On August 13, Bob Barr filed a federal lawsuit against the West Virginia petition deadline for independent and unqualified party candidates for president. The suit depends on Anderson v Celebrezze. Also it depends on the fact that West Virginia requires a higher percentage of the last presidential vote cast, on a petition, of any state (for president) except that Oklahoma is worse and North Carolina is equally bad. The case is Barr v Ireland, 2:08cv-0990.
Lawsuits against early August petition deadlines won in Rhode Island in 1976 (McCarthy v Noel) and against Alaska in 1992 (Libertarian Party v Coghill). There haven’t been many other such lawsuits.
Is that the same John Coghill who is now a State Representative in Alaska? Ironic, cause Coghill calls himself a “libertarian”.
No Dondero. Its Jack Coghill, who was the Alaskan Independence Party’s lieutenant governor at the time, I believe.
He also won 13% of the vote as a gubanatorial candidates in 1992, the same year Carl Moses was elected to the State House in Alaska as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party.
Cross your fingers.
Winning this lawsuit would be a bigger victory than Barr’s votes in West Virginia.
The LP website is showing 23,000 signatures collected against a 15,118 requirement. If they were short of the 15,118 on Aug 1 are they saying they collected nearly 10,000 more signatures in two weeks?
Good luck to Barr, I hope he wins. I hope he gets a high vote total, in WV, because I know he’s capable of it.
Too bad the worry over WV was all unnecessary. I bet that the extra $150 (for a flight and a rental car, over the $600 in gas they had agreed to spend) to bring Mike Plested into WV (one month ago) looks fairly appealing right now, next to what they are paying their lawyers. …Too bad I went into WV with the understanding that they were trying to place Barr on the ballot, using realistic petitioning estimates. Also too bad that Russell Verney and Shane Cory are delaying paying me to try to screw me on late fees on the rental car I rented for WV. Really professional, guys!
…And Barr has a credibility problem in going after Ron Paul donors why?
Hmmmm. Maybe it’s partly because under his watch, totally incompetent scoundrels have helmed the LP’s ballot access work. I’d like to know how Shane Cory got a job doing anything other than web design (since he’s apparently in the “Dondero” camp of the LP, which consists of maybe 5 people). Maybe the fact that Cory was a Marine instantly qualifies him for any kind of work.
I’d also like to know how my not doing a daily turn in to him in WV (giant waste of time) is grounds for them not paying me the money they owe me. Their logic is fascinating:
They can breach their oral contract to me, by:
1) agreeing to send a written contract to my email, in order to get me in the car on my way to WV, and then failing to do so
2) agreeing to make travel expense payments as they are incurred and then failing to make those payments to the motel or the rental car, so that I am forced to rely on the other WV 3rd parties to pay for my routine travel expenses
3) asking me for names of petitioners who could come out to WV, and then failing to bring them out over irrational objections (like a $150 difference in travel expenses for an extra 2 days of petitioning)
4) demanding (non-contractually) that I do a time-wasting signature turn in every single day of the final week of petitioning, in the next town over (Cross Lanes, from Charleston, WV), ostensibly so that Russell Verney could know _exactly_ where the petition numbers stood (since he was being fed a mountain of shit by Cory, they guy who he had delegated supreme authority to, for the LP petition drive). Now then, Verney could be a man, and admit that delegating authority to someone who had never run a petition drive before was a mistake, and that failing to listen to me during the drive was a mistake, and that contacting me on the last few days of the drive just to irrationally bitch at me was a mistake, but taking responsibility for a screw-up like WV might hurt his resume.
5) Failing to give me messages about open petitioning locations from Austin Peterson at the National Party HQ.
…But my failing to meet an extra-contractual “new rule” is grounds for them defrauding me (or at least dragging their ass in paying me, in an attempt to waste my money in late fees).
Would a jury of their peers force them to pay me promptly?
I guess the people at the National LP taught Verney well about screwing over subordinates, and making sure that they take the blame for any mismanagement, long enough for one to make the leap to the next ledge up on the crumbling structure.
…Why not blame one petitioner for a failed drive? I guess that makes it easier on the bastards.
Instead of paying their lawyers a lot of extra money, they should save themselves a lot of money by hiring competent people to do ballot access in 2010 and 2012. When I arrived in WV, there was plenty of time and money to get the job done. …Of course, I saw that it was impossible to get the job done if they refused to behave like adults, to share information with me, and to bring in other petitioners. Sadly, they failed in all these regards.
No matter how I tried to reach someone with a brain in the Barr Campaign, I was directed back to the irate and “difficult-to-work-with” Shane Cory (who refused to bring in the necessary number of professional petitioners). OK then, they should pay me what they owe me (and stop being children about it), and not be surprised that their drive failed.
…Utterly stupid.
Also utterly stupid to throw greater numbers of signatures that are less valid at the problem (in a state where the state determines validity), and pretend that they are more valid than they are.
Also very stupid to waste one’s time on ads trying to hire locals to do the job of professionals, with 3 weeks left in the drive.
Verney should stick with fundraising, and understand that libertarians want BANG for their buck. Until Barr really shows that he is an alternative to the status quo, he won’t likely tap into Ron Paul’s support.
Every libertarian in the nation remembers Reagan’s libertarian rhetoric and statist policies.
If elected, Ron Paul could be trusted to end the Federal Reserve. Could Barr?
He won’t even assert that on National TV.
It’s as if he hasn’t read G. Edward Griffin’s book “The Creature from Jekyll Island”.
But we all know that G.E. Griffin is a big Ron Paul supporter.
The inclusion of fraud, unprofessionalism, and campaign mismanagement is simply one house that needs to be cleaned in the Barr Campaign.
I wish that Barr would attend to these issues, since not doing so hobbles the 2012 Libertarian Candidate.
-Jake
Separate is NOT equal.
Brown v. Bd of Ed 1954
Way too difficult for the armies of MORON lawyers doing (and losing) ballot access cases since 1968 — a mere 40 years of TOTAL legal malpractice by such MORON lawyers.