The title was my concluding thought in my June 8 post, Tea Party Endorsements. The post was about whether Tea Party groups should endorse candidates or not. They should.

That post continues to get a lot of hits. In fact, if you google the phrase, that post (via the Peoples Press Collective) comes up in the top ten results. Why?

It turns out that it is not about my brilliant reasoning on whether Tea Parties should or should not endorse candidates; it’s because people are looking for the actual endorsements! [Ed. We can confirm that Al’s same blog post here at TCT is in our top 15 as well, and people are using the search term “tea party endorsements” to find it.]

You see, I’m learning that political endorsements among politicians is most often all about who is friends with who; you endorse me, I’ll endorse you. There are exceptions, of course, but it is often a game of collecting the most endorsements.

Among issue-oriented organizations the endorsement is all about the narrow issue. Thus, the NRA was leaning toward endorsing Harry Reid because of his pro–Second Amendment stand. Facing massive blowback from its membership, the NRA withheld that endorsement citing Reid’s support of the very anti-Second Amendment Kagan for the Supreme Court.

I think Tea Party endorsements are endorsements of a third kind. The Tea Parties are not about personalities or issues and they’re certainly not about party. They are  solely about values. Tea Party values are clear: limited, constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets. Implicit in all that is personal responsibility. Four core values. The 9–12 groups have their own set of principles and values; they don’t endorse you, you endorse their values.

Tea Party endorsements are important because they say that a candidate supports these core American values. I do that research for the candidates I endorse on my Candidates page. I think it is important that we make these endorsements because not everyone has the time or resources to do it for themselves. The establishment media frankly does not look favorably on us. Politicians lie. The truth is out there but is not always easy to find.

It is vital that we support the candidates who support our values in other tangible ways. Spread the word, walk the precincts, make the calls, donate as much as you can. Supporting our candidates means pushing as hard as you can to get them elected so that they can serve the people.

In the field behind my house on the other side of the cattle fence were two Ponderosa pine trees infested with pine beetles. I asked the owner to cut them down; he wouldn’t. I asked the county to force him to cut them down; they couldn’t. Finally, I cut one of them down. But by that time, the beetles had attacked one of my trees, which was bigger, straighter, older and yet stronger than the two infected trees. The forester later told me that the beetles instinctively know when a tree is vulnerable and swarm to it.

It took a lot of hits—I counted something over 200 pitch tubes, meaning the beetles had gotten through the bark and into the tree’s core. The County forester told me it was beyond hope, that I should cut it down and treat the wood to prevent it from infecting my other trees.  You can’t replace a 100-year old tree overnight. I hadn’t planted it obviously; I’d gotten it with the land I bought. But I decided it was worth saving and against conventional wisdom, I tried.

I sprayed it with insecticide using a spray bottle and a garden hose. I couldn’t reach the highest hits but I did the best I could. By some miracle it survived. The beetles didn’t infect any other trees the next year. That was seven or eight years ago. The tree still stands.

Unless you live in Black Forest like I do, why should you care about my tree? Because the story is a fitting analogy for this year’s Colorado governor’s race.

The two trees on the other side of the fence are Tancredo and Hickenlooper. Dan Maes is our tree. We in the Liberty movement and the Republican Party didn’t plant him or grow him. We listened to his message and because it is like ours, we bought into him and his candidacy. It was our support rather than his brilliance as a politician and campaigner that brought victory at the state assembly and the primary election. He’s not the most beautiful or strongest tree in the forest, but he’s our tree. And he’s a whole lot better than those two infected trees on the other side of the fence.

He’s taken some hits this week. The beetles that are the establishment press, the pundits, and the self-appointed power brokers are focused on destroying him. When they’re done with him (or their ratings start to decline), they’ll move on to the next target. Abandoning him will not save the other candidates on the ticket—quite the contrary, it will embolden these insects to attack someone else.

No, We the People and the new alternative media are the insecticide. You see, the beetles are not all-powerful. Not all of the beetles carry the fungus that destroys the tree. Strong trees can survive and even thrive if assisted. The insecticide I used was pretty old; I wasn’t sure it was going to work. Our insecticide is old too—it dates from 1776.

Dan said yesterday that he is in it to win it. Always has been.

Are we?

Charles H. Bucknam. Chemist. Family man.  Sue-happy fringe Democrat. His is a story that needs to be told if only because it is all too common and a complicit press won’t do it.

Bucknam—who is married to lawyer Jerri Hill—seems to make it his hobby to sue Republican candidates and their committees. He’s on record at the Secretary of State’s office for having brought at least ten complaints since 2002. Only Colorado Ethics Watch—a left-wing attack group—exceeds his filings. Most of his complaints are dismissed.

His latest attack is against a contract postal station in Parker. Owner Chris Cerasani has campaign signs in his window. His store is located two doors down from a Department of Motor Vehicles office that acted as a drop-off for mail-in ballots during the primary election, beginning on August 2nd.

Bucknam was offended by the signs on private property and wrote a letter to the Parker Chronicle, which published it.  After detailing the supposed problem with the signs, he ends the letter:

It is high time that Douglas County government shows some respect for the election process. Vote for Chuck Patrick for clerk and recorder.

A conclusion not quite supported by the facts of the letter. But it appears he’s quite proud of that letter. On August 12th, he posted this note on his Facebook page:

Finally scored a letter to the editor in the News Press; Douglas County Clerk and Recorder and Stonegate Post Office conspire to have election signs within 100′ of the voting service center despite Colorado Law to the contrary. Vote For Chuck Patrick for Douglas County Clerk and Recorder!

In the interest of full disclosure I must add that Bucknam contributed $25 to Patrick’s campaign.

The only problem with the complaint is that it isn’t justified. Jack Arrowsmith, the incumbent Clerk and Recorder looked into the matter long before the letter was published by consulting with the Secretary of State’s office. They said that the complaint was unjustified because

• the DMV drop-off is different from a polling place and having signs within a 100 feet of a ballot drop off site is not in violation of statute, and
• signs that are inside a private business and/or on private property are exempt for the 100 foot requirement

Arrowsmith sent an email with that information to Bucknam and others on July 22nd. Bucknam therefore knew he had no grounds for complaint when he mailed that letter to the Parker Chronicle and when he posted on Facebook.

Last week a man came into the Stonegate Village Postal Service Center and ranted about the campaign signs and the First Amendment petition that Mr. Cerasani has posted inside the business. The young woman at the counter was polite and offered to pass his name to the owner but he refused and stormed off. Need we guess who that man was?

This is how the left operates. Intimidation. Threats. Frivolous lawsuits. Lies and half-truths. Alinsky-style tactics to make the opposition cower in fear of retaliation if they exercise their rights. That’s not what America is all about. These people need to be defeated at every opportunity.

On the one hand, you can understand why they do it: they’ve got nothing else. They are bankrupt of ideas. On the other hand…I suggest you send $25 to Jack Arrowsmith.

According to Fox News reporting, “The Department of Defense announced Friday that it was denying four states’ requests to waive requirements of a law intended to protect the voting rights of military personnel overseas…”

Colorado is one of them.

The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act is part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010…I know, Congress doesn’t work cleanly so we have an act within an act. The law mandates that overseas voters have their ballots at least 45 days before this fall’s election—but allows states to request a waiver.

Buescher, Terrence Carroll (who introduced the bill), and Ritter (who didn’t get to sign it)

That’s exactly what Colorado’s Secretary of State Bernie Buescher did. He felt the deadline of September 18 was too soon; the primary was August 10, which ought to be plenty of time. The DoD certainly thought so.

He said that the state applied for a waiver because he wanted to ensure accuracy in the state’s elections process. Right. In addition to this attempt to delay sending ballots to our military stationed overseas, he was the author of the awful HB10-0917 which he tried sneak in toward the end of this year’s legislative session. That bill, which I wrote about on April 5th, would have mandated all Colorado elections be held via mail-in ballot—a method rife with fraud. He lied, initially saying that it had been pre-coordinated with the Clerk and Recorders Association when in fact they learned about it at the same time as the public. Fortunately it was opposed by legislators, the Clerk and Recorders and citizens and died.

Fortunately, we have a great alternative in Scott Gessler. Unlike Bernie, Scott actually has a background in election law. Check out his website: he’s written about everything I have in this area and in greater detail.

Support him any way you can, contribute to his campaign, and vote for Scott in November. Let’s return honesty and fairness to Colorado elections.

Image via Wikipedia

I received this from a 912 leader in Crawford County, Ohio and repeat it in full:

Re: Republican Dinner Last Night

Just thought I would share with you a little bit of what we heard at last night’s Republican dinner here in Crawford County, Ohio. John Kasich (running for Gov. of Ohio ) was the keynote speaker. Also present were many politicians, most notably, Bob Latta, our U.S. Congressman. Mike and I walked up to Bob and thanked him for his conservative voting record and voiced our concern about what is going on in Washington. He made some funny botox remarks about Pelosi and then agreed with us that we have every reason to be concerned.

As there were others waiting to talk to him, our time was brief. Although what took place later that evening should make chills run up and down everyone’s spine to hear. He had asked to speak a few words at the end of the night and went up on stage. He proceeded to tell the crowd how bad things really are in Washington . He said he only had a few minutes to speak, but if he could tell us even half of what the agenda is and what this administration plans to do to our country we couldn’t sleep at night. He said he only gets about 4 to 4–1/2 hours of sleep a night and worries constantly about what they want to do to this country. He said that Pelosi, Reid and Obama have to be stopped.

He said, “You know, you always hear this is the most important election blah blah blah, but I am telling you people…whatever you have to do to wake people up you need to do! We have got to vote them out in 2010 or with the things they have planned for this country we won’t even be a country by 2020! Ten years. You could see the look of almost desperation on his face.

He talked about the huge debt. He talked about how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) gets their “figures”. He sits on the finance committee of some sort and listens to the ramblings of Geitner and Bernanke. He said “If you think that the Chinese won’t hold this over us with all our debt you have another thought coming. Our children will have nothing. I don’t care if you have to go out door to door, tell at least 10 people who will then tell 10 people. We have to do this. This is the single most important election ever in the history of this country. The change that Obama promised us is NOT the change people thought he meant.”

We in the Liberty movement have made great advances this year but much remains to be done. Bruising primaries in several places, like here in Colorado, have left us more divided that we should be. Get behind our candidates: raise money, make calls, walk the precincts, donate money. Unmask the cowardly communists who are trying to pass themselves off as not radical. Whatever it takes: the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

Border Fence near Naco, AZ

I spend the latter half of this week with the Republican Study Committee of Colorado (RSCC) on a fact-finding trip to Arizona. On Wednesday, the Colorado legislators met with Arizona legislators on a wide variety of issues. I joined the group on Thursday for discussions with ranchers and concerned citizens and to view the border for ourselves. We worked through Saturday.

We learned a lot and I will be writing about it for some time to come. To deliver the conclusions first: First, nothing the press has told you about the border problem or the Arizona 1070 law is true. Nothing. Second, the problem of illegal immigration and the border is complex. Neither of these conclusion should surprise.  The good news is that with a moderate amount of resources—and above all, commitment—the problem can be solved.

In the coming days and weeks I’ll support those statements with facts. The solutions are not coming from Washington; in the best American tradition, they are coming from some very smart and dedicated citizens. I met ranchers whose families have been ranching on the border for four generations and who are being driven from their homes. I met people dedicated to patrolling the border and smuggling routes on their own initiative and at their own expense. These people are dedicated, kind, generous, common-sense and patriotic. They are doing their best to solve problems the government refuses to tackle. They are not famous or wealthy but they possess a strength of spirit that the famous and wealthy all too often lack. They work against seemingly insurmountable odds to save our country for their children and grandchildren—and they will succeed, especially if we recognize the real problems and help them. They truly deserve our support.

Washington is nothing; the People are everything.

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The following is a press release from the Republican Study Committee of Colorado. I’ll be joining them on Thursday for a visit to the border area. Stay tuned for more…

August 17, 2010 – (Phoenix, AZ) Eleven state legislators from Colorado, members of the Republican Study Committee of Colorado (RSCC), are visiting Arizona this week to meet with their counterparts in the Arizona legislature.  Members will be discussing SB-1070, current Arizona laws that apply to illegal immigration, and several other topics of common interest.  RSCC members will be introducing legislation similar to SB-1070 in Colorado early next year.

Legislative members from both Arizona and Colorado will hold a joint press conference on the Arizona State Capitol grounds on the House Lawn at 2:30 on Wednesday, August 18, to summarize the legislative visit.

Image via Wikipedia

My post last week about the Electoral College generated quite a bit of interest—from the National Popular Vote people, apparently. Within two hours of my post appearing, I received five very long rebuttals from the same untraceable hotmail account “mvymvy@hotmail.com” They arrived 1 minute apart. Overwhelm the opposition: typical leftist tactic.

I moderate this blog mostly to prevent the senseless ad hominem attacks that inevitably follow the expression of conservative opinion. These comments were not that: they were long lists of carefully selected facts to support the position of doing away with the Electoral College. If you want to see their position, go to the NPV site; I’m not going to become an extension of their propaganda machine.

Their position is simply this: direct election of the president. It’s in their title. The Founders, as I wrote last week, gave us not a democracy but a republic with checks and balances to ensure limited government. Every citizen got one vote–for their representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. Since it was the States and the People who had come together to form the union, the States got a vote, too. This was for the U.S. Senate. The 17th Amendment already removed that balance and now the people get two votes and the States zero. How’s that working out for us? Since the Progressive-era 16th (Income Tax) and 17th Amendments were passed we have seen a huge growth in government and public debt—which was zero in 1835 and still very low in 1910.

The Progressive left is determined to transform our republic into a unitary state with one political party—theirs. What would that look like? Perhaps something like the social democracies of Western Europe or maybe democratic republics of the former Eastern Europe Soviet bloc. With policy being guided by radical Marxists in the current White House, the goal could be a full-blown communist utopia. Maybe they don’t even know where they’re headed.

The point is, we do. The Founders understood the dangers of autocratic government. They knew, because they studied Aristotle, that the people could be swayed by pleasing orators and fair-sounding lies. The fact is, We the People also need to be checked against the passions of the moment, against the false promises of the snake-oil salesman.

That’s what you get from the NPV site. Take, for example, the rotating pictures of the 1777 legislators who support NPV. Sounds like a groundswell of support, right? There are 7382 state-level legislators in the United States. Their number is only 24% support, and they define support as having voted for it at least once. No changing your mind. Terrence Carroll (D-Den) is pictured. Will they take down his name when he leaves the House this fall?

They also list all the legislative houses that have passed a popular vote bill, including both houses of the Colorado legislature. The only problem with that is it never passed both houses in the same session.

A Democrat-sponsored bill got through the Senate in 2008 but was killed in the House State Affairs committee 2–9. In 2009 they tried again. The bill (HB09-1299) passed the House on a strict party-line vote (34/29) on March 17th. It passed out of the Senate State Affairs Committee but was never brought up for a final vote. Technically to say that the initiative passed both houses is correct, but Republicans were able to kill it twice in the second house when the people found out what was going on. Hardly non-partisan and hardly the kind of overwhelming support they claim.

National Popular Vote is a very bad idea and only the most liberal state legislatures have passed it.

Dan and Karen Maes earlier in the day (photo courtesy Jimmie Butler)

Two close victories for great grassroots candidates!

I was up late last night watching the returns and picking up the signs I’d placed at the polling places, so I’ll be writing more tonight. It was a great night for liberty activists in Colorado and I think we’re all just a little tired this morning.

Tired but happy: another step in the march to take back America.

Remember November.

This week, in the last days before the primary election, two very similar attack ads from the Norton campaign arrived in our mailbox, hitting on the sexism theme and urging women to vote against Buck. Both were addressed to my wife, who was disgusted by them.

On close inspection, they turned out not to be from the Norton campaign at all, but rather from a new Republican fund-raising group from California called “Grow our Party” and headed by “a group of former campaign consultants and aides to Sen. John McCain” according to ABC News.

Very interesting. The same Jane Norton who repeatedly said John McCain did not ask her to run and the same campaign that has been criticizing the Buck campaign because independent 527 organizations have been supporting him is accepting the same kind of support. She is supported by money from an organization chaired by Bill Bloomfield, a California business man who has donated heavily to Arnold Schwarzenegger and who both raised money and recruited volunteers for McCain, according to Grow Our Party.

This is not the first PAC that is supporting Norton. Allison Sherry of the Denver Post reported Thursday that Jane Norton is getting $200,000 in advertising help from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It would be easy to miss the fact that these fliers don’t come from the Norton campaign. Although funded from California, they are postmarked Grand Junction. the content is exactly what the Norton campaign has been saying and the fliers point to the same YouTube video. I’m not saying the PAC coordinated with the Norton campaign on the message—that would be illegal—but they are very close.

I want to emphasize that none of this support is wrong or illegal in any way. One of the outcomes of the 2002 campaign finance reform—known as McCain–Feingold after the sponsors—is that money has shifted away from parties and candidates to independent 527 and various 501c organizations. The Democrats figured this out early on; the Republicans are playing catch-up. The independence of these organizations is guaranteed. They are not allowed to coordinate with campaigns by that law.

The problem is that Norton’s campaign chair Josh Penry has been calling this “shady 527 money” while at the same time accepting it. I contributed to Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund. Is my money “shady?” Of course not. Penry’s taking advantage of the public’s general lack of understanding of the complexities of campaign finance to make his opponent look bad. All the while doing the very same thing.

Shameful. “Whoa!” indeed.