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The Ron Paul Revolution (Time)
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| Krypton |
Anybody see these people around. Here in Tampa, they post up at a really busy intersection and under a giant tree have little rallies or barbeque. Real grass roots stuff in my opinion. I havn't seen better supporters of another candidate than those of ron paul, at least in my experience here in tampa, or from what I've seen in the media... Hell, I'll help out if he really wins nomination. This "revolution" is a long-shot..:confused:
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/theronpaulrevolution
The Ron Paul Revolution
By JOEL STEIN 1 hour, 58 minutes ago
It sometimes seems as if someone is playing a cruel practical joke on Ron Paul. He goes to a college and delivers the same speech he's given for the past 30 years of his political career, the one espousing the Austrian school of economics. Only now the audience is packed with hundreds of kids in RON PAUL REVOLUTION T-shirts who go nuts - giving standing ovations when he drones on about getting rid of the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard. After a speech at Iowa State last month, when nearly half the crowd had to stand because there were only 400 seats, a hipster-looking student worked his way through the half-hour-long line to shake Paul's hand. This was surely it - the moment when the straight faces would break and Paul would be wedgied up the flagpole. "When you see Bernanke," the kid said, "will you tell him to stop cutting rates when gold hits 1,000?"
Politics might be rock 'n' roll for nerds, but the nerds aren't supposed to be quite this nerdy. The leader of the disaffected in next year's presidential election - the Howard Dean, the Ross Perot, the Pat Buchanan - is a kindly great-grandfather and obstetrician whose passion is monetary policy. Paul, a 72-year-old hard-core libertarian Republican Congressman who is against foreign intervention, subsidies and the federal income tax, is not only drawing impressive crowds (more than 2,000 at a post-debate rally at the University of Michigan last month) but also raising tons of cash. In the third quarter of 2007, Paul took in $5.3 million (just slightly less than G.O.P. rival John McCain), mostly in small, individual donations. On Oct. 22, he aired his first TV ads, $1.1 million worth in New Hampshire.
The numbers are even more impressive considering that as of early October, 72% of G.O.P. voters told Gallup pollsters they didn't know enough about Paul to form an opinion. He has been able to attract followers in the debates, where he's presented a clear, simple philosophy of personal freedom and responsibility. He bluntly refers to the U.S. as an empire. And the nerdiness lends Paul's simple message an aura of credibility, especially on a stage with more polished politicians and their nuanced positions. "He's about something that American nerd culture can get on board with: really knowing one subject and going all out on it," says Ben Darrington, a Ron Paul supporter at Yale. "For some people, it's Star Wars. For some people, it's Japanese cartoons. For Ron Paul, it's free-market commodity money."
The libertarian's traction is most apparent on the Internet, where his presence far outstrips that of any candidate from either party. His name is the most searched, his YouTube videos the most watched, his campaign the topic of songs by at least 14 bands. "The last thing I would listen to is rap," Paul says. "But there's something going on when there's a rap song about the Fed." On Tuesday, both Paul and Tom Cruise were guests on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The actor went to Paul's dressing room to thank him for his work on a bill fighting the forced mental screening of grade-school kids. "Go. Go. Go. Go hard," Cruise said. Paul turned to an aide and asked, "What movies has he been in?"
Paul's fans - and there were more than 100 of them in Leno's audience, many of whom had flown in from out of town - are entranced by a man who responds to surprising information with "Wowee" and a jaw-dropped smile not often seen apart from 5-year-old boys and Muppets. "It's the message. Ron isn't that exciting as himself," says Andre Marrou, who was Paul's running mate when he ran as a Libertarian in 1988. "I saw him referred to in print as semi-eccentric. He's maybe 10% eccentric. It's his ideas that are eccentric. But it's basic Americanism." Paul is such a strict constructionist that he autographs pocket Constitutions more often than Tommy Lee signs breasts.
But Paul's popularity can't necessarily be explained by a previously undetected craving for gold-standard debates on college campuses. His message, even if packaged in obscure economic lectures, is that there is something very corrupt, very Halliburton-Blackwatery going on with our military-industrial complex, and that can attract some pretty weird followers. At the Iowa State event, a student stood outside in a tricornered hat and Revolutionary War–era suit, ringing a bell. Representative Tom Tancredo, another long-shot G.O.P. candidate, tells me that after a debate in New Hampshire, one of his staffers walked up to a guy in a shark costume and asked him if he was a Ron Paul supporter. "No. They're all nuts," replied the shark. "I'm just a guy in a shark suit." There is a subset of Paul supporters who believe 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government. And there are anarchists as well: They've picked Nov. 5, Guy Fawkes Day, for a fund-raising drive.
"His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass," says G.O.P. consultant Frank Luntz. "It's not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff. They just like him because he's the most anti-Establishment of all the candidates, the most likely to look at the camera during the debates and say, 'Hey, Washington, f--- you.'"
The one place Paul hasn't become a major player is where it counts: in the polls, where he hasn't broken above 5% and has yet to pass Mike Huckabee. Paul realizes he's not a favorite among the pro-war, pro-Bush Republicans. "A lot of times at my rally, I say, 'We're diverse. We even have some Republicans,'" he jokes. (His largest Meetup.com group gathers in liberal Austin, Texas; another sizable one is in San Francisco.) And he isn't sure where all this sudden support will lead.
Paul doesn't expect that he will win the nomination, and he has no interest in running as an independent again. But he also doesn't see himself endorsing one of the other Republicans in the general election. "Those people who support me wouldn't believe it," he says. "If I said, 'Giuliani's a great guy, and he'll reduce subsidies and bring the troops home'? I couldn't do that." Even nerd revolutions don't surrender. |
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| Fir3start3r |
Wouldn't have anything to do with the spambot vote would it? ;)
| quote: |
'Criminal' Botnet Stumps for Ron Paul, Researchers Allege
By Sarah Lai Stirland Email 10.31.07 | 12:00 AM
GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul addresses the Iowa Republican Party's annual Reagan Dinner in Des Moines on Oct. 27.
Photo: AP / Charlie Neibergall
If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to computer-security researchers who've analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail supporting the long-shot Republican candidate.
"This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge," says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's director of research in computer forensics. "The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?" Warner pointed to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act.
Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam. Warner himself says that he has no reason to believe that the Paul campaign had anything to do with these messages.
Some participants in the online political world have long suspected Paul's technically sophisticated fan base of manipulating online tools and polls to boost the appearance of a wide base of support. But the UAB analysis is the first to document any internet shenanigans.
The finding is significant, because Paul's online support -- as gauged by blog mentions, friends on social-networking sites such as MySpace and popularity in online polls -- has garnered him wide mainstream print and television coverage, despite his relatively poor performance in offline polling.
The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university's Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some cases from "trap" addresses that have never been used for any other purpose.
They were received by the lab following the latest televised Republican debate Sunday afternoon, and had 16 different subject lines, including "Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate! HMzjoqO" and "Ron Paul Exposes Federal Reserve! SBHBcSO." The random string of characters at the end is a common spammer's technique to circumvent bulk e-mail filtering.
The spam went to "several hundred" e-mail addresses harvested for the university project, says Warner.
The e-mails had phony names attached to real-looking e-mail addresses. When lab researchers examined the IP addresses of the computers from which the messages had been sent, it turned out that they were sprinkled around the globe in countries as far away from each other as South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Brazil.
"The interesting thing was that we had the same subject line from the same IP address, and it claimed to be from different users from within the United States," Warner says.
One e-mail was designed to look as if it came from within a major Silicon Valley corporation, he notes. But when the researchers looked up the IP address, the computer from which the note was sent was actually in South Korea. Another e-mail that was designed to look as if it came from Houston was sent from Italy.
That pattern led Warner to conclude that the messages had been laundered through a botnet -- also a standard spammer practice, though a decidedly illegal one.
The body of a message examined by Wired News covered familiar Paul campaign themes, such as ending the war and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. It also read:
Ron Paul is for the people, unless you want your children to have human implant RFID chips, a National ID card and create a North American Union and see an economic collapse far worse than the great depression. Vote for Ron Paul he speaks the truth and the media and government is afraid of him.
Last week, the prominent conservative blog Redstate banned new Paul supporters from posting on its site because of their "shilling" for the candidate in conversations that had nothing to do with politics. Other sites have disabled their online polls, because they suspected that they were being gamed by Ron Paul supporters.
Notwithstanding such charges, Paul's third-quarter haul of $5 million in campaign contributions seems to show that he does have a larger base of support than offline polls indicate.
Dan Hubbard of security company Websense reviewed one of the messages captured by the university. He believes that there was some type of spam-laundering in use -- though not necessarily a botnet.
"I have not seen a malicious-code sample yet that is sending these mails, therefore I would say it's likely that either they are using a botnet, or they are using open relays," he says, referring to unsecured e-mail servers that will accept anonymous e-mail and forward it back out to the internet.
Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said in an e-mail, "This is the first I've heard about this situation."
"If it is true, it could be done by a well-intentioned yet misguided supporter or someone with bad intentions trying to embarrass the campaign," he wrote while ferrying his boss to tape an appearance on The Tonight Show. "Either way, this is independent work, and we have no connection."
This article has been modified to clarify that Warner has seen no evidence suggesting that the Paul campaign is responsible for the spam.
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This is why he's been taken off a lot of online polls.
Not that I don't like the guy (even if he is a little far fetched) but his faux support online isn't helping his cause...
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sorry...forgot source...
>>Source<< |
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| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Wouldn't have anything to do with the spambot vote would it? ;)
This is why he's been taken off a lot of online polls.
Not that I don't like the guy (even if he is a little far fetched) but his faux support online isn't helping his cause... |
So I guess he spammed $5,000,000 into his campaign (3rd Q.)...:rolleyes:
They want to cut off his base which is a younger tech saavy generation (post baby boomer).. |
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| erdega |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
Wouldn't have anything to do with the spambot vote would it? ;)
This is why he's been taken off a lot of online polls.
Not that I don't like the guy (even if he is a little far fetched) but his faux support online isn't helping his cause... |
why in the world would you like him ?
I would think neocons and their followers would hate him and look for anything even made up to discredit him .
That story you posted isn't that credible either, it's completelly biased. |
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| Capitalizt |
| quote: | Originally posted by erdega
I would think neocons and their followers would hate him and look for anything even made up to discredit him . |
They do. Paul is the ultimate anti-neocon.
| quote: | | They just like him because he's the most anti-Establishment of all the candidates, the most likely to look at the camera during the debates and say, 'Hey, Washington, f--- you.'" |
That's why I like him :D |
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| eROs.au |
| Just what we need. Let's try to keep the YouTube spam out of this one though. |
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by erdega
why in the world would you like him ?
I would think neocons and their followers would hate him and look for anything even made up to discredit him .
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I've never mentioned that I didn't...? :conf:
| quote: |
That story you posted isn't that credible either, it's completelly biased. |
How can WIRED magazine, a tech rag, be biased toward politics?
What possible agenda could they have other than their interest in how the internet plays with politics? |
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| venomX |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
So I guess he spammed $5,000,000 into his campaign (3rd Q.)...:rolleyes:
They want to cut off his base which is a younger tech saavy generation (post baby boomer).. |
Smokes and mirrors. Convince the actual followers that you have an even larger amount of followers and they will be even more supportive because now they believe you can actually win. You forget, he is a politician, just like the other ones you hate. He can also be lying, just like all the other politicians. For someone who constantly states the one should be a free thinker and should question everything and be in constant search for the truth, you don't seem to question your own beliefs much.
Life could just as easily be the opposite of what you all profess anyways.
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Law 32
Play to People’s Fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses
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48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers |
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| Q5echo |
| quote: | Originally posted by erdega
why in the world would you like him ?
I would think neocons and their followers would hate him and look for anything even made up to discredit him . |
Ron Paul is fine being a Congressman. i think he should run for Texas Senator. he'd have a better chance at winning that and would be the next logical and powerful step for him and his constituency.
he's a fine Legislator, a career committee man, but as the POTUS? hell no. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
Posting even more Ron Paul threads on an international electronic music forum isn't really going to increase his odds of winning.
There is no mandate, within the system or among the voters, to implement any of the loony reforms he is talking about. He wants to dismantle wide swaths of the American government (nevermind addressing the services that those institutions currently provide) and recraft them to fit the needs of the 18th Century.
Under Paul there would be no federal reserve - great, our economy would be completely unprotected. There would be no department of education - great, there go student loans (didn't think of those, did you?). There would be no Department of Homeland Security - great, I suppose no inter-agency security network is better than a semi-functional one. There would be no USAID - great, the numerous development projects that are carried out under the auspices of the federal government would disappear and the rest of the world would really have reason to think we don't care. We would no longer be part of the United Nations - great, who needs friends with enemies like these... ermmm wait. The State Department would be vastly downsized - great, because we have too many diplomats as it is.
Yeah, sounds like a winner!
I'm all for reforming the system, but please, give me something that is feasible. |
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| Trancer-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Posting even more Ron Paul threads on an international electronic music forum isn't really going to increase his odds of winning.
There is no mandate, within the system or among the voters, to implement any of the loony reforms he is talking about. He wants to dismantle wide swaths of the American government (nevermind addressing the services that those institutions currently provide) and recraft them to fit the needs of the 18th Century.
Under Paul there would be no federal reserve - great, our economy would be completely unprotected. There would be no department of education - great, there go student loans (didn't think of those, did you?). There would be no Department of Homeland Security - great, I suppose no inter-agency security network is better than a semi-functional one. There would be no USAID - great, the numerous development projects that are carried out under the auspices of the federal government would disappear and the rest of the world would really have reason to think we don't care. We would no longer be part of the United Nations - great, who needs friends with enemies like these... ermmm wait. The State Department would be vastly downsized - great, because we have too many diplomats as it is.
Yeah, sounds like a winner!
I'm all for reforming the system, but please, give me something that is feasible. |
Thank you, thought police officer :p
And no, please don't worry folks, the people who've led us down this dark and dreary path still have your well-being at heart and as soon as they've cornered the market on genetically modified foods, our drugs (both illicit and prescription), the oil and all of the other natural resoources, they're going to come and help us all out in a nice, kind totalitarian system of government. :rolleyes:
I think that Ron Paul is one of the only Candidates who stands against them. |
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| erdega |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
I've never mentioned that I didn't...? :conf: |
that you didn't like him or what ?
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
How can WIRED magazine, a tech rag, be biased toward politics?
What possible agenda could they have other than their interest in how the internet plays with politics? |
Because they can and why not ?
Ron Paul has been winning TELEPHONE polls which I presume are paid calls , not internet ones and that article only talks about emails which are sent en mass commercially anyways. Furthermore the entire intro is completelly inflamatory, unobjective with words like "criminal" and meant to paint a negative picture in the reader before presenting some allegations by some "expert".
What do mass emails have to do with poll voting , even internet ones? |
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