Steven Taylor on GOP efforts to get “spoiler” Libertarian candidates to withdraw from fall election contests:

[I]f the Texas GOP is truly that concerned about losing votes to the Libertarian Party, then perhaps they ought to try harder to please libertarian-minded voters who might be persuaded to vote Republican if the party was made more palatable to them.

Although, I have to add a caveat: that ain’t going to work unless the GOP can come up with someone less batshit than Rоn Pаul. But nobody ever said building a big tent was easy.

The boss is running for governor of North Carolina in 2008.

Via Craig Newmark, who (like me) would “pay cash money to see him debate the Republican and Democrat candidates.”

I’ve been remiss in noting the news of the passing of Harry Browne, the indirect recipient of my first two votes for presidential electors (in 1996 in Florida and in 2000 in Mississippi). Like Timothy Sandefur, I only met Browne once—in my case, at the LP’s 2000 post-election gala in Atlanta. That, of course, was prior to my conversion from idealism to neoinstitutionalism.