Topic: GOP - Rand Paul's Presidential Highlight Reel w/ his Libertarian Twist - page 61. (Read 205816 times)

Bush 16%
Paul 13%
Walker 12
Christie 10
Carson 6
Huck 6
Rubio 5
Cruz 3
Trump 3

S.300 - A bill to provide for auditable financial statements for the Department of Defense, and for other purposes.

AMES, Iowa — Sen. Rand Paul, nursing a cold, did not shake many hands on the first day of his swing through Iowa this weekend. Instead, he elbow-bumped activists as he made his way through crowds and hoarsely thanked them for their support.

The Republicans who showed up Friday at Paul’s rally did not mind. In a state where caucus-goers often demand warm interactions with presidential contenders, they were happy to hear Paul’s riffs on monetary policy and Montesquieu from a distance.

As Paul (Ky.) moves closer to a 2016 bid, he is betting that in a field of big personalities, his low-key style and atypical pitch — mixing snarky asides, dovish takes on foreign policy and a compassionate plea for criminal-justice reform — will set his candidacy apart.

“Just look at who’s here,” said David Fischer, a former Iowa GOP official, as he surveyed the crowd at Paul’s gathering Friday at a Des Moines winery. “He is actually bringing women, college students and people who are not white into the Republican Party.”

Over half the world votes for Democrats and other socialists, so I think the people-farmers can declare Mission Accomplished.  Now on to reap their reward...

Clearly the people-farmers running the show won't stop until every third kid has some expensive combination of autism, autoimmune disorders, and infertility, and a damaged mental maturation which makes them subservient and sheep-like to the existing power structures.

I'm pretty annoyed with Rand Paul right now. He's right that vaccinations should be a personal choice, but joining in with the anti-vaxxers claims that vaccines are unsafe?

He hasn't attached his wagon w/ the anti-vaccine folks, he merely posited what they speak is the gospel about vaccines. His main point was that parental choice should remain supreme and should you not want to have your kids vaccinated then you'll have to send them to a school that allows unvaccinated kids or home school them. He probably went a little too far but his point still stands and he mounted up credentials amongst social conservatives and those that roll with their faith over government controls. Plus, he single-handedly drove plenty of press his way. This will not be a make it or break it issue going into a primary or general election. As I've stated elsewhere, this is a sideshow issue muddying the waters of what the real problems are in this country. We wouldn't even be dealing with this if there wasn't a wave of kids from other countries being allowed in by design to make an issue out of nothing.

AMES, Ia. – Rand Paul looked reserved, if not slightly uncomfortable, throughout the boisterous Iowa State men's basketball game Saturday.

Paul, a likely candidate for president of the United States, had one of the best seats in the house — a midcourt floor seat secured by Republican agribusiness leader Steve Sukup, a big Iowa State booster and past candidate for Iowa governor.

Paul, a 52-year-old U.S. senator from Kentucky, gamely posed for photos with Iowans who kept running out of the stands during timeouts. He applauded the Cyclones at the appropriate moments, and at times leaned sideways in his chair to give the ebullient Sukup room to jump up and shout. When the cheerleaders did a routine almost directly in front of him, Paul didn't look their way, appearing deep in thought.
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And Paul locked in at least one influential vote Saturday.

"I'm supporting Rand Paul," Sukup announced during a private fundraiser he organized for Paul at Hunziker House at Reiman Gardens. The Register was given exclusive access.

Sukup, who served in the Iowa House from 1994 to 2002, is the chief financial officer for the Sheffield-based Sukup Manufacturing, which sells its agribusiness products in all 50 states and 100 countries. He has credibility in Iowa agriculture, and Iowans can't drive far without seeing grain bins marked with the family's last name.
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Asked why he's endorsing Paul, and so early, Sukup told the Register: "He has broad appeal. The last time around, they cornered us in with an 'us against them' type deal. Dr. Rand Paul is, 'Hey, I take care of everybody.' "

Sukup said he agrees with Paul's stances on limited government, individual responsibility and a fair tax system. "He's very principled, and that's what I think the country's looking for."

The fundraiser audience of 30 people was full of business leaders — the owner of a chain of McDonald's restaurants, a real estate company owner, the owner of multiple ethanol plants, an insurance company owner — who mentioned "electability" when asked what they're seeking in a candidate. None aside from Sukup seemed ready to commit to anyone — it's a year out from Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, and no one has even officially declared a candidacy yet.

Sen. Rand Paul , a hero to libertarians, has spent months trying to broaden his political appeal ahead of a likely presidential campaign. He got a bracing lesson this week in how tricky the political balancing act may be.

Some libertarian conservatives were thrilled by his statement that most childhood vaccines should be voluntary. They included home-schoolers and other grassroots activists who could play an important role in the early voting state of Iowa, where Mr. Paul will be this weekend.

“Rand’s comments on vaccinations were a hit,” said Joel Kurtinitis, co-founder of Liberty Iowa, the group sponsoring a Des Moines rally to call for auditing the Federal Reserve, which Mr. Paul (R., Ky.) is headlining Friday. “The parental rights movement is built on the presupposition that parents know better than government.”

But other Republicans worried Mr. Paul’s message would undermine public-health protections. That could undercut the senator’s efforts to confront a more pressing political challenge: To convince a wider array in the party that he isn’t a fringe ideologue, and that he will have broader appeal than his father, former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who ran multiple long-shot campaigns for president on strict libertarian principles.

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“The great challenge for the Paul campaign is for people to really get to know Rand Paul, so that you don’t have the assumption that he is just the mini-me of Ron Paul,” said Steve Munisteri, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, who will be stepping down to become a senior Paul adviser.

Mr. Paul wants to be judged on his own merits. “I think we’ve spent about four years really trying to create an agenda, a platform, putting it forward, so there is plenty for people to judge based on who I am,” Mr. Paul said in an interview.

The vaccine debate underscores the risk that, on occasion, Mr. Paul’s libertarian instincts will lead him into stands that could alienate other voters he has been courting.

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Mr. Munisteri said he was unconcerned about political fallout about vaccines because he believed it didn’t register with the broader public or hurt him with activists in early voting states.

Mr. Paul’s trip to Iowa this weekend will give him a chance to work on both parts of his political strategy. He will continue efforts to expand the GOP appeal by meeting Saturday with college students at the Iowa State University in Ames. And at the “Audit the Fed” rally, he will be reconnecting with a marquee issue for libertarians and his father’s supporters.

His stance on vaccines has been “received well” among libertarians in Iowa, said Adil Kahn, executive director of Liberty Iowa, because many of them are home-schoolers who have been advocates for parents rights.

Mr. Munisteri said the Iowa trip gives Mr. Paul a good chance to make sure “his existing base is shored up and fired up.”

I'm pretty annoyed with Rand Paul right now. He's right that vaccinations should be a personal choice, but joining in with the anti-vaxxers claims that vaccines are unsafe?

"Anybody here want to audit the Fed?" likely presidential candidate Rand Paul yelled as he took the stage in Des Moines Friday night.

"Yeah!" answered the audience of libertarian-leaning activists at the $15-per-ticket event.

Paul, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, has already logged nine days in Iowa this election cycle as he ramps up for a 2016 White House bid.

But this was the first speech that Paul has tailored to Iowans whose core issues are non-interventionism, a constitutionally-limited government and more stringent oversight of the Fed, the bank of the U.S. government.

Those were some central themes pitched by his father, Texas U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, who ran for president three times before he retired from Congress two years ago. The elder Paul developed a very loyal following in Iowa, placing third in the 2012 GOP presidential caucuses with 21.5 percent of the vote.

Polling shows Paul's strength is growing here. His favorability has risen 5 percentage points in the last three months as more GOP likely caucusgoers have begun to view him positively, Iowa Polls show. In the horse race for first choice for president, Paul is currently in second place behind Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. And among five anti-establishment contenders, likely Republican caucusgoers think Paul would be best to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, as well as to reduce government.

The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) issued a sharp condemnation of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) opposition to Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch on Thursday.

Paul said he opposed confirming Lynch because she supports civil forfeitures, a controversial law enforcement tactic, but the chairman of the CBC dismissed those concerns.

“Senator Paul is using the issue of civil forfeitures to block a well-qualified federal prosecutor from heading the Department of Justice,” said CBC Chairman G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) in a statement. “Senator Paul also has the audacity to suggest that Loretta Lynch should have more concern for people living in poverty.

“The Congressional Black Caucus recognizes Senator Paul’s unfounded argument as nothing but an excuse to keep an African American legal scholar from holding this high position, and we directly call on him and Republicans to allow the nomination of Loretta Lynch to proceed to an up or down vote in the Senate,” he added.

On Wednesday, Paul said that he was opposing Lynch because she had said during her confirmation hearing that asset forfeiture laws are a “wonderful tool.”

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Amid rumblings that old grudges are resurfacing in Iowa, Rand Paul says he just wants to play nice with all the GOP factions here.

"Our goal is to bring people together," Paul, a U.S. senator from Kentucky and likely presidential candidate, told The Des Moines Register in a telephone interview Thursday. "That's been my goal as I've traveled around the country. I've supported candidates from all sorts of segments of the party."

It's no secret that there was bad blood in the past between the so-called liberty movement (activists loyal to Paul's father, 2012 presidential candidate Ron Paul) and other factions in Iowa, especially the GOP establishment.

Now that a new Iowa Poll shows Rand Paul's growing strength here, there seems to be an orchestrated effort to rekindle some of that animosity toward the liberty movement — a faction that the younger Paul needs to keep close if he wants to do well in the Iowa caucuses a year from now.

These anti-vaxxers are taking away that decision from other, responsible parents.

Paul needs to stick to the line about parental choice and end there. Once he starts in on the anecdotal evidence as a counter to scientific and medical consensus, he absolutely loses me. Keep it about the principle of personal freedom, anything else is a losing argument.

I'm pretty annoyed with Rand Paul right now. He's right that vaccinations should be a personal choice, but joining in with the anti-vaxxers claims that vaccines are unsafe?

Rand Paul being praised at Age of Autism...


This is one of their daily blog posts...http://www.ageofautism.com/

These folks seem like single issue voters mostly but the issue of parental choice is a crucial one these days since the left increasingly wants more say over the parents' leeway in deciding what's best for their kids. I can only imagine how problematic it is to raise a child that has issues of some sort.

Sen. Rand Paul will oppose—very publicly—the nomination of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States.

The Kentucky Republican is unveiling his opposition to Lynch on Greta Van Susteren’s On The Record program on Fox News.

Earlier Wednesday, in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, Breitbart News watched as the senator’s legal and press team briefed him final time before the interview. Sergio Gor, Paul’s communications director, his press secretary Eleanor May and attorney Brian Darling were all present.

Paul asked the team about Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) question during Lynch’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing about whether she’d oppose using a drone to kill an American citizen on American soil.

When Paul heard about her non-answer—she wouldn’t commit that the federal government does not have such authority—he was incredulous. Furthermore, Paul was appalled that Lynch came out in favor of President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty and the use of asset forfeiture—where the federal government seizes people’s property sometimes with flimsy reasoning, something even the Obama administration has offered slight opposition to—and then told his office staff he’s going to oppose her and aim to derail her nomination chances. “Oh, she’s going down,” Paul said to the room.

“I think ideally you want an attorney general who, if there were a problem, would be independent and objective looking at the executive branch,” Paul said in a previous interview with Breitbart News this past weekend aboard a flight to Dallas, Texas, where he had several speaking engagements and publicly welcomed Texas GOP chairman Steve Munisteri to his likely 2016 presidential campaign.

That’s kind of what you want an attorney general to do. I’m concerned that a big part of her fame as a federal prosecutor was through civil forfeiture. She was asked specifically about this by Sen. Lee, and her response was ‘oh, everything is fine, it’s done with a court order.’ She seems to not quite understand that innocent people are having their stuff taken by government–their cars, their money, their hotels, their stuff is being confiscated by government even if they’re never charged or even if they’re never convicted. She didn’t seem to grasp that point and this is a week after parts of the administration said they were not going to enforce some of the civil forfeiture..."