Top issues are environmental regulation, national sovereignty, debt

Three Republicans will face off next Tuesday for a chance to run against longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak and represent Congressional District 1, which includes the entire Upper Peninsula and most of northern lower Michigan.

Term-limited state Rep. Tom Casperson of Escanaba is the only primary candidate who has raised more than $5,000.

But Casperson, a third-generation logging industry worker, said that he has learned that money is not the whole thing.

In 2002, Casperson defeated Menominee mayor Laurie Stupak (Bart Stupak’s wife) to become the first Republican to represent the 108th House district in a long time, he said, despite the fact that Stupak outspent him two to one and had name recognition and support from a sitting Congressman.

Casperson’s signs don’t mention his party affiliation.

“I want people to check me out and not tag me as Republican or Democrat,” he told Michigan Messenger. “Democrats up here are pretty popular.”

He said his major endorsement is from the Farm Bureau.

Casperson said that if elected to Congress his top priority will be to reduce regulations.

Continued – “I want to reduce government oversight over our lives,” he said. “Wetlands mitigations in the state are killing our opportunities to develop and grow. People that own their own property are being stopped from building a home ’cause they need to build a driveway across the wetlands. ”

Capserson, (who has received gifts from the Kennecott Eagle Minerals Company), said he supports Kennecott’s planned sulfide mine near Big Bay.

“Kennecott is just the beginning. There are other identified ore bodies where mining will take off … We can have a pretty good economic surge.” He characterized environmentalists’ concerns about the mine as “radicalism.”

“We have got to become a state that is business-friendly,” he said, “People should not continue to think that we are going to take money from corporations to give to government to run social programs.”

Linda Goldthorpe, from Luce County outside Newberry, describes herself as a “paleo-conservative” homeschooling mom and attorney who represents people suffering government-caused bankruptcies.

She told Michigan Messenger that her only institutional donor is a local gun-rights group and her campaign is focused on “our liberty and property rights.”

“I look at the country with fear,” she said, “Look at the national deficit. … We are bombing other countries and our own borders are open. Our rights are being decimated.”

As an attorney, Goldthorpe said, she knows how to read a law and recognize the implications of proposed legislation, and she believes this would be a useful skill.

Goldthorpe is running a high-tech campaign featuring a Web site with downloadable walking and calling lists and campaign coordinators in many counties.

Her endorsement by presidential candidate Ron Paul has motivated people from around the country to do volunteer work on her campaign through the Internet, she said, and a live-streamed debate between Goldthorpe and fellow candidate Don Hooper drew 60 chat-room participants, some from as far away as Sweden.

This is the fourth run for the 1st Congressional District seat for Don Hooper of Iron River, who at 76 says he is the oldest, best educated, most experienced and most conservative of the three Republican candidates.

As a longtime truck driver, Hooper logged over 6 million miles of travel throughout the county. He’s visited historical sites and become acquainted with different groups of people, and developed an overview and wisdom that would be useful as a U.S. representative, he said.

The current legislators are “spending like a bunch of idiots,” Hooper told Michigan Messenger. “We are bankrupt and we need to get back onto a balanced budget.”

The process will be painful, he said, but government must cut spending across the board.

This is a message that many will have a hard time accepting, he said.

“When hard times come along, people think that the government is going to save them, and Democrats say `we’ll give you whatever you want`.”

Hooper said he is frustrated by the campaign-finance system and media that work against candidates such as himself who want to discuss lesser-known issues such as policies of the United Nations, and that is he is trying to overcome these obstacles by writing essays on his Web site.

“We were the power of the world — now we are becoming a service economy subservient to China through organizations like Wal-Mart.”