Take a look at the questions from the past debate (just the questions). Is this really helping send the message the RNC must to deliver to win in November?

What’s maddening about this malpractice by the RNC is that even the current chair knows what the main stream media is and who they are promoting. In a recent interview on MSNBC, Reince Priebus fought back against a question “loaded with DNC talking points” and quickly articulated his talking points by going around the media complex.

That response is perfect for an interview in enemy territory, but on a debate stage when one is expected to answer the questions given to you, simply ignoring the egregious premises of questions and rehashing a stump speech is seen as dodging the question. Although it is motivating to conservatives that yell at liberal programming on their televisions everywhere when former Speaker Newt Gingrich blatantly says he rejects the premise of (or in some cases, the entirety) the questions posed in a debate, the real issue is that Newt does not need to do that.

In a day where anyone can produce a semi-pro live stream with $50 software and a built in camera on their computer, the RNC can certainly produce a professional debate moderated by those who will actually ask questions the people of America need and want to hear. The main stream media may own the debates when it comes time to face President Obama, but the RNC willingly has our candidates debate not each other, but the gatekeepers that are the main stream media. Those gatekeepers ask questions such as, “Why didn’t the Bush tax cuts work?”

There have been over 20 debates or forums for these candidates to deliver the message that liberty, self-governance, and free enterprise leads to a prosperous nation. This view is a stark contrast to the current President and his policies. However, that message is continually choked off by the gatekeeper moderators who keep the focus on things such as English being the official language. This is either laziness or intentional sabatoge by the RNC. They are allowing the media to choose the Republican Presidential candidate, not Republicans.

Tonight’s debate on CNN at 8 p.m. ET will be be moderated by Wolf Blitzer. Does the RNC actually think that tonight’s debate will be more insightful than the past 20? Here’s a thought, Mr. Priebus: Host an internal live-stream debate and invite the media outlets and C-SPAN to set up a camera. Have some new-media moguls and some Tea Party Congressmen moderate. The American people will be far more informed by one event like this than all of the other 20+ debates combined.

Mr. Priebus knows this can be done, why hasn’t he done it already?

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) Sunday’s debate began much the same way as Saturday night’s, with Gingrich saying Romney was a “relatively timid Massachusetts moderate” whose state ranked fourth from the bottom in job creation when he was governor.

But confronted with one of his campaign leaflets declaring Romney to be unelectable against President Barack Obama, Gingrich hedged. “I think he’ll have a very hard time getting elected.”

Romney said he had created more jobs in one state than Obama has in the entire country, adding that it was important to replace “a lifetime politician” like the president with a different type of leader.

Santorum, too, took a swipe at Romney, asking why he hadn’t sought re-election as governor after one term.

“Why did you bail out? And the bottom line is, I go fight the fight,” Santorum said, referring to his time in Congress in the House of Representatives from a blue-collar district.

Romney jabbed back with a reference to Santorum’s lucrative career in the six years since he lost a re-election campaign in 2006.

“I long for the day when instead of having people to go to Washington for 20 to 30 years, will get elected and then when they lose office, they stay there and make money as lobbyists or conducting their businesses.

“I think it stinks,” Romney said.

Moments later, Gingrich appeared irked and accused Romney of using more than his allotted time to respond.

“I realize the red light doesn’t mean anything to you because you’re the front-runner.”

“Could we drop a little bit of the pious baloney. The fact is you ran in `94 and lost (to Ted Kennedy). … You were running for president while you were governor. … You’ve been running consistently for years.”

Read more at the Associated Press.

Today, it was reported that jobless claims spiked higher…yet again. The CBO reported that, through the last 11 months, the federal government has spent almost $1.3 Trillion more than it took in. European banks are on the edge of collapse and the entire world economy balances precariously on the edge of a global depression. If the US economy hasn’t technically yet entered another recession, it is only a matter of time before it does.

The housing market is set for another downturn. The number of Americans in the labor force is at historic lows. There is no prospect for economic recovery at any point in the future. I could go on and on, but you get the point. The economy is teetering on the edge of another collapse and government debt has so suffocated us that we are flirting with a period of permanent decline.

And yet, at last night’s GOP debate at the Reagan Library (!), neither John Harris with Politico nor Brian Williams with NBCMSNBCCOMCASTGE, asked a SINGLE question about these issues. Nothing about government spending, debt or the economy. Instead, we were treated to almost 90 minutes of questions on HPV vaccines, immigration, FEMA, TSA, welfare, poverty programs (more in need after 2+ years of Obama than ever) and science. Science?!?

Seriously, do John Harris and Brian Williams need an up-to-date calendar? Are they stuck in the 90s, when the economy seemed fine and all we had to worry about were so-called ’social’ issues, ’smart growth’ and school uniforms. We thought we were fat and happy then and could afford the luxury of the ’small’ issues. We aren’t anymore, but that is all they fed us. If I closed my eyes, I don’t know that I could have told you whether this ‘debate’ was for President of the state legislature.

Now, of course, John Harris and Brian Williams aren’t really idiots. They know perfectly well what year it is and what issues consume Americans these days. They know the economy sucks and is likely to get worse. They understand that large swathes of the country are worried about government spending and our debt. They realize that over 70% of Americans think the country is on the wrong path. But, asking any of those questions would afford the GOP candidates the opportunity to criticize the media’s protege, Barack Obama. Obama is a product of journOlisters like Harris and Williams. They glide-pathed his way to the White House. But for them, his approval ratings would be in the teens. Last night showed how far they are prepared to go to keep him in office.

The ‘tell’ was revealed early. In the first minute, Brian “I’m-a-lot-more-lefty-than-you-thought” Williams signaled that he was going all-in with Aces and Eights.  He made a reference to the bad economy and stated that “Americans” blame it on eight years of Bush. (!) Never mind that Obama and the Democrats had two years and $1 Trillion of our kids money to indulge their lefty policy fantasies. He then went on the attack against Gov. Rick Perry, using flawed talking points from ThinkProgress to try to undercut the very real Texas jobs miracle. That it was his opening play tells you how much that record terrifies them.

John Harris later nervously stepped up to the microphone (how much were his knees knocking under the table?) to cherry-pick excerpts from Rick Perry’s book to goad the other candidates to declare Perry unfit for polite society. Most, fortunately, didn’t take the bait. Of course, as Andrew has pointed out, they were all already on the hook by even participating in this “debate.”

It was, simply, not the finest hour of Presidential debates nor journalism. But, it also almost doesn’t matter. The public has moved on from the world Harris and Williams cling to. It is unfortunate the the GOP still plays this game, but I think they will slowly learn the lesson. Brian Williams, with his seven-figure salary and rapidly declining audience, is a dying breed. John Harris, who has pushed Politico further to the left then MSNBC, looks like the guy who arrived late to the party. He finally clawed his way to a position of influence in the mainstream media at the exact moment that influence is collapsing.

I hope their performance last night is studied in future journalism classes. They showed us what it looks like when you slip the bonds of journalism and become partisan hacks. Old media is dead. Long live the new media.

The very premise of the Republican presidential debate, hosted by NBC/Politico and broadcast by corporate welfare queen MSNBC proves that conservatives don’t understand the power the media is trying to exert over the next election.

It is an insult to the house of Reagan that MSNBC would try to pass itself off as a fair news organization with the eight Republican candidates giving the sneering, snobby and snide enemy a certain imprimatur of legitimacy.

The only reason the GOP is in a fighting stance in the 2012 presidential election is the Tea Party. The alternative narrative-drivers at MSNBC have spent much of the last two-plus years trying to frame millions and millions of patriotic and concerned Americans as violent, racist knuckle-draggers.

To dignify those habitual and unaccountable slanderers by appearing on that stage shows that apparently these Republicans and daily MSNBC punching bags don’t comprehend the scope of the media problem.

Barack Obama was elected due to the work of the media in 2008. Barack Obama will not cross the finish line in 2012 without the help of that same media–with MSNBC leaning forward as it pushes their wildly unpopular President from behind.

For instance, the moderators dared Mitt Romney to distance himself from the Tea Party–after MSNBC and Politico spent years painting the Tea Party as toxic.

Yet MSNBC and Politico conspicuously refused to bring up the massive deficits that gave rise to the Tea Party in the first place, and which the majority of Americans rightfully fear.

(Ironically, given MSNBC’s repeated meme that the Tea Party is racist, the moderators patronizingly trotted out an Hispanic anchor to ask the candidates about immigration, then dismissed him when they moved on to other issues. This was classic MSNBC race-baiting against the GOP. Why didn’t they bring up a twelve-year old girl to ask the HPV question? Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.)

MSNBC: "Gracias. Ahora sal del escenario, por favor."

Wednesday night’s moderators also treated Michele Bachmann as a second-tier candidate, despite her win in the Iowa straw poll, and tried to frame the debate as Romney v. Perry, before any GOP voters have even had a say. They are using the absolute power of media manipulation to tell GOP voters who their candidates are.

Afterwards, MSNBC’s exclusively leaning-forward “progressive” panel-Sharpton, Maddow, O’Donnell, Shultz, et. al.–a sluggers’ row of free-market media losers–sneeringly, snobbily and snidely framed the debate they’d just witnessed as a freak circus of unintelligible and retrograde imbeciles.  All while the smartest man in the room, Al Sharpton, called Galileo, “Galeo.” It is amazing how these irony obsessed leftists can’t see how foolish they look.

Why would those candidates who seek to govern the free world put themselves in this utterly absurd position, entering an arena that is so unfairly structured to make them look extreme, ugly, stupid and crazy?

I give Newt Gingrich a “C” for pointing out the obvious when he chided the moderators over the rigged line of questioning. But we knew he was going to go after the media bias on display, because that’s his new line of attack, and a sign of life in his formerly moribund campaign.

2012 will be won or lost in the media trenches. General Electric (still partial owners of MSNBC, and its crony capitalist architect) has become the poster child for rent-seeking corporate welfare and tax dodging. Do Republicans not know that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is Obama’s close friend and corporate fig leaf as chair of the administration’s jobs panel? Why did none of the eight candidates shove this back in the aggressive moderators’ faces: that they are as complicit in the debt crisis–that they refused to bring up in the debate–as Obama himself?

MSNBC is the administration’s government-supported public relations operation, continually featuring news segments framed by the George Soros-funded and John Podesta-led Center for American Progress and Media Matters for America. The latter is partially funded by a labor movement that considers those that appeared on the Reagan stage “sons of bitches” and has declared “war” on them. MSNBC even injected an SEIU hit job ad during a debate break.

My message to these GOP candidates, while they’re licking their wounds this weekend, is this: you only have yourselves to blame.

When the New York Times and other media outlets push false “anti-science” and “racist” memes, intentionally distracting from Obama’s debt disaster and the jobs crisis mega-disaster–subjects that MSNBC did everything it could to steer clear of at the Reagan library–remember this: you willingly walked into this trap set by those willfully seeking your destruction.

Worse yet, MSNBC’s ratings would constitute a national disaster worthy of FEMA intervention. On Wednesday night, the Republican party invited millions of unsuspecting independent and Republican viewers into a venue that holds a majority of them in contempt.

Am I calling for a boycott? No. I’m not boycotting dog-fighting rings–I just wouldn’t ever entertain the thought of going to one. So the question is: Why would you? With all due respect, I have no choice but to question the judgment of those who would willingly subject themselves to a forum that puts them at the mercy of political opponents in the media who wield “objectivity” as a weapon–opponents who unsurprisingly used last night’s opportunity to craft narratives designed to help reelect Barack Obama.

In 2008, we watched John McCain’s campaign repeatedly play the role of Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy. Last night was a demoralizing reminder that the next GOP standard-bearer will find him or herself on their back after the media has pulled away the ball.

Those in the Tea Party, who in 2010 made the conservative resurrection possible, have learned everything they need to know about the mainstream media, and will be less than enthusiastic about a candidate who hopes to achieve positive results by chumming up with those who actively seek their destruction.

Mr. Immelt as the newly appointed pied-piper for the future for American industry suggests, (as Immelt wrote to shareholders):

“The interaction between government and business will change forever. In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also, an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.”

For the last three years, Mr. Immelt has been in the vanguard for this new relationship between business and government, as a member of the Administration’s “Economic Recovery Advisory Panel”.

During the wild Congressional spending spree of the last couple of years, GE miraculously became the largest beneficiary of the government’s Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) bank bailout. Although GE did not initially qualify for TARP, the company’s $18 million annual investment in battalions of Washington DC lobbyists convinced Administration regulators to push that “reset” button and extend TARP guarantees and subsidies to GE. Public records demonstrate GE Capital, the company’s massive financing arm, pocketed $120 Billion in loans from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation at interest rates of less than 1% and snatched 25% of the entire $340 billion in subsidies from “Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program” (TLGP) rescue fund.

Unlike other highly regulated financial institutions that secured Federal back-stops, including Bank of America, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase; GE was not required to curtail use of risky derivatives or pass the Fed’s liquidity “stress test” to qualify for taxpayer funding. GE was also exempted from new regulations restricting executive compensation at firms like AIG and Goldman Sachs. Mr. Immelt took advantage of GE’s special treatment to pick up $30.9 million in total compensation over the last three years, while GE shareholders suffered a catastrophic 46% loss as the company’s shares crumbled from $35 to $19.

Mr. Immelt took advantage the new “reset economy” to globally expand GE’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) unit to over 40,000 people in India. Its NBC television network funded a series called “Outsourced” to humorously showcase what happens to off-shored American jobs.

Here at home, Mr. Immelt rearranged GE’s affairs to virtually eliminate the stiff corporate taxes most other U.S. corporations will pay for government to be the “regulator; “industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner” for the benefit of GE.

Mr. Immelt financially expressed his appreciation for the Administration’s “interaction between government and business” by directing GE to invest heavily in its MSNBC 24 hour television news unit. Lead commentator, Keith Olbermann, who once donned a mask of Bill O’Reilly at the Television Critics’ Association in Hollywood and made a Nazi salute, received a hefty raise from $4 million to $7.5 million a year. His side-kick Chris Matthews, former Chief of Staff for legendary Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil, also stepped up to a $5 million annual contract.

This is the same Chris Matthews who stated on air that his job at MSNBC is to do everything he can to “help” President Obama succeed. Mr. Matthews added:

“Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is, ‘We are above that now. We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial. We stand for something.’ I mean, in a way, Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world. He’s sort of God. He’s going to bring all different sides together.”

The American people should be highly suspect of the intentions of Mr. Immelt as the national point person for jobs and competitiveness. The Obama Administration has bank-rolled GE’s continued transformation from a consistently profitable American manufacturer to a predominantly off-shored and spectacularly leveraged financial casino powered by taxpayer dollars. The Administration and Jeffrey Immelt have greatly benefitted from their Crony Capitalism relationship; the American people not so much.

After being on defense the entire time during NBC’s “Education Nation” multi-day event, she was put on a list of “Most Hated People in America,” alongside Osama bin Laden.

Now I know what you may be thinking: what conservative teacher-hater could be so over the top?

Try *Huffington Post* writer Keli Goff, who wrote:

“American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is about to join Osama bin Laden on the list of Most Despised People in America. And if even one tenth of [Davis] Guggenheim’s film [“Waiting for Superman”] is to be believed, then this distinction is well earned and well deserved.”

Wow!  Randi Weingarten, who has been described as willing to “protect a dead body” in the classroom, is taking heavy fire from the Left.  This is big.

Goff continues:

“I had no idea until seeing this film that Teacher’s Unions give more money to political parties and politicians than the NRA. Yes, you read that correctly. So the next time a politician asks for your vote and claims to be “for the children,” ask them if they are also for the teachers’ unions, specifically tenure protections. Because you can’t be for both, plain and simple.”

“Waiting for Superman” seems to be the tipping point for many liberals who are rightly horrified by the state of our nation’s inner-city schools (many of which Weingarten negotiates with personally).  The American public is beginning to realize that their tax dollars have been propping up a corrupt, immoral system and are demanding sweeping changes.

Victor Hugo is credited with saying, “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

The teachers unions see their power slipping away.  They know their time is almost up.  But don’t expect them to go without a hellacious fight.

Teachers unions suggest that the way to retain “good” teachers is to pay them all more.  The collectivist mentality is that every teacher is equal, works equally hard and should be compensated equally.

Many reformers believe that the way to spur improvement and innovation is to reward success, hard work and hold the adults accountable for student achievement.  That, of course, flies in the face of collectivism because it incentivizes individual teacher achievement.

This is a result of organized labor having such an iron grip on many American public schools.  Weak-kneed school boards and administrators have allowed Big Labor to be the gate-keepers of reform efforts.

And worse, apathetic taxpayers allow Big Labor to call the shots.  Just ask Washington, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty.

Fenty has been aggressive at reforming DC Public Schools, which has frittered away hundreds of millions of dollars over the years and produced some of the worse results in the country.  Fenty hired Michelle Rhee, a reformer that pushed for performance pay for teachers, making it easier to remove ineffective teachers and other reforms that are an affront to labor leaders.

According to Politico, the American Federation of Teachers plopped $1 million down to defeat Fenty and thus Rhee.  It was successful and now Rhee’s DC days are limited.

So labor unions know if they can’t knee-cap the reform initiatives, they can defeat the leaders pushing the ideas.

School employee unions have been steadfast in their defense of their members.  The end result?  Bad teachers stay in the system.

A New York City principal was quoted in New Yorker magazine as saying Weingarten “would protect a dead body in the classroom.”

One has to wonder what type of quality education a “dead body” could deliver to students.

With “Waiting for Superman,” a new documentary on the state of public education, as well as NBC’s Education Nation taking center stage this week, a serious debate over labor reform must accompany any discussions about the education system.

If teachers want to take the credit for pockets of success, they must also share the blame for widespread failure.