Good questions, Kevin. Here's a fuller explanation of these documents. "A <http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform-pending-amendments> copy of the Platform as our unamended report would leave it": this is the baseline document that our subcommittee laboriously refined, as shown by the wiki history. We confined ourselves to only using 100% recycled language because we consider that our best hope for omnibus adoption of it (should we decide to attempt that) before we go on to consider novel-language amendments plank-by-plank. The recycling restriction led to a few glaring weaknesses that you and others have already noticed and that most of us acknowledge and that in Vegas we'll probably adopt "pending amendments" to fix. A pending amendment is an amendment we would offer for consideration in the Platform debate in Denver, like pre-submitting a floor amendment. This parliamentary strategy lets us divide the Platform debate into two logical phases: adoption of a 100% recycled baseline Platform to fix the Portland damage, and then consideration of any PlatCom proposals for novel language. We worry that novel language will be viewed more suspiciously than time-tested recycled language. "My annotated <http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform-tour> version of our subcommittee's draft platform": This is our draft recycled platform plus 1) editorial explanations from me and 2) the particular set of "pending amendments" that I'll be advocating on Friday for inclusion in PlatCom's Report. I steer readers to this instead of the link above so that people won't waste time re-discovering the glaring weaknesses without seeing the sort of pending amendment that will be offered to fix them. (I've lost count of all the people who have complained about the "abolish all regulation of financial markets" language, that's the language we inherited from the 2004 Platform.) This document shows the maximal set of pending amendments I'm interested in -- eleven. I only consider five of them to be vital, and the rest are merely nice to have. (Yes, I consider fixing "American soil" to be vital.) "The raw text of our <http://libertarianmajority.net/directional-principles-subcommittee-report> subcommittee report" : parliamentary procedure requires our report to be written in this reader-unfriendly way. Only of interest to Robert's Rules Of Order wonks. "A compendium of <http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform-pending-amendments> potential amendments": this not a full copy of our proposed platform, but rather just a collection of all the pending amendments that I've seen proposed. Thus it's a superset of the changes you see in the annotated draft, as those are just the changes I personally endorse. Our subcommittee did not get around to formally endorsing any particular set of these amendments. I hope that choosing among them (or drafting others) will be the most interesting thing we do in Vegas, as we've already gone over the recycled baseline draft with a fine-toothed comb. For anyone who cares, a list of our most recent 38 votes on changing it is here <http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform-amendments> . Our email logs record several dozen earlier votes.
