Redstate

Of McCain, Huckabee, and Romney, you are correct.

On Fred and Rudy, you are slightly off.

Romney won the debate by all measures. Rudy did okay, but not great.

Fred, could have won it if he had been in the mix more.

McCain lost the debate with Huckabee just behind.

So, there winners where

Romney A
Thompson B+
Rudy B-
Huckabee C
McCain D

The big loser was McCain.

Huckabee suffered nothing since he wasn't planning on winning New Hampshire anyways.

Rudy didn't lose much either for the same reason Huckabee didn't

Of course, I am a Romney supporter, so I a may be slightly bias myself. But I have been critical of Romney when he hasn't done well.

...now THERE is an intelligent debate analysis.

I thought that Fred's reply made perfect sense. Paul started off by saying that the reason we don't have health care is because "we're running this $1 trillion war, we're printing all this money. If we didn't print all this money, we'd be able to afford health care." Fred's reply was simple "So you're saying that if 'we stop printing all that money', we could get out of Iraq & give everybody health care"?

As I said here & here, Fred won because (a) everyone got nailed except Fred & (b) he sounded impressive on national security issues.

"It should be noted, of course, that Romney is not innocent of the charge of having piled on the Administration when it was politically convenient to do so. But at least in recent times, he hasn't been nearly as guilty of the charge as has Huckabee."

Well, that was until yesterday. It was just two weeks ago that Romney said Huckabee owed Bush an apology, and then he says this, which is basically in tune with Huckabee's premise.

"We have too much of a 'it's our way or the highway' attitude as we go around the world. When you're working with people in other nations, foreign policy is no longer the way it was last century. We got a lot of people really good at foreign policy in the 20th century—which was more like checkerboards, our side versus their side. And we jump them and they jump us back," he said.

http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/romney_no_more_m...

At great risk of touching off a firestorm of Ronulanism, I have to say that Ron Paul answered the wrong question last night.

When Gibson asked the question (which in essence was "what will you guys do about $100 oil?"), I initially said to myself, "oh, brother, here it comes."

But no one bit. Except for Paul, who after a few seconds launched into his now-standard argument that inflation can be solved by not printing so much money.

Clearly enough, this sounds like a Friedman 101 question, and indeed St. Milton schooled many many people in interviews and forums on this over the years.

What Paul is not looking at is this: to a certain degree, the dollar price of oil (which he compared to the euro oil-price and the gold oil-price) is driven by fundamentals for the commodity itself rather than by oversupply of dollars.

I can see a contrary case against this point in the oil market, which has a heavily speculative component to it. But we're going to find out this year that the same applies to food prices, in a much more clear way.

Food prices (as to a lesser extent oil prices) are going up because there's not enough food, not because there are too many dollars.

Ron Paul's preferred solution to this problem (from his own words) would be to deflate the dollar.

We tried that already. It was called the Great Depression.

"Huh."

Which is the perfect reaction to the nonsense that was coming out of his mouth at that time.

He did continue with the actual words that you talk about. But the real response was not words, it was a grunt that said, "You are being incoherent and idiotic" which I thought was incredibly well spoken.