Reason Alert – Poll Finds Opportunity for a Third-Party Candidate

By Staff on August 27, 2011 in News

Reason Alert – August 26, 2011

– Reason-Rupe Poll Finds Opportunity for a Third-Party Candidate
– Liberating Libya
– John Stossel: Almost Everything We’re Taught Is Wrong
– New at Reason

Reason-Rupe Poll Finds Opportunity for a Third-Party Candidate
The new Reason-Rupe Public Opinion Survey finds voters may not want to limit their 2012 presidential options to just President Obama and the eventual Republican nominee. Nearly 73 percent of Americans say they "will" or "may" consider voting for an independent or third-party candidate in 2012. And in a three-way race like the 1992 presidential election, in which Ross Perot got 19 percent of the vote and Bill Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote, the Reason-Rupe poll finds there would be significant support for a candidate who is "conservative on economic issues and liberal on social issues." Forty-eight percent of voters say they’d support such a candidate, 37 percent would not. The Tea Party could also make things very interesting if it were to run its own presidential candidate instead of supporting the GOP nominee. Nearly 37 percent of voters say they’d consider voting for a Tea Party candidate for president, 15 percent are undecided and 49 percent say they wouldn’t support him or her.
Video: Polling Director Emily Ekins Discusses the Reason-Rupe Survey Results
Ron Paul Down Just Two Percentage Points to President Obama
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson Bets Big on New Hampshire

Liberating Libya
Reason magazine’s Jacob Sullum says Congress failed to do its job and set another terrible precedent: "Congress, for its part, never got around to taking a position on the war one way or the other, presumably because legislators did not want to be blamed for the consequences. Obama may not end up paying a political price either, since the elimination of a brutal, four-decade-old dictatorship is apt to overshadow the crimes and failures of whatever regime takes its place for the foreseeable future-or at least until next year’s elections. This combination of presidential presumption and congressional cowardice gives one person the power to attack other countries at will, without even bothering to pretend that the violence has anything to do with national defense. Under Obama’s rules of war, excuses for armed intervention are everywhere. In his March 28 speech explaining the motivation for his Libyan adventure, he declared that ‘we should not be afraid to act’ in situations where ‘our interests and values are at stake,’ which include genocide, mass murder, the threat of war, regional insecurity, natural disasters, and the possibility of disrupted commerce. To the contrary, we should be afraid of using military force to pursue such a wide-ranging, never-ending mission. We should be even more afraid of entrusting this power to a single man, especially one who blithely risks other people’s lives to satisfy the inscrutable demands of his own troubled conscience."
America’s Habit of Going to War Has Been Reinforced

John Stossel: Almost Everything We’re Taught Is Wrong
At Reason.com, Fox Business’ John Stossel writes, "We grow up learning that some things are just bad: child labor, ticket scalping, price gouging, kidney selling, blackmail, etc. But maybe they’re not…Ticket scalpers are seen as sleazy guys who cheat you by marking up the price of tickets. Profits go to middlemen instead of the performers. What good could they possibly do? ‘I like to think of ticket scalpers as the guy who stands in line so that I don’t have to,’ [Reason.tv’s Nick] Gillespie said. Time spent in line is part of the ticket cost. Scalpers let you pay entirely in money, rather than partly in valuable time."

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