Ron Paul follower is trying to dig up dirt on Perry They are looking for anyone who might have slept with Perry.

Fox asks Paul about it and he hammers them for giving it air time.

No wonder they don't like him.

According to the notes, which were authenticated by a meeting participant, the Perry administration wanted to help Wall Street investors gamble on how long retired Texas teachers would live. Perry was promising the state big money in exchange for helping Swiss banking giant UBS set up a business of teacher death speculation.

All they had to do was convince retirees to let UBS buy life insurance policies on them. When the retirees died, those policies would pay out benefits to Wall Street speculators, and the state, supposedly, would get paid for arranging the bets. The families of the deceased former teachers would get nothing.

PERRY: "What I find compelling is what we've done in the state of Texas, using our ability to regulate our clean air. We cleaned up our air in the state of Texas, more than any other state in the nation during the decade." He specifically mentioned successes in reducing nitrous oxide emissions by 58 percent and ozone levels by 27 percent.

THE FACTS: Texas has reduced emissions as Perry described, but most of those reductions were required under the federal Clean Air Act. However, the Environmental Protection Agency recently rescinded the state's authority to grant some air pollution permits because the state did not comply with federal regulations. Texas, home to America's oil and gas industry, still emits more carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas — than any other state in the country, according to government data. Several metropolitan areas in Texas still violate health-based limits for smog, and the county that is home to Houston is one of the biggest emitters of hazardous air pollution in the country. The Texas Legislature also passed, and Perry signed, a law that will delay enforcing stiffer clean air regulations by two years..

Any debate watchers?

Not sure why Gingrich still shows up anymore...

He says he will not stand for the moderator trying to have republicans fight each other....does he understand the concept of a "GOP Debate"?
It is not the GOP field vs Obama debate.

I constantly find it amazing Republicans dislike Obama so much. His politics probably average out rather centrist if not right leaning, and he's also a total pushover too nice. The GOP and its supporters are never going to have it as easy as they do right now. Democrats can't/don't get anything meaningful passed and you get the easy out of always being able to blame things on the president.

I constantly find it amazing Republicans dislike Obama so much. His politics probably average out rather centrist if not right leaning, and he's also a total pushover too nice. The GOP and its supporters are never going to have it as easy as they do right now. Democrats can't/don't get anything meaningful passed and you get the easy out of always being able to blame things on the president.

And with a competitive society/media/culture we all need to choose a side and just hate the opponent.

It works the other way too. And with a competitive society/media/culture we all need to choose a side and just hate the opponent.

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.

This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

I constantly find it amazing Republicans dislike Obama so much. His politics probably average out rather centrist if not right leaning, and he's also a total pushover too nice. The GOP and its supporters are never going to have it as easy as they do right now. Democrats can't/don't get anything meaningful passed and you get the easy out of always being able to blame things on the president.

False equivalency! Both parties have problems and both sides tend to far and mistrust the other but one of the parties in the country is no longer operating in good faith.

I think people are primarily driven by fear of what MIGHT happen. Obama MIGHT take away their guns, their tax breaks, their freedom, their safety etc. He MIGHT spend a ton of money on schools, public health care, the Arts and give money to freeloading welfare folks. He MIGHT be Muslim etc etc etc.

It works the other way too. And with a competitive society/media/culture we all need to choose a side and just hate the opponent.

It was a debate of bad, bad, worse, and downright horrible. None of these clowns showed any sign of being able to handle the Obama machine.

Better hope Chris Christie has a change of heart otherwise??? Someone will have to go through a massive metamorphosis.

At least they weren't name dropping Reagan at every turn.

Not GOP related but Obama had some Mojo tonight.

Right now, Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary – an outrage he has asked us to fix. We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake, and everybody pays their fair share. And I believe the vast majority of wealthy Americans and CEOs are willing to do just that, if it helps the economy grow and gets our fiscal house in order.

The Obama Policy of moral equivalency, which gives equal standing to the grievances of Israelis and Palestinians, including the orchestrators of terrorism, is a dangerous insult.

Hey Arabs! Rick Perry has something to say to you!

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyin...rstatetoanother
So, just in case it wasn't clear - Palestinians = terrorists, and Palestinian claims for statehood do not merit the same consideration as those of Israelis.

Hey Arabs! Rick Perry has something to say to you!

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyin...rstatetoanother
So, just in case it wasn't clear - Palestinians = terrorists, and Palestinian claims for statehood do not merit the same consideration as those of Israelis.

“I also as a Christian have a clear directive to support Israel, so from my perspective it’s pretty easy,” Perry said when a reporter asked if Perry’s faith was driving his views, according to the Associated Press. “Both as an American and as a Christian, I am going to stand with Israel.”

More troubling to me is this comment:
You want to stand in support of Israel as an American who supports freedom and democracy? Go nuts man. The moment you start saying you're doing it because your choice in religion tells you to do it? Ugh.

Eh. I didn't interpret that statement the way you did. To me he's saying - 'palestinians, of which some are terrorists' which is a true statement. I don't agree that Palestinian claims for statehood don't merit the same consideration but I can't say he's calling all Palestinians terrorists.

Semantics, no? I'm sure your comments are what he would say to weasel out of his comments were he challenged on them. He's taking Obama to task for viewing Israelis and Palestinians as moral equivalents, and deliberately linking the latter to terrorism by default.

"We should be careful conducting military operations that may affect Afghani and Iraqi citizens, even though some are terrorists."

"The Obama administration should take a hard line tactic against Iran, whose citizens include terrorists."

I'm sure that is what he'd say as an explanation because I do believe that is what he meant. I really hate to defend him, but I do think you're putting words in his mouth with your earlier post. To me his comment is basically saying that Obama is treating the Israelis and the Palestinians as equals and in doing so, he's rewarding whatever percentage of Palestinians are engaging in terrorist actions against Israel. In other words, he's saying the Palestinians shouldn't be allowed to sit at the grown up table until they can control all of their citizens. I don't agree with this but that's how I'm interpreting his comment. I don't see it as him saying "Palestinians=terrorists".

Speaking of the Republicans, they sent a letter to the Federal Reserve Board this week issueing veiled threats that the Fed had better not take any action to improve the economy before next year's elections. No, seriously.

GOP To Fed: Let Economy Fail

Top Congressional Republicans Tuesday took the unusual step of telling the Federal Reserve to refrain from further "intervention'' in the economy on the eve of a policy decision by the U.S. central bank.

The group, which included the top two Republicans in both houses of Congress, said the Fed's policies have been ineffective at supporting economic expansion and boosting employment.

"It is not clear that the recent round of quantitative easing undertaken by the Federal Reserve has facilitated economic growth or reduced the unemployment rate,'' the group said in a letter to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Officials at the central bank differ on how best to address the economy's woes, analysts expect Bernanke to muster a consensus behind a plan to rebalance the Fed's portfolio to push down longer-term interest rates.

Officials hope that by weighting the central bank's bond holdings more heavily toward longer-term debt they can spur mortgage refinancings and push investors into stocks or corporate bonds and away from safe-haven Treasurys.

But with interest rates already effectively at zero and unemployment still above 9 percent, Republicans said the risks of unorthodox policy were too great.

"We have serious concerns that further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy," the letter said.

Won't anyone please weep for the super wealthy? Why is this country so unfair to them?

I understand that he feels he's being unfairly vilified despite not doing anything wrong. But he fails to see that the system is wrong and it's allowing him to be detrimental to the economy.

Maybe if he wasn't such an over sensitive vagina, he would realize that the villains are not the wealthy but the politicians who have shifted the burden from the wealthy onto the backs of the working class. That wasn't class warfare though. That was stimulus.