I had wanted to speak to him about Ron Paul’s exclusion in the debates. Several Ron Paul supporters found and posted his direct office line so I called.
He was very polite. He thought I was calling about Duncan Hunter, then I said it was actually Ron Paul.
I told him I thought they should be concerned about excluding Ron Paul. He sort of cut me off and said, “You are concerned”. And I said, “yes, but I’m also concerned that FOX News is going to miss out because Ron Paul is pretty interesting guy”. He said that was subjective. I said that for example, Google makes a lot of money off Ron Paul.
He told me Google only makes money off advertising, but not Ron Paul. I corrected him and told him Ron Paul drives traffic to sites, and that in fact, people bid on keywords and that Ron Paul’s keywords are worth more than those of other candidates. He said that’s the case because a lot of his base is on the internet, to which I agreed.
He said a lot of people thought they were trying to exclude Ron Paul because of some special agenda, but he said that they had established a criteria about needing 10% in the national polls because the coming debate in NH would be very focused. But that there will be another debate on Thursday in South Carolina which Ron Paul will be in, and that in fact, Alan Keys will not, because he didn’t meet the criteria.
Sometime before the call ended, I also told him people were selling their NWS stock because of the exclusion, and he said, “Well, people have the right to be angry at us and sell their shares. This happens from time to time.”
I thanked him, told him I didn’t want to waste too much of his time and that I’d tell other people not to call him about that. Then he said, “no, I’m actually taking time off to answer phone calls, so it’s quite alright.”
It was kind of surprising that he was so polite.
Be nice if you call, and try not to ask the same questions I asked, alright?
Afterword
How can I be mad at FOX News and John Moody now? I recommend you don’t call John Moody; he is too polite and reasonable. You might actually start to think FOX News is fair. Can you live with the cognitive dissonance?
You deserve praise for openly discussing Ron Paul on FOX News. I wonder if you had to take a pay a fine every time you said Ron Paul’s name, or for every second you discussed him. I know you will be getting a lot of positive emails from Ron Paul supporters.
Just one objection: You continue to assume Ron Paul will not win the nomination, which is an understandable assumption. But it is an assumption, and some of your colleagues have been very wrong on their assumptions. For example Michael Steele had said Ron Paul “[is] done” after the first debate in South Carolina almost 8 months ago.
In fact, you are perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophesy. Ron Paul doesn’t really need your debates more than he needs positive exposure and name-recognition. This is key in marketing. Some Ron Paul supporters sometimes give Ron Paul a bad name via their obsessive campaigning or their wide variety of views. Ron Paul appeals to many distinct groups because everyone wants liberty, including liberty from each other. But I digress slightly; the point is, you (the media) hardly discuss Ron Paul’s stances in depth. You barely touch the surface of Ron Paul’s stances, and at the surface, his stances look quite ‘kooky’. Sadly, Ron Paul doesn’t promote himself with cheap soundbites, so that doesn’t help make your job easier, but now that he has a solid 10% anchor in Iowa you have a justification for taking Ron Paul seriously and discussing his stances beyond the surface.
It’s not your job to make Ron Paul look good, but presumably, it’s not your job to make him look bad either. Do you want high ratings? Discuss Ron Paul in depth. Even people who disagree with him are intrigued by what he actually believes. His views are counter-intuitive. Not all of them are strictly pragmatic or even objectively correct. But they are certainly thought-provoking.
If Ron Paul has no chance, then what’s the harm in giving him even airtime? He is certainly more interesting than Britney Spears (though arguably not as good-looking). A common technique used by websites is to talk about Ron Paul. It increases viewer traffic so much that Google makes more money on bids for Ron Paul’s name as a keyword than any other candidate. FOX News is already revolutionary in marketing and propaganda (I mean this in a positive way); you can hold an audience’s attention like no other news network. Now add some substance (Ron Paul) and you’ll make a killing. CNN is beginning to take advantage of this insider knowledge, and now that Ron Paul has secured some credibility in Iowa there is no shame in taking Ron Paul seriously.
If you are looking for substance and higher ratings, give Ron Paul a call. Take a hint from Shepard Smith and Greta Van Susteren.
Many of you have wanted to help Ron Paul in one way or another, but you are not allowed to donate to Ron Paul’s campaign, or you may have maxed out your allowable contribution. Well, here is an easy way to help, which may benefit you in more than one way: Sell all your NWS stock.
Teach FOX News a lesson. Make them bleed green until they put Ron Paul back into the debates.
Probably coincidental, but it need not be if people start selling now. Even if people are skeptical that it has anything to do with Ron Paul supporters, it would be smart to sell your NWS stock just to be safe.
Hannity tries to discount the poll results but Ron Paul forces Hannity to affront the audience, insult FOX News, or admit Ron Paul won. In all, a great interview and surprisingly civil.
Military contribution numbers originally published in a social networking website were published on digg and the blogosphere. They were downplayed by FOX News initially and a recent study published by the Center for Responsive Politics has now catapulted the analysis to mainstream outlets such as USA Today.
Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said the military support makes sense. The congressman “wants to get (troops) out of playing the world’s policemen and get them home,” he said.
Numbers were originally crunched by T. S., a Ron Paul supporter who frequents the facebook Election 08 Newsvine application, and published here. Anybody who still questions the relevance of the internet in today’s politics ought to reconsider.
The point of voting in the elections isn’t to predict the winner. If it were, it would be called gambling, not voting. People vote to *choose* the winner, not to give away the little influence they have to yellow journalism.
People sometimes vote for whom they perceive will be the winner, because they feel like they have more control over the outcome. But that’s just an illusion, because you rejected your first choice. In reality you lost AND you didn’t even try. In reality, you forwent the little control you had, just to make yourself feel good.
That’s cowardly.
Consequences of pursuing the illusion
When you vote based on popular perceptions, you are handing your vote over to the media, as they control perceptions. You are perpetuating their illusion.
Exceptions
There are strategic times to vote for a second or third choice; which is why it would be good to have multiple choices and run-off votingrange voting (thank you to commenter Bruce for this reference). However, if your first choice is Ron Paul, when all democratic and neoconservative candidates look the same, it is illogical not to vote for your first choice.
A Solution
If you need to predict the winner in order to feel good and impress your friends, create a time capsule and jot down your prediction; or spend your money on exotic gambling. If you predicted the winner, congratulations, you have a license to impress. If your favorite candidate won, you should instead be ecstatic.
CNN exhibits its bias; College Democrat displays ignorance; Ron Paul Republican represents Paul supporters well.
Shows how uninformed people are, and how biased the media is. Ron Paul’s current odds according to betting sites hover around 8:1. And the trend is in Ron Paul’s favor. My prediction is they will soon come to be 5:1 based on recent polls.
You may have read a great article by Arthur Silber pointing out that, You, Too, Can and Should Be an “Intelligence Analyst”. The basic premise is the intelligence community has little more access than you do to critical information, and that privileged information becomes irrelevant too quickly to be a major factor in foreign policy decisions.
Thus, the decision to go to war has less to do with military intelligence than it has to do with whims and irrational internal politics (read: whatever is convenient for the people in power). After all, you have an essentially unlimited number of choices from everything to what you will wear, to what you will have for breakfast, and just how you’ll get your work done today. Why is foreign policy any different? The choices aren’t only “war” and “cut and run” as this administration would have you believe. Did we have to give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum (leave the country or prepare for war) even if he had WMDs?
Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
You’d have to believe your government is incompetent if our only choice was to invade Iraq. Or maybe you’d believe it anyway. But our intelligence agencies aren’t incompetent. The problem is, as Arthur Silber points out, intelligence is irrelevant.
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
The second you start arguing about intelligence, you’ve given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a “grave” and “growing” threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you’re debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin.
Gabriel Kolko explains:
It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.
Because when intelligence doesn’t support your goals, you can just dismiss it and revise history:
What’s next? On to Iran
Since we are labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization for “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq” and since we are already over there, why not? It appears that the main reason for going to Iraq in the first place was to maintain a foothold in the Middle East and secure the region for our perpetually-muddled “ally” Israel. If the door starts to close because our military is spreading thin (as shown in the video above) the only way to keep it open (and transfer some of the responsibility for the war to the next lucky administration) is to engage Iran militarily (but it’s not really Iran, it’s the terroristic Revolutionary Guard! Oh, the wonders of the vague war on terrorism!) Of course, this is irrational, because we don’t belong in Iraq in the first place, and second, if Iran had invaded Canada or Mexico, you can be sure our government would be supplying Iran’s enemies with weapons, to maintain some control over our neighboring terroritory and protect ourselves passively by proxy.
These are the results in after an alleged voting machine malfunction. (About 4,500 votes of 13,000 had to be re-run):
As you can see, FOX dismisses Ron Paul’s support initially, and then when he gets 9.1% after campaigning for only two days he is not mentioned at all. (Others like Huckabee, Brownback and Tancredo campaigned in Iowa for months). Carl Cameron also dismissed Ron Paul’s results after Ron Paul won the South Carolina debate post-debate poll.
Out of 14,302 ballots cast
1st place: Mitt Romney (4516 votes)
2nd place: Mike Huckabee (2587 votes)
3rd place: Sam Brownback (2192 votes)
4th place: Tom Tancredo (1961 votes, 13.7%) 5th place: Ron Paul (1305 votes, 9.1%)
6th place: Tommy Thompson (1039 votes)
7th place: Fred Thompson
8th place: Rudy Giuliani
9th place: Duncan Hunter
10th place: John McCain (101 votes)
11th place: John Cox (41 votes)
Analysis by Anson Chi:
By now most of you know the results of the Iowa Straw Poll. This thread is in response to the reactions I’m seeing.
No. Ron Paul didn’t come in 1st. But he came in 5th. This was not election day. This was not the primaries. This was the Iowa Straw Poll. The point of this straw poll is simply to gauge how well the candidates did based on expectation. The candidate that had no expectations in the eyes of the mainstream media placed 5th.
Mitt Romney spent millions of dollars for his 1st place spot. He paid for people to be bussed in. He only beat the second place candidate by less than 2,000 votes.
Sam Brownback spent all but $400,000 of his campaign funds to get either 1st or 2nd. He came in 3rd.
Tom Tancredo has received about as much exposure as Ron Paul, and only bested our candidate by 656 votes. He has also campaigned in Iowa considerably.
Ron Paul, while only campaigning in Iowa for a week, while receiving practically no media exposure, while only relying on the supposed phantoms of the Internet and real life word of mouth, placed 5th. This is not a resounding victory. This is not a defeat. It shows that the message of freedom resonates with people if they only hear it, and we need to escalate our campaigning so that people do hear it.
Some people want a recount. I’m all for it. (I’m sure Brownback’s people wouldn’t mind one too). But if it doesn’t happen, all is not lost. The point is that the message is growing, and all we need to do is let more people hear about the most honest candidate in years, Ron Paul.
Also, be encouraged. Thompson is done. Hunter is done. McCain is done. Brownback’s campaign is in serious trouble (read: done). What that translates to is less competition. And considering that the average difference between the different candidate’s results was only 447 (282 not counting the difference between Romney and Huckabee), this day has shown that it is an extremely tight race. With less competition in the near future, and with a close race for those that will still stay in the race, this means that there will be more exposure ahead for everyone, including Dr. Paul.
Don’t fret. Don’t be complacent, either. The support is growing and so should our campaigning. Not to mention that 9% is almost 5 times higher than Lamestream Media’s prediction of 2%. We’ll win the YouTube/CNN debate and spread the Ron Paul Revolution even further!
UPDATE: Ron Paul’s omission is not a simple oversight. He was, again, omitted from a FOX News article on the Iowa straw poll, leading us to believe with certainty that this is intentional.
I get the feeling you readers out there don’t all like my ideology. Of course that is to be expected since I am a neoconservative, the true and only principle based ideology (not to be confused with neonazi.)
Anyway, to make the Spin Factor as Fair and Balanced as possible I offer the following: Don’t like my ideology? I’ll adopt yours! Are you an Al-Qaeda leader lacking good writing skills? I’ll help you out (but don’t tell Bush, I don’t want to be put on a no-fly list). Are you a liberal like Clinton in need for some love? I’ll write a personal ad for you and find you a cute intern.
Of course, you may not agree with me, but I certainly agree with you.
Ahmadinejad, I’ve almost finished your article on Why we need to adopt nuclear energy and stop worrying.
And Saddam, I almost finished writing Why I shouldn’t be hanged today - but I had some trouble with adjectival phrases that day, plus Bush needed a one-liner on what he would do that day (”I decided to go to sleep early and didn’t watch the execution”) and it was really hard to write. Then again, I’m still working on it. I know you are dead already, but maybe Bush will regret hanging you when he reads it: Here is an excerpt:
And that, fellow world citizens, is why my life should be spared. Nevertheless, I have some confessions to make in case I die:
To George Bush Senior: Love, I’m sorry I couldn’t quit you. I’m sorry you cheated on Barbara because of me. Maybe this hanging is what I deserve for letting you commit such a beautiful sin. The thing with Donald Rumsfeld was just a fling - I never loved him. I hope you can forgive me someday.
To George Bush Junior: I’m sorry you could never love me as a step-father. I tried. I really did. I never told you this, but when I was dating your father I always fantasized about you and I. And sometimes Bill O’Reilly, too. There’s just something manly and Irish about him.
To all Iraqi citizens: [This is where I left off… sorry Saddam].
As you can see, you need to submit your requests on time. I get calls from Castro everyday and he takes up a lot of my time. He is always babbling on about how his own doctors can’t keep him alive and how he wants me to take over Cuba in his place. But I declined. Here is my letter to Fidel:
It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Havana decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically.
So if there’s an article you heroes want me to write, I want to write it. 5/4 dictators recommend my services (Bush is the fifth, but he declined to be included).
