Slashdot Mirror

> Remember the collapse from the housing bubble burst? Who predicted that? Precious few men and women knew it was coming, and damned near none had any idea how bad it could be.

That would be pretty much the entire Republican party. Here's Ron Paul explaining exactly what would happen, in 2002. This is six years before the collapse:

http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09...

From the tippy-top of the bitcoin.org website:

Bitcoin is an innovative payment network and a new kind of money.

Now, IANAL, but I suspect walking into court with an argument that bitcoin isn't a new kind of money when its creators clearly and demonstrably assert that it is a new kind of money is likely to fail pretty hard.

And yes, I'm well aware of the of the distinction between money and currency. Gold bugs, sufferers of Fed derangement syndrome and others spend a lot of time proselytizing about this stuff. The thing is that the SEC and the courts don't, which is why no one has ever succeeded in evading financial laws by attacking the legitimacy of fiat money.

At least not without an army.

I'll even be super nice and give you a link to start with. http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-09-13/ron-paul-and-dennis-kucinich-allies-against-war/

http://www.ronpaul.com/2013-06-10/ron-paul-edward-snowden-and-glenn-greenwald-have-done-a-great-service-to-the-american-people/

“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk. They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”

Yeah, but it's the same old libertarian-party bullshit wrapped up in a fake facade.

When libertarians use the word "liberty" they mean it a lot like when scientologists use the word "ethics" or a lot of their other word misappropriations and catchphrases.

It's always funny listening to them speak. The average libertarian screaming about how government is always evil, taxation is always theft, how no entity but the government could ever have an impact on the "liberty" of another person. You know what? I prefer a world where segregated lunch counters don't exist, where there's someone who has my back to say the MY money is just as good as anyone else's rather than some kkk asshat being able to tell me to move to some other city where my "kind" is tolerated. Libertarians are so hung up on eliminating government that they'd gleefully go back to the days where I could be pushed out of a store with a shotgun just for being the wrong skin color.

Fuck them and fuck their racist bullshit.

Except wasn't being held as ransom. Go visit the site: ronpaul.com. It's almost like they like the guy! It's all around hilarious and ironic; I love it!

it's not very important since condition (a) is all that matters, but he was offered free use of the inferior ronpaul.org site, rather than the desired ronpaul.com.

by the way, the owners of ronpaul.com claim ``on good authority" that it is Lew Rockwell behind the attack, rather than Ron Paul. if true, it may be interesting to see whether Ron Paul ends up siding with 1) his elite ideologue; or 2) his grassroots support base. my money would be on (1), and if past trends hold, he'll be able to convince (2) that it's in their interest anyway.

Property rights are the foundation of all rights in a free society unless the property we're talking about are domain names that you feel are yours, right Senator Paul?

I personally feel that he'd be much better off just ignoring the domain and creating his own website (possibly with the domain, http://domains-do-not-really-matter-anymore.com/ but I do understand where he is coming from a little bit. People will assume that whatever is being published at www.ronpaul.com will be things that Ron Paul agrees with. Think of it as a giant newletter with Ron Paul's logo on it. Of course, he could just ignore it and let them publish whatever they feel like, but if he does that and they publish something he really disagrees with it could cause some damage to his "brand." Perhaps he figures the only way to prevent a repeat of the 1980's racist newletters incident is to make sure he controls his own brand.....

Of course, once again my own opinion is that he'd be much better just getting a different domain with great content and making sure his domain *clearly* states that he has no editorial control over http://www.ronpaul.com./

You are likely confused by how often big-government types claim to be for a free market or libertarian.

No, that part does not confuse me, or progressives in general, for that matter. We are quite familiar with Republican hypocrisy in that area. :-)

Since you mentioned Ron Paul, let's take a look at him. His official campaign site does not mention climate at all, and seems mostly concerned about reducing the price of gas. He also seems to think I should make polluters "answer in court" for polluting my property. I guess I'm supposed to sue my entire city for raising my ozone levels...

His biggest fan site (or at least the first Google result for "Ron Paul on climate change") quotes him as declaring global warming a "hoax" and "terrorism", and links to a couple of hilarious conspiracy theory sites. So, er... what about Ron Paul again?

Also, this is not a 'no true Scotsman' fallacy. That only applies when there are no real Scotman.

I think you have misunderstood this. The No True Scotsman fallacy is arbitrarily narrowing a category to exclude an individual that you don't like. By definition, there must be real Scotsmen for the fallacy to apply, as in the classic example:

A: "All Scotsmen love haggis."
B: "My friend is a Scotsman, and he doesn't like Haggis."
A: "He must not be a TRUE Scotsman."

But of course he is. Likewise, "libertarian" is not so easy to define. The very first thing in Ron Paul's list of issues is support for the religiously-motivated banning of abortion, which many people consider to be the very essence of big-government intrusion into personal liberty. But nobody has a problem calling him a libertarian, right?

You what now?

If our money were backed by gold and silver, people couldn’t just sit in some fancy building and push a button to create new money. They would have to engage in honest trade with another party that already has some gold in their possession. Alternatively, they would have to risk their lives and assets to find a suitable spot to build a gold mine, then get dirty and sweaty and actually dig up the gold. Not something I can imagine our “money elves” at the Fed getting down to whenever they feel like playing God with the economy.

Paulians don't even know what they're talking about when they claim to be quoting Ron Paul. If that isn't evidence of a cult of personality disorder, I don't know what is.

I'd tackle the discretionary spending in the defense budget first. The government is spending $666.2 BILLION there, as opposed to $80.6 billion on "health and human services" of which welfare is a part. Source.

If we reduced the U.S. Government (as a whole, not just defense) to the size it was in the 1990s you could do away with the income tax completely. Source. And think of how big the government was in the 1990s. What taxes could we eliminate if we reduced the government to the size it was before LBJ's "Great Society" (1965), the "New Deal" (1933), or even the income tax itself (1913)?

My apologies for the long post, but Ron Paul pisses me off. From his own website:

Ron Paul supports the elimination of the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

First line of his tax platform, and we've established that he wants to get rid of the income tax, which is currently the most direct way to put the burden of social support on those who benefit most: the wealthy. If you're of the opinion that everyone should support society equally, whether or not they can afford it, then I guess removing income tax makes sense. That's not my opinion.

To provide funding for the federal government, Ron Paul supports excise taxes...

Excise tax is often connected to "sin tax" for good reason. The government gets to put a tax on anything it wants. The paranoid folks worry about the influence of government on our right to purchase particular things, but what actually concerns me more is the likelihood that a "fair" excise tax is applied to practically everything, so all prices rise by some amount, increasing the total cost of living. If wages also increase, then it's just inflation, and nothing changes (except we're in a worse position in the global economy). If wages don't increase, then the taxes affect the lowest-income population the most, while the middle and upper classes are unaffected.

...non-protectionist tariffs...

I don't think I've ever heard of any tariff that's not protectionist. Raising the price of an import necessarily makes outsourced manufacturing more expensive. Unfortunately, this isn't the 1800's, where America was capable of being (more or less) self-reliant. Americans want their electronics from Asia, and modern companies know this. The higher prices from the tariffs will be passed on to the consumers, which again will mostly hurt the lowest-income population. I don't think that's right.

massive cuts in spending

He defines what will be cut elsewhere. Notably, he intends to close the Department of Energy (because who needs energy research anyway, when you have big energy companies working on fossil fuels?), Housing and Urban Development (which currently manages federal programs for low-income people to buy homes), and the Department of Education (because the states do such a great job already). Less specifically, some other goals are "returning responsibility for security to private property owners" which I interpret to mean cutting federal support for emergency services, and "stopping foreign aid", of which the #1 recipient is Afghanistan. Sure... once we've screwed over a country for 10 years, let's cut off support to rebuild, so we can cut back 1% of the federal budget. He also boasts about his promise to take a personal salary of only $39,000, which is a savings of almost 0.00001% from the federal budget. Then there's his spending freezes, on Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, family support, and child nutrition programs.

“I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. ...

He wants to cut out 45% of income, but his vaunted $1 trillion in cuts only total about 33% of expenses. Without replacing the missing 12% of the budget, he's going to have a hard time meeting his promise to have a balanced budget in two years.

His position on abortion cannot be justified by the constitution

Oh, I think "leave it to the states" is a perfectly constitutional opinion.

From his own position description at http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/abortion/:

At the same time, Ron Paul believes that the ninth and tenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution do not grant the federal government any authority to legalize or ban abortion. Instead, it is up to the individual states to prohibit abortion.

Oh dear. I guess I'm a troll for challenging the fact that Ron Paul is anything less that a God-King.

Rather than engaging your turd-mined example of untruth from an unrelated portion of my source, let's find sources for the on-topic claims I actually made about Ron Paul's political positions:

http://www.ronpaul.com/2011-08-18/ron-paul-limit-military-to-national-defense/

Would allow prayer in schools: "The federal government has no authority to tell your public schools whether you have a prayer in school or not"

Church and state: "But, as far as church and state goes, the first amendment gives us a pretty hint: the Congress shall write no law, there are no prohibitions." Personally I find that interpretation naive to the point of idiocy -- or possibly one taken with full knowledge that it closes the door on explicit theocracy while opening one to a much more dangerous implicit one.

Sexual harassment: He wrote this in a book: "Why don’t they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardly acceptable."

Non-acknowledgement of the right to privacy in the bedroom: He wrote this on the website of Lew Rockwell: "there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution."

Gay marriage: He sells cards of talking points in favor of DOMA on his website.
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/store/slim-jim-4x9-issue-card-packs/protect-marriage-issue-cards-pack-of-100/

Abortion: He sells similar talking point cards that dismiss even the possibility of a medically necessary abortion.
http://www.ronpaul2012.com/store/slim-jim-4x9-issue-card-packs/a-pro-life-champion-issue-cards-pack-of-100/

DADT: He voted to repeal it, but has now taken up the stance that it should be repealed...because he's so consistent and courageous, right?http://www.dailypaul.com/136125/patriot-ron-paul-changes-stance-on-dont-ask-dont-tell-votes-for-repeal

Seriously, he's not the savior you people think he is.

The GOP candidates, except for Ron Paul, seem to think that laws should be made based on religious views.

On the contrary, he thinks that there should be no separation between church and state, and rather that laws should be based on Christian religious views. Ron Paul is pro-life because of his religious views. And, rather than thinking the government shouldn't be involved in private medical decisions, he thinks it should be criminal, and investigated and punished.

Ron Paul also doesn't believe in evolution.

Take all you want!

Good job completely avoiding the topic at hand. How does your favorite candidate's plan to bring home the troops make any difference for emergency responders?

- National Guard would come home AND money would be available in case of real emergencies.

Oh, how cute. Most conservative idiots just try to link Obama to the middle east or Islam. Instead you want people to think he is a Star Wars Wookie from Kazakhstan? Yeah, that makes perfect sense if you're on heavy drugs.

- no, I just like the SOUND of it:

Just say it outloud: BORAT CHUBAKA.

It really sounds better than his name.

By the way, it's on the record in this site (I can find the links), I don't believe in any of the nonsense about Obama, he is whatever, it doesn't matter to me one bit. His mother is a US citizens, so is he. He says he is Christian, good for him. I am an ATHEIST. I don't care.

As opposed to what other president that we've had in the US in the past several decades?

- PRECISELY.

--

Now, tell me this: are you sympathetic to the OWS demand that the banks stop having special privileges with the government? Are you against special privileges that the banks have, with all that money?

If you say 'YES', then you are a hypocrite. You are against some special privileges but you are for other special privileges.

FEMA is no better than the banks, it's all moral hazard, it's all fake insurance and it's all financed by theft (either via taxes or via inflation - printing or via future taxes - borrowing).

To me the banks getting bail outs or the victims of natural disasters getting bail outs - SAME DEAL. They all have moral hazard provided by government and they all get bailed out with theft. They all should go out of business and they all should have private insurance and be regulated by market regulations, not gov't bullshit.

if you say 'NO' - then I can understand your position. You like big gov't, you are with all this spending, you are fine with borrowing, taxing income, printing and inflating money, then your position is NOT hypocritical, but it is the WRONG position.

--

As to whether Ron Paul has no chance. Whatever. Let us look at the facts.

Ron Paul is pulling in millions from tiny donations, he pulled in 8 million in the third quarter of 2011. He is steady at 11-15% support.

He just won another straw poll in Iowa with 82% out of 430 voters.

In the Iowa voters result, Paul took 82%. Following him were Herman Cain with 14.7%, Rick Santorum with 1%, Newt Gingrich with 0.9%, Michele Bachmann with 0.5%, Rick Perry with 0.5%, Gary Johnson with 0.2%, with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman 0%.

for non-Iowans who voted he ALSO won:

In the tally of non-Iowans who voted, Paul won 26% followed by Cain at 25%, Perry and Santorum tied at 16%, Gingrich at 11%, Bachmann at 6%, Romney at 1%, and Huntsman and Johnson with 0%.

See, that's called COMMITMENT. You think it takes a majority to win? It takes a group of dedicated people acting as one and not sitting on their asses.

Um, Ron Paul is one of the most vocal critics of inflated defense spending.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/06/ron-paul-joins-house-lawmakers-in-push-for-military-spending-cuts/
http://www.ronpaul.com/2010-07-08/ron-paul-and-barney-frank-cut-military-spending/
http://dailycaller.com/2011/10/02/balanced-budget-or-empire-you-cant-have-both/

He also voted against sending troops to Iraq.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul#Iraq

Of course it's biased - it's all politics. This one by Ron Paul is less full of hyperbole, but the major contrast is knowing the whole history of this effort, the people involved, what Sanders did to the bill at the last minute, and then seeing this kind of bullcrap from Sanders totally praising himself and making wild untrue claims about what HIS version of the bill does and failing to mention what he did was basically sell out to the elites.

I wonder why Ron Paul doesn't talk about slashing the military budget, it would appear the potential savings are enormous?

Mostly because he would probably end our ongoing attempts at maintaining an overseas empire. His history of opposition to offensive warfare is pretty well documented. As are his positions on military spending.

Paul is actually against foreign wars, foreign involvement in other countries, and pretty much an isolationist. He (rightly) calls for a standing military for national defense, but would not approve of that military being used outside our borders for any reason. Given those views, I think you can safely say that he would cut defense spending precipitously.

If you don't believe, take his own words for it:
Press conference

"moneyed interests" - already control us. No need to trade anything. Ron Paul is the only candidate standing up to the "moneyed interests". You should educate yourself before you speak such non-sense. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji_G0MqAqq8 http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/fiat-money-inflation-federal-reserve-2/

You are mistaken, plenty of people vote for somebody that I would vote for.

Or maybe the guy who actually did this? You know Bernie Sanders, or as Paulites would refer to him "teh ebil Socialist."

Ron Paul gets a lot of credit for doing a whole lot of nothing.

I'm getting tired of correcting you ignorant masses. But here is the full story, again

Or, say, Bernie Sanders, who ordered this audit.

You should make sure you know what you're talking about before opening your mouth. Here's a good start.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced an amendment on the floor effectively adding the Grayson-Paul language to the Senate bill, but later changed his amendment under pressure by the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration. The altered Sanders amendment passed the Senate on May 11, 2010 by a unanimous 96-0 vote.

well said. now if only enough people in this world understand that corporatism is not the capitalism we want

ron paul recognizes this

http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-10-31/ron-paul-responds-to-michael-moore-its-corporatism-not-capitalism/

so maybe some on the right can join me in this fight against the corporate destruction of our democracy, which will eventually be wedded to chinese oligarchy

Dude, learn to read. You'll notice that I didn't make a single argument against the claim that health reform is unconstitutional. That wasn't my point. My point was that your argument (there's no explicit reference to health insurance in the constitution) is lame, and isn't even used by strong opponents of reform.

I did read, and I can write. Lame? The USA Constitution is lame? Or is it believing in the Constitution is lame? Or believing in the limited role the federal government was supposed to have? Opponents don't use that argument? Congressman Ron Paul didn't say "Not to mention the fact that it is completely unconstitutional"? How about CONSTITUTIONALITY OF HEALTH CARE REFORM? Googling health care reform constitution returns almost 3 million results. The first result, other than the map link, is the link you provide in this post of yours.

Falcon

The Supreme Court is part of the judicial branch, as outlined in your nearest US Constitution. The Fed is a central bank created by Congress. Congress was specifically granted the power to do this in the Constitution. Now, they also have the power to destroy that central bank or do just about anything else to it. That's why you should support HR 1207 and S 604, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act of 2009, also known as Audit the Fed, sponsored by Rep. Ron Paul [R-Tex]. http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/audit-the-federal-reserve-hr-1207/
Make sure ALL your congresscritters are on that list.

Not properly, it isn't, you fucking moron.

http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/audit-the-federal-reserve-hr-1207/

If it WERE audited PROPERLY there's wouldn't be a brand-spanking new bill trying to get the whole fucking thing made transparent, now would there?

Not a proper audit = NOT AN AUDIT AT ALL.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/
http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/health-care/

No. I also called you a troll. You seem to want a chronological timeline of what Obama will do in advance of his presidency, with legislation included. I can't debate the future with you. I'm not a psychic. You should also take a gander at John McCain's issue site:

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/

I think you'll find that it is written at the same depth (I would contend it actually explains less, but that might be my political leanings). Here's Ron Paul's website for the sake of completeness:

http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/

McCain's key demographic just isn't as densely populated with young, tech-savvy individuals like Obama's (or other candidates) Besides, how does McCain expect his supporters to use a machine that he admittedly can't operate?