From the OC GOP Central Committee Meeting...

As promised, here's a brief report from the Hyatt Hotel in Irvine, where the Republican Party of Orange County held its first central committee meeting of 2010. It was a little stuffy for me actually, and one of the local tea partiers got rowdy and was thrown out -- to the boos of many of my fellow grassroots patriots. Here's a bit of the party paraphernalia as I walked in the lobby:

Here's the scene as I walked into the ballroom:

The party cats were hip with the social networking technology. The GOP "Tech" website is here, with a video from tonight's livestream. The Twitter page is here:

The Party Chairman Scott Baugh gave the opening speech of the night. He attacked the Republican National Committee pretty agressively (which is uncharacteristic for a local party organization), but mostly gave a traditional speech on preserving liberty and promoting free markets, blah, blah...

Baugh did go on at some length about the Citizen Power Initiative, which is now being circulated by petition for qualification on the June ballot. There's a lot of anger at taxing, spending, and out of control government, and Baugh was pretty fired up about taking back power to the people.

My main interest, however, was in catching Mark Meckler's speech, who I mentioned previously. Meckler, seen below, is the National Coordinator and Board Member of the Tea Party Patriots, out of Sacramento.

Meckler announced right away that he's not a Republican, but an independent. But as the talk went on, it became clear that he's hoping that party activists adopt the super-disciplined fiscal conservatism that's been a top issue among tea party patriots. Bringing about a "Second American Revolution" was a major theme of both Chairman Baugh and Mark Meckler. I personally think the call for revolution goes over better out on the streets than in swank hotel ballrooms, but at least such exhortations fire up the faithful.

Meckler noted that as soon as he was done in the O.C. he was heading up to LAX to board a flight for Massachusetts. He announced he was going to be there for the "victory" of GOP Senate candidate Scott Brown. In that sense, it's clear that some in the tea party leadership see the road to political power through the GOP. (I wrote about this earlier, at my entry, "Tea Party 'Precinct Strategy' Seeks G.O.P. Takeover.") But it's pretty well-established that grassroots tea party activists are fed up with both parties, so it'll be interesting to see how efforts at synergy and coordination work out. I'm pretty optimistic that tea partiers will fold their agenda into the Republican establishment, in the raw interest of winning power. Representative Michele Bachmann's the model, of course, with her super-popularity among the patriots. And perhaps additional hardline-conservative Republicans will reach out more forcefully in courting right-wing/libertarian activists. Either way, it's going to be a rough year for the Democrats. My main concern, as always, is that the tea partiers don't frizzle-away their power through the formation of a formal third party movement. Tonight's event made me quite a bit more confident that the third-party option's increasingl seen as a losing proposition.