'Liberty Kids' Shake Up Los Angeles Republican Party, Look to Other States

[big_dog]

After winning control the executive board of the Los Angeles County Republican Party in December, the “Liberty Kids,” as they call themselves, are seeing the fruits of their activism. This year one of their own is running as the Republican nominee for Congress from the San Gabriel Valley, with Zendehnam serving as policy adviser.

The Liberty Kids are challenging the party's social conservatives and are drawing the attention of Democrats, who see liberal youth as part of their base. And in what could be a harbinger for the GOP, they have begun campaigning in other states, aiming to increase their influence beyond California. Democratic strategist Steve Maviglio, who advises candidates and elected officials, said the young libertarians are evidence of a "civil war" within the Republican Party, as moderates, Tea Party adherents, neoconservatives and now libertarians vie for influence.

"I want you to look around the room," Zendehnam said at a meeting last week, "because this is what the face of the Republican Party is going to look like." Liberty Kids hold four of seven seats on the local party's governing board and dozens of spots on its 200-person central committee, representing a county that is home to 10 million people.

Raised during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and excited by the non-interventionist philosophy of Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman and presidential contender, many registered as Republicans to vote for Paul in the 2008 and 2012 presidential primaries and then stayed on in the party. The group is making its presence felt as the GOP struggles to reinvent itself in California, where Republicans make up 29 percent of registered voters and Democrats control both houses of the legislature and all statewide offices.
http://news.yahoo.com/liberty-kids-shake-l-republican-party-look-other-181234386.html

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. Here in Sonoma County, Republicans are something you try to find in a scavenger hunt.

[big_dog]

3. photos of rally

Melinda McCrady texts and watches a speaker while wearing a shirt bearing the Tenth Amendment Center motto, "Don't comply. Nullify", referring to a movement to make certain laws ineffectual through the tactics of nullification laws or widespread non-compliance, at a meeting of so-called "Liberty Kids" libertarian Republican activists in Burbank, California, July 27, 2014

[hifiguy]

2. Verrrry eenteresting, as Arte Johnson used to say.

[big_dog]

4. more GOP civil war, the kids will figure out they are used as political props

and the party leadership wants no part of 'moderation' on social issues

[hifiguy]

5. Eeyup

and the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging god-botherers continue to turn off everyone but their own brainwashed spawn. The 'pukes are still running headlong towards implosion and demographic oblivion. Bwahahaha.

[big_dog]

6. this could be the end of the gop as we know it

i wouldnt be weeping, thats for sure

[Hortensis]

7. That's just what L.A. needs - 13 million individuals doing their own thing with minimal

organized governmental interference. I suspect most of these young adults who consider themselves libertarian now will migrate toward mainstream conservatism as they learn more and discover how unworkable, and extreme, most of the proposed libertarian social experimentation really would be.

It just occurred to me how inevitable and searing some of those lessons will be -- and quickly -- as the climate and fresh water supply crises build... A really good Libertarian, of course, would leave people to find their own water, some by acquiring municipal water supplies for themselves and, for all those who can't pull that off, migrating out of Southern California, to the Great Lakes perhaps.

[big_dog]

8. these kids are Blue Dogs or the 'Reagan Democrats' of 1980-1989

NASCAR Dads etc, what ever you want to call them.

[gratuitous]

9. Well, the California GOP has to do something

They've been shooting themselves in the foot for almost 40 years, to the point where California Republicans spend the first month or so of any race explaining their candidacy as the exception to the party’s demented norm. Not a formula for winning.

It's entirely possible the Liberty Kids will grow up as they get older. Recent history suggests, though, that it's equally likely they'll just get loonier, trying to square the circle of carrying out their self-serving ideals with popular appeal: "But wait; if you're free of all governmental interference - as you call it - how will you be accountable for the horrible things you're going to do to further your own interests?"

[big_dog]

10. this crowd in LA sounds a lot like the opposite side of the naderite coin in 2000

and the GOP is clueless about what to do with them