Tuesday, January 30, 2007

That's how rumors get started ...

File under "bizarre, but interesting:"

I just got off the phone with a friend in Hollywood, who tells me that she's heard from another Hollywood source (here we go, a friend of a friend) that Susan Sarandon is considering seeking the Libertarian Party's 2008 presidential nomination, with ... get this ... either husband Tim Robbins or friend Sean Penn possibly throwing in for the VP slot.

Reliable? Who knows? Impossible? I don't think so. Sarandon has a record of financially supporting third parties (not the LP, the Greens and Natural Law), and third party/independent candidates including Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders. It wouldn't be the first time that third party flirtations have been followed by an LP involvement.

She might be a hard sell to libertarians, but she does have some libertarian-leaning credentials:

- Anti-war, of course.

- Pro-choice (of all her documented political contributions, the most frequent have been to the pro-choice PAC "Emily's List").

- Anti-war-on-drugs activism.

- Narrator of the outstanding documentary on American political prisoners, Through The Wire, among other "political media" projects.

As for myself? Very mixed feelings (I have a candidate I support already)... but if it's true, it's the biggest "celebrity candidate" possibility that's popped up in my memory.

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Saturday, January 27, 2007

Five by five for Kubby

Disclosure: I work for Steve Kubby's presidential campaign as a volunteer in the position of communications director. This post is not a paid ad, nor am I receiving financial compensation/restitution for contributions to the campaign which may result from it. To the extent that it may be regarded as an "in-kind" contribution to the campaign on my part, I value it, in line with recent "pay per post" blogging I've done, at $10.

Steve Kubby's response to the State of the Union address went up on his campaign web site before George W. Bush had left the Capitol building, and while US Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) was still delivering the Democratic response.

The "response to the response" brought our web server down as thousands of Digg readers hit the site at the same time to hear what Steve had to say. We logged more than 5,000 unique visitors in the timeframe immediately around the crash -- we don't know how many got turned away during the outage.

We'd planned on launching our first "public" fundraiser shortly, but events have pushed it up. Here's the real thing, to which I hope you'll respond, but I'll cover the high points right here, and stick in the clickables, too.

Bottom line: Steve Kubby's proving, every day, that he's a "serious candidate." Now we get to find out how serious you are. The people who follow these things estimate that the "major party" candidates will each spend about $500 million or more on the 2008 election. Call it a million dollars a day between now and November, 2008.

We're not asking for a million dollars a day for 500 days. We're asking for a thousand dollars a day for five days. That's not a drop in the bucket to Republicans or Democrats, but it's enough to ratchet the Kubby campaign up to the next level of activity.

I've already told you about the tremendous response to the State of the Union piece. We need a better web server, because that's going to keep happening.

The campaign's first two radio commercials have been recorded and are in post-production. Some time in the next few days, we'll be making them available to Libertarian candidates to use in their own campaigns ... and we want to air them ourselves, too.

Steve announced his candidacy in front of a crowd of 50,000 in Seattle, and campaigned in Washington for LP Senate candidate Bruce Guthrie. He spent several days in Colorado in November, campaigning for Amendment 44. He's been attending Libertarian Party and non-LP public events all over California. He's already confirmed that he'll be attending LP conventions in Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico and California in February, March and April. That's just the beginning. We have plans to send him all over the country ... but plane tickets don't buy themselves.

Steve's made three radio appearances in the past week. More requests are already coming in and we're proactively seeking more such opportunities. By this time next month, we'd like to have him giving three radio, television or newspaper interviews a day, and then up from there. While these affairs don't have built-in costs, they do have overhead. Specifically, the travel described above. It's a lot easier to get Steve on the air in Boise or Baltimore if we can tell the media that he's going to be in Boise or Baltimore.

Oer the years, I've heard lots of Libertarians say (sometimes in the comments of this very blog) that we need a $10 million presidential campaign. I agree. That's a bare minimum to be really effective.

So, how do we get to $10 million?

We get there $10 and $50 and $100 and $2,100 at a time.

And where do those $10, $50, $100 and $2,100 contributions come from?

Well, from you, of course. What, did you think there was a campaign fairy?

This next $5,000 will let us do the things we need to do to raise the $10,000 after that. That $10,000 will let us do the things we need to do to raise the next $50,000. And so on, and so forth. But it starts here, and it starts with you ... if it starts at all.

Here's the skinny:

Contributions or gifts to Kubby for President (FEC #C00428698) are not tax deductible. Business, corporate or individual contributions are welcome. Contributions are limited to $2,100 per person, or $4,200 per couple, for the primary election, and again for the general election. A husband and wife may make a contribution from a joint checking account in an amount of up to $4,200 if both spouses sign the check Credit card contributions are permitted up to $2,100 from the credit card holder.



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Contributing By Mail

Make checks out to "Kubby for President." Per FEC regulations, we ask that you note your employer/occupation on the memo line or let us know about it in a separate note. Here's the mailing address:

Kubby for President
17415 Ocean Drive
Fort Bragg, CA 95437


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Thursday, January 11, 2007

Austin Cassidy does it again

In the beginning, there was Third Party Watch, and it was good. Really. It still is. Check it out.

And on the third day, Austin Cassidy did rear back and pass a new miracle, Liberty Loop. And it was even better, because it's like, all libertarian, all the time. Cool.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

This is a test ...

... of the Kn@ppster Insurgency Broadcast System.

I've been meaning to do two things: Look for, and test, a blog-embeddable MP3 player, and promote The Sloan Ranger. Two birds one stone, then. Here's the embed:

Update 01/11/07 -- This didn't work out too well. The next time I posted, the damn "player" embed copied itself into the new post as well. That could get weird. So, I'll try again another time, and pursue some of the suggestions made in comments. Still, check out The Sloan Ranger. He's hosting Bob Barr on Monday, January 15th.


Let me know how it works for you. It's a Google gadget and apparently associated with their Gmail service, but a bunch of people immediately saw how easy it would be to use in all kinds of places. Or so they say. I guess you'll tell me if "they" were wrong. I've listened to the clip by downloading it, but I'm not sure how well this player will work at my (dialup) connections speed, and I have an inkling there may be encoding issues that arise as well.

If you're interested in running clips like this on your blog, drop a comment in. They're probably going to become regularly available at a rate of a few a week -- sort of mini "best ofs."

"The Sloan Ranger" is Lloyd Sloan, a long-time friend. His show runs live weeknights from 5-7 pm Central Time on St. Louis's WGNU 920 AM (and on the web, of course).

Lloyd's an interesting guy, with interesting guests. Last night, he had Jacob "Bumper" Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation on the show. Tomorrow (Friday, 6:15 pm CST), it's Judge Jim Gray, former Libertarian candidate for US Senate from California, and author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It: A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.

Lloyd doesn't have only libertarian guests, of course, but he does have a lot of them (he's a former chair of the Missouri LP, but eschews the national party's oath for reasons he'll be glad to explain) -- and who says a guest has to be a libertarian to be interesting? He also doesn't throw softballs. He's a thinker (Hah-vahd-educated, if I'm not mistaken) and he knows his history. Try to slip a made-up fact in on him, and he's likely to nail you. Listen. Call in. Tell'em Kn@ppster sent you.

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Wednesday, January 03, 2007