Awesome Ron.(The Talk of the Town)

The president of the Columbia College Libertarians, Mathieu Gordon, Class of 2008, says that he has watched dozens of video clips featuring the antiwar Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Gordon has so deeply absorbed Paul's message of non-intervention that he has decided not to contribute to Paul's campaign. "You don't really have the right to get involved in another country's politics," Gordon, who is British, said at a club meeting last week, after Paul's supporters raised four million dollars in a single day, surpassing Mitt Romney's record. "I suppose I should really support Hillary Clinton, because she'll impose loads of taxes and all the businesses will come to London."

It was fall break, and there were six libertarians in attendance, down from the usual ten. All were men, and all had seen the movie "V for Vendetta," in which the British holiday Guy Fawkes Day figures prominently. Fawkes, a Catholic rebel who tried to assassinate King James I in 1605, has become an unlikely inspiration for Ron Paul fans, who used the recent anniversary of Fawkes's failed attempt at terrorism to stage their one-day fund-raising blitz--a "money bomb," according to the organizers' Web site, ThisNovember5th.com. "It gets quite confusing," Gordon said. "On a date that's meant to be anti the guy who's anti-Parliament, the idea here is to be giving money to someone who's anti-Parliament."

"The important part is that it worked," Russell Whitaker, a junior and a biochemistry major, said. Whitaker was wearing a black "Ron Paul Revolution" sweatshirt, and showed off his copy of Paul's book "Freedom Under Siege: the U.S. Constitution after 200-plus Years," which was signed by Paul in 1988 ("back when he had black hair") and again last month, at a party on West Twenty-ninth Street. On another night, the libertarians--who fancy themselves a kind of informal debating society--might have been discussing the gold standard and the Federal Reserve, or the differences between the Chicago and the Austrian schools of economics, but the primary topic of this meeting was, as a physics grad ...