from the Cleveland Tea Party
Saturday, December 31, 2016
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Updates:Gov. Kasich (RINO) on renewable energy and other bills
art credit: redstate
In an
article “Kasich Veto Draws Cheers From Environmental Lobby,” Steve Byas at The New American reports:
Once again, Ohio Governor John
Kasich used his veto power to kill yet
another bill favored by conservatives in his state. On Tuesday, he killed a
bill that would have made renewable energy benchmarks voluntary, rather than
mandatory, for the next two years.
Kasich defended his action,
saying, “Ohio workers cannot afford to take a step backward from the economic
gains that we have made in recent years, however, and arbitrarily limiting
Ohio’s energy generation options amounts to self-inflicted damage to both our
state’s near and long-term economic competitiveness.” Of course, how suspending
mandatory benchmarks imposed on electric companies would limit the companies’
“energy generation options," as opposed to doing exactly the opposite,
Kasich did not explain.
Not surprisingly, the
Environmentalist Lobby cheered Kasich, who ran for president this year as a
Republican. The Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon
Society, and Ohio Consumers’ Counsel all praised the veto. The “benchmarks,” as
they are called, were created by legislation in 2008, requiring electric
companies to gradually obtain more energy from “renewable sources,” rather than
being allowed simply to make a free market decision to buy the least expensive
electricity.
Senator Bill Seitz
(R-Cincinatti), however, was not pleased. “It is apparent that Gov. Kasich
cares more about appeasing his coastal elite friends in the renewable energy
business than he does about the millions of Ohioans who decisively rejected
this ideology when they voted for President-elect Trump,” Seitz said in a press
release. “We can only hope that President Trump and his amazing cabinet of free
market capitalists will save us from this regulatory overreach of Al Gore-style
policies that take unnecessary money out of ratepayers’ pockets.”
Seitz said he would move to
totally repeal the mandates in the next legislative session.
Kasich made it clear by his
veto that he does not trust the free market to sort out which type of energy
source is best for Ohio consumers. This veto is a confirmation for many more
conservative Republicans that Kasich is simply not a conservative.
Ohio legislators can return to
Columbus to override this veto, if they wish. . .
During the Republican
presidential contest, Kasich defended the implementation of controversial
Common Core standards in his state, and attacked fellow Republican candidates
who opposed them — fellow governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby
Jindal of Louisiana, as well as former Governor Mike Huckabee, and U.S.
Senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio. At the time, Donald Trump was
not mentioned, although Trump also opposed Common Core, seen by conservative
opponents as an attempt to nationalize public education.
There have been numerous other
deviations from conservative principles by Kasich, including his backing of the
expansion of Medicaid in Ohio under ObamaCare. When Kasich was in Congress, he
was one of only 42 Republicans who voted for President Bill Clinton’s ban on
assault rifles. He also favors granting U.S. citizenship to illegal aliens.
Clearly, Republican primary
voters made a good decision to reject John Kasich for the Republican nomination
for president.
And
another item on the 2017 New Year’s Wish List to Columbus lawmakers: Pass the
Ohio Health Care Compact.
# # #
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Dr. Thomas Sowell retires
art credit: Benjamin T Brixey
One
of my favorite columnists, Dr. Thomas Sowell, is retiring. His farewell column
is here. And here are a few take-aways from it:
Most
people living in officially defined poverty in the 21st century have things
like cable television, microwave ovens and air-conditioning. Most Americans did
not have such things, as late as the 1980s. People whom the intelligentsia
continue to call the “have-nots” today have things that the “haves” did not
have, just a generation ago.
In
some other ways, however, there have been some serious retrogressions over the
years. Politics, and especially citizens’ trust in their government, has gone
way downhill.
.
. .
Years
of lying presidents – Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Richard Nixon,
especially – destroyed not only their own credibility, but the credibility
which the office itself once conferred. The loss of that credibility was a loss
to the country, not just to the people holding that office in later years.
With
all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the
social degeneration in black ghettos like a visit to a Harlem high school some
years ago.
When
I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a
child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the
students’ faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole that park had
become in their time.
When
I have mentioned sleeping out on a fire escape in Harlem during hot summer
nights, before most people could afford air-conditioning, young people have
looked at me like I was a man from Mars. But blacks and whites alike had been
sleeping out on fire escapes in New York since the 19th century. They did not
have to contend with gunshots flying around during the night.
We
cannot return to the past, even if we wanted to, but let us hope that we can
learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.
Dr.
Sowell is also a prolific author of books; he has made esoteric or
downright boring subjects (such as economics) accessible and interesting. Check
out some of them here. Most will be available at your local library. But his regular columns will be much missed.
# # #
Sunday, December 25, 2016
Merry Christmas
And so as Tiny Tim observed,
art credit: Pinterest
Merry Christmas
from the Cleveland Tea Party!
# # #
Friday, December 23, 2016
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Ohio Electoral College reports
cartoon credit: Margulies [okay, so it's 4 years old!]
Gateway Pundit posted this report on the Electoral College vote on Monday in Columbus:
Ohio GOP
Delegate Casts Vote for TRUMP – Then Torches All of His DNC Troll Letters in
Yard Pit
Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones received
HUNDREDS of harassing letters from Hillary trolls begging him [to] reject
Donald Trump.
Sheriff Jones ignored the
letters, emails and phone calls and voted for Donald J. Trump for President on
Monday in Columbus, Ohio.
Then he went home and dumped
his pile of letters into a yard pit. Poured lighter fluid on the pile. … And
torched them all.
Sheriff Jones posted the videos
on Twitter . . . [scroll down on GP website here]
And
in the comments section, we find some photos of the Sheriff and Cleveland Tea Party’s
own Ralph King, who also served as a member of the Electoral College and cast his
vote on Monday for Donald J. Trump:
# # #
Monday, December 19, 2016
Ohio Electoral College votes for Trump
image credit: insider.foxnews.com
From The Columbus Dispatch earlier today:
Ohio members of Electoral College cast all 18 of their votes this afternoon to formally elect Republicans Donald Trump and Mike Pence as president and vice president.
None of the electors strayed from the GOP ticket despite protests from some of those who oppose Trump.
# # #
Labels:
Columbus Dispatch,
Donald Trump,
Electoral College,
Ohio
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Fake News and the Propaganda Media
Bill Whittle's Firewall video says it all (and in just over 5 minutes):
According to Newt, today's "propaganda media . . . has no relationship with the news. It’s aligned with a Washington establishment which is corrupt and dishonest” (via Gateway Pundit).
And the mainstream/lamestream media wonders why President-Elect Trump is bypassing them so often by using Twitter.
Via YouTube
According to Newt, today's "propaganda media . . . has no relationship with the news. It’s aligned with a Washington establishment which is corrupt and dishonest” (via Gateway Pundit).
And the mainstream/lamestream media wonders why President-Elect Trump is bypassing them so often by using Twitter.
# # #
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Post-election exploding cigars
art credit: The Hockey Writers
Following the Trump win six weeks ago, the Democrat party and its supporters have been apoplectic. And they have been employing all sorts of tactics to undo the results.
First, the strategy was to claim Hillary
won the popular vote, so the electoral vote was not a true measure of the
winning campaign. But nobody knows how many illegals voted in California due to
Motor Voter laws, and some estimates go as high as 3 million. Without those and
other potential illegal votes elsewhere, nobody can say whether Hillary or Trump won the
popular vote. (Two short essays on the Electoral College are here and here.)
And when that strategy didn’t get any traction, the
Democrats (presumably backed by the Clinton campaign and her financiers) got Green Party
candidate Jill Stein to demand recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania. That blew up in their face, too. Pennsylvania
denied Stein legal standing, Wisconsin’s recount yielded an additional 100+ votes
for Trump, and the Michigan recount was discredited when something like a third
of the tallies in Wayne County (Detroit) showed more votes counted than were actually
cast.
So now the Clintons et al are coming out
with two more strategies to attempt to either change the results of the
election or to de-legitimize to the maximum extent possible, the Trump win. Now,
Hillary is blaming Vladimir Putin for hacking the election, even though what is
hackable is the emails exchanged within the DNC, not to mention Hillary’s own
email server that was notoriously exposed and unprotected. She and Podesta also
continue to blame Comey and the FBI. And the lamestream media is repeating this baloney despite the fact that there is NO evidence for these claims. (Anything
but the obvious problem of an unlikeable and flawed candidate with a long list
of alleged criminal activity who didn’t campaign much in the months leading up
to the election…)
DNC supporters are now doing
everything they can to intimidate duly chosen electors who will cast their
votes in the Electoral College on Monday; many Trump electors are on the receiving end of
everything from death threats to mail/telephone/social media pressure to withhold
their vote or cast it instead for Hillary, even when many states have laws that require electors to vote
for the winning candidate in their respective states.
President Obama piled onto the most
recent why-Hillary-lost “narratives” before flouncing off to Hawaii for his
final Christmas vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. FLOTUS is already complaining
that America now understands what it is like to be “hopeless” – as she joins her family
in Hawaii to vacation on the taxpayers’ dime (“Hopeless In Hawaii”).
Despite all the interference in and attempts to undermine the
election process, despite all the phony baloney accusations, it is likely that
the results of the Electoral College votes on Monday will lead to the Jan. 20
inauguration of Donald J. Trump.
# # #
Monday, December 12, 2016
Fascism: redefining the word
woody.typepad via Steven Crowder/Twitter
If
you managed to wade through Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, you already know that the term “fascism” has been
misappropriated by Communists, Progressives, and other left-of-center isms to mean the opposite of its original far
left definition. Several online dictionaries today reflect the switch in meaning, and
even the Wikipedia entry shows the difficulty of navigating the origins of the
term and its current usage by the political Left as a pejorative.
Today
Bookworm (of the Bookworm Room blog) has a piece at American Thinker that
summarizes the origin of the left/right nomenclature and the sleight-of-hand in
redefining “fascism” – all in the context of a short history lesson. The entire article is here. Below are a couple of extracts:
For months now, the
Democrat-Progressive fever swamps have been using the word “fascist” in
connection with Donald Trump and those who voted for him. It took Michael
Kinsley to elevate this shoddy claim onto pages of the Washington
Post: Trump, he asserts, is a fascist.
. . .
Given that conservatives
Republicans, including the majority of Trump supporters, are on the liberty
side of the spectrum, far from the world’s most brutal tyrants, what gave rise
to the glaringly false syllogism that “Republicans are right-wing fascists and
Hitler was a right-win fascist, so all Republicans are Hitler”?
You can
blame it on a nasty little historic and linguistic trick American
communists pulled, which was to make “fascism” synonymous with the political
“right.” Once having done that, they could claim that American conservatives,
being “right wing,” are therefore fascist. This is pure disinformation.
. . .
“Fascism,” another historic
term, is one that American statists embraced until Hitler tainted it. It
first gained political traction in Italy in the 1920s. Mussolini defined it to
mean “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the
state.” In other words, fascism is purely on the statist side of the continuum.
Savvy readers will have noticed
that fascism sounds remarkably like communism: It’s all about concentrating all
power in the state, leaving the individual entirely subordinate to the state.
The primary difference between the two ideologies is that in communism the
government nationalizes private property, whereas in fascism the government
does not nationalize it but nevertheless completely controls — as is the case,
for example, with Obamacare, which saw the government establish the rules for
the private insurance market and mandate that Americans buy the product.
. . .
One more thing: Obama said that
the biggest disappointment of his presidency was his failure
to grab more guns from American hands. Statists always grab guns
because their regimes are
fundamentally hostile to the citizens they control, making it
impossible for those citizens to defend themselves against tyrannical
government. Trump’s promise to protect the Second Amendment is the antithesis
of a statist, especially a “fascist,” regime.
Read the rest here.
# # #
Labels:
American Thinker,
Bookworm,
Communists,
Donald Trump,
fascism,
history,
left,
Obama,
ObamaCare,
Progressives,
right,
totalitarian
Saturday, December 10, 2016
RIP John Glenn
Mark Steyn offered some sobering thoughts on the dwindling supply of American heroes here. He quoted John Derbyshire:
Soon they will all be gone: the last participants in the human race's most astonishing, most audacious, most wonderfully inspirational adventure to date.
Gone with them will be the memory of a U.S.A. that could accomplish such marvels, in those last years of heroic national vigor, before we turned our energies to guilt and rancor and divisive social crusades, and to persuading ourselves and each other that in the human sphere, everything is equal to everything else.
Steyn concludes:
John Glenn must surely have wondered, as all the astronauts weathered into geezers, how a great nation grew so impoverished in spirit.
Our heroes are old and stooped and wizened, but they are the only giants we have. Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.
# # #
Labels:
John Derbyshire,
John Glenn,
Mark Steyn,
Mike Lester,
Townhall
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