Unless somebody else has already been privately annointed to be our LPNY candidate for the United States Senate, this email is intended to announce that I will accept a draft for the nomination to that candidacy.

I recognize that a draft for a nomination demands much. In candor, I do not plan to compete for the nomination against a pack. The candidacy is an unremunerated and thankless, job. Indeed, an LPNY candidate has to count himself fortunate if he does not wind up excoriated for his efforts. I have arranged not to teach 2004 summer courses. My plan instead is to campaign full time if the senatorial nomination is thrust upon me and to the extent that my support from the LPNY and my resources will permit.

Granted the nomination, I will commit myself to the collection of my usual 500+ nominating petition signatures instead of the 30 signatures -- my share as a party member, no more and no less -- to which two years ago I resolved I would restrict thereafter myself.

The thrust of my campaign would be simple:

Where there are the most obvious and least excusable violations of the individual liberties and rights of American citizens; against those I would speak on every plausible occasion.

These include, first, the drug war, which I aver must be scrapped in its entirety, with its victims compensated in every case possible.

Second, I would decry the drive to disarm honest citizens, because such disarmament diminishes their ability to pose a potential physical threat to the tyrannies large and small that are burgeoning over us all. I have long been a member of the community of shooters and Second Amendment activists: former President of the Dutchess County Pistol Association, the current Vice President of the New Paltz Rod & Gun Club, the Captain of its pistol team, and a participant in innumerable RKBA activist organizations.

Third, I would rage against the spate of excessive recent ``security" excesses which are increasingly imposed upon our citizenry, with the menace of terrorism deftly if often fraudulently employed as justification thereof.

These three areas of oppression and usurpation I have mentioned are, I believe, centered around the single end of engendering a police state on American soil. This unity of purpose is obfuscated by the fact that differing and ostensibly opposing political groups are involved in various aspects of multiple clamp-downs on our citizenry.

I want attention drawn to this evil unity of purpose.

I want publicly to ask why sundry murder and sex trials occupy the center of citizen awareness, whereas the trial, and the incarceration for decades, of basically innocent Branch Davidian survivors has long been avoided by the media. I want to ask Charles Schumer to explain his role in impeding the Congressional hearings on the Davidian Massacre.

I want the drug legalizers to recognize that the war on guns is merely another drive to disempower them and thus to render drug-law violators vulnerable for incarceration.

I want everybody to awaken to the the fact that death sentences have are applied to an ever widening congeries of crimes -- some of which are not in any legitimate sense crimes at all.

I want the pro-gun activists to recognize that the momentum of the citizen-disarmament movement was initiated by, and is maintained by, the eighty-year-old prohibitionistic laws launched by fun-hating puritans in league with Enforcers planning to profiteer from human misery.

And now comes the Patriot Act and its congeners to track down any who move or speak out of line, and to frighten into conformity all who dare to oppose the totalitarian juggernaut, urged by Clinton but now enormously accelerated by Bush and Ashcroft.

Some candidate for high office must speak out audibly and articulately against such deadly issues.

If I claim that somebody should advocate on these matters then why should that spokesperson not be a Professor Donald Silberger, Ph.D.?

Consequently, I offer myself as the LPNY candidate for USSenate.

What special qualities do I bring to this task?

Well, there is my exhuberant 74-year-old youth, my technologically enhanced smile, my shiny pate, my luxuriant beard, my exquisite profile, my established capacity for coprophagia, my gab of gift, my grab of guff, and my proclivity to rush in where angels fear to tread.

So... Will mine be a summer of relaxation, writing, and pleasure? Or will it instead be a ferocious struggle to lift the torch of liberty before the eyes of my fellow NewYorkers?

As of this announcement, the answers are up to you to determine.

Saludos!