Protect 501(c)(4) organizations’ freedom of speech

Photo credit: planet.infowars.com

Protect 501(c)(4) organizations’ freedom of speech

Tea Party Patriots and most liberty groups are classified as 501(c)(4) by the IRS. The NumbersUSA outfit (whose sole mission is to educate voters on any legislative action that impacts immigration) sent out an alert concerning a new IRS regulation that will muzzle all 501(c)(4)’s — in the days leading up to an election. There’s a new website called Protect C4 Free Speech http://www.protectc4freespeech.com/ and here is the home page information:

Tell the IRS to Protect Free Speech!

The Internal Revenue Service has quietly announced a new rule that strictly limits the ability of 501(c)(4), tax-exempt organizations from working on their core missions in the months leading up to federal, state, and local elections. The proposed regulations would prohibit these organizations from engaging in candidate-related political activity, which, by the proposed rule's definition, includes any mention of a candidate's name or political party even if presented in a non-political context. Further, organizations would have to ensure that any references to candidates in past communications are not publicly available, including online, during the pre-election window. These regulations would, in effect, prohibit organizations from providing the public with candidate comparisons and voting records, engaging in get-out-the-vote activities, or encouraging informed civic participation, among other activities. They would severely limit both the organizations' First Amendment free speech and the public's ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

“Under the proposed definition, any public communication that is made within 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary election and that clearly identifies a candidate for public office (or, in the case of a general election, refers to a political party represented in that election) would be considered candidate-related political activity.”

Without your input, these proposed regulations will take effect and the rights of all Americans will be curtailed. It is our duty as Americans to make our voices heard and insist that our rights are protected. Please take a look at the sample comments and then submit yours directly to the federal government. The deadline for all comments is February 27, 2014, so act now!

Among the organizations participating with NumbersUSA are The Sierra Club, the pro-Amnesty National Council of La Raza (strange bedfellows!), and The National Rifle Assoc. If you go to C4 the website, you will find sample letters to the IRS (or members of Congress) to raise your objections to this latest regulation to chill free speech. 

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Sen. Portman votes YES on Ryan-Murray budget

Photo credit: Business Insider

Sen. Rob Portman voted YES on the budget bill. The Hill reports: 

The Senate on Wednesday gave final passage to a two-year budget plan in a 64-36 vote.

Nine Republican senators voted with 55 Democrats and Independents to pass the budget deal, which sets top-line spending levels for 2014 and 2015, allowing appropriators to get to work on an omnibus spending bill for the current fiscal year.

. . .

The vote in the Senate was closer than in the House, where majorities in each party backed the compromise negotiated by Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and her House counterpart, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rand Paul (Ky.), seen as possible 2016 presidential candidates, all voted against the deal, as did GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ken.), who faces a tough primary challenge. That contrasted with the House, where GOP leaders and Ryan, another possible White House hopeful, backed the deal.

And from the Senate website, here are the Senators who voted NO on this bad budget "deal":

Alexander (R-TN)

Ayotte (R-NH)

Barrasso (R-WY)

Blunt (R-MO)

Boozman (R-AR)

Burr (R-NC)

Coats (R-IN)

Coburn (R-OK)

Cochran (R-MS)

Corker (R-TN)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Crapo (R-ID)

Cruz (R-TX)

Enzi (R-WY)

Fischer (R-NE)

Flake (R-AZ)

Graham (R-SC)

Grassley (R-IA)

Heller (R-NV)

Inhofe (R-OK)

Johanns (R-NE)

Kirk (R-IL)

Lee (R-UT)

McConnell (R-KY)

Moran (R-KS)

Paul (R-KY)

Risch (R-ID)

Roberts (R-KS)

Rubio (R-FL)

Scott (R-SC)

Sessions (R-AL)

Shelby (R-AL)

Thune (R-SD)

Toomey (R-PA)

Vitter (R-LA)

Wicker (R-MS)

In voting YES, Sen. Portman was keeping company with, among others, Orrin Hatch (UT), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Susan Collins (ME), and John McCain (AZ). Ugh.

12 Republicans Vote to Advance Budget Deal

12 Republicans Vote to Advance Budget Deal That Boosts Spending 

And of course Sen. Rob Portman was one of them. Make sure he does not vote YES again. CNS News.com reports:

(Susan Jones at CNSNews.com) - The Senate voted 67-33 Tuesday to advance the Ryan-Murray budget compromise that conservatives oppose as fiscally irresponsible.

Helping Democrats get the votes they needed, 12 Republicans voted with all 55 Democrats to begin debate on the measure.

Republicans joining Democrats to invoke cloture include Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Roy Blunt (Mo.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Susan Collins (Maine), Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), John Hoeven (N.D.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), John McCain (Ariz.),  Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and Rob Portman (Ohio). [emphasis added]

The two-year deal will ease the mandatory spending caps (sequester) imposed by Congress in 2011. This will allow a $63 billion increase in the discretionary budget, but it does nothing to reform entitlement programs, which are the main drivers of growing deficits and debt, The Heritage Foundation reported.

The deal also raises certain "fees," or taxes.

A simple majority is needed for passage, which is expected to happen later this week.

Tea Party Patriots: Call / email / tweet Sen. Rob Portman’s office

Senator Portman

DC Office: (202)224-3353

Contact: Click Here

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/senrobportman

Twitter: https://twitter.com/portmanpress

Portman's Chief of Staff

Rob Lehman 

Email: Rob_Lehman@Portman.senate.gov

Portman's N/E Ohio District Representative

George Brown

PH: (216)522-1095

Email: George_Brown@portman.senate.gov

There's hope yet

Alec Torres at National Review Online reports :

Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) told CBS’s Bob Schieffer this morning that the Ryan-Murray Budget deal that passed the House earlier this week still doesn’t have enough votes to pass the Senate.

“The struggle is still on in the United States Senate,” Durbin said. “We need bipartisan support to pass it.”

He said the Senate needs only a “handful” of Republicans to pass the bill, but that Republicans are wary of signing the deal because they are either planning to run for president and don’t want such a “yes” vote on their record, or they are being threatened by the Tea Party and the Heritage Foundations to vote against it.

Cleveland Tea Party Patriots: Call / email / tweet Sen. Rob Portman’s offices. Vote NO.

Senator Portman

DC Office: (202)224-3353

Contact: Click Here

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/senrobportman

Twitter: https://twitter.com/portmanpress

Portman's Chief of Staff

Rob Lehman 

Email: Rob_Lehman@Portman.senate.gov

Portman's N/E Ohio District Representative

George Brown

PH: (216)522-1095

Email: George_Brown@portman.senate.gov

Focus on Re-employing Americans Instead of Immigration Reform: Letter to the Editor

With Speaker Boehner now done with his temper tantrum and stomping his feet over conservative groups slamming his latest failure - passing the Murray /Ryan Budget -- he is now expected to angle for the passage of a weak immigration reform. 

With Obamacare causing many people to lose their jobs or have their work hours drastically reduced and with many Americans stuck in low-paying jobs, the allowing of 20 million illegal immigrants to flood our country and the work force will even further depress wages and take jobs from Americans.

Regardless of party affiliation, the first job of the elected elite in D.C. is to represent U.S. Citizens and the well being of our country, not open the borders or offer back door amnesty and reward law breakers to the detriment of the country & citizens they were elected to represent....

From the Plain Dealer --

With over 90 million Americans out of work, Congress should be more concerned with helping these out-of-work Americans get back to work and not on an immigration reform that will drive down wages and take jobs from the same hard-working Americans they were elected to represent.

In Ohio alone the illegal immigrant population costs our state an estimated $870 million per year. This works out to an average annual amount of $200 per Ohio household headed by a U.S. citizen. Nationally, the costs are a whopping $106 billion per year!

Opening the illegal immigrant flood gates will only increase these costs to the already financially burdened citizens of this state. Not to mention the increased costs and burdens this will cause to the social services network already struggling to meet the current needs of the low income and less than fortunate residents of our state.

Furthermore, it is also a travesty that union leaders and elected officials that claim to be "friends of labor" are so willing to use the dues of hard working union members to fight so illegal immigrants can come and take the jobs of these same union members they are to represent.

They say charity starts at home - let's put unemployed and under-employed U.S. citizens and hard-working Americans first.

Ralph King,

Bedford

What Will It Take?

Where are we headed? A prognosis in an article by Canadian columnist David Solway, posted at PJ Media, should be Required Reading (read the whole thing here), but I wonder if the people who need to read it will do so.

Let me begin with a categorical statement that, given current events and recent political history, can be easily defended: Barack Hussein Obama is a willful, indoctrinated child of the Left with strong Islamic sympathies who is not fit to govern. Indeed, he would not be fit to govern Lower Slobovia, let alone the United States of America. Obama is a historic disaster of the first magnitude and, if not restrained, he will see to the irrevocable decline of the country which foolishly elected him, leaving the world on the brink of a conflict — or in the midst of one — whose repercussions cannot be underestimated.

. . .

What will it take to convince the ersatz aristocracy of frivolous intellectuals and brainless celebrities, partisan journalists, editors and academics, and an indifferent or deluded laity that they are heading for a crisis that will change our lives immeasurably for the worse? The evidence is beyond dispute.

. . .

One must hope that America will come to its collective senses before it is too late. But I am afraid that it will take nothing less than a major catastrophe, a fiscal implosion that takes the “food” out of food stamps, coupled with more high-casualty terrorist attacks both abroad and on its own soil, leading to the eruption of civil unrest and the possible impeachment of the most destructive president in the entire pageant of American history — a sorcerer’s apprentice in a house on fire or a Machiavellian schemer following a carefully contrived plan — before America emerges from its devastating slumber. Assuming, of course, that it ever does, or that a path to recovery will still be possible. For nothing is guaranteed in a nation so divided as America is today.

One wonders if Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Paul Ryan, or Sen. Rob Portman bother with articles at PJ Media? Maybe we should all be forwarding links, or cutting-and-pasting the text to their offices.

Obama Tells Lie of the Year: "If You LIke Your Health Plan - You Can Keep It"

At a recent fundraiser in Beverly Hills, President Obama touted himself as one of the most accomplished Presidents ever. 

Below Politifact confirms this to be true. In doing Pinocchio proud, President Obama is the most accomplished President ever -- at telling the biggest lie!

From PolitiFact --

It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

"If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," President Barack Obama said -- many times -- of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief. Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

For all of these reasons, PolitiFact has named "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," the Lie of the Year for 2013. Readers in a separate online poll overwhelmingly agreed with the choice. (PolitiFact first announced its selection on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper.)

For four of the past five years, PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year has revolved around the health care law, which has been subject to more erroneous attacks than any other piece of legislation PolitiFact has fact-checked.

Obama’s ideas on health care were first offered as general outlines then grew into specific legislation over the course of his presidency. Yet Obama never adjusted his rhetoric to give people a more accurate sense of the law’s real-world repercussions, even as fact-checkers flagged his statements as exaggerated at best.

Instead, he fought back against inaccurate attacks with his own oversimplifications, which he repeated even as it became clear his promise was too sweeping.

The debate about the health care law rages on, but friends and foes of Obamacare have found one slice of common ground: The president’s "you can keep it" claim has been a real hit to his credibility.

Why the cancellations happened

How did we get to this point?

The Affordable Care Act tried to allow existing health plans to continue under a complicated process called "grandfathering," which basically said insurance companies could keep selling plans if they followed certain rules.

The problem for insurers was that the Obamacare rules were strict. If the plans deviated even a little, they would lose their grandfathered status. In practice, that meant insurers canceled plans that didn’t meet new standards.

Obama’s team seemed to understand that likelihood. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the grandfathering rules in June 2010 and acknowledged that some plans would go away. Yet Obama repeated "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" when seeking re-election last year.

In 2009 and again in 2012, PolitiFact rated Obama’s statement Half True, which means the statement is partially correct and partially wrong. We noted that while the law took pains to leave some parts of the insurance market alone, people were not guaranteed to keep insurance through thick and thin. It was likely that some private insurers would continue to force people to switch plans, and that trend might even accelerate.

In the final months of 2013, several critical elements of the health care law were being enacted, and media attention was at its height. Healthcare.gov made its debut on Oct. 1. It didn’t take long for the media, the public and Obama’s own team to realize the website was a technological mess, freezing out customers and generally not working.

Also on Oct. 1, insurers started sending out cancellation letters for 2014.

No one knows exactly how many people got notices, because the health insurance market is largely private and highly fragmented. Analysts estimated the number at about 4 million (and potentially higher), out of a total insured population of about 262 million.

That was less than 2 percent, but there was no shortage of powerful anecdotes about canceled coverage.

One example: PBS Newshour interviewed a woman from Washington, D.C., who was a supporter of the health care law and found her policy canceled. New policies had significantly higher rates. She told Newshour that the only thing the new policy covered that her old one didn’t was maternity care and pediatric services. And she was 58.

"The chance of me having a child at this age is zero. So, you know, I ask the president, why do I have to pay an additional $5,000 a year for maternity coverage that I will never, ever need?" asked Deborah Persico.

The administration’s botched response

Initially, Obama and his team didn’t budge.

First, they tried to shift blame to insurers. "FACT: Nothing in #Obamacare forces people out of their health plans," said Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to Obama, on Oct. 28. 

PolitiFact rated her statement False. The restrictions on grandfathering were part of the law, and they were driving cancellations.

Then, they tried to change the subject. "It’s important to remember both before the ACA was ever even a gleam in anybody’s eye, let alone passed into law, that insurance companies were doing this all the time, especially in the individual market because it was lightly regulated and the incentives were so skewed," said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

But what really set everyone off was when Obama tried to rewrite his slogan, telling political supporters on Nov. 4, "Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed."

Pants on Fire! PolitiFact counted 37 times when he’d included no caveats, such as a high-profilespeech to the American Medical Association in 2009: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

Even Obama’s staunchest allies cried foul.

On Nov. 6, columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the public "was entitled to hear the unvarnished truth, not spin, from their president about what they were about to face. I don't feel good about calling out Obama's whopper, because I support most of his policies and programs. But in this instance, he would have to be delusional to think he was telling the truth."

The next day, Obama apologized during a lengthy interview with NBC News’ Chuck Todd.

"We weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place, and I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, a better position than they were before this law happened. And I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me," he said.

Political fist-fight

The reaction from conservative talk shows was withering. On Nov. 11, Sean Hannity put Obama’s statements up there with President Richard Nixon’s "I am not a crook," and President Bill Clinton’s "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

On the liberal network MSNBC, Joy-Ann Reid said the Obama administration’s intention was to fight off attacks like the ones that scuttled Clinton’s health proposals in the early 1990s.

"That’s why the administration boiled it down to that, if you like your health care, you can keep it. Big mistake, but it was a mistake that I think came a little bit out of the lesson" of the Clinton years, she said Nov. 12.

Two days later, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi defended Obama’s statement as accurate and blamed insurance companies. "Did I ever tell my constituents that, if they like their plan, they could keep it? I would have, if I'd ever met anybody who liked his or her plan, but that was not my experience," she said.

Obama offered an administrative fix that same day, allowing state insurance commissioners to extend current plans. But only some have chosen to do so.

In announcing the fix, Obama again conceded he had exaggerated. "There is no doubt that the way I put that forward unequivocally ended up not being accurate," he said. "It was not because of my intention not to deliver on that commitment and that promise. We put a grandfather clause into the law, but it was insufficient."

It is too soon to say what the lasting impact of "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" will be.

The president’s favorability ratings have tumbled in recent weeks.

A Pew Research/USA Today poll conducted Dec. 3-8 found the percentage of people viewing Obama as "not trustworthy" has risen 15 points over the course of the year, from 30 percent to 45 percent.

Much depends on the law’s continuing implementation and other events during Obama’s final three years in office, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist who runs the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.

Still, Obama has work to do to win back public trust, Sabato said.

"A whole series of presidents developed credibility gaps, because people didn’t trust what they were saying anymore. And that’s Obama’s real problem," he said. "Once you lose the trust of a substantial part of the American public, how do you get it back?"