On August 8, the following letter was mailed to the editorial boards of newspapers and magazines across California:

TOP-TWO PRIMARY EQUALS CLOSED GENERAL ELECTION

In June 2010, the voters of California will be voting on State Senator Abel Maldonado's ballot measure to restructure federal and state elections in California. We request in articles about the Maldonado ballot initiative your stories refer to it as the "top-two" election proposal, not the "open primary" proposal.

The Maldonado system is not an open primary. Political science textbooks have defined "open primary" for over 100 years to be a system in which each party has its own primary. However, the voters are free on primary election day to decide which party's primary ballot to use.

Generally open primaries are popular and the voters of those states like them. Twenty-one states use open primaries:  Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The Maldonado proposal is very different. It abolishes nominations by political parties and confines the general election to only two candidates. Supporters of the Maldonado idea want the press to refer to their idea as "the open primary".

Courts have blocked the use of that terminology for that system in the past. Three times, the voters of some states have voted on the Maldonado proposal.  Never in those three instances did a state refer to the Maldonado system as an "open primary" in its ballot description.

The Supreme Court of Oregon and a Superior Court in California both ruled that it would be misleading for the ballot to describe the idea as an "open primary". This is why that term did not appear on the ballot in those states.  In Washington State, the proponents of the idea did not even try to describe it as an "open primary."

Describing the ballot initiative as the "top-two" primary is more acceptable as defined by the courts. We would appreciate it if you referred to this initiative as the “top-two” primary or as a top California Democrat classified it as the "closed" general election.

Rob Power, Chair

Ron Getty, Vice Chair

Francoise Fielding, Secretary

Marcy Berry, Treasurer

Libertarian Party of San Francisco

Last Sunday the SF Examiner had Obamacare op-eds. In today’s Sunday SF Examiner they ran an LTE I wrote in response to the op-eds.

The LTE was shortened by one sentence. You decide if it should have been left in or out - editorial space needs or too raw? It was the lead sentence of the 2nd paragraph.

Mandating a massive Obamacare red tape ridden bureaucracy run by penny pinching Obamanistas rationing healthcare costing a trillion dollars is Obamunism.

To read how to solve the healthcare crisis see this op-ed I wrote for the California Libertarian Party - Libertarian Perspective. The op-ed was re-printed in several California newspapers. The lead paragraph says it all about healthcare costs from yesterday to today.

http://ca.lp.org/lp20080123.shtml

From The Sunday July 19, 2009 SF Examiner

http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/letters/Sick-of-Obamacare--51054827.html

http://tinyurl.com/npxpwg

"Sick of Obamacare"

Your July 12 editorial’s nebulous figure of 44 million uninsured Americans is wacky. U.S. Census uninsured figures include 10 million illegal aliens. And 25 percent of the uninsured can afford insurance but don’t buy it. Individuals between jobs are included. Millions are covered by Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs. The net result is about 6 to 8 million Americans uninsured out of 300 million.

Obamacare doesn’t even account for sham claims like the $30 billion in fraudulent Medicare costs. Massachusetts’ mandated health insurance overwhelmed doctors with patients. With Baby Boomer medical personnel retiring, are there enough doctors to provide Obamacare?

Obamacare would become our de facto doctor, deciding what medical care we get while emptying our wallets and making us stand in line.

No thank you.

Ron Getty - Vice Chair - Libertarian Party San Francisco

Libertarian Party Founder David Nolan sent an open letter to the current leadership of the Libertarian Party:

As I see it, the Libertarian Party has gone far astray from its original mission. Somewhere along the way, our commitment to being The Party of Principle was replaced by a shallow, opportunistic goal of "winning elections now" -- any election, anywhere. Principles be damned, according to the proponents of this vision. We should back off from "scary" positions, tone down our rhetoric, find out "what voters want," and tailor our message to what they want to hear.

The nadir of this mindset was reached in a "Monday Message" dated March 9, 2009. It carried the heading "The most important principle is winning."

I would be hard-put to come up with a statement more antithetical to our beliefs and purpose. Just for starters, "winning" is not a principle at all; it might be a goal, or a strategy for achieving our goals, but it's not a principle. And if it were, it's not our principle. This is pure opportunistic rubbish -- exactly what you'd expect from a Republican or Democratic party hack.

For the rest of the letter, please visit NolanChart.com.