krag2112:

my mind is quite open, and i advocate a reasoned scientific approach
to judging candidates.  you will note that ron paul is especially
popular among technophiles (engineers and slashdotters) a demographic
with especially strong logic and reasoning skills.  i believe the
major reason for that is the emphasis they put on facts above
feelings.

i don't know what it means for you to say that ron paul's denial
regarding those newsletters is "not good enough" for you.  their
content is out of step with ron paul's frequent deference to non-white
heroes like martin luther king jr. and gandhi, and they aren't even
written in his style.  there is no evidence he wrote them.  are you
saying that the facts aren't good enough for you because you just feel
it in your gut that he's guilty?

let the evidence decide that...

i like him too, and ron paul has also spoken relatively positively of
him.  i've even donated to his campaign.  but he does not understand
monetary policy, and he voted for the patriot act (albeit an amended
version), while ron paul did not.  and he voted to re-fund the war,
while ron paul did not.  and he has taken plenty of special interest
money from corporations like exelon, and the (unviable) ethanol
industry (followed by votes for ethanol subsidies!), while ron paul
has not  (although obama always claims he doesn't take special
interest money).  so no, you cannot call obama a saint, although he'll
probably be the best president we've had since taft.  but you *can*
call ron paul a saint.  if the founders were here today, they'd shower
him with praise, and scold us for our ignorance as a society which
would rather watch britney spears being chased by paparazzi than the
history channel or c-span.

i sent you a link to a video that should have been more than enough to
get you started.  you can also simply google your way to a great deal
of knowledge.  but judging by your questions, that's too much work for
you.

Jesse Benton from the Ron Paul campaign writes:

"Clearly, a Paul administration cannot end the IRS on January 29,
2009. Ending the income tax..would take major cooperation with the
Congress. But, with honest communication and a lot of hard work, Dr.
Paul knows that we can end the end the income tax over the course of
just a few years. Over half of federal government revenue presently
comes from sources other than the income tax. The United States could
end the IRS and still fund the same level of big government we had
less than ten years ago. There is nothing 'unserious' about that."

did you know that the income tax only began in 1913, and the irs was
created in 1952?  well, of course you didn't.  so how do you suppose
we got by before that?

paraphrasing harry browne: In 1912, the federal budget (in 2002
dollars) was $12 billion. In 2002 it was $2 trillion - only because
the income tax made it possible.  With no income taxes, economic
necessity will force the politicians to abide by the Constitution.
America will be a free country once again."

i agree.  without the enormous power to control how all that money is
spent, political office would not be nearly as appealing to nefarious
entities such as tom delay or dick cheney.

none.  it was created in 1979, and there is no evidence that u.s.
education has become dramatically better since that time.  if
anything, it's simply become more expensive and bureaucratic.  and it
was unconstitutional in the first place.  The federal government has
no constitutional authority to fund or control schools.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/education/

i now live in san francisco, but i was born and spent most of my life
in kansas, where they've periodically suspended teaching evolution.
as long as school decisions are kept local, a person like me has the
ability to leave an area like that and raise my kids in a better
system.  but since the government has so much central federal
authority over education, bush has wreaked havoc on the educational
system over the past 7 years, with his "no child left behind" non-
sense and general disregard for education.  i'd rather his kooky
fundie base be left to raise their own children in whatever kind of
crazy ways they want to, in their own states, and not have control
over policy in my intellectually progressive area, that will diminish
my child's educational experience.

as many as possible.  leaving huge government bureaucracies without
funds means leaving citizens WITH those funds still in their pockets,
so they can decide for themselves how to spend them, rather than being
forced to pay for third rate services from cronie-run con-jobs like
FEMA.
http://thecrossedpond.com/?p=2465

that's like asking what will replace all the jobs that have been
created by the trillion dollars we've spent on this insane iraq war.
if we weren't spending that money on the war, it would be in our
pockets, and we'd be spending it at ikea or blockbuster or buying
fruit loops for our kids.  you also have to understand the difference
between consumption and production.  when we spend a million dollars
on a laser-guided bomb, in order to blow up some iraqi patriots (or as
we like to call them "insurgents") all the fruit of that labor is
destroyed.  it is consumed, just like food.  but if you spend a
million dollars making durable goods, like homes, then the utility
from that remains for years to come.  so if you eliminate wasteful
government bureaucracies, and let people spend the extra money they
are allowed to keep in a more efficient way (since people generally
like to get as much value for their money as possible, unlike
government employees when they spend it on their behalf), you end up
with a greater net wealth across society.  this ultimately benefits
the poor and the middle-class, especially when you consider the
inflation tax (since we pay for many of our bureaucracies by printing
money out of thin air).

a fundamental aspect of economics is that industries change, and
people have to switch careers in step with that.  ron paul is not
talking about getting rid of these agencies overnight.  he's been
studing economic policy for decades.  but he understands that it ought
to be our long-term goal, and that we should do it with some
aggressiveness, understanding that the positives vastly outweigh the
negatives.

not just less regulation -- less _government_.  when you research
beyond the superficial aspects, big government is actually helpful to
corporations, by giving out corporate welfare and strategically
utilizing inflation to make sure the poor and middle-class are left to
bear that economic burden.  think of the trillions of dollars we've
given to corporations who build airplanes and bombs to kill people.
we literally handed out unaccounted-for stacks of cash to corporations
far and wide, and paid for it largely with inflation.  it's the poor
helping the rich, thanks to your big government.  as a product, the
iraq war would have never succeeded in the free market.  not even the
biggest warmongers out there would have funded the war if they had the
option to spend that money at a rodeo or casino instead of on invading
iraq.  in a free market, war just isn't economically viable except
when it's a defensive war.

michael scheuer, former head of the CIA bin Laden unit and author of
two books on the subject, endorses paul's foreign policy, and spoke at
a ron paul press conference about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAt6Pf7jZjA

this month, suicide terrorism expert robert pape joined ron paul's
foreign policy advisory team.  dr. pape is an expert on suicide
terrorism and the founder of the chicago project on suicide terrorism.
he authored _dying to win: the strategic logic of suicide terrorism_,
and has published numerous articles on suicide terrorism and the use
of air power in war.  ron paul has also written extensively on the
subject, demonstrating a superior understanding relative to his
counterparts:
http://www.antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=6712

it's pretty simple really.  without spending money bombing iraq and
interfering in middle-east affairs for the past 100 years, we'd be
much safer.  if we didn't spend so much money on an overseas empire,
but instead focused our troops on doing their real job (protecting
AMERICA) we'd be far safer, and less aggravating to people like usama
bin ladin.

as for global warming, which i take very seriously, paul has taken a
realistic approach, knowing that there's no conceivable way for us to
invade countries like china to stop their pollution, or to halt our
consumption of petroleum.  instead he notes that our economy would be
well on its way toward an alternative energy infrastructure if only
the government didn't help enforce petroleum dependence by subsidizing
the incredibly wealthy oil industry, as well as make it difficult/
impossible to approve and import ultra-efficient personal vehicles
(like the smartcar) into this country.  he also points out that
government is one of the biggest polluters of all.  so we can actually
make the biggest most practical effect by simply allowing the market
more freedom, and *enforcing* the pollution caps that do exist,
instead of conspiring with heavy-polluting industries to let them
through the loopholes.  this doesn't take vast sums of money -- the
government already has a huge percentage of our income, and a lot of
it goes to *support* these industries.

as the only medical doctor running in any major party this season, ron
paul has a real-world understanding of the health care system.  also
by understanding economics, he understands how government involvement
in health care tends to make health care worse and less affordable.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/issues/health-care/

i grew up in literal poverty in rural kansas, and i dropped out of
college to spend years working full time to get medical attention and
eventual surgery for a problematic congenital deformity (that my
family had neither the money or the concern to treat when i was a
child).  i worked for over a year as a financial counselor at a major
san francisco hospital, and i can tell you from my experience with
patients from socialist countries, that our system is better than
theirs.  even after all the years of misery i faced because health
care was not "free", i know that excessive government involvement will
reduce incentives for companies to develop new life-saving drugs, and
will reduce the quality of care overall.

further, a free country leaves you wealthier, so you not only have
more money to afford your own medical insurance and care, but more
money to donate to charities to help people like me, if that's what
you really want.  you have this typically myopic socialist ideal that
if we just allow government to tax _everyone_ to fund what 50%+1 wants
government to do, then things will be better off.  but then you
_ignore_ how this system allows neocons to kill 100's of thousands of
people with *your* tax money.  you have to look at it on the whole,
thinking about what the broad and long-term effects will be of the
kind of government you support.  otherwise your good intentions will
lead your society to ruin, as we are progressively seeing.

again, you're being myopic.  you ignore the "inflation tax", which
DOES affect the poor, so it IS a tax.  and you ignore how government
waste actually decreases our net wealth, dramatically, meaning less
spending and fewer jobs -- so there is less competition in the job
market, and people with fewer skills have fewer options and have to
take lower paying jobs, or may be unemployed altogether.  and you
ignore how policy like the minimum wage increases unemployment among
low-skilled workers.  i think you should watch milton friedman's _free
to choose_ series, available free online.

which he obviously didn't write, but as long as you think he did, i
guess evidence is irrelevant.

but i think you've demonstrated a big lack of understanding of those
issues, so it does not surprise me that you think he's wrong.

carl sagan said you should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that
your brain falls out.  i'll give anything you say due consideration,
but when it's already been countered with staggering evidence, i may
not be able to take it too seriously.

i was raised by atheists, and attended a unitarian church, full of
spiritual but generally non-religious people (some exceptions) who
were highly intellectual.  below i cite a passage from an obama speech
that rings of that same kind of intellectualness that respects and
covets spirituality, but ultimately sees it as a convenient tradition,
rather than as a scientifically sound belief.  i cannot read obama's
mind, but i'd bet my life's savings that if you really sat him down
and grilled him, off the record, he'd confess that he's perfectly
willing to admit there may be no god, and most of the stories in the
bible are legends.  and good for him.

as for being a liar, it's hard for me to think of it like that.
instead i think of how jesse ventura once answered a journalist who
asked him, "how much of that wrestling stuff is real?"  and he said
"all of it".  yeah, all of it is real.  those people really put their
bodies through an endurance course.  they really come out and
entertain at a high energy level, whether they are sick or depressed
or injured or not.  in that sense, it's totally real.  a have heard
many self-described christians describe their beliefs in a way that i
would call, in the strictest sense, atheism.  in a way, they "believe"
in god in the spiritual humanitarian sense, and they feel the
authenticity of those human traditions that come with religion.  but
they don't necessarily thing genesis is historical truth.  they may
even think of god more as a personification of the natural world.  i'd
call them atheists.  but i wouldn't call them liars, per se, if they
described themselves the way obama has described himself.  i'm
especially forgiving for people who are running for political office
for generally good reasons, and i think obama is one of the few who
is.  if you have to fudge your personal narrative a little in order to
get into office and achieve the good that you wish to achieve,
sometimes you just have to play the game.  it's unfortunate, but it's
better than letting a REAL christian like huckabee get into power and
work to change the constitution to fit with god's word, or whatever
nonsense he's talked about.

Obama sayeth:
Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70
percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent
call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in
America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful
marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches.
In fact, it speaks to a hunger that's deeper than that - a hunger that
goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily
rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office,
flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on
their diets - and they're coming to the realization that something is
missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their
diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They're
looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a
recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and
confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that
somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they
are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards
nothingness.

And I speak with some experience on this matter. I was not raised in a
particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience
were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born
Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents
were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the
most spiritual and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a
healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so
did I...