As with any jingoistic carnival worth enduring, the content ostensibly central to Tuesday’s GOP debate was far overshadowed by that which seemed to be at its periphery: the commercials.

On Friday, after Ben Carson passed him in the polls in Iowa, Donald Trump called his fellow candidate “super low energy.” Carson offered a response Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by referring to his violent past: “There was a time when I was very volatile.”

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Sunday, Joe Biden, who announced this week that he would not run for president, disputed accounts that his son Beau, on death’s door, told him to run for president. “Nothing like that ever, ever happened,” Biden said.

“Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign,” the New York Times reports—more money, mostly traveling through channels legalized by the Citizens United decision, from fewer (overwhelmingly Republican) sources than in nearly half a century.

In an interview Sunday with NBC, Republican presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson said he does not think a Muslim person should ever serve as president: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”

On Saturday night, Donald Trump appeared in the parking lot of Urbandale High School, in suburban Des Moines, Iowa, to speak to the teens gathered there before their fall homecoming dance. “Hello folks,” Trump said. “Oh, they’re so young. Look at them, so young and beautiful and attractive.”

“Had a record crowd in Boone, Iowa,” Donald Trump captioned a photo taken in Ames, Iowa, and uploaded to Facebook, with the student section at Saturday’s football game between Iowa State and Iowa Universities. Wrong on both counts!

Somebody keeps stealing Hamptonite Andy Sabin’s “Hillary for Prison 2016” signs. “Living in a town with a lot of left-wing wackos, that’s what happens,” he said. So he put up new ones, atop of a 12-foot pole, surrounded by an electric fence, watched by a surveillance camera.

At a campaign event on Saturday in Laconia, New Hampshire, Chris Christie announced that, if elected president, he would ask the CEO of FedEx, Frederick W. Smith, to devise a tracking system to combat illegal immigration.

At a campaign event on Thursday, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said, to a smattering of applause, “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”