The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Libertarian Anchor

I appeared again tonight as one of the anchors on the local cable access news, Nevada County News Hour. It's pretty cool -- my role on the show has evolved to where I'm basically the Libertarian pundit, and the main host brings me on for shows where he thinks there are big political or philosophical issues to be discussed. The way it works is that there is one main guy, Eric Tomb, and he rotates co-hosts, usually having two other people make up a panel of hosts. That goes for a half hour or more, and then usually Eric interviews another guest or two one-on-one.

Generally, they discuss local news items and the whos, whats, and wheres of it all, but when Eric has me on (once a month or so), we tend to end up talking political philosophy more often than not, and I get a pretty thorough opportunity to offer the libertarian perspective on a given issue, or a few. Eric is a thoughtful and knowledgeable guy, so he's a really good person to go back and forth with on various things.

The only problem with it, I suppose, is that we end up talking very little about the local news. ;-) This week, one issue ate up the whole half hour like it was genetically modified tomatoes. Actually, it was genetically modified tomatoes, and other Genetically Modified Organisms, that we mostly talked about, because there was a big agricultural expo/world convention thing in Sacramento recently, and the other co-host Richard Stockton had gone to it. There were big protests there, because people were concerned that this expo was going to lead to the weakening of restrictions on GMOs, and also I think there was a bit of anti-WTO flavor to it, because this was a meeting of the biggest of the big in world agriculture, and lots of world government folks.

We started talking about that, and then went to talking about genetically modified organisms and the issues around it, and the WTO and similar organizations, and then after a bit Richard started asking questions about libertarianism in general. He tripped me up a little, but all in all it went well. The Secretary of the NCLP, who usually tapes the show for me, said she thought this show was probably the best one yet. :-)

I'll have the video up on the site before too long. Sometime soon I'm going to do a video-capturing marathon, and make a library of video clips. I have quite a lot of various footage that will help people get a better feel for what I'm like "live".