“From Unlikely To Long-Shot”: Rand Paul Just Sacrificed His Presidential Campaign For His Libertarian Principles
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had what will probably be the defining moment of his presidential campaign on Sunday night. It could conceivably help him, but at a high political cost. It could also end his presidential hopes.
The junior senator from Kentucky infuriated his Republican colleagues by blocking a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would curtail a controversial National Security Agency bulk phone-data collection program and reauthorize three other surveillance programs that expired at midnight. The NSA had stopped collecting telephone metadata Sunday afternoon, when it became clear no deal would be finalized in time. It won’t be able to resume until the Senate acts, the House approves any changes, and President Obama signs the bill.
In Rand Paul’s telling, and that of the red-shirted “Stand With Rand” supporters who filled the Senate gallery on Sunday evening, Paul stuck a shiv in the government surveillance state, at least for a few days. “The Patriot Act will expire — it will expire tonight,” Paul said on his way out of the Senate chamber Sunday night. “The point I wanted to make is that we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution.”
Paul had some other help, if inadvertent. Senate Republicans, notably Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), had wanted to extend the USA Patriot Act as is. They fell short. Then, after a week’s recess, when it became clear the votes just weren’t there for the Patriot Act renewal, McConnell reluctantly agreed to put the “flawed” USA Freedom Act up for a last-minute vote on Sunday, and the Senate agreed, 77 to 17. The bill had passed the House on May 13, 338-88, and Obama supports it.
Senate GOP hawks say the Freedom Act puts too many constraints on the NSA; Paul and some other civil libertarians say it still goes too far. But his usual civil-liberty allies in the Senate signaled their comfort with the House bill, leaving Rand Paul the lone holdout. In the Senate, that’s often enough to delay a bill, and Paul did so on Sunday.
Whether or not it was his prime motivation, as Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggest, Paul will earn a lot of money for his presidential campaign. But his chances of becoming the 2016 Republican nominee just went from unlikely to long-shot.
Shutting down American espionage and surveillance capabilities, even for a few days, is too off-brand for the GOP — especially at the moment.
Paul is “a niche candidate of a shrinking niche, because events are not playing out the way he anticipated two years ago when he began running for president,” George Will said on Fox News Sunday. “The world looks much more dangerous than it did,” and “literally cashing in” on his “conscientiousness as a libertarian” really “muddies the waters” of his intentions.
In a crowded Republican presidential field, Rand Paul is betting he can monopolize the libertarian caucus. It’s a gamble. Forcing expiration of the NSA provisions for a couple of days was a small victory on its own. But “his larger political victory was that he took ownership of Patriot Act opposition,” said David Weigel at Bloomberg Politics, “angering Republican colleagues whom he is happy to anger.”
Weigel names McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), but Paul also angered McConnell, who has endorsed him for president, and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who vowed on Sunday that “there won’t be any negotiations with Rand Paul from this point forward.” Paul didn’t attend the GOP caucus meeting before Sunday’s session, and Republicans walked out on him en masse when he started speaking.
The big question for Paul is whether there are enough civil libertarians in the Republican Party, and if so, whether they will vote in the primary. Plenty voted for his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), but it wasn’t enough.
“People here in town think I’m making a huge mistake,” Rand Paul said Sunday evening. “Some of them I think secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.”
In other words, Rand Paul sounds like a lot of Democrats after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That wasn’t a good place to be, politically.
Brit Hume at Fox News hammered the same point on Sunday. Paul “seems confused about which party he’s running in,” he said. “There’s a segment of the Republican electorate which shares his somewhat paranoid views of things, and he’ll have their support, but that’s not a nominating set.”
Rand Paul seems to know the risks, and he seems content to go down swinging. And if he does stake his political future on curtailing government spying and lose, unlike other GOP presidential contenders, he probably shouldn’t expect a soft landing at Fox News.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, June 1, 2015
“Despicable She”: Coulter Hates ‘The Browning Of America’
When it comes to Ann Coulter—the conservative blonde avenger, the loud-mouthed provocateur, the human hot-button of mass-media notoriety who is forever tossing turds into liberals’ punch bowls—people always want to know: Is she for real?
Even the title of her latest book, ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, is guaranteed to raise many folks’ blood pressure and strain their credulity.
Does Coulter actually believe the tendentious claim in that title or other incendiary things she has said in the past—for example, that the 9/11 widows are greedy, fame-obsessed “witches” and “harpies”; that the United States should invade Muslim countries, “kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity”; that her Christian co-religionists are “perfected Jews”; that she only wishes that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh had targeted The New York Times instead?
Or is she merely engaging in perverse, albeit attention-getting, performance art?
Apparently the answer is: a bit of both.
“I don’t know why liberals find this idea about me comfortable,” Coulter tells me over dinner, “but I just had lunch with a law school friend of mine, and I had forgotten—and he reminded me—that at law school I wore mink coats and took up smoking just to annoy liberals, so apparently I’d been like this for awhile. He said, ‘You’re exactly like you were in law school.’
“But I have summer-camp friends—who, when they see people say ‘this is just an act, she doesn’t really believe it’—they would write indignant letters and say, ‘No. She would march up to me on the hiking trail and explain that Nixon was being lied about.’ ”
We are sitting near the kitchen in a quiet Italian restaurant, a favorite haunt in the Upper East Side neighborhood in which she keeps an apartment; her other two homes are in Beverly Hills, California, and a wealthy enclave of Florida (unnamed here, at Coulter’s request, so as not to encourage stalkers), where she established official residence years ago to avoid state income taxes.
She has done very well for herself; she gets seven-figure book advances, and while her lecture fees are not in the Hillary Clinton range, Coulter has little cause for complaint.
She has arrived for dinner with the panache of a prom queen, making a grand entrance, graciously accepting the elaborate greeting of the maître d’ and stopping by a front table to trade kisses with talk radio host Mark Simone and Fox Business Network personality Charlie Gasparino on the way to her interview with The Daily Beast.
She is, as usual, dressed against type—that is, if one thinks her type is “matronly Republican Women’s Club activist from New Canaan,” Coulter’s gilded, suburban Connecticut hometown.
Instead, she wears tight, seemingly painted-on jeans, a hint of midriff showing beneath her blouse; at 53, she still rocks that “Vixen of the Right” thing that once prompted Playboy to ask her to take it all off. In a rare display of caution, she declined.
“I’m fanatical,” Coulter confides—describing not her ideology but her work habits. “I have no life. No friends. No family. No vacations. Nobody has seen me.”
She’s kidding, of course—Coulter has plenty of friends (including those, like Bill Maher, who find some of her political views objectionable; I’ve written about and occasionally socialized with her for years.) “I did take a break to watch Forensic Files,” she adds, mentioning the true-crime television series for which she admits an obsession.
Coulter has been a virtual shut-in, staring at her laptop, writing and Googling, Googling and writing, since the height of Florida’s hurricane season. The occasion for her reemergence in Manhattan—and her ramped-up appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel program—is the publication of her 11th book (the previous 10 have made the New York Times best-seller list), an often-inflammatory, usually clever, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny screed against immigration, illegal and otherwise.
Coulter’s near-life-size portrait gazes unsmilingly from the book jacket of ¡Adios America!—looking very much like a hard-eyed, flaxen-haired border guard getting ready to send an unfortunate family of refugees back to wherever they came from.
“In order to change this country to one more favorable to crazy liberal policies, Democrats passed—and Republicans were hoodwinked into passing—this crazy 1965 immigration law that has changed the country in shocking and dramatic ways,” Coulter says, explaining her book’s premise and referring to legislation—sponsored by the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy—that abolished long-implemented preferences for immigrants from Northern and Western Europe over Africans, Asians and other third-world natives.
“This has been our law for 50 years now, and I blame the Republicans for idiotically continuing it,” she continues. “The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 [creating an easier path to citizenship for foreigners who illegally entered and settled in the United States] was a mistake. As for these idiot Tea Partiers or whichever conservatives are idol-worshipping Ronald Reagan, he was great for his time, but it was a different world. I don’t think he’s going down as the greatest president when he signed an amnesty law.”
Coulter—whose own ancestors arrived here from the Netherlands, England, Ireland, and Germany starting in the 17th century, she says—argues that teeming hordes of new immigrants, especially from Mexico, vote overwhelmingly Democratic, so current immigration policy is really “an evil-genius plan to change the country. That’s what the Democrats get out of it. Obama never could have been elected in this country but for Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act. Never, never, ever, ever!”
Coulter’s politically quixotic prescription: a 10-year moratorium on all legal immigration; a complete dismantling of the immigration bureaucracy, not only government agencies and sympathetic elected officials but also outside advocacy groups; the erection of an impassable fence along the entire U.S.-Mexican border (in her book, she praises the Communist East Germans for effectively, sometimes lethally, preventing their citizens from breaching the Berlin Wall); and a return to pre-1965 policies that give preference to highly educated, usually white Europeans.
“I wouldn’t care if they were white or not; I’m talking about peasants who come from backward cultures,” she says, although she expresses alarm at predictions that by 2050 Caucasians in this country will be a minority. “There are white people from backward cultures. They just don’t happen to come from a country contiguous to the United States. It’s backward cultures that are providing cheap labor and Democratic votes.” (Coulter, however, is unfailingly friendly to our waiter, who identifies himself as “Luis,” an immigrant from Ecuador who came here 10 years ago and is working his way toward U.S. citizenship.)
Coulter argues that U.S. immigration policies were demonstrably better a hundred years ago. “There was no mollycoddling of immigrants back then. With the Irish and the Italians, and even the Germans—especially the Germans—we were allowed to boss them around,” she says. “We could say, ‘No. No. You can’t do this anymore. You are an American now. Knock it off!’ The only problem with the fact that they [recent immigrants] are brown—well, you’re saying they’re brown, I’m saying they’re peasants—is that they’re piggy-backing on the black experience, and saying ‘That’s racist’ if you tell them to do things our way, and ‘You can just assimilate to us,’ not the other way around.
“Can you imagine the Irish or Italians or Germans saying that to our country back at the turn of the century? ‘No! Fuck you! You came to our country. Learn our ways!’”
Using language that many doubtless will find hair-raising if not downright offensive, Coulter speaks of the “browning of America”—a term she says she adopted as a negative after seeing it bandied favorably on MSNBC—and how the country is being ruined by an influx from Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, Vietnam, Nigeria, and other benighted locales.
“In Nigeria, everyone is a criminal,” Coulter claims. “But we take more immigrants from Nigeria than we do from Britain. Don’t react casually to that! That’s madness. The British are just going to other countries. And a lot of these countries, like Spain, are just shitholes now. Young, smart people are emigrating to Germany and they won’t be collecting Social Security immediately. Perhaps we should consider them rather than a Nigerian terrorist.”
Coulter adds that among the victims of Latino immigration, especially, are African Americans. “Hispanic groups will move into neighborhoods and say, ‘We don’t want any blacks here,’ and start physically attacking blacks,” she says. “It’s kind of wild. In most race relations, it’s never blacks who are victims of terror, it’s whites. Now blacks are being terrorized.”
So, Ann Coulter is the voice of African Americans now?
“I know they’re never going to adopt me, so you don’t have to say it in that sarcastic way,” she parries. “If they still hate me, I don’t care. They’re being totally screwed by this whole diversity and integration imperative, and they really are part of America. They are so important culturally in America—I mean the humor, the actors…they have the comedians and the music. I love Dave Chapelle, and my close personal friend Sherrod Small. I love Eddie Murphy, although he doesn’t do anything anymore. And Chris Rock.”
In ¡Adios, America! and over dinner, Coulter expands on her belief that when new arrivals from foreign climes are not busying themselves with “browning” the country, collecting welfare payments and swarming to the polls to vote Democrats into office, they are committing Medicare fraud, child rape, gang rape, honor killings and a host of other un-American activities.
She blames politically correct U.S. government census-taking and crime statistic policies—and the media establishment’s reluctance to identify the countries of origin of the alleged perpetrators—on the fact that she doesn’t have generally accepted stats to back up her assertions, merely horrific anecdotes and back-of-the-envelope guesses.
In her assertions about the allegedly low average intelligence of various “undesirable” immigrant groups, she relies on the studies of Jason Richwine, whose work on IQ and immigration was too controversial even for the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, which dismissed him from his staff job there after his Harvard doctoral dissertation came to light.
Meanwhile, Coulter blasts the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls—with the exception of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker—as “bozos” and “morons,” and heaps special contempt on Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (whom she accuses of favoring amnesty), and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who lately pays lip service to tough policies, Coulter says, “but I don’t trust him.”
Coulter’s beau ideal is a two-time presidential candidate who insists he isn’t running this time around: 2012 Republican standard-bearer Mitt Romney.
He is the only politician whose immigration policies—including his much-derided notion from the 2012 campaign that illegal residents should be incentivized to “self-deport”—are closely aligned with Coulter’s, and she hopes that GOP primary voters will ultimately beg him to get into the 2016 race.
Calling herself a “one-issue” voter, Coulter excuses Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion rights (from pro-choice to pro-life) because “he flipped on it our way” and when he was pro-choice, it was 1994 and “he was trying to take out Teddy Kennedy” in the Massachusetts Senate race.
“Look,” Coulter tells me, “if he had to be Adolf Hitler but managed to take out Teddy, I would salute him to end that menace.”
By: Lloyd Grove, The Daily Beast, May 26, 2015
“Hillary Clinton Has Already Crushed Republicans On Immigration”: It’s Heads She Wins And Tails They Lose, Regardless Of What They Do
You can question Hillary Clinton’s political scruples. But don’t doubt her political smarts.
There is no better proof of either quality than her U-turn decision last week to go all out in embracing amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Clinton’s gambit is a major flip-flop — one that will put Republicans in a bind that they’ll have a hard time extricating themselves from. It’s heads she wins and tails they lose, regardless of what they do.
Clinton stunned everyone — even Latino activists — when she boldly called for a “path to full and equal citizenship” for all of the roughly 12 million illegal immigrants in the country. Speaking at a gathering of handpicked young immigrants in a high school in Nevada, a Latino-heavy swing state, she rejected the notion of a mere path to legalization — like the sort Jeb Bush and some of the more immigrant-friendly Republicans have skittishly backed. “That’s code for second-class status,” Clinton declared. She promised to go much further than even President Obama’s recent executive action and “defer” deportation proceedings not only against some illegal immigrants, but virtually all of them, while working toward comprehensive immigration reform that included citizenship.
This was a remarkable shift for someone who has not only maintained a studious silence for months about Obama’s executive action, but also previously opposed drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. Indeed, her flip is so dramatic that instead of raising questions about her credibility, it has changed the conversation so much that we’re immediately asking what Republicans need to do to catch up.
No doubt her proposal, which she offered no realistic plan for pushing through an unfriendly Congress, is designed to deflect attention from “Emailgate” and any number of other scandals that might yet derail her candidacy. But that’s not all its aimed at doing.
Its chief purpose is to compound what pollster Whit Ayres calls the GOP’s “daunting demographic challenge” in 2016.
Ayers points out that Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012, the highest percentage of any Republican challenging an incumbent president, and still lost because he got only 18 percent of the overall minority vote and 27 percent of the Latino vote. However, the white share of the national electorate is on track to drop by three percentage points (from 72 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2016) — and the minority share, likewise, to rise by the same amount.
This means that the GOP candidate has to do one of two things to win against Clinton: Improve his or her performance with whites to about 65 percent, a feat only Ronald Reagan has accomplished in the last 50 years, or boost his or her minority vote to 30 percent, which would require drawing about 45 percent of the Latino vote — as George W. Bush did.
But here’s the thing: While Democrats’ white and minority supporters are united on the issue of immigration (or at least not hopelessly divided), the GOP’s are not. This means that the more Republicans question and condemn Clinton’s support for “amnesty,” the more they’ll dig themselves in a hole with Latinos and make her more popular. On the other hand, it they stay mute — which is what most of them have done (with the exception of Lindsey Graham) — they’ll risk alienating the anti-amnesty white base that they have spent the last decade riling up.
In other words, if Republicans fight Hillary’s call for amnesty, they’ll lose Latinos, which will benefit Hillary. But if they don’t, they’ll lose whites, which will also benefit Hillary.
The dilemma is particularly acute for Jeb Bush, whose broad support for immigration (along with his Mexican-American wife and Spanish fluency) has made him perhaps the best-placed Republican to do well among Latinos. Yet even he doesn’t come anywhere close to the 45 percent mark yet. He has been rather equivocal in his support for a path to citizenship and has been assuring GOP voters that whatever course he charts for the undocumented, it will require them to jump through all kinds of hoops, such as paying fines and passing English tests and possibly “touching back” to their home country. Still, a recent Bloomberg poll found that 41 percent of likely Republican voters in New Hampshire, far from the most restrictionist state in the country, considered his immigration views a “deal-killer.”
By positioning herself as even more pro-immigration than the most pro-immigration GOP candidate — and potentially picking as her running mate Julian Castro, secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the former mayor of San Antonio who is wildly popular with Latinos — she will basically lock up the Latino vote. This will mean that the Republican nominee, even Jeb Bush, would have to go whole-hog for the white vote by hardening his or her opposition to amnesty and immigration, further cementing the GOP’s reputation as the anti-minority, white man’s party.
Some pundits pooh-pooh this problem, noting that like all voters, Latinos list jobs and the economy as their top concerns, not immigration. That’s true. But, also like all voters, Latinos won’t put their economic faith in someone they don’t trust politically. They will have much more confidence in Clinton solving those problems, not because they necessarily buy into her liberal tax-and-spend plans, but because they have more confidence in her personally, thanks to her appeal for them on immigration issues.
What’s more, life will get only more miserable for Republicans once Clinton enters the White House and makes comprehensive immigration reform her signature issue. That’s because if Republicans go along with her plans to extend full-fledged amnesty, they will basically be handing her a whole new block of Democratic voters. But if they don’t, Democrats will be able to milk this issue in subsequent elections, when the electorate is even more Latino.
Regardless of where one stands on the merits of the issue, the political reality is this: Republicans’ harsh anti-immigration rhetoric has left them no good options. They have created their own vulnerability. And Hillary Clinton has just zeroed in on it.
By: Shikha Dalmia, The Week, May 22, 2015
“Family Values Creeps Have A Tough Week”: Josh Duggar, Bill O’Reilly & The Sickening Hypocrisy Of The Sanctimonious Right
“19 and Counting” could be the name of a reality show on the 2016 GOP presidential field. (Poor Reince Priebus.) But it’s actually the name of that TLC show you never watch on the bewildering Duggar family, headed by Jim Bob and Michelle, who have 19 children (and counting?) because they claim that’s what God wants. There was always something off about them, but now comes news that oldest son Josh Duggar, executive director (until Thursday) of the Family Research Council’s political arm, sexually molested at least five young girls, including, it seems, his sisters, when he was a teenager.
As the details come out, it seems Jim Bob Duggar knew about his son’s abuse for at least a year, and tried to address the problem by taking him to talk to church elders, including a session with an Arkansas state trooper who later went to jail for child pornography. No, I’m not making this up. Then they sent him for “counseling” to a program that consisted of remodeling homes. When police investigated three years later, they wouldn’t let them talk to young Josh. No charges were brought against him.
We don’t know all the details of the wrongdoing of Josh Duggar, who was a minor at the time. We do have a lot of details about what his parents did, and it’s safe to say they handled the problem abysmally, for Josh and their daughters. By the way, it was observed on Twitter that the family’s sanctimonious statement mentions God six times, “daughters” none.
This comes on the heels of court transcripts revealing that bullying patriarch Bill O’Reilly, another purveyor of right-wing family values, used to return to his family and “go ballistic,” in his words, once dragging ex-wife down the stairs by the neck in front of his daughter. The daughter called his outbursts “scary and demeaning,” but also told a counselor she didn’t have much of a relationship with him because he was “never around.”
Of course, that didn’t stop O’Reilly from lecturing African Americans on how to raise their families, blaming black community troubles on “no supervision, kids with no fathers.” Now we know that instead of taking care of their own children, O’Reilly and the Duggars were out telling other people how to take care of theirs.
Or in the case of the Duggars and LGBT folks, telling them they couldn’t have any. With 19 biological kids of their own, the Duggars should have been way too tired for that level of homophobic activism, but they made time for it. And yes, a staple of their screechy preaching has been that LGBT people…wait for it…molest children.
Stellar mom Michelle Duggar made a robocall pushing the repeal of a local anti-discrimination ordinance, arguing that it would allow “child predators” to threaten “the safety and innocence of a child.” Maybe she had a guilty conscience.
Josh himself claimed anti-discrimination laws “protect one group of people over another” and make it hard to “protect the well-being of women and children in our cities.” (Think Progress has a handy guide to “9 times Josh lectured the world on family values before admitting he was a child molester.” Enjoy.)
On the campaign trail in 2012, Duggar told reporters “Our family is like the epitome of conservative values. People connect to us in that way.” Much of the 2016 GOP presidential field has connected to Josh, at least, who seems to have a vanity photo with a most of the 19 (or so) and counting GOP presidential contenders. The entire Republican field is united on the inferiority of gay families, but hails parents like the Duggars, who let their son prey on his sisters for a year without going to authorities.
Meanwhile, Fox News remains silent about the behavior of O’Reilly, because his angry white patriarch shtick is the core of its brand. The NFL is now more sensitive to the concerns of women’s rights advocates than Fox is. It was a tough week for sanctimonious creeps, but it wasn’t so great for the rest of us, either.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 22, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 