It is no surprise that the Republican Party has received more campaign contributions from employees of the military than the Democratic Party.  However, it may surprise a lot of people to find out that, according to FEC numbers, Ron Paul has received more campaign contributions from military members than any other single candidate.  The numbers can be broken down as follows:

All numbers are in US dollars and the data is arranged from most contributions to least.

NAME: TOTAL [ARMY] [NAVY] [AIRFORCE] [VETERAN] [USMC]

RON PAUL: 24,965 [6,975] [6,765] [4,650] [5,075] [1,500]
McCain: 17,475 [6925] [6305] [1795] [800] [1600]
Romney: 3,551 [2,051] [0] [1500] [0]
Giuliani: 2,320 [1,450] [370] [250] [250]
Hunter: 1000 [0] [1000] [0]
Huckabee: 750 [250] [0] [500]
Tancredo: 350 [350] [0] [0]
Brownback: 71 [71] [0] [0]

Presidential candidate Ron Paul has received over $7,000 more than McCain who was the closest other candidate.  Dr. Paul even received more money from veterans than McCain!  It’s interesting to see that the military supports the only anti-Iraq war Republican candidate.  It just goes to show you how bad this ‘war‘ really is going.

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Barry Manilow donated to Presidential Candidate Ron Paul’s campaign:

Presidential candidate Ron Paul discuses having more money than McCain:

Great Article From the Prometheus Institute:

Many less-political Americans, especially younger Americans, consider Social Security to be a boring, worthless issue that they don’t need to care about. Here are eight reasons why that’s wrong, and why everyone, especially the young, really should consider Social Security an important issue in their lives.

1. You’re paying for it. 6.2% of every dollar you make is already going to Social Security, through taxes, whether you like it or not. That’s four minutes of every hour working that you spend working for no one but Uncle Sam and your grandmother’s bridge club. For someone who makes $40,000/yr, that’s almost $2,500 paid over a full year. You’re going to not care about something that you pay that much for?

2. You might not get anything for it. Despite your aforementioned investment, your future returns are looking less-than-stellar. The Social Security system is already facing a $26 trillion unfunded liability. That means they expect to need to pay that much more in benefits than they expect to get in tax contributions. (This is because the millions of retiring baby boomers collecting Social Security will greatly outnumber the younger workers who are left to pay for their benefits.) Either the $26 trillion comes (per usual) from our paychecks, or we are the ones who end up getting stuck with benefit cuts when we retire (see next point). Or, we could fix the system now. But that would first require actually caring about the issue.

3. You might need the money. I know we’re all planning on being rich enough to not need Social Security, but hey, things happen. It’s worth ensuring that the safety net will be there when we all retire. And many of the current “solutions” for the system include cutting benefits or making you work longer before you can collect benefits…all bad news for the future people who need the money.

4. You might even make some money. Personal account proposals leave the option for you to invest your retirement funds in stocks, bonds or other long-term investments. Seeing as the stock market has a average return of over 8% a year, and Social Security’s current return is barely over 2%, Social Security reform could actually put you in a position to make some money. Who doesn’t like that?

5. To hell with the old people, too. The senior citizens lobby, the one that just got us to pay $720 billion for a prescription drug benefit for old people only, is indeed running the political show for Social Security. They don’t want to change the system. To that end, they throw their lobbying weight around making sure politicians don’t do anything to fix anything too much. They can do this because they are large, but also because no one else challenges them. And if they have their way, the rest of us will get saddled with the $26 trillion. All the more reason to gear up and take them on, no?

6. America can lead the world (again). As bad as the Social Security situation is here, believe it or not, it’s worse in Europe. Their benefits are plusher, so the costs of the system are higher. And their birthrate is even lower, so the impending baby boomer retiree money drain is going to be even bigger. If America can get its act together and solve this impending bankruptcy, we can (again) show the world how it’s done.

7. You choose: collectivism or individualism? Many ideas for reforming the Social Security system, such as the private accounts that PI supports, change the nature of the system from collectivist to individualist. Currently, your mandatory tax contributions are lumped into a giant fund that is paying out benefits to retirees as you read this. This collectivist process is at the core of Social Security’s financial crisis. Instead, you could control your own money. With the Social Security crisis, America faces the question of whether we should continue the socialist government policies of the 1930s, or whether we should give the power back to the people.

8. We have better things to do with $26 trillion. The sooner we find solutions for the Social Security crisis is the sooner all of that wasted money can be spent for something else. Everyone has ideas of where the government should spend its money, and even the bad ones are better what we’re doing now - plugging a leak in a broken system with $26 trillion of political silly putty. Everyone should be able to agree on that.

The Federal Government is positioning itself to raise taxes on cigars from 5 cents to $10 per cigar.  That’s a 20,000 percent increase!!!

The problem is that the Democrat controlled congress is looking for money.  They have proposed a bill asking for a $35 - $50 billion increase in federal funding for the state children’s health insurance program.  What better place to steal the money than from the persecuted smoking class?

Under the new funding bill, taxes on a pack of cigarettes will rise from 39 cents to $1.  The tax on “large cigars” will increase from 4.8 cents per cigar to 53 percent of the cost of the cigar, with a maximum of $10.

In 2006, taxes on cigars brought the US government $225-million — a rather miniscule number when compared to the $7.4-billion in taxes stolen from cigarette smokers.  That’s a total of more than $7.5 billion dollars worth of tax revenue from those two players in the tobacco industry. 

The tax will raise the government’s income to $53-billion from cigars and $400-billion from cigarettes — based on 2006 sales figures.  This is an obscene increase in money going to a government that we need to shrink not feed.

If you smoke a $10 cigar the price will increase to $15.  If you smoke that cigar twice a week, your expenses will increase by $40 each month or $480 per year.  If you smoke a $20 cigar the price goes up to $30 and the yearly increase doubles to $960.  Some people are on a tight budget and will not be able to afford such an increase.  So what happens?  Businesses will take a hit and people like Eric Newman will loose their livelihoods.

This is the problem with the government providing healthcare.  They believe that when they are in control of the health of the people they have the right to control what we do, whether via regulation or excessive taxes.  We need to get the government out of healthcare and we need to stop taxing people for what they enjoy doing.

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While it may be old news that the FBI has been sending out its so-called “National Security Letters” to private businesses with the goal of coercing them into revealing personal information about their clients or employees, most people are probably not aware that the FBI was not being entirely truthful in these letters.  Where are the “check and balances”?

Many of the letters were written with the following language:

Due to exigent circumstances, it is requested that records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided.  Subpoenas requesting this information have been submitted to the U.S. Attorney’s Office who will process and serve them formally.

The letters promised that the proper papers were filed with the U.S. Attorneys office.  In many cases, however, this was an utter fabrication.  It seems as though these bureaucrats think they can alter reality.  They think therefore it is.  

Thanks to the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the FBI was caught in this blatant abuse of the Patriot Act — a law which already gives too much authority to the government.  I use the word ‘give’ very loosely of course, considering that words on a piece of paper do not have the ability to give anyone anything.  At most, the law allows the government — who created the law – to obtain an aura of legitimacy regarding its otherwise obscene actions.

All of the letters seem to be coming from the Communications Analysis Unit which appears to be stationed in room 4944 of the FBI Headquarters.  The only name on any of the letters is Larry Mefford.

Mefford is the former Executive Assistant Director, in charge of the Counterterrorism/Counterintelligence Division of the FBI.  He was in charge of preventing domestic terrorism. 

It makes you wonder what type of “special project” this information – in many cases multiple pages worth of domestic telephone records — was needed for.  Why did the FBI need to reach around the Patriot Act in order to obtain these names?  Could it be because there was no evidence to excuse such a blatant disregard for privacy rights?

I will leave you with a quote from Benjamin Franklin:

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Remember it well, he was a smart man.

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