There have been many studies out on the “tea party congress” and just how tea party it actually is. One study last year noted that 70% of candidates who went to Congress under the tea party banner were voting just like the Republican Leaders they ran against.

Probably one of the best places to get a sense of this is the Club for Growth. Why? The Club ignores social votes and focuses only on fiscal votes — spending issues more than anything else. The tea party candidates went to Congress not just to repeal Obamacare, but were really motivated by out of control government spending, bailouts, etc. Remember, it was Rick Santelli of CNBC on February 19, 2009, who predicted this grassroots army of activists would rise up and say enough to out of control government spending and bailouts. Santelli said, in part,

The government is promoting bad behavior. Because we certainly don’t want to put stimulus forth and give people a whopping $8 or $10 in their check, and think that they ought to save it, and in terms of modifications… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea.

You know, the new administration’s big on computers and technology– How about this, President and new administration? Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages; or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?

…

We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m gonna start organizing.

Things sort of spiraled from there sending a wave of candidates to Washington embracing the concerns of the activists who showed up to the tea party.

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The Federal Reserve is not my issue. Audit it if you want, I’m with you. But it’s not something that drives me crazy or makes me passionate. But there is one issue that really gets me and the Fed has been at the center of it lately — crony capitalism.

Barack Obama has nominated Jeremy Stein and Jerome Powell to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for six years each. Senator David Vitter (R-LA — HAFA Score 85%) placed a hold on both men. They are creatures of Wall Street and, in the biggest red flag of the day, both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have been pressuring Senator Vitter to drop his hold.

The issue here is bailouts. Mark Calabria notes the Federal Reserve has bailout powers, but it needs the support of five Federal Reserve governors. Stein and Powell are both in favor of the Federal Reserve continuing to bailout banks and other entities with little oversight.

Harry Reid can bring these men to the floor any time he wants. The word in the Senate is that he is about to.

Conservatives in the Senate and outside the Congress are deeply worried that Mitch McConnell will cut a deal with Reid to undercut David Vitter’s hold. We potentially could delay the appointments until after the November election if Mitch McConnell will side with David Vitter and Senate conservatives by objecting to Harry Reid’s cloture motion.

Please call Senator McConnell’s office today and encourage him to stand with David Vitter and object to cloture on Jeremy Stein and Jerome Powell. His office number is (202) 224-2541. Then call your own Senator at (202) 224-3121 and tell them to oppose Stein and Powell.

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Last week, the House passed H.R. 5326, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, by a vote of 247-163, providing $51.131 billion in discretionary appropriations for fiscal year 2013. That’s $1.61 billion or 3% below the amount of funding provided for these programs in fiscal year 2012–and $731 million or 1.4% below the amount requested by the president for fiscal year 2013.

Not terrible, but clearly there was room to cut more spending, right? Surely House Republicans realized that Americans want them to cut more spending than 3%–and be more than 1.4% below where President Obama is, right?

Right?

Well, some conservative amendments did indeed pass. See these, for example:

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The Democrats have been taking professional training on how to be race baiters in this election cycle. I’m surprised this hasn’t gotten significant coverage.

I’ll get into it tonight and the logical outcomes of Obamacare start to kick in as Obama starts inserting himself into other Presidents’ biographies.

You can listen live tonight on the WSB live stream from 6:05 pm to 10pm and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

Consider this an open thread. Also, please consider going to http://wsbradio.com to find out how you can help Amy Copeland.

If you are in the Atlanta area and can give blood, please click here right now to register for a spot at the blood donation drive.

I like Don Stenberg. He’s a friend. He’s been a great leader in Nebraska. I’d like to see him in the Senate. But over the past month, as Stenberg and Bruning have gone nuclear with each other, Deb Fischer has run up the middle and may very well win the Nebraska Primary today.

I’d gladly support her.

It seems that in the withering back and forth fight with Bruning, Stenberg has lost momentum. Sarah Palin came in and endorsed Deb Fischer. Several anti-earmark groups joined in. And she is in a prime position today to win.

The Nebraska race has always been about beating Jon Bruning. He got rich in office, has a volatile temper, and sure evolved into a conservative quickly when he wanted his next office. If it can’t be Stenberg, I hope it will be Fischer.

I don’t think Fischer will be as conservative as Stenberg, but given the pedigree of Nebraska Senators, she’ll be far better than either a Chuck Hagel or a Jon Brunning. And Fischer, unlike Bruning, would never, ever support Eric Holder.

If there is a day to finger for Barack Obama losing the Presidency in 2012, it will be Sunday, May 6, 2012.

On that day, Joe Biden^* went on national television and proclaimed himself in favor of gay marriage. It started a media spiral for the President. Two days after Biden spoke, North Carolina voters voted by overwhelming margins to leave marriage alone. The next day, Barack Obama went on national television to devolve back to the position he held prior to running for President.

To a majority of Americans, Barack Obama’s devolution back to earlier years makes no difference. But this is a fifty-fifty nation. Every vote counts. And of those whose are concerned about this issue, at least 20 percent and maybe as high as 25 percent of people say it makes them less likely to vote for Barack Obama — that’s more than those who will be more likely to vote for Barack Obama (and who are probably going to vote for him anyway).

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It’s that time again. We’re going to focus on the moral President and more.

You can listen live tonight on the WSB live stream and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

Consider this an open thread.

Another day, another socialist takes to the New York Times to denounce capitalism. With his criticism — he is a professional critic, which is a job no socialist society would really see value in except as an agenda of propaganda, but he thrives in the capitalist society he condemns — he premises it on some sort of morality. He mocks Christians for embracing capitalism with no understanding of Christianity or even a real understanding of capitalism.

But his critique is filled with the usual, and totally unoriginal leftist pablum about the evils of profit motive, etc. while ignoring arms length transactions, how the free market, unlike any other economic system, has elevated so many out of poverty, etc.

Along the way, we keep hearing something from these leftists, whether it be Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, or the Hollywood crowd is that the rich need to “give back” and “pay their fair share.”

They’re just as happy to quote a secular philosopher as they are the Bible. Elizabeth Warren famously said that the factory owner wants us to ignore the people who built the roads or ran the phone lines, etc. She, however, wants to ignore the factory owner’s idea, success, and hiring record — providing jobs to people to build his product.

But all of that misses the larger point.

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In the past week, I’ve been called a bigot, a hater, had people wish I died, and had people wish Christians had died, been rounded up and killed, or experienced their own personal holocaust.

All this came from proponents of gay marriage. The media won’t cover most of this. The media sees most stories as victims versus victimizers and those who support gay marriage are the victims. They get the positive media coverage.

In reality, though, throughout this week I’ve seen a number of Christians engaged in as much hate filled rhetoric as gay marriage proponents, including the pastor in North Carolina who encouraged parents to beat up their gay acting sons.

As a Christian, I cannot support gay marriage, nor can I accept practicing homosexuality as anything but a sin. At the same time, there are a lot of Christians out there who seem convinced they aren’t sinners. In fact, we are all sinners and as I have matured in my faith, I have a harder and harder time understanding how so many Christians can be so tolerant of so much sin, but treat homosexuality as some sin set apart from all other sins making it a worse sin than, for example, adultery.

This is a political blog and I try to leave my theological ramblings for special occasions, but I think this needs to be said.

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RedState Morning Briefing
May 11, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

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Now this is just silly. The Washington Post can’t be bothered to worry about Barack Obama’s college years, college transcripts, communist friends, cocaine use, or cop-killing plotters in whose living room he first launched his major political career, but they can get in the really way back machine to 1965 and Mitt Romney’s high school years.

Mitt Romney cut a hippy’s hair at his preparatory high school. A day after Barack Obama caved on gay marriage, the Washington Post “coincidentally” says Mitt Romney cut the hair of a boy who “was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality.”

Let’s leave out the fact that the kid who got his haircut was subsequently thrown out of school for smoking one cigarette, but we’re to believe that the assailants of his hair, witnessed by many, were ignored. Oh, and the guy who got is hair cut never, ever, ever mentioned it, including to family, and died in 2004 so it can’t be verified. But a handful of students who now probably support Barack Obama have a crystal clear memory of events from 50 years ago. The people who were adults at the time of the incident and still alive have no memory of it, but remember Romney and said he was never a disciplinary problem.

N*gg*rhead rock, anybody?

After four years of ignoring Barack Obama’s bullying of religious groups and others from inside the White House, it’s fair game to go after Mitt Romney as a supposed high school bully.

I guess we won’t hear the left whining any more when we mention Barack Obama eating a dog since, as they are quick to point out, he was a kid when it happened.

We have now had more in depth examination of Mitt Romney by the Gang of 500 than of Barack Obama.

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If you listen to Barack Obama’s statement to ABC News yesterday you’ll hear something not reflected in all the transcripts that went out yesterday. He said his administration gave up the legal fight to defend the Defense Against Marriage Act. It’s actually the Defense Of Marriage Act.

Obama claimed DOMA made marriage a federal issue and it should be a state issue. That’s a gross mischaracterization of DOMA, but for now that’s besides the point. Two days after major gay donors said they’d withhold funding from his campaign and one day before his swank $40,000.00 a person fundraiser with George Clooney, Barack Obama publicly reversed course on gay marriage. The Washington Free Beacon’s headline says it all: Gay For Pay.

Obama looks weak and under duress. He looks weak because he would not come out before the North Carolina vote and under duress because he only did so now as his donors held his campaign hostage. Now President Obama might as well be called President Dick Cheney. In addition to GTMO still in use and warrantless wiretaps still being deployed, Obama comes out in favor of the states’ individually deciding the issue while supporting it himself. It’s the gay marriage equivalent of being personally pro-life, but supporting a person’s right to choose. It is also, like GTMO and warrentless wiretaps, Dick Cheney’s position — a position the much maligned former Vice President held even after Obama went from being for gay marriage, to against gay marriage, to evolving on gay marriage.

But there is another angle to this as well.

Barack Obama and the Washington Press Corps, aligned perfectly on this issue, are oblivious to one overwhelming data point.

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One initial point to ponder: if the No-H8 campaign tries to fire up in North Carolina as the No-A1 campaign, people will wonder why they are campaigning against steak sauce. Probably won’t happen. North Carolina did not pass a ban on gay marriage as the media reports. Rather they refused to allow their definition of marriage to be changed. The marriage definition was put into law years ago, but with an onslaught of judicial activists, the voters in North Carolina decided to shut down any further consideration of the issue.

The most fascinating bit of it all is that time and time again gay marriage polls quite well in the United States. Time and time again, gay marriage proponents go down to defeat at the actual polls. Said one gay marriage proponent on Twitter last night to me, “It will be a happy day when all hate filled Xians are dead.” Xians is “Christians” in Twitter speak. At first I thought it was a Xenu or Thetans reference.

This was a bad night for Barack Obama. Whoever decided to put the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina should be given a lollipop by the GOP for the intense level of comedic schadenfreude we can all now watch. The Democrats will convene in a proudly right to work state whose state Democratic Party is imploding due to a gay sexual harassment scandal, the state itself just voted for marriage by a margin few statewide candidates in North Carolina get, and twenty percent of Democrats voted against Barack Obama in the North Carolina Democratic Primary.

On the bright side, North Carolina is not West Virginia where a felon in federal prison in Texas locked up 40% of the vote in the Democratic Primary against Barack Obama. The Chain Gang looks to be as popular as the Change Gang.

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We here at RedState were the first national site to endorse Richard Mourdock. We had him at last year’s RedState Gathering. I am personally a big fan.

Tonight, we’d like to congratulate him on his huge win in Indiana against Richard Lugar. We still have the general election to win, but things are looking good.

Congrats Mr. Treasurer!

Be sure to chip in for his general election fund. Even Senator Lugar has already come out on board now and said he’ll support Mourdock.

In what may be the funniest story of the day, Eric Cantor is throwing his own super PAC under the bus.

His denial is implausible once the facts are in full view, but given the blow back he has gotten for his super PAC coming out for a host of squishy candidates who’d spend their time in Washington sucking up to Cantor instead of actually fighting for limited government, Cantor must now urge everyone to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The Young Guns Action Fund was set up by Cantor’s Deputy Chief of Staff John Murray, top aide Rob Collins, and several other Cantor staffers are involved. When Cantor’s press secretary, Brad Dayspring, was involved in an office altercation a few months ago, Dayspring was removed from the office and placed into the Super PAC.

Certainly, as Cantor partisans note, because the Young Guns Action Fund is a Super PAC, legally Cantor’s role must be limited. But considering John Murray’s role in Cantor’s office was, as the Politico reported at the time, “to increase Cantor’s image outside the Beltway by getting him in front of influential audiences across the country”, it’s a bit silly to pretend there is no relationship.

Now, as Cantor seeks to distance himself, even reporters are having a hard time believing his denials.

It would be a stretch to say that Cantor has nothing to do with the YG Action Fund. The PAC is headed by two top former Cantor aides, John Murray and Brad Dayspring. And the majority leader has donated money to the group, appeared at its events and even helped it raise money.

I await Eric Cantor’s public decision to denounce this Super PAC and publicly say he’ll never help them again.