The Obama doctrine: Leading from behind - The Washington Post

When Charles Krauthammer is on, he's on! Leading from behind is such an oxymoron that reading it as the initial writer used it makes my head spin. Once again I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe...

The Obama doctrine: Leading from behind - The Washington Post

The Obama Project: The Case For Change - Page 1 - Hugh Hewitt - Townhall Conservative

Hugh Hewitt has compiled a list of reasons President Obama should not be reelected. This is a true must read. And truthfully he hasn't listed ALL the reasons, I can think of a couple myself that aren't on there, and so can the commenters.
The Obama Project: The Case For Change - Page 1 - Hugh Hewitt - Townhall Conservative

Mommy Patriots.

Sorry for the original post about the Mommy Patriots, I really do know better.

So, now that I've cleaned it up, please go take a look. It's a way of sympathizing/supporting/being one with all us mothers that are patriotic but aren't quite Mama Grizzlies or Tiger Moms.

http://www.asamom.org/

Traveling in Texas and Happy Easter greetings.

I am taking time out of Rockport to visit family in other parts of Texas.  First my brother in Clifton; now I am at a sister's home in Longview.  I was just treated to a wonderful dessert of dewberry cobbler with ice cream.  Don't you wish you knew my baby sister?

We are a family of seven siblings. The oldest, a brother, passed away in January.  Even though we have always been a close knit family it makes those of us who are left behind even more dear to each other.

We had planned to do this trip in the fall but so much got in the way we are only now taking the time to do it.

I am not up to what all is going on in the country politics wise, so it up to you, my readers to let me know if something important happens. Post a comment here to tell me what is happening where you are. Post a link, post your thoughts.  We will see if we get some replies.

And those of you who have posting rights, please use them.

Happy Easter to you all.

More on Taxes on Tax Day.

Just two - like they say about some poker hands, "read em' and weep."

Nonpayers Complicate Republican Effort At Overhaul of U.S. Tax Code
By Richard Rubin

More than 45 percent of U.S. households won’t owe federal income taxes for 2010. That stems from decades of tax cuts and, in the minds of some Republican lawmakers, it’s also a problem.

Policies designed to ease the tax burden of lower-income Americans and offer targeted tax incentives have pushed millions of people off the income tax rolls. That has bolstered an argument that these households don’t have enough of a stake in the political system because they don’t pay income taxes.

“As a matter of fairness, wouldn’t it make more sense if all citizens paid at least something in income taxes?” asked Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, at a March 30 hearing. “I am convinced that it would help us in our fight against excessive federal spending. You get a lot of takers when you ask people if they want more of something and you tell them it’s free.”

Requiring everyone to pay some income taxes could shift more of the burden onto low-income workers at a time when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top of the economic scale. It would also come as Democrats are trying to allow income tax rates for the top two brackets to rise.

“Just as a political matter, it’s really hard to make somebody who’s paying nothing pay something,” said Bruce Bartlett, an economist who worked for Republican presidents and who has been critical of recent Republican policies. “It’s easier to get people who are paying something to pay more.”
Why People Don’t Pay

Lawmakers often cite a 47 percent nonpayer figure from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington, which it calculated for tax year 2009, said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center. The figure declined to 45 percent in 2010, and a comparable figure for 2011 is not yet available. It’s likely to be lower, because the $400 per person Making Work Pay income tax credit from the 2009 stimulus law expired at the end of 2010.

Any attempt to add people to the income tax rolls requires examining the reasons why some people don’t pay.

Nonpayers typically have low incomes or are retired and living off their savings. In tax year 2010, a married couple with two children earning $26,000 would pay no income taxes because of the standard deduction and personal exemptions.

Beyond that threshold, the earned income tax credit, the child tax credit and other similar provisions can generate tax refunds for people who pay no income taxes. The introduction of the 10 percent bottom tax bracket as part of the 2001 income tax cuts sought by President George W. Bush also pushed people outside the income tax system.

Read the rest of this article here.

And now for an example of only one pair of taxpayers who pay nothing. In this case, however, they are providing a service to the community. I think this is a rare exception of those who pay no taxes.

Five little Wards are IRS darlings
BY JOSH SHAFFER

SMITHFIELD -- This morning, when she kisses all five of her beautiful deductibles on the cheek, straps on their backpacks and nudges them out the door for the school bus, Thelma Ward will relax and wait for her reward in the mailbox - all $54,242.


This year, the federal government is sending her family such a whopping refund that it has turned her and her husband, David, into nationwide tax celebrities, landing them on CNN with all of their adopted children.

When her accountants did the ciphering, they figured the calculator was broken, maybe adding an extra zero. They even sent the Wards home to Smithfield while they totaled the gigantic sum another 10 times.

But it's true. Five figures. All at once. The reason: a change in the tax law allows credits for special-needs adopted children - which the Wards pack into three of their four bedrooms - to be collected as a cash payment even if no taxes are owed. And it's retroactive, H&R Block explained to Thelma.

"I said, 'For real, girl?'" recalled Ward, 44. "I just started shouting. The pictures on the wall were turning sideways."

The Wards are a religious couple. They don't expect compensation for good deeds. But it's hard not to see a greater hand at work here. For months the world has reeled at the idea that General Electric paid no income taxes - which doesn't appear to be true - but to say the very least, the government has been good to them.

Read more here.

This headline and the story do not match- it isn't about households who pay nothing

This is the Drudge headline-
Half of U.S. households pay no income tax...

This is the Yahoo news story:
Super rich see federal taxes drop dramatically
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press
WASHINGTON – As Monday's tax filing deadline nears, ponder this: The super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago, and nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.

The top income tax rate is 35 percent, so how can people who make so much pay so little in taxes? The nation's tax laws are packed with breaks for people at every income level. There are breaks for having children, paying a mortgage, going to college, and even for paying other taxes. Plus, the top rate on capital gains is only 15 percent.

There are so many breaks that 45 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for 2010, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

The sheer volume of credits, deductions and exemptions has both Democrats and Republicans calling for tax laws to be overhauled. House Republicans want to eliminate breaks to pay for lower overall rates, reducing the top tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Republicans oppose raising taxes, but they argue that a more efficient tax code would increase economic activity, generating additional tax revenue.

President Barack Obama said last week he wants to do away with tax breaks to lower the rates and to reduce government borrowing.

In all, the tax code is filled with a total of $1.1 trillion in credits, deductions and exemptions, an average of about $8,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Taxpayer Advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS.

Notice the article really didn't care about who didn't pay at all, or even as we all know, who gets earned income tax credits, a payoff for the low income folks.  This is a soak the so called rich article. 

Illegals and welfare

In Texas 70% of Illegal Aliens Receive Welfare

The Gateway Pundit:

Could this really be happening in America?A new study says 70% of illegal aliens in Texas are on welfare. Chron.com reported, via Free Republic:

Thirteen years after Congress overhauled the American welfare system, 57 percent of immigrants with children — those in the country legally or not — use at least one government, welfare program according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Immigration Studies.

In comparison, 39 percent of native-born Americans with children are signed up for welfare, the report found.

In Texas, 54 percent of legal immigrants and 70 percent of illegal immigrants receive welfare assistance, with illegal immigrants generally receiving benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, according to the study, written by a think tank that favors reducing immigration into the U.S.

Overall, Texas tied with California and New York for the second highest immigrant welfare rates behind Arizona.

What is extreme? What is radical?

Ed Katz at American Thinker has an essay on Harry Reid (and others)  who label those whom they oppose as radical and extreme.  Several paragraphs into the essay he has this to say:

In our present political context, resting the definition of terms like "radical" and "extreme" on the specious designs of politicians like Reid and Schumer will prove extremely harmful to America. What Americans need, in other words, is a more astute and trustworthy standard of "extreme" and "radical" in order to make judgments about the Democrats' highly volatile rhetoric.

In order to determine what is and isn't "radical" in today's context, Americans need look no farther than the very precise standard outlined by America's most important Founding Father: James Madison. In other words, without Madison's political and philosophical genius, the world would never have known the existence of what history now calls "American exceptionalism." 

"Factious leaders," says Madison, will attempt to inflame the country with their "wicked projects" from time to time, but thanks to a healthy number of opposing factions, the radicals will have trouble pervading the entire Republic with their malignant ideas:

A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

Simply put, "a rage for paper money" (inflationary government spending, among other things), "an abolition of debts" (federal bailouts), and "an equal division of property" (federal redistribution programs masquerading as nationalized "health care") constitute the bread and butter of the modern Democrat Party platform.

Read the whole article here at American Thinker.

Truth at the Huff Post -- A Crack in the Dam...

You can always tell when it's getting bad -- the New York Times or the Huffington Post has a truthful column about politics. This one is on the Puffington Host by Dylan Ratigan (of MSNBC no less) ratting out a blue rat who is defending the secrecy of a red rat. It's about how there was no deal. It was just political games. Like football. They've got blue jerseys and red jerseys, but they're all just game players, not game changers.

He actually says "The politicians aren't telling us the truth..." in a very bipartisan reference.

He's not turning against his liberal party though; in fact he ends with a "hope" that Obama will actually change business as usual. Sorry, Dylan. It's been three years. Hope doesn't get it done.

Go read it, quick! They'll probably take it down once they realize it's actually telling the truth. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dylan-ratigan/the-real-story-of-the-bud_b_848249.html

Is the O really legal?

More on the legality of our President.

Unraveling of Barry Soetoro: the sequel

Following the publication of our article titled “The unraveling of Barry Soetoro, a/k/a Barack Hussein Obama”, we’ve been inundated with hundreds of e-mails pointing out two alleged errors in our report.  We’ll accept the fact that we need to be taken to the proverbial woodshed over one of those errors. Officer John McClane did not fire at the police car in the original “Die Hard” movie as we stated. It was one of the terrorists. We stand corrected, and stand even more amazed how many people are so astute in their movie trivia but have no idea what the actual eligibility issue is all about. (ed note: whew, that really matters!)

The hornet’s nest we stirred was by citing the U.S. Constitution, followed by the intent of our founding fathers based on their subsequent writings. It is the primary issue that lies behind the smokescreen of the elusive birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, or perhaps to be more legally correct, Barry SOETORO. Specifically, we wrote the following paragraph that contains two highlighted sentences that appeared to cause confusion with some readers, while others deliberately exploited our intent:

I urge those reading this and those who are pursuing the truth to avoid “battlefield myopia” and not merely cling to the existence or lack thereof of the long form, authenticated birth certificate. The issue is much greater than the birth certificate or where Obama was physically born, as he could have been born in the Lincoln bedroom during the Kennedy administration and still be ineligible to hold the office of president under Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution. Our founders determined that future presidents must be born to two parents who are both U.S. citizens. Clearly then, the place of Obama’s birth is merely one concern, while the citizen aspect of his parents remains another.

Read the rest of this for all the legal details that have been determined through the many years of our country.

I agree with David and Rush Limbaugh when it comes to Donald Trump

I got this in an email today.  It is from Patriot Post but came from a conservative friend.

Trump, Not as a 2012 Candidate, but as a Blueprint

My brother, Rush, said on his program Thursday that Donald Trump, in taking the fight directly to President Obama, has provided a winning blueprint for defeating him in 2012.

Rush was referring to the way in which Trump -- think what you will about him and his politics -- has boldly challenged President Obama on a number of issues, including the notorious birth certificate fracas, obviously unconcerned about fallout from the liberal media.

.......--What moderate conservatives fail to understand is that there is little downside to Republicans sticking to their guns but an enormous downside to their caving. The media will vilify Republicans as uncompassionate, whether or not there's a shutdown; just wait for the debate over Ryan's budget. But if Republicans breach their promise to make these cuts, there will be hell to pay with the base.


You don't defeat the Democrats by picking your battles; you fight them at every turn -- thereby gaining political capital, not using it up.

Nothing would energize the base -- and ultimately the majority of the electorate -- more than Republicans standing their ground and fighting Obama aggressively. They've tried the milquetoast approach before and been punished for it -- most recently in 2006. So, Republicans, man up and follow the blueprint.

Go read it all, it makes so much sense.

Is it a conspiracy theory if it is the truth? And does it matter?

Donad Trump has really shined a new light on this subject.

Trumping up the constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama
The unraveling of Barry Soetoro, a/k/a Barack Hussein Obama II

To those who are now speaking out about the Obama eligibility matter, I can think of no better statement than the one uttered by a very frustrated Officer John McClane, played by Bruce Willis in the movie“Die Hard.” In order to get the attention of a police officer oblivious to the carnage taking place inside of the Nakatomi Plaza building after making a very cursory inspection and finding nothing amiss,McClane tosses the body of a terrorist from an office window window onto the windshield of the police cruiser and fires at the police car, yelling “welcome to the party, pal.”

I suspect that this statement accurately reflects the sentiment of numerous individuals and groups who have been fighting in the real world trenches for full disclosure of all of Barack Hussein Obama’s records, including his birth certificate, for the last three years. People such as Commander Charles Kerchner (retired) and Attorney Mario Apuzzo, Pennsylvania Attorney Philip Berg, Reverend David Manning of Atlah Ministries, and numerous others who have spoken out and taken their valiant fight for full disclosure of Obama’s records to the nation’s courts, only to be struck down for lack of standing or other arbitrary judicial opinions.

Due to the recent public statements by billionaire businessman turned reality television star about the birth certificate issue, the eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama has gained equal amounts of renewed interest and contempt by the American media and a vocal segment of the American public. The latter display of contempt is nicely displayed by some recent interview clips, including the priceless Meredith Viera interview of Donald Trump where she can hardly hold back her disdain of Mr. Trump and the entire eligibility matter, and Donald Trump’s appearance on “The View” last month.

Read the rest of this very interesting piece here.

The UK is waking up when it's too late, it is not too late here

As I drove across the causeway that connects my village with the larger town I could see far across the bay to the farmlands that are becoming windfarms. It looked as if they were marching straight into our town of Rockport. We are in an essential flyway for birds, we have whooping cranes and sandhill cranes which are large vulnerable birds. Please do not let them get any closer.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought
But your 'leccy bill will keep going up to buy more of it

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

The report (28-page PDF/944 KB) was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.

In general it tends to be assumed that a wind farm will generate an average of 30 per cent of its maximum capacity over time. However the new study shows that this is actually untrue, with the turbines measured by the Grid turning in performances which were significantly worse:

Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.

Want to know what has happened to our economy? Here's an answer.

America's dying industries: List of top 10 declining business revealed
By Daily Mail Reporter
It is a telling snapshot of how our lives, and what we buy, have changed over the last 10 years.

A list of the top 10 declining U.S. industries was revealed today - and it's as varied as it is predictable, encompassing everything from garment manufacturing to video post production.

While traditional manufacturing features heavily, more modern businesses such as DVD and computer game rental have also succumbed to the inevitable march of technological progress.

The report by business consultants Ibis World shows 10 industries that are in the decline phase of their life cycle.

It will make bleak reading for President Obama as he today launched his campaign for re--election.

The report highlights the industries that, during the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, experienced a sizeable contraction in revenue.

To be in the list of 10, they also needed to forecast further deterioration for revenue growth and establishments over the five years to 2016.

There is more to the story but here are the top ten.

• Manufactured Home Dealers
• Record Stores
• Photofinishing
• Wired Telecommunications Carriers
• Apparel Manufacturing
• Newspaper Publishing
• DVD Game and Video Rental
• Mills
• Formal Wear and Costume Rental
• Apparel Manufacturing

Read the whole story here.

Scientific frauds are getting shown up more and more these days.

Another one from Pajamas Media. Are we surprised?

WHO Study Used to Justify ObamaCare a Scientific Fraud

Findings were skewed to show better performance from countries with socialized health care systems.
by Rich Baehr

During the long debate over health care reform in 2009 and 2010, the advocates for the legislation made several key arguments, suggesting most of all that a health care financing system that covered a large number of the currently uninsured would be fairer — that a primary goal of health care reform was redistribution. This argument reflected the conclusions of a 2000 study by the World Health Organization, which made fairness the most important single aspect in its evaluation and comparison of health care systems around the world.
....
An article in the current issue of Commentary (subscription only) suggests that the WHO study, which provided the “moral” basis and primary justification for ObamaCare, is deeply flawed.

Read the whole article for all the details.

Victor Davis Hanson names it correctly again

Nobody can make a correct point quite like VDH.  Can we call him a political John Wayne?  Well, according to this he probably wouldn't want that designation because of John Wayne's personal life.

Kingdom of Lies

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

Alger Hiss really was a communist operative, albeit an elegant and snooty sort of one. The Rosenbergs were tag-team spies.... I admire the lives of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, even as I sensed there were large areas of their biographies that simply could not be disclosed and that the censorship was apparently for our own good. I know that if I did what Eliot Spitzer did I would not be hosting a TV show.

I did not quite know how “witch hunt” characterized the often disreputable tactics of Joe McCarthy — cruel and obnoxious were the better adjectives. You see, there were really communists in Hollywood at a time of a dangerous global cold war against communism, in a way there were never any witches at all in Salem.

But then for some reason I sensed that a murderous, camouflaged Fidel Castro killed more innocents than a murderous, gold-braided Augusto Pinochet. I accepted that we were to be silent about the former’s crimes since his ends were said to be good, while the latter’s crimes were for the bad — though economists of no particular political affiliations have shown that Chileans escaped poverty and dictatorship while Cubans were, and are still, plagued by both.

As far as Hollywood, goes, as I have said, I do not go to the cinema at all. The choices are meager. We can watch a George Clooney, Matt Damon, or Ben Affleck — multimillionaires all of mediocre talent — uncover some corporate or CIA conspiracy that threatens the environment (their employers and distributors are not corporate?), the non-white male, or global peace — or sit through yuppie crises whose double entendres and cute repartees are known mostly only to metrosexuals between New York and D.C., or from Malibu to Newport Beach. .....

The media is our ministry of truth of the Oceania brand: one day Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, Predators, the Patriot Act, and Iraq were bad; then one day in January 2009 I woke up and heard of them not all.....

Much, so much more from VDH. Read it all here.

We knew the press was liberal but this gives the facts of how it got that way

From Pajama's Media:

America’s Marxist Media
For them, truth doesn't work like it does for you and me.
by David B. Jenkins

To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long ‘tis like to be.
– A.E. Houseman, Last Poems, xxv

It has by now become glaringly apparent to all but the most obtuse or thoroughly indoctrinated among us that a majority of the members of the mainstream media (I call them cockroach media, but we’ll come back to that later) are socialists in outlook and practice. As Kyle-Anne Shiver wrote in an article for Pajamas Media on August 28, 2010, “We now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that our formerly august mainstream media is replete with socialists.”

In the interest of clarity, though, let’s not use the word “socialists,” a term that has become somewhat socially acceptable in certain quarters and to that extent masks the radicalism of their ideas. Socialists are Marxists, so let’s call them what they are: Marxists.

How did the mainstream media get to be the way they are? To find the answer, let’s turn to an old source.

Helen MacInnes was a Scottish-born novelist whose writing career spanned nearly four and a half decades. Most of her 21 novels dealt with the struggle against totalitarianism. During World War II, she wrote stirring novels of the fight against Nazi Germany. After the conclusion of that war, while other writers were busily plotting stories of the threat of a reincarnated Nazism, she was among the first to understand that communism, with its subversive hooks already well set in the upper levels of many governments, including ours, represented a far greater threat to human freedom.

In her 1951 book Neither Five nor Three, she uses her writer’s skills masterfully to create a gripping and entertaining story that is at the same time a chilling description of the methods the left used to take almost complete control of a once-noble institution: the American media. By undermining, discrediting, and marginalizing honest reporters, writers, and editors, the left gradually replaced them with people who would oh-so-subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) parrot the Party line.
.........
When did the subversion process begin? It probably began with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and was certainly well underway in the 1930s. A prime early example of the manipulation of U.S public opinion by the media was America’s sellout of China to the communists in the 1940s. James Perloff writes in The New American that “a plethora of books and news reports perpetuated the myth that Mao’s communists were ‘democratic agrarian reformers.’”

Read the rest it is interesting and doesn't even address the recent past of how the media attacked George W Bush and made way for the impostor of a patriot who is our current president.

Secretary Gates, an Honorable man in a tough spot

I'm not sure that is what David Ignatius is saying here, but it is what I think.

Gates underlines the dangers in the Middle East

Defense Secretary Bob Gates is running through the standard list of factors that have caused political upheaval across the Middle East: the youth bulge, unemployment, corruption. I start to ask another question but Gates cuts me off, as if he wants to underline the dangers and uncertainties of this moment of history.

Gates says the unrest has highlighted "ethnic, sectarian and tribal differences that have been suppressed for years" in the region, and that as America encourages leaders to accept democratic change, there's a question "whether more democratic governance can hold . . . countries together in light of these pressures." The implication: There's a risk that the political map of the modern Middle East may begin to unravel too, with, say, the breakup of Libya.

Then Gates says something policymakers rarely admit in crisis, which is that he doesn't know how things will turn out: "I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined, and that it's not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending. . . . We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be."

He has a lot more to say, read it here. You will notice I have highlighted what Gates said, not what Ignatius thinks, although I have not seen the originals.

Chickens coming home to roost? I hope so

Liberal groups call for GE’s Jeffrey Immelt to resign from White House jobs council
By Perry Bacon Jr

Two liberal groups Wednesday called for General Electric Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt to step down as the head of the White House’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness following a report that GE paid no federal taxes last year despite more than $14 billion in profits.

“One of the chief ways GE avoids paying taxes is by shifting a large portion of its profits overseas,and jobs follow. Now GE’s CEO is the person charged with helping the President create jobs here in America. That’s just perverse, “ the groups MoveOn.org and Progressives United told supporters in an e-mail message.

President Obama tapped Immelt to head the council in January. A story in the New York Times on Friday reported that General Electric avoids U.S. tax liability through a complicated series of financial moves.

We are the Tea Party and we elected you

The Washington Post is writing about this today, yesterday and last week.  They just cannot get over the fact that people who got together to change the makeup of congress would actually want their mandates enacted.  Here is today's: (actually it is first from  the Associated Press)

Tea party to House Republicans: Remember us? We helped elect you and we say no compromises

WASHINGTON — The tea partyers who helped drive GOP gains in the last election are rallying in the city they love to hate Thursday, urging Republican House leaders — Speaker John Boehner above all — to resist the drive toward compromise in the protracted fight over the federal budget. Even, they say, if that means Congress fails to do its most important job: pay for the government.
And if Boehner opts instead to agree to a deal with President Barack Obama?

“You’re going to see massive amounts of (GOP) primaries” in next year’s election, said Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots. If the Ohio Republican strikes a budget deal that doesn’t cut spending enough, Meckler said Wednesday, “he is going to face a primary challenge.”

It’s tough talk from a member of the loosely affiliated political force that helped drive Boehner’s Republican troops into the House majority last year on a platform of smaller, more austere government. And during three months in power, Boehner’s been listening.

Read all the rest here.