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

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Grimr3efer

Member
Has Dr Paul ever picked one and explained how he'd do it, how he might mitigate potential fallout and any other interesting tidbits?

What do we need to do? Spoon feed you like a baby? Explain how bringing home thousands of troops to protect our borders and rid us of illegals needs explanation. Stopping war is as easy as starting war. Grab your shit and leave NOW!

I know you comment was just a joke...:laughing:
 

ForestBuds

Member

Ron Paul was very ahead of his time!


The speech down below was in 1988!
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:plant grow: :smoweed: :plant grow:
 

monkey5

Active member
Veteran
THCphd420, You are the best!

THCphd420, You are the best!

Im voting for ron paul, hes the only canadate who wants, or atleast talks significant changes. It seems election to election, democrat to republican the direction our countrys heading isnt good.

I feel theres some fundamental problems (The fed reserve, drug war, debt, and the military bases we operate in 130 countries, ect.) that atleast Paul is willing to adress. The man isnt perfect, but who is? atlest unlike the other canidates he adamantly dismissed the patriot act, and ndaa. The others?

I feel like you have to be an idiot to vote for anyone else, but this is America and i support Discobiscuts right to vote lol.

Lol..monkey5
 

monkey5

Active member
Veteran
"I feel like you have to be an idiot to vote for anyone else, but this is America and i support Discobiscuts right to vote lol." ~~THE BEST! ~~~ See my links in the Newt thread here! .. monkey5
 

GP73LPC

Strain Collector/Seed Junkie/Landrace Accumulator/
Veteran
everyone waste your vote with me and go Libertarian.... Gary Johnson....

like Chris Rock says -
Everybody's so busy wanting to be down with the gang. "I'm conservative", "I'm liberal", "I'm conservative". Bullshit! Be a fucking person! Lis-ten! Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion. No normal, decent person is one thing, okay? I've got some shit I'm conservative about, I've got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime, I'm conservative. Prostitution, I'm liberal!

this is the libertarian stance... fiscally conservative, socially liberal...

that probably includes almost everyone on this site, especially if you smoke or grow. let's all start voting libertarian so my vote will count for a change... :D
 

kmk420kali

Freedom Fighter
Veteran
The hysteria that is energizing the campaign to smear Ron Paul and his supporters as “racist” is reaching a crescendo of viciousness, as the Beltway “libertarian” crowd revs up its motors for a righteous purge. Writing in the online edition of Reason magazine, David Weigel and Julian Sanchez (the latter of the Cato Institute) aver that the whole brouhaha is rooted in a “strategy” enunciated by the late Murray N. Rothbard, the economist and author, and Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., founder and president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, designed to appeal to “right-wing populists”:

“During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed byThe New Republic.

“….The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”

Reason, of course, in it’s new incarnation as the official organ of the libertarian movement’s aging hipsters and would-be “cool kids,” vehemently opposes reaching out to middle and working class Americans: that is far too “square” for the black-leather-jacket-wearing Nick Gillespie, formerly associated with something called Suck magazine, and Matt Welch, who was an unknown quantity before getting the job at Reason. Right-wing populism? As far as the Suck-y crowd is concerned, one might as well tout the appeal of “right-wing botulism.” Libertarianism, as understood by the editors of Reason, is all about legalizing methamphetamine, having endless “hook-ups,” and giving mega-corporations tax breaks (so Reason can keep scarfing up those big corporate contributors). The decidedly “square” Dr. Paul—a ten-term Republican congressman from Texas, no less, and a pro-life country doctor of decidedly conservative social views—was and is anathema to Team Suck.

What would the “Smearbund” do without David Duke? No smear campaign is complete without dragging him into it. No matter what the subject—the Iraq war, the Mearsheimer and Walt book, affirmative action—if you take the politically incorrect position, according to the neocons, then you’re marching shoulder-to shoulder with the former Klansman and professional nut-job.

And sure enough, the Kirchick piece takes the Paul newsletter to task for supposedly having “kind words” for Duke. Yet, if you go and read what the newsletter says about Duke, it is clear the author was merely saying Duke’s success is due to his opposition to affirmative action and the welfare state: indeed, Kirchick cites a passage (without citing it in full) in which Duke is taken to task for his lack of a “consistent package of freedom.” Yet the willfully ignorant Radley Balko, another Cato type, avers: “I simply can’t imagine seeing any piece of paper go out under my name that included sympathetic words for David Duke. That a newsletter with Paul’s name did just that demands an explanation from Paul.”

The explanation, which would be apparent if Balko had actually cited what is written, is that these weren’t sympathetic words for Duke, per se, or his political ambitions, but for the issues—legitimate issues—that he raised (and exploited) in his Louisiana campaign. After all, libertarians such as Paul reject affirmative action, racial set-asides, and all other forms of state-enforced special treatment for “minorities” precisely because they oppose racism, or any form of collectivism.

By the way, libertarians also oppose so-called civil rights legislation that outlaws discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or disability, because it violates the rights of property-owners. William F. Buckley Jr. famously derided libertarian (and “right-wing populist”) opposition to such legislation as valorizing Lester Maddox’s refusal to “serve a Negro a plate of pork chops.” Buckley’s quip surely underscored the venality and small-mindedness of Maddox and his ilk—and yet, lost in all this, is the reality of the libertarian position, which is that people have the right to be venal, small-minded, and, yes, viciously, stupidly, horribly wrong, provided they don’t initiate the use of force.

The utter dishonesty of the Reason crowd, when it comes to this issue, is breathtaking. Balko laments that

“Unfortunately, the quotes pulled from these newsletters will for many only confirm those worst stereotypes of what he represents. The good ideas Paul represents then get sullied by association. The Ann Althouses of the world, for example, are now only more certain that opponents of federal anti-discrimination laws should have to prove that they aren’t racist before being taken seriously.”

It’s all about impressing Ms. Althouse, the notoriously dyspeptic and cranky lawyer-blogger-know-it-all.

Gee, that’s the first time in a long time I’ve heard a single one of the Reasonites declare their opposition to anti-discrimination laws: perhaps it is the first mention of it in the online supplement to the magazine. Because, of course, such a position is starkly counterposed to today’s au courant political correctness, an atmosphere in which all criticism of, say, Barack Obama is typified as racist agitation. The fear of being branded a “racist” is so all-pervasive that it has had an appreciable effect on the polls: exit polls in New Hampshire foreshadowed an Obama-sweep that never materialized. Democratic primary voters were ashamed to say they hadn’t voted for Obama: talk about white liberal guilt!

The charges leveled at Paul by his accusers both the neocons, and the “libertarian” and leftist enablers, are therefore especially toxic this election season. Yet when one examines Paul’s alleged “hate crimes,” I can come up with only four sentences, lifted out of context, that are out of bounds:

“[O]ur country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists—and they can be identified by the color of their skin.”

“I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”

“We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational.”

“If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”

These statements are offensive, and I’d bet my bottom dollar that Ron Paul not only didn’t write them, but never read.

(One might quibble about the “fleet-footed” quip: it seems more like a compliment, albeit a left-handed one, rather than an insult—but never mind.) It isn’t Paul’s style or voice. In any case, when we examine the rest of the statements Kirchick cites, in context, it becomes immediately apparent that the “libertarian” witch-hunters out for Paul’s scalp didn’t even bother to read the newsletters in their entirety before they broke into a chorus of denunciations. A former beltway wonk has published an excellent chronology of the various postings by the Reason/Cato/neocon crowd after the Kirchick piece was published and the pdf files of the newsletters were posted by Pajamas Media, on January 8. He makes it clear that what he calls the “Orange Line Mafia” didn’t have time to go through and read the material in the newsletters before firing their fusillades:

“The Ron Paul Newsletters are voluminous and even a small fraction of them could not possibly be read in the very few hours that passed between the posting of the actual newsletters (the afternoon of the 8th) and the smear campaigners’ posts (also the afternoon of the 8th). All of these ‘hit and run’ blog posts, except Kirchick’s original, must then be based on Kirchik’s piece rather than on actual reading and analysis of the newsletters. Clearly the purpose of these posts was not to initiate a thoughtful discussion of the newsletters, it was to spin libertarian voters on the most crucial election day short of the November general elections.”

It was a rush job, and a sloppy one at that, because, on closer examination, the material that is being called “racist” turns out to be no such thing. When we go to the source of the above, and other examples cited by Kirchick, we come to a rather conventionally conservative analysis of the Rodney King riots of 1992: the rioters are condemned, the Koreans are valorized, and the culture of black entitlement and its relation to the welfare state are delineated in no uncertain terms. Nothing, in short, that would be out of place in any conservative magazine. The above-cited phrase about the enemy being defined “by the color of their skin” is here placed in its original context:

“Regardless of what the media tell us, most white Americans are not going to believe that they are at fault for what blacks have done to cities across America. The professional blacks may have cowed the elites, but good sense survives at the grass roots. Many more are going to have difficulty avoiding the belief that our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists—and they can be identified by the color of their skin. This conclusion may not be entirely fair, but it is, for many, entirely unavoidable.”

In context, the author was clearly saying that people will draw unfair conclusions – that racism will increase—as a direct consequence of the Los Angeles riots. How, exactly, is that “racist”? If anything, it’s a warning that the sociological consequences of statist policies – and the failure of the elites to address them—will lead to the rise of the David Dukes of this world, if more responsible politicians don’t face them head on. In linking to the source, one wonders if Pajamas Media isn’t really trying to help the Paul campaign win over conservative Republicans – because I don’t think many would disagree with much of it. Another phrase that has been lifted out of context—“only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions—placed in context reads quite differently:

“Indeed, it is shocking to consider the uniformity of opinion among blacks in this country. Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty, and the end of welfare and affirmative action. I know many who fall into this group personally and they deserve credit—not as representatives of a racial group, but as decent people.”

The idea that people are not to be treated as representatives of racial groups is the antithesis of bigotry. While the author of the above is most emphatically anti-racist, he is also anti-looter, anti-violence, and justifiably angry at the sight of white motorists being pulled out of their cars by thugs of whatever color. The author of TNR’s hit piece was a mere babe when the Los Angeles riots scorched the national consciousness, and his reaction to the description of the rioters—and the circumstances surrounding it—is untouched by either experience or understanding.

The crudeness of Kirchick’s cut-and-paste method shows how little he cares for the concept of truth. In the context of a discussion about Paul alleged antipathy to blacks, he writes that a “June 1991 entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, ‘Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.’ ‘This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,’ the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author—presumably Paul—wrote, ‘I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.’”

As James Fulford points out, however:

“People seem to think that he was calling blacks ‘animals.’ This was actually the Mount Pleasant riots, the largest in DC since the 1968 Martin Luther King riots, and it was immigrant Hispanics rioting against the African-American city government, so that’s not what what’s going on here, it’s just a normal headline like ‘Inmates Take Over Asylum.’”

But what matters the color of the rioters’ skin? Are we not allowed to say what is, or must fear reduce our language to strings of euphemism? Is every word to be examined and measured in terms of its political correctness quotient? Thus do self-righteous little prigs of Kirchick’s ilk seek to define what’s legitimate and what’s not.

It’s all downhill from there. Kirchick goes after Paul on the basis of his association with the scholars at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a brilliant writer by the name of Thomas E. Woods, whose Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is a runaway bestseller among conservatives and is issued by Regnery, the Fox News of the publishing world. Again, nothing out of the conservative mainstream – a point that will no doubt horrify the readers of The New Republic. But that’s not many people, these days.

The idea that opposition to Lincoln idolatry is evidence of “racism” is absurd, as any serious person would immediately recognize. Is anyone really surprised that Paul doesn’t idolize an American President who locked up his political opponents, repealed the writ of habeas corpus, and closed down opposition newspapers? Give me a break. It’s not for nothing that the academic branch of the Lincoln cult is headquartered over at Claremont College, where the more extreme neocons hold sway: they openly admire his authoritarian methods That may be news to what’s left of The New Republic’s readers, but I doubt much of anyone else finds this beyond the pale, never mind proof of “racism.”.

Kirchick is shocked—shocked!—by the idea that secession can be a legitimate means to achieve one’s political objectives. He equates this with “support for the Confederacy” – but then one has to ask how the Soviet empire imploded so quickly and relatively bloodlessly. Wasn’t it because individuals, as well as the captive nations, seceded from the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”?

Kirchick pays tribute to his “libertarian” collaborators, averring “The people surrounding the von Mises Institute—including Paul—may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine.” They, of course, would never endorse the idea of secession. Or would they?

In any case, there are some pretty odd formulations in Kirchcik’s essay: “To be fair,” he concedes,

“The newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were ‘the only people to act like real Americans,\’ it explained, ‘mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.’”

One wonders on what other basis the author of this newsletter piece could have praised the Asian merchants of Los Angeles—just because they’re Asian? Yet why should someone merit accolades for what they are, rather than on account of the content of their character? To do so would be—dare I say it?—racist.

Another odd touch to this slapped-together smear job is that Kirchick and his pals point to the Paul newsletter’s claim that the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party was involved in helping to trigger the Los Angeles riots as yet more proof of “conspiracism,” but as the RCP’s Wikipedia entry puts it:

“The RCP upheld the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles and nationally as a “rebellion” in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdicts. Then-LAPD chief Daryl Gates alleged that the RCP was involved in the riots. Los Angeles has long been one of the RCP’s larger and more active branches.”

I suppose little Jamie Kirchick, who was something like four years old when the riot occurred, knows more about what happened than the chief of police. Or is Daryl Gates, too, a “conspiracist”? More malarkey from Monsieur Kirchick. (For what it’s worth, David Horowitz concurs.)

The rhetoric aimed at Martin Luther King is really odd, considering that the Ron Paul campaign is launching its latest “money bomb” on the civil rights leader’s birthday. In addition, Paul himself has praised MLK as an exemplar of nonviolent civil disobedience. It is true, however, as the newsletter avers, that King had some connections to Communist Party members, and had the full support of the CP. Without the Communists, there would have been hardly any civil rights movement, especially in the early years. In addition, the Rev. King was indeed a philanderer of epic proportions, as are many strong-willed individuals of the male persuasion. Why be prudish about it? Suddenly the “libertines” of swingin’ Reason magazine are blushing virgins, but, somehow, it’s not a very convincing act.

According to Daniel Koffler, a former Reason staffer now at Pajamas Media, whose compendium of Paul’s un-PC “pullquotes” was posted shortly after the Kirchick piece went up, the charge of “conspiracism” is supposedly buttressed by a statement in the newsletter to the effect that “Hillary Clnton is the most dangerous politician in America” – in which case, all the GOP presidential candidates are guilty. Are we supposed to take this stuff seriously?

As evidence of Paul’s alleged “homophobia,” Kirchick whines that the newsletter writers termed AIDS a “politically protected disease” – and yet that is the same view held by the late Randy Shilts, an openly gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, in his book on the epidemic and the political response to it, And The Band Played On. Shilts, who who died of AIDS in the 1980s, describes, at length, how political correctness and fear of “homophobia” delayed the closing of the San Francisco bathhouses that were incubating the epidemic and spread the virus far and wide before the gay community began to wake up.

As addle-brained as this tack is, Kirchcikt gets even sillier:

“Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said that ‘gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense,’ adding: ‘[T]hese men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners.” Also, “they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.’”

As much as I, a gay guy, hate to admit it, the statement that “gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense” rings true to anyone who lives in what Herb Caean used to call “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” and knows anything about the sexual practices prevalent in the gay community. Priapism as a lifestyle and even a social philosophy is the norm, not the exception, and while that may offend the delicate sensibilities of those rather more priggish homosexuals who want to take the sex out of homosexuality – well, that’s just tough, now isn’t it? And not very realistic.

Furthermore, it has been widely reported that some AIDS victims had actually sought out the disease and refer to it as “bug-chasing” and “giving the gift”—albeit some years after the newsletter described such behavior. Kirchick, a sometime gay activist, has got to know about this. Not that he’ll ever admit it.

Speaking of “hate crimes,” yet more alleged “evidence” that Paul is a gay-basher is the newsletter’s attacks on hate crimes legislation – which, again, is a pretty standard conservative Republican (and libertarian position). Are the editors of Reason magazine agreeing with Kirchick that opposition to such legislation is de facto “homophobia”? Just asking ….

As for the piece on “I Miss the Closet,” now that’s a sentiment I admit to feeling with increasing intensity over the years, as homosexuality devolved into “gayness” and a lifestyle morphed into a political movement—a movement, moreover, that demanded complete ideological conformity on questions ranging from the origins of homosexuality (politically correct answer: it’s genetic) to the desirability of a national “civil rights” bill forbidding “discrimination” on the basis of sexual orientation. To disagree with the leaders of this “movement” is to court the charge of “homophobia.”

Kirchick is perturbed by Paul’s talk of an “industrial-banking-political elite” – any criticism of bankers, and their federally-insured con-game, is “conspiracism” and probably “anti-Semitic,” too. When the banks get bailed out, us plebeians had better not complain, on pain of facing Kirchick’s wrath. Worse, by Kirchickian standards, Paul is “promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills” – a charge that seems slightly comical, coming as it does during the most precipitous decline of the currency since the phrase “not worth a continental” was coined.

I really can’t bear to examine much more of Kirchick’s farrago of falsehoods: it’s like wading through waist-high muck without your pants on. I have to say, however, that this supposedly “devastating” attack on the Paul campaign is devastating, all right – to the author’s reputation as a credible reporter. His writing is crude, his manner slapdash, and his abilities seem to consist primarily of the artful use of ellipses. Intellectually dishonest, inauthentic in its outrage, and unintentionally humorous at times – don’t you realize that it’s a hate-crime to criticize Kirchick’s boss?—TNR’s attempt to portray the avuncular country doctor who preaches liberty, the Norman Thomas of libertarianism, as some sort of neo-Nazi is ludicrous – yet the neocons and their “libertarian” allies persist. Why?

“If a person cared about liberty,” asks the blogger who calls himself “a former beltway wonk,” “why would they be eager to mindlessly repeat smears about the most popular libertarian candidate in decades on the very day of the most crucial ‘king-making’ primary in the United States?”

It’s no mystery, really: Ron Paul is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the Beltway fake-“libertarians.” He’s a populist: they suck up to power, he challenges the powers-that-be; they go along to get along – he has never gone along with the conventional wisdom as defined by the arbiters of political correctness, Left and Right. And most of all, he’s an avowed enemy of the neoconservatives, whom he constantly names as the main danger to peace and liberty – while the Beltway’s tame “libertarians” are in bed with them, often literally as well as figuratively.

In short, the Beltway fake-libs are in bed with the State, and all its works, while contenting themselves with the role of court jester and would-be “reformer” of the system. As long as they don’t challenge anything too fundamental to the continuation of the Welfare-Warfare State, the pet libertines of the neocon-led GOP “coalition” are deemed “urbane” and “cosmopolitan,” the highest compliment the Georgetown party circuit can bestow. Once they begin rocking the boat, as Paul insists on doing, they become fair game for the Smearbund.

Another major reason for the antipathy to Paul coming from these quarters is his uncompromising opposition to U.S. foreign policy. A good half of the Reason crowd were pro-war, some ambivalent, and a powerful minority within the Cato Institute rallied to the cause of “liberating” Iraq, or was at least sympathetic to the idea of “exporting” free market liberalism at gunpoint, once the war was a fait accompli. Reason itself took no position on the most important question of the day, I’m told because of the influence of big contributors. And now I learn, from inside sources, that Reason senior editor Brian Doherty, author of the monumental Radicals for Capitalism, a “freewheeling” history of the American libertarian movement, is in danger of being fired because he’s too pro-Paul.

The most shameful aspect of this episode is the active role played by the Orange Line Mafia in the smearing of Paul. The Reason/Cato lynch mob is really threatened by the existence of a mass libertarian movement—because it’s a movement over which they have no control. They no longer get to define libertarianism to the general public, and most importantly, the media: who needs them, when we have a much more appealing and successful salesman for liberty?

Besides, it’s embarrassing for them: while they’re begging our rulers to allow us just a little freedom, and timidly seek to trim the empire around its rougher edges, Paul and the movement he’s spawned seek a much more radical application of libertarian principles: a consistent anti-statism on the home front, and a call to dismantle the empire before it dismantles the last vestiges of our old republic.

Look, I’ve been critical of the Paul campaign—see here—and I have to say I have my issues with the way the operation is being run, and I know I’m not alone in that. I would say that the antiwar message has not been pounded home, and that their strategy—particularly their California strategy – shows a complete lack of understanding of how to get delegates under the new, congressional district-based allocation system. Another major mistake: failing to make opposition to the war and the new imperialism the centerpiece of Paul’s television ads. When the candidate gets up there on stage at the debates and speaks in his own voice, from the heart, he nearly always puts the issue of war and peace front and center. The campaign does Paul a great disservice, however, when they water down his message for some imaginary political gain that has yet to materialize and probably won’t.

Yet these criticisms are minor: the overwhelming reality is that the Paul campaign has put libertarianism on the political map as never before—and the Orange Line Mafia just can’t stand it.. Real libertarians can have but one answer to the fifth columnists in their midst, the neocon-enablers and Vichy “libertarians” who hang on every word harpy-like shriek that comes out of Anne Althouse’s gullet: Screw them, and all their works.




http://takimag.com/article/why_the_beltway_libertarians_are_trying_to_smear_ron_paul/print#axzz1gCGx7WOJ

** I have only browsed over this...so I am not posting this as my thoughts...just passing on the article-- Peace--
 
You are so misguided. Your worried about private companies counting votes when the worst possibility is actually our reality. Do you know that the Federal Reserve is private. It is not part of the government and is not a federal agency. It's a private group of unelected elite that control the concept of money. They control the money and they control what info you get about them and their private empire.

so why does ron paul want everything privatized then? doesn't make sense to me.
 

DiscoBiscuit

weed fiend
Veteran
Has any Candidate ever done that??
I don't think they know the full potential of their power...or lack of, til they actually get there and try--

You make a good point, there's always considerable aspects the candidate doesn't know. And Paul has acknowledged his need to work with Congress in matters that may require.

We have statistical indicators, primarily economic forecasts. Obama's health care plan was projected during the campaign. The emphasis was on reducing 1/6th GDP and rising.

Without projected benefits, not to mention the poor historic consequences, I'm not sure that floating a promise would have a snowball's chance in hell.
 
and if we let states decide on everything...we are going to have some fucked up laws in some states and then we are going to have way too many fucking people coming to cali. cali is overpopulated as it is. we can't afford to take refugees from states that have super fucked up racist laws.
 

Sam the Caveman

Good'n Greasy
Veteran
what good does it do for the economy to send back illegal immigrants?

Raises demand for the jobs they won't have anymore and as a result wages for those positions will rise. There will still be Mexican nationals doing some jobs through the proper work programs available through the state/federal gov't. It also removes people who don't respect immigration laws and encourages people to immigrate legally.

just to name a few

but this has nothing to do with the topic of this thread
 

DiscoBiscuit

weed fiend
Veteran
here's an interesting read...

here's an interesting read...

Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins

Ryan Grim - First Posted: 12/27/11 11:53 AM ET Updated: 12/27/11 11:56 AM ET

Ron Paul’s presidential campaign has spent the last two weeks dealing with the political consequences of the reemergence of racist newsletters that went out under his name in the 1980s and ‘90s. During that same time period, however, Paul also laid out an historical analysis of the racist roots of the drug war that accurately and honestly reflects its origins.

In 1988 Paul made a presidential campaign stop at the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws while running on the Libertarian Party ticket. "What was so bad about the period from 1776 to 1914?" Paul wondered, referring to a time in American history when drugs were legal on the federal, and, in many towns, local level. "In the 20th Century, the doctors, like all business people, decided that there ought to be a monopoly. ‘If you wanted a little bit of codeine in your cough medicine, it would be much better if you come to me so I can charge you $25 for a prescription.'”

Paul, in a speech aired at the time on C-SPAN went on. “Before the 20th Century there was none of that and it was the medical profession as well as many other trade groups that agitated for the laws. And you know there’s a pretty good case made that this same concept was built in with racism as well. We do know that opium was used by the Chinese and the Chinese were not welcomed in this country,” Paul said. “We do know that the blacks at times use heroin, opium and the laws have been used against them. There have been times that it has been recognized that the Latin Americans use marijuana and the laws have been written against them. But lo and behold the drug that inebriates most of the members of Congress has not been touched because they're up there drinking alcohol.” (In the same speech, Paul delves into drug trafficking and the CIA, which I’ll cover in a follow-up article.)

For the book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America, I looked into the type of historical analysis Paul’s comment, which comes at roughly the 16-minute mark, represents, given that it is a fairly common interpretation of the origins of the drug war among its critics.

It holds up. The reaction of the American government, and its people, to drug use was -- and still is -- a complex mix of factors, involving lobbying by the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, the alcohol industry, temperance advocates, and religious movements. Historically, the argument has played out -- and continues to play out -- amid a backdrop of racism and class antagonism. Racism and bigotry were generally not the drivers of prohibition movements, but instead were the weapons used by temperance advocates to achieve their ends. The movement to ban alcohol, for instance, gained its strongest adherents without resorting to bigotry, but when World War I broke out, the movement was quick to tie beer and booze to instantly despised German immigrants, pushing the effort over the Constitutional hump.

Paul’s history of Latin Americans’ involvement with marijuana is more or less accurate, though weed was popular among white soldiers and African Americans as well, particularly in the port city of New Orleans, where it infiltrated jazz culture. Its association with Latinos and African Americans was, in fact, used to demonize it.

When the West Indies banned slavery in the 1800s, plantations there began hiring workers from India. They brought cannabis with them, and recreational pot smoking soon became a part of everyday life on Jamaica and other nearby islands. In the early 19th century, thousands of Jamaicans traveled to Panama, Cuba, and Costa Rica looking for work and bringing pot with them. In the early 1900s, American workers building the Panama Canal were smoking it. They returned through New Orleans.

A military commission looked into the situation in 1932 -- which suggests that the trend must have started a good decade or more earlier -- and found that Panamanian farmers were growing marijuana and selling the excess to American soldiers. During the same period, around a million Mexicans migrated to the United States following the 1910 revolution in their homeland. They, too, smoked marijuana, and they, too, brought the practice with them across the border.

The Chinese were scapegoated too. Conventional wisdom holds that Chinese immigrants brought opium with them when they were shipped over to build the transcontinental railroad. But there is strong evidence that opium was plenty popular before they ever got here.

The U.S. Census Bureau says that there were just over 1,000 people born in Asia living in the United States in 1850, by which time the rise of opium was already well underway.

In 1827, the first year the federal government began tabulating opium imports, almost none was brought into the United States. Five years later, the number has climbed to around 50,000 pounds. In several years during the 1830s and early 1840s, importation peaked at more than 70,000 pounds. If a dose is less than half a gram -- and it can often be much less -- then 70,000 pounds would be enough for more than 30 million opium highs in a nation with an 1840 population of roughly 17 million. Importation statistics suggest that use continued to rise throughout the 1840s and '50s.

By 1880, there were more than 100,000 Asian-born immigrants living in the United States, and their entry into American culture certainly aided the growth of the opium trade.

The Chinese became symbols of opium abuse. The first American narcotics law was passed in San Francisco in 1878, and it targeted not opium but opium dens, which were run by Chinese immigrants and attracting a multicultural crowd. By 1885, opium was less socially acceptable than alcohol, which it had begun to replace only a half-century earlier. A New York Times article about a courtroom scene published that year displays the prevailing attitudes of the decade:
James Bradford...was nobbily attired in a tight-fitting Prince Albert coat, carried a new-market on his arm, and he held a silver-headed cane and a high hat in his hand. He was an ideal of the creature known as "dude." He denied having smoked the drug. "Well, Officer Reynolds caught you in the place," said the court. "How do you account for that?"

"Well, Judge, to tell the truth," he replied faintly, "I was a little bit—a little bit—well, I must admit that I was full, and I don't know how I came to go into such a disreputable house."

"The officer further claims that you had an opium pipe in your mouth," said the magistrate. "What is your explanation of this charge?"

"That I can't tell," he answered meditatively, "unless some fellow put it in my mouth for a joke. I was full, you know, and they could have done anything they pleased without my knowing it."

Assistant District Attorney Purdy said that the case was a very clear one, and from the evidence he thought the prisoner guilty of the charge of selling opium to be smoked on the premises. He said he thought it was bad enough for a Chinaman to be charged with this offense, but it was a crime of more importance when one of our own race is caught in the act of selling this cursed drug, and he implored the court to show no leniency to the accused.
The opium den’s owner was sent away for three months and fined $500, which the Times reports was the highest penalty given to date in New York. Bradford got a $25 fine and 10 days in the city jail. "He was unable to pay his fine and he stepped down stairs a very crestfallen 'dude,'" the article notes.

As amusing as the story seems, its author is working with some seriously held assumptions: that opium use should be confined to the Chinese, that drinking -- or being "full" -- is more acceptable than getting high, and that opium is a "cursed drug."

Opium and alcohol are rather different experiences that don't mix -- either physically or psychically -- which might account for the dude's memory lapse. Thomas De Quincey, the popular author of the 1821 autobiography "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater," describes it well: "The pleasure given by wine is always rapidly mounting…after which as rapidly it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight to ten hours: the first, to borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute, the second of chronic, pleasure; the one is a flickering flame, the other a steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this—that whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony."

At the time, little research had been done exploring the relationship between opium use and drinking. But there was at least one noteworthy study: an 1872 look at the opium boom by the Massachusetts State Board of Health. The reason for the dramatic upswing in opiate use, it concluded, wasn’t the Chinese or the Civil War -- it was the temperance movement.

This unintended consequence of the call for sobriety wasn't unique to the United States, the board found. "It is a significant fact ... that both in England and in this country, the total abstinence movement was almost immediately followed by an increased consumption of opium," it notes.

The study suggests that easy accessibility to the drug through pharmacies was part of the reason for the increase, but that many other sources existed as well. "Opium has been recently made from white poppies, cultivated for the purpose, in Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut, the annual production being estimated by hundreds of pounds, and this has generally been absorbed in the communities where it is made. It has also been brought here from Florida and Louisiana, while comparatively large quantities are regularly sent east from California and Arizona, where its cultivation is becoming an important branch of industry, 10 acres of poppies being said to yield, in Arizona, twelve hundred pounds of opium," one official, referred to as a State Assayer, reported to the board.

Although this description of a thriving domestic opium crop might sound surprising today, the board’s characterization of that crop’s consumers certainly doesn't: "[T]he opium habit is especially common among the manufacturing classes,” it asserts, “who are too apt to live regardless of all hygienic laws." It puts some of the blame for such lower-class use on doctors, who are "in no small measure responsible for the moral, as well as physical, welfare of their patients," and shouldn't be allowed to get away with the "injudicious and often unnecessary prescription of opium."

American women made up "so large a proportion of opium takers,” the study suggests, because they were "doomed, often, to a life of disappointment ... of physical and mental inaction, and in the smaller and more remote towns, not unfrequently, to utter seclusion."

The "most important cause" of opium taking, however, is "the simple desire for stimulation,” an urge hitherto satisfied by alcohol consumption. Opium, the report notes, was both more available and more socially acceptable than alcohol. The narcotic "can be procured and taken without endangering the reputation for sobriety. In one town mentioned, it was thought 'more genteel' than alcohol." The report goes on to say that it was "between 1840 and 1850, soon after teetotalism had become a fixed fact, that our own importations of opium swelled," citing a rise of 350 percent. In England, "one doctor noted," "opium chewing has become very prevalent, especially since the use of alcoholic drinks has been to so great an extent abandoned, under the influence of the fashion introduced by total abstinence societies." The board also found it "curious and interesting" that as wine drinking advanced in Turkey, opium eating retreated.

As always in America, the limits of what exactly is moral behavior depend on what the meaning of “is” is. By following their version of God's code to the letter, teetotaling Americans of the 19th century freely violated its spirit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/27/ron-paul-drugs-drug-war_n_1170878.html
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kmk420kali

Freedom Fighter
Veteran
and if we let states decide on everything...we are going to have some fucked up laws in some states and then we are going to have way too many fucking people coming to cali. cali is overpopulated as it is. we can't afford to take refugees from states that have super fucked up racist laws.

And if the States can't decide...you have what we have now-- This pleases you??
 

CannaBunkerMan

Enormous Member
Veteran
and if we let states decide on everything...we are going to have some fucked up laws in some states and then we are going to have way too many fucking people coming to cali. cali is overpopulated as it is. we can't afford to take refugees from states that have super fucked up racist laws.

I fucking HATE this sentiment. It's like Cali is a club, and no one else is allowed in. Get over your state, man!
 
but isn't it true? if states in the south were allowed to make ALL of their own laws, those crazy motherfuckers down there would make some racist backwards ass laws.
 

CannaBunkerMan

Enormous Member
Veteran
but isn't it true? if states in the south were allowed to make ALL of their own laws, those crazy motherfuckers down there would make some racist backwards ass laws.

You're right, they would. You're also right that some people would relocate if that ever happened. And again, you're right that some of those displaced by those laws would move to your state.

So?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that for every new person who moves to California, there's less to go around for everyone else. That's a near-sighted, and close minded point of view.

So, now do you have to be born in a state to be allowed to live there? I'm assuming that you're a birther, or else you wouldn't have such self-righteous opinions. Either that, or you're a hypocrite in that when you moved to Cali, it was okay, there weren't so many people then...

Land of opportunity? Not in cali.
 

dagnabit

Game Bred
Veteran
but isn't it true? if states in the south were allowed to make ALL of their own laws, those crazy motherfuckers down there would make some racist backwards ass laws.

Not very well traveled are you?

Having lived in many states myself and spent extended stays in many others.
The institutional racism in this country is in the upper midwest and the northeast far more than the south.
 
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