Thread: Ron Paul on the Issues

Ron Paul declines to endorse Romney, spurns convention speaking slot

By Jonathan Terbush
Sunday, August 26, 2012 15:39 EDT


Topics: mitt romney ♦ Republican convention ♦ ron paul


Ron Paul refused to accept the terms demanded by Republican convention planners in order for him to receive a speaking slot at this week’s convention, with Paul in part spurning the invite because he says he does not fully endorse Mitt Romney’s candidacy
In an interview with the New York Times published today, Paul claims that convention organizers told him he could deliver a speech on two conditions. First, the Romney campaign would get to vet his speech, and second, he would have to give a full-blown endorsement of the GOP nominee. Paul balked at both requirements.
“It wouldn’t be my speech,” Paul told the Times. “That would undo everything I’ve done in the last 30 years. I don’t fully endorse him for president.”

Paul’s inclusion in the convention has been a much-debated topic within the GOP. With the election possibly headed toward a photo finish, Republicans are wary of angering a passionate voting block by simply barring Paul from speaking. On the other hand, Paul openly criticizes some of his fellow Republicans’ central policies, so there is some concern that giving him free reign to speak his mind on the biggest stage would harm Romney’s chances in November.

Paul’s small but dedicated following had already vowed to show up at the convention en masse and to make a quixotic push to nominate him from the floor to represent the party. Paul ultimately struck a deal to settle a debate over the seating of delegates he amassed during the primaries that calmed talk of that possibility.

Though he won’t have a central role in the convention Paul will, however, receive a video tribute put together by his supporters.

Ron Paul declines to endorse Romney, spurns convention speaking slot | The Raw Story

Reality Check: RNC Pulling Out All Stops To Keep Ron Paul's Name Out Of Nomination



Ben Swann Reality Check takes a look at how the RNC is attempting to change the 5 state rule and decredential the entire Maine delegation only 4 days before the Republican National Convention

Fear and Loathing in Tampa: A Gonzo Guide to the Republican National Convention
Michael E. Miller
Phoenix New Times
Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:54 CDT



© Ryan Sealock


As Republicans prepared to renominate Richard Nixon for president, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson had a crank-fueled moment of clarity inside his Miami Beach hotel room.

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves," Thompson wrote in his classic Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. "We are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Within 24 months, after shredding the Constitution and carpet-bombing Cambodia to hell, Nixon sneaked out of the White House like the "drooling red-eyed beast" Thompson had known him to be all along.

Now, 40 years later, the Republican National Convention is returning to Florida. On August 30, Mitt Romney will don a sleek suit and flash his Vaseline smile to a sea of pale-skinned delegates in Tampa. He will compliment the city on hosting the $123 million four-day orgiastic event. And he will implore the crowd to obey the banners hung from the rafters: "Believe in America."

"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves," Thompson wrote in his classic Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. "We are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

Within 24 months, after shredding the Constitution and carpet-bombing Cambodia to hell, Nixon sneaked out of the White House like the "drooling red-eyed beast" Thompson had known him to be all along.

Now, 40 years later, the Republican National Convention is returning to Florida. On August 30, Mitt Romney will don a sleek suit and flash his Vaseline smile to a sea of pale-skinned delegates in Tampa. He will compliment the city on hosting the $123 million four-day orgiastic event. And he will implore the crowd to obey the banners hung from the rafters: "Believe in America."

Outside the towering Tampa Bay Times Forum, meanwhile, ornery unbelievers will be confined like cattle to designated protest zones. There will be Black Bloc anarchists, Code Pink soccer moms dressed as vaginas, a poor people's camp called Romneyville, and tens of thousands of Ron Paul fanatics descending like libertarian locusts to devour whatever scraps their savior tosses them.

Barred by city officials from bringing masks, puppets, or tricycles, the malcontents will be surrounded by 4,000 heavily armed police - not to mention a city full of conservatives with concealed weapons and a distaste for godless liberals. More than 35,000 die-hard believers will jet into town for a week of GOP glitz, gluttony, and gun worship. They'll be joined by 15,000 headline-hunting journalists and another 15,000 protesters.

While the mainstream media sucks down speeches by Romney and his new budget boy toy, Paul Ryan, New Times is honoring Thompson's legacy by doing as he would have done in Tampa: dredging up the real, sordid story behind the convention.

It's not something you'll see on CNN. But screw Wolf Blitzer. We've got our own guides: pole dancers poised to suck rich Repub visitors dry, professional Sarah Palin porn impersonator Lisa Ann prepping for the performance of a lifetime, aging strip club owner Joe Redner fighting off cancer to flip right-wingers his middle finger one last time, and Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi returning to his home state to chronicle the madness.

"Florida has a lot going for it," Mandvi says. "Tampa is the birthplace of Hooters, for God's sake."

Make no mistake: The RNC's return to the Sunshine State is no fluke. For Romney, Ryan, and the rest of the party, Florida is the future.

Since Nixon's days, conservatives have transformed Florida into a hellish post-governmental wasteland. Here, super-PACs run wild through suburbs in foreclosure, people trust in only God or their Glock, and the poor are left to literally cannibalize one another on the nightly news. But, hey, there's no state income tax!

As in '72, Florida is the template for a right-wing takeover in 2012.

---

Americans have long known Florida as the tacky tropical paradise where grandparents go to die - a peninsula of endless sandy beaches and unlimited cottage cheese. Then came the 2000 election, and like a maggot-infested mango, the Sunshine State was revealed to be full of crap.

The backwardness goes way beyond blowing the election and ushering Dubya into office. Decades of conservative dominance in the state Capitol have made Florida into a dystopian test kitchen for Republicans' craziest ideas. Mass deregulation coupled with hacked education budgets has made Ponzi schemes the state's biggest industry. More than a million residents are packing heat. And murder essentially is legal, thanks to the Stand Your Ground law.

But all the evidence you need of Florida's dysfunction comes from a quick study of the state's fearless leaders - the ones America will meet via news broadcasts from Tampa.

Let's start at the top: At the head of the crazy parade is Governor Rick Scott. His poll numbers read like a thermometer in Reykjavík. For good reason. With his pale, shaven head and unblinking eyes, he looks - and governs - like Lord Voldemort.

Scott's shadiness preceded his election by decades. As a young lawyer in Texas, he turned a $125,000 investment in two hospitals into a massive healthcare empire. Then the feds came sniffing around. They accused Scott's company - Columbia/HCA - of billing Medicare and Medicaid for bogus lab tests and charging the government for luxuries such as Kentucky Derby tickets. When the investigation went public in 1997, Columbia/HCA's board booted Scott, but not before handing him $10 million in cash and $300 million worth of stock. Three years later, the company pleaded guilty to 14 corporate felonies and paid the government a record $1.7 billion in fees.

You'd think the stink from the largest Medicare fraud case in history would stick to Scott, but in 2010, he ran for governor, dropping more than $75 million of his fortune to recast himself - like Romney - as an entrepreneur. He won by 1 percent over Democrat Alex Sink (a candidate so bland she's best remembered today as the great-granddaughter of a circus-performing Siamese twin).

Scott's two years in office have been a nightmare of GOP talking points turned reality. First, he pushed through a law requiring drug tests for welfare applicants, saying it was "unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction." Instead, taxpayers have subsidized $200,000 worth of tests, much of them conducted by a company owned by Scott's wife. Capitalism! (Oh, and so far, only 2 percent of the tests have come back positive.) Never mind that the law likely is a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches.

Scott didn't stop there. He also required drug tests of every state employee (because society falls apart if the dudes at the DMV smoke a joint once in a while) and signed a truly bizarre law banning doctors from discussing gun ownership with their patients. He let local governments steamroll the Everglades and then rejected a $2.4 billion high-speed rail system between Orlando and Tampa (which was to be paid entirely by the feds and private businesses). Why? Because trains are communist, you pinko.

Scott's biggest priority in office, though, has echoed his Republican overlords' national plans: Suppress poor and minority voters. Last summer, he signed a law slashing early voting from 14 days to eight and outlawing voting on the Sunday before the election - coincidentally, the day that black churchgoers usually drive en masse to vote for Democrats. The law made it more difficult for liberal-leaning students to update their addresses to get ballots, and it threatened voter-registration groups with fines. Even the Boy Scouts of America took offense.

And Scott targeted Hispanics by ordering a purge of "potentially ineligible" voters from the rolls. It turned out that hundreds were perfectly legit citizens - including one guy who had survived combat in World War II.

People might think they're safe from this insanity in their East Village apartments or Los Angeles ranchos, but the Republicans' Frankenstein-like experimentation in Florida already is beginning to spread. The most infamously insane idea to go viral is the Stand Your Ground law, at the heart of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman's defense for fatally shooting unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

Normally, to claim self-defense, someone is required to retreat from a threat before opening fire. But in 2005, Florida put the onus on prosecutors to show shooters' lives were not in danger. Soon, the legislation quickly spread to 24 other states, including Arizona.

In Arizona, Stand Your Ground was tested in an incident at a Taco Bell earlier this year. The killer eventually was charged with second-degree murder after authorities concluded that there were holes in his story that he had been threatened by a bat- or pipe-wielding man.

In Florida, Stand Your Ground has been used by drug dealers to escape murder charges, invoked by one guy after shooting a bear, and cited by a jogger who beat a Jack Russell terrier. According to the Tampa Bay Times, the law is unevenly enforced to favor whites over blacks and Hispanics. And researchers at Texas A&M University recently found it has increased homicides across the nation.

Sadly, Stand Your Ground isn't the only scourge Florida has unleashed upon the States. Decades of deregulation have made it the epicenter of the country's foreclosure crisis. That same blind faith in business has also turned it into a veritable Scam-istan, ruled by Ponzi schemers such as retiree-bilking Bernie Madoff, cricket-crazy R. Allen Stanford, golden-toilet-owning attorney Scott Rothstein, and bogus University of Miami booster Nevin Shapiro.

Meanwhile, poor residents have borne the brunt of steep budget cuts. Programs for mental health, substance abuse, and the homeless have been slashed. So when "Miami Zombie" Rudy Eugene ate the face off of indigent Ronald Poppo a few months ago, Floridians weren't nearly as surprised as the rest of the nation.

Hunter Thompson would've similarly been unfazed: "Civilization ends at the waterline," he once wrote. "Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top."

---

Oversize pink vaginas. Black Bloc anarchists. The bright-orange spurt of pepper spray into a crowd. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn has technicolor nightmares of what could go wrong at the RNC. The moderate Democrat didn't ask for his city to host the event. But if anything goes awry, it will be endlessly looped on television and YouTube, and he'll be blamed.

"Other than the Olympics, this will be the most-watched television event in the world this year," he says. "So yeah, hosting a convention in the middle of hurricane season in this economic and political environment leads to a little gray hair."

These are strange days for Tampa, and for America. Over the past decade, political polarization has turned the country into a powder keg. Buckhorn's job is to prevent tens of thousands of convention conservatives and left-leaning protesters from combusting on his streets. It won't be easy. If the nation has been coming apart at the seams, Tampa could be the crotch that finally splits wide open.

Inside the convention center will be titans of industry, the billionaire Koch brothers, hordes of Tea Partiers in tri-corner hats, Bill O'Reilly and Fox News freaks, Karl Rove with his Crossroads GPS super-PAColytes, and a few thousand fawning female Christian fundamentalists toting "Enraptured by Paul Ryan" signs.

On the other side of the picket line will be those resisting America's rightward shift: Code Pink matriarchs clad as papier-mâché vulvas, carbon-neutral nouveau hippies, and the moldy leftovers of the Occupy movement. More than 15,000 protesters are expected. Videos threatening violence, supposedly by international hacker group Anonymous, already have been uploaded online.

"Mayor Buckhorn can shove his authoritarian zones up his ass," says a masked protester in one video. "When protest becomes illegal, there is no other option left but to fight."

Buckhorn says demonstrators have nothing to fear: "I've been very clear from the get-go that if you're coming here to protest, you're welcome. But if you step out of line, and if you're coming here to cause mayhem, we are going to deal with you."

The mayor is a cheery man with bright, beady eyes dropped like blueberries onto a doughy face. In true American fashion, he'll be happy if he can survive August with maximum profit and minimum scandal.

"I'm agnostic until the convention is over. For me, it's not about red-state, blue-state. It's about green," Buckhorn admits, estimating the convention will bring Tampa more than $175 million.

Bipartisan bonhomie goes only so far, though. The Secret Service prohibits guns within the convention center, but in a state with more than a million concealed-weapons permits, Tampa will be swimming in sidearms. When Buckhorn asked the governor to ban concealed weapons temporarily in town during the convention, Scott scoffed.

"I'm not an anti-gun kind of guy. I've got guns. Up until probably six months ago, I had a concealed-weapons permit," Buckhorn boasts. "But to interject guns into a potentially combustible environment to me is absurd."

He says Scott's snarky response was probably written by the NRA. "He has his opinions about the Second Amendment, and he isn't going to let the safety of the public or our police officers get in the way of it."

Scott's decision isn't popular in left-leaning Tampa, but it has gone down well in nearby, rabidly Republican Hillsborough County.

"Who's more likely to have a gun: a pinko commie liberal or a God-fearing Republican?" reasons Joseph Wendt, a Romney supporter in the area. "If you're a bunch of liberal activists going to protest a conservative event where people are legally allowed to carry guns, you better behave."

Buckhorn's stance hasn't exactly endeared him to progressives plotting to protest the convention, either. They decry his plan to put them in three "clean zones" located several blocks from the Times Forum. And they fear retaliation from the 4,000 heavily armed police officers - paid for by a $50 million Homeland Security grant - who will cordon off downtown.

"We're not going to do anything illegal," says Corey Uhl, head of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of South Florida. "But with the recent frameups of NATO protesters in Chicago, you never know what the government will do."

Others arguably already are breaking the law. A group called the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign rented the land behind an Army surplus store near the Forum. They spread mulch on the parking lot, set up a portable toilet, erected Pepto-Bismol-pink tents, and called it "Romneyville." Local officials say the tents violate zoning laws, but protesters say they'll handcuff themselves to fences rather than leave.

"Republicans can't ignore us," says Bruce Wright, one of the campaign's organizers. "This is the future of the United States if things don't change."

Buckhorn's office has tried to contain the craziness by barring protesters from bringing props such as puppets and masks. But he will have his hands full with Code Pink's vagina costumes.

The outfits were inspired by an incident last year when a Democratic state rep joked that the only way for a Florida woman to avoid Republicans' invasive reproductive regulations was to "incorporate her uterus." Republicans scolded him for using the word on the House floor.

"These stupid old-boy white men want to legislate our vaginas," says Anita Stewart, a home healthcare practitioner. "They came out of a vagina and spend the rest of their lives trying to crawl back up in one, but they don't want to hear the word.

"We're not in the 17th century anymore," Stewart says. "Vagina!"

---

"Governor!" The shout spun Rick Scott away from his budget presentation and toward the press pool. "You benefit from hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars every year," asked a reporter he didn't recognize. "So would you be willing to pee into this cup to prove to Florida taxpayers that you're not on drugs, that you're not using that money for drugs?"

"I've done it plenty of times," Scott stuttered.

"Would you pass this forward to the governor?" the reporter said, handing another journalist an empty plastic piss cup.

Sadly, Scott didn't take a leak. But the governor had been punked. Two months later, the stunt aired on an episode of The Daily Show, lambasting Scott for his welfare drug testing.

It was the most visible victory yet for a native son bent on airing his home state's unparalleled craziness. "When I first came to Florida as a boy, I said to myself: One day I'm going to ask the governor of this state to give me a urine sample in the middle of a press conference," says Aasif Mandvi, the comedian turned satirist. "Finally my dream came true, and I can cross it off my bucket list."

The Daily Show host Jon Stewart insists the program is "fake news," yet its skits surgically expose political hypocrisy better than any 60 Minutes piece. Florida is a favorite target, and Mandvi, who grew up in Tampa, is the perfect gonzo guide.

Born in Mumbai, Mandvi moved to northern England when he was a year old. Fifteen years later, his shopowner father saw ads for real estate deals in Florida and moved the family to Tampa. "I came from an all-boys British boarding school to a place where girls were wearing short shorts and everyone was running around on skateboards," he remembers. "It was completely another dimension for me."

As a Muslim Indian with a British accent, Mandvi was triply out of place. His new neighbors didn't know what to make of him. "I don't think that in the 1980s, Americans knew that there were other countries," he jokes. "They knew that the oil came from somewhere, but they weren't sure where exactly."

After high school, he stayed in Tampa to attend the University of South Florida. He majored in theater and later landed a job at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando making fun of guests as part of a wandering improv group. Three years later, he moved to New York.

Watching the city grow suspicious of Muslim-Americans following the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mandvi turned his comedy political. In off-Broadway plays, he mined the "idea of sitting between cultures, between East and West, being Muslim-American but having that experience of being a kid in Florida." The Daily Show asked him to audition in 2007, and he was hired the same day.

During the past four years, he has traveled the country for segments, but many of his most memorable moments have happened in the Sunshine State.

"Florida is such a huge piece of the pie in terms of national elections," Mandvi says, "so it becomes a kind of lightning rod for all kinds of political energy. There is a reason why the Republicans are having the convention in Tampa this year."

He pauses before offering another explanation for the locale of next week's event: "You can't ignore the fact that the Republicans are coming and having their convention in the city that has the best strip clubs in the world."

In five years on the campaign trail, Mandvi has learned what to expect from moments like the RNC. In Tampa, there will be a vastly different scene from the one at the Dems' convention in Charlotte.

"The DNC felt like just a big frat party, with kegs and people having a great time and dancing. The after-parties were all video games," he says of the 2008 convention in Denver. "Then the parties at the RNC always seemed to be debutante balls, with ice sculptures and women in ball gowns."

In Florida, The Daily Show won't struggle for material. Just ask executive producer Rory Albanese, who has helped coordinate coverage of six past conventions.

"A lot of that is just because it looks like America's penis," he says of Florida. "We didn't invent that. If it was Long Island, like I'm from, we wouldn't be a very well-hung country."

The Tampa convention also dovetails with two of The Daily Show's most recurring themes: the mainstream media's failings and money's ever-expanding role in politics.

"We all love watching CNN during debates or on Election Night," Albanese says. "It's like they have Q from the James Bond movies in the basement saying, 'Okay, Anderson [Cooper], here is the new jetpack. You're going to be flying around the studio.' What weird piece of technology will CNN have spent $50 million on and have no need for tonight?"

In May, The Daily Show's close cousin, The Colbert Report, poked fun at a mysterious South Floridian named Josue Larose for forming more than 600 PACs and 64 super-PACs, supposedly representing everyone from supermodels to Taco Bell customers.

As usual, Comedy Central's pranks hint at a deeper, darker truth. For months, the Tampa area has been flooded with political attack ads by shady, well-financed super-PACs, says Mayor Buckhorn. On a national scale, these anonymous expenditures could decide the election.

"There is so much political advertising coming through here, none of which is saying anything nice about anybody. And that's true of both sides," he says.

For a moment, Buckhorn sounds almost as cynical as Mandvi peeking behind the political curtain and finding nothing but frat boys drinking and screwing.

"The ads are just nonstop," he admits. "It's gotten to the point where we see so much of it that I almost long for the days of those Cialis ads."

---

Under the black lights of the Mons Venus strip club, Monica's eyes and teeth glow like St. Elmo's fire. Six-inch stilettos dangle from her toes as she sits at a waist-high table. Her folded arms prop up her bare, surgically enhanced breasts, nipples staring in opposite directions like a gunslinger's pistols. She smells like mint chewing gum and cigarettes.

It's a Monday afternoon. On an octagonal stage, a thin Asian girl grinds her naked hips against a pole as a few customers gaze at the gyrating spectacle.

"It's going to be as big as the Super Bowl," Monica says of the convention, over the heavy thumps of a hip-hop song. "Why do you think they are having it here in Tampa? It's the Mons. People have got to see what it's all about, even Republicans."

For millions of Americans, the RNC will be a pivotal political moment. In picking Romney and Ryan, Republicans will commit to a radical vision in which government and its social role are decimated, while the rich pay lower taxes than at any point in time since the Spanish flu ravaged the Earth.

But for strippers, porn stars, and a small group of savvy small-business owners, the convention means something much simpler: money. And lots of it. They're banking big on the fact that the same guys waxing nobly about family values will be lining up at titty bars after midnight.

"The history we've heard about the RNC is that there are people who will come out and spend," says Tony Hernandez, the manager of the Tampa Gold Club, "whether it's the delegates or the construction guys setting up and breaking things down."

Strip clubs have pimped themselves out in anticipation. The Gold Club has installed more black granite and marble tile than in a P. Diddy mansion. There will be $7 grouper nuggets and $18 veal shank on the menu, Hernandez says, plus Dom Pérignon and cigars, of course. There will also be giant flat-screen monitors so delegates can tweet about the convention even while getting a lap dance.

But if that isn't elite enough for One Percenters, they can rent a private sky box with its own bar and stripper stage. A private entrance allows limos to pull right up to the door and prevents paparazzi from snapping politically embarrassing photos. And as a special convention bonus, delegates will also be treated to an assortment of their favorite adult-film stars.

"We're bringing in different porn stars from everywhere," Hernandez says.

In fact, nearly every club is already seeing an influx of porn stars, as well as out-of-state and out-of-retirement strippers. Hernandez says his club will keep things strictly apolitical, but others are playing right into the RNC theme.

"I'm going to do my Palin show," says Lisa Ann, a porn star who over the past four years has impersonated the Alaskan VP candidate in classics such as Who's Nailin' Paylin? and the point-of-view flick You're Nailin' Paylin.

Ann, who once appeared in a live sex scene with a Mitt Romney look-alike almost as stiff as the real thing, swears her performance isn't political commentary. "I'm sure that there will be a bunch of people from the convention there," she says, "but I'm not here to make fun of politicians."

There is at least one Tampa luminary for whom flashing T&A will be about more than making some cash. Joe Redner, the 72-year-old owner of Mons Venus, is a philosophizing free-speech advocate who has donated his land to the Occupy Tampa movement. He's also a pain in local politicians' asses. In 1976, Redner took over a bar called the Night Gallery, and after hearing on the radio about the Supreme Court's decision to allow nudity in movies, he concluded that nude dancing would have to be protected as well.

For years, Redner played cat-and-mouse with Tampa police. When a girl stripped onstage, undercover cops would arrest her. But as soon as they took her outside, Redner would replace her with another. Then he'd go bail out the first girl. "It took nine girls on a three-girl rotation for us not to get shut down," he laughs. "They ran out of undercovers!"

Redner was arrested dozens of times. Eventually, he won an injunction against the city's nudity ordinance. Since then, he has run eight times for political office. In 2007, he lost in a runoff for city council with 44 percent of the vote. He has pretended in court to be gay to prevent a homophobic law from being enforced. His battles have pitted him against Hillsborough County Christian fundamentalists such as state Senator Ronda Storms, who has likened Redner to the Devil.

Like other strip-club owners, Redner says he looks forward to taking Republicans' money. But he sees it as long-overdue economic redistribution from the rich to the poor (his dancers are self-employed, receiving 100 percent of their lap dance fees and tips).

"The big businesses, energy companies, and banks that back the Republicans have been stealing from the little people for years," he says. "Now we're going to take some of their money. I'm glad to."

Redner doesn't hide his opinions. He doesn't have time to. He's got stage 4 lung cancer and a deep cough that reminds him of his inevitable death. He doesn't want to see the country he's gone to jail for more than 150 times - yes, a country with titty bars and pornography - thrown out for a reactionary Reich.

He won't be in town for the RNC. Instead, he'll be in Vegas for a strip club convention. It's better that way, he says. In Sin City, Redner won't have to watch Mitt Romney preach about "family values" while calling for a war with Iran.

Redner wants no part of Romney's America. He gazes around at his club. "I prefer to be in here with the decent humans," he says.

---

After he left Florida's RNC and Nixon crushed McGovern, Hunter Thompson was in no mood to forgive America.

"The 'mood of the nation' in 1972 was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded 'typical voters' of the fear & anxiety of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon," Thompson wrote. "All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives - even if it meant turning the whole state of Nevada into a concentration camp for hippies."

Forty years later, many Americans are again greedy and afraid - afraid of immigrants, afraid of upsetting "job creators" by not giving them tax breaks the country can't afford, and afraid of paying 11 cents more for their pizza so that the kid delivering it can have health insurance.

Who knows where President Mitt Romney would put the hippies? But one thing is for sure: He'd leave Americans alone, just as the Sunshine State has left Floridians alone all these years. Ponzi schemers would proliferate. Developers would bulldoze pristine land into parking lots. Everyone would carry a gun. Unless you're poor, of course. Then you'd have to piss into a cup

Fear and Loathing in Tampa: A Gonzo Guide to the Republican National Convention -- Society's Child -- Sott.net

The Ryan Delusion

August 28, 2012 by Conor MacCormack

SPECIAL

Representative Paul Ryan’s voting record shows that he harbors no love for the Bill of Rights.

With the Olympic Games behind them, Americans have returned their attention to the stage of political theater. One of the opening acts of the 2012 election season will take place this week in Tampa, Fla., where serial flip-flopper Mitt Romney is expected to be anointed the executive standard bearer for the alleged “Party of Great Moral Ideas.”
Despite the plethora of evidence proving that he is cut from the same statist mold as Barack Obama, Romney continues to be hailed as a “great conservative” and the vaunted “lesser of two evils.”

Republicans — as well as some libertarians and constitutionalists — point to Romney’s selection of Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for Vice President as a sign of his commitment to limited government principles. Upon closer inspection, Ryan — who has been touted as the “intellectual leader” of the Republican Party and a budget hawk — has all the trappings of a textbook neocon.

Ryan faithfully toes the chicken hawk foreign policy line of nation building and bloody foreign interventions. He voted to invade Iraq in 2002, voted against any attempt to establish a withdrawal date from Iraq in 2007 and voted for “emergency” appropriation of $78 billion dollars to fund the illegal and immoral wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In keeping with the foremost neocon prerequisite, Ryan is more than happy to send young American soldiers off to fight and die while he, as a healthy and able-bodied American patriot, could not be bothered to carry a rifle and fight for the principles he claims to hold near and dear to his heart.

For someone who is being embraced in some circles as a libertarian, Ryan’s voting record shows that he harbors no love for the Bill of Rights — or any facet of individual liberty, for that matter. This is the man who voted for the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and its infamous indefinite detention provision, voted to make the Patriot Act permanent and voted in favor of using electronic surveillance on Americans without a duly approved search warrant. Under this criteria Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Generalissimo Franco, Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein were all staunch civil libertarians.

“Now hold your horses there, MacCormack,” some “libertarians” will say. “Paul Ryan may not be perfect, but at least he’s a staunch defender of free enterprise. The CATO Institute said so!”

Ladies and gentlemen, if CATO told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it? It should be noted that the CATO Institute is widely panned by genuine libertarians and freedom lovers as a peddler of the faux “libertarianism” advocated from within the Capital Beltway. In order to curry favor with the Washington establishment, CATO has stumped for the following: torture, expansion of the surveillance state, a war with Pakistan, and the fiat currency factory known as the Federal Reserve.

But I’ve digressed… back to our buddy Ryan. Contrary to CATO’s claim, his voting record proves that he is more a Keynesian than a disciple of Ayn Rand. In 2008, he voted for the Bush stimulus bill, TARP and the auto bailout. Ryan even took to the House floor to pathetically beg his colleagues in Congress to support TARP.

He echoed George W. Bush’s convoluted logic, stating:

Madam Speaker, this bill offends my principles. But I’m going to vote for this bill — in order to preserve my principles, in order to preserve this free enterprise system…. I believe with all my heart — as bad as this is — it could get a whole lot worse, and that’s why we have to pass this bill.

If only it ended there. Ryan also backed the disastrous No Child Left Behind Act, which essentially bribed the public schools into passing their most deficient students in exchange for government goodies. The proof is in the pudding for that one: Just ask any American student who George Washington is. And for the grand finale: Paul voted in favor of Bush’s massive expansion of Medicare which, coupled with Romneycare, set the precedent for Obamacare.

No genuine libertarian, constitutionalist or freedom lover of any kind believes in any of the nonsense supported by collectivists like Ryan and his keeper, Romney. All of the passionate “anybody but Obama” rhetoric notwithstanding, a Romney/Ryan Administration would serve only to slow America’s drive off the cliff into moral and financial bankruptcy down from 100 mph to 90 mph. Ryan’s much-ballyhooed budget would continue massive deficit spending for another 25 years at the least. But, of course, he and Romney “aren’t quite as bad” as Obama.

The bottom line is: There was only one man named Paul who was worth supporting this year. I think you know who I’m talking about.

“Oh here we go again, MacCormack,” I hear many of you whining. “That crazy kook had no chance! We’ve got to vote for the lesser of two evils! Romney’s not so bad!”

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. To think otherwise is downright foolish. After all, the Bible says in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

“Well then, what’s your solution, big shot?” you’ll retort. It’s simple: Don’t vote. When you pull that lever for Collectivist A or Collectivist B, you are giving your consent to their respective liberty-destroying agendas.

As Lew Rockwell so astutely observed in a recent column:

How does voting change the situation? Neither of the candidates for president wants to do anything about the problem. On the contrary, they want to make it worse. This is for a reason. The State owns the “democratic process” as surely as it owns the Departments of Labor and Defense and uses it in ways that benefit the State and no one else.

On the other hand, we do have the freedom not to vote. No one has yet drafted us into the voting booth. I suggest that we exercise this right not to participate. It is one of the few rights we have left. Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.

You might say that this is ineffective. But what effect does voting have? It gives them what they need most: a mandate. Nonparticipation helps deny that to them. It makes them, just on the margin, a bit more fearful that they are ruling us without our consent. This is all to the good. The government should fear the people. Not voting is a good beginning toward instilling that fear.

This year especially there is no lesser of two evils. There is socialism or fascism. The true American spirit should guide every voter to have no part of either.

Consider those words long and hard before hightailing it to the polls this fall.

–Conor MacCormack

The Ryan Delusion : Personal Liberty Alerts=

Bush Is Not in Tampa, but His Ideas Are: A Commentary By Froma Harrop

Generic Congressional Ballot: Republicans 42%, Democrats 42%

Swing State Tracking Confirms Sense of a Race Too Close to Call

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll: Obama 47%, Romney 45%

43% Like Candidate Who'll Tax the Rich; 41% Prefer One Against All Tax Hikes

Voters remain almost evenly divided over whether they would support a candidate who opposes all tax increases or one who would raise taxes only on wealthy Americans. Read More

The current view of the 2012 presidential election, based on HuffPost Pollster charts and analysis.

Updated: Wednesday, Aug. 22 4:32 pm ET

Obama 247 Electoral Votes <---- BINGO's gone Wooo Hooo

Romney 191 Electoral Votes


270 electoral votes needed to win

Obama vs. Romney Electoral Map

The GOP and RNC have a Suicide Run~Away Train happening and they just dont get it... Romney, just like McCain wasnt picked to Win; he was picked by the Elites to knock out any and all contenders against Obama

These 2 ~ Obama / Romney are Globalists and the Elite have hedged their Bets... there is NO change Coming

It will be a Democrat win and just like Dubya Bush... it will destroy the Conservative Movement and Gut the Republican Party

Obama vs Romney

Last Updated: 8/28

State	Pollster	Poll Date	Obama	Romney
National	Rasmussen Tracking	8/24-8/26	47%	44%
National	CBS News	8/22-8/26	46%	45%
Connecticut	Quinnipiac	8/22-8/26	52%	45%
Florida	CNN/Time	8/22-8/26	50%	46%
North Carolina	CNN/Time	8/22-8/26	47%	48%
National	Gallup Tracking	8/20-8/26	46%	47%
National	ABC News/Wash Post	8/22-8/25	46%	47%
Ohio	Columbus Dispatch	8/15-8/25	45%	45%
Michigan	Mitchell Research	8/23-8/23	47%	47%
Virginia	Rasmussen Reports	8/23-8/23	47%	47%
Missouri	Post Dispatch/Mason Dixon	8/22-8/23	43%	50%
National	CNN/Opinion Research	8/22-8/23	49%	47%
Pennsylvania	Philadelphia Inquirer	8/21-8/23	51%	42%
North Carolina	High Point/SurveyUSA	8/18-8/23	43%	43%
Missouri	Rasmussen Reports	8/22-8/22	47%	46%

More Obama vs Romney »
Rasmussen Tracking »
Gallup Tracking »


Battleground States: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania.
General Election? Read the Karl Rove Playbook

Presidential Polls for 2012 Election - Latest Political National Polls

Is Mitt Fit?

August 27, 2012 by Bob Livingston

GOPCONVENTION2012.COM

The big bash called the Republican National Convention is set to kick off. If all goes as the party elites have planned, Mitt Romney will be nominated and acclaimed tomorrow (the roll call had been moved up to today “because of concerns about supporters of libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul” but Hurricane Isaac interfered) as the country’s salvation from four years of the illegal Obamination that currently despoils the people’s house.

Romney hardly qualifies as a savior — unless what you want to save is big government, ever-growing debt and perpetual war. Beyond the facts that Romney is a natural-born citizen (and there is no proof that the current occupant of the White House is) and there are slight differences in their statist, big government policies, there is little else to differentiate between Romney and the undocumented White House usurper.

To wit: Both believe the government should bail out failing industries; both believe in corporate and agricultural welfare; both support off-shoring American jobs; both support unlimited money printing; both support the notion that government can imprison people without charges or trial; both support government assassinations of Americans; both support weapons bans; both support socialized medicine; both support abortion; both believe in man-caused global warming and support cap-and-trade legislation; both have stated their undying support of Israel; both have advocated pre-emptive war on Syria and Iran and growing the American empire. As President Barack Obama has continued George W. Bush’s nation-destroying-then-rebuilding policies and Romney has employed as advisers much of Bush’s foreign policy team, expect four more years (at least) of war tacked onto the more than 20 we’ve endured in the Mideast.

But the Republican faithful have turned a blind eye to these facts and accepted the party elite’s chosen candidate as well as the elite’s false narrative. The rank and file have also dismissed the ill treatment of the only true conservative in the race, Ron Paul, as well as the ill treatment of his delegates and supporters. But do the rank and file really know who Romney is? And better yet, are they willing to hear the truth and reject Romney while there is still time to replace him with a real conservative who can defeat Obama and change the direction of the country?

In 1984, when Bain Capital was just getting off the ground and struggling to find investors, Romney approached old-money families, including the Rothschilds, for investment in the new venture. Those old-money families turned him down. So Romney went searching for other sources of funding.
In doing so, he began doing business with some nefarious characters, according to the Los Angeles Times. One of them was Sir Jack Lyons, who made a $2.5 million investment through a Panama shell company. Lyons was later convicted of fraud, fined heavily (though spared prison because of ill health) and stripped of his knighthood.

Another British investor of Bain Capital was the publishing baron Robert Maxwell. After Maxwell’s drowning death in 1991, investigators learned Maxwell had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from his company’s pension funds.

Romney’s Bain partner Harry Strachan suggested other sources of funding with Central American ties. The LA Times quotes a Boston Globe article from 1994 that describes Romney and Bill Bain as being “terrified of bringing in Central Americans” because of “drug money.” But Strachan reassured them so that they approached some of El Salvador’s wealthiest people.

El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war and many of the country’s rich were looking to get their money out of the country. Two of the investors were Francisco R.R. de Sola and his cousin Herbert Arturo de Sola, whose brother Orlando de Sola was suspected by the U.S. State Department and CIA of backing right-wing El Salvadoran death squads, according to now-declassified documents.

Another Bain investor was Jack Hanley, formerly the head of the agricultural terrorist company Monsanto. Hanley invested $1 million. “It seemed like a hell of a smart thing for to do to ride their coattails,” Hanley told the LA Times. “I got rich.”

Romney is a classic crony capitalist, i.e., a fascist, and his ties to Paul Ryan go far beyond tapping him as his Vice Presidential selection. Last week, The Telegraph reported that Romney may have violated ethics laws while Governor of Massachusetts by profiting from a marketing company that was contracted by the State after receiving $5 million from Bain Capital.

Paul Ryan’s brother Tobin was senior manager at Bain from 1995-1998. He left to become vice president of Imagitas, a company co-founded by Bain consultant Tom Beecher. In June 2000, the company got a $5 million investment from Bain. It expanded and began to win contracts with several State governments, including Wisconsin — where Republican and Ryan ally Scott McCallum was Governor — and Massachusetts (a contract that began in 2002, shortly before Romney’s election as Governor and shortly after Tobin Ryan says he left Imagitas).

That work with Massachusetts continued for several years, yet Romney never disclosed the potential conflict of interest. According to The Telegraph, Romney’s 2002 financial disclosure forms state he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital Investors VI and Bain Capital, Inc. But the forms do not detail individual companies like Imagitus, in which Bain Capital was invested.

In 2005, while Romney was still Governor, Imagitus was sold for $230 million.

Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado specializing in private equity, told The Telegraph it was “possible but unlikely” that Romney could have completely prevented himself from benefiting from Imagitas.

Over the years, Imagitas gave the Republican Governor’s Association, which Romney chaired, a total of $64,825. Former Imagitus board member Glenn Youngkin, a senior executive with The Carlyle Group — an organization with several directors and staffers who are members of the Council on Foreign Relations — has donated $50,000 to the Romney Victory Fund. He has donated more than $16,000 to Ryan’s campaigns since 1999.

Romney’s Abortion Problem
Romney has flopped like a fish on the subject of abortion, changing his stance depending upon which political office he’s seeking. He insists he’s pro-life now, but he refused last year to sign a pro-life pledge for the Susan B. Anthony List, a pro-life women’s organization. He has since created his own pledge that removed language from the Susan B. Anthony List pledge he didn’t like, and has received the organization’s endorsement.

But in 1999, Bain Capital invested $75 million in Stericycle, a medical-waste disposal firm that disposed of aborted fetuses collected from family-planning clinics. Bain and Romney claim Romney left the firm to run the 2002 Winter Olympics before the Stericycle deal was made. But documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission tell a different story.

Romney is listed as an active participant. According to Mother Jones:

Romney “may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to” 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle “in his capacity as sole shareholder” of the Bain entities that invested in the company. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. (The whole $75 million investment won Bain, Romney, and their partners 22.64 percent of the firm’s stock—the largest bloc among the firm’s owners.) The original copy of the filing was signed by Romney.

Another SEC document filed November 30, 1999, by Stericycle also names Romney as an individual who holds “voting and dispositive power” with respect to the stock owned by Bain. If Romney had fully retired from the private equity firm he founded, why would he be the only Bain executive named as the person in control of this large amount of Stericycle stock?

The Allen Stanford Connection
Romney has also been tied to convicted Ponzi schemer Allen Stanford, recently sentenced to 110 years in prison in a $7 billion fraud case.
According to The New York Times, about a month after Romney’s 2008 President bid ended, Romney’s son Tagg and top campaign fundraiser Spencer Zwick decided to form a private equity fund and they had a rolodex of deep-pocketed campaign funders to pitch their ideas to. What they didn’t have was private equity experience, so they tapped into the Charlotte office of Stanford Financial Group (SFG) — which had been closed by Federal regulators for selling sham certificates of deposit — and used $10 million in seed money from the Romney family to invest in one part of SFG’s business called Solamere Capital.

The Times reports that Solamere executives claim the group had only been with SFG a short time and knew nothing of the fraud, even though they earned commissions and bonuses from the sale of fraudulent CDs.

But the court-appointed receiver for SFG has filed a Federal lawsuit that claims the former SFG employees ignored warning signs of the fraud. He is seeking to recover money from them.

Despite Tagg Romney’s claims to the contrary, an investigation into at least three principals of Solamere who came from SFG is ongoing.

Foreign Funds And More Shady Characters
And then there’s Romney’s foreign fundraising problem. In late July, Romney went to Israel where he held several fundraisers — without collecting paperwork from the donors and most without the presence of journalists — and promised in speeches to back an Israeli strike on Iran.

In January, the Supreme Court issued an order that upheld prohibitions against foreigners making contributions to influence American elections. It stated, “Foreign nationals, other than lawful permanent residents, are completely banned from donating to candidates or parties, or making independent expenditures in federal, state or local elections.”

Veterans Today writes Romney was “personally campaigning outside the US, soliciting foreign citizens, and humiliating himself and his country with his ignorance and flagrant attempts to trade illegal cash for promises of illegal war. One could hardly break more laws if one wanted.”

The Washington Post said the fundraiser — which included Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson — involved about 40 donors who were U.S. citizens, many of whom flew in to attend the event. But there was no filming or photographs allowed and no IDs were checked.

VT also reports that Romney and Adelson met with a group of large donors from the Russian Jewish community who flew in from Moscow.

Adelson is currently being investigated by Federal and Nevada investigators for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act over an investment in Macau.

In addition to his Israel trip, Romney has also held several campaign fundraisers in England.

It seems that Republicans are now faced with three choices. First, they can shove their heads into the sand at the Tampa, Fla., beaches and pretend that all is well with their candidate, telling themselves all the while they are voting for the “lesser of two evils.”

Or they can look into this and other evidence and determine that Romney’s not the answer for the Nation’s problems and demand a new candidate be selected at the convention: preferably Ron Paul. For this route, time is short; and it’s been made shorter by even more last-minute dirty tricks by the Republican elites.

Or, as I suspect will happen, they can ignore it all and instead unleash a stream of ad hominems and fallacies, shooting the messenger by imputing all manner of nefarious pro-Obama motives to Personal Liberty Digest™ and me while they la-de-da themselves all the way to either a November defeat or, if Romney wins, a Nixonian fall later on.

Cue the slur machine. Three, two, one…

Is Mitt Fit? : Personal Liberty Alerts=

Las Vegas Sun + NY Times Confirm: Ron Paul Got SIX State Petitions for Nomination

Submitted by Kathleen Gee on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 19:10
Ron Paul 2012
Nevada

We managed, in spite of a corrupt media, corrupt national GOP, corrupt state GOP organizations, voter ignorance, voter apathy, a massive disinfo campaign, an ongoing psy-ops campaign, and physical violence, to get Ron Paul the GOP nomination, based on the rules of four days ago.
The GOP and Democrat-controlled media had to lie, cheat, steal, and break bones to stop us.
Las Vegas Sun:

Paul supporters, lead by Nevada delegate Wayne Terhune, succeeded in putting together petitions from six states to put Paul’s name up for nomination. But earlier this week, the Romney campaign won a critical rules change requiring eight states to put a candidate up for nomination.
At the last moment, Paul supporters handed the petitions to the convention secretary. Then, the convention voted to adopt the eight-state rule, crushing the Paul effort.

More at the Las Vegas Sun
New York Times:

Delegates from Nevada tried to nominate Mr. Paul from the floor, submitting petitions from their own state as well as Minnesota, Maine, Iowa, Oregon, Alaska and the Virgin Islands. That should have done the trick: Rules require signatures from just five states. But the party changed the rules on the spot. Henceforth, delegates must gather petitions from eight states.

More at the New York Times

http://www.dailypaul.com/251664/las-...for-nomination

Don't quit the party, but don't vote Romney

Submitted by TylerLiberty on Tue, 08/28/2012 - 19:23
Daily Paul Liberty Forum
DP Original

After Romney loses, all of his people will leave. We can start taking over the party in January, 4 years before the next election. Then, as Ron Paul said, "we will be the tent!"

Ron Paul has been doing this way too long to throw away everything he's built. He has been rejected by the party for 36 years. We need a megaphone if we want to take control. Returning the Republican Party to true conservatism can be done. Don't give up.

Don't quit the party, but don't vote Romney | Peace . Gold . Liberty | Revolution