Thread: Ron Paul on the Issues

Ron Paul Campaign Celebrates Great Victory at Iowa Caucus

Paul makes history in first-in-nation voting state

LAKE JACKSON, Texas – The Ron Paul 2012 Presidential campaign is celebrating a great victory with its strong top-three finish at the Iowa Caucus. Below please find comments from Ron Paul 2012 National Campaign Chairman Jesse Benton:

“The Ron Paul campaign is celebrating a great victory tonight.

“There were three tickets out of Iowa, and Ron Paul earned one of them.

“One of the three tickets, the one belonging to Rick Santorum, is a dead-end due to Santorum’s weak fundraising and lack of national campaign organization.

“This is now a two way race between establishment candidate Mitt Romney and the candidate for real change, Ron Paul.

“Ron Paul has a top notch national organization, tremendous fundraising prowess, and unequaled enthusiasm among his volunteers and supporters.

“Dr. Paul has taken the first step towards earning the delegates it will take to be the GOP nominee and is the only candidate not named Mitt Romney with the ability to do so.

“Ron Paul is now off to New Hampshire, South Carolina, Louisiana, Nevada, Maine, North Dakota, Washington, Colorado, and beyond.

“See you on the campaign trail.”

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2012/01/0...t-iowa-caucus/

Ron Paul’s Iowa Finish: “Biggest Fraud Since Kennedy Stole the West Virginia Primary”

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 4, 2012

Following Ron Paul’s suspicious third place finish in Iowa, Lew Rockwell posted remarks by Brad Funkhouser:



“I’ve been following Iowa GOP vote counts for a long time… They are being slow-walked… in 2012. Negotiations are going on… Cash is changing hands. Apparently GOP chieftains are ‘persuading,’ by one means or the other, Perry and Bachmann people who hold considerable sway over large blocs of votes to switch to Romney and Santorum – leaving Ron in the dust… Also abusing suddenly lax ID registration may have created many fake votes for neocons Santorum and Romney. Santorum has no organization, never drew over 100 people during his entire campaign. Of course he did bribe and received the benediction of of that ‘family’ leader who demanded 1 million dollars that were to be distributed in part to cronies. This is the biggest fraud since

Kennedy stole the West Virginia Primary. Perry had built a pretty organization and was around 13% of the vote. He drew far larger crowds than Santorum and ends up with just 10%. Did those votes go. Santorum? Santorum didn’t earn 24% of the vote.”

In addition to irregularities in West Virginia, it was rumored that there was fraud in Kennedy’s favor in Chicago — where the vote was controlled by Mayor Daley’s political machine — and Texas where vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson was a senator.

Brad Friedman, usually astute on voting fraud matters, pointed out a number of “rules” not set by Iowa, but rather by the GOP establishment, including allowing voters to cast ballots without showing a photo ID.

On Tuesday, we warned that the GOP would try to fix the race in order to get rid of Paul. “Tonight’s final vote tally for the Iowa caucuses will take place at a secret undisclosed location, an announcement that has stoked fears of vote fraud amongst Ron Paul supporters, concerns that were heightened following a Republican insider’s claim that the GOP establishment will not allow Paul to win,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote for Infowars.com.

The secret location was announced after Occupy threatened to disrupt the vote counting process.

In characteristic gentlemanly fashion, Paul told his supporters the third place finish is “nothing to be ashamed of” and prepared them for the New Hampshire contest.

“I think there’s nothing to be ashamed of, everything to be satisfied, and be ready and raring to move on to the next stop, which is New Hampshire,” he said.

http://www.infowars.com/ron-pauls-io...ginia-primary/

Iowa Results: Did the GOP establishment sabotage Ron Paul as it vowed to do?


“It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” - Joseph Stalin

Aaron Dykes
Infowars.com
January 3, 2012

UPDATE 1:46 AM CENTRAL: Mitt Romney has now been announced as the winner of the Iowa caucus, dramatically leading Rick Santorum by only 8 votes.



The two candidates have wrestled back-and-forth for first as various locales checked in with GOP officials– who moved today to meet at an undisclosed location to count the votes in secret after the hacker collective Anonymous issued threats to disrupt the caucus.

Ron Paul at a close third with 21%, conceded the race calling himself ‘one of the three winners,’ and dubbed his performance ‘nothing to be ashamed of’. After all, he led polls for months leading into the contest, under heavy fire from media hacks aligned with the GOP establishment ever-eager to dismiss his viability. Paul vowed to fight on, continue raising funds and fighting for victory in what he termed a movement, rather than a campaign.

Santorum’s surprise last-minute surge coincides with announcements that the vote in Iowa would be counted at a secret location– yes, vague threats from hacker collective Anonymous gave the pretext to count the votes in secret– and also coincided with statements from top GOP officials strategizing how to effectively take out Ron Paul and diminish his significance. It is no secret that all the stops have been pulled to minimize Paul’s media visibility throughout the campaign trail, with many top GOP figures and media commentators going so far as to pre-script a plan to ignore Iowa in the event that Ron Paul won the caucuses, in order to prevent the Congressman from dominating the national stage.

Did the GOP establishment succeed in sabotaging Ron Paul in the Iowa caucus vote as it vowed to do?

What accounts for Santorum’s swift rise to the top of polls in Iowa only days out from the contest when he barely showed a pulse in ANY state, let alone Iowa, among the crowded GOP field at any time in the weeks and months before?

The Des Moines Register poll from ONLY two days ago showed Santorum at 15%– a distant third that itself marked a spectacular improvement from a campaign that struggled to even stand out among the ‘second tier’ of GOP candidates. Both Paul and Romney have consistently ranked in the top three in polls for Iowa for some time– many of which led into Iowa with Ron Paul at No. 1 and nearly all others showing him nearly certain for first or second place.

A CNN report from six days ago highlights Santorum’s rise to 16% in polls from only 5% at the beginning of December– similar to numbers he’s had through the campaign, as in this Dec. 20 poll. Public Policy Polling notes Santorum at only 10% during Dec. 26-27. So how did he rise so quickly?

Whatever the answer, for the so-called “mainstream” corporate-owned media who dominate news wires and cable television (but must now combat the rise of Internet journalism), it will be enough to justify ignoring Ron Paul and keeping him out of the headlines in hopes of sinking the entire campaign before it catches on at a truly national level.

2008 GOP running mate Sarah Palin surprisingly warned against the GOP trying to marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters after the third place finish.

“The GOP had better not marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters after this, because Ron Paul and his supporters understand that a lot of Americans are war-weary, and we are broke. And he has reached these constituencies who are very concerned about the solvency of the U.S., and he has proposed solutions with the austerity measures he’d like to see implemented. So the GOP had better listen to what these Ron Paul supporters are saying– they’d better work with them,” Palin told Fox News.

A GOP insider revealed a deal to swing votes away from Ron Paul in Iowa today, raising eyebrows and questions about validity of this oh-so-close caucus vote that leads the 2012 primary vote.

See the video below:



RELATED: Tonight’s Iowa Vote Count To Take Place At Secret Location

RELATED: Republican Insider: GOP Establishment Planning To Subvert Iowa to Prevent Ron Paul Win

http://www.infowars.com/did-the-gop-...t-vowed-to-do/

The Greatness of Ron Paul

By Robert WrightJan 3 2012, 5:59 PM ET197

By introducing moral imagination to the foreign-policy conversation, the Republican candidate is doing the nation an important service.




A dispute has broken out among fans of Ron Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy about whether he's a strategic liability. Paul, says Kevin Drum, is such a "toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger" that "the only thing he's accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is."

It's certainly true that Paul's hawkish critics are using his weirder ideas and checkered past to try and make non-interventionism synonymous with creepiness. But, whatever their success, Paul is making one contribution to the foreign policy debate that could have enduring value.

It doesn't lie in the substance of his foreign policy views (which I'm largely but not wholly in sympathy with) but in the way he explains them. Paul routinely performs a simple thought experiment: He tries to imagine how the world looks to people other than Americans.

This is such a radical departure from the prevailing American mindset that some of Paul's critics see it as more evidence of his weirdness. A video montage meant to discredit him shows him taking the perspective of Iran. After observing that Israel and America and China have nukes, he asks about Iranians, "Why wouldn't it be natural that they'd want a weapon? Internationally they'd be given more respect."

Can somebody explain to me why this is such a crazy conjecture about Iranian motivation? Wouldn't it be reasonable for Iranian leaders, having seen what happened to nukeless Saddam Hussein and nukeless Muammar Qaddafi, to conclude that maybe having a nuclear weapon would get them more respectful treatment?

Paul's error is clear: He's departed from approved Republican-presidential-candidate talking points, according to which the only explanation for an Iranian nuclear program is a desire to destroy Israel. (Even Jon Huntsman, supposedly one of the more sensible Republicans on foreign policy, seems to be a slave to the talking points: It's the Huntsman campaign that created the video montage in question!)

A favorite Paul pedagogical device is to analogize foreign situations to American ones. A campaign ad promoted by a Paul-supporting super PAC begins by asking us to imagine Russian or Chinese troops in Texas. The point is that this is how our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan look to locals.

I've long thought that the biggest single problem in the world is the failure of "moral imagination"--the inability or unwillingness of people to see things from the perspective of people in circumstances different from their own. Especially incendiary is the failure to extend moral imagination across national, religious, or ethnic borders.

If a lack of moral imagination is indeed the core problem with America's foreign policy, and Ron Paul is unique among presidential candidates in trying to fight it, I think you have to say he's doing something great, notwithstanding the many non-great and opposite-of-great things about him (and notwithstanding the fact that he has in the past failed to extend moral imagination across all possible borders).

Paul's hawkish detractors may succeed in using him to taint a non-interventionist foreign policy. Even so, if in the meanwhile Paul gets enough people exercising their moral imaginations, maybe doves will get the last laugh.

Image: Jim Young / Reuters

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...n-paul/250827/

Ron Paul blasts back at Santorum after being called ‘disgusting’

By Justin Sink - 01/03/12 07:37 PM ET

Ron Paul blasted back at Rick Santorum, who referred to the Texas congressman as “disgusting” earlier in the day, deriding the former Pennsylvania senator as “liberal” and calling the incident “not a very nice thing.”

“I would say that’s not a very nice thing to do,” Paul said during an interview Tuesday on Fox News. “I think he wants to deflect away from some of the charges made against him about having been a supporter of Arlen Specter — and he was a pretty liberal senator, he supported prescription drug programs, and No Child Left Behind, and voted for all of the foreign aid, so I would say he ought to be talking about that rather than calling me names.”

Santorum reportedly called Paul “disgusting” to Fox News reporters after appearing on the network’s morning show earlier Tuesday.

Paul and Santorum are both attempting to paint themselves as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucus, but deep ideological differences — especially on foreign policy — have sharply divided the Republican competitors.

Earlier this weekend, Santorum blasted Paul for negative robo-calling and his foreign policy platform.

“Just on the issue of commander in chief, he comes from the Dennis Kucinich wing of the Democratic Party, which is not a place where I’d want my commander in chief to be,” Santorum said on MSNBC. “The problem is Barack Obama in his second term, I fear, would not be much better.”

The Paul campaign, meanwhile, touted Tuesday the endorsement of one of Santorum’s nephews.

“Santorum’s 19-year-old nephew John Garver writes in the Daily Caller all about how his uncle’s longstanding, misplaced insecurities cause him to doubt how economic and civil liberties will help America reach its potential — if those like Santorum just step aside and permit them to,” the Paul campaign wrote in a news release.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...led-disgusting

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

HOT: "Error" on Poll Results Put Santorum Ahead of Ron Paul

Run Ron Paul reports:

With just days remaining until the all-important Republican Iowa caucuses, a left-leaning political newspaper based near the nation’s capital made a critical error in reporting the results of the final Des Moines Register opinion poll before voters gather Tuesday.

On Saturday evening Politico incorrectly reported that the poll showed former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum “climbing to second [place] at 21 percent and Ron Paul in third, with 18 percent.” In fact, Paul took second place with 22 percent of the vote. Santorum was third with 15 percent.

The faulty report was issued via email as a “Politico Breaking News” alert. Politico sent a second email shortly afterward with the correct poll results, stipulating that “[t]his breaking news alert corrects a previous breaking news alert...Phone messages left for four top Politico editors were not returned. A fifth, reached by phone, would not speak on the record but promised a return call from someone who would. No such call was received.



http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com...medium=twitter

Paul on third-place finish: 'Nothing to be ashamed of'

By EMILY SCHULTHEIS | 1/3/12 11:28 PM EST

Ron Paul, speaking to supporters just now after finishing third in Iowa tonight, said there’s “nothing to be ashamed of” and urged his supporters to be ready for the next contests on the calendar.

“I think there’s nothing to be ashamed of, everything to be satisfied, and be ready and raring to move on to the next stop, which is New Hampshire,” the Texas congressman said.

He told the crowd that he had one of the tickets out of Iowa as “one of the top three vote getters.”

“We have a tremendous opportunity to continue this momentum,” Paul added.

Most of Paul’s speech focused on his favorite topics: the Fed, getting troops out of Afghanistan and foreign policy more generally.

He brought up Nixon’s “We are all Keynesians now” line, saying, “I'm looking forward to the day when we can say, 'We're all Austrians now!'"
Paul's son, Sen. Rand Paul, was visible in the background during the entire speech, looking less than thrilled.

Video at the page link

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-...of-109510.html