Today I got a chance to sit in on a brief interview session with former Pennsylvania Congressman and current Senatorial candidate Pat Toomey, who is running with token opposition in the GOP primary and expecting to face party-switching Senator Arlen Specter in the fall of 2010.
Toomey gained national notoriety in 2004 when he launched a controversial campaign against Specter in the Republican primary, drawing the ire of party insiders who didn't want to mess with a sure thing. Of course, Toomey has now been vindicated by Specter's failure to stand by the party and eventual defection to the Democrats earlier this year. Now Toomey has the enthusiastic backing of the party, as demonstrated by this conference call for bloggers sponsored by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Toomey has also demonstrated an impressive ability to raise money as demonstrated in his 2004 campaign. Since 2005 he has been President of the Club for Growth, which has a powerful fundraising network. With that and now the support of the RNC and NRSC, Toomey is likely to be able to match Specter in fundraising and outspend any other Democrat. Right now, Specter leads with a war chest of almost $11 million and Sestak lags far behind with only $1.6 million, but Toomey only entered the race at the beginning of the summer and should catch up and likely be able to match Specter's spending once the race really gets going.
On the issues, Toomey has a record as being a strong fiscal conservative and while he is also conservative on social issues he doesn't have a reputation as a die-hard religious extremist. Some Libertarian Republicans are supporting Peg Luksik against him in the primary, but her positions don't seem significantly more libertarian than his, except perhaps in her isolationist position on foreign policy. Her positions on economic issues seem ill-informed and naive, while Toomey's record in that area is outstanding. While in the House, Toomey was rated 68% on social issues and 89% on fiscal issues by the Republican Liberty Caucus, actually ranking 9 points higher than Ron Paul on economic issues.
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Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Dr Dreadful
Uh-oh. You made the mistake of mentioning Ron Paul. Prepare for incoming!
2 - Dave Nalle
We'll see. Despite agreeing with Toomey on just about everything else, the PaulTards reject him as a "neocon" (their definition rather than the traditional one) because he isn't an isolationist. It must be so frustrating to be such righteous absolutists.
Dave
3 - Baronius
Darn. I was hoping to hear three minutes of you swearing at a tire. "Dammit! Damn socialist lug nut!"
I would like to have heard Toomey mention his pro-life position when asked about non-economic issues. But I did like his answer about missile defense. It's an important issue that has never really gotten any attention on BC. In recent months, there have been several successful tests of various missile defense systems, and our allies have been increasingly calling for us to advance our programs (we have guaranteed several countries' missile defense), but the President keeps pulling back funding and calling the systems "unproven".
4 - handyguy
Since PA is a closely divided swing state, the poll numbers will likely shift, especially as Joe Sestak [at least as articulate as Toomey!] becomes better known.
I am certainly not a Specter fan, and I really wish senators would go ahead and retire as they reach 75 or 80, if not before.
5 - handyguy
Missile defense: not only unproven, but unnecessary and vastly expensive.
6 - Baronius
You're right, Handy (except that they're proven, necessary, and don't cost any lives).
7 - Baronius
Seriously, Handy, maybe you're not up on the latest tests. The Aegis ship-based missile system has completed its 15th consecutive successful simulation. The land-based system shot down one of our own defective satellites last year. We've been preparing to deploy it in Poland, although the administration is backing out of the deal. The air-based system is the trickiest, using aircraft-mounted lasers, but it's been progressing nicely. Those stories don't get much attention though.
But your comment about it being unnecessary is what really throws me. What do you mean? Do you think that there will never be a missile attack on the US or its allies, that there will never even be a threat of an attack? Or do you think that the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction is practical against rogue states, terrorists, and accidental misfirings?
8 - Dave Nalle
No question that missile defense is way less expensive than having even a signle major city nuked.
Dave
9 - Clavos
I have an idea! Let's sell all our missiles (after all, they're "unnecessary") to Kim Jong Il; bet he'd pay us plenty for 'em..
To sweeten the pot, we could give him a complete package with each missile: throw in the ship to launch it from -- wow! -- we could even pre-program each missile to target a different US city -- what a deal. We could even diversify: sell a few of the same package to Chavez, the French, Ahmadinejad -- there's a HUGE market out there!
Marketing is my life -- I'll sell anything to anyone.
Anyone wanna buy a politician? I know where there are 535 of 'em who can be bought.
10 - Baronius
Who knew that liberals don't like things that are unproven, unnecessary, and vastly expensive? Conservatives could have won the cap-and-trade and public option debates so easily. Come to think of it, TARP, the stimulus package, and the takeover of GM and Chrysler could have been stopped as well. Clean energy - that's unproven, unnecessary, and vastly expensive. The moon landing, the purchase of Alaska, Columbus' voyage...
11 - El Bicho
God is unproven, yet you don't have a problem with that
12 - Baronius
Bicho - There are a couple of valid proofs of God's existence. Let me know if you want to chat about it.
13 - Dr Dreadful
I know of a number of proofs of God's existence, including St Thomas Aquinas's and a modern one by quantum physicist/philosophical hobbyist Anthony Rizzo (think that's his name).
Whether they're valid or not is still open to debate.
14 - roger nowosielski
"Quid est enim fides nisi credere quod non vides?" (i.e. what is faith but belief in that which thou seest not?) asks St. Augustine; but he also says: "Faith has its eyes by which it in some sort sees that to be true which it does not yet seeâ€"and by which, too, it most surely sees that it does not see what it believes" [Ep. ad Consent., ep. cxx 8 (al. ccxxii), P.L., II, 456].
15 - roger nowosielski
the link
16 - El Bicho
I'm all eyes, Baronius.
17 - Baronius
If I were you, I’d start with Aquinas’ five proofs. You can find them on Wikipedia under the obscure title, Quinquae Viae. I have a lot of trouble with Anselm’s ontological proof; I wouldn’t recommend it. I consider accounts of observed miracles to be persuasive, but not a “proof” per se.
Aquinas’ first two proofs, the First Cause and the Prime Mover, are very similar and are the most intuitively obvious. If you want to see a train wreck, read Bertrand Russell’s attempt to refute them. I don’t quite buy Aquinas' third proof. The last two would persuade any Platonist (#4) or Aristotelian (#5), but you don’t run across many of those in this century. That last proof, the teleological argument, is grossly misunderstood by most people. I don’t understand it 100%.
About the only interesting arguments against the existence of God are Occam’s Razor (the idea that it isn’t necessary to assume the existence of God) and the problem of the existence of evil.
18 - Christopher Rose
Baronius, Aquinas' so called five proofs are ludicrously unconvincing and I can't even begin to understand how a five year old could find them persuasive, never mind an adult. They are just yet more of the empty-headed assertions put forth by all the victims of the god con.
For the entertainment of anybody who cares, here are the so called proofs in all their laughable and meaningless glory.
1. God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form.
2. God is perfect, lacking nothing. That is, God is distinguished from other beings on account of God's complete actuality.
3. God is infinite. That is, God is not finite in the ways that created beings are physically, intellectually, and emotionally limited. This infinity is to be distinguished from infinity of size and infinity of number.
4. God is immutable, incapable of change on the levels of God's essence and character.
5. God is one, without diversification within God's self. The unity of God is such that God's essence is the same as God's existence.
I don't understand what you mean in your closing sentence, but there don't need to be any arguments against the existence of gods beyond a simple "prove it". Despite thousands of years of this gobbledygook, nobody has come even close to proving a superbeing's existence and nobody ever will...
19 - Dr Dreadful
IMO the only truly convincing proof of God's existence would be along the same lines as how we know Dave Nalle wrote this article: a signature.
Carl Sagan speculated that a Creator might make this extremely difficult, so that it would take the capabilities of a highly advanced civilization even to find it. A more primitive one, Sagan suggested, would be unable to cope with the knowledge and their brains would explode inside their heads like an overripe avocado in a microwave.
Such a signature would take the form of a message hidden deep in one of the natural laws - Sagan's fictional example was an obviously artificial number sequence quintillions of decimal places into the value of pi.
Ruvy, of course, thinks he's already found that signature. :-)
20 - Christopher Rose
Doc, I would go with simply turning up myself. Even the worst absentee landlord turns up once in a while...
21 - Cindy
If god ever showed up I'd have to stop being a pacifist. Now there is 'someone' it would finally make sense to beat the hell out of.
22 - Cindy
Actually, though I don't think it has anything to do with a god as a being, I am really amazed that on a planet that just happens to have complex life forms emerge from chemicals (okay, that's understandable), but it gets weird that all the natural laws that are discovered make everything possible that we want to do...like sending pictures and sounds through the air. Flying airplanes. Sure it all makes sense, if you understand it, I guess. But still...life forming is weird enough, combine that with the sending information through the air, recording voices in vinyl, etc. Lotta pretty amazing things that just happen to work out.
I guess like Einstein said, the universe is ordered, or something like that. But why is it ordered in such a way so that some improbable life forms can use it to do so many improbable things?
(I realize I am revealing a lot of ignorance. I should have studied more science instead of just the scientific.)
23 - roger nowosielski
Dreadful,
You might be interested in the following account by John Wisdom, a British philosopher from the "ordinary language" tradition.
It's based on Wisdom's rather mind-boggling article, "Gods."
24 - Baronius
Christopher, those are blurbs about the proofs. But you raise an interesting point: does a proof have to be accepted by everyone in order to be true? I don't see why it would.
Descartes fell into a similar trap. He said that "that which is apparent" is equivalent to "that which is apparent to everyone". In doing so, he put all responsibility for philosophy in the hands of the craziest person in society (because Descartes would only accept a principle that such a person would accept). But there's no reason that a concept has to be universally-held to be true.
About my last sentence, you seem to think that my side has a duty to prove God's existence to your side. I don't think that's true. Nor is it your duty to prove to me that God doesn't exist. It's each person's option to work out the question on his own. But proofs for the existence of God, and arguments against them, and proofs against the existence of God, and arguments against them, do exist historically. Out of fairness I cited the two strongest positions against the existence of God.
25 - roger nowosielski
Don't forget David Hume, Baronius.