Last weekend, over 5,000 people gathered in Cincinnati to protest the bailouts and multi-trillion dollar spending in Washington in a Modern Day Boston Tea Party. Michelle Malkin reports that this is the beginning of a growing revolutionary movement. “The tax-paying rebels are not going away. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, March 7, an estimated 500 protesters gathered for a Tea Party at Titletown Brewing. Similar Tea Parties have been held in Seattle, Denver, Mesa, Arizona, Olathe, Kansas and in other cities around the country but the Cincinnati protest is by far the largest one yet.

The Tea Party concept, of course, gets its name from the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773 when colonial Americans said to George III of England that the colonists would not accept any further taxes imposed by the Crown unless they had representation in Parliament and were able to speak on and vote on all issues. The colonists just wanted a seat at the decision table. When George III denied the colonists that seat, revolution was all but assured.

Strangely, as citizens of the United States with elected representatives in Congress, we find ourselves in a position very similar to colonial Americans almost 250 years ago. While we elect our representatives and senators and technically their votes reflect our wishes, increasingly they pass legislation and increase taxes without checking with their constituents.

Politico reports House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) didn’t rule out the the idea of a second stimulus package and said Wednesday he would be willing to sit down with the White House and congressional Democrats to discuss any new emergency spending proposals.

Citing the current economic crisis, Cantor acknowledged: “You have to.”

The Richmond congressman said, though, that he would only support a bill that differed from the first stimulus and included additional tax cuts for small businesses.

Meanwhile, many others on Capitol Hill express ignorance when a second stimulus package is mentioned. Our question is: If there aren’t results from a first stimulus package, why try for a second? Won’t it only drop us deeper into the black hole of debt?

But while Congress is now throwing around the words “Billions and Billions” like Carl Sagan used to a quarter century ago when talking about the vast expanses of the universe, the new buzzword is Trillion. Already several trillion dollars have been authorized when you add up the TARP funds, the Citibank and AIG and Auto Bailout Money, and the Recovery Act of 2009. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t screaming about this as loudly as they should be, mostly because a trillion of anything is far beyond our comprehension as a species to understand. We’re discussing and throwing numbers around in our media like we understand them, but in reality the concepts a billion and trillion represent are so vast they are normally only used when discussing phenomenon out in space in our universe.

Elizabeth Williamson of the Wall Street Journal reports that The travel industry is taking aim at Democrats’ efforts to limit luxury travel by companies that accept government bailouts with a new advertising campaign that says the attacks on travel are costing jobs. The article is important because it clearly explains the other side of the coin, or in other words, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, or to put it even more simply, consequences.

Certainly the media were correct to report the largesse of AIG’s top salespersons’ conferences and conventions where executives rung up thousands of dollars in alcohol after AIG received an $85 Billion bailout from the government. Spending like that was out of line and in poor taste as long as the taxpayers are footing the bill. However, business travel is legitimate and helps the economy as long as it’s within a company’s budget and the company is profitable and can justify the travel with a resultant revenue stream and return on investment for shareholders. Absolutely travel can be wasteful when travel decisions are made for the wrong reasons. If a company has the money to spend and it’s budgeted and it’s generating a revenue stream that pays for its travel expenses, the travel is fine. If a company is in bailout or bankruptcy and its purpose is a business perk, maybe not so much. Like any other, it’s a complex issue.

In 1952 Puerto Rico entered the Promised Land as a Commonwealth of the United States with all the hopes and dreams of finally having an organized government and the opportunity to become a full-fledged state of the most powerful country on the planet; and yet, unlike Alaska and Hawaii, Puerto Rico has not completed its path to Statehood. Five decades of uncertainty as a colony of the United States under its flag were made official, but those five uncertain decades were followed by five more of legal uncertainty under a pair of flags that are supposed to represent the liberty and pursuit of happiness for all Puerto Rican citizens. How Puerto Rico has ended up in this pseudo-quagmire somewhere in between a commonwealth of the United States, full statehood, and even an independent nation in its own right is a long story with many twists and turns.

After being invaded and conquered by the American Army in 1898, which ended 400 years of Spanish rule over the island, Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States with political structures yet uncertain, and in many ways, they remain that way today.

As if the jubilation from the Democratic National Convention, where Barack Obama made history winning the Democratic Party Nomination for President, has never ended, more than two million Americans are expected to travel to Washington DC to witness what might be the most historic Inauguration in our nation’s history; while many more millions are expected to watch on television and the web. But massive parties come at a massive cost. CNN Money, Bloomberg.com, Politico and many other news outlets are reporting that Inaugural festivities will exceed $150 million by the time the galas and streamers are all cleaned up—down to the last piece of confetti. This enormous price tag just begs the question: Should we be spending so much money, even for a historic inauguration, when our economy is deep in a recession?