Category: Ron Paul

Ron Paul Rally in Nashua, N.H.

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Somewhere amid this frenzied crowd scene is
The Only Man Who Can Save Liberty in America

NASHUA, N.H.
Ron Paul just concluded a rally here in the hangar at Nashua Jet Aviation and the crowd was enormous. Afterwards, I talked to three young guys who drove up from New Jersey for the chance to see their hero. They’ve been Paulistas since 2007 and I told them, honestly, it’s good to see kids excited about liberty.

There will be a Ron Paul press conference in about 10 minutes. Here’s a photo of Paul’s fans doing their thing outside last night’s Rick Santorum event in Windham.

UPDATE: Some post-rally photos:

The afternoon sun — or, quite possibly, his own beatific radiance — highlights Ron Paul as he gives a press conference after his rally at the Nashua Jet Aviation hangar.

Pete Da Tech Guy interviews a Ron Paul supporter. Note the trademark Sicilian hand gesture.

UPDATE II: It’s always nice to run into a familiar fact on the campaign trail. In this case, it’s my libertarian buddy John LaBeaume:

John’s nickname for me is “Hate Crime.” My nickname for him is “Melungeon.” While I was sitting here working, he kept up a non-stop patter of jokes about me being the secret ghostwriter of certain newsletters. The dude is hilarious, but also a brilliant political analyst.

UPDATE III: Here’s another familiar face, Garrett Quinn of the Boston Globe and WRKO, interviewing a young Ron Paul supporter:

Say what you will about Ron Paul, no other Republican candidate inspires such fanatical enthusiasm. Here is video of the crowd inside the hangar chanting, “President Paul!”

The latest Rasmussen poll of New Hampshire primary voters: Mitt Romney 42%, Ron Paul 18%, Rick Santorum 13% and Jon Huntsman 12%. If Huntsman gets 12% in New Hampshire, I’ll be shocked beyond words.

And now, I’ve got to hit the road with Pete Da Tech Guy to the Hillsborough County GOP dinner at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, where Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum will speak tonight. Hit the freaking tip jar!

Ron Paul Is Out To Flog Mitt Romney With The Hillary Stick

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by Smitty

Now there is a provocative read:

Ron Paul — poised to finish strong in the Iowa caucuses – has begun to implement a quiet, complex plan to force a long battle with Mitt Romney for delegates to the Republican National Convention in August. His advantages: Experience, organization, and the legacy of the 2010 Tea Party revival, which convinced Republicans that anti-government figures like Paul just aren’t as weird as they’d thought.
Paul is following the roadmap set by Barack Obama’s 2008 strategy: Start early, learn the rules, and use superior organization and devoted young supporters to dominate the arcane but crucial party procedures in states your rivals are ignoring — states where caucuses and conventions that elect the delegates who will ultimately choose the Republican candidate. The plan begins in places like Minnetonka, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb where Paul has based his state headquarters, and where staffers have already begun running “mock-auses” — practice runs for Minnesota’s February 7 caucuses.
Paul’s rivals dismiss his chances. “Ron Paul’s not going to be our nominee,” Mitt Romney said flatly in December.

This is really an argument against “Arcane Rules”. We all love to hate on professional politicians, but it is truly a full-time job just to understand the basics of how the sausage is made. Complexity favors the insiders. We love to hate the IRS, but no one is really talking about killing the 16th Amendment or offering a tax code other than one putting the ‘b’ in Byzantine.

The two things we have to do, going down the road, are: involve more people, and stamp out complexity. Systems need to be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

As for the Paul candidacy: irrespective of anyone’s personal opinion of the newsletter utterances, you have to know, with total clarity, that the MSM would utterly, endlessly pillory Paul over that issue, while simultaneously touting an unexpected new hip-hop release by Jeremiah Wright as some sort of cultural achievement, just for the recreational hypocrisy of it all. Also, Ron’s foreign policies are unworkable, and would cause a big fat war, into which we’d be dragged.

So, even though Virginia’s primary is going totally South Park, I’m left to pray for a Santorum triumph, as a way to avoid the centrism of Romney, and the left-libertarianism of Paul.

via Huffington Post

The Elephant In The Fail Room

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by Smitty

From Has the conservative elite really failed?

Alan Greenspan, a free-market hero, blundered horribly in failing to regulate shadow banking, followed by another Republican appointee, Ben Bernanke. They forgot the old adage that the job of a central banker is to take away the punch-bowl just as the party is getting good. If they had acted to pop the housing price bubble earlier, they probably would have been lynched–it’s easy to beat them up with hindsight–but they still deserve a lot of blame.
These were mistakes, to be sure, but do they imply that America has suffered an “unprecedented failure” of its conservative elite? Just what sort of conservative elite did Ross Douthat have in mind? The victors of the Cold War and the authors of the Reagan economic boom set the tone for an enormous expansion of conservative intellectual life. How could we have done it better?
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property–farms and businesses–risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed a 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today.
Some of that sense of American purpose awakened after 9/11, and the conservative elite misspent the spiritual energy of Americans in the Quixotic pursuit of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Ron Paul is not the only candidate to state this plainly. Newt Gingrich has said the same thing.
What sets Mullah Ron Paul apart is something malicious, in my judgment: the assertion that a conspiracy of malefactors is responsible for the economic pain of the American people, and if these malefactors (for example the Federal Reserve) were to go away, the pain would disappear. That is demagoguery of the most insidious kind.
There is no truth-telling here: to absolve Americans of their greed, indolence, and cupidity in the great home price bubble of 2008-2006 is the biggest lie of all. Americans caught a ride on a $6 trillion wave of foreign capital inflows, and thought the free money would be there forever. The smartest kids got MBA’s and law degrees instead of learning engineering.

Why are we bashing Greenspan and Bernanke? The Federal Reserve is, to quote Thomas Sowell, “A cancer” The best those blokes can do is coax the tumor into growing more slowly. The unfortunate thing is that the ugliness of Ron Paul’s remarks is going to get blended with the idea of curbing the Federal Reserve, and thus it will be OK for our conservative elite to continue their failing ways, and protect the Fed.
The Federal Reserve is the crossroads of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and moral hazard, he said, easing himself quantitatively. Ahhhh!

Do you have a reference for this claim? It would be very interesting to see where Ron Paul offered:

the assertion that a conspiracy of malefactors is responsible for the economic pain of the American people, and if these malefactors (for example the Federal Reserve) were to go away, the pain would disappear

Again, I’m no apologist for the fellow, but I don’t think he offered any magic wand in “End the Fed”. The conspiracy has been the tacit one of the Iron Law mentioned above. Significantly curbing the Federal Reserve isn’t going to reduce the net pain of fiscal policy, but, removing power from un-elected, opaque officials would at least be in keeping with the spirit of representative government for which we claim to clamor.

And what’s this noise?

There is no truth-telling here: to absolve Americans of their greed, indolence, and cupidity in the great home price bubble of 2008-2006 is the biggest lie of all.

Mister, I have not been late on my mortgage these 12.5 years. That a group of folks, along with Fannie/Freddie, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, the Federal Reserve, and some bad banks, engineered a vast wealth transfer since the Community Reinvestment Act was signed is not an indictment of “Americans”. Conservatives who were in office and want to claim anything like the title “conservative” are not exactly at fault, either; but neither are they blameless, having been in office as the crime went down. The conservative elite is so afraid to scare the horses that you’re a kook if you talk about chopping a trillion out of the budget. Say Social Security is a Ponzi scheme? Yeah, you’re out of consideration.

Our conservative elite is so interested in playing ball-control offense that it is in jeopardy of repeating 2008.

via Instapundit

Phil Klein Endorses Obama

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OK, that’s a slight distortion:

Why I’d back Obama over Ron Paul

What I can’t understand is why Phil felt the need to write a column like that. Nobody who supports Ron Paul is open to persuasion, and Republicans who don’t support Ron Paul are unlikely to undergo a last-minute conversion at this point. (Unless, like Kent Sorenson, they’re sold-out backstabbers.)

Klein seems to be making a “here, top this” gesture, striving for the championship in the Anti-Ron Paul Derby. And, of course, his criticism will be dismissed by Paul’s supporters with two words: “Israel lobby.”

‘Everyone Sells Out in Iowa’

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DAVENPORT, Iowa
According to Michele Bachmann, that’s what her former campaign chairman state Sen. Kent Sorenson told her before he switched allegiances to Ron Paul.

Ed Morrissey is shocked — shocked! — to discover that Republicans can be bought, but it happens every day.

Remember when Tim Pawlenty was supposed to be the “conservative alternative to Mitt Romney”? And yet when Pawlenty dropped out, his campaign deep in debt, he endorsed Romney. Like that wasn’t about money?

Shane Vander Hart at Caffeinated Thoughts:

The principled thing for Sorenson to do would have been to see his commitment through to the end. . . .
I don’t know how much this will help Paul.  I would suspect not much.  What Sorenson did manage to do however is fatally wound the Bachmann campaign and damage his own credibility in the process.

Sorenson’s defection may have served the purpose of signaling to evangelicals in Iowa that, given the choice between Santorum and Bachmann, hers is the weaker of the two campaigns. A for the impact on Sorenson: “He just committed political suicide.”

Yeah. You can have a fine career in the GOP as a greedy opportunistic backstabber, but only if you maintain a public reputation as a Man of Principle and Integrity.

But why bring Ralph Reed into this, huh?

When the Story Writes Itself

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DAVENPORT, Iowa
Sometimes this job is hard. And sometimes it’s easy. And there was a moment last night that made my job much easier. Watch the video:

And now here’s the lead of my column today:

“Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!” The chants were loud and persistent.
Mitt Romney came to town Monday and a Ron Paul rally broke out. As the Massachusetts governor left one of his relatively rare campaign appearances in Iowa, some two dozen supporters of the Texas congressman lined the sidewalk along outside the Hotel Blackhawk. Romney stepped out the door and heard the crowd expressing their enthusiasm for his GOP rival. Romney chuckled and waved before boarding the bus emblazoned with his slogan, “Believe in America.” As the bus pulled out and turned onto East Third Street, the Paul fans chanted louder and waved their signs, some occasionally yelling, “Liberty!”
In one of the multiplying oddities of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, neither of the two candidates leading the polls in Iowa is the kind of conservative champion that has traditionally won the Hawkeye State’s first-in-the-nation caucus. Between them, however, the moderate Romney and the libertarian Paul combine more than 40 percent of the GOP vote here, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of Iowa polls. And though they are neck-and-neck in the polls, there is no doubt which of the two current front-runners here generates the most fanatical support. When Ron Paul holds an event in Iowa, no Romney boosters are standing outside in the cold December wind maniacally shouting, “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.





Romney Campaign Infiltrated By DHS-Certified Right Winger In Black Ford Mustang Thinking Santorum Thoughts

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by Smitty

Stacy called to gloat about arriving at the car rental and getting a souped-up Ford Mustang for the price of a mid-sized rental. Spys reporting to Sissypuss the Blog Kitty reported that this was really a Romney campaign stunt, intending to rely on Stacy’s big foot on the gas to get him thrown in jail, and thus be unable to report on the details of whatever Iowa fix is in.

Bolstering the theory was a Speed Raaaaacist screed by Dan Collins, some deep fried Southern reminisce full of code words, dog whistles, and semaphores. Have a go. It’s got everything but a banjo, as far as I can tell. Little did Dan know that Stacy, while not competent yet on TweetDeck, or bluetooth headsets–though his teeth were better unmentioned–has in fact mastered the fine art of cruise control.

It seems that Stacy hasn’t been behind the wheel of a black vehicle with anything resembling an engine since his stunt driver days on the set of Smokey and the Bandit, and the thought of being crushed in Iowa for speeding like he was crushed at the roulette table in Vegas is really too much of a bother for Stacy in his dotage.

Thus, Stacy’s arrival at the Romney event in a Black Chariot of Justice may thus catch Romney’s campaign off guard. A nearly Gingrich-ian surprise, IYKWIMAITYD. At that point, the challenge becomes keeping the Rule 5 political cling-ons from piling up too thickly on the hood. Oh, who am I kidding? Stacy will end up giving Dave Weigel a lift. But that’s how it goes.

Just remember, Stacy: if you meet a young co-ed named Mary Jo, that car is not a submarine. Okay?

And yes, the Romney campaign has the vehicle bugged. When you give the gnarly old guy in the bib overalls a lift, and

he says “Knock, knock.”,

and you reply, “Who’s there?”,

and he says, “It’s the plumber. I’ve come to fix the sink,”

that is your cue that the Semi-Conscious Liberation Army, in conjunction with the Ron Paul campaign, is preparing to pull off an operation previously only seen in the pages of the Illuminatus Trilogy, but which they think they can operationalize. Remember: if the operation fails, the statute of limitations on you for that job in Peru is expired, and Jorge really could use a favor. Whether it succeeds or fails, it will help the Santorum campaign. That’s all you need to know.

Godspeed.

Update: linked at Reluctant-Rebel

Rick Santorum On Greta

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by Smitty

Rick Santorum appeared “On the Record” last night. What an excellent outing! You can chalk it up to friendly media all you like, but Santorum seems both prepared and pleasant; American, even.

The interview alluded to this retro video:
which is a breath of fresh air. Rick’s Iowa ground game sounds like he’s all in, having supporters at most of the precinct caucuses. I’m wishing that his campaign had had more heft here in Virginia, and made the primary ballot. Hitting all of the rural counties for 400 valid signatures was just a bridge too far, apparently, but I don’t hold that against him. His Tea Party insurgency relies on doing well in Iowa and building momentum toward Super Tuesday.

Mitt, of course, needs to put on a good show, and try to counteract the perception that “the fix is in”. Elsewhere on Greta, mention was made of all the candidates giving Iowa the bus blitz over the next several days.

Virginia’s primary ballot continues to be an issue. In fairness to Mitt, doing the homework to meet the ballot requirements is not “a fix”. There is a risk of a variation on the theme of class warfare if people hate Mitt merely because he has invested the time and the money to staff a rock solid electoral machine.

Does that seem ‘unfair’? Whether or not you think it unfair, hearing Newt Gingrich compare the Virginia situation to Pearl Harbor does not elicit sympathy. Yes, its effect on him might be of similar magnitude, but the comparison simply doesn’t set well. Being caught asleep at the switch is one thing; invoking a military sneak attack in a political context is goofy at best.

If there is any Pearl Harbor comparison afoot, it’s the attack on liberty by creeping government. The over-reaching Federal government is becoming downright inimical to the day to day conduct of private life, sending waves of legislation, regulation, and irritation to bum the American people into submission. You could kill someone by forcing them to read the U.S. Code. We need a Declaration of Independence from this.

Is Santorum the guy to declare that independence, and lead us away from it? Maybe. Newt, Mitt, and Governor Asterisk excite no confidence. As you can tell by the tone of my posts, I want to sympathize with some of Ron Paul’s domestic ideas. I hope the good ideas survive his campaign, and he fades with the bad ones. Besides Santorum, Perry and Bachmann offer some hope.

But really, it isn’t about the election, or who is on the ticket. It is about the involvement level of the American people. The Ruling Class, of which Romney, Gingrich, and Huntsman seem to be anointed members, seem to be more about their own power, making these noises about social safety nets as a modern form of bread and circuses.