Gary Johnson Gets Serious

The 2012 Presidential Primary Calendar (12/20/10)
With the Nevada GOP's action last week -- setting the date of the party's 2012 presidential primary caucuses -- the big board is in need of an update. Here again are the guidelines for reading the calendar from the last update from June: Caucus states are italicized while primary states are not. Several caucus states are missing from the list because they have not formalized the date on which their contests will be held in 2012. Colorado appears because the caucuses dates there are set by the s...

New Jersey places dead last in list of business friendly states
New Jersey often plays second fiddle to neighboring New York, but a new survey of the 50 U.S. states shows the Garden State bested New York in having the least favorable tax climate for business. It's the second consecutive year New Jersey has finished dead last, according to the 2010 State Business Tax Climate Index released this week. How does New Jersey do it? In addition to having the country's highest property taxes and among the highest individual and corporate income taxes, New Jersey ...

CNN-tea party debate raises eyebrows - Kenneth P. Vogel
They have some things in common – the need to rebound from recent woes, and to carve out identities against fierce competition – but CNN and the Tea Party Express would seem like unlikely Candidates for a partnership. In fact, Friday’s announcement that they will co-host a Republican presidential debate for early September, 2011, in Tampa seems like a risky play for both. Continue Reading Text Size - + reset Politico 44 For CNN, the joint sponsorship seems to undermine the...

Previewing Tuesday's reapportionment
Mark Murray writes: Tomorrow, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its population totals and determine which states gain Congressional Seats and which states lose them in the next decade. Late last week, the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman previewed what to expect from this reapportionment, which also will impact the 2012 electoral map. For some states, there isn’t much suspense. Georgia, Nevada, and Utah are all but certain to gain an additional seat in the House, while Iowa, Louis...

Release The Gerrymander!
South Carolina is likely to gain a seat in the U.S. Congress when the Census Bureau releases its official 2010 state population totals on Tuesday .. a pick-up which would give the Palmetto state seven Congressional Districts for the first time since 1933. But where would the new district go? And how would its creation impact the state’s existing six congressional districts? On Friday, the Cook Political Report released an interesting analysis of South Carolina’s possible redistrictin...

Jeremy Bird: Organizing for America: Looking Back & Moving Forward
This past weekend--buttressed by an incredible outpouring of support from LGBT and Democratic Activists, OFA supporters, and other progressive volunteers--the United States Senate voted to Repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The historic vote on Saturday ended more than a decade of sanctioned Discrimination in our Armed Forces and fulfilled a longtime priority for President Obama. At the same time, the vote showed that Democratic activists will not give up fighting for what's right after the Novem...

2012 Asked Another Way
Due to a bunch of requests, I’m putting this up this way so you can pick from the full slate of Candidates. I have not added people like Chris Christie and Bobby Jindal because they have been fairly adamant that they are not running and are giving every hint in private that they are not running. Consequently, I’m leaving out an “other” category as well. This will also prevent the Gary Johnson v. Ron Paul fight in the other category. In any event, here you go: ...

Ron Paul not ruling out 2012 presidential run, says decision to come at beginning of the year (Daily Caller)
On Sunday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” 2008 Republican Presidential Candidate Rep. Ron Paul, a Libertarian favorite, addressed his 2012 prospects. He told NPR’s Guy Raz that a presidential run is still a possibility. “Well, it’s possible and I haven’t ruled it out, so I’ll probably be deciding at the beginning of the year,” Paul said. “And people ask me if I think about it a lot and I do because a lot of people ...

Ron Paul Attempts to Pork out on American Taxpayers
The anti-pork, anti-tax-hike, anti-IRS, anti-Fed Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul has a dirty little secret: he is a pork-spending Bureaucrat who stuffed the latest, and now defunct, $1.3 Trillion dollar Omnibus Bill with $8 million dollars in Earmarks.  This should come as no surprise to anyone who looks at these bills.  Ron Paul has snuck pork into already inflated stimulus packages American Taxpayers and the country cannot afford. Paul, who demands every earmark must be examined with abso...

Lo and behold, December 20 lives in infamy | Michael Tomasky
The Weekly Standard chose an interesting day to post the Haley Barbour story. Dennis G. of Balloon Juice makes the nice catch of reminding us all that: Perhaps the Nit Diddler is in the news today to help celebrate the 150 Anniversary of South Carolina's act of Treason that put the Nation firmly on the path to Civil War. Yes! I'd forgotten about this story I read a couple of weeks ago: NAACP members and supporters plan to hold a peaceful march in downtown Charleston the day of the ball, on Dec. ...

The South Has Risen!
Ta-Nehisi Coates sends us to The State, of South Carolina. Kudos to The State: Secessionists were clear about their cause: Slavery: ONE HUNDRED fifty years after our state seceded from the United States, precipitating the Secession of our sister states and, ultimately, the Civil War, there is heated disagreement over just what that Secession and war were about. Those who insist that it was fought over slavery and those who insist that it was all about our state preserving its rights as a state...

New govs take office amid historic budget crisis
FILE - In this Nov. 3, 2010 file photo, Ohio Republican Gov.-elect John... NEW YORK (AP) - Twenty-six new governors will take office amid the worst Budget climate for states in a generation. Many of them are promising not to raise taxes, even though states face a cumulative Budget shortfall of $140 billion next year. State lawmakers across the country have been cutting budgets for the past few years because of the poor economy. So when new governors take office in states like New York, Califor...

Get Ready for 'the Amazing Apportionment Machine'
How excited are you about the political impact of the decennial Census results that are coming out tomorrow? Well, the U.S. Census is all aflutter about the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and has put together a jazzy little video about what's going to go down. Key take home: What's happening tomorrow is apportionment, the distribution of the 435 House seats between the 50 states. That will be followed over the course of the year by redistricting, which is the much more ...

On the Bubble: 10 States Await Tuesday Census...
On Tuesday, U.S. Census Bureau officials will unveil numbers that will determine which states gain House seats and which states lose them in the once-a-decade reapportionment of Congressional Districts--and in the process launch a high-stakes political round of musical chairs. For the next year, powerful members of Congress will be nervously consulting computerized maps and wooing their political juniors in State Legislatures in hopes of guaranteeing that their districts are not drawn out from u...

New Issue of TAC
As usual, the new January issue of TAC has many excellent articles and columns that I recommend to everyone. There were a couple of these that especially caught my attention. Bill Kauffman writes on Bob La Follette and Bob Dylan in the context of Upper Midwestern antiwar Activism, and bids adieu to outgoing Wisconsin Sen. Feingold. On a related topic, Chase Madar explodes the enduring myth of interwar “Isolationism” and identifies the political tradition that produced many of the c...

Obama Lobbies GOP to Back START Pact
(WASHINGTON) — President Barack Obama tried to sway reluctant Republican senators on Monday to back a new Arms Control treaty with Russia as GOP aversion to giving a politically damaged president another victory intruded on his National Security agenda. The White House and senior Democrats expressed confidence that they had the votes for the accord that was signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April. The two countries negotiated the New START pact to cap nuclear weapon...

Dems beat back GOP efforts to alter arms treaty (AP)
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama tried to sway reluctant Republican senators on Monday to back a new Arms Control treaty with Russia as GOP aversion to giving a politically damaged president another victory intruded on his National Security agenda. The White House and senior Democrats expressed confidence that they had the votes for the accord that was signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April. The two countries negotiated the New START pact to cap Nuclear Weapons...

Yea, Murray!
Writes Ernest Curtis, MD: Thank you for reprinting the article “Do You Hate the State?” by Murray Rothbard. As usual, his brilliant insights and his talent for expressing ideas so clearly have helped me crystallize my own thoughts on the subject. I always found many of the writings and speeches of certain Libertarians to be vaguely unsatisfying but really didn’t understand why. Murray cleared it up in the first two paragraphs of this article. I now realize that the source of ...

Reflections on a Metaphor, by Arnold Kling
On p. 114 of The Symbolic Uses of Politics, Murray Edelman writes, Force signals weakness in politics, as Rape does in sex. Some reactions to this metaphor: 1. This suggests that there is political power that is not based on force, but is based on consent. Dan Klein's essay on Overlordship touches on this issue. I believe that President Obama sees himself as the duly appointed officer of the overlord. This overlord is the collectivity called "the people" or "the state." It is one big voluntary...

GovernmentRntUs
To oppose government provision of such things is not to be “against” such things.  Many people - including myself - share Mr. Lutz’s wish that every American enjoys Unemployment Insurance, safe foods, safe mines, scientific research, high pay, affordable Health Care, and all the other advantages of modern commercial society.  What we don’t share with Mr. Lutz is his assumption that these benefits can be provided only (or best) by government.  Th...

Taxation and Slavery
My LRC article today, “Taxes and Slavery: A Parallel,”  has generated quite an email response by its readership.  I would like to add a couple of additional clarifying observations.  Libertarians must truly today become the new abolitionists.  We must never concede the moral high-ground of our position that taxation is equivalent to slavery.  This slavery sustains the American welfare-warfare state and its empire (enabled by the Fed) which enci

The most ambitious effort of any author...to promote laissez-faire ideas to a black audience
As I noted last month, the historians David Beito and Linda Royster Beito have published a fascinating article on the “laissez-faire antiracism” of Libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane. Thanks to David Beito, that article is now available online [pdf]. Here’s the opening paragraph: The ideals of liberty, individualism, and self-reliance have rarely had a more enthusiastic champion than Rose Wilder Lane. A columnist and popular author, she held firm to these beliefs during the New Deal and

Dem campaign arm targeting Bass already
New Hampshire Republican Charlie Bass hasn't even taken his seat yet in the U.S. House and already the political arm of the Democratic Congressional Caucus is targeting his seat in 2012. That's the word from a Politico piece that said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee gearing up its Candidate recruitment program for the 2012 cycle, sketching out a list of Battleground districts where high-caliber nominees could flip seats into Democratic hands. That includes the 2nd Congressional D...

Quote Of The Day - Barney Frank
“It’s one thing to have a gay person in the abstract. It’s another to see that person as part of a living, breathing couple. How would a gay Presidential Candidate have a celebratory kiss with his partner after winning the New Hampshire primary? The sight of two women kissing has not been as distressful to people as the sight of two Men Kissing. [And because of DOMA] it’s not clear that a gay president could use federal funds to buy his husband dinner. Would his partner have to pay

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Funds Raided By States To Balance Budgets
CONCORD, N.H. — Two of the 10 Northeast states that agreed to dedicate millions of dollars to reduce Carbon Emissions and promote green energy have reneged on their promise, instead diverting substantial funds to saving their Budgets. New York and New Jersey over the past year have raided accounts set up under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first mandatory U.S. cap-and-trade program for Carbon Dioxide. The accounts were created to pay for Energy Efficiency programs aimed at ...