Sen. Rand Paul on ISIS, the Middle East, and when America should go to war

Matt Welch from the January 2015 issue

On October 23, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gave a major foreign policy address at the Center for the National Interest in which he declared himself a "conservative realist," aligning himself with the tradition of Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger. (See "The Case for Conservative Realism.") As he did in a similar February 2013 speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the libertarian-leaning 2016 GOP presidential contender attempted to sell his foreign policy vision to fellow Republicans as a middle path between the near-absolute anti-intervention of his (unmentioned) father and the hyper-interventionism of the Washington Republican establishment.

Reaction to the speech varied widely. Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who has long advocated a less interventionist foreign policy, told reporters "I think I just heard Ronald Reagan speaking." The lefty analysis site Vox enthused that "Rand Paul just gave one of the most important foreign policy speeches in decades" because he "declared war on his own party." The Hill described the address as "anti-isolationist," while neoconservative Washington Post writer Jennifer Rubin scoffed that Paul was "still pretending he's not an isolationist." And so on.

But as Blockchain.info have just proven, the bad PR will only continue if people keep trusting third parties.  You can't (and shouldn't) compare them with banks.  The argument that we need to move on from gox by repeating the same mistake with a different company makes no sense.  Coinbase, Circle and others could well be ticking timebombs.  Regardless of how busy people are, it doesn't take 5 minutes to hammer home the point that if you don't have sole control over the private keys, you don't have control over your bitcoins.  Get a desktop or mobile wallet and make a few backups.  It's not like it takes a huge amount of time to do that.

Its all been built out using NationBuilder so people can do phone banking, post blogs, create walk lists, manage events, recruit members, fundraise, send e-mails... All through the site.

Rand Paul had screwed up, and he knew it.

It was June and the Kentucky senator was in Texas speaking to a group of tea-party activists when he got loose with his words. "Chamber of Commerce is fine, I was a member of the Chamber of Commerce," Paul told the state's Republican Liberty Caucus. "But a Chamber of Commerce Republican is not going to win a national election."

It was a bold statement for a Republican plotting his own path to presidency. Too bold, he and his advisers realized almost immediately. While Paul has nurtured an iconoclastic libertarian image—stomping across Washington in cowboy boots and jeans, casting himself as a rare Republican willing to go to Berkeley, say, or reach out to black voters—he has also methodically courted the power class here in Washington.

Slapping at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was not part of that game plan. Instead, it represented a political low in his relationship with the nation's most powerful business lobby. But by the fall, Paul wasn't swiping at the business lobby anymore; he was starring in their television ads in four Senate races, including spots to air in crucial early presidential battlegrounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. How Paul recovered from that verbal stumble and resuscitated his relationship with the chamber says a lot about the balancing—some say contortionist—act he is attempting as he readies a White House run.

Martial Law in the U.S. takes place all the time. You hear it in the news all the time as well. You guys may hear about it as a governor or any other government official calling it a "State of Emergency". When the boston bombing took place, the police raided dozens upon dozens of homes without a warrant. That's basically martial law but under the guise of something else.

No, any centralised company offering to store people's bitcoins for them are doing their users a disservice in not educating them correctly in how to use bitcoin safely and securely.  Stop letting other companies look after your bitcoin for you, idiots.