I've long advocated that libertarians had to make a choice. Neither major party advocates shrinking government. God knows the Democrats never will, nor should they. Republicans pretend otherwise, but they are even more eager to increase the size of government (the better to pay off their political benefactors like Halliburton).

So libertarians can either vote Libertarian, or vote for the party that is less hostile to personal liberties. The Republicans are the party of the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and imperial conquest. And they don't trust individuals enough with the truth, so they lie and lie to hide their true agenda.

Dean and/or Clark would take the gun issue off the table, but yeah, Democrats would repeal the tax cut to restore fiscal sanity. Democrats would enforce environmental laws that sometimes intrude on property rights. And Democrats are more apt to try and regulate businesses for a variety of (mostly altruistic) reasons.

So, to libertarians, which is more harmful to your personal liberties? The Republicans who lie about their intentions and then trample on your civil liberties while growing the size of government, or Democrats? The choice is yours.

(And to the purists who gag at the thought of welcoming libertarians under our tent, deal with it. I don't want to just eke out a victory against Bush, I want him to go down in a landslide loss, repudiating everything he and his cabal stand for. And to do that, we are going to have to welcome, with open arms, every group disaffected with the state of the nation, be it libertarians, or Greens, or -- heck -- even Southern whites.)

The tent really does have to be big if we're going to take out Bush against the background of his enormous war-chest, the systemic GOP advantage in fund-raising, and their clear no-holds-barred/take-no-prisoners attitude towards "winning" elections and retaining their deathgrip hold on the reins of powers, so I am all for welcoming almost anyone onto the ABBA bus, as long as the cost of doing so isn't even more drifting of the party to the right. We're already in a position where right-wing positions which would have been laughable and completely on the fringe 25 years ago are now totally acceptable, thanks to the right's very successful effort to bulldoze the center and push it farther and farther into wingnut territory.

We can't afford to allow that to continue.

it's not a necessity that the Democratic candidate be a "flaming liberal", but it is essential that if he's a "centrist", he's one as defined some decades ago, and not measured against where the center is today. It should clearly be part of the mission of liberal and progressive institutions to reverse some of that forced shift and return the center to where it should be.