From the General: Ron Paul supporters blame “Jewish Cabal” for anti-Semitism charges.
This is an Open Thread.
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Actually, we are Dr. Paul’s biggest supporters. You should look at his bio .. his original name was Dr. Saul.
Would that be Dr. Saul of meta-tarsus?
Real slow news day.
Who really was responsible for the EPA shooting down CA’s new emissions law? Who else? Duck!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2231965,00.html
From deep in the heart of Texas, who needs football? Kill, kill, kill!!!! Now that’s entertainment!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/us/26death.html
Hey Stupes, from one of your favorites, the moonie times. Mike is lying, excusing me, overselling. Wingnut publications are really freaked by this guy.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fvep6
You know it gets bad when one of the leading voices of libertarian reason starts maligning dear Ronny for some of his more despicable notions:
http://scienceblogs.com/dispat.....lution.php
http://scienceblogs.com/dispat....._is_on.php
@6
Yeah, as I wrote over at Reload this morning when I first saw this, Ron Paul needs to have a ‘Sister Souljah moment’ with this whackos to make it clear that he has problems with what they really believe.
@7…Lee…
Essential to libertarian thinking is absolute freedom of conscience, even when it’s unconscienable. Otherwise, why would Ron Paul pal around with a sleeze like Dennis Hof?
For Ron Paul to Sister Souljah anyone, no matter how reprehensible or anathema the POV, is to go against his notion of liberty, which is, to a libertarian, the highest of all possible virtues. It’s, like, in the name of their movement.
In for a penny, in for a pound…
The Piper
@8
Ron Paul’s notion of liberty isn’t quite the same as many libertarians, but I don’t think it goes against either his (or other variations of) libertarian thinking to speak out against those who believe that libertarian philosophy only works for whites (which is essentially what many of these crazy-people believe). I think this dichotomy comes out most clearly when it comes to his views on Mexican immigrants.
Many real libertarians at places like the CATO Institute aren’t bothered by having massive amounts of immigrants from Mexico as long as there’s work for them, but Ron Paul’s position caters to those who buy into the Lou Dobbs’ scare-mongering about their “unwillingness to assimilate.” This is part of why he’s having the problems he’s having. Libertarianism has nothing to do with race. Things like freedom of religion, ensuring basic human rights and privacy, and democracy can work in any culture and with any race of people. You just have to buy into its importance (which is what happened in this country and why we’ve become such an extraordinary nation).
I also saw a headline this morning indicating Ron Paul was attacking Lincoln for fighting the Civil War, which Paul called “unnecessary,” but haven’t read the story yet. (I’ve been on the phone with my stockbroker.*) Paul is a nut job. I repeat, RON PAUL IS A NUT JOB!!! And don’t any of you, my fellow liberals, ever think otherwise.
* As an economic system, capitalism sucks (in many ways), but hey as long as that’s the system it sure beats working!
@7 Piper! We agree again on the conscience of a libertarian.
RR: I saw the piece on Ron Paul:
Here is the jist of RP’s views on the civil war:
Lincoln attacked the south (factually worng)
Lincoln was exercising too much federal authority.
there were better ways to end slavery (He suggest buying all the slaves – of course, many people would not have sold).
He doesn’t understand,or conveniently forgets, that it was a compromise position on slavery (no more slavery in the west) that Lincoln stood for (and was elected for) and that the southern states succeeded from the Union. Also, South Carolina started the war by firing on federal troops at Fort Sumter.
Then – even worse – he says that the civil rights act of 1964 was wrong (because it was a “government taking” and he would have voted against it).
On evolution – it is a theory he doesn’t believe in.
The guy is a true nutcase. He is against civil rights, doesn’t believe in evolution and makes up history. He does raise money well on the internet….hmmm.
@11…CnR…
Agree on something??? Pardon me while I pick myself up from off the floor!
I shake my head at much, if not most, of what Ron Paul espouses. Yet, many of his positions tend to attract newbies to the process who think only in terms of sums and not their arithmetic.
What I’m not willing to do, however, is condemn him for what anyone who supports him believes; he’s responsible only for him, not for some racist moron with a website. That he’s unwilling to disavow the beliefs of others may be of importance to others, but Dr. Paul (remember…he’s an Ob-Gyn) has the absolute right to hold the beliefs and opinions he holds, and while we can criticize them, we should be careful criticizing him for them lest we open ourselves up to a like criticism.
He can believe what he wants, and anyone can believe to the contrary, which is what makes freedom a good thing; let the marketplace of ideas sort it all out.
The Piper
@11: Piper
Those are my paraphrases of his actual statements – not what someone else says he stands for. I agree that he should be judged on what he actually says – not what others say about him.
So – judged on what he actually says – the guy (Ron Paul) is pretty out there in his views. If he is a doctor who thinks evolution is just some theory – and he doesn’t agree with it….well, that says something about his power of analysis.
That he would vote against the civil rights act of 1964 (today) because of some nebulous argument about “takings” – that also tells me about his judgement and character.
That he doesn’t understand the causes and issues in the Civil War – that tells me alot about his knowledge and application of history.
BTW – before you get off the floor (so you don’t have to fall down again!) – I also agreed with you on the tiger story above.
@13…CnR…
Yes, I caught your agreement on the tiger story…
In re the Civil War…There are many in the South (Ron Paul is from Texas, a Southern state) that will contend to you to this very day that Lincoln’s quartering of troops in the South was tantamount to taking the aggressive first step. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard’s shelling of Fort Sumter, then, was only an attempt to drive an invading force from South Carolina.
I don’t hold with this theory, but a great many who refer to the Civil War as the War Between the States do.
And I don’t agree with a lot of other stuff he says, even if there are also a great many very well educated and intelligent people in the country who do; not every thing that’s considered by anyone’s version of conventional wisdome to be a closed or settled matter is, in fact, closed or settled.
The point remains that he’s absolutely entitled to his beliefs and his rationale for them; it’s still a free country.
I will give him this, however: he’s not poll driven, keeping a wet finger in the wind before he says anything.
The Piper
In a TV interview, a supporter of Ron Paul stated that the significance of the Ron Paul phenomenon is not the beliefs or candidacy of Ron Paul, but the fact that he can raise more funds on the internet than even a corporate-sponsored candidate can generate.
It’s proof that motivated voters can successfully fund politicians as easily as corporations can.
Some research into what triggers these citizens to contribute is in order.
I’ll be voting for Ron Paul. He’s the only candidate that is different from the corporate elitist Republicans or the Socialist Democrats.
Ron Paul is a whackjob. He thinks the Federal Reserve system should be dismantled, supports an isolationist foreign policy, wants the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and the UN, opposes birthright citizenship, would replace federal income taxes with excise taxes and tariffs, is squarely in the “property rights” camp and opposes environmental and pollution regulations, is anti-choice and favors reversing Roe v. Wade, and wants to let workers opt out of Social Security. In other words, his political thinking is circa 1890. Apparently he’s nostalgic for those bygone days of robber barons, financial panics, and chronic economic depression. Me, I prefer someone who lives in the current century.
re 17: What followed the age of the Robber Barons was the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
Yes, the one who praised socialistic/collectivist solutions to the degree they are practicable, which is a line defined by experience not theory, and advocated taking steps with communists as long as you agreed with them, as this did not mean you have to take the final steps they might advocate, where you would not agree with them.
He was not a libertarian and he favored many things that today are viewed as “socialism” and contrary to conservative principles.
re 19: Yep!
Thom Hartmann (Air America’s answer to Rush Limbaugh) continually attacks Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve chief. Hartmann pretty much claims Greenspan was libertarian, yet I’d say Greenspan is a pretty even-handed guy who did a dang fine job of managing the economy for all those years. Politicians think they manage the economy, but their fiscal inputs are fleeting and usually overturned by the actions of the Fed. Monetary policy is far superior to fiscal policy when it comes to providing a platform for stable prices and economic growth. Milton Friedman was a great economist who had it absolutely correct. Too bad he’s gone.
If we had a more isolationist policy with regard to military intervention, we wouldn’t have gotten involved in the Iraq mess.
What George W. Bush should have done in late September of 2001 was to put a medium-sized nuke on the location where we thought Osama and his cohorts were hanging out. Then GW should have gone on TV and told the world that the next attempt to do anything like the 9-11 stunt would be met with a larger nuclear attack on a large Muslim population center and/or maybe a few holy sites of Islam. That would have quieted the would-be terrorists so that they’d never mess with the US again.
Of course, it goes without saying that we need to un-involve ourselves in the Middle East. Israel is strong enough to take care of themselves: they don’t need us or our support any longer.
Time to close down the show on the Korean Peninsula, too. We’ve been over there too long. Time for Japan, Russia, China and South Korea to take care of the North Korean problem.
Barron Hilton’s gonna leave all his money to charity rather than to his grandaughter, Paris. Does that mean Paris will have to get a day job?
PI @ 21
I think you’ve been reading too much popular writings by or about Milton Friedman, and, as a result, are glossing over some of his more important failures.
Friedman’s crowning achievement was to have predicted that stagflation was possible, and he did so through very sound analysis. When it comes to the efficacy of monetary policy, however, Friedman’s success is less than stellar.
One of Friedman’s seminal empirical works was to note that the primary reason for the depth of the Great Depression was a drastic reduction in the money supply from about $26.6 billion in 1929 to about $19.9 billion in 1933. So far, this observation is classic monetarism.
Where Friedman started going wrong was his attempts to lay the blame for that reduction in the money supply at the Federal Reserve. In order to understand this, we have to understand the difference between the money supply and the monetary base of the money supply. The monetary base of the money supply is currency plus any deposits that banks have with the Federal Reserve. The money supply includes both the monetary base and money that banks lend out to borrowers (the act of lending money by banks, in reality, actually creates new money–google “fractional reserve banking” for an explanation of why and how this is true). One way to think of this difference is that the monetary base is that portion of the money supply under direct control of the Federal Reserve.
With that difference in mind, we also have to note that, while the money supply fell sharply during the Great Depression, the monetary base actually increased from $6.05 billion in 1929 to $7.02 billion in 1933.
So, money supply fell but the base increased, yet Friedman blamed the Fed. How so? Well, at first, Friedman argued that the Fed should have been more aggressive in their efforts to increase the money supply. In later years, having succumbed to the seductions of his own anti-government rhetoric, his argument about an insufficiently active government transformed into an argument about the outright failure of government participation in the Economy altogether. In a 1976 Newsweek article, for example, Friedman wrote “the elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement.”
The whole episode represents a remarkable metamorphosis in the thinking of someone who had contributed so much toward Economics as a science–testimony that even the greatest minds are capable of faltering when they do not assiduously adhere to a proper standard of rigor in their thought.
In the meantime, there is a report that GM may be interested in outsourcing assembly line jobs to chimpanzees . GM’s management says the chimps are less expensive to feed than Chinese workers and apparently have unsupsected skills at took making,
Bhutto is dead! Pakistan, a nuKUlar country is coming apart at the seams. The Islamofascists want to go to heaven as martyrs and the Evangelicals want to bring on the “end times.” Thank the good Lord that we have President Bush in office in these terrible times. A man of proven wisdom and competence he shall, with the grace of God, lead us through these troubled times. Cuz you see protecting us and our families is his job. Order up some more waterboards! We need to show these god damned extremists our democratic values. Praise the Lord and God Bless America.
@22 “What George W. Bush should have done in late September of 2001 was to put a medium-sized nuke on the location where we thought Osama and his cohorts were hanging out. Then GW should have gone on TV and told the world that the next attempt to do anything like the 9-11 stunt would be met with a larger nuclear attack on a large Muslim population center and/or maybe a few holy sites of Islam. That would have quieted the would-be terrorists so that they’d never mess with the US again.”
Wow! That is about the most stupid fucking thing I’ve ever read on this blog and that IS saying something! You may not ne aware that Pakistan has nuKular weapons and many many would be martyrs who would love to go nuKular on America.
@27
Yeah, that really is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. PI, you’re not stupid enough to actually believe that, are you?
Helpless Loosie (TM) AKA Irv Kupcinet AKA Puddy The Pud @13: Since you continually deliver to us on the right your fascination with Ron Paul, I guess we all can guess you’ll be voting for him!
@10 Roger Rabbit-I really don’t give a fuck how you make a living, how often you talk to your stockbroker or how wealthy you are. Other things I don’t care about: the size of your house, car or pee pee.
Politically Incorrect @ 23: “Does that mean Paris will have to get a day job?”
No, it means she’ll start charging Ron Paul for all the blowjobs.