republican who wanted to vote for Mike Huckabee in the 2008 presidential primary election before he dropped out. Huckabee, a Republican noted for his decidedly conservative, religious views, is the former Governor of Arkansas and a current Fox News Channel political commentator. He dropped out of the race before Kentuckians got a chance to vote in the primaries.
"I didn’t want to vote for John McCain, but better him than Obama," King said. "I think things might be a little better now if McCain were in there, but it seems like he kind of jumped ship when Obama got elected."
The "Tea Parties" sprung from conservative voters’ frustration with the results of the last election and disagreement with policy decisions since. The Tea, or ‘Taxed Enough Already,’ Party protests are comprised of locally organized events across the United States that began in 2009 in to protest the federal budget and the stimulus package, which the protesters say is an example of wasteful government spending. They oppose the increase in the national debt as well as possible future tax increases. Many of the protests were held on April 15, 2009 to coincide with the annual U.S. deadline for submitting tax returns and a new wave of protests was held Saturday.
Joe Roberts, of Corbin, said the nation’s problems right now are too numerous to adequately address in one protest.
"We have the potential to bring things back and turn it into something really good. We need to just start standing up for ourselves and other people’s rights," he said. "We need to help our kids get smarter in the country and be good members of society. We need to stop helping people that just want to sit around and do nothing all day and just off the fat of the land."
Roberts said he is against recent bailouts of failed financial institutions and automaker General Motors, calling it an ineffective "quick fix" to a problem that took "60 or 70 years" to develop.
Chris Lay, who encouraged Roberts to attend the protest, held a sign likening "liberalism" with other ideologies like communism, Nazism, totalitarianism and fascism.
"Liberalism is what we are dealing with today and it is probably worse than all those," he said. "They are going to take everything you got and entitle it to everybody else."
Lay described himself as a "professional Rush Limbaugh listener," referring to the popular conservative talk-radio show host, and said the protest were the beginning of a movement by conservative voters.
"When you get conservatives fires up things happen. Look what happened in 2000 and 2004, or in 1980 and 1984 when we ushered in Ronald Reagan who had the message that government is the problem. It seems like the government always takes from the guy that is responsible and gives it to the guy who is irresponsible."
Some participants in Corbin’s protest used it as a venue to rail against all sorts of perceived government interference in the lives of citizens including gun control laws and the increased price of ammunition, police violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and the right to form a militia. One protester even discouraged others from obtaining flu shots.
