I was traveling, learning about past presidents, and I missed did not see or hear the “debate” last week among Republican hopefuls for the presidency.
Old friend and commentator Pat Carrithers asked on Facebook:
What did we learn from the Republican debate last night?
We learned they all hate Obama.
We learned they have no new thoughts or ideas for economic recovery.
We learned that they still think “No” is a policy and a program.So, I repeat, What did we learn from the Republican debate last night.
I look at the Republican field, and I worry. I may have explained before that my experience is that we should hope for, and work to obtain, the best possible candidate from each party, because circumstances well may conspire to elect the lesser of those two candidates. I cannot in good conscience hope for a clown like Bachmann or Palin to win the Republican nomination.
The Salt Lake Tribunes great, sharp-penned Pat Bagley's view of the June 2011 Republican Presidential Debates. (When is Bagley going to win a Pulitzer?)
It seems odd to me that the two candidates who rate highest on my Qualified to Lead (QTL) criteria are both Mormons, both of whom have employed people I worked with. (This contrasts sharply with Texas’s Rick Perry who is not in the campaign officially yet, but who, to my mind, has abandoned most standards of propriety in his false claims about his shepherding of Texas — remember he claimed we had a budget surplus a year ago, but this year announced deficits of nearly $30 billion, which led him to propose cutting essential functions of government; Perry would be at least a third clown in the Republican race, to me.)
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
Oops, forgot to cite where I was quoting from. its from the blog: http://www.thecuckingstool.blogspot.com/
And the GINI index at the CIA Worldbook can be found at https://www.cia.gov/index.html
And the Washington Post article can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/with-executive-pay-rich-pull-away-from-rest-of-america/2011/06/13/AGKG9jaH_story.html
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Morgan, have fun arguing that the CIA is a liberally biased organization:
According to the CIA, American income inequality has grown to the point where our income inequality peers are banana republics and autocracies. The following list is from the CIA Yearbook, and rates countries by the Gini index, a measure of unequal income distribution.
35 Rwanda 46.8 (2000)
36 Philippines 45.8 (2006)
37 Uganda 45.7 (2002)
38 Jamaica 45.5 (2004)
39 United States 45.0 (2007)
40 Cameroon 44.6 (2001)
41 Cote d’Ivoire 44.6 (2002)
42 Iran 44.5 (2006)
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I have to chuckle at conservatives like Morgan who get their panties all in a bunch at the thought of socialism or “marxism.”
The reason I chuckle is because they’ve obviously never read Marx and so don’t understand that he predicted socialism, and I mean true socialism not what the right thinks is socialism, would rise up because the wealthy would so start to **** over the middle class and the poor so much and so hog all the wealth and power that the middle class and the poor would rise up in revolt.
And what do we have now in the United States? The wealthy ******* over the middle class and the poor at every turn and hogging all the wealth and power unto themselves.
If actual socialism ever comes to be in the United States the rich and the Republicans will be its greatest allies.
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Hi Pangolin!
Thanks for your comments. I agree.
Whenever the fabulously wealthy control nearly all the money, jobs and other benefits that should be the God-given birthright of any human being, it seldom ends well for anyone, not least for those same bloated rich.
The thought of violence is anathema to me and I would never be willing to embrace an agenda of vengeance and retaliation…even though I consider the greed of the plutocrats to be truly criminal and repugnant. Unfortunately, the rank and file…those the oligarchs consider “hoi polloi”…are quite likely to reach a tipping point. Not today or tomorrow. Probably not for a dozen years yet. But one day. Late 18th century France…early 20th century Russia…injustice usually leads to reverse injustice.
The good news is, it can be avoided. But that would call for true repentance. I see no sign of that whatsoever among the opulent.
God help me, the day may come when I have to shelter a Koch brother from an angry mob. Think of it…
Jim
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Rubbing my last few neurons together gives me the idea that any continuation of the policies of the last ten years might be a bad idea for a simple reason.
We have large numbers of unemployed men; young men in particular.
Thinking back on what history I can recall large numbers of unemployed young men in a country is the political equivalent of putting a can of nitroglycerin in the paint shaker and hoping nobody hits the switch.
I don’t see a single candidate in the GOP who wants to address this. Obama wants us to have more unemployed engineers. Watch two episodes of Mythbusters and you’ll know why that’s a bad idea.
Reality is still getting short shrift by our politicos.
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Hi Ed!
I am not goint to buy the idea that Willard Romney is “qualified to lead”. Not when he has been a liberal Republican Senate candidate…a moderate Republican governor…and a conservative, right wing Republican Presidential candidate. I nearly fell for the “compassionate conservative” line in 2000.
Oh, Williard’s easily more intelligent than The Decider. Probably more compassionate, too. But qualified to lead?
Hell, I’m bone-weary of candidates who sell one bill of goods and deliver another. Case in point: the left wing, liberal I voted for in 2008 who is now a center-right corporatist.
I suppose I will vote for him again in ’12 if the race is close. Better a center-right President with a modicum of compassion and decency than a religious right nutcase or a social Darwinst. But I’m increasinly tempted, since I’ll be living in dark-blue Illinois come Thursday night, to vote Green or Socialist.
Someone talk me out of it. Meantime, I’m already working on a “Sherrod Brown in 2016” mobilization…
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Oh I forgot Rick Perry.
The lesson of Rick Perry is that you too can be a wannabe traitor to the United States and the Republican party has still gone off the deep end enough to at least consider nominating you as it’s presidential candidate. Instead of, you know, laughing you out of the room and demanding that you resign your office in the interest of sanity, loyalty to the United States and what’s best for Texas.
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Well, Ed, we learned that the Republicans are a group of people that learn absolutely nothing from their past.
I.E. They touted tax cuts to the rich 10 years ago as a cureall to the nation’s economic ills and when the tax cuts didn’t work…did they stop cutting taxes to the rich?
No..they want to triple down on those tax cuts to the rich.
We also learned that Romney is a gutless wonder. Bachmann is still a crazy lunatic, Herman Cain is also a crazy lunatic and an anti-semite, Pawlenty is an even bigger gutless wonder then Romney, that Santorum is a crazy lunatic and that Ron Paul still seems to think that you can run the United States as if it were a country 10 miles by 10 miles squared with absolutely no responsibilities to itself or to the world other then mere existance. Or if you want to put that a little shorter…Ron Paul thinks the United States is a township.
And that John Huntsman, who could conceivably beat Obama, won’t get anywhere near the nomination because the lunatics have taken over the proverbial asylum.
Oh and if anyone tries chiding me for calling Cain a anti-semite…look up the definition of the word “semite” first please.
$20 says the Republican party dies/splits by 2025.
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The Republicans weren’t debating for the average voter; they were going after those who can write big checks and have lots of friends who can write big checks; they were courting the wealthy.
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