Late on the evening of August 15, a U.S. District Court refused to issue injunctive relief for Bob Barr, in his attempt to be included in this year’s first joint appearance of general election presidential candidates. The event is set for August 16 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Only Barack Obama and John McCain had been invited.

Anyone is free to sponsor any debate and invite whom they choose, except that a tax-exempt organization, or an organization that takes tax-exempt donations from corporations to pay for the event, must have objective criteria in place as to whom is being invited. Saddleback Church did not have any pre-announced objective criteria. Thus, in effect, the church was using an indirect government subsidy to assist the campaigns of Senator Obama and Senator McCain.

Today’s Boston Globe featured an op-ed by conservative columnist W. James Antle III arguing for putting Bob Barr on the Massachusetts ballot.

The Libertarian Party of Massachusetts filed enough signatures to get on the ballot. In order to start the petition soon enough, the state LP nominated George Phillies as their stand-in candidate. Phillies is LP state chair and was a candidate for the LP presidential nomination. Phillies objects to Barr as the nominee, but he is cooperating with the ACLU lawsuit to put replace him with Barr on the November ballot.

Antle lays out the facts and his case for putting Barr on the November ballot.

Check out the article here.

On August 14, Herb Hoffman, independent candidate for U.S. Senate from Maine, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep him on the ballot. Everyone agrees that more than 4,000 registered voters signed his petition to put him on the ballot, and that the petition was submitted on time. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court had removed him from the ballot because three people had testified that Hoffman had signed off on the petition sheets they signed (as the witness) but he wasn’t really watching. Hoffman didn’t need those 3 signatures, but the Maine Supreme Judicial Court had invalidated all the signatures from those three petition sheets.

Hoffman has an excellent attorney, but he still faces long odds. The U.S. Supreme Court has not intervened to put any candidate on the ballot since October 1990, when it ordered Cook County, Illinois, to put the Harold Washington Party on the ballot for county office. The U.S. Supreme Court denied all of Ralph Nader’s requests for injunctions in 2004. Hoffman is the first person since 2004 to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to issue injunctive relief.