In a move intended to bring evangelical voters behind a single candidate, Iowa social-conservative leaders on December 20 endorsed former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

"I believe he is ready for a January 3 surprise," Bob Vander Plaats, president and CEO of the Family Leader - which opposes gay marriage and abortion - said of Santorum. "Hopefully, this gives him a stamp of credibility that some people are waiting for."

For decades, the political machine has perpetuated a deliberate void in the average American's knowledge and understanding of our foreign policies, militarism versus defense, and the relative budgets for all three. The mainstream media gives these subjects a wide berth as far as meaningful coverage goes. Even the federal budget for defense breaks out military spending from other significant defense expenditures.

Let's review how U.S. defense spending compares to the rest of the developed world. Military spending in 2010 for Germany was $46.8 billion, United Kingdom $57.4 billion, France $61.8 billion, Japan $51.4 billion, Russia $52.5 billion, and China $114.3 billion. The U.S. was $687 billion! That is nearly twice as much as all these other countries combined, adding up to $384.2 billion by comparison, according to 2010 World Military Budgets, issued by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Military Expenditure Database.

A massive turnaround in the Illinois House may have whetted political appetites for even more corporate tax relief. But don't count on it just yet.

As you may recall, a tax-cut plan for corporations and individuals failed miserably in the House a few weeks ago, getting eight votes - comically short of the 60 needed for passage.

So the House went home for two weeks and some intense lobbying began. When state representatives came back to Springfield, a slightly revised version of the corporate-tax-cut plan passed with a whopping 81 votes. The bill will grant large tax breaks to CME Group and Sears to keep them from leaving the state, as well as a few broad-based provisions.

The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands - for, in other words, not offering a platform.

But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn't have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform - a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn't a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands - with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.

Governor Terry Branstad and Iowa lawmakers will have $6.25 billion in state revenue to work with for the Fiscal Year 2013 budget, and state law allows them to spend up to 99 percent of that amount.

That's $251.3 million, or 4.2 percent, more than what's available in the current fiscal year, but only a slight uptick from previous projections.

"Very little has changed in the national or the Iowa economy" since October, said Holly Lyons, director of the fiscal services division of the Legislative Services Agency - the nonpartisan support arm of the legislature.

This time of year the classic film It's a Wonderful Life comes out of storage and is broadcast on TV, or pulled out of a video collection. In some places, including the Quad Cities, it will be shown in a theater. It's showing at the Galvin Fine Arts Center at St. Ambrose University on Saturday, December 18, at 1 p.m., with audience response encouraged.

As was typical with director Frank Capra's later films, it wasn't made primarily to be a blockbuster the way Hollywood films are often planned today. It was made so that Frank Capra could teach a few lessons. His later films always included morals.

One crucial lesson in It's a Wonderful Life is taught when Mr. Potter, the most powerful and intimidating man in Bedford Falls, offers George Bailey, his do-gooder nemesis, a job. Potter wants to destroy George's family-owned company, the Bailey Building & Loan. So driven by that most basic of sins - greed - Potter offers to make Bailey his paid lackey.

"What if conservatives who preach small government wake up and realize that our interventionist foreign policy provides the greatest incentive to expand the government?" - Ron Paul before the U.S. House of Representatives, February 12, 2009

It baffles me how some conservatives who rail against the excess and waste of big government here at home, in particular its uncanny ability to mismanage and squander our money, still have this benevolent view of government when it comes to our meddling abroad. Not only that, but how can we with a straight face decry the welfare state (socialism) here at home, all the while endorsing free handouts to other nations paid for by our tax dollars?

Foreign aid to Israel is often a popular point of controversy when discussing our foreign policy. As is often the case, the media prefers shocking sound bites rather than critical analyses in order to shape our opinions on the topic. We are encouraged to believe in this two-dimensional world view that all Israelis love the idea of America financing their country.

"I ... I ... I ... I ... I couldn't fathom what I would say to those two girls," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald stammered last week when asked what he would say to Rod Blagojevich's daughters after our former governor was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

It was impossible not to think of those little girls last week. Even some of the most hardened, partisan Republicans I know felt no joy at Blagojevich's long prison sentence because of those kids. I don't know the children well, but I did spend some time with them a few years back and thought they were good kids, even normal kids, despite their father's position at the time and the overall weirdness of their situation.

(Editor's note: This is one of three articles on Ron Paul in the December 8 issue of the River Cities' Reader. The package also includes Kathleen McCarthy's "Ron Paul Personifies Iowa GOP Party Platform" editorial and Todd McGreevy's "Media Manipulation and Ron Paul.")

Establishment political personalities are quick to claim poor "electability" to diminish Ron Paul's chances because they presume that Paul holds no positive advantage in a head-to-head matchup against President Barack Obama in the general election. That's an apparent premise of their calculation.

This is either a sublime miscalculation or a profound deception. If Ron Paul can win the Republican nomination, the path to the White House could seem downhill by comparison. Why?

Unprecedented debt circumstances demand an unprecedented re-imagining of U.S. government priorities and obligations. The U.S. national debt is categorically unsustainable and, literally, it's now mathematically impossible to repay, too. That the debt, banking, and finance system is increasingly proven to be a rigged Ponzi scheme in mainstream media only underlines Ron Paul's tenured criticism of the oligarchical Federal Reserve system itself. Further, increasing numbers of voters awaken daily to the direct correlation between endless foreign interventionism and that categorically unsustainable debt that vexes the nation.

Indeed, because of wars, rumors of wars, a fading dollar, climbing prices, hopeless unemployment, and an overreaching federal police state, the time is ripe for Ron Paul's small-government message.

(Editor's note: This is one of three articles on Ron Paul in the December 8 issue of the River Cities' Reader. The package also includes Dave Trotter's "Electability: Ron Paul Soundly Defeats Obama for These 11 Reasons" cover story and Todd McGreevy's "Media Manipulation and Ron Paul.")

Participants at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames, Iowa, in August 2011. Photo by Jesse Anderson.How curious is it that both liberal and conservative media have so obviously colluded in blacking out meaningful coverage of GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul? Add to this phenomenon that when coverage is unavoidable, it is heavily biased against Dr. Paul. This blanket policy by the mainstream media (MSM) toward this single candidate begs the question: Why is Ron Paul such a threat to both parties, so much so that the MSM has orders from on high to label him as "unelectable" but offers very little in terms of rationale for why it deems him so?

Voters' curiosity should be piqued over this blatant dismissal of the candidacy of such a highly respected member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas voters have elected Dr. Paul 12 times as a Republican, and his base has grown exponentially since he became a national candidate, attracting conservative Republicans, moderate Democrats, and independents alike because his message has remained steadfastly constitutional in all things, no exceptions.

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