We are all just a little wrinkle???

This was in my Tennessee News paper today! 11/14/07
PLEASE PLEASE lets show him just how big we are!!!!

E-mail him at jmwelch2@yahoo.com

Ron Paul’s ideas about government ignore too many facts!

Jim Welch, a Kingsport Tn resident, works in advancing biosafety and biosecurity.

The political world was a little wrinkled last week with the revelation that maverick GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul raised just under $5 million in one day. That’s right, one day.
I’m not a Ron Paul fan because he would have his followers believe the elastic clause in the Constitution doesn’t exist. It does — it’s Article I, Section 8, Clause 18. It’s the one that basically says Congress can pass any laws to carry out its enumerated powers. As long as they can link it somehow and in some way to the powers designated to Congress, they can do it.
The elastic clause is the bane of libertarianism and states’ rights activists. It is the promoter of large government. It is essentially Congress’ blank check. Some go so far as to claim that it is their single greatest power.
Just as proponents of gun control wish the Second Amendment had never been written, those who want to “get the federal government off my back” wish Congress had never been granted such an elusively worded aut h o r i t y.
Most Americans know Ron Paul only as some sort of thorn on a much larger rosebush. He tends to say some things about the war in Iraq that one expects only to hear from the Kucinich side of the table. He is an antagonist to his own political party’s blatant love affair with the famed military-industrial complex. In a field that measures its political testosterone by how quickly one would commit military force, Paul challenges conventional wisdom. Adding huge insult to GOP wisdom, Paul also opposes massive farming subsidies that help keep agricultural states GOP red.
Even though I’m not a Paul fan, I do believe I have some inkling as to why he resonates with so many people. He is basically what is left of the states’ rights movements of the ’50s and ’60s minus the understood racial overtones that accompanied many of the older states’ rights platforms.
Paul simply wants to realign the federal government to where the powers of governments diminish outwardly rather than inwardly.
My brain problem with states’ rights is that it takes a strong federal government to guarantee the rights of individual states. For example, it takes a powerful federal government to ensure that gun owners have a constitutional right to bear arms. It takes a strong federal government to ensure protection for states if invaded. What’s more, it would even take a stronger federal government to enact a judicial overturn of Roe v. Wade than we currently have to keep the decision in place.
Paul places a great deal of confidence in industrial hemp as a replacement crop. I’m not sure I could distinguish industrial hemp very readily from its recreational partner, but I am sure it would take a massive federal bureaucracy to separate the two.
Dr. Paul is a vocal opponent of gay marriage and wishes to include an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to define marriage. To do so would most certainly take a power heretofore left to the states and place it firmly in federal hands. That certainly doesn’t reduce the power or influence of the federal government.
Our government has morphed into what it is today largely because we have assumed rights our constitutional forefathers never dreamed. We cannot hold our growing assumption of liberties at bay any more than religious sects can successfully go back in time to 1847. It will always be a more perfect union that we seek.
It’s just that sometimes it will look like anything but.

Jim Welch