Redstate

Posted at 6:43pm on Dec. 1, 2007 Should We Question a Presidential Candidate's Religious Beliefs?

By Jonathan Rick

Those running for president are asking us them to trust them with the launch codes to the world’s most powerful and largest stockpile of nuclear weapons. Surely, then, it’s perfectly appropriate to question their judgment.

The most controversial of these questions concerns—ironically—the candidates’ most cherished beliefs, which is to say their religious convictions.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way: The candidates are running to be our president, not our priest, so whether they say grace or how often they attend church is inconsequential.

Yet since each one has professed to be a person of deeply felt faith, they have all thereby invited us to probe what that means.

Not because, as Christopher Hitchens would have it, religion is evil—from far it—but because anything—be it religion, a book or even a wife—which a candidates claims significantly informs his thinking, warrants scrutiny.

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Posted at 6:41pm on Dec. 1, 2007 On the GOP YouTube Debate

By Jonathan Rick

1. Playing Devil's advocate for a minute, why is it such a big deal that a Hillary operative got to ask the Republican candidates a question without disclosing his affiliation? Why does this render his question worthless? Should we exclude anybody who's aligned with a campaign?

2. Some of the questions were silly—the introductory song, the Bible, the Confederate flag—but I actually thought many of them were excellent: Specific, pointed and interesting.

3. Anderson did a poor job moderating: He failed to stop Rudy and Romney from monopolizing the debate's first five minutes; he allowed McCain to attack Ron Paul on foreign policy during a question about the fair tax; and, by deciding which candidates got which questions, he turned potentially hard-hitting questions into softballs (Huckabee, the former minister, on the Bible; Duncan Hunter, whom the NRA rates an A+, on gun control; Thompson, a self-declared federalist, on banning abortion at the federal level).

4. On Fred: (1) Interesting video, but surely it speaks poorly of him that he used his time to attack others instead of even mentioning—let alone touting—himself. (2) ATR documents his hypocrisy in taking an anti-amnesty pledge—during the debate—but refusing to take a no-new-taxes pledge. (3) It's inexcusable that a self-proclaimed federalist couldn't name three government programs he'd remove or reduce.

5. Why can't CNN enlarge the videos on its big screen?

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Posted at 7:14pm on Aug. 26, 2007 Questions for the Candidates

By Jonathan Rick

Here are some questions I'd like answered. As Dave Weigel observed of his queries, "It's just a list of nags that the candidates might not have talking points for. And those are the sorts of queries they should be getting every day."

1. Do you believe that only [Mormons, Baptists, Catholics, born-again Christians, etc] go to heaven? Do you believe that only [Mormons, Baptists, Catholics, born-again Christians, etc] should go to heaven?

2. Where do you get your news? Do you read a newspaper on a daily basis? If so, which one or ones?

3. Should using marijuana for medical reasons, as prescribed by a doctor, be illegal?

4. Everyone agrees that the tax code is too complex. How would you simplify it? Note: the question concerns tax reform, not tax cuts.

5. Running for president, especially in the age of YouTube, invites a massive amount of scrutiny. What aspects of a candidate's life, if any, should be private? For instance, is it appropriate to report that a candidate's children are not campaigning for him?

6. Name three things you did in your administration to increase transparency.

1. What role, if any, would you task Bill Clinton with in your administration?

2. If elected, would you send your children to private school? If so, why don't you favor school choice?

3. What is the purpose of government?

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Posted at 10:35am on Aug. 21, 2007 Barack Reagan

By Jonathan Rick

Kirk Dillard, the Republican minority whip of the Illinois state senate, illustrates the threat Obama represents to conservatives:

Obama can be to liberalism what Ronald Reagan was to conservatism, and that's a friendly face or likable personality that can move the country left.

Phil Klein, to whom Dillard gave the above quote, elaborates in a cover story for the American Spectator:

A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan not only won the presidency, he won the argument, selling a generation of Americans on the virtues of individualism and limited government. Just as Reagan's sunny optimism portrayed conservatism in its most positive light, Obama puts a happy face on liberalism.

"[He has] perfect pitch, I think, for the mood of the country, which is a flinch from the rhetorical vitriol for the mood that is consuming this town, "George Will said of Obama on ABC's This Week. "He's a little like Ronald Reagan in this regard: Reagan used to drive people crazy, in the Democratic Party, because they'd say the public doesn't agree with him on this or this or this or this, and they vote for him. They voted for him because they said we like him, he's not off putting, he's not frightening. And I think this is another 1980."

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Posted at 10:34am on Aug. 21, 2007 Quote of the Day: Huckabee on the Clintons

By Jonathan Rick

"[A] lot of the Republicans who have condemned them and talk about their platform of family values, interestingly, didn't keep their own families together. Give Bill and Hillary Clinton credit for doing something we say they should have done and that is hold their marriage together in spite of enormous trials."

—Mike Huckabee.

(Hat tip: AmSpec Blog.)

Update: "I'm appalled when people are so personal in their attacks on her," Huckabee recently told the Weekly Standard, in reference to Hillary. "Nothing will engender more support for her than being perceived as a bully of a guy attacking this woman."

Related factoid: Huckabee and Bill both served as governor of Arkansas (the 54th and 50th), where they were also both born, in a town named Hope.

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Posted at 6:06pm on Aug. 15, 2007 You Have a Blog, You've Watched YouTube Before, You Might Even Have Listened to a Podcast

By Jonathan Rick

Now, how do you integrate all this—not to mention embrace things like MySpace and Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us, Flickr, FeedBurner, Site Meter, widgets, Twitter, BlogAds and Google Groups?

Block off the day of August 29 (two weeks from today), and learn the tricks of the trade at the first-ever Modern Media Strategies Workshop. Sponsored by Google and hosted at Heritage, it's free and star-studded; plus, there's a reception afterward at Lounge 201. Details here.

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Posted at 5:49pm on Aug. 15, 2007 Are Liberal Ideas Harder to Communicate?

By Jonathan Rick

Rudy Giuliani is a Republican who holds the Democratic position on abortion. He's also a Catholic, which digs his hole even deeper, since various American bishops have threatened to deny him Holy Communion, as they did to John Kerry in 2004.

Most political strategists would advise Rudy to avoid the subject of communion at all costs, on the theory that there's no good way out of this minefield. A satisfactory answer would require either an encyclical or a Castro-length sermon, they posit.

Sorry, but that's dead wrong. Instead of obfuscating or tiptoeing around the issue, Rudy plunged headfirst into it, in the current issue of the New Yorker:

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Posted at 11:08pm on Aug. 14, 2007 Tommy Thompson Calls It Quits

By Jonathan Rick

Last week, Tommy Thompson announced that if he didn't finish first or second in Ames, he would end his presidential campaign. On Sunday, after having come in sixth, the former Wisconsin governor promptly did as promised.

Happily, he did so gracefully rather than as a sore loser: "I respect the decision of the voters," he said.

For the record, while I thought Thompson's campaign was embarrassing, he had a proven record and the right ideas on welfare reform and school choice.

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Posted at 11:07pm on Aug. 14, 2007 Rudy's Republicanization

By Jonathan Rick

Yesterday, the Boston Globe ran an article revealing the gradual ways Rudy has Republicanized (Romneyized?) his once moderate-to-liberal views, particularly on civil unions.

This week, a lengthy profile in the the New Yorker details two major shifts.

On guns. Once a near "absolutist" and "heartfelt advocate" of gun control, he now sees himself as a federalist on the assault-weapons ban:

He was a visible ally of Bill Clinton’s during the Brady-bill wars in the 1990s, and has been something close to an absolutist on every gun-control issue he has ever confronted, going back to his time in the Reagan Justice Department (when he opposed Edwin Meese, the White House counsel, on the issue). It is the subject on which he becomes most contorted in trying to square his past positions with his current political imperatives.

As mayor, Giuliani pressed for federal legislation banning military-type semiautomatic weapons (“assault weapons”), and requiring that anyone wishing to carry a handgun be licensed. As a Presidential candidate, Giuliani portrays his gun-control advocacy as an anti-crime tool, particular to New York, and says that gun regulation is best left to the states. “I was extremely aggressive in enforcing New York gun laws, and all the gun laws I could think of, to the point of reducing crime in New York,” he told me one afternoon in Baltimore this spring. . . .

Yet Giuliani’s past gun-control positions suggested the passion of heartfelt advocacy. He not only enforced existing laws; he lobbied for new regulations, and was the first Republican mayor to join other cities in taking gun manufacturers to court in a strategy that mimicked the anti-tobacco lawsuits meant to take down the big tobacco companies. When President Clinton signed the crime bill banning assault weapons, in 1994, Giuliani attended the White House ceremony and sat in the front row. That ban has since expired, and I asked Giuliani if he would support its renewal. “I think assault weapons would fall into the category of things that you could reasonably look at to prohibit,” he said. “But I’d really prefer to see that done on a state-by-state basis.”

On illegal immigration. Once so pro-amnesty that he instructed NYC cops to defy I.N.S. agents looking for illegals, he now employs the fence-first, secure-the-borders-now rhetoric:

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Posted at 1:13am on Aug. 13, 2007 How to Retract a Misstatement

By Jonathan Rick

Misstatements on the modern campaign trail, when everything you say is YouTubable, are inevitable. The trick is how to get past them.

Mitt Romney (again) shows how it's done: first, promptly make public audio or video of the controversial remarks, then apologize without recrimination or qualification.

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Posted at 8:43pm on Aug. 11, 2007 Mike Huckabee's "Vertical Governing"

By Jonathan Rick

Mike Huckabee would rather you didn't question his conservative credentials. Instead, he asks that you consider his actual accomplishments:

I was judged on whether or not the roads got better or worse, whether the schools got better or worse, whether jobs improved or declined, whether wages got better or worse, whether we took better care of our natural resources or didn't, whether taxes went up or down, whether the cost of government got better or worse. It's what I like to call 'vertical governing.' Because, quite frankly, the average American isn't that concerned about whether you are left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. . . . [P]eople want ... vertical leadership, which they expect to lead up and not down.

Huckabee's a witty and likable guy (counterargument here), and his theory of governance sounds refreshing and homespun. But when the theory becomes practice, it privileges ends over means, and results in some decidedly un-conservative policies—for details, click "his conservative credentials" above, or watch the below ad, from the Club for Growth:

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Posted at 10:18am on Aug. 7, 2007 The SCHIP Debate

By Jonathan Rick

Legislation: H.R. 3162, the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act of 2007.

Background: Established in 1997, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP, pronounced "s-chip") is a partnership between the states and federal government to insure poor children. The program is up for reauthorization by September 30, but big-government liberals want not just to renew it, but also to expand it.

The problem is, the expansion contradicts SCHIP’s original, limited intent.

First, it redefines eligibility by recognizing people up to 21 as “children.”

Second, it extends coverage to a family of four with an income of $82,600—hardly a “low-income” group.

Third, by removing the requirement for reauthorization, it transforms SCHIP from its current block grant status into a permanent entitlement, like Medicaid, which is automatically funded every year, regardless of congressional approval.

Read on . . .

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Posted at 3:12pm on Aug. 6, 2007 The Subtle Bias of "Loophole"

By Jonathan Rick

Another word has lit up press critic Jack Shafer's radar for loaded locutions: "loophole." Shafer concedes the word's utility—it "compresses interesting findings from the complex worlds of campaign finance, taxation, or regulation"—but argues that it's often used to editorialize rather than report. He cites three recent examples, from the Post, Times and Chicago Tribune, respectively.

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Posted at 10:57am on Jul. 24, 2007 The Logistics of Withdrawing from Iraq

By Jonathan Rick

Last night, Joe Biden returned to his old self, overpowering his opponents with knowledge and passion on the most important issue in this election: Iraq. Here's one example:

It's time to start to tell the truth. The truth of the matter is: If we started today, it would take one year, one year to get 160,000 troops physically out of Iraq, logistically.

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Posted at 12:29am on Jul. 24, 2007 Fred Thompson Update

By Jonathan Rick

Why are Christian conservatives so eager to embrace Fred Thompson, who once lobbied to overturn the domestic gag rule? The answer's complicated, but plausible (hat tip to Soren Dayton): neither Thompson nor Rudy, who's been the consistent Republican front-runner, is a reliable social conservative. But if Thompson wins the nomination, then evangelicals will be able to claim victory. If Rudy wins, they lose their kingmaker status.

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