Category Archives: Tea Party

Ron Paul Campaign Alleges Media Bias in Politico Article Headline

Conspiracy Theories, Election '12, Media, Multimedia, Politics, Republicans, Tea Party, Theory and Ideas

I saw this on my Facebook news feed from the Ron Paul FB page yesterday:

Now that I have had a chance to follow the link today, the Politico article headline now reads “Michele Bachmann wins Ames Straw Poll.”

It seems to me that Ron Paul’s supporters called them on it and Politico had the headline changed.

The Paul campaign does raise a great point here. I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen a headline reporting on any contest that listed 1st and 3rd place while leaving out who came in 2nd. Then when you consider that 2nd place is a statistical tie (Bachmann beat Paul by only 152 votes) while Tim Pawlenty had 2,530 fewer votes than Bachmann, one has to wonder why the headline writer would write such a headline if s/he didn’t have some sort of anti-Paul (or pro-TPaw) bias.

Personally, I believe the bias is more than anti-Paul but anti-libertarian (or anti-anyone who doesn’t tow the big government Republican Party line). Ron Paul would be ignored the way Gary Johnson is if Paul didn’t have such a strong following or wasn’t competitive with establishment candidates (though I wouldn’t really call Bachmann an establishment candidate either). Even as Paul has as an impressive showing as he did in Iowa, there are still those in the MSM who treat him as though he is a 1%er who doesn’t merit any serious attention. It wasn’t that long ago that talk radio host/blogger Hugh Hewitt wanted the RNC to take over the debates and “exile” Ron Paul (along with Herman Cain and Gary Johnson) from the debates.

But in the end, the results are what they are. If the Iowa straw poll is any indication, Ron Paul is a force to be reckoned with in this primary battle. Tim Pawlenty wasn’t as encouraged by his 3rd place finish in the straw poll as perhaps the Politico headline writer was. In fact, Pawlenty was so disappointed in the results that today he dropped out of the race. Gary Johnson says Pawlenty “should be applauded for a great effort” and respects Pawlenty’s decision but also said “it’s too early to be picking winners and losers” indicating that he won’t be wrapping up his campaign anytime soon.

I tend to agree. It is still very early. Tim Pawlenty made his exit just a day after Rick Perry announced that he too is getting into the race. And who knows what Sarah Palin will do?

My frustration is that it seems that the media is trying to decide which candidates are worthy of being covered and which are not. Leaving Ron Paul out of a headline he logically should have been in or ignoring Gary Johnson almost entirely is but a couple of examples. Newt Gingrich had a very valid point in the Iowa debate when he said that the campaign coverage should have more to do with ideas than on the horse race aspect. I really couldn’t care less about the inside baseball B.S. concerning which campaign is losing staff members or who gives the best stump speech. What I want to know is how candidate x plans to govern as president or explain why s/he would be better for our liberty and our economy than the current president.

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Just as I was about the click on the publish button for the above post, I saw this video that I thought was very interesting and seems to confirm my suspicions about the media.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Should Republicans Fight Gas Tax Renewal?

Politics, Republicans, Taxation, Tea Party

It appears that our Federal $0.184/gallon gasoline excise tax is set to expire in just under 2 months, on September 30. This was news to me. As my colleague Doug blogs over at Outside the Beltway, this is being batted around as potentially being big news — brought to you by Grover Norquist & the Tea Party — over the interim:

You can already see how this issue could play itself out a month from now. As it is the issue of increased energy prices is an easy one to demagouge with simplistic slogans (“Drill Baby Drill”) and even more simplistic ideas (anyone remember when Hillary Clinton and John McCain came up with the idiotic idea of a Federal Gas Tax Holiday during the 2008 campaign?). It’s not at all hard to see the argument over the the gas tax being boiled down to the slogan Barack Obama wants to increase the price of gas. Given that renewing the gas tax is going to require affirmative action on the part of Congress (rather than legislation to block it) I’d already say that the forces that come out against it are going to have the advantage here, especially given the partisan make up of Congress and the difficulty of getting anything through the Senate.

There are, in fact, some remarkable similarities between the just concluded debt ceiling showdown and the showdown that could result over renewing the gas tax. Like increasing the debt ceiling, the renewal of the Federal Gasoline Tax has been a fairly non-controversial action in the past.

Republicans and Tea Party folks can advocate this on two grounds.

The first, of course, is Federalism. It is inefficient and counterproductive to route all these dollars through the earmark meat-grinder of Washington when states are more than capable of maintaining their own roads. Simply put, outside of direct Interstate Highway planning (which may have interstate commerce implications), the Federal government need not be involved in intrastate maintenance. For a party that has paid so much lip service to the earmark issue, this is a natural progression.

The second is mere populism. The national price of a gallon of gas on the day Barack Obama was inaugurated was $1.68. Today it is $3.70. That’s more than doubled since election day, and while it’s certainly easy to point out that there are a lot of reasons NOT related to the POTUS that drive gas prices, the “drill baby drill” crowd can clearly point to the moratorium on offshore drilling to suggest that POTUS is not only driving up gas prices, but then wants to keep taxing on top of them.

There’s only one problem: it’s not going to work. As Doug & the original article point out, the public does see tangible benefit in a purpose-driven tax such as this — they have roads to drive on. While libertarians and free-market types can point out all the ways that government provides roads inefficiently and performs crappy maintenance, the public doesn’t see stripping the funding as a way to fix that.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth a fight. Just as previous debt ceiling increases were provided “cleanly” but this one was driven through brinksmanship to force a $2T budget cut to make it happen, it is clear that the gas tax renewal can be tied to being a package deal with something that Republicans want.

The natural package deal is allowing expanded drilling (incl. places like ANWR). Push that along with an end to most “green energy” subsidies, and you have a fallback position of simply allowing the drilling that will please most of the Republican base, potentially drive down long-term gasoline costs, and does so in a way that otherwise simply gives us the status quo (the current tax rates). Or tie it to different taxes (keeping the Bush tax rates, or tax reform in another area such as repatriation of foreign earnings), although these options might be a political loser as the two issues are so separate.

But it would be a shame to simply let this slide without a fight. This is a tax that’s set to expire unless Congress actively extends it. This means that the burden is on Congress to bring an extension to the floor and pass it. Given Republican’s recent fight over the debt, ending a tax which doesn’t have a lot of inherent opposition may not be feasible. But that doesn’t mean it should be a clean bill.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

The 2-Minute Budget Deal Reaction: Open Thread

Fiscal Policy, Open Thread, Politics, Taxation, Tea Party

So I’ve had a tiny bit of time to reflect on the budget deal. Here are the key points:

  • $900B in immediate cuts [1/3 to defense], coupled to a $900B immediate debt ceiling increase.
  • Additional $1.2T-1.5T debt ceiling increase IF Congress either passes a balanced budget amendment or a bipartisan commission creates a debt reduction [tax revenue OR spending cuts] that can pass Congress by the end of the year.
  • If the above doesn’t occur, triggered spending cuts to defense and medicare [and possibly elsewhere] in the amount of $1.2T will occur along with a $1.2T debt ceiling increase. No revenue increases.

It could be better, it could be worse. I can see a few things here… First, we can throw out the BBA. That’s a non-starter. The whole reason that was added was for Tea Party buy-in, but it’s simply not going to pass. So we’re left with anywhere from $1.2T minimum in debt reduction, which is ALL cuts, to probably about $1.5T maximum (as there’s no political will for more) that can come from taxes or cuts.

With multiple paths going forward, I think we have to figure out what we’d like to see. And in my opinion, the BEST outcome is for the commission to fail and for the triggered cuts to occur. The commission has the capability to push for tax hikes, and I think in any scenario they’ll find a way for more than $300B of their package [assumed to be exactly $1.5T] to be increased tax revenues, meaning they’ll cut spending LESS than $1.2T.

Of the proposed cuts in the trigger, it’s about $600B over 10 years to defense, and a sizable chunk is expected to go into Medicare. While libertarians and Republicans may not find common ground on the defense spending, we’re talking about a total of $1T over 10 years, which should be feasible if we’re going to assume that we actually draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the most part, that $1T will encompass keeping military spending roughly equal to what it is now, as those cuts are from a projected baseline which add at least $500B from what we’d spend by multiplying this year’s war-inflated spending out over 10 years.

The Medicare spending will put further pressure on reforming the program, and may give more political cover to performing drastic reforms such as the Ryan plan — voucherizing Medicare and pushing it to the Obamacare exchanges. Either way, we MUST restructure entitlements, and this is a start.

So I see a lot of danger in whatever the commission comes up with. Let’s start hoping the commission fails, and these already-planned $1.2T in cuts go into effect. Seems like the best option on the table at the moment.

This is an off-the-cuff reaction, of course. I encourage you guys to give your own thoughts on the plan in the comments.

Brad Warbiany
https://thelibertypapers.org/

The Family Leader’s Pledge Provides Litmus Test for Social Conservatives AND Libertarian Leaning Republican Primary Voters

Abortion, Civil Liberties, Culture, Election '12, Fascism in America, Freedom, Individual Rights, Politics, Privacy, Republicans, Sex, Tea Party, The Nanny State, Theory and Ideas

Just last week, a “pro-family” group that calls itself “The Family Leader” laid out a 14 point “Marriage Vow” pledge for G.O.P. presidential primary candidates to sign as a condition of being considered for an endorsement from the organization. Among the more troubling points of this pledge, at least for those of us who care about limited government and individual liberty: vow support for the Defense of Marriage Act and oppose any redefinition of marriage, “steadfast embrace” of a Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would “protect” the definition of marriage in all states as “one man and one woman” and “Humane protection of women” from “all forms” of pornography. Another point of the pledge reads “Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control” which I find quite ironic in that many of the 14 bullet points would be almost perfectly in sync with Sharia Islamic law.

In the introduction to the pledge, there was language that suggested that black families were better off during slavery and more likely to be families that included both a mother and a father than “after the election of the USA’s first African-American president.” This language was later struck from the document that included the pledge.

For most of the G.O.P. field, candidates were reluctant to sign and offered no comment. Mrs. Tea Party herself, Michele Bachmann, however; couldn’t sign the pledge fast enough – even before the reference to black families was removed. Rick Santorum also signed, Jon Huntsman said he doesn’t sign pledges, Newt Gingrich reportedly won’t sign the pledge unless there are additional changes to the language (How could he? Isn’t he on wife number 3?) Mitt Romney rejected the pledge calling it “inappropiate for a presidential campaign” and a Ron Paul spokesman said the congressman “has reservations” about the pledge and “doesn’t want the government to dictate and define traditional marriage.”

Gary Johnson, true to form, effectively vetoed the pledge.

Actually, this is an understatement. Gov. Johnson blasted the pledge calling it “un-Republican and un-American.”

Government should not be involved in the bedrooms of consenting adults. I have always been a strong advocate of liberty and freedom from unnecessary government intervention into our lives. The freedoms that our forefathers fought for in this country are sacred and must be preserved. The Republican Party cannot be sidetracked into discussing these morally judgmental issues — such a discussion is simply wrongheaded. We need to maintain our position as the party of efficient government management and the watchdogs of the “public’s pocket book”.

This is exactly what this so-called marriage vow is: a distraction. The Tea Party movement was successful in the 2010 elections because the focus was on the economy, limited government, and liberty NOT divisive social issues.

Gov. Johnson continues:

This ‘pledge’ is nothing short of a promise to discriminate against everyone who makes a personal choice that doesn’t fit into a particular definition of ‘virtue’.

While the Family Leader pledge covers just about every other so-called virtue they can think of, the one that is conspicuously missing is tolerance. In one concise document, they manage to condemn gays, single parents, single individuals, divorcees, Muslims, gays in the military, unmarried couples, women who choose to have abortions, and everyone else who doesn’t fit in a Norman Rockwell painting.

Maybe The Family Leader has done as all a huge favor? By pressuring candidates to sign the pledge in hopes of receiving The Family Leader’s precious endorsement, those of us who want to have some idea of how serious these candidates are about limited government and freedom now have a litmus test of sorts. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum receive an F, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich maybe a B, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul an A, and Gary Johnson an A+. The rest who have yet to respond get incompletes.

Obviously, for so-called values voters, the grades would be awarded in the opposite way (i.e. Johnson gets an F and Bachmann an A+). This pledge exposes the divide within the Republican Party and the battle for the party’s soul. Will G.O.P. primary voters nominate someone who will welcome individuals (especially independents) who aren’t necessarily found in a Norman Rockwell painting or will they once again nominate someone who panders primarily to white Christian men who want to tell you what to do in your bedroom?

If they win, we might as well get used to the idea of 4 more years of President Barack Obama.

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Overheated Rhetoric or Terroristic Threats?

Democrats, Dumbasses and Authoritarians, Multimedia, Political Correctness, Politics, Tea Party, The Welfare State, Unions

Just about this time a month ago, Tea Partiers and those of us who support things like cutting spending were accused of using “overheated rhetoric” in the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords among others. Sarah Palin was blamed by Leftwing pundits for inspiring the gunman because she had “crosshairs” on a campaign map which included Giffords’ district in Tucson, AZ. Remember that?

Now fast forward to the public sector union protests in Wisconsin which overwhelmingly supports Democrats. I think Andrew Klavan of Pajamasmedia captures the violence and overheated rhetoric by these union members quite nicely in this video.

Remember, these are some of the very people who lectured Sarah Palin and the Tea Party just a month ago.

It gets better.

Republican Senators in Wisconsin have also started receiving death threats for daring to stand up against the union thugs. The following is one such e-mail:

Please put your things in order because you will be killed and your familes will also be killed due to your actions in the last 8 weeks. Please explain to them that this is because if we get rid of you and your families then it will save the rights of 300,000 people and also be able to close the deficit that you have created. I hope you have a good time in hell. Read below for
more information on possible scenarios in which you will die.

WE want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and the people that support the dictator have to die. We have tried many other ways of dealing with your corruption but you have taken things too far and we will not stand for it any longer. So, this is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many
others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, we decided that we wouldn’t leave it there. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message to you since you are so “high” on Koch and have decided that you are now going to single handedly make this a dictatorship instead of a demorcratic process. So we have also built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We Will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Rep. Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. We feel
that it’s worth our lives to do this, because we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. YOU WILL DIE!!!!
Reply Reply to all Forward

What do glass houses and catapults sell for these days?

Hat tip: Boortz

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/
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