Disclaimer: This is an informational note which is political in nature, if this offends you, take a deep breath and then read. However, you must read!
Some facts about the current state of affairs in our government and why it seems drastic change must occur
It is important to remember that the money our government collects, is not their money to do with whatever the hell they want! It is our money buying the government that we elect. America needs to wake up before it is too late. It is sad really when you can run your own life so well, pay your bills, save, be responsible and the people who run the infrastructure in which we live, are fretting it away so irresponsibly. It ought to piss you off!
Delaware Residents: You have until October 31st to change your party affiliation if you want to vote Republican in the primary. I encourage you put aside past alliances or prejudices and take a real look at Ron Paul for the sake of the country and your children. Apathy does not change paradigms.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
FUN FACTS You will LOVE some of these:
(well maybe not so fun)
1. Energy prices: Crude closed at $92/per barrel last Friday; when Bush took office it was $18/barrel, you have to wonder how all of his big money oil friends like that little fact?
2. Budget Fact: $3.74 million went to fund research into the Formosan Subterranean Termite, what the hell is that all about?!?
3. Budget Fact: $1.7 million for the Centers for Disease Control to fund a Hollywood liaison to advise doctor dramas. Would you vote yes to that? Can you imagine any sane person doing so? Can you say ER anybody? Good show, but c’mon…actually they probably spent it to make Scrubs more realistic…
4. Budget/War Fact: Including both funding provided through 2007 and projected funding under the desired Bush doctrine scenario, total spending for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities related to the "war on terrorism" will amount to between US$1.2 trillion and $1.7 trillion for fiscal years 2001 through 2017. This is in addition to the annual $500,000,000,000 annual military budget.
5. Budget/War Fact: The Department of Defense (DOD) currently is obligating an average of almost $11 billion a month for expenses associated with its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and for other activities related to the "war on terrorism". Most of that amount (more than $9 billion per month) is related to operations in Iraq.
6. Amy Belasco of the Congressional Research Service, had a slightly higher figure than the CBO. She said that CRS estimated that Congress had provided about $615 billion to date for Iraq, Afghanistan and enhanced security at defense bases
Sold one too many lies…remember WMD’s? That was only the start of lies about our wars…
On Jan. 19, 2003, before the March invasion, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld what the war would cost.
Rumsfeld responded, "The Office of Management and Budget estimated it would be something under $50 billion."
Stephanopoulos countered with, "Outside estimates say up to $300 billion."
Rumsfeld shot back, "Baloney."
This is all important to remember because this week, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a deep and prolonged occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion by 2017. In presenting the report to the House Budget Committee, CBO director Peter Orszag said, "We are on an unsustainable fiscal path and something has to give."
The White House refuses to give up its delusions. Asked about the CBO report, White House press secretary Dana Perino rejected it as "a ton of speculation" and "pure speculation."
Five years ago, Lawrence Lindsey told us "That's nothing." Daniels said Lindsey's "nothing" was "very, very high." Today, Perino says $2.4 trillion is a ton of speculation. The footnotes to war continue to march us along the unsustainable path.
7. Budget Fact: According the National Priorities Project, the war cost could provide an estimated 277 million children with health care for the year, 22 million students could receive four-year scholarships at public universities, 61 million children could attend Head Start, or we could build 4 million additional housing units. Clearly there is more than enough to rebuild the homes ravaged by the fire in Southern California, or we could fix Social Security. This makes the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" the gold standard for good government. Must we bankrupt the nation before we can openly admit we were wrong?
8. BIG Spender: George W. Bush, despite all his recent bravado about being an apostle of small government and budget-slashing, has spent the most of any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. In fact, he's arguably an even bigger spender than LBJ. "He's a big-government guy," said Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research group. The numbers are clear, credible and conclusive, added David Keating, executive director of the Club for Growth, a budget-watchdog group. "He's a big spender," Keating said. "No question about it."
When adjusted for inflation, discretionary spending -- or budget items that Congress and the president can control, including defense and domestic programs, but not entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare -- shot up at an average annual rate of 5.3% during Bush's first six years, Slivinski calculates. Including costs for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense spending under Bush has gone up 86% since 2001, according to Chris Hellman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Current annual defense spending -- not counting war costs -- is 25% above the height of the Reagan-era buildup, Hellman said.
9. BIG Spender: Homeland security spending also has soared, to about $31 billion last year, triple the amount before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, points to education spending. Adjusted for inflation, it's up 18% annually since 2001, thanks largely to Bush's No Child Left Behind act.
10. Budget Fact: The 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit -- the biggest single expansion in the program's history -- whose 10-year costs is estimated at more than $700 billion.
11. Budget Fact: And the 2005 highway bill -- into which individual lawmakers included thousands of earmarks, or special local projects -- cost $295 billion. "President Bush has presided over massive increases in almost every category ... a dramatic change of pace from most previous presidents," Slivinski said.
12. Budget Fact: We currently pay 15% interest on previous years deficits, that means that 15% of your 15-45% tax rate is collected due to poor government spending
13. Budget Fact: This year we spent $15 billion in farm subsidies! This includes subsidies that have existed for the war effort since the 1940’s.
The 2002 farm bill caused agriculture spending to double its 1990s levels.
14. Budget Fact: 1.2 billion in census data.
15. Budget Fact: Postal Service 3.77 billion ( why do we need this service again? We already pay them yet they run their business at a $3.7 shortfall, would your business survive with those net losses?)
16. Budget Fact: SEC, $1 billion! How many people do we need to manage the financial markets?? At 150k yearly salary each, this will buy almost 7,000 of them. Maybe one per public company is about right, yeah that’s a good goal!
17. Budget Fact: Equal Opportunity Commission $328 million, does it really take this much money to ensure that we have equal opportunity in this country??
18. Budget Fact: Almost $5 billion is paid to support the people, buildings and salaries of our federal government. How many Congressmen and Justices do we have again??
19. Budget Fact: Bureau of Indian Affairs 2.3 billion (this does not include reservations or housing).
20. Budget Fact: Department of the Interior: 10.6 billion (80,000 employees and counting, with 2400 locations)
21. Budget Fact: US Attorneys $1.75 billion!! (that’s right your taxes pay for 1.75 bill worth of lawyers).
22. You and I don’t get to play: All previously elected congress people continue to get their salary for the rest of their lives (regardless if they served one term or twenty), oh, and they do not pay Social Security, they voted themselves a much nicer windfall.
23. Most agree that conservatively we are $9 trillion dollars in debt with obligations totaling tens of trillions more…
To help put this into perspective: If a mere two-hundred million citizens (just about all American adults) each gave the government $45,000, we could get out of debt, sorry married couples that means you owe $90,000. We would however, be in debt at least $3,000,000,000 the very next day
What happens if we go now, into a full scale recession? How long before it becomes a depression? What will the downstream effect be on the rest of the world? No one likes to see their pet project or favorite issue go, but the fact is, that while many of the items in the federal budget may seem worthy at face value (though many are just plain silly), real radical change is needed to fix it. This change must come outside the influence of special interest and the congressional favor system. Ron Paul has never once in 30 years contradicted himself or voted YES on a popular issue simply because. How is that for principle? Sounds like the kind of guy you want to make sweeping reform that is constitutionally based, not based on self-interest, special interest, main-stream media or current polls.
Time for fiscal responsibility, which means quite simply that ‘the establishment’ the status quo; must not prevail.
VOTE RON PAUL in 2008!
Let’s give liberty and change a real chance.
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/ (take a look, you will like it!!)
Many thanks to all of the sources and contributing fact finders.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Time for a BIG CHANGE - The Ron Paul ReVoLuTiOn
I feel strongly enough about this, that I must talk about it. If you had told me 2 years ago I would be writing a blog, joining meetup groups for a political candidate and planning my schedule around debates, I would have laughed at you. Circumstance and a person who brings real hope and capabililty have changed the way I view things, I really think that I took the blinders off. Read on if you dare to open your eyes and vote with your heart and your head, read on if you really want serious change for America. Ron Paul's platform will shake you to your core if you can for just a moment keep an open mind.
If you are like me, you have looked at the ‘leading’ candidates that we are presented with and find yourself depressed with our options. Clinton, Obama, Guiliani, Rooney, McCain etc. Do any of them really have an answer? Or do they all look like more of the same? Most of the people I listed as well as other candidates in the field have developed their views over the course of a few years and in some cases months, with their primary goal at the moment, to win their parties primary at nearly any cost to their convictions (or in most cases, lack thereof). Some stand on the great photo opps they got during times of national crisis, while their families fall apart around them, others are brand new to the scene and have a message that is forged in the heat of what it will take to win, not a real principled belief. Some of them have already been part of national scandals and still charge forward with blinded ambition to achieve a goal...
Win at any cost.
For the first time, there is a dark horse who is quickly rising in popularity who has a real chance at winning if people mobilize for him now. This man has principles and beliefs that have been forged over a lifetime and not by what advisors and current politics tell him.
This man is Dr. Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is so completely different that his party is terrified of him.
This is an excerpt from Congressman Paul’s website: “Congressman Ron Paul is the leading advocate for freedom in our nation’s capital. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. He is known among his congressional colleagues and his constituents for his consistent voting record. Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.”
We as Americans have become like the proverbial frog that is placed into a kettle of cold water. The frog will not jump out if the water temperature is slowly brought to a boil. It will stay in the pot until it is cooked. For the last 100 years the heat has been rising, it cannot continue this way forever.
The Patriot act and piles of legislation before it have slowly worked to erode our freedoms and our government which is currently acquiring new debt at the rate of over three billion dollars per day, continue to tax us more and more, yet still are going further into debt by borrowing from foreign countries. Yet, we remain complacent, even as our freedoms are slowly taken away from us. Our taxes have only one way to go, which is up. Answer this...what happens when these foreign lenders decide to call the notes due? How will we pay for them?
Ron Paul’s convictions are not new, they are simply…constitutional.
Our founding fathers came from a society that had eroded over the course of generations and set in motion a wonderful system of government that has itself been eroded by special interest groups and self-interested governmental departments that are well dug in and absolutely resistant to change. Republican or Democrat, it does not matter, these power brokers are self interested above anything else. They want to protect what they have forged with our two party system.
Congressman Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”
Congressmen Paul advocates an overhaul of the United States government. In corporate America, when a system does not work, a re-org is needed. Dr. Paul believes that the same thing is needed for America. We need to reevaluate our priorities and let the people decide what is important. It is rare that a political leader is not in the back pocket of a special interest group or industry. In this candidate we have a political leader who can make decisions based on constitutional law and the peoples edict, not a special interest group with billions of dollars.
Case in point; the Homeland Security Department. We have many bureaucratic extremely large, expensive federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, CIA, NSA, FBI etc. All of the necessary intelligence was recorded and known prior to 9/11. Yet these huge bureaucracies failed across the board to act on that data.
The current administrations solution?
Create an even larger bureaucracy to sit on top of all of the other bureaucracies to manage them. So in essence we simply created a new outlet to spend billions of dollars on and what problem was really solved? Dr. Paul advocates eliminating all of the bureaucracy in Washington, including the IRS. How's that for lowering taxes??
Can you imagine an America where our government is perhaps one tenth the size it is now, where we do not have troops spread thin in over 120 countries, where our economy is allowed to flourish with far less government regulation and intervention, where our taxes are significantly smaller than they are now? Can you imagine an America where our solution to world problems is not military first, negotiate later? Where we use our economic capabilities to build relationships in other parts of the world rather than create racial hatred?
This is Ron Paul’s vision for America.
We owe it to this great country to change and we owe it to our children, what kind of world will they inherit if someone does not dare to stand up and say enough is enough. Things do not have to be the way they are simply because they have always been.
Ron Paul is consistently placing high and winning many of the Republican debates. The GOP is pushing the primaries up to give Ron less time to continue to build the momentum he is gathering quickly. They do not want him to have a chance to win and they can see that his popularity, his grass roots campaign is gaining the critical momentum. The last quarter he outpaced the GOP field in fund raising. In short, the dark horse now has a fighter’s chance. Let’s help ourselves, let’s help America.
I encourage you to review Ron’s site, the media section has a tremendous amount of information, including when Congressman Paul spoke in the major debates. You will learn a lot by taking an hour to learn what you can. In order to help now, you need to vote in your republican primary. It does not matter if you are a democrat, republican or an independent. Ron Paul simply wants a constitutional government. In order to get him the nomination we need registered republicans to vote in the primaries. Act now, you can switch yourparty for the general election.
Register to Vote here (you can also specify your party choice)
http://www.workingassets.com/registertovote/?source=govote
Ron Paul 2008
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
If you are like me, you have looked at the ‘leading’ candidates that we are presented with and find yourself depressed with our options. Clinton, Obama, Guiliani, Rooney, McCain etc. Do any of them really have an answer? Or do they all look like more of the same? Most of the people I listed as well as other candidates in the field have developed their views over the course of a few years and in some cases months, with their primary goal at the moment, to win their parties primary at nearly any cost to their convictions (or in most cases, lack thereof). Some stand on the great photo opps they got during times of national crisis, while their families fall apart around them, others are brand new to the scene and have a message that is forged in the heat of what it will take to win, not a real principled belief. Some of them have already been part of national scandals and still charge forward with blinded ambition to achieve a goal...
Win at any cost.
For the first time, there is a dark horse who is quickly rising in popularity who has a real chance at winning if people mobilize for him now. This man has principles and beliefs that have been forged over a lifetime and not by what advisors and current politics tell him.
This man is Dr. Ron Paul.
Ron Paul is so completely different that his party is terrified of him.
This is an excerpt from Congressman Paul’s website: “Congressman Ron Paul is the leading advocate for freedom in our nation’s capital. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. He is known among his congressional colleagues and his constituents for his consistent voting record. Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.”
We as Americans have become like the proverbial frog that is placed into a kettle of cold water. The frog will not jump out if the water temperature is slowly brought to a boil. It will stay in the pot until it is cooked. For the last 100 years the heat has been rising, it cannot continue this way forever.
The Patriot act and piles of legislation before it have slowly worked to erode our freedoms and our government which is currently acquiring new debt at the rate of over three billion dollars per day, continue to tax us more and more, yet still are going further into debt by borrowing from foreign countries. Yet, we remain complacent, even as our freedoms are slowly taken away from us. Our taxes have only one way to go, which is up. Answer this...what happens when these foreign lenders decide to call the notes due? How will we pay for them?
Ron Paul’s convictions are not new, they are simply…constitutional.
Our founding fathers came from a society that had eroded over the course of generations and set in motion a wonderful system of government that has itself been eroded by special interest groups and self-interested governmental departments that are well dug in and absolutely resistant to change. Republican or Democrat, it does not matter, these power brokers are self interested above anything else. They want to protect what they have forged with our two party system.
Congressman Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”
Congressmen Paul advocates an overhaul of the United States government. In corporate America, when a system does not work, a re-org is needed. Dr. Paul believes that the same thing is needed for America. We need to reevaluate our priorities and let the people decide what is important. It is rare that a political leader is not in the back pocket of a special interest group or industry. In this candidate we have a political leader who can make decisions based on constitutional law and the peoples edict, not a special interest group with billions of dollars.
Case in point; the Homeland Security Department. We have many bureaucratic extremely large, expensive federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies, CIA, NSA, FBI etc. All of the necessary intelligence was recorded and known prior to 9/11. Yet these huge bureaucracies failed across the board to act on that data.
The current administrations solution?
Create an even larger bureaucracy to sit on top of all of the other bureaucracies to manage them. So in essence we simply created a new outlet to spend billions of dollars on and what problem was really solved? Dr. Paul advocates eliminating all of the bureaucracy in Washington, including the IRS. How's that for lowering taxes??
Can you imagine an America where our government is perhaps one tenth the size it is now, where we do not have troops spread thin in over 120 countries, where our economy is allowed to flourish with far less government regulation and intervention, where our taxes are significantly smaller than they are now? Can you imagine an America where our solution to world problems is not military first, negotiate later? Where we use our economic capabilities to build relationships in other parts of the world rather than create racial hatred?
This is Ron Paul’s vision for America.
We owe it to this great country to change and we owe it to our children, what kind of world will they inherit if someone does not dare to stand up and say enough is enough. Things do not have to be the way they are simply because they have always been.
Ron Paul is consistently placing high and winning many of the Republican debates. The GOP is pushing the primaries up to give Ron less time to continue to build the momentum he is gathering quickly. They do not want him to have a chance to win and they can see that his popularity, his grass roots campaign is gaining the critical momentum. The last quarter he outpaced the GOP field in fund raising. In short, the dark horse now has a fighter’s chance. Let’s help ourselves, let’s help America.
I encourage you to review Ron’s site, the media section has a tremendous amount of information, including when Congressman Paul spoke in the major debates. You will learn a lot by taking an hour to learn what you can. In order to help now, you need to vote in your republican primary. It does not matter if you are a democrat, republican or an independent. Ron Paul simply wants a constitutional government. In order to get him the nomination we need registered republicans to vote in the primaries. Act now, you can switch yourparty for the general election.
Register to Vote here (you can also specify your party choice)
http://www.workingassets.com/registertovote/?source=govote
Ron Paul 2008
http://www.ronpaul2008.com/
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