MICHELE BACHMANN: “We have an IAEA report that just recently came out that said literally Iran is within just months of being able to obtain that (a nuclear) weapon.”
RON PAUL: “There is no U.N. report that said that. It’s totally wrong, what you just said.”
Bachmann: “It’s the IAEA report.”
THE FACTS: As Paul said, the report of the International Atomic Energy Agency does not state that Iran is within months of having nuclear arms. The U.N. agency report does suggest that Iran conducted secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of nuclear weapons but did not put a time frame on when Iran might succeed in building a bomb, and it made no final conclusion on Tehran’s intent.
Bachmann also erred by arguing that Iran has “stated they will use it (a nuclear weapon) against the United States.”
Iran vehemently rejects that it is developing a nuclear bomb, let alone that it plans to drop one on the U.S.

Yes, unsurprisingly it was Michelle Bachmann who lied or I guess if you are a supporter of hers, “stretched the truth”. Bachmann also appears to have lied about what is in the Iranian Constitution, claiming it “states unequivocally” to stretch “jihad across the world”. Well, unless the Wikipedia interpretation of the Iranian Constitution is wrong I see no mention of “jihad” or “caliphate”. In fact, it directly mentions foreign policy in section X, saying in part:

Article 152 The foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran is based upon the rejection of all forms of domination, both the exertion of it and submission to it, the preservation of the independence of the country in all respects and its territorial integrity, the defence of the rights of all Muslims, non-alignment with respect to the hegemonic superpowers, and the maintenance of mutually peaceful relations with all non-belligerent States.

There is certainly no “unequivocal” mention of jihad against the world. Hopefully voters will see through Bachmann’s and Santorum’s melodramatic horse-hockey.

Here are all of Ron Paul’s moments in the debate, totaling over 18 minutes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhbGL3F8r4c

DONATE TODAY! It’s Tea Party ’11 Money Bomb Time.

Next up are two familiar tools of status-quo politics discussing Ron Paul’s recent poll numbers in Iowa. Of course, I’m talking about Bill O’Reilly and Dick Morris. Dick Morris actually appears to shudder when he considers (and then immediately dismisses) the possibility of Ron Paul being the GOP nominee. What Morris doesn’t realize is that when he speaks later in the segment about his “cockroach theory” (whatever that means) he’s actually describing the very reason Ron Paul would win against Obama and not one of his choices of Romney or Gingrich.

This just, once again, proves what a monumental task Ron Paul is up against in his quest to spread liberty by leading by example rather than leading by a leash. The pundits are coming out in droves to discredit Paul’s candidacy because they don’t want to be forced to vote for him if he should get the nomination. I’d love for one of these tools to answer the question, “If Ron Paul gets the nomination would you support him?” They’d likely dismiss the question as “impossible” rather than admit they’d support him, eventually.

Paul has a long road ahead of him. Not only must he actually win enough votes in each state, but he must also win over the pundits and their despicable preliminary coronations of other candidates. Doing enough of the former will help with the latter. One thing is for sure, Ron Paul’s campaign this time around is not an educational effort like it was in 2008. He’s all in and if Ron Paul wins, America wins.

————–
Don’t forget to pledge and donate this Friday for the Tea Party 2011 Money Bomb. It’s one way that we can punch back at the Dick Morris types.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cVqb_utNGM

This morning McCain sounded a similar tune when talking about Obama’s recent support of actions in Libya.

“There’s always been an isolation strain in the Republican party, that Pat Buchanan (a former Republican presidential contender) wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage, so to speak,” he said.

There is no question that President Barack Obama, a Democrat, made the right choice in lending US military support to the NATO mission in Libya, McCain told ABC television’s “This Week” program.

“If we had not intervened, Kadhafi was at the gates of Benghazi. He said he was going to go house to house to kill everybody. That’s a city of 700,000 people. What would be saying now if we had allowed for that to happen?

“That’s not the Republican party of the 20th century and now the 21st century,” McCain said.

McCain is a neo-con Republican dinosaur with a jingoist broken record roar of, “America F&%K YEAH!” It is as tired as it is desperate. He also, along with much of the media, needs to learn the proper definition of isolationism. For more see this excellent video on isolationism from Jack Hunter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLVlv_OP5Gw

It is a testament to Ron Paul that his message of non-interventionism is now being echoed, in various forms, by his 2012 GOP opponents. However, let’s not kid ourselves, not a single candidate in the field other than Ron Paul can be trusted to put action behind the words.

In 2008 I wrote that I didn’t think America was ready for Ron Paul. Here in 2011-2012, America just might be ready. Even if Dino-McCain isn’t.

In it we learn that neo-conservatives philosophy is based on Machiavellianism. It’s the elitist mentality that neo-cons know what is good for all citizens and can morally (in their eyes) use all means necessary to reach that perceived good. We also learn that the roots of neo-conservatism come from the left.

Now that Usama bin Laden nightmare is dead the neo-conservatives need a new nightmare to justify the continued global war on terror. At first they tried to spread general fear about a retaliatory strike. This is a real and genuine fear; however, it isn’t quite enough for them. They need a face of terror–a single person. Initial indications are this new face of terror will be Usama’s 20 year old son Hamza. He already has a nickname, “The Crown Prince of Terror” as evidenced in this recent article from The Telegraph:

Hamza, thought to be the youngest of the Saudi-born warlord’s sons, has been described as the “crown prince of terror”. He featured on an extremist website to mark the third anniversary of the July 7 London bombings in which 52 people died. He read a poem called for “destruction” of America, Britain, France and Denmark.

Intelligence agencies believe he was being groomed as a possible future leader of al-Qaeda.

He was implicated in the assassination of moderate Pakistani leader Benazir Bhutto in 2007.

Well, it didn’t take them very long did it? Hopefully it won’t take 10 years, billions of dollars, and countless lives, to find bin Laden 2.0. No doubt we will begin hearing about how the son is even more evil than the parent was.

In any case, I long for the day when our troops can come home from all over the world and we can expend our resources on true defense and better intelligence-gathering rather than the expensive nation-sitting we do now.

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 . . .

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.

Read the rest at Balko’s The Agitator

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeKoDZ_MkS0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLY19PnY2m8

What are the American people to care if their government’s missile strikes land in the bedroom of a young boy who was guilty only of being born in the wrong nation, to the wrong family, at the wrong time? That missile was far enough away from the American’s suburban home not to leave an impression in his more sophisticated brain – you know, the one with the attention span that lasts longer than 10 seconds only when celebrity gossip or local rumors or evening sitcoms are on the agenda. The same brain that can comprehend the suffering of an upper-middle income child who needs more government grant money to get that Bachelor’s degree in Political Science, so they can go to Washington, DC and feel self-important, lobbying a tiny cell of the organism that is the American war machine.

That machine is marching, left foot following right.

That young boy looks down in spirit alongside a newfound friend from a faraway land called Afghanistan. Thousands of miles away, a child’s family is no longer weeping. The older brother has given his life a new meaning, driven by the emotion that could only be delivered from a plane high above. He doesn’t know who the missile was intended for, but he knows where it came from, and he is determined to exact revenge within his lifetime, for his brother, for his family, for his God. He’s training with a group he had no interest in just a year ago, far away from his family, who quietly, tearfully told him they understand.

His parents see the men in uniform patrolling the streets where they grew up. They march by in lockstep, left foot following right.

They’ve seen the strange men before – different uniforms, hammer and sickle where stars and stripes now sit – and they wait for the day when their homeland will once again be theirs, and theirs alone. They rush home to meet curfew as the sun fades below the barren mountains to meet the other side of the globe, giving rise to a morning that will see political speeches on the glory that democracy has bestowed upon such an ungracious people who are unwilling to accept responsibility for it.

Americans greet the day with a fill-up and a subsequent lament about the outrageous price of oil over their five-dollar lattes. In the corner of the marble-floored coffee shop, a muted television shows a talking head offering his take on the political ramifications for the next election cycle. Trendy twenty-somethings are too busy discussing the imminent danger of global warming for sea otters to look up and notice. Fiscally conservative thirty-somethings on the opposite side of the street are voicing their contempt at another tax dollar wasted on health care.

The missiles are too far away to matter – if a Libyan dies in the chaos and no American is around to hear it, he apparently doesn’t make a sound. Left side of the street agrees with right.

War isn’t personal, especially those of the humanitarian variety. Profiteering government contractors, self-righteous politicians, and Americans on Main Street have one thing in common: they all want to keep it that way. They all march in lockstep, left foot now following right. Previous generations have dragged their feet and forced the gears of the war machine to come to a halt, if only long enough for the leg in power to flex and leap forward once more. Nothing close exists in the modern-day war machine. Our generation has needed no story about the humanitarian causes for their violence, for they’ve managed to pretend it simply doesn’t exist. Of apathy and outrage, apathy was the easier pill to swallow, poison though it may be. The government and the media won’t stop selling it, FDA regulations be damned.

One day, the realities of war will set in, and it will be far too late to take back the lives, the money, the apologetic excuses for why the politician on my side means well, unlike the politician on the other side who did the same thing. That day can’t come soon enough.

Letterman, basically said what Rand was saying didn’t sound right, but he didn’t know why. Hillary’s response to the elder Paul was more or less “sometimes we get it right and sometimes we don’t”. That is another non-answer, but that’s why they are called politicians I suppose. Check out the exchange below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oqKdjwwmXM

It doesn’t necessarily mean that Ron Paul will be the GOP nominee in 2012. Paul hasn’t even announced if he’s running yet. The victory’s meaning really has little to do with 2012 and much to do with the future direction of the Republican Party.

The organizers of CPAC sheepishly denounced their own straw poll prior to announcing Ron Paul as the winner. Appropriately enough, while they denounced the presidential preference question they gushed when talking about the results to the other questions in the poll. Yet the same people that voted for Ron Paul answered those other questions as well. Why did they not suggest that those results were skewed?

Yes, Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty and Young Americans for Liberty made it easier for supporters to attend CPAC by offering discounted tickets and lodging packages. They did not “bus them in” as some suggested. The reason so many showed up at CPAC for Ron Paul is because they are true political activists. They are active, vocal, and dedicated to spreading the liberty message to those who are and aren’t willing to listen.  This is something the GOP has been missing for a long time.

It is mainly foreign policy differences that keep the old guard GOP from embracing these young Ron Paul activists. Perhaps if the rest of the Republican Party could ever understand the fundamental differences between…

1. preemptive war and national defense
2. isolationist and non-interventionist
3. anti-semitism and ending all foreign aid
4. blaming America and blaming American policy

…they could welcome Ron Paul and his supporters. The CPAC straw poll result suggests an effort should be made to understand and perhaps embrace these differences. After all, isn’t the ultimate Republican goal to defeat Obama in 2012? Seeing eye to eye with Ron Paul and his numerous activist supporters could go a long way toward that goal.

I have little hope this will happen, but in the long run it may not matter. Many of those young Ron Paul supporters are growing up, feeding on liberty, and will become office-seekers in the future.

The result of the CPAC straw poll does have meaning. It suggests the future is burning bright with the fire of liberty.

Higgs writes:

In discourse about public affairs, words matter much more than most people appreciate. We live immersed in language so twisted and abused, in part by the design of interested parties and in part by the sloth of inattentive speakers and listeners, that we often fail to notice or object to linguistic miscarriages that pass for intelligent expression. The examples are legion, but here I have in mind a particular turn of phrase that American conservatives, especially neocons, have employed in recent years as a counterstrike against critics of U.S. foreign and defense policy:  They describe such critics as “blaming America” or sometimes as “blaming America first” for attacks against this country or its citizens abroad.

Thus, for example, those who fault U.S. Middle East policies for creating the conditions that caused Muslim fanatics to attack Americans, both at home and overseas, are said to be blaming America for what the policy’s defenders’ take to be the unprovoked acts of terrorists bent on imposing Sharia on the United States, destroying this country’s freedoms, or attaining another such farfetched objective.

Applications to earlier events and policies include use of the expression to fend off the arguments and evidence of those who maintain that the Roosevelt administration waged economic warfare in 1940-41 to provoke a Japanese attack that would justify and lead directly to full-fledged U.S. engagement in World War II; and use of the expression against those who argue that the Truman administration bore at least partial responsibility for the onset of the Cold War. People accused of blaming America are commonly called “America haters.”

Although this riposte to criticism is the rhetorical tactic of first resort for the more simple-minded, flag-waving species of self-anointed patriots, it is by no means their exclusive property. Neocons writing in such elevated outlets as the New York Times and the Washington Post have not been bashful about smearing their critics as people who “blame America.” I noticed this linguistic resort most recently in a commentary by an intelligent, reasonable economist and was shocked that he would embrace this trope while suggesting that “pacifists” and others who criticize U.S. foreign and defense policies are unrealistically imagining that international disputes and warfare can somehow be eliminated from human affairs.

In my view, replying to policy critics by accusing them of “blaming America” is worse than linguistically crude and ideologically twisted; it is stupid.

Read the rest of Higgs at The Independent Institute.