TEA PARTY TO GOP: WE BUILT YOUR MAJORITY

 168

 4

 218

 

---

Email Article

Print ArticleSend a Tip

by TONY LEE 29 Aug 2012 345 POST A COMMENT

Tuesday's theme at the Republican National Convention was "We Built It," but the night's speakers did not reference or mention the Tea Party movement that built the current Republican majority in the House during the 2010 midterm elections and infused a party that seemed all but moribund after the 2008 elections and the latter part of George W. Bush's presidency with enthusiasm, life, confidence, money, manpower, purpose, and a little swagger.

On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who, like his father, Ron, is one of the most prominent symbols of the Tea Party movement that revolted in part against the spending habits of Republicans and Democrats during the last decade, addressed the RNC.

But even Paul did not explicitly mention or make note, by name, of the Tea Party movement.

This has left many Tea Partiers to wonder if the Romney campaign and the RNC are deliberately trying to disassociate the Republican and Romney brands on the national stage from the Tea Party brand that has given them momentum against Obama. Tea Party members were also perturbed, to say the least, that the RNC passed rules concerning delegate selection and convention rules that stripped power away from the grassroots on Tuesday.

"Their words and their actions speak for themselves," Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the influential Tea Party Patriots wrote. "The term 'tea party' appears to have been banned from the convention."

This strategy is risky for Romney and Republicans for three reasons.

First, 2012 is going to be a base election, and Tea Party voters need to turn out enthusiastically for Romney for him to win. Second, should Romney win, this strategy could potentially create a rift between establishment Republicans and the Tea Party, making it tougher for Romney to govern and push his agenda. Third, should Romney lose, the feud with the Tea Party could potentially cause an even bigger internecine conflict.

On Wednesday, Paul spoke about some of the themes Tea Partiers hold most dear. He discussed how the “explosion of debt is unconscionable and unsustainable” and “Republicans and Democrats must slay their sacred cows” when it comes to military and domestic spending, respectively. 

He also talked about his aversion to Obamacare and defending “our God-given rights.”

"We have nothing to fear except our own unwillingness to defend what is naturally ours, our God-given rights," Paul said. "To thrive we must believe in ourselves again, and we must never -- never -- trade our liberty for any fleeting promise of security."

But he did not mention the Tea Party -- or its successes -- by name. 

On Tuesday night, three prominent Tea Party politicians -- Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley -- addressed the RNC without mentioning or making reference to the Tea Party movement of which they are a part.

Cruz spoke movingly about his father and said that when his dad came to America, "él no tenía nada, pero tenía corazón. He had nothing, but he had heart, a heart for freedom."

"Something extraordinary is happening, something that has dumbfounded the chattering class,” Cruz said. “What is happening is a Great Awakening.” 

The heart (or corazón, as Cruz would say) of this Great Awakening, though, has been the Tea Party movement, and it may be symbolic that the movement's greatest star -- former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin -- is, like any mention or reference to the Tea Party movement, nowhere to be found in Tampa, Florida. 

Photo credit: Human Events

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/08/29/Rand-Paul-Tea-Party-To-GOP-We-Built-Your-Majority

http://visiontoamerica.com/11874/tea-party-to-gop-we-built-your-majority/

GIBSON GUITARS GETS “CRUCIFIED”

By: John Hayward  
8/7/2012 03:03 PM

RESIZE:AAA

PRINT

14

The long persecution of Gibson Guitars by the Obama Administration has finally come to a close, with the battered company agreeing to pay a $300,000 fine to bring a three-year Justice Department investigation to a close.  The settlement includes $50,000 paid to a federal conservation fund, and the surrender of the valuable wood seized in federal raids, which is worth several hundred thousand dollars.  According to some media reports, Gibson might have a chance to recover some of the wood.

The case, as summarized by the Examiner:

Two central issues were at play in the government’s claims against Gibson. Justice claimed in the first instance that the fingerboards Gibson imported from India were unfinished. The guitar fingerboards would thus require finishing by American workers once they reached the United States. But India’s laws require exported fingerboards to be finished by its own workers prior to shipment.

The Obama administration insisted that Indian law be followed. Gibson maintained it was more important to protect and create American jobs by allowing American workers to conduct the finishing process.

Justice further claimed that Gibson had violated international environmental laws by using ebony from Madagascar and India. And when Justice announced today the settlement with Gibson, U.S. Attorney Jerry Martin stated, “The criminal enforcement agreement goes a long way in demonstrating the government’s commitment to protecting the world’s natural resources.”

This is perfectly in keeping with the central economic theory of the Obama Administration, memorably described as “crucifixion” by former EPA official Al Armendariz in a video the public was never supposed to see.  “It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean,” Armendariz explained.  “They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them.”

It’s still rather vague why the Obama Administration’s centurions rode into Gibson’s little Turkish town, because the extremely fine hair-splitting of the company’s Lacey Act “violation” boiled down to whether the fingerboards were finished or not.  That doesn’t sound as if it has much to do with “conservation.”  There is still considerable debate whether the Lacey Act was applicable here at all.

Naturally, despite having just threatened the jobs of American wood finishers, the Obama Justice Department issued a statement congratulating itself for painfully instructing Gibson on “its duty under the U.S. Lacey Act to guard against the acquisition of wood of illegal origin by verifying the circumstances of its harvest and export, which is good for American business and American consumers.”

Gibson would seem to disagree with just how good this Orwellian misadventure has been for American business, since company present Henry Juszkiewicz, a committed conservationist, explicitly stated he was throwing in the towel because the federal government had ground him into the dirt.  “The alternative was pretty onerous,” he said of the settlement, as quoted by theNew York Times.  “We would have had to have gone to trial and we would have been precluded from buying wood from our major source country.  For the ability to carry on with the business and remove this onerous Sword of Damocles, if you will, we feel this is about as good a settlement as we can get.”

Well, if you’re going to run your Roman legion of regulators through a corporate village to decimate a great American enterprise, you might as well bring the Sword of Damocles.  Suspicions that Gibson Guitars’ real crime was locating its operations in right-to-work Tennessee remain.  The remainder of the American business community should be comforted to know that a highly-respected company can be persecuted for years, subjected to multiple armed raids, and suffer nearly half a million dollars in losses because a bureaucrat decides they’re guilty of a “crime” no one can explain, after a “violation” no one complained about, of a law that ostensibly champions conservationist principles the CEO wholeheartedly endorses.  I just can’t understand why nobody is hiring in Obama’s America.

http://www.humanevents.com/2012/08/07/gibson-guitars-gets-crucified/