Tom Woods

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of 11 books. A senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his master’s, M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University. From his blog:

I am trying to understand the thinking behind the great many Americans who have decided to vote for a mainstream politician in 2012.

Now before you read the below and send me an angry email telling me I should be nice, that I should try to persuade them through love, etc., let me note that I have generally done that. My video appeal to Iowa radio host Steve Deace was a friendly, reasoned discussion of Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich. My videos about Rick Santorum have been straightforward examinations of the facts. (See my video on Santorum’s view that we need inflation in order to prosper, and my video on why Catholics should instead vote for Ron Paul.)

But once in a while you just can’t take it anymore, and you have to let loose.

So, whether they realize it or not, here are 26 things non-Paul supporters appear to be saying.

(1) The American political establishment has done a super job keeping our country prosperous and our liberties protected, so I’m sure whatever candidate they push on me is probably a good one.

(2) Our country is basically bankrupt. Unfunded entitlement liabilities are in excess of twice world GDP. Therefore, it’s a good idea to vote for someone who offers no specific spending cuts of any kind.

(3) Vague promises to cut spending are good enough for me, even though they have always resulted in higher spending in the past.

(4) I prefer a candidate who plays to the crowd, instead of having the courage to tell his audience things they may not want to hear.

(5) I am deeply concerned about spending. Therefore, I would like to vote for someone who supported Medicare Part D, thereby adding $7 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities.

(6) I am opposed to bailouts. Therefore, I will vote for a candidate who supported TARP.

(7) The federal government is much too involved in education, where it has no constitutional role. Therefore, I will vote for a candidate who supported expanding the Department of Education and favored the No Child Left Behind Act.

(8) Even though practically everyone was caught by surprise in the 2008 financial crisis, which we are still reeling from, it’s a good idea not to vote for the one man in politics who predicted exactly what was bound to unfold, all the way back in 2001.

(9) I am not impressed by a candidate who inspires people, especially young ones, to read the great economists and political philosophers.

(10) I am concerned about taxes. Therefore, I will not vote for the one candidate who has never supported a tax increase…

Read more at TomWoods.com.

For the second time in just five primary states, the Republican Party, with the assistance of the national corporate news media, is raising questions about the legitimacy of this season’s primary election system. First, the Iowa Republican Party and the entire American media knowingly reported the wrong Iowa Caucus results with the wrong person being declared the winner. Last night, it appears the same thing may be happening in Nevada. And again like Iowa, critics are accusing the GOP of suspicious activity.

Perhaps it’s indicative that the beneficiary of these recurring vote counting “mistakes” always seems to be former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. He’s just happens to be the same man that both the Republican Party establishment and the four corporations that own all of America’s news media outlets are actively supporting.

Read more in the Examiner and more here:

A day after losing a Nevada contest that exposed the limits of his appeal to Republicans, Ron Paul vowed to keep pressing ahead for the party’s presidential nomination, saying his ideas were inspiring an intellectual revolution among young Americans.

“I want to change the government, and I want to change it through the electoral process, but I also want to change the hearts and minds of people,” the Texas congressman told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.” “That is where it really starts, and that is where we’re making the progress.”…

Read on in the LA Times.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Wednesday suggested that President Barack Obama wanted to every kid to go to college so they could be brainwashed into being a liberal.

Speaking to a crowd of Floridians at the First Baptist Church of Naples, Santorum said that churches and families were under “assault” by the president and liberals.

“We’ve lost, unfortunately, our entertainment industry,” the candidate explained. “We’ve lost our higher education. That was the first to go a long time ago. It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid to go to college. The indoctrination that occurs at American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America — and it is indoctrination.”

“If they taught Judeo-Christian ideology, they would be stripped of every dollar. If they teach radical secular ideology, they get all the government support that they can possibly get…

[continues at RawStory via Current]

Could the Republicans choose worse names for their leading presidential candidates? Anyway, looks like the doughboy is still in the race according to this report from The Official Republican Party News Channel Fox News:

Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Republican primary, Fox News projects, further scrambling an already volatile presidential race which has produced three different winners in three states as the candidates head next to Florida.

Fox News projects that Mitt Romney will place second in the Palmetto State, where he was leading in the polls just one week ago. With 5 percent of precincts reporting, Gingrich has 38 percent and Romney has 32 percent. Rick Santorum will finish in third place, Fox News projects, while Ron Paul will finish last …

Read more: Fox News

CBS reports the results of the Suffolk University Poll for the NH Primary. Ron Paul came in second, as evidenced by this graphic.

I don’t like Ron Paul, but you can’t help but shudder when you see this happening. Journalists remind us they need and deserve unfettered access in order to give the public the truth, but evidently they need the access to decide what should be true.

The excuse for this omission is that Ron Paul is not a viable candidate despite his early popularity, and that’s a fair guess; but it’s a lie. Huntsman, Palin, and Bachmann never stood a chance, and yet they were given plenty of coverage. Why do I still know the name Dick Gephardt?

The presidential election is just one big job interview, so it makes sense that as long as we’re talking about hiring, we should talk about firing. Mitt Romney recently said: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.” Horrifying, right? How on earth could any human being like firing anyone? Well, to be fair, he didn’t say he liked firing anyone. He said he liked being able to fire someone. And so do you. You do it all the time.

Read More: CBS News

Their politics may differ. But both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have laid claim to representing the interests of the middle class, whose economic frustrations helped spur the groups’ establishment and growth.

So which side’s congressional lawmakers come closest to embodying that wide swath of the U.S. population? Or, in Occupy terms, which side is closer to the 99 percent?

Neither the members of the House Tea Party Caucus nor those of the House Progressive Caucus — whose views most closely align with the Occupy Wall Street movement — are remotely middle class, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of congressional personal financial disclosure forms covering 2010, the most recently available data.

The members of the House Tea Party Caucus are especially wealthy, the Center’s research shows.

The median average net worth of a member of the House Tea Party Caucus was $1.8 million in 2010. (Financial disclosure forms require lawmakers to value their assets and liabilities only in ranges, so it’s impossible to know exactly how wealthy a particular elected official is. However, it’s possible to calculate an average net worth for each member of Congress.)

That’s significantly higher than the comparable number for the median House member: $755,000. It’s also more than 130 percent above the $774,280 average net worth of the median, non-Tea Party Caucus House Republican.

Furthermore, the caucus, a group of 60 House members founded by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), includes 33 millionaires and six members worth more than $20 million, according to the Center’s research. That means a member of the group is more likely to be a millionaire than the average Republican who isn’t in the caucus…

Read more here.

The highest overall rating went to former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican-turned-Libertarian, who opposes the Patriot Act and — unlike Obama — supports the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Among the leading Republican candidates, libertarian-leaning Rep. Ron Paul also got a higher score than Obama despite low ratings in several categories.

The ACLU gave the Texas congressman high marks for opposing the Patriot Act and indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, condemning waterboarding and voting to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But it criticized Paul’s call for an end to “birthright citizenship” for children of illegal immigrants, his support of the law that denies federal marriage benefits to same-sex couples and his opposition to abortion.

Obama, endorsed by abortion-rights groups in 2008, was given three torches on “reproductive choice” by the ACLU, which cited his support for federal funding of Planned Parenthood and family-planning programs but also his bowing to Republican demands to ban funding for poor women’s abortions in Washington, D.C., as part of legislation to prevent a government shutdown.

Read More: San Fransisco Chronicle

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the surging candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has been simultaneously lauded for his devotion to technological innovation, and ridiculed for his warnings about futuristic weapons.

Gingrich, who has dabbled in science fiction and cited both futurist Alvin Toffler and the concept of “psychohistory” in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels as intellectual inspirations, has long been dubbed “Newt Skywalker” thanks to his vision of future warfare that blends fact and fantasy. This streak of futurism is, by his own admission, rooted in a political and philosophical belief about technology and power. ”I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats for security,” Gingrich told Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine in 1994, in reference to his support for missile defense.

Not all his futurism is a bad thing. Many of Gingrich’s early ideas, such as encouraging the Pentagon to fund bureaucratically stripped-down “Skunk Works“–type innovation are laudable.

Read More: Sharon Weinberger in Foreign Policy

Ron Paul is the wild card in the Republican presidential deck—and that makes him one of the most important cards of all right now.

It was possible earlier this year to write off the libertarian Texas congressman as an eccentric simply looking, as he did four years ago, for a place on a debate stage to proclaim his gospel of small government and hard money. But now Mr. Paul appears to be the man who could shape the outcome of the Iowa caucuses, which could go a long way toward shaping the overall race.

Nationally, Mr. Paul’s support runs a modest 10% or so in most polls, putting him well behind front-runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. But in Iowa, four polls in the past couple of weeks have put him at an average of 18%—high enough to compete for second place.

Indeed, to watch Saturday night’s Iowa debate, and hear the audience reaction to Mr. Paul, was to sense how well he is striking chords with voters. A strong Paul performance in Iowa would go a long way toward determining not just the outcome of the Jan. 3 caucuses there, but the path of the crucial phase of the race that immediately follows Iowa…

If Mr. Paul really exceeds expectations in Iowa, that also might set the stage for him to break away from the GOP down the road and mount an independent presidential run. After all, he ran before as a Libertarian Party candidate, in 1988.

“If Paul wins Iowa, which is not out of the question, then you’re going to see a lot of forces [within the Republican Party] try to denigrate him and cut him back,” says Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “Then I could see Paul saying, ‘I’ve been screwed by this party’s establishment, so screw you, I’ll run as an independent.’ ”

There are two particular reasons to take Mr. Paul seriously in Iowa. One is the strange nature of caucuses, and the second is the resonance of his libertarian message in this year of evaporating faith in government…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary — and that’s crazy.”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan …

[Full Article at Rolling Stone]

When The Texas Tribune asked state Rep. Wayne Christian (R-Nacogdoches), a supporter of the family planning cuts, if this was a war on birth control, he said “yes.”

“Well of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything, that’s what family planning is supposed to be about,” Christian said.

While disturbing, Christian’s honesty is a refreshing change from Republicans’ more common defense that cuts to women’s health care will save money. As NPR notes, the state estimates that 300,000 women will lose access to family planning services because of these cuts, resulting in roughly 20,000 additional unplanned births. “Texas already spends $1.3 billion on teen pregnancies — more than any other state.”