Ky. senators let down our vets

An excellent editorial from today's Herald-Leader:

Both Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul helped kill a plan that could have helped create jobs for the 3,000 unemployed Kentucky veterans who served their country in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The proposal fell short by just two votes of the 60 required to clear a procedural hurdle erected by Republicans in the Senate last week.

...The bill was supported by all 53 Democrats and five Republicans, including a couple who have tough re-election races. But the 58-40 vote wasn't quite enough to overcome the objection.

Rand's filibuster to deny foreign aid wrong tack

Today's Herald-Leader includes this editorial:

Sen. Rand Paul must have missed the Libyans who were demonstrating last week in support of the United States.

Paul has lumped the governments of Libya, Egypt and Pakistan together as enemies of the U.S., and he's vowing to hold the Senate hostage until it votes on his plan to end aid to all three countries. (The rest of the Senate wants to approve funding to keep our government running and go home to campaign.)

Paul's antics must be wearing thin even on his filibuster-happy fellow Republicans.

Rand Paul gets schooled on national TV

ThinkProgress has the details:

One of the least appreciated but easily-confirmed facts about the current state of the American economy is that the number of Americans employed by the government has gone down under President Obama. But apparently this is news to one the Republican Party’s most prominent tea party conservatives. During a roundtable discussion on ABC this morning over the size and adequacy of the 2009 stimulus, a flabbergasted Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) asked economist Paul Krugman if he was actually arguing that government employment had gone down under Obama:

PAUL: The thing I don’t understand is that your arguing that the government sector is struggling. Are you arguing that there are fewer government employees under Obama than there were under Bush?

KRUGMAN: Of course. That’s a fact. That’s a tremendous fact.