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NOTE: It is important to separate hunting down terrorists who attack our country and deserve justice (which Ron Paul is 100% for), and not confuse justice with occupying entire countries for a decade under the guise of the "War on Terror" or "Spreading Democracy". Terrorists are individuals and small groups, so why are we picking fights with entire nations? BILLIONS for Defense, NOT A PENNY for Empire. This speech is called "Imagine" and it was given by Ron Paul on March 11, 2009. The original text of the talk is below: Imagine for a moment that somewhere in the middle of Texas there was a large foreign military base, say Chinese or Russian. Imagine that thousands of armed foreign troops were constantly patrolling American streets in military vehicles. Imagine they were here under the auspices of "keeping us safe" or "promoting democracy" or "protecting their strategic interests." Imagine that they operated outside of US law, and that the Constitution did not apply to them. Imagine that every now and then they made mistakes or acted on bad information and accidentally killed or terrorized innocent Americans, including women and children, most of the time with little to no repercussions or consequences. Imagine that they set up checkpoints on our soil and routinely searched and ransacked entire neighborhoods of homes. Imagine if Americans were fearful of these foreign troops, and overwhelmingly thought America would be better off without their presence. Imagine if some Americans were so angry about them being in Texas that they actually joined together to fight them off, in defense of our soil and sovereignty, because leadership in government refused or were unable to do so. Imagine that those Americans were labeled terrorists or insurgents for their defensive actions, and routinely killed, or captured and tortured by the foreign troops on our land. Imagine that the occupiers' attitude was that if they just killed enough Americans, the resistance would stop, but inst

Of all the topics on which I've focused, I've likely written most about America's two-tiered justice system -- the way in which political and financial elites now enjoy virtually full-scale legal immunity for even the most egregious lawbreaking, while ordinary Americans, especially the poor and racial and ethnic minorities, are subjected to exactly the opposite treatment: the world's largest prison state and most merciless justice system. That full-scale destruction of the rule of law is also the topic of my forthcoming book. But The New York Times this morning has a long article so perfectly illustrating what I mean by "two-tiered justice system" -- and the way in which it obliterates the core covenant of the American Founding: equality before the law -- that it's impossible for me not to highlight it.

I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush's most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called a "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush's legal team." . . .

The U.S. Army yesterday announced that it has filed 22 additional charges against Bradley Manning, the Private accused of being the source for hundreds of thousands of documents (as well as this still-striking video) published over the last year by WikiLeaks. Most of the charges add little to the ones already filed, but the most serious new charge is for "aiding the enemy," a capital offense under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although military prosecutors stated that they intend to seek life imprisonment rather than the death penalty for this alleged crime, the military tribunal is still empowered to sentence Manning to death if convicted.

WASHINGTON -- These days, when we think of George W. Bush, we think mostly of what a horrible mess he made of the economy. But his even more tragic legacy is the loss of our moral authority, and the transformation of the United States of America from global champion of human rights into an outlaw nation.

As always, the most harmful aspect of the Obama legacy is that he has converted what were once controversial right-wing Bush policies into unchallenged bipartisan consensus, to endure indefinitely and without any opposition from either party.

I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. "the human microphone"), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech.

Cellular phones can lead a person to accident that can danger other's life as well. Using wireless phone while driving is prohibited in most state today and anyone caught for this offense will face the consequences.

What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?

TEDtalksDirector - September 18, 2008 - Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

Pentagon investigators are reportedly still searching for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who helped release a classified US military video showing a US helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. The US military recently arrested Army Specialist Bradley Manning, who may have passed on the video to Wikileaks. Manning's arrest and the hunt for Assange have put the spotlight on the Obama administration's campaign against whistleblowers and leakers of classified information. We speak to Daniel Ellsberg, who's leaking of the Pentagon Papers has made him perhaps the nation's most famous whistleblower; Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament who has collaborated with Wikileaks and drafted a new Icelandic law protecting investigative journalists; and Glenn Greenwald, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. [includes rush transcript]

The IOM's 1999 landmark report, "To Err is Human," dropped the first bombshell, reporting that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die in hospitals each year from medical mistakes, costing an estimated $17 billion to $29 billion annually. HHS' new finding that medical mistakes kill 15,000 Medicare patients a month equates to 180,000 Medicare deaths per year - more than the IOM's estimate, which attempted to cover all patients in the United States. That means that the annual death toll in this country caused by mistakes in hospitals is well over 250,000 deaths a year! But perhaps the most startling finding by HHS is that a significant number of patients suffered injuries or died needlessly, as 44 percent of the medical errors were preventable.

"Worldwide, work-related illnesses and injuries kill approximately 1.1 million people per year. In 1992, an estimated 65,000 people in the United States died of occupational injuries or illness. Most estimates indicate that occupational diseases account for far more fatalities than occupational injuries. However, an accurate enumeration of occupational disease fatalities is hampered by a paucity of data, owing to underdiagnosis of occupational diseases and inadequacy of current surveillance systems. In this commentary, the authors review the epidemiology of death due to occupational disease and injury in the United States and discuss vulnerable populations, emerging trends, and prevention strategies for this ongoing public health problem."

Throughout this year I've devoted substantial attention to WikiLeaks, particularly in the last four weeks as calls for its destruction intensified.  To understand why I've done so, and to see what motivates the increasing devotion of the U.S. Government and those influenced by it to destroying that organization, it's well worth reviewing exactly what WikiLeaks exposed to the world just in the last year:  the breadth of the corruption, deceit, brutality and criminality on the part of the world's most powerful factions.

This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators. Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.