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We're observing Slog silence from now until 11 a.m. while we have an editorial meeting, but look—we made an entire paper's worth of stuff for you! Here's what Rudy Bixby has to say.

For the past two years, no one has been more influential to my life and values than Dr. Ron Paul. As both a gynecologist and in his 30 years as a legislator, Dr. Paul has evinced integrity on a level that I never knew existed on our planet. He has enhanced my perspective on life and reinvigorated how I view the world forever. There are those who say that just because Dr. Paul didn't win any one of the states in the Republican primary, he should not be the Republican candidate. To those people I say that this is not a popularity contest. This is about integrity, and who has the best ideas for America going forward.

My compatriots in the Ron Paul Revolution have many theories about why Dr. Paul was unable to achieve more than roughly 10 percent of the electorate at the height of his popularity. Many of those theories involve 9/11, fluoride, and chemtrails. I have a far simpler theory: The alternative media failed to get excited about Dr. Paul, and so theretofore the alternative audience failed to listen to Dr. Paul's message. Part of that blame falls to Dr. Paul, of course. His media outreach could have been more piquant.

But a fair share of that fault belongs to the alternative media, which fails to engage with its readers on any interface level that approaches meaningfulness. I'm going to take as my example here the latest issue of The Stranger, which "rules the roost" insofar as the alternative media in Seattle goes.

There is simply nothing here that engages. We have a piece by CHARLES MUDEDE in which he spends a day at the new Target store downtown. While I enjoy Mudede's writing on a cute, basic level—his ideas remind me of some concepts I floated in my high-school-age manifesto, Toward a More Empirical Planet: Advances Toward Fairness in Post-Marxist America—he's pretty obviously just playing at being a pet contrarian for the consumer state here, a clever little voice of negativism that's allowed to honk once or twice before dissipating into irrelevance. Likewise to LARRY MIZELL JR.'s story about Macklemore's new pro-marriage-equality song. I'm not a rap aficionado myself—I enjoy a classic Rage Against the Machine track every now and again, but that's as close as I come to gangbanging—but this crass commercialism is disheartening. We're never going to have true equality until we achieve true economic fairness, as Dr. Paul dictates.

The rest of this is just consumerist drivel, and weirdly pizza-themed to boot. DAVID SCHMADER breathlessly reviews a new pizza restaurant, and new music editor EMILY NOKES teams with KELLY O to talk about some sort of a pizza-and-music festival. Is there any wonder why the printed word is dying? Perhaps if The Stranger prevaricated upon itself to publish a broadsheet or two on issues that matter—ending the Fed, say, or returning to the sanity of the gold standard—the people would listen. And then Dr. Paul's ideas would fertilize the fetid soil of the brains of alternative Seattle everywhere. As it is, we have an uphill battle, but I'm convinced that Dr. Paul can still grab the Republican throne from that big phony and his drooling band of morons. Onward, to Tampa!