It's been said that it takes 10,000 hours of experience to master any skill. Which means these guys are all now master debaters, right? I mean, holy schnikes, how many of these things does it take?

Apparently at least two more. The first one is tonight at 9pm Eastern on ABC. Livestream here.

Also, you can follow on Twitter at hashtag #NHDebate, and campaign reps for every candidate will be applying lipstick to their pigs in the Twitter #spinroom.

Then, for Saints and Lions fans I guess, there's another debate tomorrow morning at 9am Eastern on NBC. I doubt anybody here will be sobered up enough for that one after tonight's drunkblog liveblog, but TiVo.

Also, for additional entertainment value ABC stuck Diane Sawyer in one of the moderators' chairs again tonight. I'll take the over on whether she "visited a pharmacy" earlier in the day.

Now let's do this thing!

Standard reminder: Your comments do not automatically display. So don't ask "Why aren't my comments displaying?" They don't display.

They're not posted comments a la chat room. Instead they go to queue, which the producers (cobloggers) read, and we post them, by hand, if we think they make a good point.

Liveblog thingy below the fold. more...

Posted by: andy at 04:50 PM | Comments (348)
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Washington Monthly looks at what might happen in DC if Obama is out on his ass in 2013. It's the stuff of nightmares! Interestingly, there are little to no worries about the debt, deficit, unemployment rate, jobs... I guess they assume these won't be problems with a Republican President.

The selected quotes are not what I consider to be true or false but are what make these progs wake up screaming. This is what they're afraid of.

What If He Loses.

... there’s also a widespread assumption that extreme positions taken in the primaries will fade in the general election as candidates "move to the center," and will disappear entirely once the serious business of governing begins. Surely President Newt Gingrich would not get rid of child labor laws. Surely President Perry would not seek to eliminate three cabinet departments.

We don’t think that this year, with this GOP, those assumptions are warranted. And so we asked a distinguished group of reporters and scholars to think through the hitherto unthinkable: What if one of these people actually wins?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:05 PM | Comments (214)
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Cincinnati at Houston (4:30pm EST) and later Detroit at New Orleans (8:00pm EST), which would be a really dumb time for the Republican Presidential candidates to hold a debate in New Hampshire. Dumb dumb dumb.

We so dumb sometimes I can't stand us.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:45 AM | Comments (580)
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I linked a clip of these guys explaining Kenny Roger's horrifying "Coward of the County" earlier in the week.

Another funny bit from this same show is a woman calling in to explain her "sexceptions list," a list of five people her husband has agreed she could sleep with should she ever get the chance. On her her list are people like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Ben Affleck. Her husband's list is more... practical-minded, and she doesn't understand why he's "wasting" his list by filling it with "lame" picks like "the girl from the Safeway deli counter, the girl at the gym with the big boobs..."

But the whole show is funny. If you've got something to do while you play it in the background, I'd just go ahead and play all ten parts, starting with this one. It's about 100 minutes total, something like that.

This is from before the 2008 election, and they also both signal they're dislike of Obama. They don't talk much about it, and it's tentative and not flame-throwing like actual red-meat conservatives would give you, but it's nice to hear someone in entertainment not digging Obama before not digging Obama was cool.

Funny stuff. Bear in mind it's unrated and there's a lot of cursing and some sex talk in there.

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 AM | Comments (61)
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Pretty soon a sizable chunk of the GOP electorate is going to have to start dropping back to its second-choice candidate as the field gets winnowed. If you had to pick another candidate today, who would you pick?

Poll thingy below the fold. more...

Posted by: andy at 09:57 AM | Comments (199)
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Football's on the docket today, both college and pro, so I expect Dave will be along shortly with a cheerleader to criticize. And there's a debate tonight at 9pm Eastern that we'll be liveblogging while watching football with the volume muted.

In the meantime, Steyn has a great piece on the faux empathy of the left if you need to return your blood to a boil this morning.

The short life of Gabriel Santorum would seem a curious priority for political discourse at a time when the Brokest Nation in History is hurtling toward its rendezvous with destiny. But needs must, and victory by any means necessary. In 2008, the Left gleefully mocked Sarah PalinÂ’s live baby. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to a dead one.

Liberals stake out this moral high ground where they "care" about all sorts of "people": The Poor™, The 99%™, The Children™, Minorities™, Undocumented Citizens™, etc. ad nauseam.

But they sure don't seem to give a crap about any individual human beings, do they? It's all about creating and preserving groups that can be pitted against one another for electoral advantage.

As a matter of fact, they're downright hostile to individuals. And especially those in the earliest stages of life.

[Update]: Another good post on the topic by Peter Wehner.

Posted by: andy at 03:58 AM | Comments (518)
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The racist cartoon appearing in the leftwing hate-site the "LA Times" is based upon a 1939 film about the antebellum south called "Gone with the Wind." The LATimes is a blog which also features a limited-run print edition, chiefly purchased by footwear giant Foot Locker, to stuff into the toes of sneakers to keep their shape during storage and display.

The cartoon, depicting then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as the black slave maid from that film, employed the stereotype of the servile black (common in films from this period) to heighten the charge that Ms. Rice is an "Uncle Tom" or "house slave," disparaging racist terms used by elements of the fringe left to denigrate blacks who deviate from leftist ideology.

"It's perplexing that the LA Times never apologized for this cartoon," said one expert, after I told him to say it, "given that they recently claimed that a parody of Michelle Obama as Maire Antoinette was racist. After all, there is absolutely no inherent racial symbolism in the painting of Marie Antoinette, whereas the LATimes' cartoonist choose an image of slave, in a movie largely about slavery, during a period when blacks were frequently depicted in a racist manner. While the portrayal of the slave maid is given a pass by most modern-day cinephiles, due to admiration for the movie as a whole, the depiction itself is hair-raisingly racist and cliched. It shows a profound racial animus on the part of Jeff Danziger, and his employers at the LATimes, to choose to parody Ms. Rice with such a deliberately racially-edged image."

"I'm outraged!," said no one at Media Matters, an organization which exists chiefly to accuse conservatives of racism for political purposes. Media Matters, which is chiefly read through Andrew Breitbart's Twitter feed, was not bothered for comment, because, let's face it, we know what they'd say.

Thanks to circa.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 PM | Comments (109)
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I started watching this like three months ago. I can't say it's good, exactly, but most of the time it's watchable, which is good for TV.

Watching "The Gold Job" right now. Good episode. And Sasha Barese is pretty cute.

If you don't know what it is, it's a lighthearted, semi-comic version of Mission: Impossible, except they don't work for the government, they're self-motivated, self-employed do-gooder thieves and grifters. They were once criminals, and now they're criminals... for justice.

Anyone else watch this, or is it just me? And don't say "Burn Notice." I know everyone watches Burn Notice. I just saw the ratings a couple of weeks ago. Apparently it's much more popular than Psych.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 PM | Comments (131)
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"Always be drunk ... Get drunk militantly. Just get drunk."

That quote is from a French poet named Charles Baudelaire. Many more awesome quotes and tidbits of info at Life Magazine's Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts. Here is one from Charles Bukowski.

"Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."

Posted by: CDR M at 05:29 PM | Comments (670)
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Friday night, and the long BCS nightmare is shuffling to a close. Kansas State (11) and Arkansas (7) in Dallas Texas tonight in about 10 minutes.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say K State takes this one.

Is that a skort? It looks like a skort to me.

Update: All complaints welcome here. NSFW, unless you work for Hustler. [via Scott]

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:49 PM | Comments (158)
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