Why Ron Paul is like Howard Dean

by folkbum

One sad lesson I learned (of many) from the Dean campaign of 2004 is that most candidates have a lot of people who will show their support by giving money, and exponentially more people who show up to vote--or caucus as the case may be. That was not true for Howard Dean, and it will not prove true for Ron Paul.

Dean raised a lot of money from a lot of people, and I'm willing to be that pretty much every single one of those people showed up to vote, but not many more. John Kerry had poor fundraising but made up for it in, you know, actual voters.

Ron Paul's supporters (often willingly blind and deaf to the candidate's racist past, and his otherwise general nuttiness) certainly can raise the money. And I have no doubt that everyone who gives will show up to caucus/ vote/ participate. But Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney aren't raising that kind of cash and will far out-poll Paul everywhere, starting tomorrow in Iowa.

Ron Paul supporters everywhere will learn the same thing in the next few weeks that I learned in 2004.

Paul's Pot

By Keith Schmitz

I love libertarians. When it gets down to politics they are the most fun to get into it. And for the most part they have an actual idea why they believe what they believe. There is a lovable innocence about them.

That's why Ron Paul is the most fun out of all of the fine folks running for president, certainly more than those cartoons from the 50's that he is debating with on the GOP side. He has the unpolitical knack of saying what's on our minds.

So now it comes out that campaign cash is flowing into Paul's pockets. He just wrapped up the last quarter with his campaign $5 million richer, no doubt some of that siphoned from the other GOP candidates. That will pay for $1.1 million worth of commercials in New Hampshire. Rudy Giuliani is yet to go on air.

He is polling fourth in some states primaries right now, and regardless how he actually does Paul has engendered enough of a following that he can continue to raise those irritating points about Iraq in debate after debate. He certainly is not running a spendthrift campaign.

With his viewpoints spoiling the party for his party, the GOP will no doubt rue Paul.

Things that worry (or intrigue) me

by folkbum

• A lot of people didn't like Janet Reno. She may not even have been all that great as an Attorney General. But at least she didn't lie all the damn time.
  
  
• "And in the end, thanks to incompetence on the part of the Democratic leadership, they got wildly more than they had ever thought possible. There is, at this point, virtually no oversight on NSA's data collection at all." (Do you think the author of The End of Privacy: The Attack on Personal Rights at Home, at Work, On-Line, and in Court by Charles J. Sykes has a problem with this?)
  
  
• Bill O'Reilly hates the Daily Kos so much, he is willing to attack a dKos poster who is speaking out against anti-Semitism of being an anti-Semite. Of course, the guy O'Reilly chose to slander is an attorney.
  
  
• Nick is going to be offended by this, but Ron Paul is nuts.
  
  
• Saturday I wrote about how it's really Conservatives who hate America. As it turns out, Newt Gingrich is one of the biggest offenders.