Amendments to be discussed at September 25th meeting

The North Central Florida Tea Party will meet at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 25, 2014 at the Jackie Taylor Building.

This meeting will focus on the three amendments that will be on the ballot in November.  Dan Peterson of Coalition for Property Rights will speak on Amendment 1.  State Attorney Jeff Siegmeister will speak on Amendments 2 and 3.  We strive to furnish the information that will help us make the best decision on Election Day.  October meetings will be dedicated to the local candidates.

We meet at the Taylor Building, 128 SW Birley Ave. Lake City.  This is on the corner of Birley and U.S. 90; approx. 3 miles west of the I-75 interchange in Lake City.  For more information, call Sharon 386-935-0821 or go to:  www.ncftparty.org

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Reporting on the Tea Party Network Conference - Part 1

The Tea Party Network (TTPN) held its Annual Conference on September 12th &
13th in Clermont, FL.  Several members from The North Central Florida Tea Party attended and will be working on many of the issues that we heard about.
TTPN is a coalition of over 85 tea party, 912 and other like-minded groups in Florida.  The network mainly focuses on the issues facing us on a state level in Florida and what we can do to impact that.  TTPN partners with several organizations in an effort to keep us informed on issues.  These groups are vetted and then voted on each year by TTPN in an effort to stay
on the mission of TTPN.

Much of this conference was devoted to Common Core and its related issues.  Dr. Duke Pesta was one of the invited speakers.  He travels the country with an excellent presentation of the dangers of Common Core.  Fla. Stop Common Core Coalition is a partnering organization.  They are working on several fronts on the Common Core/Standardized Testing issue.  Dr. Karen Effrem and Randy Osbourne wrote a Policy Analysis last year that will explain the dangers in an easily understood format.  She is always available for consultation as we are working with our local school boards.  (I will cover a lot more about this issue in part 2)
This year’s conference included a great mixture of State and Federal issues.  We heard from Larissa Scott from ACT for America organization.  They are promoting “Andy’s Law”; we will be showing a trailer from this documentary at an upcoming tea party meeting.  Read more about this group at:  http://www.actforamerica.org/    Matt Staver from Liberty Council spoke on “Living in the Shade of Vesuvius”.  It is a good analogy of what is going on in our country today.  Read more about their organization at:   http://www.lc.org/   Karen Jaroch from Heritage Action spoke about the issues they are covering.  You can go to www.heritageaction.com  and check their scoreboard to see how your representative and senator scored.  Click on the information for their Sentinel program to see how you can be involved with that.  Karen’s group furnished lunch for us on Friday and we really appreciated that!  After lunch Ron Edwards spoke on:  “Where we are and How America can be Turned Around”.  Ron is a dynamic speaker with common sense solutions.  Go to:  http://www.theronedwards.com/  to listen to some of his speeches.  Dan Krassner, Integrity Florida spoke to us about “Ethics Reform in the 2015 Legislature”.  He told us that $1,300+ comes out of each Floridian’s pocket due to corruption in all forms of government.  Read more about his organization at:   http://www.integrityflorida.org/   Don Brown from Citizens Property Insurance Reform was next.  He informed us that on every Florida auto and homeowner policy there is an assessment for Citizens Insurance.  This subsidizes the people who have Citizens Insurance.  He entitled his talk “Charlie’s Frog Boil”; my blood was boiling by the time he got finished!  Check his organization out at:  http://www.donbrownflorida.com/.  Next was Josh Silver, “Political Cronyism & Corruption:  How We Fight Back and Win”.  Their organization works on ethics reform.  They recently had a big part in an ethics reform issue in Tallahassee.  Catherine Baer, TTPN Chairman, was part of this effort.  It will be on the Tallahassee ballot in November.  Check out Josh’s website at:  https://represent.us/#themovement.  I had the privilege of eating dinner with a group that included Josh; he is a great young man, full of enthusiasm about getting this country back on track. Read more about what Tallahassee has done at:  http://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/editorials/2014/08/26/opinion-ethics/14649757/  And that was just Day One!!  As you can see, we got a lot of information that we can use; we met many like-minded people that we can network with.  Many times someone else has already done something we are thinking about doing and they are more than willing to share their ideas. 
There is one secret though.  What will keep the Tea Party Network strong is the number of groups who belong to it, and each group has to be backed by a strong membership of its own.  When someone goes to Tallahassee and states that the Tea Party Network is working on this issue and will be having its members calling their representatives; that can carry a lot of weight.  We need to make sure we are supporting our local groups, i.e. attending meetings, writing letters/emails if asked, following up on the information we are given at the meetings.  Invite your family and friends to attend with you.  If you know of a tea party or other like-minded conservative group, find out if they are a member of the Tea Party Network, if not, encourage them to join.  If you are not receiving the daily updates from TTPN, go to http://theteapartynetwork.org/  and sign up for the email updates.  Attend the conferences if you are able; bring back the information to the membership of your local group.  The Tea Party Network is as important for Florida issues as the Tea Party Patriots, Freedomworks, etc. are for the national issues.  Many of us cannot make it to all the national conferences but we can certainly make a difference in Florida.  I will be including more information on the second day of the conference (which was very big on the Common Core issue) in a later issue.  And, as I said earlier, we will be utilizing the information that we got and the contacts that we made as we work on issues with the North Central Florida Tea Party.  If you are not attending meetings now, please consider attending one and joining the fight

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