They ARE worried about Gary Johnson, and here's the evidence

I've already noted in an earlier post today that some business communities are actively organizing to combat libertarian candidates.

The interesting news keeps coming:

Gary Johnson appears on Fox
Business: plans to take votes
from both candidates.

Fox Business gives Gary Johnson a 9:00 interview (sorry, couldn't get it to embed; go here) and Neal Cavuto spends at least five minutes pressing the former New Mexico governor to admit that he will at best be stealing votes from Mitt Romney, and if he actually wins a state could be responsible for sending the country into "a constitutional crisis."

Governor Johnson snaps back, "Or a constitutional celebration."

Johnson is then told that mentioning marijuana he's marginalizing himself.

Given that Fox News is GOP Central, we can begin to see the major Romney response emerging: a vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Barack Obama, and he's a druggie nutcase.

As I noted yesterday, it is also possible to construe the Joe Biden/Arne Duncan comments on marriage equality to be a way to insult the President against Johnson's simple stand for marriage as a civil right.

ABC News has run with one of the first post-convention stories, which calms my initial fear that the MSM would give the Libertarian candidate a flurry of news for his nomination, then refuse to cover him for the next two months, and then announce that, of course, he wouldn't qualify for the debates.

But the story goes in a somewhat different direction, and they actually talk about the Gary Johnson/Jim Gray campaign strategy. This should be required reading for anybody who supports the ticket:

Strategically, Johnson is forgoing a grassroots campaign, and concentrating instead on national media attention to gain traction.

"The focus will always be on most bang for no bucks," Johnson said. "Most time will be spent on the phone with someone like yourself."

---snip---

For his ground game, Johnson has a small staff of about 25 full-time campaign employees, some of whom work for free. To coordinate his message, he has enlisted the services of Roger Stone, veteran Republican strategist and former Nixonite, and Christopher Barron, chairman of the conservative gay organization GOProud. The team is banking on receiving as much as $5 million in matching federal election funds, and plans to capitalize on Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul's legion of passionate supporters once he steps out of the Republican race.

"Any right-leaning marketing person in the world knows how to take $5 million in seed money and turn it into $15 million," Stone told Yahoo News. "It's just not that hard, particularly once the Ron Paul candidacy comes to an end. Johnson will have both message and resources."

Johnson does not expect an endorsement from Paul, a politician with whom he shares near identical public policy views. But he's counting on Paul followers to boost his support, assuming many will refuse to vote for Obama or Romney come November.

Meanwhile, HuffPo breaks out Ian I. Mitroff (with the heavyweight credentials of Adjunct Professor at UC Berkeley) with a post Why I am Not and Will Never Be a Libertarian! To ensure our health and safety, we need to get tough on crisis-prone companies!

What this post mostly is about is not Libertarianism or Gary Johnson, but pimping Mitroff's new book on why we need more government regulations to prevent crisis-prone companies from killing us.

In fact, in the entire article, Mitroff only uses the word Libertarian ONCE, to say he won't be one, as if that fact is somehow connected to the rest of his thesis.

Of course, Mitroff completely misses the point that in eight years as Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson did not gut regulatory enforcement and create massive ecological disaster.

The only reason that I am dealing with this idiotic piece is not that it has anything to do with Libertarianism (it doesn't), but because Professor Mitroff figured he would get more hits on search engines with the word Libertarian in his title than with "crisis-prone" companies.

He's right--it got his post picked up by Google News--and that's a positive for Gary Johnson supporters.

We can afford to have them saying bad things about us.

What we cannot afford is to be ignored.

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici

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