Todd Cefaratti signed up in Feb 2011 and started posting on the thread.
WHO IS THIS?It'a a copy cat Faux Tea Party group along the lines of Tea Party Patriots. That is, it exists mainly to generate money for the people at the top.
jointheteaparty.us ^ | August 25, 2010 | swampsniper
Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 7:36:20 PM by SWAMPSNIPER
I just heard an ad for this site on the radio, not much meat on the site. Does anyone know who is behind this effort?
Refering to the thread in his first comment on it, he states "It looks like this blog was started to look in to the validity of our organization."
FR was started about 15 years before his noticing it, and is NOT a blog.
He refers to the Tea Party Movement as "our movement."
If you donate $100, they will give you a few trinkits "free of charge." Hmmm, looks like they cost a C note.
All that is interesting, but this sentence really showed me where this org is at:
We also have used donations for events like our bus tour for 9/12 last year that started with senate candidate in Nevada Sharron Angle and ended at the US Capitol on 9/12.Hmmmm, he takes credit for a Tea Party Exress Bus Tour as if it was his own.
(I have traveled with every on of the Tea Party Express bus tours, and if he was around, he was in the background leaning how to fleece Tea Party members. Like Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots who came to a Free Republic sponsored Tea Party on Feb 27, 2009 and was just here as a participant. Later in an interview, he said he organized our tea party that day.)
He freely admits to using most of the money collected to collect more money!
And email address, which was his main business before deciding that the Tea Party Movement could be a good way to extract money from concerned Conservative American Tea Party People.
Here is another therad exposting this guy and his tactics:
Tea Partiers Question Ariz.-Based Website Valley Company Collects Nearly $500K, Spends On MarketingHere is a Link To his "reverseleadsclub" money generator.
KPHO Arizona ^
Posted on Tuesday, March 01, 2011 4:26:36 PM by mnehring
PHOENIX -- A tea party organization based in Mesa, Ariz., which has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, spent nearly half of its budget on marketing its own name, according to Federal Elections Commission documents.
Those records, obtained during a CBS 5 News investigation, also show the organization spent no money to directly support tea party candidates.
The website, JoinTheTeaParty.us is registered to a nonprofit corporation in Mesa. When CBS 5 News reporters contacted the director of that company, they were referred to a Washington, D.C., attorney, who said the personnel in Phoenix were too busy to sit down for an interview.
CBS 5 News began its investigation into the company after receiving a phone call from an East Coast tea party activist who said nobody within the tea party movement he had spoken to had heard of the Mesa organization.
The caller also told CBS 5 News it did not appear the organization was spending any of its donations to support tea party priorities.
Among the findings of the CBS 5 News investigation, the organization spent $181,000 on Google, Facebook and other websites for advertising. As a result, when CBS 5 producers typed the phrase, "tea party," into the Google search engine, the first paid advertisement that popped up was for JoinTheTeaParty.us.
Additional digging into the organization's background revealed the director of the nonprofit also has ties to companies that collect and sell people's personal information. Todd Cefaratti is listed as the director the the nonprofit, as well as a company known as reverseleadclub.com.
It's too bad that some good conservatives are hooked up with this org.
You have done some good work there. I am always suspicious of lobby firms. Like gov’t they need to raise more money to survive. It’s also like the green org.s such as Sierra Club that only spend a few pennies of every dollar and actually doing something productive.
More and more sites are calling this group fake.
http://conservative-outlooks.com/2011/04/05/evidence-mounts-arizona-tea-party-is-a-fake/
http://www.mightyrighty.com/showthread.php/281-When-a-Rat-Invades-the-Tea-Party
He is also being investigated by the IRS for running a fake non-profit.
http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/tea-parties-say-irs-intimidating-them-over-tax-exempt-status
There are also several articles by leftist sites right before the election (I can’t post links here but you can find them via Google) pointing out that Cefaratti’s sites were endorsing ‘none of the above’ for President and using it to divide the Tea Party against Romney. He was a tool for the left.
Syncro,
I missed that Niger Ennis is now a big wig at this group. I wonder if they have gone legit?