The story of Maes’ finance errors was reported by Leslie Jorgensen in the Colorado Statesman. The tone is a little anti-Maes but the reporting seems factual. Reading through the article, the thing that emerges is an underfunded campaign trying to take on too much work with too few specialized, paid staff. Campaign finance is complex, just like your income taxes. Have you ever made an honest mistake on them? I have.

There was also the unrelated issue of Maes being  “delinquent” [quotes in original] in filing his in annual reports for his businesses. Sounds serious. I thought so, too, when I first formed an LLC. It turns out that the annual report is nothing more than a verification of who owns the company; publicly traded companies do file a more involved report but for an LLC it is pretty basic. Not really a big deal–unless you’re a Maes opponent looking to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Maes said the complaint was politically motivated. Attorney Erik Groves brought the complaint on behalf of Christopher Klitzke, his law-class student and paralegal. Groves himself was the subject of an ethics action for trying to influence the vote of a legislator in March2009; in July he left the lobbying firm he was working for to form his own law practice.

Was Groves’ complaint politically motivated? Could be. He certainly had an interest is Maes’ campaign filings, but why is speculation at this point.

Was the fine a big deal? Over $17,000 for a cash-strapped campaign is significant but consider this: Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign just got hit with a $219,000 penalty from the Federal Election Commission for some bad bookkeeping. His campaign spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander responded:

Some repayment is commonplace after presidential campaign audits and the repayment ordered here is relatively small.

Let’s see the Looper try to use Maes’ mistake as a campaign issue.

Was Maes inaccurate in his accounting? Yes. He did own up to it and paid a fine. And that’s what we want: leaders who are not afraid to admit their mistakes and try to make it right. What we are tired of is the sequence of denials and blame-shifting that we get from politicians.

I was at the Elbert County Tea Party meeting Saturday and they held a straw poll. These are very independent, conservative people and not all of them are Republican voters. For governor, the results were Maes 96%, McInnis 4%.

I think that says it all.

What is a little more interesting is how the event is reported. By now the obvious bias in the media is a byword but how exactly is it done? What makes it biased? Let’s look at the headlines:

From the Denver Post, in the Denver and the West section, the headline reads:

First Western Conservative Summit draws a crowd to Littleton with Tom Tancredo, Michelle Malkin

Tom Tancredo wasn’t even a keynote speaker–Michele Bachmann was and Dick Morris closed out the event on Sunday. But the liberal media in Colorado love to hate Tancredo so I guess the fact that he showed up Saturday was significant to them. The first line of the article is equally perceptive:

The Marriott Hotel South in Littleton is not a place to find liberals this weekend.

Really Bianca Davis? What was your first clue? She went on to describe a little bit the speeches of Tancredo and Malkin. Michelle Malkin gave a powerful story about being discriminated against by the left, describing her assignment to Asia House upon attending Oberlin College, accusing the left of a “plantation mentality.” I think Bianca missed that part too. In fact, the report reads as though she dropped in for lunch and a couple of speeches, took some notes and left.

But to be honest, that was good reporting compared to the Denver Post opinion page, which blasts the conference on 8 July–two days before anyone said anything. Don’t let the facts get in the way of your reportage, DP.

Kevin Diaz of the Minnesota Star-Ledger was content to re-post comments originally written about Michele Bachmann by the Colorado Independent and run an old stock photo of her wearing something brown. How do I know it’s old? Here’s her photo Friday evening: I’d say not brown but Gadsden yellow.

It was a keynote: meant to highlight and set the tone for the conference. It was entertainment and I was both entertained and energized. She’s no intellectual lightweight and she quoted the Founders, encouraging us to immerse ourselves in their writings.

So if you want to read about what was said instead of the usual tired rant about how conservatives and Republicans–by the way, there not exactly the same thing–are obstructing the progressive Road to Serfdom, here’s some places you can go:

• Joshua Sharf’s blog, which is also on the Rocky Mountain Bloggers
• Ben DeGrow’s Mount Virtus blog, part of the People’s Press Collective
• the People’s Press Collective itself, which carries Ben, Joshua and me and video-taped the whole thing

You don’t need the formerly mainstream media any more. They can rant to their echo chamber all they want; you can see and hear the truth for yourself.

When is the party going to get a clue?

Maybe the defeat of Senator Bob Bennett by grass-roots conservative Mike Lee in Utah will give pause. Or Gov. Crist’s withdrawal from the Florida GOP primary under pressure from Marco Rubio. Both men, by the way, are supported by Senator Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, which I’ve highlighted before.

In Colorado, the party’s State Assembly is this week and I’m a delegate. RSCC pick Jane Norton has decided to petition on to the primary ballot just in case.  Her campaign under Josh Penry has gone negative and just today I got an email from a prominent supporter of hers attacking Ken Buck’s character and distorting his record.

Last week I got an email from the Scott McInnis campaign making a fine distinction between McInnis, who held a “consistent” stand on immigration versus Maes, whose stand “evolved”…to end up in the same place. Who cares? Only a lawyer trying to win a debate.

This is politics as usual. These negative personal attacks are what the American people are sick of. This year the fight in the Republican party is about principle: does the party stand on the conservative principles it says it does? More importantly, do it’s candidates? Arguments like “I have more experience in politics” and “I know the players, I can get things done” don’t hold nearly as much weight as they may have in the past. In fact, they are liabilities.

Here’s the clue: if you want to win in the primary AND go on to attract independents and even non-Marxist Democrats, then you had better show that you are a person of principle and that those principles prominently include limited constitutional government, fiscal responsibility and the free market.

This year’s election is not about your political career; this is a battle for life and liberty. If you’re not in this for God and the Constitution, get out now.

The training is billed as a post-party summit.  The point is the same one I and others have been making as well: both parties have failed us. It is time to take back the country by supporting candidates from whatever party who hold our values of Constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free market capitalism. American Majority is a good name for them because poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans hold those beliefs. They have a cool logo featuring a red and blue bison: what animal better to symbolize this thundering movement?

I won’t recount all the training available or where it is going to be given; you can find that at their website. They have a great lineup of conservative speakers, too.

It is going to take me another week just to unpack and absorb all the information I got this weekend. Ned Ryun says they are coming back to Colorado again this summer and I encourage anyone serious about taking this country back from the failed political class to attend. I’ll announce it here and you can bet I will be at the training, too!

I’m proud to announce my support for Ken Buck for U.S. Senate. He’s an authentic conservative who has strong support from grass roots conservatives in Colorado,” said Senator Jim DeMint. “I’ve been watching this race for several months to see which candidate would gain traction with Republican activists. Despite being little-known and under-funded, Ken has rapidly gained momentum. He surprised everyone when he won the precinct caucus straw poll in March, and now he is positioned to exceed all expectations at the state convention in May.

I first wrote about Ken on November 15, the first time I heard him speak. In geek-speak I guess that makes me an early adopter. I liked him then and after hearing him speak several more times, I like him even better. He did well not only in the straw poll but also at the El Paso County assembly where he spoke.

You can read about his stand on the issues either at the SCF site or his own site. He has experience and he takes firm, principled stands on the issues. He is exactly the kind of person we need to send to Congress this fall.

There are more of these characterizations of the forms of government out in the public square than I have ever seen in my lifetime.  It does my political theory professor’s heart good. Maybe if we had seen more of this in the classrooms of the past twenty years we would not be where we are today.

A lot has happened in the past year.  Thousands of protests against the stimulus spending and then against an attempted health care takeover.  In the fall, victories in two gubernatorial elections and last month Republican Scott Brown was elected to the senate from Massachusetts.  Who would have thought that the political landscape could change so much in one year?

The American people are up to the challenge of taking back our country.  The movement the media is calling the Tea Party movement is broader than that: it includes the Glenn Beck-inspired 9-12 organization, libertarians, conservatives and others without specific affiliations who are simply fed up with a government out of control and moving in the wrong direction.  I call it the Liberty Movement.

As we head into spring there is every sign that this year will be even more exciting than the last one.  Consider a few recent events:

• A national tea party convention in Nashville
• Over 10,000 people attending CPAC
• PJTV launched a Tea Party channel
• Hot Tea Radio launched
• The Constitutionalist Today launched, a grass-roots conservative newspaper
• Daniel Hannan is organizing a British Tea Party!

Furthermore, recent polls say:

• Rasmussen poll 2/27 gives Obama a -21% approval margin with 43% strongly disapproving
• only 21% of the people say this government has the consent of the governed (Rasmussen 2/18)
• the same polls says 75% are angry at the policies of the federal government
• only 29% say the U.S. is heading in the right direction – the same as the week of January 26, 2009
• CNN found that 56% of the American people feel that the federal government the federal government poses a threat to rights of Americans!

This last poll apparently came as a surprise to CNN.  The people at CNN are apparently not a part of the 49% of Americans who watch Fox News as compared to all the other news channels combined.

The revolution has begun.

May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.

Good for a chuckle–especially when considering the Constitutional line of succession–unless you’re a committed leftist.  The Huffington Post reports on this “latest…thinly-veiled..death threats.”  I wrote about this on September 18: only Republican presidents get shot.  Curiously, the National Archives piece I looked up refers to Lincoln and McKinley being “shot”; only Kennedy was “assassinated.”  Be that as it may, they all died of their wounds.

In the late 1980s my wife was working in the county library system in Maryland.  One day a young man offered the observation that President Reagan “deserved” to be shot because he was taking away “our welfare rights.”  You see, the left thinks in those terms.  The idea that conservatives would do the same is another case of the myopic mirror-imaging that the left engages in.

When do conservatives commit physical, political violence?  Discounting the Revolution itself one could start with the Whiskey Rebellion against taxes under Washington and include John Brown’s Raid against Harper’s Ferry in 1859.  After that?  Don’t think so.  Let me know if you can think of any.

All the riots, intimidation and thuggery lately has been perpetrated by leftists such as ACORN and SEIU, both strong Obama supporters (and vice versa by the way.)  Is this obsession with “right-wing extremists” a way of daring conservatives to respond?

I’m beginning to wonder.  Well, we will respond: at the ballot box as we did this month and will again in 2010.  Until then, we’ll just pray.  And I’m really glad to see the left quoting Scripture.

The Tea Party will become one of 32 minor political parties certified by the state, including also the Real Food Party of the United States of America, the Prohibition Party, and the Florida Socialist Workers Party. Its website is not live.

No attempt to marginalize the new party there.  CBS News picked up the story and wrote

Even though the conservative lost in that race, “tea partiers” and other conservatives “remain convinced they’re on the right side of history,” CBSNews.com’s Charles Cooper wrote. “And in writing down their morning-after election analyses… they also delivered a hard-edged message to the Republican establishment: Get behind us or get out of the way.”

“…that race” of course refers to NY-23, the only race conservatives lost that day.  Tea Party activists campaigned for Doug Hoffman toward the end and may have been the force that took his candidacy from dead last to almost first.  I wrote about that on Nov 5.

Clearly NY-23 is the dream scenario for the left.  Squabbling among conservatives and moderates allows them to squeak by.  It’s what happened in the Russian Duma in 1917, the Weimar Republic in 1932, and here in 1992.  In 2010–just one short year from now–Doug Hoffman will win the NY-23 seat.

What does all this mean for the Tea Party as a political party?  I wrote about the role of parties in our republic in June.  Parties get candidates elected to office and then enact a platform.  The nature of our winner-take-all system is that the number of effective parties–especially at the national level–is narrowed to two and those two have historically been big tent parties.  That’s a good thing.

Starting around 1992, the Democrat Party began narrowing it’s base farther and farther left.  They can only win by attracting disaffected or politically naive voters which they did in 2008 or by moving the culture of this country leftward which they’ve been trying to do for a very long time.  In the short term, their best shot is to keep the opposition fragmented.

That’s what will happen if the Tea Party movement turns into a political party.  It will cause splits like NY-23 and the governor’s race in New Jersey.

Tea Party Patriots can’t allow that to happen.  The strength of the Tea Party movement is in holding all parties accountable, especially for fiscal responsibility.  We should seek out, encourage, support and endorse candidates who hold our values regardless of party.

Another small party run by a lawyer.  Ho hum.  The Politico was right to marginalize it.  The Tea Party movement ought to ignore it.