Republican Debate 8-11-11

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chaos
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Republican Debate 8-11-11

#1 Post by chaos » Thu Aug 11, 2011 11:55 pm

:bored:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics ... um=twitter
Republican presidential candidates participated in the Iowa GOP/Fox News Debate at the CY Stephens Auditorium in Ames, Iowa, Thursday. From left, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA); businessman Herman Cain; Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney; Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN); former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty; former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman; former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The frontrunner for a major party's presidential nomination is always happiest when his intraparty rivals turn their attacks on each other instead of him.

So by that measure, Mitt Romney had to be very pleased indeed because he was left largely unmolested by the seven other Republican candidates contending for the party's presidential nomination at the debate at Iowa State University Thursday evening.

Instead of directing their attacks at Romney, the other candidates on the stage went after each other, with the two Minnesotans, Rep. Michele Bachmann and the state's former governor, Tim Pawlenty, providing much of the night's fireworks.

. . .

Romney wasn't the only debate winner. Obama was too since, for the most part, any Republican attacks on him were quickly obscured by the fog of war that rose from the GOP candidates' attacks on each other.
Image

I had no idea that Bachmann fought so hard for Americans to have to have a choice of light bulbs :lolol:

I so need a real country.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#2 Post by Hokahey » Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:03 am

Did anyone watch this? Ron Paul was incredible in the 2nd half. They ignored him for the first 50 minutes. It's painful to sit through the neocons waiting for Ron to hand them their lunch.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#3 Post by guysmiley » Fri Aug 12, 2011 7:59 am

This shit is sounding more like Jerry Springer every 4 years. They can all eat a dick. :crazy:


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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#5 Post by Hype » Fri Aug 12, 2011 10:09 am

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washing ... -poll.html
Ron Paul's supporters think he wins everything.

Thursday night's Fox News debate presented eight of the Republican presidential wannabes on one stage as a political lead-up to Saturday's Ames Straw Poll.

Paul is a 76-year-old Air Force veteran and retired ob-gyn who has only been elected to 11 terms in the House of Representatives as a Texas Republican who talks more like a libertarian. None of the other Republican candidates have been elected to anything 11 times, counting schoolyard pickup games.

In the 2008 campaign, Paul and his noisy, very determined supporters were something of a joke. Fox News even barred him from its New Hampshire primary debate -- even though he'd done better in Iowa than Rudy what's-his-name, who went nowhere, and Fred Tennessee, who was going to be the party's next Ronald Reagan savior until he wore Gucci loafers to the Minnesota State Fair.

Paul came up more than 1,000 delegates short of winning the nomination in St. Paul, but here's what he did do: Talking fiscal discipline, he took his supporters' donations (more than Mike Huckabee's hand-clapping evangelicals ponied up, btw) and walked the fiscal walk.

Flying commercial and sleeping in Super 8's, Paul paid all of his campaign bills. He ended up with a $5-million surplus, a word we don't often hear associated with things Washington, unless it refers to empty words.

He did another book and has been going around the country preaching his less-government gospel and sowing the seeds of the "tea party," which -- oh, look -- elected his son Rand to the United States Senate from Kentucky over the opposition of the party's establishment. In many ways this presidential election cycle, much of the country's political talk has come over to Paul's position -- despite the Real Good Talker being in the White House and on the other side.

Here's the kind of things Ron Paul says in speeches, interviews and Thursday's debate:
I approach this differently than all the other candidates -– Republicans or Democrats. I defend individual liberty in a different way. I am the one that says, 'War, there is too much of it.' They are undeclared. It's time to end war.

I am the one that says, 'I'm sick and tired of this Patriot Act -– this pretense to destroy our individual liberties and molest us at the airport.' None of the other candidates are saying that.

How many of the other candidates are going to talk about the financial situation and tie it into the reality of the Federal Reserve? Those views are different from other views, and it's my strong defense of liberty that separates me from other candidates.
All Paul has done is play a major role shaping this primary season's Republican discussion agenda -- less government, less taxes. Leave us alone.

Now, another Texas Republican conservative with the same initials, Rick Perry, can step into the ring and take the Washington-doesn't-know-everything struggle to another level.

Some people make faces when they hear Paul's blunt talk. Others find it refreshing.

And then, playing by the establishment's rules, Paul's people, many of them new to politics, go out with signs and their voices and their straw-poll ballots. The debate winner may be arguable. Paul's chance of being the Republican nominee might seem distant. But he's driving a big chunk of the debate.

And on Saturday, look for Ron Paul's name at or very near the top of the straw-poll competitors.

But, of course, he doesn't really matter.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#6 Post by Hokahey » Fri Aug 12, 2011 11:28 am

Adurentibus Spina wrote:http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washing ... -poll.html
Ron Paul's supporters think he wins everything.

Thursday night's Fox News debate presented eight of the Republican presidential wannabes on one stage as a political lead-up to Saturday's Ames Straw Poll.

Paul is a 76-year-old Air Force veteran and retired ob-gyn who has only been elected to 11 terms in the House of Representatives as a Texas Republican who talks more like a libertarian. None of the other Republican candidates have been elected to anything 11 times, counting schoolyard pickup games.

In the 2008 campaign, Paul and his noisy, very determined supporters were something of a joke. Fox News even barred him from its New Hampshire primary debate -- even though he'd done better in Iowa than Rudy what's-his-name, who went nowhere, and Fred Tennessee, who was going to be the party's next Ronald Reagan savior until he wore Gucci loafers to the Minnesota State Fair.

Paul came up more than 1,000 delegates short of winning the nomination in St. Paul, but here's what he did do: Talking fiscal discipline, he took his supporters' donations (more than Mike Huckabee's hand-clapping evangelicals ponied up, btw) and walked the fiscal walk.

Flying commercial and sleeping in Super 8's, Paul paid all of his campaign bills. He ended up with a $5-million surplus, a word we don't often hear associated with things Washington, unless it refers to empty words.

He did another book and has been going around the country preaching his less-government gospel and sowing the seeds of the "tea party," which -- oh, look -- elected his son Rand to the United States Senate from Kentucky over the opposition of the party's establishment. In many ways this presidential election cycle, much of the country's political talk has come over to Paul's position -- despite the Real Good Talker being in the White House and on the other side.

Here's the kind of things Ron Paul says in speeches, interviews and Thursday's debate:
I approach this differently than all the other candidates -– Republicans or Democrats. I defend individual liberty in a different way. I am the one that says, 'War, there is too much of it.' They are undeclared. It's time to end war.

I am the one that says, 'I'm sick and tired of this Patriot Act -– this pretense to destroy our individual liberties and molest us at the airport.' None of the other candidates are saying that.

How many of the other candidates are going to talk about the financial situation and tie it into the reality of the Federal Reserve? Those views are different from other views, and it's my strong defense of liberty that separates me from other candidates.
All Paul has done is play a major role shaping this primary season's Republican discussion agenda -- less government, less taxes. Leave us alone.

Now, another Texas Republican conservative with the same initials, Rick Perry, can step into the ring and take the Washington-doesn't-know-everything struggle to another level.

Some people make faces when they hear Paul's blunt talk. Others find it refreshing.

And then, playing by the establishment's rules, Paul's people, many of them new to politics, go out with signs and their voices and their straw-poll ballots. The debate winner may be arguable. Paul's chance of being the Republican nominee might seem distant. But he's driving a big chunk of the debate.

And on Saturday, look for Ron Paul's name at or very near the top of the straw-poll competitors.

But, of course, he doesn't really matter.
Thanks for posting.
I approach this differently than all the other candidates -– Republicans or Democrats. I defend individual liberty in a different way. I am the one that says, 'War, there is too much of it.' They are undeclared. It's time to end war.
:heart: :heart: :heart:
I am the one that says, 'I'm sick and tired of this Patriot Act -– this pretense to destroy our individual liberties and molest us at the airport.' None of the other candidates are saying that.


:heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

How many of the other candidates are going to talk about the financial situation and tie it into the reality of the Federal Reserve? Those views are different from other views, and it's my strong defense of liberty that separates me from other candidates.[/quote]

:heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#7 Post by Hype » Fri Aug 12, 2011 12:40 pm

As I said in the other thread, even though I dislike him (for both reasons and non-reasons), he sometimes says things I agree with, though almost always for different reasons, which is interesting in itself.

I'm for individual liberty, but I have a different conception of liberty than Paul does. His version of liberty seems to me to be both too broadly applied as a metric for making policy decisions, and too narrowly construed to capture everything he wants to have under the banner of 'liberty'. The latter is involved in the former.

It seems to me fairly obvious that government regulations, properly administered, clearly increase individual liberty by leaving us free not to worry about at least some of the infinite things we would otherwise need to worry about in our pursuit our livelihoods and goals and dreams and so on. E.g., making sure there's no arsenic in foods. It would be absurd to claim that we should let the free market would take care of that, because the companies that put arsenic in the food will somehow miraculously be forced out of the market by the ones that don't. This is just one hypothetical example of a more general conceptual framework for the increasing of freedom through market-regulation. To disagree with this, as Paul often seems to, is to basically undermine the very notion of freedom that was supposed to be the point of the whole thing in the first place...

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#8 Post by Hokahey » Fri Aug 12, 2011 2:49 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote:As I said in the other thread, even though I dislike him (for both reasons and non-reasons), he sometimes says things I agree with, though almost always for different reasons, which is interesting in itself.

I'm for individual liberty, but I have a different conception of liberty than Paul does. His version of liberty seems to me to be both too broadly applied as a metric for making policy decisions, and too narrowly construed to capture everything he wants to have under the banner of 'liberty'. The latter is involved in the former.

It seems to me fairly obvious that government regulations, properly administered, clearly increase individual liberty by leaving us free not to worry about at least some of the infinite things we would otherwise need to worry about in our pursuit our livelihoods and goals and dreams and so on. E.g., making sure there's no arsenic in foods. It would be absurd to claim that we should let the free market would take care of that, because the companies that put arsenic in the food will somehow miraculously be forced out of the market by the ones that don't. This is just one hypothetical example of a more general conceptual framework for the increasing of freedom through market-regulation. To disagree with this, as Paul often seems to, is to basically undermine the very notion of freedom that was supposed to be the point of the whole thing in the first place...
I think you may misunderstand his position of limited government. It's more about a limited fenderal government, giving states more rights to determine what's best for them. And it doesn't mean completely abolishing the federal government. You're taking it to a bit of an extreme. Your point would make total sense if that was his position though.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#9 Post by Hype » Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:25 pm

Well, the point is more that it's almost impossible to agree on everything that should be "cut" from federal programs. The "principled" position that Ron Paul and like-minded folk take (included Obama on gay rights, by the way) of "states' rights" sounds good when it's applied, say, to frontier culture in Minnesota having perhaps some different gun-regulations than Massachusetts, but it starts sounding really weird when applied to other things like education, health, and welfare. The whole point of socialized (i.e., public) projects in those areas is both that they are, in fact, simply much more efficiently run via universal single-payer tax-payer-funded systems, and that the free market simply doesn't create a just society if left unfettered. The Civil rights movement wouldn't have got off the ground if everyone thought like Ron Paul, even though Ron Paul himself may be in favour of civil rights... his view is simply inconsistent there.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#10 Post by Hokahey » Fri Aug 12, 2011 6:55 pm

Adurentibus Spina wrote: The Civil rights movement wouldn't have got off the ground if everyone thought like Ron Paul, even though Ron Paul himself may be in favour of civil rights... his view is simply inconsistent there.
That's where you're dead wrong. I gotta tell you, you really need to read some of the man's books before saying you understand his positions so well.

Ron Paul is a huge advocate of agitation and protest, which is ultimately what the civil rights movement was about. Not a law that was ultimately passed. It was about the power of the people and where they threw their support. You don't need the government telling people who they must accept in to their privately owned land. That's forced acceptance breeds contempt, and it's a violation of the liberty of the land owner. It's a contradiction.

Justice and liberty will always prevail where the government does not intervene.
but it starts sounding really weird when applied to other things like education, health, and welfare.
No, no. Not at all. You seem to not understand states already have their own individual laws (as the 10th amendment grants), health care plans (Romney is taking a great deal of heat for his Obama like plan in Minnesota), gun laws etc.
The whole point of socialized (i.e., public) projects in those areas is both that they are, in fact, simply much more efficiently run via universal single-payer tax-payer-funded systems
But at what level? Not at the massively bureaucratic federal level. That's just naive. The smaller scale these systems are implemented in, and the more freedom the citizens have in that locale to select what's right for their area the better and the more efficient.

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Re: Republican Debate 8-11-11

#11 Post by Hype » Sat Aug 13, 2011 9:05 am

I'm not sure what else I can say to show why I think that view of things is mistaken... and likewise, you've said a few things there that you assume are obviously true, but they aren't obvious (if they were, everyone would see that they were true), and I don't think they're true either. American anti-federalism just really strikes me as odd... I understand the historical reasons for it... clear regional differences in culture and needs and so forth... but it makes no sense to me to apply that carte-blanche for everything...

You still haven't given any reasons for accepting your claims... like this: "Justice and liberty will always prevail where the government does not intervene.", and this "You don't need the government telling people who they must accept in to their privately owned land." (Those both just seems obviously false to me, for reasons I could give, and have given).

Sorry Hoka, I just don't get it. :conf:

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