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Libertarian Party Suit Could Mean A 3-Party Debate
v4mpyr writes "The lawsuit initiated by the Arizona Libertarian Party against the ASU and CPD has been successfully scheduled for a hearing. If the CPD cannot present a decent case for excluding Michael Badnarik from a private debate funded by public sources, they will have to exercise one two options: Let Michael Badnarik debate this Wednesday or reschedule and relocate the debate. Either way it will be a major win for the third parties. The official press release can be found here."
Badnarik is on the ballot in AZ, along with Bush and Kerry. The debate is in AZ, with AZ taxpayer money. Logically, then, it seems like he should be in the debate. But then again, I want Badnarik to embarass the hell out of Bush and Kerry. I'd feel the same way if it was Ralph Nader or any of the other third-party candidates. I want any third-party candidate in there to show the public how nearly indistinguishable the two major parties are these days.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Just because Libertarians can be really annoying at parties doesn't mean that they shouldn't have a voice in political debates. Count this Democrat as very pleased that the Libertarians may be included in the debates. This is tremendous victory for them, AND for our country as a whole. Inclusiveness is a goal that we have been moving towards for 228 years, in all aspects of our society. This can only be a good thing.
Now, all I have to do is figure out a way from keeping them from bringing up Ayn Rand at my next party as they hang out at the punch bowl...
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Second, I would suggest that getting the third party candidate on the debate is probably silly. However, I would suggest that the other alternative, of not using government/tax payer money is a grand idea. It's just silly that the Democrats and Republicans can run debate and then use public money to finance the damn thing. It's silly. They can easily put up the money themselves.
I know I'd be unhappy on a tax payer in that state. Finally, getting a third party candidate wouldn't be a bad idea, if only because it could introduce a lot of the public to a third party candidate for the first time in a long while. Other then Ross Perot, I don't believe there has been a legitimate candidate in my life time. I'd love to see them get a chance to be on prime time. They have a lot of good ideas, and can challenge the existing candidates from another point of view. If only to see how the major candidates respond to them.
Kirby
The debate is being run by a taxpayer funded school, and the state constitution explicitly forbids tax money to go to be used to benefit a political party. So federal law has little to do with it, it's a state constitutional issue, and he's likely to win.
Badnarik's arrest was a publicity stunt, but this on the other hand is real news.
At least FOX is censoring its guests. They cannot mention Badnarik on the air.
I emailed one person in question directly here is his reply:
I am the Muslim Outreach Coordinator for the campaign of the Libertarian U.S. presidential candidate Michael Badnarik. On August 20, a staffer for the O'Reilly Factor television show pre-interviewed me for an appearance to give an opposing point of view to O'Reilly's guest Muhammad Ali Hasan, founder of "Muslims for Bush." On the way to the studio to tape the program on August 26, however, I received a call from O'Reilly's staffer informing me that although I would be identified as a Muslim supporter of Badnarik, I must not mention the Libertarian Party or Badnarik's name on the air. I assured the staffer that I would not turn the segment into a Badnarik campaign ad, but objected that preventing me from mentioning Badnarik's name even once would muzzle my main point that one need not support Kerry to oppose Bush. The staffer insisted that I make the point without mentioning either Badnarik's name or that of the Libertarian Party. When I declined to accept these terms, the staffer had the driver they hired take me home.
Another local Muslim with no connection to the Badnarik campaign, Khalid Turaani, was hurried to the studio to take my place. On the air, O'Reilly sought to rebut Turanni's criticism of Bush with criticism of Kerry. Turaani spontaneously replied that, as a conservative, he would never vote for Kerry and intended to vote for the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. Watching this turn of events at home, I was reminded of a verse in the Qur'an: "They plotted their plans and God made His plans, and God is the best of planners."
Yours truly, I. Dean Ahmad, Ph.D. Bethesda, MD
below is the link where i first found the story.
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/09/26/ed.co l.nathan.0926.html
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Well, arguably depending on your age you may have never seen a real presidential debate. since 1988 they have been little more than staged press releases.
I've seen many debates on a smaller scale that involved more than two people, and they worked fine. I agree there has to be some arbitrary limit, but 2 seems awfully restrictive, especially when you take into account the two total losers we ended up with. 3 or 4 would at least give you better odds on seeing someone actually worth voting for, rather than against.
Finkployd
If the debate were allowed to pass without a decision, wouldn't the Libertarians lose standing to bring the suit, or something? This doesn't seem to be a case where you can simply compensate the Libertarians financially after the fact.
>but the chance is 99% that a Democrat or Republican will control the White House for the next four years.
YES! Exactly. You get it. Only ONE of them has a chance of winning. The people who say that Libertarian Michael Badnarik has no chance of winning have forgotten that on November 3rd either Bush or Kerry will NOT be the elected President!
All the Repugnicrats are talking like it is their candidate who is going to win. Probably because if they don't they'll just complain about it for four years anyway. Hooray for the moderate party.
>Given their differing views on foreign policy, taxation, gay marriage, and abortion
Last time I checked, taxation is still legislated by Congress - Bush's tax relief had nothing to do with us paying the bills. It just made more debt for our kids.
Gay marriage is not federally regulated (except the union of Bush and Kerry)
In MY state we've defined marriage as the union between one man and one woman, but our State Constitution fails to define gender. (constitutional crisis, anyone?)
and the POTUSA hasn't had a THING to do with abortion laws since Roe vs. Wade. (Unless you count promoting more abortions by locking up access to various birth control drugs.)
Shouldn't the differences and debates between the candidates actually have something to do with the powers of the President and scope of the office? Many of the Debate Topics rank up there, PRESIDENTIALLY, with boxers vs. briefs and Coke vs. Pepsi.
I'm ready to put the Government on a DIET.
Mike Bellman - MikeMac Specialist
Columbia, MO
"The voters are free to ACCEPT us or REFUSE us, but to be ignorant to us is to believe the LIE that there are only two evil choices. The power of an American Revolution is still possible with the vote."
I would argue that our current system resembles Mexico. There were (and are) differing factions of the PRI but they all stand for the same things when push comes to shove. Republican and Democratic congressmen promote and vote for the same socialist programs every year. We could simply merge them under the name "Cummunitarian Party".
I guess the Libertarian party only believes in hands-off government when it works to their advantage.
This is the Libertarian Party we're talking about, not the Anarchist Party. Libertarians aren't necessarily about having NO government, just the least government necessary.
Anwyay, as it is we have a system, laws, taxes, etc. in place... and while Libertarians would seek to make some fairly progressive changes in some of those areas, we have to work within the system in order to change it. It's not hypocritical, it's pragmatic.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
The Constitutions of most states clearly establish a two party system.
Interesting... I've never heard of such a thing. Would you mind posting a few snippets of the relevant sections of a few such State Constitutions, for our elucidation? And maybe a list of a handful of States that have such clauses in their Constitutions?
Not a troll, I'm seriously interested to see this info, as it's news to me.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Slashdot posts stories about "fringe" CPUs too.
Amongst: Intel, AMD, Transmeta, IBM POWER, SPARC, VIA etc, it's unlikely that Transmeta will "win". But it still gets more than its market share worth of "broadcast" here, whenever there's something remotely interesting going on.
Having competition can help keep the regular winners from being lazy or even colluding.
It's almost like having the American Idol thing but only giving the bulk of air-time to two competitors who the organizers think have the best chances. After all the other competitors chances of winning are "statistically indistinguishable from zero". Well in these sort of cases such actions will be sort of self-fulfilling right?
Y'know even IF it's all a setup, at least you people should make the System go through the proper motions as if it isn't a setup. It makes for a more enjoyable and "believable" Show.
That said, it sure looks like many people don't mind watching a crap show. As is the Show's not just insulting their intelligence, it's taking a baseball bat to it.
Don your tin-foil propeller hats, everyone...
Woudn't the White House just as soon skip the third debate? But that would look bad. Aha, here are the Libertarians trying a court case - we can just let them spoil the whole thing, and we won't lose face.
I don't think they'll let the Libertarians in on the debate.
I think they'll cite logistical reasons not to move the debate.
I think they'll cite logistical and timing (not enough) reasons, as well.
I think they'll just cancel the debate - or let's say, "fail to be able to negotiate specifics for a rescheduled, relocated third debate."
The debates have been at least in-part a matter of "Bush damage minimization," because public thinking-on-his-feet isn't his strong suite. Actually, there were statements up-front that the Bush campaign was going to try and define Kerry, just like the Clinton campaign defined Dole. At the very least, the debates give Kerry a chance to get up and speak for himself. Whether that damages him in your eyes or not, they are his words, and not the Bush campaign putting words in his mouth.
I don't think anyone expects to see a Bush slam-dunk out of *any* of these debates. I don't think they really put the courts or Libertarians up to this. But I don't think they mind the thought of having the third debate get cancelled, in the slightest.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Pretend you are in jail on death row. You find that you have a 50% chance of lethal injection, 45% chance of the electric chair, or 5% chance of escape... which would you vote for?
A more accurate analogy would be
50% chance of lethal injection
45% chance of life in prison
5% chance of escape
Most will vote for life in prison, hoping to tip the scales. In 2000 I voted for escape in both the presidential election (Nader) and the Missouri Senate seat (yes I voted for a dead man rather than Ascroft). As a result, Ashcroft ended up with a promotion, and W took us to war. This time I'm going with life in prision.
It would go something like this:
Badnarik: .......Something meaningful......
Kerry: That's preposterous! My party's bottom line is to find and kill the terrorists with other people's troops, while ours can have dinner with their spouses.
Bush: It's hard work, being president. The witch-doctor told me to "oooh eee ooh ah-ah, ting tang, falla walla bing bang."
And the masses of American lemmings will oooh and ahhh with the two mindless dopes that are vying for control, and be upset with the stir caused by Badnarik. Yes, I'm a cynical American, and I hate the choices presented by the dems and the 'pubs.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
let's look past the question of whether Badnarik should be allowed into the final debate. Let's ask ourselves what would happen if he were.
The final debate was, by the original agreement, to be on the subject of domestic and economic policy. This is so far a subject which has gone mostly uncovered in the debates. Only the first debate was meant to be explicitly on foreign policy, but both the vice presidential and townhall debates were dominated by discussion of foreign policy, and more specifically discussion of Iraq. Both of these debates began with discussion of Iraq, and all the most firey and attention-grabbing portions were during the Iraq portions. The domestic halves of these two debates were a bit more cursory and did not delve into the details of economic policy.
Meanwhile, economic policy is where the Kerry campaign's true strength is. It is easier to make the Bush campaign look bad over Iraq, but it is not in any way easy to make the Kerry campaign look good over Iraq. Economic policy, however, is an area where the Kerry campaign has a chance to make itself look actually good. Kerry can point to distinct policy differences and make a legitimate argument that these differences would result in real improvement. He just needs to grab the public's attention somehow. Since the last few weeks have been utterly dominated by discussion of Iraq both inside and outside Kerry's campaign, however, there has not been a chance for this to happen.
Kerry has a chance to swing the national debate over to domestic and economic policy at least for a little while in this debate. Since Kerry did not begin to heavily harp on Iraq until shortly before the foreign policy debate, it is likely Kerry will take this opportunity. The debate also offers Kerry a chance to convince the country to briefly sit down and listen to his economic views. Meanwhile, the domestic policy debate offers no positive opportunities to the Bush campaign. The best Bush can hope for is to ramble about marriage and small business owners enough that he can distract viewers from what Kerry is saying; he has no points of his own to score. The question is not whether Bush or Kerry will benefit from wednesday's debate. The question is how much of Kerry's benefit from Wednesday's debate Bush will be able to blunt.
If Badnarik gets his order granted, this becomes moot. The final debate will suddenly have an unplanned random factor plunged into it enough to totally disrupt the debate. Not only would Badnarik's mere presence in the debate be a distraction from the two candidates there, but his input and any obligation on the part of the major-party candidates to respond to it would effectively prevent discussion on the subject of which of the two major-party candidates would offer a better economic policy. Kerry could still attempt to outline his economic policy. Viewers would not pick up on it. It would be lost in the chaos.
My conclusion: Allowing Badnarik into the debate would be a serious impairment to the Kerry campaign, and have little to no effect on the Bush campaign. The Kerry campaign would lose its one given opportunity to outline to the nation a major plank of its platform. The Bush campaign would neatly get to opt-out of a potentially embarrassing debate. This would be a disastrous result for Kerry's chances of winning and an extremely positive result for Bush's.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
*Sigh* If you disagree with the points I made refute them... simply restating the case using the bold tag doesn't make for a very convincing argument.
I'll try again. The university is not ENDORSING anybody. It's hosting a debate put on by a private organization. That organization has opened the debate to ANY candidate, from ANY party that exhibits a sufficient level of public support to be considered a serious contender. There is nothing intrinsically partisan about doing so. You may think that they should invite any candidate, or any candidate that fulfills some lesser qualification that just by coincidence happens to include your candidate. But a judge isn't going to find such limitations to be partisan because strictly speaking they aren't.
The Libertarian party's failure to find support is THEIR problem. If their views were REALLY as popular as they thought they WOULD find sufficient support to show up in the polls, get some media attention, etc. Their complaint is ultimately NOT with the debate commission, the university, the state, not even with the media that won't cover them... it's with the voters that won't support them.
Sorry, you lose. Time to feed the troll heartburn-causing food again.
If this debate was being held on a private university, the suit would have been tossed. That's one of the reasons why this suit wasn't filed on the first two debates. However, the argument is that since the AZ Constitution prohibits the use of public facilities for partisan political activities, and since prohibition of one of the three parites on the ballot makes it partisan by being against one of the three, it's a problem. Furher, as I have pointed out in other posts, the CPD is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which under IRS rules cannot endorse candidates OR be partisan in any form. The only way to be non-partisan is to include them all, as a DC court has recently ruled. IF the AZ court finds that the CPD is being partisan, then the status of the CPD is thrown into doubt and the whole house of cards comes crashing down at the federal level.
You also fall into the trap that the CPD put forward, that only candidates with enough "public support" can get in, and that support is gauged by polls that are rigged to only mention their candidates anyway, which isn't accurate, so the requirement becoems self-fulfilling. Then you complain about why a lot of the public has not heard of the LP? Where do you think the D/R party would be if the media blacked them out? Why does Nader get so much press, especially in states where he isn't on the ballot!, when he is on less ballots than Badnarik and enjoys less support? It makes no sense UNLESS there is something deliberate going on.
So the problem is that nobody hears of the LP, nobody covers them because nobody has heard of them, and nobody has heard of them becasue nobody covers them, and the cycle continues unabated, simply becasue most people don't have the time to do their own research to fidn out simply because they are too busy busting their a$$es to make ends meet to satisify the ridiculous tax burden imposed by the D/R party. Then they compound the insanity by voting for the schmucks who tax them so much in the first place!
This is the uphill battle we have to deal with, and people like you don't help any and actually contribute to the problem (and your own bankruptcy!).
foreign policy - bush invaded afghanistan and iraq, kerry supported invading and iraq
taxation - both keep most of the current tax code - kerry to raise taxes slightly on the richest
gay marriage - both against it
abortion - yep, i guess they're different here, although i had difficulty deciphering kerry response in the debate
patriot act - bush proposed it, kerry voted for it
IP law - no difference
stay frosty and alert
how exactly is a third party candidate supposed to garner 15% support if NONE of the major polling & media is mentioning, asking, or offering our candidates as actual CHOICE
By getting to the minimal amount of support that gets them to start paying attention to you. It's not the polling organizations job to do your marketing/campaigning for you. It's not the governments job to force them to. It's YOUR job! Your failure to do so is not THEIR fault. Ralph Nader is mentioned by name in almost every single major poll. His campaign is getting fairly decent coverage (considering his poll numbers) in the major media. Stop whining and looking for an electoral handout. If you can't find a way to break through and get the coverage you crave that is nobodies fault but your own. Other third parties have done it, your failure to do so is YOUR failure to do so.
But, politics are too complicated for lots of choices.... the LIE that there are only two evil choices
These two statements display the fundamental failure to understand the current system common to third-party advocates. In this election cycle there were ELEVEN major candidates with a decent chance of victory representing a reasonably wide variety of views. (Kerry, Edwards, Dean, Clark, Sharpton, Kucinich, Gephardt, Lieberman, Braun, and Bush). To be fair that list tilts toward many "progressive" choices but not many libertarian or conservative ones - because Bush was a consensus candidate from that axis established four years earlier when the choices included (Bush, Alexander, Bauer, Keyes, Dole, Forbes, Hatch, McCain, and Quayle as well as Gore and Bradley) - Plenty of choices there. Badnarik could have been among them, it's that he couldn't WIN and that he didn't bother trying. The hard-core, doctrinaire, uncompromising Libertarian position just isn't shared by enough people to get a majority of the votes. It COULD compromise with other factions with which they agree on SOME general principles and build a winning COALITION - but they are too pure, to ideological, they refuse to compromise to a degree sufficient to get support beyond those very few voters that agree on almost every particular. Consequently the 1-2% support they get at the polls is a pretty accurate reflection of their actual support. If you demand ideological purity you will only get the votes of the ideologically pure... sadly for you that is only a tiny fraction of the electorate that is not worth the bother of including in the polls or in most news stories.
When you are serious about winning 50% +1 vote and willing to make the compromises required to get all those people with diverse views to vote for you come back and complain about being shut out of the system. While you are shutting YOURSELF out don't whine to me about how "unfair" it is.
Of course, that assumes that the claims aren't just dismissed out of hand, regardless of the law.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples