Word has it that Paul's faux campaign is all about getting his son Rand on the ticket as a V.P.Roll Call identified eight flights for which the Texas Republican, a GOP presidential candidate and leading champion of smaller government, was reimbursed twice for the same trip. Roll Call also found dozens more instances of duplicate payments for travel from 1999 to 2009, totaling thousands of dollars' worth of excess payments, but the evidence in those cases is not as complete.
...Roll Call obtained copies of credit card statements for a corporate American Express card assigned to Ron Paul & Associates Inc. on which many flights were purchased. The flight details on those statements matched payment records filed to the Federal Election Commission and office expenses itemized in quarterly Congressional disbursement statements published by the Chief Administrative Officer of the House... Public records show hundreds of flight payments between 1999 and 2009 in which both the House and Paul's campaign paid for plane tickets of the same price and about the same date.
The remaining candidates in the winnowed Republican presidential field are attacking one another with abandon, each day bringing fresh headlines of accusations and outrage.
But Mitt Romney and Ron Paul haven’t laid a hand on each other... they never do.
...Romney’s aides are “quietly in touch with Ron Paul,” according to a Republican adviser who is in contact with the Romney campaign... The two campaigns have coordinated on minor things [because] Paul’s presence in the race helps keep the GOP electorate fractured...
...“Ron Paul wants a presence at the convention,” the adviser said — and Romney, if he is the nominee, would grant it.
...a Democratic polling firm finds that President Barack Obama's support holds up well if an independent candidate like Michael Bloomberg or Ron Paul were to enter the race...
"Our poll shows that as a third-party candidate, Ron Paul would take 18 percent of the vote in a matchup against Obama and Romney. Almost all of this comes at Romney’s expense. Nearly tied in a head-to-head matchup against the president, Romney’s vote plummets when Paul is added to the ballot, losing 12 points of his vote share.
...While Romney’s support drops off in the face of a third-party challenge, Obama remains strong at 42 percent (12 points ahead of Romney). Thirty-one percent of Romney voters in the two-way matchup defect... [but] only 12 percent of Obama voters defect.
...Paul’s supporters are disproportionately young, independent, non-interventionist, non-Christian and perhaps most telling, dedicated...
• In the Iowa poll, Paul gets more than 50 percent support from the two youngest age groups — 18-29 year olds and 30-44 year olds — but gets less than 12 percent of 45-64 year olds and those 65 and older. In the Post poll, he gets 20 percent among 18-49 year olds, but just 8 percent among those 50 and older. That’s a remarkable age gap.
• The Post poll shows Paul winning 16 percent of independents and only 11 percent of Republicans.
Alabama man suffers sudden jihad syndrome and starts shooting at the cops.
Luis Ibarra-Hernandez wanted to do something extreme “to draw attention to Islam and himself.” So he fired on the police. The Gadsden Times reported:A man thought to be an Islamic extremist is believed to have shot the windows out of at least two businesses in Alabama City early Sunday to lure police officers to the area and engage them in a shootout.
Luis Ibarra-Hernandez was charged with attempted murder.
Luis Ibarra-Hernandez, 21, from Albertville, was charged today with attempted murder, according to a news release from the Gadsden Police Department.
“After the man was taken into custody, he reported that he knew he must do something extreme to draw attention to Islam and himself, so he planned to shoot police officers,” Gadsden Police Capt. Regina May said.
Gadsden police officers responded to alarm calls for glass breakage after doors were shot out about 1:30 a.m. Sunday at AutoZone and Rainbow Food Mart near the intersection of 27th Street and West Meighan Boulevard.
The article did not say if he was here legally but the department is checking his immigration status.
The Iranian regime’s English language propaganda channel, PressTV, has discovered a new American idol: presidential contender Rep. Ron Paul.
PressTV has stepped up its coverage of Paul’s campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination in recent weeks, featuring his anti-Israel rants, his claim that sanctions against Iran are “acts of war,” his approval of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and much more.The Iranian government channel portrays Ron Paul as an American hero, and brings on conspiracy theorists masquerading as political “analysts” to laud him for “challenging the American establishment” and the “corporate neo-conservative Zionist consensus,” that cabal of Jews, banksters, and Reagan Democrats who in Tehran’s eyes (and in the eyes of these Ron Paul supporters) run the world.
It’s a script taken almost word-for-word from the infamous anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
...No contemporary U.S. political leader has been so in sync with Tehran as Ron Paul. Here are just a few of the recent Ron Paul sound bites on Iran and U.S. policy toward Iran prominently featured by PressTV:
“Just think of how many nuclear weapons surround Iran. The Chinese are there, the Indians are there, the Pakistanis are there, the Israelis are there, the United States is there. All these countries—China has nuclear weapons! Wouldn’t it be natural that they might want a weapon? Internationally, they’d be given more respect… They have no evidence that they are working on a weapon. “Paul blasts US policy on Iran, Aug. 12, 2011.
“I think we’re looking for trouble because we put these horrendous sanctions on Iran… Sanctions against Iran are definite steps toward a US attack.” “Iran sanctions ‘acts of war’: Ron Paul,” Dec. 31, 2011; “Ron Paul raps US hostility toward Iran,” Jan. 7, 2012.
“Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had never mentioned any intention of wiping Israel off the map.” Quick Facts: Ron Paul on US Foreign Policy, Dec. 24, 2011.
“Iran is not a physical threat to us. They do not have capabilities. The stories you might hear about them being on the verge of a nuclear weapon is not true by our CIA and by the United Nations. They are not on the verge of it.” Quick Facts: Ron Paul on US Foreign Policy, Dec. 24, 2011.
“Who are they [Iran] going to bomb? If they had one or two bombs, they are going to bomb Israel? Israel has 300 of them! And our submarines all around there passing and everything else.” Quick Facts: Ron Paul on US Foreign Policy, Dec. 24, 2011...
"We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization... we must make use of everything we have at hand to strike at this front by means of our suicide operations or by means of our missiles." -- Hassan Abbasi, "strategic adviser" to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
"We are in the process of an historical war between the World of Arrogance [the West] and the Islamic world, and this war has been going on for hundreds of years... Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? ...you had best know that this... goal [is] attainable." -- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
"We have established a department that will take care of England. England's demise is on our agenda." -- Hassan Abbasi
One of the odd things I hear about from time to time from many of my libertarian colleagues and friends is their perception that Texas Republican Ron Paul is a rare model of purity in a political pigsty...
I have many issues of agreement with Paul, particularly on health policy, and I've defended him publicly in the past on many of his calls for government reform. But this perception of Paul as a principled crusader who serves only the Constitution is at odds with his wholehearted embrace of typical pork-barrel politics - a difference which is all the more stark in the wake of House Republicans' voluntary ban on earmarks last year. The record on this is available to the public, but it attracts scant attention...
...Paul made over $157 million in earmark requests for FY 2011, one of only four House Republicans to request any earmarks. Additionally, he made over $398 million in earmark requests for FY 2010, again one of the leading Republican House members...
All of the above earmarks can be found on Paul's own congressional website... Paul typically will make the earmark request, but then votes against or abstains from voting on final passage, so he can maintain his claim to have "never voted for an earmark", even the earmark requests he himself made.
One of the more insane claims in Ron Paul’s newsletters was that the Israelis were behind the WTC bombings in 1993:Whether [the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.
This claim is of course so ridiculous and absurd that even Paul has to protect himself by claiming that “a Jewish friend” told him about it. What a handy rhetorical device! If only Paul had had the foresight to couch all his racist remarks in the newsletters in this way, he wouldn’t have any problems right now! “As a black friend of mine once told me, 95% of all black people in DC are criminal or semi-criminal.” See how effective that is?...One of the excerpts CNN did not cover was Paul’s section on the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. You’ll never guess who Paul thinks was responsible:
The Middle East, in the last forty years, has soaked up billions of dollars in the name of American security and peace. The more we give Israel, the more we must give their Arab enemies. The height of this folly was vividly and tragically dramatized on October 23, 1981, with the killing of the 241 Marines in Beirut when their barracks were destroyed by radical Moslems. The terrorists probably were aided by Iran and supplied with explosives sold to them by Israel, originating from the United States and paid for by American taxpayers.
I have to admit that this is somewhat of a new spin on the usual anti-Israel conspiracy theory associated with this particular event.
One thing that seems clear is that Paul’s natural instinct is to disbelieve that Muslim terrorism can exist unless those rascally Jews are behind it somehow.
9. Ron Paul is 76 years old and would be 80 at the end of a hypothetical first term.He knows how crazy his conspiracy theories about The Illuminatis are, so he initially deflects the question ("What do you think the Bildersbergers are doing?") with an empty demurral. Then the questioner asks it a second and third time, and he can no longer counterfeit his beliefs; he offers up the Illuminatis conspiracy.
Remember, we're fighting a "phony war" against Al Qaeda, and it's all ginned-up neocon nonsense that Iran is cooking up a nuclear bomb, and Hamas was created by Israel.
But the thing we've got to really keep our eyes on is the Bildersbergers and Trilateral Commissioners.
...the very short version is that the VA GOP only certified Mitt Romney and Ron Paul for its primary ballot. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich both had too many signatures tossed; Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann didn’t even try. Of the seven candidates, one (Romney) had more than enough signatures (15K) to bypass the verification process entirely. All of this has caused a lot of agitation among Republicans following the primary process, of course; and not just from people who disapprove of what the VA GOP has done...
...There has been a good deal of defending of the outcome; and one argument heavily used in this defense has been that the campaigns all knew the rules and that previous Republican campaigns were able to get on the ballot, so clearly a competent current Republican campaign should have done so.
One small problem with that: as Winger argues, the rules were allegedly drastically changed. In November of this year.
...prior to the 2012 elections it was Republican party policy in Virginia to simply deem any candidate that brought in ten thousand raw signatures as having met the primary ballot requirements under Virginian state election law.
...On October 24th independent state delegate candidate Michael Osborne filed suit against the Republican party of Virginia [challenging the signature review process and who performs it] ... according to Winger the VA GOP decided in response to bump up from 10K to 15K the threshold for simply deeming the requirements as being met.
...I think that John Fund’s general comment is correct: this is going to go to the courts. John was not discussing this specific wrinkle, but his larger point that Virginia’s ballot access policies have systemic problems gets a big boost when it turns out that the state party can effectively increase by fifty percent the practical threshold for ballot access – in a day, and in the middle of an existing campaign.
...If it is true that the Republican party of Virginia decided in November of 2011 to increase the threshold for automatic certification from 10K to 15K, then it is reasonable to suggest that this was a change that unfairly rewarded candidates who had previously run for President in Virginia.
A direct-mail solicitation for Ron Paul's political and investment newsletters two decades ago warned of a "coming race war in our big cities" and of a "federal-homosexual cover-up" to play down the impact of AIDS.
The eight-page letter, which appears to carry Paul's signature at the end, also warns that the U.S. government's redesign of currency to include different colors - a move aimed at thwarting counterfeiters - actually was part of a plot to allow the government to track Americans using the "new money."...The letter's details emerge at a time when Paul, now a contender for the Republican nomination for president, is under fire over reports that his newsletters contained racist, anti-homosexual and anti-Israel rants.
Reports of the newsletters' contents have Paul's campaign scrambling to deny that he wrote the inflammatory articles.
Among other things, the articles called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a "world-class philanderer," criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King's name as "Hate Whitey Day," and said that AIDS sufferers "enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
Apparently, Paul will no longer entertain questions about his newsletters -- edited and published by Paul, according to the masthead -- that market a vicious, throwback form of racism, antisemitism and anti-government conspiracy theories.
Of course, the entire Paul phenomenon in Iowa is built on smoke and mirrors, as ABC News discovered....just 37 percent of Republican and Republican leaning independents nationally think Paul has the kind of personality and temperament to serve effectively as president and just 42 percent of Republicans think he would pursue policies that most Americans would find acceptable.
ABC News polling also finds that in a potential matchup, President Obama holds a significant lead over Paul.
...political observers say that Paul’s support is built in large part with the support of non-Republicans.
• "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks" read a typical article from the June 1992 “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism"
• Paul alleged that Martin Luther King Jr., “the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,” had also “seduced underage girls and boys.” The man who would later proclaim King a “hero” attacked Ronald Reagan for signing legislation creating the federal holiday in his name, complaining, “We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.”
• No conspiracy theory was too outlandish for Paul’s endorsement. One newsletter reported on the heretofore unknown phenomenon of “Needlin’,” in which “gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14” roamed the streets of New York and injected white women with possibly HIV-infected syringes. Another newsletter warned that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” a strange claim for a physician to make.
• Three months before far-right extremists killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, Paul’s newsletter praised the “1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty” as “one of the most encouraging developments in America.” And he offered specific advice to antigovernment militia members, such as, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
• In a March 2009 interview, Paul entertained [a] claim that NORTHCOM, the U.S. military’s combatant command for North America, is “taking over” the country. “The average member of Congress probably isn’t a participant in the grand conspiracy,” Paul reassured the fevered host, essentially acknowledging that such a conspiracy exists. “We need to take out the CIA.”
• In a January 2010 speech, Paul announced, “There’s been a coup, have you heard? It’s the CIA coup” against the American government. “They’re in businesses, in drug businesses,” the congressman added.
A top union and a top liberal blog announced Tuesday that they'll team up to sponsor polling through the 2012 elections. Daily Kos and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) said they will join forces to conduct issue and campaign polling in key states and races over the next two years...
...The SEIU/Daily Kos poll will use Public Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic firm that uses automated polling rather than live, over-the-phone survey methods. Moulitsas contracted with PPP in June of 2010 after severing ties with Research 2000, which faced allegations of producing faulty poll results.
Oh my: Ron Paul within one point of Gingrich in Iowa? ... "There has been some major movement in the Republican Presidential race in Iowa over the last week, with what was a 9 point lead for Newt Gingrich now all the way down to a single point. Gingrich is at 22% to 21% for Paul with Mitt Romney at 16%, Michele Bachmann at 11%, Rick Perry at 9%, Rick Santorum at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 5%, and Gary Johnson at 1%."
And let's not forget who Ron Paul really is:
• A man who claims that bloodthirsty Islamist terrorists are morally equivalent to Americans?The Ron Paul campaign is really about re-educating America to what can only be called Neoliberalism. Which, based on the evidence and writings of its supporters, appears to be a thin gruel of free markets and non-interventionism seasoned heavily with anti-Semitism, morally obtuse Neo-Confederates, and an outspoken contempt for both conservatism and conservative leaders past and present.
Interviewed on Neal Cavuto's Fox News show this afternoon, GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul claimed that "a third of the crowd was with me last night [at the debate] and more than a third of the country is with my ideas."The Ron Paul campaign is really about re-educating America to what can only be called Neoliberalism. Which, based on the evidence and writings of its supporters, appears to be a thin gruel of free markets and non-interventionism seasoned heavily with anti-Semitism, morally obtuse Neo-Confederates, and an outspoken contempt for both conservatism and conservative leaders past and present.
Yesterday, CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson told radio show host Laura Ingraham that the White House yelled and swore at her over her reporting on the Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal tied to the deaths of two U.S. law enforcement agents. Attkisson also revealed that she'd also been yelled at by the Justice Department.
...Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.
With 200 Mexican nationals and two American law enforcement personnel already dead, Eric Holder's Operation Fast and Furious is ten times bigger than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined.
• This assemblage of crackpots is supported by the Democrat Party's political organs including the Soros-funded MorOn.org, rich union bosses like Dick Trumka, and Ron Paul.The U.S. may be on its way to default on its debt despite the U.S. government's ability to print more money, a Chinese think tank researcher said Monday.
There is no guarantee for sovereign debt, which increases the risks the lenders face, said Wang Tianlong, a researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, a think tank supervised by the country's economic planner, adding that the issuer could be more careless in using the loans.
In the short term, the U.S. doesn't have much ability to reduce its deficit, Wang said in an opinion piece published in Securities Times. He added that the U.S. lacks the political system to guarantee that it will not default on its debt.There is also no way to punish the issuer country if it falsifies its accounting and there is no way to restructure the issuer either, Wang said.
Wang's comments come after the U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday the U.S. "never will default" on its government debt and reassured Beijing that Chinese investments in the U.S. are safe.
...Some time ago it was revealed that in its rush to "catch up" with western military technology, China has now developed an aircraft carrier and a stealth fighter (reverse engineering efficiency notwithstanding)...Now, it appears that China has developed its first ever unmanned drone...
...Wired has the latest: "It was another big reveal in a long history of them...
...Six months after the Chinese air force let the first photos of its new stealth fighter leak online, Beijing’s military has "accidentally" showed off another secretive weapon system: a small drone, apparently used to scout ahead of China’s fast-growing fleet of warships...
...Details of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — gleaned entirely from a snapshot (PDF) taken by a Japanese navy patrol plane last week — are sketchy, at best. But the new UAV certainly represents a step forward in China’s development of American-style spy drones." Of course, the "leak" is anything but, and is merely another attempt to demonstrate its ongoing scramble to keep up with the US across all verticals.
The results of this year's Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll are in.
The number of voters were up dramatically this year, emblematic of increased interest in constitutional conservatism nationwide.
Here's a preview of the results: the biggest bloc of voters were college-age students.
Like last year, 18-25 year old attendees dwarfed all other segments, which makes the straw poll less than useful for predicting anything of significance.
In addition, voters were overwhelmingly male.
Interestingly, 91% of all respondents listed cutting the size of government and reducing government spending as their #1 or #2 priority.
Cutting spending was, by far, the preferred choice for balancing the budget.
And attendees were generally optimistic that Congressional Republicans could achieve their highest priorities.
The collegiate-aged attendees stuffed the ballot box for Ron Paul. While Paul has admirable stands on many domestic issues, his isolationist foreign policy positions are downright nutty. He's a foreign policy kook, plain and simple. 
In response to the young idealists, may I suggest they contemplate the following: You can't be a super-power without the ability to project power.
In short, Paul believes Al Qaeda is justified in being "annoyed" at the U.S., since we've thus far disrupted hordes of suicidal freaks that are trying to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Said freaks would -- and have promised to -- set fire to our cities in a heartbeat if given the chance.
Here's a memo to Paul and his nutcase followers: it won't work to pretend that this is 1642 and that tiny weapons, capable of wreaking catastrophic damage, don't exist. 
