“Early in January RedState blogger Erick Erickson slammed the National Tea Part Convention. Erickson compared the convention organizers to Nigerian scam artists.

Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number.

I am led to believe a number of the sponsors who lent their names early on have grown wary of the event. That lines up with what I am hearing.

The tea party movement was always about the unorganized masses of concerned, passionate Americans uniting together with a common voice to protest the direction of the country. From that passion, others have sought to make money off the tea party movement. Some have done it for good. Many have not. And more and more we are seeing some people rise up to claim the mantle of “leader” of the tea party movement. Many of us who have been around for a while just want to know who the heck these so called leaders are.

But Erick Erickson had a change of heart. Today he is not as suspicious of the event. The RedState blogger actually was impressed with the convention and thinks it may bode well for the future of the tea party.”

I have strong feelings about this topic given my experience organizing the Denver Teaparty last september. 

When I started planning that event, I naively assumed that many people would step up financially to help with the costs associated with the party.  I had orginally planned to fly two national speakers in to Denver, wanted to put them up at nice hotels, pay them speaker fees, and provide professional security services to keep them safe. 

During the months of planning, I proceeded to organize as if the money would appear, and it did.  I was donated exactly $125.00 before the Evening Teaparty on September 12th.  My husband had made it abundantly clear that our family would not be funding this event on a credit card beyond the volunteer hours that I donated to the cause. 

And I was not even able to use the money that had been donated because I had no way to cash the checks.  A woman sent me a check in the mail to help with costs and I realized that I needed a bank account to cash it that was not connected to our family finances. At the last minute, a couple weeks before the party, I scrambled to set up a non profit bank account, obtain an IRS tax ID number, and set up a donate button at Pay Pal tied to the non-profit bank account. 

After days of haggling with pay pal, they denied my non profit status as being legit, and I was never able to accept online donations, and the IRS kept denying my request for a tax EIN number.  It was funny with the online IRS web site.  Whenever I typed in any name for our group that contained the word Teaparty, it was immediately denied.  I finally typed in the words Denver Constitution, and the form sailed through unobstructed.  So that was the name that I used for the bank account and had people write checks to.

Am I implying that someone at the IRS set it up so that Teaparty activists had a difficult time getting tax EIN numbers?  Yes I am.

I had asked a t-shirt maker to donate yellow Gadsden flag t-shirts to our security team.  He initially said he would give me a five dollar per shirt rate, and then did not follow through.  Literally the day before the teaparty, my daughter and I went to Hobby Lobby with that $125.00 that had been donated and we bought twenty yellow t-shirts and took them home and ironed on the security patch per capitol rules for our team.

I had also been scrambling to find speakers and fund a sound system.  I let the national speakers know that I would not be able to fly them in, and went looking for Colorado People to keynote the teaparty.  Two days before the teaparty I had neither keynote speakers nor sound system.  Then Mike Holler the author of the book The Constitution Made Easy sailed in to the rescue and connected me with a company that gave us an amazing deal on a sound system rental (And with my husband Pauls, support I rented the system on my credit card and then I ran it as the sound and light technician), and Mike gave the most amazing keynote address.

As I type this blog post I am watching C-span grill Mark Skoda, who helped organize the National Event, on the financing around the convention.  The emotion that Mark is showing as he outlines the various issues around paying speakers, funding conventions, parties, etc…is legitimate and real.  It is such a risk to put everything on the line and trust that it will all work out.

The teaparty I organized did not manifest the way that I had envisioned.

The National Speakers, the perfect balmy september weather, plenty of money to fund everything, hiring professional security, hiring a professional sound/light tech to provide perfect lights and sound, donated t-shirts, lots of people to step up and help with promotions and the various odd jobs,…all of that went down the tubes during the final weeks of planning.

How did it all come together?

By a few dedicated people stepping up, not only to provide a speech, a few dollars in cash, security help, but also those who were willing to come stand in the cold rain for five hours to not only attend the tea party but also to listen to a live 68 minute broadcast of the Constitution of the USA before it started.

It was a flat out miracle. 

Every piece of it.  When I arrived with the sound system, it was raining hard…all of the equipment got soaked, and shorted out and we had no sound for about twenty minutes.  I ran around to the crowd that had gathered to hear the Constitution and asked all of them to pray for the sound system.  Then I gathered our volunteers together and I offered a prayer and asked the Lord to fix the sound system.  As far as I was concerned we could not have a teaparty without sound.  While walking around the sound system cords on the ground I twisted my ankle and spent the rest of the evening hobbling around in pain.

As soon as the prayer was over a man walked up and said he was a sound tech professional and offered to take a look at the system.  He worked on it for twenty minutes and I was starting to feel like it was not going to get fixed.  So I went to the crowd and asked them what they wanted to do.  Right as I asked that question, the sound came on and I yelled, “Do you want to hear the Constitution?”  They all cheered and I ran up and started playing the recording accompanied by patriotic hymns.  We had one more loss of sound and our Security Marshall Frederick ran over and re plugged the system into another plug and it kicked back in and worked perfectly for the rest of the evening.

I came home so cold, frazzled, in pain from my ankle injury, and overwhelmed that I vowed to myself that I would NEVER again take on the task of organizing that type of event.  But my understanding and sympathy for ANYONE who steps up to organize this type of event at the local or national level is immense.  This is the beginning of the movement, it is so new, so maligned, so misunderstood, yet the national polls show that the American People want Freedom as defined by those of us standing up at the teapartys!  And we should stay focused on the prize of winning back the American Political Process from those collectivists who want to change America into a Socialist  Utopia.

I said in a blog entry a couple weeks ago that the American Constitution backed up by the Internet is the magical combination that will provide us the tools to fix everything.

My best wishes to the movement!  Although I am retired from street activism, I will do everything in my power on this blog to support and promote the cause of Liberty.

Jenny Hatch

PS  Here are the links to the Denver Local Media Coverage of our 9-12 Constitution Teaparty:

Denver Channel 7:  Here is a slideshow from Denver channel 7 news from our event

DENVER POST: Crowds also gather in cold rain outside Colorado Capitol

Fox 31:  Thousands brave rain for Colorado Teaparty in front of capitol

Channel 9 News: This video was tied to this story at 9 news web site Video Link: Go Here to Watch (My co-organizer Anthony Gillis was interviewed for this movie!)

Channel 4 News: Go Here to watch the CBS 4 Video 

Channel 4 News Story: Hundreds Rally Against Big Government In Denver

And my After Action Report hosted at Free Republic