Don’t want to hear BS. Why.

I could vote for Newt easily.

I want a better America.

Thanks for the heads up, I’ll tune in.

It is obvious to me at least Gingrich is at his scrappy best as the underdog or minority leader and that the relaxed, funny, mature good Newt comes out of hiding when there is nothing left to lose. He only tends to get into trouble when he’s riding high and begins to let his sense of personal historical destiny get the better of his judgment. So will he embarrass the party as the GOP standard bearer or give it a newfound dignity – should we vote him or not ?

vote for Newt. He’s bright, he’s entertaining, he’s engaging; he’s also bat s–t crazy when he doesn’t get his way or when he feels belittled…by anyone or anything.

I suspect he has a lot of mother’s genes in him and I can’t trust those.

and I appreciated your having Newt on the air and for your praise of his debate performance last night.

You and I see it the same way.

in the current field, Democrap or Republican.

I did yesterday.

Part of the answer is a desire for sensationalism, and part to incorporate more audience participation (partly, I presume, also for business purposes, as in driving traffic to the host’s website), but I think it’s also partly due to vanity and to some extent incompetence.

What do I mean by vanity? Well, the most obvious and best question to ask at at least some point of at least some of these debates — with 2 – 3 minutes provide to each for an answer — is simply “Why should primary voters vote for you INSTEAD of the other candidates? Why are you a BETTER choice than they are?” That would be a great question to open a debate. And obviously there would be much follow-up, appropriately so, all of which would give voters a chance to focus on the strength (or weakness) of each candidate’s case for himself. But that question doesn’t have much flair because it’s so obvious and simple, so a moderator, I believe, would think it’s beneath him, seeing it as the kind of question a schoolkid would ask, so it is not asked.

Instead, we get questions with some kind of twist, like John King’s question about “the greatest public misconception about you”, which is like asking a candidate first to say “Here’s the worst thing a lot of people think about me, but here’s why they are wrong, presumably out of an inability to learn or reason or some other apparent fault on their part as citizens who should not be so easily misled or confused.

Lame.

Tuesday night I watched a report on CNN from Homs, Syria. The courageous, stoic, utterly unselfish reporter provided video and description of the atrocious bombing of civilians by Assad and his military, including the story of an injured two year-old with shrapnel in his chest, whom the reporter watched struggle for breath and ultimately die as helpless family members and others watched in agony.

I was not familiar with the reporter, Marie Colvin, so I did some quick research. I read that she lost her eye to a grenade explosion in Sri Lanka. She also covered the dangerous Libyan civil war last year. And there she was in the city of Homs, Syria, as it was being bombed, even after other reporters left because it was too dangerous, because she felt it was so important to show the world what the Syrian government was doing to those people. I felt a lot of respect and appreciation for her.

Here is video of the report I saw http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=wo_t2#/video/world/2012/02/22/ac-marie-colvin-syria-baby-dies.cnn

When I woke up Wednesday morning I heard on the radio that, hours after that report, Colvin was killed in the bombing, along with a French photojournalist. It’s so sad that such a special person, so filled with good and giving, was killed by evil people while trying to help innocent people.

What the U.S. should do regarding Syria is unclear to me, and any moral view of the right thing to do must take into account the complexity and unpredictability of outcomes of any policy scenario, and I don’t know enough to say it’s clear what we should do. But we should at least give serious thought to all reasonable potential actions and policies to end this massacre (and perhaps replace a dictator with something better, although that’s no guarantee).

New Michigan/Rosetta Stone post-debate poll has Romney at 36 and Santorum at 33.

Among registered Republicans in Michigan:

Romney 42
Santorum 33
Paul 8
Gingrich 8

Santorum is only still close to Romney because Democrats in Michigan are going for Santorum 36% versus Romney 3%

http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/Michigan%20Mitchell_Rosetta%20Stone%20Feb%2023.pdf