Slate.com’s Christopher Beam took a ride on the Ron Paul Blimp yesterday and has an interesting account of his trip. Aside from following the recently uncovered Official Media Guide to Attacking Ron Paul, he covers the event somewhat fairly.
THE SKY, Dec. 20—We’re hovering 1,500 feet above Baltimore in a 200-foot blimp with Ron Paul’s name on it, and I’ve lost feeling in my hands. Elijah Lynn, vice president of the Ron Paul Blimp, passes around heat packets, the kind made for skiers. “Shake it,” he says. Over the past week, temperatures in the blimp have dropped to as low as 28 degrees. As the crew has learned, it’s hard out here for a blimp.
Good article by Tucker Carlson of MSNBC fame. This was the article he was working on when taking in a rally speech by Ron Paul is Nevada. Yes… the one he brought Dennis Hof to (the owner and operator of the Bunny Ranch, the famous Nevada brothel).
The first thing I learned from driving around Nevada with Ron Paul for a couple of days: People really hate the Federal Reserve. This became clear midway through a speech Paul was giving to a group of Republicans at a community center in Pahrump, a dusty town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Pahrump is known for its legal brothels (Heidi Fleiss lives there), but most of the people in the audience looked more like ranchers than swingers. They stood five deep at the back of the room and listened politely as the candidate spoke.
Until Paul got to the part about the Fed. “We need a much better monetary system,” he said, a system based on “sound money, money that’s backed by something.” Paul, who is small and delicate and has a high voice, spoke in a near monotone, making no effort to excite the audience. They cheered anyway. Then he said this: “The Constitution gives no authority for a central bank.” The crowd went wild, or as wild as a group of sober Republicans can on a Monday night. They hooted and yelled and stomped their feet. Paul stopped speaking for a moment, his words drowned out. Then he continued on about monetary policy.
CONCORD, N.H. – It wasn’t long ago that Rep. Ron Paul was an anti-war asterisk in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Then his campaign raised a record $6 million in a single day.
Now the libertarian-leaning Texas congressman is looking like a possible spoiler, with an eclectic, tech-savvy following and an astounding $18 million in donations raised in less than three months.
“It’s sort of gotten out of control. I don’t know what to do about it,” he told one audience recently in mock frustration.
I don’t condone the obnoxious shouting that comes with some of these, but I really think it is much better and more funny when it is a quiet show of support.