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Taylor Budowich, Opinion contributor Published 10:56 a.m. ET June 22, 2017 | Updated 3 hours ago

A protest in Philadelphia on Jan. 26, 2017.(Photo: Suchat Pederson, USA TODAY Network)

After failing in dramatic fashion at the ballot box last year, Democrats have clung to the hope that the vague anti-Trump resistance may be their saving grace a supposed organic political movement that would do for them what the Tea Party did for the Republicans. However, afterfour straight special-election defeats capped off this week in Georgia when Democrats directed tens of millions of dollars only to lose its clear the resistance is just another political paper tiger, not the partys salvation.

Since the Womens March following President Trumps inauguration, the mainstream media has attempted to draw parallels between the resistance and the Tea Party. Unsurprisingly, the comparison revolved around tactics. The Tea Party and the resistanceboth protested their respective Administrations, they both brought energy, and they both raised concerns at town halls.

However, what the media, Democratsand even some of the GOPs old guard fail to appreciate is that itwasnt tactics that created the Tea Partys historic and lasting success. There were no novel campaign strategies, patented micro-targeting, or complex data analytics. Instead, the Tea Partys rise was defined by its powerfully simple message of limited government and less spending. It was a message and pursuit that, at the time, was largely abandoned by both political parties, yet resonated with many American voters.

Additionally, the Tea Party movement understood that to change the policies, they had to change the players and we did. Democrats and their resistance have been losing election after election, a stark contrast to the Tea Partys ability to rackup victory after victory at the ballot box.

From Trump to Sen.Rand Paul of Kentucky,from Rep. Mark Meadowsof North Carolina toGov.Rick Scottof Florida,the most prominent faces of todays Republican Party found electoral success with campaign messagesthat aligned with Tea Party values.

It was never about the label Tea Party, but instead the ideas that inspired a truly organic and peaceful political revolution. And though the Tea Party was often disparaged by the media, it flourishes in the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and in state houses across the country.

Republicans now have control of 33 governors mansions, while Democrats have lost over 900 state legislative seats, putting the GOP in control either partially or entirely of 45 states.

Conservatism flourishing under Trump

Why rich liberals won't fund a Tea Party: Jason Sattler

In contrast, the resistance has only succeeded at turning out the same Democrats who supported Hillary Clinton and her failed campaign, and it has fallen far short of redefining the vanishing Democratic Party in part because the resistance and Democratic Party are indistinguishable from each other. Same rhetoric, same out-of-touch agenda, same result.

This has been true from the beginning. Statistician Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight and a Special Correspondent for ABC News, published an in-depth analysis of the anti-Trump Womens March in January. In his report, Silver found that 80 percent of march attendance came in states that Clinton won. By comparison, more thanhalf of the Tea Party protests were in states that President Obama won in 2008.

That reality hasn't changed. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat in the Georgia special election this week, had ninetimes more donations come from California than from the state where he ran. And even though he was the anointed candidate out of the gate, he didn't even live in the district. It's hard to win when neither the moneynor the candidate came from the district.

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Now that the dust has settled, here's what we know: The Democratic resistance poured a record-breaking $31millioninto Georgia to oppose Tea Party-backed Karen Handel , only to lose. If that wasn't bad enough, Ossoff lost by more than doubleClinton's losing margin in the district last fall.

This race, coupled with other special-election lossesin Kansas, Montana, and South Carolina, have become expensive reminders of 2016, when Democrats wasted hundreds of millions of dollars propping up candidates handpicked by the party leaders, only to be rejected at the ballot box by the voters. More consequentially though, it proves the Democrats' hopes for their own Tea Party revolution are dead.

The difference between the two movements is simple: the Tea Party's message captured voters the Republican Party failed to reach. The resistance merely re-organized those Clinton voters who have yet the accept Trumps victory and cling to the Not My President hashtag. Thats not the formula for a political revolution, its just sour grapes.

Going forward, the Democratic Party has two paths. It can continue under the failed, top-down leadership of Nancy Pelosi and anout-of-touch agenda, ensuring a continuing journeytowards irrelevance. Orit can finally recognize that it has a message problem, compounded by priorities that favor big cities and ignore the rest of America.

an agenda that prioritizes the interests of big cities, while ignoring the rest of America.

Taylor Budowich is executive director of Tea Party Express, the nation's largest Tea Party political action committee. Follow him on Twitter: @TaylorBudowich

You can readdiverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers ontheOpinion front page,on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter.To submit a letter, comment or column, check oursubmission guidelines.

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Trump resistance will never be a Tea Party for Democrats - USA TODAY

Added on June 21, 2017 Special Contributor Movie Reviews

Jason Momoa and Suki Waterhouse in The Bad Batch. Courtesy of NEON

by Morgan Rojas/www.cinemacy.com

Bringing Bad back to the big screen for her highly anticipated sophomore film is Ana Lily Amirpour, the visionary who made black and white Vampire Spaghetti Westerns a thing. Amirpour trades the streets of Bad City for the barren desert of Texas in The Bad Batch, a meditative and highly audaciouscannibal film that makes Burning Man look like your grandmas tea party (For our exclusive interview with Amirpour and actress Suki Waterhouse, visit http://www.cinemacy.com).

Our heroine isArlen(Suki Waterhouse), a young woman who has been dumped in the desert after spending an undisclosed amount of time in a detention facility. Disorientedand penniless, her stamina is no match for unrelenting sun as she decides to let her guard down for a quick nap in a convenientlyabandoned car. Its not long until a group of ragtag cannibal misfits find Arlen and take her to their base camp. Arlens desperation to escape literally costs her an arm and a leg as she quickly learns that its every man, or in this case, woman, for herself in the Bad Batch.

Elements of what made Amirpours first film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, so successful are replicated here strong female protagonist, gritty skate culture, a trendy soundtrack including songs from Die Antwoord and Culture Club, and all-around cool vibes. Perhaps too cool at times, but how can it not be coming from distributors like Vice, NEON, and Annapurna Pictures?

Arlen encounters many characters as she wanders through the barren landscape, including the big and burly Miami Man (Jason Momoa), his quiet yetindependent daughter, Honey (Jayda Fink) and The Dream (Keanu Reeves), the idolized patriarch of the desert camp called Comfort. The subsidiary cast ofkooks like Hermit (Jim Carrey) and The Screamer (Giovanni Ribisi) are unexpected but welcomed additions that further round out Arlens reality. Like a bad ass Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz, Arlen just wants to go home and usesthese characters she meets along the way to help her get there.

The audience isnt given the luxury of knowing Arlens backstory, or how she wound up in the Bad Batch in the first place, but character development clearly wasnt the focus here. We are dropped into a dystopian desert without knowing how we got there or where were going, but we blindly buckle up for the ride. By default, we root for Arlens success because the odds are against her, plus she is fighting to survive with a missing left arm and leg. Id venture to guess, however, that a backstory would have made the audience further emotionally invested.

Ana Lily Amirpours moody, high-style horror flick is an unconventional watch, but for as tough and tireless as the premise is, the cinematic style of the film itself is quite idyllic. Minimal dialogue and long, sweeping shots of the vast wasteland makes for a meditative watch despite the blood, guts, and gore. Lingering shots of barren desert-living mixed with the effortlessly cool and all-around badass Suki Waterhouse makes The Bad Batch an artistic vision, or dare I saydream?

The Bad Batch is rated R for violence, language, some drug content, and brief nudity. 118 minutes. Opening this Friday at ArcLight Hollywood andOn Demand, Amazon and iTunes.

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The Bad Batch makes Burning Man look like your grandma's tea party [MOVIE REVIEW] - Easy Reader

The 2017 installment of The Mad Tea Party Jam was held this past weekend at Four Quarters Farm in Artemis, Pennsylvania. Papadosios third set of the weekend was canceled on Saturday after three of the five band members fell ill. NYS Music reports a number of attendees, musicians and staff at the event also became sick with several sent to a local hospital.

NYS Music reports symptoms were first reported on Friday. The website spoke with attendee Ona Hogarty, who was taken to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. Hogarty told NYS Music she was diagnosed with dysentery and said the doctors told her dysentery is often given as a broad term diagnosis to stomach viruses accompanied by bloody stools. As of press time, no official cause of the health issues has been announced.

The Mad Tea Partys announcement about the cancellation of Papadosios third set reads in part, Due to health factors that are out of our control, Papadosio will not be able to play their 3rd set scheduled tonight at The Mad Tea Party Jam. 3/5 members of the band have fallen ill and feel they couldnt give you the show you deserve without the full band in good health. We are sorry to disappoint and take these health issues very seriously.

Four Quarters hosted WickerMan Burn the previous weekend, where similar health issues were reported. Organizers of the Mad Tea Party Jam shared a message from the venue that notes, Recently we have suffered at Four Quarters outbreaks of a very contagious Viral GI illness that is following the pattern of the 2008 season outbreaks. We have been in contact with our public health officials about Viral GI prior to the outbreak at The Mad Tea Party and have been in continuous contact since Sunday morning, June 18th. We have been forwarding contact information, hospital information, test reports and samples directly to the PA Epidemiological Dept, and will be meeting with them on site shortly. Read the full statement from Four Quarters Orren Whiddon:

[Via NYS Music / Hat Tip Billboard]

Link:
Mad Tea Party Jam Cancels Papadosio Set After Band Members & Attendees Fall Ill - JamBase

BELTON State Rep. Hugh Shine visited the Central Texas Tea Party Monday night to talk property taxes and the impending special session of the state Legislature.

The monthly meeting of the Central Texas Tea Party was held at the Harris Community Center in Belton, and much of the meeting involved passionate discussion about property tax reform.

Shine outlined his proposal for a new property tax notice that property owners would receive. His proposal is to create a spreadsheet that outlines how each taxing entity effects the taxes paid by an individual.

This is the first process of reform, Shine said. This would be a required statement across the State of Texas so that people can look at this and make an informed decision about where there was rates could be.

Shine also discussed his proposal for additional training and scrutiny of appraisal review boards.

We were going to require training and require a local administrative judge to appoint the appraisal board chairman. We had about seven different items to address that, Shine said.

One member of the audience said he believes the focus should be on the actual appraisers, not the review board.

The appraisal districts are out of control, he said. The problem isnt the review board, its the appraisers. Those guys can do whatever they want. Theres no control over them with these huge increases.

Landowners in Bell County have seen increases in their property tax valuations this year. Residents in Harker Heights recently protested increases they said were substantial and excessive.

Shine said he proposed a 10 percent cap on increases for residences, which wasnt well received.

I got no support. I heard from the Realtors immediately when I proposed it, Shine said. They believed if there was a cap, property values wouldnt raise much and it would prevent them from selling homes.

One resident voiced his displeasure with the amount of inactivity that happened during the legislative session. Shine responded by saying the process of getting a bill passed involves a lot of moving parts.

Youve got 183 people in the process. How many of you agree on everything with your spouse? Trying to get 183 people to agree is really a challenge, he said. There are people who dont like certain legislation and they will find ways to kill it.

Shine said property tax legislation will be revisited during the upcoming special session that starts next month. Shine said his first priority is to protect the interests of his constituents.

Im going to support Bell County and the folks that live here. Im going to vote the best I can always to support the people in Bell County and our economy, Shine said. Im just like you. I pay property taxes. I want to see something happen with this so that when people get their tax statements, they understand them and they know who to go talk to to find out why their tax rate didnt change if their appraisals went up.

Tea Party member Judy Brady said asked Shine to reach out to the Republican Party to help spread the word about property taxes and similar issues.

When you get into a situation where you need us to take this door to door, let us know, Brady said. Were not here to oppose you on everything. Were here to support you as well.

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Shine discusses property taxes at Tea Party meeting - Temple Daily Telegram

We never originally intended to be an instrumental band; when we started, we auditioned a load of singers and some of them were f**king awful!We wrotesomedemos in order to entice a vocalist into the band and stuck them up on the Internetandgot offered a support with ...And so I Watch you from Afar and Adebisi Shank on the strength of some instrumental demos that were never actually intended to be instrumental. When we got slots like that, we figured there might be something in this and its spiralled out of control into the fiery ball of hell that it is now!

Founding member and guitarist of Alpha Male Tea Party Tom Peters there on how his band, one of the most beloved and respected to come out of the instrumental just-dont-call-us-post-rock wave that has been fiercely bubbling away in the underground in the past decade. The band have firmly established themselves as one of the countrys premier instrumental math rock acts in a nascent yet hysterically dedicated scene. Their third album Health is due to be releasedvia Big Scary Monsters on Friday 23rd June, but you can stream the record in full 3 days beforehand,exclusively with The Independent.

Alpha Male Tea Party originally began as an escape from the drudgery of full-time employment for Tom. He started putting demos of s**tty songs together on Logic and posted a Gumtree advert to find like-mined individuals to help produce seismic tectonic-plate-shifting math rock riffs. The band took a short while to cement its line-up but solidified with drummer Greg Chapman and bassist Ben Griffiths, a person Peters asked to join the band despite never seeing him play bass on the strength that he was "a funny man".

Humour has been an essential thread through Alpha Male Tea Partys career to date; whether it be the outrageous Devo-inspired outfits or their acerbic on-stage wit. Its tended to be a characteristic that has marked them out from a scene that produces a lot of great bands with little to distinguish between them but its also been used as a noose for clueless critics to hang the band from.

I guess Health is a bit more lofty in theme than where we've been before says Tom. For all our jocular silliness and stupid humour, I think the core of what we're doing is a lot more serious than people think it is. I know we always have stupid song titles and we have a silly band name, but when it actually boils down to what we do creatively and artistically, we take it incredibly seriously. Theres a bit of a misconception about the humorous aspect of Alpha Male Tea Party; it isn't merely a pointless element. It's a very important and intrinsic part of who the three of us are as individuals and if that doesn't come across in what we do artistically, then we are f**king lying. I'm the sort of person who'll be cracking jokes in any situation; I was cracking jokes at my Grandad's funeral because that's how I cope with stuff, I have to do it like that. I'm not an insensitive person and I care very deeply about people and the world, but there comes a point where you actually have to find a way to reconcile yourself with the many s**tty things that happen and humour, for me, is pretty much the only way I can do that. If there's ever any level of criticism about us, it's always relating to the humour, as if there were a pre-scribed idea that humour and music should never cross paths.

But all music is a product of the circumstances in which it was created and Alpha Male Tea Partys third album is no different. The jubilant, major-key melodies are still scattered all over the record with abundance, and the band still show a fondness for naming some of their songs with absurd track titles, such as "Carpet Diem", "Dont You Know Who I Think I Am?" and"Nobody Had the Heart To Tell Him He Was on Fire". But the badinage is soaked in an altogether more sombre tone than what weve come to expect from the three-piece.

If we did have an agenda going into this album it was we wanted to do something a little bit darker says Tom. I think that was just a natural reaction to the personal circumstances that we were all going through. I was struggling to come up with up-beat major sounding riffs and it wasnt feeling natural either. I don't want to churn out 10 songs of buoyant, cheery riffs because that's what people think we do. As f**king pompous as this sounds, music to me is all about capturing how you are actually relating to the world individually as a person. For me, I need to be able to take those emotional things and translate them into something on my instrument; if I can't do that then nothing happens. It took us a while to get going with this album; we've had a pretty tough couple of years individually in between Droids and Healthso getting creative juices flowing when you're dealing with complicated personal issues can be pretty difficult. But as we got towards the end of the writing process, I feel like we probably could have written s**t-loads more; we were feeling really good about it.

As the album began to emerge, the band started to notice themes converging and forming a cohesive through line that came from their personal stresses and enriched the material they were working on. I think when we actually decided to call it Health, that was when the bigger, deeper definitions started to pop into our heads says Tom It was definitely harder to write this album than DroidsGreg picks up on that thread, When we did Droids there was a theme about the monotony of life which was illustrated on the cover and through the song titles. We wanted this album to be thematic as well as opposed to merely a collection of songs. There was a multitude of things that happened along the way that gave us false starts, people who we love have been ill during this process, and it wasnt until we got the name actually on to the record that it all started to make some kind of thematic sense.

Whilst Health might contain darker themes than previous records, the jollity and effervescence that usually greets ones ears when theyre wrapped around a phat Alpha Male Tea Party riff still coils its way around your pleasure centres; that tension between technicality and melody that has served the band so well is still very much present and correct. It's a very important part of what we do says Tom I think we wouldn't ever sacrifice melody across a song for the sake of being technical. We like to have moments where it's sounds f**king horrible, but then it will break into something that's quite beautiful. We always try and do it sonically and with a bit of individual character.

The litmus test tends to be 'can we sing back?' says Ben. There'll be bits that are stuck in our heads for days and it sounds clich but thats when we know weve got it right. But we never try to incorporate a particular mode or scale or time signature or anything like that. We might try and make things more interesting if something sounds a little bit too meat and potatoes, says Greg but we're not really massively uber technical players. There are a lot of math bands out there that are 100% chops but with no tunes or melody and it bores the crap out of us!

Despite this, since they formed in September 2009, Alpha Male Tea Party have very much crashed the math-rock party and are proceeding to drink everyone elses booze. Initially christened Safe in a Shell, the band changed their nom de plume to their equally ludicrous current moniker, a name that would still cause trouble with misguided dimwits who completely misunderstood the appellation is tongue-in-cheek. When the band started, Tom admits he was naive to the size of the scene they infiltrated.I didn't really even know math rock was a thing until I formed this band he admits. I'd never come across Don Caballero or American Football or any of those bigger math-y bands at that point. I've always had this leaning towards writing these sort of like proggy sounding things but I always kept them as a bit of a dirty secret.

Toms dirty little secrets soon became 10 fully-flourished songs on the bands debut release AMTP released in 2012. Though he was initially unfamiliar with the instrumental math scene, it became apparent pretty quickly to him that there was little in the way of personality injected into some of the most established and well-loved bands of the movement. He intended not to fall into the same pit-trap himself. We're quite aware of our sound and how we want to portray ourselves musically he says. There are a lot of bands in this scene that are doing cool things but theyve been covered fairly substantially already and we've always been very conscious of that. So we're really keen to always maintain an obvious sense of personal identity in our music.

I realised when I was putting Alpha Male Tea Party together, the only thing that was actually really important was if it had a sense of self to it. If you can convey who you are through the music you make, then you're doing something right. That was a real penny drop moment for me; there are things that I look back on in the early days of the band and I shudder a little bit; some of the things I posted on the internet, some of the things that we used to wear on stage. But in my defence, I was 21 years old, I was still trying to work out who I was as a human being. It's mad to think this band's 8 years old now and it has been an unbelievable personal journey for all of us. Weve had moments where weve considered getting other people involved, like a manager or something to make use seem a more professional band, but what this band really boils down is who we are in a creative and emotional, personal sense. If we try to dilute that or feel we need to change that, then why would we be doing it?

Health, the third album be Alpha Male Tea Party, is released through Big Scary Monsters on Friday 23rd June.

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Alpha Male Tea Party Health: Exclusive Album Stream - The Independent