DownsizeDC helping the enemies of freedom

To comments@DownsizeDC.org:

I am a member of the California Libertarian Party Executive Committee and the 2006 LP Platform Committee. Since my Green opponent in my 2006 congressional race is a national leader of the 9/11 conspiracy movement, I had the misfortune of acquiring more expertise on 9/11 conspiracies than probably any other leader in the LP or the broader freedom movement.

I write to tell you that you're being duped by leftist enemies of freedom.

Yes, I know you say:

DDC) most of the conspiracy theories that have emerged are speculation, or worse, lunacy. [...] The American public has been turned off by these theories. [...] We believe Al Qaeda supplied the manpower and flew planes into buildings. We believe foreign policy blowback was the primary motive. We believe that it's about the questions: The Jersey Girls deserve an answer. (DDC

Nearly all the victims' families have already gotten an unprecedented per-victim average payoff of $2.3M of taxpayer money, in exchange for which they agreed not to pursue legal action. The 9/11 conspiracy movement will never be satisfied with the independence of any investigation official enough to have subpoena power. If you want well-indexed answers to the conspiracists' questions, see http://911myths.com/, http://debunking911.com/, and http://www.jod911.com/. That your "background" page gives no hint of such resources suggests that you're more interested in cynically pandering to anti-government paranoia than in answering questions about 9/11.

During my campaign I prepared my own set of Questions For The 9/11 "Truth" Movement. If you're serious in saying that "it's about the questions", then you'll ask ask such questions of the conspiracists, and link to such resources on your background page. If you're serious about the questions you ask, then you'll post links to the answers that are already available from public resources. If you don't know how to find them yourself, I'll do it for you. You ask:

DDC) Why had the US military defenses, particularly NORAD, failed to stop any of the four hijacked planes, particularly when the plane crashes were separated by nearly two hours? (DDC

http://911myths.com/html/stand_down.html

DDC) What about the lack of response, both by the President, who sat in a public school in Florida after the second plane had struck, and his Secret Service detail, whose standard procedure is to grab the President and move him to safety, the morning of 9-11? (DDC

http://www.911myths.com/html/bush_on_9_11.html

DDC) Why have the 9-11 emergency recordings and tapes, plus 500 interviews done of the Fire Department, right after 9-11, been withheld from the public? (DDC

They haven't. http://wcbstv.com/national/topstories_story_228010652.html

DDC) How is that when we have the largest structural collapse in US history and the largest loss of life since the Civil War, not one Congressional official wants to know how this happened? (DDC

NIST conducted an exhaustive investigation of the collapse, and their massive report explains how it happened in excruciating technical and scientific detail.

DDC) Why was a potential suicide-pilot/conspirator who turned himself in nearly a year before 9-11, plus intelligence about hijacking American planes from fourteen nations, plus the Bush-requested Presidential Daily Briefing of August 6, ignored? (DDC

The conspirator was not a pilot. The FBI interrogated him for three weeks in 2000. The FBI criticized British authorities for not making him available for the 9/11 investigation. http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38448

Intelligence about hijacking threats wasn't simply "ignored", but intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 have already been exhaustively documented. See pp. 344-348 of the 9/11 Commission Report, and more details at http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq36.html.

http://www.911myths.com/html/august_6_memo.html

DDC) Why did the Justice Department, based on a FBI threat assessment, begin flying the Attorney General and other department officials by private charter jets, as reported by Dan Rather, CBS News, on July 26, 2001? (DDC

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/15662785.htm

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=4701

DDC) Why was Osama bin Laden, Al Quaeda, and their Taliban supporters, allowed to escape first to Jalalabad, then to Tora Bora, and ultimately into Pakistan? (DDC

There were disputes over how many troops to use in the battle of Tora Bora, but it's ludicrous to suggest there was a deliberate decision to allow OBL and al Qaeda to escape. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tora_Bora

DDC) Why did the administration first block, then stall, then hamstring, and only then, stubbornly cooperate (if you can call it that) with an investigation? (DDC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_your_ass. Do you really think subpoenas are going to turn up any answer other than this?

DDC) Why did only about 30% of the questions provided by the Family Steering Committee get asked and answered by the 9-11 Commission? (DDC

Of the 51 original FSC questions, the overwhelming majority have answers that even casual web-searching can find, just as I did for your questions above. Pick any five, and I'll answer those as well. Better, yet submit them all to the tireless webmasters of the anti-conspiracy sites I listed above, and see how fast they all get answered.

Anti-War Doesn't Grow The LP

It's not easy for an alternative party like the LP to do large-scale empirical research on possible political strategies. Exit polls ignore us, and government officials don't like to re-run election-day procedures to answer empirical questions (unless they're Democrat appointees on the Florida Supreme Court). So if, for example, you wanted to to use election results to measure the anti-war issue as a way to grow the LP, you would need back-to-back elections in which 1) the first election established a relatively large baseline for the available third-party vote in a war-free context, and 2) the second election was a wartime election between two major-party candidates who both favored continuing the war and who faced the same alternative candidate who had established most of the previous baseline.

Amazingly, this is precisely the scenario that happened in 2000 and 2004. Ralph Nader received 2.9M votes in 2000 from voters who were presumably anti-war and clearly willing to vote third-party. Another 450K votes went to Pat Buchanan, the darling of anti-war ex-LP paleolibertarians like Murray Rothbard and antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Colin Hunter (who all had been leaders with Rothbard of the LP's Radical Caucus in the early 1980s). Those 3.35M votes should have been available to the anti-war candidates in 2004, because both major-party candidates favored continuing the war that had started between the elections. Together Nader and Green rival Cobb reclaimed at most 580K of those 3.35M, but Badnarik improved on the 2000 LP presidential vote by only 13K! Even the tiny Constitution Party was able to add 46K to its total, a nearly 50% increase. Thus when about 2.6M anti-war third-party voters rejected Nader/Reform/Constitution to choose among 1) the pro-war major parties, 2) the anti-war LP, and 3) NOTA, the LP attracted only about 1% of them-- whereas 100% of them would still have been only 2% of all voters! It's hard to imagine better empirical evidence that emphasizing our anti-war position is not the best way grow the LP.

Understanding the origin and psychology of that position helps explain why the LP emphasizes it over others -- like privatizing education and healthcare -- that have no Green/Dem/GOP competition and that will still correspond to growing national crises long after lame-duck Bush and his entanglement in an Iraqi civil war are a distant memory. A large component of the explanation is the sincere belief that governments throughout the world, and even the American government throughout its history, have demonstrated insufficient ability to reliably choose military interventions that increase liberty instead of decrease it. Another significant component is that the Vietnam War and the Draft were monumental issues to the generation that founded the LP, and the institutional anti-war memory remained in the LP even as important radical anti-war leaders left it. (Some, like Rothbard lieutenants Bill Evers and Emil Franzi, later ended up supporting the Iraq war in their post-anti-war incarnations.)

But there is a fundamental ideological reason why opposition to war is considered by LP radicals to be the most important issue. The military defense of liberty is the textbook example of what in economics is called a "public good" -- a good that markets will underproduce due to the Free Rider Problem and that thus needs tax financing. Anarcholibertarian dogma denies this textbook market failure, and so zero-coercion absolutists have a deep need to deny that any net good could ever be done by a tax-financed military.

This could explain much of why anarcholibertarians are so peculiarly revisionist about e.g. the Civil War and World War II. It would undermine my hypothesis if we could find significant examples of 1) revisionists about these two wars who don't oppose all tax-financing of defense, or 2) opponents of all tax-financing of defense who admit that a tax-financed military could do or has done some net good in a war. The only possible example I know of is Ron Paul, whose borderline exception proves the rule. Paul defends the use of some coercive taxes (excise, not income) to finance the military -- although you might not know if from his recent appearance on the Daily Show, where even a TV comedian was able to instantly identify the national defense exception to Paul's blanket call for privatization, and force the former LP presidential candidate Paul into a muddled backpedal. Paul is indeed something of a war revisionist, but he voted to approve the use of the tax-financed military against those nations that aided or harbored the planners of the 9/11 attack -- and is criticized for doing so by zero-coercion anti-state absolutists.

As Lawrence Samuels wrote in CF: "To accept the legitimacy of the state is to embrace the necessity for war." On antiwar.com, Samuels opined that "technically, any taxpayer paying federal taxes can be considered an accessory to murder if they support involuntary taxation." Samuels resoundingly defeated the arguments of strawmen who claim "any resulting collateral damage is considered acceptable because the war is being waged for a good cause". In response to Samuels' quote of the Bourne aphorism that "war is the health of the state", Saddam Hussein's neck might reply that aversion to war is the health of the tyrant. Anti-war absolutists argue that wars have been a ratchet mechanism for the size of government, but a graph of the ratio of government spending to GDP shows otherwise. It shows only two short-term doublings: the peacetime doubling in the early Great Depression was sustained, but the WW II spike was not. Subsequent wars disappear in the noise of the growth of the nanny state.

Samuels said that "Iraq has never had a democratic government in its 7,000-year history, or possessed any grassroots movements advancing the concept of liberty." But America had in Kurdish Iraq a ten-year existence proof that the U.S. military could replace Saddam's tyranny with an commendable level of stability, prosperity, and self-determination. America achieved its objectives of 1) eliminating any WMD capability or international terrorist infrastructure, and 2) deposing Saddam's regime in favor of a federal democratic constitutional framework designed to protect minorities and fundamental human rights. By early 2004, polls showed that a majority of Iraqis believed "things were better now than they were before the war" and that "Saddam Hussein's ouster made it worth any hardships." What these Iraqis (and Cassandras in America) failed to predict was that sectarian strife was to develop into a bloody Sunni-Shia civil war and negate much of the value of achieving objective #2.

Reasonable liberty-lovers can disagree over whether a conjunction of self-defense and humanitarian arguments could justify the U.S. overthrow of Saddam. The crucial question is whether the duty of a liberty-loving polity to defend human liberty vanishes completely at lines drawn on maps by statists. Some very principled libertarians say it does, but it's hard to see how that position is liberty-maximizing.

Flames Of Freedom: cash awards for LPCA outreach efforts

Outreach to non-libertarians has its own rewards, but the Flames of Freedom initiative is now sweetening the deal. Each calendar quarter, we will add up the outreach points scored that quarter and award

• $100 to 1st place
• $50 to 2nd place
• $50 to each of two others chosen by random chance weighted by their score that quarter

Full details are at http://marketliberal.org/LPCA/FlamesOfFreedom/. All you really need to remember is this:

• Any time you perform some outreach to non-libertarians, cc: a copy (or send an brief note) to FlamesOfFreedom@yahoogroups.com.
• Any time you send libertarians an action alert or a notice of an outreach opportunity, cc: a copy to SparksOfFreedom@yahoogroups.com.

To increase your odds, check out the Flames of Freedom point values for various kinds of outreach, and also this activist's toolbox for contacting your local media and your elected representatives, investigating their campaign finances and voting records, monitoring legislation in Sacramento and D.C., etc.

To get things off to a running start, I've been monitoring LPCA forums this quarter to build a (presumably incomplete) table of outreach efforts I've noticed. The current leader board is below. (To encourage a broad base of activists, ExCom members and elected officials are ranked but are ineligible for the prizes.) If you know of outreach efforts that aren't yet in the table, feel free to add them yourself or just send me the details.

Name	Points	Eligible for Prizes
Rider, Richard	330	Y
Starchild	230	Y
Applegate, Boyd	200	Y
Griffiths, Travis	200	Y
Harrison, Harland	200	Y
Knittel, Anthony	200	Y
Newell, Richard	200	N
Orlando, Donna	200	Y
Samuels, Lawrence	200	N
Baehr, Dan	200	Y
Takenaga, Kevin	200	N
Thomas, Jesse	200	N
Benoit, Michael	200	Y
Campbell, T.J.	200	Y
Graham, David	200	Y
Holtz, Brian	60	N
Westwell, Norm	50	N
Getty, Ron	50	Y
Edelstein, Michael	15	Y
Power, Rob	10	Y
Berg, Philip	10	Y
Brierly, Elizabeth	10	Y

California Freedom: LPCA Convention

The LPCA gathered at the San Ramon Convention Center the weekend of April 21. The weekend was packed with interesting panel discussions, but having an infant and two other young children at home required this reporter to limit his attendance to the weekend business sessions only.

Saturday morning business was devoted to the Bylaws Committee Report. Delegates voted to codify the Bylaws Committee's practice of doing its work early, and to require 2/3 approval for any later changes. The Judicial Committee was made a two-year office that may hold meetings by voice or video conference. Delegates rejected a proposal to let counties set their own membership requirements and make them set and collect their own dues, despite outgoing Chairman Aaron Starr's personal offer to donate $15,000 to the counties if it passed. A proposal was passed to allow each Executive Committee (ExCom) member to sponsor for convention credentialing a member who would otherwise be too new to be seated. Also passed was the elimination of county apportionment of convention delegates, so that any 90-day-tenured member will be automatically seated at conventions. The time allotted for Bylaws work finished with only 11 of the 24 Bylaws Committee proposals having been considered. At the lunch break, the count of credentialed delegates hit its official peak of 101, compared to 91 at the 2006 convention.

The officer elections started with the Chair race. Kevin Takenaga, who had been database chairman and Santa Clara County Chair, lead a slate who promised to emphasize municipal- and county-level politics and coalitions. Takenaga won handily over the self-nominated James Ogle, 83-3-4. Takenaga emphasized the need for coalition building, noting that it "doubles our manpower". His top priority will be development of county parties, since counties are "where all the action is at". He wants local Libertarians to "reach out to people within your own community", and pointed out that "everyone agrees with us on something -- half agree with half of our positions, the other half agree with the other half".

Outgoing Northern Vice Chair nominated his successor Richard Newell, the hero of the Libertarian Perspective media relations effort. Before being elected by acclamation, Newell gave an impassioned speech arguing for a bottom-up approach to LP electoral politics. He said the experiences of Badnarik and Smither in 2006 show that "the public is not ready to vote for us" even when our candidates have big-time money or the "perfect storm" of a write-in opponent with a hard-to-spell name. "The public is not going to put us into higher office until we've proven we can govern effectively at lower levels first. Let's get real." He cautioned that there would be no LP landslide victories in D.C. or state capitols, and pointed to Ocean View school board member Norm Westwell as a model of local success built on the hard work of speaking at public meetings and building credibility in municipal politics. He said "all the heavy lifting has to be done at the county level", and that the LPCA should monitor Sacramento and do just the things that require economies of scale.

Zander Collier won Southern Vice Chair by acclamation, as did Beau Cain for Secretary. Outgoing Secretary Dan Wiener received a richly-deserved standing ovation at the beginning of the Secretary election. In winning Treasurer by acclamation, Don Cowles added a little spark to what was the fifth straight effortless victory. He began his speech by dramatically and silently taking James Ogle's map of California's 12 virtual mini-states and setting it up near the stage -- then suddenly stopped and said "I scared you guys, didn't I?"

The election for Executive Committee were next, with the top five winning 2-year terms:

Ted Brown 70
Camden McConnell 61
Laurence Samuels 58
Brian Holtz 53
Mike McMahon 52
Matthew Barnes 51 (wins 1-year term)
Bruce Dovner 46
Jesse Thomas 40
Starchild 33

The Judicial Committee was chosen to be Bob Weber, Allan Hacker, Dan Wiener, Rick Nichol, and M Carling (later elected JudCom Chair). The ExCom Alternates election chose Chuck Moulton and Jesse Thomas. Moulton is the national LP Vice Chair, and was fortuitously available for a 1-year alternate slot because he will be spending the next year at San Jose State U. in a master's program in Austrian economics.

During the Sunday afternoon business session, the credentialed delegate count was 99, and the exits were informally guarded to help maintain a quorum of 49. This meant that any two or three delegates could block changes to the Platform, which requires 2/3 of those voting but 50%+1 of the credentialed delegates. The room agreed to call for repeal of the federal Real ID act, but declined to oppose 1) any wall or fence on California's border with Mexico, 2) incarceration upon arrest when there is no immediate physical threat from the accused, 3) holding reporters in contempt for not revealing their sources, or 4) deployment of US armed forces beyond America's borders.

There were no resolutions offered for consideration, and the penultimate item of business was the announcement that a contract had been signed to host the 2008 convention on a cruise the weekend of April 18 from Los Angeles to Ensenada. Informed that we were $188 short of raising $5000 in donations this weekend, Starr inspired the delegates to cough up many tens and twenties, and then persuaded Takenaga to empty his wallet for the cause. Retiring Chair Aaron Starr then handed the gavel over to incoming Chair Kevin Takenaga, in front of a dozen cameras and the loud applause of delegates grateful for Aaron's six years of service.

The new Executive Committee met after the convention adjourned. Executive Director Angela Keaton will be managing California Freedom, with Libertarian Perspectives contributor and LA County LP Vice Chair Tom Sipos being retained as editor. Bruce Dovner and the two ExCom alternates Chuck Moulton and Jesse Thomas were nominated to fill the three ExCom vacancies created by the election of Newell and Cowles and the resignation of M Carling to allow his service on the Judicial Committee. The three were elected without objection, as they were the top three vote-getters among ExCom candidates who finished "out of the money" (as Dovner put it). ExCom deferred the filling of the two alternate seats to a future meeting, but voted in an Operations Committee consisting of the five executive officers. The ExCom passed resolutions thanking the convention committee and the outgoing officers, and set the next ExCom meeting for Saturday June 9 in San Diego.

LPCA Convention Day 3

During the Sunday afternoon business session, the registered delegate count hovered around 99 (compared to its peak of about 105), and we almost had to lock people in to maintain our quorum of 49. This put us in the interesting situation that any two or three delegates could block changes to the Platform, which requires 2/3 of those voting but 50%+1 of the registered delegates. Nevertheless, we gamely pushed forward with consideration of the Platform Committee's report.

Item 1 called for repeal of the Real ID act, and passed. Item 2 successfully fixed the apparent contradiction between opposing all strict liability and supporting it for on-the-job injuries, by changing the latter language. Item 3 was to oppose any wall or fence on California's border with Mexico, and failed. Item 4 was a proposal by Starchild to oppose incarceration upon arrest when there is no immediate physical threat from the accused. The delegates were sympathetic to the principle, but were not willing to write on the floor the language that the proposal should have already had concerning questions of bail, crimes of violence, etc. Item 5 was to oppose holding reporters in contempt for not revealing their sources. I was willing to support this only with an exception for the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to have subpoena power, saying "if a reporting is hiding the name of the witness who can save me from the death penalty, I want that reporter to sing". A few other delegates had even firmer objections, and so this item failed too. Item 6 corrected "is comprised of" to "comprises". Item 7's call for proportional representation and multi-member districts was overwhelmingly rejected. Enough delegates opposed item 8's language about deployment of US armed forces beyond America's borders.to cause it to fail too.

There were no resolutions offered for consideration, and the penultimate item of business was the announcement that a contract had been signed to host the 2008 convention on a cruise the weekend of April 18 from Los Angeles to Ensenada. Informed that we were $188 short of raising $5000 in donations this weekend, Aaron inspired the delegates to cough up tens and twenties, and had easily reached the $5K mark by the time he persuaded Kevin Takenaga to empty his wallet for the cause. Retiring Chair Aaron Starr then handed the gavel over to incoming Chair Kevin Takenaga, in front of a dozen cameras and the loud applause of delegates grateful for Aaron's six years of service.

The new Executive Committee met after the convention adjourned. In public comments, Jonathan Zwickel discussed his complaint to the Judicial Committee concerning the current dues structure, and Aaron Starr responded that he was still willing to defend the ExCom in that case on the grounds of its clear dues-setting power under Bylaw 5.1.C. He also said he will be continuing to work on the conversion from MYOB to DonorPerfect and QuickBooks, and on compiling the mailing addresses of all elected officials in the state. Executive Director Angela Keaton reported a 2% return rate on a recent renewal mailing, and that work proceeds on integrating DonorPerfect with the web site's order-taking feature.

ExCom voted to offer Tom Cipos a three-month trial as editor of California Freedom. Cipos is Vice Chair of the LA County LP and a contributor to the Libertarian Perspective. Keaton will be supervising Cipos, in lieu of having a Communications chair. The ExCom also voted to get a price quote for switching CF from color to black and white. The ExCom then thoroughly discussed Zander Collier's proposal that it should obtain business cards for each member. I asked Keaton how many times she's used her business cards, and she answered that they've been very useful in making it seem that the LP is not merely a hobby. Chuck Moulton sensibly suggested that each member absorb the cost by arranging to get his own cards, but Kevin said that the cards should be consistent so that we look like a team. It's not clear to me who is going to be comparing the cards of ExCom members, except perhaps the prospective donors that Cowles said should be wooed by ExCom pairs. (As I said before being elected, I'm primarily going to be fund-raising from myself and my wife, and business cards won't help my case very much there.)

Bruce Dovner and the two ExCom alternates Chuck Moulton and Jesse Thomas were nominated to fill the three ExCom vacancies created by the promotion of Newell and Cowles to officers and the resignation of M Carling to allow his service on the Judicial Committee. The three were elected without objection, as they were the top three vote-getters among ExCom candidates who finished "out of the money" (as Dovner put it). ExCom will fill the two alternate seats at a future meeting.

Incoming Treasurer Don Cowles reported that our fixed administrative expenses (rent and salary) are about $3500/month and that ExCom members will need to help him fundraise. He urged everyone to contribute via the LPCA Coffee Club.

Starchild arrived and made his by-now-traditional attempt to move a chair up to the Committee table from gallery seats along the wall. Moulton, Brown and I wanted to explore an alternative to ordering him back to the wall, but as he Starchildishly inched his seat back in response to the order, the episode devolved into farce, and Kevin got back to business once Starchild was sufficiently far from the table.

Ted Brown and the balance of the five officers were nominated to join the Chair on the Operating Committee. The secret ballot was Newell 12, Cain 11, Cowles 10, and Collier and Brown tied at 7. Travel plans called Brown and Dovner away before the subsequent runoff was won 6-4 by Collier.

Cory Nott was chosen as the California rep to the national credentials committee, with Cam McConnell made the alternate after Moulton suggested the need for one. McConnell will also be the initial coordinator for the 2008 LPCA convention. Dan Minkoff will be taking over the reins of the Libertarian Perspective from Newell to clear Rich's plate for his Northern Vice-Chair work.

Moulton requested the first of two or three time extensions to discuss the 2008 convention cruise contract. It has a fixed $2500 cancellation penalty, and each ExCom member was given a chance to express his opposition to floating conventions. Moulton's objection centered on the need for a passport, but Dovner suggested that the rule might be relaxed before the cruise. McConnell complained that the 2006 cruise didn't have many speakers and didn't allow communal LPCA dining, but suggested this may be different next time. Brown defended a convention cruise only to the extent it was better than no convention at all. I said that I enjoyed the 2006 cruise, heard more guest speakers there (1) than I heard at the two 2007 lunches (0 - guest speaker Rod Long canceled), and favored any venue that (like a boat) could lock delegates in and prevent a repeat of today's embarrassing quorum problem. (McConnell himself had earlier requested an apology for the absence from the Platform debate of the incoming Chair, Southern Vice Chair, Treasurer, and Secretary, prompting Takenaga to apologize to Starr.) I also pointed out that this weekend's landlocked convention had barely any more delegates than the cruise convention. Rich then claimed that $5000 was spent to promote the cruise compared to nothing for this weekend, but in the March 2007 P&L statement for 2006 I only see $2355 in convention expenses and $3506 in convention revenue.

The ExCom passed resolutions thanking the convention committee and the outgoing officers, and set the next ExCom meeting for Saturday June 9 in San Diego.