http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion...2/1?csp=34news

Hey, look, I get it, you love Ron Paul, never thought deeply about anything about any of his positions, don't care what they are, and you can't even imagine supporting someone else. Civil liberties, economy, leadership, none of this matters to you.

And apparently the fact that he's anti-science, baffled by any of the ideas, really, in economics, biology, etc. hangs around cypto-racists, and thinks IUDs result in the slaughter of untold billions doesn't give you pause; maybe you even agree with those positions. Maybe those add value for you.

But if you're just supporting Ron Paul because he's popular, might I suggest Romney or Obama? Maybe you'd be happier if you backed a winner.

Because Paul has an Austrian perspective on markets and doesn't see customers going to a place that subsidizes poorer customers as forcing them to do something.

It's this sort of disingenuous that makes this thread absolutely painful.

It's pretty clear almost everyone here would support GJ if he had any momentum whatsoever. And accusing RP supporters of not thinking about his positions?

I've done more reading on this candidate, watched more interviews, and delved deeper into the underlying theories more than I ever have with any candidate before, and I'm pretty damn sure 80%+ of American voters haven't put in the time researching their favored candidate that *we* have.

Nobody is claiming RP is perfect - he's human, he's old, he's Christian. He's also got the only program which will roll back our police state and end the ceaseless murder abroad.

You say we don't care about civil liberties?? I say YOU don't. If you did you'd vote for the guy who was against the racist drug war. If you cared you'd vote for the guy who will reign in the DHS, TSA, FBI etcetera. Instead you guys are all hung up on hypothetical when there is a very real emergency situation happening right NOW and the status quo politicians are supporting it.

Unbelievably depressing the amount of cognitive dissonance among people in this country.

" I oppose Ron Paul because he is against civil liberties. I'm voting for the guy who will reinstate the Patriot Act"

This is the sort of tricky social calculus that is needed when you need to choose between having things like the Civil Rights Act and the Patriot Act, or having neither.

+1

Ron Paul hasn't discussed trying to have the CRA repealed, and it was only the 1/10th of it that applied to private businesses that he opposed anyway.

It isn't fair in the slightest to suggest we are choosing between them.

i really liked the most recent articles about how RP is the solution to the Occupiers demands. seems a much better way to go about things than just bashing them. here they are again. (i think i got both these links in this thread)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-...b_1063092.html

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed...-be-televisedr

I disagree. You aren't the only Ron Paul poster in this thread, and you weren't whom I was addressing in that post.

I wrote out a stupidly long post, only for tannenj to remain baffled about what I didn't like about Paul.

Than you (singular) have, sure. And 80% is a low estimate.

Old and Christian excuses which of his imperfections? Give me a break. (And before get all outraged, that that's disingenuous, remember that tangent just before that Zygote started. Wholesale endorsement of everything Paul has ever said before reading it; and adoption of Paul's position afterward.)

Voting for a candidate does not mean loving every one of his or her polices. If you vote, there are a small number of choices, and they're probably all terrible.

We're not at the ballot box. We're talking in this thread. About ideas. We might agree on some outcomes, but Ron Paul frames everything in states' rights, not in civil liberties. I don't see how you can disagree with that. I'd prefer someone who advocated for the same outcomes for a direct, instead of indirect, reason.

Ron Paul's almost certainly never going to appear on any ballot I see. If he shows up, then we can talk about voting. Until then, we can talk about issues.

The level of hagiography and wholesale adoption of Paul's platform in this thread, sawdust and all, isn't really consistent with nuanced belief. I'm not sure what's so baffling about this.

We can talk about Paul on his own, or we we talk about the horse race. In the former case, I don't care how bad everyone else is. In the latter case, you need a reason to love love love Paul instead of Huntsman or Johnson (other horses already known to be lame).

Since you posted a couple more times about this, I just want to emphasize that this is a bad argument. Which candidates you passionately support, and which candidates you vote for are different, and in neither case do you need to adopt every since thing they believe.

"I like civil liberties. I'm voting for the guy who wants to change Federal law so Texas can ban sodomy."

This is a really easy game to play with Paul supporters as well. Still a terrible argument no matter which voter it's directed against.

Exactly.

Still comparing hypotheticals to real and present problems every other candidate will perpetuate and RP will try to solve.

And no RP doesn't frame everything as States Rights. He is the most passionate defender of the Bill of Rights and individual civil liberties on the political stage, he just thinks that States can regulate issues not specifically addressed in the Constitution as long as they don't infringe on the Constitution.

Also it should be obvious that as President there are some things he can do (pardon non violent drug offenders, withdraw troops, etc) and other things he cannot do, like change the Constitution.

When civil liberties and states' rights are in tension, Paul has favored states' rights. It's just not true that he is the politician who is the most passionate defender of civil liberties.

Paul's idea of what's "in the Constitution" is different from the law of the land, so who knows what that means. Clearly he doesn't think you have a Federally-protected right to privacy. (Did anyone ever chime in with Paul's thoughts on incorporation?)

Presidents have a lot of power. They appoint a lot of people who have a lot of power, including how to enforce laws, and interpret the constitution.

Paul may also get the opportunity to replace multiple Supreme Court justices, and in that situation his views on states' rights and the Constitution are extremely relevant. If he only nominates people who think Griswold and Heart of Atlanta were wrongly decided...

Isn't the legal logic the same for Griswold as it is for Roe? Like if you think the legal decision in Roe was wrong because it oversteps the role of the federal government from a Constitutional standpoint (activist judges, etc), then you have to also think that the precedent in Griswold was wrongly decided, right?

To make it way too simplified, Griswold created the right to privacy, Roe extended the right to privacy to abortions. You can theoretically support Griswold but not Roe, but I think Paul supports neither. The right to privacy has significant non-abortion implications. Specifically Lawrence v. Texas, which again should be a totally uncontroversial decision that made America a better place.

From my perspective, Griswold, Roe, and Lawrence all make the US better. I abortion and wish more people would get them. Outlawing contraception is lol stupid. And obviously there should not be anti-sodomy laws on the books. But I am sympathetic to the argument that there does not seem to be a right to privacy in the constitution and it was more or less made up because the justices wanted there to be one. The standard of a US Supreme court's legal judgement should never be "does this or that legal decision make the US a better place?" but should be based on the law, ldo. Your argument is much like the people saying that Alwaki's execution is good because he was a bad dude who was making bad youtubes about America. Well, maybe Alwaki's execution in a vacuum is a net positive, but even if that's a given it doesn't justify the disrespect for the rule of law and due process.

mjkidd: If you have not, I encourage you to go ahead and read the decisions in question. It's not as simple as saying "this makes things better." Actually, read the decisions that were overturned as well, in Bowers (by Lawrence) and Poe (by Griswold).

And now that the law is settled, why oppose it? There are a lot of things to be angry about.

If one noisily opposes the Civil Rights Act on the basis of "diminishing individual liberty" why is one is noisily opposing Lawrence on the basis of "states' rights", too.

You're welcome to point out what you think is inaccurate about that post. If you're disappointed with the moderation in this thread, I suggest that you report the posts in question.

I understand that the decisions were not using the rationale of "this makes things better" as a legal judgement. Fly was using that argument, and I was responding to him

Do I seem angry? I'm not, this issue isn't of much importance to me at all. But anyway, now that Al-Awlaki has been assassinated is it still OK for me to oppose the manner in which he was killed? Or is that just crying over spilled milk?

The reason I'm against a decision like Griswold is not because I don't want there to be a federal right to privacy. I would prefer that there is one. But from my reading of the constitution, I can't see how one exists. I would support amending the constitution to add a right to privacy, but don't support what I see as justices just pulling that protection from thin air. This is analogous to someone saying that he thinks that Al-Awlaki is a bad guy and should be put in prison and executed, but objects to the manner in which the Obama administration did so.

mjkidd- You're free to make that legal argument, but you need to understand that people in this thread as well as Ron Paul are not making that. They are saying things like

Sure. I didn't intend to imply otherwise.

Not at all.

Of course. Summary execution of citizens after secret condemnation by a Star Chamber is terrible. Let's say it was abolished by a process which I didn't like. I wouldn't pick that example to describe why I thought that process was bad for liberty.

Well, some would argue that the Constitution already was amended to give those rights (14th Amendment/Due Process argument), or even that this was already covered by the 9th Amendment. The justices who wrote those decisions will argue it better than I can, and my recollection is that the decisions are pretty readable, which is why I mentioned that.

But definitely, there are people who argue otherwise; those decisions were not unanimous, for example. I don't mean to discredit that opposition, just the choice to use this example to criticize this process.

Deserves emphasis.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...-poll-in-iowa/

Ron Paul won 82 pct of the vote in the NFRA Iowa voters straw poll

he also won the vote among non Iowan voters with 26 pct

I will not respond to "taxes = theft" crowd but you actually make sense so... :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAamTFSRICY (from 1:30).

The guy is conservative chief justice of SCOTUS appointed by G.W Bush.
This is consensus among both liberal and conservative judges that right to privacy is protected in the Constitution (extent to which it protects various areas are matter of debate though)
Of course if 300 million people read the Constitution everybody will see something different there. That's why we have courts and judges. The moment everybody pushes their version (like Ron Paul does) the whole point of the Constitution is moot. We can just as well let every state to have their own.
The reason we need some higher court than state ones is that if given state has a population which discriminates given minority or have particular bias in interpreting the Constitution (due to culture/educating system) judges comes from that biased population too. Once someone from that minority is put in front of the court she has a deck stacked against her. That's the reason originally appeal courts worked in "circuits" (judges traveled from state to state) - it's important that the judge is not part of community and has unbiased perspective on matters in question (ie. doesn't live nor interact with local community).
For the same reason we need one interpretation of the Constitution. As before, situation where California decides that right to snort cocaine in your private home is protected by the Constitution and Texas decides that right to have sex in your home isn't defy the whole point of having Constitution in the first place.
It's not possible to have 100% clear Constitution (if that would be possible to write such document then most lawyers would lose their jobs), how do you propose we decide how it applies to various matters if not by having SCOTUS ?

Hello, it was in 2003 that someone got arrested for having sex in his apartment, what hypothetical are you talking about ? Ron Paul policies would have very direct consequences of people being deprived of civil liberties they enjoy today (right to have sex, right to have abortion if you are raped) and discrimination will spread once again in schools once prayers are reinstated; the reasons for that are (in that order):
-some states still have anti sodomy laws (obviously now they can't execute them but once Lawrence is struck down they come into play again)
-many states have abortion law which ban all abortions; they did that just in case Roe were overturned so they can use it from day one
-Paul many times said he wants to struck down court decision to ban prayers in schools

Those are major direct consequences of Paul gaining power.
Comparing importance of those vs "FBI, DHS, TSA" or Patriot Act are like comparing right to snort cocaine in public to racial segregation.