Bostodelphia Super Tuesday Republican Primaries Endorsement: Ron Paul

How can we not love this guy? He characterizes those who oppose his movement as "Tolkien's Orcs." Where's all the money going? Who knows? But he's just now able to add his political friends to paid staff positions. People are not just giving up mad props, they're putting blimps up there for him!

Full disclosure, since our tangle with the Ron Paul movement over matters of basic media literacy, we've actually had more to say about Ron Paul's campaign than either Coddy or I have had time to really broach. That Orc thing, for instance. Please, those of you not putting a word into the good fight of the Democratic primary, we beg you. Drop your ballot for Ron Paul. The longer he stays in this thing, the longer we'll have a ready topic to blog about for you, dear readers. This is about more than Ron Paul. This is about you. And us. Specifically us having something for you to read.

We're Endorsing Ron Paul for the Republican Candidacy

Edit: Bostodelphia will be fleshing out our Edwards Endorsement as the MA primary approaches, and Philadelphia twiddles its thumbs until the late April PA primary. We'll also be giving a more coherrent endorsement for our selection from the Republican pool. Until then, here's a glimpse backstage at our careful deliberation process.--CTI

From a series of recent emails:

On Jan 8, 2008 3:34 PM, Cheesesteak The Impaler <cheesesteak.the.impaler@gmail.com> wrote:
Ok, should we do Repub nominations too, for the hell of it? We could even
refuse to nominate anyone, and do a quick run through why. I'm changing the
title to reflect your endorsement.

--cti

On Jan 8, 2008 4:47 PM, Cod Peace <cod.peace@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a short post:

"We refuse to endorse any of the Republican candidates because they
are all batshit fucking insane."

-CP

On Jan 9, 2008 9:24AM, Cod Peace <cod.peace@gmail.com> wrote:
We should endorse Ron Paul precisely because of the batshit crazy quality. He's an easy go to
when we run out of things to talk about, and I think his "base" may well be the electorate
equivalent of ComicCon (in terms of freakshowness copping "mainstream" appeal for a
weekend).

--cti

So there you have it! Ron Paul is the officially endorsed Republican candidate from Bostodelphia, based solely on his entertainment value.

And speaking of the Republican candidates...

The Republican candidates are collectively nuts on a number of topics, torture and illegal immigrants being amongst them. You've got them collectively endorsing torture, bashing immigrants while hiring them, and calling for a bigger tougher military and aggressive foreign policy. Meanwhile they also deny evolution and pushing Jesus on the rest of us (note to Romney who claims religion is necessary for freedom: are you utterly unacquainted with human history? Sheesh).

Of course the 'respectable' media doesn't call them on any of this insanity. Here's what I predict to see in the last Republican debate...

An illegal immigrant from Mexico is brought onto the stage. He is tackled by Tom Tancredo and held down while Ron Paul tasers him into submission. Romney and Giuliani then proceed to waterboard the guy while Huckabee praises Jesus. At this point McCain waves a sealed envelope containing evidence the poor guy was affiliated with the Oaxaca branch of Al-Qaeda and demands justice. The Republicans then fall on the purported Islamic Mexican terrorist/illegal immigrant/gay/migrant farm worker and beat him to death. Afterwards, the Giuliani and Romney camps will have dueling press releases over who was tougher on the now-deceased victim, Giuliani with his steel-toed boot kicks to the head or Romney using a spiked baseball bat to the gut. And the media will calmly discuss as though such a spectacle is an utterly ordinary affair in US politics.

Ron Paul Resurrection

Well, this guy fell off our radar too for a bit; and it looks like the MSM is currently fixated on the Huckabee v. Romney v. Giuliani threeway (an epic battle of monstrous political views I think we can safely term Destroy All Integrity. But he's back with an air force!

Now there'll be more said on this aerial maneuver in future posts. For instance, there's interesting campaign finance "logic" being applied here; but for the time being we at Bostodelphia are particularly tickled with this brand of optimism:

Imagine.. the mainstream media is mesmerized as the image of the Ron Paul blimp is shown to tens of millions of Americans throughout the day (and throughout the month).

Imagine: the major market media (new term coined, trademarked Bostodelphia, out of annoyance with the aforementioned MSM) are going to be captivated by a blimp. Does Goodyear even have their branded blimp anymore? Like the efforts of grassroots Ron Paul supporters to associate November's money bomb with the parliament bombing imagery of Guy Falkes and V for Vendetta, is it really smart to associate their candidate with a giant bag of hot air? I've been wrong on Ron Paul before, at least according to Ron Paul's own news machine. However, I think there's just something to kamakaze-quaint in this earnest effort to use really old media to generate Ron Paul buzz. In short, an attempt to get big media exposure without making media buys; but really, when was the last time a blimp made major news?

Blinded wit' Whiz: the Ron Paul Media Machinery Chopped and Served

Alrighty, so Bostodelphia's gained some attention via our coverage of the Ron Paul rally. Welcome to those of you who've dropped by and I hope a few of you stick around. We're still getting settled here, some of our furniture's not even been delivered, and we can't even agree on carpet or hardwood floors yet, let alone color of polish or fabric.

Now, I could have kept what follows in the commentary within the aforementioned Ron Paul thread, and it might sound redundant in parts to those who've been following that disucssion. However, it speaks to an issue bigger than just Ron Paul, and also outlines some general ground rules for productive discussion in this blog.

To begin, I said this earlier and I'll say it again, I could be well off with my 500. It's been over a decade since I had to perform crowd estimates with any sort of responsibility on the line, so yeah, I'm rusty at it. My number could have easily been inadvertently processed through a coefficient value reflecting the incredibly "underwhelmed" vibe the whole shindig had for me, the unconverted. For the record, I'm a registered Dem so have no stake in the Republican primary. I actually think a Ron Paul ticket would make the White House more of a cake walk for the Dems that it currently is. That said, I'm a fairly empathic person, and I can see why people are charged up by causes on the other side of the aisle. In this case, I wasn't feeling it. Not at all.

That said, I'm sticking with my number for the time being until someone else comes up with a more trustworthy figure for me to redact in favor of, a reputable source that also cites the means through which its number was derived. Both in these postings and on Digg Ron Paulists have offered this as contesting evidence:

Ron Paul Philadelphia Veterans' Rally Draws 5,000

Monday, Nov 12, 2007 - 11:19 AM
By NBC 13 Staff
PHILADELPHIA, PA.– Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul today addressed a crowd of over 5,000 enthusiastic supporters in Philadelphia. The Veteran's Day weekend rally took place from 1:00 to 3:00 PM at Independence Mall.

Hundreds of veterans and their friends and families heard country music superstar Rockie Lynne open for the Texas congressman and rising GOP contender, Dr. Paul. John Holland, the founder of Rolling Thunder, a leading advocacy organization for troops, veterans, and POW/MIAs, delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Congressman Paul, before the congressman addressed the crowd.

The rally coincided with the launch of the Veterans for Paul Coalition, which is composed of several hundred war veterans.

"Dr. Paul's support among veterans is extremely high," said Paul campaign spokesman Joe Seehusen. "These great patriots who have fought for our country know that only Dr. Paul's foreign policy of peace and secure borders can guarantee true national security, and they want him fighting for our country's freedom."

I and Coddy have pointed out two things to our challengers providing this "evidence." 1.) In no way does this "show us" because it entirely lacks both the photographic perspective allowing for empirical evaluation and any explanation as to where the number 5000 came from. 2.) This item from Channel 13 - an NBC affiliate serving Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Anniston Alabama noted for its crackerjack Philadelphia desk (do I have to say "not"?) - looks strangely like this:

Press Release: Ron Paul Philadelphia Veterans Rally Draws 5,000
November 10, 2007 7:00 pm EST PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA– Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul today addressed a crowd of over 5,000 enthusiastic supporters in Philadelphia. The Veteran's Day weekend rally took place from 1:00 to 3:00 PM at Independence Mall.

Hundreds of veterans and their friends and families heard country music superstar Rockie Lynne open for the Texas congressman and rising GOP contender, Dr. Paul. John Holland, the founder of Rolling Thunder, a leading advocacy organization for troops, veterans, and POW/MIAs, delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Congressman Paul, before the congressman addressed the crowd.

The rally coincided with the launch of the Veterans for Paul Coalition, which is composed of several hundred war veterans.

"Dr. Paul's support among veterans is extremely high," said Paul campaign spokesman Joe Seehusen. "These great patriots who have fought for our country know that only Dr. Paul's foreign policy of peace and secure borders can guarantee true national security, and they want him fighting for our country's freedom."

This duplication isn't some Shakespeare's monkeys fluke. Rather, the good staff of NBC13 decided to take a press release from the Ron Paul campaign and run it on their website unvetted with no corroborative work by getting in touch with say, their affiliate counterparts at NBC 10 in Philadelphia who haven't even bothered to archive any coverage of the rally. This isn't journalism. This is a sad comment on the state of modern network affiliate television journalism, and I'll go further to say that this problem not limited to television either. A note to the staff of NBC13: if you're just recycling press releases as news content, you're not being journalists, you're just "tools" on a lot of levels.

Press being picked up by press outlets and disseminated as news aren't anything new. In fact, it's been worse:


Those who know the story know that nothing in the Negativland angle was true, for those who aren't familiar with the facts of the matter:


Now the Ron Paul grass roots could be thinking they've successfully infiltrated the factual consensus by getting a remote news provider to uncritically distribute the campaign's press releases, and in the Paulists postings here and on Digg were rubbing their deceitful epistemological triumph in our faces. In which case, shame on you and don't insult our intelligence in the future. I get the feeling though that what we're dealing with here are some people who honestly believe that if it's on an NBC affiliated website, it's got to be true, regardless of the source's remote relationship to the location of the event or uncanny resemblance of the news item's text to the exact language of official campaign literature. If that is the case, how is anyone supposed to take seriously a group claiming to have a reading of the Constitution at the heart of their beliefs when they demonstrate in this discussion a complete lack of media literacy beyond the Sesame Street level?

Again, if an intelligent Ron Paul supporter can back the campaign claim up, thus proving me 90% blind, please do so. We want to keep this blog accurate when need be; and I got good health care so my vision corrective prescription will be covered. More importantly we want to cultivate a reasonable discourse based on intelligent discussion of thoughts grounded in critical evaluation of evidence, not a standard of evidence that wouldn't pass mustard in a high school research paper. So far Paulists, I'm even less impressed with the movement than when I left your rally.

"Timely" Declassification of PA Electoral Infrastructure

A follow up to our inaugural post. Looks like the good governor has rescinded the state's policy of keeping a lid on its polling locations.

So, while the state of PA no longer looks like Chicken Little on the homeland security front, the measure comes a bit too late for the activists organizations who had hoped to use this data to coordinate their efforts leading into next week's election.

(Thanks to Midnight Armadillo over at Democratic Underground's discussion boards. Look Coddy, someone's read us!)

PA election infrastructure now a "state secret"

So here we have various PA agencies colluding to not publicize a statewide list of polling locations, an action explained with a vague gesture to "security reasons." This whole thing just smells off. For one thing, the powers that be in PA homeland security cite the threat of terrorism, particularly the terror bombings in Madrid right before Spain's '04 elections as motivation. Someone in the "keep the people afraid dept." at PA homeland security should get re-examined on his or her knowledge of recent historic events. The Madrid bombings may well have affected Spain's election outcome, but they targeted a larger part of the county and city's infrastructure, its train and transit system. So I guess, by that logic my twice weekly commute out of Philly is going to have to be subjected to randomized time tables and a massive dog and pony show of PA paramilitary might come election day.

Huh, I'm not going to see that? Democracy will be defended simply by keeping "classified" a comprehensive accounting of the very places in PA where democracy is itself actually held up for account? In the minds of the homeland security "professionals", this may well be about security, but all this really accomplishes is the frustration of resource-strapped get out the vote campagins and other organizations invested in political participation, particularly those serving candidates outside of the political status quo. That real effect begs citizens to ponder more cynical calculations at play. The best way to ensure democracy is to make sure only the systemically entrenched can work the system.

This is homeland security alarmism via red herring threats to our civil fabric.