Free Republic

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Friday said that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was “curiously blind” to the dangers posed by the terrorist group responsible for the security meltdown in Iraq. The war of words marks the opening of a new chapter of hostilities between the two lawmakers as they weigh presidential bids in 2016. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Perry said he found it “disheartening” the senator would “suggest that our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq.” …

If there is any doubt about the hatred that Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats hold for the Second Amendment, that hatred was made apparent last week. To review the bidding: The Senate was slated, last week, to consider amendments to the giant appropriations bill funding the Justice and Commerce Departments. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) had submitted an amendment to prohibit Attorney General Eric Holder from continuing Operation Choke Point -- a program designed to shut down gun stores by forcing banks to dry up their credit and to stop processing their credit card purchases. alt You will remember that...

“Gun Owners of America [has] blasted the bill as a ‘fake pro-gun bill designed to re-elect endangered anti-gun [Senators] up in 2014 in pro-gun states.’” -- Roll Call, July 9, 2014 Earlier today, the “Harry Reid Preservation Act,” S. 2363, went down to defeat, as pro-gun Senators successfully filibustered the bill by a vote of 56-41. As you know, S. 2363 was a “nothing-burger bill” which existed solely to elect anti-gun Democrats in Red States. This includes Senators like sponsor Kay Hagan (D-NC) -- pluscosponsors such as Mark Begich (D-AK), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Mark Udall (D-CO), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Al...

A new Zogby Analytics poll of likely Republican primary voters in 2016 shows Rand Paul starting to build a lead over better known – and more establishment – GOP figures. In the poll, Rand polls 20%, followed by “Establishment” candidates New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush with 13% each. In fourth place is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker with 8%, then Florida Senator Marco Rubio 7%, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindahl 4%, and New Mexico Governor Suzanna Martinez, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley all with 1% each. Rand does well among all...

Hardball host Chris Matthews made some bizarre comments about the potential Republican candidates for president in 2016 on Tuesday night. Speaking to Jeanne Cummings of Bloomberg News and Republican strategist John Feehery, Matthews took a swipe at Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and suggested “he's the Republicans' John Edwards.” [See video below.](VIDEO-AT-LINK)The Hardball host never explained why in the world he would compare a man who cheated on his wife while pursuing the presidency to Senator Marco Rubio, but nevertheless the snide remark took his panelists by surprise. While Republican John Feehery didn’t directly condemn Matthews’ unusual comparison of Edwards and...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has a clear lead in the Democratic primary, topping her potential challengers by an almost 50 percentage point margin, yet fails to hit the 50% mark against any of her potential Republican opponents, a Quinnipiac University National Poll, published Tuesday, shows. Hillary leads the Democratic primary with 58 percent, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts with 11 percent, Vice President Joseph Biden with 9 percent and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo with 4 percent. No other candidate tops 1 percent, the poll found. On the contrary, the Republican presidential primary is wide open....

Think you’ve got a problem remembering and keeping track of all your computer passwords? After nine days on the job, the Iowa GOP’s new leadership hasn’t been able to get an accurate list of passwords for the party’s online platforms. The party’s previous chairman was ousted June 28. The list of passwords left behind for the Iowa Republican Party’s website and other online accounts didn’t work. Chad Olsen was hired as the party’s executive director on the 28th of June. “When we attempted to use those user names and passwords for the most part we were unsuccessful in gaining access...

Sen. Rand Paul sided with President Obama over some of his more hawkish conservative colleagues, saying the recent surge of violence in Iraq at the hands of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorists is not the White House administration’s fault.“What’s going on now, I don’t blame on President Obama,” Mr. Paul said during a “Meet the Press” interview. “Has he got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq war on the chaos that is in the Middle East. I also blame those who are for the Iraq war for emboldening Iran.”Mr. Paul’s...

It’s time to end aid to the Palestinian Authority. This week, three young boys were buried in Israel. The victims of kidnapping, they had been murdered by terrorists from Hamas. The boys, Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Frenkel, a 16-year-old dual U.S.–Israeli citizen, were like any other children — their lives ready to be lived, their dreams ahead of them. They grew up in a nation that was at war but desperately wanted peace. Advertisement It is a peace they did not live to see, nor will others their age if action is not taken. The Obama...

Rand Paul Offers Amendment to Stop Eric Holder’s Operation Choke Point Thursday, 19 June 2014 19:56 Written by Gun Owners Excellent news! A few weeks ago, we told you about “Operation Choke Point” -- an effort by Attorney General Eric Holder to put gun stores out of business. Basically, it works like this: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), at the behest of Barack Obama, has declared that gun stores are “high risk” businesses. “High risk” businesses have been, up until now, a small category of supposedly disreputable businesses, which have included pornographers, sellers of drug paraphernalia, and payday lenders....

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul made yet another appearance Monday with Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, who is facing a Tea Party primary challenger. While considered one of the most moderate Republicans in the Senate, Alexander has been working in recent months to look more conservative. Before anyone could ask, Alexander denied that he was trying to get political help from the Tea Party darling. “We’re not here to endorse each other,” he said, without prompting. “Rand hasn’t asked me to endorse me for the President of the United States, and I haven’t asked him to endorse me for the senate. We’re here...

It’s not exactly the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manilla,” but the ongoing Rand Paul-Dick Cheney pugilism certainly packs a punch. The libertarian ophthalmologist and the warlord emeritus have been pounding each other for months, and while it’s tempting to just kick back with popcorn and behold the entertainment, we do need to acknowledge the bout’s deeper meaning. Because this is really about something quite serious. Republicans are profoundly split these days over foreign policy: between the non-interventionists who are increasingly wary of American military involvement abroad; and the neoconservative hawks who blundered us into Iraq and want us to keep flexing...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has yet to endorse a candidate in the Tennessee primary, but incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander has already recruited him for an event in his state. The two senators will host a healthcare roundtable discussion in Nashville on June 30 with Tennessee healthcare executives and professionals to discuss the effects of Obamacare. Although the discussion is closed to the press, the two senators will hold media availability after the event. As he faces primary challenger Joe Carr in the fall, Alexander has touted his work with Sen. Paul in campaign ads – particularly on the Freedom to...

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s not the tactics themselves that bother them as much as the attention those tactics are receiving from conservative voters. Says Red State’s Leon Wolf, “If any of these bastards want to avoid the fallout they should go on the record.” According to these conversations [with two Republican Senate staffers], some $800,000 was raised for Cochran by his Senate colleagues after the McDaniel victory in the primary’s first round, largely under the rubric of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This wasn’t seen as a particularly controversial matter at the...

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul doesn’t have a problem with Democrats heavily influencing Republican primaries. Paul, a likely contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, refused to criticize Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran’s campaign efforts to lure Democrats to the polls with race-baiting ads and promises of government handouts. ”I’m for more people voting, not less people voting. I think the people of Mississippi spoke and I think Thad Cochran has done a lot of good things for Mississippi,” Paul told reporters on Wednesday.What kinds of “good things”? A Tax Foundation study found that Mississippi ranks first in the amount of federal...

I wrote here about Rand Paul’s unconstitutional plan to propose federal legislation that would enfranchise some felons. Now, Sen. Paul has addressedthe constitutional issue posed by such legislation. He argues, in essence, that states decide who votes in state elections, but the federal government has the final say on who can vote in federal elections. Roger Clegg makes short work of Paul’s contention: The U.S. Constitution itself explicitly gives the authority to decide who votes in federal elections to the states (consistent, of course, with other constitutional guarantees, like the prohibition of poll taxes). And the recent Supreme Court decision...

Chris McDaniel, onthe blatantly unethical and illegal tactics employed by Thad Cochran and Haley Barbour in the Mississippi GOP runoff Tuesday… “McDaniel: I am a two-term state senator, I have fought for this party my entire life, I’ve given money…I’ve done everything they’ve asked me to do– and last night, they pulled over 35,000 Democrats into a Republican primary to defeat me…we feel betrayed. … Hannity: Do you foresee any circumstance under which you would support this guy? Because I don’t think I could do it. McDaniel: I prayed about it last night…my core principle is gonna have a hard...

I wrote a post several years ago contrasting a good initiative by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and a statist proposal by Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. There was no connection between the two ideas, but I thought the comparison helped show the difference between someone who instinctively wants more freedom and someone who reflexively thinks there should be more government control. Let’s do the same thing, but this time highlight a difference between Rand Paul and Hillary Clinton, particularly since the two of them may be rivals in 2016. First, let’s look at what Rand Paul recently said...

He’s not on any campaign payroll, but you could call him an informal adviser. Several of the GOP’s potential 2016 presidential candidates have, over the past few years, sought the advice of former president George W. Bush in Dallas. Although the former president has deliberately kept a low profile since he left Washington in January 2009, his door is always open for ambitious Republican politicians. He has welcomed a succession of likely 2016 candidates to his office in Dallas for private conversations about life, politics, and the all-consuming quest they will confront if they decide to seek the nation’s top...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a potential 2016 presidential contender, declined to support tea party critics of Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran's efforts to mobilize non-GOP voters to win the Republican nomination."I'm for more people voting, not less people voting," Paul told reporters Wednesday.Paul, an original tea party icon for his 2010 GOP primary win over the establishment, has worked assiduously the past year on broadening his party's appeal to minority voters, including negotiating with Democrats on efforts to rewrite the Voting Rights Act.Cochran's vote total grew by almost 40,000 votes from the initial June 3 primary to Tuesday's runoff against state...