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On top there is the Goddess Diana, she had finally revealed to me. Having just picked me up from a cafe in downtown Indianapolis, we were now parked solemnly facing the nearby Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Pointing to a silhouetted figure crowning the towering structure, she elaborated, the great goddess worshipped in ancient Ephesus in the Bible was installed very purposefully in this spot by the Freemasons.

My entire experienceand a lot of it was supernaturalled to the discovery of the great archetype Goddess Diana.

I sat nodding reservedly beside my hospitable instructor. This information, esoteric and cockeyed, ought to have been alien to me, but it was perfectly familiar. I had, after all, read it in her book.

***

I first met Melyssa Hubbard about a year prior to this rendezvous at an Indianapolis brewery about a mile from where we met this evening.

I was in town to write about the launch of a nationwide network of regional meetups organized by conservative noisemaker Breitbart News, on the heels the Trump campaigns recent rise to a lead as impervious as it was unanticipated.

Breitbart had all but hitched themselves to the Trump Train, and I had hoped to capture what I thought would either be an improbable weather-vane for the Republican Party or, at least, a snapshot of insulated right-wing ephemera.

It would ultimately be both.

Apocalyptic lamentations of the loss of national identity, invitations to condemn CNN and hermetic D.C. elites, and vivid anecdotes conveying the gravity of border violence and mass immigration were the dominant themes propounded by the speakers.

But the most lasting impression was made by a dialogue shared between myself and a woman who flagged my attention on my way out.

I like your outfit, Hubbard said in passing, with a detached listlessness that could have meant sarcasm. She introduced herself, My name is Melyssa, I founded the Indiana Tea Party.

Hubbard didnt look like the Tea Partiers Id been acquainted to through various media segments covering the massive rallies years earlier. And unlike the morose orators who had just taken the stage, my interlocutor evinced a frisky, free-spirited demeanor, tempered by a natural nonchalance.

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Authoritatively donning a black fitted blazer and leather boots, Hubbard bore the appearance of a dissident art teacher.

I was a dominatrix for many years, she interjected, snatching relief from my stiff small-talk. Thats how I got involved in this whole thing. She quickly filled in the blanks, explaining that a battle with the city over her the legality of her basement fetish dungeon drove her to political activism.

I founded the Indiana Tea Party, she repeated. But Im no longer involved now that its been co-opted. Co-opted, she meant, by Republican Party elites.

The backstory, she pressed, was detailed in her memoir, amusingly titled, Spanking City Hall: Dominatrix to Political Activist. As I signalled my exit, she pulled a copy from a small bag of Spanking City Hall hardcovers and assigned me my travel reading.

***

I am not rich, Melyssa Hubbard (formerly Donaghy) reminds me, more than a few times, as we drive down her picturesque Meridian-Kessler street, each time pausing before clarifying: Im comfortable.

Its the neighborhood where the governors mansion is locateda site of local political significance not just for its tenant but in that its where Hubbard first earned repute as a right-wing activist.

In response to a slated property tax increase in 2007, Hubbard, at the time a tenderfoot Fair Tax volunteer, organized a protest at the foot of the mansion. Between 300 and 400 peeved taxpayers showed up, eventually spilling into the street and halting traffic. Governor Mitch Daniels ordered a reassessment by the end of the month.

Hubbard gave me a brief tour of her Indianapolis, much of which included arts district-centered haunts including divey taverns, punk-ish clubs, and trendy restaurants.

Steeped in this community years before her political vocation, she is credited with marrying the art scene to the fledgling fetish underground by throwing an elaborate Halloween gala advertised as the Erotic Arts Ball. Her ties to this scene today, however, are all but severed. I was sort of the it girl that year, she said.

I never wanted to be a pro domme, the universe wanted me to be a pro domme, Hubbard exhaled after a brief interregnum of silence.

In her memoir she writes, I saw a power exchange as an emotional connection with another person, adding, For me it is a form of self-possession. The creativity channel makes me feel as if Im composing a symphony.

But she was too good at her job, and at a time before Indianapolis harbored any semblance of an alternative edge, too exotic for her surroundings.

Crime reporter Jack Rinehart was accompanied by a news crew when he peered into the windows of the Hubbard residence in 2004. He hoisted a folder in the air, displaying to those at home the city of Indianapoliss lawsuit against Melyssa Hubbard, citing sexual torture and the complement of a minor zoning infraction.

There are some dommes who are hookers, Hubbard imparted to me, and the city has a right to investigate anyone that they think is doing something illegal. But Hubbard hadnt done sex work. Shed been offered, but refuted the rationale. You do realize if I have sex with you that makes me your submissive?

One of her paying masochists turned out to be an undercover cop, alleging to have been forced to get down on his hands and knees and kiss Donaghy's boots and feet and subjected to a degrading conversation.

I turned him into the slut he wanted me to be, Hubbard admitted of the session, detailing an experience with a suspiciously overbearing first-time client unrelentingly attempting to steer the session toward sex. He wouldve arrested me on the spot, she noted. But he didnt arrest me because I wasnt breaking any laws. I was basically a performance artist.

Mayor Peterson held a press conference the following morning, pledging to extinguish the scourge of adult businesses contaminating chaste Indianapolis. Hubbard jostled her way into the crowd, daggering him with questions and pledging to Spank City Hall.

The presiding Marion County judge dismissed the citys case in Fall of 2007.

***

Hubbard invited me into her charming Meridian-Kessler home and showed me old news clippings and photos from the height of her anti-tax antics.

She shuffled to a photo clipping of 500 Indianapolitans convened around a supersized ball of white fabric decorated as a giant tea bag.

Stuffed with the protesters with tax assessments, the crowd dunked the oversized teabag into the Broad Ripple Canal.

The article, dated July 28, 2007, was one of the earliest to employ the Tea Party designationmonths before Congressman Ron Pauls Boston Tea Party moneybomb and over a year before the election of Barack Obama.

Hubbard opened a folder and showed me photos from the pro-Trump Daddy Will Save Us art show in that took place in New York in October.

Look at this, Hubbard grinned, opening a picture file of disgraced former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos posing with Spanking City Hall in a tub of blood.

Theyre provocateurs, Hubbard conceded, but Im a provocateur. Hubbard had last been in New York the previous year as a featured Liberty Fest 2015 speaker. Here, as well as at the Washington, D.C. Deploraball extravaganza in January, however, she was an admirer in attendance.

I didnt even know what the Tea Party was, Hubbard said, laughing, of the time of the governors mansion demonstration.

But she recalls overhearing a conversation from within the crowd when one exasperated voice exclaimed, We need a Tea Party! Hubbard had decided that, since shed thrown parties her whole adult life, if the people want a party Im going to give them a party.

But it wasnt for another few months until the paddle-wielding patriot would finally taste her self-affirming moment of revenge.

Welcome to the biggest upset in Indiana political history, Greg Ballard, the newly elected Republican mayor, touted shortly after incumbent Peterson conceded defeat.

By a shocking 51%-to-47% margin, the no-name Republican arguably won the first electoral Tea Party victory three years before the momentous 2010 Congressional midterm wave.

In recognition of her organizing, Hubbard was awarded a Sam Adams Alliance Tea Party Award from the now-defunct eponymous conservative nonprofit.

The Meridian-Kessler dominatrix keeps a low profile today, but is leisurely mapping out a few new projects. She plans on writing a screenplay adaption of Spanking City Hall, for example, and is devoting her next book to catechizing the Goddess Diana mythology.

Hubbard explained to me that her notoriety, however brief and locale-contained, was buttressed by a burgeoning mood for revolt that she serendipitously latched on to.

But as my Indiana acquaintance drove me to my bus stop, I couldnt resist pondering the opposite: that the timeline of Hubbards Tea Party antics suggests the mighty conservative revolt that had stormed into the national spotlight by 2009 was, in fact, birthed in a kinky fetish dungeon in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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Was The Tea Party Born in This Dominatrix's Indiana Fetish Dungeon? - Daily Beast

Ballerinas, a white rabbit and a mad hatter danced around the venue and served tea to the community during Santa Clarita Ballet Companys Tea and Toe Shoes party.

Its such a unique event, said Corinne Glover, director of the ballet company. Its a formal tea and its a great afternoon.

The non-profit ballet school put on the annual event at the Tournament Players Club in Valencia to raise money for their upcoming performance of Alice in Wonderland.

Performers from the cast showcased a few numbers from the show and interacted with children aspiring to be ballerinas when they grew older.

The young kids see us as role models, Eliga De Fazio said, a performer portraying Alice in the schools upcoming production.

De Fazio, who started with the company when she was little, knows first hand how the younger ballerinas view the older performers.

When I was little, I looked up to all of the older girls, she said. Its a different perspective. It is like were shifting places.

Tawny Clement, a teacher with the company, performed at the tea party years ago when she was 17.

Clement was back on Saturday to bring her 5-year-old daughter to watch the ballerinas and sip tea for the first time.

Its been a very special journey, she said as she helped her daughter add sugar to her tea.

Its inspiring for them to get to see the older girls and to see what they can develop into after years of hard work and practice.

The Santa Clarita Ballet Company will be performing Alice in Wonderland at the Santa Clarita Performing Arts Center on June 10.

Read more:
A tea party for the storybooks - Santa Clarita Valley Signal

A judge has ruled that there was a 'strong showing' the IRS had a bias against Tea Party groups. USA TODAY

Lois Lerner, former Exempt Organizations Director at the IRS(Photo: Enquirer file)Buy Photo

The Enquirer asked a federal judge Tuesday to open a secret court hearing about tea party bias claims against the IRS, arguing the media and the public havea vested interest in the proceedings.

"The First Amendment protects the press's right to gather news," wrote Jack Greiner, the Enquirer's lawyer. "Given the nature of these proceedings, any decision by this court to prevent public access will add to the suspicion and mistrust already raised by the allegations."

Mistrust is at the heart of the tea party's case against the IRS, which is accused of singling out conservative-leaning public interest groups for extra attention while reviewing applications for tax-exempt status.

A civil lawsuit brought by several of those tea party-affiliated groups is now before Judge Michael Barrett in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati. The judge, however, has kept some court filings secret and has closed a hearing scheduled for Friday.

He's done so at the urging of Lois Lerner and Holly Paz, IRS officials who oversaw the applications in the IRS' nonprofit division, which is based in Cincinnati.

Lerner and Paz both say their lives are in danger if they testify publicly about the handling of the groups' applications. They say they have been harassed and received death threats when their roles at the IRS first were disclosed several years ago.

The two women recently provided the judge with documentation, which was not made public, containing "graphic, profane and disturbing language" from people they say have threatened them.

Lawyers for the tea party groups say the public's right to know outweighs any concerns raised by Lerner and Paz.

The Enquirer asked Barrett, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, for permission to intervene in the case to argue for an open hearing.

"Allowing (Lerner and Paz) to keep these judicial records secret would not only deprive The Enquirer of its ability to report on the conduct of the litigation, but also deny the public its ability to assess for itself the merits of judicial decisions," Greiner wrote.

The lawsuit against the IRS is one of several filed in 2013 after the agency acknowledged it had singled out some groups for special attention. A Senate subcommittee reached the same conclusion in 2014, but found no evidence of political bias.

Applications for some liberal-leaning groups also were delayed, but about 80 percent of groups affected were conservative.

Lerner, the agency's former Exempt Organization Director, resigned over the scandal and Paz was reassigned. Paz has previously said the nonprofit division was overwhelmed by applications from conservative groups and employees struggled with how to respond.

Read or Share this story: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/16/enquirer-sues-open-secret-tea-party-hearing/325935001/

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Enquirer sues to open secret tea party hearing - Cincinnati Enquirer - Cincinnati.com

Congratulations to The Roanoke Times for it's May 11 edirorial entitled "Shameful," the coverage of the recent Moneta town-hall meeting of Rep. Tom Garrett, R-Buckingham Co. I gather the meeting was best described in the partial sentence, "many members of the audience who repeatedly interrupted Garrett to boo, jeer, heckle and generally try to disrupt the proceedings."

The thought immediately came to me, "we reap what we sow." To this observer of the passing scene, I believe such behavior at these meetings can be laid at the feet of Tea Partiers from about four or five years ago. From memory, such persons had a legitimate fear concerning the national debt. They became very forceful and vocal at town hall meetings. But their rudeness and impoliteness was soon brushed aside by the radicals of their persuasion. (In political circles, it's near impossible for moderates not to be pushed aside by radicals -- of whatever party.) And repeating the newspaper's rhetorical question "This is good for democracy how?" We used to say, "I went to a brawl, and a hockey match broke out." Now we just substitute the words "town hall meeting" for "hockey match." Disgusting!

Allied to this behavior we now have the Bully-in-Chief in the White House (occasionally). Excuse my pessimism, but I'm not convinced we will still have a democracy by year 2020, How many years did it take for Adolf Hitler to rise from legitimately chosen Chancellor of Germany to Der Fuehrer?

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Williamson: Blame the Tea Party for rudeness - Roanoke Times

Lois G. Lerner and Holly Paz, two key figures in the IRS tea party-targeting, can keep testimony about their role in the targeting secret, at least for now, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

The two women had said they feared death threats and other harassment if their depositions in a class action lawsuit against the IRS became public.

U.S. District Judge Michael R. Barrett had originally ordered their depositions be sealed, but on Thursday he removed that prohibition and instead said the testimony should be deemed confidential, keeping it secret until he can see what the women had to say and what effect releasing it to the public would have.

He said the parties in the case can eventually ask to make the information public, and at that point the burden will be on Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz to explain why it should be kept secret.

Good cause exists to maintain the confidentiality of the depositions during the discovery phase, Judge Barrett ruled.

For now, only the lengthy list of lawyers involved in the case will be allowed to see the deposition testimony.

In a case already fraught with tension, the womens request for secrecy added a new dimension.

Im outraged, said Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots.

Mr. Mecklers group is funding a class action lawsuit against the IRS for its targeting, and hundreds of organizations snared in the targeting are part of the case. They want to talk to Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz as part of their effort to get to the bottom of what went on.

What shes claiming is the public should have no right to know, if theyre made at a public official, what that official says under oath, Mr. Meckler said.

He also said Judge Barrett got Thursdays ruling wrong. He said the judge should have said his plan is for transparency, leaving open the chance for limited parts to be kept secret if need be.

I think he got it backwards, Mr. Meckler said.

More than 400 groups were on the list of nonprofit organizations the IRS said it subjected to intrusive scrutiny up through 2013. It singled groups out because of worries about perceived political activities.

The targeting came to light in May 2013 after Ms. Lerner, knowing a scathing inspector generals report was coming, staged a question at a conference to get her version of events out to the public first.

The Obama Justice Department conducted a criminal investigation but cleared Ms. Lerner and other employees, saying while the IRS showed incompetent management, it did not show an intent to deny applicants their rights. The Justice Department singled Ms. Lerner out for praise, saying she was one of the first to conclude the behavior was inappropriate and took steps to clean up the mess.

Lawyers for Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz didnt respond to requests for comment. Neither did the lawyer representing the class of targeted groups.

Judge Barrett had originally scheduled a closed-door hearing for Friday to let lawyers for Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz argue the need for secrecy.

The Cincinnati Enquirer this week filed a motion to force open the proceedings, saying the press has a right to observe the arguments unless theres a clear and present danger, or a serious or imminent threat to a fair trial.

The papers lawyers said Ms. Lerner and Ms. Paz havent proved either of those conditions.

On Thursday Judge Barrett canceled the secrecy hearing, saying it was moot now.

Read more from the original source:
Lois Lerner's tea party-targeting testimony can stay secret: Judge - Washington Times