Other • Why the IRS Went After the Tea Party Instead of Establishmen
Why the IRS Went After the Tea Party Instead of Establishment Republicans
by Craig Shirley 22 May 2013, 6:06 PM PDT
As the old saying goes, beware of Greeks bearing gifts; but as the new saying goes, beware even more of Republicans bearing bribes. In either case, one could get destroyed (or at least corrupted) from the inside by trusting the wrong people.
Since 2006, with the beginnings of the breakaway of populist conservatives from the national Republican Party via the Tea Party movement, the GOP has been trying to figure out how to co-opt and capture it once again, just as George W. Bush did with many elements of the conservative movement in the early years of the 21st century.
But with the unofficial (and official) rise of the Tea Party movement, this development has struck fear in the Washington establishment because it represents an intellectual challenge to the anti-intellectual status quo of the Democrats and the Big Government Republicans.
Dorothy Parker observed her own destructiveness and the “curling smoke” of the “burning bridges” of her escapades. The IRS and the Washington Establishment may have irreparably burned down the bridge of legitimacy granted it by the American people, and the national Republicans smell an opportunity in the curling smoke.
Men and women of the Establishment Republican Party like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who previously regarded the Tea Party Movement as something unpleasant and unsophisticated, are now trying to be their friends. That sound you just heard was thousands of Tea Party individuals choking with laughter at the thought of Susan Collins defending them. Same goes for Mitch McConnell and other majoritarian Republicans. Already well known is the GOP establishment had and has nothing but contempt for the Tea Party. As my grandfather used to say, “Cover your wallet,” as the GOP desperately tried to inject itself into the debate.
The appropriation of conservative populist issues by the Republican Establishment for its own gain is not without precedent. In 1977, after campaigning against the Panama Canal Treaties for more than a year, the RNC asked Ronald Reagan to sign a direct mail piece for the committee. Reagan agreed, and over a million dollars cascaded into the RNC. But when Reagan asked RNC chairman Bill Brock to release some of the funds for a “Truth Squad,” Brock refused, in part because his friends former president Gerald Ford and Senator Howard Baker supported the treaties. Reagan was furious and vowed never to raise money again for the RNC, and he didn’t until after he became president in 1981.
The unspoken 600-pound gorilla in the room is that the IRS did not go after Republican Party groups. There has been some noise made in that direction, but it is just that–noise. The real IRS vendetta was aimed at the Tea Party movement and not at the myriad GOP inside-the-beltway groups like American Crossroads or Americans for Job Security or any of the other interlocking GOP seen as front groups for corporate America.
As I stated elsewhere recently, The Republican Establishment is pea green with envy but also embarrassment "that the IRS did not think them worthy of harassing, or even worse, on the same side as the IRS. In other words, the IRS saw the GOP as too feckless to worry about. Either explanation is not very appealing for the national Republicans.”
Of course, the only thing going through the minds of the pecuniary consultants who run the Republican Party is they are missing out on a fundraising bonanza which is necessary to feed their army of mediocre consultants.
Let’s face it, the Tea Party movement is comprised of breakaway elements of populist conservatives disgusted with the Big Government Bush Republicans beginning in 2006. They remain separate and apart even today, seven years later, because they perceive the national GOP has not changed, still a part of the corruption of Washington.
The crimes committed by the IRS have yet to be completely catalogued, but unless millions are paid out in damages and people go to jail, then justice will not be served. What they did was not rinky dink. There was a twenty-seven month criminal conspiracy inside the IRS to deny the Tea Party their basic civil rights to political speech and action and association while rubber stamping any liberal group’s application.
Conspiracy is not too tough a word to use or to say in polite company that the Tea Parties were denied their civil rights to political participation by their own government and outside agitators.
Many questions are begged. Did outside liberal groups conspire with the IRS against the Tea Party? Did Republican Establishment types conspire with the IRS to censor the Tea Party? If so, how high up did the conspiracy go inside the two major parties, both of which had something to gain with the marginalization and/or destruction of the Tea Party movement?
As far as the Tea Party and it sympathizers are concerned, nearly everybody in Washington is a suspect. The Tea Party has found the enemy, and it is the Washington Establishment.
Isn’t it ironic that the Tea Party now stands for the rule of law and that elements of the United States government and the Washington establishment have become the rogue, criminal element in America?
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government … shment-GOP
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed May 22, 2013 8:31 pm
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Political Correctness • Re: Shadows from the Past: Pedophile Links Haunt Green Party
Not to worry Yoda et al. Here in canuckistan and USA we have a socially engineered "no value" value system. Up is down and black is white, right is wrong and wrong is right. Apparently murdering babies as gosnell the gorgon has done, and other aborticidists are still doing, is acceptable as infanticide has been and is already being promoted by various lefturd loonies. Pedophilia has been in the wings, first pushed as acceptable according to an article in TIme magazine 7/9/1981 called "Cradle to Grave Intimacy" where sexperts so called among other things proclaim that adult/child sex is "basically harmless to the child". Black panther leaders can publicly proclaim murdering Caucasian people with impunity but someone even whispering what appears to be a racist perspective is targetted for vilification.
So pedos, pornographers, baby murderers, etc get free passes but so called racists are treated like dangers to the very existence of life itself. Get that? Vile despicable criminal acts get a free pass because many of them are embraced by the left, yet mere opinions unpolitically correct are targetted as the greatest threat to society since the Bubonic plague.
Does anyone see what is wrong here? Note that academia, msm whores, politicians on the left, and even some clergy enable and promote this heresy.
Statistics: Posted by edward kennedy — Wed May 22, 2013 10:34 am
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Jon Stewart on the IRS Targeting the Tea Party
Michael F. Cannon
Last night, the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart said of reports the IRS singled out tea-party groups for extra scrutiny, “This seems like a genuine scandal.” Then he turned on the funny: “In their defense, there is a good reason why people using the IRS to crack down on political enemies would not want Americans educated about the Constitution.” Best line: “Wait a minute. I didn’t realize apologies were sufficient in IRS-related issues.” Video below. (Beware: some racy language.)
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
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In the very next segment, Stewart portrays HHS’s release of (wildly divergent) hospital chargemaster prices as an example of government doing things right, gives kudos to HHS, and laments that government doesn’t do more of that sort of thing. There’s only one problem. Outrageously high and divergent hospital prices are due to government policies that encourage patients to pay for more items through health insurance and that thereby destroy the cash market and any hope of competitive and transparent prices. So that episode is also an example of government failure.
The show’s Moment of Zen was this priceless clip of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman denying that his agency was on a tea-party witch hunt:
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Moment of Zen – The Nonpartisan IRS | ||||
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IRS Lied to Congress about Targeting Tea Party
Michael F. Cannon
On Friday, the IRS admitted that when “social welfare” groups with the terms “tea party” or “patriot” in their names applied for 501(c)(4)/tax-exempt status, IRS agents targeted them for extra (and extra-legal) scrutiny to ensure they were not engaged in politicking. The Washington Post reports, “about 75 groups were selected for extra inquiry — including, in some cases, improper requests for the names of donors.” IRS agents did not apply similar scrutiny to groups with “progressive” in their names.
Over the weekend, more details emerged. It now appears the IRS lied to Congress about this practice for more than a year. It also appears the IRS is still targeting tea-party groups today, in part because IRS bureaucrats believe groups that “educat[e] on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” deserve greater scrutiny.
Here’s a rundown.
Senior IRS officials have known about these abuses for nearly two years. The Associated Press reports: “Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011…on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog’s report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriot’ or ‘9/12 Project’ in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny…Lerner instructed agents to change the criteria for flagging groups ‘immediately’…”. IRS agents also gave extra scrutiny to groups that “criticize how the country is being run.”
The IRS tried to get away with it again. The Washington Post reports:
the agency revised its criteria a week later.
But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement”…
The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for social welfare groups…until May 17, 2012…
Of course, these revised criteria are not politically neutral either. Tea-party groups are still far more likely to receive extra scrutiny than progressive groups. Lots of right-leaning political groups describe their mission as working to limit government or educate people about the Constitution. Far fewer left-leaning groups emphasize educating people about the Constitution or openly declare their mission is to expand government. And note: the U.S. government treated groups as suspect if they educate the public about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Let that one sink in.
The IRS lied to Congress for more than a year. The Associated Press reports: “At a congressional hearing March 22, 2012, [then-IRS commissioner Douglas] Shulman was adamant in his denials. ‘There’s absolutely no targeting.’” Senior IRS staff knew that claim was false nine months before Shulman made it. Yet they let Shulman’s false statement to Congress go uncorrected, amid a congressional investigation into whether the IRS was targeting tea-party groups, for another 14 months. According to the Washington Post, “The IRS made no mention of targeting conservative groups in five separate responses to congressional inquiries between Nov. 18, 2011, and June 15, 2012, according to the [inspector general’s] timeline.” Even if we view the facts in the light most favorable to the IRS and assume Shulman did not know he was uttering a falsehood – which, by the way, would mean he is a very poor manager – the IRS’s failure to correct that falsehood pretty much makes it a lie. I don’t mean that in the phony way PolitiFact uses the term. I mean a real lie.
The IRS did not come forward of its own accord. The Associated Press: “The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration is expected to release the results of a nearly yearlong investigation in the coming week.” House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) put it, “Before the IG’s report comes to the public or to Congress as required by law, it’s leaked by the IRS to try to spin the output. This mea culpa’s not an honest one.”
IRS officials maintain the targeting of tea-party groups was the work of low-level employees and not politically motivated. Yet the agency has shown a willingness to deceive Congress and the public about its own misconduct. Congress should conduct a thorough investigation.
Even if it is true that low-level IRS bureaucrats were acting on their own, Congress’ investigation should examine the role Obama administration officials played in encouraging those bureaucrats to single out the tea party. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explains:
Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.
It would be very bad if senior Obama administration officials ordered the IRS to intimidate the president’s political opponents. It would scarcely be better if administration officials denounced their opponents until IRS bureaucrats took the hint.
People should lose their jobs over this.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Political Correctness • Shadows from the Past: Pedophile Links Haunt Green Party
Shadows from the Past: Pedophile Links Haunt Green Party
By Jan Fleischhauer, Ann-Katrin Müller and René Pfister
DPA
In the 1980s, some members of Germany’s Green Party advocated the legalization of sex with minors. Now the party wants to come to terms with this dark chapter via an independent review of internal documents — some of which show that the influence of pedophiles on the young party was much stronger than previously thought.
He is a boy, roughly 10 years old, with a pretty face, full lips, a straight nose and shoulder-length hair. The wings of an angel protrude from his narrow back, and a penis is drawn with thin lines on the front of his body.
The 1986 image was printed in the newsletter of the Green Party’s national working group on "Gays, Pederasts and Transsexuals," abbreviated as "BAG SchwuP." It wasn’t just sent to a few scattered party members, but was addressed to Green Party members of the German parliament, as well as the party’s headquarters in Bonn.
Documents like this have become a problem for the Greens today. Some 33 years after the party was founded, it is now being haunted by a chapter in its history that many would have preferred to forget. No political group in Germany promoted the interests of men with pedophile tendencies as staunchly as the environmental party. For a period of time in the mid-1980s, it practically served as the parliamentary arm of the pedophile movement.
A look at its archives reveals numerous traces of the pedophiles’ flirtation with the Green Party. They appear in motions, party resolutions, memos and even reports by the party treasurer. That is because at times the party not only supported its now forgotten fellow campaigners politically, but also more tangibly, in the form of financial support.
When the Green Party was founded in 1980, pedophiles were part of the movement from the start — not at the center of its activities, but always hovering along the periphery. At the first party convention in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, pacifists, feminists and opponents of nuclear energy were joined by the so-called "Urban Indians," who advocated the "legalization of all affectionate sexual relations between adults and children." From then on, pedophiles, noisy and wearing colorful body paint, were often a visible part of Green Party gatherings.
Possible Independent Review
The aberrations of the early years were eventually forgotten. Today, when party members look at family photos from their early history during anniversary celebrations, they are quick to overlook the proponents of sex with children. No one asks about these strange figures anymore, the ones who turned up at every party convention, claiming that pedophilia was a "human right." Who exactly were they? And what did they want? As it advanced from a protest party to a member of various governments, critical self-examination was replaced by nostalgia.
Until now, that is. In an effort to come to terms with this ugly side of their history, party leaders are expected on Monday to adopt a resolution to conduct an independent academic review of documents from the 1980s. The move comes partly as a result of fierce debate over past statements made by Greens member and European parliamentarian Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who, in his 1975 autobiographical book "Der grosse Basar" ("The Great Bazaar"), described intimate experiences with children as a teacher in an alternative Frankfurt kindergarten. In one passage he writes: "You know, a child’s sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn’t the same as it is with the four-to-six-year-olds. When a little, five-year-old girl starts undressing, it’s great, because it’s a game. It’s an incredibly erotic game."
Cohn-Bendit, who has since said that the statements were meant as a fictional provocation, calling them a "big mistake," has been repeatedly criticized for the contents of his book. But it sparked renewed controversy last month when the president of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court cited it as grounds for his refusal to give the speech at an awards ceremony honoring him for his contributions to European democracy with the Theodor Heuss Prize. In hopes of calming the uproar, Cohn-Bendit later declined to accept the prize.
It’s embarrassing for the Greens. No other party depends as heavily on the claim of being on the right side of morality. The Greens also played a leading role from the start — as prosecutors — in the debate over abuse within the Catholic Church, emphatically demanding answers to allegations of sexual abuse of children. And, of course, a Green Party parliamentarian, Antje Vollmer, was also a member of the Bundestag’s round table to address the abuses that took place in mainly church-run children’s homes in the 1950s and 1960s.
How is the party going to explain that it once tolerated people whose agenda had nothing to do with progress and emancipation, but solely with the exploitation of their position of power and trust in relation to minors?
‘The Only Hope for Pedophiles’
In their initial approach to the issue, Green Party leaders have agreed that they are dealing with regrettable but isolated cases. "Protecting children from sexual abuse was and remains a central concern," says party co-chairman Cem Özdemir. "It is unacceptable that some are now trying to reinterpret the positions of individual groups in the past as a supposedly lax position of the Greens toward the sexual abuse of children."
But it isn’t that simple. The Greens are not being accused of having advocated sex with children. The real question is whether they contributed to an atmosphere in which people could feel emboldened to pursue tendencies that are illegal if acted upon, and for good reason.
"In terms of national politics, the Greens were the only hope for pedophiles," says Kurt Hartmann, a member of BAG SchwuP in the 1980s who now heads an association that promotes pedophile literature. "They were the only party that put their necks on the line for sexual minorities in the long term."
The "Schwuppies," as pedophiles are known within the party, made no secret of their sexual preferences. BAG SchwuP memos were circulated within party committees that openly portrayed minors as objects of sexual desire. One typical image is a photo of a boy in skimpy gym shorts, bending forward slightly as he stands on a playground. The official letterhead of the chairman of BAG SchwuP, Dieter F. Ullmann, featured a drawing of an older man with his arm draped over a young boy’s shoulders.
Party leaders claim that SchwuP was an embarrassment to the national party from the beginning. A look at the files, on the other hand, shows that the pedophile organization received funding — amounting to several thousand deutsche marks over the years — from the Green Party itself and from its parliamentary group in the Bundestag.
Establishing a ‘Pedo-Commission’
BAG SchwuP was upgraded in the summer of 1984, when it became part of the Green Party parliamentary group’s "Law and Society" task force. This gave it a privileged position within the party. From then on, SchwuP played a part in shaping the party’s positions within its parliamentary group. "The goal of providing the Green Party group in the Bundestag with professional support characterizes the work of the national task force," states a Green Party document.
The pedophiles’ core issue was to bring down Section 176 of the German Criminal Code, which criminalizes sexual acts with children. With the Greens they found for the first time a political force that was willing to entertain this debate. Indeed, in March 1980, the Greens held their second national convention in the southwestern city of Saarbrücken, where they approved a program that opposed "discrimination against sexual outsiders." The convention established a "pedo-commission" to specifically address the interests of pedophiles.
Today, Green Party co-chair Claudia Roth insists that the Greens never made the case for sex with children. "At no point did a committee within the Green Party’s national organization adopt a resolution that would have advocated the decriminalization of the sexual abuse of children," she said two weeks ago. But in the 1980s, the environmental party had a very specific idea of what did and did not constitute abuse.
In 1983, an ad for the Greens ran in the gay newspaper Torso. It featured a drawing of the party’s trademark sunflower and the text: "Sections 174 and 176 should be amended to read that only the application or threat of violence, or the abuse of a dependent relationship in connection with sexual acts should be criminalized!" In plain terms, this meant: Adults could have sex with children, as long as they weren’t their own and they weren’t threatened with violence. Such positions were socially acceptable among the Greens, a fact that today’s party members are only too eager to forget.
The pedophiles celebrated their greatest success in March 1985 at the Greens’ state manifesto conference in Lüdenscheid, in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. There, the party approved a position paper that sought to generally allow "non-violent sexuality" between adults and children, though the resolution was quickly dropped because of public outrage. Nevertheless, BAG SchwuP did not view this as a defeat because it had finally opened the door to public discussion of the pedophiles’ agenda.
"The subject went from being taboo to part of the political consciousness," reads a SchwuP newsletter from the period. "The fact that, for the first time, the protagonists are becoming the targets of HATE and disgust, scorn and derision, all of this is good and not bad. These emotions always arise at the beginning of a truly deep debate."
Part 2: A Product of the Late 1960s
It should be pointed out that the Greens never amended laws to make life easier for pedophiles, but it’s also true that they lacked the power to do so in their early years. And where they did eventually capture seats in state parliaments, such as in the western state of Hesse in 1985, any rhetoric to the effect never materialized into action. The coalition agreement of the first state government that included the Greens, in an alliance with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), included the pledge to both abolish the notorious Section 175, which made homosexual acts between males a crime, as well as to liberalize other parts of the law governing sexual offences. There were never any practical consequences, though.
The party’s responsibility begins at the point where an atmosphere arose in which sex with children could be viewed as a normal variant of human desire. In this sense, the Greens were entirely a product of the late 1960s generation, which aimed to free society from the shackles of sexual repression. People who were inhibited and dependent were viewed as the root of all evil.
Some results of this struggle for more freedom are certainly viewed as positive to this day. The Greens fought for the sexual autonomy of women and championed the interests of gays and lesbians, for example. But the party lost its sense of proportion by expanding its range of tolerance to encompass everything, arguing that child sexuality should be allowed to develop without prudery and compulsion. In the end, the Greens also protected pedophiles who sought to act out their violent obsessions with children.
No case exposes this more clearly than that of Willi D., a Green Party politician in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia who raped the two-and-a-half-year-old daughter of his female companion in the spring of 1985. After he was sentenced, the Greens’ state party organization advised him to resign from the party, but soon there were those who disagreed. For them, excluding Willi D. from the party would mean "delivering him to the criminal justice system without protection," wrote the "Prison and Justice Task Force" of the Green-Alternative List, the party’s branch in the city-state of Hamburg at the time. The group argued that it was inadmissible to portray D. as someone who had "acted out of conviction and deliberate anti-child intentions." In another document, the Prison and Justice Task Force wrote critically that D. was now being "relegated to the male world of prison," in which an "atmosphere of sexual crudeness prevails."
Losing Influence
An incident that occurred in 1985 shows how aggressively the pedophilia activists defended their views. A young woman using a pseudonym told a Green Party panel how family members had abused her as a child, saying that an uncle would take her to a remote parking lot and force her to play with his penis. "I was 11 at the time, and I experienced how horribly brutish sexuality can be," she said. "He stared at me with a piercing look in his eyes, and before I knew it semen was squirting at the windshield." She said she had been traumatized since then, and that the mere sight of semen made her feel sick.
In all of their documents, the pedophile activists had made it clear that sex with children should only occur if it was consensual. In this case, however, BAG SchwuP and various gay state working groups sent out a joint statement that crassly attacked the woman. It said that the statement’s author apparently didn’t see the need to "acknowledge the discussion that has already taken place in this area. Everyone believes that he/she can simply generalize his/her experiences. ‘Girl’ is generalized as ‘child,’ and AN experience is immediately turned into ‘childhood experienceS.’"
It took a full seven years after the Green Party was founded before the pedophiles lost their influence. One reason was the women’s movement, which could never understand why the Greens became involved with men who want to act out their power fantasies on children. Gays in the party had also had enough of being lumped in with the pedophiles. In early 1987, the SchwuP was dissolved, ending the pedophiles’ involvement with the Greens. From then on, there was only the National Working Group on Gays, chaired by Volker Beck.
He had always felt that the pedophiles’ demands were wrong, the parliamentarian from Cologne says today. "I always wanted to pursue pure gay and lesbian policy."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger … 99544.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon May 13, 2013 12:16 pm
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Mainstream Press (The AP) says: IRS has targeted Tea Party groups since 2011

It’s one thing for The Blaze, Glenn Beck’s online vehicle to report this (as it did in February) it is another when The Associated Press does it. There is a lot of smoke coming from the White House these days.
This is an important article because it is the AP which is reporting it.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
Targeting the Tea Party Isn’t the IRS’s Most Egregious Abuse of Power
Michael F. Cannon
As Jonathan Adler and I explain in this law journal article, and as I explain somewhat more accessibly in this Cato paper, the IRS is trying to tax, borrow, and spend $800 billion in clear violation of federal law and congressional intent.
Yes, you read that right: $800 billion.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
UK Independence Party makes big gains

Nigel Farage’s United kingdom Independent Party, or UKIP, has made big strides in recent local elections.
Much of the party’s success has come from the online presence of Mr. Farage and his unrelenting challenge to a European Union which is increasingly seen as not in the best interest of Britain. (Not to mention the Continent.)
To see what UK voters see in Mr. Farrage and his party I’ve attached a video I posted last year. It’s just so good.
View full post on AgainstCronyCapitalism.org
Still Looking for the Anti-Tea Party
David Boaz
Covering the budget fight and President Obama’s tepid and misleading budget proposal, NPR’s Scott Horsley reported this morning on opposition from the left:
We saw sort of the counterweight to the Tea Party on the right yesterday … protesting outside the White House.
Big rally against budget constraints, eh? Like the Tea Party rallies such as this one?

Well, not exactly like the Tea Party rallies. According to various news stories, the rally was supported by numerous groups, including the AFL-CIO, MoveOn.org, the National Organization for Women, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Democracy for America, and National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare. Speakers included Sen. Bernie Sanders, liberal activist (and brother of former presidential candidate Howard Dean) Jim Dean, and at least two members of Congress.
And here’s how the AP reported the results:
Liberal lawmakers from Congress and a coalition of like-minded groups rallied outside the White House on Tuesday, voicing frustration at the Democratic president they say has let them down by proposing cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
“If they vote to cut Social Security, they may not be returning to Washington,” Sanders told about 100 people who gathered with signs that read “No Chained CPI” and “We earned our Social Security.”
I’m not sure the president should have too much confidence in this “counterweight to the Tea Party.”
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Canadian • Redford’s Tories trail Smith’s Wildrose Party significantly:
Redford’s Tories trail Smith’s Wildrose Party significantly: poll
By James Wood, Calgary Herald March 4, 2013 3:40 PM Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s popularity has dropped according to a new poll.Photograph by: Gavin Young Gavin Young , Calgary HeraldPremier Alison Redford’s Tories will enter the legislature significantly trailing behind the Wildrose Party in popularity, according to a new poll released Monday.
The survey by ThinkHQ Public Affairs Inc. shows Wildrose with 38 per cent support among decided voters compared to 26 per cent for the ruling Progressive Conservatives, who took 44 per cent of the vote in last spring’s provincial election.
The NDP has 16 per cent support while the Liberals are at 13 per cent.
The online poll was conducted among 1,214 Albertans between Feb. 12 and 16. The poll’s reported margin of error is plus or minus 2.8 per cent.
In his notes accompanying the survey, pollster Marc Henry said it represents a “massive shift in public concerns about finances and the economy” since December, 2012.
In that month, Redford and her government began warning of a massive $6-billion revenue shortfall because of the so-called bitumen bubble, a deep discount for Alberta oilsands. The government will release what it says is a tough budget this Thursday.
The “March Budget has enormous implications for Redford and her government,” because her support is slipping rapidly and she faces a mandatory leadership review within her party in the fall, according to the poll notes.
At this point, only 29 per cent of Albertans approve of the Tory performance when it comes to “being a government that citizens can trust.”
Redford has only a 33 per cent approval rating while 58 per cent disapprove of her performance. Smith is at 46 per cent approval and 43 per cent disapproval.
The ThinkHQ survey stands in stark contrast to a recent telephone poll conducted by Leger Marketing, which showed both the PCs and Wildrose slipping since the April election.
Leger’s January survey showed the Tories at 40 per cent support and Wildrose at 28 per cent.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Redford+To … z2McRUv3UQ
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon Mar 04, 2013 6:02 pm
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