- Is it possible that Michele Bachmann won’t make it to the Iowa Caucuses?

- Ron Paul’s influence is evident in answers from Perry (Military adventurism),  Huntsman (bring troops home from Afghanistan), Bachmann ( Reagan’s spending reduction/tax increase trade), Romney (Bernanke criticism) and Gingrich (Fed audit, Bernanke).

- We’ve enjoyed Cain and Gingrich. But they’re not adding much to the debate at this point, particularly Cain. Isn’t it time for them to relinquish the stage so that the candidates with numbers and money can debate more?

- In fairness, let him have a little more time since he hasn’t been in the race very long. But shortly we can ask the same question of Huntsman.

- Santorum is a social conservative in an election about fiscal conservatism.

- Perry will fade. His bravado already grates. And his baggage is unknown. When people learn, and gasp about, his less attractive history/votes/actions he’ll slide.

- Romney’s baggage is well known. He has problems with Romneycare, but nothing new. That’s one of the reasons he’ll become the front runner again. And that’s why he wasn’t hurt much tonight.

- Ron Paul remains on the cutting edge of the issues. I think this primary will go long and Romney and Paul will be the final two standing. Should be fun to watch.

- Hey, maybe even California will matter this year…

Senator could benefit from the Tea Party seeds his dad planted

Rep. Ron Paul’s 2012 headway could pave the path for a future Sen. Rand Paul presidential run. And since the younger Paul hinted earlier this year that he would consider a 2012 bid but wouldn’t compete against his father, a run could come as soon as 2016, if Obama wins next year, or 2020, if a Republican other than Ron Paul wins.

The elder Paul’s campaign has seen an uptick in success so far compared with his showing in the 2008 race. He came in second in the straw poll in Ames, Iowa, this month, a jump up from his fifth-place finish in 2007. He’s polling in the double digits in some national polls, including 12 percent in a CNN/Opinion Research poll and 14 percent in a USA Today/Gallup poll. And a recent Gallup poll shows he’d fare well against Obama were the election held today—45 percent said they’d choose him over the incumbent, compared to 47 percent who preferred Obama. Despite these gains, many pundits and political strategists still view a Paul nomination as a long shot, though of course surprises happen.

But since the 12-term congressman is all about his long-held libertarian principles, the Paul campaign is definitely succeeding at keeping those philosophies in the spotlight. Insiders and Paul watchers say the father and son are very similar, though not in lockstep on every issue, so this attention could bode well for Rand Paul if he decides to run in the future.

And a well-known family name goes a long way in politics. “Obviously, the more attention Ron Paul gets, the more people will also notice Rand Paul,” points out David Boaz, executive vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Boaz emphasizes that it is too early to know whether freshman Rand Paul will succeed in the Senate—he’s been there less than a year—or what the political world will look like by 2016 or 2020. But he suspects the younger Paul could have a better chance than the elder if he decides to dip his feet in a presidential race, particularly since he has already won a statewide campaign, while his father’s wins so far have been in a relatively safe congressional district. “People have a sense that Rand Paul has rounder edges than his father,” Boaz says, adding that the younger Paul has picked his battles, focusing mostly on the deficit and federal spending. Like his father, he has advocated auditing the Federal Reserve, but the elder Paul has also called for an end to the Fed altogether. “He is going to be perceived as closer to the center of the Republican Party than his father has been.”

Also, the Senate is traditionally a much stronger place from which to run than the House, where Ron Paul has spent 12 terms.

Ron Paul’s campaign keeps relevant donors and activists engaged and ready, perhaps, to shift their focus onto his son if the time comes. Paul’s 2012 campaign chairman Jesse Benton, who is also married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter (Rand Paul’s niece), says he already sees a shared base forming between the two. “One thing that Ron and Rand share very, very deeply is that they are very, very sincere, very, very serious, and very, very honest,” he says. “I think that’s something that Ron’s core base of supporters have embraced and will continue to embrace out of Rand.”

Ron Paul supporter John Dennis, a member of San Francisco’s GOP Central Committee who ran against Rep. Nancy Pelosi in 2010, says he would support a future Rand Paul run, as long as the younger Paul doesn’t surprise him by supporting something Dennis is “shockingly against.” He believes a lot of other Ron Paulites would feel the same, though perhaps not with as much passion and intensity as they support the elder Paul. “But then,” he adds, “Rand will pick up support from ordinary Republicans that Ron might not, sort of the typical Republican that Ron would never get” because of some views still considered outside the mainstream.

Benton indicates the younger Paul is not waiting in the wings, biding his time for a presidential run. But like his father, Benton says, Rand Paul cares deeply about fighting for what he believes can fix the nation’s problems. “Rand is going to make sure, whether it’s in 2012, 2016, or 2020, that he is helping to provide leadership both in Kentucky and across the country in the United States Senate … to help right our ship and do the right things,” Benton says. “That could be in several different roles, and he would never close the door to that being a candidate for president himself.”

Of course, any talk about 2016, or any future presidential race, is pure speculation at this point. No one knows if the economy will still be in the doldrums, and no one knows what the state of the national debt and deficit will be between now and then. And, of course, no one knows whether or not President Obama will be re-elected.

But David Keating, executive director of Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative political action committee that has been involved with the Tea Party, says Rand Paul has another challenge that starts now, one Keating says will distinguish him from how his father is sometimes viewed: “If he’s interested in running for president someday, he’s going to have to prove himself to be not only a principled legislator, but an effective legislator.”

Ron Paul was the intellectual father of the Tea Party, but Rand Paul rode the movement’s wave to a 2010 Kentucky victory. If the pendulum of the political climate continues to swing toward an anti-government-spending mood, and if the younger Paul is seen as a successful senator, he could ride that wave even farther.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2011/08/16/is-ron-paul-a-fringe-candidate

But as important as the academic minutia, at least as far as the common people are concerned, is the basic logic of it all. Paul Krugman, the most prominent and widely read of the crude Keynesian persuasion, has in the last several years taken the simplified lessons of his school of thought and run with them without any nuance or qualification. Unlike most left-liberals who at least have the good sense to expect the Iraq war started by Bush and continued by Obama to be an expensive endeavor that signifies a net cost to the U.S. economy, Krugman would have none of this. In January 2008 he had this to say:

“I yield to nobody in my outrage over the way we were lied into a disastrous, unnecessary war. But economics isn’t a morality play, in which evil deeds are always punished and good deeds rewarded.

“The fact is that war is, in general, expansionary for the economy, at least in the short run. World War II, remember, ended the Great Depression. The $10 billion or so we’re spending each month in Iraq mainly goes to US-produced goods and services, which means that the war is actually supporting demand. Yes, there would be infinitely better ways to spend the money. But at a time when a shortfall of demand is the problem, the Iraq war nonetheless acts as a sort of WPA, supporting employment directly and indirectly.”

Good grief! I guess we shouldn’t expect much more from the man who repeatedly in 2002 called on Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, to pump more credit into real estate, to “create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble” — only later to try to claim this is not at all what he said. This is also the man who claims the Obama administration has been typified by “austerity spending” and whose failed predictions never seem to deter him in making new ones. And this is also the man who last week essentially blamed the ongoing recession on Standard & Poor’s.

Yet his fundamental point, that spending drives economic growth, an even a war as bloated as World War II or as senseless as Iraq is overall a blessing for the economy, has long frustrated free-marketers who argued, somewhat satirically but also seriously, that the reductio absurdum of this would be that a purely destructive war against an imaginary enemy would also be productive—that building trillions of dollars worth of ships and sending them out in the middle of the ocean and sinking them without killing anyone, would be a huge boon to the economy. As it turns out, Krugman himself would probably agree with this, as he has now argued that fighting off a space invasion would bring us out of the recession, even if it turned out the alien threat was imaginary. Has Krugman finally jumped the shark? Or will his readers still afford him maximum respect? Only time will tell.

We hear this all the time about Christian conservatives, and it’s almost clever. The only problem is, the author of the article is being very inconsistent. You see, she also criticizes Perry for misusing his office stationary “to promote a particular religion.” More to the point, many other liberals argue that conservatives wishing to ban abortion or prohibit gay marriage are imposing Christian values through the state.

They make a valid point – but I thought that Townsend, and many religious folks of the left, believe that giving to the poor was a divine mandate, one that should be carried out through government? Why is imposing social values of charity through the state a virtue, whereas imposing social values concerning sexual and family questions through the state a matter of theocracy?

In fact, many conservatives as well as liberals miss the boat on religion and government. It is best for them to be separated as much as possible, which surely means that to the extent conservatives should not look to the government to enforce family values through government, so too should liberals look elsewhere as it concerns helping the poor.

Government is an institution of force, a social monopoly that is poorly situated for either charitable giving or moral leadership. Using violence to achieve one’s religious ends is a problem, not just because the particular mixture of religion and politics is poisonous, but because anything mixed with government coercion is at risk of being contaminated.

Whether people want to help the poor for secular or religious reasons, government is a disastrous way to do it. Whether people seek to promote conservative values for spiritual or purely humanist reasons, this too is a dangerous goal to attempt to achieve through the state.

The problem is government itself – not necessarily the religious or secular values involved. If cultural conservatives want to promote chastity, if liberals want to promote charity, they will find more acceptance for their mission if they do so outside the coercive apparatus of government. Indeed, studies then do show that conservatives support charity voluntarily as much as liberal voters, and liberals keep their families together about as well as conservative voters do.

Does Christianity teach its adherents to give to the poor and live life of piety? Yes. But when the state gets involved, we have conflict, societal nightmares, and the goals left unachieved.

We are supposed to avoid discussing both politics and religion in polite company, although few topics are more important to grasp to the flourishing of humanity. In all the liberal spite hurled at conservatives every election cycle over their religion – and all the hostility that is hurled right back at liberals for their supposed lack of faith – what is often lost is the answer to all these tensions is to be found in liberty. A government that doesn’t impose the same public schools on everyone has no need to politicize the argument over evolution or sex ed or prayer in schools. A government that is not so involved in foreign squabbles is not going to spark as much controversy concerning domestic Muslims, Jews, and Christians. A state that stays out of religion leads to peace among those of different faiths. America’s relatively strong tradition of tolerance and religious liberty is the precise reason why this country, unlike most of the Old World, has been relatively free of religious wars and brutalities.

Ames, Iowa — Lost in Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Ames Straw Poll was that she only won by 152 votes over Rep. Ron Paul.

Team Paul bused in Iowans from every county and their get-out-the-vote effort was fueled by 2,500 phoone banks from around the country — including one that’s been going for three or four months in San Francisco.

Caught up with John Dennis, a Republican who ran against Rep. Nancy Pelosi last year and is a member of the GOP Central Committee. Here’s John, live from Ames, breaking down the Paul effort:”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=95346#ixzz1V840IDO6

Ames, Iowa — Lost in Michele Bachmann’s victory in the Ames Straw Poll was that she only won by 152 votes over Rep. Ron Paul.

Team Paul bused in Iowans from every county and their get-out-the-vote effort was fueled by 2,500 phoone banks from around the country — including one that’s been going for three or four months in San Francisco.

Caught up with John Dennis, a Republican who ran against Rep. Nancy Pelosi last year and is a member of the GOP Central Committee. Here’s John, live from Ames, breaking down the Paul effort:”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=95346#ixzz1V23wN2ZI

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=95346

Mock the people who go to events like Ames if you will. But these folks have a disproportionate influence on selecting presidents, even if they spent the day before at the Iowa State Fair eating deep-fried sticks of butter.

Ames offered lots of passion and occasionally substance. I enjoyed running into people who helped my campaign last year. And I still get recognized, which is, mostly, fun.

A couple of observations (disclosure: no surprises, I support Ron Paul): Ron Paul had an impressive presence, from tents to tee shirts; Michelle Bachmann had a jumping, enthusiastic tent; Rick Santorum had a larger than expected footprint; and Herman Cain has his fans. Frankly, as badly as Pawlenty did, I’m surprised he came in third. He had supporters there in green shirts, but they seemed about the same, if not fewer, than those of Santorum.

Santorum is not my cup of tea, but this performance and his enthusiastic campaigning gives him hope. I first saw Pawlenty speak in September 2009. Didn’t get him then and still don’t. He will likely not make it to the Iowa Caucus in February. Too bad, because the longer Pawlenty is in the race the better for Ron Paul.

My father in law Jeff heard Herman Cain sing and said it was amazing. I like his speaking voice and style. His talks, though, sound more like a Tony Robbins seminar than campaign speeches: long on success formulas, short on policy. I hope he stays in the race too.

Michelle Bachmann came in first place, ahead of Ron Paul by 152 votes out of 17,000. Mrs. Bachmann’s handlers have been shielding her from contact with supporters and media. It gives the impression that she and/or her handlers are afraid of impromptu interaction.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Joe Garofoli experienced an aggressive freeze out from her staff. I saw it first hand today as Mrs. Bachmann drove by in a convoy of golf carts. She waved as she passed, like a parade float rider, lovely as can be, chased by sycophants.

I suspect her supporters will roll their eyes in a few months, wondering what they were thinking. Mrs. Bachmann strikes me as a flash in the pan. Not only is she short on original ideas, she was a tax attorney who went after taxpayers on behalf of the IRS. And she and her husband apparently couldn’t get enough usual federal money and stimulus dough for their business. Seems weird coming from a small, almost anti-government, politician.

Time will tell if I’m right and if Bachmann fades by Halloween, likely from self-inflicted damage.

Objectively, it’s clear that Ron Paul’s support is much broader now than it was before. Sitting in a crowd of non-Ron supporters at his main hall speech, I heard several begrudgingly say about one point or another “well, he’s right about that.” Talking with Ron’s supporters today, I found he converted many life long GOPers within the last year.

Will Ron Paul convince skeptical GOP voters quickly enough to capture the nomination? It will be difficult, but he will be helped by Rick Perry entering the field. Perry will siphon support from Romney and Bachmann. If Palin joins, all the better. Ron’s supporters will stand out the more the candidates fight for the “establishment” Republican votes.

The question will be, at least for me, how Dr. Paul handles the race, should it go this way, as it narrows to him and one of the other candidates. Hopefully, by then, GOP voters will see what his supporters see and learn also that Ron polls better with independent voters than any other GOP candidate. He does better with Democrats too, giving him the best chance to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.

Does anyone doubt that Ron Paul will reduce the size of government for the first time in decades, something no Republican even bothers to promise? If smaller, less intrusive government and a freer life is what you really seek, seize the opportunity. Support Ron Paul. As Ames showed today, years of consistently delivering the same message has led many Republicans to accept the man.

This devoutly anti-freedom politician made a number of claims against Iran that are very misleading or just flat out wrong. Ron had only 30 seconds to respond, and did a great job, but there is more to say.

First, Santorum says Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. Ron points out that the bad blood between Americans and Iranians began in 1953, when a CIA coup installed the Shah. Indeed, we should remember that before 1953, the Iranians tended to look very warmly upon the Americans, who, unlike the British, had left the Iranians alone. Their democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, partly for his popularity due to his resistance to British corporate imperialism, was even Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951.

Now only did the U.S. install the Shah two years later; the CIA taught his secret police force, Savak, how to torture. Savak went on to imprison and torture tens of thousands of political prisoners, adopting such practices of nearly unfathomable brutality as using broken glass and boiling water on subjects’ rectums, mutilating women’s breasts, and cooking victims alive.

After years of being ruled by this U.S.-backed regime, the Iranians overthrew the Shah and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept the nation. But, despite what the propagandists say, Iranians still did not hate Americans for our freedom—only for our government’s foreign policy. All the attempts to get Iranians angry at Americans for our culture or modernity failed, Michael Scheuer, former CIA counterterrorism expert, points out.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration illegally, in direct defiance of Congress, sold weapons to the same Iranian extremists that we are now supposed to think have always been America’s #1 enemy. Meanwhile, the same U.S. administration supported Saddam Hussein’s aggressive invasion of Iran. Iran has never conducted an outright invasion of another nation in over 200 years. It is a much more peaceful nation internationally than the United States. Its one major war in recent years was defensive, against an America-backed invasion by a regime whose atrocities in that very war were later used as partial justification for America’s aggressive invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And that war, the one with Iraq that has gone on for over eight years, greatly empowered the theocratic Iranian state as has nothing else in recent memory. The Iranians were given a huge boost in influence over the new Shiite government in Baghdad, put in place by this supposed American war for democracy. Brutal shariah law resembling that of Iran became imposed. Then, despite the freedom dominoes that were supposed to fall thanks to the Iraq war, Almadinajad won the presidency in 2005. Nothing has advanced the interests of the Iranian extremists more than the United States of America. Even so, Almadinajad has since been demonized, his bizarre rants taken out of context, and implied to have far more power over Iranian military policy than he actually does.

Second, Santorum claims that Iran has killed more Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan than have the people of those countries. This accusation of significant Iranian guilt behind the insurgent resistance to the U.S. presence has been a constant theme of U.S. propaganda throughout the occupation of Iraq, but has never been demonstrated convincingly. It is even more difficult to believe now. As Jason Ditz explains, the allegations “don’t appear to make a lot of sense at this point, with the Iraqi coalition government firmly in the control of Shi’ite religious factions and the nation on good terms with Iran. There seems little to gain from destablizing the situation.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been meddling in Iran, likely including the support of some unsavory terrorists and suicide bombers intent on destabilizing the nation.

Third, Santorum argues that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. This is simply laughable. Iran has no nuclear weapons, as far as anyone can tell, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the U.S. intelligence community, Iran hasn’t been seeking such weapons for at least eight years.

Ron Paul is correct that American belligerence toward Iran is a major concern as it could easily be a precursor to war. He is also correct, and bold to say it, when he argues that these conservatives supporting sanctions against countries like Iran (or Cuba) are fake free-traders. In fact, the very worst trade restrictions are those waged in a militarist manner or with coercive diplomacy as the goal. U.S. sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands, an atrocity that contributed to the hatred that led to 9/11. Blockades greatly exacerbated civilian deaths in World War I and helped bring about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. If goods don’t cross borders, warned Bastiat, soldiers will. Those playing with sanctions are playing with fire.

The mainstream Republicans’ belligerence toward Iran should frighten anyone who is hoping for some electoral reprieve from the Obama administration but remembers the horrors of the Bush years, and what was promised by prospective future Republican presidents. John McCain infamously sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran,” in the rhythm of the classic Beach Boys tune, forever marking himself as someone who simply couldn’t be trusted  with the nuclear launch codes. If there was one reason for any reasonable American—including conservatives—to prefer Obama in 2008, despite his promises for domestic socialism and his own weaknesses on foreign policy, it was the neocons’ obsessive hatred toward Iran that persisted and grew more feverish by the day during the Bush years. Many of them sought to destroy that country, and they seem to still want to do so. Obama has been, as Ron Paul indicates, far too belligerent, such as in his saber rattling at Iran after the non-event concerning the peaceful nuclear facility at Qom, which Iran declared according to its responsibilities under international law, despite the president’s claims that the nation was caught red-handed doing something illicit.

In short, the anti-Iran fever is still apparent in the GOP. Obama has been a disaster at least as bad as his predecessor on most important issues. Yet in politics, things can always get worse. If a man like Santorum gets the Republican nomination and wins the White House, there is no guarantee the result won’t be something that makes reasonable Americans long for the days of Bush, and Obama.