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The big loser of the South Carolina GOP debate Saturday night had to have been the audience. It was painfully obvious to all with eyes to see that the audience was cooked, packed with donors backing Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. In fact, such was the transparency and desperation of the neoconservative Establishment that its attempts to salvage its candidates' diminishing prospects while weakening the frontrunner and first runner-up were at once pitiable and laughable. In the real world, Jeb Bush supporters are rarer than Elvis Presley sightings. This is consistent with Jeb's abysmal national polling, to say nothing of...

The CBS presidential debate in Greenville, South Carolina, started off with a moment of silence in memory of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose death was announced earlier in the day. And the debate that followed was a sort of tribute to the late jurist. Not that Scalia was much talked about. Every candidate agreed that the Senate should not confirm an Obama nominee, and all but John Kasich promised to appoint a conservative originalist. But the back-and-forth had a certain resemblance to Supreme Court arguments in which Scalia typically peppered lawyers with sharp questions from the get-go. The fireworks started on...

There is much digital ink being spewed this morning about Trump being "out of control" at the debate last night.Well, guess what -- there's a point where righteous anger reaches its boiling point, and perhaps Trump got there last evening.  It wasn't just stacked audiences and "enhanced" audio sound effects.  It was also the other candidates, including Cruz in particular, who flat-out lied about his position when it came to Chief Justice Roberts.He said he'd "never nominate him", but in point of fact he wrote an op-ed strongly supporting and praising him for a magazine of national circulation, National Review, when Roberts was up...

Malkin: RNC Approved Debate Moderator: Beltway Elitist John "Pulverizer" Dickerson Who is the moderator of tonight's South Carolina GOP debate? He's another not-so-moderate, card-carrying member of the D.C. media ruling class.John Dickerson is the host of Face the Nation on CBS News, political director for the network, and a longtime political correspondent for Slate and Time magazine. If there were ever a poster boy for inside-the-Beltway journalism, Dickerson is it.*snip* Perhaps most notoriously, Dickerson penned a screed last year advising President Obama to "Go for the Throat!"; "declare war on the Republican Party;" and "pulverize" his political enemies over gun control, climate change, and immigration.Dickerson...

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"CONFIRMED: South Carolina Debate Will Be Another GOP Party Insider Audience Stacked Against Trump" At the New Hampshire debate last week the House was stacked against Trump— And it showed — The Republican audience roared throughout the debate for the GOPe candidates. It was only until Donald Trump confronted the stacked audience that they began to not appear so in the tank for the establishment candidates. Donald Trump shushed Jeb Bush at GOP New Hampshire Debate. Then scolded the audience and Republican Party for its ticket policy. Trump claimed the GOP only gives tickets to certain campaigns and GOP donors....

Marco Rubio has no shortage of admirers in the "conservative" media who have stopped at nothing to spin things--like his third place finish in Iowa--in his favor. Predictably, some of the same suspects are laboring tirelessly at this moment to control the damage that their candidate inflicted upon himself on the evening of February 6 at the New Hampshire GOP debate. For example, one radio host chastised a caller for allegedly failing to recognize that Rubio is no different from any other politician in relying upon talking points. Another insisted that what Rubio said about President Obama's nefarious designs for...

Opening Super Bowl 50 Note. I knew who the teams were. I did not recognize all of the products/services that were being advertised, so; I didn't get many of the jokes. Finally, I didn't know any of the performers in the halftime show. I believe I am out of the demo. The debate Saturday night was, I thought, the best of the series. It had to do with what we've talked about before: the candidates are more familiar with their own material, they know what to expect from their opponents, and they know how to pace themselves through at 2+...

The good news for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida was that he entered Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire with the wind at his back, having gotten an unexpected third place performance in the Iowa Caucus. The bad news for Rubio was that he arrived at the debate with a target drawn at his back. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie fired at that target with both barrels, staggering the young presidential candidate. Rubio did not help himself by making the rookie mistake of repeating a line about President Barack Obama at least four times, suggesting that he was preprogrammed and...

What a glum, drab debate. ABC clearly tried to make all the candidates look bad, and the bad blood between the candidates left over from Iowa meant that they just did not care about showing any level of solidarity against the media, as they often do. Christie successfully tore down Marco Rubio for the first hour of the debate, but made himself look like a royal, braying jerk in the process. Normally in these posts, I have three winners and three losers, but I don't think there even were three winners - but there were a whole bunch of losers....

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina feels ill-treated after being left off the debate stage this weekend in New Hampshire - and some in the media agree with her. "Our debate process is broken," Fiorina said Wednesday in a letter to the Republican National Committee (RNC), which is partnering with ABC News to host the debate. "Networks are making up these debate rules as they go along -- not to be able to fit candidates on the stage -- but arbitrarily to decide which candidates make for the best TV in their opinion.” Her campaign released an email Thursday morning asking...

Fox News will host its final Republican primary debate of the cycle on March 3, in Detroit, Mich. While a March debate hosted by Fox had always been on the RNC's debate schedule, the exact day and location were not yet known. The debate will be held five days before the state's primary on March 8. The network also announced that anchors Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace will return to co-moderate the debate. Donald Trump boycotted the last Fox News debate in January partly over Kelly's inclusion as moderator and the network's refusal to remove her from the...

Last night's Fox/Google GOP debate, without the court jester, was finally a substantive conversation. I appreciate moderators who aren't afraid to ask tough questions and not accept canned responses. Unlike the disastrous CNBC GOP debate, Fox's Kelly, Baier, and Wallace didn't rely on presenting lies in the form of a supposed objective questions. But Fox failed miserably with one particular question. Their partnership with Google brought a young, Muslim Youtube "activist", Nabela Noor, to the debate via video. She asked the following question: "In 2015, the number of hate crimes against Muslims in the U.S. has tripled and on social...

Video at link. Under-card debate starts at 7pm EST, 4pm PST. Main debate starts at 9pm EST, 6pm PST.

FOX News debate anchors knew they would have a record audience tune in to their Republican debate because of Donald Trump. So, in November, they purposely planned several zingers to get under his skin. Then they all congratulated themselves for their debate antics. And they opened the floodgates of hell on the candidates for future debates by liberal anchors. They are shameless. The anchors didn't even ask a question on the Obama economy, the worst recovery since the Great Depression, until 73 minutes into the debate. The FOX moderators won over Media Matters, who said, "The Fox News moderators appeared...

Fox News and Google have invited three YouTube personalities to ask questions at the Jan. 28 GOP debate - including a Muslim advocate who describes Donald Trump as a bigot and who visually portrayed him as being in agreement with national socialist Adolf Hitler. "We have a presidential candidate whose loudest message reeks of hatred and Islamophobia... turning on the news now is scary, and oftentimes, humiliating," the Muslim woman, Nabela Noor, says in a December YouTube video. She admits to becoming a Muslim political activist amid the growing criticism of Islam's doctrines. "The current social environment for Muslims today...

Fox News and Google have invited three YouTube personalities to ask questions at the Jan. 28 GOP debate — including a Muslim advocate who describes Donald Trump as a bigot and who visually portrayed him as being in agreement with national socialist Adolf Hitler. “We have a presidential candidate whose loudest message reeks of hatred and Islamophobia… turning on the news now is scary, and oftentimes, humiliating,” the Muslim woman, Nabela Noor, says in a December YouTube video.

[SNIP] UPDATE: Now more of the story is coming out. We can see what provoked Roger Ailes. In a more complete statement issued last night, Fox erred again in editorializing, "We're not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute...." Rather than stick to the facts, Fox then argued for journalistic integrity, a reasonable point, but more of concern to insiders than to the masses. It's one thing for Trump to say he'll pull out and Fox ratings will be hurt. It's quite another to carry a vendetta and threaten the...

With just five days until Fox News airs the final GOP debate before the Iowa Caucuses, Donald Trump is reigniting his war with Megyn Kelly. "Based on ‪@MegynKelly's conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate," Trump tweeted while campaigning in Iowa on Saturday. Trump's feud with Kelly has been one of the most memorable storylines of this raucous GOP primary. In recent weeks, it has heated up. In a lengthy Vanity Fair profile this month, Kelly boasted of writing the now famous debate question about Trump's history of misogynic...

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump argues that Fox News’s Megyn Kelly shouldn’t moderate the upcoming debate on January 28 in Iowa, three days before the Iowa caucus. “Based on @MegynKelly’s conflict of interest and bias she should not be allowed to be a moderator of the next debate,” Trump posted to Twitter on Saturday. Kelly was criticized for being unfair to Trump following the first GOP primary debate. And two days ago, Kelly was charged with unleashing “on Donald Trump and Sarah Palin,” who recently endorsed the GOP frontrunner. “Breaking tonight, a moment with the potential to change the Republican race...