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RICHMOND, Va. -- Ten months ago, Princess Blanding launched a campaign for governor and a new political party in Virginia. Her name appears on Virginia ballots with fall, as the newly formed Liberation Party tries to make waves where no other third party has in recent Virginia history.

Blanding said her political efforts extend well beyond ten months, though. In fact, she easily quotes the exact date.

My spark started on May 14, 2018."

It was the day Blandings brother, Marcus-David Peters, was shot and killed by a Richmond Police Officer while experiencing a mental health crisis. The shooting was later ruled justified by the Richmond Commonwealths Attorney's office.

Since my brothers murder, myself, family members, and a continuously growing supporter base here in Richmond and beyond, have begged our local officials that we cant bring Marcus back, but we can at least enact legislation that prioritizes community care and safety, she said.

Blanding points to the legislation that bears her brothers name as an example of her frustration with the two-party political system.

Signed by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in 2020, the Marcus Alert bill launched a system to ensure behavioral health experts are involved in responding to individuals in crisis, including by limiting the role of law enforcement.

Blanding and other activists said the bill was a watered-down version of the original, but said it is only one example.

What were dealing with is politicians who are delivering nothing but crumbs. Theyre making symbolic gestures, such as removing the Robert E. Lee monument, while we still have people with nowhere to lay their head, she said. After the unjust murder of George Floyd, I kept saying, its time for the rise of a strong, independent party and we must expand our fight from the streets to seats of the key legislative positions. But, in all honesty, I didnt think I was going to be doing that.

Blanding and other activists launched the Liberation Party of Virginia. On ballots across the state, the abbreviation LP appears next to her name. The Libertarian Party, a completely separate party with no statewide candidate in 2021, goes by the abbreviation L on ballots.

The Liberation Party is here to do just that. To ensure that Liberation is a human right, not a privilege, for all Virginians, Blanding said. When we say that, we mean ensuring housing security, food sovereignty, Medicare for all. What were fighting for is bare-bones equity and humanity.

Third-party candidates have not fared well in statewide races in recent political history in Virginia.

In 2013, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis secured the highest percentage of the statewide vote by a third party candidate in more than 50 years; his 6.5% of votes more than tripled any other third party candidate for Governor.

Blanding knows those numbers but also points out this data point: it has been decades since more than 50% of registered voters in Virginia participated in a gubernatorial election. She argues her campaign speaks directly to those voters who feel left out by the two major parties.

They feel that nobody is listening and that nobody cares. So it is a breath of fresh air when they see there is a candidate who is fighting for all of us, for all working class, for all marginalized community members, for all the oppressed people, Blanding said.

Blanding said they expect to win the governors race, but no matter the outcome, they plan to continue efforts to grow the Liberation Party and run candidates in further state and local elections.

You can read more about the Blanding campaign and the Liberation Party here. You can watch her live interview with Bill Fitzgerald on CBS 6 at 7 p.m.

WTVR

Virginia Governor's Race Terry McAuliffe (Democratic)Glenn Youngkin (Republican)Princess Blanding (Liberation Party)

Virginia Lt. Governor's Race Hala Ayala (D) [Interview scheduled Oct. 15]Winsome Sears (R)

Virginia Attorney General RaceMark Herring (D)Jason Miyares (R)

To learn more about key local elections, click here for the CBS 6 voter's guide.

Watch CBS 6 News at 7 p.m. with Bill Fitzgerald on TV, WTVR.com/LIVE or now streaming on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV and Android TV. Just search "WTVR Richmond" in your app store.

Friday, Sept. 17: Early, In-Person Voting BeginsThursday, Oct. 12: Voter Registration DeadlineFriday, Oct. 22: Request Absentee/Mail-In Ballot DeadlineSaturday, Oct. 30: Early, In-Person Voting EndsTuesday, Nov. 2 is Election Day: In-Person Voting from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 2: Absentee/Mail-In Postmark by DateFriday, Nov. 5: Absentee/Mail-In Delivered By Date

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Why Princess Blanding launched the Liberation Party in Virginia - wtvr.com

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has often proved to be a gift that keeps giving for Democrats and a thorn in the side of fellow Republicans.

The stubbornly independent Pauls dogmatic advocacy of libertarian ideas about governance has often thrown a monkey wrench into the plans of the Senate leadership. That proved again the case this past week.

After all the drama about U.S. funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system had already played out in the House, and both Democrats and Republicans were eager to pass the measure and then move on to other issues on which they could resume tearing each other apart. But Paul decided the issue was far from settled.

Exercising his prerogative to overturn a call for unanimous consent which would streamline the legislative process, he objected and placed a hold on the legislation to the frustration of just about everyone else on Capitol Hill.

That earned Paul a condemnatory tweet from AIPAC.

Shots from the lobby at Paul are nothing new.

Of greater interest to the Kentucky politician, who, like most GOP office-holders depends on the backing of evangelicals to stay in office, was the way the Christians United for Israel group, and its leader Pastor John Hagee, went ballistic over the issue.

Hagee, who heads the group that claims to be the nations largest pro-Israel organization said, "Senator Paul needs to stop playing games with the safety of the Israeli people."

But that anger was matched by the barely-concealed mirth of Jewish Democrats whose interest in making a meal of Pauls grandstanding had as much to do with re-establishing a moral equivalence between the parties on Middle East issues as it did with any actual impatience with his stunt.

Democrats have been taking a beating from pro-Israel activists ever since the May conflict with Hamas, which prompted a series of exchanges on the floor of the House of Representatives in which progressives made their distaste for Israel and its policies known.

That was compounded by the embarrassment suffered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who was outwitted by members of her own caucus last month when she tried to slip Iron Dome funding into a House budget bill that raised the national debt limit. But since a considerable number of left-wing Democrats refused to vote for it because they oppose Israel, she had to withdraw it.

Two days later and after a torrent of criticism for being outmaneuvered by members of the so-called "Squad," the House leadership submitted Iron Dome as a separate measure.

Determined to both answer the claims that their party had turned on Israel and to reassert control of their caucus on a budget issue on which freelancing is considered highly dangerous, Pelosi and her team struck back. Using all the considerable leverage and powers of intimidation at their disposal, the whip was cracked and even most progressives fell in line.

In the end, only nine House members voted against Iron Dome, a total that included eight left-wingers and one Republican, fellow Kentucky libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie.

Even the ringleader of the Squad, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) felt the pressure and, at the last minute, tearfully changed her vote from "no" to "present." Though AOC subsequently apologized for a decision for what she described as insufficiently supportive of the Palestinians and critical of Israel, the lesson was learned.

Further burnishing the honor of House Democrats was the speech of Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) who accused another Squad member Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) of antisemitism for spreading the "apartheid state" lie about Israel.

So when Sen. Paul stopped the Senates approval of Iron Dome in its tracks, Democrats felt vindicated. It's not surprising that Halie Soifer, the head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, swiftly claimed in a tweet that Pauls actions were actually more damaging to Iron Dome funding than what House progressives had done.

Some went further than that and argued that the fact that the Democrats who tried to stop Iron Dome were criticized with greater heat and with charges of antisemitism while Paul was, at least by comparison, let off with a slap on the wrist. They said that showed how distorted the debate about Israel has become.

Despite the attention given the Squad and its allies, some liberals contended that these events proved that not only was the bipartisan consensus on Israel holding but that any arguments that aimed at showing a real difference between the parties on the Jewish state was misinformation.

But while the Democrats had a point about the damage Paul was doing, the attempt to assert a moral equivalence on Israel inside the two parties is simply untrue. If pro-Israel activists are more upset at left-wing Democrats than they are at the GOPs libertarian outliers, they have good reason for thinking that way.

Though its easy to lose perspective in the heat of political debate, the truth remains that the two parties have largely swapped identities over the last 60 years.

Where once the GOP was split between those who were sympathetic to the Jewish state and a much larger faction that was indifferent or hostile to it, today it is a virtually lockstep pro-Israel party. Most have views on the conflict with the Palestinians that fit in somewhere between the Likud and even more right-wing Israelis like Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Even dissenters like Paul and Massie, who oppose aid to Israel, do so on the basis of their opposition to all foreign aid and, will, if asked, speak of their admiration for Israel.

By contrast, the Democrats, who could a generation or two ago, claim to be the home of pro-Israel opinion, are badly split on the issue. A significant portion of its left-wing base looks at Israel through the prism of intersectionality and critical race theory and believe it to be a manifestation of white privilege whose stance toward the Palestinians is no different from that of racists in the Jim Crow south in the pre-Civil Rights era.

Their dissent against the Iron Dome was merely the tip of an iceberg that betrays a growing hostility toward Israel that even some who claim to be Israels supporters like the left-wing J Street lobby are quick to note when they claim that right-wing Israeli policies are alienating Americans.

Among the grassroots activists on the left there is considerable sympathy for the BDS movement as well as for views such as that of Tlaib, who views Israels existence as illegitimate. Though many Democrats disagree and are enthusiastic backers of a two-state solution that now seems more utopian than practical, there is no disguising the fact that, thanks to the increased support for intersectionality on the left, there is a real divide in the party between its establishment members and the Squad as well as many of the members of the 100-strong Progressive Caucus in the House on Zionism.

Even more troublesome is the fact that this divide seems to be largely generational, both among the activists and in the House, where the contrast between AOC and her allies and the octogenarians who still run the House leadership is too obvious to miss.

Given the popularity of the former among both the Democrats cheering section in the mainstream press, and, more crucially, the late night comedy shows, where people like Ilhan Omar, Tlaib and AOC are treated like rock stars, its not irrational to worry that, the recent vote notwithstanding, the left represents the partys future.

And although few pro-Israel activists are willing to say so publicly, most will admit in private that Rand Paul had a point. Israel is strong and rich enough that it ought to begin to wean itself from the constraints of American military aid, even if most of the money is spent in the United States.

While his proposal that Iron Dome be funded out of the allocation of foreign aid to Afghanistan now that it has fallen to the Taliban is a non-starter in legislative terms, its easy to sympathize with it and hardly equivalent to the kind of vicious libels being put about by the left about Israels efforts to silence Hamas terrorist missile and rocket fire.

While the Kentucky senator gave Jewish Democrats a good talking point, that doesnt make up for the fact that a lot of liberals now buy into the arguments that falsely characterize Zionism as a form of racism.

Rather than seeking to pretend that the actions of two neo-isolationist libertarians who are allergic to spending taxpayer money on anything are just as bad as the anti-Zionism and antisemitism that has found a home on the left, Jewish Democrats need to follow Deutchs example and concentrate their efforts on winning back their party from an increasingly influential faction that makes no secret about its disdain for Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of the Jewish News Syndicate and a columnist for the New York Post.Twitter:@jonathans_tobin

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Comparing Rand Paul to the Squad is unfair. He doesn't hate Israel - Haaretz

On October 4, 2021, Bill Kristol, an editor at large of The Bulwark, went up against Scott Horton of the Libertarian Institute in an Oxford-style debate on U.S. foreign policy at Symphony Space in New York City.

Kristol was a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq, the founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a foreign policy adviser to John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, and chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.

Scott Horton is the author of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism and Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan. He's the editorial director of Antiwar.com and the host of Antiwar Radio and the Scott Horton Show.

The debate was hosted by The Soho Forum, with Director Gene Epstein moderating.

Narrated by Nick Gillespie; production by Four Corners Media; intro edited by John Osterhoudt

Photos: Brett Raney; Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Bill Kristol and Scott Horton Debate U.S. Interventionism at the Soho Forum - Reason

Amy Poehler teases 'Duncanville''s mini 'Parks and Rec' reunion

The season two premiere of Fox's Duncanville" will feature a mini 'Parks and Rec' reunion with Nick Offerman, Adam Scott, Aubrey Plaza and Retta all voicing characters. The animated comedy follows a spectacularly average teenage boy named Duncan and his family. Poehler, an executive producer, voices both Duncan and his mother. (May 20)

AP

Nick Offerman is not Ron Swanson.

Anyone with lingering confusion about the differences between Swanson, the fictional mans man and staunch libertarian on NBC's Parks and Recreation, and Offerman, the mans man and bleeding-heart liberal actor who played him, will have their misguided notions of the real-life man quickly dispelled in the pages of his new book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside"(Dutton, out Tuesday).

The book is an amiable ramble outdoors,with Offerman sharing his assorted experiences in the wild and his musings on nature, land use, labor, agriculture and community. He takes readers on the hikingtrails of Glacier National Park, where he gets into scrapes with two of his best buds, Wilco songwriter Jeff Tweedy and author George Saunders. He walksthe verdant pastures of an English sheep farm with shepherd James Rebanks. And he visits the sprawling RV parks of the American Southwest, where he camped in an Airstream with wife Megan Mullally during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Offerman, 51,is generous with hilarious anecdotes, including a choice discursion about how both he and his wife ended up kissing Rob Lowe during their careers ("Now that I think about it, given some slight allowances for time and space, you could technically say that RoLo, Megan, and myself had a threesome").

But when he's not being funny,Offerman, who is also a professional woodworker and cohosts NBC's crafts competition show "Making It" withAmy Poehler,is quite serious, waxingphilosophical about Mother Nature and our relationship with it, and how he thinks we can live better in it.

Offerman spoke to USA TODAY about his new book and his optimism for, and hope in, humanity.

Question: You make a compelling case forpeople to learn to make and build things with their own handsand to do their own labor.Can coddled city folk learn to do these things even if theyve been taught not to all their lives?

Nick Offerman: Theres been this renaissance of creativity and artisanryin my lifetime where people are becoming reinvigorated by how things are made. I like to think that we as a society are waking up to the fact that corporate-made goods, and especially corporate-made food, are not the best for us or our planet. Across the board, you see it everywhere: people are learning to grow food, raise rotationally grazed livestock andgrass-fed pasture-raised eggs, but also clothing, beer, spirits, barbecue, woodworking, blacksmithing. You name it, people are reteaching ourselves the old ways of doing things because theres a purity to them.

Q: What do you think has kept people from being more self-sufficient?

Offerman: People everywhere can now live comfortably without ever owning a socket set, because the consumer paradigm has made it available:Theres an app for everything. If you need somebody to come over and change your lightbulbs, you can do itwith a touch of a button. And that nefariously plays on human nature. I as much as the next monkey am like, Oh, I can either climb this ladder and do it myself or I can press a button and have it done for me? Of course Im going to choose the button. Its having the wherewithal to say, Hang on guys, I happen to know that button is dangerous.

Q: You write about the gratification you feel changing a tire, and it made me want to change my next flat. My dad taught me how when I got my first car, but I've always defaulted calling AAA.

Offerman: It makes perfect sense. Among other things, you get dirty changing a tire. And weve been taught we should aspire to a life where we never get dirty because its beneath us. Thats part of what weve been sold, that you deserve to put your feet up and take it easy, so put down your broom and buy a vacuum cleaner. Getting your hands dirty is for laborers and peasants. You should aspire to be a hip-hop star and relax on your yacht while other people are getting their handsdirty. Luckily, I grew up in a family of people who still get their hands dirty, and I grew up understanding that not only is that not beneath me, thats a super power.

Q. The pandemic seems to have a lot of people rethinking the way they live. Do you think there's an opportunity here for meaningful, lasting change?

Offerman: Ultimately, it needs to reflect back on the way we vote. If were going to reshape our economy, it's going to beby the labor class standing up and saying, Wait a second, my life has so much more value than you are giving it in this low-wage job. And people often take umbrage with me and they say, Well sure, you can say that because you are paid very well to do what you do, but I felt the same way when I was a carpenter and when I was alaborer for many years before I started doing well as an actor.

Through no wisdom of my own, but through the love and perspicacity of my family, I understood the value and the recompense of doing hard work out of affection for my loved ones and for those around me. And then it bleeds into affection for our ecosystem. The older I get, the more I read, the more I understand its all the same. Were all in the same family. The bluebirds Im looking at out the window right now if I treat them with disrespect, thats eventually going to come back and bite somebody with the butterfly effect. Weve got to understand were all the same batch of molecules.

Q: Are you optimistic?

Offerman: Im always hopeful in humanity. … In my lifetime, weve come a long way. Same-sex marriage has become a yawn of a subject, and we were going to war over it 20, 30 years ago. The ever-increasing, alarming signals of climate change, more and more, I think humanity has the capacity to wake up and say, OK, I guess wed better do something about this. The same way that nowadays we say, Can you believe we used to smoke in restaurants? The fact that there was a smoking section in airplanes? Its like having a smoking section within your Prius. So thats laughable and crazy now, and my optimistic hope is (that) before long, well similarly be saying, Can you believe that everyone used to have a household SUV?

Q: Throughout your book, wherever you happen to be in the wild, you pause to reflect on the indigenous tribes that used to live there. Is that something you think about often?

Offerman: Its something Ive come around to. … I had a wonderful moment some years ago, my wifes band was playing at the Sydney Opera House. There was an announcement before the show started that said, Lets just take a moment to recognize that this theater is built on the land of this aboriginal tribe and this peninsula was a traditional place of performance and festival. So lets take a moment of silence and respect for those tribes we displaced, but lets not forget that thats how we came to be here tonight.

And I just thought, boy, thats a big deal, to simply cop to culpability. Thats all Im asking for. Nobody should be self-righteous. Were all just farting, (defecating) eating mammals. The beautiful thing is, were doing our best to create beautiful sandwiches and works of literature and symphonic compositions and also governments and schools and municipalities and bridges. Well never be done. Were always going to continue to do it in a way thats better for us and better for Mother Nature if we hope to survive.

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Nick Offerman gets philosophical on Mother Nature in new book: 'Were all the same batch of molecules' - USA TODAY

Being recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leaderis not easy.And neither was it building thenew currency as admitted byPeter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. Managing funds right from $700 million as president of Clarium to $2 billion as a managing partner of FoundersFund, Peters adrenaline has always come from informal innovation-focused startups and mentoring them. He is also known for being the first outside investor in Facebook, Inc. Presently, he presently is aninvestor and co-founder of successful investment and hedge funds management firms like Clarium Capital Management, Valar Ventures,Mithril Capital Management, and FoundersFund. Peter sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.

On his 54th birthday, we bring a few interesting yet less known facts about Peter Thiel.

Name: Peter Andreas ThielDate of Birth: 11th October 1967Net Worth: $3.7 Billion (As of October 2021)

Bullish about Silicon Valley being the torch-bearer of American success for years to come, Peter cares less for the education than the impact to the society,the startup founders can bring about through their offering. Branded as a contrarian who likes bashing brands and companies, he does see monopolies likeGoogle driving success more than incremental improvement in building technology companies like Microsoft.

Peter is also pretty biased in the companies he has invested (e.g. Space X, Lyft, Facebook) in and always shoots down the competition stating the reasons why they would not succeed. To mosts dismay, it sounds pretty true, considering the practices of the companies he corners. Even Twitters growth, he had commented, is nowhere close to its potential.

On the other hand, Peter Thiel is an evangelist of innovation in both science and technology (including, health sciences and engineering, which he calls working with atoms).

Classifyingthe Dot com bubble of the 1990s to be the most hard-hitting burst among the many bubbles and bursts over the years worldwide,he seesfour prime reasons causing this:1. Lenders showing complaisance;2. Borrowers being greedy and wanting to make the most of free money available;3. Political scenarios that have failed to prempt and prevent these bursts and recessions;4. The lack of path-breaking innovation and settling down for justminor incremental achievements in both science and technology.

These Less known facts about Peter Thiel will bring you to know this sharp worded visionary even better:

1. The first time he used Twitter was on the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 in San Francisco, USA.

2. In his book Zero to One he communicates everything he learnt about Tech and Business and that he had taught at Stanford in 2012.

3. If Thiel was not an entrepreneur, he would probably be a teacher, he admitted. He loves to mentor and guide and thus his alternate profession choice.

4. Peter was contesting to be a clerk on the Supreme Court ranks after his degree in Law from Stanford. In retrospect, he was happy he was not among the two selected of the eight he was among interviewing for the post.

5. Though he favors people learning and teaching as a profession, he is pretty skeptical about what falls under education today, classifying it as an incredible abstraction, obscuring a lot of things that we do, and being very unclear on how valuable what is being taught is, in many cases. He has been known to encourage college kids to drop out and become entrepreneurs, even funding their Zero to One ideas and projects by creating the Thiel Fellowship, which will award 20 people under 20 years of age, $100,000, in order to inspire them to quit college and create their own ventures.

6. Peter sees extreme traits (he has quoted some other founders of Paypal had built bombs in their college) in founders being a big giveaway of their entrepreneurial instincts, however, clarifies that mere craziness is not a virtue, and a balance between being crazy and doing business is the key attribute to success. Competing, according to him, is not the way to succeed in entrepreneurship.

7. His view sounds pragmatic yet is controversial on founders quitting the companies they founded, quoting it as the loss of faith in their own product that leads to their disassociating with it.

8. Having a confident stance about technology and entrepreneurship, though against the norm, is certainly a trait much respected, as much it is condemned. And his viewpoints become even more prominent when it comes to the political scenario. Be it about his remarks in the Libertarian Cato Unbound blog, where Peter states that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy are compatible or when he accounted vast increase in welfare beneficiaries liable to render the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron.

9. The first biography of Peter Thiel titled The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valleys Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin was released on September 21, 2021.

10.Peter Thiel ranked #16 on theForbes Midas List: Top Tech Investors 2021 and #273 on Forbes 400 2021 the definitive ranking of the wealthiest Americans.

11. Peter Thiel is the worlds #574 richest person, with a net worth of $4.9 billion, according to Forbes Billionaire 2021 list.

With all the zeal and enthusiasm, Peter Thiel is nothing less than an idol for many who like libertarianideologies, and his philosophy of being profit-oriented surely should go well with investors too. The believer in long-term he is, we wish his experiments with anti-aging reap him huge dividends and keep his intention to inspire many more path-breaking innovators coming.

Happy Birthday, Peter Thiel! We wish you a lasting lifetime of fiery passion to pass on to the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

The post is a part of aBday Serieswhere we celebrate the birthday of renowned personalities from Tech Industry, very frequently. The series includes Entrepreneurs, C-level Executives, innovators, or renewed leaders who moved the industry with their exponential skill set and vision. The intend is to highlight the persons achievements and touch base the little-known, but interesting, part of his life. You can see the list of all earlier celebrated tech personalities, includingMark Zuckerberg, Marrisa Mayor, Sean Parker, Andy Rubin, Julian Assange,Sir Richard Branson, SergeyBrin byfollowing this linkorsubscribe to your daily newsletter.

To make it more exciting, we suggest you make use of the comment section if you are among the ones celebrating theirbirthday with todays featured personality.

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Happy Birthday Peter Thiel: And For The New Currency PayPal - Dazeinfo