Category Archives: Ron Paul

Rand Paul Manhandled

Homeland Security, Regulation, Relatives, Republicans, Rights, Ron Paul, Terrorism, The State

I far prefer Ron Paul’s strident response to the TSA’s assault on Rand Paul than the son’s watered-down words. To CNN’s Erin Burnett, Rand said, essentially, that the TSA folks were good people bogged down by inflexible rules. He followed up with special pleading.

It is not the first time special interests—House and Senate representatives, for example—suggest a system of sectional privileges and rights, based on professional need and proximity to power. Patrick Smith, the author of Salon’s “Ask the Pilot,” has implied that because of his professional position, he should be entitled to “preferential, alternative checkpoints for pilots.”

Such cloistered concerns typified a 2,000-strong, flight attendant’s union, which has been fielding tons of complaints from its members, who were, nevertheless, none too concerned for their customers, the manhandled passengers.

Noelle Nikpour, contributor to Mr. Sean Hannity’s Great American Panel, is another. Nikpour, a tedious Republican strategist who talks up a storm on that forum, extended her exquisite understanding of individual rights to … people like herself and her co-panelists. You know, important sorts who fly a lot; they ought to be able to acquire a permit that’ll exempt them from being screened afresh as they scurry to their important appointments.

Rand seems to have joined these special-case pleaders in asking for wavers for frequent fliers who’ve been willing to share more personal data with the goons of the TSA.

I prefer the Ron Paul presidential campaign’s “strongly worded statement Monday afternoon, blistering the TSA for its practices”:

“The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe,” it said.

“And Then There Were Four …”

Elections, Military, Republicans, Ron Paul

In choosing Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (40% of the vote), South Carolinian voters showed that they were unable to comprehend that Ron Paul’s message is pro-military. That confused me. If Ron Paul’s support among the military is as large as it is purported to be, why is it that a pro-military state did not warm to the congressman’s message (13%)? Is it because these voters perceive Paul as threatening to cut the Gordian knot or the umbilical cord that sustains them, even if their “jobs” involve fighting and dying for naught? What a shame.

Is it perhaps because soldiers are not nearly as moral as some would like you to believe? You can say that again.

Major Garrett credits Gingrich with uniting “economic, social and national security conservatives”:

Gingrich united all three in South Carolina and his double-digit victory there will go down in party lore as one of the historic snap-back moments for the conservative movement. It’s not as if conservatives didn’t have a voice in Iowa or New Hampshire. They did. But they came together in bigger numbers and with a greater sense of fulmination and rage at what they perceive is the establishment Republican tendency to dismiss or delegitimize conservatives in the nominating process. This grievance has burned with varying degrees of intensity in every nominating contest since 1964 and if it were ever to find its full expression, South Carolina would be the place.

I don’t see how on earth anyone can see Gingrich, the man who describes himself as “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican,” as a conservative.

When all is said and done, “there is no path to the nomination without Paul. All candidates are angling for Paul’s supporters,” seconds Doug Wead, senior adviser to the Paul campaign, who also ensures supporters that Paul is still angling for the nomination.

As National Journal sees it, “for Rep. Ron Paul, it’s all about the delegates. [I]f you win elections and win delegates, that’s the way you promote a cause,” confirmed Paul. “In his Saturday night speech, [Paul] said his campaign will push forward and concentrate on caucus states that award delegates proportionally, because that’s the name of the game.’”

UPDATED: Paul In National Polls (Independents’ Vote Ripe for Ron Paul)

Barack Obama, Crime, Drug War, Homeland Security, Military, Political Philosophy, Race, Racism, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

January 16th, 2012: If the November election were held today, a CNN/ORC International Poll released Monday shows Ron Paul is almost statistically tied with Obama, with the president at 48% and the longtime congressman at 46%.

The CNN/ORC International poll has Obama beating Paul by a slim 48%-46% margin, but add in the margin of error and it is basically tied. The same goes for Romney’s 48%-47% lead over the president. The poll shows Obama easily beating the other Republican candidates.

[OpposingViews.]

Here are all the Ron Paul South Carolina FOX Debate Highlights:

There is a difference between defense spending and “military spending,” and between what Eisenhower called the military-industrial-complex and national defense.

Let us not rehash the Paul drug-war racism comments, which I dissected in “Diane (Sawyer) in Disneyland (The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism)”

UPDATE (Jan. 18): The New York Times concedes that “a majority of independent voters have soured on BHO’s presidency, disapprove of how he has dealt with the economy and do not have a clear idea of what he hopes to accomplish if re-elected. … Two-thirds of independent voters say he has not made real progress fixing the economy.”

What amazes me, and I can only presume that some statistical error has crept into the data (such as a bias toward giving a favorable answer for fear of being labeled You Know What), is that “38 percent of all voters BHO favorably.”

The independents vote is ripe for Ron Paul.

UPDATE II: Unfortunately, Paul repeated the leftist rant he delivered in New Hampshire about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates. (“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.”)

I said on 01.07.12 that, as a rightist I abjure anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.

Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.

“Dennis Prager offers stats showing judicial system is biased against whites, not blacks”:

…it is clear that blacks are actually under-represented in executions.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-death-penalty organization, between 1976 and January 2012, 441 blacks (35 percent of the total) and 717 whites (55 percent of the total) were executed. Given that blacks committed more than half the murders during that time (52 percent versus 46 percent by whites), if we are to assess racial bias based on proportionality of murderers executed, the system is biased against whites, not blacks.
Because this fact is both obvious and irrefutable, virtually none of the anti-death-penalty sites note it. Instead, they focus on the race of murder victims and even the race of prosecutors – in other words, the race of just about everyone except those convicted of murder.

Recent Fed Revelations Should Shoo-In Ron Paul

Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Media, Political Economy, Ron Paul

I wonder if the king of Keynesianism, economist Paul Krugman, is reading the report by his New York Times colleague, BINYAMIN APPELBAUM. The report revolves around the utter ignorance evinced in the 1,200 pages of transcripts of the “conversations between Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed Board of Governors in 2006.” Krug should!

As PBS’s RAY SUAREZ’s reports, “They discussed the changing conditions surrounding an overheated housing market.”

The question really is this: Why, in the presence of a presidential candidate such as Paul, does APPELBAUM and his interlocutor find the complete lack of understanding of the housing crisis among the Board so “striking”? Isn’t it time to admit that one current frontrunner spoke to these facts and to the economic truths they portend?

HERE ARE SOME particularly jarring excerpts from the exchange between these two blind mice of mainstream media, jarring because of the half truths they represent. The man missing from this report is also the reason the minutes are now available:

“… these minutes show us the extent of their misunderstanding of the health of the economy. They show us how badly they misunderstood the way that the economy was working, how badly they misunderestimated the impact of the housing crash.

And it shows, you know, a group of very intelligent, very thoughtful people, you know, talking about the economic situation in the country in a considered way, evaluating what might happen, and having a discussion that, it turns out in retrospect, was far removed from the reality of the actual situation.

… it’s so striking. If you kept reading from that quote, what you would see is that she went on to say, basically, but this is a small problem. The market as a whole is doing fine. The overall quality of these securities is very good. I’m not worried about the housing market.

In fact, at one point, she said that if there was a mild correction in housing, it would benefit the economy by moving resources to healthier sectors of the economy. You’re right. They saw it. They saw that housing was crashing. They joked about the problems that home builders were having in selling homes

…To be fair, a lot of other economists at the same time were talking about blue skies, soft landing, moderation in the coming years. It wasn’t like there were just a bunch of clods sitting around this table, and everybody else could see it, right?

MORE.