Liveblogging Immiment

I'm gonna liveblogging this here looming GOP debate. Let me say at the outside that I'm going to be doing this under a "no meta" rule. Statements of the form "candidate x did well" mean that I, as a citizen of the Republic, was, in fact, favorably disposed to what he did; not that I, as a mighty journalist, speculate that typical people were favorably disposed to what did.

I think the business of picking "winners" and "losers" in these things is basically bullshit. Normal people don't watch these things. The reason they matter is that they impact press coverage (and, these days, blog coverage). Which is fine. But people in the press should just cover the damn thing straightforwardly in a first-order way.

Photo by Flickr user irrational cat used under a Creative Commons license