Free Republic

Where Would Ron Paul Supporters Rally if Paul was Not Running in the GOP Primary? Rep. Ron Paul ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988. [GHW Bush [R] was elected] Rep. Ron Paul ran for president as a Republican in 2008. [John McCain [R] won the nomination and Barack Obama [D] was elected] Rep. Ron Paul is running for president as a Republican in 2012. [????] Perhaps another Obama win? Is Rep. Ron Paul and his base helping or hindering the conservative cause?

Go to any Ron Paul event and the audience is part of the tale. They’re younger, rowdier, more socially diverse than Republican rally regulars. Any one of them might have driven across the state to see Paul speak or be able to riff at length about Austrian economic theory. Any one of them also might be a Democrat or an independent, a fact that’s poised to play a big role in Paul’s story in 2012. ...The fact that roughly half of Paul’s primary supporters are Democrats or independents is probably an asset in selling his general election viability, which his...

Ron Paul is the wild card in the Republican presidential deck—and that makes him one of the most important cards of all right now. ....If Mr. Paul does well in Iowa, he could so muddy the waters that there is no clear winner. An inconclusive outcome would be a boon for Mr. Romney, who hasn't done all that well in Iowa, and who is counting much more heavily on winning the New Hampshire primary a week later. A murky Iowa result would reduce any momentum the upstart Mr. Gingrich might enjoy heading into New Hampshire. New Hampshire, in turn, is...

Meanwhile, while you were sleeping, while you were allowing your attention to wander to issues more pressing, heartwarming and good, such as gay New Yorkers in love and goofy dogs running marathons, easily the most insane and wide-eyed squirrelmonkey pseudo-politician in your lifetime announced that she is hereby running for president of the United States. And by "running" she does not mean putting on those supercute little silver jogging shoes with the funny blinky LED lights in the heels that she saw at DSW that one time, because that would be silly and not make any sense at all, and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Persistent Federal Reserve critic Representative Ron Paul plans to hold a hearing on the U.S. central bank's emergency loans to the branches of non-U.S. banks, his spokeswoman said on Saturday. "I was surprised and deeply disturbed ... to learn the staggering amount of money that went to foreign banks," Paul said in a statement. "These lending activities provided no benefit to American taxpayers, the American economy, or even directly to American banks," he said.

I know not a lot of people on free republic like Dr. Paul because of his stance on foreign policy. I want to ask: if he changed his foreign policy and supported finishing the war on terror and stood behind Israel 100% would you vote for him in 2012? What other candidate wants to bring America back to the constitution and end the FED?

During her speech to the first ever National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Saturday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin discouraged the very idea of a national organization, urging the movement to stay leaderless and decentralized. This was the most important and valuable part of Palin’s speech. As for the rest of it–Sarah sounded pretty much like the same old Republican Party. Despite the many independents that make up the movement, the tea parties in large part represent a long overdue reexamination of conservative principles. A big-spending Democratic president seems to have awakened grassroots conservatives enough to finally lament the...

I rise in reluctant opposition to H Res 560, which condemns the Iranian government for its recent actions during the unrest in that country. While I never condone violence, much less the violence that governments are only too willing to mete out to their own citizens, I am always very cautious about “condemning” the actions of governments overseas. As an elected member of the United States House of Representatives, I have always questioned our constitutional authority to sit in judgment of the actions of foreign governments of which we are not representatives. I have always hesitated when my colleagues rush...

Ron Paul

One of the popular post-9/11 sentiments has been the one that holds that Muslims are bent on conquering the world. The notion is that Muslims hate Christianity and Western freedom and values and that such hatred is rooted in the Koran and stretches back centuries. Thus, the United States has been drawn, reluctantly, into a war against Muslims. That’s why U.S. forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes — to defend our freedoms by killing Muslims over there before they get over here and kill us. I sometimes wonder whether the people who have this mindset have reflected...

1. America is at risk of more terrorist attacks - but not just from the Middle East According to a recent NYPD report, the greatest terrorist threat to United States citizens now comes from our own people - homegrown terrorists. This is not news to anyone who is aware of how different the terrorist threat is from any other enemy we've faced. John Robb, in his excellent book Brave New War, outlines the myriad ways that any dedicated homicide-minded individual can bypass America's woefully inadequate homeland security and exploit technology to wreak havoc on a massive scale: "We have entered...

It won't matter how high Ron Paul finishes in the Iowa caucuses this Thursday or in the New Hampshire primary Jan. 8 or anywhere else. He's already won his prize.... In April, shortly after he announced he'd run for president, Paul told the Trib that his goal -- besides winning, of course -- was to make an impact on the race and to spread his ideas about maximizing freedom, limiting the federal government and practicing nonintervention overseas.... Though his presence at the debates has shown what a bunch of unprincipled, flip-flopping, war-loving, faux conservatives Messrs. Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee and McCain...

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul contends that the federal government has overreacted by limiting personal freedom in the wake of terrorist attacks six years ago, noting more people die on U.S. highways in less than a month’s time compared to the number who lost their lives on Sept. 11, 2001. “We have been told that we have to give up our freedoms in order to be safe because terrorism is such a horrible event,” Paul said today to more than 1,000 supporters who attended a rally at a downtown Chicago hotel ballroom. “A lot fewer lives died on 9/11 than...

Hugh Hewitt Interviews Ron Paul supporters at the Townhall.com Texas Republican Straw Poll...

Computer engineer Jonathan Morey says, "I have never voted for a Republican, ever." Nathan Hansen, a lawyer, says, "I've been a Republican all my life." Yet a political meeting in St. Paul, Minn., brought the 31-year-old friends together for the first time -- in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul. Officially, Mr. Paul is a Republican, elected to Congress 10 times and now running for the party's presidential nomination. But the party label hardly describes the obstetrician from south of Houston. And it certainly doesn't explain his appeal to a growing, if still small, number of voters across the political...

Pat Buchanan's new book has roared to the top of the Amazon best-seller list hitting the No. 1 spot within a day of its release. In his "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America," Buchanan warns that the United States is witnessing its own death as illegal immigration destroys the fabric of the American nation. More: Buchanan says Mexico has been mounting a conscious effort to use the United States as a dumping ground for its poor and unemployed. Pat Buchanan reports that since 9/11, more than 4 million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders and...

One field in which the next conservatism will probably depart abruptly from current policy is homeland security. The departure will begin with foreign policy and national strategy. As previous columns have suggested, the next conservatism's foreign policy will seek to preserve a republic here at home, not build an American empire overseas. Logically, that will lead to a defensive rather than an offensive national strategy. In both cases, the next conservatism will not be innovating but returning to the policies our country followed through most of its history. It is no accident that when we eschewed empire and followed a...

In just two weeks, six retired U.S. Marine and Army generals have denounced the Pentagon planning for the war in Iraq and called for the resignation or firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who travels often to Iraq and supports the war, says that the generals mirror the views of 75 percent of the officers in the field, and probably more. This is not a Cindy Sheehan moment. This is a vote of no confidence in the leadership of the U.S. armed forces by senior officers once responsible for carrying out the orders of...

The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality [...] we've abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years. The old concept was that if there was a dollar's worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we'd level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their...

One all-too-realistic geopolitical nightmare was a weapon of mass destruction terrorist attack on the U.S. West Coast. A nuclear device detonates in a container ship about to enter Long Beach, Calif. News had just broken about pollution of the U.S. food supply, most analysts assumed by transnational terrorism. The U.S. can prevail conventionally anywhere but seems helpless in coping with asymmetrical warfare. In quick succession: • The dollar ceases to be the world's reserve currency. • The shaky coalition governing Iraq collapses and civil war breaks out between Sunnis and Shi'ites. • Fear of the unknown produces a new consensus...