On April 23, Yahoo!, The Huffington Post, and Slate, jointly announced that they will sponsor two primary season presidential debates, one for Republicans and one for Democrats. These will be on-line debates, probably in September 2007. They will be restricted to candidates who have announced their candidacies, and they will probably also be restricted to those Republican and Democratic presidential candidates who have been accepted by those parties as “legitimate.” In recent decades, the two major parties have been in the habit of compiling a list of “legitimate” candidates, those who are invited into party-sponsored debates. Generally one needs to be, or have been, a federal office-holder or a Governor to get onto this list, although Wesley Clark and Al Sharpton made it onto the Democratic list in 2004.

On November 7, 2006, a dues-paying member of the Libertarian Party was elected to the city council of Johns Creek, Georgia. She is Karen Richardson, 41, the only African-American member of the 7-person city council. Johns Creek is a newly-incorporated city of 65,000 in the northeast corner of Fulton County. Like almost all cities in Georgia, it uses non-partisan elections. It came into existence on December 1, 2006, when six unincorporated towns merged into the new city. It is the 10th largest city in Georgia. Thanks to ThirdPartyWatch for this news.

All the briefs have now been filed in Schaefer v Lamone, which challenges Maryland’s law putting candidates on primary ballots in alphabetical order. Schaefer v Lamone, 07-1003 (4th circuit).