[guest post by Dana]

Next Tuesday, Fox Business will be hosting the next GOP debate coming from Milwaukee. The debate lineup was released tonight, and it has a few surprises: Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee did not make the top-tier cut, and will be debating earlier. Also, Gov. Pataki (who??) and Lindsay Graham were cut altogether.

The selections were made by the financial news network based on national preference polls. Candidates had to average at least 2.5 percent or higher in the four most recent major polls conducted through Wednesday to be featured in the prime-time debate. The candidates achieving that are: Donald Trump (25.3%), Ben Carson (24.5%), Marco Rubio (11.8%), Ted Cruz (10.0%), Jeb Bush (5.5%), Carly Fiorina (3.0%), John Kasich (2.8%) and Rand Paul (2.5%).

The threshold for the undercard was 1 percent. The following candidates meet that criteria: Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum.

Earlier today, Christie seemed resigned to his debate fate, and downplayed it:

“The bottom line is you need to be on a stage and debating. I will be on a stage debating one way or the other wherever they put me.” He added on MSNBC that “I don’t really care” about making the cut for the primetime debate.

PRIMETIME
Donald Trump
Ben Carson
Marco Rubio
Ted Cruz
Jeb Bush
Carly Fiorina
John Kasich
Rand Paul

EARLY DEBATE
Chris Christie
Mike Huckabee
Bobby Jindal
Rick Santorum

Predictions on who drops out before next Tuesday??

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

A pro-Ku Klux Klan pro-lynching message was displayed on a computer at Berkeley High School yesterday afternoon, so naturally today saw a mass walkout by students and teachers protesting the “unsafe” environment and the school administration’s “slow” and “unacceptable” response. The students marched the few blocks from their campus to nearby UC Berkeley, where they encouraged the big kids to join them in their airing of grievances.

This whole contretemps seems to be following a typical pattern: a racially-tinged incident by an anonymous perpetrator is reported, campus activists seem to instantaneously be ready with a response including various demands for redress and an ostentatious demonstration to attract the media, everybody goes nuts for a few days and burns up the Internet with allegations and counter-allegations [just doing my part here, folks], then we find out that the initial incident was manufactured by individuals sympathetic to the aggrieved parties.

There is certainly a chance that this may be legit, and either the KKK is making a resurgence in, of all places, the East Bay of Northern California or else some sad loser is hacking into the system in order to harass minority students. But don’t be surprised if it turns out that this was contrived by activists to be used as a nice excuse to skip a day of classes and get some more media attention for the needy #BLM crowd.

UPDATE: School’s principal, claiming to have ID’d the perp: “We did probe the student’s motive, and my sense is that the motive in writing these comments was not to actually carry them out. Other motives did come up in the conversation that I’m not going to address right now.” Many thanks to commenter Mitch for the update.

– JVW