Archive for August, 2007
Here is what I have been up to:
After the fund raiser I flew to DC where I was pleased to get to visit with many of my friends from college. I also spent three days working as a volunteer at the Ron Paul 2008 campaign headquarters.
Since returning, I have been preparing to head off to Antigua for Medical School. I created a Ron Paul 2008 meetup group for Antigua. So far it has two members (I created the group yesterday).
I don’t have a lot of time on my hands to go into more detail, but I will do so when I get a chance.
Yes, ladies and gentleman, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the members of the Spokane Ron Paul meetup, we are in first place in the fund raising competition! Thank you all for coming to my fund raiser, you did a wonderful thing. We still have seven days to go in the competition, and we will need to continue our hard work in order to maintain first place, but I am quite confident that we can do it!
You can check the leader board here: http://www.ronpaul2008.com/meetup/standings
Happy Birthday, Dr. Paul!!!!
We raised around $5,000 for your campaign tonight at my house!
Happy Birthday!!!
We have really upset some people in the establishment! Illinois State Senator Dan Rutherford ripped a sign from the hands of a Ron Paul supporter and handed it to one of his thuggish supporters who decided to stand on it with a nasty look on his face. Rutherford is also the Illinois Chairman for Mitt Romney’s campaign. I know first hand how nasty those Romney people are. They treated me very badly in Iowa, and I was as nice as I could be to them. Civil discourse must not be one of Mitt Romney’s strong points. Wow, he’d make one heck of a president, wouldn’t he!
Check out the video!
As the following graph so eloquently demonstrates, pirates quickly and effectively deplete greenhouse gases, thus leading to a lower overall global temperature:
The Solution is Simple
Recruit Al Gore and his friends to form a Pirate’s Union in order to increase the number of pirates. Wait. No. That would destroy piracy on the high seas.
Just give IRS agents boats.
The more IRS agents who have boats, the lower the global temperature will get. After about five years, our country will need Ron Paul in order to prevent a new ice age (we’ve heard about a coming ice age before, haven’t we?)
But wait, pirates kill people!
When was the last time socialist environmentalist have cared whether their policies kill people? Hmmm….
No new coal fired electricity plants in Africa….hundreds of thousands of children die each year of respiratory diseases caused by smoke from indoor cooking fires. But what’s a few hundred thousand kids mean when we can save the polar bears?
I’m flying to DC on Tuesday morning. I will be up very late on Monday night because I am hosting a Ron Paul for President fund raiser at my house. My flight leaves at 6:00 AM. When I arrive at the airport, I’m not going to be in a good mood. I’m going to be tired and cranky. I’m always cranky at the airport because I have to deal with government employees. TSA employees are some of the most incompetent and infuriating people in the world. Last year I flew over 50,000 miles, and hated every mile of it. I’ve dealt with all sorts of jackasses in the TSA. Luckily, I’ve been able to get by without too many hassles. Unfortunately, my bad mood at the airport could soon earn me more problems.
Check out “At the Airport, You Better Smile” which is frankly really, really creepy. Check this out:
Apparently, these Behavior Detection Officers work in pairs. One scenario is that an officer might move in to “help” a passenger retrieve their belongings after they’ve been screened. And then the officer will ask where the passenger is headed. If the passenger’s reaction sets off alarm bells in the officer’s well-trained mind, another officer will move in and detain them.
Yeah. Creepy, creepy, creepy. A government agent gets to detain you because…they don’t like the look on your face. I almost never have a smile on my face in the airport. Flights leave too early, government agents are too much of a pain in the ass, and airports aren’t exactly comfortable places to relax.
No one in their right mind could think that this would make us any safer. It is just creepy. Mark that down as reason 9,876 that we should eliminate the Department of Homeland Security.
This was originally sent out to the Spokane Ron Paul Meetup Group Email List. If you are not in Spokane, donate to the campaign, even if there isn’t a fund raiser in your area. This is very, very important!
Dear Fellow Patriots,
I would like to thank everyone who has already RSVP’d via meetup for the Ron Paul Birthday Fund Raiser. This fund raiser is going to be a great success. I will be spending most of the rest of the week getting everything set up. Tomorrow I will send out another email detailing some of the things with which I will need help. In the meantime, I’d like to give you a little update on what I’ve got prepared so far.
Here is the menu:
Hot Dogs and Hamburgers (veggie dogs and veggie burgers as well)
Corn on the Cob
Watermelon
Cake and Ice CreamThe bar:
Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite
Punch
Rum Punch
A Keg of Beer
Red WineWe will have a combination of live and recorded music.
If you haven’t been to a Ron Paul event yet, I can assure you that Ron Paul supporters are some of the most amazing people in the world. Never before have I met such friendly and enthusiastic individuals from so many different walks of life.
We are going to have a great time, and raise a lot of money for the Ron Paul for President Campaign.
As many of your know, there is a contest going on between all of the meetup groups around the country for Ron Paul. The group that raises the most money total, and the group that raises the most money per member will earn a personal visit from Dr. Paul! We need to give all of the other meetup groups a serious run for their money. This campaign is incredibly important. We live in a defining time for America. Will the great American experiment succeed? Benjamin Franklyn, after the constitutional convention, said that they had given us, “A constitution, if you can keep it”. Can we keep it? I think we can.
Together, we can save our constitution and the precious freedom that our founders gave us.
If you haven’t already RSVP’d, please go to the meetup site and do so, or just send me an email. Also, please bring your friends. I will see to it that everyone who brings at least five people gets some sort of a prize and recognition. So, please, invite members of your family, invite your friends, and invite anyone who you know who cares about freedom and the constitution. Just email me or go to the meetup site to indicate how many people you will be bringing.
I look forward to seeing all of you on Monday for this exciting celebration! Together, we can save our constitution and make America free once again.
Sincerely,
Kyle Varner
PS: If you can’t make it to the fund raiser, please donate to the campaign anyway. Your donation can still be counted towards the total amount we’ve raised. If you are donating online, be sure to enter MU0149 in the project code box on the donation page so that your donation counts in the meetup group contest. Also please email me and tell me so that I can count your contribution towards the total amount that our event has raised. Spokane is ready to hear Ron Paul’s inspirational message of freedom. Let’s bring him here!
I got pulled over by a Montana State Trooper today because he said he saw me cross over the white line on the side of the road three times while he was following me. I didn’t notice myself crossing the white line, but whatever. He didn’t give me a ticket or a warning. He just told me to be careful. He took my license and “ran it”, i.e. checked the creepy database. He came back to the car and gave my license back, and saw the Ron Paul car magnet prominently displayed on the back of the car. He asked who Ron Paul was, and I told him a little bit about Ron Paul and the freedom message and then I gave him a card. He said that Ron Paul sounded really interesting and that he was going to look him up. Pretty cool!
I also saw a couple of Ron Paul rEVOLution banners in rural South Dakota. Also cool.
One more thing: a couple of newspapers interviewed me at RonStock and quoted me in their papers. A quote that was published has been making its way around the blogosphere. I’ll put together a post with links to as many blogs mentioning me and my quote as possible, because I am very vain. Plus I just want to have that record for myself. I am putting together a resume of my political work, and I am very disappointed that I didn’t keep a record of all of my media mentions during 1999-2002 (radio, tv, newspaper, et cetera). It seems that I am pretty good at getting reporters interested in what I have to say. I always have persuasive things to say, so this is a good thing.
I think that by now it is a well-known fact that Ron Paul supporters are the most dedicated, energetic and passionate volunteers of any presidential campaign. We have clear and consistent principles, and believe strongly in them. They’re the same principles those crazy guys who wrote our constitution had!
We can add another quality to our list of bragging rights: most patriotic.
Ron Paul has said that this campaign isn’t about him, its about freedom. We trust and respect Dr. Paul as the man to carry the banner of freedom, but it is the banner of freedom that excites us.
As myself and at least 150 other Ron Paul supporters waited in the Hilton Coliseum for the Iowa Straw Poll results, we chanted slogans about Ron Paul and freedom for almost the whole time. The Huckabee, Brownback, Tancredo and Romney people were there too, and they tried to chant as well, but we drowned them out.
Then, we started singing. This startled and puzzled them. What did we sing? “God Bless America” and the National Anthem! (Crazy hippies songs!)
If I were them, I would have joined in. After all, we all love our country, right? It’s American’s National Anthem, not a Ron Paul campaign song. They did nothing of the sort. I wonder, did they want us to stand out as the most patriotic? Did they disagree with the message of those “pinko songs”? I doubt either of these things are the case. What I think is the case is very telling about the strength of the messages of the various candidates.
They were all willing to chant about their candidates, because for them, the campaign is almost a cult of personality. They want Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback. The Ron Paul campaign isn’t a cult of personality. We don’t admire Ron Paul because he has expensive haircuts, lost a lot of weight, or has a bunch of money. We have chosen Ron Paul because of what we believe–in America. When we hear songs like the National Anthem or “God Bless America,” our spirits rise and we feel energized.
They’re energized by personalities. We are energized by a love for our country and what it stands for.
Several of these candidates are going to find that at some point their fundraising dries up and their supporters go off and support other “more successful” candidates. They flock to the celebrity of the moment. Ron Paul’s supporters aren’t fairweather patriots. We jump started this campaign when it seemed next to impossible, and we keep making huge sacrifices and working hard despite the long odds.
We have something great, something none of the other candidates have. Let’s keep up the hard work and keep raising the torch of liberty. It is worth every mile we drive, every step we take and every drop of sweat. I have never been so happy to work so hard, and I’m one of tens of thousands who feel the same way.
Vive La rEVOLution!!!!!!
I spoke to my mother today while I was on the road in South Dakota. I hadn’t spoken to her since the straw poll. She told me that when she was watching the results on Faux News, she didn’t see Ron Paul. She was very disappointed because she thought that meant that he scored below all of the other people they mentioned. Why didn’t they mention Ron Paul? Good question. I saw this screen shot uploaded to the Ron Paul for President Facebook Group:
Weren’t there a couple of guys between Brownback and Thompson? Hmmm…..
To be fair, they didn’t just exclude Ron Paul here, they also excluded Tancredo, which is equally wrong. These results are just plain misleading!
They’ve done the same thing on their website. Here is what they said:
Romney scored 4,516 votes to outpace former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who had 2,587 votes. Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback was third with 2,192 votes.
Announcement of the results was delayed for 90 minutes because a hand count was required on one of the 18 machines.
The biggest loser of the evening likely was former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, who finished in 6th place with 1,039 votes. He had said repeatedly that if he didn’t finish in the top two his campaign was likely to end. He left the event before the results were announced, and there was no announcement from his campaign.
The missing big names got only a handful of votes.
HELLO!!!!!! Where is your journalistic integrity, faux? I guess you’re implying that some other people got more than a handful of votes. How about that one guy…you know…the one with the huge internet following? Did he get “only a handful of votes”?
We have to redouble our efforts to make this thing work. We will.