GOP - Rand Paul's Presidential Highlight Reel w/ his Libertarian Twist

[Bit_Happy]

Dr. and Sen. Rand Paul performs pro bono eye surgery in Lousiville, KY recently.


Also, 2 of the largest local news stations covered his surgeries and mentioned his upcoming trip to do the same in Guatemala in a week or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2CqN4amn-A

Is the Senate on a summer break? I haven't been watching the daily news much lately?
His father used to do pro bono baby deliveries back before Gov't intervention helped make medical care costs soar to unbelievable heights.

[bryant.coleman]

           Aug '14May '14Feb '14Jul '13
Cruz           16%   15%   13%   8%
Paul           15%   11%   15%   18%
Huckabee   14%   11%   11%   n/a
Bush           12%   14%   12%   11%
Christie   12%   14%   10%   13%
Palin           11%   12%   13%   14%
Walker   7%   4%   4%   n/a
Ryan           6%   4%   4%   9%
Rubio           5%   3%   6%   9%
SE/NS*   4%   12%   12%   19%

Palin is almost definitely not running this time. So I'll ignore her. Other than Rand Paul, the only other candidate with significant support is Chris Christie. Alaska is definitely interesting.

[Chef Ramsay]

Is the Senate on a summer break? I haven't been watching the daily news much lately?
His father used to do pro bono baby deliveries back before Gov't intervention helped make medical care costs soar to unbelievable heights.

Yes, they are on summer break and he should be in South Carolina today and tomorrow if I heard it right. Then, he's off to Guatemala to perform 3 days worth of eye surgeries Saturday morning.

Rand Paul heading to Guatemala to do eye surgeries


WASHINGTON — Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is just back from barnstorming Iowa, home of the earliest presidential caucus, and he’s heading next to eat barbecue in South Carolina, the first voting state in Dixie and a critical stop for Republicans who aspire to the White House.

In between, though, Paul is going about as far from the beaten political track as possible, the central highlands of Guatemala.

An ophthalmologist with a medical degree from Duke University, Paul is joining a medical mission to do eye surgeries in Guatemala as Congress continues its August break. The trip comes as Paul tries to differentiate himself from other Republican contenders, including efforts at reach out to minority groups and Silicon Valley.

Paul said he “doesn’t know” what the political implications of the trip might be, only that his work as a physician was his first passion and he doesn’t want to stop.

“It’s just something I kind of miss in my life, and I want to be able to give back,” Paul said in an interview.

...

Paul leaves for Guatemala early Saturday morning and will do surgeries in the small city of Salama from Monday through Wednesday.

...

More...http://www.kentucky.com/2014/08/13/3378532/rand-paul-heading-to-guatemala.html?sp=/99/322/

Interestingly,

Paul’s three days of surgeries are going to be well documented. About 17 members of the press are going to accompany Paul, said Michael Yei, outreach manager for the Moran Eye Center. He said the list includes Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren and her crew, the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Washington Post, the National Review and the conservative website Breitbart News.

[beetcoin]

i find it funny that ted cruz is even in the running. i thought, if anything, the republican base would stick closely to the constitution, and you can't become president of the U.S. unless you are born in the united states. also, he's a clown.

also concerning huckabee, who seems to have a strong following even though he doesn't seem to have interest in running: getting his endorsement would probably go a long way for rand.

[Chef Ramsay]

Rand Paul’s race moment

By BURGESS EVERETT |

Sen. Rand Paul is staking out new ground: He’s the Republican who can talk race and police brutality.

In an op-ed for Time magazine Thursday on the events in Ferguson, Missouri, Paul (R-Ky.) took on race, militarized police and why “it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

The potential 2016 presidential contender is fond of telling the GOP that it needs to appeal beyond its mostly white base if it wants to be competitive in national races — pushing for sentencing reforms and speaking to traditionally black audiences. But his efforts to make inroads with new GOP constituencies haven’t always gone smoothly.

The tension in the St. Louis suburbs, however, could mark a turning point for Paul.

The senator’s lengthy, provocative and personal op-ed went further than any other Republican in acknowledging pervasive racial divisions in the U.S.

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” he wrote.

Republicans have a long way to go toward building support among African-Americans and other minorities. But politicians from both parties often struggle to talk about race — and Paul is winning applause from unlikely places for his willingness to confront the issue.

...

More...http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/rand-pauls-race-moment-110040.html


MSNBC host: Rand Paul breaks the mold of Republicans who never question law enforcement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1goXKsBcHs ~3 min clip

Once again, Rand knows how to get media attention.

[beetcoin]

republican candidates are dropping like flies, and we're not even close to starting the primaries just yet.

http://www.vice.com/read/rick-perry-hired-a-lawyer-who-once-tried-to-turn-him-in-to-the-fbi-717

[Matze]

looks just like its going to be the same old family names bush vs Clinton.

[counter]

looks just like its going to be the same old family names bush vs Clinton.

Please don't say that, I get sick just thinking about it.  That is not a step in the right direction and not only that but it insures we will continue on the path of destruction and will have more of the same problems that got us where we are today.  Only things are much worse these days so the effects of bad politics will be catastrophic in many ways.

[Matze]

looks just like its going to be the same old family names bush vs Clinton.

Please don't say that, I get sick just thinking about it.  That is not a step in the right direction and not only that but it insures we will continue on the path of destruction and will have more of the same problems that got us where we are today.  Only things are much worse these days so the effects of bad politics will be catastrophic in many ways.

Didn't say it was a good thing and in fact I agree with you but I bet you that's how its going to end up anyway.

[Bit_Happy]

looks just like its going to be the same old family names bush vs Clinton.

Please don't say that, I get sick just thinking about it.  That is not a step in the right direction and not only that but it insures we will continue on the path of destruction and will have more of the same problems that got us where we are today.  Only things are much worse these days so the effects of bad politics will be catastrophic in many ways.

Didn't say it was a good thing and in fact I agree with you but I bet you that's how its going to end up anyway.

Bush 3 vs Queen Clinton would be a disaster which I do not want to watch. It is vital that we have better choices.
Like Al Gore     .....kidding

[Chef Ramsay]

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Robert Steele: Rand Paul is most dangerous man in politics right now to break left-right paradigm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ix1EKybQI
7 minute segment on MSNBC yesterday where the former RNC chair says his piece on Rand Paul.

[Chef Ramsay]

IT'S TIME TO START PREPARING YOURSELF FOR PRESIDENT RAND PAUL

For the past two years, from the moment Ron Paul called off the Revolution and headed back to Texas, the political establishment has been eagerly waiting for his son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, to run for president. They’ve watched with amusement as Paul popped up around the country—in Iowa and New Hampshire, at evangelical powwows, Howard University, the ACLU—and at the top of early 2016 polls. Unlike his father, it’s hard to deny that he Paul is a “serious” candidate. But the idea that he could actually be elected President of the United States? That’s never been taken very seriously.

But with half of the GOP’s 2016 bench trying to avoid prison time and Democrats spinning their wheels in Obama’s second-term rut, the idea of a President Rand Paul is starting to sound less and less crazy. On issues like criminal justice reform, mass surveillance, and drug policy Paul is casting himself as Another Option, carving out new space as the candidate who can make room for both small-government libertarians and other voters—young people and minorities mostly—who don’t see either party as particularly effective or relevant. And some of what he’s saying makes a lot of sense.

Take Paul’s comments about the events in Ferguson, Missouri. In an op-ed published by TIME Thursday, the Kentucky Senator laid out a remarkably blunt, even angry, assessment of the racial tensions at the center of this week’s riots, linking policing issues to his broader critique of the federal government.

...

More...http://www.vice.com/read/its-time-to-start-preparing-for-president-rand-paul

[Chef Ramsay]

With Democrat Hillary Clinton Likely 2016 Neoconservative Standard Bearer, Republicans Should Offer a Real Alternative — Such as Rand Paul

By Doug Bandow
This article appeared in Forbes on August 18, 2014.

U.S. foreign policy is a bipartisan fiasco. George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies gave the American people Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving. Barack Obama has proved to be a slightly more reluctant warrior, but he is taking the country back into Iraq.

Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee, appears never to have met a war that he didn’t want Americans to fight. Hillary Clinton, the unannounced Democratic front-runner for 2016, supported her husband’s misbegotten attempt at nation-building in Kosovo and led the drive for war in Libya, which is violently unraveling.

Most of Clinton’s potential GOP opponents share Washington’s bomb, invade, and occupy consensus. The only exception is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He stands alone advocating a foreign policy which reflects the bitter, bloody lessons of recent years.

The Islamic State of Syria and the Levant is the latest result of Washington’s incessant and counterproductive meddling in the Middle East. Nowhere has U.S. policy been more disastrous. Indeed, what intervention, under Republican or Democratic administration, has worked well in that region in the last three or so decades?

More...http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/democrat-hillary-clinton-likely-2016-neoconservative-standard-bearer

[beetcoin]

i trust fivethirtyeight more than most other sources as they are more data driven, and they are saying that the "rand paul will entice younger voters" might just be a myth.

Rand Paul is having a moment. A recent cover story for The New York Times Magazine dubbed the potential Republican presidential candidate the “Pearl Jam” of the libertarian movement and a force that could win over young voters in 2016. It’s a tantalizing theory for the right and a fun story for the media. But the data suggests that the senator from Kentucky has his work cut out for him.

So far, Paul isn’t doing much better among young voters than the Republican nominee in 2012, Mitt Romney, or than Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor, is currently doing.

Since the beginning of the year, there have been eight live-interview national polls that detail results among young voters (ages 18 to 29 or 18 to 34), and matched Paul against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Together, these polls give us the views of more than 1,000 young voters. The same polls matched Clinton against Christie. The surveys show that young voters don’t see any difference between Paul and other Republican politicians.

Why should we trust these surveys? We shouldn’t expect early polls to tell us the final vote in 2016, but it’s probable that each candidate’s coalitions will remain mostly intact. Both the subsample and the overall margin should shift relatively uniformly. For example, Republicans should do better with white voters than they do overall, even if their margin among both shrinks or widens.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rand-paul-will-win-over-young-voters-myth/

[Chef Ramsay]

It might appear to just be a myth now but if you're familiar w/ Young Americans for Liberty or YAL, it's the national student org that rose from Ron's first prez run as a republican and has been expanding into lots of colleges across the country. Their growth rate has been pretty phenomenal and will likely crescendo leading up until the election in 2016 and beyond. And believe you me, this org is being primed to be a major tool for Rand and other liberty republicans. Check em out http://www.yaliberty.org/chapters

[Chef Ramsay]

Rand’s Latin American Campaign Stop
It was the first foreign trip of the 2016 presidential campaign.

By Eliana Johnson


Consider it the first foreign trip of Rand Paul’s presidential campaign. That’s not how the Kentucky senator characterized the six days he spent in Guatemala this week, most of them performing free eye surgeries in the small, impoverished city of Salama, but he didn’t need to.

The trip was marked by all of the trappings of a politician on the ascent. Paul was accompanied by his top political advisers, personal friends, his ad men, several reporters, and even by cameras from the conservative activist group Citizens United, which is in the process of filming a documentary about him. The senator and his aides were ferried from one location to another by an armored caravan and accompanied at all times by an armed security detail. Media reports were embargoed until he left the country mid-day Thursday.

Paul, who practiced ophthalmology in Bowling Green, Ky., before mounting his senatorial bid in 2010, has always cast himself as a doctor first and a politician second. Over the past four years, that calculation has clearly shifted, though Paul is loath to admit it.

“I don’t think it’s either or, that I do one or the other,” he says.

Americans have never elected a president with a medical degree, and Paul, who is fashioning himself as a new type of Republican, isn’t shy about the qualities he thinks a doctor would bring to the Oval Office. “I personally think that if we got rid of all the lawyers and replaced them with all the doctors our country would be much better off,” he says, sitting on an examination table and clad in medical scrubs, “because doctors are “problem-solvers who don’t get caught up in partisanship.”

More goodies...http://www.nationalreview.com/article/385972/rands-latin-american-campaign-stop-eliana-johnson

[Chef Ramsay]

Rand Paul Warns Dems What Will Happen if They Nominate ‘War Hawk’ Hillary Clinton

by Matt Wilstein | 4:55 pm, August 22nd, 2014

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) shared some harsh words about potential 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton in this preview of an interview he taped for this week’s Meet the Press. Wearing his surgical scrubs while on a medical mission to Guatemala, Paul predicted what would happen if Democrats decide to nominate a “war hawk” like Clinton in the next presidential election.

“If you wanna see a transformational election, let the Democrats put forward a war hawk like Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see a transformation like you’ve never seen,” Paul said, foreshadowing how he plans to run against the former secretary of state.

In another clip released by NBC Friday, Paul made his first on camera comments about the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.“One of the best things they’ve done so far in Ferguson, was send an African American police officer down there to talk to people in the community,” Paul told NBC’s Chris Jansing. “Now, it hadn’t worked completely, I’ll admit that. But it’s a better way than shooting tear gas at people in their front yard.”

Watch both videos below, via NBC News:

->...http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rand-paul-warns-dems-what-will-happen-if-they-nominate-war-hawk-hillary-clinton/

[johncarpe64]

Dr. and Sen. Rand Paul performs pro bono eye surgery in Lousiville, KY recently.


Also, 2 of the largest local news stations covered his surgeries and mentioned his upcoming trip to do the same in Guatemala in a week or so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2CqN4amn-A

Is the Senate on a summer break? I haven't been watching the daily news much lately?
His father used to do pro bono baby deliveries back before Gov't intervention helped make medical care costs soar to unbelievable heights.

I think they are in session now. I know they are going on break in September and staying on break until the election.

[Chef Ramsay]

America's eyes opening to ophthalmologist as unlikely potential president
Rand Paul is rapidly emerging as a leading Republican candidate for the White House, despite his challenging views on policing and foreign affairs

US Senator Rand Paul likes to spend his vacations helping people to see better. Last week, the Kentucky senator (an ophthalmologist) was on a humanitarian mission, performing pro bono eye surgery in Salama, Guatemala.

And while some Guatemalans are sure to have better vision as a result, Americans are starting to envision the possibility he could be president.

Polls conducted by NBC News and Marist College last month showed him either winning or tied against leading Republican rivals in both the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries.

This is not an aberration; Paul, who was elected in 2010, has long polled well in these important early states.

It's too early to make any serious predictions, but winning the first two primary contests would potentially set him up as a juggernaut for the Republican presidential nomination. As the Washington Post's Aaron Blake observed: "No non-incumbent Republican presidential candidate has won both states since they were granted first-in-the-nation status in 1976. Not one."

Much more...http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/republicans/11052897/Americas-eyes-opening-to-ophthalmologist-as-unlikely-potential-president.html

[Chef Ramsay]

Great local clip on last night's NBC's Nightly News of Rand in Guatemala. This is one of the basic news channels that all tv viewers get, unlike the paid channels of Fox and MSNBC. So, even the non-political seekers got a piece of this which is great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYRg98tyDi0