Owner: Republican Renaissance URL:http://republicanrenaissance.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:18:38 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: This is about changing the direction of the Republican Party. This is a call to true conservatives who feel their party has been led astray, steered by ambitious big-government politicians fundamentally indistinguishable from their counterparts on the lef Site statistics:Click here
The Fifth Wind 2007-11-08 10:00:00 It's shaping up to be a five-way race for Republicans right on into the primaries.Rojas at The Crossed Pond observes:So Robertson says it’s Giuliani. And Weyrich and Bob Jones insist upon Romney. And Brownback wants McCain. And Gary Bauer is leaning Thompson-ish. And nobody knows where the hell James Dobson’s at, save that he doesn’t want Thompson ... Most notable of all is the fact that pretty much everytime you actually ask them, the voters in question opt for Huckabee.I do hope Huckabee manages to hang on through the early primaries. What we'll see then is maximum fracture: the authoritarian Jingoists and Islamophobes neocons for Giuliani, the slightly more-conservative, less-intense hawks for McCain, the Hewitt/RedState/Freeper crowd split between Romney and Thompson, Christianists flocking to Huckabee, and the "Old Right" conservatives and libertarians for Paul.It's remarkably wide open at this point. Read more:Fifth
Ron Paul Slams Bernanke, Reckless Inflation 2007-11-08 09:30:00 Ron Paul demolishes the fallacy of our monetary policy and takes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
to school for trying to solve the current crisis with more inflation. Bernanke, the consummate technocrat, can only respond with a typically fuzzy non-answer:First of all, can you imagine any of the other candidates for president talking in any meaningful, intelligent way about monetary policy? I can't. If they know the first thing about it, they certainly don't give any indication. If the subject were ever to come up in a real debate, I'm certain we'd get a lot of blank faces, blinking, and talk-around gibberish. This raises another depressing question: does it matter? We seem to require very little in the way of knowledgeableness from our 'leaders' these days (for evidence one need only look at Rudy The Terrorist Fighter's complete ignorance of the 9/11 Commission Report and relevant scholarship).About inflation, Bernanke avers:"If somebody has their wealth in dollars and they are going Read more:Ron Paul
, Inflation
Few Recruits for Irresponsible Wars 2007-11-14 21:20:00 On Veterans Day, the Seattle Times ran an article about the U.S. military's difficulties with recruitment. The article begins:The Army is struggling to find volunteers for an unpopular war, despite recruiting bonuses of up to $20,000 and pay increases for enlistees that have beaten inflation by 21 percent since 2000. It met its numeric goal of 80,000 recruits last year, but it paid a price in terms of declining numbers of high-school graduates and lower scores on skills and physical tests. The percentage of minimally qualified Army recruits, known as Category IVs, has quadrupled since 2002, and the percentage that required special health or moral waivers has risen sharply as well.Among the reasons cited for the fact that volunteers are so hard to come by these days, the primary one is that young people and their parents find the risks unacceptably high, even though recruiters go to pains to demonstrate that causalties in Iraq are fewer than most people imagine and far fewer than in pr Read more:Recruits
Religious Right in Disagreement Over Iraq 2007-11-18 12:44:00 From the Boston Globe:LYNCHBURG, Va. - On Main Street of this Civil War-vintage city, known in recent years as the birthplace of the religious right, the only political sign bears the name of Ron Paul, the antiwar libertarian who is running for the Republican nomination.At nearby Liberty University, the headquarters of the late founder of the Moral Majority, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, many students say the campus is divided between at least five Republican presidential candidates, including Paul, and some support for Democrats, as well.With just weeks remaining until primary season, leaders and foot soldiers of the religious right have come to a surprising conclusion: Their bloc of voters, considered by many to be the largest single constitu ency in the Republican Party, is not going to break for any one candidate in 2008....On no other issue do opinions vary as widely among social conservatives: Some Christian leaders have been rebuked for defending the war as a religious crusade; others Read more:Right
, Iraq
Memo to Ron Paul: Take Fred Up On His Offer 2007-11-29 09:03:00 Fred Thompson apparently isn't too happy with how Wednesday's CNN/YouTube Debate turned out, and who could blame him? It was for the most part a ridiculous affair full of time-wasting irrelevancies and bizarre question selections (the Confederate flag? Personal weapons? Mars? Please.).My main problem with last night's event and what passes for "debate" generally is the format and duration of the answers. Agree with him or not, Ron Paul
can make a robust, respectable case for getting out of Iraq ASAP and ratcheting down our active military intervention in the Middle East and the rest of the world, but he can't do it in 30 or 90 seconds (nor could anyone). Paul mentioned al-Sadr in what might have been the beginning of an exchange that actually dealt with specifics (gasp!) before that "debate" was shut down by Anderson Cooper when the allotted seconds were up.If, on the other hand, Paul and McCain had an hour to debate foreign policy instead of the minute-thirty or whatever it was th Read more:Offer
Just Another Outstanding Moment 2007-12-13 23:54:00 As the mother of all campaign days draws near and many of us prepare ourselves for, or perhaps just now learn about and swing onboard, Tea Party '07, I want to share something special with those who may have missed it. I can't praise highly enough the recent statement made by Lawrence Lepard, the same fellow who created and paid for a full-page ad for Ron Paul in the Thanksgiving Day edition of USA Today. He explains why he paid a small fortune—his own money—to help advance the Ron Paul movement. It is a marvelous, stirring address that deserves the widest possible circulation. I quote:I believe that as American citizens we stand at an important crossroads in history. We are faced with a very important decision that will have repercussions for many, many years. We need to make a decision as to what we want America to represent, and to become. History will record the outcome of our decision. If we blow it, many more innocent people will die, and history will not be kind. As I say Read more:Moment
Strange Logic 2007-12-12 09:37:00 The debate over Ron Paul continues at National Review Online.Jonah Goldberg protests what he perceives to be the murkiness of Paul's Social Security position, then posts a reader's clarification of it, and finally slips an empirically deficient pacifist charge into a comment on its efficacy.Derbyshire responds:Jonah: It's news to me that Ron Paul wants to "dismantle the military." If you can give me chapter and verse on that, I will certainly ponder it. It seems hard to square with his much-repeated assertion that he is getting more campaign contributions from active-duty military personnel than any other candidate. That assertion may be false; Paul may be misinformed, or lying. If so, however, I'm surprised the falsehood hasn't been uncovered by now: I've been hearing that assertion for months. Hard to square, too, with his vote of funding operations in Afghanistan after 9/11.I haven't seen anything to suggest to me that Paul is a pacifist who wants to "dismantle the military." Read more:Strange
, Logic
Pass the Realism, Please 2007-12-12 03:30:00 What does it mean when Ron Paul says that the Bush Administration and all the interchangeable candidates who are committed to continuing down the same foreign policy path are the real isolationists?It means that the hostility felt from the rest of the world grows in direct proportion to the extent of our drift from the moorings of realism. As Andrew Bacevich put the matter, realismcounsels modesty of purpose and an acute sensitivity to the prospect of unintended consequences. For realists, the notion that globalization (according to Bill Clinton, channeling the neoliberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman) will produce global harmony or that American assertiveness (according to George W. Bush, channeling Bill Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard) will "transform" the Greater Middle East is pure folly. Americans, wrote Niebuhr in his book "The Irony of American History" (1952), fancy themselves to be "tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection." But the huma Read more:Realism
, Please
The Heroic Mr. Derbyshire 2007-12-11 23:26:00 It's official. Derb throws in with Ron.Jonah: I have pretty much decided for Ron Paul myself. I am sympathetic to many of the reservations you have posted, but every piece of serious policy analysis I read confirms to me that our country has gone too far down a wrong path—a path that leads to nothing I recognize as conservatism. ... As for the notion, which I admit I settled on in my July piece, that there is no way Paul could win: Well, possibly so, but Paul is good enough, and his ideas are good enough — and close enough to Buckley-Goldwater conservatism—that those of us who cleave to that conservatism ought to take the wonderful opportunity offered by a presidential campaign to help promote them to the electorate.If you think that our efforts against jihadist terrorism constitute World War Four (I don't), you will not want Ron Paul for president... If you think there would be a whole world of difference between what Hillary Clinton would accomplish in the Rome-of-the-Borgias Read more:Heroic
, Derbyshire
Why Derb is Backing Ron Paul 2007-12-20 13:02:00 He lays it down at NRO. A wonderfully written piece, as is to be expected. Every line is a must-read, but here's a summing-up snippet:Are those [Ron Paul] supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood ("Press one for English …"), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I'm for liberty, too. That's why I'm for Ron Paul. And why do we have 75,000 soldiers in Germany?Bravo! Read more:Backing
McCain's Korea Scenario for Iraq 2007-12-20 10:21:00 Andrew Sullivan, following his endorsement of Ron Paul, has posted a few letters from dissenting readers. One of them makes the case for McCain
, citing the Iraq
war issue:"His [McCain's] goal is to leave Iraq with a functioning government and the ability to defend itself after the departure of American troops."'Winning' has been redefined in terms of how best to get out. The reader above cautions against a hasty withdrawal, insisting that we mustn't turn our back on Iraq until the government we have installed is working and proves viable.In my view this a fool's errand. In Iraq the Arab-Islamic identity and sectarian divides are so deeply embedded that the idea that a secular, Western-style democracy installed by an outside power widely viewed with suspicion will be able to function on its own anytime soon is very nearly laughable. As with the Karzai government in Afghanistan, the only way it can continue will be with a sustained U.S. military presence - in other words as a prefe Read more:Korea
Third Place in Iowa 2007-12-19 17:37:00 It's been the Huckabee and Romney show in Iowa, but pay attention to the third place slot. Ron Paul, at 8%, is currently in a virtual 3-way tie for third with Giuliani (8%) and Thompson (9%) according to today's Washington Post-ABC News poll. A strong third place finish in Iowa would mean a lot for the campaign's momentum heading into the other early primaries. Bet you won't hear that from the dinosaur media.(Hat tip: Eric Garris) Read more:Place
Huckabee and "The Cross" 2007-12-19 09:50:00 File this under "Don't Much Care, but Sliminess is Interesting". I watched the video as well as the clip of Huck's smirking denial of intent, which strikes me as supremely disingenuous. I'm a film school grad with cinematography experience. The edges of that bookshelf were obviously intentionally lit. They were brighter than the dark blob of a Christmas tree which provides the contrast, while the rest of the background was given a dimmer and more diffuse light as is typical. You can't tell me that was an accident in the framing of the shot. A more natural and less obtrusive choice would have been to bounce a little fill light onto the shelf from below, which would have much lessened the cross effect.Make of it what you will, but I think the Huckster has struck again. I don't believe his denial any more than I believe his ridiculous assurance in the video of its unpolitical nature. Read more:Cross
, Huckabee
One Third of Republicans Favor Troop Withdrawal 2007-12-17 19:37:00 That's according to a Pew Research study, which finds that while most acknowledge that the surge has managed so far to appreciably suppress sectarian and insurgent violence, many do not see a compelling reason to continue our present military commitments there.Two-thirds of Republicans
(67%) currently favor maintaining troops in Iraq, little change from February (71%). Just 39% of independents and 21% of Democrats want to keep troops in Iraq.If these numbers are accurate, it adds another reason to be skeptical about the data we keep seeing from old-fashioned telephone polls that rank candidates. That 33% bloc of Republicans not in favor of maintaining troops in Iraq have only one candidate to turn to if they intend to vote in the GOP primaries.And let's not kid ourselves. If Republicans are to have a prayer in the general election the party will need to court Democrats as well as independents. Playing solely to the base will ensure a defeat. And yet apart from Ron Paul, all the othe Read more:Troop
Arguments from Authority 2007-12-17 09:12:00 "Ron Paul Breaks Records but Still Fringe (They Tell Me)"You knew they'd come, didn't you? The headlines and comments that wonder at Paul's fundraising feat while at the same time repeating the claims of "those who know" that he has no chance to win. To many, especially the Guy Smileys of the world, these hack opinion-makers are the only barometer of what is possible and what isn't, what is credible, and so forth.But as I cruise the news sites and blogs this morning I find reason to be hopeful. It's no longer easy to relegate Paul to the margins. He is breaking through the barriers set by political operatives and dinosaur journalists.And you know what? Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic Online just officially endorsed Paul. He joins John Derbyshire and David Freddoso at National Review Online. I personally couldn't be happier with that lineup.Maybe Pat Buchanan will be the next to make it official?From Sully's post this morning:I do not believe that an endless military, economic a Read more:Authority
Amazing Success 2007-12-17 00:50:00 $6.4 million is the number I've seen mentioned most often. One thing is for sure, we handily smashed the previous record for donations in a single day. And the money continues to stream in, bringing us closer to the $20 million mark.And 25,000 new donors. We are breaking through.Congratulations to everyone involved. What a day for liberty! Read more:Success
, Amazing
These Millions Are Different 2007-12-16 19:19:00 Over 45,000 60,000 donors have contributed to the Ron Paul campaign today. These are just everyday individuals—no PACs, no lobbies or special interests...just regular people. The significance of this must be recognized. As James Ostrowski noted earlier:When they start spinning this record-breaking day as "it's just money," we need to remind them that a small army of citizens who seek nothing specifically for themselves are beating the special interest bundlers who donate expecting huge payoffs at the expense of the people.Ron Paul is generating big league money, but not in the way other, "establishment" candidates get that kind of dough, by pandering and peddling favors. There are no liens on Ron Paul's soul, and no expectations of cozy deals. It really says something about the quality and durability of his support.
The Unthinkable is Within Reach 2007-12-16 14:16:00 As the Ron Paul campaign crosses a 4th Quarter total of $15 million, it's time to move the goalposts up. We can make it to $20 million. It may have seemed unthinkable before, but it is within our reach now. We've got to dig deep. There will never—NEVER—be another opportunity like this in our lifetimes. Today is the day to give everything you've got to a cause that towers above all others. We are on the right side of history, which will tell the story to future generations of a people who turned away from imperialism, from authoritarianism, from fraudulent economics and from senseless warmongering.60,000 people donating $150 each today will make the new fundraising goal a reality. So far we've had 30,000 donors. If every one of us could manage to donate $300, we'd already be there. So let us reach down and give the maximum amount that we can possibly spare, right here, right now, to drive the cause of liberty and peace as high as it can go. If you have already donated, you hav Read more:Reach
The Accelerating Bomb 2007-12-16 12:43:00 So here's where I start checking the velocity of donations. In the last four minutes the campaign took in $20,651. That's a rate of...wait for it...$5,163 per minute. That's nearly $2,000 more per minute than the best rates that I saw at this time on November 5th.In the time it took to write this and eat some cereal (14 minutes), we raised another $79,423. That brings us up to $5,673 per minute.Astonishing stuff, folks. Keep it up!
Paul to Meet the Press 2007-12-16 11:42:00 Tim Russert, having churned through all the cookie cutter candidates, finally extends an invite to the one person in this election cycle who is generating real energy and enthusiasm across the country. I guess in today's light it's impossible to continue pretending that Ron Paul doesn't exist. Read more:Press
Ready for Launch 2007-12-16 05:15:00 Well, we just ran up the first million dollars during the flattest part of the curve, the wee small hours. Now we're going to see it really start to take off.3...2...1...Ignition. Read more:Launch
Ron Paul's Money Nuke 2007-12-16 01:38:00 We are, as expected, obliterating the previous mark we set last month. Thusfar the number of contributors and the donation totals have more than doubled compared to November 5th. I will make a bold prediction, which I've made elsewhere just minutes into the day:I believe we will cross the $9 million mark for this event.I believe we will have 60,000 to 70,000 total contributors.I believe this will become a story like no other in modern political history. Read more:Money
, Ron Paul
Maximum Overload 2007-12-15 23:11:00 I think the Ron Paul Graphs server just crashed from the traffic! Read more:Maximum
The Secret to the Ron Paul Phenomenon 2007-12-15 19:42:00 Pay attention, all you politicians and campaign managers who yearn to discover the secret to building Paulian-level support (yes, I predict a future adjective in the making). I will share the secret with you, but first the bad news: You may as well forget it because it can't be done.Let me say that again. It can't be done. It can't be created or made to happen. It only happens spontaneously when a certain precondition exists.What's the precondition, you ask? That's the "secret".While I admire his modesty, I will disagree with Paul when he says that people are just responding to the message...though that's certainly an important part of it. It's also, and primarily, the character of the person involved. It's who you are—or more to the point, who you've been. The sort of man that Ron Paul is is unique in the contemporary political scene, and that is what droves of people are responding to. The politician or campaign staff hoping to generate a similar grassroots phenomenon nee Read more:Phenomenon
Comedy 2007-12-15 12:45:00 Bush Urges Syria to Stop Interfering in Lebanon."Like the many victims before him, General al-Hajj was a supporter of Lebanon's independence and an opponent of Syria's interference in Lebanon's internal affairs," Bush said.(Reuters)The Decider is also The Interferer, and don't you make him come over there! Read more:Comedy
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