Thread: Rand Paul: Republican Party needs to stop talking about ‘deportation’

I got this in my email this morning..I am really dissapointed in Rand Paul but I would take him over many others. I am concerned that there are not many out there who I would trust with a vote and to run our Country. Well, at least up to this point. Any one know who this John Dennis is from California, is he on any of Alipac's lists????

Dear k,

I’m pleased to announce Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has endorsed my campaign for U.S. Congress against Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Senator Paul joins over 120,000 Americans who have supported my efforts to remove Ms. Pelosi from Congress once and for all.
Like Senator Paul, I too believe we need to take our nation back from the politicians who seek to invade our privacy and violate our civil rights, all the while expanding the size of the federal government and recklessly increase the national debt.
Nancy Pelosi was one of the architects of Obamacare and the chief strategist for its passage.
Four years later, our message to Ms. Pelosi is clear: we read the bill, we know what's in it, and we like it even less.
We all recently endured the 4th Anniversary of the passage of Obamacare. I am still motivated to defeat Ms. Pelosi, go to Congress and finally repeal the Not-So-Affordable Health Care Act.
It is my mission to return our nation to its proper role as the world's beacon of freedom and prosperity, a nation where citizens do not have their private communications monitored by Washington and its intelligence apparatus.
If you want your freedom back, then join Senator Paul and the thousands of other Americans who support my campaign with a contribution of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500 or the federal maximum amount of $2,600. Any amount is appreciated.
Help me remove Nancy Pelosi this November!
In Liberty,

John Dennis
P.S. Below is the endorsement I received from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).


Sent from my iPhone

"I am proud to endorse my friend John Dennis in his candidacy to be the next Congressman from California’s 12th District. John has been a champion for liberty and will bring his much needed passion for limited government to the halls of Congress."
Senator Paul continues: "As a staunch defender of individual freedoms, due process and privacy, John offers a clear and much desired alternative to the failed leadership of Nancy Pelosi. Today I stand with John Dennis and I urge all the voters of his district to support him and send him to Congress."
Please join Senator Paul TODAY and show your support for John Dennis with a donation of $10, $20, $50 or more.


PH PS I FORGOT TO ADD I GOT THIS FROM A BREITBART EMAIL>

Originally Posted by kathyet2

I got this in my email this morning..I am really dissapointed in Rand Paul but I would take him over many others. I am concerned that there are not many out there who I would trust with a vote and to run our Country. Well, at least up to this point.

I agree, VERY disappointed!!! He is DEAD WRONG on this issue! However, if conservatives can take the Senate in Nov, we can stop this amnesty crap before we ever get to the presidential election. At least, I know Rand Paul would not govern by executive orders as obama has. However, my eyes are still open for a better candidate who is trustworthy!

I do understand to a point what Rand Paul is doing, though I don't agree. He is trying to look mainstream enough to get the backing of some of the establishment republicans that he will need to even have a chance to run for president. If he goes too rogue, those establishment people can do the same thing to him that they did to his dad in 2012 by just "ignoring" his delegates, and then changing the rules without a majority vote of the delegates present. If you're not aware of what happened at the GOP national convention in Tampa, google "gop convention 2012 rules fiasco delegates ignored." First few articles should give you a good idea. The GOP establishment stabbed their grassroots delegates in the back, and kept stabbing!

Originally Posted by csarbww

In reply to "HAPPY2BME: Good lord! What about Jeff Sessions? He has been an immovable rock fighting amnesty and open borders. Why is this patriot not given any recognition for his uncompromising fight against, as you have noted, virtually every politician and mega rich oligarch. Why is he never given the accolades he has earned? And why is his name never mentioned as a conservative leader? He deserves better than being ignored by those who should love him.

He hasn't made any move to run though, has he? Wish he would, but I don't blame him for not. Politics is like a Sarlacc pit! Once you fall in, it chews you up and you never get out! (Star Wars reference for those unfamiliar http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sarlacc )

Originally Posted by imblest

He hasn't made any move to run though, has he? Wish he would, but I don't blame him for not. Politics is like a Sarlacc pit! Once you fall in, it chews you up and you never get out! (Star Wars reference for those unfamiliar http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sarlacc )

-----------------------------------------------

What is crystal clear in all this is that the majority of us have been burned enough and are now smart enough to understand that the GOP controllers will lie to us in the face and stab us in the back when it comes time for POTUS nomination(s).

This has been duplicated in every POTUS nomination for the past thirty years.

It won't change now.

If a Republican wants to run on his own merits, believes in the Constitution and is willing to fight for it, he WON'T be running for POTUS on a Republican ticket.

Period ..

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GOP Hawks Prepare for War—Against Rand Paul

Matthew Feeney|March 31, 2014

Credit: Gage Skidmore/wikimediaAccording to several donors at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference held in Las Vegas last weekend, the billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is prepared to fund a campaign against Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) if he picks up increased support during his widely anticipated presidential run in 2016.

Several prominent GOP donors at the conference suggested that Adelson, who spent more than $100 million backing Newt Gingrich and Romney in 2012, is likely to spend vast sums against Paul if he appears to be well positioned in the Republican primaries. Adelson’s spending is largely motivated by his strong concern for Israel, and Paul’s positions may well put a target on his back.

According to TIME, one unnamed former Mitt Romney bundler said it was "scary" that Paul could win the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.
More from TIME:

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is hard at work laying the groundwork for an almost certain presidential campaign in 2016, but as he broadens his support among libertarian and younger voters, there’s a budding counter-campaign to take him down if he becomes a threat to actually win the nomination.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) meeting in Las Vegas this weekend, Paul was nowhere to be found, but his presence was felt in the form of a straw man — and frequent worry. Speaker after speaker, from former Florida governor Jeb Bush to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, laid into Paul’s more isolationist views on foreign policy. They never mentioned the lawmaker by name, but the message came across loud and clear.
The conference brings together some of the biggest names — and wallets — in Republican politics, most notably billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. At a private dinner for VIP donors in an Adelson-owned aircraft hangar holding one of his pair of Boeing 747s, Bush was asked about the growing isolationist wing of the Republican Party and replied there was no such thing — effectively casting Paul out of the fold, according to attendees.

Background on Paul’s Foreign Policy
Like his father, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, advocates for a less involved American foreign policy. However, Rand Paul’s brand of non-intervention is not a rigid as his father’s.
In February last year, Paul went to the conservative Heritage Foundation and gave a speech in which he argued for a foreign policy that is neither isolationist nor neoconservative and is open to using containment as a way to address the threat of Islamic terrorism. Watch the speech below:



During his time in the Senate Paul has come out against American intervention abroad, perhaps most notably relating to the conflict in Syria and urging the U.S. not to rub Russian President Vladimir Putin the wrong way amid the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
Analysis and Commentary
Unsurprisingly, some conservatives aren’t happy about Paul’s foreign policy proposals.
The neoconservative columnist Jennifer Rubin has mentioned Paul 143 times between March 1 and March 21 in her blog at The Washington Post. Some of the recent headlines of Rubin’s posts include "Rand Paul’s fake foreign policy" and "Rand Paul is the odd man out of the GOP on foreign policy." Yesterday one of Rubin’s posts was headlined "Rand Paul trashed military option for Iran and blamed the U.S. for WWII."
Writing about Paul’s speech at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference, Rubin outlined in characteristically blunt language her feelings about Paul’s opinions on foreign policy:

...Paul’s spiel is certainly indifferent to if not at odds with what is going on in the world. Should we be alarmed that Iran is getting the bomb, Russia is invading a neighbor and there is a war of genocidal proportions in Syria? No, the greatest danger is the government’s (nonexistent) eavesdropping on your phone calls. Not only is his shtick divorced from world events, but it also is entirely alien to the experience and concerns of most Americans who are worried about health care, the economy, the middle-class squeeze, etc. Other than people exactly like those in the ballroom, who is going to find this the most compelling message out of all the Republican contenders’ agendas? He keeps saying he will reach out to African Americans and Hispanics, but the crowd that love him was overwhelmingly white and male. And if he is serious about immigration reform (he told Silicon Valley he was), he kept it to himself.

Rubin continued:

He is after all a libertarian, not a mainstream conservative, and his disinclination to speak about anything but his paranoid vision of the government leaves little room for reform or problem-solving. This one-note fear of government has limited selling power in the Republican Party, most especially during times of rising international threats.

Writing in Forbes, David Adesnik, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, criticized Paul for flip-flopping on the Ukraine crisis:

My best guess is that Paul is desperately searching for some framework or ideology that can justify the dovish, perhaps even isolationist instincts he inherited from his father. Yet he doesn’t know enough about foreign policy to think even one or two steps ahead, so he jumps into the breach with a loudly unorthodox position, only to find himself embarrassed when events demonstrate his ignorance. Then he starts firing in every direction, not knowing what to make of a world that doesn’t conform to his preferences. I don’t get the sense Paul is learning from his mistakes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see the same pattern play out again before long.

In an oped for Breitbart News, Paul implicitly criticized fellow potential 2016 contender Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for trying to claim Reagan’s mantle after making a distinction between Paul’s foreign policy and Reagan’s. The Daily Caller senior editor Jamie Weinstein wrote that Paul and Reagan have little in common when it comes to foreign policy:

Paul may be right when he says that none of the Republicans considering a White House run in 2016 have a foreign policy outlook exactly like Reagan’s. But what’s undeniable is that Paul’s foreign policy is far and away the least Reaganeque of any of the possible 2016 Republican presidential contenders.
What Paul is trying to do is muddy the waters on Reagan’s foreign policy legacy in order to hide the reality that his foreign policy outlook bears no resemblance to that of the Gipper’s — and, more broadly, is wildly out of touch with the Republican mainstream. Sure, Reagan engaged in diplomacy, even occasionally when some in his own party believed it inadvisable. But that hardly makes Reagan a Rand Paul-style non-interventionist. Far from it.
Paul says he, like Reagan, supports “peace through strength.” Except Reagan’s notion of “peace through strength” focused on increasing military spending. Paul has not yet discovered a military cut he didn’t like.

Paul’s foreign policy has been criticized by liberals as well as conservatives. Writing in Politico earlier this month, Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute, argued that Paul’s thoughts on foreign policy put him in a politically awkward situation:

Politically speaking, Paul faces an intractable dilemma: If he embraces his inner libertarian, he’ll stir excitement among liberty-loving younger Republicans—GOP strategist Bill Kristol cuttingly calls them “Snowden Republicans”—as well as many on the left who take a dim view of U.S. power and motives. But he will alienate many social conservatives and Tea Party “patriots” who still believe in American exceptionalism, as well as mainstream Republicans who see military strength as a more reliable basis for U.S. security than withdrawing from a fractious world.
So maybe Paul has no choice but to keep trying to reconcile incompatible conceptions of America’s role in the world. So far, he’s produced only a muddle.

Like Adesnik, Marshall also argued that Paul’s comments on Ukraine are confused:

Consider Paul’s ideas for punishing Russia, which are so inconsistent they sometimes cancel each other out: Paul the geopolitical hardliner calls for restarting work on American missile defense systems in Eastern Europe that were suspended as part of Obama’s unsuccessful “reset” of U.S.-Russian relations. But Paul the skinflint insists that “the Europeans pay for it”—which means the missile shields probably won’t go up. In one breath, Paul calls for more vigorous U.S. action to punish Russia for its rogue behavior; in the next he bemoans the fact that America is “broke” and can’t be the world’s ATM or policeman. This puzzling logic sometimes sound like a Zen koan: “Like Dwight Eisenhower, I believe the U.S. can actually be stronger by doing less,” he wrote in Time.
While insisting that he stands with Ukraine against Moscow’s attempts to dismember the country, Paul also ruled out U.S. economic aid to Ukraine because it might go to Russia to pay Kyiv’s enormous gas bills. In Paul’s view, energy isn’t just a cudgel Putin uses to intimidate neighboring countries—it’s also the main weapon America has to wean Europeans from dependence on Russian gas and oil. In contrast to Obama’s supposed dithering on energy, Paul calls for aggressively exporting U.S. natural gas to Europe and demands, weirdly, “immediate construction of the Keystone Pipeline.”

Reason on Rand Paul
Reason has extensive coverage of Rand Paul and his foreign policy, which can be read here. Some highlights:

Matt Welch wrote on the fight between Paul and Cruz over the Gipper’s mantle.

I wrote about how despite what neoconservatives might say, Paul is not an isolationist. I also considered whether the American public will pay attention to Paul’s foreign policy.

Brian Doherty wrote about the "rhetorical judo" Paul has used on those who criticize his positions on foreign policy.


Matthew Feeney is an assistant editor at Reason 24/7.
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http://reason.com/24-7/2014/03/31/go...inst-rand-paul

Originally Posted by kathyet2

Several prominent GOP donors at the conference suggested that Adelson, who spent more than $100 million backing Newt Gingrich and Romney in 2012, is likely to spend vast sums against Paul if he appears to be well positioned in the Republican primaries. l

--------------------------------------------------

How did that work out for you, Mr. Adelson?

No House floor vote to consider legalizing illegal immigrants


Democrats lost the first major immigration fight of the year Wednesday after Republicans voting in unison in the House Budget Committee — rejected an effort to legalize illegal immigrants as part of the 2015 budget.

Even Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has led Republicans’ outreach to Hispanic voters on immigration, voted against the Democrats’ proposal. He said the time wasn’t ripe and that the version Democrats offered, which closely tracked the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform bill from last year, was flawed.

One way to open that “door” to the Hispanic community, he said, is to offer reassurances that “Mrs. Garcia’s nephew is not going to be sent home to Mexico.”

No, instead we will reward him for breaking the law. Key words here: Home and Mexico!

Rand Paul Warning: Republicans Need to Soften on Social (Gay and Lesbian) Issues

"I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues," Paul advised. "The Republican Party is not going to give up on having quite a few people who do believe in traditional marriage. But the Republican Party also has to find a place for young people and others who don’t want to be festooned by those issues."

ICE: Most illegals have 'close to zero' chance of being deported...

"If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it's just highly unlikely to happen," John Sandweg, until recently the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview.