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Tea Party Tag

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 24, 2017 34 Comments
By now, most people know the back story. In the run-up to the 2012 election, Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations were subjected to unnecessary scrutiny and even harassment by the IRS to whom they were applying for non-profit status.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on September 30, 2017 92 Comments
As the GOP-led Congress fails to fulfill its seven-year, oft-repeated pledge to repeal ObamaCare and fails to support meaningful immigration reform that includes securing our border (building the wall), right-leaning voters who put them in power are becoming more and more restless, frustrated, and angry. Luther Strange's primary drubbing in Alabama suggests that the Trump phenomena is looking less and less like a cult of personality and more and more like a Tea Party-inspired insurrection. When then-presidential candidate Trump said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters, many pundits and politicians marveled at his hubris while others rankled at the all-too-apparent truth of his statement. Trump supporters stuck with him through the Inside Edition tape release and the Trump University fiasco.  His opponents on both the left and the right were puzzled beyond measure, and for good reason.  These and any number of other problematic issues in Trump's background would have derailed any politician.

Posted by Mike LaChance on May 25, 2017 23 Comments
It has been almost five years since news broke that officials at the IRS used the power of government to harass members of the Tea Party and other conservative groups. The media has largely ignored the scandal and so far, no one has gone to jail. Earlier this month, IRS officials claimed they couldn't testify because their lives were at risk. USA Today reported:
IRS officials say lives at risk in tea party bias case Details about tea party bias claims against the IRS could remain secret because current and former agency officials say their lives are in danger if they publicly testify about the case.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 09, 2017 17 Comments
It is astonishing how much is being revealed about the "Deep State" since Donald Trump was inaugurated less than two months ago. This week, Wikileaks published almost 9,000 documents from the CIA about the agency’s own malware used to hack into anyone’s electronics make it look like the cyber-attack came from Russia. Now, after years of struggling for real justice from the Obama Administration that falsely claimed Tea Party groups were never targeted, citizen activists now have access to nearly 7,000 documents related to the illegal man-handling of their tax status applications by the Internal Revenue Service.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on February 07, 2017 61 Comments
While I'm enjoying the progressive meltdown as much as the next person, it may be time to think about countering the "resistance."  We would do well to think about the impact the pressure from the raging "resistance" is likely to have not on their own party but on Republicans in Congress and, perhaps to a lesser extent, on the Trump administration. From the "women's march" to airport protests to flooding into GOP town halls, the progressive left is making itself heard among the very Republicans President Trump will need to keep his agenda moving forward.  These are the McCains, the Grahams, the Collins', the Murkowskis, and others whose votes do matter (even if we close our eyes and wish really really hard that they don't). Republicans who loved the Gang of Eight amnesty plan, who are foreign policy hawks, and who want to keep ObamaCare and Common Core—i.e. those who believed that the only way to win elections was to become more like Democrats—are looking at all this, and what they see is not what we see.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on January 21, 2017 48 Comments
I'm not sure whether to be pleased or amused that we were so successful that the progressive left is now trying to recreate and manufacture a progressive version of our truly grassroots Tea Party movement. One aspect of their inchoate "resist we much" campaign to recreate our powerful movement is the left's new-found respect for all things related to the Constitution and their adoption of things like our use of "we the people."  I find this amusing.  Less amusing is their own unique twist, one that includes being purposefully offensive and violent. For example, watching the coverage of the inauguration yesterday, my jaw dropped when I saw the report about a limousine that was set on fire in DC . . . with the words "we the people" written on it.  Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 16, 2017 37 Comments
As someone who, both individually and on the website, participated in the Tea Party surge culminating in the retaking of the House in November 2010, I saw first hand how viciously the Tea Party was attacked. I attended the Tax Day Tea Party rally in Corning, NY, on April 15, 2009, Looking At Tea Parties Through Binoculars, Like On Safari:
... There was a good crowd in this relatively small town in western upstate NY (several hours from NY City), several hundred in total. Corning is home to Corning glass and Steuben glass. The entire region has been hit hard by the exodus of jobs to less tax intensive parts of the U.S. and abroad.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on August 17, 2016 20 Comments
Every now and then, I like to check on the state of reporting as it relates to the Tea Party...for entertainment purposes. I have decided that if any actual fact is offered in the elite media stories, it is purely coincidental. Today's review shows that after over 7 years of independent conservative activism, our elite media is still making rather ludicrous claims. For example, this chestnut from Bloomberg:
The Tea Party was always tragically miscast. The angry oldsters who formed its white-hot core fancied themselves tax protesters. Their self-image was informed, inflamed and more than occasionally exploited by conservative operations ranging from Fox News to FreedomWorks and a phalanx of right-wing grifters who dealt themselves into the action.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on May 27, 2016 7 Comments
I have long sensed that the 2016 California primary would be very memorable. Kemberlee Kaye just reported that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders may debate ahead of the California primary, as Hillary Clinton declined to debate Sanders recently. Hillary Clinton may want to rethink the non-engagement approach that led to this development, as Sanders is now closing the gap in recent polling.
The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll, conducted May 13 – 22 and released Wednesday, found: “Among Democratic primary likely voters, 46 percent support Clinton and 44 percent support Sanders. These voters include Democrats and independents who say they will vote in the Democratic primary. Clinton has a slight lead over Sanders among registered Democrats (49% to 41%)."

Posted by Jonathan Levin on March 22, 2016 18 Comments
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a blistering rebuke of the IRS today in Tea Party groups' suit against IRS targeting. The opinion by Chief Judge Raymond Kethledge on behalf of a three-judge panel opens:
Among the most serious allegations a federal court can address are that an Executive agency has targeted citizens for mistreatment based on their political views. No citizen—Republican or Democrat, socialist or libertarian—should be targeted or even have to fear being targeted on those grounds. Yet those are the grounds on which the plaintiffs allege they were mistreated by the IRS here. The allegations are substantial: most are drawn from findings made by the Treasury Department’s own Inspector General for Tax Administration. Those findings include that the IRS used political criteria to round up applications for tax-exempt status filed by so-called tea-party groups; that the IRS often took four times as long to process tea-party applications as other applications; and that the IRS served tea-party applicants with crushing demands for what the Inspector General called “unnecessary information.”

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 20, 2016 9 Comments
Donald Trump's quest for the Oval Office certainly has been fascinating. This weekend, protesters in Arizona and their anti-Trump road blockage made for breathless press coverage. I suspect the organizers of that inanity are going to be shocked when they learn that it helped Trump win more votes and gave the business mogul free media attention. Now, Trump is being blamed by the elite media for the impending death of the Tea Party. For example, the Los Angeles Times engages in fantasy reporting with this analysis:
...Trump’s candidacy has not only fractured the Republican Party, it’s threatening to break apart the tea party movement and erode a once-powerful voting block that has driven conservative politics and elections for the past seven years. In addition to grass-root defections by activists like Dooley, tea party leadership has split over Trump’s presidential bid. Some conservative activists met this week to try to stop him, while others have joined his campaign. Meanwhile, major financial backers, including groups funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, have been sidelined from publicly backing GOP primary candidates, partly out of fear they might alienate their divided base.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on March 18, 2016 29 Comments
It turns out that our 2012 Tea Party event was, indeed, crashed by a D-list Hollywood celebrity wannabe! The meeting, which focused on how citizen activists could counter false charges of racism, was crashed by a group of disruptors waving Confederate flags and holding White Power signs. One of our astute readers, Wolverbear, asked if it was Adult Swim comedian Eric André. Why, yes it was! Our savvy research team has uncovered this Youtube chestnut.
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