A cup of hope: Tea Party raises money for cancer awareness

WASHINGTON MILLS — Even while in the Intensive Care Unit Anjali Khatri wouldn’t let cancer get in the way of a good tea party.

 

“She loved glitter and being a princess,” said her mother Janine Roberts, of Sauquoit. “She was strong and courageous and funny.”

When 3-year-old Anjali died of Neuroblastoma in May 2010, Roberts wanted to find a way for her to live forever.

Sunday, she was very much alive in spirit at the third annual Anjali’s Tea Party.

Valentino’s Banquet Hall in Washington Mills was a little girl’s dream with finger food, cupcakes, tea and even dancers from the Leatherstocking Ballet Company dressed as princesses.

But Anjali didn’t just prompt an event, she rallied an army—Anjali’s Army, which started in 2009 and globally raises money for better treatments, supports new therapies and raises awareness of pediatric cancer.

“She’s a force to be reckoned with and we won’t stop until we find a cure,” Roberts said. “Every kid deserves a childhood.”

The first two tea parties combined raised about $20,000, she said.

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Clean Energy Gets Some Tea Party Love

Georgia’s state utility company will be adding 525 megawatts of solar energy by 2016 thanks to grassroots pressure from a new alliance known as the Green Tea Coalition, which unites environmentalists and right-wing Tea Party activists.

Their new alliance, officially launched on Aug. 6, represents a bridge between political parties in support of clean energy policies. In the state of Georgia, the coalition includes members of the Sierra Club, Georgia Watch, Occupy Atlanta, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots.

Many Republican politicians that align themselves closely with the Tea Party have been vocal opponents of renewables, energy efficiency and climate action in order to reduce government intervention in the free market. Tea Party activists in the Green Tea Coalition maintain the same conservative political commitment, but find no contradiction between valuing the free market and supporting renewable energy.

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WRONG - NOT TEA PARTY - California tea party legislator pulling ‘horrified’ teenagers from school to avoid transgender equality law

TPNR COMMENTARY:  What Assemblyman Tin Donnelly is doing is a good move.  Associating this agenda PRO or CON with the TEA Party is NOT PROPER.  The TEA Party is NOT about social issues like gay rights, abortion, racism, etc... The TEA Party is about fiscal responsibility, smaller government, lesser taxation, and constitutionality. 

California State Assemblyman Tim Donnelly went on Fox & Friends this morning and declared that he would be pulling his “horrified” children from public schools now that Jerry Brown has signed AB 1266 into law. The bill allows transgender students the opportunity to participate in sex-segregated activities and use restroom facilities consistent with their stated gender identities instead of the one on their birth certificates.
 
On Friday, Donnelly wrote that “[m]any of the parents I have heard from within the last few days have literally pulled their kids out of public schools and have enrolled them in homeschool and private school programs.”

Today, the self-described Tea Party conservative announced that he would be joining their ranks. After complaining that the bill “violates the rights of the 98 percent of students who do not identify as transgender,” he indicated that its passage unleashed a “tsunami of discontent” which, he believes, will lead to the bill’s repeal. A group calling itself “Privacy for All Students” filed a referendum to overturn the bill last week, but it is unclear whether they can gather 500,000 signatures in the 90 days required by California law.

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Tea party groups to target skeptical GOP senators on defunding Obamacare

A pair of tea party groups is teaming up to pressure key Republicans to support an effort to defund Obamacare.

Tea Party Patriots and the grassroots group For America are launching online ads against a dozen GOP senators who either oppose the effort or haven’t announced a position.

Along with the ads, leaders of the groups will embark on a six-state, five-day “Exempt America” tour (the idea being that the American people should be exempt from Obamacare) that will bring them to the home states of several of these senators.


Update 12:01 p.m.: The conservative group Heritage Action is also launching an online ad campaign pushing the Defund Obamacare effort. Heritage will spend $550,000 on online ads targeting 100 House Republicans.

The effort comes as Defund Obamacare – whose supporters pledge not to fund the government if it includes money for the president’s health-care law — struggles to gain the traction it would need to actually force the issue. Several GOP senators have opposed the strategy in no uncertain terms.

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Mark Levin Book #1 - The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic

In a new book set to hit bookshelves Tuesday, radio talk show host Mark Levin proposes 10 amendments to stymie the growing reach of the federal government.

According to Levin, the Constitution has not proved to be as an effective barrier against the growth of government. His new book, “The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic,” proposes ways to remedy that.

One of Levin’s primary aims with the book is to shift the current balance of power away from Washington, D.C. and back to state government and the individual. In order to achieve that goal, Levin proposes a repeal of Seventeenth Amendment, which would return to state legislators the power to appoint U.S. senators.

The Morning Plum: GOP elites in full blown panic

The other day, I suggested there are increasing signs Republicans leaders now know that they have a major problem on their hands — the GOP’s posture on Obamacare is untenable — and are seriously grappling with it at the highest levels. I am not well sourced among top Republicans, so that was mostly speculation and tea leaf reading.

But Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei are well sourced among top Republicans. And today they weigh in with a big piece reporting that GOP elites are in full blown panic mode about the party’s drift towards a series of Apocalyptic showdowns this fall.

The most interesting bit is the profound worry about the drift towards a government shutdown over Obamacare. But I think the fundamental problem is still being overlooked. Here’s the key part:

Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they simply cannot govern. Their favorable ratings are terrible and getting worse. But there is broad concern it could go from worse to an unmitigated disaster this fall. Most urgently, according to a slew of key Republicans we interviewed, conservative GOP senators have got to give up their insistence that the party allow the government to shut down after Sept. 30 if they don’t get their way on defunding Obamacare.
The quixotic drive — led by Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee — is part of Rubio’s effort to make up with the conservative base after he was stunned by the backlash over his deal-making on immigration. Pollsters say the funding fight makes Republicans look even more obstructionist, and causes voters to worry about the effect a shutdown would have on their own finances.
Whit Ayres of North Star Opinion Research, who has been drilling down on this issue for the conservative public-opinion group Resurgent Republic, said: “Shutting down the government is the one way that Republicans can turn Obamacare from a political advantage to a political disadvantage in 2014.”

This passage contains both an important recognition and an unwitting glimpse into the broader, unacknowledged problem here. The government shutdown push has focused the attention of GOP elites, because it is probably suicidal politically for the party. At the same time, though, the unspoken premise is that the problem is only one of excessive tactics, rather than something more fundamental.

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Vitriol has gone beyond partisan give-and-take in the nation’s politics. It is now seeping into and poison­ing the ranks of the Republican Party. - See more at: http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2013/08/on_obamacare_tea_party_on_right_track#sthash.3HG6wWaW.dpufv

Vitriol has gone beyond partisan give-and-take in the nation’s politics. It is now seeping into and poison­ing the ranks of the Republican Party. - See more at: http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/opinion/op_ed/2013/08/on_obamacare_tea_party_on_right_track#sthash.3HG6wWaW.dpuf

Nancy Mace Gets Tea Party Nod

A national Tea Party group is endorsing the U.S. Senate candidacy of Lowcountry businesswoman Nancy Mace, according to an exclusive report published this week by Breitbart.

“It’s long past time we had a conservative of conscience, not a conservative of convenience, representing South Carolina,” Tea Party Leadership Fund founder Todd Cefaratti told the site. ”In Nancy Mace, we have a candidate that tea party groups and conservatives across the state can unite behind, and finally we can send Lindsey Graham into retirement.”

Mace is one of three announced challengers to Graham. The others? Social conservative S.C. Sen. Lee Bright (R-Spartanburg) and Piedmont, S.C. attorney Richard Cash.

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Tea Party looks to 2014 revival

New groups are forming as top races take shape

Following the 2012 elections, it was unclear how much momentum was left in the Tea Party movement, both nationally and in Minnesota. Political analysts blamed the conservative faction for several embarrassing Republican losses in high-profile campaigns, while overall public opinion seemed to have soured on the concept. Nationwide exit polling found 21 percent of voters had a positive opinion of the Tea Party movement, about half of the 41 percent support found in 2010 exit polls.

Locally, a number of Tea Party-aligned politicians who helped the GOP take control of the Legislature in 2010 were defeated. Perhaps worst of all, U.S. Senate candidate Kurt Bills, who won the party endorsement thanks to organizing by Tea Party and pro-Ron Paul elements, won only 30 percent of the statewide vote in November.

But if the last few months are any indication, the party’s not over. Energized by watching a full legislative session of DFL control and continued inaction in the federal government, new branches of the Tea Party have been springing up throughout the metro area. From April through the end of this month, five new suburban Tea Party groups will have held inaugural events.

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Jesse Lee Peterson, tea'd off in South L.A.

It's not a typo: The South Central L.A. Tea Party exists, and Jesse Lee Peterson takes a bow for founding it. He's also president and founder of the 23-year-old black bootstraps group Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, or BOND, and serves as pastor for a nondenominational congregation at its headquarters. As his public pronouncements make clear, he detests Planned Parenthood and legal abortion, welfare and the California-born black holiday Kwanzaa. He used to hold a "national day of repudiation" against Jesse Jackson; he has his doubts about women in high places. He is in demand as a black voice in conservative media, and his voice was still a little scratchy back home in L.A. after yet another speaking gig in the East.

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Tea party groups tell Sen. Lamar Alexander he’s vulnerable in 2014, should step aside

Twenty tea party and conservative groups in Tennessee have signed onto a letter that asks Sen. Lamar Alexander to retire, claiming “our great nation can no longer afford compromise and bipartisanship, two traits for which you have become famous.”

Their letter praises Mr. Alexander, a Republican, for his long service to the Volunteer State.
But they say he has not fought hard enough for conservative ideals, even if it means digging in his heels when congressional gridlock calls for a deal.

“America faces serious challenges and needs policymakers who will defend conservative values, not work with those who are actively undermining those values,” they wrote.

Mr. Alexander is up for re-election in 2014, and his reelection website touts a comment from campaign co-chair Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., Tennessee Republican, that refers to Mr. Alexander as a “good Republican and good conservative who stands up for Tennesseans.”

“Senator Alexander is focused on being the best senator he can be,” an Alexander spokesman said Wednesday.

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Tea Party pushing midterm challenges to Democrats and Republicans

The Tea Party is getting back on more solid ground -- midterm elections where in 2010 the fledgling, grassroots movement unseated so-called “Washington insiders” and helped Republicans win control of the House.

The loosely knit coalition of groups has already targeted some of the Republican Party’s most established candidates, accusing them of compromising their conservative principles in negotiating with Democrats.

The Tea Party Express even boasted this winter that promising to mount a primary challenge against Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss forced him to retire instead of seeking a third term.

“Lest anyone think this decision is about a primary challenge, I have no doubt that had I decided to be a candidate, I would have won re-election,” responded Chambliss, who was part of a bipartisan Senate group that tried to reduce the national debt.

One of the most recent, high-profile Tea Party challenges is in South Carolina, where Nancy Mace, the first female graduate of The Citadel, is trying to unseat two-term Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose efforts to pass immigration-reform legislation appears most upsetting to the movement.

Graham also frustrated conservatives so much this spring when criticizing fellow Republican and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul for filibustering over the Obama administration’s drone strikes that FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe said Graham was “begging for a primary.”

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West Jersey Tea Party joins lawsuit against IRS

The Medford-based West Jersey Tea Party has joined a class action lawsuit filed by a host of tea parties and other conservative groups from across the country against the Internal Revenue Service for allegedly targeting them for extra scrutiny, harassment and delays when they applied for tax-exempt status.

The West Jersey Tea Party is one of approximately 30 groups now participating as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which was originally filed May 20 in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati by the Colfax, Calif.-based NorCal Tea Party Patriots in response to a Treasury Department inspector general’s report that revealed tax-exemption applications from tea party groups and other conservative and religious organizations across the country had been singled-out by IRS employees for extra scrutiny and delays.


Applications from some progressive or liberal groups also received extra scrutiny as well.

The complaint alleges the IRS actions violated the groups’ constitutional rights and federal privacy laws. It seeks unspecified damages for “loss of benefit of tax exempt status, cost of complying with burdensome requests, loss of donors and membership fees … punitive damages, litigation costs and reasonable attorney’s fees.”

West Jersey Tea Party joined the plaintiffs last week and was expected to be named in forthcoming legal documents, officials said.

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IRS still hasn't fixed Tea Party problems

WASHINGTON -- Front-line screeners at the Internal Revenue Service don't have any guidance on how to handle tax-exempt applications from political groups in the wake of the Tea Party scandal, an IRS employee told congressional investigators this month.

Without that guidance, the IRS is giving all applications from political advocacy groups a secondary screening. And Tea Party groups are getting a second look whether there's any indication of political advocacy or not.

That's according to an unnamed IRS agent in the Cincinnati office whose desk is the first stop for non-profit groups seeking tax-exempt status. The 15-year IRS employee was interviewed by House Ways and Means Committee investigators behind closed doors August 1. USA TODAY reviewed a redacted transcript of the interview Monday.

House Republicans say the interview shows that the IRS is still targeting Tea Party groups.
"IRS screeners continue to flag certain applications for secondary scrutiny based on name alone," House Ways and Means Committee Chairman David Camp, R-Mich., said in a letter Monday to acting IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel. The interview shows that Werfel's efforts to correct the problems in the Exempt Organization Office have failed, Camp said.

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'Nosegate' Is Good News for Mitch McConnell's Tea-Party Challenger

Gaffes rarely cause a campaign to unravel. But the revelation that Mitch McConnell's campaign manager privately confided he's "sorta holding my nose" while working for the senator's reelection could still pack a wallop.

The content of Jesse Benton's remark was bad enough, suggesting that even the conservatives on McConnell's payroll don't like him. But the timing was worse: It comes just as the Senate minority leader is trying to extinguish a fledgling primary challenge from the right by Louisville-area businessman Matt Bevin. A serious, sustained Republican rival would not only threaten McConnell's grip on the nomination, it would divert his attention from the general-election opponent many consider his most serious threat—Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.

"I think Jesse spoke for Republicans in Kentucky and all across the country when he said he had to hold his nose to support Senator McConnell," said Matt Hoskins, spokesman for the Senate Conservatives Fund. "McConnell's liberal record and his failure to lead on key issues is very disappointing."

Benton made the remark during a private phone call with Dennis Fusaro, who appeared to secretly record the conversation. Fusaro and Benton had worked together on Ron Paul's presidential campaign last year, which Benton managed before moving on to McConnell.

"Between you and me, I'm sorta holdin' my nose for two years," Benton says on the recording, which was posted Thursday at the Economic Policy Journal. He said he hoped what he was doing would be "a big benefit to Rand in '16. That's my long vision." It was a reference to a potential 2016 presidential run by Rand Paul, Kentucky's other GOP senator, who is Ron Paul's son.

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Tea Party Leader: Tea Party Fights Tyranny Like The Confederate Army, Women’s Suffrage, And Civil Rights Movement

Also, don’t call Florida’s first black Republican elected to state office since Reconstruction an African-American.

“Whenever tyranny raises its head, so does the spirit of the Tea Party that will come up and fight that tyranny. We saw it with the Revolutionary War, we saw it with the Civil War, we saw with the women’s suffrage movement, we saw it with the civil rights movement, and now seeing it again because people are rising up against tyranny tearing down the walls of our Constitution. They want to be protected by the Constitution. That’s what Tea Party is. When that tyranny has been defeated, it will melt back into the fabric of society until the next time tyranny raises its head.”

WATCH THE VIDEO.... of Mike Hill

Tea Party Republicans exert stronger influence in GOP primaries

A Pew Research survey in July found rank-and-file Republicans in agreement that their party needed to address major problems in order to do better in future presidential elections, but there was division over exactly how the party needed to change.

A major factor in this discussion is the influence Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party exert in primary elections. Aside from challenges to Republican incumbents in state and congressional races in 2012, the 2012 GOP presidential primary season was marked by the rise and fall of a series of candidates who appealed to the party’s more conservative wing.

Overall, 62% of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters who agree with the Tea Party say they “always” vote in primary elections. By comparison, only 45% of non-Tea Party Republican voters say they always vote in primaries.

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Former Gov. Paterson: Rangel comments on Tea Party 'out of line'

Former New York Gov. David Paterson (D) said Monday that Rep. Charles Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) recent remarks comparing the Tea Party to segregationists were “out of line.”

The comment was prompted by Rangel’s statement last Friday in a Daily Beast interview that Tea Party supporters were “the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police.”

“I thought it was totally out of line for [Rangel] to lump what went on during the desegregation movement in with people who just have honest political disagreements,” said Paterson.

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The Tea Party on the comeback trail

They say no publicity is bad publicity. Is the same true for aggressive oversight by the Internal Revenue Service?


That's a question some folks in the Tea Party might be asking. Amidst the scandal of a politicized IRS putting conservative groups through the wringer prior to the 2012 elections, the Tea Party finds itself the subject of a number of recent media accounts.

It makes sense to take a more sober look at the Tea Party, about as maligned a political group as has come down the recent pike. For example, there was never a racist tack to anything the Tea Party advocated, and racists were never a welcome or prominent part of Tea Party rallies. There wasn't anything more outrageous about 99.9 percent of Tea Party gatherings than there was about 79.9 percent of anti-Bush rallies in the 1990s. After all, one man's heartfelt political beliefs are another's dangerous radicalism.


Still, none of that stopped portrayals of the Tea Party as something just short of an energized and resurgent Klan. So, too, with the slang "tea baggers" moniker which, if applied with the same ill intent to other groups, could possibly be construed as a hate crime.
 
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NPR Posts House Chart Laying Out IRS Harassment of Tea Party

The Corner at National Review Online, David French (a lawyer probing the IRS scandal) reports that NPR has posted a chart summarizing the House Oversight Committee’s findings on the IRS targeting of “progressive” groups versus conservative, Tea Party and “patriot or 9/12" organizations. The numbers are not close.

There were only seven “progressive” groups targeted and all seven were approved for tax-exempt status. By contrast, the IRS targeted 104 anti-Obama groups, and 56 of them are still waiting for approval (or gave up). French says it makes the New York Times look silly:
At

If progressives experienced similar targeting, why didn’t they make any notable contemporaneous complaints? After all, conservatives raised the issue well over a year ago, members of Congress asked the IRS commissioner about it directly, and the New York Times was even moved by the complaints to write its now-clownish March 7, 2012, editorial claiming the IRS was merely “do[ing] its job.”

Perhaps progressives didn’t complain because their targeting experience involved seven groups that were asked an average of just five additional questions (rounded up to be generous) and were approved at a 100 percent rate.

By contrast, 104 ”phony scandal” conservative groups experienced an average of 15 additional questions (14.9 to be exact), only 46 percent were approved, and 56 groups are either waiting for a determination or have withdrawn in frustration. There is simply no comparison.

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'Tea Party Patriots' Preps Activists for August Town Halls on Immigration, Obamacare

TEA Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin told Breitbart News Sunday host Stephen K. Bannon on Sunday night that her group has a plan to prepare activists for town halls with their U.S. Representatives and Senators on Obamacare and immigration nationwide over the month of August.

“Really, the rise of the TEA Party started in 2009, I guess, it was four years ago, in the summer of 2009,” Bannon opened up his questions with Martin on the show. "We had the meetings, we had the rallies, but it really started with the town halls against Obamacare. Over the next five weeks we have both the defunding of Obamacare, which is being sponsored and driven by Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, but probably more important is immigration and the immigration bill and representatives going back and hearing from people.”

Martin responded with a detailed plan her group Tea Party Patriots has for five individual town halls it is hosting with other conservative groups across the country, and details for constituents attending town halls put on by their congressional members.

“We’re focusing on both of those [Obamacare defunding and immigration] and also on IRS,” Martin said. “With immigration, we’re partnering with Eagle Forum, Remembrance Project and NumbersUSA. We’re going to be in Richmond on August 12 at a town hall meeting there. We’re looking at August 19 at having a town hall meeting in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And then we have three more in the works in Ohio, Dallas, Texas, and in South Carolina. And these are all town halls that we are hosting.

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