Ron Paul emerged from last week's GOP debate as completely victorious according to every available benchmark and yet there is still a deliberate ploy to push the Texas Congressman to the sidelines on behalf of a terrified corporate media.

Every single major online poll shows conclusively that Ron Paul won the debate by a mammoth margin, trouncing the bought and paid-for shill Neo-Con candidates that the establishment press are sworn to uphold.

After just over 18,000 votes, the ABC News poll shows Ron Paul with 15,568 compared with nearest rival Mitt Romney who is on a paltry 245. After initially scrubbing Paul from the poll altogether, ABC were forced to add his name after a deluge of furious calls and e mails.
Ron Paul led MSNBC's poll right from the start and before it had even been widely circulated. ABC News claims that activist voting and multiple voting by individuals artificially inflated Paul's numbers, but both claims are demonstrably false. Keith Olbermann reported that Paul was ahead before the link was spread around message boards and blogs and to vote multiple times is impossible - the poll only allows one vote per IP address.
At time of press, Paul currently has 40% approval and 25% disapproval, compared with 43% disapproval and only 22% approval for Giuliani.
Capital News, an arm of CSPAN, had Paul leading his nearest rival Mitt Romney by 60% shortly before voting closed. Rudy Giuliani garnered just 6% of the vote.
Yahoo! News is still censoring Ron Paul by not including him in the list of candidates on their 2008 presidential coverage page, despite the fact that he is wildly popular and has trounced every other Republican candidate in ever online poll.
After receiving a flood of angry complaints, Yahoo promised to review the situation, but 24 hours later their page is still absent any mention of Ron Paul.
This whole fiasco underscores the reality that the President of the United States is not elected by the popular will of the people, but instead is selected from a highly restricted gaggle of pre-approved establishment lackeys.
The corporate media offer the excuse that Ron Paul is not a mainstream candidate and has little chance of winning, therefore their decision to afford him little coverage is justified. But this is a chicken and egg scenario - if the media routinely ignore so-called marginal candidates then they are never going to attain the exposure of a Giuliani or a Romney, thus the media bias becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If Ron Paul was afforded equal media coverage at every step of the way before the Republican nomination, and if America was still a free country with a democratic process that actually worked, then Ron Paul would be a shoe-in for the Oval Office.
But the fact remains, as is painfully underscored by the media's treatment of Ron Paul, that America is a banana republic where the president is not elected by popular will but selected by the corporate and military-industrial kingpins that for whom, upon inauguration, he becomes the puppet.

Paul, Not Romney, Won First GOP Debate

Chuck Baldwin
Wednesday May 09, 2007

No less than ten Republican hopefuls in the 2008 White House race participated in the first national GOP debate last Thursday, May 3. Even before the 90-minute debate had concluded, media pundits were declaring that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had won.

Even my friend, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough wrote, "During the debate I was flooded by e-mails from Republican activists and voters who told me Romney was dominating the debate." Scarborough went on to say, "Among those Red State Republicans (who will elect their party's next nominee), Mitt Romney won while McCain and Giuliani failed to meet expectations."

As with most political pundits, the entire focus of the debate centered on only three contenders: Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Romney. In fact, in his post-debate summary, Scarborough's only reference to anyone other than these three names was a fleeting mention of the "Sam Brownbacks of the world."

Yet, when one looks at MSNBC's own poll, a much different picture emerges. According to this poll, there was a clear winner alright, but his name was not McCain, Giuliani, or Romney. It was Texas Congressman Ron Paul.
Consider the before and after polls, as they appear on MSNBC's web site. See it at:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18421356/

The after-debate poll numbers for six of the "lesser" contenders were almost identical to the before-debate numbers. Almost identical. I'm speaking of Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Tommy Thompson. It is safe to say, that none of these men obtained any significant support as a result of their debate performance. However, the same is not true for Ron Paul.

Before the debate, Paul's polling numbers had a negative rating of 47%. His neutral number was 44%, and his positive number was a paltry 9%.

Compare those numbers with those of the three media favorites, McCain, Giuliani, and Romney.

John McCain's pre-debate polling numbers included a negative rating of 40%. His neutral number was 29%, and his positive rating was 31%. Rudy Giuliani's pre-debate poll numbers included a negative rating of 34%, a neutral rating of 25%, and a positive rating of 41%. Mitt Romney's pre-debate negative number stood at 41%. His neutral number was 31%, and his positive number stood at 28%.

Obvious to just about anyone is that Rudy Giuliani took a commanding lead into the first GOP debate. His positive number eclipsed his closest rival by more than ten percentage points.

However, everything changed immediately following the debate. Giuliani's positive number fell from 41% to a pitiful 24%. His negative number rose from 34% to 42%. And his neutral number rose from 25% to 34%. Clearly, Rudy Giuliani lost a lot of support in that first debate.

What about John McCain? Once again, his debate performance did not help his campaign. In this regard, Joe Scarborough has it right.

McCain's positive rating fell from a pre-debate high of 31% to a post-debate low of 19%. His neutral rating jumped from 29% to 37%.

Remember, media pundits seem to agree that Mitt Romney was the big debate winner. So, how do his numbers stack up?

Romney's post-debate positive rating DROPPED from a pre-debate high of 28% to 27%. His negative number also fell slightly from 41% to 37%. And Romney's neutral number rose from 31% to 36%. I ask you, Do those numbers reflect victory? I think not.

Compare the numbers of McCain, Giuliani, and Romney to those of Ron Paul's. Remember, before the debate, Paul scored a dismal 9% positive score. But after the debate, Paul's positive score skyrocketed to an astounding 38%. In other words, Ron Paul's positive number is eleven percentage points higher than his closest rival. Paul's negative number went from a pre-debate high of 47% to a post-debate low of 26%. His neutral number also dropped significantly from 44% to 36%.

Without question or reservation, Ron Paul was the clear and obvious winner of the first GOP debate, at least according to the more than eighty-four thousand respondents (at the time of this writing) who took the MSNBC online poll.

Which leads to another question: Are the media elite watching the same debate that the rest of us are watching or are they looking at something else? I think they are looking at something else. And that something else is money.

They see only the GOP's "Big Three" as having the potential to raise $50 million-plus for their respective presidential campaigns. That means, in their minds, all others are also-rans who have no chance to win and are therefore ignored. And let's face it folks, when it comes to Washington politics, there are only three considerations that even register with big-media: money, money, and money.

However, make no mistake about it: Ron Paul clearly and convincingly won the first GOP debate. It would be nice if someone in the mainstream media would acknowledge that fact.

In addition, someone in the mainstream media should ask why Ron Paul did so well in post-debate polling, because I predict that Paul's upcoming performance in South Carolina on May 15 will be equally spectacular. He may even emerge from that debate as a serious challenger for the nomination. I personally hope he does.

Ron Paul is the only candidate on the Republican ticket who would seriously challenge the status quo of the neocons currently running our country into the ground. He has a voting record unlike anyone in Congress.

As has been reported by many, Ron Paul has never voted to raise taxes, has never voted for an unbalanced budget, has never voted for a federal registration on gun ownership, has never voted to raise congressional pay, has never taken a government-paid junket, and has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch of the federal government. Furthermore, he voted against the Patriot Act and was one of only a handful of congressmen that voted against the Iraq War.

Furthermore, it was Ron Paul who introduced the Sanctity of Human Life bill in Congress, which, had it passed, would have granted federal protection to every unborn child and would have nullified Roe v Wade. In addition, Ron Paul is one of the biggest opponents to Bush's push to integrate the United States into a trilateral North American Community. Ron Paul also supports ending the Income Tax and dismantling the Internal Revenue Service. In short, Ron Paul is big-government's worst nightmare.

All of the above became obvious to voters during the six-plus minutes that Ron Paul had the national spotlight. That is why his poll numbers surged following the debate. Imagine what could happen if Paul is given more time to articulate his constitutionalist agenda. He could win more than the debate--he could win the election.

Jacob G. Hornberger
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hornberger/hornberger126.html
Thursday May 10, 2007

During the recent MSNBC Republican presidential debate, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul made three profound points on U.S. foreign policy that the American people would be wise to heed. Needless to say, Paul’s three points, being libertarian in nature, aren’t likely to be favorably received within the Washington, D.C., establishment, especially among lobbyists for the military-industrial complex. Perhaps that is why, despite Paul's first-place finish in post-debate polls conducted by MSNBC, ABCNews.com, and C-SPAN – or maybe because of those results – the Washington Post used its lead editorial on Tuesday to specifically question Paul’s participation in the rest of the Republican presidential debates.

The first point was that the Iraq War violated the traditional American policy of foreign nonintervention that characterized our nation through most of the first 125 years of its existence. What Paul was referring to was summed up in the speech that John Quincy Adams delivered to Congress on the 50th anniversary of the Fourth of July: that America does not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and that, if America were ever to embrace such a policy, the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force” and she would become “the dictatress of the world.”

What better example of the validity of Adams’s admonition than President Bush’s war on Iraq? On his own initiative and without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, President Bush sent the nation into war against Iraq in an attempt to destroy the monster known as Saddam Hussein. In the process, the United States has become a brutal occupying power that has brought not liberty but rather death, destruction, torture, mayhem, and civil war to the Iraqi people. Moreover, with its long-time foreign policy of embargoes, sanctions, regime-change operations, kidnappings, rendition, torture, detentions, invasions, occupations, and overseas prisons, in the eyes of many people around the world, the United States has indeed become “the dictatress of the world.”

The second point that Paul mentioned was with respect to the declaration-of-war requirement in the Constitution. Recognizing the historical propensity of rulers, especially ones with standing armies at their disposal, to start wars on their own initiative, the Framers separated the power to wage war from the power to declare war. The idea was that if the president failed to secure a declaration of war from Congress, he would be precluded from waging the war, no matter how vital he thought it was.

Unfortunately, that constitutional requirement has long been ignored despite the fact that the Constitution has never been amended to eliminate it. It goes without saying that if President Bush had gone to Congress to seek a declaration of war against Iraq, it is entirely possible that Congress would have pierced through his WMD rationale for the war and denied him a declaration of war, thereby enabling the nation to avoid the quagmire in which it now finds itself.

The third point that Paul made was with respect to government spending. Asked whether he supported a repeal of the income tax, he did not hesitate to respond in the affirmative, but he did not leave it there. He pointed out that it is impossible to reduce or eliminate income taxes without reducing or eliminating the programs that the tax revenues are funding, e.g., the U.S. government’s pro-empire, interventionist foreign policy, of which the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been just one part. Many years ago, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman made the same point when he stated that the true cost of government was not the tax burden but rather the level of government spending.

A related point that Paul emphasized during the debate was the insidious tax known as inflation, a process by which public officials simply print the money to fund their programs, and which ultimately is reflected in rising prices. The beauty of inflation, from the standpoint of public officials, is that most people don’t realize that federal spending is the culprit behind rising prices. Thus, when the price of commodities such as oil and gas begin to rise, people just assume that it is because of greedy people in the private sector rather than because of federal spending on the rebuilding of Iraq and other federal programs.

The three points that Ron Paul made in the MSNBC debate hold a key to the liberty and well-being of our nation. That is also why our Founding Fathers considered them so vitally important.

Ron Paul's Online Rise

Chris Wilson
US News
Thursday May 10, 2007

To those who say the Internet arcs toward the trivial, try this on for size: Currently, the most searched-for phrase on the blog aggregate site Technorati.com is Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Paris Hilton is No. 5.

Commentators often refer to the Internet as the great equalizer, but when it comes to the 2008 election, it appears that the murky economy of Web traction may even give an edge to the long shots. And Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas and an avowed Libertarian known around D.C. as "Dr. No" for his persistent opposition to just about everything, is a long shot if there ever was one. He has yet to break 2 percent in a poll of GOP candidates and raised just under $640,000 in the first fundraising quarter of the year, pocket change compared with the three GOP candidates who topped $10 million.

But his supporters have flocked to the Internet with such enthusiasm that Paul is now showing up among the much richer candidates in various measures of Internet traffic. Using sites like Digg.com, which allow users to vote on their favorite items to vault them to more prominence on the site, they keep a steady diet of Ron Paul material coming through the pipelines.

Technorati spokesman Aaron Krane confirmed that, to the best of the company's knowledge, the online support for Paul is genuine. (Tech-savvy devotees occasionally attempt to enlist programs called "bots" to artificially boost their candidate on search engines, but Krane said Technorati is usually able to detect and delete the cheaters.)

So how are a comparatively small number of supporters able to keep up--and in some cases outpace--with the publicity machines of opponents with much more money and support?

"Necessity is the mother of invention," Krane suggests, arguing that, while coverage in big-media circuits requires a lot of spending on campaign appearances and TV spots, supporters of the fringe candidates have better reason to resort to this kind of guerrilla warfare in cyberspace.

-Both ABC News and MSNBC show Paul trouncing his rivals again despite Fox News' best efforts to shoot him down last night. Ron Paul is made of sterner stuff and this snowball is only getting bigger!-

The Ron Paul Smear Campaign

Doug Kendall
SCHeadlines
Friday May 18, 2007

By now, it is painfully obvious to most people in the freedom movement that Republican presidential hopeful, Ron Paul, has been targeted for elimination—by his own Party. The politically-connected elite within the Republican Party, along with allied organizations and operatives, are working overtime to make sure that Ron Paul is burned at the stake for daring to speak the truth and defy the Good Ol’ Boy system.

In all honesty, Dr. Paul should have known that he would be set up in the second debate—after he scored so high in poll after poll, following the first debate—and after he made it clear that he would not tow the neo-con, police-state, Giuliani-style “war” on terror line.

Everyone from Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, so-called “conservative” news websites and columnists, and even local talk radio shows have done everything in their power to define Ron Paul as a “nut-job,” “dope,” and “moron,” calling for his removal from the debates because his views are supposedly “dangerous” for the country. Glenn Beck even went so far as to repeatedly label Ron Paul a “libertarian”—because there is always some kind of negativity associated with it, when Beck uses it—and then used that as a vehicle to beat up on Libertarians, in general, masterfully trying to kill two birds with one stone.
It’s very telling, and very sad, watching these elitists attempt to exterminate those who favor increasing freedom by reducing the size and scope of government.

The latest and most sickeningly obvious attempt to discredit Ron Paul, called “Big Outrage,” is coming from Fox News.

Fox News anchor, John Gibson, recently stated that the second presidential debate got a little “spicy” after “Paul suggested that the US actually had a hand in the terrorist attacks.” He even went so far as to attempt to link Paul to the 911 Truth crowd and Rosie O’Donnell—whose picture they flashed, twice, during the five-minute segment, along with the tagline, “ROSIE O’DONNELL STRONGLY BELIEVES IN 9/11 CONSPIRACY THEORIES.”

Gibson said that the 911 Truth movement has “infected people like Rosie O’Donnell, and one in three Democrats, and many other Americans—evidently, including Congressman Ron Paul.”



To make matters worse, he brought columnist and Fox News contributor, Michele Malkin, into the segment and said he would have expected to hear something like this from the Democrat debates.

In perfect neo-con newsperson style, Malkin stated, “Ron Paul really has no business being on stage as a representative of Republicans,” apparently because of the 911 Truth “virus.” She then went on to further drive the point about 911 Truthers being mainly democrats, and mentioning something about a mental illness that typically affects people on the Left, called “Bush Derangement Syndrome.”

I have lost no love on Democrats, either, but anyone who is even remotely familiar with Ron Paul knows that Malkin’s attempt to link Paul to Democrats is laughable.

If you look closely, you will see that Ron Paul’s statements had nothing to do with the 911 Truth movement, but Fox News is spinning it in that fashion.

In so many words, Paul stated the obvious and basically repeated the findings of the 911 Commission’s report: Meddling in the affairs of others often fosters animosity and a desire for retaliation, and we would never allow other countries to do to us some of the same things that the US is doing to them—and it amazes me to see the scores of people who cannot seem to grasp those facts.

The 911 Truth movement seeks to discover whether or not the Bush Administration had foreknowledge about, or actually had a hand in, the September 11th attacks—and that has nothing to do with Ron Paul’s statements. 911 Truth deals with conspiracy, but Ron Paul spoke of consequences from our brand of foreign policy—two very different things.

Being an anarcho-capitalist, I do not care for government—small or otherwise—but Ron Paul is a step in the right direction, and he is certainly the most freedom-oriented and fiscally responsible candidate in the Republican stable—and it says a lot about the Republican elites who are using character assassination techniques to discredit and silence him, instead of debating the issue.

Karl Marx would be proud.

During a radio interview, Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) once said, “The hallmark of the Republican Party has always been freedom,” but everything I’ve seen lately further confirms that his statement couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve always known, but this is just icing on the cake.

I’ve heard Republicans invite Libertarians to join the Republican Party, to work within a bigger, established Party, but this situation should serve as a warning to Libertarians, and any other freedom-loving types, that you should resist the temptation.

Freedom has no place within the Republican Party (or the Democrat Party).