You would be wrong. As long as I've been alive I've never come across another politician that thinks like Ron Paul. He got me interested in politics, something I really despise.

What he's saying is true. We are bullies of the world. 1913 was the start of a terrible path for America. It was sold to the highest bidder.

A few years back a very independently wealthy American fired up by events of the time said to me:

"How do you expect the Federal Governent and the politicians to solve your problems, when they can't even solve their own?"

I'm not denying that his views might be different from those of other candidates. I'm saying that if he ever were elected (which he won't) then I don't expect him to change much. He'd be the President. No more and no less. He's not any kind of supreme executive authority. He'd still have to run everything by the Congress and as long as that stays the same, America will stay the same.

Not true. A few examples should illustrate how meaningful a Paul presidency would be.

Presidents can veto new legislation which sends it back to Congress. That means that new legislation that a President Paul disagrees with (such as a SOPA, an NDAA etc) will require a 2/3 majority to pass.

Presidents, as chief of command, can unilaterally decide to recall the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Policy implementation is also the purview of the executive. A president can tell the DOJ not to prosecute marijuana charges, for example.

With every change of administration, a huge number of political appointments (also known as Schedule C) change hands. This is something like a tenth of the federal workforce. Usually these go to DC insiders, but that's not as likely with a Paul administration.

Yeah, that's my point. Making it harder to introduce NEW legislation is in favour of retaining the status quo.

The election is when? Later this year? Next year? I don't know.
Deadlines for withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are 2014 and 2015? You think Ron Paul is going to tell them to come back tomorrow?

Whoopdie-fucking-doo. Obama brings near universal healthcare to the Americans and Ron Paul tells the DOJ not to prosecute marijuana charges. I'm sure he'd go down in history as a greater reformer.

I really wouldn't be betting on an overhaul of the system. Ultimately, the President still needs to be popular and that means not biting the hand that feeds him. He doesn't preside over the nation in a vacuum, he is simply another piece of the puzzle and is very far from independent. Expecting a major overhaul of the system is an illusion. You've had how many changes in administration since, like, WW2? How many times has there been a radical change in policy?

Not harder, just more time consuming and with more pork added. All a veto like that would do is require more earmarks to buy off reticent lawmakers in the Legislative Branch. I worked on the Hill; close votes are just an excuse to shop out pet projects for government spending.

To stay on topic, I'll say that I agree with Ron Paul quite a bit. It is a shame that he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of getting nominated by the Republicans, much less elected to the Presidency, though. Other than that, I'll just vote for whomever the Republicans choose to run against Obama. At this point, I would vote for a moldy, rotten, smelly sack of potatoes over Obama, so that isn't saying much. :)

I think you missed my point, but never mind.

If you want to hear it, you can hear it directly from the man himself. http://youtu.be/n_rlfgPQaT8
But I suspect you've already made up your mind.

I think reasonable people can disagree about whether particular legislation is good or bad, and about the distribution of good and bad legislation. Reasonable people can also disagree on whether it is better to make it easier to pass good legislation, or to make it harder to pass bad legislation.

It remains to be seen whether the promises of Obamacare will actually materialize, see the recent Congressional Budget Office revision of the estimated cost (it doubled).

Anyone interested in seeing any of those promises actually pay out might do well to look at the plans of the various candidates regarding the deficit. You can come to your own conclusion about whose reforms are most sensible.

If you are correct that a change in president has only a marginal effect on outcomes, it does not follow that such a change is undesirable. A marginally better future is better than a marginally worse one.
That is an interesting observation and sounds quite plausible, but one would think that there is some kind of budget constraint on the availability of pork to buy off the additional legislators.

If I may, I would suggest that you consider supporting a third-party candidate. If Paul is not the Republican nominee, Obama will surely beat Romney even if he has your support.

Are you trolling here?
How about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8sTVIamljE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

I really wonder where you're going with this? I really wonder what your argumentation is behind this? Is it because Obama is a democrat? Or is it because Obama does not keep his promises? Or is it because he's black? I don't know what kind of justifications you republicans come up with, but obviously the situation is slightly more complicated than: "I'm going to close Guantanamo tomorrow," or "I'm going to fly our troops back tomorrow." It's interesting also that Ron Paul said that each day that your soldiers stay on foreign soil costs the American taxpayer money. Yeah, it does, but most of this money has already been paid well in advance (things like rent in a foreign country, and yes, America does pay a lot of money to rent land for military bases in other countries. That's how the world works.) So if you actually believe that Ron Paul would bring American troops back within a week, then wow, are you detached from reality or what?

As for me having made up my mind - I don't really give two shits about who's going to be America's next president. So you can take my opinion as that of a neutral outsider, more or less.

First of all, I never said whether legislation under a particular president would be good or bad? Why? Because to do so would be fucking moronic. For the vast majority, there is no "good" or "bad," there is simply "democrat" and "republican." That's what the Congress is there for, to decide whether something should be enacted or not. I'm sure that legalising gay marriage is reasonable for some. Perhaps not for others?

I'm not saying that Obamacare was done perfectly. Far from it. What I'm saying is that he did what was the inevitable. What was necessary. He made the first step, it's up to the upcoming governments to specify the details. A "first world" country without universal healthcare? Hilarity.

Sure. Marginally better is always preferred over marginally worse. As other forum members have already suggested in this thread - Ron Paul's domestic policies have pretty much been described from batshit insane to boarderline retaded? Now which boarder is Ron Paul likely to hinge on?

Also, I'd like to once again repeat the quote that I posted in post #97, just for emphasis:

Also, I'd like to cite an interesting reader's letter that was posted in The Economist (Feb 25- March 2 issue) that sprung to mind:
"SIR - We are coming out of the deepest economic crisis since the 1930s. There are vital questions to be asked about the respective roles of the state and the market. The middle class is acutely worried about its future for the first time since, when, ever? An authoritarian China with little respect for human rights is on the rise. Iran is close to attaining nukes and Israel wants to bomb the country.
But the Republicans want to make a political issue about limiting access to birth control through Obamacare? I mean, seriously?"

Nope, that is what deficit spending is all about. Even when politicians say they are 'decreasing funding' for something, they are merely reducing how much it is slated to be increased. Seriously, the day that one of the Big Three (Defense, Social Security, and Medicare) actually get a decrease in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, I may just keel over from a heart attack. BTW, in 2011, those three programs accounted for over 100% of our tax revenue; in other words, to balance the budget for last year one of those would have necessarily needed to be cut.

EDIT: To be clear, the cost of those three programs exceeded tax revenue when added to the fixed costs of government (wages, building upkeep, debt interest, and etc). So, I suppose the government could have sold properties, fired a bunch of government employees (or reduced salaries across the board), and reneged on some of our sovereign debt to make up the deficit difference instead of reducing spending on one of those listed programs.

Whether Obama would beat Romney is anything but a sure thing. There is a saying in American politics: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. Obama has left a lot of folks on the Left upset, so they may not all go to the polls like they did in 2008, however most on the Right would vote for anyone else just to see him gone. I don't know who would win (the election is still over half a year away), but Obama is far from a shoe-in against Romney or Santorum. The current frontrunners for the Republican nomination may be far from perfect, but they are the best chance there is to beat Obama.

Most of the election will have to do with the economy and Middle East tensions in the months leading up to the election. Financial markets generally dip in the summer, which would be bad for sitting elected officials such as Obama. However, I suspect tensions with Iran to rise, and most Americans are war weary; this favors Obama, as he hasn't seemed too inclined to come to Israel's aid so far (about the only thing I agree with him on) and Republicans are generally more hawkish.

As for third party candidates, there really isn't one that I am fully behind anyway. I am what you might call a Goldwater Republican: I want to reduce the size and scope of social programs by an order of magnitude, increase military spending, and ditch the whole 'social conservatism' family-values plank that Reagan added to the Republican platform in 1980. I don't think there is a candidate out there for me, honestly, so I just go with the most fiscally conservative one that I think has a chance to get elected.

That's not their point. It is instead that the federal government is forcing religious organizations to support something to which those organizations are opposed. Birth control and abortion happen to be in the details but it's not the major reason for this dispute. This isn't really that different than the argument about the Constitutionality of the so-called "individual mandate" of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Given that the current administration has handed out PPACA waivers to large businesses, state and local governments, and labor unions, I don't see it as a stretch to grant a more-focused waiver to religious institutions for this one thing, so long as those medications and procedures are still covered for reasons beyond simply birth control.

Truth be told (by "truth" I mean my opinion ; ) ), both sides have put out completely partisan rhetoric that has distracted from the real issue, that there are Constitutional matters that need to be attended to, as well as practical considerations of health care. The right says gov't wants to force you and I to pay for other people to get laid without consequence, while the left says birth control isn't affordable. They both conveniently leave out the details and have instead chosen, as always, the all-or-nothing sides of the argument. Dig down deeper and we'll find that the sensible folks on the right are concerned about gov't forcing religious institutions to pay for things they find antithetical to them, and the sensible folks on the left want to make sure that birth control is covered by insurance as a medication for actual ailments and not just for pregnancy prevention.

The whole thing got started because Ms Fluke sucks at making her point, choosing exaggeration over clear explanation.

Edit: what this issue really shows is that both sides will use any issue from which to cherry-pick facts for partisan gain and to bolster the spirits of the party faithful.

Most people pay tax for all kinds of things that they don't support. The fact is that being religious doesn't make one special. My views on certain things are ignored by the lawmakers. Boo hoo. The enactment of laws is done through a democratic process.
In my first year of university, I remember studying a particular case in which a particular individual refused to pay a certain tax because taxpayer money was used to fund the British army. He was a pacifist. The name of the case eludes me but I believe it made it all the way to the House of Lords (as it was then still known) and their judgment was effectively: "Tough."

I don't know the specifics behind this waiver system though, so feel free to ignore this.

I agree with you that these 'issues' are really just used for 'partisan' purposes - but what I (and the writer of that letter) were getting at is that most people don't care about the constitutionality of Obamacare. If you look at the opinion polls, you'll see that the overwhelming majority of Americans want economic concerns to be are the very forefront of the discussion. They don't want the Congress wasting their time arguing about abortion when the country is (very shakily) emerging from the deepest recession ever (or at least since the Great Depression). Most Americans simply want their politicians to sort the country out economically. Other concerns can wait for now.

How long ago was it that America was on the verge of default and the Republicans tried some more of this partisan bollocks in the Congress? Their ratings plummeted.

If we allow Catholics to not provide birth control, what do we allow next? Do Jehovah's Witnesses not have to have their insurance cover blood transfusions? Do Christian Scientists not have to provide medical care at all? No. The people should decide if they want to follow their employer's religious tenets and should not be forced into the religious line by allowing employers to restrict their health care coverage.

That's all well and good, but the Republicans are not trying to limit access to birth control. That isn't the issue, and whether or not one agrees with their premise - that a government that supposedly is not allowed to get involved in religion is, in effect, getting involved in religion - the point is that nobody is saying that people can't have their birth control of choice. With regards to birth control itself and ignoring the point about getting into matters of religion, the right is positing that if you want to participate in the fully voluntary activity of 'getting some', then a sex-participant can pay for the widely-available and inexpensive birth control devices / drugs him- or herself.

The left has turned this into exactly the premise you stated: limiting access to birth control through Obamacare. For one who uses birth control as a method to prevent pregnancy, the access isn't limited whatsoever. Where the right is making the big mistake, and this goes back to Ms. Fluke's inept "testimony" and their reaction to it, is that they're choosing to ignore that birth control has secondary uses as medications for actual ailments. Both are attaching themselves to positions that either aren't true (birth control is expensive and Republicans want to keep people from getting it) or ignoring the actual issues (birth control has legitimate medical purposes beyond prevention of pregnancy). Both of them are screwing up this simple issue.

Certainly, all of us are funding things we disagree with - that's the "beauty" of putting too much power in the hands of the federal government.

They're related, to some extent, going back to what was mentioned in a previous post: that the CBO has determined that <whoopsie!> PPACA is actually going to cost twice as much as initially promised, and that this larger cost of government policy isn't conducive to shoring up the economy. Likewise, love it or hate it, the people need to be on board with this stuff, and forcing pro-life supporters to pay for abortion services as a means of birth control simply is not going to work well to gain their approval of a plan for all. This is where the Constitutionality of it fits in (the mandate part of PPACA), and the opposition isn't restricted only to those of religious orientation.

You're right, we do want the nation to sort this stuff out. The difficulty comes in convincing folks that either way is the best way, or even that something between the two is something that can work out for all. I can argue with equal fervor both sides of the issue, but in the end it comes to this: annually spending ~40% more than the gov't takes in is a recipe for disaster. Piling on with a program that costs double the initial projections, well, that isn't going to help matters. Spending $600-800 billion annually on military stuffs isn't going to help. Maintaining the largest federal social programs in their current forms, that mathematically can not continue, isn't going to help. "See, we passed this program to take care of the people." Okay, but if the country's economy crashes as a result of the cost of those programs, then the programs themselves will be moot.

This is where Ron Paul, love him or hate him, makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a good thing that he's putting this viewpoint out there. His solutions may not be ideal but at least he's getting people to think about it.

Edited for a typo.

I'm not necessarily arguing their point, but only trying to point out that the argument itself isn't actually about birth control. But anyway, that can be, and has been, flipped the other direction - just take a look at unionization and "closed shops". And of course, we can throw out the ever-popular "slippery slope", which both sides use freely for any discussion du jour.