Paul the Younger hasn’t disguised the plain fact that he’s running for the 2016 Republican nomination for president; he’s already begun making appearances in early primary and caucus states, and this week he started putting in motion the machinery for a presidential campaign.  It’s always possible he won’t be running in 2016 – but for now, he’s certainly running for 2016.

And yet … Rand Paul faces very long odds. Perhaps not quite as long as his father did in his numerous presidential runs, but long enough.

There are basically two questions to ask about whether someone would be a viable candidate for a major party nomination. First, a candidate must have conventional qualifications. Paul certainly clears that hurdle, although not all that impressively. By 2016, he’ll be finishing up a full Senate term. That’s a little more than Barack Obama had (presumably Obama’s state legislative service meant little on this score). It’s more than Mitt Romney, a one-term governor, had. It’s the same number of years as George W. Bush, although Bush had the added qualification of having been reelected. So there’s no real barrier there.

Continue Reading...

As The Daily Beast reported yesterday, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is ostensibly designed to promote a discourse about U.S. foreign policy. But its advisory board is stacked with what writer James Kirchik characterized as “a bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet.”

And just who are the far-right luminaries helping guide Paul’s new endeavor?

Continue Reading...

The instinct to compare the two Paul's is natural. They largely share the same quirky libertarianism, and when Ron stepped out of politics after his third and final presidential campaign last year, it seemed like he was handing off the movement he started to his son. But Ron Paul probably isn't the best point of reference for understanding where Rand Paul fits in today's Republican universe, and the role he could play in the years to come. A more interesting comparison might be found in the career of Robert A. Taft, the leader of a mid-20th Century conservative movement that was anchored by many of the basic tenets of Paul-ism.

Continue Reading...

That’s the question I got everywhere I turned these past few days. I suppose it was a natural question to ask, seeing as I had been a high profile speaker at the conference in 2009 as a thirteen year-old conservative wunderkind, before renouncing conservatism last year. So my return this year was an object of fascination to many.

The answer to the question is: No, it didn’t feel weird. I mean, I guess it should have, but it didn’t. In a way going back to CPAC seemed like going back home and visiting your old libertarian friend from high school: it’s pretty predictable, there’s a familiarity to the situation, you know the kind of stuff she’s going to say, you never know exactly how (or why) she says the stuff she says (and neither does she, in all likelihood), and so long as you don’t talk politics and just listen, you’ll be fine.

Continue Reading...

The event, as it always does, will attract thousands of conservative activists, opinion-shapers and politicians and will receive substantial media coverage. It’s hard to say exactly how well the conference, which serves as an umbrella for a funky area of right-leaning groups and causes, reflects the conservative movement, but the events of the next few days could provide some useful clues about where conservatism is heading in Barack Obama’s second term and the role that some prominent and ambitious Republicans will play in it.

To that end, here are three things to be watching for at CPAC:

Continue Reading...

The obvious answer is that Paul has a genuine and principled objection to Brennan, the architect of the Obama administration’s drones program. Until Brennan’s nomination, there hadn’t exactly been an abundance of news coverage of the drones issue, which figures to recede from the headlines once Brennan’s nomination clears. And even though he did face some pointed questions during his confirmation hearings, Brennan didn’t exactly face the sort of withering examination drone critics were hoping for.  So the filibuster was Paul’s last, best chance to shine a light on an issue that matters to him before the media moves on to something else.

Continue Reading...

"Congress will not hold anyone to blame. Lyndon Johnson's probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney," Jones, a libertarian who is often critical of the war in Afghanistan, told a Young Americans for Liberty conference in Raleigh this weekend.

Jones also called the use of drones in targeted killing "absolutely unconstitutional," warning the autonomous aircraft could be used against Americans in the future. "When that drone comes to America from a foreign country, we're going to wonder what in the hell hit us. It was a drone," he said.

Continue Reading...

So it’s tempting to dismiss the broadside he leveled against Karl Rove and his Conservative Victory Project earlier this week as typical Gingrich grandstanding. And to a degree, that’s all it is. In a Human Events Op-Ed, the former House speaker and failed 2012 White House candidate accused Rove of employing “the system of Tammany Hall and the Chicago machine.” Anyone who’s been following Gingrich for a while is surely familiar with this line of attack; here, for example, he is in the summer of 1993 castigating Bill Clinton and “the Democratic machine” for forcing a tax hike bill through the House (a bill that ended up playing no small role in the balanced budgets of the late ‘90s – but that’s a story for another day).

Continue Reading...

In a blog post on Friday, the site's owners wrote that after hearing Paul say on a radio show that he wished he owned the domain name, they offered to sell him RonPaul.com and their 170,000 supporter mailing list for $250,000, with RonPaul.org included as a "free gift."

"Instead of responding to our offer, making a counter offer, or even accepting our FREE gift of RonPaul.org, Ron Paul went to the United Nations and is trying to use its legal process related to domain name disputes to actively deport us from our domain names without compensation," the blog post said.

The post continued with a message of disappointment:

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

After the election, a number of petitions emerged promoting the idea of red states fleeing Obama's America, something that we thought went out of fashion in the 1860s. Pro-secession petitions hosted on the White House website that allows citizens to start letter-signing campaigns garnered almost 700,000 signatures from all 50 states. Soon, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan sympathizers cast their lot with disgruntled conservatives.

Continue Reading...

Here are some of the notable quotes:

• "If it’s not accepted that big government, fiat money, ignoring liberty, central economic planning, welfarism, and warfarism caused our crisis we can expect a continuous and dangerous march toward corporatism and even fascism with even more loss of our liberties.  Prosperity for a large middle class though will become an abstract dream."

• "Everyone claims support for freedom.  But too often it’s for one’s own freedom and not for others.  Too many believe that there must be limits on freedom. They argue that freedom must be directed and managed to achieve fairness and equality thus making it acceptable to curtail, through force, certain liberties.

Some decide what and whose freedoms are to be limited.  These are the politicians whose goal in life is power. Their success depends on gaining support from special interests."

Continue Reading...

Then Jack Blades sang a shitty song.

Finally, well after the very brief tribute to his father, Rand Paul arrived, to deliver a speech based around last night's convention theme, "We Built That."

The nice thing about Paul's speech is that he did actually acknowledge the original context of "you didn't build that" -- he referred to roads, bridges and schools -- but he still happily and repeatedly misrepresented the meaning of the line, in keeping with everyone else so far at the RNC. "Roads don't build businesses," he said, which is not just not the point of the original comment but also doesn't even make sense as a thing for anyone to believe. Also, you know, it's hard to build a business without roads! (Also also: What about paving businesses?) "For most of our history, no politician would dare tell Americans 'you didn't build that," Paul said. (Though for much of our history many of the people who built lots of things weren't really allowed to be considered Americans.)

Continue Reading...

So I approached Giuliani, bearing in mind an incident from Ron Paul's "Rally for Liberty" on Sunday, at which a montage of Serious pundits and politicos trashing the Texas Congressman was shown on a projection screen. Rush Limbaugh, David Frum and Chris Wallace were all subject to prodigious boos (Jon Stewart was heartily cheered), but the loudest angry roar came in reaction to a December 2011 clip of Giuliani dismissing Paul as a “complete distraction.” I informed Giuliani that he was the most reviled villain at the rally, and he assumed that another clip was what provoked the response:

Continue Reading...

Virtually every Paul supporter I have encountered thus far would stridently disagree with Thune's assessment. Generally, they range from somewhere between perturbed to violently apoplectic over GOP insiders' skulduggery.

Continue Reading...

The dispute between grass-roots activists, led by supporters of Rep. Ron Paul, and the Romney campaign, appeared to be settled by this morning with a compromise on Rule 16, which would have let presidential campaigns disavow any delegates they did not want. But tensions were high again this afternoon as knots of delegates discussed Rule 12, which would allow the Republican National Committee to change party rules between conventions with a 75 percent vote, something not currently allowed. "We want to leave the rules the way they are right now ... Picking a fight right now is the dumbest thing the Mitt Romney campaign could have ever done. And conservative activists aren't going to take it," Dudley added.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

“This is the hill to die for,” Texas delegate Tom Washington, the sssistant treasurer of the state party, told Salon on the convention floor. It’s “disgusting and disturbing,” said at-large alternate delegate Mark Russo from Rockwall, Texas.

The change, approved last week by the Rules Committee, which convened here in Tampa before the convention began, would allow a presidential campaign in future elections to veto any delegates sent to the national convention to support its candidate. While we usually know who the party's nominee will be long before the convention, it's not official until delegates vote on selecting the ticket at the convention. Delegates are elected in local and state nominating conventions, and then sent to the national convention assigned to presidential candidates based on the proportion of the vote each candidate won in the state. Opponents of the rule change fear this would allow the winning candidate to disavow elected delegates and stack the convention with big donors and loyalists who could change rules, write the platform or otherwise take the party in a direction that grass-roots activists wouldn’t support.

Continue Reading...

Needless to say, the Republican National Committee did not recognize the legitimacy of said election. “Especially because this is a Ron Paul crowd, the prevailing sentiment is, we’re big on following the Constitution -- the rule of law,” Bates continued. “Not drone assassinations of American citizens, not undeclared wars ...”

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...