Free Republic

Bilderbergers, the Iraq invasion, Alex Jones—the GOP senator has routinely flirted with America's paranoid fringe.This past summer, Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky and a potential 2016 presidential wannabe, was the GOP's It Girl. The New York Times Magazine splashed his mug on the cover and asked, "Has the 'Libertarian Moment' Finally Arrived?" It noted that Paul possessed a "supple mind" and was a "preternaturally confident speaker." Washington Post political prognosticator Chris Cillizza pronounced Paul the "most interesting voice in the GOP right now," and Politico gave him the No. 1 spot on its list of the 50 "most...

Joni Ernst ✔ @joniernst Deeply saddened by tragic news of Dr. Doug Butzier. Gail&I will keep Doug’s family in our thoughts&prayers as they mourn their untimely loss 12:09 PM - 14 Oct 2014 32 Retweets 16 favorites Doug Butzier, Libertarian Party candidate running against Bruce Braley and Joni Ernst for U.S. Senate, lost his life yesterday in a plane crash. The wife of Doug Butzier confirmed Tuesday morning to KCRG-TV that it was Butzier who was killed in a plane crash Monday. … Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Lynn Lunsford said the Piper PA-46 crashed around 11 p.m. Monday on approach...

Paul is the first potential 2016 contender to visit the city.Sen. Rand Paul met with civil rights leaders Friday in Ferguson, Missouri, the city torn apart by racial unrest following the August shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. During his visit, the Republican Senator, who is seen as a likely presidential candidate, stated his concerns about long prison sentences for nonviolent crimes, the loss of voting rights for felons and military programs to give unused equipment to local police departments. “I wanted to find out what we could do to make the situation better,” Paul...

The Texas senator stands for conservative principles. Unfortunately, that's all he does with them.Is Ted Cruz good for conservatives? Or is it the other way around? The answer matters a lot, because it's not impossible that this guy could be the next GOP presidential nominee. A close adviser to Texas' junior senator told National Journal that there is a 90 percent chance the Tea Party star will run for president in 2016. "And honestly, 90 is lowballing it." Cruz denies that he has made plans past the midterms. But boy, he sure does look like a man preparing for a...

Sen. Rand Paul's best window for winning the 2016 Republican presidential nomination increasingly looks like it has passed. A lot can happen over the next 18 months, but the renewed focus on foreign policy -- and more specifically, the Islamic State -- has reminded the Republican Party where its true views on international affairs lie. And it is decidedly not with non-interventionists like Paul (R-Ky.). A new poll from CNN/Opinion Research is the best we've seen to date bearing out this point. The poll asks Americans to identify themselves as either hawks or doves -- hawks being someone "who believes...

I’m blown away. Not because McCain is saying he’d back Paul in 2016 as the nominee; of course he’s going to say that while he’s thinking of running again for Senate in Arizona. What blows me away is his reasons for saying so. The great fear among hawks is that, for all of Rand’s posturing lately about destroying ISIS and standing up to Russia, there’s little daylight on foreign policy between him and Ron Paul. No matter how hawkish Rand gets during the primaries, that’s the trump card that rivals like Rubio and Cruz can and will play on him:...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Legal marijuana is luring pot tourists and business entrepreneurs to Colorado, and it’s also attracting another demographic: the homeless, some of whom trek to the state in hopes of landing a job in the industry. “There’s an enormous migration, even a homeless movement, so to speak,” David Spencer, a homeless man from Tennessee, said. “I figured this would be a good place to start over.” While shelters across the metro area are willing to open their doors, they’re quickly running out of room. “We were averaging 190 (homeless) last year. We’re now averaging 345 a night,” Murray Flagg of the...

Two potential presidential candidates come to a conservative Christian cattle call.Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, two Tea Party senators in the hunt for the White House, find themselves in a nearly identical position these days. Both sons of celebrated conservative leaders, they regularly speak at the same events, criticize the same Democratic President with a similar message of back-to-basics constitutionalism, and poll nationally at about 10% among Republicans in the way-too-early 2016 polls. But on Friday, as conservative Christians gathered in Washington for the Values Voter Summit, their differences were far more apparent than their similarities. Paul stood behind the...

No U.S. lawmaker has better learned the lessons of both the Obama and Bush failures. Reaganesque? America has been screwing up on the foreign policy front for a long time. George W. Bush's efforts to spread democracy were laudable — but quixotic and ill-fated. And Barack Obama's "leading from behind" and"don't do stupid stuff" strategies, which supposedly learned all the right lessons from Bush-era misadventures? These also did not work. So as we head toward a critical presidential election in 2016, what should we be looking for when it comes to foreign policy? The answer is Ted Cruz. Don't laugh...

Eighty legislators from Utah have submitted an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in which the legislators warn the Court that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to the legalization of incestuous and polygamous marriages. The brief comes following the request for a writ of certiorari from both Utah's Attorney General, Sean Reyes, and the plaintiffs in Kitchen v. Herbert, the case that found both both a district court and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of marriage equality in Utah. As Joe.My.God points out, "the brief is signed by 22 of the 29 members of the state...

I was walking through the Fox News building a while ago and a producer introduced me to a young black man by saying, “This is the engineer you’ll be working with tonight.” We shook hands and the engineer said, “I know who you are. Look, I want you to know, I don’t agree with all your beliefs but I respect you for speaking your mind.” I said “Thanks” because we were in a hurry but what I really wanted to say was, “What beliefs? I’m not a Scientologist. I don’t really have ‘beliefs.’ I have opinions based on the information...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — In front of a boisterous pub crowd of young voters here, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) ripped into President Obama over executive overreach and even vowed to repeal “all previous executive orders” in one of his first acts as president, should he run. Paul’s comments came to the New Hampshire chapter of Generation Opportunity, a national grassroots conservative group with a libertarian appeal with thousands of young liberty-minded activists nationwide engaged through it. Paul focused much of his remarks on executive overreach by President Barack Obama, saving some of his most interesting points for a question-and-answer...

For several years Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky and the son of presidential candidate Ron Paul, has been one of the most interesting politicians in his party and in congress as a whole. At a time when new ideas have become increasingly scarce, and the policy bandwidth increasingly narrow in Washington, Mr. Paul, whether speaking about US intervention and foreign policy or more recently about militarization and the police, has been one of the few politicians with views outside of his party’s mainstream. With the 2016 presidential election approaching, this has made Mr. Paul one of the most...

Months ago, the isolationism of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was so extreme that I said he might as well be President Bashar Assad's man in Washington, referring to the Syrian dictator and murderer at a time when Rand Paul was following the policy of Ron Paul of extreme non-intervention. Times have changed, or shall I say Rand Paul's calculations have changed, so his positions have changed. Now Sen. Paul mocks President Obama over the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and vows to be a super-hawk going after ISIS. I guess when it's time to raise campaign money for...

Whether the issue is climate change, healthcare or gun control, libertarians are on a permanent collision course with evidence.The observation that science and politics make uneasy and often treacherous bedfellows is hardly revelatory. In science, all hypotheses must withstand the trial-by-fire of experiment; its methodology is self-correcting and objective, unconcerned with petty prejudices or personal conviction. Politics, by contrast, is deeply entangled with ideology – it is not bound to respect reality as science is, and thinks nothing of substituting convincing evidence for emotive rhetoric. And yet, when science and politics clash, it is all too often science that loses....

Jesse Benton, the campaign manager for U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, will resign his post as a bribery scandal from the 2012 presidential campaign threatens to envelop Benton and become a major distraction for McConnell's campaign. Benton told the Herald-Leader that he met with McConnell Friday afternoon and offered his resignation, which McConnell "reluctantly accepted." Benton said he offered his resignation, effective Saturday, with a "heavy heart." He maintained his innocence, faulting "inaccurate press accounts and unsubstantiated media rumors." "This decision breaks my heart, but I know it is the right thing for Mitch, for Kentucky and for the...

Former Rep. Ron Paul said he believes the U.S. government had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and has kept this information hidden in a classified section of the 9/11 Commission report. Paul, who made the comments during a radio interview last Friday, also argued that the crimes of Osama bin Laden were “minor” compared to the harm the U.S. government has caused since the 2001 attacks. “I believe that if we ever get the full truth [about 9/11], we’ll find out that our government had it in the records exactly what the plans were, or at least...

How the same right allows for both same-sex marriage recognition and refusing to sell gay couples wedding cakes.How can a libertarian support gay marriage but also the right of businesses to decline to provide goods and services such as cakes, wedding dresses, and photographers for gay weddings? For many libertarians, it makes perfect logical, philosophical, and legal sense. But from the outside perspective, it often does not. As a result, critics looking for an opportunity to throw shade on the increased media and public interest in libertarian ideas can focus on just a piece of this mentality. We saw the...

Rand Paul and Ted Cruz’s differing tone in response to the Ferguson riots could provide clues for the divergent trails they're forging to woo libertarian voters in 2016. Both the Kentucky and Texas Senate Republicans urged that civil liberties be protected in statements following unrest in Ferguson, Mo.. After an officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18 year old African American teen, last weekend, riots have erupted and police have been criticized for using overly-aggressive force against protesters and reporters calling for answers. Strategists say Paul struck a more provocative tone against in his TIME op-ed, calling for the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)"Rand Paul is right," Rev. Al Sharpton said on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Friday after the Kentucky Senator empathized with African-Americans who believe their rights were threatened by police officers. Paul published a TIME op-ed on Thursday discussing the issue of the "militarization" of the police force and what it meant in the showdown between police officers and protestors in Ferguson, Missouri reacting to the shooting death of Michael Brown. "Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them," Paul wrote, after criticizing the racial...