Robin Koerner's blog

Many of Ron Paul's supporters are currently abuzz with a letter that was written by Jennifer Sheehan, the RNC's legal council in 2008, which appears to state that no state delegate to the GOP convention is bound by his state to vote for a particular candidate. The excitement derives from the fact that if it were true, an outright Romney victory in the first round of voting at the convention in Tampa would be rather unlikely. But if it is not true - and I am sure the GOP will change rules if necessary to make it untrue - there may be just as much excitement to be had in the possibility of something that is rather more in the control of Paul's supporters.

It's the big "What if?" question that the letter begs but that few have asked.

What if Paul's supporters just ignore the binding rules and vote their consciences? What if, in Tampa, all those Paul supporters who are bound by state rules to vote for Romney put the ball firmly back in the GOP's court, and say, "Your move"?

One's first reaction might be to point out that if that were possible, it would have happened before.

But that would be a mistake. The GOP is now in uncharted territory.

The week before last, Warren Buffett's right-hand man and Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman, Charles Munger, told CNBC, "Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939... but I think civilized people don't buy gold; they invest in productive businesses."

To those who care about such things, the silence of the media about the extraordinary events around Ron Paul's campaign is deafening.

Some see conspiracy. I don't. I see the expected reaction to a paradigm shift -- a complete change in the concepts we use to make sense of our politics and culture.

An excellent illustration of the power of a "paradigm" is the Perceptions of Incongruity experiment that was conducted at Harvard in 1949.

In this experiment, subjects were shown playing cards and asked to call out what they saw. They would consistently identify the cards correctly. After a while, however, the experimenters would slip in "incongruous cards" in which the colors red and black were switched, such as black hearts or diamonds and red clubs or spades.

As I type this, the Supreme Court has just wrapped a day of hearing arguments the case of Arizona vs. United States, concerning Arizona's immigration-related bill, SB 1070.

When it was originally passed, I was an immigrant resident of that state.

I received my greencard two years ago and received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security -- the same letter that is sent to thousands of new immigrants every week -- from which I quote:

Left and Right and Right and Left
Have left America bereft
Of liberty, its founding light.

Christians, Liberals speak of peace
Until they hold the nation’s leash,
And send its youth to fight.

The welfare payments quickly rise
While still one half decap’talized;
No end to either blight.

The Left with all its good intent,
The Right with its religious bent,
Have turned our day to night.

It’s those who think that they know best
Who softly tyrannize the rest:
Domestic might makes right.

It’s means - and not intended ends -
On which the outcomes all depend,

As I take up invitations around the country to discuss the Blue Republican idea, I am learning a great deal about how our minds are opened and even changed when it comes to politics. In a slight departure from my usual topics, I offer the following in the hope that other lovers of liberty may find my experience useful in their own attempts to improve our nation ...

No one arrives at his or her political preferences as a result of only, or even mostly, logical argument (despite fervently held feelings to the contrary). Rather, people find themselves most easily convinced by arguments that support political views to which they have become committed for often highly complex reasons that the their conscious mind may never even know.

There are three political parties in the United States today, and they are all fielding candidates for the presidency.

The parties are the Republicrats, the Scared Religionists, and the Freedom and Peace Party.

By far the largest party is the Republicrats, who have held sway with their current platform since at least the 1940s. They are offering two candidates for president in 2012: their names are Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.

The title is a quote from Winston Churchill.

In what may have been my most widely-read article, I compared Paul to Churchill in an attempt to put the good doctor, and the efforts of those who support him, into historical context. Doug Wead, one of Paul’s senior campaign advisers went even further in an interview with Cavuto, saying simply “Paul is Churchill”. (*)

As we Paul supporters have failed so far to rack-up a victory in the primary or caucus beauty contests, I have started noticing that some are considering giving in to defeatism.

That is not worthy of Dr. Paul or our cause – and Winston Churchill will show you why.

In 1940, during the Second World War, Hitler’s tyranny had already swept across all of Europe. The score was liberty - zero; tyranny – too many to count.

Only Britain was left standing. And Hitler came for us.

In the Battle of Britain, the British stood alone in the world against a tyranny that had built an empire more efficiently than any had been built in history. This was when Churchill rallied the nation with what many regard as his greatest speech.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”, he said.

I had a great time at the GOP caucus on Saturday in Seattle's Belltown district. Being a Brit, I could not participate, but I enjoyed watching this brand of direct and participatory democracy that differs profoundly from anything that goes on in the country of my birth.

http://youtu.be/rVUm9mN263A

(3 mins long, captured at Ron Paul's speech in Seattle, WA on 2 March)

It is often said that a convert to a cause is more fervent than those born to it. That is probably true about me and my "conversion" as an immigrant to this great country.

In that spirit of passionate desire for my adoptive land to become everything it was meant to be, may I humbly suggest, America, that Ron Paul is Your Man.

Just a few years ago, I was excited to follow Obama's success in the hope that he would undo the worst of the un-American shenanigans of the Bush administration, including the abrogation of rights of American citizens, the killing of citizens of lands that don't threaten us and the wholesale transfer of wealth from those that create it and play by the rules to those that do neither of those two things.

Perhaps I was a little caught up in the excitement, but my intentions were good.

As it has turned out, in most things that matter, Obama is not even Bush-lite: he's more like Bush-plus. I'm not questioning his moral intent, but simply looking around me at new wars, continuation of laws that remove Americans' basic rights, mass transfer of wealth from the working man to the large subsidized groups, including financial corporations and unions, that fund the old political game.

I am strongly pro-choice. On this conviction, I differ from the candidate whom I am supporting for president in 2012, and whom I am suggesting liberals everywhere support.

Many of those liberals who most strongly disagree with the Blue Republicans -- former Obama supporters, Democrats and Independents, who support Ron Paul for president in 2012, revert to a single argument against him: that he is pro-life and this will have terrible consequences for the reproductive rights of women in the USA.

I've really not wanted to engage this as, on the one hand, it seems to be such an extraordinary (sometimes I think deliberate) misunderstanding of Paul's politics as to be not serious, and, on the other, abortion is such an emotive subject, I can't imagine any writer's gaining more readers than he loses by writing about it.

But since this matters so much -- as this misunderstanding is now standing in the way of remaking our country -- I'm going to engage it this once, and damn the torpedoes.

Monetary policy is now sexy. The young are into it. “End the Fed” rings out at Ron Paul’s political rallies like “We Will Rock You” used to ring out at Queen concerts.

There is, indeed, a direct relationship between the popularity of economics and monetary policy among the under 30s and the overwhelming support of this group for the candidate whose very political career begun on the day the USA went to a pure federally monopolized fiat fraction reserve monetary system back in ’71 when Nixon closed the gold window.

The fact that thousands of my readers know exactly what the preceding sentence means just proves the exciting change that is going on in this country, mostly thanks to Paul.

This rise of understanding of monetary policy among us commoners (those for whom the creation of money is a crime (the 99.999%)) is wonderful, but it has not yet undone a misunderstanding that prevails even among many of us who are fighting for real economic justice with our Bastiat and Hayek in hand. And this particular misunderstanding is important because it may be playing right into the very hands of the system, and even the people, we oppose.

The error is simply the idea that our government can go bankrupt. The truth is much worse.

Solvency is the ability to pay one’s bills. You become insolvent when you run out of money to pay yours.

Obviously, an entity that can create money whenever it wants to spend money can never be insolvent, and cannot go bankrupt. The US government is such an entity. It is an issuer – not merely a user – of a currency that is used to buy real stuff.