So, I took some time to analyze Ron Paul’s contribution statistics to see if the claim would stand up under scrutiny. After all, if the majority of the military is in the tank with Ron Paul, I’d like to know that going into the upcoming election season. What I found is revealing. I don’t want to give away the conclusion just yet, but I will say there is certainly a pattern that has emerged in the race for the Presidency that orbits Ron Paul’s campaign. I’ll explain shortly.

The campaign contribution figures for Ron Paul are available at opensecrets.org. Here are Paul’s top five donors, as reported by the Ron Paul campaign:

• US Army: $81,423
• US Air Force: $60,739
• US Navy: $58,267
• Google Inc: $34,191
• Microsoft Corp: $24,698

(Source: http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/contrib.php?id=N00005906)

The figures have gone up since Jan. 6th, which was expected. However, there is something strange about the numbers. The military branches are the top three donor groups for Ron Paul.

Really? The top three?

Only one other candidate in the current campaign, including all those who have already dropped out, shows ANY donations from the military; Herman Cain received $9000 from the US Army. But Ron Paul’s top three donor groups are US military personnel? Isn’t that highly suspicious? Frankly, it doesn’t pass the smell test. Even the other Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, shows no donations from the military.

Gary Johnson actually provides a good control for analyzing Ron Paul’s claims. Johnson’s platform on the use of the military is not much different from Ron Paul’s, e.g. we should bring the troops home, become more non-interventionist, and refrain from “nation building.” Yet Johnson has no listed contributions from the military. None.

Have all the libertarians in the military agreed to support Ron Paul? Probably not. But let’s get to what the actual figures tell us. It’s very enlightening.

The figures don’t actually prove that Ron Paul has any given level of support from the military; they are aggregate numbers. They actually prove too much. From a statistical standpoint, the military donor groups are outliers; these military groups are his top three sources, which should indicate that military donors are very politically active. Yet none of these same sources are donating to any other candidates. That’s unusual at best. If true, it would indicate a monolithic support for Ron Paul among active military personnel that excludes all other candidates, which is a statistical improbability.

Could there be other reasons why military donations are not being collected by the Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich campaigns? According to the author of Liberty Reborn, there are four,

“First, active duty personnel stationed overseas will often have their spouses make donation for their household to candidates. These donations are then listed under the spouse’s information which is often times not military related. Secondly is that members of the military, from my personal experience, hate to be used as political pawns and when they donate to political candidates they often do not list their military service as their profession. Thirdly, military personnel, as I have been told by military personnel themselves, generally really hate to be used for political purposes thus they again do not like to list their service on donations made to military candidates so that their donations cannot be used in this manner. And fourthly (sic) is that there is a concerted effort by Ron Paul supporters in the military to make sure that their donations are listed as coming from military personnel in order to perpetuate this talking point for political gain.”

Since there is no way to tell how many persons actually made donations to Ron Paul (it could be as few as five, for all we know), the best we can do is calculate, based on the contribution numbers we have.

As of Jan. 6th, Ron Paul could have had financial support from no more than about 4.4% of active military personnel, based on campaign contributions. Today, if we assume a $1 per person contribution level, it’s still only 13.7%. Since 200,000+ $1 donations is unlikely, let’s assume a $10/person level. It’s still less than 1.4%. But that percentage is actually more in line with exit polling numbers, which indicate that only 2.5% of Ron Paul’s total votes in military-heavy South Carolina were military voters.

The numbers above show, regardless of the total amount, about 1.4% support for Ron Paul among active military personnel. Is it possible that a large percentage of the balance of military personnel are politically inactive or contributing under other occupations? Yes, that is possible.  Can we reasonably assume that the other 98.6% did not contribute to any of the other three candidates? Absolutely not, but this is what Ron Paul’s campaign and supporters have asked us to believe.

Additionally, the figures that Ron Paul’s campaign provided to the government show that a claim of “$150,000 in Q4 alone” is very high. As noted above, he had pulled in a total of $65,270 as of Jan 6th, 2012, which included data from Q4. These are his official statistics.

I promised at the beginning of this column that I would explain the pattern I found. With the evidence above, I have demonstrated how Ron Paul’s campaign is claiming much more support from the military than it actually has. This pattern is a microcosm of the bigger claim the Paul campaign has been making for weeks, i.e. that it has more delegates than any other candidate. In similar fashion, however, they use some rather fuzzy math to arrive at that conclusion, as well as reliance on a big hope that the campaign is decided in a brokered convention that goes well for Ron Paul.

At bottom, it doesn’t look like Ron Paul’s military support, active or otherwise, is as strong as he claims. His campaign and his supporters are asking us to believe things that are statistically  unlikely. The actual numbers tell the real story. But don’t expect that to change the endless loop the Paulbots are programmed to repeat.

Russell Kirk

“Ever since the end of the Second World War, the tendency of American public opinion has been more or less conservative. But there exists some danger that conservatives themselves might slip into a narrow ideology or quasi-ideology—even though, as H. Stuart Hughes wrote some forty years ago, ‘Conservatism is the negation of ideology.’” -Russell Kirk, The Errors of Ideology

Despite Dr. Kirk’s warning, the slide into “a narrow ideology” has been an ongoing trend for people who call themselves “conservative” in recent years. This hardening of the mind is likely the result of two external causes, 1) a natural response to the leftist ideologies that seem to be carrying the day in government and the media, and 2) a lack of knowledge and understanding of what being “conservative” actually means, according to the minds who have defined it, due largely to an educational system that has worked tirelessly to extinguish such knowledge.

The difficulty is getting people to understand that the antidote to the armed doctrines of Ideology is not more Ideology, but “non-ideology.” In 2007, Erick Erickson from RedState.com criticized Mitt Romney for having “no ideology.” From the ideologue’s perspective, this is unacceptable. At best, the ideological mind assumes there is no way to predict how a candidate will act in a given situation; at worst, the assumption is that the candidate will never measure up to the expectations of the ideologue’s “aggressive political righteousness.” Ideology, the companion to religious bigotry, grants adherents permission to exterminate any opposition that threatens the vision of hegemonic superiority.

In the conservative mind, having “no ideology” is preferable in every way to the alternative. Ann Coulter points out in her column that Ronald Reagan didn’t trounce Jimmy Carter by being an ideological firebrand. “Reagan beat the odds and took out an incumbent by waging a charm campaign to win over independents, moderates and undecideds.” Mitt Romney’s biggest obstacle to the Presidency is not average Americans, it’s Americans who have turned politics into religion, on both sides of the political spectrum.

Ideology is “the politics of passionate unreason.” The Ideologue can never be an effective force for uniting disparate groups of people, aptly demonstrated by the current occupant of the White House and contradicting his own grandiose claims. The Ideologue sees everyone outside of his or her political orthodoxy as an enemy. In contrast, Dr. Kirk points out that “Conservatives…have the habit of dining with the opposition,” preferring reconciliation to the building up of what Edmund Burke called the “antagonist world.”

The conservative is guided by Prudence, what Patrick Henry called “the Lamp of Experience.” But our past experiences have been systematically hidden from us by Leftist historians and journalists, and we are left groping in the dark. Thirty years ago, Russell Kirk worried that, “…since the end of the Second World War, the American public has looked with increasing favor upon the term ‘conservative.’ Public-opinion polls suggest that in politics, the majority of voters regard themselves as conservatives. Whether they well understand conservatives’ political principles may be another matter.”

I worry that, despite our general unfamiliarity with our predecessors’ experience, we think we have found a candle to light our way.  But we will realize only too late that what we have lit is a fuse.

Photo by James Kegley

“Collectivism doesn’t work because it’s based on a faulty economic premise. There is no such thing as a person’s ‘fair share’ of wealth. The gross national product is not a pizza that must be carefully divided because if I get too many slices, you have to eat the box. The economy is expandable and, in any practical sense, limitless.” — P. J. O’Rourke

O’Rourke’s comment is right on. The primary difference between collectivists of any stripe and those who favor a free market is whether they believe (or admit) that the economy can be expanded.

The collectivist belief that the economy is a zero-sum game always leads to some form of deprivation. At first, it may be only deprivation of a given commodity; if there are 1,000 loaves of bread available, but 1,500 people who want it, obviously some are going to have to go without. This is a microcosm of the larger economy, e.g. where there is a limited amount of resources, some people may get more than others.

Enter “Social Justice.”  Collectivism being egalitarian in its philosophies, it is unjust that one of the collective have more than another. The limited wealth must be divided up as equally as possible. As more and more members of the collective community make demands on the available resources, the amount being redistributed gets smaller and smaller unless a way is found to increase the portion of each member.(1)

Otherwise, the collectivist soon realizes that the only way to ensure that everyone gets a practical share of the economic pie is to reduce the number of people making demands. At some point the elimination of 500 mouths becomes justifiable in the mind of the collectivist and, ultimately, even necessary. Deprivation of existence is transferred from the commodity to the consumer. Collectivist economies claim to make no value judgments between consumers and commodities–either are of equal value to society. And because the consumer is of equal value with the commodity, and the consumer is the source of demand that exceeds the capacity of the system to provide the commodity, the consumer can be forcibly eliminated as a threat to society. In effect, one could argue that the commodity actually has more value than the consumer, and a value judgment is made.

Collectivist economies also create deprivation at another level. An individual has the right to obtain food, clothing, and shelter–the necessities to preserve life. Collectivist economies cannot meet these demands in every instance. What’s worse, individuals are prohibited by law from obtaining those necessities outside of the system (which has already failed to provide). Thus, collectivist systems deprive individuals of the basic right of self-preservation. The death of a certain portion of the population, either through active or passive government policy, is the natural result of a philosophical belief in a zero-sum economy.

What, then, is the purpose of a collectivist government? Can we say that a collectivist government protects the people? How can it, when it can casually eliminate them or simply let them starve as a matter of economic policy? What does such a government protect?

The answer is it doesn’t protect anything. Collectivist government’s raison d’être is the promotion and establishment of an imaginary society. Socialism, Communism, Marxism, etc. are all attempts at creating a new society based on social theory and untested principles. All the old institutions (the societal realities) must be destroyed to make way for the new.

But those old institutions have upheld society for generations and are, in varying degrees, directly responsible for the prosperity of society. When you take those old ways away and replace them with new ways that have not been tried, the process of wealth creation stops and everyone suffers…except, of course, for those who control the new system. They make out like the bandits they really are.

_____________________________________________

(1) Barack Obama believes he has found the secret to overcoming this fatal flaw of collectivist philosophy: if you own or control the printing presses that create bank notes, you should be able to print as many of them as you want. He doesn’t understand that in a healthy economy, those notes represent actual wealth, not abstract wealth.

Albert Snyder Speaks At News Conference Following Court's Ruling

The Court is absolutely wrong on this one. The First Amendment was never intended to protect this kind of filth. The ruling is a complete perversion of the original intent. And for those who will argue the definition of original intent, James Madison wrote,

“I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution. And if that is not the guide in expounding it, there may be no security for a consistent and stable, more than for a faithful exercise of its powers. If the meaning of the text be sought in the changeable meaning of the words composing it, it is evident that the shape and attributes of the Government must partake of the changes to which the words and phrases of all living languages are constantly subject. What a metamorphosis would be produced in the code of law if all its ancient phraseology were to be taken in its modern sense. And that the language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founder, will I believe appear to all unbiased Enquirers into the history of its origin and adoption.” –James Madison, letter to Henry Lee, 1824

Our system of government is based upon a system of ordered liberty, and not upon some Libertarian notion of Utopia, where every man is a law unto himself. We live in a society, and the primary purpose of laws is to keep the peace within that society. The WBC is not interested in living peacefully with others. They should be the ones the Court tells to sit down and keep silence, not a grieving family.

The vermin at WBC may arguably have some form of liberty to express their opinion, but that does not nullify the right of the Snyder family to not hear it. The Court’s ruling forces the Snyder’s not only to hear it, but to endure it without recourse. With this ruling, the WBC is not coerced into changing its outrageous behavior. Instead, the Snyder family must alter their normalcy to accommodate a band of villains.

The Court ignores the Snyder’s right to be left alone, preferring an imagined “right” of anti-social, unbalanced neanderthals to spew filth on everyone within earshot. If this case were about physical abuse, the Court’s ruling would be tantamount to the Snyder’s having to endure multiple blows with no remedy for the injuries sustained. Nothing could be more shameful.

The AP has the story here. Other stories are here and here.

Stevens is most recently know for his involvement in a Department of Justice investigation in which Stevens was convicted of seven counts of lying on Senate financial disclosure statements to hide gifts from friends, including an oil company executive.

However, a judge later overturned Stevens’ conviction on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct and corruption among DoJ attorneys.

The trial and conviction cast enough of a shadow on Stevens that he lost his bid for re-election in 2008, prompting outrage among some Republicans who saw the entire fiasco as dirty politics taken to new lows.

Stevens spent 40 years serving the citizens of Alaska in the Senate, where he was known for his ability to bring millions of federal dollars to Alaska for various projects. One of the projects that caught the most attention was the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The project was intended to build a $223 Million bridge to Gravina Island from the Alaskan mainland, despite the fact that the population of Gravina Island is only 50 people. That works out to $6.7 Million per inhabitant. That kind of government waste helped to drive the creation of the Tea Party movement.

Sen. Stevens was 86.

In this video, we see a SWAT team has been called in to preserve order in the face of a tea part protest. Note the reaction from the protesters–peaceful compliance.

On the other hand, here is video of protest against the new, strict immigration law recently signed by the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer. Note the man being escorted away by police. He is a counter-protester whose life was threatened. Note the violence being enacted against the police for protecting the man’s right to life, which these protesters refuse to recognize.

In this second video, we see how liberals, progressives, and socialists treat conservatives. Why the great difference? Because liberals, progressives, and socialists don’t believe in equal rights. They believe only in their own “rights,” which includes the right to take the property of others by violence, as demonstrated by the two losers that stole a backpack from one of the tea party protesters.

Update: my favorite part of the above video is where the communists and liberals are shouting at the conservatives to “get educated,” while holding up a very large sign with word the “immigrant” misspelled (no, people, it’s not spelled “immagrant”). HA! Too much.

Here is another example of the major differences between these two movements (this one was in LA). I guess the Left wouldn’t be the Left if they weren’t looking for excuses to destroy things.

The article mentions that anarchist infiltrators may have been responsible for the damage. Ok…but the Tea Parties also had infiltrators, who were quickly sent packing. The immigration protesters didn’t stop the damage when they could and should have.

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“Our feeling is that the majority of the Republican Party delegates are now tea party people,” Brian Halladay, one of the founders of the grass-roots Utah Rising organization, tells Newsmax.

NewsMax also interviewed Dave Hansen, Utah GOP Chairman, who said,

“I’m sure they have a very strong bloc, and they may have control,” Dave Hansen, chairman of the Utah GOP, tells Newsmax. “But we won’t know that until we get to the convention.”

But the really interesting part is their discussion with Hansen concerning the fate of incumbent Senator Bob Bennett.

Dave Weigel of the Washington Post reported Tuesday that a recent poll of more than 1,000 GOP delegates in Utah showed that Bennett is the top choice of only 15 percent of them. Tea party favorite Mike Lee, an attorney and first-time candidate, was the top choice of 35 percent of the delegates polled.

Hansen is skeptical that Bennett is in as much trouble as that survey suggests, however.

The results from the straw poll taken today at the Utah County Republican Convention are in, and Bob Bennet is still carrying only about 15% of the delegates.

The Rasmussen poll quoted by NewsMax also fails to mention Cherilyn Eagar, who is in second place behind Mike Lee. Additionally, Rasmussen polled GOP voters, which may or may not have included delegates. And in Utah’s Primary system, the delegates decide who the voters will have to choose from on the ballot.

What this means is that, if these patterns hold up, Bob Bennett won’t have enough to win the first round of voting at the State Convention next month, because the first round of voting will reduce the field to three candidates. It looks like it’s no longer a question of Bob Bennett getting 40% or more of the votes, and the balance being split by his three challengers. Bob Bennett is fighting for his political career.

That would be the kind of political decision I would like to face more often–the choice between three equally competent candidates who are all strong conservatives.

He succeeded in making Bart Stupak look like a complete idiot. I’m not too sure that would be hard to do. As Moe Lane at Red State put it,

“Now, it’s like this. It’s one thing to be a prostitute. It’s another thing to be a cheap prostitute. It’s yet a third thing to be a cheap prostitute who accepts Monopoly money. But to be a cheap prostitute who gets stiffed on your Monopoly money? That takes skill.”

Almost ruined my keyboard with a mouthful of water when I read that.

So what I am getting to? The AP has released this story about Obama’s fulfillment of his promise to Bart Stupak that he would sign an Executive Order that would prohibit the use of federal funds for abortions in return for Stupak’s vote for the health care reform bill.

AP Special Correspondent David Espo writes,

WASHINGTON – Anything but jubilant, President Barack Obama awkwardly kept a promise Wednesday he made to ensure passage of historic health care legislation, pledging the administration would not allow federal funds to pay for elective abortions covered by private insurance.

Where’s the catch? It covers only those elective abortions covered by private insurance. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 13% of all abortions in 2001 were billed to private insurance. Additionally, the vast majority of abortions are obtained by single women, living below the poverty line. The women in this demographic are the same group that are most likely to not have private insurance, but are on some kind of government assistance. They cannot pay for abortions through Medicaid, but they can use state funds in several states. In other words, the women most likely to have elective abortions are the very people that ObamaCare was designed to cover (that is, when those provisions finally do actually kick in, four years from now), because of a lack of private insurance.

Barack Obama’s magnanimous promise to Bart Stupak will likely prevent federal funds from being used for only about 15% of all abortions. And that might still be a generous percentage.