Congress is in recess, and the Tea Party gatherings and Town Hall meetings are gearing up.

You lucky folks in Richmond, Virginia can attend a Tea Party gathering in front of Home Depot in Glen Allen out in the West End. That’s today, Saturday August 10th, at noon. [It’s one I’d be attending myself if life had handed me oranges instead of these lemons I’m holding in my lap. C’est la guerre.]

As for those Town Hall meetings, here’s a video from Real Clear Politics taken this week at a Town Hall meeting in Maryland. The audio quality isn’t great, but you sure get a sense of the mood of these voters. Check in at the URL above to see some of the remarks transcribed, the most memorable of which is, “We’re dying out here”:

And here is RCP’s description:

Congressman Andy Harris, M.D. (R-MD) hosted a town hall event on Tuesday August 6 in Bel Air, MD to take questions and hear the concerns of people in Maryland’s First District. Many voiced their frustration with Obamacare and the scandals that are plaguing this administration from the IRS targeting conservative groups, the NSA snooping, and the coverup in Benghazi.

Some Virginia and Maryland groups will be strategizing about the best use of their time during this recess. I read earlier this month (though I can’t find the reference now) that some union workers plan to disrupt Town Hall meetings. That ploy may well backfire as people are becoming more fed up with what government dishes out and the expectation in Washington that Americans will continue holding their plates out for whatever is on offer.

The Tea Party groups in Eric Cantor’s district here in Virginia sure would like to have a word with him, but there has been no assurance from his office that he’ll be in touch. Fortunately for concerned citizens, they can — and will — use The Empty Chair strategy to talk to Mr. Cantor. If he’s smart, he’ll show up, because an empty chair gives your interlocutor a lot more leeway to have fun at your expense.

As Real Clear Politics mentioned in the recap of that video, the issues our politicians will have to face sooner or later are the ObamaCare nightmare, the so-called Giant Amnesty bill, the avoidance so far of the fallout from Benghazi, and those disappearing jobs that Obama doesn’t mention anymore. Despite the President’s minimization of these problems as “phony”, neither he nor his echo chamber MSM have been able to make them go away.

The routine demonization of the Tea Parties has picked up its pace in the last few months leading up to this recess. That’s to be expected, given the fear of the crony capitalist establishment politicians. John McCain is the exemplar for the type. Can’t decide which party he’s with and no one much cares which he chooses. Our very own Rage Boy is simply an opportunist.

Greta van Susteren at Fox News interviewed a Richmond Tea Party leader this week. You may recall that this Richmond group was one of the first to be persecuted by the Internal Revenue Service. At the time, I figured the IRS started on Richmond because it wasn’t far down the road from Washington. They’ve since moved in on other groups, but ours felt the first tremors of the boots marching toward us.

Since the MSM has ceaselessly portrayed us Tea Party members as troglodytes, Ms. van Susteren makes certain her listeners grasp the fact that we’re a diverse group:

GvS… you don’t have to name them, but you know, give or six people in your Tea Party group — tell me what their occupations and backgrounds are.

Larry Nordvig: …well, our own board is — is a good example. We have two women. We have three men on the board. One gentleman is black. He’s the head of our very active minority outreach.

…their jobs descriptions — we have one county supervisor [who]’s in government. We have two people that work for an organization. One is in IT. We have one semi-retired businessman. You know, I’m an airline pilot. It’s everything under the sun. We are average Americans, very patriotic, very passionate, very forceful.

We want this country to return to constitutionally limited government and some fiscal sanity, and we want to hold our representatives accountable. And we’re not going to stop doing the work until we see that come to fruition.

Indeed we won’t stop. We have less and less to lose as the government becomes ever more invasive and hostile. There is a general feeling among ordinary folks that their country is fast becoming unrecognizable. That political climate is a dangerous one for incumbents.

Hat tip: Richard Falknor