the Ron Paul question...

i see the arguments as valid, both for and against the man.

"against" because he'll sever social services almost to the bone... and he'll do so during a time they'll be more needed than ever as the EU implodes and more U.S. municipalities grow insolvent.

"for" because he'll gut the defense budget, and put a stop (or at least a cessation) to the paranoid fascist police state we're rapidly becoming.

ultimately for me, until I hear more about his energy plan, i'm undecided on him...  if Paul thinks the free market will just seamlessly solve the energy crisis on its own without government help, he's more of an idiot than i'd ever have guessed.  Or he just doesn't understand - or accept - what we face. That's a very scary position to take for the leader of the "free" world, as we witness the world's spare capacity drawing down to a drip.

I'm not naive. I get why we spend 660+ billion dollars each year on the military. The defense budget is the only part of government that keeps getting a raise, and that is because its main function (for decades) is to keep bringing the oil safely home to all Western nations. NATO's geostrategy is absolutely ALL about energy, and that's why the Pentagon budget remains so bloated during a time of profound austerity already. ... Paul doesn't agree that it should be that way. He wants to close a lot of bases. That would usher in a major change to how the world oil pie gets divied up. I do hope Paul understands that the "drill baby drill" mantra is quite hollow ... Because any way you slice it, this continent does not have the reserves, nor the production capacity to cut imports very much at all. It's basic arithmetic, and that is the plain truth to anyone looking at the EIA's own data of flow rates on these various "heavy oil alternatives."

I like a lot of what Ron Paul says... But with "them" likely holding Congress, a Paul presidency would most definitely shock the system, ...   the problem is  I'm not sure this country is healthy enough to survive the surgery, and may not come out of anesthesia. The surgery I speak of would be cutting the cord to multi-national investment banks. Because make no mistake about it: when the next Lehman happens (BofA? Deutsche?), if it comes under a Paul presidency? It's domino time.

As for the racism dart they keep trying to pin on him, not buyin' it. At least not at this point. ... He was a fool to not take his name off that publication, sure, but I don't believe the man is racist. (though I'll admit his uptight reaction in "Bruno" was priceless).

What Peak Oil Looks Like | Energy Bulletin

What Peak Oil Looks Like | Energy Bulletin

It’s symptomatic that in the last few weeks I’ve fielded a fair number of emails insisting that the peak oil theory—of course it’s not a theory at all; it’s a hard fact that the extraction of a finite oil supply in the ground will sooner or later reach a peak and begin to decline—has been rendered obsolete by the latest flurry of enthusiastic claims about shale oil and the like. Enthusiastic claims about the latest hot new oil prospect are hardly new, and indeed they’ve been central to cornucopian rhetoric since M. King Hubbert’s time. A decade ago, it was the Caspian Sea oilfields that were being invoked as supposedly conclusive evidence that a peak in global conventional petroleum production wouldn’t arrive in our lifetimes. Compare the grand claims made for the Caspian fields back then, and the trickle of production that actually resulted from those fields, and you get a useful reality check on the equally sweeping claims now being made for the Bakken shale, but that’s not a comparison many people want to make just now.

On the other side of the energy spectrum, those who insist that we can power some equivalent of our present industrial system on sun, wind, and other diffuse renewable sources have been equally vocal, and those of us who raise reasonable doubts about that insistence can count on being castigated as “doomers.” It’s probably not accidental that this particular chorus seems to go up in volume with every ethanol refinery or solar panel manufacturer that goes broke and every study showing that the numbers put forth to back some renewable energy scheme simply don’t add up. It’s no more likely to be accidental that the rhetoric surrounding the latest fashionable fossil fuel play heats up steadily as production at the world’s supergiant fields slides remorselessly down the curve of depletion. The point of such rhetoric, as I suggested in a post a while back, isn’t to deal with the realities of our situation; it’s to pretend that those realities don’t exist, so that the party can go on and the hard choices can be postponed just a little longer.

Thus our civilization has entered what John Kenneth Galbraith called “the twilight of illusion,” the point at which the end of a historical process would be clearly visible if everybody wasn’t so busy finding reasons to look somewhere else.