08/1/15

Thank God Mr. Cruz is in Washington

By: Lloyd Marcus

Ted Cruz

My email account was on fire, everyone excited about Sen Ted Cruz calling Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. Cruz cited each of Obama’s unprecedented unlawful power grabs and repeals of our freedoms that the GOP promised to block, only to stab us (We the People/Tea Party) in the back. http://bit.ly/1CZmZCj Immediately, I thought, “Thank God Ted Cruz is in Washington.”

Before I go on, I wish to address a guy whom I will call Ned. Whenever I praise a conservative, Ned emails to correct me, claiming the conservative is a deceitful traitor. When I share reasons for optimism, Ned vehemently disagrees, even seeming a bit angry that I would think our efforts could possibly make a difference in America’s corrupt political environment. Ned always sees the glass less than half empty. I guess we need people like Ned to keep us balanced. Although, I am not quite sure about that.

Sure enough, in response to patriots’ giving Cruz rave reviews for speaking truth to Washington power, Ned ripped into Cruz about questionable votes. Folks, I realize Ted Cruz is not perfect. But then, which presidential candidate is? Jesus is not running for president in 2016.

As a member of the Tea Party since it began, Cruz going down the list of GOP betrayals brought back memories. Remember how we fought and worked our butts off to give the GOP the House, then the Senate? We worked to elect Republicans to stop Obama from rolling out the welcome mat to illegals.

Over a million of us showed up in DC to protest Obamacare.

I thought of all the travel miles, funds, blood, sweat and tears sacrificed by Tea Party Americans; patriots who simply want lawful Constitutional government.

I thought about how Obama sent out his liberal mainstream media air force to bomb us with accusations of racism against the first black president; hoping to soften and diminish our ranks. The Tea Party is not racist, nor do we hate anybody.

In his speech, Cruz did two things that were quite remarkable. First – Cruz exposed the good-cop, bad-cop personal and corporate enrichment scam both parties have been playing on the American people. Second – Cruz spoke with unprecedented clarity. He did not say McConnell misspoke or McConnell was disingenuous. Cruz said McConnell lied.

Cruz has been on a roll speaking the truth, making mincemeat of Obama minions http://bit.ly/1GRt3Hy and Leftist ideologues. http://bit.ly/1Im0bbu He really exposes DC insider political corruption in his book, “A Time For Truth.”

It was refreshing that when pressed by the liberal bias media, Cruz refused to jump on the destroy Donald Trump bandwagon. This tells me that Cruz has backbone and will not automatically play by the Left’s rules of engagement.

It is fair game for GOP presidential contenders to express their disapproval of Trump’s style and tactics. However, when a GOP presidential contender joins the MSM in its evil attempt to brand Trump a racist for simply addressing illegal immigration, red flags go up regarding the character of that contender.

It tells me the contender will say whatever necessary to win. I call that “soulless” politicking.

Such behavior has the awful stench of what happened in Mississippi. In the primary, Republican Thad Cochran’s camp joined Democrats in branding the Tea Party racist. To beat the Tea Party conservative, Cochran’s people despicably made lying phone calls to black voters saying the Tea Party candidate would turn back the clock on racial progress. This is the kind of deplorable evil divisive totally self-serving politicking Cruz exposes in his book.

The GOP presidential field is rich with honorable contenders. I ask myself the following question.

When I lay my head on my pillow at night which candidate winning the WH will cause me to sleep the most peacefully? Who is most likely to remain true to their promises to We the People; fight to repeal Obamacare, end the invasion of our borders, defend life and traditional values?

Who believes in Conservatism enough to throw a lifeline of inspiration to those drowning in the treacherous deep dark sea of Obama’s welfare state America? Who will pray as the song says, “Lord lift us up where we belong” as Americans?

Currently, I believe that candidate is Sen Ted Cruz.

Realizing the fruitlessness of trying to instill a bit of hope/sunshine into Ned, I delete his emails without opening them. Ned has gotten creative. After lunch the waiter brought the check and my fortune cookie. The message inside said, “Ted Cruz sucks! – Ned” (Just kidding)

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee

02/3/15

The Tea Party: Then and Now

By: Michael Johns

The largest and most impactful political movement, at least since the civil rights movement and perhaps in all of American history, originated in the minds and efforts of less than a dozen American citizens.

It was late February 2009, just weeks after the inauguration of Barack Obama, and there was every reason for conservatives to fear the worst: That we had elected a polarizing, far left and ultimately ineffectual president who would prove a threat to constitutional law, our economy and America’s global standing in the world.  Most concerning was that he would gradually or even quickly erode our nation’s two centuries of respect for individual rights and liberties upon which America was founded, “fundamentally transforming” (as he promised) our nation in destructive ways.

On the morning of February 19, 2009, as was often the case, I had the financial media outlet CNBC playing on a distant television in my suburban Philadelphia home.  This particular cold February morning, Rick Santelli, a Chicago-based CNBC reporter, was doing his usual stand-up reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade (COMEX).  Santelli began reporting on Washington’s federal subsidies of housing under Obama when mid way through his report his sense of outrage began to escalate passionately.

Santelli accused the Obama administration of “promoting bad behavior” in subsidizing mortgages then at default risk with a $75 billion housing program, known as the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan. He then turned and, while still live on CNBC, stated assertively to COMEX floor traders: “We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party!” Santelli’s suggestion of a Tea Party response to the federal government’s overreach was greeted with supportive applause and whistles of approval from COMEX traders. Santelli then said: “What we are doing in this country is making our founders roll over in their graves.”

I found Santelli’s Chicago comments accurate, inspirational and even bold for a mainstream reporter in a media world that really never challenged Obama on much of anything during or since the 2008 campaign. What I did not realize was that his remarks were viewed similarly by several other conservative-leaning Americans, who would go on to inspire a national political movement that would shake the nation.

Just a few days following Santelli’s rant, 12 or so conservative activists, including me, were invited to participate in a strategic organizing Tea Party conference call moderated by Nashville-based, Stanford educated conservative Michael Patrick Leahy.  It was Leahy who earlier launched the now famous #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter) hashtag, where it remains today one of Twitter’s most commonly used hashtags and a key methodology for conservative communication.

Most on the call, unlike me, were new to political engagement.  They had largely never worked in government, public policy or politics. Aside from Leahy and me, the others had never managed an organization either.  They had largely never written or spoken on political or public policy themes, even though all of us would soon be called upon to articulate our Tea Party message nationally in the weeks to come.  Most had never even worked on a political campaign.  But the passion on that call was infectious.  The 12 or so of us left it with a feeling that a potentially influential national political movement was emerging—and quickly.

Several follow-up calls were scheduled, and they led us to devise a now well-known plan for Tea Party protests across the nation on Tax Day, April 15, 2009.  The aggressive six-week timeline, like much that the Tea Party movement has undertaken since its creation, was organized hastily, with a sense of urgency, and not without its errors. But April 15, 2009, is now a fairly notable day in American history in the sense that it was the physical manifestation of a national political movement, comprising tens of millions of Americans and quite possibly the largest in American history, that would go on to impact significantly the nation’s political debate.

The day of April 15, 2009, was a busy one. For my part, in the afternoon, on Boston Square in downtown Boston, just blocks from the original Sam Adams-led Tea Party on December 16, 1773, I spoke to a large and passionate crowd furious with Obama and the country’s direction.  I then left Boston to speak that evening at one of the nation’s largest tea parties of the day, held in lower Manhattan, not far from the memorialized 9/11 attack location. Three days later, on the grounds of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, I spoke for a third time in just three days to a very large and vibrant Tea Party rally organized by the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, of which I was then an officer.

The years 2009 and 2010 were full of flurry and a sense of urgency for the national Tea Party movement, an urgency that has continued to this day.  In 2010, in Quincy, Illinois, where Lincoln held his sixth debate with U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas on October 13, 1858, I joined Leahy and the late media personality Andrew Breitbart in addressing a large Tea Party crowd on the precise location where Lincoln pointedly articulated his anti-slavery message: “We (the Republican Party) also oppose it as an evil so far as it seeks to spread itself,” Lincoln said that day in Quincy.

By this time, the message of our movement was being refined and polished, comprised mostly of three universal themes that were and continue to be broadly popular with the American people: First, the federal government has grown too big and its taxes vastly too excessive.  Second, the sovereignty of the United States—in controlling its borders, in developing its national security and foreign policies — must be defended at all costs.  And third, that the U.S. Constitution was a document containing absolute truths to which government needed to adhere if it was to avoid lawlessness and chaos.

As I was in Boston and New York City, Leahy and others organized one of the day’s largest and most successful events in Nashville, drawing thousands.  In downtown Chicago, just a couple blocks from where the Santelli rant heard round the world took place, another Tea Party founder organized a large and hugely successful Tea Party rally.  His name was Eric Odom.

Quickly, the passionate and activism of this small cadre spread to thousands, then tens of thousands, and ultimately to millions of Americans who identified themselves as being supportive of the Tea Party movement. On November 2, 2010, a highly motivated Tea Party movement rocked the nation, sending 65 new Republican House members to Washington and thus forcing then Speaker Nancy Pelosi to surrender her gavel to new Republican John Boehner. Four years later, on November 4, 2014, the Tea Party movement again proved a huge difference maker, further increasing Republican presence in the U.S. House and increasing its U.S. Senate seats by nine, including pulling out wins in hugely contentious races in many states, including Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, and South Dakota.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. House of Representatives, a Tea Party Caucus, chaired by former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, had been developed with the movement’s input to coordinate the Tea Party agenda in Congress.  And the national strategy discussions continued. In Chicago, for instance, Odom and I spent three long days in detailed discussion on the movement’s strategy, messaging and allocation of limited resources.

In the months and years since, along with other Tea Party founders from the February 2009 conference call, we continued tireless efforts of what by then had become a vast, influential, though sometimes chaotically organized movement of political consequence. All the Tea Party movement founders from Leahy’s first conference call are impressive in their own ways, and have their own personal stories about what sparked their leadership in this now historical movement.

In the years that followed, along with other national Tea Party leaders, Leahy, Odom and I crisscrossed the nation articulating the Tea Party message and helped to organize the movement politically in order to prevail in elections.

In Dallas, Leahy organized a national Tea Party leadership meeting that included many of the founders from the original February 2009 call participated.  “Let’s begin this meeting with a prayer to God for His guidance of this movement,” I suggested privately to Leahy, who agreed. We began the meeting exactly that way.  Later, also in Dallas, we organized a two-day training course for regional and other Tea Party leaders on political and public policy activism.

One of those leaders was Chicago-based Eric Odom.  In fall 2010, from Las Vegas, we poured ourselves into the campaign of Nevada State Senator Sharron Angle in hopes of replacing the Obama administration’s strongest U.S. Senate ally, Harry Reid.  As the movement’s prominence (and the associated strategic questions facing it) evolved, Odom and I spent several days in Chicago asking and discussing those questions and developing our best answers.  And there was the day in Philadelphia where I invited Odom to join me in addressing an important pre-election Tea Party rally held on the iconic grounds of Independence Hall in front of the very building where 56 founders of our nation pledged with a “firm reliance of the protection of divine providence,” their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to remove imperial British forces and rule and establish a self-governed nation rooted in liberty and the rule of law.

The Tea Party movement’s efforts, as even its detractors would concede, have since proven hugely consequential, ensuring that Obama, at least since 2011, was not given full reign of the legislative and executive branches of government.  A Tea Party-influenced Republican House and Senate, along with our extensive grassroots efforts, have held liberal Obama’s agenda at bay, despite the Tea Party’s ultimate inability to defeat Obamacare.

Since that first February 2009 conference call, the founding and ongoing development of the historic Tea Party movement is one of many intriguing personal stories, and a singular collective story.  Along the way, we have done many things well (removing Pelosi and then Reid as Speaker and Majority Leader, respectively).  We have strengthened the Republican Party as a party that stands more than before for conservative principles expressed (but too often ignored) in the GOP platform.  We also quickly obliterated the 2008 progressive political culture that maintained that Obama was a man who singularly held the answers for the nation.  Time has proven those ideas were not at all innovative and were actually just a rewording of those from the liberal playbook of more government and more taxes.  In all these ways, since those February 2009 planning calls, the national Tea Party movement has exceeded the accomplishments of the effective and well-constructed 2008 Obama for America campaign that ultimately propelled Obama to the presidency.

All this history is important because it reaffirms the veracity of Margaret Mead’s famous statement: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.  Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” It’s worth asking: If those first organizing calls had not been launched, would Republicans today control the U.S. Senate and House? If no, that means that Obama’s entire far-left political agenda would have been rubber stamped by an equally liberal Congressional leadership.  Has the Tea Party movement saved the nation?  I believe it likely has.

Yet, to be truthful about the inner workings of the Tea Party movement, we have done many things well, but failed in others.  In 2015, the Tea Party and patriot movement’s top priority must be communicating and impacting public opinion and explaining why and how Tea Party principles can make America great again: creating jobs and economic prosperity, restoring rigid adherence to the U.S. Constitution, and restoring a strong America that can defeat serious national security threats.

With a reliance on divine providence again, let’s roll back this utterly destructive, unconstitutional government and welcome in a century or more of strong liberty leadership.  Next step: We must explain our Tea Party vision and solutions for America.

01/27/15

Sarah Palin Too Toxic for 2016?

By: Lloyd Marcus

Sarah Palin saying “Of course” she’s interested regarding running for the presidency in 2016 has people buzzing. http://abcn.ws/1xPVFhj During that interview, Palin said we need a candidate who is ready for Hillary. I agree. Romney would be Mr. Nice Guy/gentleman unwilling to attack the girl.

As for Palin running, a woman wrote: “I have never given up on her (Sarah Palin). I am sooooooo hoping that she will be our spokesperson. My husband says the press and Obama have tainted her so much that it would be impossible for her to run. I say that ‘with God,’ all things are possible.”

To this woman, I say, “Right on sister!” No offense to her husband, but I find his mindset frustrating. We complain that there are far too few politicians with the cojones to push back against Obama’s unprecedented arrogance, lawlessness and tyranny. Despite their newly acquired control over the House and Senate, the GOP appears to be attempting to pull the wool over our eyes regarding amnesty. In their Spanish response to Obama’s SOTU, the GOP brought up immigration, desiring to “create permanent solutions” without mentioning immigration in the English version. What is up with that? http://bit.ly/1yWGNjU

So tell me folks, how many politicians on our side truly are who they say they are; standing up for our principles and values – fighting for freedom and the Constitution? We lament that many politicians on our side are obsessed with winning an approving pat on the head from the MSM; reduced to political impotence. Oh if only there was a little blue pill for dis-functioning Republicans/conservatives.

Palin has proven that she does not give a rat’s derriere about what the MSM thinks of her. We pray for a voice on the big stage with the guts to stand up for Conservatism.

Sarah Palin fills the bill in spades; one of the few unafraid to get into Obama’s grill. I love it! Unapologetic to the Left (Democrats, Hollywood and MSM) Palin’s attitude is, “Say it loud. I’m conservative and proud.”

Not too long ago, a conservative savior arrived on the scene, exciting and inspiring millions. I remember being on the Tea Party Express national tour bus. We kicked off the tour in a dust bowl, Searchlight, NV with Sarah Palin as our headliner. Twenty five thousand people showed up, many camping out days ahead to reserve their spot. I witnessed the moving scene of seniors who had to park almost a mile away approaching the event using walkers; all coming to see their Sarah.

The Left launched an over the top vicious shock and awe champion to crucify Sarah Palin, her family and her disciples. When the Left sought after Palin supporters, sadly, many cowardly said, “I never knew her.” There is something deja vu about this scenario.

So, Palin courageously comes along and does everything patriots have been longing and praying for someone to do. Her reward is patriots distancing themselves from her. Classy. Real classy.

Since taking the national political stage by storm with her amazing VP nominee acceptance speech, the Left as gone crazy, insane with pure unadulterated hatred for Sarah Palin; no attack was too evil or too low. Every Palin family member was in-play including Trig Palin, her Down Syndrome child. http://bit.ly/1BTSIQc

Intellectually challenged actress Pamela Anderson said, “I can’t stand her. She can suck it!” http://bit.ly/1p3IlBB

Obama supporters showed up at Palin events wearing t-shirts which read, “Sarah Palin is a C***” in huge letters. The t-shirt was even featured on Obama’s website with no rebuke from the MSM or Democrats. http://bit.ly/1sCgoly

Howard Stern idiotically blamed Palin for the AZ shooting and called her a “F***er and a c***!”

http://bit.ly/1p3K7T3

HBO show host Bill Maher called Palin a “dumb twat” http://bit.ly/1yjq64E Maher has used the c-word when referring to conservative women including Palin. http://bit.ly/1o90BcB This vile little man has also called Palin a MILF (Mother I’d Like to F***). http://bit.ly/1yjquA2

Despite the Left’s best efforts to humiliate and destroy her, Palin has hung tough, remaining faithful to the mission of the Tea Party; the preservation of our freedom, liberty and culture — traditional conservative principles and values; God, family and country.

And yet, there are those on our side who suggest that we kick Palin to the curb because she has become “too toxic”.

The field for 2016 is pretty crowded. I am not ready to select a candidate. However, if Palin throws her bonnet into the ring, my heart is with her 100%. We need a hero.

Lloyd Marcus, Unhyphenated American
Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee