Rand couldn’t make it because he was busy with his personal Kentucky Derby. Overturning that law that he can’t appear on the ballot for both the Senate and POTUS.
A couple of others were also no shows. With only three weeks advance notice, Dr. Ben and Ms. Fiorina couldn’t fit an agriculture briefing session into their schedules before the event. Rubio opted to attend a wedding.
Otherwise it was a full house with notable ag specialists Governors Chris Chris and Jeb Bush and George Pataki and Senators Cruz, Graham and Santorum, the farm boys Governors Perry and Pataki, Governor Walker who grew up near farms (and his daddy was a preacher), and Governor Huckabee who may or may not have preached that pray is the best answer for good crops.
Pigs are an Iowa crowd pleaser as the new pig castrator Senator demonstrated. So, JEB! went with it:
Calling the Environmental Protection Agency “a pig in slop,” Jeb Bush said, “We have to begin to rein in this top-down driven regulatory system.” Asked how to achieve that, the former Florida governor said, “The first thing you do is you change presidents.”
That’s called throwing down a gauntlet. And hoping it goes unnoticed that in a combined twelve years his daddy and bro didn’t fix the “pig slob.”
Graham was apparently humorous. (No, not about his “why not run for President?” campaign that some of us thought was a joke.) He and JEB! stood out by supporting some way for undocumented workers in the US to become documented. The “Christian” preacher asked,“What do we do to stem the tide of people who are rushing over because they’ve heard that there’s a bowl of food just across the border?” (Huck and Christie then rushed out because they heard the free donuts and corndogs tent was open.)
On corn ethanol, Cruz (who also has a daddy preacher) was edgy:
“The answer you’d like me to give is, `I’m for the RFS, darnit,’ ” Cruz said. “But I’ll tell you, people are pretty fed up, I think, with politicians who run around telling one group one thing, another group another thing, and then go to Washington and they don’t do anything they said they’d do.”
Papa Cruz might have to do a bit more preaching to those Iowa corn farmers after that his son’s moment of honesty.
Christie is down with ethanol. Christie will verbally kiss any butt (including Sheldon Adelson’s) if that’s what it takes. Santorum moaned about the loss of US manufacturing jobs that may or may not have been in response to the ethanol question, but doesn’t matter because he already answered that one four years ago. The current Iowa front runner, Walker said,
he would continue the subsidies for now but phase them out once ethanol producers are assured access to markets. “I think eventually you can get to that,” he said. “But you can’t get to that unless you deal with market access.”
He either screwed up his talking point or it was code only ethanol producers understand.
It’s going to be a long ten months.
Hanging around after the Ag Derby, Jeb Bush Faces Kitchen Sink at Iowa Pizza Ranch.
Not. Going. To. Happen. They are not like that half-generation of younger Boomers that really dug the senile Reagan.
Democrats really need to get their talking point loaded in response to this:
Not that the average USian has any idea what “net neutrality” is and why they should care one way or the other. But the GOP is good at repeating and repeating the propaganda until it begins to stick. (Luntz will come up with a phrase that connects better with anti-gov types than “net neutrality” because frankly they need all the help they can get.)
The liberal response on this one is easy and potent: Chatanooga Public Internet: Better-Faster-Cheaper.
One customer rating:
The related economic boost for Chattanooga is interesting, but as those returns would be low to none if all cities constructed a public internet, best to sell it for its inherent benefits to consumers.
Should ask him why we regulate Narcotics with a 1914 law, especially one like this:”The drafters played on fears of “drug-crazed, sex-mad negroes” and made references to Negroes under the influence of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana, and “Chinamen” seducing white women with drugs.[16][17] Dr. Hamilton Wright, testified at a hearing for the Harrison Act. Wright alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and caused them to rebel against white authority. Dr. Christopher Koch of the State Pharmacy Board of Pennsylvania testified that “Most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain”.[4]”.
That part in particular, “alleged that drugs made blacks uncontrollable, gave them superhuman powers and caused them to rebel against white authority”, reminds me of Ferguson?
Harrison was largely superseded by the 1970 Controlled Substances Act which has been amended several times. Short of repeal, which Congresses work hard to avoid, the racism of Harrison can no more be removed than can the original text of the Constitution that counted slaves as 3/5th of a human being.
While Coca Cola removed the active narcotic in coca before “Harrison,” a hundred million tons of coca leaves are consumed annually for production of Coke.
iirc the Pauls are more into states regulating currently illegal drugs than being for legalization.
It was a quick google search for something that republicans support before 1934.
Regarding 3/5ths of a man, that’s a misreading of the clause. Actually, Southerners wanted them to count 100% to give them more Representatives. Northerners, OTOH, wanted the to count as ZERO, because they were not voters and, I’m sure, because that would increase the North’s relative control in Congress. It was a political power compromise, not a racial indictment.
Women weren’t voters either but were counted as whole and not zero human beings. Plus the Constitution didn’t define who was and who wasn’t a voter, the states did; so, seriously doubt your reading. The issue was slavery. iirc half of the slaves at that time resided in VA, and there was not an insignificant number free blacks in the state as well.
Number of women is roughly equal to the number of men and most significantly, this ratio does NOT change with latitude.
Voice, we’re now far off-topic and I really don’t want to argue about what may or what may not have been in the minds of a few men over two hundred years ago. I don’t even know what’s in the minds of people currently living. Why does any man give too figs about what a woman he doesn’t know, will never know, and will never even see does with her own body?