Thread: Ron Paul on the Issues

Two Lectures On The History Of Austrian Economics

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/31/2011 17:01 -0500

When it comes to the types of people in this world, there are those who say that the only way to fix the current economic catastrophe is to keep doing more of the same that got us in this condition in the first place (these are the people who say mean regression is irrelevant, and 10 men and women in an economic room can overturn the laws of math, nature, physics, and everything else and determine what is best for 7 billion people), and then there is everyone else. The former are called Keynesians. The latter are not. Only those in the former camp don't see the lunacy of their fundamental premise, a good example of which is the following. Luckily, the world is nearing the tipping point when the camp of the former, which for the simple reason that it allowed the few to steal from the many under the guise that it is for the benefit of all, is about to be overrun, hopefully peacefully and amicable but not necessarily, and the camp of the latter finally has its day in the sun. Naturally, when that happens the status quo loses, as the entire educational and employment paradigm is one which idolizes the former and ridicules the latter even though the former has now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt it is a miserable failure (ref: $20+ trillion excess debt overhang which will, without doubt, lead to a global debt repudiation or restructuring, with some components of "odious debt"). So for all those still confused what some of the core premises of the ascendent "latter" are, below we present two one-hour lectures by Israel Kirzner. We urge readers to set aside two hours, which otherwise would be devoted to watching rubbish on TV or waiting in line for In N Out burger, and watch the two lectures below. Because, contrary to what the voodoo shamans of failure will tell you, there is a way out. It is a very painful way, but it does exist. The alternative is an assured and complete systemic collapse once the can kicking finally fails.

Part 1:



Part 2:



h/t ZH_Crown

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/two-le...rian-economics

$5,482,352.56 Contributed So Far TOWARDS FREEDOM!!!!!

https://secure.ronpaul2012.com/?sr=29-1226

Ron Paul: Sanctions against Iran are 'acts of war'
By Paul West
December 29, 2011, 11:20 a.m.

Reporting from Perry, Iowa—

Defending himself against charges of isolationism, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul told voters in Iowa on Thursday that western sanctions against Iran are "acts of war" that are likely to lead to an actual war in the Middle East.

Paul, one of the leading contenders to win next week's Iowa caucuses, said Iran would be justified in responding to the sanctions by blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. He compared the western sanctions to a hypothetical move by China to block the Gulf of Mexico, which Americans would consider an act of war.

He also said he would not respond militarily to keep the strait open—because he would not consider it an act of war against the U.S. But if he were president, he would report to Congress on the issue, leaving it up to lawmakers to declare war if they wanted.

"I think we're looking for trouble because we put these horrendous sanctions on Iran," Paul told a midday audience at the Hotel Pattee in Perry, Iowa. He said the Iranians are "planning to be bombed" and understandably would like to have a nuclear weapon, even though there is "no evidence whatsoever" that they have "enriched" uranium.

Apparently alluding to Israel and its nuclear-weapons arsenal, Paul said that "if I were an Iranian, I'd like to have a nuclear weapon, too, because you gain respect from them."

To approving applause from a crowd of about 125, the Texas congressman said that "we always seem to have to have a country to bash," linking the current saber-rattling against Iran to previous hawkish rhetoric that led to conflicts in Iraq, Libya and elsewhere.

"If you want to quiet things down," he said, referring to Iran, "don't put sanctions on them" because it's "just going to cause more trouble."

He said an Iranian blockade would be the most likely response to tighter sanctions because Iran has "no weapons of mass destruction" and shutting down the strait is "the most" it could do.

"I think the solution" to current tensions with Iran "is to do a lot less a lot sooner and mind our own business and then we would not have this threat of another war," he said to applause.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics...C4395532.story

From Israel: Vote Ron Paul and Let My People Go!

December 29, 2011
By Rafi 122 Comments

Lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I sit here in my living room in Karnei Shomron, Israel, on the 8th night of Chanukah, wondering what other miracles lay in store on January 3rd and in the months ahead. The name Ron Paul is constantly at my fingertips. I’ve typed it in so many times the past month it’s insane. I’m experiencing an excitement I’ve rarely ever felt, and I don’t even live in America anymore. During the last Republican debate I woke myself up at 3am Israel time to watch an 8pm EST live stream on YouTube, with no fatigue whatsoever. I’m on overdrive, and I can’t calm myself.

I’ve only recently figured out what this excitement actually is.

I first got interested in the whole freedom movement when I heard that Ron Paul wanted to end all foreign aid, including to my country, Israel. This seemed like a spectacular idea to me. I hate the idea of taking American tax payer money I don’t need. The only reason we take it, by the way, is not because we need it. It’s that we don’t want to feel alone, and Jews always feel a deep existential isolation and loneliness. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, this is a people that dwells alone, not counted among the Nations,” says Balaam of the People of Israel in Numbers 23:9. We still feel that loneliness. So we take the money. It’s shameful, it’s theft, it’s destructive, it’s morally wrong, and it makes people hate us for tying them into a conflict they have no business trying to solve. I wanted it to end and didn’t trust any Israeli leader to give it up on his own, so I looked up more about Ron Paul.

What I found was fascinating. On the forums, I learned of people who, back in ’08, literally gave their lives short of death to this man. Some poured money into his campaign they could not afford to give, and some even lost their marriages because of their single-minded insane dedication. This shocked me. I couldn’t yet understand it, but after a few days of listening to him, it began to click.

What is it about Ron Paul that inspires such extremes? Such maddening support on the one hand, and such fear and loathing on the other? I can give the answer in one word: Soul.

The essential soul of a human being is by definition free. The idea that men are free as determined by God is a concept that is foreign to most men. This is because most men want to control others, to take away their freedom. This is usually referred to as the drive for power. The drive for power is antithetical to freedom because power means the ability to control others. There is only one legitimate thing that power can and should be used for, whether it be military, legislative, or executive power. That is, to legalize freedom.

Ron Paul doesn’t want to be President to “give” me freedom. He doesn’t own my freedom and he didn’t give it to me. The only reason Ron Paul wants to be President is to stop punishing people for using their freedom that is rightfully theirs. He wants no power. This is clear to anyone who listens to him speak.

There are two kinds of human beings. Those who want power, and those who want freedom. You can tell which one’s which very easily. Those who want freedom are straight-edged. They are consistent, principled, and you can feel their human soul when they speak to you. There’s a continuum out there of human souls somewhere in spiritual cyberspace, and when you come into contact with one of these souls, you know immediately, because souls are by definition free. You sense sincerity, realness, consistency, a free human being. If you’re a man who seeks freedom and you come into contact with a real human soul, you become instantly addicted and you swallow up anything you can get your hands on. You want to unite immediately, no matter what you disagree on. There are people in the freedom movement that don’t exactly like Israel, especially me being a “settler” and I don’t care. If they want freedom, I sense it and my human drive for individualism suddenly turns into an intense desire to unite into a collective – but a collective of free individuals. It’s a beautiful dialectic, and it doesn’t matter what we agree or disagree on, as long as we agree on freedom.

You get hooked on Ron Paul and you desperately seek more and more, any video you can find from the past, any speeches you missed, anything he said that you haven’t heard yet, even though you’ve heard it a thousand times already in different words. You can’t help yourself. The voracious hunger to be able to use your God-given freedom takes you over entirely. It’s like you suddenly realize you’re human and the Divine Image with which God created you comes alive and catches fire.

But something else happens to you. Once you get hooked on Ron Paul, you can no longer bear to listen to a man who wants power, and you become instantly disgusted when they start saying words. Before, they were just boring. Now they’re revolting. Listening to Romney or Gingrich or Bush or Obama makes you sick and you don’t know how Ron Paul gets through those debates without getting nauseous. You see a political veneer in these politicians that’s so transparent it’s like a ghost flapping its ethereal tongue at you. You can’t bear it.

What’s so maddening about hearing Romney or Gingrich talk is that there’s someone standing there saying things, but there’s no soul in it. These are not free men. These are power men. Not that Romney or Gingrich don’t have souls. They do. They are men just like you and I. But they have practically forfeited their souls to try and attain power, to control others with spin and talking points and contradictory statements like “I want to cut the budget and expand the military!” and they’ll say it with a polished tone and a straight face, just like a soulless recording. Their humanity is so buried under the mountain of lies they have told themselves, that neither they themselves nor you can even sense their souls in the human continuum. The scene of a human body speaking but no soul communicating can drive a free man mad.

The reason that Ron Paul never goes down in the polls is that he’s not “convincing” people in the everyday sense that he’s right on whatever issue. He’s activating human souls, lighting spiritual fires one by one speaking about freedom. Once a soul gets activated, and the man realizes that he IS free no matter what people do to him or tell him, there is no turning back. The other candidates are trying to turn heads with snappy one-liners that sound cool. Slaves follow these one-liners like mobs, and follow each other from candidate to candidate. Slowly but surely, Ron Paul activates a few of the individual souls in the mob as they bob from snappy comeback to snappy comeback and he goes up in the polls.

Continued Below

Yet, we cannot expect every man woman and child to understand or get excited about the message of liberty. In fact, most just can’t handle it. Being truly free is as terrifying as it is electrifying. The Bible tells us this very clearly in the story of the Exodus from Egypt. When Moses finally accepts the role of deliverer from God, he was assigned to say the following to my great-grandparents the Israelites:

“Therefore say to the Israelites: I am God. I will free you from the labors of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with amazing signs. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God, and you will know that I am the Lord who freed you from the labors of the Egyptians.” (Ex. 6:6-7)

And what was my grandparents’ response?

“And Moses told this to the people, but they didn’t listen due to lack of spirit and cruel bondage.” (6:9)

Not everyone can handle the message of freedom. It’s too frightening for some people, and some are just too enslaved. Those are the people that despise Ron Paul, the same types who rebelled against Moses in the desert and attempted to go back to Egypt. Freedom is too much for them and they can’t handle the Divine gift. They want and need someone to control them. Their souls have been too battered by slavery, taxation, and wars.

But nonetheless, God forced my stiff-necked great grandparents to leave Egypt, and as a result I’m here today, preaching freedom once again, fighting not only for America’s freedom, but for my own from America’s influence in my own region.

Vote Ron Paul and let my people go once again! Stop meddling here and stop trying to buy influence by giving me money. Stop trying to be the all powerful Peace Maker and let us work out the problems here on our own! If we think Iran is a threat, we can handle it and we’ll take the consequences. It’s not America’s problem and you can’t afford another war.

Now I understand why people will give everything to this man. Whenever he’s asked the question, “Would you legalize heroin?” Ron Paul answers, “I want to legalize freedom!” Little do these people understand that freedom is a thousand times more addictive than heroin.

American Jews! Wake up! Set your brothers in Israel free! We were the first nation ever to be set free by God, and we brought the concept of liberty to the world when we left Egypt over 3000 years ago. It’s about time we set the example we were chosen to set.

The writer, Rafi Farber, is a member of Jews for Ron Paul and manages the website World of Judaica. Email him at settlersofsamaria@gmail.com

http://settlersofsamaria.org/vote-ron-paul-free-israel/

How Many U.S. Soldiers Were Wounded in Iraq? Guess Again.

Posted: 12/30/11 10:20 AM ET

Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded.

The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American servicemembers who have come back from Iraq less than whole.

The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands -- maybe even more than half a million -- if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems.

We don't have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody's been keeping track.

The much-cited Defense Department figure comes from its tally of "wounded in action" -- a narrowly-tailored category that only includes casualties during combat operations who have "incurred an injury due to an external agent or cause." That generally means they needed immediate medical treatment after having been shot or blown up. Explicitly excluded from that category are "injuries or death due to the elements, self-inflicted wounds, combat fatigue" -- along with cumulative psychological and physiological strain or many of the other wounds, maladies and losses that are most common among Iraq veterans.

The "wounded in action" category is relatively consistent, historically, so it's still useful as a point of comparison to previous wars. But there is no central repository of data regarding these other, sometimes grievous, harms. We just have a few data points here and there that indicate the magnitude.

Consider, for instance:

• The Pentagon's Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center reports having diagnosed 229,106 cases of mild to severe traumatic brain injury from 2000 to the third quarter of 2011, including both Iraq and Afghan vets.
• A 2008 study of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans by researchers at the RAND Corporation found that 14 percent screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and 14 percent for major depression, with 19 percent reporting a probable traumatic brain injury during deployment. (The researchers found that major depression is "highly associated with combat exposure and should be considered as being along the spectrum of post-deployment mental health consequences.") Applying those proportions to the 1.5 million veterans of Iraq, an estimated 200,000 of them would be expected to suffer from PTSD or major depression, with 285,000 of them having experienced a probable traumatic brain injury.
• A 2008 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 15 percent of soldiers reported an injury during deployment that involved loss of consciousness or altered mental status, and 17 percent of soldiers reported other injuries. (Using that ratio would suggest that 480,000 Iraq vets were injured one way or the other.) More than 40 percent of soldiers who lost of consciousness met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Altogether, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America group estimates that nearly 1 in 3 people deployed in those wars suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or traumatic brain injury. That would mean 500,000 of the 1.5 million deployed to Iraq.
• The single most common service-connected disability is actually hearing loss. A 2005 Department of Veterans Affairs research paper found that one third of soldiers who had recently returned from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq were referred to audiologists for hearing evaluations due to exposure to acute acoustic blasts, and 72 percent of them were identified as having hearing loss. Richard Salvi, head of the University of Buffalo's Center for Hearing and Deafness announced recently that "as many as 50 percent of combat soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who come back have tinnitus" because of the intense noise soldiers must withstand.
• The Department of Veterans Affairs' list of potential deployment health conditions includes chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, fibromyalgia, hearing difficulties, hepatitis A, B and C, leishmaniasis (also known as the "Baghdad boil"), malaria, memory loss, migraines, sleep disorders and tuberculosis.
• The VA's web page on hazardous exposures warns that "combat Veterans may have been exposed to a wide variety of environmental hazards during their service in Afghanistan or Iraq. These hazardous exposures may cause long-term health problems." The hazards include exposure to open-air burn pits, infectious diseases, depleted uranium, toxic shrapnel, cold and heat injuries and chemical agent resistant paint. The VA provides no estimates of exposure or damage, however.
• A 2010 Congressional Research Service report, presenting what it called "difficult-to-find statistics regarding U.S. military casualties" offers one indication of how the "wounded in action" category undercounts real casualties. It found that for every soldier wounded in action and medically evacuated from Iraq , more than four more were medically evacuated for other reasons.
• The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center's most recent monthly report found that the proportion of returned deployers who, around 3 months after their return, rated their health as “fair” or “poor” was 10 to 13 percent. More than 20 percent said their health was worse than before they were deployed; a similar number had "exposure concerns" and more than 27 percent reported depression symptoms.
• A March 2010 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded that many wounds suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan will persist over veterans' lifetimes, and some impacts of military service may not be felt until decades later.
  There are surely many other data points out there. But a comprehensive tally escapes us. In the meantime, the figure for "wounded" constantly cited by politicians and the media does not come close to reflecting the real cost to the servicemembers who went to fight in George W. Bush's war of adventure and will never be the same again.

We owe it to them to make a full accounting of their sacrifice -- and then never forget it.

Dan Froomkin is the deputy editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project. He is also Senior Washington Correspondent for the Huffington Post.

This post originally appeared at NiemanWatchdog.org.

Follow Dan Froomkin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/froomkin

http://www.opednews.com/populum/link...?linkid=143478

No 'Military' Mission Accomplished... Destroy America Accomplished

By Karl W B Schwarz
12-31-1

There is an old adage that puts forth a simple truth: Money talks, bullshit walks. In the case of the United States of America it can be rephrased to state 'money talks, liar warmongers die and lose'.

Senator Joe Lieberman has proposed a bill that would terminate your citizenship if you stand up to the government. Well, frankly it is not theirs to give or take away for a natural born citizen. It is a birthright, not ordained by the asinine shitforbrains in Washington, DC. They are that desperate to cover up their lies, war crimes, human rights abuses and failures in Washington DC.

The NDAA authorizes that the President can deem you an enemy and you either disappear or get assassinated, by the very government that pretends to be your 'representative' leader. They represent nothing, stand for nothing but their own callous greed and self-empowerment.

The Patriot Act I and II, the TSA, the DHS are all intended to strip away your freedoms more and more each day until you cannot stand up and fight back like happened in 1776.

Get this straight people, they fear an armed America that is growing more fed up with them with each passing minute. You are the by definition 'terrorist' they fear and rightly so. King George was a piker compared to these fascist un-American thugs in Washington, DC.

The CIA wants to stick their nose up your butt about 3 feet whether you like it or not. The CIA venture capital arm In-Q-Tel is behind the financing and creation of AOL, Google, Facebook and even more. Ah, yes, a huge Facebook IPO is planned so just the right folks can pocket a lot of US dollars, just like AOL, Google, etc.

The US and their 'agenda buddies' created 9-11 as an excuse to attack Afghanistan. That was the only way they could sell it to idiot Americans, who otherwise would have refused to go along with an attack on Afghanistan since people living 100 years behind us technologically cannot possibly launch a serious attack on America within its borders. Like obedient Little Sheeple, the 'go shop' suggestion of Bush was obeyed straight into the US poor house.

Wake your lazy ass up, AMERICA! I know some things about this that most Americans are clueless about. I used to be very close to the inner circle of RNC Finance, helped to design and implement the strategy to take the House and Senate away from Clinton in 1994, and was on what was then called The National Policy Forum.

On election night 1994, my wife and I were two of the 156 people even allowed into the inner sanctum of RNC Finance to watch Clinton go into meltdown mode, exactly as planned. We were at the table of then RNC Treasurer William J McManus, along with a billionaire and two admirals and their wives.

I left the RNC and NPF when it became obvious to me that even during the period 1992 to 1996 there were some in the RNC designing a bogus war (the false Global War on Terror) so the US could dominate world energy supplies. There were some, the likes of Gingrich, convicted felon Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, et al, that truly believed that a warmongering RNC defending America from a contrived boogeyman would help to win elections.

Yep, folks, it was that simplistic and that myopic. Make up a boogeyman, make up a war and then hammer the Hell out of Americans with political and MSM rhetoric about who would best defend them from nothing. The Dems were left wing, tree-hugging, anti-war nitwits, right?

The Republicans would defend America. Get it? The Democrats lie. Get it?

The Republicans lie. Get it?

They know you are either lazy or stupid. Get it?

Listen to the campaign rhetoric right now and see if you can get those brain cells into gear and think that 'war plan' statement through, and remember it dates back to 1992-1996. I was there and both glad I was and wish I had not been. I got to see the inner workings of this insanity up close and personal.

Well, it was an idiot idea then but damn, they put it into motion under Bush and his lies. Bush was an immediate hit and proved it was way past being a really, really stupid idea. It is not hard to figure out, take an idiot idea and launch it with a Village Idiot at the helm and voila, wind up with a totally stupid idiot outcome.

Most Americans do not realize that one of my companies was on the approved Iraq reconstruction list. I took one look at that huge scam and refused to be involved.

The US government has steadfastly refused to utter the name Bridas Corporation, an Argentina entity that had the entire Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, or TAP, sewed up until Clinton and the CIA flipped Turkmenistan and Pakistan. All that was left standing in the way were the Taliban and their contract with Bridas Corporation.

An intelligent American has to consider the comical irony of bombing a Stone Age people into the Stone Age they already lived in.

Viola! 9-11-2001, so let's go steal that pipeline deal and take over all of that Caspian Basin oil and natural gas. Trillions to be made; so just make it all up and line all of the right pockets. The Democrats have to play along. The same money backing the RNC is lavishly laid on the table for the DNC, too.

Yes, they salivated and coveted that oil and natural gas mother-lode since the Carter Administration. Both he and Zbigniew Brzezinski dreamed up a brain fart called 'Al Qaeda' to help destabilize that region and flip it to the US way of thinking.

Old Zbig, the Russia-hating dinosaur he is, even wrote the book that became their War Bible for the grand fiasco caper, 'The Grand Chessboard'.

Well, we lost the chess match, the war, many American lives and have nothing to show for it but a mountain of debt that would have built hundreds of pipelines. Yet, the US has accomplished none due to having a failed business plan as to how to get it done.

Russia's Gazprom controls virtually all of the natural gas in the Caspian Basin that some in DC assumed belonged to them, Various Russian, Chinese, India, Japanese, Korean oil companies now control most of the oil rights that the US also deemed was theirs thanks to their totally stupid war plan to take it all over.

Pens, contracts and money have buried the almighty US military and their ill-conceived war plan. The competition got the oil, gas, the pipelines and America got the debt and maimed and dead US soldiers sent to die for a lie.

Well, here we are over 10 years later, no 'Mission Accomplished' by BushCo or BarkyCo, no pipeline, trillions down the drain and the US sinking under the weight of its debt. Meanwhile over at the Bridas hacienda they have completed thousands of miles of pipelines in the past 10 years, the first being across the northern part of Iran, through Turkey to the Mediterranean.

Then they built a long pipeline north to carry Iranian oil into Russia and let Russia sell their oil since the US and UK (and Israel) keep trying to start a war with a nation that has no intentions of attacking anyone.

In 2012, Bridas will complete one of the longest pipelines ever built from Turkmenistan to China.

And then there is China, a nation that is now a financial partner of the Iran-Pakistan-India Pipeline, or IPI Pipeline. Additionally, China has taken control of a port named Gwadar Pakistan in the province of Baluchistan. The US had planned to run its coveted TAP from Ashgabat Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Baluchistan to the port city of Gwadar.

Oops, checkmated again!! Solution, create a war planning team in the Pentagon to come up with a way to take that port city back from China. Put the CIA and Special Forces into Helmand Province Afghanistan, Baluchistan Province Pakistan and stir up all kinds of shit with Pakistan and IRAN.

Getting the picture?????

You had better wake up and get it before you get drafted to serve and die in World War III.

As they say down South where I am from, 'it ain't happening, folks'. China is currently building a pipeline from Gwadar through Pakistan to China. The folks in Beijing have no intentions of allowing the US, UK and Israel to have any control whatsoever regarding their energy supplies and their economy.

Continued Below

The IPI Pipeline and the Gwadar ­

China pipeline are marching right along while the US still lies in every photo op and every pronouncement, and pretends it is defending the world from terrorists. Of course, it is the US that is the real terrorist in this instance but they can rest comfortably that most Americans are just too distracted or just too damned stupid to read a map, read the news, come up with the right answers that the transgressor to the extreme is the United States of America.

It is not about terrorism coming at the US. It is the US projecting terrorism outward like a teenage punk. It is about US dominance in oil, natural gas, pipelines and ability to manipulate who does and does not get energy. We lost, DC would rather shoot itself in the head on national TV than to admit they lied, many died, and it never had anything to do with terrorism. Just money and damn, is that shallow or what?

For all of this talk about human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, Americans need to look in the mirror and come to grips with the grotesque human rights abuses that have resulted due to the lies of the US government in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around this world. Come to grips with the fact that Pahlavi in Iran and Mubarak in Egypt were brutal puppets and the US wanted them there.

The US is not with clean hands on the issue of human rights abuses.

Why attack Libya in 2011 after Qadaffi had mellowed into a benevolent tyrant and doing many good things for his people? He was denominating the sale of Libyan energy in EUROS, not the almighty weakling US dollar. Our 'good buddy' Saddam Hussein was doing the same and look what happened to him. Chavez has steadfastly refused to denominate the sale of Venezuelan energy in a pathetically weak US dollar.

Woe to those who pull back the curtain and expose why the world needs to abandon the US dollar as the petrodollar. Weak dollar equals high energy prices; the math is not hard to do.

There is a moral to this story. Russia showed up in the Caspian Basin with pens, contracts and money while the US chose to use bombs, bullets and outright terrorism to get its way. They won, we lost.

There is yet another moral to this story. China showed up in Pakistan and Iran, and India, with pens, contracts and money while the US chose to use bombs, bullets, drones across borders they had not been invited across, and TERRORISM. Our global competitors have kicked our stupid American asses black and blue in the oil, natural gas and pipeline games.

The 'Who is to Blame for this Shit?' is a very long list and goes all the way back to when Clinton became president and even before that when President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziski concocted this idiotic, stupid and lunatic game plan, all for oil, natural gas and money, and American hegemony and American Empire.

Even before Clinton, Daddy Bush lied and completely fabricated the reasons to attack Iraq in 1991.

Yes, Bush was to blame for Afghanistan and Iraq II, but he was just the Useful Idiot that wanted to be the War President. Even before that Clinton tried to launch it and many forces made sure he could not.

Then we get Slick Barky as the Black Clinton and he decides to keep up with the illusion, delusion and lies because it sells well with Stupid Americans. How else can a do-nothing talker get elected President and cannot find his birth certificate? How else can a war criminal and human rights abuser be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?

Ron Paul is 100% right on one thing: We need to learn to mind our own business.

So, wars won by US = 0. Nations destroyed = 4 (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), including America.

The US lies have resulted in trillions of dollars squandered and most of the world laughing their asses off at how incredibly naïve and stupid most Americans are. Cannot read a damned map yet think they know it all due to listening to FOXNews and other MSM mynah birds.

Welcome to 2012, folks. America is still the laughing stock of the world and pretending (delusion) to be Number One in all things.

In closing, I have but one question for Americans. How long are you going to look at the horseshoe before you can admit to me you know it is a horseshoe?

Your democracy is a sham and a scam. Your freedoms and liberty are at best illusory; a delusion after what DC has done to gut the very essence of what made America great.

Wake up! 2012 might be your last chance to turn it around. Vote against every DC asshole running for re-election. Send them home.

Stop hiding under the shadow of your own ass and VOTE to turn things around.

Ron Paul is the only candidate that would do that. The rest are just talking and spouting out the talking points to get your vote.

Wake up, get the lead out of your ass, or suffer the consequences.

http://www.rense.com/general95/dessy.htm

Iowa's GOP caucuses may see some Democratic defectors

Voters who helped elect Obama in 2008 are planning to cast Republican ballots Tuesday, and Rep. Ron Paul is perhaps the most likely to benefit from the crossovers.



A supporter pins on a campaign button as he arrives to hear Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul speak at Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Charles Dharapak, AP / December 29, 2011)

By Paul West, Washington Bureau December 30, 2011, 5:30 p.m.


Reporting from Atlantic, Iowa— Adding an unpredictable element to the presidential contest in Iowa, some disaffected Democratic voters are planning to switch sides and cast Republican ballots in Tuesday's caucuses.

Caucus rules limit participation to registered party members. But anyone who shows up at a Republican caucus — including Democrats, independents and libertarians — can join the GOP or switch their party affiliation on the spot.

Rep. Ron Paul, in a tight race for first place in Iowa with Mitt Romney, is perhaps the most likely to benefit from Democratic crossovers. His campaign is distributing information sheets advising Iowans that they can register Republican "for a day" on caucus night, then switch their registration back afterward if they want.

"It's easy. You can register on your way in the door," David Fischer, co-chairman of Paul's Iowa organization, told voters Thursday at a campaign stop in Atlantic.

John Long, a registered Democrat, said that "last time, unfortunately, I believed a lot of the rhetoric" and voted for Obama, after going to a Democratic caucus as a Joe Biden supporter. Long feels that job-crushing regulations have gotten worse under President Obama, who he said had failed to end the "embarrassing" political spectacle in Washington, in part because he was too weak to stand up to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the Democratic leaders in Congress.

The 65-year-old semi-retired accountant plans to vote for Paul at a Republican caucus in West Des Moines. "Ron Paul has a lot going for him, particularly in the economic area," he said. Long doesn't care for the Texas congressman's isolationist foreign policy but says that no candidate is perfect and that Paul "is principled enough not to say stuff just to get elected."

Even though members of the Occupy movement disrupted a recent Paul rally in Des Moines, the candidate speaks sympathetically to voters about the left-wing group, which he likens to the tea-party movement that he is credited with inspiring. His outspoken support for civil liberties, including staunch opposition to the Patriot Act, and dovish foreign policy views have natural appeal to many Democrats, particularly in Iowa, where antiwar sentiment has long run high.

But estimating the effect of party-switchers is extremely difficult. Like newcomers to the political process, they fall outside the ranks of the registered Republican and independent voters hotly pursued by the campaigns and tracked by pollsters.

With polls showing a close race among the leading candidates, an influx of Democrats into the GOP caucuses could make an impact, or might amount to a relatively insignificant number of votes. Iowa Democratic Chairwoman Sue Dvorsky dismisses talk that Democrats dissatisfied with Obama will defect to the GOP on caucus night, calling it "a canard." Crossover voting — when members of one party invade the presidential contest of another, sometimes to make mischief — is often predicted but rarely materializes.

But there are reasons to suspect that a different dynamic could prevail this time.

Iowa Democrats will hold their own caucuses on Tuesday, featuring a live Web video appearance by Obama, whose caucus victory four years ago launched him to the White House. But there isn't a contested nomination fight, and caucus attendance will be a fraction of the 2008 record.

Instead, all the action, and voter turnout, will be on the Republican side, after more than a dozen televised debates, weeks of nonstop campaign ads and a closing blitz of in-person appearances by the candidates.

Some disgruntled Democrats say they might wind up voting to reelect Obama but still plan to caucus with Republicans. According to interviews with Iowans at recent campaign events, Democrats and independents who backed Obama last time are looking at several of the GOP contenders, including Romney and Rick Perry, a former Democrat, as well as Paul.

Cheryl Hout, an Obama voter from Osceola, Iowa, said she "fell for" Obama in 2008 "because he's such a good speaker," but now calls the president "a liar." The 54-year-old special-education teacher is very unhappy that he didn't deliver on the change he promised, especially with a healthcare plan whose implementation has been much too slow to meet her family's medical needs. She and her husband, Terry, 63, an independent who says his Obama vote was "a mistake" and who has never attended a caucus before, plan to vote for Paul.

"We're looking for something new to revive the country," she said. "We're so close to losing our whole country. China owns us. They could just walk right in and take us. It's scary."

Four years ago, the Paul campaign counted on a crossover vote that never materialized, which makes some advisors leery of predicting one this time. "Getting people to walk into a caucus and change their registration is not the easiest thing to do," said national campaign manager John Tate.

That was a concern for Marilyn Miller Butler as she waited for Paul at the community center in Atlantic. She might vote for Obama in the fall — the president has "done a good job under difficult circumstances," she said, though "sometimes I think he's bent over a little too far backward without any reciprocal behavior" from his political foes — but the Houston congressman has her attention now.

She knows she'll get some ribbing from Republican friends if she goes to a GOP caucus, she said, adding: "I'd have to get over my feeling of being disloyal."

But the Iowa retiree said that Paul "is the only fresh voice around. He has his own ideas." And as he spoke, she found a lot to like. She applauded repeatedly, including when the Republican candidate said — in an echo of liberal Democrat George McGovern four decades ago — that the U.S. needs to "come home from Afghanistan and all these unwinnable wars."

By the time he finished, Butler's doubts about defecting and attending a GOP caucus had been resolved. "OK," she said. "I'm going."

paul.west@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...2C843950.story

CNN Haters, Bachmann Accusations Do Not Deter Paul

December 30, 2011 by Sam Rolley

Ron Paul has overcome several campaign difficulties, heading toward the Iowa caucus with strong support.

Despite the fact that the mainstream media have pulled no punches against Republican Presidential primary hopeful Ron Paul, his campaign is continuing to gain steam as the Iowa caucus, the first in the Nation, approaches.

Two polls released on Wednesday show Paul in a dead heat with fellow GOP contender Mitt Romney; however, the polls conflict one another, each reporting opposite leaders by similar margins.

A poll conducted by Public Policy Pollingshows Paul leading the pack among likely voters in Iowa, with 24 percent saying they would vote for him over Romney’s 20 percent. PPP accredits Paul’s popularity to his ability to unite non-traditional Republicans, independents and some Democratic converts. Romney still takes the most favor among mainstream Republicans.

“If Ron Paul really manages to change the electorate by turning out large numbers of young people and independents, he should win Iowa,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “If it’s a more traditional turnout with an older electorate, Romney will probably win. And given his personal popularity it’s worth keeping an eye on [Rick] Santorum in the final week.”

CNN and Time conducted a separate poll that shows Romney leading with 25 percent to Paul’s 22 percent heading in to the caucus. It has been pointed out that the CNN-Time poll — unlike the PPP poll — surveyed only a list of declared Republicans that was provided by the Iowa Secretary of State.

Many people have in the past week questioned if CNN is running a campaign against Paul after the news network repeatedly aired a heavily cut video that makes it appear as if Paul walked out on an interview with reporter Gloria Borger after she asked him the same question several times about controversial newsletters published under his name. The full video of the interview reveals CNN’s sleight-of-hand reporting tactic and portrays the interview in a different light.

Despite the CNN-driven controversy, Paul is continuing to pick up key supporters, some even from the campaigns of fellow candidates. Michele Bachmann’s Iowa campaign chairman, Senator Kent Sorenson, jumped ship on Wednesday to offer his support to Paul’s campaign in a decision that ignited headlines throughout the media.

Sorenson released a statement saying that he had a difficult time choosing which of the two candidates to support from the beginning but, given Paul’s surge in the polls and real chance at the Presidency, he felt joining the campaign was in the best interest of the country.
A portion of Sorenson’s statement reads:

Ron Paul is the only candidate to predict the current mess we find ourselves in economically, and he’s the only candidate to offer a true plan to cut spending and balance our budget.

He’s also consistently spoken out against government spending, assaults on individual liberties, and unnecessary trillion-dollar military adventurism for over 30 years. Polls show he is the Republican candidate that can take on and defeat President Obama in November 2012.

Bachmann denied that Sorenson’s decision was made for love of country but contended in a Wednesday announcement that it was for love of money, saying, “Kent Sorenson personally told me he was offered a large sum of money to go to work for the Paul campaign. Kent campaigned with us earlier this afternoon and went immediately afterward to a Ron Paul event and announced he is changing teams. Kent said to me yesterday that ‘everyone sells out in Iowa, why shouldn’t I,’ then he told me he would stay with our campaign. The Ron Paul campaign has to answer for its actions.”

Despite the accusation from Bachmann, Iowa political director for her own campaign, Wes Enos, denies that money could have been a motivator for Sorenson’s decision. His comments appeared later on Paul’s campaign website.

“I won’t say much about the situation or the conflicting statements beyond this; I can say unequivocally that Kent Sorenson’s decision was in no way financially motivated,” said Enos.

Sorenson’s decision to endorse Paul comes just after one of the Texas Congressman’s former aides, Eric Dondero, attempted to do damage to the campaign by saying Paul is “unsettled by being around gays personally” and is “out of touch” with black and Hispanic voters in an editorial on RightWingNews.com. The Paul campaign described Dondero as “a disgruntled former staffer who was fired for performance issues.”

The New York Times reported Wednesday that despite the flurry of accusations and controversy media and other candidates are drumming up around Paul, droves of college students are currently arriving in Iowa to assist with the ground campaign in the State. The young supporters, whom Paul has embraced in the past as “having a better grasp of the meaning of liberty than many lawmakers in Washington,” are expected to be vital to the success of the Paul campaign.

http://www.personalliberty.com/news/...ter-paul/?eiid=