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After reading about Ron Paul’s 10 percent returns in the Iowa caucuses today, I am beginning to see some encouraging signs that his campaign may be able to bring libertarian ideas into the American mainstream. While browsing through one of my favorite libertarian forums, someone posted a link to what is probably the best Ron Paul interview that I have seen to date.

The interview was conducted by Bill Moyers from the PBS television network and is refreshingly free of blatant bias, forced soundbytes, snide comments, and all of the other marginalizing tactics that have become commonplace in most mainstream media outlets. It runs 22 minutes long and includes a readable transcript for those of you who may not be able to hear the audio and are looking for a closed captioning option. There were a few good points brought up in the video that I am pleased to see are finally being discussed:

1. Near the beginning of the segment, Bill Moyers actually brought up the fact that Fox News excluded Ron Paul from one of the recent debates, and that Fox never gave any explanation for this. However, he is being included in the ABC debates.
2. Ron Paul was able to explain that libertarianism is inherently anti-racist because it sees people as individuals as opposed to members of a collective group. One of the defining characteristics of all forms of racism is that they attempt to categorize people into separate groups, in this case by race. Libertarianism does not categorize people by race or any other group label, but instead upholds the rights of the individual, usually in opposition to the power of the State.
3. Near the end, there was some good discussion about the problems with the two-party system, and the obvious inconsistency of the United States invading (or substantially interfering with) other countries in the name of imposing “democracy” on them, while at the same time we do not really have democracy in the U.S., as anyone who gets involved with independent candidates or third party efforts soon realizes.

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I have received another fundraising letter from the national Libertarian Party today. The party is hoping to make up for a slight budget shortfall (compared to their annual projections) for the year 2007 so that there will be enough money available for advertising and ballot access efforts in 2008. An unfortunate side effect of the Ron Paul “revolution” is that his campaign has probably diverted some funds from donors who might have otherwise given more time or money to other libertarian causes such as the LP. If Ron Paul does not win the Republican nomination (it is very difficult for me to believe that the GOP establishment would ever allow this), there will not be many options left for liberty lovers, so it is worth considering the idea of helping out the LP as much as we can, even if it is only for a “protest vote”.

Below is the actual text of the letter. I have placed a link to the donation page at lp.org at the bottom of the page.

Dear Fellow Libertarian,

I need your help.

I’m not usually that blunt, but right now I have no choice.

We - you and I - are looking at perhaps the greatest opportunity the Libertarian Party has ever seen.

But we are also looking at what is easily the greatest challenge we have ever seen - by far!

And whether we seize this opportunity or fail to meet this challenge will depend greatly on what you decide to do after reading this letter.

You see, thanks to the support of freedom loving Americans like you, the Libertarian Party has made some truly remarkable gains over the past year - including a growth in membership of nearly 20 percent!

And right now, the political climate in American is ripe for us to move forward with even more growth - growth that will ultimately break the two-party stranglehold that has had such a devastating impact on our country.

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Even after the Tea Party ‘07 event, Ron Paul’s fundraising success has continued, surpassing $18.5 million this weekend for the fourth quarter of 2007 according to the official campaign website. Interestingly, after almost completely ignoring Ron Paul for most of the campaign season leading up to the primaries, the mainstream media is beginning to take notice.

A few days ago, CNN published a front page article on Ron Paul’s fundraising efforts and campaign progress. It was relatively unbiased and surprisingly devoid of the condescending tone that I have become accustomed to reading in most media mentions of him. The only potential downside to the article was actually addressed in its content by the candidate himself; he mentioned that unfortunately, the media seemed to be focusing so much of their attention on the campaign’s monetary intake rather than the importance of its message. Frankly, I couldn’t agree more, but for a mainstream media outlet, this still represents encouraging progress.

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Several notable stories and videos about the Ron Paul campaign have surfaced over the past week, so this is probably a good time to collect some of these into a post and prepare them for consumption by “Ron Paulers” who are eager for positive messages and news coverage.

Probably the most significant event of the campaign so far occurred last Sunday when over $6 million was donated in a single day as part of the Tea Party ‘07 “money bomb” fundraising effort. With sufficient cash on hand, supporters are hoping to increase public awareness and name recognition ahead of the start of the presidential primary season in January. December 16 was the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a famous act of rebellion against unfair taxation that marked the beginning of the American Revolution and subsequent independence from the British.

Meanwhile, one of the most popular videos recently is this one titled “Ron Paul: A New Hope”. It is an uplifting montage of news coverage, clips from the debates, and notable facts about Ron Paul that significantly separate him from the other candidates. Length is 8 minutes, 44 seconds.

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Our Texas LP is making its last push to recruit prospective candidates before the filing deadline on January 2. Even though the actual election is still more than ten months away, time is running out for getting the necessary paperwork completed in order to get on the ballot. I have reprinted Wes Benedict’s email below just in case any of you who might be eligible to run for office in Texas and wouldn’t mind seeing your name on the ballot will have the information needed to make an official application.

Dear Texas Libertarian:

I need you to fill out an application to be a candidate and send that back to me as soon as possible. Please do it this weekend.

We are behind on candidate recruitment. We have about 79 candidates right now, but there are less than three weeks left to reach our goal of 250 nominees.

I hope by now most of you understand how important it is to have an army of Libertarian Party candidates on the ballot helping to build our movement. I understand most of you won’t spend any funds or much time on your campaign and that’s okay. I also understand that some of you will be running very active campaigns and that’s wonderful.

Whatever your plans, please just get an application in to me now. If you change your mind later, you can always withdraw.

The absolute deadline for filing an application is 5:00 PM on January 2, but waiting till the last minute makes my work incredibly difficult. If you wait, that means I’ll be asking other people to run for the same position, and if you both file at the last minute, then I won’t have time to offer one of you a different race where we have an opening. Additionally, that means I will have wasted my finite amount of time recruiting a candidate we didn’t need, and leaving an office unchallenged where we wanted a candidate.

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Today I received a letter from the Libertarian Party notifying our membership that there has been a bill introduced by Ron Paul called HR 3600, officially titled the Voter Freedom Act of 2007, that would establish a national ballot access standard for all Congressional candidates. In most cases, it would effectively lower the threshold to something much more reasonable than the complicated, ever-changing patchwork of state laws and regulations that currently govern ballot access for independent candidates and “minor” parties. According to the text of the bill, prospective candidates could qualify for the ballot by submitting a petition declaring their intent to run for office and collecting at least 1,000 signatures from registered voters within their respective districts.

The Libertarian Party letter from Shane Cory reviews some of our current struggles with ballot access issues and includes a petition declaring our support for the Voter Freedom Act. Members can sign the pre-printed petition forms and mail them back to the Libertarian Party, who will then forward them to Ron Paul. The contents of the letter and petition are published below:

Dear fellow Libertarian,

Enclosed you will find with my letter a very important petition personally addressed to Congressman Ron Paul.

Why a petition to Congressman Paul? Let me explain.

Although the Libertarian Party has made great gains in recent years winning Presidential ballot access in nearly every state (48 of 50 in 2004), we are in a constant battle to remain there and continue as the only viable alternative to the Republicans and Democrats.

Congressman Ron Paul has introduced HR 3600, the Voter Freedom Act of 2007, a bill which would set a reasonable national standard for Congressional candidates to gain a position on local ballots for Congress. Passage of this legislation will be a great boost to our efforts in 2008.

You see, each election cycle, we have to jump through hoops and comply with thousands of state laws regulating voting - even voting for Congress!

The horror of the matter is that these laws are constantly changing and it’s a whole lot harder to hit a moving target!

Why? Because as Libertarian candidates continue to increase in voting strength, and more and more of our candidates are elected at the state and local level, we are a growing threat to the Democrats and Republicans we challenge.

The Republican/Democrat monopoly in politics isn’t good for our country and it is certainly not good for your state and local government as well.

While the Republicans didn’t invent corruption, they certainly seem to have elevated it to an art form. And can you remember back when Republicans claimed they were the party of smaller government?

That’s all changed.

And as for the Democrats, when they aren’t being corrupt and ineffective, they are advancing a socialist cause that threatens to grow government even bigger and to restrict so many of our freedoms.

As a Libertarian, I know I don’t have to convince you of the value of our work!

My friend, we have excellent opportunities in several benchmark states, and I believe that once we clear this gigantic hurdle that is ballot access, we will be able to move forward toward the critical 2008 elections with great momentum.

Our goal of having ballot access in 50 states may still be a few years off due to rising challenges, but I believe we will get there soon.

Recently, North Carolina has been a top priority…and a good example of what we have been up against. While voters have been allowed for several years to register publicly as Libertarians, in 2005 we were “decertified” as a party. There, the state raised the threshold for party recognition, and in the process they even sent letters to our members telling them they were no longer part of a recognized party!

Volunteers from across the Tar Heel state have collected thousands of the needed signatures and we are hiring temporary help to get the rest. In fact, we have been able to get an excellent bargain and are paying a very low rate of just one dollar per signature acquired. And the best news of this situation is that we are in a position to regain a long term position on their ballot in 2008.

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Earlier this week I received an informative letter from Wes Benedict, the current executive director of the Libertarian Party of Texas. It covers several different topics, including candidate recruiting for the upcoming 2008 elections, the recent “Roundup Tour” of 25 Texas cities, the effects of the Ron Paul campaign, next year’s national convention, and the usual appeals for donations and membership renewals. For any aspiring Libertarians out there who may want to run for an office or simply request more information about the Texas LP, please contact the state party at www.tx.lp.org. Meanwhile, you can read through the latest update letter below:

Dear Texas Libertarian:

The candidate filing deadline is rapidly approaching, and so is our party’s end-of-year campaign finance reporting date.

Please return your Candidate Preference sheet and make a financial contribution today as well. If you aren’t yet a member, now is a great time to join.

Our 2007 fundraising is right on track for the first three quarters. We need a strong final quarter to meet our budget.

Our revenue budget for 2007 is lower than 2006 because typically it’s easier to raise funds in even-numbered years, which are election years with lots of candidates that generate excitement.

However, if by some chance we’re able to beat our 2006 revenue in 2007, that would be significant news and prove to the public and ourselves that we are experiencing strong growth.

(For those of you following the Ron Paul for President campaign, you probably know what I mean when I describe how fundraising success builds excitement and attracts media attention. It wasn’t what Ron Paul did with the money that made news, it was the fact itself that he raised so much money.)

I have a feeling we might surpass the 2006 level because recently our State Chair, Pat Dixon, started working the phones to raise large donations so we can hire a third staff member for 2008.

We’ll be busy in 2008 with lots of campaign activity going on, and with a third staff member we’ll be able to provide more service than ever to our candidates and county organizations.

Additionally, I’ve served as Executive Director for over three years now, and I might be leaving after the November 2008 elections. I want to have plenty of time to train new staff to ensure a smooth transition should I return to the private sector.

Whether or not Pat succeeds in raising enough money for a third staff member, we still need your financial help. Please send in the reply sheet with your contribution.

Candidate Recruitment

Thanks to our highly successful “25-City Candidate Roundup Tour”, our candidate recruitment is going strong. We’re already ahead of where we were at this time two years ago. We have over 40 candidates confirmed. But our goal is 250 candidates nominated in 2008 (we had 168 in 2006), so we have a long way to go.

Will you be a candidate? Running for office is one of the most effective ways to help build our party and get our message of more freedom and less government out to the public.

While some of our candidates run full-fledged campaigns geared at winning, other candidates don’t have the time or resources to run a big campaign.

That’s okay. We need you to be on the ballot even if you can’t spend a single dime on your campaign. If you tell us you’re willing to be on the ballot, but you won’t be able to run an active campaign, that’s fine. If someone else with bigger intentions comes along, we’ll let you know in case you want to step aside for that person.

If you want to see how having lots of candidates helps us, go to the “In the News” page on our website. You’ll see hundreds of news stories from 2006. These news stories covered our candidates all over Texas. Some of the stories from the beginning of 2006 were simply reporting on the fact that we had so many candidates.

Most of these candidates did not run active campaigns, but many of them were still covered by the media. They often had an opportunity to get a quote about liberty into the newspaper that they would never have gotten if they weren’t candidates.

The deadline to file is 5 PM on January 2, 2008, so tell us right away if you’re interested so we can get an application to you. Just fill out the enclosed candidate preference sheet.

Results of 25-City Candidate Roundup Tour

Our 25-City Candidate Roundup Tour was a big success and I’m exhausted! Pat Dixon and I visited 25 Texas cities in nine weekends and met with over 300 Libertarians and newcomers.

Pat has a full-time job, yet he took nine weekends in a row to travel all the way from Beaumont to El Paso, as far north as Amarillo and south as Brownsville, and lots of places in between. Texas is a huge state!

At these meetings, we explained the Libertarian Party and our party’s progress over the last several years. We answered many questions, and distributed a lot of literature and bumper stickers.

Many of the people who attended told us they really appreciated our visit, and often several people would stay after the meeting and discuss how they could improve their local organization.

We were especially pleased that we came across two more elected Libertarians we previously did not know about.

We met Larry Bush at our Temple (Bell County) meeting and found out he was elected to the Jarrell City Council on May 12, 2007. And, from a phone call to invite folks to the Amarillo meeting, we found out Brett Hall is currently serving as president of Miami Independent School District, and was first elected to the Miami ISD Board in November 2001.

I think this Roundup Tour was a great way to promote and strengthen our party throughout Texas, and I hope we’ll be able to do it again in future years.

An Update on the Ron Paul Campaign

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This essay by Jamie Austin explores the issue of whether or not there is a significant liberal bias in the news media. For the most part, I actually agree with it, although I probably would not have 20 years ago. With the relatively recent rise of (mostly conservative) talk radio, the Faux Fox News network, and the panoply of diverse views from Internet sources, the idea that news media as a whole is dominated by liberal bias has become rather stale.

Liberal Bias in the Media is a conservative catch phrase with users as diverse as radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, television pundits like Sean Hannity and Joe Scarborough, and even politicians such as Richard Nixon and George Bush. It’s a common phrase that is grossly misunderstood and exaggerated. First, what does it actually mean? Using a handy reference tool called a dictionary, namely the Fourth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the phrase can be broken down into its individual components as follows:

a. Liberal: Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
b. Bias: An unfair act or policy stemming from prejudice.
c. Media: A means of mass communication, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, or television. The group of journalists and others who constitute the communications industry and profession.

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The Libertarian Party products store LPStuff.com seems to have significantly expanded their selection of merchandise since I posted about them last month. This convenient e-commerce site has now added holiday greeting cards to its line of offerings, along with many other new items such as banners, necklaces, pendants, and an ever-growing variety of t-shirt designs. The latest email announcement from LPStuff.com is reprinted below:

We all love the holiday season: a time when everyone is joyous and willing to extend an act of kindness. The world seems to come alive with millions of lights and decorations hanging from windows to lawns.

As we try our best to be with distant friends and family during the holiday season, sometimes it just doesn’t work. A greeting card is a terrific way to send your holiday wishes far away.

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Elizabeth Brooks, the Volunteer Coordinator for the national Libertarian Party, is encouraging members to assist in Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts by using the party’s relatively new Ballot Base system. Ballot Base is an organized database of registered Libertarian voters that facilitates campaigns by allowing volunteers to place calls to people who are likely to vote for Libertarian candidates and reminding them that they need to go out to the polls on Election Day.

This year, the LP is awarding prizes in the form of gift certificates for LPStuff.com to the top callers. Details of this email notification on GOTV efforts are published below:

Dear Libertarian,

As you may know, this is a critical time of year for the Libertarian Party. The main objective of the Libertarian Party is to get Libertarian candidates elected to office!

On November 6, 2007, we have the opportunity to do exactly that. There will be state legislative elections, citizen initiatives, and a variety of local offices on the ballot. We must ensure that our candidates are successful this year!

One of the easiest ways to do so is to use our most efficient tool for helping Libertarian candidates: LP Ballot Base.

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Shane Cory has sent out another letter informing us about the current status of the ballot access situation in Oklahoma. Apparently state legislators, in their continuing attempt to suppress any hint of opposition to the two-party system, are proposing even more unfair, unnecessary laws that would prohibit paying petitioners on a per-signature basis. This could become a problem for us because petitioners are normally paid according to their performance rather than a strictly time-based system. Having to pay these kinds of workers on a per hour basis would make it less likely that they would be motivated to actually collect signatures for us. Of course, this is exactly what the State is hoping for because it means that the chances of there ever being more than two parties on the ballot will be reduced even further.

Meanwhile, the petition drive by Oklahomans for Ballot Access Reform (OBAR) continues, and still needs significant funding in order to reach their goal of 100,000 signatures. Anyone who actually gives a flying horseflip about the opportunity to vote for candidates other than Republicans or Democrats is encouraged to donate, as success by OBAR would help all third parties and independent candidates, not just the Libertarians. Shane Cory’s explanation of the details regarding the Oklahoma ballot access issue is reprinted below:

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