Quote:

---

Originally posted by Niki2:
Hmmmm...disarray on the right?

Quote:

---

After Republicans recaptured the House on Nov. 2, party leaders tried their best to tamp down the sense of triumph. "This is not a time for celebration," minority leader John Boehner admonished a GOP crowd during election-night festivities. "This is a second chance for us," Boehner's deputy, Eric Cantor, told CNN the next day. "If we blow it again, we will be in the wilderness for a very long time."

Though delivered to rank-and-file members, the remarks were clearly aimed at the Tea Party activists instrumental in the GOP's sweeping gains. Since their emergence as a powerful political force, Tea Party leaders have repeatedly warned that the GOP cannot take its support for granted. Lawmakers who simply used the movement as a springboard to office only to swerve from its guiding principles, they said, would be thrown from their perch at the next opportunity. With the elections behind them, Tea Party activists would promptly pivot from allies to watchdogs.

It's hard to imagine they like what they're seeing so far in the nation's capital.

In the House, key committee chairmanships were doled out to veteran Republicans whose records clash with the Tea Party policy pillars of smaller government, fiscal responsibility and free markets. The GOP Steering Committee awarded the Energy and Commerce gavel to Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan moderate whose candidacy sparked condemnations from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as well as a "Down with Upton" Internet petition that cited offenses ranging from his support of the Wall Street and auto-industry bailouts to his opposition to incandescent lightbulbs. To chair the powerful Appropriations Committee, GOP leaders tapped Kentucky lawmaker Hal Rogers, whose earmarking prowess led to his christening as the "Prince of Pork." Meanwhile, the ink was barely dry on the GOP's much touted earmark moratorium before members reportedly began probing for loopholes.

Ned Ryun, the president of American Majority, a Virginia-based group that trains Tea Party activists, called the committee-chairmanship choices "a slap in the face" for the movement. If that's true, one might expect that the tax plan hammered out by the White House and GOP leaders feels like a haymaker to the jaw. After chanting Tea Party mantras for months, congressional Republicans appear poised to back a bill characterized by many as a second stimulus — one that piles hundreds of billions of dollars in debt, including a slate of deal sweeteners tucked into the package to appease special interests, onto an already bulging federal budget gap.

"The GOP is going to pay dearly," says Colleen Conley, president of the Rhode Island Tea Party, "for so quickly forgetting that the people want deficit reduction and limited government."

The Tea Party Patriots, the movement's largest umbrella organization, recently circulated a petition urging members to oppose the pact, calling the framework a violation of first principles. Other conservative organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to the antitax Club for Growth, came out against the plan. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, the firebrand of the GOP's conservative wing, told TIME last week that the plan's inclusion of deficit spending is "going to give a lot of Republicans who just ran for office heartburn." Apart from DeMint, however, few Republicans — retiring Ohio Senator George Voinovich is one, along with Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Jeff Flake of Arizona in the House — have announced they will vote against the deal.

---

More at: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2036857,00.html#ixzz1
87srl3RX

At the very least, it's good to see one part of the right which sees the enormous increase in the debt as a bad thing!


Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

---