I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, all of you who gave me your support, in whatever form, or forms that support came. I must admit that Wednesday morning I was disappointed because I certainly aimed towards a much higher result than we had in the end.

I never run paper campaigns or educational campaigns. I run to get the job and to serve in that job. In the course of that process I find myself doing far more educating than if I had just gone out to educate.

The vast number of voters that I met at 6:40 in the morning last Tuesday at my polling place, snaking from the steps of Hazelwood Elementary School, out the front driveway, south on Hazelwood Avenue and then turning east onto Hamilton Avenue was a sight I thought I never would see on an election day in Baltimore City. This gave me the opportunity to talk with all who waited, and to turn votes in my direction. Because of the vastness of my district, I really only spent any length of time at three of my polls, and I know that I was able to turn votes in my direction - anywhere between 60 and 100 people. I had spontaneous pictures taken with young boys and girls from one of Baltimore's budding charter schools. I was thrilled to be recognized by young voters, ranging from first time to 20s or 30s, because they had done their due diligence and, instead of waiting to be approached by someone or be told by someone, they had done their research on who the candidates were, and had been to my web page.

The support of my coworkers at my place of employment has been superb. At least 100 of the 8,000 plus votes I received came right from the building where I work. Later on Wednesday I got a hold of myself and realized that, given the circumstance my results, while still, in my view, unacceptable, were not that bad. On Thursday afternoon, before leaving for home, one of my supporters at work reminded me that I'm not running just against a man but that I'm running against the system. And we are. I'm hoping that in 2010 I will be able to receive the Maryland LP's nomination to further and complete the job we started.

My deepest thanks.

In liberty,
Lorenzo

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I have dedicated the last 16 years to help bring about political alternatives to Maryland. I've done this by running under the Libertarian banner for Baltimore City Council in 1999 and 2004, and for Lieutenant Governor in the State of Maryland in 2002.

The current problem facing the United States is the destruction of civil liberties, as it applies to all areas of life: economic, political, or social. Our federal government is using crisis situations or the appearance of crisis situations to increase its power and ability to intrude into the lives of law-abiding citizens. The war on drugs is a subsidy to terrorists and criminals, and does nothing to help people who are substance abusers. That is an individual medical problem. Currently, law enforcement agents plea bargain with thugs to get names of people who may or may not be dealers, so that they can break into their homes in the middle of the night, in flagrant disregard for the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Instead, they should focus on holding people accountable who drive or operate heavy equipment while impaired, regardless of the cause of their impairment (antihistamines, alcohol or drugs).

The so-called "War on Terror" (e.g. Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security) is not too far behind the war on drugs. This is the antithesis of our Bill of Rights and the clearly defined provisions of our constitution. The so-called "War on Drugs," the so-called "War on Terror" are driving our deficit spending, which devalues the dollar, and leads to sky-rocketing energy prices. What kind of security is this? The incumbent, Ruppersberger, is part and parcel of this problem. Sure, he can provide pork for many, but it's time we shifted to lean proteins and more fiber to eliminate the waste.

I am qualified for this as someone who works for a living, and who has spent his own time and money for 16 years helping to break down the legislated regulatory barriers that have kept alternative parties as well as independents from being offered as viable choices to the citizens and voters of Maryland. It is time that we elect people who are not connected with the monopoly power - people who understand that government service is just that - government service, and not a career opportunity.

The first step is to have people in Congress who are free and unburdened by years of feeding off a system that uses them at the same time that they use it. This first step also requires congressional representatives who are predisposed to being accountable, and who will insist that others be accountable as well.

I am convinced that I am one such individual, and I want to serve you, my fellow citizens of the Second Congressional District, as your Congressman.

Watch this website for more policy and issue details.

Often questionnaires on the health care issue sent out to candidates are set up to reply either in favor or against the federal government's running health care, so the statement below should cover them all.

The federal government has messed us up in Iraq. The federal government has messed up the Veteran's Administration. Two friends of mine were grossly misdiagnosed by the VA and only survived by the grace of God. So, what we need to do is get the federal government out of the whole health care thing. After all, the federal government is probably the most incompetent administrator of health care - so why do we want to give it power over our health care?

Let's have America's working people keep the most money possible in their pockets and purses and encourage non profit health coops for the working poor and the middle class so that they can put money aside tax free to get check-ups and health care for themselves. Let's have genuine tax free accounts for catastrophic health situations. Let's look into ways to provide for the truly needy in truly charitable ways that do not make bureaucrats wealthy but actually help those in need.

I find many proposals for health care to be the antithesis of help for the poor, instead promoting wealth for the health care provider.

Where do I stand on Iran? I happen to think that talks with the government of Iran should have begun 15-20 years ago, so as far as the suggestions from former Secretaries of State regarding unconditional dialogue are concerned, to me it's a no brainer. I find the sabre rattling regarding invading Iran symptomatic of middle aged and old men who willy nilly go for wars that are going to be fought by young people - a centuries old disgusting spectacle.

I'm not a pacifist. If self defense is needed, I believe in self defense. Preemptive action such as attacking Iran is out of the question - obscene, really.

The theme of my campaign is "Civil liberties is everything" (or "everything is civil liberties"). The so-called war on terror is farcical. Terror is an emotion. You fight terrorists who are criminals, who commit criminal acts. You seek them out as you would a serial killer. You don't invade countries. (A caveat: Afghanistan was where the terrorists were residing at the time, but we lost that advantage because we were in Iraq.) Invading Iran would only make matters worse.

The Iranian young people who are sick and tired of the oppression of the corrupt, so-called mullahs need to know that the government and people of the US are their friends, not the ones who are going to bring further misery and pain.

First of all, I reject the notion that government defines marriage. In my view, marriage is defined by faith and the agents of faith, for instance, churches. I happen to think that the entire discussion of so-called homosexual marriage or heterosexual marriage approved by government is a canard hoisted against the ability of consenting adults to enter into legal contracts.

Let churches decide who or what constitutes a marriage. Let secular government uphold contracts between or among consenting adults. The issue is far greater than who marries whom. I think that the reason why we are in this whole ridiculous discussion in the first place is because of things like my own personal situation. My wife Susan (a woman) and I live with my mother. Why cannot my elderly mother be part of the same health care insurance plan that my wife and I share? Instead, she has to be stuck with the phoney-baloney Medicare.

It is absurdities of this sort that fuel the fictitious argument of government approved marriage. Government has no business approving marriage, unless people are forced into marriage or any kind of union, in which case government must defend the rights of the person who is being forced.

First of all, I'm not a pacifist. I believe in self defense. The invasion of Afghanistan had a specific target - the Al Qaeda minions who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and was therefore justifiable self-defense.

On the other hand, the war in Iraq, which was labeled from the beginning as a preemptive action, was wrong at the time and is wrong now on all counts. First of all, you do not do preemptive wars. Preemptive wars are wars of aggression, and that is beneath what this country is supposed to stand for - or common decency, for that matter.

Secondly, the reasons given for the war in Iraq, if not outright lies, were distortions, and Exhibit A of our multi-billion dollar intelligence apparatus' unfathomable ineptitude. The war in Iraq didn't happen only because of an incompetent (to be kind) president and his party, it was also the collusion of members of Congress, who now parade themselves as being anti-war. This is one of the reasons I'm running. The current holder of the Second Congressional District, Dutch Ruppersberger belongs to that group of legislators who colluded with the President in allowing an illegal war and now pretends to be different.

Even the war in Afghanistan, with a legitimate target, Al Qaeda and its host the Taliban, might have been completely unnecessary if our intelligence apparatus had heeded the warnings of competent field operatives who were suspicious of foreign nationals learning how to fly planes but not land them. After all, all Al Qaeda did was to copy the kamikaze pilots of the Second World War, striking buildings instead of ships.

I believe in a foreign policy that aims for peaceful dealings with other nations while maintaining a strong defense that is just that - defense, not preemptive attacks. We need a streamlined, patriotic intelligence operation, which is not what we got. The incumbent, Ruppersberger, has never spoken on this, because he can't.

The current rise in gasoline and fuel prices is being blamed on supply and demand. Well, there's some truth to that, but the real sticking point is the devaluation of the dollar. If our dollar were today on a par with the Euro, we would be paying, maybe $2.20 per gallon at the pump instead of $3.99 - $4.20. For Euro currency countries, the price of the oil barrel has barely doubled, while, for our dollar based economy, it's working on quadrupling the cost. Why? It's not because we demand necessarily much more than the Europeans. It's because our federal government and all of its parts, including Congress, through the Federal Reserve monopoly, have gone on a printing spree of money as if it were confetti. In fact, what the Fed has done regarding the printing of money is tantamount to the printing of counterfeit money, except that their counterfeit dollars are deemed to be legal. Without a substantial commodity to back it up, our fiat money is being destroyed and so is our economy.

There's more that I would like to say on this, but I'm trying to be brief, so I'm sticking to the central points on the economy right now.

I am not going to pretend that we humans do not affect our environment - our water, our air, etc. Of course we do. Nor am I going to ridicule people who have a concern for global warming, or climate change. I'm no expert on any of this, but unlike Al Gore, I'm not going to pretend that I am. From what I've read and listened to, the planet earth is much like any living organism. It undergoes changes and responds to the environment in which it is.

Back in the tenth and eleventh centuries, our planet underwent a warming period. (And remember, back then, there were no carbon producing engines.) This event allowed Norse colonists to settle in Greenland, where they raised crops, had animal husbandry, and a relatively good and prosperous life for that time period, much like Maryland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

When this warming trend ended a couple of hundred years later, the Norse settlers failed, died, or had to eventually evacuate, because they failed to adapt. They had a model of adaptation right in front of them - the earlier colonists of Greenland, the so-called Eskimos, who knew how to live in cold weather. They refused to adapt, and they failed. To me, climate change sends this message - we have to adapt, whether it's colder or warmer, we have to adapt, and to be always mindful that if I pollute my neighbor's air, water or soil, I either have to pay to clean it or give my neighbor the money to clean it - and then stop my nasty ways. That is how we should deal with the environment today, by applying English common law - the basis for our legal system.

I believe in free trade. Free trade does not include corporate welfare, does not include treaties the size of several major cities' phone books (like NAFTA). It can be conducted simply and efficiently, being always mindful of fraud. In spite of all the regulations in banking and lending, we've ended up with the subprime mess which is essentially fraud. Lies were sold and lies were bought, yet we were unable to deal with this fraud with all the myriad regulations requiring armies of lawyers to remain in compliance with them We need an entrepreneurial labor force unfettered by all the oppressive regulations, and only watched closely with the purpose of preventing and punishing fraud.

Regarding liberty and democracy in the United States, I would like to refer to the oft told tale in which Benjamin Franklin, coming out of the Constitutional Convention, was asked by a woman, "What kind of government have you given us, sir?" He replied, "A republic, if we can keep it." We are a republic, meaning that we elect representatives to whom WE give the right to govern - not the other way around. We use a democratic process to elect those representatives - or we're supposed to - and a majority of voters decides who gets to represent us. I have to admit that I would like to see in our legislative chambers proportional representation based on ideas, rather than race and gender as has been suggested by some over the last decade or so. Ballot access should be virtually unrestricted, and to those who say that you would have too many people on the ballot and it would be confusing, I would simply say that the value of our liberty, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights and certainly our Declaration of Independence does deserve time and effort from citizens to learn who in the heck is running and what they stand for, and to vote for the one they most agree with as their civic duty. Voting for the lesser of two evils is a game of losers. We're supposed to be winners in this country, not losers.

Our liberties are under siege by many things: attacks on the Second Amendment, free speech zones set up so that the politically privileged ears will not be hurt by dissent, and the one most onerous thing of all - the so-called "Patriot Act," insult of insults - a law so vile that I think even John Adams, second president of the United States, who lost his second bid on account of his anti sedition acts, might find repugnant.

The term "education" is a misnomer, by and large. Our young people need to be proficient in reading, writing and arithmetic by the fifth grade, and be encouraged to pursue the things they like from that point on. Education is a life long process, much like gaining wisdom. You don't gain wisdom in a classroom, you can only encourage learning. The government has a role in encouraging parents (through leadership and "jawboning") to take care of their children's education. Rather than taking the educational authority away from parents, devolve the education authority back to the parents, with the understanding that many parents don't know what they're doing. This potential problem can be offset by applying the true concept of village child rearing - a community of individuals working together voluntarily to achieve the best outcome for their children, without government involvement.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexicans could cross the border for a dollar's fee. They could come in freely, find work and stay or not find work and leave. Today, immigration of that sort is nowhere near as simple, yet it's convoluted by American politicians' encouraging illegal immigrants from south of the border to take advantage of so-called welfare when, in fact, those immigrants never had any sense about it at all, they just wanted to come here and work, do well for themselves and their families back in Mexico and Central America, by and large. So who is in fact responsible for this mess? It's our phony-baloney politicians, particularly in Maryland, who don't really care about these people, but understand that if they get the immigrants involved in the welfare system they will be dependent on them (the politicians). It's pretty sick.

Click for a report with commentary about the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, with an interview of Lorenzo Gaztaņaga, by Stephanie J. Henry

Fells Point Fun Festival - October 4/5, 2008

The booth; Lorenzo Gaztaņaga administers The Quiz.

Essex Day Festival - September 21, 2008

Candidate signs at the booth; Lorenzo Gaztaņaga.

VIP Wine & Cheese Reception and Candidate Forum - September 6, 2008


Lorenzo Gaztaņaga at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City.

Black and White Summer Gala - August 2, 2008

Lorenzo Gaztaņaga at Vote the Power 2008 in Aberdeen. It was organized by the Grassroots Steering Foundation.

Hamilton Fair - July 26, 2008

Bill Barry, prominent Baltimore City Green, offered Lorenzo Gaztaņaga the use of his space at the 15^th Annual Hamilton Street Festival and Car Show. Bill and Lorenzo shake hands for clear, honest, and transparent governance, and ending the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

Four Libertarians, Darlene Nicholas, Bill Buzzell (a.k.a. McGuyver, basically the man who's ready for anything), my wife Susan, and yours truly, showed up between 7 and 7:30 a.m. on July 4 to march in the Dundalk Independence Day Parade. We decorated Bill's car with as many liberty messages as possible and all kinds of doodahs. Bill drove the car. Darlene Nicholas, candidate for US Congress, Fifth District, helped Susan carry the Maryland LP banner, and I walked behind the car, which had my campaign banners on each side. As it happens, Dundalk is in my congressional district.

Lo and behold, there were people along the parade route that knew me. They happen to live there, and knew me from work. Pretty lucky. But the important thing was the eye contact that I was able to make. A lady said to me, "O'Malley is a sissy; thank you for being here." I said, "You're welcome." Two fine looking, middle aged American women who happened to be black were holding up Obama signs. I looked at them and acknowledged them in a positive way. Why? Because if we can transcend the thing we see - the physical color - then we have a chance of transcending what we cannot see - the ideological discussion. Exactly. There was the man with the sign that said, "Drill here and drill now." I nodded to him. I believe in that nod, not because it's going to solve the whole energy thing, but merely because it's a foot in the door, and, besides, technology has advanced to such a degree that, yeah, drilling in ANWR can be done properly, so long as government stands where it's supposed to be - no force and no fraud. What a concept!

I felt a powerful connection to the people lining the parade route. Whatever their ethnicity, I glimpsed in them the true America - people who deeply want this to be a united country, a peaceful country, a happy and prosperous country. At times I was almost moved to tears. At one point during the parade, four youngsters with T-shirts promoting a barbecue place came to me and asked, "Can we walk with you?" I said, "Sure, you can hang with me." They ranged in age, I guess, between nine and fourteen or fifteen. Suddenly, the four or five people who had said they would be joining our parade unit but didn't show had been unofficially replaced. These kids kept shouting, "Vote for Lorenzo!" and "Happy Fourth of July!" At one point, they even brought me a bottle of water.

Independence and the free market. What an experience for a guy who's run for office so many times and never even gotten close. I am the possessor of a dubious title. At this point, I've run for office more often than any other Maryland Libertarian, and I've never gotten in. People might argue that that is a losing streak, but I'll tell you this, the real losers are the ones who cower.

In liberty, your friend,
Lorenzo Gaztaņaga

Lorenzo Gaztaņaga was born in Havana, Cuba in 1949 and received his early education in Christian Brothers schools. He came to the United States with his family on October 21, 1961, locating in Baltimore in June 1963. In 1973, he became a United States citizen. He attended parochial school in Baltimore City, finishing high school in the third graduating class of Cardinal Gibbons School. After high school, he attended Loyola College and Towson State University, majoring in history and political science, returning to college again in the 1980's to study psychology at the University of Baltimore.

He has held jobs ranging from language teacher (during five years in Haiti), car salesman, and director of development for his old high school. He is currently working in the security business to support his activities as a citizen politician. He is fluent in English, Spanish and French, and conversant in Haitian Creole. A Maryland Libertarian Party officer, he worked with the Coalition for a Democratic Maryland and Marylanders for Democracy to ease the stringent ballot access requirements that have effectively kept independent and third party candidates off the ballot for the last 25 years. He is a founding member of the Human Values Network and former member of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Crisis Center, which provides food and shelter to the homeless of Baltimore City. He is active in the Cliftmont Community Wesleyan Church, where he has mentored young people of the Belair-Edison community.

Gaztaņaga shares his life with his mother, his wife of 33 years, New York City native Susan Jacobson Gaztaņaga, and his black, 20-pound cat, Lord Baltimore.