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MINOT, N.D. - A group of students at Our Redeemer's in Minot took a break from reading, writing and arithmetic Thursday for a tea party!

And they had an expert from across the pond teaching them how to have their tea in class.

England native Silvia Rau knows a thing or two about tea party etiquette.

Rau shared some lessons with the youngsters at Our Redeemer's.

A group of students donned in fancy colorful hats gathered for a sip of tea and a snack, in the British tradition.

Rau, who moved to the U-S in the '90's, taught them how to properly sip their drink, and to take food one item at a time.

It's not like a buffet where you pile it all on because that's the idea of a small tea plate, said Rau.

Rau also debunked some myths about the tea party.

We actually are not supposed to point up, we're not actually supposed to sip tea with our pinky. It's kind of a joke, said Tavia Carlson, 4th Grader.

If I had to pick... the sandwiches. They were really good, said Carlson, when asked her favorite part of the party

Rau also showed the importance of manners.

I said, 'When you come in for tea, it's a very relaxed, but nice meal.' And I said, 'We have our best manners when we have tea,' and they've done that. Please and thank you, I've heard it all the time, said Rau.

Bringing a taste of British culture to the Northern Plains of North America.

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Fancy that! Our Redeemer's students learn tea party etiquette - KFYR - KFYR-TV

Back in January, I argued in these pages that whatever President Donald Trumps proclivities toward being a strongman ruler, the American system of checks and balances in the end had a good chance of containing him. Fridays failure of the Republican attempt to repeal Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act underscores how difficult our political system makes any kind of decisive political action. During Obamas presidency, House Republicans voted some 60 times to repeal parts or the whole of the ACA, and Trump himself pledged that he would replace it with something wonderful on Day One of his administration. And yet it appears the ACA will continue to be, as House Speaker Paul Ryan admitted, the law of the land. This happened despite the fact that we no longer have divided government, with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency.

The fundamental reason for the failure of the American Health Care Act lies, of course, in the internal divisions within the Republican Party. The bill was extremely unpopular from the beginning due to the fact it would have potentially resulted in 24 million fewer Americans having health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Democrats, though a minority, were therefore uniformly opposed to repeal, meaning that the Republicans could afford only 26 defections for the legislation to fail. The hard-line Freedom Caucus in the end could not be badgered or threatened to accept Obamacare Lite, coming, as many of them do, from safe, gerrymandered districts.

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This is where the mounting number of institutional checks within the American system came into play. Had this vote been held 75 years ago, the powerful committee chairmen in the House, together with the Republican Party leadership, could have corralled these renegades through a combination of bribes or threats. Today, such tools do not exist: Earmarks have been eliminated along with the powers of the committee chairs, and there is too much money from groups outside the control of the party hierarchy. The Freedom Caucus holdouts were much more frightened of a Tea Party challenge in the primaries than they were of either Paul Ryan or Donald Trump.

And then, of course, there is the fact that the Republican Party is itself much more narrowly ideological and fragmented than it was in the mid-20th century, making it better adapted to vetoes and obstruction than to actually governing. As Ryans ill-fated predecessor, John Boehner, understood, party discipline no longer exists.

President Trump came into office seeming to think he could run the U.S. government like he ran his family-owned business, through executive orders. As he admitted on Friday, We learned a lot about the vote-getting process. Unlike a parliamentary system, the U.S. Constitution firmly vests most powers in Congress; the president is powerful only to the extent that he can be a cheerleader and consensus-builder in a system of widely shared powers.

So, far from being a potential tyrant as many Democrats fear, Trump looks like he is heading to the history books as a weak and ineffective president, hobbled by the same checks and balances as his predecessor. He has expressed regret that he went for health care reform before tax reform, but he will find that the latter is an even further bridge. Should the Republicans push ahead with their border adjustment tax, they will find a huge coalition of powerful and well-organized interest groups opposing them. (Note, for instance, how vociferously Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, home of retail giant Wal-Mart, has expressed his opposition.) Whatever the national interest in lowering the headline rate of corporate taxation, the organization of Congress gives these interest groups the ability to veto any measure affecting their narrow part of the economy. Ditto for an ambitious infrastructure initiative: It is that same Tea Party bloc that will be the most relentless opponents of any effort to spend federal dollars on it. And even if Congress approves, the courts and states will have a major say in how and whether projects are executed: just look at the remaining obstacles to Keystone XL getting built.

Trump could end up being a powerful and transformative president under one condition: that he breaks decisively with the Tea Party wing of his own party and pursue bipartisan cooperation from the Democrats. On the infrastructure initiative and possibly on tax reform this is entirely plausible. This would also have been possible with health care reform, had Trump worked sincerely to fix the ACA rather than foolishly demonizing from the start what has proven to be a popular law.

Im not counting on any of this happening, however. Trumps instinct is to run to his red-state base of core supporters for comfort and adulation, rather than seeking to govern as president of the entire country. Note that he has yet to hold an event in a state he didnt win. He needs moreover to think carefully about the interests of his working-class supporters, rather than outsourcing policy to conservative ideologues like Paul Ryanwhose ideas would make them worse off. In Latin America, populist presidents shower their supporters with new social programs; our populist president has spent much of his early days trying to take benefits away from them.

Moreover, Trump has done so much to undermine trust that its not clear the Democrats would accept an olive branch even if it were offered. Their intention to filibuster the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, an eminently qualified jurist, to the Supreme Court is a harbinger of future obstruction for its own sake. It is much more likely that the Trump presidency will continue to hobble along, weakened by its own lack of experience and internal contradictions. I am personally very pleased that the AHCA failed, since I thought Obamacare was a good thing, and I hope Congress will reverse many of the cuts proposed in Trumps budget. But Americans should not be pleased with an institutional system that privileges small minorities like the Freedom Caucus and makes the search for broad consensus so difficult. This is what feeds demands for strongman leadership in the first place and prevents the country from facing difficult decisions for the common good.

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Trump's a Dictator? He Can't Even Repeal Obamacare - POLITICO Magazine

Its painful to see our own sheriff pointing to an incident when an immigrant committed a crime and using that to slander by implication all undocumented immigrants and call sanctuary cities bad business. If he has been in law enforcement as he claims, he has seen a lot more crime committed by US citizens.

Criminals are the problem, not sanctuary cities, and most of the criminals are US citizens. We have more people in prison than any country in the world. Sanctuary cities are not saying that they will tolerate serious criminals and the sheriff knows it. He admitted in the meeting that he knows of no sanctuary city that has that policy.

Why would the sheriff choose to scapegoat immigrants other than for political reasons, to show that he is a tough sheriff, at the expense of ruining the lives of hard working recent immigrants?

For me personally, its painful to see recent immigrants and refugees scapegoated, as if attacking and getting rid of law abiding hard working people will solve all of our problems. The crime rate among immigrants is about half the crime rate for US citizens. These are not the people who have outsourced or automated our jobs or caused the recent sub prime mortgage financial collapse. Economic analysis shows that these recent immigrants benefit our economy.

The argument that they are somehow bad because they are undocumented and therefor illegal is truly offensive in a nation that has thrived as a nation of immigrants. Morally, no human being should be deemed illegal. This wasnt always the case. The Holocaust was entirely legal. 6 million Jews and about 5 million other innocent men women and children were brutally murdered and almost no on went to prison or was charged with a crime. The 11 million murdered civilians were deemed illegal.

We have not had a rational, effective immigration policy. The history of our immigration policy is a history of a policy based on discrimination. This great country has benefited all of us, since we or our families all came here as refugees or as economic migrants. I would hope that, in time of need, we will want to provide a safe harbor to others.

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Home Front Page Videos Video highlights of Morris Tea Party sanctuary cities talk by Sheriff James... - Morristown Green

The piano tinkled "Tea for Two," and soon most of the room joined in singing during a spring tea party on Friday, March 24, at Montgomery Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Taylor Springs.

Painstakingly organized by activity director Mandy Smith, the tea party featured exquisite table settings, finger foods, cookies and cakeseverything in spring pastel colors, including elegant hats for every woman in the room.

"What a wonderful day for all our ladies," Smith said. "I'm not sure what I loved the mostseeing each resident in her fancy hat and pearls, the smiles on their faces as they saw each table with fancy china sets, cakes made by Kim Smith's cakes, all the wonderful finger sandwiches, piano music played by Dottie Paden, or hearing the ladies tell me past memories of tea parties they attended or held years ago.

"I want to thank Administrator Carla VonderHaar, Helen Loucks and Nancy Meyer, Theresa Legg and Al Lemme for all their volunteer hours, Cindy Laurent, Karen McCaffrey and to all our wonderful staff at MNRC. It took every department to make this one of the most amazing days for all our ladies."

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Spring Tea Party For Residents At MNRC - thejournal-news.net

I get a kick out of the Republican members of Congress who claim the angry constituents at their town hall meetings are paid agitators. I remember how Democrats tried to dismiss noisy tea party protesters the same way in 2009.

Not surprisingly, President Donald Trump doesn't see it that way.

"The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans," Trump tweeted Tuesday, "are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists."

Gee, imagine that: Angry liberals are strategically encouraging people to come out and let their lawmakers know what's on their minds. Liberals are calling it grassroots politics while some conservatives are calling it "AstroTurf politics."

But that's what a lot of liberals called it when the conservative tea party movement erupted in 2009. Now many of those tea party critics are trying to employ the same tactic.

Angry constituents have made headlines across the nation, upset over everything from the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, evidence of Russian interference in the U.S. elections and the Trump White House's travel ban, just for starters.

As for "liberal activists?" Republican have known since December that a growing number of liberal organizations and activists have been sharing strategies for ways to encourage voters to light up town halls with tough questions for members of Congress.

More than a thousand local groups have popped up across the country, organizing around an online how-to organizing manual called "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda."

Drafted by former Democratic congressional staffers who say they came up with the idea at an Austin, Texas, bar a couple of days after Thanksgiving, the manual has gone viral on the web, helped along by some prominent liberal groups like Barack Obama's Organizing for America in promoting the Indivisible Guide.

Following the tea party model makes more sense than the Occupy Wall Street movement, which captured public attention for a few weeks and then faded without much follow-up. By contrast, the tea party grew potent enough to help take away the Democrats' House majority in 2010, its second year. President Obama's momentum was never the same.

Does Indivisible have a chance to do the same to President Trump? That depends mainly on how well local organizers can keep their enthusiasm and momentum going.

The first big test for this new Indivisible movement may not come until next year's midterms, just as it did for Republicans in 2010.

That's a good test because Democratic Party turnout tends to drop in midterm elections. The most recent and notable exception was 2006. Dissatisfaction over President George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War and a series of scandals involving Republican politicians, among other woes for the Grand Old Party, resulted in a Democratic sweep. The donkey party captured both houses of Congress and a majority of governorships and state legislatures.

Could they do it again? The election map doesn't look nearly as good for Democrats this time, but that, too, makes 2018 important. State lawmakers will be elected that year who will draw the electoral maps for 2020.

And Democrats have another unusual asset: President Trump. Defying traditions, as he loves to do, he has continued to focus on whipping up his conservative base without making the traditional pivot that others have made toward the political center.

The result has been approval ratings in almost all of the major polls that are historically low for a new president. A recent Quinnipiac University poll this month, for example, found only 38 percent of voters think he is doing a good job while 55 percent said he was doing a bad job.

Worse for the GOP, a Pew Research Center poll released this month before showed rank-and file Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are still so psyched up for Trump that 52 percent of them say they are likely to side with Trump in a dispute with party leaders.

If Trump fails to keep his promises, even his core support could erode.

But, of course, Trump only gives Democrats someone to vote against. Let's see whom they offer us to vote for.

TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

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Will today's town hall crowds turn into a liberal tea party? - Allied News