Republican Debate After Report; Because You Can’t Have a Post-mortem if Nobody Dies
Well I didn’t watch the debate (no TV right now) but I did follow two live-blogs, one from the NYT and the Guardian, and two Twitter feeds from Digby and TBogg as well as periodic check ins on news sites so got the overall reaction. My conclusion? Little to no winnowing of the field, at least from the Grownup Table.
Consensus seems to be that Carly earned a promotion from the Kid’s Table while Jindal, Santorum, Graham and Perry got a ‘meh’ and Gilmore and Pataki got a sub voce “who invited those guys?”.
But who makes room for Carly at the Grownup Table? My take is that Trump, Walker and Bush all lost something but more like a dip than a dive. That is I would not be surprised if all stayed at or above 10% with Trump probably above 15%. On the other hand everyone else seemed to do enough to maintain their own respective niches. So who gets kicked off the island to make room for Ms. Fiorina? My guess is Chris Christie. But maybe that is because I despise the guy and he has a main platform item of cutting Social Security.
Anyone else have thoughts here? I really expected some flame-outs and a possibility of only seven or so survivors from the main even and one or two from the JV warmup. But maybe we do have 11 or 12 still clinging to life.
Putting this another way. What is the case for any of the following not being able to stay right in the 4-5% range?
Paul (Libertarians)
Huckabee (Evangelicals)
Rubio (Establishment/Cold Warrior)
Carson (Social Conservatives)
Kasich (Main Street)
Cruz (Tea Party)
and now Fiorina (Wall Street)
As I inferrred in the Main post I can see Kasich and Rubio and Fiorina squeezing Christie (and isn’t THAT a horrible visual) out of their respective niches from his previous Wall Main Establishment Street positioning. But everyone else seems to have their nice little 5% slice of the 40% of the population that only identifies as Republican. After all that is only 2% national.
Bonus question: Who is the new Neo-Con favorite? Because I don’t see them betting on Lindsay for the long haul. Does that go to Walker?
I like Fiorina. Don’t like Trump.
I like Carson, but I do not see that he has either the management experience or the political experience for the job.
Sorry, had something more productive to do last night: Band practice for the gig to night.
I would love for somebody to ask Paul(or Pauls) is private property theft via the state:
Gore Vidal (1925-2012) once remarked that the so-called “libertarians” of the right wing are not libertarian at all but should be called “propertarians.” He had a point. The one freedom that right-libertarians value above all others is the right of property owners to dispose of their property. By contrast, people who were called “libertarians” between the 1850s and 1950s were anarcho-communists who adopted P.J. Proudhon’s view that “property is theft.” What, then, is the relation between property and freedom?
The answer is that a property right limits the freedom of every human being but one, that one being the proprietor. If it is corporate or state property, then it limits the freedom of every human being on the planet.
This is simply a matter of understanding what a property right is: It is the power of the proprietor to call on the state to prevent anyone else from using the property — that is, to limit the freedom of others to use the property. A property right does not grant proprietors freedom to use their property in any way they may choose. If I own a pan, I cannot use that pan to cook my neighbor’s chicken, nor can I use it to conk my neighbor on the head. What I can do as proprietor of that pan is to eliminate my neighbor’s freedom to use my pan to cook his chicken without my permission.
This confusion is at the root of one of the most “conservative” ideas of right-wing “libertarians”: their opposition to civil rights laws that prevent racial discrimination by businesses, such as lunch counters. These propertarians oppose these laws because the laws “limit the freedom of proprietors to use their property as they choose.” But in the context of a Jim Crow system, the right of the proprietors to do that is, in turn, a limit on the freedom of African-Americans to travel, shop and lunch as they choose. It is not a case of freedom against restraint but of the freedom of some against the freedom of others.
Of course, some property rights (and other restraints on freedom) are necessary for a prosperous society. If I were free to take my neighbor’s chicken, then he might give up raising chickens. If he were free to take my pan, I might decide not to buy a pan in the first place. On the other side, my neighbor and I might decide that his property and mine, combined in a cooperative way, could provide us with an excellent dinner together. More generally, exchange is an important basis of our prosperous society, and property rights facilitate exchange. Even state and corporate property almost certainly contribute to our prosperity — in the right circumstances. But those who value freedom should understand that property rights do not extend freedom but limit it. “Libertarians” who do not understand that are — at best — badly confused.
I think most of that is well constructed.
I would add that propertarians would insist on the right to self-protect property as being prior to the ability to call in the state to protect it on your behalf. And I come at this not from the modern perspective of ‘stand your ground’ and ‘castle doctrine’ but from my studies of early medieval and pre-historical societies and drawing heavily on the thought of Fustel de Coulanges and his ‘Ancient City’ (1864).
I have put up some scattered posts on this topic at AB in the past arguing that ‘conservatism’ is at root simply based on the right of the householder/proprietor to maintain rights over house/home/hearth against all outsiders. Which it seems would identify them with your right libertarians as opposed to your anarcho libertarians and really (as you suggest) not allowing the former group to identify with the latter at all. Because it seems to me that most right libertarians are perfectly happy controlling the liberties of those under their ‘rightful’ power/protection. Which is how libertarians like Rand Paul are perfectly comfortable with patriarchal control over women in such matters as abortion and birth control and children in education and tradition and so denial of their autonomy. Freedom for me but not for mine. And certainly no freedom for you over mine. Which I think is your point.
I might add that in my construction ‘family’ and the rights of the householder over it are previous to any idea of property in land.
And I take a lot of this from another book, not quite so old, called Nomads of South Persia by Fredrik Barth (1961). It is a study of the Basseri a tribe of nomads including both iranian and arab components (and so a mixture of Indo European and Semitic peoples) whose family structures and practices seemed to me staggeringly parallel to those of early medieval peasants even as their households moved from one physical place to another over the course of the pastoral year. When we couple this with the known fact of the tremendous mobility of the peoples in Europe on either side of the beginning of the first millennium (say 800BC to 600 AB) suggests that the European social pattern and attitudes to family and house were not in origin tied to a particular piece of ground. That is as people ultimately settled the rights of the householder over his habitation and his family ultimately were tied to that ground and did not proceed from it.
Which has interesting implications of its own as in later times in Europe freedom or not became directly associated with a particular concept of land ownership and the ‘land lord’. Those who ‘owned’ land were free those who were simply ‘tenants’ or literally ‘holders’ might or might not be and in any event owed something to their land lord that extended beyond any concept of pure land rent.
not about your question, Bruce, or the debate, which i didnt watch, but i found this interesting:
Donald Trump and His Changing Political Affiliation:
(his voter registration records)
I started to watch but had to drop out quickly due to skin crawls.
What do you guys use to combat this ? Cortisone ointment? iv prednisone ?
I feel it’s my civic duty to pay attention to this stuff but I can’t do it without the help of pharmaceuticals , I’m afraid.
I was watching two news live blogs on one monitor and two Twitter feeds on the other so had some prophylactic protection from direct exposure. One of my Twitter feeds was Digby’s and she reported waking up with a huge hangover so even the help of pharmaceuticals might have only offered temporary relief.
BTW Prednisone is big juju. I have some for emergencies, and it does work for what I would use it for. But man it is literally no joke.
Been nosing around everyone else’s After Action/Post-mortems and have to report back that Popcorn Futures are Up in all Progressive Markets.
Because Trump and his followers are turning on Fox News and Megyn Kelly as if she was bound to the hip with Rachel Maddow. In the meantime Rubio and Kasich are getting fairly solid reviews across the board from the Beltway types, while Bush and Walker are getting somewhat panned. And Christie caught in a little white lie that might be just what is needed to boot him off the island to be replaced by Carly!
The next full post-debate polls, which should be out by Monday, should be interesting. I am still holding out for a 7 way statistical tie for fourth place.
I’m not a Republican and so can’t vote in the Republican primaries, and I’m not going to vote for the GOP nominee in the general election, so I don’t think I have any obligation to watch these debates (and I try to avoid watching video of any right-winger at any time – I can tolerate reading what they said as long as it’s in small doses).
I did read one analysis that said that the “establishment” candidates, most notably Rubio (to a lesser extent Jeb and Kasich) got much easier questions.
“I like Carson”
“Oh, the humanity………”
Bruce I’m getting worried that if Trump does not start getting more “presidential” very soon, all could be lost to Clinton who scares me more than trump… I to wish Alan Mulally would save the day for the repubs and run at the last minute. Perhaps just wish full thinking but we need a “white knight” to save our economy first ,then country. I’m not so sure that Trump would be the “white knight” that many(including myself) are beholding him to be? Perhaps he is more the “white horse” where it is said in the Bible Verse 2 “And I saw and behold a “white horse” And he sat on him had a bow. And a crown was given to him. And he went forth conquering. And this man will change any position. he lies with no moral distress. he will say almost anything. He is emulating he Christian anti-Christ. And he does not know it”. Perhaps we all should be more careful what we wish for?
It’s not possible for Democrats and Republicans to discuss this in the same comment thread. In a taxonomic sense, “Major U.S. Political Party” does not identify a species, or even a genus. It’s more like a family. [Wolves and coyotes are the same genus, wolves and foxes are one step more removed and in the same family.]
The problem is that word meanings change depending on which discussion you’re having. For example, “we” refers to members of the same tribe. When white Democrats use the word “we” they mean all Americans. Republicans use the word much, much differently. “Forward”, “progress”, “winner”, “together”, “God”, and (especially) “women” are all words that change meanings depending on party. For Democrats, a woman is a moral agent with the exact same rights and responsibilities as every other moral agent. For a Republican a woman is “blessed” to have a diminished right to health and life when those rights conflict with the rights of an unborn baby. It’s not even a balancing of rights. A woman is always less human (in a rights sense) than her child. But they believe this is a good thing, a “blessing”.
If Trump scares you less than Clinton, you need to pay more attention to Trump.
Not a big fan of Hillary at all, but Trump(and the other Reps) would spell disaster for the country.
Trump pointed out the complete corruption that is our political system. Nobody cares and all the buzz is about his latest ignorant tweet.
Trump also bragged about being the corrupter in that system to the point that he effectively said he ordered Hillary to show up at his wedding.
And didn’t present any solutions to the problem of billionaires corrupting the system other than putting one particular billionaire in charge – Him.
In fact Trump has proposed a single solution to every domestic and foreign policy problem this country faces – Put Trump in Charge.
Even a blind narcissistic big can stumble across some problem facing America, that Trump can grunt ‘immigration’ or ‘corruption’ or ‘Putin’ doesn’t make even any less narcissistic or any less of a pig.
Historically most would be dictators wait until they are actually in power before putting up statues in their honor and putting their pictures up on every building. Trump seems to believe he has earned that right straight out of the box.
Trump is the Silvio Berlusconi of American politics. No more and no less. A billionaire sex addict who thinks that you can fix everything with just a few more Bunga Bunga parties.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/21/us-italy-berlusconi-idUSBRE9AK0NO20131121