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Sunday, April 19, 2009

Sipos Says Caring About Facts Is Anal

Tom Sipos, if you're ever in doubt about the relative space to give to topics in CF, here's some advice: instead of being guided by your own admitted personal anti-war obsession, just take a look at the Libertarian Party platform.  Of its 27 planks, fully 18 deal with personal liberty and economic liberty, while only 3 deal with intervention.  Thus intervention is only 1/9th of the planks of the LP Platform.  (And if you complain that the 2008 Platform was adopted by delegates you classify with your vile "Republican lite" smear, then note that the vaunted radical 2004 platform touched on intervention in only 1/7th of its planks.)

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.)