Yes, I understand what you’re saying. Black men selling black men into slavery is way worse than white men buying black men for slaves.
I’m just not sure what issue of the Ron Paul Report I can find the manifesto on this point. Let me guess – it was published between 1989 and 1995.
They owned slaves, and wrote a constitution that allowed it and included the 3/5ths compromise. They most certainly didn’t oppose slavery, they practiced it.
Exactly. Slavery, race in general, votes for women, votes for the general public, the genocide of the Native Americans, and so on. We’ve progressed a tiny little bit in 200+ years. If we do things differently than they did, it’s because we are doing them better.
Rand is running in Kentucky. Ron is running in Kentucky and 49 other states.
Some of them opposed it. Others thought it was bad, but didn’t object enough to insist it be outlawed or to avoid having slaves themselves.
Why would the big donors pick a side at this stage? The primaries are 20 months away. I’m sure she’s spending plenty of money. She’s keeping up appearances and we know she likes the finer things. But we know there’s an audience for her. Do you want to compare her book sales to Ron Paul’s?
I think you’re wrong here. Bain Capital, which Romney previously worked at, is part owner of Clear Channel. I don’t know that he owns any of Clear Channel himself. Even if he did, it would be a very small portion of the money he’s made over the years.
Just to emphasize this again: it’s ridiculous to use Kentucky as a proxy for the entire country. Kentucky went for McCain in 2008 by 58 percent to 41 percent. The popular vote went to Obama 53 percent to 46 percent. That’s a 24 point swing. Kentucky is a small state that is largely rural. It is almost entirely white. About 91 percent of the people are white, and there are very few Hispanic or Latino voters. The population is a bit older than average. It is not a good stand in for the entire country.
Just like with subprime mortgages, a lack of white people buying and taking away the slaves would cut the number of slaves seized way down. No whites, and the slave catchers would be standing on the beach like schmucks trying to sell the slaves to the seagulls or something.
You know, by this stage I think we have established that most here wouldn’t vote for Ron Paul and don’t think he can win. Okay, got it. I am going to flip the script a little and put you all on the defensive for once. Would you support anybody except Barack Obama?
If you don’t agree with Ron Paul, fine. You are entitled to your opinion. But if you think Obama and his team have done a swell job and he deserves reelection, I seriously have to question your sanity. At least I have come to the conclusion that both the Republican and Democrat parties are essentially the same and we need a new voice.
So for those who support Barack Obama vs Ron Paul (or whoever becomes the challenger in 2012), can you honestly defend these policies?:
On foreign policy:
Barack Obama promised to take troops out of Iraq. He has been in office for a year and a half and we still have 100,000 troops in Iraq. He claims he still will remove troops, but actions speak louder than words. This timetable keeps being pushed further and further out. Furthermore, he sent more military contractors to Iraq. Are we going to close down our military bases and turn over the country back to the Iraqi people? I guarantee that will never happen.
Barack Obama massively increased the troop levels in Afghanistan. This is so stupid. Sending this many more troops there now is as dumb as Bush invading Iraq in 2003. We now have more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. There are less than 100 Al Qaeda and we don’t have any clear mission or strategy for victory.
Barack Obama has massively expanded a CIA program of predator drone attacks in Pakistan killing innocent civilians. He even jokes about it:
It is estimated that for every Taliban or Al Qaeda killed, 147 civilians have died. Thats not the way to win hearts and minds. This is a barbaric immoral program that is creating new Al Qaeda every single day.
Ron Paul, who you all claim is a crazy, batshit insane conspiracy nut, puts it this way:
**“…it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion-dollar-war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing.”
“Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never been found in violation of that treaty. Iran is not capable of enriching uranium to the necessary level to manufacture nuclear weapons. According to the entire US intelligence community, Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapons programme.”
Paul scoffs at the propaganda: “We hear war advocates today on the [Congress] floor scare-mongering about reports that in one year Iran will have missiles that can hit the United States. Where have we heard this bombast before?”**
Obama is leading us down the same failed path that Bush led us down in regards to Iraq. And you all, despite opposing Bush, cheer him on. Perhaps you are nothing but hypocritical partisans.
The Economy and Banking Regulation:
Obama came into office promising change and running as a populist outsider. People felt like he represented them. They were duped. As Matt Taibbi wrote about in his article “Obama’s Big Sellout”,
**"Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place."**
And this from a left leaning Rolling Stone journalist who supported him initially.
He opposes Auditing the Federal Reserve, Derivative Transparency, stopping Too Big to Fail or any other common sense financial regulatory measure currently being proposed. He and his team are continually siding with the Banks and Wall Street firms against the American people.
Look at his top campaign donors:
Goldman Sachs: $994,795
Citigroup Inc: $701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co: $695,132
Morgan Stanley: $514,881
Seem like a conflict of interest to you? Listen to the words of renowned Trend Forecaster Gerald Celente:
We are being controlled by the Financial Mafia and Barack Obama is their pitchman.
On Civil Liberties and The War on Drugs:
Obama opposes any drug legalization.
Obama opposes medical marijuana.
Obama opposes Gay Marriage
Obama supports the Death Penalty
Obama supports the ineffective notion of Gun Control laws
Obama supports a national ID card
Obama supports the ability to assassinate american citizens
(Don’t believe me?, check this out):
http://trueslant.com/michaelpeck/2010/04/07/when-is-it-legal-to-assassinate-americans/
If Bush was in office you would be criticizing him all day long for a record like this. But since its a democrat in the White House, it doesn’t matter to you.
On Health Care Reform
Regardless of what you may think, Obama’s health care bill is blatantly unconstitutional due to the mandate forcing Americans to purchase health insurance from a private company.
This health care bill was a total corporate welfare giveaway.
Please read these links:
**"Last Wednesday the nation was riveted to the President’s speech on healthcare reform before Congress. While the President’s concern for the uninsured is no doubt sincere, his plan amounts to a magnanimous gift to the health insurance industry, despite any implications to the contrary.
For decades the insurance industry has been lobbying for mandated coverage for everyone. Imagine if the cell phone industry or the cable TV industry received such a gift from government? If government were to fine individuals simply for not buying a corporation’s product, it would be an incredible and completely unfair boon to that industry, at the expense of freedom and the free market. Yet this is what the current healthcare reform plans intend to do for the very powerful health insurance industry.
The stipulation that pre-existing conditions would have to be covered seems a small price to pay for increasing their client pool to 100% of the American people. A big red flag, however, is that they would also have immunity from lawsuits, should they fail to actually cover what they are supposedly required to cover, so these requirements on them are probably meaningless. Mandates on all citizens to be customers of theirs, however, are enforceable with fines and taxes.
Insurance providers seem to have successfully equated health insurance with health care but this is a relatively new concept. There were doctors and medicine long before there was health insurance. Health insurance is not a bad thing, but it is not the only conceivable way to get health care. Instead, we seem to still rely on the creativity and competence of politicians to solve problems, which always somehow seem to be tied in with which lobby is the strongest in Washington."**
This is widely acknowledged by anyone who knows anything about this bill. It strengthens the grip of Health Insurance companies on Americans and takes away our medical freedoms.
**"Rapidly-rising Medicare spending already threatens “to crush the federal budget,” and much Medicare spending is wasteful, yet the Obama Administration claims it can somehow save money by creating Medicare-like programs to cover all Americans. In the New York Times, economics professor Tyler Cowan calls it “the new voodoo economics.” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson concludes that Obama’s health-care plan “is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three.”
Obama is firing an inspector general who exposed wrongdoing by one of his supporters, and previously uncovered millions of dollars in waste and fraud in the troubled AmeriCorps program, whose budget is being dramatically increased by the Obama Administration. Inspector General Gerald Walpin was fired after he uncovered misuse of federal “stimulus money.” The recently-passed stimulus package repealed welfare reform, and it subsidizes waste and corruption."**
There is plenty more. I could easily go on. I think the above make a very clear case against Obama earning reelection in 2012. This is the state of our country and Ron Paul, for all his faults, would do a hell of a lot better than Barack Obama is doing.
Where are your priorities? The nation is crumbling around us, our liberties are disappearing and all you want to talk about is whether or not Ron Paul believes in a conspiracy theory or bring up twenty year old newsletters he didn’t write?
If you prefer Obama, you better be willing to defend his positions. You can start now.
Let’s just pretended everyone listed a bunch of stuff that you proceeded to ignore. Then we can save the universe another 500 or so posts of Ron Paul The Messiah Witnessing.
-Joe
No.
Most people have refuted the notions/examples you two have used to claim that Paul’s victory (at any level) is well nigh imminent.
People have also generally said that regardless of his electability, he is by varying degrees wrong, untrustworthy in character and judgment, and/or dangerous and destructive to the nation itself; so they wouldn’t vote for him.
And just on a lark, you got that cite yet about how many Jews there are “Central bankers”? Just curious where you’re getting your information from. Or is it like the ‘evidence’ you saw for a NAFTA superhighway, that turned out not to, strictly speaking, be there?
I’m not doing the whole thing. Here’s a small sample of where you’re incorrect, misleading, or expecting wildly impractical results.
He campaigned on this platform, you know. He openly stated he thought we should focus more on Afghanistan instead of just ignoring it like Bush did. The current timetable has troop withdrawl starting next year. So you’re angry here that he’s keeping a campaign promise, yes?
You’re off by 137. It’s estimated at 10 to 1. Not good, I’ll give you, but your wild inflation doesn’t help you make a point.
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0714_targeted_killings_byman.aspx?p=1
Oh man, I hadn’t realized that! Wait… lets see who donated to McCain…
**McCain: **Top Contributors to John McCain, 2008 Cycle | OpenSecrets
Obama: Top Contributors to Barack Obama, 2008 Cycle | OpenSecrets
Huh. It’s the same names. It’s like they hedge their bets and donate to both sides. Hold on a second… two of Obama’s top three are Universtities! He’s beholden to our elitist educational overlords!
True. But he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act in '96, supports Civil Unions, and is working towards getting DADT repealed. He’s as openly pro gay rights as you can be and still hope to maintain the middle. It’s completely unrealistic to expect him to be doing more right now. Do I wish he was? Yes, but I’m not so naive to think he can just wave a magic wand and change American society even if I wish he could.
:smack: :smack: :smack: He’s continuing a policy of treating Americans who join the Taliban/Al Queda as combatants and having the military attack them the same as any other. He’s not advocating shooting people in the streets.
You may want to read the articles you link to, by the way. The first is supportive of this policy.
This has been gone over a million times. So far nobody has convinced a court of that.
sigh That should be has worked to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. 
Yes, I’d consider it.
Unless we’re talking about Ron Paul. Or Lyndon Larouche. Or anyone else on the far side of, um, electability.
Yes. If they are better. Which pretty much rules out any Republican, and certainly rules out Ron Paul.
It depends on what he does and who the other options are. He’s served a third of his term.
I think everybody comes to that conclusion at some point. Later they notice that the parties have too much in common but that some of the differences are very large.
The withdrawal is scheduled to be complete by the summer. That’s been in place since very early in his term. The war was a ridiculous error but taking everyone out yesterday is not practical, let alone possible.
I don’t know if Afghanistan is fixable, but that there’s no comparison to Bush in 2003.
I’m uncomfortable with this because it’s essentially assassination. I don’t see any particularly better alternatives to it, and unfortunately this is one of those powers no chief executive is going to give up.
Estimated by who? The people who you believe say the sanctions killed a million Iraqis?
Again, this is ludicrous and completely wrong. I don’t know why or how you think any war is in the offing. There are no parallels, and if you can’t distinguish between Bush’s approach (which telegraphed “we’re going to war as soon as possible” from the first moment) and Obama’s (pushing for sanctions, and not quickly - something Bush never would have done) your views lack any nuance.
I’d argue he’s too willing to trust people with expertise. By nature he’s a compromiser who who is willing to take what he can get and make a system work as well as it can, arguably without asking if the system itself is workable or worth saving. This push for financial reform should have been made much sooner.
Those are always the first people to turn on politicians they used to support.
So does everyone who doesn’t support Ron Paul on the internet.
Letting banks fail would not have been common sense, it would have been a disaster. But this is another area where more reforms are needed and he should’ve moved sooner.
He’s wrong on all these.
Cite?
When they’re in Pakistan working with Al Qaeda, yes. I can’t say I’m shaking in fear over this.
As I told people before the election, no president was going to give up these powers. It’s too tempting and it’s politically too difficult. Doesn’t make it right, but it’s nothing I didn’t expect.
You’ve failed to make the case for your own candidate, so you’re attacking everyone else. What do you expect to accomplish here? Do you think this is going to win votes for Paul?
Absolutely untrue, and there’s plenty of case history to back that up.
This is another case where he chose to work with the system that existed and do the best he felt he could regardless of the flaws in that system. There should have been a public option. He overcompromised and from there he was mostly playing defense against a lot of lunatics who were comparing him to Hitler. If he’d started stronger that might’ve worked out better for him, although I see why he made the choices he did.
More hysterical rhetoric.
After 11 pages, nothing has changed: whenever someone brings up an objection to Ron Paul, you dismiss it and say it’s not important. Meanwhile it seems like your audience disagrees with him on most of the issues large and small. You can’t dismiss them all as irrelevant. I agree with Ron Paul about drugs, the defense budget, and at least some elements of the war on terror. I disagree with him about abortion, foreign policy, economic policy, the gold standard, Medicare, Social Security, the Constitution, and if not race, then personal responsibility. According to you, none of those are important, I guess. But as someone who doesn’t believe in the New World Order, the North American Union, and who supports vaccinations (because when you start indulging the anti-vaxxers, herd immunity goes away and there’s no fucking point in being vaccinated, which is why eradicated diseases are coming back), I have no compelling reason to vote for Ron Paul.
You are not going to put anyone on the defensive in this thread with that remark.
If you want a new topic to debate, then open up a new thread in which to debate it.
(I will note that several of your opponents regarding Ron Paul are actively opponents of President Obama, so all you are going to get by switching topics in mid thread is a lot of confusion with posters accusing other posters of thoughts that they have not even expressed.
This thread is not a debate of the current president. You are perfectly free to open a new thread to discuss that topic.
[ /Moderating ]
And I’m sure you will.
Have you accepted it yet, though? Your argument for Ron Paul’s ability to 1) get the Republican Nomination and 2) win a general election have more or less been torn to shreds.
If you’d like to go back to debating the topic of the OP, feel free to indulge me - if you still think Ron Paul can win in 2012, why?
I won’t dwell on beating Obama’s policies into the ground, because as was correctly stated, I should start a new thread to explore that topic. I will just say that I believe Obama’s record so far, his backtrack on campaign promises, his “compromises” and ill conceived ideas disqualify him in my mind for a second term. If you are a progressive, conservative, independent, or libertarian you would oppose Obama’s policies. That is not to say I think anybody should vote for Romney or Palin, though. But you should expect more.
That said, I want to make a few pointed criticisms I have with liberals. I want to explain why a system of Free Markets and smaller government is more beneficial to the poor and needy, who liberals always claim to care about. I seems to me many liberals have a hatred and distrust of free markets and free enterprise, preferring instead varying degrees of socialism, welfarism or extensive government intervention into the economy. Please read this excerpt from an article at Ron Paul’s campaign for liberty:
*"Liberals say that they love the poor, needy, and disadvantaged. Unfortunately, however, the economic philosophy that liberals favor constitutes a direct assault on the economic well-being of the poor, along with nearly everyone else in society.
Liberals claim to combat poverty in two principal ways.
First, they use the force of government (e.g., income taxes) to take money from those who have earned it in order to give it to the poor.
Second, they restrict people’s use of their property to enable the poor to have access to such property.
What liberals fail to understand, however, is that the very means they choose to combat poverty – socialism and interventionism – actually exacerbate the problem that they claim to address. Their war on poverty hurts the very people they say they are trying to assist.
In proposing welfare-state programs, by necessity liberals always make an important assumption. They assume that there is wealth in society. After all, if there is no wealth then what good would welfare-state policies do? The welfare state operates on the assumption that there are people who are earning wealth or have accumulated wealth. Those are the people from whom the government takes money in order to redistribute it to the poor.
Let’s consider a hypothetical case based on science fiction. Astronomers discover that an inhabitable planet is hurtling toward our solar system and will soon join the other planets in orbit around the sun. Faced with overcrowding of its prisons, the federal government decides to exile 50,000 prisoners on a spaceship to the planet. Everyone is given six months of supplies on which to survive – food, water, and clothing – and nothing else.
When the prisoners arrive on the planet, they call into existence a federal government, democratically elected. Federal officials are empowered to do everything and anything they can to combat the extreme poverty that is immediately facing society.
Liberals are elected to the presidency and to Congress. They propose a massive welfare-state program modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Social Security. Medicare and Medicaid. Public housing. Food stamps. Grants to education. Agricultural subsidies. Unemployment relief.
Do you see the problem? The federal government isn’t a fountain of wealth. It has no money. Its coffers are empty. In order to get the money to distribute all these welfare benefits to people, it must first impose a tax on people.
But do you see the next problem? There are no wealthy or even middle-class people who can be taxed because everyone in this society is poor.
In proposing their array of welfare programs to help the poor, liberals operate under the mindless assumption that wealth exists naturally in a society. Even worse, they give nary a thought to the possibility that a society in which wealth is growing is the greatest benefit to the poor. Worst of all, they don’t consider the distinct possibility that their own tax-and-redistribute policies tend toward destroying the base of wealth in society, thereby relegating everyone to poverty."*
Read the rest here: Campaign for Liberty - Reclaim the Republic. Restore the Constitution.
Please read this and tell me what your response would be. I get sick and tired of people claiming that those who believe in the free market and understand economics don’t care about the poor. You will need to substantiate that point if you are to be taken seriously.
You haven’t “torn my argument to shreds”. But my primary belief is that Ron Paul is right. Secondarily, I believe he will be a contender in 2012. Not that he will win, it will still be an uphill battle. But he could make it very interesting.
I would rather now, turn the focus of this thread more towards whether Ron Paul is philosophically right and what effect his policies would have in action.
If Ron Paul does choose to run, I think he will surprise all of you and do quite well.
Your arguments have been torn to shreds. Just as have the arguments in the other threads you’ve started here.
I can understand why you’d like to turn our attention elsewhere. But it’s Friday afternoon & this Texan learned more than she wanted to know about Doctor Paul quite a few years ago.
If Ron Paul is the best candidate for 2012 to challenge Obama, yet you don’t think he will win, does that mean you consider Obama unbeatable in 2012?