Senator Webb’s Roanoke Office closed at 4:30 PM? Updates on a variety of issues.
I swung by Jim’s office on Chapparal Road and lo and behold..nobody was home. I called the number for the office, which directed my calls to the Washington number (without providing the number…bad customer service Senator). I called and left a message on his DC number after getting a couple of busy signals. I certainly hope this is a sign that the local staffers are running to the hills based on the volume of calls from folks on the health care reform bill. I do appreciate Senator Webb showing enough intellectual honesty to oppose the current bill and we continue to urge him to do so. Until a decision is made…we need to keep the pressure on.
A couple of exciting pieces of information about the Tea Party. In case you didn’t know it, up until recently the Tea Party was little more than a collection of concerned citizens meeting in basements and restaraunts. While we aren’t much more than that, we are an Incorporated entity now. We did this to protect our brand. According to recent polls, Tea Party’s are more trusted then either political party. (Based on the performance of both parties recently, one could hardly be less trustworthy)
The tea party name has, for better or worse, value. There are examples of the GOP trying to create their own “tea parties.” While there are some in the GOP that share our values, there are some that do not. And our organization will not be beholden to any party. So we felt it necessary to protect the brand. We also need to be able to handle money effectively. Before, transactions were done on a person to person basis which is bad for everyone involved. Now we can write checks to the Roanoke Tea Party. This is goodness.
We will be moving away from protests in 2010 (although we will still need to do some of that) and towards
- Endorsing and supporting local candidates
- Pushing for or opposing legislation
- Monitoring and reporting on adherence to our core principles
I was called naiive today, but we should expect our elected officials to support the Constitution, fiscal responsibility and individual liberty without close scrutiny. Since that doesn’t seem to work right now, our organization will be committed to holding politicians feet to the fire all year round.
We will hold our first formal members meeting on Feb 4th 6:30-8:45 PM at the main Roanoke Library located at 3131 Electric Road SW, Roanoke VA 24018. We will be discussing our by-laws, organization and other internal issues as well as organizing for future events. If we want to keep this movement together for the long haul, we need to ensure we have the structure to make that happen. We are exploring several ideas in this regard and will cover them in detail on Feb 4.
We will have a shop open soon on the site for T-Shirts and other items. This stuff costs money. So far we have depended on the kindness of our members and the generosity of our leaders to pay our way. This won’t work long term, as we need to be able to advertise, endorse and contribute to candidates who support our values. We will be discussing thorny money issues on Feb 4th, because we need to be transparent (really transparent unlike the faux transparency of our President) if you are going to trust us with your hard earned money. The more money we have to work with, the more impact we can have on policy.
We are focusing our main protest efforts right now on the January 18th rally in Richmond. We will be putting much more out on this soon. We will be having bus trips to Richmond for a nominal cost (around $25 a head). We can make a big difference in Richmond with a friendlier legislative enviornment. We will be joined by every major tea party group in Va. on that date so it should be quite a show.
Keep the faith and keep checking the site for updates.
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