Live Coverage Of The First Republican Debate

Just check his glowing Twitter mentions from members of the press corps: The media horde is likely to declare John Kasich the winner of the debate. For viewers at home, he’s not as much of a standout, at least based on his middling Google search traffic. But the post-debate spin often matters more than the reality.

Rand Paul brags he has a balanced budget and says he wants to cut foreign aid to countries that “hate us.” That’s fine, but the two ideas have very little to do with each other. The U.S. spends less than $50 billion a year on foreign aid, less than 1 percent of the federal budget.