Rising acclaim on The Revolution: A Manifesto

Everywhere I turn, people are praising Rep. Paul's new book The Revolution: A Manifesto. I guess it's about time I read it, huh?

(Get the audiobook here).

I'm sorry but this kid's a liar

Following Saturday's MTV presidential forum, various audience members were interviewed for their reactions to the candidates which were reported in this article published at the mtv website.

Check out the remarks by one 20-year old NYU student and self-described avid GOPer David Laska, regarding Ron Paul:

Although Laska is siding with McCain, he said as an ardent GOP supporter, he was surprised that he wasn't aware of Paul's views until now. "I didn't know there was anyone in the race that thought the way he did, and I follow the race closely," Laska said. "But it may be too little, too late for him."

I have to ask just how closely he claims to be following the race, because if he has taken the time to watch just one of the numerous GOP debates, he would have learned of at least some of Ron Paul's conservative positions. Being an avid GOP supporter, he would have identified and researched all 11 candidates (or however many there were still in the race when he decided to start following the race "closely"). At the very least, an avid GOP supporter who follows the race closely would have noticed Paul's name among the other remaining candidates on the primary/caucus returns to date no matter in which media they were reported, and would have availed himself to at least an introduction of each of these candidates.

I know this quote will be used with great fanfare across the Paulosphere to further solidify proof of a media blackout against Paul (which I agree is occurring, to an astonishing degree). But for anyone to claim to be an ardent GOP supporter, and to be "following the race closely," he would have achieved enough exposure to Paul to have witnessed the fundamentals of his conservative policies.

Congressional Quarterly: No U-Turn Likely with Mainstream Candidates

This week's cover story in the Congressional Quarterly offers a very good analysis of the likelihood that Bush's executive power overreach will remain in place should any of the leading frontrunners from either party win the White House in 2008.

For the past seven years, George W. Bush has expanded presidential power in ways that no one could have predicted when he took office.

[...]

However, the records and statements of the eight major candidates — the three Democrats and five Republicans who have had double-digit support in the most recent national polls — show that the 2008 presidential election is not likely to start a huge shift in the balance of power away from the White House.

That doesn’t mean the top candidates would continue all of the Bush administration’s practices, and most aren’t likely to take the same kind of deliberately confrontational approach to Congress. Also, an upset victory could still go to one of the few candidates whose victory would represent a clear rejection of Bush’s overall policies. But there is enough evidence of a preference for strong executive power in the backgrounds of most of the field to suggest that, more likely than not, there will be no U-turn under the next president.

And that in an oversimplified nutshell is why Ron Paul has so much support, in spite of some of his more "radical" positions.

Fracturing the Democratic Base
It also helps shed some light on why many rank-and-file Democrats feel so threatened by Paul that they've started swiftboating him at some of the more respectable Democratic internet haunts.

Democratic bloggers across the board have spent the last 7 years attacking Bush's Imperial Presidency and "unitary executive" overreach as unlawful and unconstitutional. But now that Bush's time in office is up, the Democratic establishment candidates have presented no plans to bring the Executive Branch back in line as one of the three co-equal branches of government.

There is a segment of the rank-and-file Democrats who continue to believe, based on those years of demanding it, that the Executive Branch should be scaled back on principled, constitutional grounds, without respect for whomever is president. But there is another segment of the Democratic base who have chosen to embrace this expansion of power because they fundamentally believe that all government is good, if only the right people are in office to manage it properly. And this segment of the base, whether truly indicative of the majority or not, in tandem with those Democrats who are salivating over the prospects of obtaining such overwhelming power, currently holds the louder megaphone and has started using it forcefully against anyone who tries to advocate a reduction in any government power.

These assaults on the constitutional principles of the Democratic base, on which rested the arguments against Bush's power grab for 7 long years, are driving these principled voters toward the only candidate who openly argues for reducing the power of the executive branch to within constitutional limits, and as a bonus comes with a documented history of voting against any expansions of its authority.

This shift of a portion of the Democratic base toward Paul's candidacy, being the result of the now-obvious blatantly gratuitous exploitation of heartfelt principles, is one of the main reasons the establishment Democratic bloggers are attacking Ron Paul so vehemently. In all actuality, these abusive displays strengthen the veracity of the phrase "there's not a whit of difference between the two parties."

Most courageous, principled man in the race

Who is the only presidential candidate who doesn't tailor his message to the sensitivities of his audience? (w/spanish-language video clip from the Univision debate 12-9-07)

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"Drug Addict" - Our economy on the Fed

Our economy, under the management and supervision of the Federal Reserve, has become a "drug addict."

According to GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, on watching the Fed try to salvage the current credit bust:

You're right, but it's sort of like a drug addict. The drug addict demands more or he's going to have convulsions. The economy would have a convulsion if the Fed didn't inject more credit. But if you continue to do that, the problem gets worse. You can't solve the problem of monetary inflation with monetary inflation. These circumstances have all been created by our government and the Fed. Link.

It's Big, Really Big

Ron Paul Youtube ad that aired on CNN during Wednesday's debate.

Ron Paul Blimb from the grassroots

I pledged $25 toward the $350,000 needed. How about you?

Is the left intentionally blind?

These two diaries posted at the center of the leftist blogosphere prompts this post as a response to some of the ill-informed commenters there.

The first diary addresses with envy the grassroots success of Ron Paul's presidential campaign, emphasizing their enormously successful fundraising efforts. Analysts and consultants across the board are trying to concoct the perfect formula to duplicate for other candidates the passion and fervor being pumped into Paul's campaign by his volunteers. As one commenter noted, his volunteers are not your typical political activists who are trained as such by the establishment; many of them are inspired for some reason to actively participate in the electoral process for the first time in their lives. What none of them understand is that Paul's campaign isn't in charge, the people are. There is still enough freedom in this country for the rest of you to grab your candidate's message and shout from the rooftops, but you haven't. Ask yourselves why not and you will find the formula you need for a successful grassroots phenomenon to challenge Ron Paul's.

Those reasons people are jumping into Paul's grassroots base are just as diverse as Paul's supporters themselves, who hail from both ends of the political spectrum. Some have latched onto his rigid anti-war position as their dealmaker, others consider his integrity, built over 30 years of a voting record consistently matching his rhetoric, to be the perfect lure, others still consider his established, unwavering devotion to constitutional principles as the most important aspect of their candidate.

Several dkos commenters claim that your average Paul supporter has latched onto his attractive anti-war position without understanding all his other positions. Because surely when they understand his take on abortion or gays or race or the environment (insert other issue here), they will find him to be opposed to all the things good little progressives want out of their government, and would no longer support him simply for his signature position alone. Well thank you for putting words into my mouth, but as a liberal voter who naively trusted the Democratic rhetoric about ending the war and restoring civil liberties in 2006, I can assure you that the majority of Paul's supporters are fully aware of his positions on most issues of the day and we have concluded that some of them are no longer that important.

The Democrats, thank you very much

But before we start explaining this shift in our fundamental priorities, the progressive anti-war left who are still clinging to the hope that the Democrats are their answer to end our aggressive war policies and restore our civil liberties need to understand the history of foreign policy under Democratic leadership. Traditionally Democrats were the ones who pushed military aggression across the globe, from President Wilson's "making the world safe for democracy" through the wars in Korea and into Vietnam under Democratic presidents John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, to Clinton's Kosovo and indiscriminate bombing of Iraq and the Middle East (whose 500,000 resultant civilian deaths were a small price to pay for cheaper oil).

Why now would you expect the Democrats to suddenly change their entrenched foreign policy views just because we're in another protracted quagmire that just happened to be started by a RINO? Bush's foreign policy more closely resembles the historical Democratic position than anything ever proposed by a genuine conservative.

Expecting Democrats to restore civil liberties and lighten up on the devastating drug war, and especially looking to another Clinton to do so, reveals total ignorance of the expansion of police state powers during the Clinton I administration. Were you too busy defending him from the vast right wing conspiracy to pay attention to such programs as Echelon and Carnivore?

'ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of 'unpopular' political affiliation or for no probable cause at all... What was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world,' Poole concluded.

Did you somehow miss the unconstitutional anti-terror laws he signed into place following the OKCity bombing? And weren't you the ones cheering his move to put 100,000 new cops on the streets to beef up our nation's war on inner city drug users?

How about all the copyright protections shredding your fair use rights to published material and invading your computer for extortion rights that prop up players in the entertainment industry like RIAA? Yeah, that was Clinton too.

And let's not conveniently forget the fact that our monstrous Department of Homeland Security was championed by Democrats, and was initially resisted by President Bush.

So as the progressive left comes to terms with how the Democratic Leadership typically advances war and routinely tramples our civil liberties, their continued hopeless support for these Democrats (and their successors) will be one clever series of twisted intellectual acrobatics. These liberals keep demanding that the Democratic candidates return to their principles so they can vote for these candidates with pride. A return to their principles is a restoration of their military aggression abroad and diminished civil liberties at home. Stop projecting your expectations onto a party who shares no such values.

Shifting Liberal Priorities
The explanation for the shift in priorities that liberals have made in order to support Paul may seem very complicated but in general terms it's really quite simple. There are two ways to explain it.

One is the realization by younger liberal voters that the Democrats are no friend to civil liberties or less aggressive foreign policy stances as outlined above. They're looking to Ron Paul as the only candidate capable of filling that void, because he comes from the original positions of anti-police state, pro-civil liberties, anti-foreign adventurism from the paleo conservative right. The democrats are not going to give us these things, it's not in their history. Just because they now exist as the opposition party to the current violators of our rights does not mean they are the antithesis of these incursions. History suggests that the Democrats, and especially Hillary, will fully support this encroachment, and build on it.

Another way to explain this shift in simple terms is that we (81% of the population) feel the country is moving very rapidly in the wrong direction. Into uncharted territory that requires us to trust our government to lead us there blindly without the rule of law, while trying to reconcile the dissonance that comes from understanding that the government messes things up worse than it fixes.

We've been solving the poverty problem for over 40 years, and it's only gotten worse. We've been slaying the illegal drug demons for about 30 years and our drug problems have only gotten worse. We suddenly have leaders on the national stage defending torture while a militarized, federalized police state grows up around us like kudzu. The war on terror, which was launched quietly under Clinton I, and the war on drugs have eviscerated our innocent until proven guilty notions of justice.

Our manufacturing base and technological superiority have begun shifting to other countries, thanks in great measure to our government's trade policies. College degrees are no longer the promised road to success when they cost you more than you'll earn in any of our rapidly changing industries. Common sense should dictate that you don't commit to $50,000 in education debt if your only career prospects are found in India or China with salaries in the $5-10,000 range.

Meanwhile, the enormous debt racked up by our government is causing economic tremors across the globe. For the past two decades a sense of urgency has taken hold in the public consciousness to make as much money as you can as fast as you can before the opportunity vanishes, because working steadily and saving for retirement over the course of one's life is no longer sufficient as the value of the dollar evaporates before you get the opportunity to spend it, and you come to realize our government's monetary policies have created this problem.

Yes I'd agree with that 81% of the population that we're moving in the wrong direction, and quite rapidly, in large part because of our government's policies. So not too many of us who've been paying attention would be inclined to blindly trust the government to get us wherever we're going in one piece with what's left of our rights intact. In a single broad brush you could simply say our great empire is in decline, and people are coming to realize it.

Staring in the face of virtually imminent totalitarian rule, being one terror attack away from martial law, one financial crisis away from total economic collapse, we realize that when the collapse comes and the dust settles, we'd rather be standing firmly on our established constitutional roots than wake up in a police state under a dictator. In a sense, by supporting Ron Paul, we're coming home to our familiar Constitutional underpinning in preparation for the consequences of the empire's inevitable collapse. The alternative is both foreign and unimaginable to us as an historically free people.

Georgia Ron Paul Donations - 11-22-07

Using data from ronpaulgraphs.com, here's a graphic of the locations of the 17 Georgia donors whose information was captured in the ronpaulgraphs.com sampling for Nov. 22, 2007 (Thanksgiving day).

Atlanta,Augusta,Bainbridge,Canton,Cleveland,Dalton,East Point,Kennesaw,Locus Grove,Macon,Madison,Mcintyre,Murrayville,Norcross,Thomaston,White,Evans

Georgia Ron Paul Donations - Nov 21, 2007

From ronpaulgraphs.com, donor information was captured from 33 Georgians who donated to the Ron Paul campaign on Nov. 21, 2007.

Acworth,Alpharetta,Atlanta (2),Augusta (2),Canton,Chatsworth,Columbus,Dacula (2),Dallas,Decatur (2),Douglasville,Duluth,Fayetteville,Griffin (2),Guyton,Hephzibah,Lilburn,Lyons,McDonough,Rising Fawn,Roswell,Savannah,Smyrna,Stone Mountain,Tybee Island,Unadilla,Valdosta,Woodstock

USNews Blog: Full page RP ad in USA Today

USNews.com's news desk blog reports another amazing grassroots accomplishment for Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Worth the read.



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When Ron Paul says jump, supporters say "how high?"

It's no secret that an extra special money bomb is being planned for Ron Paul's campaign to occur on December 16th in memory of the brave patriots who launched tons of tea into Boston Harbor in protest (notice the big Liberty graphic on the top right of this blog). However, as a result the regular donations to Paul's campaign have slowed to a trickle as people save their money in order to have a greater impact during that fundraiser. While the money bomb will have a significant impact on the success of the campaign in terms of free media coverage, this current trickle is not helping the campaign fund all its critical advertising efforts in the early primary states.

As you can tell from this worst-days box on Ronpaulgraphs.com, the last three days (Nov 17, 18 and 19) are at the top (bottom) of the worst days in terms of 4th quarter campaign fundraising, barely raising $20,000 per day. And today, Nov 20, was on track to be the 4th consecutive worst day so far this quarter.

Then all of a sudden the campaign sends out an email at precisely 1:58pm this afternoon explaining that they need money for advertising now, and suddenly the dollars start flooding in. Nearly a quarter of a million in fact, in less than 12 hours.

Looking at the graph below, which charts the fundraising activity comparatively over the last three days, it's startlingly obvious to anyone even remotely familiar with his phenomenal grassroots support that when Ron Paul snaps his fingers, we jump.



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LA Times Blog: Ron Paul keeps rolling

This objective entry in the LA Times Blog is worth the read:

Certain numbers keep calling attention to the phenomenon that is Ron Paul.

The most obvious one, of course, was the more than $4.2 million that his campaign reported raising in a single day via the Internet earlier this month. This week, other figures stand out: He attracted a crowd of more than 1,000 people in Nevada, and a new poll showed him doubling his support in New Hampshire.

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Georgia support for Ron Paul

I've been watching the support for Ron Paul grow in Georgia and am curious to see where his support is concentrated, partly to understand where more attention needs to be put to help build his support to a necessary 23-25% among GOP primary voters. Since most of the GOP voting block resides in rural areas of the state I suspect those are the areas needing the most attention.

Since campaign contribution reports are one of the two most revealing sources to examine Paul's support across the state (local straw polls being the other), I periodically check the donor information collected at ronpaulgraphs.com here.

While the information at ronpaulgraphs.com is not nearly as authoritative as the official FEC reports released quarterly because it only captures a representative sample of less than half the actual current donors, ronpaulgraphs.com is more immediate and captures some of the under-$200 donors whose information is not included in the official reports. (You can see my Georgia donor maps created from quarterly FEC reports here and here).

The event that inspired this post is the astounding impact the campaign's recent fundraising email has had on Georgia's support. At approximately 1pm I glanced at the ronpaulgraphs.com donors to see that only 83 donors were reflected in the site's captured demographics, with only 1 of those being from Georgia (a donor from Atlanta). At 1:58 pm, the campaign sent out an official fundraising email request. At 3pm, the total number of donors' names collected at the site had jumped from 83 to 255.

And in just a little over an hour, the number of Georgians reflected in that data grew from 1 to 13, scattered across the state as follows:

Atlanta (2 different donors)
Norman Park
Rockmart
Savannah
Jonesboro
Kennesaw
Warner Robins
Bogart
Marietta
Roswell
Bonaire
Valdosta

Since ronpaulgraphs.com only collects a sampling of donors, this information reflects only about half of the actual donor activity taking place at the campaign site. We can reasonably assume that these 13 donors are accompanied by 13 others whose information wasn't collected, for a total of about 25-26 supporter responses in under an hour.

That is an impressive immediate response to an official campaign communication from Georgia's Ron Paul supporters from rural as well as the big population centers, and I just wanted to share it since I stumbled onto it accidentially. I'll check back in later this evening to see how much larger this response becomes.

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Updated 4:30pm: We're now up to 394 donors captured, 28 of those from Georgia.
Atlanta (4 different donors)
Norman Park
Rockmart
Savannah
Jonesboro
Kennesaw (2)
Warner Robins
Bogart
Marietta (3)
Roswell
Bonaire
Valdosta
Fayetteville
Austell
Douglasville
McDonough
Hogansville
Cleveland
Alpharetta (2)
Ellijay
Mineral Bluff

Paul wins nationwide Zogby blind poll

Candidate A (Ron Paul) wins.

A new nationwide Zogby telephone poll reveals that a sizeable majority of Americans are looking to vote for a candidate who protects liberty, wants to shrink government and immediately withdraw troops from Iraq - all traits common to Texas Congressman Ron Paul.

Candidate A is identified as:

... a 10-term US Congressman from a large Southern state who is an advocate for a smaller government and individual liberty. This candidate believes in strictly following the Constitution and has never voted to raise taxes. He has never voted in favor of the war in Iraq or the Patriot Act, and wants to bring troops home as soon as possible. As a former doctor, this candidate has delivered more than 4,000 babies. One of this candidate's goals is to return America to the gold standard, and he believes that the current monetary policy needs to be drastically overhauled because of the dollar's decline.

Who is Ron Paul cannabalizing?

From ABC's roundtable 11/18/07: In NH, Paul is expected to finish ahead of "two or three national candidates" so the question is "who is he cannabalizing?"

The Protest Candidate, backed by Gold

This piece by Marc Gutttman does a good job of explaining Ron Paul's positions and makes a strong argument in favor of Paul's role as a protest candidate.

Pundits are speculating about the reasons behind the vast support for Ron Paul's campaign for the U.S. presidency. Deductions I've read about the campaign's impressive $4.3 million dollar online fundraising by donations from 38,000 Americans in a 24-hour period, seem to miss the obvious point. It's more than just widespread disapproval of our current government and the Iraq War. There have been “protest candidates” before, but few have had Paul's success. It's the man and his message. And many who have heard it are convinced.

Let me add that unlike other protest candidates in the past, Paul is the protest candidate with whom you can't go wrong because he's as good as gold not only in the figurative sense embodying the utmost integrity, but in his economic policies as well. Additionally, he is the one protest candidate standing firmly on the US Constitution, the fundamental basis for what it means for each of us to be Americans. No matter this particular protest candidate's perceived flaws, the US Constitution will guide this great country home.

Cops like Ron Paul

Over the last decade I've witnessed disturbing trends in the growing militarization and aggressiveness of our local law enforcement agencies, and am especially troubled by the lack of accountability when cops commit sometimes heinous crimes in the course of their "duties."

If you follow the daily writings of Will Grigg, you would come to believe that our local law enforcement agencies operate in very similar ways to the mercenary firms Blackwater and DynCorp in Iraq, exerting their own totalitarian agendas with near total impunity. Reading more and more about the extraordinarily cavalier use of tasers, not as less-lethal alternatives to guns in self-defense but in order to force compliance with arbitrary orders, and seeing how this tortuous extrajudicial corporal punishment is actually condoned by police departments everywhere makes me fear that the dreaded police state is upon us already.

It's easy to assume that law enforcement personnel enjoy their freedom to abuse their power and would eagerly embrace an even more authoritarian government under the likes of Guiliani. It seems they would be the least likely group to support someone (Ron Paul) who believes that government's primary role is to protect citizens' rights.

However, in the two months I've been out on the streets daily campaigning for Paul, there have been several police officers drive by and beep, wave, and nod approvingly at my big Ron Paul sign. One officer pulled up to tell me I was violating an anti-pedestrian rule near a major highway, and he began his admonishment with "I support what you're doing and I'm glad you're out here doing it. But... yada yada yada." That was a shocker considering the stories I'd read about others engaged in similar behavior being arrested for disorderly conduct and the like.

In the Ron Paul message boards, I've seen a few others report that they were pulled over for minor infractions and were let off with just a warning specifically due to the Ron Paul bumper sticker or sign on their vehicles. This doesn't mean they all support Paul because I've seen many officers go by without reacting at all. But learning first hand that at least a few cops will openly acknowledge their support gives me hope that whatever police state has emerged can be rolled back and it's not entirely a foregone inevitability.

So I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this article asserting that policemen across the country support many of Ron Paul's positions, especially his strong pro-second amendment stance.

According to a poll conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, more than 75% of the nation's police officers agree with Rep. Paul's stance on gun ownership including private citizens carrying concealed weapons for personal protection.

[snip]

AFP president Dennis Wise agrees with Rep. Paul's stance on gun control. "When our founding fathers assembled to write one of the greatest papers ever written -- our Constitution -- they put down the amendments ... in the order of their importance," said Wise.

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Ron Paul the pragmatic choice for everyone

I figure this article is directed toward liberals, but makes a well written valid argument for anyone seeking advice on how to consider Ron Paul. He argues that electing one of the Democratic frontrunners won't accomplish any social policy changes that liberals want because of the budgetary deference to foreign policy concerns (read: empire building) as we head into an increasingly dire economic catastrophe at home.

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Liberty Dollar raid

Update: This piece on the front page of the Washington Post is the best article to date on the Liberty Dollar Raid. Very objective in dealing with this issue.

------------ Previously:
Here's one of the better articles regarding Thursday's raid on the makers of the Liberty Dollar.

Authorities have attacked such alternatives as counterfeiting, while supporters of such bartering tool attack the Federal Reserve Notes as fakes.

That opinion was shared by Lance Haverkamp, who joined in a forum at the Courier-Press newspaper on the issue.

"Do you realize how stupid it is to say the green stuff is 'real' and the gold & silver is 'fake'… You must work for the government!" he wrote.

The organization explained its position like this:

"It's incredible how few people know the facts about the Federal Reserve. The organization chaired by Ben Bernanke is not 'Federal' – it is instead a cabal of private and international banks that does not answer to the United States government. And while there is some precious metal stored in Fort Knox, it doesn't back the debt based 'fiat' U.S. dollar that they issue, because nothing backs it except your trust in the system! Even a casual look at the Fed's history leads one to wonder how an institution that profits mightily from its own policies of victimizing Americans has maintained control over the money of the wealthiest nation on Earth. For those who have made a serious inquiry, the Federal Reserve is shadowed in deceptive origins and fraudulent policies."

Its alternative is a series of coins made of precious metals that can be exchanged for an assigned dollar amount. Over its history, the company has produced the California Bear, Chambersburg Dollar, Evansville Dollar, Hawaii Dala, Peace Dollar and the new Ron Paul Dollar, among others.

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