Month: February 2008

Ron Paul has announced that he is scaling down his campaign and, has absolutely ruled out a third-party Presidential run. He plans to focus on his reelection to Congress. He faces a March 4 primary challenge in his home district.

For the first time, Paul left no wiggle-room in addressing the third-party question:

Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties – just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.

Thank you, Dr. Paul, for a great effort.

Mike Moore will be discussing his important new book, Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance, at the Independent Institute in Oakland, CA, on Tuesday, February 12, 7:00 PM. Here are the details.

Moore’s book is an indispensable contribution to an issue often neglected: The efforts by the U.S. empire to militarize, monopolize and weaponize space. This could potentially spark another Cold War, and Moore, former editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, has a unique grasp of the history, technology and geopolitics involved. If you’re in the area, you won’t want to miss it.

Appropos my recent column on John McCain’s foreign policy views, and especially this piece in the current issue of The American Conservative, check out this Bizarro McCain:

The Washington Post created an illustrated timeline of neoconservatism to go with a review of Jacob Heilbrunn’s They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of The Neocons.

Click here for the whole graphic.

As always, observations and gripes are welcome in comments.

It will be interesting to see what Rupert Murdoch does to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, particularly if long-standing rumors that he intends to distance itself at least a little from its thinly veiled Likudist line. This week’s op-ed by Shalem Center senior fellow Michael Oren entitled “Israel’s Lebanon Disaster” was particularly – extravagantly, embarrassingly – transparent in its implied championship of former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is predictably calling for the resignation of the Olmert government and new elections. An unsparing indictment of Olmert’s performance during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the op-ed apparently anticipated a much more damning verdict in the long-awaited Winograd Commission report than what the Commission actually produced, one day after Oren’s screed. Oren, whose bizarre comparison last September (also published in the Journal) of George W. Bush to the Old Testament prophet Jonah as part of the neo-conservative campaign to rally support for the Surge I noted in a September post, even blames the fact that his rifle fell apart during Israel’s eleventh-hour ground offensive in Lebanon on Olmert.

An Israeli nationalist historian who was born and raised in the U.S., is a protege of Natan Sharansky, the director of the Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute, named for its founder-funder, casino multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly is also the biggest financial backer of Freedom’s Watch, which launched its own campaign to save the Surge at the same time that the Journal published Oren’s Jonah article. It’s really all part of the same Netanyahu network: the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the Shalem Center, Freedom’s Watch, and you can add the Middle East specialists at the American Enterprise Institute, Sharansky’s One Jerusalem, etc. etc. Aside from the fact that Oren clearly failed to anticipate the Commission’s exculpatory findings, what’s remarkable about this most recent column is the Journal‘s willingness to be so openly partisan in Israel’s internal politics. Is Bret Stephens, who, before becoming the Journal‘s “Global View” columnist, served as editor of the Conrad Black-owned Jerusalem Post, responsible? Will Murdoch retain him when he assumes full control?

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

According to the fourth quarter reports, the majority of military contributors supported Ron Paul, the one antiwar candidate in the Republican primaries.

Ron Paul received more contributions from servicemembers than the other three remaining GOP candidates:

Ron Paul – 1349
McCain – 413
Romney – 140
Huckabee – 99

And the Dems:
Obama: 466
Clinton: 181

This follows the same trend that was set in the second and third quarters of last year.

UPDATE: Ron Paul also received more total money from military contributors than all the Democratic candidates combined, or all the Republicans combined. Here are the totals in dollars for each candidate:

Ron Paul $392,721.00
Barack Obama $124,234.00
John S McCain $106,309.00
Hillary Clinton $75,258.00
Fred Thompson $58,373.00
Mike Huckabee $47,376.00
Mitt Romney $43,332.00
Rudolph Giuliani $23,430.00
Bill Richardson $21,175.00
John Edwards $20,711.00
Joseph Biden $10,940.00
Duncan Hunter $9,820.00
Thomas Gerald Tancredo $7,200.00
Samuel Dale Brownback $3,606.00
Dennis J Kucinich $2,952.00
Christopher J Dodd $1,098.00
Mike Gravel $970.00

Thanks to Tex McRae and Jeff Shulman.