Author Archives: Stephen VanDyke

Way back in 2008 (not that long, I know), Kid Rock promised us all he wouldn’t be getting political, and even chastised music entertainers who got into endorsing candidates and playing music for free for them at small political rallies.

He said, “I truly believe that people like myself, who are in a position of entertainers in the limelight, should keep their mouth shut on politics. Because at the end of the day, I’m good at writing songs and singing. What I’m not educated in is the field of political science. And so for me to be sharing my views and influencing people of who I think they should be voting for … I think would be very irresponsible on my part.”

He went on to say, “I think celebrity endorsements hurt politicians. As soon as somebody comes out for a politician, especially in Hollywood, when they all go, ‘I’m voting for this guy!’ I go, ‘That’s not who I’m voting for!’” see more…

In early December of 2011, NBC unveiled a partnership with check-in king foursquare to track the presidential candidates on the 2012 campaign trail. From the looks of it, many hours of design and code were put into this impressive project that promised to show the candidates trekking across America in real time.

The short of it being that if Rick Santorum dropped in on his NASCAR buddies in Daytona, there’d suddenly and magically be a blip marking his appearance. Or suppose Ron Paul spoke to a crowd of 1,700 in Oklahoma City, or Newt Gingrich pointed and grunted at the moon in Cape Canaveral, or Mitt Romney visited a factory in Flint to jokingly threaten to fire everyone — the world would know about such heroic public services thanks to the harnessed power of databases and the internet. see more…

The presidential political season is picking up steam with the next round of GOP elections coming up rather quickly. The fact that anyone can campaign in seventeen separate primaries and caucuses (fifteen if you are an inconsiderate ass who thinks Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands aren’t worth campaigning in, even though they aren’t) is a sheer marvel of the information age and the phenomenon of paid political advertising (and transportation, lest we forget Rand Paul’s TSA travesty).

Here’s the rundown of the next two weeks of primary pollshocks waiting to unfold: see more…

From time to time, here at Hammer of Truth one of us will liveblog a debate or something. This is what it looks like.

On Wednesday February 22nd 2012, four GOP candidates for president got on stage to once again lay into each other in the new public blood sport democratic process of of getting to know our next commander in chief. From left to right on the stage were Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Most people have been more interested in Whitney Houston’s sudden death over the past week and a half than anything political, so we’ll see if the first post-Whitney GOP debate is a pop or a drop amongst the American rabble.

The complete transcript of the debate can be found here. Ron Paul highlights can be found here. Read on for our official Hammer of Truth verdict on the debate and be sure to leave your thoughts on how the candidates did. see more…

Maine Maine Maine… it’s the new nine nine nine that won’t go away any time soon.

Many of the counties with large groups of young people were initially delayed. What most people may not realize is that the Maine Caucus timeline is an anomaly among primary states, spanning the entire month of February and parts of both January and March. And proceedings don’t truly end until the first Sunday of May. The kicker is the delegates are never even bound to a presidential candidate.

Even with all these stop and start delays between counties, Ron Paul may yet have a significant victory in Maine according to Reuters:

When the chairman of the Belfast Caucus Committee telephoned his results showing a Paul victory to the state’s Republican headquarters, he was told they already had the numbers. Those numbers mysteriously — and inaccurately — showed a Romney victory in Belfast. When the final tally for Maine’s caucus was announced, zero votes from Belfast were included. Interestingly, not a single case of excluded caucus results supporting Romney has been publicly identified yet.

Gardner expects a large turnout this Saturday. “Based upon the fact that this year’s caucuses ginned up a lot of interest, we were anticipating there would be north of 200 people there,” the county GOP chairman told Dave Weigel at Slate.com. “Now that we’ve gotten the attention, the amount of attendees we’ll see is anyone’s guess. I’d be shocked if we saw lower turnouts as a result of this.”

Sentiment around Maine is that Ron Paul will likely win the Washington County caucuses to be held this coming Saturday. He only received eight votes from the county in 2008, but statewide in 2012, even without the votes in question from Waldo County, Belfast and Waterville, Paul almost doubled his vote total from 2008. Romney, on the other hand, saw his statewide vote count decline from 2,837 votes in 2008 to 2,190 votes in 2012. Another factor is that Washington County has both a proud, independent tradition in electoral politics and the kind of community and public college population that often provides support for Ron Paul.

But even if Paul doesn’t win, the electoral process has still been tainted. Not allowing people in at least a county and a half to have their preferences registered in Maine’s caucuses, particularly those in areas that all political observers believe favor one candidate, skews the results and undermines democratic input.

see more…

Former New Mexico Governor and 2012 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is being sued, in a civil lawsuit that claims the campaign and several contractors owe $104,945.65 in unpaid commissions and fees to their former money man.

Bydlak v. Gary Johnson (2/7/2012) [scribd]

Professional fund raiser Jonathan M. Bydlak (Bydlak & Associates) filed papers in Alexandria, Virginia Federal Court on February 7th. The suit names Johnson personally, Gary Johnson 2012 Inc., Our America Initiative, NSON Inc., Daines Goodwin & Company PC, Chet Goodwin (personally), Ronald T. Nielsen (personally), and Kim Blanton (personally). In the brief, Bydlak (who is represented by Charles Burham, a real lawyer) seeks damages for fraud, unjust enrichment, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

Bydlak previously raised money for Ron Paul during his 2008 campaign (without incident) as Director of Fundraising, claiming to have raised more than $35 million. Now, he’s come out guns blazing over allegedly not getting paid in full for his commission on more than a half million dollars he says he raised for Johnson between July 2010 and December 2011, “OAI and GJ2012 are insolvent or in danger of becoming insolvent.” He says the campaign started to have payment problems “from the beginning.” see more…

It may be a picture of Mitt Romney in this photo, but Ron Paul is the name on the primary states’ voters lips these days. Even the New York Times can’t help but enjoy the conflicting image presented on their Sunday print edition:

Spit-take: The font is larger and more readable than the NYT masthead, and Romney looks downright ghoulish and scary, with children wise to keep their distance.

This is nothing less than winning, because last time I checked they don’t put faces on ballots.

A lot of people are saddened that Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch will be airing its last show tonight (Monday, Feb 13) on the Fox Business Network. The judge is being pushed into a lesser role at the media behemoth as the Rupert Murdoch owned cable channel retools itself to be more business-oriented. Top executives have been ordered to sweep all political content back over to Fox News, sending a strong signal that the days of FBN being a libertarian haven are coming to an end.

Back in October, a leaked memo from FBN exec Kevin Magee foretold the bad news, “I’ve been asked to remind you all again that they are separate channels and the more we make FBN look like FNC the more of a disservice we do to ourselves.”

“There is always going to be overlap between economics and politics, but we need to maintain two separate services,” Magee said. “We can cover the political angle, but our focus should be on our charter of gaining and producing wealth.” see more…

Navel-gazing search queries on Google often leads to some interesting results:

Full-nudity 18+ version available to anyone with a deviantART login.

Cartoonist Tim Kelly provides one of the very best rebuttal shots in a very long time:

h/T to the fine friends at Ron Paul Revolution

Literally.

Yes, I threw this video documentary together. Yes, I understand if you hate on my terrible video editing skills (I make up for it in enthusiasm):

Here’s the description, because I’m trying to lend some credibility to YouTube in the form of proper linguistics:

OLD BROOKLYN/CLEVELAND, Ohio — Frigid forty degree weather did nothing to deter North East Ohioans from supporting Ron Paul in a Saturday afternoon sign wave at the busy intersection of Pearl and State. Reinforcements arrived in the form of the USS Constitution ship of peace. There were a LOT of honks, as you can guess.

Yes, the cannon works and is extremely loud! Luckily the guy at 1:58 was über cool.

More soon from Cleveland’s libertarian legion.

UPDATE: Sister group Ron Paul Akron has posted an even longer (and much better edited) video of the sign wave and a great deal of interviews on how easy it is to counter the whole electability issue, along with loads of horn honkings (bonus: both Cleveland EMS and Fire). Thanks to Craig Thompson for putting together this video:

Cleveland’s Rocking the USS Constitution. Sponsored by Todd Bonar, a local entrepreneur making a soy-based medical adhesive called Soy Sap, he states it simply, “Walk the walk and talk the talk.”

It’s certainly more fun to walk and talk when there’s a giant ship involved. Ahoy!

It seems the Green Party is getting a celebrity candidate in Roseanne Barr, as she decided to seek the presidential nomination this week announcing on Thursday that she would begin the arduous process of getting on the ballot across the nation (or at least the arduous process of announcing her intentions).

Here’s a snippet from the official announcement from Barr (read the whole thing, chock full of unfiltered unelectable hilarity, that goes on and on and on and on):

My Platform is Three fold, and will result in world peace within one year:
STEP ONE: MAKE WAR ILLEGAL, AND LEGALIZE HEMP
allow women to grow it and to make food clothing shelter and fuel from it for pennies. And legalize marijuana too, and let women integrate their divided consciousness with a natural herb instead of doctor’s pills which destroy the liver. End the War on drugs. this will take the potheads and non-violent drug users out of prisons, where you can get drugs anyway, thereby making room for the violent offenders and the real criminals–the actual threats to world peace.

STEP TWO: CHANGE THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF GOVERNMENT:
Since women make up 53% of the population, as well as the work force, a MINIMUM of Green Tea Party leadership will be female, and given that one in six Americans lives in poverty, at least one sixth of the party’s officials will officially be poor (since generations of rich guys running things has only gotten us here). As Congress people and senators, they will be able to become rich enough to eradicate their own poverty for generations, as well as that of those they represent simply by having access to public policy that decides where public money goes. They will simply direct public money TO THE PUBLIC, a novel idea and something which is not being done at all, ever. A small grant of 1500 dollars can enable a poor woman to start a business that can create wealth and jobs for as many as ten other people within two years.
Poor women know how to get things done well, and on the cheap. They know how to stretch that dollar.

In American, for speaking truth, women are called Bitches. I seek for next Mother’s Day, a march of One Million American Bitches who can get the job done–the job of getting the food to the hungry kids in this country and thereby creating real wealth, as well as saving our rich American friends and neighbors from going straight to hell and burning there for all of eternity. This is just one of my righteous spiritual goals and solutions to the real problems in America!

STEP THREE: (MOST IMPORTANT) I WILL OUTLAW BULLSHIT:
After the passage of this one law, the Patriarchy will inevitably begin to crumble, as will the concept of War itself, which is largely a large load of bullshit.

There’s a LOT more, including “THE NECESSARY RE-EDUCATION CAMPS” that do not sound very fun, or even slightly constitutional.

Worth an estimated $42 million according to a November TMZ article about some legal mess, I can easily see Barr making for an interesting campaign sideshow in the coming weeks if she has a savvy political/press team already fired up. She’s already put marijuana legalization at the forefront of her campaign and taken at least one nasty swipe at Ron Paul (and several at libertarians) on her twitter account:

The 2012 Green Party convention will take place in Baltimore, Maryland in July.

So what do you think, America? Is is good to see a longtime political critic emerge from Hollywood to help split the left-wingers without a clue away from Obama come November? Or will the media hyenas move in for the predictable commentary overkill on her waist size, and to ask her just how much of the green she’s been smoking recently?