Rand Paul Speech at the VFW

The Washington Post "fact checker" Needs to Fact Check Himself on Ike

The Washington Post "fact checker" (who had previously and rather dishonestly "fact checked" Rand Paul's State of the Union response) just gave Rand Paul 4 Pinocchios (a score meaning he is lying through his teeth) for saying that he received guidance and inspiration from Eisenhower.  I would think that to get such a score he would have had to dig up some speech or some paper that Rand Paul gave/wrote saying how he thought Eisenhower was Satan or something.  But no, Glenn Kessler finds some policies that Ike supported and Rand Paul doesn't (foreign aid, the CIA and international organizations) to prove his point and gives Rand Paul the worst score he can.  

I think the "fact checker" should actually look up in the dictionary what inspiration and guidance means, it certainly doesn't mean "I agree with everything that another person said and did".  If Rand Paul said he received inspiration and guidance from the Beatles, would he deserve 4 Pinocchios for not having a coke, alcohol or heroin addiction like various members of the band did?

So what about Eisenhower inspires Rand Paul?  Well first, he was a former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces who becomes President and did what he thought what was best for the country and not just his friends.  He didn't juice defense spending and military projects to help his former comrades in the Defense Department (I realize it was the War Department during WWII, but you get the drift).  Instead, he cut the defense budget by 27% in real terms during his time in office.

And what probably most inspired Rand Paul was Ike's warning about the "military industrial complex" in his farewell address in 1961:  

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Sounds like something Rand Paul would agree with 100%.  So why did he get 4 Pinocchios again?  Maybe Glenn Kessler needs to complete his "fact checking" before writing hit pieces in the future.

Rand Paul's Response to the Possibility of a Detroit Bailout: Over My Dead Body!

Gotta love him:

"There's some good things that come out of bankruptcy," Paul said in a phone interview from Iowa. "One is you get to start over. Bankruptcy lets you be forgiven of your debt. And you do so by getting new management, better management, and by getting rid of unwieldy contracts, contracts that give you where public employees are getting paid twice what private employees are and things come back more to normal. That's the way cities and businesses can recover. 

"I basically say he [Obama] is bailing them out over my dead body because we don't have any money in Washington."

...

Paul said the reason he is going to fight to stop any efforts to bail out Detroit is that if the president succeeds in bailing it out, that will send a signal to the rest of cities and states nationwide that the federal government will bail them out to if they conduct reckless spending. 

"Those who don't have their house in order, who are teetering on disaster, will continue to make bad decisions. And by the way these [local and state budget choices] are tough decisions. I'm not saying they are all prescient and that it will be easy on everybody who works for the city or the state, but you need to make these decisions and the sooner you make them the better. If you wait to make them, it's even harder on people."

...

"You don't set up an implicit promise from the federal government that everybody is getting bailed out," Paul said. "It's sort of like too big to fail for banks. If you have too big to fail for cities or for states and they believe they'll be bailed out they'll continue to make unwise decisions. 

"So, really, the answer is, just like the federal government, live within your means and spend what you have but don't spend money you don't have. The problem is so many of our state governments, the politicians are being elected by the public service unions. If the public service unions want to be paid twice as much as what private sector employees make, they want twice as good benefits and twice as good a pension. 

"I mean the statistics in California are staggering. I think there's over 100,000 people there getting over $100,000 a year in retirement. You got police chiefs in medium-sized cities getting $350,000 a year for a salary. It's become untenable. But the main thing is we cannot send a signal from the federal government that cities and states are going to be too big to fail."

Ultimately, Paul said, if Detroit had been more fiscally responsible before, this process would not have needed to happen. "Bankruptcy in Detroit is going to much harder than if ten years ago, they had started downsizing and making their pensions and salaries more commensurate with the private sector," he said.

Washington Monthly Profile of Rand Paul

While it's basically written from the perspective of someone who doesn't like Rand Paul too much, the profile does have some interesting tidbits:

Even as the neoconservatives are busy trying to stamp out Paul's brand of foreign policy, however, Paul is engaging in a concerted outreach to them. After Paul won his primary, he spoke with a group of GOP foreign policy hands at a meeting organized by the Foreign Policy Initiative that included Senor, Bill Kristol, Jamie Fly, and Tom Donnelly. Senor met with Paul again before the Israel trip, and the two discussed Senor's book on the Israeli economy. Elliott Abrams, a former George W. Bush administration official who is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has met with Paul twice, forty-five minutes each time, talking mostly about the Middle East. He found Paul willing to listen and argue. There are two possible explanations for Paul's discussions with neoconservatives, Abrams said. "One is purely political—that is, like the trip to Israel, it is a part of creating a better image of himself as someone who listens to everyone and who is just seeking as many opinions as he can get. The other theory is that he's actually interested in seeing what we think."

PPP Poll: Rand Paul Leads in Iowa But Needs Help with Women and the Elderly

The polls of the 2016 GOP nomination race so far make Rand Paul a frontrunner in all of them I've seen but, as I've said before, he has some major weaknesses among women and the elderly.  

In the latest PPP poll, Rand Paul is in first with 18%, Chris Christie is second with 16%, Paul Ryan is third with 15% and Jeb Bush at 14%.  As you can see, his lead is razor thin and possible wouldn't be a lead at all if Jeb Bush decides not to run and endorses Chris Christie instead.  Every time we have a race of 1 moderate vs. a bunch of conservatives of various stripes, the moderate wins.  Also, with a poll this tight, the race becomes a turnout game.  And who usually turns out for primaries and caucuses?  The elderly.  Which is a group that Rand Paul is consistently weak with.  In this poll, he only gets 11% of the vote from the >65 crew, which puts him in 6th place, just after "Someone Else/Not Sure".  That is not a recipe for success.  Heck, he doesn't do much better among the 46-65 group either.  He is in 4th place with 12% of the vote with them.  He also polls in 4th place with 14% of the female vote, behind Paul Ryan, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.

While I would like to believe that Rand Paul can go all the way on the backs of the young, males and  very conservative people, I doubt it.  He needs to do some outreach and fast or else we will be stuck with either another Bush or Chris Christie as the nominee and I might not be able to take that.

Rand Paul reaches out to Orthodox Jews

A positive piece titled Rabbi Rand Paul in the National Review.  I'm glad at least the National Review hasn't followed Commentary down the anti-Rand Paul lunacy hole:

'We are very pleased to have Rabbi Rand Paul here," the senator's host, Richard Roberts, said as two dozen religious Jews sat down to lunch in Roberts's home in Lakewood, N.J.

"Senator, we have 6,500 men studying here," Roberts continued, referring to Lakewood's Beth Midrash Govoha, one of the largest rabbinical schools in the world. "Can you get me one or two Jews from Kentucky learning here?"

It was a sunny day in mid June and Paul had come to Lakewood, one of the nation's hubs of Orthodox Judaism, direct from Kentucky before returning to Washington, D.C. In the Orthodox community, Roberts, who last August sold his pharmaceutical company for $800 million, is a good friend to have. "If [Paul] has Dr. Roberts backing him, that is a great imprimatur for everybody in the community here," Rabbi Zisha Novoseller tells me. "These are movers and shakers in the audience here and he is looking for us to spread the gospel."

...

He says he's on a "speaking tour," taking the GOP message to new venues, and he faults Republicans for failing to do even a little of this. "Half of it is showing up" in minority communities, he told reporters on a May swing through Iowa, "and I don't think we've been showing up and asking."

His pitch isn't solely rhetorical, though. Paul has a legislative pitch tailored to minorities as well. He is planning to pursue legal action against the National Security Agency for what he considers a vast overreach of its surveillance powers and tells those assembled in Lakewood that "Jews should be very concerned about due process and liberty," and that "blacks should be too." In his remarks at Howard University, he railed against mandatory minimum sentencing for drug use, which many say disproportionately impacts African Americans and Hispanics. At times, he's gone further and argued that he doesn't believe people should be jailed for nonviolent drug crimes. "Look, the last two presidents could conceivably have been put in jail for their drug use," Paul told Fox News. "It would have ruined their lives. They got lucky. But a lot of poor kids, particularly in the inner city, don't get lucky."

Among the Orthodox in Lakewood, the senator has found a receptive audience. "I think that for politicians in general, certainly for higher office, including a president, the No. 1 thing we're looking for is integrity, somebody who's real," Roberts says. "He's real, he's authentic."

Rand Paul Seeks to End Aid to Egypt

Honestly, I'm a bit conflicted on this one.  I think it would be bad foreign policy to actually cut off aid to the relatively pro-western Egyptian military, especially when things are still so much in flux over there.  I would hate for us to send the wrong signal and end up with another Iran (I wrote a post on this here).  On the other hand, the law is the law and we really need to stop this arbitrary enforcement of laws that this administration is making a very bad habit of.  So I at least applaud Rand Paul for bringing that up:

Sen. Rand Paul today introduced legislation to prohibit the United States from sending foreign assistance to the government of Egypt, as a result of the country's military coup d'état on July 3, 2013. Click HERE to read Sen. Paul's legislation in its entirety.

 This week, it was reported that the Obama Administration was moving forward with plans to deliver four F-16 fighter jets to Egypt despite the political unrest in the country. Earlier this year, the Senate voted against an amendment introduced by Sen. Paul that would have prohibited the U.S. government from selling F-16 military aircraft, M1 tanks, and similar military weapons to the Egyptian government.

 "Egypt is the latest example of the Obama Administration's misguided foreign policy," Sen. Paul said. "The overthrow of the Egyptian government was a coup d'état, and the law is clear that when a coup takes place, foreign aid must stop. But, the President still plans to continue to send aid to Egypt, at a pace of more than $1.3 billion per year. By the President's refusal to call the situation in Egypt a 'coup' and continuing the flow of foreign assistance to Egypt, he is forthrightly saying 'I am ignoring the rule of law.'"