CRYSTAL COAST TEA PARTY PATRIOTS
MEETING MINUTES OF
APRIL 24, 2012
Meeting held at Golden Corral, Morehead City, NC
Meeting called to order at 6:05 pm by Chairman BOB CAVANAUGH
Invocation was led by HOWARD GARNER
Invocation by STEVE BEST
BOB opened the meeting with “It has been an exciting week!”. His phone has been ringing off the hook. Several others said they had had the same problem. EULA PARKIN said she had been driven off the sidewalk where she was working the polls in Beaufort. When it had gotten too hot for Ms EULA, who had set up on the pavement of the parking lot, NORM SANDERSON had helped move her table into the shade (awning of a store, down pass the last business) .. still outside the 50 foot legal distance. Doug Raymond told her she had to move, that the Board of Elections had called him and said they had had something like 20 calls about her blocking the entrance of several stores and they (the customers) were having to walk around the table. Several different stories were told about this incident, so no one is totally sure exactly who insisted on EULA having to move, but several had their opinions. BOB said last week an elderly gentleman had shown up at the Beaufort polling place, said he was a member of the TEA Party and told voters who came up not to pay any attention to the list the TEA Party had put out, it was wrong, they were asking people to vote for Elaine Crittenton and NOT Harry Taylor. Well, it seems Harry stopped by and asked him who he was and why was there a problem with the TEA Party’s list. Harry called HOWARD, who in turn called BOB and by the time BOB got there to check it out, the man had left. We also had an incident in Newport where one of our new young Republican/TEA Partier (and BOB said he noticed they were missing tonight)…(Note: they showed up right before the close of the meeting without making any comment.) was working under the Republican umbrella but passing out TEA Party ballots. He was telling voters that he was with the TEA Party Group but don’t vote for the first 3 people. He was against anyone voting for Mitt Romney (was pushing Ron Paul), talked against Frank Palombo and Pat McCrory and recommended they not vote for any of those three. Most of the attendees at tonight’s meeting were upset and considered this a stab in the TEA Party’s back. BOB said he planned to have a talk with the offenders. This can not be allowed. If they disagreed with the democratic vote we had taken, then they should not proclaim to be members of the TEA Party, but campaign under their own auspices. This is a bad reflection on them and makes the TEA Party look bad also. KEN LANG said he had gotten several messages on Face Book indicating their dissatisfaction on Ron Paul not being selected by the TEA Party to support. They also went to the 3rd District Republican Convention with a group from other areas supporting Ron Paul, but because of the rules and the way things were, they made virtually no end rows at all. You could tell by the different counties represented that they had gotten together and they were very well organized. But as it turned out they were unable to get a delegate elected to send to the National Convention in Tampa, Florida. There were a couple of other positions that were voted on (at large positions) which they were unable to get delegates for either. KEN said he thinks they got upset with that process also. He thinks they were here, and there, for one purpose and that was to drive Ron Paul onto the recommended list, which is fine, because that is what we are all about, especially here. Everyone in attendance Tuesday night week, voted, went with the majority vote and that was the way it was. You can’t just accommodate the minority, which is what they turned out to be. Majority rules. BOB said he felt that giving voters our ballot and telling them to dis- regard anyone is disenfranchising the votes of all the people that were here that night to vote.
HOWARD said he wanted to apologize…BOB forgot the donation jar last week in his hurry to get to Cape Carteret meeting and we carried it home with us, planning to bring it back tonight. We forgot it. But he did want to report that during the week we had a $20.00 cash donation, and a check for $50.00 given to us. (With what was in the jar, the new donations, and tonight’s donations, we have collected $100.00 for our treasury.) BOB said, well with collecting that kind of money, maybe the Garners should just keep the jar. HOWARD said he was blaming it all on BOB and then apologizing for his forgetfulness also.
BOB reported on the final total votes for each candidate (both Morehead and Cape Carteret) and how we ended up with our recommended ballot. We had 27 people here that night and 17 at Cape Carteret for a total of 44 eligible votes.
He said he had gotten a lot of flack from disgruntled folks saying we had picked the wrong candidates, with all kinds of accusations about who is being hand picked by other leaders in the party, who is trying to stuff the county commissioners board and school board, etc. People he has known for many years have called arguing for one candidate or another that did not appear on our list. LYN BAKER asked if he told them they should have been to the meeting to vote. BOB said he had been concerned about narrowing the list (especially in the county) to one candidate might disenfranchise a lot of people who would otherwise support the TEA Party and might now see us as being biased. He worried about how it would impact the TEA Party going forward into future elections, but after discussing this with several other TEA Party members, he decided that we would cross that bridge when we come to it. We made our decision, we cast our votes, everyone here was in agreement with the process, and we tried to be as fair and honest as we could be. Everyone here had an opportunity to listen to the candidates who came to speak to us, offer their opinions and rationale, and then vote. If there are some who are disappointed in our decisions, we are sorry, but we did what we felt was the right way to go.
BOB said a lot of discussions were going on in the Republican Face Book page and recommended anyone interested to check it out. Also check out the Crystal Coast TEA Party Face Book page also and join in the discussions.
BOB reported that he had received an email from Harry Taylor and Harry had asked BOB to thank everybody for their support, and he promised he would not let us down. He really did appreciate our show of confidence in him.
David McFayden had stopped by to thank us for our support tonight prior to the meeting. He was on his way to another meeting and was unable to stay, but wanted us to know how much it meant to him to receive our endorsement.
BOB again recognized EULA PARKIN saying she was 85 years old and probably weighed about that same amount, but had been representing us at the poll in Beaufort and she could really use some assistance. The poll in Beaufort runs from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 in the evening. Give her some slack, she gets down there about 9:00 or 10:00 and stays a reasonable amount of time. One of the members said he went down by the girl scout building and he couldn’t find where the voting was going on. (He was in Morehead City.) BOB explained that there was no early voting in Morehead. The early voting was taking place at the Fire Department in Davis, the County Board of Elections office in Beaufort, Fort Benjamin Park in Newport and the Western Park Community Center up by Cape Carteret. The member said he guess that was why there was no one there when/where he went. The Beaufort location is open from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday, while the other sites are open from noon to 7 pm Monday through Friday. The last day of early voting is May 5, (Saturday) when all locations will be open from 8 am to 1 pm. BOB said STEVE BEST has been manning the location at Fort Benjamin Park. It has been a little windy and cool the last couple of days. The wind blew his tent over and while he was chasing that the wind blew his table over and all his papers. STEVE has really stepped up to the plate, a real trouper. KEN LANG has been manning the table at Cape Carteret. KEN said he has actually had some help this time. Two years ago he had done it all by himself for the whole early voting. Jim and Pat Nalitz and Karen and Bob Clark and a gentleman, whose name Ken could not remember, have been helping and Bill Sherry has volunteered to come tomorrow also. He feels he has had decent volunteer help. It would be nice if we could get a few people to come out and help Eula. WAYNE WILLIS reported on the Davis Fire Department polling site. He said there had been a grand total of 13 people voting and he was one of them. Another was Weston Willis, who is relieving him today, because WAYNE had physical therapy and another voter was CLAYTON WILLIS.
HOWARD said he has seen some dirty elections before but never like what he is seeing today. He is talking about the campaigning being so dirty.
Discussion on the fact that Randy Ramsey had workers at every one of the polls. Someone said they were employees of Ramsey’s business. KEN said it was not like he had this vast army of volunteers working for him at the polls; it is his employees who are there. BOB wanted to know if anyone knew how Ramsey was manning the polls in the other counties. Someone in the audience said he was doing the same thing in the other counties, because there was no one working at the business the last few days, including Randy, who was out politicking.
HOWARD showed everyone his sign that someone (who was stupid enough to leave his address on the Ramsey flyer) had defaced. They had taped one of Ramsey’s flyers to one side of a Sanderson sign and taped an X over Sanderson’s name on the back. Everyone wanted HOWARD to take the sign to the sheriff’s office and complain. HOWARD said he might later on but was getting a lot of mileage out of showing it to people right now. He had it to the polling place in Newport last Friday and a lot of people saw and commented on it, including the man who was there representing Ramsey. He apologized for the action by apparently one of Ramsey‘s supporters. HOWARD said he had been having a lot of problems with someone stealing or tearing down the Sanderson signs he had put up. This one he was showing had been a replacement for another sign in the same location that had been stolen. When he was going by on the way to the dump (at the intersection of Masontown and Tom Mann Roads) he noticed the sign had been tampered with. He stopped and started to tear off the electric tape that had been used to deface the sign and PEGGY told him to keep the sign, what had been done to that sign was illegal and could get whoever was responsible in real trouble. So he brought the sign home and later put up another one. A couple of days later he noticed on the way to church that that sign had been pulled up and thrown down in the mud.
KEN said Ramsey has sent out approximately 12 different flyers to Republicans and Independents in Carteret, Craven and Pamlico counties. It is estimated that it is costing him about $10,000.00 per mailing. That is $120 thousand that he has spent so far just on mailing these things out. He has radio ads on 107.1 and probably 94.1. The frequency of those have gone up in the last several days. And he has television ads on Time Warner’s Channel 14 and several others. It is estimated that Ramsey will probably end up spending about $250 thousand to win this race. Norm Sanderson told KEN that he doubted that he would be able to spend over $20 thousand, because he just doesn’t have the money or the big spenders (“What’s in it for Me Crowd”). You have heard very little from Norm defending himself from this attack on his supposedly voting for Obamacare, because he does not have enough money to put ads in the papers, radio and TV to defend his position. The fight is being done via email, face book, Twitter, and stuff like that, that is free. KEN has posted Pat McElraft’s letter to the editor on the TEA Party Web and Face Book pages. He also sent Pat’s letter to the over 900 TEA Party member email addresses he has. This is the only way Norm has of getting the truth out to the voters right now and hopefully all those will pass the word on to their friends.
HOWARD said he had talked to Pat and during their discussion he mentioned that the lady working the Republican booth had gotten a copy from HOWARD of Pat’s letter. She then had shown it to Ramsey’s man at the poles, after which he noticed the man on his cell phone for an extended period of time. Upon figuring the time frame of Ramsey’s man getting the letter and making his phone call, Pat said it was somewhere around that time she had received a phone call from Ramsey. He did not apologize but instead told her he was going to win and looked forward to working with her in Raleigh.
WAYNE said around Easter he went to the church he has been going to for about 7 years and the preacher pulled in ahead of him and had a Ramsey sticker on the back of his vehicle. This was not problem, since that is his prerogative but when he went inside, there on the table along with the bulletins of the church activities and other religious pamphlets was a stack of Ramsey political propaganda. So he got in touch with the pastor and he told him that it did not appear to him to be an appropriate place for him to display political activity of that nature. The preacher responded by saying that he goes out to Jarrett’s Bay every Wednesday, conducts a prayer meeting, and apparently someone stuck the sticker on the back of his vehicle without him knowing it and brought the political flyers in and put them on the church table. He doesn’t know whether the preacher is being totally honest with him or not, but WAYNE feels this is inappropriate action.
HOWARD and BOB, both, said if anyone could afford a little donation to help Norm out, please do so. It will be greatly appreciated. If you can’t help financially, then please get on the phone and call anyone you know in Carteret, Craven or Pamlico counties and ask them to please vote for Norm and help him out. Explain the flyers that are being mailed out are false and there is no truth to them and that Norm has been endorsed by Pat McElraft. Pat has informed the radio listeners recently that what Norm Sanderson did vote for was done by every Republican in the House and several Democrats, also. The only people that voted against that bill were the liberal Democrats in the House, which is an indication that the bill is not what Randy has represented it to be, otherwise liberal Democrats would have voted for it because they are FOR Obamacare. Pat is very upset because basically when Ramsey tried to impugn Norm Sanderson, he ended up impugning every single Republican member of the House. BOB said in case you are not familiar with the bill, it was not an endorsement of Obamacare, it was largely a procedural bill that protected North Carolina in the event the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and would save the state countless dollars. In fact, the full title of the legislation was “An Act to Preserve State-based Authority to Regulate the North Carolina Health Insurance Market and Prevent Federal Encroachment on State Authority by Establishing the North Carolina Benefit Exchange”. As the name implies , it was designed to limit the power of Obamacare. It was NOT an endorsement of Obamacare as Ramsey implies.
NANCY BOCK said she had seen about some meeting with Pat McElraft as guest speaker on the internet or via email (could not make out totally what Nancy was saying). She said she would send it to KEN and PEGGY to put into the minutes. (Not received in time to go in these minutes, so maybe KEN will get it out via email to the members in time.)
HOWARD reported that he understood Phil Knight (radio host) will have Randy Ramsey on his radio show Thursday and Norm Sanderson on Friday. Might be interesting to listen to.
KEN said tomorrow night (Wednesday) the League of Women Voters is having a Senatorial candidate forum at 6:00 in the County Commissioners meeting room in the Beaufort Court House. Need to get there early if you want a seat. It will be a question and answer. You can get a card and write down your question and the LofWV will choose which questions to ask. Discussion followed on the fact that pointed questions were never selected to be asked.
BOB said Thursday they are going to have a second forum at the same time for the county commissioners and the board of education.
KEN said he understood we were running the recommended list of the TEA party in the paper on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. It is going to cost us $1,113.00, which will just about deplete our treasury (approximately $400.00 left), so we need to be thinking about how to build our funds back up, because after the primary is over we need to start thinking about the general election and funds are going to be needed at that time. Our list is worth putting out. If you notice at the polls, many people come up with the copy from the paper or ask for one from us.
KEN brought up about the death of Cox’s Restaurant owners’ daughter and he thought it would be nice if the TEA Party sent a card or something to let them know how much we appreciated their help in getting us started. HOWARD said the VFW in Newport had a fund raiser dinner last weekend to help with the expenses of her treatment. She had three children he understands.
BOB asked RUTH PARKER to get a sympathy card and bring it next week for all of us to sign. He said he would carry it down to Cape Carteret for those members to sign also..
CLAYTON wanted to know if anyone had any pocket Constitutions that we could hand out at the polls. BELVA MANNING said she had a box full at her house.
The Men’s Republican Club is having a candidate forum on May 3rd, at the Sanitary Restaurant and it is for the County Commissioner races. All candidates running have responded that they will be there. He thinks it starts at 6:30 if you want to come and eat there and then the candidates begin to speak at 7:30pm. The reason it is as late as it is is because they asked Lockwood Phillips to m-cee and he had a previous engagement so they had to kind of jockey the schedule so he would be able to do that. Feel free to come. It is open to anybody.
EULA discussed “UVisa”. It is called violence against women authorization act or VAWA. It was initially passed in 1994 to protect women suffering domestic violence and abuse. It has become the latest vehicle for open borders lobby to increase visas and grant amnesty to illegal aliens.
EULA requested that everyone above the age of 65, please check to determine when they had their last pneumonia shot. If it is over 5 years, we need to get it renewed. She also asked how many had had their tetanus shot. She told about her sister in law who died after getting cut by a rusty wire. Everyone should have an up-to-date tetanus shot. Also if you have ever had chicken pox, you need to check into getting a shingles shot.
BOB recognized Debbie Rucker who is now attending the Cape Carteret meetings but came out tonight to say hello.
HOWARD said he felt that the reason we had been getting so many phone calls is because apparently some people think we are more effective that he even thinks we are, or we would not be getting those phone calls.
JERE GUERIN said he too had been receiving phone calls about our selection, and he had told them that he didn’t think everyone of the TEA Party members agreed with the total selection but we had all been given the opportunity to voice our opinion and vote, and the majority ruled per our decision of how we would select our candidates. He thinks that everybody in the TEA Party will support that slate as a group.
CLAYTON wanted to know how many had voted already and over half raised their hands. CLAYTON said he voted early, in case he dropped dead, he wanted his vote counted.
RUTH said when she went to vote she was not asked for a voter ID, but did have to give her address which they matched up with her name and address they had listed, but she did show them a picture ID even though they didn’t ask for it.
JERE said he would like to address the Voter ID issue. Every time he goes on the base at Cherry Point, even though he has a sticker on his windshield, he still has to show his ID card. If he goes to the base exchange to buy something, when he goes to the register to check out, he has to show his military ID card. Every place he goes on the base he has to show a military ID. In town, if he goes to cash a check at the bank, his own bank, they ask for a picture ID. Why is it such a bad idea to show ID when you go to vote, which is one of two things that a citizen can do to support the government and the other one being jury duty.
KEN said WAYNE had told him that when he went in to vote in Davis, he had his TEA Party hat on and they made him take it off. Much discussion followed. Did not like this.
Discussed the pro-Ramsey letters to the editor. Most felt the authors had some type of connection to the boat industry….employees, owners of other boat companies that deal with Ramsey, etc. Information on where Ramsey’s donations have come from will now be published until probably sometime next week. Not in time to write anymore letters to the editor. KEN said if he could get hold of it earlier, he would send it out to the members. Make sure KEN has your email address.
PEGGY asked if all had heard Walter B. Jones latest ad. It is not about voting for him but is FOR the Marriage Act. It is a great commercial. Almost makes you want to vote for him!!! BOB said that’s what it is for. PEGGY said she thinks it is going to work. HOWARD said when he and PEGGY went to vote they voted the TEA Party slate. We felt we worked for and belonged to the TEA Party and we owed it our allegiance. PEGGY said she felt if she couldn’t support the TEA Party’s decision, then she shouldn’t be a member.
Meeting adjourned at 7:18pm.
Minutes submitted by PEGGY GARNER, Secretary.