This nationwide movement is composed of millions of independent-thinking individuals who are fed up with high taxes and big government. Local TEA party organizations cannot even tell these people who to vote for–much less the State Treasurer.

As an enthusiastic supporter of Curtis Loftis for Treasurer in 2010, I am extremely disappointed in his decision to endorse Gov. Mitt Romney, but that decision is his own, nothing more.

Mr. Loftis, you may feel that Romney “has the greatest chance of taking back the White House in 2012,” but like Sen. Jim DeMint, I’m at a point where I’d rather lose fighting for the right cause then win fighting for the wrong cause. Judging from DeMint’s exceeding popularity here in SC and abroad, I am not alone.

If you want to remain relevant, you and all your friends in Columbia had better understand that we are fed up with higher taxes and government intrusion into our personal lives. Whether you call it Obamacare or Romneycare, it’s all the same to us.

Yes, even when it comes in a nice, pretty Republican package.

Jonathon Hill
Organizer, Anderson TEA Party
Chairman, Upcountry Coalition of Conservative Organizations

I think more and more you might need to consider something a bit radical to the good government types in Washington — hold the line and don’t take the deal.

For the next few weeks, they will bully you, flog you, scare you, and scare your constituents. Hold fast. The same people who have gotten us into this mess want you to believe they will now get us out of this mess.

Hold fast. Hold fast. As Allen West would say — steadfast and loyal. Your leadership won’t be. But now is your time to lead. Now is your time to save the country. Don’t be afraid of deadlines. Be afraid of selling out the country with a bad deal just for the sake of a deal.

To Reps. Duncan, Gowdy, Scott, Wilson, and Mulvaney: we are watching, we support you, but we will remember what you did in November 2012.

To Rep. Duncan specifically: if you hold the line regardless of the flak and grenades that come your way, you will have done more than your predecessor ever did, and we will be forever grateful.

May General Vassy’s words from the WWII Battle of Thermopylae be our motto:

“Here we bloody well are, and here we bloody well stay.”

There was a time when Barack Obama seemed more honest than Bill Clinton. While Slick Willie notoriously claimed he smoked pot but “didn’t inhale,” Obama candidly admitted, “When I was a kid, I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”

Lately I have not been so impressed by Obama’s truth-telling tendencies. Three incidents last week vividly illustrated the president’s Clintonian desire to have things both ways, even if it means insulting our intelligence.

Obama wants credit for using the American military to protect civilians and compel a regime change in Libya. But he doesn’t want to admit that blowing up the government’s forces and facilities counts as “hostilities,” because then he would need congressional permission under the War Powers Act.

Last week Obama sent Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser, to explain this counterintuitive position to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, whose members were noticeably unimpressed. “When you have an operation that goes on for months, costs billions of dollars, where the United States is providing two-thirds of the troops, even under the NATO fig leaf, where they’re dropping bombs that are killing people, where you’re paying your troops offshore combat pay and there are areas of prospective escalation,” said Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), “I would say that’s hostilities.”

The following day, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit was more receptive, accepting Obama’s argument that Congress is regulating interstate commerce when it forces people to buy health insurance. But a concurring opinion highlighted another striking example of presidential duplicity.

Judge Jeffrey Sutton devoted half a dozen pages to rebutting the Obama administration’s argument that the insurance mandate, which requires the Internal Revenue Service to collect a “shared responsibility payment” from Americans who fail to comply, should be upheld under the federal government’s taxing power, thereby avoiding dicey questions about the limits of the Commerce Clause. Sutton was too polite to note that the president himself had indignantly insisted, prior to passage of his health care law, that the assessment was “absolutely not a tax increase.”

Another unacknowledged reversal occurred on Thursday night (just before the long holiday weekend), when the administration released a memo that supposedly “clarified” its position on medical marijuana. Although Obama has promised to stop “using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole informed federal prosecutors that “commercial operations cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana” for medical use are fair game, even when they comply with state law.

By contrast, an October 2009 memo from Cole’s predecessor, David Ogden, said U.S. attorneys “should not focus federal resources” on ”individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” The Ogden memo listed criteria for prosecution, such as violence, sales to minors, and sales of other drugs, that make sense only when applied to medical marijuana suppliers, as opposed to the patients and caregivers who the Justice Department now claims are the only people covered by the policy of prosecutorial restraint.

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in May 2010, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that the promised forbearance applied to people “dealing in marijuana.” When Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) asked him about threats to raid “legitimate businesses” that supply medical marijuana, Holder said “that would be inconsistent with…the policy as we have set it out…if the entity is, in fact, operating consistent with state law and…does not have any of those factors” mentioned in the Ogden memo. This position jibed with Holder’s earlier statement that “the policy is to go after those people who violate both federal and state law.”

So how does the new Justice Department memo address the blatant contradiction between prosecuting state-authorized medical marijuana suppliers and not prosecuting them? It assures us the two policies are “entirely consistent.” That way Obama can get credit for tolerance and compassion without being painted as soft on drugs. After all, he did inhale.

A couple of weeks ago, a new congressional plan for South Carolina pushed by the Myrtle Beach business community, in general, and by a Myrtle Beach state representative, in particular, unraveled in the South Carolina Senate. Much to their dismay, the state Senate approved a redistricting plan that creates a new 7th District with the counties of Beaufort, Berkeley and Dorchester — three of the fastest growing counties in the state — as its core.

South Carolina once had a 7th congressional district, but the 1930 census took it away. The recently completed census, however, showed our state’s population in the past ten years grew at a rate (15.3 percent) greater than the country as a whole (9.7 percent), and so on December 21, 2010, the federal Justice Department announced that our state’s 7th district would be restored.

Wesley Donehue, director of the state Senate Republican Caucus, summarized what happened next: “One of the worst kept secrets in state politics is that [Myrtle Beach] Rep. Alan Clemmons is running for the yet-unrealized Seventh Congressional District. Clemmons, as chairman of the [state House] subcommittee drafting the plan, had the ability to craft himself a district that he could win.”

And as Donehue goes on to explain, that’s exactly what Clemmons did, and the state House adopted his plan to create a new 7th district stretching from Myrtle Beach “into the Democratic Pee Dee area … a district created for a more moderate Republican.” (That state House-approved plan was developed in conjunction with and as recommended by Congressman Jim Clyburn and members of his staff, and it chops the counties of Beaufort, Dorchester and Berkeley into pieces and scatters them among multiple districts, diminishing their political relevance.)

Clemmons is an honorable man; however, drawing a new district to suit the desire of a particular politician is horrible public policy. The state Senate Republican Caucus agreed, so it hired John Morgan, one of America’s leading electoral demographers, to draw a congressional plan that reflected South Carolina’s communities of interest, avoided gerrymandering and had the strongest chance of surviving the inevitable legal challenges in federal district court.

Morgan objectively reviewed the data, applied federal Justice Department criterion and drew a plan that, among other things, happened to anchor the new 7th district in the Lowcountry. That plan became the state Senate Republican Caucus plan, and attorneys specializing in redistricting law formally recommended it to the state Senate’s special redistricting subcommittee. That subcommittee then held a meeting to consider it, and that’s when power politics reared its head again.

Unhappy that the new district might not be anchored in Myrtle Beach and include the Pee Dee, hundreds of people from that area went to the subcommittee meeting and demanded adoption of the Clemmons plan passed by the state House. The subcommittee had no such plan – none resembling it had even been recommended – but one was hurriedly prepared that very evening and quickly passed.

That hasty action was subsequently corrected by the full state Senate, which voted 25 to 15 to approve the state Senate Republican Caucus plan. State senators from all parts of the state – except those from Myrtle Beach and the Pee Dee – voted for the plan, for the same reason I did: it is the most logical plan for the state, the least gerrymandered and the one with the least number of county splits.

The South Carolina General Assembly will reconvene on July 26 to decide which chambers’ plan will prevail. I am convinced the one approved by the state House, based on the gerrymandering of raw politics, would be successfully challenged in federal district court and result in judge-drawn district boundaries – a nightmare scenario that must be avoided. I will do everything in my power to keep that from happening.

Becky Acker’s scathing commentary on Texas’ cowardice is worth a read:

Predictably, Simpson’s effort “died in the regular legislative session in the wake of warnings [sic for ‘blackmail’] from federal officials that it would conflict with federal law” – whoa! Who knew federal law allows “touching a person’s private parts without probable cause”? And now that we do know, what will we do about it? – “and could force flight cancellations if the safety of passengers and crew could not be assured.”

This is manure of nauseating degree, Piled High and Deep. “The safety of passengers and crew” is never at greater risk than when the TSA is groping, robbing, beating, and killing victims – to say nothing of when it damages their planes or traumatizes the pilots on whom depend the lives of everyone aboard. Indeed, if the TSA were actually concerned with protecting us rather than its $8.2 billion yearly budget and 60,000 make-work jobs, it would disband tomorrow.

By now, only morons swallow Our Rulers’ lie that the TSA has anything to do with safety….

And this was the real kicker:

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst asked the state attorney general’s office for guidance to ensure the measure is in line with the U.S. Constitution and federal law. You can calculate how far we’ve travelled down the road to serfdom when Our Rulers actually pretend that they must “make sure” legislation barring bureaucrats from pawing us doesn’t conflict with the Constitution. Try to imagine James Madison’s reaction to such insult. Even the anti-Federalists would grab their horsewhips rather than remind Jemmy et al, “We told you so.”

All that, in a Republican-controlled Texas Legislature. I don’t think South Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly would be any better at all. If Speaker Bobby Harrell is any less evil than Texas Speaker Joe Straus, it is only because he is more politic and devious.