RedStateEclectic

When Whacko Birds Attack: Rand Paul Lectures Congress

This is so awesome! For those of you just tuning in, Apple was called to testify before Congress, because Congress is offended that Apple didn't pay taxes they didn't owe.

Rand Paul seems to think that Congress is a bunch of holier-than-thou hypocrites:

 

 

Edited to add: Here's an editorial on the subject written by Paul.  If you want to know the history of Gorilla Glass, you'll have to click through.

 

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Rand Paul At Howard University

While Marco Rubio was getting all dolled up for dinner with Obama, Rand Paul was speaking at a traditional black college, Howard University.   I haven't seen the speech yet but I did appreciate the recap that the Daily Caller posted.  Here's a taste:

One student asked about voting rights, wondering how (Paul) could say he was in favor of voting rights when he supported voter ID laws.

“I think if you liken using a license to using a literacy test, you demean the horror of” what happened during the Jim Crow era, Paul responded.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/10/rand-paul-at-howard-reject-caricature-of-gop/#ixzz2Q7CFfG1a

(Some of my friends at Ron Paul Forums are having a spontaneous RAND PAC money bomb! We'd love to have you join us for $20.16!)

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Courtesy of FreedomWorks, here's the whole video: 

 

Is Lindsey Graham Going To Switch Parties?

*** Updated Below ***

Speaking of Rand Paul, Master Gamesman, have you seen the ads that RandPAC is running?  This piece on Business Insider sums up the politics,  pointing out that while Paul is targeting Democrats who disagree with him on foreign spending, it's pretty unusual for sitting Senators to target each other directly and so harshly.  Here's one example:

 

Now my take on all this?  First, that's an odd race for Paul to spend money on, because Democrat Manchin is a moderate who is currently leading the race by quite a bit.  But I have a hunch that foreign policy spending could be a popular discussion in moderate circles, so watching the polls to see if these ads have any effect in the race will be interesting.  If this message gains traction, look for other politicians to adopt it.

What else made this ad buy especially interesting is Lindsey Graham's  reaction: in one of those moves that would cause wailing and hostility from the GOP if a Paul had dared such a thing, he went way over a line. He joined the Democrat Manchin on a campaign conference call to support the big spending colleague.

Did you get that? He is campaigning for a Democrat. Against a Republican. I suppose he knows that the media and the party won't question this, it's obviously putting policy over politics, and is for the public good. Right?

OK, enough snark. Next question: Do you know who Senator Tom Davis is?  The force is strong in this one, and speculation is that he might be preparing a primary run against Graham in 2014.  It certainly isn't hard to imagine that Graham could leave the GOP and join the Democrats rather than face an actual fiscal conservative in a primary election. 

And while I wouldn't want to predict a winner in that race, I would point out that Jim DeMint is retiring in 2016, so even if we can't oust Graham in 2014, Davis certainly has a chance at 2016.

Hope lives!

 ***Update***

Heh! Came back home, and saw that Rand Paul has now apparently noticed Graham's shenanigans. According to Politico:

“I don’t see myself campaigning against a Republican in a general election ever, that’s why I think it’s extraordinary that Graham is supporting a Democrat in a general election,” Paul told POLITICO. “That’s fairly extraordinary to do that.”

Never fear! The Democrat quickly rushed to Graham's defense:

(Manchin) accused Paul of a “callous” act that put “politics over your country.” Manchin also accused Paul of acting as a partisan while portraying himself as a bipartisan rabble-rouser. Manchin said Paul was “putting more gasoline” on the partisan fires in Washington. “He showed me his true colors, and it’s a shame,” Manchin told POLITICO. “That’s not how we’re going to move this country forward with that type of an attitude and mentality.”

Silly me. I didn't realize that Republicans were supposed to be bipartisan in the general election. Gee, I wonder which side of this argument the Republican in the race will come down on?  

Fahrenheit 451: Play the Man, Master Ridley

A very good speech by Rand Paul. My only wonder is how he manages to speak it from within a party that no longer supports liberty.

Just outside my window sits a Mexican petunia. At times, a hummingbird zips in and drinks from the purple flowers. Those mornings when fortune provides this brief but wonderful immersion, it's gratifying beyond words.

And so it is that homilies of liberty, spoken longingly from any direction, left or right, are welcome respites from the reality which has befallen us by our own hand.

We are not the first to do this, as pointed out by Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who wrote,

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Gibbon provides us a short list which marks a culture in the throws of decay:

• Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth
• Obsession with sex and perversions of sex
• Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original
• Widening disparity between very rich and very poor
• Increased demand to live off the state.

A hollowed-out remnant of personal dignity and charity, it seems we have put ourselves on the short path to longsuffering.

***UPDATE 8/23***

By sheer coincidence, this morning’s Mises Daily article, Socialism and Decivilization, by Jesus Huerta de Soto, discusses the underlying economic cause for Rome’s civil decline:

The obvious course of action was to leave the Italian countryside and move to the city, to live off the Roman welfare state, the cost of which could not be borne by the public treasury, and could only be covered by reducing the precious-metal content in the currency (that is, inflation). The outcome was inescapable: an uncontrolled drop in the purchasing power of money, i.e., an upward revolution in prices, to which the authorities responded by decreeing that prices were to remain fixed at their prior levels and imposing extremely harsh sentences on offenders. The establishment of these price ceilings led to widespread shortages (since at the low prices set, it was no longer profitable to produce and seek creative solutions to the problem of scarcity, while at the same time consumption and waste were still being artificially encouraged). Cities gradually began to run out of provisions, and the population began to leave and return to the countryside, to live in much poorer conditions in an autarchy, at mere subsistence level, a regime that laid the foundation for what would later be feudalism.

He ends it on an optimistic note:

… in contrast with the culture of subsidies, irresponsibility, the lack of morals, and dependence on the state for everything, there is, surging from the ashes among many young people (and also among some of us who are no longer so young) the culture of entrepreneurial freedom, of creativity and risk taking, of behavior based on moral principles, and, in short, of maturity and responsibility (as opposed to the infantilism our authorities and politicians would restrict us to in order to make us increasingly servile and dependent). To me it is clear who has the best intellectual and moral weapons, and hence, who holds the future. That is why I am an optimist.

 

A Paul by Any Other Name…

The dark side is soooo tempting

Rand Paul: Critiquing the Sausage-Makers

”Republicans have been correct in criticizing the president for trying to pick the winners and losers in energy production. Yet now, a majority of republicans are poised to vote for their own set of taxpayer-subsidized loans to the export-import bank. … The American people know hypocrisy when they see it. The American people know corporate welfare when they see it.”

Rand Paul: Polite Policy Questions

Notice how it is not the head of the department that is at fault, but the collective “we” and their processes which occur beneath him. They, who or whatever ‘they’ are, provide cover for all that is wrong. The singular in politics exists for promotion only.

I am compelled to quote Tolstoy once again:

“From the day when the first members of councils placed exterior authority higher than interior, that is to say, recognized the decisions of men united in councils as more important and more sacred than reason and conscience; on that day began lies that caused the loss of millions of human beings and which continue their unhappy work to the present day.”

Rand Paul at CPAC

This didn’t sound like a teaching speech:

More like a campaign speech. Has anyone else noticed any similarity between his voice and Bill Clinton’s?

What About This? Rand Paul On The Romney Ticket

All week long, I've been quietly noticing a change in tone across the media waves and blogosphere. Suddenly, the bloggers aren't all calling Ron Paul nuts. The media is telling us that he is important in the race. Sarah Palin even mentioned that the party needs to embrace his support and listen to what he is saying, and she didn't get ostracized for it. 

Also, the debates have been a little odd.  Romney is the only candidate that Ron hasn't gone after.  Ron was also the first to defend Romney against the Gingrich/Perry attacks on capitalism.

So, during a blog-n-brunch this morning, DH and I happened to read  Smitty's piece, and an idea formed - one that made my eggs flip one more time.   What if Rand Paul is on Romney's short list of vice presidential picks?

As always, here's the thing: Who can bring more voters? 

Rand Paul is a staunch pro-life Christian conservative, with one amazingly beautful wife and several adorable kids. He can bring in Social Conservatives who might otherwise shy away from Romney's Mormon faith.

Of course, he's also the heir apparent to almost the entire libertarian wing of the GOP, which happens to be the only wing that's actually growing at the moment. (It also raises a whole lot of money.) And while part of that growth is in the youth who don't tend to vote as often as we would like, another sector they're capturing is the independents, and those are  the votes that the GOP desperately (and I do mean desperately) needs to capture if they stand any chance at all in ousting Obama. 

But here's the kicker: Rand Paul is also a legitimate TEA Party conservative. And not the pathetic GOP inflitrated, Gingrich supporting Judson "I want to make a million" Phillips type of TEA Partier, either. Nope, Rand brings the people who actually are sick to death of the spending and actually do want less government, not just more control of big government. 

So I ask again - who can bring more voters? Who else can bring the unification ticket to fruition?

I hear the names Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio bounced around, and while it's true they could bring some female / Hispanic voters in, as well as the TEA Party, are there enough of them to swing the election?  

Of course, there's a down side. It's entirely possible that such a move, if it were to happen, could actually be the GOP's way of getting pesky Rand Paul out of the Senate, opening the door for a more "agreeable" Senator to fill the chair. 

But we know that Ron Paul is a historian, and as such we can assume he knows that the Vice President is also the President of the Senate.  If memory serves me, up until Spiro Agnew left the Vice President had an office in the Senate and spent a good deal of his time actually driving the legislation that the executive branch was pushing for.  Sarah Palin even mentioned that she wanted to return to that model if she was elected to that office.  Is it possible that Romney would let Paul assume that role, which would be especially fulfilling if the GOP regains the Senate majority?

Practically speaking though, while I find it more than just a little amusing that they might be forced into it, would the same GOP that fought hard to keep Rand Paul out of the senate would, in less than two years, suddenly hand him the second highest position of power in the land?  It seems like an awfully risky move for a party that's not known for adapting well to change. 

There's certainly more than a few Ron Paul suporters who would never vote for Romney, period. But to be perfectly honest, I'm suddenly not sure that I'm among them.  After all, the Bush/Rockefeller wing of the party was swept in on Reagan's coattails. Would it really be so wrong for us to return the favor? 

 

Cain’s Out; Rand’s an Extremist; And More

In the last couple of hours:

• Herman Cain “suspended” his presidential campaign (which, in practice, means that he’s done).
• Sen. Rand Paul has been referred to at National Review as a “libertarian extremist”—the venue and the description both point to just how tough it’s going to be for libertarian-leaning Republicans to gain a foothold in the GOP unless something drastic happens.
• The Nebraska Republican Party took no formal action on this, but a party official was heard to say that, not only is it the party’s responsibility to elect Republicans (I’ll agree with that—when they’re competing with Democrats and other parties’ candidates—it is the job of any party to support their candidates), but that it’s “the Party’s” responsibility to predetermine who the strongest candidates are (in most cases, they will be Republicans), and to endorse candidates—even in the primaries against other Republicans. 
• This is a battle that some of us here in Nebraska have been fighting for several years.  We believe that it is the Party’s role to provide help to its nominees; not to determine who the nominees are.  We have objected on several occasions to both automatic endorsements for Republican incumbents (congressional and state legislature, as well as a few more local offices), as well as a litmus test enacted at the previous State Central Committee meeting which would deny help to any incumbent Republican incumbent legislators—even in a general election against a Democrat—who had failed to support a particular piece of legislation which would return Nebraska’s Electoral College voting to winner-take-all. 
• It appears now that the next move will be for the 100 or so Party overlords to tell half of the voters in Nebraska (roughly 550,000) who should be nominee of the Party.  If smoking weren’t so politically incorrect, one might be tempted to think that we were returning to the days of smoke-filled rooms for choosing our candidates…