Ron Paul’s successes in the last month have gotten under the skin of the GOP. As their shenanigans to counter his success will undoubtedly gather steam in short order (they’ve already started), Ben Swann of Cincinnati’s Fox 19 Evening News exposed a few facts inconvenient to the GOP’s agenda of a Romney nomination.
Something awesome, this was comes.
For those of you who have a tendency to lean toward reality television or other pseudo-scripted drama, you want to start paying attention to the Republican Party process through the August convention in Tampa. Ron Paul had a very straightforward, open, declared and practical plan for the primary process and it’s paying dividends.
This letter was sent to the Maine state delegates and alternates this week.
When the pine beetles infested Colorado forests a few years back (they proceeded to decimate the forests and continue to do so), the pine trees responded to attacks by attempting to “bleed” out the parasites by pushing sap out as a natural defense. The eventual effect is the pine tree is dead, dry and standing tinder waiting to be knocked over by high winds or burnt to ashes by wildfire.
Rachel Maddow continues to be the only big time talking head willing to report the Paul campaign victories with veracity.
The Republican pine forests are becoming awful red.
Just for pure entertainment, this highly amusing clip of Shepherd Smith announcing Newt Gingrich’s campaign suspension.
Newt’s gone. This has easily surpassed the most attention I’ve ever given to a nomination process and it hasn’t disappointed for frustration with the media and voters. At times I’ve had to remind myself how insurmountable the odds have been against a Ron Paul nomination. I make no bones about it.
I sincerely believe if Paul emerged as the nominee in Tampa, the GOP would discretely support the sitting president rather than have an anti-statist, anti-interventionist, strict-constructionist like Ron Paul potentially influencing generations of voters to come with his message of peace, love, controlled spending, non-intervention and liberty.
So through all the crap scattered by the party fan hoping for anyone but Mitt, Dr. Paul has emerged still speaking to his message, still packing in the crowds of young voters eager to hear a message of true and dedicated change and still raising money. He’s not going anywhere and why should he? Because the same GOP and propaganda arm Fox News say he should?
This is a party that wholly abandoned their principles in 2001 and have drifted left at maximum warp ever since. They don’t want to admit it, cretins like Dick Morris scoff when Paul accurately labels him a statist. Sorry Dick, but when you advocated drug testing every high school student in America, you were advocating statism.
What do we have left? Two indistinguishable left-of-center Ivy League educated, well-connected, TBTF bank supported puppets bickering over who will command the military, appoint judges and ignore Constitutional restraints from 2013-2017. Wonderful. At least we can count on Mitt to pick a solid VP from the myriad smorgasbord of potential candidates right?
Wrong. Marco Rubio, another RINO, gave a speech that indicates what most of the awakened Americans already knew, the Republican Party is just as incompetent and horrible for the country as their Democrat counterparts.
He gave this speech yesterday at the Brookings Institute and by all rights he advocated the a foreign policy so interventionist it would make J. Edgar Hoover weep for joy. It makes George Orwell look like the architect for modern government, rather than an author who warned us.
Pay attention to the specific language Rubio used, “I always start by reminding people that what happens all over the world is our business,” he said. This is a potential candidate for VP suggesting the federal government of the US has a need, nevermind a right, to know what is going on all over the world. He specifically identified tiny hamlets in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen.
What?! It’s difficult to remain calm knowing these are the people making decisions that effect us all, but the American people began voting for the services politicians promised to provide with other people’s money when FDR came to power and that’s really all you need to know. We collectively have not shown any interest in voting for candidates who reflect sound moral conscience.
The parties encourage this behavior of course. In New York this week a county chairman for the GOP robocalled voters saying every candidate had dropped out except Mitt Romney. Dr. Paul is still in the race, still raising money and still racking up the delegates, so why would they lie?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, nothing circles the wagons of the status quo like a threat to their power. Sound money, non-intervention, the end of bailouts, massive and substantive spending cuts, the end of cronyism and a non-puppet president would be devastating to the corporations and banks who have had their hand in the puppets for the last several decades.
They would have to generate a profit using sound business principles instead of having the two party system legislate new moral hazards that remove the liability from failure. Ron Paul doesn’t want to put them out of business, but he certainly plans to put the lobbyists and special interests on long-term vacation. His veto pen would be kept warm from friction with this Ship of Fools in Congress.
Congratulations Dr. Paul, you outlasted every RINO but one and now they’re going to have to cheat to keep you from making one hell of a fine mess in Tampa. Cleanup on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Next up? Let’s see what happens in Texas. The backyard of Rick Perry, Shrub and Hedge is Paul’s neighborhood, but don’t expect the GOP to pay fair. The game plan is to toss the rule book and do whatever it takes to put the Goldman Sachs puppet up against … the other Goldman Sachs puppet.
Boy that Ivy League Goldman Sachs Puppet knows how to stir up a crowd of delusional liberals doesn’t he? In case you missed the stopover in Boulder, Colorado last night, the floundering president stopped in to speak to his adoring masses in the People’s Republic and made more promises with other people’s money.
Speaking to the growing concerns of college students from coast-to-coast that his generation may have accidentally-on-purpose duped them into thinking everyone was not only entitled to higher education, but shouldn’t have to borrow money in order to achieve it, the campaign promises flowed aplenty.
Far be it from to criticize such an accomplished individual as his Zeroship, but this man couldn’t balance a checkbook given a calculator and three days. He suggested (keep in mind Boulder is 30 square miles surrounded by reality) to the known liberal stronghold the Buffalo call home, that although times are tougher for this generation of students, the money they are obligated to pay on their student loans would be better used reviving the economy.
The reaction from the crowd of lemmings? Cheers. This couldn’t be a more clear example of exactly what’s wrong with this nation. The incumbent liberal president suggesting more free services from a government that’s so far in the red “massively overextended” would be an immeasurable improvement.
But he didn’t stop there, oh no, doing his best Max Pruss impersonation the president stated, “We cannot price the middle class out of getting an education,” he said. “Higher education shouldn’t be a luxury.”
These claims coming from a man who has never actually put his education to work in the fields in which he graduated would be laughable if they weren’t indicative of his total disconnect from the economic situation, history and what the modern liberal interpretation of Keynes’ theories have done to the country.
Not one to sit around on his laurels when there’s campaigning and new toys to play with, the wizard of no-math informed the crowd that a bound to be successful ploy to distract young voters from his utter failure to accomplish anything he promised just four years ago was launching as a White House pet project.
#DontDoubleMyRate is the hashtag they plan to use to raise awareness. It seems a number of young voters who voluntarily borrowed money for school no longer wish to pay that money back at the agreed-upon rates.
The president suggested the American people need to invest in building America for the long-term. Investing in, “things like — education,” the jester suggested. For America’s strongest financial growth, never mind the facts, definitely did not take place during a time when blue collar jobs were a strong path to the middle class.
We can’t afford to correct the real problems in this country, out of control spending, interventionist foreign policy, massive waste and fraud in federal spending, acting as a puppet for the banks, you know, business as usual; so we’re going to offer the young voters who want a free lunch a free lunch and the older voters who don’t want changes to Medicare and Social Security the status quo and we’ll just let the president elected in 2016 deal with it.
A rhetorical question, is it feasible that someone could be both eloquent and not particularly well-educated? Coming out of the Ivy League most people assume graduates to be rather intelligent. Have you ever read the First Lady’s thesis from Princeton? Here’s a digital version, here’s the scanned version.
Is this the quality of writing we are willing to accept from graduates of Ivy League universities when they purport themselves to be the best of the best?
It’s become fashionable in the media to accuse anyone critical of the president and First Lady of being racist. However, I absolutely could care less about anyone’s skin color when it comes to the destruction of the Republic of the US of A. I despised this president’s predecessor as well as his and they were as white as Larry Bird. As far as I’m concerned the Ivy League is to blame for the state of this nation as well as the military service academies.
But let us assume for a moment that the thesis of the First Lady can be used as an indicator for how well educated her husband is. When he says something like, “We’re here because someone somewhere made an investment in each other,” adding that he’s dedicated to investing in students and making sure they have the opportunities he did.
Is it not a valid assumption that perhaps he doesn’t actually know anything significant about how to run anything? What has he ever actually been responsible for? She was an absolute disaster on the national stage and I roll my eyes when I hear her name, but do you realize Caribou Barbie herself was governor of the largest state in the union?
That was more responsibility than the current president ever had in his life prior to beating Old Man River and his running mate the Exxon Valdez in 2008. An election to a position, I might add, he voluntarily pursued and has spent the majority of his administration blaming his predecessor for not making better before departing.
There exists a disconnect between the two parties and the rest of the country. The two parties know they only really care about staying in power and the rest of the country thinks the parties care about the effects of what they have to do to achieve that end. Mitt Romney isn’t a threat to the status quo. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are the status quo.
As he was giving his speech promising free higher education and happiness to the middle class, the below meme was posted on the Veterans for Ron Paul Facebook page. We have to learn the lessons of FDR and Jimmy Carter. Politicians cannot continue to use our own money against us people.
They cannot provide us with anything we cannot do ourselves. In fact, they are no different from most Americans with the exception of the fact most Americans don’t think they deserve to sit on the right hand of God. I don’t want a politician who promises the federal government will do more for me. It’s been around 236 years for crying out loud. Take a break! You’re doing it wrong!
Stop believing the hype kids. He has nothing to offer you but empty promises that lead to ruin. He is a shell of what he claims to be, you can do more for yourself with hard work and determination than any politician will do for you with someone else’s money.
(all quotes attributed to The Rocky Mountain Collegian’s Facebook page, viewed here)
Despite the media and Republican Party having declared Mitt Romney the GOP nominee for the 2012 presidential election, fewer than half of the states have actually chosen their delegates for the convention in Tampa in August.
However, the media has done not a middling job, not a mediocre job, but a horrendous job of reporting the nomination process for this year’s primary and caucus season. Several states have non-binding straw votes on the day of their caucuses, Ron Paul hasn’t yet won a primary or caucus vote though it bears mentioning, voter fraud is strongly suspected in Alaska, Maine and Nevada.
Despite this perceived lack of electability on behalf of the GOP and media, the Paul campaign has persisted on both their message of a clear delegate strategy and demonstrating they know what they’re talking about.
As I wrote in this post last week, Santorum’s supporters have teamed up with Dr. Paul’s and have adopted a “anyone but Mitt” mentality. Ostensibly this won’t include Newt, but what it has done is upset the Romney apple cart.
Witness the highly amused Rachel Maddow admitting Ron Paul has won Iowa.
Notice how dubious she seems that Iowa has selected their third caucus winner for 2012? Maddow is one of the few hosts known to give Paul adequate time to explain his nuanced views and she credits his consistency of message.
The compliment from the majority of talking heads (who have given him any opportunity to speak at length) is he makes you think and he’s never been accused of pandering to gain voters. His message is the same now as it was in the late ’70s but now his predictions have been proven accurate and his message is spreading thanks to the internet.
CNBC’s Squawk Box had Dr. Paul as a guest co-host this weekend and despite him not quite doing as well as I would have liked during the argument with Stephen Roach (the dollar has lost 96 percent of its purchasing power since 1913), they did give him a hell of a lot of air time and is worth the watch. He really did push the buttons of the co-hosts throughout the show.
We’re not willing to support one statist over another. Yes, we see the narcissism, if not the naked messianic complex, of the president and the damage he’s likely to do if reelected. However, we have utterly no reason to believe Mitt Romney, who is already bought and paid for by Goldman Sachs, will be any different.One of the more popular videos this past weekend prior to the Iowa news and the Squawk Box hosting was of Marine Major Christopher Miller declaring definitively the problems he sees with voting for Romney, from whom the Obama administration has taken much of their strategy, over Obama. These are the sentiments of virtually every Ron Paul supporter.
He’s got the support of the military and he’s got the most passionate and dedicated supporters of any candidate and he’s not going anywhere.
Today and as I write this, stoners, pot-heads, dopers, hippies and the like shall celebrate their support and involvement in pot culture by sparking up in public though many still in private.
Something this massive group of people who would support him just for this pragmatic stance on the drug war won’t think about is their presidential candidate. However, this year it’s no contest amongst the three Republicans nor even the lone Democrat for this personal liberty.
Ron Paul is an adamant critic of the costly and egregiously stupid War on Drugs. (or more appropriately the, “protecting the profit margins of major pharmaceutical and alcoholic beverage companies against less controlled substances they can’t profit from”-war.)
There cannot be a bigger freedom than doing what you want, with your own body as long as it doesn’t hurt or risk hurting other people. Beyond that foundation of his argument against the drug war, Paul also cites the fact if it’s going to be a law, it should be up to the states, but certainly not the federal government, because it’s not in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
He additionally calls for an end to the drug war purely because it isn’t working. It isn’t worth the cost to put money into the hands of criminal organizations untaxed by the same arm of government that’s trying to stop it from coming in. Cut the drug spending, stop filling the prisons, stop doing it in the name of “public good” when entire sections of major cities are known to be high-crime simply because you’ve funded these criminal organizations and their operations in areas with low-education, low-income families.
You’ve created this mess federal government. And part of the reason the Republicans are doing their best to sabotage any chance he has in the very state the last “D.C. outsider” Caribou Barbie was plucked from, is because at very high levels, those profitable drug companies are plugged directly into the two parties and have a powerful influence on our greedy, stupid and neutered politicians.
Palin, btw, is exactly what the Republicans want and Americans somehow convince themselves is a good person to run a country of 300 million. She’s not, she’s just not up for it folks. She’d have tanks in the streets in months.
I digress. For those of you inclined to spark one up today, or even those of you who support their right to, you want to look into Ron Paul. He’s the only one with the right solutions. Mitt Romney? He and Clown Zero are the chocolate and vanilla flavor of the same cookie.
You couldn’t tell these apart any better than you could a blind taste test of equestrian and bovine poop, and you shouldn’t and don’t have to, because there’s a perfectly delicious option on the plate this year if you can get your poop in a group longer than the four hours and twenty minutes your high will last today.
Ron Paul wants to end the war on drugs. Know what he thinks about our friend cannabis specifically? Less dangerous than alcohol. Right?! Like where’ve you been all my life?! Total brocrush on Doc. Ron Paul is the warning your parents should have fired to the status quo in the 60s and 70s. Ron Paul is the defender of the Constitution. Don’t vote for another Goldman Sachs/GM/Pfizer puppet.
Get registered Republican if there’s still time to for your primary or caucus and get in to be a delegate. You’re not bound in most states to the candidate who wins your straw poll but check with the Paul campaign staff in your state. Put your money behind the candidate you think is best for personal choices and protections at the federal level.
Dr. Paul’s first act in office would be to pardon everyone in prison for a non-violent, drug-related crime. Know what that’s going to do for spending? The economy with organized crime losing most of their profits overnight? You’ve also just made the price of marijuana about 1/10 what it is now, less actually. I was told an ounce goes for around $15 in Amsterdam just last night by a friend from Holland. How insane is that?!
Of course, naturally some states would ban everything again, (hello Utah! hello Bible Belt!), but most wouldn’t bother with weed unless it was to tax it, which is fair if the alcohol tax is fair, which it’s mostly state, so, yeah, maybe. At any rate. you know what to do. Enjoy the day, go get em Monday.
The current administration blames American gun stores and companies for the violence in Mexico between drug gangs. South and Central America want the U.S. to consider another direction on the drug war. Zero laughed in their faces and said it’s not happening. Ron Paul? He knows the Mexican drug cartels wouldn’t have any power if the federal drug laws didn’t exist. (Nevermind the role his administration played in many of those firearms making it to Mexico in Operation Fast & Furious)
The Colorado and Minnesota Republican conventions were held this weekend and despite the press having declared Mitt Romney the GOP nominee seemingly in early 2009, the events did not go as planned for the Republican Party.
Though it’s certainly impossible to tell with any degree of certainty how all of this is going to play out, one thing is for sure, Ron Paul’s campaign is organized, intelligent, informed and savvy. They obviously spent a great deal of time learning the rules and they have come to this game to play.
I fully expect the GOP to come out with guns blazing henceforth, the party’s power brokers are no more interested in a Paul presidency than the Yankees and Red Sox are in seeing a Royals/Diamondbacks World Series.
The most interesting effect of the conventions (Paul/Santorum delegates took 20 of 33 primary delegate slots including two slots on the rule making committee and the Delegation Chairman) was forcing the mainstream press (Old Media) to finally catch up to what many of those seeking accurate and timely information online (New Media) have known for quite some time, Romney hasn’t won anything substantive yet. The Examiner’s story is here and The Denver Post‘s piece here.
Far be it from me to suggest a conspiracy, but the Old Media continues to treat this like every other election, it’s not. This is different. The economy is still in the crapper, the president who promised to uphold the Constitution and civil liberties has become the most pro-war president of the last century and has authorized the assassination and indefinite detention of American citizens. In the meantime, many people have recognized the odorous emanations indicating something is rotten in D.C. and have begun seeking information in the New Media.
What have they found? Transcripts, interviews, speeches, writings, sound bites and a multitude of user-generated content showing Dr. Paul isn’t just a legitimate threat to Mitt Romney’s nomination, he is a direct threat to the establishment of crony capitalism, indefinite wars, Constitutional rights violations, interventionist foreign policies, etc. A number of very wealthy people who have become even more wealthy by buying the legislators and executives of the last several decades stand to lose a lot of future income with a Paul presidency.
I sincerely believe this is partially to blame for the media’s blackout treatment. Ron Paul’s coalition in Minnesota? Took nine of nine delegate seats. A sweep. The GOP rewrote the rules of the caucuses to ensure Mitt Romney wouldn’t lose the southern states for being Mormon. They created the system, Ron Paul is using their rules against them.
Observe the “unelectable” Ron Paul at Texas A&M:
You think Mitt Romney is going to have a crowd this size anywhere in the US? UCLA filled their tennis stadium to capacity and turned people away, Texas A&M? They haven’t had attendance like this for anything outside of Kyle Stadium in a very long time, I’m sure.
In the midst of introducing Dr. Paul, the student body president shared a story. When he won the election last spring, Dr. Paul’s granddaughter informed him he was going to get a call and he was going to want to answer it. Ron Paul was on the other end congratulating him for his win.
Would Newt, Rick or Mitt do anything like that? Clown Zero in D.C. wouldn’t do something like that without issuing a press release. Dr. Paul is exactly the type of president we have always needed. A tough, idealistically consistent everyman dedicated to enforcing his oath to “Support and defend the Constitution …” both during his time in the USAF and his time as a Congressman.
This isn’t over folks. And at the absolute worst, we’re going to fire a warning shot to the rotten two party monopoly. It started before the news of the conventions.
The support for Ron Paul’s non-interventionist foreign policy has two groups of ardent supporters. The uber-hippies of Code Pink and a growing number of pure badass warriors who have deployed to various parts of the globe and returned with multiple unknown questions in their minds.
I’m admittedly and proudly among them. Though the questions for me started in 2004, I didn’t actually start looking for real answers until my education in criminal justice began delving into the deeper issues of the Patriot Act in the years immediately following my return. I came to several conclusions with minimal influence coming from either the press or my professors with University of Phoenix.
First, the Patriot Act was a political coup by the Bush Administration. They capitalized on the fear the people felt in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and they framed the bill as both patriotic (the title) and necessary (with veiled threats of future attacks). What galled me in particular about the act was the repeal-in-effect of the 4th Amendment.
I didn’t know much about the Constitution at the time but I knew the importance of the 4th, 5th and 6th as I was at various levels working in law enforcement for the Air Force in Security Forces my entire career. If I’m trained to ensure I never violate a suspect’s 4th, 5th or 6th Amendment protections, they must be important.
Unlike others in law enforcement who were thrilled with the carte blanche the Patriot Act offered for warrantless wiretaps and the like, I recognized something very serious had just changed in our society. When I eventually stumbled upon multiple quotes by James Madison directly relevant to the Patriot Act.
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” The Patriot Act’s removal of 4th Amendment protections represented a definitive shift to tyranny and oppression as legal acts of government which the Supreme Court unbelievably upheld as Constitutional.
“It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” Though the danger of 9/11 obviously was real, the sole obstacle to preventing future attacks was an arcane law that prevented the FBI and CIA from communicating directly. The solution to future attacks would have only necessitated removing that law or altering it in a way that would have allowed the two biggest agencies of their respective purposes on the planet to share information they both had.
Instead, we get a draconian law interfering in protecting citizens from government intrusions and a monstrosity of a bureaucracy which has not only become leviathan in both total employee numbers and cost, but has yet to prove competent to prevent even a single attack from taking place.
“It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.”
I really don’t think I need to say much more about that gem. It was as if he and Jefferson alone understood the nature of men people in positions of political power. The Patriot Act and Obamacare the Affordable Healthcare Act in particular serve as reminders that the representatives we’ve elected to serve the best interests of the country are some combination of lazy, incompetent or corrupt.
I’ve had countless discussions with friends of both left and right persuasions, they tend to disagree with my views on corruption when it comes to their party and don’t seem to comprehend that when I say incompetent, I mean they don’t understand the law of unintended consequences. You do not get involved in wars unless you’re willing to bear the unintended fruits and poisons of those wars.
Dare I say the Bush Administration ignoring the generals who warned of the likelihood, nay unavoidable, long-term insurgency that was going to result from the invasion, demonstrated a total lack of concern for both the consequences of their actions and for the troops they were sending into harms way.
I can’t express how much it pleases me to see groups like Oathkeepers and Iraq (and Afghanistan) Veterans Against the War and others coming into focus as non-partisan groups of veterans who recognize at least some flaw in the foreign policy. Other groups such as the Combat Veterans for Ron Paul have a candidate in mind to at least provide an obstacle to future disasters in foreign policy.
This open letter to the president posted Friday, April 6 and represents many of the thoughts I’ve had myself. What I realized, because I have wondered on occasion if my affinity for Ron Paul is misguided, is that I was drawn to Ron Paul because I read his content and watched videos of his speeches. I support Ron Paul because as I dug deeper into the flaws of our federal government, I kept finding him staring back at me with logical and reasoned responses.
The establishment is pitted against him and the baby boomer generation of GOP voters participating in the primary caucus just doesn’t seem interested in seeing the flaws in our government, so they’re going with the same flawed plan that brought John McCain to the nomination in ’08, voting for who Republicans want to vote for rather than who the independent, unaffiliated and unregistered voters will choose.
And they are choosing poorly, don’t choose poorly, choose wisely.
The corporate media owned by mega-corporations and the mainstream “old media” (newspapers, radio, broadcast TV) have done a horrendous job of covering Ron Paul’s campaign. Just this week the loathsome Party Propaganda Machine Fox News rolled out this bovine fecal matter in their usual underhandedness ensuring “Fair and Balanced” remains a punchline to the informed.
Their claim is that Ron Paul’s campaign has “gone dark” and held only one campaign event so far this month. Note the date of April 4th with the weekend starting on the 1st. To see any of the cable news channels as legitimate informers is the height of lunacy. Not only has the mainstream press wholly abandoned accurate reporting for all of the candidates (Sen. Frothy & the Team Vatican pulls the majority of attention not already purchased by Gov. Robot & Team Temple), they’re now blatantly ignoring major stories.
This week Ron Paul held rallies at Chico St., UCLA and UC Berkeley. To say he rocked all three of these places would be a massive understatement. Paul drew over 6,000 to his rally at Chico St., 8,000 to his final rally at UC Berkeley and some estimates are placing his attendance at UCLA at over 10,000, check out the capacity crowd. Fire marshals wouldn’t let at least another 1,000 into the stadium and the trees in pictures are filled with attendees.
When Mitt Romney played to an empty Detroit Lions Football Stadium, the story gathered much coverage.
So what gives? The delegate count is completely unknown. The straw votes at the caucuses were non-binding and Paul still landed 2nd in the majority of the state party counts. His campaign’s strategy of having supporters get locked in as delegates is sneaky, and if the brokered convention becomes a reality in August, could pay massive dividends. I suspect a much higher number of delegates will shift to Dr. Paul if Romney fails to clinch.
Regardless, Ron Paul runs on the platform of threatening the status quo. He not only embraces this, he’s using it as a trampoline from which he flies into the air in front of the young disenfranchised former-party voters with both middle fingers extended to the corporate and banking owners of the government and politicians Occupy Wall St. finds so detestable.
A Ron Paul presidency would directly undermine the pocketbooks of most of the ultra-wealthy who control the cable media directly and in Rupert Murdoch’s case, some of the old media as well. This is why the open distaste for Paul is so nakedly obvious on Fox News. In a debate with Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Chris Wallace, Ron Paul would go off on the three of them like the ’92 Dream Team went off on the world in the Barcelona Olympics.
Which explains why this week, the same day the Texan broke records in California, Fox News slides out a sensationalist piece of flotsam designed to pull in the non-thinking voters they’ve come to depend on for revenue. It’s sad really, we have two parties of misinformation fighting for control of a government they don’t actually run directly regardless and the press charged with reporting the facts is nowhere to be seen.
Gerald Celente, head of the Trends Research Institute, predicted in 2010 that an “Internet Candidate” would emerge in 2012 to challenge the two party system. This is without a doubt, going to be Ron Paul as I foresee massive fraud taking place in Tampa in August. Make no mistake, the GOP would rather talk George Bush Sr. out of retirement to run for another term than have Ron Paul at the top of their ticket. The party and powers that be absolutely despise his anti-statist views.
What’s interesting is the GOP is in total denial about the general election trends of the last several decades. Presidential elections are never decided by the parties’ registered voters who pick the candidate in the primary process. Presidential elections are won by the candidate who motivates the unaffiliated, undecided and third party voters to vote for them. Comrade Zero motivated two groups with traditionally low voter turnout to show up on election day with racial minorities and young voters participating in record numbers and overwhelmingly in his favor.
He wasn’t nominated by either of those two groups.
Ron Paul is the best chance the Republican Party has of winning the November election and the Party power brokers recognize the nightmare for their chokehold on the power represented by Dr. Paul. Don’t look for the Old Media to start covering Paul’s campaign in any substantive or accurate way, nor should you look for cable news (other than Jon Stewart anyway) to show him any respect.
But come August, look to the Gulf side of Florida for fireworks. This fight is far from over and it may very well not be in the hands of the party when it’s all said and done.
Tuesday’s Our View in CSU’s The Rocky Mountain Collegian criticized Texas Congressman and GOP candidate for president Dr. Ron Paul. I want to say first and foremost, I welcome any and all factual and nuanced criticisms of the only candidate who isn’t bought and paid for by the banks.
The problem is, it’s virtually impossible for the media to criticize Dr. Paul the way they typically have candidates with whom they disagree or don’t like but they continue to attempt to use the same formula against Dr. Paul.
Instead of boiling down his foreign policy and economic policies to talking points that sound good in front of a debate audience or TV cameras, the Texas Congressman has developed nuanced, complicated and factually supported policies.
Like him or hate him, you cannot boil down his ideas to a few words or talking points.
In the Our View, which was strong on writing and opinion but wanting regarding explanation of complex ideas, the board said the following:
“He also believes that, rather than relying on government restrictions for environmental control, free enterprise is perfectly capable of regulating the environment. Call us crazy, but the BP oil spill pretty much proves how misguided this idea is.”
It takes research and effort beyond what the left or right press opine and report in order to recognize why this claim is completely absurd, but I assure you, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was anything but a failure of the free market.
The free market risks of drilling in areas such as the Deepwater Horizon location were too great for the oil companies to risk due to the liability of oil spills until the lobbies got their claws into Congress after the Exxon-Valdez spill.
My friend, former editor and CSU graduate Ian Bezek covered this very issue in this Collegian column in July 2010. Not only did he adequately explain the market forces at hand that directly contributed to the oil spill, but he did an excellent job demonstrating exactly why Ron Paul is such an asset and is not a kook.
The oil interests, corporations and banks do not WANT the free market Dr. Paul supports. It would kill their golden goose and they would have to rely on effective business strategy and tactics in order to survive and profit.
God forbid.
Our View then made a couple of contextual one-line criticisms of Ron Paul’s philosophies without getting into the nuance. Watch the following video from The Whitest Kids You Know, at the 1:00 minute mark you’ll see exactly the type of tactic that was used in this opinion piece.
“And while Paul claims to be a stringent libertarian, he nevertheless advocates banning abortion and is quoted as saying that gay marriage is absurd.”
Paul doesn’t claim to be a stringent libertarian, he is the embodiment of libertarian ideals. As an OB/GYN he was told very early in his training, when you take over the care of a pregnant woman, you’re responsible for two lives, as a libertarian, he views protection of life as the ultimate responsibility of government.
However, he has stated he does not agree with Congress writing laws governing abortion either way, so he’s advocated the states handle the issue individually. While at the same time he’s introduced a potential Constitutional amendment that would protect fertilized fetuses.
Unlike Sen. Frothy, Rick Santorum’s pro-life policy of keeping us from descending into anarchy for violating God’s will, Ron Paul’s pro-life stance is based on the pragmatisim of protecting existing life.
This wasn’t conveyed in the Our View and it is a significantly complex issue to deserve discussion of the facts, not a butchered attempt at glib criticism in the form of an easily-digested-yet-misleading one-liner.
As far as Dr. Paul stating gay marriage is absurd, try again folks. He’s been consistent and adamant in his view that marriage is not a government issue.
It’s a relationship declaration formed within a religion. If you run a search in Google using “Ron Paul gay marriage is absurd” as the key terms (not with the quotes) the first result to come up is the Our View in question and the rest of the search results don’t exactly support the claim.
What Dr. Paul has repeatedly advocated for those who are concerned on both sides of the issue is to leave it in the hands of the states to decide as the Constitution (Paul is a strict constructionist, meaning if the powers aren’t stated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution he won’t support it), doesn’t allow Congress to determine personal relationship statuses.
Judge for yourself if that Our View adequately explained Dr. Paul’s stance:
In case that’s not enough evidence of the ludicrous idea Congressman Paul is somehow against gay marriage, further proof of his stance against federal incursion into the arena of marriage is here.
“If elected, Paul promises to eliminate the Federal Reserve, cede most federal power to the states (that would include repealing numerous important federal mandates, including the ones that prohibit segregation in schools) and return to a gold standard.”
Those on both left and right have attempted to frame the subjects of states rights as a descent into total chaos. How it is anyone with any education in modern government can convince themselves that federal laws prohibiting segregation of schools are still necessary is truly beyond my grasp. As if Alabama has the money to build new schools for white students or vice versa.
To claim Dr. Paul advocates simple policies without getting into the subtleties of his positions is disingenuous at best and intentionally misleading at worst. Either way, we’ve seen far too much of it in the mainstream media specifically regarding an honest man who has had the tremendous courage to stand up for what he advocates in the face of tremendous pressure and ridicule.
Who amongst us in the American society would demonstrate the will power Dr. Paul has shown for thirty years in the face of such tremendous political pressure?
The senator from Illinois who now sits in the White House has chastised the monied interests in politics while taking significant contributions from Goldman Sachs and refusing to hold anyone complicit in the financial collapse responsible. This is a man who promised transparency and has carried out the same secret activities as his predecessor.
Ron Paul meanders into town and surprise, surprise, we have two columns critical of excerpts taken out of context from a Congressional member who has seen thru the facade of continuing the cycle of talking point politics.
Last night witnessed half of a soccer game in the BCS National Championship Game featuring a rematch of SEC rivals LSU and Alabama. Earlier in the year LSU beat Alabama 9-6 in overtime, providing the only loss for either team in the regular season.
While I watched the GOP primary season and the college football bowl seasons running parallel for the last month, I realized how perfectly the BCS has encapsulated everything that is wrong with politics in America.
The BCS came to be after a number of bowl seasons ended with ties in the voting for national champions. Obviously there has to be a winner in anything this lucrative, so the wealthiest conferences in college football got together, decided they best represented the best in the land for college football, and designed the BCS.
Part of the BCS is what they designated AQs or Automatic Qualifiers, wherein the highest ranked football team from each of the six conferences (and Notre Dame) involved in designing the BCS would receive automatic bids to one of the four BCS bowl games with the top two teams according to the BCS formula were guaranteed to play for the championship.
At the time, not much was thought of the eventual consequences of such a protectionist racket, until Urban Meyer’s University of Utah Utes crashed the BCS in 2004. They went undefeated in their non-BCS conference but beat some very talented Mountain West teams along the way.
Their reward? Drubbing the Big East AQ U of Pittsburgh 35-7. The Big East, btw, is the softest of the AQ conferences.
A year later Boise St. wrecked the party and defeated Oklahoma in one of the most exciting BCS games ever.
At any rate, this year Oklahoma St. won the Big-12, had one loss, on the road, in double OT, the same day several members of the university athletic staff were killed in a plane crash during a recruiting trip.
They were the clear #3 team according to the BCS rankings. LSU & Alabama had already played once in what many people considered a boring game. Why would a championship system rematch two teams from the same division of the same conference when only one of them won their conference?
And this is very nearly the position Ron Paul finds himself in right now. Despite a very strong finish of third in the Iowa caucus, despite polling solidly in the top three candidates for the GOP consistently and in the top two frequently, the media continues to tell the public he’s unelectable, he can’t win.
They’re wrong. Americans love the underdog story. As movies, Seabiscuit was reviewed much better than Secretariat; but as race horses, Seabiscuit couldn’t have caught Secretariat unless Big Red was asleep, but Seabiscuit was an underdog and won his races against “better” horses despite being considered inferior.
Make no mistake, this is no horse race, this is the nasty, ugly and unrepentant world of politics. A place where a man with a record as detestable as Newt Gingrich is considered a man of his word. Only when you assume the opposite of whatever emerges from his largest cranial cavity can you trust the contemptible, loathsome creature that is Gingrich. The man lies with the same comfort as he breathes.
Mitt Romney is a puppet of Goldman Sachs, his largest contributor, he’s nearly the consistency of pudding when it comes to the issues most voters use as a litmus test. The problem? None of those issues are relevant for this election.
The ’08 election was a foreign policy election that broke late into an election on the economy. Despite having utterly no economic knowledge whatsoever, Chairman Zero was fortunate to be paired with Stupid opposite his name on the ballot. Old Man river was leading the polls until he started speaking about the economy, at which point the wheels fell off.
Enter Ron Paul. No candidate in either party has demonstrated the foresight of Dr. Paul in either the economy or foreign policy, the two most important areas of this election. But he represents a clear and unmitigated threat to the status quo of bankers, corporation owners and Wall St. As such, they have given their orders to the media stations they own to keep him from winning.
They’ve used spin, lies and fabrication. They’ve ignored him whenever possible and yet, through the largest form of media, user generated, he’s defying their wishes.
Stunning isn’t it? You won’t see that type of record from Gingrich or Romney, but you’ll certainly see the doctrine of hatred consistently from Santorum. Who is a blight on the human race.
I feel for you Oklahoma St. But at least you got a better shake in the media than Ron Paul.
Opposing the Status Quo 