WHO IS JIM AND MELISSA SHARPE??????!!!!! :)
Well, let me tell you,... they're Libertarians :)
They use to have a morning talk show in L.A. on a station that was pop rock (kinda like "the Zone" here in Phoenix). He's from Navajo county here in Arizona and was libertarian many many years ago from the influence of a much older friend of the family. He and his wife Melissa moved back to Arizona where Melissa has been the morning DJ for the KYOT 95.5 jazz station for some time while Jim did a stint on Power 92. Their siter station was KFYI and Jim asked to be allowed to do days off and such for the talk show host so he could break into that field. He did very well and was given his own show at night 7-9 I think. That's where we discovered that we had a libertarian on the air (even though at the time he was calling himself a constitutionalist) I and others could tell right away he was a libertarian and that he knew it. He was hard core all the way and it was very obvious to those that know and understand how to spot a libertarian. After doing a spot on his show by phone against Rep May and some crap of his, Sharpe called to ask if he could attend our State Party Convention which he did and many of us have been friends with he and his wife ever since.
He's made it very clear that he is Libertarian on the air and what is far better is that he really is (in the no-compromise way of the Arizona Libertarian Party) Years ago Barry Young made a big deal out of registering Libertarian but was never involved with the activist and was constantly taking very unlibertarian positions "As a Libertarian".so we had to out him as NOT a Libertarian. In 1994 we went after him on his show. We criticized his positions of the recent past that had him (as a libertarian) supporting the invation of Haiti & Somalia as a proper function of government and the needed role of FEMA. He was also promoting that taxpayers be forced to use their money to help the rebuilding of the homes damaged and detroyed in the earthquakes of California (that were built on the fault LINE) and the homes that were built in the Mississippi flood plain. His PC position on guns sucked too. We knew that if we were to have a libertarian cultural shift here in Arizona, there was no way it was going to happen with the likes of Barry Young defining what it meant. We challenged him to a debate on the definitions of libertarianism with our State Chair at the time, Rick Tompkins and published it in over 100,000 copies of our campaign tabloid during the John Buttrick and Scott Grainger campaigns of 1994. From then on he stopped calling himself Libertarian,.. yeah.
Now we have a "REAL" Libertarian,... no,... TWO REAL LIBERTARIANS that will be taking over the #1 radio show in the state as openly libertarian on the most liberal radio station in Arizona that I know of (hell, they are followed by Az. Republic columnist David Lebowitz,... that should tell you something :) When the KTAR station manager was quoted in the article on top of the front page of the Valley and State section of the Az Republic saying "Jim and Melissa Sharpe talk the talk and walk the walk of the audience we are hoping to target" he was talking about their being Libertarian,.. get it. Economic forces will always lead political popularity. And if you have faith in the power of freedom and free markets you can always lead the masses by a good distance and be precieved as leaders of the movement when it was going to happen no matter what anyway. If we stop trying to be popular and work at supporting what's right then the masses will eventually find us and we don't even have to go looking.
Being that the Sharpes are so libertarian and in such a position to help the movement, it has been one of my personal and most effective and rewarding projects to see that the Sharpe's career get all of the help we can provide. We are far better served by helping to solidify the position of a very libertarian team where they have tens of thousand listening to them every weekday for 4 hours where the libertarian perpective gets heard on every subject presented to a group of people that are the most liberal in the state than almost any other project I can think of. In 1994 we could have tried to jump on the coattails of one of the most popular talk show host in the state (Barry Young), but we would have done great damage to the freedom movement if we did. We just ignored him until we could no longer and had to separate ourselves from his collectivist positions on too many issues for us to be able to be associated with his retoric. Did we take a hit from this? No not really. Barry, and to a large extent Mo, didn't have very nice things to say about us after that, but we were far better off having our platform speak for us than someone with the philosophy of Young. Amoungst the activist we knew that we would get another chance someday. Then Stallion and Stallioness Sharpe came along. At the very least, I will put at least 10 times as much effort in the promotion of them as representative of our philosophy as I did in the effort to separate us from the philosophy of Barry Young (I liked Barry fine, but calling himself a Libertarian was consumer fraud and we were responsible for product quality).
The Sharpes future is always unknown, as is all of ours, but I have faith in the freedom message and those that promote it. I also see it as a good investment of my time, money and effort in comparison to many other things I could be doing for freedom. My hope is that Rush get's competition from another nationally sindicated radio talk program that has a host that has both sides of his brain untied and therefore a libertarian,... And the Sharpes are my best bet.
Always thinking ahead and remembering the past,
Ernest Hancock
Arizona Freedom Activist