While still hesitant about his foreign policy, Sarah Palin recently professed in an interview that Ron Paul is the “only one” passionate and serious about reining in the size of government, spending, and debt. Townhall.com web-editor Daniel Doherty reports,
Appearing on Fox News this morning, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin surprised her acolytes by singing the praises of the most libertarian-leaning GOP presidential candidate … Ron Paul.
I still sense his desire to be more of an isolated-type country and not be as aware and active on the international scene when it comes to protecting our allies like Israel and doing all that we can.
That is my hesitancy there still with Ron Paul’s candidacy. However, on the domestic front, he is the only one who has been so adamantly passionate about doing something about the suffocating debt, about doing something about reining in government growth and actually slashing budgets – $1 trillion a year, he’s been specific about until we get our hands around this - I respect that.
I appreciate it. His austerity measures that he wants to see Congress adopt in order to rein in government and let the private sector actually grow and thrive and hire more people.
This video should shock every American who has a conscience, every American who loves this country and what it stands for! What you are witnessing might just as easily be the actions of some totalitarian regime; Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Myanmar….
A line of students sitting on the ground, heads bowed. A police officer dressed in riot gear walking up to them, holding a pepper spray gun. He theatrically raises his arm, as if about to carry out an execution, and presses the trigger. A foul-looking orange spray shoots out.
Methodically, deliberately, he walks to the end of the line, saturating each student. He might as well be casually spraying bug spray. When he reaches the end he begins walking back in the other direction, spraying each of them again. The students huddle in obvious pain. People in the crowd nearby gasp in shock and began chanting, "Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!"
This event is powerfully symbolic. It is about contempt from those in power and the wanton use of force against the powerless.
We have seen similar things over and over again in the past few years. We have seen it in banks lobbying for public handouts and then denying relief to millions of exploited homeowners. We have seen it in tax breaks and bonuses for the rich while millions of Americans are out of work. We have seen it in church and university officers abusing children and then covering it up. We have seen it in the censorship of climate science performed in the public interest. We have seen it in the absurd declaration that corporations are "people" and entitled to spend billions of dollars to elect representatives that they will then own. We have seen it everywhere we turn.
The police officer is Congress. Our banks. Our clerics.
The students are us.
If I had to sum up the attitude of America's governing classes in one word, I would say: contempt.
We are seeing the beginning of a worldwide movement to fight for dignity and intelligent, collective governance.
It is time for UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi to resign. I simply cannot fathom a university administrator bringing riot police onto campus to assault peacefully demonstrating students. At the most, campus police could have simply carried them away. In her blog, Duke prof (and former teacher of mine) Cathy Davidson deftly dissects the craven claim that tent camps present "health and safety concerns." And Bob Ostertag, a UC Davis prof, shows how the administration lost its moral compass.
People say that the Occupy movement has not been clear in its demands. I would say that their demands could not be more obvious.
They are already being articulated everywhere: the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Salon.com, the New Yorker. They are full of luminous writers: Nicholas Kristof. Paul Krugman. Gail Collins. Hendrik Herztberg. George Packer. Steve Coll, Bill McKibben. Dozens of intelligent books have appeared on the shelves in the past few years, examining the country's problems and offering thoughtful proposals for reform.
They want a fairer tax system. They want a sane energy policy that addresses climate change and searches for cleaner ways to power our civilization. They want a government that is not wholly owned by the rich. They want access to justice and education. They want a reasonable hope of getting and keeping a job that gives them a living wage and the ability to invest for the future.
They want a rational health care system that they can afford. They want government policy that is driven by thoughtful attention to rational research, not ideology. They want a transparent government that holds the powerful accountable. They want a government that understands the importance of investing now in human capital and infrastructure.
The obstacles to reform seem overwhelming. The country's far right has systematically obstructed every attempt to change things for the better. The electorate seems hopelessly divided. For decades, it has voted to create legislative deadlock. Despite the overwhelming failure of the Bush administration, half of the country has not grasped how utterly the Republican philosophy of governance has been discredited. The Democrats are uncoordinated and have no coherent philosophy at all. In our Internet age, the media are so fragmented that no single idea can seem to hold the country's attention for long. America has never seemed more divided and paralyzed in living memory.
Nonetheless, America's two most famous recent political movements - the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street - have taught us several things. It is possible to get the country's attention. And getting its attention is equivalent to setting its agenda.
Occupy Wall Street needs to start setting a moral example. Moral examples move people to action. I am very proud of the students at UC Davis, both the ones who remained seated, heads down, and the ones in the crowd surrounding them. They vastly outnumbered the police officers. They could have torn them apart. I have no doubt that many of them wanted to. I wanted to.
But, as Gandhi and Martin Luther King so well understood, nonviolent resistance is extraordinarily powerful. It shows who holds the moral high ground. It reveals the thugs and bullies in high places for who they are. It creates sympathy and evokes principled action. It clears the way for thoughtful men and women of conscience and character to speak out for rational courses of action.
Gray Lady scolds stupid unemployed people for not becoming communists...
“Somehow, the Unemployed Became Invisible,” the New York Times reported on the front page of its Sunday Business section a couple days back.
“Unless you are one of those unhappy 14 million, you might not even notice the problem,” Catherine Rampell reported with all the authority the Gray Lady can muster.
Which is not much. This is how out of touch America’s self-proclaimed serious journalists have become. And it goes well beyond liberal bias. I don’t question Ms. Rampell’s political motives nearly as much as I wonder what planet she lives on.
As native-born Earth residents, I and everyone I know are starkly aware of unemployment and the damage it has wrought. Covering Washington, I noticed that just last week, the most powerful Republican in Washington, John A. Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, took to Twitter, a widely used social media site, to ask Barack Obama, a man also of some note, where all the jobs were that supposedly came with that $800 billion stimulus package.
The idea that we’ve forgotten the unemployed is hardly the most fanciful peddled by Ms. Rampell. Even if we did remember the poor bastards, she writes, we’re not paying attention to them because they’re politically irrelevant. At just 9.2 percent of the work force, “the unemployed are a relatively small constituency.”
Never mind that those 14 million people are married (affecting 28 million) and have 1.4 kids (47 million) and many of them have a best friend (61 million), a sibling or three (75 million) and a parent or two (96 million). If you considered those facts, you might get the idea that nearly everyone is connected to unemployment, and intimately at that. Then there are the millions of Americans who don’t count as unemployed because they have given up their job search or can only find part-time or menial work for which they are overqualified. Then there are the millions more who work at companies where they’ve seen co-workers laid off and all those people’s children, parents, siblings and friends who fear what comes next.
And, of course, that scarcity of jobs and the failure of this administration to do anything of substance about the problem are at the center of the Republican Party’s critique of President Obama. The only way anyone could not hear about the jobless every day would be if he neither knew nor listened to any Republican and lived in a world where exposure to any Republican or his ideas would immediately lead to a call to the exterminator.
Which may well be true in Ms. Rampell’s case because the next words to sally forth from her pen were “And with apologies to Karl Marx, the workers of the world, particularly the unemployed, are also no longer uniting.”
You see the unemployed vote less than those with jobs, according to some political scientist or other. Therefore, obviously, they don’t count. Never mind that unemployment and the economy were top issues in the 2010 election and voters smashed the party they blame for the fact that the economic “recovery” is a spluttering mess hardly worthy of the name.
Surely we should believe the words of political scientists rather than our own lying eyes and silly election results. Elections aren’t scientifically designed, and the electorate is not representative of Americans as a whole. The last election could really have been about the availability of corn fritters in Saskatchewan.
So what would make Ms. Rampell happy and turn our attention back to the forgotten, invisible, suffering unemployed? “During the Great Depression, riots erupted on the bread lines,” she writes, quoting a historian who says, “There used to be a sense that unemployment was rich soil for radicalization and revolt.”
So why not today, the intrepid reporter wonders. “Intellectuals used to play a big role. … In the 1930s, Communists and socialists were a major force.”
Without the communists to lead them, the poor, uneducated and easily led unemployed don’t know what to do. Ms. Rampell writes, “To the extent that frustrations are being channeled at all, they are being channeled largely through the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is mostly against devoting government resources to helping the unemployed.”
It is as if those silly unemployed people think it’s the private sector that might give them a new job.
If only we had a bunch of 1930s communists around to lead us, we wouldn’t have made this mistake. I guess we all owe a big apology to Karl Marx. Dude, we’ve failed you. I only hope you can forgive us our Tea Parties.
How many Americans are even aware that there are 4 verses to our National Anthem? At a recent Tea Party rally, a United States Marine Veteran stood up and sang the 4th verse bringing the crowd to their feet and some to tears.
The words he sang so eloquently should ring in the hearts of all Americans, as do the words of the 1st verse we are all familiar with. God Bless America. In God Is Our Trust.
The Star Spangled Banner Lyrics By Francis Scott Key 1814
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
The Republican Party has a history of using desperate times to call for drastic measures and when bailing out AIG, bolstering Medicare or bombing Iraq, that party has always been willing to go big and bold on some of the largest government expansions in this nation’s history. But what about cutting government? You know, that stuff GOP politicians always talk about during election time?
One might think that in a political environment in which so many are desperate to reverse what they see as unsustainable government growth, Republican rhetoric might at least attempt to reflect that desperation. But when GOP leaders unveiled their “Pledge to America” last week, the only thing revealed is that these Republicans remain what they have always been-pansies. In a nutshell, the old Republican guard now pledges to save America from the excesses of Obama by basically returning to the level of government we experienced under Bush-when these exact same Republicans were doubling the size of government. The pledge reflects little substance, there’s not even anything about a balanced budget amendment or earmarks-two longstanding but fairly tame Republican gripes-and some of it even promotes GOP statism, with promises to repeal and “replace” national healthcare, and of course, to spend even more money on a “defense” budget that already accounts for half the earth’s military spending.
From the Contract with America in 1994 to the Pledge to America last week, the GOP has broken every contract or pledge it has ever made with conservatives. Now these same Republicans have made another empty promise, similar but even less appealing than the lies they’ve told in the past.
This “pledge” is a joke.
When asked to give his take on the Pledge to America, Congressman Ron Paul stated the obvious on FOX Business, “I don’t hear enough precise things we would cut. I never hear that the military-industrial-complex should be addressed. I don’t ever hear that the discretionary and non-discretionary funding is all the same. I never hear which departments they really want to get rid of, so, it goes on and on and you just can’t have a little tinkering on the edges… as long as we want big government you can’t tinker with the edges.”
Tinkering indeed.
In a Tea Party environment in which so many are tired of conventional GOP politicians screwing around with the peripheral and irrelevant, why shouldn’t conservatives look to the one Republican who has never screwed around? Instead of wondering if John Boehner is now serious, trying to figure out what Sarah Palin is saying, hoping that Scott Brown turns out to be something special, looking for something worthwhile about Newt Gingrich or wondering which version of Mitt Romney might run for president, why shouldn’t those serious about limiting government get fully behind the one conservative leader who has always been dead serious?
Congressman Ron Paul’s pledge to America is over three decades old and was taken the day he was sworn into office, or as he explained during a 2007 Republican presidential debate: “Hello, my name is Ron Paul. I am a congressman from Texas serving in my tenth term. I am the champion of the Constitution.” Virtually every Republican claims to be for the Constitution, but most with the moral authority of a cheating husband claiming to be a champion of marriage. Paul’s unwavering fidelity to this nation’s founding charter and his peers rampant infidelity can measured by the countless votes in which the Texas congressman stood as the sole opposition to the entire House of Representatives. This distinction is important as so many new Tea Party candidates are now criticized by the mainstream for being “extreme” in suggesting that we should follow the Constitution to the letter of the law, including dismantling the IRS, phasing out Social Security or abolishing the Department of Education. Such constitutionally-minded, nuts-and-bolts suggestions should be included in any serious conservative “pledge” to America-and have all been advocated by Paul his entire career.
To that extent that some conservatives may take issue with aspects of Paul’s constitutional philosophy is more often an invitation for self-examination. For example, many say they like Paul but part ways on foreign policy. Fair enough, but in supporting undeclared wars, the PATRIOT Act and forever empowering the Executive branch, such conservatives shouldn’t delude themselves that they actually stand for the Constitution or limited government in any substantive manner. In fact, they stand with the bulk of the Republican Party, who’ve also long made these constitutional exceptions, along with countless others, and not-so-curiously helped expand government every bit as much as the Democrats. Most Republicans claim to be for the Constitution-”but”-with the biggest “but” typically being a ridiculous and unnecessary foreign policy that costs as much as anything else the Tea Party now targets. Paul has always been for the Constitution, period, no “buts” about it.
So how comprehensively constitutional are conservatives willing to be? Those who wrote the Pledge to America obviously aren’t the least bit serious even as the Tea Party continues to show unprecedented conservative will. If the big government establishment now considers the Tea Party too radical, perhaps conservatives en masse should finally and fully consider the constitutional philosophy of the one man that establishment has also long considered too radical-and for the same reasons. There’s a reason Ron Paul’s influence continues to rise in conjunction with the rise of the Tea Party and to the extent that the movement adopts his philosophy, it will pledge itself to limiting government in a far more serious and comprehensive manner than it would listening to any other figure who now speaks in its name.
, bolstering 
or bombing Iraq, that party has always been willing to go big and bold on some of the largest government expansions in this nation’s history. But what about cutting government? You know, that stuff GOP politicians always talk about during election time?
in 1994 to the Pledge to America last week, the GOP has broken every contract or pledge it has ever made with conservatives. Now these same Republicans have made another empty promise, similar but even less appealing than the lies they’ve told in the past. 
environment in which so many are tired of conventional GOP politicians screwing around with the peripheral and irrelevant, why shouldn’t conservatives look to the one Republican who has never screwed around? Instead of wondering if John Boehner is now serious, trying to figure out what Sarah Palin is saying, hoping that Scott Brown turns out to be something special, looking for something worthwhile about Newt Gingrich or wondering which version of Mitt Romney might run for president, why shouldn’t those serious about limiting government get fully behind the one conservative leader who has always been dead serious?