While Baker works painstakingly to preserve chemically volatile vinyl stickers in separated layers of plastic and archival silicone-release or alkaline papers, she also has traced the history of bumper stickers back to her home state of Kansas and screenprinter Forest P. Gill. Initially, Gill’s car stickers printed on paper, but were more liable to slough off in nasty weather, even with the application of protective wax or varnish. So Gill introduced self-adhesive vinyl to the automotive world, and the rest is history.

Jackson Lee explained her vote by recalling the difficult early years of the United States of America. She reminded her colleagues that, although the early U.S.A. was besieged by European powers intent on ruining the new nation, the founders did not allow their fears to interfere with the growth of liberty. The early Americans stood firm in support of the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure in a way that many Americans today are reluctant to emulate.

Jackson Lee declared:

“To win the war on terror, the United States must remain true to the founding architects of this democracy who created a Constitution which enshrined an inalienable set of rights. These Bills Of Rights guarantee certain fundamental freedoms that cannot be limited by the government. One of these freedoms, the Fourth Amendment, is the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. We do not circumvent the Fourth Amendment, or any other provision in the United States Constitution, merely because it is inconvenient.

As an American citizen, the security and safety of my constituency is pinnacle, but I will never stand for legislation that infringes on the basic rights afforded in our Constitution. When our founding fathers drafted the constitution, after living under an oppressive regime in Britain, they ensured that the American people would never experience such subjugation. Where are the protective measures for our citizens in the Patriot Act? Why are the measures addressed in the last Congress not included in the bill?

Instead of reauthorizing these provisions, Congress should conduct robust, public oversight of all surveillance tools and craft reforms that will better protect private communications from overbroad government surveillance.”

In these times when phantom fears are provoking many politicians in Washington D.C. to rush to sacrifice our constitutional freedoms for a thin semblance of security, we need more leaders like Sheila Jackson Lee who remember what true American courage looks like. Courage means that, even if there are dangers out there in the world, we keep hold of our freedoms.

If you’re a resident of the 18th congressional district in Texas, display your support to Representative Jackson Lee. Put this bumper sticker on your car to show that when Sheila Jackson speaks in support of liberty in the Constitution, she speaks for you.

If you live further to the east, consider making your way to Washington D.C. this Saturday to show some leadership yourself. This Saturday, March 12, 2011 at noon, there will be a protest against the Patriot Act outside the U.S. Capitol Building.

In order to justify their opposition to social programs that help their neighbors, the Tea Party activists come up with elaborate conspiracy theories about Muslims from Kenya and Communist plots to enslave us all by keeping Americans healthy.

The Boston Tea party was for freedom. Today’s Tea Party is for fear.

That anti-Bush bumper sticker movement crested in early 2005, and then was replaced by the phenomenon of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. That campaign, unlike the campaign against Bush in 2004, was centered around one personality, and so the grassroots bumper sticker approach of individuals expressing themselves creatively was replaced by a flash again of the old way of movement uniformity.

Look out on the road today, and you see the result – a lot of official Obama for President bumper stickers, and not very many independently produced items. As long as Obama holds sway over the imagination of the progressive imagination, that’s how it’s going to be, and ironically, that centralized, personality-focused approach, as effective as it has been at electing Obama himself, may be the undoing of progressive idealism itself.

So we see the emergence of a new, post-election group of bumper stickers, with themes such as thank me, I voted for Obama.

Almost disappeared are the issue bumper stickers, and now, the Obama campaign itself is disappearing, to transition through Inauguration 2009 into the Obama Administration.

What will become of progressive activism? Can the progressive grassroots survive, when the White House accepts responsibility for progressive action itself?

I’m writing this post through a service called ThisNext, a kind of social networking web site that focuses on shopping. People recommend things to buy, writing short reviews of them and arranging them into lists.

Among the items that are reviewed and recommended on the network are political bumper stickers – this one, for example.

I appreciate this bumper sticker’s effort to stretch Americans’ political memories. Back in the year 2000, America chose George W. Bush, believing his promise that he would bring honor and integrity to the White House. Barack Obama is offered by the sticker as a long-awaited fulfillment of that promise.

It’s a great message for Obama supporters, but I do want to offer a caveat emptor message: Barack Obama is making a lot of promises, just like George W. Bush did. We won’t know whether he’ll fulfill those promises until he’s actually President. Progressives, as much as anyone else, will need to watch Barack Obama like a hawk, and work to hold him accountable to his promises.

A caveat emptor for ThisNext too. ThisNext offers a means through which people can write articles like this, for their own blogs, on the ThisNext web site.

Think about it for just a second, and you’ll realize that people who write blogs can ALREADY write blog articles about bumper stickers, or anything else for sale for that matter, without the ThisNext widget.

Writing a blog article on ThisNext actually is more difficult, because it doesn’t allow the use of html. A blog article with no links? How useless is that?

Well, it’s actually very useful for ThisNext, because there is one link in this article – to the bumper sticker listed on ThisNext, which provides ThisNext with a source of affiliate income. How very convenient for them. How very useless for bloggers.

My experiment with blogging through ThisNext is done.

Post script: Dear Goodness me. ThisNext blogging is even worse than I thought. Not only is it super-controlling, stripping out html, it doesn’t even work properly. There’s supposed to be a bumper sticker graphic with a link for buying the bumper sticker in this article, but look for yourself: No graphic, and no link, is there.

Now I’m going to have to go back in and remove that garbage code, and place in my own link to the bumper sticker – direct, without any extra affiliate nonsense. Thanks for nothing, ThisNext. I’ll keep blogging for myself.

The more I see of social networking sites like ThisNext, the more I think that independent web sites are really the way to go for substantial networking. Making links and “friends” comes quick and easy on social networking sites, but so easy that the benefit is ephemeral, the relationships lasting just as long as a click.

I’ll put this in another way: John McCain is history.

It isn’t just because John McCain is old. A person can be old and still remain relevant and be able to contribute meaningfully.

It has to do with John McCain’s place in time. John McCain has failed to update his ideas.

John McCain is a politician of the past. McCain embraces ideas and attitudes that are two generations out of date.

John McCain has no vision for the future of America. His agenda is one of defense, trying to delay progress, to fend off hope, to desperately cling to the old ways of thinking that he and his supporters are fond of.

John McCain is a relic of time gone by, of plans that didn’t work out, of limitations that most Americans have transcended.

The way of John McCain is the way of the failures of America’s past.

John McCain is history. Now is the time for America to do better than it has done. Now is the time for a candidate of the future. Now is the time for Barack Obama.