It’s Time To Bring Back The Tea Party

The Conservative Treehouse is reporting today that the House Republicans have voted to reinstate earmarks. An earmark is defined as a provision inserted into a discretionary spending appropriations bill that directs funds to a specific recipient while circumventing the merit-based or competitive funds allocation process. In plain English, it is a bribe inserted in a bill to get the vote of a specific member of Congress. Earmarks are one of the things that are responsible for the bloated federal spending that characterizes Washington. Instead of crafting bills that everyone in Congress can support, Congress resorts to earmarks to buy the votes of their members. Eliminating earmarks was one of the goals of the Tea Party.

The article reports:

When earmarks exist, the crap legislation passes because individual votes can be purchased through the earmark process.  Remember: “The Cornhusker Kickback”; “The Louisiana Purchase”; or “Gator-Aide”; those were legislative earmarks to get Obamacare passed in the Senate.

Obamacare was the sh!t sandwich the American people were forced to eat, the earmarks just gave senators some justification for their votes.

Bottom line.. it is the earmark process that makes crap legislation pass.  Confront any politician and they will admit this.

The most brutally honest answer to the question of earmarks is this: If the legislation sucks and will not pass on its own (hence the need for earmarks), then why would adding some expensive ice-cream make the sh!t sandwich better?

Remember, the originating legislation doesn’t come from inside congress.  The K-Street lobbyists are the ones writing the legislation; the earmark process only arms congressional leadership with an enhanced tool to sell the K-Street construct. {Go Deep}

Every Republican Congressman who voted to bring back earmarks needs to be voted out of office as soon as possible.

The Professionally Offended Often Have No Idea What They Are Talking About

Yesterday The Daily Wire posted an article about a recent dust-up over a shirt worn by Chris Pratt. The shirt depicted the Gadsden Flag, a Revolutionary War flag.

An article at Yahoo News reported:

The Marvel star’s top shows the American flag with a coiled snake over the top and a message underneath which reads “Don’t Tread On Me.”

The writing and snake combo on its own is depicted on the Gadsden flag; a symbol created by Christopher Gadsden, a Charleston-born brigadier general in the Continental Army.

It came to prominence during the Revolutionary War of the US by colonists who wanted independence from Great Britain.

Although it is one of the symbols and flags used by the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team, over the years the flag has been adopted by Far Right political groups like the Tea Party, as well as gun-toting supporters of the Second Amendment.

It has therefore become a symbol of more conservative and far right individuals and, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of the US, it also is “sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts.”

Wait a minute. Since when is it far right to support the U.S. Constitution and want smaller government? Note the subtle criticism of those who support the Second Amendment. Also, there is nothing racial about the Gadsden flag. Race was not part of the equation at the time it was designed. The Yahoo News story is injecting opinion into its reporting, giving some basic facts, but misleading the reader.

Aside from the fact that the professionally offended are again trying to put a negative spin on a symbol of our history, Chris Pratt was wearing the shirt to support a pro-veteran nonprofit called the Brain Treatment Foundation.

The article at The Daily Wire reports:

On Facebook, Brain Treatment Foundation posted a photo of Pratt in the T-shirt and said that they were “honored” by the support.

“We are honored to work with the silent warriors who sacrifice greatly so that others may live free, who defend our freedom, who live with honor and by the word of God. These warriors hunt evil to protect our peace, while those who disparage their sacrifices and our nation from behind a computer screen, pretend it doesn’t exist,” the organization said. “We are proud of the American flag and all symbols that represent the freedom brave men and women have shed blood for since the inception of our great country.”

This is another example of the political left criticizing something they know nothing about. Hopefully fewer people are falling for the antics of the professionally offended.

The Uni-Party Needs To Be Voted Out Of Office

The Washington Examiner posted an article today with the following headline, “Republicans join Democrats to kill Rand Paul’s fiscally responsible Pennies Plan because no one cares about the debt crisis.”

As of today, the national debt of America is approximately 22 trillion dollars. That’s a lot of debt for our children and grandchildren to be saddled with.

The article reports:

That was a nice decade of Republicans pretending to care about our $22 trillion national debt and annual multitrillion-dollar deficit. But as of Monday, we can safely say the Tea Party is over.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced about as reasonable an attempt to rein in our exploding deficit with his Pennies Plan, which would cut 2% from on-budget spending per year for the next five years. Additionally, Paul’s plan would expressly protect Social Security, include instructions to make the individual income tax reforms passed by President Trump permanent, and expand access to Health Savings Accounts.

It’s a modest but tangible step in the right direction. It wouldn’t solve our debt crisis, but it would ameliorate it somewhat. So naturally, a large bipartisan majority voted to block it from the Senate floor.

Just 22 Republicans proved themselves to be great American patriots. Sixty-nine senators, including a whopping 25 Republicans, voted not to bring the bill to a final vote.

What are we voting those 25 Republicans into the Senate for? Conservatives tell me that Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is the next big thing. But while he’s found the time to nearly derail Trump’s exceptional judicial agenda and threaten to go full-big-government on private social media companies, he refused to bring the Pennies Plan for as much as a floor vote.

It is time for those who formed the Tea Party Movement in 2009 to rename and rebrand their movement and work to shrink the cost of government. Increasing debt is not a workable financial model. It is time to elect legislators who will actually keep their promise to shrink government–not grow it. There is something in the water in Washington that causes people who run as conservatives to forget who put them in office. We need to keep voting them out of office until we find someone who knows how to keep his promises.

Attacked For Doing His Job

A smart police force keeps track of groups coming into town to hold rallies or protests. I am sure that any time the Tea Party or Antifa holds a rally in a city, the police are aware of the gathering and keep close tabs on it. That is their job. However, some of the residents of Portland, Oregon, seem to be unaware of the procedures involved in policing rallies.

Yesterday Hot Air posted an article about some recent events in Portland.

The article reports:

Last week a Portland police lieutenant named Jeff Niiya was accused of colluding with right-wing protest group Patriot Prayer after a string of his texts were released to the public. Lt. Niiya’s job is to coordinate with protest groups coming to the city and the texts show him doing just that, i.e. chatting with Patriot Prayer’s Joey Gibson about the group’s intentions and planned movements. As I noted last week, Lt. Niiya has previously been in close contact with a member of Antifa who became an outcast when other members of the group learned she’d be talking with police.

…Despite the fact that it was the Mayor’s own office requesting the information Lt. Niiya was gathering on Patriot Prayer, the investigation prompted by Niiya’s texts remains ongoing. As part of that process, Police Chief Outlaw scheduled a listening session to hear the community’s concerns Thursday night. Reporter Andy Ngo, who attended the meeting, says it quickly became a “sh*tshow” and a “circus of identity politics and hysteria.”

Some attendees at the listening session called for the Portland police to be disbanded. This sort of foolishness in Portland is not all that unusual.

The article concludes:

It’s not hard to imagine why Antifa anarchists like the idea of a city without a police force. That’s pretty much what they got last August when Mayor Ted Wheeler allowed an Occupy ICE camp full of vile extremists to grow and fester. Protestesters became so violent that ICE officers called 911 for help but Mayor Wheeler ordered the police not to respond. When the same mob turned on a woman running a food cart and burned it down, the police never responded. In the end, it was Police Chief Danielle Outlaw who demanded the Mayor allow her to clear out the camp. Naturally, the protesters left behind loads of garbage for the city to clean up.

At this point, Chief Outlaw seems to be one of the few city officials with any sense. Hopefully, she won’t buckle under the pressure from extremists to condemn Lt. Niiya.

This would be comical if it were not so serious.

This Is Really Sad

John McCain is a war hero. When given the chance to go home from a North Vietnam prison camp because of his father’s rank, he chose to stay with his men. Because of that choice he was severely beaten and mistreated. That is heroism. Unfortunately his actions in recent years have not reflected the patriotic service to his country that his time in Vietnam exemplified. We have no way of knowing how long the brain cancer he is suffering from clouded his judgement, but even so, some of his actions in recent years are reprehensible.

On Friday, The Washington Times posted an article about some recent documents received by Judicial Watch as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

The article reports:

A new report from Judicial Watch reveals a concerted effort from Sen. John McCain’s office to urge the IRS under Lois Lerner to strike out against political advocacy groups, including tea party organizations. 

Thanks to the results of an extensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that has been delayed for many years, Judicial Watch has obtained several key emails from 2013 that chronicle McCain’s and Democrat Sen. Carl Levin’s efforts to reign in the advocacy groups that sprouted immediately following the Citizens United decision from the Supreme Court. 

The documents uncovered by Judicial Watch include notes from a high-level meeting on April 30, 2013 between powerful members of McCain’s and Levin’s staffs and Lerner, then-director of tax exempt organizations at the IRS under Barack Obama. The notes reveal the suggestions from McCain’s former staff director and chief counsel on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee, Henry Kerner who urges Lerner to use IRS audits on the advocacy groups to financially ruin them:

In the full notes of an April 30 meeting, McCain’s high-ranking staffer Kerner recommends harassing non-profit groups until they are unable to continue operating. Kerner tells Lerner, Steve Miller, then chief of staff to IRS commissioner, Nikole Flax, and other IRS officials, “Maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous.” In response, Lerner responded that “it is her job to oversee it all:”

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article yesterday detailing some of the biography of Henry Kerner.

The Conservative Treehouse reports:

Yesterday it was revealed that Henry J Kerner (Henry Kerner), as a former McCain senior staff official, was part of a bipartisan DC team who constructed the IRS weaponization program to target the Tea Party.  That’s bad enough.  However, a little more digging, you’re not going to believe this: the same guy who was attached to the prior investigations, is now in charge of all DC “corruption” and “whistle-blowing” cases, including the current FBI and DOJ corruption.

Henry Kerner is Special Counsel in charge of all “whistle-blowing” witnesses and cases of government corruption.  Henry Kerner controls the events as the lead official, the Special Counsel in charge of the Office of Special Counsel; and he is in the position to manipulate/control any investigative outcome.

Now a whole bunch of things begin to make sense. From his CV summary Henry Kerner would have been in position to influence: Fast-n-furious scandal (Issa), IRS scandal (Chaffetz), Benghazi (Chaffetz, Gowdy, McCain); and now in his position in charge of the entire Office of Special Counsel he would have influence and control over Spygate etc. (underline is mine)

This is how the deep state works–put a person in a position to act as a dam in case of scandal. In case we ever wondered why none of the above scandals ever resulted in a prosecution, we have a common thread–Henry Kerner.

John McCain’s treachery is bad enough, but to have his former staff member as the protector of those involved in scandals is disgusting. We really need to start voting some of our Congressmen out of office–they have not served us well.

Why Congressional Investigations Can Take A Long Time

It seems that there have been so many scandals involving the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton that it is hard to keep track. After a while it seems as if the investigations never seem to end. Well, there’s a reason the investigations seem to drag on–sometimes the information needed to conduct the investigation can be hard to get.

The Hill reported yesterday that thousands of emails from Lois Lerner have magically appeared.

The article reports:

The Treasury inspector general for tax administration (TIGTA) said it found roughly 6,400 emails either to or from Lerner sent between 2004 and 2013 that it didn’t think the IRS had turned over to lawmakers, the panels said. The committees have yet to examine the emails, according to Capitol Hill aides.

…But a spokesman for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said the committee hoped the new emails would bring the panel closer to releasing the findings of its IRS investigation. Committee aides have said the panel was close to finishing its report when the IRS said it couldn’t locate the Lerner emails last year.

“These emails will be carefully examined as part of the committee’s bipartisan IRS investigation,” the spokesman said. “After TIGTA produces their report regarding the missing data later this year, the Committee hopes to follow suit and move forward with the release of its bipartisan report on this issue.” 

If the IRS had produced the emails when they were originally asked to, the investigation would be over. I also can’t help wondering if the emails have been tampered with in any way.