On the subject of being a racist Paul sites, for one thing, the Los Angeles rioting that followed the Rodney King trial against Los Angeles police officers. The letter includes more detail than most of us had a chance to read in the media reports of Rodney Kings arrest and subsequent "beating" that was taped. It included some of the descriptions of the aftermath of the trial, in which the police officers were acquitted, and quotes Mayor Bradley's feeble attempt to quell any rioting, which instead encouraged rioting, looting, racially motivated black on white beatings, looting, and general terrorist style destruction, some of which was directed toward the Korean owned businesses in the area. Paul's comment that the rioting ceased after three days when welfare checks were due to arrive is more "evidence" of his bigotry, but the same day that welfare checks arrived in the mail, the looting stopped.

His opposition to making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday is the subject of more "evidence" of Ron Pauls "racial hatred". He was opposed to making King's birthday a holiday for good reasons, and he wrote of those reasons in his newsletter, for which he should make no apology. Some of the things he mentioned in those columns were direct quotes from authors Carl Rowan from his book "Breaking Barriers" and from David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of King.

Paul was a congressman who was put into the position of having to vote for or against the holiday. He chose to vote against it for reasons he cited in his newsletter. Those charges made in that newsletter have not been proven false, among which was that MLK plagiarized his doctoral dissertation, was an adulterer, and according to Rowan's book, was caught on tape in a sexual relationship with his fellow Christian minister Ralph David Abernathy. Rowan by the way is black.

The charges of homophobia (which I find a strange word, since it would mean fear of homo, or man) stem from his articles on the HIV and AIDS outbreak. He wrote one article from which the quoted words "Bring back the closet" were emphasized. Paul was pointing out in that article how few cases of AIDS and HIV infections there were prior to the Gay Pride movement being started. Since it became a point of gay pride to claim your homosexuality there also became a more widespread acceptance of gay sex and also an accompanying of HIV/AIDS outbreaks. It would take being dropped here from some strange planet for one not to recognize the truth in his statements. Paul also went to the defense of none other than Andy Rooney for his being criticized for making the same observations. He mentioned other instances of homosexual problems, some in the first Bush administration, that were covered up to hide any embarrassment to the administration. None of his accusations has been proven to be untrue.

I can find no evidence in the cited reports to indicate that Paul is an anti-semite. His call to cut off aid to Israel is consistent with his call to cut off aid to all foreign governments. He believed then, as he does now, that Israel would stand on it's own two feet if we didn't stand on them, keeping them from making a strong defense on their own, a defense that would keep all of it's enemies from harming it's people. Israel was, afterall, the only nuclear "superpower" in the region. Bullies don't pick on the big guy in the schoolyard.

I would encourage anyone who believes that Ron Paul is guilty of the accusations in these articles to read the reports they site. I found them by going to New Republic's site and doing a simple search for Ron Paul reports, but if you go directly to Kirchick's column, which can be found at: 
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397-a3c7-4720-ac15-4532a7da84ca

  
or if you can't cut and paste this address, go to www.tnr.com and type in their search engine "Angry white man" and it will take you to the Kirchick story, in which you will find the links to the Paul reports he cites.

What I find amusing and amazing is that if the same things being said about blacks that Paul said were used instead by Bill Cosby, Walter Williams, or Thomas Sowell nobody would or could call them racist, and yet all three have said some of the same things, although maybe not in the same words.

Political correctness has kept some of us from recognizing truth when it is told, even though most of us know that truth is truth and that nothing can alter that truth. If we don't like the messenger, just say so, but don't accuse the messenger of something he is not guilty of.

Is it possible for a Christian to be a Democrat? I mean a really true Christian who believes in the sanctity of the life of the unborn, who believes that a marriage is between one man and one woman, and that it takes an intact family, not a village to raise a child?

Can one who is a Christian in clear concience belong to a party whose leaders all advocate for a womans right to choose to murder her unborn child and to allow marriage between any two consenting adults, reardless of their gender?

Can a Christian be willing to allow their children to be taught that it's OK to question your sexuality while as young as kindergartners? (or for that matter, at any age)

I don't know! I really don't know, but I know that being a Christian, I couldn't.

I know the Democrat candidates all make a big show of going to church, but as Joyce Meyer is fond of saying, "sitting in a church doesn't make you a Christian any more than sitting in your garage makes you a car".

While I wouldn't cast my vote for a candidate just because he was a Christian, neither could I cast a vote for a Republican who says he or she was a Christian yet still agrees with the policies of the Democrat party.

Mitt Romney has flip flopped on both the abortion and gay union issues. He was for them before he was against them. Is there something in the water in Massachusetts? Who knows what he really thinks? I'm not sure if he does.

Rudy Guliani has been " tolerent" of both. One the one hand he says that he is against abortion, personally, but defends a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, murder her unborn child. On one or two other points, Rudy would limit your right to own firearms and made New York a sanctuary city for illegals while mayor.

Fred Thompson has said he is opposed to abortion, but as a senator, voted for the Partial Birth abortion act of 2000. He believes that a marriage is between a man and a woman and needs no constitutional amendment to define it. On that point I agree.

John McCain is pretty much against abortion and gay marriage and has a good voting record on those issues, but he co-authored McCain/Feingold and joined with Ted Kennedy to offer amnesty to illegal aliens, so while he takes a conservative stance on the first two issues, he sure leans left on some others.

Mike Huckabee opposes both abortion and gay unions, but is not a fiscal conservative, having raised taxes while governor of Arkansas more than once.

Ron Paul opposes abortion and as an OB/GYN doctor, says he has never seen an instance where an abortion was necessary to save the life of the mother. He believes that a marriage is defined as between a man and a woman, but that we need no constitutional amendment to define it. He has also stated that you shouldn't need a licence from government to marry, but that it should be done by the church.

Duncan Hunter is strongly opposed to abortion and supports a constitutional amendment prohibiting it. He is opposed to gay unions.

I'm not sure if Alan Keyes is still in the race, but his position on abortion is legend, and also who comprises a marriage. I truly believe he is a good Christian.

Every Democrat candidate believes that abortion is a right that is unalienable, and that there should be laws that allow gay marriage or civil unions. They are also all in favor of increasing taxes on "the rich", meaning most of us, would gladly take away your right to own a firearm, and would force us all to pay into a "free" government health care plan.

This is for all of those who are not Huckaboomers:

It's 1992 and another winter in Iowa means another presidential caucus. They came from around the state to their caucus sites to pick who they would hope to be the next president. Iowan's knew that as Iowa goes, so goes the nation, or so it was said. Republicans didn't caucus that year since our president, George H.W. Bush was running unapposed, so all of Iowa's Democrats gathered to select the man who would bear the standard for their party.

We all remember that the eventual winner went on to win the nomination and hence the presidency. No, wait a minute, he didn't win either one. Tom Harkin won that caucus handily, giving him a leg up going into the New Hampshire primary. Eventual nominee and presidential winner, Bill Clinton finished fourth with only 2.8% of the caucus vote.

What is the lesson to be learned from this? Iowa does not necessarily dictate who either party's nominee will be. Sure, some of the eventual nominees did win the caucus, but for example, Ronald Reagan didn't, twice in fact. In 1976 he lost out to incumbent Gerald Ford, and in 1980 was beaten by George H.W. Bush. There was, again, no Republican caucus in 1984, since Reagan who finished second place in Iowa in '80 was running unapposed for re-election.

On the Democrat side, there have also been winners that went on to nowhere. In 1972 Ed Muskie finished first over George McGovern's third place finish; Dick Gephardt won in 1988 over third place finisher Mike Dukakis; and as mentioned above, in 1992....well we all know how that went.

Iowa is a great state, but somehow the importance of their caucus has gotten out of hand. Same can be said of New Hampshire's primary. I can remember when Gene McCarthy upset seated president Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire, causing his withdrawl from the race for re-election, but McCarthy didn't win the nomination over Hubert Humphrey that year (1968). Pat Buchanan beat Bob Dole in New Hampshire in 1996, but again, didn't win the Republican nomination.

The law of probabilities favors the Iowa winner winning the nomination, but probable is not always possible. If an obscure ex-governor from an obscure south-western state, who finished fourth with 2.8% of Iowa's caucus vote can go on to become president, anyone can be president in this great country, even one who finishes with only ten percent in Iowa. Oh, and by the way, an obscure ex governor from an obscure south western state is in this one again, but this time he was the winner in Iowa. What does this mean. Who knows?

The opening of the mission statement of the State Department (on page 71 of the FY2008 budget), states the following:

If you think this is America's role in the world, raise your hand. I hope there are not many hands raised.

I'm sure the mission of Islamic nations would be to go to every continent around the globe and transforming every nation into a believer of Islam, to change the world for the better. Why is Islam's goal any different than the stated goal of the State Department of the United States?

I sure as hell don't want to have to convert to Islam in order to make the world a better place to live, and I am sure there are nations in the world who want nothing to do with being converted to democracy.

Personally, I would not like it if we continued to push for democracy in this country. This country was established under a republican form of government, not a democracy. No democracy in history has survived for longer than about two hundred years. If we keep up doing what we have been doing, we will not survive much longer either.

We cannot continue to be the standard setter for the rest of the world, either financially or morally.

We have been told that in order for the Republican party to be able to retain the presidency we must nominate a candidate who, according to the news media, can win Although there are eight candidates in the race, they only consider five of them; Rudy Guliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Fred Thompson.

No thought has been given to the three candidates who are the most conservative: Ron Paul, Duncan Hunter, and Alan Keyes.

Of the true conservatives, the only candidate who has the recources to win is Ron Paul. Paul's campaign has, in the fourth quarter alone, taken in nearly $20 Million (0ver $19,500,000. as of 11PM est 12/31/07) and has a strong campaign force in fifty states.

Ron Paul is not going away, and the biggest concern the Republican party has is that if he doesn't get the nomination that he will run on a third party ticket. This is a real concern, and the Republican "powers that be" should question why it is. Obviously, if Paul decides to run as a third party candidate, he will siphon away many voters from the Republican party who now support him. The reason they are behind Ron Paul is that he represents the only hope for a change in the way things are now being done. He would take some votes from the more right side of the Democrats as well, the slightly left of center, not the dyed in the wool liberals.

The threat of getting Hillary or Obama (or God help us Al Gore) as president is not going to convince Ron Paul backers to vote for any of the "top tier" RINO's. The only Republican who can win in November 2008 is in reality, Ron Paul.  Ron Paul backers are tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.

Which candidate, other than Paul can take a large portion of the Republican votes with him, if he ran as a third party candidate? None!! Which candidate has the loyalty from their supporters that Ron Paul has? None!!!

Even with the lack of media attention, his campaign fundraising is still increasing, and this without a lot of effort by Ron Paul's staff, it is grassroots. Ron Paul is not going away. He will be in the primary races and in the caucuses until the end, and with any luck, the Republican party will recognize that the only hope they have of holding on to the the Oval Office is with Ron Paul. If not, and Paul chooses to run as a third party candidate, Republicans can kiss this presidency goodbye.

We live in a country that is trillions of dollars in debt. I can't even fathom what a trillion dollars might look like; how many rooms of my house it would take to hold it. Yet we are sending billions each year to countries around the globe, many of which would like to see us all dead. What's going on here?

If our debt was called due, we would be the ones in need of foreign aid. We have outsourced most of our technical skills to places where the wages are lower and we don't even grow a lot of our own food anymore. Soon we will be totally dependent on foreign countries. Our trade deficit is weakening our security as well, as we import more than we export, and then from countries that are not exactly friendly with us, such as China and Saudi Arabia, but we still send those countries some form of foreign aid.

We are paying for a military that is stationed around the world in places where American military involvement has been over for more than fifty years, and we have sent our military into places where we had no interest and those troops were not under American command, but UN and NATO. And.....they are still in some of those places. We left Viet Nam with no American bases there, but we have not yet recieved one threat from that country. Do we really have a responsibility to defend South Korea or Germany? Should we have military presence in places like Bosnia and Japan? What about France? More importantly why not our own borders?

This brings me to our current involvement in the middle east. While at the time I wondered why we invaded Iraq when it was mostly Saudi's who hijacked our planes on 9/11, now I wonder why we are staying there when Sadam Hussein is dead and his entire regime is wiped out. We found no weapons of mass destruction, and largely what we did find was that Sadam was committing crimes against his own people, not Americans. What was our justification?

Afghanastan was another case. We were, we were told, after the mastermind of 9/11, Osama binLaden. I find it strange that our government can track an infected cow from Canada to its new home in Washington state, but cant find a six foot six inch tall Saudi in a country the size of one of our Western states. But I digress. The point I was trying to make is that since we have not found binLaden in about six years, and we have routed the Taliban in Afghanistan, why are we still there? How much longer do we expect to be there? To hear the government tell us, it will be a great number of years. If the war on terror goes as well as the war on drugs, you can expect that we will be there for decades.

In 2007 the United States government, you and I, gave away almost $30 billion to International Aid.
 

With a failing dollar and economic conditions sliding in our own country, why are we giving away tax payer dollars to shore up any other country's economy?

In 2007 Department of State and USAID Bilateral Economic Asistance gave away $17,713,444,000. Thats 17 billion with a "b". Some of those funds went to places like:

Andean Counterdrug Initiative...$569,350,000.

Assistance for the former states of the Soviet Union...$269,200,000.

Assistance to the Eastern European and Baltic states...$435,480,000.

Child Survival and Health Programs fund (CSH)........$1,518,359,000.

Economic Support Fund (ESF).......$2,603,540,000.

U.S. Emergency Refuge and Migration assistance (ERMA)...$30,000,000.

Global HIV AIDS Innitiative (GHAI)........$1,852,525,000.

On top of that there is :

Contributions to International Organizations.....$2,144,792,000.

Embassy security, construction, and maintainance....$1,182,585,000.

To International Financial Institutions.....$1,066,198,000. International financial institutions?

Seems like it costs more to "administer" the money than any one of the single programs benefiting.

And the list goes on. For 2008 the budget request is even higher, at $36,186,518,000.

Thats thirty six billion, one hundred eighty six million, five hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.

Someday this country will not be in a position to bail the rest of the world out of their financial difficulty. If our own finaces continue in the direction they are going we won't be able to help ourselves, let alone the rest of the world. Our dollar is not as valuable to the rest of the world as it once was, with the euro becoming the currency of choice. The presidents of Iran and Venezuela have already spoken about accepting only a solid currency, such as gold or silver, or the euro for their transactions of oil. This was a move on their part to economically damage America. And it will probably work, as long as congress is unwilling to allow drilling in ANWR and offshore, and as long as we have regulations on the oil refineries that force them out of business, rather than comply to unreasonable demands for updating. But that's a subject for another column.

The whole point is, we cannot continue to do as we have been doing for so many years without positive results, and expect those actions to now achieve positive results. Like welfare at home is a failed government program, welfare abroad is a failed government program. Remember what Einstein once said "The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results".

There is a lot being made of the interview by Tim Russert with Ron Paul on Meet the Press last Sunday. Some are saying that Paul is a hypocrite for asking for earmarks for his district while he has always preached against them. Is it hypocritical, maybe, is it wrong probably not. For a span of 19 years Ron Paul has served the 14th district of Texas, and in most of that time he watched as his constituents were robbed of their earnings by a government that was and is out of control. He watched as money that his constituents paid in taxes was siphoned off by his colleagues to build bridges to nowhere, Robert Byrd memorials in West Virginia, rain forests in the midwest, and a whole lot more, and after a while it became obvious that the only way he could get some of his constituents' money back was by asking for the money to be used in his district. I find nothing wrong with that. If the system has been set up to allow congress to butter their own bread, at a cost to the rest of the country, that is what should be questioned, not Ron Pauls integrity.

There are 535 members of congress, and all of them are guilty of using earmarks to richen their own districts or states. Ron Paul happens to be the one who has used earmarks the least, but because he used them at all, it seems he is more guilty than all of the rest. I think he would have been doing his district an disservice if he had not gotten what he could for them.

So now Ron Paul has one mark against him that the press can use. He did what all of the rest of congress did. It wasn't against the law.

So what have we learned from this? I think it is that we have a system that is broken, and the best man to put in charge of fixing that system is the one who seems to be taking the biggest amount of criticism and the least amount of benefit. Is it possible that any one of the other candidates would reign in an out of control congress? Most likely not. The only one of those seeking the nomination who has even talked about such a thing is Ron Paul.

Am I glad he took earmarks? No I am not, but I understand why he did it. Would I have done the same thing in his place? I don't know, I have never been elected to congress, not even once, let alone ten times. The frustration of 18 plus years of watching the pork barrel spending is the problem. That spending is what has to be stopped, and I think Ron Paul is the best man to stop it. I don't think he will be shy about using his veto pen, unlike George W. Bush who failed to veto one piece of legislation in his first four years and very few since. Congress may override his vetos at first, but after a time I think they would tire of having to spend their precious time getting the necesary 60% to send legislation back to his desk.

America is tired of congresional overspending and Ron Paul is the only one standing against it.

We have been hearing a lot lately about a so called "Fair Tax" which would be a tax on sales, rather than income. Advocates of this tax are telling us that it would be at a rate of 23%, yet under their plan if you purchase one dollar worth of goods, your total cost woulld be $1.30. I worked in the retail industry for a lot of years, and a 23% tax on one dollar worth of goods would amount to $1.23 not $1.30. True, the thirty cents does represent 23% of the total amount, but it is not a 23% tax, but a 30% tax. I have to ask myself, if the fair tax people will lie about a thing a simple as the proposed tax rate, what else are they willing to lie about?

That out of the way, my next concern is, if we are to find ourselves with a "Fair Tax" of even 23%, would we first rid ourselves of the IRS and repeal the 16th amendment? If not, sure as shootin' we would have them both.

The flat tax represents another problem. The original income tax, we were told, would only effect the very rich and then only at a small percent of their income, and that most people would never be subjected to the tax, Social Security used that same ploy. If the entire nation were taxed at a rate, say 15%, and we did not repeal the 16th amendment, we could find ourselves with both a flat tax and a progressive tax as well; flat at the 15% rate for the lowest income earners and progresive to the higher earners. Like the original inclome tax and Social Security, there would be nothing to prevent congress from raising the "flat rate".

How about a plan where we first repeal the 16th amendment, abolish the IRS, reduce government spending, cut off foreign aid, eliminate some un-constitutional departments, and then determine if we need any other form of government revenue. Now there's a new concept. Wait, no it's not, Ron Paul has been saying the same thing for years.