Coffee Party, Tea Party to take stage together at
first Coffee Party National Convention
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 13, 2010
Louisville, KY – The Coffee Party’s first annual national convention will feature a Transpartisan Dialogue between Coffee Party co-founder Annabel Park, Tea Party Express Chairperson Amy Kremer, Republican strategist Mark McKinnon, and Constitutional scholar Lawrence Lessig.
The panel will be facilitated by Joseph McCormick, co-founder of the Transpartisan Alliance, and a former Republican nominee for Congress. Park expressed gratitude to all the convention participants, McCormick and Kremer in particular.
“Earlier this year, we declined most of the invitations we received to appear with Tea Party leaders,” Park said. “We felt the Coffee Party needed to go through an internal process first. Now that we’ve done that, we are eager to engage with the Tea Party, and help to move America’s civic discourse beyond the narrow confines of partisanship.”
Transpartisan Dialogue
7:00 p.m. on Saturday, September 25th
140 North 4th Street
Louisville, KY 40202-4227
Coffee Party leaders from around the U.S. have registered for the September 24th-26 convention, to be held at the Gault House Hotel in Louisville, KY. Other highlights will include a Mock Constitutional Convention chaired by McKinnon and Lessig in response to the “Citizens United” Supreme Court Decision, and a webcast celebration of MTV Networks’ world television premiere of “9500 Liberty,” Park’s award-winning documentary that she says inspired the Coffee Party.
Transpartisan Dialogue, Confirmed participants:
Annabel Park, Founder, Coffee Party USA, was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to America when she was nine. Annabel and Coffee Party co-founder Eric Byler directed the award-winning film 9500 Liberty, chronicling the only two months in American history when local law enforcement was mandated to check immigration status based on a standard of suspicion.
Amy Kremer, Chair, Tea Party Express, was one of the original founders of the Atlanta Tea Party and has coordinated Tea Party events nation wide. She was a speaker at the 9/12 March on D.C. and was a keynote speaker at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville. She also participated as a panelist at the 2009 Value Voters Summit in Washington, D.C. She has appeared on Fox News Channel, as well as CNN, NBC, and MSNBC.
Lawrence Lessig, Founder and Chairman of the Board of Change Congress, is currently the Director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, and a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. While a professor at Stanford Law School, he founded the school's Center for Internet and Society. Lessig is the author of Remix (2008), Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999).
Mark McKinnon, Board Member of Change Congress, is an award-winning media producer and communications strategist who has served as principal media advisor for hundreds of corporate and political campaigns including McCain ’08 and Bush ‘04. He is a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and was a Bush appointee to the Broadcasting Board of Governors. McKinnon lectures at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. McKinnon earned his degree from UT Austin.
Facilitator, Joseph McCormick, co-founder, Transpartisan Alliance, spent a decade as a Christian Coalition activist and won the Republican nomination for U.S. Congress in one of the most conservative districts in America, learning firsthand the most destructive force in our country today is Americans taking sides against other Americans. Since 2004 he has organized a series of ground-breaking private retreats that brought over 145 national leaders representing over 70 million Americans into dialogue in search of opportunities to collaborate. His passion now is to apply the tools developed in these gatherings to facilitating cooperation between grassroots groups from all sides. He is a former officer in the U.S. Army Rangers and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and Yale University.
More participants to be announced later.
The Coffee Party National Convention is being held September 24th through 26th in Louisville, Kentucky. For more information, including scheduled events, area information and sign-up. Please visit http://www.democracymeetup.com.
