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Whatever happened to Ron Paul?

He, uh... well, this happened to him: He is running for president still but he hasn't won any primaries. He has 50 delegates. The end.

But how did that happen? How did Ron Paul not win all the primaries and the delegates, after he raised a bunch of money and had big rallies?

His strategists are searching for answers, and one may be that many who turned up for his rallies were less eager to take part in Republican primaries or argue Mr. Paul’s case at Republican caucuses.

Even Mr. Paul cannot entirely explain why the passion he generated, especially among young people and those his campaign identified as motivated supporters, did not translate into more votes.

“I don’t have a full answer for that,” says Mr. Paul, who says he believes ballot irregularities have chipped into his numbers in some places. He adds, “I think there’s some problem with always making sure this energy is translated into getting to the polls.”

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The Kochs have sued for the right to buy the shares in Cato held by the widow of co-founder William Niskanen. Their aim is basically to make Cato into another arm of their explicitly partisan messaging machine, along with Americans for Prosperity. To that end, they have already attempted to install some ridiculous Republican Party hacks on Cato's board of directors -- hacks like John "Hind Rocket" Hinderacker, the attorney and "Powerline" blogger with no history of support for "liberty" to speak of. Current Cato people are upset. Some have preemptively resigned, even. (Well, announced an intention to resign upon the completion of the Koch takeover, anyway.)

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That said, I believe the argument being forwarded by progressive-minded Paul supporters is significant because it embodies a calculating pragmatism that highlights uncomfortable truths both about liberal priorities and about presidential power.

To review the basic Paul profile: When it comes to government social spending and regulation, Paul is more antithetical to progressive goals than any candidate running for the White House. This is indisputable. At the same time, though, when it comes to war, surveillance, police power, bank bailouts, cutting the defense budget, eliminating corporate welfare and civil liberties, Paul is more in line with progressive goals than any candidate running in 2012 (or almost any Democrat who has held a federal office in the last 30 years). This, too, is indisputable.

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Here's Paul on C-SPAN in 1995, talking about his newsletters:

The fact is, Paul has lied like a very old-fashioned sort of politician about these newsletters, and he has been lying for years. He has gone through the motions of public regret about their contents, but has never acknowledged knowing who wrote the offensive material or even being aware that offensive material went out under his name. That's bullshit. Now he ducks questions on the subject entirely (and his supporters complain that it's "old news," because they have no serious defense of the comments or Paul's responsibility for them).

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Stossel's a ridiculous local-news "consumer watchdog" reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He's the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he's "politically incorrect" (a term that when self-applied invariably means "an asshole").

If I were a libertarian, I'd be embarrassed by Stossel's prominence. Sneering contempt for supposed liberal shibboleths is not actually a well-considered political philosophy. There's nothing "libertarian," for example, about not believing in climate change. That's just tribal corporatism, totally disconnected from any economics-based belief about the superiority of market forces over government industrial policy.

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Rove, in Bloomington, Minn., for the Republican Midwest Leadership Conference (can't believe they held it the same weekend as the Values Voters Summit), was glittered by LGBT activists on Friday, in part because Rove was the one who decided Bush should endorse an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in 2004 but mostly because he's just an all-around repulsive person who has made America a meaner, poorer place.

The glitter mostly missed him. But still: Good show, glitter-bombing folks.

Less embarrassing but probably more aggravating to Rove is the growing rift between him and his wealthy political allies, the Koch brothers, that Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports on today.

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Jon Huntsman may win liberal affection by tweeting about his love of Captain Beefheart and evolutionary science, but Johnson is the race's genuine voice of reason (or Reason), opposing the drug war, mass incarceration and the military-industrial complex in no uncertain terms.

Despite usually meeting most of the official "requirements," poor Johnson has thus far been shut out of GOP debates (and much of the press in general) due to the presence of perennial candidate Paul, who will not relinquish the "token libertarian" seat. Johnson has, I think, a much better shot at winning disaffected young liberals to the libertarian cause than Dr. Paul.

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Think Progress revealed some of the invitees to one of last year's meetings.. Increased awareness of the role the Kochs play in our national politics led to protests at the February retreat, which was suddenly guarded by hired goons. (Right-wingers decried these protests as assaults on the civil liberties of the Kochs and their billionaire friends.)

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Given their professed interest in admirers of Mussolini, it is curious that American conservatives and libertarians have not seen fit to discuss the view of fascism held by one of the heroes of modern American libertarianism, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. In his book "Liberalism," published in 1927 after Mussolini had seized power in Italy, Mises wrote:

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Still, The Post's coverage of Paul looks thin compared with its stories on Bachmann. In the past six months, The Post has published online or in print 34 staff-written stories plus 12 wire service stories on Bachmann, who has served not even five years in the House, and that doesn't count the blog posts about her on The Fix or Glenn Kessler's Fact Checkerpieces. The Post published 19 staff-written stories on former House speaker Newt Gingrich in that time, plus one wire story and many blog posts. On Paul, a congressman for more than 20 years, who was No. 2 in fundraising after Romney in the last report, The Post has published just three full stories, a couple more that had large sections on him along with other candidates, two wire stories and The Fix blog posts.

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After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

(Galveston is in his district! Not that he spends a lot of time there.)

Paul doesn't support FEMA because of "moral hazard." The fact that people will receive help should a natural disaster strike encourages people to live where natural disaster happen. (Like "North America.") Paul is mostly talking about the National Flood Insurance Program, which definitely has glaring flaws as public policy, but abolishing the federal agency in charge of responding to natural disasters instead of fixing the problems with one program that agency oversees seems like overkill.

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What's the worst that Ron Paul could do? Try to get America back on the gold standard, only to find that he doesn't have the votes in Congress to do it? I am not just being funny. Though Paul has some radical domestic policy ideas, I just don't see any of them getting passed into law. And in foreign policy and national security matters, the areas where he would exercise the most unchecked discretion, he is the candidate you'd least expect to unwisely provoke or launch a war.

I'm going to assume that we are all adherents of "mainstream economics" and not, like Paul, Ludwig von Mises acolytes -- though even Austrians would surely find something to worry about in a Paul presidency.

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Of course the ostensible point of the thing was to promise never, ever, ever to endorse marriage equality, and I wouldn't be surprised if other candidates signed it, now that the offending slavery language has been removed and apologized for. (Newt Gingrich didn't sign it -- yet -- because it required that the candidates swear a vow of marital fidelity, but he's willing to take another look if they change the language.)

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Unlike her tale of being a Carter-supporting Democrat until she discovered Gore Vidal's disrespect for our Founders (or, as is more likely the case, until she became an antiabortion activist), Bachmann's IRS job isn't part of her grand conversion narrative. She doesn't hide it, but she does describe her old gig with fancy government bureaucrat talk: She was a "federal tax litigation attorney," she says. Her four years at the IRS are also the only job she's ever held outside of elected office.

Here's Bachmann's spin on the job: God, through her husband, told her to persecute delinquent taxpayers.

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Say what you will about libertarian arguments, but they're always fun to discuss. So we sat down with Gillespie and Welch earlier this week and talked about their philosophy over a sushi lunch:

Your book urges the American public to embrace an unregulated market free of government control. But you also include a quote from Julian Assange, a self-described libertarian, stating that "a free market ends up as a monopoly unless you force it to be free." So basically, some external body has to exist to ensure the freedom of a market -- doesn't that imply that free markets are inextricable from some form of government control?

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As Sanders and Franken explain: If we make sure old folks have money for and access to adequate nutrition, fewer of them will need to be hospitalized or placed in nursing homes. Because Medicare would pay a lot more money for hospitalization or nursing home care than it would cost to make sure these old folks don't go hungry to begin with, this program is cost-effective in addition to being humane.

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The airline bills the move as a way to offer passengers even lower prices. In conjunction with the move, ticket prices will drop -- by $5. So even if you forget to print out your boarding pass, you're not really losing, right? You're just not gaining that new discount.

But I don't think I'm alone in feeling irked at this news. Even though I was an eager early adopter of online check-in technology, and almost never arrive at an airport without boarding pass already in hand, I am nonetheless disgruntled at the thought of yet another fee lying in wait to ambush me if I screw up.

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On June 7, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a libertarian think tank founded and funded by the Koch brothers, released its latest snapshot of liberty in the U.S.A: "Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom."

As is usually the case in studies of this sort, high-population blue states inevitably end up ranking last. The metrics used by the authors of the study penalize high taxes, regulations and, in general, just about anything that restricts the freedom of individuals and corporations to do as they please, from gun control laws and healthcare mandates to rules requiring seat belts and motorcycle helmets. Befitting libertarian sensibilities, the ideological biases in the Mercatus report do not purely jibe with conservative Republican priorities -- states get points for decriminalizing marijuana and allowing same sex marriage or civil unions, for example -- but nevertheless, the political gist is hard to ignore. Blue states cluster at the bottom, while red states are at the top.

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MediaMatters says Stossel also did this with Ron Paul. Why would anyone agree to do this? It's humiliating!

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