An Ohio Patriot corrects the record

Art credit: ayurvedamagazine.org

Fellow Ohio patriot Nelson Hack of the Morrow County Tea Party, had his letter published in The Morrow County Sentinel on Dec. 30:

To the Editor:

Last week our representative to Congress answered critics who have been vocal about the recently passed government funding bill – the so-called Cromnibus.  I would guess he included me since I copied to him and his staff my Letter to the Editor of 12/17/14.  I also let him know that I sent it to all the Morrow County TEA Party members, the Morrow County TEA Party web page, Facebook, other Tea Parties, and newspapers throughout his district and state.  

Let me say I like Pat Tiberi as a person.  I believe he is a good man and has a wonderful family and seems to be honest until it comes to politics.  There is a war in the Republican establishment against Constitutional Conservatives within the party of which I am one.  For over a hundred years the progressives (liberals), both Republican and Democrat, have been doing their best to destroy the Constitution.  Did you ever wonder why, when a so-called conservative is elected, he/she never tries or manages to undo the legislation or programs the progressives and, most of the time they themselves, voted to have enacted?  Most of this legislation and these programs are unconstitutional and no one says a word!  After a long-enough silence it stands as law.    

Something Representative Tiberi did not tell is the political earmark in the Cromnibus bill that INCREASES the amount the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) can collect from individual donors from $32,400 per year to $324,000 – a tenfold increase! Since the NRSC takes sides in primaries, the new donation limit will help the DC establishment do more to support liberal incumbents. It's an earmark for RINOs (Republican In Name Only)!  This bill was so bad that Republican leaders had to rely on 57 Democrats to pass it.  President Obama even whipped up votes in support of the bill, and NOTE that Representative Jim Jordon did NOT vote for it. 

Let’s look at what Representative Tiberi calls “things in this bill that conservatives can be proud to have accomplished”:  

1. “The agency that handles immigration enforcement is only funded until February.”  But negotiators gave new money for immigration programs through OTHER federal agencies.  They gave $948 million to the Department of Health and Human Service for an unaccompanied children program -- an $80 million increase. That program provides health and education services to the young migrants (MIGRANTS!  I believe they mean illegals).  The department also gets an additional $14 million to help school districts absorb new illegal students. And the State Department gets an additional $260 million to assist Central American countries from which the illegal children are coming.   Current funding for Department of Homeland Security which oversees most immigration policy is scheduled to end in February.  If Congress fails to pass legislation to fund it for the remainder of the year before the deadline there will be no pay for the Border Guards.  Wow, wouldn’t that be a real poke in the eye to Obama - no Border Guards!  That would surely put a stop to Obama’s illegal executive overreach on immigration, wouldn’t it?   Because the Republican establishment in D.C. cannot figure out strategies that work they will be made to look foolish and will cave in again.  Once again they will say this is not the right time for a fight - we will fight in September.  As someone on radio said, they are just like Lucy; they will once again yank the football away just when Charlie Brown (the Constitutional Conservatives) is ready to kick it.

2. “It doesn’t provide new funding for Obamacare.” The key word is NEW.  It doesn’t stop any money that is already in place to fund whatever is already authorized in Obamacare until October.  Take that, Obamacare!

3. “Strengthens pro-life provisions.” REALLY?  Here is what this bill does: once again it bans using federal funding to perform most abortions; blocks the use of local and federal funding for abortions in the District of Columbia; and blocks the use of federal dollars for abortions for federal prisoners. Republicans say that there's also new language directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to ensure that consumers shopping for health-care coverage on the federal exchange can see whether or not a plan covers abortion services.

These are only a few examples of political speak our dear congressman learned from the years he has been in Washington.  I could go on but I think most will get the point.  Our Constitution does not guarantee anyone to be coddled and cared for from cradle to grave.  Socialism promises that, but it has failed everywhere it has been tried.  There have always been those who hate the freedoms our Constitution protects.  The only way our Republic will survive is to elect Constitutional Conservatives in both parties (or in another party) that may be on the ballot.  For those that say they are conservative but their voting record tells otherwise, hold their feet to the fire, let them know how they failed, and remember it at the next election.  Term limits, anyone?

Nelson Hack

Mount Gilead

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from Cleveland Tea Party Patriots!

Sea of Blue Support Rally Report

At noon today, Dec. 27, a crowd gathered in downtown Cleveland at Public Square to honor our men and women in blue, to pay tribute to those who have lost their lives in the line of duty, and those who risk their lives every day for our safety. Almost everyone was wearing blue to show their support. The rally included a silent march, led by an Honor Guard, to the Police Memorial opposite the Cuyahoga County Justice Center on Lakeside Ave.

Although Cleveland.com initially reported a crowd numbering in the "hundreds," it looked more like 5,000 to me. Here are some photographs (photo credits: Pat J. Dooley):

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Merry Christmas 2014

On this special day we want to wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas! 

We hope your lives will be filled with blessings and joy this holiday season.

Sea of Blue Support Rally Dec. 27

From 19 Action News:

Sea of Blue Support Rally 

DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND, OH (Source: WOIO)

Friends and supporters of Cleveland Police officers are asking for the citizens' support.

On Saturday, December 27 at 12:00 p.m., the group is holding what they are calling a "Sea of Blue Support Rally".

The rally will last until 1:00 p.m. and it's being held on Public Square in downtown Cleveland. According to the organizers, 'it's time to stick together like never before.'

They want to start telling the world that officers' lives matter.

They are also asking participants to wear blue in support of law enforcement. 

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Obama Takes Lead Over Speaker Boehner in 2014 Lie of the Year Competition

With the deadline fast approaching for 2014 Lie of the Year, President Obama has just one upped his closest challenger & golfing partner Speaker John Boehner.

Speaker Boehner has been working hard to keep it close and recently closed the gap in this heated competition with his lie that he "will fight tooth & nail" against the Obama's Executive Action on Amnesty. Then ratcheting up the competition, Boehner put the race in a dead heat with his fib's on the Cromnibus.

Refusing to be out done & showing why he IS the Pontiff of Prevarication, President Obama is now clearly the front runner with his doozy's on Cuba....

From Breitbart -- 

President Barack Obama unveiled a new U.S. policy toward Cuba on Wednesday as part of a deal that brought American Alan Gross home in exchange for three convicted Cuban spies. As he has done so often in the past, Obama tried to channel the perspective of America’s enemies and critics, as if his job were to act as a neutral mediator instead of defending U.S. interests and values. In the course of his address, Obama told American ten major lies, both of omission and commission.

Here they are, in order of appearance:

1. No mention of the Cuban missile crisis. “I was born in 1961 just over two years after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba….Over the next several decades, the relationship between our countries played out against the backdrop of the Cold War and America’s steadfast opposition to communism.” Cuba’s role in helping the Soviet Union project a direct threat to the U.S. mainland is carefully elided (though Obama, as he has done before, refers to his own birth as a kind of watershed.)

2. Suggesting that the president can establish a U.S. embassy on his own. “Going forward, the United States will reestablish an embassy in Havana and high ranking officials will visit Cuba.” An embassy needs to be funded by Congress, and needs an ambassador to be approved by the Senate. None of that is going to happen–nor should it, especially after the disastrous experiment in re-establishing an embassy in Syria, which Obama did in 2009, to no good effect whatsoever.

3. No mention of Cuba’s role in repressing democracy abroad. “Cuba has sent hundreds of healthcare workers to Africa to fight Ebola.” Yes, and Cuba has also sent experts in repression to Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Cuban agents also allegedly beat and raped Venezuelan protestors earlier this year. For decades, Cuba assisted guerrilla armies abroad, fomenting bloody revolution in some countries and propping up communist regimes elsewhere. It continues to do so.

4. Suggesting that Cuba does not support terrorism. “At a time when we are focused on threats from al Qaeda to ISIL, a nation that meets our conditions and renounces the use of terrorism should not face this sanction.” Yet Cuba was caught, only last year, smuggling “missile equipment” to North Korea, the dictatorship that targeted America with a cyber-terror attack on the day Obama announced the new Cuba policy. Cuba continues to offer other kinds of support to terrorists.

5. False claim that the U.S. is to blame for lack of information in Cuba. “I believe in the free flow of information. Unfortunately, our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe.” This is perhaps the most offensive lie of all, since Gross was detained for trying to help Cubans access technology. The reason Cubans lack news and communication is because the regime censors them brutally, not because of the U.S. embargo.

6. False promise to consult Congress on Cuba, when his administration broke that promise. “As these changes unfold, I look forward to engaging Congress in an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.” And yet when Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asked White House official Tony Blinken whether the administration planned any major Cuba policy changes, Blinken (now Deputy Secretary of State) lied and said any change would come in consultation with Congress.

7. False claim that Cuba agreed to release political prisoners as part of a deal with the U.S. “In addition to the return of Alan Gross and the release of our intelligence agent, we welcome Cuba’s decision to release a substantial number of prisoners whose cases were directly raised with the Cuban government by my team.” As the Washington Post noted, these political prisoners were already set to be released as the result of negotiations four years ago with the Vatican and Spain.

8. False commitment to principle of changing policies that do not work. “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing for over five decades and expect a different result.” If that were really what Obama believed, we would not see the administration pursuing policies whose failure is already evident as a matter of historical record: high taxes, economic redistribution, socialized medicine, union-dominated schools, restrictive labor and environmental regulations, and so on.

9. Conflating the collapse of the Castro regime with the collapse of Cuba. “Moreover, it does not serve America’s interests or the Cuban people to try to push Cuba towards collapse.” A false “binary choice.” By failing to differentiate between the regime and the country, Obama signaled his intention to allow the Castros and their heirs to entrench their power–abandoning the cause of freedom and reform, just as he did with the mullahs in Iran during the 2009 uprising.

10. Falsely identifying the U.S. as a colonial power. “Others have seen us as a form of colonizer intent on controlling your future..…Let us leave behind the legacy of both colonization and communism, the tyranny of drug cartels, dictators and sham election.” America actually liberated Cuba from Spanish colonialism, and though the U.S. influenced the island heavily for decades afterward, Obama’s attempted moral equivalence between “colonization” and communist tyranny is a false one.

Obama borrowed a quote from the Cuban literary giant José Martí: “liberty is the right of every man to be honest.” Yet as my colleague Frances Martel has pointed out, Obamashortened that quote, leaving out the phrase ” and to think and to speak without hypocrisy.” Obama’s speech was both dishonest and hypocritical. It was an ominous introduction to a new policy that might have deserved a chance, were it not based on such evident disregard for American interests and Cuban freedom.

For more on the dishonesty of Obama’s speech, see Martel’s “Line by Line: Every Empty Promise in Obama’s Cuba Speech.”

Kasich on Medicaid and Common Core

Art credit: theadventuresofcallum.blogspot.com

This letter, published yesterday in the Wheeling News-Register, is by our fellow patriot Bob Connors with the We the People Ohio Valley :

Kasich Mishandled Medicaid

December 16, 2014

The Intelligencer / Wheeling News-Register

Mike Myer's recent opinion "Political Litmus Tests Unwise" makes sense except where conscience and freedom meet. Should we not hold politicians accountable for issues like health care choice or kid's education?

Describing Gov. Kasich's unilateral implementation of Medicaid expansion as a single issue may be naive, Ohioans voted for, and overwhelmingly passed, a health care amendment to protect themselves from the unpopular Obamacare in its entirety and Kasich disrespected that vote. Kasich then defied Ohio state representatives who said "no" to Medicaid expansion as they cut it from the budget. Kasich also ignored the throng of phone calls and email begging him not to support Obamacare via Medicaid expansion.

Is it crazy to question Kasich's contempt for voters and his debt legacy which will saddle Ohioans with huge permanent budget busting surges in spending for decades? No. It is fiscally irresponsible to commit billions of future tax dollars to hospital and health insurance executives as with Medicaid expansion. Ditto for committing big stealthy spending growth for Common Core Standards, a national one size fits all education disaster.

Many people oppose putting more of Ohio's poor into this broken Medicaid program because several studies show Medicaid patients have worse health outcomes than people without insurance. Kasich could have reformed Medicaid when he was first elected, thereby providing people with better outcomes at less cost, but he did not. Kasich uses the Bible to justify his actions but the Bible speaks of people helping people, not about politicians getting into heaven by creating generational debt.

Bob Connors

Bridgeport

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