What's it going to be, Republicans?

What's it going to be, Republicans?

Are you a big-government, pro-torture, pro-amnesty, deficit-spending, pro-war, no-dissent corporate globalist who endorses the following:

• USDA blocks ranchers from testing cattle for Mad Cow Disease
  
• Senate amendment blocks prescription drug reimportation plan
  
• Mandatory mental health screening for entire US population
  
• US facing $53 Trillion in unfunded obligations
  
• Local governments struggle with unfunded federal mandates
  
• Immigration proposal amounts to amnesty for illegals
  
• Bush opens border to Mexican truckers
  
• Massive new US Embassy being constructed in Baghdad
  
• Iraq Law commits US to protect Big Oil in Iraq for 30 years
  
• Neconservatives pushing Bush to bomb Iran
  
• Monitoring Americans in a growing police state
  
• An Executive Branch emancipated from the Rule of Law
  
• Leading GOP Candidates surge to embrace torture
  
• Federalized, militarized local police forces growing
  
• Bush grants presidency extraordinary powers
  

Is this the party that speaks for you?

Or are you a small-government, pro-sovereignty, fiscally-responsible, principled conservative non-interventionist American like Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul?

Just a taste of Ron Paul, in his own words:


More, if you're so inclined:

• How the Government Corrupts Faith, 7/01
  
• 9/11 was Preventable, 10/01
  
• Don't Go to War with Iraq, 12/01
  
• GOP government Veering Off Course, 1/02
  
• Enron in one word: Over-Subsidized, 1/02
  
• Don't Attack Iraq, 3/02
  
• How Fiscally Responsible is Deficit Spending?, 3/02
  
• No Corporate Welfare, 5/02
  
• Are We Doomed to Be a Police State?, 6/02
  
• Government Ruins Capitalism, 7/02
  
• Our Flawed Foreign Policy of Interventionism, 7/02
  
• State Security: Homeland Takeover, 11/02
  
• Homeland Security Largest Government Expansion in 50 Years, 11/02
  
• Bush Offers Welfare for Everybody, 2/03
  
• Stop Censoring Religious Speech, 4/03
  
• Bush Betrayal on Gun Control, 4/03
  
• So Much for Social Conservatism in Congress, 5/03
  
• Federal Government Bullies State and Local Elections, 5/03
  
• Republican Debt Monster, 6/03
  
• Party of Big Government Strikes Again, 7/03
  
• Our Party, Our Country Have Been Hijacked, 7/03
  
• That's Your Money They're Spending in Iraq, 9/03
  
• GOP Abandons Conservatives, 12/03
  
• Memo to Govt: Get Out of the Way, 2/04
  
• Torture, War and Presidential Powers, 6/04
  
• Therapeutic Nanny State, 9/04
  
• Republican Congress Wastes Billions Overseas, 6/05
  
• How to End the Iraq War, 5/07
  

Brief Overview of Congressman Paul's Record:

He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.

He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

Your party's been stolen, conservatives, and it's time to pay the piper. Do you approve of what's been done to your Republican Party without your express knowledge and consent? Do you approve of the rapid morphing of your small government fiscally agile personal responsibility party into an overgrown big government leviathan that's bankrupting your country?

So which is it going to be Republicans, Big Government Authoritarian Empire or Pro-Liberty American Conservatism?

You need to make up your minds now, while you still can, and if you're of the latter group you best reclaim your party from the freespending warmongering neocon imposters vying for the GOP nomination. With 70% of this country opposed to the war, any pro-war Republican candidate will toss the White House into Democratic territory where they'll continue raping our freedoms and dismantling every last thing that makes this country so wonderful.

You do think this country's worth saving from ruin, don't you?

Mapping Ron Paul's support

Someone at the buddymapping.com site has created a Ron Paul map(below) to show the locations of individual Ron Paul supporters. So far there are over 2,400 people shown. Note the heavy concentration of support on all three coasts.

Ron Paul on Bill Maher 5-25-07

About those Youtube stats...

The TechPresident site has done an amazing job assembling the data across the internet that can be used as metrics of online support for the 2008 Presidential Candidates. They generate charts based on registered eventful.com demands, cumulative video views at Youtube, and blog posts from Technorati.com. I will be defering to TechPresident's expertise from now on when discussing the internet-based support for particular candidates.



TechPresident's cumulative video views per candidate (above) charts the actual number of individual video views for each video uploaded by the campaigns to their official YouChoose08 pages. This chart looks impressive, but is deeply flawed as a stand-alone metric for candidate support at Youtube. Below I will attempt to explain why, and will limit the discussion solely to the youtube statistics.

For starters, the video view totals include involuntary display counts achieved through embedded placements on external pages throughout the internet. Additionally, Youtube counts every time the video is played, regardless of whether one user played it a thousand times (see page-refresh schemes) or whether a thousand users viewed it only once. There is no way to measure the depth of support for a candidate based exclusively on video view counts. When these data are combined with other metrics, then a clearer picture of candidate support density can emerge.

Each candidate has one or two videos that virtually exploded in popularity, while their remaining videos received very little attention in proportion to the outliers. Remember we're trying to measure support - loyalty - to the candidates, and not the popularity of an overnight fad sensation. For that very reason I'm taking the liberty of throwing the outliers out in the text analysis that follows. Please note that the data used below is current at 5pm EDT, Monday, May 21, 2007.

Mitt Romney leads the field with 938,520 total views across 140 videos posted by the Romney campaign. But one of his videos received 440,798 views alone (46% of his total views), leaving 497,722 views across 139 videos. That averages out to just 3,581 views per video.

Hunter with 15 videos under his belt is running neck and neck with Paul as far as cumulative views go, but he too has an outlier with a disproportionate number of views (290,548 views) from his otherwise mundane 2,863 average views per video.

McCain, with 48 videos, has one video boasting 300,698 views, with the other clips averaging around 3,171 views each.

Giuliani's 16 videos show one with 49,575 views (nearly 50% of his total combined views), leaving the others to an average 3,785 views apiece.

Paul, with 17 videos in his profile, has one receiving 122,832 views, leaving the other 16 clips with an average of 15,488 views each.

Chart:

Also, each candidate has a different posting style. Ron Paul posts complete videos, while Romney and Hunter post tiny sections of larger appearances that are broken down by specific topics. Let's take the May 3 debate clips for an example. Paul posted one clip, covering his participation throughout the event. This single debate clip received 122,832 views, was rated 1,255 times, and was favorited 514 times. Romney on the other hand, posted 12 individual clips, each averaging just 5,183 views, with an average of 39 ratings and 6 favoritings per clip. What can we gather from this kind of data, and how do they more accurately reflect the loyal support base of the candidates?

I spent about 8 hours combing through each of the listed candidate's videos at Youtube to pool together how many times each was rated, commented or favorited, as well as the number of subscribers each candidate has and the number of videos each candidate has posted. This information is intended the recognize the conscious action viewers took willingly to express their support, therefore more accurately representing the support candidates are receiving at the site. I hope you find the effort revealing. This is the chart that resulted from the numbers, which includes the outliers that were previously eliminated above (click for larger view):

Tossing out the outliers mentioned above, here's a chart of the averages per video, per candidate (click to view larger).


So once again while Romney has an impressive high cumulative view total, he's coming up way short on the law of averages. And once again, Paul's support seems to punch through the mediocre haze to catapult this candidate into a mainstream mainstay for the duration.

While TechPresident's data is a step up from the information we had in the 2004 presidential campaign and should be commended, it doesn't go nearly far enough, as you can see from the layers of intricate data that reflect measurements of actual free will support through voluntary behavior. I think I am not alone in expressing hope that they will incorporate a deeper analysis tool that carefully weighs and adjusts the aggregates to more accurately reflect a candidate's real underlying online support.

Update: Just stopped by the meetup.com site, and noticed of the candidate groups organized so far, Ron Paul tops the list in the general Candidate category with 2,301 members in 113 locations around the country. But, there seems to be a USA President category under which Paul is not listed. In that section, Obama has the most members at 3,210 with half the number of cities as Paul.

And over at Alexa.com, Paul's still leading the pack in website traffic, beating out even Obama.

Ron Paul fans gaming the polls? No they're not

The conventional wisdom is that Ron Paul's visible success in most online polls and networking site activity is the result of coordinated multi-voting and page-refresh schemes being used to create the illusion that his support online is much greater than it actually is. (Note: It's odd that this conventional wisdom is not applied universally to other candidates receiving high marks in online polls. Why?).

While there is no way to verify the integrity of the many online polls or video view counts, without knowing whether they use cookies or IP addresses to verify participants, or use nothing at all to filter multiple votes from the same computer, there are many other metrics in the sea of data to conclude Paul's support is real.

1. Number of blog posts. Since the first debate on May 5, Paul has consistently outranked all the other GOP candidates in the number of posts being generated in the blogosphere. This is not an easily automated process, but one that requires much more than 1 minute per post to accomplish, an eternity in internet timeframes. In order to be counted in the rankings, the blog would already have to exist, and have some "authority" by technorati standards, which can't be conjured up in a matter of hours out of thin air. This makes blog postings a good metric to use to gage the attention Paul is getting in the blogosphere.

Granted these post totals do not differentiate between positive and negative commentary, but they do indicate the interest level in the subject matter at hand. Let's look at the media's assertion that Guiliani won the second debate because of his "smackdown" of Paul's root cause of anti-US terrorism remarks, even though Paul finished a strong second in Fox News' own poll, 6 points ahead of Guiliani. Oh, it generated alot of buzz across the internet and indeed in the mainstream media that stretched on for several days, but if you look at the blogs, G-man didn't have half the attention Paul had after that little dust-up.

Blog posts over the next three days following the debate, per data from technorati.com:

May 16:	2700 Paul 1500 Guiliani
May 17:	2000 Paul 1100 Guiliani
May 18:	1450 Paul 850 Guiliani

2. Web traffic. Web traffic is the number of uniques visitors to a site in a given period. Most traffic analyzers limit users to their IP number, or a cookie installed in their browser. In the case of Alexa.com, whose data we use in this example, the user is identified by his or her computer on the basis of a toolbar the user has consciously installed, meaning that each computer is counted as one unique visitor.

These Alexa.com graphs show that the number of unique visitors to the candidates' websites are real visitors, and the vast majority are assumed to be seeking more information about the candidates. Taking into consideration the support for Guiliani gained from his remarks in the second debate, his site traffic remained relatively calm and stagnant, while traffic to Paul's site literally soared. (Note: click here to view graph if you can't see it below)








An important point to make about internet users is that those who know how to game the system generally don't install these web tracker toolbars on their computers, thus further increasing the likelihood that the numbers on Alexa's charts are genuine.

3. Contributions. The best way to gage support for a candidate is to look at the source of his campaign contributions. Unfortunately we've got another month and a half to go before the current quarter results are released. It is my hope that Paul will conduct some online fundraisers very soon, where the contributions are tracked and reported in realtime, in much the same way that Howard Dean transformed his internet presence in 2004 into a formidable powerhouse campaign. In the event Paul does launch an online fundraiser with realtime reporting, I predict a more resounding earthquake irreparably undermining the mainstream media's credibility once and for all. For more enlightened commentary on the Ron Paul effect on the media establishment, see Butler Shaffer's post at Lew Rockwell's blog: Ron Paul 1, Establishment 0.

If you haven't contributed to Paul's campaign, please do so now to prove to the skeptics that his support is very real.

Ron Paul generates enormous internet buzz after seven minutes of exposure

The Ron Paul Revolution is now underway. After just one debate, during which America was given a seven minute glimpse of the man and his principles, see for yourself the astounding results.

From Technorati.com:

English posts that contain Ron Paul per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Additionally, bloggers have catapulted Ron Paul to the top of the list in Technorati Top Searches.


From Alexa.com:







As the campaign sees it:

Ron Paul Builds Momentum

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 8, 2007

ARLINGTON, VA – Congressman Ron Paul's support has soared since the first Republican presidential debate. Conservative commentator John McLaughlin, host of “The McLaughlin Group," cited Ron Paul as having given "the best performance of the debate." In fact, the Paul campaign's apparent strength has many other pundits scrambling to explain it. Paul campaign officials offer the following examples of the candidate's rising success.

Since the debate on May 3, Ron Paul:

• Handily won two post-debate polls posted by event sponsor MSNBC
• Placed a close third (18%) in a post-debate poll on the conservative Drudge Report
• Won an ABCNews.com online debate poll with 84%
• Won a C-SPAN online GOP candidate poll with 69%
• Became the third most-mentioned person in the blogosphere, beating out Paris Hilton, according to the reputable Technorati.com
• Produced a YouTube.com video that was ranked the 8th most popular overall video, and the most-viewed political video
• Was featured, by popular demand, on the front of Digg.com
• Generated so many bulletin posts on MySpace.com that the site owner News Corp. blocked all additional posts about Dr. Paul
• Became a "most searched" term on Google and Yahoo!
• Saw a quadrupling of daily visitors to RonPaul2008.com

"These figures speak for themselves," said campaign chairman Kent Snyder. "Ron Paul has quickly become a strong contender for the GOP nomination because of his powerful message of freedom and limited government."

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POLLS: Who Won the GOP Presidential Debate, May 3, 2007?

Above is a compilation video of Congressman Paul's responses in the May 3 GOP Presidential primary debate, hosted by the Reagan Presidential Library, MSNBC and Politico.com. If you like what you see, please vote on the video and add it to your favorites at the Youtube site. If you were impressed by Ron Paul in this debate, please contribute to his campaign, even $25 from you will help Paul get mainstream media's attention.

Below are the results of various internet polls questioning users on their opinions about the May 3 GOP Debate. Some of them are still ongoing and thus subject to change. The totals reported here were current at the time this post was published. More polls will be added as they are discovered.

Jump to MSNBC debate categories poll, MSNBC Rate the Candidates poll, C-Span poll, Conservativesbetrayed.com poll, World Net Daily poll, Boston Globe poll, ABCnews.com poll.

If you know of other internet polls measuring the response to the May 3 GOP debate, please post a link to the poll in the comments.

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MSNBC Live Vote Debate Categories Poll (updated 5-7-07, 00:28 EDT) Who stood out from the pack? 62248 responses
Sam Brownback	2.4%
Jim Gilmore	1.3%
Rudy Giuliani	16%
Mike Huckabee	3.6%
Duncan Hunter	1.8%
John McCain	7.6%
Ron Paul	40%
Mitt Romney	22%
Tom Tancredo	2.8%
Tommy Thompson	3.3%
Who showed the most leadership qualities? 61455 responses
Sam Brownback	2.3%
Jim Gilmore	1.8%
Rudy Giuliani	17%
Mike Huckabee	3.6%
Duncan Hunter	2.1%
John McCain	12%
Ron Paul	35%
Mitt Romney	21%
Tom Tancredo	2.6%
Tommy Thompson	3.6%
Who was the most convincing candidate? 61214 responses
Sam Brownback	2.8%
Jim Gilmore	1.7%
Rudy Giuliani	15%
Mike Huckabee	4.3%
Duncan Hunter	2.1%
John McCain	9.6%
Ron Paul	38%
Mitt Romney	20%
Tom Tancredo	3%
Tommy Thompson	3.7%
Positive Rate the Candidates responses, MSNBC, 82,645 votes (watch Kieth Olbermann report the winner in post-debate commentary) (updated: 5-7-07, 00:16 EDT)
Paul	38%
Romney	27%
Giuliani	24%
McCain	19%
Huckabee	13%
C-Span: Who won Thursday's Republican Presidential debate? (6637 votes) (updated: 5-7-07 00:00 EDT)
Sam Brownback	1%
Jim Gilmore	1%
Rudolph Giuliani	4%
Mike Huckabee	2%
Duncan Hunter	2%
John McCain	4%
Mitt Romney	8%
Ron Paul	74%
Tom Tancredo	3%
Tommy Thompson	2%
From Romney's home state: The Boston Globe: (430 votes)
Ron Paul	56.0%
Mitt Romney	27.2%
John McCain	7.2%
Rudy Giuliani	3.7%
Tommy Thompson	2.1%
Tom Tancredo	1.2%
Jim Gilmore	0.9%
Sam Brownback	0.7%
Mike Huckabee	0.7%
Duncan Hunter	0.2%
World Net Daily: If you watched the Republican debate, who do you think won?
Ron Paul	33.30% (608)
Mitt Romney	23.49% (429)
Tom Tancredo	18.57% (339)
Duncan Hunter	8.54% (156)
Rudy Giuliani	6.19% (113)
Sam Brownback	2.46% (45)
John McCain	2.30% (42)
Mike Huckabee	2.19% (40)
Tommy Thompson	2.03% (37)
Jim Gilmore	0.93% (17)
Added 5-7-07: ConservativesBetrayed.com: If you watched the May 3 Republican presidential debate on MSNBC, who do you think was the biggest winner?
Ron Paul	77.58% (412)
Mitt Romney	10.35% (55)
Tom Tancredo	3.01% (16)
Duncan Hunter	2.63% (14)
Rudy Giuliani	2.25% (12)
John McCain	1.69% (9)
Mike Huckabee	1.31% (7)
Jim Gilmore	0.56% (3)
Sam Brownback	0.37% (2)
Tommy Thompson	0.18% (1)
Added 5-7-07: ABCNews.com: : Who do you think came out on top at the Republican debate?
Ron Paul	87% (6415)
It Doesn't Matter	8% (595)
None of them	1% (96)
Mitt Romney	1% (87)
Rudy Giuliani	1% (78)
John McCain	0% (33)
Tom Tancredo	0% (20)
Mike Huckabee	0% (10)
Tommy Thompson	0% (10)
Sam Brownback	0% (9)
Duncan Hunter	0% (7)
James Gilmore	0% (4)
Now, look at MSNBC's Published ranking: 9. Ron Paul - Texas congressman Last Ranking: -- The anti-war Republican stood out, and his answers (here) were the talk of the spin room -- well, parts of it, anyway. Our problem: until he starts to take votes from someone else, we don't know where to place him.
Next day's coverage on the wires: Other participants in the debate included ...Ron Paul, Congressman from Texas. chirp chirp... chirp...

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Yahoo News: Ron Paul Wins MSNBC Debate Poll
Fri May 4, 2:49 PM ET
To: POLITICAL EDITORS

Contact: Jesse Benton of the Ron Paul (news, bio, voting record) 2008 Presidential Campaign Committee, +1-202-246-6363

ARLINGTON, Va., May 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Congressman Ron Paul finished first in the MSNBC poll following the GOP primary debate last night held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California. Dr. Paul received 43 percent, beating the second-place finisher by five points, and crushing the rest of the field.


"Last night, Americans met Ron Paul and loved what they heard," said campaign chairman Kent Snyder. "Dr. Paul's message of freedom and limited government resonates with Republicans hungry for a return to their party's core values."


"Ron Paul is the only true conservative in the GOP race. Americans saw that last night," continued Snyder. "The campaign looks forward to further debates and opportunities so even more Americans will discover Dr. Paul's message of freedom, peace and prosperity."

In order to help Paul break into the mainstream, please contribute what you can to his campaign. Even $25 will help. $100 would be better, the maximum you can give for the party primary election campaign is $2,000. Together we'll put this country back on its moral, freedom-minded course.

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