Tag Archives: Tea Party

The Anti Tea Party

 

My biggest concern about Trump is that he mimics Obama and trounces the constitution, expands the scope of the Federal government and inches ever closer to a “too big to fail” executive.

My second biggest concern about Trump is the pendulum – the swing back to a liberal majority.

Perhaps I’m wrong in fear number two:

But what made the tea party successful, according to Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor whose field studies of the tea party movement became a 2011 book, was a particular climate on the political right. “We thought of the tea party as a set of several intersecting forces that were leveraging each other and helping to build each other’s clout to change and use the Republican Party,” she said. Self-organizing grass-roots groups, top-down professional advocacy and money groups, such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, along with right-wing media, swirled together to make the movement a success, according to Skocpol. It remains to be seen if the climate on the left will prove to be hospitable for the growth of a similarly effective movement.

Personally, my belief is that the Left is made up of fringe groups – each with their complaint.  It might be the environment, or women’s rights, racism, the poor or refugees.  Almost always the group is made up of people who themselves are not injured, but instead are people *representing* the injured.

Further, these groups don’t advocate policy that would require themselves OR the aggrieved to bear responsibility for the work to be done to fix the problem.  THAT responsibility falls on someone else, usually the rich, the white or the man.

As such, because they don’t feel it their responsibility, combined with the fact that it is not them impacted, they will never dig deep enough to do the work.

I shouldn’t fear the professional ‘outrager’, but I admit to some lost sleep.

Echos Of The Civil War

For two reason I don’t like this:

Washington (CNN) – Rep. Charles Rangel on Tuesday compared what he considers the most intransigent members of the House Republican caucus with the Confederates of the American Civil War.

The last-minute holdups on a deal over funding the government and raising the debt ceiling, the longtime Democrat from New York City told CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield, are not coming from conflict between Republicans and Democrats.

Rather, “this is all about a handful of people who got elected as Republicans that want to bring down our government. You can see it in the streets. You can see where they’re coming from,” Rangel said.

“The same way they fought as Confederates, they want to bring down the government and reform it.”

Rangel was asked to confirm that he was referring to the Confederates of the Civil War. He told Banfield, “If you take a look at the states that they control, take a look at the Dixiecrats, see how they went over the Republican Party…”

The reasons?

  1. The reaction to Obamacare has nothing to do with race.
  2. Nothing good comes out of incendiary remarks like this.

 

The Impact Of The Tea Party

Tea Party Spending

The debate is raging in Washington.  Can the government spending excess be reigned in.  On the one had we have an Obama administration that wants to spend and spend and spend.  There can be no doubt as to their desired policy – more government spending is better government spending.

And then you have the Tea Party.  Facing opposition not only from the democrats but also from the republican establishment.

And what have they accomplished in their short existence?  Look at the graph above.

They stopped the spending in its tracks.

Rage on little T, rage on!

State Of Occupy Wall Street – Raleigh Style

Occupy RaleighThought I’d slum it tonight and wander through the Occu-camp.

Not surprising.  They Gone.

Policy or philosophy differences aside, the effectiveness of the Tea Party compared to the efforts of a bunch of vagrant criminals.  One group is shaping national legislation, the other is “taking too long to respond.”

Tea Party – Occupy Wall Street

Say what you will about the Tea Party and their tactics in the House over the debate surrounding the Debt Ceiling and raising it.

There is absolutely no doubt that the Tea Party has been wildly more successful in their ambitions to change politics than the Occupy Wall Street hippies ever thought they could hope for.

There hasn’t been a serious OWS story in a year, there are no Occupy candidates running for office and not one that holds office.

Given that success, which movement do you think more accurately represents most American’s desires – the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?

Mountain Moral Monday

And they said the Tea Party lacked color:

All KINDS of brown skinned people at the Moral Monday rally.

“But They Are Terrorists…”

I think that Coyote sums it up nicely:

There won’t be any direct order found telling the IRS to go hassle Conservative groups.  That’s not the way it works.  Obama’s style is to “other” groups he does not like, to impugn their motives, and to cast them as pariahs beyond the bounds of civil society.  Such and such group, he will say, opposes me not because they have reasonable differences of opinion but because they have nefarious motives.  Once a group is labelled and accepted (at least by your political followers) as such, you don’t have to order people to harass them. They just do it, because they see it as the right thing to do to harass evil people.  When Joe Nocera writes this in support of Obama in no less a platform as the NY Times, orders are superfluous

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took…

He concludes by saying

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.

There are probably some deeply confused people in the IRS right now — after all they were denying tax exempt status to terrorists, to enemies of America.  They should be treated like heroes, and now they are getting all this criticism.  So unfair.

Jay Carney mentioned the other day that the White House and Barack Obama is responsible for setting “tone.”

I think that Obama has been clear that the Tea Party is the bad guy.  That’s the tone.

Legit Scandal

IRS

Recently ReflectionEphemeral posted on the IRS scandal:

On a scale of 1-10, the IRS scandal seems to me about a 3. It is improper to focus on one side’s fundraising groups. An overall examination of supposedly tax-exempt organizations would probably be worthwhile. But they didn’t audit or persecute people; they sent them additional questionnaires.

Recently, nickgb got me thinking that perhaps profiling groups isn’t that bad an idea.  In fact, it’s an idea that I have been a proponent of in the gun debate.  As such, RR may have a point.  Overtly political groups may need to be audited.  However, it might be nice if such political groups were audited in equal measure based on their ideology; right and left groups.

However, in RR’s post, he pointed out the fact that there maybe a bigger scandal:

If someone at the IRS actually took confidential information and sent it out, that’s unequivocally a crime.

Well, as it turns out:

ProPublica on Monday reported that the same IRS division that targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny during the 2012 election cycle provided the investigative-reporting organization with confidential applications for tax-exempt status.

That revelation contradicts previous statements from the agency and may represent a violation of federal guidelines. Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS sector that reviews tax-exemption applications, told a congressional oversight committee in April 2012 that IRS code prohibited the agency from providing information about groups that had not yet been approved.

As an interesting experiment I Googled “ProPublica IRS”:

Not one single major news source on the first page.  And when I include “CBSnews” in the search I do get a New York CBS affiliate and, at the bottom, a cbsnews.com story about how the scandals benefits conservatives.  And even that story is lifted from Slate.

Anyway, it would seem that we now have a legit scandal.  We’ll see if it goes anywhere.

Obama’s Tyranny Speech

…hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some seperate sinister entity that’s at the root of all of our problems Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works.  They’ll warn that tyranny is just around the corner.

You should reject these voices.

Obama is talking about conservatives in general.  Republicans in congress and Tea Party republicans in specific.

He is referring to people who feel that we must ever be careful that government is only one day away from becoming a tyrannical mechanism that will restrict liberty.  He is referring to people, specific people.

Think those voices need to be rejected now?

IRS

IRS Targetted Tea Party Affiliated Groups

Right now the report is only mentioning Cincinnati.  I’m not sure what caused the IRS to review its data or how they determined the discrimination took place, but it sure would be fun to see if they are willing to audit other IRS offices:

(Reuters) – U.S. tax auditors inappropriately targeted applications from conservative political groups seeking tax-exempt status, an Internal Revenue Service official acknowledged on Friday.

Lois Lerner, director of the IRS tax-exempt office, said the practice was “was absolutely incorrect and it was inappropriate.”

Lerner, speaking at an American Bar Association conference in Washington, said, “We would like to apologize for that.”

None of the groups that were given extra scrutiny have been rejected yet for tax-exempt status, she said.

Organizations that used the words “patriots” or “Tea Party” in their filings were flagged by the Internal Revenue Service for further review, something conservatives complained about during the 2012 election campaign.

I think it’s important to note that the IRS is reporting, as above, that no group given extra scrutiny has yet been rejected.