The verdict: indigestion with a rough case of the runs.

I heard that Tom Tancredo attacked Sam Brownback’s mother for being in a union and a postal worker. I’m going to have to check the tape on that one. A reader comments:

“What’s the worst threat to our long-term economic security?”

Romney: “Our sense of optimism.” – WHAT????

Brownback: “The breakdown of the family.” – WHAT????

Halloween may be on the horizon, but no horror flick is more scary than the thought of any one of these people on that stage as president.

Reactions to the GOP debate are already springing up in the blogosphere.

Matthew Yglesias, “Best Debate Yet”

We learned nothing new about the candidates during this debate, but it was a lot funnier than any of the previous Republican or Democratic debates. The candidates seem to have gotten some good joke-writers or something. The best part was when Romney said something like “this campaign is a lot like Law & Order — it’s got a huge cast, it seems to go on forever, and Fred Thompson shows up at the end” and then Thompson fired back: “I thought I was gonna be the best actor on this stage.” Laughs all around. Plus: I agree with both of them, Thompson is an empty suit and Romney is a pathetic liar.

Andrew Sullivan, “Romney vs Paul”

This line about whether the president can go to war without Congressional approval is not likely to win over the bomb-and-torture-’em-first-ask-questions-later base:

“We’re going to let the lawyers sort out what he needed to do and didn’t need to do.”

Paul’s response won applause:

“This idea of going and talking to attorneys totally baffles me. You’re not allowed to go to war without a declaration of war. It’s in the constitution. This is just war propaganda … preparing the nation to go to the war not only into Iraq but also into Iran.”

But we’re at war, Congressman. Haven’t you got the GOP memo that in wartime, i.e. for ever, the president is the constitution?

Oliver Willis, “Shorter Republican Debate”

“I can beat Hillary!”
“No, I can beat Hillary”
“Snooze.” (Fred Thompson)
“The Iraq War is a fraud.” (Ron Paul)
“Close the border!” (Tom Tancredo)
“I can beat Hillary Clinton!”

Hillary Clinton: I’m in yer polls, beatin’ all you Republicans.

Scroll through Ken Layne’s liveblogging of the debate at Wonkette. (Apparently, Richard Nixon didn’t like FDT’s performance tonight.)

Watch the replay on MSNBC at 9pm E/6pm P.

Presidential Debates | 2 Comments »

FDT makes his presidential debate debut. The “watch live” link at MSNBC does everything but give you the live feed.

Presidential Debates | 2 Comments »

David Kurtz notes that former New York Senator Al D’Amato is filling in the role of “Rudy Giuliani” in pre-debate warm ups for former Senator Fred Thompson’s (R-Tennessee) first debate appearance.

Rumor has it that Rudy Giuliani’s stand-in for Fred Thompson is Viggo the Carpathian doing an impression of Foghorn Leghorn.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney thought that it would be a good idea to create a whirlwind of negative press so that he will be asked about it incessantly tomorrow.

http://www.rawprint.com/media/2007/0710/cnn_romney_medical_mariju ana_071008a.flv

Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Presidential Debates, Rudy Giuliani | 2 Comments »

Here’s the DNC on the Republicans’ country-club campaign:

The GOP tried hard to present a diverse face at the 2000 RNC. Next year’s convention looks to be a much more golf-clappy sort of affair.

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Radio host Tom Joyner took a jab at the four GOP front-runner candidates that passed on showing up at the PBS Republican Presidential Forum hosted at Morgan State.

http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/09/JoynerPBS.320.240.flv[/flv  ]

Think Progress noted on Friday:

Last night was the third minority-focused debate in which the Republican front runners refused to participate. They also skipped a debate on gay issues and a Spanish-language debate.

Tavis Smiley appeared on CNN and noted that their avoidance of the PBS debate is part of a “pattern.”

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Just now got to a computer with the internet. What did I miss? If you’re like me and missed parts of the debate, check back tomorrow for video, audio and analysis by Tavis Smiley.

Watch the debate here.

Presidential Debates | 2 Comments »

It’s September 27, the day of Tavis Smiley’s All-American Presidential Forum for Republicans, at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Do you know where your GOP frontrunners are?

Let’s see, what are some better things to do than talk to African-American voters?

Mitt Romney will be eating his way across California, with a fundraising lunch in Sacramento and a dinner in San Diego (and perhaps a nightcap in Tijuana?). Let’s hope he doesn’t ruin everything by filling up on pancakes during his very important visit to “the IHOP on Advantage Lane” this morning.

Rudy Giuliani will also be living it up in the Golden State, doing the cafe scene in Santa Barbara, and hitting the midway at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds in Lancaster. He’ll also be making a stop in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, but he might not have time to see the pier, as he’ll be busy getting endorsed by ex-California governor Pete Wilson. Yes, that’s the same Pete Wilson who ran the state GOP into the ground by gambling everything on the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 back in 1994. So Rudy will be skipping Smiley’s debate to spend the day with an icon of the Republican Party’s suicide-by-racism. And they say irony is dead.

John McCain will be here in New York, speaking to a friendly crowd at the conservative Hudson Institute (between Hudson, the Manhattan Institute, and the National Review, I think conservative house intellectuals make up about half the Republican population in NYC). He’ll also use the opportunity to grandstand some more about Columbia and Ahmadinejad. This evening it appears he’ll be fundraising somewhere in town. His campaign has an event scheduled for the New York Athletic Club at 6:00 pm, but it’s unclear whether he himself will be there. To be fair, he’s a little old for the gym these days.

Speaking of old, Fred Thompson will be back in his home state today, campaigning across middle Tennessee. Breakfast with Fred in Clarksville: $250 a plate. Lunch in Murfreesboro and dinner in Franklin: $500 each. Chance to reach out to African-American voters: priceless. Or, if you’re Thompson, apparently worthless.

All the frontrunners cited “scheduling conflicts” when they turned down Smiley’s invitation. So, judging by the schedules above, can we get a sense of what the Republican candidates value more than talking to minority voters? As the New York Times reports, even some on the right are unimpressed:

The decision to skip the forum tonight was criticized in an editorial in The Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper, that said, “It is striking that the Republican front-runners believe that some run-of-the mill fund-raiser is more important than building up their relationships with black and Hispanic voters, groups who flock to the Democratic Party in droves.”

(more…)

Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Presidential Debates, Rudy Giuliani | 5 Comments »

It took David Shuster to say what Democrats could have been saying all along about this ridiculous MoveOn ad controversy. Marsha Blackburn had all the stats at the ready about MoveOn (except the one where the organization has raised $1.6 million dollars in a week because of the mau-mauing from the establishment), but she couldn’t name the last soldier from her district to die in Iraq, couldn’t understand why that would be kind of an important thing to know, and indeed said “I don’t know why I don’t know that” in defense of herself.

SHUSTER: Congressman, let’s talk about the public trust. You represent, of course, a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last soldier from your district who was killed in Iraq?

BLACKBURN: The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq, from my district, I do not know.

SHUSTER: His name was Jeremy Bohannan (ph). He was killed August 9, 2007. How come you did not know that the name?

BLACKBURN: I do not know why I did not know the name. We made contact with the families in our district. When you have a major military post, you are very sensitive to this and sensitive to working with those families, and that is something that my staff and I do daily. Our district director is a gentleman who has served in the U.S. Army and currently serves in the National Guard. And we do everything that we possibly can do to assist those families. We are very appreciative of the sacrifice.

It goes without saying that Blackburn is supporting the Freddie Thompson campaign, who has turned not knowing things into an art form.

But the point I want to make is that this was a lay-up. We know that Republicans manufacture outrage but are impervious to compassion or empathy. We also know that they have an ideological blind spot when it comes to the attacks perpretrated by their side. Why, indeed, then, can Democratic leaders not take a look at what was sung out loud during the “Values Voters” debate, attended by 7 Presidential candidates, and make a little noise about it?

Why should God bless America?
She’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back
On everything that made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sin and heal our land

The courts ruled prayer out of our schools
In June of ‘62
Told the children “you are your own God now
So you can make the rules”
O say can you see what that choice
Has cost us to this day
America, one nation under God, has gone astray

Why should God bless America?
Shes’s forgotten he exists
And has turned her back on everything
That made her what she is

Why should God stand beside her
Through the night with the light from his hand?
God have mercy on America
Forgive her sins and heal our land

In ‘73 the Courts said we
Could take the unborn lives
The choice is yours don’t worry now
It’s not a wrong, it’s your right

But just because they made it law
Does not change God’s command
The most that we can hope for is
God’s mercy on our land

That’s really the most direct statement of hatred against America that you can ever possibly hear. And yet the DC establishment fears a backlash, somehow, if they deigned to bring up these radical, disgusting views, for fear of offending some mythical voter in the “heartland.” Do they REALLY believe that most every American wouldn’t reflexively recoil at this bile? Every Republican officeholder in the country should be asked if they support a view that God has abandoned as sinful America, and if they would be willing to condemn those who sang it. I mean, every Democratic officeholder was asked about a pun.

Advisors, Fred Thompson, Presidential Debates | 2 Comments »

Grandpa Freddie Thompson is showing the outlines of a highly detailed and knowledgeable campaign. In just a week or so we’ve learned that Freedie thinks that somebody ought to do something about Al Qaeda, that the Terri Schiavo case was a couple years ago so it’s hard to remember it, and that there’s no oil in the Everglades.

Now, Freddie is ready to take these Miss South Carolina-like oratorical skills to the debate stage. And he’s going to jump right in with… a debate that’s already been cancelled.

Now this is awkward. On Monday, Fred Thompson’s campaign put out a press release saying he had agreed to three debates in October. However, it turns out that one of those debates, in New Hampshire on October 14th, had already been cancelled by ABC News.

To be fair, how could Thompson have known that ABC cancelled that debate? It probably happened a few weeks ago. That’s outside the “memory line” of 15 minutes that he appears to have.

Man, who knew that campaignin’ was so hard?

Fred Thompson, Presidential Debates | No Comments »

World Net Daily puts a literary spin on the failure of the “Values Voter Debate”:

With “invisible” candidates who failed to show up getting grilled with questions, hundreds of empty seats, not a single mainstream television network on hand, and the name of God invoked countless times, the “unseen world” clearly dominated last night’s Republican presidential debate in South Florida.

High-profile contenders Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson all chose not to participate, though each had an empty podium with his name displayed on stage to emphasize his absence.

You might have thought all that nothingness would drive the organizers to atheism — certainly it doesn’t say much for their political clout.

The second tier was out in force, at any rate, and Mike Huckabee led the pack, winning the straw poll. Huckabee, it might seem, has nothing to lose by pandering to a religious right that has been feeling neglected lately, though if he were somehow to catapult himself to the nomination, such associations might come back to damage his image as a new and different kind of evangelical politician.

If you missed the debate, or if your streaming video link didn’t work (mine didn’t), you can find the questions here. One is by a gentleman from an organization called “Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.” Sadly, my gay friends and family members inform me that the truth about homosexuality is not nearly as exciting as you might think. But I digress. Video clips will be up at the VVD website, I presume, so you can watch the parade of moral warriors demanding, on behalf of invisible constituencies, just what the invisible candidates plan to do about the imaginary problems confronting their made-up version of America.

Alan Keyes, Duncan Hunter, Florida, Fred Thompson, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Presidential Debates, Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo | 4 Comments »