Rand Paul.  What have you done?  Where’s your integrity, man?  First you say one thing, and then when people poo-poo on your philosophies you change your tune so they will like you.  Wow.  Not even a Senator yet and already you act like a typical politician.  Why send you to Washington?  We already know people like you.  So disappointing.

Ah, forget it.  Here are the articles, folks.  You read and decide for yourselves.  Long Live the Republic.

Firstly, from The Newsroom, our opener about what Paul originally said Wednesday the 19th:

Tea party candidate Rand Paul won Kentucky’s GOP Senate nomination in part by bucking the establishment, but could his unconventional beliefs hurt him in the general election?

Paul is under fire today for saying Wednesday, first in an interview with National Public Radio and then to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, that he opposes part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I’m not in favor of any discrimination of any form. I would never belong to any club that excluded anybody for race,” Paul told Maddow, saying discrimination and segregation was a “stain on our history.”

But he said he doesn’t agree with a provision in the bill that makes it a crime for businesses to discriminate on the basis of race.

It’s a philosophical difference, Paul told Maddow: He doesn’t believe the federal government should be able to intrude on how a private business operates.

If “you decide that restaurants are publicly owned and not privately owned, then do you say that you should have the right to bring your gun into a restaurant even though the owner of the restaurant says, ‘Well, no, we don’t want to have guns in here’?” Paul said. “Does the owner of the restaurant own his restaurant? Or does the government own his restaurant?”

It’s a tricky argument that GOP officials have declined to comment on. But Dave Weigel over at the Washington Post defends Paul and tries to explain the point the candidate is trying to make.

Paul is articulating “a philosophical and legal stance” and refusing “to dissemble in a way that would, you know, get people to stop accusing him of some archaic form of racism,” Weigel writes.

Weigel continues: “Paul believes, as many conservatives believe, that the government should ban bias in all of its institutions but cannot intervene in the policies of private businesses.”

LATE UPDATE: Paul has now reversed himself and says he does support the Civil Rights Act.  (See next link!)

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And now, let’s look at Rand Paul and Civil Rights, today, Thursday the 20th.  Also from The Newsroom:

After an intense 24 hours, tea party darling Rand Paul — Kentucky’s new Republican nominee for the Senate — is stepping back from his criticisms of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  He tells conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that he does in fact support the historic legislation. And he tells CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he would have voted for it if he were in the Senate.

That statement came after he declined to say he supported the act in interviews Wednesday on NPR and “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. In both those exchanges, Paul said that though he personally abhorred discrimination and believed it should be banned from government-funded programs, he disagreed with the provision in the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination by private businesses. Paul, along with many libertarians, believes that the federal government should have a very limited role in the everyday lives of Americans.

But after a firestorm Thursday, Paul told Ingraham that it was a “poor political decision” to go on Maddow’s show and declared that he supported both the ban on public discrimination and the ban on private discrimination.

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NOTE: If you follow the links to their original postings, there are some nifty videos to watch as well.