Visual source: Newseum
Jonathan Bernstein sums up last night's GOP debate:
Mitt Romney is easily the best in the field at doing this; he’s really the only one up there who seems even remotely well-cast as a presidential candidate. Of the rest, I suppose Rick Santorum shows pretty good statewide-debate-level chops, and Ron Paul certainly has his Ron Paul thing down cold. The other six are just awful at it.
Corbett B. Daly, Stephanie Condon, Kevin Hechtkopf give their take:
Mitt Romney: The former governor of Massachusetts was the clear winner of the Orlando debate hosted by Fox News and Google. He's run a presidential campaign before and it shows. His answers were polished and on message. When he didn't have an answer, he quickly went on to the main talking point of his campaign -- attacking President Obama. And he held his ground in a back and forth with front-runner Rick Perry over what each said in their respective books, telling the Texas governor "words have meaning."[...]
Rick Perry: The Texas governor was caught flat footed from the very beginning when asked about the specific policies he would implement to revive the economy. Perry didn't seem to have a response and resorted to speaking in generalities.
More consensus on Perry's lackluster performance from John Dickerson:
The Republican presidential debate in Orlando was sponsored by Google, but it was Gov. Rick Perry who was searching. The frontrunner's answers meandered. When fielding a hypothetical question about terrorists getting nukes in Pakistan, his response ribboned out like he was reading the first results that came up. Even when he read his attack lines on rival Mitt Romney from the notes on his lectern, it was muddy. With each successive debate in this campaign, his performance gets worse.
Steve Kornacki turns his eye to the live audience:
Once again, Republicans held a presidential debate on Thursday night. And once again, the live audience helped give the party a black eye. [...]
"This question stirred up a whole lot of controversy online," Fox's Megyn Kelly said as she introduced a video submission. "It comes from Stephen Hill, who is a soldier stationed in Iraq."
Hill, wearing a gray "ARMY" t-shirt then appeared on-screen and told the candidates that he is gay and that he had been forced to lie about his identity when he was deployed to Iraq in 2010 because he didn't want to lose his job. He then asked if the candidates would "do anything to circumvent the progress that's been made for gay and lesbian soldiers" now that the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy has been officially repealed.
His video then ended and ... a handful of very loud boos erupted in the debate hall. Otherwise there was silence -- not one cheer for an active duty soldier asking the candidates if they'd let him continue serving his country without lying. No other voter-submitted question all night elicited such a harsh response.
Alicia Cohn looks at Romney's testy relationship with the Tea Party:
“He’d become a Tea Party hero if he’d withdraw,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of influential group Tea Party Nation.
Phillips also slammed Romney’s “political tone-deafness” when it comes to the movement, criticizing him for a politically based motivation for belatedly reaching out to members.
“I don’t think Romney understands what the Tea Party movement is,” Phillips said. One big problem the Tea Party has with Romney is a “philosophical” one, Phillips added: “The belief that Romney really has no core values.” Romney’s campaign did not comment.
Eugene Robinson on the abolishment of the death penalty:
The death penalty is a barbaric anachronism, a crude instrument not of justice but of revenge. Most countries banished it long ago. This country should banish it now.
The state of Georgia was wrong to execute convicted murderer Troy Anthony Davis as protesters and journalists kept a ghoulish vigil Wednesday night — just as the state of Texas was wrong, hours earlier, to execute racist killer Lawrence Russell Brewer.
Paul Krugman:
This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”
It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.
Timothy Egan:
If your neighbor said he was going to dump garbage on a sidewalk you both shared, you would hold him responsible for trashing the common ground. We should take the same attitude toward people who want to allow more poisons, carcinogens and greenhouse gases into the little orb we all inhabit.
“We look like a joke,” Bill Clinton said this week, on the growing crazy caucus of earth-unfriendly politicians. “If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial.”
With climate change, it’s easy to follow the money that bought the nutty opinions: big coal-burning utilities have the most to lose in the effort to curb greenhouse gases, and have been purchasing opinion and politicians as the urgency has increased.
The New York Times:
Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, showed courage facing down powerful Republicans on Wednesday and pressing forward with his efforts to spur economic growth by pushing down long-term interest rates to lower the borrowing costs of businesses and families.
Republicans in Congress and on the campaign trail are now steadfastly opposing every government effort to pull the economy from the mire. There is no economic sense or logic to their position, which makes it look as if they want to stall the economy for the 2012 election.[...]
The weak economy calls for urgent action. The most effective answer is more robust stimulus — bigger payroll tax breaks, more infrastructure investment, bigger transfers to states and cash-strapped families — and more help for debt-choked homeowners. The only things standing in the way are Republicans with narrow political aims.
