RALSTON’S FAVORITE “PROMINENT”
TEA PARTY LEADER
Liberal
blogger Jon Ralston burped up another
of his patented anti-Nevada Republican Party rants on Wednesday, tweeting the
following…
“Prominent Tea Party leader blasts NV GOP for primary endorsements, suggests party is shooting itself in foot.”
Oh,
my. This sounds bad, doesn’t it?
“The
Tea Party has arrived in the form of a group that has much more credibility to
be anti-Establishment than anyone in this debate,” Ralston frothed in a follow
up on his blog (because he no longer has a real newspaper column in, you know,
a real newspaper). “This is not an
Establishment front; this is the real Tea Party deal.”
Really? Let’s see…
The “prominent”
tea party leader Ralston is referring to is Roger Stockton.
What? Never heard of him? Not surprising. I checked his Twitter account. He has all of 37 followers. And the last of his 17 tweets was almost a
year ago, while the last blog post on his organization’s website is dated
August 13, 2013.
Yeah,
real prominent.
And
it’s more than a bit hypocritical for Mr. Stockton to maintain that the Nevada
GOP shouldn’t endorse candidates in primaries when his own Western
Representation PAC…endorses candidates in primaries!
Oops.
Why
is it that people who are already endorsing in primaries – such as Gov. Brian Sandoval (R&R-Advertising)
and Sen. “Moderate Mike” Roberson – are
opposed to the Republican Party itself doing the same thing that everybody else
is doing?
There’s
more…but first, let me make it clear I only looked into this organization and
am reporting what I found to refute Ralston’s simpleminded argument that a
letter from Mr. Stockton – whose PAC is registered in Arizona, by the way –
telling the Nevada Republican Party what to do is somehow significant.
It’s
about as significant as Sue Wagner
leaving the party.
Who?
Exactly.
Again,
Ralston is trying to make it seem ground-breaking and earth-shattering that this
“prominent” tea party “leader” is opposing the Nevada GOP endorsement
process. But truth be told, even though
I know of Stockton and his PAC, I can’t tell you that they are active in Nevada’s
conservative movement.
On
the other hand, I know what Vicki
Dooling and her tea party organization are doing. They meet every month. And I know what Connie Foust and her tea party group are doing. They meet every month, too. Even that crazy Cathie Lynn Y’all Profant-et.al.-Gizi meets on a regular basis
under the tea party banner.
But
Roger Stockton and the Western Representation PAC? No idea.
I
also checked out the PAC’s FEC filing for last year. Granted, I just did a cursory review, but it
looks like the PAC raised less than $80,000 last year…and most of it appears to
have gone to paying vendors and contractors and unidentified employees.
In
addition, a member of the GOP Central Committee who looked into the
organization’s reports sent me the following…
“Thought you might find this interesting...for 2011-12, just under a million bucks raised, of which $755,000 went to operating expenses. They did toss out $100K or so to committees and independent expenditures, but I think if I gave money to this group, knowing that only 10 cents on the dollar went to the cause I'd be a little pissed. I don't have time to walk through the expenses to see how much the Stocktons made, or through the expenditures to see what candidates actually got some $, but on the surface, Stockton's set up a nice little election year money machine...”
If
the Western Representation PAC is indeed “prominent,” it’s only because they
appear to be extremely aggressive at online fundraising, not in actual
political operations and organizing in Nevada.
But let’s
get to Mr. Stockton’s letter – which, though addressed to the Executive Board
of the Nevada Republican Party, was instead sent to the state’s #2 liberal
blogger.
What’s
that tell you about this guy?
No,
seriously. If this guy had a problem
with endorsements, why didn’t he pick up the phone and call the party chairman
instead of leaking a letter to a liberal blogger? Makes you wonder what the ulterior motive is
here.
Anyway,
according to Mr. Stockton, adopting a pre-primary endorsement process “is
unnecessary because we already have a process in place to endorse candidates:
it's called a primary, and the will of our voters is the imprimatur of
legitimacy.”
This
is, of course, the stupidest argument possible – and naturally one that Ralston
endorses with all his heart.
The
primary isn’t the endorsement process.
The primary is the NOMINATION process.
And
regardless of whether or not the party endorses – the way Stockton, Sandoval,
Roberson, et. al., do – the voters will STILL have the final word. This takes absolutely NOTHING away from
Republican voters. Nothing.
Stockton
continued, “If the party wants to anoint its preferred candidate, it might as
well do away with the primary altogether and select its nominee outright.”
Actually,
that’s EXACTLY what the Utah Republican Party does. Their nominees are selected at the party
convention unless a candidate fails to get a super-majority vote of the
delegates. Then, and only then, do the
rank-and-file GOP voters get a chance to vote in a primary election.
So,
um, the Nevada GOP’s decision to simply issue pre-primary endorsements – the way
many other party organizations, Democrat and Republican alike, do – isn’t
radical at all.
Stockton
concluded his whine with this: “Compromise is a part of politics, and a middle ground
will have to be forged.”
Spoken
like a true sellout.
No
wonder Ralston loves this guy…whoever he is.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“Yes,
children suffer when their parents break the (U.S. immigration) law. Also when
their parents get divorced, become alcoholics, don't read to them at night,
feed them junk food and take them to Justin Bieber concerts. None of that is the child's fault. But it's not the country's fault either. If we have to excuse lawbreaking so as not to ‘punish
the children,’ there's no end to the crimes that have to be forgiven -- insider
trading, theft, rape, murder and so on.” – Columnist
Ann Coulter
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