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many here seems to think I always give liberals a pass. Maybe you guys should start posting unmitigated praise for Obama for me to oppose.

Rand Paul's Drone Rant

Give Rand Paul credit for theatrical timing. As a snow storm descended on Washington, the Kentucky Republican's old-fashioned filibuster Wednesday filled the attention void on Twitter and cable TV. If only his reasoning matched the showmanship.

Shortly before noon, Senator Paul began a talking filibuster against John Brennan's nomination to lead the CIA. The tactic is rarely used in the Senate and was last seen in 2010. But Senator Paul said an "alarm" had to be sounded about the threat to Americans from their own government. He promised to speak "until the President says, no, he will not kill you at a café." He meant by a military drone. He's apparently serious, though his argument isn't.

Senator Paul had written the White House to inquire about the possibility of a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on American soil. Attorney General Eric Holder replied that the U.S. hasn't and "has no intention" to bomb any specific territory. Drones are limited to the remotest areas of conflict zones like Pakistan and Yemen. But as a hypothetical Constitutional matter, Mr. Holder acknowledged the President can authorize the use of lethal military force within U.S. territory.

This shocked Senator Paul, who invoked the Constitution and Miranda rights. Under current U.S. policy, Mr. Paul mused on the floor, Jane Fonda could have been legally killed by a Hellfire missile during her tour of Communist Hanoi in 1972. A group of noncombatants sitting in public view in Houston may soon be pulverized, he declared.

Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well. The U.S. government cannot randomly target American citizens on U.S. soil or anywhere else. What it can do under the laws of war is target an "enemy combatant" anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant. The President can designate such a combatant if he belongs to an entity—a government, say, or a terrorist network like al Qaeda—that has taken up arms against the United States as part of an internationally recognized armed conflict. That does not include Hanoi Jane.

Such a conflict exists between the U.S. and al Qaeda, so Mr. Holder is right that the U.S. could have targeted (say) U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki had he continued to live in Virginia. The U.S. killed him in Yemen before he could kill more Americans. But under the law Awlaki was no different than the Nazis who came ashore on Long Island in World War II, were captured and executed.

The country needs more Senators who care about liberty, but if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. He needs to know what he's talking about.

Rand Paul Tops Field in Poll of Conservatives

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky narrowly won a straw poll of thousands of conservatives Saturday at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.



Mr. Paul, listed on the ballot with 23 other political figures, picked up 25% of the vote, CPAC organizers announced Saturday evening. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio was a close second-place pick, with 23%. Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum came in third, with 8% of the vote.

Mr. Paul’s victory was fitting for a conference that tends to draw young GOP activists with a libertarian streak. More than half of the nearly 3,000 who voted were ages 18-25.

{snip}

Regarding your editorial "Rand Paul's Drone Rant" (March 7): The problem isn't simply the president's ability to kill U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, which everyone acknowledges may be an important tool of the commander in chief if he is faced with an immediate threat and no practical ability to effect a capture. The problem is that the president would like to determine these definitions at his sole discretion (and the leaked white paper suggests that "immediate threat" and "ability to capture" could mean anything he decides those terms mean) and doesn't want to acknowledge that his actions may be limited by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees due process to all U.S. citizens.

Forget the specifics of today's situation. Mr. Paul's most important point is that once this precedent is set, it can be expanded and subject to misuse in the future. Who will be president in 20 years? How do we know he won't broadly define the country's enemies as his own political opponents? Even the current administration has released memos defining potential terrorists as people who are pro-life, own guns or publicly advocate adherence to the Constitution. The Republican establishment has once again showed itself to be nothing but shortsighted careerists.

Richard Masson
Lexington, KY

The young Dr. Paul is almost as quintessentially libertarian as you get in the group of individuals who choose to run Republican

There was a time when perfectly rational people with a grasp of economics and foreign policy controlled the G.O.P. How did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk — they are timid shadow of Jefferson and FDR.

Mike Lofgren was once a proud Republican. In the early eighties, he came from Ohio for what he thought would be a short stint on Capitol Hill. Last summer (2011) he finally stepped down, exasperated by the circus of the debt-ceiling debate. He channeled his frustration into an incisive indictment of Washington, which was posted on Truthout and read by millions.

The Party is Over is a rousing manifesto for the growing number of Americans who are disgusted with politics and fed up with the pandering to corporate interests. Money has corroded Washington so completely that banks, defense contractors, and the multinationals routinely shoehorn their corporate wish lists into every bill, and it is virtually impossible to get anything done.

Lofgren is a refreshingly skeptical insider who understands how the system works, and knows its dirty secrets. He offers clear suggestions for how to break through the gridlock; let’s hope there are enough grownups left in Washington to listen.

Question Bill, why is that Libertarians with any name recognition always run as Republicans?

There was a time when perfectly rational people with a grasp of economics and foreign policy controlled the G.O.P. How did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk — they are timid shadow of Jefferson and FDR.

Democratic-Republicans split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe, and the party faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the Democratic Party

The Democratic Party is often called "the party of Jefferson,"[22][23][24] while the modern Republican Party is often called "the party of Lincoln."

The Party of Jefferson and Jackson without Mr. Jackson

The Democratic Party has been in business for nearly as long as The United States has been in business independently, rather than as a subsidiary of Great Britain, Inc. It has succeeded to continue on, despite its recent Post WW II, Leftist deracination. It has done so as an alliance between intellectual (Jeffersonian) thinkers and proletariat, salt-of-the-Earth working people. These working Americans are the Jacksonians.

This alliance gave the Democrats a powerful combination of weapons with which they could bludgeon foes. The Jeffersonian Wing gave the party a sense of intellectual engagement and ideological “fashion.” It kept them on the cutting edge of modernity.

The Jacksonians gave them things more visceral, real, and emotional. The Jacksonians came to be legion. They gave the Democrats a quantity that is a quality all its own. They gave the party grounding in reality. They gave it something else, more important. They gave the Democratic Party a culture and a soul. Norman Rockwell painted Jacksonian Democrats.

Now the Jeffersonians have deliberately attenuated that connection between the two. They now seem embarrassed to have Jacksonians around the table at The Annual Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner. People with a culture and a soul cling to things. They are the Grass Roots to whom intelligent leaders of political movements needed to carry their message. But as Walter Russell Mead points out in his famous essay “The Jacksonian Tradition,” they do certain things that quite frankly scare the modern incarnation of the Jeffersonian Democrat.

The Democratic-Republican Party was the political party organized by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1791-93. It stood in opposition to the Federalist Party and controlled the Presidency and Congress, and most states, from 1801 to 1824, during the First Party System. It split after the 1824 presidential election into two parties: the Democratic Party and the short-lived National Republican Party (later succeeded by the Whig Party, many of whose adherents eventually founded the modern Republican Party).

Most contemporaries called it the Republican Party. Today, political scientists typically use the hyphenated version while historians usually call it the "Republican Party" or the Jeffersonian Republicans, to distinguish it from the modern Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 and named after Jefferson's party.

The organization formed first as an "Anti-Administration" secret meeting in the national capital (Philadelphia) to oppose the programs of Secretary for the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson needed to have a nationwide party to counteract the Federalists, a nationwide party organized by Hamilton. Foreign affairs took a leading role in 1794-95 as the Republicans vigorously opposed the Jay Treaty with Britain, which was then at war with France. Republicans saw France as more democratic after its revolution, while Britain represented the hated monarchy. The party denounced many of Hamilton's measures (especially the national bank) as unconstitutional.

The party was strongest in the South and weakest in the Northeast; it favored states' rights and the primacy of the yeoman farmers. Republicans were deeply committed to the principles of republicanism, which they feared were threatened by the supposed monarchical tendencies of the Hamiltonians/Federalists. The party came to power with the election of Jefferson in 1801.

do you *really* see Democrats fighting for states' rights

Regarding states' rights, Jefferson went overboard with some of his shenanigans in that respect, particularly the "Kentucky Resolutions" that he authored or co-authored while Vice President (secretly, because he would have been charged with treason if his involvement had come to light). If these and the "Virginia Resolution" (authored secretly by James Madison, co-founder with Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party) had passed there was concern that civil war and/or the dissolution of the country would result. Fortunately most at the time realized the danger giving the states too much power over the federal government posed to the long-term continuance of the country and the states, it had not been that long since they had replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution just for that reason. All other states thoroughly rejected Jefferson and Hamilton's attempts. The issue divided Jeffersonian Democrats, not all of whom agreed with Jefferson's views about states rights.

These are opinions, Glenn, and not facts.

There is a constant dynamic tension between the federal vs. the state powers. There is no "right" way to do it. There is only the way it ends up, based on what the voters want and how the Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of various laws.

You're implication that Jefferson's wishes were "treasonous" is fiction.

Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone argued that the Kentucky resolution might have gotten Jefferson impeached for treason, had his actions become known at the time.

You want vitriole? Listen to those angry at Obama's overreach of federal powers with Obamacare. It passed the Supreme Court not because the justices ruled it legal to impose a federal mandate. Rather the justices ruled that Congress had the right to tax, and individuals still had the right to choose to participate - or not. An interesting twist on all this is that the entire thing can be rendered impotent by reducing or eliminating the tax. Certainly the very healthy/wealthy can choose to "self fund" and just pay the small tax imposed on them.

This dynamic tension between federal and state powers will never end, and will never stay static.

Back to my original point...

I'm quite familiar with the book you cited. I've read it, and am not impressed by it. Somehow we're to presume that there's a universal opinion that we're all to ascribe to. Ain't gonna happen. And the battle between various forces exist to protect the rights of various minority interests in this country. As George Will is want to say, the Founders designed not an efficient government, but rather a *safe* government. Gridlock is virtue and not vice.

You're becoming a one-issue broken record on this Bill, don't neglect all the other issues worth complaining about.

That book and the exasperation it represents may not speak to you, but it strikes a cord with many who are concerned about how gridlock and the corporate-led party interests fueling it are weakening the U.S.

What you are not seeing is that there is a segment of the population who are Americans first and Kentuckians or Virginians or Democrats or Republicans or whatever second, if that, and we are fed up with what all this division is doing to our country.

1) I am a published health services researcher, and am employed by a Fortune 100 health insurer which does business both in the commercial and Medicare Advantage sector. I've worked in the field for 20 years. I know more about health care delivery (and medicine as well) than Obama and Pelosi and Reid combined. Yea, I have an opinion or two on the matter.

I don't doubt your expertise, but I think your vision of what makes a healthcare system great is different from what some of us think.

you're pretty dismissive of people you perceive as being stupid.

You have a pro-business bias