Today we begin rating the Presidential candidates with our rating for Barack Obama. The Paul-O-Meter will give us a total score on 20 criteria. The closer a candidate gets to 100 points the more that candidate is like Ron Paul. For each criteria we will give the score and a short justification for that score. Read the results for Barack Obama below.
Who needs a Ron Paul endorsement when you have the Paul-O-Meter?
Everyone knows the perfection of Ron Paul. He is already a living legend. All future candidates are damaged goods simply because they are not Ron Paul. There is only one Ron Paul. So to see how other candidates measure up to his perfection we are introducing the “Paul-O-Meter”.
The Paul-O-Meter ranks candidates on a scale from 0 to 100 depending on how closely they are in agreement with Ron Paul on chosen criteria. Since no candidate can possibly equal Ron Paul, the highest score on the Paul-O-Meter attainable for candidates other than Ron Paul is 99. To simplify the ranking, each candidate will be graded from 1 to 5 on each of the 20 criteria. The 20 criteria are listed below, along with a short description for each.
NEW: Now you can submit your own ratings using our new Paul-O-Meter web polling service. Check it out here.
Walter E. Williams has been one of my favorite columnists over the years. Anytime I open up one of his columns I salivate for the contents. His latest column is another good one. This article finds Williams, as usual, effectively arguing against government intervention in our lives. Here is an excerpt.
Right now Congress tells each American how much should be set aside out of his weekly paycheck for retirement. How can they have the information to know what’s the best use for the $70, or so, taken from you and put into Social Security? Might you benefit more by saving that money to start a business, purchase tutoring lessons for your children, or putting it in a private retirement plan? Unlike congressional control of traffic signals and supermarkets, the effects of Social Security aren’t apparent because we don’t have the information about what people would have been able to accomplish if they were able to keep more of their earnings.
You might argue that saving for retirement is important, but so is saving for a home or your children’s education. Would you want Congress to force us to put money aside for a home or our children’s education?
Here is the 6 part (full hour) interview of Glenn Beck interviewing Bob Barr from tonight (06/06/2008). Good stuff. Note that without the commercials it is not a full hour.
Vern McKinley is challenging incumbent Frank Wolf in a Republican primary next Tuesday, June 10th in Virginia’s 10th congressional district. I live in this district and have heard some seriously scary things about Frank Wolf. I will not repeat them because I have no proof, instead I will try to focus on the issues where he and Mr. McKinley differ.
Vern McKinley is a principled Reagan Republican. I’m talking about the Reagan running for office, not the Reagan who forgot about cutting spending as well as cutting taxes. I suppose his Congress could be blamed for that. Frank Wolf used to be a Reagan Republican. He even ran supporting term limits in 1980. Almost 28 years have passed and he is still in office. Wolf, from the very beginning couldn’t keep a campaign promise.
On to the issues. If an issue is not listed it means that both McKinley and Wolf generally agree on the issue with a bit of room for differences in the margins. The point is to show where the candidates truly have a different world view.
Earmarks (AKA “bringing home the bacon”): Wolf likes to tout his SAFE commission, which is yet another Wolf investigative committee like he has proposed so many times in the past without much to show for it. The idea is to “examine” earmarking and figure out methods to curb it. This, in my view, is an establishment politician trying to have his cake and eat it too. It looks good on paper, but why did Wolf propose and get over $200 million in federal money in earmarks last year? Just another sly Wolf-like move, I guess. I hope people are paying attention this time.
McKinley on the other hand is almost running his entire campaign on “earmark” reform. He rightly criticizes Wolf on earmarks, saying that states shouldn’t use the federal government as an ATM machine. Funds for local projects should be raised locally. There’s some true federalism for ya. Bravo Vern.
Grades: Wolf gets an ‘F’ for being a shyster. McKinley gets an ‘A’.
Here is the audio of an excellent interview with Ron Paul this morning on WOR New York Radio. He discusses taxes, government expansion, economics, and his new book. The interview is little over 13 minutes long (commercials removed).
Ron Paul is like the smart kid in the class the teacher no longer likes to call upon to give answers because he’s right most of the time. In the case of solving the Social Security problem Ron Paul has a solution that both Democrats and Republicans could love. If only they’d pay attention to the man.
Yesterday, the trustees for Social Security and Medicare released a report saying that both will be completely depleted by 2041 and 2019 respectively. The “oxy-moronic” thing about this is that these programs are deemed “trust funds” in the first place. There’s certainly no trust in a fund that is slated to eventually be wiped out.
Throughout his campaign Ron Paul has repeatedly outlined a solution to the problem that gives both the Democrats and Republicans reason to smile. Paul proposes to utilize some of the massive amounts of money saved by switching to a non-intervention foreign policy to help those people currently dependent until the programs can be phased out over a long period of time. He would let the younger people immediately opt out of the program. The approach is a sensible and gradual approach.
American voters will have a choice between the lesser of two evils yet again in the Presidential election of 2008.
It is the equivalent of choosing mint chocolate chip over strawberry ice cream. Sure they taste different, but the end result is the same. You will still get fat. Or in the case of the election you will still get evil. Like ice cream, evil comes in many flavors. This year your featured flavors are fascism and socialism.
On the Democratic side you have the choice of two flavors: light vanilla socialism or french vanilla socialism. On the Republican side your only choice is a single scoop of soft serve fascism. Unfortunately, the political reality is that an independent or third party flavor will likely melt away into non-relevance unless enough of us truly want change.
In this interview Judge Napolitano (always a favorite of mine) promotes his book “A Nation Of Sheep” and in the end endorses Ron Paul without actually saying he endorses Ron Paul. It is a great interview and worth your time. It is in 3 parts.
This was a very good 25 minute speech at CPAC today. I only wish the media covered it more widely. He went in to his normal monetary policy stuff, but had some choice words about McCain as well. The portion about a strong national defense was also very good. Especially when he talked about Osama Bin Laden’s plan to financially bankrupt the United States. Well… listen to it yourself. Right now I have the audio. I’m guessing someone will have the video up as well at some point.
Liberty Maven
