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The Tea Party Has Not Yet Begun to Fight

If the Tea Party has been weakened by the November election, why are the mainstream media expending so much effort attacking it?

The latest attempt is today’s front-page article by the New York Times, which alleges that the Tea Party is turning to “narrower” issues and suggests, none too subtly, that Congress should stop paying attention to it.

As proof, the Times offers the fact that Republican leaders “have embraced raising tax revenues in budget negotiations, repudiating a central tenet of the Tea Party.” It ignores the fact that Republican leaders could not muster the votes in the House to pass those proposals.

To the great frustration of the mainstream media and the GOP establishment alike, the Tea Party continues to hold the line against tax hikes and new bailouts. It also won a significant victory with the recent passage of right-to-work legislation in Michigan.

These are not “narrower” issues: they are the most fundamental issues concerning the nation’s fiscal health and economic future. It is the Times and the liberal gentry that it serves who cling to narrow, often contrived issues such as the co-called “war on women” to maintain their political clout. The ailing, indebted Times hates the Tea Party precisely because it is serious about economic realities the left would prefer to deny.

Read more from this article HERE.

Video: Sam Donaldson Tells Tea Party, ‘It’s Our Country Now’

On Chris Matthews this past weekend, leftist Sam Donaldson contended that the Tea Party has lost it’s relevance:

It’s the Tea Party and thinking of the Tea Party and people like that that are driving the Republicans out of contention as a national party.

You cannot win nationally if you don’t know something about the way the country’s changed, and the Tea Party seems to think the country can go back 25 or 30 years.

The greatest slogan that I hated during this last campaign was “We want to take back our country.” Guys, it’s not your country anymore – it’s our country and you’re part of it, but that thinking is going to defeat Republicans nationally if they don’t get rid of it.

Boehner Scoffs After Called on Purging Real Conservatives from Powerful Committee

Boehner Spokesman Kevin Smith responds- “The Steering Committee makes decisions based on a range of factors.”

House Speaker John Boehner and GOP leadership have removed several conservative House members from their respective powerful committee positions, Breitbart News has learned.

Effective next Congress, leadership pulled Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash and Arizona Republican Rep. David Schweikert off committees from which they could exert conservative pressure on fiscal matters. Amash and Huelskamp were pulled from the Budget Committee and Schweikert from the Financial Services Committee.

Huelskamp, a freshman elected during the 2010 tea party wave, thinks the leadership move to pull him from the powerful committee is revenge for him standing up for conservatism. “It is little wonder why Congress has a 16 percent approval rating: Americans send principled representatives to change Washington and get punished in return,” Huelskamp said in a Monday night statement. “The GOP leadership might think they have silenced conservatives, but removing me and others from key committees only confirms our conservative convictions. This is clearly a vindictive move, and a sure sign that the GOP Establishment cannot handle disagreement.”

Earlier on Monday in an interview with Breitbart News, Huelskamp again reaffirmed his support for the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) anti-tax pledge. He’s encouraging his colleagues in the House to come out publicly against potential tax increases and asking citizens across the country to help.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Split: FreedomWorks Chair, Dick Armey, Resigns

.In a move not publicly announced, former Rep. Dick Armey, the folksy conservative leader, has resigned as chairman of FreedomWorks, one of the main political outfits of the conservative movement and an instrumental force within the tea party.

Armey, the former House majority leader who helped develop and promote the GOP’s Contract with America in the 1990s, tendered his resignation in an memo sent to Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks, on November 30. Mother Jones obtained the email on Monday, and Armey has confirmed he sent it. The tone of the memo suggests that this was not an amicable separation. (See Armey’s email below.) Armey demanded that he be paid until his contract ended on December 31; that FreedomWorks remove his name, image, or signature “from all its letters, print media, postings, web sites, videos, testimonials, endorsements, fund raising materials, and social media, including but not limited to Facebook and Twitter”; and that FreedomWorks deliver the copy of his official congressional portrait to his home in Texas.

“The top management team of FreedomWorks was taking a direction I thought was unproductive, and I thought it was time to move on with my life,” Armey tells Mother Jones. “At this point, I don’t want to get into the details. I just want to go on with my life.”

In the email, Armey indicated that he wants nothing to do with FreedomWorks anymore. He asked that all user names, passwords, and security-related data created in his name be emailed to him by the close of business on December 4. He even insisted that FreedomWorks—”effective immediately”—was “prohibited” from using a booklet he authored. Was Armey’s resignation a reaction to the recent election results? “Obviously I was not happy with the election results,” he says. “We might’ve gotten better results if we had gone in a different direction. But it isn’t that I got my nose out of line because we should’ve done better.”

Armey declined to specify his disagreements with FreedomWorks. Asked if they were ideological or tactical, he replies, “They were matters of principle. It’s how you do business as opposed to what you do. But I don’t want to be the guy to create problems.”

Read more from this story HERE

Norquist: Resurgent Tea Party Will ‘Dwarf’ First Wave

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, predicted on Friday that an upcoming “Tea Party second wave” will “dwarf” the first wave that propelled Republicans into the majority in the House during the historic 2010 midterm elections.

In an interview with “The Victoria Taft Show,” Norquist said the fiscal cliff negotiations and President Barack Obama’s second term will lead to a movement that will revolt against a government that spends, regulates, and taxes too much.

“We are about to have a Tea Party second wave that will dwarf the first wave and that is because while ‘spend too much’ brought the Tea Party into existence, we’re about to walk into ‘spend too much, regulate too much, and tax too much, all together,'” he speculated.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Vows to Stay for Long Haul, Takes No Blame for GOP Losses

photo credit: fibonacci blue

Tea party leaders say they refuse to be the scapegoats for the drubbing Republicans took on Election Day, claiming it was the party establishment — not their insurgent movement — that cost the party seats in the House and Senate and returned President Obama to the White House.

In fact, various branches of the grass-roots movement vow to reassert themselves on the local and nation levels as Congress begins talks aimed at averting the “fiscal cliff.” They say their call for limited government is more relevant than ever before.

“As far as the tea party is concerned, we are still here,” said Amy Kremer, leader of the Tea Party Express. “We may not be out on the streets with the colorful signs like 2010, but we are here, we are engaged and we are going to continue to fight. We never thought this was a short-term process. It is going to take a long time to turn it around.”

Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, said the tea party’s first order of business is to rebut Republicans who want to blame the movement for their poor performance at the ballot box.

“They went well out of their way to ignore us, marginalize us and pretend we did not exist, and they gave us the most liberal nominee in the history of the Republican Party,” Mr. Phillips said, taking particular aim at Karl Rove, the mastermind behind former President George W. Bush’s career and founder of American Crossroads, a super PAC that spent more than $100 million in the campaign but had few successes to show for it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Murkowski, the Blame Game, and GOP Irrelevance

It’s hard to believe we are now two years removed from the historic 2010 election in which our senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, won a disputed write-in victory with one of the most vicious and underhanded campaigns of the modern era. I’m quite sure it would have made David Axelrod blush, that is, if he wasn’t involved.

That Murkowski triumphed in such a brazenly dishonest and cynical way is still shocking to my sensibilities, though I must confess that I always have been guilty of putting too much faith in my fellow man.

If that wasn’t bad enough, what came next should outrage every liberty-loving American and self-respecting Republican. Murkowski returned to Washington defiant and un-chastened, only to side with the defeated and discredited Barack Obama on every major piece of his lame duck agenda: ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ allowed gays to serve openly in the military for the first time in American history (over the objections of an overwhelming majority of service men and women in the field); The Dream Act would have allowed millions of illegal aliens to be granted amnesty, providing ‘anchors’ for millions more; The START Treaty unilaterally disarmed American weapons in the face of a growing nuclear threat the world over; and the tax compromise that struck down a permanent extension of the Bush era tax cuts. Fiscal cliff, anyone?

Murkowski was the only Republican to vote for all four pieces of legislation. But she didn’t stop there. She continued her ‘war on the Republican party’ by obstructing efforts to cut federal spending. Planned Parenthood funding was apparently an indispensable government expenditure, and was NPR, etc. Paul Ryan’s budget was too extreme. Tea Partiers were out-of-touch absolutists. The Republican Party was engaged in a ‘war on women.’ Radical activist judges could not be opposed. And the debt ceiling negotiations had to be given over to the appropriators. Just let the President pretty much spend as much as he wants. Yep, that’s our senior senator.

In siding with Barack Obama, Murkowski offered bipartisan legitimacy to a president who was essentially down for the count. Had he plowed forward to pass his agenda without some Republican support, it would have only dug him in deeper. But Lisa Murkowski is for nothing, if not for a hand out. So she offered her hand to Obama and helped him back onto his feet.

For almost two weeks now, conservatives have sat by and listened as luminaries from the Republican establishment have bloviated about how tea party insophisticates, social conservative morons, and Ron Paul libertarians are to blame for the epic failure of their golden boy, one Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney.

The Anchorage airwaves have been filled with talk of ‘adult conversations’ that must take place with the above mentioned villains, replete with sneers and bony fingers pointing in every direction, except in the mirror. Fact is, Anchorage talk radio is populated almost exclusively with Murkowski supporters. And for the record, not one has offered to sit down and have that ‘adult conversation’ since election night.

Just last week, a Murkowski groupie pontificated in the Anchorage Daily News about those embarrassing social conservatives and their outdated obscurantism. She even suggested that they (we) should be kicked to the curb for a new, and presumably more enlightened, center-left alliance. The all-new ‘Murkowski Republican Party'(good luck with that).

Just when I thought we were starting to move past the blame game, imagine my astonishment last night to stumble unto yet another missive in the mainstream press about the ‘civil war’ raging inside the Republican Party. I expect that coming from the likes of Rove, Jesmer, Schmidt, and their ilk.

But this time it wasn’t the supercilious Karl Rove, or the ubiquitous hung-over punditry inside the beltway still tipsy from months of hitting on the Romney Kool-Aid. It was none other than the nameless, faceless eunuchs inside the United States Senate who wished to be identified only as ‘Republican Senators.’ Sounds officious, doesn’t it? (If you’re going to wage war on us, at least come out of the shadows and show your face.)

Their agenda: ‘Read my lips; no more Todd Akins!’

The hubris of such a statement hardly even needs commentary. Yet it betrays their utter lack of even a nodding acquaintance with reality. The folks they so despise are, none other than the very ones who offered them the trust of elective office, only to be kicked to the curb when folly had run its full course.

Click HERE for the powerful conclusion.

Allen West Digs In

Florida Rep. Allen West has never been one to back down from a brawl — and he’s not starting now.

The freshman tea party favorite is refusing to concede his hard-fought reelection campaign, despite vote tallies showing him trailing his Democratic challenger, 29-year-old construction company executive Patrick Murphy, by nearly 2,000 votes. While Murphy has declared victory, West and his advisers are threatening to wage a protracted legal battle – raising the prospect that the high-profile race will drag on for days, if not weeks, longer.

As of Monday afternoon, Murphy had accumulated 166,223 votes to West’s 164,316, according to the Associated Press, which has yet to call the race. The vote tally encompasses 100 percent of the precincts in the Treasure Coast district. Murphy holds a 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent lead over West, just outside the 0.5 percent margin that would automatically trigger a recount under Florida law.

On Saturday, Florida election officials completed an unofficial certification of the contest. An official count is expected to come Friday, when about 150 overseas ballots will be included in the total.

West’s legal advisers have homed in on the vote count in St. Lucie, one of three counties that comprise the newly-drawn 18th District seat. They argue that some ballots that were cast early there were accidentally counted twice. Murphy received 54 percent of the votes cast in the Democratic-oriented county. West won majorities in the district’s two other counties, Martin and Palm Beach.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Mike Lee Says Republican Party Continues to Benefit from Tea Party

photo credit: Michael.JolleyLee’s comments came after House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) deemphasized the influence of the Tea Party in the House.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) argued that the GOP continues to benefit from the Tea Party.

Lee’s comments, made during an interview Friday with Laura Ingraham on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor” came after House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) deemphasized the influence of the Tea Party in the House. In a recent interview with ABC News, Boehner said that “We don’t have a Tea Party Caucus to speak of in the House.” He added that “all of us who were elected in 2010 were supported by the Tea Party.”

“I’m not sure what his intent was. And he’s not here to speak for himself. But what I can say is that this party has benefited because of the grassroots conservative political movement that started in 2009. Some have called it the Tea Party,” Lee said. “That brought us a Republican victory in 2010 in the House it brought us some victories in the Senate. And it has continued to benefit the party in the 2012 election cycle.”

“I really don’t know what John Boehner meant about this Tea Party Caucus,” Lee added. “It may have been that all he meant was that the Tea Party cause is itself the Republican cause. If that’s all he meant, then I agree with him wholeheartedly.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Demonizes Tea Party in Final Days of Campaign

After failing to mention the Tea Party by name on the stump in 2012, President Barack Obama mentioned the movement during at least five stump speeches on Thursday and Friday.

Running against the Tea Party movement that successfully stymied his grassroots agenda and energized conservatives and independents to give Republicans in the House a majority, Obama said Mitt Romney would “rubber-stamp the Tea Party agenda in Congress.”

Jenny Beth Martin, National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots, said Obama was continuing to divide Americans by badmouthing “millions of grassroots” Tea Party activists across the nation.

“In a single speech today, our current President demonized Americans who have achieved the American Dream and badmouthed millions of grassroots Tea Party activists in every state in the nation,” Martin said on Thursday. “If he spent as much time uniting Americans as he does dividing Americans and attacking them, his presidency might have been a success.”

Politico reviewed a transcript of all of Obama’s speeches and found Obama had only mentioned “tea party” once — in a campaign appearance in Virginia in October — on the stump in 2012 before this week.

Read more from this story HERE.