This election cycle's second Grand Ol' Party convention held at the Anchorage Baptist Temple was over before it began as the state party leader Randy Ruedrich and his supporters torpedoed the convention hopes by urging members of the party to "go fishing" instead.

His decision to curtail the meeting that could not come up with a quorum was met with jeers and boos that Ruedrich responded to with a declaration that the audience was out of order. With that, he quickly ended business and announced the end of the meeting.

Many in the crowd felt that the reason for the meeting being shot down was because many of those present wanted a rule change to oust Ruedrich immediately and replace him with the incoming chair Russ Millette, who won the seat in the April meeting. Millette is due to take over chairmanship of the state GOP in February of next year.

Others felt that Ruedrich and his supporters feared a suspension of party rules with the end result seeing the party’s delegated handed over to Ron Paul, who had a large amount of backers at the failed meeting.

Alaskans for Ron Paul organizer, Evan Cutler, standing before the crowd accused Ruedrich of breaking the party’s rules by encouraging GOP delegates to forego attending the meeting and to instead to go fishing for the day.

Another of the items that tea party and Paul backers had hoped to accomplish at this meeting was the censure of Alaska’s Senator Lisa Murkowski, who won her Senate seat back last election cycle without gaining the Republican ticket. The Republican party backed Joe Miller in that election instead when he won the Republican primary in the state.

That vote to censure was taken later in the day at another church in downtown Anchorage, where the “Ron Paul/Tea Party” coalition founded their new name, “The Committee to Help the Alaska Republican Party.” As first order of business, the group voted in former lawmaker, Jerry Ward to preside over their meeting. One of the first items on the agenda was to censure Senator Lisa Murkowski for abandoning her party promise to support the GOP nominee. That later meeting also voted to deny party funds to state Senators belonging to the Senate Bipartisan Coalition. It is these very same Senators that resisted the Governor’s attempts to re-structure the taxes of the oil companies this last session.

It is the hopes of this new group to deny funds to these Senators as the elections grow closer, even as the Alaska Public Offices Commission has flung the financial doors wide open to allow unions and corporations unlimited spending.

The Alaska Dispatch reported that Rebecca Logan, who is the manager of the pro-oil Alaska Support Industry Alliance had said as she left the meeting that the APOC decision was a “gift” for her group and that the Alliance has “big plans” this election year. It is the hopes of that alliance to oust the senate coalition members and replace them with Senators that will fall into step with the Governor’s new tax plans.

Only 192 delegates showed up at the Anchorage Baptist Temple’s Anchorage Christian School gymnasium. 275 were needed for a quorum.