The U.S. Tea Party: Anti-War and Pro-States?

When he was the republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, Rand Paul claimed that there was not enough money in entitlement programs to counter the federal government’s deficit for 2010. Approximately 40% of the budget was military. Accordingly, the candidate said, “Part of the reason we are bankrupt as a country is that we are fighting so many foreign wars and have so many military bases around the world.”[1] The Tea Party is animated by opposition to the exorbitant levels of federal spending and indebtedness. Applying their frugality to foreign policy, the party could make a clean break from the neo-cons such as Dick Cheney.

The full essay is at "The U.S. Tea Party: Anti-War and Pro-States?"

1. W. James Antle, “Rand Plan: Will the Tea Parties Turn Anti-war?” The American Conservative (August, 2010), 8-9. See Thomas Di Lorenzo, “Inflating War: Central Banking and Militarism are Intimately Linked,” The American Conservative (August, 2010), 16-18.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul on Civil Rights and the BP Explosion

U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), was the Tea Party candidate who challenged the Republican establishment to win the party’s Senate nomination in Kentucky on May 18, 2010. A day later, he publicly criticized a plank of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Specifically, he said in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC television that he supported the sections of the Civil Rights Act that applied to public accommodations but had concerns when it came to its applicability to private business. He had raised similar concerns earlier in the day about the Americans with Disabilities Act in an interview on National Public Radio. Asked by Maddow if a private business had the right to refuse to serve black people, Mr. Paul replied, “Yes.” In so answering, the new senator failed or refused to distinguish private property that is open to the public from private property, such as a person's home, that is not. 

The full essay is at "Civil Rights and the BP Explosion."