I'm Off the Ballot

I returned home from vacation today, and not entirely to my surprise, I found a letter from the Board of Elections informing me that they determined my nominating petition contained an insufficient number of signatures on its face. I had only submitted about 120 of the 1,500 required signatures.

Frankly, I am not too upset about this development. I've been distracted by a lot of other stuff lately, and my heart just wasn't in the race this year, as demonstrated by my lame petitioning effort... and my sparse blogging.

I will continue to work on Serf City and help the other Libertarian candidates who did make it on the ballot, as time allows. At some point, I'll probably resurrect this blog as a general, non-campaign libertarian blog.

But for now, I'm taking a nap.

Keep Your Hands Off My Power Supply

I'm featured briefly in this week's Village Voice in an article about the recent blackout in Queens. The usual suspects whine about how deregulation somehow put the lights out for a week. On the other hand...

There are those who take an opposite tack from the advocacy groups, seeing the Queens debacle as indicative of insufficient deregulation. Jim Lesczynski, the Libertarian Party candidate for Sheldon Silver's Lower Manhattan assembly district, calls the New York State plan "phony deregulation" and adds, "They tweaked their regs and called it deregulation. What we really need is real deregulation. What we really need is a free market in electricity. Then you'd have lots of suppliers rushing in to fill that demand."

But the Queens blackout had nothing to do with inadequate supply; it had to do with grid deterioration. Lesczynski has a quick answer to this observation too: "They can afford to let their equipment go to pot," he says, "because they're a monopoly and what are we gonna do, go elsewhere? If they had someone threatening to compete against them, we would have reliable electricity."

Various competing companies, each with its own lines? Sounds like a lot of potential for chaos.

"The free market has a lot of potential for chaos," he says, "but it has a way of working itself out. If you don't perform you don't stay in business."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Oh wait, I did say that myself.

Here's how you can tell we don't have real deregulation in the electricity market. Can you imagine any other company urging its customers not to use so much of its product?

(Kudos to whoever gets the obscure 80s rock reference in the title above.)

Coup-Coo for Silver

It turns out even the Democrats are getting tired of old Shelley. From the Buffalo News via the Empire Zone comes a report that one upstate assemblyman is urging his colleagues to replace Silver as speaker. I guess that's assuming I don't send him packing in November. Oh ye of little faith.

A 3-Way Race After All?

I had been told by several insiders that the Republicans had no one to run against Silver. (In fact, I was approached more than once about seeking the Republican nomination myself, which I declined to do.) But according to the NY Sun's 51st State, the Republicans do have a candidate by the name of Lawrence Capici. Never heard of him.

Separated at Birth - Faso and Delay?

I haven't posted anything in awhile due to a combination of being away for the July 4th weekend and general inertia. But on a slow Friday afternoon, I thought I'd get something off my chest that's been bugging me awhile.

Has anyone else ever noticed that Tom "The Hammer" Delay and John "The Tool" Faso are practically twins?

Can You Feel The Love Tonight?

The Republicans over at Urban Elephants dig my campaign for Assembly.

UN-Welcome

Fellow Libertarian activist and Assembly candidate for the 66th Assembly district Nic Leobold hit a homerun with his UN-Welcome protest outside the Secretariat building on Monday morning. Nic organized a loose confederation of RKBA activists henceforth known as Gun Rights Activism Partners to demonstrate against this week's United Nations conference on small arms. The thugs who run the world body (understandably) will feel much more comfortable when only government agents have the right to bear arms.

Turnout at Nic's protest was sparse due to the torrential rain (I made a cameo appearance at the event), but it nonetheless got the attention of the press. In particular, Times columnist Clyde Haberman published a shockingly favorable column. I can't link to it because it's behind the the dreaded TimeSelect firewall, but here's an excerpt:

Their issue was not typical for the plaza, which is named for a secretary general of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961 and received the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. Most times, demonstrators there demand things like freedom for Tibet or justice for Palestinians or fairness for Israel or nukes for no one.

Very few go there to talk about how guns are good for you.

"Crime goes down the more that citizens are armed," said Nic Leobold, an organizer of this mini-rally. And don't fool yourself, he said: human rights are very much at stake.

"The right to defend oneself - that's the epitome of human rights," said Mr. Leobold, who lives in the East Village and plans to run, not for the first time, for the State Assembly on the Libertarian Party line. "Gun rights," he said, "are the best litmus test of where you stand on individual rights and ownership. It's the clearest litmus test that I know of.

"What led him and his mates to the plaza was a conference that began yesterday at the United Nations, part of a campaign to stop the illegal trade worldwide in handguns, rifles, grenades, light missiles and other weapons defined as "small arms." A key phrase there is "illegal trade."

Yeah, right, the protesters said. If you buy that line, you're probably gullible enough to buy an East River bridge. The true goal, they said, is to eliminate everyone's right to bear arms.

"Tyrannical politicians thrive on gun control laws," said Ralph J. Rubinek, a Staten Island man who identified himself as chief of public affairs for a group called Gun Owners of America. "In the end," he said, "only tyrants and the very criminals they seek to disarm will have all the guns, and no lives will be saved."

Mr. Leobold elaborated. "All the major genocides of the 20th century," he said, "were preceded by gun confiscation. So the politicians are the only ones who have guns, and they have total control."

Way to go, Nic!