Free Republic

Ron Paul at the University of South Florida: “Somebody said the other day on the Internet, if those Paul people had been in charge, Osama Bin Laden would still be alive. But you know what I think the answer is? So would the 3000 people on 9/11 -- be alive!”

Is a vote for the Republican Party in 2012 a vote for war? Is a vote for Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich a vote for yet another unfunded war of choice, this time with a nation, Iran, three times as large and populous as Iraq? Mitt says that if elected he will move carriers into the Persian Gulf and "prepare for war." Newt is even more hawkish. America should continue "taking out" Iran's nuclear scientists — i.e., assassinating them — but military action will probably be needed. Newt is talking up uber-hawk John Bolton for secretary of state..

Paul says friendship best way to deal with Iran AP News Sunday, November 06, 2011 GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul says "offering friendship" to Iran, not sanctions, would be a more fruitful to achieving peace with Tehran. The Texas congressman says fears about Iran's nuclear program have been "blown out of proportion." He says tough penalties are a mistake because, as he says was the case in Iraq, they only hurt the local

As Congress considers appropriating hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for the Department of Defense, a bipartisan group of legislators today announced an initiative to urge the President’s deficit reduction commission to reduce military spending as part of government efforts to address the budget deficit. At a press conference today, Representatives Barney Frank (D-MA), Ron Paul (R-TX), and Walter Jones (R-NC), along with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), released a copy of their joint letter to the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and outlined their plans for forcing serious consideration of spending that has long been considered...

There is nothing conservative about the war in Afghanistan. The Center for Defense Information said a few months ago that we had spent over $400 billion on the war and war-related costs there. Now, the Pentagon says it will cost about $1 billion for each 1,000 additional troops we send to Afghanistan. One Republican Member from California told me recently that we could buy off every warlord in Afghanistan for $1 billion. Fiscal conservatives should be the ones most horrified by all this spending. Conservatives who oppose big government and huge deficit spending at home should not support it in...

During her speech to the first ever National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Saturday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin discouraged the very idea of a national organization, urging the movement to stay leaderless and decentralized. This was the most important and valuable part of Palin’s speech. As for the rest of it–Sarah sounded pretty much like the same old Republican Party. Despite the many independents that make up the movement, the tea parties in large part represent a long overdue reexamination of conservative principles. A big-spending Democratic president seems to have awakened grassroots conservatives enough to finally lament the...

Last week Congress passed the war supplemental appropriations bill. In an affront to all those who thought they voted for a peace candidate, the current president will be sending another $106 billion we don’t have to continue the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a hint of a plan to bring our troops home. Many of my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration seem to have changed their tune. I maintain that a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war. Congress exercises its constitutional...

What would we do if a freely-elected Muslim theocracy came to power in Pakistan? What would we do if Iran suddenly announced that it possessed several nuclear weapons and the missile technology to deliver them? According to the Bush* Doctrine, we'd have to eliminate the potential threat with military action. This doctrine cannot possibly be consistently applied to all potentially-threatening, Iraq-like situations. At $200 billion a pop, these actions would have a significant effect on the economy. The cost to our foreign relations and world image would be incalculable. One shudders to think of the sinister plots that each action...