24 Hour Bad News

I'd like to think I'm not that old but I remember when the news was only on at either 6 o'clock and 10 o'clock. And that was all. Before the news came on, you watched something else. Anything else.

Then in 1980 CNN went on the air as a 24 hour "News" broadcast cable station and now everywhere you look there's "News".

And it's not good news and these days we don't know which of it actually happened or whether most of it is true. Sure, storms really happen. Planes really crash but the other stuff, the subjective stuff, the things that happen in other places, we don't know the half of it and the only word of it we get is through the 24/7/365, never ending news channels.

And we already know they're all full of SHIT.

The local outlets are the worst at trying to fill up their massively expanded schedules. With their vans driving up and down the highways hoping something bad will happen because we all know this "news" has to be BAD.

Bad news is important to the TV executives and it's important to advertisers. The term "If it bleeds, it leads" is now spread across the entire day. If a plane skids off the runway in Singapore or a car hits a tree in Dallas, it's on our local Boston "news", why?

Probably because they have an "insert car crash here every day in this time slot" mandate and if nobody local crashes, they get footage off the wire to fill the spot. I don't really know but I always wonder why I'm hearing about something that happened in California like a car chase or a house fire when they happen on the East coast too but just not that day. There's a lot of time to fill up now so they have to keep the bad "news" coming.

I remember Fox news used to love to broadcast California car chases. That's "news" as entertainment, watching a car chase. Here in New England, car chases suck because there are too many trees to block the camera crew. Car chases happen in Andover, Massachusetts I'm sure, you'll just never see one on television.

Bad News Over and Over

But with all the satellite feeds, the global networks, the broadcasting vans looking for cats caught in the trees, these stations still run out of bad news to hit us over the head with. So what do they do? They REPEAT it over and over, sometimes for three days.

In the Internet world, three days is an eternity to hear the same thing over again. Bad enough you hear it again in an hour but, just in case you somehow missed it, here it is again today. Damn it makes it hard to turn on the radio, I've long ago stopped watching television.

Casting a Pall

What this does, all this bad 'news", is cast bad feelings among the populace. People actually feel the world is going to Hell. The world is not going to Hell. The world is the same as it's ever been. It's always been turning, always there is turmoil somewhere. Just not the same place all the time if you don't count the Middle East. That's a world constant.

But there's always a bad law about to be passed, always a "crisis" to be averted and always someone trying to convince you that unless you go jump through some HOOP, the worst possible outcome will be made real.

But the 24 hour "news" cycle causes preoccupation with what's going on, or at least, what we THINK is going on. I wonder sometimes how information got around back in colonial times. Information traveled slowly and I'm sure was subject to miscommunication and modification.

So the only thing that's changed is the speed of miscommunication and modification.

Why Television Exists

Is it to inform you? It can do that. Is it to educate you? It can do that too. It certainly can entertain you. But the reason it's here is to sell you things.

Beyond all the advertisements, the people who control the media and it's portals want to show you what they want you to see and only what they want you to see. And it's all pretty dumb and contrived. Most of the time, since television was developed, the government and the media were on the same page as to The Message they wanted to send the public. Right now there is a schism and the two are currently split.

Mostly these days the media is selling fear, angst, worry and remorse. Fear of the outside, angst about your well-being and remorse over parts of our history you or your family was never a part of.

It's about "helping" you form ideas and opinions that are of a certain perspective, their perspective. You're told either the truth when if fits, half-truths when it doesn't and outright lies when it suits them. And you have no idea which one you're getting.

Yet people believe it just the same.

Swallowing the Elephant

I never get people who, even though they know that they've been lied to, believe the next thing that the liar says! If someone lies to me once, I tend to have a doubt about the truthfulness of anything they say after that. But that's just me. It's more about how people are inclined to believe "facts" that fit their own opinion about a subject no matter what the source.

We catch a "news" station deliberately distorting the facts and the next day someone says, "Hey, did you hear what's on _____?" Same station. I mean, they're not going to stop broadcasting just because they were caught in a lie.

I don't know if anyone remembers back to 1993 when NBC News, not having success confirming the rumor that the pickup truck GM was making at the time had a problem catching fire in a roll-over accident, actually put a LIGHTED FLAIR on the gas tank and re-did their roll-over test. That worked! The truck finally caught fire.

Of course, the flair showed up rather prominently when General Motors ran the footage in slow-motion.

Oops!

Politics, Politics, Politics

Politics was never far from "news" since the beginning of time. The way certain information is going to be perceived by the Public is always worrisome to those with something to lose.

All news today is political. Why the car crashed, why the storm tore your roof off your house, why your wife left you and why your young kids come home from school and tell you that the number one priority of their lives will be to save the planet.

And whether you think you're a Progressive or a Conservative, you just have to know you're not getting the whole story. The bubble you've built for yourself by only watching certain stations or reading certain publications that back up your thinking to the point where people who risked their very lives to bring you a different sort of news and put it out of reach of the people who don't want you to see it, are ignored.

If the truth should suddenly hit you in the face, would you even know it?

Believe it, don't believe it, that's not the point. The point is that you should have access to it and know it exists.

Something to believe in. 

Is U.S. Behind Latest "Gas Attack" in Syria?

What a coincidence! Just when Donald Trump announces that the United States is finally going to leave Syria, a new gas attack has suddenly been perpetrated by the dastardly Assad and his Russian and Iranian henchmen.

Yes, it's been reported that pictures of dead families foaming at the mouth are circulating around the world but where are they? There is one picture in the New York Post of two wet kids with ventilation masks and an old picture of blown up buildings from...somewhere on the New York Times. Where are these foaming mouthed dead people?

Yes, these pictures are circulating but somehow these two world-class news organizations can't seem to get their hands on ONE of them.

The timing is perfect too. If I was Assad, I would certainly pick this very moment when the United States has one foot out the door to gas people since I secretly want them to stay in my country unwanted and intervene, again, in the victory I should have had years ago.

And we call what Russia does "Propaganda". At least they're less transparent at it. This is an obvious swindle.

But any excuse will serve a Tyrant. And here we go again.

And just who got to President Trump to make him act like this has actually happened? The military industrial complex I suppose. The "War is Good Business" people who never met a conflict around the world they couldn't profit from. Or it could be the right-wing GOP with the Eisenhower complex that still practice the "Domino Theory" of foreign affairs. Who knows?  The only thing I know is that this is a lie, the last "attack" was a lie and as far as we know sitting here at home is that it's all a lie.

But the U.S. War Machine wishes to roll on so it will roll on.

Until I see live streaming video of people writhing in their foaming death throws, I'm not going to believe it since we've been lied to so much on so many occasions that I refuse to swallow any more of this Bullshit until I see some real tangible evidence.

It's not real, it never happened and President Donald Trump and his military plunderers are behind this whole charade.

Next we will be hearing from Senator John McCain saying that Donald Trump is doing the right thing by staying in Syria and knocking off Assad because of these poor freedom loving rebels, who can't afford a good marketing department, are suffering at the hands of the person who is wrongfully preventing them from establishing their own Muslim Caliphate in Syria.

Great, just great.

Instead of blaming the last president...er, what's-his-name, for the attack, President Trump is moving to stamp his ownership of our Intervention in Syria  and should now be held totally accountable for prolonging the suffering of the people there. This conflict was none of our business in the first place and by pretending to be outraged enough to turn the Syrian civil war into a global conflict at a time when we are trying to sustain an economic upturn just doesn't make any sense.

Yes, if this laugher of a pretense is allowed to stand and the U.S. does rush troops back into the region even though the war, by all informed observation, is pretty much over and won by Assad, then the only person to blame for what results will be Donald Trump.

After all he is the President.

Can We Ever Trust the Media Again?

The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN, Fox News…how can we trust anything they say ever again?

All just propaganda sweat sheets. Not a word can be trusted and they prove it every day. I don’t read them, I avoid listening to them whenever possible and I can’t understand why anybody else would either. If they lie about one thing or use “weasel words” to distort the facts, then why should I trust them to even tell me the weather? Should I trust that because THIS TIME they might not be lying?

Don’t think so.

Shades of Clarence Thomas

The recent big lie about Donald Trump has all the timing and suspense of belief as the allegations against Conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when we was up before Congress for his confirmation vote back in 1991.

This was when a former long-time employee, Anita Hill, was put up by the Democrats at the last minute to claim that Mr. Thomas had sexually harassed her while she was in his employ.

It wasn't just a lie, it was an obvious lie.

Based just on the timing alone the allegation was hugely suspect and although the Political Left who backed her “claim” never took a step backward, her story fell apart on facts alone. Especially the fact that if Ms. Hill was harassed in so unwelcome a fashion, then why did she follow Mr. Thomas from the employ in one firm to another? She had no answer.

But to his credit and for a nation’s thankless task, Justice Thomas has proven to be the most consistent stalwart and defender of the U.S. Constitution as it is written. Not even the late Anthony Scalia could make such a claim.

Anita Hill went on to a lucrative career as a motivational speaker on the college circuit. A gift from her Leftist benefactors for a job well done if not entirely successful.

Such is the world we live in.

The “Conservative Press” is No Better

These supposedly Right Wing talk shows, Rush Limbaugh included but also Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and our local talker Howie Carr all make their bones on trumpeting their “outrage” at what the New York Times and the Boston Globe etc write. I don’t need to hear it from them. I don’t buy or read them so why do I need these guys to tell me what the hell they said? If I wanted to know, I’d read it myself.

But the real reason they do this is because THEY’D HAVE NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT 

otherwise. It’s like the Left Wing and Right Wing press feed off each other. They need each other for their livelihood. They, like the present group of Republocrats and Demlicans, are two sides of the same coin.

And WE are all paying for it.

Human Nature to Believe

I love it when a colleague tells me about some outrageous thing that they heard on a television news show about, well, anybody of prominence or of a situation overseas. I just ask, “Are you stupid? Why would you believe that?”

This is why I have no friends at work.

There are people that I know who tell me what a pack of lies they’ve heard on the news about something and then come running to me about Donald Trump. Why on Earth would you not believe everything else except this?

With what is going on today why would anyone believe a word about what's going on in Syria, Yemen, Russia, the EU or our own presidential election. And a bigger question would be why are they buying these publications or supporting them with the cable subscriptions? 

Make the Slaves Love Their Slavery

This is why freedom never seems to win in public opinion polls. I don’t know what it is, do people not trust themselves? Don’t they want to be free to pursue what makes them happy? Wouldn’t they want to have a healthcare plan they can take with them and can afford free of government and employer mandates? A plan for their individual needs and not paying for everyone else’s?

Wouldn’t people want to have more of their own money that they earn in THEIR OWN pockets so that THEY can choose how to spend it and what businesses to support instead of having it yanked from their paychecks and used for businesses the government chooses instead?

Will people vote for a chance to be rid of excess regulations, a big and intervening government, a press that is so BENT that they take it as a personal task to collude and destroy anybody who has a alternate plan (that means you too Bernie Sanders!)?

We’re going to find out but the one thing I do know is...

The idea of a free press is DEAD.

Government Tells You What To Do

They bribe you with your own money. They take the means you need to support yourself and withhold it. They’ll keep you from spending your money on the things you want by forcing you to pay more for the things you need and the things they control.

We are not the freest nation in the world. We are also no longer the least enslaved.

We have become slaves of our government. The government tells you to vote and they’ll tell you who to vote for. You only see what it allows you to see and you only get what it wants you to have. You are not in the drivers seat but they'll let you buy a shiny new car and tax the shit out of the purchase. 

The television and print media are all in on it. They’ll back the government because it’s the government that will put them out of business and they’ll lose their high-paying propaganda jobs if they don’t tow the line. A free press? Right. There is no free press in America. They sold their souls to the devil and you have to pay for that too.

Why are you even watching, because you always watched? 

The municipal police and fire departments negotiate their fat pension plans at the public’s expense. You only need to pay for it, otherwise you’re participation is not needed. Then they send you letters asking for money to support their police and firefighters funds or to solicit your vote for their preferred political candidate. Don’t even think about the irony in that, just do as they say or it’ll get hard for you. They should be answering to you but you answer to them. It could get ugly if you don't, their entitlement to your finances has made them brazen in their demands. 

The court system and the lawyers are in on it too. If you have a beef with them, even if you are right, they will only back each other against you. This is because they know that the average person in America cannot afford the cost of justice in America. Even the people with money and who are willing to spend it will wait years of their life for a verdict.

That’s because, in case you haven’t noticed, that there is no longer swift justice in this country for the average citizen. Those arrested now face years before they get a trial. And that time costs money. This forces them to negotiate. 

If you play by the rules you’re screwed.

We get nothing for our money. They take it and ask for more. They’ll pass a tax, like the gas tax and say it’s for the roads but when we see the roads turn to shit and complain they say they need to increase the tax if you want good roads. Where did the money go? We don’t know and they won’t tell us.

The government drives up the costs of your health care by forcing doctors and hospitals to give away care for below market rates or for nothing at all. You pay that. That's why you pay a bundle for a healthcare plan yet still have a $1,500.00 to $2,000.00 out of pocket deductible. Why even have insurance? 

This is because we’re suckers.

Then you receive a jury duty notice in the government mail asking you to participate in their sham court system for free even though you couldn't afford to be on the other end of the dock. Who pays for that? You do. Don’t think about the disconnect, just do as you are told. Otherwise they will arrest you. They won’t arrest a drunken illegal alien ramming their unregistered uninsured car into yours but they will arrest you because YOU are playing by a different set of rules than they are. It’s their ball and you’re playing on their court.

We are constantly forced to provide evidence against ourselves. Our rights are constantly violated via unauthorized search, seizure and surveillance. Our license plates are scanned when we drive down the street or park on the road. Our phone conversations are monitored. Our bank transactions are scrutinized and our accounts can be laid open without a warrant. 

The government limits the right of the people to protest to “free speech zones.” I've got news for you, the whole country is a free speech zone and that’s the law of the land regardless of whether a court of law will back you on it or not. These rights are inalienable and God-given. Stand up for them.

We are targeted by the Internal Revenue Service and our assets seized without trial or notice.

The National Parks Service takes over massive tracks of land to “preserve” and then keep you from using it or as we have recently seen, forced you off of it even though you have a lease agreement. That’s because it’s THEIRS and it’s not YOURS. The law doesn't matter to these people so why should it matter to you? 

We are going to have a vote next week but it’s going to be rigged. There may be enough people to override the criminality of these Vile Leftists in this country but maybe there won’t be. 

And what we get, the Establishment Republocrats, won’t be any better. They like Big Government Control just as much since they are the other side of the same coin.

Big Government has taken over and tells you what’s good for you. It decides what you have access to purchase and what goods it will allow you to have and it decides how much money you have left in your pocket. If you should need more, the government will then provide for you once you come crawling to them. And crawl you will. This is what it’s about.

This is why the country has turned to shit. This is why you have to go on paying and paying regardless of who is in the White House or in the Governor’s office. This is why the quality of life for many people has become degraded. 

Your only job is to pay for being jobbed. 

This is why small business in this country cannot get off the ground. This is why the storefronts are empty. 

If you have an idea for making a buck and improving your life then the government that is there to “help” you wants a piece of it UP FRONT. We are regulated, taxed, monitored and prosecuted because we want something in life and because other don’t have what you have built so instead of building them up, you must be torn down. The illegals can go about their business but you, YOU must pay the toll for both.

How foolish to go along with this abuse. This must all be undone.

Don't go along and do not participate in your own demise. 

Do not participate in jury duty: Just chuck the letter. You never received it. The post office is in such a state of disarray, it could conceivable have gone anywhere. My car insurance bill always ends up at the neighbors but I'm supposed to be convinced the jury notice they get right?

Do not contribute to any government organization charity fund: If they aren't using your tax money for what they told you it was intended for, what makes you think the charity money is going to go to its stated purpose. How many lies can you rationalize? Tell them to screw. Hell, they’re screwing you.

The time for the end of politeness and civility is fast approaching its end. There is too much government and they take too much from our pockets and do nothing but tell us to shut up and sit down. Stand up for yourself. Use the tools available to circumvent the government whenever you can. 

Living on your knees is no way to go through life. 

EU Motives, Propaganda, Ukraine and Russia

Not a whole lot of truth coming out of the Western press right now on the Ukraine/Russia standoff.

I immediately wonder when I read reports of  Russian troops storming command posts and guarding the borders, do they actually mean to say “Crimean militia troops sympathetic to Russia” or actually, from across the border Russian army troops?

There has been very little distinction between these militia forces which are home grown and who consider Russia to be their homeland and the so called “Invading Russian Army”. Since there are also Russian bases inside Crimea, how would that be an invasion?

The fact that Ukraine has just been taken over by a political faction that is, to be kind, diametrically opposed to a pro-Russia view, it stands to reason that Crimean militia and Crimean based Russian forces would want to isolate Ukrainian troops stationed there. The media is making this look like aggression when it is common sense. I find it remarkable that neither side has fired a shot with bad intent, an unusual result considering who we're talking about. It appears that nobody is looking for a fight on this except the EU and the new Ukrainian regime since the U.S.and EU want to force Russia off of the Black Sea and Ukraine doesn’t want to lose the income from the Crimea which by most reports is doing better economically that the rest of Ukraine.

And nobody really knows how many troops are currently in the Crimea or who they belong to so why is the U.S. media relying on obviously biased statements from the Ukrainian military for a troop figure? It makes no sense since they are clearly going to overstate the number of Russian troops in the area to “prove” a violation of the 1997 Ukrainian agreement that actually allows Russian troops to remain in that region. This is what passes for journalism in the Western hemisphere these days. Why not admit it's impossible to know instead of issuing misleading information? Because it serves the interests of the U.S and EU, that's why.

Can Russia really “seize” a country that is going to vote to join it in two weeks by national referendum? Just wondering. If the Ukraine votes in its new EU friendly government which is very likely, Crimea, an autonomous region with it's own separate system of government it has been reported, can certainly vote to decide where its own fortunes lie. If that’s Russia, well then, the Ukraine would most certainly march against them. Crimea has every reason to believe that the new Ukraine will come after them to forcibly bring them into the EU fold even if they vote to remain separate from both countries.

This is what I see the danger in the region to be, not Russian aggression but EU coercion. These regions have been divided between Western and Eastern leaning factions for ages and none of this is a new thing by any stretch. This is why the EU and especially the United States should stay out of it. Washington, so adept at squandering our resources, our good will and our tolerance for war with its useless, make-work wars over the last number of decades, has gone to the well too many times for the people to get behind them on this. Only perennial war mongers like John McCain and Sean Hanity will think that would be a good idea. People are tired of it all and by the way, we’re broke!

So why shouldn’t Crimea get to vote? Ukraine is going to vote.
Is it because Crimea is going to vote “wrong”? Is this the way of the EU, to recognize the people who will vote “right” and to deny the other? Aesop had a proverb about this: “Any excuse serves a tyrant”.

And Obama’s so called solution is a joke! We all know that outside observers either from the U.N. or the OSCE are totally useless and much like the U.N. itself, has not managed to protect anybody but looks on while people get killed all around them. History has shown that the U.N. has only served to prolong conflicts, not solve them. The OSCE group cannot be trusted in the first place since they work for the EU. Nothing independent about their point of view. Gee, I wonder what they're going to report? Good idea letting those spys walk around the place.

But I think the Whitehouse is welcoming this distraction since it would rather have you looking at the Ukraine "Crisis" than at your own paycheck which continues to shrink as the government programs they have implemented suck your resources and drive you and the company you work for to the poorhouse."Look, Russians on the boarder!" is the old familiar ring from the late 1950s, "Forget about us screwing with Libya, Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan et al, the Russian's are violating the sovereignty of a country! We've got to do something by God!"

And why don’t we just pledge to give Ukraine $100 Billion? We don’t really HAVE the $ 2 Billion anyway so what’s the difference?

One really has to laugh when CNN has earlier reported that some Ukrainian television channels inside the Crimean territory have been replaced by “state run” Russian channels. Considering here in the U.S. CNN is just one of many, many state run television channels. Can't help but stifle a chuckle when I read about "Russian Propaganda" these days. Thanks CNN for the laugh.

I don’t see the crime here other than the escalation of rhetoric and innuendo reported as fact. These days I find I trust the words of Barack Obama and David Cameron much less than those of Vladimir Putin. At least Putin has lied to me a whole lot less. Who'd of thunk that?

And so as I write this, the U.S. seems now willing to send ships and ordinance in the European region to “help”. What this never ending continuation of military blunders coming out of Washington will most likely do is increase the chances of starting WW III since the last two world wars started in Europe and we all know Russia is not going to give up it's access to the Black Sea. It means too much to them as a nation and what it would take to dislodge them from Crimea even if we had the political will to actually attempt it would be too large a price to pay for the world.

Would we destroy the Crimea to save them? Hell, we've done it before, just look at Vietnam, a country we spent a decade to "save" from the Communist Threat by killing upwards of 7 million people there. All in a days work for the United States.

Hold onto your hats!

National Public Radio: Last Believers in Global Warming

It’s about time that our nationally sponsored government radio stations across the United States just drop the whole Climate Change/Global Warming shtick once and for all since it’s quite obvious that nobody inside or outside of the public sector still believes it was actually happening.

The revelations of collusion between the Global Warming science “community” has long been brought to the light of day as is clear and mounting evidence,formerly suppressed or just never reported in the mainstream, revealing that for the last 17 years temperatures have not been rising but actually dropping after all.

Even staunch Leftists have been coming clean about the situation, the smartest of them already seeing the writing on the wall. Some have simply stopped attacking the Denialists and have just shut their mouths already.  Perhaps they can tour the talk circuit with the tagline: “I was a Climate Change believer” thereby gaining some added sustenance by reveling how they were duped or coerced by an evil government management into going along with the game. Maybe they could go on Oprah and talk about how they feel so used.

But tune into any NPR radio station any time of any day and you will never know that anything has changed. They will have either a panel discussion or a guest commentator who talk about how "more needs to be done" concerning the “settled science” of Climate Change which is how they’ve been trying to structure the argument ever since they realized their pseudo-science wasn’t holding up to scrutiny. 

Changing the name, it was hoped, would lend an air of ambiguousness to their Climate Science since people were seeing through their bogus Global Warming cabal that saw people like former democratic presidential candidate for the presidency of the United States, Al Gore, go from a lowly Millionaire to a more respectable Billionaire and saw just oodles of public funds funneled to American universities and scientists to “study” the problems in the fevered hope that someday they will find a solution, wink wink!

And the change in semantics was so clever, so subtle, one day the phrase is Global Warming and then the next day it’s Climate Change and so NOBODY NOTICED!

But it is a new world these days. There are no secrets. Or at the very least there aren’t enough people who can keep a secret anymore and so everything comes out eventually.

So it’s time for the good Leftists over at The People’s Radio Station to just drop the act. They’ve been able to keep a straight face for this long and that’s a marketable skill when one works for the government, especially the kind of government we’ve had to put up with for the last couple of decades, but it’s over.

It’s time that someone tell them that the propaganda war is over and THEY LOST.

To continue with an obvious charade is tiresome and, frankly, embarrassing. The money is sure to dry up so isn’t there some “Income Inequality” or “Services Access Disparity” for these good Comrades to jump on now? Surely there is another rainbow to chase now that the Political Lefts Holy Grail has turned out to be a shoddy pewter beer mug.

Maybe they can hold a fund raiser to retrain all the Climate Chicken Little’s to do something else with their lives. Perhaps they could be retrained for a new and completely different line of work. How about Journalism School?

Or perhaps the best of these Global Cooling Deniers at NPR could just transfer over to Bloomberg Radio and add a little more mileage to their careers since it will likely be Bloomberg , the station started by the former Crazed Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg renowned for his Billions of dollars and certifiable odd behavior, that will hold onto the Global Warming party line to the last man, woman and Bolshevik.

But it makes no difference at this point in time since the argument, science, and quixotic belief in Global Warming as a man-made phenomenon is over.

It’s about time NPR got the news.

Fox News and the US War Obsession

I'm seeing a pattern with the recent elevation of the standard dismissive "Ron Paul's a kook" talk.  I hear this stuff all over talk radio and especially from Fox News. Every TalkJock on the station repeats either "kook" or "Isolationist" every hour on the hour. Then they marvel at the devoted "kooks" that "follow" Ron Paul. I don't know if they really think the guy is a nut or they just want the phone calls. It is a very transparent strategy leading up to Iowa for the Imperialist Warmonger crowd at Fox and my local stations who are in the bag for Mitt Romney. I'm in Massachusetts and I won't be voting for Mitt if he's nominated. I'll probably write in Ron Paul...AGAIN. 

When they call Ron Paul an Isolationist for his Free Trade and Non-Intervention policy, it's just a euphemism for not wanting to take over a place by either shear military force or by CIA skulldugery. The people of these countries don't want another US puppet dictator like the Shah or a US occupational force. They want to run their own country their own way. And how can we be Isolationists if we're TRADING with the place?  You are either trading with a country or you are isolating them, not both. 

I especially bristle at the talk of how "out there" Dr. Paul's ideas are. When they call HIM a kook, they're calling ME a kook and disparaging MY ideas too. Screw them.

And you know something? Iran IS going to go nuclear and develop a bomb regardless of what anybody thinks is going to happen. They know that the big benefit of having the bomb is to keep the US honest in our dealings with them. They NEED the bomb. Meanwhile, we've worn out our war machine on long and needless occupations and now that something "important" has come up, we don't have the will or the money to do anything about it. What are we going to do now, attack Iran? 

I guess we can just put the Iran war memorial right next to the new Iraq war memorial that goes next to the Vietnam war memorial that fits right next to the Korean war memorial. The wars just go on and on. 

Yet for all our Imperial nature, for all our Interventionism and heavy handedness, the United States has never been as unsafe or as close to collapse as it is RIGHT NOW. 

This latest diatribe from the right wing radio windbags just goes to show that the Republicans aren’t really for limited government. They aren’t really for limited taxation either. They just want to redirect public funds to keep their war machines going. The “War Junkies” of the Political Right have run us into the ground just as badly as the “Welfare Junkies” on the Political Left. They don't want different ideas, they want THEIR ideas and FOX News is as bad as NPR in this regard. Neither side would carry out the reforms that a Ron Paul presidency would. They would go on attempting to either buy or coerce influence around the world and speed this nation closer to it's ruin. Look at what a great job they've done so far.

The way I see it, it’s the Democrat and Republican parties that are holding the extreme beliefs. They are two sides to the same bad penny. One wants too much spending and welfare give-a-ways and the other wants too much intervention and war but they BOTH want control of the means of taxation. The elections are a dog and pony show for the public but we still get the same guy in office. I find the airwave onslaught of both Left and Right wing propaganda tiresome. It's just a lot of empty words to defend proven failure. 

So you can go on doing the same wrong things and hoping for a better result. I'll "waste" my vote on Ron Paul.