CNN has the story about Ron Paul’s 1987 book, written at the time he was leaving Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party to run for president as a Libertarian and ” re-issued in 2007 during Paul’s last presidential bid with a cover photograph of an ominous SWAT Team”: Paul criticized people suffering from AIDS or other contagious diseases for demanding health insurance coverage. “The individual suffering from | Read More »
Sometimes you write the stories, and sometimes they write you. I awoke this morning to a big, blazing Drudge headline about Texan pop starlet and American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson having endorsed Ron Paul for president. As it happens, I’m probably the only conservative political writer in America who has taken Clarkson seriously at some length (see here, here and here; I still follow her | Read More »
The battle for position as the more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney is a classic showdown of words vs deeds, and it is the deeds of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich that have led me to support Perry. But there’s no arguing Newt’s way with words. Enjoy this one from yesterday in New Hampshire, which is full of win on so many levels. For a | Read More »
As we all know by now, there’s Good Newt and there’s Bad Newt. If you want the full Good Newt experience, check out this speech he gave to the NRA convention back in April. If you don’t have time for the full 26-minute speech, watch from around the 5:18 mark to about the 14:30 mark. It’s spellbinding.
Not a site endorsement; this is the view of the undersigned RedState Contributors. If this website has a purpose – if any conservative website or publication has a purpose – it must begin with electing conservatives to significant public offices. We have the chance to nominate a conservative for president and win the White House in 2012. We can fumble that chance away by settling | Read More »
Let’s imagine the primaries as a conversation between the conservative grassroots and the national media elite (including the conservative media establishment): Elite: Time to find a new national standard-bearer, Republicans. But not somebody dumb, like George W. Bush. Grassroots: We love Sarah Palin! Elite: She’s dumb. You can’t have her. Grassroots: We love Michele Bachmann! Elite: She’s dumb. You can’t have her. Grassroots: We love | Read More »
Ideas don’t run for president; people do. That’s as true today as it was four years ago. So, it is understandable that much of the press and blog coverage of the 2012 GOP primary race has focused on the personalities, experience and record of the candidates rather than their ideas. In fact, until you know the candidates by their actions, you cannot meaningfully judge what | Read More »
It’s Election Day today in Lousiana: [T]he electorate will settle increasingly nasty bouts for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and the state board of education. Local ballots are dotted with contested legislative matchups, a handful of judicial contests in New Orleans, and parish offices in Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist. Voters also must navigate a gaggle of | Read More »
I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead. Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for: [T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that | Read More »
The 2012 presidential election season has not been a normal one in many ways. History teaches us that every election season brings something new we haven’t seen before – but also that progress in electioneering, as in most walks of life, is more gradual than people are wont to predict. The candidate who says “this time, everything is different” or “the old rules don’t apply” | Read More »
President Obama is on the prowl for new targets for (1) raising more tax revenue and/or (2) demonizing “the rich” for campaign purposes. Among Obama’s proposals, besides raising taxes on high-income individuals generally, is to more than double the tax rate paid by many private equity and venture capital investors from 15% to 35%, by reclassifying sales of their businesses (or shares in their businesses) | Read More »
Until September 11, 2001, I worked in the World Trade Center, halfway up Tower One. I wasn’t doing political blogging at the time, but was writing “the Baseball Crank” as a weekly baseball column for the online edition of the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Here’s my account of that day, written for ProJo two days later while it was all still fresh. We run this every | Read More »
The major controversy right now in the GOP presidential primaries is over Rick Perry’s contention that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that can’t deliver on its promises under its current structure. Mitt Romney doesn’t exactly dispute this – in fact, Romney himself said the same thing in his book, but then Romney always did like to attack other Republicans for things he himself has | Read More »
Let me offer my takes on last night’s GOP primary debate (I saw all but the very end). -Short answer? The debate reinforced, rather than changed, my impression of each of the eight candidates on stage. Which is usually what these debates do, but there’s always the odd night when somebody really makes a good impression or shoots themself in the foot. -Globally, the bad | Read More »
I was reading this excellent 2010 speech by the great baseball writer Bill James in his latest essay collection, “Solid Fool’s Gold: Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom”, and the whole thing is available at his website if you’re a subscriber. It’s an excellent summary of what James does and does not do for a living, but I found it also very pointed about | Read More »
I confess: on some level, I like Jerry Brown. He’s one of those guys – like Pat Moynihan, Paul Tsongas or Bill Bradley – who really, truly and honestly believes in the goals of liberalism, yet is periodically honest enough to be blunt about its failures in the real world. He even studied to be a priest, way back when. One can argue, as Steven | Read More »
The Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activist, Greg Sargent, thinks he can convince you that he has a “gotcha” moment with Rick Perry’s recent book “Fed Up!: Our Fight to Save America from Washington”: Rick Perry’s campaign is now distancing him from another controversial claim in his book: That we should repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with a “Fair Tax,” a radical idea that’s | Read More »
Last weekend, Republicans waiting for the proverbial man on the white horse to ride in and save them from an unsatisfactory 2012 primary field got their answer, or at any rate the best answer they are likely to get: Texas Governor Rick Perry. And while Perry entered stage right, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, my previous choice among the announced candidates in the field, exited | Read More »
This anonymously-sourced report from The Hill, which clearly derives in good part from Republican sources, is pretty damning about President Obama’s leadership, if it turns out to be accurate: GOP aides and lawmakers, speaking on background, portrayed Boehner as the calm negotiator who repeatedly exasperated President Obama. Boehner last month asked the networks to televise his response to Obama’s address to the nation, a request | Read More »
There are many species of bad journalism, most of which involve too much opinion by the writer, but sometimes the opposite is true and a writer gives you the apparent facts without the context needed to make sense of them. Let me use an article from the NY Times about 30 Rock to illustrate a common type of bad journalism that I find to be | Read More »
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