11-08-2011 Portsmouth Municipal Election Results

In Portsmouth, there was a concentrated effort  to not only get the more pro-liberty candidates elected, but to improve their vote totals.  The effort was led by Association of Portsmouth Taxpayers and others.  All of the APT endorsed candidates were elected.  Even better, while many incumbents received fewer votes than in 2009, all of the APT endorsed incumbents received more voter than in 2009.  The more efficient government candidates on the ballot increased their vote totals by 30%, 18%, 17% and 5% versus the 2009 results.  The candidates in favor of more spending and taxes decreases their vote totals 17%, 8% and 7% respectively.  The only tax and spend candidate to increase his vote total was Councilor Bob Lister.

The Portsmouth city council is elected by an unusual method.  There are nine city council seats.  The top vote getter is declared the mayor.  The number two vote getter is declared the assistant mayor.  Democratic Councilor Eric Spears received the most voters with 13.5% of the total in a ten way race.  Spears campaigned for mayor on an agenda to keep tax increases around the same level as inflation.  Spears has a history of good votes, scrutinizing expensive spending and even challenging the police union when it comes to spending.  He received a B from APT and had the second best voting record of the incumbents according to a chart on the APT website.

Councilor Spears helped lead an effort to get a referendum question on the municipal ballot.  The question, if passed, would prevent elected officials from working for the city or school system while in office.  The voters passed with question overwhelmingly with 81% voting yes.

In an apparent judgment lapse, APT also endorsed incumbent Assistant Mayor Nancy Clayburgh.  When Councilor Spears learned about the endorsement he called up Assistant Mayor Clayburgh and said he was furious.  According to Assistant Mayor Clayburgh, he also went to APT people and said the endorsement should be removed.  Partly because of Councilor Spears’ action, the bottom parts of the APT endorsement signs were removed so that Assistant Mayor Clayburgh’s name would no long be on the signs.

The APT also endorsed Councilor Anthony Coviello, Councilor Esther Kennedy, Jack Thorsen for City Council and Mary Olea for the School Board.  Councilor Coviello was the third highest rated incumbent on the APT voting record chart.  Councilor Coviello claimed that high quality schools and keeping the budget in line were top priorities.  Councilor Kennedy was the highest rated incumbent on the APT voting record chart.

Republican Jack Thorsen is known as a strong fiscal conservative.  Unfortunately, Thorsen was the only candidate to sign the APT pledge.  It says, I pledge to only approve a city budget that results in a decrease in the property tax rate. Thorsen was outed for being friendly with a few area free staters in a letter to the editor about the election in a failed attempt to get voters to reject him.  Thorsen made failed attempts at city council in 2009 and state representative in 2010.  In 2010, the Democratic leaning Portsmouth Herald newspaper was so upset with then Democratic Speaker of the House Terie Norelli, it endorsed Thorsen to replace Speaker Norelli in her position as a state representative from Portsmouth.  As far as I know, Thorsen was the only Republican that the Portsmouth Herald endorsed in 2010.  Thorsen is known for being open about his positions and writing letters to the editor to the Portsmouth Herald.  For example, in 2010, he wrote a letter explaining why it makes sense to completely legalize cannabis in NH and sell it in stores.  Just before Thorsen was elected to city council, he was on Portsmouth based libertarian radio show Left Right And Correct.  On the show, Thorsen talked about his distrust of government officials.

The only other Republican Councilor is Ken Smith.  Councilor Smith signed the APT pledge in 2009 but voted to increase taxes in 2009.  The APT rated Councilor Smith D-, the second worst of the incumbent councilors.  There is an anti-Smith website, active since 2009.  According to the website, Councilor Smith’s voting total dropped by 210 votes between 2007 and 2009.  According to APT, he received 303 fewer votes in 2011, a 17% drop.  Councilor Smith is also known for trying to increase police pay, even though police already earn over twice as much as private sector workers in Portsmouth.

Steve Marchand’s opinion piece (Seacoast Sunday, May 30) on the adverse affect that the electric generator tax would have on New Hampshire economics is an excellent example of the kind of analysis we need for every tax increase that Concord contemplates.

I agree with the writer that the BCRA stifles free speech — but Republicans and Democrats are equally interested in stifling viewpoints that challenge the existing power structures. Anyone who thinks that the Republican Party is going to work for real change, other than putting themselves at the helm of the great ship of state, is deluding himself.

While New Hampshire’s political system is hostile to third parties, with onerous petitioning requirements and very tight deadlines, the options do exist.

While many SeaLs are working for liberty within the major parties, and I wish them luck, it is my opinion that the national organizations are so hostile to liberty as to render those efforts even more futile than third-party options. Stop by the LP of NH table at Liberty Forum this weekend and think about it.

It is ridiculous that we have people in jail for what is essentially a victimless crime, and the whole process from stake-out to bust to arrest to prosecution to incarceration wastes an enormous amount of time and taxpayer money.

Let’s All Take a Deep Breath

By Scott McPherson

At a recent Seacoast Liberty event I was approached by a member of our organization who told me that he planned to start dedicating a great deal of his time to persuading people to homeschool their children. I applauded his intentions, only to quickly re-evaluate my initial reaction.

Because, you see, he then told me that one of his methods for accomplishing this goal would be to “convince parents that sending their kids to a public school is child abuse.”

Moral hysteria plays, sadly, too large a role in the Freedom Movement today. Few of us, myself included, are completely innocent of having employed it at one time or another to make a point. But in using moral hysteria as a ready tool to beat our opponents into intellectual submission we run a very serious risk of losing all credibility.

Admittedly, this kind of behavior is not unique to libertarians. “Godwin’s Law,” which states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches,” came to be a popular observation on the World Wide Web precisely because the average American’s ability to dispassionately and fairly argue a point is in rapid and steady decline. Politics is a nasty business.

But even if one feels perfectly up to the task of “proving” to another beyond a reasonable doubt that he is no better than a murderous dictator for failing to support some cause or embrace some point of view or take some action, it doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to get our overall point across. We will not make any friends this way.

Worse, we will drive away the friends we already have.

And while swimming around as the big fish in a little pond may gratify the egos of some, it won’t move us any closer to the free society we all wish to see in our lifetime.

This came jumping off the page at me today as I read my friend Jacob Hornberger’s blog on the Future of Freedom Foundation website. In a mock contrast of modern “liberalism” and “conservatism,” he shows how alike they are by highlighting the major issues on which they generally find common cause. These are:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, SBA loans, foreign aid, government-business partnerships, economic regulations, income taxation, trade restrictions, immigration controls, public schools, the Federal Reserve and its fiat currency, home loan assistance, corporate bailouts, the war on drugs, militarism and empire, torture, military tribunals, and the military industrial complex.

I would add “gun control” to this list. Support for these pretty much sums up the liberal/conservative worldview. Now, you might shave a few off here and there, but essentially these are the things that the average American, regardless of the dominant political philosophy with which he identifies, agrees government ought to be doing to us.

Then there is this small but, thankfully, growing number of people who identify with the libertarian view. We by and large oppose all of that. You can shave a few off here and there, but essentially these are things that the average libertarian thinks government shouldn’t be doing at all.

What struck me right away was how large this list really is. It is by no means exhaustive, but it gives us a great perspective. There is a lot of agreement in our movement. It is this general agreement and, more importantly, agreement on the principles from which we derive our stance on these issues, that draws us to one another, and to Seacoast Liberty.

At the same time, it is important to realize that there is not universal consensus even among “hard core” libertarians about every one of those things, let alone some others I could mention. What about “intellectual property rights”? Anarcho-capitalism versus limited, constitutional government? Abortion? Privatization of roads and bridges? Gay marriage? The complete abolition of taxation? Replacing a standing army with a general militia? Age of consent laws?

Do all of these debates have to be settled with complete uniformity of thought before we can get on with the business of promoting individual freedom?

And if changing public opinion about government is truly our goal, then an honest person would have to admit that we are still a long, long way from even modest success. That distance will only grow larger when we abandon civil discourse and start calling people “child abusers” because they send their kids to school.

Scott McPherson is a member of Seacoast Liberty. His children have never set foot in a school.

The American people are fed up with paternalistic over-reaching government, and we are starting to shout, “Enough is enough!” Freedom is the unifying factor missing from today’s divisive political dialogue.

This year, I created a new organization. This grew out of some conversations leading up to the election; there was a taxpayers’ group in Portsmouth, but no general liberty organization. Well, there is now.

Announcing Portsmouth Pro Liberty. Currently it is a blog and a mailing list, and we are small, but we are more than just me. Come join us. Check out that site, and e-mail info@portsmouthproliberty.org if you are interested.

I would hope you consider these arrests a wake-up call on how the real world works. You need to understand that you live in a free country and in a free country you can’t just do what you want, even if what you do does not harm anyone else. You see, individuals do not have the right to make decisions for themselves. Only our infallible government has that right.

The City Council numbers are very interesting. There is a clear division between the top eleven and the bottom three. Incumbent Laura Pantelakos and previous councilman St. Laurent finished a few hundred behind the last elected council member; then there is a big drop-off of nearly 500 votes to the last three. Ryan Baker and Jack Thorsen would have been newcomers to Portsmouth elected office, and David Adams’s previous experience was only on the Historic District Commission. The two newly-elected council members are Tony Coviello, a veteran of the Planning Committee who was encouraged to run by the mayor, and Bob Lister, who was the School Superintendent for years.

It shows, to me, the parochial nature of local politics. To get elected, one must already have some kind of profile; that means getting appointed to some board or other, or having a very large and strong community support network. Running as a maverick may be satisfying, but is unlikely to be successful.

Meanwhile, I see that our neighbors to the east have voted to continue marriage apartheid. The silver lining is that perhaps it will drive Down Easters who value personal liberty to the Free State.