Ron Paul takes the lead in Iowa.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Would be extra super duper whizz-bang groovy neato with bacon on top if I can avoid hearing from any more Americans saying they can't afford to see a doctor.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Would be extra, extra special if liberals understood that the best way for a society to achieve high quality health care is through the market.

That totally worked in providing health care for everyone.

[kentonio]

Would be extra, extra special if liberals understood that the best way for a society to achieve high quality health care is through the market.

Please provide examples of this.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Latest press release in-

A further broadcast supporting Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) in his presidential campaign released a devastating 3-minute web ad this evening designed to put a final end to stories about racist and homophobic comments attributed to Paul.

The ad stars Mohammed Trixiebelle M'dinga, a gay black Islamic man from Bumcivilian County, Ohio. Williams says that when his fishing boat was caught in a storm in the 1980s, Ron Paul was on hand to help him.

"I thought I was done for. The engines were gone and we were sinking fast. Then Ron Paul came to my rescue. He just walked across to us, bodily walking across the surface of the water which grew miraculously calm in his presence," Trixiebelle relates, relating the story of how Paul saved him and made sure he never received a bill.

"He think of one human being just as much as the other. I say "he think of one human being just as much as the other" to remind people that I am an African-American, incidentally. Make sure you write it out like that. Fo sho. No shizzle." Trixiebelle says. "I was so moved that I tried to hug him, but he vomited over my shoes and damned me as a sodomite. We need honesty like that, and we need more like him."

The ad ends with a plea for donations, and for a further plea for homosexuals to stay at least 50 metres away from Dr Paul when making their donations.

[Elok]

American health care sucks, at least when you consider the ratio of quality of care to money spent. In some respects Peru is better than America. For example, we basically couldn't afford to have our kid in the US. Even a standard delivery costs more than a damned home theater system, and a C-section could put us in debt for years. That's absurd. Here a C-section is considerably cheaper than a standard birth back home even if you adjust for local cost of living. Now, part of the problem there may be outside the market's control (malpractice suits, for example). But I don't think they have such ridiculous problems in Europe.

[HalfLotus]

Another defection from a neocon campaign:

Iowa Campaign Chairman Leaves Bachmann for Paul

The faltering presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann was dealt another blow Wednesday night when Kent Sorenson (left), her Iowa campaign chairman, turned up at a Ron Paul rally in Des Moines to announce he had left Bachmann and is supporting Paul. Just hours earlier Sorenson had been at a campaign event with Bachmann, Politico.com reported. The Iowa state senator appeared on stage just moments before Paul spoke, and announced his endorsement before a cheering crowd of about 500 at a rally billed as a veterans event.

The defection was more bad news for Bachmann, an Iowa native and member of Congress from Minnesota, who expected a home-field advantage in the neighboring state. But since surging to the top in polls last summer, she has sunk to single digits in recent surveys. She issued a statement Wednesday night, claiming Sorenson was bought off by the Paul campaign.

"Kent Sorenson personally told me he was offered a large sum of money to go to work for the Paul campaign," the Minnesota congresswoman said in a statement emphatically denied by the Paul camp. What made matters worse for Bachmann is that it was also disputed by her own Iowa political director, Wes Enos. Just after midnight Thursday morning, the Des Moines Register reported, the Paul campaign released a statement from Enos defending Sorenson and disputing Bachmann's charge.

“I can say unequivocally that Kent Sorenson's decision was in no way financially motivated. His decision had more to do with the fact that Ron Paul supporters have been something of a family to him since he was first elected in 2008,” the statement from Enos said. With the Iowa caucuses but a few days away, “Kent believed that he needed to be with them as they stand on the cusp of a potential caucus upset.”

In his statement, Enos said that while he disagreed with Sorenson's decision, and would himself remain with the Bachmann campaign, he could not “watch a good man like Kent Sorenson be attacked as a 'sell-out.'... That is simply not the case and it was not the basis of his decision.”

"I adore Michele Bachmann, but the fact of the matter is I believe we have an opportunity to take Romney out here in Iowa and I believe that person is Ron Paul," Sorenson said in an interview behind the stage as his new candidate addressed the crowd. "I love Michele, I love the Bachmann family, but I love this country, also."
 
Paul had campaigned for Sorenson in his state Senate race and the Iowan said he had remained in touch with the Texas congressman's local supporters even after he had joined the Bachmann campaign. He said he would be with the Paul camp, “at their service,” for the remaining days of the Iowa campaign.

“It was difficult, but it was the right thing to do, because [Paul] fights for the values that I hold dear as well,” Sorenson said in his remarks to the veterans and others in the crowd of Paul supporters at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. While praising Bachmann for also fighting for conservative causes, Sorenson said he believes he needs to back Paul in what he described as a “turning point” in the 2012 campaign.

“When the Republican establishment is going to be coming against him over the next few days, I though it was my duty to come to his aid, just like he came to my aid during my Senate race, which was a very nasty race,” said Sorenson, who pledged to do all he can “in Iowa and beyond” to help the campaign.

“We're going to take Ron Paul all the way to the White House in 2012,” he told the cheering crowd.

...

Paul's campaign manager, Jesse Benton, appeared to discount other challengers, including Gingrich, in explaining Sorenson's choice of Paul as the candidate to “take Romney out” in Iowa.

“He said he has come to realize that this is a two-person race,” Benton said, and that “Ron is the only conservative alternative to Romney and the establishment status quo.”

[Zevico]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/12/29/ron-paul-yeah-i-wrote-some-of-the-newsletters-just-not-the-bad-stuff-thats-causing-me-problems-now/

Ron Paul: Yeah, I Wrote Some of the Newsletters, Just Not the Bad Stuff That’s Causing Me Problems Now

Ron Paul morphs into the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s former parishioner right before our eyes.

In 1995-96 Ron Paul actively promoted the newsletters that bear his name as representing his views. In 2008 and again this year, as the racist language in them drags his presidential campaign, he has disavowed them. And earlier this week, he claimed in a CNN interview not to have even read much of them for a good 10 years after they were published.

Well, on a radio show today he changed the story again, admitting to having written some of them. Just not the most racist stuff, which by the way he minimized to “about 10 sentences out of 10,000 pages for all I know.” Here’s the video:

PAUL: Well, the newsletters were written, you know, a long time ago. And I wrote a certain portion of them. I would write the economics. So a lot of what you just mentioned… his would be material that I would turn in, and it would become part of the letter. But there were many times when I didn’t edit the whole letter, and things got put in. And I didn’t even really become aware of the details of that until many years later when somebody else called and said, you know what was in it? But these were sentences that were put in, a total of eight or ten sentences, and it was bad stuff. It wasn’t a reflection of my views at all. So it got in the letter, I thought it was terrible, it was tragic, you know and I had some responsibility for it, because name went on the letter. But I was not an editor. I’m like a publisher. And if you think of publishers of newspapers, once in a while they get pretty junky stuff in newspapers. And they have to say that this is not the position of that newspaper, and this is certainly the case. But I actually put a type of a newsletter out, it was a freedom report, investment, survival report — every month since 1976. So this is probably ten sentences out of 10,000 pages, for all I know. I think it’s bad that happened but I disavowed all these views, and people who know me best, people of my district, have heard these stories for years and years, and they know they weren’t a reflection of anything I believed in, and it never hurt me politically. Right now, I think it’s the same case, too. People are desperate to find something.

Is anybody buying this? The newsletter wasn’t a “newspaper,” it was staffed by at most three or four people beyond Paul, and he hired them all. If he didn’t write the worst stuff, he incompetently managed the enterprise in ways that suggest he is not capable of managing the executive branch of the government.

The newsletters included a lot more than 10 sentences of offensive material. A whole lot more. They included a theory that the US government created AIDS at a secret Army lab. They included a theory that the $50 bill was being engineered to allow the government to track all of us. And more.

We don’t even have to go back to the newsletters to find Ron Paul saying batty things. Here’s an interview he did with Iran’s English-language propaganda channel in 2009. He compares Israel’s handling of the Gaza Strip to a “concentration camp,” using those exact words. And he blames all of the ills of the Middle East on the US and Israel, not the genocidal jihadists who have tried to destroy Israel more than once and continue to desire that end.

Relevant? Ron Paul just picked up some vital support…from Klanner David Duke. That goes along with the love he gets from Truther Alex Jones and the folks at Stormfront.

Frankly, I’m sick of writing about Ron Paul. In Congress he has been a mostly harmless backbencher, with no evidence of having productively led or done anything. He passed one bill in two decades, and otherwise brought home the bacon to his district. If he remained there or retired he would be of no interest. As long as he’s in the campaign and a factor crowding out better candidates, though, there isn’t much choice but to continuing to expose his record. The mainstream won’t do it until he is actually the nominee. And by then, it will be too late.

[Dinner]

You don't do your cause any service by linking to crap like Pajama Media.

[Zevico]

You don't do your cause any service by linking to crap like Pajama Media.

If it really is as bad as you say then simply consider it a link compiler. Links to original sources are contained in it. I mean, am I going to watch CNN? No. These guys bother to, and bother to point out when it reveals something relevant.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that you refuse to accept the credibility or reliability of a source because of the politics of that source when those politics don't have any bearing on its credibility. The writer didn't put forward any particularly controversial reasoning. He didn't conduct any original research. The truth or falsity of the facts-in-issue is not in doubt. The writer relied on publicly available evidence to come to reasoned conclusions. The fact that he writes for PJM is not to the point.

[kentonio]

Latest press release in-

I really wish I could 5 star individual posts some days.

[HalfLotus]

Funny little video showing the media's love/hate relationship with Iowa.

[HalfLotus]

Iowa GOP moving vote-count to 'undisclosed location'

Vote counting moved to secret location, campaigns not notified about location. Presumably Diebold reps are in the know, however.

[DaShi]

Good idea. They don't want the 'wrong' candidate getting the nomination.

[HalfLotus]

CNN skews poll in favor of Romney, over Paul. Honest mistake, surely.

A recent CNN poll appears to run counter to recent polling showing Ron Paul leading the Iowa caucus. The CNN poll shows Mitt Romney in the lead, and neoconservative champion Rick Santorum rising. But the CNN poll excluded from its sample Democrats and independents: precisely the group of people whom previous polling showed giving Ron Paul the lead. Thus, in suggesting a Romney victory, CNN is repeating the same polling mistake that many believe helped cause the Chicago Tribune to falsely claim that Thomas Dewey had defeated Harry Truman: they are polling a skewed sample of the electorate.

Here are the numbers for the four top candidates from the CNN poll:

Romney 25%
Paul 22%
Santorum 16%
Gingrich 14%

CNN reports these results with the headlines, "Poll: Romney on top in Iowa," and "Stunning turnaround for Santorum in Iowa."

But, as Nate Silver notes at FiveThirtyEight, CNN only polled "using a list of registered Republican voters and registered Republicans only."

To present a poll of people limited to those currently registered as Republicans as predictive implies a belief that on caucus day, there will not be a significant group of people there who are not now registered as Republicans. (According to the rules, voters can register as Republicans at the caucus.)

But no one outside of CNN believes this. As Silver noted, Public Policy Polling put the Democratic and independent share of the caucus electorate at 24%. The Washington Post put it at 18%. Public Policy Polling showed Paul beating Romney 39-12 among Democrats and independents. Of course, the key reason that these Democrats and independents are backing Paul is Paul's opposition to the wars. So, by excluding them from its sample, CNN is silencing antiwar voices -- nothing new there.

Suppose that Public Policy Polling was right about the composition of the electorate, and about the preferences of Democrats and independents. Let's see what happens to the CNN poll if you add the Democrats and independents back in.

Here are the numbers for the "adjusted" CNN poll:

Paul 26%
Romney 22%
Santorum 14%
Gingrich 14%

So, both of CNN's headlines in reporting its poll were substantially driven by CNN's decision to exclude Democrats and independents from their polling.

It's certainly true that in any event, the gap between Paul and Romney is not large relative to sampling error, regardless of the composition of the electorate; and it's certainly true that Santorum has risen and Gingrich has fallen relative to previous CNN polling.

Nonetheless, it remains true that the stories CNN told by their headlines were substantially driven by their decision to exclude Democrats and independents from their polling, and therefore, it remains true that the CNN headlines were substantially misleading.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert...b_1174668.html

[kentonio]

All they need to do is include the conspiracy nuts and the racists in the next poll, and he'll be sure to be on top.