[posted first at RedState.com]

Tomorrow night — Thursday, January 24 — the struggling cable outlet MSNBC will host the final Republican debate before the Florida primary. At the debate will be John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Oh, and… RonPaulRonPaulRonPaul. (I saw the incomparable Dr. Paul speaking at the March for Life in DC yesterday, carried live by EWTN. Good for him!)

The debate is from 9-10:30p ET at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, with the post-debate analysis going from 10:30 ’til midnight, hosted by Chris Matthews. It would seem so that the sportscaster Keith Olbermann, who evidently runs MSNBC but cannot even get close to winning his own time slot, has taken himself out of the mix. Perhaps he realizes that he is an embarrassment to his own fiefdom when he attempts to operate in any grownup capacity.

The moderators will be NBC News anchor Brian Williams and Tim Russert of Meet the Press.

Read On…

In the post-debate opinion promulgation, we might not be able to expect much better than the sportscaster from Matthews, who was talking campaigning with a Giuliani aide on yesterday’s Hardball and uttered:

Let’s not forget, you can do almost anything when you’re running against Romney.

This, of course, was Matthews’s attack on Romney’s weakness, the public perception that he will take any position or say whatever he feels will help him to take the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination.

Matthews is a harbinger of Dem things-to-come should Romney be the nominee, so the GOP will have to be ready in case he wins the party’s main prize.

As for the debate itself, it is the final Republican debate before next Tuesday’s Florida primary. It will air on a little-watched cable news outlet and PBS when Floridians might sooner be tuned to reality TV and game shows on the broadcast networks.

The questions will probably be directed to MSNBC’s target audience, the bitter American left, and the debate will not be worth viewing to those of us outside Florida who would be forced to watch via live webcast off MSNBC’s web site. (Then again, if these “debates” are part an important part of the process to you, and you want to watch, perhaps they will have a decent connection.)

For what it’s worth, this floating mass of dross is to be sponsored by this outfit, who are also doing a Dem debate on Sunday.