Bud Light Tea Party meme

The Bud Light Tea Party seen at Power Line:

Click to embiggen or visit the link above and scroll down

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Rebuild America First

 

J D Rucker is fired up.  Here’s an extract from “Rebuild the America First Movement or Die Trying” at America First Report:

Recognize the Enemies

We cannot fight an enemy if we do not recognize exactly who they are. It’s easy to say that the massive, widespread voter fraud as well as legal but dirty tactics used to sway elections are all the fault of Democrats, but this is inaccurate. It’s the Uniparty Swamp that’s truly behind the theft of the “red tsunami” in 2022 and the presidential election in 2020. Mitch McConnell was just as responsible (in fact, probably more so) for Republicans losing elections as Chuck Schumer.

The RINOs would rather the party lose than win with America First patriots. They despise Donald Trump, but more importantly they despise those of us who supported him. This is why they managed to lose a seat in the Senate despite the state of the nation being more abysmal than it has been in modern history. The party in charge of the House, Senate, and White House does NOT get rewarded with more seats under normal circumstances, but the Uniparty Swamp made it happen. The GOP may have won a razor-thin majority in the House, but that’s just because it’s too challenging for them to subvert so many elections across the country. The Uniparty Swamp is okay with a House led by Kevin McCarthy since he’s one of them.

. . .

Localize

This doesn’t just have to do with the America First movement. We should be striving to localize nearly every aspect of our lives with so many threats coming together around us. But the original plan of the Tea Party was to establish localized chapters. The America First movement should do something similar with one caveat. If we’re going to operate locally, we need to maintain that stance.

The Tea Party was killed by several groups of grifters who nationalized the movement. Some of the Tea Party groups were okay, but most were not. Unfortunately, being “okay” isn’t good enough for the long haul and being a grifter group is counterproductive. We cannot allow that to happen to the America First movement. If should form locally in areas across the country. It should stay local. It should operate locally [emphasis added]. Otherwise, it will be corrupted. . . .

Read the rest here.  Mr Rucker outlines some of the things patriots can DO to try to reverse course and undo some of the damage.   

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Sundance’s preview of the midterms

 

This blog recently linked to Sundance’s overview of the Uniparty; click here.

Unfortunately, once you see the strings on the UniParty club marionettes, you can never return to that moment in time when you did not see them.

I continue to link to Sundance at Conservative Treehouse to encourage more readers to see those marionette strings.  Sundance is my go-to source for analyses on the Uniparty machinations, and he is beginning his previews of the midterms:

Long before President Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago was raided, both political clubs in DC appear to have developed a map to stop the voters from interfering in the DC business model.  Always remember, the color of the flag atop the dome matters not, the provided indulgences underneath the dome do not change.  Destroying the populist movement known currently as the MAGA base, formerly the Tea Party, is as much a goal for the red club as it is the blue club.

Shortly before August 8, 2022, club agreements were made, prior strategies within the DNC and RNC wings were triggered, and events began unfolding according to the script. In the aftermath of the raid the club’s narrative engineers now begin to finish setting the stage.  “Democracy is at risk” because of this populist uprising. 

… But it’s not the polling per se’ that people should be paying attention to. Instead, it’s the overarching national midterm election narrative being created.  There’s a vulgarian hoard out there creating all of this angst and trepidation you are feeling. Voters are going to have to decide if they want instability (an election outcome against the interests of Washington DC), or stability (an election outcome congruent with the interest of Washington DC).

This is how the abuser system works.  If you leave, you have no idea what might happen next; however, if you stay, you have the benefit of familiarity.  Even though the abuse is painful (‘we’re on the wrong track), at least it is consistent and predictable.  Skilled abusers leverage psychological resignation.

You might scoff at the metaphor, but on a larger national dynamic that’s our reality. . . .

Read the entire analysis here.

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IRS: Internal Radical Service

 

The great David Horowitz and his colleague John Perazzo have a new pamphlet just out and you can access it for free online.  Here’s Mr Horowitz’s introduction:

How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes
illegally and unconstitutionally

On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The IRS violations include providing taxpayer subsidies to Democrat election campaigns; to underwriting Black Lives Matter riots which caused billions of dollars in property damage and led to the deaths of scores of individuals; the Internal Revenue Code's explicit requirement that all charitable activities should “promote the public good”; and the funding of racist policies which violate the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution.

This booklet -- Internal Radical Service -- documents these violations and their destructive consequences. We publish it now as an appeal to Congress to investigate the abuses, and restore the integrity of an organization which has become a major threat to our democracy.

Click on the link here for access to the pamphlet. 

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Ohio anti-sanctuary law: Action Alert

image credit: pagop.org

From Cleveland Tea Party’s Ralph King on Facebook:

Via USATODAY.COM

Trump changes in immigration policy slowed, but states are cranking out their own new laws

As President Trump and Congress remain deadlocked on immigration legislation, a slew of immigration bills are moving through state legislatures.

More and more states are passing Anti-Sanctuary City laws. Ohio needs to get moving!!!

OH HB 169 Anti-Sanctuary City Bill in Ohio! HB 169 would require state and local authorities to cooperate with the federal government in the enforcement of immigration laws, to sanction those that fail to do so. HB 169 is in the Ohio House Criminal Justice Committee awaiting hearings.

Please contact Committee Chairman Rep George Lang (614) 466-8550 and politely request HB 169 be brought up for Committee Hearings.

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Sarah Palin’s Lipstick

photo credit: American Thinker

Gordon Wysong at American Thinker vividly remembers Sarah Palin’s speech at the GOP convention in 2008. Mr. Wysong’s recollection will resonate with many Cleveland Tea Party readers:

The Democrats don’t have lousy Presidential nominee candidates merely because the good ones were keeping their powder dry.  A Black Swan candidate of 2008 is appreciably responsible for it, and no one seemed to notice.  When Sarah Palin became the focus of the hopes of committed conservatives, the swamp did everything in its power to destroy her.  Venal Republican operatives were so beset with personal jealousy, they were willing to crash the ship on the rocks to ensure against her ascendancy.

They won their battle, sadly.  But, a single line -- just one -- provided the foundation for conservatives.  Mrs. Palin told America “Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?  Lipstick!”

In one succinct line she captured the commitment and determination of conservatives seeking to protect something they love.

Fast forward a year, and those same conservatives saw Obama trying to destroy that which they love and without hesitation, these conservatives jumped into a new political movement.  Bolstered by their belief that Sarah Palin was an everyday somebody like them, and infuriated by her maltreatment, they populated the ranks of the Tea Party.  They were determined to protect America. Within months, they were activists.

As I recall, Sarah ad-libbed the joke because for some reason (???), the teleprompter went down for a few moments. Mr. Wysong's full article is here.

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Lloyd Marcus and the Tea Party

Lloyd Marcus is the “Unhyphenated American” who performed at the 2009 Taxpayer March on DC and now contributes regularly to the American Thinker blog. Here’s an excerpt from a recent column:

The recording session for my "Trump Train 2020" song could not have gone better.  If you remember, my music producer is based in Baltimore.  I asked him to gather singers to form a choir for the recording of the song.  He reported back to me that all the singers he knows do not support Trump or are passionately against him.  This prompted me to launch a clarion call for pro-America/pro-Trump singers.  The response was tremendous.

Saturday, September 7, 2019, singers from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, and Florida trekked to Blue House Productions recording studio in Silver Spring, Maryland to record the "Trump Train 2020" song by Lloyd Marcus.

The singers were an enthusiastic, racially diverse choir ranging from age 14 to the mid-70s.  It was thrilling to have teenagers who have not drunk fake news media's anti-Trump Kool-Aid performing on the recording.  Everyone was happy, upbeat, and excited about contributing to the re-election of our president, keeping America great!

Despite the singers being strangers meeting for the first time, the recording session felt like a family reunion.  Everyone was of one accord.

I posted this not because of the Trump Train, but because those last two sentences describe exactly the same reaction I felt at my first Tea Party meeting back in 2009. 

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David Harsanyi on The Tea Party

David Harsanyi takes a look at the inception of the Tea Party and its activities today (“The Left Can’t Stop Lying About The Tea Party”). He concludes:

. . .

The Tea Party, whether some of their champions later turned out to be hypocrites or not, didn’t want to change the Republican Party as much as they wanted to force conservative politicians to keep their promises. The movement initially backed a number of terrible candidates, but it learned.

In the end, the Tea Party successfully re-energized Republicans, who went on to win two wave elections and stifle Obama’s presidency for six years.  Whether the movement was a long-term failure, as the Times argues, is a debatable contention.

One things is true, though: the majority of Tea Partiers were white. You know what that means, right? And, as those of us who covered the Obama administration remember, no matter how historically detailed or ideologically anchored your position might be, the very act of opposing a black president was going to be depicted as act of bigotry.

This cheap and destructive rhetoric now dominates virtually every contemporary debate, most of which have absolutely nothing, even tangentially, to do with race. It’s a kind of rhetoric, in fact, that now retroactively dominates our debates, as well.

Full article at The Federalist is here.

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Do you donate to conservative PACs?

Some years ago, our household stopped contributing to conservative PACs that supported various conservative candidates in a particular election cycle. One reason was that we did not always agree on their choice of candidates. So now we contribute directly to candidates we like, whether at local, state, or federal level.

Today I read about even more reasons to pause before writing out your check or filling out your credit card details. Here’s part of a sobering report at National Review by Jim Geraghty (via Instapundit):

Back in 2013, Conservative StrikeForce PAC raised $2.2 million in funds vowing to support Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for governor in Virginia. Court filings and FEC records showed that the PAC only contributed $10,000 to Cuccinelli’s effort.

Back in 2014, Politico researched 33 political action committees that claimed to be affiliated with the Tea Party and courted small donors with email and direct-mail appeals and found that they “raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.”

. . .

In the 2018 cycle, Tea Party Majority Fund raised $1.67 million and donated $35,000 to federal candidates. That cycle, Conservative Majority Fund raised just over $1 million and donated $7,500 to federal candidates. Conservative Strikeforce raised $258,376 and donated nothing to federal candidates.

Full report (“The Right’s Grifter Problem”) is here. Let the buyer contributor beware.

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If today's media covered the original Tea Party

Cartoonist Gary Varvel at TownHall

Undeclared Civil War

cartoon credit: anticap.wordpress.com

Steve McCann published a provocative essay at American Thinker titled “The Ruling Class and an Undeclared Civil War.” Tea Party people are part of his scenario:

. . . the current social structure has evolved into a near impregnable three-tier categorization in which the ruling class, that sits astride the social order, has revealed, thanks to the election of Donald Trump, open and unabashed disdain for the two lower classes and the unleashing of a radicalized army of malcontents.

The citizens who provide the primary labor and resources for the economic engine of the country constitute the second tier.  The third is comprised of those who have been betrayed by a self-serving education system and are conditioned to be totally dependent upon a government dominated by the ruling class.

. . .

There is at present an undeclared and non-violent civil war being waged in this country.  The underlying factor of any civil war is an elite ruling class desperate to maintain power at odds with a majority of a population seeking change.   Also prevalent in most civil upheavals is the unleashing, by those determined to retain power, of the radicalized and ultimately uncontrollable dogs of war who more often than not devour their sponsors.  Both elements are currently in play.

While the ruling class publicly obsesses over Donald Trump and denigrates the vast majority of the population, they have planted the seeds, by their actions, for a takeover of the country by a radical element that will turn on them as they are presently doing within the Democratic Party.

The American people must understand that the current ruling class will not willingly exit the stage or take on their mercenary army.  Donald Trump, while perhaps accomplishing a significant degree of change, cannot induce their demise.   This threat can only be marginalized through the determined utilization of political process which will encompass a number of political cycles and the long-term willingness to not be intimidated or cowed into submission.  The future of the nation as founded is at stake.

The full essay is worth reading; click here.

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Tea Party and MAGA vs Uniparty

Image via Conservative Treehouse

Sundance has must-read history lesson starting with the Tea Party movement in 2009, its metamorphosis into the MAGA movement, and why the GOP continues to break its promises and obstruct President Trump’s initiatives. A few extracts from Sundance’s history lesson at Conservative Treehouse:

An interesting pattern of seemingly disconnected political stories is beginning to show signs of a common continuity.  In the bigger of the big pictures seven words continue to set the baseline: “There are trillions of dollars at stake”.

When the common sense Tea Party movement formed in 2009 and 2010 it contained a monumentally frustrated grassroots electorate, and the scale of the movement caught the professional republican party off-guard. When Donald Trump ran for the office of the presidency he essentially did the same thing; he disrupted the apparatus of the professional republican party.

The difference between those two examples is one was from the bottom up, and the second was from the top down.  However, the commonality in the two forces resulted in the 2016 victory.

. . .

A few years pass and the issues that spurred the Tea Party movement remained unresolved.  In 2015 Donald Trump taps in to that exact same Tea Party frustration toward the control authority within one-half of the DC UniParty; again, the professional republican apparatus was disrupted.  The movement re-branded and now the MAGA movement wins the presidency.

So it should not come as a surprise to see an eerily similar response from within the GOP toward the new threat; the Trump presidency.  After all, there are two constants in an ever changing universe: (1) “NeverTrump” didn’t go away; and (2) the Bush-clan, or GOP old guard, will never accept losing power.

The professional republicans and the professional democrats, ie. “the uniparty”, have a common enemy in President Trump.  The vulgarian leader of the deplorable coalition never asked for permission; never paid the indulgency fees; never attended the necessary cloistered club meetings paying homage; and never offered the indulgent team of political elites terms for his takeover.

Thus Donald Trump, just like the Tea Party, would never be accepted.

. . .

There are no MAGA lobbying groups in Washington DC advocating for policies that benefit economic nationalism.  On this objective President Donald Trump stands alone.

We don’t need a third party in Washington DC, we actually need a second one.

I no longer think of the GOP as the “party of Stupid.” I think of the GOP instead as the “Party of Bought” -- that would be the (R) half of the “Uniparty.”

Read the whole thing here.

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We Tea Party people

photo credit: historynewsnetwork.org

The unhyphenated American Lloyd Marcus posts at American Thinker. Here’s the last two paragraphs of his article titled “Not Guilty: The Tea Party and Violence”:

We Tea Party people never beat up our opposition. Desiring the best for all our fellow Americans, we reach out to Democrats/leftists trying to educate them. Democrats/leftists have become super-hostile to facts and truth. They now seek to silence, punish and jail anyone daring to disagree with their agenda. Tea Party people are the opposite. We highly respect our constitutional right of free speech. So don't tell me that Tea Party people are just as guilty of incivility as Democrats/leftists. That is a lie.

Trump's swift dismantlement of Obama's anti-America agenda and successfully placing another conservative on the Supreme Court has caused Democrats and the fake news media to suspend any pretense of civility, honesty, and respect for the law. The Democratic Party has morphed into an angry insane mob. Their enforcers, joined by fake news media, are determined to beat the American people into submission. The Democrats' Trump resistance mob bears no resemblance to the Tea Party which is dignified, patriotic, and good. The Democratic Party has become the home of pure evil and must never be allowed back into power, controlling the house, senate or White House.

It’s a good article to keep in mind as we head into November. The entire article is here.

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Desperation at MSNBC

Art credit: quotesgram.com

Today’s headline at Breitbart:

‘Woke Nation’: Joe Scarborough Rebrands ‘The Resistance’ as Tea Party of 2018

Cultural appropriation?

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Long Live the Tea Party

dontgive-uptheship-blog-blog.tumblr.com

I don’t usually agree with Rick Moran, who posts at PJ Media. But his piece “The Tea Party Is Dead, Long Live the Tea Party” was linked on Instapundit, and it had a few good thoughts, going back to the inception of the Tea Party groups in 2009:

But the tea party's real value to the country is that for the first time since the ratification debates over the Constitution, millions of people across the country were actually reading and discussing our founding document.

These weren't constitutional scholars sitting around some Ivy League lecture hall esoterically discussing the foundations of America. These were millions of ordinary people sitting at kitchen tables, in small church meeting rooms, on front porches and backyards probing the reasons America came into existence.

. . . What mattered was that ordinary people had taken a keen interest in preserving the spirit of the Constitution and the essence of our founding principles that are "self-evident" in that document at a time it has been under relentless attack.

. . .

This side of the tea parties was never widely reported on by the media, for very good reasons. The left hates getting into a discussion about what the Constitution says because they can't defend most of their ideas. Despite the fact that the founders wrote the Constitution so that basically anyone who could read could understand it, the left keeps insisting the Constitution says things that it doesn't.

Any clever lawyer or willing judge can twist the meaning of the Constitution so that it says anything they want it to say to accomplish any end they wish to accomplish. So the budget deal may have killed fiscal sanity in Washington and -- perhaps -- the tea party's political power to some extent. And the GOP may have co-opted most of the larger tea party groups to do the party's bidding.

What remains of the tea party is, to my mind, the best part. The desire of ordinary people to govern themselves, to take personal responsibility for their own lives, and to try to do something about the denigration and increasing irrelevance of the Constitution.

As Glenn Reynolds concluded: Don’t give up the ship.

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Blogging for the Cleveland Tea Party

photo credit: pinterest

photo credit below: zazzle.com

Everyone is doing their Year-End round ups, think pieces, retrospectives, and so on. Here is mine.

Back in 2009, I signed on to the Tea Party because I agreed with its 3 core values:  [1] Fiscal Responsibility (don’t spend more than you have);  [2] Constitutionally Limited Government (big government is not the solution; keep the accountability as close to your backyard as possible); and  [3] Free Markets (as little regulation as is possible)

But for me, there is another motivator. And I go back to President Trump’s historic address in Warsaw, in which he talked about America’s role in global society: one of things he said was “we write symphonies.” Some of the media had no idea what he was talking about, but his comment struck me right where I live. 

The great divide in America is now a crisis: it's about the magnificent culture of Western Civilization versus a nihilistic movement to destroy that Western Civilization. We (today’s generations) can’t claim any credit for its development, but Rome and Greece are not at the forefront today, Europe is collapsing, and America is the de facto or default flagship and guardian of Western Civilization. Or at least it was.

But how long can America lead the Free World if our citizens do not acquire the skills of critical thinking and logic; learn our language and history; and embrace the American culture? The collectivist left has infiltrated, quite successfully, our major cultural institutions: academia, Hollywood, and the media. And it is weakening our once robust can-do culture. It may even be that in 50 years’ time, classical music will be performed only in the Far East, not in Europe or the United States. I am thinking here of Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Gershwin, etc. and dwindling support for the orchestras.  

I spent many years in the trenches employed by various performing and cultural arts organizations, and most of my erstwhile colleagues would be in the “left’ to “hard left” categories. I identify as a fiscal conservative. Not as a Republican, but as a fiscal conservative. Until I stood up and signed up for the Tea Party, I thought I was in some sort of socio-political Siberia. That changed with the emergence of the Tea Party.

All this ties into my thoughts about the cultural collapse of America, the disintegration of behavioral self-restraint, and why I am grateful beyond words that our President is Donald J. Trump. He treasures a culture that writes symphonies, and he wants to ensure that future generations inherit that culture. 

When you have a media that calls FLOTUS Melania’s Christmas decorations at the White House a “nightmare” that would scare little children, despite the grade-schoolers flocking to her for hugs, there is, I would say, something seriously wrong with that media and those who agree with their “narrative.” I am one of many observers who think we are witnessing some form of mass hysteria. When Morning Joe warns his viewers that Trump is "mentally unstable," Joe is exhibiting the phenomenon of projection: Accuse those with whom you disagree with what you yourself are doing.

What has all this to do with my cultural concerns? In the past several years, I’ve been involved in some projects that aim to preserve our cultural assets -- much as the early Catholic monks did. They labored in many ways, and some of them sat there in seclusion, attempting to preserve the artistic, intellectual, and literary accomplishments of their cultural heritage (not to say literacy itself), out of fear that the barbarians at the gate would destroy the flowering civilization.

Archival projects today tear off a page from those monks. Maybe the Golden Age of Musical Theater (think Rodgers and Hammerstein) is not your thing, but The Musical Theater Project here in Cleveland is dedicated to such preservation. Maybe your thing is the visual arts. Cleveland has a world-class Museum of Art that offers free admission. Maybe your thing is classical music. The Cleveland Orchestra excels in performing and preserving that repertory. Maybe you’ve heard them for free at Public Square on the Fourth of July. My work over the last 20 years involved research on Shakespeare and his biography. I am so lucky that we live in close proximity to the Cleveland Public Library – it is another cultural treasure trove. 

The point is: How long will these world-class institutions survive, whether in Cleveland or anywhere else in the United States? Where are their future audiences and readers? Many schools no longer require that students read any Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn is banned in many schools. I weep.

I was in a conversation about some of this recently with a friend and colleague who leans liberal, but we found ourselves on common ground when it came to our cultural history and traditions. I expressed some of my concerns, and he mentioned the monks. I took his point and mentioned them above. It is frightening to even have to think that we need those monks now.

So-called "Safe Spaces" are increasing, especially on campuses. The "Snowflake" population continues to insulate itself and reject critical thinking in favor of emotional self-gratification. Identity Politics are everywhere, and as groups like BLM and Antifa turn to violence, our cultural heritage is being destroyed. Attacked. Erased. Our historical monuments -- representing our very history -- are being destroyed. Literally.

Look at what’s happening to the legacies of George Washington; Christopher Columbus; and Robert E. Lee. We expect that sort of historical erasure from ISIS – destroying Palmyra’s sacred antiquities. But we do not expect it in the United States. Except that it is happening NOW before our very eyes. Even our language is being corrupted.

So I continue with my little contribution to the Cleveland Tea Party. Most of what I blog on is related to the three Tea Party core values, often to post Action Alerts for legislative initiatives at the local, state, and federal level that affect those three core values. But for me, it also impacts the heritage that has been entrusted to us, and I speak as a senior citizen who is so grateful to our forebears for our cultural inheritance.

I stand for our National Anthem. I recite the Pledge of Allegiance to our flag. And I blog for the Cleveland Tea Party (deferring always to Ralph King, who is my mentor on whatever is going on in the political world). For me, being a Cleveland Tea Party blogger is also about a devout reverence for our Judeo-Christian traditions and values; a profound gratitude for our freedoms; and a sense of responsibility to preserve and pass on to future generations our cultural endowment, history, and yes, symphonies.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

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IRS “apologizes” for targeting Tea Party and liberty groups

cartoon credit: Christopher Weyant [The Hill] via Pinterest

  

The media is reporting that the lawsuits filed against the IRS by various Tea Party and liberty organizations have been settled. This extract is from the report in The Washington Post: 

The Justice Department has reached settlement agreements with groups that alleged their constitutional rights were violated when their applications for tax-exempt status received extra scrutiny because their names contained words such as “tea party” or “patriots,” court filings show.

In one agreement, which still must be approved by a judge, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that its treatment of the organizations was “wrong” and expressed a “sincere apology” for what happened.

. . .

The targeting of tea party organizations that applied for tax-exempt status was a major controversy of the Obama administration, as hundreds of conservative-leaning groups received scrutiny. In some cases, it delayed the processing of applications for years.

Many felt the conduct was an example of the president punishing his political enemies.

. . .

The Justice Department, too, conducted a criminal investigation but ultimately decided not to bring charges, including against Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw tax-exempt groups.

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted them based on their political viewpoints,” Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs Peter J. Kadzik wrote in 2015.

“But poor management is not a crime,” Kadzik wrote. “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

"Poor management"? Weaponizing the IRS is “poor management”? And of course, nobody is going to jail, losing their job, or losing their pension. Read the rest of the WaPo story here. There’s also a report at cleveland.com.

UPDATE at 6:21pm from Rick Moran at American Thinker blog:

The settlement, as unsatisfactory to many as it is, at least closes the book on this sordid chapter in the history of the IRS.  Will it curtail the IRS from using politics to enforce tax law again?  Since no one was punished after this blatant example of political use of the tax agency, I doubt it.

Full blog post is here.

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The Manchester jihad attack

Victim in Manchester: eight-year-old Saffie Roussos

photo from Religion of Peace website

Being a Tea Party person, I subscribe to the three core values:

Fiscal responsibility

Limited government

Free markets

Those values are under attack by ISIS and jihadists who have declared war on all infidels, such as us. The Manchester suicide bombing is only the latest in the continuing jihad against Western Civilization.

And to hear the official government responses, the UK (and Germany and France and Sweden and . . . ) are still playing defense. That guarantees one result: more terror attacks. As usual, Mark Steyn nails it in his “Dangerous Woman Meets Danger Man” column:

Angela Merkel pronounced the attack "incomprehensible". But she can't be that uncomprehending, can she? Our declared enemies are perfectly straightforward in their stated goals, and their actions are consistent with their words. They select their targets with some care. . . .

the arithmetic is not difficult: Poland and Hungary and Slovakia do not have Islamic terrorism because they have very little Islam. France and Germany and Belgium admit more and more Islam, and thus more and more terrorism.

. . .

Few of us have gotten things as disastrously wrong as May and Merkel and Hollande and an entire generation of European political leaders who insist that remorseless incremental Islamization is both unstoppable and manageable. It is neither - and, for the sake of the dead of last night's carnage and for those of the next one, it is necessary to face that honestly.

Theresa May's statement in Downing Street is said by my old friends at The Spectator to be "defiant", but what she is defying is not terrorism but reality. So too for all the exhausted accessories of defiance chic: candles, teddy bears, hashtags, the pitiful passive rote gestures that acknowledge atrocity without addressing it - like the Eloi in H G Wells' Time Machine, too evolved to resist the Morlocks.

. . .

If Mrs May or Frau Merkel has a happier ending, I'd be interested to hear it. If not, it is necessary not to carry on, but to change, and soon - before it's too late.

The rest of his column is here.

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The next phase for Tea Party people

image credit: The American Mirror

As reported by Breitbart News:

The Spirit of America: Conservative Grassroots Leaders Plan Massive Pro-Trump Demonstrations Nationwide

Conservative grassroots leaders are planning a series of massive pro-President Donald Trump rallies nationwide, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

On Feb. 27 and March 4, the rallies—dubbed the Spirit of America Rallies—will spring up nationwide in cities and towns across America.

“These rallies are inclusive, non-partisan, and open to anyone supporting President Trump in his efforts to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, put the security of our nation ahead of political correctness, improve our infrastructure, revitalize the inner cities and secure our nation’s borders,” Debbie Dooley, a national co-founder of the Tea Party movement and a key organizer of the Spirit of America rallies, says in a press release obtained by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.

Since President Trump’s election, during his time as president-elect and since his inauguration on Jan. 20, hardcore progressive leftists have been repeatedly protesting him in a sometimes violent manner. These rallies, organizers say, are meant to be a peaceful show of force from the “silent majority” that delivered Trump a landslide electoral college victory over failed Democratic president Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dooley told Breitbart News that since the anti-Trump women’s march in D.C. after the president’s inauguration, she has received so many calls from Trump supporters–including many, many women Trump supporters–urging her to organize a show of force among the silent majority nationwide in response–that she had to turn off her cell phone so she could get work done. The Spirit of America rallies are not Tea Party rallies, she adds, and she hopes that Democrat groups backing Trump–there were many of them nationwide, forming a collective called the “Trumpocrats”–will get involved and step up to help the president, too. She also notes that the selection of Feb. 27 as the kickoff date of these pro-Trump rallies is significant, since that was the first day of the Tea Party movement back in 2009.

“I am proud to lead the charge here in Louisiana to get supporters of President Trump to show their support of his policy agenda through these Spirit of America rallies,” Col. Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, founder of GatorPAC and two-time conservative Senate candidate in Louisiana who’s also involved in helping the rallies in his home state, added in the release. “Average citizens from across the political spectrum and all walks of life elected Mr. Trump and we at GatorPAC are especially pleased to help him with his national effort to Make America Great Again and #DrainTheSwamp priorities in Washington D.C.”

Ralph King, an elector for President Trump from Ohio and the co-founder of Main Street Patriots, added that he believes “the American electorate spoke loud and clear this past November.”

“These Spirit of America Rallies are a continuation of the collective voice of Americans that embrace President Trump’s policies to put the American workers and citizens first once again,” King said.

Rallies are in the works in states as far-flung as Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington state—as well as other states, organizers say. More information is available on the Spirit of America rallies website.

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Legislation Without Representation (at the Treehouse)

art credit: britannica.com

Many people I know think everything in America today is just hunky-dory; they just shake their heads if I bring up any of the critical issues involved in this election (see e.g., The Flight 93 Election blog here). Many people I know who plan to vote for Hillary don’t see anything wrong with anything she does, even when her actions clearly violate the law. Hard to know where to go sometimes. 

It’s especially discouraging to have to try to counter the corrupt mainstream media narratives, day in day out, especially on television. Media bias, media malpractice, propaganda – whatever you call it, the corrupt media is carrying water for the corrupt political class. 

Sundance/Conservative Treehouse is one of my daily stops online. His essay today on “Legislation Without Representation” is a sobering sanity check. Here’s a short extract:

There are many who use a frame of reference about ‘saving a constitutional republic‘; while I do not mean to be dismissive of this benevolent sensibility — in case you have not been paying attention, we’ve long since passed the threshold of that possibility.

The architecture of our own U.S. government is now operating independent of the electorate (Obamacare, Omnibus, etc.).  Congress is consistently passing legislation without appropriate representation (PR [Puerto Rico] Bailout, Omnibus, Corker/Cardin [link added] amendment, Fast-Track Trade Authorization, etc.), and the various operational constructs, divisions, and agencies within the DC UniParty are now fully weaponized against us (IRS targeting, FBI Comey/email non-finding, etc.).

Whether we like to admit it or not, just like the futuristic Skynet, our government has become self-aware, risk adverse and is intent on sustaining its UniParty agenda against any threat, risk or voice that might rise in opposition.

Read the whole thing here. It's not as pessimistic as you might think.

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