Category Archives: Primary Elections

Candidate Forum: 2014 GOP Cass County Primary

Posted on by

The Cass County Candidate Forum met last night at the Harrisonville Community Center. The democrats weren’t present. Their party strictly controls their primary—there isn’t one. They don’t allow contested races.

The only ones at the forum were ‘Pubs for three contested races between the county GOP conservatives and members of the Oligarchy who created the mess that plunged the county deeply in debt. The current office holders are working and making progress against that debt by returning the county to its principle areas of responsibilities.

The races covered was the Presiding Commissioner, Associate Circuit Judge, County Auditor and Circuit Clerk. Amy Bell, Kim York’s opponent for Cass County Circuit Clerk, withdrew a week or so ago as part of an agreement with the judicial system ending her service as Circuit Clerk. Kim York is now unopposed and will take office at the beginning of the new term. Regardless, she appeared alone and answered question as did the rest of the candidates.

The forum began at 6:30pm with introductions by each candidate. I noted a couple of…interesting items. All the candidates had two minutes for their responses and answers to questions with a one minute closing statement.

Dave Morris, who ran for state senator against Scot Largent and Ed Emery in the last general election, learned a few things since then. I took him to task then when he appeared at a GOP ‘meet the candidates’ meeting wearing shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops when Messrs Emery and Largent wore suits. I said at that time, Dave Morris wasn’t ready for prime time, i.e., his lack of experience in public office and the professionalism needed for state office. I’m sorry to say, he still isn’t ready for prime time.

In a subsequent question, Dave Morris was first to be asked, “What is the most positive act by the County Commission in the last ten years?” After a minute or so of stammering, he admitted he couldn’t think of anything. Jeff Cox, when asked the same question, immediately answered with killing the TriGen and Broadband projects that were pushing the county into bankruptcy.

The comparisons between Judges Meryl Lange and Stacey Lett were distinctive as well. Ms Lange has been practicing law for well over twenty years. Ms Lett for eleven years if I heard her correctly. Stacey Lett said that she has managed her own law office, and had experience with the local US Attorney’s office and other similar offices. It was unclear if Meryl Lange had ever done so, although she said she was once a lawclerk for a Supreme Court Judge. I didn’t recognize which judge that was so it must have been a state supreme court justice.

The important difference between the two was that Stacey Lett, younger and with only ten years practicing law, had twice the experience as a judge. Ms Lett has been the Raymore Municipal Judge for the last three or four years and has personally handled over 9,000 cases. Ms Lange was appointed to fill a vacancy as an Associate Circuit Judge a little over a year ago.

I did notice that Ms Lett answered the questions given her while Ms Lange did not, using the excuse of maintaining her impartiality prohibited her response to some general answers. I suppose that is one method of not making a statement on her views of being a judge. One statement that struck me, when Ms Lange actually answered a question, was her claim to have “handled 100 cases in less than an hour.” That means each case had only 36 seconds of her attention. It does make one wonder how she could do so and give each decision the necessary scrutiny any judicial case deserves.

The questions to Ron Johnson and Ryan Wescoat was fiery as expected. To call this race for Cass County Auditor a grudge match would be a great understatement. Ron Johnson was elected in 2010 ending decades of auditorial neglect by a string of democrat office holders who did not perform a single audit since the 1970s. During that time, the county auditor, “was an accounts payable office,” said Ron Johnson. Ryan Wescoat was an employee in Johnson’s auditor office when that office uncovered the fiasco of the TriGen and Broadband projects. I’ve written about his discovery in a post some years ago.

Mr. Wescoat wasn’t an employee for long. He was fired for insubordination and, without authorization, releasing documents and approving payments to UAM, the company being sued by the county for non-performance on the TriGen and Broadband projects. Since Wescoat’s political backers are the same former commissioners under investigation, Brian Baker and Bill Cook, one may suspect Wescoat’s motives running against his former boss.

Mr. Wescoat, during the initial introduction, went into great detail about his education and teaching experience. It brought to mind the saying, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” I made mention of that phrase in a Facebook posting last night. My wife, a professor in a local bible college, was not amused by the allegory.

When questions about the future of the county, both Dave Morris and Ryan Wescoat spoke at length about the need for economic development and taking advantage of the conversion of US 71 highway to Interstate Highway 49. At one point I had to wonder if Ryan Wescoat was running for Auditor or for the office of Director for Economic Development. I forget who responded, Jeff Cox or Ron Johnson, that unrestrained spending by the prior commission to push two economic development projects, nearly bankrupted the county.

Returning to the County Auditor’s race, one question clearly displayed the difference between Ron Johnson and Ryan Wescoat. The question, “What would you do if you found an office holder who was not complying with procedures demanded by law?”

Johnson used his discovery of apparent nepotism by the Cass County Clerk, Janet Burlingame as an example. He reported the discovery to the County Clerk and asked her to change her practice to be compliant with the state’s nepotism law. When, after six months, she had done nothing, he reported the case to the county prosecutor. The case was referred to the circuit court where a judge dismissed the charge because it had occurred during a previous term of the county clerk.

Ryan Wescoat’s answer was similar except for one step. After working with the office holder and not getting compliance, he would go to the County Commission, then the prosecutor. The problem with Wescoat’s process is that elected county officeholders are NOT subservient to the County Commission. The commissioners and officeholders are elected peers. One office is not subordinate to the other. The only point of contact is their budget. The Commission, working with the officeholders, creates a budget for the county and the offices. The Commission, after review with the officeholders, approves the budget. I suppose the power of the budget could be a device to use to insure compliance by an officeholder, but it would be a messy and long drawn-out affair, with, I suspect, lawyers involved in the end. Apparently, Mr. Wescoat’s view of the office of Auditor is more inline with the auditors before Mr. Johnson, an accounts payable office who rubber-stamps the decisions of the Commission without question. The concept of the Auditor being the ‘Check and Balance’ of the Commission and the elected officeholders appears to be foreign to Mr. Wescoat’s thinking.

Overall, the distinction between the two political groups, the GOP conservatives and the Oligarchy seeking return of the old, corrupt methods of governance, was readily apparent last night. I make no apology for wishing the conservatives a win next week. Else…we can greet a return to unrestrained spending, debt, and the return of the county to the path of bankruptcy.

Facebook

Illegal!

Posted on by

A federal appeals court dealt Obamacare another blow—Obama’s subsidies are illegal.

Fed appeals court panel says most Obamacare subsidies illegal

– CNBC

This is a breaking news story. Please check back to the link above for updates.

In a potentially crippling blow to Obamacare, a top federal appeals court Tuesday said that billions of dollars worth of government subsidies that helped 4.7 million people buy insurance on HealthCare.gov are not legal under the Affordable Care Act.

In its decision, a three-judge panel said that such subsidies can be granted only to people who bought insurance in an Obamacare exchange run by an individual state or the District of Columbia — not on the federally run exchange HealthCare.gov. Plaintiffs in the case known as Halbig v. Burwell argued that the ACA, as written, only allows that often-significant financial aid to be issued to people who bought insurance on a marketplace set up by a state.

The decision is certain to be challenged by the Obama Administration, and does not immediately have the effect of law. But if it is ultimately upheld, it would cause insurance rates for those people who lost the subsidies to dramatically rise.

HealthCare.gov serves residents of the 36 states that did not create their own health insurance marketplace. About 86 percent of its 5.45 million customers received a subsidy to offset the cost of their coverage this year because they had low or moderate incomes.

In a report issued Thursday, the consultancy Avalere Health said that if those subsidies were removed this year from the 4.7 million people who received them in HealthCare.gov states, their premiums would have been an average of 76 percent higher in price than what they are paying now.

…

Before the decision, a leading Obamacare expert who was firmly opposed to the plantiffs’ arguments said a ruling in their favor could have major consequences for the health-care reform law.

“If the courts were to decide that the Halbig plaintiffs were right, it would be a huge threat to the ACA,” said that expert,Timothy Jost, a professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law.

…

On Monday, one of the intellectual godfathers of the argument that is the basis of the Halbig case, as well as three other similar pending court challenges, said that tens of millions of people would be freed from Obamacare mandates in the affected states if the challenges prevailed.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said more than 250,000 firms in those states—which have about 57 million workers—would not be subject to the employer mandate being phased in starting next year. That rule, which hinges on the availability of subsidies on Obamacare exchanges, will compel employers with 50 or more full-time workers to offer affordable health insurance or pay a fine.

The crucial point to this court decision is in the last paragraph above—no subsidies, no employer mandate. If the employer mandate is declared illegal, then why would anyone want to stay in the program…Obamacare…if their rates go up an estimated 76%?

The decision is bad news for Obama, his sycophants and Obamacare.

***

Dave Helling, writing in the Kansas City “Red” Star laments on the lack of discussion about issues in the upcoming Primary two weeks from today. Helling’s lament was echoed in the PoliticMO newsletter this morning.

AUGUST BALLOT — “After dragging for months, the primary is now just two weeks away,’ Dave Helling previews in the KC Star: “That deadline does not seem to have quickened the pace of local campaigns, however. They seem slightly listless, as if the voters’ verdict is still months in the future. Missouri’s three-fourths cent sales tax for transportation improvements has probably drawn the most interest. It would be the largest tax hike in state history. But where’s the campaign? Normally, two weeks out, you would see tax supporters holding news conferences at crumbling bridges. Ads would suck up TV time. Letters to the editor would extol (or denounce) the proposal. Have you seen much of this? I haven’t, either. …

“Sluggish campaigns lead to low turnout. …  In most years, “no” voters are more motivated and a small turnout would endanger the tax. But it’s also possible the quiet campaign has helped tamp down anti-tax fervor in Missouri. In either case, it’s probably too late for consultants to reconfigure their campaigns. It’s going to be hard to awaken voters in the next two weeks after putting many of them to sleep over the last six months.” — KC Star.

Perhaps Mr. Helling should look at his own editorial board for that lack of interest. If stories aren’t reported, the great unwashed, i.e., those who only get their news from that liberal Kansas City rag, are unaware of those issues. It makes me wonder if the average denizen of Kansas City is even aware an election is scheduled two weeks from today. Don’t blame any apparent lack of interest of the lack of substance in the issues, Mr. Helling. Blame those like the KC Star editorial board for down-playing those issues hoping that a low turnout will allow the tax increase in Amendment 7 to pass. The KC Star hasn’t yet seen a tax increase it didn’t like.

Facebook

Hierarchy of Needs

Posted on by

Have you heard about the Federal Tax increase passed by the House last week? Not many people have because it contained a tax deferment and the Washington elite from both parties didn’t want the news spread. Ignorance of voters is bliss—especially when it is Washington taking more money out of our pockets.

In this case, the bill would allow employers to defer making pension fund payments. Pension fund payments are tax deductible. Companies are required by law to make those payments…unless…the government wants those measly tax payments for something else.

It’s a matter of taking from Peter to pay Paul. This Highway bill, which our local congresscritter, Vicky Hartzler voted for, allows companies to defer making those pension payments. If a company is in such dire straits, they would have more trouble making their tax payments. Peter, in this example, is the FedGov. Paul is the retirees. Guess who gets screwed. Vicky says, “It’s budget neutral.” My question is, “Whose budget!?” Not mine!

Highway maintenance is a subject that will appear on the upcoming primary election ballot August 5th. Amendment 7 is a sales tax increase to ‘help’ fund maintenance of Missouri’s roads and bridges. The reality is that there is sufficient money already—if the state, county and city governments use that money as it was intended.

The real problem is that the state, counties and cities, have not been spending the existing funds on roads and bridges. Instead, they’ve been using the funds for other items. For example, Kansas City has a fixation with light rail and street cars. They have a plan, using funds from the roads and bridges maintenance funds, to restore a 1940’s era rail plan.

In 1943, Abraham Maslow published a paper on Hierarchy of Needs. In that paper, Maslow discusses needs—prioritization of needs that must be met. In engineer-speak, it is known as prioritization of tasks and dependencies. In order to complete a project, say maintaining roads and bridges, the individual tasks must be listed, dependencies determined, and then the tasks are prioritized by need and efficiency, i.e., getting the most bang for the buck.

The assumption is that the state, counties and cities, will be logical and work the projects as engineers. Unfortunately, the leaders of the state, counties, and cities, especially the larger cities more insulated from voter wrath, are not logical. They are more like neurotics, seeking to upset that engineering hierarchy of needs to feed their neurotic needs of their egos. They want their needs to be at the top, and a high need is to remain in office.

If they can placate their supporters, some of their needs have been met. The original purpose of the project funding gets lost and instead of maintaining the city’s road and bridges, we get the light-rail/street car boondoggle in Kansas City. I’m given to understand St Louis has similar boondoggles that is funded by the road and bridges budget just like Kansas City.

Maslow’s thesis was that everyone has a hierarchy of needs. No one really disagrees with that concept. Organizations, like city and county governments have needs, too. Unfortunately, governments are logical people. They are reflections of their elected officials. The passage of Amendment 7 would feed their egos insteading of meeting the actual needs of roads and bridges.

In Kansas City, the issue is the ego-stuffing of Mayor Sly James. In Cass County four years ago, it was the egos of the presiding commissioner Gary Mallory and commissioners Bill Cook and Brian Baker.

Mallory, Cook and Baker approved two unworkable boondoggles called Tri-Gen and Broadband Internet. The projects were unworkable and unaffordable but they did present the opportunity for corruption. That issue is still being played in the courts.

The damage to Cass County’s finances was severe. The county was within a hair-breath of bankruptcy. Due to the leadership of the current Presiding Commissioner Jeff Cox and County Auditor Ron Johnson, Cass County is slowly recovering.

Cass County has a new crop of responsive elected officials and an auditor who actually does his job instead of being a rubber stamp for the county commission. But the opposition, the prior officials, are still present, building an insurgency to regain access to public funds. Their hierarchy of needs opposes the hierarchy of needs of us the residents of the county.

When the primary arrives on August 5th, vote for yourself, your needs, not for the selfish needs of an oligarchy, unrepentant of their corruption. Vote for Jeff Cox, Ron Johnson and Stacey Lett. Let’s keep Cass County free of the Oligarchy and supportive of the needs of the residents. We don’t’ need a minority in office who has rapacious eyes on our public funds.

Facebook

News and Views

Posted on by

Obama went to Texas this week. He went for another fundraiser. He had no intention to visit the border—and didn’t over the protests of his own party members, such as Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-TX.

http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Perry.Hannity.pngGovernor Rick Perry met Obama on the tarmac of Austin’s airport to ask Obama to go with him to the border. “He flies in a big airplane. It’s only 350 miles to the border,” Perry said in an interview with Shawn Hannity last night. Perry and Obama did meet to discuss the border, a meeting that resulted in Obama’s presser yesterday that said nothing and continued to blame Republicans for the border crisis.

Obama wants billions to ‘fix’ the border. He doesn’t need more billions; he can do that immediately by ordering the DoD to secure the border. In fact, Obama has a duty to do so. But he won’t. Instead he’ll dither as usual and do nothing while the problem compounds itself. The crisis is nearing the boiling point from Texas to California. Obama could not care less.

What will happen next? No one knows…except that it won’t, while Obama remains in office, get any better.

***

There is a bill floating in the Senate that Dems hope with give them some creds with Second Amendment activists. The bill has a lot of good changes in it…and a poison pill for anyone who votes for it.

EDITORIAL: No free pass on gun rights for red-state Democrats

Republicans must deny endangered incumbents a phony vote

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Wednesday, July 9, 2014

If Democrats regain a majority in the House and retain the Senate, the first order of business after a tragic shooting — any shooting will do — would be to enact strict gun control. Everyone knows it, and that’s a problem for Democratic senators trying to keep their seats in states where people aren’t afraid of guns.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid let Sen. Kay R. Hagan, a Democrat with an uphill re-election struggle in North Carolina, bring up her Bipartisan Sportsmen’s Act, which would actually make several useful changes in the law. It would modernize licensing for duck hunting and encourage the use of federal land for fishing, hunting and target shooting. It would even allow hunters who legally shoot a polar bear in Canada to bring the pelt back home to the United States.

But, as always with democrats, it’s a sham.

In 2012, Sen. Jon Tester, Montana Democrat, was fighting for survival and pushed such legislation to shore up his pro-gun credentials. After he won re-election, Mr. Tester joined the liberals in his caucus to support President Obama’s actual gun-control agenda. Mr. Tester voted for the “background check” requirement that the federal government track sales of firearms between friends and family, inevitably creating a national registry. It came within a handful of votes of passage.

Several tough, realistic Republicans aren’t eager to give endangered Democrats an undeserved break and insist on adding language to reveal which senators actually believe in the Second Amendment and which only pose as believers.

A number of GOP Senators want to add some amendments to the bill. Senator Reid won’t allow any. He wants a simple ‘hunting-friendly’ bill to help those Senators in danger of being booted out of office.

When the bill comes up for a vote Thursday, senators won’t be allowed to freely amend the bill. If the measure clears the Senate, House Republicans must resist the temptation to pass the bill as is to put it on Mr. Obama’s desk. It’s so rare that a bill gets past Mr. Reid’s legislative blockade that it would be hard to scold Republicans for taking the poisoned bait.

Voters deserve to know where their representatives really stand on gun control, so House Speaker John A. Boehner should encourage the addition of genuine pro-gun amendments that would doom its chances for Senate concurrence. Better to allow a positive but mostly symbolic bill to die than to give Mrs. Hagan and her colleagues a trophy to fool their constituents.

***

Missouri GOP Party Chairman, Ed Martin, has been watching the Mississippi fiasco and he isn’t pleased. This week, he has called for an investigation into Mississippi’s primary and that of Halley Barbour.

MOGOP — ‘Missouri GOP head seeks party probe of Mississippi ads alleging racism,’ The Washington Post: “The head of the Missouri Republican Party on Tuesday asked Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to appoint a task force to investigate what he called “racially divisive ads and robocalls” critical of state Sen. Chris McDaniel in the Republican runoff for U.S. Senate in Mississippi, marking the latest instance of lingering intra-party discord following Sen. Thad Cochran’s narrow victory over McDaniel last month. Missouri GOP Chairman Ed Martin e-mailed letters to Priebus and RNC members Tuesday afternoon expressing concerns over ads reported by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper that sought to link McDaniel to a Ku Klux Klan ally, suggested that the tea party has “racist” ideas and warned that a vote for McDaniel could mean losing food stamps and other government programs. Martin’s concerns came a day after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) slammed the “D.C. machine” for “racially charged false attacks” against McDaniel. And they arrived as McDaniel’s campaign was gearing up to challenge the results of the election, which were certified. Martin, who said he was neutral during the primary and runoff, said his concern is that Republican National Committee member Henry Barbour could be partially responsible for the ads. The Daily Mail report suggested that Barbour, who ran a pro-Cochran super PAC, could have ties to the group that ran the ads, Citizens for Progress. The group has no record at the Federal Election Commission. …

Martin asked Priebus to “appoint a special committee of RNC members to investigate this matter and report to us at our August 7th Members meeting before the August 8th general RNC meeting.” Martin said in a telephone interview that he already had received a response from one RNC member volunteering to join the special committee.” — The Washington Post, PoliticMO.

I’m glad to see I’m not the only Missouri Republican who is concerned about the RNSC’s actions in that mess in Mississippi. There is potentially another RNSC fiasco brewing next door in Kansas and that’s too close to home to ignore.

Facebook

System Failure! No Post Today

Posted on by

A severe thunderstorm rolled through last night—high winds and rain up to 4″ per hour. The National Weather Service sent a small streams and urban flooding alert earlier in the evening.

Around 2:00am, we lost power. It was out for at least two hours. When I came downstairs this morning, all my servers were powered down. Two were on UPS systems, two were not. All the servers survived. My keyboard however, one I’ve used since the 1990s, a Compaq industrial, high volume keyboard, one we used for my former employer’s call centers, didn’t respond. I finally got it up and running.

It’s on to 10:30am. Everything seems to be working once again. but it’s too late for a normal blog post. Instead I’ll direct you to a  link that documents all the GOP Senators who donated to the Thad Cochran campaign. MIssouri’s Roy Blunt in among the contributors as are both Kansas Senators, Roberts and Moran.

Here is the list of contributors and their donations:

Thad Cochran’s Senate Enablers

July 03, 2014

GOP Senate Contributions to Cochran
Senator — Amount Given — Phone Number

Roy Blunt (R-MO) — $15,000 — (202) 224-5721

Jerry Moran (R-KS) — $10,000 — (202) 224-6521

Pat Roberts (R-KS) — $5,000 — (202) 224-4774

You can see the entire list by following the link above. Here is another column on the same subject and provides some additional background on the story.

Donor Controversies Hit ‘Mississippi Conservatives’

By – 7.8.14

The headline in the New York Times over the weekend was straightforward: “Unease in G.O.P. Over Mississippi Tea Party Anger”:

The stormy aftermath of Mississippi’s Republican Senate runoff has sent Tea Party conservatives around the country to the ramparts, raising the prospect of a prolonged battle that holds the potential to depress conservative turnout in November in Mississippi — and possibly beyond.

Well, there’s an understatement. Just last night Texas Senator Ted Cruz was on Mark Levin’s show talking about “the D.C. machine” running “false attacks” that were “racially charged” and demanding that allegations of criminal conduct — one man reportedly told Charles C. Johnson that Cochran paid him to buy votes — be “vigorously investigated.” There should be “unease” in the Republican Party, as more and more of the base becomes aware of just how cynical GOP leadership has become, and as the curtain continues to be pulled up on all the shenanigans in Mississippi.

At the story’s center is the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, which is on the receiving end of furious charges of race-baiting against insurgent candidate Chris McDaniel and the Tea Party as a whole. But an even bigger problem comes from evidence that the group calling itself Mississippi Conservatives was anything but, illustrating in stunning detail how the establishments and donors of the Republican and Democratic parties intermingle.

The column continues at the American Spectator website. You can read it here.

I don’t expect anymore power outages. At least, not today. I’m thankful there was no lasting damage, just some small fixes. Y’all have a great day and drop back tomorrow.

Facebook

The next battlefield—Kansas

Posted on by

The Battle of Mississippi in the GOP civil war is drawing to a close. The result is still in doubt. For the establishment GOP its Pyrrhic victory may evolve to defeat in November.

Chris McDaniel is investigating what appears to be massive vote fraud—democrats crossing over to vote in the run-off. That’s illegal in Mississippi. More than 1,000 fraudulent votes have been found already. Haley Barbour is being investigated about robo-calls to black claiming a McDaniel win will mean an end to welfare and other false claims. Reports of vote buying by the GOP establishment are also under investigation, one that may cause Cochran being removed from the ballot in November. The Washington GOP, through the NRSC, had dumped a ton of money into Mississippi to support Thad Cochran.

Why would a Cochran victory be Pyrrhic? Because the GOP has tainted the well. If Cochran versus the democrat is the choice in November, why would the GOP expect all those alienated conservatives to vote for Cochran? If that is the choice, I would expect conservatives to just not vote for Cochran and the democrat may win. When people see no clear choice, they may choose to not choose at all.

The NRSC is doing the same in another state—Kansas. Pat Roberts, a 47-year Washington veteran who hasn’t lived in Kansas for decades, is being challenged by Dr. Milton Wolf. The NRSC is dumping more and more money into Kansas against Wolf—another Tea Partier challenging a GOP establishment stalwart and political rubber-stamp.

Remember Mississippi, and FIGHT. LIKE. HELL. in Kansas

This Independence Day, the American Revolution endures

By: Diary)  |  July 3rd, 2014 at 02:05 PM

Conservatives, this is your call to arms, and Kansas is the battlefield.

The truth of the Mississippi Betrayal hurts. GOP party bosses have declared an all-out war on conservatives and betrayed our Republican Party itself in the process. The GOP establishment in general and the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC) in particular have some serious explaining to do.

America is descending into a struggle, less about Republicans versus Democrats and more about the permanent ruling class versus the American citizens. The NRSC betrayed the wishes of its Republican donors by diverting their hard-earned money from their stated goal of defeating Democrats and instead used the funds in Mississippi where they defeated a conservative Republican. The betrayal included outrageous and false charges of racism against a fellow Republican where they actually joined league with liberal Democrats including explosive evidence that Sen. Thad Cochran’s campaign possibly funded an illegal vote-buying scheme.

The party boss behind the NRSC’s bone-headed betrayal is Kansas’ own Sen. Jerry Moran. The NRSC spent over $200 thousand and deployed an army of staffers and volunteers to knock tens of thousands of doors and ring tens of thousands of phones in Mississippi to join league with liberal Democrats and defeat Chris McDaniel for the sin of being a constitutional conservative.

This was never about defeating Democrats or winning a Republican majority in the Senate. RNC chairman Reince Priebus admitted that Mississippi was not in play for Democrats. Faced with the ugly truth on the KCMO Morning Show with Greg Knapp, NRSC Chairman Sen. Jerry Moran confessed, “First of all, the NRSC is not the Republican Party.” He excused the betrayal with an  unusually candid confession that the NRSC “supports Republican incumbent senators to help them get reelected. That’s an important aspect of its mission.”

Kansas is the new Ground Zero.

And now the NRSC is circling the wagons around another insider favorite, my GOP primary opponent, Sen. Pat Roberts who has been in Washington for 47 years. Like Thad Cochran, Roberts’ record is lackluster at best. Roberts is posing as a conservative during an election year. Before I challenged him, however, Pat Roberts’ 2012 scorecard at Club For Growth was 55 and at FreedomWorks was 54. He voted for Barack Obama’s $600 billion fiscal cliff tax hike and to raise the debt ceiling 11 different times. Pat Roberts even voted to put Kathleen Sebelius in charge of ObamaCare.

Perhaps most offensive, Pat Roberts doesn’t even have a home in Kansas. He first ran for Congress using a vacant lot in Dodge City (where he has never lived) as his official address. He scrambled to rent a bedroom from a donor where he brags that he has “full access to the recliner.” (I’m going to give him permanent access to that recliner.) The Kansas GOP circled the wagons around Pat Roberts by empaneling a board of his public endorsers to declare he can remain on the ballot despite having declared that his Virginia home is his primary residence.

Playing the insider game, Sen. Pat Roberts contributed $5,000 from his PAC to Thad Cochran’s campaign which is now accused of the illegal Democrat vote-buying scandal.

…

We must start acting like the Americans we were meant to be: sovereign citizens of the republic, not subjects of a permanent ruling class. Our Founders conquered a continent and fought a revolution to escape a permanent ruling class. We must not be the generation that surrenders it. We must not squander the blessings of liberty they provided.

This Independence Day the American Revolution endures and the battlefield is Kansas. Step up. Join the revolution. Contribute. Volunteer. Say a prayer for our nation. Get involved.

Remember Mississippi, and FIGHT. LIKE. HELL. in Kansas.

Kansas Senator and NRSC Chairman Jerry Moran was on Greg Knapp’s local radio talk show. Knapp asked Moran directly about the NRSC’s role in the Mississippi primary and about the robo-calls and other reports of political abuse and illegalities. Moran, at first, didn’t answer the question, skirting the issue. Under pressure, he distanced himself claiming the NRSC had no control over expenditures after donating the money. Moran didn’t answer the followup question, “Who received the NRSC’s money?”

That same station is running back-to-back ads by the Robert’s campaign claiming Wolf ridiculed patient x-rays on Facebook. When pressed for proof, Robert’s people never responded but they continue to make the same unsupported claims. The say Wolf violated ethics conventions. They ignore Robert’s own ethics issues. A typical tactic of the GOP establishment.

The Missouri primary is less than a month away, August 5th. Missourians, like Kansans must make choices. Fortunately, the MO GOP is responding better than the leadership in Kansas and Mississippi. If they want to gain control of the Governor’s mansion and retain control of the statehouse, they had better support the grassroots conservatives across the state…or, else! Remember what happened to the Whigs.

Facebook

Mississippi Primary just won’t go away

Posted on by

The NRSC, Haley Barbour, Thad Cochran and Karl Rove wish they’d been more…clandestine in their behind-the-scenes maneuvering in this past primary election. In fact, I’ll bet they hope to survive their fiasco without spending time in the gray-bar hotel.

http://images.politico.com/global/2014/06/28/140628_thad_cochran_gty_605.jpgYesterday, a black minister accused the Cochran campaign of vote buying. That is illegal at both the state and federal level.

Democrat Pastor Accuses Thad Cochran Campaign of Vote-for-Pay Scheme

 

 

A black Mississippi pastor has emerged to claim Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign paid “thousands” of Democrats $15 each to vote in the June 24 GOP runoff – and that he was Rev. Stevie Fielder, an associate pastor at First Union Missionary Baptist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, says Cochran’s campaign “told me to offer blacks $15 each and to vote for Thad.”

Fielder, who was paid by freelance journalist Charles C. Johnson for the story, provided a new outlet launched by Johnson—GotNews.com—with four text messages from a person purporting to be Cochran campaign staffer Saleem Baird.

The messages cite an official Cochran campaign email address—Saleem@ThadForMs.com—and include detailed discussions of the campaign providing envelopes of money to distribute to people who vote.

“Send me individual names and amounts along with home address to saleem@thadforms.com and I’ll have money separated in envelopes at the office waiting for you,” one message, sent three days before the runoff, says.

Fielder said he helped distribute the Cochran cash for votes on a promise of eventually getting paid $16,000—and because a key Cochran campaign staffer convinced him that Cochran’s conservative challenger state Sen. Chris McDaniel was racist.

“They sold me on the fact that he was a racist and that the right thing to do was to keep him out of office,” Fielder said.

But Cochran’s campaign never paid, Fielder said.

Today, it has been disclosed that Haley Barbour was behind the racial robot calls against McDaniel.

On the Tuesday broadcast of his FOX News show, host Sean Hannity played a radio ad that aired in Mississippi during the Republican primary which clearly pitted State Sen. Chris McDaniel (R-Miss.) as a racist that wants to take away government benefits. The group responsible for that ad, Citizens for Progress, is reportedly backed by Haley Barbour, the former governor of Mississippi and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“He’s got some answering to do on that,” Hannity said. — Real Clear Politics.

Neither story bodes well for Cochran, Barbour, et. al. There appears to be concrete proof supporting the accusation. It does not bode well for the NRSC, either, nor the GOP Washington establishment. More reports from Mississippi by McDaniel supporters say they will not vote for Cochran if he is still on the ballot come November. It could well be that a democrat is elected to the Senate this year in Mississippi.

Facebook