by Ron Paul | March 23, 2008

Five years ago last week, the US military's "shock and awe" campaign lit up the Baghdad sky. Five years later, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly four thousand Americans dead, we should pause and reflect on just what has been gained and what has been lost.

From the beginning, the march to war was paved with false assumptions and lies. Senior administration officials claimed repeatedly that Iraq was somehow responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001. They claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They manipulated the fear of the American people after 9/11 to further a war agenda that they had been planning years before that attack. The mainstream media was complicit in this war propaganda.

Nearly ten years ago, long before 9/11, I requested the time in opposition to the fateful Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, where I then stated on the Floor of the House of Representatives, "I see this piece of legislation as essentially being a declaration of virtual war. It is giving the President tremendous powers to pursue war efforts against a sovereign Nation." Less than five years later we were invading Iraq.

Dear Friends,

Back in January, I asked for some suggestions on revamping the Daily Paul. It looks like the time has come to make these suggestions a reality.

First, some background: The Daily Paul runs on an open source platform called Drupal. Before I started this site last year, I did some pretty exhaustive research on the best content management systems (CMS), and Drupal came out at the top of the list. For one thing - amazingly - it is free. Back when I was a web developer in Seattle in 2001, building a site like this would have cost $100,000 and taken an army of programmers! In just a few short years, with technology advances and people working collaboratively together over the web, you can see the results in the Daily Paul.

I'm not a programmer, but I know just enough to be dangerous. Which is to say I got the site up & running, and have for the most part managed it by myself. The site runs on Drupal 5. I know there have been many calls for outside moderators, which believe me, I am all for. The only problem is that with Drupal 5, it was impossible to give people moderator privileges without giving the keys away to the entire site, which is something that I simply judged to be too risky to do at the time. I have handed the keys over to a trusted few, but the site is simply too big for the few of us to handle.

Friends,

I had a post like this earlier soliciting ways to make the site better. Everyone came up with a lot of great ideas, but I had no way of implementing them at the time. I simply didn't have the technical skill to administer most of the requests, nor the money to pay someone else to do them. But now I'm ready to take the site to the next level. I can't do it myself, so I'm hiring the best consultants around. They're not going to be cheap, which is why I'm having this fundraiser and selling these posters.

I'm redesigning the site from the ground up, which means a faster more useful site for our movement. Now that we've been here for a year, I'd like to hear your suggestions again on how to make it better. I know that in many ways I am the bottleneck at this site. I get anywhere from 100 - 300 emails a day from the site, many marked "URGENT!" I simply can't deal with them all. People want their stuff on the site or on the front page. I have tried to deal with that by setting up the forums for people to post, but then we have the problem of spammers and plain offensive/off topic posts, and topics just getting lost under the deluge of posts. There are a lot of false positives with the spam filter, but unfortunately I don't have time to review them all. I've been getting a lot of complaints from that recently in my inbox (many of them marked URGENT! I am not a spammer!)

From the Official Site | March 25, 2008

Dr. Paul wanted all of his supporters to be aware that his longtime friend and colleague, Barry Goldwater, Jr., has released a new book, Pure Goldwater. (Palgrave MacMillan) The work contains never-before-published entries from his father’s journals and provides in-depth analysis and commentary from Mr. Goldwater, Jr. and former Nixon White House Counsel John Dean. Incidentally, Dean and Barry Jr. were high school classmates.

Barry Goldwater Jr. has been a wonderful supporter during the campaign, contributing a bold video endorsement and traveling on several occasions to stump with Dr. Paul and speak on his behalf (see videos below). RP ‘08 supporters interested in a terrific and informative read should certainly consider picking up a copy.

One more video, below:

The following is researched from http://www.washingtonpost.com/ ~ these are lists of the top three candidates that have received donations from each state. Flabbergasting! This email needs to go to all your local media, just copy and paste into an email. This speaks volumes. WOW!! Ron Paul is in the top three in every state that has already voted. WE MUST REMEMBER OUR NUMBERS WERE BIG LAST QUARTER AND WE NEED TO KEEP PLANTING SEEDS FOR THEM TO GROW! THANKS~

check this out too http://www.dailypaul.com/node/46362

Montana
Ron Paul $63,992
John McCain $10,030
Mitt Romney $9,585

From Liberty Maven: http://www.libertymaven.com/2008/03/27/ron-paul-republicans-...

Ron Paul Republicans Surround DC
March 27th, 2008 6:19 am | by marc

Dear Friends,

Compared to the heights of the Summer of '07, our movement is losing steam. Many of the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots have moved on to other pursuits, as can be seen by the diminished numbers visiting this site, and others like it, including the Ron Paul Forums. We who remain are a dedicated bunch. I will be attending a meeting this weekend to see about becoming a delegate. There is still a chance that Dr. Paul can win the GOP nomination.

However, we also need to think of contingencies and strategies to carry this movement on beyond the election. What are the best ways to remain organized and engaged in advancing the cause of liberty. No matter how tiny and insignificant, or large and impossible you think your idea might be -- let's hear it! Let's make this a huge brainstorming session to come up with ideas to restore our republic, to legalize freedom, to wake up our fellow citizens, and to get our lawmakers to obey the Constitution Ideas generate more ideas, so let's build upon them and see what we can come up with.

Thank you all for your continued support in the cause of liberty.

Michael Nystrom
Editor
www.dailypaul.com

Dear Friends,

Someone is attempting to hack the site. Yesterday and the day prior, as many of you are aware, someone got in and deleted a large number of posts. They are now attempting to gain access to the site through different members' accounts. If you receive an email from the Daily Paul asking you to reset your password that you did not request - IGNORE IT It means that someone is attempting to hijack your account. It is a good idea to beef up your passwords, not only on this site, but all sites that require passwords. This means using a long string - 8 characters or more, with numbers, upper and lower case characters, and special characters as well (like $, &, *, ^), etc.

I have taken several measures to beef up security, but please be on the lookout and notify me of anything suspicious or unusual via the contact form above. Thank you for your continued support and help.

Best regards,
Michael Nystrom
Editor
www.dailypaul.com

Time to listen to Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the lone voice of reason in Congress today who’s got to feel like he’s shouting into a field of cotton with his repeated warnings about the dangers of a collapsing dollar, while the administration goes AWOL on the problem.

The dollar just hit a record intraday low against the euro on reports that consumer confidence levels have dropped to levels not seen since the post-Watergate era. It is down 7% year to date against the Chinese renminbi, it’s weaker than the Japanese yen and the Canadian loonie.

The joke is the greenback is now only stronger than the Mexican pesos and the Zimbabwe dollar, an overstatement for dramatic effect, to be sure.But since hitting a peak in 2002, the dollar has lost about a quarter of its value against a trade weighted basket of currencies.

Continue reading here...

I'm not here as much as I use to be, but I thought I'd drop by to post this Time Mag. article for the few Paulies that are still coming to this site. It's a good article and worth the read. Too bad they give him a realistic profile piece after they hosed him for so many months.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1724358,00....

I admire your fortitude at staying on the DP.

Keep up the fight, good people. Peace.

Just got the phone call from our MAJOR pet supply company...Our rep has informed us that the weekly deliveries we have been recieving since Christ was a carpenter will now be every two weeks and possibly in the near future they will be only once a month or longer due to gas prices etc.

When I questioned her further she said that almost all wholesalers in all areas of business...including food...were going to begin doing this ie..combining routes etc..which would make many products unavailable should they be wiped off the shelves in a short time after delivery...

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2008/03/26/paul_to_visi...

Happy valley is going to get happy!

former Alaska U.S. Senator Mike Gravel joined the Libertarian Party. He currently lives in Virginia, which does not have registration by party. Gravel joined the party by becoming a dues-paying member. Thanks to ThirdPartyWatch for this news.
http://waronyou.blogspot.com/2008/03/mike-gravel-joins-liber...

UPDATE: Since it would confuse people to remove the first sentence of this post and try to understand the vitriol, I'll leave it, but in retrospect, I agree I should have left it out. The remainder of the message is, I believe, useful information, and contains links to two sets of writings that are almost entirely in agreement with Ron Paul's views, and offer both arguments and evidence that will be useful in promoting Dr. Paul's candidacy, and that contain nothing promoting the candidacy of any other person.

I should also have noted that Dr. Ruwart and her husband have been active supporters in this year's Ron Paul for President campaign, and that she only declared after Dr. Paul's announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign (or after what looked to most people like such).

Okay: my original message, with the offending first sentence follows:

I think I know who Dr. Paul is going to be voting for in November, and it isn't John McCain. ;)

Dr. Mary Ruwart, who was nominated in 2002 by Dr. Ron Paul to be FDA Commissioner, has entered the race for the Libertarian nomination. Ruwart, a former Assistant Professor of Surgery at St. Louis University Medical School and research scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, is the author of Healing Our World in an Age of Aggression, a primer on libertarianism which Dr. Paul says "bridges the gap between conservatives and liberals, Christians and New Agers, special interests and the common good, with practical solutions to our economic and societal woes." Although the current 2003 version of the book is well worth the price, an older version of the book is available online for free at http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/

In her turn, Dr. Ruwart supported Ron Paul in his Libertarian presidential bid in 1988, and has indicated that her campaign intends to promote Dr. Paul's Health Freedom Act proposal now in Congress. She has announced that her three campaign themes will be Foreign Policy, The Economy, and Health Care, all issues in which she and Paul are in virtually total agreement. Her popular Internet column for the non-political educational group Advocates for Self Government, "Ask Dr. Ruwart", provides short answers to the tough libertarian questions, and archives of her answers can be found at http://www.askdrruwart.com.