Showing posts with label Rand Paul. Show all posts
Marco Rubio Seizes The Day
HH: Senator Rubio, you represent a lot of senior citizens in Florida. The country knows that. I think it’s despicable to scare them this way. What’s your reaction to the President’s threat to hold their Social Security checks hostage?
MR: Well, if they don’t get their Social Security checks, it’s because the President’s decided to do that, because we still have revenue coming in. Here’s the other thing I would say. If in fact the President holds up their checks for Social Security, and Medicare, and whatever else he wants to hold up to make his point, isn’t he admitting that all these programs are funded by deficit spending? Isn’t he admitting that all these programs are dependant upon borrowed money? And I think the folks who are on Social Security, people like my mom, would be shocked to learn the truth that the money that they’re receiving in Social Security isn’t the money they worked hard for all these years to put away, the government was going to give back to them in their retirement. The government spent all that money already. They spent it long ago on other things. This is borrowed money. This is money that we’re borrowing from our children and our grandchildren. And I think people are going to, if that happens, I think people are going to be shocked to learn the real truth about what the government’s done with their Social Security money.
Truth=Controversy: Rand Paul & the 21st Century's Welfare Queens
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul says the poor in America are "enormously better off than the rest of the world," citing an old Cold War film that showed even impoverished homes had color televisions.
Paul's recent remarks at his first forum with Democratic opponent Jack Conway stirred some anger in impoverished pockets of Kentucky, where as many as a third of residents live in poverty.
The libertarian-leaning Paul addressed the issue of poverty by alluding to a decades-old, anti-American propaganda film by the Soviet government designed to criticize the free-market system.
"They filmed a building in the poorer section of New York with some broken windows and they said, `Oh, this is how the poor in America lives,"' Paul said at last week's forum. "But it backfired on them because the Soviet citizens looked at that video closely and they saw flickering color television sets in all those windows."
Paul went on to say that "the poor in our country are enormously better off than the rest of the world. It doesn't mean we can't do better. But we have to acknowledge and be proud of our system of capitalism."
The Bottom of the Page: Stories of Note From the Blogroll
Karim Wasfi, director and conductor of the Iraqi National Symphony, was waiting in the lounge of the Rasheed Hotel one recent afternoon for two things: the arrival of a 13-year-old American pianist scheduled to headline a rare concert here; and the Steinway grand he was supposed to play.
The prodigy, Llewellyn Kingman Sanchez-Werner, was coming from New York. The piano was coming from the symphony's rehearsal space, just five miles away from the hotel. Mr. Wasfi was more worried about the piano.
To a fundamentalist, there was kind of a “well, duh” reaction to this recent headline:
It’s scarcely surprising to learn that members of an ethno-religious group – whose ancient scriptures advocate endogamy and proscribe marrying outside the group – would be genetically similar. What I didn’t realize, however, was that some revisionist historians have cast doubt on the Biblical geneaology of the Jews:
The two genome surveys . . . refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.
So, for those of you keeping score:
Genesis, Exodus, etc. . . . . . 1
Revisionist historians . . . . 0
With special assistance from the Sony corporation, we have made several changes to your original Karate Kid, a warmongering, Reagan-era film that was pock-marked – like the blemished faces of your pimply American teenagers – with the backward, revanchist rhetoric of that era. In our new Karate Kid, we no longer have young New Jersey teenager Daniel and his economically disenfranchised mother seek a new life in the state of California. Instead, we have young ‘Dre’ – played with scrappy insouciance by Jaden Smith (son of your American movie star, Comrade Will Smith!) – seek his fortune in a more suitable land of opportunity: mainland China. In the new Karate Kid, a heartless American automotive company in Detroit shifts the job held by Dre’s mother to Beijing. Since America offers no other possible job opportunities for her, she is forced to make the only economically rational decision: move herself and her son 10,000 kilometers to the (Far) East, even though they don’t speak Chinese!
What we are witnessing in this election cycle is the slow death of traditional statewide campaign journalism. I noticed the same pattern (and the same nearly reporter-free campaign trail) in Kentucky last month as I covered libertarian Rand Paul's decisive defeat of the state Republican establishment in the GOP Senate primary. Aside from an occasional AP reporter, virtually the only print journalists whom I encountered at campaign events were my national press-pack colleagues from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico and the Atlantic Monthly.Newspapers like the Louisville Courier-Journal and The State, South Carolina's largest paper, have dramatically de-emphasized in-depth candidate coverage because they are too short-handed to spare the reporters. A survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) found that newsroom staffs across the country have declined by 25 percent since 2001.
What most amazes me about this huge decline: It brings us no closer to a realistic elite public acknowledgment of innate limits of ability. Rather, the official fantasy gets maintained in the face of copious evidence against the secular religious faith in equality of ability. As John Derbyshire points out, in elite circles public protestations of faith in education to raise up poor performers continues unabated. It is remarkable that during the Middle Ages the Catholic Church abandoned its faith that the Earth was the center of the universe under the weight of far less evidence than the amount of evidence that exists today for the view that group differences in student performance are due to group differences in average ability. Our secular left-liberal defenders of their faith demonstrate far stronger public attachment to irrational beliefs than the Catholic Church did in a supposedly far less rational era of faith in the supernatural.
A few days before the game, Jay's father called me. He and the other parents of his son's team were "very, very concerned." Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for thecompetition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to "bragging rights in the schoolyard." And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to "frame the situation as a teaching moment." Eventually, he got to themoney point: He and the other parents of Jay's team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?Initially, I was nonplussed. But I heard myself saying something like, "You're way over-complicating this. The purpose of playing the game is to win it. And by the way, the winning team has earned bragging rights."
