Thousands Attend Virginia Tea Party Convention

The scorn heaped by activists at the Virginia Tea Party Patriots convention on former President George W. Bush was second only to that for Democratic President Barack Obama. Even Virginia's popular Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell had to field barbed questions from some of the more than 2,000 angry conservatives and libertarians who attended the meeting Friday and Saturday. Organizers said it was the largest tea party meeting in the nation. Across the nation, tea party groups this year have proved an ability to influence Republican primaries. In several U.S. Senate races, they've ousted entrenched incumbents in favor of conservatives bent on measures such as repealing the Democratic health care bill enacted in March, giving state legislatures authority to nullify federal laws through a vote of two-thirds of the states. The Republican who had the least to fret was Virginia's conservative lightning rod attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli. He and maverick Republican Rep. Ron Paul both received lengthy, roaring standing ovations from more than 1,000 people, many of whom bore "Cuccinelli for President" and yellow flags emblazoned with a coiled snake and the words "Don't Tread on Me."...more

Tea Party Giving Neocons Heartburn

Several neoconservative writers have recently expressed nervousness about Tea Party supporters threatening to make substantial cuts in military expenditures in order to rein in government spending. Articles in the Washington Post and at Heritage.com, by Danielle Pletka, Thomas Donnelly, Arthur Brooks, Edwin Fuelner, and William Kristol have made it clear that “the conservative movement — and the party that seeks to represent it — is at a crossroads.” One road will continue funding the military-industrial complex in “defense of freedom,” while the other road “beckons in an almost Calvinistic call to fiscal discipline” resulting in potentially severe defense department cuts. Justin Raimondo, on the other hand, says that such efforts reflect panic on the part of those who, in the name of peace, support a strong military and an interventionist international policy. “They’re living in fear of the so-called tea party, the spontaneous grassroots rebellion against runaway federal spending that has successfully challenged the GOP establishment and wants to cut big government down to size — with a meat axe." [emphasis added] They especially fear supporters of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) who are seeking to stuff the government genie back into its constitutional bottle. Raimondo refers to a study available at Mises.org, “What You Paid For,” illustrating how much of the average taxpayer’s taxes are spent for each department of government. Entitlements make up nearly 40 percent of his taxes, while 10 percent go to support the military establishment including the current wars, military personnel and veterans’ benefits. And those numbers for defense keep climbing, he says, from $437 billion in 2001 to $720 billion currently...more

Conservatives must remain vigilant in the weeks leading up to Election Day

Let's posit that conservatives have every reason for optimism in the coming elections. The Tea Parties are enthusiastic and powerful. Middle America is fed up with big government. The left is dispirited. The polls looks great. It therefore would take a real wet blanket to warn that the momentum could fizzle and the triumph be less than grand. Sorry, but this blanket is wet indeed. Before we go any farther, please understand: This is not a prediction; it's a warning. It isn't meant to kill optimism, but only to temper it. Vince Lombardi's Packers won not because they were confident of victory, but because they were prepared for anything their opponents might throw at them. Churchill offered "sunlit uplands" only after the blood, toil, tears and sweat. As the campaign season enters its home stretch, conservatives need steel to go with their energy, and need to recognize their vulnerabilities that must be shored up. The reality is that a lot can happen in the last 26 days of a campaign...more

The Unraveling Of ObamaCare

Thirty companies and organizations get waivers from the new health care overhaul because otherwise they'd have to raise rates or drop coverage. The president said neither would happen. Hey, where's our waiver? When McDonald's told federal regulators in a recent memo that it would be "economically prohibitive" for its insurance carrier to continue to cover its 30,000 hourly workers unless it received a waiver from the ObamaCare requirement that 80% of premiums for such minimed plans be spent on medical care, alarm bells went off in the White House. Suddenly the "affordable health care for Americans" that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of when she passed a bill no one had read was revealed to be an unaffordable fraud that threatened to throw untold numbers of young workers into the ranks of the uninsured in an already precarious election year. So now McDonald's has its waiver, for 115,000 workers, not just 30,000. Jack in the Box also has a waiver, as do 28 other companies and organizations. The largest waiver, for 351,000 people, is for, appropriately enough, a union — specifically the United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund, a New York brotherhood that covers teachers. The United Agricultural Benefit Trust, a California-based cooperative that provides such low-cost minimal coverage to farmworkers, was allowed to exempt 17,347 workers. Even what has been dubbed RomneyCare gets a waiver, with Massachusetts' universal health coverage bureaucracy getting an exemption for about 5,000 people. Remember the days of sharing the burden and spreading the wealth? ..more

Howard Dean sneers at Tea Party, says GOP has “created monster”

The confirmed Socialist (scroll) and Dr. of Disology told the Obama administration’s favorite “news” network that the GOP has, in effect, “created a monster” by giving credence to the Tea Party movement...He then went on to attack Republican Christine O’Donnell , who is supported by the Tea Party in her bid to win the Delaware Senate seat formerly held by Joe Biden. The first thing that came to mind after reading this was: Will the real Howard Dean please stand up? Just a few weeks ago, he was talking about how he “approved” of much of what the Tea Party was doing...So anyway – what happened between that mid-September piece and today’s MSDNC interview? Well, in a nutshell, we’re a month away from what looks to be a bruising election for the left and the word’s already gotten out from the Oval Office to paint the Tea Party as “extremists” (read: racists) and, along with it, any GOP politico/candidate who affiliates with them in any way – especially those who are endorsed by the Tea Party. Essentially, Dean has performed a flip-flop that would impress flip-flopster extraordinaire John Kerry...more

Nevada Tea Party Chairman Quits

The head of the Nevada Tea Party resigned Tuesday after its candidate for Senate leaked a recording of Sharron Angle – the Republican running to replace Senator Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority — in which she complained about Republican leaders and confessed that she does not know if she can win. Ms. Angle is, of course, considered a Tea Party candidate herself — that is, she is supported by the conservative anti-establishment movement that wants to shrink the role of the federal government. But she will appear on the ballot as a Republican. And in Nevada (as in Florida) there is an official Tea Party, with a candidate, Scott Ashjian, who will appear on the ballot with a Tea Party label. The chairman of the Tea Party — the official one — Syd James, said he set up a meeting between Mr. Ashjian and Ms. Angle to see if Mr. Ashjian could be convinced to get out of the race and endorse Ms. Angle. Mr. Ashjian secretly recorded the meeting, and released a tape of it to Jon Ralston, the state’s best-known political columnist. On the tape Ms. Angle tells Mr. Ashjian, “I’m not sure you can win and I’m not sure I can win if you’re hurting my chances, and that’s the part that scares me.” She badmouths national Republicans — who had hoped that a former state GOP chairwoman, Sue Lowden, would win the primary instead of Ms. Angle — saying they have “lost their principles.” Mr. Ashjian, in turn, complained on tape that Tea Party leaders — who began referring to themselves as “grassroots activists” to distinguish from his official party — had smeared him...more

Tea Parties Forge Alliances in Bid to Advance Agendas

The tea-party movement is turning more professional. Around the country, tea-party groups are building increasingly sophisticated political organizations and overcoming early bickering to push legislative platforms, elect their own delegates, shake up statehouses and even form alliances with the Republican Party establishment they profess to dislike. Nowhere is this evolution more vivid than in Virginia, where a federation of more than 30 groups scattered across the state now has the ear of the Republican governor, top state legislators and the state's congressional delegation. The Federation of Virginia Tea Party Patriots helped push legislation through the Virginia Statehouse earlier this year to blunt the impact of the new federal health-care law. It is now allying with like-minded lawmakers to champion an ambitious roster of bills. For much of the past year, the meteoric rise of the tea-party movement has struck many as a threat to the Republican establishment. But in state after state, tea-party groups are putting the fireworks aside to form at least temporary alliances with the GOP as they strengthen their own organizations. Many of these groups are already looking beyond the November midterm elections and plotting strategies for legislative sessions and local elections next year. The result could help determine the tea party's longevity...more

NY Times Alarmed: Tea Party Reading Unapproved Texts

Instead of just reading the latest approved tomes and today’s issue of the Times, people are learning from “obscure” old books by dead people. The Tea Party “has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted everywhere from protest signs to Republican Party platforms.” The idea of a movement animated by ideas rather than leaders is just right. Bastiat, Hayek, and Mises are magnificent, and also just what one would expect from a movement born in Ron Paulism...more

Thune: Tea Party could form splinter group by 2012

If Republicans neglect the concerns of Tea Party activists, the group could break off to form a third party as early as 2012, warned Republican Senator John Thune. Thune, who is considering a presidential run, said if Republicans manage to take back the Congress next month, they will have to work quickly to deliver results to voters. "If we do not govern according to our principles and if we don't follow through on the things that we say we're going to do, I think the Tea Party–I think there will be a third party in this country," Thune said on C-SPAN Newsmakers. He applauded Tea Party candidates running for office this year as energetic and driven and said their concerns coincide "with what many of us who are there want to see done."...more

Tea-Party affiliated group seeks constitutional change

A Tea Party activist is working to get state backing for a constitutional convention to pass a constitutional amendment that would give two-thirds of the states the ability to repeal congressional acts, such as the new health care law. “It restores a lot of the sovereignty and a lot of the power that the states have lost,” said Marianne Moran, executive director of RepealAmendment.org and *former executive director of Tea Party In Action. The Tenth Amendment has become useless because of Supreme Court decisions that have expanded federal power and because of the Seventeenth Amendment that stripped state legislatures of their right to name U.S. senators, Moran said. “This doesn’t undo some of those bad Supreme Court cases and doesn’t resolve some of the problems of the Seventeenth Amendment, but it does restore some of the balance of power that was originally intended ̶ and the mechanism by which we can control some of the out of control spending and get our debt under control,” she said. Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett initially devised the idea in a 2009 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, which drew the attention of numerous Tea Party activists. Several Tea Party groups back the amendment, Moran said...more

Tea Party vs. War Party

“We’re all on the same page until the polls close Nov. 2,” Richard Viguerie, the longtime conservative strategist who has allied with the Tea Party, told The New York Times. After that, “a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party begins.” Indeed, such a battle seems unavoidable. Consider. The great issue uniting and motivating the Republican Party and Tea Party is the deficit-debt crisis, a national debt nearing 100 percent of gross domestic product and a deficit of 10 percent of GDP. As to the cause of the deficit that could precipitate a run on the dollar, double-digit inflation, even a default, the Tea Party and GOP also agree — federal spending that consumes 25 percent of GDP. Both are also on the same page in their opposition to closing the deficit with new or higher taxes. This means spending must be slashed. But to cut the budget to 20 percent of GDP, where it was before George W. Bush and Barack Obama, requires spending cuts of an astronomical $700 billion a year. Even then, the 2011 deficit would be $700 billion. Which leaves one place where a bipartisan majority may be found for major spending cuts: defense and the empire, the warfare state. The “agonizing reappraisal” of commitments abroad that John Foster Dulles predicted half a century ago may be at hand. And here is where the Tea Party and War Party split the blanket...more

Take Two for Tea Party Express and Murkowski

The Tea Party Express says it is going to target Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski - again. The national Sacramento-based organization announced Thursday that next week they'll unveil a new television and radio ad campaign against Murkowski, who is running in the general election as a write-in candidate. Last month, Murkowski conceded defeat in her bid for her party's nomination. The senator, who is part of a political dynasty in Alaska, was upset in the August 24 Republican Senate primary by attorney Joe Miller, a previous longshot who enjoyed strong support from Tea Party activists and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. The Tea Party Express had endorsed Miller and spent over $600,000 to help him defeat Murkowski. "Lisa, take a hint, the voters rejected you once before and now watching you defy their will is bound to alienate yourself from Alaska voters even more," says Amy Kremer, chairwoman of the Tea Party Express, in a news release...more

Distrust in media hits record high

Fifty-seven percent of Americans do not trust the news media to accurately and fairly report the news, a new high according to a Gallup poll out Wednesday. The percentage of Americans who distrust the media has been steadily climbing since the mid 1990s, when distrusts in the news media rated hovered around 45 percent. Now, only 43 percent have a “fair amount” or a “great deal” of trust in the media, the lowest point since Gallup began rating. Perhaps one of the leading factors for American distrust in the media is the high percentage who believe that reporting tilts too far in one ideological direction or the other. Forty-eight percent believe the media is too liberal while only 15 percent of find that it tilts too conservative. Just 33 percent believe coverage is “just about right.”...more

71% of Republicans Are Tea Party Supporters

The tea party has emerged as a potent force in American politics and a center of gravity within the Republican Party, with a large majority of Republicans showing an affinity for the movement that has repeatedly bucked the GOP leadership this year, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll has found. In the survey, 71% of Republicans described themselves as tea-party supporters, saying they had a favorable image of the movement or hoped tea- party candidates would do well in the Nov. 2 elections. Already, the tea-party movement has helped to oust a number of incumbents and candidates backed by party leaders in this year's GOP primaries amid complaints that they lacked commitment to small-government principles. The poll findings suggest that the rising influence of the movement, with its push to cut spending and oppose the Democratic agenda, will drive the GOP to become more conservative and less willing to seek common ground on policy...more

ACORN Is Very Much Alive; Funding Ban Dies This Week

As I reported yesterday, federal investigators are recommending that government funding for ACORN's still operating housing affiliate be cut off immediately. In a recently completed probe, the inspector general for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that ACORN Housing (now renamed Affordable Housing Centers of America) appeared to have committed massive fraud against the taxpayers of the United States. Investigators must have felt it was necessary to urge the funding cutoff because the federal government's prohibition on funding ACORN isn't a permanent ban. It exists at the whim of lawmakers and (because it was attached to annual appropriations bills) runs out at the end of this month. There is no indication currently that the federal ban on funding ACORN, whose last day in effect is Sept. 30, will be extended. As of writing (Tuesday morning) spokesmen for the House and Senate appropriations committees told me they had no idea if the funding prohibition was going to be extended...more

Tapping Sam: At 288, Adams’s Ideas Are Still Brewing

Samuel Adams’s political genius understood that to remain free, he and his fellow colonists had to band together around an issue (seemingly trivial–Tea), and build a philosophical common understanding about where and how that freedom had to be defended. He was the first to understand the connection between taxation and core human liberties, and framed the issue in a way that allowed an American consciousness to emerge that was strong enough to fight the most powerful empire in the world. Samuel Adams had three qualities that are reflected in the Tea Partiers of the twenty-first century. He recognized the early signs of tyranny, he took responsibility for the fight that would come, and he believed in the capability and the willingness of his fellow colonists to reach that same understanding. We are all familiar with that culminating act of civil disobedience, the Boston Tea Party, but the consolidation of foment into the Sons of Liberty and the hundreds of impassioned letters he penned to all parts of the colonies urging, pleading, reasoning, and cajoling others to join the fight that allowed the first thoughts of “independence” to ever be considered with any seriousness...more

CBS show CSI jumps in on Tea Party smearing

The Sept. 23 season premiere plot of CBS’s hit drama “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” involved guest star Justin Bieber attending “right-wing” political events before being targeted as a suspect in bombings of a Las Vegas Police Department funeral. Alessandra Stanley of The New York Times wrote on Sept. 24 that Bieber played a “domestic terrorist with Tea Party leanings.” Even though the episode made no direct reference to the Tea Party, the “right-wing” protest depicted resembled a Tea Party protest, at least according to some viewers who have commented on FreeRepublic.com, a conservative blog. BigHollywood and BigGovernment publisher Andrew Breitbart said the show’s producers are undoubtedly using the program as a propaganda mechanism and he finds it particularly disturbing that an episode like this popped up so close to the upcoming midterm elections. “This is predictable behavior from Hollywood,” Breitbart told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “Over the past year and a half, the Democratic Party, left-wing media and, now, Hollywood, have done anything they can to portray the Tea Party movement as a violent Timothy McVeigh-esque or as a racist movement.”

The Disgrace of the Ruling Class

We now have confirmation that Barack Obama truly loves poor people. Because he is creating so many of them.
Check out Pete Ferrara's article at The American Spectator for a rundown on Obamanomics and recent political events.

Why Statists Are Attacking the Tea Party

The upside to the Tea Party movement — the one that has the welfare-warfare crowd so consternated — is that its members are not behaving as the good, little citizen-automatons that epitomize the statist crowd. The Tea Partiers are asking questions and they’re challenging the establishment paradigm, a real no-no in the eyes of welfare-warfare statists. There are two primary issues that are common to Tea Partiers: first, concern over out-of-control federal spending and debt, and, second, the U.S. Constitution. Those two issues are what have statists, both on the welfare side and the warfare side, extremely concerned, causing them to increasingly go on the attack against the “extremism” of the Tea Partiers. Why are the statists engaging in such a preemptive attack? After all, it’s not as if these two issues — federal spending and debt and the U.S. Constitution — are really all that controversial in and of themselves. It’s because the statists know that if an increasing number of Americans are thinking — and especially about these two particular issues — they might well come up with the right answers, and it’s those answers that absolutely scare the statists to death...more

Tea Party divided over immigration

Tea Party activists who are debating whether to embrace “family values” issues in a year when the economy could make or break the Democrats and sweep their candidates to power are also divided over another hot-button issue — immigration. One leading Tea Party group has decided to work closely with Roy Beck’s Numbers USA, a well-known “restrictionist” lobby that wants to see immigration, both legal and illegal, reduced.  Together these groups are opposing passage of the DREAM Act, the stand-alone legislation that immigration reform advocates have rallied around as the prospects for passing a broader immigration bill have faded. However, two other key Tea Party groups, including FreedomWorks, whose co-founder, former House majority leader Dick Armey, supports expanded immigration, say they’ll stay out of the fight over the DREAM Act. Ideologically, support for immigration is thoroughly consistent with the Tea Party’s enthusiastic endorsement of the unfettered free market.  In fact, for years, libertarian, pro-free enterprise groups like the CATO Institute have joined business groups and immigration advocates in calling for less government regulation of immigration — a position that critics call an “open borders” policy. But many Tea Party activists believe that restoring the “rule of law” — and regaining control of the country’s borders — is also fundamental to the American ideal of freedom.  They don’t necessarily oppose rising immigration, especially legal immigration, but they are hostile to “amnesties” for illegal aliensthat appear to reward “lawbreakers.”...

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/09/23/tea-party-divided-over-immigration/#ixzz10hzqaRDB

The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party

The Tea Party movement has further sought to spruce up its historical bona fides by laying claim to the United States Constitution. Many Tea Party members subscribe to a literal reading of the national charter as a way of bolstering their opposition to deficit spending, bank bailouts and President Obama’s health care plan. A Tea Party manifesto, called the Contract From America, even contains a rigid provision stipulating that all legislation passed by Congress should specify the precise clause in the Constitution giving Congress the power to pass such a law — an idea touted Thursday by the House Republican leadership. But any movement that regularly summons the ghosts of the founders as a like-minded group of theorists ends up promoting an uncomfortably one-sided reading of history. The truth is that the disputatious founders — who were revolutionaries, not choir boys — seldom agreed about anything. Never has the country produced a more brilliantly argumentative, individualistic or opinionated group of politicians. Far from being a soft-spoken epoch of genteel sages, the founding period was noisy and clamorous, rife with vitriolic polemics and partisan backbiting. Instead of bequeathing to posterity a set of universally shared opinions, engraved in marble, the founders shaped a series of fiercely fought debates that reverberate down to the present day. Right along with the rest of America, the Tea Party has inherited these open-ended feuds, which are profoundly embedded in our political culture...more

As Public Sees GOP Moving Right, More Say It Shares Their Values, View of Government, According to Gallup Data

At the same time the public perceives the Republican Party becoming more conservative, more Americans are saying the party reflects their values and their attitude about the role of government, according to newly released Gallup polling data.Democrats, meanwhile, have lost ground on these measures. In a USA Today/Gallup poll of 1,021 American adults conducted Aug. 27-30, respondents were asked whether they believed the Republican Party had “become more conservative, or not” since Barack Obama took office as president. In the same poll, respondents were also asked how well each of the two major parties “represent your values” and “represent your attitude about the role of government.” Fifty-four percent of Americans told Gallup they believed the GOP had indeed become more conservative since Obama took office, while only 40 percent said they did not believe the Republicans had become more conservative. At the same time, the Republicans did better than the Democrats on the percentage of Americans who said the party represents their attitude about the role of government and their values. Fifty-two percent told Gallup the Republican Party represented their attitude about the role of government either “very well” or “moderately well,” while only 44 percent said the Democratic Party represented their attitude about the role of government either “very well” or “moderately well.”...more

ObamaCare at Six Months

As President Obama spent Wednesday celebrating the six-month anniversary of the national health care law, his crowning legislative achievement remained deeply unpopular. Despite repeated claims by proponents of the law that Americans would begin to warm up to it once it was enacted, more than 49 percent of the public currently opposes the law, according to an average of polls compiled by Pollster.com, compared with just 41 percent who favor it. Those numbers are virtually identical to where they stood when Obama signed the legislation in March. The months since passage of ObamaCare have been marked by the evaporation of one promise after another. Contrary to the rhetoric employed by Democrats when they were ramming the unpopular measure through Congress, further evidence has confirmed that the law will increase costs, raise premiums, and cause Americans to lose their current coverage -- even if they like it. Yet this is no time for opponents of the law to become complacent. ObamaCare boosters are already laying the groundwork to use the failures of the law to advocate a further expansion of the government’s role in health care...more

Witch’s Brew for the Tea Party

Tea Party favorite, Senator Jim DeMint said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that if the GOP takes control in November but betrays conservatives again-as DeMint points out, his party certainly did during the Bush years-then “the Republican Party’s dead.” DeMint is not only correct, but under his leadership it’s not hard to imagine a Senator O’Donnell, or possibly a Senator Angle, generally voting for the same Tea Party principles that first brought them to the dance. DeMint knows well how the game is played on Capitol Hill and reliably plays it toward Tea Party ends. But there is a difference between cultural conservatives like O’Donnell, Angle and on some level, even DeMint, and more libertarian leaning candidates like Rand Paul, who possess a deeper and more comprehensive constitutional philosophy, due in no small part to his upbringing. To the extent that the otherwise solidly fiscally conservative DeMint disagrees with this libertarian wing of the Tea Party, that extra-constitutional statist measures are OK so long as they reflect the values of cultural conservatives-the federal drug war, federal anti-gay marriage legislation, an increased police state, funding trillion dollar undeclared wars-that this ideological disconnect in the Tea Party might endure is the greater fear raised when we are reminded of O’Donnell’s fundamentalist background, via her talk about “witchcraft,” or even masturbation being “adultery.” No conservative should really care about O’Donnell’s views on such subjects-only to the extent that her worldview could possibly, one day, undermine or negate the larger limited government aims of the Tea Party. escribing the Tea Party’s goals in both the short and long term, The American Conservative’s Daniel McCarthy writes, what’s “important in the long run is that a.) the GOP leadership be purged, and b.) conservatives realize that there’s a difference between being conservative and being crazy.” O’Donnell and similar Tea Party candidates have been of great value in this purging, despite occasionally exhibiting behavior that even their champions might consider “crazy.” So long as these candidates are perceived as more reliably conservative than crazy, they will likely continue to do well. To the extent that they might actually be crazy, time will tell-and the Tea Party will continue to brew...more

Is The Tea Party Just a Big Scam?

Is the tea party one the most successful scams in American political history? Before you dismiss the question, note that word “successful.” Judge the tea party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media. But it’s equally important to recognize that the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers. Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by tea party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since. The tea party drowns out such voices because it has money—some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in The New Yorker—and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact...more