Interestingly, everyone got a big hand of applause, except for Tancredo.  Paul had trouble hearing his first question, which didn’t help a response where he’s going to be out of sync with most of the audience.  Romney is getting destroyed tonight.  McCain had some excellent cracks at Romney’s expense.  Huckabee takes an early lead by rising above the intra-party squabbling and makes his pro-life appeal.  Thompson is doing very poorly.  Tancredo complains that people aren’t paying attention to his “objective” conservative ratings.  Duncan Hunter starts blathering about the Bay of Pigs and El Salvador!

Ron Paul prefers aiding the poor rather than world empire.  Romney desperately avoids talking about MassCare.  Tancredo stands athwart the health care debate yelling, “No!”  Thompson realises that NLCB was a bad idea.  It only took six years.  Everyone talks about how much they loathe Clinton.  Huckabee mentions Islamofascism again.

Update: I was getting completely bored with the debate, and didn’t watch the rest.  Dan McCarthy had some good liveblogging commentary.  He really doesn’t like Huckabee (or the debate audience), and there isn’t any reason he should.

This will give Dave Weigel heartburn:

In Massachusetts’ 5th Congressional District–a collection of mill towns and affluent and blue-collar suburbs north of Boston–the surprise issue was illegal immigration. Ogonowski made it the centerpiece of an anti-Washington campaign. An Ogonowski news release, for example, accused Tsongas of being “committed to giving cheap college to illegals at taxpayer expense.”

I had been guessing that Ogonowski’s anti-immigration positions were probably doing him more good than harm.  It shouldn’t be surprising that such an issue could work to Ogonowski’s advantage, especially in a special election with fairly low turnout.  That doesn’t mean that Ogonowski’s position wouldn’t help him in a regular general election, but it does remind us once again not to put too much stock in what MA-05 tells us about the strength of the two parties or the importance of particular issues.  What many people seem to be concluding from this race (GOP is reviving, Dems are in danger) is probably wrong, and no one should be investing the closeness of the outcome with much significance.

As an original native of Denver, where I was born, I have been especially impressed and stunned by the Rockies’ surge to the World Series.  When the Rockies began as an expansion team, I took some interest in them as the nearest baseball franchise to Albuquerque and as a team representing my birthplace, but they were never going to displace my attachment to Houston.  Their bumbling (mis)management over the last decade made it painful to think about the franchise, and O’Dowd seemed dedicated to ensuring perpetual mediocrity.  No longer. 

Even so, it was a great shock to see the Rockies capture the wild card in an end-of-season sprint, and sweep through the first two rounds in record time.  They wiped out their playoff competition so quickly that they have had a week to recover while the Indians and Red Sox bludgeon each other in a complete seven-game series. 

On the other side, I do hope that the Indians finally prevail in the AL, because the only thing as obnoxious as a satisfied Yankee fan is a proud Red Sox fan.  Also, as Tom Piatak has explained, the Indians represent the forces of good fighting against those of evil.

The San Francisco Chronicle sullies its op-ed page with more of Bruce Fein’s denialist prattle.  Armenians in the Republic are taking a keen interest in the resolution’s fate.  Jay Tolson in U.S. News and World Report makes the obvious, but necessary point:

The question is whether Turkey will ever enter a debate in which the consensus of scholars holds that the killings and mass deportations of Armenians did indeed constitute a genocide. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the historical record on the Armenian genocide is “unambiguous”: In the years approaching World War I, a new breed of Ottoman officials, the Young Turks, heirs to two centuries of imperial decline, saw themselves as the defenders of the Turkish remnant state in the Anatolian core of the empire. Embracing an ultranationalist and supposedly secular ideology, Young Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress pointedly excluded non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians, from their vision of Turkish purity. The outbreak of war allowed these leaders to paint all Armenians as pro-Russian fifth columnists (which only a small number were) and undertake organized and widespread massacres and deportations that led to further deaths from starvation and disease.

In his ongoing effort to make a fool of himself save the Republican Party, Fred Thompson continues to plumb the depths of how badly he can campaign:

When it came time for Fred D. Thompson, the crowd was primed, having listened to his rivals deliver speeches, lasting about 20 minutes each, that the candidates each obviously thought played to their strengths.

Mr. Thompson walked slowly onto the stage, kissed his wife, Jerri, on the cheek, made a joke or two, claimed to be a “consistent conservative” — and said good night. He spoke for four minutes.

“I was really kind of shocked,” said Linda Hoffman, 47, who wore stickers for all the candidates on her blazer, reflecting her indecision. “We were all hoping he would say something we could get behind, but there was nothing.”

I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: that Thompson really is as absurd a presidential candidate as I have always thought him to be, or that such an absurd candidate still has a reasonably good chance of receiving more support than all of his rivals.  I think the GOP is in such disarray and enough Republicans are so unhappy with the alternatives that Thompson might yet be their ultimate choice.  For that to happen, though, he will have to give speeches that last longer than four minutes.

As many of you have probably already heard by now, Bobby Jindal has won the Louisiana governor’s race outright in the first round.  He was the favourite since he declared his candidacy, but winning in the first round is still pretty impressive. 

That’s some good news for Louisiana, and it should also please George Ajjan, who explains in his post how sharp and competent Jindal is.

The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. ~Cal Thomas

Via Sullivan

That must be why the White House said, “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  It doesn’t take a genius to come up with the formulation, “Yes, it was a genocide organised by a state that no longer exists, but this resolution is badly timed, provocative and strains an important alliance in wartime.”  That is not the White House’s position.  In fact, that is a fairly rare position in this debate–it is a view held, shockingly enough, by none other than Charles Krauthammer.  Meanwhile, the White House is taking the Ahmadinejad “we need more research” view of the question.  We call Ahmadinejad’s maneuver the tactic of a Holocaust denier.  The same standard should apply to the administration.

The “cult” charge is patently unfair and seems to reflect bigotry, but the perspective that Mormonism is more of an offshoot of Christianity than a variety of it seems fairly well-supported to me. Generally, when you add a new holy book, you have a new religion. ~Matt Yglesias

Perhaps the pejorative use of the term “cult” is a bit much, if by “cult” you mean a group of people who are mindlessly controlled by a cynical, villainous leader who exploits their gullibility.  Even if you think that is true of Joseph Smith’s career, it is hard to claim the same thing for his modern successors, who are, if anything, all together in earnest and sincere.  In another sense, “cult” refers to any religious group and could be fairly applied to the LDS church.  It is a bit intriguing how some cultural conservatives will make a point of noting how culture derives form cultus, referring a religious cult, but how others will use “cult” as an insult. 

In any case, the thing that intrigues me most is the idea that, for some people, “values” trump theology, even though it is allegedly from theology and church teaching that these same people derive their “values.”  One might suppose that how one reached these conclusions would matter quite a lot, but this “values” talk reminds us that there are some who don’t care how you reach the right conclusion so long as you get there.  At bottom, it really is a question of identity politics: can Christian conservative voters knowingly endorse someone who is not really Christian?  For some, “values” are enough.  But I imagine they are not sufficient for most.

For those who value their sanity and general peace of mind, NRO has long since ceased to be part of their regular reading, but recently there has been a small hubbub over the objections raised by Mark Shea to this effort at promoting softcore pro-Israel propaganda.  For what it’s worth, the ad ought to be as distasteful to Orthodox Christians, who find any trivialisation or denigration of the Theotokos to be something deplorable.

In response to the criticism, Shea has written:

Now the amazing thing to me is that, of all the things NRO could be doing, they chose to go to bat for *this*. And not just go to bat for it, but claim that criticism of it is an attempt to “turn us against a brave ally”. Because, of course, anything less than uncritical acceptance of anything the Israelis might choose to do–right down to a blasphemous jiggle ad–is endorsement of the idea of pushing Israel into the sea.

Shea is beginning to understand how many of the people at NRO see things. 

In his original post, Shea wrote:

This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder how long American Evangelicals (and even some Catholics) can be snookered by the notion that Israel is something other than a secular nation-state.

That is the real question.  If it is really just a secular nation-state with all that this entails, the religious enthusiasm about it at some point becomes absurd.  That was the point of Shea’s original observation.  The point was not to “turn us against a brave ally fighting a just war.”  The complete inability to distinguish between critiques of sleazy or offensive “pro-Israel” P.R. and attacks on “a brave ally” is one of the reasons why many so-called “pro-Israel” pundits seem less and less credible all the time.