Ron Paul continues to be the voice of reason in a sea of choppy bullshit in Washington. He wrote an open letter about the bailout plan that sums up my exact thoughts on this mess. I actually wrote my congressman for the first time in my life about this (the bailout), I didn’t even receive a form-letter automatic response. Here’s an excerpt:
The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are about to be looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care?
Yes I do care, the question is do enough other people care enough to do something about it.
Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas called on voters to back a third-party candidate for president Wednesday, rejecting his party’s nominee and offering equally harsh words for the Democratic candidate.
I get NOT voting for a the two status-quo partys, but I’m not going to vote for a third-party candidate “just cuz”. They have to earn my vote just as much as the assholes from the Dems and Pubs. I’ll probably end up just writing in a vote for RP.
There is a new Ron Paul grassroots fundraising event planned for December 16th. This time it is to coincide with the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, which I think is more appropriate than the blowing up the parliament thing from the last event. The goal is the same as before, get 100,000 people to contribute 100 bucks each to raise $10 million, the last event raised over $4 million. Again as with the event in early November, I was planning on contributing in December anyway, so this was a no-brainer for me to join. Spread the word if Ron Paul’s message is attractive to you, and don’t if it isn’t. Link to the site here: (Tea Party 07).
One of the areas/platforms where I have been uncomfortable with Ron Paul’s stance has been economics and Paul’s belief that we should move back to a gold standard. This would typically make me cringe when he said it, as I think it perpetuates a common opinion that he is a wacky little dude. I began performing some research into it, and my head feels like a small alien is attempting to burst from my sinus cavity. I think my initial aversion to these statements were I had assumed that Paul meant a move back to the Breton Woods system that was established after World War II and ultimately failed in 1971. The more I look however, it appears that Paul and the flavor of Libertarian philosophy he espouses is following the Austrian school of economics. I am no economist, but have had some exposure to Macro and Micro economics in grad school, I think I will need to perform additional research so I completely understand the core issues. The more I look into this, the more I realize I have to learn. Fuck-it, maybe I should just watch TV. Your thoughts?
Well it’s November 5th and the grassroots fundraising campaign I had mentioned previously has had significant positive impact to the fundraising goals of the campaign.  As of 2:30 PM today, the event has poured in over $2 Million additional buckaroos into the campaign. It’s a far cry from the ultimate goal, but with a few more of these, they might just get there. Click here to contribute if you are so inclined.
EDIT (11/6):Â It looks like the campaign ended up taking in something like $4.2 million bucks… really amazing.
I recently came across a grassroots fundraising event aimed at raising $10 Million bucks in one day for Ron Paul’s campaign (November 5th). The event is described here as:
Please join us this November 5th for the largest one day political donation event in history. Our goal is to bring together 100,000 people to donate $100 each, creating a one day donation total of $10,000,000.
You can subscribe to the cause via feedburner on the site, that is how they are tracking participants. They have some significant work ahead of them if they are going to achieve their goal of 100K participants, as of this posting the number of participants was in the range of 5,600. In any case, these are the type of events that will have to come off to make Paul’s overall goal of $12 Million dollars this quarter. As I have stated previously, Ron Paul’s campaign overall goal is aggressive, but the campaign may have a fighting chance if more of these grassroots events are successful. I was personally planning on donating in November, so I have joined the event.
After last quarter’s unexpected success in the fundraising space (just over $5 million clams), Ron Paul benefited with increased buzz and “free” advertisement with the mainstream media. Because of this the campaign has redoubled it’s efforts and has made the quarter 4 target $12 million bucks translating to $4 million every month. I personally hate it when people tell me I have goals that are too lofty or that I couldn’t do something, however this new target for fundraising begs the question… is it attainable? I am pulling for him and will contribute to the cause this quarter, but to make his numbers they are going to have to pour on the new/incremental support, his base can only contribute so much. If you are interested in contributing, just click this link.
“Say it isn’t so” is what the Republican front-runners were probably thinking when Ron Paul announced yesterday that he raised over $5 million in Q3. Ron Paul is starting to glean the expected bump in mainstream media attention after his stellar fundraiser quarter. Now they (the GOP front-runners and media) may have to start paying attention to real issues and not the typical rhetoric bullshit and pandering to the LCD. Here’s a good RP quote discussing his success from ABCnews.com:
“The organization of the campaign popped up spontaneously on the Internet with these meet-up groups,” Paul told ABC News. “It’s natural that they would donate the money. So in many ways, the campaign has found me as much as I have found them. It’s not a top-down organization. It’s sort of bottom up. All we have done at the campaign is provide the message, and the message turns out to be popular.”
Good for you Ron, hopefully this will build some momentum going forward…
The Ron Paul campaign got a shot in arm by raising 1 Million bucks in less than 7 days, extraordinary for a grassroots campaign…. Dr. Paul will certainly gain some additional media attention for this.
I find myself in uncharted territory politically, I am in support and am supporting a Republican candidate for the first time in my life. I’m no die hard Democrat, but I’ve been a registered Democrat since I became eligible to vote. I’ve always considered myself an independent that leaned more Democrat than Republican, but as I grew older, began a career, and advanced I found myself leaning more and more conservatively (at least fiscally). I hadn’t heard much about Ron Paul, I vaguely remembered the Libertarian Presidential bid in the 80’s but I did however catch one of the early debates and was very intrigued by him.  This is a candidate that was making sense to me and not spewing forth the typical crap I expected, and received,  from the other candidates.
I still think the GOP is full of rich corrupt SOB’s and the Democrats are full of whiny little babies that deep down inside wish they were rich corrupt SOB’s. Dr. Paul is the only guy making sense to me out of the bunch.