DES MOINES — Ron Paul’s college-aged volunteer army — a core of the powerful ground organization that is the envy of rivals — is descending on Iowa from around the nation to coax people to the state’s Republican caucuses as he seeks to pull off what only months ago seemed like an unthinkable victory here on Tuesday.Jeez, it's like boot camp.
Four years after young people flocked to the state to help propel the campaign of Barack Obama, this radically different movement is embracing a 76-year-old veteran Texas congressman who is drawing supporters for his libertarian and antiwar views.
And they say they are under strict orders: To look, dress, shave, sound and behave in a way that will not jeopardize Mr. Paul’s chances. Even before flying here on their own nickel, some students said they had been instructed to cover up tattoos and told that their faces should be fresh-shaved or beards neatly trimmed, wearing only nice clothes that one described as “business casual.”
“No tats,” another volunteer, Rocco Lucente, said as he ticked off the rules after arriving at the airport Tuesday night. No liquor, no drugs and, he said, no “fraternizing in the dorms, nothing like that.”
He said the standard expected of volunteers was: “What would Ron Paul do?”
The hundreds of volunteers are considered Mr. Paul’s most potent weapon beyond his vast and acerbic advertising campaign in Iowa, where the caucus results often turn on the ability of campaigns to turn out supporters. After the volunteers arrived at the airport here, they were whisked to a Y.M.C.A. camp the campaign rented in Boone, an hour outside Des Moines, where some said they expected to be drilled on get-out-the-vote techniques and how to use scripts to talk to prospective caucusgoers.
Much of their efforts have been cloaked in secrecy: They said that once they arrive at the camp they are under orders not to speak to journalists or make postings on social media sites about their activities in Iowa, a provocative limitation for a movement lubricated by the effective use of the Internet. A half-dozen Paul aides declined to comment or allow a visit to volunteers. “We’re keeping our cards close to our vests,” said Jesse Benton, the national campaign chairman.
Here's the weird thing ... As I've argued before, the greatest division in the Western world today lies not between rich and poor, working class and upper class, or Left and Right, but between on the one hand the rapacious, unaccountable Bankster/Corporatist/Political establishment and on the other everybody else. Why then, aren't I standing with the Occupy St Paul's crowd right now, making this point more vociferously?Check the link for the whole thing.
Simple. Because though my analysis of the problem may be quite similar to the Occupy crowd's, my solution couldn't be more different. This is why – as the above video explains – Tea Party types like me are unlikely ever to find common cause with Occupy. We're classical liberals who believe in low taxes, limited government, property rights and equality of opportunity, whereas they are progressives who believe in greater government control and wealth redistribution in order to create equality of outcome.
It's a shame, really it is, because in these terrifying economic times it really would be nice to harness some of that commitment, zeal and self-righteous rage you find among the Occupy crowd and channel it towards a useful purpose. Problem is, we're dealing here with the victims of two or three generations' worth of ingrained cultural Marxism. Thanks to the Gramsciite capture of the media and the seats of academe, a lot of these kids simply lack the knowledge base or intellectual wherewithal to appreciate that instead of championing freedom what they're actually defending is economic stagnation, higher unemployment, more stifling regulation, more entrenched social division and a moribund status quo in which an ever-growing political elite leeches off the backs of us wage-slave Untermenschen.
Oh, and there's one more thing I dislike about the Occupy crowd (and their ideological soulmates): there's a really vicious nastiness there which you simply don't find among the classical liberals of, say, the Tea Party or Ukip. Check out this video of Occupy DC in action and you'll see what I mean.
Reporting from Des Moines— Mitt Romney has a 59-point economic plan. Newt Gingrich promises "very big solutions." But to a large and increasing extent, issues aren't driving the fight for the Republican presidential nomination.RTWT.
With Iowans about to cast the first votes of 2012, issues have declined in importance as a factor in the campaign, according to a recent national opinion survey of Republicans. Instead, the GOP contest reflects an intensifying search by voters for the candidate they believe has the strongest chance of unseating President Obama next November.
That's a departure from some past elections, when policy positions split the party.
"The striking thing about the Republican race is that there's an incredible amount of unanimity," said Yuval Levin, a domestic policy aide in the George W. Bush White House.
Republicans currently regard Romney and Gingrich as the candidates best able to defeat Obama, according to the latest CNN/Opinion Research survey. Yet each man is picked by fewer than 1 in 4 GOP voters as the candidate that they are most likely to agree with on the issues they care about most.
Even more notably, the salience of issues as a way of sorting through the crowded GOP field has declined sharply over the course of the pre-primary campaign.
In June, Republicans said a candidate's stance on issues was just as important as the leadership skills and vision a candidate would have as president, according to CNN/Opinion Research. By mid-December, a candidate's stand on issues mattered to barely 1 in 3 voters. In the same poll, twice as many Republicans ranked leadership skills as more important.
That shift reflects, at least in part, the influence of the 13 televised debates, in which the Republican contenders have largely failed to draw meaningful differences over issues or highlight new ideas, even when they have them. Instead of revolving around a galvanizing issue, the GOP race has been shaped by the overall tone of the debates and the perceived authenticity of the candidates as foes to Obama.
Every summer, on the first weekend in August, thousands of twins converge on Twinsburg, Ohio, a small town southeast of Cleveland named by identical twin brothers nearly two centuries ago.That's cool.
They come, two by two, for the Twins Days Festival, a three-day marathon of picnics, talent shows, and look-alike contests that has grown into one of the world's largest gatherings of twins.
Dave and Don Wolf of Fenton, Michigan, have been coming to the festival for years. Like most twins who attend, they enjoy spending time with each other. In fact, during the past 18 years, the 53-year-old truckers, whose identical beards reach down to their chests, have driven more than three million miles together, hauling everything from diapers to canned soup from places like Seattle, Washington, to Camden, New Jersey. While one sits at the wheel of their diesel Freightliner, the other snoozes in the bunk behind him. They listen to the same country gospel stations on satellite radio, share the same Tea Party gripes about big government, and munch on the same road diet of pepperoni, apples, and mild cheddar cheese. On their days off they go hunting or fishing together. It's a way of life that suits them.
"Must be a twins thing," Don says.
Sorenson DENIES Bachmann statement, calls it "absurd" and that he was not offered money by Paul campaign via @AnthonyNBCNews #iacaucusAdded: More bad news, it looks like, "Bachmann SuperPAC Defects to Romney."
Kim Jong-il hated the United States. But an American carried him to the grave.Read it all at that top link.
The casket of Mr. Kim, the cultish North Korean leader, sat atop the roof of a polished masterpiece of American automotive grandeur: a mid-1970s armored black Lincoln Continental, which wended through the snowy streets of Pyongyang on Wednesday in a rigorously choreographed funeral. Mr. Kim’s gigantic, smiling portrait was balanced atop a second Lincoln limousine. A third, slightly smaller Lincoln brought up the rear, its roof bearing an immense wreath. The aging but impeccably maintained cars gave the footage on North Korean state television the quality of a cold war Hollywood film.
“The Lincoln Continental in the old Asia was considered to be a solid, robust, powerful car,” said Kongdan Oh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses who has written on daily life in North Korea, where her parents were born. “They are a time capsule. North Koreans are living still the 1970s life.”
She said the cars were probably chosen because they were previously used in the funeral of Kim Il-sung, who was Kim Jong-il’s father and the founding president of North Korea and who died in 1994. “Whatever they did in the past, they are very comfortable repeating that, especially this Kim family dynasty,” she said of the North Korean leadership. “They probably didn’t even think twice about using this car. For them, it’s a very natural choice.”
After a campaign effort that has defied convention and angered top Iowa Republicans, Mitt Romney is well-positioned to emerge as a big winner in Tuesday's presidential caucuses.The Times delivers a conspicuous non-mention of Michele Bachmann there, but what can you do?
The tightest GOP caucus contest in decades features Romney, Ron Paul and a fading Newt Gingrich in a virtual tie for the lead, making the final days of politicking unusually consequential. And another candidate, Rick Perry or Rick Santorum, could get hot at the end and knock one of the favorites out of the top three.
But it seems increasingly likely that Romney, condemned only last month by Iowa's Republican governor for ignoring the state, has managed to finesse the tricky voter test that he failed four years ago. He ran second then to upstart Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and ex-evangelical minister, despite investing huge amounts of time and money.
Just before flying to Iowa on Tuesday for a four-day campaign swing, Romney said that expectations were "very different this time." He then tried to lower them, noting that a couple of weeks ago he "was a distant third in Iowa, and you just don't know what's going to happen in this process."
Don’t look now, but Mitt Romney suddenly seems like the Iowa front-runner.
The former Massachusetts governor has carefully tempered expectations in Iowa all year, visiting only a handful of times and saving the bulk of his television spending for the final weeks of the race. But as a crowd of conservative opponents keep the anti-Romney vote divided, his odds of a victory in the state that humbled him four years ago have never been better.
Even as he tried to keep talk about his prospects in check Tuesday, a slew of public and private polling and anecdotal evidence on the ground suggests that Romney is within striking distance of a first-place finish in Iowa — especially as Ron Paul’s momentum spurt appears to have run into the reality of front-runners’ scrutiny.
Why does the left hate free speech? Because they don’t know how to talk about the substantive merits when they are challenged. Having submerged themselves in disciplining each other by denouncing any heretics in their midst, they find themselves overwhelmed and outnumbered in America, where there is vibrant debate about all sorts of things they don’t know how to begin to talk about. They resort to stomping their feet and shouting “shut up”… when they aren’t prissily imploring everyone to be “civil.” — Ann Althouse.
The movement is about income inequality, joblessness, and ways to make the system (financial, and electoral) more fair. Money is not speech. Corporations are not people. Equitable taxation, where everyone above poverty wages pays their fair share on all they earn. The people should have more political power and access than those who can pay for it. Politicians and their votes shouldn't be for sale.God, that's so bad I don't even know where to start.
To highlight such talk [of Occupy's anti-Semitism] is to invite one predictable retort: One cannot hold an entire movement responsible for the excesses of outliers. But, despite the assertions of its advocates, Occupy Wall Street was not in fact a movement. Its ranks never numbered more than a modest few hundred people in Manhattan—which made its anti-Semitic cohort statistically significant. Its lack of structure, moreover, and near inability to repudiate sentiments by its participants meant that even a fringe was no less part of the whole.In other words, advocates and endorsers of Occupy are lying when they claim, as does racist Walter James Casper III:
...all he's doing is linking to the few anti-semitic (or illegal, or immoral) incidents that occurred at or near occupy sites -- the perpetrators of which for the most part were just strangers on the street, not long-time liberal activists with any connection to occupy or any other movement -- and pretending that these few people and/or incidents represent the thinking of every single person who attended or in any way supports any portion of the occupy movement.This is the kind of deranged progressive denialism that Dr. Pat Santy has documented thoroughly. It's literally an illness, a pathological infliction, rooted in hate-based ideology which blinds progressives to the truth: They literally can't deal with reality, so they invent a new one.
As we prepare to light the sixth Chanukah candle tonight, here’s a Maccabee-esque story about the few prevailing against the many – a lone Israeli student taking a year to fight an unfair system, and winning. On the downside, it’s only a partial victory, as the university is shamefully backing this ‘professor’, who is an affront to academic integrity, and has forfeited the privilege of guiding the careers of rising young academics like Smadar Bakovic.Word.
Read the FBDC item, then take time to watch the full hour and decide for yourself which is supercilious and not much worth one's time, as opposed to what appears to be a very substantive young woman well on her way to saying something important enough that many people will want to hear it via New Media.
With a wave of over a dozen bombings ripping through Baghdad just a week after U.S. troops officially pulled out, new questions are being raised about the country's ability to stand on its own without U.S. security assistance. Before looking ahead to whether Iraq can withstand a potential new wave of sectarian violence, it's crucial to take measure of where the country currently stands and the effect of eight years of war on its people and institutions.Continue reading at the link.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, researchers at the Brookings Institution began the Iraq Index to keep tabs on how the war progressed. As students of counterinsurgency know, it is difficult to find the right metrics to evaluate how a war effort of this type is going. It is also challenging to obtain reliable data even if relevant metrics have been identified. The most important metrics can also change with time; additionally, some can be leading indicators of change, while others tend to lag broader improvements.
In the war's early days, the general sense of disorder and chaos and the disempowerment of many former Baathists and former soldiers were probably the most important metrics. They augured poorly for the future -- while official U.S. data focused more on restoration of infrastructure and other generally positive indicators that though important may not have been quite as crucial as they seemed at the time. Then U.S. attention turned to building up Iraqi security forces, but, alas, progress in their training, numbers, and equipment could not trump the growing sectarian fissures that were widening within the government, Army, police, and country writ large.
Metrics of violence were recognized as the most important indicators by 2006 and 2007, when the country was being ripped apart. The success of the surge was fairly easy to see, as these numbers plummeted in late 2007 and 2008. Since then, however, tracking Iraq's changes has become harder as progress has slowed and politics have become at least as important as security and quality-of-life indicators.
With U.S. military engagement in Iraq having come to an end, here are 10 key metrics that reveal both the damage wrought by the war and the state of the country that U.S. forces are leaving behind...
Even when he does use social or political terms, their denotative and connotative definitions bear no resemblance to what I stand for politically or socially. For Donald, there is no difference between calling someone a communist or racist, and calling that person a fuckwad. As used by Dishonest Don, these political and social labels are nothing more that ad hominem insults and rhetorical ejaculations.
In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language."BBM" is BlackBerry Messenger, the main device that helped set off the rioting in Enfield, near London, earlier this year.
To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.
By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.
Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.
Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.
It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Aaron Rodgers threw five touchdown passes for the first time in his career and helped the Green Bay Packers nail down the No. 1 seeding in the NFC and claim another round of bragging rights in the NFL's most storied rivalry by knocking the Chicago Bears out of the playoff chase.PREVIOUSLY: "Leianna's Hot Green Bay Packers Lingerie."
Rodgers threw two touchdowns to Jordy Nelson, another two to James Jones, and he found tight end Jermichael Finley for a score as the Packers beat the Bears, 35-21, on Sunday night.
Clay Matthews made a key first-half interception for the Packers (14-1), who needed the win to tie down home-field advantage in the NFC.
The loss eliminated the Bears (7-8) from playoff contention and put the Atlanta Falcons in the playoffs as at least a wild card.
The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and theoretically ... The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the turn of the century, but not after a lot of bad stuff had been written in all kinds of places. There was way more than the Ron Paul newsletters. There was the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, which was another major place publishing these sorts of views. They could also be found in a whole bunch of Mises Institute publications of that era. It was the latter that led me to ask to be taken off the Institute’s mailing list in the early 1990s, calling them “a fascist fist in a libertarian glove.” I have never regretted that decision or that language. What the media has in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg of the really unsavory garbage that the paleo turn produced back then.Read the whole thing at the link.
Through it all though, Ron Paul was a constant. He kept plugging away, first at the center of the paleo strategy as evidenced by the newsletters. To be clear, I am quite certain he did not write them. There is little doubt that they were written by Rockwell and Rothbard. People I know who were on the inside at the time confirm it and the style matches pretty well to those two and does not match to Ron Paul. Paul knows who wrote them too, but he’s protecting his long-time friend and advisor, unfortunately. And even more sadly, Rockwell doesn’t have the guts to confess and end this whole megillah. So although I don’t think Ron Paul is a racist, like Archie Bunker, he was willing to, metaphorically, toast a marshmallow on the cross others were burning.
Even after the paleo strategy was abandoned, Ron was still there walking the line between “mainstream” libertarianism and the winking appeal to the hard right courted by the paleo strategy. Paul’s continued contact with the fringe groups of Truthers, racists, and the paranoid right are well documented. Even in 2008, he refused to return a campaign contribution of $500 from the white supremacist group Stormfront. You can still go to their site and see their love for Ron Paul in this campaign and you can find a picture of Ron with the owner of Stormfront’s website. Even if Ron had never intentionally courted them, isn’t it a huge problem that they think he is a good candidate? Doesn’t that say something really bad about the way Ron Paul is communicating his message? Doesn’t it suggest that years of the paleo strategy of courting folks like that actually resonated with the worst of the right? Paul also maintained his connection with the Mises Institute, which has itself had numerous connections with all kinds of unsavory folks: more racists, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, the whole nine yards. Much of this stuff was ably documented in 2007 and 2008 by the Right Watch blog. Hit that link for more.
Those of us who watched all of this happen over two decades knew it would come back to haunt us and so it has, unfortunately just as Ron Paul and libertarianism are on the cusp of something really amazing. And that only goes to show what a mistake the paleo strategy was: imagine if the newsletters were not an issue and Paul were to win Iowa. Yeah, he might get ignored, but he would not be the easy media target he is now, nor would all of libertarianism pay a potential price. The legions of young people supporting Paul did not come in via the paleo strategy; they came because libertarianism in general is on the rise in all kinds of venues (and yes, the Mises Institute’s post-paleo influence is important here, but it’s hardly the only institution that matters). These young people, for the most part, are surprised by all of this dirty laundry. That, in my view, is the real tragedy: I think libertarianism could have got to this point just as fast, maybe faster, without the toxic baggage of the paleo strategy.
So why deal with this now, when libertarianism is so hot? Because those newsletters are not what libertarianism is and the sooner and louder we make that clear, the better. There are too many young people who don’t understand all of this and who we need to help see the alternative liberal vision of libertarianism – and to understand that “liberal libertarianism” is radical, principled, and humane and not “beltway selling out.” To do that, we need to confront the past and explicitly reject it. That doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting Ron Paul in electoral politics, but it does mean that we cannot pretend the past doesn’t exist and it means that Paul and the others involved need to do the right thing and take explicit responsibility for what they said two decades ago. That has not happened yet. Then we need a complete and utter rejection of the paleo world-view and we need to create a movement that will simply not be attractive to racists, homophobes, anti-Semites etc., by emphasizing, as we have done at this blog, libertarianism’s liberal roots.
