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(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...

Sen. Rand Paul said President Barack Obama made “one important point ” in his remarks on Wednesday saying that the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was neither Islamic nor a state, but questioned the constitutionality of the president’s strategy. “Ultimately, civilized Islam will have to step up. We need to do everything we can to protect ourselves, I’m all in for saying we have to combat ISIS,” Paul said Wednesday on “Hannity.” “So I think it is important not only for the American public but for the world and for the Islamic world to point out that this...

Is Congress really going to allow the president to escalate military action against ISIS without voting on it? There almost certainly won't be any vote before the midterm elections. But there is still another way: members of Congress could try to force a vote on authorization of force after the elections - during the lame duck session. ...

"I should have anticipated the optics," President Obama said by way of acknowledging that golfing right after making a statement about the beheading of James Foley looked bad. "Part of this job is also the theater of it," he said. "It's not something that always comes naturally to me. But it matters." For those who remember that this is the same guy with the Greek pillars, the campaign stop in Berlin, the newly minted "seal" of the president-elect, it was an odd confession. Obama likes theater just fine; he just doesn't like having to read from a script not of...

"My policy on cake," the ebullient Tory mayor of London, Boris Johnson, once remarked, "is pro having it and pro eating it." Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator and potential GOP presidential aspirant, has hopes of embracing a similar policy on running for office. Kentuckians, to their credit, aren't buying it. Paul was elected to the US Senate in 2010, and he has said clearly that he intends to run for reelection in 2016. But almost from the moment he took office, he has also shown every sign of wanting to run for president in 2016. And that poses a problem:...

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...

WASHINGTON, September 6, 2014 — Rand Paul’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal sums up his analysis of how the menace of the Islamic State developed, and clearly declares that it must be dealt with: "The Islamic State represents a threat that should be taken seriously. But we should also recall how recent foreign-policy decisions have helped these extremists so that we don’t make the same mistake of potentially aiding our enemies again". The Christian Science Monitor wonders, “Has Rand Paul become a Hawk?” and outlines his pre-existing image: His relatively dovish foreign-policy views have long been seen as...

s a de-facto declaration of war. The measure, which was introduced several months ago by Senators Lindsey Graham, Bob Casey and Joe Lieberman, supports continuing to pressure Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program. The resolution advocates using methods other than containment to stop Iran, including exerting economic and diplomatic pressure. Senate Joint Resolution 41 “rejects any United States policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear weapons-capable Iran.” Senators expressed their fears regarding Iran’s nuclear capabilities. “We know that Iran would create access for terrorists – access for them – to these nuclear weapons, making the Middle...

Obama has made mistakes but so did Bush by invading. There's no good case for U.S. military intervention now. Though many claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan on foreign policy, too few look at how he really conducted it. The Iraq war is one of the best examples of where we went wrong because we ignored that.In 1984, Reagan's Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger developed the following criteria for war, primarily to avoid another Vietnam. His speech, "The Uses of Military Power," boils down to this: The United States should not commit forces to combat unless the vital national interests...

The Kentucky senator is trying to tell us he’s not an isolationist. That dog won’t hunt.Rand Paul insists he’s not an “isolationist.” Writing this week in TIME, he says, “I look at the world, and consider war, realistically and constitutionally.”But in reality, the Kentucky senator has advanced a brand of neo-isolationism and appeasement that is as short-sighted as it mistaken. Despite his recent, and frantic efforts to recast himself as not completely ridiculous on national security issues, the truth is his record often puts him in league with Barack Obama—or even to the president’s left. Anyone who truly cares about...

Jeb Bush, Florida’s former governor, is still deciding whether to jump into the 2016 race. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie continues to endure an investigation into whether his administration abused its power by intentionally creating traffic jams. And Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is struggling to convince conservatives that he is not a foreign policy isolationist while Islamic terrorists run rampant through Iraq and Syria and execute Americans journalists. A dozen or more prominent Republicans have been testing the national political waters for more than a year trying to decide whether to make a bid for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination....

>Hawks...or Vultures?I just read a piece posted on Drudge, from the Washington Post, in which the writers, Sebastian Payne and Robert Costa, take note of what they observe as a shift in the GOP, away from the trend of non-interventionism, back towards 'hawkism', i.e, the NeoCon perspective and focus. I don't doubt the numbers, I only question the perhaps over broad application of the context of this shift. The writers make particular note of Rand Paul, Libertarian leaning Senator from Kentucky and potential contestant in the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination race: “Even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a leader of the...

Over the weekend, Rand Paul said something entirely out of character for him, and as Aaron Blake of the Washington Post commented, “almost nobody noticed.” "If I were president, I would call a joint session of Congress," Paul told the AP. "I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily." The quote didn't really make the rounds and was buried deep in the AP story, but it's a pretty telling little nugget. Why? Because, to date, it's one of the most hawkish things that any potential...

Pat yourselves on the back! As you will recall, GOA rallied gun owners several times over the past couple of months in opposition to Operation Choke Point. Well, faced with a devastating barrage from the Second Amendment community, the Obama administration has staged a hasty retreat on its plan to shut off credit for gun stores through “Operation Choke Point.” According to an article in The Washington Times, “[g]un retailers are no longer on a hit list deemed ‘high risk’ by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. after the banking regulator formally withdrew [this list]” last week. The FDIC said its...

He mocked President Barack Obama over the controversies that have plagued his second term. “It’s sorta like the Old MacDonald’s farm of scandals. Here a scandal, there a scandal, everywhere a scandal,” Paul jabbed, adding of Obama’s ISIS strategy “If the president has no strategy, maybe it’s time for a new president.” But Paul saved special scorn for Clinton, the prospective frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, specifically highlighting her role in the events surrounding the deadly 2012 attacks on American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. “If she wants to be commander in chief and she cannot protect our embassies,...

On Wednesday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul seemed to reverse course on the crisis in the Middle East, calling now for the military destruction of the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist organization. In recent weeks, Paul has vacillated between downplaying the threat of ISIS to ruminating that previous US action was somehow responsible for the group's rise. Christian Whiton rightly takes Paul to task for this, but, in his critique, suggests that more robust intervention by the US in the Syrian civil war would have blocked ISIS. The two arguments are flip sides of the same flawed coin.  Both Paul and Whiton overstate...

Various folks expressed surprise when the Associated Press wrote “Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky pounced Friday on President Barack Obama’s ‘we don’t have a strategy yet’ comments.” Rick Perry, sure, but Rand Paul? Isn’t he supposed to be an “isolationist” as the AP claims in a later paragraph? The broader debate pits those who favor the GOP's traditional muscular foreign policy — a group that includes Perry and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — and those, like Paul and Cruz, who prefer a smaller international footprint. The so-called isolationist approach plays well with grassroots activists...

The bribery scandal surrounding former Rep. Ron Paul’s (R-Texas) 2012 presidential bid is threatening to damage his son’s 2016 White House prospects. The saga took down Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) likely campaign manager, Jesse Benton, who was running Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) reelection bid. And the implications of wrongdoing two years ago could still further trickle down and hobble the younger Paul’s developing presidential campaign apparatus. Benton, a longtime aide to both Pauls, resigned Friday from the GOP Senate leader’s campaign amid controversy sparked by former Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson’s admission in court that he accepted tens...

For starters, Rand is short for Randal, not an allusion to Ayn Rand, after whom Sen. Paul was not named by his libertarian (not Objectivist) father Ron Paul. Reportedly, growing up he was called Randy … until his wife shortened the diminutive to Rand.Washington, ordinarily, is committed to maintaining the status quo or making, at best, incremental changes. As we struggle with the political consequences of the end of an era of all-out war the old political status quo is ripe for transformation.Paul shows signs of being the key transformational figure. If he himself understands the depth of this proposition he...