Gary Johnson

The guy in the center of the picture is Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico whom I had a chance to hear speak a few weeks ago at Lola's Room, I'll get back to this place. He is running an exploratory campaign right now to decide whether to run as Libertarian, I'll get back to them. He's a really interesting guy, he was or is an entreprenuer; he started a handy-man business and grew it to over a thousand employees, he sold it before becoming governor.

He talked about his background and answered questions from the audience. This was one of the few times that I've been around a politician and it was really interesting when he answered questions from these people, straight off the cuff and honest.

I'm a poster boy for big government, my position was created through ARRA (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), it has a website where contractors and other employers enter how many people they've hired as a result of the stimulus every quarter. Anyways, Gary Johnson is the man when it comes to keeping government small, he cut 1,000 jobs during his two terms (which seems like as many would be reduced through natural attrition), while the guy after him increased their roles by 4,500. He also talked about how he is different from the present governor from A to Z, he told about 'H' which was for 'helicopter', he flew in it something like 6 times, his successor has flown in it 1,000 times and purchased one for his official use, seems wasteful to me...

Another thing I liked about him was his stance on legalization of drugs, he talked about a policy called harm reduction. Harm reduction is the reduction in harm that a drug user would cause themselves or others in order to get their fix. An real world example he had of this was from the chief of police in Zurich, Switzerland, if anyone had an addiction to heroin they could get an authorization to have as much heroin as they needed. They would no longer need to steal to pay for the heroin, dealers would have to move somewhere else, and the drug disputes would be handled in the courts. This police chief told him that crime had been reduced significantly in Zurich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_E._Johnson

I've been reading a lot about the Libertarian ideals lately and though I'm not a Republican nor one of the crazy Tea Party people, I feel more and more like our liberties have been taken away.

About Lola's Room: it's usually a dance club at night playing eighties music while people bounce up and down on the bouncy wood floor. That made it kind of an odd venue for this event.