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By j davis on 12-14-07
The GOP would do well to discuss REAL issues instead of made up wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage that quite simply, a majority of Americans could care less about. Pandering to the ‘religious’ right will get the GOP nowhere and will contribute greatly to its decline. They should address real issues like the war, the economy, health care, and the war on the middle class.
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By KPD on 12-14-07
j davis, when are you running for office? Well said.
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By Nick on 12-14-07
You’re right, because the dems NEVER waste time on silly things such as religious beliefs… oh wait, that’s right, that’s one of their main issues with Romney, that he’s mormon… instead, they’ll waste their time on each other including Obama’s drug use as a young man that has little or no bearing today…
Both parties are just as frivilous with their quarrels, so please don’t go bashing one or the other when both are equally petty and engulf themselves with each other’s personal business rather than the issues that are affecting today’s society. Do I care if Obama smoked pot in the 70’s? Hell no! What does it matter today… almost 40 years later? His position on the issues mentioned above by J Davis are more important than whether or not he was a “normal” college student…
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By Entertained on 12-14-07
“RON-PAUL QUIXOTE”
Having watched several debates, I personally believe there are just two presidential candidates worth looking at. Particularly since the television writer’s strike is forcing me to find new sources of entertainment.
On the left, Dennis Kucinich, the elf who would be president, continues to surprise us. Forget the fact that he seems to actually believe he could win. After all, many of us have an inflated view of our capabilities. Some aspire to be president. Others hope to become professional athletes without steroids. And most of us hold onto clothes that no longer fit because one day we know, with great certainty, we’ll lose that last forty pounds.
The entertainment value of Kucinich goes beyond his numerous presidential runs. He now has a trophy wife. Who is about a two feet taller and half again as young as he is. Evidently tall women are drawn to men with big ... dreams. Even if those dreams are a result of one’s personal delusions. Hopefully after the election C-Span will convince Dennis and his wife to become the stars of a new reality show similar to the Osbournes. If so, then every nickle I donated to his campaign would have been well spent.
Not to be outdone, the Republicans have also contributed to my need for humor. I was first introduced to the Ron Paul revolution last summer while drinking a beer at an outdoor blues festival. A homeless person (at least he told me he was homeless - I didn’t follow him to his camp to see whether or not he was telling me the truth) handed me a flyer directing me to the campaign’s website. The “revolutionary” admitted that he had not viewed the site. A few months earlier he was kicked out of the library and lost his internet access. But, he assured me, Ron Paul was the real deal and we should vote for him.
As he left, I found myself hoping that Ron was appealing to other interest groups since the percentage of homeless people who actually vote is only marginally higher than the number of college students who actually vote.
Since then, I’ve been impressed with the enthusiasm of Dr. Paul’s followers. Even though his chance of winning is only slightly higher than Dennis Kucinich’s. In some respects, his campaign reminds me of the classic story written by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha. In the story, the hero sets out to undo tremendous wrongs inflicted upon society. A noble goal, indeed. However, as he continues on his quest his overexcited imagination blinds him to reality: he thinks windmills to be giants, flocks of sheep to be armies, and galley-slaves to be oppressed gentlemen.
Now, having said that, I really do not believe Ron Paul is anything but a sincere man. He seems quite passionate about his beliefs and I doubt if he will use his presidential run to try to bag a trophy wife.
Still, his followers appear to have allowed their imaginations to run rampant. I don’t know if they are chasing windmills or battling sheep. But I do know their hero’s quest for the White House is nearly impossible. Especially with Oprah holding rallies across the country. Havind said that, I continue to be entertained when I watch the Revolution’s rallies and listen the Revolutionaries enthusiastically join Ron Paul in his quixotic journey.
So it’s true. During this primary season the Republicans appear to have lost their identify. At the same time the Democrats appear to have lost their message. Fortunately, politics continues to be a source of great entertainment.
Which means I can watch something other than reruns of The Office and Grey’s Anatomy while waiting for the strike to end.
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By Nick on 12-14-07
Kellyn,
Great write-up. I’ve felt this way about republicans lately, even moreso now that Bush is possibly the most hated man in America, maybe even the world. But I honestly believe that it is Bush’s inability to bend and break with such disapproval by the general public that has led these new candidates to having to “liberalize” themselves a little to gain any nationwide popularity. I believe that as a whole there are more dems in the general public than reps… it’s just the popular thing to be these days… but I also think that the GOP candidates know this, thus they are trying to show that they are “evolving” into a new-era republican. This new-era rep is someone that is understanding of where we are headed in terms of the big issues like abortion and gay rights. In my opinion, these are issues that are very similar to those faced over the past couple hundred years… slavery/minority rights, women’s rights… A repulican today saying they are against gay rights is like a southerner during the civil war era being against rights for the blacks. It’s something that we will most-likely see a widespread “acceptance” in the next half-century. Will it ever fully be accepted, probably not, just as racism is still around today… but it’s nice to see that these new-era republicans are coming out and putting forth a solid contention. It shows that politics (especially conservatives) is evolving beyond worrying about religious beliefs. I believe that at least these reps are finally figuring it out that this nation doesn’t need a hard-core one way or the other President that follows one line, and one line only, rather we need someone that is closer to the middle, while still holding their CORE beliefs true. I don’t think gay rights should be included into this core, just as civil rights shouldn’t have been, and really isn’t today.
I think we’re goign to see the “real” republican sort of start to die off a little, and this new “republican” is goign to emerge and show us that we don’t all have to be up-tight, staunch, religious, people that are against anything “immoral”... we will see a shift as we’ve seen over the past 200 years… we’re always evolving.
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By Mcdav on 12-14-07
Mitt Romney has shown over the many years that he is capable of being the POTUS. In his grassroots organization, leadership skills, family values, and CEO experiences in business and the Olympics as well as governor of Mass. Feel free to visit other websites locally at http://www.montanansformitt.com or the official website at http://www.mittromney.com
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By Romney is for BIG GOVERNMENT! on 12-14-07
http://www.ronpaul2008.com Read the issues. Ron Paul is the only true republican, who stands for America as a republic and promotes the constitution. Ron Paul is leading all other Republican candidates in fundraising. Anyone who sees what is happening to this country’s economy, personal freedoms, and military sees that Ron Paul is the most capable and honest candidate that knows the issues. Vote Liberty, Freedom, Justice and Peace, VOTE RON PAUL 2008!
Mitt Romney is an advocate of big government.
Is Mitt Romney the “economic conservative” he claims to be? Especially when it comes to tax and spend policies?
Now that he’s running for president, let’s compare his words with his deeds.
Taxes
Romney claims to be anti-tax. He even “took” a “no new taxes” pledge when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. “Took” is in quotes because he refused to sign that pledge. His signature wasn’t necessary, he claimed. He assured us that he’s a man of his word.
But Mitt Romney has been a champion of new taxes.
Mitt Romney proposed three new taxes while campaigning for governor: a new tax on vehicles, a new tax on campaign donations, and a new tax on building construction. They didn’t get much fanfare in the media and were quickly forgotten.
Right before the 2002 election, he ran millions of dollars in ads portraying himself as a “no new taxes” governor. The media refused to set the record straight.
But that was only the beginning.
Each of the four years Romney served as governor, he raised taxes – while pretending he didn’t. He claims he only raised mandatory government “fees.“ But government mandatory fees are nothing but taxes, and taxes are nothing but mandatory government fees. Romney’s new tax-fees raised hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the state government every year.
He also increased several taxes by “closing loopholes” to enable collection of a new Internet sales tax and by passing legislation that enables local governments to raise business property taxes. This, he claims, is not raising taxes.
I suppose you could say Romney merely enacted bills that force taxpayers to hand over billions of dollars – which end up in the coffers of the government.
Quacks like a tax increase?
Romney now boasts that he was the first presidential candidate to sign a “taxpayer protection pledge,“ in which he promised to oppose “any and all efforts” to increase income taxes on people or businesses.
So he’ll call his tax increases “government fees” or “closing loopholes” or something else. But if Romney is president, the IRS will collect this money from you, your family, your friends, and millions of Americans just like you.
Government Spending
Mitt Romney claims to have cut the Massachusetts budget by “$2 billion.“ Sometimes he claims he cut it “$3 billion.“ The media gives him free advertising by parroting this myth repeatedly. They repeat it so often that even some libertarians assume it must be true.
But these “cuts” were merely budget games. Spending cuts in one area were simply moved into another area of the budget.
In fact, not only did Mitt Romney refuse to cut the overall Massachusetts budget, he expanded it. Dramatically.
The Massachusetts state budget was $22.7 billion a year when he took office in January of 2003.
When he left office four years later, it was over $25.7 billion – plus another $2.2 billion in spending that the legislature took “off budget.“ (Romney never reminds us of this fact.)
The net effect of budgets proposed and signed into law by Mitt Romney? An additional $5.2 billion in state spending – and a similar increase in new taxes. Every year.
He claims to have done a good job as governor of liberal Massachusetts in light of the fact that it’s a “tough state” for poor “conservatives” like him. He infers his hands were tied by the predominantly Democratic legislature.
But when it comes to tax and spend policies, he’s not only in lockstep with the Democrats. He leads the way.
Each of the four years Romney served as governor, he started budget negotiations by proposing an increase of about $1 billion. Before the legislature even named a budget figure.
Romney initiated massive new spending – without any prodding.
The legislature responded with a handful of line item budget increases. Romney agreed to some of them and vetoed others. The media helped him out again by making fanfare of his vetoes and portraying him as tough on spending – after he had already given away the store!
The Romney-Kennedy Alliance
But his grande finale was the worst of all: RomneyCare, Mitt Romney’s version of socialized medicine.
By his own admission, he didn’t plan his socialized medicine scheme until after the 2002 election.
During Romney’s governor campaign, he convinced voters that his Democrat rival would be worse – because she would saddle us with socialist tax-and-spend policies, he said.
But soon after he was elected, Romney started the drumbeat for socialized medicine. Three years later, he signed RomneyCare into law.
Voters of Massachusetts did not vote for RomneyCare. Mitt Romney foisted the granddaddy of Big Government expansions upon them without warning. He championed it from the beginning. Again, without any prodding from his Democrat rivals.
When Romney ran for U.S. Senate in 1994, his campaign popularized the derogatory term “Kennedy country” to describe the devastating effects of Ted Kennedy’s “liberal social programs” on poor neighborhoods in Massachusetts.
Yet Mitt Romney stood proudly with Kennedy while he signed RomneyCare into law.
Ted Kennedy has pushed for socialized medicine for decades. Romney fulfilled his dream. Kennedy lobbied the legislature hard to get Romney’s bill passed. It was a Romney-Kennedy alliance.
Welcome to Massachusetts: Romney-Kennedy country.
Romney’s socialized medicine law mandates everyone who doesn’t have insurance to buy it – or suffer income tax penalties. There’s yet another “off budget” Mitt Romney tax increase.
Romney’s mandate will cost individual taxpayers many thousands of dollars every year in health insurance premiums for unwanted policies – or force them to pay the equivalent in tax penalties.
The total cost of RomneyCare in mandates and new spending? At least several billion dollars every year – to start. It will rise from there, as socialized medicine programs are wont to do.
Romney’s law goes into full effect in 2009. Unless it’s repealed before then, the loudest screams of protest from Massachusetts won’t be heard until after the 2008 presidential election is over. Romney’s time-release tax increase.
Romney’s Words Versus Romney’s Deeds
Smart moms tell their kids, “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.“
That advice saved me a lot of heartache. And it will do the same for Republicans who are leaning towards voting for Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary.
Candidate Romney campaigns for president with the words we’re aching to hear. Words we want to believe. Candidate Romney tells us that he is a:
“fiscal conservative”
“tax cutter”
“waste fighter”
“opponent of runaway spending”
“tough leader who vetoes new taxes and needless government spending”
Let’s follow Mom’s advice: ignore candidate Romney’s words. Look at elected Governor Romney’s deeds.
What does he do when he’s elected?
Mitt Romney hits up taxpayers with a variety of new taxes – while pretending he doesn’t.
Mitt Romney jacks up government spending as much as any Big Government Democrat would.
Many conservatives have said that they agree with Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul on just about everything, but they just can’t see things his way when it comes to dealing with the Middle East. Paul’s views – correctly or incorrectly perceived – could well be a deal breaker for some in the base of the Republican party who look for strong presidential leadership to protect us from foreign threats. This open letter is an attempt to persuade you that Paul has been, and continues to be, right about the terrorist threat and what should be done about it.
Ron Paul understands something that the other candidates from both parties apparently cannot: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda is a relatively small organization with limited reach. The attack of September 11th was a desperate act from a desperate group who has failed miserably in their quest to conquer and unify the Islamic world. They do not control a single state on earth. By all indications Bin Laden, al Zawahiri and their closest followers remain isolated in the no-man’s-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al Qaeda is not an Islamo-fascist caliphate on the march, but they have attacked us and remain a threat. It is al Qaeda – not extremism everywhere – that Dr. Paul means to fight. Responding appropriately demands a cold and objective assessment of the situation, not unchecked, knee-jerk emotion.
Let us start with the question “Why did they attack us on September 11th?“
Dr. Paul’s fellow GOP candidates may publicly denounce him all they want for his view that the September 11th hijackers, their accomplices and financiers were motivated by a hatred of American policy in the Middle East. The terrorists themselves cite U.S. support for Israel and an indefinite military occupation of the Saudi desert, necessary for the enforcement of the blockade and no-fly zones against neighboring Iraq during the 1990s.
Similarly, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a primary architect of the Iraq invasion, explained to Vanity Fair magazine soon after the fall of Baghdad, in May, 2003, that the ability to move the bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq was a great benefit of the war because it detracted from one of bin Laden’s motivations for attacking the U.S.:
“There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed – but it’s huge – is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.“
According to authors Lawrence Wright, Terry McDermott, Michael Scheuer, Loretta Napoleoni and James Bamford, the purpose of al Qaeda terrorism, and specifically the September 11th attacks, was to provoke a reaction. Bin Laden and his partner Zawahiri have both explained that they already saw the U.S. as being in a state of war with them, but through their own governments and from far away North America. Their strategy was to hit us hard enough to provoke a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan. Essentially, their goal was to recreate their war against the Soviets a generation before – a war that they, of course, consider to be the primary cause of the USSR’s collapse. In other words, they meant to lure our military to their sandtrap to bleed our treasury dry, forcing our empire out of their region for good.
In this sense, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s decision to keep the invasion “light and fast” – at least at first – was smart insofar as it would deny the terrorists the quagmire they sought to provoke. Unfortunately, the administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq stole defeat from the jaws of victory, ridding the largest Arab state of its secular and formerly Western-backed dictator and creating a second chance for bin Laden to claim gains against the United States.
Years before 9/11, In February 1998, Dr. Paul told the Congress:
“Mr. Speaker, the Saudis this past week expressed a sincere concern about an anti-American backlash if we start bombing Baghdad. We should not ignore the feelings of the Saudis. If a neighbor can oppose this bombing, we should be very cautious.“
Later that year, while Bill Clinton was shooting cruise missiles at antibiotics factories and empty training camps in Afghanistan, Ron Paul spoke from the floor of the House of Representatives, warning the public and the Congress that our policy was in fact making enemies of our former friends, the mujahedeen warriors of Afghanistan (who he had opposed funding in the first place during his stint in Congress in the 1980s):
“Osama bin Laden and his Afghan religious supporters were American allies throughout the 1980s and received our money and training and were heralded as the Afghan ‘Freedom Fighters.‘ Even then, bin Laden let it be known that his people resented all imperialism, whether from the Soviets or the United States. ...
“[T]he region’s Muslims see America as the imperialist invader. They have deeply held religious beliefs, and in their desire for national sovereignty many see America as a threatening menace. America’s presence in the Middle East, most flagrantly demonstrated with troops and bases in Saudi Arabia, is something many Muslims see as defiling their holy land. Many Muslims – and this is what makes an extremist like bin Laden so popular – see American policy as identical to Israel’s policy; an affront to them that is rarely understood by most Americans.
“Far too often, the bombing of declared (or concocted) enemies, whether it’s the North Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Sudanese, the Albanians, or the Afghans, produces precisely the opposite effect to what is sought. It kills innocent people, creates more hatred toward America, unifies and stimulates the growth of the extremist Islamic movement and makes them more determined than ever to strike back with their weapon of choice – terror.“
You can see now why Ron Paul did not endorse Bill Clinton’s endless bombing campaigns back then and why he opposed the war in 2003. He saw the consequences of U.S. policy on their way back when most were caught up with the dot-com bubble and White House sex scandal.
Between these two warnings from Dr. Paul about the possible terrorist blowback from U.S. foreign policy, Osama bin Laden had re-released his 1996 “fatwa” against the United States. Titled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” (the Arabian peninsula), he invoked support for Israel, the occupation of Saudi Arabia, the backing of local dictatorships and the continuous bombing of Iraq as his major grievances against U.S. policy.
For those determined to see bin Laden as simply a cold-blooded murderer who hates us because we are free, what is important to understand is that no matter what he actually believes, his message is one of specific complaints against U.S. policy. And it is this, as Ron Paul noted back in 1998, that makes bin Laden’s message useful in gaining new recruits to his “jihad.“
Even though some on TV complain that recognizing these facts somehow implicitly excuses the actions of those who attacked the United States, this, of course, is a red herring. Nothing could excuse the acts of September 11th. A Congressman identifying the motives at play is not justifying the attacks any more than when a local DA tries to figure out why someone has committed any other crime. If we believe that the terrorists are motivated to attack us because we have freedom, or have yet to invade their countries and give them freedom, then our policy prescriptions for multiple regime changes across the Middle East can only make matters worse. With opinion of the United States falling all across the world, and especially in the Muslim world, the continued presence of U.S. combat troops on Arab soil makes attacks against this country much more likely, not less. Paul voted to give the president the authority to use military force against bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and has repeatedly stated that were he president, actually doing so would be a top priority.
Not only did Paul foresee the problem with terrorism stemming from our continuous bombing campaign in the 1990s, he also predicted the consequences in Iraq were Saddam and the Ba’athists to fall. In the February ‘98 speech quoted above, he also asked:
“And even if we do kill Hussein, what do we do? We create a vacuum, a vacuum that may be filled by Iran. It may be filled by some other groups of Islamic fundamentalists.“
The invasion of Iraq created what the CIA calls a “training and recruiting ground” for al Qaeda wannabes in that land, though it seems the low numbers of so-called “foreign fighters” being brought into “al Qaeda in Iraq” have had even less influence than the skeptics had predicted.
These al Qaeda wannabes in Iraq have worn out their welcome with the local Sunni insurgency and have not been able to mount attacks outside Iraq. The local Sunnis tolerated them only as long as they were useful in fighting the occupation and were able to flick off “al Qaeda in Iraq” like a switch when they felt like it, as seen in the 2006–2007 “Sunni Awakening” in provinces where they had been welcomed.
The president threatens that if the U.S. withdraws, Osama bin Laden and his followers could somehow take over Iraq and create a new terrorist state bent on attacking the America. This just does not hold water. Osama’s movement remains small and marginal. The “central front” in the fight against them is in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, not in far away Iraq.
The end of Saddam’s rule has also empowered Iran, which has used the democracy provided by the American occupation to get their proxies elected to power. The Bush administration apparently tolerated this for no other reason than that the pro-Iran factions needed the U.S. occupation and so welcomed it, while the nationalist Shi’ite leaders like Muqtada al Sadr insisted on withdrawal. Were the American occupation to end, it is much more likely that nationalist types such as Sadr’s Mahdi Army would drive the Iranians back to Persia.
Ironically, the U.S. has spent 2007 accusing Iran of backing and waging war against American forces in Iraq through the Sadrists, who are not Iranian proxies and who are not fighting the occupation. They have provided no evidence that this is the case and our Shi’ite allies in Iraq have nothing but praise for Iran’s support of their government.
When it comes to Iran, Ron Paul’s view isn’t much different than that of Gen. John Abizaid, George Bush’s former head of Central Command. The General stated recently that Iran is not much of a threat and still would not pose one were they to obtain nuclear weapons – an achievement they are years away from, according to Mike McConnell, Bush’s National Intelligence Director.
The Iranians pose no real threat to Israel or the West. Their nuclear enrichment equipment is nothing more than first-generation crap bought second-hand from the Pakistanis, every bit of which is monitored by international inspectors. Ninety percent pure Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 is needed to make an atom bomb; the Iranians have yet to enrich their uranium higher than 4 percent and could not do so in the presence of the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors and sensors. Harvesting plutonium from their nuclear reactors would take years and likewise could not even begin without everyone knowing.
Iran’s much touted “support for international terrorism” has nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or the September 11th attacks on this country. Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. While often times extremely violent, these groups are not global in their reach, are not enemies of the United States and pose no threat to this country.
It has been claimed that the president of Iran, who actually holds the power of a glorified Secretary of the Interior, has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,“ in a speech in October, 2005. But according to those who are fluent in Farsi, he said no such thing. What he said was that the “regime” over Jerusalem would one day “vanish from the page of time.“ This was not even a subtle or implied threat, much less a promise of imminent attack. The fact also remains that Iran has no capability to destroy Israel, conventionally, with nukes they don’t have or through nearly powerless groups like Hamas.
No country in the world would attempt to “annihilate” Israel. The politician who did so would be dooming himself and his entire nation to perish in nuclear flames. Israel has at least 300 nuclear bombs and the delivery systems necessary to “wipe Persia off the map” in the space of an afternoon. As Paul has noted, the U.S. triumphantly faced down the Soviet Union (who actually were an existential threat), while our modern day think-tankers say the only way to deal with nearly-helpless Iran is with preemptive war.
Many Americans believe they need the government to defend them from “radical Islam,“ but those who hold truest to enforcing the strictest interpretations of Islam as a way of life have no chance of gaining or maintaining real dominance over humanity in the 21st century. Even if 100 impossibilities found Osama bin Laden leading the new caliphate in the Middle East, it would be as doomed as Communism was in the last century. Do we really fear that a stateless band of pirates in exile in the Hindu Kush will destroy us? Have we so much confidence in the capabilities of those who had to steal our planes in order to launch their Kamikaze attack and so little belief in the resilience of our own civilization?
Speaking of (Japanese Shintoist and Buddhist) Kamikazes, why should we believe that terrorism is intrinsically connected with Islam at all? Suicide bombings are rife in Sri Lanka where neither side is Muslim. By contrast, radical Islam is prevalent in Sudan, where it has no relationship to the current widespread violence (both sides are Sunni Arabs) and there has never been a suicide bombing. Did radical Catholicism motivate the IRA?
In the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Dr. Robert A. Pape’s research shows that suicide terrorism is a strategic response to occupation by foreign armies, plain and simple. The only role religion plays in this struggle, according to Pape, is that the willingness of the occupied to resort to suicide attacks increases when the occupying army is made of people who come from far away, look different and believe differently due to the fear that their entire way of life will come under attack.
Americans are the same way. Our irrational fear that Arab Islamic terrorists from the Middle East are coming here to force us all to convert to Wahhabism has convinced us to spend thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, pass piles of new laws and nearly break our defenses in our efforts to preempt them. Now that’s suicide.
The hyperbole about “radical Islam” has also helped to obscure divisions among those who oppose the U.S. in the Middle East and Central Asia. Even presidential candidates speak as though al Qaeda, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Sunni radicals in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon are all one unified threat that must be “preempted.“ This may be good for defense manufacturing firms and votes, but if we can’t even tell who our adversaries are, what distinguishes one from another, how are we supposed to win the fight?
A recent local newspaper story from Dr. Paul’s Texas Gulf Coast district quoted one of his constituents complaining that if Paul were elected president and withdrew U.S. troops from the Middle East, we would have no oil at all. This is just not the case. In fact, it is the economic theory of mercantilism that Adam Smith refuted in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776.
It is not necessary for the Japanese, Chinese or Swiss to send armies to the Middle East in order to get the petroleum their economies demand. They simply buy it on the market like anything else. The only reason one would need the Marine Corps to “secure” the oil is to ensure which companies get to do the pumping and distributing. The fact that the price of oil is now approximately triple what it was before the war ought to tell us that someone is benefiting. But who? Is it you and me? Or is it politically connected big-wigs such as oil company shareholders and executives? The oil will always be for sale. Even if unfriendly regimes sit on the wells and sell only to others, it will free up other supplies elsewhere in the market and we’ll be just fine.
It is a mistake to think of Ron Paul’s foreign policy as some sort of liberal exception to the rest of his conservative outlook. Instead, his views follow the tradition of the Old Right Taft Republicans. They opposed foreign interventionism for the same reason America’s founders did – out of caution for the inevitable domestic detriments that accompany permanent military establishments. It has only been since the Vietnam War era that the antiwar position has been perceived as the province of hippies and leftists. Paul’s prescriptions for dealing with the world are the most conservative in the race. Meanwhile, the current National Security Strategy – unlikely to change substantively under Giuliani, Romney or Hillary administrations – is itself a radical doctrine, called “Hard Wilsonianism” by its closest adherents. Paul’s policy is to pull back the empire in order to preserve the republic and the Constitution from the radical changes brought about by avoidable conflict. These are conservative principles of independence and prudence, friendly relations and open trade. As Gov. George W. Bush once advised,
“[U]se of the military needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. ... I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, ‘We do it this way. So should you.‘ ... I think the United States must be humble ... in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.“
Sooner or later the U.S. must leave Iraq – for financial reasons if nothing else – and the jihadists will attempt to claim credit for it no matter when it happens. Leaving Iraq and the larger Middle East as a matter of principle, however, is the only way to do so with any hope of restoring some of the integrity that has been lost since the invasion. Dr. Paul believes we have no business maintaining a world empire and that its consequences cost us far more than the gains. A withdrawal from Iraq under a Ron Paul administration would not be a victory for the terrorists, but an event to which they quickly become irrelevant bystanders.
When someone finally captures or kills Osama bin Laden and his few hundred followers, the larger “Global War on Terrorism” must end as well. The sooner the U.S. disengages from the Middle East, the quicker al Qaeda’s support will dry up. International cooperation from the various national police forces and intelligence agencies will be plenty to handle the problem. The more America intervenes in the affairs of others, the more blowback we can expect to suffer, but it is not too late to put our country back on the right track.
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By Sam on 12-14-07
http://www.puppetgov.com/videos.html
For those of you who care about the nation you live in, I am posting a link to several outstanding video clips. Watch the second one if any at all please. I too am a devout supporter of Ron Paul and his nonaggressionist views. I encourage all voters democrat and republican to put their party loyalty on hold, take a careful look at Ron Pauls stance on the issues and think what it is that is really important to you. Ron Paul has been in congress for 20 years, and has a tremendous amound of experience with economic issues as well as national security. Ron Paul is gathering support from all those who love liberty and freedom and believe in the constitution as the foundation of our great nation. Look at the support that Dr. Paul has recieved from both sides of the spectrum. google Ron Paul, watch his speehes and passion on youtube. Ron Paul is the greatest candidate that has run for president in 30 years…..period. Bring hope to America, VOTE RON PAUL.
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By James on 12-14-07
This discussion can go on forever. The fact is this, RON PAUL is it. There is no other candidate on the republican platform that is worth looking at. Giuliani is not a republican at all, Romney is a flim-flam man, Huckabee is broke and is purely a media creation with no real support. Ron Paul has recieved little to NO MEDIA acknowledgement and look at him. He is breaking every fundraising record in presidential race history. People want Ron Paul. Pay attention: December 16th is the anniversary for the Boston Tea Party. Ron Paul on that day will raise over $12,000,000.00 dollars! Look at his record
Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record:
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.
He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
By No Republicans at all please...... well maybe one! on 12-14-07
The only good republican at all is Ron Paul. The others are a vast collection of crooks, thieves, and warmongers.
The Republican Party is an institutionalized lie. The Bush administration is the embodiment of modern political deception. Unfortunately, some of the people that should know better and should see through the Republican lie don’t. I’m talking about fellow libertarians who still consider the GOP the lesser of two evils.
Pending a Watergate-type miracle, we have four more years of this monstrous administration, four more years to test our resolve for the cause of liberty and to refuse to fall for the Republican deception ever again.
Throughout junior high and high school, I was a young libertarian that often fell for these lies. In 1996 and 2000, I secretly rooted for Dole and Bush. As a fledgling libertarian I admired Reagan, carried books by Rush Limbaugh wherever I went, tuned in to listen to Michael Savage, wished I lived in the “real America” of the red states instead of the territory dominated by the clueless socialist blue, told fellow students they were unpatriotic for preferring Democrats, cheered on the Republicans as they impeached Clinton over high sex crimes and misdemeanors, and dreamt of the day that the Republicans would dominate all three branches of government and bring us back – however gradually – to the Constitutional structure forged by America’s Founding Fathers.
I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.
I don’t distrust Republican rule because I’m young, idealistic and naïve. If it weren’t for all the reading I’ve done, I would probably be a Republican now. I would have been a young conservative at Berkeley, scoffing at the leftist kids with dreadlocks and regarding the radical anti-capitalist left on campus as the greatest threat to human liberty imaginable.
That’s naïve. The disorganized campus left may have some sway, here and there, on the margins of political discourse and maybe even policy. But we’re not going to see a Maoist takeover of America. We’re not going to see Bibles banned and replaced by Das Kapital. What we’re more likely to see is a fascist takeover. I never thought I’d think this, but now I do.
How can the Bush administration – the most anti-liberty, Constitution-shredding, big-government administration to wield power at least since the days of LBJ’s and Nixon’s guns and butter – still manage to convince libertarians that the current political regime is the best realistic chance for liberty? How can a party that has a thirty-five year record of expanding government at a much faster pace than the other party still be perceived as the smaller-government party?
The answer, of course, is deception. The Republicans are much shrewder, much better organized and much more dishonest than the Democrats. The only reason so many libertarians and free market conservatives don’t think so is because the Republicans are also master magicians. They conjure up all sorts of illusions and tricks to convince freedom’s friends that they’re basically on the same side in the cosmic battle against the true enemy – the left.
Illusory Tax Cuts
The Republicans rely on nothing in their bag of tricks more than tax cuts. Under Reagan and Bush II, we have seen reductions in marginal tax rates matched with exploding growth in government spending. This deficit spending allows Republicans to use hidden forms of taxation – borrowing and inflation – to fund all the militarism, corporatism and welfarism they want and buy votes from swing voters, all the while pretending to stand up for the taxpayer.
The rich are overtaxed. But so are the poor and middle class. Hidden Republican tax increases end up hurting this last group the most, while their visible tax cuts do tend to help the rich more. If the Democrats and the left attack these schemes, or any component in them, the Republicans can turn to the libertarians and say: “Look! The Democrats want to raise your taxes! We understand the importance of tax relief; we respect the rights of the individual.“
Of course, the Democrats do want to raise taxes on the rich. The left doesn’t understand economics enough to know what’s going on, and so the lefties complain only about the visible tax cuts as opposed to pointing out that the Republicans are in fact raising taxes on all of us through inflationary spending.
The Republicans get everything they want. They can give tax cuts to the rich – which is not in itself a bad thing – securing votes among the affluent as well as the helpless libertarians who prefer some relief to none. They can incite the left to respond with misguided, anti-capitalistic criticisms. They can pretend to be the champions of economic liberty. And they can increase government spending to their heart’s content, sticking us with the bill through the gradual devaluation of the dollar, all the while blaming deficits on the big-government Democrats.
Any reduction in taxes is a blessing. But the Republican tax cuts are not really tax cuts; they are simply illusions – tricks that substitute one form of wealth extraction with another, even more destructive one.
Whereas the Democrats are arrogant and ignorant of economics, the Republicans know exactly what they are doing. Which is more evil?
Another tax fraud the Republicans love is distracting us with promises of simplifying the tax code or instituting a flat tax or national sales tax. Our goal should not be replacing one tax with another. Our goal should be cutting the size of government, which is the only way to reduce the actual tax burden on the American people.
Privatization Hoaxes
The Republicans also want us to have our own money back, instead of the evil government, or so they tell us. They want to “privatize” Social Security, allowing us to invest a small portion of our payroll taxes into a government-approved private account. They say that full privatization will come in seventy or so years.
Libertarians need to stop falling for this hoax. We can’t trust Republicans who make seventy-year plans any more than we can trust Communists that make five-year ones. No Republican Congressman is going to be alive in seventy years to be held accountable, for one thing. If a Social Security scheme doesn’t immediately set the country on a course toward more liberty for the taxpayers, smaller rates, actual control over private property, and a steady shrinking of the Social Security system, it isn’t a libertarian reform. It’s a scam.
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed…by Democrats
But the Democrats want to round up everyone’s guns, right? Many of them do. Here, too, the Republicans never deliver on their promises. Bob Dole labored hard to push the Brady Bill through Congress. Ronald Reagan and other Republicans pushed through one of the worst gun laws in California history, helping to give my state its reputation as a gun-free zone. George Bush I let his ATF and FBI commit murder at Ruby Ridge, which began as a gun control entrapment ploy.
Every time the Republicans are vying for power, they say America doesn’t need any more gun laws; it needs more enforcement of the current gun laws.
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have ten million gun laws that never see enforcement at all than one single gun law stringently enforced by the law-and-order Ashcroft regime.
Bush doesn’t care about the Second Amendment. The Assault Weapons Ban lapsed, but not to his credit; he said he would have signed it if it passed. Bush stonewalled efforts to arm airline pilots. Bush rigorously enforces the unconstitutional, immoral gun laws on the books today. Bush has never proposed to repeal a significant gun control law.
Disarming a population is a perfect recipe for totalitarianism. But another good method is keeping the armed population disarmed with lip service to the Second Amendment, even as you trash the other nine in the Bill of Rights and do nothing to reverse the violence done by previous Republicans and Democrats to the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This is the Republican strategy.
The Republicans don’t see the right to bear arms as an inalienable human right, any more than the Democrats see the Fourth Amendment as sacred. The Republicans see the Second Amendment as a political issue, and would without flinching go door to door in America rounding up weapons – just as they have in Iraq – if it suited their authoritarian purposes.
If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would not be impressed by how much the Republicans respect gun rights. He would be amazed that the Republicans have gotten away with as much tyranny as they have, in spite of the armed populace.
Strict Constructionist Judges
Republicans don’t have any use for the Constitution, so it’s a wonder why anyone would assume they would appoint judges that do. Our Supreme Court has seven Republican appointees. The court has upheld campaign finance censorship and although, thankfully, it ruled against Bush’s destruction of habeas corpus rights of “enemy combatants,“ the Republican hero, Clarence Thomas, was very little help in that brief moment of sanity.
Republicans don’t want judges that rule in favor of federalism, constitutionalism, or common sense. If they believed in any of these principles, they wouldn’t pass such blatantly atrocious legislation and wage such horrendously unconstitutional wars. Republicans want judges that will approve of their despotism. Simple as that.
School Choice
Democrats believe in public schooling, probably more than Republicans. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t believe in public schooling but they love the power it brings, nevertheless.
Under Republicans, federal education spending has increased about 50%, and the Department of Education budget has gone up about 70%. I saw a top Republican on television say that, unlike his party members in the 1970s and 1980s, the Republicans have now given up on the idea of ending federal education control. They’re willing to admit they lost that battle, but now they want to use federal education to shape America according to Republican values. This is what he said.
Again, we see what the Republicans are about. They know that government education is an attack on liberty and families – they know it better than the Democrats do. And yet, they have no problem increasing the scope of and spending on federal education. How could they do this, knowing the destruction to federalism and the human spirit caused by such policies?
They do know. That’s why they do it.
Protecting Us From “The Liberal Media”
Throughout the nineties, we all heard about the liberal media. They gave Clinton a pass for everything he did. Meanwhile, the lefties said there were no liberal media; the media were corporate-run, so they’re obviously conservative. Many of us libertarians laughed at such a preposterous notion. Obviously, the media were liberal.
In actuality, both claims are partly right and partly wrong. The media aren’t “liberal” or “conservative.“ The press is, overwhelmingly, pro-government. Sometimes that means liberal, other times that means conservative.
Many libertarians, however, still believe the lie that the media are simply liberal. What this means is that when CNN puts the Iraq War under the most timid of scrutiny, the American Right can scream foul. The Republicans claim that the media, being liberal and all, are clearly out to make Bush’s “catastrophic success” in Iraq look like more of a failure than it is.
This is nonsense. The mainstream press has indeed done a terrible job at reporting the War on Terror, but not for the benefit of Bush’s detractors. The press rarely asks administration officials any tough questions, the major networks never question the underlying assumptions of this insane war, and the “embedded” reporters have become a de-facto tentacle of the White House.
The reason we occasionally see chaos and death in Iraq on CNN and NBC is because that’s what’s going on there. In actuality, it’s much worse than what we see on the nightly news. One hundred thousand Iraqis have likely died because of Bush and Cheney’s murderous adventure. That should be on the news every day. The administration has lied constantly, before and after the invasion, about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s contempt of the United Nations and the nature of US occupation. The talking heads should be screaming aloud, calling for the impeachment and trial of Bush for war crimes.
The “liberal media” probably did want to see Bush lose, but they were quite poor at teaching Americans the basics about current events. Forty-two percent of Americans, and probably most Bush voters, still think Saddam was “directly involved” in 9/11. This can’t be blamed on a “liberal” anything.
The “liberal media” might be the Republicans’ best trick of all. During the Clinton years, they bashed the media as being too easy on Clinton, and libertarians were forced to agree.
Now the Republicans claim that Bush’s reelection is a populist rejection of the “liberal anti-Bush media” and Hollywood. How ingenious is that? Whereas in previous centuries – and, according the Republicans, as recently as the 1990s – the press was there to protect the people from the government, now all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe that Americans are rallying around the president to protect them from the evil press.
Don’t fall for it. Just because most news correspondents are “socially liberal” on certain issues doesn’t mean that they are making Bush look worse than he is. Such a feat is nearly impossible.
Pity the Power Elite
The Republicans want to be victims. They blame the left for burdening the country with a victim mentality, but listen carefully to what they say. Pity the conservative college students, who must put up with socialist professors. Pity Big Business – including the government contractors – for paying all the taxes and being the most persecuted group in America. Pity the poor president, who has more political power than has ever been concentrated in one man’s hands on earth, because people like Michael Moore hate him so irrationally. Pity America the Superpower, which tries hard to run the world and yet is despised by those who don’t want to be bombed, maimed and invaded.
Republicans like to have in both ways. They pretend to be on the side of the people, not the government, even as they control the government and strip away our liberties. They pretend to be for the free market, even as they increase spending and enact outdated New Deal schemes. They pretend to be the party of the Founding Fathers, even though they are running a global empire that even the most statist of the Federalists would have considered the very embodiment of tyranny.
They want us to pity them, the bold protectors of our freedom against the pathetic and out-of-power left. They want us to fear the leftism of Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin, who have no power over us whatsoever, while they run the biggest government in the history of the world. They want us to think we have something in common with them – a love for liberty – even as they rob us blind, pound us into submission, and use our resources to conduct mass murder on innocent people thousands of miles away.
They want to be regarded as the underdog when they are the most powerful and dangerous power elite ever to rule the world.
Tricking Libertarians
The Republican Party, from its beginnings, has never been a party of small government. And yet, some libertarians are relieved that Bush has won. More perversely, some are glad he won and that the Republicans have gained in Congress.
The Democrats are rotten; I’ve never said otherwise. But the Republicans, if anything, are worse. Certainly, they’re the ones in power, and so they’re the ones to target as the main enemies of freedom.
The Republicans love to pretend they’re on our side when they’re not in power, and when they grab power they keep the illusions going, in any ways they can, to keep as many lovers of liberty duped into thinking that this is the best we can do, that the Republicans are preventing a socialist takeover even as they institute fascism with every law they pass and war they wage.
Don’t be distracted by other enemies from the left, who also target the Bush regime for their own reasons, some good and some bad. Don’t let the fact that the left thinks No Child Left Behind is “under-funded” distract you from the truth that the Republicans have nationalized education in unprecedented ways. Don’t let the leftist attacks on Bush’s warfare state make you the least bit sympathetic to the war.
One of the few reasons many libertarians think the Republicans are preferable is a matter of aesthetics. The Democrats are simply shrewder, slimier, and more dishonest.
That’s the greatest Republican lie of all. Here is a party that has enlarged government far more than the opposition, and yet is still perceived – even by those who should know better – as the party of smaller government. Here is a party that calls itself pro-life, even as it federally funds abortions and cherishes war. Here is a party that lies about weapons of mass destruction and aggressively bombs, invades and occupies a country that meant us no harm, and gets away with saying the media are too hard on them and that Clinton was the real liar. Here is a party that accepts every fundamental premise in the culture of statism and favors the continuation or amplification of every government program under the sun, and yet can get away with talking about how they take our side, not the side of the government they control. That’s shrewd. That’s slimy. That’s dishonest.
The Republicans have done too much damage, and no good, to the cause of liberty. They have made both right and left think that capitalism is the equivalent of imperialism, guaranteeing we will have neither true economic liberty nor peace, and marginalizing those of us who want both. These rabid elephants in sheep’s clothing have taken far too many libertarian lambs to the slaughter, all the while pulling our own rhetorical wool over their eyes.
It is not hating capitalism or America to distrust Republican rule. It is simply resenting being ruled by people who refuse to admit they are despots. Just as the Communists pretended to care for the common man, even as they slaughtered millions, the Republicans pretend to respect our freedoms even as they attack them without relent. Just as the Communists were arguably worse than the fascists, because of their façade, so too the Republicans are worse than the Democrats, for they pretend to be something that they most certainly are not.
My hope and dream is that America’s true partisans of freedom will put aside some of their minor differences, at least for now, and recognize that the current regime is not the lesser of two evils, it is not protecting us from something worse, it is not something to be thanked for our remaining liberties and puny tax refunds. It is not the representative of the free world, or the guardian of capitalism, or the defender of the Constitution. What we see when we look in the face of George W. Bush, a man who got more Republican votes than any other man in history, is the face of tyranny. It is not the face of a lesser of two tyrannies; forget about such distracting thoughts. Focus on the Republicans who rule America, and realize that these are the greatest enemies of freedom in our time.
VOTE RON PAUL 2008. Kick the neo-cons out and vote to restore America! http://www.teaparty07.com donate to Ron Paul today and be a part of the largest fundraiser of any president in HISTORY!
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By John on 12-14-07
Ron Paul, Christians and the Golden Rule
Ron Paul, Huckabee and Romney are all vying for Christian attention. Who’s the best fit?
“Do to others as you would have them do unto you.“
Luke 6:31
While Mike Huckabee declares himself a, if not the, Christian leader in this presidential campaign, Ron Paul quietly lets his actions do the talking. As Dr. Paul practices his faith privately, Mitt Romney and Huckabee stumble over themselves to bring religion smack dab into the middle of their campaigns and if they win, their governments. Huckabee’s intentions regarding faith and government are clear. It’s his card, and he’ll never stop playing it, especially if he were to become President. And Romney went one step too far in his “religion” speech by declaring
“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history “
Oh boy…
“Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the
most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty?“
Um, isn’t that a religious test? By this standard, would anyone who doesn’t recognize that we are obligated to “serve one another”, much less believe in God, be acceptable for political office?
And then there is Ron Paul who told Howard Fineman this week that he hopes his “Christian values reflect in (his) character and what he believe(s) in.“ Dr. Paul found the necessity of Mr. Romney’s speech “tragic.“ As the only candidate to issue a press release on the speech, Dr. Paul urged that “Gov. Romney should be judged fairly, on his record and his character, not on the church he attends.“ Compared to the deafening silence and, in the case of Huckabee, snide innuendo, of the other candidates, Dr. Paul’s Christian character reflected admirably.
Dr. Paul’s political philosophy likely finds its roots in Christian ethics’ greatest hit - the Golden Rule. Let’s ask: if you don’t want to give money to corporate welfare, should I be able to force you to? If you want to spend money on stem cell research, should you be able to force Sally, who is pro-life? If you were Sally, how would you like to be treated? This is the crux of the philosophy of freedom. If you don’t want to be forced to donate to a project with which you don’t believe, don’t force other people to give to projects in which you believe. The goal of a Paul government would be to get the money out of the government’s hands and back into yours. Then you can vote with your dollars by donating to any project you want. And Sally can do the same.
For all their sad pandering, maybe the candidates who call themselves Christians, and those who feel they need to prove themselves Christians, might learn something from the Christian who doesn’t advertise his faith.
by John Dennis
(Libertarian)
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By j davis on 12-14-07
I see this thread has been hijacked by Ron Paul supporters with their usual mindless cut and paste. Don’t any of you guys have an original thought?
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By illustr8r on 12-15-07
I like to read about the political opinions held by the folks in the Flathead but when these lengthy Ron Paul paragraphs/propoganda get copy/pasted ad nauseum into every story with a political bent my eyes glaze over and I click to another article…or go to another site altogether. *sigh*
We get it, that you support Ron Paul, but can you condense it a little? I don’t think you are winning any new RP supporters with this dump of RP info into every election story that appears in the Beacon.
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By Gman on 12-17-07
The Rs calling Bohlinger “liberal” is like the pot calling the kettle black.
According to Natelson’s Montana Conservatives group, a majority of Rs serving in the state legislature vote moderate to liberal…
And, finally, word to Paul supporters, brevity is an important communications characteristic in the blogosphere. Your comments are too long and unreadable. KISS—keep it simple stupid….
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By Nick on 12-17-07
I agree… we get the whole Ron Paul thing. Keep things to the point and quit re-posting on every political article. We get it… we do.
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By Sam on 12-17-07
So do 58,000 people who helped push the idea of freedom into another campaign record breaking 6.026 million dollars in one day. You should ask yourself why 121,000 people donated to Ron Paul in this 4th quarter. Why are we so passionate about this cause and what he stands for? Truth my friend. People hear something they no is not shallow, political nonsense (Hillary) and something that isn’t fear filled war-mongering (every other republican candidate), people see a candidate that stands for the very cornerstone of this country, our constitution. Congressman Ron Paul has a passion, a true love of this country. He is not in this to see what he can get out of it, to see what name he can make of himSELF, no Ron Paul is in this because he loves the principles our founding fathers died fighting for. Ron Paul is fueled by the passion of millions of other Americans who are tired of being fleeced by the corporations and banking industry. Mortgages, interest rates, inflation, credit cards and debt, taxes for every aspect of life, lies, wars, wire-taps, people just want to be left alone, and yet the government we created WE THE PEOPLE created to serve our needs, now REQUIRES US TO SERVE IT. We are all forced to pay over 28% of our income in Federal Taxes, and the rest to interest and insurance. How much do you have in your wallet at the end of the month? I suggest you watch the documentary by Aaron Russo “Freedom to Fascism”: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173
Sometimes when you hear something so unique, and yet so true, you just cannot help jumping up on your rooftop and screaming out to let your neighbors know as well. We apologize if our enthusiasm offended some of you. http://www.ronpaul2008.com Be a part of history. Be a part of restoring America!
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By Gman on 12-18-07
Sam, you’re preaching to the choir. I totally agree with you and support Ron Paul - both financially and how I will vote.
Ron Paul embraces the principles of the free society that I have been advancing (in my own sphere of influence) for quite some time now. Those principles are simple:
1. Individual liberty
2. Free enterprise
3. Limited, constitutional gov’t
Generally, these principles lead to peace and prosperity if society accepts moral standards without gov’t coercion. In other words, they govern themselves. As de Tocqueville observed:
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?“
Paul’s biggest challenge is trying to convince a public that has generally accepted socialism in their daily and public lives. Basically, Paul is up against this:
Can this mindset be overcome? Sure, that’s why I’m supporting Paul. We all hold out for hope. To some extent I fear that it will take a crisis for someone like Paul to get elected. (Watch The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - humanity often doesn’t “wake up” until evil and death are staring at us straight in the face.)
The West’s pending crisis is how to pay for the entitlement civilization we’ve turned into. Once you’ve created a Ponzi scheme it’s difficult to get out of it.
Sam, someday you’re children and grandchildren will wish for the day of paying 28% of the fruit of their labor in taxes.
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By Enough!!! on 12-19-07
Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination. For those who think he will, you’re delusional. He will go down in history as another Ragin-Ralph Nader, unless he runs for president two more times in which he will be seen as another nut-case.
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By Sam on 12-19-07
He has more financial support than the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul earned 6.02 Million dollars in 24 hours, recieved donations from 122,000 people last quarter totalling over EIGHTEEN MILLION dollars. Yes he may not get the primary nomination. If he doesn’t get the nomination it isn’t because the people don’t support him, it’s because the system doesn’t. It’s a rigged game and the house never loses. People like you, give up and never fight for anything. Accuse me of throwing my vote away, atleast I voted for WHO I WANTED and NOT WHO I WAS TOLD TO VOTE FOR.
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By Gman on 12-20-07
Sam, big time kudos for your last comment. It is spot-on. The establishment will do whatever it can to be the kingmaker. Look at what has happened here in Montana. It’s completely rigged.
There are a growing number of Republicans (which I hesitate to call myself because the party is so liberal) that are fed up with the establishment and we’re jumping ship. More of us are going to start voting our consciences instead of picking the lesser of two evils.
I wouldn’t so quickly dismiss Ron Paul. Moreover, what is wrong with fervently supporting him during the nomination process? This Republican mindset that all of have to march lockstep is despotic.
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By Enough!!! on 12-20-07
You can vote for who you want. You can even send money to politicians, rally for causes you believe and voice opinions that may be silly.
That’s what I love about this country!
You can also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and in Ron Paul’s chances of becoming president.
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By Nick on 12-20-07
Wha…? You make it sound like Santa isn’t real… he IS real…
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By Howie on 12-20-07
A true (sort of) story.
At his first visit to a psychiatrist a man was asked why he had come.
“My wife wanted me to come and talk to you. She thinks that I may be having trouble connecting with reality.“
“Oh really,“ the psychiatrist said. “Why does she think this?“
“The other day,“ the man replied, “I came home from my day and, as always, she asked me how it went.“
“Great,“ I told her. “I went to a Ron Paul for President rally and as I was leaving I ran into Elvis.“
When he heard that the psychiatrist interrupted. “I’m sorry,“ he said. “You’re wife is wrong. You have not lost touch with reality. Ron Paul for President?“
“You’re NUTS!“
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By Gman on 12-20-07
What’s interesting about Howie’s little story is that Paul’s rallies attract a lot more people than any of the other candidates. Plus, it’s so nice to have some intelligent discourse…
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By Not true ... on 12-20-07
That’s not true, Gman. According to the news sources (that I admit are slanted against Ron Paul and my other personal favorite, Dennis Kucinech, the Obama/Oprah show has drawn the largest crowds.
Ron Paul’s crowds do, however, make more noise.
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By Sam on 12-20-07
I was looking at this link that Brad Funkhouser sent in showing Ron Paul at 7% in Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll today, when I noticed this Colorado poll from a few days ago that is also interesting:
Which of the following Republican candidates is most in tune with the attitudes and needs of Colorado?
19% John McCain.
14% Rudy Giuliani
14% Fred Thompson
12% Ron Paul
9% Mike Huckabee
8% Mitt Romney
16% None of the above
8% Not sure
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By Jim R. on 12-20-07
After the first three debates on National television, three mainstream news channels featured polls asking the American people who won. After the first debate on May 3rd, MSNBC ran a poll obtaining over 72,000 responses showing Ron Paul was the most convincing candidate receiving 45% of the vote. His nearest competitor was Mitt Romney who received 18%. Fox news ran its own poll after the second debates on May 15, and with over 40,000 votes Ron Paul came in second with 25% of the vote. Watching Sean Hannity’s face was priceless as while he was saying that Ron Paul’s chances were over in this election, Fox’s polling numbers flashed across the screen and had Ron Paul in the lead. He immediately did his best spin to claim the polls had been rigged. MSNBC also ran a poll about that debate and discovered Ron Paul was, again, the most convincing candidate with 64% of the over 25,000 responses. After the third debate on June 5, CNN’s poll of over 25,000 respondents showed Ron Paul won with 60% of the vote. VOTE RON PAUL!
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By Howie on 12-20-07
Ron Paul and Elvis
Sam gives some great numbers. In Colorado it appears that Ron Paul has a favorable rating of 12%, probably with a statistical range of +/- 2% which means just over 1 in 10 Coloradians think Dr. Ron “feels their pain,“ so to speak.
This is about the same number of people who still believe that Elvis is alive.
Coincidence? I think not!
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By riley on 12-20-07
here are reasons why i will not vote for ron paul: 1) he does not believe the federal govt should own any land other than a few national parks. he wants to liquidate federal land and hand it over to the states and let it be sold to private individuals. ( really rich individuals will be the only ones who could afford to buy big chunks of land out here). no federal land in montana - hmm, that will really change the quality of life here. 2) he thinks nuclear power is great, and every state should have their own nuke plant and multiple nuke waste sites - no thanks! 3) thinks taxes are completely illegal and the original tax law was improperly written which therefore makes taxation under it completely illegal. look, i don’t like taxes and i can’t really believe how much of my pay check goes to taxes - but to completely do away with taxes is completely ludicris (sp?). who will pay for the roads we drive on? or for the military???
i think ron paul is just another extreme nutcase - we can do better.
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By Gman on 12-20-07
Howie, your posts are so cute… hee hee…
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By SAM TO RILEY on 12-20-07
Riley,
Each of your issues raised can be addressed logically and with much more facts than you provided. I suggest you do a bit more research instead of spouting off what you are told through rumor and mass media. Lets start with taxes. Ron Paul understands taxes and the economy more so than any candidate running. He has studied the Austrian Theory of economics for over 30 years and his opinion is seconded by some of the most respected economists of today. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173 This documentary actually proves many of his tax theories correct. The military and Government make 99% of their money from corporate taxes, NOT YOURS and mine. The income tax (Proved unconstitutional 12 times in 12 courts) is gone as soon as they get it and does not completely cover even the interest on the US debt (Currently 9 trillion dollars.) Ron Paul is not against all taxes. Only the federal income tax which is the 25-30% taken out of your paycheck. Before 1913 how did the US government survive without the income tax? There are many ways the US government can do with less. Why not cut spending Riley? Are you aware the US spends over 50% of taxes recieved in all forms on the military? We have 700 bases all over the world and 40,000 troops in Korea. Why not close those bases, bring troops here and protect OUR borders and cut the military spending a little. Are you aware the US spends more on the military than the other top 3 military spending nations combined? Over 8% of our GNP goes to guns, tanks and missiles. Sorry that is ridiculous. Nuclear power is great actually. It is the cleanest form of energy around other than the waste. Ron Paul BLOCKED bills that would allow for the waste to be buried in wilderness and paid to be disposed of on national lands. HE PROTECTED THE WILDERNESS! Until we come up with something else, it is the only non-global warming, non-emissions way to light all the American homes bro! http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/016152.html
With the federal lands. Ron Paul is against the Federal Government controlling the states. His desire is that the states control the Federal government (as the forefathers layed out in the constitution). He wants the states to control their forests and wilderness areas. He does not propose anything further. Actually if you would read some of his issues, you would find out that HE OPPOSES government sponsored and subsidized logging on national lands! http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/environment/ Here are his environment stances. I encourage you to do more research before you back one of the pro-war candidates that will only waste your tax dollars and the lives of your countrymen. He is not nuts. He is an intelligent OB/GYN doctor that delivered 4,000 babies, studied economics and served this country as an Air Force Surgeon. He also served this country for 20 years in the Senate. So give him some respect. He has done a whole lot more than you probably have for this world and nation. So open your mind, read and learn a little.
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By The REAL NUMBERS ARE IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on 12-20-07
The pollsters insist that polls conducted over the phone are the most scientific way of accurately assessing a candidate’s viability. This statement couldn’t be further from the truth. What it all boils down to in the end is votes. On Caucus and Primary day you cannot phone in your vote and for all the Ron Paul supporters you cannot click your vote either. You must show up in person and cast your ballot live.
The Ron Paul brigade has proven they can vote. Ron Paul wins every single internet poll as well as almost all cell phone text message polls after network debates.
The question media pundits are constantly asking regarding the huge internet voting and fund raising success of Ron Paul is can he translate his tremendous support into Caucus and Primary votes?
Well let’s take a look at what that means. To the media, polls are success. Polls determine who gets the most media coverage. Polls determine who gets endorsed by big names in both politics and from Hollywood.
The Ron Paul supporters have proven online votes and text message votes, but have they proven votes in person, where you actually have to leave your computer or couch and travel somewhere, listen to a bunch of stump speeches then wait in long lines to vote? The only test of that are straw polls. Straw polls are actually a rehearsal for Caucus and Primary day. They are held in almost every state and require a person to travel (sometimes hours away), sit through speeches and stand in lines to vote. Furthermore straw polls are also GOP fund raisers, so in order to vote you often have to pay about $35 to $55.
So now you’re getting to the question the media pundits are asking. The translation to actual votes!
There have already been close to 50 official straw polls throughout the country. There is a website that keeps track of these events and tallies the scores just like the Media and pollsters do. Now remember straw polls are the closest you can get to actual voting. There is no spammers clicking on 50 internet polls per day, there is no phone polling to the miniscule ruminant of the decimated Republican Party. These are real people taking the day off to go and support their candidate. So without further ado here are the results.
As you can see the candidate with the most number of Straw poll wins is Ron Paul. Also notice that the current break through front runner in the phone polls Mike Huckabee has won only 2 straw polls.
Candidate# Wins
Ron Paul 25
Fred Thompson 24
Mitt Romney 22
Rudy Giuliani 7
John McCain 5
Mike Huckabee 2
Duncan Hunter 2
Alan Keyes 0
Now here is the really shocking statistic of these real life votes. If you look at the total straw polls and average Ron Paul’s polling percentage the same way phone polls are averaged, the percentages of votes for Ron Paul is 33.02%.
33.02% is the media pundits answer to their question of translation to actual votes.
So if you are were hesitant to throw your endorsement towards Ron Paul because of the Medias assessment of viability, your likely in a genuine position to justify Ron Paul as your candidate.
I say, welcome to the Ron Paul Revolution.
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By Gman on 12-21-07
Sam, could you shoot me an email at
? I’d appreciate touching base with you given your knowledge of the Austrian School. Such people are not easy to find. I have a project that I’m working on that you might find interesting.
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By riley - back atcha sam on 12-25-07
sam - why is it i am spouting off and apparently you are not, when, i like you have an opinion and post my thoughts about it here just like you have done - can’t you respect that my opinion is not the same as yours?
i was recenlty in las vegas. ron paul was a guest on an hour long radio program there. he spoke at length and in detail about how he would govern and where he stands on various issues. the topics i posted earlier here were ones he commented directly on, while on the radio for an hour. these words came from his mouth - to my ears. i formed an opinion about the man after listening to him on that program for an hour and visiting his webpage. on that program he said that he would liquidate federal land and either sell it off to private individuals or turn it over to the various states. he said that, and the other things i posted here. the program was the “state of nevada” it was broadcast on knpr about 2 weeks ago. unless they fabricated ron paul’s voice and faked the whole thing, it was his words that i heard, and his words that influenced how i feel about him.
apparently you love the guy and will follow him to the ends of the world. good for you, you have a purpose, we all get that after the miles and miles of stuff you have posted here. however, i - and many others do not feel the same way about this libretarian candidate who is running as a republican.
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By Leslie on 02-10-09
Badly need your help. Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
I am from Kiribati and bad know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Men’s health magazine money saving tips, good investment advice, and how to make money fast.“
Thanks for the help , Leslie.
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Comments on: Commentary: What ‘Real’ Republican?
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By j davis on 12-14-07
The GOP would do well to discuss REAL issues instead of made up wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage that quite simply, a majority of Americans could care less about. Pandering to the ‘religious’ right will get the GOP nowhere and will contribute greatly to its decline. They should address real issues like the war, the economy, health care, and the war on the middle class.
By KPD on 12-14-07
j davis, when are you running for office?
Well said.
By Nick on 12-14-07
You’re right, because the dems NEVER waste time on silly things such as religious beliefs… oh wait, that’s right, that’s one of their main issues with Romney, that he’s mormon… instead, they’ll waste their time on each other including Obama’s drug use as a young man that has little or no bearing today…
Both parties are just as frivilous with their quarrels, so please don’t go bashing one or the other when both are equally petty and engulf themselves with each other’s personal business rather than the issues that are affecting today’s society. Do I care if Obama smoked pot in the 70’s? Hell no! What does it matter today… almost 40 years later? His position on the issues mentioned above by J Davis are more important than whether or not he was a “normal” college student…
By Entertained on 12-14-07
“RON-PAUL QUIXOTE”
Having watched several debates, I personally believe there are just two presidential candidates worth looking at. Particularly since the television writer’s strike is forcing me to find new sources of entertainment.
On the left, Dennis Kucinich, the elf who would be president, continues to surprise us. Forget the fact that he seems to actually believe he could win. After all, many of us have an inflated view of our capabilities. Some aspire to be president. Others hope to become professional athletes without steroids. And most of us hold onto clothes that no longer fit because one day we know, with great certainty, we’ll lose that last forty pounds.
The entertainment value of Kucinich goes beyond his numerous presidential runs. He now has a trophy wife. Who is about a two feet taller and half again as young as he is. Evidently tall women are drawn to men with big ... dreams. Even if those dreams are a result of one’s personal delusions. Hopefully after the election C-Span will convince Dennis and his wife to become the stars of a new reality show similar to the Osbournes. If so, then every nickle I donated to his campaign would have been well spent.
Not to be outdone, the Republicans have also contributed to my need for humor. I was first introduced to the Ron Paul revolution last summer while drinking a beer at an outdoor blues festival. A homeless person (at least he told me he was homeless - I didn’t follow him to his camp to see whether or not he was telling me the truth) handed me a flyer directing me to the campaign’s website. The “revolutionary” admitted that he had not viewed the site. A few months earlier he was kicked out of the library and lost his internet access. But, he assured me, Ron Paul was the real deal and we should vote for him.
As he left, I found myself hoping that Ron was appealing to other interest groups since the percentage of homeless people who actually vote is only marginally higher than the number of college students who actually vote.
Since then, I’ve been impressed with the enthusiasm of Dr. Paul’s followers. Even though his chance of winning is only slightly higher than Dennis Kucinich’s. In some respects, his campaign reminds me of the classic story written by Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha. In the story, the hero sets out to undo tremendous wrongs inflicted upon society. A noble goal, indeed. However, as he continues on his quest his overexcited imagination blinds him to reality: he thinks windmills to be giants, flocks of sheep to be armies, and galley-slaves to be oppressed gentlemen.
Now, having said that, I really do not believe Ron Paul is anything but a sincere man. He seems quite passionate about his beliefs and I doubt if he will use his presidential run to try to bag a trophy wife.
Still, his followers appear to have allowed their imaginations to run rampant. I don’t know if they are chasing windmills or battling sheep. But I do know their hero’s quest for the White House is nearly impossible. Especially with Oprah holding rallies across the country. Havind said that, I continue to be entertained when I watch the Revolution’s rallies and listen the Revolutionaries enthusiastically join Ron Paul in his quixotic journey.
So it’s true. During this primary season the Republicans appear to have lost their identify. At the same time the Democrats appear to have lost their message. Fortunately, politics continues to be a source of great entertainment.
Which means I can watch something other than reruns of The Office and Grey’s Anatomy while waiting for the strike to end.
By Nick on 12-14-07
Kellyn,
Great write-up. I’ve felt this way about republicans lately, even moreso now that Bush is possibly the most hated man in America, maybe even the world. But I honestly believe that it is Bush’s inability to bend and break with such disapproval by the general public that has led these new candidates to having to “liberalize” themselves a little to gain any nationwide popularity. I believe that as a whole there are more dems in the general public than reps… it’s just the popular thing to be these days… but I also think that the GOP candidates know this, thus they are trying to show that they are “evolving” into a new-era republican. This new-era rep is someone that is understanding of where we are headed in terms of the big issues like abortion and gay rights. In my opinion, these are issues that are very similar to those faced over the past couple hundred years… slavery/minority rights, women’s rights… A repulican today saying they are against gay rights is like a southerner during the civil war era being against rights for the blacks. It’s something that we will most-likely see a widespread “acceptance” in the next half-century. Will it ever fully be accepted, probably not, just as racism is still around today… but it’s nice to see that these new-era republicans are coming out and putting forth a solid contention. It shows that politics (especially conservatives) is evolving beyond worrying about religious beliefs. I believe that at least these reps are finally figuring it out that this nation doesn’t need a hard-core one way or the other President that follows one line, and one line only, rather we need someone that is closer to the middle, while still holding their CORE beliefs true. I don’t think gay rights should be included into this core, just as civil rights shouldn’t have been, and really isn’t today.
I think we’re goign to see the “real” republican sort of start to die off a little, and this new “republican” is goign to emerge and show us that we don’t all have to be up-tight, staunch, religious, people that are against anything “immoral”... we will see a shift as we’ve seen over the past 200 years… we’re always evolving.
By Mcdav on 12-14-07
Mitt Romney has shown over the many years that he is capable of being the POTUS. In his grassroots organization, leadership skills, family values, and CEO experiences in business and the Olympics as well as governor of Mass. Feel free to visit other websites locally at http://www.montanansformitt.com or the official website at http://www.mittromney.com
By Romney is for BIG GOVERNMENT! on 12-14-07
http://www.ronpaul2008.com Read the issues. Ron Paul is the only true republican, who stands for America as a republic and promotes the constitution. Ron Paul is leading all other Republican candidates in fundraising. Anyone who sees what is happening to this country’s economy, personal freedoms, and military sees that Ron Paul is the most capable and honest candidate that knows the issues. Vote Liberty, Freedom, Justice and Peace, VOTE RON PAUL 2008!
Mitt Romney is an advocate of big government.
Is Mitt Romney the “economic conservative” he claims to be? Especially when it comes to tax and spend policies?
Now that he’s running for president, let’s compare his words with his deeds.
Taxes
Romney claims to be anti-tax. He even “took” a “no new taxes” pledge when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. “Took” is in quotes because he refused to sign that pledge. His signature wasn’t necessary, he claimed. He assured us that he’s a man of his word.
But Mitt Romney has been a champion of new taxes.
Mitt Romney proposed three new taxes while campaigning for governor: a new tax on vehicles, a new tax on campaign donations, and a new tax on building construction. They didn’t get much fanfare in the media and were quickly forgotten.
Right before the 2002 election, he ran millions of dollars in ads portraying himself as a “no new taxes” governor. The media refused to set the record straight.
But that was only the beginning.
Each of the four years Romney served as governor, he raised taxes – while pretending he didn’t. He claims he only raised mandatory government “fees.“ But government mandatory fees are nothing but taxes, and taxes are nothing but mandatory government fees. Romney’s new tax-fees raised hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax revenue for the state government every year.
He also increased several taxes by “closing loopholes” to enable collection of a new Internet sales tax and by passing legislation that enables local governments to raise business property taxes. This, he claims, is not raising taxes.
I suppose you could say Romney merely enacted bills that force taxpayers to hand over billions of dollars – which end up in the coffers of the government.
Quacks like a tax increase?
Romney now boasts that he was the first presidential candidate to sign a “taxpayer protection pledge,“ in which he promised to oppose “any and all efforts” to increase income taxes on people or businesses.
So he’ll call his tax increases “government fees” or “closing loopholes” or something else. But if Romney is president, the IRS will collect this money from you, your family, your friends, and millions of Americans just like you.
Government Spending
Mitt Romney claims to have cut the Massachusetts budget by “$2 billion.“ Sometimes he claims he cut it “$3 billion.“ The media gives him free advertising by parroting this myth repeatedly. They repeat it so often that even some libertarians assume it must be true.
But these “cuts” were merely budget games. Spending cuts in one area were simply moved into another area of the budget.
In fact, not only did Mitt Romney refuse to cut the overall Massachusetts budget, he expanded it. Dramatically.
The Massachusetts state budget was $22.7 billion a year when he took office in January of 2003.
When he left office four years later, it was over $25.7 billion – plus another $2.2 billion in spending that the legislature took “off budget.“ (Romney never reminds us of this fact.)
The net effect of budgets proposed and signed into law by Mitt Romney? An additional $5.2 billion in state spending – and a similar increase in new taxes. Every year.
He claims to have done a good job as governor of liberal Massachusetts in light of the fact that it’s a “tough state” for poor “conservatives” like him. He infers his hands were tied by the predominantly Democratic legislature.
But when it comes to tax and spend policies, he’s not only in lockstep with the Democrats. He leads the way.
Each of the four years Romney served as governor, he started budget negotiations by proposing an increase of about $1 billion. Before the legislature even named a budget figure.
Romney initiated massive new spending – without any prodding.
The legislature responded with a handful of line item budget increases. Romney agreed to some of them and vetoed others. The media helped him out again by making fanfare of his vetoes and portraying him as tough on spending – after he had already given away the store!
The Romney-Kennedy Alliance
But his grande finale was the worst of all: RomneyCare, Mitt Romney’s version of socialized medicine.
By his own admission, he didn’t plan his socialized medicine scheme until after the 2002 election.
During Romney’s governor campaign, he convinced voters that his Democrat rival would be worse – because she would saddle us with socialist tax-and-spend policies, he said.
But soon after he was elected, Romney started the drumbeat for socialized medicine. Three years later, he signed RomneyCare into law.
Voters of Massachusetts did not vote for RomneyCare. Mitt Romney foisted the granddaddy of Big Government expansions upon them without warning. He championed it from the beginning. Again, without any prodding from his Democrat rivals.
When Romney ran for U.S. Senate in 1994, his campaign popularized the derogatory term “Kennedy country” to describe the devastating effects of Ted Kennedy’s “liberal social programs” on poor neighborhoods in Massachusetts.
Yet Mitt Romney stood proudly with Kennedy while he signed RomneyCare into law.
Ted Kennedy has pushed for socialized medicine for decades. Romney fulfilled his dream. Kennedy lobbied the legislature hard to get Romney’s bill passed. It was a Romney-Kennedy alliance.
Welcome to Massachusetts: Romney-Kennedy country.
Romney’s socialized medicine law mandates everyone who doesn’t have insurance to buy it – or suffer income tax penalties. There’s yet another “off budget” Mitt Romney tax increase.
Romney’s mandate will cost individual taxpayers many thousands of dollars every year in health insurance premiums for unwanted policies – or force them to pay the equivalent in tax penalties.
The total cost of RomneyCare in mandates and new spending? At least several billion dollars every year – to start. It will rise from there, as socialized medicine programs are wont to do.
Romney’s law goes into full effect in 2009. Unless it’s repealed before then, the loudest screams of protest from Massachusetts won’t be heard until after the 2008 presidential election is over. Romney’s time-release tax increase.
Romney’s Words Versus Romney’s Deeds
Smart moms tell their kids, “Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.“
That advice saved me a lot of heartache. And it will do the same for Republicans who are leaning towards voting for Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary.
Candidate Romney campaigns for president with the words we’re aching to hear. Words we want to believe. Candidate Romney tells us that he is a:
“fiscal conservative”
“tax cutter”
“waste fighter”
“opponent of runaway spending”
“tough leader who vetoes new taxes and needless government spending”
Let’s follow Mom’s advice: ignore candidate Romney’s words. Look at elected Governor Romney’s deeds.
What does he do when he’s elected?
Mitt Romney hits up taxpayers with a variety of new taxes – while pretending he doesn’t.
Mitt Romney jacks up government spending as much as any Big Government Democrat would.
Mitt Romney champions massive Big Government Programs – that make Ted Kennedy proud.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/016777.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/howell5.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017645.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017634.html
By VOTE RON PAUL NOT ROMNEY on 12-14-07
Many conservatives have said that they agree with Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul on just about everything, but they just can’t see things his way when it comes to dealing with the Middle East. Paul’s views – correctly or incorrectly perceived – could well be a deal breaker for some in the base of the Republican party who look for strong presidential leadership to protect us from foreign threats. This open letter is an attempt to persuade you that Paul has been, and continues to be, right about the terrorist threat and what should be done about it.
Ron Paul understands something that the other candidates from both parties apparently cannot: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda is a relatively small organization with limited reach. The attack of September 11th was a desperate act from a desperate group who has failed miserably in their quest to conquer and unify the Islamic world. They do not control a single state on earth. By all indications Bin Laden, al Zawahiri and their closest followers remain isolated in the no-man’s-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al Qaeda is not an Islamo-fascist caliphate on the march, but they have attacked us and remain a threat. It is al Qaeda – not extremism everywhere – that Dr. Paul means to fight. Responding appropriately demands a cold and objective assessment of the situation, not unchecked, knee-jerk emotion.
Let us start with the question “Why did they attack us on September 11th?“
Dr. Paul’s fellow GOP candidates may publicly denounce him all they want for his view that the September 11th hijackers, their accomplices and financiers were motivated by a hatred of American policy in the Middle East. The terrorists themselves cite U.S. support for Israel and an indefinite military occupation of the Saudi desert, necessary for the enforcement of the blockade and no-fly zones against neighboring Iraq during the 1990s.
Similarly, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a primary architect of the Iraq invasion, explained to Vanity Fair magazine soon after the fall of Baghdad, in May, 2003, that the ability to move the bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq was a great benefit of the war because it detracted from one of bin Laden’s motivations for attacking the U.S.:
“There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed – but it’s huge – is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.“
According to authors Lawrence Wright, Terry McDermott, Michael Scheuer, Loretta Napoleoni and James Bamford, the purpose of al Qaeda terrorism, and specifically the September 11th attacks, was to provoke a reaction. Bin Laden and his partner Zawahiri have both explained that they already saw the U.S. as being in a state of war with them, but through their own governments and from far away North America. Their strategy was to hit us hard enough to provoke a full-scale invasion of Afghanistan. Essentially, their goal was to recreate their war against the Soviets a generation before – a war that they, of course, consider to be the primary cause of the USSR’s collapse. In other words, they meant to lure our military to their sandtrap to bleed our treasury dry, forcing our empire out of their region for good.
In this sense, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s decision to keep the invasion “light and fast” – at least at first – was smart insofar as it would deny the terrorists the quagmire they sought to provoke. Unfortunately, the administration’s decision to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq stole defeat from the jaws of victory, ridding the largest Arab state of its secular and formerly Western-backed dictator and creating a second chance for bin Laden to claim gains against the United States.
Years before 9/11, In February 1998, Dr. Paul told the Congress:
“Mr. Speaker, the Saudis this past week expressed a sincere concern about an anti-American backlash if we start bombing Baghdad. We should not ignore the feelings of the Saudis. If a neighbor can oppose this bombing, we should be very cautious.“
Later that year, while Bill Clinton was shooting cruise missiles at antibiotics factories and empty training camps in Afghanistan, Ron Paul spoke from the floor of the House of Representatives, warning the public and the Congress that our policy was in fact making enemies of our former friends, the mujahedeen warriors of Afghanistan (who he had opposed funding in the first place during his stint in Congress in the 1980s):
“Osama bin Laden and his Afghan religious supporters were American allies throughout the 1980s and received our money and training and were heralded as the Afghan ‘Freedom Fighters.‘ Even then, bin Laden let it be known that his people resented all imperialism, whether from the Soviets or the United States. ...
“[T]he region’s Muslims see America as the imperialist invader. They have deeply held religious beliefs, and in their desire for national sovereignty many see America as a threatening menace. America’s presence in the Middle East, most flagrantly demonstrated with troops and bases in Saudi Arabia, is something many Muslims see as defiling their holy land. Many Muslims – and this is what makes an extremist like bin Laden so popular – see American policy as identical to Israel’s policy; an affront to them that is rarely understood by most Americans.
“Far too often, the bombing of declared (or concocted) enemies, whether it’s the North Vietnamese, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Sudanese, the Albanians, or the Afghans, produces precisely the opposite effect to what is sought. It kills innocent people, creates more hatred toward America, unifies and stimulates the growth of the extremist Islamic movement and makes them more determined than ever to strike back with their weapon of choice – terror.“
You can see now why Ron Paul did not endorse Bill Clinton’s endless bombing campaigns back then and why he opposed the war in 2003. He saw the consequences of U.S. policy on their way back when most were caught up with the dot-com bubble and White House sex scandal.
Between these two warnings from Dr. Paul about the possible terrorist blowback from U.S. foreign policy, Osama bin Laden had re-released his 1996 “fatwa” against the United States. Titled “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” (the Arabian peninsula), he invoked support for Israel, the occupation of Saudi Arabia, the backing of local dictatorships and the continuous bombing of Iraq as his major grievances against U.S. policy.
For those determined to see bin Laden as simply a cold-blooded murderer who hates us because we are free, what is important to understand is that no matter what he actually believes, his message is one of specific complaints against U.S. policy. And it is this, as Ron Paul noted back in 1998, that makes bin Laden’s message useful in gaining new recruits to his “jihad.“
Even though some on TV complain that recognizing these facts somehow implicitly excuses the actions of those who attacked the United States, this, of course, is a red herring. Nothing could excuse the acts of September 11th. A Congressman identifying the motives at play is not justifying the attacks any more than when a local DA tries to figure out why someone has committed any other crime. If we believe that the terrorists are motivated to attack us because we have freedom, or have yet to invade their countries and give them freedom, then our policy prescriptions for multiple regime changes across the Middle East can only make matters worse. With opinion of the United States falling all across the world, and especially in the Muslim world, the continued presence of U.S. combat troops on Arab soil makes attacks against this country much more likely, not less. Paul voted to give the president the authority to use military force against bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and has repeatedly stated that were he president, actually doing so would be a top priority.
Not only did Paul foresee the problem with terrorism stemming from our continuous bombing campaign in the 1990s, he also predicted the consequences in Iraq were Saddam and the Ba’athists to fall. In the February ‘98 speech quoted above, he also asked:
“And even if we do kill Hussein, what do we do? We create a vacuum, a vacuum that may be filled by Iran. It may be filled by some other groups of Islamic fundamentalists.“
The invasion of Iraq created what the CIA calls a “training and recruiting ground” for al Qaeda wannabes in that land, though it seems the low numbers of so-called “foreign fighters” being brought into “al Qaeda in Iraq” have had even less influence than the skeptics had predicted.
These al Qaeda wannabes in Iraq have worn out their welcome with the local Sunni insurgency and have not been able to mount attacks outside Iraq. The local Sunnis tolerated them only as long as they were useful in fighting the occupation and were able to flick off “al Qaeda in Iraq” like a switch when they felt like it, as seen in the 2006–2007 “Sunni Awakening” in provinces where they had been welcomed.
The president threatens that if the U.S. withdraws, Osama bin Laden and his followers could somehow take over Iraq and create a new terrorist state bent on attacking the America. This just does not hold water. Osama’s movement remains small and marginal. The “central front” in the fight against them is in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, not in far away Iraq.
The end of Saddam’s rule has also empowered Iran, which has used the democracy provided by the American occupation to get their proxies elected to power. The Bush administration apparently tolerated this for no other reason than that the pro-Iran factions needed the U.S. occupation and so welcomed it, while the nationalist Shi’ite leaders like Muqtada al Sadr insisted on withdrawal. Were the American occupation to end, it is much more likely that nationalist types such as Sadr’s Mahdi Army would drive the Iranians back to Persia.
Ironically, the U.S. has spent 2007 accusing Iran of backing and waging war against American forces in Iraq through the Sadrists, who are not Iranian proxies and who are not fighting the occupation. They have provided no evidence that this is the case and our Shi’ite allies in Iraq have nothing but praise for Iran’s support of their government.
When it comes to Iran, Ron Paul’s view isn’t much different than that of Gen. John Abizaid, George Bush’s former head of Central Command. The General stated recently that Iran is not much of a threat and still would not pose one were they to obtain nuclear weapons – an achievement they are years away from, according to Mike McConnell, Bush’s National Intelligence Director.
The Iranians pose no real threat to Israel or the West. Their nuclear enrichment equipment is nothing more than first-generation crap bought second-hand from the Pakistanis, every bit of which is monitored by international inspectors. Ninety percent pure Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 is needed to make an atom bomb; the Iranians have yet to enrich their uranium higher than 4 percent and could not do so in the presence of the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors and sensors. Harvesting plutonium from their nuclear reactors would take years and likewise could not even begin without everyone knowing.
Iran’s much touted “support for international terrorism” has nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or the September 11th attacks on this country. Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. While often times extremely violent, these groups are not global in their reach, are not enemies of the United States and pose no threat to this country.
It has been claimed that the president of Iran, who actually holds the power of a glorified Secretary of the Interior, has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,“ in a speech in October, 2005. But according to those who are fluent in Farsi, he said no such thing. What he said was that the “regime” over Jerusalem would one day “vanish from the page of time.“ This was not even a subtle or implied threat, much less a promise of imminent attack. The fact also remains that Iran has no capability to destroy Israel, conventionally, with nukes they don’t have or through nearly powerless groups like Hamas.
No country in the world would attempt to “annihilate” Israel. The politician who did so would be dooming himself and his entire nation to perish in nuclear flames. Israel has at least 300 nuclear bombs and the delivery systems necessary to “wipe Persia off the map” in the space of an afternoon. As Paul has noted, the U.S. triumphantly faced down the Soviet Union (who actually were an existential threat), while our modern day think-tankers say the only way to deal with nearly-helpless Iran is with preemptive war.
Many Americans believe they need the government to defend them from “radical Islam,“ but those who hold truest to enforcing the strictest interpretations of Islam as a way of life have no chance of gaining or maintaining real dominance over humanity in the 21st century. Even if 100 impossibilities found Osama bin Laden leading the new caliphate in the Middle East, it would be as doomed as Communism was in the last century. Do we really fear that a stateless band of pirates in exile in the Hindu Kush will destroy us? Have we so much confidence in the capabilities of those who had to steal our planes in order to launch their Kamikaze attack and so little belief in the resilience of our own civilization?
Speaking of (Japanese Shintoist and Buddhist) Kamikazes, why should we believe that terrorism is intrinsically connected with Islam at all? Suicide bombings are rife in Sri Lanka where neither side is Muslim. By contrast, radical Islam is prevalent in Sudan, where it has no relationship to the current widespread violence (both sides are Sunni Arabs) and there has never been a suicide bombing. Did radical Catholicism motivate the IRA?
In the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Dr. Robert A. Pape’s research shows that suicide terrorism is a strategic response to occupation by foreign armies, plain and simple. The only role religion plays in this struggle, according to Pape, is that the willingness of the occupied to resort to suicide attacks increases when the occupying army is made of people who come from far away, look different and believe differently due to the fear that their entire way of life will come under attack.
Americans are the same way. Our irrational fear that Arab Islamic terrorists from the Middle East are coming here to force us all to convert to Wahhabism has convinced us to spend thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, pass piles of new laws and nearly break our defenses in our efforts to preempt them. Now that’s suicide.
The hyperbole about “radical Islam” has also helped to obscure divisions among those who oppose the U.S. in the Middle East and Central Asia. Even presidential candidates speak as though al Qaeda, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Sunni radicals in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon are all one unified threat that must be “preempted.“ This may be good for defense manufacturing firms and votes, but if we can’t even tell who our adversaries are, what distinguishes one from another, how are we supposed to win the fight?
A recent local newspaper story from Dr. Paul’s Texas Gulf Coast district quoted one of his constituents complaining that if Paul were elected president and withdrew U.S. troops from the Middle East, we would have no oil at all. This is just not the case. In fact, it is the economic theory of mercantilism that Adam Smith refuted in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776.
It is not necessary for the Japanese, Chinese or Swiss to send armies to the Middle East in order to get the petroleum their economies demand. They simply buy it on the market like anything else. The only reason one would need the Marine Corps to “secure” the oil is to ensure which companies get to do the pumping and distributing. The fact that the price of oil is now approximately triple what it was before the war ought to tell us that someone is benefiting. But who? Is it you and me? Or is it politically connected big-wigs such as oil company shareholders and executives? The oil will always be for sale. Even if unfriendly regimes sit on the wells and sell only to others, it will free up other supplies elsewhere in the market and we’ll be just fine.
It is a mistake to think of Ron Paul’s foreign policy as some sort of liberal exception to the rest of his conservative outlook. Instead, his views follow the tradition of the Old Right Taft Republicans. They opposed foreign interventionism for the same reason America’s founders did – out of caution for the inevitable domestic detriments that accompany permanent military establishments. It has only been since the Vietnam War era that the antiwar position has been perceived as the province of hippies and leftists. Paul’s prescriptions for dealing with the world are the most conservative in the race. Meanwhile, the current National Security Strategy – unlikely to change substantively under Giuliani, Romney or Hillary administrations – is itself a radical doctrine, called “Hard Wilsonianism” by its closest adherents. Paul’s policy is to pull back the empire in order to preserve the republic and the Constitution from the radical changes brought about by avoidable conflict. These are conservative principles of independence and prudence, friendly relations and open trade. As Gov. George W. Bush once advised,
“[U]se of the military needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. ... I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, ‘We do it this way. So should you.‘ ... I think the United States must be humble ... in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.“
Sooner or later the U.S. must leave Iraq – for financial reasons if nothing else – and the jihadists will attempt to claim credit for it no matter when it happens. Leaving Iraq and the larger Middle East as a matter of principle, however, is the only way to do so with any hope of restoring some of the integrity that has been lost since the invasion. Dr. Paul believes we have no business maintaining a world empire and that its consequences cost us far more than the gains. A withdrawal from Iraq under a Ron Paul administration would not be a victory for the terrorists, but an event to which they quickly become irrelevant bystanders.
When someone finally captures or kills Osama bin Laden and his few hundred followers, the larger “Global War on Terrorism” must end as well. The sooner the U.S. disengages from the Middle East, the quicker al Qaeda’s support will dry up. International cooperation from the various national police forces and intelligence agencies will be plenty to handle the problem. The more America intervenes in the affairs of others, the more blowback we can expect to suffer, but it is not too late to put our country back on the right track.
By Sam on 12-14-07
http://www.puppetgov.com/videos.html
For those of you who care about the nation you live in, I am posting a link to several outstanding video clips. Watch the second one if any at all please. I too am a devout supporter of Ron Paul and his nonaggressionist views. I encourage all voters democrat and republican to put their party loyalty on hold, take a careful look at Ron Pauls stance on the issues and think what it is that is really important to you. Ron Paul has been in congress for 20 years, and has a tremendous amound of experience with economic issues as well as national security. Ron Paul is gathering support from all those who love liberty and freedom and believe in the constitution as the foundation of our great nation. Look at the support that Dr. Paul has recieved from both sides of the spectrum. google Ron Paul, watch his speehes and passion on youtube. Ron Paul is the greatest candidate that has run for president in 30 years…..period. Bring hope to America, VOTE RON PAUL.
By James on 12-14-07
This discussion can go on forever. The fact is this, RON PAUL is it. There is no other candidate on the republican platform that is worth looking at. Giuliani is not a republican at all, Romney is a flim-flam man, Huckabee is broke and is purely a media creation with no real support. Ron Paul has recieved little to NO MEDIA acknowledgement and look at him. He is breaking every fundraising record in presidential race history. People want Ron Paul. Pay attention: December 16th is the anniversary for the Boston Tea Party. Ron Paul on that day will raise over $12,000,000.00 dollars! Look at his record
Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record:
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.
He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
Congressman Paul introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.
http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/comments/rehberg_montanans_trust_giuliani/
http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/comments/rehberg_says_iraq_troop_levels_could_be_reduced/
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/
Other great discussions on Ron Paul:
http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/comments/rehberg_montanans_trust_giuliani/
http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/comments/rehberg_says_iraq_troop_levels_could_be_reduced/
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/
VOTE RON PAUL IN 2008.
By No Republicans at all please...... well maybe one! on 12-14-07
The only good republican at all is Ron Paul. The others are a vast collection of crooks, thieves, and warmongers.
The Republican Party is an institutionalized lie. The Bush administration is the embodiment of modern political deception. Unfortunately, some of the people that should know better and should see through the Republican lie don’t. I’m talking about fellow libertarians who still consider the GOP the lesser of two evils.
Pending a Watergate-type miracle, we have four more years of this monstrous administration, four more years to test our resolve for the cause of liberty and to refuse to fall for the Republican deception ever again.
Throughout junior high and high school, I was a young libertarian that often fell for these lies. In 1996 and 2000, I secretly rooted for Dole and Bush. As a fledgling libertarian I admired Reagan, carried books by Rush Limbaugh wherever I went, tuned in to listen to Michael Savage, wished I lived in the “real America” of the red states instead of the territory dominated by the clueless socialist blue, told fellow students they were unpatriotic for preferring Democrats, cheered on the Republicans as they impeached Clinton over high sex crimes and misdemeanors, and dreamt of the day that the Republicans would dominate all three branches of government and bring us back – however gradually – to the Constitutional structure forged by America’s Founding Fathers.
I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.
I don’t distrust Republican rule because I’m young, idealistic and naïve. If it weren’t for all the reading I’ve done, I would probably be a Republican now. I would have been a young conservative at Berkeley, scoffing at the leftist kids with dreadlocks and regarding the radical anti-capitalist left on campus as the greatest threat to human liberty imaginable.
That’s naïve. The disorganized campus left may have some sway, here and there, on the margins of political discourse and maybe even policy. But we’re not going to see a Maoist takeover of America. We’re not going to see Bibles banned and replaced by Das Kapital. What we’re more likely to see is a fascist takeover. I never thought I’d think this, but now I do.
How can the Bush administration – the most anti-liberty, Constitution-shredding, big-government administration to wield power at least since the days of LBJ’s and Nixon’s guns and butter – still manage to convince libertarians that the current political regime is the best realistic chance for liberty? How can a party that has a thirty-five year record of expanding government at a much faster pace than the other party still be perceived as the smaller-government party?
The answer, of course, is deception. The Republicans are much shrewder, much better organized and much more dishonest than the Democrats. The only reason so many libertarians and free market conservatives don’t think so is because the Republicans are also master magicians. They conjure up all sorts of illusions and tricks to convince freedom’s friends that they’re basically on the same side in the cosmic battle against the true enemy – the left.
Illusory Tax Cuts
The Republicans rely on nothing in their bag of tricks more than tax cuts. Under Reagan and Bush II, we have seen reductions in marginal tax rates matched with exploding growth in government spending. This deficit spending allows Republicans to use hidden forms of taxation – borrowing and inflation – to fund all the militarism, corporatism and welfarism they want and buy votes from swing voters, all the while pretending to stand up for the taxpayer.
The rich are overtaxed. But so are the poor and middle class. Hidden Republican tax increases end up hurting this last group the most, while their visible tax cuts do tend to help the rich more. If the Democrats and the left attack these schemes, or any component in them, the Republicans can turn to the libertarians and say: “Look! The Democrats want to raise your taxes! We understand the importance of tax relief; we respect the rights of the individual.“
Of course, the Democrats do want to raise taxes on the rich. The left doesn’t understand economics enough to know what’s going on, and so the lefties complain only about the visible tax cuts as opposed to pointing out that the Republicans are in fact raising taxes on all of us through inflationary spending.
The Republicans get everything they want. They can give tax cuts to the rich – which is not in itself a bad thing – securing votes among the affluent as well as the helpless libertarians who prefer some relief to none. They can incite the left to respond with misguided, anti-capitalistic criticisms. They can pretend to be the champions of economic liberty. And they can increase government spending to their heart’s content, sticking us with the bill through the gradual devaluation of the dollar, all the while blaming deficits on the big-government Democrats.
Any reduction in taxes is a blessing. But the Republican tax cuts are not really tax cuts; they are simply illusions – tricks that substitute one form of wealth extraction with another, even more destructive one.
Whereas the Democrats are arrogant and ignorant of economics, the Republicans know exactly what they are doing. Which is more evil?
Another tax fraud the Republicans love is distracting us with promises of simplifying the tax code or instituting a flat tax or national sales tax. Our goal should not be replacing one tax with another. Our goal should be cutting the size of government, which is the only way to reduce the actual tax burden on the American people.
Privatization Hoaxes
The Republicans also want us to have our own money back, instead of the evil government, or so they tell us. They want to “privatize” Social Security, allowing us to invest a small portion of our payroll taxes into a government-approved private account. They say that full privatization will come in seventy or so years.
Libertarians need to stop falling for this hoax. We can’t trust Republicans who make seventy-year plans any more than we can trust Communists that make five-year ones. No Republican Congressman is going to be alive in seventy years to be held accountable, for one thing. If a Social Security scheme doesn’t immediately set the country on a course toward more liberty for the taxpayers, smaller rates, actual control over private property, and a steady shrinking of the Social Security system, it isn’t a libertarian reform. It’s a scam.
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed…by Democrats
But the Democrats want to round up everyone’s guns, right? Many of them do. Here, too, the Republicans never deliver on their promises. Bob Dole labored hard to push the Brady Bill through Congress. Ronald Reagan and other Republicans pushed through one of the worst gun laws in California history, helping to give my state its reputation as a gun-free zone. George Bush I let his ATF and FBI commit murder at Ruby Ridge, which began as a gun control entrapment ploy.
Every time the Republicans are vying for power, they say America doesn’t need any more gun laws; it needs more enforcement of the current gun laws.
I don’t know about you, but I would much rather have ten million gun laws that never see enforcement at all than one single gun law stringently enforced by the law-and-order Ashcroft regime.
Bush doesn’t care about the Second Amendment. The Assault Weapons Ban lapsed, but not to his credit; he said he would have signed it if it passed. Bush stonewalled efforts to arm airline pilots. Bush rigorously enforces the unconstitutional, immoral gun laws on the books today. Bush has never proposed to repeal a significant gun control law.
Disarming a population is a perfect recipe for totalitarianism. But another good method is keeping the armed population disarmed with lip service to the Second Amendment, even as you trash the other nine in the Bill of Rights and do nothing to reverse the violence done by previous Republicans and Democrats to the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This is the Republican strategy.
The Republicans don’t see the right to bear arms as an inalienable human right, any more than the Democrats see the Fourth Amendment as sacred. The Republicans see the Second Amendment as a political issue, and would without flinching go door to door in America rounding up weapons – just as they have in Iraq – if it suited their authoritarian purposes.
If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would not be impressed by how much the Republicans respect gun rights. He would be amazed that the Republicans have gotten away with as much tyranny as they have, in spite of the armed populace.
Strict Constructionist Judges
Republicans don’t have any use for the Constitution, so it’s a wonder why anyone would assume they would appoint judges that do. Our Supreme Court has seven Republican appointees. The court has upheld campaign finance censorship and although, thankfully, it ruled against Bush’s destruction of habeas corpus rights of “enemy combatants,“ the Republican hero, Clarence Thomas, was very little help in that brief moment of sanity.
Republicans don’t want judges that rule in favor of federalism, constitutionalism, or common sense. If they believed in any of these principles, they wouldn’t pass such blatantly atrocious legislation and wage such horrendously unconstitutional wars. Republicans want judges that will approve of their despotism. Simple as that.
School Choice
Democrats believe in public schooling, probably more than Republicans. Republicans, on the other hand, don’t believe in public schooling but they love the power it brings, nevertheless.
Under Republicans, federal education spending has increased about 50%, and the Department of Education budget has gone up about 70%. I saw a top Republican on television say that, unlike his party members in the 1970s and 1980s, the Republicans have now given up on the idea of ending federal education control. They’re willing to admit they lost that battle, but now they want to use federal education to shape America according to Republican values. This is what he said.
Again, we see what the Republicans are about. They know that government education is an attack on liberty and families – they know it better than the Democrats do. And yet, they have no problem increasing the scope of and spending on federal education. How could they do this, knowing the destruction to federalism and the human spirit caused by such policies?
They do know. That’s why they do it.
Protecting Us From “The Liberal Media”
Throughout the nineties, we all heard about the liberal media. They gave Clinton a pass for everything he did. Meanwhile, the lefties said there were no liberal media; the media were corporate-run, so they’re obviously conservative. Many of us libertarians laughed at such a preposterous notion. Obviously, the media were liberal.
In actuality, both claims are partly right and partly wrong. The media aren’t “liberal” or “conservative.“ The press is, overwhelmingly, pro-government. Sometimes that means liberal, other times that means conservative.
Many libertarians, however, still believe the lie that the media are simply liberal. What this means is that when CNN puts the Iraq War under the most timid of scrutiny, the American Right can scream foul. The Republicans claim that the media, being liberal and all, are clearly out to make Bush’s “catastrophic success” in Iraq look like more of a failure than it is.
This is nonsense. The mainstream press has indeed done a terrible job at reporting the War on Terror, but not for the benefit of Bush’s detractors. The press rarely asks administration officials any tough questions, the major networks never question the underlying assumptions of this insane war, and the “embedded” reporters have become a de-facto tentacle of the White House.
The reason we occasionally see chaos and death in Iraq on CNN and NBC is because that’s what’s going on there. In actuality, it’s much worse than what we see on the nightly news. One hundred thousand Iraqis have likely died because of Bush and Cheney’s murderous adventure. That should be on the news every day. The administration has lied constantly, before and after the invasion, about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s contempt of the United Nations and the nature of US occupation. The talking heads should be screaming aloud, calling for the impeachment and trial of Bush for war crimes.
The “liberal media” probably did want to see Bush lose, but they were quite poor at teaching Americans the basics about current events. Forty-two percent of Americans, and probably most Bush voters, still think Saddam was “directly involved” in 9/11. This can’t be blamed on a “liberal” anything.
The “liberal media” might be the Republicans’ best trick of all. During the Clinton years, they bashed the media as being too easy on Clinton, and libertarians were forced to agree.
Now the Republicans claim that Bush’s reelection is a populist rejection of the “liberal anti-Bush media” and Hollywood. How ingenious is that? Whereas in previous centuries – and, according the Republicans, as recently as the 1990s – the press was there to protect the people from the government, now all of a sudden we’re supposed to believe that Americans are rallying around the president to protect them from the evil press.
Don’t fall for it. Just because most news correspondents are “socially liberal” on certain issues doesn’t mean that they are making Bush look worse than he is. Such a feat is nearly impossible.
Pity the Power Elite
The Republicans want to be victims. They blame the left for burdening the country with a victim mentality, but listen carefully to what they say. Pity the conservative college students, who must put up with socialist professors. Pity Big Business – including the government contractors – for paying all the taxes and being the most persecuted group in America. Pity the poor president, who has more political power than has ever been concentrated in one man’s hands on earth, because people like Michael Moore hate him so irrationally. Pity America the Superpower, which tries hard to run the world and yet is despised by those who don’t want to be bombed, maimed and invaded.
Republicans like to have in both ways. They pretend to be on the side of the people, not the government, even as they control the government and strip away our liberties. They pretend to be for the free market, even as they increase spending and enact outdated New Deal schemes. They pretend to be the party of the Founding Fathers, even though they are running a global empire that even the most statist of the Federalists would have considered the very embodiment of tyranny.
They want us to pity them, the bold protectors of our freedom against the pathetic and out-of-power left. They want us to fear the leftism of Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin, who have no power over us whatsoever, while they run the biggest government in the history of the world. They want us to think we have something in common with them – a love for liberty – even as they rob us blind, pound us into submission, and use our resources to conduct mass murder on innocent people thousands of miles away.
They want to be regarded as the underdog when they are the most powerful and dangerous power elite ever to rule the world.
Tricking Libertarians
The Republican Party, from its beginnings, has never been a party of small government. And yet, some libertarians are relieved that Bush has won. More perversely, some are glad he won and that the Republicans have gained in Congress.
The Democrats are rotten; I’ve never said otherwise. But the Republicans, if anything, are worse. Certainly, they’re the ones in power, and so they’re the ones to target as the main enemies of freedom.
The Republicans love to pretend they’re on our side when they’re not in power, and when they grab power they keep the illusions going, in any ways they can, to keep as many lovers of liberty duped into thinking that this is the best we can do, that the Republicans are preventing a socialist takeover even as they institute fascism with every law they pass and war they wage.
Don’t be distracted by other enemies from the left, who also target the Bush regime for their own reasons, some good and some bad. Don’t let the fact that the left thinks No Child Left Behind is “under-funded” distract you from the truth that the Republicans have nationalized education in unprecedented ways. Don’t let the leftist attacks on Bush’s warfare state make you the least bit sympathetic to the war.
One of the few reasons many libertarians think the Republicans are preferable is a matter of aesthetics. The Democrats are simply shrewder, slimier, and more dishonest.
That’s the greatest Republican lie of all. Here is a party that has enlarged government far more than the opposition, and yet is still perceived – even by those who should know better – as the party of smaller government. Here is a party that calls itself pro-life, even as it federally funds abortions and cherishes war. Here is a party that lies about weapons of mass destruction and aggressively bombs, invades and occupies a country that meant us no harm, and gets away with saying the media are too hard on them and that Clinton was the real liar. Here is a party that accepts every fundamental premise in the culture of statism and favors the continuation or amplification of every government program under the sun, and yet can get away with talking about how they take our side, not the side of the government they control. That’s shrewd. That’s slimy. That’s dishonest.
The Republicans have done too much damage, and no good, to the cause of liberty. They have made both right and left think that capitalism is the equivalent of imperialism, guaranteeing we will have neither true economic liberty nor peace, and marginalizing those of us who want both. These rabid elephants in sheep’s clothing have taken far too many libertarian lambs to the slaughter, all the while pulling our own rhetorical wool over their eyes.
It is not hating capitalism or America to distrust Republican rule. It is simply resenting being ruled by people who refuse to admit they are despots. Just as the Communists pretended to care for the common man, even as they slaughtered millions, the Republicans pretend to respect our freedoms even as they attack them without relent. Just as the Communists were arguably worse than the fascists, because of their façade, so too the Republicans are worse than the Democrats, for they pretend to be something that they most certainly are not.
My hope and dream is that America’s true partisans of freedom will put aside some of their minor differences, at least for now, and recognize that the current regime is not the lesser of two evils, it is not protecting us from something worse, it is not something to be thanked for our remaining liberties and puny tax refunds. It is not the representative of the free world, or the guardian of capitalism, or the defender of the Constitution. What we see when we look in the face of George W. Bush, a man who got more Republican votes than any other man in history, is the face of tyranny. It is not the face of a lesser of two tyrannies; forget about such distracting thoughts. Focus on the Republicans who rule America, and realize that these are the greatest enemies of freedom in our time.
VOTE RON PAUL 2008. Kick the neo-cons out and vote to restore America! http://www.teaparty07.com donate to Ron Paul today and be a part of the largest fundraiser of any president in HISTORY!
By John on 12-14-07
Ron Paul, Christians and the Golden Rule
Ron Paul, Huckabee and Romney are all vying for Christian attention. Who’s the best fit?
“Do to others as you would have them do unto you.“
Luke 6:31
While Mike Huckabee declares himself a, if not the, Christian leader in this presidential campaign, Ron Paul quietly lets his actions do the talking. As Dr. Paul practices his faith privately, Mitt Romney and Huckabee stumble over themselves to bring religion smack dab into the middle of their campaigns and if they win, their governments. Huckabee’s intentions regarding faith and government are clear. It’s his card, and he’ll never stop playing it, especially if he were to become President. And Romney went one step too far in his “religion” speech by declaring
“We should acknowledge the Creator as did the Founders in ceremony and word. He should remain on our currency, in our pledge, in the teaching of our history “
Oh boy…
“Nor would I separate us from our religious heritage. Perhaps the
most important question to ask a person of faith who seeks a political office, is this: does he share these American values: the equality of human kind, the obligation to serve one another, and a steadfast commitment to liberty?“
Um, isn’t that a religious test? By this standard, would anyone who doesn’t recognize that we are obligated to “serve one another”, much less believe in God, be acceptable for political office?
And then there is Ron Paul who told Howard Fineman this week that he hopes his “Christian values reflect in (his) character and what he believe(s) in.“ Dr. Paul found the necessity of Mr. Romney’s speech “tragic.“ As the only candidate to issue a press release on the speech, Dr. Paul urged that “Gov. Romney should be judged fairly, on his record and his character, not on the church he attends.“ Compared to the deafening silence and, in the case of Huckabee, snide innuendo, of the other candidates, Dr. Paul’s Christian character reflected admirably.
Dr. Paul’s political philosophy likely finds its roots in Christian ethics’ greatest hit - the Golden Rule. Let’s ask: if you don’t want to give money to corporate welfare, should I be able to force you to? If you want to spend money on stem cell research, should you be able to force Sally, who is pro-life? If you were Sally, how would you like to be treated? This is the crux of the philosophy of freedom. If you don’t want to be forced to donate to a project with which you don’t believe, don’t force other people to give to projects in which you believe. The goal of a Paul government would be to get the money out of the government’s hands and back into yours. Then you can vote with your dollars by donating to any project you want. And Sally can do the same.
For all their sad pandering, maybe the candidates who call themselves Christians, and those who feel they need to prove themselves Christians, might learn something from the Christian who doesn’t advertise his faith.
by John Dennis
(Libertarian)
By j davis on 12-14-07
I see this thread has been hijacked by Ron Paul supporters with their usual mindless cut and paste. Don’t any of you guys have an original thought?
By illustr8r on 12-15-07
I like to read about the political opinions held by the folks in the Flathead but when these lengthy Ron Paul paragraphs/propoganda get copy/pasted ad nauseum into every story with a political bent my eyes glaze over and I click to another article…or go to another site altogether. *sigh*
We get it, that you support Ron Paul, but can you condense it a little? I don’t think you are winning any new RP supporters with this dump of RP info into every election story that appears in the Beacon.
By Gman on 12-17-07
The Rs calling Bohlinger “liberal” is like the pot calling the kettle black.
According to Natelson’s Montana Conservatives group, a majority of Rs serving in the state legislature vote moderate to liberal…
http://www.mediafire.com/?dwmegdx2t5g
And, finally, word to Paul supporters, brevity is an important communications characteristic in the blogosphere. Your comments are too long and unreadable. KISS—keep it simple stupid….
By Nick on 12-17-07
I agree… we get the whole Ron Paul thing. Keep things to the point and quit re-posting on every political article. We get it… we do.
By Sam on 12-17-07
So do 58,000 people who helped push the idea of freedom into another campaign record breaking 6.026 million dollars in one day. You should ask yourself why 121,000 people donated to Ron Paul in this 4th quarter. Why are we so passionate about this cause and what he stands for? Truth my friend. People hear something they no is not shallow, political nonsense (Hillary) and something that isn’t fear filled war-mongering (every other republican candidate), people see a candidate that stands for the very cornerstone of this country, our constitution. Congressman Ron Paul has a passion, a true love of this country. He is not in this to see what he can get out of it, to see what name he can make of himSELF, no Ron Paul is in this because he loves the principles our founding fathers died fighting for. Ron Paul is fueled by the passion of millions of other Americans who are tired of being fleeced by the corporations and banking industry. Mortgages, interest rates, inflation, credit cards and debt, taxes for every aspect of life, lies, wars, wire-taps, people just want to be left alone, and yet the government we created WE THE PEOPLE created to serve our needs, now REQUIRES US TO SERVE IT. We are all forced to pay over 28% of our income in Federal Taxes, and the rest to interest and insurance. How much do you have in your wallet at the end of the month? I suggest you watch the documentary by Aaron Russo “Freedom to Fascism”:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173
Sometimes when you hear something so unique, and yet so true, you just cannot help jumping up on your rooftop and screaming out to let your neighbors know as well. We apologize if our enthusiasm offended some of you.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com Be a part of history. Be a part of restoring America!
By Gman on 12-18-07
Sam, you’re preaching to the choir. I totally agree with you and support Ron Paul - both financially and how I will vote.
Ron Paul embraces the principles of the free society that I have been advancing (in my own sphere of influence) for quite some time now. Those principles are simple:
1. Individual liberty
2. Free enterprise
3. Limited, constitutional gov’t
Generally, these principles lead to peace and prosperity if society accepts moral standards without gov’t coercion. In other words, they govern themselves. As de Tocqueville observed:
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed?“
Paul’s biggest challenge is trying to convince a public that has generally accepted socialism in their daily and public lives. Basically, Paul is up against this:
http://fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8135
Can this mindset be overcome? Sure, that’s why I’m supporting Paul. We all hold out for hope. To some extent I fear that it will take a crisis for someone like Paul to get elected. (Watch The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - humanity often doesn’t “wake up” until evil and death are staring at us straight in the face.)
The West’s pending crisis is how to pay for the entitlement civilization we’ve turned into. Once you’ve created a Ponzi scheme it’s difficult to get out of it.
Sam, someday you’re children and grandchildren will wish for the day of paying 28% of the fruit of their labor in taxes.
By Enough!!! on 12-19-07
Ron Paul will not win the Republican nomination. For those who think he will, you’re delusional. He will go down in history as another Ragin-Ralph Nader, unless he runs for president two more times in which he will be seen as another nut-case.
By Sam on 12-19-07
He has more financial support than the other Republican candidates. Ron Paul earned 6.02 Million dollars in 24 hours, recieved donations from 122,000 people last quarter totalling over EIGHTEEN MILLION dollars. Yes he may not get the primary nomination. If he doesn’t get the nomination it isn’t because the people don’t support him, it’s because the system doesn’t. It’s a rigged game and the house never loses. People like you, give up and never fight for anything. Accuse me of throwing my vote away, atleast I voted for WHO I WANTED and NOT WHO I WAS TOLD TO VOTE FOR.
By Gman on 12-20-07
Sam, big time kudos for your last comment. It is spot-on. The establishment will do whatever it can to be the kingmaker. Look at what has happened here in Montana. It’s completely rigged.
There are a growing number of Republicans (which I hesitate to call myself because the party is so liberal) that are fed up with the establishment and we’re jumping ship. More of us are going to start voting our consciences instead of picking the lesser of two evils.
I wouldn’t so quickly dismiss Ron Paul. Moreover, what is wrong with fervently supporting him during the nomination process? This Republican mindset that all of have to march lockstep is despotic.
By Enough!!! on 12-20-07
You can vote for who you want. You can even send money to politicians, rally for causes you believe and voice opinions that may be silly.
That’s what I love about this country!
You can also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and in Ron Paul’s chances of becoming president.
By Nick on 12-20-07
Wha…? You make it sound like Santa isn’t real… he IS real…
By Howie on 12-20-07
A true (sort of) story.
At his first visit to a psychiatrist a man was asked why he had come.
“My wife wanted me to come and talk to you. She thinks that I may be having trouble connecting with reality.“
“Oh really,“ the psychiatrist said. “Why does she think this?“
“The other day,“ the man replied, “I came home from my day and, as always, she asked me how it went.“
“Great,“ I told her. “I went to a Ron Paul for President rally and as I was leaving I ran into Elvis.“
When he heard that the psychiatrist interrupted. “I’m sorry,“ he said. “You’re wife is wrong. You have not lost touch with reality. Ron Paul for President?“
“You’re NUTS!“
By Gman on 12-20-07
What’s interesting about Howie’s little story is that Paul’s rallies attract a lot more people than any of the other candidates. Plus, it’s so nice to have some intelligent discourse…
By Not true ... on 12-20-07
That’s not true, Gman. According to the news sources (that I admit are slanted against Ron Paul and my other personal favorite, Dennis Kucinech, the Obama/Oprah show has drawn the largest crowds.
Ron Paul’s crowds do, however, make more noise.
By Sam on 12-20-07
I was looking at this link that Brad Funkhouser sent in showing Ron Paul at 7% in Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll today, when I noticed this Colorado poll from a few days ago that is also interesting:
Which of the following Republican candidates is most in tune with the attitudes and needs of Colorado?
19% John McCain.
14% Rudy Giuliani
14% Fred Thompson
12% Ron Paul
9% Mike Huckabee
8% Mitt Romney
16% None of the above
8% Not sure
By Jim R. on 12-20-07
After the first three debates on National television, three mainstream news channels featured polls asking the American people who won. After the first debate on May 3rd, MSNBC ran a poll obtaining over 72,000 responses showing Ron Paul was the most convincing candidate receiving 45% of the vote. His nearest competitor was Mitt Romney who received 18%. Fox news ran its own poll after the second debates on May 15, and with over 40,000 votes Ron Paul came in second with 25% of the vote. Watching Sean Hannity’s face was priceless as while he was saying that Ron Paul’s chances were over in this election, Fox’s polling numbers flashed across the screen and had Ron Paul in the lead. He immediately did his best spin to claim the polls had been rigged. MSNBC also ran a poll about that debate and discovered Ron Paul was, again, the most convincing candidate with 64% of the over 25,000 responses. After the third debate on June 5, CNN’s poll of over 25,000 respondents showed Ron Paul won with 60% of the vote. VOTE RON PAUL!
By Howie on 12-20-07
Ron Paul and Elvis
Sam gives some great numbers. In Colorado it appears that Ron Paul has a favorable rating of 12%, probably with a statistical range of +/- 2% which means just over 1 in 10 Coloradians think Dr. Ron “feels their pain,“ so to speak.
This is about the same number of people who still believe that Elvis is alive.
Coincidence? I think not!
By riley on 12-20-07
here are reasons why i will not vote for ron paul: 1) he does not believe the federal govt should own any land other than a few national parks. he wants to liquidate federal land and hand it over to the states and let it be sold to private individuals. ( really rich individuals will be the only ones who could afford to buy big chunks of land out here). no federal land in montana - hmm, that will really change the quality of life here. 2) he thinks nuclear power is great, and every state should have their own nuke plant and multiple nuke waste sites - no thanks! 3) thinks taxes are completely illegal and the original tax law was improperly written which therefore makes taxation under it completely illegal. look, i don’t like taxes and i can’t really believe how much of my pay check goes to taxes - but to completely do away with taxes is completely ludicris (sp?). who will pay for the roads we drive on? or for the military???
i think ron paul is just another extreme nutcase - we can do better.
By Gman on 12-20-07
Howie, your posts are so cute… hee hee…
By SAM TO RILEY on 12-20-07
Riley,
Each of your issues raised can be addressed logically and with much more facts than you provided. I suggest you do a bit more research instead of spouting off what you are told through rumor and mass media. Lets start with taxes. Ron Paul understands taxes and the economy more so than any candidate running. He has studied the Austrian Theory of economics for over 30 years and his opinion is seconded by some of the most respected economists of today. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173 This documentary actually proves many of his tax theories correct. The military and Government make 99% of their money from corporate taxes, NOT YOURS and mine. The income tax (Proved unconstitutional 12 times in 12 courts) is gone as soon as they get it and does not completely cover even the interest on the US debt (Currently 9 trillion dollars.) Ron Paul is not against all taxes. Only the federal income tax which is the 25-30% taken out of your paycheck. Before 1913 how did the US government survive without the income tax? There are many ways the US government can do with less. Why not cut spending Riley? Are you aware the US spends over 50% of taxes recieved in all forms on the military? We have 700 bases all over the world and 40,000 troops in Korea. Why not close those bases, bring troops here and protect OUR borders and cut the military spending a little. Are you aware the US spends more on the military than the other top 3 military spending nations combined? Over 8% of our GNP goes to guns, tanks and missiles. Sorry that is ridiculous. Nuclear power is great actually. It is the cleanest form of energy around other than the waste. Ron Paul BLOCKED bills that would allow for the waste to be buried in wilderness and paid to be disposed of on national lands. HE PROTECTED THE WILDERNESS! Until we come up with something else, it is the only non-global warming, non-emissions way to light all the American homes bro!
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/016152.html
With the federal lands. Ron Paul is against the Federal Government controlling the states. His desire is that the states control the Federal government (as the forefathers layed out in the constitution). He wants the states to control their forests and wilderness areas. He does not propose anything further. Actually if you would read some of his issues, you would find out that HE OPPOSES government sponsored and subsidized logging on national lands! http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/environment/ Here are his environment stances. I encourage you to do more research before you back one of the pro-war candidates that will only waste your tax dollars and the lives of your countrymen. He is not nuts. He is an intelligent OB/GYN doctor that delivered 4,000 babies, studied economics and served this country as an Air Force Surgeon. He also served this country for 20 years in the Senate. So give him some respect. He has done a whole lot more than you probably have for this world and nation. So open your mind, read and learn a little.
By The REAL NUMBERS ARE IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on 12-20-07
The pollsters insist that polls conducted over the phone are the most scientific way of accurately assessing a candidate’s viability. This statement couldn’t be further from the truth. What it all boils down to in the end is votes. On Caucus and Primary day you cannot phone in your vote and for all the Ron Paul supporters you cannot click your vote either. You must show up in person and cast your ballot live.
The Ron Paul brigade has proven they can vote. Ron Paul wins every single internet poll as well as almost all cell phone text message polls after network debates.
The question media pundits are constantly asking regarding the huge internet voting and fund raising success of Ron Paul is can he translate his tremendous support into Caucus and Primary votes?
Well let’s take a look at what that means. To the media, polls are success. Polls determine who gets the most media coverage. Polls determine who gets endorsed by big names in both politics and from Hollywood.
The Ron Paul supporters have proven online votes and text message votes, but have they proven votes in person, where you actually have to leave your computer or couch and travel somewhere, listen to a bunch of stump speeches then wait in long lines to vote? The only test of that are straw polls. Straw polls are actually a rehearsal for Caucus and Primary day. They are held in almost every state and require a person to travel (sometimes hours away), sit through speeches and stand in lines to vote. Furthermore straw polls are also GOP fund raisers, so in order to vote you often have to pay about $35 to $55.
So now you’re getting to the question the media pundits are asking. The translation to actual votes!
There have already been close to 50 official straw polls throughout the country. There is a website that keeps track of these events and tallies the scores just like the Media and pollsters do. Now remember straw polls are the closest you can get to actual voting. There is no spammers clicking on 50 internet polls per day, there is no phone polling to the miniscule ruminant of the decimated Republican Party. These are real people taking the day off to go and support their candidate. So without further ado here are the results.
Source http://www.usastrawpolls.com
As you can see the candidate with the most number of Straw poll wins is Ron Paul. Also notice that the current break through front runner in the phone polls Mike Huckabee has won only 2 straw polls.
Candidate# Wins
Ron Paul 25
Fred Thompson 24
Mitt Romney 22
Rudy Giuliani 7
John McCain 5
Mike Huckabee 2
Duncan Hunter 2
Alan Keyes 0
Now here is the really shocking statistic of these real life votes. If you look at the total straw polls and average Ron Paul’s polling percentage the same way phone polls are averaged, the percentages of votes for Ron Paul is 33.02%.
Source http://www.ronpaul2008.com/straw-poll-results/
33.02% is the media pundits answer to their question of translation to actual votes.
So if you are were hesitant to throw your endorsement towards Ron Paul because of the Medias assessment of viability, your likely in a genuine position to justify Ron Paul as your candidate.
I say, welcome to the Ron Paul Revolution.
By Gman on 12-21-07
Sam, could you shoot me an email at ? I’d appreciate touching base with you given your knowledge of the Austrian School. Such people are not easy to find. I have a project that I’m working on that you might find interesting.
By riley - back atcha sam on 12-25-07
sam - why is it i am spouting off and apparently you are not, when, i like you have an opinion and post my thoughts about it here just like you have done - can’t you respect that my opinion is not the same as yours?
i was recenlty in las vegas. ron paul was a guest on an hour long radio program there. he spoke at length and in detail about how he would govern and where he stands on various issues. the topics i posted earlier here were ones he commented directly on, while on the radio for an hour. these words came from his mouth - to my ears. i formed an opinion about the man after listening to him on that program for an hour and visiting his webpage. on that program he said that he would liquidate federal land and either sell it off to private individuals or turn it over to the various states. he said that, and the other things i posted here. the program was the “state of nevada” it was broadcast on knpr about 2 weeks ago. unless they fabricated ron paul’s voice and faked the whole thing, it was his words that i heard, and his words that influenced how i feel about him.
apparently you love the guy and will follow him to the ends of the world. good for you, you have a purpose, we all get that after the miles and miles of stuff you have posted here. however, i - and many others do not feel the same way about this libretarian candidate who is running as a republican.
By Leslie on 02-10-09
Badly need your help. Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
I am from Kiribati and bad know English, please tell me right I wrote the following sentence: “Men’s health magazine money saving tips, good investment advice, and how to make money fast.“
Thanks for the help
, Leslie.