Free Republic

At the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin this weekend highlighted a video of Rand Paul speaking in 2012 about sanctions on Iran. In it, Paul disparages the notion of use of force, and for some reason claims the United States was partly to blame for World War II! “There are times when sanctions have made it worse. I mean, there are times .. leading up to World War II we cut off trade with Japan. That probably caused Japan to react angrily. We also had a blockade on Germany after World War I, which may have encouraged them … some of...

In February, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) was asked during a panel what he thought about Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin saying negative things about him. Amash dismissed it and suggested people should go look at how often Rubin criticizes Rand Paul instead. So I did. Jennifer Rubin mentioned Senator Rand Paul’s name 143 times in the first three weeks of March (March 1-21) on her Right Turn blog. The only other political figure mentioned more often than Paul was President Obama at 206 times (not including “Obamacare,” but just President Obama specifically). The most frequently mentioned named after Sen....

THE WASHINGTON TIMES - The Republican Party must temper its emphasis on moral issues like abortion and same-sex "marriage" if the party is to regain seats lost during the 2006 congressional elections, a new poll says. Fifty-three percent of Republicans say the party "has spent too much time focusing on moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage and should instead be spending time focusing on economic issues such as taxes and government spending." "The results of this poll confirm what we have long believed — that what holds the GOP together is a belief in core economic principles," said...

Two newcomers, Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Cruz of Texas, are the hottest figures in the dominant conservative wing of the Republican Party. In markedly different ways, they both claim to be the heirs to the party’s contemporary patron saint, Ronald Reagan. In a short time, these first-term lawmakers have electrified elements of the party’s base and rattled the Senate establishment. The top two Republican leaders in the chamber, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Cornyn of Texas, have had to defer to the political popularity of their junior colleagues. Both are outside the party mainstream, rock stars...

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who’s quite vocally suggested President Barack Obama use his visit to the Vatican to explain to Pope Francis the so-called contraception mandate, lobbed another idea at Obama on Twitter Thursday morning: go to confession about this whole spying-on-the-Vatican thing: The Italian magazine Panorama reported last October that the National Security Agency — those guys! — had monitored up to 46 million phone calls in and out of the Vatican during the Papal conclave in which Pope Francis was chosen.

This ain’t your daddy’s libertarian. More to the point, this ain’t his daddy’s libertarian.First he went after Ted Cruz for trying to characterize him as a dove, now this. By the end of the year, he and McCain will be holding joint filibusters on the Senate floor demanding that America build the biggest nuclear bomb evah. Rand Paul, hawk? In the current budget, the Obama Administration called for the elimination of the Tomahawk missile. This missile protects our troops and allows us to avoid much direct person-to-person combat. Our navy has depended heavily on them…Nobody wants to cut spending, including...

Sen. Rand Paul has become the first Republican to assemble a network in all 50 states as a precursor to a 2016 presidential run, the latest sign that he is looking to build a more mainstream coalition than the largely ad hoc one that backed his father’s unsuccessful campaigns. Paul’s move, which comes nearly two years before the 2016 primaries, also signals an effort to win the confidence of skeptical members of the Republican establishment, many of whom doubt that his appeal will translate beyond the libertarian base that was attracted to Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman. Rand Paul’s...

Rand Paul is the most intriguing — and for Democrats, perhaps the most frightening — figure in today’s Republican Party. The Kentucky senator, who is more than flirting with a 2016 presidential run, is making a smart play for the millennial generation that was key to President Obama’s twin victories and that his own party has convincingly repelled. Paul’s unlikely pilgrimage to the progressive precincts of the University of California at Berkeley offered the most convincing evidence so far that he is serious about carving out this (sorry, President Clinton) third way space — and a demonstration of his potential...

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 26, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent U.S. senator has said that President Obama should “explain to the pope why he is telling businesses in America they can’t remain true to their faith and stay in business.” On Thursday, President Obama will meet with Pope Francis for the first time. According to probable 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, a topic of top priority should be the abortifacient, sterilization, and contraception insurance coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act. Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Tuesday morning, Paul did not mince words. “The ‘Hobby Lobby’ case is...

The conservative group Club for Growth has changed gears and is supporting establishment GOP candidates in primaries. Launched a decade before the tea party made life difficult for moderate Republicans, the club quickly rose to the political forefront while supporting challengers to incumbent Republicans who it felt were not conservative enough, according to the National Journal. In 2012, the fiscally conservative organization backed tea party candidate Richard Mourdock’s challenge to Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar and vilified veteran Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch for his voting record. The group also targeted 10 moderate House Republicans. But the political action committee has suddenly...

A new Facebook meme paints two leading Republicans as anti-science because of their alleged views of the age of the Earth. The Facebook group Being Liberal posted a picture March 10, 2014, featuring side-by-side images of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., looking somewhat sheepish. Bolded text under the images describes the senators’ views on the age of the Earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs. According to the meme, Rubio "believes Earth (is) 9,000 years old," and "humans hunted dinosaurs to extinction." Paul, the image proclaims, says the Earth is 10,000 years old and believes "God...

With an eye on 2016, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton is stepping up his Super PAC game. The former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations raised over $800,000 in 2013 and is looking to make a big splash in the second quarter of this year when he'll announce endorsements. “We had a very, very good March,” Bolton said in an exclusive interview Monday, referring to fundraising numbers that still aren't public. “We've got criteria and we're evaluating candidates to support,” he added. The hawkish Bolton isn't exactly coy about where this is headed. “I don't rule...

In two days, Barack Obama will meet with Pope Francis for the first time at the Vatican, Obama’s second trip to the Holy See. The Vatican state visit will take place as part of a tour of Europe, where Obama’s popularity has fallen considerably as a result of the NSA scandal and his foreign-policy decisions on drone warfare. Senator Rand Paul suggests that Obama could break the ice with Pope Francis by promising not to spy on him anymore, but then tells Fox News that Obama should also pledge to stop infringing on the religious freedoms of those in the...

Yesterday, Ron Woodward of NC Listen reported on a meeting he had with Renee Ellmers on the topic of immigration and amnesty. He claimed he had exited the meeting appalled both by her positions and by her behavior.One of the constituents attending the meeting recorded the conversation.The Randolph Tea Party posted the clips online, and exclusively forwarded the links to PJ Media. Four clips of the meeting are embedded below.At one point, Ellmers says of Woodard: “You don’t have any damn facts.”Ellmers claims he is stereotyping, and constantly interrupts him. This conduct occurred after she had inconvenienced the group by...

It’s about guns, it’s about the midterms, and maybe it’s about the first primary states in 2016, too. Democrats thought they would win confirmation for more of President Obama’s nominees by waiving the 60-vote filibuster hurdle for executive branch appointments, but they didn’t factor in nervous red-state senators afraid of taking tough votes that could sink their reelection in November. The latest apparent casualty is Vivek Murthy, a 30-something British-born American doctor, whose parents are from India, and whose Ivy League credentials and activism on public-health issues includes co-founding Doctors for America, which launched in 2008 as Doctors for Obama....

Rand Paul is an appealing candidate to many conservatives. But he has a fatal libertarian streak on social issues that will make his candidacy in 2016 a non-starter for convictional conservatives. According to Breitbart.com, Paul is urging the Republican party to "soften on social issues." But this is the one thing it cannot do and remain the Republican party. The GOP was founded in 1854 to fight slavery and bigamy, those "twin relics of barbarism." In other words, the GOP came into existence to declare and defend a principled stand on the two leading social issues of its day. Says...

RUSH: Rand Paul went to Berkeley yesterday, last night. Rand Paul got a standing O from the students at the University of California-Berkeley. Do you know the issue that he hit on that they just jumped out of their seats and applauded him on was the government spying on the citizens? He came out firmly against it, highly critical of it, and they couldn't be quiet. They were just cheering him like Republicans don't get cheered on college campi. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Rand Paul "delivered a scathing rebuke to the US intelligence community Wednesday, calling it 'drunk...

The conservative 2016 contender wants to lure young and black voters to the GOP, so he's taking his message to them. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ BERKELEY, Calif. – Rand Paul's swing through Berkeley is just the beginning of his foray into traditionally Democratic territory. After his visit to this liberal stronghold, where he's speaking to students about the NSA and privacy, the Kentucky senator will make stops at the National Urban League in July and at the NAACP in the coming months, if an informal invitation from the group is made official. He's also plotting a trip to Chicago and Milwaukee, Paul said...

BERKELEY, Calif. — Delivering a rare speech for a Republican at this bastion of liberalism, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday was given multiple standing ovations by the left-wing audience after railing against government surveillance and warning the students: “Your right to privacy is under assault.” “I am here to tell you that if you own a cell phone, you’re under surveillance,” he told the crowd. Paul’s address at the Berkeley Forum on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley focused on the National Security Agency’s collection of telephone metadata and the debate over privacy.

In an effort to expand his party’s base of support, Senator Rand Paul is urging fellow-Republicans “to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by” issues like “traditional marriage.” Is he serious? Does he actually think this is a winning strategy? And can he truly believe that this is a way for Republicans to advance their cause? I’m afraid so. As reported on March 14th, Paul stated that, “I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues.” What a self-defeating, misguided...