Press "Enter" to skip to content

April 2017 Open Thread

By on April 1, 2017 8:00 PM

Our monthly open thread. Post news tips about alt parties and independent candidates, discuss any story that should be posted here but has not yet been posted, or even delve into completely off-topic stuff…just avoid quarantined thread subject matter and things that could get us and/or you into legal trouble such as threats, libel, and copyright infringement.

News tips can also be sent to the IPR writers who have chosen to make their contact info available at https://independentpoliticalreport.com/about/.

Our videos this month, an IPR Open Thread tradition:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_9jBXSPaBE

52 Comments

  1. paulie paulie May 1, 2017

    Thanks for the heads up

  3. paulie paulie April 30, 2017

    https://theintellectualist.co/cato-right-wing-terrorists-have-been-behind-73-of-all-attacks-resulting-in-death-since-911/

    The ongoing controversy and litigation over the Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” has reignited a debate that has raged since the 9/11 attacks: Who commits more domestic terrorism–violent Salafists or traditional “right wing” extremists? According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, it’s the latter and by a very wide margin. From p. 4 of GAO’s report:

    Of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).

    But as researchers at the Georgia State recently reported, media coverage of terrorist incidents makes it seem as if terrorism is almost exclusively perpetrated by Muslims:

    We examined news coverage from LexisNexis Academic and CNN.com for all terrorist attacks in the United States between 2011 and 2015. Controlling for target type, fatalities, and being arrested, attacks by Muslim perpetrators received, on average, 449% more coverage than other attacks. Given the disproportionate quantity of news coverage for these attacks, it is no wonder that people are afraid of the Muslim terrorist.

  5. paulie paulie April 28, 2017

    I’m already in their crosshairs so my best bet is probably to make everything about it as public as possible in case anything happens.

  6. paulie paulie April 28, 2017

    May be an article later, already emailed to IPR writers

    https://amthirdpartyreport.com/ is getting another reboot. At the moment I am using it to post Invictus-related articles, since there was some pushback with having so many on IPR. At some point soon I will make them into a compilation article on IPR as has been suggested by Tom and Jill and then not post anything about it for a while or just add to the compile article.

    Right now the admins are Cody Quirk, Joshua Fauver and myself. William Saturn is still signed up to write but apparently has been demoted because he added Chris Lesiak back, according to what I was told. The current owners do not want Chris back in any way shape or form for a variety of reasons.

    I know several of you were previously signed up there and it looks like you no longer are. I can sign you up again if you want, just ask. Rules are pretty much the same as at IPR, except that there is no rule against self-publishing your own editorials directly to the site as articles.

    Also, for anyone who did not catch the story:

    At some point I think last summer or fall Chris teamed up with someone named Max Dickstein which oddly enough turned out to not be a fake screen name but a real person and the grandson of a congressman and marginally semi-famous 9/11 survivor. Dickstein took over ATPR, kicked off people he did not approve of (including me) and announced he was running for LNC Chair. He then had a falling out with Chris in short order, as well as a falling out with Augustus Invictus, who he had been a volunteer for. Then, very shortly after that, Dickstein disappeared completely, as far as I can tell, on election day in November. Maybe Invictus sacrificed him and drank his blood? Not that I have any evidence for this or anything, but I would not be surprised if Invictus did something like that, or blew up a federal building, or had women chained in his basement, or all of the above…

    And, speaking of Invictus and friends, at least as of yesterday Ryan Ramsey seems to have removed the two libelous articles about myself, Warren, IPR, etc from his Libertarian Heathen site.

    As one LPF member (I’d have to look up who it was and probably not worth the effort) said on FB….

    I personally know one supporter of his [Invictus -p] and I won’t publically name them or what I’ve learned of them, for safety’s sake. I will say that anyone standing up against the goat fucker is brave and better be armed. He and all of his ilk are deranged and dangerous.

    This has been this morning’s edition of as the alt party world turns.. we now return you to your regularly scheduled deprogramming.

  8. Andy Andy April 24, 2017

    Jill, I did not post either of those two posts above you. Somebody take them down.

  9. Jill Pyeatt Jill Pyeatt April 24, 2017

    American women are generally immature, selfish, extremely arrogant and self-centered, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and highly unchaste. The behavior of most American women is utterly disgusting

    Is this an April Fool’s joke?I don’t find it to be very funny.

  10. Jill Pyeatt Jill Pyeatt April 23, 2017

    Troubling news: This was posted to Facebook 3 hours ago:

    Please join me in prayer and well wishes for my friend, my Brother in Christ and Liberty, Roger Lee Wrights. He is in ICU and unconscious. To respect his and his family’s privacy, these are all the details I will disclose at this moment.
    Please lift Lee up in your prayers. I am not ready to say goodbye to my dear friend…

    It was on Thomas Hill’s page

  11. paulie paulie April 21, 2017

    It appears that Nathan Norman has taken to impersonating me as his latest gimmick for avoiding IPR comment bans. IPR editors, check IP address if you see any comment that does not seem like I actually wrote it. Everyone else, if you have any doubts whether any comment purporting to be mine is genuine, feel free to call or text at 205-534-1622 or email paulie.frankel@lp.org

  13. Starchild Starchild April 19, 2017

    dL quotes (April 15, 2017 at 00:31) from “The Cult of the Omnipotent State” (http://www.libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-perverse-presidential-incentive-system/):

    “War reminds the people that their real religion is the religion of State, i.e., nationalism. Their other religions place a distant second. The Trump case drives home the point. Here was a guy who until recently scared the bejeezus out of our weightiest thinkers. He was thought to combine three of the worst traits: conceit, ignorance, and impulsiveness, born of an exaggerated estimate of his own gut. Yet all he had to do to win over these critics was (illegally) to command the Navy to fire several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from some ships, and suddenly he’s just the right man in just the right place at just the right time.”

    Indeed! Most self-described Christians clearly don’t take their nominal religion, which teaches them to “turn the other cheek”, “beat their swords into plowshares”, and refrain from “casting the first stone” as seriously as they take their belief in Big Government and its warmaking as a way to solve their problems. I would go so far as to say that statism is the world’s leading (if unacknowledged) religion today. In the Cult of the Omnipotent State, nationalism may be viewed as the dominant sect, like Roman Catholicism vis-a-vis Christianity.

    Thanks for posting, dL.

  14. George Phillies George Phillies April 18, 2017

    I must sadly report that Stewart Flood has resigned as chair of the Libertarian State Leadership Alliance, the association of libertarian state chairs. He is fine. He found he was overcommitted and could not give the LSLA his best. The LSLA ExComm has not yet discussed who will replace him.

    Meanwhile, the LSLA National Conference on the Future of the Libertarian Political Movement, to be held in Manchester, New Hampshire on May w8 this year, is advancing. Read much more about it at http://libertarianleaders.org/index.php/conference.

  15. Andy Andy April 17, 2017

    “illiam Saturn
    April 17, 2017 at 18:42
    Here’s something Andy will like:

    https://youtu.be/m4219mka5zA ”

    I already knew about this, that is that Glenn Jacobs, aka-Kane in WWE, is running for Mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. This is excellent news, as “Kane” is a hardcore libertarian. Unfortunately, he is running as a Republican rather than as a Libertarian (he has been an LP member in the past, and he was in fact a delegate at the 2008 LP National Convention in Denver, but I’m not sure if he is still an LP member or not), but given the internal dysfunction in the LP, and given the fact that this had led to the Libertarian Party having less success at electing people to offices in government than the party had in the past (not that it was ever good, but the party has gone downhill in this regard), I can’t say that I blame him. I think that he’s got a real chance of being elected, and I hope that he does.

  19. dL dL April 16, 2017

    If that was the only constituency for migration restrictionism we would be much better off.

    Once the thing is in place, it doesn’t really matter all that much what popular opinion is. It is pretty tough to get rid of, regardless.

  21. paulie paulie April 15, 2017

    If that was the only constituency for migration restrictionism we would be much better off.

  22. dL dL April 15, 2017

    Welcoming Immigrants Means Higher Wages

    Unwelcoming them means higher wages for border control thugs. And that’s Trump’s constituency.

  23. paulie paulie April 15, 2017

    http://reason.com/archives/2017/04/14/welcoming-immigrants-means-higher-wages

    Welcoming Immigrants Means Higher Wages
    ‘Immigration represents an opportunity rather than a threat to our economy and to American workers.’
    Ronald Bailey | April 14, 2017

    “The benefits that immigration brings to society far outweigh their costs,” declares an open letter to congressional leaders and President Donald Trump. The letter, published on Wednesday and signed by nearly 1,500 economists—including six Nobel Prize winners—notes that immigrant entrepreneurs start new businesses that hire lots of Americans; that immigrants are far more likely to work in innovative, job-creating fields such as science, technology, and engineering; and that they bring diverse skill sets that keep our workforce flexible, help companies grow, and increase the productivity of American workers. A new study parsing employment data between 1991 and 2008 confirms that immigrants significantly boost both the productivity and the wages of workers.

  24. Jill Pyeatt Jill Pyeatt April 15, 2017

    That’s an excellent video by James Corbett, Andy. People everywhere seemed to spot things wrong with the “Assad gassed his people” story right away. Ron Paul said there’s “zero chance Assad gassed his own people.” It’s nice to hear false flags openly talked about now.

  26. dL dL April 15, 2017

    The Cult of the Omnipotent State

    http://www.libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-perverse-presidential-incentive-system/

    In other words, war reminds the people that their real religion is the religion of State, i.e., nationalism. Their other religions place a distant second.

    The Trump case drives home the point. Here was a guy who until recently scared the bejeezus out of our weightiest thinkers. He was thought to combine three of the worst traits: conceit, ignorance, and impulsiveness, born of an exaggerated estimate of his own gut. Yet all he had to do to win over these critics was (illegally) to command the Navy to fire several dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from some ships, and suddenly he’s just the right man in just the right place at just the right time. CNN’s and the Washington Post‘s Wise Pundit, Fareed Zakaria, declared him president just after the missiles launched. The New York Times‘s Nicholas Kristof said Trump’s action was of “dubious legality,” “hypocritical,” and “right.” Every major newspaper lauded him editorially and turned over its op-ed page exclusively to commentators who agreed. Such praise gushed forth even though Trump’s strike against Syria was rash, having been ordered before an inquiry into the origin of the chemical-weapons attack had been conducted. Dissent was as scarce as a hint of humility in the Trump household.

  27. Just Some Random Guy Just Some Random Guy April 14, 2017

    So, I did some research. If anyone is looking for third party candidates to potentially support, here are the ones I could find that are currently running for office PRIOR to the November election. I took a look at the list of candidates on the Green Party and Libertarian Party website and took whoever happened to have a website. I didn’t find anyone in the Reform Party or Constitution Party running. There are probably some independents out there but I didn’t really know of a good way to search for them, so I ended up with just the Green Party and Libertarian Party candidates. At any rate…

    For the special election for the (sole) US Congress representative in Montana on May 25, we have:
    Mark Wicks: https://WicksForFreedom.com/ (Libertarian)
    Thomas Breck: http://thomasbreckforcongress.us (Green Party)

    We have a special election for the State House (95th District) in Tennessee on June 15:
    Jim Tomasik: http://JimTomasik.Nationbuilder.com/ (Libertarian)

    And a special election for US Congress (5th district of South Carolina):
    David Kulma: http://votekulma.org (Green Party)

    There’s also a bunch of people running for the November elections but there’s a bunch of them and that’s a ways away so I’m not including them in this lineup. Just the special elections.

  28. Nicholas Hensley Nicholas Hensley April 13, 2017

    I have been informed that Reform Party member Jon Winter has won his campaign in the town of Lakeside, Wisconsin. He will be taking office as Chairman of the board of Supervisors on the 18th. Won with 47 votes with 31 votes scattered to varies candidates. Turnout was under 20 percent.

  35. George Phillies George Phillies April 8, 2017

    dL That’s a good idea. I will see if I can figure out how to do this.

  36. dL dL April 8, 2017

    The LSLA is in the process of bringing up new web pages. The process is a bit slow.

    Suggestion: Need to optimize those page banners. At 5 megs, the page load is a bit slow.

  37. George Phillies George Phillies April 8, 2017

    The LSLA is in the process of bringing up new web pages. The process is a bit slow.

    Nonetheless, at http://LSLA.org, you can find information on the LSLA’s organization, detailed information on our forthcoming national convention, and an Affiliate Support page with all sorts of information useful to state chairs.

    Major documents already up on as Affiliate Support pages include:

    The Cisewski County Organizing Manual

    The Success ’99 Organizing Manual

    The Guida Plan

    Winning Elections

    Techniques for Effective Campaigning

    The Libertarian Volunteer Newsletter

    Letters on Libertarian Strategy

    Yes, that’s the real Gene Cisewski County organizing manual, now available for the first time on the world wide web.

    We also have new pages LP-History.org. So far we have up there Brian Holtz’s historical pages and the old LPedia. We are preparing to put up John Famularo’s LP2000 materials, but all this takes some time.

    Please consider attending our national convention over the Memorial Day Weekend. For more information http://libertarianleaders.org/index.php/Conference

  38. paulie paulie April 8, 2017

    Ah, that’s right. I thought it was posted as a separate article here already but I’m not seeing it. Will post when I get a chance.

  39. Just Some Random Guy Just Some Random Guy April 8, 2017

    @ paulie

    The last updates I saw a few days ago was they were up to 69k raised out of total possible 101k for the match.

    That’s what my link said.

  40. paulie paulie April 8, 2017

    The last updates I saw a few days ago was they were up to 69k raised out of total possible 101k for the match.

  42. paulie paulie April 8, 2017

    So what is the criteria for which parties to list on the sidebar under the “Party Websites”? At first I thought maybe it was some level of electoral success (i.e. electing someone to someplace, even if it’s just a small local thing), but I don’t think the Justice Party has had any of that.

    We had a discussion about this maybe a year or two ago and site owner Warren Redlich decided to delete most of the parties because he thought they did not show signs of being more than a website/newspaper. I pointed out the Justice Party is dead and others such as PSL and Socialist Alternative are more active but he stuck to his guns. You are welcome to write Warren to help restart the discussion on that. His email is in the about IPR tab at the top. For best results you may also want to copy me and the others who have chosen to include our contact info there.

  43. Just Some Random Guy Just Some Random Guy April 6, 2017

    @ TomP

    There is also a special election to be held next Tuesday, April 11, 2017 for the 4th Congressional district in Kansas. That’s a three-way race featuring Ron Estes, the Republican; James Thompson, the Democrat; and Chris Rockhold, the Libertarian. That district includes Wichita and the seat being filled is Mike Pompeo’s old seat.

    Good find. I considered making a small donation, even at this late hour, but his site bafflingly appears to require you to only choose one of the set amounts (25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2700) with no option to give an amount lower than 25 or anything between those amounts.

  44. TomP TomP April 6, 2017

    @Some Random Guy

    There is also a special election to be held next Tuesday, April 11, 2017 for the 4th Congressional district in Kansas. That’s a three-way race featuring Ron Estes, the Republican; James Thompson, the Democrat; and Chris Rockhold, the Libertarian. That district includes Wichita and the seat being filled is Mike Pompeo’s old seat.

  45. Just Some Random Guy Just Some Random Guy April 5, 2017

    So what is the criteria for which parties to list on the sidebar under the “Party Websites”? At first I thought maybe it was some level of electoral success (i.e. electing someone to someplace, even if it’s just a small local thing), but I don’t think the Justice Party has had any of that.

  46. paulie paulie April 5, 2017

    http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/05/trumps-illiberalism-is-infecting-other-c

    Last month, Indian Prime Minister installed as chief minister of the country’s most important state a Hindu cleric who makes no bones about his agenda to cleanse India of Muslims. And to justify his agenda during recent state elections, this man repeatedly invoked Trump’s Muslim ban.

    Trump may have not even heard of this cleric, but that doesn’t mean that he is not emboldening him. Indeed, Trump is costing America its soft power to remake the world in its own liberal image by spreading pluralism, tolerance, and other liberal values. Instead of remaining a beacon for protecting vulnerable minorities, Trump’s America seems to be turning into a giant green light for their persecution, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.

  47. paulie paulie April 5, 2017

    “liberal” fascism in Chicago:

    http://reason.com/blog/2017/04/05/chicago-mayor-threatens-teens-diplomas-u

    The school system is going to withhold diplomas from graduating high school seniors unless and until they provide the school system information about their post-school plans.

    And to be very, very clear: This is not a “choose your own post-education adventure.” You will choose from one of four government-approved options. If you want a diploma you will be required to provide proof you’ve been accepted to:

    A four-year college
    A community college
    A branch of the armed services
    A trade school or program
    That’s it. That’s what the City of Chicago has decided your choices for success are after you’ve graduated high school. Got an entrepreneurial spirit? Go get an official post-secondary stamp of approval with a business degree, kid. Or else it doesn’t count. Part of a family-owned business? The city plans to regulate and tax them out of existence anyway.

    There’s an entire list of ways this demand offends the conscience. First and most obvious, it treats people who are becoming adults as though they are wards of the state and withholds a diploma that they’ve earned unless they provide information to the Chicago Public School system that they have no authority to even ask for.

    Second, note that how all of these post-school options tie the teen further into environments subject to continued government control and operations even after reaching adulthood. Granted both the colleges and trade schools could be privately operated, but both are heavily dependent on government grants and subject to significant government control.

    Third, since the demand requires merely acceptance and not actual commitment to attend (at least that’s what the reporting is saying now) and community colleges accept pretty much everybody, it’s just insulting bureaucratic busywork when all is said and done. They can’t take your diploma back if you get accepted into college and then don’t attend. And that just makes it all the more offensive. It’s paternalistic government nudging designed to socialize and fundamentally trick teens into thinking that this is the sum of all their choices after graduation.

    Fourth, imagine being a teen and not grasping the busywork “nudging” nature of this demand, concluding post-secondary education is out of reach for you for whatever reason, and believing that you have to join the military in order to get your diploma.

    And finally, this is clearly a jobs program—but not for these students. It’s a jobs program for post-secondary educators and administrators, an attempt to force an increase in demand through this not-so-subtle coercion. Emanuel pretty much said so himself:

  49. G G April 4, 2017

    So how is the Oregon litigation advancing. “Faster than the speed of justice!”

  51. Just Some Random Guy Just Some Random Guy April 2, 2017

    So, I was thinking of trying to use the monthly posts as a place to post any information about currently running third party candidates for people to check out and possibly support. Obviously 2017 is a slow year for such things, but we do have a Libertarian running in a special election for U.S. congress in Montana:
    https://wicksforfreedom.com

    I don’t know of any other elections going on right now.

  52. Wang Tang-Fu Wang Tang-Fu April 1, 2017

    Groovy videos in the post above.

Comments are closed.