Last night's Sioux City debate

Fox news stream sucked, so I couldn't watch it all.  So I went to other pages that were liveblogging it.  But they weren't serious.  To get a serious assessment of it this morning, I went to Barone.  I respect Barone's opinion, but I don't like Romney.  As a matter of fact, if he gets the nomination, I may seriously consider not voting in this election.  Because it won't make any difference.

Barone is negative on Paul, but I may give him serious consideration.  I wince at his foreign policy statements, but I think he would be good if anybody is interested in doing more than just paying lip service to small, limited government.

Gingrich would not be as cold turkey as Paul, but I think that he would at least slow down the rate of growth of government.  That may be as about as good as we can do, from a realistic standpoint.

Perry is interesting, but he is too cowboy.  Also, he will remind people of Bush, which is a big handicap for him.  He is reliably small government conservative type, but it won't mean anything if he gets the country involved in military adventures.

I don't like Bachmann at all.  She seems more interested in attacking other candidates than attacking Obama.  This may not be fair, but that's the impression she is leaving me with.

Huntsman and Santorum may not last long enough to get a good enough look, unfortunately.

The clock is running down pretty fast now.  If I had to choose today, it would be between Paul and Gingrich.  Not necessarily in that order.  Perry may have a chance if he tones down the cowboy act.

Update:

The more I read about the debate, the worse Paul looks.  We can't use diplomacy on Iran, it won't work.  I agree we need to stay out of wars, but diplomacy alone won't do the job.  It didn't work with Japan in 1941.

Gingrich doesn't look as good either.  That leaves me with a problem.  I think that Gingrich should just stop defending his work on the GSE's and agree to give the money back to the Treasury.  The only way to stop this kind of criticism is to stop fighting it.