Sleepless in Midland

Lois Lerner claims she received death threats -- I don't believe her

This is a remarkable claim: IRS Officials Claim Lives in Danger if They Testify About Tea Party Bias Case:

Former official Lois Lerner and Holly Paz both argued in recent filings under seal in the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati that the death threats and other harassment they have faced take precedence over the public's right to hear their testimony on the case of IRS bias against conservative groups, USA Today reported.

They just want to get out of testifying. Lerner has already taken the fifth, so she knows the routine.

Meanwhile, she's in less danger than conservatives. See Violence And Intimidation Against Republicans Are Becoming The New Normal which chronicles some of the recent violence while noting that some progressives call for more of the same.

Oh, but we're supposed to sympathize with Lois Lerner?  It's pathetic.

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2:07 PM 5/15/2017

Lefty rioter groups gets tax exempt status denied to Tea Party

If there are any groups of people in the U.S. who have gotten a raw deal it's the people who tried to organize Tea Party groups.

They tried to get tax exempt status, and it's no secret that in many cases that status was denied or endlessly delayed for what appears to have been political meddling by the IRS. Under most circumstances, that would have been a big NO-NO. But in the Obama administration federal agencies were politicized to the extent no other administration had ever done, at least as far as we know.

And even today we read that two Tea Party groups' applications were denied by the IRS. See IRS denies tea party groups after long wait for decision on tax-exempt status.

Meanwhile, as we watch video of rioting anti-Trump mobs it's useful to remember who is backing them. Blake Montgomery reports that lo and behold, the radical organizer ANSWER Coalition is right in there swinging.

In case you're wondering whether they've got a tax exemption, look no further than their donate page where they helpfully explain the following:

Donations to PUF / ANSWER Coalition are processed by our fiscal sponsor, the Progress Unity Fund, a 501(c)(3) organization.

You may also make a tax-deductible donation by mailing a check made out to Progress Unity Fund / A.N.S.W.E.R. to the following address: ...

(Bold added, address withheld.)

Their tax exempt status should certainly be investigated. And if Donald Trump really intends to drain the swamp he should start with the IRS.

Kudos to two councilmen who opposed higher local taxes

What a difference a few years make. Back before the Tea Party movement was stomped into dust there was a group of folks who went before the Midland, Texas, city council to plead with them not to raise taxes again. The annual tax hike here is a ritual as regular as the four seasons.

But that was a time shortly after Barack Obama was first elected president, and a a more powerful movement swept government entities as they imagined voters were eager to fatten government coffers across the nation.

The local city council was about as eager to hear tax protests as bin Laden would have been to listen to a Christian sermon. The tax hike was voted in unanimously. And those of us who spoke before the council learned our civic lesson and were put in our place.

Fast forward to today. Stewart Doreen tells us in the morning paper that two city council members voted "No" this time. Kudos to those two, J.Ross Lacy and Jeff Sparks. It's still a minority. But it's a start.

It really is the takers vs the makers

I don't remember whether it was Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders who promised her/his audience free college tuition. Perhaps it was both. An audience member planning to attend or currently attending college would be very receptive to that promise. And anyone stuck under debt for his/her college tuition would be similarly receptive to a promise of debt forgiveness.

Presumably the promise of a free single payer full coverage medical insurance program would garner the same level of support. A promise of a higher minimum wage certainly has an eager audience. We've already seen that.

But when we factor in that 45% of Americans don't pay income taxes, we need to wonder where all that money to pay for these promises will come from. They could tax the rich 100% and it wouldn't cover the cost of all those promises. Someone has to make money before they can pay taxes, and if you remove any incentive to do that and throw in all the free stuff, then there's little reason to work for pay above the minimum wage, however much it happens to be.

What we've become is a nation populated with people with fantasy prone personalities. It's the takers vs the makers with the takers mesmerized by the promises of a politician whose only interest is getting elected.

Post Script: Speaking of fantasy prone personalities, Republicans have plenty of those in their midst, too.

Tim Carney sums up Obama nicely -- he was good at only one thing

The always astute Timothy P. Carney has Barack Obama figured out. Seems that a politician has to be good with people, and getting them to vote for him every few years is only one aspect of that, although it's a very important aspect. Obama isn't very good at much else. As Obama saw it, he had only one job. See Obama was no political master, after all for the details.

Well, maybe that's what we get when electing a community organizer. Meanwhile, one very comforting thing that yesterday's shellacking of Democrat revealed is that Obama's political machine, whether we call it Big Data as in 2012 or Catalist in 2014, doesn't work so well without the big O on the ballot. The idea that brilliant psychologists dedicated to the lefty agenda can come up with catch phrases and techniques that easily manipulate the masses was a scary prospect. The fact that it depends on a messiah type character to really inspire the masses is a little bit comforting, at least until another messiah type character sweeps Democrats off their feet again.

I'm hoping for a Tea Party libertarian type messiah to come along so I can swoon, too. But the odds of him/her surviving the MSM firing squad may be too much.

Senator Mike Lee nailed it

State of the Union Address? Didn't see it. But Senator Mike Lee's response is getting some buzz, and for good reason. He made some good points, and if only he could reach enough voters the country might experience something positive instead of the sorry state of affairs President Obama has caused.

Here's the youtube link for the speech. There are some excerpts at Mike Lee's site. And be sure to check out Patrick Howley's Six reasons why Mike Lee’s tea party response to the State of the Union was amazing.

I like this part:

You're probably as frustrated as I am about an ever growing government that somehow thinks it's OK to lie to, spy on, and even target its own citizens. Many hardworking Americans are discouraged and wondering what if anything can be done. I believe we need to do what Americans have always done -- come together and press for positive change.

He says we are facing an inequality crisis. Not the inequality to which Obama pays lip service. But one which manifests itself in three forms: immobility among the poor, insecurity in the middle class, and crony privilege at the top,

where political and economic insiders twist the immense power of the federal government to profit at the expense of everyone else. To be fair, President Obama and his party did not create all of these problems. The Republican establishment in Washington can be just as out of touch as the Democratic establishment. ...

After all, if we're going to reform welfare, we really should start with corporate welfare.

Government is the problem. Will voters recognize this and vote for people who can correct it? We'll see.

IRS similar to FBI under J. Edgar Hoover?

I'm reading this great book by Tim Weiner titled Enemies, a History of the FBI in which Weiner sets out what he learned about the FBI from numerous interviews, publicly available sources, and J. Edgar Hoover's own secret files. The files were obtained by a Washington lawyer through a FOIA request for a writer who was no longer interested when the files finally arrived 26 years later. The lawyer offered them to Weiner who snapped them up and wrote a very interesting history of the FBI.

These days the top political news story is the Tea Party non-profit applicants for exemption and how the IRS agent's delaying actions may have affected the outcome of the 2012 election. Weiner's book gives the reader a good reminder that government employees can sometimes see their mission as so important that laws don't apply to them.

There doesn't seem to be a bureaucrat around today with quite the power of J. Edgar Hoover who was so intent on ferreting out Communists and terrorists that he ordered his agents to perform all sorts of illegal bug planting and black bag operations. Stop violence before it happened -- that was a guiding principle. Sometimes he acted at the behest of presidents, and sometimes he did it on his own. The result was that FBI agents did things that could have landed them in jail if they had gotten caught.

This brings us to the IRS scandal. The agents who actually committed the acts, or in some cases simply failed to act, may very well have been doing it on their own. But it was all done in an environment where management either encouraged that sort of behavior or looked the other way.

And then there's Barack Obama. He's the J. Edgar Hoover in this picture. He simply lets it be known how much of a threat he thinks certain classes of people are, and the underlings do the dirty work. Just don't leave a paper trail that would lead to the top.

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Too busy to read Weiner's book? Watch an hour long Q&A with him on C-SPAN. Too busy for that, here's a shorter interview on Fresh Air.

Those tea party terrorists

Oh those tea party fanatics! Aren't they a bunch of malcontents with all that talk about balanced budgets, reduced debt and small government?

Joe Biden nailed them when he called them "terrorists."

But maybe that's not such a bad thing as Dave Carter explains in They Can't Be Serious:

Richard Gere needs to plead for calm while a whole blood bank of bleeding hearts invites the nation to join in a dialogue to, "understand the rage." Perhaps Katie Couric could begin the collective introspection as liberals on both coasts try to understand, "why they don't like us." ...

Tolerance will be the watch word, as Tea Party members are welcomed on university campuses across the land. ...

Construction of a Conservative Cultural Center will be welcomed right smack in the middle of Harvard, where Ann Coulter will launch the Council on American Tea Party Relations and serve as its president.

Tolerance indeed.

Tea Party Voter Rally

Yesterday the Odessa Tea Party held a Voter Rally in the hanger at the CAF Museum giving several candidates the opportunity to address some of their potential voters.

They announced that the Odessa Tea Party, Inc., has a 501(c)(4) exemption, and that means they can lobby, but they can't participation in political campaigns. So in full compliance with the IRS regs, they invited a long list of candidates but didn't endorse a single one.

OTP president Elizabeth Wooldridge read the list of the invitees so that the attendees could consider which candidates refused to visit. But the ones who showed up got a nice welcome and the full appreciation of the crowd.

Cowboy poet and story teller Dennis Gaines served as the master of ceremonies and made sure there was not a dull moment between speeches. Each speaker was expected to talk no longer than 15 minutes, but Mr. Gaines cautioned that sometimes trying to take a microphone away from a politician is harder then getting a Baptist preacher away from an all-you-can-eat buffet. With that hanging over them, the speakers stuck to the schedule.

 Warren Chisum, representative from District 88 in the Texas House, was first up. His photo is on the right.  He stunned the audience when he announced that the state of Texas has over 300,000 employees, but he recently threw his hat in the ring for Speaker of the House and hopes the house can become more fiscally responsible. However, families and children are his primary issue, and he's very proud of HB 480 which, if passed and signed into law, would a require a couple with children seeking a divorce to take a crisis marriage education course.

Jeff Gonzales spoke on behalf of Charlie Garza who is running for the District 1 spot on the contentious Texas State Board of Education. "We not only drink tea, we breathe fire," Mr. Gonzales said as he beat the drum for Mr. Garza. But he was candid about the chances when challenging a 21 year incumbent and hoped they would lose by only a small margin.

  Kathie Glass is running for Texas Governor as a Libertarian and made a very impressive appearance. Where has she been all this time? She could have stolen the show if Perry and White had shown up, and maybe that's why they stayed away. Her objectives are these:

Secure the borders with the Texas State Guard;
Resist unconstitutional mandates from Washington;
Cut the budget in half to what it was 10 years ago;
End taxpayer funded services for non-citizens; and
Death to the Trans Texas Corridor.

When asked, Ms. Glass said she favors the right of Texas voters to put initiatives on the ballot. Texas politicians have been very resistant to giving up any power to the voters, and since she's the only candidate for governor who would support that, she gets my vote.

Railroad Commission candidate David Porter provided a short history lesson about the Texas Railroad Commission which was started in 1890 as an agency to regulate the railroads. Then in 1919 it was given jurisdiction over oil and gas, and today it covers not only oil and gas but pipelines, LP gas, coal and uranium. Mr. Porter's goal, if elected, is to do a better job of managing the funds the agency is given.

The always entertaining Jason Moore, Captain Watchdog, and self acclaimed "filthy stinking capitalist," made an appearance and kept the audience laughing as he nicknamed various politicians and their projects. For example, the "Golden Plaque Syndrome" afflicts politicians with an insatiable desire for plaques honoring them on structures the taxpayers had to buy. "Taxpayer Towers" is the new Midland Memorial Hospital structure, the plan for which was expanded recently to use up some extra money. Then there's the "Oil Patch Opera House" theater currently under construction near the airport.

  Texas is number one! But unfortunately, the category is the percent of tax per property value Texans pay. He proposes a law requiring that a bond proposal must get favorable votes from a minimum of 25% of registered voters or it fails.

The hot button issue in Odessa right now is a bond proposal to fund an Odessa College expansion. It's not "anti education," he says, to ask, "Why now?"

Jon Roland is running for Texas Attorney General as a Libertarian. He said people hear him speak and say they wish Republicans were more like libertarians. And he says they say they wish Republicans would nominate libertarians. He says the primary system would need to be reformed before that could happen, but there is not enough demand from the voters. To get reform people need to write it out exactly what they want and keep a close eye on those they expect will implement it. "We are led by people who marginally know what they are doing."

Chris Younts -- Mr. Younts ran in the Republican primary last March for the position of U.S. Representative for Texas District 11 against the incumbent Mike Conaway. Voters had an opportunity to send a message to Washington that they didn't want the big government that was being foisted on us. And it isn't just Democrats, both parties want big government. But when District 11 Republican votes were counted, voters gave Mr. Conaway the message that they want more of the same. If big government is the problem, Mr. Younts said, District 11 voters can find the problem by looking in the mirror.

Mr. Younts is a former firefighter and is currently a business man and rancher. He's familiar with hunting dogs, and he made an analogy. Pointers among hunting dogs are very common. What's uncommon is a dog that will actually go out and retrieve. What we've got now in Washington are pointers who point to the hot issue of the moment. But we need retrieves who are willing to do the work. Our politicians are so gun shy, he said, that they don't even want to come out of the kennel.

Mr. Younts said that when he was a firefighter they would roll up to a burning house, and invariably there would be people standing outside, and one might be spraying at the house with a water hose. The firefighters would push the people aside, break down the door, go in and put out the fire. That's what is needed now, someone willing to go in and put out the fire. Instead, Republicans are demonstrating the lack of backbone by downplaying the once urgent drive to repeal Obamacare. At the end of the day, we just can't spend more than we bring in.

After his speech he was asked if he would run for office again. Mr. Younts gave his head a half shake and said, "I really like my life the way it is." So I guess that's a "no." Too bad.

Dennis Gaines finished off the day with a long and engaging speech about how our elected officials, who should perceive public service as a privilege, have betrayed us. He can direct a string of pejorative adjectives at Washington that will sting your ears and make you laugh. But the Tea Party movement demonstrates an awakening of the mighty, he said. Mr. Gaines quoted a Texas Ranger, "No man in the wrong can stand up to a man in the right who just keeps on a-comin."

There's hope. And maybe there will be change.