OCPAC e-mail - The dreaded weekend - Russell vs. Douglas & Kern vs. Yen also Gov. Mary steps in it again!

[Charlie Meadows]

Members and friends of the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC)

++  AGENDA FOR THIS WEEK’S MEETING

++  ANNOUNCEMENTS

++  THE RUSSELL-DOUGLAS & KERN-YEN RACES

++  GOV MARY STEPS IN IT AGAIN

++  AGENDA FOR THIS WEEK’S MEETING

Our 12 noon meeting for Wednesday, August 27th will be held at Olivet Baptist Church, 1201 northwest 10th street in OKC. I had hoped to have candidates by this Wednesday, but just couldn’t get the invitations out in time. We have candidates scheduled for September 3rd. This week we will go through the results, from OCPAC’s perspective, for the primary races and the primary run-off races which will take place this Tuesday. We may well have some of our candidates at our meeting. We will also discuss and vote on two by-law changes determined by the OCPAC officers at our recent board meeting. First will be the creation of a new board position titled, Founding President Emeritus/Ambassador and the other will be to change the by laws to allow “up to” 3 vice presidents. If time allows, I will give my perspective on the 2 committees I have recently served on regarding the cut mark placements for Oklahoma’s 8th grade U.S. History tests. The second committee I was on worked to edit or reject new test questions for the 8th grade U.S. History tests that will be in use for the 2015 or 2016 school year.  

++  ANNOUNCEMENTS

*  TUESDAY EVENING  -  KONAWA AREA  -  The Konawa Tea Party will be hosting their regular monthly meeting this Tuesday, August 26th, 7:00 p.m. at the Kennedy Library - Dougan Room, Konawa School, 701 W. South Street. Speakers are Home Schooler Ed Hopper with 3 of his daughters debating Middle East Policy and Economic Development. The next speaker will be Steve Byas, managing editor of the Oklahoma Constitution Newspaper, the owners of the Conservative Index. The title of Steve’s speech will be “THE MOST LIABLED MAN IN AMERICAN HISTORY. For the folks in the area, this is a great group, as I have attended several of their meetings and will be one of their speakers in October of this year.

*  WEDNESDAY EVENING  -  OKC AREA  -  The showing of THE TRUTH PROJECT will begin this Wednesday evening, 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Quail Springs Baptist Church, 14613 N. May in OKC, room A-215. The final 30 minutes of each meeting will be for questions and answers. This course will last for 13 weeks, the $14 charge is to cover all hand out materials for the course. There may not be a finer 13 hour Christian World View class in America than this, make every effort to attend.

*  THURSDAY EVENING  -  GUTHRIE AREA  -  OK2A (Oklahoma 2nd Amendment) and Patriot Industries are co-sponsoring a 2 hour class on use of force and when and where you can carry. The class will be from 7 to 9:00 p.m. at the American Legion Post 58 in Guthrie, 123 N. 1st street. The cost is $5 for OK2A or US Law Shield members and $10 for all others.

++  THE RUSSELL-DOUGLAS & KERN-YEN RACES

Nearly all candidates in hotly contested races are concerned about the “dreaded weekend” or in other words the last weekend before the Tuesday election. The reason for such dread is that any candidate that is behind can unleash by direct mail a highly charged accusation and the candidate on the receiving end, has little to no time and perhaps not enough resources to respond. It is usually a hectic and difficult time for any campaign. 

If a mail piece arrives on Friday, unless a candidate owns a printing facility they might not have time to get a response in the mail on Saturday and then it might arrive on Monday before the election or later. Even then a good number of voters might or might not read the piece in time. If a negative mailer hits on a Saturday, there is not enough time to respond by any other means than robo-calls or perhaps radio and TV, the latter being very expensive, and then only if all the advertising time has not already been sold.

*  RUSSELL-DOUGLAS  -  With that information in mind, lets look at what happened during the dreaded weekend in regard to the Steve Russell - Patrice Doughlas race for the 5th congressional race. On Friday I got a call from the Russell campaign in shock over a mail piece that arrived with Richard Engle’s endorsement on it as a co-founder of OCPAC. It also indicated that OCPAC had disapproved of Russell’s performance for 2 of the 4 years he was in office. 

So I went home and took the time to craft a robo-call message to set the record straight. Senator Russell did not score well on the Conservative Index his first year in office, but he was not dubed as the RINO or RINO runner-up that year. The next year his score improved and he won our Senate Freshman of The Year Award. The next year his score was outstanding and he won our Senate Lawmaker of the Year Award. His final year his score dropped some, but it was not low enough to be outside of our acceptable level.

On Saturday another mail piece dropped with a picture of Patrice and James Lankford together with the caption “IMPLYING”  a Lankford endorsement of Douglas. Lankford was contacted and issued a statement that was on most of the networks. James made it very clear, he has not endorsed any candidate in this election cycle. One of our members talked with him on Saturday and was told that he had not endorsed Patrice nor would he! Let us look at what that might mean. It could mean that he does not like or want Patrice to win, but I doubt that. It could mean he can’t stand the consultants that are running her campaign as they were the same ones that ran his main opponents campaigns in his election cycles. Or, it could mean he being wise and not endorsing Patrice and thus make the Russell supporters mad and not endorsing Russell and thus making the Douglas supporters mad. Bottom line, the mailer was deceitful and the result of slick consultants. 

Now lets talk about Richard Engle’s endorsement for Patrice. I called Richard Friday and he told me he gave the consultants permission for his endorsement to be used. They asked if he could be referred to as Vice President and the told them no, but co-founder was correct and ok. You need to understand, these consultants are master spin doctors, word smiths crafting pieces that are usually technically correct but often implying things that aren’t representative of reality. 

In a mail piece that arrived on Saturday, Richard’s name was used with “OCPAC” by his name. Both of those pieces were designed to “imply” that OCPAC was endorsing Patrice, when in “REALITY” Steve Russell appeared before the members of OCPAC for our grueling interview process and won our endorsement without a run-off needed with 4 choices on the ballot. The candidate coming in second to Steve was Harvey Sparks who has enthusiastically endorsed Steve Russell. 

Richard has the freedom and right to endorse anyone he wants in this race. Richard was a co-founder and served as our loyal and competent vice president from our founding until about two and a half years ago. Richard did not join OCPAC during 2013 but joined again in June of this year. Richard is a valued member just like all our dues paying members, but he is not currently an officer and his endorsement is personal only and does not represent OCPAC. Our members voted to endorse Steve Russell and I hope that clears up any confusion. I am more confident of that decision as the days go by. 

With the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber behind Patrice, the endorsement of the Oklahoman and “dark money” behind her as well as massive amounts of money from the tall building crowd, she is the establishment’s candidate without doubt. Perhaps the two most important issues to the U.S. Chamber are amnesty for illegal aliens and fast track passage of “so called” free trade agreements such as NAFTA, an agreement that has cost America millions of manufacturing jobs and turned our trade balance between the U.S. and Mexico from a positive for the U.S. to a negative.    

Steve Russell is not perfect, I don’t agree with him on everything, but he is the grass roots candidate, far and away the more conservative, and patriotic candidate with the depth and gravitas necessary to serve in this position. He is a class act that has kept his campaign positive even in the midst of many attacks designed to warp reality and confuse the voters. This was necessary for the Douglas campaign as Patrice was down significantly in the polls. I believe Russell still wins with a comfortable margin, if his supports turn out, but it may be closer than expected as the misdirection has brought confusion to some, I know, they are contacting me wanting to know what is really going on.   

*  KERN-YEN  -  In this race, unlike the big money raised by Dr. Yen, Steve Kern has not been able to raise enough to do polling, but a basic understanding of being down 18 or so points in the primary tells him he has a difficult hill to climb. It is a possible hill as Jason Murphey had a larger lead in 2004 and eventually lost in the run-off, only to come back 2 years later and defeat the incumbent. In addition, in 2010, James Davenport was, I believe just 3 votes shy of avoiding a run-off but Ralph Shortey came back and handily beat James in the run-off race.

With that in mind, the Kern Campaign had to make the decision to expose the things about Dr. Yen that the good doctor would prefer the voters not know about him. The purpose of political campaigns are to examine the differences between the candidates. If those differences are recent, accurate, relevant and represent reality, then that is not negative campaigning. If they are decades old, not relevant and are such spin as to offer the opposite of reality, then that is negative campaigning. Voters need to be involved enough to decide the differences.

The Kern campaign exposed that Dr. Yen had contributed to the ultra liberal Democrat Senator Andrew Rice as Rice was trying to defeat our Republican Senator Jim Inhofe. Kern did this by suggesting that both Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama had endorsed Rice, but Dr. Yen did more than just endorse Rice, he even contributed $1,250.00 to the liberal Rice. It must have burned Dr. Yen as he had his media person post a big time spin on his web-site suggesting that Kern was accusing him of contributing to Hillary and Obama, something Kern never came close to saying.

Dr. Yen’s media person is Wes Glinsman, the lobbyist for the Oklahoma State Medical Association. Again I say, Dr. Yen said over and over again how much he opposes Obamacare, but the Medical Association that is supporting him favored it. Dr. Yen said he had a positive plan to improve the business climate, improve schools and improve health care, of course he has not released his plan, he has only talked big talk. 

Let me make it as clear as I can. If Dr. Yen is elected I believe you will see him become a lackey for the big hospitals to see laws passed to get as many tax dollars as possible to keep the current system going even though it is unsustainable long term. He will be much like Dr. Cox in the House, the most liberal Republican of the 72 Republican House members. Oh, by the way, Dr. Yen brags about contributing to Dr. Cox on his web-site. Of course he did not contribute to Dr. Ritze, the conservative Dr. in the House.

If elected, Dr. Kern will approach solving health care problems in much the same way the Surgery Center of Oklahoma City is having a powerful influence on dramatically bringing down the costs of surgeries. If Dr. Yen is elected, hold on to your wallets, he is likely to support government getting ever more of our tax dollars for health care.      

All you have to do is follow the money. Dr. Yen has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, much of it from the tall building folks and tens of thousands in dark money are also being spent to get him elected. We can never, never make the changes needed to be made in government if we keep putting establishment candidates in office. 

Have you ever realized the majority is wrong most of the time? If that were not true, then we would not have the kinds of problems we have in society today as the majority have been giving us the leadership that have led us to where we are today.  Be wise and elect Steve Kern, a true conservative, quite able to think outside the box and come up with conservative solutions to real problems.

++  GOV. MARY STEPS IN IT AGAIN

This past Thursday, August 21st, there was an article in the Oklahoman titled:  “Gov. Fallin applies for Obamacare grant”.  According to the article, Governor Fallin recently stated: “Every month, we learn a new lesson about why the state of Oklahoma should stay as far away from Obamacare as possible”, which is why conservatives are left pulling their hair out when they learned the following:

“In an application dated July 18, Fallin requested $3 million, the maximum amount allowed for the type of grant the state is seeking, to develop an Oklahoma State Innovation Model based on “health system innovation that makes good business sense.” The grant application targets four pervasive health problems: obesity, diabetes, hypertension and tobacco use.”

I am not saying these issues aren’t problems to some degree, but are they really problems for government to solve? People that believe so are Democrats and “nanny state” Republicans. Of course Governor Fallin’s chief spin doctor, Alex Weintz and a good one he is, went to work to spin the Governor’s position to protect her as much as possible.

He said: “We do not support expanding Medicaid, and we do not support creating a state-run exchange”.  “In terms of other grants, basically we listen to our agencies,… If the experts are telling us that we’ve got a good shot at getting some federal support to make an Oklahoma program more robust or to improve it somehow, we’re generally interested in pursuing those grants,”

Here’s the problem, Gov. Mary do you really believe we need stay away from Obamacare or not? In reality, Oklahomans want to get back from Washington every possible penny we send there. But the greatest need we have in Oklahoma, with our relationship to Washington, is to wean ourselves off of all the deficient dollars that come to Oklahoma. This grant money does not come from tax dollars we send to Washington, but rather newly printed and borrowed dollars. Conservatives want Obamacare repealed and we don’t want our Governor getting on her knees and begging for $3 million in grants from Obamacare.

It is getting tougher and tougher for me to consider voting for this “nanny state” Republican governor this coming November. I won’t be voting for Joe, the question is whether or not I will leave that part of the ballot blank?

I look forward to seeing everyone this Wednesday.

Charlie Meadows

Charlie...@gmail.com 

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