See Steve Benen. I may comment more later.

Update: Here’s a good analysis by The Incidental Economist. Bottom line, this is more of a tremor than an earthquake.

Before I get into the debate, please note that Rand Paul says we are all corporations. We are all chartered by a government and as an entity have legal rights separate from our owners? Weird.

[Update: Sarah Palin also says corporations are people. Are you paying attention, baggers?]

As I lacked the stomach to watch the GOP debate last night, the best I can do is link to other reactions to it — in no particular order —

Eugene Robinson, “GOP Debate Land”

Steve Benen, “Ten-to-One Isn’t Good Enough for the GOP”

Ezra Klein, “No Winners in Thursday’s Debate, But Many Losers“

This’ll get the Truthers pumped up, although it shouldn’t. Richard Clarke claims that in 2000 and 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, former CIA Director George Tenet hid intelligence about al Qaeda operatives in the U.S. from the White House. From The Daily Beast:

Clarke offers an incendiary theory that, if true, would rewrite the history of the 9/11 attacks, suggesting that the CIA intentionally withheld information from the White House and FBI in 2000 and 2001 that two Saudi-born terrorists were on U.S. soil—terrorists who went on to become suicide hijackers on 9/11.

Clarke doesn’t know why Tenet would have done this, but he believes the CIA may have been trying to recruit the two Saudis to be informants. Of course, after 9/11 Tenet and others in on this plan would have gone into massive butt-covering mode.

There have been all kinds of speculation and rumor about what the CIA might have known about the terrorists prior to 9/11, and these rumors helped give birth to the Truther movement. However, Clarke’s story places some of this narrative during the Clinton Administration. Even if you believed the haplessly incompetent Bushies somehow pulled off the Mother of All Conspiracies to give Dubya dictatorial powers, it’s even more absurd to think that the Clinton/Gore White House was in on it before the 2000 election.

Clarke’s theory is far more plausible, especially given some of Tenet’s other bizarre judgments (remember the “slam dunk”?).