Whatcha say?

I that's likely baloney. That stadium is huge and it was almost entirely full. I find it hard to believe that they could fill it with friends and family.

Does it really matter? You probably had some of both going on at the same time. The biggest response I saw was at the very beginning, when Trump would not pledge to not run as an independent. And that clearly got booed.

It will be interesting to see the first poll after the debate. If you watched Fox after the debate, they had Frank Luntz with his focus group on. There was a big swing in people who came in having a positive view of Trump who switched to negative, along with plenty of really bad comments about what he did..

Which left me confused, because the Trump I saw was very much the typical Trump, nothing new. If anything, he was somewhat more reserved, he didn't openly insult anyone except Rosie O'Donnell, again.... That insult alone for me was further proof of his character, how he holds grudges, isn't statesman like, etc. So, I don't really understand the folks in the focus group that turned on him. A plausible explanation I've heard for the Trump phenomenon is that it's so early in the process that voters haven't paid attention and know little about all the candidates. But they do know Trump from TV, his brand name, etc, so that's where the support has really been coming from.

My prediction is that Trump will come way down and the beneficiaries will mostly be Cruz and Rand, with all the lower share candidates picking up some, Bush and Walker probably staying about the same. And Fiorina will be in the next main debate. But in this environment, who knows....

I also have to wonder if we didn't just see Hillary getting elected. Trump has said that he would base his decision on whether to run as an independent on how the Republicans treat him. With his ego and character, I would think the threshold for mistreating him was reached in the first minute, when they asked the pledge question. I can see him saying that this was a put up job, the GOP and Fox screwed him, so now he's free to run as an independent because of what they did.

Along with his after debate follow up he had to have lost 99% of the female vote. A tiny part of me likes that he says what he is thinking, be that good or bad. The rest of me shudders at the thought of him negotiating a peace treaty or nuclear arms deal.Refreshing at first, in this PC world, but scary one you get past the first chuckle.

No matter what happens, he has had an impact. He may shape what the rest of the field does over the next few months too. I think it is possible he will find a way to walk away and preserve his ego and not be a loser (in his eyes) in a real election.

He just did it again. He was on CNN, berating Megyn Kelly for asking him the question about women and he said "She had blood coming out of her eyes......... out of her wherever...."

A conservative group that was having him as it's keynote speaker canceled him over that. There is something seriously wrong with him and I 100% agree that I wouldn't want him handling an international crisis. Just think about the Cuban missle crisis, for example. You had the military advising Kennedy to invade Cuba, take out the missles. Unknown at the time was that the Russians had tactical nukes both on land and on their subs and the commanders had been given the OK to use them to defend the missles. What would have happened if Trump were running that show?

I hope you're right and the sooner it happens, the better.

The only member of the Joint Chiefs that JFK listened to was the Commandant of the Marines, a communist sympathizer. In the 1920s, he'd resigned his Army commission because he'd met Marines and found them as socialist as he was. Eisenhower had appointed him commandant so he'd have somebody on the Joint Chiefs he could trust.

With JFK out of the way, LBJ fired him. That freed him to express his views publicly. He could make a compelling case for staying out of Vietnam, but the antiwar senators wouldn't let him testify. The rest is history.

Assuming what you say is true, which I've never heard before, then the Marine Commandant apparently recommended that JFK not invade? If so, we owe him a debt of gratitude, because he was right and the outcome would, by all indications, have been a nuclear exchange that could easily have lead to the total destruction of the USA and Soviet Union.

I suspect Mr. Burns is talking about:

If so, he was also right in thinking we should have backed Mao because he was going to win in his battle with the Chinese nationalists.

but it sure does seem to be true. (-:

I am sure Mr. Burns with his encyclopedic knowledge of the USMC can confirm or deny this "factoid.: