Well, Ebbie, Kucinich successfully launched a court action to be included in one of those primary debates...and he won it. The powers that be had less than 24 hours to do something about that and they did...they managed to pull together an extraordinary session of high judges at a state supreme court level to overturn the lower court's ruling, and they did it with an hour or two to spare before the start of the debate! Can you imagine the urgency that someone in high places attached to achieving that?

That is simply incredible, and it tells me that this wasn't a matter of "rules" at all. It was a matter of a ruling power structure deciding in no uncertain terms that a specific politician had to be muzzled for the sake of some larger political purposes.

You can look it all up for the details if you want. It happened in one of the western states, I think it might have been Nevada.

Rules such as you refer to are interpreted by lawyers. Different lawyers seem to reach different interpretations of the same rules. That can depend on who they are working for, I think, and how much they get paid.

To assume that it's all an honest and well-intentioned process or that it necessarily has anything to do with truth and justice would be highly naive, in my opinion.