The 2010 and 2012 class of Tea Party House Congressional members have done an outstanding job of holding the line amid attacks from both Democrats and Republicans.  Can you just imagine what legislative life would be like without their fight?
Ted Cruz appears on ABC This Week and discusses his meeting with them during the shutdown.   Jonathan Karl is just aghast at their united patriotic perspectives.

So Speaker John Boehner doesn’t LIKE US ?

In 2009 we had a decision to make.   Either assemble our rapidly growing force under a new structure, a new political party; or align and take over an existing structure, and existing political party.     A prudent decision was made in 2010 to just take over an existing structure – Conservatives became insurgents within the Republican Party.
Initially the GOP saw benefit to our association.   Through us they could gain back the House of Representatives, and we did.   We handed them the gavel as a stop-gap measure to slow the growth of the infection, big government, that was killing our freedom.
But the GOP doesn’t like us.   We are not *their* type of people.  We are surly, deliberate, loud and, according to them, unrefined extremists, jihobbits and terrorists and such.   They consider us a rowdy bunch more comfy with a beer straight from the bottle and incapable of appreciating the aroma of their preferred vintages.
In short, they don’t like us.  We represent a risk to their influence, careers and livelihoods built upon retention of power.
Screw em’. (more…)

Brilliant parody ad for GOP Candidate Mike Collins (GA-10).   This commercial reflects a vibrancy, an ‘out of box’ new thinking, that can be infectious.  It is brilliant.

If the GOP is going to break the crusty dopey branding they are insufferably famous for –  this kind of enthusiastic risk taking is what sends an effective message.
I don’t know anything about Mike Collins per se’ but I do hold a remarkable level of appreciation for the 2010 freshman Tea-Party class of conservatives who have stood steadfast in the face of adversity from all sides.   That coalition can’t be bought and it’s driving the Dems, the media, and the establishment GOP nuts.    This Mike Collins type of approach is reinforcement for that group of reps who have patriotically held the line.

I hate to take exception with a substantive portion of this article but it misses several key factors.    Not the least of which is the decision to say: “….. if you like your plan/doctor, you can keep your plan/doctor – period”….., was not made AFTER the 2012 election, it was made way, way before.  President Obama and  crew were using this talking point in 2009 and 2010 (throughout term #1) and beyond – all the way to this summer.
The article seems to blame the absence of Axelrod, Gibbs and Plouffe for that fatal Obamacare talking point mistake.  This is factually incorrect.  David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, David Plouffe and *others*, including those still there, were all present when that decision was made.
(The Hill) Former administration officials and Democratic operatives say President Obama is ill-served by his current White House staff and must reboot his second term team following the disastrous ObamaCare rollout.
First-term insiders argue the White House’s weakness was defined by a lack of preparedness, messaging blunders and failure to keep the president informed.
They say Obama’s team lacks depth after the departures of longtime advisers David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Robert Gibbs and Patrick Gaspard, and suggest new people must be brought on.
“You basically have [White House senior adviser Dan] Pfeiffer and [deputy chief of staff] Rob Nabors running the show politically, and that’s it,” one former administration official said. (more…)

VIA TELEGRAPH – A senior advisor to the Saudi royal family has accused its Western allies of deceiving the oil rich kingdom in striking the nuclear accord with Iran and said Riyadh would follow an independent foreign policy.

Nawaf Obaid told a think tank meeting in London that Saudi Arabia was determined to pursue its own foreign and policy goals. Having in the past been reactive to events, the leading Sunni Muslim nation was determined to be pro-active in future.
Mr Obaid said that while Saudi Arabia knew that the US was talking directly to Iran through a channel in the Gulf state of Oman, Washington had not directly briefed its ally.
“We were lied to, things were hidden from us,” he said. “The problem is not with the deal struck in Geneva but how it was done.”   (read more)

George Will:  “Iran will now definitely get the [atomic] bomb” !

CAIRO — Israeli officials knew they were being kept in the dark as the U.S. conducted secret talks with Iran, and the knowledge that the White House was “going behind Israel’s back” was one of the key sources of tension between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, according to a senior Israeli minister and other Israeli officials. (more…)

NRO has a detailed explanation which is 100% in-line with all the research and prior considerations we have assembled.    The only point of contention I would lay over the well written article would be to remind readers it is not a construct of just Barack Obama per se’.  He is, after all, merely a willing participant in the scheme.   The actual architecture comes from a league of people, the circle of influence, in and around him.

( Via NRO) […]  The point of showing that Obama is carrying out a massive scheme to defraud — one that certainly would be prosecuted if committed in the private sector — is not to agitate for a prosecution that is never going to happen. It is to demonstrate that there is logic to the lies. There is an objective that the fraud aims to achieve. The scheme is the framework within which the myriad deceptions are peddled. Once you understand the scheme, once you can put the lies in a rational context, you understand why fraud was the president’s only option — and why “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan” barely scratches the surface of Obamacare’s deceit.
In 2003, when he was an ambitious Illinois state senator from a hyper-statist district, Obama declared: (more…)

(Via Daily Caller) If voters had been aware last year that they might lose their health-care plans when Obamacare went into effect, Republican President Mitt Romney would be sitting in the White House today, according to a poll released Friday.
A Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research survey conducted from Nov. 18-20 asked voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012: “As you may know, millions of Americans have lost their insurance plans despite President Obama’s promise that, quote, ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it.’ If you knew in 2012 that this promise was not true, would you still have voted for Barack Obama?”
In response, 23 percent said they would not have voted to re-elect Obama, while 72 percent said they would still have voted for him. The largest number of defections were among female voters ages 18-54, 31 percent of whom said they would not have supported the president. (more…)

(Via New York Post)  People are puzzled: Why would Barack Obama have lied about how wonderfully everything was going to go with ObamaCare when officials in his administration knew perfectly well that disaster was going to strike?
In one sense, the answer is simple: At the time, just before Oct. 1, Republicans were insisting ObamaCare be delayed or defunded. The president and his team weren’t going to give the enemy the satisfaction of agreeing — or the potent ammunition that would have come from a rueful admission the system wasn’t ready.
Today, a bipartisan agreement to delay ObamaCare seems like it would have been a pretty good deal. It didn’t look that way at all in the last two weeks of September.
But there’s a deeper reason he and his people lied: They did it because they could. They did it because nearly five years in the White House had given Obama and his team confidence they would not face the music and they could finesse the problems until they got fixed. (more…)

(Via Heritage)   Last week’s closed-door testimony by five CIA operatives who witnessed the attack on the U.S. special mission in Benghazi has finally created an opening for the congressional investigating committees.

The five CIA contractors, who testified in closed-door hearings before the House Intelligence Committee Thursday and Friday, were stationed at the “CIA annex” in Benghazi, about one mile from the U.S. special diplomatic mission. This was the facility that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tasked Ambassador Chris Stevens to turn into a permanent consulate, even though security staff there was totally inadequate. (more…)