They're Embarrassing Our Country Blogging #1

9:32 PM: I'll say it again. Whatever Trump said, The New York Times has acted in an amazingly sleazy fashion with this Trump off the record story.

9:34 PM: I'm curious in what sense it's a bigger punishment for Mexico if the wall is higher. Like, they're going to say, we could live with 35 feet but 50 feet we just couldn't ever accept that?

9:42 PM: This is reminiscent of when Megyn Kelly asked Rove on election night 2012 whether it was “just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"

9:46 PM: "You went to Manhattan."

Donald Trump Has a Big Dick

And here's the video of Donald Trump bragging that his penis is really big. Because that already happened in the first ten minutes of the debate. After the jump ...

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And Here We Go Blogging #1

9:03 PM: Feel like crowd is more Trumpy this time.

9:06 PM: Rubes: Donald did it first!!!!

9:07 PM: Seven minutes in and we've got dick jokes. Makes me confident Rubes physically attack before the night is out. Only question in my mind is whether Secret Service gives Rubes the protestor treatment if Rubes actually attacks.

9:10 PM: Rubio's afraid to say "con man" in person.

9:13 PM: Trump's 'I haven't started on her yet' always gets the crowds going in a fairly gruesome way.

9:14 PM: Kasich: You keep writing me off and I keep losing and then you write me off again.

9:17 PM: I think Rubio lost the thread of that answer at some point.

That China Won't Unbreak

So many things are happening right now - mostly with the actors in question having no clear plan for what they're doing - that it's very hard to know where our politics will be a week from now let alone in six months. But there's one thing we can see clearly and it's worth noting: top Republican stakeholders are breaking a lot of china right now that will be very, very hard to unbreak. What seems most relevant to me is that almost all of this is being done with no clear sense of an end-game or even a clear plan.

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This Actually Just Happened

Chris Christie just a few moments ago: "No, I wasn’t being held hostage."

GOP Pioneers Poignant Self-Parody

TPM's Lauren Fox is at CPAC today and found a lonely presentation by a GOP strategist which approached self-parody (emphasis added) ...

"We make it so easy for them to make villains out of us," Madrid said. "We just fall into the trap over and over and over."

"Do you have suggestions about what we should say," one CPAC attendee asked in the hall after the official presentation.

"Don't talk to people the way you wouldn't talk to your family," Madrid responded. "I am not going to give you silver bullet words. I am just going to say don't say bad things. Don't offend people."

Welcome to the GOP

Trump campaign official arrested by FBI on charges tied to Bundy Ranch standoff.

Gushing Romney Accepts Trump Endorsement

In some ways Mitt Romney's emergence as Twitter elder snarksman of the Republican party is stranger than Donald Trump's emergence as frontrunner. His speech today is obviously meant to be a weightier affair, a graver denunciation of Trump and Trumpism. But here's video from 2012 where a gushing Mitt accepted Trump's endorsement and praised him to the stars.

Yes, I know, politician's are hypocrites. Big surprise. But still. Watch the video - after the jump. I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of it.

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Racist Wingnut Harmonic Convergence

Many of you will remember this. Back in 2013 there was a disruption at a CPAC panel on race. Not surprisingly, the panel topic was a version of 'the Democrats are the real racists.' The actual panel was entitled "Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You're Not One?" But there was a sort of audience revolt in which attendees got up and started saying, 'No, wait, we're the racists.' It basically went downhill from there. Here's Benjy Sarlin's write up from 2013 (he was there in the audience as it happened.) One of the ringleaders was a guy named Matthew Heimbach. And he's now one of the guys who's attacking black protestors at Trump rallies. Specifically, he was the one attacking that woman at the event Tuesday in Kentucky.

A Most Intriguing Question

In his heart of hearts, would Chief Justice John Roberts prefer a conservative successor to Antonin Scalia even if that means the court is hobbled with eight justices until 2017? We talked to experts on Roberts and the court to find out.

New Light on the Nomination Process

Every human system has both formal and informal rules. US presidential nominating processes are no different. But it's often not clear what the informal rules are until a dramatic change of circumstances leads to their being violated. One of those is coming up now in the GOP nominating process. There was a very interesting AP piece today showing that while Donald Trump is in a commanding position he's not yet winning a high enough percentage of delegates to win the nomination. As Stephen Ohlemacher and Steve Peoples explain, Trump is currently winning only 46 percent of the available delegates, a big plurality but not a majority.

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Rubes Events Canceled in Lexington and Baton Rouge

Rubio events in Lexington, Kentucky (notice) and Baton Rouge (notice) canceled.

It is important to recognize that a candidate can only be in so many places on a given day. As the campaign progresses and more contests come at a more rapid clip, campaigns will narrow their focus on the most important races and the ones where they can garner the most delegates. All that said, that doesn't sound like a great sign for the Rubio campaign. In fact, it sounds a lot like what the other evidence tells us: that the Rubio campaign is shifting from a plan to win to a plan to hold on as long as possible in the hopes of some dramatic shift in the dynamics of the race. In that context, fighting everywhere makes no sense: better to find a few states where a win seems plausible and focus resources there.

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Please, Stop

I confess it is difficult to take reporters seriously when they write things that suggest they don't understand the difference between what David Petraeus was indicted for and what Hillary Clinton, even by the most maximal interpretation, is accused of. What David Petraeus did was not mishandling classified information. No one ever suggested those were the facts of the case; it was lesser charge that grew out of a plea deal.

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Almost Like a Scheduled Part of the Rallies

As people were voting yesterday, white Trump supporters attacked a black protestor at a Trump event in Louisville. Story and video here.

Worst Possible Outcome

I saw a few pundits saying last night that Donald Trump had 'underperformed' in the Super Tuesday primaries. That strikes me as laughable unless you're using some metric that forced him to win every contest to meet some nonsensical expectations game. But the more I thought about last night's results the more it became clear to me that it was about the worst possible mix of outcomes for Marco Rubio and the even worse for the GOP.

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