TeaPartyWire.com – Tea Party News by and for Tea Party Members

By Arlette Saenz

EVANSVILLE, Ind. – Mitt Romney lent a hand to a Tea Party-backed Senate candidate, Richard Mourdock, in Indiana today, campaigning with him at a barbecue stop here this afternoon to urge voters to elect the state treasure this fall.

“We got to get this guy elected in the U.S. Senate, you know that,” Romney said to applause from patrons seated at tables in Stepto’s BBQ Shack. “He has proven as the treasurer that he knows how to make sure to balance books. He’s also proven as a campaigner that he can take his message to the people of Indiana. They’ll support him.”

At a stop that had the feel of the Republican primary events held in small restaurants across the country earlier this year, Romney, campaigning with Mourdock for the first time, discussed the common vision he shares with the Indiana Republican to cut spending in Washington.

Read more at ABC News.com

Richard Lugar

Richard Lugar’s 36-year Senate career came to an ignominious end Tuesday evening when Indiana Republican primary voters chose Tea Party champion Richard Mourdock to face a Democratic challenger this November.

“He [Lugar] did not run a campaign recognizing the lessons … of the 2010 [midterm] election,” an anonymous GOP strategist told The Hill, “He could have defined Mourdock early on, and failed to do so.”

For Lugar to “define” Mourdock required he first define himself. Since 2010, establishment Republicans have scrambled to co-opt those around the Tea Party periphery by claiming the meaningless title “conservative,” with Mitt Romney being the most glaring example.

Not all Tea Party enthusiasts buy into this cynical strategy, however. “This will be my first primary vote,” Indianapolis resident and Mourdock supporter Nick Ellis told me, “I’m making sure I count now more than ever to ensure my Indiana is an example to all other RINOs out there,” saying he wants establishment Republicans to pay at the ballot box for their “betrayal.”

“36 years is enough,” said Ellis of the veteran Indiana Senator, “enough time to become corrupted by the D.C. political machine and to lose sight of the core values of the state you represent.”

A strong Second Amendment supporter, Ellis noted, “Lugar’s F-rating with the NRA didn’t help his cause either. I mean, how does a Republican from Indiana receive an F-rating?”

In a piece written in support of Lugar, former presidential speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan said, “What Washington needs is sober and responsible adults. We are as a nation in a moment of real peril, facing challenges that are going to become existential – maybe already are – if we don’t do something about them.”

What Noonan and her fellow establishmentarians fail to grasp is that many Hoosiers have patiently waited 36 years for Lugar to grow up and face these existential perils. Indiana’s Tea Party realists came to the conclusion that Lugar was much too old a dog to teach new tricks.

“The mainstream media keeps insisting the Tea Party is dead,” Nick Ellis reminds me, “But if the polls are any reflection of today’s outcome – that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case.”

Lugar’s departure from Washington’s political theater of the absurd proves that reports of the Tea Party’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Lugar Republicans would be wise to take note, grow up, and seriously confront the perils facing the nation.

In the end, fighting for our nation’s survival greatly enhances the odds of your political survival.

Richaed Lugar

Source: KansasCity.com

By: James Rosen – McClatchy Newspapers

Posted: April 10th , 2012

Unlike in the last election cycle, Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina is maintaining a low profile as he appears to fulfill a promise to Senate Republican leaders that he won’t oppose any sitting GOP senators through his Senate Conservatives Fund.

But Senate Republican aides and campaign-finance experts say DeMint has reneged on that promise by using a stealth funding mechanism to target Sen. Dick Lugar, an Indiana Republican who’s been in office since 1977 but now is facing a stiff tea party-backed primary challenge.

Team DeMint, the South Carolina Republican’s campaign political action committee, last month transferred $500,000 to Club for Growth, an influential free market advocacy group based in Washington with longstanding close ties to DeMint.

Club for Growth last week started running a hard-hitting TV ad in Indiana, accusing Lugar of having backed tax increases, along with federal bailouts of Wall Street bankers and mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

“Call Dick Lugar,” the ad ends. “Tell him — no more tax hikes and no more debt.”

Lugar recently voted against two top DeMint initiatives: codifying in law the current moratorium on spending earmarks and preventing U.S. funds from helping to bail out debt-laden European governments.

The anti-earmark amendment, defeated by a 59-40 Senate vote Feb. 2, was crafted by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, the former Club for Growth head whom DeMint helped elect to the Senate in 2010 with $304,000 in donations from his Senate Conservatives Fund.

In its analysis of 36 key votes dating to 2003, DeMint’s fund ranks only three of the other 46 GOP senators — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — as more liberal than Lugar.

Jennifer Duffy, a Senate analyst with the widely read Cook Political Report, said DeMint’s highly unusual transfer of such a large sum of money from his re-election PAC to a group that’s made Lugar its top Republican target this year received wide notice in GOP Senate offices.

“The fact that DeMint used his campaign account to take this action looks far more personal and drives the perception that he has gone back on his promise not to go after his Republican colleagues,” Duffy told McClatchy.

Two senior Senate Republican aides, who requested that they not be named in order to provide candid views, gave similar accounts.