四 川 铁 FourRiverIron

A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for Freedom

  Normally I would never recommend that anyone vote for a Republican or a Democrat. In modern times there pretty much isn't a dimes difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. They both want to steal your wallet and enslave you by micromanaging your life.

The exception is Ron Paul. While most politicians will lie and say anything to get you to vote for them Ron Paul consistently talks the way he votes. Which is why he has gotten the nickname of "Dr No." in Congress.

Ron Paul votes "No" on everything he considers unconstitutional.

Ron Paul wants to legalize not just marijuana, but ALL drugs.

Ron Paul wants to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and bring the troops home from all the 130+ countries they are stationed in.

So Ron Paul is the ONLY Republican or Democrat I would ever recommend that you vote for.

In today's world your only hope for freedom is to vote Libertarian. And I will say that despite the fact that I was "f*cked over royally by the Arizona Libertarian Party".

The idiots in the Arizona Libertarian Party that f*cked me over are hypocrites that don't practice what they preach much less practice the values of the Libertarian Party which they pretend to believe in.

In my case I discovered that these *ssholes who claim to be Libertarians were spreading lies about me saying that I was a government snitch.

About 10 years ago Ernie Hancock told me that David Dorn was spreading these lies about me.

I suspect that Ernie Hancock is another person that has been spreading these lies around about me. But I don't have any proof.

In the past year I also discovered that Powell Gammill was another of these people spreading lies about me.

Up until I talked to Powell Gammill I didn't even know what the lies were. From Powell Gammill I found out one of the lies these hypocrites are telling people about me is that I worked for the Attorney Generals office. I still don't know any of the other lies.

So here are some articles about Ron Paul and his run for President.


Ron Paul wins Values Voters straw poll

Source

Ron Paul wins Values Voters straw poll, Cain in 2nd

Oct. 8, 2011 02:18 PM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Rep. Ron Paul of Texas is the top presidential pick of the thousands of social conservatives who are meeting this weekend, winning 37 percent in a non-binding straw poll.

Georgia businessman Herman Cain came in second at the Values Voters Summit in Washington with 23 percent and former Sen. Rick Santorum placed third with 16 percent in Saturday's straw poll among the Republicans' White House contenders.

Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas tied with 8 percent.

Paul, making his second run at the GOP nomination, regularly fares well in such straw polls because his fervent supporters flock to the events to give him wins. Yet Paul trails other better known candidates such as Perry and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in traditional polls.


A nice editorial on Ron Paul in the New York times

Remember Ron Paul wants to end all the American wars in addition to legalizing drugs!

Source

Op-Ed Columnist

O.K., Now Ron Paul

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: November 25, 2011

Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, now seems to have an outside chance of winning the Iowa caucus vote. Not the presidential nomination. It seems highly unlikely that the Republicans are going to give the nod to a guy who disapproves of the Patriot Act and marriage licenses.

But, still, he’s definitely having a moment.

And, therefore, I feel obliged to add him to our survey of presidential candidate book reports.

Just say a prayer Rick Santorum doesn’t take off next.

Paul has written a ton of stuff, most of it on his economic theories. His big best seller is “End the Fed,” and, if you are interested in abolishing the Federal Reserve, I would really suggest reading it. However, the Fed is not going to be ended. People are not going to be given the power to mint their own money, as Paul also suggests. But, really, if this is what floats your boat, read away.

“Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom” has more variety. It’s full of essays, mostly about things Paul disapproves of, from abortion to Zionism.

It’s quite a list. Paul says he believes that the federal government (“the wealth-extracting leviathan state”) shouldn’t be doing anything that’s not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, which once caused him to vote against giving a Congressional medal to Mother Teresa.

He doesn’t really believe in global warming, but, even if he did, he doesn’t think government is smart enough to be able to do anything about it.

He also doesn’t believe in, well, let’s see: gun control, the death penalty, the C.I.A., the Civil Rights Act, prosecuting flag-burners, hate crime legislation, foreign aid, the military draft under any circumstances, campaign finance reform, the war on drugs, the war on terror and the war on porn. Also the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. Taxes are theft. While his fellow Republican candidates fume about gay marriage, Paul thinks the government should get out of the business of issuing marriage licenses entirely. (“In a free society, something that we do not truly enjoy, all voluntary and consensual agreements would be recognized.”)

Paul is the only person running for president in either party who seems determined to be consistent, come hell or high water. The only time I ever saw him dodge a question was when somebody asked him if he preferred letting people die in a ditch to government-financed health care. But, even then, you could tell that he really did prefer the ditch.

Paul can get kind of swoony when he’s talking about the rock stars of the Austrian school of economics, but he’s not much for personal autobiography. He has a few stories about his childhood in “End the Fed,” but they mainly involve the way his stamp and coin collections helped him to understand the concept of currency inflation.

When six of the Republican presidential candidates got together recently for a Family Forum in Iowa in order to woo the social right, they were invited to tell personal stories of their own moments of despair and doubt.

Herman Cain broke down while discussing a bout with cancer. Rick Perry said that Jesus had filled a hole in his soul. Santorum told a moving story about his seriously ill baby daughter, which he then somehow connected to the evils of Obamacare. Paul seemed at a loss, but then he finally offered that when he was in high school he really wanted to be a track star but it didn’t work out.

Basically, Paul seems to want to revert to the 18th century, when every bank could set its own monetary policy and every community ran its own schools — presuming, of course, the community wanted to pay for them.

“The founders of this country were well educated, mostly by being home-schooled or taught in schools associated with a church,” he reasons. Those of us who were not born in the gentry could presumably go back to sowing and reaping hay.

Naturally, a man with such a wide range of pet peeves is going to make waves in his own party.

“Chicken-hawks are individuals who dodged the draft when their numbers came up but who later became champions of senseless and undeclared wars when they were influencing foreign policy,” Paul writes in his chapter on conscription. “Former Vice President Cheney is the best example of this disgraceful behavior.”

Really, you can’t totally dislike the guy.

Charles M. Blow is off today.


Ron Paul: The Alternative Candidate is a force to be reckoned with

Source

Ron Paul: The Alternative Candidate is a force to be reckoned with

By Joel Achenbach, Published: December 14

Ron Paul rides in the back of a campaign van that’s rolling toward the New Hampshire seacoast for a town hall meeting. He’s fastidious in a dark-blue suit. He’s not the standard presidential candidate — he lacks the factory-built appearance of Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. He’s thin, bony, a bantam rooster. He’s 76 — the only one in the race who was born during the Great Depression.

He doesn’t wear his seat belt. “I never have,” he says, and doesn’t explain whether it’s a matter of back-seat comfort or a deep, philosophical aversion to nanny-state meddling in our lives.

There are a lot of things he doesn’t do, such as make small talk, or touch the tray of cookies at his feet, or doff his suit jacket and try to relax. What he’s eager to do is talk about ideas. The Texas congressman doesn’t have “positions” on “issues.” He has a philosophy.

The one big idea: Government tramples liberty. He’s by far the most radically anti-government candidate in the running. He’d boil the federal government down to a few, skeletal functions. He’d end the welfare state, cut every dime of foreign aid, halt overseas military action and bring home all the troops. He’d return to the gold standard and abolish the Federal Reserve.

Paul opposes not only recent government shenanigans but also stuff that happened 50 or 70 or 90 years ago, such as the creation of Medicare (1965), Social Security (1935) and the federal income tax (1913). He’s against national banks, the first of which was the handiwork of Alexander Hamilton in 1791. You have to crank the time machine into the red zone to get back to where Paul is completely comfortable.

He’s also a force to be reckoned with in this presidential cycle. He has passionate followers from across the political spectrum, a good organization, a distinct libertarian message and plenty of money. He could be a game-changer if he decides to run as a third-party candidate.

No one has ever accused Ron Paul of being a flip-flopper. He has been saying the same things for 35 years. Now world events have conspired to make him look increasingly on point.

He has warned for decades about financial meltdowns and the unchecked power of central bankers, and on this very day, as he’s heading to the seacoast, the Fed has teamed with central bankers overseas to infuse massive amounts of money into the world banking system. It’s an effort to keep Europe’s debt crisis from bringing down the global economy. The stock market is ecstatic. The Dow Jones industrial average has risen 400 points in a single day. Paul is disgusted.

“They’re the professional lenders of last resort, which means they’re the professional counterfeiters,” he says of the Fed. “They’re going to end up buying bad debt. . . . It’s going to end up prolonging the agony, and things are going to get a lot worse.”

Paul is the Alternative Candidate, someone who subscribes to an alternative history of the world. Paul believes that powerful and secretive forces (the Fed being the best example) have manipulated human events and bankrolled wars. He fears that the nation is turning into an Orwellian police state. (“Sometimes it seems as if we are living in a dystopian novel like ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World,’ ” he writes in his most recent book.)

He points out that, even as the Fed is taking this ominous action, the Senate is pushing through a defense bill that he argues would erode American civil liberties. He’s a stalwart opponent of the USA Patriot Act and regularly condemns post-Sept. 11 security measures, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“As conditions get worse, you know, they’ll blow up the fears, both economic and the threat of terrorism, so that you can have martial law,” he says.

Martial law? Really?

Sure, he says. “It’ll be an exaggeration of what happened in World War II when they rounded up the Japanese and put them in concentration camps,” he predicts. “Now it’s going to be anybody who speaks out against the government.”

Ron Paul flirts with apocalyptic thinking and opposes many of the political structures of modern America, and yet he has had a life that could be described as the American Dream. From modest ­beginnings he became a highly successful obstetrician/gynecologist, delivered about 4,000 babies, became the patriarch of a sprawling family and was elected to Congress 12 times.

“The American Dream” is the term his wife, Carol, uses to describe their life in the “Ron Paul Family Cookbook.” Not many dystopians have cookbooks, but Paul is one who does. It’s folksy, chatty, filled with pictures of the kids (five) and grandkids (18) and great-grandkids (five).

Carol Paul writes, “Ron and I both understand the dangers America faces and that spurs us both on to do the best job we can for our family, friends and country.” In the very next sentence, she switches to family news: “We have added one more sweet great-grandchild.”

The Pauls live in Lake Jackson, Tex., south of Houston. They sat 30 for their Thanksgiving dinner this year. Nothing fancy, just paper plates and paper cups.

Ron Paul loves to garden. Turn your back, and he’s re-potting a plant. So he’s writing a book called “The Revolution: A Manifesto” one day and dividing bulbs the next.

His favorite movie is “The Sound of Music.”

“He’s ready to make a monstrous change in the world and yet he’s such a down-to-earth person,” says his close friend and fellow doctor Rick Hardoin, a Lake Jackson pediatrician who cared for many of the children in the Paul clan. “Doesn’t sit there and pat himself on the back. He’s a humble person. There’s no pride, none of this ‘I’m so great.’ ”

Another Paul hobby is riding his bike. He doesn’t do so after dark, he says — he’s not crazy.

But no, Hardoin says, Paul never wears a helmet.

Paul is in many ways a throwback. He’s a product of the Depression and World War II. His eldest son, Ronnie, says his father believes in fundamentals such as hard work, earning your way, being thrifty.

“There’s no free lunch,” the son says. “You have to earn it. No one gives you anything.”

Ronald Ernest Paul was born in 1935 in Green Tree, Pa., near Pittsburgh and was raised on a five-acre farm. His was a family of scrimpers and savers — “rather poor,” he said in a debate the other night. But he added: “I didn’t even know it.”

The kids helped out in the family’s dairy business. They had to inspect the glass bottles to make sure they were clean. If they found a bottle that was dirty, they’d get a penny.

He tells this story in his book “End the Fed.” Ron was the middle of five boys and the only one to become fascinated with numismatics. He knew that certain pennies were worth more than their face value because few of them had been minted. He bought a jar of 986 pennies from his father for $20, knowing that a rare 1909 penny was inside. He says he still has those pennies.

He bemoans the decline of the dollar and blames the printing of money “out of thin air.” At a committee hearing in 2008, he said that what a penny could buy in 1909 now costs 47 cents. As a boy of about 8, he says, he asked his older brother Bill why the government couldn’t simply print more money to pay for the war effort. His brother said, “If they did that, the money wouldn’t be worth anything.” Paul, telling this story in the campaign van, adds: “If the two of us could figure it out then, why don’t governments figure it out?”

“End the Fed” discusses his grandparents, one of them born in Germany, another a first-generation German American who visited Germany in the 1920s and saw the disaster of the Weimar Republic’s runaway inflation. His grandmother, he writes, was reluctant to sell a piece of property; she wanted to hang on to it “in case the money goes bad.”

This idea — that the money can go bad — has scriptural echoes. Paul, who was raised a Lutheran and now attends a Baptist church, quotes Genesis 47:15 in the book: “So when the money failed in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, ‘Give us bread, for why should we die in your presence? For the money has failed.’ ”

As a boy, he didn’t think about these things, nor did he ponder them much as an undergraduate at Gettysburg College, but by the time he was in medical school at Duke he “started having a curious mind about what made the world tick economically.” He read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.” He was captivated by the Austrian economics school of thought promulgated by Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and others. The Austrian school preaches free-market absolutism.

“I didn’t go fishing,” he says. “I’d rather think about these things and read about them.”

Austrian economics continues to occupy a modest niche in the academic world. There’s a cluster of economists at George Mason University who subscribe to those views. Another center for Austrian economics is in Auburn, Ala., at the Von Mises Institute.

The chairman of the institute is Lew Rockwell, who worked for Paul in his congressional office in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Rockwell is best known for his blog, LewRockwell.com, a libertarian watering hole where revisionist history comes mixed with conspiracy theories. (Multiple posts in recent weeks have touched on the JFK assassination and FDR’s alleged foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.) Paul has written that he visits LewRockwell.com every day.

His belief system has a whiff of the plot of “The Matrix”: The world we think we see is not the world as it really is.

The country may seem more affluent than it was during his youth, but he sees this as a temporary state. The nation, he says, is “bankrupt.”

“The idea that we’re a lot better off materially, that is true, but it is an illusion,” he says. “Because it’s all on borrowed money.”

He blames the economists who follow the teachings of John Maynard Keynes: “Seventy years of Keynesian economics have taught us to live like drug addicts.”

Does he ever doubt that he’s right about all this?

“No, but I try to instill that doubt in [Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke’s mind all the time. I tell him, ‘What if you’re wrong? You just spent 40 years writing all this stuff, and you’re wrong!’ ”

There aren’t many places on the planet that have adhered to Austrian economics. Paul says it has been tried to some extent in Switzerland and Hong Kong. And also Byzantium.

“If you go back to the Byzant, the Byzantine Empire, I think they had like a thousand years that they just used gold coins,” he says. “The Roman empire was stable for a long time, and then they fought too many foreign wars, and they inflated by diluting the metals and clipping coins. They went off sound money.”

The event on the seacoast turns out to be an excellent one, about 200 people filling a generic meeting room in an upscale hotel in downtown Portsmouth. The Paul campaign prefers relatively intimate gatherings. The challenge is finding a way to keep attendance down.

Such is the quirky nature of Paul’s candidacy. His faithful will drive hundreds of miles. They’ll show up wearing their “End the Fed” T-shirts and already knowing exactly what he thinks. But what Paul really needs are the undecided voters. Campaign staffers use direct mail to reach the undecideds and avoid hyping events on the Internet.

The congressman has come a long way from his days as a lonely voice on the fringe of the Republican Party.

“I watched him give speeches to five people and 10 people for many, many years,” his son Ronnie says.

Asked whether he’ll run as a third-party candidate in the fall, Paul said no, then added: “No intention of doing that.” He has run before, in 1988, as the Libertarian Party nominee, and finished a very distant third. Four years ago, he didn’t make a rogue bid for the presidency, but his situation is different this time, because he’s retiring from Congress and wouldn’t have to worry that party leaders would punish him for his apostasy.

His calculations may take into account the long-term interests of his son Rand, now a GOP senator from Kentucky, who is poised to represent the Paul brand in the Republican Party for another generation. If Paul made a third-party run in the fall, his support probably would come primarily at the expense of the Republican nominee.

But these are political calculations, and Paul is not someone who is terribly politic. He’s not a dealmaker and is not interested in forging bipartisan compromises.

When someone in Portsmouth asked him what he’d do to overcome the partisan divide in Congress, he said the gridlock was a blessing. It’s when the Democrats and the Republicans agree on things that he becomes most worried, he said. In his view, the moderates are the most dangerous people in Washington.

Paul has been rooted in place, philosophically. The world of late has been bending his direction. He’s not to be underestimated. He says what he believes, believes what he says.

There is no Ron Paul 2.0. This is the original.


Will Ron Paul kill the caucuses?

I suspect the real reason Republican insiders don't want Ron Paul to run for President is because he does not want to continue with government as usual.

Source

Will Ron Paul kill the caucuses?

by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns - Dec. 20, 2011 02:45 PM

POLITICO.COM

SIOUX CITY, IOWA -The alarms are sounding in Iowa.

Conservatives and Republican elites in the state are divided over who to support for the GOP nomination, but they almost uniformly express concern over the prospect that Ron Paul and his army of activist supporters may capture the state's 2012 nominating contest -- an outcome many fear would do irreparable harm to the future role of the first-in-the-nation caucuses.

In spin rooms, bar rooms and online forums, the what-to-do-about-Paul conversation has become pervasive as polls show him at or near the top here just weeks before the January 3rd vote.

Paul poses an existential threat to the state's cherished kick-off status, say these Republicans, because he has little chance to win the GOP nomination and would offer the best evidence yet that the caucuses reward candidates who are unrepresentative of the broader party.

"It would make the caucuses mostly irrelevant if not entirely irrelevant," said Becky Beach, a longtime Iowa Republican who helped Presidents Bush 41 and Bush 43 here. "It would have a very damaging effect because I don't think he could be elected president and both Iowa and national Republicans wouldn't think he represents the will of voters."

What especially worries Iowa Republican regulars is the possibility that Paul could win here on January 3rd with the help of Democrats and independents who change their registration to support the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman but then don't support the GOP nominee next November.

"I don't think any candidate perverting the process in that fashion helps [the caucuses] in any way," said Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, adding that he didn't know if that's necessarily how Paul would win.

While there's no evidence of an organized effort, public polling shows that Paul's lead is built in large part with the support of non-Republicans - and few party veterans think such voters would stick with the GOP in November.

"They'll all go back and vote for Obama," predicted Beach.

The most troubling eventuality that Iowa Republicans are bracing for is that Paul wins the caucuses only to lose the nomination and run as a third-party candidate in November -- all but ensuring President Obama is re-elected.

"If we empower somebody who turns around and elects Obama, then that's a major problem for the caucuses," said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa).

Leading Republicans, looking to put the best possible frame on a Paul victory, are already testing out a message for what they'll say if the 76-year-old Texas congressman is triumphant.

The short version: Ignore him.

"People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third," said Gov. Terry Branstad. "If [Mitt] Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and the other states."

The Paul rise comes at a moment when many Iowa GOP elites are already angst-ridden about their beloved quadrennial franchise. The fretting began four years ago when long-shot Mike Huckabee cruised to an easy caucus win, only to lose the nomination to John McCain, who finished fourth in Iowa after ignoring the state for much of 2007.

The concern has only grown in this election cycle. Romney has kept the state at arms-length for much of this year; Michele Bachmann won the Ames Straw Poll only to quickly recede to single-digits in state and national polls, raising questions about the future relevance of what is a fundraising bonanza for the state party.

Further, the decline in the number of candidate events here -- and the prominent role debates and cable TV have played in this year's election -- have sparked difficult questions about whether Iowa's retail-heavy traditions are a thing of the past.

Paul officials note that they've embraced the Iowa way. And even establishment Republicans like Branstad concede that the congressman has done it "the old-fashioned way" and enjoys the best organization of any of the candidates.

"Dr. Paul is hands down the most authentic, principled candidate in the race, and we have run the best, most comprehensive campaign," said Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton. "Iowans will help further cement their national status by choosing Dr. Paul and proving that sincerity, seriousness, consistency and hard grassroots campaigning wins in Iowa, not glitzy, media-anointed, establishment front-runners."

But many Iowa Republicans, convinced that Paul's views are well out of the party mainstream, believe that rewarding such an effort in the short-term would risk the very process itself in elections to come.

"My biggest fear is that the Republican Party nationally and a lot of states that want to be number one [in the nominating process] will simply point to his winning and say, 'Iowa's irrelevant," said Andy Cable, GOP co-chair in Hardin County.

Jeff Lamberti, a Des Moines attorney and former Iowa Senate President, emphasized what he said was the difference between the 2008 and 2012 dark horses.

"Everybody has the perception that there's absolutely no way [Paul] can win the nomination, whereas a Mike Huckabee coming out of nowhere at the end to pull out a victory here - he was a serious contender," said Lamberti. "That's the distinction that has the potential to do real damage to Iowa."

With his left-of-Obama foreign policy views, libertarian outlook on social issues and paper trail of controversial statements, a Paul victory could represent a potentially devastating blow to the tradition of Republicans starting their White House campaigns in Iowa.

"Mortal," said Doug Gross, a leading Republican lawyer and Branstad adviser, when asked how severe the wound of a Paul win would be.

"I think a Paul win would be devastating for the state of Iowa and the caucus process," added Sam Clovis, an influential talk radio host in Northwest Iowa who endorsed Rick Santorum Monday.

Clovis and other Republicans expressed hope that Paul's debate performance last week would wake up traditional activists, who've seen his conservative TV ads and aren't aware of how far the libertarian is from the party base on some core issues. Paul's isolationist foreign policy views came to the fore at the Sioux City forum.

"What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, 'What do you think about Dr. Paul?'" said Cable. "These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30 and 60 second ads. If you ask Iowans if they're for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they'd say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that's ok. But people don't all know that."

So far, Paul has been largely ignored by his Republican rivals. But as he increasingly appears to be a serious contender here two weeks out, that's changing.

Rick Perry is now hitting his fellow Texan over earmarks and Bachmann and Newt Gingrich have begun targeting his foreign policy views. And their in-state surrogates have begun testing another line of attack -- that Paul and his backers have "hijacked" the caucuses.

"To see the process hijacked would be a concern for those who consider the honor we have of being first in the nation," said conservative activist Tamara Scott, a Bachmann state co-chair.

The Arizona Republic is a member of the Politico Network.


Ron Paul’s plans for taxes, spending and Social Security

It's really nice to see Ron Paul getting some publicity.

While Ron Paul's plans are not 100 percent Libertarian I would support him over any of the other government bureaucrats running for President.

Last but not least while the other candidates routinely shovel the BS on how they will reduce government, they never do it when they get into office. Ron Paul on the other hand as a proven track record of voting against government spending. That's why he is called Dr. No, which is based on his voting record as a Congressman.

This article doesn't mention it but Ron Paul also wants to end the insane and unconstitutional "war on drugs" and legalize all drugs.

Source

Paulonomics: Ron Paul’s plans for taxes, spending and Social Security

By Zachary Roth

Senior National Affairs Reporter

By Zachary Roth | The Ticket

If you know anything about Ron Paul's economic views, it's probably that he's not a big fan of the Federal Reserve system, or that he loves the gold standard. But those are hardly the only noteworthy planks in his platform. The Republican congressman from Texas, who now looks to have a real chance of winning the Iowa caucuses in less than two weeks, also wants to abolish five Cabinet departments, drastically lower corporate taxes, and allow younger workers to opt out of the Social Security system.

Here are they key components of Paul's economic plan, "Restore America," released in October:

Spending: Paul proposes cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget during his first year in office, and balancing the budget by his third year. He would do this in part by eliminating five cabinet departments: Energy; Housing and Urban Development; Commerce; Interior; and Education. (Paul has not offered specifics on what would happen to some of the functions currently performed by the departments he wants to abolish--maintaining our nuclear weapons, administering our intellectual property system, and conducting the Census, for instance.)

He would also scrap the Transportation Security Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, eliminate corporate subsidies, end foreign aid, and return most other federal spending to 2006 levels.

Paul says he would cut the federal workforce by 10 percent, and accept a presidential salary of $39,336- roughly equal to what the average American makes. The president currently makes $400,000.

Paul, who opposes almost all American military intervention overseas, also says he would save money by ending foreign wars.

Taxes: Paul has said in the past that he'd like to abolish personal income tax rates, but his plan doesn't suggest that. It does propose lowering the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, from 35 percent. And it would extend the Bush tax cuts and eliminate the estate tax. Paul's campaign has said elsewhere that he supports eliminating the capital gains tax, which, as we've written, would be a boon for, among others, private-equity managers on Wall Street.

Regulation: Like most of his rivals, Paul would repeal President Obama's health care law. He would also get rid of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law intended to increase regulation of Wall Street. And he'd scrap Sarbanes-Oxley, the corporate governance law passed in the wake of the Enron scandal.

Monetary Policy: Paul has written a book called "End the Fed," but his plan calls only for auditing the central bank--something he's been trying to do as a legislator. He also would push "competing currency legislation"--meaning he wants individuals to be able to use alternative currencies to the dollar, including gold and silver. The idea is to reduce the federal government's control over the monetary supply.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: Paul says he wouldn't scrap Social Security and Medicare. His plan "honors our promise to our seniors and veterans," meaning that those currently in the programs could stay in them. But he would like to allow younger workers to opt out of the Social Security system and the payroll taxes it imposes--although the details of how he would accomplish this are unclear.

"Dr. Paul is committed to fully funding Social Security and Medicare while we work a transition to allow young workers the freedom to save for their own retirement," Jesse Benton, the national chairman of Paul's presidential campaign, told Yahoo News.

Benton implied that the Social Security and Medicare payments for current retirees--paid for by payroll taxes on younger workers under the current system--would be provided by radically reducing the American military footprint around the globe, along with other cuts. "It will require cuts elsewhere, but we can save hundreds of billions of dollars a year by bringing troops home, ending foreign welfare and overseas nation building and providing a stronger national defense here at home," Benton said. "If we cut and work hard, we can take care of our seniors who rely on their Medicare and Social Security."

In its basic outline, Paul's plan shares several common features with those of his Republican rivals. All support extending the Bush tax cuts, and most want to lower the corporate tax rate. Newt Gingrich, Jon Hunstman, and Rick Perry would scrap the capital gains tax. And a desire to cut government spending is almost a requirement for entry into the Republican field.

If Paul's profile in the race continues to rise, he'll likely be required to fill in some of the plan's details, which remain vague. Extending the Bush tax cuts and cutting the corporate tax rate by more than half would make it difficult to balance the budget in three years, even by eliminating five Cabinet departments and cutting waste. The only feasible way to do so would be large cuts to the three big drivers of government spending: Social Security, Medicare, and the military.


Ron Paul accused of being a racist???

Ron Paul accused of being a racist???

If Ron Paul is a closet racist, I wouldn't like it. But on the other hand for the last 20 years or so Ron Paul has a proven record of voting for freedom and against big government so I would still vote for him.

On the other hand his son, Rand Paul has sounds like a racist in the past and I don't like him at all. But Rand Paul, ain't the same guy as Ron Paul.

Source

Paul's story changes on racial comments

By Jackie Kucinich, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON – Rep. Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disavow racist and incendiary language published in Texas newsletters that bore his name, denying he wrote them and even walking out of an interview on CNN Wednesday. But he vouched for the accuracy of the writings and admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.

Some issues of the newsletters included racist, anti-Israel or anti-gay comments, including a 1992 newsletter in which he said 95% of black men in Washington "are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

Paul told TheDallas Morning News in 1996 that the contents of his newsletters were accurate but needed to be taken in context. Wednesday, he told CNN he didn't write the newsletters and didn't know what was in them.

Paul, who leads polls in Iowa leading up to the caucuses there on Jan. 3, published a series of newsletters while he was out of Congress in the 1980s and 1990s called The Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul's Freedom Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report and The Ron Paul Investment Letter.

In 1996, Paul told TheDallas Morning News that his comment about black men in Washington came while writing about a 1992 study by the National Center on Incarceration and Alternatives, a criminal justice think tank in Virginia.

Paul cited the study and wrote: "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

"These aren't my figures," Paul told the Morning News. "That is the assumption you can gather from the report."

Nor did Paul dispute in 1996 his 1992 newsletter statement that said,"If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be."

'I didn't write them'

Now, Paul says he had nothing to do with the contents of the newsletters published in his name.

"Why don't you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN and what I've said for 20-something years, 22 years ago?" Paul said on CNN Wednesday. "I didn't write them. I disavow them. That's it." Paul then removed his microphone and abruptly ended the interview.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said the congressman was practicing medicine at the time the newsletters were published and "did not write or approve the incendiary passages and does not agree with them."

"He has, however, taken moral responsibility because they appeared under his name and slipped through under his watch," Benton said. "They do not reflect what he believes in: liberty and dignity for all mankind. … Dr. Paul, renowned as a straight shooter who speaks his mind, has given literally thousands of speeches over the past 35 years, and he has never spoken such things."

Paul gave the Morning News interview in 1996 to reporter Catalina Camia, who is now a reporter for USA TODAY.

"I covered Congress and the Texas delegation for The Dallas Morning News," Camia said Wednesday. "I don't recall the specifics of this interview. The story speaks for itself."

The content of the newsletters was recently brought back to light in the most recent edition of TheWeekly Standard.

In the article, reporter James Kirkchick describes tracking down many of the newsletters at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society and noted that they contained few bylines, making it hard to decipher who was the author of the inflammatory writings.

Statements in newsletters

A 1992 newsletter about Washington referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours."

Another newsletter about AIDS said people suffering from the disease should not be allowed to eat in restaurants "because AIDS can be transmitted by saliva," a claim that is not supported by medical evidence. Paul is a physician.

In 2001, Paul told the magazine Texas Monthly that the language in the newsletters wasn't his, but his campaign staff told him not to say others had written it because it was "too confusing."

"I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me," he said. "It wasn't my language at all. Other people help me with my newsletter as I travel around."

Texas Monthly said of Paul: "It is a measure of his stubbornness, determination, and ultimately his contrarian nature that, until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret. It seems, in retrospect, that it would have been far, far easier to have told the truth at the time."


GOP in Ron Paul denial in Iowa

Republicans don't like Ron Paul, because he actually votes AGAINST big government? How refreshing, somebody who votes like they talk. Sounds like a great reason to vote for Ron Paul!

Well in addition to the fact that Ron Paul is against the war on drugs and against all the current illegal and unconstitutional American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Source

GOP in Ron Paul denial in Iowa

For Republicans, caucus winner will be whoever isn't Ron Paul

John Kass

December 22, 2011

With the Iowa presidential caucuses just a few days away, the Republican establishment is busy with some frightening new themes, like:

What happens in Iowa stays in Iowa.

Who cares what happens in Iowa — if anything — anyway?

My personal favorite comes direct from the unyielding mind of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican who insists that American voters don't care which candidate wins the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3.

"People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third," said Branstad. "If (Mitt) Romney comes in a strong second, it definitely helps him going into New Hampshire and other states."

Losing Iowa helps in New Hampshire? So it's not winning that counts, its losing? What the?

Is he high?

Just what the devil is wrong with the Republican bigwigs these days? Their minds can't be besotted by Hopium. That's a liberal Democratic leaf for Democratic pipes depressed that Chicago's City Hall has run the country into the ground. So Republicans must be smoking something else, something just as potent: Dopium, a leaf so powerful that it allowed many Republicans to call themselves "conservatives" while embracing a series of big government programs and federal bailouts from the Bush administration, not to mention two wars.

These days, Gov. Branstad isn't alone. The entire Republican establishment is babbling similar nonsense about the importance of being earnest and a loser in Iowa.

Meanwhile, the Republican-media high priests — yes, the GOP has its own hierarchs — are now in full-throated roar. From the secular pulpits they predict unending torment and Obamanation for anyone foolish enough to embrace the current heretical teachings.

And the name of this heretic?

Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and libertarian who is leading most polls in Iowa with a message of cutting government, including the defense budget, and staying out of wars.

The problem isn't that he's saying it. Paul has been consistent for years. The problem for the GOP establishment is that the American people are now listening. And this threatens the coalition that can put Karl Rove and Wall Street and the Religious Right at the same table to slice the pie of power.

The fact that voters, particularly younger voters, are edging toward Paul has sent the GOP into a panic.

"His supporters are younger and more likely to (use) a cellphone, so he's probably going to perform better than his polling suggests," Iowa State associate professor Dave Peterson told cbsnews.com. "His supporters are also dedicated and will likely turn out on caucus night and not change their minds."

Republicans sure changed their minds about Mitt Romney, a moderate who yearns to be conservative during party primaries. Republicans pegged him for what he is, a corporate stiff, every hair in place, who'll run left the second he secures the nomination. Tim Pawlenty? Just another can of Spam. Rick Perry stuck both boots in his mouth and kept them there. It's a wonder he has any lips left.

Michele Bachmann had her troubles with American history, and Rick Santorum seems ready to punch anyone who won't let him attack Iran tomorrow morning. And Herman Cain? With so many "girlfriend" stories buzzing around him, he was tagged on the Internet with an M.C. Hammer-type parody theme song: "Cain Touched This."

Now it's Newt Gingrich's turn to drop his blossoms. What was it exactly? Was it that $1.6 million chunk that his consulting firm took from federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac as it was getting a massive federal bailout? Or that pledge of marital fidelity he signed the other day, suggesting that his oath to his third wife wasn't nearly enough?

And as he inked it, his campaign was infected by a terrible political virus, Newtonian Ego Interruptus.

Since August, the media has desperately avoided mentioning Paul, a fact noted during the summer in a hilarious rip by liberal comic Jon Stewart and a few days ago by the conservative journalist Neil Cavuto, proving that intellectual honesty is not and never has been a partisan affair. Yet for every Stewart or Cavuto there are dozens of eager clerics of the Church of Common Wisdom, desperate to become bishops.

I'm not endorsing Paul here. But you'd have to be blind not to see Republican bosses in panic. Because if Paul wins Iowa, his ideas might catch fire. And then the bosses won't be able to feed as easily.

Once there was no more amusing sight for me than watching Democratic mouthpieces appearing on TV, claiming then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Rezko, — backed by all those guys from Chicago's City Hall — would bring hope and change as he transcended the broken politics of America's past.

The journalistic high priests, their brains swollen by several bowls of Hopium, chattered and repeated the slogans of City Hall's favorite mouthpiece, David Axelrod. So Americans never quite realized that the man they were electing president had been an earnest but inexperienced back-bencher in the Illinois Legislature who spent his entire career taking orders from machine bosses while trying to get ahead.

Hopium was bad enough. But what worries me are all those clouds of Dopium wafting across Iowa, where the Republican establishment remains in Ron Paul denial.

Iowa: where winning isn't as important as losing.

jskass@tribune.com


Ron Paul a racist????

It's sad to see Ron Paul might be a racist.

On the other hand based on Ron Paul's consistent voting record for the past 20 years against big government and for personal freedom, I would still vote for him even if he is a closet racist.

Source

In '90s newsletter appeal, Ron Paul warns of 'coming race war'

By Kim Geiger

December 23, 2011, 1:58 p.m.

A solicitation from the 1990s that carried Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s name predicted a “coming race war,” suggested the government was engaged in a “cover-up” over AIDS, and warned that a plan to update U.S. currency was really a conspiracy to “steal our freedom and our prosperity.”

It is the latest controversial writing to resurface this week as the congressman’s record is coming under new scrutiny amid speculation that he may be gaining ground in Iowa, where the first GOP nominating contest of the 2012 presidential campaign will be held next month.

The letter – an appeal for supporters to subscribe to Paul’s newsletters – was obtained by Reuters from James Kirchick, a contributing editor for the New Republic magazine, who said he found the letter in archives maintained by the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Sent under the banner of “Congressman Ron Paul” and carrying Paul’s signature, the letter offers “wealth-saving intelligence” gleaned from Paul’s network of sources within the federal government. For $99, readers could receive monthly newsletters including the “Ron Paul Political Report,” an investor’s manual and the phone number for Paul’s financial hotline.

Written in the first person, the letter warned readers that President George H.W. Bush and the federal government had scammed Americans by updating U.S. currency to prevent counterfeiting and money laundering.

“The feds see us as rats in a maze,” the letter said. “And they want to own the maze. And the New Money is a key part of this scheme.”

Describing the new bills, which Paul “uncovered” as a member of Congress, the letter said: “These totalitarian bills were tinted pink and blue and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It wasn’t money for a free people. It was a portable inquisition, a paper ‘third- degree,’ to allow the feds to keep track of American cash, and American citizens.”

The currency conspiracy theory reads like a paranoid version of Paul’s long-standing argument that U.S. monetary policy has set the country on the brink of collapse. But the letter is also riddled with provocative accusations that veer into territory that seems entirely unrelated.

“I’ve been told not to talk, but these stooges don’t scare me,” the letter said. “Threats or no threats, I’ve laid bare the coming race war in our big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS (my training as a physician helps me see through this one.)”

Paul has struggled to craft an explanation for offensive statements that were contained in his newsletters from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational,” one newsletter said. Another, referring to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, said that “order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”

On Wednesday, Paul disavowed the statements, saying he had not written them, nor had he read them, at the time they were mailed out. But in the past, Paul had defended some of the writings, suggesting they were taken out of context.

Drew Ivers, the Iowa chairman for Paul’s campaign, told Reuters on Thursday that Paul stands by material he has written under his own signature. But when asked if that meant he still believed there was a federal cover-up relating to AIDS, as the letter states, Ivers said: “I don’t think he embraces that.”

Now, Paul spokesman Jesse Benton tells Talking Points Memo that Ivers was not authorized to comment on the matter, and that Paul “did not write that mail piece and disavows it.”

“Drew Ivers is a great guy and leader, but he was not speaking on behalf of the campaign and is not acquainted enough with the issue to have the facts,” Benton said.

kim.geiger@latimes.com


Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views

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Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support

By JIM RUTENBERG and SERGE F. KOVALESKI

Published: December 25, 2011

The American Free Press, which markets books like “The Invention of the Jewish People” and “March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” is urging its subscribers to help it send hundreds of copies of Ron Paul’s collected speeches to voters in New Hampshire. The book, it promises, will “Help Dr. Ron Paul Win the G.O.P. Nomination in 2012!”

Don Black, director of the white nationalist Web site Stormfront, said in an interview that several dozen of his members were volunteering for Mr. Paul’s presidential campaign, and a site forum titled “Why is Ron Paul such a favorite here?” has no fewer than 24 pages of comments. “I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews,” read one.

Far-right groups like the Militia of Montana say they are rooting for Mr. Paul as a stalwart against government tyranny.

Mr. Paul’s surprising surge in polls is creating excitement within a part of his political base that has been behind him for decades but overshadowed by his newer fans on college campuses and in some liberal precincts who are taken with his antiwar, anti-drug-laws messages.

The white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed. “I wouldn’t be happy with that,” Mr. Paul said in an interview Friday when asked about getting help from volunteers with anti-Jewish or antiblack views.

But he did not disavow their support. “If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say — it has nothing to do with endorsing what they say,” said Mr. Paul, who is now running strong in Iowa for the Republican nomination.

The libertarian movement in American politics has long had two overlapping but distinct strains. One, backed to some degree by wealthy interests, is focused largely on economic freedom and dedicated to reducing taxes and regulation through smaller government. The other is more focused on personal liberty and constraints on government built into the Constitution, which at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.

Mr. Paul has operated at the nexus of the two, often espousing positions at odds with most of the Republican Party but assembling a diverse and loyal following attracted by his adherence to libertarian principles.

Mr. Paul’s calls for the end of the Federal Reserve system, a cessation of aid to Israel and all other nations and an overall diminishment of government power have natural appeal among far-right, niche political groups. Aides say that much of the support is unsolicited and that it is unfair to overlook the larger number of mainstream voters now backing him.

But a look at the trajectory of Mr. Paul’s career shows that he and his closest political allies either wittingly or unwittingly courted disaffected white voters with extreme views as they sought to forge a movement from the nether region of American politics, where the far right and the far left sometimes converge.

In May, Mr. Paul reiterated in an interview with Chris Matthews of MSNBC that he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation. He said that he supported its intent, but that parts of it violated his longstanding belief that government should not dictate how property owners behave. He has been featured in videos of the John Birch Society, which campaigned against the Civil Rights Act, warning, for instance, that the United Nations threatens American sovereignty.

In the mid-1990s, between his two stints as a Texas congressman, Mr. Paul produced a newsletter called The Ron Paul Survival Report, which only months before the Oklahoma City bombings encouraged militias to seek out and expel federal agents in their midst. That edition was titled “Why Militias Scare the Striped Pants Off Big Government.”

An earlier edition of another newsletter he produced, The Ron Paul Political Report, concluded that the need for citizens to arm themselves was only natural, given carjackings by “urban youth who play whites like pianos.” The report, with no byline but written in the first person, said: “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self-defense. For the animals are coming.”

Mike Holmes, former editor of The American Libertarian, who has known Mr. Paul from libertarian circles since the 1970s, contended that the newsletters did not “rise to the level of hate speech.” He added: “It goes more to the level of social commentary. There was no use of any ‘N’-words. It amounted to the style of foul-mouthed punks trying to get inside the gang of paleoconservatives.”

Those newsletters have drawn new scrutiny through Mr. Paul’s two recent presidential campaigns. The New Republic posted several of them online in 2008 and again recently, including a lament about “The Disappearing White Majority.” The conservative Weekly Standard ran an article highlighting the newsletters last week.

Mr. Paul often espouses positions at odds with most of the Republican Party but has assembled a diverse and loyal following.

A Ron Paul Political Report labeled “A Special Issue on Racial Terrorism.” Mr. Paul has repudiated such newsletters.

Mr. Paul has long repudiated the newsletters, contending that they were written by the staff of his company, Ron Paul & Associates, while he was tending to his obstetrician’s practice and that he did not see some of them until 10 years later. “I disavow those positions,” he said in the interview. “They’re not my positions, and anybody who knows me, they’ve never heard a word of it.”

But production of the newsletters was partly overseen by Lew Rockwell, a libertarian activist who has been a close political aide and adviser to Mr. Paul over the course of decades. At the same time that he was a director for Mr. Paul’s company, Mr. Rockwell called on libertarians to reach out to “cultural and moral traditionalists,” who “reject not only affirmative action, set-asides and quotas, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all subsequent laws that force property owners to act against their will.”

Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Paul came to know each other as followers of the free-market Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, who argued against socialism and centralized economic planning, a spokesman for Mr. Paul said. They joined with the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard in the 1970s and 1980s during the early attempts to forge libertarianism into a national party.

Mr. Rockwell was listed in business filings as a director of Ron Paul & Associates from its founding in 1984 through its dissolution in 2001, and was a paid Paul campaign consultant through at least 2002, according to federal campaign records. He was Mr. Paul’s chief of staff during the congressman’s first period in Congress, which began in the 1970s, and championed his successful bid in 1988 for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination.

During that nominating battle, a flier produced by Mr. Paul’s opponents accused him of gay-baiting by reporting in one of his newsletters that the government was “lying” about the threat of AIDS and that the virus could be transmitted through “saliva, tears, sweat.” It said that some “AIDS carriers — perhaps out of a pathological hatred — continue to give blood.”

Mr. Paul said Friday “that was never my view at all,” and again blamed his staff. Still, that same year he was quoted in The Houston Post as saying that schools should be free to bar children with AIDS and that the government should stop financing AIDS research and education.

As the Libertarian standard bearer, Mr. Paul won less than 1 percent of the vote. After the election, as libertarians searched for ways to broaden the appeal of their ideology, Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Rothbard advocated a coalition of libertarians and so-called paleoconservatives, who unlike hawkish “neocons” were socially conservative, noninterventionist and opposed to what they viewed as state-enforced multiculturalism.

In the Rothbard-Rockwell Report they started in 1990, Mr. Rothbard called for a “Right Wing Populism,” suggesting that the campaign for governor of Louisiana by David Duke, the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was a model for “paleolibertarianism.”

“It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians,” he wrote.

Arguing that too many libertarians were embracing a misplaced egalitarianism, Mr. Rockwell wrote in Liberty magazine: “There is nothing wrong with blacks preferring the ‘black thing.’ But paleolibertarians would say the same about whites preferring the ‘white thing’ or Asians the ‘Asian thing.’ ”

Their thinking was hardly embraced by all libertarians. “It was just something that we found abhorrent, and so there was a huge divide,” said Edward H. Crane, the founder of the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian research center.

Mr. Crane, a longtime critic of Mr. Rockwell, called Mr. Paul’s close association with him “one of the more perplexing things I’ve ever come across in my 67 years.” He added: “I wish Ron would condemn these fringe things that float around because of Rockwell. I don’t believe he believes any of that stuff.”

Mr. Paul said in the interview that he did not, but he declined to condemn Mr. Rockwell, saying he did not want to get in the middle of a fight. “I could understand that, but I could also understand the Rothbard group saying, Why don’t you quit talking to Cato?” he said.

Mr. Paul described Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Rothbard as political provocateurs. “They enjoyed antagonizing people, to tell you the truth, and trying to split people,” he said. “I thought, we’re so small, why shouldn’t we be talking to everybody and bringing people together?”

Nonetheless, Mr. Paul’s newsletters veered into language that would most likely appeal to Mr. Duke’s followers, including the suggestion in 1994 that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

He said he did not discuss the content of the newsletters with Mr. Rockwell because readers never complained. “I was pretty careless about what was going in my own newsletter — that was my biggest fault,” he said.

Mr. Rockwell did not respond to interview requests. Carol Moore, a libertarian opponent of his at the time, said he and his allies had “all evolved” and moderated their views since.

Still, the newsletters had a lasting appeal with the audience Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Rothbard talked about reaching.

Mr. Black of Stormfront said the newsletters helped make him a Ron Paul supporter. “That was a big part of his constituency, the paleoconservatives who think there are race problems in this country,” Mr. Black said.

“We understand that Paul is not a white nationalist, but most of our people support him because of his stand on issues,” Mr. Black said. “We think our race is being threatened through a form of genocide by assimilation, meaning the allowing in of third-world immigrants into the United States.”

Mr. Black said Mr. Paul was attractive because of his “aggressive position on securing our borders,” his criticism of affirmative action and his goal of eliminating the Federal Reserve, which the Stormfront board considers to be essentially a private bank with no government oversight. “Also, our board recognizes that most of the leaders involved in the Fed and the international banking system are Jews.”

Mr. Paul is not unaware of that strain among his supporters. Mr. Crane of the Cato Institute recalled comparing notes with Mr. Paul in the early 1980s about direct mail solicitations for money. When Mr. Crane said that mailing lists of people with the most extreme views seemed to draw the best response, Mr. Paul responded that he found the same thing with a list of subscribers to the Spotlight, a now-defunct publication founded by the holocaust denier Willis A. Carto.

Mr. Paul said he did not recall that conversation, which was first reported in the libertarian publication Reason, and doubted that he would have known what lists were being used on his behalf. Yet he said he would not have a problem seeking support from such a list.

“I’ll go to anybody who I think I can convert to change their viewpoints — so that would be to me incidental,” he said. “I’m always looking at converting people to look at liberty the way I do.”

Kitty Bennett and Jack Begg contributed research.


Racist Ron Paul Newsletter

I joined the Libertarian Party in 1994 or 1995, so I think these Ron Paul newsletters were before my time.

But in the years I have been a Libertarian and know about Ron Paul by his actions he has always seemed like a true Libertarian.

The only problem I have had with Ron Paul is that he is against a woman's right to have an abortion.

The Libertarian platform says that should be the woman's right to decide if you wants an abortion, not the right of some government bureaucrat.

Because of that I used to say Ron Paul was about 95 percent Libertarian.

Since then I have read new information about Ron Paul's positions on the issued during the 2012 Presidential campaign I have lowered my Libertarian assessment of Ron Paul from 95 percent to 90 percent.

But even still I would vote for Ron Paul over any Democrat or Republican.

Last but not least I am sad if Ron Paul is a racist.

 
Racist Ron Paul Newsletter???
 


Who cares about the issues????

Who cares about their positions on the issues, we need a negative sound bite!!!!

On the other hand while they pretend that we are electing public servants who will help the American people, in reality we are electing a new Emperor and Congressmen who are in really royalty who will rob the American people blind for themselves and the special interest groups that helped them get elected.

Source

Modernizing Attack Ads by Using Old Videos

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Published: December 26, 2011

It seemed innocuous enough at the time. The Democratic speaker of the House and one of her Republican predecessors cozy up on a love seat arranged for them at the bottom of Capitol Hill. They look into the camera, then at each other, and declare that they are really not all that different when it comes to caring about global warming.

Newt Gingrich says he regrets his public service announcement with Nancy Pelosi.

What does Newt Gingrich think of his tender moment with Nancy Pelosi now? “Probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years.”

He has good reason to fret. Scenes from that 2008 public service announcement appear in no fewer than four television advertisements now running in Iowa and can be found in numerous videos on the Web, all made by rival Republican presidential campaigns and outside political groups that are trying to sink Mr. Gingrich’s candidacy.

It is the attack-ad technique of choice for the 2012 election: anything you have said or done on film will be held against you. And its prevalence has helped make the Republican primary campaign a ferociously negative contest. Nowhere is that more obvious than in Iowa, where commercials that portray candidates in an unflattering light now account for two-thirds of the money spent on advertising for the caucuses.

It is a shift in emphasis from the days of using depressing montages of carnage abroad and social unrest, like the ads that helped Richard M. Nixon discredit Hubert H. Humphrey in 1968, or the reliance on selective recitations of Congressional votes that have twisted the positions of candidates running from a perch in Washington. It averts the need to shoot much, if any, new footage, and through the use of actual images and the words of the target — sometimes misleading, sometimes not — the negative message can be made to appear more credible than mere assertions.

“We don’t need to embellish with a nasty announcer,” said Steve Grand, a Republican media strategist who has helped American Crossroads, a political group backed by Karl Rove, create some of the commercials. “It’s not somebody else saying, ‘This person did something.’ There they are. See it with your own eyes, hear it with your own ears. And I think it feels more documentary than propaganda.”

Turning the candidates’ own words against them is, of course, one of the older tricks in the political playbook. But today more than ever, when a candidate’s every kaffeeklatsch, rope-line handshake and editorial board interview is captured on camera, there is a wealth of material. With news outlets like C-Span digitizing their video archives and making them available online, old footage is easy to come by. Anyone with an Internet connection and the patience to conduct a lengthy Google search can be an opposition researcher. And the willingness of some campaigns not only to employ old film but to rip it out of context seems to be greater than ever.

According to the Kantar Media Campaign Media Analysis Group, Iowans have been subjected to commercials about candidates 17,151 times this year. Of those, 10,591 were negative. In dollar terms, the overwhelmingly negative tone of the advertising war is just as glaring: $3.3 million spent on negative ads versus $1.7 spent on positive ones.

The negativity reflects both the wide-open nature of the race and the advent of the “super PAC.” Those outside groups operate without coordinating with the campaigns and have taken on much of the dirty work of tearing down opponents.

Over the past week, Mr. Gingrich has borne the brunt of the attacks, and his support among likely Republican voters showed signs of eroding as a result.

Mitt Romney employs a small team of video- and film-savvy staff members who produce ads from three editing suites at the campaign’s headquarters in Boston’s North End. Their recent productions include one 30-second Web video that shows Mr. Gingrich telling the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010 that “Governor Romney, in his business career, created more jobs than the entire Obama cabinet combined.” Another, titled “Newt and Nancy,” ends with the words, “With friends like Newt, who needs The Left” splashed on the screen.

This Romney ad team also produced one of the more misleading commercials produced by a presidential candidate this year. That spot, called “Believe in America,” featured Mr. Obama quoting an associate of Senator John McCain. “If we keep talking about the economy,” Mr. Obama says, “we’re going to lose.” The ad makes it appear as if the president, who was speaking in 2008 about his rival’s campaign, was referring to his own political fate in the 2012 election.

Rick Perry’s campaign went after Mr. Obama with a similarly deceptive ad that takes an out-of-context approach to the president’s remarks that American businesses have been lazy about attracting foreign investment.

But as Mr. Romney has learned, the in-your-own-words game is a double-edged sword. He has been subject to relentless skewering by the video staff at the Democratic National Committee, which, like Mr. Romney’s team, trawls the Internet for footage.

The committee’s most attention-grabbing ad was one called “Trapped” that showed Mr. Romney making contradictory statements on issues like abortion.

Mr. Romney also saw himself skewered in a commercial produced by a little-known political group called American LP. It contains footage of him welcoming volunteers to the Salt Lake City Olympics in French. Along the bottom are what are purported to be subtitles but are actually quotes from previous statements that Mr. Romney has made, like his comment that he is politically independent.

One benefit from producing such provocative ads is that the groups and campaigns broadcasting them are able to generate publicity while spending little or no money buying time on television. The Romney “Believe” ad was broadcast on a single station in New Hampshire just a handful of times. And the Democratic National Committee spent only about $20,000 to broadcast “Trapped.” The ad with Mr. Romney speaking French was barely shown at all.

But they all got plenty of play on cable news and in blogs.

In that sense, the use of old footage in campaign ads mirrors the larger shift in the way voters are getting their campaign news. Some strategists see it as an extension of the way the primary process is evolving as it moves beyond Iowa pizza restaurants and church basements and is played out almost exclusively on national television.

“Voters are looking more discretely at the messages being presented by campaigns, and I think that’s one of the reasons the debates are more impactful this time,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic media strategist. As voters grow more wary of messages relayed through official filters, Mr. Devine added, “I think the ad makers are observing that and saying, ‘Well, why don’t we move toward this in our own advertising?’ ”


Ron Paul’s House record marked by bold strokes, and futility

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Ron Paul’s House record marked by bold strokes, and futility

By David A. Fahrenthold, Published: December 26

The passage of H.R. 2121, in fall 2009, unfolded without drama. It allowed for the sale of a customhouse in Galveston, Tex. The House debate took two minutes, and the vote took eight seconds. The ayes had it.

But something historic was happening. On his 482nd try, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) had authored a bill that would become law.

Paul has become a surprising force in the Republican presidential race, promising to use “the bully pulpit of the presidency” to demand deep cutbacks across government. But Paul has had only limited success using his current pulpit — a seat in Congress — to rally lawmakers behind his ideas.

Of the 620 measures that Paul has sponsored, just four have made it to a vote on the House floor. Only that one has been signed into law.

House colleagues say the genial Paul has often shown little interest in the laborious one-on-one lobbying required to build a coalition behind his ideas. This year, for instance, Paul has sponsored 47 bills, including measures to withdraw from the United Nations, repeal the federal law banning guns in school zones and let private groups coin their own money.

None has moved, and 32 have failed to attract a single co-sponsor.

“He’s somewhat of an introvert [and] a little quirky, so he doesn’t work the legislative process like most do,” said former congressman Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), who served with Paul from 1997 to 2010. But Wamp said Paul, as president, might succeed where Paul the legislator had not.

“When you’re president, they can’t just ignore you,” Wamp said. “Because you have a mandate.”

Rejection as a constant

In Congress, failure is often the norm: Many legislators file bills only to please some hometown constituency or to publicize their ideas. Most bills go nowhere, especially if their sponsor is not a powerful committee or subcommittee boss.

The other current legislator in the GOP race, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), has introduced 45 bills in her five-year-old career without one passing both houses.

During Paul’s years in office, only 4 percent of the more than 69,000 bills filed by House members have become law.

But Paul’s record stands out for its futility. His lifetime success rate: about 0.2 percent.

“This is an indication of Ron’s strength of leadership. He has had the courage to stand alone and to fight for principle, ignoring the pressure to sell out,” Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign chairman, said in a written statement. Benton said these failures were not proof that Paul, as president, would struggle to get his ideas passed through Congress.

“Now, the American people are demanding his principled Constitutionalism that will bring together broad coalitions from across party lines,” Benton said.

Paul, 76, has served three stints in Congress, covering 11 terms and part of another. His first bill was introduced just 11 days after he arrived on Capitol Hill in 1976. It would have repealed the law that had created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration six years earlier. It didn’t get out of committee.

In the terms that followed, Paul sponsored legislation to abolish the Education Department. He sought to repeal the income tax. He wanted to limit the census to just three questions: name, address and number of people in a household.

These measures also got little traction. The only time Paul got a full House vote for one of his sweeping ideas was in 2001, when he proposed to withdraw from the agreement that created the World Trade Organization. The House voted it down, 363 to 56.

Instead, his success came mainly on small-scale resolutions for Texas causes. In 2006, Paul authored a resolution congratulating NASA on a shuttle flight; it passed both houses unanimously. And in 2009, Paul wrote the bill that sold the Galveston Custom House to a local historical society for use as its headquarters.

Paul’s campaign says its candidate has also won legislative victories by amending bills written by others.

During the fight over the Dodd-Frank financial regulation in 2010, for instance, Paul won a partial victory: A provision was included to require a limited audit of the Federal Reserve’s transactions. The audit was still not as broad as Paul had long insisted.

Benton said that, in that case, Paul had marshaled more than 300 lawmakers behind his idea. “He had some of the most progressive Democrats to some of the most conservative Republicans on the same bill,” Benton said.

But Paul’s House colleagues say they have rarely seen him put forth the kind of sustained lobbying effort necessary to get a big idea passed into law.

Paul “has his ideas and puts them out there. And if people want to get on them, they can,” said Rep. Thomas J. Rooney (R-Fla.). “But I don’t necessarily think that he goes out and works — lobbies for them — like some of the younger guys.”

A quiet approach

For most members of Congress, passing a bill starts with one-on-one lobbying: They look within their party, or their state’s delegation, to build up a large number of co-sponsors. Then a member ­lobbies the relevant committee chairman to take up the bill, using those co-sponsorships as proof of support.

Other Republicans said Paul takes a more low-key approach. He will seek out a small circle of lawmakers who have supported him on previous issues, and he will let potential allies come to him.

“He has a particular spot on the floor: about four rows up on the middle aisle,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). If you want to be lobbied, Chaffetz said, you walk by, and “he’ll say, ‘Hey, Jason, I want you to look at this.’ ”

That approach has paid limited dividends, even in the current Congress, which is controlled by Paul’s fellow Republicans. Among his 47 new bills, Paul has attracted a very large number of co-sponsors for only one, which demands a full audit of the Fed. It remains bottled up in committee.

His other bills are as ambitious as ever. In H.R. 1098, Paul proposes allowing private groups to coin their own money to circulate alongside dollars and cents. Some libertarian groups like the idea, saying that the new money could be useful if the dollar loses value through inflation.

Other experts have their doubts. “We’d have to spend probably the first four hours of every day trying to figure out which currency to use today,” said James Livingston, a professor at Rutgers University who studies economic history.

Paul has attracted no co-sponsors for that bill, and he doesn’t appear to be pulling out all the stops to find some. The Congressional Record contains a March 15 speech from Paul: “I urge my colleagues to consider the redevelopment of a system of competing currencies.”

But the speech is a common congressional illusion: Paul didn’t give it aloud to his colleagues. Instead, he simply wrote it and had it inserted into the record later.


Paul builds campaign on doomsday scenarios

As a Libertarian I think Ron Paul is correct, even though this article seems to paint his Libertarian views as nut job stuff which will destroy the world as we know it.

Even though I support Ron Paul I disagree with some of his views. I am not a racist and will be sad if Ron Paul turns out to be a racist as recent articles have pointed out. I also disagree with Ron Paul's position on abortion. It's a woman's body and she should be the one to decide if she has an abortion, not some government nanny.

Source

Paul builds campaign on doomsday scenarios

Reuters

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON, Iowa (Reuters) - The man who might win the Republican Party's first presidential nominating contest fears that the United Nations may take control of the U.S. money supply.

Campaigning for the January 3 Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul warns of eroding civil liberties, a Soviet Union-style economic collapse and violence in the streets.

The Texas congressman, author of "End the Fed," also wants to eliminate the central banking system that underpins the world's largest economy.

"Not only would we audit the Federal Reserve, we may well curtail the Federal Reserve," Paul told a cheering crowd of more than 100 in this small Iowa city last week.

Paul, 76, is facing questions for racist writings that appeared under his name two decades ago, which he has disavowed as the work of "ghost writers."

But Paul's dark-horse presidential bid ultimately could founder, analysts and others say, because of increasing questions about how his unorthodox vision of government would work in the real world.

Republican rivals criticize his anti-war, isolationist approach to foreign policy as dangerously naive, and object to his plans to slash the Pentagon's budget and pull back U.S. troops from overseas.

Non-partisan analysts say his economic proposals - drastic spending cuts, elimination of the Federal Reserve and a return to the gold standard - would plunge the country back into recession.

"Paul appeals to people whose knowledge of major issues is superficial (and) he sees conspiracies where there are none," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group, an analysis firm. "If he does well in Iowa, which is likely, it will be an enormous embarrassment to the Republicans."

However, Paul's calls for a dramatically limited government and a hands-off foreign policy are resonating among voters who have grown deeply alienated from Washington after a decade of war and nearly five years of economic malaise.

"Obama got into office and I can't tell the difference between him and Bush," said Deanna Pitman, a homemaker from Bloomfield, Iowa, citing President Barack Obama's support for policies such as the Wall Street bailout and the war in Afghanistan that began under George W. Bush.

Polls show Paul jockeying for the lead in the Iowa caucuses, and political observers say his organization in the state is unmatched. His campaign stops draw hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, along with undecided voters who are giving him a look.

On the campaign trail, he reaches out to Tea Party supporters on the right and Occupy Wall Street supporters on the left.

Some potential supporters from the left have been put off by Paul's uncompromising support for the free market.

At a campaign stop in this small city of about 7,000, Paul told breast cancer survivor Danielle Lin that insurance companies should not be required to offer coverage to people who are already sick.

"It's sort of like me living on the Gulf Coast, not buying insurance until I see the hurricane," said Paul, whose Galveston-based district was devastated by a hurricane in 2008. "Insurance is supposed to measure risk."

The response left Lin in tears. While her insurance covered her treatment, she said, several of her friends were not so fortunate.

"I watched three friends die because they didn't have insurance," said Lin, a registered Democrat who is looking for a Republican candidate to support this time.

"Nobody can afford private insurance, nobody can. And they're dead."

APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS

Paul can wax apocalyptic as he warns of the dangers of a diluted currency and a deeply indebted government. His doomsday scenarios often are incomplete, leaving listeners room to fill in the blanks.

He draws parallels between the current situation in the United States and that of the former Soviet Union, whose economy collapsed amid the union's breakup and civil unrest in 1991.

Paul acknowledges that his proposal to avoid that outcome - an immediate, $1 trillion spending cut that would slash the federal budget by more than one-third and eliminate the departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Interior, and Housing and Urban Development - could have some unpleasant side effects.

"I'm afraid of violence coming," he told a crowd of more than 600 in Bettendorf, Iowa. "When you see what the government is preparing for, and the arrests and military law, and the demonstrations in the streets, some people aren't going to be convinced so easily that you don't owe them a living."

At the earlier stop in Washington, he said the Federal Reserve was poised to "bail out" the Euro zone, a move that he said ultimately would cause the United States to surrender control of its own currency to the United Nations.

"This monetary crisis is well known by the international bankers. They want the U.N. to come in and solve this problem," he said. "The dollar will probably eventually disintegrate and be taken over. But I don't want the U.N. issuing that currency."

Economists note that Paul's long-standing proposal to return the dollar to a gold standard would force the United States to relinquish control of its currency.

"We would still have monetary policy - it would be set by gold miners in South Africa and Uzbekistan, rather than bureaucrats in Washington," said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist with JPMorgan Chase.

"If you like what OPEC means for oil prices, you'd love what the gold standard would do to financial markets."


Ex-Aide to Ron Paul Makes Stunning Claims About Old Boss

Source

Ex-Aide to Ron Paul Makes Stunning Claims About Old Boss: Anti-Israel, 9/11 Truther, Doesn’t Believe U.S. Had Any Business Fighting Hitler

The Blaze

AP

Eric Dondero, who worked for Ron Paul on and off for a total of 12 years dating back to 1987, released a jaw-dropping statement in Right Wing News Monday in regards to his old boss. It appears Dondero wrote the statement to answer questions presented to him of late by various media outlets in regards to controversial newsletters connected to the congressman that have consumed his campaign for President. While attempting to defend Paul as not being a “racist” or “homophobic,” as many have accused him of being given the hateful language in the newsletters, Dondero “sets the record straight” by making shocking claims about the beliefs and behind-closed-doors statements of the man vying to be Commander in Chief. The Paul campaign has already reacted to Dondero’s claims, labeling him as a disgruntled ex-employee. Nonetheless, the allegations are astounding.

Dondero begins by strongly refuting claims that Paul is a “racist,” saying he never heard Paul make any racist comments in the 12 years he worked for the man, and makes clear that the congressman has frequently hired blacks and Hispanics for his office staff. However, Dondero makes “one caveat,“ stating that Paul is ”out of touch,” with both Hispanic and Black culture:

“He is completely clueless when it comes to Hispanic and Black culture, particularly Mexican-American culture. And he is most certainly intolerant of Spanish and those who speak strictly Spanish in his presence, (as are a number of Americans, nothing out of the ordinary here.)”

Dondero, who is half-Jewish himself, says Paul is not Anti-Semitic. He says Paul has no issue with Jewish-Americans and can “categorically” say that he has never heard anything Anti-Semitic, slurs or any sort of derogatory marks come out of Paul’s mouth. However, Dondero claims Paul is “most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general:”

“He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, [the webmaster also sides with the Palestinians] and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.”

Dondero moves to the claims that Rep. Paul is a “homo-phobe.“ The former aide claims that Paul is not bigoted towards homosexuals but ”personally uncomfortable” around them. Dondero points to two instances to back his claims. One being in 1988, when Paul was staying with an openly gay Libertarian supporter for a 3-day campaign swing in the SF Bay Area, and pulled the young personal assistant aside demanding Dondero find a bathroom he could use because he did not want to use the one at his homosexual friend’s home. The second instance occurred many years later when a fellow staffer told Dondero that Paul allegedly swatted away a handshake from flamboyant gay man who was a “hardcore campaign supporter.”

After giving his piece on the areas he feels the “liberal media is ferociously attacking Ron” on, like “stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past,” Dondero moves to what he considers the real problem with his old boss: foreign policy.

Based on countless “arguments/discussions” with Paul over the years, Dondero claims that no matter how hard the candidate denies it “Ron Paul is most assuredly an isolationist.”

“For example, he strenuously does not believe the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler in WWII. [the American public also held this view until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor] He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews,’ was absolutely none of our business. When pressed, he often times brings up conspiracy theories like FDR knew about the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before hand, or that WWII was just ‘blowback,’ for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy errors, and such. ”

Moving to more contemporary subjects, Dondero states “with absolute certainty” that Paul was opposed to the War in Afghanistan and to any military reaction to the 9/11 attacks. [the webmaster is also 100 percent opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan]

“He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for ‘invading’ Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11, and pretty much forbade us staffers from engaging in any sort of memorial expressions, or openly asserting pro-military statements in support of the Bush administration.”

Dondero claims that Paul, up to the eve of the resolution vote, was telling staffers that he planned to vote “No” on a resolution initiating the War in Afghanistan. Dondero claims that all of the congressman’s district staff told his Chief of Staff that they would immediately resign if Ron voted “No.”

“At the very last minute Ron switched his stance and voted ‘Yay,’ much to the great relief of Jackie and I. He never explained why, but I strongly suspected that he realized it would have been political suicide; that staunchly conservative Victoria would revolt, and the Republicans there would ensure that he would not receive the nomination for the seat in 2002.” [the webmaster is angry that Ron Paul voted Yay!! He should have voted NO!!!!]

The claims come just over a week before the start of Republican primary voting.

Eric Dondero was a Senior Aide to Congressman Paul from 1997-2003, Ron Paul for Congress Campaign Coordinator from 1995-1996, National Organizer for Draft Ron Paul for President from 1991-1992, and a personal assistant for Ron, Libertarian for President from 1987-1988. That said, Dondero’s claims should be taken with a grain of salt.

Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton emailed The Weekly Standard Sunday afternoon in regards to Dondero’s latest statement:

“Eric Dondero is a disgruntled former staffer who was fired for performance issues. He has zero credibility and should not be taken seriously.”

A Facebook group was created during the 2008 campaign, titled “Eric Dondero is Slime!” making similar allegations to Benton, that Dondero is a disgruntled former employee attempting to enact an unjust revenge on his former boss.

Dondero disputes he was fired, telling CBS News he resigned in 2003 after going “back and forth” with Paul for months. Dondero even challenged Paul for his congressional seat in 2007.

Dondero is currently the publisher and editor of LibertarianRepublican.net


Former opponents discuss Ron Paul’s racist newsletters

Source

Former opponents discuss Ron Paul’s racist newsletters

The Daily Caller

Two former opponents of Rep. Ron Paul, one of whom once worked for the Texas congressman, have come forward to discuss racist comments in newsletters published by the Republican presidential candidate.

Even though the newsletters were never a secret, a former Democratic consultant told The Atlantic’s Molly Ball that plans to turn them into an issue during Paul’s 1996 campaign for Congress never picked up steam because voters appeared to agree with them.

“At the time I was Lefty Morris’ campaign manager, who was the Democrat running against Ron Paul in the general election,” the unnamed consultant told Ball in an email. “Our campaign released the ‘Ron Paul Political Report’ to reporters and later focus grouped some of his writings and affiliations at a restaurant in La Grange, Texas.”

“At the time, the ‘Ron Paul Political Report’ was listed in an online Neo-Nazi Directory that also included publications by the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brothers (or something like that),” he continued.

Much to his surprise, the consultant said that some participants in the focus group began defending the Klan when told that the newsletters were listed alongside white supremacist publications. “We had a runaway focus group on our hands,” he recalled. “About 10 of the 12 participants were chirping their enthusiasm for the KKK.”

“It was 1996, but Texas was, well … still Texas,” he said.

Ball notes that the first thing one finds when Googling “Lefty Morris” is the story of Eric Dondero, a Paul-staffer turned 2008 primary opponent, who claims to have been asked by the campaign to confront Morris and defend Paul from accusations of anti-Semitism. Dondero is half Jewish, and says he was asked by Paul staffers to wear “a Jewish yarlmuke, and other Jewish adornments” when he confronted Morris.

Dondero recently published an account including his thoughts on Ron Paul and the racist newsletters. He wrote that while many of the Paul’s views are old-fashioned or eccentric, Paul is neither a racist nor an anti-Semite.

“I worked for the man for 12 years, pretty consistently,” Dondero writes. “I never heard a racist word expressed towards Blacks or Jews come out of his mouth. Not once. And understand, I was his close personal assistant.”

However, Dondero also says that Paul “is far from being the hippest guy around” and is “completely clueless when it comes to Hispanic and Black culture, particularly Mexican-American culture.”

Dondero, who Paul has described as “a disgruntled former employee who was fired,” also wrote that Paul is “absolutely” not an anti-Semite, but “most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general.”

“He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all,” Dondero says. [just because the Jews got screwed by Hitler, doesn't mean the Jews have the right to steal the land from the Palestinians and use it to create a Jewish state!] “He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.”

At the same time, Dondero says Paul has no problem with American Jews, and even worked to befriend the very small Jewish community in his own district.

Despite the uproar over the newsletters, Paul continues to poll well in early primary states, and is currently leading the rest of the Republican field in Iowa according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.


Rand Paul, Ron Paul's racist son

I never have liked Rand Paul. Rand Paul seems like a racist jerk. Rand Paul while he is a Tea Party member certainly isn't anywhere close to being a Libertarian.

I have always wonder how Rand Paul could be such a jerk, when being raised by his father Ron Paul.

I don't have any evidence to support this, but this is what I suspect.

Racism is something that seems to be taught from parents to children. People usually don't just magically become racists, the learn the hate from their parents.

Now if it is true that Ron Paul is a closet racists, which the media has accused him of being but Ron Paul denies, I suspect that Rand Paul could have learned his racism from his father Ron Paul.

I have been following Ron Paul since around 1994 or 1995 when I became a Libertarian. Not once have I ever seen a word come out of Ron Paul indicating that he was a racist.

Well not once until in December of 2011 when the media started printing articles that says Ron Paul might be a closet racist.

I don't know if Ron Paul is a racist or not. But even if he is a racist, his voting record seems to say he is a freedom fighter for everybody against government tyrants.


Ron Paul and the racist newsletters

Source

Ron Paul and the racist newsletters (Fact Checker biography)

Posted by Josh Hicks at 06:02 AM ET, 12/27/2011

“I’m not a racist. As a matter of fact, Rosa Parks is one of my heroes, Martin Luther King is a hero — because they practiced the libertarian principle of civil disobedience, nonviolence.”

— Ron Paul, responding during a Jan. 10, 2008, CNN interview to questions about racially charged articles published in the “Ron Paul Political Report” during the 1990s.

“I never read that stuff. I was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written, and it’s been going on 20 years that people have pestered me about this.”

— Ron Paul, responding to more questions about the newsletters during an interview with CNN, Dec. 21, 2011

Accusations of racism against Paul first surfaced during the candidate’s 1996 congressional campaign, when Democratic opponent Lefty Morris unveiled racially tinged quotes from a newsletter the Texas libertarian had published during his 12-year hiatus from public office.

The national media latched onto the issue during Paul’s 2008 presidential bid, after the New York Times and the New Republic highlighted derogatory statements about blacks and gays from the bulletins.

The issue resurfaced as Paul moved to the front of the GOP pack in recent weeks, and the congressman appeared to be fed up with the matter as he walked away from an interview in which a CNN reporter pressed for more answers.

We won’t be the judge of whether Paul is a bigot, but we can examine the extent to which he had control over his publications. Are we to believe he never reviewed the newsletters that bore his name? Would he have eliminated the messages if he’d seen them?

THE FACTS

Paul helped form the Ron Paul & Associates corporation in 1984, and the now-defunct company, for which he served as president, began publishing newsletters the following year. The monthly publications included Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report, the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Investment Letter.

Columnist Jonathan Chait noted in a recent column for New York magazine that statements of racist paranoia appeared regularly in Paul’s newsletters, representing a “consistent ideological theme.”

Many of the derogatory comments came from a 1992 commentary in the Political Report titled “A Special Issue on Racial Terrorism.” The article blames African American men for the L.A. riots, saying, “The criminals who terrorized our cities — in riots and on every non-riot day — are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are.”

Another passage from the article tries to explain how the tumult finally ended, saying, “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began.” The writer gives no credit to police, state troopers or soldiers from the National Guard and Army and the Marines who helped end the chaos.

That wasn’t an isolated incident with Paul’s newsletters. A separate article from the Survival Report said, “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

The Paul publications also criticized homosexuals, saying gays “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick,” referring to AIDS.

The articles contain no bylines and no signatures, just Ron Paul’s name in giant letters on the publications’ mastheads. This leaves a tiny bit of wiggle room for the Texas congressman to defend himself. That’s what he’s done, telling the media he has “no idea” how the inflammatory comments made it into print.

“I honestly do not know who wrote those things,” he told CNN in January 2008.

Paul has compared himself to a major publisher who had little time to review every article that went to press, even though his newsletters came out monthly — and were thin at that. He claims he was too busy practicing medicine and giving speeches across the country to pay attention to the bulletins.

“It’s been rehashed for a long time, and it’s coming up now for political reasons,” Paul told CNN in January 2008. “Everybody in my district knows I didn’t write them, and I don’t speak like that. Nobody has ever heard me say anything like that.”

Certain passages in the newsletters suggest that Paul, or at least someone using his persona, wrote for the publications. One article from October 1992 refers to the congressman’s hometown, saying, “even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense, for the animals are coming.”

In an article earlier that year, the author — writing in the first person — announced his decision to chair the economic advisory committee for Pat Buchanan’s presidential bid, a post Paul took up at the time.

The libertarian magazine Reason cited an anonymous source close to the 2008 Paul campaign attributing much of the content from Political Report to Lew Rockwell, founder and chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian economics center.

Rockwell, whose name appears on the newsletters under the title of contributing editor, told the New Republic that he did not write the controversial articles. He said that there were “seven or eight freelancers involved at various stages” during his tenure with the publishing outfit.

As for Paul’s comments about Rosa Parks, the candidate didn’t show much love for his “hero” when he voted against a measure to award a Congressional Gold Medal to the civil rights icon in 1999. To be fair, he opposed giving the medal to Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II as well, so it doesn’t appear race had anything to do with his stance.

Paul has generally applauded lawmakers for wanting to issue the Gold Medal, but he insists they should put up their own money instead of asking taxpayers to foot the bill, which typically runs about $30,000 for each award.

As for King, a 1992 Ron Paul newsletter referred to the civil rights leader as a “world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours.”

THE PINOCCHIO TEST

Paul offers implausible explanations for why so many derogatory statements made it into his publications, insisting he knew nothing about them. It’s hard to believe that a man who wants to oversee the entire U.S. government — albeit a smaller version — would provide zero oversight of his publications, or even bother to read them from time to time.

The Texas congressman has to take responsibility for the newsletters that bear his name, or at least acknowledge negligence as the former head of the company that produced them. He earns three Pinocchios [on a scale of 0 to 4] for failing to do so.


Gasp! Ron Paul won't bomb Iran?????

If it's OK for the American Empire and Israel to have nuclear weapons why shouldn't it be OK for Iran to have nuclear weapons?

I guess the reason is that government bullies are like human bullies and that they would prefer that their victims be unarmed and unable to defend themselves.

The easiest way for Iran to prevent the American Empire from invading it is for Iran to get nuclear weapons.

As an American who is against the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan I support Iran effort to get nuclear weapons. Mainly because I know after Iran gets a nuke the American Empire will not invade them.

Source

Romney, Perry slap at Paul on Iran

Associated PressBy KASIE HUNT and PHILIP ELLIOTT

MUSCATINE, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Perry on Wednesday assailed Ron Paul for saying the U.S. has no business bombing Iran to keep it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, drawing a sharp contrast with their rising rival as he returned to Iowa days before the lead-off caucuses.

"One of the people running for president thinks it's okay for Iran to have a nuclear weapon," Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, said in this eastern Iowa city in response to a question from someone in the audience. "I don't."

It was the first time that Romney has challenged Paul directly since the Texas congressman jumped in polls. Neither he nor Perry, the Texas governor, named Paul, but the target was clear.

"You don't have to vote for a candidate who will allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. Because America will be next," Perry said in Urbandale, reiterating a line of argument from a day earlier.

"I'm here to say: You have a choice," Perry added.

The stepped-up criticism of Paul, the libertarian-leaning Republican, comes as surveys show he's in contention to win Tuesday's caucuses.

In recent days, conservative opponents including Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann have increased their criticism of Paul on social issues, foreign affairs and inflammatory comments in his decades-old newsletter. By tearing him down, they hope voters will give their campaigns another, closer look after a season marked by candidates who have risen quickly in public standing only to fall back down.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who's slide in surveys over the past week has come as Paul has risen, said Tuesday he couldn't vote for Paul if he were to become the GOP nominee and called his views "totally outside the mainstream of every decent American" during an interview with CNN.

Paul, for his part, was meeting with supporters near Des Moines, his first visit to the state since before the campaigns went dark over the Christmas holiday. He planned a series of events over the next two days as his campaign looked to take advantage of a burst of momentum as the caucuses approach.

A conservative with libertarian leanings, Paul commands strong allegiance from his supporters but appears to have little potential to expand his appeal and emerge as a serious challenger for the nomination. Yet he could complicate other candidates' pathway to the nomination.

His opponents were spreading out across the state to woo potential caucus-goers, many of whom are still undecided amid a flood of television and radio ads.

In Independence, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum mingled with 25 people at a diner and touted his plan to give a tax break to businesses that move their operations back to the United States.

He told diners: "Things are going great, we've got momentum." He began airing a new radio ad Wednesday that promotes his hardline opposition to abortion and describes him as a "father of seven, a home-schooler and a devoted husband for 21 years."

Romney kicked off a three-day bus tour in the eastern edge of the state, in Muscatine, and shook hands with an overflow crowd at Elly's Tea and Coffee House. The line to get in stretched into the street.

Beginning the day, Romney told Fox News Channel that he was only joking Monday when he criticized Gingrich's failure to earn a spot on the Virginia ballot as something out of the sitcom "I Love Lucy."

"I hope the speaker understands that was humor, and I'm happy to tell my humorous anecdote to him face to face," Romney said.

Gingrich on Tuesday challenged Romney to make the "I Love Lucy" comparison to Gingrich's face.

Perry, looking to recapture the enthusiasm that greeted his entry into the race in August, railed against Washington and Wall Street insiders as he met with conservatives for breakfast near Des Moines.

"Why should you settle for less than an authentic conservative who will fight for your views and your values without apologies?" he asked, delivering the core rationale for his candidacy.

The packed crowd of conservatives in Urbandale applauded as he pledged to champion a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget, secure the border within a year and crack down on illegal immigration. He also said he would bring his faith with him into the Oval Office, a nod to the Christian conservatives who have strong sway in the nominating process.

___

Elliott reported from Urbandale. Associated Press writer Mike Glover in Independence contributed to this report.


Romney, Paul polling on top ahead of Iowa caucuses

Source

Romney, Paul polling on top ahead of Iowa caucuses

Dec. 28, 2011 07:25 AM

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The months of turmoil among Republicans bidding to become the party nominee to challenge President Barack Obama head into a final sorting process in Iowa next week with Mitt Romney and Ron Paul leading a field of seven candidates.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, and Paul, a long-serving Texas congressman, are running neck-and-neck in the Midwestern state that holds precinct nominating caucus meetings Tuesday night. The caucuses are a test of the campaign financing and organization that can winnow candidates who fail to finish in the top tier.

Obama's approval ratings have improved slightly, but he remains vulnerable because of Americans' dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy and it's laggardly recovery from the Great Recession.

But the chaotic nature of the Republican race, in which a series of candidates have shot to the top of the field and just as rapidly lost support, has been a gift to Obama, diverting attention from the difficult politics surround his hopes for re-election in November.

With Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, quickly fading from the top tier after being targeted by a barrage of attack ads, Iowa voters are about evenly split between the more moderate Romney and the extreme libertarian views of Paul.

But many Republican conservatives across the country distrust Romney because of his past positions on abortion, gay marriage and health care. Paul, meanwhile, is seen as too extreme by mainstream party voters.

The Iowa caucuses likely will force some candidates to drop out of the race and shape the coming six-month string of state-by-state primary elections and caucuses leading up to the Republican National Convention in August that officially names a candidate.

Romney, who returns to Iowa Wednesday, has projected the confidence of a front-runner as he looked past his Republican rivals and accused Obama of "misguided policies and weak leadership."

As if previewing the themes of a general election campaign, Romney said Tuesday that in his campaign travels, "I've heard stories of The Great Obama Recession, of families getting by on less, of planned-for retirement replaced by jobs at minimum wage," he said during campaigning in New Hampshire, which holds its primary Jan. 10.

He said of Obama: "Gone is the 'hope and change' candidate. ... Instead the campaigner-in-chief divides Americans, engages in class warfare and resorts to distortion and demagoguery."

Aides added that by design, Romney spoke not far from where Obama campaigned four years ago this week en route to an Iowa caucus victory that set him on the road to the presidency.

Romney, making his second run for the nomination, has relied on a well-funded and disciplined organization, generally strong debate performances and deep-pocketed allies to keep his balance as others have risen to challenge him and fallen back.

Romney's biggest challenge is the distrust of him among many conservative Republicans who have split their support among several candidates whose policy promises are more palatable to them, including Gingrich, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

Also in the contest is former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who decided not to focus on Iowa but, instead, to try to make his stand in New Hampshire.

Attacking in waves, Romney's rivals cast him as unreliable on central conservative issues such as taxes, abortion and gay rights.

"I've been a conservative all my life," said Gingrich, who began a bus tour through Iowa on Tuesday. He called Romney a "Massachusetts moderate ... who campaigned to the left of Teddy Kennedy."

Perry, on a bus tour of Iowa in hopes of resurrecting his once-promising candidacy, touted his own conservative credentials. "My idea of gun control? Use both hands," said Perry.

Paul also was due in Iowa on Wednesday where he planned to meet with his die-hard supporters near Des Moines. But his rivals were already working fervently to disqualify Paul on social issues, foreign affairs and even his decades-old newsletter.

Gingrich said Tuesday he couldn't vote for Paul if he were to become the Republican nominee and called his views "totally outside the mainstream of every decent American" during an interview with CNN. [ Translation - if Ron Paul gets elected he will stop the other members of Congress and the Senate from using the American treasury as their personal piggy bank. And actually represent the people of American, instead of the royal members of Congress and the Senate. ]

Perry said his fellow Texan was dangerous during a campaign stop in Council Bluffs: "You don't have to vote for a candidate who would allow Iran to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and then ultimately America." [ Translation - Ron Paul doesn't think the military industrial complex should be treating the American treasury as their personal piggy bank either and would end all the wars American is now in, along with ending the corporate welfare for the military industrial complex. ]


In Iowa, rivals put heat on Paul

Source

In Iowa, rivals put heat on Paul

by David Espo - Dec. 28, 2011 11:30 PM

Associated Press

NEWTON, Iowa - Texas Rep. Ron Paul received a welcome befitting a man with a suddenly serious chance to win next week's Iowa Republican presidential caucuses as he arrived in the state Wednesday for a final burst of campaigning.

His rivals attacked him, one by one.

If the 76-year-old libertarian-leaning conservative was bothered, he didn't let it show. He unleashed a television commercial that hit Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. In his remarks, he lumped all his rivals into one unappealing category.

"There's a lot of status quo politicians out there," Paul told a crowd of a few dozen potential caucus-goers who turned out to hear him on the grounds of the Iowa Speedway. "If you pick another status quo politician, nothing's going to change."

The audience applauded, but by day's end, it appeared that yet another contender might be rising: former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

"We have the momentum," he proclaimed.

A new CNN poll released Wednesday put Romney at the front of the pack despite his decision to spend relatively little time in Iowa, where a conservative GOP electorate has resisted his candidacy. Romney had 25 percent support, compared with Paul of Texas at 22 percent and Santorum gaining ground at 15 percent. Former House Speaker Gingrich of Georgia, who was the front-runner just a month ago, trailed with 13 percent in the CNN poll. The poll was conducted Dec. 21-27 and has a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

The politicking, meanwhile, was unending.

Paul got a welcome surprise -- and rival Michele Bachmann an embarrassing one -- when the state chairman of the Bachmann campaign announced Wednesday night that he was throwing his support to Paul. The endorsement came just hours after he had appeared with the Minnesota congresswoman.

Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson said he was switching from Bachmann to Paul because the Texas congressman was the most conservative of the top-tier candidates, an assessment sure to encourage those who want Bachmann to drop out of the race and free up her supporters for a conservative candidate with stronger backing.

Two politically active pastors in Iowa's robust evangelical conservative movement were already pushing that idea. They disclosed an effort to persuade either Santorum or Bachmann to quit the race and endorse the other.

"Otherwise, like-minded people will be divided and water down their impact," said Rev. Cary Gordon, a Sioux City minister and a leader among Iowa's social conservatives.

There was no sign either contender was interested.

For months, Romney has remained near or at the top of public opinion surveys in Iowa, as Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, businessman Herman Cain and Gingrich rose briefly to challenge him.

Romney has bent without breaking in the face of each challenge, benefiting from his own well-funded campaign, attack advertisements funded by deep-pocketed allies and the missteps of his challengers.

Paul's surge represents the latest threat, and in some respects, the unlikeliest, coming from a man whose views on abortion, the war in Iraq, Iran and other issues are at odds with those of most Republicans.

At the same time, his anti-government appeal appears to tap into the desire of a frustrated electorate for profound change in an era of high unemployment and an economy that has only slowly recovered from the recession.

"In the last couple of weeks, I fell into Ron Paul's camp," said Bob Colby of Newton, who spent 21 years in the military and is a former employee at a now-shuttered Maytag plant in town.

"I threw my hands up" in frustration, said Colby, who added that he supported Romney in the 2008 caucuses and chose Sen. John McCain over Barack Obama that fall.

In his remarks, Paul drew applause when he said, "I want to cut $1 trillion out of the budget the first year," and eliminate deficits in three.

"The debt is unsustainable once it reaches a certain point," he said. "My whole effort is to face up to it."

Paul strongly suggested the United States withdraw its troops from Asia, and drew laughter from the audience when he noted Obama's recent announcement that Marines would be deployed to Australia.

"How long do we have to stay in Korea? We've been there since I was in high school," he said, making no mention of the recent death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and the resulting uncertainty about the nuclear-armed nation.

Nor did Paul refer in his remarks to his recent statement in a campaign debate that he would not consider pre-emptive military action to block Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

"You don't have to vote for a candidate who will allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Because America will be next. I mean, I'm here to say: You have a choice," Perry told an audience near Des Moines.

"I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that the commander in chief would think it was irrelevant to have an Iranian nuclear weapon," Gingrich said.


Ron Paul is 'unelectable'????

Think of it this way. You can vote for an electable Republican canidate who is a Republican version of Hitler, Stalin or Mao, or you can vote for an unelectable candidate who is a public servant, not a royal ruler.

Are you going to waste your vote on a Republican version of Hitler, Stalin or Mao, or vote for somebody who will represent you?

You can waste your vote on an electable candidate who thinks he is your royal master, or you can vote for Ron Paul who's voting record over the past 20 years says he is a "public servant"

Ron Paul is against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ron Paul is also against the illegal and unconstitutional "drug war""

Source

Jon Huntsman says Ron Paul is 'unelectable'

By Maeve Reston

December 28, 2011, 7:07 p.m. Reporting from Pelham, N.H.— Stepping back out on the campaign trail in New Hampshire after the Christmas break, GOP contender Jon Huntsman joined a chorus of his rivals Wednesday in criticizing Ron Paul – calling the Texas congressman "unelectable."

During a town hall style meeting in Pelham near the Massachusetts border Wednesday night, Huntsman urged voters to look beyond the polls and punditry to select their candidate. The former Utah governor called GOP frontunner Mitt Romney, who led his nearest rival by more than 25 points here in a new CNN poll, a product of "the establishment" and then moved on to Paul: "He's not electable at the end of the day," Huntsman told his audience. "Let's be real about it."

When asked by reporters to elaborate, Huntsman said Paul’s policies were "out there" and said voters would not support a candidate who advocates "isolationism when you’ve got threats like Iran that are on the ascent."

"Things like legalizing drugs – I just don’t think is a position that is going to sell with a lot people who are going to turn out and make a big difference in the end," he said. "You’ve got to get mainstream support to win the election, and I just don’t think he’s going to be able to get enough mainstream support to win."

While other Republican candidates have been pressed in recent days to say whether they would support Paul if he became the Republican nominee – Gingrich said he wouldn’t vote for the Texas congressman; Romney said he would – Huntsman declined to answer that question, calling it a hypothetical.

"I’m just making the case for electability," Huntsman said. "At the end of the day, we’ve got to win back some people who actually voted for Barack Obama just to make the math work…. I believe I’m the most electable candidate in the race right now."

Though Huntsman was among the candidates recently who did not gather enough signatures to qualify for the Virginia ballot – an organizational failure that a voter questioned him about during the town hall – he argued that a favorable result in New Hampshire would help his campaign overcome those kinds of hurdles.

"Our philosophy has always been that if we come out of New Hampshire with a head of steam, we’re going to do well in South Carolina; we’re going to do well in Florida, in which case you’re going to get the early delegate states who are going to want to be with the most electable candidate, which will have been proven at that point."

Huntsman said the recent revelations about incendiary newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name in the 1990s had also raised questions about the Texas congressman’s electability.

"You’ve got to own up to that history, and ultimately he’s going to have to explain that to the American people if he wants to get enough support to actually be a legitimate player."


Ron Paul's grandfatherly advice for Iowans

"Stop the wars. Stop the spending. Bring our troops home"

"I'd like to repeal the Patriot Act."

"The people who got bailed out, they should suffer. They should go bankrupt, not us"

cut $1 trillion at the outset and eliminate the Education Department and other federal agencies

Source

Ron Paul's grandfatherly advice for Iowans

December 28, 2011 | 1:26 pm

Ron Paul's going to win in Iowa. Mitt Romney's going to win the GOP presidential nomination. Newt Gingrich is going to blow his stack.

There. Now you don't have to pay attention for the next few months to the Republican presidential race.

But you will. And so will I. Why? Because it's like watching a car wreck: You know what's going to happen, but you can't turn away.

Plus, because one of the "drivers" is Ron Paul, it heightens the surreal aspect of it all. It's as if your eccentric grandfather suddenly ran for president, and people actually started paying attention to what he said.

For Paul, no problem is so complex that there isn't a simple solution. Take this excerpt from a Times story Wednesday on a speech he gave in Iowa:

He drew applause for his attacks on foreign aid and overseas entanglements ("Stop the wars. Stop the spending. Bring our troops home"), a federal government assault on individual liberty ("I'd like to repeal the Patriot Act."), big banks ("The people who got bailed out, they should suffer. They should go bankrupt, not us") and federal spending (cut $1 trillion at the outset and eliminate the Education Department and other federal agencies).

Forget 100 days. President Paul would solve our nation's problems by lunch on the first day. Wonder what he'd find to do by the end of the week? [ Probably make the job of President a part time job, and cut the pay of the President to a tenth of what it is now. ]

But Romney isn't taking any chances. Ever the daring campaigner, he took after Paul over his stance on -- Iran. Romney said he believes Tehran poses a great security threat, despite what a certain unnamed rival (Paul) says.

He made his comments at a coffee shop in Muscatine, Iowa. I'm sure it set the place abuzz. Having once worked in Iowa, I can tell you from personal experience that the folks there are mighty concerned about Iran, its leadership, its pursuit of nuclear weapons and so on. Those kind of stories are usually high up on the radio and TV news shows, right after pork belly prices, beef prices, the grain report and the weather.

As for Gingrich, he was somewhat less subtle about Paul: "I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American."

Ouch. Of course, Gingrich -– or rather, a pro-Gingrich Super PAC, which he doesn't control, wink wink -- isn't much happier with Romney. It put out a flier this week in Iowa that labels Romney "the second most dangerous man in America." (After President Obama.)

Imagine what he'd say if he hadn't decided to run a totally positive campaign. Or what he'll say once he loses in Iowa.

But I'll let next week's winner have the final say. Call it Grandpa's thought for the day:

Paul closed his remarks by reminding Iowans that "a message is going to be sent" from next week's caucuses, the first voter test of the 2012 nomination contest.

"It's going to go one way or the other," he said.

How true.


Ron Paul’s constitutionalist record (Fact Checker biography)

Ron Paul doesn't sling the BS like the rest of the crooks in DC do!!!!

A quote from the socialists at the New York Times which Ron Paul should be proud of:

"Paul has distinguished himself as the most consistent candidate in the GOP field. He votes according to his principles almost 100 percent of the time, establishing a reputation as an uncompromising representative. In short, voters know exactly what to expect from him -- which should make it easy to decide whether to vote for him."

Source

Ron Paul’s constitutionalist record (Fact Checker biography)

Posted by Josh Hicks at 06:02 AM ET, 12/29/2011

“Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the ‘one exception to the Gang of 535’ on Capitol Hill.”

-- Biographical excerpt from the Ron Paul campaign site

“I have something different to offer. I emphasize civil liberties. I emphasize a pro- American foreign policy, which is a lot different than policemen of the world. I emphasize monetary policy and these things that the other candidates don’t talk about. But I think the important thing is, the philosophy I’m talking about is the Constitution and freedom.”

-- Paul, during Fox News GOP debate, Dec. 15, 2011

Paul has long portrayed himself as a constitutionalist, one who supports limited government and who values individual liberty above all else.

The term constitutionalist holds various meanings and incorporates numerous philosophies, but the main premise is that the government derives its powers from the Constitution. Paul applies the definition strictly, calling for the abolition of all federal programs not expressly authorized by the document.

We examined Paul’s record to find out whether he has lived up to his rhetoric. Could he really spend nearly 22 years in Congress without violating his principles?

THE FACTS

Paul has earned the nickname “Dr. No” for refusing to cut deals and for opposing virtually every piece of legislation that could be interpreted as government overreach or interference with the free market.

The congressman’s unwillingness to budge has made him a political loner at times. Congressional Quarterly noted in 1999 that he cast the lone `no’ vote in the U.S. House nearly twice as many times as all other members combined, a fact that Texas Monthly cited in 2001.

The Washington Post’s vote tracker shows that Paul voted with his party just 73 percent of the time during the 2011 congressional session, despite working in an exceptionally party-loyal House. By comparison, Sen. John McCain, known as a maverick within the GOP, voted with Senate Republicans 92 percent of the time.

Beyond his voting record, the Texas libertarian has had a hard time gaining support for his proposals. The Post’s David Fahrenthold reported that just four of the 620 Paul-sponsored measures have made it to the House floor for a vote, and only one has become law.

Paul has been a consistent champion of smaller government, calling for elimination of various departments and agencies such as the IRS, the Federal Reserve and the Department of Education. The first bill he introduced as a congressman back in 1976 would have eliminated the then-newly-formed Occupational Safety and Health Administration -- the measure failed to make it out of committee.

The surging GOP candidate has argued for a gradual return to the gold standard. Speaking of President Richard Nixon’s decision to abandon the system, he said: “After that day, all money would be political money rather than money of real value. I was astounded.”

Paul goes to great lengths to practice what he preaches, refusing to register for his federal pension and returning unused money from his congressional office. He has also spurned federal funds as a physician, opting to work on Medicare and Medicaid patients for free.

The Texas congressman has also voted against the interests of many of his constituents at times, opposing federal flood insurance and farm subsidies in the agriculturally-focused, coastal district he represents.

Paul has opposed international aid, saying the government should not force taxpayers to “pay for foreign welfare.” He argues that citizens and private organizations should donate independently to charity if they want to help a good cause.

The congressman has also opposed domestic aid, having voted against funding for victims of Hurricane Katrina. He asked at the time: “Is bailing out people that chose to live on the coastline a proper function of the federal government? Why do people in Arizona have to be robbed in order to support the people of the coast?”

Paul has spoken out against the Civil Rights Act, voting in 2004 against a bill honoring the 1964 measure. He has said the legislation “did not improve race relations or enhance freedom,” but instead “increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”

Paul has also called for the U.S. to reduce its global military presence. ”I wouldn’t have a military-industrial complex that demands so much, but I wouldn’t have a welfare state either,” he said during a March interview on MSNBC. “And under those conditions, you don’t need an income tax. And I think that’s the way it should be.”

We found one contradiction in Paul’s recent voting record: he supported federal funding for an education program this year, agreeing to reauthorizing the D.C. opportunity scholarship initiative that provides charter-school vouchers for children living in the nation’s capital. However, the bill was later revised, and he voted against it.

The Paul campaign did not respond to a Fact Checker request for an explanation of why the candidate supported the original bill to renew the D.C. opportunity scholarship program.

Paul has voted overwhelmingly against federal involvement in schools during his political career, having opposed No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, funding for Hispanic and black colleges, and even incentives to retrofit schools with environmentally friendly features.

THE PINOCCHIO TEST

Paul has distinguished himself as the most consistent candidate in the GOP field. He votes according to his principles almost 100 percent of the time, establishing a reputation as an uncompromising representative. In short, voters know exactly what to expect from him -- which should make it easy to decide whether to vote for him.

We’re won’t weigh in on the merit of Paul’s ideas, but it’s clear from our research that he sticks to his beliefs and rarely contradicts himself. He earns a prized Geppetto’s checkmark for being an unwavering constitutionalist, at least by his definition of the term.


Ron Paul’s World

Source

December 29, 2011, 12:22 am

Ron Paul’s World

By JAMES KIRCHICK

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.


Do Shave, Don’t Tweet

I guess I wouldn't be allowed to work on Ron Paul's campaign!!! Even with that I would still vote for the guy, even though I don't normally vote for Republicans or Democrats.

Source

Marching Orders for Paul’s Volunteers: Do Shave, Don’t Tweet

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Published: December 28, 2011

DES MOINES — Ron Paul’s college-aged volunteer army — a core of the powerful ground organization that is the envy of rivals — is descending on Iowa from around the nation to coax people to the state’s Republican caucuses as he seeks to pull off what only months ago seemed like an unthinkable victory here on Tuesday.

Ron Paul and his libertarian views have appealed to many youthful voters, including David Richardson, of Newton, Iowa, who attended a campaign event in his hometown on Wednesday.

Four years after young people flocked to the state to help propel the campaign of Barack Obama, this radically different movement is embracing a 76-year-old veteran Texas congressman who is drawing supporters for his libertarian and antiwar views.

And they say they are under strict orders: To look, dress, shave, sound and behave in a way that will not jeopardize Mr. Paul’s chances. Even before flying here on their own nickel, some students said they had been instructed to cover up tattoos and told that their faces should be fresh-shaved or beards neatly trimmed, wearing only nice clothes that one described as “business casual.”

“No tats,” another volunteer, Rocco Lucente, said as he ticked off the rules after arriving at the airport Tuesday night. No liquor, no drugs and, he said, no “fraternizing in the dorms, nothing like that.”

He said the standard expected of volunteers was: “What would Ron Paul do?”

Volunteers are considered Mr. Paul’s most potent weapon beyond his vast and acerbic advertising campaign in Iowa, where the caucus results often turn on the ability of campaigns to turn out supporters. After hundreds of college volunteers arrived here this week, they were whisked to a Y.M.C.A. camp the campaign rented in Boone, an hour outside Des Moines, where some said they expected to be drilled on get-out-the-vote techniques and how to use scripts to talk to prospective caucusgoers.

Much of their efforts have been cloaked in secrecy: They said that once they arrive at the camp they are under orders not to speak to journalists or make postings on social media sites about their activities in Iowa, a provocative limitation for a movement lubricated by the effective use of the Internet. A half-dozen Paul aides declined to comment or allow a visit to volunteers. “We’re keeping our cards close to our vests,” said Jesse Benton, the national campaign chairman.

For college students together a long way from home, the mood was all business as Tuesday’s caucuses neared and they began canvassing in full force.

“There was no partying that we saw or heard,” said Dave Sherry, the camp director, who emphasized that the Y.M.C.A. was simply renting out the camp and was not aiding Mr. Paul. On Wednesday morning, he said, the few hundred students ate breakfast, had a meeting and then left the camp, saying they did not expect to be back until after 10:30 p.m.

The requirements about personal conduct seemed to be a recognition that bringing in a cadre of outsiders carries risks in Iowa, a lesson Howard Dean learned the hard way eight years ago when thousands of intense and orange-stocking-hatted volunteers from out of state apparently rubbed many Iowans the wrong way, with Mr. Dean placing third in what was the beginning of the end of his campaign.

Part of the Dean camp’s problem was that it did not know what to do with all its volunteers. But for a well-oiled organization like Mr. Paul’s, “it’s a decent strategy, since it’s such a labor-intensive process,” one rival campaign official here said. “Outside folks can be helpful.”

For the students, much of Mr. Paul’s appeal derives from civil libertarian views like ending the federal ban on marijuana and other drugs, as well as his desire to end foreign wars and his small-government credo.

Mr. Lucente, a 19-year-old from Ithaca who is a sophomore at Alfred University, said the Republican Party had been hijacked by a “social conservative war party” that had lost sight of the “idea that the government should be out of the way,” one of Mr. Paul’s abiding principles.

Mr. Lucente’s ride from the airport — along with two dozen others who arrived the same time — was on a Partridge Family-style school bus painted red, white and blue and festooned with slogans like “Pro Gun Ownership,” “Pro Homeschool,” “No Lobby $” and “Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.”

Josh Plotkin, 21, an American who traveled from his job in Brazil, said Mr. Paul was the only candidate serious about shrinking the national debt and noted that his message had been consistent for decades. “You can take a speech of his from the ’80s and it’s still applicable today,” Mr. Plotkin said.

That determination and consistency also help explain his support among the young, Mr. Plotkin said. “It’s 500 college kids away from home and who are volunteering not to drink,” he said.

The college effort is critical to Mr. Paul, who is depending on a nontraditional base to bring him victory on Tuesday. In his speeches he is also careful not to dismiss Occupy Wall Street protesters — as most of his Republican rivals have — and he goes out of his way to praise young people as having a better grasp of the meaning of liberty than many lawmakers in Washington.

What remains to be seen is whether new scrutiny of racist statements in newsletters carrying Mr. Paul’s name — which he has disavowed — will complicate his support. The timing of the caucuses during the holiday break is also likely to dampen turnout from his college supporters.

And some students also question the real-life impact of Mr. Paul’s policies on programs that might affect them. One student from Grinnell asked Mr. Paul on Wednesday afternoon whether he could name something he thought government could do to help the country. Another asked about the future of the Peace Corps under a President Paul.

His answer may not have been what either had hoped for, as he cited defense and protection of currency as reasonable governmental duties but added, “Probably about 80 percent of what the federal government does is technically unconstitutional.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Newton, Iowa.


Rick Santorum rips Ron Paul

“Congressman Paul would take every ship we have and bring it into port,’ Santorum said. He also suggested that Paul, a Texas Republican, would be ineffective as president. “He’s passed one bill in 20 years,” he said.

Didn't Thomas Jefferson say something like "he who governs least governs best"? In that case Ron Paul has got my vote!!!

The founders also thought the military should be disbanded when the American government is not involved in any wars. Something which Ron Paul would approach doing.

Source

As he surges in Iowa, Rick Santorum rips Ron Paul

By James Oliphant

December 29, 2011, 12:55 p.m. Reporting from Muscatine, Iowa— Five days away from the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum was greeted here by a packed room of supporters and a battery of cameras and reporters, suggesting that his long-shot presidential campaign, once just a wisp on the radar screen, had finally found a spark just when it needed it the most.

It was just a day earlier that a new CNN-Time poll showed Santorum in third place, surging past rivals Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. The poll seemed to confirm what had been felt here for days—that social conservatives here, a key to success in this state, were finally beginning to rally around a single candidate.

And so Santorum awoke to a changed world. For months, the former Pennsylvania senator had criss-crossed the state with little return on his investment, and had been, for all intents and purposes, an afterthought in the political conversation.

But Gingrich’s decline in the state seems to have given Santorum an opportunity. And Thursday he seemed to be relishing the moment, speaking to the media at length and passionately addressing the overflow crowd at a restaurant here along the Mississippi River.

“We’ll turn this country around and Iowa will be the spark that did it,” he told the crowd.

While Santorum spent most of his time criticizing President Obama, he took some shots at Ron Paul, a favorite to win next Tuesday’s caucuses. He warned the crowd that Paul’s foreign policy beliefs jeopardized the nation’s security, saying Paul would dismantle the U.S. Navy.

“Congressman Paul would take every ship we have and bring it into port,’ Santorum said. He also suggested that Paul, a Texas Republican, would be ineffective as president. “He’s passed one bill in 20 years,” he said.

And in a sign that Santorum was now being taken more seriously as a threat, he was ripped on the campaign trail by Rick Perry for requesting earmarks as a senator. Perry’s campaign also cut a new radio ad attacking Santorum.

In his remarks in Muscatine, Santorum resisted the suggestion that he was merely a candidate for evangelicals and other social conservatives, highlighting his national security credentials and emphasizing his role in reforming welfare while in the Senate in the 1990s. “We’ve got a pretty broad message. It’s not just focused in one area,” he said. “We’re excited that we’re resonating beyond the social conservatives.”

But, inevitably, talk returned to matters of faith and family, Santorum’s most comfortable zone. He was asked about his opposition to same-sex marriage. He restated his support for traditional unions and blasted liberals who, he said, “want to drive faith and the conclusions that come from faith out of the public square and out of the public law.”

He invited supporters of gay marriage to “come to the public square, make your case” but to not condemn him for his beliefs. Santorum, of course, has notoriously been victimized by an online effort to connect his name with a gay sexual act.

He said that it’s the “birthright” of every child to have a “mom and a dad.”

Santorum disputed the argument that he would be a poor candidate in the general election against Obama, arguing that his blue-collar Pennsylvania roots would help him do well in Midwestern swing states. He served in the House and two terms in the Senate before being routed by Democrat Bob Casey in 2006, knocking him from public life.

Afterward, one attendee, Steve Maher of Muscatine, said he was now leaning toward caucusing for Santorum over Bachmann. “The thing that concerns me about Bachmann is not so much her as a candidate but her organization,” he said, referring to the defection of Bachmann’s Iowa campaign manager, Kent Sorenson, to Paul’s camp. And, he said, he had soured on Gingrich, who has been the target of a blitz of negative ads in the state. “I’m suspicious of his backround,” he said. “Some of the ads are starting to get to me.”

“I’m looking for someone where I don’t have to worry about their morality or integrity,” Maher said.

Earlier in the day, Santorum spoke to about 40 people at an event in Coralville, Iowa. He’ll wrap up the campaign day in Davenport.


Steve Benson attacks Ron Paul

While recent news articles seem to say that Ron Paul might have racists attitudes towards Blacks I have not seen anything indicating that Ron Paul is sexist, homophobic or anti-Semitic.

Ron Paul denies that he is a racist.

Of course I don't know who is telling the truth. I just read this stuff in the newspapers and don't know who is lying or telling the truth.

But I do know that for the last 20 years Ron Paul has consistently voted against the big government police state. And because of that I support him.

Even if Ron Paul is a closet racist and thinks that Blacks are inferior to Whites, I am sure that he believes in the Libertarian principles that the government should not discriminate against Blacks, woman, gays or Jews.

Ron Paul wants to end all the current wars American is involved in. That includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Ron Paul is the ONLY presidential candidate with those views, and I agree with Ron Paul on that.

Ron Paul is one of the few candidates who wants to end the illegal and unconstitutional drug war and legalize ALL drugs. I also agree with him on that.

Ron Paul wants to limit the Federal government to the powers it is given in the constitution. Again I agree with him on that.

Ron Paul wants to slash the size and scope of government. Again I agree with Ron Paul on that.

Steve Benson may be stretching the facts to say that Ron Paul is homophobic.

I support the right of gay folks to have a marriage.

But the Constitution does not allow the Federal government to define what marriage is. Which means that per the 10th Amendment, that right is left to the STATE governments.

So I think Ron Paul is right in saying that the gay marriage issue is something the the Feds should not be addressing because the Constitution doesn't let the Feds address that issue. And thus "gay marriage" should be an issue reserved for the State government.

Again I agree with that.

Myself I don't think you should have to get permission from the government to marry. If I had my way marriage would be a contract between two or more people. And of course those two or more people would decide all the facts about the marriage contract, not some government nanny.

Ron Paul doesn't shovel the BS and say what ever lies it takes to get him elected. Ron Paul has been consistently saying the same stuff for the last 20 years and I agree with most of his stuff.

The only MAJOR problem I have with Ron Paul is he wants to make abortion illegal. I disagree with him on that.

It's the woman's body, and the woman should be the only person who should decide if she is going to have an abortion.

 
Steve Benson attacks Ron Paul - I'm racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic ... Other then that I am the perfect candidate
 


Ron Paul can win the Iowa caucuses

Wow! A statement like that from the socialists at the Washington Post!!!!

Source

Mitt Romney, Iowa frontrunner

Posted by Chris Cillizza at 09:30 AM ET, 12/30/2011

It’s been a long, strange trip for Mitt Romney in Iowa, but with just days left before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, the former Massachusetts governor is the odds-on bet to claim victory in the Hawkeye State.

Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney greets supporters during a campaign event at J's Homestyle Cooking December 29, 2011 in Cedar Falls, Iowa. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)That Romney sits atop the Iowa field — and two new polls (here and here) confirm that status — heading into the final weekend speaks to just how odd a race this has been so far.

For most of the Iowa campaign, Romney ignored the state. He skipped the allegedly predictive Ames Straw Poll and, heading into the final weeks of the race, had made only seven visits to the state.

While Romney kept Iowa at arm’s length, a cavalcade of conservative alternatives to him rose and fell — starting with Rep. Michele Bachmann and running all the way through former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

Romney bided his time, wary of exerting too much time and, more importantly, money in a state that he had dumped $10 million into four years ago, only to finish a distant second behind former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

In many ways, Romney’s caution was warranted, as he is still viewed skeptically by the state’s sizeable social conservative community.

But unlike four years ago, when Huckabee united social conservatives behind his candidacy, the evangelical vote has been and almost certainly will continue to be splintered between the other five candidates running active campaigns in Iowa this time around. (Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman is skipping Iowa to focus on New Hampshire.)

What’s happened then is a sort of bifurcated Iowa caucus. Everyone not named Romney is trying to be the social conservative/tea party darling. Romney alone is going for the establishment Republican vote.

Romney has consolidated that vote — probably good for around 25 percent on caucus night — while the other candidates continue to pummel one another in hopes of seizing the social conservative slot in the race. There’s still some time for that to happen (four days to be exact), but if no one has been able to coalesce social conservatives in Iowa yet, why would it happen now?

Below is our look at the Iowa caucus field. The candidate ranked No. 1 (Romney) is considered the most likely to emerge victorious on Tuesday night.

To the Line!

6. Michele Bachmann: It’s amazing to think that the winner of the Ames Straw Poll could well be headed to a last-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

But, that’s the reality that the Minnesota congresswoman has to face, as the Ames win wound up being the high point of her campaign. The same day she won the straw poll, Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the field — and stole all of Bachmann’s momentum. By the time Perry flamed out, it was too late for Bachmann.

She has struggled mightily to raise money — surprising given her success on that front as a House member — and the Kent Sorenson debacle seemed like an unfortunately fitting symbol of her fleeting Iowa hopes.

5. Newt Gingrich: Even when the former speaker was soaring in Iowa, there was a sense in the political community that it couldn’t last. After all, Gingrich’s three decades in public office amounted to an opposition researcher’s dream, and it was only a matter of time before the onslaught began. And begin it did.

Led by “Restore Our Future” — a super PAC aligned with Romney — and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a furious negative barrage pummeled Gingrich over the past three weeks — an onslaught that has done him irreparable damage.

Gingrich’s biggest problem wasn’t the negative ads, though. It was his inability/unwillingness to hit back. Gingrich’s ad buys were far smaller than those of his main rivals and his pledge not to go negative proved, for the billionth time, that a negative attack unanswered is a negative attack believed.

4. Rick Perry: We decided to leap-frog Perry over Gingrich for one reason: money. Perry, as well as his aligned super PAC, have spent massive sums on television ads in Iowa and will continue to do so right through caucus night.

While the momentum among evangelicals seems to have moved to former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, the Texas governor remains a viable option for social conservative voters who are still looking for someone to be for.

Perry’s performance on the trail — and the debate stage — earlier this fall seems to have foreclosed the possibility that he will be a top-tier candidate in the race. To continue on as a relevant member of the field, he probably needs to break into the top three, which, at the moment, looks possible if not probable.

3. Rick Santorum: Santorum, long mocked as the only candidate who never got a spark in Iowa, may be having the last laugh. His surge into third place in a CNN/Time poll suggests he is the last flavor of the moment for social conservatives and evangelicals in the state.

As we wrote Thursday, it’s hard to see Santorum cracking the top two on caucus night, but he may not need to. Iowa is all about over-performing expectations, and if Santorum really does wind up in the “show” spot on Jan. 3, he will have won himself a shot in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

2. Ron Paul: We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Ron Paul can win the Iowa caucuses.

Paul probably has the hardest ceiling of any of the candidates. His views — particularly on foreign policy — put him way outside the mainstream of the Republican Party and make it hard for him to pick up support from rank-and-file GOPers still looking for a candidate.

That means that for Paul to win, he needs to a) turn out all of his loyalists, which shouldn’t be a problem given their devotion to him, and b) expand the caucus electorate with non-Republicans who register on the day of the caucuses. Knowing whether Paul can pull the latter off is virtually impossible but, aside from possibly Romney, the Texas Republican has the best organization in the state.

A Paul Iowa win would be a HUGE news story, but likely wouldn’t change the dynamic of the overall race much, as it’s virtually impossible to imagine him as the Republican nominee in 2012.

1. Mitt Romney: If Romney wins Iowa, his chances of winning the nomination increase dramatically.

An Iowa victory would give Romney a major burst of momentum heading into the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary where he has had held a steady (and quite wide) lead for months.

Back-to-back wins might not seal the deal for Romney, but it would come darn close to doing just that. (Worth noting: No non-incumbent Republican candidate has won both Iowa and New Hampshire.)

If Romney does win Iowa and New Hampshire, the 11 days between the Granite State primary and the South Carolina primary would be filled with GOP establishment types doing everything they can to judge the race over and declare Romney as the winner. His rivals could obviously ignore that chatter, but it wouldn’t be easy. At al


Kelly Clarkson Endorses Ron Paul

Source

Kelly Clarkson Endorses Ron Paul

Us Weekly – Thu, Dec 29, 2011 12:00 PM EST

The American Idol champ voiced her support for Republican Ron Paul Wednesday via Twitter, and says that should the Texas politician snag a 2012 presidential bid, he's got her vote.

"I love Ron Paul. I liked him a lot during the last Republican nomination and no one gave him a chance," Clarkson, 29, who considers herself to be a Republican but supported the Democrats in the last election, Tweeted Wednesday. "If he wins the nomination for the Republican party in 2012 he's got my vote. Too bad he probably won't."

When Clarkson's Twitter followers accused the politician, 76, of racism and homophobia, the singer was forced to clarify her endorsement.

"I love all people and could care less if you like men or women," she replied to one Twitter follower after fans cited articles published in a Paul newsletter from the late 1970s until 1990. "I have never heard that Ron Paul is a racist or homophobe?" (Paul has denied he wrote the commentary and said he does not agree with the statements.)

"I am really sorry if I have offended anyone. Obviously that was not my intent. I do not support racism. I support gay rights, straight rights, women's rights, men's rights, white/black/purple/orange rights," an under-fire Clarkson continued. "I like Ron Paul because he believes in less government and letting the people (all of us) make the decisions and mold our country. That is all. Out of all of the Republican nominees, he's my favorite."

Iowa voters will begin the process to select 2012's Republican presidential nominee next week.


Sanctions against Iran are 'acts of war'

Source

Ron Paul: Sanctions against Iran are 'acts of war'

By Paul West

December 29, 2011, 11:20 a.m.

Reporting from Perry, Iowa— Defending himself against charges of isolationism, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told voters in Iowa on Thursday that western sanctions against Iran are "acts of war" that are likely to lead to an actual war in the Middle East.

Paul, one of the leading contenders to win next week's Iowa caucuses, said Iran would be justified in responding to the sanctions by blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. He compared the western sanctions to a hypothetical move by China to block the Gulf of Mexico, which Americans would consider an act of war.

He also said he would not respond militarily to keep the strait open—because he would not consider it an act of war against the U.S. But if he were president, he would report to Congress on the issue, leaving it up to lawmakers to declare war if they wanted.

"I think we're looking for trouble because we put these horrendous sanctions on Iran," Paul told a midday audience at the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa. He said the Iranians are "planning to be bombed" and understandably would like to have a nuclear weapon, even though there is "no evidence whatsoever" that they have "enriched" uranium.

Apparently alluding to Israel and its nuclear-weapons arsenal, Paul said that "if I were an Iranian, I'd like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them."

To approving applause from a crowd of about 125, the Texas congressman said that "we always seem to have to have a country to bash," linking the current saber-rattling against Iran to previous hawkish rhetoric that led to conflicts in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

"If you want to quiet things down," he said, referring to Iran, "don't put sanctions on them" because it's "just going to cause more trouble."

He said an Iranian blockade would be the most likely response to tighter sanctions because Iran has "no weapons of mass destruction" and shutting down the strait is "the most" it could do.

"I think the solution" to current tensions with Iran "is to do a lot less a lot sooner and mind our own business and then we would not have this threat of another war," he said to applause.


Who is Lew Rockwell????

Lew Rockwell is allegedly one of the people responsible for the alleged racist articles in Ron Paul's newsletters.

I have been a Libertarian since around the end of 1994 or beginning of 1995 and I certainly remember seeing his name in a number of Libertarian articles I have read. I don't remember any specific articles written by Lew Rockwell, but I do remember the name.

I just Googled on Lew Rockwell and this is his web site:

http://lewrockwell.com
Over the years almost all of the Libertarian stuff I have read in Libertarian publications like Reason Magazine, Liberty and other publications has matched the Libertarian Platform.

I don't every remember reading any racist, anti-gay, anti-Jewish, anti-Mexican or other hate stuff in them.

Occasionally I have read stuff that didn't jive with the Libertarian platform, but that didn't happen much.

My self as a Libertarian I have always thought that most of those groups where great places for Libertarians to reach out and find new members.

Gay folks have been discriminated against for years by religious nut jobs and government tyrants who want to codify their anti-gay hate into government regulations and laws.

For that reason I think that gays would be great people to recruit as Libertarians, simply because they have been discriminated against by government tyrants.

The Libertarian platform specifically addresses the gay issue and says:

Sexual orientation, preference, gender, or gender identity should have no impact on the government's treatment of individuals, such as in current marriage, child custody, adoption, immigration or military service laws. Government does not have the authority to define, license or restrict personal relationships. Consenting adults should be free to choose their own sexual practices and personal relationships.
I have also thought that the Libertarian Party should actively seek out Latinos or Mexicans for our members. One reason for that is the Libertarian Platform supports free trade and immigration. And I live in the southwest where we have lots of Mexicans and Latinos coming here from Mexico and Central American. This is the party platform on that issue:
We support the removal of governmental impediments to free trade. Political freedom and escape from tyranny demand that individuals not be unreasonably constrained by government in the crossing of political boundaries. Economic freedom demands the unrestricted movement of human as well as financial capital across national borders.
I disagree with this part of the Libertarian platform, because I don't think government nannies should be allowed to tell anybody where they can live or work:
However, we support control over the entry into our country of foreign nationals who pose a credible threat to security, health or property.
Lew Rockwell also has an entry on wikipedia which is suspect was written by himself.


When is it OK for the President to order a murder???

Only Mr. Paul, the libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas, argued for a more limited view of presidential power.

Asked to describe the circumstances under which the Constitution permits a president to order the targeted killing of a citizen who has not been sentenced to death by a court, Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Huntsman, Mr. Perry and Mr. Romney all said that a president could order the killing of a citizen

Mr. Paul, by contrast, described the circumstances in which a president could order the extrajudicial killing of a citizen in one word: “None.”

Source

In G.O.P. Field, Broad View of Presidential Power Prevails

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: December 29, 2011

WASHINGTON — Even as they advocate for limited government, many of the Republican presidential candidates hold expansive views about the scope of the executive powers they would wield if elected — including the ability to authorize the targeted killing of United States citizens they deem threats and to launch military attacks without Congressional permission.

As Republicans prepare to select their party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Newt Gingrich, Jon M. Huntsman Jr., Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have provided detailed answers about their views on executive power in response to questions on the topic posed by The New York Times, which is publishing the full text of their responses online.

The answers show that most of them see the commander in chief as having the authority to lawfully take extraordinary actions if he decides doing so is necessary to protect national security. Only Mr. Paul, the libertarian-leaning congressman from Texas, argued for a more limited view of presidential power.

The views of the other four candidates who responded echoed in many respects expansive legal theories that were advanced by President George W. Bush. In certain significant ways, they dovetailed as well with the assertive posture taken by President Obama since taking office, like his expanded use of drones to kill terrorism suspects around the world — including a United States citizen.

The answers come against the backdrop of a decade of disputes over the scope and limits of presidential authority. Because executive branch actions are often secret and courts rarely have jurisdiction to review them, the views of the president — and the lawyers he appoints — about the powers the Constitution gives him are far more than an academic discussion.

Instead, in practice, a president’s views can influence such momentous matters as whether and how the country commits acts of warfare abroad, the rights of American citizens at home and the ability of government officials to keep information secret from lawmakers, the courts and the public.

Asked to describe the circumstances under which the Constitution permits a president to order the targeted killing of a citizen who has not been sentenced to death by a court, Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Huntsman, Mr. Perry and Mr. Romney all said that a president could order the killing of a citizen who joins an enemy force that is at war with the United States, at least under certain conditions.

“My preference would be to capture, interrogate, and prosecute any U.S. citizen who has engaged in acts of war against the United States,” Mr. Romney wrote. “But if necessary to defend the country, I would be willing to authorize the use of lethal force.”

The Obama administration embraced similar reasoning as the basis for a drone strike in Yemen this year that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen whom executive branch officials accused of being a terrorist operative.

Mr. Paul, by contrast, described the circumstances in which a president could order the extrajudicial killing of a citizen in one word: “None.” Similarly, while Mr. Paul said that a president should not order a military attack without Congressional permission unless there was an imminent threat, the other four candidates agreed that a president could do so if he decided it was necessary.

An exception to that pattern was the use of signing statements to claim a right to bypass new statutes — often, provisions in bills that limit executive power — a president signs into law.

The three current and former governors among the candidates — Mr. Perry, Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Romney — each described circumstances in which he would use the device to raise constitutional concerns about legislation, with Mr. Romney outlining the most assertive version.

The two former House colleagues, Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Paul, said they would not issue such statements. (Mr. Gingrich has taken a more assertive view about constitutional disagreements with the judicial branch, saying presidents may lawfully ignore Supreme Court rulings.)

Two other Republican candidates, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, did not answer the questions. Mr. Obama did not either; his re-election campaign said he had “pursued policies that strengthen our security” while “upholding our laws and values” and suggested that he would debate such matters in greater detail after Republicans chose his opponent.

Mr. Obama — along with Mr. Romney and Mr. Paul — participated in a similar project by The Boston Globe during the 2008 presidential primary campaign. His record in office shows how circumstances and the assumption of power can alter views expressed in a campaign.

Asked if a president could bomb Iran without Congressional permission, Mr. Obama, then a senator, said, “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

In 2011, after the United Nations approved an air campaign in Libya to protect civilians, Mr. Obama — without Congressional permission — deployed the American military to join NATO allies in airborne attacks on Libyan government forces. In asserting the legality of that step, the Justice Department issued a memorandum saying that Mr. Obama had inherent constitutional power to do so because he could “reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest.”

Later, Mr. Obama also adopted the view — overruling Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers — that he could lawfully continue the bombing and drone strikes beyond a 60-day clock imposed by the War Powers Resolution because they did not constitute the sort of “hostilities” regulated by that law.

In the survey answers, Mr. Perry criticized that approach, arguing that Mr. Obama should have instead asserted that the War Powers Resolution was an unconstitutional constraint on his wartime powers rather than employing “a convoluted, unbelievable definition of ‘hostilities.’ ”

Presidential power has been growing since the early years of the cold war and ratcheted forward under the Bush administration, which asserted sweeping theories of presidential powers to bypass statutory and treaty constraints, justifying a range of detention, interrogation and surveillance policies. As a candidate, Mr. Obama accused Mr. Bush of undermining the Constitution.

After taking office, Mr. Obama ordered strict adherence to antitorture rules; justified his counterterrorism policies as authorized by Congress and consistent with international law, rather than invoking any inherent powers as commander in chief; and sought to handle terrorism cases that arise on domestic soil exclusively through the criminal justice system rather than using the military.

Still, Mr. Obama has outraged civil libertarians by keeping in place the outlines of many Bush-era policies, like indefinite detention and military commissions for terrorism suspects. And in the Libya air war and the targeted killing of Mr. Awlaki, he went beyond Mr. Bush’s executive-power record.


Chicago Tribune wants to shoot the messenger???

It sounds like the Chicago Tribune doesn't like the Libertarian message and is criticizing Ron Paul for delivering the message.

Source

In book, Paul criticized AIDS patients, harassment victims

Peter Hamby CNN Political Reporter

10:25 p.m. CST, December 30, 2011

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) - Texas Rep. Ron Paul has distanced himself from a series of controversial newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s that bore his name and included inflammatory and racially charged language.

As the newsletters burst into view, first during his 2008 presidential bid and again in recent weeks after he climbed to the front of the Republican race in Iowa, Paul has blamed the writings on ghostwriters. He said he was not aware of the "bad stuff," as he described it.

But one of Paul's own books, published solely under his name, contains several passages that could be problematic as he attempts to push his libertarian message into the political mainstream.

In his 1987 manifesto "Freedom Under Siege: The U.S. Constitution after 200-Plus Years," Paul wrote that AIDS patients were victims of their own lifestyle, questioned the rights of minorities and argued that people who are sexually harassed at work should quit their jobs.

The slim, 157-page volume was published ahead of Paul's 1988 Libertarian Party presidential bid and touches on many of the themes he continues to hammer on the stump.

Returning again and again to the of concept of "liberty," he hails the virtues of the gold standard, attacks the Federal Reserve and defends the rights of gun-owners. [Correct, the problem is big government]

But the book, re-issued in 2007 during Paul's last presidential bid with a cover photograph of an ominous SWAT Team, has so far escaped scrutiny amid the latest furor over his newsletters.

In one section of the book, Paul criticized people suffering from AIDS or other contagious diseases for demanding health insurance coverage. [I agree, demanding health insurance for a disease you already have is like demanding fire insurance for your uninsured home that just burnt down. In both cases you should have bought the insurance before the problem started.]

"The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim - frequently a victim of his own lifestyle - but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care," Paul wrote.

In another chapter on the rights of individuals outside of government – the central theme of Paul's libertarian philosophy - he sharply criticized the "absurdity" of politicians who try to bestow differing rights on various social and ethnic groups. [Again I agree. All people should have the same rights!!!!]

It's dangerous to craft a separate set of rights for groups like Hispanics, African-Americans, children, employees and the homeless, Paul wrote.

"Until all these terms are dropped and we recognize that only an individual has rights the solution to the mess in which we find ourselves will not be found," Paul explained.

"Every year new groups organize to demand their 'rights,'" he continued. "White people who organize and expect the same attention as other groups are quickly and viciously condemned as dangerous bigots. Hispanic, black, and Jewish caucuses can exist in the U.S. Congress, but not a white caucus, demonstrating the absurdity of this approach for achieving rights for everyone."

Paul also defended the rights of an individual to "control property and run his or her business as he or she chooses," without interference from "the social do-gooder." [Again I agree]

In a passage first flagged by the Houston Chronicle in 2007, Paul then claimed that sexual harassment should not be a violation of one's employment rights. [I think firing an employee because she won't go on a date with the boss is stupid, but for the government to make it illegal is just as stupid]

"Employee rights are said to be valid when employers pressure employees into sexual activity," Paul wrote. "Why don't they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable."

Paul's campaign manager Jesse Benton defended the book and said the candidate "has been speaking out for decades that rights do not come from belonging to a group."

"Rights come because we are all individuals, endowed by our creator, and Americans must look beyond race or creed and recognize that we all deserving of the same Liberty," Benton told CNN in an email. "This truth is a tenant of natural law and the only way we will achieve a color blind and truly free society."


Ron Paul's more kooky moments

The author of this editorial also seems to dislike Libertarian values and instead of attacking the Libertarian values, he attacks the messenger who is Ron Paul.

Source

Ron Paul's more kooky moments

Clarence Page

January 1, 2012

So now it's Ron Paul's turn to be a top-tier Republican presidential candidate? It's about time. He deserves it. The Grand Old Party's 2012 contest is driven heavily by tea party politics. It is appropriate that GOP voters give rise to an original tea partier , even if he sounds a little cracked.

After all, as some of his many younger fans like to say, the aging Texas congressman and physician is to the tea party what Snoop Dogg is to hip-hop, an "original gangsta": He's got his mind on your money and your money on his mind, especially if he can keep it away from tax collectors.

But few of his supporters expect him to be elected. Like Chicago Cubs fans, the Paulistas don't like to be disappointed, but after two failed runs, they have grown accustomed to it.

Paul's rise comes partly out of desperation as the GOP's conservative "Anybody But Mitt" faction runs out of alternatives to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the party establishment's odds-on favorite. A half-dozen other hopefuls soared and flamed out. Paul will fail, too, I predict, as his curmudgeonly pronouncements remind voters why they didn't support him sooner. [To be honest I think most GOP members hate Ron Paul because if he gets elected Ron Paul will attempt to end big government as we know it, destroying their empires!]

I'm not referring to the good doctor's crackpot side, like recently revived reports of his 20-year-old newsletters, sprinkled with racist and anti-Semitic comments. Paul denounces the statements and claims he never read them. Yet they appeared in the newsletter that bears his name and funneled dollars to him from eager subscribers. Paul is not that much of a details man, he wants us to believe, yet he wants to run the White House. Fat chance. [Again that's a lie! The details are get rid of as much government as you can, as quickly as possible]

But, Paul says enough these days to alienate fellow conservatives without having to probe into his past.

On his visit to "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" before Christmas, for example, he brought his biggest applause with views his own party tends to oppose. [Which probably means people are sick of big government as we know it]

Gay marriage? "My position on marriage," he said, "is that the government just ought to just stay out of it totally and completely and quit arguing about it."

Marijuana legalization? "The role of the federal government is to protect liberty," he said, including "our right to do to our body what we want, what we take into our bodies."

Foreign policy? He's an isolationist. He criticized the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, thinks Iran poses little threat to the U.S. and wants to end all foreign aid programs, even to Israel. In general, he would repudiate decades of foreign policies supported by both parties.

Even on the party's signature tax-and-spend opposition, Paul goes over the top. His ideal federal income tax cut, he said, would be "before 1913," the year it was born with the ratification of the 16th Amendment.

In his first presidential year, Paul said, "I'd like to cut spending by $1 trillion." And how would he get Congress or the country to go along with that? Ah, well. Like a barbershop grouch, Paul has more gripes than answers. [Wrong again. He has the answer and it is cut government to the bone! Something socialists and government bureaucrats hate!]

But few of his exuberant supporters worry much about who will pay the price for Paul's political dreams, since few actually expect him to be elected. They want to "send a message" to the GOP and the nation, they say. But even if the controversial congressman surprises us with his strength in the upcoming primaries, what message does his extremism send?

I can think of two. The first is one that the Paulistas don't want: a short-term disaster for Republican prospects and a big boost to their nemesis, President Barack Obama. Paul's kooky extremism only helps to reinforce Team Obama's efforts to paint today's Republicans as nutty enough to make Sarah Palin sound like Margaret Thatcher.

But in the long run, Dr. Paul's outside-the-box thinking, like Ross Perot's maverick 1992 presidential campaign, does bring attention to serious fiscal questions that neither party is eager to take on: What should be the role of government in the new century? How big should it be? How can we modernize a social and financial system designed for an earlier industrial age to suit the new global economy?

Those are the questions that this election should be about. Beyond today's partisan cat fights and media grandstanding, we need a serious debate about the country's future between thought leaders on the right and left. Unfortunately winner-take-all politics keep getting in the way.

Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at chicagotribune.com/pagespage.

cpage@tribune.com


It's about principles, not getting elected!!!!!!

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Paul at home in Texas on weekend before Iowa vote

Associated Press

By PAUL J. WEBER

LAKE JACKSON, Texas (AP) — The last time Ron Paul's congressional district was redrawn, he ended up with NASA's Johnson Space Center as a new neighbor. A group of Houston businessmen soon invited their new congressman for a primer on the value of the space shuttle.

Paul's reply came in a note they thought was a joke. "He told them space travel isn't in the Constitution," said Patricia Gray, a former state Democratic lawmaker once nudged to challenge the Republican.

Paul's dismissal wouldn't matter. He'd still cruise to re-election as always.

With polls giving Paul a chance to win Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, the mercurial congressman has once again dismissed the conventional political playbook. He spent the last weekend before the 2012 voting begins at home in warm Lake Jackson rather than campaigning in the cold of Iowa.

It's the latest in a long list of "He did what?" decisions that detractors point to when arguing Paul will be unable to build on a successful showing in Iowa and eventually capture the GOP nomination.

Supporters note his two decades of electoral invincibility in Texas' 14th Congressional District. But some who live in Paul's home district and know him best still question the viability of an approach and a political orthodoxy that would doom the average incumbent.

"His ideas are wonderful, but you wonder if you can really run the United States in 2012 with strictly those ideas," said John Grotte, a Paul supporter and retired engineer. "He really hasn't changed that much with the flow of the times. So you wish you could take about 60 percent of him, take another 20 percent of something, just a pure politician and stick them together, and you'd have a pretty jim-dandy guy."

Paul has remained loyal to his brand of libertarianism while representing his coastal Texas district. When Hurricane Ike pummeled the Gulf Coast city of Galveston in 2008, Paul voted against money to help his imperiled constituents.

Officials at the district's shipping ports try other members of the Texas congressional delegation when seeking money for dredging. Even neighbors who've carpooled with his children to swim practices and praise Paul's principles say they wish he would have made some allies during all his years in Washington.

In his campaigns, Paul is true to his calls to shut down the Federal Reserve, return the country's currency to the gold standard and halt all military interventions overseas.

At 76, Paul is older than Lake Jackson itself. Dow Chemical Co. created the city for employees in the 1940s, mapping out parts with a business-minded pragmatism.

The Lutheran, Baptist and Methodist churches are lined in a row on Willow Drive because, said retired Dow employee Adrian Zambala, "that's the street where they decided the churches would go."

Residents tell stories of Paul biking around town in too-short shorts and know it's their congressman in the saddle from his habit of keeping one arm slung low to his side when he's worn out from pedaling.

The district runs nearly 200 miles along the Texas coast, skirting Houston's suburban core, and ending north of where Hurricane Rita clipped the coast in 2005. The congressman known as "Dr. No" later stuck to his libertarian principles and voted against federal dollars for Rita recovery efforts.

In the next election, Democrat Shane Sklar won the backing of port officials, earned newspaper endorsements and gained the support of the farm bureau in the largely rural district. Sklar tried to seize on Paul's vote as a slap in the face to the district's storm-struck residents. Paul beat him easily, winning 60 percent of the vote.

Sklar said Paul did it in part with the same formula he's used to establish his foothold in Iowa, relying on a loyal core of supporters who can raise money quickly. In Texas, he's used the money to flood the Houston airwaves each election.

Paul "can raise $2 million with a keystroke," said Gray, who represented Galveston in the Texas Legislature. "But the national Democratic Party would never donate money. I told them, 'I'm sick of you guys coming down here and asking us to raise money, and then we get a decent candidate and can win the race, and you won't give a dime to help.' And they say, 'You can't beat him.'"

In the presidential race, Paul lacks such a dominate advantage in fundraising. He also can't rely on the personal touch he's used so effectively in his campaigns for Congress.

Many of Paul's supporters in his Texas district know him as a 76-year-old former obstetrician who has delivered the children and grandchildren of hundreds of his constituents, and as the politician who sends the Paul family cookbook throughout the district every holiday season.

"My grandmother's never voted Republican in her life, and she always gets a birthday card from him," Sklar said.

If Paul doesn't succeed in his presidential campaign, his career in elected politics will come to an end. He has said he won't seek re-election to Congress while making his third run for the White House. That disappoints Jeff Ward, a chiropractor whose patients include members of Paul's staff.

"I think he'd make a phenomenal president," Ward sad. "I just don't think he's going to make it through the caucuses coming up."


Ron Paul doesn't shovel the BS

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Ron Paul leaves rosy outlooks, campaign promises to the other GOP candidates

By Nia-Malika Henderson, Published: January 1

DES MOINES — At nearly every event, Ron Paul begins on a high note. He generally smiles, introduces a member of his family, talks up his campaign and says how pleased he is with the way things are going.

And then, for the next 45 minutes or so, he outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist.

There will be a total collapse of the economy. An eruption of violence in the streets. Martial law is just around the corner.

Paul says he would like to cut $1 trillion out of the budget.

“People say that means everybody will suffer,” he adds. Some probably will, he concedes, but “they should have to suffer.”

And then there are the sorts of ominous predictions he made at an evening rally here Wednesday: “There are certain events that are coming that are going to happen — they are going to be very dangerous. They might come in a day, a week or a year.”

Not exactly morning in America.

Paul’s sky-is-falling message goes against everything a successful American politician is supposed to do. In the land of hope and change, where a little malaise can undercut a campaign, it is almost always the sunniest candidate who succeeds.

But the Republican congressman from Texas is betting that the usual optimism and laundry list of promises — millions of jobs, bringing people together, changing the tone in Washington — is not what voters want to hear this year. The latest Iowa polls, which show Paul in a virtual tie for first place with Mitt Romney ahead of Tuesday’s caucuses, suggest that he has found an audience.

“I want someone to give it to me straight. We aren’t getting a lot of fluff, and he isn’t offering us a prize or a present or something to make us feel good,” said Tom Icatar, 65, who saw Paul at a West Des Moines town hall. “I think he’s been consistent and honest. He is giving people the bitter medicine they need to have.”

Jordan Sorensen, 23, of Adele, Iowa, said after an event in Perry that “we’ve heard the same old political talk of promising this and that. Ron Paul isn’t the most brilliant speaker, he isn’t great with rhetoric, but it’s refreshing for me to hear something that’s more truthful. He is realistic about what he is working with, and he is less full of it.”

The fact that Paul is resonating with some voters is more reflective of the moment than the man. Paul has long spoken in such apocalyptic terms, but after years of war and financial hardship, his leave-’em-alone foreign policy and get-the-government-off-my-lawn domestic approach is a match for the times. And to his backers, his anti-politician demeanor confirms their sense that he’s telling the truth, unlike what they see as a bunch of overproduced alternatives.

“The others are political-machinery people. They change their message to tell us what we want to hear, not what’s actually needed,” Steve Chase, 63, said at the event in Perry. Paul, he said, is “the least likely to create a situation that will lead to the destruction of everything.”

Most of Paul’s rivals also lay out the difficulties America faces — it’s just that it’s not all they focus on.

Gov. Rick Perry, in ads and on the stump, talks up his faith and his idyllic childhood in Paint Creek, Tex., where he says he learned the value of hard work. He touts the millions of jobs created in Texas on his watch and how domestic energy production can create many millions more.

In Romney’s ads, there are green fields, kids playing baseball, factory workers strolling on the shop floor, and soundtracks of soothing music as the candidate strolls hand in hand with his wife, Ann.

And in his speeches, Romney quotes “America the Beautiful,” promises more and better jobs (11 million to be exact) and invokes what he sees as a pre-Obama heyday linked to Ronald Reagan.

“I’m asking each of you to remember how special it is to be an American,” Romney said in Davenport on Tuesday. “That America is still out there. We still believe in that America. We still believe in that shining city on a hill. We still believe in the America that brings out the best in all of us, that challenges each of us to be better and bigger than ourselves.”

The speech later became the basis for a Romney ad called “American Optimism.”

Paul offers little of this. His ads and rhetoric are filled with images of destruction and decline. There are shuttered stores, dark clouds, barking dogs, and federal department buildings lined up for destruction all set to to urgent music.

Paul says sanctions on Iran will lead to another useless and costly foreign war. Mounting debts and more bailouts will lead to the government printing more money, which will make the dollar worthless. The latest bill to fund the Defense Department is a slip into tyranny.

“If we continue to do what we do, if we have runaway inflation, everybody gets thrown out on the streets, because the whole thing comes down on our head,” he said last week at a town hall at the Iowa Speedway in Newton, in front of about 200 people.

At another stop, he said: “If we continue to [spend money overseas], we will have an economic calamity, we will have runaway inflation . . . we will have violence in the streets, and that will be very, very dangerous.”

Paul does offer a solution to avoid all the calamity he sees — lawmakers should just follow what’s laid out in the Constitution — but he makes no promises to directly improve people’s lives.

“All of a sudden, people are tired of the wars, they are tired of this economy, they are tired of the Federal Reserve, they are tired of Congress spending a lot of money, and they are looking for some change,” Paul said, summing up the state of mind of his audiences. “And I am suggesting one significant change. Why don’t we just follow the Constitution?”

There is one radical change Paul likes: the Internet.

“Fortunately we’re able to get some information out, and a lot of what we’ve done in our campaign makes use of the Internet,” Paul said at a rally in Des Moines.

As might be expected, however, Paul anticipates a problem or two on that front as well.

“But also,” he went on to say, “there’s an attack on the Internet now.”


Socialists and fans of big government hate Ron Paul.

And this seems like a hit piece on Ron Paul by a socialist who is a fan of big government.

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Ron Paul’s quest to undo the party of Lincoln

By Michael Gerson, Published: January 1

Let us count the ways in which the nomination of Ron Paul would be groundbreaking for the GOP. No other recent candidate hailing from the party of Lincoln has accused Abraham Lincoln of causing a “senseless” war and ruling with an “iron fist.” Or regarded Ronald Reagan’s presidency a “dramatic failure.” Or proposed the legalization of prostitution and heroin use. Or called America the most “aggressive, extended and expansionist” empire in world history. Or promised to abolish the CIA, depart NATO and withdraw military protection from South Korea. Or blamed terrorism on American militarism, since “they’re terrorists because we’re occupiers.” Or accused the American government of a Sept. 11 “coverup” and called for an investigation headed by Dennis Kucinich. Or described the killing of Osama bin Laden as “absolutely not necessary.” Or affirmed that he would not have sent American troops to Europe to end the Holocaust. Or excused Iranian nuclear ambitions as “natural,” while dismissing evidence of those ambitions as “war propaganda.” Or published a newsletter stating that the 1993 World Trade Center attack might have been “a setup by the Israeli Mossad,” and defending former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and criticizing the “evil of forced integration.” Each of these is a disqualifying scandal. Taken together, a kind of grandeur creeps in. The ambition of Paul and his supporters is breathtaking. They wish to erase 158 years of Republican Party history in a single political season, substituting a platform that is isolationist, libertarian, conspiratorial and tinged with racism. It won’t happen. But some conservatives seem paradoxically drawn to the radicalism of Paul’s project. They prefer their poison pill covered in glass and washed down with battery acid. It proves their ideological manhood. In many ways, Paul is the ideal carrier of this message. His manner is vague and perplexed rather than angry — as though he is continually searching for lost car keys. Yet those who reject his isolationism are called “warmongers.” The George W. Bush administration, in his view, was filled with “glee” after the Sept. 11 attacks, having found an excuse for war. Paul is just like your grandfather — if your grandfather has a nasty habit of conspiratorial calumny. Recent criticism of Paul — in reaction to racist rants contained in the Ron Paul Political Report — has focused on the candidate’s view of civil rights. Associates have denied he is a racist, which is both reassuring and not particularly relevant. Whatever his personal views, Paul categorically opposes the legal construct that ended state-sanctioned racism. His libertarianism involves not only the abolition of the Department of Education but also a rejection of the federal role in civil rights from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is the reason Paul is among the most anti-Lincoln public officials since Jefferson Davis resigned from the United States Senate. According to Paul, Lincoln caused 600,000 Americans to die in order to “get rid of the original intent of the republic.” Likewise, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 diminished individual liberty because the “federal government has no legitimate authority to infringe on the rights of private property owners to use their property as they please.” A federal role in civil rights is an attack on a “free society.” According to Paul, it is like the federal government dictating that you can’t “smoke a cigar.” The comparison of civil rights to the enjoyment of a cigar is a sad symptom of ideological delirium. It also illustrates confusion at the heart of libertarianism. Government can be an enemy of liberty. But the achievement of a free society can also be the result of government action — the protection of individual liberty against corrupt state governments or corrupt business practices or corrupt local laws. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent 1,000 Army paratroopers to Arkansas to forcibly integrate Central High School in Little Rock. This reduced Gov. Orval Faubus’s freedom. It increased the liberty of Carlotta Walls LaNier, who was spat upon while trying to attend school. A choice between freedoms was necessary — and it was not a hard one. Paul’s conception of liberty is not the same as Lincoln’s — which is not a condemnation of Lincoln. Paul’s view would have freed African Americans from the statism of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act. It would have freed the occupants of concentration camps from their dependency on liberating armies. And it would free the Republican Party from any claim to conscience or power. michaelgerson@washpost.com


With Iowa upset in sight, Ron Paul battles skeptics

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With Iowa upset in sight, Ron Paul battles skeptics

By James Oliphant

January 1, 2012, 2:30 p.m.

Reporting from Des Moines—

On the cusp on the nation’s first presidential contest of 2012 and with Ron Paul a threat to win the Iowa caucuses outright, the Texas congressman continues to insist that he is an electable candidate who should be taken seriously by voters and pundits alike.

At the same time, Paul’s writings and record are undergoing scrutiny like never before — one sign that he’s viewed in some corners as a threat to finish strong here and move on.

Paul appeared on two Sunday talk shows here to make his case to Iowa voters, who will caucus Tuesday evening, arguing that his support was growing despite a new Des Moines Register poll that suggested he was beginning to lose ground in the state to upstart Rick Santorum.

On ABC’s “This Week,” he disputed the notion that he’s a fringe candidate. “If I'm leading in the polls, that means I'm electable. I've been elected 12 times in Texas, when people get to know me. We're doing well in the polls. Our crowds are getting bigger. And the people who are complaining are the ones who are way down in the polls, so they don't have a whole lot of credibility about my electability.” (Video below.) Paul might have been talking about the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and — until recently — Santorum, all of whom of late have taken to repeatedly bashing Paul over his forgiving posture toward Iran. Even amid the attention, it’s a frustrating time for Paul and his ardent admirers. If he doesn’t win Iowa, he’s dismissed yet again by the press as a cult figure. If he does, the focus will be on how a win by Paul might both de-legitimize Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and end up helping to propel Mitt Romney to the nomination. At the same time, rivals such as Bachmann and Perry have centered their campaigns around shrinking the size of the federal government, which Paul has been advocating for years. Paul argues that he, more than any candidate in the field, has the ability to attract independents and Democrats, potential disaffected supporters of President Obama. That’s another reason that critics, should he win, will be quick to call it meaningless, as Iowa allows any resident to register as a Republican on the spot and participate in the caucuses. “I think it's — it's a mistake if people want to write me off and say that I am not with the — with the people. As a matter of fact, it's so appealing that we get a lot of independents and a lot of Democrats coming to our rally, and that's what you need in order to win an election,” Paul said Sunday. But with his rise in the polls have come new questions about the Texas libertarian. Paul was pressed about newsletters published under his name in the 1980s and 1990s, many of which endorsed extreme, conspiratorial or racist views. He has since disavowed the newsletters and repeated again Sunday that he did not write or edit them. “I don't know exactly who wrote them. It's — you know, I had eight or nine people working for me back then. And a lot of people wrote a lot of different things. So I've condemned them and — and did not write them. And I've said this quite a few times,” Paul said. “On the issue of race relations, I'm the one that really addresses it. When we look at the drug war and the imprisonments, the court systems, the death penalty, the imbalance on the suffering of the minorities in our military, whether we have a draft or no draft." “And I think that people ought to, you know, look at my position there, rather than dwelling on eight sentences that I didn't write and didn't authorize and have been, you know, apologetic about, because it shouldn't have been there and it was terrible stuff,” he added. Asked by host Jake Tapper about whether he had ever espoused conspiracy theories involving the 9/11 attacks, Paul called the idea “nonsense.” “I never bought into that stuff. I never talked about it,” he said. “That’s just off the wall.” Paul called his failure to monitor the content of the newsletters a “human flaw.” “I admit that I'm an imperfect person and — and didn't monitor that as well. But to, to paint my whole life on that is a gross distortion, because we have to remember, I didn't write them, I didn't see them before that, and I have disavowed them. That to me is the most important thing,” he said. On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace, too, confronted Paul about his past writings. Citing a book Paul wrote in 1987, he asked about a passage in which Paul wrote that an AIDS sufferer “victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care.” Paul said he wasn’t being homophobic, but instead talking about the risks that come with sexually transmitted diseases. “If a fault comes with people because of their personal behavior — in a free society, people do dumb things — but it isn't to be placed on a burden on other people, innocent people, why should they have to pay for the consequences? I'd say a sort of a nationalistic or socialistic attitude,” Paul said. “But in a free society, people are allowed to act the way they, but they are responsible for their actions.” Wallace went on to ask whether Paul believed in sexual harassment laws in the workplace and Paul made a clear distinction between a physical assault, against which the government should protect citizens, and “rude behavior.” “So, you have to separate those two out. But because people are insulted by, you know, rude behavior, I don't think we should make a federal case out of it. I don't think we need federal laws to deal with that and people should deal with that at home,” he said. Finally, Paul was quizzed about his record in the House. Critics such as Santorum have seized on Paul’s lack of legislative accomplishments to paint him as ineffective. “The American people are sick and tired of Washington and the people who have been in charge have been passing all these bills and I've been voting no all of the time and vote no on these appropriation bills. So, I am the individual that has pointed out this,” Paul said. “So, of course, why would they pass my laws? I wanted to stop this a long time ago. That's why I went to Washington for. “But the tide has changed,” he said. “Now, the opportunity is there. And now, I'm a serious contender.” james.oliphant@latimes.com


Lets hope Ron Paul kicks ass in Iowa!!!

“For somebody that doesn’t have a chance, this is some crowd,” said Monte Goodyk of Sully, Iowa. “This is the beginning of the second revolution.”

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Ron Paul plays to packed house as supporters await victory

By James Oliphant January 2, 2012, 1:25 p.m. Reporting from Des Moines— While other candidates were speaking at coffeehouses and diners on the day before the Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul was greeted by a crowd of 500 and scores of national media who packed a downtown hotel ballroom for a morning event. “This is almost like a real rally,” the Republican presidential hopeful exclaimed. “This is great!” Polls show Paul in a position to pull off an upset victory in the caucuses Tuesday night, an accomplishment that, if it happens, would amount to one extremely sharp stick in the eye of the GOP establishment. The turnout had Paul’s supporters crowing. “For somebody that doesn’t have a chance, this is some crowd,” said Monte Goodyk of Sully, Iowa. “This is the beginning of the second revolution.” Paul was introduced by his son, Rand Paul, the U.S. senator from Kentucky. “There’s energy. It’s overflowing. And it’s coming tomorrow,” Rand Paul told the crowd. “We’re going to win in Iowa tomorrow.” If Ron Paul does win, it will be viewed widely by analysts as a fluke, a one-shot that will do little to derail Mitt Romney’s march to the GOP nomination. But Paul’s supporters don’t buy that — and many of them aren’t interested in supporting other Republican candidates or worrying about what the political press thinks. “I think they’re a bunch of losers, whining and crying,” said Tara Wilkens of Seattle, who came to Iowa to support Paul’s efforts. She called the crowd in the ballroom “super-exciting. It’s contagious!” Ron Paul said the same. "The enthusiasm is growing by leaps and bounds,” he said. “The crowds are getting bigger.” Paul, too, framed the choice Tuesday between him and the rest of the GOP field. “The others represent the status quo, variation of the status quo.” In his speech, Paul hit his marks, talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan, shrinking the size of the federal government, warning about the invasion of personal privacy on the Internet, and criticizing President Obama for signing the recent Defense Authorization Act, which, he said, could lead to the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. “Treason! Treason!” some in the audience shouted. Mandie Devries is a Paul supporter who said she would speak on his behalf at a caucus meeting in Ankeny, Iowa, on Tuesday. “I’m trying to get all my friends and family there,” she said. “That’s really all we can do — fight for the right thing.” Devries said she was unsure whether Paul could pull it off, but Goodyke, a former Romney supporter, was more confident. "He'll win in a landslide," he said. "This guy — he stirs a passion inside of people."


Will Ron Paul send a message to the world?

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Paul tells Davenport crowd caucus will send message worldwide Ed Tibbetts | Posted: Monday, January 2, 2012 In front of a crowd in Davenport that cheered him repeatedly, Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul suggested Monday the groundswell of support for his campaign will send a message far beyond Iowa’s borders. Melding his usual calls for a dramatically smaller government and bringing American troops home, Paul told about 400 people at the SteepleGate Inn in Davenport that his crowds are growing and so is his message. “Tomorrow, we may well send a message that is going to be heard not just throughout Iowa but throughout this country, and believe it or not, it could be heard throughout the world,” he said, just as the audience broke into chants of “Ron Paul, Ron Paul, Ron Paul.” Paul, like the other GOP candidates, was dashing across the state on the last full day of campaigning before Tuesday’s caucuses in an effort to see as many voters as possible. He was traveling with his son, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Referring to a litany of international organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, Ron Paul preached a pullback from overseas relationships. “We shouldn’t be selling out to the WTF, the IMF, the World Bank and to the United Nations. It should be the United States of America,” he said. He also complained about the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which he said basically “repealed” the Constitution’s 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Its enactment stemmed from fear tactics that also were used to build support for the war in Iraq and the federal bailouts, he said. A congressman from Texas, Paul has been drawing large crowds. Polls show him and Mitt Romney leading the GOP field, and Paul is credited with having a strong organization in the state. Many of those young organizers lined the walls at the SteepleGate Inn, and there were several cars with out-of-state license plates in the parking lot. Still, the enthusiasm for him was at volumes far higher than other candidates in their recent visits. When Paul was leaving, several shouted thank-yous to him. Before the speech, Dave Irelan of Davenport said he’s going to go to the caucuses and will support Paul. “I think the federal government should go back to the way it was supposed to be, the way it was intended to be,” he said. “More and more people want change. More and more people are fed up.” In addition to Paul, Romney also campaigned in Davenport on Monday. He started the day with a rally at the Mississippi Valley Fairgrounds. This afternoon, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, will visit his local campaign headquarters, where he will hold a telephone town hall meeting. He’s also slated to be at the Hotel Blackhawk at 9 p.m.


Ron Paul loses in Iowa

Ron Paul comes in third place

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Mitt Romney30,01524.6%
Rick Santorum30,00724.5%
Ron Paul26,21921.4%
Newt Gingrich16,25113.3%
Other19,76316.2%

Iowa caucus results: Romney edges Santorum; Paul finishes third

By Karen Tumulty, Published: January 3

DES MOINES — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney beat former senator Rick Santor­um (Pa.) in the Iowa caucuses by just eight votes, a sign of a splintered and increasingly fractious field as the GOP presidential race moves to New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida.

Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) scored a close but disappointing third-place finish in a state where he had hoped to score a breakout victory. But he told his supporters “there’s nothing to be ashamed of” and urged them to “be ready and raring to move on to the next stop.”

With 99 percent of precincts reporting at 12:36 a.m. Eastern, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) was in a virtual tie with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, leading him by just five votes.

Further back in the pack were three candidates who had been considered leading contenders at earlier points in the race: former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), with 13 percent of the vote, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, with 10 percent. Putting in a particularly dismal showing was Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), with 5 percent.

Earlier in the day, Perry had vowed to continue on to South Carolina and take the fight to Romney. But on Tuesday night, the governor said he planned to go home to Texas instead and “determine whether there is a path forward for myself in this race.”

It is more difficult to see such a path for Bachmann, given her last-place finish and the fact that her campaign strategy had been premised on a strong launch in Iowa, the state where she was born and where she won the GOP straw poll in Ames in August.

But her campaign manager, Keith Nahigian, said Bachmann is going ahead “full steam.”

Gingrich, meanwhile, sounded a note of determination. “There will be a great debate in the Republican Party before we are prepared to have a great debate with Barack Obama,” he said as the final results were coming in.

Though Santorum’s old-fashioned, shoe-leather approach to campaigning paid off in Iowa, the question now is how far he can go from here, given his lack of resources and the need to ramp up a national organization.

In his victory speech, San­torum alluded to concerns that he was not up to a contest with Romney. “Let me tell you what wins in America are bold ideas, sharp contrasts and a plan that includes everyone,” Santorum said.

Santorum also will come under the kind of scrutiny and criticism that he was spared when the other contenders did not view him as a threat.

Paul, for instance, has already branded Santorum “very liberal,” and Perry has described the former senator as “addicted to earmarks.”

For his part, Santorum has said Paul is “disgusting,” and he blamed Paul’s campaign for automated phone calls in which voters were told that the vehemently antiabortion Santorum was, instead, more supportive of abortion rights.

Though Romney’s Iowa vote percentage was almost precisely what he got in 2008, the fragmentation of the field meant that he was spared the kind of defeat he suffered four years ago. This time, he had made a far more modest effort in the state. As he noted Tuesday night, his Iowa staff of five was less than one-tenth the size of his operation in 2008.

And both Paul, a libertarian whose views are out of line with those of most Republicans, and Santorum, an underfinanced social conservative, will struggle to prevail against Romney in the long run.


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Ron Paul looks to capi­tal­ize on top-tier Iowa finish

By Nia-Malika Henderson, Published: January 3

ANKENY, Iowa — Ron Paul wanted some legitimacy this time around, a bigger platform for his movement, and with his third-place showing in last night’s Iowa Republican Caucuses, he might just get it.

On stage before a cheering crowd in a hotel ballroom here as the final votes were being counted, Paul said that winning elections is the best way to promote a cause, declaring himself one of the night’s three winners.

Paul claimed a ticket out of Iowa, vowing to continue his fight, even as his GOP rivals have dismissed him as a fringe candidate and as party leaders have flatly declared him unelectable.

Iowa voters thought otherwise, taking to Paul’s strident antiwar and small-government message in enough numbers to lift him into a finish just a few percentage points behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. Evangelicals, home-schoolers, young people, moderates, libertarians and disaffected Democrats formed an unlikely coalition that led to Paul’s strong showing, and at his Tuesday evening rally he predicted Iowa would be a launching pad to bigger things.

“We have tremendous opportunity to continue this momentum, it won’t be long that there’s going to be an election up in New Hampshire, and believe me, this momentum is going to continue and this movement is going to continue and we are going to keep scoring,” Paul said to his supporters. “So tonight, we have come out of an election where there were essentially three winners, three top vote-getters and we will go on, we will raise the money, I have no doubt about the volunteers.”

The question for Paul, though, is how he can capitalize on one good night in Iowa and turn it into more good nights in New Hampshire, South Carolina and beyond.

As returns came in Tuesday, he got something of a lift from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who said that the Republican Party should not ignore the Texas congressman’s view of fiscal policy or his fervent base of young supporters.

In New Hampshire, Paul has been airing a 60-second TV commercial that touts his consistency and casts him as the only candidate who can take on Washington. A campaign aide said that he will “make a real run at Mitt” in New Hampshire, a firewall for Romney, with a strong ground game and an aggressive ad campaign.

“He has an image problem among conservatives and Republicans on foreign policy, but his anti-Washington message is the strongest, and he has some great spots that are unique and that are breaking through,” said Michael Dennehy, a New Hampshire strategist who advised John McCain in 2008. “He will continue to pick up support in New Hampshire, especially from moderates and independents — but he does have a ceiling, of about 22 to 25 percent.”

On the stump, Paul has led with a strong antiwar message, vowing to shrink the military’s footprint and slash the defense budget.

Paul, who was a flight surgeon in the Air Force, says he has received more donations from active-duty military members than all of his rivals combined, some $112,000. His message of radically shrinking the size of government has especially resonated with young people — particularly men — and over the next days, the campaign will continue to deploy Paul’s son Rand, a Republican senator from Kentucky, as a top surrogate in New Hampshire and South Carolina.

South Carolina has a significant number of evangelicals, who caucused for Paul in Iowa and will probably be a crucial voting bloc in the Palmetto State’s Jan. 21 primary. To appeal to them, the Paul campaign recently started running an antiabortion ad in South Carolina highlighting the Texas congressman’s work as an obstetrician.

Less clear is how his foreign policy stance against military intervention will play out in a state with a sizable military population.

“People that haven’t heard from us yet and haven’t really heard what Ron really stands for on foreign policy, they have to scratch their heads a little bit,” said Jesse Benton, Paul’s national campaign manager. “Luckily we’ve got the resources and the volunteers to be able to communicate directly with the voters and let them know what Ron really stands for.”

In Iowa, at least, that strategy worked well enough for Paul to have doubled the votes he received in 2008, when he campaigned with much the same message.

“Dr. Paul isn’t going to change or tailor his message to fit any audience and that’s what people like about him. We are going to keep doing what we’ve been doing,” said Gary Howard, Paul’s press secretary. “We are in this for the long run.”


Ron Paul, supporters pleased with third-place finish in Iowa

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Ron Paul, supporters pleased with third-place finish in Iowa By Robin Abcarian and Kim Geiger 11:21 p.m. CST, January 3, 2012 If Ron Paul’s fervent supporters were disappointed in his third-place finish in Iowa, they certainly didn’t show it. “Right now, I’m really excited,” said Cullen Comerford, a 19-year-old college student from Ft. Worth who was one of many young adults who trekked to Iowa from all over the country to help Paul in his battle for the GOP presidential nomination. Comerford has been in Iowa for a week, attending as many Paul rallies as possible, phoning voters and knocking on doors to support the 76-year-old candidate. “Top three,” Comerford said, “that’s good enough for me.” And certainly it seemed good enough for Paul, who stood with his wife and family, including his son, Rand, a U.S. senator from Kentucky. Ron Paul cast his third-place showing as a victory for the libertarian-minded ideas he’s been pushing. “What makes me feel good about it is you’re doing something because you believe in something,” Paul told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Ankeny. “That is what’s worthwhile. ... How’s the best way to promote a cause? That is win elections – that’s the way you promote it!” Paul seemed almost giddy as he talked about a recent national poll that questioned respondents about their views on returning to the gold standard – one of his favorite causes. “How long’s it been since they’ve taken a national poll on the gold standard?” Paul asked. The crowd of several hundred chanted, “Dr. Paul! Dr. Paul!” (Paul is a obstetrician/gynecologist who often says he’s delivered more than 4,000 babies.) “I think there’s nothing to be ashamed of, everything to be satisfied, and be ready ... to move on to the next stop, which is New Hampshire,” Paul said. “I’m not disappointed,” said Mike Fortune, a 39-year-old customer service representative who spoke for Paul at his caucus in West Des Moines. “Reagan didn’t win the Iowa caucus the first time he ran. This really isn’t over.” robin.abcarian@latimes.com kim.geiger@latimes.com Abcarian reported from Ankeny, Iowa. Geiger reported from Washington.


Ron Paul comes in third place

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Romney Wins Iowa Caucus by 8 Votes “Onto New Hampshire, let’s get that job done!” Mitt Romney told supporters before being declared the winner. More Photos » By JEFF ZELENY Published: January 3, 2012 DES MOINES — Mitt Romney’s quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum, who fought him to a draw on a shoestring budget by winning over conservatives who remain skeptical of Mr. Romney. In the first Republican contest of the season, the two candidates were separated much of the night by only a sliver of votes, with Mr. Romney being declared the winner by eight ballots early Wednesday morning. But the outcome offered Mr. Santorum a chance to emerge as the alternative to Mr. Romney as the race moves to New Hampshire and South Carolina without Gov. Rick Perry, who announced that he was returning to Texas to assess his candidacy. “Being here in Iowa has made me a better candidate,” Mr. Santorum said, arriving at a caucus in Clive, where he urged Republicans to vote their conscience. “Don’t sell America short. Don’t put someone out there from Iowa who isn’t capable of doing what America needs done.” The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House. With 99 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney, whose views represent the polar sides of the party, each had 24.6 percent. “Onto New Hampshire, let’s get that job done!” Mr. Romney told supporters at a late-night rally, when he was five votes shy of Mr. Santorum. “Come visit us there, we’ve got some work ahead.” The last time the Iowa caucuses produced such a close outcome was in 1980, when George Bush beat Ronald Reagan by two percentage points. Representative Ron Paul of Texas was a close third on Tuesday with 21 percent of the caucus votes. “We will go on,” he said in an upbeat speech. “There is nothing to be ashamed of.” The Iowa caucuses, which sounded the opening bell of the Republican contest, did not bring the clarity to the nominating fight as Mr. Romney had hoped. But even though he did not secure the authoritative victory that he had fought for in the last week, he handily dispatched two rivals who were once seen as his biggest threats, Mr. Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. And Mr. Romney is poised on Wednesday to collect the endorsement of Senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr. Gingrich was in fourth place with 13 percent of the votes, followed by Mr. Perry with 10 percent and Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota with 5 percent. More than 120,000 Republicans took part in the caucus, a turnout that was slightly higher than four years ago. With Mr. Perry heading back to Texas, Mr. Gingrich pledged to press forward and be on the stage at the next debate on Saturday in New Hampshire. “There will be a great debate in the Republican Party before we are prepared to have a great debate with Barack Obama,” Mr. Gingrich said, pledging to raise the intensity of his criticism of Mr. Romney before the next contests. He offered a glimpse at his approach, calling Mr. Romney a liar whose conservative credentials could not be trusted. The determined band of Republicans caucusgoers streamed into firehouses, gymnasiums and even a few living rooms across Iowa for the precinct meetings. The caucuses do not award any of the 1,150 delegates needed to win the party’s nomination, but the result began reshaping the race as the campaign shifted to New Hampshire and South Carolina. A snapshot of the Republican mind-set, according to polls of voters as they entered caucus sites, found that Mr. Romney had won the most support among those who said defeating Mr. Obama was the most important quality in a candidate. Mr. Romney’s business experience, which is the spine of his candidacy, was a draw for voters concerned about the economy. Among voters who said the economy was the issue that mattered most in deciding whom to support, a plurality — about a third — said they would support Mr. Romney. In one of the most conservative pockets in the state, the northwestern Iowa town of Alton, a supporter of Mr. Romney urged Republicans gathered at a firehouse to resist “throwing your vote away.” “I didn’t vote for Mitt Romney in the last caucus, and I wish things had turned out differently,” said Dan Ruppert, who rose to deliver a testimonial for Mr. Romney. “I’m definitely going to vote for Mitt Romney now.” The surveys found that Mr. Paul had far outpaced his rivals among caucusgoers under 40. But he dropped behind Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum among voters 40 and older. Even though older caucusgoers made up a much larger portion of the electorate, Mr. Paul’s outsize lead among younger voters kept him competitive. In the survey of voters arriving at their caucuses, which was conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press, nearly four in 10 said they had never attended a caucus before. Those new attendees supported Mr. Paul over any other candidate. Many caucusgoers did not make up their minds until late; entrance polls indicated that nearly half had decided whom to support within the last few days. Mr. Santorum was the candidate who benefited the most from these late-deciders — a third of them backed him. Nearly six in 10 voters consider themselves evangelical or born-again Christians, the poll found, which illustrated the surge for Mr. Santorum in the closing days of the campaign here. Mr. Santotrum celebrated late Tuesday by recalling how he had campaigned in all 99 Iowa counties. “Thank you so much Iowa,” he told the crowd at a rally in Johnston. “By standing up and not compromising, by standing up and being bold and leading, leading with that burden and responsibility you have to be first, you have taken the first step in taking back this country.” Mr. Santorum now faces a challenge of trying to broaden his campaign organization on the fly to compete with the structure that Mr. Romney has spent years building. His aides said he will campaign this week in New Hampshire and South Carolina, vowing to compete with Mr. Romney everywhere. In polls of Republicans entering the caucus sites, just more than four in 10 said the most important issue was the economy, while about one-third said the federal budget deficit was their chief concern. Asked what quality was the most important in a candidate, about three in 10 voters said the ability to defeat Mr. Obama, while about a quarter said someone who was a true conservative and another quarter said someone who had strong moral character. As Republicans turned out across the state to render the first judgment of the candidates, some voters conceded that they were still wrestling with selecting someone who stands the best chance of winning in November or one who is fully aligned with conservative principles. Don Lutz, who works in real estate, arrived early and called himself a “Newt guy.” But he said he would not cast his vote that way. He said he was supporting Mr. Romney. “I don’t want to have a vote for nothing,” Mr. Lutz said in an interview at his caucus meeting in Clive, a suburb of Des Moines. “I just don’t think that Newt is going to be there in the end. When I look at the business side of things, Mitt is probably the most qualified.” The fissures in the party, particularly among social and economic conservatives, have been exposed during the early stage of the presidential nominating battle. But while Republicans have yet to unite behind a single candidate, they are united in their determination to defeat Mr. Obama. While Republicans were the focus of the night, thousands of Democrats gathered at their caucus meetings, too. Mr. Obama addressed supporters via video, urging them to come to his defense in the general election. “It’s going to be a big battle, though,” Mr. Obama said. “I hope you guys are geared up.” A woman piped in from Cedar Rapids: “How do you respond to people who say you haven’t done enough?” “That’s why we need four more years,” Mr. Obama said. The Iowa campaign, which provided a laboratory for the unregulated money from outside groups that will course through the presidential campaign, quickly moved on to New Hampshire, which will hold its primary next Tuesday, followed by South Carolina on Jan. 21 and Florida on Jan. 31. While the New Hampshire primary has traditionally drawn the lion’s share of attention after the Iowa caucuses, Mr. Romney’s strong lead in polls in the state has changed the strategy of some candidates, and South Carolina was quickly emerging as a focal point of the race. Mrs. Bachmann, whose political fortunes have declined since she won the Iowa straw poll in August, said the caucuses were the beginning of the race for president, not the end of the road for candidates who finish at the bottom of the pack. “The people of Iowa have spoken, and they have written the very first chapter in this long campaign,” she said, not elaborating on her plans. “There are many more paths to be written on the path to the nomination.”


Paul, Influence Assured, May Face More Attacks

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Paul, Influence Assured, May Face More Attacks Eric Thayer for The New York Times ANKENY, Iowa — Before the voting began in Iowa, Ron Paul was asked by an ABC correspondent, “When you lay your head on your pillow at night, do you see yourself in the Oval Office?” “Not really,” he said. But while few Republican strategists expect Mr. Paul to make it to the White House, the results last night showed that at the least he will be a force to be reckoned with in the primaries, and in his party’s politics. If he can carry some of his momentum to other states, Mr. Paul is likely to have more influence in the national Republican Party’s platform, a goal of many of his supporters who say their anti-Fed, anti-debt and antiwar movement and message are just as important as Mr. Paul’s candidacy. For many true believers, winning a handful of caucuses and collecting a respectable number of delegates could give them power to influence the party’s message, and maybe even its nominee, this summer. Mr. Paul’s strength in Iowa may also bolster the political potential of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican and darling of the Tea Party movement who is seen by many Paul campaign organizers as the inevitable heir to his father’s mantle. Just after 10 p.m. Central time, Mr. Paul appeared at the ballroom of the Courtyard Marriott in Ankeny, a suburb of Des Moines, to cheers of “Ron Paul! Ron Paul!” and “We love you Ron!” and “Preach it!” Even though many supporters were disappointed by the third-place showing, Mr. Paul praised the results and, alluding to the rival campaign of Mitt Romney, said his operation was now “one of two who can actually run a national campaign and raise the money.” He said the campaign had succeeded in “reintroducing some ideas that Republicans have needed for a long time.” “This is the conviction that freedom is popular,” he said to cheers. “This movement is going to continue and we are going to keep scoring. We will go on, we will raise the money, and I have no doubt about the volunteers.” He added that he was “ready and raring to move on to the next stop, which is New Hampshire.” One supporter, John Carle, a volunteer from Ankeny, said: “It’s exciting to know the world may start listening to him. The media has done its best to marginalize him, but the world needs a leader like Ron Paul.” But the results also mean that increased criticism by other candidates of Mr. Paul in the last few weeks is only the beginning of a period of more negative attacks and campaign advertisements sure to be introduced against the Texas representative, whose dovish national security views are considered heretical by many establishment Republicans, and who has faced new scrutiny over racially charged statements in newsletters distributed under his name that he later disavowed. His performance also underscores not just the resonance of his message, but the effectiveness of his ground campaign in Iowa. It is the handiwork of a decision four years ago to maintain an active political presence in the state while also trying to seed state and local Republican committees with Paul supporters. The four-year process made Mr. Paul’s supporters part of the G.O.P. fiber in Iowa. For Mr. Paul, the question is whether the strategy that worked so well in Iowa can be duplicated in other states. His campaign relies on well-organized and motivated local coordinators, which usually have more influence in caucus states like Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Dakota and Washington. His political organization in some other states is similar to Iowa’s — using an activist group to keep supporters motivated after he dropped out of the race in 2008 and then getting them to rejoin the campaign once he declared his candidacy last year. Randy Page, a Republican activist in South Carolina, said Mr. Paul’s supporters had also worked hard in that state, which votes on Jan. 21, to become county and state party officials. “Dr. Paul had a very effective organization across the state, and a lot of them morphed into the Tea Party as well as the mainstream Republican Party organizational structure throughout the state,” Mr. Page said. A Clemson University Palmetto Poll several weeks ago found Mr. Paul with 10 percent support among South Carolina Republican primary voters, trailing Mr. Gingrich at 38 percent and Mr. Romney at 21 percent. Mr. Paul has begun running ads in the state that highlight his anti-abortion appeal to social conservatives and his military record, including a six-figure purchase of television ads that started a few days ago. But it remains to be seen whether his Air Force service will assuage voters in a state with a legacy of major military bases. “South Carolina is a national security state, and Ron Paul is not a national security candidate,” said Jim Dyke, a Republican strategist in Charleston. And absent the same long-term attention he showered on Iowa — where he could also explain, over months and months, his foreign policy views in nuanced terms — others in the party say Mr. Paul will not be able to replicate Tuesday’s caucus performance. “A guy like Ron Paul can do well when he’s got one state to focus on for months at a time, but he’s not going to do well beyond Iowa, in part because people have not trained their fire on him,” said Peter Wehner, a former policy adviser to President George W. Bush, who said Mr. Paul’s foreign policy views, as well as racially charged statements in newsletters distributed under his name, would draw more scrutiny now. “If he was even remotely viewed as a threat to win the nomination,” Mr. Wehner said, “then he would be the target of a ferocious assault and he simply couldn’t withstand it.” Before South Carolina comes New Hampshire, which votes on Tuesday. Mr. Paul is leading Mr. Gingrich in the polls for second place — though both are well behind Mitt Romney — on the strength of a much improved ground game. “Four years ago he would show up and do an event and leave, and there was enthusiasm, but there wasn’t any follow-up organization,” said Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committeeman for New Hampshire who is unaffiliated. “This time they take names, they take e-mails, build e-mail and social media contacts.” Polls in New Hampshire show Mr. Paul doing especially well with voters under 30, where he leads Mr. Romney. “That’s the core of his campaign,” said David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University in Boston, which has been conducting tracking polls in New Hampshire. “The older the voter, the lower support is for Paul.” Younger voters make up about 15 percent of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, he said, and about 42 percent of them support Mr. Paul, while 26 percent support Mr. Romney. Less clear is the strength of Mr. Paul’s organization in Florida ahead of that state’s primary on Jan. 31. One Republican strategist in Florida not affiliated with any presidential campaign, and who insisted on anonymity, said Mr. Paul did not seem as well positioned, partly because of the structure of the primary. “The Tea Party in Florida has more of a evangelical and national security bent to it, rather than Paul’s brand of Libertarianism,” the strategist said. In Nevada, which holds caucuses on Feb. 4, , Mr. Paul’s supporters have become a force within the party, just as they did in Iowa. But he still has a lot of ground to make up. A recent Nevada poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and 8NewsNow showed Mr. Paul trailing Mr. Romney and Mr. Gingrich by a wide margin among the state’s registered Republicans. “The campaign is a lot more organized and they seem to be in it to win it this time,” said James Smack, the Republican vice chairman in Nevada, who is supporting Mr. Paul. “In 2008 I didn’t get that feeling.”


GOP's Paul places 3rd in Iowa, looks to NH

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GOP's Paul places 3rd in Iowa, looks to NH

Associated Press

By THOMAS BEAUMONT | AP

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Texas Rep. Ron Paul rode a current of youthful discontent to third place in Iowa's Republican presidential caucuses Tuesday, promising to take his outsider bid for the GOP nomination into independent-minded New Hampshire.

"This momentum is going to continue. This movement is going to continue, and we're going to continue scoring, just as we did tonight," Paul told cheering supporters at a hotel in a northern suburb of Des Moines. "We will go on. We will raise the money. And I have no doubt about the volunteers. They will be here." The libertarian-leaning Paul challenged Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for the top slot in the leadoff nominating contest, cobbling together an enthusiastic and diverse coalition of college students, veterans and tea party activists in a sign of the divided GOP's struggles ahead. "There were essentially three winners," Paul told the crowd as it chanted "Doctor Paul, Doctor Paul." Paul's top-tier performance was a marked improvement on his fifth-place finish four years ago. But Paul waged a far more structured campaign in his second bid for the nomination, raised more money and advertised aggressively on television, attacking former House Speaker Newt Gingrich throughout November. Paul rose steadily in Iowa polls late last fall as Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, the Georgia businessman who quit the race in December, all struggled to sustain early curiosity as potential outsider challengers to establishment candidate Romney. Paul's calls for strict spending cuts and the abolition of the Federal Reserve are popular rallying cries for conservatives, while his opposition to foreign military intervention and desire to close overseas military bases appeal to younger voters. However, his opposition to a military strike against a nuclear-armed Iran prompted sharp attacks from Santorum, who was locked in a tight race with Romney, and Bachmann, who fought Paul for tea party supporters. Undeterred, Paul recommitted to the positions that have prompted questions about whether he will run as a third-party candidate if he is not nominated, a move he has said he does not want to make. The 76-year-old physician-turned-congressman has become an iconic figure for angry conservatives and strict constitutional constructionists fed up with government overreach. And despite his rise among Iowa Republicans, he was viewed in the same polls as among the least likely to be elected, demonstrating the divide in the GOP between an ideological favorite or one viewed as a more viable challenger to Democratic President Barack Obama. It was clear from the Paul campaign rally in Ankeny, after the results were in, which option they preferred. The crowd, far from the typical Republican establishment activists, cheered wildly for the low-key, humble Paul as he took the stage in the hotel ballroom. "There's nobody else that has people like you working hard and believing in something," Paul said. "That is all the difference in the world." While several candidates had begun attacking Paul, one who didn't was Romney, who emerged from Iowa a top-tier candidate despite not campaigning as aggressively as he did four years ago. Romney aides had said a strong finish by Paul was not a concern because they did not feel the Texan had the financial and organizational strength to wage a months-long battle for the nomination. Paul echoed the point Monday on his last full day of campaigning, noting in an Associated Press interview that he needed big turnout in Iowa's caucuses and the next-up New Hampshire primary, and that the path beyond the early states was "a challenge." Paul also said Monday that he didn't necessarily envision himself as president, and said his odds of winning were slim. Still, Paul's campaign dug in even during the closing hours of the campaign, launching an automated telephone message campaign questioning Santorum's commitment to opposing abortion rights


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