![\"\"](\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4017\/4332551067_73b20d0d52.jpg\")
<\/p>\nJudson Phillips speaks to the press. (Photo by David Weigel)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In a conversation before the presser, Luke Livingston, the director of Tea Party: the Documentary Film, credited Skoda with turning around the “bad PR” and opening up the convention. When Skoda took the stage he unleashed a long monologue about the values and strength of the movement before announcing the formation of the Ensuring Liberty corporation and Ensuring Liberty PAC. It would be incorporated in “the heartland of America, Memphis, Tennessee,” and would employ a team that wasn’t yet assembled but might include “former K street people” who wanted to change the way Washington worked.<\/p>\n
Skoda was peppered with questions on what money the PAC would accept. Corporate money? Yes. Lobbyist money? “We’ll determine that.” One thing that Skoda made crystal clear was that he and the Tea Party Convention “absolutely do not support a third party.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n A few reporters asked Phillips to respond to comments Tom Tancredo made in his Thursday night speech. Did he agree with Tancredo that a John McCain victory in 2008 would have been a disaster? “Congressman Tancredo has a gift for understatement.” Would he denounce Tancredo’s comment that Obama was a socialist and that his voters would have failed literacy tests? No, he wouldn’t denounce it — Phillips pointed to “man on the street” videos of voters that found many of them unable to state basic political facts. NASHVILLE – At an alternately blunt and blustery press conference, National Tea Party Convention organizers Judson Phillips and Mark Skoda declared that they had credentialed 200 reporters and sold tickets to 600 attendees — with 500 more tickets sold for Sarah Palin’s Saturday night speech. (At least 100 of those reporters huddled around to ask […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4313,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-283585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4313"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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