Is Ron Paul a hypocrite? I haven't looked far into him, but the common belief seems to be that he isn't.

Maybe he shouldn't qualify as a politician (in the derogatory sense?)?

and ghost, thats why Ron Paul will never ever be the GOP candidate.
tantris...you mean palin would win the primary(? or the election? the first is probable the latter very very unlikely.
My go to site for polling and this kind of stuff is fivethirtyeight.com
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/first-look-at-palins-primary-math.html ( quite detailed)

So Ross Perot got almost 19% of the popular vote in 1992, but no electoral college vote, because he won no states. What does a 3rd party candidate need to do to win?

become a republican or democrat.

Who else thinks that the electoral college sucks, and popular vote only would be better for presidential candidates?

Why doesnt matter who you vote for? your vote probably wont be counted anyway, and on the off chance your vote isnt stolen, what sort of choice did you have in the first place.
the choice of a lesser of two (and it's always only ever two) evils is really no choice at all. Republicans, democrats, two faces of a coin. Theres really only one party, the party of imperialism and war.

I would rather acceptance voting or at least IRV. We need to allow for other parties. Sadly, the other parties aren't fighting for a reform of the electoral system. I don't actually know what their purpose is, most of the time.

@sean:
I meant the primary, I hope she doesn't have a chance at the actual election.

Sicarus +1

"Who else thinks that the electoral college sucks, and popular vote only would be better for presidential candidates?"

I do, when voting for one position, you should just count the votes.

"Why doesnt matter who you vote for? your vote probably wont be counted anyway"

Have you have evidence to suggest that over half the votes don't get counted?

Hey, if we had elections via popular vote, we wouldn't have had to put up with the gong show of 8 years of Bush.

Gore would have been worse. that year was a lose-lose.

Would you have got Gore and Bush out of the primaries, though?

And what would the effect on the way people voted have been?

See, the hilarious thing about American politics in the last 50 years or so is this.

The father of the modern idea of "conservatism" is Senator Barry Goldwater. Yet in the last 30 years, American conservatism has turned increasingly religious.

This quote from Goldwater illustrates this:

"There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in 'A,' 'B,' 'C,' and 'D.' Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of 'conservatism.' "


Once you turn the political debate between idea A and B and the relative merits of both, into "God is with us, and if you're against us, you're against God", you poison the entire process.

I come from a ultra-conservative Iowa small town, and I often ask my old HS classmates that think that Christians are under attack how they would feel if they were a minority in a Muslim country, and the majority was imposing their own view of the world upon them. Most of them fall back on the whole "But we're right!" statement. But a few actually think about that, and that gives me some hope.

"Once you turn the political debate between idea A and B and the relative merits of both, into "God is with us, and if you're against us, you're against God", you poison the entire process." - unless you are argueing with a Jew, who may simply retort, 'yeah? well we already killed your God, so i've no problem going up against him again!' :p

First, I really think we should avoid this topic, or this thread will go down in flames quickly. Nevermind, I'll just leave it at that. :D

LOL! Orathaic +1 for the humor of it.

Ron Paul is a joke. Some of his positions I agree with but when you point out that:

Ron Paul wants to define life as starting at conception, build a fence along the US-Mexico border,prevent the Supreme Court from hearing cases on the Establishment Clause or the right to privacy, permitting the return of sodomy laws and the like (a bill which he has repeatedly re-introduced), pull out of the UN, disband NATO, end birthright citizenship,deny federal funding to any organisation which "which presents male or female homosexuality as an acceptable alternative life style or which suggest that it can be an acceptable life style" along with destroying public education and social security,, and abolish the Federal Reserve in order to put America back on the gold standard. He was also the sole vote against divesting US federal government investments incorporations doing business with the genocidal government of the Sudan.

Oh, and he believes that the Left is waging a war on religion and Christmas, he's against gay marriage, is against the popular vote, opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wants the estate tax repealed, is STILL making racist remarks, believes that the Panama Canal should be the property of the United States, and believes in New World Order conspiracy theories, not to mention his belief that the International Baccalaureate program is UN mind control..

...then it's much more immediately obvious that he is completely insane.

Source links for every claim: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=20719563&postcount=18289

Jesus Christ. You people are all socialist muslims.

As for good Republican candidates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Huntsman,_Jr.

He's so good Obama sent him as ambassador to China.

pull out of the UN- The UN is a joke. If we withdrew, we would be sending less soldiers to countries like Iraq to help with their governments.

disband NATO- Ron Paul says, "More than 50 years ago the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed to defend Western Europe and the United States against attack from the communist nations of Eastern Europe. It was an alliance of sovereign nations bound together in common purpose - for mutual defense. The deterrence value of NATO helped kept the peace throughout the Cold War. In short, NATO achieved its stated mission. With the fall of the Soviet system and the accompanying disappearance of the threat of attack, in 1989-1991, NATO’s reason to exist ceased. Unfortunately, as with most bureaucracies, the end of NATO’s mission did not mean the end of NATO." that makes sense to me.

more coming

Regarding the Ron Paul link at the bottom of HIsbiskiss's post - at random, I pulled one up. It was a bill introduced in 1980. 31 years ago.

arghh! more then half of my post is gone! :x

@ Hisbiskiss- I was going to go down your list and debunk all of your claims, but did you even read the links you posted? You are making huge conclusions from the readings that are supported by very little evidence. please go through your own links and read them before posting them here as proof of Paul's bigotry.

@The_Master_Warrior - I wasn't expressing an opinion, I was just saying that it definitely hurts Romney that he is a mormon.

@Dingle: Is that a criticism of how he's been consistent in his support of the same ideals his entire career or..?

There so much more than that list also, he's a huge hypocrite and he's going to get primaried in his own district for it: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/02/28/paul-decries-challenge-in-my-own-primary/

No Hibiskiss. I don't know whether he's been consistent in that. But showing me a link from a 31 year old bill isn't going to do much to convince me. Showing me he is STILL in favor of that 31 year old position, yes, that would do more. But I suspect whoever wrote the original article can't find one more recent for the topic in question, or he would have cited it.

Ron Paul is insane, and the gold standard wouldn't work anymore, but he's no more insane than the other idiots we've got in there.

At the very least Ron Paul's policies would keep us out of bankruptcy. Anything that doesn't directly address that coming catastrophe is the real crazy policy.