Free Republic

If Republicans don’t quash the libertarian streak shown recently by some of their members they risk following the destructive lead of Democrats in the 1960s, says GOP Rep. Peter King of New York. “When you have Rand Paul actually comparing [NSA leaker Edward] Snowden to Martin Luther King or Henry David Thoreau, this is madness,” King said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “This is the anti-war left-wing Democrats of the 1960s that nominated George McGovern and destroyed their party for almost 20 years. I don’t want that happening to our party.” …

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724). The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. --...