Gabe, You Ignorant Slut
— Jack M.

Yeah, I read your post. You missed my point. I'll let Ace and Malkin respond for themselves.

My criticism was twofold, and you left out an important part of my analysis. Did I complain about the questions CNN selected? Yes. Maybe you are comfortable having conservatives intentionally portrayed as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster made up of scary end-time evangelicals, trigger happy survivalists, segregation happy racists and John Birch Society members, but I'm not. It is neither a fair depiction, nor an accurate one.

Flip the image. If Fox News had held this debate and portrayed the Dem Candidates as Gaia-Worshipping, Tree Spiking, One-Child Policy Forced Abortionist, NAMBLA members it would have been just as wrong, regardless of what questions they asked. If convicted child-porn enthusiast Gary Glitter pops up showing interest in a Democrat during his YouTube question, the damage has been done regardless of how profound his question on Tax Credits for Renewable energy might be.

Under your "assumptions", you just let a professed Richardson supporter off the hook for pretending to encourage a Ron Paul run. You fail to see the problem with that?

That is beside the point, though. What you failed to mention was the other aspect I raised. As bothered as I was by the questions (which as they come under even more scrutiny appear to have been specifically designed by Democrats to influence the public perception of who Republicans are and what we stand for), I was just as outraged by the Republican candidates failure to call "bullshit" on the proceedings.

To the extent that there were "victims" on that stage, they were "victims" by choice. While Democrats may be comfortable assuming that role, it was disgusting to watch Republicans pliantly accept it.

I wanted someone in the GOP to produce what I called a "Coverdell Moment." It didn't happen.

In fact, Romney made the matter worse. By declaring the Rebel Flag to be so racially divisive it ought not even be seen (with no apparent qualifications), not only did he basically slander a large segment of the South as irredeemable racists, but he did so in a way that validated the little punk who asked the irrelevant question. That punk has since admitted that he wanted to create a wedge issue. Mission Accomplished!

Fred!'s answer was better, but still fell short of what should have been said.

Quite simply, CNN rigged a debate in order to divide and smear Republicans, and to create wedge issues where none existed before. And the GOP candidates stood there and took it. For you to excuse this on the grounds that "well, hey, the questions were good" is ridiculous. Or, charitably, naive.

Come on, man. You're going to be a lawyer. Are you telling me that if an Opposing Attorney pulled the same kind of tricks, you wouldn't object to the questions? You wouldn't be looking in your Rules of Civil Procedure or your Rules of Evidence for a way to remedy the intentional prejudicing of a jury?

I'm fairly sure you would.

Unless, of course, you limit your practice to "International Law". I don't think the UN picks their Secretary general thru YouTube debates.

Posted by: Jack M. at 03:57 PM | Comments (113)
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Comments Back Again
— Pixy Misa

Sorry about that, folks!

We'll have a permanent fix for New Comments Thingy very soon.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:42 PM | Comments (16)
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The CNN/YouTube Debate: We Are Far From Daylight, My Friends.
— Gabriel Malor

I continue to disagree with many, if not most, Republican commentators about last nightÂ’s CNN/YouTube debate. The questions were almost all good and appropriate to a Republican debate. I also think the format went a long way toward freeing the event from the stoic, scripted events we usually see and turned it into something that better resembled a real debate between the candidates.

More than that, as commentators like Michelle Malkin, our own Moron-in-Chief, and even Glenn Reynolds, try to outdo each other on the outrage-o-meter while they work themselves and their readers into a scorn-lathered orgiastic spasm of victimhood, we are largely missing the real stories that came out of last nightÂ’s debate. Today, the legacy media did better than us at reporting on the content of the candidatesÂ’ answers and the debateÂ’s impact on viewers. With a very few notable exceptions (thank you, Slublog), weÂ’re wasting our energy on a silly process story. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:36 PM | Comments (83)
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Did Huckabee Fudge the Scholarship Question? - Bumped and Updated
— Slublog

Honestly, I'm not trying to turn into the anti-Mike Huckabee blogger. However, his answer on the question of tuition breaks and scholarships for children who are in this country illegally seems a bit nuanced.

Here's video of the exchange between Huckabee and Mitt Romney. Here's a transcript. Huckabee explained that the program is being misunderstood by those who are critical of it:

Ashley, first of all, let me just express that you're a little misinformed. We never passed a bill that gave special privileges to the children of illegals to go to college.

Now, let me tell you what I did do. I supported the bill that would've allowed those children who had been in our schools their entire school life the opportunity to have the same scholarship that their peers had, who had also gone to high school with them and sat in the same classrooms.

They couldn't just move in in their senior year and go to college. It wasn't about out of state tuition. It was an academic, meritorious scholarship called the Academic Challenge Scholarship.

Now, let me tell you a couple of provisions of it. And, by the way, it didn't pass. It passed the House but got in the Senate and got caught up in the same kind of controversy that this country is caught up in.

And here's what happened. This bill would've said that if you came here, not because you made the choice but because your parents did, that we're not going to punish a child because the parent committed a crime.

That's not what we typically do in this country.

It said that if you'd sat in our schools from the time you're five or six-years old and you had become an A-plus student, you'd completed the core curriculum, you were an exceptional student, and you also had to be drug and alcohol-free -- and the other provision, you had to be applying for citizenship.

As he describes it, the program sounds fine. But according to Arkansas Journal, he's not being entirely forthcoming about the provisions of that bill. Here's their earlier post on this issue, with links to the original news stories and the bill itself. (pdf)

Now, Huckabee may have been describing another bill entirely, but this seems to be the only bill that would have provided any sort of educational benefits to illegal immigrants. And this bill - House Bill 1525 - suffered the fate described by Huckabee during the debate - it died in the Senate. It seems to be the same bill - read the news links at Arkansas Journal.

Here's what it took for students to qualify for tuition breaks and scholarships under the actual bill:

(b) A student without documented immigration status shall be exempt from paying the nonresident portion of total tuition for attendance at a state-supported institution of higher education, if the student:
(1) Attended high school in Arkansas for no fewer than three (3) school years;
(2) Graduated from a high school in Arkansas or received a General Education Development diploma in the state; and
(3) Is or has been admitted at an institution of higher education.

Nothing about being in the school system since age 5, nothing about being drug-free, nothing about being an A+ student. Those are provisions of the existing Academic Challenge Scholarship Program, which HB 1525 would have given illegals access to.

And it doesn't matter which version of the bill you examine. None of the stringent requirements that Huckabee talked about in the debate are part of HB 1525, the bill that actually would have opened in-state tuition and scholarships to illegal immigrants.

The debate over whether states should provide such a benefit is not the issue here. The issue, to me, is whether Huckabee is being entirely forthcoming about the program he's using as evidence of his 'compassionate conservatism.' I'm open to a different view on this, so fire away in the comments. (um...when they work again that is...)

Creamy Nuance? - Okay, after an email conversation with another blogger, I re-read Huckabee's statement again. It seems what he's doing is focusing entirely on one scholarship that illegals would have had access to if this bill had passed. So he's right in saying he supported a bill that would have done those things. There's no misdirection there.

However, there still is a problem with this statement - "They couldn't just move in in their senior year and go to college. It wasn't about out of state tuition." Well, actually, it was governor. Again, from the bill: "A student without documented immigration status shall be exempt from paying the nonresident portion of total tuition for attendance at a state-supported institution of higher education..." It seems pretty clearly about in-state versus out-of-state tuition rates, actually.

Which was, incidentally, the focus of the question. The questioner asked nothing about the scholarships.

Ashley: Governor Huckabee, while governor of Arkansas, you gave a illegal aliens a discount for college in Arkansas by allow them to pay lower in-state tuition rates. However, we have thousands of military members currently serving our country in Iraq with children at home. If these children chose to move to Arkansas to attend college, they would have to pay three times the tuition rate that illegal aliens pay.

Would you support a federal law which would require any state that gives these tuition rates to illegal aliens to give the same rates to the children of our military members?

In his statement, Huckabee also ignores the fact that all state-sponsored scholarships would have been open to these students, not just the one with very stringent standards.

So in the end, Huckabee fudged, but he didn't mislead.

Update - Take care of our own first? - MamaAJ points me to this bill, on the federal level - "The Military Child College Affordability Act." It would "require states to charge in-State tuition rates to active-duty members of the Armed Forces domiciled or stationed on active duty in that State and to the dependents of such members."

AJ points out that military families move quite often, something I know from personal experience. My family moved every three years, which made it difficult for me to get in-state tuition when I started college. I'd like to see what the candidates say about this bill and whether they're willing to go on the record on it. Personally, I wouldn't want to see it mandated for private institutions, but I believe state institutions that take federal dollars should perhaps rethink their policies toward military dependents.

Posted by: Slublog at 02:00 PM | Comments (47)
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Outraged! Murdered Family Of Brave Iraqi Journalist *Posed For the Camera* As If They Were Alive In Macabre Tableau
— Ace

His entire family was murdered, probably by US mercenaries. The world press reported it, and thus it must be so.

So just to sicken us further, they actually prop the dead family members up and put clockwork gears in their limbs to make them appear to stand, smile, and wave at television cameras!

Why isn't the press sinking its teeth into this latest outrage? What sort of monsters has our Army of Beauchamps finally produced?

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (5)
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"Total Crap" That CNN Didn't Know of Plants
— Ace

Not really news to just have Joe Scarborough calling bullshit, but what the hell.

The fact is that simply clicking on the user profiles for the plants would have revealed all this.

Allah thinks the debate was "solid" and that it's a good argument for letting Republicans ask questions of Democrats. Right -- in theory, sure. Let's see if they'll allow that.

Tell me: Did CNN allow obviously Republican plants to participate in the Democratic debate? Do they have plans of allowing us to participate in the next one?

I think the debate was awful. In an attempt to get as many wannabe supahstahs as possible on TV, CNN only let one or two candidates respond to each question before moving on to the next one. On the waterboarding question, only McCain and Romney got to respond. All of the Republican candidates should have gotten the chance to respond. As it was, John McCain got to preen and the hapless Romney got to sit there and just take it, with CNN focusing on his reaction as McCain ripped in to him. It was unfair to Romney and unfair to the question, because Romney didn't give a particularly convincing one, so the only responses were McCain's emotionalism and Romney's evasions.

And then Anderson Cooper moved on to the next question.

This happened time and time again -- CNN and You Tube apparently forgot who's opinions and thinking people were turning in to see, deciding it was more important to give "equal time" to as large a number of You Tube idiots as possible than to let each and every Republican candidate answer each question.

What does Duncan Hunter, another combat vet, think about waterboarding? How about devoted Baptist minister Huckabee? Or tough-guy prosecutor Giuliani? We don't know -- at least from this debate -- and apparently CNN didn't think his response was as important as the next camera-hungry You Tube douchebag's supahstah moment.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (3)
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Intoxicated Rodney King Shot Near Home
— Dave In Texas

Minor wounds from shotgun blast, while riding his bike.

[Rialto Police Sgt. Don] Lewis said King told police the shooting took place while he was riding his bicycle in neighboring San Bernardino. King rode his bicycle home after the incident and it was not immediately clear who fired the shot, Lewis said.

"(King) and the whole house were very intoxicated and very uncooperative," Lewis said.

Probably not very nervous though.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 01:00 PM | Comments (10)
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NY State Fights Request For "GETOSAMA" License Plates As "Lewd" and "Offensive"
— Ace

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Actual patriotism is apparently rather lower on the list.

A retired police officer is seeking a court order to force the state Department of Motor Vehicles to drop its demand that he return vanity license plates calling for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden.

Arno Herwerth, a 21-year veteran of the New York Police Department, said he requested the “GETOSAMA” plates earlier this month to send a political message. He said he was surprised to hear, after receiving the plates, that the DMV wanted them back.

In a Nov. 15 letter to Herwerth, the agency cited a regulation prohibiting plates that could be considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, derogatory to a particular ethnic group or patently offensive.” It returned his previous generic license plates and asked that he send the “GETOSAMA” plates, which were issued Nov. 2, back to its Albany headquarters.
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Herwerth, 42, said in a phone interview that it was important to him that the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which bin Laden is accused of orchestrating, be remembered.

“I got the plates because of 9/11,” he said. “I want to keep the message alive that this man needs to be killed or captured. It’s been a long time, but we haven’t forgotten.”

Herwerth’s attorney, Vincent Amicizia, said he would seek a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court that would prevent the DMV from revoking the “GETOSAMA” plates. He maintains the plates are patriotic because the sentiment supports the U.S. war against terrorism.

“That’s the oddity of this case,” Amicizia said. “I’ve never heard of a First Amendment case that seeks to suppress patriotic speech.”

...

“What is unique is that this message does reflect the policies of the present administration,” she said. “When ‘offensive’ is applied to political views, it encroaches on free speech."

I don't find it odd at all. The First Amendment now apparently only protects speech approved by the liberal/anti-American establishment.

Thanks to Alice H.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (7)
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Fuzzy Justice: Teddy Bear Teacher Convicted of Blasphemy
— Ace

I think in light of this the question posed by the Muslim woman/likely Democratic plant about what the US can do to improve its image in the Muslim world becomes even more pressing.

New Mohammad Themed Toys! From The Nose On Your Face.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (4)
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TWO MORE FUCKING PLANTS
— Ace

Does CNN actually have a difficult time finding Republicans to ask questions at a Republican debate?

Apparently so.

The latest plants? The Social Security question asked by an activist who quit his job to work with Dick Durbin on Social Security; the guy begging Ron Paul to run as an Independent and guarantee a Democratic victory is a Bill Richardson supporter.

Thanks to CJ.

I am getting physically angry now.

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (18)
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