Free Republic

In an interview with talk show host Sean Hannity, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) sounded more equivocal about a presidential run than at any time in the last year or so: “If the ideas are resonating — if the ideas look like they have a chance – then it’s much more likely that I’ll make a go of this. If it looks like we’re at 1 percent, we’re not in the top tier, and it’s just going to be a quixotic sort of run, then I think it’s not something I want to do just for educational purposes. I would do...

I try to ignore Ron Paul and his spawn as much as humanly possible but sometimes the doddering old fraud just goes too far. As a recap, Muslim terrorists, or at least everyone in the world thinks they are Muslim terrorists except the Obama administration, stormed the offices of a Parisian magazine that happens to poke fun at Islam and its Mohammed. People were killed. What lesson does Ron Paul draw from this? The French had it coming:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) “But in the context of things, France has been a target for many, many years, because they’ve been involved in foreign affairs...

In remarks this morning from Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry said he agreed with the French imam who called the victims of today's murderous rampage in Paris "martyrs for liberty." Video at link.

France was on high alert on Thursday the day after a terror attack on a satirical magazine left 12 dead. Muslim leaders have condemned the shootings, but fear there may be a backlash. (VIDEO-AT-LINK)The French government has placed the country on the highest state of terror alert after an attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo left 12 dead, including two police. Extra security forces were drafted in to secure mosques, synagogues, department stores, shopping centres, train stations and airports, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said. Paris announced that an extra 650 soldiers and 2,000 more police officers will...

The Associated Press is among the numerous news outlets that have been self-censoring images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that may have provoked Wednesday's deadly Paris attack. In a statement, the news organization said that such censorship is standard policy: None of the images distributed by AP showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images. The conservative Washington Examiner publication then pointed out that the AP nonetheless continued to carry an image of Andres Serrano's 1987 "Piss Christ" photograph—which is certainly provocative, having been the subject of massive...

Former Republican presidential candidate and congressman Ron Paul says bad foreign policy is to blame for the Paris terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that left at least 12 dead and 11 wounded. “Well, you know, partially what the Secretary of State said is true — this is pretty obscene, when it comes to violence, and libertarians are pretty annoyed by anybody who initiates violence,” said Paul on NewsMaxTV’s Steve Malzberg Show Wednesday. “This is pretty bad.” Paul said the context for the attack, however, was France’s involvement in the Middle East. “But in the context of things,...

Occupy may be gone, but it is clearly not forgotten. The people protesting Eric Garner’s death in New York City were marching to a slightly different drum beat in 2011, but they seem to have returned, having learned something from their previous mistakes.

While both the Ukrainian and Russian governments continue to point fingers at one another for the MH17 crash, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) urged caution Friday against jumping to any conclusions about where blame lies. Some American pundits accuse Vladimir Putin of having “blood on his hands” since the missile that took down the Malaysia Airlines flight may have been a Russian weapon given to pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. Speaking with Newsmax TV’s John Bachman earlier today, Paul said “Putin is a little bit smarter than that. I don’t think he would ever come close to participating in an act...

BUENOS AIRES, August 5 (RIA Novosti) – Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro dismissed Tuesday accusations of Moscow’s alleged role in the deadly Malaysian passenger plane crash as “primitive.” “Accusing the Russian Federation of destroying the Malaysian Boeing during the flight is horrifying primitivism,” Castro wrote in an article published in Cuba’s Granma newspaper. “Neither President Vladimir Putin, nor Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov nor other Russian leaders could have ever done such a stupid thing,” Castro stressed. Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17. All 298 people on board,...

WASHINGTON — Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said his support for a filibuster against Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel never meant that he would vote against Hagel's confirmation. "I voted no because I wanted more information and I think that part of what the Senate does is try to get information about the nominees," Paul told reporters in the basement of the Capitol after Hagel's confirmation Tuesday. "I've said all along that I give the president some prerogative in choosing his political appointees." "There are many things I disagree with Chuck Hagel on, there are many things I disagree with John Kerry...

Paul is the first potential 2016 contender to visit the city.Sen. Rand Paul met with civil rights leaders Friday in Ferguson, Missouri, the city torn apart by racial unrest following the August shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer. During his visit, the Republican Senator, who is seen as a likely presidential candidate, stated his concerns about long prison sentences for nonviolent crimes, the loss of voting rights for felons and military programs to give unused equipment to local police departments. “I wanted to find out what we could do to make the situation better,” Paul...

Sen. Rand Paul is blaming politicians for the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, arguing that the criminal justice system fuels racial tension by disproportionately targeting African-Americans. The so-called war on drugs has created a culture of violence and put police in a nearly impossible situation," Paul said in an op-ed published for TIME. He acknowledged that the shooting death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer wasn't related to drugs, but argued that outsized penalties for nonviolent drug crimes creates a "tension in some communities that too often results in tragedy." The comments are another attempt by Paul, a Kentucky...

Now that the Ferguson grand jury documents have been made public, even MSNBC has had to quietly drop its fantasy of Michael Brown being gunned down like a dog in the street by Officer Darren Wilson. Instead, MSNBC is defending the looters. On Monday night, MSNBC's Chris Hayes objected to anyone referring to the people who "set fires or looted as 'thugs.'" His guest, former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper, said, "I could not agree more." (Stamper did such a bang-up job dealing with the World Trade Organization riots in 1999 that he was forced to resign -- which...

A long time ago, on an island not too far away, a pair of brothers was ejected from a good Jesuit school. The one was reportedly a better student, the other less impressive, but together, they preferred other things – politics, rabble-rousing, war. When the brothers grew up, they fell in with a bad crowd – the worst of crowds, in fact. Far across the oceans, Chinese communists were consolidating their power, Soviet communists were drawing an iron curtain down the center of Europe, Korean communists were settling in for the long haul in Pyongyang, Vietnamese communists were revolting against...

There may be disagreements on foreign policy among conservatives, but one thing that there's near universal agreement on is that President Obama's foreign policy has been an abysmal failure. That's why it was especially noteworthy that Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., already facing an uphill battle in winning over conservative primary voters on foreign policy, has embraced the disastrous, John Kerry-led negotiations with the radical Islamic Iranian regime. Speaking at a meeting sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Paul said he doesn’t favor increasing sanctions on Iran as the U.S. continues diplomatic efforts aimed at ending the Iranian nuclear weapons...

WASHINGTON — Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that starting to trade with Cuba "is probably a good idea" and that the lengthy economic embargo against the communist island "just hasn't worked." Paul became the first potential Republican presidential candidate to offer some support for President Barack Obama's decision to try to normalize U.S. relations with Cuba. The president's surprise announcement on Wednesday was slammed by several potential GOP candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who said it amounted to appeasing the Castro regime. Paul said in a radio interview with Tom Roten of...

Sen. Rand Paul broke with the field of Republicans considering a 2016 presidential run on Thursday, calling President Barack Obama's decision to normalize relations with Cuba a "good idea" since the American embargo against Cuba "just hasn't worked." Paul, a likely presidential candidate, made the remarks in an interview with News Talk 800 WVHU's Tom Roten, just a day after his potential competitors for the Republican nomination -- former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz -- slammed the decision to normalize relations as a dangerous move. Rubio and Cruz are sons of Cuban immigrants. Paul...

Rand Paul Breaks With Rubio and Bush Over Cuba Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is the latest potential presidential candidate to weigh in on policy changes to Cuba and the libertarian leaning Republican's position splits from other Republicans who are also considering a presidential run. Paul told Tom Roten of News Talk 800 in West Virginia that the 50-year embargo "just hasn't worked" and normalizing relations with the island nation is "probably a good idea." "If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn't seem to be working and probably it punishes the people more than the regime because the regime...

Via Mediaite, an easy lay-up here for a guy who (a) warned the world about Saddam’s WMD threat more than once as president, (b) cautiously declined to take a firm position against the war at the time, and (c) is of course married to someone who cast a vote in the Senate to invade.But never mind that. This is an interesting counterfactual: What would have happened to Iraq during the Arab Spring and Syrian uprising if Saddam had endured? Clinton implicitly assumes that ISIS advancing on Baghdad is the worst possible outcome of the past 10 years, which is...

A heavyweight lineup of former national security officials banded together late Tuesday to accuse Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) president Grover Norquist and high-ranking GOP political operative Suhail Khan of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. The officials authored a 45-page dossier on the issue to Cleta Mitchell, the top lawyer for the American Conservatives’ Union who in 2011 cleared Norquist of the allegations initially brought by former high-ranking Reagan official Frank Gaffney. The signatories include numerous powerful and respected former officials, including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former CIA Director James Woolsey, former Florida Rep. Allen West, retired Army Lt....