Ron Paul 2012!!! Your thoughts on who we should pick for our "Cause"?

[dagnabit]

Almost everything you said was pure spin.....

Let me guess big fan of O?

One example is evolution...

When asked in an '08 debate raise your hand if you dont believe in evolution all but 2 raised their hands.
Dr paul was one of the two.


If you dont like Dr Paul whom do you endorse?

 

[stonedstoner]

i'm a bigger fan of obama than ron paul. in my opinion, obama is the lesser of two evils. obama believes in regulation of business. ron paul thinks there should be no regulation at all. isn't the fact that there was no regulation the reason we got into this mess? wouldn't corporations just become even more powerful under ron paul? they can do whatever the fuck they want without any regulation. and what about monopolies? don't you think regulation is necessary to keep monopolies from forming?

also, ron paul wants everything privatized. he wants to do away with all the social programs. he wants everybody to not have to pay taxes. why not tax the rich? how do we fix a disparity in wealth by not taxing the rich? the rich are just going to hold on to their money and they are not going to spend it. spending is what keeps the economy going!

 

[Sam the Caveman]

alright stonedstoner, we know you don't like ron paul.

This thread is about who we should pick for our cause, being cannabis legalization.

All the candidates are very clear on their stances for or against cannabis, including Obama. The only one who is in favor of allowing us the personal freedom to possess, smoke, eat or whatever you want to do with cannabis is Ron Paul.

So if your going to pick a candidate solely on the basis of cannabis freedom, there is only one choice.

 

[dagnabit]

How does taxing the rich increase income for the rest?

governmental intervention created a moral hazard that led to our current economic turmoil in large part.
Bankers would never have made the fools bet if there were no guarantee they could never loose.

There are hundreds of thousands of pages of business regulation on the federal books and very little of it serves to protect anyone but those who payed for it.


All you need to know about O is who contributed most to his campaign...

 

[stonedstoner]

sorry for being such a hater guys. don't mean any disrespect to you all.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

then why this crap?

http://www.newser.com/story/134324/ron-paul-defrauds-the-99.html

are they smearing or are we deluded ? does seem a conservative site....

Here's the entire article from lefty Salon.

Ron Paul’s phony populism

The libertarian presidential candidate is a true friend of the 1 percent

By Gary Weiss

To me, the epiphany of the most dreadful presidential campaign in history took place in Keene, New Hampshire, last week, when a Ron Paul town meeting was interrupted by some Occupy Wall Street hecklers.

“Let me address that for a minute,” the Republican presidential candidate said, “because if you listen carefully, I’m very much involved with the 99. I’ve been condemning that 1 percent because they’ve been ripping us off –” He was interrupted again, this time by cheers, almost drowning him out.

After the usual chants of “We are the 99 percent” and “There are criminals on Wall Street who walk free,” Paul quickly took back the audience, not that he had ever lost it. “Do you feel better?” he asked, to laughter.

“We need to sort that out, but the people on Wall Street got the bailouts, and you guys got stuck with the bills, and I think that’s where the problem is.”

It was a masterful performance. Ron Paul — fraudulent populist, friend of the oligarchy, sworn enemy of every social program since Theodore Roosevelt — had won the day, again.

Why shouldn’t he? Frauds win, whether they are in finance or politics. Bernie Madoff proved that, and so did Ronald Reagan. The success of the Ron Paul campaign with young voters, which David Sirota pointed out in Salon Monday, is but the latest example of how Americans can be persuaded to support the most reactionary politicians in America when they’re suitably manipulated, even if they aren’t reactionary and, sometimes, even when they identify themselves as progressive.

There’s little doubt that aspects of his message are both appealing and sincere. There is a definite “yay factor” in some of his oratory, and his denunciations of Dick Cheney are the kind of thing that gets yays on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.”

Paul has been consistent in opposing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in opposing American military adventures in general. He has staked out a lonely position as the only presidential candidate to oppose aid to Israel (until Rick Perry more or less aped him on that), and his distinctly non-aggressive posture on Iran is indistinguishable from that of dovish Democrats like Dennis Kucinich.

So there’s no question that there’s a lot to like in Paul’s foreign policy positions, if you’re leaning to the left. The problem is that Paul is less of a 21st century dove than he is a throwback to the isolationism of the early to mid-20th century, in which fear of foreign entanglements was embraced by the hard right — with all that came with it. Paul emerges from that mold as about as far right as they come, further right than Ronald Reagan ever was, more of an enemy of the poor and middle class, and an even warmer friend of the ultra-wealthy. A Ron Paul America would make the Reagan Revolution look like the New Deal.

Paul’s own oratory tends to deemphasize his reactionary stance on social issues, or to sugarcoat it. But his program is now laid out in black-and-white. Last month, the Paul campaign set forth the details of what it grandiloquently called a “Plan to Restore America.” It has received surprisingly little attention, given Paul’s surging popularity.

This is not a plan for the 99 percent. It is about as much of a 1 percent-oriented ideological meat cleaver as you can find anywhere in the annals of politics. Paul would take an ax to the federal budget, hacking off $1 trillion in the first year alone, ripping and cutting and deenacting and deregulating so as to ostensibly return America to “its former constitutionally limited, smaller-government and less-burdensome place.”

“Return” implies that America would be taken back to a starting place, though it’s not clear where that would be. What I do know is that there is definitely an undercurrent to his slash-and-burn philosophy, a strong whiff of Ayn Rand — the Russian-born philosopher-novelist, atheist and advocate of individuality, rational self-interest and selfishness. Paul is, in fact, the closest of all the GOP candidates to carrying out the anti-government policies Rand advocated.

To be sure, there are aspects of this budget plan that hardcore Randers would not like. It leaves in far too many nonessential government functions, such as allowing the continued existence of the Department of Health and Human Services. But, from the Randian perspective, Paul is definitely moving in the right direction.

His “restore” plan embraces the kind of deprivation that Rand’s Objectivist philosophy would impose on America, and would enact a fundamental change in the role of government that the radical right cherishes.

After spelling out the good stuff from the leftist perspective — a 15 percent Defense Department spending cut ending all funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the hard charge backward commences:

• No more aid to education. Goodbye, Department of Education.

• No more government-subsidized housing. Goodbye, Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• No more energy programs. Goodbye, Department of Energy.

• No more programs to promote commerce and technology. Goodbye, Department of Commerce.

• *No more national parks. Goodbye, Department of the Interior.

His opposition to the very existence of the Federal Reserve — he wrote a book titled “End the Fed” — is straight out of Rand, as is his promotion of the gold standard.

Paul would not reform the abysmally flawed and underfunded Securities and Exchange Commission, he would eliminate it. The only agency of the federal government that stands between the public and greedy bankers and crooked corporations would be gone. He is philosophically opposed to it, as he is to Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, the reform measures enacted after Enron and the 2008 financial crisis, respectively. His Reformed America would no longer discomfit Wall Street with the latter’s restrictions on banks or annoy corporate executives with Sarb-Ox’s ethics and fair-disclosure rules.

And this is but the beginning of the shower of blessings that would rain down upon the very richest Americans. He would end the income tax, thereby making the United States the ultimate onshore tax haven. The message to both the Street and corporate America would be a kind of hyper-Reaganesque “Go to town, guys.” With income, estate and gift taxes eliminated and the top corporate tax rate lowered to 15 percent (and not a word about cutting corporate tax loopholes), a kind of perma-plutonomy would come to exist in the land — to the extent that there isn’t one already.

The guts of Paul’s grand scheme, where its rubber hits the road, is in the all-important theme of cutting programs that benefit the poor and middle class. Despite all its window-dressing and spin, the heart of every libertarian plan for this country is a kind of mammoth subtraction: making deep cuts in programs benefiting millions of Americans, out of a belief that such programs are morally wrong. Restoring America is a moral statement, an enshrinement of the Randian belief that aid to one facet of the population (the poor) is really “looting” of resources from other facets of the population (the wealthy).

So when you see in this plan a $645 billion cut in Medicaid over four years, what you are seeing is an expression of the philosophy that Medicaid itself is wrong, that it should not exist because it is not the function of society to provide healthcare for the poor. If they get sick, tough. While Paul does not go the full Randian route by entirely eliminating this program, he goes a long way to establish the principle that as a general proposition, as a moral question, we simply should not have this program.

Ayn Rand believed that there is no such thing as a “public,” and that the public was a collection of individuals, each having no obligation to the other. So when you read through this budget, and see the deep cuts in food stamps and child nutrition, what you are seeing is an expression of a philosophy that is at odds with the Judeo-Christian system of morality embraced by most Americans.

That, fundamentally, is what the deficit debate is all about, from the perspective of Ron Paul and the radical right. It’s not about getting the red ink out of the government but using the government’s fiscal travails as a pretext to change the very purpose of government. So yes, he opposed the Wall Street bailouts, as Rand no doubt would have, and that also is “yay”-worthy to many people. But if you buy that, if you buy Ron Paul, you have to buy the rest of his belief system: his opposition to securities regulation, his opposition to consumer protection, his belief that the markets can defend Americans from the depredations of big business.

What I’ve just described is many things, but it is the very antithesis of the values of Occupy Wall Street, which is based on opposition to the prerogatives of the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. Yet rather than forthrightly oppose OWS, which would at least be intellectually honest, Paul has sought instead to co-opt it, con it, calling it a “healthy movement” at one appearance, and seeking to link it with his “end the Fed” agenda.

In Keene he went one step further by declaring himself as being in league with the 99 percent and against the 1 percent.

That’s about as far from the truth as it possibly could be. The only question is, how long is Paul going to be allowed to get away with his faux-populist con job? I agree with his backers in this sense: He is less of a fringe candidate than he is sometimes portrayed in the media. His positions are increasingly infecting mainstream Republican politics, and it’s scary.

No, strike that. His positions are scary only if you know what they actually are, and not how he spins them.


Gary Weiss is a journalist and the author of "Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul," to be published by St. Martin's Press on February 28, 2012. Follow him on Twitter @gary_weiss.More Gary Weiss

 

[stonedstoner]

^ i agree with that writer gary weiss. he knows what's up. "his positions are scary only if you know what they actually are, and not how he spins them." so to whoever that was who said i'm putting spin on shit, ron paul is the one spinning shit!

 

[stonedstoner]

U see the shit where some cities have cut aid to the homeless to pay for removal of OWS protesters?

It feels like the movie demolition man...

ron paul definitely would approve of cutting aid to the homeless.

 

[stonedstoner]

Wow! I am so glad to see not everyone is either fooled or beat into apathy!!!!!!!!

It is all about money. Sometimes I feel like "what is the use" of even voting but then we have to at least do what we can. I voted for Obama because he wasn't McCain and that didn't feel good. Ron Paul more closely emulates what I believe is the correct positions but didn't vote for him because he couldn't win. BIG MISTAKE. At least I could have thrown my vote away for a good cause.

Republican or Democrat it is all the same... bought and paid for!!!! It is like being given a choice of being shot in the head by a .357 or a .44 mag-- The result is ultimately the same. Divide us and herd us all in the same direction just sometimes from this side and then from that side but the destination is always the same.

How do you get people to wake up and see where we are headed? Our fathers and for sure our grandfathers would not have put up with spying, wire taping, secret prisons, torture, bail outs (wealth reallocation), military assignment to domestic crowd control, suspension of the Constitution (Patriot Act), burning of the Bill of Rights by unjust laws, American FEMA detention camps... all in the name of safety. We fired Nixon for bugging the head quarters of the DNC but not too many years later said nothing when Bush admitted they have been bugging all of us for the past years. I don't get it.......

Cannabis is one very important reason to vote for Ron Paul but man it is not the only reason. We have to at least try to get someone in there who doesn't just smile, look pretty, tell us what we want to hear, then do what they are bought and paid to do anyway. Ron Paul is just the "good kind" of crazy to at least attempt to make a dent. The last time we had a "LEADER" like that... he was assinated.

We headed down a very dark road when we declared war on a concept!!! Terror... or Terrorist is anyone that does not agree with you and is willing to do something about it. Don't get me wrong... there are crazy bad guys out there that need dead. The problem is if it ever comes to our own people being the ones to do something, they will be labeled terrorists. The Boston Tea Party would have been a terrorist act in today's terms.

Voting for Ron Paul is at least an attempt to move in the right direction peacefully!!!! God only knows if it is too late.

Peace

i really hope you're not comparing jfk to ron paul. they are pretty much the EXACT opposite.

 

[stonedstoner]

The lower and middle class are being totally screwed by inflation due to the current monetary policy. Ron Paul rails against the current monetary policy and is well aware that its the monetary policy that makes poor people poorer and the middle class poor.

Inflation is hidden tax on everyone.

The people who get assistance from the goverment, if their program even gets inflationary increases, those increases are determined by the government. They claim its 2-3% a year. I guess that explains why the price of everything I buy goes up 8-12% every year. 2-3% my ass!!! Lies, blatant lies to cover up their theivery. They are lying to the people recieving assistance so they don't have to pay them more. This is the current status quo. 10 more years at the rate we are going and none of those programs will be worth a dime of todays buying power. This will happen unless something is done.

Ron Paul is nearly the only one who outspokenly resists current monetary policy, no one else understands it.

What if we had deflation every year instead of inflation?

deflation is no good!
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/07/16/why-deflation-is-worse-than-inflation

On the surface, it sounds appealing: Prices fall, things get cheaper, and consumers catch a break. But deflation is a pernicious problem that can strangle an economy for years—and it's a growing worry for the watchdogs minding the anemic recovery that has followed the Great Recession.

One of the Federal Reserve's primary responsibilities is to keep inflation under control, which generally means shepherding the economy along with benign inflation of 1 to 3 percent per year. But inflation has been close to 0 so far this year, and with economic growth slowing, the odds are rising that overall prices could decline. That's a rare phenomenon most Americans have never experienced.

[See 14 things that are getting cheaper.]

Poobahs at the Fed have started debating what to do, and liberal columnist Paul Krugman recently called the Fed "feckless" for talking about deflation but taking no action. John Makin of the conservative American Enterprise Institute calls deflation "a classic prolonger of crises" and predicts it will be here by the end of the year. Investors are worried too, with stock prices vacillating on fears that price declines could undermine corporate profits.

If you're confused, welcome to a club that includes most Americans. In the midst of the recession, economists warned us not about deflation, but about runaway inflation, thanks to aggressive government stimulus spending, record-low interest rates, and more than $1 trillion in new money injected into the economy by the Fed. In a normal economy, all that liquidity would ratchet up demand for assets, which in turn would drive up prices. Voila: Inflation.

As you've no doubt heard dozens of times, however, this isn't a normal economy. Consumers need way more than the traditional pick-me-ups provided by low rates and government spending. Many are out of work, with falling income—or no income. Debt loads are so high that many consumers couldn't borrow if they wanted to, so they're using unspent cash to pay down debt. After a few hopeful months earlier this year, consumer spending is slipping. That worries CEOs, who are reluctant to hire when spending is down, while shoppers worried about scarce jobs respond by shutting their wallets. Consumers and corporate chiefs have basically formed a mutual-worry society.

[See why raises are so scarce.]

Low inflation has been a blessing for consumers, with a few things getting more expensive but many things getting cheaper. The microprocessor revolution, for example, has driven down the cost of computers, televisions, and other kinds of electronics, while growing imports from low-cost countries like China has made clothing, furniture, and appliances cheaper. Economists call this "good deflation," because it makes people and companies more productive and helps improve living standards.

"Bad deflation" happens when the price of everything falls. And that can harm everybody. Economist Gary Shilling cites three factors needed for bad deflation: A financial crisis, a deep recession, and a spike in unemployment. Gulp. We've had all of those. When the economic pain gets intense enough, demand for all products falls far below supply, simply because people don't have enough money to buy all the stuff companies are geared up to produce. That has clearly happened in the market for homes, cars, many retail items, and the commodities used to make a variety of products. The danger comes when falling demand for some products creates so much slack in the economy that the demand for all products—as measured by the consumer price index, for example—tumbles.

[See 10 states where taxes are up, services down.]

If all prices fall, it's a disaster. Falling prices means lower revenue and profit margins for companies, which as we know leads to layoffs, less hiring, stagnant wages, and outright pay cuts. Consumers with lower incomes have less money to spend, which tends to lock the cycle in place: With sales down, firms have to cut prices even more to get business. The worst part comes when everybody realizes that prices are falling, because nobody wants to buy something today if it will be cheaper tomorrow. That's why our housing market is such a disaster: When prices are falling, you've already lost money on your investment the day after your big purchase. Buyers would rather sit on the sidelines and wait for prices to bottom out.

Deflation also wreaks havoc with routine borrowing and other aspects of a normally functioning economy. For people (or countries, ahem) in debt, inflation actually eases the burden because the real value of fixed debt goes down over time. If inflation is 5 percent per year, for instance, your income keeps pace with inflation, and you pay $1,000 a month toward a fixed-rate mortgage, your nominal income goes up over time but your mortgage payment doesn't. So the mortgage effectively gets cheaper over time. The opposite happens with deflation, which makes debt more expensive over time. If deflation were 5 percent per year and your income fell at the same rate, the mortgage payment would take an increasingly big bite out of your paycheck.

[See how the economy will look on election day.]

That turns the basic machinery of the economy inside out. Under deflation, cash becomes a highly valued asset, since a 0 percent return is better than a negative one. Banks have no incentive to make loans, since they'd lose money. Defaults would skyrocket, exacerbating the problems we already know about: broke consumers, money-losing banks, frozen credit markets. Everybody would hoard cash and consumers would only buy essentials.

That's been the situation in Japan since 1995, a case study that economists have been paying a lot of attention to lately. The circumstances are different in the United States, but Japan is hardly a medieval society with illiterate central bankers. In other words, if it can happen there, it can probably happen here.

There are lots of technical lessons from Japan's battle with deflation, but the most important takeaway is that deflation is the economic equivalent of an STD: Once you've got it, you're stuck with it for awhile. "Prevention of deflation remains preferable to having to cure it," said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in a long-ignored 2002 speech that's found new life as an ironic prophesy.

[See 5 reasons a double-dip recession could happen.]

Bernanke and other Fed officials think they know what to do if deflation strikes, but they haven't had a lot of practice: Full-blown deflation hasn't been a problem in the United States since the early 1930s, when widespread fire sales caused overall price drops of about 10 percent per year. So they'd rather deal with inflation, which is common enough that it essentially comes with a dog-eared troubleshooting manual. The Fed, of course, doesn't get to decide what problems it has to confront, as the last few years have shown us. Maybe they'll get one more chance to show their creativity in crisis.

 

[dagnabit]

Some people just prefer their president be bought and payed for by citi and goldman i guess....
The big O is 100% payed for.
Tell me stoned how do you justify voting for a guy who is owned by the very banks OWS is protesting?
or did you know goldman and citi were the top contributors?
did you know they owned bush too?
ever wonder why obama and bush have no real policy difference?
it's because they both work for the same people(if you believe corporations are people)

so yea ill take ron over bush's 4th term anyday!

 

[bentom187]

Ron paul is the only one who can make those programs viable for the time being,by eliminating 1T in spending,by taking ALL our troops home.
His monetary policy is just fine by me,we need to take back control of our monetary system.
i would rather have the value of my dollar be determined by 2 or more commodities than some dude behind a printing machine issuing debt as he pleases.

 

[pearlemae]

Two thoughts, 1. No matter who gets elected a president can not change exiting law with an executive order congress will not change pot laws no money in it for them. 2. The government on both side is wholly owned by the banks in this country, what the banks want the banks get cause they have bought the best government money can by.
So even if Ron Paul gets elected pot laws will remain the same.

 

[dagnabit]

Where does this bullshit come from?
there are many examples of a president circumventing existing law with XO...
hell the DEA was created by XO.
Not to mention the president is direct supervisor of the doj.

The president is far from the powerless figurehead Obama apologists try to portray.

 

[FunkBomb]

If you don't like Ron Paul don't vote for him. The least you can do is acknowledge his intelligence of what is really happening to America.

-Funk

 

[itisme]

Please vote Ron Paul.....and don't forget to change from D to R in the states that require it or your vote will be trashed. Below is a link to help you out Please use

http://www.bluerepublican.org/

A vote for Ron Paul:

1. Save a Trillion USD $$$ Year one.

2. End the Drug war - Helping minorities immensely as well, Save Billion of wasteful spending, End the DEA Dicks Every & All Free 1.1 million non violent criminals, Give patients and suppliers real freedom to be legit, Real research on cannabinoids.

3. End the FED - He won't end it right away or for sure but he will end the printing of money for the banks to pad their pockets and AUDIT THE FED......Then take our money back from the thieves or banks whichever term you prefer.

4. REALLY SUPPORT THE TROOPS & END THE POINTLESS WARS - Ron Paul has more contributions for President from the troops than all the other R candidates combined. I think most of us want less wars I damn sure hope so

5. He will end the DEA, FDA, EPA, and more

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/

Read the articles & watch the adds.

If RON PAUL is elected you can rest assured that your freedoms will be protected and your President is not in anybody's pocket!

 

[BrnCow]

As far as weed politics improvement, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson appear to be the only ones interested. The media queered it for Ron Paul last time when they sold him off as prejudiced and as an idiot. But the news media mostly works for the extremest that own it.. and most support the one world government dictatorship..just remember that Obunny has done opposite of everything he has promised unless it already fit in with his dictatorship policies. A very slick liar akin to slick Willie back in the day....polished shit feeders...

 

[BrnCow]

The race wars and gang bullshit also is created to keep citizens from getting together to stop these political nightmares...

 

[BadRabbit]

Couple of things:

Bentom--Ron Paul wants to eliminate the IRS

Sam the Caveman--absolutely agree..... karma given

Stonedstoner--er any candidate running right now that does? answer no.. but at least some of the things Ron Paul is for will help those even if you are correct he doesn't care about the poor.

BadRabbit--I threw my vote away last time for the candidate that could win and did say many of the things we all wanted to hear.... Obummer or Obama.... well at least if indeed I do throw it away for Ron Paul... I can justify it. There is no way I can vote for anyone who would be sanctioned by either the Republican or Democratic Parties..... look where the hell those two have gotten us. Don't wish to CHOOSE to be shot in the head with a .44mag or .357mag which is what voting for either of the "two" parties amounts too.

Peace

You should always vote what you think is right of course.

For me ... Obama's a disaster and a second term would be utter catastrophe for this country. Sorry, I know a lot of folks love him, but my ONLY goal for this next presidential election is his removal and I almost don't give a shit about who replaces him.
best,
rabbit

 

[blackmarket]

In that case I vote for the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera and get this place cleaned up!