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Thread: Ron Paul on the Issues

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  1. #1811
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    CNN: 3 of 4 GOP Candidates Would Add to Deficits

    Hmm… I wonder which GOP candidate would actually cut spending? Reports CNN Money:

    Newt Gingrich’s economic plan would do a lot of things. But reducing the debt and balancing the federal budget aren’t among them.

    Same goes for Rick Santorum’s and Mitt Romney’s economic plans.

    Indeed, a preliminary analysis by the independent Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released Thursday estimates that the three candidates’ plans could add between $250 billion and $7 trillion of debt over the next nine years.

    By contrast, the proposals of Ron Paul could reduce the debt by $2.2 trillion, the group estimated.

    Newt Gingrich’s plan
    Debt over next decade: Adds $7 trillion, increasing debt to GDP to 114%…

    Rick Santorum’s plan
    Debt over next decade: Adds $4.5 trillion, increasing debt to GDP to 104%.

    Mitt Romney’s plan
    Debt over next decade: Adds $250 billion, increasing debt to GDP to 86%…

    Ron Paul’s plan
    Debt over next decade: Reduces it by $2.2 trillion, lowering debt to GDP to 76%.

    CNN: 3 of 4 GOP Candidates Would Add to Deficits*|*Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee
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  2. #1812
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    16 U.S. Intelligence Agencies in agreement with Ron Paul...

    Submitted by MrBibbins on Fri, 02/24/2012 - 12:36

    The audience chuckled at Ron Paul during Thursday's debate when he made the "claim" that there is no hard evidence Iran is actively pursuing a bomb. However, a recent report indicates that the 16 U.S. Intelligence Agencies are actually in agreement with Ron Paul's assessment...

    http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-int...

    16 U.S. Intelligence Agencies in agreement with Paul... | Ron Paul 2012 | Peace . Gold . Liberty
    Last edited by AirborneSapper7; 02-24-2012 at 03:31 PM.
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    U.S. does not believe Iran is trying to build nuclear bomb

    The latest U.S. intelligence report indicates Iran is pursuing research that could enable it to build a nuclear weapon, but that it has not sought to do so.



    Revolutionary Guard personnel watch the launch of a Zelzal missile in June 2011 near Qom, Iran. (Raouf Mohseni / Mehr News Agency / June 28, 2011)

    By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times February 23, 2012, 6:11 p.m.



    Reporting from Washington— As U.S. and Israeli officials talk publicly about the prospect of a military strike against Iran's nuclear program, one fact is often overlooked: U.S. intelligence agencies don't believe Iran is actively trying to build an atomic bomb.

    A highly classified U.S. intelligence assessment circulated to policymakers early last year largely affirms that view, originally made in 2007. Both reports, known as national intelligence estimates, conclude that Tehran halted efforts to develop and build a nuclear warhead in 2003.

    The most recent report, which represents the consensus of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, indicates that Iran is pursuing research that could put it in a position to build a weapon, but that it has not sought to do so.

    Although Iran continues to enrich uranium at low levels, U.S. officials say they have not seen evidence that has caused them to significantly revise that judgment. Senior U.S. officials say Israel does not dispute the basic intelligence or analysis.

    But Israel appears to have a lower threshold for action than Washington. It regards Iran as a threat to its existence and says it will not allow Iran to become capable of building and delivering a nuclear weapon. Some Israeli officials have raised the prospect of a military strike to stop Iran before it's too late.

    It's unclear how much access U.S. intelligence has in Iran, a problem that bedeviled efforts to determine whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

    The assessment that Saddam Hussein had secretly amassed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to build a nuclear weapon, cited by the George W. Bush administration to justify the invasion, turned out to be wrong.

    Iran barred inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog group, from visiting Parchin, a military site, this week to determine whether explosives tests were aimed at developing nuclear technology.

    An IAEA report in November cited "serious concerns" about "possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear program," but did not reach hard conclusions. Another IAEA report is imminent.

    Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted Wednesday that Tehran had no intention of producing nuclear weapons. In remarks broadcast on state television, he said that "owning a nuclear weapon is a big sin."

    But he said that "pressure, sanctions and assassinations" would not stop Iran from producing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

    The U.S. and European Union have imposed strict sanctions on Iran's oil and banking sectors, and unidentified assassins on motorcycles have killed several nuclear scientists in Iran, attacks for which Tehran has blamed Israel.

    For now, U.S. military and intelligence officials say they don't believe Iran's leadership has made the decision to build a bomb.

    "I think they are keeping themselves in a position to make that decision," James R. Clapper Jr., director of National Intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 16. "But there are certain things they have not yet done and have not done for some time."

    Clapper and CIA Director David H. Petraeus told a separate Senate hearing that Iran was enriching uranium below 20% purity. Uranium is considered weapons grade when it is enriched to about 90% purity, although it is still potentially usable at lower enrichment levels.

    U.S. spy agencies also have not seen evidence of a decision-making structure on nuclear weapons around Khamenei, said David Albright, who heads the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security and is an expert on Iran's nuclear program.

    Albright's group estimates that with the centrifuges Iran already has, it could enrich uranium to sufficient purity to make a bomb in as little as six months, should it decide to do so.

    It is not known precisely what other technical hurdles Iran would have to overcome, but Albright and many other experts believe that if it decides to proceed, the country has the scientific knowledge to design and build a crude working bomb in as little as a year. It would take as long as three years, Albright estimated, for Iran to build a warhead small enough to fit on a ballistic missile.

    Albright said a push by Iran to build a nuclear weapon probably would be detected.

    Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, the former CIA director, told a House committee that such a decision would be a "red line" prompting an international response.

    Stephen Hadley, who was President Bush's national security advisor, said it would be too late to respond then.

    "When they're assembling a bomb, that's going to be the hardest thing to see," said Hadley, now a senior advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank.

    Some developments have bolstered the view that Iran is secretly pursuing a weapon.

    In 2009, Western intelligence agencies discovered a clandestine underground facility called Fordow, near the city of Qom, that is said to be capable of housing 3,000 centrifuges for enriching uranium.

    Israel worries that such facilities may be invulnerable to conventional bombing if Iran begins building a weapon. Israeli officials have warned that Iran could create what they call a "zone of immunity" by year's end.

    And some U.S. officials have come to different conclusions about the intelligence. Among them is Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "We know that [Iran is] aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program," Rogers said this month.

    U.S. intelligence on Iran's nuclear ambitions has vacillated over the years. After Iranian dissidents exposed a long-hidden program in 2002, U.S. intelligence warned that Tehran was "determined to build nuclear weapons."

    In 2006, Bush asked aides to present him with options for a U.S. attack. But newly recruited informants, intercepted conversations and notes from deliberations of Iranian officials led U.S. intelligence to reconsider its warning.

    In December 2007, the National Intelligence Estimate judged with "high confidence" that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. It judged with "moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons."

    In his 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," Bush questioned whether analysts had reversed course to atone for their errors on Iraq.

    Michael Hayden, who was CIA director in 2007, said the analysts who wrote the report had no political motivation. "It was intelligence professionals calling balls and strikes the way they saw them," he said in an interview.

    He said the 2007 estimate was poorly worded and "quickly got translated into 'Iran stopped its nuclear program,'" which he does not believe is accurate.

    The more important finding, Hadley said, was that Iran was continuing its efforts to develop fissile material and to build ballistic missiles capable of delivering warheads.

    "They are doing everything they can to put themselves in a position so that they have a clear and fairly quick route to a nuclear weapon," he said.

    ken.dilanian@latimes.com

    U.S. does not believe Iran is trying to build nuclear bomb - latimes.com
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  4. #1814
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    Why Does the Military Love Ron Paul?

    Servicemembers are giving way more cash to the anti-war GOP candidate than any other—but not for the reason you might think.

    —By Adam Weinstein
    | Fri Feb. 24, 2012 3:00 AM PST

    Veterans and supporters rally for Ron Paul in Iowa in December. Patrick Fallon/ZUMA

    Conventional wisdom on politics in the military can feel almost as age-old as the Constitution itself: Conservative Republicans are strong on defense, and the military skews conservative and Republican. Foreign wars? Bring 'em on! Unwavering ally of Israel? You betcha. More dollars for defense? If not, you must be with the terrorists.

    The 2012 presidential race tells a different story: The lion's share of political contributions by servicemembers and defense industry workers is going to anti-war, "soft on Israel," also-ran candidate Ron Paul. In fact, the battle for their dollars isn't even close: Paul has raised at least $282,868 from individual active-duty servicemembers and Pentagon employees—more than four times what the other three Republican presidential candidates have raised, combined. (President Obama has fared slightly better, drawing $123,644 from that group, but still less than half of Paul's total. For more, jump to the charts below with the numbers by candidate and branch of the armed services.)

    "Clearly there's something about Paul that appeals to some members of the military," says Viveca Novak of the Center for Responsive Politics, which provided Mother Jones with the most recent tally of military contributions. "Whether it's that he speaks his mind, wants to end foreign engagements, has a libertarian's view of the world—we can't say."

    One easy explanation has been that Americans in the service have grown tired of a decade of war and identify with Paul's isolationist anti-interventionist rhetoric. But if the military men and women with whom I spoke this week are any indication, it's hardly that simple.

    Paul's anti-war stance is certainly part of the draw. Last weekend, the group Veterans for Ron Paul 2012 organized an anti-war President's Day march on the White House. That organization's leadership includes notable Iraq Veterans Against the War member Adam Kokesh, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a libertarian Republican candidate in 2010, and Jake Diliberto, a former Marine who's previously worked on Rethink Afghanistan, an anti-war project funded by the left-leaning Brave New Foundation. "I have always been a conservative, and I recognize that I am the kind of conservative that doesn't exist anymore," Diliberto told me. As for what unites servicemembers behind Paul, he said, "It is fair to say, we all do not like the current trajectory of US foreign policy, and we are cynical about US national security policy." He added that he's personally concerned about Obama's "targeted killing campaign" against alleged terrorists.

    "Ron Paul is not opposed to the defense of this country," says one active-duty soldier. "He's not opposed to fighting wars that are declared."

    One of the speakers at last weekend's rally was retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon analyst and key figure in revealing how the Bush administration sold the Iraq war based on bogus intelligence. "I'm 95% in harmony with Ron Paul's candidacy and his philosophy," Kwiatkowski—who's running for Congress in Virginia as a Republicantold me in an email. "I hold the DoD as a federal bureaucracy in a bit more contempt than he does because I spent way more time in it, and I saw close up the actual conscientious, direct political lying to promote war, invasions and occupationsnone of which were sanctioned or even reviewed in accordance with the Constitution."

    But Paul's supporters say the candidate's "anti-militarism" shouldn't be confused with being anti-defense. "He's not opposed to the defense of this country. He's not opposed to fighting wars that are declared," a 27-year-old active-duty enlisted soldier in the Army said. (He spoke on condition of anonymity; after a uniformed soldier spoke out at a Paul rally in Iowa, the military warned soldiers about politicking publicly.)

    There's a certain irony in supporting a small-government candidate while working for the largest federal bureaucracy. The politics of it are, well, complicated. "I do wrestle with this conflict of being a Paul supporter while also being a government employee," the active-duty soldier said. "Ultimately, in my support for Paul, I care more for the restoration of the ideals this country was founded upon than my current well-being." At the same time, he added that the military saved him from student debt, while many of his friends are struggling to make it "as baristas and waiters" in the civilian world. "I didn't join the Army to be some hero that defends the Constitution," he said.

    Soldiers tend to see Paul as understanding the pressures they face better than the other candidates because he's the only one in the group who served in uniform, as a flight surgeon in the Air Force and Air National Guard during the Vietnam era. The libertarian's service gives him "street cred," Kwiatkowski noted. "We often in the military have no idea what the foreign policy or the military policy is. All we know is we get told to do things, and often these things are costly, dangerous, and unproductive, and create more insecurity for us and for the country."



    Meanwhile, Paul's support from defense contractor employees—who donated more than $177,000 to him in 2011—has outpaced that of his competitors, according to Defense News. (Obama leads in that category overall, having pulled in about $348,000.) That may seem downright counterintuitive: Why would workers for companies that profit from war back an anti-pork candidate (self-proclaimed, anyway) who opposes, as Kwiatkowski puts it, "fraud, waste, abuse, warmongering, idiotic leadership, political correctness, and a host of other things"? It's a matter of ideology, military analyst Loren Thompson explained to Defense News. "There's a strong libertarian streak among many in the sector," he said. "Just because people work in the defense industry doesn't mean that they always vote their economic interests." (Interestingly, in the 2008 election cycle, Obama and Paul were for a time beating out that other vet in the presidential race, John McCain, for military contributions.)

    Campaign contributions aren't necessarily a great indicator of a candidate's chances. The figures can't predict how, or how many service members will actually vote, and even if all of them did, they'd represent a tiny fraction of the US electorate. And these donation figures are a drop in the bucket when it comes to overall campaign spending: Even excluding super-PAC money, Obama's reelection campaign pulled down $29.1 million in January alone; Paul got $4.5 million in that time, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

    Still, military voting jumped 21 percent in the 2010 election cycle, according to federal statistics, and it rose fastest—33 percent—among 18- to 24-year-olds, a demographic that heavily favors Paul (and Obama) over traditional conservatives. In an era in which presidential elections turn on a few battleground states, which can turn on a few thousand votes, the military's love affair with Ron Paul could play a role in determining the eventual GOP nominee.

    "We veterans know about the mistakes that previous presidents have made, and we don't want to repeat them," Diliberto said of young vets who are loyal to Paul. "We need to change what we do."


    Adam Weinstein
    Reporter

    Adam Weinstein is Mother Jones' national security reporter. For more of his stories, click here or follow him on Twitter. RSS | Twitter

    Why Does the Military Love Ron Paul? | Mother Jones
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  5. #1815
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    Salute the New Camouflaged Warriors in the Grand Old Party

    Submitted by Priscilla Jones on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 04:45
    Conservative Republican values—I remember them well from my rural, independently-minded Idaho upbringing: limited government, personal liberty and responsibility, fiscal restraint, and respect for human life, right? As proof of my dyed-in-the-wool Republican childhood, Reagan’s portrait had such a prominent place on my family’s mantle I always assumed he was one of our uncles. When George W. Bush changed his address to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I was squarely in the middle of a growing young voter demographic. That’s when I got to know the heavy-hitting Grand Old Republicans in the behemoth states of California and Texas.
    It has since taken me a decade to realize that the GOP is run by three types of people: busy-bodied heifers who dominate others through gossip and intimidation, their emasculated sidekicks who meekly fall in line, and shrewd business people who have figured out how to game the system for personal profit, prestige or, if they’re exceptionally shrewd, both.

    Try as I might over the years to recruit fresh blood to the Republican Party, the mighty missing alpha males with their well-toned leadership abilities and hearts full of devotion to our country were invariably engaged in more noble, rewarding pursuits. It seemed the guys and gals who could turn the GOP and the country around were deployed overseas, hunting deer at the ranch, raising strong sons, running a business, or throwing a football with friends. Heroes like this have better things to do than dedicate countless nights and beautiful weekends to GOP meeting minutia. Over time, I abandoned my goal to change the GOP from within by introducing pure-hearted, limited government, common sense warriors. I then picked up a few hobbies of my own that did not result in me beating my head against the wall in a room full of mean heifers and girlie men manipulating Robert’s Rules of Order to their advantage.
    Cue the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2012. By this stage in my political exposure to the GOPandemic, I knew I was witnessing the party of Uncle Reagan flatline. Mitt Romney of Taxachusetts is your pick? Really, CPAC? Congratulations. Your brand is officially ruined. Thanks for driving the stake through my party’s undead corpse.

    Dejected does not begin to describe how I felt when I realized I wasted my twenties as a GOP activist. I wondered if I was the only longtime Republican who had chosen to swallow the Truth Pill in spite of its permanent side effects.

    Imagine my delight this President’s Day when I found myself among 544 impressive military members and veterans excited to enlist in Republican politics! My heart soared as Veterans for Ron Paul marched in step toward Chancellor Obama’s pretty white palace, chanting for serious reform in deep-voiced unison. “End this War!” and “Legalize the Constitution!” reverberated like cannon fire off the cheerless government buildings. Upon reaching the Presidential gates, they promptly did an about face and stood in formation with their backs to the Commander-in-Chief’s residence, silently saluting the servicemen lost to war and suicide under his administration.



    The Veterans for Ron Paul’s mission is to galvanize tens of thousands of their comrades standing for peace and liberty and march them to the Republican National Convention (RNC) 2012 in Tampa. This organic veterans’ movement is noteworthy due to its leaderless leadership. It grows by word-of-mouth and is assisted by social media outlets. It has no non-profit status or mailing address. It doesn’t even have a real website. Yet, Veterans for Paul are everywhere and are poised to infuse the Republican party with good-old-fashioned American reform that would make our founders proud.

    It’s a shame that the same people we send off to fight foreign wars must return only to do battle with the political machine to save their country and revive the GOP.

    Ron Paul is the clear choice of the troops. They both oppose the endless wars that have bankrupted our nation.

    Dr. Paul represents the real Republican Party, old school style. Liberty is indeed popular and his message resonates with young and old, rich and poor, military and civilian. Fortunately, he’s bringing back into the GOP fold real leaders with sound philosophies concerning the proper role of government. The fresh faces are idealistic, to be sure, but they also have iron wills, strong stomachs and are battle-hardened thanks to our misguided policies.

    Mean heifers, girlie men and shrewd opportunists be forewarned: you’re about to get some serious camo-wearing competition.
    ************************************************** ************
    For more inane American humor and Texas grit, follow www.twitter.com/patriotwr... and visit www.blogspot.com/patriotw....

    Salute the New Camouflaged Warriors in the Grand Old Party | Ron Paul 2012 | Peace . Gold . Liberty
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  6. #1816
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    WOOOOOO HOOOOO .... THANK YOU PATRIOTS
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  7. #1817
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    Around 2,400 people at the Boise, Idaho Rally!
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    Ron Paul attracted more than 1,200 supporters and undecided voters at his latest Washington event, continuing his pattern of drawing triple-digit crowd numbers along the Pacific Northwest campaign tour he began yesterday. In this photo he is motioning to his wife Carol, to the excitement of event attendees.
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  9. #1819
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    Congressman Ron Paul surveys the crowd of about 1,350 in Twin Falls, Idaho. In the foreground are stage props for the Alfred Hitchcock play ‘The 39 Steps.’
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  10. #1820
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    We had 2500 at the Minneapolis Convention Center Rally tonight!
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