America's Only Elected Socialist (TM) on state murder

I certainly don't agree with everything he says, but I have to hand independent Senator Bernie Sanders this: he has forcefully, and repeatedly, condemned President Obama's expansion of the war on terror and his recent authorization of the assassination of two American citizens without charge or trial.

Oh, wait, I'm thinking of Ron Paul.

Well, then. What does American's only elected self-styled socialist from the People's Republic of Vermont think about the due-process free killing of Americans? It's kind of dumb question, really: Obviously a man who "values the rule of law" and opposed the use of torture under the Bush administration would oppose the lawless, extrajudicial -- and immoral -- killing of his fellow countrymen. I mean, if you think waterboarding is unacceptable and un-American, then you surely can't be cool with a president unilaterally assassinating anyone in the world he chooses based on secret and admittedly patchy evidence.

Right?

CNN's Wolf Blitzer recently tried to figure that out:

Blitzer: Did President Obama do the right thing in ordering the killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki?

Sanders: Uh, that's a long discussion. Probably longer than the amount of time we now have.

Blitzer: Go ahead, give me 30 seconds.

Sanders: Well, the answer is that I, you know, that when you have an American citizen killed by the United States government, it raises some real questions. On the other hand, when you have somebody who's a terrorist at war with the United States, that's the other side of that equation. 

Stirring. On the one hand, Bernie Sanders casts himself as tough, no-nonsense socialist fightin' for the average American. On the other hand, he caucuses with the Democrats and campaigned for his seat in the Senate alongside "one of the great leaders" of that august institution, Barack Obama.

Ron Paul hates women and minorities; Obama just kills and imprisons them

Sure, the guy I support blows up poor brown people on a daily basis with drone strikes and cluster bombs while backing a war on drugs responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more, mostly poor minorities, but at least he's not a racist!

My favorite part of (trigger warning) Amanda Marcotte's characteristically angry and poorly written screed against American's favorite cranky uncle -- lulz, she calls his supporters Paulbots! -- is perhaps the line toward the beginning where she suggests only white men smoke pot and that anyone who supports or maybe just utters a non-derogatory remark about Ron Paul embraces all of his positions, the latter a particularly risky stance to take for someone who supports a guy, Barack Obama, whose administration has proposed record-high defense budgets and has deported so many immigrants you'd think Pat Buchanan and his pitchfork were in the White House.

Alas, Marcotte -- who, since she's calling someone else a racist, it should be noted once published a book that depicted indigenous peoples as brutish savages -- isn't one for sophisticated, nuanced arguments, nor is she seemingly aware of how her own crude attacks could be used against her. Her eager, slavish Democratic partisanship matched in its tediousness only by her unimaginative, "batshit"-sprinkled prose, Marcotte earlier reduced the problems with the American political system to the existence of Republicans, after all, so sophisticated political analysis isn't exactly her thing. And so in the midst of spitting venom at the mean old Ron Paul who in his old meanness forgot that hating on FEMA went out of style when Bush left office, the ever-edgy Marcotte declares of his imaginary strawmen supporters that "it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important for dudes to have legal rights to joints than women to have legal rights to abortion," presumably addressing all three of the posters on Reddit who actually believe that.

Adopting Marcotte's line of argument, though, one could easily argue that it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important to elect politicians who will, every two to four years, make a big show of defending a women's legal right to abortion than it is to elect one who at least won't burn little children to death with cluster bombs and won't support ramping up funding for a racist drug war that has made the United States home to the largest prison population in world history. It's especially disgusting to elevate abortion rights, by which Marcottee means the election of Democrats, over issues of war and peace when the politician you're slavishly supporting has actually done more to undermine that right with a single executive order than any Texas Republican ever has.

Now, by all means, say nasty things about Ron Paul. He's a politician! Indeed, while I've argued he's more progressive than Obama -- while adding the huge caveat that I won't be voting for him because electoral politics is a fraud -- he's nonetheless a guy who believes some pretty awful things, like using the power of the state to penalize those who cross arbitrary geopolitical borders. He's also associated with people I think can fairly be called racists and he let his name be used as the byline for some of the awful things they've written. Go ahead, call him an asshole! But -- and here's another huge caveat -- make sure that if you're doing so, you're not neglecting to mention the guy who is actually in the White House and who is actually deporting record numbers of immigrants and who is actually ordering bombs to be dropped in more than a half-dozen countries and who actually propped up the company responsible for perhaps the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Otherwise, well, you're going to come across as an asshole too.

A final word about Ron Paul

Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi responds to my recent piece criticizing Obama critics like him who, despite acknowledging that the president is perpetrating mass murder -- in the form of ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Libya -- and continuing to lock up scores of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, say that they'd still vote for the guy over someone who wouldn't do any of that: Ron Paul.

Now, I love Taibbi's work. And I'm not just saying that: dude's been a favorite of mine since his New York Press days, even if I think he's unfortunately become more of a conventional liberal Democrat since moving over to Rolling Stone (for example, I'm not sure the Taibbi of old would have felt it necessary to start a piece critiquing the president's personality cult with the line, "I supported Barack Obama. I still do."). I didn't mean to single him out because I think he's especially awful -- just the opposite: here's a guy who pretty much gets what's going on, knows that Obama's expanding the empire and handing trillions of dollars to Wall Street, and still supports him. I find that strange.

And as the proprietor of a blog called "false dichotomy," I didn't intend to paint Obama supporters into a false either/or choice of "I support Ron Paul, or I support mass-murder," as Taibbi characterizes my piece. Indeed, I made it clear I'd rather cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman than either Paul or Obama.

The framing for piece came not because I believe one must choose between the two -- as I wrote for Counterpunch last year, I'd rather people forgo the diversion of electoral politics altogether -- but because of an explicit hypothetical posed to Taibbi earlier this year.

"In light of the enormous disappointment that was Barack Obama," a reader wrote to him this past February, "would you vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama in 2012?"

Taibbi's response at the time was, well, no, primarily because he said he found Ron Paul's son, Rand, to be an enormous prick. No argument there, though I'd note that his opponent in the race for Senate was one too -- we're talking about politics, after all.

That reply, combined with Taibbi's earlier avowed support for Obama, was one of main the reasons -- along with the smug denunciations of Ron Paul, who opposes war, from self-styled progressives who support a president who just launched, believed-it-or-not, another one -- I wrote my piece. It's not like Ron Paul's anywhere near perfect, as I noted, but given a choice between a guy who cluster bombs women and children in Yemen and one who, reactionary though he may be, is a true believer in peace, why support the war criminal? It's not even like Obama's war crimes have been accompanied by the creation of a socialist worker's paradise at home -- quite the contrary, in fact -- effectively negating the liberal critiques of Paul's budget-slashing domestic agenda, which even if enacted wouldn't preclude local governments and -- as an anarchist, I would hope -- alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion from picking up where the federal government left off.

Taibbi, who knows well enough that Obama's a corporatist, recognizes that in a lot of ways Paul is superior. And he even notes that the latter's supporters -- who I'm afraid probably bombarded him with links to my piece, complete with denunciations of his role in serving the New World Order (dude: sorry!) -- weren't all that bad in his experience:

When I followed the elder Ron Paul’s campaign in 2008, a lot of the people I met were intellectuals who had a genuine philosophical problem with government spending and the Fed, and who were really consistent about their limited-government beliefs – no welfare, but also no drug laws and no foreign interventionist wars. (You frequently found Ron Paul supporters who were more passionate about ending the drug war than they were about ending food stamps or whatever). I got along with almost all of these people, who were all unfailingly polite and respectful toward me. And I had a lot of respect for their views, even though I didn’t agree with everything they believed.

So why, given the choice between Paul and Obama -- a false dichotomy, yes, but the one posed to him -- would he choose the latter, war crimes and all? Because Rand Paul, Ron's son, is a dick, one who Taibbi argues relied on "racial signaling" during his run for the Senate. I'm not going to dispute his characterization of Rand, which he says now colors his view of the father, but this strikes me as less than persuasive. If the Pauls' uglier views and racial insensitivity was held out as a reason to forget elections in favor of community organizing and direct action? Hey, I'd be right there with ya. But as a reason to continue supporting Obama? Eh . . .

I could be off base, and I'm conscious that I may be unfairly using my personal hobby horse as a litmus test for others, but I feel pretty damn strongly that ending the empire is far and away the most important issue of our time. Not killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya -- pretty big deal. Not imposing an embargo on Cuba or helping fuel violent insurgencies in Mexico and Colombia -- again, big deal. Not undermining any foreign leader who shows the slightest inclination to serve his or her own people rather than international capital -- you get the idea.

Domestically, I also see no more pressing issue than the fact that 2.3 million Americans, or roughly 1 in 100 adults, are now in prison, mostly poor minorities and largely for non-violent offenses that ought not be crimes in the first place. Ron Paul says he would do away with the war on drugs and pardon many of its victims; Barack Obama, by contrast, hasn't freed a single person behind bars, instead choosing to use his enormous power as president to unilaterally launch new wars and threaten states that dare consider legalizing medical marijuana dispensaries.

Ron Paul may be a dick, but at least he's not a murderous dick that would throw you in prison for growing some pot. Go ahead and don't vote for him -- again, by all means. But instead of discussing how awful he is, I'd like to hear folks like Taibbi discuss why they still support Obama -- less "Why I Can't Vote For Ron Paul," more, "Why I Can Vote for Barack Obama." Or, better yet, I'd like to hear ideas on non-electoral alternatives to supporting, yes, a mass murderer. I'm all ears.

Addendum: Since some of you in the comments think I'm somehow backing off my original position, let me clarify. When I say that I'm conscious I may be using "my personal hobby horse" -- empire, or rather, the state bombing little children with cluster bombs -- as a litmus test for politicians, I'm being sarcastic. A year or so ago Chris Floyd and I were accused by one particularly dull liberal blogger of of making issues of war and peace our silly little "hobby horse," and I've since embraced the term.

Perhaps I was too subtle -- there's a first for everything -- but, obviously, if somebody believes it's okay to blow poor foreigners up with munitions because somebody Bad might be in the vicinity, then they are fucked as a human being and not worthy of your support, whether they're a politician or a friend (I'm harsh like that). If you believe it's okay to murder innocent men, women and children with Predator drones, I don't care what your position on Social Security is.

Also, to be gratuitous: Fuck Matt Tabbi on this.

I'll take the reactionary over the murderer, thanks

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government's criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you'll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul's good on the war stuff -- yawn -- but otherwise he's a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who'd kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He's more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He's a Democrat. And gosh, even if he's made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he's a murderer, in other words, but at least he's not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn't be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, saying they'd prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

As someone who sees the electoral process as primarily a distraction, something that diverts energy and attention from more effective means of reforming the system, I don't much care if people don't vote for Ron Paul. In fact, if you're going to vote, I'd rather you cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman. But! I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that.

Let's just assume the worst about Paul: that he's a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let's say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn't exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he's not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he's pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of “clean energy” – see his administration's policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that “nuclear renaissance” we've all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments -- and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion -- from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans' income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul's policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it's Paul who's the reactionary of the two?

My sweeping, I'm hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don't much care about dead foreigners. They're a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama's re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they'll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean 'ol Rethuglican.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, for example, has chastised anti-Obama lefties, complaining that undermining – by way of accurately assessing and commenting upon – a warmonger of the Democratic persuasion is “extraordinarily self-destructive" to all FDR-fearing lefties.

“Just ask LBJ,” Drum added. The historical footnote he left out: That LBJ was run out of office by the anti-war left because the guy was murdering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But mass murder is no reason to oppose a Democratic president, at least not if you're a professional liberal.

There are exceptions: Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman has a piece in Truth Out suggesting the anti-war left check out Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who's something of a Ron Paul-lite. But for too many liberals, it seems partisanship and the promise – not even necessarily the delivery, if you've been reading Obama's die-hard apologists – of infinitesimally more spending on domestic programs is more important than saving the lives of a few thousand innocent women and children who happen to live outside the confines of the arbitrary geopolitical entity known as the United States.

Another reason to root -- if not vote -- for Ron Paul: if there was a Republican in the White House, liberals just might start caring about the murder of non-Americans again.

John Warner: Great Senator, or Greatest Senator?

When a prominent U.S. politician either dies or retires, the press and his or her fellow lawmakers can be expected to fall over themselves to praise their dignity, their devotion to country over party, etc. (see: Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, et al.) no matter how corrupt or immoral they actually were.

The latest beneficiary of bipartisan hosannas is retiring Senator John Warner, a Republican from Virginia who did his best to gloss over the Bush administration's responsibility for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq and helped shepherd the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress -- the bill that abolished habeas corpus for those accused of acts of terrorism and retroactively legalized torture.  And when I last spoke to Warner in the summer of 2006, amid rampant bloodshed in Iraq, what issue was the respected senator focused on? Pushing a constitutional amendment to ban the national epidemic of flag burning, which he told me was necessary in order to honor our nation's veterans (which, via his support of the Iraq war, he was ensuring there would be many more of).

Of course, these details -- you know, actual facts about Warner's record -- seem not to matter to his colleagues in the U.S. Senate, including his fellow Virginia Senator, Democrat Jim Webb, who offers this howler:

"There is not a person who is wearing the military uniform today who has not benefited from the wisdom and judgment of John Warner."

Yeah . . . except maybe all those wearing military uniforms who are being bombed and shot at in the quagmires that are Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, I'm not entirely naive -- I realize politicians spout b.s. about "my good friend" this and "my esteemed colleague" that all the time. Nonetheless, it's a bit disconcerting to see Webb -- an opponent of the Iraq war whose son is currently deployed in that country, and who certainly knows better -- gloss over Warner's outspoken support for a war of aggression that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, but so it goes.

More amusing, however, is what Warner believes is wrong with the Republican Party today (hint: it's not the Party's support for "preemptive" war and crony capitalism):

Warner thinks the Republican Party in Virginia, which he helped build, is substituting rigidity for independent thinking.

"I would have to say that I'm deeply concerned, indeed sad, about the Republican Party of Virginia," he said.

A year ago, when he knew he was not going to seek re-election, Warner said he donated $2,000 to the Republican Party of Virginia to help defray the costs of a luncheon and straw poll at the party's annual Advance in Arlington.

"Guess who they elected? Ron Paul. That was the worst investment of several thousand dollars I ever made."

If the problem with the Republican Party, as Warner posits, is that it is "substituting rigidity for independent thinking," why, prey tell, is he bemoaning the fact that the only Republican presidential candidate who dared to challenge his party on its support for endless war and corporatism -- and the only one to challenge the consensus during the primaries that the economy was fine and dandy -- won a local straw poll? Say what you will about Ron Paul (who I interviewed here and here), but he was clearly the only Republican candidate who had any semblance of "independent thinking", for which he was pilloried by the Party establishment. 

Methinks John Warner's opposition to "rigidity" and support for "independent thinking" just may be nothing more than meaningless claptrap self-styled mavericks like he and John McCain are expected to utter for the media's consumption. Admitting the Republican Party lost the '06 and '08 elections because of the policies he himself pushed -- imperialism abroad and corporatism at home -- would probably be too much for the senior senator from Virginia. 

It sure must be comforting for Warner to blame the Party's woes on poor old Ron Paul. Too bad it isn't true.

Can someone bail out the media?

If cable television and newspapers like the Washington Post were your only sources of news, then you would probably think the debate over the $700 billion bailout for politically connected Wall Street investment firms was divided between the experts and journalists on the one side -- united in their belief that "something must be done" -- and on the other, the simpletons and country bumpkins who just didn't understand that the modern economy requires using taxpayer dollars to subsidize the risks and socialize the losses of Henry Paulson's golfing buddies.

Indeed, the Dow's fall by over 700 points last Monday was, to the financial press and other professional agitators for expanded corporate and government power, clear evidence that the House's (short-lived) rejection of the Wall Street bailout was directly harming the economy. No doubt these self-styled financial experts will interpret/spin today's events -- where the Dow fell more than 800 points at one point -- as further evidence that the government must take bold, decisive action to intervene in the economy (as if the Federal Reserve hasn't already been doing so by injecting more liquidity -- that is, more dollars -- into the banking system; just today the central bank cut interest rates to just 1.25%, after doubling the amount of money it was lending to major banks).

As after 9/11 and with the the lead up to the Iraq war, the establishment media has parroted the line that there is a crisis that demands the public defer to the very same inept elite that failed to predict -- much less understand the causes of -- the catastrophe that had just taken place. And as in the months before the United States unleashed "shock and awe" over Baghdad, the last few weeks have seen voices critical of the stampeding toward an ill-considered and destructive policy generally marginalized as simple folk incapable of grasping the world's complexities (which invariably demand that the U.S. government assume evermore power).

However, as Congressional Quarterly's Daniel Parks pointed out in a piece for the Chicago Tribune, the divide over the bailout was not simply between those journalists/politicians/bankers who understand economics and the ignorant, Dancing With the Stars-watching proles, but rather "between Wall Street and its allies in Washington, and the rest of the country."

As Parks notes:

While it is true that most Wall Street economists predict doom and gloom for America without immediate government action, many of these economists are connected in some way to the institutions that would benefit from a bailout.

This point is obviously true and bears repeating, but one can take it a step further: not only were the Wall Street "experts" on TV shilling for the bailout likely to directly benefit from one, but so were those people hoping to implement the plan: our dear leaders. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to see the impropriety in having a former Goldman Sachs CEO, Henry Paulson, using the public treasury to bail out his former colleagues on Wall Street, aided (and abetted) by a whole host of former Goldman Sachs employees.

John McCain and Barack Obama are also likely both salivating at the chance of exercising the type of unprecedented power over the economy the U.S. Congress just granted to the lame duck Bush administration, which no doubt explains their vocal cries for lawmakers to do the "right thing" and vote to subsidize the bad decisions of their corporate backers.

Though opponents of the bailout were accused of just not getting the connection between Wall Street and Main Street (and one can only hope that phrase dies a sudden, albeit violent, death), most people can understand what's going on rather easily and don't need the help of a screaming cable TV financial guru to explain to them why 21st century living demands that the poor subsidize the tennis lessons of the rich. In fact, much of the opposition to the bailout can be chalked up to the fact that people know all too well what is going on: politicians enriching influential corporate interests at taxpayer expense.

As Parks writes:

The fact is, most people do understand. They just aren't convinced that this particular approach—or any government approach—is the best answer. And there are plenty of smart, highly educated people on their side. Just because you won't find many of them on Wall Street, or in Washington, doesn't mean they don't exist or their analysis is any less sound.

Even among the voters who believe a bailout would help, many remain opposed regardless. They want to see Wall Street suffer for its excesses, even if they must suffer, too. Normally the media would seek out and admire stands on principle such as this, but not on this story.

The disconnect appears to stem from the fact that in many cases, financial journalists have simply gotten too cozy with the Wall Street crowd. These journalists have failed to cast a critical eye on what their small circle of East Coast experts in the financial world tell them, and they have ignored other sources in most cases.

One would think that after being taken to the woodshed for failing to challenge the underlying assumptions on the need to go to war in Iraq, journalists would be more cautious about accepting the establishment explanation of any undertaking of this magnitude. But the journalists who covered the war for the most part are not the same journalists who are now covering the economy.

Perhaps the two groups should have a chat.

While the U.S. establishment may have gotten away with openly transferring the wealth of the middle class and the poor to the politically influential upper class (yet again), the opposition to the latest display of crony capitalism was at least somewhat inspiring, and -- one can only hope -- perhaps indicative of the "realignment of American politics" that Ralph Nader spoke of at last month's press conference with Ron Paul and the Constitution and Green party presidential nominees, Chuck Baldwin and Cynthia McKinney.

As evidenced by Paul's press conference -- where the assembled candidates all agreed that the the empire should be ended, the Federal Reserve's power should be greatly curtailed (and perhaps abolished), and that "There should be no taxpayer bailouts of corporations and no corporate subsidies [and] corporations should be aggressively prosecuted for their crimes and frauds." -- there appears to be something of an emerging anti-war, anti-corporate shift in the United States, with an increasing number of people recognizing that both the Democratic and Republican parties are thoroughly committed to corporatism and imperialism (their respective claims to represent the "little guy" and the "free market" notwithstanding). That's not to say that the bipartisan corporate/government power structure is on the verge of a collapse, but it's at least something to be hopeful about in these rather dark times.

This emerging consensus, though obviously limited to what the likes of the Washington Post's Dana Milbank would dismissively term the "lunatic fringe", is readily apparent, as the Chicago Tribute notes, in the fact that Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul -- long allies when it comes to fighting the warfare state -- appear to now be making a shared and explicit case against the corporate welfare state. As Kucinich wrote to his supporters last week, echoing Paul's criticism of the Federal Reserve's manipulation of the U.S. economy for the benefit of Wall Street and the openly corporatist nature of the bailout scam:

[Under the bailout the] taxpayers loan money to the banks. But the taxpayers do not have the money. So we have to borrow it from the banks to give it back to the banks. But the banks do not have the money to loan to the government. So they create it into existence (through a mechanism called fractional reserve) and then loan it to us, at interest, so we can then give it back to them.

Confused?

This is the system. This is the standard mechanism used to expand the money supply on a daily basis not a special one designed only for the "$700 billion" transaction. People will explain this to you in many different ways, but this is what it comes down to.

The banks needed Congress' approval. Of course in this topsy turvy world, it is the banks which set the terms of the money they are borrowing from the taxpayers. And what do we get for this transaction? Long term debt enslavement of our country. We get to pay back to the banks trillions of dollars ($700 billion with compounded interest) and the banks give us their bad debt which they cull from everywhere in the world.

-----

The globalization of the debt puts the United States in the position that in order to repay the money that we borrow from the banks (for the banks) we could be forced to accept International Monetary Fund dictates which involve cutting health, social security benefits and all other social spending in addition to reducing wages and exploiting our natural resources. This inevitably leads to a loss of economic, social and political freedom.

Under the failed $700 billion bailout plan, Wall Street's profits are Wall Street's profits and Wall Street's losses are the taxpayers' losses. Profits are capitalized. Losses are socialized.

As Kucinich highlights, the bailout is simply more corporatism dressed up as an "economic rescue", highlighting the fact that in the United States -- under the guise of a market system -- the Wall Street rich win, even when they lose.

The apparent realignment of politics was also evident, to me at least, in a surprising post at the liberal-hipster-media website, Gawker, which -- when their writers are not assuming the posture of uber-cool ironic detachment, is capable of some worthwhile commentary:

[T]he larger problem here . . . is that no one understood that the nation's economy was built on a house of cards except for the people who didn't care, the people who constructed the house of cards, and Ron Paul.

So we understand the crisis through an unhelpful lens of politics—we can explain the political machinations behind the bailout bill, yes, but is it good or bad policy? Paul Krugman says it's bad-but-necessary, or something. What a cop-out!

The People are actually to blame, yes; the stupid people who didn't pay attention to the terms of their loans and lived outside their means and gambled everything away while gorging themselves on bacon-wrapped shrimp at Red Lobster. Except who were the ones pushing the "ownership society," giving huge incentives for homeownership to people who shouldn't own homes, never providing anything but misleading information, convincing themselves that housing prices would never ever ever fall? Both political parties, two presidents, and all the respectable press. There was a dereliction of duty by everyone in the nation responsible for serving the public trust, which certainly used to mean journalists too.

It took Time until March of this year to explain credit default swaps, but at least they did explain it in March. And now we're probably in for another corrective period, in which like after the Lewinsky free-for-all and the credulous lead-up to the Iraq war, the press will spend a self-flagellating year promising to do better in the future.

I just have one small quibble with Gawker's analysis: the idea that corporate journalism was ever about "serving the public trust" is not based in anything remotely resembling fact, and is instead based on the same fiction that the U.S. government -- which massacred the native American population and enslaved hundreds of thousands of others -- was established to uphold decency and justice but has only rather recently been corrupted by the mean 'ol Republicans. While the media's selling of the war in Iraq was undoubtedly egregious and not in the American public's interest (to say nothing of the Iraqis), have you ever heard of William Randolph Hearst?

An American warship explodes off the coast of Cuba and Hearst almost singlehandedly sells the country on a war by blaming the cowardly Spanish; a war that resulted in the United States colonizing Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, more or less ushering in the U.S.'s era of imperialism. The media's role in peddling falsehoods is most certainly nothing new, and as a student of history, I'm still struggling to find an era when the major media outlets did not shill for the political and economic elites.

Still, some recognize that the major media outlets fail 90% of the time at providing the American public a complete and unbiased view of the world -- and only at most 10% of the time displays any measurable amount of skepticism toward government demands for new power -- and view that as a reason to improve on that last 10%; you know, get the media back to what its "job" was supposed to be, with all that "speaking truth to power" stuff.

Others, however, see that the major newspapers and television stations invariably shill for those in power -- both in the corporate sector and the U.S. government (or do I repeat myself?) -- and think, "hmm, maybe the media is doing its job..."

"9/11 truthers": a persecuted minority?

In response to my post about this past weekend's Ron Paul rally in DC, commenter David Stratton accuses me of engaging in the same sort of bigotry toward so-called "9/11 truthers" -- those who believe the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were an "inside job" perpetrated by the U.S. government -- that I criticized when directed toward illegal immigrants:

Kurt Vonnegut might say "so it goes...", but I doubt he would use words like "lunacy" "kookery" and the like to denounce people without exploring their side of the issue whatsoever. If you want to sit and cast stones at the guy who was being a bigot and using hateful language towards Mexican illegals, perhaps you ought not to build yourself a glass house in which to live by turning right around and casting your *own* hateful propaganda at your *own* group of hated persons.

I'm actually glad this came up, because I am typically hesitant to denounce anyone as a "kook" or a "lunatic". If you check out my posts over the years, you'll find a good deal of them are spent defending people who have been denounced by all Right Thinking people as crazed lunatics (see Jeremiah Wright). As for 9/11 truthers? I referred to them in my last post as kooky lunatics because, in my experience, the vast majority are kooky lunatics.

I have watched the exceedingly silly Loose Change -- God's word to truthers, set to a hip-hop soundtrack -- and witnessed the tinfoil hat-wearing creators make fools of themselves on national television. Consider this exchange, where Loose Change creator Dylan Avery attempts to cite some former Underwriters Laboratories employee to back his assertion that there was just no way for the steel in the World Trade Center to collapse due to burning jet fuel:

DYLAN AVERY: Well, real quick, I just want to jump in and say, Kevin Ryan has been open about his statement. He has always been public about the fact that he worked for the—I don’t remember the exact name, but it was a subdivision of Underwriters Laboratories, which did water testing. But it was the fact that he got the higher-up from—he got the word from his higher-ups that they actually had certified the steel and, I mean, his science still adds up.

DAVID DUNBAR: In fact, Underwriter Laboratories does not certify structural steel.

DYLAN AVERY: Oh, okay.

It pretty much goes on like that from there. Now, I'm not looking to conduct an exhaustive debunking of 9/11 conspiracy theories (others with much more will power than me have already done that), but let me throw one question out there for any conspiracists looking to bombard my comments with "gatekeeper!": if the Bush administration was so damn good at pulling off a massive "inside job" on 9/11 in order to justify the war in Iraq, then how come they couldn't even plant a few WMDs? As Alexander Cockburn suggested in a 2006 debunking of 9/11 conspiracies, wouldn't planting a few boxes saying "Weaponized Anthrax, Destination: Middle America" be much easier to pull off than a controlled demolition of WTC 7?

But I digress.

Whether 9/11 conspiracies are true or not (they're not), they serve as a massive distraction from much more worthy causes. In fact, if one were a government agent bent on discrediting anti-establishment movements, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a better marginalizing tool than the truthers (how's that for a conspiracy?). At nearly every anti-war rally I've been to there have been people holding "9/11 was an inside job" signs; I saw the same the same thing when I covered an ACLU-sponsored rally last year in support of habeas corpus (yes, in these here United States people have to protest for rights King John recognized in the 13th century).

And what have 9/11 truthers gained? Why, they've done their damndest to discredit a whole bunch of movements that have much, much more popular support then their -- yes -- kooky theories. Hell, they even did their best to ensure that Ron Paul's chances of securing the Republican presidential nomination went from "slim" to "non-existent" by trying to make his campaign not about opposition to militarism and the burgeoning police state, but about WTC 7 (which, naturally, the hacks at Fox News were more than willing to exploit).

So again I ask, what have 9/11 truthers done for America lately -- convinced a few naive high schoolers to download Loose Change?

That said, here's my message to David Stratton and any other truthers lurking out there: thanks for nothing.

Ron Paul Rally in DC

Yesterday I headed down to the U.S. Capitol to check out a rally for former presidential candidate and current Texas Republican congressman, Ron Paul. Having interviewed Mr. Paul several times during the course of his campaign, I was interested in checking out just what kind of crowd he could attract on a 90-degree July day in Washington.

In many ways, the crowd seemed a lot like the recent antiwar rallies I have attended -- largely consisting of "average" folks, with a visible 10 percent of the crowd consisting of what can only fairly be described as the "lunatic fringe" (more on that later). Otherwise, everyone from hippie-types shouting "free the weed" to right-wing Christians concerned about a "North American Union" were in attendance (in addition to a good deal of regular-looking, "normal" folks), highlighting the politically transcendent appeal of Paul's radical anti-war, anti-corporatist message.

Particularly surprising to me was the speech by Naomi Wolf, a prominent feminist and one-time adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, on the 10 signs that a country is drifting toward fascism (video shot by yours truly below):

A few years ago I would have expected Wolf to be just another Democratic partisan willing to write-off Ron Paul as a kooky "right-wing extremist." But many of Paul's positions on the most pressing issues of the day -- opposition to empire, torture, and the national security state -- are what would usually be characterized by the establishment media as "far left", and appeal to many people who are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party's embrace of corporatism and illegal, aggressive warfare.

As Wolf noted in her speech, for far too long those who agree with Paul's stances on those issues would allow themselves to be divided by a range of red herring wedge issues that are largely meaningless when a country is engaged in illegal foreign occupations and indefinitely detaining suspected "terrorists". When it comes down to it, those who agree on the immorality of preemptive war, warrantless spying, and torture should not be divided by their differing views on the estate tax -- priorities, people.

Yet for decades both the Democratic and Republican parties have been busy scaring their respective bases with the horrifying prospect of the other party taking power, obfuscating the fact that, for all practical purposes, there is no real disagreement between the parties on the worthiness of an imperialistic foreign policy.

That said, there were several speakers at the rally who, if the goal is to appeal to as broad an audience as possible by focusing on a message of peace and freedom, were . . . questionable choices, to put it mildly. In fact, one man who followed Wolf -- a retired Arizona police officer by the name of Jack McLamb -- rambled on with crackpot conspiracies about the "New World Order" so ridiculous it was if they were intentionally designed to marginalize the entire event.

In addition to your garden-variety "9/11 truth" kookery (cheered on by a not insignificant Alex Jones-worshipping segment of the crowd), McLamb went off about how government agents are,  apparently, affixing color-coded stickers to the mailboxes of would-be troublemakers. The purpose? Well, you see, a red sticker on your mailbox signals to "foreign troops" that one should be taken out to a field and shot. A blue sticker, in contrast, merely means that these undefined foreign soldiers should take you to a Halliburton-constructed concentration camp.

As one Ron Paul supporter standing next to me astutely observed, "so how does that work with apartment complexes?"

With such a range of fairly respected speakers -- Wolf, former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, talk show host Charles Goyette -- it boggles the mind as to why rally organizers would allow someone suffering from bizarre paranoid delusions to address the crowd.  If supporters of Ron Paul are looking to shake off the "fringe" label, inviting a guy who makes the "9/11 was an inside job" crowd uncomfortable doesn't appear to me to be the most effective strategy. 

In fact, due to the quality of some of the speakers -- another man who later took the stage went beyond mere "secure the borders" rhetoric to a full-on, xenophobic rant about how there were too many "illegals" committing crimes in the U.S. (undocumented workers actually commit less crime, but hey, they tend to have darker complexions so what do the facts matter?) and that, h'yuck, we ain't learnin' no Spanish -- I ended up leaving before Ron Paul actually spoke. 

Judging by the near-total lack of applause the speaker received, I'm guessing I wasn't the only one perplexed as to why a rally in favor of a guy who made opposition to war and the police state the focus of his campaign (and who, even with his anti-illegal immigration rhetoric, has said he finds the concept of a border fence "rather offensive" and that "I think we could be much more generous with our immigration") would allow a speaker to engage in such rank bigotry and fear-mongering about "illegals".

Such is the downside to creating a political coalition that includes everyone from Green Party supporters to the close-the-borders crowd. On the one hand, Ron Paul's message, by transcending the obsolete constraints of "left" and "right", is able to attract a large, diverse following that shows the potential mass appeal of a simple "bring the troops home and follow the Constitution" message. However, that larger following often brings a whole range of crazies with their own pet issues who are not so much concerned with ending the American empire as they are with demanding that people buy into the lunacy that WTC 7 was brought down in a controlled demolition, god damn it (as I witnessed one man try to convince a group of perplexed Chinese tourists who were walking by).

As the late Kurt Vonnegut would say, so it goes...

-----

(Also see The American Conservative's Kelley Vlahos and Daniel McCarthy for their takes on the rally.)

And since this is a post about Ron Paul, what better time then to hawk one of my interviews with him? This one, from January 2007, I believe was the first interview with Paul about a potentially launching a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination:

Interview with Ron Paul

Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) may now be winding down his campaign for president, but when I first spoke with him last year he was just getting started. The following interview, conducted on January 16th, 2007, just off the floor of the House of Representatives, I believe was in fact the first interview with the Congressman following the news that he was forming an exploratory committee and considering a presidential run. The interview also happened to take place right after President Bush announced the so-called "surge" in Iraq, which provides an interesting starting point for the conversation.

In hindsight, several of Congressman Paul's comments turned out to be rather prescient, such as his prediction that the Internet would allow him to get his message out to an untapped segment of the population that would be receptive to his libertarian message.

My favorite part? His characterization of the current Republican Party as having been taken over by promoters of "big government, corporate interests, and warmongering."

Anyway, go ahead and check it for yourself:

In Defense of Barack Obama

I've been a critic of the cult of Obama as much as anyone, and not because of anything particular the man has done, but because I don't think it's wise to invest much faith in a politician, no matter how many times they may mention "change" or "hope" in their stump speech. That said, the made-for-TV pseudo-controversy over the comments his pastor Jeremiah Wright has made over the past few years is completely unwarranted (but nonetheless predictable), and demonstrative of how the media attempts to stifle any actual discussion of the realities of life in America. Unless your politics fall in somewhere between Newt Gingrich and Joe Lieberman, you are more or less a radical extremist in the eyes of our elite media outlets. Just ask Ron Paul.

By now you have probably seen Wright's sermons -- or at least the four second excerpts the cable news airheads will allow on television. And if you rely on these tabloid news outlets for your information, then you've probably already come to the conclusion that Wright not only hates white people, but he hates America (I addressed the phenomenon of so many Americans "hating" America two years ago).

Of course, that's what the kids these days refer to as "bullshit".

Wright's only crime is stating uncomfortable truths in an inflammatory manner. You know what? The United States government has imprisoned an incredibly large number of African Americans in the name of a failing crusade against drugs (I reported on the racist aspects of the war on drugs for Oklahoma Public Radio last year) -- part of the reason why this country leads the world in the number of people it imprisons. Not to mention the fact that the CIA looked the other way while its dear friends the Contras smuggled cocaine into the United States in order to finance its vicious war in Nicaragua. Of course, pointing out that the U.S. government has been less than angelic, particularly in regard to its killing of poor foreigners, is an unspeakable truth -- which explains the current two minute hate against Wright.

That said, there are still people out there who are willing to look at what the man has actually said before condemning him to Guantanamo. And surprisingly, some actually work for the aforementioned tabloid news outlets, such as CNN contributor Roland Martin:

As this whole sordid episode regarding the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has played out over the last week, I wanted to understand what he ACTUALLY said in this speech. I’ve been saying all week on CNN that context is important, and I just wanted to know what the heck is going on.

Amazing, right? Martin does a public service by providing the actual contents of Wright's now infamous post-9/11 speech, in which he dares to mention that the United States government has killed a whole hell of a lot of people. An excerpt:

“I heard [former U.S. Iraq] Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday did anybody else see or hear him? He was on FOX News, this is a white man, and he was upsetting the FOX News commentators to no end, he pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.

“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

The audacity of the man! To think, a Christian pastor preaching that "an eye for an eye" only begets violence, and that the United States should treat others as it wishes to be treated.

Why, he ought to be crucified.

Iowa Caucus Reaction

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Jonathan Schwarz is somewhat encouraged by Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic caucus, but not necessarily because of Obama's positions, but for what he appears to represent:

It's... a very good thing to have a viable politician who's not just "black" (by American standards) but has used cocaine, has a weird name, has Muslim family members, and has dated white women -- just as it was a good thing to have a president like Clinton who everyone knew had smoked pot and cheated on his wife. The forces of reaction have always counted on using such things to destroy anyone who gets in their way. If American society is becoming less insane in these areas and that tool is no longer available to reactionaries, it's a small but real step forward.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein at The American Prospect can barely contain his enthusiasm following Obama's win, gushing:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

American liberals criticize the cult of personality surrounding Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush, but many seem to fall over themselves when a "great communicator" on their side (the Blue Team) regurgitates the same empty platitudes and "the American dream" claptrap they rightly criticize when it occurs on the other side (the Red Team).
As Dennis Perrin notes in response to Klein's piece:

There are few things more nauseating than American liberals giddy over politicians. Their worst features rise to the surface and emit an acrid stench, perfume to the faithful, noxious to the rest. Saint Obama's victory in Iowa has many online libs on their knees today, hands stretched upward to the light, dopey gleam on their faces, tongues wagging uncontrollably.

As for the Republican side, Texas Congressman Ron Paul pulled in 10% -- more than twice the number who voted for former "national frontrunner" Rudy Giuliani. I never thought I'd see the day when a politician who calls the United States an "empire" and refers to 19th century anarchist Lysander Spooner on national television would be able to gain even half that amount in a Republican primary, especially one held in Iowa. As you may recall, Paul got into a spat with Giuliani earlier this year in a debate hosted by Fox News over the root causes of 9/11. Paul, a principled non-interventionist, argued that the U.S. troop presence on the Arabian peninsula and the continual bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990s played a large part in motivating the 9/11 hijackers -- a point confirmed by the 9/11 Commission Report and backed up by people such as Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden. Naturally, Giuliani claimed to have never heard the concept of "blowback," and in true demagogic fashion, "demanded" that Paul retract his statement -- which he of course refused to do. At the time television pundits called the exchange a clear win for Giuliani that made him look "tough" in the face of the "crackpot" Ron Paul. As is so often the case with the punditocracy, however, they were wrong. Paul enjoyed tremendous exposure thanks to the exchange, which led to record-breaking fundraising for a guy most of these same pundits dismissed as "fringe," while Giuliani's campaign has crashed and burned.

It's also interesting to note that Paul spent less time than any other Republican candidate in Iowa -- even less than Giuliani, who has been trying to claim that he didn't try all that hard to do well there.

Of course, Paul's success hasn't stopped Fox News from excluding the antiwar Republican from a debate this weekend. Fox claims to only have room for five candidates -- Huckabee, Romney, Thompson, McCain, and Giuiliani -- and that they are only including those candidates who have registered double-digit support in national polls. Never mind that Paul is polling on par with Giuliani and beating Thompson in New Hampshire, and that the only actual verifiable poll -- the Iowa caucus -- showed Paul breaking into double-digits and beating one of the invited candidates; to Fox News, Paul's position on the war makes him unacceptable and "fringe," regardless of how the actual voters feel. [Insert quip regarding Fox News being "fair and balanced."]

Kucinich-Paul '08?

Much is being made of a potential Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX) bipartisan ticket for the White House, thanks to comments made over the weekend by Congressman Kucinich while campaigning in New Hampshire.

"I'm thinking about Ron Paul" as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The antiwar Ohio Congressman says a Kucinich-Paul ticket could unite Republicans and Democrats and "balance the energies in this country."

Now some may think Kucinich is simply trying to get some free press by attaching himself to the growing support for Ron Paul, who has enjoyed a large amount of media attention after he raised more than $4.2 million for his campaign in just 24 hours. But that's not likely the case, as Kucinich and Paul have long worked closely together on issues concerning war and civil liberties, and Paul has said he would likely vote for Kucinich were he himself not running. Back in May I spoke with Kucinich for a piece that I was working on for Ohio Public Radio regarding his anti-war, anti-establishment campaign. During the course of the interview I asked him what he thought of Congressman Paul:

DAVIS: You guys probably disagree on a lot, but you come together a lot when it comes to issues of war and peace. Could you a little bit talk about your relationship with Ron Paul over the past couple years?

KUCINICH: Ron Paul is a great American. I have tremendous respect for him. He has the courage of his convictions, he’s not someone who goes with the crowd. I like him. I admire him.

DAVIS: What do you think about his campaign? He’s kind of almost playing the same role [as you] in the Republican Party, in that he’s the only antiwar candidate on stage.

KUCINICH: I can tell you, Ron Paul -- more often than not -- is right. And he’s somebody who’s a great American.

So what are the chances of a joint Paul and Kucinich ticket happening? Not good. The Paul campaign has already shot down the idea, with spokesman Jesse Benton quoted as saying "there are too many differences on issues such as taxes and spending to think a joint ticket would be possible." And, of course, both Paul and Kucinich have a long way to go in terms of getting their respective party's nomination before they could even considering naming a running mate.

That said, I raised the prospect of a Paul-Kucinich ticket when I interviewed Congressman Paul earlier this year:

DAVIS: Congressman Dennis Kucinich is kind of similar in that he is one of the more vocal antiwar critics on the Democratic side of the debates. I know you guys probably disagree on a load of things, but you’ve come together a lot to work on issues of war and peace. So could you talk about your relationship with Congressman Kucinich over the past couple years, what it’s been like, what you think of him?

PAUL: We’re close friends, and we certainly agree [on the war]. And I think we may end up voting closely all the time on the war issue. Sometimes some of these funding bills are a little bit complex, and even Walter Jones and I will disagree even though we agree on what we’re supposed to be doing, but the interpretation will be a little bit different. But I think Dennis and I usually come down on the same side of it. That is, if you don’t want the war you quit the funding, and that’s our responsibility and it’s not the president’s authority to do what he wants because we have the purse strings, so you have to vote against the spending. So we get along very well on that, and since it’s such a major issue I think I will continue to work with him the best we can. And you know, take some of the liberal welfare spending that Dennis might support more than I. But you know, I’m not hostile toward that. If I can save the money from overseas, put some of it against the deficit, end up with a net reduction in the size of the budget, at the same time stopping a war, I may well be very open to funding some of these programs. Because I’m not out to gut some of these programs that have taught people to be very dependant on the government, like medical care. I mean, that’s not my goal. I’ve never run for office with the goal of slashing [those programs] even though philosophically I don’t think it’s the best way to deliver services and prosperity to poor people.

DAVIS: So can we look forward to a Paul-Kucinich 2008 ticket?

PAUL: Not likely, but I think that Paul and Kucinich will continue to work together and do the kind of work that we’ve been doing for a couple years now.

Digg it.

Why Does Everyone Hate Congress?

A recent Zogby/Reuters poll finds that public opinion of Congress is at an all-time low. In fact, Congress' approval rating of 11% is so low that it almost makes President Bush look popular. So why does everyone hate Congress? That's the question I posed to several members of the Texas congressional delegation in a story for KUT in Austin, TX. Lawmakers I interviewed include Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX), and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX).

To listen and/or read the story, go here.

Ron Paul Interview

With the GOP Straw Poll currently taking place in Ames, Iowa, now seems a good time to shamelessly promote this June interview I conducted with Texas Republican Congressman Ron Paul. We discuss everything from why he is running for president, to his relationship with antiwar Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich.

The interview was cited by Reason magazine's Brian Doherty in an article on Ron Paul's strong online presence and his potential appeal to Democrats.