Who won yesterday's event?

Rating the odds, strengths and weaknesses of the GOP presidential candidates, one quickly finds that most ratings are unnecessary.

GOP voters have made it abundantly clear that there’s really only three qualifiers and one’s just make pretend.

1) They want a man who’ll lower their taxes.
2) They want to eliminate federal regulations for all businesses, and
3) They don’t trust experienced politicians so they’d prefer an outsider. This is the make pretend one since they continue to pretend that Trump is an outsider.

This narrows the field to two: Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy, the guy in a distant second place in the GOP polls.

Ramaswamy believes Juneteenth is a useless holiday, would fire every federal government official involved in Trump’s prosecutions, would pardon Trump, wants to eliminate the FBI and the Department of Education, wants to eliminate voting for people under the age of 26, end affirmative action and business regulations.

GOP voters aren’t opposed to convicted criminals running the country so Trump is likely to win the primaries. If that changes however, that means it’s likely Ramaswamy would win and if he defeats Biden would be the youngest president in our history. And the first of Hindu faith.

In short, he’s a Trump sucker-upper pushing two common GOP racial tropes (Juneteenth & affirmative action) and two common GOP anti-govt tropes (eliminating federal involvement in education and crime control). And he expects to win without the support of the young people that he’s trying to disenfranchise.

He does meet another important GOP standard with that last one as he’s completely delusional.

So unless GOP voters nominate Trump they’ll nominate nobody. Do you really think they’ll fight to elect a Hindu who opposes a federal abortion ban?

Consider the others: DeSantis comes straight from the Group W bench always offering to maim or kill some group of people. GOP voters won’t elect a Black man or Brown woman so Scott and Haley are out. They’re still mad at the spineless Pence. Chris Christie, Will Hurd and Asa Hutchinson are too anti-Trump to gain any traction.

Which only leaves North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and Miami mayor Francis Suarez. But the last four mentioned are each polling at less than 1%. Pence is around 5%. DeSantis and Ramaswamy range between 8% and 15%. And Ronald Reagan is still dead.

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The Debate winners were those who found better tv fare elsewhere.

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After listening to four decades of Americans wanting affordable health care, I never saw a single plan offered by the GOP. All I saw were delays, distractions and after Obama got it done, dozens of repeal efforts by the Republicans.

After watching bridges and roads fall apart for 40 years with lots of lip service about rebuilding our infrastructure, Biden got it done in 2021.

The immigrant kids who came here as toddlers and have only known this country as their home? The GOP is still blocking them from becoming full citizens.

Employment levels are setting new records, wages have finally gone up after a long dozen year stall, inflation’s tapering off.

The climate changes are extremely uncomfortable to many of us already and guys like Ramaswamy are touting fossil fuels. Guys like Trump just insult environmental activists like Greta Thunberg.

And the efforts to limit human rights again and censor history and restrict education are all the rage with Republican candidates again. Forward into the past!

So yesterday was won by Joe Biden and the Democratic Senate. Biden had billboards up all around the debate city and ran ads on Fox News throughout the debate, to make it clear there’s better more effective options in place with more planned ahead.

Meanwhile, the crooked ex-president was doing his same old election denial dance routine on the Tucky Fishsticks show. Tired old reruns.

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Meanwhile back in Fulton County, we got to see another rerun. Not sure if it’s a remake of the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares but it sure made me miss Paul Lynde, Rose Marie and Florence Henderson.