<p>Ron Paul is psychotic. People are getting caught up in his ideas simply because he has worked well to present a message of "maverick" and "visionary." You might respect Paul's foreign policy, but his domestic initiatives are lunacy. And he does too vote with his party -- analysis shows he does so 80% of the time. Hardly a line-crossing unpredictable.</p>
<p>Here's a quote from a group I'm part of, that reconstructs Paul's extreme right-wing ideas:</p>
<h2>
[quote]
1. Eliminating public institutions of higher learning by privatizing the entire system, stubbornly voting against all measures to increase public funding of universities.</h2>
<h2>2. Destroying free public education at all levels K-12 and beyond (i.e. abolish the dept. of education, arguing that that all education should be a privately-owned venture, advocating home-schooling, opposing all public spending initiatives, eroding funding by eliminating taxes on the wealthy)</h2>
<h2>3. Staunchly opposing Universal Health Care and in favor of further privatizing an already corrupt corporate system that rakes in billions in profits for its ownership while close to 50 million Americans are uninsured and those that are insured get screwed, dropped or drowned in extremely costly co-pays and premiums.</h2>
<h2>4. Worsening the student debt crisis by further gutting (I say 'further gutting' because Bush and his GOP congress made putative cuts in 2005) programs like Pell Grants and Stafford Loans (put in place by LBJ) and giving even more of the student loan system over to a (corrupt, as we've seen from recent revelations in NY) billion-dollar private racket. Students in France and the UK strike over tuition increases and fight for grants and the abolition of loans... Ron Paul thinks we should slash all of it and only have private lenders who generate profits from college students' inability to afford high-priced tuition.</h2>
<h2>5. Destroying the environment: in the 109th Congress alone, he voted to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to shield oil companies from MTBE contamination lawsuits, against increasing gas mileage standards, to allow new offshore drilling, and to stop making oil companies pay royalties to the government for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.</h2>
<h2>6. Destroying the progressive income tax (reverting to the regressive system in place during the Gilded Age), letting the rich get out of paying their fair share and depleting funding for social goods. On Ron Paul’s view, it’s ‘communistic and against liberty’ for Bill Gates to be expected to pay higher taxes than working-class single mothers.</h2>
<h2>7. Supporting right-wing anti-choice laws and stripping women of reproductive rights.</h2>
<h2>8. Opposing Church-State Separation: From keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to co-sponsoring the school prayer amendment to keeping the Ten Commandments on a courthouse lawn, this "strict constitutionalist" isn't a big fan of the Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state. “Separation of Church and State”, on his view, is something that left-liberals simply made up from whole cloth.</h2>
<h2>9. Supports the repeal of public programming like NPR, PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities.</h2>
<h2>10. Supporting right-wing anti-immigration legislation. Opposes building a wall, but only because that would require ‘big government’, otherwise presumably erecting a wall would be a great idea for this xenophobic nativist.</h2>
<h2>11. Opposing worker's rights and virulently against workers organizing themselves against exploitative employers (has consistently voted against Employee Free Choice Act.)</h2>
<h2>12. Fervently opposes raising the minimum wage, in favor of abolishing the minimum wage altogether (a standard libertarian belief.) Let me repeat this one more time: Ron Paul argues that we should abolish the minimum wage altogether.</h2>
<h2>13. Repealing Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and every other social program put in place since the New Deal.</h2>
<ol>
<li>etc, etc, etc...</li>
</ol>
<p>Yes, Ron Paul is against the Iraq War, and so are Pat Buchanan and David Duke. The fact that he is against the Iraq war alone isn’t enough to actually make the guy worth a second look. He's also not the only person running for president who is advocating withdrawal (Kucinich (D) and Gravel (D), both of whom also have no chance of receiving a nomination, both advocate immediate withdrawal.) His non-interventionist position on Iraq cannot be a compelling reason to suspend judgment about the lunacy of his other positions.</p>
<h2>"But he's consistent throughout his whole career!" They will say. Yes, we agree, but since when is being consistently wrong about everything that matters a good thing?</h2>
<p>According to most major polls, Ron is pulling either " - " or "1-2%" among Republicans.</p>
<p>As a Congressman, Ron Paul (R-TX) has voted with his party nearly 80% of the time, which places him firmly within the bounds of a "rank-and-file-Republican".
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