ron paul=awesome/kickass?

[kwame k]

OK....so we create a government entity to audit the Fed......

A Bipartisan group that brings their findings to congress and new regulations are put in place.

So do we go back to a free banking system like before?

Create a new all government entity and not this hybrid pseudo government/private thing we have.

Someone has to control the value of the dollar and how interest rates are determined.....who?

[kwame k]

Fuck me!

I forgot all about this.......

Federal Reserve Transparency Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Transparency_Act

[FORD]

Now, I'd be fine with the Federal Reserve Transparency Act.. Have Ron team up with Dennis Kucinich in the house, and his kid can team up with Bernie Sanders in the senate. That way they can call it a bipartisan bill. Except I'm sure Boner would never bring it up for a vote, and I doubt Spineless Harry would either.

[Combat Ready]

OK....so we create a government entity to audit the Fed......

A Bipartisan group that brings their findings to congress and new regulations are put in place.

So do we go back to a free banking system like before?

Create a new all government entity and not this hybrid pseudo government/private thing we have.

Someone has to control the value of the dollar and how interest rates are determined.....who?

Take it one step at a time? Audit the Fed first. The audit could/should consist of members of congress and an equal number of private citizens.....Then the results should be made public. The electorate could then help "guide, nudge, or push" the politicians from there......

Go into it with an open mind, and let the results dictate the future course of action....

[Combat Ready]

Now, I'd be fine with the Federal Reserve Transparency Act.. Have Ron team up with Dennis Kucinich in the house, and his kid can team up with Bernie Sanders in the senate. That way they can call it a bipartisan bill. Except I'm sure Boner would never bring it up for a vote, and I doubt Spineless Harry would either.

Yeah--it makes good sense. I'd be on board with that.

[kwame k]

Take it one step at a time? Audit the Fed first. The audit could/should consist of members of congress and an equal number of private citizens.....Then the results should be made public. The electorate could then help "guide, nudge, or push" the politicians from there......

Go into it with an open mind, and let the results dictate the future course of action....

OK....so we don't force the Comptroller General to do the audit, we force a Transparency Act type thing through.

I'm 100% behind it.

Once we have the audit and we are faced with the reality that the Dollar is worthless and we have no way of paying back the debt or bonds that rest of the world has bought because of the guarantee that our Dollar is backed by the taxes or government generated revenue.

Wall Street crashes and then the rest of the world markets crash. The Dollar being worthless causes the rest of the world to abandon our currency in favor of trading oil in another currency.

So......we all agree that the house of cards is shaky at best, dismantling is going to be a bitch.

I agree baby steps, brother.

It's the first step that worries me.

[Dr. Love]

you guys...

Here's a novel idea. If you don't like how a corporation behaves, don't purchase their products. Put them out of business. If people held others accountable for their actions this country would be in much better shape. Hold companies accountable with your money. Hold Congressmen and Senators and Presidents accountable with your votes.

Don't just stand on the sideline with the "woe is me, I need the government" ... stand up for your convictions and principles. Educate others. Use your money and your votes to bring about change. The people let these motherfuckers get away with it, because they don't care, they aren't interested and they think their actions won't make a difference.

Don't like the banks? Don't support them! Don't like some company doing shit that you don't like? Don't buy their shit. Educate others. Bring about change. And if you really think the government should be involved, great. Get your local and state governments to pass laws.

The federal government can do the job. If you're willing to give up your freedom, and if you're willing to accept that you're going to pay waaaaaaaay too much money for it to be done, and if you're willing to accept that these same companies that you think the government should protect you from are going to be the ones writing the laws.

You guys that say that Ron Paul's ideas work great "in theory" don't seem to be paying much attention to how things are going right now "in practice" ... the system is fucked, and no one else that is running is going to significantly change it. Are you cool with corporations writing the laws and the government robbing you blind for shitty service?

Would you really pay for this shit and let this happen to you if you had any choice?

[Dr. Love]

RON PAUL: AHEAD OF HIS TIME
Pat Buchanan agrees that foreign 'freeloaders' should defend themselves for a change

After his fourth-place showing in Florida, Ron Paul, by then in Nevada, told supporters he had been advised by friends that he would do better if only he dumped his foreign policy views, which have been derided as isolationism.

Not going to do it, said Dr. Paul to cheers. And why should he?

Observing developments in U.S. foreign and defense policy, Paul’s views seem as far out in front of where America is heading as John McCain’s seem to belong to yesterday’s Bush-era bellicosity.

Consider. In December, the last U.S. troops left Iraq. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta now says that all U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan will end in 18 months.

The strategic outposts of empire are being abandoned.

The defense budget for 2013 is $525 billion, down $6 billion from 2012. The Army is to be cut by 75,000 troops; the Marine Corps by 20,000. Where Ronald Reagan sought a 600-ship Navy, the Navy will fall from 285 ships today to 250. U.S. combat aircraft are to be reduced by six fighter squadrons and 130 transport aircraft.


Pat Buchanan’s latest book — autographed! — the title says it all: “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?”

Republicans say this will reduce our ability to fight and win two land wars at once – say, in Iran and Korea. Undeniably true.

Why, then, is Ron Paul winning the argument?

The hawkishness of the GOP candidates aside, the United States, facing its fourth consecutive trillion-dollar deficit, can no longer afford to sustain all its alliance commitments, some of which we made 50 years ago during a Cold War that ended two decades ago, in a world that no longer exists.

As our situation is new, said Abraham Lincoln, we must think and act anew.

As Paul argues, why close bases in the U.S. when we have 700 to 1,000 bases abroad? Why not bring the troops home and let them spend their paychecks here?

Begin with South Korea. At last report, the United States had 28,000 troops on the peninsula. But why, when South Korea has twice the population of the North, an economy 40 times as large, and access to U.S. weapons, the most effective in the world, should any U.S. troops be on the DMZ? Or in South Korea?

U.S. forces there are too few to mount an invasion of the North, as Gen. MacArthur did in the 1950s. And any such invasion might be the one thing to convince Pyongyang to fire its nuclear weapons to save the hermit kingdom.

But if not needed to defend the South, and a U.S. invasion could risk nuclear reprisal, what are U.S. troops still doing there?

Answer: They are on the DMZ as a tripwire to bring us, from the first day of fighting, into a new land war in Asia that many American strategists believe we should never again fight.

Consider Central Asia. By pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and building air bases in nations that were republics of the Soviet Union two decades ago, the United States generated strategic blowback.

China and Russia, though natural rivals and antagonists, joined with four Central Asian nations in a Shanghai Cooperation Organization to expel U.S. military power from a region that is their backyard, but is half a world away from the United States.

Solution: The United States should inform the SCO that when the Afghan war is over we will close all U.S. military bases in Central Asia. No U.S. interest there justifies a conflict with Russia or China.

Indeed, a Russia-China clash over influence and resources in the Far East and Central Asia seems inevitable. Let us get out of the way.

But it is in Europe that America may find the greatest savings.

During the Cold War, 300,000 U.S. troops faced hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops from northern Norway to Central Germany to Turkey. But not only are there no Russian troops on the Elbe today, or surrounding West Berlin, they are gone from Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Between Russia and Poland lie Belarus and Ukraine. Moscow no longer even has a border with Turkey.

Why, when NATO Europe has two nuclear powers and more than twice the population of a Russia whose own population has shrunk by 8 million in 20 years and is scheduled to shrink by 25 million more by 2050, does Europe still need U.S. troops to defend it?

She does not. The Europeans are freeloading, as they have been for years, preserving their welfare states, skimping on defense and letting Uncle Sam carry the hod.

In the Panetta budgets, America will still invest more in defense than the next 10 nations combined and retain sufficient power to secure, with a surplus to spare, all her vital interests.

But we cannot forever be first responder for scores of nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests. As Frederick the Great observed, “He who defends everything defends nothing.”

http://www.wnd.com/2012/02/ron-paul-ahead-of-his-time/

[Dr. Love]

Ron Paul and His Enemies

An effective antiwar candidate is what the neocons fear most.
By Scott McConnell | February 2, 2012

After a strong second-place showing in the New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul stood before a young and giddy crowd of supporters. In a near giggle, he spoke of the many detractors who had called his campaign “dangerous.” Paul reveled in their fear. To cheers, he exclaimed, “We are dangerous to the status quo in this country.” The candidate was right about that, if not necessarily in the way he most wanted.
What is it about Paul’s success that frightens his opponents? Not fear that Paul will win the presidency, though polls show him running strongly against Obama. Unlike his rivals, Paul hardly pretends the White House is a goal. On the stump he emphasizes the goal of building the cause of liberty. Libertarian ideas in domestic policy have had a secure place in the GOP for more than a generation, though Paul has widened the channels for their discussion. Yet when Paul began to rise in the pre-caucus Iowa polls—by mid-December, it seemed possible he would win the state—a shudder of panic ran through the neoconservative commentariat. What drove it? The answer had little to do with the cause dearest to Ron Paul.

A week before New Hampshire, after placing third in Iowa, Paul thanked his backers and referred to Nixon’s famous “We are all Keynesians now” statement. He asked whether people would soon be saying, “We are all Austrians now.” What tiny fraction of the national television audience, some seeing Ron Paul for the first time, had any idea what he was talking about?

Ron Paul was a student at Duke University’s medical school when he first read Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, a classic argument for laissez-faire capitalism. The book propelled Paul into study of “the Austrians,” especially the work of Hayek’s mentor Ludwig von Mises. In 1971, after serving as an Air Force surgeon, Paul was practicing obstetrics outside Houston when he drove to hear a lecture by the 80-year-old Mises, who had found refuge here from Nazism in 1940. Shortly thereafter, Richard Nixon closed the gold window and imposed wage and price controls, and Ron Paul decided that someone—himself, actually—needed to bring Mises’s understanding of sound money and free markets to a larger American audience. In his first congressional campaign, a 1974 losing effort, he ran on a platform of “Freedom, Honesty, and Sound Money”; Paul thereafter began his secondary career as an author and publisher of economic newsletters spreading the Austrian message.

Once elected to Congress in 1976, Paul gained renown as an uncompromising “Dr. No” who refused to vote for any federal program not explicitly sanctioned by the Constitution. Admired for his integrity—and in recent years, for his antiwar stands—his passion for sound money was more respected than influential. But the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 multiplied the audience for systematic critiques of the financial system. Since 2002, Paul had given repeated warnings that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, by soaking up unsound money injected into the economy by the Federal Reserve, were preparing an economic calamity that would strip homeowners of their savings and ruin banks. His warnings proved prophetic, and as they were replayed on cable news, Paul gained new stature within the GOP. In 2009, The Atlantic called him the Tea Party’s “Marx and Madison,” an exaggeration but far from a falsehood.

Important as Paul’s bubble warnings were, sound-money doctrine by itself would not have enabled him to build the movement he now leads. Virtually alone among prominent Republicans, Paul opposed the Iraq War, and alone among the current presidential candidates, he stands against sanctions and military threats against Iran. He has long opposed all foreign aid, a position with important implications for the special relationship with Israel, in per capita terms by far the most favored recipient of Washington’s largesse.

Paul’s foreign-affairs perspective is completely different from the prevailing Republican norm. The Texas congressman avoids heavy breathing about American exceptionalism and expresses little interest in giving orders to the rest of the world. He frequently seeks to understand global issues from other nations’ points of view. He has noted that Iran is surrounded by hostile powers, some of them armed with nuclear weapons, and has seen Iraq invaded and destroyed in the name of democracy. He finds Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, under such circumstances, natural. A Paul-associated PAC has produced a viscerally heart-pounding ad asking how Texans would respond to Russian and Chinese troops occupying their territory—a question that informs Paul’s perspective on Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is simply different from the others. As Andrew Sullivan wrote before the Iowa caucuses: “Paul is the only candidate we can be sure will not take us into a third war with a Muslim country in a decade. And he seems to believe this is a strength. No wonder Washington is still scratching its collective head.”

How marginal are such positions within the Republican Party? A mid-December Washington Post-ABC poll reported that 29 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents considered Paul’s noninterventionism a good reason to support him. That is smaller than the 45 percent who for whom Paul’s dovishness was a turnoff, but it is hardly negligible—nearly a third of the right-most half of the electorate, a group of millions that can claim no prominent leaders in Congress, no regular newspaper columnists to shape and focus its thinking, no significant representation on the cable news shows to validate and amplify its ideas.

What might happen if this group found a political voice? More than any other factor, this question accounts for the vehemence of the attacks on Ron Paul. His opponents were not afraid that the 76-year-old maverick would storm his way to the nomination, nor that Paulism would restore the gold standard or end the Federal Reserve. But they quite rightly feared that Paul’s foreign-policy ideas could find fertile ground in the electorate and lay the seeds for more forceful and majoritarian representation within the GOP and the larger conservative movement.

When December polls showed Paul moving into the lead in Iowa, the knives came out. The fear, as the American Spectator’s Phil Klein put it, was that a good Paul showing would “help mainstream his noxious foreign policy views—particularly on Israel.” Republicans, added Commentary’s Alana Goodman, needed to be wary of the idea that Paul’s “unforgivable flaws—the bigotry-laced newsletters he published for years, his dangerous foreign policy positions—are somehow more acceptable than Gingrich’s and Romney’s faults.”

Here the reprise of the story of the newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name 20 years ago proved critical. The New Republic had made a national story of them early in the 2008 campaign. James Kirchick reported that numerous issues of the “Ron Paul Political Report” and the “Ron Paul Survival Report” contained passages that could be fairly characterized as race-baiting or paranoid conspiracy-mongering. (Few in Texas had cared very much when one of Paul’s congressional opponents tried to make an issue of the newsletters in 1996.). With Paul rising in the polls, the Weekly Standard essentially republished Kirchik’s 2008 piece.

I’ve seen no serious challenge to the reporting done four years ago by David Weigel and Julian Sanchez for Reason: the newsletters were the project of the late Murray Rothbard and Paul’s longtime aide Lew Rockwell, who has denied authorship. Rothbard, who died in 1995, was a brilliant libertarian author and activist, William F. Buckley’s tutor for the economics passages of Up From Liberalism, and a man who pursued a lifelong mission to spread libertarian ideas beyond a quirky quadrant of the intelligentsia. He had led libertarian overtures to the New Left in the 1960s. In 1990, he argued for outreach to the redneck right, and the Ron Paul newsletters became the chosen vehicle. For his part, Rockwell has moved on from this kind of thing.

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that much of the racism in the newsletters would have appeared less over the top in mainstream conservative circles at the time than it does now. No one at the New York Post editorial page (where I worked) would have been offended by the newsletters’ use of welfare stereotypes to mock the Los Angeles rioters, or by their taking note that a gang of black teenagers were sticking white women with needles or pins in the streets of Manhattan. (Contrary to the fears of the time, the pins used in these assaults were not HIV-infected.) But racial tensions and fissures in the early 1990s were far more raw than today. The Rockwell-Rothbard team were, in effect, trying to play Lee Atwater for the libertarians. A generation later, their efforts look pretty ugly.

The resurfacing of the newsletter story in December froze Paul’s upward movement in the polls. For the critical week before the Iowa caucuses, no Ron Paul national TV interview was complete without newsletter questions, deemed more important than the candidate’s opposition to indefinite detention, the Fed, or a new war in Iran. On stage in the New Hampshire debate, Paul forcefully disavowed writing the newsletters or agreeing with their sentiments, as he had on dozens of prior occasions, and changed the subject to a spirited denunciation of the drug laws for their implicit racism. This of course did not explain the newsletters, but the response rang true on an emotional level, if only because no one who had observed Ron Paul in public life over the past 15 years could perceive him as any kind of racist.

If the Weekly Standard editors hoped the flap would stir an anti-Paul storm in the black community, they were sorely disappointed. In one telling Bloggingheads.tv dialogue, two important black intellectuals, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, showed far more interest in Paul’s foreign-policy ideas, and the attempts to stamp them out, than they did in the old documents. Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates likened Paul to Louis Farrakhan. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but the portrait fell well short of total scorn. It was difficult to ignore that the main promoters of the newsletters story, The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, had historically devoted exponentially more energy to promoting neoconservative policies in the Middle East than they had to chastising politicians for racism.

Thus the newsletters could only serve as a kind of prelude; the main insults would be on the grounds of foreign policy. The Republican Jewish Coalition excluded Paul from its Dec. 7 debate because he was “so far outside the mainstream of the Republican Party.” Paul made the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen (a liberal, except where the Mideast is concerned) think of Hitler’s conquest of Europe. Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called Paul’s positions not conservative, not libertarian, but “nutty.” Also at the Post, blogger Jennifer Rubin asked Iowa’s governor to make an “Anybody but Ron Paul” endorsement, and columnist Michael Gerson accused Paul of seeking to “erase 158 years of Republican Party history.”

The barrage continued across the neocon blogosphere. Michael Medved labeled Paul “Dr. Demento” with “eccentric and detestable views.” David Frum smeared Paul with a photo of David Duke, whom he depicted as representing Ron Paul’s “base.” Gary Bauer, an evangelical accessory to Bill Kristol’s war-promoting Project for a New American Century efforts, cut a commercial for use in South Carolina attacking Paul as “hostile to our ally Israel” and “not a Reagan Republican.” (An interesting sidelight to Paul’s career is that he was one of a handful of Texas officials to endorse Ronald Reagan in 1976 and headed the Texas for Reagan delegation at the ’76 convention. When in the 1980s he faced a right-wing primary challenge for being insufficiently hawkish, Reagan taped a rousing Ron Paul endorsement.)

Yet the insults were never directed at the issues at the heart of Paul’s career: support for sound money, opposition to the Federal Reserve, objection to the growth of the federal government on constitutional grounds. This reflected a reasonable assessment of where Ron Paul might make the greatest difference. Whether or not eliminating the Federal Reserve is a good idea, it is considered far-fetched among economists left, right, and center and is unlikely to be on the national agenda very soon.

Foreign policy is a different matter. Paul’s skepticism about American military interventionism—the Iraq War, the Afghan War, the war Israel and the neocons are trying get America to fight with Iran—resonates far more among foreign-affairs specialists, the military, the intelligence community, and the Republican rank and file. Paul’s campaign has the potential to begin bringing that skepticism into the inner reaches of the GOP—where the interlocking web of big donors and neoconservative-run think tanks and media have managed to keep the doves, realists, and other skeptics at bay.

This may be recorded as neoconservatism’s most singular achievement: to have their disastrous strategies enacted in Iraq, see them thoroughly discredited, and yet nonetheless retain their spots as the Beltway arbiters of “responsible” conservative opinion, with the power to exclude those who dissent. But the neoconservatives understand better than anyone how tenuous is this hold on the Washington discourse, how necessary it is to crush dissident movements before they can grow beyond the cradle. Thus a septuagenarian congressman who is an outlier in his own party must be treated as a mortal threat, his ideas not debated or refuted, but obliterated, presented as so far beyond the pale that no sane person could entertain them.

By the night of the New Hampshire primary, it was clear that Ron Paul had torn a hole in the matrix. On top of his third place in Iowa, where he doubled his 2008 vote percentage, Paul had finished a strong second in New Hampshire, tripling his share from four years earlier. In both contests, Paul won the under-30 vote going away and scored better with independents than any of his rivals. The congressman was the only Republican connecting with young people and bringing new voters into the GOP. While it is surely too soon to speak authoritatively about “Ron Paul Republicans,” as we do about Reagan Democrats or evangelicals, such a voting bloc appears to exist. Whether they become part of the GOP coalition is critical to the party’s future. If, as the Economist suggested, they came for the anti-imperialism and civil liberties and grew interested in the fiscal and monetary package, that would be telling as well. When in Iowa and New Hampshire a young crowd cheered a liberty-based campaign with chants of “Bring them home,” it was hard to imagine more full frontal repudiation of the Bush/Cheney vision of the party.

After New Hampshire one could see the wheels of the establishment begin to recalibrate. Paul now seemed likely stay in the race for the duration and might arrive at the Tampa convention with a horde of delegates. GOP politicos began to muse over about how he might be accommodated. It was possible to imagine a Paul prime-time convention speech, but only, said David Frum, if it was subject to Romney pre-approval. (Frum might hope it focuses on Paul’s gold coin collection.) Commentary’s James Tobin, dipping into the favorite neocon trope, warned that Ron Paul could not be “appeased.” Paul has denied any interest in a third-party bid. But while the Republican Party could easily find a way to make rhetorical and platform concessions to the economic parts of Paul’s agenda, a potent “bring them home” foreign-policy movement cannot long coexist alongside the GOP’s regnant neoconservatism. What Paul’s enemies fear is that his early success may herald the beginning of the end of their own dominance. About this, at least, they are entirely correct.

Scott McConnell is a TAC founding editor.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/ron-paul-and-his-enemies/

[Dr. Love]

[Dr. Love]

By the way, here is a link to all of what "anonymous" got from those white supremacists. Read through it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

http://pastebin.com/MCmzw7aR

[Dr. Love]

Ok, so I read everything that covered Ron Paul (and a fair amount of other nonsense in there as well).

I'm not sure where the smoking gun is? It seems like they're talking about how they see a lot of white people that like Ron Paul that they feel like they can latch onto and take advantage of? In some points it seems like they aren't even fans of Ron Paul himself (there's one e-mail whining about how he said he'd pardon blacks from prison and admired MLK), and another entry complaining about how Paul's people apparently treated them very badly at CPAC.

There's only a passing reference to them intending to meet Ron Paul, but it seems to again be at CPAC (which they complained about being shoved aside on) and the only other references to meeting Ron Paul appear to be them going to his campaign events.

So is this really just about some racists talking about Ron Paul and wanting to try to co-opt what he's doing? I mean, I'm trying to reconcile a bunch of e-mails from some people talking about how they intend to go to Ron Paul events against quotes from Ron Paul himself talking about how racism is the enemy of liberty and what he would do to help out minorities in the US... it just doesn't add up.

Unless someone can give a better example than what's here, I'm going to conclude that (surprise, surprise), it's a bit of sensationalism by an internet group seeking attention and using a "hot button" topic to try to drum up their own traffic.

[LoungeMachine]

Don't just stand on the sideline with the "woe is me, I need the government" ...

I'd love to see a link to where ANYONE at ANYTIME ever said this here.....

[Dr. Love]

I'd love to see a link to where ANYONE at ANYTIME ever said this here.....

I was actually responding in a exaggerated way to what unchainme had to say on one of the previous pages, where he was basically saying something along the lines of we need the EPA or something like that and some other government agencies to protect us from corporations screwing us over.

My point being that we as a people don't have to depend solely on the government for things like that. We can take our money elsewhere. I remember people doing that not too long ago with Bank of America over their proposed fees and ... guess what! ... they changed their policy (too late) because their customers were making their displeasure heard loudly enough for the company to feel it.

I looked up the actual quote. Here you go.

In theory, I enjoy Ron Paul's ideas for taxes, I think that's a decent idea to consider. And again, with what FORD said, the issue on decriminalizing marijuana is something I agree with.

I think there is..some things that gov't should handle though, and it's not all evil. Stuff like the EPA, while it can be corrupt at times and at times harm the way a lot of companies need to do business, is at it's a heart a good thing. A long with other sorts of agencies that protect the enviorment and ensure that the working man is not fucked over.

There's problems within the gov't, yes. But to deal with it the way Paul was planning to do is like treating dandruff with decapitation.

[Dr. Love]

here's a link of the white supremacist dude trying to recruit people at CPAC and being chased off by Ron Paul supporters...

Should be somewhere around 9 and a half minutes in.