Kentucky Pro-Lifers Accuse Rand Paul of Faking His ‘100%’ Pro-Life Credentials

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Press release from Kentucky Right to Life:

In a recent fund raising letter from the Rand Paul U.S. Senate Campaign, Rand Paul claims that he “scored 100%” on the Kentucky Right to Life PAC pro-life survey.
Rand Paul filled out, signed and faxed the KRLA PAC survey to the KRLA PAC office on February 11th at 10:29 am. Rand Paul did not score 100% on the questionnaire.
This is one reason why Rand Paul was not eligible for the Kentucky Right to Life PAC Endorsement for the U.S. Senate seat.

KRL-PAC provides documentation that Paul omitted an answer to one of the questions on the survey. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports:

In a recent fund raising letter from the Rand Paul U.S. Senate Campaign, Rand Paul claims that he “scored 100%” on the Kentucky Right to Life PAC pro-life survey.
Kentucky Right to Life is the largest pro-life group in the state. In February, its PAC endorsed Secretary of State Trey Grayson of Boone County in the Republican U.S. Senate primary.
“Trey Grayson has always been 100 percent pro-life. He’s demonstrated it by being chairman of the board of the pro-life New Hope Center” in Crestview Hills, said PAC Treasurer Susan Kenney.
She said PAC had concerns with statements Paul has made about the morning-after pill and a claim that he “probably would” support a ban on partial birth abortion.

(Hat-tip: Lisa Graas.) Meanwhile, Sarah Palin appears in Paul’s new TV commercial:

And to be “fair and balanced,” here’s an ad for Paul’s GOP primary opponent, Trey Grayson:

KENTUCKY SENATE: KEY RACE ROUNDUP

The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Yes, friends, I’m talking about . . . heterophobia:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz, of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.
“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”
Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.
“That kind of taunting is going to make it more difficult for closeted members of the LGBT community to be comfortable with themselves,” Kravitz said. “It’s damaging.”

VOTE KRAVITZ: Because He’s Not as Gay as Charlie Crist!

What Kind of Totalitarian A–hole Would Object to ‘Downfall’ YouTube Parodies?

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If you guessed “Hitler,” you’re a winner:

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason‘s Hit & Run:

The thousand-year reich of Downfall parodies has ended in ruins. Constantin Films, the German producer of the 2004 film Der Untergang, has compelled YouTube to start taking down the popular Hitler-rants-about-funny-thing-X clips. . . .
The 4.3 million-view original, in which Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live, has been replaced by the notice: “This video contains content from Constantin Film, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” A quick search of YouTube shows that many others have vanished. . . .
The legal merits of Constantin’s argument are clear: They do not exist. Downfall parodies take less than four minutes of a 156-minute film . . .
Not that that will matter. The issue is YouTube’s kneejerk takedowns. The site is free to do what it likes . . . it’s not like there’s some inalienable right to run your content there. Still, the use of immediate takedowns is a blunt instrument that YouTube and its owner Google will, I hope, learn to refine in the future.

YouTube: Obeying Der Fuhrer Since 2010

(Hat-tips: Instapundit and Memeorandum.)

PREVIOUSLY:

Republicans for Arlen Specter*

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* – Offer expires 5/19/2010.

Attention, members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve got an unanticipated problem developing in Pennsylvania, where the long-awaited Arlen Specter meltdown appears to be beginning prematurely.

A recent poll by Rasmussen shows that Joe Sestak has now closed to within the margin of error in his Democratic primary race with Specter, and another recent poll — which found Specter still leading 42% to 28% over Sestak, with 26% undecided — summarized the results this way:

Typically, long-term incumbents with support in the low forty percent range are thought to be vulnerable, which means that Sestak still has an opportunity to pull off an upset if he is able to raise enough money to communicate a message.

A Sestak victory in the May 18 Democratic primary must be prevented. Of course, the VRWC has no love for Specter — if he got run over by a D.C. Metro bus tomorrow, we’d send flowers to the bus driver — but a Sestak primary victory would foil our carefully orchestrated Pennsylvania Plan, which has been spectacularly successful so far:

  • April 2009 – Looking at polls showing him losing GOP primary to Pat Toomey, geriatric crapweasel Specter opportunistically decides to change to Democratic Party.
  • May 2009-May 2010 – Geriatric crapweasel Specter soaks up all the money and media coverage, killing the dreams of an up-and-coming Democratic challenger, and wins the May 18 primary.
  • June-November 2010 — Haunted by his well-deserved reputation for unprincipled opportunism, geriatric crapweasel Specter sinks steadily in polls, loses general election to conservative Republican Pat Toomey in a landslide.

All of the VRWC’s nefarious scheming will be for naught, if up-and-coming challenger Sestak wins the May 18 Democratic primary. And there’s a real danger that could happen, because Specter’s negative TV ad campaign against Sestak appears to be backfiring:

A congressman and retired Navy vice admiral who is challenging Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic primary election is accusing the fifth-term senator of using “Swift Boat”-style attack tactics in an ad that suggests the Navy fired him.
U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak on Wednesday released a list of former Navy officers who support him while a group of veterans held a news conference in suburban Philadelphia calling on Specter to remove the ad.
In an e-mail to veterans, the Sestak campaign called the ad “baseless” and compared it to the attacks mounted in 2004 by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which sought to tarnish Sen. John Kerry in his challenge to President George W. Bush.
The ad, which first aired Tuesday, begins with a narrator saying, “Joe Sestak, relieved of duty in the Navy for creating a poor command climate” — a term for morale — then criticizes Sestak for missing votes in Congress last year.

Democratic primary voters react like Pavlov’s dog to the phrase “Swift Boat,” and this could create a sympathy backlash that helps Sestak. Therefore, the VRWC is issuing an alert to all Pennsylvania Republicans, calling on them to pull out all the stops to ensure that Specter wins the primary, so that he can get his geriatric crapweasel butt stomped by Toomey on Nov. 2. Here’s an anti-Sestak ad that all VRWC bloggers should post on their sites:

.

VOTE FOR ARLEN SPECTER MAY 18!
Because We Don’t Want That Vicious Bastard to Lose . . . Yet

BTW, I remind readers that I live just south of the Pennsylvania border — it’s about an hour-and-a-half drive to Harrisburg from my house — and may be able to go do some Pennsylvania primary campaign coverage in the next few weeks, if you’ll contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund.

Social Security Is Popular?

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by Smitty (h/t Insty)

Legal hero Randy Barnett has a couple of clips discussing ObamaCare’s Constitutionality.

He makes the claim that Social Security is popular at the end of the second clip. With whom? Lots of people are cigarette smokers, and I submit that the godforsaken Ponzi scheme that is Social Security is popular, relatively speaking, compared to reform the way avoiding withdrawal symptoms is to breaking the nicotine shackles.

This Congress and Administration’s morbid fascination with policy that has such a proven lousy track record, e.g. the VAT, also continues to astound. There is some political Eye of the Beholder mechanism at work.

James Manzi Will Regret This But Once, and That Will Be Continuously

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He has written a very dismissive attack on Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny. Levin will surely respond, as always, with overwhelming rhetorical force.

Manzi focuses his attack on Levin’s chapter about anthropogenic global warming (AGW), a topic on which Manzi considers himself something of a lay expert. While I have no personal quarrel with Manzi and have no interest in a detailed discussion of the scientific issues involved, let me explain the basis of my skepticism toward the climate-change alarmists, as I am sure many other conservatives share the same perspective.

In its basic outlines, the AGW panic combines the motifs of several previous liberal fear crusades, especially Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” scare of the late 1960s and the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and ’80s. There is a distinct element of Malthusianism at the root of it, as well as the kind of transparent prejudice against Western capitalist society that motivated those who marched for a (unilateral) “nuclear freeze” and those who chained themselves to the gates at the Diablo Canyon project.

Ever since global-warming theory became a political controversy — in the 1997 ratification fight over the Kyoto Protocol — I have dismissed AGW as merely the latest manifestation of the same anti-Western doom-and-gloom hokum that liberals have peddled so often in my lifetime. That this gut-hunch reaction is not scientific, I readily admit, but I am one of those “men of untaught feelings” of whom Edmund Burke spoke, and have never subscribed to the Temple Cult of Scientism.

Furthermore, I have a stubborn resistance to bandwagon arguments cloaked in the trappings of prestige: “How can anyone possibly disagree with so many sophisticated experts?”

When the facts are clear and the logic is sound, there is no need to invoke prestige, and therefore whenever I hear such an argument, I instinctively suspect a scam is being perpetrated. Judging from the revelations at East Anglia, that suspicion was well-founded as regards AGW.

If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is, and AGW theory was — from the perspective of environmentalists — far too good to be true. So I think we can safely predict two things:

  • The entire pseudo-scientific edifice of AGW theory will eventually be proven utterly false; and
  • Mark Levin will soon pile onto Jim Manzi with a frightening ferocity.

“Epistemic closure,” and all that.

Why The Sudden Bi-Partisan Financial Regulation Interest?

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by Smitty

After the economic stun-ulus, auto takeover and the ObamaCare fiasco, the default position amongst conservatives is that the 111th Congress couldn’t lead two nuns in one minute of silent prayer. Now the Senate is setting about considering Wall Street regulation, to howls of derisive laughter, combined with angst at the economic sodomy to follow.

The National Review’s Daniel Foster points to the weakening of the GOP on Wall Street Reform:

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) crossed the aisle today, and voted with all 12 Democrats on the Senate Agriculture Committee to send sweeping new derivatives regulation to the Senate floor, where it will be merged with the Dodd bill as part of the Democrats’ far-ranging effort to reshape Wall Street.
Grassley breaking-of-rank is the latest in a series of signs that Senate Republicans are softening their tone on the Democrats’ financial reform bill, and that Democrats, for their part, seem willing to negotiate.
The change in tone was reflected in remarks by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), who said he was “heartened to hear that bipartisan talks have resumed in earnest,” and later told reporters he is “convinced now there is a new element of seriousness attached to” negotiations to iron out differences in the bill.

No Quarter falls short of enthusiastic:”Just Another Dog and Pony Reform Show”

. . .you might want to know that there is a sizable group of economic experts and even democratic supporters who think that what is being offered is at best a half measure that falls far short of what is needed to prevent another financial crisis.

Many quotes and links to Real News clips at No Quarter.

Charles Krauthammer’s realpolitik modeling tool must be fully charged:

The point is everybody understands if the financial system is at risk, if a major institution is about to drag the rest down, the feds will intervene no matter what is in the bill or no matter what anybody says today. The text of the bill is irrelevant. It happened in ’08 and no government will allow the collapse of the banking system.
So it’s because of our recent history that everybody understands a bailout will happen one way or the other. So I think all of this arguing over the details is really a matter of positioning. . . .
This is all about the elections, upcoming elections. Obama wants a narrative where he says: Yes, I haven’t attacked unemployment, but I gave you health care and I’m attacking Wall Street. It’s a winning hand. The Republicans ought to settle, get it over with, and put it behind them.

It is only a winning hand as long as people are ignorant of what a sham the whole Goldman Sachs situation is.

Tangential surprise, from Gateway Pundit:
“White House: President Obama WILL NOT Return $1 Million in Donations From Goldman Sachs”

And who else besides the POTUS accidentally benefits immensely?
William Jacobson introduces “Senator Hedge Fund”:

Now Schumer is holding himself out as a leader in the effort to reform Wall Street as part of the effort by Democrats to raise a populist argument in the run-up to the November elections.
Expect Schumer publicly to treat his former Wall Street friends the way he treated a flight attendant, now that the spotlight is on the money shoved deep into his and other Democrats’ pockets for years.
Privately, Schumer will see to it that the “reforms” are for show only, so that he can go back to the Wall Street fundraising well again and again and again.

Speaking of what a farce the reform is, getting to the heart of the title, Jonah Goldberg had this bit from a reader, pursuant to the unprecedented Goldman Sachs fraud case that unexpectedly dropped in time to help generate a good crisis soundtrack for the legislative rollout:

Goldman is NOT being thrown under the bus. This is a rope-a-dope scam and Goldman is in on it. A politically divided SEC has brought a very weak case that will never see a court room. It will be settled with a wrist-slap. In return for being made the whipping boy — which Goldman is very used to and even thrives on — it will get a “regulation” bill that enshrines too-big-to-fail status upon it and which will give it the same competitive advantages that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enjoyed. That is, an implicit taxpayer guarantee. It will then be able to borrow at lower rates and engage in riskier behavior at a lower cost. Meanwhile, smaller competitors will not enjoy this advantage, thereby making Goldman even more powerful and profitable.
Don’t buy the spin on this. Obama is not throwing Goldman under the bus. Goldman willingly jumped and will receive a huge payoff for its “sacrifice.” But the rest of us will pay. This is all a political scam from start to finish.

Overall, no good can come from fewer bureaucrats affecting more money with less accountability amidst denser thickets of legislation.

After some scratching about, here is the current version. A mere 357 pages, a financial magnum between the eyes.

The fact that there is real cash money, and not mere rhetoric on the line seems like it’s making the GOP go wobbly. Pay attention, you RINO knobs: the Tea Party will pillory you if you go reaching for the 30 pieces of silver.

Update: via Insty, Prof. Bainbridge has more on the Goldman Sachs case causing the good crisis that will let Congress do things it otherwise might lack justification to do.  Or something.

Take a Chill Pill, Phil

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My friend Philip Klein of the American Spectator goes into Eeyore mode over the prospect of a three-way Florida Senate election with “independent” Charlie Crist:

Yet, while a Quinnipiac poll taken last week found that he trailed Marco Rubio by 23 points in the primary, it also found that in a general election, Crist leads Rubio by a narrow 32 percent to 30 percent margin, with Democrat Kendrick Meek at 24 percent.
So, yes, it is true that Crist’s independent run would encounter obstacles. But it’s at least plausible that he can win, whereas if he stays in the Republican primary or drops out of the race altogether, he’s virtually assured to be out of public office come January.

Yes, Phil, and in June 2009 Quinnipiac showed Charlie Crist beating Rubio 54-23.

So Crist has gone from +31 to -23 in the span of 10 months. Why? Because Marco Rubio is an appealing young conservative and Charlie Crist is a washed-up, two-faced, backstabbing crapweasel. The more voters got to know Rubio, the more they liked him, and the more they got to know Sorry Charlie . . . eh, not so much.

Excuse me for going into my “I’ve Got Ties Older Than You, Kid” curmudgeon routine, but you kids have got to stop buying into this intellectual nonsense that politics is about polls and trends.

Politics is about people. Those political phenomena that appear from the bird’s-eye view as indomitable “trends” are, in fact the results of human activity — the various efforts of innumerable individuals.

Men make trends, and not the other way around. To believe otherwise is to concede the game before it begins, to surrender to anomie and apathy, drifting along without purpose or direction, helpless and inert. If Scott Brown had taken that attitude, Martha Coakley would be a senator today.

“I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”
— Ronald Reagan, Jan. 20, 1981

During the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness, the Confederates made a night attack that scattered a couple of brigades in Sedgewick’s division on the right flank, and a panic-stricken officer reported to U.S. Grant that all was lost. Lee was surely going to cut off their line of supply and put them in a trap, the officer declared.

Grant exploded. He was sick and tired of hearing what Lee was going to do, he said. “Some of you always seem to think he is suddenly going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both flanks at the same time.” To the panicky officer, Grant ordered: “Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do!”

That’s exactly what the problem is with all this doom-and-gloom worry-wart attitude about polls and trends. If you start letting yourself be panicked by polls, it leads to political paralysis. 

A poll is not a prediction. It’s nothing but the measurement of opinion at any given time. Good candidates and good campaigns actually change people’s opinions.

For several weeks now, Crist has been running a desperate smear campaign against Rubio — honestly, does anybody think this IRS investigation story is a coincidence? — and the only real effect has been the final destruction of Crist’s credibility. Crist himself is as likely as anyone to be burned by Jim Greer’s Florida GOP scandal:

Gov. Charlie Crist has moved swiftly in the last few weeks to distance himself from the widening scandal engulfing his hand-picked state GOP chairman. . . .
According to hotel invoice records obtained by the Orlando Sentinel, Crist, along with his much of his traveling entourage (former chief of staff George LeMieux, former general counsel Jason Gonzalez, former communications director Erin Isaac, and others), stayed at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in early January 2009.
The event: Jim Greer’s re-election as chairman of the Republican Party of Florida.
Who picked up the check? Greer and Delmar Johnson, who charged the $26,000 tab for Crist’s presidential suite, along with the other rooms, VIP valet parking, restaurants, mini-bar tabs, in-room movies and meals.

“Crist’s presidential suite” — ain’t that a kick in the head?

Victory seldom goes to those who are paralyzed by the fear of losing. So stop worrying about what the Quinnipiac poll says in April and start thinking about what Marco Rubio’s going to say in his victory speech on the evening of Nov. 2.

MARCO RUBIO for U.S. SENATE