Posted on 03/02/2007 8:40:17 AM PST by areafiftyone
All day today we are covering speakers and panels at the 34th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC. This morning, we'll hear from Republican presidential hopeful former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He will be followed by Reps. Scott Garrett (NJ), Tom Tancredo (CO), and others.
CLICK ON THE MAIN CSPAN PAGE HERE
My folks respect my privacy, and I'll respect theirs.
Your nastiness IS my business. You're an embarassment, not just to this site, but to the human race.
Woops.....your grandmother who you took care of, right!
Well, you have my sympathies for your Grandmother in any case.
You're the queen of nasty, Howlin.
Yep. That's the one. :)
Thank you.
You're welcome. It's hard to lose someone you love so much.
Never said I wasn't; and at least I own up to it.
LOL.
You have a nice evening too.
I'm no "kissy poo poof"! I'm gonna TELL-L-L!
I tend to ignore the names attached to posts so I don't notice people pinging jim into the conversations, although I guess it happens.
I have noticed Jim has been very involved in the conversations. I've even responded to him occasionally, in a way that would likely make you happy.
I find a lot of the over-the-top rhetoric unproductive, on both sides. When I'm talking with primarily pro-Rudy people I tend to attack their positions, in other threads I do the same.
Because, in my opinion, it seems people are being more emotional than logical in their support. With Rudy supporters, I can't tell how many actually like his positions, vs those who simply think he's the only one who could win and they are settling almost 2 years before the election.
With most of the others, it's the absolutist attitude about their brand of "conservatism", as if anybody who thinks you shouldn't shoot unarmed mexicans simply for being on our side of the border must be flaming liberal illegal-lovers.
Now, I understand their position regarding Rudy, because even if you buy him as a "fiscal conservative" (I have my doubts) he still has a vast number of positions which will translate to policy that will be wrong for the country, and the president does set policy through budget requests.
Worse, if the democrats hold the house and senate, even if Rudy doesn't push his social liberal agenda, I can't imagine him vetoing it.
My biggest fear is that he will support modifying DOMA to require states to honor civil unions from other states. He fully supports civil unions, and if you do it's hard to argue against the discrimination of requiring long-term "unioned" couples to stay only within their few states that recognise them or else lose all their special privileges.
Of all the problems with the other candidates, not one of them scare me as regards abortion, gay marriage, civil unions, or general moral clarity.
I think Romney could be my candidate, but I need to see him for six months or so to watch for this "flip-flopping" and figure out what he really will do. He's saying the right things, but there's a lot more than talking in being President. I'd like him to stay viable though until the first primaries.
About the only candidate I wouldn't mind seeing drop out is McCain. He's got no chance of winning, he's too old, but while he's around it weakens the rest of the conservative field.
I also suspect that a good part of the Rudy support are republicans who hate McCain and see Rudy as the only chance to stop him. Much like the democrats used Howard Dean to knock out their more radical candidates in 2004, and then discarded him for a "safe" choice.
Only I hope we don't go with safe, but with the truly qualified.
I've never worried about people calling me things I know I'm not. How could they know? Why do I care about their opinion? If I worried about the opinion of everybody who expresses it about me, I'd need years of psychotherapy.
All I care about regarding opinions is people's opinions about my ideas. If they raise valid arguments against me, I re-evaluate my positions. If I find their arguments unpersuasive, I tell them why.
But I mostly like to stay out of the personal attacks, and mostly ignore them in response.
I'm worried about Mitt.
I think he's slick, and possibly a phony.
The worst of all possible worlds would be slick enough to win the nomination and not phony enough to win the general.
Rudy is my guy, but I am starting to process the level of antagonism to him here (which is quite a surprise, BTW) and I wonder what it portends for the future. I would have thought that the Rudy irreconcilables could meet in a phone booth, but perhaps that's untrue. It may be that all these socons who have been sucked in by Bush and Rove really believed that their views would be incorporated into legislation or executive action.
Hunter was a zero on his first trip through NH, and his CPAC appearance was just OK.
Newt would be great, of course, but he is so prideful that I don't think he can or will seek forgiveness.
McCain is vanishing before our eyes.
I think it will be the Mayor, but it may be that the process will wreck all of them and someone will show up late.
And I don't think you're nasty at all.
No. The questions are, first did he reduce it as much as he should, and second, did he even try?
If you think he did as much as he should have, or that New York when he left was the model for a limited-government conservative town, I would respectfully and forcefully disagree. I doubt you or most Rudy supporters believe that, but I'm not trying to put words in your mouth.
If you think he did as much as he COULD given that it's a liberal state, then I want to see evidence that he wanted to do more but couldn't. But his record looks like a person who was satisfied with his progress, who felt he had done just what needed to be done.
It's like his record with Judges. I've never heard HIM say he did the best he could under the circumstances. In fact, he touts his judgment in that regard, and points proudly to his work. It's Simon the conservative who is making excuses for the liberal judges, not Rudy the candidate. So, is Simon talking so that conservatives hear what they want to hear without having Rudy have to say he was wrong or should have done more, which Rudy might not believe? Or does Rudy really think he should have put more conservatives in, but was constrained by the process (which he ignored when he really cared about the outcome?)
I happen to believe Rudy is more fiscally conservative than most of the republicans we seem to have in power now. New York City is a great example of his leadership and ability to reign in spending. I just don't know if it's indicative that he really is a limited-government conservative, or simply a "spend a little less than liberals and on different things" conservative.
Richard Land (president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) has a lot of gravitas with a segment of the Religious Right. I think the GOP needs to consider very carefully if the "throw the SoCons under the bus gambit" is going to work out in the long run.
It's quite a stretch to jump from the fact that abortion killed more people than a nuclear weapon would to suggesting I'd trade off the two.
Abortion is not now a state matter. The feds have control over it in many ways. First of course is the Supreme Court, and even if I believe Rudy on the "judges like" comment, there are judges like Alito and Roberts who would respect precident enough not to overturn Roe.
Second, they spend my money on foreign aid which includes abortion counselling and giving to planned parenthood, at least they have in the past and could well do again under a pro-abortion president. Medicaid covers abortions, or could again, using my federal tax dollars to kill innocent babies.
Then there is the bully pulpit, where the president has a lot of opportunity to educate the country on what we as a country should care about. A President who speaks lovingly of NARAL and Planned Parenthood and focuses NOT on honoring life but instead on ensuring women have the right to kill their babies would set back the cause of ending the holocaust, JUST AS SURELY as a president who sees terrorism as a "police matter" would set back the cause of freedom and security.
If you could guarantee me that the federal government under Rudy would go back to doing only what it's supposed to do, I'd vote for Rudy in a heartbeat. But not only will it not happen, Rudy doesn't even suggest he thinks it should. Rudy does not sound like a small-government conservative.
I see modern times have passed you by. It is a modern, coined term for the gap in understanding when people fail to see the sarcasm in a statement.
There are new words and terms that come along every day that are not in your dictionary. I doubt you'll see RINO in a dictionary, but you know what it means, and your abortion-lover Giuliani is an example.
This term is, however, listed in online dictionaries of modern terms. Just because you lack knowledge of a term doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You can copy and paste this link though, if you have the cognitive capacity to do so, which I highly doubt. http://www.unwords.com/unword/sarchasm.html
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
