(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
The “good” news, per CNBC: “Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, will be hosting eight GOP candidates tonight for the CNBC “Your Money, Your Vote” debate focusing on the economy and jobs. Tonight’s event is only 90 minutes compared to previous GOP debates, featuring eight candidates, which have been 2 hours in length.”
Mr. Pierce at Esquire doubts the candidates’ ability to stay focused on the C.R.E.A.M.:
Tonight, in the 3245th of 9876 scheduled debates between the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, the topic is very likely to be OMG, SCARY IRANIAN NUKES! FECKLESS! NAIVE! HIDE UNDER THE BED!!! Of course, nobody in the field except Jon Huntsman, the Incredible Vanishing Mormon, has any serious experience at dealing with foreigners. Michele Bachmann has negotiated with nobody except the voices in her head for 10 years, and Rick Perry believes there are only two countries in the world — America-Fk-Yeah! and Meskinland. Newt Gingrich’s most memorable overseas experience was bitching about his seat on Air Force One, and all Ron Paul knows about people in other lands is that we shouldn’t give them any money. (He feels much the same about other Americans, too, so that’s a wash, I suppose.) Mitt Romney’s experience in foreign affairs is limited to bobsledders, and Herman Cain’s experience in foreign affairs is — please, god in Heaven, let this be so — merely limited.
__
The debate — in Michigan, where the unemployment rate is 11.1% and has yet to fall below 10% since Barack Obama’s election — is supposed to be about the economy. Nevertheless, the whole thing’s likely to turn into a geography bee among eight half-bright students who studied a globe in the hour and a half before the cameras and the lights came on. So far, their performance has not been promising….
Click the link for further details, and gird yourselves for the livestreamening.
Certified Mutant Enemy
Tonight on CNBC: A Cavalcade of Idiocy
Zifnab
I look forward to meeting the new GOP Messiah to replace Herman Cain. Is this the debate where everyone just caves and admits they’re going to vote for the Mormon? Will another dark-horse candidate emerge to reclaim the vaunted “None of the Above” title? Are we absolutely, positively, super-duper-sure Chris Christie doesn’t want to throw his hat into the ring? We’ll find out, tonight!
Litlebritdifrnt
Hey wait a minute I thought Cain’s foreign policy experience was trying to hit on that woman in Egypt.
jl
“Your Money, Your Vote”
I don’t like that slogan, or name, or whatever it is. Sounds like some one is softening us up for a wealth weighted voting system, coupled with the final emancipation of our poor long oppressed mega corporations.
Morbo
Awww, I was hoping for McCotter to be in there since it’s in Michigan and all.
jl
And a quibble with Pierce’s column. I do not think that most of the candidates would look at a globe in preparation for a foreign policy debate.
If anyone did that, and word got out, they would be charged with atheism, for true geography tells us
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.
The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold;
And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.
And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.
And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.
jl
@Litlebritdifrnt: We do know Cain can communicate with female acquaintances with sign language that is internationally understood. That should count for something.
Mike G
Romney’s only foreign experience was
his Mormon missiondodging the draft in France during the Vietnam War.Chuck Butcher
Only 90 minutes … that might be about an hour and a half more than my mental stability can take.
feebog
Meh, I have a meeting that should encompass the entire time period. Not that I would watch it anyway. I’ll tune into TRMS and pick up the highlights.
Commish
I haven’t been in the comments over the past weeks so maybe y’all have seen this….maybe the best political ad ever, locally at least:
SF Mayor Ed Lee – 2L2Q
jl
@Mike G:
You mean Franky Frenchy French fry a stan stan stan?
Who wants a pres who has been brainwashed (oops, sorry, not a good word for a Romney) by some obscure foreign godless hellhole like that, wherever it is?
BGinCHI
My question for Herman Cain: Show me on Rick Santorum’s body where you touched those women.
Anonymous At Work
You can also judge Cain’s foreign policy interactions by the number of fatwas and warrants and subpoenas.
Spaghetti Lee
Enjoy, everyone. I’ll be looking at porn (and thus, doing something more productive than anyone associated with this debate).
Violet
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
And here I thought it was the off-off-Broadway preview of Idiocracy! The Musical!
Ruckus
@Chuck Butcher:
You still have a significantly larger capacity than me.
MikeJ
TCM will have on entertainment about a dimwit in Washington that gets pushed around by big money interests. But Judy Holliday’s character is good at heart and given a chance does the right thing. Certainly not a republican.
David Koch
Meanwhile, Obama opens up 9 pt lead over Mittens in key swings state of Ohio.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2011/11/obama-up-big-in-ohio.html#more
Svensker
In fairness to Ron Paul, his foreign policy credentials include not wanting to bomb folks, which I think is one gold star for him.
Svensker
@Commish:
Certainly gets his name and face out there but doesn’t tell me anything about his politics except that funky folks like him.
Marc McKenzie
The cartoon says it all….Mike Lukovich for the win.
Villago Delenda Est
@Svensker:
If you convinced Ron Paul that there was personal profit in it for him to bomb folks, I don’t think he’d see a problem with it.
Martin
@Svensker: Well, don’t make it a gold star, because the flip side of his foreign policy credentials is the elimination of fiat money which turns the whole planet into a zerg rush for control of that gold star in order to buy food.
He replaces diplomacy by HE with diplomacy by economic ruin. At least high explosives can be managed. But once you go wild kingdom with the human race, there’s no reigning it back in.
Commish
@Svensker: Ed Lee is the incumbent and pretty well known. He comes across as a little boring for this funky town, though, so I think the ad is effective. Mostly, I meant “best ever” in terms of entertainment value, for a real ad not a spoof.
He’s leading after yesterday’s vote, btw, though we have that ranked-choice voting now and it’ll be a while till we know for sure he’s won.
Spaghetti Lee
@Martin:
You know, I never thought of it that way. But yeah, when libertarians end up doing something good, it’s not out of love for their fellow man (he’s most likely a moocher) but a need to feel good about themselves and their ideas.
Punchy
This event should be sadder than the time I eyed Chuck Hustle hustling his chickenscratch for scratch at a Las Vegas sporting things store….
peach flavored shampoo
@Spaghetti Lee: I read your “liberterians” as “librarians” and thought what the fuck do you have against bespeckled MILF?
Someguy
According to Salon, Joe Paterno and Jerry Sandusky… registered Republicans.
Stop me if I say something that surprises you here.
Mike in NC
Mitt was said to have hired a few illegals to trim his hedges and clean the pool. Expect to hear more on that tonight.
cleek
no thanks. i’ll be watching my Skyrim download progress bar slowly creep, pixel-by-pixel, towards completion.
5,700 MB ?
yow.
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
What eludes guys like Paul is that ALL money is “fiat money”. If you could trust gold or silver to retain their “value” in a fixed matter, there wouldn’t have been any inflation in the 17th century.
But there was. Because the supply of silver increased, and it took more silver to buy a bushel of wheat at the end of the 17th century than it did at the beginning.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: Heresy! There is no fairy but the gold dust fairy and thou shalt exchange no other fairy but her! Expect to find a very small horse tooth under your pillow tomorrow.
GambitRF
How many times will the 15-cent Christmas Tree tax–the worst thing to ever happen in America–be mentioned?
BGinCHI
@Villago Delenda Est:
Fixed for accuracy.
ericblair
@Villago Delenda Est:
I guess they’re happy handing our monetary policy over to a bunch of gomers in South Africa and how fast they can dig it out of a hole in the ground over there so we can dump it all back in a hole in the ground over here.
I believe the production costs of an ounce of gold average around $350/oz or so. So if the US went to the gold standard, we’d probably end up making South Africa the wealthiest county in the world overnight. Better start learning Afrikaans, or at least start talking like a Brit with his teeth glued together.
TenguPhule
What debate?
They all agree that they don’t want “those people” to have either.
BGinCHI
@TenguPhule: Our money, no vote (for you).
/Koch Bros catchphrase
TenguPhule
Ron Paul is too busy trying to kill people at home to worry about killing people overseas. Perhaps once he’s built enough mounds of skulls of poor and old people domestically, he’ll have a change of heart.
BGinCHI
Herman Cain can’t even keep his biggest endorsement.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/1768
Wow.
Mnemosyne
When Ta-Nehisi Coates brings the snark, he has no equal.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
Yet McMegan can publish crap where she asserts 2+2=5 and no one blinks an eye.
BGinCHI
@Mnemosyne: Did Derbyshire write that with a straight face??
Seriously?
Jesus, empathy fail 101. Don’t these guys know any women? Or at least employed women?
Martin
@Villago Delenda Est: Except for two things:
1) There’s a utility value to these things, so just as more is produced, more is also consumed. The relationship between the utility value and the exchange value is totally arbitrary and unrelated, however. But at least it resembles a sensible system, which is probably much of the appeal.
2) Producing more carries a cost in labor. You can’t just make more with a stroke of a pen. And the labor cost to produce more influences the value. If the value is too low, nobody will bother. If it’s too high, there will be a rush to flood the market with supply and pull the price down. Presumably this is a feature. It’s also a huge problem as ericblair notes as if you can control the source of the commodity, you can control global currency.
Sovereigncy is all about the ability to control your own fate, and fiat currency gives you that. For mysterious reasons, the libertarians, the guys most worried about protecting sovereigncy want to tear that down.
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
Actually, they’re all neo-feudalist assholes.
“Libertarianism” is about as much about actual liberty as “National Soshulism” was about soshulism.
They’re both marketing terms.
BTW, the stroke of a pen is “work” in the strictest sense. Not as much work as say digging a ditch, but then again, we can’t have folks from Ivy League schools digging ditches and actually working up a sweat, now can we?
Anne Laurie
@BGinCHI:
Derbyshire got himself in trouble with his fellow conserves, a couple years back, bemoaning the existence of statutory rape/anti-pedophilia laws because every female was “most sexually desirable” between the ages of approximately 12 and 15. IIRC (from the peanut gallery at Sadly No & TBogg) he doubled down when K-J Lopez cried foul, choosing “Your minds have been poisoned by nanny-state political correctness” over the usual con-fallback, “Can’t you people take a joke?” So, yeah, that’s The Derb’s official position on the NR team: defending the retro-positive misogyny level where women aren’t just lesser, we’re probably not even fully human.
BGinCHI
@Anne Laurie: Wow. Just wow.
What’s next? “Hey, lay off Sandusky! Those boys were asking for it”?
It’s pitiful.
And what’s the deal with these people even having careers? What happens, you show up at each of the College Republican meetings, wear a suit, and they give you employment for life?
It’s fucking unbelievable.
Catsy
@cleek: I feel you–MW3 is 14084. I am holding off on Skyrim until after I finish Uncharted 3, MW3, and Assassin’s Creed Revelations; once I get Skyrim I won’t be playing–or doing–much of anything else.
Villago Delenda Est
@BGinCHI:
Pretty much it. Born into it. Merit, my ass.
The sort of thing Jefferson was trying to avoid when he got an estate tax implemented.
Gex
@Martin:
FTFY. The only freedom they endorse in reality is for themselves to pay fewer taxes.
Martin
@Villago Delenda Est:
Nah, I’d argue that.
The thinking is that there need to be market incentives to get people to dig silver out of the ground. That the whole system has a built-in stability mechanism like Lotka–Volterra which monetary policy can bypass.
I can understand why they seek that, but it’s bullshit. Sure, maybe in a perfect macro sim city sense you do, but national borders, population issues, and a million other things make it impossible. You’re either going to nuke the other guy to prevent them from taking more of the fixed economic pie, or you’re going to be forced to sit back and watch an entire nation starve to death as a monetary control – and we’re just not going to permit those things. Their model of economic policy requires us to be sociopaths just to keep everything in balance.
So, I agree that their model doesn’t work, but what they describe as ‘work influencing the value of the currency’ is pretty much true in the micro sense, and that stroke of a pen has the power to massively fuck up the system with no more work than to make minor changes. Of course, thanks to our fiat currency, we don’t have to worry about Auric Goldfinger any more.
Redshift
@BGinCHI:
They don’t call it wingnut welfare for nothing! It’s not a real job, so you can write whatever dumbass thing you want as long as you don’t contradict orthodoxy.
Martin
@Gex: Well, that’s true. And to own as many guns as they can cram in a single-wide.
Gravenstone
Related (kinda) to the subjects of the thread.For nerds only.
Presidential candidates as D&D character sheets
Villago Delenda Est
@Martin:
You know, I really wish these guys would crack open The Wealth of Nations, read the first few chapters, in which Smith at length affirms your next paragraph.
But they’ll never do that in a bazillion years.
Because it’s not a soundbite style read, no matter what some people might imagine. I say imagine because it’s painfully obvious that they’ve never read it.
Martin
@BGinCHI:
I think the ability to say douchebaggy things in public, and the willingness to then defend them to the end is a requirement. There’s a talent portion in there as well – kind of like landing a job as a circus geek.
WaterGirl
@BGinCHI: I thought for sure that was an onion article, but it wasn’t. Wow.
Jebediah
@Anne Laurie:
If that isn’t enough to get him expelled from the club, those fucking wingers are further gone than I thought. 12 to 15?!?!? Fucking hell, that’s… I’m speechless.
bob h
Republicans think they are just having a little discussion within the family about the nomination. But others are watching, and are appalled.