Ron @ MindSay

I voted for Chuck Baldwin.

Before I start, I'd like to revisit our 8th grade civics class and discuss the Electoral College. 538 popularly elected representatives cast their vote which formally decides who becomes the next president and vice president of our country. This is what would be called an 'indirect election'. Each state has a number of         representatives that directly correlates to its population (also the same as its number of representatives in the House). The great state of Texas has 34. Louisiana has nine. California has the most with 55. In theory these electors vote according to the majority vote of the individuals in their state but in 27 states there are no laws to punish faithless electors. The Electoral College members can cast their vote for anyone eligible to be president. A situation something like this happened in 2000 when Gore won the national popular vote but lost the election due to the Electoral vote. So, in effect, your vote doesn't count. Mine doesn't either. We put our trust in to someone else to vote the way we would to decide what probably is the most important election in the world every 4 years. That means all this nonsense about 'A vote for Barr is a vote for Obama' and 'Why vote for him? He doesn't have a chance to win.' is bullshit. It also means that a candidate doesn't have to campaign to win votes from the majority of Americans, they just need the electoral votes of the states with the most representatives.
If there must be an Electoral College the number of votes each state gets should be related to it number of registered voters, not total population.
All that being said, here is my prediction for the way the College will vote:




You can find this nifty little thing here.

This doesn't at all mean I hoping for an Obama win, just the opposite. Anybody but Obama. But I do think Obama wins by a good margin.
Even if McCain can win in Florida, Obama still wins but in a much closer race. If McCain does win in Florida, he has a chance of winning the whole election but I just don't see it happening. Maybe I've read too much into some of these conspiracy theories and websites, but I think Obama has the election already won.

The problem with Barack is that he is full of shit and empty catchphrases. He's either telling a lie or spouting off something about 'hope' and 'change' without really saying what type of change or what type of plan he has.
Universal healthcare is a bunch of garbage. America is the only major industrilized country in the world without some form of government subsidized healthcare and we need to keep it that way. Anybody whos ever been to or had a family member in the VA has seen government funded healthcare at work. I agree with Dr. Ron Paul on the topic of health care costs.

   From the Ron Paul Library:

   "One big problem arises from the 1974 ERISA law, which grants tax benefits to        employers for providing health care, while not allowing similar incentives for individuals. This results in the illogical coupling between employment and health insurance.  As such, government removed the market incentive for health insurance companies to cater to the actual health-care consumer. As a greater amount of government and corporate money has been used to pay medical bills, costs have risen artificially out of the range of most individuals.

Only true competition assures that the consumer gets the best deal at the best price possible by putting pressure on the providers.  Patients are better served by having options and choices, not new federal bureaucracies and limitations on legal remedies. Such choices and options will arrive only when we unravel the HMO web rooted in old laws, and change the tax code to allow individual Americans to fully deduct all healthcare costs from their taxes, as employers can."

While I don't know this firsthand (I was born in 1981) but from what I have learned, in the 50's & 60's there were no HMO's. People paid for check-ups and other routine doctor visits out of pocket. Insurance was bought by individuals from private companies and used for unforeseen medical costs (surgeries and such). Regular doctor visits weren't excessively costly since physicians weren't billing an HMO, they were billing the consumer and competing for business. Now that doctors bill insurance companies there in no reason for them not to charge the maximum allowable amount. The government, by interfering with the free market, has taken away competition and caused the price of healthcare to skyrocket.  This is explained much better in Ron Paul's book The Revolution: A Manifesto.

While I think Obama is full of shit, I don't think McCain is enough of a 'maverick' to make a real difference. I'd say I respect John McCain a hundred times more than I do Barack Obama. I also think his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate saved his campaign from getting compeletly blown away by Obama. I don't agree with all of his ideas either, but at least it seems like he's telling the truth.
McCain's idea about spending $300 BILLION to bail out homeowners is an awful plan. All this talk about banks and lenders acting unmorally and deciving people looking to purchase a home may be true, but as a consumer you need to be smart enough to realize that on a $40K/year salary you can't afford a $200K home, regardless of how they make it look on paper. The government buying up bad mortages to make sure people don't lose their homes just somehow makes me feel like I'm going to end up paying for it in taxes sooner or later. The big problem with that... I don't own a home. My credit is bad, but I know better than to try and get a home loan when I can't afford it.

There's problems with both of these canidates that are too big to overlook. I refuse to vote McCain just because he's 'the lesser of two evils'.

But, since Boston just took the lead in game 2 of the ALCS and I have to get some sleep since I'm headed offshore in 3 1/2 hours (1am) I'll have to save the rest of my rant for another time.

     


 

I wish people had a better understanding of nuclear technology because then it would be much harder to fear monger and propagandize the way Israel/United States do in relation to Iran. As long as Iran is in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it would be impossible to conceal their progress in enriching uranium toward weapons grade material.

Please visit http://ronpaullibrary.org/

Thanks!

NAACP President: Ron Paul Is Not A Racist

Austin NAACP President Nelson Linder, who has known Ron Paul for 20 years,
unequivocally dismissed charges that the Congressman was a racist in light of
recent smear attempts, and said the reason for him being attacked was that he
was a threat to the establishment.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/011308_not_racist.htm