HELL YES, SHE IS DISAPPEARING DESPITE HER RHINO-LIKE GIRTH

"THEY ARE EXTREMELY COMPLICATED AND UNEXPLAINABLE

TO THE AVERAGE PERSON'

lib•er•tar•ian

n. 1. a person who believes in the doctrine of the freedom of the will
2. a person who believes in full individual freedom of thought, expression and action
3. a freewheeling rebel who hates wiretaps, loves Ron Paul and is redirecting politics

By Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch

Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page B01

How to make sense of the Ron Paul revolution? What's behind the improbably successful (so far) presidential campaign of a 72-year-old 10-term Republican congressman from Texas who pines for the gold standard while drawing praise from another relic from the hyperinflationary 1970s, punk-rocker Johnny Rotten?

Now with about 5 percent (and climbing) support in polls of likely Republican voters, Paul set a one-day GOP record by raising $4.3 million on the Internet from 38,000 donors on Nov. 5 -- Guy Fawkes Day, the commemoration of a British anarchist who plotted to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605. Paul's campaign, which is three-quarters of the way to its goal of raising "$12 Million to Win" by Dec. 31, didn't even organize the fundraiser -- an independent-minded supporter did.

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When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism is able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of campaign cash on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it's clear that a new and potentially transformative force is growing in American politics.

That force is less about Paul than about the movement that has erupted around him -- and the much larger subset of Americans who are increasingly disillusioned with the two major political parties' soft consensus on making government ever more intrusive at all levels, whether it's listening to phone calls without a warrant, imposing fines of half a million dollars for broadcast "obscenities" or jailing grandmothers for buying prescribed marijuana from legal dispensaries.

Paul, who entered Congress in 1976, has been dubbed "Dr. No" by his colleagues because of his consistent nay votes on federal spending, military intervention in Iraq and elsewhere, and virtually all expansions of federal power (he cast one of three GOP votes against the original USA Patriot Act). But his philosophy of principled libertarianism is anything but negative: It's predicated on the fundamental notion that a smaller government allows individuals the freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit.

Given such a live-and-let-live ethos, it's no surprise that at a time when people run screaming from such labels as "liberal" and "conservative," you can hardly turn around in Washington, Hollywood or even Berkeley without running into another self-described libertarian.

The lefty Internet titan Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas penned a widely read manifesto last year pegging the future of his party to the "Libertarian Democrat." The conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg declared this year that he's "much more of a libertarian" lately. Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, "South Park" co-creator Matt Stone -- self-described libertarians all. Surely it's a milestone when Drew Carey, the new host of that great national treasure "The Price Is Right," becomes an outspoken advocate of open borders, same-sex marriage, free speech and repealing drug prohibition. As Michael Kinsley, an arch purveyor of conventional wisdom, wrote recently in Time magazine, such people are going to be "an increasingly powerful force in politics."

Kinsley is hardly alone in recognizing this trend. In April 2006, the Pew Research Center published a study suggesting that 9 percent of Americans -- more than enough to swing every presidential election since 1988 -- espouse a "libertarian" ideology that opposes "government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres." That is, a good chunk of your fellow citizens are fiscally conservative and socially liberal; in bumper-stickerese, they love their countrymen but distrust their government. Anyone looking to win elections -- or to make sense of contemporary U.S. politics -- would do well to understand the deep and growing reservoir that Paul is tapping into.

Though relatively unknown at the national level, Paul is hardly an unknown legislative quantity. A former Libertarian Party presidential candidate, he has at various times called for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA and several Cabinet-level agencies. A staunch opponent of abortion, he nonetheless believes that federal bans violate the more basic principle of delegating powers to the states. A proponent of a border wall with Mexico (nativist CNN host Lou Dobbs fawned over Paul earlier this year), he is the only GOP candidate to come out against any form of national I.D. card.

Such positions may not be fully consistent or equally attractive, but Paul's insistence on a constitutionally limited government has won applause from surprising quarters. Singer Barry Manilow donated the maximum $2,300 to his campaign; the hipster singer-songwriter John Mayer was videotaped yelling "Ron Paul knows the Constitution!" and 67,000 people have signed up for Paul-related Meet Up pages on the Internet. On ABC's "This Week" recently, George Will half-jokingly cautioned his fellow pundits, "Don't forget my man Ron Paul" in the New Hampshire primary. Fellow panelist Jake Tapper seconded the emotion, saying, "He really is the one true straight talker in this race."

Yet Paul's success has mostly left the mainstream media and pundits flustered, if not openly hostile. The Associated Press recently treated the Paul phenomenon like an alien life form: "The Texas libertarian's rise in the polls and in fundraising proves that a small but passionate number of Americans can be drawn to an advocate of unorthodox proposals." Republican pollster Frank Luntz has denounced Paul's supporters as "the equivalent of crabgrass . . . not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff." And conservative syndicated columnist Mona Charen said out loud what many campaign reporters have no doubt been thinking all along: "He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

When conservatives feel comfortable mocking the victims gunned down by Clinton-era attorney general Janet Reno's FBI in Waco, Tex., in 1993, it suggests that a complacent and increasingly authoritarian establishment feels threatened.

And little wonder. In the 1990s, conservative Republicans rose to power by relentlessly attacking Big Government. Yet the minute they took control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, they kicked out the jams on even a semblance of fiscal responsibility, signing off on the Medicare prescription drug benefit and building literal and figurative bridges to nowhere. From 2001 to 2008, federal outlays will have grown by an estimated 29 percent in inflation-adjusted terms, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The biggest Big Government expansion during the Bush era is the one that Americans now despise most: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose direct costs are already an estimated $800 billion, plus 4,000 American lives. Paul's steadfast bring-the-troops-home stance -- not just from Iraq, but Korea and Japan as well -- is the major engine powering his grass-roots success as ostensibly antiwar Democrats in the majority can't or won't do anything on Capitol Hill.

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But if war were the only answer for his improbable run, why Ron Paul instead of the perennial peacenik Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic congressman from Ohio whose apparent belief in UFOs is only slightly less kooky than his belief in the efficacy of socialized health care?

Part of the reason is Republican muscle memory. Paul's "freedom message" is the direct descendant of Barry Goldwater's once-dominant GOP philosophy of libertarianism (which Ronald Reagan described in a 1975 Reason magazine interview as "the very heart and soul of conservatism"). But that tradition has been under a decade-long assault by religious-right moralists, neoconservative interventionists and a governing coalition that has learned to love Medicare expansion and appropriations pork.

So Paul's challenge represents a not-so-lonely GOP revival of unabashed libertarianism. All his major Republican competitors want to double down on Bush's wars; none is stressing any limited-government themes, apart from half-hearted promises to prune pork and tinker on the margins of Social Security.

College kids (a key bloc of Paul's support) have seen no recent evidence that the GOP has anything to do with libertarianism. Yet there's no reason to believe that Democrats will do anything useful about the government intrusion that so many young people abhor: the drug war, federal bans on same-sex marriage, online poker prohibitions, open-ended deployments in Iraq.

This is the mile-wide gap in the Maginot line of "serious" Washington politics. Undergrads aren't the only ones weary of war and moralizing, and more interested in exploring new frontiers of technology and culture than in heeding the stale noise coming from inside the Beltway.

More than at any other time over the past two decades, Americans are hungering for the politics and freewheeling fun of libertarianism. And with the dreary prospect of a Giuliani vs. Clinton death match in 2008, that hunger is likely to grow even faster than the size of the federal government or the casualty toll in Iraq. Ron Paul may lose next year's battle -- though not without a memorable fight -- but the laissez-faire agitators he has helped energize will find themselves at the leading edge of American politics and culture for years to come.

gillespie@reason.com

They call it flyover country. These are the parts of the United States that the pundits and prognosticators of American politics see just occasionally - and usually from several thousand feet. It is a land where people shop at Wal-Mart, eat at Dairy Queen, work two jobs to make ends meet and have a Bible at home. They can decide on their vote with the help of talk radio, cable television and the internet - or from a combination of rumour, scraps of hard information and gut feeling.

Iowa and New Hampshire are the early-voting states into which the east-coast campaign "bubble" bounces every four years. They provide the stage for the opening acts. But it is in flyover country where the 2008 presidential election will be won and lost.

"There's less hustle and bustle here than on the coasts and a different outlook on life," said Marla Russ, a secretary and part-time policewoman at a football game in Weatherford, Oklahoma. "There's pride in the land and trust for each other. Things are still done on a handshake."

So is Hillary Clinton the "polarising" figure we hear so much of in the media? Can only a Democrat win in 2008? Is America ready to elect its first female or black president? Has the letdown of the Bush years left the average Joe Schmoe yearning for the Clintons?

With a year to go before the country votes for its 44th president, The Daily Telegraph embarked on its "Crossing America" project to find out. The answers that Julian Simmonds, photographer and videographer, and I got were often surprising. They provide little comfort for Mrs Clinton but not much more for any other politician. Although few people have no opinion about the 2008 candidates, the election has yet to grip the American imagination. And for most, their final decision remains a long way away.

Travelling principally by road in between hops by air, we reported as we went along, posting video, text and photographs on the Telegraph website each night. Our odyssey was enhanced by the emails and blog comments we received from Americans suggesting routes, berating us for skipping over their town or promising to show us a slice of true American life if we stopped down their way.

"Try small-town restaurants, country stores, truck stops and outside houses of worship after services," advised MyTelegraph's racefan. "You will be intrigued to discover that people can think for themselves."

Saulflieder urged: "Follow Highway 61 along the Minnesota-Wisconsin border and experience this wonderful drive that Dylan devoted one of his best albums to. Duluth, Minnesota, is a must-stop if you want to meet." Sadly, we could not get everywhere, but we were able to pursue several readers' tips.

We set out from Portland, Maine, on the north-east coast of New England on a diagonal route to the California port of San Diego in the south-west. The return leg started in the Seattle suburbs of the Pacific north-west and ended at the Atlantic on a beach in Florida, America's most south-eastern state.

In between, we stopped at places such as Wooster, an Ohio town hit by the wave of house foreclosures, Hannibal on the Missouri banks of the Mississippi and El Dorado (pronounced with a "ray" rather than a "rah" in the middle), an oil-boom town in the Kansas flatlands of Middle America.

We spoke to a megachurch minister in Washington state, new citizens in California, a cowboy doctor in Wyoming, a Kentucky country singer in Nashville and believers in UFOs in a dusty New Mexico town. Some interviews were arranged, but most discussions flowed from impromptu encounters in diners, parking lots, bars and shopping malls.

Mrs Clinton might be the frontrunner in the polls, but almost everywhere we went people questioned her candidacy. Many stated bluntly that they did not want a woman in charge. "It's a man's world," said Hugh Laflin, 62, a Kansas truck driver. "Would a Middle East sheikh talk to a lady president?"

A Vietnam veteran in Arizona and a Florida gun-shop owner were among those who made crude jokes about America "going to war every 30 days" under a female president. We never brought up Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances, but many ordinary Americans did. "She couldn't keep her own home together, so how can we trust her to manage America?" asked Micki Martinson, a housewife in Somerset, Pennsylvania.

While we found many people who hated Mrs Clinton, those who loved her were few and far between. Certainly, many said they would vote for her, but the reasons cited tended to be her status as the top Democrat, the fact that she was battle-tested against Republicans and - for some women - the fact that she would be the first female president.

"I'm always amazed how we can screw things up," said Steve Ayers, a coffee-shop owner in Hannibal. "Maybe the way we screw it up this time is by nominating Hillary - across the Midwest that would be the only way of unifying Republicans."

Views about President George Bush ranged from vitriolic hostility to mild disappointment. But many seemed to view him as irrelevant in terms of the 2008 election, not least because no Republican candidate is trying to assume his mantle.

Although Mr Clinton is no longer the villain he was for many in the late 1990s, there was precious little evidence of nostalgia for the Clinton years - another alarm bell for the Hillary campaign.

Support for the Iraq war was thin in most places - though far from non-existent - but backing for American troops was strong and, on balance, most people thought Islamic extremism needed to be confronted. When national security dominates an election campaign, the advantage traditionally lies with Republicans.

But the anti-Hillary mood does not necessarily translate into happy days for her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, or the Republicans such as Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney queueing up to take her on. Beyond the coasts and outside the college towns, Obamamania was difficult to find. His lofty, professorial manner has made it difficult for him to connect with ordinary Americans and he could well go the way of earlier "outsider" Democrats running on a platform of change, including Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas and Bill Bradley. Obama's lack of experience was a staple of conversations about him.

Although few people cite Obama's race as a negative factor, there are clearly worries about whether he is too exotic a creature for Middle America. Some openly speculated that he was a Muslim - the result of snippets from his background cited in emails that have dropped into inboxes everywhere.

A childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii and mixed-race parentage in some ways epitomise modern America. But voters are often most comfortable with the candidate they can best relate to - something Bush tapped into in 2000 when he played down his Yale education and chose not to reveal how often he had travelled abroad.

The great and the good of Washington decreed long ago that Mr Giuliani, who favours abortion and gay rights and has previously advocated gun controls, was too liberal to secure the Republican nomination. Not so in the flyover states, where in the post-9/11 world, defending America trumps everything else among conservatives.

"I have always admired Giuliani, especially after 9/11," said Grita Poehle, a German-born new citizen in San Diego. "If he can do for America what he did for New York, that would be good."

If there was a single message from Americans everywhere, however, it was that they cannot stand politicians. "They all lie all the time," stated the Hertz attendant at the airport in Wichita, Kansas. "The 2008 election? I wouldn't cross the road to vote anyone," vowed our waitress at the Village Inn in Casper, Wyoming.

Apart from the war on terror, the issue we were confronted by again and again was illegal immigration - a preoccupation of Democratic as well as Republican voters. "We did everything legally and so should they," said Ljiljana Zezelj, 38, a new citizen from Croatia. "Nothing will work in this country until we secure our borders," said Laura Dietz, a retiree in Phoenix, Arizona.

Just before the Crossing America project, the Telegraph's Washington staff produced two top 100 lists of the most influential conservatives and liberals in the United States - an undertaking that drew huge attention through CNN, the Chicago Tribune and the Drudge Report.

But Crossing America reminded us that the most influential voices in the 2008 election - the most open contest since 1928 – are those in flyover country. Once the parties choose their candidates, these are the people - cynical and anxious, unimpressed and disillusioned - who still have to be persuaded.

"HEY A VAT OF SMIRNOFF JUST FOR ME...WILL IT BE ENOUGH?"

THAT PARTICULAR HO WAS DOING A ONE NIGHTER WITH DENNIS KUCINICH

THIS SKANK MAKES MICHAEL JACKSON APPEAR NORMAL

HUH???  IS IT A TRAINWRECK?  ARE THE WHEELS COMING OFF?

SIOUX CITY, Iowa —  Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s campaign admitted Friday that it planted a global warming question in Newton, Iowa, Tuesday during a town hall meeting to discuss clean energy.

Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elliethee admitted that the campaign had planted the question and said it would not happen again.

"On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton's energy plan at a forum,” Elliethee said.

“However, Senator Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.”

In a state where the caucus is held sacred and the impromptu and candid style of the town hall meeting is held dear, Clinton’s planted question may come as a great offense to Iowans.

"It's a calculated risk but what the hell, we don't have to feed the bitch.  By the time she burns through the blubber she can starve for all we care."

I've read Ed's blog extensively and conclude that Ed is a genius and is totally on target.  It amazes me how Ed is always one step or more ahead of the skanks he refers to.  I think Ed has a career in political punditry any time he wants.  Keith Olbermann needs a replacement.  BAD.

As Hillary Clinton positions herself for a presidential run, a former fund-raiser is moving ahead with a lawsuit claiming the New York senator orchestrated the largest campaign-finance fraud ever by an American political campaign.

In an interview with WorldNetDaily, Los Angeles millionaire lawyer and businessman Peter Franklin Paul asserted Clinton failed to declare to the Federal Election Commission more than $2 million in contributions – a massive omission he believes prevented her 2000 senatorial campaign from going bankrupt in the crucial final weeks.