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?

Mike Flynn, Editor Big Government:

Little known fact; during the last GOP debate in Iowa, the RNC held their holiday party at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in DC. There weren’t any TVs among the open bars. So, no one at the RNC was actually watching the debate among candidates vying to be the standard-bearer of the party. Perhaps the RNC has throw parties during all of these debates. How else to explain its continuing acquiescence in letting the legacy media pay inquisitors to its nominees? The GOP field actually did well combatting some of silliness from Diane Sawyer, Snuffleupagas and some guy we’ll never hear from again. But, the American public was short-changed in getting 1 hour and 41 minutes (!) of chatter on issues that almost no one outside of the hard left cares about. (2 questions on the economy…kinda?) Et tu RNC?

The obvious big winner of the night was Mitt Romney. Inexplicably, he largely escaped criticism from his fellow nominees. Weirder still, as Romney is vulnerable to at least 25 attacks from the right, is the fact that Newt, et al decided to attack him from the left. Being in the same room as Snuffleupagas will do that to you I guess.

The other big winner was Ron Paul. One would have thought he were the front-runner given the attention he received from the moderator and other nominees. Santorum, inexplicably finding himself in the big leagues, reverted to form and acted like a candidate who is simply trying to get attention. His initial statement that America doesn’t need a CEO or manager, but a leader is frankly baffling. I think it speaks to a personal insecurity that he has virtually no private sector experience and no executive experience. Making awesome speeches on the House or Senate floor is not a leader. He was like a player called up to the majors who whiffed at every at-bat. Santomentum is fading.

Newt seemed neutered. He did a great professorial turn at times and reminded me how great he is in this medium, but he need to draw distinctions. He didn’t.

Perry did well, but he was mostly irrelevant tonight. He started with a great theme about Washington insiders, but pulled his punches in the end. He didn’t screw up, but he needs to quickly put points on the board.

Huntsman spoke Chinese.

Whatever happens in November, whomever at the RNC approved these debate formats needs to find a new line of work.

Alex Marlow, Managing Editor, Breitbart.com:

Fitting for a Saturday night, the tenor of the New Hampshire debate was decidedly business casual. The remaining Republican presidential candidates intermittently discussed some of the most important issues of the day between answering questions on the constitutionality of contraception and whether or not they believe it’s the government’s job to “invest” more in “infrastructure” (presumably so we can get more of those American Recovery and Reinvestment Act road signs). George Snuffleupagus was an utter embarrassment as a moderator; his gotcha line of questioning was as ineffectual as it was transparent. I don’t hold it against him, though; after all, he is a Clintonista. The blame lies squarely with ABC, who thought he was an appropriate moderator for a GOP primary debate. Diane Sawyer wasn’t exactly professional either, giggling like a school-girl getting her tootsies tickled throughout much of the night. Yep, it was the MSM vs. the GOP again, and I’m happy to say the GOP won this round handily.

Regarding the candidates, we’re officially at the point in the campaign where if Romney doesn’t obviously lose, he’s the winner by default. He was steady as usual and no one landed a clean blow to him. Mitt’s take-down of Snuffy over the bizarre contraception question was the highlight of the night. Newt was also impressive, particularly when he drew attention to bigotry against Christians. Curiously, Rick Perry said he’d send troops back to Iraq and Santorum wasn’t able to capitalize on his Iowa momentum. Towards the end of the festivities, we were finally reminded that Jon Huntsman was a member of the Obama administration, just before the Mongolian Candidate broke into Chinese to order some Szechuan Shrimp (I think…).

Joel Pollak, Editor Breitbart.com:

This was one of the best debates for the Republican field, because the candidates finally defeated their media inquisitors (they’re not “moderators” when they demand the Republicans meet left-wing standards). Gov. Mitt Romney absolutely squashed George Stephanopoulos’s attempt to use a bizarre question about contraceptives to cast him and the rest of the candidates as religious extremists. Speaker Newt Gingrich stood up to Diane Sawyer on the issue of gay marriage by challenging the anti-Christian bigotry of the left and the mainstream media. Sen. Rick Santorum challenged the premise of the term “middle class,” insisting that the United States is not a class-based society. It was amusing to watch the post-debate analysis on ABC as the journalists described their dismay that the candidates didn’t do more to attack each other, and to attack Romney in particular. There were a few attacks–Santorum did very well defending his record in response to Rep. Ron Paul–but the candidates have learned that Republican voters will not reward them for playing to the mainstream media’s tune. They know (most of them, anyway) that the main target is Barack Obama, and the candidate that wins will be the one that shows the strongest, most effective contrast to the president.

Yet federal agents accused two men from these circles of plotting to make firebombs and hurl them at police cars during the convention. An F.B.I informant from Austin, Brandon Darby, was traveling with the group and told the authorities of the plot, which he had encouraged.

We brought this to your attention on February 24th when we asked the Times to correct the record. We noted that according to the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, the assertion Darby “encouraged” the plot was patently false. On February 27th, we brought in Matthew Vadum, an expert on the circumstances surrounding the plot, to provide broader context to the Times’s smear.

Still, the error remained uncorrected.

Then, last week, a source informed BigJournalism.com that the New York Times reporter acknowledged the charge they published against Darby was in fact bogus, but still, the Times did not correct the article.

As of this writing, the false charge against Darby remains in tact.

Today, Brandon Darby filed a lawsuit against New York Times for libel and defamation. An official letter from Mr. Darby:

We’ll be following the story as it develops on BigJournalism.com and BigGovernment.com.

If you are a Tea Party activist or someone who is sick and tired of being forced to choose the “best available Republican candidate from among the worst,” then this is the event you have been waiting for.

The nominating convention will take place in America’s heartland, Kansas City, October 5^th-9^th, 2011.  Over 1 million people are expected to attend, including several of the U.S. Presidential hopefuls.

I am humbled to write that Yours Truly has been selected to act as emcee.

The purpose of the convention is not to be a third party challenge but instead, to vet U.S. Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates so that the RNC understands which candidates the grassroots Tea Party nation supports.  Should the Republican party choose to ignore the message, they will do so at their own risk.

As political pollster and author of the book Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two Party System Scott Rasmussen recently told me on my radio show, “I can’t imagine any Republican party Presidential candidate winning his party’s nomination without the support of the Tea party movement.”

The process will involve a fifty-state “grassroots” Tea Party “straw poll” and provide each state’s Tea Party and 9/12 groups a caucus area to rally and discuss their local, state, and national candidates and any legislation or issues important to their independent groups.

The organizers of the event will join me tonight on my radio show (7pmPST AmatoTalk.com) for an exclusive interview.

Could it be because the newspaper is sympathetic to the goals of the thuggish community organizers and union goons intimidating state legislatures across America and wants to help advance the liberal-left narrative?

The man with the bull’s eye on his back is Brandon Darby, formerly a far-left community organizer. This heroic defector from the Left stands accused by the New York Times and by angry radical groups of becoming an agent provocateur. Unhinged anarchists across the country would love to get their hands on him.

All over the Internet Darby’s name has been dragged through the mud by the Daily Kos and Crooks and Liars crowd. They accuse him of selling out and pushing the wrongdoers hard enough that he essentially became a co-conspirator. Search for his name with the words traitor, rat, or fink and you’ll see what I mean.

Darby got to this point after years of leading in-your-face protests, using confrontational tactics, and working with America-haters. But he experienced an epiphany and rejected the radical Left and its ever-present culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all. “I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” he said. “I love my country.”

The change of heart happened around the time he returned from socialist Venezuela where he had been trying to get the government there to donate to his nonprofit group. While in that country high officials in Hugo Chavez’s administration tried to get Darby to launch a terrorist network in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. Darby refused.

After he returned to the U.S. Darby learned two anarchists wanted to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention. Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBI’s request, infiltrated a left-wing group that hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The FBI sent Darby to meet with the plotters. “It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of ‘black bloc’ anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary,” he explained. “They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas.” (The plot and its aftermath is described in greater detail in my upcoming book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration which will be published in mid-2011. It was also referenced in Townhall.)

The 20-something plotters on whom Darby informed, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, made riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the convention site. They also manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

Thanks to the information Darby provided to authorities, police raided a residence and found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles filled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons. “They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer,” Darby said.

Darby’s patriotic effort helped to put the would-be bomb throwers behind bars. McKay pleaded “guilty” and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered “firearm,” illegal manufacture of a firearm and possession of a firearm with no serial number. A week before, Crowder cut a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 24 months in prison for possession of an unregistered firearm.

McKay received the stiffer sentence largely because he told a tall tale about Darby’s involvement in the plot.

As the U.S. Department of Justice reported in a press release available on the Internet, during sentencing the trial judge went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

McKay also confirmed that finding, the Star Tribune reported. “I embellished – I guess actually lied – that Brandon Darby came up with the idea to make Molotov cocktails.”

Yet somehow these publicly available facts could not be located by the New York Times, America’s Google-averse newspaper of record.

In the Wednesday edition James C. McKinley Jr. falsely reported that Darby had actually encouraged the conspiracy.

In the article Anarchist Ties Seen in ’08 Bombing of Texas Governor’s Mansion published February 23, 2011, the paper said Darby urged two radicals to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota:

Yet federal agents accused two men from these circles of plotting to make firebombs and hurl them at police cars during the convention. An F.B.I informant from Austin, Brandon Darby, was traveling with the group and told the authorities of the plot, which he had encouraged. [emphasis added]

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota this is absolutely, demonstrably untrue. That office stated the following in a May 21, 2009 press release titled Texas Man Sentenced on Firearms Charges Connected to the Republican National Convention:

A 23-year-old man from Austin, Texas, who was connected to a group that planned to disrupt the Republican National Convention in September 2008, was sentenced today in federal court on three firearms charges.

On May 21 in Minneapolis, United States District Court Chief Judge Michael Davis sentenced David Guy McKay to 48 months in prison and three years of supervised release on one count of possession of an unregistered firearm, one count of illegal manufacture of a firearm and one count of possession of a firearm with no serial number. McKay pleaded guilty on March 17.

Today’s sentence included a finding by Judge Davis that McKay obstructed justice at his January trial by falsely accusing a government informant, Brandon Darby, of inducing him to manufacture the Molotov cocktails.

Big Journalism has asked the New York Times to retract the false claim it made and correct the record. But even a retraction won’t come close to making Darby whole at this point.

This is not some tiny little molehill of a mistake. It is a savage, unconscionable attack on a truly great American who deserves the nation’s gratitude. It is also a wrenchingly painful smear that will stick around on the Internet for the rest of Darby’s life whether the paper ever prints a correction or not.

The implication the newspaper made was that these young men aren’t really to blame for what they did because Darby manipulated them into doing it. Isn’t it an odd coincidence that liberal bloggers are saying the same thing?

Yet another spooky coincidence: the storyline for “Better This World,” a piece of George Soros-funded celluloid agitprop that attempts to rehabilitate McKay and Crowder, happens to share this through-the-looking-glass point of view.

And it’s not the first time the newspaper has mugged Darby. It provided hostile coverage when he was outed as an informant too. Ignoring his heroism, a January 5, 2009, article focused not on Darby’s lifesaving intervention but on the feelings of “betrayal” his former allies in left-wing anarchist circles were experiencing.

Scott Crow, who with Darby co-founded the Common Ground Relief agency in New Orleans, whined the loudest after learning of Darby’s cooperation with the FBI.

“I put it all on the line to defend him when accusations first came out,” Crow said. “Brandon Darby is somebody I had entrusted with my life in New Orleans, and now I feel endangered by him.” Why someone who presumably hadn’t committed a crime would feel “endangered” by knowing an FBI informant is unclear.

You really have to wonder how such a prestigious, award-winning, agenda-setting media outlet could keep making these mistakes, if that’s what they are. But it does.

It is also important to remember that there used to be a time when spelling a source’s name wrong could get a reporter fired or at least given a humiliating dressing-down. And when the reporter’s story blackened someone’s name, it had to be right – or else.

As a journalist with 14 years of full-time professional experience under his belt, I paid my dues in the early days and got (justifiably) chewed out from time to time for comparatively minor goof-ups, so I have an idea how this might have happened.

Perhaps the reporter was pressed for time and didn’t know the back story. He may have carelessly relied on a left-wing source with an axe to grind to give him the background information he needed to add context to the story.

Maybe he was simply so politically biased against Darby that he couldn’t even see past his own prejudices and wrote that fateful phrase “which he had encouraged” sincerely believing it was true. (Snort!)

Perhaps he deliberately wrote something he knew was false or his editor changed the wording, innocently or not, to make it false.

As a cause of this I’m leaning towards good old fashioned politically motivated malice, but the nation is waiting for an explanation from the New York Times. It’s disgraceful that this damage was done to an innocent man who put his life on the line to help protect America’s hard-won freedoms.

Team Steele promised something akin to a prize fight at the recent RNC Chairmanship debate.

A Steele insider tells Power Play that the embattled chairman will “name names” and “make it personal” when he faces off with the four candidates looking to replace him as RNC chairman at today’s debate hosted by The Daily Caller and Americans for Tax Reform.

That it didn’t happen causes me to wonder if the pre-debate statement wasn’t simply stage craft, perhaps designed to get the others taking shots at him. I think Steele handled himself very well, in fact, but he has shown a tendency to enjoy playing the victim a bit too much during his term. If he wanted a me against them debate, he didn’t get it and he certainly didn’t start any fights. And while I continue to like Steele, that he lost so many PR and narrative battles, some of which he didn’t deserve, it’s that, almost as much as anything, that convinces me the RNC needs to turn the page. In prize fight terms, I ranked him fourth of the five RNC Chair contenders that took to the ATR/DailyCaller stage yesterday.

In lieu of judging it as a fight against one another, I’ve been thinking in terms of ranking them based upon how well they would likely perform as fighters for Republican candidates and the party going into 2012, especially given the unique demands of the job.

I liked Maria Cino more than I thought I would. Still, she struck me as someone who may very well need to be working for the next RNC Chair in an important role, as opposed to leading the team. She can spin it however she wants, but lobbying for Pfizer, which supported Obamacare, even to improve it on their behalf, means she was doing precisely what she now claims to have not been doing. Given that, plus the fact that even NRO didn’t buy her explanation of her supposedly Pro-Life stance, while acting contrary to it, she gets a DQ for disqualified. Frankly, after hearing her out, I’m glad we have someone like Maria Cino in the GOP. I’m just not convinced she’s the right person to be one of the leaders of it as RNC Chair right now.

I came away seeing Saul Anuzis as an able fighter, but ultimately second best in this particular case. He’s a favorite in some corners of the grassroots and I can see why. However, even as a member of the grassroots, my sense is, we need more than that. If Saul does come up short, it’ll be on the high-end fund raising side. We need a Chairperson who can work both with the base and high-end donors. It’s a fact of politics today, one to be taken seriously. For now, that ring is one in which I’m unconvinced Saul would truly shine.

As for Reince Priebus, his performance left him bloodied in my view. At times overly dramatic, repeatedly relying on catch phrases like “playing in the sand box” and “licking envelopes” didn’t impress and sometimes even insulted, as when he applied the term “sand box” to the Tea Party crowd. His remarks left the impression he doesn’t really think things out and speaks too loosely, as he did when calling Osama Obama three times in a row without catching himself. A man who likes to hear himself talk but doesn’t actually think about, or listen to how he sounds, or what he’s actually saying, or has said, can be a dangerous thing in an RNC chair. But then, we already know that. At least, I hope the committee does.

He looked on edge, or furtive, spoke from the side of his mouth and opens his eyes wider than his lips when he talks. At 38, looking at his real resume and accomplishments, beyond the PR blasts, frankly, I don’t see the heft needed for the slot. I’m afraid twelve rounds with hard fighting Democrats and an incumbent president on a national stage could leave a guy like Reince Priebus face down on the canvas and the GOP disappointed after 2012. This country can’t afford that given the crucial political and economic times we’re in. We need competence going forward, not a comeuppance.

Ron Johnson beat Feingold by putting up $8 million of his own, while raising another $4 million. Prior to the GOP wave of 2010, Priebus really had not delivered the goods in any measurable form back in Wisconsin, not so far as I can tell, despite his claims to the contrary. As a fighter, I was left with the impression that, if Reince Priebus walked into a dark room and tripped over a guy on the floor, his first reaction would be to reach for a phone to tell the world he knocked him out – and dramatically, at that. Sorry Reince, I’m just not buying it. The RNC doesn’t need a drama queen, especially not now, to say nothing of his actions behind the scenes as General Counsel and close confidante to Chairman Steele.

That leaves Ann Wagner edging out Anuzi in my book, at least for the January 3 go round. Over at The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin says she has the goods for the base. I’d agree with that. But her resume goes well beyond.

… she sure was the most telegenic and amusing. What’s her favorite book? “Well, there is my kitchen table… oh, BOOK… I thought he said bar.” A lady who drinks at her kitchen table and owns 16 guns is hard for conservatives to dislike.

It’s that, combined with her campaign management and re-districting savvy, along with her state and big dollar national fund raising success I like best. She can and will punch, calling Steele out early, without going too far. Yet, she seems calm, controlled and professional, ever a smile on her face. That may be just the kind of person the RNC needs right now, someone with both the attitude to fight and the ability to raise big money to hire the right people so they can go kick some Democrat butt in 2012, while knowing the chairperson will have their back in a scrape. That, to me, is what the RNC Chair role is really about. Smiling professionally as she does it may give Wagner just enough of an edge over Saul, perhaps. If she has Anuzi’s grassroots appeal, combined with enough Mehlman-like political and fund raising savvy, it would be a combination that would serve the RNC and the GOP extremely well, especially now.

I’m not endorsing her, nor anyone, at this point. And in a race that can end up looking like anything from selecting a prom king or queen, to a hard fought political contest, I’m hard pressed to even predict a winner. But based upon her January 3 performance, I’m far from prepared to call it over for her on a technicality like a male co-chair in Wagner’s case. It’s my understanding there may be a way around the Rule 5 business, in any event.

As there isn’t even a declared male candidate for co-chair, two women currently running for Chair, Ann Wagner and Maria Cino, are at a distinct disadvantage. Talk about your unintended consequences. There is definitely something wrong with this picture, especially as contrasted with the rules original intent. See below for that.

MORE FROM THE RNC – PAYBACK: Indiana RNC Committeeman Jim Bopp has endorsed Wisconsin’s Reince Priebus in the chairman’s race, throwing his support to Michael Steele’s leading challenger days after the incumbent chairman called Bopp an “idiot” during a radio interview. Priebus, Bopp said, “understands that we need more active RNC member participation and that members need to be empowered to hold the leadership accountable. … It was a close decision, particularly between Saul and Reince, since I think Ann has an insurmountable difficulty reaching a majority of the votes, because of our unfair gender requirement for Co-Chairman.”

The tradition, now formalized by Rule 5, was actually intended to highlight the importance of women in politics as far back as 1937.

In the Rules of the Republican Party, Rule No. 5, which concerns the “Officers of the Republican National Committee,” states:

(a) The officers of the Republican National Committee shall consist of:

(1) A chairman and a co-chairman of the opposite sex who shall be elected by the members of the Republican National Committee. [Emphasis added.]

If the RNC elects a male chair, then, it must elect a female co-chair — and vice versa. Currently, the RNC has a male chair, Michael Steele, and a female co-chair, Jan Larimer, the committeewoman from Wyoming. Both are running for reelection. So far, Larimer and Sharon Day, the committeewoman from Florida, are the only declared candidates for co-chair.

From a brief history of the Republican Party. Women should not be forced to take a back seat to men in the race for Chair of the RNC because of a once well-meaning rule that is now so obviously antiquated.

In fact, writing in US News and World Report, former White House speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush, Mary Kate Cary, believes a female chair may be precisely what the GOP needs right now. Perhaps, perhaps not, but what the RNC race most certainly needs is a level playing field.

Perhaps the most significant accomplishments of the Republican-controlled Congress was the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote. Responsive to the role of women in both party politics and government, Republicans were the first to recognize women in their platform: “The Republican Party is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom. Their admission to wider fields of usefulness is viewed with satisfaction, and the honest demand of any class of citizens for additional rights should be treated with respectful consideration.” (1872)

… The next 20 years were a time of rebuilding for the Republican Party. The effort included establishing a greater role for women. In 1937, Miss Marion E. Martin was named first assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, launching a tradition that the RNC chairman and co-chairman be of opposite sex.