I am the only candidate that’s been there. I went because I support their sentiment. Something is wrong with Wall Street. The big check beats the good idea. It’s the same thing that’s wrong with Washington, DC. I don’t take the big check, PAC money. Im free to lead, that’s what this campaign is about. I support the protesters PERIOD.

GOP presidential candidate Gov. Buddy Roemer in a Reddit AMA answering the question, ”What’s your opinion of the Occupy Wall Street movement?”

Howard Kurtz & McKay Coppins will be hosting our live chat during tonight’s GOP debate (believe you can watch it on Bloomberg TV), and one of your nwk tumblr’s will be in there moderating comments, pulling in tweets, and running random polls. Perhaps you’d like to stop by? We’ll kick things off a little before 8:00pm ET as Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and our friend Michele Bachmann settle in amongst the other soon-to-be-also-rans to talk jobs, the economy, and because they can’t resist, Mormonism. As G. Andrew says on one of our Facebook pages, “I wonder who will get booed tonight? Orpans? Alzheimers patients? Kittens?” Stop by to find out!

cheatsheet:

Here are ten words, presented without context, from our interview with GOP presidential contender Herman Cain.

1. bullfeathers
2. suck
3. thimble
4. duds
5. chemistry
6. dancing
7. stuck
8. bus
9. bellman
10. 9-9-9

If you’d like the context…click here to see why Herman Cain is angry.

This week’s cover…

(Source: cheatsheet)

Rarely have I seen a more unpatriotic public display.

Paul Begala at The Daily Beast responds to the moment in last night’s GOP debate when audience members booed an openly gay U.S. soldier serving in Iraq. Watch the video here. (via theweekmagazine)

(via theweekmagazine)

Here’s why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Andrew Sullivan on the debate crowd’s positive response to the large number of executions that Perry resided over while governor of Texas. (via liberal-life)

(via utnereader)

None of this is to say Brown would win in 2012, or that a Brown bid is the best option for the Republican Party. His candidacy would still be crippled (and perhaps killed) by apathy or even outright hostility among the GOP’s evangelical base, and it’s hard to imagine his mentor, Mitt Romney, simply stepping aside. But the alternatives are not particularly attractive: six years in the Senate or four years in the wilderness; familiarity breeding contempt or absence leading to obsolescence; a more crowded, talented field in 2016, either way. On the other hand, if Brown runs for the presidency in 2012 and loses—the likely outcome for anyone vying against an incumbent—he will immediately become the GOP’s “next in line.” He could run for governor, or, if he falls short in the Republican primaries, for vice president. Ultimately my point is that, despite the understandable urge to dismiss all this absurdly premature speculation, Scott Brown’s running for president in 2012 might wind up being the best available option for Scott Brown.

Romano, answering the question we’ve all been asking.

It’s virtually impossible to find an elected Republican official who can speak intelligently and accurately about budget issues. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is supposed to be a comer in national politics, but his piece in the inaugural issue of the Daily Caller was a howler. (Budget analyst Stan Collender smacked him down for arguing that a $1.4 trillion deficit could be narrowed primarily by reducing “discretionary spending in real terms, with exceptions for key programs such as military, veterans, and public safety”) Columnist David Brooks recently tried to elevate South Dakota Senator John Thune into a serious thinker about fiscal issues. “He doesn’t have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down.” In fact, Thune, like his colleagues, has no plans to cut the federal leviathan or bring deficits down. When I called his office in December to ask if Sen. Thune had ever laid out any specific combination of spending cuts and revenues enhancers that could reduce the deficit, the answer was a polite, genial no. Last summer, at a dinner with a group of conservatives where I heard frequent complaints about $9 trillion in deficits over the coming years, I asked the assembled if they could come up with budget cuts and/or tax increases that would cut $900 billion from the projected deficits - one-tenth of the total. The response: silence.

Irresponsibility is one of the perks of being in the minority. You don’t have to pass anything, or govern. But there are limits. If you’re for tax cuts and you’re against cutting spending on Medicare and defense, you shouldn’t be able to call yourself a deficit hawk. And if your reaction to the biggest financial crisis and the deepest recession since the Great Depression was to refuse to be party to the rescue efforts, you shouldn’t be taken seriously as a policy thinker.

Gross, on the junior senator from Massachusetts.

Because it’s never too early, Romano is already handicapping the GOP contenders for 2012. This weeks entry: Luis Fortuño, governor of Puerto Rico, whom Grover Norquist recently touted to us here at Nwk HQ. Here’s Romano:

The most important thing about Fortuño may be that Norquist & Co. are mentioning his name at all—at least for now. Do I think a Puerto Rican will win the 2012 Republican nomination? Not really. And neither, I’m guessing, does Norquist. A party whose base is animated in part by its opposition to illegal immigration is probably not going to “import” someone, as it were, for the biggest job in the land. But in the age of Obama, the GOP is suffering from a serious dearth of credible minority leaders—people who can speak with authority to an increasingly multiethnic electorate. And the shortfall is especially glaring in regard to Latinos, who are the country’s fastest-growing minority group (they represented 7.4 percent of the electorate in 2008, up from 6 percent in 2004 and 5.4 percent in 2000) but are trending heavily Democratic, despite their religious, family-first leanings (George W. Bush took 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004 versus only 31 percent for John McCain in 2008).

This is where Fortuño comes in. For Republicans, using Fortuño to fuel the eternal flame of 2012 speculation serves to make the GOP seem, at least, like a more welcoming place for Latinos—however whimsical his chances of reaching the White House currently are.