Paul’s speech in St. Cloud touched on issues like domestic economic policy, the drug war and foreign interventions.

“The country and the world is in a mess today, and I’m quite convinced that we know exactly how we get here and exactly what to do,” Paul told the crowd, “and one thing’s for sure is we don’t need more government.”

Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for helping to bring about the speculative bubbles that sunk the nation’s economy.

“It’s the Federal Reserve that by interfering in the monetary system, monkeying around with interest rates, they create the bubbles,” Paul said. “For a while they can create one bubble and patch it up again, but eventually the big bubble bursts.”

He also condemned government bailouts of big banks and companies.

“They said if we don’t bail out the system there would be a depression,” Paul said. “Guess where the depression would have been? It would have been on those who were receiving our money. Instead the depression was dealt to the people, the middle class, they lost their jobs and they lost their houses and we the taxpayer absorbed the debt.”

Paul also voiced support for abolishing the Department of Education and the federal income tax, condemned the drug war as a tragedy and worried about creation of a worldwide monetary currency.

He told supporters that the country is increasingly in agreement with their libertarian economic views.

“We’re witnessing the end of an economic era,” Paul said. “This is a tremendous opportunity for those of us who believe in liberty to get this message out.”

Paul’s foreign policy stances have drawn jeers from some Republican crowds at debates, but he continues to advocate for neutrality and condemn the United States’ assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, saying that ”what we must worry about is the rule of law because the rule of law protects us.”

Organizers put the turnout for the Republican candidate at about 2,500. Paul has trailed in most polls, but has captured a number of high-profile straw poll victories.

“You can not stop an idea whose time has come and the idea of liberty’s time has returned,” Paul said of his supporters. “We don’t have to understand each little issue, all we have to do is legalize freedom.”

DHS/I&A assesses that lone wolves and small terrorist cells embracing violent rightwing extremist ideology are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.

“There’s an absence of hard data over just how many people that we’re talking about, here,” huffs Moe Lane, one of many conservative bloggers to attack the report. Indeed, one could read this DHS report and imagine that a deranged 22-year-old man in, let’s say, Pittsburgh, could marinate in eliminationist rhetoric and murder, to pick a number at random, three police officers. And that’s just crazy.

Seriously, though, I struggle to find anything wrong in a close — not a willfully obtuse — reading of the report. I’m nine days out of a huge machine gun show in Kentucky. I know that all of the gun stuff in this report is true. For example:

Open source reporting of wartime ammunition shortages has likely spurred rightwing extremists—as well as law-abiding Americans—to make bulk purchases of ammunition.  These shortages have increased the cost of ammunition, further exacerbating rightwing extremist paranoia and leading to further stockpiling activity.  Both rightwing extremists and law-abiding citizens share a belief that rising crime rates attributed to a slumping economy make the purchase of legitimate firearms a wise move at this time.

I’ve had conversations with people who said all of this, and we have data on increased gun sales.

Michelle Malkin is annoyed by the report.

[It] demonizes the very Americans who will be protesting in the thousands on Wednesday for the nationwide Tax Day Tea Party.

Well, it doesn’t. But what about the Tea Parties? Here’s an ad for PajamasTV’s Tea Party show:

Here’s the widget from TaxDayTeaParty:

Both promotions suggest that the Tea Parties are the start, or tipping point, of some kind of “revolution.” Do I actually think the protesters want to overthrow the government? No, of course not. But if they want to use this rhetoric, they can’t really be too angry when the government frets about a rising tide of violent government overthrow rhetoric. If the Tea Parties are just a bunch of harmless cosplay nonsense directed at beating Democrats in the 2010 elections, they can say so.

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Weren’t those revolutions in countries that didn’t have functioning democracies? Well, so is this one! People are angry, says Mayer, “whether it’s due to massive electoral fraud or the emergence of big corrupt banks with big corrupt politicians.”

I’d thought, somewhat naively, that President Obama’s decisive winning margin ended the agonizing “not my president” debates of 2001-2005 and to a lesser extent (thanks for nothing, Greg Palast) 2005-2009. But maybe, just maybe, ACORN scared up 9.5 million fake votes for Obama. Who can say, really?