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Tonight is the Big Republican Debate on Fox News. Candidates appearing are Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich. And of course, ever present in this debate will be the corporate "persons."

Fox will be livestreaming it here, or you can follow my live-tweets on Twitter.
Discuss. :)

I may chime in on Twitter @JohnAmato

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President Obama had some opinions on the 2012 field of Republican candidates. I think my favorite was his message for Michele Bachmann.

Michele Bachmann is here, though, I understand. And she is thinking about running for President, which is weird, because I heard she was born in Canada. [laughter] Yes Michele, this is how it starts.

Tim Pawlenty:

He seems all-American, but have you ever heard his real middle name? Tim Hosni Pawlenty? What a shame.

Jon Huntsman:

Now, there's something you might not know about Jon. He didn't learn to speak Chinese to go there. Oh, no. He learned English to come here.

On Mitt Romney:

There's a vicious rumor floating around that I think could really hurt Mitt Romney. I heard he passed universal healthcare when he was Governor of Massachusetts. Someone should get to the bottom of that. And I know just the guy to do it. Donald Trump.

The Donald Trump comments are about as funny and as withering as anyone could get without descending into the nasty zone. Watch those to see what I mean.

As annoyingly insular as these events are -- and they are -- they're also an opportunity for the President to use humor as a way of disarming ongoing and aggravating personal attacks with some humor and some class, which he really did quite nicely.

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[Excerpted from Millions.]

I knew this was going to come out of Utah as soon as I heard the announcement that Jon Huntsman was going to China. I emailed Howie about it.

Ben Smith:

This, from the blog of a Utah State Rep. Craig Frank, may not be quite what Huntsman and Obama were thinking:

This is a big deal for the Governor, Utah, the United States, and…the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

Although the LDS church’s missionary program has an ecclesiastical presence throughout many parts of the world, the countries with the largest population bases (China and India) are not currently open to the church’s missionary efforts. Huntsman served his LDS mission as a 19 year old young man in the Taiwan Taipei Mission in the early 1980’s. He has since been back to the Far East on a number of occasions. Huntsman not only takes to China his political acumen but also a lifetime of membership in the LDS church. This should bode well for the LDS church’s mission to spread the gospel throughout the world, since all members of the LDS faith are under divine mandate to…”Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…” (Matt 28:19)

Huntsman’s ambassadorship not only puts him in an excellent position to address US-China relations, it puts him in an even better position to teach the gospel…in Mandarin.

The blog has since been scrubbed, GOP 12 reports, but it lives on on Google.

Is it country first or the LDS for Jon? Maybe Huntsman will receive a special eternal gift if he converts at least fifty people while being in China per year. You never know.

The headline comes from Arianna Huffington.

Why did it take until this morning for CNN to finally run a chyron saying "Safety of Rescue Operation Debated"? For 12 days, there was precious little debate about why the mine had collapsed in the first place, or about the safety of the rescue operation -- which was, by law, in the hands of Stickler, another "heck of a job" Bush special, a coal industry insider who couldn't even win the approval of a GOP-controlled Senate.

So here we are, 12 days after the first collapse, with three heroic rescuers dead, six others injured, and the original six trapped miners almost certainly lost forever. And, finally, we have Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman suggesting we "focus like never before on workplace safety" (the Governor had better be prepared for the wrath of Murray: when Hillary Clinton made a similar statement months ago about the importance of workplace safety, Murray attacked her as "anti-American.")

So why wasn't the focus on workplace safety the focus of the media from Day One? It shouldn't have taken the deaths of 3 miners for those covering the story to have gotten that message...read on

When I pointed out Murray's insipid attacks against global warming, my quotes came up in a NY Times (The Lede) article that was doing a round up of reactions about Murray. Patrick Lyons seems to be interested in the vitriol he whipped up instead of his actions.

Crooks and Liars attacks Mr. Murray’s criticism of efforts in Congress to minimize global warming; Chesapeake Climate paints his defense of coal as alarmist, and Firedoglake sarcastically paints him an apologist for greed.

Why was I accused of attacking the man when he clearly had a political agenda while controlling the media during this horrible situation and I pointed that out? Here's some of my post.

Amidst the tragedy of the trapped coal miners in Utah, Bob Murray said this:

We’re going to get them,” said Robert E. Murray, chairman of Murray Energy Corp. of Cleveland, a part-owner of the Crandall Canyon mine. “There is nothing on my mind right now except getting those miners out.

Nothing on his mind other saving the miners, really? Download (1741) | Play (1488) Download (794) | Play (322)

Digby follows up with:

Tragically, a whole bunch of people have died and others are injured but so far, we've heard almost nothing about this "star's" background in pushing unsafe mining techniques and anti-union policies and neither have we heard anything about the fact that the man Bush named to be the "mine safety czar" was such a bad choice for the job that he had to give him a recess appointment with a Republican congress...read on.