I was on the phone with a Kentucky-based AP reporter the other day-- at least I think he was based in Kentucky-- clearing up some false claims about Blue America's very public support for Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway after some insane press release from Karl Rove's shady political action committee, American Crossroads, sent out some false information about us. That done, I decided to take a look at what American Crossroads is up to in Kentucky. The first thing I found was sickening-- a couple of September 22 expenditures against Jack-- $13,805 for media production work and $235,246 for ad placement. That's on top of Independent Expenditures the week before from the NRSC ($414,007.00 + $12,000.00 + $70,171.00), as well as a flood of smaller expenditures from the insidious Club For Growth, DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund and from the anti-Choice fanatics, National Right to Life. In all, these Republican Party front groups have already spent $745,229.00 smearing Jack on TV and radio from one end of Kentucky to the other.

Not many outside groups have spent anything in Kentucky in favor of Jack's campaign-- nothing from Menendez's all-failure-all-the-time DSCC, which is probably trying to figure out a way to insert Cal Cunningham into the race-- and the only I.E. I could find was $43,941.00 spent by MoveOn in opposition to Rand Paul.

Nonetheless, yesterday's Louisville Courier-Journal bannered the brand new SUSA Bluegrass Poll showing that Conway has made up whatever deficit he's had in the minds of Kentucky voters. "Democrat Jack Conway," they reported, "has cut sharply into Republican Rand Paul's once-commanding lead in Kentucky's U.S. Senate race, moving into a statistical tie with a little more than five weeks before Election Day... The previous Bluegrass poll, released the first week of September, showed Paul leading Conway 55 percent to 40 percent."

The poll shows that Conway, the state's attorney general, is now appealing to voters who say they are neutral on the tea party-- Paul's base of support.

And Conway is building a significant lead among women, who earlier were almost evenly split between the two candidates.

The widening of a gender gap goes a lot further than women being turned off by Rand Paul's bizarre wig. Women are often primarily motivated by concerns for their families and, especially, their children. Paul's crackpot pronouncements about how the government has no role in protecting society from the Eastern Kentucky drug epidemic that no one has told him about and about how Kentucky doesn't want federal financial help, have caused many women, particularly independents to do a double-take on the Tea Party-oriented ideologue. For every tax dollar Kentuckians send to the federal government, they get back $1.51, a great deal-- subsidized entirely by states like New Jersey, California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut and the other states that pay far more than they get back. "Paul is in effect saying that if he is Kentucky's next Senator, he will work to reduce his state's share of federal spending, thus hurting his own constituents." He sounds almost as crazy as... Joe Miller, the Alaska fringe kook who doesn't recognize the great deal Alaskans get ($1.84 for ever dollar) and, like Paul, promises to be an advocate for making his own constituents' lives much poorer.

And if that weren't bad enough, Rand Paul, who abhors campaigning among the "common people," is advocating policies that instead send American jobs-- and wealth-- overseas. The tax code has a loophole that lets companies deduct their foreign interest and income from their U.S. taxes. This provision essentially encourages companies to invest in foreign companies and ship jobs overseas. Experts estimate shutting this loophole would save $100 billion over ten years. And it would be more effective if combined with an effort to shut down offshore tax shelters, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates could save an additional $30 billion. Conway vigorously supports closing this loophole. Falling inline behind the Party of Big Business, Rand Paul just as vigorously opposes it.

If it sounded above that I was insinuating only women cared about their families and their children and about Paul's bizarre claims about the drug problem (or lack of it), that's not what I meant. In fact, this powerful Conway ad is aimed directly at fathers. Please tale a look at it and consider helping him keep it on the air by contributing to his campaign.

[Crossposted at DWT.]

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Rand Paul's controversial and insane beliefs have now transmitted into his life experience as a new profile that was published by GQ reveals. Smoking weed in college is no big deal but when that's added to kidnapping and forcing a female student to worship an 'Aqua Buddha," you've now entered the twilight zone, not to mention physically abusing a woman.

TPMDC:

Remember your college years? The test cramming, the questionable decisions when it came to alcohol, the even more questionable decisions when it came to dating? And who can forget that classic college prank -- the one where you kidnap a girl from the swim team, blindfold her, and try to force her to take bong hits before making her kneel in a creek and pray to "Aqua Buddha"?

What's that you say? You never tried that one? Well you must not have attended college with Rand Paul.

From a new profile of Paul's college years published by GQ:

The strangest episode of Paul's time at Baylor occurred one afternoon in 1983 (although memories about all of these events are understandably a bit hazy, so the date might be slightly off), when he and a NoZe brother paid a visit to a female student who was one of Paul's teammates on the Baylor swim team. According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, "He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They'd been smoking pot." After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. "They told me their god was 'Aqua Buddha' and that I needed to bow down and worship him," the woman recalls. "They blindfolded me and made me bow down to 'Aqua Buddha' in the creek. I had to say, 'I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.' At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no."

Paul's time at Baylor has become the talk of the Kentucky Senate campaign in recent days, after the Lexington Herald-Leader reminded everyone of the fact that Paul never graduated from the Baptist university in Texas.
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Late Update: Politico's Ben Smith reports that Paul's campaign is dismissing the kidnapping story -- but not denying it.

We know have more insight as to why Paul would favor legalizing Pot. Will he push to decriminalize kidnapping? Baby Paul could be nicknamed Aqua Buddha now. This is another bizarre episode in the life of Rand and quite clearly he was either stoned out of his mind or found it acceptable to coerce a female student.

As Ben Smith points out, Rand Paul isn't denying the events at all.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton didn't respond directly to Zengerle's question about the incident; I've e-mailed him to ask whether that story is true, and am also trying to reach the accuser.

UPDATE: Benton repeated his non-denial to me in an e-mail, adding: "We'll leave National Enquirer-type stories about his teenage years to the tabloids where they belong."

I've never heard the term 'teenage years' referred to when describing our college days, have you? Then there's the Skull & Bones secret society stuff he was involved with too. Being anti-religious is anyone's perogative, but this is just weird.

According to several of his former Baylor classmates, he became a member of a secret society called the NoZe Brotherhood, which was a refuge for atypical Baylor students. "You could have taken 90 percent of the liberal thinkers at Baylor and found them in this small group," recalls Marc Burckhardt, one of Paul's former NoZe Brothers. Sort of a cross between Yale's Skull & Bones and Harvard's Lampoon, the NoZe existed to torment the Baylor administration, which it accomplished through pranks and its satirical newspaper The Rope. The group especially enjoyed tweaking the school's religiosity. "We aspired to blasphemy," says John Green, another of Paul's former NoZe Brothers.

And so the NoZe Brothers would perform "Christian" songs like "Rock Around the Cross"; they'd parade around campus carrying a giant picture of Anita Bryant with a large hole cut out of her mouth after the former beauty queen proclaimed oral sex sinful; and they'd run ads for a Waco strip club on the back page of The Rope. In 1978, the Baylor administration became so fed up with the NoZe that it suspended the group from campus for being, in the words of Baylor's president at the time, "lewd, crude, and grossly sacrilegious."

And it also points out that he could possibly be lying about his "things would be better if everybody was a Christian" crap.

Appearing on The Brody File, Rand Paul, who believes that portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act need "further discussion" and may violate private business owners' First Amendment rights, said that we wouldn't really need laws in this country if everyone were a good Christian:

I'm a Christian. We go to the Presbyterian Church. My wife’s a Deacon there and we’ve gone there ever since we came to town. I see that Christianity and values is the basis of our society. . . . 98% of us won’t murder people, won’t steal, won’t break the law and it helps a society to have that religious underpinning. You still need to have the laws but I think it helps to have a people who believe in law and order and who have a moral compass or a moral basis for their day to day life.

Although Paul attends a mainline Protestant church, in his comments one might hear an echo of Christian Reconstructionism. RD contributor Julie Ingersoll, an expert on Christian Reconstructionism, once described it to me this way: "Reconstructionists claim to have an entirely integrated, logically defensible Christian worldview. Reconstructionism addresses everything you have to think about." In other words, as a society we should follow (preferable) biblical law, and dispense with all but a small handful of civil laws.

Rand Paul is at it again. Sam Stein:

Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul was caught in a now-familiar campaign mishap on Thursday when it was revealed that he has failed to correct mistaken assumptions about his educational achievement.

Contrary to popular belief, the Tea Party favorite never received a bachelor's degree from Baylor University, reports the Lexington Herald-Leader reported. Paul attended the school but left for Duke University after being accepted into its School of Medicine.

The mistake, the campaign insisted, was made by the press. "I guess many people and some in the media have assumed Dr. Paul had a bachelor's degree, but he has never said that," Doug Stafford, a consultant for Paul's Senate campaign said.

As for why the Paul campaign never asked publications to run a correction, Stafford insisted that the candidate and his aides were not aware that the erroneous assertion had ever been made.

Naturally, video was bound to surface testing that claim. And by Thursday afternoon, Paul's opponent Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway had unearthed footage of Paul sitting through an interview with the Louisville Courier Journal editorial board in which his bio was read to him as follows:

"Dr. Paul is the chairman and founder of Kentucky Taxpayers United. A native of Pennsylvania he is a graduate of Baylor University and the Duke University School of Medicine."

I'm shocked that Rand even went to Duke. Why didn't he start his own medical school to get his degree just like he did when he started his ophthalmologist certification group?

Instead he starts his own rival group "National Board of Ophthalmology."

He is listed as the group's president; his wife, Kelley, is listed as vice president; and his father-in-law is listed as secretary. Paul and his relatives receive no salaries from the organization, his campaign said.

Maybe his father could have been the principal of his new medical school...

And the only reason he's running is because of his father.

If you support a woman's right to choose then you're out of luck with Rand. Do we really need another Ben Nelson on this issue? The only thing he really has going for him is his father's name. I've heard many bloggers complain about nepotism being used to get elected to Congress and to acquire very sweet jobs on TV. As Scott Horton and Digby point out--rightfully so--that Paul's beliefs fall in line with your basic country club conservative republican, except he'll be more extreme. "Baby" Paul is nothing without Poppa Bear.

This man is unqualified to hold a position in Congress.

A Bush is what a Bush does, even if his name is Jeb. How awkward would you feel if you have to stump for a candidate on the anniversary of the passing of a landmark piece of legislation signed into law by your father, knowing full well that your candidate would have voted against such an act, one that is all about common decency?

Does Jeb Bush believe that handicapped people should forced to ride on the back of the bus? You may think I have two separate things mixed up, but not in Rand Paul Land, because he's all for businesses to be allowed to do whatever they like, including being racists, because that's how the free markets work in his mind. His beliefs extend to the handicapped as well.

Sam Stein: Jeb Bush's Rand Paul Fundraiser Awkwardly Takes Place On Anniversary Of Disability Act

When former Florida Governor Jeb Bush hosts a fundraiser on behalf of Senate candidate Rand Paul on Monday it will symbolize, in more ways than one, the uncomfortable union of opposite poles of Republican ideology. Bush's brand of pragmatic conservatism stands in contrast to Paul's Tea Party temperament. The Kentucky Republican, likewise, often touts his independence from the GOP, citing the antiquated Republicanism of the Bush clan as an example.

And so it seems almost appropriate that the two would team up, of all days, on the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

ADA, which made it illegal for employers to discriminate against the disabled, was a signature piece of domestic legislation for Jeb's father, former president George H.W. Bush, and not merely because Congress forced it down his throat. The 41st president pledged his commitment to the bill starting with his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. "I am going to do whatever it takes to make sure the disabled are included in the mainstream," he said.

Indeed, when the legislation was celebrating its 19th anniversary, last year, the elder Bush put out a statement, congratulating President Obama "for taking some time today" to commemorate its significance.

We all remember what Rand Paul said to Rachel Maddow and anyone else that would listen. That was until they actually started to pay attention to his crackpot ideas.

"I think a lot of things could be handled locally," Paul said. "For example, I think that we should try to do everything we can to allow for people with disabilities and handicaps... I think if you have a two-story office and you hire someone who's handicapped, it might be reasonable to let him have an office on the first floor rather than the government saying you have to have a $100,000 elevator. And I think when you get to solutions like that, the more local the better, and the more common sense the decisions are, rather than having a federal government make those decisions."

After the Maddow interview he cancelled his 'Meet The Press' interview and is trying to stay off the national grid as much as possible. What an embarrassment. This fundraiser isn't helping him much. Here's what's being said about the Bush fundraiser in Kentucky.

Jack Conway bashes Rand Paul, Jeb Bush at ADA celebration—Louisville Courier-Journal Conway blasts Paul, Jeb Bush at rally for disabled persons—Lexington Herald-Leader

Jeb Bush chided for attending Rand Paul event—Associated Press

Conway criticizes Paul, Jeb Bush at event honoring passage of ADA--CNHI

ADA group protest Rand Paul, Paul's campaign blames Jack Conway—WHAS 11

Jeb inspires $100k haul for Paul, protests—WHAS 11

Jeb Bush's Rand Paul Fundraiser Awkwardly Takes Place On Anniversary Of Disability Act—Huffington Post

Would the ADA pass today?—The Guardian One Bush is back on the campaign trail—The Hill

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