Local Races – 2012
Posted January 24th, 2012 by Julie
Some of you may recall that 2 years ago NETTP put on a fantastic candidate fair, providing voters with the opportunity to speak personally with every candidate before voting. I can’t tell you how empowering it was to go to the polls and know each candidate on the ballot! I was able to make an educated and informed decision on public offices that I’d never even heard of prior to getting involved in the tea party! The fair received rave reviews and really put NETTP on the map as a tea party to pay attention to.
This year we were planning to host the same sort of event, but discovered that another group was wanting to host it instead. Knowing how much effort and work it took to pull it off in 2010, we let ‘em!
TCGOP Candidate Fair & Straw Poll
Saturday, February 4
Hurst Convention Center, 1601 Campus Dr, Hurst 76054
1-6pm – meet your candidates and vote in the straw poll
6-6:30pm – straw poll winner ceremony
For more details, click here.
I cannot encourage you strongly enough to attend this fair. There are two reasons to do so…
- It gives you an opportunity to know who to vote for and why. The candidates will not be giving speeches. They’ll be standing at booths and speaking one-on-one with voters who approach them. Think of it as a job interview, and ask them, “Why should I vote for you?” You’ll learn a lot about the issues and the roles of the different offices. And you’ll have the power to decide who best will deal with those issues and perform those roles.
- There will be a straw poll. You’ll have a chance to cast your ballot in each race in Tarrant County, and the winners will have bragging rights that they won the TCGOP Straw Poll! That’s a big deal. If you think the RINOs won’t have their supporters there voting for them, think again. We must as conservatives show up to unite behind the conservative candidates. We most certainly don’t want the RINOs announcing that they have won!
NE Tarrant Tea Party will have a booth at this event, and we need help manning it. We’ll divide volunteers up into several shifts to cover set up, the event itself, and tear down. Another endeavor we are working on (a petition to get term limits on the ballot for the City of Grapevine) also needs volunteers for their booth (Better Grapevine PAC). If you can help with either one, please email heyjuliesue@gmail.com.
Posted December 13th, 2011 by Konni
My Second Town Hall
I am hosting my second town hall on Monday, December 19th, at Spring Creek Barbeque in Irving. Please come out and share your thoughts and concerns.
Stinchfield for Congress Town Hall
Congress’ Role
Monday, December 19th, 2011, 6:30pm
Spring Creek Barbeque
3514 W Airport Fwy
Irving, TX 75062
For more information, or to RSVP, please contact us at 214-549-6058 or
email us. I hope to see you there!
Posted December 12th, 2011 by Julie
12 December 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact Kathleen Thompson
info@bettergrapevine.org
Term Limits Petition Circulating in Grapevine
Young parents, professionals, and grandparents from across the partisan political spectrum are signing and circulating petitions for term limits in Grapevine. Citing a lack of accountability and transparency, this coalition of Grapevine voters is working to remove entrenched council members who are no longer accountable to residents.
“Incumbents have won every city council election in Grapevine for the past 30 years. With that kind of record, city council members have no pressure to vote on principle. They know they’ll be re-elected regardless of their actions. There is no accountability, and nobody is listening to the citizens,” said Julie McCarty of the NE Tarrant Tea Party.
Nearly two-dozen of Grapevine’s neighboring cities govern with term limits including Southlake, Lewisville, Bedford, Carrollton, Trophy Club, and Irving.
The petition language asks registered Grapevine voters:
Should the Grapevine City Charter be Amended to State:
Each person duly elected to the position of Mayor or Council Member shall be
allowed to hold any one position for a limit of three (3) consecutive, full three-year
terms per position. This provision shall apply to all elections held subsequent to
the adoption of this Charter Amendment.
“In neighboring cities, transparency and accountability in government are top priorities. They open their books so taxpayers can see exactly where their money is going. Why not in Grapevine?” asked recent City Council candidate Kathleen Thompson. Grapevine residents deserve citizen legislators, not career politicians, who will put the community and city employees before themselves.
Voters wanting to sign the petition should visit www.bettergrapevine.org.
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Posted December 1st, 2011 by Konni
RINOs are the curse of the GOP, but, as hard as it is to believe
after two years of Tea Party activism, many key RINOs are still in
office and Joe Straus is still the Texas Speaker. Despite the
current redistricting turmoil, we need to organize to give the boot
to as many RINOs in Austin and DC as possible.
Full report:
In 2012, Texas conservatives need to focus our energies on removing
our own RINOs from office, and keeping them off the Republican
ticket, this coming election.
It's impossible to overstate how important this task is, on both
the state and the national levels. RINOs are poison to a
conservative agenda. There is little real difference between them
and Democrats, and once elected they use their power to sabotage
attempts to enact good conservative legislation. We've seen this
take place in Austin over and over. No matter how loudly
conservatives speak at the polls, and how good prospects for
conservative legislation look, the RINOs in the party often manage
to water good bills down, or block them altogether.
Posted November 1st, 2011 by Konni
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MANY TEXAS POLITICIANS TALK THE “CONSERVATIVE” TALK.
DOES YOUR STATE REPRESENTATIVE WALK THE WALK?
Fellow Texans:
If you paid attention to this year’s legislative session in Austin, you know that conservative policy did not fare well this year in the State Capitol. Frustrated by legislative shenanigans and inaction on key priorities, Texans are asking themselves who the good–and bad–guys were.
Thanks to watchdog groups like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Young Conservatives of Texas, Texas Eagle Forum and Heritage Alliance, Texans have scorecards full of ratings to help them evaluate their elected officials and sort the conservative champions from the establishment cronies.
Grassroots Activist Don Shipe of Tarrant County has compiled the conservative ratings for the State House Republicans and combined them into his Conservative Index. Shipe’s Conservative Index combines the various ratings in order to provide a more balanced result. We’ve posted a pdf of Shipe’s Conservative Index here:
We thank Don for his hard work on this resource, and we encourage all grassroots Texans to distribute his excellent resource far and wide.
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Posted October 17th, 2011 by Konni
By Yamil Berard
yberard@star-telegram.com
State Rep. Vicki Truitt says she may go back to the drawing board on legislation she sponsored this year that open-government advocates are criticizing as a slap to public interests.
House Bill 2460, which took effect Sept. 1, contains broad language that blocks the public from some financial information about municipal pensions, the critics say.
“What she needs to say is that she made a mistake and she’s going to go out and change the law she sponsored,” said Joe Larsen, board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas in Austin.
Truitt, R-Keller, said she’s going to see whether the law is being interpreted the way lawmakers intended. She said the goal was to open up information about public pensions that had been exempted from disclosure, while keeping confidential private information that could identify individuals. Several open-government advocates had supported the bill because it removed roadblocks to access, she noted.
“If there is a perceived problem with legislation, I’m always open to looking at it,” Truitt said.
Public pensions are a hot topic because many are underfunded and may need more taxpayer money to meet obligations. The law for first time allows overseers of municipal pensions to decide what information regarding members they will release. Truitt said that provision was included to avoid a flood of requests to Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office.
But in the first legal test of the new law last month, a state district judge in Austin ruled that the Fort Worth Employees’ Retirement Fund has sole discretion to determine what information it will release to the public regarding public pension recipients, and there was no avenue of appeal.
At issue was information on lump-sum payments to recent Fort Worth city retirees that was requested by the Star-Telegram. The attorney general’s office had said that individuals’ names were confidential, but told the fund to release information on their ages, departments, years of service and amount of payouts. The fund then sued, and the court ruled that the new law doesn’t allow the attorney general or the courts to review such decisions by municipal pension administrators.
Truitt said she was baffled by the Austin judge’s interpretation of the law. The legislation was never intended to give public pensions carte blanche over information, she said.
She said she expects to study the ruling and statutes.
Pensions that deny public access to aggregate financial information — data that doesn’t identify individuals — could be at risk of breaking the law, she said.
Larsen, who is a media attorney in Houston, said Truitt shouldn’t be shocked at the judge’s ruling.
“It’s not miscarriage of justice; it’s not a legal error,” Larsen said. The judge “ruled according to the letter of the law sponsored by Vicki Truitt,” he said. “She needs to go back and fix it, is what the bottom line is.”
The next regular session of the Legislature is in 2013.
Yamil Berard, 817-390-7705
Posted October 6th, 2011 by Konni
Tuesday, Sep. 06, 2011
By Chris Vaughn
cvaughn@star-telegram.com
FORT WORTH — In the first legal test of a controversial new law, a state district judge in Austin has ruled that the City of Fort Worth Employees’ Retirement Fund has sole discretion to determine what information it will release to the public regarding those drawing a public pension.
The cut-and-dried ruling by Travis County District Judge Scott H. Jenkins overturned an attorney general’s opinion.
The Legislature this spring passed a bill, written by state Rep. Vicki Truitt, R-Keller, that took authority away from the Texas attorney general and courts to determine what records regarding members of municipal pension funds are open to public scrutiny and left the decisions to the funds themselves, granting the funds what appears to be more power than any other governmental agencies in the state.
A great deal of interest and attention have been focused on the health of public pension funds in recent years because many are underfunded and at risk of needing more taxpayer money to meet obligations.
“What Judge Jenkins ruled is exactly what we feared when this legislation was enacted,” said Houston media attorney Joseph Larsen, a board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. “The Legislature ought to be ashamed of itself for passing something like this. They need to turn around and get rid of it as fast as they can. I just don’t think you can give any agency sole discretion to decide what should be public.”
He said that managers of pension funds are “abusing” the discretion given them by withholding all information about retirees.
He also said that the Legislature has abdicated its role of public oversight involving tax money.
But the executive director of the fund, Ruth Ryerson, said she was pleased with the ruling.
“Although we understand the concern of some open-government advocates about decreased transparency in our retirement systems, we believe the new law reflects the desire of the Legislature to protect information that is of a highly personal nature, especially financial information,” she said in a statement.
The ruling came in a case involving a Public Information Act request by Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman about lump sum payouts that were going to some recent city retirees. He said he believed there were vastly greater amounts than were being reported by the fund’s overseers as average.
The fund objected on privacy grounds and asked for an opinion from the office of Attorney General Greg Abbott.
“I didn’t realize this was going to be complicated,” Schnurman said. “Honestly, I thought it would be the same as looking up the salary for a public employee,” which can be disclosed.
Abbott agreed with the pension fund that individual names were confidential.
But he said the fund must release the employee’s age, department where the person worked, years of service and the amount of the payouts.
The fund again objected, arguing that the information “still identifies the person, especially to fellow co-workers” and that it was “intimate and highly embarrassing information.”
The fund sued the attorney general in December, asking the judge to declare the opinion wrong. The Star-Telegram filed a brief intervening in the case on the side of the attorney general.
In the ensuing months, the Texas Legislature passed Truitt’s bill, making changes to the Public Information Act that ensure that pension funds have to release aggregate, big-picture financial information to the public.
But the law, which took effect Sept. 1, also gives pension funds the sole discretion to determine whether any requested financial information can be denied because it may identify a person, and there is no way to appeal a denial.
Jenkins’ ruling says that the new law applies to the Star-Telegram request.
“This ruling is going to have an extremely detrimental effect on the public’s right to know what is going on with their tax dollars,” said Jim Witt, senior vice president and executive editor of the Star-Telegram. “To give pension funds the right to be their own judge and jury in deciding what records should be released is ludicrous. It totally subverts our system of checks and balances. I can’t believe this is what the Legislature intended.”
Truitt has defended the changes to the law in the past by saying that the language was included to prevent the attorney general’s office from receiving constant requests for opinions. She could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
It is the second legal dispute among a pension fund, the attorney general and the Star-Telegram.
After reporter Yamil Berard requested information from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the attorney general ruled that it should be disclosed, the retirement system sued in district court in Travis County. That case is pending.
Chris Vaughn, 817-390-7547
Posted October 4th, 2011 by Konni
Here is a great 15 minute video that gives a concise explanation of Agenda 21. We encourage all NETTP members, freedom lovers, and most importantly – candidates and office holders, to watch this so that we can all be educated on why this flies in the face of all things American. And then pass it on to others so that they can be educated and stop it’s enforcement in their own towns and cities.
http://my.brainshark.com/False-Choices-The-Story-of-Agenda-21-713151488
Posted October 4th, 2011 by Konni
by: Joyce Morrison, NewsWithViews.com
The United Nations Agenda 21 was signed by the United States in 1992 and 14 years later, people are still in the dark. If you were to ask at random the question, “Have you heard of Agenda 21?” the answer would be an over-whelming “No,” although it is being implemented in every local community.
Agenda 21 is a 40 chapter document listing goals to be achieved globally. It is the global plan to change the way we “live, eat, learn and communicate” because we must “save the earth.”
“Its regulation would severely limit water, electricity, and transportation – even deny human access to our most treasured wilderness areas, it would monitor all lands and people. No one would be free from the watchful eye of the new global tracking and information system,” according to Berit Kjos, author of Brave New Schools.
Maurice Strong, Secretary-general of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro said, “…[C]urrent lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat consumption and large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable. A shift is necessary which will require a vast strengthening of the multilateral system, including the United Nations.
In other words, the Global plan is for us to live on the level of third world nations. That means no box mixes or microwave meals, limited use of fuel of any kind, no air-conditioning and very little meat. When the cost of freon skyrocketed, when mad cow disease hit, the National Animal Identification System introduced, the price of fuel soared, it has become apparent that given time, these sustainable controls will be put into place – one way or another – and the Global Governance is powerful.
In 1992, Agenda 21 began to change our lives. In that same year, Al Gore wrote his book, Earth in the Balance. To advance his cause, he has now written another piece of fiction entitled, An Inconvenient Truth about global warming…..he even starred in the movie. He also thinks he invented the internet.
Although groundwork had been laid, it took a Bill Clinton to actually introduce something so invasive to our nation and get by with it without the public becoming aware. President Clinton appointed his “President’s Council on Sustainable Development” and he literally gave away the rights and freedoms the framers of the Constitution had provided.
People in the United States may not know about Agenda 21 and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, but people around the world do. They know that Chicago has one of the greatest numbers of activities existing at the local, neighborhood and/or microregional level. They also know that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors and promotes activities in this field through their Office for Sustainable Ecosystem and Communities.
Found on a Slovakian website: “To the leading countries in the field of development but especially of practical using of sustainable development indicators belong to the U.S.A. At the top level these activities are promoted by the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (1996), which defined a set of ten national goals toward sustainable development. These goals express in concrete terms the elements of sustainability. Alongside the goals are suggested indicators that can be used to help measure progress toward achieving them.”
Agenda 21 is certainly not a secret. The internet is full of how Agenda 21 has been fulfilled through Smart Growth planning, land use, sustainable development and extreme environmentalism. The so-called agenda is grant driven to your city council or county board in terms of sustainable, visioning, partners, tourism and stakeholders, along with consensus and other terms with the intent to make you believe we are running out of all our resources and we must do our part and “save for tomorrow. [See Agenda 21's Table of Contents.]
It has nothing to do about “saving anything” – it has everything to do with “control.” Sadly, very few congressmen even know Agenda 21 is actually running our country when they are voting to send grant money back home. Agenda 21 is incentive driven as the planners know that greed in the heart of man will be his downfall.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, better known as ANWR, has oil we need to be drilling for the security of our nation. Environmentalists don’t seem to understand we are dependent on foreign oil from nations who do not like us and our nation’s defense is at stake. The area where drilling would occur is just a dot in this vast land, yet they would gamble the strength of our nation in behalf of their favorite word –”pristine.”
At the same time, technology is advancing and we may not need the oil later. But we do need it now.
Henry Lamb of Eco-logic, Restructuring the U.N., The world changed on 9-11. No longer can the world tilt at the windmills of a fantasized “global village.” No longer can visions of “sustainable development” be justified in a world where “sustainable freedom” is the only possible solution to the economic and power vacuum that foments acts of terrorism.
There is a better way.
Nations can and, ultimately, must learn to live as neighbors, free from the web of “international laws” that dictate which activities are “sustainable” and which are xenophobic and unacceptable. Nation-to-nation relationships, just like neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, should be fashioned voluntarily, driven by mutual benefit. For the first time in a century, the United States may be exploring this possibility.
Henry Lamb is right. We can live as neighbors with other nations but we do not need to live under a “web of international law.” There are dedicated citizens in the United States who are wise enough to set our nation’s guidelines without following Agenda 21 and Sustainable Development as set forth by the United Nations.
To watch a 15 minute video that explains more on Agenda 21, please go to our link here: http://www.netarrantteaparty.com/?p=5795&preview=true.
Posted September 27th, 2011 by Konni
Here are just a few local success stories of people who walked or worked their precinct in the last election cycle. It DOES make a difference!
Sara walked her precinct (Medina supporter). Medina received 18% throughout Texas, 20% in Tarrant County, but 32% in Sara’s precinct.
Giovanni Capriglione, who Natalie was walking for, received 55% of the votes in her precinct – 2.5 times the average.
Chuck, a Precinct Chair in Ft. Worth mailed 200 letters to his Republican neighbors. He had the highest percentage turnout for any precinct – 25% of the registered voters – for a June election!
The 30+ Keller amendments failed in only three precincts: Dennis’, Billie’s and Sara’s. These three walked their precincts and educated the voters on why to vote “no” on these amendments – not a coincidence, they worked it hard.
In the November 2011 election the percentage of voters who voted was related to activism. There was a 16% turnout for a District 98 precinct with no Precinct Chair, but 40%+ for Natalie’s who is a Precinct Chair and worked her precinct.
