Good Luck On The LSAT Guys

I have a bunch of friends that are taking the law school entrance exam this weekend. I wish them luck. I still think the state doesn't need any more lawyers, but hey, I don't want to kill their dream. It must be a political hack thing to want to get a law degree.

OC Blog Skirmish

It was pretty funny to read the back & forth posts between Jubal at OC Blog and Steven Greenhut from the Register yesterday. They were debating Mike Carona and all the issues surrounding his indictment. Both Matt and Steven are my friends and it is sad that Mike Carona has driven this wedge into the GOP family like he has(although Steven says he is out of the party as soon as his vote is cast for my man Ron Paul).

I was at the Central Committee Meeting. I saw what was going on and what happened there. I am taking Steven's side of this. There are a lot of GOP elected officials who are nervous about crossing Mike Schroeder. They don't want to wake up with a horse head at the bottom of their bed. Having said this, they are elected to represent all the GOP and not Mike Schroeder. There are going to be tough votes like last week. So it disappointed me greatly to hear from members of the committee say that they will just leave the room before the hard vote. That's bush league(no pun intended). I'm not going to embarrass the ones who told me that they were not going to be in the room because it told to me in confidence, but I let them know in not so subtle languange that this was chicken bleep.

Introducing The Ron Paul Air Force One Campaign Plane

The Ron Paul Blimp! I'm not making this up. Someone on RonPaulForums.com came up with an idea to raise money and charter a blimp as another way of guerrilla marketing to get Ron's name ID up and get millions in free publicity from this unconventional idea. They researched how much it would cost to hire the blimp and came up with a figure of $350k. They've already basically raised all the money they need to pull this off...in one week! The blimp is tentatively scheduled to be up in Boston on Dec 16th for our huge Boston Tea Party moneybomb/fundraiser.

My Flashreport Column on Ron Paul

Jon Fleischman of Flashreport asked me to pen a column about the Ron Paul campaign here in California. I was happy to do it. I thank Jon for giving me the opportunity to reach a large GOP audience in California and the nation. Here is the piece:

THE RON PAUL REVOLUTION

There is something happening out there in the country right now. A not so quiet revolution is brewing against the governing classes. You could say another Boston Tea Party is around the corner. A candidate is running for President out there that is speaking the language of freedom and the US Constitution. His name is Ron Paul.

I can't tell you how refreshing Dr. Paul's run has been for myself and a lot of others. The last six years of GOP rule in Washington, D.C. is something most Republicans would like to forget about. Unfortunately for us, the voters haven't forgotten about it and they threw us out of office in 2006. We have a chance to get it right again though by supporting Ron Paul.

He has been running a very unconventional campaign up to now. Instead of wasting the money he's raised so far on over rated political consultants, he's relied on the Internet to get his message out to the masses and it has paid big dividends. In fact Ron is dominating the campaign online right now. He's brilliantly leveraged the online social networking groups like Meetup, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and others for a huge advantage. These groups have harnessed his campaign because the message is very appealing to them. There's a funny story about this that Ron told me at a recent fundraiser on the USC campus. Apparently, some operatives from one of the other GOP campaigns tried to infiltrate his headquarters to find out why he was doing so well on the internet. They wanted to see what "his secret" was. He laughed and said that the internet has harnessed him. They didn't do anything special except talk about the message of freedom and the Constitution.

In one day back on November 5th, the campaign made major headlines by announcing they had raised over $4.3 million dollars in one day from 37,000 different small donors. You can go to his website and watch his donations add up in real time with the real name of all his donors. This is another revolutionary concept in politics. It's a true open source campaign.

So you say, well that's all great Allan, but talk about some of the issues that he's running on. First he's a big believer in Austrian economics. This is the study of small government, individualism, and sound money to name a few of their tenets. It's NOT Arnold Schwarzenegger's way of spending your way into oblivion and creating a 20 billion dollar deficit, but I digress. He wants to get rid of the income tax and abolish the IRS. I tell this to people and get a lot of well earned skeptical looks. This is what Ron said about this subject at the first GOP debate at the Reagan library...

"We can only do this if we change our ideas of what the role of government should be. If you think the government has to take care of us from cradle to grave, if you think our government should police the world and spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a foreign policy that we cannot manage, you can't get rid of the IRS, but if you want to lower taxes and if you want the government to stop printing the money to come up with the shortfall that's causing all the inflation, you have to change policy,"

Amen.

As a ten term Republican Congressman from Texas, he has:

* never voted to raise taxes
* never voted for an unbalanced budget
* never voted to raise Congressional pay
* never taken a government paid junket
* never voted to increase the power of the executive branch
* voted against regulating the internet
* does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program
* repeatedly been named the "Taxpayers' Best Friend" in Congress

On immigration he wants to end birthright citizenship for illegal aliens. He wants to end welfare and social benefits for them. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. He wants to end this. He's a strong opponent of granting any form of amnesty and he's got the voting record to prove it. The current reform proposals in Congress would allow up to 100 million more illegals into our country according to a Heritage Foundation Study by Robert Rector. This is insanity. We need to follow the rules.

Dr. Paul is strongly pro-life. As an OB/GYN doctor, he's delivered over 4000 babies in his career. This has obviously made him a strong advocate for the unborn. He wants Roe vs Wade overturned and has authored legislation to strip jurisdiction of this issue from federal courts. He wants the issue returned to the states.

On foreign policy, he follows the advice of the founders and advocates a policy of non-intervention. We should mind our own business. He believes we should have free trade with all nations and entangling alliances with none. This is not being isolationists like some would believe. In 2000, George W Bush ran on a humble foreign policy. He did not want to police the world and did not want to get into nation building. We've seen him do the opposite though during his Presidency.

We cannot afford to keep our empire going anymore. It is bankrupting the nation. Recently Ron was interviewed by our ownCalifornia State Senator Tom McClintock. Tom asked Ron what a President Paul would have done the day after 9/11. Ron voted to go after the Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was disappointed that it turned into a nation building mission and we still haven't found and killed Osama Bin Laden to this day. He wants to target our enemies better by using the constitutional principle of Marque and Reprisal.

We didn't need to start World War III because a bunch of renegade thugs attacked our country. He wants our troops pulled home from around the world. We have troops in South Korea, Japan, Germany and many other countries. Let these countries pay for their own defense. We've also been sending our Border Patrol men & women to Iraq. They need to be here protecting the border, not in Iraq. It's not surprising that this message has resonated with the younger generation. That's one of the most pleasant surprises of the campaign so far is all the young people becoming freedom activists. The GOP needs these voters of the future. We should be appealing to them instead of the mythical hispanic vote.

If you have opened the business section of any paper, you can see how this disastrous foreign policy has been affecting our falling US dollar. It's in a freefall right now and it's causing big time inflation. It's not in our countries' interest to have a weak dollar. The biggest culprit for this is our unconstitutional Federal Reserve System. Ron wants the Fed abolished. The founders had bad experiences with a fiat money system. Inflation ran rampant. The phrase "not worth a Continental" came from the fact that the Continental dollar was not worth the paper it was printed because of inflation of the day. That's why the founders stipulated in the Constitution that only gold and silver are allowed to be legal tender. Andrew Jackson was re-elected for a second term because he fought to end the Second Bank of the United States. Ron wants to let private commodity backed currencies compete side by side with the dollar. It's the same principle as Fed-Ex and UPS competing against the US Postal Service. It's good for the system. A little competition never hurt anyone. As a student of history and licensed commodity broker myself, it is my recommendation that people have some gold and silver in their portfolio because of our governments propensity to always inflate the money supply. They never make the tough decisions to cut spending.

These are some of the issues at stake in this campaign. To find out more about Dr. Paul's positions and get news about the campaign, you can always follow the advice I give to strangers to learn more about him and it happens to be one of the motto's of the campaign...Google Ron Paul.


So on February 5th, 2008 I encourage all Republicans to vote for freedom and the constitution. Vote for Ron Paul for President.
_________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Bartlett was born and raised in Southern California.

He's a licensed Commodity Broker and hedge fund manager. He is the proprietor of the political & financial blog Powder Blue Report.

He 37 years old and lives in Irvine with his wife Lynn of six years.

FLASHREPORT™ - All rights reserved designed by cloudspace

Monday Musings

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Lynn and I did. We had sort of a non traditional Thanksgiving. Lynn didn't cook and instead we went out to eat at Lucille's BarBQ over at the District Shopping Center. They have great food and we had leftovers to.

I have a column about Ron Paul that's going to be in the Flashreport tomorrow. I'll post the link when it's up.

UCLA is still in the hunt for the Rose Bowl after their shutout victory over the Oregon Ducks. Which brings me to my next point. This week is USC week in the Bartlett house aka "hell week" as I call it. With a victory over the hated Trojans and an Arizona victory over Arizona St., UCLA will go to the Rose Bowl on Jan 1. If Karl Dorrell loses to USC, he should be fired IMO. No pressure.

Lastly, I was reading the Register yesterday while out getting breakfast at one of our favorite spots(Bill's Burgers in Costa Mesa). It was cool to see that Steven Greenhut used a couple of quotes from my recent post about the GOP & Mike Carona. Thanks for the plug Steven. His editorial yesterday was right on the money regarding Mike Carona.

OC Blog Talk Radio

I had the opportunity this afternoon to be a guest on Red County's inaugural Blog Talk Radio broadcast. I want to thank Matt Cunningham for inviting me on the show. It was their first foray into blog talk radio and went pretty well. He interviewed me about how I got started blogging and about the Ron Paul campaign here in Orange County. I might have to give it a shot myself soon. If anyone would like to be on my blog talk radio show just shoot me an email and let's set something up. This is a great idea. Just know that whoever decides to enter the Bartlett no spin zone, I will not be asking many softball questions. Have a listen below:

OC GOP Tables Carona Resolution Until January

I gotta hand it to the elected GOP Central Committee members of Orange County, they are officially afraid of their own shadow when it comes to this Carona business. Tonight a totally watered down resolution was offered by Mike McGill and it couldn't even get a majority vote let alone a 2/3 vote to even have a debate on the resolution asking the Sheriff to take a leave from his job. Talk about embarrassing. Members were joking that they were going to leave the room when the vote came because they didn't want to go on record for this vote. They are gutless.

It was also ironic to see so many new civil libertarians in the room when their guy is under indictment. If I got a dollar for everyone that came up to me tonight and told me "Allan, the Sheriff deserves to be presumed innocent under our system", I'd be a richer man tonight. Of course these are a lot of the same people that believe cops and prosecutors can do no wrong. Go figure. It must be nice to have double standards on everything when its convienent for your side. Unfortunately for the party, this issue is now going to fester like a bad cancer until at least the next meeting in January.

Listen to John & Ken's rant from today on this resolution. It starts at about the twenty minute mark.

You Might Be A Redneck If....

You spend all night waiting to shoot wild pigs that come by in the middle of nowhere and get paid to do it! The story is on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times of all papers.

Mike Carona Resolution On Tap Monday At The OC GOP Central Committee

I have learned that there will be a resolution introduced Monday night at the OC GOP Central Committee meeting asking for Mike Carona to step down as Sheriff until the charges against him are adjudicated. This is only fitting after the Sheriff's allies on the committee abused the endorsement process last year and in light of the fact that the Sheriff is facing a seven count indictment. The man has abused his office and laid waste to the Law Enforcers Code of Ethics that reads as follows:

As a Law Enforcement Officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind(Mike Carona's own self interests); to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception(hehe...good one), the weak against oppression or intimidation, and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the Constitutional rights of all persons to liberty, equality and justice.

I will keep my private life unsullied as an example to all(you have to laugh at how blatant he's violated this tenet); maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn or ridicule(mostly ridicule); develop self-restraint(hehe); and be constantly mindful of the welfare of others. Honest in thought and deed in both my personal and official life(another doozy here), I will be exemplary in obeying the laws of the land and the regulations of my department(OMG...it just doesn't end). Whatever I see or hear of a confidential nature or that is confided to me in my official capacity will be kept ever secret unless revelation is necessary in the performance of my duty(especially when mistresses are involved).

I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, animosities or friendships to influence my decisions. With no compromise for crime and with relentless prosecution of criminal, I will enforce the law courteously and appropriately without fear or favor(except for my reserve deputies), malice or ill will, never employing unnecessary force or violence and never accepting gratuities(bribes for the layperson, LOL).

I recognize the badge of my office as a symbol of public faith, and I accept it as a public trust to be held so long as I am true to the ethics of the police service. I will constantly strive to achieve these objectives and ideals, dedicating myself before God to my chosen profession...law enforcement

The party has sustained a huge black eye now that Mike Carona has been indicted. The resolution is going to need a 2/3 affirmative vote from members present the way it's coming to the floor. It really shouldn't have come down to this. If the Sheriff had any ounce of honor left, he would spare everyone from a long embarrassing trial and resign ASAP. He has not chosen that path though. He has chosen to give himself 60 days of paid leave in the hopes that the media firestorm will blow over. It won't. This is too sexy of a story for them to not cover. John & Ken have been having a field day over all these salicious stories. every day in the five o' clock hour they have been reading Scott Moxely's OC Weekly stories from the past few years. I'm surprised it took them this long to talk about it. This is a ratings bonanza for them. My personal favorite is the one about Sheriff Carona glossing his unit as the "little sheriff",but I digress.

The motion is being introduced by former Cypress councilman and former Assembly candidate Mike McGill. Mike is known to be a very fair minded person on the committee. He has been reaching out to all members asking for their input. Some Carona sympathizers want the resolution watered down. Whatever it takes to get a 2/3 vote I'm fine with. Here is a copy of the final draft which could be amended at the Committee meeting. I personally would prefer a resolution asking for Carona's immediate resignation, but it needs a 2/3 vote and it wasn't clear if that objective could be achieved without a watered down resolution.

Whereas, Michael Carona is the Sheriff of Orange County and was previously endorsed by the Republican Party of Orange County (OCGOP) in his successful reelection bid in 2006 and


Whereas, Orange County Sheriff Carona has been indicted by the U.S. Attorney on several criminal charges and


Whereas, if the OCGOP requests Sheriff Carona to immediately resign based on the distraction of the indictment, the OCGOP would be asking Sheriff Carona to forfeit an office and a career that he cannot regain, if he is innocent of the charges against him and


Whereas, the Sheriff’s own conduct, coupled with the serious federal charges against him and the pending trial, provide a significant distraction to the Sheriff in the performance of his duties and ability to serve Orange County;


Therefore, be it resolved, that the OCGOP calls upon Sheriff Carona to take an extended leave of absence (as permitted by law) until such time as the charges against him are resolved in a court of law.

Mike Carona Is Fired Resigns From Homeland Security Task Force

I heard on KFI driving in to work this morning that Homeland Security fired Sheriff Carona from their task force. Gee I can't imagine why they would do such a thing. Maybe it has something to do with losing his security clearance because he's under a seven count federal indictment, but that's just me. Here's the Register story.

I loved this quote from Carona spokesman Mike Schroeder trying to refute that Sheriff Carona was fired...

"That's just false. He tendered his resignation right away. It wasn't because he was asked to."

Whatever you say Mike. If Carona was so anxious to quit this Homeland Security gig, how about telling your guy that it's in everyone's best interest if he resigns from being Sheriff. If you could only hear yourself talk. This is crazy. No one believes the little sheriff anymore. Mike Carona is done, through, finished, finito.

There's also some other news about Mike Carona that's brewing that I will have for you guys later today.

Please Join The Ron Paul Revolution For Some Tea On Dec 16th

Alright, this is going to be huge. Some of you may know that Ron Paul raised over $4.3 million dollars in one day back on Nov 5th. It was not even organized by the official campaign. It was started by the grassroots. They had 18,000 people sign up for the Nov 5th event and they raised $4.3 million. There is now a new "money bomb" slated to go off on Dec 16th next month. That is the day over two hundred years ago that colonists fed up with King George's taxes without representation threw barrels of tea into Boston Harbor as a protest. They already have over 10,000 people signed up and it just got started a few days ago. At the current rate of signups, they could have over 75,000 people ready for a tax revolt.Please go to the site Tea Party 07 and view some of the Ron Paul You Tubes and consider signing up for the biggest one day political fundraiser of all time.

Mike Huckabee Loves Raising Taxes

This video is proof that Mike Huckabee is a tax raiser. Ain't You Tube a bitch Gov. Huckabee.

Newsweek Article About my Sister Amy

My sister has an article out in Newsweek about her battle with cancer this year. She is an inspiration.

CRA Endorses Mitt Romney

By the smallest of margins, the California Republican Assembly endorsed Mitt Romney this morning up here in Sacramento. I give their organization credit for doing a great job organizing and gaming the CRA system of endorsements. This gives Romney a little conservative "street cred" that he hadn't earned with his past liberal record. Make no mistake though, Gov Romney is using the CRA IMO. When he loses the GOP nomination, all those Romney delegates will never be seen again in CRA most likely. I think this gives the CRA a huge black eye. Anyone who reads our statement of principles can tell that Romney should not have been the one getting the CRA endorsement. It is what is. I'll post more about the weekend when I get home.

Ben Bernanke Smacked Down Again By Congressman Paul

We do have a dollar crisis in this country. The value of them have been in a freefall. These are dangerous financial times we are living in. I do know that 100% of all fiat money systems throughout history have failed eventually. We are seeing that right now with ours. Did anyone listen to me to buy gold and silver for the last few years? Congrats if you did. You are making some serious money right now.

America's Corrupt Sheriff

It was not a good media weekend for indicted OC Sheriff Mike Carona. We had stories coming at us from all around. I'm not going to link to them all, suffice to say though that the call for Carona's resignation is coming from all sides of the political spectrum. It feels good for me to be vindicated. I just wish my friends in the GOP who are still defending him will stop with all their nonsense.

Ron Paul Money Bomb Going Off

This is an exciting day for the Ron Paul campaign. The November 5th Money Bomb is happening right now. The campaign has already raised over $1.4 million since midnight today and it's only 6:30 AM as I'm typing this post out. We could have $3 million today in online donations. I'm thinking this could be a record for any campaign for one day raising dough online. I love the Ron Paul supporters. You guys are awesome.