Intimidating Ron Paul never worked nor will it work on his supporters.  Eddie Dillard voted and then decided to go home, put on his Ron Paul T-Shirt, pull his Ron Paul sign from his front yard, and go back to show some support for Paul.  Little did he know it was a scheduled stop for Newt & the Gang.  Gingrich's security immediately tried to intimidate Dillard but he held his ground, even after stomping on his bare foot (he was wearing flip-flops)...

PHOTO BEFORE GINGRICH ARRIVES:

<cite class="DL-source"> Getty Images 9 hours ago</cite>

Eddie Dillard (R) holds a Ron Paul sign and Sue Janssen (R) holds a Newt Gingrich sign before Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich visits a voting precinct at the First Baptist Church of Windermere January 31, 2012 in Orlando, Florida.

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Ron Paul Campaign Calls on Newt Gingrich to Apologize for His Staff Assault on Ron Paul Supporter

"They say the culture of an organization is a reflection of its top executive and today’s deplorable behavior against Ron Paul supporter Eddie Dillard in Florida reflects very poorly on Congressman Gingrich"

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‘Everyone step on his toes!’ Gingrich security harasses Ron Paul supporter

Dillard, a 29-year-old Ron Paul supporter from this suburb near Orlando, arrived to vote at his precinct at Winderemere Baptist Church early Tuesday morning. Pulling into the parking lot, Dillard noticed a man outside the polling place with a Gingrich sign. He decided to run home, slip into his "Ron Paul Rocks America" T-shirt, grab a "Ron Paul 2012" sign from his garage, and return to give his candidate some representation outside the precinct after he cast his vote.

Dillard found a quiet spot along a sidewalk lined with tiny American flags and held up his sign. Little did he know, Newt Gingrich had chosen that very spot to make his first Primary Day campaign stop.

When Gingrich's bus pulled up, Dillard stood silently holding his sign and watched the news-media horde swamp the candidate. Gingrich stepped down from the bus and made a beeline for Dillard. He stopped in front of Dillard and his sign and parked himself for a round of handshaking and pictures with voters. The placement couldn't have been worse. There was Gingrich, standing with his wife Callista at their first event of the day, and a giant Ron Paul sign floated inches from their crowns.

Noticing the awkward optics, Gingrich aides and security personnel swarmed Dillard, trying to intimidate him into moving. One of Gingrich's security agents stepped in front of him. When Dillard didn't budge, the agent lifted his heeled shoe over Dillard's bare foot and dug the back of it into his skin, twisting it side-to-side like he was stomping out a cigarette. Shocked, Dillard kept his ground and took a picture of the agent with his phone, which was quickly knocked out of his hand. Dillard slipped off his flip-flop to pick up the phone with his foot, and a Gingrich supporter kicked the sandal away.

"Don't kick me!" Dillard said to the man who knocked away his sandal. More members of Gingrich's security retinue approached, shoving their shoulders and chests in front of him.

"Just block him!" a Gingrich campaign aide said. "Everyone step on his toes!"

Gingrich supporters handed a "Newt 2012" yard sign up to the front to put in front of Dillard's Paul sign. The two signs, zipping back and forth inches from Gingrich's head, circled each other in the air like fighter jets in a dogfight.

When the candidate finished taking pictures with voters, furious Gingrich aides grilled Dillard.

"If we did this to you, you guys would be furious," said an aide before stomping back toward the bus. "They have no class. No class."

As Gingrich pulled away, Dillard looked down at his foot. With the adrenaline pumping, he hadn't noticed the pain, but now it was starting to sink in. A bruise was forming, and there was a cut mark where the security agent had dug in his heel.

"That was really something," Dillard said afterward. "My heart's racing. Not what I expected to happen today."

The campaign is gaining momentum and the message is becoming crystal clear... "Freedom is Popular!"

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PayPal co-founders fund pro-Paul Super PAC

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Co-founders of online U.S. payment service PayPal, now owned by eBay Inc, donated to the Super PAC funding group supporting Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, the group Endorse Liberty disclosed on Tuesday.

 

Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) speaks to supporters at an event in Freeport, Maine January 28, 2012.

Credit: Reuters/Joel Page

PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek and Scott Banister, an early adviser and board member, put their support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, alongside Internet advertising veteran Stephen Oskoui and entrepreneur Jeffrey Harmon, who founded Endorse Liberty in November.

Texas congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian, has been an unconventional candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, advocating an isolationist brand of foreign policy and a $1 trillion cut in the U.S. government's budget.

"Too often in this country we learn things the hard way ... With its unsustainable deficits, government spending is heading down the same path. Men and women who want freedom and growth should take action. A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul," Thiel said in a statement.

Thiel, a libertarian activist whose $1.5 billion in wealth ranked him 833 on the Forbes top billionaires list last year, became the first outside investor in social networking service Facebook in 2004.

Releasing the donor list before officially filing with the Federal Election Commission, Endorse Liberty founders said they raised $3.9 million to support Paul, who failed to win any of the first three state-by-state Republican nominating contests.

Republicans are voting in the Florida primary on Tuesday. Paul trails frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in most polls in the state, but he is seen as having a better chance in Nevada, which votes next.

Endorse Liberty founders have so far reported spending about $3.3 million promoting Paul by setting up two YouTube channels, constantly buying ads from Google and Facebook and StumbleUpon and building up a presence on the Web.

PayPal began as an independent company, founded in the late 1990s by technology entrepreneurs, including venture capital investors Thiel and Nosek. The business battled with eBay for supremacy in the emerging online payments market. But soon after it went public in 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.

Endorse Liberty also received donations from James O'Neill and Jonathan Cain, who now run the Thiel Foundation that seeks to "defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions: political, personal, and economic," according to its website.

(Editing by Paul Simao)

SOURCES,

EXIT POLLS 5 PM ET:

46% ROMNEY

32% GINGRICH

12% SANTORUM

7% PAUL...(Didn't campaign in FL as winner takes ALL the Delegates...)

DEVELOPING...
VOTING IN PANHANDLE CLOSES 8 PM ET...

 Down memory lane. . .

PhotoBlog: Occupy Wall Street tries to seize church lot for new camp
Dec 17, 2011

"NEW YORK, NY --  A festive and celebratory mood quickly turned tense and angry Saturday as New York police arrested about 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters at a church-owned lot demonstrators had hoped to use as a camp site.

A dozen or so protesters climbed a wooden ladder into the fenced lot at Duarte Square, according to J.A. Myerson, a writer with Truthout...

But their potential new landlord at Duarte Square, Trinity Church, has [already] voiced strong opposition, and the move by Occupy is seen by some as applying strong pressure to them to cave in and let the protesters install themselves."

"...Trinity Church has provided the protesters with meeting rooms and use of their neighborhood center but is opposed to having them stay at the Duarte Square lot. An attempt to move in there on Nov. 15 was rejected by the church.

“In all good conscience and faith, we strongly believe to do so would be wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious,” its rector, The Rev. Dr. James H. Cooper, said in a statement dated Dec. 9 and posted to the church website. ""

 As Occupy D.D. movement grows, so does tension ...
Dec 17, 2011

"...the goodwill has begun to evaporate as *protests have become more contentious and some local leaders have begun turning on them."

"...  a key provision that pro-life protesters had feared, is coming to reality under the new health-care plan..."

Obama Administration Approves Mandated Contraception Coverage

WASHINGTON — "Health-insurance plans must provide birth control and surgical sterilization as “preventive care” for women, with no co-pays, according to a directive issued Monday by the Department of Health and Human Services..."

"...The HHS guidelines were slated to be released on Aug. 1, and religious organizations and pro-life groups had already taken note of troubling signs that the federal government would ignore their moral concerns and approve new directives that might force Catholic institutions to close their doors or end medical benefits for their employees, as some agencies have done..."

So much for being able to keep your current insurance ...   Just another example of one of those sneaky ol' cats and dogs that snuck into the law that just never seemed to get "scrubbed." 

Allen West at a Palm Beach GOP fundraiser:

"This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America. Yeah, I said hell. Read more

How did the MSM let this one slip out???  Huge rally, check out this awesome photo.  Don't want to infringe, so here is the link, be sure to click to enlarge it, and just look at the enthusiasm!!  It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings....He IS surging!

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/146079654/new-republic-why-old-people-could-save-newt

Scribe

Doug Ross spotted the relevant excerpt of Schweizer’s book (h/t Ben Domenech’s Transom):

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy… After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends…

…But an examination of grants and guaranteed loans offered by just one stimulus program run by the Department of Energy, for alternative-energy projects, is stunning. The so-called 1705 Loan Guarantee Program and the 1603 Grant Program channeled billions of dollars to all sorts of energy companies…

…In the 1705 government-backed-loan program [alone], for example, $16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. The grant and guaranteed-loan recipients were early backers of Obama before he ran for president, people who continued to give to his campaigns and exclusively to the Democratic Party in the years leading up to 2008. Their political largesse is probably the best investment they ever made in alternative energy. It brought them returns many times over.

…The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears “arbitrary” and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials “did not always record the results of analysis” of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, “lacks performance measures.” No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.” The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, … has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

…These programs might be the greatest—and most expensive—example of crony capitalism in American history. Tens of billions of dollars went to firms controlled or owned by fundraisers, bundlers, and political allies, many of whom—surprise!—are now raising money for Obama again.