I think the best part of seeing Rand Paul, the first-ever true Tea Party candidate to win something in politics, was the atmosphere at his Kentucky Republican Senate primary race acceptance speech. He didn’t even have a real podium to deliver his lines about how he loves his wife, and how he has “come to take our government back” with the Tea Party, whatever that means. Instead, he had what looked like an actual soap box, placed on top of a cheap coffee table draped with a cloth, and a 99-cent campaign sign taped to it. Some people call Rand Paul a right-wing radical, others say he’s a libertarian genius, and others call him a jerk. I call him: practical!
victory laps
Should You Be Scared of Rand Paul’s Message From the Tea Party?
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Lucas
For some reason I like this guy. I think he’s going to surprise us, as his father would, on key gay rights issues.
Lucas
If he beats Jack “I support gay equality except for the whole marriage thing” Conway that is.
Ed
Rand Paul would like to dismantle the Americans with Disabilities Acts (ADA). He also pals around with armed militias, even referring to some of them as his private security force.
Baxter
Is he kind of nutty like his dad? Probably, but I kind of like him. We need more real libertarians in government.
ousslander
Sounds good to me. plus he’s kinda cute
JamesStone
If you read his views on issues he is AGAINST gay marriage and is AGAINST a woman’s right to choose….
tjr101
This guy is way out there in right-wing loony land and there’s no way he will be pro-lgbt. Have to admit this November is going to be very interesting.
Bill Perdue
The chickens are coming home to roost for both right wing parties.
For decades Democrat and Republican lawmakers have joined in a bipartisan attack on the standard of living of working people, small farmers, independent truckers, etc.
Clintons NAFTA, Carter, Clinton and Bush’s deregulation, Reagan’s job export and Reagan and Obama’s union busting created widespread pauperization, wrecking the economy. They produced unemployment figures not seen since the earlier depression – 17.1% for April, 2010 – and widespread homelessness.
[img]http://extratv.warnerbros.com/images/news/0107presidents.jpg[/img]
Now Democrats and Republicans are beginning to pay the price. Economic collapse is creating widespread radicalization and deep social and political polarization. Class warfare by the looter class creates class warfare by workers. People are moving hard to the left and hard to the right.
The Republicans, one way or another, will fall to the Teabaggers, most likely by being taken over. As Republicans move further to the right, Democrat-Dixiecrats will follow suit.
For right wing parties like the Democrats and Republicans there’s nowhere to go. But for the left the opportunities for mass action and independent political action are just beginning.
[img]http://www.ridenbaugh.com/photo/DignityVillage006.jpg[/img]
Caine
Just another typical conservative trying to “protect” us from the
big, bad scary gubiment…by becoming the government.
He has already stated that marriage should be between a man and a women. He also explicitly stats on his website that the goverment-how ironic-should intervene and make abortions obsolete.
He’s also another “we’ll add do solar power later. But first, more coal” energy nut. He knows nothing about true, renewable energy. He has no experience with environmental science.
He was also endorsed by some of the most criticized and lobbyist-aid politicians, including Jim Demint, Jim Bunning…and Sarah Palin. Need I say more?
He’s not a libertarian. He’s nothing, just like every other damn republican/conservative. He’ll do nothing.
bryce
this guy said he wouldn’t remember his siblings, nieces, and nephews names? and did you listen to any of his other nonsense?
i dont care how cute he may be. he sucks.
Baxter
@JamesStone: He’s actually against all government-sponsored marriage, gay and straight. Like most libertarians, he thinks that government should just get out of the marriage business completely.
Jake the libertarian
I love the guy. He against any government recognition of marriage, which makes him de facto for gay marriage. He wants to shrink government and hates the Christian right as much as anyone on this forum. I am very happy we will be seeing and hearing from him a lot.
Andy
This guy is against gay marriage and gay rights. For fuck’s sake: Sarah Palin endorsed him.
Countervail
Frankly if you read any reasonable political analysis of the Paul primary, you realize he’s really a TPINO, Tea Party in Name Only. He’s only associated himself with the Tea Party for their support but unlike the Tea Party doesn’t have particularly strong libertarian leanings, probably less than his father. He’s a social conservative and runs on a fairly standard conservative platform, much less to do with Tea Party politics than with a general conservative viewpoint. Observations of him paint him as aloof and condescending. And Democrats still had a 60% higher turnout in the same primary for their candidates in Kentucky and have about 170,000 more registered voters there.
Look for this race to get ugly and Paul to bring out the crazy. I think you’re just hot for him.
AustinAbomination
And here we have the beginning of the end of Ron Paul’s movement. True limited government, anti-corruption, and ultimately for equal rights for all. And then the batshit Sarah Palin co-opted the Tea Party for her own use. Now what could have effected change (Ron Paul) is lumped in with the most batshit of people (Palin, Beck, Rush, etc), and will be rendered useless. Great.
JamesStone
@JamesStone: Oh..I forgot! Last year he said Sarah Palin would make a “GREAT” president!! Need I say more? His opponent already has a lot of fuel to throw at him!!
SteamPunk
I may be OK with some of the Tea Party’s “Take Our Country Back” stance if only I knew what they were trying to take our country back to. Are they wanting to take us back to the last 5 years? The last 10 years? The 1960s? If so, then all of those are pretty unappealing to me. I’d rather us move forward, not backward.
The other problem I have is the generally negative stance they have on gay marriage while fighting for fair taxation. It’s tough for me to think of a population of people who are taxed the same yet represented less in this country than gay people.
delurker again
KY, though socially conservative, is a welfare state with a bunch of PWTs on some form of public assistance. I wonder what they feel about Dr. Paul’s belief in gutting and cutting all those social programs.
Devon
He’s as bad for the gays as the rest of ’em.
Next!
Nicholas from NicholasLand
Whoa how did somebody post pictures in these comments?
And everyone remember his father’s reaction to Bruno in the movie of the same name. If I remember correctly he called Bruno a queer, angrily, and not in a good way.
Baxter
@Jake the libertarian: I love the morons on this post who seem to think that just because this guy’s a Republican that he must be some evangelical monster. Rand Paul is a libertarian. He’s the type of Republican that we should be supporting, because he wants to keep the government out of our bedrooms.
delurker again
Also, like a good losertarian, Paul wants to repeal the parts of the Civil Rights Acts banning discrimination in public accommodations because the free market wil supposedly take care of that.
Nutjob.
delurker again
wow. wow. wow. Dr. Galt was just on Maddow’s show. Maddow asked him point blank whether it should be legal for a private restaurant to have a no blacks allowed policy in their restaurant.
The doofus would not answer yes or no. He obviously wants to say yes (it should be legal), but is smart enough to realize how horrid that sound.
Yeah, this fool is going to be great for gay rights.
jason
Rand Paul looks like Justin Timberlake minus the penis nose.
Shallow HAL
so opponents to this guy can’t handle any debate or respect the ideas of others. all that seems to be happening here is that people that speak in favour of this guy get flooded with thumbs down.
so the thumbs up/thumbs down system that in my mind is there to get rid of offensive vitriol is being distorted to force a one sided view on the matter.
way to go…
james_from_cambridge
@delurker again: *Sigh* Kentucky and other red states receive more Federal funds than they send to Washington, they have far more people on welfare than blue states, they have, by far, the highest rates of divorce, abortion, child and spousal abuse, much higher rates of incest and much higher rates of divorce and not that this is going to shock anyone but much lower rates of high school and college graduation. Red states are just like the family values Republicans that represent them in congress…they talk a good game about values but then you find them in an alley way behind a gay bar performing abortions while giving blow jobs to Hispanic waiters.
james_from_cambridge
@delurker again: *Sigh* Kentucky and other red states also receive more Federal funds than they send to Washington, they have far more people on welfare than blue states, they have, by far, the highest rates of divorce, abortion, child and spousal abuse, much higher rates of incest and much higher rates of divorce and not that this is going to shock anyone but much lower rates of high school and college graduation. Red states are just like the family values Republicans that represent them in congress…they talk a good game about values but then you find them in an alley way behind a gay bar performing abortions while giving blow jobs to Hispanic waiters.
Fitz
@Shallow HAL: I totally agree. The “hidden due to low rating” is a disaster for the concept of real discussion. It’s like a promise to only preach to the choir.
scott ny'er
@Fitz: I agree. The thumbs up/down shouldn’t actually HIDE the comment. That seems to go against the free speech and stop any actual discussion.
I mean, if the comment was threatening, cursing, etc. We have the flag/removal button. So thumbs up/down should just be for how popular that comment is. Not to hide the comment.
ossurworld
You can have one low rating and, if Queerty doesn’t like you, you will be discriminated against.
ossurworld
What’s a drag queen doing running for the Senate? Oh, wrong Paul.
Rob Moore
Have any of you who think the libertarian philosophy of government ever examined it and thought about it? The law of unintended consequences would be a huge part of it. First of all, in his view, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 went too far. It not only made racial discrimination illegal in government services, but also applied to private businesses. He doesn’t like that last part. He thinks restaurants, stores, hotels, medical practices, etc. should be allowed to refuse providing services to customers based on whatever criteria they want to such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and so on and so on.
Strictly speaking, libertarianism is to the Constitution as fundamentalist Christians are to the Bible. Their view is that if the Constitution doesn’t say it, then it isn’t protected.
There is no right to privacy, no right to a free public education, no involvement of the Federal government in infrastructure development, no Social Security, no Medicare. The Libertarian view of Federalism is that the Federal government has only those responsibilities specifically defined in the Constitution. They defer to state’s rights in most areas. Carried to its logical conclusion, the Federal government would have allowed the secession of the southern states.
There would be no national environmental policy, National Parks would revert to the control of individual states, which could then do with them as they wanted. No National Institutes of Health or CDC would exist under the Libertarian philosophy.
Widespread electrification in rural areas, which was beyond the means of individual states, should not have occurred in the 1930s and 1940s.
We tried this approach up until the 1840s. It was not practical. There was nothing to coordinate the national currency or to allow transactions with other nations. The first attempt was the Bank of the United States. Andrew Jackson who was the Rand Paul of his day, got it killed as soon as possible after he was elected. By the way, Andrew Jackson was one of the biggest racists ever to hold the office of President. He got the bank killed as quickly as possible. The next attempt was the Federal Reserve under Franklin Roosevelt.
Libertarianism is even more impractical than Communism. It would lead to such a weak national government that we would be severely weakened in the world.
Rand Paul like his father is a died in the wool Libertarian. He is not a libertarian in the quaint way Republicans claimed to be. He is hard core Libertarian; a true believer.
Rob Moore
I made so many misspellings and typos. Sorry about that.
Shallow HAL
HA. just like i said.
liberal bigots. awesome.
Rob Moore
@Shallow HAL: I am not certain what is bigoted in what I wrote. Is it bigoted that I listed the core arguments of libertarian philosophy? Or is it that you cannot refute my statements so resort to the favored tactic of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum when faced with uncomfortable facts.