The prolific Jeremy Lott has a fun little piece about the race for the Libertarian nomination and points to one of the curious facts about the LP, its purity testing:

This ideological rigidity has drawn a self-selected group of freedom’s bitter-enders who hate the Federal Reserve and fear the Post Office. They win a handful of local and state elective offices every year but hold no seats in the US Congress. LP-ers are suspicious of newcomers and scrutinize them for any ideological deviations.

This thirst for orthodoxy is such that the first question directed at the candidates at a recent forum moderated by my friend Dave Weigel was about whether or not they would decriminalize child-pornography (the possession of it, not the making of it.)

Never one to let a story go unreported, Weigel recently texted/twittered an update: Libertarian nomination poll from my airport shuttle: 40% Barr, 40% Ruwart, 20% undecided.