While Kentucky Senator Rand Paul was at the Iowa Freedom Summit over the weekend, it appears that his daddy, former Texas Representative Ron Paul, was at a Texas conference talking secession.

Yes, you heard right. Ron Paul was the final speaker at a one-day conference in Houston on “breaking away” from the central state. It was sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank on which the senior Paul sits as a member of the board.

“A lot of times people think secession, they paint it as an absolute negative,” said Paul. “You mean we should have been obedient to the king forever? So it’s all in the way you look at it.”

That’s not the only sticky issue with Pop that will plague Rand Paul as he considers a run for the White House. Earlier this month, after the Charlie Hebdo/Kosher Supermarket attacks in Paris, the Ron Paul Institute website ran an article which claimed that the the attacks were a false flag conspiracy. The article, written by Paul Craig Roberts, begins with this:

“The Charlie Hebdo affair has many of the characteristics of a false flag operation. The attack on the cartoonists’ office was a disciplined professional attack of the kind associated with highly trained special forces; yet the suspects who were later corralled and killed seemed bumbling and unprofessional. It is like two different sets of people.”

Apparently Ron Paul doesn’t see these comments as possibly deleterious to his son’s presidential ambitions. Asked by a reporter at the Houston conference whether he might be making trouble for Rand, the elder Paul replied, “If we had decent reporters, there would never be any problems. You think you could ever meet one? Have a heart, buddy.”

The media may be the cause for much political discord, but in this case it’s Ron Paul who just might kill Rand’s chance for higher office.

Steven Kruiser, writing at PJ Media, notes, “Rand Paul has been making all the right moves to prepare himself for a run at the presidency except one: shutting up his daddy and his daddy’s lunatic minions.”

Walter Block, an economics professor at Loyola University who likes both the Pauls, said,

“Ron is a millstone around Rand’s neck, in the sense that he’s not helping him — or, at least, he’s not helping him be Rand. Because Rand is a compromiser, and Ron and ‘compromise’ don’t belong in the same sentence.”

Last November, former President George W. Bush released a book he wrote about his father, former President George H.W. Bush. Entitled 41: A Portrait of My Father, the book is a warm and personal — as one reviewer at Amazon put it, “a story of a son’s affection for his father.” If Ron Paul puts the kibosh on Rand Paul’s drive for the Presidency, it will be curious to see if the son will hold his father in a similar high regard.