Republican Debate

Check this out from last night's debate and listen for the little whisper of "raise taxes".

Cesca sez:

It's either a spooky electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) of Reagan himself, or The Romney Unit was receiving answers from an advisor. Listen for the whisper, "Raise taxes."

Amato thinks "it's very curious indeed". and Schecter is wondering if Mitt was getting prompts. Even Andrew Sullivan was wondering "what the hell that was".

Once you get past all the lies told last night at the GOP debate, I think there was one important message sent out by all the candidates, except Ron Paul. That message is simple - "We support George Bush". They tried to pin all the problems in America today on the Democrats. Considering the Democrats have only been in charge of Congress for a year, and that year was mostly ineffective due to Republican stonewalling, it shows that the Republican candidates are unwilling to take any responsibility for their failures.

What it comes down to is that the Republicans want to be the "feel good" party. They want to feel good about their own party, while ignoring the failures of their party. Perhaps the social conservatives should take them to task on that very notion. While the candidates are patting the party on their backs, ask them what has happened to the social conservative agenda? You don't hear any of them talking about Roe or gay marriage. Evangelicals - they have forgotten you.

Just a reminder for those interested that there is a Republican debate on MSNBC tonight at 9:00pm est. I will be live blogging it if you can't stomach watching the fools. Also I will be testing out a new live blogging module I developed. How this works is if you are on the live blog post the data will refresh automatically every 30 seconds. It takes a lot of the work out of live blogging as I can easily add new items and it will be timestamped with my latest comments - almost like a one way chat system.

If this works out good, I will be looking for people to join in the live blogging sessions in the future. It will provide a new way to keep people up to date with opinions and analysis.

I found it very interesting that so little time was dedicated to actual social issues. Global warming got very little attention, as did oil prices. Even when questions were asked on those issues, the candidates quickly ran to their old fear-mongering talking points of terror. For people that want to be President, they sure do seem to have a one-track mind.

I found the end rather curious. There was a lot of talk of "reaching across the aisle" and unity throughout the debate, but none of them could say anything good about Clinton. As matter of fact, Guiliani tried to pin 9/11 on Clinton. Perhaps Mr. Guiliani should study a little bit of history and he might find out that Clinton was on the offense against Osama. It was the Republicans in Congress who thought Osama was some sort of boogey man created by Clinton to divert attention from  Monica. There are tons of quotes from 1998 of Republicans accusing Clinton of "wagging the dog" when he went after Osama.

Something else stuck out at me. McCain was talking about radio frequencies for fire and police departments. This is an area I have a lot of experience in, being a former firefighter. Why don't John take a look at how the problems came to being. They are all standing in a building dedicated to the man who helped these problems emerge - Ronald Reagan. It was his administration that decided to start selling off the frequencies used by public safety to private business. This forced fire and police departments to move to the 800 MHz frequency and that has been shuffled around with the rise of cell phones. Ask yourself how many times your cell phone dies inside a building then ask yourself if you want the people trying to save you limited to the same technology. On top of that, the 800 MHz frequency needs many more cell towers (repeaters) to work. This is the very thing that hindered operations in New Orleans.

So it was Reagan and the GOP philosophy of capitalism that helped hinder our first responders.

Over all, what it boils down to is that every single one of these candidates stood up there and tried to separate themselves from George Bush. In truth, they are just the same. They know the only way they can win is by a platform of fear. Luckily America is waking up to that tactic and it won't work next year. If we work to protect our nation, while ignoring the nation itself, then what the hell are we protecting? There was a lot of war drums beating about Iran going on also. This country will not tolerate another war like Iraq. Actually a war with Iran will make Iraq look like a 15 round boxing match. Hopefully people who are still leaning towards the GOP side will realize that is a mistake. Well that is unless they vote for Ron Paul. He was the most sensible one out there.