The Pseudo Conservative, Pseudo Libertarian Views of Glenn Beck and Ron Paul

Glenn Beck and Ron Paul and most of the other "small government dogma" types that push this "the government is the problem" swill like to pretend that they are "conservatives" or "libertarians".  But, they are really neither if you go by the more traditional, classic definitions of the terms.

The first tenet of original libertarianism, which has cross mojinated with modern "conservatism" at this point,is that the ONLY legitimate purpose of government is to protect the rights of the people. I wonder how you can protect people's rights without protecting their person or how you can abstractly separate rights from physical well being with regards to regulations, laws, government agencies or whatever, but somehow Beck and his followers think they make sense. They don't.  Conservatism also used to be about espousing the traditional, spiritual, community values and care for neighbors or the "least of these".  Somehow, conservatism has morphed into Ayn Rand's anti altruistic, pro business, pro corporate, anti government version of reality.  It makes no sense to me and it probably doesn't make sense to you if you are reading on this website.

Chaps like Glenn Beck and Ron Paul, et al, say they want to minimize government and that no one should expect the government to protect them. He asserted that since the government can't, won't or shouldn't protect us that we need to all keep guns around and be ready to get in line for a bucket brigade in case of catastrophe as if we live in Tombstone of the old west or something.

As Ken Brooker Langston points out in his article "Why I Am Not A Libertarian", its true that of all the political groupings out there, guys like Beck and his followers have the most grandiose rhetoric. They get to spout all that stuff about freedom vs. tyranny and use the quotes the founding fathers made about King George and so on...

It's also the perfect belief system for young, uneducated or fundamentalist people that see things in stark black and white and especially young males. You don't need knowledge or experience or details or nuances on complicated issues. All you need to "get it" is to buy in to essentially ONE BIG IDEA that supposedly resolves everything- that other than a minimalist military and court system that government and taxation is evil, that all you need is more gun rights, slight protection of life by the authorities, to enforce property rights and contracts and then the "free market" AKA Ayn Rand's magical, laissez faire economic principles will take care of everything else. How do I know this? Because for a few years as a college freshman and sophomore between 1982-84 I bought it and learned ALL the arguments before I grew up and figured out that the world doesn't work that way. It never has and never will no matter what you call it, reaganomics, trickle down economics, free market capitalism, whatever. It has been tried and it has a track record of success on par with hardcore socialism, it sucks.  Someone will say that the death toll from hardcore socialism is much higher... but you can only try to make a point like that if you decide not to count the mega- millions of laborers, Indigenous people, American Indians, Africans and so on that died and are still dying in the ongoing conquest of the West and the endless quest for the gold, coal, oil, timber, cotton and gemstones.

Beck and the rest of the pseudo-conservative/libertarian's view of political realities is a caricature, a simplistic right wing fantasy and it just can't work.

The truth is actually that we live in a society that is a hybrid of pure capitalism or socialism and it has been for a very long time... It works somewhat ugly when it "works" (depending on who and where you are) at all... It has boom and bust cycles and trends, but its about as good as we can expect to do at trying to manage a complex, pluralistic country in a complicated and jacked up world, especially when we've put corporations, materialism and consumerism and the profit motive at the very pinnacle of our value system.

As for me, I don't really care if the government is big or small so long as it is doing the right things and doing them as efficiently as possible and it does not impinge too much upon my personal life.  In this approach one does not need either "small government" or "more government" dogmas.

One day guys like Beck and the rest will be mere shadowy and unpleasant memories in a world that has left them behind... assuming we don't crash and burn the planet or Western "culture" first.  Some days I am more optimistic about the future than others.  After reading about Rick Perry's latest poll numbers, today is is one of the less optimistic days.

Geysers and Floods of Pig Feces: The Bush Environmental Legacy

In light of the threat of Hurricane Irene wreaking havoc once again in the Coastal Carolinas I have decided to take up the sword and blog again.  Just as Hurricane Floyd did in 1999 when it washed out millions of gallons of animal waste from concentrated animal feeding operations, Hurricane Irene threatens a repeat of the same catastrophe since there are, as far as I can tell, still no hard regulations or laws dealing with the waste management practices of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). 

For now, allow me to address this matter with this old chestnut that I once crafted for my circle of e-mail friends in the days before Facebook and Twitter. Enjoy: 

Geysers of Pig Feces: The Bush Environmental Legacy:

(excerpted and adapted and de-nastywordified from a book by Al Franken, arch enemy of one Bill O'Reilly; Al Franken, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them:  A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, Dutton, New York, 2003, p. 329-335.  Since then Franken Became a Senator and Bill is still Bill and somehow still on the air although entrapped in the hermetically sealed bubble of FOX News's version of reality)

Former President G.W. Bush would argue that our natural resources are best managed by people intimately familiar with all the relevant regulations and statutes, and the tricks polluters use to evade them.

I agree. Such people include academics, regulators, and envi­ronmental advocacy groups. Experts all. Oh, but let's not forget the lobbyists for the polluters themselves. In their own way, they are every bit as expert. This last group seems to be disproportionately represented in this administration. There's people like: I am not going to put you through a long list of horrible environ­mental actions taken by this administration. Instead, I refer you to what TeamFranken calls the Internet. For instance, a Google search of the terms "Bush, horrible, environment" yields 42,500 websites, some of which discuss Bush's environmental record without any reference to horny, barely legal coeds.

Instead, I want to focus on what, for me, is the symbol of the Bush administration's relationship to the environment: the sky-scraping pig feces geyser.

The scene I described at the beginning of this chapter was not from some science fiction movie. It's very real. It happened on one of the growing number of factory farms that are despoiling vast tracts of America. It's a very, very crappy story.

Before we start, allow me to make it clear that I love meat. In fact, I am eating meat right now. Sitting to my right are two mem­bers of TeamFranken. Sitting to my left are two pounds of summer sausage.

Twenty years ago, the hogs produced in this country were raised by family farmers. Today, three companies produce 60 per­cent of all the hogs in America. And they do it in factory farms, or CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations are, perforce, Con­centrated Animal Feces Operations. Every hog produces ten times as much feces as a human being. Imagine if you produced ten times as much shit as you do right now. You'd probably be able to read this entire book on the can, instead of just this one chapter.

A single CAFO in Utah is home to 850,000 hogs, producing as much shit as the city of New York. New York City has fourteen sewage treatment plants. CAFOs have none. This presents some­thing of a problem.

In order to dispose of hog waste, farmers have, since time im­memorial, used it as fertilizer. It's a nice idea. The pig eats an ear of corn and, two or three minutes later, takes a dump. The feces is then used as fertilizer to grow more corn, which is then fed to the pig, producing more feces, and so on and so forth. It's the circle of life.

The concentration of hundreds of thousands of animals in a small area has disrupted this delicate balance by overloading the feces side of the equation. The waste from a hundred thousand pigs cannot be recycled in the same way. This is where our lagoons come into play.

A typical factory farm lagoon holds anywhere from five to twenty-five million gallons of untreated pig dung. As you might imagine, it smells a bit. In fact, according to pilots, you can smell a CAFO dung lagoon from an altitude of three thousand feet. The smell also travels horizontally. People lucky enough to live in the vicinity of an industrial hog farm are, with each breath, made keenly aware of the cause of their declining property values. If you live downwind of a CAFO, the value of your property drops thirty percent. If you drink a glass of orange juice, it tastes like hog shit.

"I've seen grown men cry because their homes stank," says Don Webb, a very sad retired hog farmer.

The dung stink is exacerbated by the practice of spraying excess shit into the air and onto fields of Bermuda grass when the lagoons threaten to overflow. The industry maintains that spraying the shit onto Bermuda grass is a productive way of recycling the sewage, al­though the grass is so toxic that it will kill any animal that eats it. At any rate, most of the sprayed feces just goes into the environ­ment, seeping into the groundwater, into the air, and into rivers and streams.

In 1995, a spill from one of these lagoons killed a billion fish in the Neuse River of North Carolina. Every year since, dead fish have continued to wash up onshore by the tens of millions. They're not dying from the smell. No, these fish are falling prey to a pre­viously unknown life form spawned in the pig shit basins and car­ried into the river waters: the pfiesteriapiscicida. This dinoflagellate is a microscopic free-swimming single-celled organism that can mutate into at least twenty-four different forms, depending on its prey. It attacks the fish, stunning them with one toxin, then lique­fying their flesh with another, then feasting on the liquefied skin and tissue. This is why so many of the fish in the Neuse (dead and alive) sport horrible, bloody lesions.

The fishermen and bridge keepers of the Neuse have also de­veloped these ugly sores, which is why they don't wear shorts on a first date. Of course, it's hard to get a date when you suffer from lethargy, headaches, and such severe cognitive impairment that you can't remember your own name or dial a telephone number. Which pfiesteria also causes.

Because the meat industry in this country has become vertically integrated, Big Meat has put the small independent hog farmer out of business. Twenty years ago there were 27,500 family hog farm­ers in North Carolina alone. Now there are none. Today, a single company named Smithfield owns more than 70 percent of the state's hogs. Small farmers are learning that you can't beat Big Meat.

Nobody claims that factory farming is pretty. But its defend­ers say that it brings economies of scale that drive down the price of meat for consumers. This is true as long as you don't factor in the all the dung. Bobby Kennedy, Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Al­liance, told me that, if the waste were disposed of legally, the cost of pork from factory farms would be higher than pork from fam­ily farms.

They cannot produce hogs, or pork chops, or bacon more ef­ficiently than a family farm without breaking the law. They aren't about the free market, because they can't compete without committing criminal acts every single day. Their whole system is built on being able to disable or capture gov­ernment agencies.

They're not in favor of responsibility, or democracy, or private property. It's just about privatizing the air, water, all the things that the public's supposed to own. They are try­ing to take them away from us, privatize them, and liquidate them for cash.

That's the only coherent philosophy they have. That's it.

Yeah!

To be totally honest, I wish the Clinton administration had done more to address the pig shit problem. But at least he was pushing in the right direction. Toward the end of his administra­tion, the EPA issued stringent new CAFO regulations, requiring hog factories to take responsibility for their waste and initiating suits against some of the violators.

When Bush took office, his appointees gutted the regulations. Eric Schaeffer, head of enforcement for the EPA, resigned in disgust after being told to drop the agency's cases against the of­fending conglomerates. The administration cut a deal granting im­munity to factory farm air polluters, and its Republican allies in Congress defeated a proposal by Paul Wellstone to bar hog pro­ducers from also owning the slaughterhouses. As Bush's stance on pig feces became clear, you could hear the squeals of joy at Smithfield.

They say that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in a pig dung lagoon, the only boat that rises is the one on top of the geyser.

Perhaps there is someone reading this who is saying, "Give me a break, Al. I don't care about pigs, or pig waste, or family farms, or mountaintops, or this pfiest-a-mahoosey, or the environment." To you, I have this to say: You were not legitimately elected pres­ident, sir.

But I respect the office you hold, and I'm honored that you're reading my book.

*The geysers, which are not necessarily explained in detail in the excerpt from Franken's work, having been explained before this section, are the phenomenon that occurs when seepage or a tear in the lining of a pig feces lagoon allows the substance to get under the said lining and build up a methane gas bubble that occasionally in magnificent glory not unlike that of Yellowstone's 'Old Faithful'.
(apply standard disclaimers about his views not necessarily being my views here)

Busting The Reaganomics Myth

What we have nowadays, rather than a “government”, is actually more of a dualistic system of adversarial fat cats whose primary activities, it would seem, are the acquisition of power, the maintaining of it, exchanging insults and being nasty to one another…

This article, about a former Reagan admin. insider, will challenge all the conventional wisdom about "conservative" vs. "liberal" politics:

"Trickle Down" economics was a "Trojan Horse"

David Stockman

In the 1980’s Ronald Reagan ushered in a new era in American economics as he cut the top tax bracket from 70% down to 50% and then down again to 28%. In order to get support for doing this from the people, and also from politicians, a very crafty set of lies were produced. As David Stockman, then Reagan’s budget director, put it: giving small tax cuts across the board to all brackets was simply a “Trojan Horse” that was used to get approval for the huge top tax bracket cuts. “Trickle-Down” was a term used by Republicans that meant giving tax cuts to the rich. Stockman explains that:

"It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."

"Yes, Stockman conceded, when one stripped away the new rhetoric emphasizing across-the-board cuts, the supply-side theory was really new clothes for the unpopular doctrine of the old Republican orthodoxy."

"…the Reagan coalition prevailed again in the House and Congress passed the tax-cut legislation with a final frenzy of trading and bargaining. Again, Stockman was not exhilarated by the victory. On the contrary, it seemed to leave a bad taste in his mouth, as though the democratic process had finally succeeded in shocking him by its intensity and its greed. Once again, Stockman participated in the trading -- special tax concessions for oil -- lease holders and real-estate tax shelters, and generous loopholes that virtually eliminated the corporate income tax. Stockman sat in the room and saw it happen."

"'Do you realize the greed that came to the forefront?' Stockman asked with wonder. 'The hogs were really feeding. The greed level, the level of opportunism, just got out of control.'"

The Education of David Stockman 1981:

http://www. theatlantic. com/politics/budget/stockman.htm

Reagan's policies did more than simply cut income taxes. A large number of tax loopholes were written into the tax code that catered to special corporate interests. In fact many of the current scandals involving companies such as Enron are rooted in laws that were passed during the Reagan administration that gave these companies more legal legroom to work with and less oversight.

In addition, the small “income-tax cuts” that were given to the middle and lower income tax brackets were countered with new taxes that were directed at middle and low income individuals, as former House Speaker Jim Wright said:

Reagan's tax increases fell mainly on consumers, low- and middle-income people. Sales and excise levies. Reagan didn't call these taxes. They were, in his euphemistic lexicon, "user fees" and "revenue-enhancers."

The most important issue though is that even if you take the Reagan “Trickle-Down” policy at face value it’s still horribly flawed as a policy that will provide economic growth that benefits all Americans.

There is no realistic way for "Trickle-Down" economics to work to increase the income of the working classes of America. In fact I am certain that the developers of the theory of "Trickle-Down" economics were fully aware of this and that "Trickle-Down" has in fact worked as intended. This means that the intent behind implementing "Trickle-Down" was to benefit the wealthiest Americans at the expense of working class Americans. "Trickle-Down" hasn't failed, as many modern economists have suggested, it has succeeded in its goals, which is the increase of economic inequality and the shift of a greater portion of America's wealth into the hands of the wealthiest Americans.

I'll show you exactly why "Trickle-Down" can never really trickle down, and I'll expose the logic that was used to trick Americans into supporting the idea that freeing up money for the wealthy could somehow benefit the poor and middle class.

I'm going to use a very simplistic example to demonstrate the principles of "Trickle-Down" economics. No, this is not a 100% accurate model of our economic system, and it assumes that "all other aspects of the economy are equal," but the major principles are represented. I will give "Trickle-Down" the benefit of the doubt and assume that it actually does create jobs in my example.

We have a room with 5 people in it. The total value of all the money in the room is $10. 00. The money is apportioned as in the table below.

Total Value $10. 00
Jim	$4. 00	40%
Susan	$3. 00	30%
Tom	$2. 00	20%
Amy	$1. 00	10%
Bill	$0. 00	0%

Sam enters the room and says that he has $10. 00 that he wants to give to Jim. This makes everyone else unhappy of course and everyone says that they will beat Jim up if he takes the money. Sam then proposes a solution. He says that if everyone allows him to give Jim $6. 00 he will give $1. 00 to everyone else in the room. This sounds pretty good to everyone so they agree to let Jim receive the money. So, after Jim gets the money and everyone gets a dollar this is what the monetary breakdown of the room looks like:

Total Value $20. 00
Jim	$10. 00	50%
Susan	$4. 00	20%
Tom	$3. 00	15%
Amy	$2. 00	10%
Bill	$1. 00	5%

As you can see, due to inflation most of the other people in the room either lost value or saw no real gain. As you can also see the size of the "economy" did in fact grow as the theory of "Trickle-Down" proposes, but the growth only benefited one person, Jim, and arguably Bill. Even though the economy grew overall most of the people in the room saw a loss of value. This is because the value of money is relative. It's relative to many factors, but one is how much money is in the system. If you have 1 dollar out of 10 then its worth more than 1 dollar out of 1,000. How wealthy you are in terms of dollars is not measured by the number of dollars you have, it is measured by the share of dollars that you have out of the total number of dollars in the system.

Now, your opinion of Sam and Jim can be one of only two options.

1) Jim and Sam were naive and actually thought that they were going to be helping everyone with their actions; the fact that the actions had a negative effect on everyone else was an accident.

2) Jim and Sam knew that taking the $10. 00, keeping $6. 00 of it, and giving $1. 00 to everyone else wasn't going to help anyone but Jim, and they tricked everyone for the purpose of self gain using the $1. 00 "gift" to the under-classes as a "Trojan Horse" to support the action.

As in the example above there are three basic possibilities for economic growth (and many variations in between): Either the growth of the economy can be spread equally among everyone, the growth of the economy can be shifted towards the bottom of the population in which case the poor see a rise in relative value, becoming "less poor," or the growth can be shifted toward the top in which case the rich see a rise in relative value, becoming "more rich. "

The general economic policy of "Trickle-Down" that was put in place by Reagan has gone fundamentally unchanged since it was adopted by the country in the 1980s. The claim of Reagan was that "all boats would rise" by giving huge tax cuts for the wealthy. This did not happen. The majority of boats stayed the same or sank, while only between 5% and 1% of the boats actually rose.

The effects of "Trickle-Down" policy are evident. As would be expected from the policy, the largest beneficiaries of the "Trickle-Down" system have been the wealthy.

Individual earnings inequality as reported by the U. S. Census Bureau was falling or stable from the 1960s through the 1970s, however, beginning in the 1980s, along with the economic reforms of "Trickle-Down" policy, income inequality began to rise and has continued to rise dramatically ever since, as shown in the figure below.

(Data for the graphs below comes from the US Census Bureau)

http://www. census. gov/hhes/income/histinc/histinctb.html

Although there was a huge increase in real income for average Americans between World War II and the 1970s the income of the average American male has gone essentially unchanged since 1970 as the figure below indicates. Income for females though has continued to rise. What is significant about this graph is that between 1980 and present (2003) the incomes of the top 2% of American wage earners has gone up dramatically despite the stagnation of the income of average Americans.

This graph shows both average hourly earnings and the minimum wage together in 2001 dollars. As you can see both the minimum wage and average hourly earnings reached their peak in the 1960s and 1970s. This graph does not go back any farther than 1960, but for all practical purposes the peak shown here in 1973 is the historical peak for hourly earnings in America. See the source data in the link below for details on hourly earnings.

http://w3. access. gpo. gov/usbudget/fy2000/sheets/b047. xls

As we can see below, the percentage of people in poverty who are also working full time has gone up steadily since the 1970s, and it also underscores an important point, as all of these graphs do, which is that the fundamental economic policy of the Reagan administration has gone essentially unchanged, even by President Clinton.

http://www. census. gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/hstpov18.html

Today we are still operating under a Supply Side economic model. In fact, even though the average income tax rate paid in America today is roughly the same as it was in 1979, the average income tax rate for the top 1% is less than it was in 1979. The graph below shows the actual percentage of income paid to all (Income, Social Security, Corporate, Capital gains, and Excise) Federal taxes per the various groups. During the Regan era, you can see that total Federal taxes on the lowest income groups actually went up. Clinton continued to maintain the Supply Side model that was established under Reagan. By 2000 the Top 1% still maintained significantly lower taxes compared to the pre-Reagan era, but taxes on "upper middle class" earners had increased and taxes on the middle class have stayed about the same as they were just prior to Reagan's entry into office, which is higher than they ever were prior to the 1970s.

http://www. cbo. gov/showdoc. cfm?index=4514&sequence=3&from=0

As the figures below indicate, the degree of increase in income for the wealthiest Americans has far outpaced the majority of the population, a trend that also started with the Reagan Presidency. A large factor in this increase for the top 2% has been capital gains.

http://www. cbo. gov/showdoc. cfm?index=3089&sequence=11

The two graphs above show similar data, but there are some important differences. Obviously the first graph shows a wider range of data in terms of the years that it covers, but the first graph also shows the data for total household incomes, which have increased among the bottom quintiles in large part because of the increase in two or three worker households, but the bottom graph shows the data adjusted for household size. In addition the bottom graph obviously also shows data for the top 1%, whereas the top graph does not, and, perhaps most significantly, the bottom graph shows after tax income, so it is showing what was taken home after all federal taxes were paid.

This next graph shows an even longer range view. This shows after tax income in 2000 dollars going back to 1913 for the top 1% and the average for the remaining bottom 99%.

http://www. aflcio. org/corporateamerica/paywatch/

After World War II significant efforts were made to ensure prosperity for all Americans. These efforts dramatically reduced poverty rates and helped to build the strong middle-class that America has become famous for. However, as the graph below shows, significant changes began with the Reagan presidency.

Between 1965 and 2001 the number of multi-worker households has increased dramatically. In fact the slight increase in income that is shown for the 1^st through 4^th quintiles in the graph titled Average Household Income by Quintile (a quintile represents 1/5^th of the population) is primarily attributed to an increase in the number of households with two or more workers supporting the household. Individual male income for the 1^st through 4^th quintiles has actually gone down or stayed the same since the 1980s when adjusted for inflation.

In 1965 27% of the full time workforce was female, by 2001 that number had risen to 41%. What has allowed the average American household to continue to maintain a good standard of living is an increase in multi-worker households and a decrease in the number of children that families have, as well as a large increase in the trade deficit, with increasing numbers of American goods being made in third world countries.

The issue is that the economic policies of the Reagan administration were designed to primarily benefit wealthy Americans. At the time a lot of smoke and mirrors were used to convince average Americans that these policies would help them as well. A similar set of lies has been used by those, like Steve Forbes, who promote a flat tax system.

What the "Trickle-Down"/Supply Side policies of the Reagan administration were designed to do was to increase the amount of money available to wealthy Americans for investing and developing businesses. This was intended to create an increase in production of products and services and hence and increase in new jobs. The reason that the policy is called Supply Side, is because the supply of goods increases before there is a demand for goods. So, in that case, the supply of goods is intended to then spark demand, resulting in economic growth.

This use of Supply Side policy led to a huge increase in consumerism and the use of credit. An environment of consumerism was created in American society through the media via advertisements, movies, and television shows, etc. that promoted consumerism. Consumers though, did not have the money to fulfill the desires created by society so debt was used to participate in the economy. Restrictions on credit were loosened under the Reagan administration making it easier for individuals to gain credit lines because the use of credit was essential to growing the economy because real wages were not going up for the average American, yet it was essential that the average American increase spending in order to fuel the economy. This situation fueled female entry into the workforce as more households require two workers to maintain their standard of living.

The result of this is that American household debt has been constantly hitting new highs since the 1980s as can be seen in the graph below provided by Michael Hodges.

http://mwhodges. home. att. net/nat-debt/debt-nat-a.htm

The truth is that "Trickle-Down" was never intended to help middle income and poor Americans; it was intended to help the wealthy and Corporate America.

The economic policies of the Reagan era increased the trade deficit and provided easier ways for companies to "hide" money.

1980 the top 1% of tax filers received 8. 45% of American AGI (Adjusted Gross Income) and in 2000 that figure had risen to 20. 81% of the national AGI. Today the over 50% of the national income goes to the wealthiest 20% of Americans. This is the first time since 1935 that such a large portion of the national income has gone to such a small portion of the population. In 1967 the wealthiest 20% only accounted for 43% of the nation's income. The trend began in 1982. Between 1967 and 1982 middle-income households were gaining a larger share of the economy. What this means is that between 1982 and 2001 the bottom 80% of Americans have lost share in the nation's economy. This was the inevitable result of Reaganomics. It was an intended result. Political control and economic control go hand in hand. If the control of the economy is not in the hands of the majority of Americans then neither is political control.

For more on taxation and income in America see:

In Depth Analysis of American Income and Taxation

Pelosi, Cheney and Hypocrisy on Waterboarding and Torture

For all the "conservatives" and pundits that are full on attacking the integrity of Nancy Pelosi, whom I don't particularly care for either, over her perceived improprieties and "story changing" in the "waterboardgate" scandal.... I wonder if the irony or hypocrisy inherent in the juxtaposition of these two stories below even register on their consciences or if its just a matter of who you like and don't like or agree with and don't agree with... I just can't believe that A. they think this tactic of displacing blame will work and B. that it is apparently working on a lot of people...WOW!!!:

Read and consider these two articles:

White House denies Cheney endorsed 'water boarding'

Cheney was key in clearing CIA interrogation tactics

If one wants to go after Pelosi for mangling the truth- how can they not take issue with Cheney?

I have often been lectured about moral relativism in discussions with those aligned with Cheney's worldview... Here's the definition of moral relativism:
"In philosophy moral relativism is the position that moral or ethical propositions do not reflect objective and/or universal moral truths, but instead make claims relative to social, cultural, ... Read More historical or personal circumstances. "
Doesn't Cheney's position and/or the lack of consistent standards between these two characters by Cheney's allies and advocates reflect moral relativism?

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government -- whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community -- has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. A number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee's mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners' civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

We know that U.S. military tribunals and U.S. judges have examined certain types of water-based interrogation and found that they constituted torture. That's a lesson worth learning. The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history. The law of war is no different. This history should be of value to those who seek to understand what the law is -- as well as what it ought to be.

Waterboarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in the Vietnam War. On January 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a controversial front-page photograph of two U.S soldiers and one South Vietnamese soldier participating in the waterboarding of a North Vietnamese POW near Da Nang. The article described the practice as "fairly common". The photograph led to the soldier being court-martialled by a U.S. military court within one month of its publication, and he was discharged from the army. Another waterboarding photograph of the same scene, referred to as "water torture" in the caption, is also exhibited in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.

If one wants to go after Pelosi- how can they not see the duplicity in the former members of the Bush administration on this issue- denying and lying on this issue on TV and in press conferences in an all too obvious way and then give them a pass? That's partisan blindness, no matter what you think of the issue at hand and is one of the kinds of things that has put their party in their current political predicament. I have called it "selective truth engineering". I know a few people that claim as one of their pet peeves when people mangle the truth to make political points. I share that peeve.

Am I Conservative?

I have not been writing actively since about the time of the U.S. presidential elections. After the last several years of the very heated geopolitical climate, the milieu of the Church and all the passion I had invested in the things I have written about- it was time for a break and a re-alignment of my own spirit. After attending the funeral of my beloved 92 year old Cherokee grandmother and an energizing visit with my aunt and uncle and other relatives- I have decided it is time to wield my voice again- hopefully in a way thast reflects the progression of my spirit as guided by the Holy Spirit. I am hoping to bring out less of me and more of my Master.

Let's start with this. This, from my e-mail archives, was merely an attempt to explain to my friends and family where I was coming from around the time of the elections. I think it is an important point in trying to explain my perspective, which is hopefully representative of God's perspective.

Subject: Am I conservative?
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:18:44 -0500

I received a message earlier that asked a few good questions and raised a few good points. Since I have been torturing you with e-mail rants between another person and I- this may give a "frame of reference" to some things that have been said:

To SS:

Who is Mr. Rowley? (I had an exchange with him that was public and very harsh from his side)

I receive a lot of emails from acquaintances that I've made over the years. 100% of the political related email that I receive is a bunch of right wing spin with one exception. You are the exception. Your emails appear to be left wing spin compared to everything that I receive. I enjoy and value your emails as I do you my friend.

I know that you declare yourself independent as I have seen you state numerous times. Be aware, however, that SOLELY BASED ON YOUR EMAILS I would label you a full blown liberal before considering you to be libertarian as I believe that you would probably prefer. Anyway, it's all perception and opinion that is founded by one's own frame of reference. That's my honest perception be it good, bad, right, or wrong.

I listen to NPR a lot recently because I detest commercials. Yesterday there was a very interesting segment with an author that chronicled the philosphies of the early Quakers. They were very disciplined and were driven to create education institutions for the pure sake of knowledge. It was important to them that there leaders were EXPERTS on the United States constitutions and all concepts and philosophies of it's basis. This was a critical point for their choosing a president considering that person is the foremost defender of the constitution. I have not heard this concept uttered a single time this election. Have any of the candidates achieved a sufficient level of expertise of the United States constitution to be true defenders of it?

Answer from SS:

That is the father of some good friends I made in Dallas. He gets credit for launching my career as an armchair pundit. I was in his back yard by the pool one day in 1998 with Chuck and his sons sharing some cold beverages. One of the sons casually mentioned that I was not going to be supporting then Texas governor George W. Bush for his quest for the office of president. Right then and there without asking a single question of me and without nuance he lit into me with a tirade not unlike the ones he's written this week. I barely got a word in.

Afterwards, I thought to myself, if this mean spirited fellow is a representation of what conservatism has become, then as now counting myself as a conservative at heart, then this whole "conservative" thing is waaaayyyy off the intended track. This inspired me to start writing and as soon as I could I started doing just that and hitting his e-mail box with challenges to his twisted world view. Needless to say it has not played well with him.

I agree that the perceptions of these terms have much to do with contrasts and frames of reference. I am sure I am a flaming liberal up next to Mr. Rowley and most other inobjective, party line toting ideologues. It is a relative term. I can tell you that in Native circles I would be considered very much conservative and traditionalist. I was thinking about this very concept today and came to the conclusion that where the disconnect and misunderstanding lies in this is that I am operating from a spiritual, biblical, Christian conservatism that takes seriously Christ's injunctions against intolerance and the overly militaristic reliance on the myth of redemptive violence and worldly power structures and folks like Mr. Rowley are operating from a very contaminated- by-the- world version of Christianity that for the most part is not authentic spirituality but worldliness and American nationalist, political ideology with a quasi Christian veneer slapped over it.

I may be the only one operating with definitions like this that you know- but I stand on what I say. I have said before that these terms conservative and liberal have lost their meaning and what we actually have here in the US political arena is authoritarian and worldly and more authoritarian and worldly.

Another thing... Mr. Rowley does not really know me because as you can imagine he is nearly impossible to talk to in person and has little more than his own 'frame of reference" and the e-mails to go on concerning what I think.

Lastly, not that I am a constitutional expert, no, none of these candidates both know and honor what the constitution actually says- which I can plainly see even with my own limited knowledge of the document.

Thanks for the good word.

Now, this is a comment I got back from an old Bible teacher of mine that I first met during my stay in Waco, TX. on the subject of my claims of conservatism in the above message:

Interesting.

I tell people I’m a conservative, and that those who try to pass themselves off as “conservatives” these days are really liberals. I can demonstrate this philosophically. In short, the “liberal” position in the Enlightenment (out of which our nation sprang, NB), was “anti-conservative.” The “Conservative” position were those who believed in conserving tradition (in this case the Christian tradition) because of its inherent value (longer explanation belongs here). The Enlightenment philosophers rejected this conservatism because they came to believe that one both could and should “think for oneself.” That is liberalism. Your friend is a liberal.

IN our country, as some contemporary philosophers have pointed out, we are all liberals. To be sure, there are “right leaning” liberals like Bush/Cheney, and left leaning liberals like Clinton/Gore, but we’re all liberals. Period.

Now, if the idea of “thinking for yourself” is nothing but an Enlightenment myth/lie, then all liberalism is based on a false premise (that “thinking for yourself” is indeed possible) and doomed to failure. That is why the Enlightenment died. And good riddance. May true conservatism live on.

If you want to explore this more, see the various works of Alasdair MacIntyre, especially After Virtue. He has some followup books that are also incredibly insightful, but that’s the place to start.

As for me (and probably you), I believe we are attempting to conserve the Christian tradition of social justice that begins in the Law of Moses, continues in the OT Prophets, and is revived by Jesus. Romans 8:18-24 demonstrates that God intends eventually to bring all his creation under his kingdom/rule/reign. What that polity would look like is probably best described by the Sermon on the Mount (i.e., what would it look like if people really lived as if God really is in charge?). To conserve that tradition is indeed true conservatism. It is NOT “thinking for oneself,” and in fact many things in this sermon don’t make sense on a purely rational basis, but ONLY make sense if one really calls Jesus “Lord” and believes he is king and is in charge and cares about his subjects and his creation. Only on that basis can one have the courage to love one’s enemies and be cheated out of what he/she has lent to someone, etc.

Stanley Hauerwas is another author to whom I’m greatly indebted. And one of his mentors was John Howard Yoder, a NT scholar.

So, call your friend a stinking commie liberal. J With Christian love, of course.

Why We Fight - Oil & Blowback

The War on Voting

Using the Department of Justice, friendly governors, and its usual propaganda outlets, the GOP has propagated the myth of voter fraud to purge the rolls of non-Republicans.

One week before the close of voter registration in Kentucky last fall, in an election that culminated with the victory of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Beshear, Johanna Sharrard, a fresh-faced 26-year-old national organizer for the low-income advocacy group ACORN, gathered her canvassers in a run-down Louisville office and told them some good news: "We got 396 people yesterday -- that's really great!" Then she added what could have seemed a jarringly discordant note: "We know it's getting harder to reach people with the cards in this area. It's really important that you guys are not slipping up and turning to filling out your own applications or other fraudulent activity. Just yesterday we had to let another person go because she did not follow protocols." Sharrard continued sternly, "What's important is that we get 15,000 new voters. We're not out there to get 10,000 new voters and 5,000 false applications." Indeed, the voter registration waged by ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in Kentucky was also an effort to test the group's new system for rooting out any fraud. The organization is readying itself for the challenges to voter participation that the poor and minorities -- and Democrats -- are sure to face in 2008. Sharrard's cautionary tone was a response to the Republican Party's ongoing nationwide campaign to suppress the low-income minority vote by propagating the myth of voter fraud. Using various tactics -- including media smears, bogus lawsuits, restrictive new voting laws and policies, and flimsy prosecutions -- Republican operatives, election officials, and the GOP-controlled Justice Department have limited voting access and gone after voter-registration groups such as ACORN. Which should come as no surprise: In building support for initiatives raising the minimum wage and kindred ballot measures, ACORN has registered, in partnership with Project Vote, 1.6 million largely Democratic-leaning voters since 2004. All told, non-profit groups registered over three million new voters in 2004, about the same time that Republican and Justice Department efforts to publicize ?voter fraud? and limit voting access became more widespread. And attacking ACORN has been a central element of a systematic GOP disenfranchisement agenda to undermine Democratic prospects before each Election Day. Revelations that U.S. attorneys were fired for their failure to successfully prosecute voter fraud have revealed how fictitious the allegations of widespread fraud actually were -- but the allegations haven't gone away. They live on in all the vote-suppressing laws and regulations that will likely affect this year's election, in GOP rhetoric and, most recently, in the arguments presented by champions of Indiana's restrictive voter-identification law in a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Unfortunately, progressives have tended to pay more attention to Election Day dirty tricks and to electronic voting machines than to a more systemic threat: the Republican campaign to suppress the votes of low-income, young, and minority voters through restrictive legislation and rulings, all based on the mythic specter of voter fraud. Those relatively transient voters, drawn to the polls this year by the Obama and Clinton campaigns, could find themselves thwarted in November and thereafter by the GOP-driven regime of voting restrictions -- particularly if, as many observers believe, the Court upholds Indiana's restrictive law before it adjourns this June. Voter fraud is actually less likely to occur than lightning striking a person, according to data compiled by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. As Lorraine Minnite, a Columbia University professor, observed in the Project Vote report, The Politics of Voter Fraud, "The claim that voter fraud threatens the integrity of American elections is itself a fraud." In October 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft launched an intensive "Ballot Access and Voting Integrity Initiative" that required all U.S. attorney offices to coordinate with local officials in combating voter fraud. Yet even after the Justice Department declared the war against voter fraud a "high priority," only 24 people were convicted of illegal voting in federal elections between 2002 and 2005 -- and nobody was even charged by Justice with impersonating another voter. (The Justice Department declined to answer questions about more recent fraud prosecutions.) And despite the anti-immigrant frenzy fueling photo-ID laws, only 14 noncitizens were convicted of illegally voting in federal elections from 2002 through 2005 -- mostly because of their ignorance of election law. Unfortunately, the public hasn't heard just how nonexistent the voter fraud epidemic actually is. While progressives have successfully challenged some of the most restrictive laws in court, they're still playing catch-up when it comes to combating the glib sound bites of voter-fraud alarmists. Republicans and the Bush Justice Department have cloaked their schemes under such noble-sounding concepts as "ballot integrity." The GOP's vote-suppression playbook features everything from phony lawsuits to questionable investigations to authoritative-seeming reports, all with the aim of promoting restrictive laws. These tactics were first perfected in the hotly contested swing state of Missouri. The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an outrage!" -- and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for black people [voting fraudulently]." That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states. Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls. Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits, and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud, among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a 26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group, known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with Democrats in the Senate race -- but then failing to sign the document so the agency never considered it. The goal of such complaints and allegations was to create a barrage of negative publicity about voter-registration groups and the voter-fraud menace that could pave the way for restrictive laws. In Missouri, the Republicans' cries for a new state photo-ID law began in 2002, before the GOP blitz in most other states. The legislature passed such a bill in early 2006, before it was struck down that September by a Missouri state court as unconstitutional. The GOP in Missouri also turned to prosecutions and lawsuits, most either overblown or groundless. In November 2005, Bradley Schlozman, then the Justice Department's acting civil-rights chief, insisted on filing a lawsuit that accused Missouri's secretary of state, Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, of failing to purge supposedly ineligible voters under federal law. (U.S. Attorney Todd Graves was forced out in March 2006 for having balked at filing the suit.) A federal judge, who found that the Justice Department did not produce any evidence showing fraud justifying the purges, dismissed the lawsuit in April 2007. The department continues to appeal the ruling. The fraud-obsessed Schlozman was then moved into Graves' old post without Senate confirmation, through a loophole in the Patriot Act. In an apparent effort to discredit both Democrats and ACORN, just five days before the tight Senate election in 2006 between incumbent Republican Jim Talent and Democrat Claire McCaskill, Schlozman announced, in violation of the department's own standards, the indictment of four former ACORN workers who had been fired by ACORN for filling out false voter-registration forms. The indictments were part of a broader effort to tilt the campaign against Democrats by bashing ACORN and limiting voter access. St. Louis' Republican election director, Scott Leiendecker, sent out a chilling letter shortly before the election to 5,000 mostly African Americans registered by ACORN, asking them to verify to the election board that they were eligible to vote. Leiendecker backed off after he faced the threat of a voting-rights lawsuit and received a warning letter from Secretary of State Carnahan. *** What began in Missouri soon went nationwide. Starting in 2003, the Justice Department's civil-rights division issued a flurry of advisory letters, rulings, and lawsuits under the guise of fighting fraud that appear designed to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters. Federal and state courts have struck down some of the laws shaped by policies promoted by the Justice Department, such as strict database-matching laws limiting new voters in Washington state and Florida. Even so, Justice Department-backed secretive purging policies have targeted voter-registration applicants and current voters in several key states: In Ohio in 2006, 303,000 voters were purged in three major urban counties, while the Brennan Center reported that Pennsylvania's rigid database rules, later loosened, had excluded up to 30 percent of eligible registrants. Karl Rove aide Tim Griffin played a major role in state GOP voter "caging" operations (that is, challenging the eligibility of registered voters) in such states as Ohio and Florida. These schemes, Project Vote reports, challenged the right of 77,000 mostly minority voters to cast ballots between 2004 and 2006, under the pretext that non-forwardable letters sent by GOP activists to their addresses were returned as undelivered. Thor Hearne's now-vanished ACVR lobbied for strict voter-ID laws in nine states, according to McClatchy and other news organizations. Voter-ID laws in states such as Georgia, Arizona, and Indiana have, for now, been allowed to stand. All these campaigns have created a kind of GOP vote-suppression playbook that aims to limit voting rights in the states and attack registration groups such as ACORN. In most states where ACORN wages ballot-initiative and voter-registration campaigns, Republican lawyers, officials, and some prosecutors routinely file dubious lawsuits and complaints to generate bad press for the voter-registration drives. The lawsuits seldom if ever succeed, but the bad press they engender creates a climate to pass restrictive voting laws. In New Mexico by the summer of 2004, ACORN's effort to register voters in advance of the closely fought presidential election was a stunning success: The organization registered 35,000 voters, mostly in the Albuquerque area. "Republicans were freaking out," recalls John Boyd, an attorney for the state Democratic Party. Republicans accused ACORN of "manufacturing voters," conflating error-plagued cards with fraud while trumpeting one registration card filled out in the name of a 13-year-old boy. The boy's card became the centerpiece of the lawsuit Rep. Joe Thompson, an Albuquerque Republican, filed in August 2004 demanding that the state government require photo ID for voters registered by ACORN and other nonprofits. The lawsuit claimed that the Republican plaintiffs' votes were "diluted" by supposedly false registrations. Their case fell apart in court, and by September, a judge dismissed the lawsuit. But Republicans were not deterred by their loss in civil court and pressed for a criminal investigation, a probe which U.S. Attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias started on the same day that the court ruled against the GOP. Iglesias was a true believer in the menace of voter fraud. As one of just two U.S. attorneys in the nation to form such task forces, he was invited to lecture other U.S. attorneys in 2005 as part of the annual Justice Department ballot-integrity conference. Iglesias' efforts weren't enough for Patrick Rogers, the Republican National Lawyers Association point person in the state, who mounted a campaign to pressure Iglesias to bring criminal charges before the election, rather than form a task force. Indeed, even before Iglesias concluded in 2006 that there wasn't enough evidence to indict on voter fraud, major Republicans in the state had started asking the Bush administration for his removal. In early December 2006, Iglesias was one of seven U.S. attorneys whom the Justice Department fired. Today, Iglesias says of voter fraud: "It's like the boogeymen parents use to scare their children. It's very frightening, and it doesn't exist. U.S. attorneys have better things to do with their time than chasing voter-fraud phantoms." But the damage of chasing phantoms proved more substantial. In 2005, the state legislature, with the blessing of its Democratic governor, Bill Richardson, passed legislation that essentially crippled the ability of groups like ACORN to do mass voter registration. In 2006, ACORN had only 10 certified canvassers in the whole state, and registration plunged to 2,000 new applicants from 35,000 two years before, according to ACORN's top New Mexico organizer, Matt Henderson. In Florida in 2004, ACORN's initiative to raise the state's minimum wage looked to be cruising to victory (it won with 71 percent of the vote), and brought in over 200,000 newly registered voters. That led business lobbies and the GOP to find a poster boy for fraud in a fired ACORN employee and ex-con named Mac Stuart, who spun elaborate tales of ACORN squirreling away hundreds of GOP voter applications it gathered but did not turn over to election officials. Republican attorneys filed two lawsuits featuring Stuart's claims. After the election, Stuart ultimately conceded that he made false statements about ACORN. In December 2005, federal judges dismissed both lawsuits. But in the same month, the legislature passed one of the most restrictive voting-registration laws in the country. The new law fined every registration worker $5,000 for any lost application, potentially wiping out the entire budget of the state League of Women Voters if just 14 forms were lost and forcing the group to stop registering voters for the first time in over 70 years. It was not until August 2006 that a federal judge blocked enforcement of the law. However, a slightly revised version passed last year. Responding to the GOP-generated hysteria over voter fraud, criminal investigations were launched in 2004 and 2005 in Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio, with ACORN often a target. But by the end of 2005, the investigations ended after finding either no evidence of wrongdoing by ACORN or any pervasive voter fraud. Nationally, only six former ACORN employees were charged with registration fraud or other election-related crimes in the 2004 election, offenses involving fewer than 20 forms. That's out of 1 million new voters registered by ACORN during that cycle. Yet Thor Hearne, among others, took advantage of these assorted investigations and news accounts about fraud to create the fictional appearance of an epidemic, then added some fabrications of his own. Perhaps the wildest ACVR whopper -- seized on by The Wall Street Journal as late as November 2006 -- was the charge that ACORN and an affiliated group were under criminal investigation for "paying crack cocaine for fraudulent registration forms." Actually, the tale originated with the arrest of a Toledo-area man who may have received drugs while working for another volunteer for a now-defunct organization, not ACORN. Without substantiation, ACVR identified Democratic-leaning cities as hotspots for fraud. They were generally the same locations where U.S. attorneys later faced pressure over prosecutions, including Seattle, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. (The one exception to overblown investigations targeting ACORN was the indictment last year by a local Seattle prosecutor, welcomed by ACORN, of seven rogue ex-employees who had fabricated nearly 2,000 registration forms.) The hyped reports, indictments, and hearings had their intended effect after the 2004 elections. Nearly 30 states considered bills to require photo ID or proof of citizenship to register or vote. While most of these measures haven't yet passed, those that have can be severe: An Arizona law requiring proof of citizenship to register has disenfranchised up to 60 percent of applicants in some counties. Over the past few years, what began as local phony lawsuits and investigations escalated into a concerted drive by the Civil Rights Division to restrict voting. Since 2004, the goal of the state GOP vote-caging initiatives has become official Justice Department policy. The department has also promoted the equivalent of caging by pressuring 16 states and cities to speed up their purging of hundreds of thousands of voters through letters and lawsuits, as first reported by Alternet. Alarmingly, the insubstantiality of the claims of pervasive voter fraud may not deter the U.S. Supreme Court from upholding Indiana's restrictive voter-ID law -- which, according to a new University of Washington study, could disenfranchise the more than 20 percent of the state's African American voters who lack the ID required by Indiana's law. Amazingly, Indiana has admitted that there hasn't been a single alleged case of in-person voter fraud in the state's history. Instead, Indiana's attorneys and legal allies, including the federal government, have submitted virtually nothing but unverified newspaper clippings and right-wing claims about fraud allegations in other states. Indeed, the Supreme Court, in a little-noticed comment in an earlier ruling on Arizona's ID law, has already granted government the leeway to enact laws denying the vote based merely on fears of fraud, regardless of evidence. But outside of the world of voting experts, little attention has been paid to the lack of evidence in the federal court rulings leading up to the Indiana case. As Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center observes, "The way this case has been decided so far [in lower courts] is that a state doesn't have to justify measures to suppress the vote." The Supreme Court is expected to issue its Indiana ruling in the next few months, and it's considered unlikely that the Court will strike down the law. *** These days, weakened by the publicity over the U.S. attorneys scandal, the savvier voter-fraud propagandists are shifting their now-discredited arguments about massive voting by illegal immigrants to yet another "menace": "double voting." Republicans and some newspapers point to lists of the same names in different states to claim there has been large-scale double voting. Yet such sweeping double-voting claims are almost always due to administrative errors and the statistical probability that people with the same name and birth date will show up in large pools of voters. Regardless of the facts, the drive for new voter-ID restrictions will likely be strengthened in the wake of the upcoming Supreme Court decision. There's little sign that progressives or Democrats are going to launch what the Brennan Center's Deborah Goldberg has called the "huge public education effort" needed to raise awareness about the problems with voter-ID laws. Democrats seemingly haven't yet grasped the political importance of fighting these restrictive policies, though they could prove a major impediment to minority voting (and if minorities voted at the same rate as whites, there would be 7.5 million more voters on Election Day). But Johanna Sharrard and other ACORN leaders aren't going to be deterred by Republican obstacles and smears as they gear up for new registration drives this year that could be their most successful yet. Sharrard's campaign in Kentucky last year brought in over 14,000 new voters, a state record. And after seeing all the attacks against ACORN in Missouri and elsewhere, she realizes, "It's a good motivator; it showed us that that things we were doing are important." It's an open question, though, whether progressives will realize that it's worth fighting to make sure that the voters ACORN is trying to reach will actually have their votes count. Research assistance for this article was provided bvy the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.
Art Levine is a contributing editor of U.S. News and World Report and of The Washington Monthly and has written for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications.

By Liza Porteus Viana
Oct 17th 2008 5:52PM

Barack Obama's campaign fought back hard today against the ongoing accusations that the Illinois senator is connected to voter fraud.

Obama general counsel Robert Bauer wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking that a special prosecutor look into what role, if any, Justice Department and White House officials have had in supporting the McCain-Palin campaign and the Republican National Committee's "systematic development and dissemination of unsupported, spurious allegations of vote fraud."

The Republican White House ticket has been hammering Obama on his connection to ACORN, a voter-registration group being investigated by the FBI for voter fraud.

The special prosecutor on the case is Nora Dannehy, the same one investigating the removal of U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration.

Obama's camp says the same exact type of improper behavior that led to the firing of some of those U.S. attorneys several years ago - removals based on "improper political factors, including to affect the way they handled certain voter fraud or public corruption investigations and prosecutions" in 2006 - is being acted out now by Republican Party officials around the country.

"It has become clear, in these remaining weeks of the Presidential campaign, that 'the fact and law require' the Special Prosecutor's urgent attention to recent partisan Republican activities throughout the country," Bauer writes. "These activities seek both to suppress the vote and to unduly influence investigations and prosecutions through baseless allegations of vote fraud - exactly as in the 2006 election cycle."

Some of those activities cited included GOP claims of "fraud" by John McCain and Sarah Palin surrounding ACORN, and Republican lawmakers calling on the DOJ to launch an investigation into "these manufactured allegations of 'fraud'" involving ACORN. Bauer said those McCain-Pain surrogates who have sent such letters include: Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio, John Cornyn of Texas, and Reps. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.

"Of course, the timing of the opening of this investigation and leaking of this information is damning, 19 days before the general election - and less than 24 hours after the Republican Presidential nominee announced the advent of fraud so pervasive that it threatened the very 'fabric of democracy,'" Bauer writes.

But the McCain-Palin attack against ACORN marches on.

Palin today said Obama hasn't been forthcoming about his ties to the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, even though Obama has said he doesn't have any significant links to the group.

"You deserve to know," Palin told thousands surrounding her stage in a suburban community park in Ohio. "This group needs to learn that you here in Ohio won't let them turn the Buckeye State into the Acorn State."

In a press call today, Bauer said ACORN is not "an agent of this campaign, they did not perform registration services for this campaign."

McCain-Palin campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters Friday that he sent a letter to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, encouraging them to join a group called "The Honest and Open Election Committee" organized by the McCain campaign.

"We've gotten little to no response back from the Obama campaign on this issue," Davis said, adding that you can't just "blow off" these allegations as a "cynical ploy to reduce voter turnout," "like David Plouffe did."

The ACORN allegations are "not anything less than disturbing," Davis added.

To add to the ACORN debacle, AP reports that the group has another nasty issue on its agenda when its board of directors meets in New Orleans this weekend: missing money.

ACORN leaders are locked in a legal dispute stemming from allegations that the brother of the group's founder misappropriated nearly $1 million of the nonprofit's money several years ago. The embezzlement case has spawned a lawsuit and set off a power struggle inside ACORN.

Bertha Lewis, ACORN's interim chief organizer, called the lawsuit "a distraction from us marshaling our forces to deal with the Republican right-wing attacks" over ACORN's voter registration.



This all came on the heels of the High court rejecting the GOP in Ohio voting dispute.
Republicans had won an order that the state do more to check eligibility but were overturned by the USSC.

Iglesias: "I'm Astounded" By DOJ's ACORN Probe

By Zachary Roth - October 16, 2008, 6:50PM

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.
Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.
And he added that it "stands to reason" that the investigation was launched in response to GOP complaints. In recent weeks, national Republican figures -- including John McCain at last night's debate -- have sought to make an issue out of ACORN's voter-registration activities.
As we noted earlier, last year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly highlighted changes made to DOJ's election crimes manual, which lowered the bar for voter-fraud prosecutions, and made it easier to bring vote-fraud cases close to the election.
Speaking today to TPMmuckraker, Iglesias called such changes "extremely problematic."
The way in which the news was revealed today -- Associated Press sourced its report to two "senior law enforcement officials" who "spoke on condition of anonymity because Justice Department regulations forbid discussing ongoing investigations particularly so close to an election" -- is also raising eyebrows.
Both Iglesias and Bud Cummins -- another of the U.S. attorneys who, according to the IG report, was also fired for political reasons -- told TPMmuckraker that DOJ guidelines do allow US attorneys to speak publicly about an investigation, even before bringing an indictment, if it's to allay public concern over an issue.
But that certainly wouldn't cover anonymous leaks. "If you can't say it with your name on it, it's fair to say you should not be saying it," Cummins told TPMmuckraker.
Earlier this afternoon, House Judiciary Chair John Conyers (D-MI) released a letter he sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey and FBI director Robert Mueller, which connected today's news to the U.S. attorney firings, and to recent GOP efforts to stoke fears over voter fraud.

McCain’s Terror Connection: G. Gordon Liddy

John McCain.

Here’s what the mainstream media won’t tell you when they’re busying parroting the Republican line on how what William Ayers did when Barack Obama was 8 actually having any relevance.

As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in “if necessary”; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a “gangland figure” to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap “leftist guerillas” at the 1972 Republican National Convention — a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Liddy has donated $5,000 to McCain’s campaigns since 1998, including $1,000 in February 2008. In addition, McCain has appeared on Liddy’s radio show during the presidential campaign, including as recently as May. An online video labeled “John McCain On The G. Gordon Liddy Show 11/8/07″ includes a discussion between Liddy and McCain, whom Liddy described as an “old friend.” During the segment, McCain praised Liddy’s “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great,” said he was “proud” of Liddy, and said that “it’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program.”

Liddy called for the murder of federal agents, served time in jail, plotted murder - and after that, John McCain applauded him and took his money.

Ron Paul, The Only Presidential Candidate My Conscience Will Allow Me To Vote For

Ron Paul on War & Peace

Republican Representative (TX-14)

Sub-sections under War & Peace:
• Iraq War
• Voting Record
• Other issues under War & Peace

If Iran invaded Israel, it's up to Congress to declare war

Q: If Iran invaded Israel, what do we do? A: Well, they're not going to. That is like saying "Iran is about to invade Mars." They don't have an army or navy or air force. And the Israelis have 300 nuclear weapons. Nobody would touch them. But if it were in our national security interests, Congress could say, "This is very, very important; we have to declare war." Presidents don't have the authority to go to war. You go to the Congress and find out if they want a war, and do the people want the war.
Source: Meet the Press: 2007 "Meet the Candidates" series Dec 23, 2007

Israeli government & the neocons want US to bomb Iran

Q: This is what you said about Israel. "Israel's dependent on us for economic means. We send them billions of dollars. They say, 'We don't like Iran. You go fight our battles. You bomb Iran for us.' And they become dependent on us." Who in Israel is saying "Go bomb Iran for us"? A: Well, I don't know the individuals, but we know that their leadership--you read it in the papers on a daily basis--about the government of Israel encouraging Americans to go into Iran. I don't think that's top secret.
Q: That the government of Israel wants us to bomb Iran?
A: I don't think there's a doubt about that, that they've encouraged us to do that. And of course the neoconservatives have been anxious to do that for a long time.
Source: Meet the Press: 2007 "Meet the Candidates" series Dec 23, 2007

Every country ended slavery without civil war; US could have

Q: I was intrigued by your comments about Abe Lincoln. "According to Paul, Abe Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of getting rid of slavery." A: Absolutely. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil war. No, he shouldn't have gone to war. He did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic. I mean, it was that iron fist..
Q: We'd still have slavery.
A: Oh, come on. Slavery was phased out in every other country of the world. And the way I'm advising that it should have been done is do like the British empire did. You buy the slaves and release them. How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where the hatred lingered for 100 years? Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. I mean, that doesn't sound too radical to me. That sounds like a pretty reasonable approach.
Source: Meet the Press: 2007 "Meet the Candidates" series Dec 23, 2007

Non-intervention means Congress declares war when threatened

Q: Sen. McCain criticized you for an "attitude of isolationism and appeasement," concerning Iraq in the YouTube debate. A: McCain was awfully confused about isolationism versus non-intervention. There is a big difference. Isolationism isn't what I advocate. I advocate non-intervention, not getting involved in the internal affairs of other nations.
Q: Under what circumstances, if you were president, would you intervene outside the borders of the US in some sort of crisis around the world?
A: When Congress directed me to in the act of war. If our national security was threatened and we went through the proper procedures, Congress would say, "Our national security is involved, it is threatened and we have to act." And Congress has that responsibility. The president is the commander in chief, and then he acts.
Source: CNN Late Edition: 2007 presidential series with Wolf Blitzer Dec 2, 2007

Congressional authorization needed to attack Iran's nukes

Q: If you were president, would you need to go to Congress to get authorization to take military action against Iran's nuclear facilities?ROMNEY: You sit down with your attorneys and tell you what you have to do.
HUNTER: It depends on one thing: the president does not need that if the target is fleeting.
PAUL: Absolutely. This idea of going & talking to attorneys totally baffles me. Why don't we just open up the Constitution & read it? You're not allowed to go to war without a declaration of war. Now, as far as fleeting enemies go, yes, if there's an imminent attack on us, we'd never had that happen in 220 years. The thought that the Iranians could pose an imminent attack on the US is preposterous. There's no way.
HUNTER: Not an imminent attack a fleeting target.
PAUL: This is just continual war propaganda, preparing this nation to go to war and spread this war, not only in Iraq but into Iran, unconstitutionally. It's a road to disaster if we don't read the Constitution once in a while.
Source: 2007 Republican debate in Dearborn, Michigan Oct 9, 2007

Radicals come to kill us because we occupy their lands

Q: What's your strategy to protect our American way of life from the designs of radical Islam?A: We indeed do have a problem, but if we go at this incorrectly, we are going to do more damage to ourselves than we are to our enemies. We have to understand the motives of those who come here & kill us. If we don't understand that, we are not going to win this fight. They come here & kill us because we occupy their lands, and they rationally reason [that] we have to do something about it.
Source: 2007 GOP Values Voter Presidential Debate Sep 17, 2007

Talk to Iran like we talked to Soviets during Cold War

Q: Would you go to war with Iran if they developed nuclear weapons and threatened Israel?A: Well, one thing I would remember very clearly is the president doesn't have the authority to go to war. He goes to the Congress.
Q: So what do you do?
A: He goes to the Congress and finds out if there's any threat to our national security. And thinking back to the 1960s, when I was in the Air Force for five years, and there was a Cold War going on, and the Soviets had 40,000, and we stood them down, & we didn't have to have a nuclear confrontation, I would say that we should go very cautiously. We should be talking to Iran right now. We shouldn't be looking for the opportunity to attack them. They are at the present time, according to the IAEA, cooperating. I think that we ought to be talking about how to get along with some people that are deadly, like the Soviets and the Chinese and the many others. We don't have to resort to war every single time there is a confrontation.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at UNH, sponsored by Fox News Sep 5, 2007

US has fought 70 engagements since 1945

It should be harder to promote war, especially when there are so many regrets in the end. In the last 60 years, the American people have had little to say over decisions to wage war. We have allowed a succession of presidents and the U.N. to decide when and if we go to war, without an express congressional declaration as the Constitution mandates. Since 1945, our country has been involved in over 70 active or covert foreign engagements. On numerous occasions we have provided weapons and funds to both sides in a conflict. It is not unusual for our so-called allies to turn on us and use these weapons against American troops. In recent decades we have been both allies and enemies of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and the Islamists in Iran. And where has it gotten us?
The endless costs resulting from our foolish policies, in human lives, injuries, tax dollars, inflation, and deficits, will burden generations to come. For civilization to advance, we must reduce the number of wars fought.
Source: A Foreign Policy of Freedom, by Ron Paul, p.363 Jun 15, 2007

Limit wars debunking glorification of war

For civilization to advance, we must reduce the number of wars fought. Two conditions must be met if we hope to achieve this. First, all military (and covert paramilitary) personnel worldwide must refuse to initiate offensive wars beyond their borders This must become a matter of personal honor for every individual.
Second, the true nature of war must be laid bare, and the glorification must end. Instead of promoting war heroes with parades and medals for wars not fought in the true defense of our country, we should more honestly contemplate the real results of war: death, destruction, horrible wounds, civilian casualties, economic costs, and the loss of liberty at home.
The neoconservative belief that war is inherently patriotic, beneficial, manly, and necessary for human progress must be debunked. These war promoters never send themselves or their own children off to fight. Their hero, Machiavelli, must be buried once and for all.
Source: A Foreign Policy of Freedom, by Ron Paul, p.363-364 Jun 15, 2007

Ronald Reagan had the courage to turn tail & run in Lebanon

Ronald Reagan in 1983 sent Marines into Lebanon, and he said he would never turn tail and run. A few months later, the Marines were killed, 241 were killed, and the Marines were taken out. And Reagan addressed this subject in his memoirs. And he says, "I said I would never turn tail and run." He says, "But I never realized the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics," and he changed his policy there. We need the courage of a Ronald Reagan. Source: 2007 Republican Debate in South Carolina May 15, 2007

Intervention abroad incites hatred & attacks like 9/11

Q [to Paul]: Should the 9/11 attacks have changed our non-interventionist policies?PAUL: No. [Abandoning our tradition of] non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years.
Q: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack?
PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.
GIULIANI: That's an extraordinary statement, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that.
PAUL: If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there.
Source: [X-ref Giuliani] 2007 Republican Debate in South Carolina May 15, 2007

When we go to war carelessly, the wars don't end

Q [to Paul]: You are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq. Are you out of step with your party? Or is your party out of step with the rest of the world? PAUL: I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, and stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them. Just think of the tremendous improvement in relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men [during the Vietnam war]. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution. And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. When we do, the wars don't end.
Source: 2007 Republican Debate in South Carolina May 15, 2007

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Ron Paul on Iraq War

Different view on war because I adhere to the Constitution

Q: You have a different point of view on the war than your GOP colleagues, don't you?A: I do. I definitely have a different point of view, because we weren't justified in going over there. We did not declare the war. You might ask the question, why is it that I have a different view point on foreign policy? Because I adhere to the Constitution and the advice of the founders to stay out of the entangling alliances, the internal affairs of other nations.
Source: 2007 Republican primary debate on Univision Dec 9, 2007

Iraq is not Nazi Germany; WWII opposition did not cause WWII

Q: John McCain said in the YouTube debate that you "talk about the war in Iraq and how it has failed. And I want to tell you that that kind of isolationism, sir, is what caused World War II. You allowed Hitler to come to power with that kind of attitude of isolationism and appeasement." You were shaking your head as you heard the final words. I want you to elaborate this morning.A: Well, first off, Iraq is not Nazi Germany. And besides, I thought it was Hitler that caused World War II, not the American people who opposed going in. So it didn't make any sense. And then he was awfully confused about isolationism versus non-intervention. There is a big difference. Isolationism isn't what I advocate. I advocate non-intervention, not getting involved in the internal affairs of other nations, and not pretending a country like Iraq is equivalent to Nazi Germany. Iraq had no army, no navy, no WMD, had nothing to do with 9/11, so the comparison makes no sense.
Source: CNN Late Edition: 2007 presidential series with Wolf Blitzer Dec 2, 2007

Anger abroad at US for planning 14 permanent bases in Iraq

Q: John McCain said after the YouTube debate, "I tried to point out to Rep. Paul that the soldiers in Iraq believe that they are winning & they don't agree with his description of the motives for which we went to war in Iraq." You want to respond to him? A: Well, yes, we do disagree on this. I don't believe we went to the war for the right reason. There were no weapons of mass destruction. It had nothing to do with 9/11. So we were there for the wrong reason and he doesn't understand the motivations for why they want to come here. It's not because we are wealthy and prosperous and free. They come here because we are in their country. And even if there is an improvement, which we all hope there is, we plan to keep 14 bases over there, a huge Naval base, and we have this huge embassy. We have a permanent plan to stay there and take over these $30 trillion worth of oil in that region. And the people in those countries know that and that's why they are very angry. And to deny that is folly.
Source: CNN Late Edition: 2007 presidential series with Wolf Blitzer Dec 2, 2007

Mercantilist oil dependency was reason for war

Q: Would we have gone to war in Iraq if we weren't so dependent on Middle East oil?A: Probably not, but that should not be a reason. That's an old theory. It's mercantilistic. It's neocolonialism that you have to maintain your supply routes and your natural resources. But I think there's still a lot of those kind of people around. You know, we were told it was about oil and jobs when it first started in 1990, and this is just a continuation of that war.
Source: 2007 Republican debate in Dearborn, Michigan Oct 9, 2007

We went into Iraq under false pretenses of WMD and 9/11

Q: Regarding declining minority enlistment, what do you say to minorities who are overwhelmingly opposed to the continuation of this war?A: The most important promise we keep is the oath to obey the Constitution. We just shouldn't be going to all these wars. We shouldn't have so many injured and in our hospitals because we shouldn't go to war unless it's declared. If it's declared, we should go win it and get it over with. We went in under false pretense. There were no weapons of mass destruction There are still people who believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, yet 15 of the people were from Saudi Arabia. We need to live up to our principles so there are less injured veterans, but when they come home we better jolly well take care of them, and we're not doing a very good job right now, because all the money's going overseas. We're broke. We got to do something about it. And we can't perpetuate a welfare state AND police an empire without going bankrupt.
Source: 2007 GOP Presidential Forum at Morgan State University Sep 27, 2007

Preemptive war is against Christian doctrine of just war

Q: Tell us about your personal faith, and what it means to your life.A: I get to my God through Christ. Christ, to me, is a Man of peace. He is for peace, He is not for war. He doesn't justify preemptive war. I strongly believe that there is a Christian doctrine of just war. And I believe this nation has drifted from that. No matter what the rationales are, we have drifted from that, and it's very, very dangerous, and I see in many ways being unchristian. Christ is for love, and forgiveness, and turning the other cheek for peace. And to justify what we do in the name of Christianity I think is very dangerous, and not part of what Christianity is all about. Christ came here for spiritual reasons, not secular war and boundaries and geography. And yet, we are now dedicating so much of our aggressive activity in the name of God, but God, he is the Prince of Peace. That is what I see from my God and through Christ. I vote for peace.
Source: 2007 GOP Values Voter Presidential Debate Sep 17, 2007

No US role in autonomy for Christians in Iraq Nineveh region

Q: US policy has thus far failed Christians & other non-Muslim minorities in Iraq; their very existence is threatened. This would be a tragic and ironic outcome of Iraq's liberation. Do you support their political goals by endorsing the creation of an autonomous administrative area in their ancestral homeland of the Nineveh plains, as permitted by Article 125 of the Iraqi Constitution?

• HUCKABEE: Yes.
• TANCREDO:Yes.
• COX: Yes.
• BROWNBACK:Yes.
• PAUL: No.
• HUNTER:Yes.
• KEYES: Yes.

Source: 2007 GOP Values Voter Presidential Debate Sep 17, 2007

People saying "bloodbath" said "cakewalk": listen to dissent

Q: Your position on the war is pretty simple: Get out. What about trying to minimize the bloodbath that would certainly occur if we pull out in a hurry?A: The people who say there will be a bloodbath are the ones who said it will be a cakewalk or it will be a slam dunk, and that it will be paid for by oil. Why believe them? They've been wrong on everything they've said. So why not ask the people who advised not to go into the region and into the war? The war has not gone well one bit.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at UNH, sponsored by Fox News Sep 5, 2007

Take marching orders from Constitution; not from al Qaeda

Q: [to Paul]: Your position on the war is pretty simple: Get out. PAUL: Yes, I would leave. I would leave completely. Why leave the troops in the region? The fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia was one of the three reasons given for the attack on 9/11. So why leave them in the region? They don't want our troops on the Arabian Peninsula. We have no need for our national security to have troops on the Arabian Peninsula.
Q: You're basically saying that we should take our marching orders from Al Qaida? If they want us off the Arabian Peninsula, we should leave?
PAUL: No! I'm saying we should take our marching orders from our Constitution. We should not go to war without a declaration. We should not go to war when it's an aggressive war. This is an aggressive invasion. We've committed the invasion of this war. And it's illegal under international law. That's where I take my marching orders, not from any enemy.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at UNH, sponsored by Fox News Sep 5, 2007

How many more lives lost just to save face?

PAUL: [to Hunter]: We have lost over 5,000 Americans killed in Afghanistan & Iraq, plus the civilians killed. How many more you want to lose? How long are you going to be there? What do we have to pay to save face? That's all we're doing, is saving face. It's time we came home.HUNTER: Let me just tell you what they've done. In Anbar Province, we were having 1,350 attacks a month last October. By the blood, sweat and tears of the US Marines out there, we pulled it down 80%. They've pulled down civilian casualties 74%. We've got 129 battalions in the Iraqi army that we're training up. That's the right way to win. It's called victory. That's how we leave Iraq.
Q: No matter how long it takes?
HUNTER: If you think we're going to be there for a long time, you don't understand the determination of the US Marines and the US Army. We're going to turn it over.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at UNH, sponsored by Fox News Sep 5, 2007

Neocons hijacked our foreign policy to invade Iraq

Q: [to Huckabee]: Should we continue the troop surge?HUCKABEE: We have to continue the surge, and let me explain why. When I was a little kid, if I went into a store with my mother, she had a simple rule for me: If I picked something off the shelf at the store and I broke it, I bought it. Well, what we did in Iraq, we essentially broke it. It's our responsibility to do the best we can to try to fix it before we just turn away. whether or not we should have gone to Iraq is a discussion the historians can have, but we're there. We bought it because we broke it.
PAUL: The American people didn't go in. A few people advising this administration, a small number of people called the neoconservatives hijacked our foreign policy. They're responsible, not the American people. They're not responsible. We shouldn't punish them.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at UNH, sponsored by Fox News Sep 5, 2007

Iraq war is illegal; undeclared wars never end & we lose

Q: What would be your strategy for ending the war in Iraq?PAUL: Just come home. We just marched in. We can just come back. We went in there illegally. We did not declare war. It's lasting way too long. We didn't declare war in Korea or Vietnam. The wars were never really ended. We lose those wars. We're losing this one. We shouldn't be there. We ought to just come home. The #1 reason it's in our national self-interest & for our national security, think of our defenses now, how rundown they are. What is the morale of our military today when they're sent over there for 12 months and then they're kept for another three months? They come home and, with less than a year's rest, they're sent back again. Congress is currently trying to change the rules so we give these men an adequate rest. This war is not going well because the foreign policy is defective.
HUNTER: I'm tired of the Democrats and my colleague saying, "Come home." It's a race to see who could stampede for the exit the quickest.
Source: 2007 GOP Iowa Straw Poll debate Aug 5, 2007

Neocons promoted Iraq war for years; not about Al Qaida

I opposed the war a long time before it started. The neoconservatives promoted this war many, many years before it was started. It had nothing to do with Al Qaida. There was no Al Qaida in Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Just think of the weapons the Soviets had in the '60s. We did not have to go to nuclear war with them. There's no reason to go to war against these Third World nations.At the same time, those individuals who predicted these disastrous things to happen if we leave Iraq are the same ones who said, "As soon as we go in, it will just be duck soup, it'll be over in three months and it won't cost us anything because the oil will pay for it."
The individuals who predict [an Iraq] disaster, predicted the domino theory, in Vietnam. I served five years in the military in the '60s. When we left there, it was tough, yes. But now we trade with Vietnam. We can achieve much more in peace than we can ever achieve in these needless, unconstitutional, undeclared wars.
Source: 2007 GOP Iowa Straw Poll debate Aug 5, 2007

We're more threatened now by staying in Iraq

Q: If General Petraeus' strategy is not working so far in September, what do you do then?A: The sooner we come home, the better. If they declare there's no progress in September, we should come home. It was a mistake to go, so it's a mistake to stay. If we made the wrong diagnosis, we should change the treatment. The weapons weren't there, and we went in under U.N. resolutions. And our national security was not threatened. We're more threatened now by staying.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at Saint Anselm College Jun 5, 2007

Stop policing Iraq's streets; have Iraqis take over

Q: Considering the Iraqi people have lived under a dictatorship for the last 30 years or so, what are we going to do to make sure they have a government in place before we pull our troops out and they're able to help themselves? Otherwise we're just putting them in a position to accept another terrorist leader. A: Well, we've had four years to do this and it hasn't worked. The biggest incentive for them to take upon themselves the responsibility is just for us to leave. We don't need to lose 100 men and women every month, more than 1,000 per year. And so you want it done. You want them to take over. You've got to give them an incentive. So I think we should immediately stop patrolling the streets. That's a policeman's job. It's not the work of the Army. We're not fighting a military battle. We're in a different type of warfare right now. So the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can make sure that no more Americans will die.
Source: 2007 GOP debate at Saint Anselm College Jun 3, 2007

We should have declared war in Iraq, or not gone in at all

Q: You're one of 6 House Republicans in 2002 who voted against authorizing Pres. Bush to use force in Iraq.A: Right.
Q: Now you say we should pull our troops out?
A: In 2002, I offered an amendment to declare war, up or down. Nobody voted for the war. And my argument there was, if we want to go to war, the Congress should declare it. We don't go to war like we did in Vietnam and Korea, because the wars never end. And I argued the case and made the point that it would be a quagmire if we go in.
Source: 2007 Republican Debate in South Carolina May 15, 2007

Opposes Iraq war and opposes path toward Iran war

Ron Paul strongly opposes the war in Iraq, and warns that President Bush is going down a dangerous path toward war with Iran. Source: Jill Morrison on KUHF, Houston Public Radio Jan 17, 2007

---

Ron Paul on Voting Record

Voted against war because Iraq was not a national threat

Q: You voted against the war. Why are all your fellow Republicans up here wrong?A: You might ask the question, why are 70% of the American people now wanting us out of there? I tried very hard to solve this problem before we went to war by saying, "Declare war if you want to go to war. Go to war, fight it and win it, but don't get into it for political reasons or to enforce U.N. resolutions or pretend the Iraqis were a national threat to us.
Source: 2007 GOP primary debate, at Reagan library, hosted by MSNBC May 3, 2007

Voted YES on redeploying US troops out of Iraq starting in 90 days.

To provide for the redeployment of US Armed Forces and defense contractors from Iraq. Requires within 90 days to commence the redeployment; and to complete such redeployment within 180 days after its commencement. Prohibits the use of DOD funds to increase the number of US forces serving in Iraq in excess of the number serving in Iraq as of January 1, 2007, unless specifically authorized by Congress. Authorizes retaining in Iraq US forces for providing security for diplomatic missions; for targeting al-Qaeda; and for training Iraqi Security Forces. Requires the President to transfer to the government of Iraq all interest held by the US in any military facility in Iraq. Proponents support voting YES because:
This war is a terrible tragedy, and it is time to bring it to an end. This is a straightforward bill to redeploy our military forces from Iraq and to end the war in Iraq. This bill does not walk away from the Iraqi people. It specifically continues diplomatic, social, economic, and reconstruction aid. Finally, this bill leaves all the decisions on the locations outside of Iraq to which our troops will be redeployed wholly in the hands of our military commanders.
Opponents support voting NO because:
This legislation embraces surrender and defeat. This legislation undermines our troops and the authority of the President as commander in chief. Opponents express concern about the effects of an ill-conceived military withdrawal, and about any legislation that places military decisions in the hands of politicians rather than the military commanders in the field. The enemy we face in Iraq view this bill as a sign of weakness. Now is not the time to signal retreat and surrender. It is absolutely essential that America, the last remaining superpower on earth, continue to be a voice for peace and a beacon for freedom in our shrinking world.
Reference: Out of Iraq Caucus bill; Bill H R 2237 ; vote number 2007-330 on May 10, 2007

Voted NO on declaring Iraq part of War on Terror with no exit date.

Voting YES would support the following resolution (excerpted):
• Whereas the United States and its allies are engaged in a Global War on Terror, a long and demanding struggle against an adversary that is driven by hatred of American values and that is committed to imposing, by the use of terror, its repressive ideology throughout the world;
• Whereas the terrorists have declared Iraq to be the central front in their war against all who oppose their ideology;
• Whereas the United States and its Coalition partners will continue to support Iraq as part of the Global War on Terror:

Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
• Honors all those Americans who have taken an active part in the Global War on Terror;
• Declares that it is not in the national security interest of the United States to set an arbitrary date for the withdrawal or redeployment of United States Armed Forces from Iraq;
• Declares that the United States is committed to the completion of the mission to create a sovereign, free, secure, and united Iraq;
• Declares that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.

Reference: Resolution on Prevailing in the Global War on Terror; Bill HRES 861 ; vote number 2006-288 on Jun 12, 2006

Voted NO on approving removal of Saddam & valiant service of US troops.

States that the House of Representatives:

1. affirms that the United States and the world have been made safer with the removal of Saddam Hussein and his regime from power in Iraq;
2. commends the Iraqi people for their courage in the face of unspeakable oppression and brutality inflicted on them by Saddam Hussein's regime;
3. commends the Iraqi people on the adoption of Iraq's interim constitution; and
4. commends the members of the U.S. Armed Forces and Coalition forces for liberating Iraq and expresses its gratitude for their valiant service.

Reference: War in Iraq Anniversary resolution; Bill H Res 557 ; vote number 2004-64 on Mar 17, 2004

Voted NO on authorizing military force in Iraq.

Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq: Passage of the joint resolution that would authorize President Bush to use the US military as he deems necessary and appropriate to defend U.S. national security against Iraq and enforce UN Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. It would be required that the president report to Congress, no later than 48 hours after using force, his determination that diplomatic options or other peaceful means would not guarantee US national security against Iraq or allow enforcement of UN resolutions and that using force is consistent with anti-terrorism efforts. The resolution would also give specific statutory authorization under the War Powers Resolution. Every 60 days the president would also be required to report to Congress on actions related to the resolution. Reference: Bill sponsored by Hastert,R-IL; Bill HJRes114 ; vote number 2002-455 on Oct 10, 2002

Voted YES on disallowing the invasion of Kosovo.

Vote on an amendment to the "Kosovo and Southwest Asia Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act" which would prohibit the use of funds for any invasion of Yugoslavia with U.S. ground forces except in time of war. Reference: Amendment introduced by Istook, R-OK; Bill HR 1664 ; vote number 1999-119 on May 6, 1999

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