NH Debates Quick Thoughts

By some strange 'perfect storm' of weather phenomenon I actually have both TV reception (all 4 channels) and net connectivity tonight (durring a storm!) in my mountain retreat. Not only did I got to see the debates but can also comment on them.

Republicans first...

Get a mop! There's blood on the floor. McCain, Huckabee and Guiliani gave Romney what appeared to be a gang initiation by beating. It looked painful. It makes me think of Reagan's 11th commandment of 'thou shalt not speak ill of fellow republicans'. Perhaps they thought it was okay because Mitt is basically a liberal flip-flopper anyway? I don't know, but it didn't really make any of them look good. What you didn't see of course was Romney's attack ads which prompted this bashing as much as his polling if not more, no doubt. Blowback anyone?

As usual, Ron Paul came across as the smartest guy in the room, though personally I thought he could have done much better. Mostly in articulation but also in assertiveness. His thoughts on foriegn policy were spot on and well said and really quite irrefutable. To boil it down: They hate us because we're fucking with them. It's a pretty simple concept really and backed up by all credible intelligence experts. Somehow though, this idea that even a child can grasp, that if you poke a hornet's nest you'll get stung, was completely beyond the comprehension of all the other Republican candidates. Rudy was the most ignorant of the bunch, claiming that foriegn policy has absolutely nothing to do with terrorism, in fact he said flat out that foreign policy is 'irrelevant, totally irrelevant'. The depths of the man's ignorance is quite astonishing. Of course, he's not alone, the entire non-Paul crowd clamorred about islamofasism, jihadists and a worldwide caliphate. I suppose they also don't understand the concept of overloading the capacity to be afraid with excessive fear mongering either.

Paul also spoke well on the economy, but not so much on healthcare... he sort of blended the two together. He was correct, of course, but I think he could have done himself better with the healthcare question sepparate. Fred Thompson also used this opportunity to take a swipe at Paul (breaking Reagan's 11th just like the rest), unfortunately for him. Unfortunate because Fred didn't have such a bad night and like Paul stayed above the fray for the most part. This one swipe though sort of ruined it for him and I know a lot of paleoconservatives who like both Paul and Thompson who will take this very personally. Also, on a strictly clinical level, if Fred Thompson really didn't understand Paul's explanation of how printing money out of thin air and endless war and nation building prevents us from affording healthcare, then he's really not qualified for the big chair, is he? Back to Paul and healthcare though... This is the second time I've seen him field that question and in neither one did he state the simple fact that he's a medical doctor. Why? This is too humble in my humble opinion. The man is a world class economist, a renowned student of foriegn policy and a medical doctor... he could be called in court to testify as an expert in any of these areas, so throw it out there and let people know.

The run down...

Huckabee was coming off of a media created fake 'surge' that just gave him Iowa and while he got some good licks in on Romney, other than than that seemed like a deer in the headlights and in fact only drew attention to the fact that he's not ready to swim with the sharks or sit at the big table. Prediction: Huck's 'surge' is over, he'll be in single digits for the next two or three states and then drop out.

Romney. He's done. His Wyoming victory has been completely overshadowed and erased. He'll probably run vicious attack ads as a 'rebuttal' but it will do little good. His showing in New Hampshire will be very poor and despite throwing gobs of cash at his campaign he's already seen his high point and has nowhere to go now but down.

Guiliani. Has shown himself to be a complete imbecille on foriegn policy. People were already turning against him for his authoritarian attitude and his overuse of 9/11 scare tactics. His big hope is Florida and when that doesn't come through for him, he'll be done.

McCain. Would have done better if he had said less. He's riding a re-surge, but it won't translate to any money (ask Huckabee) and he'll continue his shoestring campaign to the bitter end. If he weren't so damn wrong on foriegn policy and Iraq, he'd be a shoe in for president. Along with Paul, he's the only Republican that can draw independent and crossover votes in any significant numbers and the math says that you can't win without that. In the end I'd say he has a fair chance of recieving the nomination.

Fred Thompson. He actually said something. In fact, other than what I pointed out above, he didn't make too much of a fool of himself. I think his fans and the media in general will make a big hoopla about this, perhaps even declare him the winner. I guess for him, he did a lot, really though even if he were energetic and charismatic, which he is neither, he would be unelectable on his record alone. It is the mere fact that he's so boring which has kept him from serious media scrutiny all this time and he's the better off for it.

Ron Paul. Could have done better. Could have done worse. Really needs to do something drastic. It seems as though his grassroots army is doing all the heavy lifting here. It's time Paul himself and his paid campaign do something amazing themselves. Give the boots on the ground something to cheer, something to magnify, something to hope. His biggest problem, strangely enough is the democrats. Hillary is losing and it'll be a much harder contest against Edwards or Obama and those two are both stealing the indies as well. Time to get crazy, perhaps offer a hand of friendship in the name of 'Change' bi-partisanly. Prediction: Paul takes 2nd in New Hapshire (though 1st isn't out of the question) and it will be seen as the real begining of something new(as well as the end of old-news punditry).
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Democrats...

Hillary's voice is shrill and annoying. Most of what I hear is that they all want to bankrupt the country. They're planning huge and costly 'programs' and an avalanche of taxes to pay for them. Obviously they are all so out of touch with middle America that they don't realize there's a bunch of folks out there living paycheck to paycheck and hand to mouth who are barely making it under the huge tax burden they're already shouldering.

Perhaps they caught the scent of Romney's blood in the water from the previous debate. The attack is on. Hillary, Ice Queen draws first blood but Obama and Edwards circle their wagons and begin a tag-team. Richardson remains out of the fray, mostly recounting his own extensive credentials. In the end, Hillary loses big, though I'm sure her campaign machine and her friendly news outlets will somehow spin it differently. Obama came out even-steven and Edwards definitely won. Richardson seemed to be in a different debate, with only himself and neither won nor lost. The entire debate was very much lessened by the lack of Kucinich, the lone real anti-war candidate on the Democrat side. Too bad, but really he'd been marginalized all along because he serves to highlight the fact that the Dems are really just as pro-war was the Republicans and thus he was messing it up for all of them. On that note, Hillary once again took the opportunity to point out multiple times how different they 'all' were than their Republican counterparts, which would have been humorous if it weren't so sadly false. I can find very little difference between her policy and that of Bush. They are so like, that she seems to be using the same tactic philosophy of - repeat it enough and they'll believe it. "We're totally different", "There are weapons of mass destrution". When will it end?


The run down...

Hillary did terrible. She's far from done however. Her political machine is beyond enormous and reaches into both parties as well as every industry. She'll battle on to the end and will not accept (or be offered?) a vice presidential spot. Ultimately I sincerely hope she loses, but won't predict such a thing, especially since she hasn't even opened her bag of dirty tricks yet.

Obama sort of rode this one out. Not bad, not great. He seems tired. The Hillary machine will find some way to attack him over the debate and he's about to come under super scrutiny from the media anyway. Can he withstand it? Only time will tell.

Edwards wins again. He's good. He actually has a good message for the most part and I'd be backing him if he didn't set my truthiness detector off so much. Alas. He'd be smart to form a coalition now, before things get really dirty. In some way's he's in a better position than Obama because he's already run and been vetted and that could be a bit of a bargaining chip.

Richardson. Really the only remaining Democrat running who is actually qualified to be President. He still hasn't found a way to display his credentials without sounding awkward and self agrandizing. Too bad. He'll make an alliance soon, throw his support and earn a cabinet position... but with whom?

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I'll make more posts as long as my connection holds. Sorry for lack of cites and poor spelling... I'm working with the equivalent of bear skins and stone knives here.

Ron Paul poised to bypass Hillary in largest straw poll

Yep. They've been running neck and neck for a while now at 10%. You can see the poll in the left column of this blog. Hillary has been riding the down spiral of her "funny" little sopranos video, while Paul has been on a massive upsurge of repeated good news as he places higher and higher in every poll he is included in as well as the snowballing effect of his message of freedom and liberty gathering followers wherever it touches. At the time of this writing, the newsvine/facebook poll has over 100,000 voters and the sheer numbers plus the efforts of newsvine makes it more accurate than most of the other fly-by-night polls of this sort. One thing these polls show is that the mainstream media 'pundits' are way off base. For instance, they are predicting Obama very distant to Hillary. This of course is a joke. Obama is far ahead of Hillary right now. Not that I like him, I think it would be charitable to call the man an empty suit, but the fact is he is FAR ahead of Hillary Clinton and only her massively powerful campaign spin machine with a complicit media is hiding that fact. On that note, I'm not a big fan of facebook (cia owned) or newsvine either. I suppose newsvine is alright and I can appreciate the idea behind it, but I prefer the anarchy of digg myself. Anyway, the point is that this poll is fairly accurate for a certain segment of the voting population. Mostly the younger population. Here's something they don't factor in to the polls: People under 21 are registering and going to be voting in nearly TWICE the number that they have in the previous elections. These are people that are NOT on the lists that pollsters use and are an unmeasureable x-factor in the upcoming elections that the mainstream media doesn't want to acknowledge and think they can marginalize by ignoring. Surprise. This will be the voting bloc that decides the election people. Hillary, most hated woman in America is OUT. Likewise the anti-freedom asshat Giuliani. This race is going to be decided on the internet, all unbeknownst to the so called pundits and it's going to be between Barak Obama and Ron Paul... at least that's the way it should turn out, but of course they could in theory cancel eachother out.

Anyhow... vote in the newsvine poll in the left column here and register your opinion. It really does matter.

As soon as Paul crushes Hillary in this poll, he'll be right on the heels of Gouliani and from there it's just a sprint to Obama who will undoubtedly falter between now and election time. VOTE! And as the saying goes "vote often". Don't let the media tell you 'who can win', decide for yourself.

On a side note... since I have multiple site statistic utilities installed here, I can verify that there is absolutely no gaming of the system going on and I have the logs to prove it.

Ron Paul is walking on the moon

Everything seems to be breaking Ron Paul's way lately. Recent events are throwing other candidates into a tailspin while Paul proceeds calm, cool and collected like the elder statesman he has shown himself to be. He is getting his common sense message out and gathering a snowballing group of devoted followers along the way. The juggernaut of freedom.

Meanwhile...

Rudy Giuliani, already mired in the stink of corruption, suffered a tough blow when the state chairman of his campaign Thomas Ravenel was indicted on cocaine charges.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has left the GOP, further fuelling speculation that he might run for President in 08 as an independent. This will have several consequences.

First, the big money folks being bought off by special interests are likely to suffer because piles of their corporate backing is going to dry up in the face of a self financed billionaire. So that's 1 whammy each to Hillary, Giuliani and Romney. It might be enough to knock Mitt Romney out of his magical underwear because he's been shoveling gobs of cash into his campaign bid and has barely registered much more than some of the third tier candidates as it is. I guess he's just boring, or perhaps too scripted, or maybe it's the flip-floppery? I don't know, I never really thought he had a chance to begin with.

Another consequence will be, being from New York, that's bound to hit both Giuliani and Hillary to some degree. I doubt it will be enough to completely crush Rudy, but considering the recurring corruption scandals, his general unlikeablility and the spanking he got from Ron Paul on foreign policy... it's certainly not helping him. Hillary herself will take less of a hit, but since every day she's sounding more and more like a pro-war neocon koolaid drinking Bush clone and that's bound to start driving people away, every little chip at the ice queen is going to sting. To add a little insult to injury, today's real news has pretty much overshadowed her little Hillary Clinton Sopranos video on hillaryclinton.com which is probably just as well because to me it seemed rather stilted. Another same girl video. I'm sure someone thought it'd go viral, but really it's just a yawn.

Of course Bloomberg doesn't have a chance ftw, he's not a great campaigner or speaker and he has much the same flaw Rudy does... stances on issues from both parties which the other party utterly hates. Someone should tell them that this doesn't make you a 'centrist', it makes you unelectable. In any case, he's likely to dillute the pool on both sides of the isle for pretty much everyone, except Ron Paul of course, much the same way that arch neocon and coward Freddy Thompson will be dilluting the small and ever dwindling pro-war vote.

Moving on... as noted earlier Iowans for Tax Relief and Iowa Christian Alliance have failed to invite Ron Paul to their little forum on the 30th. Well, it's been exposed that The Chairman of Iowans for Tax Relief, Ed Failor, is a Senior Advisor to the McCain Campaign in Iowa. That answers some questions. Somehow I doubt this will help McCain's foundering campaign. No doubt, these folks are feeling the full fury of the Ron Paul Army, much as the foolish Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis did before them (I wonder how long his career will last?).

And that brings us to... the end of the quarter campaign finance disclosures coming up at the end of this month. It's likely that some of the stragglers will drop out before the next quarter, and some of these lesser knowns are going to be reporting not only low revenues, but possibly debt. I expect McCain to have a rather poor showing, in fact the more I see from McCain, the more I think he'll be lucky if his constituents take pity on him and allow him to remain their senator. In any case, the field is going to be narrowing somewhat. On the other hand, word on the grapevine is that Ron Paul will be reporting some respectable fund raising numbers, thanks to his incredible popularity on the internet and the growing affinity for his message. I hope it's enough to catapult him into a solid first tier position. There's ten days left, so you can still donate to his campaign for this quarter to give him a bigger bump.

Sometimes I think the other candidates and their bumbling shenanegans are working to make Ron Paul look even better.

Vote Ron Paul 2008.