A Clear Message: Freedom

 With all of the turmoil in the world today, and all the saber rattling by the 'favorites' in the Republican party, a voice of reason gets lost in the din. But not last night!

In what many are calling a 'breakout performance', Kentucky Senator Rand Paul demonstrated why he is the right choice to truly make America the nation it was meant to be.

The CNN debate last night, the final debate for Republican candidates of the year, left little doubt that Senator Paul not only belonged on the main stage last night, but that his stance on the limits of government placed on it by the Constitution are both 'necessary and proper' to restore the nation to prosperity and security.

Each and every candidate stood by the war hawk mentality that we have to spend more, bomb more, determine the fate and policies of other nations through military force and presence. It hasn't helped us and it certainly hasn't promoted stability in any place that foreign policy is applied.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said we need to establish and enforce a 'no fly zone' over the airspace(s) of other nations and shoot down Russian warplanes if they dare enter that space. When did we get the authority over airspace of another sovereign nation? That is an invasion and a cause for war.  Russia is welcomed there, regardless of whether or not US foreign policy makers agree or not.

Billionaire megalomaniac Donald Trump wants to prevent Islamic terrorists from being able to recruit through social media by controlling the Internet. In other words, the First Amendment and free speech advocates are 'stupid'.  Only Rand Paul remained steadfast in defending the Constitution against all of his opponents.

Rand Paul stood up against Marco Rubio on NSA spying and issues of immigration 'amnesty', clearly demonstrating the abuse of power under such unconstitutional acts.

Immediately after the debate and continuing on Twitter and other social media, Rand Paul was hailed as the true champion of freedom and the man to really make 'America great again' even by liberals. I read several posts of Democrats who say they will change registration to vote for Rand Paul in the primaries.

The home run was in the closing statements, when Senator Paul said the greatest danger to the United States was the debt. How can we build border security when they nation is borrowing money at the rate of about a million dollars per minute?

It is apparent that Americans will have to choose whether they want more of the same or a restoration of the principles this nation was founded upon. I see the choice of freedom is embodied in electing a President who understands that above all issues, the Constitution is the point from which actions taken must begin. I we erode our freedoms for the illusion of security we will lose both. Benjamin Franklin knew this and so does Rand Paul. His message is clear:  FREEDOM!

The Farce of Debate: Rand Paul Shines and Nobody Notices

I was so disappointed in the way the debate was handled, I really could not sleep last night. I tossed and turned thinking about how badly Rand Paul was treated, not just by Donald Trump, which is somewhat expected by now from the bully billionaire, but from the CNN panel of moderators who only allowed him to speak when his name was mentioned by the other nominees.

Pompous platitudes and innuendos abounded, while Dr. Paul was given the obligatory opportunity to defend himself slightly. It appeared that Trump at center stage was in complete control of the panel. 

I finally dragged myself out of bed at 11:00 AM to have some coffee, and ran across the following article, which perked me up a bit.

I present it in its entirety to the Esteemed Readers of this blog for their assessment.


"Donald Trump does not like Rand Paul.

In the weirdest non sequitur of a often-incoherent second Republican presidential debate, the billionaire front-runner for the party nomination declared, “Rand Paul shouldn’t even be on this stage. He’s number 11. He’s got 1 percent in the polls. There’s too many people onstage already.”

As he has been on so many points, Trump was entirely wrong on this one.

Paul distinguished himself with coherent questioning of mass incarceration, calls for criminal-justice reform, and aggressive referencing of the injustices that extend from a failed drug war. The senator from Kentucky had one of the best moments of the debate when, during a back-and-forth over Jeb Bush’s youthful inhaling of marijuana, Paul put things into perspective for the former Florida governor: “Kids who have privilege like you do don’t go to jail. But the poor kids in the inner city still go to jail.”

And when the debate turned to foreign policy, Paul made more sense than the rest of the runners combined.

“I’ve made my career as an opponent of the Iraq War,” declared the senator, who reminded the crowd that “The Iraq War backfired and did not help us.”

“I’m not sending our sons and our daughters back to Iraq.” —Rand Paul
Those lines did not earn Paul a lot of applause Wednesday night. This Grand Old Party does not well remember—nor respect—the wisdom of Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings about a military-industrial complex or the example of “old-right” Republicans who opposed military adventurism.

But Paul displayed a steady awareness of that history. His great contribution to the debate was to offer an alternative to the bombast and bluster that came Wednesday night from many of the other contenders—and that, frankly, comes on a regular basis from prominent figures who position themselves across the political spectrum.

The senator warned, “”If you want boots on the ground, and you want them to be our sons and daughters, you’ve got 14 other choices. There will always be a Bush or Clinton for you if you want to go back to war in Iraq.”

While others spoke of putting boots back on the ground in the Middle East, he dissented, saying, “The first war was a mistake and I am not sending our sons and daughters back to Iraq.”

Paul’s dissents extended beyond objections regarding the Iraq imbroglio—as was appropriate during the course of a debate that produced plenty of objectionable statements from the crowd of Republican front runners and pretenders.

Early in the evening, several of the contenders were stumbling over one another in express their readiness to rip up the Iran nuclear agreement, with Senator Ted Cruz trumping them all by promising, “If I am elected president, on the very first day in office, I will rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal.”

A few minutes later, in a break from what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie referred to as “this childish back-and-forth” with Trump and Fiorina over who was the worse CEO, Fiorina said there would be no back-and-forth with the president of Russia. “Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all,” she announced. “We’ve talked way too much to him.”

This is where Paul really stepped up.

Noting the location—the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California—Paul said with regard to the “wouldn’t talk to him” line: “Well, think if Reagan had said that during the Cold War? We continued to talk with the Russians throughout the Cold War which [was a] much more significant [challenge than] where we are now.”

Paul continued:

Should we continue to talk with Iran? Yes. Should we cut up the [Iran nuclear] agreement immediately? That’s absurd. Wouldn’t you want to know if they complied? Now, I’m going to vote against the agreement because I don’t think there’s significant leverage, but it doesn’t mean that I would immediately not look at the agreement, and cut it up without looking to see if whether or not Iran has complied.

The same goes with China. I don’t think we need to be rash, I don’t think we need to be reckless, and I think we need to leave lines of communication open. Often we talk about whether we should be engaged in the world, or disengaged in the world, and I think this is an example of some who want to isolate us, actually, and not be engaged.

We do need to be engaged with Russia. It doesn’t mean we give them a free pass, or China a free pass, but, to be engaged, to continue to talk. We did throughout the Cold War, and it would be a big mistake not to do it here.

There was a similar moment when the question of intervention in Syria arose.

The Kentuckian said:

I think this gets to the point of wisdom on when to intervene and when we shouldn’t. Had we bombed Assad at the time, like President Obama wanted, and like Hillary Clinton wanted and many Republicans wanted, I think ISIS would be in Damascus today. I think ISIS would be in charge of Syria had we bombed Assad.

Sometimes both sides of the civil war are evil, and sometimes intervention sometimes makes us less safe. This is real the debate we have to have in the Middle East.

Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam, and we’re more at risk. So, I think we need to think before we act, and know most interventions, if not a lot of them in the Middle East, have actually backfired on us.

There are plenty of issues on which Rand Paul is wrong. He is not so steadily anti-war as his father, former congressman and 2012 presidential contender Ron Paul, or as “old-right” Republicans like North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones Jr.

There are plenty of things that Paul has said and done that merit skepticism, and opposition.

But the senator—and his dissenting views with regard to foreign policy—belonged on the main stage Wednesday night. Indeed, it was Rand Paul, not Donald Trump, who made Wednesday night’s gathering of Republican presidential contenders a debate. "

Thanks to John Nichols, The Nation’s Washington correspondent.
http://www.thenation.com/article/rand-paul-made-some-of-the-few-sensible-points-of-the-whole-debate/

Rate The Debate

While there are many analysts who think that Trump and Jeb Bush were the big winners in last Thursday night's FoxNews debate, to anyone who viewed this two-hour farce, it is plain to see that the stand out and stand up presidential hopeful was Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).

From the very start, Paul challenged Trump's integrity and it was downhill for the Donald from there. Forget the Megyn Kelly issue because she is not running for office.  If Trump thinks she was tough on him, then he better drop out now because that was still minor league compared to what lies ahead.



Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were both articulate and calm n their performances as was Dr. Ben Carson, who seemed a bit apprehensive at first but settled in and gave some very good answers and a few good humorous lines that grabbed the audience momentarily.

For me it was Rand Paul who stood out among the losers and the wannabe newbies. His lambasting of Christie was a classic in a patriotic display of what liberty and freedom is what this nation was founded upon. Christie so much as called the founders' Bill of Rights ridiculous, lending to his stance in favor of unconstitutional infringements on Individual Rights for the sake of national security. Rand shouted out louder than Christie, "Get a warrant!" and that tipped the scales on the FoxNews approval meter.




By the time the "post-game analysts" began their assessment, the media had already lashed out against Fox for they treated poor rich boy Donald Trump, totally ignoring the fact that they gave him twice the air time of any other candidate on the dais. Charles Krauthammer wasted no time in making Rand Paul a nonissue, and for me, that is the telling of how FoxNews operates. Certainly not the fair and balanced network they project themselves to be. They are establishment lackeys, same as the rest of the privately-owned major media.

The real winner of this debate is the American People. They were able to witness how the media manipulates opinion to produce a desired outcome, in this case, making Trump a victim while ignoring the command performance given by Senator Paul. 




Rand Paul demonstrated why he must be the next American President. He was the only one who was ready to present a plan to reduce taxes, balance the budget, and audit the Federal Reserve. It will be that latter issue that will be the reason opposition will rise and use any despicable means to attempt to destry his character.

I will not be fooled again.