“Leader Of The Leave-Me-The-Hell-Alone Coalition”: Rand Paul Is Fighting For Your Privacy—Unless You’re A Woman
“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights,” Kentucky senator and presidential aspirant Rand Paul said over the weekend in San Francisco. He was there to sell himself to the young tech elite as a civil-liberties crusader; the only candidate willing to take an uncompromising stand against government surveillance. He cares so deeply about privacy that he’s planning to filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act.
But the leader of “the leave-me-the-hell-alone coalition” is simultaneously, albeit more quietly, arguing that women should have little privacy in their healthcare decisions. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul said at a summit organized by the anti-choice Susan B Anthony List in April, by which he meant making abortion illegal. Paul describes himself as “100 percent pro-life.” Along with all of the other Republican presidential candidates he supports a bill that resurfaced this week in the House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Recently Paul has become something of a champion for anti-abortion groups that are trying to reframe the abortion debate so that pro-choice views seem extreme. Pressed by reporters last month to clarify whether his support for abortion bans includes exceptions, Paul deflected the question by calling up the specter of late-term abortions. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” he said to a New Hampshire journalist. No matter that only 1 percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy; claiming Democrats endorse the “killing” of babies is an easy way not to account for his selective support for personal liberty.
Paul’s hypocrisy isn’t new. Indeed, one of the long-standing ironies of American politics is that the people who decry government meddling in, say, healthcare are the ones calling most vociferously for the government to step in to regulate women’s bodies. As Katha Pollitt noted in Pro, conservatives like Paul never would propose to restrict access to guns, despite the tens of thousands of deaths caused by gun violence in the United States each year. Only when it comes to women does “life” trump individual freedom.
It’s still worth pointing out how inconsistent Paul’s advocacy for civil liberties is (and on issues beyond abortion), since that’s the platform he’s using to distinguish himself. If Paul really believed in “the right to be left alone,” he’d demand that women be allowed as much control over their bodies as their phone records.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, May 12, 2015
“Koch Funding Of Universities Shrouded In Secrecy”: Trying To Reshape Public Education To Match Their Libertarian Ideology
In a recent column entitled “The Campus Climate Crusade,” The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel spent over 800 words arguing the basic conceit of UnKochMyCampus, a campaign uniting students at universities around the country who are working to increase transparency on their campuses and fight attempts by corporate donors like Charles and David Koch from influencing their education.
Her core arguments? The left is wielding transparency as a “weapon,” and efforts to access information through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are “shutting down debate across the country.”
Unfortunately for Strassel, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Our work with UnKochMyCampus has shown us that transparency removes the smoke and mirrors that cloud the debate, leaving ordinary people ill-equipped to develop informed opinions on research and policy around the most important issues of the day. Our policy is being shaped by corporations, for corporations – and that’s a huge problem.
There was a time when the public engaged in a seemingly-legitimate debate about whether smoking caused cancer. Then we learned that the studies claiming cigarettes were safe were funded by the tobacco industry. Once the cat was out of the bag, people saw that “debate” for what it was – a farce.
Just as tobacco companies had a vested financial interest in keeping the public in the dark about the dangers of smoking, today’s fossil fuel companies are stoking denial about the realities of climate change and masking the positive impact of regulations and renewable energy programs to protect their bottom line.
One of the key strategies they use to accomplish this is unleashing a flood of money into think-tanks and universities around the country to help disseminate their message. That money comes with strings attached that give corporations more and more influence over education and research at both public and private universities around the country.
Just weeks ago it was revealed that Harvard-Smithsonian’s Willie Soon – whose climate change studies the scientific community have long claimed to be inaccurate – received almost all of his funding from fossil fuel interests. Were it not for public disclosure laws, this information would have been hidden from the public, making it much more difficult for those who are not members of the scientific community to discern whether Soon’s research was above board or just corporate PR disguised as science.
While this is an egregious example, it’s by no means an aberration. Between 2001 and 2013, the Charles Koch Foundation has provided nearly $70 million to almost 400 campuses across the country. This money goes to researchers like Soon or think-tanks like the Beacon Hill Institute housed at Suffolk University in Boston that produce content designed to further climate denial and attack policies they oppose, like the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon rule or state renewable portfolio standards.
But that’s not all the money buys. As students at Florida State University and Clemson University discovered in 2011, grant agreements (Memorandums of Understanding, or “MOUs”) between universities and the Charles Koch Foundation often give the Kochs influence over the hiring of professors and development of course curriculum. In other words, on top of reshaping scientific studies to further their bottom line, the Kochs are also trying to reshape public education to match their libertarian ideology. This strategy has been in effect for decades and was even referenced outright by Charles Koch during a 1974 speech he delivered to a room of businessmen at a seminar on “The Anti-Capitalist Mentality”: “We should cease financing our own destruction…by supporting only those programs, departments or schools that contribute in some way to our individual companies or to the general welfare of our free enterprise system.”
Bringing to light the MOUs between the Charles Koch Foundation and universities exposed the Kochs’ dark money campaign on college campuses around the country and rightfully caused an uproar, which explains why Koch Industries is so vehemently opposed to further efforts by students involved in the UnKoch My Campus campaign to increase transparency. Case in point: Koch Industries is currently paying legal fees for University of Kansas professor Art Hall who sued the university following a Kansas Open Records Act request submitted by a student who sought to gain more information into his hiring. It sure looks shady: From 1997 to 2004, Hall was chief economist of Koch Industries’ lobbying subsidiary, Koch Companies Public Sector and currently serves as the director of KU’s conservative Center for Applied Economics, which receives funding from the Kochs.
But perhaps no other university in the country serves as a better example of the corporatization of education than George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. GMU has received more than $34 million from the Charles Koch Foundation since 2011. But the real impact of the Kochs’ funding on campus remains a mystery. Despite repeated attempts by students to obtain information about the grants and MOU with the Foundation, the school refuses to comply because it has housed the grants under the private George Mason University Foundation instead of the university itself in an attempt to prevent any potentially damning information about their source from being subject to the rules governing public universities like GMU.
Transparency is one of the last avenues available to concerned members of the public, including students, professors and alumni, who have serious and well-founded concerns about the motives of major financial donors like the Kochs. If transparency is seen as such a threat, only one logical question remains: what are they so afraid of disclosing?
By: Kalin Jordan, Co-founder of UnKochMyCampus; Center for Media and Democracy, PR Watch, April 20, 2015
“Rand Paul Consistently Defends Discrimination”: And Opposes The Government’s Right To Protect People From Discrimination
In the past, when Senator Rand Paul has been asked about enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or other civil rights bills, he’s fallen back on the idea that you can better assure, for example, desegregated lunch counters by denying that particular Woolworth’s your business than by enacting federal legislation. When it came to housing, he said this, “Decisions concerning private property and associations should in a free society be unhindered. As a consequence, some associations will discriminate.”
Using this rough logic, if you can call it that, people who seek to order lunch or buy a home are behaving a certain way. And people who deny patrons a meal or won’t sell them a house are also behaving a certain way. And people should be free to behave pretty much however they want. In a free society, some people will exhibit racist behaviors: “some associations will discriminate.” Other people will try to do certain things and find that they can’t accomplish them because of their race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. But no one told them that they couldn’t try.
For Rand Paul, the best way to change someone’s behaviors is to behave some way yourself. Like Indiana Governor Mike Pence, who said he wouldn’t continue to eat at a restaurant that turned away gay couples, Rand Paul thinks that businesses can best be persuaded to serve all people by the threat of lost business from customers whose patronage they actually want.
So, pretty much across the board, Senator Rand Paul thinks about civil rights as a matter of how people behave rather than a matter well-suited for legal solutions or protections.
But, then, look at this:
“I don’t think I’ve ever used the word gay rights, because I don’t really believe in rights based on your behavior.” –Senator Rand Paul
The logic of that statement appears straightforward. Being black or a woman, how old you are, are not things you can change through behavioral modifications, but who you are physically attracted to is purely a matter of choice. Someone can deny you a sandwich or a wedding cake based on their perception of your sexual orientation because the presumption is that you behave a certain way, not that you are a certain way.
So, suddenly, the gay couple seeking dinner is distinct from the black gentleman seeking lunch, even though their behaviors are nearly identical.
If you’re seeking some consistency here, it’s not that hard to find. Rand Paul, in all circumstances, defends the right to discriminate and opposes the government’s right to protect people from discrimination.
He’ll shift around how he justifies these positions, but the positions remain the same.
There’s a certain appeal to the Paulista philosophy that has the potential to attract a lot of people in the younger generations, but here we see him running afoul of a core value of our youth, which is that gays should not be denied the same rights as everyone else.
It’s not just that he seems to be insisting that sexual orientation is a choice, but also that he wants to defend people’s right to behave any way they want, even in an openly discriminatory manner, unless their behavior involves sex.
This is not a winning position and it will hurt Paul badly with the very generations that might otherwise flock to his campaign.
By: Martin Longman, Ten Miles Square, The Washington Monthly, [Cross-posted at Progress Pond], March 31, 2015
“Notably Absent From This Debate”: Why Won’t Rand Paul And Chris Christie Take A Position On Indiana’s “Religious Freedom” Law?
Nearly a week since Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), igniting a nationwide debate about whether the controversial law invites discrimination based on sexual orientation, most potential Republican presidential candidates have taken the opportunity to bolster their conservative credentials.
“Governor Pence has done the right thing,” said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Monday.
“I want to commend Governor Mike Pence for his support of religious freedom, especially in the face of fierce opposition,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in a written statement. “Governor Pence is holding the line to protect religious liberty in the Hoosier State. Indiana is giving voice to millions of courageous conservatives across this country who are deeply concerned about the ongoing attacks upon our personal liberties. I’m proud to stand with Mike, and I urge Americans to do the same.”
Ben Carson, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry all expressed their support for Pence and Indiana’s RFRA law. (Meanwhile, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have come out against it.)
But two likely 2016 candidates have been notably absent from this debate: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. What do they think about the law, and why have they been so quiet on the issue?
Samantha Smith, the communications director for Christie’s Leadership Matters for America PAC, did not return a request for comment on Wednesday morning. (I’ll update this if I hear back.) Christie’s past statements offer little light on where he will fall on the issue, but he has been shifting to the right on social issues in advance of the Republican primary. On Tuesday, he announced his support for a 20-week abortion ban. Given Christie’s shaky position within the party, and the fact that the rest of the field supports Indiana’s law, it would be very surprising if he joined with liberals in opposing it.
As for Paul, Sergio Gor, the communications director of RandPAC, wrote in an email, “The Senator is out of pocket with family this week and has not weighed in at this time.”
It makes sense that Paul is unplugging with his family this week: He’s expected to announce his presidential bid on April 7, the beginning of a long, grueling journey—and a victory would mean that these are his last moments of real privacy for a very long time. Could anyone blame him if he wanted to spend a few quiet days with his family? I couldn’t.
But it also seems a bit convenient that Paul is entirely unreachable while the controversy swirls. If his campaign launch is just six days away, surely Paul and his staff are in close communication. How long does it take to send a tweet or tell your staff to craft a statement?
It will be interesting to see how Paul reacts to the law—as he’ll be forced to do, probably no later than April 7—in light of his libertarian credentials. If he stuck true to them, not only would he support the law but also support the right of Indiana’s businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, something that the rest of the Republican field opposes. (They just disagree with liberals about whether Indiana’s law would allow discrimination.)
But if recent history is any guide, don’t expect Paul to stick true to his libertarian roots. Almost whenever he has faced a choice between traditional libertarian positions and mainstream Republican positions, he has chosen the latter in hope of winning the GOP nomination. Just recently, for instance, he called for more defense spending after saying for years that the military was bloated and needed further cuts.
In fact, Paul has already reversed himself on whether private businesses should be allowed to exclude people from their establishments for any reason. “I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2010. “But, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.” He continued, “In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don’t belong to those groups, or don’t associate with those people.” Just a few years later, as that position became controversial, Paul (dishonestly) said that he never held the libertarian position to begin with.
So while it is taking a while for Paul to give his position, it isn’t hard to deduce where he’ll eventually fall. Maybe he’s just waiting until the spotlight on Indiana dies down a bit, so that his libertarian supporters are less aware when he adopts the party line. But if that’s his plan, it’s not very presidential.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, April 1, 2015
“How Rand Paul Is Losing His Distinctiveness”: He’s About As Libertarian As An Ambitious Republican Can Be
As the 2016 presidential race has swung into motion in the last couple of months, we’ve heard a lot about Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker, and even Ted Cruz. But there hasn’t been a lot of news about Rand Paul, whom many people considered the most interesting candidate in the race. Paul has proven adept at gaining positive news coverage, and the fact that he’s a quasi-libertarian makes him a little less predictable than other candidates. In fact, that’s the core of his appeal. He can’t argue that he has a lengthy list of accomplishments; his 2010 Senate campaign was the first time he ran for any office, and he hasn’t authored any important legislation. Being different is what makes Rand Paul compelling.
But there’s only so different you can be. The guy who was supposedly so skeptical of the overuse of American military power is now proposing a huge increase in military spending:
The move completes a stunning reversal for Paul, who in May 2011, after just five months in office, released his own budget that would have eliminated four agencies—Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Energy and Education—while slashing the Pentagon, a sacred cow for many Republicans. Under Paul’s original proposal, defense spending would have dropped from $553 billion in the 2011 fiscal year to $542 billion in 2016. War funding would have plummeted from $159 billion to zero. He called it the “draw-down and restructuring of the Department of Defense.”
But under Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.
The boost would be offset by a two-year combined $212 billion cut to funding for aid to foreign governments, climate change research and crippling reductions in to the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Education.
We should have seen this coming. Last August, I wrote that while Paul may have a few positions that don’t fit neatly into traditional Republican conservatism, the more central an issue is, the more likely he is to take the expected GOP line:
Even if being a little less ideologically predictable is part of Paul’s appeal, it turns out that there are some positions that are negotiable for a Republican presidential candidate trying to win over primary voters, and some that aren’t. A true libertarian can start off telling those voters that he favors low taxes and small government, and they’ll cheer. He can tell them he’s concerned about the militarization of the police, as Paul recently wrote eloquently about, and they might say, “I still think we need law and order, but I get what you’re saying.” He can tell them that government surveillance of Americans is getting out of control, and they might decide he has a point, even if they’re still concerned about fighting terrorism. But if the libertarian candidate goes on to say that because he believes in maximal personal freedom, he also supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and the legalization of drugs, they’ll raise their eyebrows and say, “Hold on there, buddy.”
That’s not what Rand Paul will be saying; on those last three issues, he ranges from firmly Republican (he opposes abortion rights) to essentially Republican (he opposes same-sex marriage but says it should be left up to the states) to somewhat less Republican (he opposes legalization but has suggested some sensible reform of marijuana laws). In other words, he’s about as libertarian as an ambitious Republican can be: pushing the GOP a bit on issues where the party is pulled by competing impulses (like law and order vs. skepticism of state power), but safely in the fold on every issue where there’s consensus in the party.
Why is Paul making this proposal now? It’s partly because the presidential race is getting going, but mostly because this intra-Republican argument over the budget has brought the issue of military spending back near the top of the agenda. If he wants to be competitive in the presidential race, Paul has to get on the right side.
Contemporary conservatism has four main pillars: low taxes, small government, “traditional” social values, and a large military. No one who wants to be the GOP presidential nominee can stray from any of them in any serious way. And this is Rand Paul’s dilemma: His distinctiveness as a candidate comes from the fact that there are areas in which he questions Republican orthodoxy, but if he questions parts of that orthodoxy that Republicans fervently believe in, they’ll reject him. But when he does things like propose a large increase in military spending, he ends up looking just like every other Republican.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 26, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 