Wednesday, October 03, 2012

MILE HIGH. The undead Jim Lehrer has made the final selections. Let the blood feast begin!

9:05. Aw, what a nice husband. Tough crowd!

9:06. "Skew toward the wealthy" vs. "Education and training." Well, I'm sold.

9:09. The economy is a tender topic. Someone asked Romney for help. Did he give them a dollar? No, it will take a different path. One with five different parts. Four million jobs with energy! And the best schools in the world! And small business! Mitt Romney hires people. So no, ladies, no dollar for you. Oh, and no abortions.

9:09. The Crypt-Keeper caught that trickle-down thing. Is Marlin Fitzwater still alive? Must be shitting a brick.

9:10. Governor Romney and Barack Obama agree.

9:11. Oh no, are we still doing the note-writing thing? Or was Romney just checking his nails?

9:12. Mitt Romney doesn't have a tax cut. On that scale. And Paul Ryan will be President, again. Now Obama's checking his nails. Bad idea to have a manicurist on site.

9:15. Aha, oil and gas are up -- but on private land! Ha ha, private wins. They'll give us all coal, but they'll wash it first, so it'll be clean, like the lettuce you buy in bags.

9:16. The battle of the tax cuts is very gentlemanly so far. Barack Obama's some socialist, huh?

9:17. Jim is having trouble telling the President to shut up.

9:18. He's having trouble telling Romney, too. No tax cut that adds to the deficit? I thought you were a Republican. Hmmph! But you do have five boys. And they LIE.

9:20. 54% of these people are not taxed at the corporate rate. How do they live? Oh oh, Obama brought up math. Romney will have to bring up geography, maybe recess. I see Obama's still cutting taxes. We'll all be living tax-free, eventually. Now a Clinton shout. Boy, that speech was something, huh? Ah, new "definition of small business." A socialist one. It doesn't include Donald Trump, who is calling in favors now, demanding to be allowed to attend the next debate from a giant desk at the back of the stage, with a gong or buzzer.

9:23. Romney said Obama was right about something. What a gent! But now he's telling us the President wants this guy in St. Louis to go from 35% to 40% in taxes. And that's over 50% if you're in St. Louis and you know Mitt Romney. Jobs! Jobs! Did you all catch that? Balanced budget, yeah sure, but jobs.

9:24. Obama can say "trillions" with a straight face. Oh he's good. Also, he's juuuuust starting to get into the Bush years. If Romney doesn't behave he'll bring out that Bush impersonator who used to be so popular on Leno.

9:25. Romney should have demanded a microphone. A second microphone, because he can afford it. Well, he got to talk more, and give us some more of that high-speed accounting yak that will sweep him to victory... oh wait, food stamps! You hear that, North Carolina? [cameras shows white hands crumpling transcript]

9:28. Romney has math too: Either you raise taxes, cut spending, or you "grow the economy." Surprise! There is an easy solution! He'll cut Obamacare! And Jim Lehrer! I'm kinda warming to him. AND... he's going to combine some agencies. That sounds cool. I'd like to see Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts combined into some kind of Voltron of bombs and urine-soaked crucifixes.

9:30. Obama cut stuff too, like war and ignorance. Hmm, that sounds reasonable. Oh, and Eisenhower. And look, Obama knows he's doing well in this great country of ours. He must be hoping Romney will tell us all we're 47% again.

9:31. I support Simpson Bowles for someone else. Yeah, yeah, I took care of that. Oh yeah, well you created a bunch of debt. People don't understand that I'm a tax-cutter and he's raising taxes, albeit hypothetical, and it's killing people in the future, like in 12 Monkeys.

9:34. Romney doesn't want to go down the path to Spain, unless it goes to Majorca on a private yacht.

9:36. Romney = ExxonMobil and corporate jets. And shipping jobs overseas. Romney smiles, realizing that if he loses he can bathe in the blood of his Vietnamese slaves, so who needs it.

9:38. America was not built on ten-year-old schoolbooks. If the schoolbook lobby is screwed, we're all screwed.

9:39. But that oil and gas tax tax break is an accounting thing. Obama tries to throw him -- end it! Romney's not listening, though, as has been clear throughout, so good for him, why am I listening to this shit? But Obama's cool, he smiles at the Solyndra thing. He knows 95% of us think it's some kind of a new car.

9:40. The basic structure of Social Security is sound, and Obama is sure Romney agrees. (Go ahead, Governor, after this nice grandmother story it won't sound so good.) Now Obama philosophizes that entitlements are actually things we're entitled to. I thought the Return of Reverend Wright tape was supposed to put an end to this sort of thing.

9:43. Yeah, Romney's no dummy. Social Security is sac. Ro. Sanct. Michelle Malkin and Erick Erickson hold hands and jump into the Grand Canyon. Also, Obama's cutting Medicare to pay for this Obamacare which has nothing to do with medicine.

9:45. "If you're 54, 55, you might want to listen." Gasp!

9:47. Obama's trying this Clinton-explainer thing where he tells us how vouchers are a rip-off, but he's not as good at it so he brings in his grandmother again. But he's using the AARP for support -- that's a Soviet organization committed to Early Bird anti-colonialism.

9:48. Did you hear Romney, grandpa? He's not going to kill you!

9:49. If I don't like Medicare, I'd rather destroy it and get my own high-premium plan and take ALL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS DOWN WITH ME.

9:51. Does it seem to you people as if this low-intensity thing is just making viewers sort of zone out? You probably don't realize I've been blogging the 1988 debate for three stanzas. Ha ha, made ya look.

9:52. Can we have an ad of Romney saying "regulation is essential"?

9:54. This guy sure likes regulations.

9:55. Well, see what you did, Romney, now Obama gets to talk about Wall Street as if he's the sheriff instead of the madame at the whorehouse.

9:56. On Dodd-Frank: Everything you want to do to punish big business hurts small business. It's like big business has a gun to small business' head. You make one false move and he'll shoot!

9:58. Well, Romney avoided saying "death panels." And he's onto small business again. This is as close to coherent argument as he's gotten. But then he says Romneycare was good because it was state-level, which is like saying The Avengers would have been better if it had a budget of $20,000 and starred Frank Stallone. (Yeah, I know.)

10:00. Obama seems to have missed this gambit and is praising Romneycare, which will allow Romney to come back if he's smart enough.

10:03. He's not smart enough. He's just praising the shit out of Romneycare. No one could believe  he's against Sociamalized Medicine on principle, so to buy his argument, you have to believe he's going to do something similar but better. He's sure not campaigning as a smash-the-state type. How's that an alternative to a sitting President?

10:06. Which is why Obama is asking what he's going to replace it with.

10:07. "Free people and free enterprise." I see Cletus and Festus at the ole Doctorin' Shack, using their wits and freedom to figure out how to remove a tumor with a whittlin' knife. (Romney's naming big hospitals, but they all take gummint money.)

10:10. I thought Obama was just vamping, but with this "details" schtick he seems to be thinking pretty well on his feet. Romney comes back with Reagan and O'Neill, which has already been played; also, the old Democratic House was full of venal grifters, God bless 'em, who could be bought -- infinitely preferable to the block-everything, scorched-earth lot we have now.

10:12. Okay, I'm gonna use my own bipartisan President -- Abraham Lincoln! Who was a tax-and-spend liberal. Math and science teachers, blah blah... that pained grimace Romney's been working isn't working for me. He seems to be waiting for a wind machine.

10:17. Romney loves teachers -- they're in the Constitution! So too are other unfortunates. And here, with Obama, we have trickle-down socialism. Say, that's good, trickle-down socialism -- why didn't Romney think of that? Call me! My rates are reasonable!

10:19. Obama's filibustering, because he thinks we haven't heard enough about his successful programs yet. But I suspect average Americans are tuning that out; it doesn't matter how other people are faring. Poor Romney, he wants to know why Obama's sacrificing education to the environment. Who cares about the environment if we're not well-educated enough to enjoy it? Better we have a firm scientific foundation for our global warming denialism as we're drowned by molten icecaps.

10:24. "You've been great, Jim." What a suck-up!

10:25. Oh Christ, bi-partisanship? Isn't Romney's speech the same one Bush gave when he came out of Texas? Obama punts and talks about the middle class, which is probably smart, considering everyone now believes if the guys in The Defiant Ones were a Democrat and a Republican instead of black and white, they would have killed one another in the first ten minutes.

10:30. Obama: Detroit! Loopholes! Fight every single day! Vote for more of the same! Romney: I'm concerned about America! Middle-class squeeze! 12 million new jobs! Romneycare not Obamacare! Don't worry, I'll preserve the military-industrial complex!

Can they both lose?

UPDATE. I see by the Internet that media people think Romney won this debate, by which I assume they mean that they are smitten with his boyish charm. I have as low an opinion of my fellow Americans as the next rootless cosmopolitan, but even I can't see them falling for this. That leaves only one alternative: Roseanne Barr for President. Hey, at least I can live with myself!

UPDATE 2. Shots fired! Commenter mds: "That's Rosanne Arnold. As far as I know, she still hasn't released her long-form divorce certificate."

74 comments:

  1. BG, ribbons in my hair9:16 PM

    Hahahaha. I think I'll stay here. :-)

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  2. Leeds man9:20 PM

    Hope you're well stocked with refreshments, Roy.

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  3. Greg Hao9:36 PM

    Since when did Bowles-Simpson become more Important than Jesus. It seems to be the response to everything.

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  4. clinton, clinton is this thing on?

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  5. our greatest humanitarians

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  6. Greg Hao9:40 PM

    Did Archie and the gang write Romney's zingers?

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  7. chuckling9:48 PM

    Man, Obama's getting stomped so far. I think the problem is that when it comes right down to it he agrees with Rommey about all the major issues. Austerity, health care, mass murder by flying robots, you name it. Obama has failed in his own eyes for not doing a better job of implementing the Republican platform.

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  8. chuckling9:49 PM

    It shows.

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  9. chuckling9:55 PM

    Another check in. Obama just cant stop gushing about how much he agrees with Romney on all the major issues. That's the problem. The real choice in this election is who will be most effective at implementing disasterous conservative policies both a home an abroad. So far, I'm leaning towards Obama. With a Democratic congress, he can push the entire conservative agenda. Romney, poor asshole that he is, would not be anywhere near as effective at implementing his billionaire friendly policies.

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  10. KatWillow9:59 PM

    Bowles-Simpson is the US version of the Greece/Spain plan. The MOTUs are panting to do it to Americans.

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  11. M. Krebs10:14 PM

    Tedious chuckling is tedious.

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  12. Not watching the debates myself because, you know -sanity - but Roy, this bit was hilarious:

    ". AND... he's going to combine some agencies. That sounds cool. I'd like to see Defense and the National Endowment for the Arts combined into some kind of Voltron of bombs and urine-soaked crucifixes."

    - trex

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  13. chuckling10:27 PM

    Took a shower to wash off the stench of Obmaney. Came back out and Obama still can't stop talking about how much he agrees with Romney. Man, this sucks.

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  14. Substance McGravitas10:34 PM

    None more boring.

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  15. wileywitch10:34 PM

    I don't know what it means, exactly, but I think "zerb" expresses my feelings about that debate right now.

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  16. M. Krebs10:42 PM

    chuckling doubles down on being tedious.

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  17. Hey, did you notice that Roy asked if they could *both* lose? He's a traitor to the Obama! Not one of us! Not one of us!

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  18. Halloween_Jack10:51 PM

    Didn't watch it myself, but Josh Marshall's take on it was that Romney lied his ass off and Obama didn't call him on it, so Obama loses, sort of. Which might be true if everyone who's voting watched and cast a vote right afterward, the way they do on American Idol, but there's actually another month or so until the election, and I would bet real money that the liar-liar-pants-on-fire ads are already being worked up.

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  19. DocAmazing10:55 PM

    Jesus, Roy, you deserve hazardous duty pay. Watching our dime's worth of difference losing value--I just can't bring myself to do it.

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  20. hellslittlestangel10:56 PM

    Kind of boring. I was hoping Romney's pants would fall down. Oh, well, when is the next one?

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  21. Fats Durston11:01 PM

    I'll throw in my own ugh for Obama adopting the rightwing frame of po' folks gettin' loans as responsible for the housing crisis.

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  22. DocAmazing11:01 PM

    If I recall correctly, Zingers had the Peanuts gang on the wrappers. They may have been the writing team.

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  23. DocAmazing11:02 PM

    And by "refreshments", I suspect he means "powerful narcotics".

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  24. The MSNBC guys, and Ed Schultz in particular, are ripping Obama a new one for not fighting harder. I actually thought the same thing watching Obama debating McCain four years ago, and McCain's no Romney. Al Sharpton made the point that Romney's lies will be exposed days from now when video of the debate is compared with video of Romney's flips on his earlier positions, but by then it'll be too late. My big hope is that Obama's performance in the next two debates will be so much better that this one will be forgotten.

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  25. Tehanu11:14 PM

    Oh, Roy, poor Roy, but you do seem to have kept your spirits up through the entire, er, blartfest. So glad I didn't hafta watch it.

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  26. zinged, or zung?

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  27. Leeds man11:17 PM

    but by then it'll be too late

    Why too late, satch?

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  28. hellslittlestangel11:41 PM

    My takeaway from the debate is that Jim Lehrer is an old fucker. Was he expecting Shields and Brooks?

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  29. DocAmazing12:09 AM

    I'd prefer Shields and Yarnell.

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  30. DocAmazing12:09 AM

    It's the zinger, not the zong.

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  31. hellslittlestangel12:13 AM

    I had to look that up. A mime-dance-comedy team? Hard to believe; guess I'll have to check the youtubes.

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  32. hellslittlestangel12:14 AM

    Eww. Even the thumbnail stills are too much for me.

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  33. PulletSurprise12:25 AM

    VP debate in 8 days in Danville, Kentucky... United Mine Workers turf. Somehow I don't think that Ryan will play the best there.

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  34. calling all toasters1:19 AM

    I was going to drink whenever Romney said "welfare" or Obama said "General Motors." Now I just have to drink every time I think about how Obama pooched this. Sadly, the distilleries don't work fast enough.

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  35. Another Kiwi1:29 AM

    Make it zimple to last your whole life long

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  36. I'll always love Futurama for throwing in a "shields at maximum yarnell" joke, which, I dunno, like 5 people would understand.

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  37. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:43 AM

    I kinda sorta half listened to the debate on NPR, lying in bed resting before a graveyard shift and it's a wonder I didn't doze off. What a bloodless, gutless performance on both of their parts. The mee-ja is reporting it as a Romney victory, but it's a pretty sucky win, all told.

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  38. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:52 AM

    I'm hoping that Obama was using this first debate as a rope-a-dope exercise, and that an overconfident Mitt will really screw up the foreign policy debate. I'm not holding my breath, though.

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  39. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard6:11 AM

    No, he was expecting Brooke Shields.

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  40. Pope Zebbidie XIII6:57 AM

    Romney: Loves Sesame Street - wants to sell it to Wall Street.

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  41. M. Krebs7:52 AM

    Yeah, Duncan. That's exactly how people here think. You're so perceptive.

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  42. "That leaves only one alternative: Roseanne Barr for President."

    That's Rosanne Arnold. As far as I know, she still hasn't released her long-form divorce certificate.

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  43. satch9:19 AM

    Why too late? Because the initial impressions will have a chance to harden, people will remember the feeling they had when they first heard them, and the corrections will be drowned out by more current events.

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  44. montag29:45 AM

    it's not the sort of thing that happens on Very Serious Television these days, but, it would have been refreshing, when the Rmoneybot disregarded the "follow the rules etiquette" program, if Lehrer had simply yelled, "Romney, just shut the fuck up!"

    It would have made for great television to see a sprocket or two go flying, a solenoid clicking uncontrollably and a puddle of hydraulic fluid spreading behind the `bot's podium.

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  45. Halloween_Jack9:54 AM

    Oh, come on. There have to be more than five people around who remember the seventies, aren't there? *long silence, looks around, voice rising:* Aren't there?!?

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  46. Uncle Kvetch9:57 AM

    Can they both lose?


    Now don't you worry, Mr. E -- no matter what happens next month, we all lose!

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  47. Halloween_Jack10:00 AM

    "Days from now"? Does Al Sharpton understand the intertubes? Does he think that a counterattack ad has to be sent to some grouchy old craftsman who takes the order, muttering under his breath, and sticks it on the bottom of a big, teetering stack on his workbench? There's already a FiredBigBird Twitter account.

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  48. Marilyn Merlot10:20 AM

    I kept waiting for Romney to use the "jerk store" line.

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  49. Unless you're a bankster or an important part of the M.I.C., Uncle Kvetch is right.
    ~

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  50. BigHank5311:07 AM

    It's a Romney "win" because he didn't actually kick a grandmother in the crotch or wipe his ass with an orphan. I suspect the bubbly was flowing at campaign headquarters

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  51. Leeds man11:14 AM

    Bit blurry, but possibly false memories of them on Sonny and Cher or the Smothers brothers.

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  52. edroso11:48 AM

    There is room for all on our Big Tent, or rather our Big Top, and plenty of peanuts.

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  53. Marilyn Merlot11:51 AM

    God, that was tedious. It's telling my roommate spent most of the debate washing dishes and I spent most of the debate yelling at the TV and comparing Romney to the Ninja Turtles character Krang.

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  54. KatWillow2:16 PM

    Why does no one suggest that Billionaires ought to endure "austerity" as much as poor elderly people and uninsured sick people? Take ALL their money, make them get jobs at Walmart & McDonalds.

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  55. stratplayer3:16 PM

    I've decided to buck the Nervous Nellie trend and enthusiastically embrace the rope-a-dope and eleventy-dimensional chess theories concerning Obama's strangely lassitudinous (is that a word?) affect last night. As Aravosis just pointed out, Romney's massive prevarications may already be coming back to bite him in the ass. The MSM may want to gin up a horse race, but they don't like being played for fools, even if they really are fools. Which they are.

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  56. stratplayer3:21 PM

    If Romney zang him, Obama would have been zung.

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  57. So ... Willard didn't get in a "there you go again" calibre headshot?

    That means he lost, period. Math is cruel but it never lies: his boat is sinking slower now - but bailing with a bigger sieve isn't going to cut it this late in the race. Obama mailed it in because, just like Bubba said at the DNC shindig, mathematics trumps everything else - & as long as he doesn't let Romney score any major hits, Car-Garage-Boy's hooped, no matter ho nice his hair is or how much he smirks. Romney knows it too - that's why he acted so damn maniacal: he can feel this thing slipping away, a day at a time, & there seems to be bugger-all he can do to turn things around.

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  58. M. Krebs3:25 PM

    If you remember the seventies, you weren't having enough fun.

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  59. admiral.naismith4:01 PM

    Even for someone like me, who enjoys politics, that debate was super fucking boring. On the other hand, I finished a good novel that retold the Aeneid. Much better than the debate.

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  60. wileywitch5:53 PM

    Well, to imagine how the "undecided voters" might choose, I imagined who they might think "won" if the undecideds were sitting in a sound-proof booth and figured they'd choose Mittens Smiley.

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  61. Because no one who doesn't work for the Billionaires could get on the general election ballot for either of our major parties.

    They prefer compliant employees.
    ~

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  62. MBouffant6:38 PM

    Oh gawd, all too real. Used to see Shields pestering people in Union Sq. in S.F. in the very early '70s, well before the big time.

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  63. redoubt7:42 PM

    There are at least two more debates scheduled, and to misquote Mencken, "no one ever went broke underestimating the short attention span of the American public." Too late would be November 7th.

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  64. redoubt7:48 PM

    Duly noted.

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  65. Tiny Tyrant9:05 PM

    upside down commenting system' g'ah!

    viewing the end of a thread first where everyone is lounging about in a post-coital fugue doesn't work for me.

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  66. whetstone9:09 PM

    At first I thought Lehrer made a great case for killing PBS; if Mitt had looked into the camera and said "and I'm firing your smirk ass, David Brooks," I'd have gone the next day for an absentee ballot. But now I think Lehrer was on to something.

    Just letting them answer the same fucking question over and over again for the first half hour, trying to find the most oblique possible way to describe how to raise revenues while pretending not to raise taxes resulted in so much infantilizing nonsense that I think Lehrer was just sitting there thinking "fine, assholes, drown in it."

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  67. Check the "discussion" button at the top of the column. You can choose the order in which you can view comments.

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  68. Another Kiwi10:15 PM

    There's peanuts?

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  69. It wasn't Lavinia, was it? Because that book is great.

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  70. Tiny Tyrant6:26 AM

    of course, it's a discussion. thanks!

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  71. admiral.naismith7:51 AM

    It wasn't, but Lavinia is great. It was "Black Ships" by Jo Graham, which is a lot like Lavinia but from the perspective of a young Trojan woman.

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  72. admiral.naismith10:27 AM

    It wasn't, but Lavinia is great. It was "Black Ships" by Jo Graham, which is a lot like Lavinia but from the perspective of a young Trojan woman.

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  73. Tiny Tyrant10:27 AM

    of course, it's a discussion. thanks!

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  74. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard10:27 AM

    No, he was expecting Brooke Shields.

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