Tag Archives: Rand Paul

medical news, national news, political news, State news

Ebola becomes political football

Let’s call it the politics of Ebola.

Politico reports that some of the presumptive Republican candidates for president in 2016 are shouting “panic!” at the prospect of the deadly virus infecting the United States of America.

Not all of them, mind you, are saying such things.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry — along with President Obama, if you can believe that — suggests it’s better to stay calm and cool as medical professionals seek to contain the single known case that ended up in Dallas.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/gop-republicans-elections-2016-ebola-panic-111597.html?hp=r15

Yes, it’s a concern. A man flew from Liberia to Texas while carrying the Ebola virus. He is in critical condition. But his status has been upgraded a bit to stable. He is undergoing intense medical care at a Dallas hospital, where he is receiving the best care possible.

Meanwhile, GOP politicians are calling for an immediate ban on all flights from West Africa to the United States.

And, of course they’re saying the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to fight the virus. They’re scattering out over right-wing talk radio and TV and proclaiming their intense concern that the president isn’t sounding sufficient alarm over the Ebola case that found its way to Dallas.

There will be more intense airport screening of inbound passengers, the president has assured. There also will be greater vigilance at the outbound end of flights headed for the United States and other countries.

These measures haven’t stopped some of the GOP candidates in waiting. As Politico reports, “Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky declared on ‘The Laura Ingraham Show’ that ‘this could get beyond our control’ and worried, ‘Can you imagine if a whole ship full of our soldiers catch Ebola?’”

How about settling down just a bit?

The next political campaign will get into full swing in due course. Cooler heads think better than those that are overheated with political ambition.

Uncategorized

Rand Paul: unfit for presidency

1 Comment

Sen. Rand Paul has demonstrated the kooky trait that seems to endear him to some Republicans but demonstrates why he is unfit to sit in the Oval Office of the White House.

The Kentucky Republican said this week that if he’s elected president — fat chance — that the first executive order he’d issue would be to undo all previous executive orders.

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/217599-rand-paul-says-as-president-he-would-repeal-all-executive-orders

Oh, but wait. His spokesman said he’s more or less kidding. His statement, which he made to Breitbart News, was meant to illustrate that President Obama’s overuse of unconstitutional executive authority is the real target.

OK, then. When he made that statement, did he wink at the reporter? Did he qualify what he said by alluding to what President Obama has done?

Umm. No. He said “all” and I presume he meant “all.”

Such action would repeal a lot of U.S. standing policy, such as the one that prohibits the United States from assassinating foreign leaders. That one was signed by President Gerald R. Ford — in 1975!

Sen. Paul is likely to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016. Good. I hope he does. The political debate needs a laugh or two. Lord knows too much seriousness can get a nation down.

national news, political news, State news

Time for 'new president'?

“If the president doesn’t have a strategy, maybe it’s time for a new president.”

You know who said that? U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., in remarks at a Dallas ballroom after speaking at an Americans for Progress meeting.

http://news.msn.com/us/perry-paul-bash-obama-for-no-strategy-on-Syria

Pretty darn profound, don’t you think?

He’s talking about President Obama’s declaration that he doesn’t yet have a strategy to deal forcefully with ISIL, the hideous terrorist organization seeking to overrun governments in Syria and Iraq.

Paul has joined a number of other critics who’ve hit the president hard for not having such a strategy.

It’s the “maybe it’s time for a new president” comment that makes me chuckle.

Let’s see: We’re nearly halfway through Barack Obama’s second term as president. We’ll be getting a new president in January 2017, which is just around the corner.

The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids Obama from seeking a third term. So he’s out of the campaign game.

Yeah, it’ll be time for a new president … in due course.

 

International news, national news, political news

Rand Paul has become a peacenik

Wow! What in the world has Sen. Rand Paul been putting in his Wheaties?

The Kentucky Republican is now accusing former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of being a “war hawk” and is staking out some interesting turf as he prepares to launch a possible 2016 presidential campaign.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rand-paul-calls-hillary-clinton-war-hawk?cid=sm_m_main_1_20140825_30412376

The young man is sounding downright dovish in his approach to foreign policy.

Go figure.

Paul long has been considered a darling of the tea party movement within the Republican Party. As I have watched the tea party wing of the GOP, I’ve been struck by how hawkish many of its members have sounded regarding the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. What’s more, the tea party folks have pulled many of the so-called “establishment wing” GOP members over to their side.

Have you heard the griping from veteran U.S. Senate and House Republicans calling for more “robust” responses in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to the terrorists who are creating so much havoc?

Meanwhile, Rand Paul is saying quite the opposite, He said on Meet the Press this past weekend: “Were I to run, there’s going to be a lot of independents, and even some Democrats, who say you know what? We are tired of war. We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she’s so gung-ho.”

Yes, then-Sen. Clinton voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq ordered by President Bush. She’s since walked back from that vote, declaring she believes now that was a mistake.

Is she “gung-ho” these days? I don’t sense what Sen. Paul is sensing in a possible — if not probable — Hillary Clinton presidential candidacy.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. Paul, after all, did declare his desire to see “all aid” to Israel suspended. He’s tried to take that statement back. However, as my late friend and colleague Claude Duncan once told me about politicians who try to retract regrettable statements: You can’t unhonk the horn.

 

Uncategorized

HRC's second-most surprising comment …

Having already declared surprise that the Benghazi flap would encourage Hillary Clinton to run for president, I’ve found perhaps the second-most interesting thing she said in that TV interview that aired Monday night.

It’s what she didn’t say.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/208757-clinton-doesnt-deny-narcissistic-looney-tune-comments

ABC News’s Diane Sawyer asked Clinton about a comment she made about Monica Lewinsky — you remember, yes? — in which she was quoted as calling “that woman” a “narcissistic loony tune.” Clinton’s response? “I am not going to comment on what I said or didn’t say in the late 1990s,” she said.

There it is. She said it.

Frankly, I have to agree with that description … not that it excuses her husband’s behavior, and that’s all I’ll say about that.

Sawyer then noted that Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has said that the Lewinsky scandal that resulted in the impeachment of President Clinton is fair game if Hillary Clinton runs for president in two years.

“You know, he can talk about what he wants to talk about. And if he decides to run, he’ll be fair game too for everybody,” she said. I’m reminded a bit of what the late U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Lufkin, once said about an opponent who kept bringing up negative aspects of Wilson’s admittedly flamboyant lifestyle. “I have never initiated a negative campaign,” Wilson told me, “but if my opponent keeps saying those things, I’ll be prepared to respond.” Brother, did he ever.

Message to Sen. Paul? Be very careful if you intend to go there.

Uncategorized

GOP abandons wacky rancher

Cliven Bundy once was considered a darling among Republicans for his stance against the federal government.

Then the Nevada rancher made a truly reprehensible statement, which is that African-Americans would be better off as slaves than many of them are today as unemployed citizens.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-distance-selves-from-nevada-rancher-cliven-bundy-over-racial-remarks/2014/04/24/76a72780-cbe3-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

Oops. There went the support from his one-time allies.

You see, the Republican Party is trying to remake its brand among ethnic and racial minorities. Many congressional Republicans have been vocally opposed to immigration reform. They’ve sought to make it more difficult for people to vote by requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship at polling places. Some in Congress have said some mightily offensive things about the nation’s first African-American president.

The result has been that minorities — chiefly African-Americans and Hispanics — have been voting overwhelmingly for Democrats. Republicans are seeking to make inroads.

Then they lined up with Cliven Bundy, who’s been fighting with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management over whether he should pay grazing fees for his cattle that are feeding on public land. The BLM wants him to pay; Bundy will have none of it, even if it means he’s breaking federal law.

Then this clown makes racist remarks about the so-called virtues of slavery.

Is it any wonder many in the GOP are abandoning this guy? U.S. Sens. Dean Heller, R-Nev., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., were among the first high-profile lawmakers to toss the guy over. Others have followed suit.

Republicans are learning a tough lesson here, which is to take great care in aligning themselves with gadflies while undergoing a political makeover.

Uncategorized

Rand Paul makes sense on outreach

Listen up, tea party wing of the Republican Party.

One of your own is making sense on ways your party can reach out more effectively to a growing minority of voters in the United States.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/rand-paul-gop-must-get-beyond-deportation-105241.html

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a possible candidate for president in 2016, says the GOP must get “beyond deportation” if it hopes to attract Latino voters.

Think about that. So many leading Republicans were saying during the 2012 presidential campaign that deportation — or “self-deportation,” as Mitt Romney called it — was one way to rid the country of illegal immigrants.

“The bottom line is, the Hispanic community, the Latino community is not going to hear us until we get beyond that issue,” Paul said this week.

Who wants to wager whether the Republican Party is going to heed this sound advice? I’m not yet willing to believe the tea party wing of the GOP — the minority within the party with the loudest voice — is going to take the bait.

I do admire Paul, though, for telling the harsh truth to his GOP tea party brethren. Indeed, another key member of that wing of the party — Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — is an immigrant himself. The Texas Cruz Missile, though, keeps talking tough on immigration, brushing off efforts to reform the system in a comprehensive, constructive way.

Keep driving home the message, Sen. Paul. Maybe one day they’ll get it. Then again, maybe they won’t.

Uncategorized

Sen. Paul does the seemingly impossible

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul has made two fascinating public appearances of late.

The Kentucky Republican — and tea party favorite — spoke to thundering applause at the Conservative Political Action Conference gathering. CPAC is where conservatives go for anointment by the Republican Party’s most faithful, the true believers, the hardest of the hard core right wing.

Then, just this week, the senator showed on the other coast, the Left Coast, and addressed a crowd of University of California-Berkeley students. Now this is where the lefties hang out to get their blessing from the progressive/liberal/lefty crowd. It’s also a place that usually doesn’t welcome those from the other side. But there was Sen. Paul, giving the Berkeley faithful a snootful of libertarian dogma.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2014/0322/Rand-Paul-most-intriguing-man-in-the-GOP.-Really-video

What gives here?

Is he actually the most “intriguing man in the GOP,” as Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus has posited? He might be.

The CPAC meeting was a no-brainer for Paul, who’s considered to be a virtual shoo-in as a candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. He won the CPAC straw poll, beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

The Berkeley event, though, raised my eyebrows. Too many colleges and universities — those bastions of progressive thought and supposed tolerance for all points of view — have rolled out the unwelcome mat to conservatives. Rand Paul appears to be the exception, though, given his libertarian views on things such as drug decriminalization and his pacifist view of war.

He’s a conservative, though. Frankly, I was glad to see him speak at Berkeley if only to know that at least one progressive institution in this particular instance was being true to the credo of openness and tolerance of differing points of view.

Now, let’s see if Hillary Clinton shows up at a right-wing-leaning school such as, say, Liberty University.

Uncategorized

HRC sick of the media? Duh!

Sometime around late 1999, I offered a prediction.

Hillary Rodham Clinton would not run for the U.S. Senate in New York, I said then. Why? Well, my notion was that she had grown weary of the constant battering she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, had taken from the right-wing media, not to mention the members of the Senate who voted to convict her husband of “high crimes and misdemeanors” relating to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

She ran anyway — and won handily — in 2000.

The columnist Roger Simon, one of D.C.’s smarter political analysts, writes that Clinton is sick of the media.

Will that prevent her from running for president of the United States in 2016? Part of me says “yes,” but I now know better than to suggest that HRC doesn’t have the stomach for another campaign.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/hillary-clinton-media-simon-says-104497.html?hp=l18

I cannot quite figure Clinton out. Her husband cheated on her with a White House intern less than half his age. She forgave him — apparently. The House of Representatives impeached the president for lying to a federal grand jury about the affair. The Senate then put the president on trial, but acquitted him on all three counts relating to obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power.

The then-first lady decided she wanted to serve with those individuals in the Senate after she and her husband vacated the White House. By all accounts, she became a stellar senator from New York and earned the respect of her colleagues. Interestingly, one of her best friends in the Senate happens to be John McCain, R-Ariz., who was among those senators who voted to convict the president. Go figure.

The media beat her up as she ran for president in 2008. Her campaign ended just before the convention that year and then — wouldn’t you know it? — she ended up serving as secretary of state in the Obama administration.

The media kept dogging her. She had at least one major misfire, her handling of the Benghazi consulate tragedy. Again, the media poured it on.

Now, at least one leading Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky — a possible presidential candidate himself in ’16 — is dredging up the Lewinsky matter as a way to besmirch Hillary’s reputation. Give me a break.

Still, the media keep digging into all this stuff.

Why should Hillary Clinton want any part of this?

Beats me. I remain baffled that she ran for the Senate in the first place.

Uncategorized

No surprise: Paul wins CPAC straw poll

And the winner is …

Rand Paul, senator from Kentucky, and now a presumed Republican candidate for president of the United States.

What did the senator win? The straw poll taken at the Conservative Action Political Conference meeting in Maryland.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/08/rand_paul_wins_cpac_straw_poll_121856.html

He finished far ahead of the second-place candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Dr. Ben Carson, a noted neurosurgeon finished third, with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie finishing fourth. Cruz pulled 11 percent of the vote, 20 percentage points behind Paul.

So, there you have it. Sen. Paul is now the presumptive frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.

I know what you’re thinking. This is a straw poll. It matters not one bit. It was taken among members of the most fervent wing of the Republican Party. What about the rest of the party faithful?

Well, allow me to let you in on what I believe is a reality in modern GOP politics: CPAC represents the party these days. The middle ground in the GOP is shrinking faster than Lake Meredith in the summer. The CPAC crowd is calling the shots, or so it appears.

I normally wouldn’t give Paul’s “victory” in this straw poll much credence, except that the political landscape is changing before our eyes. Paul’s form of libertarian-strain conservatism seems to play well with the CPAC wing of the party. Rest assured, when the time comes for Paul to make up his mind about running — and I’m betting he’ll do it — he will look back at the CPAC straw poll as some sort of vindication for the message he’s been delivering.

He’s in step with most Republicans in wanting to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. He’s opposing almost all of President Obama’s domestic and foreign policy agenda. He thinks the Benghazi and the IRS stories still have legs.

He fits right in with this version of modern Republicanism.