Scientific Polls in NH vs. Straw Polls in NH

Some interesting facts:

New Hampshire has approximately 267,000 registered Republicans.

1% of that number is 2670 people.

182 people voted for Ron Paul at the NH straw poll you've all seen reported.

That would seem to force us to conclude one of two things:

1. Nearly 10% of the total registered Republicans who support Ron Paul in the state of NH showed up to vote in the straw poll.

-Or-

2. The "scientific" polls in NH that put Paul down at around 1% or 2% are flawed in some way.

I find #1 really, really hard to believe.

Capitol Hill Blue Completely Melts Down

An amusing meltdown from Doug Thompson today.

He's completely blown his cool under very slight pressure, demonstrating for all the world to see that he's not a serious journalist at all, but just another ranting blogger like the rest of us.

Let's check the series of events here:

1. Doug posts false information about Ron Paul's fundraising he cribbed from freemarketnews.com.

2. When the rumor he linked to and ranted about turns out to be false, he blames the Paul campaign, even though he has not and can not produce evidence that freemarketnews.com's rumor started with the campaign.

3. When people call and write him to complain, he deletes their posts and their emails and whines about it on his blog.

4. He then decides that complaint calls to a so-called journalist are somehow criminal, so he trots out the truly lamest internet whine of all - the good old "I've called the FBI and they will stop you from making me sad!" card. What a loser. What's next? Blog posts telling us how he doesn't have to listen to Paul supporters because he has a "great car" and a "hot girlfriend"? Grow up, dork.

I guess that's pretty much par for the course. You could almost write a book at this point about the stages a Ron Paul hater will go through. It's almost always the same.

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Capitol Hill Blue Desperately Slams Ron Paul

After getting the story on Ron Paul's 2nd quarter fundraising dead wrong earlier in the week, the wankers at Capitol Hill Blue are back today to whine about it.

Although they conspicuously don't talk about how their prediction on Paul's fundraising was dead wrong, they seem quite upset to see that Paul now has more cash on hand than doddering old fool and free-speech hater John McCain.

You can tell they're really angry, because they trot out the whole parade of anti-Paul smears: "racist", "anti-Semite", etc. They trot out the discredited Chronicle accusations as well. I had no idea they were such McCain fans. Sorry, guys. I hear your little hearts breaking.

They also try out a new smear, claiming that the Paul campaign had earlier claimed to have raised $5 million. They'd be hard-pressed to document this lie, however, since no Paul spokesman has ever been quoted making such a claim. They got that $5 million number from freemarketnews.com as a pure rumor - and they don't disclose that freemarketnews.com was also the source of the false $1.5 million number Blue quoted earlier this week. Nice way to try to pin your mistakes on the campaign, boys. Way to go.

What losers.

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Fred Thompson, Spy for Nixon

The Boston Globe reports that while serving as minority counsel to the Senate Committee investigating Watergate, Fred Thompson provided the Nixon White House with important information regarding the investigation's revelations.

This is ethically at the level of an attorney representing you in a civil suit conspiring with the opposing counsel to undermine your case.

What makes it worse is that Thompson made his reputation at that time as a "maverick" Republican who was honest enough to put party considerations aside and go after Nixon.

It turns out that he was just another whore for Nixon. If we're going to elect one of Nixon's plumbers to be President in 2008, doesn't Liddy have seniority? Don't the Nixon Whore Union rules require us to give him the first shot?

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Capitol Hill Blue - Chumps

Capitol Hill Blue is picking up a freemarketnews.com story about Ron Paul's fundraising and trumpeting it as evidence that Paul's campaign is doomed.

Uh...news flash. Everyone already knows Ron Paul can't win the Republican nomination. Paul seems to think he's running for the Republican nomination in 1980, and it's not 1980. The Republican party has shifted demographically and ideologically since then and there is no room in the party now for anything but slobbering torturers and Young Earth hillbillies.

That's not to say that Paul is wasting his time, however. By being in the campaign at all, Paul forces the other candidates to embrace their war policy and their extralegal detention policy and their hatred of the Bill of Rights that much more closely as they compete with each other to scorn Ron Paul. Since that dooms the eventual nominee to a McGovern-scale defeat in the general election, this is a very good thing.

That sort of spoiler campaign is also very, very inexpensive to run, so it really is of very little importance how much Paul has raised. That being said, I think given the track record over at freemarketnews.com, the folks at Capitol Hill Blue might want to hold off on doing their victory dance just yet. They pulled a number out of their ass over there before, and there's every likelihood they're doing it again.

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Believing this makes you a Ron Paul kook

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If you actually believe any of this, please turn yourself in and immediately report to Guantanamo.

Thanks.

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American Conservative Mag: Nothing Left to the Republican Party but the War

We Are the War Party

Congressional Republicans who doubt the Bush Doctrine face a primary purge.

I have noted for some time now that the Republican party no longer needs a platform. They can save time and paper at the convention by not discussing or voting on the platform for 2008. It is a sick charade for the party establishment to pretend that they still care about issues of economic liberty, of taxation, of federalism, of racial preferences, of regulation. None of that stuff matters to them any more and none of the base that is still sticking with the party gives a damn about any of it.

The only thing that matters is the war.

Period.

The sole qualification for being a Republican now is the desire to kill Iraqis. If want you to bathe yourself in the blood of Iraqi children, as Rudy Giuliani does, you're a good Republican. If you slobber at the prospect of torturing detainees in secret or extralegal prisons and camps, as Mitt Romney does, you're a good Republican. It doesn't matter that Mitt instituted compulsory universal health insurance in Massachusetts, and it doesn't matter what Rudy's record is on any other issue. Only the war matters.

That's also why they hate Ron Paul. His decades-long record on issues of spending, taxation, regulation, and federalism mean nothing. They're completely disregarded. They just don't matter any more, because Ron Paul committed the unpardonable sin: he stated openly that he doesn't want to kill Iraqis, and certainly doesn't want to kill Iranians. And on that basis, he is no longer a Republican - not to the party establishment, in any event.

Scooter Commutation Shows Why We Need Ron Paul in 2008

I'm under no illusions that Ron Paul would be the perfect Presidential candidate.

His currency theories in particular are highly anachronistic.

But I think anachronism is what we need this year. We need someone who is out of step with modern politics. Bush trumped even Clinton for achieving the perfect synthesis of goverance with political campaigning - if you can call what George W. Bush has done governance. Every action Bush has ever taken has been political; every action he has ever taken has been to advance or protect his political cabal. He has never, not even for a moment, merely served the nation.

As an antidote to that we need someone who is so caught up in their own image of themselves as a boy scout that this would be unthinkable for them. I really find it impossible to picture Paul torpedoing the judicial process to protect an aide. I find it impossible to picture Paul putting the political prospects of his party above the ability of the Congress or a prosecutor being able to investigate wrongdoing. I find it completely impossible to picture Paul handing out a commutation as a reward or inducement to an executive branch official.

John Mark Reynolds - Fool?

It's appropriate for me to inaugurate my blog for the 2008 campaign season with a critique of this post by Mr. Reynolds. I'm one of those prune-faced people who's interested in being right that he's so upset about.

Mr. Reynolds offers the sort of political argument that I really despise. Ron Paul is wrong, to Mr. Reynolds, because he is too concerned with being right. The way to be right, apparently, is to not give being right any thought whatsoever. This is the sort of intellectual drivel the Bush conservative base is left with in these late days.

After two terms of a President who proudly did the wrong thing at nearly every turn, perhaps the time has come for someone with a prune face to step in and balance the scales a little.

Reynolds is far too typically modern in his disdain for the concept of right and wrong and his enthusiasm for an amoral pragmatism. He resurrects the tired argument that worrying about being right gets in the way of practical policy:

"They are right, very, very right, but that is it. They have no humanity and no ability to make their rightness work out in the real work [sic - I assume he meant "world" here]."

Mr. Reynolds, on the other hand, demonstrates his humanity by favoring continuing a policy of pre-emptive war, and demonstrates his make-it-work practicality by arguing that equality between the sexes is a bad thing because it leads to "no children". More evidence of his robust practicality is his claim that "the goal of life is to balance all the competing interests of church, state, family and the individual in a working whole." It might be interesting to hear him describe a church "interest" that I need to be required by law to balance with my individual interests - or if not interesting, at least good for a laugh.