Tomorrow is the Primary and it is critical that every Libertarian votes so we can get our write-in candidates on the ballot.
On your ballot, you will find a spot to write-in a candidate, and a method to indicate your vote for that candidate. Below is a full list of our Write-in candidates:
U.S. Congress
U.S. Congress, C.D. 1: Nicole Patti
U.S. Congress, C.D. 3: Clay Adair
U.S. Congress,
C.D. 6:
Darell Tapp
Arizona State Offices
State Treasurer: Thane Eichenauer
Corporation Commissioner:
Rick Fowlkes
Arizona Legislature - Senate
State Senate, L.D. 7: Dennis G. Grenier
State Senate, L.D. 19: William Munsil
Arizona Legislature - House of Representatives
State Representative, L.D. 6: William Barker
Volunteers are needed for the Hand Count Audit Board to help observe the auditing of 2% of the Precincts during the upcoming 2010 General Election. This is a hugely important role to help keep Arizona and Federal elections free from tampering.
If you are interested in helping out in this endeavor please send an email to mphelpsrsc@yahoo.com with a good contact Phone number or email address. This opportunity will be closed after Tuesday August 17th 4:00 PM.
Mark R. Phelps
Chair PCLP
In fewer than 8 hours, polls will open for Arizona’s special election. The sole question on the ballot: whether sales taxes should temporarily be increased to balance the budget.
Over on Goldwater State, I recommend a “no” vote. Neither the Pima County Libertarian Party nor the Arizona Libertarian Party have, to the best of my knowledge, taken official positions, but I presume that they would recommend the same. At first glance, voting “yes” may appear to be the responsible thing to do; Arizona’s budget is required to be balanced, and to date the cuts made by the legislature have not been responsible or well-thought-out at all.
However, Americans for Prosperity and the Reason Foundation have found more than enough to cut, and a few good one-time revenue sources as well. One figure that should jump off the page: $120,000,000 could be saved per year by releasing non-violent drug offenders from prisons. “Waste” is too nice a word to describe that sort of spending.
Make a stand for fiscal responsibility and send a mandate for cuts to the legislature; vote “no” in Tuesday’s Special Election. A mere “no” isn’t enough; we must insist that the legislature scale back the scope of government and do so in a reasonable fashion. In the days and weeks ahead, call your legislature, write letters to the editor, ‘blog, and spread the word supporting what you find most agreeable in the Reason Foundation’s whitepaper.
To prevent our ballot line from being hijacked, spread libertarian policy positions, and maybe even to make the major-party candidates sweat a little more to earn votes, several area libertarians are seeking nomination to be the Party’s candidates in the november election.
They are:
- Raymond Patrick Petrulsky, running for US House in District 7
- Paul Davis, running for US House in District 8
- Mark Phelps, running for State Representative in District 27
- Tom Rogers, running for Pima County School Superintendent
All Pima County Libertarians live in either CD 7 or CD 8. Make a note with the names appropriate to your area, take it with you to your polling place on 2 September, and write these candidates in, to be sure they’re representing the LP in the November election.
The Libertarian Party, in convention last weekend,
- Re-elected Bill Redpath as chairman of the National Committee,
- Adopted a platform that is at once solidly libertarian and suitable for public consumption,
- and nominated Bob Barr for President of the USA and Wayne Root for Vice-President.More details can be found at Brian Holtz’s Libertarian Intelligence. Commentary will be posted on my personal political weblog and many others
Armed resistance against a government which has overstepped its bounds is central to the American mythos even if alien to our political tradition. While we had little trouble taking up arms against King George’s regulars over taxation without representation, we can’t bring ourselves to, for example, make sniper attacks on la migra for raiding our businesses and breaking up our neighbors’ families and livelihoods because they never got a permission slip that the government refuses to offer, or even to riot like Frenchmen over new legislation. I’d venture to say that we’re better off for it, but that’s a matter for another time
March 24, 2008
Are we attracting voters that will help us win elections? Here are some reservations I have and suggestions for the future.
Today I received by mail “Libertarians Rising, The 2007 Annual Report of the Libertarian Party.” From the first page onward I was stunned by the overwhelming negativity of the content. “The Bush administration has plunged this nation to new depths” four paragraphs into it, then wailing away about lost rights, “useless war”, “economy into a tailspin” among others. Then complaining that the polls show congress’ ratings below those of the president.
OK, guys and gals. I don’t disagree that things could be better, but this becomes a classic example of the political left’s “hate Bush” campaign. The Democrats believe that they can win elections by whipping up hatred of George Bush, and they might be right - although I personally think they’re deluded. And for the Libertarian party to think that it can win anything at all through this negative strategy is completely loony. (more…)
March 20, 2008
Ron Paul has gotten quite a few people angry about the Federal Reserve, largely using a narrative with no basis in fact. Ordinarily, the monetary system works well enough to justify ambivalence, but of late, the Fed has adopted an inappropriately reactionary stance, responding to the banking crisis and manipulating interest rates in ways that look more like symbolic reassurance for the rubes than than they resemble anything prescribed by any normative work from modern economics.
Thus even those of us who never believed that the Fed Just Prints Money so that government can spend and spend have had good reason lately to look for alternatives, be they adoption of the Friedman k-Percent Rule, or more radical proposals, such as free banking.
Last night at the Pima County Libertarian Party meeting, Joe Cobb, one of the US’s experts on commodity money and free banking, treated us to a freewheeling lecture and extended question and answer session on the advantages of a monetary system in which the supply of money is determined, from the bottom up, by market mechanisms, without the intervention of a government or a government-appointed bureaucracy. He even managed to pull off the near-impossible: to change my mind about what is, at its heart, a technical question, without handing me a stack of journal articles to read.
(more…)
January 11, 2008
I ate an illegal dinner tonight.
If your thoughts are running to ambergris-scented breast of bald eagle or a traditional Indonesian curry, spiced with cannabis, you’ve gone too far afield. Dinner was a glass of Ommegang Hennepin and a few illicitly sold tamales.
(more…)
December 12, 2007
Vernon Smith, who won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (split with Daniel Kahneman) for his contributions to experimental economics, gave a public lecture this afternoon at the University of Arizona on the history of his work .
Smith was a member of the University of Arizona faculty from 1976 to 2001, and there conducted most of the work that later won him the Nobel Prize, before leaving to join the libertarian powerhouse at George Mason University as distinguished senior faculty.
His work is of particular interest to libertarians, who advocate privatization, the breakup of government-mandated monopolies, and implementation of market mechanisms to replace command-and-control regulation.
(more…)
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