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  1. Havakasha is offline
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    12-27-2011, 10:41 AM #1

    Paul Builds Campaign on Doomsday Scenarios

    Much like Peter Schiff his favorite "economist" (who got almost all his 2011 economic predictions wrong.)

    http://news.yahoo.com/paul-builds-ca...161301486.html

    Paul builds campaign on doomsday scenarios
    By Andy Sullivan | Reuters – 19 hrs ago


    WASHINGTON, Iowa (Reuters) - The man who might win the Republican Party's first presidential nominating contest fears that the United Nations may take control of the U.S. money supply.
    Campaigning for the January 3 Iowa caucuses, Ron Paul warns of eroding civil liberties, a Soviet Union-style economic collapse and violence in the streets.
    The Texas congressman, author of "End the Fed," also wants to eliminate the central banking system that underpins the world's largest economy.
    "Not only would we audit the Federal Reserve, we may well curtail the Federal Reserve," Paul told a cheering crowd of more than 100 in this small Iowa city last week.
    Paul, 76, is facing questions for racist writings that appeared under his name two decades ago, which he has disavowed as the work of "ghost writers."
    But Paul's dark-horse presidential bid ultimately could founder, analysts and others say, because of increasing questions about how his unorthodox vision of government would work in the real world.
    Republican rivals criticize his anti-war, isolationist approach to foreign policy as dangerously naive, and object to his plans to slash the Pentagon's budget and pull back U.S. troops from overseas.
    Non-partisan analysts say his economic proposals - drastic spending cuts, elimination of the Federal Reserve and a return to the gold standard - would plunge the country back into recession.
    "Paul appeals to people whose knowledge of major issues is superficial (and) he sees conspiracies where there are none," said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Potomac Research Group, an analysis firm. "If he does well in Iowa, which is likely, it will be an enormous embarrassment to the Republicans."
    However, Paul's calls for a dramatically limited government and a hands-off foreign policy are resonating among voters who have grown deeply alienated from Washington after a decade of war and nearly five years of economic malaise.
    "Obama got into office and I can't tell the difference between him and Bush," said Deanna Pitman, a homemaker from Bloomfield, Iowa, citing President Barack Obama's support for policies such as the Wall Street bailout and the war in Afghanistan that began under George W. Bush.
    Polls show Paul jockeying for the lead in the Iowa caucuses, and political observers say his organization in the state is unmatched. His campaign stops draw hundreds of enthusiastic supporters, along with undecided voters who are giving him a look.
    On the campaign trail, he reaches out to Tea Party supporters on the right and Occupy Wall Street supporters on the left.
    Some potential supporters from the left have been put off by Paul's uncompromising support for the free market.
    At a campaign stop in this small city of about 7,000, Paul told breast cancer survivor Danielle Lin that insurance companies should not be required to offer coverage to people who are already sick.
    "It's sort of like me living on the Gulf Coast, not buying insurance until I see the hurricane," said Paul, whose Galveston-based district was devastated by a hurricane in 2008. "Insurance is supposed to measure risk."
    The response left Lin in tears. While her insurance covered her treatment, she said, several of her friends were not so fortunate.
    "I watched three friends die because they didn't have insurance," said Lin, a registered Democrat who is looking for a Republican candidate to support this time.
    "Nobody can afford private insurance, nobody can. And they're dead."
    APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS

    continued by clicking on link at top
    Last edited by Havakasha; 12-27-2011 at 10:54 AM.

  2. Havakasha is offline
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    01-03-2012, 09:19 PM #2
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...y.html?hpid=z3

    Richard Cohen
    Opinion Writer
    Isolationism redux via Ron Paul

    By Richard Cohen, Published: January 2

    The blogger Andrew Sullivan, typing faster than he could think, endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican presidential nomination. (He took it back, but we’ll get to that later.) Sullivan is British-born, Oxford-taught and, like so many from that sceptered isle, gifted in print and speech. Still, he somehow did not realize that if someone like Paul had been president in the 1940s, his homeland might have succumbed to Nazi Germany while America, maddeningly isolationist, sat out the war. No doubt, curriculum changes would have been made at Oxford.

    Paul opposes just about all international treaties and organizations. He would have the United States pull out of the United Nations and NATO. He would do away with foreign aid, abolish the CIA and essentially turn his back on the rest of the world. This is pretty much what used to be called isolationism, and it allowed Hitler to presume, quite correctly as it turned out, that America would not interfere with his plans to conquer Europe, Britain included. It took Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, not the other way round, to get Uncle Sam involved.



    The isolationism of the 1930s and early ’40s has come roaring back — in the person of Paul, I am tempted to write, but that is not exactly the case. The old isolationism was deeply conservative, both socially and economically, and its leaders — Sen. William Borah, R-Idaho, for instance — would never have advocated the decriminalization of recreational drugs. Paul does because he is a libertarian. It is this ideology coupled with his staunch antiwar pose that attracts so many young people and, when you take another look, some not so young people as well. Sullivan is/was one of them, but others on both the left and the right have praised Paul on this score, as if his antiwar position can be extracted from his general nuttiness to make a rational candidate. No such luck.

    Now some of these people — notably Sullivan — have backed off. Paul’s old newsletters have (once again) surfaced, and their smarmy racism is downright repellent. Paul said he did not write the stuff, and maybe that’s the case. But there’s more than one noxious newsletter, and his name is on them all. Either he never read his stuff, or he did and didn’t wince, or he had people working for him who thought a little racism would please the boss. None of those explanations flatter him.

    Just as troubling, though, is what was known about Paul all along — and that is a foreign policy, if it can be called that, drained of morality. His total indifference to what happens overseas is chilling and reminiscent of the old isolationism, best articulated in Des Moines — a world capital this election season — by Charles Lindbergh back in 1941. In that speech, Lindbergh identified three groups that wanted to take America to war against Germany: the Brits, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration. They all had their reasons, he acknowledged, but, “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.” I can almost hear these very words coming out of the mouth of Paul.