He shouldn’t be an ‘also ran’ or even an afterthought. And he’s not being taken as one, at least by those who realize the importance and strength of the candidate’s following.
I’ve been saying for a while now that whoever wins the GOP nomination had better take Ron Paul and his followers, more like a movement, seriously. I’m staring to hear news pundits say something similar. Like the political analyst on one of the networks who noted “Ron Paul’s campaign is about $2 million in the black. And he’ll probably have a role in the convention on the platform.” Good for him. He deserves it.
All the GOP contenders should have a voice in hammering out the platform and policies on the issues, social and fiscal, domestic and foreign.
It had the air of a new day and new beginning. Even critics in media punditry noticed that.
Or the ones who covered Tuesday’s five state elections and Gov. Mitt Romney’s remarks at the end of the day.
On a symbolic night for his campaign, Mitt Romney returned to New Hampshire to thank his supporters for his all but certain claim on the Republican nomination and to spell out the economic themes that will underpin his fall battle with President Obama.
Four years ago, Obama “dazzled us” with sweeping promises of “hope and change,” Romney said. “But after we came down to earth, after all the celebration and parades, what do we have to show for three and a half years of President Obama?
Morality has always been such a relative term. It seems more so these days.
Between politics and the economy, which is probably redundant, ‘the right thing to do’ has become a sliding scale with the ruling hand tilting it toward what’s most pragmatic for them.
So it’s no surprise that the media have not been particularly amenable to Cong. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, especially since the Republican controlled House passed it and President Obama is actively campaigning against it.
Ryan claims Catholic Social Teaching helped him shape the budget. Over the past year and a half, those of us paying attention to the process (media policy wonks, mostly) noticed that Ryan was in dialogue with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, President of the US Bishops’ Conference, while he was crafting it.
At its core, stewardship of the environment is an important ideal. At its extremes, it has become an anti-human ideology.
Dr. Robert Zubrin explains in detail with extensive references in his book Merchants of Despair. From the forward:
Antihumanism is not environmentalism, though it sometimes masquerades as such. Environmentalism, properly conceived, is an effort to apply practical solutions to real environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, for the purpose of making the world a better place for all humans to thrive in. Antihumanism, in contrast, rejects the goal of advancing the cause of mankind. Rather, it uses instances of inadvertent human damage to the environment as points of agitation to promote its fundamental thesis that human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.
In the first hours after news broke that Chuck Colson passed away Saturday, headlines referred to him in either neutral or slightly derogatory tones with reference to the Watergate era. Most missed his most important role in Christian ministry. As if a decades-long witness to the grace of conversion was a mere footnote to the fall that preceded it.
Here’s a sanctimonous snip from nearly four decades ago that endured in much of big media.
Before Colson went to prison he became a born-again Christian, but critics said his post-scandal redemption was a ploy to get his sentence reduced. The Boston Globe wrote in 1973, “If Mr. Colson can repent of his sins, there just has to be hope for everyone.”
I remember being very impressed many years ago hearing a man of celebrity status earnestly credit his wife in an interview with having the toughest job in the world. She worked in the home raising their children, and he marveled at it, saying it was far more demanding than what he did.
That came to mind last week when I heard the remark Hilary Rosen made about Ann Romney. It came to mind again when I read this piece about it in the Weekly Standard.
I, and every conservative I know, have been eagerly polite, warmly encouraging to women who chose to work—from the very beginning, from the 1970s or ‘80s, when working women first changed the national landscape.
Just when liberal women were angrily trumpeting their bogus claim that the GOP has a ‘war on women,’ a high-profile liberal female Democrat lobs a grenade at the wife of Gov. Mitt Romney.
Which The Hill reported as “a gift” to the Romney campaign. Really.
Hilary Rosen’s comments that Ann Romney had “never” worked outside the home triggered a new round in the culture wars and provided an opening for Republicans to close a gender gap between Mitt Romney and President Obama.
Both parties seemed to sense that the veteran Democratic strategist’s criticism of the stay-at-home mom could be a game-changer in the fight for female voters.
Obama’s campaign sought to distance itself from Rosen, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, and Romney’s campaign put the candidate’s wife on television, where she urged Rosen to “respect” the choices of other women.
Going into Easter weekend, this seemed inevitable, and not for purely political cost/benefit calculations. Pundits who reckoned that way didn’t figure in the human factor.
Rick Santorum’s decision to drop out of the Republican presidential race came after he spent the holiday weekend evaluating the race with his family, who were grappling with the latest hospitalization of his 3-year-old daughter Bella…
“We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over for me and we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting,” Santorum said during his speech in Gettysburg on Tuesday. “We will continue to fight for those voices for those Americans who stood up and gave us that air under our wings.”
Some people are getting a lot of traction out of this. In spite of its contrivance as an election year strategy.
Which became a trendy meme parroted in media. Take the Economist, for example, which is lamentable since it’s usually so much more sensible. Lexington ran this column.
It is also a mistake to assume that women’s preferences are driven only by hot-button issues such as abortion and contraception, which Mr Santorum has driven so unhelpfully up the news agenda. Polls show that women lean towards the Democrats for many other reasons. They are, for instance, likelier to believe in activist government and stronger regulation. On abortion, it turns out, men and women have similar attitudes. Just over half of both sexes think it should be legal in all or most cases, and about 43% think it should be illegal in all or most cases.
The question is not whether President Obama keeps making gaffes and mis-steps lately in public policy or public statements. My question, instead, is…are they calculated and to what end?
This blogger wondered the same thing, particularly about the so-called ‘accommodation’ allegedly adjusting the HHS mandate to suit religious liberty claims.
Has this been Obama’s goal all along – to set such an extreme, unconstitutional standard to begin with that he is now able to set a still unconstitutional standard while the public believes he’s being reasonable?
He’s mis-stepping alright, but more voices are saying his steps are intentional and defiant. Like these Bloomberg News writers.
President Barack Obama has shown a willingness to campaign against the U.S. Supreme Court if the justices strike down his 2010 health-care law. It’s a strategy that’s as risky as it is rare.
A thought experiment about marriage
24 May 2012
A world in which sexual intimacy could not produce children would never have come up with the idea of marriage.
SiteMap 
12:07:09 PM
He shouldn’t be an ‘also ran’ or even an afterthought. And he’s not being taken as one, at least by those who realize the importance and strength of the candidate’s following.
It had the air of a new day and new beginning. Even critics in media punditry noticed that.
Morality has always been such a relative term. It seems more so these days.
At its core, stewardship of the environment is an important ideal. At its extremes, it has become an anti-human ideology.
In the first hours after news broke that Chuck Colson passed away Saturday, headlines referred to him in either neutral or slightly derogatory tones with reference to the Watergate era. Most missed his most important role in Christian ministry. As if a decades-long witness to the grace of conversion was a mere footnote to the fall that preceded it.
I remember being very impressed many years ago hearing a man of celebrity status earnestly credit his wife in an interview with having the toughest job in the world. She worked in the home raising their children, and he marveled at it, saying it was far more demanding than what he did.
Just when liberal women were angrily trumpeting their bogus claim that the GOP has a ‘war on women,’ a high-profile liberal female Democrat lobs a grenade at the wife of Gov. Mitt Romney.
Going into Easter weekend, this seemed inevitable, and not for purely political cost/benefit calculations. Pundits who reckoned that way didn’t figure in the human factor.
Some people are getting a lot of traction out of this. In spite of its contrivance as an election year strategy.
The question is not whether President Obama keeps making gaffes and mis-steps lately in public policy or public statements. My question, instead, is…are they calculated and to what end?