Rand Paul (Ron Paul's son) to run for Senate in Kentucky
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Technically he's setting up an exploratory committee, because there's always the chance that the incumbent senator could decide to run for re-election in 2010, but barring that Rand Paul has decided to run. This is very good news and something I've thought for a long time (and wrote about recently), as the GOP we saw during the 2008 election needs to be firmly ground into the dust and replaced with something intellectually consistent, which is what Ron Paul has always been and hopefully Rand Paul will be.
He also gets extra points for announcing that he'll be running on Rachel Maddow's show.
The question is just how similar he will end up being to his father. He certainly sounds like him and from his speeches he's given in 2008 during Ron Paul's campaign he also had the same message, but it remains to be seen whether he has the same incorruptibility that Ron Paul has. Ron Paul is interesting in how he runs on a message that is philosophical in nature and not one tailored to get extra votes based on the present mood, which can be quite unnerving at times considering that sometimes the public seems prepared to hear a message like his, and at other times it can come across as political suicide. At the same time, Ron Paul has only had to defend a single congressional seat, and it's hard to say whether he would have been able to do the same thing had he been something more prominent like a senator.
After the announcement $15,000 in donations quickly flowed in, and there was quite a bit of national news coverage, which he addresses in this video the day after.
First item I'd like to see him address as a senator: changing the name of the state back to Transylvania. I know there's the economy and two wars and everything else, but Kentucky used to be called Transylvania? Let's change it back to its former name right away and up the coolness of the state a hundredfold. Chop chop.
8 comments:
Rand Paul lost my vote with his "never hire a computer programmer over 30" quip on the Rachel Maddow show. As far as renaming the Commonwealth (Kentucky is not a "state", but like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Viginia, is a "Commonwealth", even though we use the term "Secretary of State" instead of "Secretary of the Commonwealth") it will never happen. Kentucky was never legally called Transylvania, but started off as Kentucky County, Virginia.
There is a Transylvania University in Lexington, but the University of Kentucky's supporters will never let the name of the state fall into the lesser college's name.
However, there has been some talk of merging counties (which will probably never happen either) - Kentucky has more counties, 120, than any other state except Texas and Georgia - and perhaps one of them will be named Transylvania.
*Checks site*
"I have been developing software since 1981 and teaching off-and-on since 1980 (mostly on since 2000)."
Ah, so that's why he lost your vote.
Thanks for the extra info, and let me know if the issue of joining counties comes up as I'll be on the forefront to name it Transylvania. Definitely looking forward to that.
One of the other candidates is Cathy Bailey, who was once US ambassador to Latvia because she raised a lot of money for George Bush 43. Her husband, Irv Bailey, was president of an insurance company that I worked 7 years for. He was incompetant and led the company to the ground (and in the interim firing good people like myself), so I won't be voting for her either.
The other Republican candidates include Secretary of State Trey Grayson (who will probably win the Republican primary) and possibly State Senate President David Williams (probably the most qualifed to be a great senator from day one). There is a Democrat also named David Williams who runs for office every year, and occasionally wins the primary (he won in 2008 for Agricultural Commissioner, an elected position in Kentucky, but lost to a famous-in-Kentucky basketball player coincidently named Richie Farmer) because of the popularity of the Senate President. The final Republican running, Daniel Essek, is yet another Libertarian-type who ran against Kentucky's other Senator, Addison Mitchell "Mitch" McConnell in 2008, and received 7% in that primary. He is a strong believer that since Barack Obama has not actually produced a certified birth certificate stating that he was born in Hawaii, that it must be presumed that he was born in Kenya, and thus should not be president.
On the Democratic side, there is favored-to-win-it-all Attorney General Jack Conway, who already even has a campaign office next door to one of those Laser Tag Game playing places here in Louisville, and Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo, who ran against Jim Bunning in 2004 and almost won. There are also a couple of other Democrats running whose only hope of winning are if the two front runners knock each other out with negative campaigns.
Unfortunately, Kentucky laws makes it very difficult for a third-party candidate to mount any type of legitimate campaign at all. The Libertarian Party of Kentucky tried to run a former actor, Sonny Landham, for US Senate in 2008, but disavowed him after he made anti-arabic (genocidal) comments.
There is an anti-Louisville bias in most of Kentucky, which will hurt Conway, and might help Rand Paul (who is from Bowling Green, the only place in the world where the Corvette automobile is made).
All-in-all, it will be an interesting election (how many other statewide races are covered by foreign bloggers?). If you (or your readers) want to follow it, be aware of the following deadlines:
4-Nov-2009 to 26-Jan-2010: Filing period for Republicans and Democrats - filing fee is $500 and two signatures (most will file on the last two days)
31-Dec-2009: Last day to join the party you plan on running in. (It will be interesting to see if anyone changes their party.)
1-Apr-2010: Last day for independents and third-party candidates to declare their candidacies.
18-May-2010: Republican and Democratic Primary election day.
17-Aug-2010: Last day for non-major parties to turn in 5000 signatures and $500 filing fee.
19-Oct-2010: Last day to file as a write-in candidate (Kentucky charges write-in's a $50 fee to have their votes counted - the only time write-ins have won is when no one has filed regularly).
2-Nov-2010: Election day. [Note: except for the final election day, each state sets its own filing dates, primary election dates, etc.]
Mithridates: I will be participating in a meeting with Rand Paul this Saturday, and plan on asking him what his stance is on the space program and the space shuttle retirements. (I think the older two should be retired, but the newest one kept active until the replacements are ready.) Any questions you want me to ask him?
Sure, I always have a ton of questions and it would be great if you could ask him some. Some of them might be a bit exotic though and I wouldn't expect everybody running for office to have answers to them.
I suppose the first one would be what he thinks of the Jupiter shuttle replacement, which has been worked on quite a bit by engineers in their spare time:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4295233.html
Other questions that he might or might not have an opinion on:
-What does he think of Ceres vs. Mars vs. the Moon? Or manned exploration vs. robotic exploration? Does he have any plans to promote the development of private companies in space exploration as a senator? Does he have any personal interest in space (signing up for Virgin Galactic's suborbital flights, etc.)? Does he differ with his father on space policy at all?
But yeah, the most important ones would probably be his view on shuttle retirement and private space exploration. I wonder if he's heard of companies like JP Aerospace.
Okay, Rand Paul said he has not fine-tuned his position on space yet, but he did say a couple of interesting things to me about it.
He wants to populate nearby planets with organisms (he specifically stated algae) that could grow there to help feed the people who eventually will explore those planets (and perhaps change the planet's atmosphere). That tells me that he will keep the space program.
In regards to Iran, he took a hands-off approach, that since the country can't even refine its own oil, that we shouldn't worry about it. Even if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they won't use it because Israel has 400 such weapons and would wipe Iran off the map, and they know it. He said that if Israel tried a pre-emptive strike that we should use our forces in Iraq to try to stop it.
Also in regards to Israel, he stated that even though we give $4 billion in aid to Israel, we give $6 billion to the surrounding Arabic countries, and that we have no business spending the people's money in such a way while the United States has budget deficits. He would cut it all out.
He also stated that he would never vote for a budget that was not balanced, regardless of the party in power. The budget deficit is the big issue to him and he believes that inflation will be higher in 2010 than the record 20 percent inflation we had in 1979 because of what President Obama has done.
He also stated that, like his father, he believes that the nation should have voted on a declaration of war against Iraq and Afghanistan. And although he would have voted "no" on the war against Iraq, unlike his father he would have voted "yes" on the war against Afghanistan since there is sufficient evidence that all of the training for 11-Sept.-2001 was done there. In a separate question, he stated that he would have voted no on going to war against Somalia.
Nobody asked him anything about North Korea.
He will make a formal announcement on whether he will run before 20 August (his father's birthday), but it sounded to me that he is running.
Okay, Rand Paul said he has not fine-tuned his position on space yet, but he did say a couple of interesting things to me about it.
He wants to populate nearby planets with organisms (he specifically stated algae) that could grow there to help feed the people who eventually will explore those planets (and perhaps change the planet's atmosphere). That tells me that he will keep the space program.
In regards to Iran, he took a hands-off approach, that since the country can't even refine its own oil, that we shouldn't worry about it. Even if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they won't use it because Israel has 400 such weapons and would wipe Iran off the map, and they know it. He said that if Israel tried a pre-emptive strike that we should use our forces in Iraq to try to stop it.
Also in regards to Israel, he stated that even though we give $4 billion in aid to Israel, we give $6 billion to the surrounding Arabic countries, and that we have no business spending the people's money in such a way while the United States has budget deficits. He would cut it all out.
He also stated that he would never vote for a budget that was not balanced, regardless of the party in power. The budget deficit is the big issue to him and he believes that inflation will be higher in 2010 than the record 20 percent inflation we had in 1979 because of what President Obama has done.
He also stated that, like his father, he believes that the nation should have voted on a declaration of war against Iraq and Afghanistan. And although he would have voted "no" on the war against Iraq, unlike his father he would have voted "yes" on the war against Afghanistan since there is sufficient evidence that all of the training for 11-Sept.-2001 was done there. In a separate question, he stated that he would have voted no on going to war against Somalia.
Nobody asked him anything about North Korea.
He will make a formal announcement on whether he will run before 20 August (his father's birthday), but it sounded to me that he is running.
One of the other candidates is Cathy Bailey, who was once US ambassador to Latvia because she raised a lot of money for George Bush 43. Her husband, Irv Bailey, was president of an insurance company that I worked 7 years for. He was incompetant and led the company to the ground (and in the interim firing good people like myself), so I won't be voting for her either.
The other Republican candidates include Secretary of State Trey Grayson (who will probably win the Republican primary) and possibly State Senate President David Williams (probably the most qualifed to be a great senator from day one). There is a Democrat also named David Williams who runs for office every year, and occasionally wins the primary (he won in 2008 for Agricultural Commissioner, an elected position in Kentucky, but lost to a famous-in-Kentucky basketball player coincidently named Richie Farmer) because of the popularity of the Senate President. The final Republican running, Daniel Essek, is yet another Libertarian-type who ran against Kentucky's other Senator, Addison Mitchell "Mitch" McConnell in 2008, and received 7% in that primary. He is a strong believer that since Barack Obama has not actually produced a certified birth certificate stating that he was born in Hawaii, that it must be presumed that he was born in Kenya, and thus should not be president.
On the Democratic side, there is favored-to-win-it-all Attorney General Jack Conway, who already even has a campaign office next door to one of those Laser Tag Game playing places here in Louisville, and Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo, who ran against Jim Bunning in 2004 and almost won. There are also a couple of other Democrats running whose only hope of winning are if the two front runners knock each other out with negative campaigns.
Unfortunately, Kentucky laws makes it very difficult for a third-party candidate to mount any type of legitimate campaign at all. The Libertarian Party of Kentucky tried to run a former actor, Sonny Landham, for US Senate in 2008, but disavowed him after he made anti-arabic (genocidal) comments.
There is an anti-Louisville bias in most of Kentucky, which will hurt Conway, and might help Rand Paul (who is from Bowling Green, the only place in the world where the Corvette automobile is made).
All-in-all, it will be an interesting election (how many other statewide races are covered by foreign bloggers?). If you (or your readers) want to follow it, be aware of the following deadlines:
4-Nov-2009 to 26-Jan-2010: Filing period for Republicans and Democrats - filing fee is $500 and two signatures (most will file on the last two days)
31-Dec-2009: Last day to join the party you plan on running in. (It will be interesting to see if anyone changes their party.)
1-Apr-2010: Last day for independents and third-party candidates to declare their candidacies.
18-May-2010: Republican and Democratic Primary election day.
17-Aug-2010: Last day for non-major parties to turn in 5000 signatures and $500 filing fee.
19-Oct-2010: Last day to file as a write-in candidate (Kentucky charges write-in's a $50 fee to have their votes counted - the only time write-ins have won is when no one has filed regularly).
2-Nov-2010: Election day. [Note: except for the final election day, each state sets its own filing dates, primary election dates, etc.]
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