BluegrassBulletin.com

Trey Grayson Leaves Harvard Post

Former Republican Secretary of State Trey Grayson has announced that he is leaving his post at the Harvard Institute of Politics.  Some are speculating that he will return to Kentucky and seek elected office again.

Considering that Rand Paul faces legal difficulties in his desire to run for both Presidency of the United States and his Kentucky US Senate seat at the same time, Grayson may be eyeing an opportunity that he was denied in 2010.

However, as popular as Grayson was among many Kentucky establishment republicans four years ago, his stature as a viable republican candidate has not been helped by his activities or the changes to the political landscape since he left Kentucky.

Grayson, along with former Clinton administration official Robert Reich, were named as co-chairs of a PAC dedicated to electing only democrats. [Washington Post]

In addition, the forces of the TEA party which gained strength in the Commonwealth largely on the shoulders of Rand Paul have gotten far more organized in Grayson's former home county of Boone.

Rand Makes Another Break From Conservatives

Rand Paul talks little these days about what needs to be done for Kentucky.  His focus is on re-building if not re-branding the entire republican party, speaking frequently on the national stage about where the GOP has gone wrong.  His message these days is about how to get votes for a GOP presidential candidate.

Sen. Rand Paul on Tuesday argued the Republican Party needs to get “beyond deportation” in order to break through to Hispanic voters.

The Kentucky Republican and likely 2016 contender argued that before the GOP can make its case to the Latino community, which voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2012, the party needs to make clear it is open to a more welcoming approach to immigration.

“They’re not going to care whether we go to the same church, or have the same values, or believe in the same kind of future of our country until we get beyond that. Showing up helps, but you got to show up and you got to say something, and it has to be different from what we’ve been saying.”

That differs from the political path promoted by some of Paul’s fellow conservatives, who argue that if the GOP highlights other areas of common ground with the Hispanic community beyond immigration — shared religious and entrepreneurial values, for example — that would be sufficient to make inroads with Hispanics. [POLITICO]

Putin Wants To Claim Finland

From the International Business Times:

One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest ex-advisers has claimed that the ex-KGB agent ultimately wants to reclaim Finland for Russia.

Andrej Illiaronov, Putin's economic adviser between 2000 and 2005 and now senior member of the Cato Institute think tank, said that "parts of Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Finland are states where Putin claims to have ownership."

"Putin's view is that he protects what belongs to him and his predecessors," he said.

When asked if Putin wishes to return to the Russia of the last tsar, Nicholas II, Illiaronov said: "Yes, if it becomes possible."

Romney Pretty Chatty For A Non-Candidate

Mitt Romney is adamant, he is not running for president.  But every time you look at the news he seems to be leveling pretty specific criticisms at the president.  Now he has taken aim at the democratic front runner Hillary Clinton.

Mitt Romney blames former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton along with President Barack Obama for the situation in Ukraine, saying they both misunderstood the world stage.

“There’s no question, but that over the four years where he and Secretary Clinton were working together, and now the year since then, it’s hard to name a single country that holds America in more esteem and respect than when the president took office five years ago,” Romney said on Fox News’s “Hannity”on Tuesday. “It has not been a time of building America’s respect and admiration and esteem and frankly our soft power or our hard power around the world.” [POLITICO]

Charles Krauthammer pulls no punches either.  He says the world sees Obama as weak, a situation which clearly puts our nation at risk.

 

As Romney says:

The former Republican governor said Obama and Clinton gave Russia “gifts” early in the administration.

“I would not have given Russia the gifts that Secretary Clinton and President Obama gave Russia, this whole reset with the smiling pictures of them pressing the button, it’s like are you kidding me?” Romney said. “Don’t you understand that Russia has different — Putin has different interests than America, and they will pursue those interests?”

He said the president needs to show strength.

“The best way to keep them from pursuing those interests is by being a strong and powerful nation that can stand up to them,” Romney said. “When you say in Syria, ‘There’s a red line here in Syria, you go across that line there’s going to be serious consequences.’ You go across the line, what do you do? You let Putin do a sleight of hand and then nothing. Weakness only leads to other people taking advantage of you, being aggressive and in part, that’s what leads to situations like Ukraine.” [POLITICO]

Like I told you, tough talk is going to be the winning ticket for the GOP nominee, not going soft.

Rand Is Getting Some Very Bad Advice

Rand Paul got a standing ovation at Berkley University in California, one of the most liberal universities in the nation when he railed against government surveillance.  According to one report “That Paul decided to take his libertarian-leaning message to one of the most liberal campuses in the country is no mistake. He is actively making an effort to appear before crowds that have not been supportive of Republicans to demonstrate his ability to appeal to a broader electorate.” [Daily Caller]

Appealing to a ‘broader electorate’ is certainly a good November strategy, but I’m not sure the republican base that Rand needs to convince in the primary season are going to be impressed by some of the moves he has been making lately.

Rand has been widely quoted as saying

"I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues," Paul told vocativ.com. "The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues." [Washington Post]

I get it.  He sees a future where young people don’t want to be “festooned” by prohibitions against abortion for example.  But that sounds dangerously close to what Barack Obama said when he told an audience he wouldn’t want his daughter to be “punished with a baby.”

And Rand says that young people need to be embraced by the Republican party if it wants to win and that means accepting their moral standards on a variety of issues or face losing to the liberals who those same youth find more appealing.  In other words, to win as republicans we need to think and behave like liberals.

I get the whole notion of running a big campaign across a broad spectrum of American cultural differences and how the desire to be liked by everybody can be intoxicating.  And when you find a way to get that kind of adoration it is easy for those around you to convince you that you have found a populist appeal that will transcend the mendacity of politics, set you apart as a true visionary and lift you upon the shoulders of your countrymen into the White House.  And they may be right.  But you would be presiding over an Idiocracy.

Leaders lead.  Conservative leaders only qualify if they have a firm conservative core.  I doubt many of the kids a Berkely will be voting in republican primaries.  And I doubt that the social conservatives are the crippled elephants headed to the grave yard that the mainstream media would like to think we are.

If you think the TEA party folks get riled up when their principles are not met, think for a minute what those of us who place a very high value on life are capable of when compromise on that front is being urged by those who would have us choose them as leaders.

No, as much as I like and respect Rand, somebody is giving him some very bad advice.  Caving on social issues and courting liberals in California are not steps on the path to a republican nomination.  He needs to go into those places more like Reagan went to Germany, not the way Lord Chamberlain did.

2016 Presidential Race: Those With 'Low T' Need Not Apply - Russia Threatens The USA With Annihilation

The world is laughing at the United States.  We've lost all credibility as the defender of liberty via the exposure of government spying and IRS abuses.  We've lost our stature as the strongest economy.  And now we face the greatest danger as the world taunts us and threatens us because they see us as weak.

Barack Obama has been accused by some of deliberately plotting the demise of the nation.  It doesn't matter.  Whether by intent or inaction he has demonstrated for the world that he is a pushover, capable of being bullied, unwilling to fight.  He has made America more vulnerable.

Only hours after Russia moved in and assisted a rogue group of Ukrainians to secede from their nation in Crimea, they installed a former street thug as governor.  Now they have control of the land over which much of our European allies get their natural gas, and Russia has a cold water port.

As soon as Crimea became a Russian territory, Russian TV spit this right into Obama's face:

Russia, news anchor DmitryKiselyov took to the Rossiya 1 news channel to put the situation into a broader geopolitical context for views.

One part of his explanation, however, has caught a lot of attention: Kiselyov explained to his viewers that Russia is the only country capable of turning the United States into “radioactive ashes.” He then went on to use animated maps to show exactly how Russia would automatically respond with nuclear missiles if command and control were attacked or disabled by a U.S. attack. [Washington Post]

Former world chess champion and Russian human rights activist Gary Kasparov says he doesn't think Putin will stop at Crimea.  In addition he tweeted how weak the US looks under Obama and how much of this is Hillary's fault:

Even Americans say that Putin is a much stronger president than Obama.  And now we are getting ready to choose the next president as the world around us grows more threatening every day.

Who will it be?  Hillary?  Patriotic Americans instinctively know she is but a smell in a windstorm when it comes to aggressively defending American lives, and no, Benghazi is not going to go away.

Will it be Rand Paul?  I think the world of him and what he has achieved, but his base is very much of a non-interventionist mindset.  Until the Russian Navy lands in California or New York they'd prefer to let other countries get by with murder never seeing the growing threat on the horizon until it was too late.  He'd have a lot of selling to do to make the case for being more of a hawk.

And what difference would it make anyway now?  We are drawing down the size of our military, Russia is housing the guy with all our internal codes and secrets who many in the TEA party want to call a hero, we don't have the money to back down another USSR, our all volunteer army is made up of kids who wanted the jobs and the perks but some of them reportedly threatened to go AWOL during the government shutdown if they didn't draw a paycheck and the press won't even let our warriors be warriors.

There are a lot of puzzled expressions on people’s faces when it comes to the subject of the late Osama Bin Laden and why the White House has not authorized the release of any pictures of the body.

Matt Bissonnette, one of the SEAL Team Six operators on the raid, partially outs the reason in his book, No Easy Day.  The book reads, “In his death throes, he was still twitching and convulsing. Another assaulter and I trained our lasers on his chest and fired several rounds. The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless” (No Easy Day, Chapter 15).

You may not care if Bin Laden got some extra holes punched in him, few of us do, but what should concern you is a trend within certain special operations units to engage in this type of self-indulgent, and ultimately criminal, behavior.  Gone unchecked, these actions get worse over time. [sofrep.com]

War is about killing people and destroying things.  Warriors are killers.  Rules of engagement for our troops have trained them to assess rather than kill.  The idea of bombing nations rather than specific targets has turned our military response into a spectator sport for our enemies, instead of the fearsome horror of war that brings an entire nation to its knees and surrender.

We need to be the biggest, baddest, scariest force on the planet.  At the same time we need to be unassailably the most devoted defender of human rights and liberty and the right to life and proseperity the world has ever known.  We can do none of this with a powder puff president, or a non-interventionist policy. 

Our founders came to this nation as missionaries seeking to bring Christianity to a savage world.  We have always been missionaries seeking to bring democracy and prosperity to a struggling world.  We are compelled by the terms of our endowment to continue this tradition.

No, I am not saying that we need a rabid hawk for president.  But neither do we need the image of an Ostrich, with its head in the sand and it's ass hanging out.

We need a strong looking, strong sounding, strong thinking man of his word who has a Congress and a Senate and a nation of people who want better for themselves and their posterity not to be used as sacrificial lambs in pursuit of leveling the playing field where nobody else is playing by the same rules to begin with.

IF we survive until 2016 what America needs is a president who, at the very least, won't lose in the polls to Putin.

Therefore, those with low testosterone need not apply

God help us.

Told-Jah: Rand Was Right

When the Courier Journal criticized Rand Paul for opposing Obama's pick for Surgeon General, I pointed out how the paper had missed the point.  Well, maybe now they will get the point themselves.

The administration's choice to be the nation's doctor in chief views gun ownership as a public health issue and not a constitutional right, and wants doctors to query patients about guns in their homes.

[G]un-grabbing advocate Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, [is] Obama's nominee to be U.S. Surgeon General.

Murthy is the 36-year-old president and co-founder of the anti-gun group Doctors for America, which advocates ObamaCare and gun control laws.

Doctors for America has also promoted the invasion of privacy by doctors by allowing them to ask patients if they have guns at home, including asking children if their parents own guns...

He would have doctors counsel their patients against exercising their Second Amendment rights.

One wonders how private that information might remain if entered into the medical records the government would be privy to under ObamaCare.

Murthy ignores the fact that mass shootings such as at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., occur in so-called gun-free zones where the only armed individual is the predator. [Investor's Business Daily]

Thank you Rand.  Shame on you Courier-Journal.

Obama Bad For Black Americans

This one will take your breath away.  Our northern neighbors at the Canada Free Press have nailed it.  Barack Obama is bad for Black Americans.

It would be the irony of all time if the 71 percent of disenfranchised black African American youths trying to survive under President Barack Obama forced him out of office before his time is up.

This is one group Obama cannot silence with the racist smear he levies against any who dare criticize his destructive policies.

They see clearly through Obama’s Feb. 27th announced “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative that they have been as blatantly Obama-ignored as Obama’s brother still living in abject poverty in a hut.

It must be the most tragic fact of politics that Barack Obama gets to use his colour to remain untouchable while he spreads Marxist misery on the masses when a sizeable part of those masses entail a lost generation of African Americans.

That’s just the tragic state of affairs for young blacks who remain jobless and hopeless while Obama travels the world giving unlistened-to speeches, playing golf and shooting hoops.

This is the hard life Obama is imposing on young black youth who made it to school and university age.

The ones who didn’t make it through childbirth dominate appalling statistics.

More than any other race, Black babies do not make it past abortion. Shamefully, there are now more Black babies aborted than born in New York City,  and New York isn’t the only place following the evil trend started a century ago by Planned Parenthood founder/ bigot Margaret Sanger.

The tide is turning.

Interesting Read: Four Faces Of The Republican Party

Henry Olsen offers a rather insightful view of the Republican Party in his piece for the "The National Interest".  In it he identifies four factions of the GOP, the moderate or liberal voters; somewhat conservative voters; very conservative, evangelical voters; and very conservative, secular voters.

Evaluating how each faction approached various presidential contests over the years Olsen concludes that the year before the election is crucial. "In this “preseason,” candidates compete to become favored by one of the four factions. Sometimes no one is competing with a candidate for that favor, which frequently happens on the moderate or liberal side. Other times, though, there is intense competition and the preseason maneuvering determines if someone survives until the actual early contests."

Olsen says that the factions are not equal in number.

The most important of these groups is the one most journalists don’t understand and ignore: the somewhat conservative voters. This group is the most numerous nationally and in most states, comprising 35–40 percent of the national GOP electorate. While the numbers of moderates, very conservative and evangelical voters vary significantly by state, somewhat conservative voters are found in similar proportions in every state. They are not very vocal, but they form the bedrock base of the Republican Party.

They also have a significant distinction: they always back the winner.

The moderate or liberal bloc is surprisingly strong in presidential years, comprising the second-largest voting bloc with approximately 25–30 percent of all GOP voters nationwide. They are especially strong in early voting states such as New Hampshire (where they have comprised between 45 and 49 percent of the GOP electorate between 1996 and 2012), Florida and Michigan. They are, however, surprisingly numerous even in the Deep South, the most conservative portion of the country. Moderates or liberals have comprised between 31 and 39 percent of the South Carolina electorate since 1996, outnumbering or roughly equaling very conservative voters in each of those years.

Moderate and liberal voters prefer someone who is both more secular and less fiscally conservative than their somewhat conservative cousins.  In 2012, they began firmly in Ron Paul’s or Jon Huntsman’s camp. Paul and Huntsman combined got 43 percent of their vote in Iowa and 50 percent in New Hampshire. Once it became clear that their candidates could not win, however, the moderate or liberal faction swung firmly toward Romney in his fights with Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

The third-largest group is the moderates’ bête noire: the very conservative evangelicals. This group is small compared to the others, comprising around one-fifth of all GOP voters. They gain significant strength, however, from three unique factors.[T]hey are geographically concentrated in Southern and border states, where they can comprise a quarter or more of a state’s electorate.

This group prefers candidates who are very open about their religious beliefs, place a high priority on social issues such as gay marriage and abortion, and see the United States in decline because of its movement away from the faith and moral codes of its past. Their favored candidates tend to be economically more open to government intervention.

The final and smallest GOP tribe is the one that DC elites are most familiar with: the very conservative, secular voters. This group comprises a tiny 5–10 percent nationwide and thus never sees its choice emerge from the initial races to contend in later stages.

The 2016 field is still developing, but it’s already possible to discern which candidates are focusing on which factions.

Virtually everyone else in the race is competing for the favor of the smallest, least influential group: the secular conservatives. All focus on some sort of fiscal issue as their primary focus, and most also try to adopt an anti-Washington tone. Some have secondary messages designed to appeal to other factions, much as George W. Bush did in 2000. Senator Rand Paul’s focus on civil liberties and limiting overseas military actions would hold some appeal for GOP moderates and liberals, as would Senator Marco Rubio’s occasional forays into antipoverty efforts. Rubio’s backing of immigration reform is of interest to somewhat conservative donors, and his authoring of federal antiabortion legislation creates some support among the socially conservative wing. But Paul’s, Rubio’s and Texas senator Ted Cruz’s hope must be that the secular, very conservative wing is in fact much larger in 2016 than it has been in the past.

It is a very interesting analysis which should do well to put Olsen on the payroll of any serious contender looking to find a way to survive the heat of a presidential marathon.

Rand Paul: Leader Of The Pack?

Some pretty interesting people are beginning to sense what I told you three years ago when I jumped out front for Rand Paul: he is a man who has landed on his feet in a world that is very ready for his brand of political philosophy.  Now he may very well be the frontrunner in the GOP field for the presidency.

Paul has been doing more than almost any other Republican to expand the party's appeal to nontraditional GOP voters—the type of activity that's imperative for future success. He spoke at Howard University and historically black Simmons College in Kentucky (twice) as part of an outreach effort toward African-Americans. His Jack Kemp-like pitch for "economic freedom zones" has even drawn the interest of the NAACP, which invited him to speak. He's been leading the call for reforming drug sentencing, an issue that's won support from many young voters and minorities who disproportionately bear the burden of current zero-tolerance policy. This week, at a Missouri Republican Party banquet, he said the party needs "a more diverse party—with tattoos and without tattoos."

Meanwhile, the politics of the 2016 Republican nomination look increasingly favorable to Paul. He is one of the top fundraisers in the field, has a ready-made base of support from his father's presidential networks, and has proven his savvy political instincts with a made-for-TV drone filibuster and NSA lawsuit. The newly compressed Republican presidential calendar should benefit a Paul candidacy, since he's got the grassroots support to play in the small states and the money to fight forward in the big media-market states that follow.

Paul's mutually beneficial alliance with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who faces reelection this year, is a prime example of his political foresight. McConnell has helped him build chits with the establishment, including donors skeptical of his national viability. McConnell, meanwhile, has gotten tea-party validation to get him through a contested primary against businessman Matt Bevin. He's also benefited from Paul's swipes at former President Clinton, who is emerging as an important surrogate for McConnell's Democratic challenger, Alison Lundergan Grimes. McConnell, if he survives the general election, could become the next majority leader. But Paul, in taming the establishment skepticism toward him, could end up with the bigger prize. [National Journal]