[Remember_Salamis]

He is now a "contendah"! He's got as much money as McCain and apparently has a lot of supporters out there.

Paul can now actually campaign in states and run commercials.

It's kind of hard to break the 3% barrier when you don't actually have a campaign.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

BUMP to that “kooky” Libertarian!!

[fieldmarshaldj]

Contendah for the nut house. Dr. Demento can share a room with Crazy Johnnie.

[rob21]

So there are some rich moonbats out there. Who cares?

[BJClinton]

If he sticks to fiscal matters he could have a positive impact on the GOP primaries.

[fieldmarshaldj]

[advance_copy]

Daggone... I have to admit, that’s pretty impressive.

[Maelstorm]

Paul has some interesting supporters. A gay friend of mine supports him. Interestingly enough Paul seems to be picking up some otherwise Demokook voters. The word is Charlie Sheen is considering supporting him. lol

[tcrlaf]

How much of it came from MoveOn, and from Soros shadow organizations?

98-99%???

[new yorker 77]

Looks like Bin Laden is placing his oil money on Paul.

[Chi-townChief]

The lefties are coming through for him big time.

[LonePalm]

How special!

Now if he triples his support he might break the margin of error in a professional poll.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[The South Texan]

[HiTech RedNeck]

Ya think he could be a spoiler to the Dems if he goes third party? (No way the GOP is going to nominate someone who just fundamentally does not grok the Islamist-terrorist connection.)

[dighton]

Sure, scoff at perhaps $4 or $5 million that Ron Paul is said to have raised, admittedly hard to tell because the numbers keep changing.

[SCHROLL]

wouldn’t worry about it too much, the lefties Trojan Horse contributions will dry up once they figure out no one is buying their scam.

[niki]

Great news! It would be wonderful to have a person who believes in limited government, the Constitution and liberty as POTUS.

[Nephi]

It can only benefit the political discourse to have Ron Paul participate in the discussion. He sure polls well among freepers. Heh, heh. Republican elites have silenced him long enough. It’s sad the number of Republicans, acting like liberals, wanting to shut him out of the debates. What are they afraid of? He’s got more conservative bona fides than nearlydeadFred, to say the least.

[Publius]

A few weeks ago, I engaged in a colloquy with NCSteve, a supporter of Dr. Paul, and I posed certain questions to him. I’d like to pose the same questions to you to get a better idea of where Dr. Paul is coming from. Up to now, I have concluded that Dr. Paul’s ideal is to return to the America that existed before the Civil War -- minus slavery, of course.

The America we lost was defined by a Constitution written for a republic of farmers. But long before the Civil War, the nation had industrialized, and most of its basic concepts had changed, thanks to the work of Webster and Clay. We are the America that Hamilton created, not the one that Jefferson wanted to preserve. If I understand what a Paul administration would look like, we could expect the following:

• The restriction of the federal government to the 5 explicit powers and 7 implied powers granted it by the Constitution. That means only 3 federal crimes -- treason, piracy and counterfeiting. All other responsibilities would devolve to the states. Entitlements would either be run by the states -- or handed over to churches, charities and benevolent associations.
• The end of federal taxation as we know it and a return to excises, imposts and dunning the states for their share of the federal budget. With most items devolved to the states, the federal budget would be small, and Congress would meet for 6 weeks a year and then go home.
• The end of the fiat dollar, paying off of the national debt, and a return to the gold standard. The London Bill Market, closed since 1914, would be reopened, and real bills maturing to gold coin would circulate along with gold coin itself.
• The end of our large standing army, which the Constitution permits to exist for only a 2 year period anyway. We would have a Coast Guard to protect our shores and some kind of air defense system, but the Army would return to the state militias that existed before the National Guard system was created in 1910.
• American foreign policy would be somewhat isolationist. We would come home, close our borders, guard our shores, expel the UN and mind our own business. We would no longer use our dollars or military to take over various sectors of the planet. We would have a much smaller global footprint and would end any dream of an American Empire.

I find this very seductive. But although the US has shipped its manufacturing capabilities abroad to the Third World and we now make our money moving piles of electronic currency around, I can't see us returning to what we had before the Civil War, much as I would like it. The changes sought by Hamilton and wrought by Webster, Clay and Lincoln are irreversible. So I’d like to pose some questions in line with my previous points:

• Corporations were strictly regulated by the states before the Civil War. Afterward, we were pretty much governed by Big Business in general and the railroads in particular. With the states' rights position discredited by the Civil War, Jeffersonians turned to using Lincoln’s powerful federal government for the people, i.e. using Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. This was what the Progressive agenda was all about. Franklin Roosevelt built on that to define a whole new paradigm of democratic socialism -- using government as the tool of the people's will to control the forces of the market. This raises the question of a power vacuum. Should the federal government retreat to only those powers granted by the Constitution, then who gains control? In a global marketplace, the states are going to find themselves fairly powerless in regulating corporations. One would probably end up with some form of corporate fascism, sometimes referred to humorously as "Proctor and Gamble with the death penalty". This would indicate that even under a Paul administration, it would be necessary to utilize a loose construction of the Interstate Commerce Clause to prevent the undermining of democratic rule.
• With the American people believing that only Big Government can protect them from Big Capitalism and that Big Government is the proper means by which the American people take care of each other, how does one convince the American people to go back to the good old days? We have lost the ancient American trait of self-reliance, as Hurricane Katrina proved. How do you convince the American people to give up the protections they have relied upon from their federal government? (Most people have based their retirement on those government checks.)
• You would need a worldwide financial crash and the involuntary imposition of a worldwide gold standard to get people to rethink the role of the modern state in their lives. How do you return to a hard money standard without inflicting massive pain? (If you divide the value of the world economy by the amount of gold in the world, you end up with gold at $350,000 per ounce!)
• After the War of 1812, even President Madison decided we needed a standing army.
• Power, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If America comes home and minds its own business, who steps into our shoes to run the planet? Macchiavelli says someone is going to try. The European Union? Russia? China? Iran? The United Nations (after relocation to Geneva)? It's a question that has to be answered.

As one who has specialized in our history after the Revolution and before the Civil War, I'd love to see a return to those less complicated days of Monroe and Jackson, but it's not something that is going to happen on its own. And I fear the events that could force it to happen.

These questions have bedeviled me for a long time. Returning to original intent sounds like a great idea, and it's certainly the purest definition of conservatism. But how do you get there from here, and how do you lead the American people to change their collective -- and "collective" is the right word! -- mindset?

[unspun]

I wonder how much this money has come from the Soros minions.

[WFTR]

His only problem is that advertising his positions will make many Republicans less likely to vote for him.