Arapahoe County Republican Men's Club
If we are serious about winning in Arapahoe County, we better turn up the effort or we’ll lose. Hoping, wishing and rooting for our side to win will not move the needle. Are we just talkers and not doers?
Below are our Arapahoe County GOP candidates. Please find a way to volunteer for them in 2012.
We are closing the directory to get it off to the printer. If you have not pad your 2012 dues of $5 you won’t be in it. If you need to pay your dues, please be sure to be there on April 18 to pay your dues. Or, if you cannot make it, contact me or David Ariss.
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Club History
The ACRMC was founded in the early 1960s as a Chapter of Toastmasters International, a self-development group which stresses education in public speaking. The organization eventually evolved into a political club in 1977 with influence in local, state and national politics, public policies and personal financial support.. The club’s membership of 300 men and women consists of business, political and citizen patriots.
ACRMC ‘s mission is to encouraging political participation, discourse, and voluntary action in the support of Republican principals.
ACRMC meets every Wednesday, 7:00 to 8:30 am at Garcia’s Mexican Restaurant, 5050 South Syracuse Street, Denver/DTC. The club welcomes visitors and new members.
Contact: acrmc1@gmail.com
A Reagan Tribute
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Senate Republicans Announce Committee Assignments
Posted Mon, 22 Nov 2010
Today Senate Minority Leader Mike Kopp released the Senate Republicans’ committee assignments for the 2011 legislative session. “It’s critical that Senate committees have members with the background and experience to deal with the tough issues we face in Colorado,” said Senator Kopp.
Kopp’s appointments were focused on including professional and demographic diversity in each committee. The committee appointments are listed below.
Business Affairs, Labor & Technology
Sen. Al White – Ranking Member
Sen. Ted Harvey
Sen. Shawn Mitchell
Agriculture & Natural Resources
Sen. Greg Brophy – Ranking Member
Sen. Ted Harvey
Sen. Al White
Finance
Sen. Keith King – Ranking Member
Sen. Greg Brophy
Sen. Mark Scheffel
Judiciary
Sen. Kevin Lundberg – Ranking Member
Sen. Steve King
Sen. Mark Scheffel
Education
Sen. Nancy Spence – Ranking Member
Sen. Keith King
Sen. Scott Renfroe
Local Government & Energy
Sen. Ellen Roberts – Ranking Member
Sen. Bill Cadman
Sen. Kevin Grantham
State, Veterans & Military Affairs
Sen. Bill Cadman – Ranking Member
Sen. Kevin Grantham
Health & Human Services
Sen. Shawn Mitchell – Ranking Member
Sen. Kevin Lundberg
Sen. Ellen Roberts
Transportation
Sen. Scott Renfroe – Ranking Member
Sen. Steve King
Sen. Nancy Spence
Appropriations
Sen. Ted Harvey – Ranking Member
Sen. Kevin Grantham
Sen. Kent Lambert
Sen. Al White
Audit
Sen. Keith King
Sen. Steve King
Legislative Council
Sen. Mike Kopp
Sen. Bill Cadman
Sen. Scott Renfroe
Sen. Mark Scheffel
Legal Services
Sen. Greg Brophy
Sen. Ellen Roberts
Capital Development
Sen. Scott Renfroe
Joint Budget Committee
Sen. Kent Lambert
Election stings major parties State GOP head sees ‘slow destruction of political parties’
DENVER – High-profile defectors from the Democratic and Republican parties went down in defeat in the election, but not before they put some dents in the two-party system.
Thanks to state Rep. Kathleen Curry and governor candidate Tom Tancredo, unaffiliated candidates and third parties finished the election with increased legal rights.
Colorado Democratic leaders are not worried, but Republican officials see the legal aftermath of Tancredo’s race as a threat to the major parties.
Curry conceded defeat Wednesday in her write-in campaign to hold on to her Gunnison-based seat in the state House of Representatives. But she, along with La Plata County Commissioner Joelle Riddle, made things easier for future candidates to defect from their parties and run on an unaffiliated ticket.
Before this year, unaffiliated candidates had to leave their parties nearly a year and a half before the election in order to get their names on the ballot.
The requirement kept Riddle and Curry off the ballot. Both left the Democratic Party in 2009. They sued in federal court to get the law overturned, but they lost.
However, they succeeded in getting the Legislature to move the deadline to defect from a party to Jan. 1 for future candidates.
Curry’s Durango lawyer, William Zimsky, thinks Curry would have won if her name had been on the ballot. She lost her write-in campaign by about 300 votes.
“It was a heroic effort, although we fell short,” Zimsky said.
Zimsky represented Curry in other lawsuits. They won a quick ruling in the days after the election that allowed write-in votes for Curry to count even if voters forgot to fill in a bubble next to her name.
A campaign-finance lawsuit that Riddle and Curry filed is still active. They are challenging a state law that allows Democrats and Republicans to collect twice as much in donations as unaffiliated candidates, because major party candidates face the possibility of a primary.
“We’re going to continue to fight that. Hopefully, we’ll get that resolved before the next election cycle,” Zimsky said.
Tancredo’s case still has the attention of Republican officials.
The former congressman defected from the Republican Party in July and got the American Constitution Party’s vacancy committee to put his name on the ballot.
In a September ruling, Denver District Judge William Hood said minor-party vacancy committees can pick any person they want, as long as the candidate is a registered voter.
The state of affairs is another blow to political parties, said Dick Wadhams, chairman of the Colorado GOP.
“We are already seeing the slow destruction of political parties through these stupid campaign-finance referendums,” Wadhams said.
Finance laws restrict large donations to political parties, but they have few limits for independent groups. Wadhams said the third parties now can undermine major parties even more by plucking away candidates who don’t want to go through primary elections.
“I happen to think that strong political parties are essential to a healthy political process,” Wadhams said.
His rival in the Democratic Party, state chairwoman Pat Waak, is not as concerned.
Tancredo and Curry are special cases, one a famous former congressman and the other a well-known incumbent state representative, Waak said.
“I think these are two very unusual circumstances,” she said. “I just don’t see this as something that sets a new standard.”
But the lawyer who argued against Tancredo disagrees.
“Maybe it’s not a big deal for Pat Waak and the Democrats, if she thinks it’s going to be exclusively a Republican Party and American Constitution Party problem,” said Richard Westfall, who sued the secretary of state to try to get Tancredo kicked off the ballot.
Westfall is a Republican Party official, but he took the case on behalf of two GOP voters, not the state party.
The court’s ruling applies to all minor parties, not just the ACP. Hypothetically, it could allow the Green Party to pick a disaffected Democratic candidate at the last minute and beat up the Democratic nominee all the way through Election Day.
Westfall thinks the Legislature should pass a law to clarify that any party switch must be completed by Jan. 1 of the election year, with no exceptions for third-party vacancy committees. Neither Westfall nor Wadhams has talked to legislators about changing the law.
Tancredo did so well in the governor’s race that the American Constitution Party is now legally considered the state’s third major party.
ACP officials are elated and say their party makes a natural home for the tea party activists who energized Republican campaigns.
“I think the original two major parties have lost their way, and I think people are hungry to get this country back on track,” said Amanda Campbell, an American Constitution Party officer and secretary of state candidate.
Next to Tancredo, Campbell is the second-most successful Colorado candidate in her party, taking 7 percent of the vote in the secretary of state’s race, or more than 100,000 votes.
Campbell’s father, Douglas “Dayhorse” Campbell, has run for Senate several times and never garnered more than 60,000 votes. Other ACP candidates running for governor or secretary of state have won between 9,000 and 13,000 votes in elections over the last decade.
Because of Tancredo, many Republican voters realized they did not need to cast party-line ballots, Campbell said.
“That just opened a world of possibilities for Colorado voters,” Campbell said.
We Are American. That’s What We Do.
Ted Nugent on Border Security
America Rising
Trends forecaster Gerald Celente Wall Street regulations
What does it mean to you to be a Republican?
Are you Republican for good reasons?
Do you believe in the overall direction, agenda and principles of the Republican Party?
Do you expect the Republican Party to be perfect?
How can you contribute to making the Republican Party better?
Democrats are reportedly planning to raise $125 million for a campaign to sell Obamacare to the voting public. Apparently, the idea is that what 50-plus presidential speeches and statements and months of congressional debate could not do can be done by $125 million spent on everything from TV ads to community organizers.
Maybe. But there seems to be a more fundamental problem here. The Obama Democrats didn’t set out to produce an unpopular stimulus package, an unpopular health care bill and an unpopular cap-and-trade scheme.
They thought these initiatives would be popular. In their view, history is a story of progress from small government to big government, and as historians of the New Deal wrote, that progress is especially welcome in times of economic distress.
The massive unpopularity of the Obama Democrats’ programs suggests that view of history is defective. Let me propose another, starting with the Founding Fathers.
The Founders believed there was a tension between representative government and the right to life, liberty and property. So they wrote the Fifth Amendment to ensure that no citizen was deprived of those rights without due process of law.
In Britain, that tension had been limited by allowing only property-owners to vote. That way, those without property could not elect representatives who would steal from the rich and give to the poor.
In the early years of our republic, that precaution did not seem necessary. We were a nation of farmers, where land was plentiful and labor scarce. The large majority of citizens then considered relevant -- white adult males -- actually owned the land they farmed. There was no danger in allowing all of them to vote, as would become the general rule in the U.S. by the early 19th century, because the large majority owned property.
The definition of relevant citizens in time expanded to include blacks and women. But as Americans and immigrants increasingly clustered in enormous cities, and as large industrial factories employed thousands of low-skill workers, the percentage of property owners fell.
One hundred years ago, most urban Americans rented rather than owned their homes. Many had no bank accounts, and few had significant financial assets. Elites worried that this proletariat might rise in revolution.
In this America, the Progressives argued that the Founders' vision was obsolete. Property rights should be subordinate to human rights. Government should regulate economic activity and "spread the wealth around," as Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber.
This view animated the New Deal in the 1930s and appealed to the non-property-owning majority. Franklin Roosevelt sowed the idea, harvested by the New Deal historians, that an ever-expanding government was both good and necessary. Democrats were referencing this when they said they were "making history" by passing their health care bill.
Their problem is that the America of the Progressives and New Dealers no longer exists. Government home-finance programs helped make us a nation of homeowners. Technological progress and deregulation squeezed out transportation and communications, and made the necessities of life less costly, enabling citizens to accumulate significant wealth in their working years.
True, we carried some of these things too far. Efforts to raise homeownership over 65 percent resulted in a housing price crash. Poorly understood financial innovations resulted in the financial crisis of 2008.
But we still live in an America like the America of the Founders, and unlike the America of the Progressives and the New Dealers, in which a majority of citizens are or have every prospect of becoming property owners. And a nation of property owners is less willing to plunder the property of others in search of some promised gain than a nation where most people don't and will never own significant property.
So when Susan Roesgen, then of CNN, upbraided a Tea Party protester in 2009 by reminding him that he was getting a $400 tax rebate thanks to the Democrats' stimulus package, she was met with utter dismissal. You don't sell out your property rights for a mere $400.
The polls and the post-2008 election results show that the purported beneficiaries of the Obama Democrats' programs are unenthusiastic about voting and people with modest incomes are trending heavily Republican. The only enthusiasm for the Obama Democrats' policies comes from David Brooks' "educated class": people who are or identify with the centralized experts tasked by the Obama Democrats with making decisions for the rest of us.
Unfortunately for the Obama Democrats, they, unlike property owners, are not a majority in today's America.
Election 2010: Colorado Governor
Republican Scott McInnis holds on to 48% of the vote for the second month in a row in his match-up with Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper for governor of Colorado.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds Hickenlooper with 42% support again this month. Four percent (4%) like some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided,
But McInnis’ inability to cross the 50% mark suggests that the race is still up for grabs.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
In February, after Hickenlooper formally entered the race following incumbent Democratic Governor Bill Ritter's surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, he posted a 49% to 45% lead over McInnis. The GOP ex-congressman held a three-point lead over the Democratic mayor in January. In December, prior to Ritter's quitting the race, McInnis led the incumbent governor 48% to 40%.
McInnis leads among male voters by 20 points but loses women voters to Hickenlooper by six.
Among voters not affiliated with either major party, McInnis has just a six-point lead.
Seventy-three percent (73%) of Colorado voters believe all candidates for public office should be required to make their tax returns public. Only 16% disagree.
Hickenlooper is expected to release his returns by the end of the week. McInnis has refused to commit to the release of his tax returns but says he may do so in the future.
Fourteen percent (14%) of Colorado voters have a very favorable opinion of McInnis, while eight percent (8%) view him very unfavorably. Sixteen percent (16%) have no opinion of the GOP hopeful.
Hickenlooper is viewed very favorably by 27% and very unfavorably by 18%. Just seven percent (7%) express no opinion of him.
At this point in a campaign, Rasmussen Reports considers the number of people with strong opinions more significant than the total favorable/unfavorable numbers.
( A post by Sue Fleck)
America is almost always described as a democracy in school textbooks, educational programs, and news outlets of every ideological stripe. Likewise, when talking of America, politicians from both sides of the aisle frequently mention “our democracy,” by which they mean American democracy. President George W. Bush did it while reauthorizing the ... Voting Rights Act in 2006, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) did it during her Democratic National Convention speech in August 2008, and President Barack Obama did it in a pre-inaugural speech on January 19, 2009.
Yet America is a republic, not a democracy. Our Founding Fathers instituted a form of government guided by the rule of law rather than the desires of a majority of voters. They understood that a democracy is always in flux and given to “mob rule,” while a republic is fixed and stable, resting on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Because of the uncertainty of democracy, Benjamin Rush — a signer of the Declaration of Independence — wrote: “A simple democracy is one of the greatest of evils.”
The “evils” Rush saw in democracy are evident when we compare the basis for rights in a democracy with the basis for rights in a republic. In a democracy, rights ultimately flow from the majority, and every right — from keeping and bearing arms to possessing private property — is re-callable if the party in the majority so decides. In the constitutional republic that our Founders intended America to be, rights are seen as coming from God and because of this, are unassailable by government (regardless of which party is in the majority). In the Declaration of Independence these unassailable rights were described as “unalienable” and were clearly presented as rights over which the government has no say.
While many of the references to America as a democracy are harmless, being made out of ignorance by people who are just repeating what they were told in grade school or on the evening news, some of the references betray a desire to change the very fabric of the nation. In other words, a great many of the references to democracy in America represent a clear intent to move America further away from the rule of law and closer to the rule of the majority.
Historically, the Democratic Party has been home to revolutionaries who refer to America as a democracy in order to move the country toward a point where majority rules, a point where the Constitution no longer stands in the way of their agenda. These revolutionaries, such as the people who filled the ranks of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the 1960s and who comprise groups like Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) and Democracy For America (DFA) today, gather knowledge on how to use democracy to undercut the rule of law from the writings of men like Vladimir Lenin.
In pushing for the Bolshevik Revolution of the early 20th century, Lenin used democracy to weaken the Russian government and to simultaneously stir up class warfare to irreversible levels. He pleaded first for democracy, then a broadened democracy, and finally a democracy that favored the downtrodden. Relying heavily on the tactic of shaming one’s opponents into submission, Lenin praised the universal aspects of democracy only to criticize them as insufficient once they were achieved: “It is sheer mockery of the working and exploited people to speak of pure democracy, of democracy in general, of equality, freedom and universal rights when the workers and all working people are ill-fed, ill-clad, ruined and worn out.”
In Lenin’s words and historical example we see that those who use democracy to achieve their ends are necessarily insatiable in their push for change and their appetite for power. (Sound familiar?) They are would-be tyrants who pit one group of citizens against another, and essentially destroy the country in order to remake it.
Such men prove that democracy is transitory — it is a tool that allows revolutionaries and despots to transform nations according to their own wishes. And because it is transitory, it is temporal. This is clear if we consider that former democratic countries like Cuba, China, North Korea, and North Vietnam are no longer democratic (or are democratic in name only).
That our Founding Fathers were well aware of the temporality of democracy was evident in the words of America’s second president, John Adams, who said: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Our Founders saw the dangers that democracy posed for our great experiment in freedom and risked “[their] Lives, [their] Fortunes, and [their] sacred Honor” to create a republic instead. It is to honor them and preserve our own liberty that we don’t just pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States, but also to “the republic for which it stands.”
AWR Hawkins is a conservative writer who holds a Ph.D. in military history from Texas Tech University.
By Matthew Balan | Tue, 05/04/2010 – 16:40
On Tuesday’s American Morning, CNN’s Jim Acosta sympathized with the suspect in the failed Times Square terror plot, Faisal Shahzad, citing how a guest claimed that his family’s house in Connecticut went into foreclosure in 2009: “One would have to imagine that that brought a lot of pressure and a lot of heartache on that family” [see video here].
Acosta remarked on Shahzad’s familial difficulty at the end of an interview of Brenda Thurman, one of the suspect’s former neighbors, which began 47 minutes into the 8 am Eastern hour. During the interview, the CNN personality, who was filling in for anchor John Roberts, asked Thurman about her foreclosure claim: “What sense did you get from the family? I mean, you just said a few minutes ago, I think- that it’s pretty significant that this house that he apparently owned was foreclosed on in Shelton, Connecticut….Did you get a sense from the family as to- I mean, that must have been extremely difficult on them.”
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/#ixzz0n0ARBvWWashingtonpost.com readers have posted 110 comments about this item.
GOP Leaders Try to Polish Party’s Image
By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 3, 2009
A group of prominent GOP leaders yesterday launched an effort to improve their party’s sagging image, hosting an event at which they did not directly attack President Obama, rarely used the word “Republican” and engaged in a healthy dose of self-criticism.At a pizza restaurant in Arlington, where they officially unveiled the National Council for a New America, party leaders attempted to portray Republicans as sensitive to the concerns of average Americans and to shake off the “Party of No” label that Democrats have tried to affix to the GOP.
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) rejected the idea that yesterday’s event, the first in a national series, was about “rebranding” the GOP, but it gave the impression of a party looking for a fresh start. Cantor, former Florida governor Jeb Bush and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney sat on stools and lobbed criticism at “Washington” and “liberals.” They took few shots at Obama as they pledged to start a “conversation” with voters around the country.
The three men were flanked by banners bearing the name of the council and its Web address (http://www.wethepeopleplan.org), but there were no obvious signs that it was a major Republican initiative. They repeatedly noted that they were speaking about policy, not politics, and they touted conservative ideas on issues such as health care and education while bemoaning initiatives that involved more government intervention. Read entire article here.
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