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There are 36 blog entries within the category of Campaign 2014

Jacob Lavoro and Kevin Ludlow posing at a local dinner. Jacob is currently facing up to 99 years in prison for baking THC brownies in Williamson County, Texas Many of you have probably heard about the 19-year-old kid from Round Rock, Texas that is facing up to 99 years in prison for allegedly baking and selling pot brownies. That's him standing next to me in the photo. The Libertarian Party of Williamson County has been working with Jacob and his family in an effort to help him with his current legal nightmare. The reason he is facing this kind of prison sentence is due to the fact that the district attorney has thus far chosen to weigh the entire amount of material confiscated and declare that the weight of the "illegal substance". Of course this is patently absurd. Included in this weight were eggs, flour, water, chocolate, even the glass bowl, and likely just a few grams of THC. I have been calling on all Texas State Legislators to speak out against this kind of inhumanity. We are all victims of a vicious state apparatus when this kind of prosecution comes to light. Not only is this a victimless crime, but the situation has been publicly fabricated and few inside of the state seem to care very much at all. It's simply not possible that a district attorney cannot conclude of her own intelligence that there were not several pounds of THC in Jacob's Betty Crocker concoction. Furthermore, what possible sense does it make to ruin the life of a 19-year-old young man? He'll forever be marked a criminal and if he does serve time, society will be paying for him while simultaneously loosing out on any productive value he would bring to the community (not to mention contributions to the tax base). As a State Representative I would absolutely love to get involved in situations like this at ground zero. I would proudly attend court proceedings and use whatever influence I could as a legislator to sway an opinion of the court towards a sensible outcome.

A direct link to the radio broadcast can be found here. I come on the air just after the 19:30 mark. This evening I had the pleasure of being on air with Ryan Dixon and Harlan Deitrich, hosts of The Crypto Show on local Austin station 90.1 FM. Harlan, by the way, is the loveable owner of Brave New Books located at 1904 Guadalupe. I had been originally invited to participate in a weekly Bitcoin meetup. A friend of mine started the group some time back and had asked me to speak about my campaign. The whole thing was a wonderful experience. It was fun to speak with so many people working on Bitcoin and other Alt-currencies; as a software engineer, I've spent a lot of time in that field myself. As kind of a bonus to the evening, Ryan Dixon asked if I would be interested in doing a segment on the campaign on The Crypto Show. Check out this archived episode page for the broadcast I was part of. My interview is the first part of the show and starts just after the 19:30 mark on the MP3 file.

Kevin Ludlow (leftmost), Jake Benson (2nd from right), and Dan Held (rightmost) Following the success of the /r/bitcoin/ AMA, I was contacted by Dan Held and Jake Benson. Both Dan and Jake are originally from Texas, but have been living in California for awhile now. They are both very active players in the Bitcoin market and moved to San Francisco to work on their respective startups. Jake is the CEO of a new Bitcoin company called LibraTax and Dan is the co-founder of ZeroBlock and the Director of Product for Blockchain. The both of them have some pretty cool thoughts on how Bitcoin is going to continue maturing. More specific to my campaign, they also have some good insight on the political future of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin community. LibraTax in particular is an amazingly useful application for keeping up with tax requirements from Bitcoin investments. Although I'm not sure it was designed for this, I am willing to wager it will have a significant application in campaign finance reporting too.

The Bitcoin logo, symbolic of the 16-hour long AMA I participated in on /r/Bitcoin Following the unprecedented success of the AMA (ask me anything) I did in /r/Austin/, I decided I would try reaching out to a slightly larger audience. I had a number of leaders in the Bitcoin community reach out to me after the Austin AMA and ask what I would do for Bitcoin as a state legislator. Naturally I am a huge proponent of Bitcoin and absolutely want to see it succeed. It very well may turn out to be that thing that finally requires the dollar to step in line and so I would be willing to take any steps necessary to ensure the government leaves it alone and lets it grow as the market dictates. Following the success of the previous AMA, I followed the same general formula and posted the following title: I'm running for the Texas State Legislature. I support LGBT rights, pot, and net-neutrality and oppose the NSA and TSA. I also happen to be a long-time Bitcoin enthusiast. I'd love your support. I did not think for a second that I would be able to top the previous AMA, but I was very wrong. I wound up answering campaign questions from Redditors for more than 16 straight hours. We drove a record 16,000 people to the campaign website in a single day and raised enough money to finally kickstart the campaign into full gear. From here on out it's pretty clear to me that there is a strong demand for common sense politics in the State of Texas. I intend to remain passionately focused on bringing that message to the constituents of TX House District 46 and am genuinely looking forward to the remainder of the campaign.

In an effort to begin getting the word of my campaign out on social media, I decided to reach out to the Reddit community today. Specifically I was only intending to reach the /r/Austin/ subreddit, but the conversation seems to have spread far beyond what I anticipated. I posted a link to my website around 11:45am with the following Reddit title: I'm running for State Representative in District 46 (east Austin, north of 7th). I'm pro-pot, pro-gay, pro-open-internet, oppose the TSA, and oppose the NSA. Here's my website. Soon after posting the link I left my office for lunch. A few messages trickled in while I was eating and I quickly answered them. Twenty or so minutes past that and something started happening that I would have never expected, a full-blown AMA organically developed. I've always wanted to participate in an AMA and having now completed one can definitely say I enjoyed the process. I had the opportunity to personally converse with more than 600 people. Thankfully I am a pretty fast typist (10fastfingers puts me at 117 WPM) because it was the only way I could provide ongoing and thorough answers to all of the questions pouring in. When it was all said and done I had answered more than 400 questions, had more than 20 people offer to volunteer themselves to the campaign, drove almost 5,000 people to the campaign website, and even raised several hundred dollars. The AMA is currently the 29th highest post in /r/Austin/ of all time.

Patrick Dixon addresses the body at the 2014 Libertarian State Convention in Temple, Texas The recent Libertarian Party State convention in Temple, Texas was a great success. In addition to electing some very intelligent, well-spoken, and qualified people as statewide candidates, we had an opportunity to address the official party platform. I'm very proud to say that after many hours of debate, the Libertarian Party of Texas has removed any language from its platform that would even hint at the idea of supporting closed borders. As a long-time supporter of open-borders, I was very pleased to see this change adopted and am proud to say I voted for the language. So as of 2014, the official party language on border control reads as follows: "The Libertarian Party believes in and encourages free and fair trade among nations which allows the easy exchange of currency, goods, labor, and services." This was considerably shorter than the platform committee had come back with and I'd like to personally thank Art DiBianca for proposing this particular language.