I am growing increasingly concerned by the status of the Post's news reporting. Understand that I am not concerned by the accuracy of what is written in your paper, because I have no cause to believe that, but that I am concerned by what the Post chooses to report and how it chooses to report these matters.
Some people are inclined to declare that you and other papers, as well as some television news sources, are intentionally refusing to report on certain stories due to their own nefarious motives. I am loathe to agree, but the only alternatives I can find are either gross incompetence or debilitating arrogance on the part of the management and editors.
For international news, I have been forced to turn to international news sources such as BBC - a source I find more impartial and more accurate even on most issues within the United States.
When it comes to the continuing Presidential campaign, the failures of the Post and other media sources have forced me to rely on online, independent sources exclusively. It's true that I still read your "The Trail" section, but only so that I can be sure that all it includes are minor news stories about candidates I don't care about that I already read thirty-six hours before online.
I have not been wrong so far.
Why would I spend money on something that is useless to me? The Washington Post has become obsolete to anyone truly interested in an accurate, complete picture of the news. Therefore, I will not pay for it.

Reform is a cool word. Lots of things need to be reformed, and lots of good things have been done in the name of reform. Welfare reform, for instance, is about limiting welfare to those who are not just un- and under-employed but to those who are unable, through no fault of their own, to getting work, and stopping government handouts to people who don't need them.

So it's only logical that marketers and lobbyists would want to co-opt a word that makes people think of good things, and apply them to bad things.

Like "immigration reform."

Now, I have no problem with immigration. This is a country founded by immigrants, a melting pot of a thousand cultures all brought here by immigrants. In my own opinion, legal immigration should be expanded. But immigration must be controlled. Illegal immigration is just that - illegal - and the law must be applied equally to all or what our nation stands for is lost. What we need is not the so-called "immigration reform" packages that would allow tens of millions of new immigrants to flood into the country, barely-controlled, without actually solving the problem.

What we need is true immigration reform, a package that stops giving government benefits to illegal immigrants. Those who want our government programs must pay into them. Those who want to use our hospitals, our schools, and our roads must pay the same price everyone else does to use them. We cannot have a so-called reform package that rewards millions of illegal immigrants with amnesty for breaking the law.

I have nothing against illegal immigrants - except that they broke the law, and just as American law gives equal protection, it must also give equal punishment.

What we need is true immigration reform, like that proposed by Ron Paul.

Some people online have grown concerned by Ron Paul's pro-life position on abortion. Now, I'm a big boy, I'm willing to accept that some people have different positions than I do, and that many of those who most oppose the war in Iraq are also those liberals with so-called pro-choice abortion positions. But what really gets my goat are the number of people who have started saying that because Dr. Paul opposes abortion, he is suddenly no longer a "true" libertarian.

On the contrary, Dr. Paul's position on abortion makes him all the more a libertarian. Libertarianism isn't anarchism. Libertarianism is the position that a certain, small number of laws must be enforced in order to preserve society, and that those are the only legitimate laws. One of these few legitimate laws(some libertarians, though I am not among them would say the only one) is the responsibility of the government to punish those who harm other people. There are people who believe that abortion is not harmful to people, and I am willing to believe that a libertarian with such a belief(as misguided as I believe it is) would think the government had no right to interfere with the practice of abortion.

Yet for a person who believes that life begins before birth, a libertarian must accept that government must protect the life of an unborn child from any action that is intended to destroy it.

Where Dr. Paul's libertarian convictions really come out, though, is in a more important position he's taken. You see, Dr. Paul has pointed out that no matter what his position on abortion is, it doesn't matter as long as he's in a federal office(whether Representative or President) he has no authority over any matter not specifically outlined in the Constitution - thus sayeth the 10th Amendment. No matter whether abortion should be legal or illegal, the authority for making that legislation is given by the Constitution to the states(unless your doctor is across a state line from you as the procedure is happening, I guess) rather than to the federal government. In fact, Dr. Paul has said that what he intends to do with regards to abortion is only to invalidate the Roe v. Wade decision so that state and local governments are free to make their own laws. That sounds not only perfectly reasonable to me, but also perfectly libertarian.

I've decided I want this blog to reflect the person who is writing it. The key, perhaps, to writing an appealling blog, is allowing people to understand who is inside. So I'm expanding this beyond just talking up Ron Paul - though there is quite a lot of talking up of Ron Paul that I plan to do - to discuss the whole election process.

Today I'm thinking of Giuliani. Of all the Presidential candidates I can think of, on either side, Rudy Giuliani scares me the most. I don't like the way Obama caters to interest groups and remains a moderate by refusing to commit to a position on any issue. I don't like the way Edwards would lead us smilingly into a well-coiffed socialist utopia - or, at least, that's what I'm sure everyone would continue to call it. I don't like the way Mitt Romney seems to by campaigning for president of IHOP. I don't like the way Hillary Clinton wants to attack companies for making money. But Rudy Giuliani scares me the most.

The Rocky Mountain Chronicle(http://www.rmchronicle.com) has a quote by Rudy Giuliani on what he thinks of freedom:


That's right. Rudy Giuliani actually believes that freedom is slavery.

I find it curious that as one gets closer to the locations of actual terrorist attacks, one finds fewer and fewer people who would trust Giuliani to protect them. Rudy Giuliani asserted at an early Republican debate that he was "someone who lived through the September 11th attacks," but this is of course only as true as saying that any other American did the same. Giuliani does not actually have any anti-terror credentials whatsoever - but he did manage to get Ground Zero at some point soon after the two towers fell.

What does this prove?

A) Rudy Giuliani is good at manipulating the media.
B) Rudy Giuliani has absolutely zero qualities, besides that one, that make him appealling to conservatives.

What we have here is an authoritarian pro-choice neoconservative control freak. A lot of Democratic Presidents would ineffectually promote policies that would be harmful to the country. Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate who wants to actively go out there and subvert Americans' freedoms, not as a sort of misguided sacrifice in the name of further government programs but actually for the sake of subverting freedoms, and who would pretend to be doing it in the name of freedom in the first place.

Rudy Giuliani...meet George Orwell.

I wish that I could be legitimately surprised by the Washington Post's complete ignorance of Dr. Ron Paul in its recent articles. Perhaps it was simply a mistake that in the Post's article on the results of the recent Iowa straw poll, Dr. Paul was the only candidate who went entirely unmentioned. Yet it seems odd to me that in one paragraph the second- and third-place candidates are discussed, in the next the fourth- and sixth-place candidates are discussed, and the fifth-place candidate is not only unmentioned nearby, but unmentioned altogether.
Nor is the Post's continued ignorance of Dr. Paul limited to this article. Dr. Paul went unmentioned in an Outlook article the very same day that discussed extensively various candidates approaches to the Iraq war and its effects on their campaigns - even though Dr. Paul's stance on that war is among the most well-known and most popular of all candidates' positions.
Newspapers have been struggling to maintain their relevance and circulation in the face of internet news, and they claim to have been incorporating the internet into their strategies. Yet they continue to ignore the internet at curious times - such as when one candidate achieves such startling popularity over the internet that it is clear their message resonates with exactly who the Post and other newspapers seek to get back - the generation of computer-literate internet users.

So it looks like Dr. Paul has finally gotten enough mainstream media attention that people have started looking for scandals to discredit him. Someone has turned up a fifteen year-old newsletter(actually fifteen years old, too - from 1992) which contains a few statements which appear, out of context, as if they might be racist in nature.

I admit that I don't have the newsletter in question, nor have I read it, and thus I do not know the context. What I can say is from the statements - which were about such things as the speed of young black men and the tendency of African-Americans to have liberal views - even the idea that the writer was racist is questionable. The statements appear to me more to be victims of American political culture's oppressive requirements relating to political correctness than to be actually racist in origin.

What's more, it doesn't look like Dr. Paul actually wrote them himself. Apparently, the newsletter was ghostwritten under his name.

I can say pretty confidently that a fifteen-year-old newsletter that contains politically incorrect statements that weren't even written by the candidate in question isn't going to change my vote.