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Tag: teaparty

Another former TPN member comes forward: Boycott National Tea Party Convention

Posted by Kevin Smith – 1/18/10

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Looks like another former member of the Tea Party Nation has come forward, this time calling for a boycott. Like so many others, Shane Brooks was banned from Tea Party Nation’s website for offering an opposing viewpoint, and today yesterday he published a very revealing exchange with Sherry Phillips, wife of Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips.

Portions of note from Sherry:

Your membership was suspended yesterday based on your threats toward TPN (TPN is in my “crosshairs”) and encouraging TPN members to move to another site (GOOOH).

Judson was disappointed that we had to suspend you as he said you contributed a lot of great information to TPN and our instant survivalist group.

Portions of note from Shane:

It seems that any personal attacks on members are usually addressed handled very quickly by TPN so long as the one attacked is on message w/TPN.

[...]

Then Pam Farmsworth came in and deleted my comments that had no personal attacks, swear words or anything that violated TPN policy but rather a passionate defense of my arguments and myself … The discussions have become so butchered and edited that it looks like your members arguing with themselves for no reason, it’s pathetic.

[...]

TPN claims to have open and thoughtful debates and an exchange of ideas. However, if you have the opinion that it is too late to save a deaf GOP and favor the 3rd party idea or anything other than your belief in the GOP, then it is open season to allow your members to ridicule, belittle and offer up scathing sarcasm disguised as a rebuttal. There is no real honest debate on this and several other issues at TPN. It appears to be tow the TPN line or be quiet, have your post removed and be banned.

Instead of quenching the thirst for freedom, the TPN leadership is attempting to squash members’ attempt at freedom. To be honest, I’m not at all surprised. I personally experienced this kind of “freedom” of thought and opinion displayed by the Tea Party Nation leadership beginning the day Judson announced he was the sole owner of Tea Party Nation.

Brooks also released this video calling for tea partiers to boycott the upcoming National Tea Party Convention.

Prove Me Wrong: Tea Party Nation, PayPal accounts, and a shady financial past

Posted by Kevin Smith – 1/17/10

If you’re just arriving at this controversy, you may want to get up to speed on the back-story. Here’s the blog that started things up last week.

In an interview with NBC News, Judson gave a classic politician’s answer to my allegation that he used his wife’s personal PayPal account to accept donations in the days immediately following the April 15th “Tax Day Tea Party” in 2009.

“That’s completely false,” Phillips said. “There’s a PayPal account that goes for the corporation. The money goes into a corporate account that is held in the name of Tea Party Nation, Incorporated.”

He further elaborated in a Tennessean article published today.

PayPal payments were always directed to a Tea Party Nation bank account, not a personal account, he said.

Smith and others might have thought they were misdirected because his wife, who keeps records for the company, set up the account to send e-mail confirmations of transactions directly to her, Phillips said.

Nice little jab by Phillips, insinuating that a web professional misunderstands how PayPal works, but it seems like the more this guy opens his mouth, the worse things get for him.

This has become a hot-button topic with the press in recent days because co-mingling of personal funds with donated funds is never permissible. In every interview so far, he’s answering a different question than the one that’s been asked. My allegation was that he used his wife’s personal PayPal account in April 2009 to accept donations for Tea Party Nation. The PayPal account he claims he has always used for all ticket sales and donations wasn’t even set up until August 21, 2009– well after the donations that occurred in April. This lovely screenshot of the PayPal member information panel for Tea Party Nation’s business account proves it. (If you have a PayPal account, you can corroborate this yourself.)

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I dug deeper today, and found something that I missed the first time around.

Below is a screenshot sent to me by someone who donated to Tea Party Nation on April 17th, 2009, during the time-frame that I allege Judson and his wife were funneling donations through her personal PayPal account. It’s an email received by this donor as a receipt for the donation. (Identifying information has been blacked out to protect the donor from retribution.) But look at the email address attached to the PayPal account…

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The PayPal account that was being used to accept donations in April of 2009 for Tea Party Nation was, in fact, a PayPal account with an email address from Judson’s law practice. So was it her personal PayPal account? Or was it a PayPal account she administered on behalf of “Judson Phillips, Attorney at Law”? Given his comment that sherry@teapartynation.com‘s PayPal account was a business account with her email attached to it, perhaps the same is true of the PayPal account for sherry@judsonphillips.com. Of course, one is no better than the other. Judson and his wife have a lot of explaining to do. (The description in the email above is auto-populated by ChipIn, the free service that was used to show a donation meter widget on the site. Given that I was the webmaster, I had set up this ChipIn account, thus why it shows my former TPN email address. As is stated on the ChipIn website, “Your contributors chip in via PayPal and the money goes directly into your PayPal account.” All donations went directly into the PayPal account owned by sherry@judsonphillips.com.)

Throughout last week, even more questions regarding Judson’s financial dealings have come to light. It was reported Friday that Phillips filed personal bankruptcy in 1999 and has since had three federal tax leins against him for more than $22,000. RedState’s Erick Erickson smelled something fishy on Monday. Then following Melissa Clouthier’s explosive article uncovering Phillips’s desire to make a million dollars from the Tea Party movement, Erickson had some advice for Phillips.

Just as a “for instance,” were I still practicing law I’d advise clients to have their 501(c)(4) or 527 already set up before taking people’s money. Saying the organization will turn around and pour the collected money into an as of yet unformed 527 or 501(c)(4) is questionable, if only from a tax standpoint.

I haven’t practiced law in a few years, but this was the area in which I practiced. If the fact are as reported, there is something questionable going on.

Sure, people make mistakes in life, but sometimes those mistakes carry with you for years in the form of a lack of trust. A person in this position must take extra steps to prove that all financial dealings are above board and properly organized, yet even Judson’s behavior last week in print and on radio arouse suspicion.

Given the questions raised about your inability to properly handle finances in the past, it only seems right that you should take the extra effort to show funds aren't being mismanaged this time.

So here’s the challenge, Judson. There are a lot of hard questions out there to which the convention attendees, your sponsors, the speakers, and certainly Sarah Palin deserve the answers. You called me a liar, so prove it. Tea Party Nation should immediately open its financial books for inspection with records dated from April 2009 to the present. Show the tea partiers that you’ve already set up the 527 that you claim will be receiving profits from the National Tea Party Convention. If there is truly nothing unethical going on here, then you’ve got nothing to hide. However, given the questions raised about your inability to properly handle finances in the past, it only seems right that you should take the extra effort to show funds aren’t being mismanaged this time. Sarah Palin — whose answer to the question of a speaking fee you foolishly refused to confirm — and the other speakers are trusting you with their political futures, and they deserve your honesty here.

Nothing wrong with transparency, openness, and fiscal responsibility, right? After all, it’s the very thing you claim to be demanding of government.

I swear, he doesn't represent the Tea Party movement!

Posted by Kevin Smith – 1/15/10

It’s confirmed: Judson Phillips gives the worst interviews ever.

You folks should see what it’s like to press him for information in private! Backed into a corner—and without a radio audience—this man has naught but to retreat, eject the offending party, and threaten to sue. More on that soon…

Phillips takes high road, says no comment on former members… then calls me a liar

Posted by Kevin Smith – 1/15/10

As a result of the brouhaha Anthony Shreeve and I have been causing these last few weeks with the release of inside information regarding Tea Party Nation and the National Tea Party Convention, Judson and his newest generation Advisory Board were forced to release a statement late, late last night. Aside from the slap in the face they delivered The Wall Street Journal by grouping it alongside World Net Daily in their exclusive, limited list of media organizations approved to cover the event, the group tried to downplay those of us who are now coming forward to expose corruption as some kind of minor, disgruntled employees.

Between last February and the present, Tea Party Nation has seen members come and go. We have tried to deal fairly with our present and former relationships, however, not without some criticism. This criticism has been unfortunate and we believe, unwarranted. However, it is the policy of Tea Party Nation not to focus on past challenges, but to stay focused on the task of advancing the conservative cause and defeating liberalism.

With that in mind, we will not be making any comments regarding former members.

Well, I’m glad to see they’ll be taking the high road now; up to this point Judson’s had a nasty proclivity to eject employees and threaten lawsuits following dissent within the ranks. It warms my heart to see… wait, what’s that? You mean to tell me that less than 12 hours after “taking the high road,” Judson went on record to call me a liar?

In a conversation with NationalJournal.com, Phillips, a Nashville attorney, called Smith a “liar” and defended the legitimacy of the organization. He said that ticket sales for the convention are going to a PayPal account owned by Tea Party Nation corporation.

I suppose it would’ve been nice for the author of the article to at least attempt to reach me for comment, but I’m not really all that worried. (After all, his best response is akin to playground trash-talk.) I’m much more interested in this– Do you see that nice little trick Judson played? He defends TPN and its handling of finances by saying that ticket sales are going into a PayPal account owned by TPN rather than someone’s personal account, but that was never the accusation I made. I know nothing firsthand about their current state of affairs. From my post yesterday (emphasis added):

The suggestion then was made by several in our little tea party group that we needed to set up a donation box online as we would need funding very, very soon to pay for things like the leased server, the printed Tea Party Nation banner, etc. We couldn’t wait for advertising revenue to roll in. We quickly set up a ChipIn box on the site and tied it to Judson’s wife’s PayPal account. Admittedly, I thought this was odd. I told Judson that this would make many, many potential donors really uncomfortable, but he assured me that it was just temporary since he hadn’t yet been able to get us a bank account or a PayPal account.

This occurred back in late April 2009.

See? His defense is to set up a straw man and rip it to pieces. Notice I said nothing about the convention. The truth is, donations in April 2009 to Tea Party Nation absolutely went into Sherry Phillips’s personal PayPal Account. Any of the more than 160 donors from that time period can attest to this.

Since my post on Tuesday, more and more former associates of Judson have been contacting me with information about the inner workings of Tea Party Nation in recent months. Just a suggestion: you may want to keep checking this blog over the next few days.

UPDATE: From the comments, Wanda says:

I can tell you I have an email sent to me from Sherry Phillips, that tells me how to pay for my sponsorship for the convention, and it says to send it to the Paypal account of sherry@teapartynation.com so that sounds to me like it is still a personal account not one for the organization.

No doubt this looks shady, but it’s certainly possible that this is merely the result of an extremely poor business decision to make Sherry the owner of the legitimate PayPal Business account for Tea Party Nation. I say it’s a poor decision because a publicly-facing method for accepting payments should feature more official contact information such as paypal@… or tickets@… But then again, I’m not sure Judson has been accused of making great decisions lately.

UPDATE II: Judson tells MSNBC that I’ve just got “an ax to grind.” (Glad to see we can trust him to keep his own promises, especially ones that were made only a day before.) “He’s got a motive for doing this.”

You know what? He’s absolutely right. I made my motive pretty clear in my post a few days ago:

I was approached by one of my fellow liberty-loving friends who reminded me that fraud, corruption, and deceit like this exists in Government because good men who are fully aware never stand up and say anything. How can I honestly object to this same behavior in my Government and demand they clean up Washington when I am unwilling to risk the personal and political injury it takes to expose the fraud, corruption, and deceit to which I am privy?

So to be clear:

I cannot reiterate strongly enough that this is the cancer that can take this movement down if we let it. We are not just searching for something “good enough” to beat the current powers-that-be. We hold ourselves to a higher standard, and corruption from the inside will not be tolerated.

On the Backs of Tennessee's Middle Class (or, The Story Behind Tea Party Nation's Dishonest Beginnings)

Posted by Kevin Smith – 1/12/10

This is the story of the tea party movement in Nashville and the duplicitous behavior, dishonesty, authoritarianism, and downright fraud that this movement is trying to ferret out of our Government. Unfortunately, this particular case comes from the inside. It’s lengthy, but important. What began as a short blog post has become a novella. I left out as many extraneous details as I possibly could and this is the boiled-down result.

In February of 2009, Rick Santelli let out the now famous rant during a segment on CNBC calling for Americans frustrated with Obama’s mortgage bailout “solution” to stand up, make their voices heard, and do something about it. In the days and weeks that followed, thousands of Americans answered his call for a new tea party, in the spirit of the Boston tea party, to present a show of force that the country wasn’t entirely in lockstep with Obama’s plans. Numerous organizations attempted to cultivate the outrage into something politically useful. While the national Republican Party and its like-minded lobbying groups would have liked immediately to lead the parade of opposition, they were woefully unprepared. That wouldn’t be the case many months later, but at least initially, the popular demand for tea party rallies sprang up in the larger cities like Nashville with such swiftness that the de facto local leader was the first moderately organized and connected person to the table. In an age of social networks and 24/7 access to the Internet, this meant that the yet uncreated position was open to almost anyone. In Nashville, the first man out of the gate was Judson Phillips.

Judson sent the word out on Facebook to the myriad groups created in reaction to Santelli’s rant that he was planning a tea party rally on February 27th at Legislative Plaza in Downtown Nashville. Anyone who could throw in and help was invited to contact him. He specifically needed someone to photo document the event so that this event could get some media coverage. I know my way around a camera, and I knew a nice SLR that I could borrow from a friend. I volunteered.

When I arrived at the plaza, I had to call him to find him in the already sizable crowd. As the phone was ringing in my ear, I saw a middle-aged man in a suit reach into his pocket and retrieve his cell phone. I hung up instead of waiting for him to answer and walked over to greet him instead. He smiled, and I introduced myself. I handed my business card to both him and the man to his left that he had been speaking with. Judson looked at my card and smirked. “hearSAY,” he said. “Well of course I like that.” In return, he handed me his business card: Judson Phillips, Attorney at Law. He patted me on the shoulder and added, “Don’t take the test. Call me in the morning.” I must have looked like some kind of lush. Apparently he was the kind of attorney that works to alleviate drunk drivers of their responsibility to the community. He was also, I would later come to discover personally, the kind of attorney who would regularly use his status as a legal professional to threaten and intimidate people into giving him what he wanted.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into. More…

A day of Political Meals: Bill of Federalism, Meeting with a State Senator

Posted by Kevin Smith – 5/21/09

Well today turned out to be one that revolved around food and politics. At the same time. I was pleased to have lunch with a new libertarian friend of mine, Adam. (A new friend. I don’t know how long he’s been a libertarian.) I always enjoys those one-on-ones. The lunch begins without any sort of agenda, and an hour and a half later you find your conversation miles from its origination. Of course the hot topics right now among libertarians and conservatives involved state sovereignty resolutions, gun rights bills passed by the states, the tea parties, and things like the Bill of Federalism. Adam read the bill for the first time at the table and was completely enthralled with it. He brings up a strong, significant objection to it though: if we call a constitutional convention, does that not open the whole constitution up for modification? We’re apparently only a few states’ requests away from actually having a constitutional convention. (As I understand it, unless a state recalls its request, that request stands permanently. Thus, all requests for a constitutional convention since our nation’s founding have tallied up to almost meet the threshold.) And since most state legislatures, who would appoint the delegates, are left leaning… that could open us up to some disastrous modifications to the Constitution. Yikes. I’ll be interested to see what professor Barnett says in response to this.

Then tonight I met with Ken Marrero of Blue Collar Muse and several other bloggers to have dinner with state Senator Ken Yager from the 12th district which is a chunk of East Tennessee (back where I come from). It was quite informative, but even better was the opportunity to form a relationship with one of the folks who represents Tennesseans. He certainly seems to hold the constrained world view, and regardless of where I might disagree with him, this means I know we’re forming our opinions based on the same basic understanding of the world.

I also met Jarod Scott, a younger fella with some political aspirations for 2010. I’m not sure how much he’s publicly announced, so I’ll keep mum for now. But I like him.

I’ll write more on things like this later, but I wanted to take a light dip in the pool of political commentary before jumping back in. I’ve been so busy with the tea party efforts in middle tennessee lately, specifically with helping start up the non-profit Tennessee Tea Party, I haven’t had time to really ponder and pen my usual political drivel. Have no fear; I’m sure I’ll be back to churning out the same old useless garbage in no time.

My Resignation from Tea Party Nation

Posted by Kevin Smith – 4/25/09

Original Post Removed.

My intention with posting my resignation letter was to be completely forthright and transparent, the kind of thing we demand from our Government. Given that this may appear otherwise, I’ve removed this, and I’m going to retire for a few days to be with family and friends. God bless.

Concerning the Bailouts

Posted by Kevin Smith – 4/22/09

…the biggest welfare recipients are using our own money to lobby us for more. According to the Associated Press, “The top 10 recipients of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout spent about $9.5 million on federal lobbying during the first three months of the year.” Lead among them is GM, which burned through $2.8 million in lobbying in the first quarter alone. 

More here.

Are we really that surprised, honestly? How long have us free marketeers been saying, “If you reward something, you’ll get more of it.” GM and the others did their cost-benefit analysis, and they rationally figured that their most profitable venture was lobbying Congress. So they did more of it. And they’ll continue to do so.

So bend over, America.

All about racism

Posted by Kevin Smith – 4/22/09

Dang it Janeane, you’re right. That whole thing last week was just about a bunch of white rednecks hatin’ on the coolest President ever just cuz he’s a black man:

Tea Party: Huge crowd in Nashville!

Posted by Kevin Smith – 4/15/09

Quickly, here are two quick photos of the Nashville Tea Party. We’re estimating several, several thousand!

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We’re live on the scene at the Tea Party Nation tent. Sign up and organize!

UPDATE: Based on police reports and several counts, we can confidently estimate 9,812 people at the rally! I know, sounds weird to have such an exact number, so let me share quickly how we arrived at the number. We know that there were an average of 7 or 8 people on each concrete square, which are all the same size across the plaza. Based on where the crowd tapered off, which according to the police was near the far end of the plaza, we arrive at 7,312. Add to it the estimated 2,500 folks on the street and across the street who weren’t on a concrete square, and we arrive at 9,812. (Some estimates are as low as 2,000, some more saying 5,000. No worries. Estimating by sight is extremely difficult. We’re trying to get our numbers using a more specific methodology.)

Yeah, yeah, some will disagree. That’s fine. That’s why we have pictures. They’ve got a pretty big impact, too. :)

UPDATE II: Apparently Nashville made Yahoo!’s tea party gallery!

UPDATE III: Some great photos of the Nashville rally from Mark Currier.