North Carolina ballot access and party registration = Demopublican facism

I'm sure that Ryan McTeague Beckwith of the Raleigh News and Observer thought this was funny:

The number of registered Libertarians has more than doubled.

But don't get too excited — it's only gone from 5 to 11.

As recently as Monday, the State Board of Elections reported only a handful of people registered to the political party, which was only re-recognized in late May.

Deputy elections director Johnnie Mclean said that the state board only recently got the forms together to allow people to re-register, so it will take a while before the party bounces back.

No word yet on whether Mike Munger is one of the 11.

And I'm positive that Dr Michael Munger, the Libertarian candidate for North Carolina governor is pissed:

1. Even though we spent $200,000, plus all those volunteer hours, the state does not yet have the forms to register. I just downloaded the forms the Wake County BoE, and even their ELECTRONIC forms are not yet changed. How long does it take to upload a new form? It is just a few BLOCKS from the SBOE to the Wake County BoE. They are just not trying. Why isn’t that the news, Ryan? Why don’t you have a post that says, “State drags feet, prevents Libertarians from being able to register.”?

2. There were 13,000 registered Libertarians in the state of NC in 2005. They were stripped of their registration by the state. The state is supposed to restore those registrations. But they are not going to do that, because they say that too much time has passed. Why do some people (Ls) have to register multiple times, and others (Rs and Ds) only once? How many Rs and Ds would have reregistered, do you think, within a week of learning that they had been stripped, and had to start over? Why isn’t that the news, Ryan? 13,000 registered Libertarians are denied a basic right, even after their party has done everything the state says they must do, to qualify?

3. The League of Women’s voters claims that they want to make sure candidates are legitimate before allowing them in the debate. But:

a. I had to spend $200,000 to get the signatures. Same signatures we already got 7 times previously!

b. We have to pay filing fees, but the state will not allow us to have a primary. So, no publicity and no chance to campaign. The Rs and Ds get millions of free dollars of ads.

c. I tried to put up some road signs. State highway workers took them down as soon as I put them up. I asked one guy. He said, “We only leave those up near an election.”

Why isn’t that the news, Ryan? How can I campaign? I poured all my money down a rathole, and the state won’t honor its commitment to reinstate previous registrations. And when I do put up road signs the state takes them down. I don’t even know what the rules are. As soon as we pass one hurdle, the state makes up another one.

Why isn’t THAT the news?

This is outrageous, to the point of being anti-American.

I'm working on what can be done about it from a distance. Obviously, here in Delaware, where Delmarva Power owns half of our legislators and the Governor feels free to veto an eminent domain bill, we're not doing a hell of a lot better than the Tarheel State. I don't expect the North Carolina authorities to give a damn about people outside the State, when they really don't care about democracy for their own citizens.

But this is not an issue that should just concern Libertarians: doesn't the diminishing of democracy for those we don't agree with diminish us all?

At the very least, for my non-Libertarian friends in the Delaware blogosphere (who have all always supported open government), I hope some of you will stop by Mike Munger's website and let him know you're as outraged as he is.

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

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