The event, located in Indian Wells, boasted the largest group of attendees in its history — around 500, according to BuzzFeed News. Participants “were briefed behind closed doors on the 2016 landscape and on of each of the presidential candidates’ policy positions early Sunday morning by two of the top officials from the Koch network,” the website noted. “Although the seminar stuck to policy during the 2016 briefing, presidential politics and the future of the party were on the minds of a lot of the donors.”

The Trump factor

Unsure who was going to place where in this week’s first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, anxiety around Donald Trump’s prospects ran high. “Top supporters of Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas held private meetings to sway potential new recruits at the annual winter conference,” according to one participant, the New York Times’ Nicholas Confessore reported, adding that “officials with the Kochs’ political operation also began sounding out allied donors about a potential campaign” against Trump, “whose evolving views on issues like corporate subsidies put him at odds with the Koch network’s own policy priorities.”

Although Cruz managed to best Trump in Iowa, with Rubio coming in a surprisingly strong third, Trump had pulled into a substantial lead over the rest of the field in the run-up to Iowa, aggravating fears among donors and more traditional Republicans that the insurgent mogul could use a dominant first-place showing to break the spirits of his rivals and run the primary-season table. Instead, Cruz’s victory — which has deepened a different sort of anxiety among some established members of the donor class, who believe Trump to be more electable and open to influence than Cruz — wound up heartening many Koch attendees, who are inclined to view Cruz more favorably than Trump.

Still, the Trump factor left attendees cagey in Indian Wells. “Despite Trump rankling donors for months, the Kochs’ political network and its members were reluctant to do anything that might cause him to launch a third-party bid, sources said this weekend,” according to BuzzFeed News. “Also, there was concern that attacks from the Koch brothers and their allies could have potentially added to Trump’s momentum and his populist appeal with the GOP base.”

Lining up votes

Cruz and Trump, once willing to treat one another with relative kid gloves, have been drawn into an increasingly fierce competition as they bump up against each other at the top of the polls. “Cruz and Donald Trump are now knotted in a statistical dead heat for top support among California’s likely GOP voters five months before the state’s primary,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “The poll may mark the end of the blustery billionaire businessman’s dominance in California. It shows Cruz probably has room to grow his Golden State support even further, while Trump’s already might be maxed out.”

But some pro-Republican analysts have cautioned that Cruz is too conventionally conservative to draw disaffected former Republicans and so-called Reagan Democrats into the fold — especially in states like California, where those sorts of likely voters are plentiful. “According to what one of the state’s most reputable voter list companies told me not too long ago, there are about 340,000 ‘decline-to-state’ voters in California who are former Republicans, and who have a reliable voting history,” wrote James Lacy at the Orange County Register. “This special, large group of voters should be a big focus of the Republican Party’s attention right now. And the best way for these voters to empower themselves is to re-register Republican.”

In a twist as sudden as it was unlikely, Republicans appear poised to make Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the next Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Though he could face opposition from the House’s conservative caucus, McCarthy’s reputation — and solid positioning in the party ranks — have worked in his favor. As Bloomberg reported, some members have already publicly stated that McCarthy, the second-ranking Republican in the House, was likely to prevail. Their ranks included Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., who has been critical of the sometimes calculating, sometimes conciliatory approach of outgoing Speaker John Boehner, R-Oh., who will leave Congress altogether by next month’s end. “The important question is, will things change? Will they change for the better or we simply replace Mr. Boehner with somebody else who do the same thing?” Mulvaney asked.

Courting conservatives

In an email to colleagues announcing his formal candidacy, McCarthy sought to signal his awareness of the skepticism that has grown up around many House conservatives. “We can’t ignore the differences that exist, but we can and must heal the divisions in our conference with work, time and trust,” he wrote, according to NBC News. “If elected Speaker, I promise you that we will have the courage to lead the fight for our conservative principles and make our case to the American people. But we will also have the wisdom to listen to our constituents and each other so that we always move forward together.”

McCarthy has the benefit of some political innocence. Well before Boehner’s announcement, conservatives had begun to discuss the prospect of voting him out of the Speakership — plans that McCarthy played no role in. That helped endear him to some dissatisfied with Boehner. As one member of the so-called Freedom Caucus told the Hill, “I don’t think he’s plotting. I don’t think he’s trying to aid and abet. I just think he is trying to figure out where everyone is. I volunteered to him that, under the right circumstances, I could vote for him for Speaker.”

A historic shakeup

McCarthy’s run for the spot has triggered a scramble for advantage as top jobs in the GOP chain of command opened up. In addition to a challenge to McCarthy fielded by Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla., the race for Majority Leader has “already turned into at least a three-way contest,” Yahoo News reported, “with the No. 3 and No. 4 House Republicans, Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, aggressively pursuing the job, along with the Budget Committee chairman, Tom Price of Georgia.” Although the House’s tea party members have not put forward a candidate of their own, they do not see McCarthy as a choice that will lead to much change in how the party’s legislative strategy moves forward, Yahoo added.

McCarthy, a relatively low-profile member of the party leadership hailing from a state with few other nationally-known Republicans, has been seen as experiencing something of a political windfall. But if he is elected Speaker, he will have his patience and diligence on the Hill to thank. “McCarthy has tended to this flock of House Republicans more than any GOP leader of the past five years,” the Washington Post observed. “He recruited many of the members to run in the 2010 elections that delivered the majority, he has been their adviser and confidant, he works out with them in the House gym and keeps tabs on family members.” Still, if elected, his rise will have been the fastest comparable since the 1800s. “A Speaker McCarthy would represent a sharp shift in the historical trends of the last 125 years. In that time,” the Post noted, “it took an average of almost 23 years in the House to be elevated to speaker, according to a Congressional Research Service report.”

I did everything right when I submitted it to Amazon. But when it came to the setting up the automatic IRS system that extracts a portion of my “profits,” I have had nothing but problems for days.

I gave the IRS the right info. I have had the same SS number for 42 years. I’ve lived in the same apartment for 20 years. I’ve had the same name for 58 years.

But no matter what I do, I can’t get past the IRS approval.

Amazon now is saying I should contact a tax accountant or the IRS. But all I want to do is sell a little book for which I will get 35 cents a pop and which nobody will buy!

It’s infuriating.

I can’t prove it, but it looks like this is another case of the IRS targeting conservative and libertarian commentators. The latest: 80 percent of IRS targeted groups were conservatives.

Or maybe they just hate classical music.

By Katy Grimes

We’ve heard so much about the nation’s “fiscal cliff” that we can’t even see the real fiscal mess in front of our faces: the approaching bankruptcy of our nation. So warned Rep. Tom McClintock, R-California, when I met him for an interview. But he also had positive words on how Republicans can lead the nation back to prosperity.

“The truth is that once the government has spent a dollar, it has already decided to tax it,” McClintock explained. “The only question is whether it taxes that dollar now or taxes it later by running a deficit.”

“By postponing spending cuts, Congress turned the ‘fiscal cliff’ bill’s tax relief provisions into a mere illusion,” he said. “The bill passed by Congress actually increases federal spending by more than $300 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office — and more than $600 billion when you include the totality of new social and corporate welfare spending and tax exemptions to reward politically connected special interests.”

McClintock said that, since Congress postponed the spending reductions contained in the sequester and we continue to spend money we don’t have, the net result of this measure is simply to transfer the current tax bill to our children.

Business and politics

Seventy-six percent of all small business income is going to be hit by President Obama’s tax hikes, according to McClintock. “The income  they use to create and sustain two-thirds of the jobs in our economy is being taxed higher. This means hundreds of thousands of middle class jobs will evaporate over the next year.”

About 850,000 small businesses are going to pay higher taxes. But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to be concerned about this. Like most Democrats, they believe that, regardless of the tax rates, people will always go along about their business and comply, McClintock said.

California looks even worse. The state controller’s office reported, “Corporate taxes came in $445.9 million below (-31.2 percent)” monthly estimates in the 2012-13 budget. “The State ended the last fiscal year with a cash deficit of $9.6 billion. As of December 31, that cash deficit totaled $24.2 billion and was covered with $14.2 billion of internal borrowing (temporary loans from special funds), and $10 billion of external borrowing.”

Add these bad numbers to the  the “fiscal cliff” deal, McClintock said, and the deficit is going to balloon in California, as well as the nation. “We’re going to see hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending added to the budget at a time when we’re borrowing roughly 60 cents for every dollar that we spend. We’ve just taken an enormous tax burden, added to it, and handed it to our kids.”

McClintock lost two close elections, in 1994 and 2002, for California state controller. In his more than 20 years in the California Legislature, he was one of the legislators most knowledgeable on the state budget.

Voters and immigrants

Talking with McClintock is actually uplifting because he is an historian. While the numbers sound daunting at the moment, he understands real trends in history. One of these trends is with voters.

We talked about the wave of immigrants coming to the United States, and the impact on elections since the country was founded. McClintock said that, throughout American history, immigrants’ voting changed significantly as their socioeconomic status rose. “When was the last time you heard anyone talk about the Italian or Irish vote?” he asked. “It wasn’t that long ago, only about 30 years, that we were talking about the importance of the Italian and Irish votes.”

Italian and Irish immigrants started out voting predominantly for Democrats. But as they prospered in America, in increasing numbers they joined the Republican Party, as shown by such prominent names as President Ronald Reagan and Justice Antonin Scalia.

Right now, the Hispanic vote is receiving all of the attention. In the last two national elections, Hispanics voted heavily Democratic. But McClintock said that, just as it was with the Italian and Irish immigrants, as Hispanics prosper, they will vote more Republican. Which is another reason why restoring strong prosperity should be Republicans’ major goal.

Compromise is king in D.C.

One of the biggest issues with Republicans is whether or not their politicians hold firm on promises for limited government. McClintock said compromise is only appropriate when it benefits the country, yet compromise is used too often by Republicans. Rarely do Democrats compromise.

McClintock agreed that it’s usually Republicans on the losing side of compromise. “Is the country better off because of the vote?” McClintock asked of the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal.

Last week, Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Morain criticized McClintock for voting against the Jan. 1 “fiscal cliff” deal, which passed anyway:

“But as he showed last week, his political machine of one has gained compatriots among the shrunken but more conservative band of Republicans representing California in the House. That doesn’t bode well for California as it tries to get back some of the money it sends to Washington, and certainly not for the Sierra district McClintock represents.”

I asked McClintock about this piece. “Here’s a question for the Sacramento Bee,” McClintock replied. “What does Morain plan to say to the newly unemployed?”

McClintock said the unemployment rate in California of nearly 10 percent is going to get worse. “Increasing numbers of unemployed persons in California will wreak havoc on the state’s economy, reducing revenues while the demand for state social services rises,” McClintock said. California still owes the federal government $10 billion for unemployment relief.

“The country is getting a graduate course in Obamanomics in the next four years,” McClintock said. Despite this, he said America is waking up and paying attention.

Ronald Reagan lives

Although Republicans constantly are being criticized as the party of “no,” McClintock said that, when somebody is driving you off a cliff, “no” is a handy word to have in your vocabulary. But it can’t be the only word in the national debate over the future of the country.

McClintock said President Reagan built morale so people believed things could be accomplished. Right now there is low morale among Republicans. But this is just a blip in history, said McClintock. “We’ve had it worse,” he remembered of the 1976 election, when Democrat Jimmy Carter won with a Democratic Congress. They ran the country into a recession. Only four years later, Reagan swept in and restored prosperity with major tax cuts.

“When Carter was president, the mood in the country was dark. When Reagan became president, all of a sudden people started to believe things could be accomplished again,” McClintock said. In another dark hour, McClintock wants those beliefs to rise again.

Katy Grimes: The gross double standard in media today was exacerbated Monday when far-left, liberal radio talk show host Sirius XM radio host Mike Malloy lost it on air. Malloy said he wished the Lord would lop off the heads of Tea Party members.

“These Tea Bag bastards who by the way, I just wish they would all just go away – or, like in Passover, I just wish there was an angel of the Lord that would pass over – instead of killing the first born in all the households of Egypt just wipe out all the Tea Baggers. Just, you know, the terrible swift sword, just [Mike makes exaggerated “swishing” sounds] – lob their heads off!”

Malloy is so vile, he was fired from Air America radio.

As disgusting as Malloy’s comments were, I have yet to find anyone in the mainstream media calling for discipline or termination. Had Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus or Laura Ingraham said something similar, they’d be off the air within minutes, groveling and apologizing, in order to keep the job.

Radio talk show host Don Imus was fired from CBS radio in 2007 after he called members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”

In March, only a few weeks after Andrew Breitbart’s premature and shocking death, Malloy said that Breitbart should “burn in Hell” and that he was “goddamn glad” he died. There were very few news report, and nothing happened to Malloy.

Recently, on air, Malloy pretended that he was on a phone call with Satan to inquire how Breitbart is doing in Hades.

This is another glaring example of the double standard in the media over what constitutes “civil discourse.”

The bottom line: Liberals can say anything and keep their jobs, and Republicans must maintain “civil discourse,” as determined by the liberal media.

Malloy should be fired, or at least made to grovel for his job.