Topic: GOP - Rand Paul's Presidential Highlight Reel w/ his Libertarian Twist - page 71. (Read 205816 times)

The guys a slimeball who back stabbed his own dad last time around. You do remember that right? He failed to support his old man against the others and instead went with a mainstream candidate.

Not that any of it matters. As someone pointed out earlier the whole thing is a farce to give people the illusion of freedom and choice.The only person who could have made a difference (and actually did somewhat) was Ron Paul; that is someone whos really top shelf all the way around.

Great read. There's nobody thinking about running for Prez that can offer that thoughtful of a solution to the present health care market. This man is top shelf all the way around.

Sen. Rand Paul just gave one of the most important speeches on foreign policy since George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. But instead of declaring war on another country, Paul declared war on his own party. Or, at least, its entire approach to foreign policy.

In his address last night at the Center for the National Interest — a think tank founded by Richard Nixon — Paul gave, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of how he thinks about foreign policy. His moderate non-interventionism is a far cry from his father's absolutist desire for America to exit the world stage. But Paul's stance is light years away from the hyper-hawk neoconservatism that's dominated Republican foreign policy thinking for decades.

Paul is signaling that, when he runs for president in 2016, he isn't going to move toward the Republican foreign policy consensus; he's going to run at it, with a battering ram. If he wins, he could remake the Republican Party as we know it. But if he loses, this speech may well be the reason.
[...]
In the abstract, this doesn't tell you a whole lot about what Paul believes. But when he gives specific examples of where he agrees and disagrees with Obama's policy, the core idea becomes clearer: Paul wants to scale down American commitments to foreign wars.

Paul endorses the original decision to invade Afghanistan, but criticizes Obama's decision to escalate it. He savaged the Libya intervention, calling Libya today "a jihadist wonderland." He supports bombing ISIS, but blasted Obama's decision to arm the Syrian rebels: "the weapons are either indiscriminately given to 'less than moderate rebels' or simply taken from moderates by ISIS."

But Paul also, much more quietly, agrees with major parts of the Obama agenda. In a move that's bound to infuriate Republican hardliners, he's calling for negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. He tacitly endorsed Obama's sanction-and-negotiate approach to the Ukraine crisis. And he called for a peaceful, cooperative relationship with China.

In Paul's ideal world, America only very rarely engages in war. Most of its relations with foreign powers are conducted via diplomacy and trade with other states. This is hardly a detailed theory of how to conduct American foreign policy, but it is absolutely a conservative vision for ramping down America's role in the world.

The Obama-bashing reveals Paul's real target: the GOP

Paul's agenda has a lot more in common with Barack Obama's view of the world than it does with, say, John McCain's. But his speech very cleverly played up the criticisms of Obama, and minimized the points of agreement. That's because the basic goal of the speech was to teach conservatives that they can oppose foreign wars and Democrats at the same time.

The real target of Paul's speech were the neoconservatives: the wing of the GOP that believes that American foreign policy should be about the aggressive use of American force and influence, be it against terrorist groups or Russia. Paul's unsubtle argument is that this view, dominant in the GOP, is a departure from what a conservative foreign policy ought to be.

His tactic for selling this argument is innovative. He's reframed arguments with neoconservatives as arguments with Obama, banking on the idea that he can get everyday Republicans to abandon hawkishness altogether if they see Obama as a hawk. "After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war," Paul said, clearly linking his critique of Obama to an attack on the Bush legacy.

Until this speech, Paul's 2016 foreign policy positions hadn't been clear. Now it is. Rand "clearly wants a more restrained US foreign policy," says Dan McCarthy, the editor of The American Conservative magazine. According to McCarthy, who's talked about these issues with Paul's staff, Paul has been engaged in a "trial and error" experiment. The idea is to figure out how to make a less aggressive foreign policy politically viable in the Republican Party.

After this speech, the testing phase appears to be over. According to his advisors, this speech represents the final, overarching framework for Paul's worldview. Rand has developed a strategy for wrenching conservatives away from the Bush legacy, and it's now a question of implementing it.

The stakes in the Paul-GOP fight are tectonic

Paul is setting the terms of the 2016 election. So far, every plausible Republican nominee who's spoken about foreign policy has taken a more hawkish tack. Paul has picked a fight on foreign policy, and now he's going to get one.

The Republican primary, then, will be at least partly a referendum on the future of Republican foreign policy. If Paul wins the primary — let alone the presidency — then the GOP and its elected officials will have to line up behind him. That will mean defending his foreign policy against Democrats, who will likely blast Paul from an interventionist point of view.

"Paul's been clear about his goal," DNC Press Secretary Michael Czin told reporters before the speech. "He wants to see America retreat from our responsibilities around the world." A Paul primary win would force Republicans around the country to line up behind Paul's non-interventionism against these attacks. It might also lead the Democratic Party to become more hawkish as it unites against Paul's philosophies — and that's particularly true if Hillary Clinton, who is already on the more hawkish side of the Democratic spectrum, is the nominee.

"Rand is the first guy," McCarthy says, "to have a chance to come in and do something different than what our foreign policy has been doing in 70 or more years." He's not wrong.

Rand Paul, whose foreign policy views have become a frequent target of his GOP critics, will use a high-profile speech in New York on Thursday to urge the United States to exercise restraint when engaging in wars overseas.

At a dinner hosted by the Center for the National Interest, the libertarian-minded Kentucky senator, a potential White House contender in 2016, will argue for “limits” on U.S. engagement in military conflicts. It’s a view that runs counter to the hawks among his fellow Republicans who have called for a more aggressive American presence in hot spots in the Middle East.

“America shouldn’t fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate,” Paul plans to say, according to excerpts provided by his office. “America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory. America shouldn’t fight wars that aren’t authorized by the American people, by Congress. America should and will fight wars when the consequences — intended and unintended — are worth the sacrifice.”

Paul plans to add: “After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war.”

Paul aides say the speech will be the first time the freshman senator fully spells out his “conservative realist” foreign policy, outlining how he views international trade, diplomacy and the national debt as it relates to national security.

Sen. Rand Paul is summoning his top strategists and political advisers to Washington one week after the November election for a strategy session over his widely expected 2016 presidential bid.

The gathering of Paul's top lieutenants in the nation's capital has been quietly organized by Doug Stafford, his chief political strategist, who began reaching out to key figures in Paul's political world earlier this month, multiple sources told National Journal.

Stafford has told invitees to reserve Nov. 12 on their calendar both during the day and into the night. Paul himself is expected to attend some of the meetings.

"This is the come to Jesus before the planned launch," said one Paul insider, who has been invited to the gathering.

The meeting of the Kentucky Republican's kitchen cabinet has been kept under wraps, with most of the invitees not even told who else will be there. Stafford has yet to circulate a formal official agenda, though few on "Team Rand," as Stafford sometimes calls the group, need to be told the talk will focus on a presidential run.

...

Dr. Paul has championed ophthalmology priorities such as repeal of the sustainable growth rate, preserving office-use access to compounded drugs, and derailing problematic quality measures for ambulatory surgical centers. Dr. Paul also serves on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The transcript of his remarks as prepared for delivery can be found below.

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning. It really is a pleasure to be here with you all today. It's great to be with normal people for a change. I work in a city where logic is the exception and dysfunction the norm. DC is so dysfunctional we can't even pass things we agree on. I have a bill that I co-sponsor with Harry Reid and I can't even get a vote on that.

When I think of how screwed up DC is, I think of what Groucho Marx said about politics: "The art of politics is looking for problems everywhere, finding them, misdiagnosing them, and applying the wrong remedies."

Being here in Chicago with fellow physicians is a big improvement over DC any day of the week.

I would like to thank the American Academy of Ophthalmology for inviting me here today. It is an honor to address you.

People often ask if being a physician affects my view of our nation's problems. Absolutely. I think physicians tend to be problem solvers. Physicians typically analyze a problem and apply the remedy based on the facts, not preconceptions.

Today I want to examine our healthcare system and look at ideas for making healthcare less expensive and more accessible.

Many years ago when my father first entered politics, he wrote an essay on Kwashiorkor. As you may remember Kwashiorkor is a stage in chronic starvation when protein deficiency becomes so severe that there is not enough intravascular colloid to maintain osmotic balance and fluid leaks into the abdomen creating ascites, the swollen bellies of starvation.

As a medical student, my father dreamed of a cure for Kwashiorkor, but the more he read, the more he discovered that the answer was economic, not medical.

I traveled to Guatemala this summer with the John Moran Eye Center and had a wonderful experience. Likely, nothing in my career has been more satisfying than seeing the smiles spread as the patches were removed the day after surgery. I'll never forget the Guatemalan man, who'd been blind before his cataract surgery, who fell to his knees to thank God. He told of how his life had been ruined by his blindness: His wife left him, he lost 40 pounds, he lost his job. In his jubilation the day after cataract surgery, he hoped to get his life back.

The team was lead by Alan Crandall from the John Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah. While we were in Guatemala, Alan gave me a copy of ‘Second Suns’ --- the story of two remarkable ophthalmologists and their ambitious goal of eliminating preventable blindness worldwide.

I read with fascination of the exploits of two great surgeons, Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin, and their quest to basically create a process whereby cataracts could be removed and vision restored throughout the developing world.

Dr. Ruit introduced the small incision sutureless extracap cataract surgery performed with an IOL in under five minutes. A phenomenal medical accomplishment…but a large part of their success was also an economic breakthrough --- discovering how to manufacture intraocular lenses cheaply and locally in Nepal.

I was fascinated to read of Dr. Ruit and the accomplished phaco surgeon, Dr. David Chang, going head to head and Ruit's technique not only competing successfully for speed, but also for outcome.

Ruit had discovered how to perform cataract surgery as quickly as we do in America, but at one-tenth of the cost. His surgery gave just as good a result but didn't require phacoemulsification.

The medical advance of bringing sight to tens of thousands of the blind people in the developing world was as much an economic miracle as it was a medical breakthrough.

In our country we have had a debate over what system best delivers the highest quality of healthcare to the most amount of people, at the least cost, and the least time spent waiting for it.

Though the debate over Obamacare may appear, at times, to be a debate over healthcare, it is really a debate over what type of economic system distributes goods the most efficiently.

Which really, when you think about it, is extraordinary that the debate is necessary at all. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, most economists have acknowledged that only when the marketplace determines the price of goods and services can the goods and services be distributed efficiently.

What does that mean?

It means that the Soviet Union failed because when prices are set by a central planner, mistakes inevitably occur.

The Soviet Union failed because they couldn't determine the price of bread. If they set the price too low, bread would fly from the shelves and there would be shortages and scarcity.

If they set the prices too high, the bread would rot on the shelves and bread would again be in shortage.

Only democratic capitalism, where millions of consumers vote daily, can determine the price of any good. The correct price of good is the price at which the most stuff is distributed to the most people.

There is no moral price. There is no correct price that any one individual can discover.

The Nobel Prize winning economist, Frederick Hayek, called this the fatal conceit, that any one individual would be so presumptuous as to believe they had sufficient knowledge to discover a "correct" price.

Every time a Washington bureaucrat sets a price, the consumer suffers.

You might respond that food or healthcare is too precious to let consumers decide its price.

If you believe that, realize you cannot escape economic truths. If you insist that healthcare is somehow different from all other goods and services, you will still suffer the consequences of economic fallacy.

If you set the price of cataract surgery too low, let's say free, the demand will be infinite and there will be shortages of cataract surgeries and cataract surgeons….and the only way to sort this out is by having the patients wait in line until supply can catch up with demand.

Adjusting supply to meet demand is not just a theoretical concept. It is the new normal in societies that reduce the apparent price of medical services to zero. In Canada, over a million people, at any point in time, wait in line for elective surgery.

When LASIK first arrived on the scene, I remember hearing of a prominent Canadian eye surgeon who would run through his government allotted number of surgeries by September and then come to the U.S. for the rest of the year and perform refractive surgeries.

But proponents of government intervention will argue, "Vision is too important a goal to be treated as a mere commodity. We could never leave something so precious as vision up to the vagaries of the cold, immutable marketplace.”

Yet, look at what happens in the LASIK marketplace and the contact lens marketplace. Prices fall and both LASIK surgery and contact lens are available in abundance.

But emotions run high when we talk of healthcare or basic needs such as food. Some argue that healthcare and food and water are too vital to be left up to capitalism. Only the government can distribute them fairly.

If you believe that, realize that the laws of economics, like the laws of thermodynamics, are inescapable… there will be consequences.

Rationing, either by mandate or by waiting in line, is an inevitable side effect of government distribution of goods.

But how would we take care of the poor? Isn't the civilized way to have government be in charge of healthcare and foodcare and the necessities of life?

I think there is another option: free up prices. Allow a marketplace of freely fluctuating prices for everyone. The consequences would startle you. The beauty of capitalism is that it distributes the greatest amount of goods at the cheapest price.

The economist, Joseph Schumpeter, once remarked, "The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…”

The wonder of Capitalism is not in producing a silk stocking that the Queen can purchase, but in producing silk stockings that even a shop girl can buy.

But wouldn't capitalism leave some people behind? Wouldn't some people be left without healthcare? Yes, but instead of destroying a system that works efficiently for the vast majority, why not address the needs of those left behind?

Instead of taking capitalism and pricing out of healthcare, why not let capitalism distribute most of healthcare and then devise ways of taking care of the indigent.

When poverty is the exception not the rule, the government and charities could get involved to fix the exception, but not screw up the system for the vast majority. Competition, when allowed to thrive, drives prices down.

How would we do this practically? Get government out of the business of setting prices. End the SGR, the government system that sets fees. It was wrongheaded policy from the beginning. It's been temporarily suspended over dozen times. Let's not temporarily fix SGR, let's abolish it once and for all!

Once prices are free to be set by millions of consumers, bidding instantaneously, will we free up choice.

For Medicare, we could still allow taxes to pay for the healthcare of senior citizens, but allow seniors the same choices that federal employees get. Federal employees get over 250 different insurance plans to choose from.

If you did that, there would be no need for government to fix either physician fees or patient prices.

Let consumers decide what kind of insurance they want and where they want to purchase it. It is a crime against nature to give unmarried young adults, insurance that covers pregnancy for the wife they don't have, in vitro fertilization for the kids they are not ready for, and pediatric dental coverage for the kids they don't have.

True freedom of choice would let patients buy any type of insurance they want, including inexpensive insurance. Shouldn't every American get to decide whether they'd rather buy expensive insurance or save that money for something they prefer?

To allow the marketplace to work in healthcare, we should allow the purchase of insurance with lifelong tax-free savings accounts. Health Savings Accounts started at birth would accumulate such remarkable amounts that health insurance costs would plummet to approach the costs that we associate with term life insurance.

For the exceptions to the rule, for those who live in poverty or are afflicted with expensive chronic medical conditions, government and charity can find a cure.

As physicians, we think of healthcare as medical problem. Only when we begin to understand that the most vexing medical problems are really economic problems will we be closer to a cure.

I think it would be an improvement if politicians acted more like doctors----

and if doctors became more involved in politics. We've been put through the meat grinder in the last few years, and no one in government seems to ask physicians how to improve healthcare.

America leads the world in so many medical innovations. I hope we don't lose that edge I hope the medical devices tax doesn't drive American medical companies overseas.

Our system wasn't perfect before Obamacare but I fear it's much worse now. There was nothing inherently wrong with medicine in our country.

The old system before Obamacare was not perfect, but I fear the new system with more government intervention will be worse. We are already reading of newly empowered patients who have subsidized health insurance and a $6,000 deductible.

We are in for a rude awakening when we discover that free or subsidized health insurance provides an incentive to seek care but with a $6,000 deductible, many of these new patients will still be non-payers.

As we discover the number of non-payers, we will also discover that premiums must rise to cover that cost. Unfortunately, the premiums will be paid by fewer and fewer non-subsidized purchasers of insurance.

We can search around for blame, and there is plenty. But the fact is, everyone in this room can help.

The voices in this room belong to experts in ophthalmology and leaders in communities across the United States. You should stand up and be heard.

Don't let the powers that be ruin medicine. Become part of the solution. Help fix the process. Support candidates who understand the problem and offer proper solutions.

Support policies that enable doctors and treat patients like consumers, while minimizing government.

If you don’t like what you see, be part of the next round of diagnosis and treatment.

I plan to be, and I would love to see you all with me. Maybe it’s time for a doctor to fix the problem.

I hope you'll join me and be part of the solution.

###

Rand Paul to Michelle Obama: Look at me — I’m at Dunkin’ Donuts

By Cheryl K. Chumley
Friday, October 17, 2014

Sen. Rand Paul took a playful jab at Michelle Obama and her healthy eating initiatives that condemn all types of junk food, tweeting to her handle to let her know the location of his first New Hampshire stop — Dunkin’ Donuts.

He wrote, to his nearly half a million followers: “Just arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire. First stop: @DunkinDonuts cc: @MichelleObama,” The Hill reported.

He didn’t specify his menu choices — but the jab was obviously at Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move!” anti-obesity campaign.

The first lady has fielded considerable fire from schools, parents and hungry students who say her cafeteria dictates are costing a lot of taxpayer dollars, usurping the roles of mom and dad and leaving diners — particularly athletes, who have higher calorie needs — outright starving.

Rand Paul, Chris Christie Laid Out Plans for Black Voters at Penthouse Forum

David Freedlander
10.17.14

At a Fifth Avenue event with America’s richest Republicans, the 2016 front-runners both told donors why they’re the man who can win minority voters.

Earlier this month, nearly a hundred of the wealthiest Republicans in the country gathered at the home of Woody Johnson, the owner of the New York Jets and an heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical family, for a GOP fundraiser. The crowd was nearly all white, and older, and male (“There was one Native American guy there, I think,” said one attendee) and sat at two long tables in overlooking Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in the $75 million duplex’s drawing room.

A number of top would-be contenders to the GOP presidential nomination, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and even Mitt Romney, were there to make their pitch to the assembled masters of the universe. So were two of the early polling leaders of the long presidential contest—Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.

And what both Paul and Christie spoke about, according to sources in the room, was how popular they were among those who are as far away from Fifth Avenue drawing rooms as you can get: poor, black, and Hispanic voters who, when they vote at all, almost reflexively vote Democratic.

Telling some of the wealthiest Americans to give you money because of how well-loved you are by some of the nation’s poorest people struck some of those in attendance for its incongruity; but equally interesting was how Christie and Paul seemed to be boxing one another out over who is best able to carry the Republican banner into America’s inner cities.

...

“No minister, anywhere, should ever have to submit a sermon to a government censor.” – Senator Rand Paul

Only minutes ago, Senator Rand Paul spoke up for the Houston pastors who have become the latest target in the city government’s ongoing war against its own churches. Messaging on Twitter, Senator Paul declared, “The First Amendment doesn’t exist to keep religion out of government. It exists to keep government out of religion.” Said Paul, “I stand with the pastors and churches in Houston against government interference and harassment.”

Houston city attorneys, under the direction of Mayor Annise Parker, have now subpoenaed sermons preached by selected pastors whom they believe are opposed to the city’s new agenda.

Here is a quick review of the unfolding drama in Houston.

...

ASHLAND, Va.- Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) used an appearance for Virginia congressional candidates Wednesday to slam the National Institutes of Health's claim that funding cuts had limited their ability to fight the Ebola virus.

"We have people who go blithely on TV and say 'we don't have enough money to study Ebola.' Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?" Paul said at a rally for Republican Senate candidate Ed Gillespie and House candidate Dave Brat. "Nine hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars spent to discover whether or not male fruit flies would like to consort with younger female fruit flies, $117,000 spent to determine that most monkeys are right-handed and like to throw poop with their right hand apparently."

He also listed $2.4 million for "origami condoms" as an example of wasteful spending.

"And then they say they don't have enough money. Their budget was $17 billion in the year 2000, it's now $30 billion, so when they say they don't have enough money or their have been cuts, look at the bottom line," he said.

A Man Coming Over The Hill, Singing

In the Carolinas, Rand Paul confronts a new war in the Middle East — and the voters who rejected his father.

by David Weigel


Rand Paul usually starts with a joke; it relieves the tension that’s never there. On Tuesday, Sept. 30, the junior Senator from Kentucky is running a little late, but a University of South Carolina lecture room is already overfull, stragglers fighting for space behind a row of TV cameras. A few college Democrats are in the room, but as listeners, not hecklers.

Most of the students actually sound like Brett Harris, a sophomore studying political science, who had showed up an hour early to win a front-row center seat. “I’d have camped out on the lawn if I’d had to,” he says, clutching a red-and-white STAND WITH RAND sign to his matching STAND WITH RAND T-shirt. “Of course I would! It’s Rand Paul!”

Harris starts to explain his affinity for Paul, and how right he’s been about foreign policy, when the man himself arrives; jeans and battered cowboy boots, no jacket. This will be his uniform for two days of speeches and schmoozing and selfies, across South Carolina and North Carolina, in front of everyone from military veterans to pastors to reporters to donors to students. The students would come first.

“Last time I was here, I was at a barbecue,” says Paul. “The guy in front of me was loading up two plates of barbecue. I said, ‘You’re not gonna live long eating like that!’ He said, ‘My granddad lived to be 105.’ I said, ‘He didn’t live to 105 by eating like that.’ He said, ‘No, my granddad lived to be 105 by minding his own business.’”

The joke is as fresh as the last grease scrapings from an outdoor smoker. Two years ago, Paul liked to deliver it before introducing his father, Rep. Ron Paul, to the Republican voters tasked with picking a presidential nominee. His father badly lost the South Carolina primary both times he ran, which was taken as evidence that antiwar libertarianism had no place in the heartland of the modern Republican party. Rand Paul is in the state to explain what these voters missed. His sort of politics should be popular—in fact, isn’t it popular already?

...

Sen. Paul Holds Listening Session in Ferguson

Oct 10, 2014


WASHINGTON, D.C. - TODAY, Sen. Rand Paul visited Ferguson, Missouri to attend a listening session with local leaders in the wake of the civil unrest over the past two months. The NAACP, the Urban League and several local business and church leaders participated in the event. The discussion centered around Sen. Paul's belief that the underlying problem in Ferguson-and many other troubled areas of our country-is a broken criminal justice system that unfairly targets minorities.

"I came to Ferguson today to listen to leaders in the community and to learn more about how we can fix the problems of criminal injustice together," Sen. Paul said.

"Senator Paul's decision to meet with the St. Louis county NAACP and local leadership in Ferguson speaks volumes about the NAACP's strength and influence in the civil rights community. Local leadership was encouraged by his decision to call a meeting with us to have a round table discussion and discuss common sense solutions. We were honored to have an informative discussion about the Senator regarding ways that he can help to assist our civil rights agenda in Washington and help to end police militarization," said John Gaskin III, spokesman for St. Louis County NAACP

Senator Paul has previously noted that anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. He has often noted that prisons are full of men and women of color who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent, youthful mistakes.

"Given the over-militarization of our law enforcement and the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for minority communities not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them, " noted Senior Advisor, Doug Stafford. "Senator Paul will continue to work to fix the broken system and in the meantime, let us continue to pray for the people of Ferguson, citizens, police and officials alike."


Senator Paul has introduced six pieces of federal legislation that reforms the federal criminal justice system and addresses the underlying economic reasons for high crime areas:

• Justice Safety Valve Act - S.619 - The bill introduced on March 20, 2013, and cosponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) would allow a federal judge to depart from mandatory minimum sentences under certain circumstances.
• Economic Freedom Zones Act - S.1852 - The bill, introduced on December 18, 2013, would provide for the establishment of free market enterprise zones in economically distressed areas.
• Civil Rights Voting Restoration Act - S.2550 - The bill, introduced on June 26, 2014, and cosponsored by Sen. Maj. Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) would restore the voting rights for every non-violent offender in federal elections upon release.
• REDEEM Act - S.2567 - The bill, introduced on July 8, 2014, and cosponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) would create a judicial process for adults to seal non-violent records on the federal level and an automatic process to expunge records for non-violent juveniles.
• FAIR Act - S.2644 --- The bill, introduced on July 23, 2014, raised the standard for the federal government to seize property in criminal investigations to raise the standard to clear and convincing evidence as a means to protect individuals found not guilty of crime.
• RESET Act - S.2657 - The bill, introduced on July 24, 2014, would reclassify simple possession drug crimes of small amounts as misdemeanors from felonies and eliminates the distinction between crack and powder cocaine for sentencing purposes because of the unfair outcomes of the distinction.

Journalistic eminence Bob Woodward took the stage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit today to interview two Silicon Valley legends, Eric Schmidt and John Doerr, and one Valley political favorite (though he hails from Kentucky), Rand Paul.

Onstage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the debate, titled “Why Can’t Tech Save Politics,” ranged from education to health care to immigration reform. It was just one of 11 sessions packed with boldfaced names at the inaugural New Establishment Summit celebrating the “Age of Innovation,” and no one on the surprisingly friction-free panel really disagreed on much — try as Woodward did to prod them.

A fast-forward through the onstage conversation, which might serve as a primer of Silicon Valley political opinions:

Rand Paul, U.S. Republican senator from Kentucky, on student-teacher ratios: “I think we should go a million to one! Ten million to one!”

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, seemed to agree with this, but added: “Gamify the lessons. … As jobs get automated away, the only thing we can do is have smarter people.”

The panel agreed that we need more education entrepreneurs, and less regulation and less centralized authority around schools.

Paul called out the Internet as a good model: “No one’s in charge of the Internet, and look how good the Internet’s going.”