Liberty Candidates have made it into the big time!  Elizabeth Dworkin of Bloomberg/Businessweek has written a story including many of our liberty candidates like Karen Kwaitkowski, Tisha Casida, Calen Fretts and more!  Gigi Bowman met up with the author and some of our Liberty Candidates during Philly Phreedom, the Ron Paul Rally on April 22.  In the middle of a storm Elizabeth Dworkin might have found more Liberty than she’d imagined 4,500 people with umbrella’s in the rain to hear the Presidential Candidate who has brought so much inspiration to all the liberty Candidates 🙂

~Gigi Bowman, President of Liberty-Candidates.org;  libertycandidates.com

 

Ron Paul’s Torchbearers

 

 

By Elizabeth Dworkin on April 26, 2012

Karen Kwiatkowski, a Republican candidate for Congress in Virginia, rarely passes up an opportunity to scold Washington politicians about runaway defense spending, which she says is an egregious waste of taxpayer dollars that does little to make Americans safer. Halfway across the country, Tisha Casida, a Colorado Independent, says she’ll push to end the drug war and legalize marijuana if she’s elected to the House. In Florida, Calen Fretts, a Libertarian seeking to unseat a veteran Republican congressman, promises that if he’s elected he’ll begin working to abolish the U.S. Federal Reserve. “As people increase the size and scope of government,” Fretts says, “there’s got to be a few of us to resist it.”

These candidates have two things in common: All are long shots seeking office for the first time. And all were inspired to run by the same man—Ron Paul.

After 12 terms in the House, Paul, who is 76, says he’ll retire at year’s end. Though he gamely insists he can still defeat Mitt Romney and capture the Republican nomination, his presidential runs have always been about forcing other candidates, and the public, to pay attention to his libertarian arguments for eliminating most taxes, closing federal agencies, bringing U.S. troops home from overseas, legalizing drugs, outlawing official secrecy, dismantling the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and generally getting the government to get out of the way.

If forcing his don’t-tread-on-me, minimalist philosophy into the mainstream is the benchmark, Paul can claim victory and return to Texas a happy man. The professional political class may ridicule him as an eccentric kook leading a cantankerous army of potheads who invade chat rooms with ALLCAPS rants about government overreach. (And no doubt there’s something to that—the most worshipful Paul evangelists can be hard to stomach.) But listening to his rivals in the GOP debates demand that the Fed be audited and the Departments of Energy and Education be shuttered, it’s clear that many of Paul’s positions, once considered extreme, are now routine Republican talking points—and that his influence over conservative politics greatly outweighs his low poll rankings and back-of-the-pack primary returns. “I believe our time has come,” says Paul, who quickly tempers this uncharacteristic display of optimism. “It’s still going to be a knock-down dragged-out fight.”

continued:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-25/ron-pauls-torchbearers#disqus_thread