The two-hour political extravaganza pulled in 24 million viewers according to initial Nielsen ratings numbers – breaking the all-time record for a non-sports cable event.
[…]A good comparison here: the largest audience that any debate drew in the 2012 election was 7.6 million.
[…]And about that coverage on Thursday: Of the two-hour broadcast, the candidates collectively spoke for one hour and eight minutes total. Mr. Trump spoke for 10 minutes, 32 seconds, with Jeb Bush in second place at eight minutes, 32 seconds – this according to University of Minnesota political professor Eric Ostermeier, who tallied it all up with a stop watch and a spreadsheet.
[…]Trump and Bush were the only two candidates who reached — and exceeded — that mark,” the professor adds. “They received more than their equal share of speaking time while the rest of the field was shortchanged.”
In third place was Mike Huckabee at 6:40 followed by Sen. Ted Cruz (6:39), Ohio Gov.John Kasich (6:31), Ben Carson (6:23), Sen. Marco Rubio (6:22), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (6:10), Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (5:51), and in last place, Sen. Rand Paul (5:10).
The Fox News moderators spoke for 32 minutes – taking up about a third of the total on-camera dialogue.
The Fox News moderators spoke for 32 minutes. They should have spoken for 10 minutes total, and in fact I saw them say that they only intended to speak for 10 minutes, just after the early debate for second-tier candidates.
Conservative Mark Levin was not please with the Fox News moderators’ performance.
He says:
Lawyer, constitutional scholar, best selling author, and conservative talk radio host Mark Levin, in an interview on theBreitbart News Saturday radio program, expressed outrage at the Thursday night GOP presidential debate hosted by Fox News.
Levin asserted, “I think that we were all duped. The fact of the matter is that this was a ratings gambit.”
[…]Levin claims that “We the people” were overlooked in the debate, and the event became a media spectacle with more emphasis on the show’s moderators than on discussing the important issues that face America.
[…]Bannon observed that the debate reeked of “opposition research” and had a definite “adversarial” tone with the questions they asked Trump and others. Levin agreed and recounted that the question they asked Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker about abortion seemed prosecutorial in nature.
It’s not just that the speaking time was unfair, and actually favored the moderators, it’s that the moderators’ questions were almost entirely tabloid-style gotcha questions:
Levin described the debate as a failure to address the two hundred trillion that America faces in unfunded liabilities, the bankruptcy of the Social Security system, the fact that Medicare and Medicaid are on the brink of collapse, that our educational system costs a trillion dollars a year and is a “complete failure,” our immigration policy is a disaster, the EPA is destroying our economic system, and that our Constitution is being undermined. Levin rebuked Fox for wasting time on “pardon the phrase—trumped up stuff. To me it is such an outrage what took place. And it was planned. The questions were planned. I am very troubled by it too.”
I think Megyn Kelly in particular was a lousy moderator, and just approached the debate as a way to attract attention to herself. She was a disgrace. People say Fox News is conservative, but they were anything but conservative during the second debate. They were in it for themselves, and the Republican Party suffered. I might as well have been watching CNN, or even MSNBC.
EPA dumps 1 million gallons of mining waste into river
Yes, the Environmental Protection Agency is polluting rivers. They are not admitting responsibility, and the mainstream news media is covering for them.
Imagine if a business dumped a million gallons of mine waste into Animas River in Colorado, turning it into what looked like Tang, forcing the sheriff’s office to close the river to recreational users, and prompting the EPA to warn farmers to shut off water intakes along the river.
Oh, and imagine that the business also failed to warn officials in downstream New Mexico about the spill.
Such a calamity would probably lead the nightly news, with calls from environmentalists and the EPA for investigations, fines, lawsuits, and tougher pollution controls.
Except in this case it’s the EPA itself that is to blame.
Newsbusters notes that the mainstream media is mum – because they are all for big government, and big government never makes mistakes:
Yet here we are four days later, and the story has gotten very little visibility outside of center-right blogs and outlets. That’s largely explained by how the wire services have handled the story. After the jump, readers will see headlines and descriptions of the stories which have appeared thus far at the web site of the New York Times:
No headline acknowledges the EPA’s admitted responsibility for the spill. Only one headline mentions the EPA at all.
[…]Although the first AP report parroted the EPA’s claim that “that there was no threat to drinking water from the spill,”a story at the Denver Post yesterday indicated that “Tests show (Animas River) water (is) acidic as coffee,” and that“EPA officials on Saturday morning also said they are bracing for another surge of acid discharge from mines above Silverton.” In other words, the ordeal is far from being over.
But look on the bright side – at least the EPA is hard at work banning coal production so that we all have to pay more for electricity, including heating and cooling our homes.
If I could close four departments out at the federal level, I would choose the EPA, the Department of Energy, the IRS and the Department of Education. Get rid of failure.
The day before hundreds of pro-life activists prepared to flood Planned Parenthood’s offices with requests to schedule a mammogram, the organization issued a statement admitting that they do not offer the cancer screening procedure at any of their facilities.
The calls were placed today as part of “Call Planned Parenthood to Schedule Your Imaginary Mammogram Day” – an event organized by pro-life activists in response to President Obama’s statement during the presidential debate Tuesday that the abortion organization offers mammograms.
“There are millions of women all across the country, who rely on Planned Parenthood for, not just contraceptive care, they rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings,” the president had said, repeating a claim he had made earlier this summer in an interview with Glamour magazine.
But Obama isn’t the only one.
The notion that Planned Parenthood offers mammograms is one of the most enduring myths about the abortion giant. The claim is regularly trotted out by pro-abortion politicians eager to defend taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, but wary of invoking its controversial status as the country’s leading provider of abortions.
Not only does Planned Parenthood not provide mammograms, but the abortions they perform have been linked to the epidemic of breast cancer that is afflicting women today.
What about the claim that only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is doing abortions?
Practically every defender of the organization, fighting to preserve its federal funding, reverts to the 3 percent figure. How could you possibly, they ask, defund a group that devotes itself overwhelmingly to uncontroversial procedures and services for women?
[…]The 3 percent factoid is crafted to obscure the reality of Planned Parenthood’s business. The group performs about 330,000 abortions a year, or roughly 30 percent of all the abortions in the country. By its own accounting in its 2013–2014 annual report, it provides about as many abortions as Pap tests (380,000). The group does more breast exams and provides more breast-care services (490,000), but not by that much.
The 3 percent figure is derived by counting abortion as just another service like much less consequential services. So abortion is considered a service no different than a pregnancy test (1.1 million), even though a box with two pregnancy tests can be procured from the local drugstore for less than $10.
By Planned Parenthood’s math, a woman who gets an abortion but also a pregnancy test, an STD test, and some contraceptives has received four services, and only 25 percent of them are abortion. This is a little like performing an abortion and giving a woman an aspirin, and saying only half of what you do is abortion.
Such cracked reasoning could be used to obscure the purpose of any organization. The sponsors of the New York City Marathon could count each small cup of water they hand out (some 2 million cups, compared with 45,000 runners) and say they are mainly in the hydration business. Or Major League Baseball teams could say that they sell about 20 million hot dogs and play 2,430 games in a season, so baseball is only .012 percent of what they do.
Supporters of Planned Parenthood want to use its health services as leverage to preserve its abortions, as if you can’t get one without the other. Of course, this is nonsense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides free or low-cost breast- and cervical-cancer screenings — without aborting babies. State health departments provide free cancer screenings — without aborting babies. Community health centers provide a range of medical services — without aborting babies.
I think it’s a good idea to be able to respond to Planned Parenthood’s rhetoric. These are the people who kill babies, and we have to be able to respond to their false claims. When a majority of people learn the truth about the baby killing business, it will stop.
WINTERY KNIGHT 