From yesterday, during testimony at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
At NYT, "Fauci Says Senator Rand Paul Is Fueling Threats Against Him."
Folks were slamming Senator Paul on Twitter yesterday. Mean-spirited, though MAGA trolls where cheering.
WATCH:
Is the 2016 GOP field starting to enter the second stage of dealing with Trump – moving from denial to anger? The latest signs include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul's new declaration of war against the reality TV star, but that move may say more about how the freshman legislator views his own campaign than it does about how Trump's competitors view his novel candidacy.BONUS: At iOWNTHEWORLD Report, "Rand Paul – “Trump is Not a Conservative”."
Waiting for Hillary to appear at a parade - this woman wearing Bernie and Rand stickers with Benghazi sign in hand pic.twitter.com/hoOX8aUZ2v
— Katie Hinman (@khinman) July 4, 2015Rand Paul insists he’s not an isolationist. Luckily for him, many in his libertarian base are willing to let him keep saying that.More.
A movement that often demands ideological purity is, for now, largely giving the potential 2016 presidential contender a pass, even as he appears to take some foreign policy positions well beyond traditional libertarian limits.
Libertarians say they’re willing to look the other way because the Kentucky Republican — the son of isolationist iconoclast Ron Paul — is their best hope for taking their views into the mainstream and all the way to the White House. In more than a dozen interviews at a libertarian conference this week in Alexandria, Virginia, many attendees said they understand if Paul, who recently came out in favor of airstrikes against militants in Iraq, has to hedge on some issues to gain broader appeal — but that they still believe he’s one of them at heart.
“He’s playing two games,” said John Walsh, a former professor of physiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. “He’s trying to position himself so he doesn’t get tripped up and ruled out [of 2016], and at the same time, maintain his anti-interventionism.”
Paul already faces deep skepticism from many establishment Republicans. They are quick to note that he once espoused isolationist-leaning views, including arguing for ending all foreign aid, including to Israel; reining in defense spending and expressing deep reluctance to intervene in the Middle East. He has since distanced himself from some of those positions — saying, for instance, that he would not support ending aid to Israel anytime soon — but hawkish members of the GOP donor class remain unconvinced.
“When people meet Sen. Paul in person, they’re impressed by him, and he exceeds the expectations they have based upon the rantings of his father,” said one Republican who works closely with hawkish GOP donors. “He can change his positions now and come across as friendly in one-on-one meetings, but he still, at some point, is going to have to explain for his previous positions. And by the way, if he actually flips to a pro-Israel or more interventionist foreign policy, he’s going to lose a lot of his base libertarian isolationist supporters.”
So many Republicans have been conned by lying, libertarian filth like @SenRandPaul into thinking that libertarianism is something it isn't
— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) June 22, 2014
WATCH, MORON OF THE CENTURY-@SenRandPaul: Stopping A Terror Attack On The U.S. Is Not 'A Clear-Cut American Interest' http://t.co/ObksspObZZ
— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) June 22, 2014
WATCH - @SenRandPaul: Blame Bush For Return Of Al Qaeda Power In Iraq Since Last Year, Not Obama http://t.co/4jjjRDfsjn #teaparty #lnyhbt
— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) June 22, 2014
Also at NBC, "Sen. Rand Paul's Full Interview on Meet the Press."Senator Rand Paul is smart enough not to place too much importance on his victory in the presidential straw poll held at the recently concluded CPAC conference. Paul was undoubtedly the favorite of the conservative activists who attended the annual big conservative jamboree and received the biggest ovation of all the GOP stars who spoke there. Yet he is sure to remember that his father Ron also won the straw poll in 2010 and 2011 without it aiding his noisy but ultimately futile 2012 presidential candidacy.Continue reading.
However no one, least of all, his GOP rivals, should think that Paul hasn’t expanded his base from his father’s band of libertarian extremists or won’t be a first tier contender in 2016 when runs for president. He has maintained the momentum he got from his filibuster on drones last year while also carefully avoiding confrontations with the GOP establishment he’s eager to supersede. Many of his backers thought the disastrous government shutdown was a good idea and want to make all members of the party leadership to pay for the compromises they forged in order to extricate Republicans from the corner into which the Tea Party had painted them. However, Paul is quietly backing his Kentucky colleague Mitch McConnell for re-election. He’s also sent out signals to the establishment that he should be trusted to avoid extremism by saying that the shutdown wasn’t such a good idea.
But none of that changes the fact that Paul remains outside the mainstream of his party on foreign policy. As Ted Cruz, Paul’s main rival for the affection of Tea Party voters, reminded the country today on ABC’s “This Week,” it would be a mistake to think the Kentucky senator’s neo-isolationist views represent the sentiments of most conservatives or even Tea Partiers. Resentment against big government and suspicion of President Obama’s actions may have helped boost Paul’s popularity, but the idea that it is Rand’s party on foreign policy is a myth.
Sen. Rand Paul is warning his party that Republicans will not take the White House again unless the party changes.
“I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime for the presidency unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party,” Paul said on Glenn Beck’s show on TheBlaze in an interview that aired Thursday. “And it has to be a transformation, not a little tweaking at the edges.”
The Kentucky Republican said the GOP needs to have a “better message” and one that appeals to people “in a way they can understand it.” He said when he appears before young people, for example, he talks about civil liberties instead of taxes.
“Republicans haven’t gone to African-Americans or to Hispanics and said, ‘You know what? The war on drugs, Big Government, has had a racial outcome. It’s disproportionately affected the poor and the black and brown among us,’” Paul said.
The rumored 2016 presidential candidate said it’s “too early” to make a decision on whether he will be the Republican that takes back the White House, but he repeated his frequent message that Republicans need to appeal to more Americans.
“There is a struggle going on within the Republican Party,” Paul said. “It’s not new, and I’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of the fact that there is a struggle. And I will struggle to make the Republican Party a different party, a bigger party, a more diverse party, and a party that can win national elections again.”
As Rand Paul test-markets a presidential candidacy and tries to broaden his appeal, he is also trying to take libertarianism, an ideology long on the fringes of American politics, into the mainstream. Midway through his freshman term, he has become a prominent voice in Washington’s biggest debates — on government surveillance, spending and Middle East policy.Still more at the link. The piece goes into some detail on the "fringe" paleos like Lew Rockwell (who had a thing for Cindy Sheehan sometime back) and Murray Rothbard. And it mentions how Rand, right before announcing his run for office in 2009, he appeared on nutjob Alex Jones' radio program. There's a lot of unsavory conspiracists and racists in those swamps, and frankly, just being Rand Paul he may never fully escape them.
In the months since he commanded national attention and bipartisan praise for his 13-hour filibuster against the Obama administration’s drone strike program, Mr. Paul has impressed Republican leaders with his staying power, in part because of the stumbles of potential rivals and despite some of his own.
“Senator Paul is a credible national candidate,” said Mitt Romney, who ran for president as the consummate insider in 2012. “He has tapped into the growing sentiment that government has become too large and too intrusive.” In an email, Mr. Romney added that the votes and dollars Mr. Paul would attract from his father’s supporters could help make him “a serious contender for the Republican nomination.”
But if Mr. Paul reaps the benefits of his father’s name and history, he also must contend with the burdens of that patrimony. And as he has become a politician in his own right and now tours the circuit of early primary states, Mr. Paul has been calibrating how fully he embraces some libertarian precepts.
“I want to be judged by who I am, not by a relationship,” Mr. Paul, a self-described libertarian Republican, said in an interview last week. “I have wanted to develop my own way, and my own, I guess, connections to other intellectual movements myself when I came to Washington.”
Coming of age in America’s first family of libertarianism — he calls his father, a three-time presidential aspirant, “my hero” — Rand Paul was steeped in a narrow, rightward strain of the ideology, according to interviews, documents, and a review of speeches, articles and books.
Some of its adherents have formulated provocative theories on race, class and American history, and routinely voice beliefs that go far beyond the antiwar, anti-big-government, pro-civil-liberties message of the broader movement that has attracted legions of college students, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Tea Party activists.
That worldview, often called “paleolibertarianism,” emerges from the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, started with money raised by the senior Mr. Paul. It is named for the Austrian émigré who became an intellectual godfather of modern libertarian economic thinking, devoted to an unrestricted free market.
Some scholars affiliated with the Mises Institute have combined dark biblical prophecy with apocalyptic warnings that the nation is plunging toward economic collapse and cultural ruin. Others have championed the Confederacy. One economist, while faulting slavery because it was involuntary, suggested in an interview that the daily life of the enslaved was “not so bad — you pick cotton and sing songs.”
Mr. Paul says he abhors racism, has never visited the institute and should not have to answer for the more extreme views of all of those in the libertarian orbit.
“If you were to say to someone, ‘Well, you’re a conservative Republican or you are a Christian conservative Republican, does that mean that you think when the earthquake happened in Haiti that was God’s punishment for homosexuality?’ Well, no,” he said in an earlier interview. “It loses its sense of proportion if you have to go through and defend every single person about whom someone says is associated with you.”
Still, his 2011 book, “The Tea Party Goes to Washington,” praises some institute scholars, recommending their work and the institute website.
And he has sometimes touched on themes far from the mainstream. He has cautioned in the past of a plan to create a North American Union with a single currency for the United States, Mexico and Canada, and a stealth United Nations campaign to confiscate civilian handguns. He has repeatedly referred to the “tyranny” of the federal government.
Since becoming a national figure, Mr. Paul has generally stayed on safer ground. His denunciations of government intrusion on Americans’ privacy have been joined by lawmakers in both parties and have resonated with the public — though no other member of Congress as yet has joined him in his planned class-action suit against the National Security Agency.
He has renounced many of the isolationist tenets central to libertarianism, backed away from his longstanding objections to parts of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and teamed with members of the Congressional Black Caucus in calling for an easing of drug-sentencing laws. He recently unveiled a plan for investment in distressed inner cities.
Much of that is in keeping with the left-right alliance Mr. Paul promotes, an alternative to what he dismisses as a “mushy middle.” Such partnerships, he says, “include people who firmly do believe in the same things, that happen to serve in different parties.”
In recent months, potential rivals for leadership of the Republican Party have depicted him as an extremist. Before the recent investigations into political abuses by his administration, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said Mr. Paul’s “strain of libertarianism” was “very dangerous.” And Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told donors in New York that in a national campaign Mr. Paul could not escape Ron Paul’s ideological history.
Mr. Paul is not the first political son encumbered by a father’s legacy, but his mantle is unusually heavy. He has been his father’s apprentice, aide, surrogate and, finally, successor. Side-by-side portraits of father and son adorn one wall in his Senate conference room...
Democrats have been so successful at “mainstreaming” left-wing fringe movements that we tend to forget these movements were ever on the fringe. Republicans, meanwhile, are so beholden to notions of bourgeois respectability that they often assist Democrats in denouncing and marginalizing the rightward fringe. This is how we find ourselves with a president whose bestselling memoir was quite probably ghost-written by the unapologetic terrorist Bill Ayers, and who was re-elected by a campaign that smeared the harmless moderate Mitt Romney as a dangerous menace to the common good.Continue reading.
So the Democrats not only never cede an inch of their radical past, but are forever pushing forward with new radicalisms, while Republicans habitually assume the strategic defensive. But should we blame this on the GOP, or blame it on the fringe? Jack Hunter, bless his heart, was trying to speak truth to kookery.
The conservative movement flourished in the wake of the 1964 Goldwater debacle not by purging their own fanatical supporters — some of whom were as kooky as any Paulbot — but by persuading these fanatics to get organized and comport themselves in a manner that could attract mainstream support. The movement that eventually elected Ronald Reagan president and, in doing so, subsequently defeated the Soviet empire, was very pragmatic in its approach to the electoral process and what we might call image management.
By the way, am I misunderstanding or does he seem to think Ted Cruz, like Paul, is some sort of isolationist? I’m … not sure why. There was no one in the Senate, McCain included, who was tougher on Chuck Hagel than Cruz. When the Washington Free Beacon asked him to explain, Cruz said it’s because Hagel “has repeatedly been soft on our enemies.” Paleocons have also noticed that Cruz, despite often being lumped in with Paul on foreign policy, sounds plenty hawkish on Iran. Maverick’s likely concluded that because Cruz and Paul both speak frequently about the tea party and the Constitution and because Cruz was, after all, Paul’s wingman during the drone filibuster that they’re simpatico on foreign policy, but I suspect that’s untrue. In fact, Cruz and Paul seem to me to represent the two sides of the tea-party coin. From the beginning, Ron Paul fans have insisted that he’s the “godfather” of the movement; there are certainly tea partiers, especially the younger set, who are doctrinaire libertarians and whom Rand is trying to mobilize. But there’s another wing, which skews a bit older, that’s composed of more traditional conservatives — hawkish, concerned about “values” — who are disaffected with the GOP leadership’s squishiness and looking to rebrand themselves. The two wings overlap on spending, the core tea-party concern, and on stricter observance of constitutional limits on government, but they diverge on social issues and on foreign policy. Cruz was an ally of Paul’s during the drone debate because of that constitutional overlap, and of course because it was a chance to rebuke Obama. If a bill hit the floor tomorrow authorizing military action against Iran, though, I’m a lot less confident than Maverick that Cruz would end up on Paul’s side rather than on McCain’s and Rubio’s. We’ll find out…I don't know. But just love watching Ted Cruz grilling all the leftists idiots up on the Hill. He's been on fire.
By the end of the night, I was tired and my voice was cracking. I ended by saying, “The cause here is one that I think is important enough to have gone through this procedure.” I talked about the idea of compromise, but said that “you don’t get half of the Fifth Amendment.” I argued that we need more extended debates. And finally, at 12:40 a.m., I yielded the floor.RTWT.
On Thursday, the Senate confirmed John Brennanas director of the CIA. But this debate isn’t over.
The Senate has the power to restrain the executive branch — and my filibuster was the beginning of the fight to restore a healthy balance of powers. The president still needs to definitively say that the United States will not kill American noncombatants. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment applies to all Americans; there are no exceptions.
The outpouring of support for my filibuster has been overwhelming and heartening. My office has fielded thousands of calls. Millions have followed this debate on TV, Twitter and Facebook. On Thursday, the White House produced another letter explaining its position on drone strikes. But the administration took too long, and parsed too many words and phrases, to instill confidence in its willingness or ability to protect our liberty.
I hope my efforts help spur a national debate about the limits of executive power and the scope of every American’s natural right to be free. “Due process” is not just a phrase that can be ignored at the whim of the president; it is a right that belongs to every citizen in this great nation.
I believe the support I received this past week shows that Americans are looking for someone to really stand up and fight for them. And I’m prepared to do just that.
4 years ago, Brennan's advocacy of torture forced him to withdraw for top CIA spot; now, all Dems except 2 vote to confirm him #ObamaLegacy
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 7, 2013
Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well. The U.S. government cannot randomly target American citizens on U.S. soil or anywhere else. What it can do under the laws of war is target an "enemy combatant" anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant. The President can designate such a combatant if he belongs to an entity—a government, say, or a terrorist network like al Qaeda—that has taken up arms against the United States as part of an internationally recognized armed conflict. That does not include Hanoi Jane.The editors fail to note that the administration killed Anwar Awlaki's 16-year-old son without designating him as an enemy combatant. He wasn't on a kill list. He was just killed. A boy. An American boy.
One of the stranger results of the popular Paul filibuster was the instant coalescence of an ad hoc “Calm down, Rand” (read: shut up) effort. This political eruption loosely and overlappingly linked “surge” and Arab Spring diehards, neocon-esque conservative journals and blogs, and establishment pooh-bahs such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.Hey, I just like killing terrorists. But if it were me, we'd be putting boots on the ground, in Syria, Africa, you name it. Take it to the terrorists, I say. And don't be hypocritical about it.
I think the common ground here is that these groups basically favor the Bush-Obama drone wars that allow them to believe we are winning, or at least fighting, the war on terror, even if the unacknowledged reality is that we are losing the free world to what we might call “noncombatant” (or pre-combatant) Islamization. Maybe they think deep inside that if drone wars were deemed unconstitutional in any way – or, worse, ineffective – the hollow offensives the U.S. continues to support would eventually collapse, giving rise to panicky paralysis. In such an event, the absurdity of picking off terrorist leaders worldwide as a national strategy to fight “terror” might emerge with distressing clarity, while the Islamic law and money that have almost wholly engulfed Western institutions might become frighteningly apparent.
Maybe that’s why it seems as if blind trust in presidential discretion now trumps the bounds of the Constitution. But I hope not.
