Notes on a debate I don't care about

Since Gary isn't making any appearances, I could really care less who these people end up nominating. Nevertheless, some amusements occur.

"The audience claps at the idea that Texas has executed a lot of people. They would love China." I'm guessing the Perry kerfuffle over the execution of Willingham (a potentially innocent man) and the subsequent political crushing of an independent investigation into that execution by Perry is not going to effect him very much within the GOP. If at all.

What bothers me as a "small government" type is the notion that the power of the state to execute people is taken so glibly as to be an applause line for other people who claim to be small government types.
Speaking of small government types.

"One of the things I'll miss when this field is winnowed down is Rick Santorum's spittle-flecked hostility toward Ron Paul." - The sort of general hostility toward Paul by Republicans is fascinating to watch. Paul's close but not quite libertarian in his politics and philosophy is enough to get him all sorts of hatred from liberals and progressives (which I find strange on some points especially), and yet his paleoconservative foreign policy which gets him a lot of media attention (and semi-favorable liberal coverage) is precisely the thing that gets GOP types riled up to hate libertarian types. Reading over some points so far, I'd have to say that Huntsman and Johnson come out with more plausible and acceptable foreign policy views than Paul does for me personally, but Paul's views are still less toxic and dangerous than the views of the rest of the Republican field. This of course means that I've noted the two candidates doing the worst in that field and one candidate who isn't going to get more than 10-15% of the GOP electorate as acceptable to me (at least on this very important point, to say nothing of civil liberties defences that Paul-Johnson types do very well on and other GOP types are terrible, possibly even worse than Obama on).

Alas, something tells me that I'm not voting Republican for a while.

"The questions to Ron Paul embody the kind of thing non-libertarians think are devastating objections, but libertarian ideologues like Mr Paul hear and answer them so often they are in effect softballs." - Pretty much how we look at these silly questions yes.