Group items tagged

AFP is an excellent branch of the American Tea Party Movement.  The Grassroots tools are very good, and the group leadership effective, trustworthy and patriotic.  "The Great One", Mark Levin is a founder of AFP and remains very involved with the day to day operation.  Although i'm a contributing member, one of the things i most appreciate about AFP is that when they launch a contact/letter surge, unlike many other "grassroots" operations, there is no charge for the contact.  AFP is an easy and affordable way to contact those who took an oath to represent us and defend our Constitution.  Good group! excerpt: Americans for Prosperity™ (AFP) and Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP Foundation) are committed to educating citizens about economic policy and mobilizing those citizens as advocates in the public policy process. AFP is an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state, and federal levels. The grassroots activists of AFP advocate for public policies that champion the principles of entrepreneurship and fiscal and regulatory restraint. AFP Foundation is committed to educating citizens about economic policy and a return of the federal government to its Constitutional limits. AFP Foundation's educational programs and analyses help policymakers, the media, and individual citizens understand why policies that promote the American enterprise system are the best way to ensure prosperity for all Americans. To that end, AFP and AFP Foundation support: Cutting taxes and government spending in order to halt the encroachment of government in the economic lives of citizens by fighting proposed tax increases and pointing out evidence of waste, fraud, and abuse. Tax and Expenditure Limitations to promote fiscal responsibility. Removing unnecessary barriers to entrepreneurship and opportunity by sparking citizen involvement in the regulatory process early on in order to reduce red tap

"Real political change begins at the local level & there is no section of political geography more local than the Precinct. Get involved in the political process in your Precinct & make a difference in the world around you. Do your part to promote the ideals & principles that Americans have protected for generations" This site offers a how-to handbook style guide to participating in and managing successful GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operations.  The site even offers technology to assist efforts. One thing is very clear about the 2012 election fraud.  Getting out the vote is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than raising money and buying ad time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   My thinking is that the Tea Party Patriots need to launch a massive GOTV grassroots initiative that starts with two key efforts: .............. Contest the Obama Election Fraud.  Demand a recount in at least the four states where fraud was obvious, overwhelming and in-your-face clear.   .............. Immediately set about the task of replacing House Speaker Yohan Boehner with Darell Issa. ::  http://goo.gl/Z5xDk ............. Pump the Tea Party Manifesto :: http://goo.gl/ApWBP ............. Join forces to organize at the national level a Precinct Project strategy  ............. Adopt an Anti Agenda 21 movement based on the submission and support of State level Propositions protecting the Constitution, the principles of individual liberty embedded in the founding documents, and, individual property ownership rights.  Including homeownership and land usage.   The Precinct Project effort can become the force that takes on all of these issues.  On the ground local Manpower is the awsome force Tea Party Patriots bring to the table.  Time to start using that force.

Having failed in two violent coup attempts that were thwarted, the U.S., UK, and Israel, acting in convert with Venezuelan oligarchs have succeeded in inflicting enough misery that the Opposition has won a controlling majority in the Venezuelan legislature. The Bolivarian Revolution lives on at least for now in the executive and justice branches of government. A presidential impeachment process is about to begin without any impeachable offense being alleged. The U.S. has been pushing very hard diplomatically and via stiff economic sanctions to secure the release of principles in the previous violent coup attempts. A bill declaring amnesty for them was found unconstitutional by the Venezuelan high court. (I haven't checked but I suspect Venezuela's constitution  resembles that of the U.S. in placing the pardon power strictly in the hands of the Executive.) Watch out, Venezuela, if Hillary becomes the U.S. PreZ. 

Tea Party Precinct Workers Needed: http://goo.gl/8u9wAI Republican Community Organizers? Or are they really libertarian infiltrators posturing as repubicans :) Interesting discussion at The Tea Party.org. Here is my comment concerning "fragmentation" and third party participation. And yes, I have registered to become a precinct worker on behalf of the Republican Party Libertarian Caucus movement. I've also listed myself in a number of local County Sheriff activities. It's getting real that matters :) ................... Fragmentation is an issue. Which is exactly why the core set of principles must be very limited. IMHO, restoring the founding documents and principles; the American Republic, the Constitution and the principles so famously described in the Declaration of Independence are the single point of agreement that defines "America". The founding documents created a Republic based on "individual liberty". So it would seem that the concept and value of "individual liberty" would be the single "lowest common denominator" that all Americans can rally around. Stray from the Constitution and Declaration, and you will have arguments that divide and defeat. Stay on point, arguing the value and importance of "individual liberty" and it becomes very hard to wander from the importance of limiting government, and protecting individual rights to privacy, property and prosperity. I've been very successful at arguing that a socialist can not honestly take the oath of office, oath of citizenship, or pledge of allegiance. The socialist believes that the rights and liberty of the individual is subordinate to the needs of society. For the socialist, there is no such thing as individual liberty or inalienable rights. They are un-Constitutional and un-American to the core of their being. For the libertarian, an ordered society based on limited government and the Rule of Law, is the best guarantor of effective and meaningful "individual liberty". The ess

Interesting collection of stories indicate that the Wall Street Banksters are losing control of the Republican Party.  They are realizing that their money can no longer buy elections.  The power of the Tea Party grassroots movement is now dominating big government issues and decisions.   I for one hope this is true! 

excerpt: .................... The controversy over the IRS's harassment of conservative groups continues. President Obama's team continues to blame low-level bureaucrats. Some conservatives suspect a more sinister explanation: that the levers of government were used to attack an existential threat to the president's 2012 reelection. The president and his party dismiss this as a paranoid fantasy. The evidence, however, is enough to make one believe that targeting Tea Party groups would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle. It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous "shellacking" in the 2010 mid-term election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered-and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been de-mobilized by the IRS. In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum. The Tea Party movement's huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a hal

One interesting facet of this scandal is that the IRS in its own regulations rewrote a law passed by Congress in the early 50s to permit non-profit corporations to devote part of their resources to political issues. As passed by Congress, it says that the non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable in nature. But when the IRS wrote its implementing regulations, it substituted "primarily" for "exclusively," thus allowing the non-profits to engage in political political campaigns to an undefined extent and getting the IRS into the business of looking at political credentials rather than a simpler review of whether the given non-profit's purpose is purely charitable. Thus, a question of what should be done about this. Roughly, the choices are: [i] amend the statute to read "primarily;" or [ii] leave the statute alone and have someone litigate to correct the IRS regulations. The latter path, if followed, should result in ending *all* non-profits' participation in political campaigns. The advantage of the latter path is that it gets the IRS out of the business of picking whose politics they like. The disadvantage is that it gores a huge number of non-profits' oxen across the political spectrum, so a major lobbying effort to rewrite the statute to maintain the status quo is predictable. But with a court decision holding that the IRS got it wrong, that non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable, presumably it would be illegal for non-profits to do that campaigning themselves.

Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies

Why the anti-war and 99-percenter "progressives" never get around to ending wars and reforming Wall Street. Spot on. An excellent snapshot of where the real political power in the U.S. is. And for Gary, George Soros gets mentioned more than once.

From the Tenth Amendment Center:   "On Tuesday, April 9th, the California Assembly Public Safety Committee will hold a hearing and do-or-die vote on AB351.   Passage of this bill would be a serious setback to those advancing the power of "indefinite detention" in the United States. AB351 NEEDS YOUR HELP RIGHT NOW TO PASS. 1. CALL all the members of the Public Safety Committee.  Call in the evenings or on the weekend as well.  We want them to have a flood of messages in support by the time they have the hearing on Tuesday.  Be VERY respectful, but be strong. Urge each of them to vote YES on AB351. Tom Ammiano, chair (916) 319-2017 Melissa Melendez, vice-chair (916) 319-2067 Byron Jones-Sawyer, Sr. (916) 319-2059 Holly J. Mitchell (916) 319-2054 Bill Quirk (916) 319-2020 Nancy Skinner (916) 319-2015 Marie Waldron (916) 319-2075 "

Well, now we know that it ain't just the IRS harrassing conservatives. This is all very reminiscent of the situation in the 80s, when New Right activists successfully prompted federal, state, and local police to investigate anti-herbicide activists as "marijuana growers" and touted a propaganda line that environmentalism was a plot funded by the KGB to overthrow the U.S. government. Unfortunately, there were too many Reagan Administration appointees who believed it. The result: a Presidential declaration of "War on Drugs" and a national surveillance program of environmental activists instigated under cover of that program. 

BDS continues to grow exponentially.

There's more detail not quoted, but AIPAC (and the War Party) are indeed having a horrible year, already.  Perhaps worst of all for AIPAC, even mainstream media is now willing to discuss AIPAC's blunder. See e.g.,  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/obama-state-of-the-union-iran_b_4702457.html ("AIPAC's hopes to override Obama's veto ended with a whimper, AIPAC's whimper.") When even mainstream pundits are willing to discuss AIPAC's blunder in public, that's a spotlight on an organism that can't stand the light. 

Note that this article's original is behind a paywall in Haaretz, one of Israel's market-leading newspapers.  There can be no questioning of the facts that: [i] the Palestinian Boycott, Divesment, and Sanctions ("BDS") movement is rapidly gaining strength globally; and [ii] that factor weighs heavily in the negotiations between Israel and Palestine for a two-state solution. Although not bluntly stated, the BSD movement's path runs directly to a single-state solution that would sweep Israel's present right-wing government from power and result in a secular state rather than a "Jewish state." And the E.U., Israel's largest export market, has promised to go even farther in sanctioning Israel than the considerable distance it has already gone if the negotiations do not result in a two state solution. Labeling all products produced wholly or in part in Israel-occupied Palestine territory is among the mildest of sanctions under discussion, a measure already adopted in two E.U. nations. The BSD Movement's success has also been marked by Israel attaining the pariah state status previously experienced by South Africa. Only the U.S., Canada, and a half-dozen or so tiny island nations closely aligned with the U.S. still vote in favor of Israel at the U.N. For example, the vote on granting Palestine U.N. observer state status was 138-9, with 41 abstentions.  The prospect of an end to the non-secular Jewish state has enormous ramifications for U.S. foreign policy, not the least of which is the influence of the Israel lobby in the U.S. that has thus far led the U.S. to three Treasury-draining wars in Southwest Asia and Northern Africa and host of minor military actions in other area nations, as well as a near-war in Syria, averted mainly via Russian diplomacy that outfoxed Secretary of State John Kerry. Time will tell whether the diplomatic outreach by Iran will succeed in averting war with the greatest military power remaining in the Mideast after Israel itself. "Protectin