Why I'm Voting For Ron Paul at the Iowa Straw Poll

A quick glance around the periphery of this web page reveals that both Bawb and I are pulling for Dr. Ron Paul to get the Republican nomination for president. Let me elaborate why I'll be voting for him at the Republican straw poll in Ames Saturday. My reason is this: I believe Ron Paul will lead the party back to a position supporting smaller, Constitutionally limited government.

This is vitally important because America currently does not have a viable political party that advocates such. The Tenth Amendment is dead. The Second Amendment is on life-support. First Amendment free speech rights, the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures, and Fifth Amendment property rights are increasingly under assault from various government entities. Spending has skyrocketed, borrowing against the economic freedom of our heirs. The powers of the President (a single, fallible man) have expanded tremendously in the last seventy-some years. Both Republicans and Democrats have played a part in this erosion of personal liberty.

More importantly at the moment, all of the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul have played a hand in it as well. Most of the candidates supported the police-state "Patriot" Act. McCain, Romney, and Giuliani have all actively worked to restrict Second Amendment gun rights. McCain also took a big bite out of the First Amendment with his McCain-Feingold "Incumbent Protection Act."

Contrast these with Ron Paul's record in Congress. His website lists his achievements succinctly:

• He has never voted to raise taxes.
• He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
• He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
• He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
• He has never taken a government-paid junket.
• He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
• He voted against the Patriot Act.
• He voted against regulating the Internet.
• He voted against the Iraq war.
• He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
• He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

In short, he supports smaller, Constitutionally limited government. There was a time when the Republican Party stood for that. Unfortunately, the neo-conservatives now in charge of the party do not. In 2006 the neo-cons watched their party lose control of Congress. Perhaps if Ron Paul wins the Ames Straw Poll, or even makes a good showing, the neo-cons will begin to lose control of their own party.

Can Ron Paul lead the Republicans to victory in 2008? I don't know. But he can lead the party back to where it should have been all along, at it's small government, Goldwater-Republican roots.

WHAT OUR GOVERNMENT DOES WELL

Let's ignore for the moment the fact that our beloved Federal government does mostly what it has no Constitutional mandate to do and that it has become the largest union employer in these United States, something which would make the Founding Fathers grab their swords and flintlocks. Of all the things it does do, whether it even should, what does it really do well, i.e. effectively, efficiently, inexpensively, and on time?

NATIONAL DEFENSE: You'd think from hawks like us, they would at least receive high ratings here. Nope. Primarily because we have served, we know how the system (dys)funtions. First off, with the most technically advanced military on the face of the earth, we cannot even secure our own borders. Second, at the heart of things, the military is just another top-heavy bloated ineffecient bureaucracy that requires about 20 "support" people for every rifleman it can put boots on the ground. Even in WWII, Winston Churchill ruefully noted, "Your military peacock is mostly tail." And, in every major war this country has been involved in, the "professionals" usually mess it up from the beginning and we have to mobilize the good old citizen-soldier "amatuers" to come clean up the mess.

FOREIGN POLICY: Very poor marks. We are becoming despised throughout the world for our constant meddling in everyone else's affairs. We have traditionally supported the most hienous of dictators as long as they were "our" dictators. We shovel billions into numerous countries that hate our guts, as long as they promise to "be good". Just like Hitler did at Munich. I believe it was Anwar Sadat who made a comment along the lines that he had spent years trying to figure out the subtle cunning Byzantine strategy of America's foreign policy before he finally realized it was simply stupidity.

MANAGING NATURAL RESOURCES: Hahahahahaha!. I work in that field. When 85% of an agency's budget stays in D.C., where there isn't a single National Forest, that money is not being spent wisely, efficiently, or usefully. Next.

MANAGING MONEY: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!! Our government has literally bankrupted the entire country. If the National Debt chips were called in all at once, every family in America would have to cough up something like $680,000 to cover our politicians' screw-ups. None of us can write checks on money we don't have without facing jail time; our "leaders" on the Hill can do it to their black hearts' content on or off duty.

SOCIAL SECURITY: Whew! Too short of breath for anymore maniacal, bitter laughter. This was nothing more than a Ponzi scam right from the beginning. The money entrusted to the government has long since been "borrowed" and pissed away. They couldn't have made good on their promises even if they hadn't been raiding the cookie jar. The average person would have seen more return on their retirement funds from investing in baseball cards.

WELFARE: We've had a War on Poverty since the Johnson Administration, and it's been an abysmal failure. Where are all the politicans crying, "Pull out! It's a war we can't win!" Again, part of the reason is that 90 cents out of every single dollar goes just to feed the bureaucracy administering the "war". If political drones and hacks working in government actually SOLVE a problem, then they are out of their jobs, so they simply MANAGE the problem for eternity.

DELIVER THE MAIL: Puh-leeeeeze!

MANAGE HEALTHCARE: As P.J. O'Rorke says, "If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free." Socialized medicine is a terrible idea to begin with. Will 90 cents on the buck go to "administration" of the program? If you have ever had the misfortune to go to a VA hospital, you have seen the dark Orwellian world of socialized medicine. You might be better off with a witch doctor and a bag of leaches. If the government ran abortion clinics, there would be a ten-month waiting list.

PROTECT ITS CITIZENS: Again, puh-leeeeze! Even the Supreme Court says that law enforcement has no obligation to protect YOU as a citzen, only "society as a whole." So, when you call 911 and don't get help for two hours, tough. Plus, they're trying to take your guns away so you can't even protect yourself when they are too incompetent to. A whole alphabet soup of Federal bureaucracies had all the pieces to the 9-11 puzzle before it happened, but they were too busy knitting diversity quilts and worshipping political correctness and trying to catch Idaho hillbillies in sting operations involving shotgun barrels 1/4-inch under an arbitrary length limit to put it all together and act on it. Bush's solution? Create an even bigger, more complex and compartmentalized super bureaucracy to fight for turf with the already-existing bureaucracies.

RUN A COURT SYSTEM: I keep reading stories about how all across the country, they can't get people for jury duty. I personally think it's because we the people are completely losing faith in our pathetic court system. Let's face it, the LAST thing that will ever come out of official court proceedings is anything resembling the truth. This is not a rant against unscrupulous defense lawyers, either. As Scooter Libby and the Duke Rape Case prove, prosecutors, especially Federal ones, are ready, willing and able to manufacture "evidence", suppress real evidence, and even create "crimes". Our judges have wayyyyy too much power to rule on subjects that they have less knowledge of than I have about interstellar faster-than-light space travel. Plus, by now, what with all the new "rights" the courts keep finding in pustules popping out of our "living Constitution", cons in prison and foreign terrorists have more rights than the average citizen on the street.

LEGISLATE MORALITY: First off, this really isn't the government's job. Secondly, the politicians need to have at least a tiny spark of some morality of their own before they start casting stones. Thirdly, their efforts seem to center on destroying the Judeo-Christian traditional family unit, the building block of Western Civilization. In places like Filthadelphia (William Penn is spinning in his grave) it has become a prosecutable "hate crime" the quote Scripture from the Holy Bible.

Which leaves us with....what? What does our government do well these days? Basically, all I can give them high marks for is turning huge amounts of money into fecal material. It's kind of like feedings $20 bills to a goat.

Is there a solution? Yup. It's called RON PAUL 2008!!!!

Good News For Iowa Third-Party Supporters

Starting in January '08, Iowa voters will be able to register as members of a third party. This comes as a settlement after the ACLU of Iowa slapped a lawsuit on the Iowa Secretary of State, on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Iowa and the Iowa Green Party. (I guess the ACLU doesn't suck ALL the time.)

The parties will still face certain hurdles to qualify. Each party will have to collect at least 850 signatures in at least five counties. For the Libertarian Party that will be no sweat. The old standard, to be recognized as a "legitimate" party by the State of Iowa, was that a party's candidate must earn at least 2% of the vote in a statewide race (Governor, U.S. Senate or President). So a third party could have swept every single seat in the Iowa state legislature but not be recognized as a party by the state. (That's why we Libertarians allowed the other two parties to hang on to the Iowa legislature. Wasn't worth our effort.) The Iowa Green-Wienies had a brief stint as a major party in Iowa after their dark horse candidate Ralph Nader garnered the required 2%, in his run for president, to qualify them.

It will be nice to finally register as a Libertarian. I'm still registered as a Republican, but I'm not going to change my registration until after I vote for Ron Paul in the primaries.

PAUL IN THE POLLS

Recently I received an email from some GOP group or another, the National Republican Senatorial Committee. I guess I didn't contact each and every Republikrat group and tell them to get stuffed when I got sick and tired of their big government, big spending, reduced freedom tickets. I was glad that this one slipped through the cracks, however. It was a straw poll just for, supposedly, the GOP faithful regarding their choice for a Republican Presidential candidate.

Really, I figured it was a lost cause among such a group, but out of my usual cantankerousness I tilted at the windmill and cast my ballot for Ron Paul. I was very pleasantly surprised when the results of the poll popped up. Fred Thompson, who still hasn't really "officially" declared, was running in first place, but good old Ron "Dr. No" Paul was in second place with a very nice showing. The "Big Three", the Rudy McRomney Show, the "Ted Kennedy Wing of the Republican party" that the GOP had hand-picked to serve to us were all half or less of Ron Paul's numbers!!! The Manchurian, or perhaps I should say the Michoacan Candidate, John McStain showed up in sixth place, nearly tied with Tom Tancredo, and finishing behind "Other".

I noticed in the fine print at the bottom that a new straw poll will be conducted after every Republican Presidential debate. This tells me that the mainstream media and GOP power-mongers are going to be moving heaven and hell to keep Ron Paul out of future debates. After all, what gives us (the people) the right to turn down the neatly-packaged "offerings" we have been presented with? As one wag I know put it, "I sure wouldn't want to be on an airplane with Ron Paul in the near future."

Keep the pressue on, people. We are making progress.

Ron Paul Spanks McCain

A couple of interesting developments on Dr. Ron Paul's presidential campaign:

Firstly, the Paul campaign announced that they now have $2.4 million on hand, beating out Republicrat-extraordinaire John McCain. Unfortunately, Ron Paul still won't be able to buy the kind of press coverage that McCain gets for free. Also, keep in mind that Dr. Paul still has a long way to go to catch up with the deep pockets of Rudy Giuliani, who has $18 million in the bank, and Mitt Romney, with $12 million, so anything you can give will be put to good use by Dr. Paul.

Secondly, after being dissed by the Iowa Christian Alliance and Iowans for Tax Relief who excluded ONLY Ron Paul and invited the other GOP presidential candidates to speak at their forum, the Paul campaign held its own rally right next door. Despite being thrown together in less than a week, Dr. Paul's event ended up having several hundred more attendees than the other forum with its 6 GOP candidates. Some believe that this event was the biggest rally for a Republican candidate in Iowa during this campaign cycle.

No doubt, despite this good news, the media and the GOP leadership will seek to downplay the significance and chances of the Paul campaign. Apparently, only "we the people" are excited about Ron Paul's candidacy and the chance to restore the Constitution and repair liberty in this land. Let's show the entrenched elites that having the people on your side still matters by getting Dr. Paul on the ballot!