Flada Blog

If you have been reading about Ron Paul and like what you’ve read, the only way you will be able to vote for him in the General Elections in November is if he wins the Republican nomination during the Primaries. His website has put together a table of the Primary and Caucus information for all of the States and Commonwealths. The chart also lists the date that you have to be registered by in order to vote in that State’s primary.

Many Ron Paul supporters have never voted before, and many others are registered in other parties. If you live in a State that has a closed Primary, then you won’t have any input into the Republican nominee unless you are registered Republican. Time is running out to change your party affiliation in order to vote for Ron Paul. A lot of you are off work for the next week, this would be a good time to go to your DMV, or other voter registration center and update your registration. If you’re unsure where to go, Googling “voter registration ‘My State’ ” is a good place to start. This is very important if the chart below shows you are in a “Closed” primary State.

Here is the chart from ronpaul2008.com:

I’ve been a Dr. Ron Paul fan for many years. I first heard of Congressman Paul in 2000(ish) in a Yahoo Politics Chat room. One of the other conservative libertarians in the room asked me what I thought of Ron Paul and I had to confess that I’d never heard of him. So my chat buddy pointed me to a few links and I read up on the Congressman and was very impressed with what I read.

At the time, most of the self-professed conservatives in the chatrooms liked what they heard about Dr. Paul as well. Such statements as, “If you hear that there were 434 votes in Congress for a bill and only 1 vote against, you can be pretty sure that the one vote was cast by Ron Paul and that it was an unconstitutional bill.” were often read.

Another frequent comment was, “Wow, there’s actually someone in Congress who does more than just talk about smaller government.”

What a difference 7 years make. I was a member at Freerepublic from sometime in 1997 until about a month ago. Now, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of blocking Freerepublic on my wireless router. This is primarily because the comments about Dr. Paul have changed from the above. Now, even the owner of Freerepublic is on record actually saying that Ron Paul and all of his supporters are traitors. This post is dedicated to debunking some of the whoppers written about Ron Paul on that and other sites.

So here are a few of my favorite lies about Dr. Ron Paul (in no particular order).

Ron Paul is an isolationist

This is the one that McCain used during the Youtube debate to wedge his foot in his mouth. Dr. Paul did a pretty decent job of responding (considering he only had 30 seconds). His reply was that McCain doesn’t understand the difference between isolationism and non-interventionist policies. It is unfortunate that Dr. Paul had so little time to reply, because it’s impossible to say too much about this.

Historically, conservatives have been major proponents of non-interventionist policies. Unfortunately, their elected representatives (as well as those of their Democrat opponents) often seem to govern exactly the opposite from this stated ideal. Interventionism has led to a common belief that we can go anywhere in the world and do anything we want as long as we claim that our intent is to spread democracy or freedom. Unfortunately, you can’t hold a gun on someone and force them to be free. The only way is to lead by example. Be the shining city on the hill that Reagan spoke about. Be an example of freedom, justice, self-reliance, responsibility.

Yet, instead of trying to improve the example we set, we send armies in and decrease our levels of freedom at home. Just the opposite of what we should try to do. Ron Paul would fight terrorism by showing them something better that they could strive for and by destroying trade barriers. Guiliani, McCain, Thompson, and Romney would increase terrorism by giving large numbers of people more reasons to hate Americans–unless they somehow think they can kill them all (which may explain why each of them have stated that they would even consider pre-emptive nuclear strikes).

Isolationists are people like Pat Buchanan who would be happy if we built a huge wall completely around our country to keep immigrants out and to keep our companies from sending jobs to places where labor is less expensive. Ron Paul would like to encourage more trade by keeping the government on the sidelines. Ron Paul would like to encourage companies to keep jobs here by lowering (to zero) the taxes that both the companies and their laborers pay. He would also lower the regulatory costs involved in providing jobs here in the United States.

Ron Paul wants Federal dollars to go to the shrimping industry

This one is about as ridiculous as they get, but many of the ronpaulophobes were trying to gain traction with the claim. The claim started when Congressmen were asked to publicly release their requested earmarks. One of the few who actually released such information (because of his principled stance of full disclosure) was Dr. Paul. The problem is that few people understand what earmarks are so it’s easy to attempt to smear a good man.

Spending bills determine what kind of program the money will be spent on, and Ron Paul votes against every unconstitutional spending bill. Despite his vote, the spending bills ultimately pass, bills that are loaded with money for unconstitutional programs (like farm subsidies), and nothing Ron Paul does will effect or change that. Requesting earmarks is not ADDING anything unconstitutional to the bill, it is simply determining exactly how the money in that unconstitutional spending bill will be spent. Without the earmarks, the complete decision goes to the executive branch on how to spend the money in the unconstitutional bill. Effectively, all Ron Paul does, is pass along earmark requests from his constituents.

His explanation compares earmarks to any other unconstitutional spending. For example, if a constituent needed help with a medicare claim, Ron Paul’s job is not to tear up the constituent’s claim despite the fact that medicare is unconstitutional.

Some might even argue that Dr. Paul has a responsibility to try to bring some of the money that has been stolen through taxation back to his constituents, although he doesn’t make that argument.

He can’t possibly win

I used to believe this one myself. Despite being a huge supporter and fan, I firmly believed that the power structure was built in a way that our continuous slide into more socialism, less individual liberty, and less individual autonomy was inevitable. However, recent events have changed my mind.

Ron Paul became the recipient of the largest single-day campaign fundraising in Republican history. On November 5, his campaign brought in $4.2 million. I, unfortunately, failed to contribute that day, but on Dec. 16 there will be another fund drive and I will be donating this time.

Especially among young people, Dr. Paul seems to be a huge favorite. I guess young people still like the idea of freedom. I’m in a position where I work with thousands of young military enlistees and many of them intend to support Ron Paul.

With enough people talking about him, enough people sending money, and enough people who actually feel they have a reason to care about politics again–he most certainly can win.

There aren’t a lot of good things to be said about living in base housing on a Navy base. But there are a few nice things. I guess it’s like a gated community in that there are armed guards controlling who can access the community. On the down side, you sure don’t want to forget your ID at home when you leave the base.

Last night I discovered the best thing about living here–the greatest trick-or-treating that a kid could imagine. Many housed decorated with very friendly people giving out candy are the norm on this base. One of the houses we stopped at had a sheet over their garage door with a fog machine in the garage and more than a few ghosts, ghouls, and other nasties. I’ve paid to go to haunted houses that weren’t nearly as nicely done as that garage.

My wife walked with our older son while I pushed the stroller with the baby. It was a fabulous night which makes me wish that we could go knocking on people’s doors every night. Conrad didn’t have a costume, so I put some mousse in his hair and messed it up while my wife drew a moustache on him with some kind of eyeliner pencil. It was our attempt to make him an Albert Einstein costume. Although I’m not sure anyone knew who he was supposed to be, he got a lot of comments on how cute he was. Of course, the baby wasn’t wearing any costume and he got a few comments on how cute he is as well.

Anyway, a picture:

Unfortunately, this is the only photo I took of Conrad that actually turned out decent.

Other (non-Halloween) photos:

Click any picture to see a larger image.

In 2003, I left one of my favorite jobs that I’d ever had in Illinois to move with my new wife to Virginia. She had joined the Navy, so she didn’t have much choice about where she was going to be. To save our relationship and build our future, leaving that company was the only possible decision.

There were almost immediate financial problems, however, because my pay had been considerably more than a new sailor’s. After a few months with no luck finding work in my field, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. So for about 4 months, I worked as a “Sales Consultant” for a Hummer dealership.

I managed to gross an average of about $1600 each of the 4 months I was selling, which is quite bad considering the number of hours that a car salesman puts in. But it was a lot better than nothing.

Very early in my time there, I realized that I wasn’t working for the right dealership because their sales philosophy and my business philosophy were at odds. Twice per week, every salesperson and the managers had to attend a sales meeting. The meetings usually consisted of one of the managers giving a “pep talk” to the sales staff.

A sample talk would go something like this, “You can’t think of the customers as people. You have to envision them as wallets full of money, and your goal is to get as much of that money as you can.” Time was also spent on roll playing to develop techniques to deceive customers, steer them away from discussions of price, and introduce them to our manager. Working on perfecting our handshakes was a primary lesson.

The problem with this approach is that your customers are people. Your customers want value and are happy to make an exchange (of their money for your value) when they believe that they are getting enough for their money. The dealership philosophy involved an attempt to extract more value from the customer without actually increasing the value that they were providing to the customer. However, the ideal trade is one where the values being exchanged are equal.

To make the values equal, it requires that both parties have a complete understanding of what the other is offering. Anything other than that is a form of fraud. Even though I worked in an environment where the policy of fraud had become institutional, I made an effort to provide an equal value by offering my customers as much after-sale value as I possibly could. However, the dealership even put roadblocks in place to make that more difficult.

In an effort to change the mindset of the dealership, I gave a copy of U Will Be Satisfied, a book by Bob Tasca, to the General Manager. Bob Tasca is one of the most successful Ford salesmen of all time. He owns several dealerships in New England and his philosophy is simple–satisfy your customers at all costs. Too bad I wasn’t working for Mr. Tasca. I’m pretty sure that the guy I was working for quickly skimmed the book and tossed it into the round bin.

Eventually, I found a job doing similar work to what I had done before my wife joined the Navy, and put the memory of the car dealership behind me. Over my next few years living in Virginia, I heard from many local sources about the terrible reputation of the dealership where I had worked. I was not surprised.

Simply put, if you want to build loyal customers it is imperative that you provide them with values that are at least equal to the money they have given you. That is how you will prevent your name being attached to a reputation similar to the one that dealership has.

I am going to start a new feature where I write about some of my favorite sites that I have found during the week. These may not necessarily be new posts or pages, but they are new to me. This is volume one.

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There have been ongoing discussions on my blog notes about several of my posts regarding home schooling. One reason I listed is regarding textbooks and the inaccuracies. The Textbook League has a great page including text from a letter written by noted physicist Richard Feynman. Dr. Feynman’s findings about the selection process of school textbooks parallels a lot of the problems I have found in textbooks. For those not familiar with Richard Feynman, he assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale).

Read more about Richard Feyman at Wikipedia.

Yesterday, I Stumbled Upon this link about making some really basic Indian cheese at home. The cheese is called paneer. I haven’t tried it yet, but I was very impressed with the last thing I made that I found on fxcuisine.com, 300 minute eggs. I made devilled eggs from the 300 minute eggs and they were very good and a bit unique with a light smoky flavor. I’ll be making the cheese soon.

I would be remiss if I didn’t note my sister’s new blog. She has been a valuable noter here at the Flada Blog with great insight about public schools.

Finally, for this week, I point you to a great .pdf called Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read by Mark Federman who is the Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.

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If Flada Faves turns out to have value to my readers, I intend to make it a regular feature at the Flada Blog. Let me know what you think in the notes.