I need a recommendation for official TEA Party member positions on issues:
Debt ceiling – this morning the national debt was $14.274 trillion. There is a Debt ceiling vote coming up in Congress. Do we support an increase?
Gov’t shutdown – Eric Cantor leads the charge on FY2010 budget cuts. Are these budget cuts (or lack of) worth shutting the government down, or do we stand on the principle of cutting spending and shrinking gov’t? The Republicans campaigned hard on $100 billion cuts from FY2010 Budget. They are offering $66 billion (4%). Obama rejected it yesterday. The Dem’s will agree to $31 billion (2%). Michele Bachman found $506 billion in cuts – just from Obamacare. Where is all that money now??
- $6.2 Trillion in cuts over 10 years – Is Paul Ryan’s proposal enough?
- $6.2 t / approx. $40 t =15.5% of the total 10-yr budget.
- Ryan includes proposal for 10% federal employee reduction through attrition (not layoffs). Reform of welfare and Medicaid – like Clinton did. GDP vs Federal budget will reach 100% 2022 and 200% at 2033-40(?).
- http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/PDF/All-Budget-chart-book-2010.pdf
- http://blog.american.com/?p=29518
- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703806304576242612172357504.html
Federal gun control end run – Obama and NYC Mayor Bloomberg calling for executive action on gun control in the name of public safety. Do you agree? Or is there some acceptable, inherent risk in a free society that allows “easy” and legal access to handguns? The Second Amendment simply reads “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
NC easing gun laws – NC lawmakers want to ease the carry restrictions for NC citizens. Currently, the list of where you can carry is shorter than the list where you can’t carry. Do you approve?
Voter ID – NC lawmakers rejected the Mexican Matricula Cards as NC ID. Is picture ID a common-sense remedy to ACORN/OFA stealing elections?
2 American executions at the Tijuana, Mexico, border crossing yesterday – At what point do we decide they have declared war on us? Are you outraged?
“War” in Libya – Should we be there??
Obamacare repeal worth fighting – Is this issue still worth fighting for in NC and in DC?? Many of our lawmakers are working to thwart this legislation. The Repub’s in NC are still working to override the governor’s veto.
I want to put together an official statement and send to public officials at all levels. Send to the newspapers and other media?
Caldwell TEA Party 
first of all, if the government shuts down, life goes on. it’ll teach them to sit down and work for a change. secondly,i like paul ryan’s budget proposal, although i would cut the business tax down to 12.5 percent like Ireland. and i would also start eliminating government agencies and boards that serve no purpose whatsoever. as far as the American executions in Tijuana,start bombing those turkeys til hell wouldn’t have ’em.
No increase. It’s too easy to increase. Elected officials need to start doing some real work and figure out how to live within their means!
Is the goal to shrink government or to pay off the national debt? These are not necessarily the same thing. If we are serious about paying down the debt, we will make big cuts in the bloated military spending that has exploded the debt over the past ten years. We will end our national policy of perpetual war. This alone will bankrupt us and bring us to national ruin. We will also cut spending by cutting government subsidies to oil corporations, agri-business and all other corporate welfare. We will increase government revenue by closing all the corporate tax loopholes that allow most large corporations to avoid paying any income tax. And we will raise taxes on the super rich. We will do all these things if our objective is to truly pay off the national debt and balance the budget.
But if our purpose is to simply strangle government to death and turn over all power in the country to big corporations, we will never raise taxes for any reason and keep the corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the wealthy going, and keep our foreign policy of perpetual warfare and global domination going. The government will certainly collapse if we continue on this path. Is this what we actually want to accomplish?
Gordon, I want it all! I want to shrink the size of government AND pay down the national debt. Those in power in DC right now, should begin to make cuts to government size and scope, and with that savings they must pay down the debt!!!!
What of the military, Christine? Should we cut military spending, or continue to feed the exploding military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against decades ago?
The Founding Fathers rightly feared maintaining large standing professional armies. They had suffered under the British imperial army, so for the first 160 years of our history the United States kept a bare-bones military in peace time. With a threat of war they used a draft to expand the military to take care of whatever danger appeared. And they always followed the Constitution and did nothing until Congress had issued a declaration of war. Today we are in a state of perpetual war. Yet Congress never declares war. Our rulers have resorted to a professional military because they know that people would rightly resist a draft to go off and fight in places like Afghanistan. The only purpose of the people now is to pay the taxes to fund these unnecessary wars… which seem to be fought only to provide a raisn d’etre to keep shoveling money into the military. I believe that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and company would look aghast at our maintenance of a huge professional and imperial military that is never used to defend the United States and its interests but instead is used on one United Nations-style mission after another, basically defending the global capitalist ruling system from any and all threats.
What about it, Christine? Are you a loyal Republican, or a loyal American patriot? Pro big military or cut military? Are you for big government or for limited Constitutional government?
Gordon,
Yes, cut military spending too. Typically, Congress can write anything they want into a bill. And usually, the military continues to be paid during a government “shut down”, as directed by Congress. So, I guess I am a Patriot. I do worry about our military-industrial complex that sucks taxpayer money into a black hole. There is plenty of waste in the military budget ($900 hammers) without sacrificing soldiers’ pay or safety. But… if we cut too much waste, how the black ops get funded? Hmm??
On the issue of shutting the government down, I would not do it under any circumstances. The economic repercussions would be so bad your neighbors might burn your house down and publicly stone you if they found out you were an activist who had pushed such a course of action.
I disagree. When they talk about “shutting down government”, Washington only closes non-essential departments. Why do we have non-essential federal employees? All government employees, should only be essential (the bare minimum). Also, there is concern that some federal employees will not be paid during the shut down, but Congress usually writes retroactive pay authorization into the new legislation that allows for those federal employees to be paid after the shutdown. I know that’s double talk, but the shut down is more symbolic than anything else. SHUT IT DOWN, if that’s what it takes to force the Dem’s hand.
Do you have a credit card, Christine. What is the interest rate you pay on it? And what happens to that interest rate if you decide to skip a payment or two? It goes up dramatically! And all of a sudden you will have to pay off the entire balance immediately or plan on paying a much bigger total payoff over time to ever pay off your total debt if you continue to finance that debt with the much higher interest rates.
That’s what will happen to the United States if we refuse to raise the national debt and decide to “skip a debt payment” to those who have loaned us money. Our creditors will see that we are unreliable and our interest rate will shoot up. And we can’t come up with the cash to pay our creditors off. We will have to cut spending on everything just to pay off the higher interest rates we will owe. Plus, interest rates will go up for everyone: for business, for personal rates — everything. Mortgage rates will at least double. Rates on personal debt will skyrocket. People who have variable rate loans based upon the prime rate will see their payments go up dramatically. This stunt you talk about so lightly will send businesses, government and individuals into sudden insolvency. There indeed will be millions of incredibly angry people whose standard of living and personal wealth have suddenly crashed.
Not all these people will hang themselves or jump off a building. Some will indeed come looking for the idiots who did this to them.
The responsible course is to not “skip a payment” to our creditors by shutting down the government. Make our payments to keep our credit standing, but then get serious about cutting spending and raising revenue to pay this debt down as quickly as possible.
We truly aren’t free people as long as we are in this kind of overwhelming debt.
Gordon, Gordon, Gordon… Shutting down the government doesn’t mean they default on “loans”. Please!!! It means they will be forced to CUT SPENDING. They can still pay loan obligations.
The biggest group of “non-essential federal employees” I can think of are those serving in the military. We could cut the size and expense of our military in half and still have by far the largest and most powerful military on the planet. This is the most effective move we could make to become debt free and regain our freedom and liberty.
I don’t think I am in favor of cutting the standing military by half. I would have to do some research about that kind of cut, before I can be sure.
The reason the government will shut down is because it will run out of money. It will run out of money because Congress will not authorize it to borrow more money to pay for its expenses. These expenses include making interest payments to creditors. That’s essentially skipping a credit card payment. Failing to send out Social Security checks is also failing to pay creditors. People have paid into the Social Security trust fund all their lives are owed what they have paid for. The government has taken the money and blown it in idiot crusades against phantom menaces in places like Vietnam and Iraq while putting three trillion dollars worth of IOUs in an account. This money is owed to US citizens. When the government doesn’t send out the checks, it is defaulting on a loan payment. Likewise when it doesn’t pay interest payments to China, Great Britain and other foreign creditors. Responsible people pay their just debts. Deadbeats, cheats and thieves don’t pay their debts.
Regarding our military, what good is it if it cannot be used to defend our national borders? We could take our Predator drone squadrons out of Pakistan and Afghanistan and put them on the border with Mexico and easily shut off illegal immigration. Why don’t we do this? I can’t go along with Republicans who want to spend trillions of dollars on useless and archaic weapon systems like aircraft carrier battle groups that are never used to defend the United States. About the only branch of the military (and its part of Homeland Security) that is used for the good of US citizens is the Coast Guard. They do patrol our coastline, stop and arrest drug smugglers, stop boats loaded with illegal aliens and rescue Americans who are in distress at sea and on our lakes and waterways. I see no benefit in any of the rest of our vast military. It’s a useless waste of money and is the main reason we are going broke. We should have slashed our military after the collapse of the Soviet Union and invested the money in developing our infrastructure, research on new technology, education and health care for our citizens and renewable energy so we could be competitive with China and other developing economic powers. China will surpass the US as the dominant world economy within five years. They will dominate us economically and technologically. We will lose our superpower status just like the Soviet Union did: We will bankrupt ourselves trying to maintain a huge and useless military. And when we go broke, our military will become a bunch of abandoned and useless junk just like the Red Army and Navy did.
Ronald Reagan and his minions of Republican/Conservative followers have destroyed this nation and pushed it off a cliff. We just haven’t hit the bottom of the canyon floor yet.
My position on cutting the military is not a Democratic position. It’s the position advocated today by the father of the Tea Party: Ron Paul, about the only man in Congress who understands the US Constitution and believes in it.
Christine, you said: “Gordon,
Yes, cut military spending too. Typically, Congress can write anything they want into a bill. And usually, the military continues to be paid during a government “shut down”, as directed by Congress. So, I guess I am a Patriot. I do worry about our military-industrial complex that sucks taxpayer money into a black hole. There is plenty of waste in the military budget ($900 hammers) without sacrificing soldiers’ pay or safety. But… if we cut too much waste, how the black ops get funded? Hmm??”
For me the issue isn’t about $900 hammers. If such things ever existed, the idea has become a cliche for people who think small. The thing that bothers me is who is it who controls our super-power military and what missions do they assign it?
For decades American patriots have feared the United Nations developing a powerful military component that could be used against the United States and its interests; or the fear was that globalist politicians would sign treaties that would place the US military under United Nations command, that the UN flag would fly over our military. The globalists have been more clever than this. They dispensed with the whole idea of a United Nations military; and they knew openly flying the UN flag over US military units would bring howls of protest. Instead they have done the clever thing. They have put globalists inside both the Republican and Democratic parties and inside the big think tanks that supply our top bureaucrats and technocrats. These people control our military and assign missions that are essentially missions a United Nations military would have handled: bombing Serbia because it rebelled against New World Order dictates; thumping any small nation that refused to take orders from the global banking system; nation-building missions in sh_tholes like Haiti and Somalia and Afghanistan. Basically stamping out any sign of nationalism anywhere in the world it manifested itself. But while carrying out these idiotic and un-American missions our military did it under our flag, and all the simple-minded patriot yahoos cheered and cheered… too dimwitted to realize what was even happening.
So don’t worry about the $900 hammer. Think big. Look at the big picture and ask yourself if our military and its missions make any sense. Does it benefit the American people, or does it benefit someone else.
Former NATO commander Wesley Clark is a perfect example of the one-world globalist leader who controls our military that I’m talking about. Check out what this former Republican candidate for president actually believes. He’s right in there with elitist one-world types that Glenn Beck focuses on. Clark is no different than George Soros. Patton and MacAurthur were the last two truly patriotic military leaders we’ve had. Patton died under highly suspicious circumstances, and Harry Truman fired Douglas MacArthur because he actually believed in defeating Communism. Since then the military has always been commanded by the likes of Robert Strange McNamara and General Wesley Clark: committed one-worlders.
And if we could strangle any part of government it should be the CIA. The very concept of this organization defiles the idea of limited Constitutional government. Read George Washington’s farewell address and ask yourself if he would have approved of anything remotely like the CIA. No way! This outfit is totally off budget, totally secret and pretty much accountable to nobody. If Adolf Hitler had had an organization as sinister as the CIA he would have won the second world war. I can’t believe you support the CIA, black ops, torture and all these mechanisms of dictatorship. If this is what you believe in, Christine, then I’m inclined to believe that the Tea Party is a front group for Republican dictatorship and global banks and corporations, and all the talk about American patriotism is just propaganda for the simple minded.
A piece written about two years ago that all Republicans should read and consider.
Memo to the Republican Party: You Are A party Of European-Americans.
Posted on: 2009-11-25 20:24:04
Accept it or die.
by Kevin McDonald, 2008
In the wake of the Republican defeat, there is the inevitable soul searching and jockeying for control. The project of defining the Republicans is quite a bit harder than for the Democrats. The Democrats don’t have an identity problem, at least since they got rid of the Southern contingent and unions (apart from government unions) began to be fairly irrelevant. They’re the party of the minorities, government workers, sexual non-conformists, and diverse beneficiaries of the leftist entitlement culture. These people all get along with each other and have no problem supporting each others’ pet projects, notwithstanding the little falling-out between the cultural leftists and the minorities over the California ballot proposition banning same-sex marriage. At least they can agree on looking forward to a post-European future.
But who are the Republicans? Even though 90% of their votes come from European-Americans, these are people who really aren’t on the same page at all. So after each major defeat it’s a Herculean effort to try to keep it all together. You’ve got the big business–globalist–Wall Street Journal–open borders–free trade crowd (the ones with the money). These people actually get along quite well with the neocons whose main agenda is to make the world safe for Israel and are liberals in every other way, especially on immigration. Then there’s the libertarians — people far too principled to find any reason to oppose the mass immigration that has gutted the America they grew up in and not seeming to realize that the people coming here are definitely not on page with their vision of America.
And there is the Republican base — working class and middleclass whites with various ideologies, mainly Christianity. They are remnants of the Reagan coalition and they were critical to the electoral victories of George W. Bush.
There is an obvious incompatibility here. There is deep anxiety in the Republican base because immigration has transformed the country and, along with free trade policies, gutted the labor market. But, as Pat Buchanan notes, the Republican Party is “hooked on K Street cash.” So in the end, the money people get their way on the big issues like free trade and immigration, and then they nominate someone like Sarah Palin to a figurehead position to try to patch things up with the base.
It didn’t work this time around, since enough European-Americans defected to the Democrats to seal McCain’s fate. Indeed, the amazing thing is that more European-Americans didn’t defect from the Republicans given that the Bush administration was arguably the worst presidential administration in history. And they managed to cap it off by presiding over the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. This indicates that European-American identity politics is already a reality in the Republican vote.
But the European-American defectors from the Republicans can’t possibly be happy with the multicultural–sexual deviate–leftist entitlement Democrats. They are likely to return to the Republicans if there is any reasonable excuse for doing so. As a result, one counsel among the Republicans will be to simply stay the course.
There is every reason to think that this might work, at least for an election or two. It’s quite easy to imagine a Republican candidate reclaiming essentially the same electoral victory George W. Bush achieved in 2004 in better economic circumstances. In fact, it probably would have happened this year, except for all of the headwinds of the Bush presidency.
But the problem with that strategy is that it can only work for one or two more presidential election cycles at most. The European-American percentage of the electorate is continuing to decline—around 70% in this election and is slated to continue to drop ever further. (This percentage is based on excluding non-European-Americans such as Jews and Muslims from CNN’s count of white voters — a correction that certainly makes sense given that their interests and their voting patterns are not at all similar to those of European-Americans.) Amnesty for illegal immigrants and continuing high levels of legal immigration will erode the European-American majority even further—and quickly.
Republicans can’t expect to continue to win national elections much longer. There is a ceiling effect for the percentage of European-Americans who might be induced to vote for the Republicans. Some European-Americans are so immersed in the leftist counterculture that there is no hope that they would ever abandon the Democrats. A great many other educated European-Americans are part of the hopelessly liberal educational establishment or they are government workers. Many benefit from the leftist entitlement zeitgeist themselves. And many, especially the young, have become multicultural zombies, having grown up with MTV and intellectually seduced by their college professors. These people may well become Republicans when they get a family and start looking for a mainly white suburb where they feel comfortable with the schools, but by then they’ll be part of a permanent electoral minority.
It’s difficult to say what this ceiling might be. Around 60% of European-Americans voted for Bush in 2004. But even if 70% of European-Americans voted Republican, it would not be enough to win an election when European-Americans make up 65% of the electorate. And that will happen very soon — probably by 2012.
In this election, overwhelming percentages of all the minorities voted for Obama—ranging from wealthy and middle class Jews and Asians to impoverished blacks and Latinos. If Hillary Clinton had been the Democratic candidate, this tendency would have been somewhat muted, but there would have been a similar general pattern. In fact, greater percentages of minorities voted Democrat in this election with a non-white candidate than when, as in all previous elections, the choice was between two European-Americans. The message is clear: An unambiguous assertion that the Democrats are the party of the ethnic minorities draws a greater percentage of minority votes.
Of course, the globalists and neocons urge the Republicans to solve their problem by trying to appeal to minorities. Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute writes, “If the Republican Party cannot make significant, lasting inroads into … minority voting populations, it has a long-term disaster on its hands.”
Apart from the fact that such a strategy amounts to surrender for European America, the problem with this is that it’s really hard to see how the Republicans could have reached out to minorities any more than they did. McCain is the poster boy for amnesty for illegal aliens, and he said nothing against legal immigration. For his efforts, he received around 30% of the Latino vote. He said nothing to oppose affirmative action, and he studiously avoided linking Obama to Rev. Jeremiah Wright because he didn’t want to offend blacks. For his efforts, he received less than 5% of the black vote. McCain surrounded himself with neocon operatives with a long history of allegiance to Israel. For his efforts, he received just over 20% of Jewish votes. McCain even discouraged any mention of Obama’s Muslim-sounding middle name.
So what more are Republicans supposed to do? The simple fact is that the coalition of minorities in a powerful Democratic Party is their best strategy for achieving their dream of a post-European America, and there is nothing that the Republicans can do to change that.
The only long term choice that makes any sense for the Republicans is to acknowledge that they are a party of European-Americans and that the purpose of their party is to further the interests of European-Americans.
First and foremost, they must publicly state that it is a legitimate interest of European-Americans to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in a country where substantial percentages of non-Europeans — blacks, Latinos, and Jews — have historic grudges against them. And they should advocate policies aimed at improving the status of their base — middleclass and working class European-Americans.
Nothing short of adopting a European-American identity will do. It might be possible for the Republicans to adopt a Sarah Palinesque identity of Christianity and traditional small town values. But even if they do, they would still have to oppose legal and illegal immigration in order to remain a majority. The left has shown repeatedly that they will label as racist any criticism of immigration—even those based on economic or ecological arguments. And they would surely do so if a party composed almost exclusively of European-Americans advocated an end to immigration. It won’t matter what surface ideology they adopt.
Fundamentally, the Republicans have to be able to say to the New York Times, the SPLC, the ADL, the NAACP, and La Raza: “We are the party of European-Americans and we wish to remain a majority. We are advocates for our people in the exactly the same way that other groups are advocates for their people.”
The Republicans would certainly lose some of their constituencies if they did this. The neocons would be in high dudgeon, although they are nothing if not pragmatic in pursuing their main goal of helping Israel. And the globalists might leave. But neither of these constituencies is numerically significant.
And on the plus side, the new Republican Party would doubtless gain the allegiance of a lot of European-Americans who voted for the Democrats in 2008 while holding their noses.
Of course, the Republicans won’t do this. Not for nothing did Sam Francis call them the Stupid Party. For one thing, the Republicans would have to find new sources of funding. But more importantly, very few people can withstand the accusation of being called a racist by the mainstream media. Conservative commentators like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly studiously avoid saying anything that could be construed as “racist”; nor do they dare to oppose the massive legal immigration that will make them a permanent electoral minority even if we stopped illegal immigration immediately; nor do they openly advocate for European America even though the vast majority of their audience are European-Americans who would love for them to do just that.
Nevertheless, despite their timidity (or their concern with keeping their advertizers), the bottom line is that advocacy for their own people is entirely legitimate and intellectually unassailable.
But unless Republicans become the explicit party of European-Americans, they will surely die — quite soon, and right before our eyes.
I’m glad to see there is building momentum in the Tea Party movement for ending our pointless and wasteful foreign wars and for cutting unnecessary military spending. Only the old Neo-Cons like Dick Cheney, John McCain and Joe Lieberman are still pushing for more war. Let’s hope this wing of the Republican Party continues to decline in influence. They are bankrupting us!