A Gentleman’s view.

Republican leaders in Congress have all but reneged on a key agreement they reached with the White House last summer rather than reconsider their unwavering stance against new tax revenue.

Relations between the Obama administration and the congressional GOP were already just about as bad as can be. But even so, this sets a precedent future Congresses and White Houses will remember when partisan mismatches force them to strike deals and govern.

“I’ve got concerns about the sequester,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters Thursday. “I’ve made that pretty clear. And replacing the sequester certainly has value. The defense portion of the sequester, in my view, would clearly hollow our military. The Secretary of Defense has said that, members of Congress have said it. But the question I would pose is, where’s the White House? Where’s the leadership that should be there to ensure that this sequester does not go into effect.”

“Sequester” is budget-speak for across-the-board cuts. But the cuts he’s talking about were part of a deal he recently claimed he’d honor. Here’s what he’s talking about.

In late July 2011, the federal government was nearly out of borrowing authority, marching toward default, and a deeply divided Congress couldn’t figure out how to raise the national debt limit.

The predicament was an outcome of the GOP’s strategy of using the threat of default as leverage to force Democrats to agree to deep cuts to federal aid programs. The GOP demanded a dollar-for-dollar match between guaranteed cuts and newly allotted borrowing authority. And they got most of what they wanted.

In the end they took about half the cuts up front, with the other half tied to the success or failure of the Super Committee, tasked with securing $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. The catch was that both parties needed an incentive to deal honestly — so GOP leaders and the White House agreed that if the Super Committee failed, it would result in $600 billion in automatic, across the board cuts to national security spending, and another $600 billion in domestic cuts, taken mostly from Medicare providers. With both Democratic and Republican sacred cows in line for slaughter, surely, the Super Committee members would reach a compromise.

They didn’t.

Immediately after the Super Committee failed in November, rank and file Republicans began a campaign to swap out only the defense cuts with other spending cuts — no tax increases.

For a time, that was a rogue effort. On November 3, 2011, Boehner told reporters, “Me, personally? Yes, I would feel bound. It was part of the agreement, and so either we succeed or we’re in the sequester. The sequester is ugly. Why? Because we didn’t want anybody to go there. That’s why we have to succeed.”

Boehner’s Thursday comments came moments after Senate Republicans unveiled their plan to partially phase out the enforcement mechanism by reducing the federal workforce and freezing federal pay. Both developments indicate Republican leaders no longer regard their own deal as sacrosanct.

Now Boehner’s pressuring the White House to let Republicans off the hook for the piece of the deficit enforcement mechanism that was designed to make them negotiate in good faith. And Democrats are furious.

“Now we’re really talking skullduggery,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters. “They understood what the consequences were. They agreed to the consequences, and they thought that they could walk away from all the deficit reduction that was possible in that and now say, well, forget about deficit reduction altogether when it comes to the defense budget. I think that an agreement was reached. It must be honored.”

This will be a huge piece of the defining election year fight on Capitol Hill — one that will test Democrats’ will to break the GOP’s anti-tax absolutism, and thus weigh heavily on the broader fight between the parties over the future of the social safety net.

What the Left Gets Right By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Pilots Who Fought to Soar Above Racism By STEPHEN HOLDEN

America Isn’t a Corporation By PAUL KRUGMAN

That’s how the fictional Gordon Gekko finished his famous “Greed is good” speech in the 1987 film “Wall Street.” In the movie, Gekko got his comeuppance. But in real life, Gekkoism triumphed, and policy based on the notion that greed is good is a major reason why income has grown so much more rapidly for the richest 1 percent than for the middle class.

Today, however, let’s focus on the rest of that sentence, which compares America to a corporation. This, too, is an idea that has been widely accepted. And it’s the main plank of Mitt Romney’s case that he should be president: In effect, he is asserting that what we need to fix our ailing economy is someone who has been successful in business.

In so doing, he has, of course, invited close scrutiny of his business career. And it turns out that there is at least a whiff of Gordon Gekko in his time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm; he was a buyer and seller of businesses, often to the detriment of their employees, rather than someone who ran companies for the long haul. (Also, when will he release his tax returns?) Nor has he helped his credibility by making untenable claims about his role as a “job creator.”

But there’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Why isn’t a national economy like a corporation? For one thing, there’s no simple bottom line. For another, the economy is vastly more complex than even the largest private company.

Most relevant for our current situation, however, is the point that even giant corporations sell the great bulk of what they produce to other people, not to their own employees — whereas even small countries sell most of what they produce to themselves, and big countries like America are overwhelmingly their own main customers.

Yes, there’s a global economy. But six out of seven American workers are employed in service industries, which are largely insulated from international competition, and even our manufacturers sell much of their production to the domestic market.

And the fact that we mostly sell to ourselves makes an enormous difference when you think about policy.

Consider what happens when a business engages in ruthless cost-cutting. From the point of view of the firm’s owners (though not its workers), the more costs that are cut, the better. Any dollars taken off the cost side of the balance sheet are added to the bottom line.

But the story is very different when a government slashes spending in the face of a depressed economy. Look at Greece, Spain, and Ireland, all of which have adopted harsh austerity policies. In each case, unemployment soared, because cuts in government spending mainly hit domestic producers. And, in each case, the reduction in budget deficits was much less than expected, because tax receipts fell as output and employment collapsed.

Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn’t necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

And there’s also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain — namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama’s actions: “He did it to try to save the business.” No, he didn’t; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America’s slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

America certainly needs better economic policies than it has right now — and while most of the blame for poor policies belongs to Republicans and their scorched-earth opposition to anything constructive, the president has made some important mistakes. But we’re not going to get better policies if the man sitting in the Oval Office next year sees his job as being that of engineering a leveraged buyout of America Inc.

At least twenty weapons that were allowed to “walk” during a Bush-era investigation aimed at combating gun trafficking were later recovered in Mexico, documents the Justice Department sent to congressional investigators on Thursday indicate.

One of the distinctions that Republicans have drawn between Operation Fast and Furious, the flawed investigation that allowed weapons to “walk” into Mexico during the Obama administration, and Operation Wide Receiver, which did the same during the Bush administration, is that authorities who took part in the earlier investigation were coordinating their efforts with Mexican authorities.

“The difference in the previous administration is there was coordination with the Mexican government,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said at a hearing in December. “They made a real effort under Wide Receiver to pass off a small amount of weapons and track them.”

But new documents DOJ disclosed to congressional investigators on Thursday indicate that ATF officials didn’t even consider looping Mexican authorities in on their operation until several months after the investigation began and ATF had already lost track of weapons that likely ended up in Mexico.

DOJ Assistant Attorney General Ron Weich wrote in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa that the documents paint a “mixed picture” of how Operation Wide Receiver unfolded. ATF agents had already allowed suspected “straw purchasers” to buy weapons well before they began discussing making the effort to involve Mexican authorities. The documents indicate that former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton participated in a discussion about the tactics used in the investigation, but don’t explicitly indicate he signed off on the strategy. Ten months later, however, an email from an assistant U.S. attorney indicated that agents were still not arresting straw purchasers. The federal prosecutor indicated in May 2007 that it was their understanding that ATF “will probably take them down on the next purchase.”

An ATF official observed in June of that year that they “want the money people in Mexico that are orchestrating this operation for indictment” and that they already “have numerous charges up here.”

By late 2008, the Arizona Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to the case was expressing concerns with the tactics used, saying it “is wrong for us to allow hundreds of guns to go into Mexico to drug people knowing that is where they are going.”

An email from an unknown ATF official in August 2009 — just before officials in the Gang Unit at Justice Department headquarters in D.C. too over the case — indicates that a federal prosecutor on the case was “pushing back [with] moral dilemma [with] the [government] allowing the targets to traffic 300+ firearms to Mexico.”

Republican who have been pursing Fast and Furious said the documents don’t change their view of the matter.

In a statement, Sen. Chuck Grassley said that the documents showed that the “administration knew that guns were walked in Operation Wide Receiver, yet did nothing about it even as it was happening again in Fast and Furious.”

“I’ve said all along that walking guns is wrong, period. I don’t care who did it,” Grassley said. “We know that Lanny Breuer knew about guns being walked in Operation Wide Receiver, which is why he needs to do the right thing, hold himself accountable and resign.”

A spokeswoman for Issa said that DOJ was prolonging and complicating the investigation by refusing to offer direct answers and access to key witnesses like the lead prosecutor from Operation Wide Receiver.

“It is deeply discouraging that top Justice officials knew such details about problems in Operation Wide Receiver yet were still so quick to dismiss warnings from whistleblowers about reckless and dangerous tactics happening on a much larger scale in Operation Fast and Furious,” said Becca Glover Watkins.

1. Candidates fall all over themselves to kiss the asses of rich people and trash the downtrodden.

Jesus once said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Well, the Republicans must want to compensate for this by making rich peoples’ time on Earth as heavenly as possible through a wonderful blend of tax cuts and blatant ass-kissing.

The entire Republican economic philosophy can basically be boiled down thusly: Rich people are magical wealth-creating leprechaun fairies who sprinkle their sparkle dust over all of us worthless dirtbags to bless us with the gift of employment. But if any nasty populist ever says anything relatively nasty about rich people, they will vanish from the realm and take their magical job-creating powers with them and none of us will ever work or have food to eat ever again.

You can see this pretty clearly when you look at the way Rick Perry has been pushing Texas’ tax system as a shining model for the rest of the nation. As theInstitute on Taxation and Economic Policy [PDF] has shown, Texas’ regressive tax system ensures that the poorest 20% of its citizens typically pay more than four times in state and local taxes as a percentage of their overall income than the wealthiest 1% of Texans. How can this be, you ask? Well, Texas relies heavily on sales and excise taxes to fill its coffers, meaning that poorer people pay a much larger share of their income in taxes since a much larger share of their income goes toward consumption.

Nonetheless, Perry has described this system as “a tax policy in place that allowed for our job creators to not be burdened, still delivering the services that the people desire in the state of Texas.” Well, yeah, if by “services” you mean a pathetic social safety net that leaves more than one quarter of the population without health insurance, I guess that’s good.

Perry wasn’t alone in giving a big, sloppy kiss to the rich. Herman Cain’s infamous 9-9-9 tax plan would have slashed the income tax to 9% while at the same time implementing a 9% national sales tax that would take a huge chunk out of Americans in the lower income brackets while at the same time saving “a taxpayer in the top 0.1% who makes more than $2.7 million” an average of $1.4 million a year, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Speaking of Cain, he also wins the award for the most obnoxious class-warfare statement of the entire campaign when he said that “if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” He also went on to say that it was foolish to protest the greed and corruption on Wall Street since Wall Street bankers are “the ones who create the jobs.”

And then there’s Mitt Romney, the patron saint of the 1%, who has shown a similar lack of empathy for our nation’s economically downtrodden. When asked what he’d do to help solve the massive foreclosure crisis that has put millions’ of families’ homes underwater, Romney replied that the best course of action would be to halt efforts to “stop the foreclosure process” and thus “let it run its course, to hit the bottom and let investors buy the home.” Or put another way, Romney wants to allow people to suffer so some rich asshole can swoop in and make a profit from their misery. That’s right Christian of you, sir.

One gets the feeling that Jesus wouldn’t do very well if he ran in a GOP primary since throwing money changers out of the temple would leave him vulnerable to charges of socialism.

2. GOP debate audiences and candidates celebrate death.

When the scribes and Pharisees brought Jesus an adulterous woman and asked him if she should be put to death for her sins, Jesus replied to them, “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.”

But if Jesus had found himself in a similar situation with some Republican primary voters they would have responded by saying, “Give us the damn rocks, hippie!”

The ungodly trouble all started this past summer when NBC’s Brian Williams noted that Texas under Rick Perry had executed 234 death-row inmates during his term, “more than any other governor in modern times.” While no one expects anyone to be particularly sympathetic toward death-row inmates, we should expect that most decent people will refrain from erupting into bloodthirsty roars. And yet that’s just what the GOP debate audience did earlier this year.

If this were the only instance of Ancient Roman-style bloodthirst we could perhaps forgive it. But members of Republican debate audiences expressed similar enthusiasm when asked whether we should let Americans die if they lack health insurance. Cain, meanwhile, got a big round of applause during a speech when he said that he wanted to keep immigrants from entering the United States by building a “barbed-wire fence” that’s “20 feet high” and “electrified.” While Cain acknowledged that some people would find electrocuting immigrants to be an insensitive policy prescription, he said that the immigrants were the truly insensitive ones for “sneaking into America.”

This is all pretty weak sauce for a party that claims to be the direct disciples of the Prince of Peace. After all, when Jesus healed the lepers he never asked them whether they were personally responsible enough to buy insurance from Aetna. He just, you know, helped them. What a commie.

3. Which Muslims would Jesus bomb and torture?

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus informed his audience that “peacemakers” were “blessed” and would be considered “sons of God.” Many Republican candidates, however, seem content to be God’s creepy nephews who enjoy burning off insect legs with magnifying glasses.

During the Republican presidential debates, several GOP Godheads such as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann went out of their way to defend waterboarding, the form of torture that had been employed by American intelligence agencies against terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay. For those of you questioning whether waterboarding is actually torture, try having yourself drowned for five minutes and let us know if it was an enjoyable experience.

Bachmann, for one, said that torturing prisoners was justified because it was “very effective at getting information for our country.” Perry went a step further and said that he would defend the use of torture techniques such as waterboarding “until the day I die.” Herman Cain wasn’t quite as enthusiastic as Bachmann and Perry, as he hedged by saying he wasn’t sure whether or not waterboarding constituted torture and would instead “trust the judgement of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture.” The military, of course, aren’t supposed to be the ones making the laws, but you can see why Cain would blindly trust their judgment since he doesn’t know where Libya is.

When GOP candidates weren’t supporting torture, they were just as enthusiastic about bombing and invading other nations. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrichpledged to go to war with Iran to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon, with Newt in particular relishing the idea of “taking out their scientists,” and “breaking up their systems, all of it covertly, all of it deniable.” Yeah, not sure the Iranians are going to give you a pass for assassinating their scientists when you announce your cunning plan to do so live on national television, Newt.

(It should be noted that no candidate is as war-crazy as Rick Santorum, whothinks that our global Good versus Evil Battle Against Muslamonazism will be “1000 years long.”)

Herman Cain, of all people, came across as relatively dovish when it came to war with Iran, saying it wasn’t practical to bomb the country since its topography is “very mountainous.” Not exactly the reason that Jesus was looking for, but compared to the rest of candidates, we’ll take it.

4. Michele Bachmann looks to an atheistic Communist dictatorship for inspiration.

It’s very difficult to get Michele Bachmann to say anything nice about foreign countries, especially ones that are as atheistic and repressive as the People’s Republic of China. But Ms. Bachmann is apparently envious of China in certain key ways, namely that it lets its poor people rot and die in the streets.

During a November debate in South Carolina, Bachmann praised the People’s Republic for its adoption of the Milton Friedman/Augusto Pinochet school of economics in which corporations can do whatever the hell they want to people without paying one damn penny in taxes for the general welfare.

“If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps,” she lectured. “If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They don’t have AFDC [Aid to Families with Dependent Children]. They save for their own retirement security. They don’t have the modern welfare state. And China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”

Hear that, old folks? Get ready to get booted off of Medicare so you can spend your Golden Years being economically productive and manufacturing plastic children’s toys 16 hours a day. If this doesn’t seem like an ideal scenario for you, you might want to rethink voting Republican. Ever.

5. Spermin’ Herman’s excellent misadventures,

Jesus once said that any man who “looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Well, according to multiple women, Herman Cain has been committing adultery using his heart and several other body parts too.

Sex scandals are nothing new in politics, whether it’s Anthony Weiner, Mark Sanford, Larry Craig, etc. etc. etc.  Whether a politician survives such scandals all comes down to whether he’s canny enough to win over public hearts and minds. Herman Cain, to put it plainly, was not that smart.

How not smart? Well let’s start off with the fact that Cain tried to brush off the sexual harassment allegations made against him while he was head of the National Restaurant Association. Cain tried to paint the allegations as a trifling non-issue, claiming he didn’t even know if the women in question had received any compensation for his alleged naughty advances. Then it turned out that the National Restaurant Association had paid out settlements to two of his accusers of roughly a year’s pay. Oopsie-doodles!

Cain then quickly backtracked and said he knew there was an agreement between the association and his accusers, but that the agreement was not the same thing as a settlement.

“When I first heard the word ‘settlement,’ I thought legal settlement,” Cain said. “My recollection later is that there was an agreement. So, I made assumption about the word ‘settlement’ that was legal. I didn’t think there was a legal settlement, but an agreement. Remember, this happened 12 years ago.”

If only Herman had gone to great lengths to discuss the definition of “is,” he could have wound up a laughing stock for right-wing talk radio for years to come. (Well, if he’d done that and come out as a Democrat.)

Cain got a brief reprieve from discussing his sexual misadventures when Rick Perry infamously forgot which government agencies he’d destroy but they came back with a vengeance in late November when Atlanta businesswoman Ginger White said that she’d had a 13-year affair with Cain. She described the affair thusly: “It wasn’t complicated. I was aware that he was married. And I was also aware I was involved in a very inappropriate situation, relationship.”

Cain responded by saying that such accusations were being fabricated by unseen forces who were “afraid of a Cain presidency.” And then he decided tosuspend his campaign less than a week later. But on the plus side, he’ll likely never be asked what he thinks about Libya again in his life, the poor sap.

6. Newt Gingrich emerges as a frontrunner.

Above all else, this is the one most likely to make poor Jesus slap his hand on his face and say, “Verily, dost thou listen to anything that I didst say?” Put simply, Newt Gingrich is a walking Commandment breaker. He can’t even finish a bowl of cereal without coveting his neighbor’s ox. He’s that bad.

Let’s start with Newt’s three marriages. Gingrich and his first wife, Jackie, divorced in 1981 while she was still recovering from cancer. L.H. Carter, who served as Newt’s campaign treasurer at the time, said Newt told him that Jackie wasn’t “young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president. And besides, she has cancer.”

Newt then married his second wife, Marianne Ginther, six months after his divorce was finalized. Newt and Marianne divorced in 2000, as Newt admitted he had been having an affair during their marriage with Callista Bisek, a former House staffer who also happened to be 23 years younger than Newt. I guess it took poor Newty a while to find someone young enough and pretty enough to be worthy of his over-sized head, but he apparently found her in Callista since they’ve been married for more than 11 years now.

While no man is perfect and Newt’s past infidelities aren’t unique, his explanations for them sure are. When Newt was interviewed by David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said that he cheated on his wife because he was “driven by how passionately I felt about this country” and thus “worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”  That is, to quote the late George Carlin, what’s known as being stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit.

Which brings us to another of Newt’s un-Christlike traits: His incredible ability to spew bullshit about anything and everything. When it was revealed that Gingrichmade at least $1.6 million lobbying on behalf of government-sponsored entity Freddie Mac, Newt simply claimed that Freddie had paid him all that money to learn his unique perspective as a historian on the housing market.

And what was Newt’s historical advice, you ask? Well, Newt says that he warned Freddie execs they were buying up far too many risky mortgages. Which sounds all well and good until you read a 2007 interview with Newt posted on Freddie Mac’s Web site in which he says that conservatives ought to be supportive of government-sponsored entities because they’ve done such an amazing job in expanding home-buying opportunities for so many Americans.

“The housing GSEs have made an important contribution to homeownership and the housing finance system,” Newt said a mere year before Fannie and Freddie collapsed and were taken over by the federal government. “We have a much more liquid and stable housing finance system than we would have without the GSEs. And making homeownership more accessible and affordable is a policy goal I believe conservatives should embrace.”

Oh, and have I mentioned Newt’s self-idolatry? Because there’s lots and lots of that as well. In 2009, for instance, Newt mused about his potential for a political comeback by comparing himself to Charles de Gaulle. In 1999, right after he had been run out of his job as House Speaker by his own party, Gingrich said he would go down as the most significant Congressman since Henry Clay in the 19th century since “Henry Clay’s probably the only other speaker to have been a national leader and a speaker of the House simultaneously.” And when Gingrich received criticism for his poor political strategy back in 1996, the former Speaker responded by pointing out that people used to criticize the Duke of Wellington as well.

At any rate, if Newt is actually elected president, I pledge to become a born-again evangelical Christian since praying every night for the Rapture would be better than dealing with reality.

7. Ron Paul’s bigoted newsletters.

Before I get into this, I should note that Ron Paul is the rare Republican candidate who doesn’t want to plunge the United States into a series of ruinous wars in the Middle East. So, good job on that. Jesus will bless him in that regard.

The Prince of Peace will be less pleased, however, by Paul’s history of releasing bigoted newsletters that trashed black people and homosexuals while spouting loony-toons conspiracy theories about the Trilateral Commission that would make Glenn Beck blush.

How bad were these newsletters? Consider a 1992 issue that said riots in Los Angeles only ended “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. … What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.” Another 1992 newsletter said that “Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage” and thus cause rioting.

Paul’s newsletters also attacked homosexuals as deviant disease carriers who only have themselves to blame for contracting HIV. A 1994 newsletter explained that “those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get blood a transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.” Another newsletter similarly said homosexuals were to blame for contracting HIV as they “don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties” since “they are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners.”

For his part, Paul claims that he didn’t write the letters that bore his name. And, you know, sure. I’m trying to imagine how the Irish Taoiseach will react when he receives a letter in President Paul’s name informing him that “the Irishmen have reverted to their traditional roles as Europe’s brawling drunks after having a brief period of economic prosperity. Only an ample supply of Guinness and potatoes will be able to stop the Irishman from rioting and looting his British superiors in the months ahead.” Will the Irish chief of state really buy the president’s explanation that the letter was written by a rogue Secretary of State?

Race

“A Special Issue on Racial Terrorism” analyzes the Los Angeles riots of 1992: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began. … What if the checks had never arrived? No doubt the blacks would have fully privatized the welfare state through continued looting. But they were paid off and the violence subsided.”

The November 1990 issue of the Political Report had kind words for David Duke.

This December 1990 newsletter describes Martin Luther King Jr. as “a world-class adulterer” who “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.”

A February 1991 newsletter attacks “The X-Rated Martin Luther King.”

An October 1990 edition of the Political Report ridicules black activists, led by Al Sharpton, for demonstrating at the Statue of Liberty in favor of renaming New York City after Martin Luther King. The newsletter suggests that  “Welfaria,”  “Zooville,” “Rapetown,” “Dirtburg,”and “Lazyopolis ” would be better alternatives—and says,  “Next time, hold that demonstration at a food stamp bureau or a crack house.”

A May 1990 issue of the Ron Paul Political Report cites Jared Taylor, who six months later would go onto found the eugenicist and white supremacist periodical American Renaissance. 

The January 1993 issue of the Survival Report worries about America’s “disappearing white majority.”

The July 1992 Ron Paul Political Report declares, “Jury verdicts, basketball games, and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems,” and defends David Duke. The author of the newsletter—presumably Paul—writes, “My youngest son is starting his fourth year in medical school. He tells me there would be no way to persuade his fellow students of the case for economic liberty.”

A March 1993 Survival Report describes Bill Clinton’s supposedly “illegitimate children, black and white: ‘woods colts’ in backwoods slang.”

Gays

The December 1989 Ron Paul Political Report contains entries on a “new form of racial terrorism,” cites former Congressman Bill Dannemeyer’s claim that “the average homosexual has 1,000 or more partners in a lifetime,” and quotes Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in the third person.

In January 1990, the Ron Paul Political Report cites “a well-known libertarian editor” who “told me: ‘The ACT-UP slogan on stickers plastered all over Manhattan is ‘Silence=Death.’ But shouldn’t it be Sodomy = Death’?”

The September 1994 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report states that “those who don’t commit sodomy, who don’t get blood a transfusion, and who don’t swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are deliberately infected by a malicious gay.”

The June 1990 issue of the Political Report says: “I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”

A January 1994 edition of the Survival Report states that “gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense,” adding: “[T]hese men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners.” Also, “they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

Survivalism and Militias

The January 1995 issue of the Survival Report—released just three months before the Oklahoma City bombing—cites an anti-government militia’s advice to other militias, including, “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The October 1992 issue of the Political Report paraphrases an “ex-cop” who offers this strategy for protecting against “urban youth”: “If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”

Conspiracies

This 1978 newsletter says the Trilateral Commission is “no longer known only by those who are knowledgeable about international conspiracies, but is routinely mentioned in the daily news.”

Middle East

A 1989 newsletter compares Salman Rushdie to Ernst Zundel, a Canadian Holocaust-denier.

Anti-Government Paranoia/Conspiracy Theories/Survivalism

A fundraising letter from Paul’s 1984 Senate campaign in which Paul complains about the “minions of Kissinger and Rockefeller” and “the big New York banks, and their pals in Texas” who “want me silenced.”

The January 1988 Ron Paul Political Report approvingly cites Dr. William C. Douglass, who “believes that AIDS is a deliberately engineered hybrid” developed at a World Health Organization experiment conducted at Ft. Detrick. Douglass has long been a fringe medical guru, and today claims that “smoking can help you live longer!!!”

The November 1989 Ron Paul Political Report reports on the Bohemian Grove and Ronald Reagan’s “old Trilateralist agenda item of four-year terms for Congressmen.”

This 1993 Ron Paul Strategy Guide entitled, “How to Protect Yourself from Urban Violence,” is a special supplement to the Ron Paul Survival Report.

In the April 1993 Ron Paul Survival Report, the author—writing in the first person—states, “Whether [the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.” The newsletters also warns readers to “do your very best to keep your family away from inner cities. If you can’t, have a haven remote from the metropolitan areas.”

The May 1995 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report warns of “The Trilateralist Alan Greenspan” and its author writes, “Now that my five children are grown and educated, I’ve listened to the many supporters who’ve urged me to return to office. I can now give up my medical practice, and dedicate every fiber of my being to saving our country.” The newsletter also contains an advertisement for the Ron Paul congressional exploratory committee.

The September 1995 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report asks about “Black Helicopters?”

The June 1996 issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report refers to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers as “Jackbooted Thugs.”

Jews

The November 1992 Ron Paul Survival Report defends chess champion and Holocaust-denier Bobby Fischer, saying that “the brilliant Fischer, who has all the makings of an American hero, is very politically incorrect on Jewish questions, for which he will never be forgiven, even though he is a Jew. Thus we are not supposed to herald him as the world’s greatest chess player.”

Pat Buchanan

In January 1992, Paul writes about his consideration of a presidential bid which he dashed after Pat Buchanan expressed his intention to run. Paul wrote of “the essential compatibility between [Buchanan’s] ideas and mine” and “agreed to serve as the chairman of his economic advisory committee.”

A 1992 issue of the Rothbard-Rockwell-Report tells of Paul’s decision to defer to Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican presidential primary.

Newsletter Authorship

The masthead of March 1987 Ron Paul Investment Letter lists “the Hon. Ron Paul” as “Editor and Publisher” and “Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.” as one of several contributing editors.

An undated personal solicitation letter—signed by Paul—asking the recipient to subscribe to his newsletter in anticipation of (presumably) the 1988 Libertarian Party Presidential nominating convention.

The April 1988 Ron Paul Investment Letter lists Paul as Editor.

The May 1988 Ron Paul Investment Letter lists Lew Rockwell as Editor. It also advertises books by the far-right conspiracy theorist Gary Allen, who was a contributing editor to the Ron Paul Investment Letter.