• 8:16 - Ron Paul’s first question. Makes clear his position that marriage is not something government should be involved with. It’s a private, religious institution and the government aught not be dictating who can or can not associate.
• 8:30 - Paul finally gets a healthcare question but doesn’t get the chance to really go into detail.
• 8:57 - Paul mentions tha 70%+ of the public wish to get out of Iraq which brings a round of booing. However, he receives applause after continuing with his normal speech about our interventionist foreign policy.
• 9:06 - Paul is the only candidate who mentions offering people to actually opt completely out of Social Security and receives a decent round of applause.
• 9:20 - Guiliani claims we need to increase military spending to show our enemies and possible enemies that we are not to be messed with.
• 9:23 - Paul again receives boos for bringing up the need for non-interventionist foreign policies.

It was an all around crappy debate. No one really did all that well. The ‘front-runners’ spent more time bashing Clinton and cracking jokes than talking about their platforms. Paul was particularly disappointing. He was given again few questions and he didn’t take full advantage I felt of his time. The crowd however was extremely hostel to his views on foreign policy and he was booed at least twice. The group of people Fox had rounded up seemed pretty far to right. One guy called Paul ‘certifiably crazy’ and several outright called Hillary socialist and/or communist. Paul came away winning the cell phone texting poll with 34%. Huckabee in 2nd with 27% and Giuliani 3rd with 11%. Sean Hannity again accused Paul supporters of ’stacking the deck’ or otherwise mischievous behavior but stopped short of again accusing them of ‘hacking’ the system. He was far nicer to Dr. Paul in the post interview than times before which was refreshing and while he wasn’t the liveliest during the debate he seemed to have woken up a bit. Interestingly he made a comment on the number of tickets received to give to supporters. He seemed to imply that other candidates got more when Hannity brought up that he was booed. Saying that if given twice as many tickets he could have packed the house.

Overall it was probably the worst debate so far. I’m not familiar with Florida politics but the crowd seemed very neo-conish and hostel to Paul’s platform. The same statements in other debates got him large applauses got him a hardy round of booing. It interesting given Florida is 14th in per capita donations and 3rd in total contributions in the nation to the Paul campaign (including DC.)

USA Daily has a good summary of the event.

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