- UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE
- the racially ambiguous V leader demanding only positive media coverage
- a (one) world government
- "reptilian spies"
- I heard the word hope at least once
Or am I just to eager to jump on the Stossel network here?
Maybe it's time the Punditalkcrazy realized that Sarah Palin is the most polarizing politician in the Republican Party, not just America. Rasmussen reports:
Although, Newt is more evenly balanced. (Now there's five words in the English language I bet you never thought you'd see in the same sentence with a negation!)
Maybe Obama meant "fierce advocate against gay rights", though, in all fairness, maybe he didn't mean anything at all.
Maybe Charles Franklin (cofounder of Pollster.com) is smarter than the entire Punditalkcrazy put together. Okay, not saying much. But his take on Palin is all the proof you need....
Noxious though it may be, there's nothing aberrational about Palin's refusal to condemn anti-abortion violence as terrorism. The right has a long, long history of inciting violence, and excusing it, rather than condemning it. When Clinton was President, there were frequent examples of this. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the GOP Congress held hearings during which the "Militia" leaders were treated with deference and respect.
Then, just last fall, while Ron Paul was ramping up his "insurgent" presidential campaign--and in full denial about his past racist publications--he praised a couple who then engaged in an armed stand-off with federal officials. I wrote about it in a diary, "Ron Paul Equates Former Militia Wingnut Tax Evaders With Martin Luther King", which included this video, so there can be no mistaking Paul's position. The principle tax-evader in question, Edward Lewis Brown, was convicted of armed robbery and assault with a dangerous weapon in 1960, and was imprisoned until 1965. But Paul compared him not only to Martin Luther King, but to Ghandi as well:
Hey, they's not terra-ists! They's just Ghandi with a gun!
I'm waiting to see Grover Norquist speak at the Target Center in Minneapolis surrounded by a few thousand Ron Paul supporters. Yesterday a Ron Paul supporter proselytized to me for fifteen minutes about freedom and property before going on a rant against President Lincoln for provoking the civil war by raising taxes on South Carolina. This is, shall we say, 'out of the box' thinking.
Here's Tom Woods laying into McCain and Obama. His quips are remarkable, this one is a vicious criticism of Madeleine Albright.
And here's a line about McCain versus Obama on the tax code. It's fresh rhetoric, really compelling, and horrific at the same time.
... Norquist just spoke, and he talked about how Democrats are people who don't want the unemployed 'to get jobs and switch parties'. He also compared Republicans that vote for higher taxes to 'ratheads' in coke bottles.
Texas Congressman and Republican Primary candidate Ron Paul is holding a "counter convention" which he calls the Rally For the Republic in Minneapolis while the RNC goes on in St. Paul. While he says that this rally is not an event to get votes as a write-in candidate, it is certainly a thumb in McCain's eye.
The event covers "the great American principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy." It is strongly focused on getting out of Iraq.
This is an interesting mix of speakers who are independent, or libertarian, or radical-right-Republicans. Take a look at their schedule today:
Tuesday's Rally for the Republic schedule:
11:30 - Doors open
12:30 - Intro: Tucker Carlson
12:40 - National Anthem: Matt Colvin
12:50 - Invocation: Barb Davis White
12:55 - Howard Phillips
1:10 - Doug Wead
1:30 - Tom Woods
1:50 - Grover Norquist
2:10 - Lew Rockwell
2:30 - Bill Kauffman
2:50 - Special Guest
3:10 - Bruce Fein
3:35 - Gov. Jesse Ventura
4:05 - John Tate‚ Campaign for Liberty Presentation
4:25 - Gov. Gary Johnson
5:00 - Aimee Allen
6:00 - Break
7:00 - Intro: Barry Goldwater (Jr.)
7:05 - Ron Paul
8:05 - Sara Evans
9:30 - End of Program
9:30 - Jimmie Vaughan After Party
Paul has said that this "a philosophic campaign... my campaign for the Presidency has ended." But it will compete with the first really big day of the RNC (and be covered live on C-Span2) and can't be good for the Republican Party's hopes to get back on track after Gustave muted their first day.
So it looks like the Republicans have their own Nader... and it remains to be seen if this, combined with the Bob Barr Libertarian Party campaign, has an effect on the election.
Former Rep. Bob Barr won the Libertarian Party's Presidential nomination at the party's convention in Denver Sunday afternoon. He defeated long-time party activist Mary Ruwart, 54 to 46 percent, on the sixth ballot.
Fourteen candidates ran for the nomination. Former Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel was defeated in the fourth round.
Third place finisher Wayne Allyn Root, an internet gambling entrepreneur, is the vice-presidential nominee. (...)
"I'm sure will we emerge here with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party," Barr said in his victory speech.
For a great play by play of the convention, click here.
Now, if Barr-Root actually will be "with the strongest ticket in the history of the Libertarian Party," it would require at least 1.07% of the popular vote, surpassing the 1.06% Edwards Clark scored for a fourth-place finish in 1980. Since that election, the best libertarian performance was 0.50% by Harry Browne in 1996, also for fourth place. In fact, 1984 and 1988 are the only elections where the Libertarian nominee even managed to finish in third-place.
As a former congressman, Bob Barr appears to be a more formidable candidate than the typical third-party crusader. Also, Ron Paul's campaign demonstrated that there was both activist excitement, and a 2-3% national voting base, for an effective libertarian candidate. So, there does seem to be an opening, at least in theory.
However, I just don't think that Barr is going to be able to make a real impact on this election. In fact, he probably won't even break the 1.06%, 1980 high-water for Libertarians. For one thing, after decline sets in, third-parties in American never recover. The No Names, the Populists, the Socialists, The Progressives, the Reforms, the Greens-all of them went into permanent decline after an initial splash. Further, you can't change leaders in mid-stream, and Bob Barr is not going to attract the same support that Ron Paul had. The activist excitement around Ron Paul over the last year was closely connected to Ron Paul himself, and will not be easily transferable in such a short period of time. Yet further, even if the activist excitement around Ron Paul was transferable, it isn't going to a Libertarian-come-lately like Bob Barr. Even the Libertarian Party was lukewarm about Barr, as it took him six ballots to receive a narrow delegate majority of 54%.
So, while I would like to believe that Bob Barr will receive more than 1.06% of the vote, I just don't think it will happen. In fact, with Ralph Nader in the field, he won't even get all of the non-ideological, "f**k you" vote, which is the roughly 1% of the electorate that always chooses third-parties no matter what. It is nice to dream of Barr pulling down 3% of the vote, with his supporters drawing roughly 2-1 from the McCain camp, but in truth he will probably get about 1% of the vote, with about two-thirds of his supporters being people who would never vote for either McCain or Obama. So, Barr might swing the election 0.1% in favor of Obama, and thus probably cancel out Nader. There is an outside chance even this small amount will swing a state or two, but not much.
Third parties will not be a significant factor in this presidential election. If Ron Paul himself had run for the Libertarian nomination, it would be a different story. Alas, 'twas not to be.
Update: Another reason Barr is unlikely to be a factor is that third-party performance is actually on the decline (or, at best, stagnant). Click here and here for my post-2006 election analysis on this subject.
Author Pat Buchanan says President Bush should be impeached for failing to stop the invasion of illegal aliens across the U.S. border with Mexico.
"I think he's committed an impeachable offense in refusing to enforce the immigration laws and in failing to uphold the Constitution by defending the states against this invasion," Buchanan told radio talk-show host Curt Smith this weekend on National Public Radio stations in upstate New York.
"When you have 6 million people apprehended on the border and several million got in on your watch ? and you have the ability to stop it ? I think you're derelict in your duty," he said. "And if the president says 'I can't do it,' you need a new president who will do it."
"This is not Ellis Island," said Buchanan. "This is an invasion."
Theodore Roosevelt is one of my greatest political heroes. The "strenuous life" was T.R.'s definition of Americanism, a celebration of America's pioneer ethos, the virtues that had won the West and inspired our belief in ourselves as the New Jerusalem, bound by sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity. "We cannot sit huddled within our borders," he warned, "and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond."(...)
And for Roosevelt that common destiny surpassed material gain and self-interest. Our freedom and our industry must aspire to more than acquisition and luxury. We must live out the true meaning of freedom, and accept "that we have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither."
Some critics, in his day and ours, saw in Roosevelt's patriotism only flag-waving chauvinism, not all that dissimilar to Old World ancestral allegiances that incited one people to subjugate another and plunged whole continents into war. But they did not see the universality of the ideals that formed his creed.
The last major conservative split took place in the early 1990's, when Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were able to exploit conservative dissatisfaction with Bush Sr. over trade, immigration, the first Iraq war, and multilateral cooperation abroad. A McCain nomination has the potential re-open this exact same rift. It is ultimately a split between neoconservative imperialism and paleoconservative American exceptionalism. While McCain is a strong believer in the inherent superiority of American civilization, he draws many of the same internationalist conclusions from that belief that we have seen from the Bushes: spread American influence through foreign wars, free trade, religious evangelizing, and immigration policies that are relatively open when compared to those favored by other conservatives. This draws the ire of paleocons like Buchanan who are mainly interested in preserving what they see as the exceptionalism of American cultural identity through closed borders, closed trade, and a general disdain for involvement overseas.
With McCain as the nominee, a conservative split of this nature is almost inevitable. Like Bush, Iraq and immigration are two of the few areas where he simply refuses to pander to certain sections of his base. What is less inevitable is that this split will blow up into a full-scale primary and third party challenge ala 1992. In fact, that appears extremely unlikely, given what appears to be a remarkable decline in the political influence of paleoconservatives.
The first stage of the convoluted delegate selection process to the Republican national convention will take place tonight. While I don't expect it will receive much coverage--there are only about 30 stories discussing the caucuses on Google News right now, and 13 of them focus on Ron Paul's trip to the state--the results will provide significant insight into the state of the Republican nomination campaign none the less. With only eleven precincts across the entire state, turnout will be extremely low and limited to die-hard activists. With John McCain and Mitt Romney making the strongest pushes here, it will help to determine if John McCain's recent victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina has allowed him to turn a corner with the party faithful or not:
By most indications, the most organized pushes for delegates came from U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
For his part, McCain held a meet-and-greet function at the Camelot Club in Baton Rouge in late December, where handlers were able to get a bit of in-person delegate work done. With members of the national press hunkered down in a waiting area, McCain met privately for a brief period with several donors and members of the transition team of Gov. Bobby Jindal, a fellow Republican.
Romney has taken a more modern approach to herding delegates. His campaign oversaw a mass e-mail drive earlier this month that reached out to conservative voters and asked them to run as delegates for the Louisiana Republican Convention. In a response sent from the originating e-mail address, Alan Philip, Romney's regional political director, wrote that the names targeted for the drive were gleaned from lists compiled by old GOP campaigns in Louisiana. In particular, he cited the recent and failed attempt by term-limited state Sen. Craig Romero, R-New Iberia, to capture the 3rd Congressional District.
Tonight, 105 delegates to the February 16th state convention will be chosen. On February 16th, those 105 delegates will be trimmed down to 44 of the state's 47 national delegates (three delegates, representing the senior GOP leadership in the state, have already been chosen). Unless a candidate receives over 50% of the vote in the February 9th Louisiana primary, all of these delegates will be officially unpledged, and not obligated to support any candidate on the first ballot of the national convention. However, since the delegates signed up to support a candidate in today's caucuses, we will know the candidates which each of the delegates favor.
Now, with little media, and with the delegates almost certain to be officially "uncommitted," it may not seem like anything is at stake here. However, as I discussed yesterday, McCain has struggled in low-turnout party caucuses and conventions like these, while Romney has thrived. If McCain is able to win the most delegates to the state convention, it will be a strong sign that he can indeed perform well in caucus and convention states, thus greatly improving his chances to become the nominee. However, if Romney wins, especially if he wins by the wide margins of his Wyoming and Nevada victories, it will be a confirming sign that McCain will struggle mightily in caucuses and conventions around the country, and that Romney is indeed the choice of the party faithful (remember that Bush Sr. introduced Romney when he made his big speech on Mormonism). With numerous caucus and convention states between now and February 9th--Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Washington, West Virginia--Romney can potentially use them as a rich delegate farm, combined with a Florida to California strategy, to emerge as the delegate leader after February 9th. From that point, he would be positioned to take the nomination on March 4th with a double win in Ohio and Texas.
So, even without media, and even without official delegate selection, tonight's result will reveal quite a bit about the state of the Republican nomination campaign. Don't expect Huckabee to play well here, since he is not nearly as well liked by the party faithful as Romney, and since Louisiana is mainly a Catholic state rather than an evangelical one. However, Paul's dedicated activists should once again do better than expected, just as they did in Iowa and Nevada. If the results from Nevada are replicated here, a crushing Romney victory combined with Paul edging out McCain for second, that will be the best possible sign that the Republican nomination fight will go on for a long, long time.
Romney's enormous victory in Nevada tells us several things about today:
Nevada Polls Way Off: First, Romney looks like he won with about 46%-47% of the vote, beating McCain by more than 30%. In fact, it appears that Ron Paul finished second in Nevada ahead of McCain, and did so by at least 5%. Both of these results are nowhere near the pre-caucus polls, none of which had shown Paul higher than fourth, Romney ahead by more than 15%, or McCain below 19%. So, our first lesson is that Nevada polls are entirely unreflective of Nevada results so far.
Activists and organization matters. Once again, Ron Paul has decisively outperformed the polls in a caucus, and McCain has under-performed. Romney, the favorite of the Republican establishment, did very well. The lesson here, I think, is that organization and activists matter, and that McCain has neither. Clinton's edge with the establishment, and Obama's edge with unions and activists should matter. Then again, since Todd Beeton thinks that Clinton's final rally was better attended than Obama's, perhaps Obama does not have an activist edge in Nevada.
McCain is in real trouble: Almost all of McCain's support is soft support and media driven, which is why he will do poorly in caucuses and closed primaries as the campaign moves forward. If he loses South Carolina tonight, which is starting to seem quite likely, there is no way he can be considered the frontrunner anymore. On the Republican side, there are very few open primaries on Super Tuesday, and even fewer if one discounts the southern primaries where Huckabee will be favored should he win South Carolina. If McCain goes down tonight, he will have a difficult time getting back up.
Interesting results so far. The Democratic caucuses in Nevada are gathering as I finish typing this.
Paul led among Republican caucus goers in only two categories. One category he took a slight lead in was independents. The other category he blew everyone away with was this one.
It's also worth noting that while some of Paul's support came from his war stance, by far the largest chunk of his supporters named the economy as their top issue. In other words, Paul is the candidate of angry independents who are extremely angry with George Bush and believe that debasing the currency through wars and inflation is the stated policy goal of the United States. It's like they are Perotistas amped up on reasonable-sounding conspiracies. The Cunning Realist has more.
I don't know why, but Ron Paul seems to compel a dramatic lack of nuance among mainstream liberal types. He represents a pretty simple phenomenon, it seems to me. Where Paul is sane (American empire is bad, war on drugs is bad), the Beltway gaggle is crazy. Where the Beltway is sane (Lincoln was good, IRS is necessary), Paul is a lunatic. It's like matter-antimatter.
Here's Ezra Klein expressing a fairly common sentiment among both Democratic base voters and Democratic elites.
As a result of my post defending Obama this morning, I'm getting a bunch of links along the lines of "Ezra Klein, no fan of Obama..."
This is, to be sure, my failure as a writer, so just to be clear: I'm impressed with all three of the major Democrats, and, for that matters, most of the other Democrats not named "Bill Richardson."
Ezra is happy with the Democratic candidates; most Democratic voters share Ezra's views. I don't (and neither do a few others). The issues we are dealing with today - health care, jobs, even a war in Iraq - are literally the same issues we dealt with in 1992. How can that possibly be considered progress? A real progressive candidate would take an apolitical problem and turn it into a mainstream political subject. None of our candidates have done that. Here are five easily mainstreamable problems ripe for the picking. There are more of these, I'm just picking at five that touch on the national security state, secrecy, economic injustice, and attacks on our civil liberties.
Subject: End the War on Drugs
Factoid: There are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done.
Marijuana is America's largest cash crop, and it is responsible for around 225,000 arrests a year. Overall, the war on drugs incarcerates around 1 million people a year. Direct spending on the war on drugs this year is $50 billion dollars, about $600 a second. Around half of high school seniors have consumed marijuana (pdf). Simply put, why do some people go to jail for marijuana and cocaine, and others run for President?
Subject: End corporate media ownership:
Factoid: General Electric, a major defense contractor and conglomerate, owns NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.
Our media is owned and controlled by a few major companies. One of them, GE, has major defense contracts, and strong incentives for war. It also has huge interests in the financial industry. Why is this company controlling our news content again, while we are in two wars? And why did the FCC just relax ownership requirements in local areas, again?
Subject: End American empire
Factoid: As of 1998, America had troops stationed in 144 countries around the world.
There are any number of ways to talk about this issue, from disparities of foreign aid to complaints about the IMF to the war in Iraq to the CIA and blowback. The bottom line is that America has troops everywhere in the world, it's expensive, the way it is done now is a bad idea, and we need to bring them home and return to being a republic. That or we need to figure out how to be a responsible international power again and get rid of the Blackwater-style military we are building and the gunrunning vigilante CIA-style Cold War and post-Cold War nonsense.
Subject: End the war economy:
Factoid: Money for Iraq keeps passing in 'emergency' legislation to avoid being subject to budget rules.
For some reason, Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans argue that they are fiscally responsible while ignoring their votes to spend 700-800B a year on war. Libertarian charlatans like energy expert Amory Lovins think that the corporate sector and the military sector are legitimate parts of the state, but that other spending is wasteful. The whole notion of the military not being a part of the overall government is crazy, and reflective of a huge, corrupt, and Soviet-style misallocation of capital through secret budgets and fear.
Subject: End the cradle-to-prison superhighway
Factoid: 2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world.
Think slavery has ended? Think torture is 'new'? Think again. With two million people in prison, and tens of thousands of sexual assaults every year, prison is a huge industry and a horrendous abridgment of the idea that is America.
Touching on any of these massive injustices in our economic infrastructure is something no candidate has systematically done. Only John Edwards has remotely addressed the concept of the war on terror, in a somewhat half-hearted way, and he has made 'poverty' a somewhat commonly repeated theme, though not in any meaningful sense. Clinton and Obama are disgracefully absent on these topics. Ironically, Bill Richardson, aside from his great work on residual forces, has also said that the 'war on drugs is not working', which reflects perhaps a more executive oriented and confident worldview. Chris Dodd has also advocated for marijuana decriminalization, which is a less aggressive but still laudable sentiment, especially in light of his work on core constitutional issues.
So anyway, while the insider wonk community is happy that their issues seem to be taken care of, and Democratic base voters like the different candidates we have, I find that actual progressive reframing of our political system is appearing only at the margins of our secondary candidates like Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd, and among crazy white supremacist types like Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. Each of the five hinges I've discussed starts with the verb 'end', and that was not planned when I started this post. I think it means that we must end a chapter in American history, and begin a new one.
Restoring healthy communities, healthy citizens, a healthy global order, healthy local media, and a healthy sustainable economy are the key drivers of where need to go as a country. The cancerous symptoms are all around us, and leading Democratic Presidential candidates are too corrupt and morally crippled to even begin talking about them. But we'll get there.
Ron Paul supporter are hiring a blimp to fly from Washington, DC, to Boston, and then over New Hampshire. And they are doing it through a for-profit media company, so it's not subject to campaign finance laws. The website cycles through donor names publicly to give people credit for giving, which is radically transparent, and is backed by former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith, whose aim is to gut campaign finance laws by opening the loophole of funneling money through for-profit media companies.
Paul has by far the most innovative support network of any candidate this cycle. They are techno-utopians, young guys, ardent libertarians,e tc. and they don't care about the fact that he has long ties to the white supremacist world. In other words, it's everyone who was annoying in college.
Still, Ron Paul blimp is pretty damned creative, and it shows the hold that constitutional language can have in driving a populist message.
Józef Pilsudski of Poland is one of the most interesting figures of European history during the first third of the 20th century. Variously a communist, a nationalist, a liberal democrat, and a crypto-fascist strongman, he ran the gamut of inter-war European ideologies. He also employed a wide variety of policies to achieve his various aims, the two most interesting of which were Prometheism and Miedzymorze. Here is a quick description of Prometheism:
Prometheism (Polish: "Prometeizm") was a political project initiated by Poland's Józef Pilsudski. Its aim was to weaken Tsarist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, by supporting nationalist independence movements of the major non-Russian peoples that lived within the borders of Russia or the Soviet Union.
Between the World Wars, Prometheism and Pilsudski's other concept of a "Miedzymorze federation" constituted two complementary geopolitical strategies for him and some of his political heirs.
Miedzymorze was a project pursued after World War I by Józef Pilsudski, of a Polish-led federation of Central and Eastern European countries. Invited to join were the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Czech lands.
The Polish name Miedzymorze may be translated as "Intersea" or "Between-seas" and has also been rendered, from the Latin, as "Intermarum" or "Intermarium."
Neither project succeeded, at least partially because Pilsudski engaged in a series of military conflicts with neighboring states, thus rendering such broad co-operation impossible. However, I admire Pilsudski's audacious strategic goals to defend a series of new and relatively small nations against the massive empires of Germany and Russia, from which many of these states had been recently liberated. Had both plans succeeded, World War Two would almost certainly have been avoided, and the Cold War might have been averted as well. Now, nearly a century later, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent eastward expansion of the European Union, both Prometheism and Miedzymorze have basically been achieved. The peoples of the Baltic, Black and Caspian Sea basins have achieved independence (though some still lack democracy). Most of these new nations have joined with international organizations such as NATO and the EU that provide them with strategic security from what is still quite clearly an aggressive Russia.
I wonder if Pilsudski's goals can be applied to the American political system. For one thing, the pluralist strategy I have discussed for the Democratic Party and progressive movement is reasonably analogous to the international concept of Miedzymorze. Further, the past six months have strongly suggested that a Prometheist strategy might be within reach. At least three major pieces of the Republican coalition have threatened significant breaks with the larger coalition, which collectively would leave Republicans as a rump, minority political party for a generation. Consider the following:
With the rapid growth of both all three House ideological caucuses, Blue Dogs, New Democrats, and Progressives, certainly Democrats have their own balkanization problem. However, in contrast to Republicans where three major third party threats are still on the table, none of the divisions among Democrats have resulted in any serious third-party threats this year. I don't think a total anti-Republican Prometheian strategy is possible in the short term, since I don't know what circumstance would result in the simultaneous splintering of the socially conservative theocons, the country club Bloomberg types, and the American exceptionalist, libertarian Ron Paul types, but it still seems useful to think about. As Democrats expand their coalition to include a series of smaller, very pro-Democratic identity groups, driving deep wedges into the Republican coalition seems to be a natural, complimentary strategy. This is very much what happened to Democrats in the 1980's and 1990's, after all, as Dixiecrats, New Dems, and Naderites all splintered the party in different directions just as Republicans were sweeping to power nationwide.
So, any thoughts on strategies to drive deep wedges into the Republican coalition? This isn't something Democrats have been very good at lately, or really ever, but I think it is a subject worth exploring in more detail.
This is why the Republican Party is not going anywhere! So shouted several Ron Paul supporters who were turned away by the San Francisco Republican Party after they attempted to participate in its recent straw poll.
[Because folks are still being gulled by Ron Paul.]
In ancient Greek mythology, Procrustes (the stretcher) was a bandit from Attica who had an iron bed into which he fitted every passerby. If they were too tall, he would amputate their heads and/or feet, if too short, he would stretch them on the rack. Nobody ever fit, because the bed was secretly adjustable before hand. Ron Paul's libertarianism is just like Procrustes' bed: one size fits all.. or none. Including, of course, the truth.
In my two-part diary "Ron Paul OPPOSSES Cutting Taxes-IF He Smells A Messican!" [ Part 1] [ Part 2], I went into excruciating detail about how Ron Paul fundamentally and repeatedly misrepresented the issue, abandoning his signature stance of opposing taxes because of his underlying nativism and racism. Usually, however, his nativism and racism are expressed through his narrow ideology, not by abandoning it, and thus they are kept in the background. (He's a libertarian, and it's not his fault if destroying the Federal Government hurts people of color disproportionately.) In this diary, I want to highlight two crystal-clear examples of a more pervasively prominent phenomena-how his ideology utterly warps his perception and presentation of fundamental problems for which he has no answers, because his ideology is utterly inadequate.
The two examples I'll use are two biggies: health care and global warming. Neither one can be dealt with via libertarian means. Indeed, the problems with both are direct results of market failure, made much, much worse by the dominance of knee-jerk rightwing ideology that rejects the very essence of what is needed to deal with them: effective Federal Government action to "promote the general welfare" just like it says in the Constitution. This is the subtext of this diary: Far from being derived from or consistent with the Constitution, Ron Paul's rigid libertarianism is directly opposed to one of the Constittuion's core purposes.
There are a large number of tests floating around online that are designed to determine an individual's political leanings. as A simple Google search verifies this. I generally don't like such tests and rarely take them, since I think most of them have been constructed to prove a point for one candidate or ideology rather than actually determine someone's political orientation. Further, even in the instances where such tests were constructed primarily with determining someone's political orientation rather than supporting a candidate or cause, I find them further problematic because of what they don't measure. Typically, such tests rank where someone fits on either one or two left-right axis of social policy, foreign policy, and economic policy, but leave out questions such as whether or not you are crazy.
Such omissions are a serious problem when considering the Democratic presidential field. For example, according to most of these tests, Dennis Kucinich probably ranks as either the most, or close to the most, progressive Democratic candidate. So, progressives should supoort him, right? However, at the same time, Kucnich is talking about seeing UFOs, his wife is talking up a Kucinich-Paul 2008 ticket, and it appears that a Kucinich administration would re-open the 9-11 commission. Check out the final 1:11 of the video for more on this:
Dennis Kucinich stands for some great progressive policies, including single-payer health care and a reduction in the size of the national security state. Sometimes, he also says what needs to be said about the Democratic leadership and Iraq, even if I don't necessarily agree with his strategy to end the war in Congress. However, despite his voting record, Ron Paul is the most fundamentally anti-progressive candidate I have seen since Pat Buchanan, and to suggest an alliance with him is both crazy and anti-progressive. Further, progressivism is not interchangeable with conspiracy theories, although that does seem to be what connects Kucinich and Paul in this instance. Kucinich and Paul connect quite well along the crazy axis that is rarely tested in those political orientation surveys, an axis that I think needs to be included along with economic, social or foreign policy in order to develop an accurate picture of a person's politics.
Still, there is something quite amusing that could happen as a result of a potential Paul--Kucinich alliance. Unity08, originally designed as a top-down alliance between LieberDems and Country Club Republicans, could end up dominated by Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich online activist types. Even before talk of a Kucinich--Paul alliance crept up, both Paul and Kucinich have already refused to endorse the nominees from their parties, at least without a series of litmus test strings attached. Further, Unity08 is looking to nominate one Democrat and one Republican in an online convention, and both Kucinich and Paul have decently sized online followings that could easily swamp an organization with as little online buzz as Unity08.
Paul--Kucinich 2008. Now that would be a wild third-party, "Unity" ticket. The crazy axis indeed. I can't say I would be entirely opposed to such an alliance, either. At the very least, it would be highly amusing to watch, and also quite satisfying to see Unity08 go down in flames like that. Further, I bet it would draw significantly more potential Republican supporters than Democratic supporters, given both that Ron Paul would be on the top of the ticket and that white men tend to go third party more than any other demographic group. Maybe they can get Justin Timberlake to redo one of his hits for their campaign theme: bringing crazy back.
In Part 1, I laid out the background for the US/Mexico "Totalization Agreement,"an arrangement, similar to others entered into with other countries since the late 1970s, which has the primary aim of eliminating double taxation for social security purposes. Ordinarily, this is just the sort of thing one would expect Ron Paul to be leading the charge for. But with Mexicans involved in the equation, it turns out, not so much. With the background out of the way, it's time for him to take center stage.
Totalization Agreements-A Capsule Recap
Totalizaiton agreements do two simple things:
(1) arrange things between two governments so that people and businesses don't suffer from double taxation, and
(2) arrange things between two government so that if people pay into two different social security systems, they can get credit for paying into both.
The overall logic, and salient particulars of the proposed US/Mexico Totalizaiton Agreement were discussed in Part 1. And so, without further ado, we turn to...
OH NO! Not ANOTHER Ron Paul Diary! Well, yes, and a rather arcane subject, to boot. But there's a method to this madness, based on the premises that (a) everything is connected, (b) the universe is a fractal, and (c) you can sometimes learn the most by examining seemingly secondary matters where the BS defenses are weaker. Furthermore, picking apart a far right movement candidate is important for the larger purpose of reflecting, yet again, on the lack of symmetry between left and right in America today. Part 1 lays out the basics of the issue. Part 2 gets into how Ron Paul completely misrepresented it, taking the the exact opposite of his his usual anti-tax position.
Arguably Ron Paul's greatest bugaboo is cutting taxes. As a doctor, quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if someday he didn't recommend cutting taxes as a cure for the common cold. So imagine my surprise when I discovered a tax cut he's opposed to!
Well, I wasn't really surprised. You see, the tax cut was for Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, Americans working in Mexico, and the companies that employ them. And when it comes to Mexicans-or anything hinting of them-Ron Paul has a tendency to, well, let's just say that he claims he's not a racist. But actions speak louder than words. And here is one blindingly clear example where Ron Paul opposes cutting taxes. In fact, he can't even bring himself to accurately describe what he's even talking about. So I'll have to do it for him.
The issue at hand is what's called a "Totalization Agreement," that harmonizes the payroll tax-collecting policies between two countries that both have social insurance systems (like Social Security). Such agreements started in Western Europe, where the phenomena of citizens from one country working in another has long been a common one. Without such agreements it was commonplace for both individuals and the companies that employed them to be taxed by both governments.
Clearly, this is not fair. Anyone can see that. Anyone except Ron Paul, that is. Here we have a classic example of the kind of situation that Paul is always railing against-an unfair tax burden-but unlike many of the situations where he imagines that burdens are unfair, or simply assumes it, for no clearly defensible reason, this situation is so obviously unfair that it only needs to be described to be seen as unfair. All of which leads us to question his purported motivation in raising the issue of "unfair tax burdens" in so many other situations. If that was really his concern, he would be championing the cause of totalizaiton with every country in the world. Instead, he is bitterly opposed to a proposed totalization agreement with Mexico. And that smells just a wee bit like racism to me.
But, go ahead, jump to the flip, and smell for yourself.
