Eye on the Prize: The PCREC Prepares for 2012

Jay Beyrouti, Chairman of the PCREC

Jay Beyrouti, Chairman of the Pinellas County Executive Committee (PCREC) is not satisfied.

He is not content that the PCREC’s fundraising efforts have been immensely successful. He is not ready to relax given that that Republicans occupy the majority of elected positions in Pinellas County, and dominate the county board of commissioners and the state legislative delegation. The fact that a Republican occupies the Governor’s mansion does not make him complacent.

A believer in the Republican message of smaller government, lower taxes, and more individual freedom, Beyrouti points to the facts that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by about 19,000 in Pinellas County, and that the county is home to 150,000 registered Independents. Beyrouti thinks the vast majority of the adult inhabitants of Pinellas County are conservative in their political and social views, that the Republican message resonates with a lot of people who are not members of any party as well as many who are members of the Democratic Party, and that the radicalization of the Democratic Party is a source of ongoing concern for these people.  He thinks this is so because, as a longstanding businessman in the community, he deals with such people on a daily basis, and he knows that many of them are ripe to be brought over to the Republican fold with the right approach.

Beyrouti’s goal is the defeat of President Barack Obama and Senator Bill Nelson in the 2012 elections.  He points out that Obama carried Pinellas County by 30,000 votes in 2008, and he does not want to see that repeated in 2012.  To accomplish this, he has begun a new Republican voter registration initiative, and has placed responsibility for its implementation squarely on the hundreds of precinct officers, club presidents, and other activists who make up the soul of the PCREC.

Pinellas Legislative Delegation and Circuit Court Bench Become More Conservative

By Spartacus Thrace

Elections do have consequences, and one palpable consequence of the November 2 election is that the legislative and judicial branches of government in Pinellas County have gotten more conservative, and more Republican.

In the legislative races, all Republican incumbents were returned and two long-serving “moderate” Democrat incumbents, Janet Long and Bill Heller, lost their seats in the House of Representatives to conservative Republican challengers Larry Ahern and Jeff Brandes. The election of Larry Ahern is particularly significant in that he was in a three-way race against a moderate female Democrat with vastly superior financial support for her campaign and a female candidate from the so-called “TEA Party” who some observers believe was a ringer who entered the race with with the sole purpose of drawing votes away from Ahern.

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 PCREC: Fired Up and Ready To Go

COMMENTARY 

By Spartacus Thrace 

A little over a year ago, the radical Lefties in the media and the Democratic Party declared the Republican Party roadkill in the wake of Marxist Barack Obama’s 52.92% to 45.66% victory over an erratic and clueless RINO named John McCain. Even before the election, media whores and political hacks were writing the GOP’s obituary, declaring that the Republican Party was a dead party walking, doomed to permanent irrelevancy, awaiting political execution at the hands of the voters on election day. One such hack, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton who also worked on the Hillary Clinton campaign named Sid Blumenthal even had a book published in early 2008, and wrote a follow-up commentary published in the Leftist media, smugly titled “The Strange Death of Republican America and 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.” As recently as May 2009, the Leftists in the media were gleefully publishing articles with headlines such as “Republicans in Distress: Is the Party Over?” and otherwise amusing themselves by mocking Republicans. But then, to paraphrase the President’s radical close friend and spiritual guide Rev. Jeremiah Wright,  the chickens that are the grim reality of what it means to be ruled by Obama and his fellow statists came home to roost.  No longer demoralized, the Republicans are returning to their conservative roots and spoiling for the fight against the statists.

PINELLAS COUNTY 2010: Those Who Would Be Our Legislators

By Le Corbeaunoir

[UPDATED August 21, 2010]

The 2010 campaign season is already well underway and next fall’s state legislative elections in Florida’s Pinellas County are a microcosm of the political trends emerging nationally. One trend is that the more experienced and prepared candidates are tending to avoid head-on contests with incumbents and are instead trying to pick up seats of those who are barred by term limits from seeking re-election.  Overall, the 2010 elections may result in rightward adjustments, but won’t effect anything approaching a revolution in government.  Still, there are no certainties as to outcome at this point. There remains time for new candidates, issues and events to change the course of the elections, but that time is slipping away.