According to the Barr campaign, Barr is going to be showing up on various main stream media outlets this week. Tuesday night he appears on The Colbert Report for the second time. He will be on CNN on Wednesday and Friday mornings. He is also taping his second full hour with Glenn Beck on Thursday, likely to be aired Friday evening (as that is when Beck usually airs his full hour TV interviews).
Barr has also shown some continued traction in the Zogby state by state polling as well. Hopefully these new media appearances will continue to help him reach new heights in polling (15%) allowing him to get into the debates. Sure it is unlikely, but anything can happen in politics. I will remain realistic yet hopeful.
Much speculation has occurred about who Ron Paul will endorse following the Republican Convention and his Rally For The Republic. Perhaps just as much speculation has occurred about whether he will endorse anyone at all. If he were to endorse a candidate, the two names that have the most potential are Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin. However, it’s high time to realize that Ron Paul’s endorsement isn’t the be all and end all. Let’s take a look at some other candidates that Congressman Ron Paul has endorsed already.
Sifting through the list of endorsed candidates from Ron Paul’s Liberty PAC web site reveals that Paul is no liberty purist like so many of his supporters. To me, this shows Paul does compromise and play politics to further the larger goal rather than focus on specific issues of fundamental disagreement. The fact that he endorses sending money to Paul Broun, an Iraq war and surge supporting Congressman from Georgia demonstrates this. It gets worse, much worse.
Ron Paul was interiewed earlier today on Downsize DC Radio with Jim Babka. They covered some interesting topics. Below is the audio/mp3 in 3 parts (each segment, no commercials).
Our next topic is that of seigniorage, which is a silent weapon used historically by governments repeatedly legally plunder the populace. Let’s start by defining it followed by several examples.
Seigniorage – Revenue or profit taken from the minting of coins, usually the difference between the value of the bullion used and the face value of the coin. In economics literature, the term is frequently used as a synonym for monetary expansion. Root of the word means a French feudal lord, and refers to the lord’s right to confiscate, or steal, money from the people.
The Lord’s Right to Steal – An Abbreviated History of Coin Clipping
As we saw earlier, governments often use ‘legal tender’ laws to force everyone to use their legal tender money, and only their legal tender money, as money. Note when I use the term “law” in this case, I mean law by decree, but it could also be common law. However, these laws were preceded by at least two very important steps.
Michael Phelps and other American athletes are bringing back loads of Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medals from the Beijing Olympics. A young libertarian economist asks if it was worth it.
I confess that due to being an athlete and loving competition myself, I greatly admire the athletes. Their abilities represent the human potential, and in a way every world record set pushes at our limits. However, surely a darker way of looking the Olympics is similar to Dan Clore’s article “A Libertarian View of the Olympics” as just a nationalized bread-and-circus event or an opiate for the masses. Surely some of the events are graded in a subjective manner – while one can run a marathon with a certain indisputable time, the same cannot be said of diving or synchronized swimming, or this jump-rope-tossing-and-dancing event I saw.
A rather interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal today regarding the recent split among Nevada GOP delegates. Some delegates are backing Ron Paul and some are backing John McCain and neither side is giving an inch. The author uses this as further proof that Republicans are not sold on McCain for President. When you then add Libertarian candidate Bob Barr to the mix John McCain has something to truly worry about.
PAHRUMP, NEV. — Two Nevada delegations are packing their bags for the Republican National Convention Sept. 1, and if the latest party ruling stands, neither of them will be seated.
A fiasco at the state convention spawned the dueling delegations — one for John McCain and one for Ron Paul — and their continued wrangling has exposed a split in the party that may spell trouble in a key state for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
Running a strident libertarian campaign in the primaries, Texas Rep. Ron Paul tapped a seam of Republican frustration across the country, railing against the Bush administration’s impact on civil liberties, foreign policy and the growing federal government. Mr. Paul’s message resonated particularly in Nevada, a state where frontier spirit and personal freedom runs deep, and he captured second place in the January state caucuses, ahead of Sen. McCain.
Mr. Paul has suspended his campaign, but his libertarian loyalists have not. Their lingering discontentment and underlying philosophical differences may prove fertile territory for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Bob Barr, and dangerous ground for Sen. McCain if even a portion of the Republican base is too disgruntled to vote. Nevada is shaping up as a key battleground in the presidential race; President Bush won the state by roughly 20,000 votes in each of the last two elections, and Democrats are contesting it strongly this year. Republican hopes in Nevada have also been hampered by the scandal-plagued GOP governor, Jim Gibbons, whose approval ratings have tanked as he has dealt with a messy divorce and a federal corruption investigation.
The Paul-O-Meter is designed to rate candidates and office holders on how closely they measure up to Ron Paul on 20 criteria. We at Liberty Maven have rated the six main Presidential candidates and have recently added all Senators and members of Congress to the application. For a detailed description of the Paul-O-Meter check out the methodology.
We’ve added a new feature to the Paul-O-Meter. It occurred to us that we may not know about some wonderful candidates running for office around the nation. So now anyone can request a candidate be added to the Paul-O-Meter system. Once approved that candidate can be rated by anyone along with the existing candidates. This new feature will hopefully help draw attention to other liberty minded candidates running for office across the nation.
The Barr campaign posted a video of Bob Barr doing an odd sort of stand up comedy routine, stump speech in Philadelphia. I admit I actually laughed a few times at his jokes too. Check it out below.
A special live event and screening of a documentary on fiscal responsibility entitled I.O.U.S.A. was held this evening. Ron Paul had a small part in the movie (actually two), but it was one of the more crowd pleasing moments of the entire movie. Paul’s clip showed him questioning Greenspan and telling him that if a doctor had the same failure rate at meeting his goals, patients would die. Then silence and everyone staring at each other, including Greenspan, all dumbfounded. Hilarious. The packed theater thought so too as the crowd laughed heartily and loudly.
The movie as a whole took great pains to be non-partisan and was quite successful. Ron Paul was the only Presidential candidate in the movie painted in a positive light. In fact he was utilized as an expert, especially during the discussion of the Fed and it’s power. The unflattering moments were saved for George W. Bush in the final part of the movie on the “leadership deficit”.
Bill Clinton received some positive air play for balancing the budget in the late 90’s. I was pleased that they then accurately added Social Security and Medicare to the budget equation showing the surplus being wiped out.
This afternoon WashingtonPost.com had a Q&A session with Bob Barr. I found it somewhat annoying that he didn’t answer all the questions (or they weren’t included in the transcript) when someone asked a two- or three-part question, but nonetheless it could serve well for those not too familiar with Bob Barr. Oh, and the closet Libertarian purist in me cringed when he called for “some form of a consumption type tax” in lieu of the IRS and payroll deductions.
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