Replies to post #212840 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Sections Of Rand Paul’s Op-Ed On Drug Sentencing Plagiarized From Article Week Earlier

November 4, 2013
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/sections-of-rand-pauls-op-ed-on-drug-sentencing-plagiarized [with comments]


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Rand Paul Op-ed found to have copied passages

The Rachel Maddow Show
November 4, 2013

Rachel Maddow reports late breaking news of yet another unattributed copy/paste of text by Rand Paul, this time in a Washington Times Op-Ed bearing his name.

© 2013 NBCNews.com

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53462515 / http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53462515/#53462515 [with transcript; show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/links-the-114-trms-1 (no comments yet)]


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Rand Paul scandal hurts his standing at home

The Rachel Maddow Show
November 4, 2013

Rachel Maddow reviews the latest revelations of plagiarism by Sen. Rand Paul and notes how the scandal is being reflected in the local Kentucky press.

© 2013 NBCNews.com

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53462725 /
http://video.msnbc.msn.com/rachel-maddow/53462725/#53462725 [with transcript; show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/links-the-114-trms-1 (no comments yet); the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dCCgp8JEWQ (with comments), also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4UvQEz2GWk (no comments yet) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOGc4CNpUt0 (no comments yet)]


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Move over, Ted Cruz: Rand Paul’s wacko public meltdown


Rand Paul
(Credit: AP/Charles Dharapak)

The proven plagiarist trashes his “haters” and wishes he could challenge them to a duel. Who’s the wacko-bird now?

By Joan Walsh
Monday, Nov 4, 2013 04:22 PM CST

Just when Sen. Ted Cruz’s self-promoting extremism seemed to create room for a far-right 2016 rival who wouldn’t scare children (and the donor class), Sen. Rand Paul is blowing his big chance.

Last week the New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/us/politics/republican-rivalry-simmers-as-paths-and-styles-diverge.html ] that in the wake of Cruz’s implosion, Paul’s aides had taken to calling Cruz “the chief of the wacko birds,” using John McCain’s memorable epithet for the junior Texas senator. Paul himself, Jonathan Martin reported, “has quietly been reaching out to more establishment forces within the Republican Party, trying to prove to big donors and mainline Republican organizations that he is more than a Tea Party figure or a rerun of his father’s failed candidacies.” And establishment Republicans were beginning to use the word “grown” and “matured” to describe Paul.

That’s not the word they’re using today, on the heels of a crazy appearance on ABC’s “This Week” where he wished he could challenge the journalists who’ve accused him of plagiarism to a duel [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/03/rand-paul-plagiarism_n_4208469.html ].

On the one hand, the revelation that he lifted material from several speeches as well as whole pages of his book from other sources, without attribution, isn’t necessarily a 2016 candidacy-ender. What’s most politically self-destructive is Paul’s bizarre reaction to the charges – which really aren’t “charges,” they’re fact. Instead of admitting he or someone on his staff made an error and promising to toughen his standards, he’s attacked Rachel Maddow, who found the first instance of plagiarism, repeatedly and personally.

“This is really about information and attacks coming from haters,” he told ABC’s Latino-focused network Fusion. “The person who’s leading this attack — she’s been spreading hate on me for about three years now.” Ew, “spreading hate on me,” that sounds kind of disgusting, Rachel – really?

And then, in a bizarre, likely candidacy-ending interview with ABC’s “This Week,” he began talking about a duel.

“Yes, there are times when [speeches] have been sloppy or not correct or we’ve made an error,” Paul said. “But the difference is, I take it as an insult and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting. I have never intentionally done so.”

He went on: “And like I say, if, you know, if dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know, it would be a duel challenge. But I can’t do that, because I can’t hold office in Kentucky then.”

“I think I’m being unfairly targeted by a bunch of hacks and haters.”

Paul’s assumption that normal people will hear his reference to fighting a duel and say, “Hell yeah!” betrays his permanent residency on the American fringe. He lives in a world where it’s always the 19th-century South, and troubles are best handled with guns and guts, not government. Paul acts like nobody’s ever been either smart enough, or brave enough, to tell the plain truth – and once he does, common sense voters will recognize it and reward him. Instead, they recoil and go, “Huh?”

It reminds me of his first run-in with Rachel Maddow [fifth item in the post to which this is a reply], in May 2010, when he told her he didn’t think the Civil Rights Act should apply to private businesses. He bobbed and he weaved but when Maddow asked point blank, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say, ‘we don’t serve black people?’” He answered, “Yes,” and defended their “right” to discriminate as “freedom of speech.” (He also said he thought if he’d been alive back then, he’d have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That’s the interview that made Maddow a “hater,” in Paul’s view.

I saw the same thing in his under-covered response to the revelation that his aide [ http://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/rand_paul_completely_mangles_lincoln/ ] Jack Hunter was a neo-Confederate racist who’d written a column headlined “John Wilkes Booth was right,” defending the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Paul, of course, came out against assassination – but then he went on to describe Lincoln the way neo-Confederates do, as a tyrannical racist hypocrite who fought the Civil War not to end slavery but to consolidate Northern power. He thought he could get away with repudiating the most extreme expression of neo-Confederate beliefs while validating their core. And that time, at least, he did.

There’s another problem with Paul’s over-the-top response to the plagiarism controversy: It suggests that he doesn’t understand the meaning of the term “plagiarism.” He has repeatedly insisted that he credited the original source of his speech material – the movie “Gattaca,” in one instance, and “Stand and Deliver” in another. But he does not seem to get that you can’t lift words directly from Wikipedia and claim them as your own – even though that’s something every sixth-grader knows.

Only a few days after Tailgunner Ted Cruz seemed to be facing a credible Tea Party rival, that rival is melting down. For his part, in the Times piece Cruz was said to be telling GOP donors that Paul can never be elected president “because he can never fully detach himself from the strident libertarianism of his father.” An even bigger problem: Rand Paul can never fully detach himself from himself.

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/04/move_over_ted_cruz_rand_pauls_wacko_public_meltdown/ [with comments]

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Washington Times gives Rand Paul's Column the Boot

Lefty Coaster
Tue Nov 05, 2013 at 05:06 PM PST

The Washington Times doesn't want its lofty reputation for journalism to be sullied by Rand Paul's plagiarist ways, so they've halted running Paul's regular column.

Washington Times ends Sen. Rand Paul column amid plagiarism allegations [ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/5/washington-times-ends-sen-rand-paul-column-amid-pl/ ]

The newspaper and the senator mutually agreed to end his weekly column, which has appeared on each Friday in the newspaper since the summer.

“We expect our columnists to submit original work and to properly attribute material, and we appreciate that the senator and his staff have taken responsibility for an oversight in one column,” Times Editor John Solomon said.

By Jim McElhatton-The Washington Times

Only one of these men knew they were a clown.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/05/1253403/-The-Washington-Times-gives-Rand-Paul-s-Column-the-Boot

[StephanieVanbryce]

unbelievable!__More problems for Rand Paul

by Loge
Fri Nov 08, 2013 at 10:42 AM PST

Quick and dirty. On twitter, Greg Sargent linked to a Jennifer Rubin piece [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/11/08/rand-paul-has-another-problem/ ] that shockingly appears to be well-researched and detailed, and strongly suggests Rand Paul repeatedly violated physician advertising laws in Kentucky by holding himself out as board certified.

We probably know the story that Rand Paul made up his own ophthalmology board (the National Opthalmology Board, which despite its name, was mainly a Kentucky thing) in 1997. I just thought that it just sounded like bullshit and left it at that, but it turns out the board was defunct in 2000, revived in 2005, and defunct again in 2011. During the time it was out of business, no board was certifying Dr. Paul, and after 2005, it was not recognized as a licensing board by the state of Kentucky.

Now, one does not need board certification to practice medicine or to obtain admitting privileges, but it is a factor in physician advertising rules for consumer protection purposes. If there is no board to enforce compliance or regulate continuing education, then board certification is utterly meaningless, so the board has to, first of all, exist, and second of all, perform some function other than advance the interest of younger ophthalmologists upset that older ones could be grandfathered into certification rules.

This is likely because you can't just have doctors making up their own licensing boards and call themselves board certified! Of course, this is what Dr. Paul would call "big government," because what does freedom mean if quacks can't cut open your eyeballs.

Paul may not be a quack, but by holding himself out as board certified despite not being that in reality, he in effect holds himself out as a quack.

So, it sounds like Paul's ethical problems may not stop with plagiarism. And ask yourself - what would a real medical board do with the plagiarism story, anyway?

Of course, take anything Jennifer Rubin says with an ocean of salt, but I think at the very least, Paul has some questions to account for (and Rubin reports his staff in no way did). And in the meantime, bask in the delicious joy that is R-on-R violence.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/08/1254153/-More-problems-for-Rand-Paul

HaHA! ... This is delicious! .. ;) btw, That Jennifer Rubin article is the only decent article I have ever seen from her .. I mean after all for two years solid she wrote about her love affair with Mitt romney ... so ... maybe she is getting over it ? ........I still will never trust her .. ;) __Can YOU HEAR 'Paul's' WHINING NOW?

Again - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2013/11/08/rand-paul-has-another-problem/

o.k .... ONE down.. NEXT? 'cruz' .. .UNFIT for everywhere except TEXAS!

[fuagf]

Greg Palast: Rand Paul's Zombie-nomics Versus Janet Yellen

Thursday, 14 November 2013 09:02 By Greg Palast, Truthout | News Analysis



Senator Rand Paul. (Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Will Sen. Rand Paul, misunderstanding the voices of the undead, block the appointment of Janet Yellen to head the Federal Reserve Board?

No joke. Tea Party fave Paul told The Wall Street Journal he would have preferred Milton Friedman, the free-market fanatic, to the liberal-ish Yellen. But, as a stunned Journal reporter informed the senator, Milton Friedman is, alas, some years dead.

Unbowed, Paul contends he is channeling Friedman from beyond the grave, invoking the Nobel Prize economist to support the senator's quest against Yellen's well-known commitment to easy money policies at the Fed.

Paul has written, "One need not be an economist or mathematician to wonder whether printing money out of thin air is a sound way to help the economy .. http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/11/rand-paul-why-i-plan-to-grill-yellen/ ."

You're more than correct, Senator. If you don't know why America is printing more dollar bills, then you definitely are not an economist nor a mathematician.

As a former student of the late professor Friedman, I'm quite certain that Milty would have been thrilled by Yellen's push to mainline more greenbacks into the US economy.

If you return to your séance, Senator, and ask Friedman's ghost about "printing money out of thin air," you'd find out he all but invented the idea. Or, throw away the Ouija Board and read Friedman's A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960, his Nobel-winning work, in which he argued convincingly that the Federal Reserve could have prevented the Great Depression had it radically pumped up the money supply.

Friedman's - and Yellen's - greatest fear is not inflation, but deflation, a disastrous fall in prices because of starving the economy of dollars.

Senator Paul moans that, since the market crash of 2008, the Federal Reserve has printed $3.6 trillion and dumped these dollar bills, ink still wet, into the financial system. Paul is waiting for the day when the printing of all these dollars suddenly will cause the price of a can of tuna to soar to $7,000.

But despite the Fed's smoking-hot printing press, the price of tuna is perilously close to falling. Price inflation today stands at a teeny-weeny 1.2 percent.

It's time for Senator Paul and daddy Congressman Ron Paul and their followers in gold-foil hats to admit that adding trillions to the money supply has not caused hyper-inflation. After a quarter-century of hysterical warnings from the two Pauls, the hyperinflation spaceship never landed and little green dollar men did not eat up the planet.

An Idiot's Guide to Gold-Buggery

The Pauls have told us horror stories of the German hyper-inflation of the early 1920s, when you had to schlep a wheelbarrow full of currency to buy a loaf of bread. The cure Paul père hawks, is a return to the gold standard, raising zombie economic theories from the grave, where Friedman buried them.

As Friedman warned, there's something far worse than having to pay for a loaf of bread with bags of currency, and that's having to pay for a loaf of bread with a bag of gold.

Notably, the Tea Party, not the guys in the goofy wigs on Fox TV, but the real one in Boston in 1773, was formed principally to protest King George's reimposing the gold standard on the colonies.

The colonies faced a crisis. Bricks of gold don't have babies; and so, when an economy grows rapidly as did early America, there simply is not enough money to represent that new trade and wealth because the currency is limited by a fixed and arbitrary amount of metal.

Here's why. When the money stock stays flat as production and work force grows, each dollar buys more of that production. Sounds good? No way. A monstrous fall in prices and wages means workers and businesses get less for their output and can't pay off old loans. To simplify: When a farmer borrows $100 for land and seed then sells his corn for $50, the farmer goes bust.

The American colonies faced such ruin when gold-backed currency was insufficient to fund our massive expansion. A revolutionary leader of the time explained the insurgent solution, "Happy for us that we fell upon the Project of giving a Credit to Paper .. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/makingrev/crisis/text2/sugaractresponse1764.pdf ."

Happy days ended when the British Parliament counterattacked with the Currency Act of 1764 that, "renders our Paper Money no legal Tender." King George, to shackle the States to the crown's metal-based currency, required purchasing a tax-stamp for each case of tea, which had to be paid for in His Majesty's "pounds sterling."

So the dissidents threw the tea into the ocean.

A century and a half later, after World War I, the British Parliament did it again, reimposing the gold standard. The United States and most of the world joined Britain in the golden noose. Economies strangled and dangled. The Great Depression eased only when FDR, in one of his first acts of office, rescued the United States, setting the dollar free of gold and letting fly the "Federal Reserve Note," created out of thin air - just like America itself.

And while your beloved Friedman did not care for the government caring for people's welfare via New Deal programs, my professor did praise FDR's printing press for expanding the money supply.

In today's hearing, Janet Yellen might remind the Senate of economist J.M. Keynes warning about, "Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

Senator Paul, if you are going to listen to the voices of deceased economists, at the least, listen carefully.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/20034-rand-pauls-zombie-nomics-versus-janet-yellen

See also:

Debunking The Gold Standard: The Myth of Stability
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53144001

Learning from the Great Depression .. one bit ..

The second cause of our Depression was our adherence to the 'gold standard'. (Actually, many Depression scholars have concluded that the decision of most countries to return to the gold standard after World War I was the primary cause of the Depression around the world. So much for Wall Street's crash in October 1929.)
http://www.smh.com.au/business/learning-from-the-great-depression-20091113-iens.html
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=43583786

Ah, this is the one! .. Gold At $14,172 An Ounce? Brian Bloom .. 15 November 2008 .. excerpt ..

And the pragmatic question one needs to ask is therefore: If all the gold in the world was being used for the purposes of currency backing, then how would industrial demand for gold be satisfied? Alternatively: What will happen to world industrial demand for gold if the gold price rose to over $14,000 an ounce?

And this, finally, raises a very important philosophical question: Why do we insist that the most important role for gold is currency backing? What if it is discovered that gold has a far more important role to play in, say, ensuring the viability of all biological life? If the gold price rose to a level which became prohibitively expensive, would this not block the development of alternative - and arguably far more important - applications for gold?

The definition of ignorance is when we don't know enough to know how much we don't know. Why does humanity, in its arrogance, keep taking decisions which are calculated to keep us ignorant of our potential? Why does humanity keep insisting that the most important yardstick of measurement of the quality of life on earth is our "material standard" of living?
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_08/bloom111508.html
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=34774397

[F6]

There Is An Epidemic Of Pussy Republicans Plagiarizing From Pussy Rand Paul

Eight pussy Republican candidates have literally copied and pasted from pussy Rand Paul’s pussy “issues” page.
April 18, 2014
Pussy Sen. Rand Paul’s pussy libertarian vision for the Republican Party's pussy future has such broad pussy appeal that a generation of pussy Republican candidates is copying his pussy platform — in many cases, literally copying and pasting it on to their own pussy websites.
[...]
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/plagiarizing [with comments]

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