As President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney prepare for their second debate tonight at Hofstra University on Long Island, we speak with George Farah, author of "No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates." The debate will feature questions from the audience that have been pre-selected by moderator Candy Crowley of CNN — a detail revealed when Time magazine published the contract secretly negotiated by the Obama and Romney campaigns and the Commission on Presidential Debates.

After Iowa, Republican Party finally figures out the fit has hit the shan, wants desperately not to get "Perot'd" by Ron Paul and his supporters. In fact, there are hints Republican operatives actually _understand_ Paul and his supporters as NOT "kooks." The key comment: "Paul agrees with us 85 percent of the time," said the operative, "and his supporters are earnest conservatives and libertarians who have no reason to support Obama in 2012 unless they're stepped on by our team."

"There are a number of people here [at Liberty Forum] who have been going to Tea Parties and have been turned off by all the nationalism," he said, "agreeing that [Republicans] all want a piece of it. The question is, how do we reach those people?"

Perhaps the better question is, how do you prevent those people from allowing what was a genuine grass-roots opposition to the Republican mainstream platform to become part of the Republican mainstream platform?