Response to
    "Another Voice in the Choir" by David S. Broder
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/10/AR2007101002123.html

I was extremely disappointed with this article.

You call Ron Paul a "gadfly" but then you complain about the "absence
of fresh policy ideas" from the leading candidates.  You can't have it
both ways, Mr. Broder.

You correctly point out that Michigan is unlikely to be pleased with
the results of Bush's economic policies.  The US dollar has inflated
13% since last year alone [1].  The Economist's commodity-price index
shows 17.2% increase since last year [2].  Have their salaries gone up
by 18% this past year?  Has yours?  Ron Paul is the only candidate
addressing our monetary policy.

Why do you bring up Mike Huckabee as the champion of disaffected
working people?  Your own transcript [3] shows that Ron Paul was first
to address this issue, more eloquently: "That's why you have more
billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of
a recession for a lot of people. Michigan knows about it. Poor people
know about it. The middle class knows about it. Wall Street doesn't
know about it. Washington, D.C., doesn't know about it."  And Dr. Paul
went on to address the root cause.

Why do you praise Thompson for "political courage" when he makes a
minor regulatory change to Social Security benefits, while Ron Paul's
Social Security Preservation Act of 2007, which requires the
government to stop raiding Social Security funds and instead invest
them for the future, languishes in committee [4]?  How you calculate
the benefits won't matter if there is no money left to pay out.
Thompson's proposal would rely on the government's cost inflation
measurements, which ignore the cost of gas and food [5], and would
unfairly serve the elderly in particular [6].

As for "policy specifics", Ron Paul has one that he's consistently and
strongly put forward during his entire career, and that's the rule of
law.  The Constitution is very specific about the responsibility of
Congress to declare war.  Yet all the candidates but Ron Paul were
leaping over each other in their eagerness to say flat-out that they
would defy Congress if they want a war and Congress won't give it to
them.  How can you ignore this?

We've seen what undeclared undefined wars got us, in Korea, in
Vietnam, and now in Iraq.  Yet every Republican candidate but Ron Paul
is rattling sabres at Iran.  This eagerness for preemptive war when
our own military is tired from repeated tours of duty overseas, kept
in place with stop-loss orders!

If you support the troops, you support Ron Paul.  72% of US troops in
Iraq wanted us out already [7].  Ron Paul has received more campaign
donations than all the other Republican candidates [8].  And Ron
Paul's warnings about the military-industrial complex come straight
from U.S. General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower [9].

You can ignore Ron Paul in your reporting.  But after every debate, he
wins all the polls and gets a surge in donations.  Beware ignoring
someone on behalf of your readers, lest they find out and begin
ignoring you.

References:

[1] http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html

[2] http://mickrussom.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html

[3] http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/transcript_gop_debate_100907.html

[4] http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:h219ih.txt

[5] http://www.mindfully.org/Energy/2007/Peak-Oil-Inflation19may07.htm

[6] http://www.epinet.org/issuebriefs/ib105_1995.pdf

[7] http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075

[8] http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=3601542

[9] http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html