I thought this
thing would be boring as hell, but ...
Willard (Romney) just cold cocked Rudy Giuliani on illegal immigration and "sanctuary cities." After Rudy punched back on his Sanctuary City record in NYC by accusing the Mittster of having a "sanctuary mansion" because he allegedly employed illegal immigrants, Romney called Rudy on the carpet by asking a very pertinent question: to paraphrase, "are you telling me that if you hire a company to perform a service at your home, like painting your roof, that you should be responsible for going out and asking any workers employed, not by you, but by the company you hired, and who don't look like you or who have a foreign sounding accent ... are you saying you should go out and ask them to show you their papers?"
Rudy couldn't answer.
Next up was Sleepy Fred, who said he found it interesting that Rudy would attack another candidate based on
poor hiring decisions ... ouch. Had he delivered that line while wide awake, it might have been a keeper.
Incidentally, when Rudy tried to hit Romney again, the crowd booed ... and I mean booed
Rudy. These guys are debating in Tampa, in what should be the heart of Rudy Country. The mayor is putting all his cards on Florida. Not a good look so far.
Update: John McCain is in the process of boring my husband...
Full coverage of the debate on CNN
here.
Update 2: Romney is following up on a good McCain answer on GOP overspending. Romney is still the most
polished slick (sorry, I must have been dozing off when I wrote that...) of these losers... I mean, candidates, although pound for pound, I think Rev. Huckabee is the best candidate (no formerly fat joke intended... He's the most authentic and despite being the most fundamentalist, he's also the least wierd, Ron Paul excepted...) Anyway, Rudy just used his first Ronald Reagan. I wonder if any of the Youtubers will ask him about voting for George McGovern (
because he wanted to vote for Richard Nixon... but ...
forgot ... ?)
Update 3: Okay, these guys are now officially boring me to tears. I guess the first five minutes were a clever Republican deception. Best answer so far, Ron Paul just answered the question about cutting programs by saying cut the Department of Education and bring the troops home from Iraq. Huckabee says get rid of the IRS by switching to the Fair Tax.
Revised: best answer so far -- Mike Huckabee said we should get rid of the IRS because "most people are more afraid of an audit than a mugging."
Update 4: Uh-oh, look at John McCain trying to step up ... McCain just hit Ron Paul on Iraq, saying of his views on Iraq: "that kind of thinking got us into World War II." and he used the "a" word (appeasement). Mick got a few applause on that one, but Ron Paul hit back, saying McCain doesn't even understand the difference between isolationism and non-interventionalism.
Okay, now they're doing their tax cut pledges. Going back to sleep now...
Update 5: waking back up. Anderson Cooper just asked Rudy about his taxpayer paid police detail to the Hamptons in the most dismissive, namby pamby manner possible, not even mentioning that the trips Rudy took were allegedly getaways with his mistress. Of course, Rudy dismissed it, and said he can't discuss his security needs because "there were threats that I don't often talk about..." Oooh, suspense. How un-journslistic of you, Anderson. He even responded to Rudy's answer by snapping, "good."
Update 6: the ultimate GOP billboard. Some hickbilly just asked the candidates to describe the guns they own. Never has there been a more irrelevant, backwater question in a debate (okay the UFO thing was pretty bad, too...)
Update 7: Reverend Huckabee is trying to explain how you can be both pro-life and pro-death penalty. The question was, "regarding the death penalty, what would Jesus do?" Huck didn't answer. He just added that "Jesus was too smart to run for public office." Tancredo dropped the ball on the question, too. This is one of those questions that no winger can answer credibly, because it exposes a core hypocrisy of the conservative movement. The answer is that Jesus was in the business of saving people, not killing them.
Now Rudy is answering a pretty creepy Internet guy's question about whether the candidates believe every word of the Bible by saying he doesn't believe it literally, but he "reads it a lot..." His answer was way too long to be credible, although I guess it makes sense since the Bible has stuff in there about not committing adultery.
Another emblematic moment for Republicans and conservatives. Many of their followers are almost robotic in their literalism and lack of complexity. What they want in a candidate is someone with a lot of guns, who believes literally in the Bible, who wants to jail abortion providers (and in some cases, the women getting abortions, too) but who matches being pro-life with a zeal to kill convicts and Arabs. They're so obtuse, they're almost South Park characters...
Update 8: another question Republicans simply can't answer. A questioner act how would you repair America's image in the Muslim world?
Rudy Giuliani - "by fighting the Islamofascist hoarde"
John McCain - "by continuing the surge in Iraq and never letting the Dems surrender!"
Duncan Hunter - "we save your asses when it floods in your God forsaken countries you foreign bastards!
And another - "do you oppose waterboarding?"
Romney - "we don't discuss our torture methods. ... and long live Gitmo!" (Romney also said he wants "what happened to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to happen to other terror suspects." So ... you want them to be waterboarded?
McCain - "I'm astonished that you haven't found out what waterboarding is, and that you would want that to happen to anyone in our capture. It's torture, it's a violation of the Geneva Conventions ... we're not gonna do what Pol Pot did ... how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted on anyone in our custody is absolutely beyond me." Finally, someone who can answer the question. Romney is trying to recover, but why?
Wow. Mick just told his base that "I hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not '24' or Jack Bauer." He just took a firm stand saying we should never allow torture to be countenenanced in our country. Good answer.
Okay, now some mook is blathering on about staying in Iraq forever and ever and ever... how long does this thing go, again ...?
Update 9: On Iraq, Ron Paul just followed up on a boring Fred Thompson shpiel by saying "the best thing we can do for the people of Iraq is to give them their country back." And Mick just missed Paul's point that after we left Vietnam (which McCain seems to think we won...) they became a modern trading partner rather than an enemy. "Vietnam achieved in peace what the French and the Americans couldn't achieve in 20 plus years of war." The troglodytes in the audience just booed him, but hey, they're Republicans...
Update 10: Ha! Rudy just answered a question about whether he's using 9/11 to enhance his political prospects by using the phrase "September 11,2001" four times. Oh, and he touted his record as a federal prosecutor in addition to his role as America's Mayor. Funny thing about that proscutorial record, though ... funny thing... From a July 1989 article in the New York Times:
In the midst of his Republican-Liberal campaign, a review of the Giuliani record, interviews with current and former prosecutors, law-enforcement officials, judges, defense lawyers and law professors, and a long interview with Mr. Giuliani present a profile of a skilled prosecutor who won some exceptional victories.
But the 45-year-old Mr. Giuliani is also coming to be seen by some as an ambitious prosecutor who used questionable judgment in several episodes at the Justice Department, both before and during his tenure as United States Attorney, and whose personal accomplishments may have been exaggerated by critics and supporters alike.
Even as Mr. Giuliani reaches for greater stature, many people - including some admirers - are urging that his larger-than-life image be reconsidered.
''People were caught up in the view of him as a superman or a devil,'' said Burt Neuborne, a professor at the New York University Law School and former national litigation director of the Amer-ican Civil Liberties Union.
''The truth is he was neither. He was a pretty good prosecutor who made some mistakes,'' Professor Neuborne said.
The Record Major Cases And Recognition
...Several of the most-noticed prosecutions begun in Mr. Giuliani's tenure are not complete. So they cannot be counted as his accomplishments. It is not clear whether the plea agreement Mr. Giuliani approved with Ivan F. Boesky, the arbitrager, will lead, as prosecutors hoped, to a conviction of Michael R. Milken, the former chief of high-yield bonds for Drexel Burnham Lambert.
Because of the ill health of Ferdinand E. Marcos, a Federal judge suspended the Government's case against the former president of the Philippines, and prosecutors have not had to test their charges against him; his wife, Imelda, and others.
The trial of the case against Leona Helmsley and two former aides under another major indictment filed in Mr. Giuliani's tenure has just begun. Attack by Judge
If there were major triumphs, there were also major setbacks, many of them recently. The divorce-fixing prosecution of Bess Myerson for supposedly trying to influence a State Supreme Court Justice ended in December with an acquittal. Shortly afterward, a Federal judge ruled that the Government had failed to prove, as Mr. Giuliani had charged, that the Genovese crime family controlled the main union at the Fulton Fish Market.
In March, another Federal judge threw out the charges against seven of 14 defendants in the Pizza Connection 2 heroin-trafficking case. The judge, John E. Sprizzo, ridiculed the caliber of the office Mr. Giuliani had recently left, calling the prosecutors incompetent and improperly trained.
Behind many headlines Mr. Giuliani generated, there was sometimes less substance than there appeared to be. He speaks frequently, for example, about his ''Federal day'' project, in which a day is chosen occasionally, without notice, when street drug dealers answer charges in Federal, instead of state, court. Because Federal drug enforcement is perceived as more punitive, the aim is to keep drug dealers off balance, not knowing where they might have to appear.
In 1986, the last year for which statistics from the Federal Bureau of Prisons are available, Mr. Giuliani's office sent 351 people to jail on controlled-substance and narcotics charges, including many who would have been arrested on Federal charges even without the special program.
That was 64 more people than were sent to prison by the Federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, who had no special project, and a small fraction of the 67,000 people arrested on narcotics charges in the city that year. Mr. Giuliani said he always warned that the program processed few people. The Image Out in Front When Camera's On.
... Some critics said Mr. Giuliani's flair sometimes overstated his accomplishments. He has long asserted he invented the use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to pursue the Mafia commission. In his interview, Mr. Giuliani repeated an account he has told many times about formulating the idea before becoming United States Attorney, when he read a book by Joseph Bonnano Sr. about his life in the mob.
''Using it against the commission,'' Mr. Giuliani said, ''that was an idea that no one had until I developed it and went down to Washington and started talking about it. And I came to the office with it.''
That is flatly disputed by others who suggest the strategy was evolving. Mr. Martin said he had heard the approach discussed by highly placed people in the Federal Bureau of Investigation while he was a prosecutor. Mr. Goldstock of the state agency recalled that before Mr. Giuliani took office, Mr. Goldstock had fully briefed officials on bringing a RICO case against the five families.
Mr. Giuliani said the others' recollections were simply incorrect. ''Absolutely, totally not true,'' he said. ''Those people are now trying to recreate a good idea.''
And one more piece:
Mr. Giuliani's drive and self-assurance may have contributed to his few clear debacles as prosecutor. Campaign opponents question whether his strong commitments were motivated most by expediency.
They have questioned Mr. Giuliani's role as the main defender of the Justice Department policy of detaining illegal Haitian immigrants while he was the third-ranking official in the department in the Reagan Administration, which focused on control of illegal immigration. Human rights groups criticized the detention camps, saying many internees were political refugees trying to escape the repression of Jean-Claude Duvalier.
Mr. Giuliani said in the interview he still considered the policy justifiable, considering the problems caused by illegal immigration. McDonnell Douglas Case
Update 11: Mike Huckabee just blew Rudy out of the water on the question of why more African-Americans don't support the GOP. Rudy trotted out some tripe about reducing crime and giving out school vouchers. Huck on the other hand, said that 48 percent of AA voters in Arkansas supported him, "because I asked for their vote." He went on to talk about reaching out by way of appointments to his cabinet, and spending on things like diabetes and low income targeted healthcare.
Mittster and Sleepy Fred just took strong positions against the public display of the Confederate battle flag. Surprisingly un-pandery.
And Ron Paul has a quite good little Youtube commercial.
Sidebar: I'll tell you what, if the GOP had any sense, Huck would be the nominee. He would be the toughest candidate to beat, because shockingly, he comes off like a real "compassionate conservative" who is religious, but not looking to turn the country into a religious police state. What's also remarkable about Huckabee is that he, and Ron Paul, are the only two guys standing up there who seem to actually believe everything they're saying, which is why they don't have to pause or parse their words.
Okay, the debate is over. Rudy just tried to explain rooting for the BoSox.
CNN is focusing on the retired gay general who
never got an answer to his question.
