Why CNN is Failing

CNN published an article by Shannon Travis yesterday,"Has the Tea Party 'Sold Out' to the Mainstream GOP?," that illustrates why that once dominant media company is now failing.

I received a phone call from Mr. Travis at 11 pm Saturday night as I was driving back the 310 miles from the Bristol Motor Speedway to my home in Nashville. Over the weekend, I had been part of a group of "Volunteers for Virginia" who had driven the round trip between Nashville and the Bristol Motor Speedway where we spent two days at the NASCAR race registering Virginia residents to vote. As might be expected, we learned during our stay there that the large crowd of 165,000 was almost entirely conservative, pro-tea party, and pro-Romney. With the exception of one union member from Toledo, Ohio every single person we spoke with or registered to vote was intensely committed to defeating Obama in November.

Mr. Travis, who had interviewed me previously about my role as the co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, the informal group of local tea party leaders from around the country who launched the Tea Party movement in a conference call on February 20, 2009, wanted to get a "grassroots" perspective for his story. But it became apparent through his questions that he had already written the narrative of his story and was simply looking for a few "grassroots quotes" he could throw in to support that misleading narrative.

Mr. Travis was trying to support his theme that the grassroot activists in the Tea Party were somehow upset by our level of involvement at the Republican National Convention.

I told him he was asking the wrong question, that grassroots activists are focused on get-out-the-vote projects like Volunteers for Virginia. " We're not upset about the level of engagement or visibility the grassroots of the Tea Party movement is receiving at the Republican National Convention," I told him. "We're focused on getting-out-the-vote, which is far more important in my mind than the convention. If you're writing a story about what the various 'national groups' are doing at the Republican National Convention, you're not writing about the far more significant story of the great grassroots get-out-the-vote effort."

"Volunteers for Virginia" is a collaborative project announced last week by grassroots leaders from the red states of Texas and Tennessee designed to help WeRVirginia, the independent get-out-the-vote effort, to defeat Barack Obama in that state this November.

"The real issue you should be focusing on, Mr. Travis, is the phenomenal level of commitment at the grassroots level going on right now to get-the-vote-out to defeat Barack Obama in November," I said. "In addition to our own "Volunteers for Virginia" project, you should be writing about the "Paint Florida Red" project that the Birmingham Alabama RainyDayPatriots.org Tea Party and Zan Green have launched, as well as the "NobamaNevada" project that the Bay Area Patriots in San Francisco and Sally Zelikovsky have launched. That's the real story," I told him.

Not surprisingly, none of my comments made it in to Mr. Travis's story, because they didn't fit his incorrect preconceived narrative.

You can read the rest of this article here at Breitbart News.

Grassroots Leaders in Texas and Tennessee Launch “Volunteers for Virginia”

August 20, 2012 - Local grassroots leaders from the red states of Texas and Tennessee today announced the launch of “Volunteers for Virginia,” an independent get-out-the-vote project that will support Virginians in defeating Obama in November.

The project’s first event will take place this weekend at the NASCAR race held at the Bristol Motor Speedway where volunteers from Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee will be registering Virginia residents to vote. Many of the expected crowd of 165,000 who will be attending the Food City 250 Nationwide series NASCAR race on Friday, August 24th and the Irwin Tools 500 Sprint series NASCAR race on Saturday, August 25th are Virginia residents.

Volunteers for Virginia will be working side by side with We rVirginia, an organization which is committed to coordinating the efforts of local grassroots leaders that are focused on getting out the vote on November 6th. We rVirginia will provide all the resources necessary to Volunteers for Virginia, including all lodging and food.

Lorie Medina, founder of the Frisco, Texas Tea Party and currently Chief Strategist for Texas Faith & Freedom Coalition said, “After Texas grassroots conservatives helped Ted Cruz become the Republican nominee for US Senate in an incredibly hard-fought Primary, we’re ready to help other states. Activists around the state are ready to give their time and energy to support Virginia. And, we have several newly-elected Texas State Representatives that have won their Primary Election. Now they don’t have a Democratic challenger to contend with and want to lead activists from their District to Virginia to walk door-to-door.”

You can read the rest of this press release at the Volunteers for Virginia website.

Democrat Erksine Bowles Called Ryan Budget 'Sensible, Straightforward, Serious'

Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman of President Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, called the Paul Ryan budget "sensible, straightforward, serious" at a speech given at the University of North Carolina last September. The video of the speech, first reported at HotAir via Morgen Richmond, provides a compelling case that a growing number of independents and Democrats are acknowledging President Obama has failed to offer a serious solution to our expanding fiscal crisis.

You can read the rest of the story here at Breitbart.com.

Portman as VP Won't Get in Way of Coming Romney Landslide

It's fun to play the "Who will Romney pick as VP?" parlor game, but the identity of who Romney selects won't have an impact on the election in November. As I've been saying since April, Romney is going to win in an electoral college landslide. The decisive factor in that victory will be President Obama's poor performance these past three and a half years, not who Romney selects as VP. The sample skewed polls the mainstream media have been pushing lately are meaningless exercises in liberal wishful thinking. The intensity of opposition to the odious statism practiced by Obama and his cronies is so great, tea party activists will literally crawl over broken glass to get to the polls on election day. The get-out-the-vote effort they will launch will be an historic turning point in American political history.

Rob Portman is one name on everyone's short list for VP, but outside of Ohio, very few people know much about him. Who is Rob Portman and why is he on Romney's short list? A native of Ohio, Portman attended Dartmouth and the University of Michigan Law School, served a dozen years in Congress, had a cup of coffee as George W. Bush's Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and was handily elected to the United States Senate from Ohio in 2010.

His political philosophy and personal style is standard brand Republican establishment. There's little to see in his background that suggests he's particularly sympathetic to the tea party's core values of constitutionally limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility. The tea party friendly Club for Growth, for instance, rates Portman as only the 29th most conservative Senator--tied with the recently defeated Richard Lugar of Indiana, defender of the Republican establishment.

But Portman's ideological blandness will have little to do with his performance as a potential VP candidate. He's smart, loyal, and won't make many unforced errors. And in this election, the VP candidate's ability to handle the job of President if that need arises will be the key point upon which the Romney team will focus. Perhaps most important to those calculating the odds that he will be picked as VP is the observation that Romney seems very comfortable with his cautious, buttoned down, intelligent reliability.

Portman does get some style points for his skill and interest in canoeing and kayaking. In fact, he wrote an article recently about a kayaking adventure he had in China. As such, Portman has enough experience navigating through rough waters to predict that, if Romney selects him for the VP slot, he won't do anything during the campaign that will capsize the good ship Romney.

You can read the rest of this article here at Breitbart News.

Harvard Knew Elizabeth Warren Was a Poor Scholar When They Hired Her

When Harvard Law School offered Elizabeth Warren a tenured faculty position in February 1993, administrators at the school knew that her scholarship had been criticized harshly. Between 1989 and 1991, three leading academic experts on bankruptcy wrote devastating critiques of the 1989 book she co-authored with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbrook, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America. The reviews, published in highly respected academic journals, belied claims made at the time of her hiring by Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark that her work reflected "excellent scholarship" and by Appointments Committee member Professor Charles Fried that she was "at the very top of her profession as a scholar."

Charges from one expert, Professor Philip Shuchman of Rutgers Law School, that Warren and her co-authors engaged in "scientific misconduct" were made in a 1990 edition of the Rutgers Law Review. Those charges remain controversial to this day. Breitbart News has learned that at least one member of the faculty at Harvard Law School brought the Shuchman allegations to the attention of the Appointments Committee in late 1992 as it began to consider Ms. Warren's qualifications to join the faculty on a permanent basis. Neither former Dean Robert C. Clark nor Professor Charles Fried, both of whom served on the Appointments Committee at the time, have confirmed this report.

Another member of the Harvard Law School faculty during that period, Professor Alan Dershowitz, told Breitbart News that he was unfamiliar with the Shuchman allegations. "I was not on [the Appointments] [C]ommittee," he said, "and do not recall any such charge." Professor Dershowitz noted that Ms. Warren's qualifications as an instructor were strong. "She was regarded as the best classroom teacher at the law school," he added. His knowledge of Ms. Warren's scholarly qualifications, however, was limited to what the Appointments Committee communicated to him during the meeting held on February 5, 1993 to consider her appointment to a tenured faculty position.

Based on the evidence currently available to Breitbart News, it appears that neither the Appointments Committee nor Dean Clark investigated the merits of Shuchman's allegations of "scientific misconduct," nor did they inform the full faculty that such charges had been made. In addition, they appear not to have informed the full faculty of the two other substantive critiques of Ms. Warren's work that did not involve allegations of "scientific misconduct." Indeed, based on their subsequent public statements that incorrectly characterized the quality of Ms. Warren's record of scholarship, it is possible to speculate that both Professor Fried and Dean Clark likely failed to point out Ms. Warren's academic shortcomings.

You can read the rest of this article here at Breitbart.com.

My speech "We Will Defeat Barack Obama and Restore the Covenant of Liberty"

Tea party leader urges Birmingham group to defeat Barack Obama

Published: Thursday, July 19, 2012, 10:10 PM  
By Robin DeMonia -- The Birmingham News

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- A man who helped launch the national tea-party movement urged a local chapter to redouble its efforts to defeat Barack Obama, accusing the president of corrupting the Constitution with the help of a "faithless chief justice."


Speaking to the Rainy Day Patriots in Hoover, Michael Patrick Leahy warned that a second term for Obama will lock in a "nightmare government" that tramples individual liberties and pushes the country to financial ruin.


Leahy told 120 people who gathered at Hoover Tactical Firearms that the United States is at risk of a crisis like that being experienced now in Greece and other European countries. He said federal spending is already at historical highs in relation to gross domestic product and predicted it would rise even higher in a second Obama term.


"This is financially reckless extremism," Leahy said. "The founders ... would despise and detest this."

Leahy also had strong words for Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion upholding Obama's signature health care law. Leahy, who has called Roberts a "judicial Benedict Arnold," tonight called the chief justice a "con artist ... (who) redefined the court as an overarching, superlegislative body." 


"Justice Roberts knew he was conjuring up a decision that would make the American people retch," Leahy said. "More importantly, he just told us which team he's playing on. He's with the anticonstitutionalists. His legacy as their champion is secure."


But Leahy predicted the victory would be short-lived, and that Obama would be defeated in November, thanks to tea-party members who insist on preserving constitutional limits on government and protections for citizens.


"We are faithful to that covenant," Leahy said. "Barack Obama and the allies he has are in the middle of corrupting that covenant. It will not happen on our watch. ... We conservatives will defeat Barack Obama."


In response to an audience member, Leahy agreed Republican leaders don't have a solid record of supporting limited government. Still, he defended Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as someone who will be more responsive to tea-party concerns.


"I would say he's better than the alternatives by a long shot. He's our only alternative," said Leahy, who was elected in Tennessee as a Romney delegate in 2008. 


Leahy helped start the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition in 2009. He also has written a book, "Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement," which he autographed after tonight's gathering.


The Rainy Day Patriots formed in Birmingham and Shelby County in 2009, in response to concerns about the encroachment of big government going back as far as the prescription drug plan during George W. Bush 
administration. "Then Obama's socialist government takeover finally broke the camel's back," said Zan Green, the group's president and founder.


Green said her chapter now counts 4,000 "hard members" and has had more than 10,000 attend its events and rallies. She expects members to get more active as the election approaches and tonight pushed an effort to get Birmingham area tea-partiers to sway their Florida friends to Romney's side.


Tonight's Rainy Day Patriots meeting was a first for Ben Marcus and his son, Barry Marcus. "It's time to get involved," said Barry Marcus, who lives in Shelby County. "We have strayed so far from the Constitution, it's not funny. It's time to stand up and say we're going in the wrong direction." 


He said his concerns are not limited to either political party. "It's just the entire political climate. It's just gotten so toxic and corroded, I don't trust the Democrats or Republicans to do what they say."

Justice Roberts Turns Obamacare into Origination Clause Shell Game

Chief Justice Roberts’ ruling Thursday in NFIB v. Sebelius is a bitter loss for constitutional conservatives, delivered to us by a judicial Benedict Arnold. Forget the so-called long term victory contained in the commerce clause limitations. There’ s no denying that Roberts’ majority opinion represents a clear judicial defeat for defenders of the Constitution and individual liberty.


Roberts knew he was conjuring up a decision that would make the American people wretch. But judicial activism to limit the power of the individual and extend the powers of the federal government has been going on since the Supreme Court first caved to FDR’ s power grabs in a series of capitulations that culminated in the odious 1942 Wickard v. Filburn decision.

Now comes the equally odious NFIB v. Sebelius decision, in which Roberts rewrote a law from the bench. The Chief Justice wasn’t writing a legal opinion. He offered a political solution. More importantly, he just told us which team he’s playing on. He’s with the anti-constitutionalists. His legacy as their champion is secure.

Roberts’ decision to call the individual mandate a “tax” placed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in violation of the Constitution’s Origination Clause. Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 states: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.”

You can read the rest of this article here at Breitbart.com .

University of Texas Whitewash of Elizabeth Warren Scientific Misconduct Charge Entangles UVA, UC Presidents

When Elizabeth Warren, Teresa A. Sullivan, and Jay Westbrook, co-authors of the 1989 book As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, were charged by Rutgers Law School Professor Philip Shuchman with scientific misconduct in 1990, they quickly asked for an investigation to clear their names. Sullivan, who resigned earlier this month as President of the University of Virginia, “immediately asked [her] employer, The University of Texas, to investigate the charge,” as she told me in a letter I received by email from her on June 5, 2012.



By 1990, all three co-authors--Sullivan, Warren, and Westbrook--were well established fixtures in University of Texas academic and social circles. Sullivan was the Chairman of the Sociology Department at the University of Texas, and would soon become the Dean of Graduate Studies. Westbrook was a long-tenured member of the faculty at the University of Texas Law School. Warren, who taught at the University of Texas Law School from 1981 to 1987, had by this time moved on to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, a top ten school with great prestige.



Warren’s former colleagues at the University of Texas took pride in her emergence as a rising legal star of the left, a reputation she carefully cultivated. According to some who have followed her career, she was considered a master practitioner of hard-nosed academic political tactics, and her critics in the genteel world of higher education were increasingly wary of her.



It was in that environment that current President of the University of California system Mark Yudof (then Dean of the University of Texas Law School) and current University of Texas Dean of Graduate Studies, ad interim Judith Langlois, wrote the April 1991 report for the investigation that Sullivan requested. It was titled University of Texas Preliminary Inquiry Report: Scientific Misconduct Against Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Westbrook.


You can read the rest of the story here at Breitbart.com.

Did Breitbart Investigation Play Any Role in Sudden Resignation of UVA President?

Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. Sometimes it's more than that.

Based on all available current evidence, it appears that Teresa A. Sullivan's sudden resignation as President of the University of Virginia this past Sunday was most likely unrelated to an ongoing Breitbart News investigation into twenty-two-year-old allegations of scientific misconduct. However, since none of the key players in this drama--neither the sixteen members of the Board of Visitors who asked for her resignation, nor President Sullivan--have been willing to offer much in the way of explanation, rumors and speculation as to the true reasons for her sudden dismissal have been rampant.

Here's a chronology that documents the curious coincidence of timing:

You can read the rest of this story here at Breitbart.com . 

The Academic Scandal Elizabeth Warren and Harvard Don't Want You to Know About

Here's the first article in my four part series running now at Breitbart News on 1990 allegations of "scientific misconduct" against Elizabeth Warren.

In 1990, Rutgers Professor Philip Shuchman charged Elizabeth Warren, along with Teresa A. Sullivan (above), the President of University of Virginia who resigned unexpectedly yesterday, and Jay Westbrook,  her two co-authors of the 1989 book, As We Forgive Our Debtors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit in America, with “scientific misconduct.” Within a few months, Warren’s friends and former colleagues at the University of Texas quickly completed an error-filled investigation.

This secret report was accepted by University of Texas President William Cunningham. For two decades, Warren and her co-authors have claimed in academic circles that this report--never before made public--exonerated them.

You can read the rest of the article here at Breitbart.com .

BREAKING at BREITBART: Cherokees Demand Truth from Elizabeth Warren

You can read the full story, breaking now at BREITBART, here:

 Cherokees Demand Truth from Elizabeth Warren 

Covenant of Liberty Book Tour of Western States

I'll be speaking at several events as part of The Covenant of Liberty book tour of the western states next week:

Monday, April 30 -- Santa Monica Tea Party, Santa Monica, CA

Tuesday, May 1 -- East Valley Tea Party , Mesa AZ

Wednesday, May 2 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

Thursday, May 3 -- Dallas, Texas

Friday, May 4 -- Frisco, Texas (just north of Dallas)

Also, I may be speaking in Santa Barbara CA Sunday April 29 or Monday April 30

If you live in any of these areas and would like to attend, please contact me for specific times and locations.

Mitt Romney Gets a Copy of Covenant of Liberty

Last Monday, I introduced Mitt Romney at a meeting of the Independence Hall Tea Party's Tax Day Tea Party Summit, held at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

In my introduction, I said that "the Tea Party reserves the right to encourage the Republican Party nominee to more closely align with the tea party's core values."

After the event, I gave Governor Romney a copy of my new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement.

The Coming Conservative Landslide

Wishful liberals and Chicken Little conservatives who watch the weekly fluctuations in the presidential polls have concluded that President Obama is a shoo-in for re-election. They point out that Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, can’t connect with women, has a large likability gap and is slightly behind Obama in most national polls as well as in the key swing states of Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Ohio.


The despair of faint-hearted conservatives deepens when they contemplate President Obama’s disastrous performance in office. His record of fiscally reckless extremism is unparalleled in American history. In three short years, federal spending as a percentage of GDP has climbed from 20% to 24% while the national debt has exploded from $10 trillion to $15.5 trillion. By the end of his term, Obama will have increased the national debt by a staggering 67%.


Add to this record President Obama’s continual disrespect for the Constitution, his unceasing regulatory attacks on free enterprise and small businesses, his rhetoric of class warfare, his deceptive demagoguery and his spendthrift economic policies that have fattened the wallets of his political cronies but created so few jobs that millions of Americans have simply dropped out of the labor force, and many conservatives can offer only one explanation for Obama’s current lead in the polls.


America, they conclude, must have lost its can-do spirit of rugged individualism and replaced it with what Governor Chris Christie recently called an attitude of “paternalistic entitlement” championed by a coalition of political elites, acolytes in the mainstream media, crony capitalists and an ever-growing dependency class.
Conservatives across the nation should be of good cheer, however. The United States remains a center-right nation. This November, voters will choose common sense over fiscally reckless extremism in what will be a landslide conservative victory. Republicans will retain the House, gain the Senate and win back the presidency with a 2-to-1 Electoral College margin.


You can read the rest of the story at The Daily Caller.

Lou Dobbs and I Talk About the Impact of the Tea Party on the 2012 Election

My Appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rick Santorum Gets the First Copy of Covenant of Liberty

(Photo courtesy of Samuel E. Burns)

Although my new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement , won't be released until March 20, my publisher, HarperCollins' new conservative imprint, Broadside Books, overnighted one advanced copy of the book to me on Friday so that I could give it to Rick Santorum on Saturday.

The occasion was the Chattanooga Tea Party's celebration of the Third Anniversary of the launch of the Tea Party movement. Santorum was the featured speaker, and I was one of a few who spoke before he addressed the crowd, which was quite large (I estimate about 2,000.)

After the event, I was able to have a brief conversation with Senator Santorum. I think it helped when I pointed out that both Richard Viguerie and John Bolton had written very nice back jacket blurbs. I thanked Senator Santorum for engaging with the Tea Party movement, and suggested that he consider aligning his policies more closely with our three core values. The Senator was very gracious.

Tea Party Leaders to Florida Voters: Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul Should Continue Past Florida

You can see the full Election Day Tea Party press release here.

What's Next for the Tea Party Movement? Election Day Tea Party 2012

Time for Warren Buffett and his Secretary to Release Their Personal Tax Returns

The political theater of the Obama Administration continues at this evening’s State of the Union Address. Debbie Bosanek, Warren Buffett’s personal secretary–you know the woman who has become the poster-child for President Obama’s attacks on the “unfairness” of the not progressive enough tax code–will be seated in the First Lady’s box this evening. Buffett has repeatedly lectured to us about a tax code in which his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.

Ms. Bosanek, who until recently had only been thrust into the public dialogue over “fairness” and redistribution by her publicity seeking and political favor hunting boss (note how his Burlington Railroad company benefits financially from the President’s decision to halt the Keystone Pipeline) has now thrust herself into the national debate.

Fair enough.

Now that she’s voluntarily participating in the public arena, I call on both Ms. Bosanek and Mr. Buffett to release their own personal tax returns for the past four years. Let’s see what their tax rates really are. This is an important political argument that will be a central theme of the Obama campaign for the rest of the year. Having made the claim on behalf of the Obama campaign, it’s time for Mr. Buffett and Ms. Bosanek to demonstrate its veracity.

I suspect we’ll find that Mr. Buffett has benefited significantly from his own lobbying of Congress. And I’m curious to see exactly how much higher Ms. Bosanek’s tax rate is than Mr. Buffett’s.

The analysis of their personal tax returns is likely to be highly educational for the entire country.

More commentary at Broadside Books' Line of Fire here.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series, co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, and co-organizer of Election Day Tea Party 2012. His new book,Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .