{"id":2543,"date":"2008-05-08T12:02:52","date_gmt":"2008-05-08T17:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2543"},"modified":"2008-05-08T11:18:32","modified_gmt":"2008-05-08T16:18:32","slug":"full-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2543","title":{"rendered":"Full House"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So about 600 or so of my closest friends joined us at the Northland Inn in Brooklyn Park last night for the first <em>ever<\/em>\u00a0 debate, anywhere in the world, between nationally-syndicated conservative and liberal talk show hosts.\u00a0 Michael Medved took on Ed Schultz in the two-hour &#8220;Donnybrook in Brooklyn Park&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0 The event was jointly sponsored &#8211; this may be a national first &#8211; by AM950 Air America Minnesota and AM1280 The Patriot.<\/p>\n<p>I co-MCed the event with former Minnesota state representative Matt Entenza.\u00a0 We did a point-counterpoint format, switching off between me questioning Schultz and Entenza querying Medved.\u00a0 Each response got two minutes; the other party got a minute&#8217;s rebuttal; if needed the original respondant got a minute worth of redirect.<\/p>\n<p>Well, officially, anyway.\u00a0 There were a few times it was hard to control the flow of things &#8211; but we did our best.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>A few random observations, in no particular order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Advance ticket sales as of the day before the event were roughly 4-1 in favor of AM1280 fans.\u00a0 The lefties hit the doors late, however, so I estimate the crowd ended up about 2.5 or 3 to 1 conservative.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The lefties, however, made up for the numerical disadvantage with&#8230;er, enthusiasm.\u00a0 Not that that was a bad thing; it was a fun evening.<\/li>\n<li><em>While I&#8217;ll admit my bias<\/em>, I think it&#8217;s fair to say that Medved won on knowledge of facts and their coherent, articulate presentation.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>What Schultz lacked in knowledge and ability to answer a question, however, he more than made up for with sheer volume.\u00a0 He attacked the podium for every question, no matter how innocuous, at top volume, barely needing a microphone most of the night.\u00a0 Face red, veins bulging, fingers poking the air in front of him for emphasis, he looked a bit like a banana-republic dictator on the dais.\u00a0 But in a good way.<\/li>\n<li>Schultz had a very politician-like tendency to dodge the questions that were asked, and swerved handily into Carville\/Begala-caliber snarking points as a substitute for actual command of the issues.<\/li>\n<li>The audience was&#8230;let&#8217;s just say &#8220;animated&#8221;.\u00a0 In the interest of fairness, the heckling was bipartisan (although there were a group of people down to stage-left that were, I&#8217;ll be polite, bellowing like baying dogs at Medved).\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The first half of the debate involved questions from Entenza and I.\u00a0 For the second half, we took questions from the audience, on written index cards.\u00a0 We found a lot of good ones &#8211; Entenza and I probably had 100 questions to sort through.\u00a0 But there were some others and&#8230;well, let&#8217;s just say that I gotta shout out to America&#8217;s talk show phone screeners on the left <em>and <\/em>the right.\u00a0 Whoooie.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a tough job.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Leftyblogger Gavin Sullivan <a href=\"http:\/\/gavinsullivan.blogspot.com\/\">was there <\/a>with a camera and his own review.<\/p>\n<p>If you were there, feel free to drop a comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So about 600 or so of my closest friends joined us at the Northland Inn in Brooklyn Park last night for the first ever\u00a0 debate, anywhere in the world, between nationally-syndicated conservative and liberal talk show hosts.\u00a0 Michael Medved took on Ed Schultz in the two-hour &#8220;Donnybrook in Brooklyn Park&#8221;.\u00a0\u00a0 The event was jointly sponsored [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-narn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}