Your site merely relabels discredited neocon talking points as somehow “Libertarian”.

That is not to say that there cannot be a Libertarian argument for this irresponsible war, but it certainly is not to be found on your site.

PEACE

No, Brian, I wrote whatever I pleased. I didn’t count the words. I’m not anal, like you.

You’re so anal, you even count the characters in the urls I post.

And yes, I do expect people to go to the urls. That’s why I print them.

Holtz: “You’ve issued same-page instant rebuttals to me, Scott Lieberman,”

Wrong again. You didn’t do your research.

I didn’t rebut Scott, I answered his question, at his request.

Scott sent me his email, as a personal question. It wasn’t an LTE. I asked Scott if I may print it in CF as an LTE. Scott said that was okay, but added, “I’d rather you answer my question.” (Or answer his point, whatever, I don’t have it before me.)

So I printed Scott’s email as an LTE, and answered it, as he’d requested.

At the 2008 LPC convention in San Diego, Scott even came up to me, and thanked me for answering his question, rather than ducking it.

Holtz: “You even went to the trouble of adding my hometown to make my essay look like a current LTE.”

I told you beforehand that I was publishing it as an LTE, and you’d agreed.

And I didn’t quote Bruce out of context. Once again, I included the url.

Man, there’s no pleasing you.

You publicly whine that you wish I’d print your screed, then when I do so, you accuse me of having “jumped all over Rob Power’s calculated suggestion that you print some liberventionist writing of mine right before I’m up for re-election.”

I didn’t “jump” on Rob’s suggestion. I printed your screed because you were publicly whining for me to do so.

But you’re a real time sink. No matter what I do, it’s just more complaining.

There’s nothing that would please a pair like you and Bruce Cohen, short of throwing straw into your room.

(I wonder if anyone will get that TV reference?)

With the Barr LTE — which actually WAS a “letter to the editor”, and not a vintage essay — the dare I included technically worked: “If by chance this letter to the editor is printed in full in CF, take note whether Sipos will once again allocate himself more space to answering a critical letter than he allocates for the letter itself.” You satisfied the letter of the dare, by just barely limiting your instant rebuttal to the length of my complaint. Of course, if you don’t count my postscript dare paragraph, then your rebuttal was in fact longer than the part of my letter that you rebutted.

You say you “rarely rebut LTEs”. What you need to try to say is “I rarely rebut LTEs I disagree with.” I stand by my statement: “Unlike any previous CF editor that I know of, you treat the letters to the editor section as an extension of your own (already-expanded) editorial page, reserving yourself arbitrary space to rebut nearly anything you disagree with.” I challenge you to name a previous CF editor who ever allocated himself equal space to rebut LTEs he disagrees with. You gave a rebuttal to the only other critical LTE in that March issue. You’ve issued same-page instant rebuttals to me, Scott Lieberman, Tim Crowley, and others. In one case you took twice as much space as the original letter, as you needed room to expound on your paranoid “suspicions” about the Reform Caucus planning expulsions and where its financing comes from. (The latter you even questioned twice in the same rambling rebuttal. Great editing. Have you cracked the case of LRC financing yet?)

There was no need for me to write a new essay on libervention, because I stand by what I wrote in early 2007 — as long as the word “now” in it is allowed to refer to 2007 instead of 2009. You even went to the trouble of adding my hometown to make my essay look like a current LTE, instead of just honestly telling your readers when it was written.

You quote Bruce Cohen out of context. Here’s what Bruce said next: “So the liars who say Aaron or I are pro-war, are just, liars. And to [sic] those who say the paper was pro-war, are liars, too. In fact, just as I said to Ted Brown after Kookenaga’s election, they would turn it into an idealogical soapbox for their personal opinions.” What he obviously was trying to say in this sloppy blog comment was that he did not print any articles supporting the war during his tenure. The fact you still don’t dare deny here is that I’d already listed for you — with dates — five anti-intervention pieces that ran during Bruce’s tenure. So now you’ve got a fair-minded Libertarian like Debra Dedmon saying “I did not agree with Bruce and Brian running 0 antiwar articles when they ran CF”. Congratulations, Tom, mission accomplished.

“Prior dares” don’t work with me. You dared me not to rebut your Barr LTE, and I did rebut.

There was no “prior dare” in your liberventionist LTE. Hence, no rebuttal.

BTW, I rarely rebut LTEs.

Holtz: “I don’t recall CF splitting articles with so many page-jumps before your tenure”

I mostly leave it to our layout editor, Brad Reynolds, on how he splits articles. I didn’t give him any suggestions, one way or another.

Brad is paid much less than our previous layout editor, Muffett Brown. $333 an issue, as opposed to $750.

Layout editors are paid for their time. You and Bruce worked with a layout editor that was paid more than double what my layout editor is paid.

Anyway, both your LTEs were on page 3, from the start, in full, unsplit, no jumping. So it’s no excuse for you not seeing your LTEs.

Holtz: “When I offered my April 2007 essay “Defending Libervention In Iraq”, I had no idea that you would deceive your readers by letting them assume I had freshly submitted it for the March 2009 CF.”

??? You wanted me to print your piece, and I did so. Why didn’t you submit a fresh piece, if that was an issue with you?

Holtz: “you write about Bruce Cohen that “under his tenure, CF was silent on the war.” In fact, you had seen me point out multiple times that Cohen ran five anti-intervention pieces in his tenure (and zero pro-libervention pieces).”

Are you calling Bruce Cohen a liar? He claims: “When I ran California Freedom, we never had ANY articles about the war at all. Period.”

I took Bruce Cohen at his word. Was I mistaken to do so?

See his post # 10 at: http://www.independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/02/6618/

You say you have clearly improved CF, that you are confident of LP-internal support for what you’ve made your signature topic, and that “most current ExCom members have been very supportive”. If you really believed these things, you wouldn’t have wasted precious CF column inches pleading for the LPCA delegates to save you from what you claim will be my organized effort at next weekend’s convention to fire you. You quote me saying I hope to “fix the California newsletter”, but I guess it hadn’t occurred to you that whatever influence I have comes from my ability to make a case in public writing, and not from backroom conspiracies. So no, contrary to the unsubstantiated paranoid claims you saw fit to print in CF, I have not talked to any current or prospective member of ExCom about firing you. (I’ll continue to try to shame you about your use of CF space and your sloppiness with facts, but I now suspect that my strategy can only backfire. Some people, it seems, know no shame.)

By contrast, you jumped all over Rob Power’s calculated suggestion that you print some liberventionist writing of mine right before I’m up for re-election. When I offered my April 2007 essay “Defending Libervention In Iraq”, I had no idea that you would deceive your readers by letting them assume I had freshly submitted it for the March 2009 CF. My essay said “we have now achieved our two most important war aims”, and any competent editor would know that you don’t reprint a two-year-old essay with such temporal language and let it look like it was written last week. I’ve favored U.S. withdrawal from Iraq for almost three years now, but you misleadingly titled my essay “A Case For War”, inviting casual readers to think I favor continuing the war. Touché, Mr. Sipos. I obviously have a lot to learn about pre-convention machinations from you and Mr. Power.

These machinations of yours are an interesting contrast to your outright mendacity elsewhere in that issue. In the same issue as my LTE busting you for getting your facts wrong in an earlier editorial, you write about Bruce Cohen that “under his tenure, CF was silent on the war”. In fact, you had seen me point out multiple times that Cohen ran five anti-intervention pieces in his tenure (and zero pro-libervention pieces). I had even given you the list of articles — with dates — to rebut your earlier claim that “Bruce ran the paper without mentioning the war.” How many times can you print this documented falsehood before it qualifies as a lie? Again, sir, have you no shame?

Re: “obsession” — I use quotation marks to faithfully report what people have actually and verifiably said, and don’t indulge in using them around paraphrasings for dramatic effect as you’ve been known to do. If I wanted readers to think you’d called your antiwar focus/priority an “obsession”, I would have put it in quotes. When I say “your admitted X” and X is not in quotation marks, then X is my characterization of something you’ve made an admission about.

Thanks Tom! We try.

Again, not true. So not true, it casts doubt on all your other rants and ravings.

Just how much journalist research do you do?

You LTE appeared in the March issue, which is online at: http://www.ca.lp.org/cf/CF-200903.pdf

I’ve already received the April issue, so the March issue has long been out, on paper and online.

“your own admitted personal anti-war obsession,”

I’ve never admitted it was an “obsession.” I’ve called it a priority.

I only call it my “obsession” in quotes, as a joke on you.

No one suggested otherwise.

(1/7) > (1/9)

Hope this helps.

I don’t know where your “20 articles” pseudo-fact comes from, and I doubt you’ll try to back it up. In the thread next door you just saw me write that you included 8 anti-intervention pieces in your first 3 issues. I just hopped over to ca.lp.org and sampled the 3 latest issues there, and again found 8 anti-intervention pieces. That rounds to the 3 per issue that I said, not the 1 per issue that you said. If you’re not sure whether you’ve been averaging one anti-intervention article per issue or three, then that explains a lot here.

You like to claim that I have trouble with reading, but this is yet another instance where you have trouble with arithmetic. You have claimed that you print critical letters to the editor, but CF readers will apparently never see the one I sent in January (below) documenting another spectacular math mistake by you.

As for “anal”, I’ll let our readers decide which is more anus-related, my carefulness with facts or your carelessness with them.

Editor Tom Sipos writes in the Jan 2009 California Freedom: “Bob Barr only contributed millions of PAC dollars to GOP candidates running against LP candidates, while he sat on the LNC.” This is a recklessly extravagant falsehood.

Barr joined the LNC in Dec 2006. OpenSecrets.org tells us that the Bob Barr Leadership Fund donated a total of $41,300 to 25 non-LP federal candidates in the 2008 campaign cycle. Even if by some miracle all 25 had Libertarian opponents, Sipos’s reckless charge against our party’s recent presidential nominee would still be wrong by two orders of magnitude.

Meanwhile, during the 2008 cycle Barr’s PAC relied on its presumably conservative/Republican donors to finance contributions of $4,300 to federal LP candidates, $21,000 to the LNC, and $5,000 to the South Carolina LP. I seriously doubt that any other source donated more to LP causes during that cycle. Barr has also personally donated thousands of dollars to the LP and its candidates, including several hundred dollars to the LPCA. Meanwhile, Sipos is paid by the LPCA about $4000/year — surely much more than any other state LP editor — for stuffing California Freedom with multi-page editorials and multiple antiwar articles per issue. I find no record of any donations by Sipos to the LP or its candidates. (Full disclosure: I’ve donated over $10,000 to the LP and its candidates in the last 5 years. Details at http://libertarianmajority.net/bh-lp-activism.)

I don’t think it is 3 per issue. You once counted 20 articles total, no? That averages to one per issue.

Not that I counted. I’m not as anal as you.

BTW, do you think “We don’t need 3 economic liberty articles per issue”?

Or would you say “We don’t need 3 personal liberty articles per issue”?

I think I’ll get another drink…

Well, I was talking to their mothers just the other night; I said I think that they’re pro-individual liberty, they said yes, we think you’re right….