Republican Presidential Candidates

[ts69]

Tatata, on ne s'y résume pas. Les criminels de droit commun c'est mal aussi, mais ca tout le monde le sait.

Bien entendu, on vise juste plus souvent celui qui est de loin le plus grand criminel

[Ash]

Le fils de Paul, Rand (un clin d'oeil aux objectivistes ? ) :

nb: c'est pas celui du tout début.

[xara]

Le fils de Paul, Rand (un clin d'oeil aux objectivistes ? ) :

nb: c'est pas celui du tout début.

En tout cas, il y a des objectivistes qui ne sont pas près d'accueillir favorablement tout clin d'oeil du camp Paul, puisque la revue The New Individualist est en pleine campagne anti-Ron Paul:

http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=653

Trouvé via le blog de Roderick Long. Voir son post et les commentaires à propos des raisons avancées pour justifier l'hostilité affichée envers Paul par cette revue.

[xara]

Les critiques envers Ron Paul sont toutes pitoyable jusqu’ici.

Sinon Tucker Carlson (présentateur du Tucker show sur MSNBC) supporte Ron Paul et çà c’est une bonne chose.

http://weneedronpaul.com/ron-paul-visits/t…ron-paul-rally/

Voir son article tout à fait rafraichissant et intéressant, notamment sur le talent de Paul pour communiquer sur le sujet de la politique monétaire qu'on pourrait imaginer sans intérêt pour la plupart des gens:

The New Republic

Pimp My Ride by Tucker Carlson

On the road with Ron Paul's merry band of misfits and his hooker fan club.

Post Date Friday, December 21, 2007

The first thing I learned from driving around Nevada with Ron Paul for a couple of days: People really hate the Federal Reserve. This became clear midway through a speech Paul was giving to a group of Republicans at a community center in Pahrump, a dusty town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Pahrump is known for its legal brothels (Heidi Fleiss lives there), but most of the people in the audience looked more like ranchers than swingers. They stood five deep at the back of the room and listened politely as the candidate spoke.

Until Paul got to the part about the Fed. "We need a much better monetary system," he said, a system based on "sound money, money that's backed by something." Paul, who is small and delicate and has a high voice, spoke in a near monotone, making no effort to excite the audience. They cheered anyway. Then he said this: "The Constitution gives no authority for a central bank." The crowd went wild, or as wild as a group of sober Republicans can on a Monday night. They hooted and yelled and stomped their feet. Paul stopped speaking for a moment, his words drowned out. Then he continued on about monetary policy.

Wow, I thought. The constitutionality of a central bank is not an issue you see on many lists of voter concerns. (How many pollsters would think to ask about it? How many voters would understand the question?) Yet a room full of non-economists had just responded feverishly when Paul brought it up. Hoping for some context, I went outside and found a Paul staffer. He didn't sound surprised when I told him about the speech. "It's our biggest applause line," he said.

Our biggest applause line? There are two ways to interpret a fact like that: Either the Ron Paul movement is more sophisticated than most journalists understand, or a lot of Paul supporters are eccentric bordering on bonkers.

One thing you can say for certain: The crowds at Ron Paul rallies aren't coming to be entertained. Stylistically, a Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return. He is the only politician I've ever seen who doesn't draw energy from the audience; his tone is as flat at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. There are no jokes. There's no warm-up, no shout-out to local luminaries in the room, no inspiring vignettes about ordinary Americans doing their best in the face of this or that bad thing. In fact, there are virtually none of the usual political clichés in a Paul speech. Children may be our future, but Ron Paul isn't admitting it in public.

Paul is no demagogue, and probably couldn't be if he tried. He's too libertarian. He can't stand to tell other people what to do, even people who've shown up looking for instructions. On board the campaign's tiny chartered jet one night (the plane was so small my legs were intertwined with the candidate's for the entire flight), Paul and his staff engaged in an unintentionally hilarious exchange about the cabin lights. The staff wanted to know whether Paul preferred the lights on or off. Not wanting to be bossy, Paul wouldn't say. Ultimately, the staff had to guess. It was a long three minutes.

Being at the center of attention clearly bothers Paul. "I like to be unnoticed," he says, a claim not typically made by presidential candidates. "That's my personality. I see all the excitement and sometimes I say to myself, 'Why do they do that?' I don't see myself as a big deal." Ordinarily you'd have to dismiss a line like that out of hand--if he's so humble, why is he running for president?--but, in Paul's case, it might be true. In fact, it might be the key to his relative success. His fans don't read his awkwardness as a social phobia, but as a sign of authenticity. Paul never outshines his message, which is unchanging: Let adults make their own choices; liberty works. For a unified theory of everything, it's pretty simple. And Paul sincerely believes it.

Most Republicans, of course, profess to believe it too. But only Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk. Give yourself five minutes and see if you can think of a more countercultural idea than that. Most people assume that the whole reason we have a government is to make sure the milk gets pasteurized. It takes some stones to argue otherwise, especially if nobody's paying you to do it. (The raw-milk lobby basically consists of about eight goat-cheese enthusiasts in Manhattan, and possibly the Amish.) Paul is pro-choice on pasteurization entirely for reasons of principle. "I support the right of people to drink whatever they want," he says. He mocks the idea that "only government can make sure we're safe, so we need the government to protect us. I don't think we'd all die of unsafe food if we didn't have the FDA. Someone else would do it." If you know Ron Paul primarily from watching the Republican debates, you probably assume he spends most of his time ranting about September 11 and the Iraq invasion. In fact, his real passion is Austrian economics. More even than the war, Paul despises paper currency, which he considers a hoax, "fiat money." He can become emotional talking about it. Caught in traffic in downtown Vegas on the way to an event, Paul looked out the window at the casinos and mused aloud: "Can you imagine when all those slot machines used real silver dollars? All that silver … " His words trailed off, as in a pleasant daydream.

Paul trusts coins, and he has bought them all his life, first as a childhood collector, then as an investor. During the 1980s, as he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and the White House, he became involved in a coin business, Ron Paul Coins. Numismatics, he says, is a labor of love. "You only make five or ten dollars a coin. You've got to sell a lot of coins to get rich. I was just promoting something I believe in." It's a rare person who admits something like this. Everybody knows the gold standard is for cranks. It's complicated, unwieldy, and basically incompatible with the modern world. Worse, it's boring. Paul doesn't care. "It's been over one hundred years since that issue has been talked about in a presidential election," he told me with apparent pride.

Over dinner at the coffee shop in the Saddle West Hotel, Casino, and RV Resort, Paul and his staff talked about little else. There were eight or nine of us at the table, with the 72-year-old obstetrician-congressman at the head in a gray suit, working over a chicken platter and discussing hard money. It had the feel of a familiar conversation, a dialogue that doesn't really end but that never diminishes in intensity. At one point, Paul's assistant checked his BlackBerry for the latest gold and silver prices and read them aloud to the table.

For Paul, the original sin in monetary policy took place in 1933, when FDR uncoupled the currency from gold. This removed limits from federal spending, allowing Congress an endless supply of money it could print at will, while leaving citizens vulnerable to the inflation that inevitably resulted. But, worst of all from Paul's point of view, it was compulsory. Private currencies are forbidden, so Americans had no choice but to participate. The whole system is a mandatory Ponzi scheme, built on faith in the government. Except that, now that the bottom has dropped out of the dollar, it's clear there's no reason to have faith in the government or its money.

That's Paul's essential argument. His solution: allow competing currencies.

If individuals want to circulate gold or silver coins (or scrip backed by metal reserves), let them. Give citizens the chance to decide which money they trust.

The owners of NORFED, an Indiana coin company, gave it a shot. The company minted and sold thousands of silver Ron Paul dollars, complete with the candidate's face in profile, before federal agents showed up in November and confiscated their entire remaining inventory. In its affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI accused NORFED of trying to "undermine the United States government's financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code." That may be a crime, but it's also pretty close to Ron Paul's stump speech.

It's hard to think of a presidential candidate who's ever drawn a coalition as broad as Ron Paul's. At any Paul event, you're likely to run into self-described anarcho-capitalists, 9/11-deniers, antiwar lefties, objectivists, paleocons, hemp activists, and geeky high school kids, along with tax resisters, conspiracy nuts, and acolytes of Murray Rothbard. And those are just the ones it's possible to categorize. It's hard to say what they all have in common, except that every one is an ideological minority--or, as one of them put it to me, "open-minded people." To these supporters, Paul is a folk hero, the one person in national politics who doesn't judge them, who understands what it's like to be considered a freak by straight society.

Which is odd, because, in person, Paul doesn't seem like a freak. He seems like someone's grandfather. I first met up with Paul after a rally at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He apparently hadn't known I was coming but accepted my arrival with Zen-like calm, welcoming me into the seat next to him in the minivan and offering me baked goods from a plate on his lap. We were both finishing our brownies when he mentioned they'd been baked by a supporter. I stopped chewing. Where I work, this is a major taboo (Rule One: Never eat food sent by viewers), and my concern must have shown. Paul grinned. "Maybe they're spiked with marijuana," he said.

If so, it would have been his first experience with illegal drugs. Though Paul argues passionately for liberalizing marijuana laws and is beloved by potheads (Timothy Leary once held a fund-raiser for him), he has never smoked pot himself. He sounded shocked when I asked him. "I have never seen anyone smoke marijuana," he said. "I don't think I'd be open to using it." For some people, libertarianism is the philosophical justification for a zany personal life. Paul, by contrast, describes his hobbies as gardening (roses and organic tomatoes) and "riding my bicycle." He has never had a cigarette. He doesn't swear. He limits his drinking to an occasional glass of wine and goes to church regularly. He has been married to the same woman for 50 years. Three of their five children are physicians.

Ron Paul is deeply square, and every bit as deeply committed to your right not to be. "I don't gamble, but I'm the gambler's best friend," he says, boasting of his support for online casinos. He is a Second Amendment absolutist who doesn't own a gun. "I've only fired one a couple of times in my life. I've never gotten around to killing anything." It's an impressively, charmingly principled world view, though sometimes you've got to wonder how much Paul has in common with many of the people who support him.

Before we left the speech in Pahrump and headed across the state, I'd called a friend of mine in Carson City named Dennis Hof. Dennis owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch, probably the most famous legal brothel in the country and the setting for an HBO series called "Cathouse." Dennis isn't very political, but he's smart, and I suspected he might lean libertarian. I told him Ron Paul was speaking the next morning in Reno. He said he'd drive down to see it.

I wasn't planning on showing up at Paul's press conference with a bordello owner and two hookers, but unexpected things happen on the road.

I'd arrived with the campaign at the Best Western Airport Plaza Hotel in Reno at two in the morning the night before, and, at some point while I was sleeping, the power in the hotel went out, disabling my alarm. By the time I woke up, Paul and his staff had left. So I called Dennis for a ride. He was there in ten minutes, in an enormous stretch limo with a BunnyRanch logo on the side. He'd brought two of his girls, Brooke and Air Force Amy, as well as his driver, a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat and Western wear. It was a conspicuous group.

Probably because they didn't fully understand who I was coming with, the Paul people waved the limo through a roadblock outside the auditorium and brought us in through the loading dock. A Paul aide informed us that press conferences are for press only. That's us, said the girls, and we walked right in.

The other, actual journalists looked confused. Dennis is built like a linebacker and was dressed entirely in black. Brooke and Air Force Amy looked like hookers because they are. All three slapped on Ron Paul stickers ("we could use these as pasties," Air Force Amy said, giggling) and sat near the front. Pretty soon, Paul showed up and did his 15 minutes on liberty and Austrian economics. If he noticed there were prostitutes present, he didn't show it.

The first time I heard Paul talk about monetary policy, I'd felt like a hostage, the only person in the room who didn't buy into the program. Then, slowly, like so many hostages, I started to open my mind and listen. By the time we got to Reno, unfamiliar thoughts were beginning to occur: Why shouldn't we worry about the soundness of the currency? What exactly is the dollar backed by anyway? And, if the gold standard is crazy, is it really any crazier than hedge funds? I'd become Patty Hearst, ready to take up arms for the cause, or at least call my accountant and tell him to buy Krugerrands. I looked over at Dennis and the girls. They looked like they might be having the same thoughts.

Once the press conference ended, Paul left to do interviews with local TV reporters. Dennis and the girls stood at the podium and had their pictures taken under the Ron Paul sign. Air Force Amy hammed it up. What I really want more than anything, she told me, is to get my picture taken with Dr. Paul. She meant it.

I considered trying to explain to her that I was not actually affiliated with Ron Paul, merely writing about him for a political magazine back in Washington. But I didn't. Instead, I led all three of them into the back room where Paul was doing his interviews.

Paul was talking on camera and never saw us. But his staff was on high alert. They looked more uncomfortable than I have ever seen a campaign staff look. Air Force Amy didn't appear to notice. Dressed in red, her Dolly Parton hairdo and 36DDs at full attention, she sidled up to Lew Moore, Paul's campaign manager, and made her pitch. "Hi," she said. "I'm Air Force Amy, and I'd like a picture with Ron Paul." I knew right away it wasn't going to happen. "I've got a concern, I've got to be honest," Moore said, tense but trying to be nice. "If that picture surfaces, it could be very damaging to him politically." Dennis stepped in to take up Air Force Amy's cause, but Moore wasn't budging. "The mainstream in the early primary states is not moving in that direction," he said.

I really thought Air Force Amy was going to cry. She looked crushed. Like a child of alcoholic parents, she immediately started to rationalize away the pain. "It wasn't Ron's decision," she told Moore. "It was yours. So I can't take it personally." But it was obvious that she did. It was awful. There wasn't much left to say, so Dennis and the girls and I left and went downtown to a casino for pancakes. There were no hard feelings. They wore their Ron Paul stickers all through breakfast. If I'd had one, I would have worn it too.

Tucker Carlson is an anchor on MSNBC.

Trouvé via le blog de Sheldon Richman

[Ash]

En tout cas, il y a des objectivistes qui ne sont pas près d'accueillir favorablement tout clin d'oeil du camp Paul, puisque la revue The New Individualist est en pleine campagne anti-Ron Paul:

http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=653

Trouvé via le blog de Roderick Long. Voir son post et les commentaires à propos des raisons avancées pour justifier l'hostilité affichée envers Paul par cette revue.

C'est vraiment un mec bien ce Paul

[Ronnie Hayek]

En tout cas, il y a des objectivistes qui ne sont pas près d'accueillir favorablement tout clin d'oeil du camp Paul, puisque la revue The New Individualist est en pleine campagne anti-Ron Paul:

http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=653

Trouvé via le blog de Roderick Long. Voir son post et les commentaires à propos des raisons avancées pour justifier l'hostilité affichée envers Paul par cette revue.

Les motifs invoqués par cet objectiviste ne me surprennent, hélas, pas :

And that philosophy is a complete mess. In principle, it weds the following: the economics of laissez-faire capitalism (which I emphatically endorse); a religious-based conception of individual rights that leads him to appalling positions on the separation of Church and State, abortion, immigration, and certain other social issues; and, most dangerous of all, a platonic, utopian notion of "noninterventionism" in foreign policy: a view derived directly from his philosophical misunderstanding of the implications of individual rights, which would render America completely vulnerable to its enemies, destroy the security infrastructure at the foundation of international trade, and thus impoverish the nation.

En somme, Paul est rejeté parce qu'il est, aux yeux de ce type, trop conservateur et trop proche des idéaux des Pères fondateurs des Etats-Unis.

[walter-rebuttand]

En réalité, Ron Paul est un Jeffersonien classique.

[Ronnie Hayek]

En réalité, Ron Paul est un Jeffersonien classique.

Absolument.

[melodius]

Ca confirme tout le bien que je pense des abjectivistes.

Sinon, excellent l'article de TNR.

De Standaard a fait un long papier (pas très bon) sur RP ce week-end.

[Nick de Cusa]

Ca confirme tout le bien que je pense des abjectivistes.

Sinon, excellent l'article de TNR.

De Standaard a fait un long papier (pas très bon) sur RP ce week-end.

Tu l'as? Tu me le gardes?

[melodius]

OK. Si tu as le temps d'aller courir demain après-midi, je te l'amène.

[John Loque]

Absolument.

+1 mais je ne vois pas en quoi cette position ne pourrait pas être également qualifiée de minarchiste. On peut dire ce qu'on veut sur sa position vis-à-vis de l'immigration, RP est clairement un libertarien (pas étonnant lorqu'on parle d'un des fondateurs du Mises Institute).

OK. Si tu as le temps d'aller courir demain après-midi, je te l'amène.

Plus simple : http://www.libertarian.be/2007/12/de-stand…rder-tegen.html

[Ash]

Sur l'article de Tucker, ce passage est hilarant

Before we left the speech in Pahrump and headed across the state, I'd called a friend of mine in Carson City named Dennis Hof. Dennis owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch, probably the most famous legal brothel in the country and the setting for an HBO series called "Cathouse." Dennis isn't very political, but he's smart, and I suspected he might lean libertarian. I told him Ron Paul was speaking the next morning in Reno. He said he'd drive down to see it.

I wasn't planning on showing up at Paul's press conference with a bordello owner and two hookers, but unexpected things happen on the road.

I'd arrived with the campaign at the Best Western Airport Plaza Hotel in Reno at two in the morning the night before, and, at some point while I was sleeping, the power in the hotel went out, disabling my alarm. By the time I woke up, Paul and his staff had left. So I called Dennis for a ride. He was there in ten minutes, in an enormous stretch limo with a BunnyRanch logo on the side. He'd brought two of his girls, Brooke and Air Force Amy, as well as his driver, a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat and Western wear. It was a conspicuous group.

Probably because they didn't fully understand who I was coming with, the Paul people waved the limo through a roadblock outside the auditorium and brought us in through the loading dock. A Paul aide informed us that press conferences are for press only. That's us, said the girls, and we walked right in.

The other, actual journalists looked confused. Dennis is built like a linebacker and was dressed entirely in black. Brooke and Air Force Amy looked like hookers because they are. All three slapped on Ron Paul stickers ("we could use these as pasties," Air Force Amy said, giggling) and sat near the front. Pretty soon, Paul showed up and did his 15 minutes on liberty and Austrian economics. If he noticed there were prostitutes present, he didn't show it.

The first time I heard Paul talk about monetary policy, I'd felt like a hostage, the only person in the room who didn't buy into the program. Then, slowly, like so many hostages, I started to open my mind and listen. By the time we got to Reno, unfamiliar thoughts were beginning to occur: Why shouldn't we worry about the soundness of the currency? What exactly is the dollar backed by anyway? And, if the gold standard is crazy, is it really any crazier than hedge funds? I'd become Patty Hearst, ready to take up arms for the cause, or at least call my accountant and tell him to buy Krugerrands. I looked over at Dennis and the girls. They looked like they might be having the same thoughts.

Once the press conference ended, Paul left to do interviews with local TV reporters. Dennis and the girls stood at the podium and had their pictures taken under the Ron Paul sign. Air Force Amy hammed it up. What I really want more than anything, she told me, is to get my picture taken with Dr. Paul. She meant it.

I considered trying to explain to her that I was not actually affiliated with Ron Paul, merely writing about him for a political magazine back in Washington. But I didn't. Instead, I led all three of them into the back room where Paul was doing his interviews.

Paul was talking on camera and never saw us. But his staff was on high alert. They looked more uncomfortable than I have ever seen a campaign staff look. Air Force Amy didn't appear to notice. Dressed in red, her Dolly Parton hairdo and 36DDs at full attention, she sidled up to Lew Moore, Paul's campaign manager, and made her pitch. "Hi," she said. "I'm Air Force Amy, and I'd like a picture with Ron Paul." I knew right away it wasn't going to happen. "I've got a concern, I've got to be honest," Moore said, tense but trying to be nice. "If that picture surfaces, it could be very damaging to him politically." Dennis stepped in to take up Air Force Amy's cause, but Moore wasn't budging. "The mainstream in the early primary states is not moving in that direction," he said.

I really thought Air Force Amy was going to cry. She looked crushed. Like a child of alcoholic parents, she immediately started to rationalize away the pain. "It wasn't Ron's decision," she told Moore. "It was yours. So I can't take it personally." But it was obvious that she did. It was awful. There wasn't much left to say, so Dennis and the girls and I left and went downtown to a casino for pancakes. There were no hard feelings. They wore their Ron Paul stickers all through breakfast. If I'd had one, I would have worn it too.

[John Loque]

Aujourd'hui 18h00 chez nous, Ron Paul pendant une heure sur CNBC Europe dans "Meet the press".

[Ronnie Hayek]

+1 mais je ne vois pas en quoi cette position ne pourrait pas être également qualifiée de minarchiste. On peut dire ce qu'on veut sur sa position vis-à-vis de l'immigration, RP est clairement un libertarien (pas étonnant lorqu'on parle d'un des fondateurs du Mises Institute).

Tout à fait, mais qui a dit le contraire (hormis A.B. s'entend) ?

[John Loque]

Tout à fait, mais qui a dit le contraire (hormis A.B. s'entend) ?

AB et l'un ou l'autre sceptique, pas toi évidemment.

[Pan]

C'est simple : Ron Paul est ce qui est arrivé de mieux au libéralisme depuis très, très longtemps. A travers sa campagne de quelques mois, il a probablement communiqué la pensée libérale à plus de gens que les différents think tanks en en plusieurs dizaines d'années.

Et qui sait ce que le gamin de 12 ans aujourd'hui, qui entends Ron Paul et commande des livres de Locke et Rothbard parce Ron Paul en parle, fera dans 10 ou 20 ans?

[Ronnie Hayek]

L'American Conservative fait sa une sur la tentation autoritaire incarnée par cette taupe gauchiste de Giuliani :

January 14, 2008 Issue

Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Authoritarian Temptation

Can we trust the the presidency to a mayor like Giuliani?

by Glenn Greenwald

One of the most under-discussed aspects of Rudy Giuliani’s quest for the presidency is how politically shrewd he is. Giuliani was elected mayor of one of the great bastions of American liberalism despite being a former Reagan DOJ official and Republican prosecutor renowned for his merciless, at times humiliating, treatment of criminal defendants. And after four years of living under his rule, New Yorkers re-elected Giuliani in a landslide victory against an icon of traditional Big Apple liberalism, Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger.

Giuliani never disguised himself. While his moderate stances on social issues distinguished him from the Jerry Falwell wing of the 1993 Republican Party, he never pretended to be anything other than what he was. He was not a popular mayor because he softened his prosecutorial zeal or concealed his fixation with imposing order or renounced his faith in centralized power vested in a single, strong, even unchallengeable leader.

Quite the contrary. But New Yorkers, including hordes of traditional Democrats and even Manhattan liberals, were grateful for Giuliani’s rule and overwhelmingly re-elected him, precisely because he so aggressively wielded government power. At least for the first several years of his tenure, even the Left cheered as he defended and encouraged his police department’s excesses, casually disregarded long-standing limits on mayoral power, crushed seemingly immovable bureaucracies, took control away from the most sacrosanct municipal fiefdoms, and forced the city’s powerful unions and political factions into submission.

But the very characteristics that made Giuliani (for his first term) such a popular and effective mayor render him spectacularly unfit to be president. In many senses, the city that Giuliani inherited in 1993, languishing in chaos and craving order, is the antithesis of the United States of 2008, plagued by previously unthinkable abuses of executive power.

New York City in the mid-1990s presented an authoritarian mayor with the ultimate challenge: impose order on a city that was widely assumed to be ungovernable. But America in 2008 presents an authoritarian president with the ultimate fantasy: the ability to wield more power than any other human being in the world, with the fewest real limits in modern American history.

As constrained as a mayor’s power typically is, Giuliani never ceased pushing those limits. In a 2001 retrospective on the mayor’s tenure, the New York Times concluded, “the suppression of dissent or of anything that irked the mayor, became a familiar theme.” Giuliani’s idiosyncratic—one could say Orwellian—understanding of “freedom,” expressed during a 1994 speech, reveals just how literally authoritarian his worldview is:

What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

By the nature of the office, even the most excessively secretive, grudge-harboring authoritarian in charge of a municipality can only do so much damage. But the dangers posed by allowing such an individual to rule the most powerful nation on earth are boundless. And those general risks are greatly enhanced after eight long years of unprecedented expansions of government power and systematic erosions of virtually every check on executive authority.

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

Our political landscape has now tilted so heavily in favor of unchecked presidential prerogatives that even a lame duck, wildly unpopular, and universally discredited George W. Bush is rarely denied what he wants. With this framework now bolted in place, a newly elected, shrewd, and inherently aggressive Giuliani, whose certainty about his own rightness is matched only by his contempt for those who disagree, could easily run roughshod over any attempts to constrain his actions.

The Sept. 11 transformation of Giuliani into the swaggering, beloved “America’s Mayor” has erased from the collective memory just how severely his bullying ways had overstayed their welcome in New York. Giuliani was widely disliked by 1999, when his approval ratings dropped to a Bush-like 37 percent. At the root of New Yorkers’ discontent with Giuliani was his complete intolerance for any limits on his own power and contempt for dissent from his decisions. Giuliani claimed the mantle of The Decider long before George W. Bush crowned himself.

The longer he stayed in office, the more drooling Giuliani’s thirst for power seemed to become. Popular first-term efforts to crack down on menacing squeegee men and turnstile-jumpers morphed into senseless, vindictive second-term crusades against hot dog vendors and jaywalkers.

In 1999, Giuliani sought amendments to the City Charter that would have eliminated term limits and allowed him to remain in power indefinitely, just as leftist authoritarian Hugo Chavez recently attempted to achieve with Venezuela‘s Constitution. Giuliani tried again shortly after the 9/11 attack, invoking the crisis to suggest that his term be extended.

Whenever he found a crusade that triggered his sense of righteousness, legal and even constitutional constraints were of little concern to the mayor. He ended up on the losing end of one court battle after the next, arising from his efforts to stifle private expression that he disliked, including endless campaigns against an art exhibit he deemed blasphemous, bus and subway advertisements he considered offensive, and political protests he found annoying. According to Rachel Morris‘s recent article in The Washington Monthly, Giuliani “lost thirty-five First Amendment cases in court.”

New York is governed by a “strong mayor” system in which the City Council has very little power. But throughout his tenure, Giuliani viewed even isolated attempts by the council to “interfere in” his governance to be contemptible nuisances. He frequently waged war with city agencies whose task was to exercise oversight of the mayor’s office, and he initiated numerous battles designed to amend long-standing City Charter provisions with the goal of increasing his own power. He demands absolute loyalty from underlings, and, in return, retains and rewards even the most inept and corrupt loyalists.

Perhaps most disturbing of all when considering his presidential ambitions, Giuliani seemed to take particular delight in intervening in and inflaming the city’s most intense controversies arising out of excessive assertions of state authority. Some of the most turbulent scandals he faced involved the racially charged, highly dubious use of violence by the NYPD. His paramount instinct was to defend the police reflexively, even before any relevant facts were known.

Almost uniformly, Giuliani’s presidential campaign has been measured and highly disciplined, but he has had momentary lapses that expose the authoritarian impulses that New Yorkers know so well. In the midst of the September controversy over the MoveOn.org ad criticizing Gen. David Petraeus, Giuliani opined that the antiwar group “passed a line that we should not allow American political organizations to pass.”

Exactly as one would expect, Giuliani has enthusiastically endorsed virtually every one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney assertions of presidential power. He wants to keep Guantanamo open and mocks concerns over the use of torture, even derisively comparing sleep deprivation to the strain of his own campaign. He not only defends Bush’s warrantless surveillance, but does not recognize the legitimacy of any concerns relating to unchecked government power.

In April, Cato Institute’s president, Ed Crane, asked several candidates if they believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, and detain them with no review of any kind. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reported Giuliani’s response: “The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.”

In aggressively rejecting that such a power could exist, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Yet Giuliani’s instinct was to assume that he would automatically possess that tyrannical power.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire a week later, Giuliani suggested that the president would even have what he called “inherent authority” to disregard a Congressional vote to defund the war in Iraq and could continue to prosecute it unilaterally. Not even the most radical of the Bush theorists of presidential omnipotence would endorse such an idea. In a February New York Times op-ed, former Bush DOJ attorney John Yoo acknowledged, “Congress has every power to end the war—if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse.”

Giuliani, when he was merely in charge of New York’s garbage collection, zoning rules, and a municipal police force, developed a reputation as a power-hungry, dissent-intolerant authoritarian, obsessed with secrecy and expanding his own power. It takes little imagination to apprehend the grave dangers from vesting in such a person virtually unlimited power to control the world’s most powerful military as well as a sprawling, federal bureaucracy

[John Loque]

C'est simple : Ron Paul est ce qui est arrivé de mieux au libéralisme depuis très, très longtemps. A travers sa campagne de quelques mois, il a probablement communiqué la pensée libérale à plus de gens que les différents think tanks en en plusieurs dizaines d'années.

Et qui sait ce que le gamin de 12 ans aujourd'hui, qui entends Ron Paul et commande des livres de Locke et Rothbard parce Ron Paul en parle, fera dans 10 ou 20 ans?

Oui, c'est un moment important pour le libéralisme aux Etats-Unis et donc dans le monde. Mais ce phénomène n'aurait jamais pu émerger sans le travail mené par les think-tanks depuis 30-40 ans aux USA. Un phénomène politique concrétise toujours la bataille des idées mais il ne peut jamais émerger sans celle-ci.

[Nick de Cusa]

J'en viens à me dire qu'un Parti Libertarien a bien plus de sens qu'un parti libéral: il laisse les conneries aux partis normaux et s'en tient à un message qui fait se dresser les oreilles.

[walter-rebuttand]

Viens de voir "meet the press". Ron Paul a l'air peu habitué aux questions agressives.

[Pan]

J'en viens à me dire qu'un Parti Libertarien a bien plus de sens qu'un parti libéral: il laisse les conneries aux partis normaux et s'en tient à un message qui fait se dresser les oreilles.

Ca dépend. Le parti libéral américain a effectivement un assez bon message dans l'ensemble.

De toutes manières, John Loque a raison : la politique, en démocratie, c'est la moisson. Celui qui veut vraiment faire quelque chose pour le libéralisme aujourd'hui, doit semer et faire pousser les idées.

[Ronnie Hayek]

J'en viens à me dire qu'un Parti Libertarien a bien plus de sens qu'un parti libéral: il laisse les conneries aux partis normaux et s'en tient à un message qui fait se dresser les oreilles.

Un changement d'étiquette n'empêche pas un parti de dire ou faire des conneries.

[Ash]

Viens de voir "meet the press". Ron Paul a l'air peu habitué aux questions agressives.

Vu quelques extraits. Ca cherchait de toute évidence la petite bête.

[kobsh_gigaone]

Vu quelques extraits. Ca cherchait de toute évidence la petite bête.

Tim Russert cherche la petite bête avec tous les candidats.

Il semble que Ron Paul a eu du mal à entamer l'interview, mais s'est rattrapé sur la fin.

[Phil]

Aujourd'hui 18h00 chez nous, Ron Paul pendant une heure sur CNBC Europe dans "Meet the press".

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/

Vu quelques extraits. Ca cherchait de toute évidence la petite bête.

En effet, les questions comme "Et si l'Iran envahit Israel" et "Si la Corée du Nord envahit la Corée du Sud".

J'aurais clairement répondu : Les candidats au suicide c'est pas mes oignons.

Mais Ron s'est bien défendu, je trouve.

[Nick de Cusa]

Un changement d'étiquette n'empêche pas un parti de dire ou faire des conneries.

Je voulais parler du contenu plus que du nom.

[Ronnie Hayek]

Je voulais parler du contenu plus que du nom.

Précisément : je ne suis pas persuadé qu'un parti libertarien serait immunisé contre les conneries.

[Nick de Cusa]

Précisément : je ne suis pas persuadé qu'un parti libertarien serait immunisé contre les conneries.

Nul ne l'est. Individu ou groupe. Si ton critère de fréquentation est: immunisé contre les conneries, tu exclues toute l'humanité et tous les groupes humains.

[Ronnie Hayek]

Nul ne l'est. Individu ou groupe. Si ton critère de fréquentation est: immunisé contre les conneries, tu exclues toute l'humanité et tous les groupes humains.

Aaah, mais ce n'était évidemment pas mon propos. Je rebondissais sur ta remarque "on laisse les conneries aux autres partis" pour simplement préciser que c'était loin d'être gagné.