Liberty for America, which came out for many years as a print publication, ceased physical publication last month. This month it came out in a much shorter, online-only version:
Liberty for America Monthly Report
January 2015
Welcome to the occasional publication of Liberty For America Monthly, now being produced for email distribution only to our wonderful subscribers.
This issue is an experiment. We’re using a different word processor, and the issue itself is being generated not by having your illustrious editor type but by your illustrious editor using a voice to text converter. I am talking at the computer and the computer is typing what I am saying. Those of you who once upon a time watched Star Trek may remember the episode in which the secretary in the 1960s encounters the remote visitor and his mechanical typewriter that takes dictation. It was almost as crazy as a car that could drive itself. Thanks to the triumphs of capitalism, these machines now actually exist. Science-fiction author David Weber reports that the typing software can actually take dictation at 200 words per minute, but that would require that I talk at two hundred words per minute, which is not my particular technical expertise. Also, proofreading of voice to text messages is not the same as proofreading typing.
The most significant news for the month is probably the national membership going down drastically. National Membership fell by 500 in the month of November and by another 900 in the month of December. These are not simply post-election post year drop-offs. For starters, the 2014 year created a very limited increase in the national party membership, so those people weren’t there to go away. The one large group that apparently did go away were some of the people in Ohio who joined for a year to enhance the size of the Ohio NatCon delegation.
There are two major email lists that discuss events on the national scale, namely the State Chairs List and the LNC list. Discussion has tended center on the state chairs list. It is noteworthy that the Nevada group resurfaced the Double The LP plan from 2012. That plan had significant merits, if you had the resources and four years to execute it. Execution was attempted with far more limited resources in a far smaller time.
Taking other news in something like chronological order:
The LNC put out a wonderful press release calling for the abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency. They were promptly attacked by Brett Pojunis, Nevada state chair, on the grounds that the proposal was 100% crazy. Pojunis demanded that the national party stop contacting members in Nevada. Oregon State chair Wes Wagner started pulling his members, who were highly supportive of the idea. He was promptly attacked by Nevadan Jason Weinman. Some readers will be welcoming what Weinman was doing on the state chairs list, in that he is not a state chair. We also encountered Scott Lieberman on the State chairs list. He is also not a state chair. He did, however, propose that I should be kicked off the state chair list by the LNC. We are unable to explain this phenomenon.
Wagner answered them: In a certain sense you have several choices. You can change your positions until the electorate supports you, and which point your party is no different from the Democrats or the Republicans. Alternatively you can present your positions in a way which convinces people to support you, in which case you move the electorate to your worldviews. The abolitionists did not win by campaigning for softer whips. There was an extended debate on the state chairs list. Most state chairs who said anything were more supportive of Wagner’s position than that of the Nevada position.
Jason Weinman of Nevada attacked your editor because your editor, as the state chair of Massachusetts, advocated recruiting more candidates. Weinman viewed recruitment candidates as a 40 year proven failure. He noted my remark that I had recruited someone to run for U.S. Senate in 2018, and spend the 35K$ or so needed to get on the ballot, and asked why I didn’t spend the money now. The notion that I should not be spending someone else’s money did not seem to arise. LNC alternate Daniel Hayes came to your editor’s defense. In particular, he noted that many people are far more willing to spend money on their own campaigns than on other things.
Readers will recall that the LNC spent several years arguing about honorary titles to be given to people who donated different amounts of money to the LNC. The implementation of these levels, rather the implementation of new levels since old levels already existed, had been put off for various reasons. Finally, all of the conditions for creating the new levels were satisfied, because we had a new building and fixed address etc. etc. etc., but it turns out that months later the new levels had not all appeared on the web pages or other locations. Executive Director Wes Benedict had the issue called to his attention by Kevin Knedler, and directed it to the attention of the LNC, claiming that there were issues that were areas of interpretation. In other words, years after the original motion was passed the new membership levels have still not been placed on the national party website.
Wes Benedict circulated the LNC a report showing that LNC fundraising letters and other efforts always have substantial positive return. Efforts to recruit new members work sometimes and do not work other times. Assertions that the LNC fundraising efforts are currently ineffective, in terms of bringing in money over cost, are clearly incorrect.
Our sources on the LNC note an interesting anomaly. The LNC sells a great deal through LPStuff. They are perfectly nice people, but they do not supply the LNC with the names or addresses of the people who are doing the purchasing. As a result, all of this interesting contact information is lost forever. This does not seem to be the world’s most brilliant and favorable contract for the LNC. Our source claims that the person who negotiated this contract for the LNC was also the person who gave a staff member a contract that provided that if the staff member would receive “3 months pay and relocation reimbursement in the event of termination for cause”. Your editor believes that the sort of management decision potentially has some modest relationship to the recent member ship changes that the LNC is experiencing. The LNC source did however express the opinion that recent LNC operations have been much better run.
Same guy.
What Shane said makes sense…our membership is tapped out. Plus for whatever reason there arelikely lots of folks who want to support us but cant join us for whatever reason, like alot of the RP Gopers,
p.s is that Shane from theBob Barr campaign??
We should be prospecting for both donors and members. They are different pitches with different targets. I pushed prospecting for years. The LNC is institutionally against it due to misunderstandings of the effectiveness of past pitches.
pf: I don’t think ideology is even close to being our biggest problem as far as membership goes at this stage.
me: LIke Glinda said in the Wizard of Oz: “It’s always best to start at the beginning.”
Flaws and corruptions at the beginning sew the seeds for the ultimate undoing of anything.
But I am open to an alternative theory….
Shane does make a good point about the anti-authority personality of the L community. That does make it even tougher to build something.
Have you proposed this to Nick and Wes? I can’t speak for them but I would think they would be interested, at least if there isn’t a big up front cost to get started.
I said donors not members.
The problem is pretty clear. The LP is not prospecting for new donors and when it does on rare occasions no one at the helm has a clue what they’re doing.
I could bring in 1,000 new donors next week — but not a single new member.
The lame statement of principles isn’t the issue, it’s much more straightforward of an issue and easy to resolve. People don’t join, especially anti-authority folks. But they will donate.
I don’t think ideology is even close to being our biggest problem as far as membership goes at this stage.
mp: Most LP members are not abolitionist NAPsolutists. and there are far more abolitionist NAPsolutists than there are LP members.
me: Right. There’s maybe 30 million Ls, and maybe 1MM abolitionist NAPsolutists. The founders, however, WERE abolitionist NAPsolutists, and they have poisoned the party as a vehicle for the much broader LM with NAPsolutist code words.
I’d agree with JP that “no chance of winning” also probably scares away most of the 30MM. Some non-abolitionist NAPsolutists join or stay as a vehicle to express themselves politically, overlooking the NAPsolutism in the foundational documents, with the cadre of NAPsolutists blocking any efforts to defringe the LP.
It’s also quite true that a large percentage of abolitionist NAPsolutists also don’t join the party, like the agorists, f’instance. Some NAPsolutists are also probably revulsed by figures like GJ and BB being the top of the ticket.
This dynamic leads to keeping the pond small and largely ineffective.
The dysfunction will likely continue as long as there are at least 2 very different approaches to L politics.
“There are many Ls, but only a tiny subset who challenge the cult of the omnipotent state. Many Ls, few abolitionist NAPsolutists.”
I don’t think that’s it, either. A large part of it is undoubtedly our failure to win elections. This is one of those Catch-22 things. We won’t win elections until we get more members, but we won’t get more members until we win elections.
I don’t think that’s it. Most LP members are not abolitionist NAPsolutists. and there are far more abolitionist NAPsolutists than there are LP members.
a: So why is party membership down?
me: There are many Ls, but only a tiny subset who challenge the cult of the omnipotent state. Many Ls, few abolitionist NAPsolutists.
Shane said: “On national membership, I’ve never seen a better time to prospect. It’s a buyer’s market. There is no reason the LP should not go into 2016 with an email list of at least a million names and 100,000 active donors — easy stuff.”
The party should be a lot bigger than this by now. The fact that it is not is in large part due years of mismanagement.
The word “libertarian” is now more popular than it has ever been. There are more people self identifying as being “libertarian” than ever. Libertarian Party voter registration totals nationally are at an all time high.
So why is party membership down?
George, good catch on LPStuff’s lack of data exchange. If it’s still the same folks I don’t think there would be an issue. Also data dumps were built into the first contract.
While LPStuff has been handled well, it should have never been arranged.
That went down at the same time as zero dues and was part of the attempt to kill the national party. They also attempted to outsource LP News but that failed.
On national membership, I’ve never seen a better time to prospect. It’s a buyer’s market. There is no reason the LP should not go into 2016 with an email list of at least a million names and 100,000 active donors — easy stuff.
I’ll second those comments. Thanks for your work, and for sending me each issue over the last few years.
But thank you for all your kind comments.
I will likely be doing the short version regularly.
banned?? pfft…libertarians shouldnt know the word
You were banned from the state chairs’ list? We may at times have agreed to disagree on certain issues, but I can’t imagine you doing something that would ban you from their list.
This state chairs “LSLA” has clearly gone down the drain.
Although I agree you probably have better uses for your time, George, I admit that I’ll miss your monthly watchdog report.
Agreed.
Thanks for the continued effort, and for all the issues of LfA over the years.
The last regular paper issue was December. I will be doing occasional electronic reports; I am not sure how often. The reports are much shorter than the magazine was. The magazine dealt reasonably well in my opinion with a certain set of issues, but those issues have faded. The current LNC does not have extended debates over, e.g., Starchild vs Mr. Starchild. It was some time ago that I received this nice email offering free political signs, forwarded to the State Chairs list, and was ejected from the State Chairs list by the then-Chair of the LSLA. This led to the current ban on LPMass officers participating in their ex officio identities in LSLA activities. There are current issues, but they are not the same.
Here’s a clip of a different woman, who can read the Gettysburg Address in 30 seconds, while enunciating very clearly. That part starts at approximately the 3:15 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM6zPikfOEs
I have seen a different clip where Moschitta is going much faster than that. In that commercial, I would say he’s probably going somewhere between 300-400, which is not that fast, although his enunciation is quite impressive. As for the woman, I couldn’t understand her, either; it seemed to be a problem of volume. She was very quiet, so it was hard to tell whether she was really enunciating, or just mumbling.
I can understand everything in the Moschitta video above, but very little of what the woman says in the last video, so I can’t say whether she is telling the truth about breaking the record in that video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzbnwASIFKU
Per wikipedia, the record is in the 600+ range.
That’s crazy fast. Really, anything more than about 400 is virtually impossible to understand, no matter how clearly the speaker enunciates, just because the listener’s mind usually can’t process information that quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_listening
John Moschitta, Jr., was listed in Guinness World Records, for a time, as the world’s fastest speaker, being able to talk at 586 wpm.[17] He has since been surpassed by Steve Woodmore, who achieved a rate of 637 wpm.[18]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M
If you like Tonedeff, you should check out a group he used to be in called Extended Famm. One of my favorites from them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1mfw8o516U
Per wikipedia, the record is in the 600+ range.
Auctioneering, debate, or what?
Debate.
Can any of you imagine him speaking at 200wpm? I can’t. 🙂
“I used to be involved in an activity where the ability to speak rapidly was very advantageous”
Auctioneering, debate, or what?
Thanks George.
A few minor glitches with the software recognizing the correct word (e.g., “welcoming” instead of “wondering”), but easy to figure out in context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U1nyw5x05w
Incidentally, speaking at 200 words per minute is not at all difficult. I used to be involved in an activity where the ability to speak rapidly was very advantageous, and I knew some people who could speak at over 500 wpm. In fact, despite growing up with a heavy Southern drawl, I was able to train myself to speak at over 400 wpm.
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2014/12/george-phillies-its-time-for-something-else/
Why did you decide to switch to this new format, George? I’m guessing it is cheaper and easier this way, right?