CRYSTAL COAST TEA PARTY PATRIOTS MINUTES
November 15, 2011
Meeting held at Golden Corral, Morehead City, NC
Meeting called to order at 6:04pm by President BOB CAVANAUGH
Pledge of Allegiance led by NANCY BOCK
Invocation by JERE GEURIN
No. in attendance: 28
Introduction of New Attendees:
JOHN and LEDA LARSON – They found out about us through their son-in-law, who attended one of our meetings. They live in Morehead City. BOB asked if they voted last week and they assured him they did.
BLAKE BEADLE – Group creator of the Young Professionals, new title for the Young Republicans. Officers not yet elected. Age group is 18 to 40, so if you have children or grandchildren, neighbors or friends, that are interested in getting politically active, please have them get in touch with Greg Lewis or the Party and they will direct them to Blake or others now involved. (Bob jokingly said “they cancelled the parade the other day for the Young Republicans; one got sick and the other one didn’t want to march alone.’ —- Boos from the audience.)
FRANK PALOMBO – Candidate for US House of Representatives – running against Walter B. Jones.
BRIAN MULLAS – Friend, supporter and Campaign Manager of Frank Palombo.
Late comer – NORMAN KENT – Apologized for being late. He had read on the website about our meeting but had misread the time. When he rechecked and discovered the time, he had gotten there as soon as he could. He said he lived in Newport. BOB explained that we (those who wish to) meet at 5:00 to eat and socialize and the meeting starts at 6:00 pm and runs until he gets a sore throat. He explained about the Western end of the county recently starting another group for those who live in that end of the county. They meet the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of the month. We meet every week.
Budget Report – Jan 1, 2011 – Nov. 15, 2011
Beginning Balance Jan 1, 2011 $1,997.82
Income:
Donations: $1,090.00
Sale of Tees/hats 874.41
4/15 Rally 694.50
Insurance Claim
(Bob’s Fire) 610.00
7/4 Parade 451.25
$3,720.16 + 3,720.16
Expenses:
4/15 Rally $1,488.43*
Hats 800.00
Banners 549.53
Ad for JLF Seminar 447.84
T-Shirts 348.00
Flags, Buntings 270.91
Veterans Day Parade 231.26*
Pocket Constitutions 198.81
Bumper Stickers 169.95
Business Cards 113.13
Carteret Literacy 100.00
Islamaphobia Booklets 25.00
$4,742.86 – $4,742.86
Ending Balance Nov. 15, 2011 975.12
*4/15 Rally Expenses:
Ad $ 622.00
W. Montague 360.00 (plane ticket)
Sound System 323.25
PortAJohns 183.18
$1,488.43
(Does not include $940.00 special events insurance paid 2010 for 2 events in a calendar year.)
*Veterans Day Parade Expenses:
500 ea 4×6 flags $ 129.87
50’ Fringe 51.39
Candy 50.00
$ 231.26
(Gave out approximately 800 pocket Constitutions, 400 small flags, and 500 flyers.)
INVENTORY:
78 – s/a t-shirts
11 – l/s t-shirts
31 – hats
100 – 4×6 flags
600 – Pocket Constitutions
OBLIGATION:
$216.00 donation to Wounded Warrior Project
Candy purchased by Clayton Gillikin for Veterans Day Parade ($75.00?)
UPCOMING:
Ad for second session of JLF Seminar
Ad for 2012 Elections. (The Voter Recommendation ad we ran in 2010
Cost $1,592.32 for 8 times.)
We feel it was well worth the money. BOB said he had worked all election day at the polls in Broad Creek. Many, coming to vote, came to his table and took a copy of the recommendation form or showed they had their copy, they had cut from the paper, as they arrived to vote. TOM HARMON, HOWARD GARNER, and several others who had worked the polls, reported the same results. SCOTT wanted to know ‘if we do another Voter Recommendation, at what point do we need to start having it published in the paper. BOB said he did not know when the early voting would begin this coming election, but in 2010 we had early voting for probably two months or so. KEN LANG, who is at the Out West TEA Party tonight, worked the Stella or Cape Carteret Precinct every day they had the early voting and he found the same thing. We certainly want to have it ready for next year by the beginning of September at least. LOU KUKULINSKI asked were we thinking about having one for the primary. BOB said there are so many running in the primary that it is hard to vet them all. Do we discriminate with just the Federal Elections? Hard to vet these people in person. State Elections….Jean Preston, Pat McElraft, and folks running against them. Problems occur with trying to coordinate between all their schedules, and finding time to pencil us in to come and answer specific questions we have. Discussion on methods of vetting….paper questionnaires, email questionnaires, face to face interviews, etc. Think we should wait out the primary and wait to see who is left standing when they are over with and then we will make our recommendations for the election…Republican or Democrat based on which is most conservative and meets our core values best. If anyone has a way to vet all those various candidates in the primary, you are in charge of that committee right now!!! And give us a report by next meeting!!!
HOWARD said we need to find out who files before we can do anything. BOB said that’s one of the problems. The filing date is in February and the primary is in May. That’s only about nine or ten weeks. Anyone think we can get it all coordinated and get them all down here so we can vet them and then publish the meaningful data in that time frame to have an impact on informing the public. HOWARD said most of the time you pretty much have figured out who is going to run. BOB said yes, most of the time, but he knows of a couple of occasions (like Craig Weber) – who filed during the last hour of filing.
BOB said any way we go, we are going to have to raise some money. He had asked us at the last meeting to put our thinking caps on so when we met tonight we could talk about the Spring Rally, which has always been a good fund raiser for us. He said he was talking to KEN LANG and KEN recommended that maybe we should have a pig picking or something like that. BOB said he didn’t think we could do that at the Newport Flea Market, since they sold food and would not want our competition. HOWARD said they have let several organizations hold barbecue or chicken dinners to raise funds for various things (especially for those with large medical expenses). FRED DECKER said maybe we could use Gracelyn Park (meant Fort Benjamin Park). STEVE BEST said he understood it would cost $75.00 an hour. BOB said we need to decide are we going to do a Rally, or are we going to do some kind of fund raiser like a barbecue.. (roasting a pig) for example. SCOTT wanted to know why we couldn’t do both. Some others agreed. BOB said it boils down to ’parking problems’ then. When we had our Rally there in Newport year before last, we had 700 cars and 2000 people. He didn’t know if there was that many parking spaces at the Fort Benjamin Park. HOWARD and TOM both said they thought there was plenty of room to park by utilizing the road sides just on the perimeter of the park. BOB said to do both it was going to take a lot of long term planning…cooking pigs (how many needed), hush puppies, coleslaw, baked beans, etc., are we going to need some kind of County Health Permit? We need to really look into are we really able to do both. We usually have the same crew to plan, organize, coordinate, etc. The day of the event we have a big turn out of members, but most of them are unable or do not show up for the planning stage. There is never a problem of shortage of people on the day of the event, setting up and such. Another thing with serving food is the need for more tables and chairs. He can get some from the base but not sure how many we will need. HOWARD said several of the fund raisers serving food at the Flea Mall were mostly drive through and you didn’t need tables. Some that he knows about have gone well. BOB said the drive through would be a whole different thing from the Rally/Meal combo because with the Rally going on you will want people to get out of their cars and listen to the speakers as well. Everyone think about it and decide what we can pull off and what we can’t pull off. We won’t make a decision tonight, but be prepared to discuss it further next week. TOM said he hadn’t had such grand ideas, maybe something like the scouts have…sandwiches along side of the road. No Rally or anything, maybe have a big yard sale and sell sandwiches, cookies, brownies, cakes, etc. BOB said that sounded pretty good also. Hopefully we can come up with some good ideas and firm plans for next week and make a decision as to how we are going to raise funds. Other locations were mentioned to hold whatever we planned. BOB said we need to also consider when talking location about availability of electricity, especially if we go with the rally. SCOTT said he thought we needed to stay with Highway 70 venue where there is more traffic.
Next week BOB said he would like for us to do our review of the Veteran’s Day Parade, dids, didn’ts, and should haves. SCOTT is going to put his drill instructors hat on and walk us through our paces.
BOB said he would love to see us do something for the primary, since Frank Palombo is running against Walter B. Jones and he would like to see us provide him support. He is going to need a lot of help. He is here tonight to talk to us. BOB said he told him we had already drank the Koolaid so we didn’t need the whole stump speech. Mainly we needed to know how we could help him with his campaign. Also sometime maybe in the spring, he, BOB would like to have a fund raiser to help Frank get some last minute advertising money prior to the primary which is around May 15.
STEVE MILLER (I think it was) said he would like to come up with a vetting plan and present it to the members at our next meeting. He thinks it can be done with today’s electronic devices. You get the right questionnaire, put a strong letter together that says ’here is what we did last time, all those we recommended won. It would behoove you to pay attention to our survey and tell where you stand.’ BOB said one of the things he found out when he ran for Congress in the primary season, no one told him to expect a dump truck to back up to his house and unload all those surveys and things from all these groups that are trying to vet you. You spend hours filling these thing out. Some of them are like essay tests. STEVE said it may be two weeks or so before he gets everything worked out, but he would come up with something.
He then turned the floor over to Frank.
Frank said he wanted to tell us why he came here tonight. It is the TEA Party’s fault that he is running. Everyone that was here the last time when he said he was thinking about running, remember? Several said ’vaguely’. Frank said it was because of “you all” and the reception we gave him that day, and the encouragement he received then and since, gave him the determination to move on in this process; making him realize there is so many in this district that want good representation. They want real leadership. He said he didn’t know about us, but for himself, he had had politicians up to here. He just can’t take it anymore. People have told him, you know if you run and win, you are going to be a politician. He said ’No, I am not’. You can send him to Washington in November and you can send him back again and again but he will never be a politician, because he is already what he is going to be. He is a leader. He knows it from his years of experience. He knows it from the skills that he learned from the military and from his years with his law enforcement career, to dealing with folks like those here tonight. And he knows this.. career politicians are people who have spent their entire life in Washington, DC or Raleigh. They have no idea what we are going through. None. Because they live in a world that doesn’t even exist for us. And our world doesn’t exist for them. We’ve got to change that. We have to put people up there that actually know what is happening down here and care about what is happening here. And are willing to do something about it. And not worry about being there year after year getting re-elected and re-elected. He is only going there to do a job and then come home. His wife has already imposed term limits on him, so we don’t need a Constitutional Amendment as far as he is concerned. She has already told him how many terms he is allowed. So that is that – the Supreme Court has ruled. Understand when he says ‘It is your fault’, and when he wins and goes to Washington, ‘You all can blame yourself or take the credit, whichever you prefer’. ’If I don’t do a good job, then kick me out’. ‘Make that, tell me first so I can fix it and then if you’re not happy, kick me out. Impose your own term limits.’ He said BOB had told him he should tell us what he needs. It is so obvious what he needs, ‘I need your help, and a couple of things from you. I need you to not be afraid to talk to 10 of your friends, each one of you, and tell them about Frank Palombo and about this campaign and about how important it is to change the leadership in Washington, DC, who will make a positive impact and make things happen with real change to all the things we know are a real problem. So I need you to talk to 10 of your friends, get them to go to our web site “palomboforcongress.com”. Take a look at it and see what is on there. Look at the position on different issues. Look at the buttons that say volunteer and contribute. If you want to help, click volunteer. There are lots of things you can do. Find sign locations for us – have a little fund raiser at your house – a little meet and greet type. I’m not talking about 100 people, maybe 10 to 20 of your friends. Bring them over and tell them to bring their check book. If you like what you hear from Frank, then leave a check for him. So talk to 10 of your friends and get them to talk to 10 of their friends. Oh, and please write a check for us. Doesn’t have to be a $100 check, or a $500 check, please let it be whatever you can afford and get your friends to do the same thing. If you get 10 and they get 10 and they get 10, we are talking some serious financial help for us. And keep our message going. We do not want to wind up broke at the end of the campaign. So we are pushing hard for this. If anyone here wants to have a little fund raiser at your house, let us know. Brian will take your name and we will get our fund raising director to come and talk with you. The two things we need most is your hard work, which I know you are capable of, and your resources, your finances. We need your help. I know times are tough, I know they are. I’ve talk to a lot of people who got hit by the hurricane, besides the down economic times we are in, but if we are going to make it better you got to invest in good government. You gotta invest in making a change up there in Washington, DC. So, help me if you can… palomboforcongress.com
Check it out as soon as you can. Click on one of those two buttons. Send me 10 bucks or whatever you can afford. You have heard of 999, Cain’s plan; well, our plan is 10,10,10; one better than the Cain plan. It is 10 of you, getting 10 of your friends, and all of you contribute $10 a piece. That is the plan. Thank you all very much for getting me into this, I think! You all are great and I appreciate what you do. Thanks for your time tonight and this guy here (BOB) – he works hard as any 10 guys I know, which fits into my 10,10,10 plan.’
BOB said he could iterate how important financing is to a campaign. Them little stupid yard signs, like you stick in your front yard with the wire hoop, they are about $4.00 a piece. When you are trying to blanket 22 counties, trying to use a 1000 signs even here in Carteret County they would be so stretched out you would hardly see one here or there. So it runs into money real fast. Just look at our advertising in the local paper for the Voter Registration data – 8 times was almost $1600. These guys running for office, they have to get their message out and keep it out. You can’t just run an ad one time and assume everybody in the County read the paper that day.
Frank asked if he could do a “Did you know kind of thing?” We talk about my capabilities as a candidate and that is really important when we talk about my background and history and all that. But one of the things we talk about too is a ‘did you know’. When we talk about Walter Jones’ voting record – and we talk about did you know about this and that, sometimes even people who strongly support Walter didn’t know because they didn’t follow and the latest did you know is (and you have to hear this because I don’t think you are going to believe it). Any of you heard of the Veterans Opportunity to Work Act? It was passed by the House 418 to 6 – (6 no votes). A bi-partisan bill. Went through the Senate, zinged right through and is going to be signed by the President. No problem. Know who voted against that bill? Walter B. Jones. This is strong on the military – there’s over a million GI’s out of work right now and this bill will do a lot to help those people get work and this is one of those did you knows. The reason Jones voted against it is there is a provision in the bill that was supposed to reduce fees on home loans, (filing fees, and some other fees), It wasn’t going to increase them – it was supposed to reduce them and because of the budget and because of financing, that fee stayed the same, it didn’t go up, it stayed the same. His thought process was ’because that fee did not go down, he voted against the whole bill’. That bill is going to put people back to work. We can not worry about the minutia of some of these things. This is ridiculous and I just wanted to give you another did you know. Thanks.
JERE GEURIN wanted to know if anyone knew where Jones stood on the HR2 (Right to Carry Act – Concealed Weapon across state lines). He said he emailed Jones today but had not heard back yet. TOM HARMON asked ‘didn’t they vote on that today?’ JERE said it was on the floor, but he had not heard anything yet.
BOB asked if everyone had seen the latest edition of Crystal Magazine. Maybe the guys hadn’t since it was a sexist magazine ‘for women only’. Several comments were made jokingly. Anyway HOWARD and PEGGY’s granddaughter (actually great granddaughter) Catie, is featured in an article. He asked PEGGY to tell the group about why Catie has been honored by the magazine.
PEGGY said “CATIE McCABE” started out with us when we started with the TEA Party. She pretty much grew up with the TEA Party. She is now 16, has her drivers license, so you all don’t see her anymore. As long as she was riding with us, she was here. She started going to a Church here in Morehead and she went to a session in Atlanta where she got interested in ‘human trafficking/slavery’. It sort of touched her and got her to really thinking about it so she started doing a lot of research on her own about the subject, (magazines, internet, etc) and really got involved in the subject. The lady at the Church has encouraged her a lot. What she has found out is- they take these young girls and young women also, and turn them into prostitutes and that is all they know. They are normally in small homes with usually no more than two girls, not big brothels like we usually think of, and keep them captive. BOB asked if they were girls brought into this country, runaways, or what? PEGGY said she imagined it would be anyone they could control. Recently, a woman who was from the mountain area in North Carolina was enticed to come to this area, with the promise of a good paying job, cleaning homes, who was locked up in a trailer/home and used to make her captors money. So it is not just illegal girls who have come to the US, it is anybody they can control. If they are found by the authorities, they are usually placed into foster type homes where as soon as they can get away, they go right back to the pimps who had had control over them; since that is all they know. They have been brainwashed. So, CATIE and some others are in the process of trying to raise enough funds to build a home where these girls can learn a trade and find out there is more to life than what they had known, make them feel good about themselves, so they can turn their lives around and become good productive citizens of the community. CATIE has been named ‘State Coordinator’ for the project. We are very proud of her and we thank the TEA Party for starting her off on the right track, because you are the ones that gave her her start. I don’t believe she would have ever come this far without your encouragement. Something you all do not know is – when she was born she was born with club feet and a speech impediment. You could turn her feet from facing forward all the way around to facing backwards. A doctor put her in casts and we were supposed to leave them on for three months. We finally got her into the Shrine Hospital in South Carolina. When they removed the casts, gangrene was just before setting in. If we had not gotten her to that specialist when we did, the probability of her losing both legs was a very strong possibility. They scrubbed her legs almost down to the bone and told her mother to not put anything on them and keep a close eye on her. (CATIE’s mom is a Nurse Practitioner.) As soon as we could we got her into dance lessons, which according to the doctors, was the best thing we could have done, since it strengthened her legs. I’m sure not one of you here ever noticed anything different with the way she walks. Right? And the speech impediment was helped with a speech therapist. They did a wonderful job – you all have heard her speak at almost every rally we have held. Didn’t know she ever had a problem, did you? We are so proud of her. BOB said ’you should be, we are all very proud of her’. We feel she belongs to us also.
BOB, speaking of leg problems, asked TOM HARMON how his wife was doing. TOM said she was on the mend.
BOB said he guessed we all have heard the news interview with Herman Cain, where he was asked if he thought President Obama had done a good job handling the war
in Libya. Herman said he didn‘t think he handled it very well, and then he said ‘well wait a minute, let me back up there…rolled his eyes and said he had all this stuff jumbled in his head here…then a long pause, and BOB said he was thinking ‘holy geez‘.. He said Herman was a hell of a nice guy but it is now definite that he is not ready for prime time. The problem is he is probably trying to remember all the practice and rehearsing of data and rehearsed answers rather than actually listening to the questions. SUSAN RYNAS said no she thought he was listening to the questions, but just didn’t know the answers. TOM said ’like Perry, he froze’. BOB said yeah, it made Perry look intelligent. It was really a soft ball question. There was no real reason to screw it up. BOB feels that put the final nail in the coffin for Cain, what with all the bad publicity (true or false) about the sexual harassment. The media is going to show that clip over and over. Everyone seemed to think Cain can not bounce back from this latest faux pas. BOB said he is now back in the Newt Gingrich camp. He had said from day one that Newt was the smartest one up there but carried a lot of baggage that the media would expound on as he moved up in the polls. LOU said he had never left Newt’s camp. BOB said he was curious who Newt would pick for his running mate… Rick Santorium or Michelle Bachman. LOU said he would prefer Mark Rubio. It didn’t have to be one of those running now. BOB said Bachman had already been tainted badly by the press, so he thought Rick would be the next logical choice. Several comments were made about the subject of who would be the best candidate. There are three primary states you have to think about. Ohio, Penn. And Florida. From what he could find out, Obama had already lost Florida. Ohio is going to be a toss up. If someone gets the nod and puts Santorium (from Penn) in as VP, that could made the difference in carrying the state of Penn. BOB said he had not thought about it from that angle, but that was a good point. BOB said up north they do things differently. They break a big city down into blocks and put someone in charge that knows everyone. They meet with everyone regularly, give a lot of them like team captain jobs, etc, and they know how everyone is leaning. They keep everyone in that block involved and on election day they knock on everyone‘s doors and, they will even carry them to the polls, just to make sure they vote. You don’t see that in the south. Precincts up there are pretty small, not compared to the size of the counties here in the south. For example Carteret County is like 75 miles across. FRED said he knew a little about this precinct business, he had about 1400 Republicans in his. BOB asked where he was hiding them. LOU said that is because you try harder FRED. FRED said he had been working on it since 1984. He said he had told them they needed term limits on Precinct Chairmen. BOB asked how many of them were dead and still voting. LOU said you don’t want to go there.
BOB said he was really surprised that David Horton lost his bid for mayor of Morehead City. He thought that the sulfur problem would work as a sure thing for him. He wanted to know how the voter turnout was. He was told it was very small. BOB couldn’t believe it, as riled up as so many people were over that deal at the port. HOWARD said Jerry Jones’ ad in the last paper before the election was kind of hard hitting and in his opinion there were some untruths in it. But apparently people believed it. BOB said Jones and Horton had been going back and forth for weeks with a newspaper war there. He really thought in the final run the people would remember the sulfur smell and vote Jerry Jones out. HOWARD said Jones claimed in the ad that if David got elected, he, David, was going to resign, get Ballou installed as mayor and David take the job of Town Manager. There were several things in the ad that he thought were down right untruthful. NANCY BOCK said she understood David only lost by 80 votes.
BOB said while he was thinking about it, Frank Palombo was going to need a phone committee later on to make calls reminding people to get out and vote for Frank. Frank told FRED he was going to need all 1400 of his people.
BOB asked STEVE how his movie thing went this past week. STEVE said he was going to have a matinee this Saturday for young kids or even anyone young at heart. It was going to be an animated movie ‘The Miracle Maker’. PEGGY said she had heard that ‘Atlas Shrug’ was now out on DVD and she was thinking about buying it and wondered if everyone would go to STEVE’s to watch it; that is if STEVE would agree to show it. He said he would. NANCY said if you have not read the book, you need to. The movie is nothing compared to the book.
BOB told us that on December 6, at our regular 6:00 pm Tuesday meeting, that Dr. Mark Creech, Executive Director of the Christian Action League of NC will be our guest speaker. He also will be hosting a luncheon at the Golden Corral at noon that day for pastors and also will be available to meet with individuals from 2pm to 5pm. This is a valuable opportunity to learn more about the work of the Christian Action League, receive a Legislative Update, and discuss the Marriage Amendment scheduled to be on the ballot May 2012. RUTH PARKER wanted to know if we could get Lockwood to announce that on the radio. BOB said yes. That was another thing he had been thinking about – if we decided to do a pig pickin fund raiser, maybe have Lockwood do a live broadcast from there and interview people coming in. All thought that was a good idea.
BOB said that would be a good way to get free advertising by getting Lockwood to push it for us.
BOB asked JOHN LARSON what he thought of our meeting tonight. He said he had come to see what we were doing but he still was not quite sure exactly what we stand for. He had not heard anyone say tonight. He was going to go to the web site and see what else he could find out. BOB said ‘before you go to the website, what do you think the TEA Party stands for?’ JOHN said ‘Smaller government’, ‘cutting spending so you do not have a debit’, ‘a balanced budget’, ‘more representation that represents the people’, than the ones that are in office now. BOB said this whole primary process, you have seen a lot of people rise to the top only to get knocked down. A primary is like a big boiling cauldron where everybody gets tested by fire. Some can not take the heat and they get burned up. Herman got chewed up, Michele Bachman (forgot what her early flubs were but she had John Wayne Gacey (the serial killer) and John Wayne the movie actor mixed up. RUTH said she wished Elvis Presley a Happy Birthday on the anniversary of his death, which was an unpardonable sin. Someone said he had been looking on the website for a national TEA Party association. Are we like a subcomponent of it? BOB said ‘good question’. There are several umbrella groups that call themselves TEA Party. You’ve got the TEA Party Express that has the bus going all around and Dick Army is the Chairman of that group. They are more of a top down organization. They have someone in charge that sends out the word to all the other ones. Then we have the TEA Party.Net, another group. We belong to a group called the TEA Party Patriots. It is the largest TEA Party group in the country. Right now there is about 3500 parties around the country organized under the TEA Party Patriot umbrella. You can go to their web site (teapartypatriots.org) and it will have a link at the top that says groups, click on that and all the states will drop down and then you can go down and click on North Carolina and all the North Carolina groups will drop down and you will find us there. If you click on our name it will go to our dedicated web page which we have never used because we have our own web site. The TEA Party Patriots is an upward organization. We do not have any leaders at the top. BOB is a local coordinator. The state coordinator is Russ Finchum and then we have national coordinators. These are essentially the eleven people that first started the TEA Party Patriots the day after Rick Santori had his rant on wall street. Every Monday night we have a call-in web-a-nar for all the local coordinators to call in and they get a legislative update. They have different members that are tracking what is going through the House and Senate. Someone else is tracking other things coming down the pike. They have guest speakers that speak on different things like the Marriage Amendment, Immigration and things like that but one of the things he wanted to emphasize is the TEA Party Patriots have the three core elements; one is fiscal responsibility in the government. (we understand that we have to pay taxes to the government, but we want the money spent in a fiscally responsible manner. Don’t waste it. He just heard today that in Obama’s stimulus package, something like 700 million dollars went to some university to create a computer software program with this intelligent machine that makes its own jokes. It is a joke machine. (how apropos)). The second tenant is limited Constitutionally endowed government. (The Constitution sets up the framework of how we are supposed to be governed. There is nothing in there about the Supreme Court legislating – they interpret the law, they do not make the law. All these different agencies creating and over interpreting the law and Congress not doing anything about it. This also goes into the government overreaching their Constitutional authority. Health Care Mandate is one example) The third tenant is promotion of Free Market Capitalism. (This is keeping government regulations of our free enterprise system to a minimum. It is true we have to have some regulations, otherwise we would have 10 year olds still working on assembly lines and a lot of needless deaths because of worker accidents but OSHA has gone over and beyond; as has the EPA gone over and above their intent. We are a free market capitalistic system and it works best with the least amount of government involvement.) Those are the three things the TEA Party is based on. We are not an anti-Mexican group; nor an anti-Gay group; nor an Islamic J’Had group nor an anti-abortion group. We are a conservative group and most of those things are handled through meeting discussions, with some defending one side and some the other; but they are not what we truly get really involved with. It is just a forum where we can actively vent what we feel or think on the issues. Those are the things that will divide us; whereas the three core principles we can all unite around, and they will keep us together. You are certainly free to bring up any issues that might be on your mind when he, BOB asks if anyone has anything they wish to bring up from the floor.
Anyway, we meet every week and it has become sort of like a social event for most of us, giving us a reason to get out of the house (and not have to cook that night for some), have a little camaraderie and share an evening with like minds. LOU – peace, justice and the American way.
TOM brought in a couple of signs and fans “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media”. web site StopTheBias.org. We got them free of charge and they only ask if we use them maybe at a rally, or something similar, to please take pictures for their website and promote the organization. Now is the time to go around and find those campaign signs and “recycle” the wires. FRED said he had a bunch. TOM said he would need about 35 or 36. He had gotten 10 of the big signs and 25 of the small ones.
Don’t forget Dr. Creech will be our guest on the 6th of December. Everyone please try to attend.
Meeting adjourned at approximately 7:30 pm
Minutes submitted by PEGGY GARNER, Secretary.