Good (inexpensive) Wines

I'm came across a gem recently: Avalon - Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage 2004. I found it at Central Market for $12.99. It's better than most cheap wines I've had.

This Dona Paula Cabernet Sauvignon is pretty solid too. See this link as well if you like inexpensive wine.

If you know of any others, I'd love to hear about them.

Violence Begets Violence

I thought now would be a good time to repost Harry Browne's classic article from 9/12/01, since Ron Paul finally got Harry's talking points in the public spotlight...6 years after he wrote it. I'm glad somebody finally did. A lot of people were appalled by Harry's article and vehemently disagreed back then, but I knew he was right.

The terrorist attacks against America comprise a horrible tragedy. But they shouldn't be a surprise.

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth – that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda. But sanity was a prior casualty: it was the loss of sanity that led to war in the first place.

Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it. It is a terrible tragedy of life that the innocent so often have to suffer for the sins of the guilty.

When will we learn that we can't allow our politicians to bully the world without someone bullying back eventually?

President Bush has authorized continued bombing of innocent people in Iraq. President Clinton bombed innocent people in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Serbia. President Bush, senior, invaded Iraq and Panama. President Reagan bombed innocent people in Libya and invaded Grenada. And on and on it goes.

Did we think the people who lost their families and friends and property in all that destruction would love America for what happened?

When will we learn that violence always begets violence?

Pat Buchanan on Ron Paul

After the debate, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," came one of those delicious moments on live television. As Michael Steele, GOP spokesman, was saying that Paul should probably be cut out of future debates, the running tally of votes by Fox News viewers was showing Ron Paul, with 30 percent, the winner of the debate.

When Ron Paul said the 9/11 killers were "over here because we are over there," he was not excusing the mass murderers of 3,000 Americans. He was explaining the roots of hatred out of which the suicide-killers came.

Lest we forget, Osama bin Laden was among the mujahideen whom we, in the Reagan decade, were aiding when they were fighting to expel the Red Army from Afghanistan. We sent them Stinger missiles, Spanish mortars, sniper rifles. And they helped drive the Russians out.

What Ron Paul was addressing was the question of what turned the allies we aided into haters of the United States. Was it the fact that they discovered we have freedom of speech or separation of church and state? Do they hate us because of who we are? Or do they hate us because of what we do?

Osama bin Laden in his declaration of war in the 1990s said it was U.S. troops on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, U.S. bombing and sanctions of a crushed Iraqi people, and U.S. support of Israel's persecution of the Palestinians that were the reasons he and his mujahideen were declaring war on us.

Of the 10 candidates on stage in South Carolina, Dr. Paul alone opposed the war. He alone voted against the war. Have not the last five years vindicated him, when two-thirds of the nation now agrees with him that the war was a mistake, and journalists and politicians left and right are babbling in confession, "If I had only known then what I know now ..."

Follow Ron Paul

Keep up with his campaign here.

Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) is the leading advocate for freedom in our nation’s capital. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. He is known among his congressional colleagues and his constituents for his consistent voting record. Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution. In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the "one exception to the Gang of 535" on Capitol Hill.

Brief Overview of Congressman Paul’s Record
He has never voted to raise taxes.
He has never voted for an unbalanced budget.
He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
He has never voted to raise congressional pay.
He has never taken a government-paid junket.
He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
He voted against the Patriot Act.
He voted against regulating the Internet.
He voted against the Iraq war.

He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program. He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.

U.S. Foreign Policy Toward Iraq

This is a follow-up to the last post to help further prove Lew's point that, "the U.S. government is the enemy of the American people and their values." Check out the links at the end of the article.

Consider U.S. foreign policy toward Iraq:

1. The U.S. support of Saddam Hussein.
2. The U.S. furnishing of weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein and the correlative assistance provided by the U.S. in the use of such weaponry.
3. The Persian Gulf intervention.
4. The intentional destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage facilities, with full knowledge as to what effect such action would have on the long-term health of the Iraqi people.
5. The more than 10 years of brutal sanctions, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children from sickness and disease.
6. The deadly no-fly zones, which had not been authorized by either the UN or the U.S. Congress, and whose enforcement entailed the firing of missiles and the dropping of bombs that killed even more Iraqis.
7. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright’s infamous statement to “Sixty Minutes” that reverberated throughout the Middle East that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children had been “worth it.”
8. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of more Iraqis.
9. The torture and sex abuse of Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq, photographs and videos of which are still being kept hidden by U.S. officials because of their potential blowback.
10. The periodic rapes and murders that some U.S. troops have committed against the Iraqi people during the occupation.
11. The arbitrary and indiscriminate searches and seizures without warrants being conducted by U.S. troops.
12. The indefinite detentions without trial of some 20,000 Iraqi men and women in overcrowded prisons.

How can anyone honestly believe that such actions would not engender horrible anger and rage throughout the Middle East and, indeed, throughout the world?

As Ron Paul emphasized in last night’s debate, imagine if some foreign power – such as China – had done these types of things to the United States. Wouldn’t Americans experience anger and rage?

In last night’s debate Rudy Giuliani made a mistake that is commonly made by those who view the federal government as a deity. Conflating the U.S. government and the American people, he suggested in the post-debate interview that Ron Paul was “blaming America.” Actually, Paul did no such thing. He blamed the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policies for the morass in which our nation now finds itself. Like our Founding Fathers and the Framers, Paul understands that the federal government and the country are two separate and distinct groups, which in fact is precisely why the Bill of Rights expressly protects the country from the federal government.

Lew's Latest

on Ron Paul

Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.

Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.

So far as I know, Ron Paul is the only prominent public figure in the six years since who has given an honest telling of this truth. The explosive exchange occurred during the Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina...

It is a normal part of human experience that if you occupy, meddle, bully, and coerce, people who are affected by it all are going to get angry. You don't have to be Muslim to get the point. The problem is that most of the American people simply have no idea what has been happening in the last ten years. Most Americans think that America the country is much like their own neighborhood: peaceful, happy, hard-working, law-abiding. So when you tell people that the US is actually something completely different, they are shocked.

Now, I know this is a lot for the tender ears of Americans to take, who like to think that their government reflects their own values of faith, freedom, and friendliness. But here is the point that libertarians have been trying to hammer home for many years: the US government is the enemy of the American people and their values. It is not peaceful, it is not friendly, it is not motivated by the Christian faith but rather power and imperial lust.

Ron vs. Rudy

from CNN

Ron Paul Wins Another Republican Debate

I agree with Lew that Dr. Paul's performance in the debate last night was, "one of the great moments in the history of modern American politics."

Excerpt from Paul:

Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Ron Paul Compilation

RP on Hannity & Colmes afterwards

RP Update

Since the debate on May 3, Ron Paul:

1. Handily won two post-debate polls posted by event sponsor MSNBC.

2. Placed a close third (18%) in a post-debate poll on the conservative Drudge Report.

3. Won an ABCNews.com online debate poll with 84%.

4. Won a C-SPAN online GOP candidate poll with 69%.

5. Became the third most-mentioned person in the blogosphere, beating out Paris Hilton, according to the reputable Technorati.com.

6. Produced a YouTube.com video that was ranked the 8th most popular overall video, and the most-viewed political video.

7. Was featured, by popular demand, on the front of Digg.com.

8. Generated so many bulletin posts on MySpace.com that the site owner News Corp. blocked all additional posts about Dr. Paul.

9. Became a "most searched" term on Google and Yahoo!.

10. Saw a quadrupling of daily visitors to RonPaul2008. com.

"These figures speak for themselves," said campaign chairman Kent Snyder. "Ron Paul has quickly become a strong contender for the GOP nomination because of his powerful message of freedom and limited government."

The Dictatress of the World

John Quincy Adams delivered a speech to Congress on the 50th anniversary of the Fourth of July: that America does not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” and that, if America were ever to embrace such a policy, the “fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force” and she would become “the dictatress of the world.”

On his own initiative and without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, President Bush sent the nation into war against Iraq in an attempt to destroy the monster known as Saddam Hussein. In the process, the United States has become a brutal occupying power that has brought not liberty but rather death, destruction, torture, mayhem, and civil war to the Iraqi people. Moreover, with its long-time foreign policy of embargoes, sanctions, regime-change operations, kidnappings, rendition, torture, detentions, invasions, occupations, and overseas prisons, in the eyes of many people around the world, the United States has indeed become “the dictatress of the world.”

War = Organized, Systematic Violence

WWJD?

Dr. Ron Paul

This is the right guy for President.