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Paul burned by Tea Party blowback
Politico ^

Posted on 02/27/2010 5:08:52 PM PST by Sub-Driver

Paul burned by Tea Party blowback By: Alex Isenstadt February 27, 2010 06:29 PM EST

Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-oriented Republican whose 2008 presidential run provided kindling for the Tea Party movement, suddenly finds himself dealing with the blowback: a handful of Tea Party-inspired candidates are seeking to dislodge him in Tuesday’s Texas Republican primary.

It’s an unusual turn of events for a veteran congressman who has reached stardom in conservative populist circles and who just last week emerged as the victor of the presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Yet despite his solid anti-establishment credentials and non-conformist views, Paul finds himself under siege from three Republicans who are embracing many of the themes that have defined Paul’s career. At the heart of the resistance is the notion that the 10-term Paul has gone Washington, abandoning his constituents as he pursues his white whale—the presidency.

“To be honest, I was surprised when these guys started coming out of the woodwork,” said Fort Bend County GOP Chairman Rick Miller. “They’re trying to tap into the idea that it’s time for a new face. It’s a sign of the times. It’s what’s happening in our country.”

Paul remains the favorite in the race but the opposition clearly has him looking over his shoulder.

In a January email alert titled “They’ve Turned Their Attack Dogs Loose On Me!”, Paul warns that both parties are “doing everything they can to make sure I am defeated.”

“These candidates include three Republicans in my own primary on March 2,” he wrote, “and they will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy all we have worked for.”

(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: 111th; 2010midterms; gopprimary; libertarian; rino; ronpaul; rupaul; strawpaul; teaparty; truther; tx2010
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To: Smokin' Joe

You make no sense whatsoever. Who cares whether they were worth a damn? They are going to be trying to stay alive themselves, probably without much luck.

I am talking about American lives. What happens to the Americans Paul thinks can stay in other countries when we have insufficient numbers of troops to defend them?

You talk about hauling the word’s water. Every involvement America has had has been deemed to be in America’s interest by those who set policy. Of course you may not agree with their decisions. The fact is that altruism is rarely if ever the basis for sending American troops into foreign countries. Of course the exceptopn is the humanitarian assistance our troops provide in places like Haiti.


81 posted on 02/28/2010 3:10:49 AM PST by SkipW
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To: Christian_Capitalist

BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAAA!


82 posted on 02/28/2010 7:06:24 AM PST by Darksheare (Tar is cheap, and feathers are plentiful.)
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To: SoCalPol

well said !


83 posted on 02/28/2010 12:31:31 PM PST by Patton@Bastogne (Angels and Ministers of Grace, Defend Us ....)
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To: darkwing104

Sure. Perhaps we’ll end up with another Bush big government Republican to replace him. Conservatism is about nothing more than killing Arabs at this point. And spare me the tears about Barack socializing the country. Those were sparse when Bush pushed the Medicare drug benefit through.


84 posted on 02/28/2010 8:23:21 PM PST by Harry Wurzbach
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To: AmishDude

I give you a C for defending the GOP establishment. Or, at least, for believing their bullshit. Wake the F up.


85 posted on 02/28/2010 8:27:07 PM PST by Harry Wurzbach
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To: AmishDude

While I generally agree that third parties tipping elections to Dems is a bad thing, and that where moderate Republicans are the best we can get we should shoot for that.....

Kirk isn’t even a moderate. He’s a leftist, and it really doesn’t matter whether the leftist with the “R” or the leftist with the “D” wins.

Hank


86 posted on 02/28/2010 8:53:43 PM PST by County Agent Hank Kimball (Where's the diversity on MSNBC? Olbermann, Schultz, Matthews, Maddow.....all white males!)
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To: SkipW
What happens to the Americans Paul thinks can stay in other countries when we have insufficient numbers of troops to defend them?

They aren't worth much as allies if they can't defend our people within their borders--just as we defend their people within ours.

Don't they have a military? A police force? Can't the vast majority maintain internal security without our military presence? (Hint: I'm not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan).If not, maybe we have been doing their job so well they haven't bothered.

Any well I've been near, that is "hauling someone else's water".

87 posted on 02/28/2010 9:46:37 PM PST by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: County Agent Hank Kimball
Kirk isn’t even a moderate. He’s a leftist, and it really doesn’t matter whether the leftist with the “R” or the leftist with the “D” wins.

Then sit in your state-mandated mini-Prius and with the "Don't Blame Me" bumper sticker as you wait in line for the 14th toll booth on your commute to work.

He's not a "leftist" except as defined by people who want to justify losing every time. Better to lose than to have to defend somebody. Better to sit and sulk about the imperfections of the world than do something about it.

Kirk won the Republican primary. Handily, with a solid majority. If your favorite conservative candidate can't win the GOP primary, how the hell is he going to win the general election?

And there is one vote I know that he will make and that is he will not vote for Harry Reid or Chuck Schumer or any of the Dems for majority leader. That's a net win in my book.

88 posted on 03/01/2010 8:19:37 AM PST by AmishDude (It doesn't matter whom you vote for, it matters who takes office.)
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To: Harry Wurzbach
I give you a C for defending the GOP establishment.

Now, children, here you see the attempt at continuing the humor from the previous poster. This is usually a bad idea, inasmuch as the first poster is quite a bit more clever and intelligent than this Wurzbach fellow. Let's move to the next exhibit:

Or, at least, for believing their bullshit. Wake the F up.

This indicates the frustration on the part of the poster. You'll note that he censors one curse word while including the other. One might suspect that this individual is experimenting with any number of forms of, shall we say, medication or is possibly just drunk.

89 posted on 03/01/2010 8:24:59 AM PST by AmishDude (It doesn't matter whom you vote for, it matters who takes office.)
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To: Smokin' Joe

The answer to your questions is no, they do not have effective military or police forces. It is obvious that both organizations are infiltrated by terrorists or their sympathizers. There is no vast majority.

I said that our troops are in other countries because it has been decided to be in the national interest. An exception is when they are sent to help in situations like the one in Haiti.

I don’t understand your hint. If you are not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan I don’t have a clue about where you are talking about.

I suspect that you are right when you suggest that perhaps they (Iraqi and Afghanistan governments) have found it convenient to depend on America for their security. My understanding is that this is not a cynical tactic. It is because they can’t survive otherwise.

Obviously our government decided to support a faction within Iraq. That country was in chaos and it was decided to support the faction we preferred to see in control.

I also don’t understand you comment about “any well you have been near.” What are you saying?I am beginning to sense that you have some underlying, secret knowledge about how things are really happening. Do me a favor. Spell it out.


90 posted on 03/01/2010 9:56:10 AM PST by SkipW
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To: SkipW
The answer to your questions is no, they do not have effective military or police forces. It is obvious that both organizations are infiltrated by terrorists or their sympathizers. There is no vast majority.

I think Scotland Yard will be dismayed. The truth is that the vast majority of our allies DO have functional police forces and military forces as well. Japan, Australia, Great Britain, West Germany, etc.

If you will kindly remove your focus from Iraq and Afghanistan for a moment, you will realize that vast numbers of our troops are deployed to noncombat positions elsewhere.

If you are not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan I don’t have a clue about where you are talking about.

There is the problem. To save time, just check a little on where US troops are based. I think the number of locations (globally) will surprise you. When you look at the internal capabilities of those countries (outside of present combat areas) you will find that we have assumed a significant portion of their self-defense role, to our great expense.

The interests protected are those which have benefitted from the policies which have hurt domestic industry, and by extension of that our economic base. We create wealth when we take raw materials and transform them into finished goods. Only we are paying others to do that for us, partly because our own environmental and other regulations have made it darned difficult for our own industry to do so. Our military support of others who do the dirty work is the extra payment in blood and treasure for cheap goods at home, but the dark side includes the degredation of our capabilities to extract and develop our own resources and manufacture our own goods. Americans, fooled by the walmart prices are only beginning to see the writing on the wall, with an entire class of manufacturing jobs missing from the recovery.

Had Americans felt the pain of regulation here at home at the checkout counter, I surmise that such regulations would not be in place beyond that which was clearly in the public interest, and we would retain much of aour ability to produce our own at a reasonable cost.

When the dollar is rendered worthless by the economic machinations in Washington, what will we buy foreign goods with? By then, we will have lost to attrition much of the workforce which understood the nuts and bolts of prospecting for, developing, and utilizing our own resources and that will leave us in a position where we will not be able to fight a protracted conflict anywhere on the planet. Our manufacturing sector (heavy industry) has already been gutted in the past three decades. Only one steel mill in the country was producing the steel to up-armor Humvees, for instance.

The "Arsenal of Democracy" will not be able to get'er done, and the coffers will be full of worthless paper.

IF you understand the concept of total warfare, this could not have been better orchestrated by an enemy, even if it is likely the result of wholesale stupidity.

So the many of the 'interests' we protect are the interests of only a relative few, not the long term interests of our Nation.

YMMV

91 posted on 03/02/2010 10:15:21 AM PST by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Smokin' Joe

Hey Joe:

Thanks for the info. I don’t have time right now to respond properly. I’ll get back to you later this evening.

I have a question though. Do you think that it would occur to everyone to search for the countries you mentioned?


92 posted on 03/02/2010 4:03:06 PM PST by SkipW
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To: AmishDude

I dare say you don’t know much about Kirk if you say with 100% conviction that he’d continue to caucus with the GOP for even his entire first term. He’s a Republican of the Jim Jeffords variety....not even a Snowe/Goober Graham/Collins style “moderate.”

If the choice was McConnell or Schumer I wouldn’t count on him not to jump ship.

Hank


93 posted on 03/02/2010 6:44:20 PM PST by County Agent Hank Kimball (Where's the diversity on MSNBC? Olbermann, Schultz, Matthews, Maddow.....all white males!)
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To: SkipW
Probably not, Skip. We have tunnel vision, not uncommon in a gunfight.

There are US troops deployed to (according to Wikipedia) 150+ countries and according to Global Security.org, 130+ countries. Surely some of them can ensure the safety of visitors without having the visitor's country's military present, Embassy guards nonwithstanding.

If American vital interests are that scattered, perhaps it is time we took a vital interest in the USA.

94 posted on 03/02/2010 7:46:00 PM PST by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Smokin' Joe

Joe:

It is long past the time for us to look to America’s interests. Perhaps this is a little off topic, but I just got back in from a Tea Party generated meeting of conservatives here in the Bitterroot Valley. The presenter was a man named Shaw and he presented on Agenda 21.

I became aware of Agenda 21 ten years ago when I ran across an outfit in Santa Cruz, CA called Freedom Advocates. Agenda 21 is a U.N. website that reports on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992.

At that meeting the method of eliminating private property world wide was decided. Enviromentalism was the tool. Today the Rocky Mountain West is increasingly coming under government control. Here in the Bitterroot zoning regulations have ignited a war between local government and land owners.

I have been fighting for years to make people aware of what is behind all of the wildlife corridor and riparian area regs proposed by the County Commissioners. I have been a thorn in their side. Tonight Michael Shaw gave me information I did not have before. It is enough to make your blood run cold.

I said that this is off topic, but our national interest is under assault and has been for a long time. If this sounds conspiratorial it is because that is exactly what it is. Our concerns about troops around the world, perhaps inappropriately, is a legitimate concern. So is the massive assualt on America by members of both political parties. If you find the time I suggest that you check out Freedom Advocates.com. Got to go. I have to do a search on an organization named I.C.L.E.I.


95 posted on 03/02/2010 9:52:04 PM PST by SkipW
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To: 50mm

You must be pretty depressed today. LOL


96 posted on 03/02/2010 9:55:24 PM PST by Captain Kirk
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To: tubebender

yeah, I got it


97 posted on 03/02/2010 9:55:37 PM PST by EDINVA (Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.)
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To: SkipW
Agenda 21 is a U.N. website that reports on the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero in 1992.

I have been aware of Agenda 21 since the early '90s, and have watched as the 'rewilding' of America has fulfilled part of that plan.

The time schedules talked about in those days are horribly (from their viewpoint) late. I think that is the reason we have Obama, who is breaking all the rules to catch up with that and other programs.

Despite the multifaceted assault on American Liberty, from both (yes, both--there are individual exceptions, but overall, both parties are complicit) parties, with nearly as many excuses and a completely complicit media, America has resisted the plan to encompass and absorb it into a global socialist tyranny.

Repeatedly, the UN has failed to get our willing compliance with the Kyoto accords, with global small arms control, and a host of other plans.

So, despite the objection of aware people, the pieces are being set in place anyway, through regulations with the weight of law, published in the Federal Register and quietly permitted to take effect by a populace too preoccupied with feeding their children, egos, or greed ('poor' people can be greedy, too).

The amount of the West unfettered by the most stringent of regulations on land use has continued to shrink, regardless of who is in power, the rights of the individual have steadily evaporated, and our ability to extract our nation's mineral wealth has been significantly hampered. In addition, dangerous predators have been 'reintroduced' to populated areas, further increasing the difficulty in utilizing private property, with a tangle of serious consequences and regulations which make it difficult for those who live there to defend life and limb without risking the forfeiture of all else they own, including their freedom.

Those who live in cities have willingly, by virtue of their location, often abdicated the rights those of us who live in rural areas take for granted--or at least took for granted.

At that meeting the method of eliminating private property world wide was decided. Enviromentalism was the tool.

When the riparian rights which were granted with the land to landowners and their descendants were repealed in the state of my birth, I saw the writing on the wall. Those Rights had been part of the English Common Law and went with the land, land, in my ancestor's instance which was also purchased from the Nanticoke and Powhatan tribes who had been warring over it--the chipped stone remnants of that conflict evident in the tobacco fields of my youth as arrow heads.

It wasn't stolen, nor were the right to hunt, fish, harvest shellfish, etc.--although we were now required to have a license to do the latter, and anyone could camp in front of our house as long as they were below the 'mean high water mark' in the tidewater.

To have otherwise was an affront to the 'peace and dignity of the state', with no regards for the rights, nor peace and dignity of those who had helped build it from the start and who owned the land.

In my mind, it started then, although it actually started much earlier in places where eminent domain had been used to push people off their land to build WPA projects in the Appalachians and elsewhere.

Now, the West, already more than 50% Federally owned, is finding out (again) that Great (Half-)White father indeed speaks with forked tongue.

Today the Rocky Mountain West is increasingly coming under government control. Here in the Bitterroot zoning regulations have ignited a war between local government and land owners.

Fight the good fight. We have stymied some local efforts to turn go-back land into "wilderness area", one of which presented a series of a dozen parcels which, when plotted on the map, controlled access to a far greater area and effectively would have placed that area off-limits to the ranchers and farmers who had lived there for over a century.

The battle has to be won in a thousand local venues, and that means we need for more people to get involved in more places.

Anyone only a few tens of miles from any designated park or other Federally 'protected' area is in for a scrap as the Government seeks to impose 'park rules' on private land through the use of buffer zone regulations, especially when those regulations can effectively control far greater parcels of land.

If you could control 100,000 acres of land, you could control the whole country, provided those acres were patches of rail line and highway junctions. They know this, and will use that concept to control as much private property as possible.

Keep fighting, and make as many like minded people as aware as you can. Many won't want to listen, that is normal. Give them the website of the UN's Agenda 21 pages, let them dig for themselves. It is hard to deal with at first, and some won't want to. Let them come around on their own. It will sink in and they will either be in denial, despair, or they will want to fight.

Gather the latter and hit every hearing, write letters to the Editor, hit any hearing with the facts, and take it to the people as much as you can.

It is especially hard with the Socialist educated generations which follow us older guys, people who have been taught from kindergarden on that anything but communal ownership is bad, or who have no personal desire to carve out a living with hard work nor understanding of it, because their self-respect has been replaced with the cheap imitation of self-esteem.

God help us all. It is late in the game and it's going to be a long, hard, fight.

98 posted on 03/02/2010 10:42:37 PM PST by Smokin' Joe (How often God must weep at humans' folly. Stand fast. God knows what He is doing.)
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To: Darksheare
Hmm.
81-19.
99 posted on 03/03/2010 6:05:07 AM PST by Christian_Capitalist
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To: Christian_Capitalist

LOL, you’re still pushing the moonbat I see.


100 posted on 03/03/2010 7:14:44 AM PST by Darksheare (Tar is cheap, and feathers are plentiful.)
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