Meet the Candidates Family Picnic!

You're Invited!

Republican "Meet Your Candidates"Family Picnic Saturday,

Oct 9, 11:00 am to 2:00 pm Orem City Center Park

- 300 East 100 North, (North Pavilion) Orem*

Meet Your Republican Candidates and Representatives: Governor Herbert - Senator Hatch - Mike Lee Jason Chaffetz - Morgan Philpot Gary Anderson, Doug Whitney County Candidates and your Utah County State Representatives and Senators

Family Picnic - Food - Live Music - Kid's Activities. Picnic Tickets: At the door = $6 per person, or $25 per . Pay Now for a discounted rate of $5 per person or $20 per family! Tickets can be purchased in advance for a discounted price on the county website at http://www.utahcountygop.org/.

Of course you are welcome to meet the candidates without charge. The optional food and activities require a paid ticket.

*Directions: Orem Center Street exit from I-15. Go East through the light at State Street and Center, and after you pass Smith's you will see the park on your left just before the traffic signal at 400 East. There is parking on Center and also on 100 North.

Save the Date! Fundraiser this Saturday!

Looking to downsize a bit? Do you have extra items you no longer need?

Bring them to the our Garage Sale on Saturday, 9/25/10. Proceeds go to benefit the Morgan Philpot campaign.

Address: 5276 West 10850 North from 7:00 to Noon.

Be there!

86% of all Congress are up for re-election

See this new ad from Morgan Philpot who is opposing Jim Matheson. If you agree with it, please donate to his campaign @

http://www.philpotforcongress.com/.

Central Committee Meeting Notes 28 Aug 2010

Wendy and I attended the Central Committee meeting on 28 Aug 2010. Someone proposed revising the agenda in order to improve it. In my view the specific changes suggested were good but not significant, but  the point of proposing the revisions was to criticize the County Steering Committee (Party Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer + 5 appointees) which was not useful and ended up wasting valuable time. (30 to 45 minutes) In the end the original agenda was adopted so I'm not sure what purpose the exercise served unless it will be a taken as a lesson going forward by the steering committee to improve agendas.

To summarize, four changes to the Bylaws were proposed  (click here to see a document with the with additions underlined and deletion struck out). They were all adopted. Below is a description of the discussion.

1. Change to finance and budget policies: The bylaw was revised to eliminate an inconsistency. The original version defined the approvals required to spend money and then directed the Central Committee to define these limits for each election cycle. The proposed change eliminated the direction to the Central Committee to define the limits. (they can be changed by a request to change the bylaws). There was little discussion on this one and it was adopted.
   
   
2. Robert's Rules of Order: This is a new bylaw that says that Robert's will be used as the default rules of order for any meeting of the County GOP. There was some discussion on this but it was not consequential and it was approved almost unanimously.
   
   
3. Change in the number of CC members required to constitute a quorum (without which business cannot be conducted). The change was to move the number from 35 to 100. There about 560 CC members so this is a little less than 20%. Someone moved that we use a percentage rather than an absolute number. This was rejected when the secretary pointed out that the number of members varies slightly from meeting to meeting (people move, resign, etc) and this would mean that the quorum requirements would need to be recalculated for each meeting. It is much simpler to have a fixed number. Pretty much everyone agreed with that and this change was approved with almost unanimous (if not unanimous) support.
   
   
4. Clarification to rule regarding county and precinct officers public support of candidates for Republican office. The current rule says that the steering committee members cannot publicly endorse Republican candidates for office if their party candidacy is opposed (primary or convention).  The rule was revised to exclude people from criticizing candidates. Evidently, a precinct chair publicly criticized one of the Republican candidates during a primary using his or her title and claimed that this did not violate the rules because he was not endorsing a candidate (only tearing down one).  There was a lot of discussion on this for two reasons:
   
   1) Some people felt that the new language added ambiguity for precinct officers. I didn't concur, it seems clear to me. Precinct officers cannot endorse a candidate for nomination when using their title. For example I could not have said that as your precinct chair I encourage you to vote for Morgan Philpot during convention. I could and did say that I personally supported him and encouraged all the delegates I knew to do the same.
   
   2) A number of people did not like the entire bylaw and felt like it should be removed. This has both pros and cons but was out of order because what was being discussed was clarifying the current bylaw. It was suggested that a separate request be sent to the bylaw committee for this action. Evidently this has been discussed in previous Central Committee meetings.

A resolution was proposed and adopted that we encourage our state party leaders to reject the money recently apportioned by the federal government to states to as a bailout for education workers (click here to see the resolution in its entirety). The governor has said that Utah will take the money because, regardless of whether we take it or not, it will get spent and we will just be losing out. I know this may sound a bit Polyanna but I think we should take a stand and say that we as Utahns will not take the money because we think this is not the time for the Federal government to be piling onto the already disastrous debt burden we are carrying. Plus, it can be reasonably argued that this is not a role given to the federal government by the Constitution in the first place. There was not a lot of discussion on this and it was passed again with near unanimity.

One item which as brought up was that you can now register to vote online. Not sure how good an idea this is. Someone pointed out that when an audit of drivers licenses was conducted that 10% of those with licenses are not citizens. But for now it is the way it is.

Some time was spent discussing the county budget and how much money was given to candidates by the county. The elections committee also gave a report on what the county plans were to promote Republican candidates this fall. Real short this involves contacting all county voter  (member of all parties or no party affiliation) by the 22nd of Sept. We will be handing out voter registration cards, mail-in voting applications, and a data sheet that has candidate contact info and election related deadlines. If anyone would like to help our precinct with this effort please contact me (hi02.precinct.chair@gmail.com, 801-847-2051).

Get out the vote-This Saturday 8/21

(Image courtesy of utahdatingideas.com)


Join us this Saturday, as the Utah County Republican Party takes an important step on the Road to Victory!We have two Get-out-the-Vote events slated for Saturday, August 21 in North Utah County. Join your Republican friends in an effort to get voters registered and educate our neighbors on why voting Republican matters more than ever.



9:45 a.m. at Highland City Splash Park (north of the Highland City Hall)

Support Morgan Philpot for US House

Get Informed! Get Involved!

Set aside some of your time and money to

Support Morgan Philpot NOW

So that we won't have to fight Nancy Pelosi later.

Most of you were very energized at the time of our caucus, especially around health care and general spending  issues. We had 5X the number a attendees at this years precinct caucus as compared with the last one. I hope many of you are still feeling the passion as it is time to start to look at the elections this fall. I know it is early but in what I feel is the most critical race for our precinct, the race for the US House of Representatives, your early support of Morgan Philpot can make a big difference in the final outcome.  I know him personally and can tell you that he is an honorable person who will do all the he can to support the principle of limited government and the free market. I will not worry and wonder about how he will vote as I do now with our current representative.

If you don't know him Morgan will be on the radio Thursday August 12th between 11 and Noon on  KTALK AM 630

I recently did some checking on voting patterns for our precinct In the last three election cycles for the house of representative we voted as follows (turnout % is for all voters in our precinct boundary):

Year	Republican Candidate	Democratic Candidate	Voter Turnout
2004	65%	33%	?
2006	61%	37%	52%
2008	54%	41%	72%

Like many of us I had heard and believed that Congressman Matheson was a moderate to conservative democrat who generally voted the interests of his constituents. While in some sense that may be true below are some interesting bits of information that may alter that perception:

  The National Taxpayers Union rates each Member of Congress' voting record to determine how friendly (or unfriendly) they are to taxpayers. Here are their grades for Matheson:

Year	Grade	Score	Rank
2009	C-	30%	187
2008	C-	40%	188
2007	D	24%	202
2006	C-	47%	205
2005	D	37%	231
2004	D	29%	228
2003	D	30%	245
2002	D	27%	263
2001	F	25%	239

While Matheson has improved over the years do we really want someone with a C- rating in this category.

The Americans for Democratic Action (a liberal activist organization) rates congressmen each year on how closely they adhere to the "liberal agenda" through their voting records. While he does not get a 100% liberal rating he is widely out of step with our other two congressional representatives (which one of them do you think more accurately reflects our views) and much more closely aligned with the average democrat than you might think.

Year	Average Democrat	Average Republican	Matheson	Hansen/ Bishop	Cannon/ Chaffetz
2001	85%	8%	70%	5%	0%
2002	86%	5%	80%	0%	0%
2003	89%	11%	70%	0%	5%
2004	85%	10%	70%	5%	0%
2005	91%	8%	75%	10%	0%
2006	83%	10%	45% hmm, wasn't he up for relection this year?	10%	5%
2007	92%	16%	75% back to normal	10%	10%
2008	89%	22%	55% relection again?	0%	0%
2009	85%	7%	55% writing is on the wall?	0%	0%

Here are some of the votes which earned Jim is liberal rating over the last couple of years:

• HR 1905: voted to give Washington DC a seat in the House of Representatives
• HR 2669: voted to increase the max Pell grant to $5,200, cut the interest rate on subsidized student loans in half, increase the federally backed loan limit to $65,000.
• HR 3963: reauthorize the SCHIP (State Children's Health Insurance Program) at a cost of $60B over 5 years.
• HR 6: increase the CAFE standards for cars and light trucks as well as mandate that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be used by 2022 (how was anyone supposed to know in 2007 what fuel mix would be the most cost effective in 2022 and where in the constitution does congress have the mandate to do this in the first place?)
  
• S 2739: voted to suspend the rules and pass a bill designating new park, wilderness and scenic areas ... .
  
• HR 384: voted for TARP
• HR 1913: voted to expand the federal hate crimes law
• HR 3435: voted the cash for clunkers program
• and of course he has voted several times for Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the house.
  

Related Links:

• County voting information: http://www.utahcountyonline.org/Dept/ClerkAud/Elections/index.asp
• Americans for Democratic Action Newsletter A Newsletter for Liberal Activists (contains rates for members of US House and Senate)
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2001.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2002.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2003.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2004.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2005.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2006.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2007.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2008.pdf
  http://www.adaction.org/media/votingrecords/2009.pdf
• National Taxpayers Union rating for Congressman Matheson: http://www.ntu.org/on-capitol-hill/ntu-rates-congress/members/house/jim-matheson.html
  

Videos from Morgan Philplot Meet the Candidate Event May 2010

On May 20, 2010 our precinct sponsored a Meet the Candidate event with Morgan Philpot.Although sparsly attended it was a great evening and we were able to discuss on number of issues with Morgan. Scott Hart (our Vice-Chair's husband) did a great job of taking the recording and creating short videos of Morgan's response to key questions. He also separated out a brief personal background Morgan shared with us. One interesting note is that he grew up in a small town in Oregon called Wallowa (current population 755). Carin Hadley, our precinct secretary, lived there as well and was his primary teacher. Small world. Below are the videos

The Hand of Providence: Boston Freed and Other Miracles

On July 4, 2010 Ron Mann was the keynote speaker at the Milestones of Freedom event in Orem, Utah. He discusses the Hand of God in the founding of our nation with a focus on the battle of Boston which concluded in March of 1776. This speech is similar to that given at the event on July 2nd in Highland (we taped that as well but the audio was not good). The video is 53 minutes long but well worth watching.

Start your July 4th Holiday off right!-Updated 6/29/10

Start your July 4th weekend by learning about the founding of our country as well as learning how to keep it on track!!!!!

Vote Today!

The Primary Election is today....PLEASE PLAN TO GET OUT AND VOTE!!!!

The Founding Fathers and the Lords hand in the establishment of our Nation

Dear Precinct Members:

We have an opportunity to bring a guest speaker for a "fireside" in early July.

Senatorial Debate hosted by HI02 and Novell

For those of you who missed this spectacular opportunity to hear Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater debate this past evening....all is not lost. Thanks to the generosity of Novell, you can view it in the comfort of your own home.

Also, our thanks to Mike Bready for arranging this event with Novell. He deserves our thanks, and it would be appropriate to let him know personally!

Utah County Policy Regarding Early Voting

I recently heard a rumor that early votes are only counted if races have less than a 2% margin. Below is the reply I recieved from the county clerk to the email I sent about this.

Debate between Mike Lee and Tim Bridgewater on June 9th!

The Highland 2nd Precinct is proud to announce that it will be hosting (along with the LD 27) a debate between the Republican Candidates for the U.S. Senate seat on June 9th.

Early Voting begins soon

With the June 22nd Primary Election coming soon, it is important to know that you can begin voting early if you wish. You may vote beginning June 8, 2010.

In our area, you can vote at the American Fork Library. You may vote Tuesday through -Thursday from 3-7 pm. On Friday, voting can take place between 1-5 pm.

Be sure to take a picture ID with you.

No matter what.....get out and vote!