Friday, 27 January 2012

Ron Paul proofed his racist newsletter

quote [ But people close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ ]
[by foobar@8:00pmGMT] [+10 Interesting]

Comments

KingPellinore said @ 8:06pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
+1 Who Didn't See That Coming?
foobar said @ 8:11pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Who didn't want to see that coming.
CapnSilver said @ 8:21pm GMT on 27th Jan
You know what I didn't see coming?
Page 3 behind a paywall
foobar said @ 8:26pm GMT on 27th Jan
There is no page three. All their stories have that at the end now.
foobar said @ 8:32pm GMT on 27th Jan
But I've changed the link anyway.
sanepride said @ 9:51pm GMT on 27th Jan
I'll admit to being a little (but not very) surprised. I was willing to take Paul at his word that he wasn't fully aware of what was being published in the newsletter that bore his name. Of course I was never willing to absolve him of responsibility.
GordonGuano said @ 11:46pm GMT on 27th Jan
+1 No Shit.
lilmookieesquire said @ 8:17pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:5 Funny]
structured_spirits said @ 11:44pm GMT on 27th Jan
I think I like Newt better because he wants the Moon to become a US state.
dreamingzephyr said @ 1:15pm GMT on 28th Jan
Yeah, it's weird. Newt is a putrid little amphibian, but hearing a politician talk about a reinvigorated space program is exciting.

Unless every society becomes a whole lot more draconian (and science- rather than faith-based, and future-paying-attention-to rather than now-living-for), we are going to CONTINUE to fuck this world up with overpopulation and pollution. Our only possible future as a species involves expanding beyond Earth.
mrcucumber said @ 2:29pm GMT on 28th Jan
Or maybe population control. Nature has a funny way of doing that with natural disasters and disease.
arctan said @ 3:26pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
That's kind of nonsense. If you can't take a planet that's already tailor-made for humans to live there (or, rather, we're tailor-made to live here, as a result of evolving here) and *keep* it from becoming uninhabitable, how the fuck are you going to take a totally uninhabitable ball of rock and *make* it inhabitable?

There is no way the massive engineering project of trying to create inhabitable space on the Moon from scratch could ever be cheaper, easier or make more sense than just keeping the inhabitable places on the Earth from becoming uninhabitable.
dreamingzephyr said @ 3:52pm GMT on 28th Jan
Tailor-made or not, we don't have room for all the people you people keeping peopling this planet with.

Perhaps my parents' house had everything I needed, and it certainly was cheaper to live there. Should I not have moved out?

Just because, at this point on our timeline, we don't have a solid means of developing infrastructure for non-Terra living doesn't make taking steps toward it "nonsense." That's like saying there's no point in spending money on Cancer studies because we don't have a cure yet.

As it is, we need to look to the stars if we want to avoid a global society with strictly limited reproductive rights, and all the war creating such centralized control would require.
dreamingzephyr said @ 3:55pm GMT on 28th Jan
The cancer analogy is particularly apt, given that both of these problems are issues with a group of biological entities reproducing beyond their environment's abilities to support them.
arctan said @ 5:03pm GMT on 28th Jan
The solution to cancer is not to try to create an entirely new biological life form from scratch that you can then spread cancer to.

I mean, for one thing, that does absolutely nothing to cure the cancer in the original organism. You are aware that even if we did develop a Moon colony there's just no fucking way you could get it to the point where you could start pouring the unwashed masses there, right? We're talking bankrupting ourselves for the sake of making a tiny town for a few thousand people.
foobar said @ 8:59pm GMT on 28th Jan
That's pretty much how colonization always works, at least at first.
arctan said @ 1:55am GMT on 29th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
No, it isn't. The American colonization was colonizing a place where *people were already living* and thriving, complex civilization already existed. That's not the same thing at fucking all.

Space colonization wouldn't be about tilling the earth or clearing out wild animals or the other things you do to make a basically habitable space more habitable. It would be about *creating habitable space from nothing*.

The cost of colonization would exponentially *increase* with increased population, not decrease as you pushed past economies of scale like with the settlement analogies you're falsely drawing. Terraforming the Moon or Mars involves the wholesale transformation of an entire planet and the creation of ecosystems from scratch, which is exponentially so much harder than making a tiny city of vacuum-sealed rooms it's not even worth talking about.

Making the Sahara Desert bloom would be *so much easier* than terraforming Mars that it's not even worth making the comparison. We shouldn't even consider the idea of terraforming Mars until we've already terraformed the Earth -- if we can't solve the relatively tiny problems we have with pollution and resource depletion on Earth then the idea that we could make an utterly uninhabitable place inhabitable is fucking laughable.
foobar said @ 2:48am GMT on 29th Jan
America wasn't habitable to early colonists. Several attempts resulted in everyone dying.

And we shouldn't even consider geoengineering Earth until we've tried it out somewhere else, first.
willrogers said @ 5:05am GMT on 29th Jan
I don't know anything about geoengineering, but don't forget that the only reason most of the colonies that didn't fail only survived because the local Indian tribes helped them.
arctan said @ 1:26pm GMT on 29th Jan
America wasn't habitable to early colonists. Several attempts resulted in everyone dying.


America was habitable *to humans*. One of the reasons early colonists died was that the people *already there* didn't want them there.

If you are missing this huge, incredible, basic distinction between America and the Moon then you're missing the point of this whole conversation. And, indeed, you're missing why the thrust of your comments is kind of offensive -- as has been the case with your comments about the First Nations in the past. (The US and Canada don't exist as the result of "colonizing the wilderness", they exist as the result of the conquest of one set of complex, thriving civilizations by another.)

And we shouldn't even consider geoengineering Earth until we've tried it out somewhere else, first.

"Geoengineering" is not some kind of magic separate category of technology.

If we can't invest in the basic organizational skills and technological solutions to stop fucking up the Earth first, we have no business talking about completely remaking Mars. For one thing, the simple *energy costs* of remaking Mars will totally deplete the reserves of an Earth-based civilization that right now can't seem to keep its own lights on without ruining everything.

Again, read the Stross link. This isn't an airy-fairy discussion of abstractions and it certainly isn't some political stomping ground to have some pointless aesthetic discussion of whether we want our civilization to be"outward-looking" or not. This is a real engineering discussion with certain hard, immovable caps in cost in terms of energy and material resources, and it's one where any practical benefits of living on Mars simply do not exist.
foobar said @ 8:41pm GMT on 29th Jan
The primary reason early colonies were wiped out was that they simply couldn't survive through the winter, and as willrogers pointed out, many made it only because the Natives helped them.

You're missing the huge, incredible, basic distinction between the technology of the fourteenth century western civilization and today. Our attempts at living in enclosed, self sufficient spaces has a similar record, but we are learning.

Terraforming isn't something we're going to do in any foreseeable timeframe and isn't really even worth discussing.
arctan said @ 1:52am GMT on 30th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
The big difference is there's nothing fucking *there* on the Moon or Mars that makes it worth going to, and if you're creating a totally "enclosed, self-sufficient space" then there's no fucking point doing it on the Moon.

The idea that the Moon is some kind of solution to our overpopulation is utterly fucking retarded. Go to the Moon for the cool factor of being on the Moon. Go there to do low-gravity experiments. Go there to make it easier to mine asteroids or whatever. (There's almost nothing in space we need *right now* that could make a difference to Earth's economy, but that might change if we run desperately low on gold or copper and need more electrical conductors or whatever.)

But to go to the Moon to *live there* is really stupid. If you want more space to live, there are thousands of places you can go on Earth first. When we say Earth is "overpopulated" we mean we're running out of usable resources to sustain human life on Earth -- none of which exist on the Moon. We don't literally mean we're running out of places to put people. If you want to put people any old where in sealed domes, you could put them on the oceanic continental shelves, you could put them in Antarctica, you could put them in the Sahara and Gobi Desert -- fuck, you could put them in the grand wide open unpopulated spaces of the American Great Plains or the Canadian Prairie Provinces, which have a ridiculously low population density due to their lack of creature comforts to attract settlement and yet are millions of times more habitable than the Moon.

Once the Earth is actually literally filled up in terms of space -- something it seems unlikely will ever actually happen, given that food and water and energy are far more pressing limits to our expansion -- it will make sense to shoot people up in rockets to live on the Moon. Until then? Don't be ridiculous.
happiest_sadist said @ 3:37am GMT on 30th Jan
Even then it won't work. Unless you stop people reproducing it's not possible to build rockets and launch them quickly enough to put a noticeable dent in population. Even with a series of "space elevators" you couldn't export bodies as quickly as they reproduce.

This all sounds like me shooting my mouth off, and it is. There exists a pretty good article on the subject based on very optimistic numbers showing that it wouldn't work- unfortunately I've not been able to google it up. I'll post it if I find it.
foobar said @ 5:41am GMT on 30th Jan [Score:1 Good]
Europeans didn't colonize America for food and water. They did it for gold, and modern equivalents are on the Moon and asteroids in rare earth elements. Those expeditions paved the way for people who were being crowded out socially, politically, or economically even if not physically in Europe.

As a 'solution' to overpopulation it is of course stupid, because overpopulation isn't a problem, poverty is.
happiest_sadist said @ 6:15am GMT on 30th Jan
Damn straight!

But again, exporting meat bodies to space as a mitigator to population growth simply will not work. It's a limit problem at the intersection of biology and physics, and the numbers are simply prohibitive.

But we can get the gold, rare earths, et al. from the Belt (and maybe from the Moon too, but with greater difficulty) without having to go there in person. At least in theory, and not anytime soon or without great effort.

And as for your last sentence, I can't endorse it enough. Poverty is the problem. Feeding more mouths can also feed more brains- and mentation is our most precious resource.
foobar said @ 7:16pm GMT on 30th Jan
But again, population growth isn't a problem, so we don't need solutions to it. The drivers for colonization in the past (and all migration, really) was a lack of economic opportunity or political differences.

Here's an interesting tidbit: the cost to execute/imprison for life is in the same range as it is to launch 200 kg into orbit ($3,000,000).
happiest_sadist said @ 12:26am GMT on 31st Jan
OK, as a mitigator to population pressure, then.

Also, that is an interesting datum, but the cost-to-launch 200kg at a time is different from that to launch 200,000,000 kg at a time (or, 2 million humans with a small bag each, a number still far too small to affect regional population pressures.)
I'm not at all against the idea of space colonization (after all, I'm going), just harping on the fact that dreamingzephyr's idea of colonization mathematically can't work. There are plenty of other reasons to go, though.
foobar said @ 1:11am GMT on 31st Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Europe has a lot more people living in it today than it did during the colonialist period. What a bit of terra nullius brought was an opportunity for those dissatisfied or marginalized by the status quo to bugger off and make a life for themselves elsewhere.
foobar said @ 1:18am GMT on 31st Jan
Oh, and lifting 2 million people into orbit would drive the price way, way down from efficiency gains.
happiest_sadist said @ 3:22am GMT on 31st Jan
Assuming we're talking about lifting with rockets, from whence shall these 'efficiency gains' come?

Building and launching rockets isn't like manufacturing widgets. The cost to launch is limited by mass ratio, and that's a hard limit. Unless you can achieve an at least ten-fold improvement in mass ratio, you won't realize a noticeable gain.

Even if a price drop occurred, it wouldn't happen right away. The next two million to launch might benefit from it, but the first batch will cost what they cost.
This ignores the externalities of launching lots of big, heavy rockets all at once. I don't even know where to start counting those costs.
foobar said @ 7:40am GMT on 31st Jan
How much would a Honda Civic cost to make, if you were only building one, and entirely from scratch? How much would it cost if you were making 200,000 of them? But yes, the cost of the first run would cost more than subsequent runs, but you wouldn't be making 200,000 at a time, especially at first.

Fuel cost is ultimately tied to energy cost. We don't exactly have a shortage of hydrogen and oxygen.
happiest_sadist said @ 9:55am GMT on 31st Jan
"How much would a Honda Civic cost to make, if you were only building one, and entirely from scratch?"

I don't know, and neither do you. What do you mean by "entirely from scratch"? Do you think orbit-capable spacecraft are built "entirely from scratch"? Do you know of any Honda Civics that can reach LEO?

And yes we do in fact have a shortage of hydrogen. I understand it's the most abundant element in the universe so far as we know- but how much of it can you actually gather? Free hydrogen that is- you know, the kind that can be combined with oxygen to yield energy. Most of the hydrogen on this planet is bound up into relatively stable molecules (like water, for example). It takes at least as much energy to pull hydrogen out of such molecules as you can hope to get by combining it again.
foobar said @ 7:39pm GMT on 31st Jan
We do more or less make spacecraft from scratch, and we only make a few of each model. There are a lot of efficiencies of scale that could be taken advantage of.

As to hydrogen, again, that's just energy. There's no material shortage we have to overcome. If Algal oil pans out, we won't even have to resort to cracking water, and we can use even more energy dense fuels almost for free.
happiest_sadist said @ 4:49am GMT on 1st Feb
Well, I'm not going to claim that it's impossible, just that it's really really expensive and may not be worth it.

Hell, if we're going to spend enough to build a million rockets or so, let's just do a Space Elevator instead. Those are pretty rad, and you get a "free" geosynchronous station thrown in!
foobar said @ 5:40am GMT on 1st Feb
Well, that one is impossible with current technology. If we had the material science to do it, it would almost certainly happen.
arctan said @ 5:02pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Tailor-made or not, we don't have room for all the people you people keeping peopling this planet with.

Then we need to reduce population growth. That's already happening with the demographic shift in the First World.

Perhaps my parents' house had everything I needed, and it certainly was cheaper to live there. Should I not have moved out?

If your problem is that you're running out of houses then yes, considering not moving out makes more sense than saying you're going to jump into the Atlantic and start swimming until you find a rock out there that you can live on. That's what space travel and the difficulty of terraforming is like. Avoid any analogies to historical migration -- you're not finding new land, because there isn't actually any "land" there. You're talking about *creating* land from scratch -- usable, habitable space -- and that's a completely different kettle of fish from discovering America.

Just because, at this point on our timeline, we don't have a solid means of developing infrastructure for non-Terra living doesn't make taking steps toward it "nonsense."

I don't think you realize what the scale of what you're talking about is. It makes, for instance, 1000x more sense just in the energy cost of moving people there -- to say nothing of making it possible to breathe -- to fill the Himalayas or the Sahara Desert or Antarctica with cities than to put cities on the Moon.

An Antarctica colonization project would be incredibly cheaper to do than a Moon colonization project. All the biggest problems with colonizing the Moon are basically already solved -- there's breathable air, you don't have to build an enormous fucking rocket to get there in the first place, there's H2O, etc.

And yet if you proposed a bill to start building cities all over Antarctica right now people would look at you like you were fucking crazy. Because it makes no economic sense.

Talk to me once the Earth is actually a functioning, self-sustaining ecology where we're making full use of the resources and space we have here and then we'll talk about the immense, incredible cost of going to the Moon. Or Mars.

As it is, we need to look to the stars if we want to avoid a global society with strictly limited reproductive rights, and all the war creating such centralized control would require.

And, see, when you talk about going to "the stars" you go from talking about things that are merely very difficult with very little reason to do them to things that are flat-out impossible with zero reason to do them.

Again, demographic shift is happening already in the First World as the (to be honest, irrational) pressures that make people have tons of kids in the Third World get replaced by other life drives.

But even if it weren't, yes, imposing global population controls is much easier than moving everyone to Mars. I don't see any way moving everyone to Mars doesn't require *more* social disruption than imposing global population controls, plus it would cost an immense amount of energy we just don't have. (And it doesn't even solve the problem, anyway -- migration has never been a permanent or even a particularly long-lasting fix to population growth. If the rate of population growth continues to be exponential then you just replace the people who leave faster than they leave -- and keep in mind space travel is several orders of magnitude more expensive than sailing across the ocean.)

But anyway don't take my word for it. If you're an SF geek surely Charles Stross is a good enough source for you?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html
foobar said @ 8:57pm GMT on 28th Jan
You're significantly underestimating the difficulty of colonizing America. The first many attempts failed horrifically.

It seems easy with the technology we have now, but it wasn't at all with what they had. In that sense it's very much like how we are now with regard to space colonization. If we tried it, it would fail, but at least we'd learn from it rather than never hearing from those folks again.
arctan said @ 1:52am GMT on 29th Jan
Did you read the Stross link I put there? It's still a horrendously flawed analogy. America is not like the Moon because America was already suitable for human habitation -- indeed, there were already thriving human civilizations there.

The comparison between the colonization of the New World and space colonization is pernicious for many reasons -- one because it makes space colonization sound far easier than it is (it's not really "colonization", it's *creating inhabitable space from nothing*) but the other is because it perpetuates an utterly false myth about American colonization.

People weren't coming into an empty wasteland to make life livable in "the wilderness", they were invading someone else's home. That's the thing about habitable places -- they usually already have someone living there, and the challenge largely comes from the fact that the people already living there don't want to leave.
foobar said @ 7:33am GMT on 31st Jan
Again, America was not habitable to European humans, and they very much did 'euroform' what was to them an empty wasteland to make it suitable to their needs. Setting aside the ethics of it, the terrain was a far greater impediment than the Natives were. Which is rather why they were ignored and displaced.

Now that our technology has advanced so much further, we can look at reforming much less hospitable locations for our needs. Thankfully there aren't going to be any Natives to mistreat, at least in this solar system, because I'm not altogether sure we wouldn't just roll over them if we had something to gain.

As to Stross, I read him regularly, and while he does pour some needed cold water on the issue, he overdoes it a bit. The price of something light and valuable (like rare earth elements) would have to go up quite a bit and launch costs would have to fall, but it's not totally out of the question. (Extrasolar stuff is an entirely different matter. That's not happening pre-singularity.)
schatten00777 said @ 1:24am GMT on 29th Jan
Thank you for pointing out the demographic transition. Every time I hear "overpopulation" my eye starts twitching.
happiest_sadist said @ 11:29pm GMT on 29th Jan
Forget the Moon and Mars. There's nothing on either one that we want. What we need is a permanent space-station in LEO which is capable of repair, refit and refuel of some basic, probably robotic spacecraft. Once we have a space program based in space, then we can have a sustainable space program, one that even pays for itself by harvesting resources in the asteroids or even on the Moon. This is something we could do in the next 20 years if we were willing to make the effort.
We won't be able to export humans off the planet faster than they reproduce within 20 years, nor yet 200 years. Space travel is not a cure for overpopulation. At best it can be used to make life better here on Earth, but only if it's done in certain ways.

With that said, I'm still going.
foobar said @ 12:19am GMT on 30th Jan
I agree with you about Mars, but the Moon is different. It's close, and has low gravity, so the cost of relaunch from there can be offset by resources in situ. In fact if we do keep a near earth space station, it makes more sense to put it in orbit of the moon or at a lagrange point and supply oxygen/water/food from a lunar station because it's so much easier to launch from there than from earth.
arctan said @ 1:53am GMT on 30th Jan
Sure, but now you're not talking about "colonization" in the sense dreamingzephyr was.
foobar said @ 5:41am GMT on 30th Jan
Colonies get started with small, utilitarian outposts.
happiest_sadist said @ 3:28am GMT on 30th Jan
I agree that the Moon is potentially useful. I just don't think it's a necessary part of a worthwhile space program.

A near-Earth station needs to be as near Earth as practicable, to minimize the amount of fuel / reaction mass it must carry before it can be replenished. All other considerations are secondary to this. After we have can relaunch from LEO we can go anywhere in the System we like, especially if we're not hauling bags of meat around.

That said, if we ever get to a place where we can afford to haul meatbags in space, the Moon is somewhere we'll want to go. We'll definitely want a base on Farside, for example, if for no other purpose than radio astronomy.
foobar said @ 5:46am GMT on 30th Jan
That's why Low Earth Orbit is a bad transfer point, unless everything sent there is coming from even lower, in which case it a transfer point isn't all that useful anyway.

Once you're out of the atmosphere you don't need as much brute force to build up to escape velocity, because you don't need to pay a friction tax. You can more leisurely increase your velocity and thus expand your orbital diameter.

The only reason we're there at all is that the pitiful budget allocated to NASA won't allow anything more.
happiest_sadist said @ 6:08am GMT on 30th Jan
This is exactly my point.

LEO is the necessary first step to the rest of the solar system. The delta-v to get to LEO is a non-negotiable requirement to getting anywhere else in the solar system. At the same time, hardware that can make it to LEO can get nearly anywhere else in the system if it can refuel at LEO.

LEO is not anywhere near the limit of atmosphere. The atmosphere peters out somewhere around 70 miles up, and LEO is between approximately 400 to 700 miles.

Anything lifting from Earth has to get through the atmosphere and to LEO before it can go anywhere else. It's potentially much much cheaper to refuel at LEO (if you can) than to carry that fuel and/or reaction mass all the way to that point.

Transfer orbits to/from LEO from above are thousands of times cheaper in terms of delta-v. Transfers at a higher orbit are only slightly cheaper until you get to one of the Trojan points, where station-keeping comes free.
foobar said @ 6:56pm GMT on 30th Jan
If you're fuelling that transfer point from the surface, though, you're not gaining much, if anything. Any efficiencies from bulk transport will be offset by the cost of running the station.

If you're producing the fuel elsewhere in the system, things change.
happiest_sadist said @ 12:17am GMT on 31st Jan
Absolutely. I guess I wasn't clear about that. The idea is to save on fuel you have to lift and therefore you need the lowest-energy orbit possible. Once you get there you refuel with the "cheap" stuff (at least in terms of Δv).

Most likely you wouldn't refuel the vehicle that brought you from surface to orbit, but would instead switch to one intended for interplanetary travel. That one is the one you'd take out with a full tank, probably of something like liquid water or ammonia- something that's relatively abundant in the Belt (at least compared to hydrazine!)
bruceski said @ 9:55pm GMT on 28th Jan
Eh, I'd be more exited if I trusted to even make a half-hearted attempt at trying to go through with it.
sacrelicious said @ 8:32pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:2]
structured_spirits said @ 8:53pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Same story as has been running for 4+ years now, no new information. No one claims he wrote the racist newsletter, and no one but Paul knows whether he proofed the issues in question. It's propaganda.
foobar said @ 9:44pm GMT on 27th Jan
Did you read the article? It's his staff saying that yes, he did read and sign off on the issues in question.
structured_spirits said @ 10:18pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
I've read it. Here's the notable sections:



"It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it," said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul's company and a supporter of the Texas congressman."

"Jesse Benton, a presidential campaign spokesman, said that the accounts of Paul's involvement were untrue and that Paul was practicing medicine full time when "the offensive material appeared under his name." Paul "abhors it, rejects it and has taken responsibility for it as he should have better policed the work being done under his masthead," Benton said. He did not comment on Paul's business strategy."

"Mark Elam, a longtime Paul associate whose company printed the newsletters, said Paul "was a busy man" at the time. "He was in demand as a speaker; he was traveling around the country," Elam said in an interview coordinated by Paul's campaign. "I just do not believe he was either writing or regularly editing this stuff."

"A person involved in Paul's businesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing a former employer, said Paul and his associates decided in the late 1980s to try to increase sales by making the newsletters more provocative. They discussed adding controversial material, including racial statements, to help the business, the person said."

"It was playing on a growing racial tension, economic tension, fear of government," said the person, who supports Paul's economic policies but is not backing him for president. "I'm not saying Ron believed this stuff. It was good copy. Ron Paul is a shrewd businessman."

"Ed Crane, the longtime president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said he met Paul for lunch during this period, and the two men discussed direct-mail solicitations, which Paul was sending out to interest people in his newsletters. They agreed that "people who have extreme views" are more likely than others to respond."

"Paul has said he wrote portions of the economic sections. The people familiar with his business said there was no indication that he wrote the controversial material.

Rockwell was the main writer of the racial passages, according to two people with direct knowledge of the business and a third close to Paul's presidential campaign. Rockwell, founder of a libertarian think tank in Alabama, did not respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment. In 2008, he denied in an interview with the New Republic that he was Paul's ghostwriter.

Paul "had to walk a very fine line," said Eric Dondero Rittberg, a former longtime Paul aide who says Paul allowed the controversial material in his newsletter as a way to make money. Dondero Rittberg said he witnessed Paul proofing, editing and signing off on his newsletters in the mid-1990s.

"The real big money came from some of that racially tinged stuff, but he also had to keep his libertarian supporters, and they weren't at all comfortable with that," he said.

Dondero Rittberg is no longer a Paul supporter, and officials with Paul's presidential campaign have said he was fired. Dondero Rittberg disputed that, saying he resigned in 2003 because he opposed Paul's views on Iraq."



So basically a secretary said she thought Paul proofread, an anonymous person said they know Paul was doing it for the money, and a Republican war hawk former aid who was fired claims he saw Paul signing off on the letter with the nebulous term "in the 90s." I don't see that contradicting or expanding on the story. Paul had a newsletter written and published by other people which he occasionally contributed to, which published racist ideology which he may or may not known about at the time. Whats new?
foobar said @ 10:24pm GMT on 27th Jan
A staff member has confirmed that he had day to day, hands on involvement with the newsletter. That simply blows out any possible claim that he didn't know what was going on.

That others are backing up her story is just gravy.
structured_spirits said @ 10:38pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Yeah, because a secretary saying her boss was aware of everything going on in the office is proof positive that Paul was aware of every single article that went into every single issue of a newsletter that was published for nearly 20 years.

Again, all this has been claimed before, there's nothing new here. Here are three sensible erection posts going back to 2009 that contain the keywords Ron + Paul + newsletter in the comments. You can judge for yourself whether you think this is a new claim.

sensibleerection.com/entry.php/85638
sensibleerection.com/entry.php/84023
sensibleerection.com/entry.php/77243
foobar said @ 10:45pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
Paul said he wasn't involved at all.

Are you really still unwilling to accept that he lied about that?
danshyu said @ 11:11pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Yes, he could very well to have lied about that, but there's also a possibility that when he said he wasn't involved in "those newsletters" he was talking about the paticular issues in question, not the entire publication.
willrogers said @ 8:22am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
Oh, so now it's that he was involved with his newsletter but that he was entirely uninvolved just with every single issue with racist and/or antisemitic content?

When will you stop manufacturing excuses for Ron Paul and call a spade, a spade?

But fine, let's say that Ron Paul didn't write those newsletters, he still defended them during his 1996 campaign and has said other racist things, like, “We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked,” he says. “Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious … I mean, a lot of them can’t even speak English, hardly. Not that I’m accusing them of anything, but it’s sort of ironic.”

Also, he has plenty of other awful, hateful, anti-freedom positions, like opposing a woman's right to choose, only being in favor of ending the federal drug war but letting individual states keep their own drug prohibition laws, being against marriage equality, and being in favor of letting states have anti-sodomy laws.

Ron Paul is not pro-freedom/liberty, he's just pro-states' rights and anti-federal government
danshyu said @ 1:32pm GMT on 28th Jan
Again, I'm calling it as I see it. And I'm not even a paulturd.

A racist don't chose to practice medicine at poor neighborhood filled with minority. A racist wouldn't have often treated the said impoverished minorities free of charges if they couldn't pay. A racist generally don't have leaders of black community organizations vouching for him not being a racist. A racist wouldn't want to end drug wars.

The list goes on and on and on. Honestly people, there are many many legitamate attacks you can throw at his wacky proposed libertarian polices. But calling him a racist over a few newsletters he might/might not have personally written and a few ambiguous quotes is just down right silly.
BergZ said @ 9:08pm GMT on 28th Jan
I think the news letters keep coming up because they show what kind of a character Ron Paul is:
He's the kind of guy who will accept and cultivate the support of racists (through his newsletter) and then disavow all knowledge of his supporters when they become inconvenient to his political aspirations.
I say "dance with the ones who brung you" and it is nobody's fault, except Paul's, that it was racists who brought him to the proverbial dance.
Paul's refusal to take personal responsibility for the contents of his newsletter, in my opinion, disqualify him from being a serious candidate for President.
danshyu said @ 10:31pm GMT on 28th Jan
Again that's the exact problem I have with Paul. But he's simply not a racist as foobar and others are trying to lable him as.
foobar said @ 3:00am GMT on 29th Jan
So you concede that he is a racist, and we're just quibbling over how racist he is?

That's fair.
danshyu said @ 8:21am GMT on 29th Jan
Again I don't believe he's a racist.

At worst he pander to racists to garner what ever support he could, regardless what kinda people it's from. That he's welling to align himself with the devil, at least for the time being, just so he can push his own libertarian agenda. At best he's guilty of some extreme negligence, which's a quality we don't wanna see in government. As the current government is already pretty bad at it.
radioelectric said @ 12:00pm GMT on 29th Jan
Discounting the "is he racist?" question as unknowable, I don't understand why Ron Paul would have intentionally behaved in a way that would give a public impression he was racist.

Even in the 80s, would you not recognise that this could be political suicide?

Political parties in the UK still campaigned on racist platforms at a local level in the 80s but they did it in a deniable way. The leaflets were produced by third parties without official ties to them to avoid poisoning the public image of a particular candidate with racism.

Ron Paul appears smarter than most US politicians (particularly the other republicans) when he recognises the problems with war (on drugs and other countries). His ideology might be idealistic (as they are) and nutty, but I don't think he's an idiot.
arctan said @ 1:31pm GMT on 29th Jan [Score:1 Underrated]
Discounting the "is he racist?" question as unknowable, I don't understand why Ron Paul would have intentionally behaved in a way that would give a public impression he was racist.

It made him rich. He went from a nobody with struggling finances to a local somebody with stable finances. If you read the article you can see the newsletters were very much a business proposition to pump up his fundraising.

Political parties in the UK still campaigned on racist platforms at a local level in the 80s but they did it in a deniable way. The leaflets were produced by third parties without official ties to them to avoid poisoning the public image of a particular candidate with racism.

You don't seem, based on your comments, to realize that much of the US, especially the American South, is essentially a Third World country run by psychos.

Until Ron Paul wanted to gain fame on the national stage -- and this wasn't even a glimmer in eye back in the '80s -- being seen as a racist lunatic was only a good thing for him because the part of Texas he's from loves racist lunatics.

We can see this demonstrated by the simple fact that his newsletters *were* chock-full of racist lunacy and yet he remained an incredibly popular congressman.

We've made a great deal of progress in terms of making racism unspeakable in public even at the local level but honestly a lot of that progress has been since the '80s. If you find it shocking that someone could actually gain popularity with their base then you didn't live in the South in America in the '80s.
structured_spirits said @ 11:39pm GMT on 27th Jan
I'm pretty sure he didn't say that, in fact I think he says that he "takes responsibility" whatever that means. I know he dissolved the newsletter a long time ago.
willrogers said @ 8:13am GMT on 28th Jan
He "dissolved it" because he was trying to run for president.

There's pretty much no way to run for president while simultaneously publishing a racist and antisemitic newsletter.

Ron Paul specifically defended those newsletters and their racism in 1996, but he didn't start denying that he wrote them until 2001 and he only started explicitly denouncing their racist content when he ran for president in 2008.

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/12/27/395391/fact-check-ron-paul-personally-defended-racist-newsletters/?mobile=nc

Ron Paul is a terrible person with terrible ideas. Anyone who isn't white, male, Christian, and/or heterosexual realizes this.
danshyu said @ 1:52pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:-1 Flamebait]
So... You have something against white Christian heterosexual male? Wow, even I, an athiest, wouldn't have gone that far down the biggotry lane. I honestly thought only far right wing lunatics would go with the silly "With us or against us" line of thinking. But I suppose lunatics really does fill the ranks of the whole spectrum.
mrcucumber said @ 2:44pm GMT on 28th Jan
I am a white heterosexual male, educated (indoctrinated) in on of the three largest organized religions, and I think Ron Paul is a lunatic. A dangerous one.

But then again, willrogers can find racism and bigotry between two different kinds of rocks.
arctan said @ 4:27pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
I don't hate white Christian heterosexual males. I just think, for somewhat obvious reasons, white Christian heterosexual males are really bad at perceiving bigotry against nonwhite non-Christian non-heterosexual females. And they have a hard time grokking why nonwhites, non-Christians, non-heterosexuals and females think the bigotry is so important, which is why they piss off members of the latter category so often.

The very fact that when you point out to a white Christian heterosexual male that maybe they should try to see it from someone else's perspective before they spout off about how "That's just not a big deal" you often get accused of being a bigot yourself -- that's kind of the giant problem here.
willrogers said @ 9:05pm GMT on 28th Jan
"Biggotry?" The fuck?

It's not bigotry to point out which groups are the status quo in this nation and that people of those groups tend to not know what it is like to be a persecuted minority.

It's not "Us against them," it's "Ron Paul and other people in the status quo don't understand what it's like to be anything but in their group, which is why so many of them are so callously indifferent to the suffering of others."

But nice job trying to make me look like a bigot for calling out Ron Paul's bigotry.
sanepride said @ 9:48pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:3]
Wrong. Paul's defense of these newsletters is that he was out of the loop, too busy practicing medicine to know what was being published in his name, that he didn't find out about the racist content till years later.
This is new information that directly contradicts these claims.
structured_spirits said @ 10:02pm GMT on 27th Jan
What new information? No one has said they know he read and approved those letters. There's an interview with a secretary who says she thought Paul was very hands on in the office and that she thought he read everything and there's a dinner meeting with some guy who says Paul said his best revenue came from extremists. The article then takes the next step and implies he allowed this kind of thing because he thought it would make him more money. That's a reporter's speculation, not a new story.
foobar said @ 10:12pm GMT on 27th Jan
"It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it," said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul's company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

You really didn't read the article at all, did you?
structured_spirits said @ 10:22pm GMT on 27th Jan
You are aware this is not a new accusation right? That in fact it has been previously claimed by other people that Paul was aware of what was being published, he has denied these claims in the past.
foobar said @ 10:26pm GMT on 27th Jan
His denial is well passed credulity at this point.
structured_spirits said @ 10:39pm GMT on 27th Jan
But the point is that the accusation has already been made and denied, regardless of which position you take, it's not a new story.
foobar said @ 10:47pm GMT on 27th Jan
There's new evidence, showing that he's lied about his level of involvement.

We're well passed the threshold of reasonable doubt. It's time to accept that Paul is a bigot.
danshyu said @ 11:17pm GMT on 27th Jan
Apparently one single heavily edited sentence by a former secretary is good enough to be an evidence beyond reasonable doubt to proof anything to you?

Sorry, this feels too much like cherry picking words to suit a preconceived notion to me.
foobar said @ 11:21pm GMT on 27th Jan
It wasn't just one or two issues, it was a long running theme.
foobar said @ 11:21pm GMT on 27th Jan
Woops, this should be a response to your comment above.
danshyu said @ 11:26pm GMT on 27th Jan
There's also a huge number of American believes in intelligent design, and would vouch every single words in the bible. According to the same logic, that's proof enough that evolution is a lie. I'm sorry but I simply can't process that.
foobar said @ 11:30pm GMT on 27th Jan
So... you're saying Ron Paul's secretary isn't a reasonable source for whether or not he was frequently in the office?
danshyu said @ 11:41pm GMT on 27th Jan
Secretary also doesn't generally sit next to his/her boss's desk monitoring everything he does. Especially if it's for a medical doctor. She probably felt that Ron Paul was very "hands on" with the newsletters. And he probably indeed proofread many of them. But this still isn't a concret evidence that he proofed every single issue during the 20+ years publication and had indeed came across the considerably few issues in question and approved them.
foobar said @ 11:43pm GMT on 27th Jan
Again, it wasn't a "considerably few" issues, it was a longstanding theme.

Again, he claimed he wasn't involved at all.
BlutStein1984 said @ 1:55am GMT on 28th Jan
No it wasn't.

Have you even bothered to read them? Check them out at all?

Even Politfact looked into this and said that they could only find 30 sentences that were Racist or could offend some people. 30 sentences in a newsletters printed for 10-20 years, thousands of pages over ~230+ editions and written by 10+ authors. You could easily find 30 questionable sentences in any newspaper/magazine with similar stats.

I think a better litmus test would be to look at Paul's 25 year Congressional record, his speeches before Congress, on tv, radio, public and in print.....none of it has ever been remotely racist.
Naruki said @ 2:33am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:-1 Troll]
I wouldn't say that.

He thinks his sticking to his absolutist philosophy is more important than improving the lives of millions of oppressed minorities.

Saying he would have voted against the Civil Rights bill is pretty racist, no matter that he had a non-racist justification.
BlutStein1984 said @ 3:13am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:-1]
Paul has stated he is against Jim Crow laws and was happy the Civil Rights bill helped do away with them but he disagrees with Sectiom Five of the bill due to how it is written concerning Federal powers over private property rights. Everything else he agreed with but he personally would have liked the last segment written with a slightly different wording.

How is that racism? Who benefits from lowering the standard so low?

Paul is the only candidate in the GOP race speaking out against the War on Drugs and how our courts unfairly convict minorities at a much higher rate than whites for the same crimes. Obama isn't even trying to fix the current mess that is afflicting minorities.

Look, if you disagree with his economics or foreign policy, fight him on those issues but to make up BS that he secretly hates minorities is deeply sad.
foobar said @ 5:34am GMT on 28th Jan
It's the legislative branch, not the executive, that would have the power to end the War on Drugs, so if you're going to put the blame on just one person, Paul actually fits the bill more than Obama does.

You don't have to hate other races to be a racist. Contempt and apathy is plenty, and Paul shows quite a bit of that.

Plus there's the fact that he really isn't a libertarian if you look at his stance on things like abortion or gay marriage. He's a raging statist on many very important issues. But hey, he wants to destroy the Jews
foobar said @ 5:35am GMT on 28th Jan
Fed, so he's ok by a large swath of that crowd.

... is how that should have ended.
danshyu said @ 7:11am GMT on 28th Jan
I'm sorry, but your entire argument here seem to be crumbling bits by bits. It has come to the point that it's so obvious that your mind is so set on him being a racist, you're welling over look most of things he's been doing just so everything about him would fall into the correct place for you only.

He has always been vocal against the war on drugs, he has been against it since the very beginning of his career. It also reflects on his voting records, the only problem being he's basically one hand clapping, thus he wasn't able to change anything. Also, him wanting to cut aid to Israel doesn't make him an anti-semite. He want to cut aid to EVERYBODY. Hell, Netanyahu said so himself that Israel doesn't need American aid.

Finally, I truely think you have NO idea on what libertarianism is. Ron Paul is against abortion and gay marriage, but he believes that the fed should no business banning or allowing those 2 issues, as the local governments, being better representitive of their people, should be the ones making the deicisions.
foobar said @ 8:56am GMT on 28th Jan
Ron Paul supports government intervention in gay marriage and abortion. There's no way to twist that into a libertarian stance.
willrogers said @ 9:17am GMT on 28th Jan
Not, just gay marriage, Ron Paul is against the Lawrence v. Texas decision and in favor of states being allowed to enact anti-sodomy laws, which would criminalize simply being homosexual.

Ron Paul isn't in favor of civil rights, he's just against the federal government.
danshyu said @ 1:14pm GMT on 28th Jan
The point is it's a lot easier for people to influence the goverment body at local level than at federal level. So if the issue is something people can agree on at local level, it would be considerably more doable for them to get things done locally, than going through the whole federal process due to the fact the local government will still need the fed's approval. The job of the federal government should just be protecting individual's constitutional rights, and anything else should be left to the locals. At least that's how libertarians generally see it.
arctan said @ 3:54pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Insightful]
The point is it's a lot easier for people to influence the goverment body at local level than at federal level.

It's easier for local majorities to specifically target people they don't like and bully them at the local level than at the federal level.

Christ, I shouldn't need to debate this academically. If you're a gay person in Texas you KNOW why it's a good thing the federal government took away Texans' rights to decide what kind of sexual behavior is permissible in Texas. Same thing if you're a pregnant woman in Alabama whom Alabamans think should be forced to carry a fetus to term. Or a woman in Louisiana where Louisianans think marriage is an implicit contract that means your husband can do anything to you sexually and it isn't rape. Or...

Shit, I'm getting depressed that I even have to go on about this.

Fuck the asshole paleo-libertarians who *don't even* really care about individual rights so much as they care about the rights of communities to shit on community members without interference. Fuck that right in the fucking eye.
danshyu said @ 10:19pm GMT on 28th Jan [Score:-1 Troll]
Again, the logic is that you can move. The states with outdated social nom will eventually lose so much resources in the form of economy flow, human resource, etc. They'd start lagging behind the states who has made positive social progresses. Then they'd be left with no choice but get on with the program. Plus if states enacts any form of laws that harms individual's consititutional rights, that's when the feds steps in and protect the said rights (sodomy law, spouse abuse, etc).

I honestly think you have zero idea on what libertarianism is. I don't like libertarianism, but only after I studied it and figured out on my own that it's a simply over optimistic view on human nature and thus will never work. RESEARCH something even if you don't agree with it. Cause otherwise you just sound as immature and retarded as far right. 2 sides of the same retarded coin, as I like to put it.
tiemy said @ 11:05pm GMT on 28th Jan
And that logic is really terrible. Geographic mobility hinges on economic power (why we've seen a huge decline in national mobility since the start of the economic crisis), which in places like the Jim Crow South was essentially non-existent for the black minority.

The general libertarian thesis that unregulated markets eventually produce just political and social outcomes is even more retarded; markets and capital produce, thrive on and perpetuate inequality, coercion, violence and poverty by their very nature. Jim Crow would have no more disappeared from the South as 'outmoded' than slavery would have a century earlier (not surprisingly libertarians here too are extremely hostile to Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union's role in the civil war).

Plus if states enacts any form of laws that harms individual's consititutional rights, that's when the feds steps in and protect the said rights

That's exactly the opposite of the Paul/libertarian/laissez-faire conception - they see the federal government as the enemy, not protector, of individual rights and freedoms. It's no more the federal government's job to protect privacy rights (something like Roe v Wade) as implicit in the Constitution, so they say, than it is to provide a minimum of individual economic security or regulate the national economy.

And in general this notion that libertarians only have a problem with federal power because it is federal power - that they're perfectly enlightened and fine with state-level economic and social reform for example - is complete bunk. A huge part of their opposition to federal power is precisely because it's been central to the last century of economic reform (the do-gooder abomination responsible for the US' fall from its Gilded Age pinnacle); that because of its size and scope it's been able to carry out massive enterprises like Social Security or Medicare that state governments could not. They oppose *any* reform regardless of its level of government as an undue infringement on property rights, on vast accumulated private wealth, on the natural workings of the market and business.
arctan said @ 2:02am GMT on 29th Jan
Jesus Christ, asshole, I've known what libertarianism was since I was fourteen years old. You can't be on the fucking Internet and not know what it is. I read Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia years ago, to say nothing of reading through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged just to make myself do it.

To say that because I despise something and think it's the most pernicious and corrupting influence on American political thought today means I don't "understand" it or haven't "researched" it is really obnoxious.

The fact that libertarians claim to believe their ideology would end in sunshine and roses for everyone doesn't make me like them better. It just makes me think they're stupid or they're lying. Either way it's not a reason to respect them.

Again, the logic is that you can move. The states with outdated social nom will eventually lose so much resources in the form of economy flow, human resource, etc. They'd start lagging behind the states who has made positive social progresses. Then they'd be left with no choice but get on with the program. Plus if states enacts any form of laws that harms individual's consititutional rights, that's when the feds steps in and protect the said rights (sodomy law, spouse abuse, etc).

And if I were a Christian Scientist I'd say you should take cancer patients out of hospitals and pray over them and claim that if you did they would heal miraculously without any side effects. The fact that I didn't actually want people to die from cancer (or claim that I didn't) wouldn't make me less of a fucktard, and wouldn't make me worthy of anyone's respect.

I'm not even going to argue with you about whether the scenario you lay out is full of shit because you seem to agree with me that it's full of shit -- I'm just confused as to why you seem so eager to defend the character and suck the cock of someone who is as tremendously full of shit as Ron Paul.
danshyu said @ 8:16am GMT on 29th Jan
Ron Paul is full of crazy shit indeed. But racism isn't one of it no matter how people can slice it. Ron Paul isn't anymore racist than any other political figures we see. All the supposed argument about him being a racist feels nothing more like labeling to me. Which's something far right wing nutjobs are into doing. I rather not see people stoop to the same level.

Once again, there are many legitamate attacks you can throw at his policies and the libertarian ideals. And labeling will only cheapen those legitimate arguments about his policies.
willrogers said @ 10:27am GMT on 29th Jan
Then why did Ron Paul specifically defend those racist newsletters and their racist content during his 1996 campaign if he's not racist?

Specifically,

In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.

“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Dr. Paul said.

Paul also defended his claim, made in the same 1992 newsletter that “we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” Paul told the Dallas Morning News the statistic was an “assumption” you can gather from published studies.

Paul’s failure to deny authorship was not an oversight. He was repeatedly confronted about the newsletters during his 1996 campaign and consistently defended them as his own. A few examples:

– In 1996, Ron Paul’s campaign defended his statements about the rationality of fearing black men. (“[W]e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational.”) The Houston Chronicle reports, “A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson.” [Houston Chronicle, 5/23/96]

– Paul said that his comments on blacks contained in the newsletters should be viewed in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.” [Houston Chronicle, 5/23/96]

– Paul defended statements from an August 12, 1992 newsletter calling the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) a “moron” and a “fraud.” Paul also said Jordon was “her race and sex protect her from criticism.” In response, Paul said “such opinions represented our clear philosophical difference.” [Roll Call, 7/29/96]

– “Also in 1992, Paul wrote, ‘Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions.’ Sullivan said Paul does not consider people who disagree with him to be sensible. And most blacks, [Paul spokesman Michael] Sullivan said, do not share Paul’s views.” [Austin American Statesman, 5/23/96]
...

Further, some of the disturbing ideology embedded in the newsletters is reflected in Paul’s legislative record. In 1999, he was the only member of Congress to oppose the issuing on a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks. In May 2011, Ron Paul said in an interview that he opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Why did he more recently make the following racist comment about the TSA:

“We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked,” he says. “Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious … I mean, a lot of them can’t even speak English, hardly. Not that I’m accusing them of anything, but it’s sort of ironic.”

Ron Paul isn't being smeared with lies here, no matter how many times you try to paint this situation that way. He has shown racist sentiments time and time again, but you and Paulbots just keep denying it despite all the obvious evidence.
willrogers said @ 9:15am GMT on 28th Jan
So, it's ok if people have their rights taken away from them as long as it's the state and/or local governments that do it?

Wow, that certainly is the "pro-freedom" side and in no way tyrannical.
radioelectric said @ 12:50pm GMT on 28th Jan
If I (as an outsider) understand Ron Paul's position on "state's rights" etc. I think he means to devolve all of these "freedom-affecting" powers to a local level. Such that you would have conservative states that might ban gay marriage and liberal states that might allow it based on the breakdown of voters in the state (though I understand this already happens? so what's the deal? just more devolution?). I'm from a much smaller country than the US, but if this happened there couldn't people just move to the state that fits their lifestyle? Even better, if a more progressive state ends the "war on drugs" and things turn out well because of it (i.e. the world doesn't end as a conservative might predict) then that can serve as an example for other states that they didn't have to worry so much.
danshyu said @ 1:46pm GMT on 28th Jan
Which's on par with the Libertarian believes in leading by example, not by force. Social change should always happen naturally, not by "strong arming" from the federal government.

While it sounds good. I do happen think that's a quite naive way to look at things. But that is one of the fundmental ideologies Libertarians go by. Some of more exterm Libertarians even opt to go one step further and promote all out anarchism.
mrcucumber said @ 2:39pm GMT on 28th Jan
The whole point with giving individual states authority is to divide and conquer. This is why Ron Paul constantly hides behind the mantra "leave the federal government out of it." He's very well aware that breaking down the enemy one by one is easier than the whole army together, reaching a tipping point of victory - being libertarian ideals : racism, sexism, xenophobia, moral superiority, and free market abuse.
arctan said @ 4:21pm GMT on 28th Jan
I'm from a much smaller country than the US, but if this happened there couldn't people just move to the state that fits their lifestyle?

A-ha. Write me back when your country decides to unilaterally ban something you do and tell me how calm and peaceful you feel about it because you can just quit your job, sell your home, say goodbye to everyone you know and go through the enormous financial expense and personal disruption of moving to a different state.

Oh, and what about kids being brought up in that state getting fucked over by this shit? (You know there are states in the US right now fighting against anti-bullying laws aimed at gay children because it oppresses the freedom of anti-gay religious expression?) I guess they can just divorce their parents and move to another state too, huh?

What about people who are desperately poor, and desperately poor partly because of their state's shitty laws -- like no minimum wage, no protections for workers against abuse, a regressive sales tax structure and exorbitant state fees to make up for super-low income and property taxes on the rich, etc.? What about the worker ants living in the Third World sweatshop hellhole Texas seems intent on becoming? Who pays for them to pull up stakes and buy a home in upstate New York and become an accountant?

Geez, that's just a solution to everything, isn't it? If you don't like what your country does, just *move to another country*! I never knew it was so simple! We'll tell all the women being beaten and raped in Afghanistan to just *move to Switzerland*! We'll tell all the suicidal sweatshop workers being poisoned by unregulated toxins in China to *move to the UK*! We'll tell gay people in red states who live in fear of being outed because it's legal to fire them for being gay that they can just *all move to San Francisco*! All 10% of the population of them! Can just find a pro-gay place and live in it!

And I'm sure the places that people are trying to move to can accommodate the migration and you wouldn't run into problems with immigration limits being raised and crackdowns on refugees and that sort of shit that totally doesn't dominate the international headlines!

Fuck this shit. Seriously, just fuck it. The lives of human beings are not a laboratory on which you are free to do experiments. You have zero right to condemn some child to hell because she somehow chose to be born in a country that would keep her poor, uneducated and denied access to basic reproductive freedoms and therefore it's somehow fair for her to be forced into a life of servitude as someone's chattel-wife -- and then tell her that she can "just move" if she doesn't like it and that saving up the money to leave everything behind and try life in a strange new place should be easy for anyone.

Fuck that shit, fuck that shit, FUCK THAT SHIT.
radioelectric said @ 7:53pm GMT on 28th Jan
A-ha. Write me back when your country decides to unilaterally ban something you do and tell me how calm and peaceful you feel about it because you can just quit your job, sell your home, say goodbye to everyone you know and go through the enormous financial expense and personal disruption of moving to a different state.

So states in the US are like countries? I guess they have to be for your subsequent rant to make much sense. Many people really do those things you describe in order to find a better life.

You have the idea that everything will go to shit in a bunch of states if the people who live there were allowed more control over policy. I don't see why a majority of people in Texas (from your example) would say "let's make our state a shitty place to live". Do you really think a bunch of places would make the choice to go backwards? Putting themselves into situations worse than they are at the moment? Because otherwise it only gives places an opportunity to move forwards.

And the size of the US does make it seem to move very very slowly.
arctan said @ 2:05am GMT on 29th Jan
So states in the US are like countries?

Yes. The state of Texas, for instance, is larger than most European countries both in geographic size and population.

Many people really do those things you describe in order to find a better life.

AND MANY PEOPLE *CAN'T*.

Is the idea that someone might be a gay child living in a homophobic community that fucking foreign to you? Or might be, shock and surprise, *too poor to move*?

You have the idea that everything will go to shit in a bunch of states if the people who live there were allowed more control over policy. I don't see why a majority of people in Texas (from your example) would say "let's make our state a shitty place to live".

You clearly don't live in Texas.

Do you really think a bunch of places would make the choice to go backwards? Putting themselves into situations worse than they are at the moment? Because otherwise it only gives places an opportunity to move forwards.

You REALLY REALLY clearly don't live in Texas.

Specifically, you obviously do not work at nor attend a Texas public school.
danshyu said @ 8:23am GMT on 29th Jan
Have you been to Texas?
radioelectric said @ 11:53am GMT on 29th Jan
When you're talking about leaving somewhere as a refugee, do you think the way in which a state is like a country is because of the size of it?
arctan said @ 1:28pm GMT on 29th Jan
I think that plays into the cost and cultural dislocation caused by having to move out of one, sure.

Moving is never as easy as people think it is, but you seem to think that moving from Alabama to Massachusetts is as easy as driving a few hours, and that there's no culture shock involved. Both of these are highly optimistic views to take.
radioelectric said @ 9:03pm GMT on 29th Jan
I would have thought the more difficult half of the equation for a refugee is being granted asylum, personally.
arctan said @ 1:44am GMT on 30th Jan
Because when they are granted asylum life is daisies and puppies?

Political asylum is in fact a huge problem. The economic cost of leaving behind everything you own that can't be packed and then having to find a new job in a strange place where you have no connections is another, equally huge problem.

The fact that you don't need to apply for a visa to move from Nevada to Hawaii doesn't magically make moving a cost-free easy solution. And the people who are most vulnerable to abuse from local majorities are the ones who can least afford to move (funny how that works).

But sure, go tell all the bullied gay teens in the US that they should've just had the foresight to all move to the Castro district in San Francisco.
radioelectric said @ 12:10pm GMT on 29th Jan
"Fuck this shit. Seriously, just fuck it. The lives of human beings are not a laboratory on which you are free to do experiments."

Does it not work like this in the US? Because it is how new policies are piloted in the UK. If you don't try out new ideas before committing to them then you can't make evidence-based decisions.
arctan said @ 1:33pm GMT on 29th Jan
We know exactly what many of the red states would do if given freedom from federal authority -- they've been clamoring to do it for some time -- and it mostly involves turning back the clock as far as they can turn it. They've been eager to do it for a while.

It's no different from Thatcher and her goons talking about "experimenting" with the free market when they really meant turning back the clock to the early 20th century. It's bullshit.

Your idea that local majorities will always want to do what's "best" for their state and couldn't possibly ever want to go "backward" is touching and endearing. Pray to whatever deity you believe in you're never reincarnated as a teenage girl who gets pregnant in the South and has to figure out how to get a fucking plane ticket hundreds of miles away to get an abortion.
radioelectric said @ 9:04pm GMT on 29th Jan
Is that how things are now? Or how you assume they would become?
arctan said @ 1:41am GMT on 30th Jan
Having to fly hundreds of miles for an abortion (or else get a back-alley abortion) is how things were before Roe v. Wade, and the red states are extremely open and unashamed about clamoring for the right to ignore Roe v. Wade.
lilmookieesquire said @ 5:10pm GMT on 28th Jan
Keeping in mind that some States are bigger than some small countries.
BlutStein1984 said @ 5:50pm GMT on 30th Jan
Paul is a statist? That's it...not wasting anymore of my time on this. If you don't even have a clue about poltics, the meaning of terms or persons voting record but feel comfy creating your own conclusions apart from reality...fine. Debate yourself.
arctan said @ 6:13pm GMT on 30th Jan
Paul supported a constitutional amendment that would've said a fertilized egg is a person with all the rights of a person.

And yeah, for a fertile woman who run the risk of unwanted pregnancy, that shit is a big damn deal when it comes to "statism" -- bigger than all this bloviating about the Federal Reserve.
arctan said @ 3:51pm GMT on 28th Jan
The vast majority of the shittiness of Jim Crow was not officially enacted legislation but a de facto series of standards applied all across the South by all major businesses keeping blacks segregated from whites.

That's fucked up. It was the great shame of our nation, and the WHOLE POINT of the civil rights movement was to force an end to it.

That was what Ron Paul is against because, to him, it just wasn't a big deal, and apparently having 100 years to sit back and let the free market somehow slowly erase the South's racism wasn't long enough and he wanted to give another 100 years a shot.

I don't care whether you think that makes Ron Paul a racist person, but the effect of that decision is very much pro-racism.
arctan said @ 3:42pm GMT on 28th Jan
I think a good litmus test for a person's character is the company he keeps, and I want an explanation from you why, if Ron Paul is not a racist, he hangs out with racists, racists run his statewide fundraising drives (Bill Johnson a.k.a. James Pace, writer of a 1985 book proposing expelling all non-whites from the USA), and racists WRITE HIS FUCKING NEWSLETTER.

Blutstein, you were all heated up here yelling a while back about how Ron Paul publicly disavowed those newsletters as soon as they were written and how he publicly fired the "low-level staffer" who wrote them. Neither of these things ever happened. Can you provide any evidence they did? The latter especially.
arctan said @ 3:49pm GMT on 28th Jan
You are a HUGE FUCKING LIAR, Blutstein.

This is the article from Politifact you're talking about, right?

http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2011/dec/30/ron-paul/ron-paul-says-newsletters-contained-only-eight-or-/

Did you actually read it? Check it out at all?

This is the quote from Politifact. They make a "ruling" at the end of the article that's a simple summary so that even a moron would find it difficult to spin what they say the wrong way:

"Paul says the newsletters that bore his name contained only eight to 10 sentences of "bad stuff." Although "bad stuff" is in the eye of the beholder, we found nearly three dozen sentences that we think many would find inflammatory — and that's just in the excerpts we had access to. Paul's statement is False."

They found three dozen inflammatory statements JUST IN THE EXCERPTS THEY HAPPENED TO LOOK AT ON THE WEB.

It was SO EASY for them to find these inflammatory statements that their ruling was that Ron Paul's minimizing statement was "false". They didn't bother to trawl through the entire archive of newsletters because YOU DON'T NEED TO in order to find three dozen inflammatory statements.

You can argue with Politifact's methodology but the fact remains they said THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you said they said.

You are either an incredibly blinkered moron who sees everything through a mental filter, or you are an intentionally mendacious Ron Paul operative. Either way I don't see why we should take anything you say seriously.
arctan said @ 3:45pm GMT on 28th Jan
There is tremendous evidence *for* evolution being true. If there weren't, there wouldn't be any reason to believe it.

The only evidence we have that Ron Paul knew nothing about the newsletters is *Ron Paul and his current campaign staff saying so*.

That's it. It's an incredible, nonsensical claim otherwise. Your claim that Paul disclaiming things that make him look bad is "evidence" on par with the scientific evidence for evolution is ludicrous -- it plays right into the idiotic claims of creationists that the only reason to believe in evolution is that "experts say so".
arctan said @ 3:33pm GMT on 28th Jan
"Beyond a reasonable doubt" is for criminal trials. We're not talking about putting Ron Paul in prison here.

Everyone says that Ron Paul knew about the shit in the newsletters except Ron Paul, and Ron Paul is the only person in this conversation who has a strong personal stake in lying about it.

For fuck's sake. It's RON PAUL'S NEWSLETTER with HIS NAME IN THE BYLINE, which means that one's initial assumption would be that he stood behind what the newsletters said.

The claim that he had absolutely no idea what was already a dubious-sounding claim that would have to be backed up by a lot of evidence to seem credible, and the fact that person after person has contradicted this AS WELL AS Ron Paul himself in a 1996 interview with the Dallas Morning News (where he actually sticks up for the content of the newsletters) makes the claim simply impossible to believe.

For fuck's sake, if this weren't everyone's hero Ron Paul there wouldn't even be a question about this.

If I made a post here, and a bunch of people said that I made that post, and *I* said I made that post and defended it in a subsequent post, but then 10 years after that I suddenly said I'd never even seen that post and had no idea what it said, would you really call it a 50/50 "No one can ever know issue"?

I *hate* this thing where anytime something becomes a "controversy" the right thing to do is take a 50/50 "Anyone could be right" attitude toward it until we somehow get utterly incontrovertible proof (like video from three different angles of Ron Paul reading the newsletter and saying "I'm Ron Paul and I approve this message!")

This kind of absolute refusal to make any kind of judgment and just let assholes tell unbelievable lies and get away with it is what's ruining the mainstream media.
arctan said @ 3:38pm GMT on 28th Jan
I'm so mad about this I'll post again:

The "preconceived notion" is that when you put out something under your name with your byline, you stand behind those words. That was, I thought, the basic understanding people had in adult society.

Ron Paul says that he's a candidate all about "personal responsibility" and he won't take responsibility for something as *basic* as this?

If he were totally out of the loop about this that makes him not a racist, necessarily, but a giant fucking irresponsible moron. Either way neither a racist nor a giant fucking irresponsible moron should be president.

And note we're not just talking about not knowing about the newsletters, but also not knowing about them and yet somehow choosing to defend them in an interview:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/12/27/395391/fact-check-ron-paul-personally-defended-racist-newsletters/

Let me tell you, if a post here appeared under my name saying shit about black people and someone called me on it I would immediately say "Holy shit" and figure out who hacked me and make a huge post disavowing the last post.

I wouldn't blindly say "Well, you took my post *out of context*" and then go on to *defend* that post despite having never read it.

And this scenario -- that Paul never even *saw* those newsletters and yet was interviewed about them by the Houston Chronicle and said they should be considered "in context" -- is the *good* scenario that Dr. Paul's asshole supporters think we should assume to be the truth until proven otherwise (because everything Ron Paul says is true until proven otherwise).
tiemy said @ 12:18am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Funny]
I can't say I really follow the Paulbot/anti-Paulbot circlejerk, but it should be said that Paul is sort of a textbook Old Right libertarian Republican, with a good dash of far right/conspiracy nutter thrown in for good measure.

Racist or quasi-racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-federal government views are pretty common in this political element. His significant (and coincidental) public support notwithstanding, for the most part Paul doesn't even shy away from this stuff. Why the 'newsletters issue' is so contentious is a bit beyond me.
structured_spirits said @ 12:37am GMT on 28th Jan
Because political strategists think their constituents are too stupid to understand their legitimate attacks on Paul's policies, so they go with the old racist line, over and over and over again. I expect we'll see several more breaking stories about these 20 year old newsletters before the election cycle is up.
GordonGuano said @ 12:40am GMT on 28th Jan
The contention comes from Paultards looking at proof in black and white that their messiah has peddled some really nasty literature, looking at their severed limbs on the ground, then saying, "all right, we'll call it a draw".
structured_spirits said @ 12:48am GMT on 28th Jan
Interesting then that the news cycle is always democrat/republican accusations of racism and not paultards continually trying to push "new evidence" of his innocence. I mean it it's such a clear0cut case of racism and people believe them paultards aside, then why do they have to keep making the accusation over and over again? It reminds me very much of the birth certificate issue, which keeps popping up over and over again, no matter how many times it's addressed. Look for more of that before 2012 is over too.
GordonGuano said @ 1:13am GMT on 28th Jan
Look! Your arm's off!
structured_spirits said @ 1:15am GMT on 28th Jan
'Tis but a scratch!
tiemy said @ 5:09am GMT on 28th Jan
i'm sure there are political agendas at work, Paul is obviously not well liked by the Democrats/Republicans for his anti-war positions. but it doesn't really change the facts about who he is (an old right-wing crank) or why it should come as no surprise that he's put out newsletters with racist content.
arctan said @ 4:04pm GMT on 28th Jan
Because if you were to make a giant post here saying "I HATE CHINKS AND THEY SHOULD ALL BE SENT BACK TO FUCKING CHINA" here, and I got mad at you and said you were a fucking racist piece of shit, and then you *ignored* me and said "Oh, well, heh, I didn't write that, my girlfriend did", and then a whole bunch of other people took your side --

Well yeah. I'd keep bringing it up. Because the fact that you did something so egregious and *refused to take responsibility for it* would be really fucking galling and I'd continue to get mad over it.

You seem to not get that having a newsletter under your name saying that kind of hateful and frankly terrifying shit is a big deal -- and that this big deal isn't going to just "go away" as long as Paul keeps ducking responsibility for it like an immature child.

I hate to use the P-word but that's serious fucking white privilege. You don't get why black people would be actively upset and terrified that there is a piece of paper out there showing Ron Paul making a snide joke about how to shoot a black man dead and then get rid of the evidence, and that people want this fucker to be President.

It reminds me very much of the birth certificate issue, which keeps popping up over and over again, no matter how many times it's addressed.

Yes. It's just like how Obama published a newsletter under his name saying that he's not a US citizen and he's a secret Muslim agent trying to destroy the government. And then when someone showed him that newsletter he shrugged and said he was "busy" during that time and "one of my interns wrote that".

It's also like how someone interviewed Obama about his being a secret Muslim agent in 1996 and he defended the claim, saying "You have to take my claims of launching jihad against the Western world in the context of the religious conflicts of the time and place".

...It sure is crazy how both of these controversies involving exactly the same amount of black-and-white evidence on both sides, isn't it?
lilmookieesquire said @ 9:00pm GMT on 27th Jan
"Last year, he reported a net worth up to $5.2 million."
scojam said @ 10:27pm GMT on 27th Jan
Only $5.2 million. I thought he was a doctor. If he made $5.2 million treating people, making them well, then he is a lot more productive than the others guys running and so what if he is racist. Do you think Obama isn't racist?
evelynwood said @ 10:39pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:2 Insightful]
I weep for the electorate.
sanepride said @ 10:43pm GMT on 27th Jan
So you think Obama is racist?
I'd love to hear your reasoning on this.
danshyu said @ 10:50pm GMT on 27th Jan
Cause everybody's a little bit of racist one way or the other?
sanepride said @ 10:53pm GMT on 27th Jan
Sorry but this is stupid reasoning.
GordonGuano said @ 11:48pm GMT on 27th Jan
But it's an awesome, toe-tapping song.
sacrelicious said @ 5:38am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:-1 Overrated]
oh, once I was a young lad
strollin' down the lane
I spotted a masked marsupial
diggin' through trash in the rain
I ran home fast as I could run
like an addict of cocaine
and told my old pop about it
in a colloquial refrain

he looked a little shocked
oh, a look not to be misread
he looked me in the eye
and this is what he said:

"son, everyone's a little bit racist
everyone believes stereotypes
everyone's got some bigotry in them
but especially the kikes"

few years later there I was
at a rummage sale one spring
there I spied a medieval breastplate
it's only defect a minor ding
took it to the man, hopin' for a deal,
I pointed out the flaw and this I heard him sing:

"Everyone's a little bit racist
xenophobia can't be stopped
everybody thinks their race is the best,
but especially the WOPs!"

the summer of my eighteenth year
I met my dear Rosa Black
auburn hair and hazel eyes
and one hell of a rack!
just one quirk that I mentioned
with somewhat too little tact
was that she sweat alot
particularly on her back

she said:

"everyone's a little bit racist
nobody can always win
nobodies PC about everything
but especially the Indians!"
sacrelicious said @ 6:32pm GMT on 30th Jan
damn, I wrote an entire song just for one little joke, and nothing so much as a mod for my efforts.
happiest_sadist said @ 3:24am GMT on 31st Jan
Got you covered >8^)
structured_spirits said @ 11:38pm GMT on 27th Jan
How about the continuing to turn a blind eye towards modern day slavery in the form of illegal immigrants? It's one of the issues that really pisses me of that no candidate, not even Paul, seems to be willing to deal with. Amnesty should be declared and it should be absolute. Forcing people to work for less than minimum wage by denying undocumented workers access to jobs through the E-Verify program is a form of racist discrimination.
sanepride said @ 12:08am GMT on 28th Jan
We could probably find some common ground on the immigration issue and the fact that the ball has been dropped by Republicans and Democrats alike. But calling this 'racism' is a pretty big stretch.
theolypse said @ 12:47am GMT on 28th Jan
Calling that 'a pretty big stretch' is a pretty big stretch. At best, it's nationalism with an especially xenophobic, isolationist cultural chauvinism. The distance from that to racism is a bad mood one day.
sanepride said @ 1:20am GMT on 28th Jan
The anti-immigration mindset sure. But the proposition put forward here is that Obama himself is racist because of current policies (never mind that he's on the record as favoring immigration reform and is a strong proponent of the 'Dream Act').
arctan said @ 4:07pm GMT on 28th Jan
Ron Paul's a lot worse than the other candidates if this is your issue, because he's actively opposed to birthright citizenship and has moved to amend the 14th Amendment. It could become legal to deport me to China, for instance, if it were shown that my parents didn't entirely have their papers in order when they came here, even though I have literally lived in this country my entire life.

As an Asian-American and therefore a member of one of the groups that were historically denied 14th Amendment protection despite being entitled to it, this pisses me right the fuck off. It makes the bigots incredibly happy, though, and throughout the '80s and '90s they do seem to have been Ron Paul's base, so I guess that's okay.

Just like he's openly moved to amend the constitution to legally define abortion as murder, but I guess that's unimportant because it only affects those uterus-havers among us.
scojam said @ 4:39pm GMT on 28th Jan
Naturally he is very guarded so examples are rare, but remember when Barack Obama, the President of the US jumped in on the Gates/Crowley issue? In support of his black friend he jumped to a conclusion which he later softened. My first thoughts on this at the time were that

A) the cop was responding to a potential threat to the resident of the townhouse and had protocol to follow and remember he was entering a potential life threatening situation requiring him to be somewhat aggressive.

B) Gates was legitimately alarmed at the appearance of a cop in his house and had a right to challenge to cop resulting in a difficult situation for both.

C) Obama waded into the situation with a judgemental comment despite lacking an understanding of the details. The President of the United States waded in against lawfull authority doing its job.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_controversy

You can have whatever opinion you want on this issue, mine at the time was that Obama displayed some latent racist tendency.

He very quickly turned this into a "teachable moment" him being the student.
structured_spirits said @ 10:43pm GMT on 27th Jan
Paul has been criticized by Republicans for being "unAmerican" because he doesn't invest much in the financial industry. Paul is a bear, he invests in gold bullion, mining ect. I'd say most of his wealth has come in recent years after the 2008 collapse and the soaring gold/metals and commodities prices.
sanepride said @ 10:46pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Funny]
Actually Paul apparently made millions from the newsletters themselves.

More in-depth article from the Washington Post
structured_spirits said @ 11:43pm GMT on 27th Jan
Lol,

"It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters."

and again this article is basing the claim that Paul was soaking racists on an anonymous source.
sanepride said @ 12:33am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:1 Good]
The full passage:

It is unclear precisely how much money Paul made from his newsletters, but during the years he was publishing them, he reduced his debts and substantially increased his net worth, according to his congressional and presidential disclosure reports. In 1984, he reported debt of up to $765,000, most of which was gone by 1995, when he reported a net worth of up to $3.3 million.
structured_spirits said @ 12:44am GMT on 28th Jan
So then it's unclear whether he made any money from his newsletters and if so how much. He's supposedly worth 5-6 million now in 2012, you're saying the majority of that came from racists donating to a newsletter and not bear investments?
sanepride said @ 1:06am GMT on 28th Jan
I'll just let the figures I quoted above stand. But the point is the newsletter was intended to be a money making enterprise, and judging from the dramatic change in Paul's fortunes when it was published, it succeeded.
sezoomj said @ 4:51am GMT on 28th Jan
For myself, if the concollusion isn't that he is a racist, but that he incites racism for money, then I still think it stinks. He is treating a group of people as things towards his own ends. Icky...
danshyu said @ 7:16am GMT on 28th Jan
That's the exact problem I'd have with him, if he really was responsible for those newsletters.

But the whole him being a racist argument that our friend foobar here is trying to convince us? I'm sorry, but that's just crazy even when it's about Ron Paul.
willrogers said @ 8:08am GMT on 28th Jan
Firstly, what ever happened to "the buck stops here?" If Ron Paul is such a stand up guy, why doesn't he take responsibility and go, "Yeah, that's my newsletter and I fucked up. I need to apologize to African American, Jewish Americans and everyone else who was insulted and maligned under my name" and then give some/all of the money he made from those racist newsletters to charitable causes?

Secondly, there is ample evidence that he is a racist.

For a couple salient examples,

Ron Paul is blowing up real good

1.In the Speaker’s Lobby, Paul describes the federal airline security system as an extra-constitutional affront to civil liberties, and thinks security should be handled by the private sector. Then he takes a rather un-presidential jab at the appearance of many TSA screeners, a workforce heavily populated by minorities and immigrants. “We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked,” he says. “Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious … I mean, a lot of them can’t even speak English, hardly. Not that I’m accusing them of anything, but it’s sort of ironic.”


2.FACT CHECK: Ron Paul Personally Defended Racist Newsletters

Recently, Ron Paul has been subject to intense criticism over controversial newsletters written under his name in the 80s and 90s that frequently included racism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories. Over the last few days, Paul has responded that he did not write the newsletters and disavowed their contents, claiming this has been his consistent position for 20 years. Here’s what Paul told CNN on December 21:

PAUL: I never read that stuff. I never — I would never — I came — I was probably aware of it 10 years after it was written… Well, you know, we talked about [the newsletters] twice yesterday at CNN. Why don’t you go back and look at what I said yesterday on CNN, and what I’ve said for 20-some years. It was 22 years ago. I didn’t write them. I disavow them and that’s it.

Paul’s denials, however, are not supported by the public record. When the newsletters first arose as an issue in 1996, Paul didn’t deny authorship. Instead, Paul personally repeated and defended some of the most incendiary racial claims in the newsletters.

In May 1996, Paul was confronted in an interview by the Dallas Morning News about a line that appeared in a 1992 newsletter, under the headline “Terrorist Update”: “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be.” His response:

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation…

In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.

“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Dr. Paul said.

Paul also defended his claim, made in the same 1992 newsletter that “we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” Paul told the Dallas Morning News the statistic was an “assumption” you can gather from published studies.

Paul’s failure to deny authorship was not an oversight. He was repeatedly confronted about the newsletters during his 1996 campaign and consistently defended them as his own. A few examples:

– In 1996, Ron Paul’s campaign defended his statements about the rationality of fearing black men. (“[W]e are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational.”) The Houston Chronicle reports, “A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson.” [Houston Chronicle, 5/23/96]

– Paul said that his comments on blacks contained in the newsletters should be viewed in the context of “current events and statistical reports of the time.” [Houston Chronicle, 5/23/96]

– Paul defended statements from an August 12, 1992 newsletter calling the late Rep. Barbara Jordan (D-TX) a “moron” and a “fraud.” Paul also said Jordon was “her race and sex protect her from criticism.” In response, Paul said “such opinions represented our clear philosophical difference.” [Roll Call, 7/29/96]

– “Also in 1992, Paul wrote, ‘Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions.’ Sullivan said Paul does not consider people who disagree with him to be sensible. And most blacks, [Paul spokesman Michael] Sullivan said, do not share Paul’s views.” [Austin American Statesman, 5/23/96]

Contrary to his statements to CNN last week, it was not until 2001, that he first claimed that newsletters were not written by him. He told the Texas Monthly in the October 2001 edition that “I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me.” The reporter noted, “until this surprising volte-face in our interview, he had never shared this secret.”

There is no evidence that Paul denounced the newsletters in clear terms until he ran for president in 2008 when he said “I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.” Paul has never explained how this blanket denial squares with his vigorous defense of the writings in 1996.

Further, some of the disturbing ideology embedded in the newsletters is reflected in Paul’s legislative record. In 1999, he was the only member of Congress to oppose the issuing on a Congressional Gold Medal to Rosa Parks. In May 2011, Ron Paul said in an interview that he opposes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Ron Paul is obviously a racist and pretty much everyone that doesn't see this is a Paulbot.
danshyu said @ 1:20pm GMT on 28th Jan
Revisit his voting record, review the things he have done through out both his political and medical careers. They say action speaks louder than words, and it applies here.

And here we go again, the whole "if you're not with us, you're against us!" mentality. I can't believe I'm actually defending a naive/delusional libertarian like Paul here. I'm simply calling it as I see it. You can call Ron Paul many things, but being a racist is simply not one of them.
arctan said @ 5:06pm GMT on 28th Jan
You may claim to think he's "naive" or whatever but you repeatedly say things for which there is no evidence (like Paul being a great friend of minorities throughout his medical career, hence living in an 86% white city) that serve no purpose other than to suck his cock.
willrogers said @ 9:01pm GMT on 28th Jan
Yeah, except that in the quotes I posted, Ron Paul explicitly said racist things AND said he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
danshyu said @ 10:44pm GMT on 27th Jan
Okay, here's what we know. After Ron Paul finished running for president in 88' he went back to being a doctor in a poor neighborhood with large numbers of minorities. He's known to have often treated patients (many of whom minorities) who couldn't pay free of any charges.

Yet, it's also during this time four newsletters were published under his name. From which the racist letters in question were from.

But this is also a man who volunteered to use his own money to fund a Rosa Parks statue. Who saw Martin Luther King Jr as his hero through out his long career. Who delivered babies from poor families of all races for most of his life, often free.

So I dunno... Ron Paul is either a very complex character with conflicting personalities. Or he's a con man who tricked racists into paying for his newsletters. Or maybe he honestly didn't care enough to pay attentions to what was being done under his name (still a quality we really don't want for a president). You can call him senile, out of touch, or flat out batshit insane. Hell, he probably fits a little bit of all 3. But one thing he's definitly not, is a racist.

Not to mention this article really didn't introduce any new evidences aside words from yet another 'former' employee of his. Whom literally only got to speak one single badly chopped up sentence in this whole article.
sanepride said @ 10:50pm GMT on 27th Jan [Score:1 Funny]
There's nothing in this new claim to suggest that Paul himself is or was actually a racist. The claim is that he was well aware of the racist content in the newsletters and approved it - not because he specifically agreed but to sell more newsletters to his racist readers.
foobar said @ 10:51pm GMT on 27th Jan
1. Paul claimed not to be involved in the newsletter at all.

2. Here's a bunch of evidence showing that, yep, Paul actually was pretty hands on with the newsletter.

So if Paul really didn't know what was going on, why did he lie about his involvement?

It's possible to be a racist and still accept token "good" members of races you don't like.
danshyu said @ 11:07pm GMT on 27th Jan
What evidences? Most of these so called "evidence" are all hearsays at best. Consider there are also many people of many races who knew Ron Paul personally still vouching for him. You can't just cherry pick one over the other simply because you already had your mind set on he being a racist.

Like I said, he's either a con man who stole money from racists. Or he's guilty of neglict. Or he simply didn't bother to check every single issue published under his name. All of them are quite negative quality for somebody who wants to be the president. But I honestly still don't see any proof that he's a racist.
foobar said @ 11:24pm GMT on 27th Jan
1. That's not what hearsay means. People are saying "I saw Paul in this place/take this action" not "I heard Paul say this".

2. You're using the "I have lots of black friends!" line.
danshyu said @ 11:35pm GMT on 27th Jan
"I'm not a racist, I have a lot of black friends!"

is a lot different than

"He's not a racist, I'm black and dealt with him on many occations, he has always been courteous and respectful. And everybody I know will tell you the same!"
foobar said @ 11:42pm GMT on 27th Jan
Would you accept, that if it can be reasonably shown that he knew about the content of these newsletters, that it would be fair to call him a racist?
danshyu said @ 11:56pm GMT on 27th Jan
It would've make him a con man who scamed people into supporting him financially even though he's actually doing completely opposite of what he claimed to believe in his publication.

Lying to people to get their money is an assholish thing to do, and I honeslty can't respect that at all (even if the ones being con'd are genuine racists). But the act of scamming people itself has no relation with the subject of racism.
foobar said @ 11:59pm GMT on 27th Jan
...

So your position is that Ron Paul was just pretending to be a racist?

Keep in mind that his voting record is consistent with racism, re: the Civil Rights Act.
sanepride said @ 12:11am GMT on 28th Jan
To be fair, you can't cite Paul's actual voting record regarding the Civil Rights Act, since it passed some 14 years before he became a US Congressman. He's certainly stated that he wouldn't have voted for it, but luckily he never had that option.
danshyu said @ 12:15am GMT on 28th Jan
IF he lied about not involved in the racist letters at all. Which I still doubt. But if he did lie, yes, he pretended to be a racist just to scam racists into making him richer. Which's something I also don't approve of.

As for him voting against civil rights act. He did it on the priciple of him againsting government sponsered social engineering. That healthy and perminant social progress could only come naturally and without government interference.

The vote was also based on his stance on property rights and free market. His libertarian logic is that a shop owner SHOULD have the rights to put on an "Whites Only" sign on his own shop. As it is in his own property and he has the right to be a bigot. However, this will also result in him losing a lot of business due to limiting his customer base and from the resulting negative publicity. In time he'll have no choice but to comply to the progressing society at larg, or ruin his business, a free market would've make sure of that. But if instead of the said shop owner finding it out the hard way on his own, the government strong arms him into taking the sign down. All that does is build more resentments, thus actually hiders the social progress that would otherwise run it's course slowly but steadily.

Is the logical naive and full of holes? Probably. But it definitly wasn't racist ideals that motivated Ron Paul to vote against the civil right's act.
danshyu said @ 12:16am GMT on 28th Jan
I guess he didn't have the chance to vote on it, my mistake. But those were the reason he gave on why he wouldn't have supported it.
arctan said @ 3:57pm GMT on 28th Jan
Lying to people to get their money is an assholish thing to do, and I honeslty can't respect that at all (even if the ones being con'd are genuine racists). But the act of scamming people itself has no relation with the subject of racism.

Being completely comfortable with having huge flaming racists as your chief supporters does say something about you and your comfort with racism, whether you want to admit it or not. (Again, Ron Paul's chief fundraiser in California was for a while Bill Johnson, the "Let's expel all the blacks" guy.)

And bullshit that he's trying to accomplish the opposite of what they want. Ending affirmative action? Killing the EEOC? Letting people put a "Whites Only" sign on their storefront? Giving states more power to ban gay marriage and sodomy? Bigots LOVE that shit.

In America there's plenty of bigots who don't want to enact bigotry on the federal level (Bill Johnson with his constitutional amendment, interesting, being one of the exceptions) but just want to be "free" to do it in their private lives, with the power of their business and with the power of their town council without any uppity lawyers from Washington getting in their business. That was what the entire culture war during the civil rights era was *about*, and you seem to think that these bigots are entirely right and to stand with them in their views.

So fuck you.
arctan said @ 4:14pm GMT on 28th Jan
"I'm not a racist, I have a lot of black friends!"

is a lot different than

"He's not a racist, I'm black and dealt with him on many occations, he has always been courteous and respectful. And everybody I know will tell you the same!"

Not particularly much, really. There are plenty of people who are pretty fucking racist who *do* have friends of whatever race they're racist against. People are all too willing to make exceptions or fudge their perceptions for a good friend they've known a long time, in both cases -- white racists will have a black friend who's "one of the good ones" and the black friend will be all "Well he's not a bad guy at heart".

This doesn't do any good for the black people who *aren't* the white guy's friends who still get treated like shit. And believe me people in oppressed categories get in fights about "your racist friend" all the time. I've had to have sense slapped into me about people I kept making excuses for who treated my other friends in ways that were not okay that I didn't want to see because I liked the person for other reasons.

The fact that you honestly think that racism is so simple that "He has some black friends whom he's nice to" is some kind of wide-ranging disproof of racist attitudes -- that if I can get through the day without screaming "FUCK YOU" to every non-white person I see I must not be racist -- is incredibly naive.

Here's another fucking exampel:

http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2011/12/27/Former_Aide_Says_Ron_Paul_Uncomfortable_Using_Gay_Bathroom/

There's Ron Paul and Ron Paul's gay friend and Ron Paul supposedly being totally okay with his gay friend and yet being so weirded out by his being gay that he *can't even use the bathroom in his house* for fear he'll somehow catch the gay.

That's homophobic. It's homophobia in the most basic and literal sense, and if he did it to some gay guy who wasn't his friend you know for a fucking fact that the gay guy would find it really offensive. But this gay guy thinks Ron Paul is going to save us from the deficit so here he is, making excuses about why being so disgusted by gay people you can't use a bathroom in their house isn't that bad.

The kind of mental contortions people go through to make it okay for them personally to support Ron Paul because for various reasons they've latched onto him as an icon of hope just make me sick and sad, and I really wish I could stop hearing it from people I otherwise respect.
danshyu said @ 10:05pm GMT on 28th Jan
That guy has been pretty much discredited. Sinec that story popped out, it was revealed that he was fired by Ron Paul for slacking on the job, afterward he ran against him and lost. He was pretty much a former employee who left on a ugly note with an axe to grind. The so called "gay friend" never came forward and backed him up on his story, even after he got pushed to prove the incident actually happend.
willrogers said @ 7:54am GMT on 28th Jan
You don't have to be a cross-burning Klansman to be a racist.

There are plenty of racist people who work with people of other races and are even friendly with them.

Racism is a far more complex and nuanced concept than simply being a person who never associates with anyone outside their own race or acts hostile to other races. Racism can take many forms, from fear to disdain to hate to superiority.

E.g. Ron Paul said, “We quadrupled the TSA, you know, and hired more people who look more suspicious to me than most Americans who are getting checked,” he says. “Most of them are, well, you know, they just don’t look very American to me. If I’d have been looking, they look suspicious … I mean, a lot of them can’t even speak English, hardly. Not that I’m accusing them of anything, but it’s sort of ironic.”

So, non-whites and immigrants are suspicious to Ron Paul?

Also, Ron Paul actually did defend those racist newsletters in 1996,

In May 1996, Paul was confronted in an interview by the Dallas Morning News about a line that appeared in a 1992 newsletter, under the headline “Terrorist Update”: “If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet of foot they can be.” His response:

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation…

In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men.

“If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Dr. Paul said.

Paul also defended his claim, made in the same 1992 newsletter that “we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, DC] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” Paul told the Dallas Morning News the statistic was an “assumption” you can gather from published studies.
arctan said @ 4:54pm GMT on 28th Jan
Okay, here's what we know. After Ron Paul finished running for president in 88' he went back to being a doctor in a poor neighborhood with large numbers of minorities.

You are so tremendously full of shit.

Ron Paul lives in Lake Jackson, TX. Lake Jackson is 87% white. Latinos make up about 14% of the population (there's overlap because the census counts Latino as being different from a specific "race"). Blacks are like 4% of the population, Asians 2.5%. And that's a census from *2000*; census data going back to the '80s for that specific town is hard to find but if it was less white back then I'll eat my underwear.

These "large numbers of minorities" would be damn hard to find in Lake Jackson, and if he did find them almost none of them would be black. Which means that when it comes to his apparent issues with black people, even if he lived in the most minority-laden neighborhood in Lake Jackson it would prove almost nothing.

If he actually specifically wanted to help minorities he'd go move to Galveston where white people are only 65% of the population instead of 87%. Or live somewhere else. He's in one of the whitest fucking parts of the country, and I can find absolutely no evidence online for this "Ron Paul in the inner city" spin job you're doing.

I mean, think about it -- that's his district. That's where his supporter base was. If there were that many minorities among his supporter base, then wouldn't there have been some blowback about the horrifying racist shit in his newsletters *when they came out*? Apparently all his constituents who signed up for the newsletter were just fine with it. Doesn't that tell you something?

Who saw Martin Luther King Jr as his hero through out his long career.

So much so that he voted against MLK Day as a holiday, in fact. The newsletter that came out at this time -- one of, I'm sure, a very very few cherry-picked newsletters wildly at odds with their normal tone -- said:

"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day."

His newsletters also elsewhere referred to MLK as a "lying socialist satyr" and a "pedophile".

I mean, gosh, if something came out with my name on it talking about one of my "heroes" that way I'd feel really bad. Really really bad, in fact -- so fucking bad I'd make a huge stink about it and go after the horrendous asshole stealing my name and my image for this indefensible shit with all the muscle I had. Destroying any association whatsoever with that piece of shit scumbag by publicly outing him and publicly vilifying him and making absolutely certain the connection between him and me were destroyed would take over my life.

But I guess Ron Paul is much more blasé about people screaming imprecations at one of his heroes and then putting his name in the byline than I am. Who knew.

You know, if Ron Paul's hero was really Martin Luther King and it was that important to him, how would someone who thought MLK was a pedophiliac socialist satyr even get a job working for him in the first place? How does that work?

So I dunno... Ron Paul is either a very complex character with conflicting personalities.

You know when someone has a much nicer personality than their previous personality emerge as soon as they become a candidate for some high office, we don't diagnose that as some kind of multiple-personality disorder. It's just called being a "hypocrite", or "lying".

Who delivered babies from poor families of all races for most of his life, often free.

See above.

Not to mention this article really didn't introduce any new evidences aside words from yet another 'former' employee of his.

You expect Ron Paul's *current* employees to openly contradict their boss's attempt to safeguard his political image and thus get fired? Are you fucking high?
clumsy_juggler said @ 12:55am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:4 Insightful]
I don't quite understand what the questions about this are. If you publish a newsletter with your name on it you are responsible for all the content. Arguments about whether he wrote articles or proofread every issue are not relevant.
BlutStein1984 said @ 2:57am GMT on 28th Jan [Score:2 Informative]
Ben Swann, an investigative reporter in Ohio, looked into the Ron Paul Newsletters.

Part 1:



Part 2 - The Author Revealed:
foobar said @ 9:11am GMT on 28th Jan
So the takeaway is: Ron Paul definitely published a racist newsletter. All other Republican candidates also racists.

Obama is a racist because Glenn Beck said something racist.
danshyu said @ 1:38pm GMT on 28th Jan
You're just trying too hard at this point...

But whatever, I don't even like the guy. It's just very sad to see that somebody from the (supposely) intelligent left like you can stoop down the same level of labeling people based on cherry picked shady "evidences" as lunatics from the far right often do.
foobar said @ 7:55pm GMT on 28th Jan
So what would it take to get you to hold Paul responsible for his newsletter?
danshyu said @ 9:58pm GMT on 28th Jan
He IS responsible for the content of his newsletter. He's guilty of negliect. But he's not a racist (Him being a racist was your whole argument here) since so far there's no evidence of he ever writting them personally, beside some guy saying "I remember him working on his newsletters all the time! He must've wrote those couple issues, too!". Plus the fact what he's been doing is entirely contridicting to what was written in those newsletters in question.
clumsy_juggler said @ 12:17am GMT on 29th Jan
Do the same rules apply for cartoons. If I publish racist cartoons in my newsletter it doesn't make me a racist because I didn't draw them?
danshyu said @ 1:12am GMT on 29th Jan
If that's your one and only reputation. And was in no doubt full knowledge during the publication process. Yeah, you're probably a racist.

In case of Ron Paul, he also had many other things going on, just about all of which contradicts to the stuffs that was published. At best he was being negligent, at worst he was pandering to the racist folks just to garner support where ever he could find.
clumsy_juggler said @ 1:43am GMT on 29th Jan
So you are not a racist if the newsletter you publish contains racist contents but you are not aware of them and you are doing other things that are not racist. I understand now. I was under the mistaken impression that someone's newsletter contained their personal views.
danshyu said @ 8:10am GMT on 29th Jan
He hired ghost writters and editors to work on his newsletters since he was practicing medicine full time. So no, he wasn't nearly as hands-on as some people claimed he was with the newsletters.
arctan said @ 2:07am GMT on 29th Jan
In case of Ron Paul, he also had many other things going on, just about all of which contradicts to the stuffs that was published.

This is what galls me. Almost nothing about Paul's career "contradicts" what was said in those newsletters other than 1) things he only started saying when he started running for president, and 2) things that seem to be made up from whole cloth, like Paul living in the inner city and serving minorities.
foobar said @ 11:32pm GMT on 29th Jan
What galls me is that people think that because he was nice to some people of colour it somehow contradicts the fact that he published very racist things in his newsletter.

No one is accusing him of being Skeletor. No one is saying that he devoted 100% of his waking time to bigotry. But he did publish a racist newsletter, and yes, that makes him a racist regardless of how many puppies he saved.
CapnSilver said @ 6:04am GMT on 28th Jan
When do Blut and Dan make out?
foobar said @ 9:14am GMT on 28th Jan
I'm told they have to get permission from their local government for that.
:-3(|) said @ 4:49am GMT on 29th Jan
sheeeeeit.
BlutStein1984 said @ 6:12pm GMT on 30th Jan [Score:-2]
Wow. Some of y'all have some time on your hands.

In the end we are all free to believe whatever we convince ourselves as being true...I personally prefer to go off reality, voting records and truth. *puts on flame suit*

I love how everyone here seems to think Paul hasn't taken repsonsiblity for his oversight. I love that you can read and watch I interviews he has done for the last 20 years where he has taken responsibility for the newsletters and then clarified that those views in no way are his own. I simply am besides myself that people can willfully choose to blind themselves to reality in order to keep their worldview intact.

And let me just finish this post off by beating the uncreative folks to the punch. "na huh....you're the one who is blind. You live in a fantasy!" *rolls eyes*

Y'all enjoy Obama the Warmonger or any of the big government Neocons running that might win the republican nomination but lose the election.

I'll be voting for Peace, Civil Liberties, Limited Government and Strong National Defense. Ron Paul 2012!
arctan said @ 6:21pm GMT on 30th Jan [Score:1 Good]
Ron Paul gave a series of interviews defending those newsletters in the 1990s. This directly contradicts all claims that he either didn't know about those newsletters or totally disavowed their content from the beginning.

Links to and quotes from those interviews have been posted here, repeatedly. This isn't a secondhand source, this is direct firsthand statements recorded from Ron Paul acknowledging what the newsletters said and defending them (while trying to minimize them, but still defending them).

Here's the quote from the Dallas Morning News in 1996 about the horrifying "fleet-footed black men" quote:

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation.
Dr. Paul also took exception to the comments of Mr. Bledsoe, saying that the voters in the 14th District and the people who know him best would be the final judges of his character. “If someone challenges your character and takes the interpretation of the NAACP as proof of a man’s character, what kind of a world do you live in?” Dr. Paul asked.
In the interview, he did not deny he made the statement about the swiftness of black men. “If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them,” Dr. Paul said.

What is your response to this?

If your response is to totally ignore this comment, like I presume it will be, then that really says it all about who's "the one who is blind".

There's a smaller possibility that you will take up 1996-Ron-Paul's stance on this, which is standing behind the newsletters but demanding they be taken "in context", which will be a revolting thing for you to do but still consistent (although you will then be in conflict with 2012-Ron-Paul's claim that he had absolutely nothing to do with those newsletters).
happiest_sadist said @ 6:38pm GMT on 30th Jan
I think it's amusing how you continue to insist that Paul's voting records, interviews and other public statements support your position, yet you never actually cite them.
Others in this thread have cited specific instances of Paul's statements, and you have not yet responded to any of these specificities except by name-calling and hyperbole.
I guess you really do prefer to "go off reality"...
foobar said @ 6:48pm GMT on 30th Jan
Lying about his level of involvement isn't taking responsibility, nor is refusing to discuss the matter when it's brought up.

For many people continuing to run for office would not be taking responsibility. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider the publisher of a racist newsletter as unfit for office.

Even with that, I might have some sympathy for your position if Paul were actually a libertarian, but he's not. He supports government intervention in abortion and marriage for people he doesn't like.
tiemy said @ 3:31am GMT on 31st Jan
The irony in presenting Paul as an alternative is really that the two parties have gone so far right that the GOP now openly champions many of his once-fringe ideas. Dismantling the federal government and rolling back a century of national reform/regulation, once the domain of far right crackpots like Paul, is now pretty much the bipartisan consensus. There were several points over multiple Republican debates where 'serious candidates' tried to outdo each other in declaring how much of the federal government they would disband or privatize upon assuming office.

The only real appeal Paul has - and the reason he's achieved support way beyond the real constituency for his politics - is his apparent anti-war and pro-democratic rights stances. And those are both espoused much more prominently and consistently (and from a real anti-imperialist standpoint, not Paul's right-wing America First nationalist one) by the socialist left.

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