Sunday, November 30, 2014

Tea Party vs. Liberal Politicians


Is the tea party ready to chill out?
After 2014 losses, conservative activists chart a new strategy by Kyle Cheney, 11/26/14

Most of their candidates were crushed this year, even as their party won big. Now, many tea party activists are embracing a strategy for 2016 that’s strikingly at odds with the movement’s take-no-prisoners approach.
It’s time, they say, to show a little restraint.

In interviews, more than a dozen conservative leaders said the activist right needs to be pickier about which Republican incumbents it challenges in primaries, acknowledging its total wipeout in primary challenges to resurgent establishment Republicans.
“I would generally urge my conservative friends to not focus on the primaries as much as on open races,” said Richard Viguerie, a veteran tea party operative. “There’s some primaries you have to go out there — and you should — but I wouldn’t spend as much energy and resources on incumbents, particularly for Senate.”
Though many of the conservatives noted that just the threat of a primary challenge can pull a mainstream Republican senator to the right, some questioned the wisdom of targeting relatively reliable conservatives this year, such as Kansas’ Pat Roberts and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. As a general rule, they said, the tea party should only go after Republican incumbents who are to the left of their state’s electorate. They mentioned New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte, Illinois’ Mark Kirk and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey — Republicans representing liberal or moderate electorates – as senators up for reelection in 2016 who may deserve a pass on those grounds.
Such a strategic change may be easier said than done; many of the conservative movement’s ideological leaders and top funders are dedicated to the notion that it’s better to be right than to win. And the question of which moderate Republicans deserve a pass is a subject of inevitable dispute. Joe Carr, who ran unsuccessfully in the GOP primary against Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, is one who urges a more cautious, strategic approach — even as he defends his decision to take on Alexander.
“As conservatives, we have to do a good job of choosing the battles that move the pendulum in the Senate more to the right,” said Carr, who maintains that Alexander is still more liberal than the voters of Tennessee. “If we move the pendulum to the right, let’s make sure we don’t knock some of our own players out of the way unnecessarily.”
That would be a reversal for groups like Senate Conservatives Fund and Tea Party Patriots, which — along with groups like Club for Growth, the Madison Project and FreedomWorks — spent north of $11 million on ads during primary season, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, only to see its candidates flop. Neither group would make its leaders available to comment on its thinking about 2016.
It was a miserable year for the tea party, with its highest-profile candidates all losing to establishment-backed incumbents. In Kansas, Milton Wolf, a doctor and distant relative of President Barack Obama, was roiled by a professional scandal and lost to Roberts. In Mississippi, conservative challenger Chris McDaniel bested Republican Sen. Thad Cochran on primary day but fell short in a runoff that still has the right crying foul. In Kentucky, Matt Bevin was crushed by McConnell despite tea party support for the challenge. Alexander, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Texas Sen. John Cornyn also survived feeble tea party-backed challenges.
“I think strategically we’ll have to be a little bit smarter,” said Drew Ryun, political director of the Madison Project, a conservative political action committee. “I think there’s going to maybe have to be a narrowed focus, maybe not spreading the field as we did this election cycle.”
Indeed, it’s not enough to run losing candidates simply to make a statement, argued Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List: “If you’re going to shoot a bear, you better kill it. If you actually are going to engage in a primary challenge, play to win.”
Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator who was the choice of many social conservatives during his 2012 presidential bid, is one who argues that conservatives should take on moderate Republicans in conservative states but give a pass to moderates representing more liberal constituents.
“I think you have to be smart,” he said. “If your voting record or level of activism isn’t up with what the majority of folks in your state would like to see in your party, then I think a challenge is a legitimate thing.”
That, Santorum said, could exempt Ayotte, Toomey and Kirk — all top Democratic targets in 2016. He added that he doesn’t expect any of them to face a serious challenge from the right.
 
Chris McDaniel's loss to Sen. Thad Cochran in the Mississippi runoff still has the right crying foul. | AP Photo
Arizona Sen. John McCain may be less fortunate. McCain, a former presidential nominee who has built an identity around sometimes poking his party’s base in the eye, has already emerged as a top target for conservatives — if he ultimately decides to run for a sixth term. Last week, McCain took steps toward a reelection bid and predicted he’ll face a primary challenger.
Carr said McCain may be a “viable target” for conservatives, but only if there’s a responsible alternative who has a reasonable chance of holding the seat.
“In McCain’s case, can we get that truly viable alternative that can articulate the conservative message without making a mess of things?” Carr wondered.
 
Milton Wolf was roiled by a scandal and lost to Sen. Pat Robert in Kansas.| AP Photo
Leaders of some conservative groups say their decisions to go after incumbents in primaries will depend largely on how the new Republican Senate majority governs. If leaders capitulate to Democratic demands or water down their ideological principles, they say, conservatives may be as fired up as ever to mount challenges.
“Republicans create the most problems when they’re in the majority a lot of the time,” said Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth. He argued that GOP lawmakers often “work hard to protect the majority at all costs and therefore lose.”
“Let’s see how our officeholders behave between now and 2016,” added Jim Gilmore, a former Virginia governor who embraces — and has been embraced by — the tea party movement. “If Republicans adopt a good [policy agenda] and move the country ahead, I think that a lot of these primary challengers will take care of themselves … We need to have a positive, conservative approach to the challenges facing the nation. I think that we can unify the tea party conservatives and the regular conservatives.”
 
Comments
In the Georgia Primary we supported Constitutional candidates. They each received 25% of the vote.  Most Georgia voters haven’t thought through this solution to paying down our debt and setting policy to support a free enterprise system. Voters don’t yet see the disconnect between what many of our incumbents say vs. how the vote. 
We have supported more discussion of the Constitution and it is happening.  More candidates are actually talking about closing the US Department of Education, so we know we are having some impact.
We follow the legislators’ scores posted by the Club for Growth, Heritage Action, New American Freedom Index, and Numbers USA for the US Congress and electtherightcandidate.us for Georgia Legislators.

Tea Parties were busy this year fighting UN Agenda 21 implementation at the city, county and state level and have been fighting Common Core and the Convention of States. We were urging our legislators to nullify bad federal laws and regulations. We don’t like federal grants to states and we don’t like the Federal Reserve. All of this gets RINOs nervous, because they are too dependent on campaign contributions from to the Chamber of Communists. We have been promoting the US Constitution (as written) and the 10th Amendment.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Illegals can sue US


Judge Gives OK for Illegals to Sue United States
(San Francisco Chronicle) - A Bay Area federal judge has given the go-ahead to a nationwide suit by thousands of immigrants who seek asylum in the United States and accuse the government of illegally keeping them in jail for months.
In rejecting the Obama administration’s attempt to dismiss the suit, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland ruled that federal law requires officials to decide within 10 days whether an undocumented immigrant has a “reasonable fear” of persecution or torture if deported. Immigrants are held without bail while awaiting those decisions.
The law says a decision must be made within 10 days unless “exceptional circumstances” exist. Justice Department lawyers argued that immigration officials have the sole authority to define exceptional circumstances and are not bound by any deadline.
But Gonzalez Rogers, in a ruling Friday, said the law’s meaning is clear: Decisions are required within 10 days except in rare cases where circumstances justify a delay.
Government records since 2006 show that “the exceptional appears to have become the norm,” the judge said. Out of 2,583 reasonable-fear determinations nationwide in the first six months of this year, she said, only 78 were issued within 10 days.
“The (immigration) agency appears to have ignored the regulatory deadline altogether,” Gonzalez Rogers said. She said the suit could proceed as a nationwide class action, since the government’s practices are the same in every state.
The suit was filed in April on behalf of undocumented immigrants who have been deported but re-enter the United States and say they would be persecuted in their homeland.
To avoid immediate deportation and remain eligible to seek asylum, they must convince either an asylum officer or an immigration judge that they have a reasonable fear of persecution.
Despite the 10-day legal deadline, the suit said, decisions last year took an average of 111 days. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which employs the asylum officers, has a policy that “encourages” them to decide 85 percent of their cases within 90 days.
Michael Kaufman, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, contrasted the administration’s policy on the asylum hearings with President Obama’s recent orders protecting several million unauthorized immigrants from deportation, mostly migrants who entered the U.S. as youngsters or parents of legal residents.
“At a time of some progress in the immigration system, this ruling highlights a troubling trend that has been left unaddressed by the president’s executive action,” Kaufman said.
 
Source:http://www.teaparty.org/judge-gives-ok-for-illegals-to-sue-united-states-69626/
http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Immigrants-can-challenge-months-long-confinement-5920616.php
- See more at: http://www.teaparty.org/judge-gives-ok-for-illegals-to-sue-united-states-69626/#sthash.X0Va8Ks2.dpuf

Politics is Not Personal, It’s Business.


Representative government dies when nobody runs against the incumbent. Dynasties and oligarchy replace the citizen-politicians who the Founders envisioned would succeed them.  It worked for a while, but eventually, when the wrong people were elected, the Constitution was chiseled away.  It was replaced by expediency, stupidity and greed. 
We now have government by “special interests” and the only ideology that thrives is socialist, Marxist Communism. Voters are dumbed-down and distracted from their responsibility to maintain our Republic, so the “special interests” have taken it away from them. 
These special interests include Communists, socialists, environmentalists, statists, crony corporations, banksters, criminals, scammers, academics, union bosses, globalists, internationalists Hollywood and the media. They manipulate diverse groups to support them including: union members, Catholics, teachers, Blacks, nature lovers, criminals, wimps, morons and people whose emotions rule their decisions.
The herd instinct drives both the puppet masters and the “useful idiots”. But these Liberals are lemmings, rushing into the sea. Nothing they do serves anyone’s true self-interest.
The American Communist Party republished 45 goals in 1963 (posted August 4, 2014).  All of them have been accomplished through federal legislation and executive orders.  All were accomplished through bribery, something for nothing, promises and lies.  The puppet masters first got control of the mechanisms they needed to manipulate the voters. 
The unconstitutional Federal Reserve (central bank) gave them the tools to manipulate the economy to create bubbles and crashes. The crashes softened up the voters to accept the next government take-over. Promises to “help the people” put government in control of our retirement, our medical care, our freedoms and our sovereignty. Promises to make us “proud” resulted in the unconstitutional federal government takeover of 30% of the land mass in the US.
Excessive immigration and bad trade agreements and executive orders will destroy our means of self-support, destroy our economy and render us a 3rd World Country.
UN Agenda 21 implementation in the US will remove our right to private property in the US and Regionalism, with unelected, appointed boards will destroy the elective process and seize our land.
Unless state legislatures nullify ruinous federal laws and regulations, our Republic will surely “perish from the earth”. Good people need to step up, otherwise what good are they.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
 

Obama’s Amnesty Project


Obama’s Secret 9 month Amnesty Project
(Politico) - Nine months ago, the new Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, received a request from the White House. President Obama wanted him to personally take on perhaps the administration’s toughest political assignment: looking for creative ways to fix America’s immigration system without congressional action—or executive overreach.
Just four months into the job, Johnson had been prepared to take on tough security issues: Bombs on planes. Deadly diseases. Radical Islamists carrying U.S. passports. As the Pentagon’s chief counsel, Johnson had routinely dealt with contentious national security matters, finding himself in the midst of sensitive political fights like whether and how to close Guantanamo Bay, allowing gays in the military, and the rapid expansion of America’s killer drone program.
He wasn’t prepared for a crisis of purely political making.
Just days earlier Obama had been labeled the “deporter in chief” by a top Hispanic leader and ally, furious over the inaction by a president who seemed trapped between the demands of his supporters to allow millions of long-time residents who lacked documentation to stay in the country, and the seemingly endless foot-dragging of Republicans.
That request to Johnson would prove critical: a moment when the president set on the path of a much more ambitious change than the narrow changes in civil enforcement policy he and his aides had initially explored. In the remaining months of 2014, Obama would come to support a sweeping executive action to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, as Congress lurched from willingness to consider changes to strained immigration laws to refusing to tackle the issue at all. Meanwhile, interest groups from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to the Business Roundtable, from K Street’s shrewdest lobbyists to the most hard-nosed union bosses, intervened to try to shape the direction of the order.
At several key points, Obama wavered under pressure from members of his own party, worried about an electoral collapse that happened anyway when the votes were counted in the midterm elections earlier this month. Throughout, Johnson worked, largely in secret on the grand plan that finally became public this week, convening a small group of former Capitol Hill aides with expertise on immigration to work with Homeland Security officials to draft a policy that all expected would provoke not only fierce opposition from conservatives but from liberals who thought Obama should go further. It was a consuming task: in all, sources said, the immigration issue ate up fully half of the Homeland Security secretary’s time in recent months, with Johnson —a high-powered corporate attorney in his previous life — writing the final presidential memorandum himself.
By the time Obama went before the American people to unveil his plan in an Oval Office speech to the nation Thursday night, the White House and DHS had exchanged dozens of drafts and endured months of starts and stops, punctuated by a sharp electoral defeat for their fellow Democrats. Still, they went forward, with the president finally telling aides of his decision in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Monday night.
Johnson, for his part, seemed anxious to be done with a journey he portrayed as a political lesson.
“I was new to immigration law and policy…when I came into this job,” Johnson said this week. “Before that it was law of armed conflict, national security fiscal law. I’ve been disheartened and disappointed with how volatile the issue has become in American politics. I hope that people will look at immigration reform from a common sense point of view, what makes common sense, what’s practical, what’s pragmatic.”
Summer of miscalculations
Three months after Obama’s first overture to Jeh Johnson, Republicans had not given up on the idea of an immigration plan of their own. At least, some argued, there was a political opening to forestall any independent action by the president. June 12 was the day that Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) planned to unveil to House leaders an immigration bill that, he was convinced, many Republicans could get behind.
For more than a year since Obama’s re-election, in which Hispanic voters had turned out in unprecedented numbers to vote against a Republican nominee who came out hard against undocumented immigrants (Mitt Romney even memorably called on them to “self-deport”), Republicans had flirted with — and invariably backed away from — proposals for comprehensive immigration reform. Any bill that could be seen as granting legal status to people who entered or stayed in the country illegally was a non-starter for many conservatives. Senate Republicans like John McCain and Marco Rubio had eventually, carefully, stuck out their necks just far enough to get a comprehensive reform bill through the Democratic-controlled Senate. But the Republican-controlled House was another matter. GOP leaders saw the need for some sort of action, but rank-and-file conservatives were deeply skeptical or outright opposed.
Enter Diaz-Balart, the Floridian whose Hispanic background and solid relationships with conservative members of the House GOP conference made him well-positioned to broker a compromise. In May and early June, Diaz-Balart spent his evenings quietly shopping a PowerPoint presentation of a border enforcement and legalization bill to his colleagues. He poll-tested the proposal. He recruited a whip team of roughly eight lawmakers and they secured soft commitments from at least 120 Republicans, enough to pass Democratic support, according to multiple sources familiar with the process.
He had planned to sit down with House leaders on June 12, ask for a week to firm up the numbers and secure their commitment to bring the bill to the floor — from which he hoped it would pass with a bipartisan majority. Behind the scenes, he kept the White House informed of his actions. Obama held out hope that Diaz-Balart might succeed where so many others had failed, agreeing to delay the release of a narrow batch of executive actions on immigration to avoid antagonizing conservatives at a delicate moment in Diaz-Balart’s negotiations.
But then, just two days before the meeting, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader who had gingerly supported certain immigration reforms, lost the Republican primary for his Virginia House seat to an insurgent candidate who hammered him for his supposed softness on immigration. “Eric Cantor saying he opposes amnesty is like Barack Obama saying he opposes Obamacare,” thundered Dave Brat, an obscure college professor who challenged the powerful majority leader. Beating Cantor, Brat claimed, “is the last chance” to prevent undocumented immigrants from pouring into the country.
“We were so close,” Diaz-Balart says now. “We were closer than the House has ever been.”
Democratic misgivings
Obama was back at square one. He had no bill to sign. And he was coming under pressure from his liberal allies. Hispanic advocates remained furious with him for waiting so long to do something— anything. Frustrated Senate Democratic leaders prodded him to take unilateral action by the end of the summer — just before the midterm elections — a timeline that White House officials tried unsuccessfully to get the senators to reconsider.
Then, in a face-to-face meeting outside the Oval Office in late June, House Speaker John Boehner informed Obama that not only would his Republican members decline to address immigration, they planned to sue the president, as well, for exceeding his authority in a variety of administrative actions taken in the absence of congressional approval.
A week later, Obama had settled on his course: He would go it alone, and take much broader executive action than the rest of Washington expected. And he would act soon, setting an end-of-summer deadline. Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, the president turned combative as he repeatedly veered from his prepared remarks.
“The failure of House Republicans to pass a darn bill is bad for our security, bad for our economy, and it’s bad for our future,” he thundered. “Drop the excuses.”
But Obama had bigger problems than Republican intransigence.
A shocking influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children, sent by their parents from violence-torn villages in Central America, were crossing the southwestern border of the United States, where overwhelmed federal border guards struggled to find ways to handle them. Some news reports mistakenly suggested that the parents were responding to Obama’s promises of leniency; and as the numbers of children grew, even some previously supportive Democrats began getting cold feet about Obama’s plans to loosen immigration rules at a time when they feared it could send still more migrants flooding to the border. The first signs of the impending border crisis had been visible when Obama made his June announcement, but Democrats did not anticipate how it would alter the political landscape.
National Republicans soon launched a campaign to make the border influx a defining issue in the midterm elections. But Obama, at first, was unmoved.
In July, one White House aide dismissed the notion that Obama would pay much heed to the potential damage to Democratic candidates in conservative areas of the country. “My guess is it is pretty minimal,” the official said when asked what effect the fate of his party in the midterms would have on Obama’s decision. “We are going to do what we think is the right thing to do.”
Testing the legal boundaries
As the politics got worse for endangered Democrats, outraged liberal activists were besieging the White House with demands for what should go into his executive orders.
Senior White House officials including counsel Neil Eggleston and domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz hosted more than 20 sessions in July and August with business, labor, Hispanic activists and lawyers. There was no shortage of special pleadings.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus wanted Obama to protect all 8 million undocumented immigrants who would have been eligible for legal status under the Senate bill. Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and other high-tech players pressed officials to include some of their longstanding requests, such as recapturing unused green cards to bring in more skilled workers from abroad. So-called “dreamers,” the young undocumented immigrants for whom Obama extended administrative relief in 2012, pleaded for similar leniency for their parents. Undocumented farm workers sought a special carve out, too.
That only added to the pressure on Johnson and his small working group back at the Department of Homeland Security, who were struggling to come up with a plan that was legally defensible and yet sufficient to address the political demand. Some advocates, including California’s liberal Rep. Zoe Lofgren, an immigration attorney, drafted extensive memos for the administration laying out their own legal rationales for expanded executive action.
At DHS, however, Johnson and his team were hungry for information to back up their decisions. As time went on, they leaned more heavily on the work of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank that churned out data that caught the department’s attention. One report offered detailed projections of how each of the different categories of undocumented populations might benefit from executive action — possibilities based mostly on educated guesses from the Institute’s experts.
DHS aides were impressed enough to seek two personal briefings for Johnson from the Institute’s staff.
The process appeared to be humming along.
A debate on Air Force One
On Labor Day, Obama was traveling to Milwaukee, a battleground in recent years with Republicans as they’ve sought to curb union benefits. The president invited a small group of top labor leaders to fly with him to the event. The conversation aboard Air Force One turned to a heated political debate: whether Obama should take executive action on immigration before the November election.
Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, urged the president to stick with his plans to act by the official end of summer, less than three weeks away. But Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, argued that Obama should delay the announcement until after the election, out of concern for Democratic Senate candidates who might be caught in the backlash. The conflicting advice, some advocates contend, undermined the unified front that activists were desperate to maintain, particularly as Senate Democrats grew nervous. (Gerard and Henry declined to comment.)
Over the next few days, more and more Democrats began siding with Gerard.
What really worried the White House was that opposition wasn’t limited to vulnerable moderates up for reelection in Republican-leaning states. Sen. Al Franken, a liberal from Minnesota, expressed concerns. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who wasn’t on the ballot, pointedly asked Obama to wait until after the election. And Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, declared openly that it would be a “mistake” for the president to do anything alone, ever.
When King personally delivered that message to White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, the Obama team knew it had a problem. If an independent from Maine, a state Obama won by 15 points, couldn’t support the president’s actions on immigration, they really were in trouble. David Simas, the White House political director, asked Guy Cecil, the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, for polling on the immigration issue. Cecil gave him polls commissioned by the Iowa and Arkansas Senate campaigns, showing vast numbers of voters who didn’t want Obama to ease pressure on undocumented immigrants without the agreement of Congress.
The White House realized it couldn’t put out an executive order that would get attacked by candidates of the president’s own party. By that Friday night, as Obama flew home from a NATO Summit in Wales, he began calling allies to inform them of his decision to delay action — dealing yet another setback to the immigration reform advocates and the president’s relationship with Hispanic voters.
The anger was palpable as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus squared off with top White House officials in a meeting room steps away from the House floor in September, days after the announcement. The lawmakers viewed the president’s decision to delay action as the latest in a long line of broken promises.
As they sat around a long table in a meeting room of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office, more than a half-dozen lawmakers spoke as the caucusgrew impatient with McDonough, Munoz, and other Obama aides.
Democratic Reps. Tony Cardenas and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard spoke about the pressures they were under from impatient and disappointed constituents in Los Angeles. Cardenas, in particular, pressed the White House to maximize the number of undocumented immigrants who could be protected under the president’s authority — telling officials that if the number of immigrants covered under Obama’s order turned out to be smaller than expected — say, 3.5 million — he would feel that Obama hadn’t gone far enough.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), for his part, was adamant that the Obama administration follow through on executive action by Thanksgiving.
Roybal-Allard wanted to know: Would the formal recommendations from the caucus, which lawmakers had sent months earlier, be included?
They had the memos, the aides responded.
The lawmakers, White House aides promised reassuringly, would be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.
Closed doors at DHS
The drafting process going on in the bowels of the DHS headquarters was a mystery to those on the outside. And that’s the way Johnson — and the White House — wanted it.
Disciplined and direct, Johnson approached his work for the White House like an attorney going to the mat for his clients. Unlike some political figures, he wasn’t interested in buffing up his own image. As an early supporter of Obama’s 2008 campaign, Johnson had credibility in the president’s insular world. No matter what, he wasn’t going to leak details of the president’s plan.
 
Despite his scant knowledge of the complex web of immigration laws when Obama first handed him the assignment, he took personal ownership of preparing the president’s policy. He held dozens of meetings with outside legal experts, lawmakers and interest groups, including NumbersUSA and Center for Immigration Studies, fierce opponents of legalizing undocumented immigrants.
But rarely did they walk away with any sense of Johnson’s thinking.
“He’d be a terrible person to play poker [with]. He could have a cheap-ass hand and you’d think he’d have four aces,” Gutierrez said. “He almost stops breathing when you ask him a question. I feel he gets like, catatonic, like ‘I ain’t telling you nothing. I’m not going to give you any verbal, non-verbal indications of affirmation. I’m not going to let you read me.’”
Johnson’s circle of aides included Capitol Hill veterans like Esther Olavarria, who worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), a leading champion on immigration reform for decades; David Shahoulian, a former Lofgren aide; and Serena Hoy, who worked on immigration issues for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Their former colleagues on the Hill struggled to get anything out of them, too.
“These are people that are not going to overstep,” said a prominent immigration attorney who has known the key players for years.
Obama and Johnson, as well as their staffs, traded draft memos and ideas for months. By one count, they produced more than 60 iterations of the proposals. Johnson’s aides would draft something, then shoot it over to Eggleston and Munoz to examine and return with revisions.
The deliberations had gone on for almost eight months without any major leaks on the policy proposals — a feat that impressed White House aides.
But once Johnson’s tight circle expanded last week, the broad outlines of the plan began to seep out, starting the clock on the White House’s rush to unveil the most sweeping executive action on immigration in history.
“He ran an airtight process,” a senior White House official said of Johnson. “It was an impressive thing.”
Shifting into sales mode
As soon as Republicans realized the president was preparing to act, in the days after the GOP’s big victory in the midterm elections, they took to the airwaves to decry his abuse of authority. He was a king, an emperor, a heavy-handed executive abusing his power. Democrats, for their part, didn’t know enough about the president’s plans to offer any defense.
By this week, a belated White House response team kicked into high gear. Munoz and senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest aide and confidante, quickly ramped up their outreach. They put out calls to high-tech companies, detailing several changes that would make it easier for them to retain foreign workers. They summoned civil rights leaders in an effort to get buy in and work the grassroots. They dropped hints to Hispanic activists that they would be happy with the result.
But even in the lead-up to Thursday’s prime-time address, not all the president’s allies were happy.
The White House realized it couldn’t put out an executive order that would get attacked by candidates of the president’s own party. | AP Photo
The AFL-CIO, for one, was continuing to voice its displeasure over what it was hearing, including a sweetener for the tech industry that was reportedly included. Top union officials reached out to the Congressional Black Caucus to press their case that a provision to allow tech companies to recapture unused visas would harm American workers.
By Wednesday night, the months of political acrimony, second guessing, and behind-the-scenes furor appeared to subside as Obama sat down for dinner with 18 congressional Democrats. Placed next to the menu of crisp fennel cucumber and tomatoes salad, thyme-roasted rib eye and artichoke puree, was a card with talking points on immigration.
If critics raise the amnesty charge, the response should be: “Taxes and background checks aren’t amnesty. That’s accountability. Doing nothing — that’s amnesty.”
If the president’s legal authority is questioned, say: “Every president for 70 years, both Democrats and Republicans, has taken executive action on immigration.”
When Republicans argue for a government shutdown over it, supporters should respond: “Republicans are blocking funding to conduct millions of background checks.”
As the group sipped on a Cabernet Sauvignon from Washington state and a California Chardonnay in a White House dining room, Obama gave his pitch. His legal rationale was sound, his politics solid. House Republicans had plenty of time to take up immigration reform. More than 500 days had passed since the Senate approved its own comprehensive reform bill, Obama noted.
“This is bold,” Gutierrez told the president. “This is courageous, and generous.”
This one critic at least had finally been converted.
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/how-obama-got-here-113077.html#ixzz3KNev7iZ1
- See more at: http://www.teaparty.org/obamas-secret-9-month-amnesty-project-69795/#sthash.ikeD6F64.dpuf

Blacks Guarded White-owned Business


Black Residents Armed With Assault Rifles Stand Guard outside White-Owned Business during Ferguson Riots
A group of black Ferguson residents armed with high-powered rifles stood outside a white-owned business in the city during recent riots, protecting it from rioters that looted and burned other businesses.
After a grand jury returned no indictment against Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teen Michael Brown, protesters took to the streets and the demonstrations quickly turned into rioting. Several buildings were set ablaze, but a group of heavily armed black men stood outside a Conoco gas station.
One of the residents, a 6-foot-8 man named Derrick Johnson, held an AR-15 assault rifle as he stood in a pickup truck near that store’s entrance. Three other black Ferguson residents joined Johnson in front of the store, each of them armed with pistols.
In a city torn apart by racial tensions, the fact that black residents took up arms to defend a white-owned store made headlines.
The men said they felt indebted to the store’s owner, Doug Merello, who employed them over the course of several years. The men said Merello always treated them with respect.
“He’s a nice dude, he’s helped us a lot,” said a man identified himself as R.J. The 29-year-old R.J. said the group chased away several groups of teenagers who wanted to loot the store, but also nearly got into a brush with soldiers from the Missouri National Guard, who initially mistook them for looters.
The gas station’s owner said the men definitely saved his store. “We would have been burned to the ground many times over if it weren’t for them,” said Merello, whose father first bought the store in 1984.
While the black Ferguson residents defended the white-owned store, dozens of other businesses were not as lucky. Officials said more than a dozen businesses received “significant” damage as groups of rioters threw bricks, broke windows, and set fires.
http://www.inquisitr.com/1638935/black-residents-armed-with-assault-rifles-stand-guard-outside-white-owned-business-during-ferguson-riots/#Bbtd1w7TORjl7iby.99

Closing Coal Plants Suicide


Global Cooling up North, Northeast Closing Power Plants, Just in time for winter, with a 37% increase in electric bills. 
As Natural Gas Demand in Northeast Skyrockets, Environmentalist Groups Demand... Solar? by Marita Noon 25 Nov 2014
A couple of months ago, National Grid, one of Massachusetts’ two dominant utilities, announced rate increases of a “whopping” 37 percent over last year.
Why, when natural gas prices are at historic lows, does the Northeast face double-digit increases?
New England has seen one big power plant close within the past year: Salem Harbor Power Station in Salem, Massachusetts, which went “dark” on June 1. Another major closure is scheduled within weeks: Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.
The Salem Harbor plant is scheduled to be replaced with a new, state-of-the-art natural gas plant—though it has received resistance from environmental groups who filed a lawsuit to block it and, once the suit was settled, threatened other ways to stop the project, including civil disobedience. They want to replace the planned plant with renewables.
However, an iced-up wind turbine or a solar panel covered in several feet of snow doesn’t generate electricity. And the cold days of a Northeast winter remain one of the times when energy demand peaks.
Remember last winter’s polar vortex, when freezing weather crippled the Northeast for days and put a tremendous strain on the electric supply?
Following the near crisis, Congress brought in utility executives to explain the situation. Regarding the nation’s electrical output last winter, Nicholas Akins, the CEO of the biggest generator of coal-fueled electricity in the United States (American Electric Power), told Congress: “This country did not just dodge a bullet—we dodged a cannon ball.”
We already face this winter’s extreme weather in fall. Come January, the Northeast will be down not one, but two power plants since last year—not because they had to be retired, but because of regulations and public sentiment. Without these two vital power plants, what will the Northeast do?
A few months ago, Weather Bell Analytics’ Joe Bastardi told me: “This winter could be as cold and nasty as last year and in a worst case go beyond that to some of the great winters of the late 1970s, lasting all the way into April—though the position of the worst, relative to averages, may be further southeast.” Since then,  I’ve been saying that I am afraid people will have to die due to power outages that prevent them from heating their homes in the winter cold before the public wakes up to the damage of these policies. Atkins seems to agree. He told Columbus Business First: “Truth be known, something’s probably going to have to happen before people realize that there is an issue.”
ISO New England, the agency that oversees the power grid, warns in the Boston Globe: “Boston and northeast Massachusetts are ‘expected to face an electricity capacity shortage’ that could lead to rolling blackouts or the use of trailer-mounted diesel generators—which emit far more pollutants than natural gas—to fill the gap.”
As seen at Salem Harbor, those new power plants will likely be natural gas, and building those new power plants will face challenges from environmental groups. Plus, natural gas faces cost volatility. Natural gas consumption in the Northeast has grown more than 20% in the last decade, and not one new pipeline has been built. Stuffed existing pipelines can carry no more supply.
The lack of available supply results in higher prices. In the winter’s cold weather, the gas goes to people’s homes first. Different from coal, shipped by train with a thirty-day supply easily held at the point of use, the switch to natural gas leaves power plants struggling to meet demand, paying higher prices.
These shortages in the Northeast come before the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, which experts expect to shut down hundreds of coal-fueled plants nationwide by 2016. New infrastructure needs to be built, but “not-in-my-backyard” attitudes and environmental activists will likely delay or prevent construction as they have done in the Northeast, resulting in shortages and higher costs nationwide.
Current policy may have all of America, not just the Northeast, freezing in the dark.
The author of Energy Freedom, Marita Noon serves as the executive director for Energy Makes America Great Inc. and the companion educational organization, the Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy (CARE). She hosts a weekly radio program: America’s Voice for Energy—which expands on the content of her weekly column.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2014/11/25/Hows-That-Solar-Working-Out-for-You

Ozone Tightening Costly


By law, EPA must set the air quality standard based on what the best science says is safe to breathe, and not on how much it will cost to get there. Still, EPA said the economic benefits would outweigh the costs by a wide margin: Under the strictest version of EPA’s proposal, the costs in 2025 would amount to $16.6 billion, compared with $21.2 billion to $42.1 billion in benefits, including a reduction in illnesses and premature deaths.

“This would be the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the American public,” said the National Association of Manufacturers, in a July study calculating that an especially strict version of the rule would wipe out $3.4 trillion in economic output and 2.9 million jobs by 2040.

The existing ozone standard, created by the George W. Bush administration in 2008, set a limit of 75 parts per billion, despite recommendations by EPA’s science advisers to place it between 60 and 70 — ideally, at the lower end of that range. The advisers have repeated that recommendation several times since.


Comments

Credibility for government science is at an all-time low. The global warming hoax perpetrated by the UN has caused us to question any claim that air standards should be tightened any time soon. Ozone has been with us forever. It is created by lightening. It consists of 3 Oxygen molecules. Not long ago it was considered beneficial.  Carbon has also been with us forever but the EPA lists it as a pollutant. Carbon dioxide feeds plants. Also, we appear to be entering a cooling cycle and could probably benefit from more carbon dioxide, not less.  This same government doesn’t appear to do anything else right, so trust in their “science” is dead and the costs are too high. The $16 billion in cost would land on our electric bills. The benefits cited have no basis in fact.

We are in a government created economic death spiral. The one thing we are sure of is that our government wants to crash our economy and morph the US into a 3rd World slave region under a UN fronted Marxist global government controlled by the Global Banksters.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Friday, November 28, 2014

When Political Parties Play Politics


Political Parties play politics to their own detriment.  Those volunteers who become active in party politics need to ensure that the party functions according to the principles the party purports to embrace. They would operate under rules that support participation of the volunteers who show up to help.
Current Problems
What occurs instead is that the party organization is controlled by elected officials and their special interests. They work to control the party officers to do their bidding.
These elected officials also enlist special interests to ensure that threats to their elective office are removed.
The result of all of this control is that all volunteers who are not part of this clique are not given a voice when it comes to rules, following rules and making decisions.  Instead, the party functions in a charade. 
The elected officials controlling the county parties try to ensure that the party functions on the basis of blind faith, friendship and loyalty to a clearly corrupt organization. 
When party meetings and conventions are planned with serial speeches by elected officials and no time to do the convention’s business of voting for rules and party officers, you know it’s a rigged convention.  
The result is that smart working party members feel manipulated and turnover is high. What is left is a small cadre of frustrated members and reformation is not achieved.
Unless county party organizations operate with principles, the party organization dies.
Political Clique Dynamics
Elected officials at the city, county and state level continually work together. They also work with the Chamber of Commerce, Community Improvement Districts, Regional Planning Offices and developers and builders. They all seek good working relationships.  It’s a natural clique like you would find in a workforce. They look to these relationships for support, especially elected officials. Challengers are always attacked. The group prefers to control who they deal with and resent meddlesome voters or primary challengers. If corruption infects the group, they are all infected.
Current law reflects a trend toward less voter control over taxes, borrowing, bond issues, projects and spending because of federal bribes and state complicity. Voters object to the waste of low priority, over-expensive projects required by federal grants, so politicians write laws that don’t require voters to vote on these projects. 
When they do allow a vote, they make sure that there are city bribes in the county projects. These city councils and their chambers of commerce become the cheerleaders to vote for the SPLOST or Bond issue.       
The Clean-up Plan
We need to start to clean up the county party organizations. If parties held a series of meetings to review rules and needs and offered broad participation, they could create a set of rules that empowers members.  They would have a hand in crafting simple rules that are difficult to corrupt.  The Party County Chair becomes the facilitator of the meetings and rules are voted on by the members.  The County Chair becomes the chief enforcer of the rules (as written). Plans are developed by the members and voted on by the members. These should include open meetings where registered voters are invited to participate.  This is a volunteer organization and needs to continually recruit potential active members.  It is also a political organization and should be proactive in gathering voter input.
Choosing a Party
Most voters take their cues from family. Most families have distinct political beliefs, so children are raised to be Republicans or Democrats. At some point these children may do some research and confirm their beliefs and remain with the “family party” or change them and move to the other party.
The party you choose should be based on its platform and resolutions and should be in close alignment with your own beliefs.
Ideology
Democrats range from “feed the poor” Liberals to avowed Communists. This is a “big government” socialist party.
Republicans range from Constitutional Conservatives who would work to remove unconstitutional federal powers to save the free market to “big government” internationalists. The Platform and Resolutions are Constitutionalist, but most of the elected officials and central committee are “big government” internationalists.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
 

Immigration Lessons


Listen to the BBC News to find out how Muslims have invaded Europe and their voters have had enough.  Muslims do not assimilate well into the general population and many European countries’ voters are demanding some relief.  Europe signed on to an open borders policy in the 1990s and began immediately to increase immigration.
History
In 1957, European countries formed the European Economic Union (Common Market). In 1973, the European Union began to form.  With the 1992 UN Rio conference brought UN Agenda 21.  Europeans were quick to go overboard on the environment and began to build wind and solar power, while ignoring the cost.  By 2000 the Euro became the common currency.  http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/index_en.htm
By 2010, Europeans began to object to doubling their energy costs and these countries stopped building wind and solar.   The Brits wanted their guns back and all countries were having problems with excessive immigration.  The economy was poor, immigrants weren’t assimilating, unemployment was high and voters shifted to conservatives. Australia elected 3rd party candidates to repeal their carbon tax.  The Brits are talking about a 4 year waiting period for immigrants to become eligible for their welfare system. 
In 2008 in the US, Democrats took the Whitehouse, House and Senate and UN Agenda 21 implementation began to be noticed.  We didn’t really notice immigration building since 1989 until the 2008 Meltdown put us in a permanent depression.  Immigrants soaked up the meager number of jobs that were available after 2008. 
By 2010 it was clear excessive immigration was causing high unemployment, global warming was a hoax and carbon capture was unnecessary.  Despite this, Democrats and some Republicans continued to insist that global warming was real and immigration was good.   Democrats lost the House in 2010 and lost the Senate in 2014.  It appears that US voters don’t want to continue to follow the path the Europeans followed with excessive immigration, wasting trillions on clean energy and maintaining open borders offering full welfare benefits to illegal immigrants.
Now in 2014, Obama seems to be the only one who still thinks global warming is real and Congress will change in 2015 to ensure that he doesn’t close all of our coal-fired power plants and continue to waste any more borrowed and printed dollars.
With our build-up of excessive immigration resulting in 40 million more immigrants than we can handle, it will take decades to find jobs for the 92 million US citizens without jobs.
The dangers posed by our open borders and loose visa policies includes terrorist cells attached to Mosques and Mexican drug cartels terrorizing border ranches and pocketing to not assimilate.
The dangers posed by the federal government’s UN Agenda 21 implementation and our bad trade agreements threaten our property rights and our economy.
The dangers posed by our state government’s failure to nullify unconstitutional federal law threatens our freedom and property rights.
Our fear is that Republicans will pick another Democrat-lite to run for President in 2016 and not roll back unconstitutional federal laws and treaties.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader