The burgeoning IRS scandal is a clear example of a government agency abusing its power and repressing organizations that disagree with the party in power. This incredible abuse of power by an unelected bureaucracy is a serious threat to American political thought.

Pastor Martin Niemöller‘s famous poem illustrates the situation perfectly. He wrote this work following the Nazis‘ rise to power and the subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Catholic.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.

It is incumbent for us to correct this situation swiftly and forcefully. Any and all individuals who were in any way involved should be removed from the IRS and either terminated or transferred from this sensitive agency.

In Friday’s hearing, outgoing IRS chief Stephen Miller testified that he didn’t think that agents had any political motivations in their involved questioning of conservative organizations.

However, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, ripped the tax-collecting agency over the practice at the start of the hearing. “Now we know the truth — or at least some of it,” he said. “We also know that these revelations are just the tip of the iceberg. It would be a mistake to treat this as just one scandal.”

As the IRS scandal unfolds I expect that we will find further abuses of their authority. There may be instances of singling out political opponents for unnecessary audits. We have seen instances of that recently.

Prominent Republicans have been audited coincidentally during and after the recent general election after they had played a role in the Romney campaign.

We already have had several individuals come forward with their suspicions that they were audited due to their political stances.

Frank VanderSloot, an Idaho businessman who donated more than $1 million to groups supporting Romney, told ABC News he believes he may have been targeted for an audit after his opposition to the Obama administration.

So did Hal Scherz, a physician who started the group Docs4PatientCare to lobby against President Obama’s health care initiative, and became a vocal critic of the president on cable news programs.

Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, said he believes his father was a target of unusual IRS scrutiny as well, according to published reports Wednesday.

If the IRS took this types of politically motivated actions what other federal agencies dis the same thing against any number of conservative organizations? Only the appointment of a special prosecutor with a wide-ranging mandate will get to the bottom of this scandal.

In the classic movie Casablanca, Captain Renault utters a classic line, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” just before he is handed his winnings. Much the same thing is occurring in Washington and New York, where the mainstream media is discovered that the Obama administration has been circumventing the Constitution from almost the start.

The latest revelations that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has been singling out tea party organizations for audits when they applied for tax-exempt status have exploded like a bombshell in the media. In fact, it appears that the revelation by a mid-level manager of the tax-exempt group of the IRS was an attempt to get in front of this week’s release of an Inspector General’s report that will reveal that high level officials of the IRS were aware of the practice for almost two years. READ MORE

Earlier this month the Huffington Post published a piece by Nick Wing about an interview Phil Russo, a self-described libertarian-leaning, ”Goldwater Republican.” In the interview Mr. Russo proclaims that the conservative movement is dead, killed off by members of the “political and religious right” who have poisoned it with toxic strands of hypocrisy and racism.

It’s clear in the interview that Mr. Russo is an extreme libertarian who was severely disappointed that the movement did not become a vehicle for those of like mind. His main thrust is that racism has killed the movement. Here is his entire interview in The Grio.

Patricia Murphy in The Daily Beast interviewed Chris Littleton, the co-founder of the Ohio Liberty Council, a statewide coalition of Tea Party groups in Ohio in February 2012. Mr Littleton opined, “The Tea Party movement is dead. It’s gone. I think largely the Tea Party is irrelevant in the primaries. They aren’t passionate about any of the candidates, and if they are passionate, they’re for Ron Paul.”

Perhaps, Mr. Littleton missed the point at the time. Perhaps, the reason that the Tea Party Movement wasn’t passionate about any of the candidates was because none of them appealed to them. Placing candidates in front of the Tea Party and expecting them to select one is simply not a way to gain their support.

If the Tea Party is so dead then why do prominent Democrats understand the power of Tea Party-supported Representatives in the House. At the end of the last year during the fiscal cliff negotiations, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) told a crowd gathered outside the U.S. Capitol on Friday that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has given “veto power to the most extreme members of the Tea Party caucus.”

Van Hollen used the supposed extremism of the Tea Party elements in the House as a weapon against the Republicans. At the end of the negotiations he told his caucus: “Let’s keep the pressure on them—let’s not announce publicly that we’re going to vote for it,” he told Pelosi at the end of the caucus. “The Senate Republicans have already passed this overwhelmingly. So if most of Boehner’s guys vote against it … we’ll say this is proof of how extreme the House Republicans are.”

The left needs a boogie man to incite their base and they see the tea party as that vehicle. On the one hand they have tried to diminish the Tea Party by endless op-eds and posts about the death of the Tea Party Movement.

Yet, they seem to understand that the movement has some power on both the state and national stage. Republicans in red states will make a concerted effort to gain endorsements from local and state-wide Tea Party groups. Republican politicians look upon them for what they are, concerned citizens who are afraid that their country is on the wrong road.

Here’s what the left doesn’t understand about the Tea Party Movement. First and foremost, it is not a political party. It is composed of ordinary citizens who meet once or twice a month to discuss ideas and concerns about their country.

Yes, there is a cadre of hard-core members but most are just ordinary people who have normal lives and concerns. Were the Minutemen full-time soldiers? Of course not. But when it came time to defend their liberties they assembled and fought for their rights. The Tea Party members are the modern-day Minutemen.

Today is tax day in the United States. It is the day that all levels of American government collect income taxes on individuals across this great land. Governments, all governments, have one thing in common: taxation. One method of controlling government, cutting off its air so to speak, is to limit its means and sheer volume of taxes.

In the United States, the Founders knew this so they made very little provision for taxation by the central government. They saw the lack of taxes as means of assuring freedom and prosperity. The only provision that they made for taxation was in the event of war.

Up until 1913 when the 16th Amendment was enacted, READ MORE

On its face, the Common Core Curriculum sounds productive. It is just that, a broad standard curriculum for Mathematics, English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. These two broad areas of education are the foundation of all education system in America.

The Mission Statement is quite innocuous:

The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

Sounds innocent enough but the possibilities for abuse are endless. First and foremost, education in the United States has traditionally been the province of states and localities. Generally, local school boards with guidance from their states oversee education at all levels in elementary and secondary schools.

However with the advent of the Department of Education the federal government has increasingly interposed itself into this area. Using the carrot of federal funding, the government has imposed a series of federal mandates on local school.

Unfortunately, the lure of federal dollars is just to difficult to pass up and almost all school districts in the United States have been hooked.Social conservatives have never liked that kind of incentive game, especially when it’s connected to a Democratic president.

GOP Rep. Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is ground zero for the anti-Common Core movement, called the Common Core a “hook” from which the state could never extricate itself.

According to its critics, the most nefarious consequence of Common Core is a data collection program that’s part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus). The idea is to better track student demographic and achievement data to figure out what’s working and what’s not, and respond accordingly.

Heather Patenaude, a writer at the anti-core site Truth in Education synthesized the movement’s fears:

There will be a massive data tracking system on each child with over 400 points of information collected. This information can be shared among organizations and companies and parents don’t have to be informed about what data is being collecting. They will collect information such as: your child’s academic records, health care history, disciplinary record, family income range, family voting status, and religious affiliation, to name a few. Big brother will be watching your child from preschool till college (P20 Longitudinal Data System). You, the parent, are UNABLE to opt your child out of this tracking system.

Lawmakers in 18 states have considered legislation to block the implementation of the curriculum standards. Five—Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia—have successfully rejected or partially rejected Common Core. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell reiterated his opposition to Common Core in late March, just one week after Texas Gov. Rick Perry went on Beck’s program to denounce it.

On the most basic level, the fight over Common Core is same fight parents and policymakers have been waging over public education for the last century, centering on two basic questions: What is the appropriate level of federal involvement in local schooling? And if we did settle on an umbrella curriculum, what should it actually look like? Education reformer Diane Ravitch, for one, opposes Common Core on the grounds that, while there should be a set of national education tenets, she believes “such standards should be voluntary, not imposed by the federal government.”

“I do not necessarily agree with this,” the teacher also allegedly said, “but I am supposed to teach you that we are not to call these people terrorists anymore, but freedom fighters.”

What would require a teacher, any teacher in Texas to instruct his or her students in such a manner. It seems that 80% of the school districts in the state use CSCOPE, an all-embracing, online K-12 educational curriculum.

It appears that the progressives in the educational establishment see CSCOPE as a means to circumvent both the Texas legislative process and the desires of local school boards and communities. They also charge that the creators of the curriculum operate secretly and do not make it easy for parents or even school board members to see the material.

Here are several of the most egregious and outrageous lessons that the curriculum teaches.

Islam is awesome: In a unit of high school world history, the online material that students are given is essentially a paean to the greatness of Islam and its founder, Mohammed.

Christianity is a cult: the materials in another world history lesson inform students that Christianity is a cult that parallels the death and resurrection in the story of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. The same material takes pains to point out that early Christians were accused of incest, cannibalism and other atrocities.

Communism is awesome: At the top of a chart is communism, which the CSCOPE creators innocuously describe as “the idea of living together in a ‘commune’ where all people work together for everyone.” The chart manages to insult the Marxist vision of communism as well, by suggesting that government control and planning is highest under the system.

The Boston Tea Party was a terrorist attack: the Boston Tea Party, the famous protest against taxation without representation is depicted as an act of terrorism.

And the list goes on with equally ridiculous assertions praising terrorists as freedom fighters and asking for the student’s assistance in helping enforce a one-child policy world-wide.

The question that must be asked is , “Who is responsible for foisting this claptrap on Texas school children?”  CSCOPE has already been the subject of heated debate and state legislative hearings due to parental uproar over some of its curriculum content.

“I felt like the line had been crossed,” a parent said. “Christian kids who want to pray have to do it outside of school hours — yet Islam is being taught to our kids during school hours.” This parent questions why Islam is being taught in a geography class at all.

“She (the daughter) went from learning about Mexico to learning about Russia to learning about Islam. Islam is not a country. Islam is not a continent.”

The school district released a defensive statement to Fox News: “The lesson that was offered focused on exposing students to world cultures, religions, customs and belief systems. The lesson is not teaching a specific religion, and the students volunteered to wear the clothing.”

According to a press statement, jointly released by the Senator, the State Board of Education and CSCOPE representatives, the online curriculum provider ultimately agreed to “significant changes.” However, it is unclear what these change will be.

But after a number of reverses in electoral politics, the Tea Party movement is beginning to understand that there is strength in numbers. Continuing to deny the fact that the Tea Party is not a political party simply diminishes its power in the arena of ideas.

We are starting to see local tea party organizations coalescing into state level organizations in order to exercise their strength in numbers. Here in Virginia, local tea parties are in the process of joining together on a state-wide basis in order to exercise a voice in the upcoming state-wide nominating convention.

We already have our preferred candidate for Governor, current-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Currently, he is the only announced candidate for the position. There are several candidates for Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General vying for tea party support.

Opposing them will be a slate of typical liberal Democrats headed by Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton’s former campaign manager. He is making his second run for the Democrat nomination after an unsuccessful attempt four years ago.

Across the country, local tea parties are seeing the wisdom of joining together to seek out and endorse candidates. The concept of “strength in numbers” is trickling down to the local level and hopefully people will understand that it provides the Tea Party Movement of the strongest possible voice in state and national politics.

We did not coalesce behind preferred candidates in many races across the country in last year’s elections. Yes, we had some notable successes like Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin but more needs to be done.

Politics is hierarchical. Local victories build momentum for state-wide victories. By winning at the local level, especially in state legislature races, we assure that our ideas will be heard and respected at the top state offices. Republicans particularly will come to see us as their natural allies in the struggle.

The national government is continuing their attempt to coerce the American people by promulgating more restrictive laws, rules and regulations. It is the duty of every American to fight this unconstitutional takeover of our country.

The Tea Party movement is one of the few committed national organizations that is willing to resist the Obama regime. However, without strength in numbers by forming state-wide and national coalitions, the movement will go the way of the Whigs.

Not satisfied with attacking freedom of religion with the contraception mandate and the Second Amendment with his attack on gun rights, Barack Obama has set his sights on curbing the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. The latest action by the Obama administration is a proposed regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate that would require publicly-traded corporations to disclose their political donations.

Surprisingly, this new proposal mirrors a proposed bill, the DISCLOSE Act, that Senate Democrats failed to enact into law. The bill would have required political organizations to publicly name their donors and the amounts they give. READ MORE

In a recent interview, FreedomWorks’ Matt Kibbe opined , “Our sense is that the New Year’s Day massacre is … unfortunately, is going to be a gift that keeps giving,”

Asked who was massacred, Kibbe said “the taxpayers … [and] fiscal responsibility are getting massacred.”

“I think, whether we like it or not, this constant budget crisis — which I think is by design — is going to continue to define the congressional debate all the way up until the 2014 election,” he continued.

Mr. Kibbe went on to say that the fiscal cliff negotiations would give the Tea Party “the opportunity to educate the American public on the gross irresponsibility of the representation in Washington.”  He described it as “a teaching moment for America on exactly how not to do things.”

In order to benefit from the fiscal cliff deal and the impending clash on the national debt, the Tea Party must, absolutely must, present a united front on these issues.

They need to join the on-going debate with credible spokespeople who are not perceived a wild-eyed right wingers.

They need to nominate and support credible candidates who can win. In a word, no more Christine O’Donnells or Sharon Angles. Politics is about winning. If you lose you have no voice in the national debate.

The days of protesting that the Tea Party is not a political party need to be put behind them. The Tea Party needs to become a party of action not just words.

The Tea Party can no longer masquerade as a non-partisan pressure group. Make no mistake, the party is just that a political party. Their natural allies are by and large members of the Republican Party. The sooner they accept that fact, the sooner the country will benefit from the Tea Party’s energy.

Oh, and one more thing. The national media still doesn’t understand that the Tea Party is not a structured political party yet. A recent poll found that only 8% of those polled considered themselves members of the Tea Party.

Well, that’s today, two months after a shocking reversal. In six months or a year that number will double and triple as the political climate heats up. Depend on it.

CREDO Action actually began as a business-for-profit mobile virtual network operator headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1985 by Peter Barnes.The company was originally named Working Assets Wireless.Sprint Nextel is their mobile network operator.

In 2007, the corporate name was changed to CREDO Mobile to better reflect the company’s values: A belief that people, through donations to nonprofits and political activism, can effect progressive change.

Leveraging their wireless network, CREDO Action started an initiative called Pollworkers for Democracy, in which they hired volunteers to staff polling places and ensure fair voting practices.

Pollworkers for Democracy was active for the first time during the 2008 election cycle. However, it doesn’t appear that their website has been updated since then and there is no indication that the organization has been active in the years since then.

However, the main organization, CREDO Action, is still active at this time. Their website is updated and brimming with manifestos.

Their most recent diatribe is against the National Rife Association. As soon as the news about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, CREDO Action rolled out their anti-gun campaign.

“Teachers stand up to gunmen, but Congress won’t stand up to the NRA.” That’s what one of the signs read when hundreds of people joined CREDO’s Emergency March on the NRA in Washington, DC. This is how they begin their post on the events from Newtown, Connecticut.

The rest of their ’causes’ are a litany of every left-wing diatribe in America. Starting from the top of the page, after the NRA section are the following headlines: