CRYSTAL COAST TEA PARTY PATRIOTS
MEETING MINUTES OF
21 AUGUST 2012
Meeting held at Jing Gianni’s Restaurant in Morehead City (across from O’Malley’s on
Hwy 70/Arendell Street – Beaufort side of Cox’s) Information provided for those
Who still are having trouble finding our location)
Meeting was called to order by Chairman BOB CAVANAUGH
Pledge of Allegiance was led by RO THOMPSON
Invocation by STEVE BEST
BOB asked if everyone was aware that the ‘2016 Obama’s America’ movie was going to be shown in Jacksonville at the Carmike 16 Theater, 350 Western Blvd, located behind the Mall (behind Belks).
Times are: Friday, August 24 – 1:00pm, 3:10pm, 5:20pm, 7:30pm, 9:40pm
Saturday, August 25 – Times same as above
Sunday, August 26 – Times same as above.
According to the web site it plays from this Friday until next Thursday.
Discussion followed as to location of theater, and who was planning on going and what time and day. The email we had received came from TOM AUSTIN who also wanted to know who planned to go and did we want to go as a group. HOWARD GARNER and several others thought it would be nice to go as a group; however, it appeared that different ones were planning their own car pooling times, so no consensus was agreed upon all going together at the same time. So BOB said you all have the schedules – work it out yourselves. He, personally, was not going…there he did not think they would show anything to make him dislike Obama more than he already does. VERNE THOMPSON said he agreed with BOB, except he felt like he should support the people that had produced this movie. BOB said he thought buying the DVD would give them more financial support than anything else. Ongoing discussion among the attendees about who wanted to go with whom, until BOB used the gavel to bring order back to the meeting by asking PEGGY if she would like the floor (since she was talking and making plans with BELVA and RON MANNING about getting together and going). She thanked BOB but said she didn’t think she could carry the floor very far. (Laughter) BOB said Atlas Shrugged Part II was coming out later on this month. They have also released it on DVD.
BOB reminded us that VERNE THOMPSON had told us last week that he would take the Paul Ryan budget which was about 70 pages and he would summarize and condense it down, which he has done. He brought several copies for us to take and read and discuss at our next meeting.
BOB took 5 to take to Cape Carteret when he left our meeting.
BOB said STEVE BEST had contacted ‘One Nation Under God’ Radio station and they sent him a box of pamphlets entitled “Unfit to Rule” (The Saga of Barack Hussein Obama). Everyone there who was interested was urged to take a copy. What was left over he planned to also take to Cape Carteret tonight.
BOB said, ‘we have an issue that is arising from the Republican Party. A great deal of discussion ensued. Highlights follow:
VERNE said he was able to cast his first vote in a presidential election for Barry Goldwater. Ever since then there has always been a continual argument of (a) you can not govern unless you get elected and to get election you cannot be radical. He bought in that for a long time but at some point I finally said ‘No more moderates. I am never going to cast a ballot for a moderate Republican because George Wallace was right. There is not a dime’s worth of difference between a moderate Republican and a Democrat. So it boils down to this…the Republican Party sees their interest lying in moderate Republicans that are not radical and can easily co-exist with the Democratic Party and so therefore have a better chance of getting elected. The way I see it, and the way I think a lot of the TEA Party members see it is there is no point in getting elected if you are not going to try to squarely address the problems. That means we are going to have to support some candidates that the Republican Party considers radical. That is an irresolvable problem.
HOWARD said, ’I think VERNE is exactly right on that, but if you’ve noticed, I think there is a lot of jealousy over this last election. Almost every Republican candidate came to talk to the TEA Party and asked for our support.
LUKE said if this election goes the right way there will no longer be a Democrat party and if the Republican Party wants us to make a choice between them and the TEA Party, I don’t know about anybody else, but I am going with the TEA Party. BOB said the main stream Republicans to me are like the left wing of the Republican Party and the TEA Party is the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
FRED said Greg Muse is running against Norman Sanderson and from what he had heard Mr. Muse was backing Norman and only got into the race when he thought that Randy Ramsey was going to win the primary. He was banking on all those who were against Randy would then vote for him. FRED doesn’t think there is any cause for alarm in the Muse/Sanderson race.
BOB said the TEA Party has a huge amount of influence throughout the country. It has given us Alan West, Paul Ryan, Ran Paul, got Scott Brown elected up in Mass.at a point in time when we really needed a Republican….Cruz in Texas. And we had a huge influence if you look at the Randy Ramsey race. We really altered the course that the Republican Party was going in this state. JERE GEURIN said whatever we do in this situation with the Republican Party, we do not want to lose our values. LUKE told BOB to tell them at that executive meeting that it will be their loss if they keep this up.
LUKE reminded everyone that Sam would be packing boxes in the morning at his regular spot across from Trucker’s Toy Store, behind the furniture store….9:00 if you want to help.
ERIC said speaking of Alan West, he has been getting a lot of emails recently and apparently the Democrat Party was really going out to get him. They are playing dirty with him in ads also and if you can afford it, you might want to throw a few dollars his way. BOB said he has been gerrymandered into a heavily populated district. BOB said every dollar helps but in a race of that scale in Florida would take a lot more that we could afford. It is going to have to fall on the Florida voters. They have very active TEA Parties down there that are working hard for West. This other thing with this Akin guy and his legitimate rape comment is supposed to announce tonight if he is dropping out the race. Several said he had already said he was not getting out. HOWARD said the money is starting to be withheld by the Republican Party which will hurt him even more. TOM HARMON wanted to know why the Republican Party was so quick to throw one of their own under the bus so fast and the Democrats stand by and say ‘you just misunderstood him’. BOB said it goes back to they are just trying to appeal to the moderates.
EULA PARKIN finally arrived. She said she had spent the last hour down there at Yonnie’s or whatever that place is called. Everyone got a laugh but assured her we were glad she finally figured out where we were hid and could join us. EULA said she had something for show and tell. Two hundred and twenty-two years ago, does anyone know what happened? BOB asked her was that when you graduated college? (friendly laughter and several joking comments) She said no, not quite. She said she couldn’t understand why we would want to have a meeting there at that other place. You couldn’t hear a thing it was so noisy. Two hundred twenty-two years ago on August 4th, the US Coast Guard was begun. She had a lovely hand carved wooden plaque that she had won that she displayed for us.
Discussion on Biden’s comment about Republicans wanting to put you’all in chains and all the gaffs he has gotten away with…being just good ole Joe. And how the Democrats have actually hurt the blacks and have held them down instead of helping them up. If Martin Luther King were alive today, he would be devastated at what had happened to his people. They have been economically trapped and are totally dependent on a government check. If you don’t jump through the hoop, you don’t get the check. Any black who stands up and speaks his mind and opposes what is happening to his people, he is an Uncle Tom and put down. BOB said it is not just the blacks, there are a lot of retired military that are just milking the system to death. I know guys that are retired E9’s, Col, Lt Col’s, they are knocking down $4 or $5 thousand a month retirement and pulling in another $2 or $3 thousand dollars disability and yet they are holding down jobs on the base with no physical limitations that are paying $90 to $120 thousand dollars a year. When they retire from the base, they will be drawing a military retirement check, disability check, social security check, and a civil service retirement check. It is not just liberals and blacks that are milking the system. If these guys are drawing a retirement check and an 80% disability, then there should be some type of compensation to the tax payer if they are holding down a job paying $120 thousand dollars that has no physical limitations, then why are they drawing disability. I know a lot of people who have faked back problems that are drawing disability. Something has got to give. The system can’t keep going as it has. Hopefully Romney and Ryan will get in there and start checking into these entitlement programs, hopefully it is going to affect the conservatives as much as it is the liberals. It has got to be across the board. Everybody is going to have to take a little bit of a cut. Look at Wisconsin when the governor tried to take bargaining rights out. Didn’t affect their salary, just the capability of bargaining and the unions went wild. When they start talking about cutting benefits for whomever, there is going to be ‘ugliness’. The media is going to blow it way out of proportion. I hate to think about it but it is going to take 16 to 20 years to ever get this country back, if we can do in that amount of time.
HOWARD said he knew a guy that lost his job when the Philadelphia Navy Shipyard closed. He came to Cherry Point and when he thought the base might close here he went back to Philly, and took classes on how to convince a Psychiatrist that he was crazy. He came back here and filed and got 85% disability. He held classes and one of his students went and got a 100% disability, so then this guy went back and convinced the psychiatrist he should be considered 100%. More discussion on disability fraud continued. JERE said he worked with payroll and if you gave the executives a 15% increase, it wouldn’t even make a blip in that payroll line, but if you gave all the other employees and gave them a 3% raise that line would go up. The same thing will happen if they take just a little bit from everybody it will have that effect. LUKE said if they want to take a part of my pay, they can go over and take it out of the part my ex-wife got.
JERE said he had a suggestion to make to help the situation: First of all reduce the senators to 50, one for each state. Then reduce the number of representatives to about 220. And then only allow them to meet one day a year and that cut back on all the damage they do.
BOB said he had been thinking about line item vetoes. He thinks the TEA Party should promote support for a line item veto that has term limits. In other words, Romney wins election and has it for four years, so we pass a law that gives the presidential executive branch line item veto authority for no more than 4 years and when his term expires his line item veto expires with him and it doesn’t pass on to the next president. VERNE said it would require a constitutional amendment. VERNE said this has been discussed over many years but nothing has come of it due to dissention.
VERNE explained about the $716 billion dollars, Obama and medicare. The origin goes back to 1997. If you remember Newt Gingrich and his crowd won the house and the senate was in Republican hands. The congress passed a lot of legislation trying to get a hold of the program. A lot of things that they passed in 1997 (couldn’t remember the name) but one of the provisions of it was a measure to try to control Medicare costs because they were then like they are now, constantly rising and rising faster than other costs in the economy. So, what they did was pass a measure that attempted to tie the reimbursement for Medicare costs to GDP. Medicare from that point forward could not grow faster than GDP. Medicare is mostly to providers which we know is doctors and hospitals. If that had been allowed to take effect it would have cut the reimbursements to doctors and hospitals about one to two percent a year but it was open ended. In other words it wasn’t something that was going to take place for a two year period and then stop. It was supposed to be forever. But the medical providers did not like the idea so it was put off and it became known as what we hear about, the docfix (?). Is everyone familiar with the term? The docfix comes up every few years and what it is is this legislation because it has never been implemented. Every year that the reimbursement that continued to be above the level that they would have been if this law had been implemented. As of now, if it would be implemented in one swoop, the total reimbursements to doctors and hospitals would be about 27% less than it actually is today. But whenever it comes up to be implemented again then the medical community, particularly the AMA starts lobbying for it to be put off again. But the AMA has wanted to get a permanent abolition to this for a long time. In the run up to Obamacare this was the main thing that was on the AMA agenda. The people in the White House calculated at that time the total amount of money that was taken to fix this was $208 billion dollars so they could have put in Obamacare another $208 billion dollars and that would enable them to do away with this legislation. But at the last minute, and they promised AMA that they were going to do it, they got cold feet because it was so much money and if you remember at that time they got it scored for less than a trillion dollars. This $208 billion would have put it well over the trillion dollars. So, in essence they screwed the AMA. They promised they would fix it, give them the money in Obamacare and they didn’t. But as we know the AMA endorsed Obamacare anyway. So, now, since the Supreme Court ruled a month or two ago, that Obamacare is constitutional, the legislators immediately asked the CPO to score Obamacare again particularly this part, this docfix, to see what it would cost. Now since Obamacare doesn’t take place or implemented this portion of it for another three years, they in essence were asking the CPO how much is it going to cost to do this, starting in three years from now and going into the thirteenth year. CPO came back and said $716 billion dollars…that is how much it is going to cost. In other words if you implement this you are going to be cutting reimbursement to doctors and hospitals by $716 billion dollars. So Obama is saying that the $716 billion dollars is what he is saving us in Medicare. That is what he predicates his assertion that he has saved Medicare by cutting reimbursements, not today’s reimbursements but projected reimbursements by $719 billion dollars. They also counted it again….remember they were talking about how they counted it twice and they were. They were counting it in the Obamacare legislation as well as in their budget. In fact Secretary Sebilous (?) admitted that in testimony. Ryan’s budget also contains this same $716 billion because his budget is predicated on current law and that is a part of current law. But the Romney budget does not include it. Romney has said that he is just going to abolish it and there will be no docfix. They are not going to cut reimbursement to doctors and hospitals. As far as I can tell, that is the only difference between the Ryan plan and the Romney plan as far as Medicare is concerned. That is the story of that $716 billion and where it came from. The reason he brought it up was because there had been so much on TV about Obamacare not taking money from Medicare but Ryan’s budget was and back and forth.
BOB called for a Treasurer’s report. NANCY BOCK said we have, including the donations she had gotten from the jar tonight, $739.00. BOB wanted to know what we had spent on the TEA Party ballots advertising in the primary and runoff. NANCY said we spent $373.00 in the runoff ads and $1,219.00 in the May primary. BOB said in other words we have about two months to fill this donation jar up before the election.
LUKE said there was not going to be a Vice Presidential Debate….Joe Biden was going to call in sick.
BOB reminded us about the initial meeting in Jacksonville next month at the Golden Corral.
Meeting adjourned at 7:34pm.
Minutes submitted by PEGGY GARNER, Secretary.
