(and I am not a spambot 🙂 )

Thanks, please understand that I drift between responding to specific points made here and reacting to stuff I see in “the cloud”. I know most regulars here can well argue against Paul’s policies. I seem to have become the neo-neocon gadfly-in-residence.

I have taken extra time to follow as many links as I can, and see where they lead. They have led in circles. The summary you cite in your last paragraph is one I had not seen, but I have seen the stuff it links to. It is an example of the generalizing that I complained about. Which quotes, in which letters is Paul confirming or disavowing in which interview? I doubt he has disavowed any of the “sound money” stuff, but it would be easy to make a case that he has as part of the general disavowance. I am comfortable laying some guilt on lousy reporting as part of the mix.

When I watched in particular the recent CNN/Borger interview, Paul was correct. She was badgering him with the same questions he answered yesterday, last week, last year. It calls to mind Martha Stewart or police interrogation. Ask someone the same thing enough times and once in while they might not say it exactly the same. That’s now become evidence of lying. Rephrase the same essential question, get the same essential answer, but still be guilty of perjury. I say “nonsense”.

I just followed my own admonition and tried to find the evidence of newsletter income. All I get are references to Reason and one Reason column that provides numbers with no sources. My napkin P&L strongly suggests that there had to be more than the newsletters to generate such income. And how does an 8-page letter require a staff of 11 to produce? Was Paul earning speaking fees? Was his staff working on other consulting and writing under the aegis of RP&A? Did RP&A sell books or merchandise about investments and survivalism? If somebody has the tax returns, show them. It frustrates me that nobody appears to even ask such questions.

The thinking changes if we find RP&A was a broader business, with newsletters being but one vehicle. It may be that the letters were a sideline to his sideline business.

The figures on the newsletters are from tax statements, obtained by Reason, if memory serves me (I don’t have time right now to look it all up again).

Funny stuff about how much I make on this blog. It’s actually a pittance; this is a labor of love mostly (I realize you were probably joking, but still I thought I’d clear that up!). Ron Paul always, I would imagine, had a much greater following and readership than I do. His group RP&A also put out not just one newsletter but several (not necessarily all at once, but in some years they all were published).

I cannot imagine a person putting out a rather short newsletter, year after year, and not reading it fairly regularly. It just is not credible. And if I’m wrong about that, and he never looked at it, that is just another reason to reject him as a candidate.

But in every post I’ve written about Paul and the newsletters (and I think there have been only two), I’ve taken pains to say it’s not the reason I reject him. To list all his positions that are too extreme for me would be a long list; let’s just say we disagree strongly on a lot of things, especially foreign policy but many other things as well.

By the way, I don’t think Paul’s a racist. I just think he’s most likely lying about his lack of knowledge of the newsletters’ content.

And no, I haven’t spent hours and hours and hours checking out everything Paul ever said about them, starting in the 90s when he apparently was first questioned about them. I have relied on summaries such as this, to take just one example of many, which describes how Paul’s story about whether or not he read the newsletters and was familiar with what was in them has morphed over time.

Part of the problem is believing what Ace posts. Truth is not their top priority. The $1M/year assertions, for example, need some evidence. And not just that blogger A posted that blogger B said he saw that blogger C knew that Paul sold $1M. Show me the financials. Or at least sketch out a P&L. To think that a tiny newsletter aimed at the tiny libertarian audience would sell that well, much less show that much profit is incredible.

Guessing $100/year for sub, we’re talking about 10,000 subscribers. That would put his newsletter at the top of that ecosystem. And if it were so grandly successful, why is it so hard to find copies now?

How much do we all think Neo makes from this blog? $1M/year? Her readership is greater, and her costs are lower.

I don’t find persuasive the argument that the tone of the headlines is proof that Paul was involved or even aware. It was a sideline, a vehicle to express. The next issue was due for mailing and there were pages to fill. What do you do? You fill them, maybe with some submitted material that gets people fired up.

It is important to remember my point about sloppy generalizing. Paul does not say he never had any knowledge of any content. Go back through the challenges on each snippet, some he knew, some he did not. Sometimes he called for context, sometimes he disavowed.

The absence of any corroborating evidence in Paul’s long public life suggest that Ace is once again inventing a narrative. As many times as the idea is repeated by many mouths, it doesn’t get more true.

It’s just like Cain was a womanizer for only three years at the NRA? Based on the word of a total of two people of dubious credibility? Suspending disbelief is for the movies, not for politics.

I acknowledge that some of this stuff looks bad, is bad, and is worth looking into. But all y’all have to acknowledge that Paul has taken responsibility and put it all into perspective. The whole proposition is a ludicrous sideshow. Beat Paul down about his policy proposals. Show me where his views are wrong, or where some others are superior.

And if all y’all get so easily wrapped around the axle on this stuff, wait until we all get the blogosphere version of Mormonism.

All of the news stories I’ve seen about this incident have stated that the gun in question was a muzzle loading black powder rifle. In other words – no cartridges. The only way to empty a muzzle loader other than firing it is to use a bullet-puller which is not a quick-and-easy operation. So firing the rifle in order to empty it is common. Now, why the moron fired it into the air rather than into the ground is another question altogether.

I’ve been writing here about probabilities and suppositions, not certainties, as to whether Obama and Paul were lying (Obama about whether he knew of Wright’s offensive remarks, and Paul about whether he knew of the offensive remarks in his own newsletters).

That’s why I have tried to make it clear that I don’t know for sure, although I think it’s likely that they each lied (in fact, Don Carlos took issue with me for what he called my “ambiguation,” and my hesitation to call either of them liars outright).

And of course I realize that something highly implausible can be true; that’s why I wrote, “Unless I am 100% sure something is a lie I don’t call it one for certain.” But I reserve the right to have an opinion about what is highly likely to be a lie based on the best information I can gather about something. And that’s what I’ve tried to do here.

As far as Paul’s newsletters go, that information includes what I gleaned from Ace’s post, which I quoted at great length in the comments section here. In his post, Ace points out a few things that helped me conclude that Paul is most likely lying when he says he had not known the content of the newsletters published under his name by his group RP&A.

For example: for most of the years the offending newsletters were being published, Paul was doing two things: being a doctor, and publishing the newsletters as the president of Ron Paul & Associates, which seems to have been formed for that purpose. The newsletters in question were not lengthy, either. They were quite short, and published under Paul’s own name. Because of their brevity it would have been relatively easy for him to have regularly familiarized himself with what was in them, and if he had done so he would have become aware of their offensive content because it was not a rarity but was instead rather frequent.

Reason magazine, which has studied the newsletters (I have not), wrote that they contained especially offensive content during the years between Paul’s run for president on the Libertarian ticket (1988) and his return to Congress in 1996. During these years he was busy, but does not appear to have been so very busy that he had no time to read short newsletters published under his own name. He was not serving in public office at the time; he was a doctor. Also, the entity he formed that published the newsletters (and of which he was president), Ron Paul & Associates, was not especially large. This was the situation during those years:

Paul resumed his private medical practice as well as taking part in other small business ventures. For 1992, RP&A earned $940,000 and employed Paul’s family as well as Lew Rockwell (its vice-president and occasional editor) and seven other workers.

Not an unwieldy size nor such a vast empire at all. Why would this organization have been so difficult to manage or to monitor that he had no time to even take a look at the product it created and skim its rather short contents now and again? He was not stretched so very thin, and although the writing of the newsletters may indeed have been delegated to others (writing them would have taken a fair amount of time), there would be little excuse for him not familiarizing himself with their content on a fairly regular basis. Also, they appear to have made him a lot of money, so they would seem rather important. even as compared to his other work.

Do you really think it credible that he didn’t even read them or familiarize himself with their general content, year after year after year, as he now claims? I do not, although I don’t think it impossible that he failed to do so.

Disbelieving him is hardly tantamount to finding him guilty in a kangaroo court. I certainly would not convict Paul, or anyone else, in a court of law without hearing further testimony and further evidence than I’ve found so far. But we are not in a court of law. I render opinions here about a host of things based on a lesser standard of proof than I would were I actually in a court of law. If I didn’t do so, I would be unable to render opinions at all.

Person B’s opinion about person A’s veracity when person A is making claims about what was in his/her mind at a certain time must nearly always be based on imperfect knowledge on the part of person B. We cannot read minds. The only way to come to an opinion about whether or not Ron Paul has been lying when he claims no prior knowledge of the content of his own newsletters is to decide whether his story of ignorance is generally credible or not (as I’ve tried to do here), because it cannot be definitively proved or disproved—unless one were to somehow come into possession of something like a smoking gun, for example a secret recording of Paul talking about the newsletters’ offending content back in the 80s-90s when they were first written and published. I wouldn’t recommend sitting on a hot stove waiting for that to happen.

As for Obama’s veracity concerning Rev. Wright’s offending sermons and whether or not Obama heard them—I haven’t felt the need to list all the possible lies Obama may have told about this. My point is that Obama most likely lied about it. I suppose that his lies either could have been about (a) whether he heard them; or (b) whether he attended the large number of services he said he did; or maybe even (c) both. (And, come to think of it, it’s also possible that Obama attended most of the services and yet slept through them and didn’t hear any of the sermons, and is therefore telling the truth about both (a) and (b). I didn’t feel the need to list that possibility either.)

We could go on and on this way, couldn’t we, listing all the possibilities? But that’s not the way communication usually goes. There are always things left unsaid, and always things that can be misunderstood and/or misinterpreted. So I’ll leave it at that.

it’s like conception
it depends on whether the process starts when you get the rifle off the wall or when you actually have it empty.

In your mind cleaning starts with the firearm properly empty
in lazy peoples minds cleaning starts when they get the idea to clean and start getting things ready

the larger point was that he thought it was implausible that his shooting the gun to remove the cartridge would cause any harm!!!!
So the implausible idea led to an actual act in which the outcome was as implausible given the space involved and randomness

I have known more than one rural person whose firearm needed repair and were too lazy to do so and that firing it was their workaround
notice I use the word moron!

this whole method of seeking truth puts ignorance and stood up front over knowledge and experience as now you have to convince the dumb to see what they can’t or wont compute!!!

Churches from the underground railroad and even in soviet places serve other purposes than what’s said for consumption

it drives me batty to watch three stooges logic in action

I can’t conceive of it or figure it out and I can’t even think any point is a lie and so the stooges win every argument (not)

Turns out a man cleaning his gun and too lazy to remove the bullet fired it off and it travelled a mile and hit her by accident

because
1. you can’t clean a gun with the action closed
2. you can’t shoot a gun with the action open
and
3. you can’t clean a gun with a cartridge in the chamber
4. you can’t shoot a gun without a cartridge in the chamber

A person can be shot by a gun that’s being aimed, played with, twirled, shown off, played catch with, grasped under a pillow during a dream, picked up, or dropped.

Not by a gun that’s being cleaned. Unless you mean removing fingermarks with a rag and a little Pledge or gun oil. That can be done to a gun that’s loaded, cocked, and locked. But that’s not what’s meant by cleaning.

Usually the cleaning-his-gun theme is trotted out when nobody wants to say suicide or criminally negligent homicidebut I guess it works for Amish girls too.