Archive for the ‘Tea Party Nation’ Category

BY Aaron Goldstein

The Obama 2012 campaign is in full gear and playing from the Saul Alinsky playbook that has served it so well. You know the drill. Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.
Obama’s re-election team has set it sights on the Tea Party. Of course, it’s not the first time the Tea Party has been in Team Obama’s crosshairs. Just last month, while appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, David Axelrod told Candy Crowley that Republicans in Congress “were in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged the party to the right.” So if one of Obama’s top advisers is prepared to liken his political adversaries to terrorists then you know there’s no limit to what Obama and his acolytes are prepared to say about the Tea Party. In two of its campaign ads with its Maoist inspired theme “Forward,” the voiceover solemnly says, “Some said our best days were behind us,” accompanied by images with Tea Party protesters.
Tea Partiers, like a majority of Americans, believe the country is going in the wrong direction under President Obama’s policies. But that’s a far cry from believing that America’s best days are behind us. As someone who addressed the Tea Party Tax Day Rally in Worcester, Massachusetts, last month, I can personally attest that Tea Party activists want to leave their children and grandchildren with a better America. Consider this portion from the Worcester Tea Party Mission Statement:
The Worcester Tea Party is a local, all volunteer, non-profit organization. Across the greater Worcester County area we are building the bottom-up organization to return our country back to the principles that made her great.
We need to connect with our neighbors to form strong local groups, ready to take on whatever challenges we face. Together, there’s no limit to what we can achieve.
Now that doesn’t sound like an organization that believes America’s best days are behind it. If the Worcester Tea Party or any other chapter of the Tea Party believed that it wasn’t possible for America to have a better future, then the Tea Party would not be much of a political force and would have ceased to exist long ago. It could be that President Obama knows about as much about the Tea Party as he does about the authority of the Supreme Court to overturn legislation, the difference between the Maldives and the Malvinas. or how many states there are in the Union. Or it could very well be that President Obama knows exactly what the Tea Party represents and simply isn’t telling the truth.
With regard to the Obama campaign’s targeting of the Tea Party, Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard writes that “one expects this line of attack many times over before November’s presidential election.” Halper is no doubt correct in his assessment. Obama’s targeting of the Tea Party has only just begun. Yet this shouldn’t be viewed as a negative development. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that obituaries were being written for the Tea Party. Back in January, Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos wrote, “The Tea Party proved itself ineffective, irrelevant and co-opted this primary cycle.” A year after the mid-term elections, Robert Schlesinger of U.S. News & World Report sardonically wrote, “Remember the Tea Party? It was all the rage back in ’10, inspiring fear in establishment Republicans and loathing in Democrats.” Last September, Will Bunch of Media Matters argued that the Tea Party was basically a creation of “the right-wing media, and it echoes.” Bunch’s argument is basically a variation on the theme put out by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who once characterized the Tea Party as “Astroturf.”
But if the Tea Party is so ineffective, irrelevant, co-opted, artificial, and as out of style as a polyester suit, then why does the Obama 2012 campaign feel the need not only to conjure up images of the Tea Party but to misrepresent its positions? If anything, Obama’s attention towards the Tea Party demonstrates its strength and resonance with a significant portion of the electorate. So by all means I hope the Obama campaign continues to target the Tea Party. In his pursuit of re-election, President Obama might end up making the Tea Party stronger than ever.

by Karen Holt

The most influential and aggressive group in the political arena today, the Tea Party, is committed to searching out and identifying strong conservative candidates, then providing support to their campaigns in an effort to champion the organization’s values in an effort to return the United States to the constitutional principals established by the Founding Fathers; values which for many years have made America the ‘shining city on a hill.’

The six simple principals of the Tea Party are:

No more bailouts
Reduce the size and intrusiveness of government
Stop raising our taxes
Repeal Obamacare
Cease out-of-control spending
Bring back American prosperity
The Tea Party was born in the political spotlight as it boldly announced its presence on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009. Childhood was fleeting as the movement grew quickly through giant Tax Day rallies.

With mid-term elections on their way, town-hall meetings began to take place as disgruntled voters demanded to be heard by their representatives. Many of those representatives, knowing what they faced from their constituents after witnessing what their colleagues had already been through, chickened out and cancelled the meetings. This frustrated their constituents all the more, and as a result, many of those who refused to meet with their constituents lost their opportunity to return to Washington following the election.

There are those who now wonder if the Tea Party still exists because the ‘umbrella’ organizations have yet to endorse a candidate. Presidential front runner, Mitt Romney, is seen by many as totally un-Tea-Party-like; partly because of the involvement he had with Massachusetts’ health-care reform law during his time as that state’s governor.

Harvard Professor Theda Skocpol recently released a book entitled, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. While doing her research, she traced about 1,000 tea party groups which formed between 2009 and 2010. Her estimates today put the number at 600. Though the number may seem to be diminishing, Skocpol considers 600 to be a good survival rate. “They’re not dressing up and going to demonstrations in the street. They’re meeting. They’re poring over the legislative records of these Republicans that they elected. They’re contacting their representatives, and they’re keeping the pressure on. They’re following the debates . . . They’re voting. They’re determined and they haven’t gone away.”

Those who evaluate the success of an organization according to measures used inside-the-Beltway (endorsements, wins/losses in polls, dollars donated) ignore the power of the Tea Party. This is basically due to harboring a fundamental misunderstanding of what the organization is all about. What it is not is a party such as the Republican or Democratic Party. Instead, it is a style of politics – an ideology – which presently seeks to pull the Republican Party back from the slow drift it has taken towards the left.

Constitutional law professor Elizabeth Price Foley, author of The Tea Party: Three Principles refers to the Tea Party as being the ‘new Republican base.’ “If anything, the Tea Party is the one who is moving the mountain; the mountain being the Republican Party.” A good example of this was the congressional debate over the debt during the summer of 2011. During the debate, representatives who stand by the principals of the Tea Party forced Speaker John Boehner’s hand and were instrumental in postponing a vote to raise the debt ceiling and required a balanced-budget provision to be incorporated.

Being Republican does not guarantee a candidate the Tea Party’s backing. The party is still hard at work today to promote conservative ideology in all levels of government, from the mayor’s office to the White House and in both the state and federal legislatures. Those GOP incumbents whose track records do not live up to the necessary conservative standards will be targeted by the Tea Party for replacement as strongly as any liberal. Two high-profile senators serve as perfect examples of this fact – Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Indiana Senator Richard Lugar – two of the GOP’s most senior members in the Senate.

Since the Tea Party’s endorsement of Lugar’s opponent, Indiana Attorney General Richard Mourdock, the Madison County Republican Party has taken to the air prior to the state’s May primary to tell voters, If you care about the real Republican Party, you must act now before it is too late.

Lugar and Hatch, along with other left-leaning Republicans, need to keep in mind that even though voters who hold fast to the principals of the Tea Party may not be out in the streets holding signs and sponsoring rallies, their numbers are interwoven into the fabric of every community. You may not see them, but they are there, they are in it for the long haul – and they vote!

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 10:27 am

Last week, at the annual conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, I interviewed Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, about the development of the Tea Party. Kibbe said, among other things, that the Tea Party is becoming more directly political, focusing on get-out-the-vote efforts and the like, and, more importantly, that “the community is now seeking out the ideas of liberty. . . . They want to understand what it is they’re fighting for.”

Colleen Owens
In January and February of this year, the Internal Revenue Service began sending out letters to various local Tea Parties across the country. Mailed from the same Cincinnati, Ohio IRS office, these letters have reached Tea Parties in Virginia, Hawaii, Ohio, and Texas (we are hearing of more daily). There are several common threads to these letters: all are requesting more information from these independent Tea Parties in regard to their nonprofit 501(c)(4) applications (for this type of nonprofit, donations are not deductible). While some of the requests are reasonable, much of them are strikingly onerous and, dare I say, Orwellian in nature.

What are local Tea Partiers to think with requests like “Please identify your volunteers” or “are there board members or officers who have run or will run for office (including relatives)”? What possible reason would the IRS have for Tea Parties to “name your donors” when said donations are non-deductible? These are just a few of the questions asked by the IRS in these letters, and one cannot help but suspect an intrinsic threat encompassing all these demands.
The other question is the timing of these IRS letters requesting reams of copies and hundreds of hours of work and potentially thousands of dollars in accounting/legal fees (all due in two weeks). Some of these Tea Party groups have not received anything concerning their nonprofit status since 2010 prior to these letters.
These documents are further undermined by a letter sent to the IRS Commissioner Shulman. Signed by six Senators, it requests that the commissioner investigate 501(c)(4) groups to determine whether they are engaging in substantial campaign activity, including opposition to any candidate. Who signed this letter? Senators Schumer, Franken, Udall, Shaheen, Whitehouse, Merkley and Bennet — all Democrats.
Could it be that these Senators want the IRS to investigate the nonprofit status of Media Matters and its coordinated political activity with the White House? Or perhaps they are concerned with nonprofit ACORN groups’ record of voter fraud, and other previous campaign abuses including alleged close ties with President Obama’s Project Vote? No, when these Senators sent this letter to the IRS commissioner, the message would be very clear. The 501(c)(4) groups they want investigated are not those with Democratic liberal ties.
But why would a department like the IRS cave to Democrat demands? Could it be because this Democratic administration proposed a budget earlier this month that would result in “$1.1 billion in new funds for the Internal Revenue Service… that would translate to 5,112 new hires, or a 5 percent expansion of enforcement operations”? Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, couldn’t contain her glee at the prospect of over 5,000 new union hires, exclaiming in response to the announcement that “the administration’s 2012 funding level for the IRS would permit the agency to improve services through increasing response rates to inquiries, deploying enforcement resources to what the White House called high-return integrity activities and by modernizing information technology systems.”
The IRS is already focusing on “deploying enforcement resources,” as Kelley put it, toward targeting small, local Tea Parties; we’re sorry to report that these “high-return integrity activities” are generating a higher fear factor, not necessarily higher returns.
In the near future, the Affordable Healthcare Act mandate and all things related to healthcare are to be policed and enforced by the IRS. This means thousands more IRS agents will be added, but the actual number is yet unknown. Considering that healthcare accounts for 1/6th of the U.S. economy, it will probably be a significant number of additional agents. According to the tax administration inspector general, Russell George, “The new Affordable Care Act provisions represents the largest set of tax law changes in 20 years.” That’s an overwhelming thought considering there are over 70,000 pages of federal tax code.
The Tea Party movement is well known for wanting to shrink the size of government and decrease government spending because of the ballooning deficit. This means that unionized government employees that may be out of a job if the Tea Party is successful also have the power to choose whether or not Tea Party groups get nonprofit status. And those same employees are also requesting names and information of board members, volunteers, donors, invited speakers(and party affiliation) and just about anyone that has had any association with the Tea Party.
It is apparent that there is a potential conflict of interest and it could be used to stifle the right to free speech of the Tea Party members, or any other citizen willing to question the system and powers that be.
Many Tea Party boards are afraid to speak out publicly about these intrusive requests because of fear of being personally targeted and singled out by the IRS. This is especially scary to citizens of modest incomes that don’t have the financial means to hire accountants or tax attorneys. And that is probably the point. Cower and fade away, or face possible persecution at the hands of government bureaucrats.
Some people may read this article about this possibly-coordinated effort against Tea Parties and be glad. But, the tables can easily be turned if and when another party takes control. The potential of using the IRS as a weapon against those that disagree with the people in power is exactly why the Tea Party fears the growth of government.
If your Tea Party has received similar letters, please let me know (Colleen Owens, citizenczar@gmail.com) and I will put you in contact with other Tea Parties that have also received them. I will not publish your Tea Party or names publicly.
Remember the words of Ben Franklin, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

During the heady days of the 2009 protests against the “Porkulus” bill, Obamacare, and big government in general, many people spoke of the rise of the Tea Party movement as the result of Presidents Obama and Bush having “woken the sleeping giant” of pro-liberty America.

But that giant may turn out to be a pygmy when compared to what Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Occupy Wall Street have awoken with their incessant and intensifying class warfare.

Americans who consider themselves Tea Partiers are a minority of the country, even if a significant and motivated one. The real majority, one which Democrats are foolishly antagonizing, are those of us who refuse to accept the left’s claims that Americans of one economic class are the enemy of those in another economic class.

A recent poll by Gallup shows that the efforts of Obama and the Occupiers may be backfiring against the beggar-thy-neighbor Alinskyite left.

To be clear, while the poll shows that “Americans’ views of their own position as ‘haves’ or ‘have nots’ have been remarkably stable,” the percentage of Americans who believe that the nation is dividedalong those lines has plunged since the last similar poll, done just prior to President Obama’s election in 2008.

During the Bush years, people were beginning to think that lower-income Americans were in a form of conflict with the elite, now called “the 1 percent,” or were perhaps even their victims. Those views became particularly intense during the depth of the 2008 financial crisis when politicians of both parties, parroted by media everywhere, blamed the real estate crash and ensuing stock market plunge on Wall Street bankers who fooled unsuspecting borrowers into buying houses they couldn’t afford and then securitized “toxic” derivatives and sold them to unsuspecting investors.

The mess was far more a failure of government than of markets, something which one might think would be difficult for the American people to learn, especially since politicians of both parties have a lot to answer for when it comes to pushing “affordable housing” aka “vote buying” on the nation.

But Barack Obama has given the nation a tremendous object lesson by posing the federal government as the solution to all problems — and then proving that it isn’t. When the president said that spending a trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings would keep unemployment below 8 percent only to see us spend the last two and a half years with only three months below 9 percent unemployment — and none below 8.5 percent — the public begins to see the economic emperor as wearing no clothes.

Even if the voters don’t think about it explicitly, if the Obama administration’s claims about government fixing the economy are so obviously false, then just perhaps the other charges made about evil capitalists being the source of all evil may also be false. At least, they’re worth skepticism.

And thus the public has become skeptical.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has likewise had the opposite effect of what its anarcho-socialist hygiene-challenged spoiled middle-class kids intended. When you see “protesters” defecating on a police car or an American flag, instigating violence, and generally being incoherent, the ordinary American is likely to see those people as a greater threat than a bunch of villainized bankers could ever be. Again, when the messenger is so utterly without credibility, the internalized message among the public is likely to be the opposite of what the preachers of radicalism offer.

Among those 19 groups for which Gallup broke out the “haves” versus “have nots” responses, only one, those earning less than $30,000 per year, had a majority who put themselves in the latter category. Even the unemployed, non-whites, those without a college degree, and Democrats all have a majority who self-identify as “haves.”

While a majority of Americans believe that the nation is not divided along these lines, a majority of Democrats do buy into the class warfare rhetoric, with 58 percent saying we are split between “haves” and “have-nots.” However, even that is down three percent from 2008. Independent voters reject the class warfare concept with only 37 percent believing we’re divided, a stunning drop of 11 points from three years ago. Similarly, self-identified moderates are at 38 percent, down 13 percent. Not surprisingly, barely one quarter of Republicans (26 percent) and conservatives (27 percent) see class warfare as real.

Interestingly, while the numbers for Independents and moderates were nearly identical, as were Republicans and conservatives, there is a significant gap between Democrats and liberals, with the latter group showing a 66 percent majority believing in the “haves” versus “have-nots” divide, eight percent more than Democrats. While this might mean that there are liberal Independents adding to the number, a bigger take-away is likely that there is a fair number of slightly conservative Democrats, those we used to call Reagan Democrats, who might drift away from their party’s presidential nominee.

As if to reemphasize the point, another Gallup poll released Fridayshows that “More Americans say it is important that the federal government enact policies that grow the economy and increase equality of opportunity than say the same about reducing the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.” Only 46 percent of poll respondents thought that government efforts to reduce income or wealth gaps between rich and poor were “extremely important” or “very important.” However, when it comes to increasing equality of opportunity, the number is 70 percent, and for “grow and expand the economy” the number jumps to 82 percent. Somewhere Thomas Jefferson is smiling; Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky not so much.

We are all Americans, all endowed with an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, and most of us with aspirations to the American Dream of upward economic mobility. When you hate your neighbor because of his success, you shred our national fabric. Barack Obama may want to go down that road, but most of the rest of the nation properly finds his intentional attempts to divide us somewhere between dubious and abhorrent.

As Gallup notes, “Americans as a whole are no more likely to see the country as divided into haves and have nots than at any time in the past two decades.” This is bad news for Barack Obama and other Democrats running for reelection in 2012. Their siren song of divide-and-conquer is falling flat on the ears of the majority of Americans. But the annoying political tinnitus is awakening the real sleeping giant — those Americans who recognize that our nation did not become great by thinking like V.I. Lenin, Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao.

Could repeal Obama’s healthcare law and eliminate Department of Education and HUD

By PAUL BEDARD
October 18, 2011 RSS Feed Print
The Tea Party would go much further than the House Republicans, the Simpson-Bowles Commission and the congressional super-committee with its new deficit cutting plan, pushing reductions of $9 trillion over 10 years by eliminating several major programs and agencies.

[Check out political cartoons about the Tea Party.]

Previewing its plan set for a mid-November release, FreedomWorks today reported that most Tea Party supporters want to kill Obamacare, close the doors on the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development, and privatize financial giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

“There’s a real hunger for bold, principled solutions and an end to bipartisan ‘kicking the can down the road.’ As we know only too well, many regular citizens out there have pretty much given up on Washington insiders ever listening to their concerns,” said the preview provided to Whispers.

Disappointed by the size of the cuts made in July’s debt ceiling deal, FreedomWorks created a Tea Party Debt Commission with a goal of cutting $9 trillion over 10 years. It encouraged Tea Party supporters to help and set up a Web page and poll to help sift through potential budget cutting targets.

[Check out political cartoons about the budget and deficit.]

The top 10 suggested cuts by Tea Party members total $6 trillion over 10 years, more than the cuts proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the president’s Simpson-Bowles Commission, and the totals being sought by the congressional “super committee.”

The Tea Party’s top 10 preferred cuts:

1. Repeal Obamacare (93%)

2. Reduce duplicative purchases of Pentagon Supplies (90%)

3. Eliminate Department of Education (81%)

4. Privatize Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac (81%)

5. Reduce discretionary spending to 2008 levels (76%)

6. Block grant Medicaid (74%)

7. End ethanol tax credits (71%)

8. Sell needless federal buildings (71%)

9. Eliminate HUD (70%)

10. Reduce Medicare teaching subsidies (68%)

See the full preliminary report here.

Read: Tea Party: Stop Comparing Occupy Wall Street To Us.
Check out political cartoons about the Tea Party.
See editorial cartoons about the budget and deficit.

 NO MORE RHINO’S          NO MORE RHINO’S      NO MORE RHINO’S

9 (NINE) 9 ( NINE) 9 (NINE) EVERYONE CAN UNDERSTAND THAT

In a recent article penned for CNN addressing President Obama, unabashed Democratic strategist James Carville revealed his true feelings about the Tea Party.
Carville boldly asserted that its members harbor a deep seated blood-lust — a kind so egregious in fact that they would have orgasmically rejoiced over the deaths at Stalingrad. The “Rajun’ Cajun“ also lamented the ”clean-air-hating, mortality-fascinated, Wall-Street-protecting Republicans running my country.”
“This may be news to you [Obama] but this is not going well. For precedent, see Russian Army 64th division at Stalingrad. There were enough deaths at Stalingrad to make the entire tea party collectively orgasm,” Carville blasted.
Strangely, the bizarre tirade appeared in a “letter” that was focused on Obama’s re-election strategy. For Carville, smearing conservatives and Obama’s re-election apparently go hand in hand. He continued:
“As I watch the Republican debates, I realize that we are on the brink of a crazy person running our nation,” Carville fretted. “I sit in front of the television and shudder at the thought of one of these creationism-loving, global-warming-denying, immigration-bashing, Social-Security-cutting, clean-air-hating, mortality-fascinated, Wall-Street-protecting Republicans running my country.”
Carville’s brief list of things Obama must do to get re-elected included, “panic,“ ”fire a lot of people,“ and ”indict people.”
Below is a clip of Carville discussing his article with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer:

The Tea Party is a grassroots effort of millions of Americans seeking to realign our government with the intent of our Founding Fathers. It is a non-partisan movement that believes government should operate within the framework of the Constitutionm and acknowledges that both Republican and Democrat Congresses have violated this principle and passed unconstitutional laws (i.e., The Patriot Act, Healthcare)

The Tea Party movement seeks to realign the operations of our government, to within the framework of the Constitution. We are seeking this realignment because we believe when elitist politicians ignore the Constitution, in reality what they are saying is that they know what is best for us, because they possess the wisdom to over-rule the Constitution. This approach often leads to anarchy or fascism. Therefore, we seek to reestablish a Constitutional government. The core beliefs and goals are:

- American exceptionalism
- Limited federal government
- Limited federal spending (debt reduction)
- Strong states’ rights
- Strong national defense
- Enforcement of immigration laws
- Protection of individual rights
- Rejection of any UN jurisdiction over the U.S. (Agenda 21)

The media tends to portray conservatives as “righy wing” but in reality, conservatives appear to be the only true moderates. Just the Folks.

There is more to know than you see on your check stub, more than you see on your tax return, more than you see on your quarterly estimated taxes, more than you see at the gas pump. The following numbers from usrevenue.com bring some clarity to taxes in the US.

Federal Budgeted Revenue 2011 (Federal Government Income)

Income Taxes: 1.154 Trillion
SS/Med/Ins .806 Trillion
Ad-Valorem .133 Trillion
Business/Other .079 Trillion
Fees/Charges .001 Trillion
Total: 2.173 Trillion

53% is from personal income taxes paid by citizens
37% is from personal & employer SS, Medicare, or Gov. Ins. paid by citizens & employers
6% is from ad valorem: Fuel, Inheritance, Tariff, Leases, and other value-based taxes
3.6% is from corporate/business taxes
0.04% is from use fees or charges

53 % of all federal revenue is paid up front by us
16 % is deducted from our pay for social insurance
21 % is paid on our behalf by or employer, but ultimately it is passed back in the cost of products
6 % is paid by companies and passed on to us in the cost of products
4 % is paid by companies and passed on to us in the cost of products
Use fees or charges are paid by citizens directly to federal agencies, for the privilege of using (our) public land.

The fact is that we as citizens and consumers pay either directly or through hidden taxes the full $2 trillion in annual federal revenue. Business pays nothing, because they have to cover the cost of taxes in the price they charge for the products or services, which we pay. In addition they must bear the administrative costs for reporting and paying the taxes, again a cost coming to us in the price of the product or service.

There are a total of 311 million citizens, so the average citizen is paying $6987.00 this year in federal taxes. For a family of four the average is $27948.00. Averages however can be deceptive, for taxes are not paid evenly, in fact over 40% of all federal taxes are paid by just 1% of taxpayers, those in the highest income bracket, and a full 97% of taxes are paid by 50% of taxpayers, those of average income and above. Only 3% of taxes are paid by those in bottom 50% of the income scale.

It is just plain ignorance that people believe the rich should pay more taxes; each of us who make less than $410,000.00 are already being heavily subsidized by those who earn more than that.

Those that would increase corporate taxes to “redistribute the wealth” obviously don’t understand that a business tax is just a hidden tax on the consumer, and an overhead cost that takes investment and growth money out of businesses.

To foster a robust economy there should be no taxation of business. People should not have to send their social services money to the government; it should go into their personal accounts. There should be no hidden taxes; citizens should know exactly what they pay in taxes. Business would boom, prices would decrease, consumer power would increase, and personal wealth would increase.

Obama Our Prince of Wails, Goes on Another Vacation to Forget Tea Party Terrorists. I am beginning to wonder if this arrogant creature that is usurping our office of the presidency has any conscience or shame in that super-ego of his to go off on ANOTHER golfing vacation at a critical time.

by  Scott Baker

President Obama got into a heated back and forth with a Tea Party activist who demanded to know at the end of a town hall meeting here whether or not Vice President Biden had called members of the Tea Party “terrorists” during the debt ceiling debate.

In public, Obama did not directly answer the question from Tea Party activist Ryan Rhodes about Biden. But Obama fired back that he knows better than anyone what it’s like to be slammed for his political views and was not about to accept a lecture on the topic.

“As someone who’s been called a socialist, not born here, taking away freedoms for providing health care, I’m all for lowering the rhetoric,” Obama said.

Obama did say he would discuss the matter further with Rhodes, founder of the Iowa Tea Party, after the event. And the duo was spotted in an animated conversation a few moments later.

In an interview later with Fox News, Rhodes claimed that the President insisted that Biden had not made the original comment.

“He just denied it, he said the Vice President didn’t make any of those assertions,” said Rhodes. “He doesn’t want to even admit what was on TV nationally — all over the place — then how can you have a conversation?”

Rhodes added that Obama brushed him aside. “Then he said ‘we can’t have a conversation because you’re saying I called you a terrorist,’” recalled Rhodes. “The fact is it demonstrates the deep divide that he is unwilling to negotiate without going after the other side, the whole day was about going after republicans and talking about how unreasonable they are.”

The private conversation between Rhodes and Obama was partially picked up by a TV camera but the audio was a little tough to make out. But Obama in general did seem to be saying the incident with Biden was misconstrued and that if Rhodes wanted to insist that the word “terrorist” was used then they were never going to see eye to eye.

The incident stems from a private meeting Biden attended at the height of the debt ceiling debate with House Democrats who were angry that Republicans were not meeting the President halfway. One lawmakers, Rep. Mike Doyle D-Pa.), went so far as to say that Republicans affiliated with the Tea Party had behaved like “terrorists” during the debate.

Some Democrats familiar with the meeting said at the time that Biden had appeared to agree with the sentiment expressed by Doyle and others as a way of moving the conversation along and convincing Democrats to support the final compromise. But Biden himself denied to CBS News that he had uttered the word “terrorist” in the meeting in the context of the Tea Party.

Here in Iowa, some people in the Iowa crowd here seemed to be unhappy with Rhodes. One woman was overheard confronting him by saying, “That was extraordinarily rude” to the President.

A second woman who did not want to be identified by name said she felt the exchange was “over the top aggressive.”

But Rhodes was not backing down. “I said my piece,” he said.

BY GLENN BECK

When President Obama signed the final deal to increase the debt ceiling earlier this week, he kicked the can further down the road instead of addressing our nation’s fiscal problems now. The deal falls dramatically short of the goals of “Cut, Cap, Balance”, legislation which was championed by FreedomWorks, a broad coalition of grassroots groups and Tea Party lawmakers.

But what we saw in this debate was a liberal President, a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House all shift their positions toward the Tea Party. When we made our voices heard, everyone started talking about spending cuts not tax increases.

So as Congress now breaks for their August recess, your Representative will be holding town hall meetings over the next few weeks in your community. I need you to show up at these town halls and make YOUR voice heard again.

We’ve set up our August Action center on FreedomConnector, where you can get the FREE tools you need for town hall meetings this August: strategy memos, talking points, a map of town hall locations and more. http://connect.freedomworks.org/portals/august-action?src=aug5

Their recess means it’s time for us to take action. Conservative radio host Glenn Beck recently joined us by endorsing our August action plan live on the air:

“FreedomWorks and I are launching a major and powerful nationwide project designed to remind your Congressmen and Senators that you mean business. Remember when folks started realizing the Tea Party movement was for real? One of the biggest turning points was when the Tea Party members started taking over town hall meetings two summers ago. They couldn’t ignore it. Your elected officials are home for the August recess, and it’s time to take a little August Action.” — Glenn Beck

Go to August Action right now, download your free kit, and find your elected officials’ town halls! Don’t see a town hall in your area? Call your Representative, find out where they are hosting one, and create the town hall as an event on the August Action page so other activists can find it.

Don’t forget to bring your camera, video camera or notepad to your Representative’s town hall this August. You can add pictures, video and an after-action report at August Action to help us tell the real story about the town halls and counter the liberal media spin machine.

August Action is simply the best place for Tea Party members to get organized for August Recess.

“Everything you need to be effective, the tools are all there and they’re there for free at August Action…Go there now get the free tools you need to turn up the heat this summer,” — Glenn Beck.

As I said before, at August Action you’ll find free memos and talking points on important issues. You can use this information to ask questions during your Representative’s town hall meeting. In our August Action kit you’ll find out why we need to:

• Support the Lee/Wash Balanced Budget Amendment.
• Force Congress’ new “super committee” to cut more spending than was in the debt ceiling deal.
• Stop the regulatory train wreck at Obama’s EPA.
• Support Rep. Connie Mack’s Penny Plan to reduce federal spending.
• Push Congress to recognize the ideas of our Tea Party Debt Commission.

All these issues are critically important. The Left is already organizing to show up in town halls across America to drown out our message of limited government, free markets and individual liberty. I need you to help us fight back.