The Sons of Liberty

Tonight I stumbled across an article on washingtonpost.com detailing the extensive expenditures of the Mitt Romney campaign in the months and weeks leading up to his victory the Iowa Straw Poll.  I’ve always thought that math is fun, so let’s see if we can calculate how much each vote cost Mitt.

Romney’s expenditures included over $2.4 Million in TV ads in Iowa, $2.5 million in non-TV campaign materials, a fleet of busses to bring supporters from around the state to the straw poll, $200,000 to a consultant to direct his straw poll production, and my personal favorite - the $500 - $1,000 per month in “walking around money” he has been paying 60 so-called “super volunteers” to talk him up and rally grass-roots support.  Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dollars Romney paid to purchase tickets to the even for all of his supporters.

So, if we add that all up - and by no means are these numbers complete - Mitt easily spent over $5 million dollars to claim victory in Iowa.  Romney received 4516 votes at the straw poll, which translates  to $1107 per vote based on our conservative estimate of $5 million total spent.   If you ask me, Mitt might as well have just sent those 4516 people an $1100 check and called it good.  Considering the rest of his competitors haven’t even raised $5 Million combined, it seems like a bit of a hollow victory for Romney, especially considering he didn’t even beat his nearest competitor by a 2-1 margin, let alone 8-1 as some experts had predicted.

In case you aren’t on his email list, here is today’s message from Dr. Paul.

Message from Ron Paul

Keep fighting the good fight!

This is one of my other favorites.

I’m definitely a George Carlin fan, and this has to be one of the best bits he ever did. Just thought I’d share it with any who haven’t seen it before since I stubled across it on Youtube. Enjoy!

Once again, ABC News has been busted for blatant misrepresentation. After getting busted first for removing Ron Paul from their online poll and then removing all Ron Paul-related user comments claiming they were “fake” following the recent Republican Presidential Debate, they then tried to convince the world that Ron Paul was lagging behind in the number of supporters he had present at the debate. I found this little video on youtube to be pretty telling in regard to ABC’s dishonest reporting:

Ok, I’m starting to think that a separate section for ridiculous, redundant legislation might be in the immediate future of this blog. I came across a press release today from the office of Senator John Kerry. It seems that as a reaction to the recent indictment of Michael Vick on charges of running an illegal dog fighting operation, Senator Kerry wants to make it illegal to transmit images over the internet that depict dog fighting. Yay! for restrictions on the internet AND on free speech! Senator Kerry gets a two-for-one on this one! Senator Kerry has succeeded in protecting the unwashed masses from themselves again (because we are all too dumb to realize that dog fighting is bad).

Perhaps Senator Kerry simply isn’t aware of the fact that dog fighting is already illegal in all 50 states, and that there is already a federal law in place that bans the interstate transport of any animals used in a “fighting venture”. Sounds like the existing laws on the matter pretty much have it covered, right? I guess none of those facts are of any importance when you are pandering to your audience for a little publicity!

Seriously, how can anyone in their right mind think that this is a good idea? There is no question the practice of dog fighting for sport is completely repugnant, but Senator Kerry’s assault on our civil liberties in this case is completely over the top - let’s just keep punching more holes in the first amendment, shall we?. Perhaps the honorable senator from Massachusetts would care to explain exactly how he expects that people who are are breaking the law by promoting dog fights will somehow be magically transformed into law-biding citizens - if they are breaking the law to promote the fights, why would they respect a law preventing them from posting pictures of the fights on the internet? The logic of most politicians when it comes to issues like this simply makes my brain hurt.

You can see Senator Kerry’s press release in it’s full brilliance here:

http://kerry.senate.gov/cfm/record.cfm?id=279464

I came across an article in the NY Times this weekend regarding a proposed law to ban sending or reading text messages while driving.  The proposed law is a reaction to a recent incident in upstate New York in which 4 teenagers were killed after a head-on collision.  Police believe the driver of the vehicle may have been sending text messages immediately prior to the crash.

Pointless laws like this really bother me.  Aren’t there plenty of laws on the books now that make it unlawful to drive in an unsafe manner or while distracted?  It’s certainly tragic that these 4 kids died, but would it be any more or less tragic if they had died because the driver had fallen asleep instead of being distracted by a text message?  More useless, redundant legislation with no purpose other than to try and protect us from ourselves.  When will the politicians learn that they can’t legislate stupidity out of existence?

You can read the entire NY Times article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/nyregion/18cnd-driving.html

Interestingly, I somehow ended up in a slightly heated discussion with my Dad the other day on the subject of the Electoral College. Pops is all for ditching the college in favor of a popular vote (he’s one of those ‘Bush stole the election’ folks). Now, off hand, it might seems as if a constitutional amendment discarding the Electoral College system in favor of a popular vote to elect presidents would make a certain amount of sense. After all, we are supposed to be a democracy, and in a democracy the majority is supposed to rule, right? But then I started to really think….

The Framers of the Constitution clearly spent quite a bit of time coming up with and later adjusting our election process. The first version of the presidential election process is stated right in the US Constitution - Article Two, Section One (although it’s not called by it’s current name there). It was even an important enough concept that they saw fit to tweak it somewhat with the 12th Amendment, making the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections separate events as well as making other changes to how electors cast votes. It just seemed to me like a lot of time was spent in consideration of the entire election process, both before and after the Constitution was drafted, and yet we did not end up with a popular vote for president. Why?

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, after three long years of owning this domain and using it for absolutely nothing, I have finally found the motivation to start using it for it’s intended purpose - so here I am typing my first ever blog entry. What, you ask, has inspired such action after 3 years of laziness and indifference? Well, it’s an interesting story…

In my business, it’s practically a requirement that I spend a large amount of time each day just browsing the interwebs. Over the past couple of months, the name Ron Paul has simply become impossible to avoid. After initially dismissing the ‘hype’ surrounding the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, I finally decided that perhaps there may be something to this guy. So, after spending a weekend immersing myself in the platforms of all of the candidates from both parties, I now understand why everyone feels that he’s such an important candidate. So, now that I’ve officially jumped on the Ron Paul bandwagon, I also find myself inspired to take some action and add my voice to the realm of ideas.

I’ve always considered myself ‘different’ from most of the other people of my generation - I’ve never really found myself to be disaffected and cynical as the 30-somethings of today are always accused of being. I’ve always been of the opinion that ultimately the classical American ideal would prevail - government would, over some time, naturally correct itself and become smaller. Free market economics would naturally win out due to the non-viability of the other systems out there. The problem that I think I tried to just ignore until now is that the people in power - both Democrat and Republican - simply aren’t motivated to move our country in the right direction. They’ve missed the bigger picture, and are simply too short sighted to see that the key to true prosperity both for them and the American people is to get government out of the way and let the American people do what they have done best for 200 years - prosper. While I still believe that our society is headed toward a big economic and social correction one way or the other, I now believe that we can conduct these changes in such a way that the American ideal and the American people can come through it mostly unscathed. The key, however, will be starting to take action now - hence the reason for my blog.

In closing, I hope that at the very least anyone who reads my musings will at least be inspired to engage their minds and join in the debate in the forum of ideas. I don’t expect that everyone will agree with everything I think or say, but I do have the hope that perhaps my views will inspire others to evaluate their own. I learned some time ago that thinking is absolutely a volitional act, so let’s all choose to use our gift of thought and direct that effort toward making our country and our world a better place.