Very Good Debate On C-SPAN

C-SPAN is great during the election season. You can get a lot of information unfiltered - raw, with no sound bites.

Here's a great debate with Steve Forbes, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Alan Colmes, and others. Serious issues are discussed, but the conversation is always civil and even very polite, and all sides are heard. Why can't presidential debates be like this????

C-SPAN has no embed code for the video, but here's a link to it.

Check out this outrageous statement by Alan Colmes:

"We have a right to know (about Sarah Palin), and I think the press did its job by asking hard, tough questions about (Sarah Palin)... But we know pretty much about Barack Obama, who has been fully vetted. And also, by the way, his executive experience - he ran a campaign that did pretty well. That's a budget, that's executive, that's running something..."

Obama has been "fully vetted"???? How can he even try to pull off this lie? The liberal Kool Aid has finally toasted all of his reasoning skills. If there is one thing Barck Obama is NOT it's "fully vetted". Most people know nothing about his political and ideological formation (unless they've been watching Fox News).

And this crud about running a campaign qualifies as executive experience?!?!? Mr. Colmes, what you are saying, then, is that anyone who has ever run for any public office is qualified for that job on the basis that they ran a campaign. Outright stupidity. And, he takes this right out of Barack Obama's talking points. Obama came up with this point out of desperation, because he has absolutely no real qualifications for the job other than charisma - which is not a qualification per se, but a trait of electability. AND, Obama doesn't directly manage that campaign itself - that's what campaign managers do, so I guess Obama's campaign manager is more qualified for the presidency than Obama.


MORE HIGHLIGHTS (my comments in italics):

14:00 - Mike Huckabee gives a stirring and eloquent presentation of how conservatives view the abortion issue - it gets back to what our founders said - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". It's not about the politics, Huckabee says, it's about the intrinsic value of that life and all life.


22:00 Steve Forbes
The fundamental reason for our current economic problems is the weak dollar.
Obama's proposals total about 4 $TRILLION - about $50,000 to $60,000 for each family of 4.
"When you lower the price of good things, like risk taking and success, you get more of them."
Our crazy tax code - get rid of it and start over. 6 billion hours spent a year on taxes.
Unions - the Dems want to do away with secret ballots for unionization.

Donna Brazille (Campaing Mgr. for Gore, senior Democratic Strategist)

"This economy will call for more sacrifices."
"We all are in this together, and we have to share..."
"This will require us all to come together as Americans".

Man, I'm so tired of the liberal mantra, "we all have to come together". I always thought they meant solving solutions with consensus and only by consensus. But now I understand that they mean - "we have to take from those that have and give to those that we the Democrats need in our power base."

"It's time we look out for one another."

Does she really believe this? Because the policies she advocates are not about brother taking care of brother - they're about brother giving to Big Brother, and Big Brother deciding who receives government largess. If Ms. Brazille really believes what she says, she'd advocate for complete privatization of all charity programs - food stamps, welfare, assistance, etc. Clearly the best way to do this is to put it in the control of individuals who have only in their mind the interest of the people in need. Government bureaucrats can never do this well, if at all.


32:30 Rick Santorum (former Repub. U.S. Sentator)

"Whoever is elected had better know who our enemy is - and right now I'm not convinced Barack Obama does."
"No one person in this audience could have predicted on Sept. 12, 2001, that we'd be sitting here today without another terrorist incident. That is not a mistake. The party in power gets absolutely no credit for making our country safer, and in fact making the world safer."

38:00 Geraldine Ferraro
Often charming and humorous, but what a blow-hard. She obviously views herself as the sage and having the right to blather on endlessly, which she often does during this debate.

48:00 Steve Forbes "Can you cite any period in American history where the reduction in tax rates at the federal level did not result in an increased economic activity and more federal revenues?

Colmes' only answer was that Reagan left us with a lot of debt - didn't directly answer the question.
Forbes' retort was that the answer is tax revenues did increase under Reagan, but, as today, the congress spent the money and spent some more.
Forbes:

"It's been compared, their spending proclivities, both Republican and Democrat, to drunken sailors, which is an insult to drunken sailors. Because they're spending their own money."
"That is a spending problem, not a revenue problem."

53:00
Forbes, in response to Ms. Brazille asking "why don't you want to give tax cuts to 95% of the American people", says you have to do it the right way - by lowering the tax rates, which are a big burden, and not giving temporary rebates.

57:00 Rick Santorum asks the panel on the left if we should raise taxes because it's "fair", whether or not it increases tax revenues. The panel on the left never actually answered that point.
Ferraro:

"Flat tax (as a policy) is gone!!" "You may like it, it's easy, but it's never going to go anywhere in this country."

Steve Forbes, after Ferraro said flat taxes don't work, pointed out that 25 countries have adopted it and it's worked everywhere it's tried.

1:08 Huckabee points out that corporations really don't pay taxes - the end-users - the public - does. The people who buy their product are the ones penalized.


1:18 The totally unbiased moderator from MSNBC had the temerity to ask if Gov. Sarah Palin was qualified (this question, of course, was asked of no other candidate). Santorum answered, "If Barack Obama's qualified, Sarah Palin is."

Ferraro said that there was "no comparison" between Palin and Obama, because Ivy League schools only pick the brightest, so that makes them better (not joking!).

Ferraro is wrong here, of course, because we already know of Michell Obama that she was let into Harvard via Affirmative Action criteria, not merit. So the very nature of that admission policy means someone else was not able to go to Harvard, because someone less qualified was admitted instead. I actually think she's right - there is no comparison between Obama and Palin - Palin has way more experience.

1:34 Awesome wrap-up by Rick Santorum.

"If in fact (Obama) is elected... you will see dramatic - and I underscore that - dramatic change... from an economic system, that from the days of Ronald Reagan was focused on wealth creation, to one that is focused on wealth redistribution."
"The world has been stable and safe because America has been the leader, not because America has given up its leadership to international bodies..."

Brings up the point that Obama was the only one in the Senate who actually wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act - so get ready for the radical Gay/Lesbian political agenda.

"This is not just one man you're giving (the presidency and power) to... He's not going to write his health care bill. Ted Kennedy is going to write that health care bill. He's not going to write his tax bill - Charlie Rangel is going to write that tax bill. That's what we have to look forward to. Not the moderate..."

1:47 Steve Forbes.
"Somebody said 'the end of the world can only happen once, and this is not it.'"
Forbes' summary is just great - he sums up the conservative position on everything from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to health care.



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