by Steve Watson

Infowars.com

Congressman Ron Paul has topped a Tea Party presidential straw poll, beating Sarah Palin as the favourite to run against Barack Obama in 2012.

The former Alaska governor was placed a distant third, behind Paul and Georgia businessman Herman Cain in the poll of close to 1,600 members of the Tea Party Patriots grassroots activist group.

The Congressmanromped home with 581 votes, while Cain received 256 votes.

Palin scored just 149 votes, almost four times less than Ron Paul, and was almost beaten into fourth place by Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was shy of Palin by just 6 votes. “Mr. Cain and Rep. Paul’s positions resonated with Tea Party Patriots this weekend,” said Mark Meckler, the Tea Party Patriots’ national coordinator.

The poll was conducted jointly online and in house at the groups’ convention in Phoenix this past weekend. The result echoes that of other recent surveys, including the CPAC straw poll, which have shown that Ron Paul has a greater chance of beating Obama than Sarah Palin does.

A string of victories in the polls, as well as a huge injection of $700,000 of support in the form of a recent “moneybomb” on behalf of supporters, is sure to influence Paul’s impending decision of whether to embark on a third presidential campaign.

The former Governor of Alaska trails Obama by 11 per cent in current approval ratings, whereas Paul only trails the President by 9 per cent. Once Paul is able to mobilize his hugely effective grass roots base, which outstrips anything the likes of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich or Mike Huckabee can call upon, a 9 point deficit is far from insurmountable.

Indeed, an April 2010 Rasmussen poll showed that Paul was almost level with Obama if the two were to go head to head for the presidency. Following a 15 point bounce in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, Obama has pulled away from all potential Republican candidates, but given the momentum Paul could build with his energetic grass roots base, beating Obama would be a distinct possibility.

When Obama was at one of the lowest ebbs of his popular approval, a YouGov/Polimetrix study found that establishment Republican candidates like Palin, Gingrich and Romney were all losing popularity at a similar pace to the president. Only Ron Paul has bucked this trend.

On the other hand, if the Republicans go with Palin, Obama’s second term is virtually guaranteed. In addition to the fact that she is an archetype neocon, numerous interviews have highlighted the fact that Palin has little grasp of any policy issues and is a poor public speaker in a debate context. It was only a few months ago that she made another faux pas in claiming that North Korea was a U.S. ally.

Congressman Paul delivered a 20 minute speech at the event, with the opening gambit “every once in a while they ask about who started the Tea Party. I want to put that straight, I have never claimed to be the father of the Tea Party movement, but I do claim I am the father of the junior Senator in Kentucky!”

The Congressman is modest, however, as we have consistently highlighted, Ron Paul was the figurehead at the inception of the Tea Party ­movement, which consisted of a small but dedicated team of people who organized Boston Tea Party re-enactment protests in 50 different cities in late 2007, in support of Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign.

The libertarian themed protests became extremely popular, and continued throughout 2008 and into 2009, prompting thousands of people to engage in peaceful political protest.

Since that time the movement has been somewhat co-opted by the establishment GOP and figures such as Palin, who is as much a pro-war hawk as the neocons responsible for miring the US in two endless, devastating and extremely costly wars.

During his speech, Paul went on to speak of the unfolding crisis stemming from the Federal Reserve system’s manipulation of monetary policy and big government mismanagement.

“We allowed the wrong kind of people to take over our government, and we allowed too many people to go to Washington that did not ever take their oath of office seriously.” Paul commented.

­An analysis by Andrew Bossone

Libyan people protest to oust Moammar Gadhafi. (photo by Associated Press)

Moammar Gadhafi’s totalitarian control over the military and media has made Libya’s revolution the most violent so far in a region beset by uprisings.

The dictator has gone to extreme lengths in an attempt to beat down the protest movement, bringing in mercenaries to slaughter people on the streets and ordering aircraft and boats to fire on crowds of civilians.

“We managed to capture mercenaries and we discovered chemical weapons to use against protesters. Now we are afraid of the chemical materials we found. We don’t know how to store it or destroy it,” Mohamed al-Hasy, who defected from the military, told AOL News.

Gadhafi, of course, does not hold a monopoly on oppression among the now-shrinking list of the world’s dictators. But in his Machiavellian quest to be both feared and loved, he has wielded an unmatched amount of control over both the military and communications.

“In the whole western area, airplanes are used to bombard people from a low altitude,” al-Hasy said.

“They don’t use bombs but machine guns so they don’t leave any trace. I heard of 2,000 killed in Tripoli and 3,000 injured. Bodies and injured are hidden in stores, many of which are incinerated.”

An accurate accounting of the number of deaths ­and injured is nearly impossible because of a blackout on communications. Press estimates vary greatly, from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

The death toll might have been far worse if members of the Libyan military had not disobeyed orders. Jets, helicopters and warships have landed in Malta after soldiers refused to massacre fellow Libyans.

by Marianne Leigh

Natural News (NaturalNews)

Fluoride is getting a lot of bad press these days, and for good reason: it is a toxic molecule that wreaks extensive, often irreversible, havoc on the body. The thyroid is particularly affected by fluoride exposure because its  store of iodine is depleted.Iodine deficiency depresses the thyroid’s metabolic and immune functions, resulting in hypothyroidism and lowered immunity.

Fluoride and iodine are both halogens. Fluoride, the negative ion of the element fluorine, easily displaces iodine in the body because it is much lighter and therefore more reactive. In fact, the activity of any one of the halogens (Iodine 126.70, Bromine 79.90, Chlorine 35.45, Fluorine 18.99 are the most common) is inversely proportional to its atomic weight. In other words, one halogen can displace another one of a higher atomic weight but cannot displace one of lower weight.

Lack of iodine shuts down production of thyroxine, the thyroid prohormone that controls metabolism, and, in one way or another, impacts every aspect of health. The resulting hypothyroidism causes weight gain, cold intolerance, dry and prematurely aged skin, depression, constipation, hair loss, memory loss, irritability, increased cholesterol levels, heart disease and loss of libido. But the action of iodine in the thyroid is not limited to metabolism; it also has an important immune function.

Blood circulates through the thyroid once every 17 minutes in what has been called the ‘17 minute passage’. Secretion of iodine, a potent germ killer, into the blood stream as it is passing through the thyroid weakens invading organisms, allowing them to be more easily eradicated. If the thyroid is defi cient in iodine, this critical step in immunity will be reduced or eliminated.

Unlike iodine, which the body cannot store longterm, fl uoride is a problematic and persistent toxin. Its effects are systemic and only about half of what is ingested can be excreted; the rest is stored in bones and ­tissues, blocking access to other elements, like iodine.

Fluoride exposure can come from multiple obvious and not-so-obvious sources. In addition to dental hygiene products and drinking water, many breakfast cereals, juices from concentrate, soda and other processed foods contain alarming levels. Fluoride-containing pesticide use means that the environment is being fl ooded with fluoride by conventional agriculture (http://www.fluoridealert.org/fpest…).

Also, many antidepressants contain large amounts of fluoride and are widely prescribed, often for a lifetime of use.

Conventional medicine’s response to hypothyroidism typically ignores causes and prescribes synthetic thyroxine hormone in an attempt to balance out the health equation with another unnatural substance; this is nothing new. But hypothyroidism is a national epidemic, affecting roughly 10% of the female population in the US and in no way sparing men. It has created a stable, everexpanding market for these cash cow thyroid drugs (the leading thyroid drug was number 7 on JAMA’s list of ‘most commonly prescribed’ in 2006; one year later it was number 4).

One might assume then that fl uoride’s role in depressing thyroid function is a new discovery, that government fluoride programs simply lack this vital information. Yet research has been taking place since the 1930s, when fluoride was used to treat individuals with overactive thyroid. The relationship is well established, and old.

Which leads inevitably to a diffi cult question:

How could government allow fluoride addition to drinking water, approve fluoride-containing drugs and pesticides, and fail to test for fl uoride content in food when there is a known connection with serious thyroid complications?

Perhaps the cash value of the fact that millions of Americans take thyroid drugs, and most likely will take them the rest of their lives, can suggest an unbiased, honest answer.