Defending friends

Thanks to Keaton for this one.

Specifically, this part:

To BetteRose Ryan, I’m a big puss. I sacrificed my bohemian creds to maintain a completely worthless middle class privilege. Starr, Carling and Cory were savaging you in an executive session over the Shotgun Willie’s booth. Starr insisted that it scared off other vendors. Scared off whom? Here ya go, you lying posers: I danced from Austin to Vegas. I’ve worked in the best and worst clubs. I’ve been paid $1000 to do nothing but sit for thirty minutes. I’ve spoken to more men about libertarianism while dressed as a school girl than any of you will in your tacky double knit polyester suits.

Evidently the Starr Chamber thinks it can insult convention organizers in Executive Session and get away with it. They thought wrong.

I've known BetteRose Ryan for years. Ditto her husband, Tony, and her sister, Michelle Poague. I consider them my friends. They are great people, first class all around. BetteRose and Tony have both served the LP with distinction in both LPCO (BetteRose as state chair and predecessor to my state chair, John Bernsten, Tony on the LPCO Board with me), and as LNC representatives (BetteRose as at-large, and Tony currently in a region). Michelle has also served on the LPCO Board in 2003-4. I was busy being a dad at that time as my son was born 4 days after the 2003 LPCO convention, which I helped organize, following the BetteRose "Cookbook" for conventions. I stepped down from the LPCO Board at that point for exactly that reason--parenting called.

Shotgun Willie's is the premiere club in Denver metro, in the unincorporated Glendale district. A lot of the girls there are LPCO activists, including Michelle. They co-sponosered the LPUS Convention. To Coloradoans, we know them as the "Glendale Ballet", and they have been mainstays in the LPCO, especially at election night parties, for years.

If the Starr Chamber is pissed over the Glendale Ballet at the LPUS Convention, then perhaps they ought to untwist their prude panties and go to a show. I’ve known that outfit for years; it’s high class, and they are regulars on the LPCO circuit–hell, an institution, even!–and not just for sex appeal either–some of them are bona fide party activists! That and BetteRose Ryan, Tony, and Michelle are all well-known as class acts bar none, which seems to be lost on the Starr Chamber, since they seem to lack it. The Glendale Ballet is what the LP is all about–free enterprise, free expression, and free minds and bodies.

Sorry, Starr Chamber. Methinks you doth protest too much, and for the wrong reasons. You should be thanking the Ryans, Michelle, and LPCO for putting on a great convention (as they tend to do!) instead of criticizing them. You also ought to be taking notes on what they did right instead of coming up with an idiotic cockamamie scheme to do LPUS 2010 in Hawaii, away from media cameras, media coverage, and the ability of most delegates to attend, in what is a poor imitation of the LPCA 2006 convention fiasco.

We got you out of CA before you ran it into the ground. Let's hope we can do the same at the LNC before it is damaged beyond repair.

For more info on Shotgun Willie's, check out http://www.shotgun-willies.com/Flash_index.htm