SHAM: Who the Hell is TEA Party Candidate Victoria Torres and Why is She Running in My District?

By Angry Wasp

I live in Florida House District 51 in Seminole, Florida, which is part of Pinellas County.  I am a veteran, work a regular job, own the house I and my family live in, pay my taxes, keep my lawn mowed and trimmed, am friendly with my neighbors, and I vote in every election.

Rep. Janet Long (D-Seminole)

The other day, when I was at the computer checking on who was going to be on the ballot in November, I saw that someone named Victoria Torres was running for the House District 51 seat as a TEA Party candidate, along with the Democrat incumbent Janet Long and Republican challenger Larry Ahern.

Larry Ahern, Republican Candidate for Florida House District 51

Victoria Torres?  I never heard of her, but I thought, well, if she’s part of the tea party crowd she’s probably as fed up as I am about the way our government is going.  I decided to check her out, even though I had pretty much already decided to vote for Larry after meeting him at a local candidates’ night in my neighborhood.

I Googled “Victoria Torres” and, boy, did I get a shock.

There were all kinds of articles linking her to a couple of political scam artists in Orlando, but no sign of a campaign website.  Thinking that maybe she had just gotten some bad press lately but might otherwise be OK, I continued to search for her website and any information I could find out about her.  It seemed that the longer I looked the less I found, and things just weren’t making sense.  This made me even more curious about who this lady was, and why she was running in my district.

The Smell In the Room: Controversy Over Florida’s New Ballot-Qualified TEA Party

By Le Corbeaunoir

TEA Party Logo

The creation of the TEA Party as a minor political party in Florida in August 2009, its subsequent qualification of federal and state candidates to be on the November 2010 ballot under the TEA Party name, and other activities of people closely connected to that party have sparked a major political row with implications extending to the 2012 presidential election and beyond. At the heart of the controversy is a fight to the finish between members of the new political party and grassroots Tea Party movement organizers over proprietary ownership and control of the name “Tea Party” and other aspects of the Tea Party “brand” in Florida. The controversy is about power, control, and money, and who gets to define what “Tea Party” means in Florida.

FORMATION OF THE BALLOT-QUALIFIED TEA PARTY

The ballot-qualified “TEA Party” and the “Tea Party movement” are not the same thing. They do not share organizations, leaders, or members, and they are ideologically opposed. The movement is decentralized with power diffused among its many factions. The party is centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of a few. The movement has grown spontaneously across the state over the past year-and-a-half or so, while the party was created by a filing with the Florida Secretary of State in August 2009.

The Troubling Pro-Criminal Legal Standard of the St. Petersburg Times

By Spartacus Thrace

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth” (Proverbs 28:1)

The ultra-liberal members of the editorial board of the St. Petersburg Times believe that criminals who run from the police should be allowed to get away with it, notwithstanding United States Supreme Court precedent and the law passed by the Florida Legislature.  That is the import of  the December 20, 2009 Times editorial titled, “A troubling double legal standard.”

Logo of the St. Petersburg Times

What bothers the leftists at the Times is that police operating in a high-crime area are constitutionally permitted to pursue and detain individuals who engage in headlong flight upon the approach of the police, and that in Florida persons who do flee from the police can be charged with the midemeanor of Obstructing or Opposing an Officer Without Violence.  In other words, the editors at the Times do not like the fact that the police may take into consideration that the neighborhood is infested with individuals engaged in criminal activity in deciding to pursue someone who flees from them, and that the police can criminally charge a fleeing individual with obstruction.