Good morning, one and all and welcome once again to your Sunday Morning liveblog of the week-end political blather factories. My name is Jason, and is it just me, or are things out there starting to make very little sense? They are going to make a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie, people. Not a joke. Don't understand it. What's the plot here? There are hippos, they need to eat, there's a struggle, eventually, they happen upon whatever hippos eat, and they eat it, the end. Am I missing something? Is, like, Jonthan Franzen doing the screenplay and all the hippos are vaguely unlikeable and the twist is they were all hungry for meaning?

Earlier this week, DC's own Jumbo Slice pizza made it onto a list of America's 35 Best Pizzas. For those of you who don't know, this is not possible. This is un-possible. It is the null set of possibilities. Anyone who has eaten one of these jumbo slices will tell you: they are a galactic gastric disaster. If it is possible that it is one of America's best pizzas, then there is literally no boundaries anymore, between things that have merit, and things you can pluck from your stool. Even after you eat a Jumbo Slice. (Trust me, you will have to endure a poundingly long wait, for a really terrible payoff, for that one.)

For a long while, I thought I sort of understood the Nobel Peace Prize as something that was given to extravagantly decent people, with the occasional warmonger thrown in there to add a little dose of post-modernist irony, or to put a Febreze-like stench on an enduring drone war. Now, they've given one to the European Union, and, you know, nothing against the EU, it's awfully good of y'all member states to have avoided participating in a genocide for a few decades. But it sort of feels like they gave the EU the Nobel as just sort of a pick-me-up. You know, "Hey, EU, I know you're going through a rough patch right now, what with your financial crisis and all, but hang in there!" I thought that sentiment was best expressed with a poster of a treed kitten.

Against that backdrop, our election is somehow understandable. Also: very tense now, for everyone who is heavily invested in the outcome. (This leaves out, I guess, rich bankers and Canadians and most species of waterfowl. In a few weeks time, the race has gone from something the media compared to Clinton-Dole to one that should be compared to Bush-Gore -- tight as a snare drum with a dash of foreboding chaos. Is everyone ready for the possibility of an electoral college tie? That seems to be the sort of hell-with-the-lid-off that fate has lined up for us, somehow.

One thing is for certain, this week, the Game 5 of the Nationals-Cardinals series is going to become the most overworked metaphor for horse-race politics since we started defaming the horse-races. It has something for everyone. Romney supporters can talk about the inexperienced team in Washington going down hard. Obama supporters can talk about the reigning incumbent winning out in the end. Yankee fans will, of course, be the ABSOLUTE WORST. These hack adventures in figurative language could start in just a few minutes time, now. Let's agree to heap scorn upon those who do.

As usual, you all should feel free to relax and let me watch these shows for you. If you'd like to meet and greet in the comments, please do. If you need to drop me a line, feel free. Yes, you iPad and iPhone users should use Safari, the link will appear atop this page. You may, of course, follow me on Twitter. And as I've been doing lately, I have stacked up some Sunday morning alternatives to read while you wait on my Rebel Mouse page. Let us commence!

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

Today we'll begin with David Axelrod and Ed Gillespie dully going through the surrogacy motions. I appreciate the way Chris Wallace says "Axelrod and Gillespie!" as if that's something worth rejoicing. Whoa, guys, major gets, there. Can't wait to hear what they have to say, I'm sure it would be difficult for me to predict, just sitting here.

Axelrod is in Williamsburg, Virginia, home of the College of William And Mary, who passed on my college application many years ago, but that's okay, not bitter, whatever! Axelrod is hanging out, probably gonna hit the Trellis later, but now, he's got to talk about the Obama campaign. And unfortunately for the Obama campaign, we crapped the bed in Benghazi and now its rough sledding for them -- though probably not as rough as the sledding in the actual Benghazi. Remember: terrible things that happen to people and economies only get talked about on Sunday shows because they might thwart the ambitions of permanently affluent political celebrities.

Joe Biden said that the White House didn't know that the consulate in Benghazi, only several State Department officials told a hearing that there were lots of requests for additional security, so Wallace's question is apt: "What is the vice president talking about?" Axelrod says that Biden was "talking about what the White House knew," and that these requests went to the State Department's...I don't know...Security Request Suggestion Box, and nobody told the White House nothin'. There are embassies everywhere! Fair enough. It's just that I don't expect anyone to be calling round to see how security is in Luxembourg. Libya, on the other hand, might be one of those "loop me in on everything" sort of security situations. Just spitballing. (I could probably adequately secure the embassy in Luxembourg, with these spitballs.)

So, what does "we" mean? When Biden says "we didn't know?" Axelrod reiterates that the State Department knows a bunch of cool stuff that the White House doesn't. He ensures Wallace that Obama is totally, super concerned about what happened, has so many feelings that are super-duper, and people should know that he takes "personal responsibility" for all of our people stationed abroad.

So, Wallace is all, hey, I think I will challenge your definition of personal responsibility, and Axelrod says, dude, the President is responsible for everything that happens, you know, all the stuff...SO MUCH STUFF...and you can't guarantee anything. But the thing you guarantee is the responsibility, I think?

Wallace presses on the whole day where it was clear the Benghazi attacks were terrorist attacks and Susan Rice was still saying it was mostly a case of film criticism gone horribly awry, like that time GIGLI came to theatres and all those people were murdered and Ben Affleck had to agree that they had a point. Axelrod gives a puzzling answer: "Well, I think the president is responsible for everything that happens on his watch. and I mean, it isn't the -- it isn't us or anyone else who is suggesting that that is what the intelligence was at the time." The two parts of that sentence are fundamentally at odds with one another.

At any rate, Axelrod insists that sometimes the facts don't comport entirely to the information you receive in real time in the heat of a crisis, and sure, you can imagine that rumors and frantic suppostions emerge in those situations -- I remember how lots of people thought there had been a bombing at the State Department on September 11th, and that made it all the way to news channels before finally getting clarified. I get that. As Wallace points out, though, there were some people in "real-time communication" between Benghazi and the State Department, and it seems to have been the quick consensus that the attacks were not some sort of improvisation. So, the question is, when did the White House decide to participate in some sort of "let's meet and get this all sorted" exercise.

Axelrod says that they are still in the process of sorting it out, and says that Obama called it an "act of terror" on the very day after it happened. As for the State Department, he says that their members testified under oath that "anyone who had the intelligence they had would have said what Susan Rice said."

Wallace dings Obama for going off to a fundraiser, and asks if he met with national security people before he went back on the campaign trail. Axelrod says that Obama was totally in communication with the relevant people at all times.

Wallace moves to Stephanie Cutter's comments that the only reason the Libya story has become so newsworthy is because Romney and Ryan politicized it. Apparently, there is no issue of great concern that cannot be shifted from a substantive interrogation of the relevant facts to a pissant little horse race inquiry that hangs entirely on a campaign spokesperson having one very bad moment of spokespersoning. It was just a bunch of dead diplomats until Stephanie Cutter used a bad sentence, NOW THIS IS ALL TOO REAL. GO SUNDAY MORNING POLITICAL MEDIA.

Axelrod notes that the conversation suddenly shifted from a serious dicussion to a stupid one -- but then undercuts his own point by yelling at Romney for politicizing it, and stuffing the 47% remarks in there, for no reason.

Chris Wallace is gonna get all umbraged up over it, and mischaracterizes Axelrod's remarks. Axelrod says that Chris Stevens' father lamented that his son's death was being politicized, and that "we should all follow his lead." Wallace goes high-snippy-dippy-dudgeon, asking, "Are you saying we can't discuss this?" Axelrod wasn't saying that, dude. And anyway, he has been having a discussion with you for ten minutes. He was merely saying that Steven's dad regrets the politicization of these deaths, not the reporting and larger security discussion. Axelrod says that Romney was "cravenly trying to exploit this." But that's what we do, in America, cravenly exploit things.

The discussion moves to debate prep for Tuesday, because we need to squeeze in some more fluffy process crap so whatever substance we we got in the first part is watered down. Hey, guess what, David Axelrod thinks Obama will be prepared for the debate, and that it will be "interesting." That settles the matter of whether Axelrod thinks the president is a terrible debater or person!

How does Axelrod feel about the shifting poll numbers? "Hasn't Romney made real gains?" Axelrod admits that Romney got some of the Republican independent voters who had lost heart. I'd say that's true. But everyone has got polls to cling to. Axelrod cites a poll from Arizona that has Obama up to that, I'm sorry, is such an outlier that someone should bring it some food. He says that 59% of early voters are breaking for Obama. (Doesn't that mean that Election Day voters might break back the other way, though?)

And now, let's get Ed Gillespied. Wallace asks him what Romney is trying to say about Benghazi right now. Gillespie says that "we need to know what went wrong" so that we can protect embassies and consulates going forward. Seems like nothing ever really changes on that front -- we're competent up to a point and then past that point we're vulnerable and so we wring our hands and to some blame-seeking and then move on until the next one happens. I can't recall a time where America did "totally securing our foreign garrisons all over the globe" particularly well, but the cock-ups only really count during an election year, so now we are where we are -- loud horse-race noises pretending to be authentic concern. All the Obama team really wants to do is dodge the worst of it, and all the Romney team really wants to do is end zone dance on it. For actual Americans stationed in high-risk parts of the world, it's KMAG YO-YO, as always.

Gillespie says that the administration is giving a "constantly shifting story," which is true, but it also sounds like he's saying that the administration is giving a "Mitt Romney campaign."

But Gillespie is right when it comes to the fact that there's no real "we" and "they" distinction to be made between the administration and the State Department, and he's got an authentic critique going until it becomes one of our new post-modern "word count" critiques, where it becomes amazingly important that he mentioned the YouTube movie "six times" against no examples of "this was a terrorist attack and I will drink from the skulls of Chris Stevens' killers, BLARGLE."

Wallace keeps asking questions about Mitt Romney's impressions of what Obama is thinking, which is not actually a question of value? "What do you think about the way this guy thought? Does it make you sad? Do you need a glass of milk?" Somehow, Gillespie manages to "dodge the question" to an extent that Wallace gets mad at him for doing so, but that question is simultaneously not worth answering and undodgeable.

Wallace mansplains the question again, and Gillespie just says, "I don't know" and just says that everyone wants answers to outstanding questions.

Wallace moves on to the whole phenomenon of Romney suddenly becoming a moderate. I'm guessing that Gillespie will either dispute this in terms of the movement or dispute this in terms of the moderation, and we can all go home just as cynical as we were earlier this morning. Gillespie says that "Romney's positions don't comport with Obama's attack ads," which is not particularly true but a cagey answer to the question -- just blow up the premise of the inquiry entirely.

But Romney said something about not being familiar with any pending abortion legislation, and yet there is some that he's familiar with, so Wallace wants to know what the deal is? Gillespie actually piles on MORE anti-choice legislation that Romney supports, and briefly even claims that Obamacare provides taxpayer funding for abortion, which, if you'll recall is not true in an epic way. I don't know is Gillespie is just lying or is stupid like a month-old floral arrangement. Probably both, as required by the profession known as "political consultancy."

Gillespie tries to move the conversation to the economy, and Wallace is briefly, like, "No you don't, we're talking about abortion." But the conversation doesn't get any better. So Wallace moves the conversation to Romney's tax plan. Which got the absolute, ever-loving snot kicked out of it this week, by Bloomberg's Josh Barro. Read the whole thing, but here's the part Barro finds to be the most astonishing:

Finally, I would note one item that the Romney campaign does not cite in support of its tax plan: Any analysis actually prepared for the campaign in preparation for announcing the plan in February. You would expect that, in advance of announcing a tax plan, the campaign would commission an analysis to make sure that all of its planks can coexist. Releasing that analysis now would be to the campaign's advantage, helping them put down claims like mine that their math doesn't add up.

Why don't they release that analysis? My guess is because the analysis doesn't exist, and the 20 percent rate cut figure was plucked out of thin air for political reasons without regard to whether it was feasible.

Wallace wants to know "Why is it all right to tell voters about the candy...and not the spinach?" By which he means, Romney is touting the tax plan as a pure delight for everyone under the sun without actually going to the trouble of explaining where the seemingly free lunch forces a cost. Gillespie, sort of cynically, explains that this is how you lock in different voters, and he insists that you can do all the impossible things that Romney's tax plan actually can't do.

Wallace presses on the fact that independent studies tear this tax plan to shreds, but Gillespie keeps right on, and then gets to the "six studies support the plan" line. Wallace jumps on him right off the bat, pointing out that "some of the studies are questionable" and that a few aren't event actually studies. (Barro quips: "The Romney campaign sent over a list of the studies, but they are perhaps more accurately described as 'analyses,' since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I'm not hating -- I blog for a living -- but I don't generally describe my posts as 'studies.'")

But it's not just that some of them are questionable! It's that ALL OF THEM CONCLUDE THAT ROMNEY'S TAX PLAN IS CRAPOLA ON GRANOLA. Per Barro, who goes through each of them: "None of the analyses do what Romney's campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound."

Gillespie says that they are "very credible." Wallace says that one is a blog post from a former Bush adviser. Then they actually get bogged down in an argument over the American Enterprise Institute's political leanings. They are a right-wing think tank. On most days, Ed Gillespie wakes up and when he hears the words "American Enterprise Institute" he thinks, "Yes, those are my guys, a right-wing think tank, awesome." And when he meets people over at the AEI, he sings the Golden Girls theme song to them, and switches the word "confidant" to "right wing think tank" and yeah, it doesn't scan, but whatever, this is just a guy singing to his pals.

And, of course, there's nothing in all the world that's wrong with being a right-wing think tank. Think tanks exist as a vital part of the white-collar welfare industry for parchy white people who lack the courage to actually make material contributions to society like teaching children math or delivering pizza. This nation is amazing, because in actual countries with actual problems, think tankers would be thrown in ditches.

But yeah, on teevee, Gillespie has to claim they are non-partisan, so, whatever, another one of those things we all pretend to believe in public.

Anyway, Gillespie thinks that this a "big choice" election and that even if Obama "changes his style" he won't be able to "change his policies or his record" in a debate. But, Romney did all of those things, and rather well.

And it is panel time, today with Brit Hume and Bob Woodward and Laura Ingraham and Jeff Zeleny.

Hume says that the race is tight, with Obama a little bit ahead and momentum for Romney that wasn't entirely broken by the vice presidential debate. Dropping bombs of obviousness on the teevee today!

Zeleny says that enthusiasm is growing, visibly, at Romney's rallies, and now more people are stepping up to say they want to affirmatively vote for Romney, and not just vote against Obama. Zeleny says that the double-edged sword to Obama's voters voting early is that the Republicans can use that as a thing to concern-troll the GOP base with.

Looking ahead to the next debate, Ingraham reckons that the town-hall formet favors Obama, and to a certain extent I agree -- my cat just knocked over a potted plant that can out-empathize Romney in a town-hall setting with other human beings. The pitfall, though, is Obama getting baited into challenging Romney, in the direct way that everyone says was lacking in the first debate. First, he can't do what Biden did -- laugh and scoff and eyeroll at Kid Seriouspants. Second, the setting really is all about the ordinary people, finally getting a chance to bounce from the cheap seats down to the dais. And the whole look of the thing, on camera, is big proscenium style theatre, where all acts of aggression look outsized -- remember Gore stepping to Bush in the debate, and how dumb it looked?

But everyone wants Obama to "take it to Romney." I think that's a trap! (What I would do, in a town hall format, is play the role of the cheerful underminer and find a way to include subtle indictments of Romney in my answers with and to the people who ask the questions.)

Woodward says that the race is volatile and can go in either direction. Thanks! He eventually gets to a good point -- Obama can't come to the debate and look like a totally different person, otherwise it looks like "showmanship."

Hume agrees that the President will "do well with being empathetic" with voters, but he isn't sure that he can make up the ground lost in the previous debate. He disagrees with my suggestion of using the conversation with voters to cut at Romney. I'm right and Hume's wrong, no big deal.

Woodward says that the big uncertainty in a town-hall, any questioner could come out with the "killer question." Which doesn't mean that it will happen, because I'm pretty sure that the media will be filtering the questions and anything that really rocks the firmament of our bought-and-paid-for government will be kept far away from the forum.

Zeleny doesn't think that the vice presidential debate will be that memorable. Ingraham essentially says that only Mitt Romney is allowed to smile and laugh and interrupt at debates, and that Biden is history's greatest monster for having done so. (Maybe Romney has existing copyrights on "debate behavior?")

Wallace usually goes from the newsy story of the week to horse-race crap, but this week he's doing the obvious, and going to Libya with the second panel discussion.

Hume reckons, that the whole "we bombed in Benghazi" story is a "significant vulnerability for the president. I think that's true, and if there's anything that's going to mitigate that, it's going to be whether voters are all into foreign policy matters at the moment, and if not, if Romney can make them interested in it. Hume says that the matter is a "two-track" issue: first, an intelligence failure, and second, a cover-up with real "mendacity." The second may be a reach -- from my vantage, it just looks like a lot of floppy-armed flailing. He reckons that the only reason Susan Rice went on teevee on that Sunday, many weeks ago, is because "no one else would do it," but, feh, I've seen Susan Rice on Sundays plenty of times, it's standard-issue.

What does Bob Woodward think about all of this? He says he's "troubled" by the Obama administration and there are "unanswered questions" and fixates on a document that says that they were trying to "normalize security" in Libya and another document that indicates that security in Libya was still pretty touch-and-go. To Woodward's mind, this is puzzling, but I think in just about any event, there's a goal to one day "normalize security." There's a whole war going on in Afghanistan that is all about "normalizing security" on both macro and micro levels. I guess if the first document had read, "Our goal in Libya is to keep it gangsta, forever, and it will never be normal," there wouldn't be a problem.

Libya! I knew from the get-go it was gonna be big trouble! I say in my car at the grocery store parking lot listening to the radio address that layed out what we thought we were trying to do and I was like, "Hey, now. This is some wildly inconsistent stuff, right here," and also, "Sorry Syria and Bahrain, I don't think you are gonna actually be a part of this whole 'protect people from getting slaughtered' thing and I guess poo on you guys for not making it a lot easier for us to intervene." But the jokes on me, because, "easy?" LOL, where did I come up with that! But I'm more interested in how dumb ideas get started down the road in the first place than looking for a zazzy cover-up.

Zeleny isn't sure that Libya is going to do much to move people's minds with this much time before the election, because most folks are fixed in their ways. We'll see, though! Romney's whole gamble involves moving a lot of opinion in the last three weeks.

(By the way, the last debate is all foreign policy, so that means more talk about Libya, less talk about Romney's tax plan.)

THE CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW

Today we will have John Heilemann, Liz Marlantes, Nia-Malika Henderson, and Andrew "Panic-Pants" Sullivan joining Chris Matthews to talk about debates and more debates and how awesome Bill Clinton is at doing things that Barack Obama is lousy at doing -- like explaining things to voters in an exciting way and pointing out Romney's inconsistencies, no big deal, why would Obama want to be good at those things?

Hey, that vice president debate was sure exciting, because POW and VOOM and also SHAZAM. But now it's back to Obama versus Romney, and it's KATIE BAR THE DOOR WHENEVER THOSE TWO GET TOGETHER, because behind that door is where we keep all of our beds.

Actually Chris Matthews gets the challenge for Obama pretty right -- he has to point out Romney's detriments in a way that doesn't lead to disagreeable encounters with the actual voters who will be asking the question. He shows a clip of Clinton, "gently disagreeing" with Dole: "I can only tell you that I don't think Senator Dole is too old to be President, it's the age of his ideas that I question." Honey-soaked dagger, basically.

Can Obama do that against an opponent who is "even steven" in the polling? Matthews reckons that Obama needs to be significantly more forceful. I say that's a trap! Obama really should be the Obama that voters liked, to reprove the whole "concept" of Obama -- and that guy was manifestly cool and calm and under control. He wasn't, however, so cool and calm that he was listless and enervating! This is a destination that he needs to arrive at -- not an amount he needs to achieve by averaging levels of energy and aggression in three debate performances. If you go "too cold" and then "too hot" and then "just right" -- that's a 1-2 record.

Heilemann points out the Romney's "etch-a-sketch" moment came at the last moment, and the challenge is that Romney is running from the characterization that he helped Obama make, and it's caught Obama off guard.

Sullivan says that Obama needed to immediately bring up the "47% remarks" and move on from there. He says that now, you tell voters that Romney is sometimes a "severe conservative" and now he's a happy moderate, and you don't know which guy will show up on Inauguration Day. (You can ease the situation considerably by pointing out that Romney, in any event, will have vote or veto powers over policies coming out of the howlingly mad House of Representatives.) Sullivan also says Obama needs to nail him on the tax proposal question -- "What are you hiding? What is the trick?" Again, the final debate is on foreign policy, so it's Tuesday or never for confronting Romney on that.

And I suppose that the argument for directly confronting Romney is: "Tim Pawlenty didn't do it, and where is he now?" (Actually, he's at a really cushy job, so maybe Obama has considered this, only too well!) Meanwhile, the best in-your-face stuff that was directed at Romney came from, Rick Perry, I guess? And that's advantage anyone, facing Governor Back Pain Pills, but Romney didn't even handle it all that well.

Ha, you know what would make Romney just LOSE HIS MINDS all over that stage? If Obama came in and said, "The Romney that showed up for the last debate wasn't the guy I'd gotten to know...it was like he'd been brainwashed." Google "Romney and brainwashed" to see why Mitt would probably void his bowels. The invocation of "brainwashing" would be the lowest of blows -- an absolute dirty crotch punch. But hey, Paul Ryan threw car accidents at Joe Biden, so heck -- let's take the gloves off, for our entertainment.

Henderson points out that Obama isn't always that great empathizing with people, but, like Ingraham noted, he is up against maybe the one person in the world that ameliorates that disadvantage.

What do you do with the whole teevee split screen? Matthews reckons that if you can't smile like you are happy to be there or look down because you are taking notes, what does that leave? Sullivan says you "stare the guy down." Again, not sure that's possible in a town hall debate! Don't follow Romney around, staring at him! That is called "making it weird." (Henderson, pointing out Gore's moment of personal space invasion, recommends against "making it weird.")

Matthews wraps things back around to the content of the debate. Biden opened up some distinction between the two tickets on abortion. Does that create opportunities? Marlantes says it does, because there is no "center" on the issue, and that you are either on one side or the other. Totally not true! How many people are like Biden -- personally against abortion but unwilling to impose that on other people. Part of the problem with the media's construction of this issue as "pro-life" versus "pro-choice" is that they have opted to depict these two concepts as mutually exclusive, when they aren't. If there was a group of people going around to maternity awards to convince women to not have babies, then we would have two diametrically opposed groups to evaluate.

Also, my whole "I do not have a uterus and thus I shall defer material decisions that need to be made about uteruses to the people who have them" position is a pretty centrist one if society would just let me have it.

Heilemann says that the "center" is Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare," but that's not the center, either, that is just "can't we imagine a world where nobody cares about this issue because we've limited it so much that we all let it slide?" Marlantes says that the whole "legal" part is where the conflict is, but actually, the "safe" and "rare" parts are too. You'll note that when they came up with the "Plan B" pill, which is not an abortifacient and actually prevents conception, anti-choice conservatives didn't say, "Sweet! Good work science! You solved the problem!" No, they freaked out anew, because the real issue here is being against non-procreative sex.

Actually, let me check that. The issue is being against women, and only women, having non-procreative sex, because you don't see anyone out protesting all the super-duper pills and powders and salves and extracts and poultices that let grey and dessicated old men continue to spray their dusty old baby-batter remnants hither and yon, up as many vaginas as they like. The world seriously does not need septuagenarians procreating, and no one event pretends that pharmaceutical bonerjuice is about making babies. It's pretty hard to square the whole "old men can but women can't and also no gay stuff" circle, but presumably the idea is that women are just always in a lose-lose situation, policy-wise.

But I digress! Matthews asked his pals if Obama could have "played his post-Denver hand better," and nearly everyone said, emphatically yes despite the fact that the question doesn't, strictly speaking, make a lot of sense. But, okay, Heilemann says that Obama made way too big a deal over the whole Big Bird thing and I totally agree with that. "Don't run your political campaign based on what dumb internet memes are breaking in the twenty-second attention span of social media, dumbasses," is the first chapter of my book on how to run a political campaign. It is just that sentence, repeated over and over again for twenty-five pages, ending with a phone number where you can reach me so that I can come over to your office and punch you in the face as many times as are needed to make it sink in.

Heilemann says that Obama has better prepare for the "disappointed Obama voter" to show up at the debate, because he doesn't handle that voter very well.

Sullivan says he wants to passionately defend his record, but I think that maybe Sullivan likes that record really more than most people? Like there's always that one guy who wants to passionately defend Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Starlight Express" and you are just like, NO NO MAKE IT STOP I NEVER ASKED ANYONE FOR DUDES ON ROLLERSKATES PRETENDING TO BE FREIGHT TRAINS.

Has Romney and Ryan established themselves as being "presidential enough?" Everyone says yes. Ha, so, even though Sullivan spent the better part of the first part of this show calling Romney a rank fraud and a liar, he nevertheless thinks that Romney has "crossed the threshold for being a President." That tells you all you need to know about why American politics is such a bag of rot, circa 2012.

Now they are showing a clip from DOCTOR STRANGELOVE, which is great, because that is a fantastic movie.

Moving on to a discussion of Bill Clinton and how awesome he is at "making the case" for Obama that Obama doesn't seem to be capable of making. (In fairness, it's really easy to be a Romney critic in public when you actually do not have anything personally at stake.)

Props to John Heilemann for using the word "objurgation" in a New York Magazine piece. He points out that Clinton's legacy is now wrapped around Obama -- I guess that's where the stakes are -- Obama has moved from being the "alternative brand to Clinton" to the "inheritor of Clintonism" and, perhaps, the guy who sets up his wife's campaign. (He might force Hillary into the 2016 race a lot faster if he loses, though, because the Democrats have no talent in their cupboard in terms of people with presidential timber.)

Marlantes has to be a total buzzkill by saying, guys, Bill Clinton is just a surrogate, he cannot do all that much. True.

Sullivan says it's a miracle that Obama and the Clintons have put their rivalries in the past and demonstrated a lot of emotional maturity. It's too bad that you cannot create jobs out of emotional maturity, because then, I would give a crap about that.

What things does Chris Matthews not know this week? Heilemann says he doesn't know that Clinton still hasn't done a joint campaign event with Obama, but there's time reserved in the home stretch to do them and they will do them a lot -- you know, when it will almost certainly be too late to do anything. Liz Marlantes says that Matthews has been thus far unaware about the fact that the early votes are so far breaking for Democrats but both sides are doing better than they did last year. Henderson says that Matthews has been totally clueless about the fact that Julian Castro and Deval Patrick are doing a ton of events for Obama. Sullivan says Matthews has totally missed the boat on the real question that hasn't been asked at the debates, and that's "Which of George W. Bush's policies do you disagree with?"

He intends that to be asked of Romney, because the answer would be "nothing." Though if they asked Obama, he clearly wouldn't be able to say, "I disagree with him on the matter of using expanded executive power to carry out extra-judicial killings and inprisonment and also waging limitless war unchecked by the peoples' representatives or the realities of budgets!"

Matthews wants to know if the Obama administration "put the whole matter of Libya to rest." What, huh? How do you do that, exactly? Heilemann says "they are certainly going to try." Marlantes says the "drumbeat will continue" and Biden's answer was "the worst moment of the debate." Henderson says Romney will continue to start all conversations with Libya, so good luck putting it to rest. Sullivan says that "the key difference between the two candidates is that one candidate will strive to keep us out of war in the Middle East, and the other will hand over the keys to Bibi Netanyahu to launch a new global war." Well...if attacking a bunch of Yemenis, bad guys or no, with drones isn't a "new war in the Middle East," then I don't know what a "new war in the Middle East" is, clearly. And if you've concluded that ol' Risk-Averse Romney -- who has the exact same policy on Iran as Obama, except all those things he "puts on the table" are put there REALLY LOUD AND HARD, BECAUSE BLAAARGH, TABLE! -- has the actual balls to start a war on his own, then you have a more powerful electron microscope than I do, and congratulations. I guess it could all work out that way, but Sullivan's really glibly premature about it, I think.

THIS WEEK WITH DUDE IN SUIT AND A CONFERENCE TABLE

Yep, George Stephanopoulos has yet another "well-deserved day off" because really, who works anymore at the teevee show that has your name in the title, that's cray. It works to our potential advantage, because Jake Tapper is here, and he actually knows some things about our global military entanglements, and won't just stare at a map of Libya and ask it, "What about your gaffes?"

On the other hand, the show today looks like it will largely deal with debate bullcrap, and we'll have Rob "You Would Be Winning Ohio Right Now If You'd Picked Me As Your Running Mate" Portman and Beau "I Wonder What He's Going To Think Of The Performance of Joe Biden" Biden doing the surrogate thing.

Rob Portman, who has been playing Obama in the debate prep, figures that Obama will be "coming out swinging" in the debate because he's so negative and totally mischaracterizing Romney's positions.

Tapper, citing Ryan's claim that increased unemployment is what's "going on all around America," asks Portman why Ryan would say this, "in defiance of facts." Of course, asking the Romney campaign why they do anything in defiance of facts has a simple answer: because it works. And lo, right on cue, Portman says, "Unemployment is higher today than when Obama took office." Nooope. Not a fact. But if people believe it, who needs to have the facts on your side?

What's kind of amazing about this is that from the very get-go, the Romney campaign admitted that they were going to get down to the business of lying early and often. They jumped into the campaign by stripping words that John McCain had said four years ago, and making it look like Obama said them this year -- exploiting the simple fact that Obama has dared to relate McCain's comments to an audience on the 2008 stump.
The media was actually pretty quick to point out it was a lie. They were actually ahead of the Politifact entry, cited above, on pointing out just how brazen a deception is was. But right from that beginning, the Romney campaign waggled their finger at the media and said, essentially, just so you know, we do not give a flying frack about your adorable efforts to apply the convention of truth to us. Here are the actual comments:

“First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.”

It's the one think they've been consistent on, and it works for them because from the very beginning, they made it clear that they were going to deceive with real brass balls, big as the swing of Tiger Woods. The Romney hits foul balls into the deep outfield seats, and then just rounds the bases and calls it a homer, laughing at the umps who tell them otherwise. I sort of envy them, it must feel amazing to be able to disassociate yourself from moral conventions so completely. It must make you feel fifty feet tall.

And what can I say, it works! It is almost campy in its obvious silliness, but it works. Look at Portman go! Portman says the Obama administration has created "net zero jobs." This is an extravagant falsehood! He is going out of his way to just troll the fact-check industry. Portman is pissing on Tapper's leg and calling it rain, in front of the whole world, and homey just don't give a f--k. Tapper, whose senses must be straight-up dulled into icy numbness by the astounding flamboyance of Portman's fandangle, doesn't even say a word about the two titanic lies that were just sent up his snooze-hole.

Oh, no. Some very sad news to report today -- Arlen Specter has died. I wish only the best for all of the loved ones he has left behind today. I know that this liveblog has a running joke of saying that the lovely Ms. Arlen Gargagliano was America's greatest Arlen -- but I want to make it clear that Mr. Specter should be remembered with fondness and I extend my own condolences to those who knew him.

We move to the Benghazi attacks. Tapper tells Portman that Chris Stevens' father said that it "would be really abhorrent" to make his son's death "part of a campaign issue" and asks if that gives the Romney campaign pause? The short answer is, of course not, and Portman equates the Romney campaign's politicization of the matter with Tapper's own investigative reporting on the matter.

Tapper presses on China next, asking Portman if Romney can continue to take some "get tough" pose with China, even as he continues to profit from enterprises in China. Portman says, "That is something that we should re-think, because you are right Jake, that is an obvious hypocrisy and the country deserves better."

Ha, kidding. Portman says there is "no disconnect at all!" We need more trade, he says, and says the Obama administration has not negotiated a single trade agreement. One million percent wrong, again, but sweet sassy molassey, you just have to watch Portman perform today. He is just trolling objective reality in its entirety, right now; that is a whopper so dense that light cannot escape from it.

Last question, on Ohio polling. Obama is in the lead, 51-45%. Can Romney win the presidency without Ohio? Portman is pretty sure Romney will win Ohio, but he says, "I wouldn't want to risk it."

Beau Biden is up next. I hope that one of the questions is not, "Who won this week's debate?"

Tapper says that "some say" that Beau's father's behavior during the debate was bad because it contained sarcastic laughter and eyerolling. I don't know what else you are supposed to do, at Paul Ryan, though. I have actually needed to get reading glasses, because eyerolling at Ryan continuously has put enormous strain on them.

Beau Biden, also smiles in the face of obvious nonsense, and says he's happy to defend his dad, pointing out that if the other side is complaining about smiles the day after the debate, then they must not have a whole lot to say about their own guy's performance.

Tapper asks for clarity on the whole "removing troop vis a vis the 'fighting season'" thing, pointing out that the generals in Afghanistan generally prefer to not draw down during a "fighting season," because, you know, fighting season is all right for fighting. Biden (fils) says, "The point that I heard and the American people heard is that you heard my father clearly articulate that we wouldn’t have forces in Afghanistan by 2014...and you’ve seen here the congressman equivocate on that, in fact, not be willing to guarantee the American people that we wouldn’t have forces in Afghanistan.”

On Libya, Biden (fils) says that when his father said, "We weren't told" about the requests for additional security in Benghazi, that "we" refers to "himself and the President." That's still really sort of dumb and weird sounding, sorry. At this stage, it would be more credible to just literally lay out everything that everybody knew about this from start to finish. One of the big lessons you learn from Neil Barofsky's book, "Bailout" is that the best way to have the press on your side when you need them to stand up for the truth of what you are saying is to go right to them, and truthfully tell them, "This, right here, was our cock-up. Let me tell you all about it."

Biden (fils) continues: “You know, I've served with and know and have personal friends who in the Foreign Service as we speak...And the idea that Romney and Ryan are suggesting that the president of the United States doesn't take seriously the security of our diplomats and Foreign Service officers around the world, I find absolutely outrageous, especially outrageous coming from the congressman, who in his budget proposed to cut diplomatic security by $200 million to $300 million.”

The case for "budget cuts are the cause of this security problem" is not particularly well-founded. But, hey, after Rob Portman's performance, I almost want to say, "Beau Biden, go get some."

Oh, lord, did the force of Rob Portman's lying put me into a coma for an hour that I did not notice? I can't believe I am still liveblogging. I am going to breeze through this super panel discussion without TiVo pausing.

On the panel today is Martha Raddatz and George Will and Newt Gingrich and Chris Dodd and Donna Brazile and some historian dude named Richard Norton Smith. The topic is "do debates really matter?" Well, they had bloody well better if I am going to watch a panel discussion on the topic.

First there is a montage, because that's what ABC News does now, montages, and not the funny ones that everyone likes. Suffice it to say that this montage does a great job explaining the presidential debates have happened for a long time, and also happening for a long time is a discussion as to whether debates actually matter. This snake will keep eating its own tail forever.

Will says that "we make too big a deal" about debates, in some ways, but in other ways we do not make a big enough deal about them. They are "semi-constitutional events." It is "plausible to say" they make a difference, unless it turns out they do not make a difference.

Brazile says that the debates she helped Al Gore prepare for are...well, something she remembers? And they do matter, because maybe people are tuning into the debates as the first thing they do to meet the candidates, and you learn I guess, what their names are, or if they have a weird birthmark or something.

Gingrich says that what he learned from debating Romney is that he wins the "life-or-death debates," and that he was surprised that Obama was so "startlingly empty" and that made the "matchup extraordinary." He then trolls the historian with a bunch of historical references. Bottom line, though, is that Romney "got himself back into contention in one night" and if Romney has been bad, the election would be over.

Dodd is reminded of the one time he did something in a debate that anyone remembers, taking on Hillary Clinton over drivers' licences for undocumented immigrants. Dodd says that the primary debates are different from the presidential debates, because you no longer have to "check boxes," and instead demonstrate that you have the character and the emotional foundation to appear "presidential." Dodd says that Obama is totally talented, and he was three more hours of debating to demonstrate it, so you shouldn't declare the election over. And yeah, dude, that is I think the one lesson we all agree has been learned.

Historian dude says that social media has tranformed the way we share and experience the debates. We have more "intermediaries interpreting what we see" and now debates are pop-cultural events, that we offer insta-analysis of ourselves, on Twitter and crap like that.

Martha Raddatz studied a lot of debates and learned that the candidates really work to get a consistent message through for ninety minutes, and trying to work in all the things they want to say.

Will says that the most consequential debates were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is a very popular thing to say, but they were media drenched crapshows that rivaled our own reality shows, with each candidate's purchased-media declaring their guy the winner and the other guy history's greatest monster. We remember those much too fondly.

Gingrich says that character and nature of the person matters in the debate, and it gives you a different sense of the man than you may know from the way the campaigns tend to distort and caricature the candidates. Gingrich, by the way, rarely disproves his caricature while debating.

Will wants to know what things would be like if the candidates could do like the Lincoln-Douglas debates were, with a one hour monologue followed by a ninety-minute monologue, followed by a thirty-minute rebuttal to the ninety-minute monologue. And the answer, of course, is that this prospect sounds horrifying.

ABC News asked a lot of people at home about whether the debates changed their mind. Some people say it totally does. Some people say they totally don't. A few people told ABC News that Romney's performance switched their vote from Obama to Romney -- presumably these conversions have been confirmed by ABC News' team of oneironaut reporters, who traveled into these respondent's dreams to ensure that they weren't just responses offered up by campaign sockpuppets.

So, panel? Do debates matter?

Dodd: "Maybe." [More blather.]

Gingrich: "If Obama screws up again he is in trouble." [More blather.]

Historian Dude: "I think we've established they matter. But they should stretch out the time period in which they occur." [More blather.]

Will: "They matter, and I don't think Newt Gingrich's blather was the best blather we could have had." [More blather.]

Raddatz: "Or maybe stretching out the time period in which they occur is a terrible idea. But yeah, I guess they matter. Even though the debates feature people saying things that aren't true." [More blather.]

Brazile: "The Democrats should stop factchecking the Republicans every time they open their mouth and just tell America about where they want to take the country."

It surely does seem like pointing out lies is a largely hopeless exercise after watching this show, doesn't it? Anyway, I am declaring an end to this, before I lose consciousness. It won't be much longer until the election has come and one and we can get to the month long circular firing squad to which the losing side will submit itself. In the meanwhile, try to have a nice Sunday, and we'll be back here on Sunday unless a comet hits us or something. Have a great week.

[And while you wait for next Sunday, you can check out my Rebel Mouse page throughout the week for entertaining reads.]

Jason Cherkis and Zach Carter have a humdinger out today that lays out Bain & Company's deep involvement with Big Tobacco in the early 1990s as it was dodging U.S. plaintiffs and government watchdogs, and working to crack open the Super Kitty that was the collapsing Soviet Union.

Your first thought on reading that Bain wrote the book -- literally wrote the "official government manual laying out the rules for bringing state resources into the marketplace" -- on how to transfer the Russian people's property into the hand of a few oligarchs might have been: Well, of course they were! What heist of historical proportions would be complete without the power-pointed guidance of America's best and brightest, its private-equity technicians?

But the second thought -- after learning about the flagrant conflicts of interest, the rampant corruption, the "packets of rubles" floating around -- might be: Wow, they did all this stuff?

Bain had plenty of company in the wholesale looting of Russia, which was abetted by major Western banks and intellectuals -- some of whom wound up in jail, most of whom wound up fantastically rich. When it comes down to it, the story of Bain and its Western colleagues in post-Soviet Russia isn't one of anomalous behavior brought about by too much vodka and the bad influence of some nasty Russian mob figures. No, what Western companies did in Russia -- did to Russia -- is more or less what they've done to the United States and Europe over the past few decades. It's just that in Russia they did it basically in a weekend.

"I've been thinking for a while that it's really appropriate to have a private equity guy as a possible president. American decline has reached the asset-stripping phase, as elites stint on investment -- both public and private -- and run off with all the national cashflow. And the electorate hasn't begun to figure this out," wrote Doug Henwood, who blogs regularly over at Left Business Observer, summing up his initial musings on the direction that state-directed capitalism might take if the King of Bain ends up winning the election, and thus, the right to have his hands on the nation’s economic defibrillators. (Doug's no partisan, though. Don't get him started on Obama.)

"Add to this the novelist Gary Shteyngart's observation that the USA today reminds him of the declining USSR he was born into and you've got a pretty dark picture of our future," says Doug, referencing an interview Shteyngart did with him.

As Cherkis and Carter hint at, Bain’s past, and Russia's present, illuminates our possible future. As economic vacuums opened in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Western banks and consulting firms moved to fill them -- with promised payoffs to decadent elites who would quickly become Russia's new oligarchs. Our own recent history demonstrates that those wheels are similarly greased -- the hole into which further taxpayer wealth may be funneled to Wall Street is at least $4.8 trillion wide, thanks to the post-crash bailout.

The story of Bain and post-Soviet Russia fits neatly into a counter-narrative that has emerged about Mitt Romney and his company, one told by those who have paid the price of his success. Bain's lucrative role in the systematic looting of the country is a compelling story not because it represents an anomalous departure from an otherwise civic-minded free enterprise. Rather, Bain's activity in Russia is simply a blunt and unsophisticated version of the model it and other private equity firms operate here in the United States. Instead of illegally using straw buyers, for instance, it sets up shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. Instead of dodging tax authorities altogether, it claims that hundreds of millions in management fees are not fees at all, but are in fact capital gains to be taxed at a dramatically lower rate. Instead of handing money directly to politicians, it gives contributions to political action committees. Instead of manipulating auctions to find bargain prices, it uses massive leverage to take over companies with little upfront cash.

Of course, having a private equity titan in the Oval Office would only add a dose of steroids to a political system that already features a host of oligarchs as privileged rentiers with what amounts to veto power over legislation -- a phenomenon that, again, the Wall Street bailout and its accountability-free aftermath should elucidate. Yesteryear’s fight to privatize Social Security was sold as freedom for taxpayers to direct their own retirement funds, but it was really a fight to get a gigantic pool of taxpayer money into the hands of bankers. “School choice,” and its promises of greater liberty for parents, is much the same -- it’s about getting a pool of taxpayer money that flows to public schools into the hands of private sector businesses who promise dynamic improvements in educational outcomes which, taken as a whole, have never been delivered.

Even your beloved Affordable Care Act depended on the approval of powerful corporate lobbies to exist. In Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men, Billy Tauzin -- whose support for the Affordable Care Act was critical -- is described as being an ally of the “unfettered marketplace,” with “little faith in government acting as an arbiter.” But as Chris Bray pointed out in the June 2012 issue of The Baffler, that’s bunkum:

When Suskind first shows Tauzin in action, he’s one of two people sitting near Larry Summers at a White House–sponsored meeting on health care reform: “A long-serving Louisiana representative who switched from Democrat to Republican in the 1990s, Tauzin had pushed through one of the most expensive pieces of legislation in American history: the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003. Costing $500 billion over ten years, it is considered by many to be a massive handout to the pharma industry, which in return hired Tauzin as their lead Washington representative.”

So the “unfettered marketplace” is where the central government nakedly gives away hundreds of billions of dollars in handouts to private corporations, and people who don’t believe that government should act as an arbiter in health care matters are the sponsors of some of the most expensive health care legislation in history, and free market purists work as corporate lobbyists in the District of Columbia, probing for the spigot. It’s free markets and laissez-faire economics, a half trillion public dollars at a time. Thank god Billy Tauzin doesn’t believe in government intrusion in the health care marketplace, because just imagine what that would look like.

The eloquent point that Bray helps to make here is that there exists no mainstream political party in America that doesn’t openly and proudly practice his sort of oligarchical favoritism in their governance and policy-making. If there’s a dollar’s worth of difference, it comes from political expedience and, perhaps, shame -- for example, the only daylight between the education policies of Romney and Obama is that Obama does not flagrantly demonize teachers’ unions, just subtly so. But, speaking of shame, if Mitt Romney -- who is the member of a faith community that’s hostile to cigarettes -- can nonetheless pad his bankroll by selling them, tithe a portion of those proceeds back to his faith community, and sell the exchange as proof of his generosity, then that dollar’s worth of difference is likely to add up quickly.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

Jack Welch, the strongest and most capable CEO in the history of the world, made news last week when he took to his Twitter account (history shall record the phrase "took to his Twitter account" as the five words that immediately precede all news of social media disasters) to accuse the Bureau of Labor Statistics of intentionally cooking its latest jobs report to favor President Barack Obama's chances for reelection in November, writing "Unbelievable jobs numbers...these Chicago guys will do anything...can't debate so change numbers."

While Welch won some support from the right-wing fever swamp, most rational observers saw the remarks as listing toward a certain dementia, and before long, he was doing a semi-backtrack in line with the precepts of Lean Six Sigma. On Sunday, Welch returned to Twitter (in for a penny, I guess!) to say, "Have never commented on White House in any tweets I can recall." Which, I guess exposes the fact that Welch is now having a problem with object permanence.

Well, all of the criticism has apparently gotten to Welch, and now he will, in a fit of pique, take his leave from Fortune magazine and Reuters, where he had previously been a contributor. As Fortune's own Stephen Gandel reports:

Welch said he will no longer contribute to Fortune following critical coverage of the former CEO of General Electric, saying he would get better "traction" elsewhere. On Friday, Welch suggested that the Obama administration, calling them "these Chicago guys," had manipulated the monthly jobs report in order to make the economy look better than it actually is just weeks before the election. Welch has been battered by criticism since making the suggestion on Twitter.

Welch apparently ended up at odds with various journalistic institutions that placed a higher premium on providing readers with objectively rational information about the economy, as opposed to flattering an old executive who sows derangement on the Internet. According to Gandel, Welch did not take kindly to a CNN Money piece that criticized Welch's original tweet, and was further angered by a Fortune piece, "detailing Welch's record as a job destroyer."

Gandel goes on to report that after these stories were published, "Welch sent an e-mail to Reuters' Steve Adler and [Fortune managing editor Andy] Serwer saying that he and his wife Suzy, who have jointly written for Reuters and Fortune in the past, were 'terminating our contract' and will no longer be sending our 'material to Fortune.'"

This was probably the first many of you had heard that Welch and his wife were contributing articles to Reuters and Fortune, but there you go.

READ THE WHOLE THING:
Welch can't take the heat: I quit [Fortune]

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

So this past Wednesday night, President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney met at the Magness Arena and debated policy and politics for 90 white-knuckle minutes, and you probably only remember a couple of important points -- like, Obama was listless, Romney was shiny and sharp, and also there was some stuff about Big Bird?

But then! After the debate the two sides marshalled their spin-doctoring army and mounted excuses for why Obama wasn't a perfect debate unicorn and how it came to pass that Romney fibbed so many times. Trial balloons were launched, explanations were proffered, the Obama team briefly tried to make "Romney sure was testy last night" happen (it didn't) and by the next morning, everybody who had a stake in the goings on had offered their dollop of spin.

Some of those dollops were wallops, some of those dollops were flops. Our favorites form these week's HuffPost List.

Michelle Obama: Twenty years ago to the day, Michelle Robinson said "I do" to Barack Obama, setting in motion a chain of events that would inevitably lead to him being terrifically distracted the night of his first big debate with Mitt Romney! Or so the excuse goes. We didn't think much of it as an excuse until Jay Pharoah made it seem plausible.

David Axelrod: The president's senior campaign adviser told "Face The Nation" host Bob Schieffer that Obama "was a little taken aback by the brazenness with which Governor Romney walked away" from the positions he'd previously taken on the issues. That's a lot like giving Bill Clinton four pages of prepared remarks and being taken aback when he gives a two-hour speech that includes his recipe for jambalaya.

Eric Fehrnstrom: At the debate, Mitt Romney made an interesting claim, specifically saying that "pre-existing conditions are covered under my plan." Sounded pretty, but it wasn't true, and poor Fehrnie had to back that track on up and say so. "So Governor Romney was fact-checked by his own campaign?" Obama told a rally crowd in Northern Virginia. "That’s rough."

Stephanie Cutter: So, Steph Cutter, Obama's deputy campaign manager and official truth squadder, what did you think about the debate? "I think that Mitt Romney, yes, he absolutely wins the preparation," she declared, adding, "He wins the style points." Cutter might be right, but what is she doing? (She just takes that truth squadding stuff super seriously.)

Al Gore: You are not helping, former Vice President Al Gore! “Obama arrived in Denver at 2 p.m. today, just a few hours before the debate started. Romney did his debate prep in Denver. When you go to 5,000 feet, and you only have a few hours to adjust." Seriously? "I don't know ... Maybe." Yeah, okay. I mean, when did we ever start expecting our president to just be able to get off planes and, like, do stuff, right? (Also, wasn't Obama at a higher altitude when he was on the plane?)

Welcome, hello, how are you, why don't you sit back and relax or make yourself some tea or get some napping in or get a grip on the day and do some chores around the house or, you know, DO NONE OF THESE THINGS, because this is your Sunday morning liveblog of the Sunday morning political bafflegabbers and that means (for you) FREEDOM, and (for me) futile typing as I watch flickering nonsense on the teevee.

Let's see, what can I tell you all about this week in the 2012 Horse Race To Certain Oblivion? In the middle of the week, backers of one candidate were sent into a orgy of garment rending sadness because their guy failed to swiftly dissect the other guys nutsack with a deft display of Jack the Ripperian rhetorical derring-do. And then days later, backers of the other candidate went on a long, dark journey in the damp lycanthropic forests of La Lune when it came to pass that more Americans were gainfully employed then previously imagined.

And then the Cardinals actually won that dumb baseball play-in game, only I feel really dirty about it because let's face it guys, that was a weird place to be invoking the infield fly rule, okay? And even though they won, I live in the Washington, DC and the Nationals are having a storybook season and everyone all around me is like "Natitude! The only thing that would be a bigger unicorn than Bryce Harper is a bipartisan deficit deal," so I'm going to be like, that guy at the party who didn't mean to fart in the mashed potatoes but did and now he hopes no one else finds out.

In short, it was a strange week, full of strange and unwanted metaphors. And the worst part of all is that once again I have failed to find the horcruxes of the Sunday Morning Television Shows and so I must once again watch them and recap them. But you, gentle readers, need not do the same. Instead, hang out with each other in the comment streams. If you like, you can drop me a line. I am on Twitter, you can be too, if you want. And, as I've been trying to do lately, I've some stories over at my Rebel Mouse page set up for some Sunday Morning diversions.

And as always, those of you who are using the iPhone and/or iPad are reminded to KEEP CALM AND USE SAFARI.

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

Today, in the battle of the surrogates, we will have Kelly Ayotte battling Martin O'Malley battling keeping anyone who is watching this from falling alseep. And there will be a debate coaching session, followed by a panel discussion, and there you go.

O'Malley and Ayotte are both in studio, to yell at each other. Wallace leads off with the great jobs news, which is in fact good news for many people, so I'm glad for that. It's always best, when you hear of some fortunate economic news to remember that fortunate economic news is good for America, and that the wealthy and popular political celebrities who are running for office are going to be okay no matter what happens to the unemployment rate.

Of course, Sunday is all about discussing larger issues of economic dislocation through the prism of how it impacts the possibility that a wealthy American will get a government job that he won't even like that much once he gets it, so we'll get back to that. Ayotte says that the good news in the economy is mostly based on people doing part time work and there is a low labor force participation rate, and when she looks at the 7.8% rate, it feels like it's 11% to her.

O'Malley, because he is supposed to, agrees with Ayotte that "nobody should be satisfied" with where we are in terms of unemployment. That said, he is probably glad that the discussion today leads off with the news on jobs and not Wednesday's debate. O'Malley notes the 31 consecutive months of private sector gains, and the generic "right track" of the financial trajectory.

Wallace points out that no president has been elected with an unemployment rate as high as it is, or with GDP figures as low as they are (remember GDP was recently revised downward and found to be more anemic than previously imagined). O'Malley reckons that voters will remember what an astounding cock-up Obama's predecessor was, and think in relative terms about the economy, instead of absolute terms about the economy.

Ayotte, though, wants to talk about Obama policies, and especially the stimulus package, which came with a promise of 6% unemployment, and then she poked her way through a few Romney talking points without hitting them with the same oomph that Paul Ryan does. Wallace sort of goes "feh" and changes the subject to the debate, and the way each side is accusing the other of lying.

Wallace maintains that it is not true that Romney is talking about a $5 trillion tax cut. Wallace is mostly wrong about that, but he's a victim of Romney's lack of specifics. Here's Brian Beutler:

Romney’s objection is that the $5 trillion tax cut is only one half of his plan. But crucially, it’s the only part of his plan that he’s detailed with any specificity.

The $5 trillion from the nonpartisan, independent, Tax Policy Center. It’s an estimate of how much cutting everyone’s tax rates 20 percent below where they are right now would add to deficits over 10 years. That gross tax cut figure is not in dispute. Romney’s complaint is that it only accounts for one big piece of his tax plan. But what’s still unclear, perhaps more unclear after the debate, is the other big piece: how Romney plans to pay for it.

“[T]he governor repeated his vow that his tax rate cuts would not add to the deficit,” tax expert Howard Gleckman wrote on TPC’s blog after the debate. “And he said high-income households would pay the same share of taxes as they do today. And middle-income people would pay less. So, how will he finance the rate cuts? The poor could pay more, I suppose, though that’s unlikely. The only other solution: The tax cuts would have to pay for themselves by generating a huge increase in economic growth. But these big supply-side effects are implausible at best.”

O'Malley makes these points, sort of, -- "Ahhh, which loopholes and which deductions...Governor Romney hasn't told us what he would cut." -- but it seems that he is having a contest with Ayotte to determine which surrogate can be the more soporific.

Ayotte interrupts saying, "Governor Romney made it clear and was actually able to speak directly to the American people" at the debate. The second part of this is true, but he actually didn't make the first part clear. O'Malley grimly intones the Big Bird talking point. Ayotte flatly attempts to retell Romney's joke about having five sons. This all feels like I am being punished for waking up this early.

Wallace confesses that Romney and Ryan have been really sketchy about providing details about his plan. Ayotte says that they cannot be more than hazy on the matter of what they would do, because they don't want to start making deals in advance with Congress. Here's Matt Yglesias on what reporters should do about this:

Rather than demanding more specifics, what I wish is that reporters would press candidates for more clarity. Romney seemed to be saying that if Dave Camp and Eric Cantor start whipping up votes for a deficit-increasing tax cut for the rich, Romney will issue a veto threat at which point presumably House conservatives will drop the matter rather than pick a doomed fight with a same-party president. Then he and congress will negotiate a revenue-neutral reform with contours TBD. But is that really what would happen? It certainly doesn't sound like the kind of thing that would happen. A Republican president vetoing tax cuts would be a remarkable turnaround from the past several decades worth of American political history. Things can change, of course. And presidents sometimes do pick fights with their base. But what Romney was saying last night is really a dramatic departure from what you'd expect to see happen. This idea should really get aired out.

He should be asked clearly if that's what he's saying and we should hear the reaction from conservative politicians and advocates and such. For my part, I think it sounds like a fishy claim but I'm open to persuasion.

Moving towards budget talks. Ayotte declares Obama's budget to be "the worst of both worlds," and Wallace notes some gimmicky double-counting. O'Malley insists that as you emerge from the Iraq War, et al., you should be allowed to score and project accordingly. But as Mother Jones reported after the debate: "the $850 billion Obama claims the United States is getting by leaving Iraq and Afghanistan hardly amounts to savings: Instead, it's money borrowed from abroad, which needs to paid back with interest."

More broadly, O'Malley insists that Obama knows that "you cannot cut your way to prosperity." I don't know -- Obama shows up in this article about every syphilis-brained numbskull in Washington and their dreams of austerity-uber-alles as someone who is amenable to their fever dreams.

O'Malley makes some pop-culture joke that is too old for even me to pick up on, and Wallace laughs, but Ayotte doesn't get it, but that's okay because she just cycles back to lying about the deficit. Here, O'Malley's gentle reminder that she is lying seems to rattle her a smidge. They fight about it, and Wallace is like, "UGH SHUT UP, GUYS."

He moves the discussion to the fiscal cliff, and the fiscal X Games that are going to take place in January. Ayotte says that Obama hasn't shown "leadership" on "sequestration," by which she means that Obama has bravely ridden to the Senate and House's rescue, to tell them they are off the hook for those trigger cuts to the Defense Department that they all insisted would prove to be the impetus that all but assured that a deficit deal would get made. Paul Ryan took to the well of the House and gave a stirring speech about how awesome and amazing the sequestration cuts were, and how he just wanted to stand in the rain and kiss them, all over, like he was Ryan Gosling.

Anyway, Obama should really show some leadership and bail out the legislature one more time for failing to "make the tough choices" they always say are so important until they end up being the ones tasked with making them.

Ayotte begins a complaint, "We know from Bob Woodward's book..." and that's my cue to point out that fully two-thirds of the people in Washington who cite Bob Woodward's book have not even cracked the spine of that book. You should know that! They should just say, "According to a news report on this book," instead of fronting like they bother to read actual books. (Neither Ayotte or O'Malley have read the book, I guarantee you.)

Where is the campaign going now? O'Malley points out that there are a bunch of more debates, which is helpful, but I think that Wallace was looking for an answer that's more strategic or philosophical, and less based on what is on the calendar.

O'Malley goes on to helpfully note that Joe Biden and Paul Ryan have different positions on things, in case that wasn't entirely clear. (O'Malley is partial to Biden's point of view, in case you hadn't heard.)

Ayotte says that the campaign has been reset, and the American people now get to see the "real Romney."

O'Malley ends up having to re-explain whatever pop-cultural reference he was making.

Now we are going to debate school with Brett O'Donnell, the man who turned Michele Bachmann into a powerhouse of steely eyed forensic skill and rhetorical ninja-ing. What did Obama do wrong, and how would O'Donnell fix it? Hopefully his first advice is, "Mr. Obama should probably take anything I have to say with a grain of salt, since I am also tasked with helping Mitt Romney win."

But, let's go along with this, because Obama's debate prep was more or less terrible. O'Donnell says that Obama clearly knows his policy positions, but didn't "seem to have a strategy" in place, and "wasn't mentally prepared for Romney" and seemed "shocked when Romney went on offense" -- by which he means shocked when Romney showed up espousing entirely new policy positions and governing philosophies. (We covered most of these problems in this week's Speculatron.)

O'Donnell says that Romney "cast a vision" from "the very beginning," and included "five things that his plan would do" which "set in motion" a "frame" that "allowed him to case vision." That was "good." He says that Obama managed to "take the vision of taxes" and "encapsulized" (is that a word?) everything about it "into one sentence" which was "good" because it "created a moment that the audience could catch on to."

Bad things? O'Donnell says that it was bad that Obama "kept looking down while his opponent was speaking" because he looked "disinterested" in what Romney is saying. (Maybe Romney isn't that interesting?) Anyway, O'Donnell says it "sends the wrong message." He says that Romney's regrettable moment was his "If you're 60 you can stop listening moment." "It seemed to be the moment he wasn't as sure as himself as he was in other moments of the debate," O'Donnell says.

They talk about the "Big Bird" moment, and say nothing of particular note about it.

What does O'Donnell expect from the Biden-Ryan battle? He thinks that Biden will "turn up the heat" and "go on offense." "Whoever stays on message will be thought of as the victor." "I think that both men will be very prepared." As for the next presidential debate, O'Donnell would advice Obama to go on offense, make mention of Bain Capital or the "47%" remarks to get at Romney, while articulating his own vision to define himself. But he doesn't want to change his persona so much that the big story afterwards is the adjustments he made.

Okay, let's panel with Brit Hume and Kirsten Powers and Kim Strassel and Mara Liasson.

First off, jobs report -- the Obama camp has to be happy that right now, the jobs report is the shinier, bouncier ball than his debate performance. Hume says that the president's talking points are now improved, but he's pretty sure that people make up their minds about the economy using "the stuff that's going on in their lives" and not the number, so "it doesn't help the President very much." Liasson agrees with Hume, but notes that consumer confidence is also on the rise, as is confidence in the future and how people feel about the economy.

Strassel figures that the debate is going to matter more to Americans than the jobs report, and Powers agrees. Powers says that it nevertheless gives Obama more positive things to say about the economy on the stump.

Moving to the debate, Hume says that the Obama team's efforts to undercut Romney by pointing out lies is not going to work, and furthermore, the Obama that showed up is "the Obama I've been listening to" all this time. "He's not ten feet tall, and he never has been," says Hume, referring to the outsized expectations of Obama's core group of fans, who could maybe benefit from a resetting of expectations?

Liasson reckons that the town hall format of the next debate will make it hard for Obama to attack Romney. Strassel agrees that Obama's core strategy is remaining likeable, and so going on the attack may not fit that strategy. (Perhaps he doesn't need to attack Romney, though? At the town hall debate, why not just relate to the ordinary Americans who will be asking the questions?)

I will readily admit that viewing the debate inside the strange and distorting bubble of Washington and the oppressive conventional wisdom that hangs in the air poisoning us all may have given me a warped idea of how the debate played. When I got the chance to hang out with a bunch of people who weren't so entirely focused on politics yesterday, more than a few told me that they were surprised that so many people were making a big deal about the debate. Sure, Romney was sharp, they told me, but Obama was "calm and Presidential," and they didn't know why that was such a bad thing.

I'm still inclined toward my original argument, that Obama did a bunch of self-negating things that he could have avoided. But if you're of the mind that it was just shrewder to stay calm and not get drawn into some angry attack, I guess I'm open to that argument. I don't think it can be denied that Romney made the most of the "levelling effect" he finally got to enjoy just by dint of standing on the same podium as the president.

Wallace says he is looking forward to the Ryan-Biden debate. Strassel says that Biden will benefit from being wildly underestimated, and Ryan will have to expect Biden to be on offense. Wallace points out that Ryan does not expect Biden to turn in an undisciplined performance.

Memo to Kirstin Powers: Biden saying he supports marriage equality is not a gaffe! A gaffe is not defined as "a statement that causes problems for Obama because Obama has a more cowardly position on an issue than his vice president."

Hume says Biden should not attack Paul Ryan's policy portfolio -- he should attack Romney's portfolio, and "try to make some hay out of them." That's actually very good advice. Liasson agrees, and warns that it will be "harder to paint Romney as the handmaiden of the House GOP's extreme agenda." Strassel and Hume points out that since Ryan has joined the ticket, they've submerged Ryan's policy aspirations and made Ryan a servant to Romney's vague proposals.

Wallace brings up an obvious point -- the vice presidential debates don't really move the needle, with voters. That's probably true, but at this point, I think a lot of political reporters would like to write the "Joe Biden saves Obama's bacon" story.

MEET THE PRESS

Today, Robert Gibbs and Newt Gingrich are going to be doing the yelling, and there will be, like, 170 minutes of interminable panel discussions, as usual.

Oh, wait, is this going to be a solid hour of paneling?

Gag. Me. That's exactly what it is: Robert Gibbs and Newt Gingrich and Mike Murphy and Hilary Rosen and Chuck Todd and the grim, winking figure of Death in the corner of the room, pointing his extended, greying metacarpal at me as a reminder that I frittered away whole days of my life watching these shows, and that I shan't get them back when it's time for me to pass over into the great beyond.

Anyway, we start with the jobs report, which is "certainly not something the Romney team wanted to see." Gingrich says it was a help to the President, saying, "Imagine if it had been 8.2% coming out of the debate." Gibbs says that it's a strong recovery in terms of jobs produced, and the pattern is consistent, but there's still a ways to go. (Gingrich flags an IMF report predicting full recovery isn't happening until 2018.)

Murphy still reckons that Romney can run a jobs campaign, because there is still wide-enough economic dislocation. Todd notices that there are curiosities all over the swing-state map -- in Ohio, the economy is doing better, which is probably why Obama's electoral map firewall is there. It's different in other places, he notes, like Nevada -- but even there, he notes that Romney's challenge is convincing voters to "start over." Rosen reckons that Obama comes to the table with strong middle-class affection for the incumbent, and that will be hard for Romney to penetrate.

Gingrich figures that when voters take stock in the entire economy, however, and consider their communities, and their family and friends, many of whom are getting by on less, it doesn't exactly give them great cheer. To Gingrich's mind, that's why despite the fact that Romney has gone through months and months of straight cocking up all the time, Obama hasn't pulled away -- the bad economy is a "rubber band" that keeps the two men close in the polls.

Gibbs says that the race was "always going to be close," and then rattles off a bunch of statistics making the case for Obama. And then there are a bunch of campaign talking points.

Murphy says that at the debate, Romney shattered the existing narrative by showing people a candidate they hadn't seen before -- and he is new and vital and exciting while the president has been "sleepwalking." Gibbs quips that there's "no doubt that Romney had never been seen before, there had to have been people in his own campaign" who didn't recognize him. "You simply can not wish away the entire premise of your campaign platform," Gibbs complains. He and Murphy fight over this for a few minutes.

After a few minutes of Lehrering, Gregory regains control of the panel and moves the topic to Jack Welch going all ding-dong-dementia on twitter over the BLS numbers, with claims that the books had been cooked.

Gregory describes Welch as "one of the most important CEOs in America," which should underscore just how unimportant CEOs are to America, in the main. Gingrich says Welch's theory is "plausible but irrelevant" -- he reckons though that it's more telling that Welch went right to the assumption that "Chicago" had "cooked the books." (What that should tell you is that WELCH IS BONKERS.)

One think you have to give Obama's critics credit for is substantially raising the esteem in which the "corrupt Chicago regime" is held. (My mother, who grew up in nearby Hammond, Indiana, has a good laugh whenever she is asked to think of Chicago politicians as criminal masterminds, and not as the bumbling bunch of inept aldermen that they actually are.) Texas, by contrast, is where the real deal, skin you alive with a smile politicians reside. You will probably survive an encounter with an Illinois politican, with the possible exception of the one who has a "kill list" and has gotten his hands on a bunch of aerial death drones!

Chuck Todd decries the way people with conspiracies can get traction in society, almost as if the network he works for was inviting them on Hardball and pointing teevee cameras at them, or something!

Gingrich says that we are, of course, missing the whole point: "The reason that people are losing respect for Washington" is Obama, duh.

I wonder if Chuck Todd, political expert, might, during his tragic musings on the way there's been this accelerated lack of trust in our political culture, might happen to notice that Newt Gingrich and his GOPAC were the driving force behind fomenting widespread distrust in science, academics, the media, etc. I am guessing not.

Gregory brings us back around to Wednesday's debate. "What happened?" he asks Gibbs. Gibbs says that the President was "disappointed" in his performance, but the big excuse is that Romney suddenly showed up with a bunch of new policy positions, and it caught him off guard. Which is sort of like encountering a bear in the woods and being surprised to discover that the woods are, in fact, where said bear has been leaving his fecal matter. "Well, this could not have been prepared for!"

Rosen notes that Romney's tax plan, bottom line, doesn't add up, and that "something will have to give." (Maybe mortgage interest deductions?) She adds, though, that the Obama on the campaign trail, regularly shows up and "fights for the American people," and there should be a sign of that guy when he comes to the debate.

Murphy counters: "[Obama] lost the debate because he had nothing to say...Romney seemed like he had energy and ideas, the president didn't." Todd adds, "The fact is that style has always mattered in these debates."

Gibbs has now scribbled a bunch of stuff about Romney's tax plan on a piece of paper, and it sort of proves the point that on teevee, style ends up mattering more than substance. Murphy says that Obama needs to bring substance to the debate: "If he'd have showed up with a couple of sharp ideas and a love for the job, he'd have won the debate."

What will Obama do better in the next debate? Gibbs says that the president will show up engaged and ready to take on Romney's changes of position. He calls Romney's performance last Wednesday, a "superb acting job."

Todd says that right now, the GOP has an advantage in terms of the enthusiasm gap. Older voters are more interested in the election then young voters, and that benefits Romney as well. He also thinks that high affection of Obama among Hispanic voters may be washed out by low turnout.

Gregory: "I was struck by this David Brooks column." That is hopefully not the phrase that activates all the Manchurian Candidates to go jump in a lake, you know?

Rosen goes on an extended monologue about how Obama's policies reduce a wide variety or economic burdens and displace a lot of uncertainty for individuals and households, and concludes that Americans, in general, are more "holistic" about their interests than most people imagine. Murphy repeats his contention that Obama isn't bringing any zingy new ideas to the debate, and that ultimately, the need to go on the attack against Romney will just make him "look small."

There is a good point to be made here about Romney just needing to survive long enough to make it to the debates and put Obama into a position where he had to contend directly and materially with his challenger -- Obama was winning the war of abstractions, now he's struggling as the debate turns concrete.

Will we see "Mitt the moderate" now? Gingrich says no, and then goes on a wonky journey about energy that Rosen immediately disputes, causing Gregory to say, "Gah, just finish your point" -- and then we go to commercial.

What will we see from Biden? Gibbs says that Biden will not be "overcompensating" and the mystery will be if Ryan is a trickster "chameleon," like Romney. Gingrich figures that Ryan will "not give an inch" but will refrain from being "hostile" because of respect for his status as a veteran legislator. Todd points out that elder statesmen tend to do better in these situations. Murphy reckons that Biden is a constant "high-wire act."

Rosen points out something that maybe everyone needs to consider: it's possible to be able to say, "That guy won the debate" and nevertheless not decide to vote for them. That's true to some extent, but there are voters who just want to be able to say they backed a winner, so "winning" things -- even debates -- are still important.

Now we are having an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he is shilling a memoir. What do you really need to know about this? Arnold is sad that there isn't more "post-partisanship" and that the GOP is kooky-loo on issues like the environment and stem-cell research. He says that the GOP needs to do more to court the Hispanic vote, and return to supporting comprehensive immigration reform. This is a more haunted and earnest Schwarzenegger, and it's interesting to see him communicating without that movie star swagger -- he's at once more human and less imposing, those normally ever-present Austrian vowel-switched sanded-down and muted.

Gregory brings up Schwarzenegger's humiliating private life, and asks if he's lost some credibility. He says, "If people are angry with me, I deserve that." He says that he will work hard in the coming years to repair the relationships he's broken. Asked if he thinks of himself as a sympathetic figure, he says that his intent is not to make himself sound sympathetic -- but he goes on the talk about his rise from obscurity and his "dark side," and the only people who publicly talk about their "dark side" are people who either want hugs, or want people to be impressed.

Anyway, there's a few more minutes of therapy, and Gregory ends the discussion about about anold encounter with Matt Lauer, which is not worth redocumenting here. Buy his book, if you want, it's in it.

FACE THE NATION

You'll be surprised to learn that we will be discussing the debate! And David Axelrod is here, to spin it! And there will be a panel discussion. All sorts of exciting innovation in the face of the horsey race. Then there will be a roundtable discussion about baseball, which we are going to skip entirely.

First, we will have David Axelrod spinning about the debate, and what not. Also Norah O'Donnell and John Dickerson are there, hanging out.

"So, what happened?" asks Bob Schieffer. Axelrod gives his variation on the "some new and surprising version of Mitt Romney showed up" theme. Romney, he says, "delivered a performance" that was "completely unrooted in fact." Schieffer asks if he is saying that Romney lied, and Axelrod affirms that yes, he says Romney was being dishonest -- pointing to the pretty hilarious instance of Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom having to tell reporters after the debate that Romney was just kidding about pre-existing conditions being covered under a Romney health care plan.

Schieffer and Axelrod have a brief colloquy over whether calling a man "dishonest" is the same as saying he "lied," because unemployed America could really use a discussion on semantics and what terms are deemed "polite" enough to be aired on television. (Our country would be in 2000% better shape, I think, if the FCC would just permit people to use the word "bullshit" without being fined.)

Why didn't Obama "bring up the famous 47%" line? Axelrod says that he "didn't find the opportunity to raise it." Which is pretty stupid! The debate topics can simply be the rough contours of the points you'd like to raise, so raise away, debaters! Axelrod says it's nevertheless astonishing to hear Romney offer a fitful apology to the half of America he deemed privately to be useless, as he passed on a chance to do so weeks ago. Nevertheless, Axelrod now has a LOT to say about a matter that wasn't worth bringing up during the debate, for some reason.

O'Donnell asks Axelrod why the President didn't point out Romney's dishonesties during the debate. Axelrod says that Obama was there to discuss his own vision for the future, but anyway he was totally shocked by the "brazen" way "Romney walked away" from so many of his previous policies and convictions, even thouge that is the last thing you should be shocked about, with Mitt Romney.

Anyway, it's something that Obama will "have to adjust for." Their contention, I guess, is that it's reasonable to be surprised by this -- Dickerson says, "All that means is that the president didn't do his homework."

Dickerson continues to press on the matter of whether Romney's tax plan is a "lie" or just an "unrealistic promise," Axelrod says that their point is that all the loopholes in the world won't balance the budget under Romney's tax cut plan, so the only way around it is to "sock it to the middle class." Dickerson contends that the case Axelrod is making is that Romney's plan is "unrealistic," Axelrod counters by saying it's "impossible."

If Obama really wants to lower the boom on Romney's sudden changes in position, and highlight how he was a different person Wednesday night than he's been all the other days of the campaign, he should say something to the effect that Romney seemed "brainwashed." (Google it.) That will, for a lot of reasons, fill Romney with rage. It's also the meanest thing Obama could do to the man.

Anyway, the argument continues. Axelrod says Romney's plan is a "shell game," where no matter what shell you pick up, "the middle class loses." That might have been a good line to use, in the debate.

O'Donnell poses a long and confusing question that I think is just meant to ask, "Why was the president looking down the whole time?" So: why was he looking down the whole time? "The President was taking notes on what he said, so that he could be responsive," Axelrod says. That's nice that he took notes, I guess, but they sure didn't fuel a whole lot of "responding."

We move to the good news about the unemployment rate dropping. Schieffer asks about those who accused the BLS of "cooking the books." Axelrod says that those people can "join the birthers on the lunatic fringe," and that "every respectable economist said that response was completely nuts." He adds that it "robs Romney of talking points," which is nice but actually is not a thing most Americans were counting on the economy being able to do.

Now it is time for roundtabling, with John Fund and Michael Gerson joining Dickerson and O'Donnell. So it's another one of those classic DC panels were two conservatives "debate" two reporters and we call it even-steven.

Gerson likens Obama's performance to Bush 43's first debate against Kerry -- he knew what he wanted to say but hadn't had that sort of competition in a long while and thus lacked a sharp, competitive edge. "It was a wake-up call," he says, "I think he'll do better next time, but you could hardly do worse."

Did Romney move to the middle in the debate? Fund says that in terms of rhetoric, sure, but what saves Romney from a lot of conservative fretting is the fact that he can run against Obama's second term, which conservatives will see as further from the middle in the other direction.

O'Donnell says that Romney has successfully energized his supporters and his own campaign staff, who "now feel they have an opportunity to focus on issues." Next week, the Romney campaign will attack Obama on Libya, and they are considering "major speeches" on the economy and the debt. The Obama campaign, she says, has had their "wake up call" and will make "major changes on style and substance" going into their next tilt.

Gerson reckons you'll see a preview of the next presidential debate in this week's vice presidential encounter: "Biden is going to have to be aggressive in this debate...which is not an easy thing to calibrate." That said, Gerson notes that Biden has a facility with the national stage, while Ryan has been a bit nervous in the big spotlight. Fund disagrees, and says that Biden has gone a little loosey-goosey on the campaign trail. He insists Palin fought Biden to a draw, but that's only because everyone expected Palin to basically injure herself or set the debate venue on fire.

Norah O'Donnell thinks that both candidates should "go head to head" on their tax reform plan, and I mean, she could just tell that to Schieffer, who will be moderating the last debate between Obama and Romney.

Everyone sort of generically agrees that at worse, Romney is being "unrealistic" about his tax plan, and not "dishonest."

Schieffer asks if Romney changed minds during the debate. Gerson says that he "punctured a stereotype" in the debate. "He stopped losing the election," Gerson says, "that's different from winning the election."

Schieffer offers his editorial, about debate moderatin' and whether or not debates were still important. Guess what? He still thinks they are important. For whatever reason, that spins into a lament about how people in both sides in Washington don't hang out with each other and the debates are at least one chance that each side has to listen to the other. And I mean, fine, but if you want to get "both sides snuggling" with each other again maybe you should turn off the teevee cameras every once in a while and force them to just stop grandstanding? I don't know. Anyway, yes, "both sides" have to show up for the debate, hooray.

Oh wow, this show literally decided to spend a half-hour talking about baseball? Sweet fancy Moses, they did. Still no one told Tony LaRussa to comb his hair, which is oddly fitting.

Anyway, that is your week in politics. There was a debate, and everyone remembers it. There were some job numbers, and they meant something, too. There will be other debates, and they might also be important, unless they aren't, in which case they won't. And we'll all get together on Sunday to talk about these events as if they were, ultimately, utterly inscrutable phenomenon. We will see you then. In the meanwhile, have a great week!

[You Sunday morning liveblog will return in one week's time. Probably, anyway!. While you wait, check out my periodically updating Rebel Mouse page for stories of interest around the web.]

WASHINGTON -- The Daily Caller, working in collaboration with Fox News, released a video Tuesday night of a speech President Barack Obama delivered at Hampton University back in 2007. The release was preceded by an all-afternoon Drudge Report banner headline splash, billing the video as some sort of electorally game-changing revelation with racial overtones that was going to affect the 2012 campaign ahead of the first presidential debate.

It ended up being a rerun of a 2007 story that was already well known to reporters and political partisans. So, as a piece of new and incendiary news, it was something of a letdown. However, as a piece of Internet trolling that forced political reporters to bide their time until the evening release of the video, instead of watching the goings-on in the last days of Major League Baseball's regular season, it was a work of genius.

So, here, in 2012, is how a screaming Drudge-siren scoop comes and goes, in 10 easy steps.

1. We get a big tease, about a bombshell video scoop that's going to "drop," from Matt Drudge. He uses Twitter to get the word out. Relatively speaking, that's kind of new. Anyway, this is enough to prompt zillions of political reporters to point their browsers at the Drudge Report and start refreshing like mad. Relatively speaking, that's kind of old. But, hey, if you want to attract lemmings, give 'em a cliff.

2. Naturally, one sort of suspects that something of a letdown is coming. Condoleezza Rice, after all, was not selected to run alongside Mitt Romney. But the promised outcome is that the video is going to "cause controversy, ignite accusations of racism -- in both directions!" (No, I've no idea what "both directions" is supposed to mean.)

3. Those madcap browser-refreshers get gradual payoffs. We learn that the video in question will be shown on Fox News later Tuesday night. It's billed as "Obama's other race speech." A later update teases: “THE ACCENT … THE ANGER … THE ACCUSATIONS …THE SHOUT OUT TO REV. WRIGHT WHO IS IN AUDIENCE ...”

4. Matt Drudge has an image to his Obama video splash, of Obama speaking, in front of some sort of drum kit. He is apparently unaware that Google allows anyone to do a reverse-search to find information about images. A reporter from BuzzFeed, Jessica Testa, figures this out, and identifies the image as Obama, giving a speech at Hampton University, in 2007. She and her colleague, Andrew Kaczynski, start finding relevant portions of the speech on YouTube.

5. As it turns out, Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish has had a transcript of the prepared remarks of the speech since 2007. (Though Obama did, at times, improvise from those remarks, as the videos BuzzFeed gathered demonstrate.)

6. And Politico reported the "shout-out" to Wright in 2008 as one of the "top eight gaffes of the campaign." By which I mean, the 2008 campaign.

7. Newsbusters wrote about this appearance, speech, et al., back in 2008 as well. This virtually assures that everyone who was a) alive in 2008 and b) a conservative political blogger, is well aware of this story.

8. Actually, they were likely aware of it even before Newsbusters wrote about it. CNN's Roland Martin, in fact, pushed back against the conservative outcry over this speech in 2007.

9. Tucker Carlson, who was chiefly responsible for rolling out this old video, insisted earlier today that all the extant video clips that were found to be in wide circulation were incomplete, and that he, exclusively, had the full video. What's really strange about this is that Tucker Carlson already covered this speech -- back in 2007, on his eponymous MSNBC show.

10. The Daily Caller and Sean Hannity collaborate on an explosive release of this story, releasing it simultaneously at 9 p.m., as if it had not happened a long time ago.

And that's how the entire political Internet was briefly trolled on Tuesday, and into Tuesday night.

For what end? Well, it's a largely a reheat of something that conservatives have already pretty much bugged out over once before. The Daily Caller, writing up the video in a post published to coincide with Hannity, runs down a list of what it finds objectionable: Obama shouted out the Rev. Wright, he used "an accent he almost never adopts in public" (meaning it's an "accent" he sometimes uses), and he criticizes the federal government's response to Hurricane Katrina. (As did Bobby Jindal, and David Vitter.)

Obama expresses his dissatisfaction thusly:

“People in Washington, they wake up, they’re surprised: ‘There’s poverty in our midst! Folks are frustrated! Black people angry!’ Then there’s gonna be some panels, and hearings, and there are commissions and there are reports, and then there’s some aid money, although we don’t always know where it’s going — it can’t seem to get to the people who need it — and nothin’ really changes, except the news coverage quiets down and Anderson Cooper is on to something else.”

And that ...pretty much accurately describes Washington's official response to this, actually, right down to Anderson Cooper finding something new to cover. The only thing I'd object to, is that there didn't end up being all that many panels and hearings and commissions and reports. So, Obama is in the wrong here, by giving Capitol Hill even that much credit.

Obama goes on to object that the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act -- which requires localities to match federal relief funds, a requirement that was waived for the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath -- was not waived for Hurricane Katrina relief. But Obama is hardly alone in calling for reforms of the Stafford Act. Here's Desiree Evans of the Institute for Southern Studies:

For years policy advocates have called for an overhaul of the Stafford Act, the primary law that also governs the Federal Emergency Management Agency's role in responding to disasters. Policy advocates say that amending the Stafford Act will better serve people in the wake of disaster. Following the disastrous federal response to Hurricane Katrina, this call to action became even more urgent.

As the Louisiana Family Recovery Corps pointed out in a recent statement, the Stafford Act was not designed to deal with massive disasters, and it has ultimately retarded recovery in Louisiana and other states. According to the Recovery Corps, "the rigidity of the Act and its voluminous amendments has certainly served to handcuff those federal agents, officers, and agencies working under its oversight."

[...]

Critics of the Stafford Act also argue that it needs to give FEMA greater latitude in how it responds to catastrophes as devastating as Hurricane Katrina. The assistance flowing from the Stafford Act has been inadequate following major disasters and unable to fulfill vital needs, human rights advocates argue. Reform advocates also call for more flexibility in providing cash assistance quickly -- particularly in the form of grants to states and localities, while also avoiding the type of bureaucratic red tape that has marred post-Katrina recovery efforts.

Following Hurricane Katrina local Gulf Coast officials said the "match" requirement in the Stafford Act -- which said that affected communities had to pay a 25 percent match upfront before they can receive federal disaster fund -- played a large role in the pace of recovery in the region. After Katrina, the White House reduced the match requirement to 10 percent, but it was still a hefty sum for devastated areas.

Did race play a role in the response to Katrina? That question was put to the 2008 slate of Democratic Party candidates. Well-known angry black guy Christopher Dodd opined: "I believe that if this had occurred in a place with a majorly white population, we would have seen a much more rapid response and a consistent response." Here's Howard Dean, on the same topic: “We must ... come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not.”

It was a fairly mainstream Democratic Party critique of the Katrina response, in other words.

Beyond that, the objections seem to be largely based on Obama acknowledging that the black community hasn't exactly had the easiest time of it in America for the past three centuries. The Daily Caller contends thusly: "Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event."

Pardon me -- I mean to say that the Daily Caller recontends things that conservative critics already contended four years ago, about this speech. (Newsbusters, circa 2008: "This entire speech is filled with nothing but class warfare, expansions of social programs, raising the minimum wage, typical great society type junk all couched squarely as a civic responsibility enmeshed with Obama's view of Biblical precepts.")

Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt responded to all of this, thusly:

In a transparent attempt to change the subject from his comments attacking half of the American people, Mitt Romney’s allies recirculated video of a 2007 event that was open to and extensively covered by the press at the time. The only thing shocking about this is that they apparently think it’s wrong to suggest that we should help returning veterans, children leaving foster care and other members of Mitt Romney’s 47 percent get training that will allow them to find the best available jobs. If the Romney campaign believes that Americans will accept these desperate attacks tomorrow night in place of specific plans for the middle class, it’s they who are in for a surprise.

There's really not much more to say about this. If you were inclined to object to the content of this speech, you've been so inclined since the 2008 campaign, and you're probably all het up again tonight. If you're open to the argument but need convincing, this might do the trick, but it's just as likely that it will be seen as pretty weak tea.

Four years of the Obama White House basically makes it hard to present Obama -- now -- as an "angry black man" -- the reason Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele's "Obama Anger Translator" comedy sketches work is because Obama never manifests that sort of raw, racially-tinged ire, so watching "Luther," his "anger translator" indulge himself in it is a hilarious contrast. The closest Obama came to that sort of acrimony was when he referred to the police who arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr for breaking and entering "stupid." (Mind you, Gates was accused of breaking and entering his own home. If the day ever comes that the police arrest me for doing the same, I plan on calling them "stupid," quite a bit. They, in turn, should plan to take it with humility.)

So what's the point of this? Well, it's become an article of faith among many conservatives that Sen. John McCain cost himself the election when, in the late stages of the 2008 campaign, he didn't make greater use of the Rev. Wright controversy, and all of the attendant racial dog whistles it offered, to win the election. This rehash of a news event that was exceedingly well covered four years ago is less about new information, and more about fulfilling a conservative tribal need, left unfulfilled by the previous Republican candidate.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not?]

This week, your heroic replacement refs of the National Football League achieved a brief moment of “bipartisanship” on the campaign trail, when just about everyone in the race came out against the replacement officials who ruined Monday night’s Packers-Seahawks game. Vice presidential contender Paul Ryan did something for the first time in his life -- call for an industry to be competently regulated. The real refs' return prompted President Barack Obama to enthuse that it was a “great day for America.” (BUT WHAT ABOUT JOBS?) Somewhere, we are guessing that even Romney was relieved. “HA HA HA. Sport. That’s fine,” we imagine he said, adding, “Ha ha ... ha.”

The point is, when politicians need an easy-money way to show some basic affinity with their fellow Americans, they can do a lot worse than reach for the sports pander. Some are more successful than others.

JOHN KERRY: John Kerry may be the senior senator from Massachusetts, but his attempts to cater to hometown sports fans have been historically lacking. As Politico’s Erika Lovely remembers, Kerry has struggled with the names of various Red Sox during his career -- once famously referring to Manny Ramirez as Manny “Ortez.” But the strangest moment by far was when Kerry “named baseball legend Eddie Yost as his favorite Red Sox player.” Yost’s third base coaching must have left a major impression with Kerry, because that’s the only role he ever played in Boston -- he was a player for the Senators, Angels and Tigers.

NEWT GINGRICH: It’s a Saturday night in January, and for some reason ABC News is making the 2012 GOP hopefuls debate, because ABC News is awful. Out of sympathy, the moderator asks the candidates, “If you weren't here running for president, what would you be doing on this Saturday night?" Newt Gingrich answers: "I'd be watching the college championship basketball." Maybe on the moon, sir. Here in America, you have to wait until March to watch the “college championship basketball.”

MITT ROMNEY: Yes, yes, from time to time we wonder if Romney can relate to the average sports fan, like when we hear that he has a fancy dancing horse and commonly refers to sports as “sport,” as if he were Gore Vidal or something. But let’s not forget he did make an Olympics happen! And he even cut a commercial in which Olympic athletes celebrated his work. (They leave out the part where he saves the Olympics “thanks to the largess of the 1 percent and the congressional appropriations process.”)

BARACK OBAMA: Nobody worries if President Obama is some sort of robot-aristocrat when he talks about sports. And like most human beings in America, the president fills out a NCAA bracket when the “college championship basketball” -- as Newt would call it -- starts up. That said, Obama seems to embed a certain amount of political calculation in his tournament picks. Especially last year’s swing-state heavy Final Four picks: Kentucky, Ohio State, Missouri and North Carolina. He picked UNC to win it all, prompting many observers to say, "Yeah, yeah, we saw what you did there."

PAUL RYAN: When you need one guy on the ticket to do the sports-related pandering of two people, you are not going to do any better than P90X broheim Paul Ryan. This past week, he led the league in decrying the way the victory was stolen from his home-state Packers. Saturday, he headed to the Varsity Club near Ohio State’s Columbus campus to hang with Buckeyes fans as their team contended with the Michigan State Spartans. Finally, he finished off the weekend by pandering his behind off at the National U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance's 16th Annual Save Our Heritage Banquet. That’s Ironman-class bro-ing out from the bottom of the ticket.

Hi everybody! This is your Sunday Morning Liveblog and I am your long-suffering replacement referee of political chit-chat, here once again with you for another week of desperation and sleep-deprivation. Hello! My name is Jason. We are now within forty days of this election thingy, right? Thank heavens, I'm sure it's going to solve everything in America. Hopefully, and especially, that problem we all face on planes when contents in the overhead compartments "may have shifted." WHY DON'T WE KNOW? It is the twenty-first century! Anyway, that all changes in Jill Stein's America. Or whoever is favored to win the presidency. Lebron James, was it? The cast of Modern Family?

Anyway, let's get this little she-bang started. As always, you should feel free to jump into the comments and hang out with one another. You should also feel free to drop me a line if necessary. I guess I should remind all of you having trouble with your iPhones and iPads -- KEEP CALM AND USE SAFARI. You will be able to read this there, don't worry. You can follow me on the Twitter, if that's your bag. And, if you find yourself waiting for more liveblog or otherwise bored, head on out to my RebelMouse page, where I have got newsworthy, interesting, and diverting reads from the week gone by waiting for you.

FOX NEWS SUNDAY

I like how when Chris Wallace stands on the set to introduce his show, they back-light him, so that he looks like a ghost or a hologram.

Today's extra-special guest is Paul "Kid Serious" Ryan, who is the part of the Romney/Ryan ticket that conservatives seem to authentically like. Now, he's having weird satiric pieces written about him in POLITICO, your go-to source for both political humor and the subtle use of the English language. Also, there will be a big panel discussion about the debate, because it is so shiny and bouncy right now. "The presidential debates may be Mitt Romney's last best chance to turn this thing around," says Wallace. What? He doesn't think the whole Lyme disease thing is gonna be a game-changer?

Wallace went to New Hampshire, to exclusively crawl around the bowels of some convention center venue. There he learned that Romney and Ryan opposes the Obama/Biden ticket, probably because of tick-borne illness.

What does Romney need to do in the first debate? Ryan says that "he needs to give America the choice that we're offering." Isn't that what the debate moderators have done, by suggesting to America that there are two people who have different ideas and they are going to have a battle of wits with each other? I don't mean to get ontological here. Anyway, Ryan says his ticket is against the bad economy and government dependency, and he is for a "brighter future." It's a Classic Choice, that you will prefer to the New Choice and also Pepsi.

Wallace asks, "I thought you dudes wanted to make this a referendum election, what?" Ryan says that Obama's record is a "failed record" and they were right to try to point that out but now it's time to do choice election stuff, like vaguely hint at plans and promise to be for the future and what not.

Wallace points out that they are trailing in the polls and that the conservative pundits are starting to get twitchy. It's apparently been declared -- not by me or anything, but by whoever Wallace has bagels with on Sunday morning -- that it Romney doesn't score a clear victory, donors will start to put their money elsewhere. So Romney must cleanly extract Obama's pancreas with his bare hands and feed it to Jim Lehrer, right? Ryan says, "I don't think one event is going to make or break this campaign."

Then he explains that Obama is the greatest living debater and laser-visioned orator and Mitt's never debated at this level before -- where everyone is jumping around in the trees like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and levitating on the end of each other's swords and stuff, and so you should expect Obama to delicately fillet Romney, with words, but slowly, Romney will win the same way John Cusack wins in the movie "Better Off Dead" -- a really good montage, underscored by Roxette, or something.

Has the President engaged in a cover-up over the events in Benghazi? Ryan doesn't want to go there, instead calling the response slow and muddled, and the larger problem is that "the Obama foreign policy is unraveling before our eyes." Romney, he says, will articulate a foreign policy that's based in "strength" and not "weakness."

Wallace is skeptical, pointing out that Romney would not put troops on the ground in Syria or attack Iran. "There's no big difference," Wallace contends. Ryan disputes that, saying that in Iran, Romney will have "credibility," and Romney's credibility will convince the ayatollahs to stop building their nuclear weapon. So, while Romney and Obama both put "all the options on the table" Romney does so in a wholly different way, so that foreign agitants say, "Holy crap, that thing is really on the table there. Like it's totally near the floral centerpiece and I cannot reach the gravy boat without dealing with that. Bravo, Mitt Romney! Here, we are just going to turn over all of our weapons to you."

Wallace says, okay, here, take some credibility if you want, and asks if Ryan and Romney would put the "red line" in the same place as Netanyahu? Ryan says that they will establish credibility and that will be enough. Wallace points out that this doesn't answer his question. Ryan contends that the Obama administration "has moved their rhetoric a bit to be more like ours, and that's good, but it's built on a mountain of non-critical actions."

Ryan also says that the President is planning to "gut the military," referring to the budget sequester that Ryan both supported, voted for, and gave a sticky, sappy speech about how he wanted to hug and kiss the sequester and sing Dashboard Confessional songs to it, because it was a thing of bipartisan beauty and devotion.

Wallace points out that the economy is terrible, and so it's weird that Romney isn't straight up running away with the race. "We're going to win this race," Ryan says. Wallace says, "But you're not winning!" Ryan says, well, Obama is good at distorting the truth for people, and "we're going to show the country the clear difference."

Wallace says, "But Romney has been running for two years and there are only five weeks left in this campaign." This is totally why Romney is gonna get some cool teevee cameras, cue up Roxette's "Joyride," and straight up montage that mofeaux to victory!

The weird thing about how Ryan presents "specifics" is that he does so like this: "We're offering very specific reforms. How do you save and strengthen Medicare? How do you prevent a debt crisis? How do you grow jobs?" You aren't supposed to ask how, though! You are supposed to answer it. Or, at least, you are supposed to say, "We will grow jobs." Like, when you go into the diner and order scrambled eggs, they are supposed to say, "I will bring that to you," and not, "Okay, how do you cook stuff?"

Wallace asks if after all this time, are they behind in the polls because of their own failings or because of the voters. Ryan says it is not the voters fault, it's Obama's fault, because he is wily and tricky.

Wallace tries to go through the budget math on Ryan's plan, but Ryan very giddily and repeatedly dodges Wallace's key question, "How much will this cost?" by answering, "it's revenue-neutral!" over and over again. "I'm not going to get into a baseline argument with you," Ryan says, who then dispenses with "math" altogether and wallows instead in a bunch of platitudes about bipartisanship. "You haven't given me the math," Wallace complains. "It would take too long," says Ryan. MONTAGE IT, KID SERIOUS!

Wallace asks, "What it the math doesn't add up?" Ryan says, "I've run the numbers, it does." Wallace doesn't want to hear that right now, instead asking "What's most important to [Romney]" if the plan doesn't work and he has to make some kind of choice. Ryan says that the choice would be "keeping tax rates down...that's more important than anything." And he promises to "deny and close deductions and loopholes" to rich people. Every single one of those deductions and loopholes comes with a battalion of syphilitic lobbyists, so good luck.

Should the "47%" pay income taxes? Ryan says, "We don't think that imposing taxes on everyone is a good idea." Rather, he will "grow the economic pie." Wouldn't it be easier to have an economic cake, by the way? You can still slice it, like a pie, but you can add layers and frosting and stuff? Just a thought, metaphor makers!

If there ever going to be passion from the Romney/Ryan campaign? Ryan says that there is totally a lot of passion, and that Mitt Romney is full of awesome specifics. All that criticism, Ryan says, is about the attitudes of Beltway hand-wringers. Ryan continues to contend that Romney's "47%" remarks are just a mis-articulation of an idea that's actually super-friendly and well-disposed to ordinary Americans.

Wallace asks: "Do you think that the media is carrying water for Barack Obama?" Ryan: "I think it goes without saying." He also says he's totally "used to" the biases of the mainstream media because he is a conservative, and everyone knows that wherever Ryan goes, the media is always telling him he is awful and stupid. I mean, it's not like Paul Ryan's entire persona of being the super-serious "math guy" and "budget savant" was completely created by easy-to-snow political reporters or something! No, no, Ryan does not owe his extraordinarily high regard and sterling reputation to the fawning media, at all!

Moving the the vice-presidential debate, Wallace asks if he's figured out Joe Biden's strengths. "He's fast on the cuff, he's a witty guy, and he's been doing this a long time," he says. "My job is to make sure [viewers] aren't confused about what we stand for." Ted Olson has been standing in for Joe Biden, and has been practicing, having watched tapes. (The irony there is that you could argue that no two political figures in America have done more to advance marriage equality in recent years than Ted Olson and Joe Biden.)

Wallace points out that Obama hasn't been on Fox News Sunday for over 1,600 days. But he's totally invited to come by! Friend of the liveblog Chris Blakely writes in: "Regarding the length of time since Obama and Biden have been back to FOX News, I suspect we will see them at FOX when we see Romney and Ryan on MSNBC." Ha, right! (And if they came to CNN, who would watch?)

Now it is time to get our panel on, with Bill Kristol, Liz Marlantes, Laura Ingraham, and Juan Williams.

Kristol says that Romney needs to win this debate, because it's time to start panicking a bit. To quell the panic, Romney needs to lay out the future, and stop dwelling on the last four years, Kristol says. He urges Romney to "ignore Jim Lehrer" and not answer his questions. Marlantes says that the universal consensus is that Romney needs to win, and that a "safe debate performance" probably won't cut it. That said, she goes on to say that the challenger typically has an easy time winning the first debate. "The dynamics will, in some ways, favor Romney," she says, "and he could win this debate with one geniunely good human moment."

Ingraham objects to the notion that the debate is the be-all end-all for Romney. She goes on to say that Obama is "very uncomfortable" when challenged, and that Romney needs to challenge him and show "real leadership" and set up a contrast between himself and Obama, who, to Ingraham's estimation, is only comfortable on "late night talk shows."

Williams wonders if the people who will be tuning into the debate won't just be the sort of people who have intractably made up their minds in this election yet and are just following their tribal impulses.

Does Bill Kristol feel that there is a lot of media bias? Kristol says that it's pretty clear, but that conservatives can't use that as an excuse -- after all, they win plenty of elections. He goes on to say that one condition this creates is the call for Romney to be "more likeable." "Forget it," Kristol says. "He's got to be tough, he's got to go right at Obama," and if the narrative the next day is that everyone got along and had a mature debate, that's a loser for Romney.

Marlantes says that the problem the media poses for Romney is just that they are "covering him like he's losing." Ingraham says that the real story is that Obama has been constantly running for re-election and not meeting with foreign leaders. Williams objects to this, but not in a particularly interesting way. Williams and Ingraham fight to the commercial break.

On their return, the discussion turns to recent events in the Middle East and the administration's fumbling explanations of what happened in Benghazi, and was the ensuing confusion incompetence or a cover-up? Kristol says that the attack in Benghazi was clearly a terrorist operation, but "Obama has a big investment in the notion that...al Qaeda is dead," and they "tried to pretend that this was just a reaction to a video."

The problem, here, is that Susan Rice did her round of Ginsburging a couple of Sundays ago at a time where there were plenty of other people reporting on the matter as a pre-planned attack. Marlantes points out that Rice left herself no wiggle room, and that's created a problem. She says that the problem is that it presents an "honesty problem" and raises the question that the administrations' actions were less about foreign policy and more about protecting his presidential campaign.

Ingraham wonders why it was so necessary for Susan Rice to run around on Sunday when there was so much more, at that time, to learn. That's a good question, frankly! Williams defends Rice, "I think she gave the best information she had at the time...she was being forthcoming." If that's true, then the lesson is that discretion and caution is preferable to something that sounds like premature consensus -- and it's not like Rice was the only person contending that everything stemmed from the goofy little YouTube video.

Kristol says that the media's reaction to Netanyahu's Wiley Coyote bomb-cartoon was totally wrong and dismissive. In Bibi's defense, he was at a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly, and it's not like every nation in the world is filled with erudite geniuses.

THE CHRIS MATTHEWS SHOW

Let's have some affable conversations about politics punctuated by video clips from Chris Matthews' favorite SNL routines, okay? Today, joining Chris at the genius bar -- to talk about debates, and polls, and the campaign -- are John Heilemann, Trish Regan, Kelly O'Donnell, and our own Howard Fineman, who has, I guess, synced his Chris Matthews Show schedule to mine, or vice versa.

Matthews says he has a, like, debate must-do list, and the first thing he has to do (contra Bill Kristol) is "get likeable." He can't get all snippy at the debate, like he did with Rick Perry back during the primaries. Instead, he will need to be "formal and presidential." Heileman says that the Romney team is going to try, and that they will specifically be trying to "reach for a moment" that "breaks through" and that the risk they are running is that they may do so in too heavy-handed a fashion. (We are told that Romney is "learning zingers" for the debate. I do not think this is what he should be doing. At any rate, you want those zingers to appear spontaneous, so telling people that you are working on some really cool cutdowns in advance is actually going to steal some of the "zing.")

O'Donnell says that Romney has to present a "you can't afford another four years of Obama" theme. Should he be aggressive? They are prepping him to be aggressive.

So how does he become likeable? Howard says he will have to be "skilled" and "deft" and "visionary" and "focused" and "humorous" and "specific" and pretty soon, the rest of the panel is laughing, as intended. "Don't steal my punchline, John Heileman." He goes on to say that the Romney campaign will probably treat the four debates as if they were a television series -- the four occasions will fit together as a narrative, with pre-planned arcs and tonal shifts. The only problem I see with that plan is that GOP donors are probably looking to this Wednesday as a clear moment of breakthrough where this candidacy reclaims it's footing. I don't know if they'll tune in for subsequent episodes.

Regan says that Romney needs to establish some ability to empathize with people, because they will be looking for a candidate who doesn't just "understand Wall Street" but seems capable of grasping what the economic interests of ordinary human-Americans are.

Turning to Obama, Matthews says that one thing he'll have to avoid in the debate is his tendency to be snippy and condescending -- the "you're likeable enough" moment from the 2008 primary debates gets presented as an example.

Howard notes that it was a bad moment for Obama -- "the essence of arrogant condescension...and that's the sliver of Obama's personality that he cannot afford to show." He concludes that this is exactly the sort of reaction that Romney will help to engender.

You wouldn't think that politicians at the top of their game would resort to, or even fall for, these sorts of tactics, but let's not forget that these are men and their penises tend to get all penis-hurt by the slightest slight. (Also, American politics is not some model of maturity!) Now everyone is arguing if Obama is a good debater at all. My verdict is that Hillary Clinton was way better at debates than Obama but that John McCain was, somehow, hilariously bad at them. None of the three particularly blew my mind.

Howard insists that Obama's big problem is that "he doesn't like to be challenged" and can "be brittle" when he is.

The one thing I'll say about this discussion is that lots depend on whether the people who tune into the debates are tribal partisans with their minds made up (Romney fans will cheer his zingers; Obama fans will applaud his condescension) or authentically undecided people who don't have their minds made up. Regardless, you should remember that the whole conversation about "who won the debate" will be pushed by the first group -- the tribal partisans. Authentically undecided people don't actually care who won a debate, they are trying to make up their minds about who has the better vision for the future! But for tribalists, every event in the election decathalon matters in its own way.

The panel watches an old clip of Romney debating Ted Kennedy, and O'Donnell concludes that Romney, too, has a "prickly" side.

Fineman says that right now, Romney could really serve himself in good stead by attacking Obama "deftly and with humor." It could be a big factor in getting his supporters out to vote, in early voting. Regan agrees up to a point, but maintains that Romney "still needs to get specific now," especially with his economic plan. "As a financial journalist," she says, "I want to know and I think the American people want to know."

Heileman surmises that Romney, having telegraphed his intentions to take on Obama's "veracity," probably won't actually do that. Rather, Obama has to watch out that he doesn't "take the sort of cheap shots at Romney that generate sympathy for him."

Regan and Matthews agree that doing a lot of Bush-blaming in this debate will be a bad idea. If Romney has any zingers prepared, a response there, will be among them. Howard says that Romney will have to articulate exactly what Romney finds inadequate about Obama's policies, and turn the debate into a pure litigation over why he thinks he deserves another four years. Heileman says that as Romney has been "reduced to a caricature," he needs a "big moment of strength or empathy" to get people thinking about him in a new way.

Matthews shows some clips of past debates that had frozen moments that pundits now talk about today, when they are bored and/or heading into a commercial break. What happens if the Obama/Romney debates are just mediocre, though? What then? ARE YOU GONNA CRY, CHRIS MATTHEWS? (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

Meanwhile, stuff like "political science" and "history" teaches us that as September becomes October, it becomes harder for challengers who are trailing to make up enough ground on the incumbent to beat him. Also, as September becomes October, the CVS fills up with Christmas decorations. I love Christmas but more restraint is needed.

But that is a different conversation. What about the numbers? Will Romney defeat them? Howard adds that "early voting has taken on a life of its own" and that lots of people are voting right now, ahead of the debates, locking in votes for whoever ahead of whatever "game-changing" moment could come. He adds that debates, on balance, tend to play a role in confirming pre-existing opinions, not break back against them, so that's additional pressure on Romney.

Regan agrees, and restates that Romney "needs to convince Americans that he can make their lives better." Heileman says that early voting doesn't really matter as much as people say, because undecided voters aren't the ones going to the polls right now. I agree with that -- the early voters are the hyper-enthusiastic partisans. You can measure which candidate is being more enthusiastically embraced right now. Our own Jon Ward talked to early voters in Ohio last week, and my impression of his reportage was that the Obama voters came out in force. But all of that can be balanced, by Romney voters who take to the polls following a particularly good debate performance.

Here are some things Chris Matthews doesn't know: Heileman says that based on the polling he's seen, the Romney campaign's dishonest welfare ads have not worked and were "wasted money"; Regan says that "2013 is looking more and more like we could fall back into recession"; O'Donnell says that Linda McMahon is doing better in her recent bid in Connecticut because she's had a lot more direct contact with voters; Howard says that the Obama campaign is focusing more and more on veterans issues, and that Richard Carmona is doing the same in his Arizona Senate race, which has become a tie.

Was Mitt Romney's choice of Paul Ryan a mistake? Heileman says yes, Regan says no, O'Donnell hedges, and Howard agrees with Heileman. Here's Matt Meyer, the 'president of Opportunity Ohio, a free-market think tank in Ohio, and the author of Taxpayers Don’t Stand a Chance," assaying the Ryan pick (hat tip: Alex Pareene):

Politically at the top-of-the-ticket, Ohio is purple, and, other than with Governor Bob Taft’s reelection in 2002, victories have been tough for Republicans. Bush won Ohio by just 165,000 votes in 2000 and 118,000 votes in 2004; Democratic Governor Ted Strickland won in a historic landslide in 2006 by nearly 1,000,000 votes; Obama won Ohio in 2008 by over 260,000 votes; and Governor Kasich, in a national Republican wave year, won by less than 80,000 votes. (As Rob Portman won his Senate seat by 660,000 votes — tell me again why Romney didn’t choose him as the vice-presidential candidate?)

Yeah, the whole Rob Portman thing really seems to have been a mistake, in retrospect.

THIS WEEK, WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS

In case you missed it, our own Hunter Stuart whipped up this fun mastercut of the opening credits of This Week, and their introductions of the "Powerhouse Roundtables."

The good news, I guess, is that George Stephanopoulos is here, today, to do his job, so hooray. The big discussion? The same thing everyone else is talking about -- the debates. The surrogate battle will be between Chris Christie and David Plouffe, and the roundtabling will be conducted by Haley Barbour and Howard Dean and Matthew Dowd and Donna Brazile and Maggie Haberman.

We begin with Chris Christie, who promises that Romney is totally going to "shake things up" and he promises that by Thursday morning, everyone in the media will say it's a "brand new race." He thinks that all Romney has to do is "be truthful" and "lay out a positive vision for the future" and that he is not worried because Mitt Romney can "walk and chew gum at the same time" which is something that the average Roomba, I'm sorry, cannot do. (Though I think Roomba would be a strong third party contender in this race, don't you?)

Christie, because he has to "set expectations" says that Obama is a good debater, and has had plenty of "debates inside the White House." "He'll be good Wednesday night, but he can't change the facts," Christie says.

How would Christie respond to the criticism that Romney intends to "double down" on Bush's economic policies? He says that he would tell the president to "Stop lying." I would tell the president that I've had it with the parlance of blackjack players being abused in that fashion, but that's just me.

Stephanopoulos points out that Romney has not been very detailed about his plans. Christie says that the President has the obligation to be specific. "So the challenger doesn't have to?" asks Stephanopoulos. Christie says that he didn't say that, just that the president has to add more specificity sauce, and tell the truth about Romney's policies. (Christie objects to the idea that Romney favors the wealthy with his tax plan, because of Romney's promises to close loopholes. The issue, however, is how he can do all the things he promises and pay for the cuts as well, and the argument put forth by the Tax Policy Center is that he can't -- not without an increase of the rates on middle-class earners.

Christie says that Romner is "not going to lock himself into something" specific. Stephanopoulos wonders if the people actually deserve to know those details now, Christie says that they deserve to know the contours of his plans.

Should Romney be "big and bold?" Christie insists that Romney will be "big and bold" and that the debate will be a "powerful moment" for Mitt Romney. (So, we are not really managing expectations anymore, I guess?)

Christie says that he doesn't buy the argument that the polls are "skewed" against Romney. He also says that Todd Akin does not deserve the support of the Republican Party, and that he does not support Todd Akin himself.

Okay, time to get Plouffed.

Plouffe insists that Obama is going to tell the truth, so shut up Chris Christie -- except for all those high expectations he was building for Romney just now! He can totally keep doing that. Other than that, the notion that Obama is lying about not having a specific plan for budgets and taxes are "strong words but not true." He adds that if Romney is elected, the middle class will be footing the bill for the wealthy, and "we are happy to have that debate."

Stephanopoulos asks Plouffe if he is worried that Obama is "going to have a rough night with the factcheckers." No, no, most factcheckers are into pony-play and as long as you bridle them correctly they are all quite manageable.

Plouffe goes on to describe the various messages that Romney has "sent to the American people" both with his famous "47%" comments (which are hurting him) and the responses "around the events in Libya" which -- while definitely bad for Romney in the first 24 hours -- are no longer a real liability for him. I'm surprised to hear Plouffe even remind us of it. Will Stephanopoulos jump on it? No, he lets Plouffe monologue about Romney and his inadequacies for about three more minutes, and stays on the subject of the debate afterwards, asking Plouffe is the campaign is worried that Obama will be undone by Romney's "zingers."

Plouffe, to the surprise of everyone, does not answer, "We live in a constant state of paralyzing dread that Romney will destroy us with the bon mots for which he is celebrated around the world, by all people."

Romney, he says, is more well prepared than "any other candidate in history" so everyone should expect Romney to "have a good night on Wednesday."

Now Stephanopoulos moves to Libya. Not literally. That would be strange. No, he poses a question, centered on that topic. Though it's definitely not implausible that a man can hit a breaking point, having to constantly talk to campaign surrogates, where you say, "Piss it, I am moving to Libya."

He notes that the administration's first response was to characterize the Benghazi attacks as a spontaneous demonstration of rage against an anti-Islamic video, when it was really a pre-planned terrorist attack, all of which has prompted Romney to call the administration "confused, slow, and inconsistent." Plouffe insists that there has been an ongoing investigation and that more has been learned since then. The problem is that Susan Rice was insisting on one story as others were reporting out something entirely different. Plouffe says it was all about what our intelligence knew then, versus what they know now. Then, more monologuing.

Now we will powerhouse roundtable ourselves to death for the next forty-five minutes or so.

Dowd says that the race, right now, is about a five point lead for Obama, and the target states are going to "flow with that." This has come as a result of what Dowd terms "campaign malpractice" -- Romney essentially quitting the field over the summer and allowing the Obama campaign to outspend and outwork and out-muscle the Romney team, thus "setting the tone for the final month of the campaign." Dowd says that the Romney campaign obviously didn't expect to be behind at this point.

Barbour says that what's damaging Romney the most is that the campaign has become about "process" -- polling, campaigning, campaign management. "It's about everything but the issues," he says. He goes on to say that Romney needs to stay focused on these issues, especially economic issues.

Brazile says that a sizable portion of the electorate seem to believe that the "modest and slow recovery" is planted and that it will continue, as a "slight wind at the back" through the next four years. Haberman notes that while "right track/wrong track" is still "underwater" for the president, those numbers have, nevertheless, steadily improved. Dean, for his part, doesn't just want to accept the story of the past four years as one that's featured a "slow and modest" recovery -- he insists that Obama's arresting of the slide into depression should be duly credited. He also mentions the recent revisions in the employment numbers that have gotten Obama over the line so that he can say he's added net jobs to the recovery. (I am guessing Dean won't mention this week's other revisions -- the ones by Commerce, which revised GDP figures downward.)

Beyond that, Dean says, Romney's central problem is an inability to connect with ordinary people. Barbour says all of that is wrong -- Obama's recovery is not great and Reagan's was better.

Dowd interjects, saying that he thinks the "natural equilibrium" of the race is about "two points" and that with enough work, he might be able to restore the race to just a slight Obama advantage, in which the economic factors that could drag on the president's campaign may return. More broadly, however, the major problem Romney is facing is that this election has become "a referendum on Mitt Romney." "At some point," Dowd says, "he needs to fix that, really quick."

Brazile says that you can't compare this recovery to Reagan's because this downturn was more downturny, or something. I don't know. The 1980s! Let's not remember them so fondly!

We break for commercials, and return to keep talking about whether or not the debates will be important. Everyone on the panel says, "Hey, you know what, let's just cancel them." I still think I'd rather watch Romney and Obama strip to their skivvies and try to climp up a greased pole, to ring a bell at the top, and everytime they fall, they land in a puddle of extra virgin olive oil, and maybe the whole thing is moderated by that dude from that "Gangham Style" video?

Actually, that's not what the panel says about the debates, because that would be such an interesting idea to pose on a Sunday show that it would immediately disqualify the person who offered it from ever returning to the program. Instead they would be forever banished to wander around in a world...well, let's face it, they would be wandering around in a world full of actual people who are more interesting and have fun things to do.

But, yeah, the panelists believe the debates are important, and Romney needs to be specific, and perhaps even "change the dynamic" of the race, and Dean thinks Obama is awesome while Barbour thinks the opposite. And the pressure is on Romney unless it's not and it's actually on Obama unless it's not and it's on both of them unless it's not and there is no pressure at all.

Also, don't sigh all the time, like Al Gore. Remember that other shiny thing we once talked about? Maybe it's like this new shiny thing?

Brazile says that Romney is amazing debater, on a long mission, like Uma Thurman in KILL BILL, and Obama will have no defense against the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique. Dean agrees that Romney is well-prepared, but he says that the key to the debate is to "turn off the sound and watch the mannerisms" -- they belie whether the debater is comfortable in their own skin.

I volunteer to watch the debate with the sound off! In fact, I might even turn the picture off! I volunteer to evaluate the debate from the perspective of a guy drinking whiskey alone at the sports bar on the ground floor of our office building. It will basically be me saying, "I am not sure about the choices I've made with my life. Christ, look at me. I used to have so much potential! What's the fifteen-syllable German word for feeling nostalgic for things you never even wanted to do back when you had the chance to do them? Also my knees hurt." I am not sure what material understanding you will get about American politics reading that, but we might as well find out, right?

The panel has, during this time, continued to speak somewhat meaninglessly about the election. Donna Brazile thinks that Romney will be a moderate-seeming Republican in the debate Wednesday night. Barbour says that Romney "just needs to be Romney." I think Romney just needs to be William Shatner -- Barbour is very close to achieving that for himself, and he's doing okay! Dowd says that Romney needed to go bold a long time ago, and instead opted for "small-ball." Dean says that his impression is that "small ball is the way Romney thinks, and that's the problem." (Huh? Romney invented Obamacare!)

Speaking of small-ball, Romney's campaign in Virginia is all about Lyme Disease now, for some reason? Haberman says that this was "surprising" to her. I would say so! "This has not been a thing that people have been screaming about in the election...it's not entirely clear how it came about."

This is how it came about:

A highly influential social conservative in Virginia, Michael Farris, believes that people can contract “chronic Lyme disease” that must be treated with long-term antibiotics. The Center for Disease Control says there is no such thing as “chronic Lyme disease” and “long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease has been associated with serious complications.”

You can read about these complications in this article from “Clinical Infectious Diseases,” the official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, called “Death from Inappropriate Therapy for Lyme Disease.”

Farris “claims that his wife is a chronic Lyme sufferer as are all his seven children.”

Farris, who has no medical training, was invited to speak with Romney on his campaign bus a couple of weeks ago. Farris said that he and Romney “talked about Lyme disease. It was cordial and encouraging.”

More to the point, Haberman points out that Romney has gotten the "small-ball" tag because the campaign does a lot of "throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks." Dowd attributes that to obsessions with "micro-targeting." I'd say that it's primarily a function of the Romney campaign placing a preference on expressing themselves with political tactics rather than policies or ideologically. They simply take the news of the day and try to react to it the best, to "win the narrative." They need "ideas," but they are addicted to tactics. (When I hear that they've reduced Romney's debate prep to nothing more than learning a bunch of zingers, I believe them.)

The panel goes on to discuss Obama's significant advantage on Medicare. Dean points out that the advantage is basically a product of the Obama campaign being the one that doesn't walk around promising to end it. Barbour disagrees, and says that Romney should have "stuck with the issue" instead of abandoning it. Dowd says that Romney should have definitely done more to educate voters on the issue. Dean points out that campaigns that set out to educate voters usually lose. (He has been, at times, one of the few Democrats that seems to grasp this. Most Democrats believe that America is perpetually one lesson plan away from voting them into office, forever.)

The topic shifts to Netanyahu's speech at the U.N. General Assembly, and I now sort of see why Bibi brought his cartoon bomb with him -- otherwise, the speech might never have attracted the attention of the Sunday morning news hosts. WE NEED MORE CARTOON BOMBS, NOT LESS.

Anyway, Stephanopoulos reports that the moment "got a lot of attention," which is stellar reporting. Dowd says that we should be on the lookout for whether some exogenous event that could change the race. Like, what if a piano falls on Mitt Romney? Or what if Barack Obama is transformed, by magic, into a plate of grits? These things could really "change the game." Haberman says that the Romney campaign is "very concerned" that early voting has started ahead of the debate, but offers a prediction that some "intervening event" will happen between now and Election Day that will factor into the voters' decisions.

I think that's the place to leave this today. Especially since that's where THIS WEEK is leaving it, this week, with George Stephanopoulos. Something will, definitely, most likely happen between now and Election Day. Bank on it. And one of the things that might happen between now and Election Day is that nothing might happen, which would, in itself, be a significant event, unless it is not. Think about it! Unless you don't want to, I mean, I'm not going to force you to think about things. Okay?

Glad that's settled. Everyone have a good week, if you are so inclined, okay? See you next Sunday.

[As you are waiting for more liveblog, click here for fun reads from around the web.]

If you are not a regular reader of Politico's Playbook, then you probably don't know that they have begun a new feature, called "THE MOMENT," in which Mike Allen will relate a moment, and then replace the indefinite article with a definite one, thus lending it important gravitas. The idea here is that they will do this "each day ... so that if you spliced them all together, they would tell the story of the final month." Because that is what you will probably want to do the day after the election: straight-up splice together a bunch of "moments" like a flip-book of stumbling stick figures so you will know exactly what went on in the life of America according to a Beltway newsletter.

Anyhoo, here is today's "THE MOMENT," brought to you by "the WashTimes’ Seth McLaughlin, from last night's Romney funder at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington," where Romney was introduced by the executive chairman of Marriott International, Bill Marriott:

(Remember, THIS IS THE MOMENT.)

"Both Mitt and I have summer places up in New Hampshire on Lake Winnipesaukee. And a few summers ago I was taking my grandchildren and children to town in the boat for ice cream. And we got into the docks and they were all full and I looked around, there was no place to park, so we stopped at the end of a dock. They all jumped off and ran up the dock. And I realized there was nobody in the boat to help me dock the boat, handle the ropes, do anything -- they just left me out there at sea. So I finally found a place to park after about 20 minutes, and I pulled in, I said, 'Who's going to grab the rope?,' and I looked up and there was Mitt Romney. So he pulled me in, he tied up the boat for me. He rescued me just as he's going to rescue this great country."

Yes, so Romney 2012: because wherever America's yacht is mildly inconvenienced, he will grab a rope.

I know you already want to start cuttin' and splicin' these THE MOMENTS together, so here you go:

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WASHINGTON -- Earlier today, on Huff Post Live, Huffington Post D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim and Republican strategist Brian Morganstern had themselves a merry little debate over whether "money" was the equivalent of "speech." Please feel free to watch the excerpted argument above, in which Grim discusses the need for a more clean and clear delineation between the two concepts, while Morganstern argues that the current regime, in which the two concepts are inextricably linked, is ideal because one cannot, say, mount a political advertising campaign without money.

Leaving aside the issue of what was so darned wrong with America during the hundred-year period when money in politics was better regulated, the real matter at hand is what's gone wrong in America since it was decided that free speech required all citizens to cut six-figure checks. To put it glibly, it's become a 99 percent vs. 1 percent matter, in which some free speech is, as they say, more equal than others, and people like Mitt Romney mega-donor Sheldon Adelson (to use just one example, they truly do exist, to varying levels of efficacy and bankroll-ability, on both sides) get to have the most free speech of all.

In the pageantry of an election year, political candidates love to tout their small donors. All those folks giving $25? They just serve to prove that their candidate is down for the middle-class cause. But the truth is that over the past four years, elections have clearly been driven by big donors, especially big business -- which already bankroll a massive lobbying operation to sway legislators to shape laws to their liking. And while it took a while to get the big-money engine cranked, two years after the Citizens United decision, the flow of money into the system has skyrocketed, as this chart from The Nation/The Investigative Fund's big piece on money in politics will finally make clear.

Your piddling $25 donation doesn't look like much, does it? And considering the fact that in 2008, the financial sector was able to get a $4.8 trillion bailout -- of taxpayer money -- for galactic screw-ups, it's pretty clear that going forward, politicians are going to be even less amenable to prioritizing the needs of those who speak with pocket change against the needs of those with the million-dollar megaphones.

But more broadly speaking, does money really equal speech? Man, it's too bad former Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.) didn't know that! He could have contended in court that when the FBI "filmed [him] taking $100,000 in bribes from a government informant," he was only really taking words, and that when "agents found $90,000 in marked money in the freezer of Jefferson’s Virginia home," well ... that was just a whole lot of speech he was keeping on ice. Wouldn't want all that freedom of expression to spoil, right?

Why would bribery, in this context, be illegal? Why shouldn't you be able to roll on up to your congressman's office and plunk down a nice wad of free speech on his desk? For that matter, why would prostitution be illegal? Surely Louisiana Sen. David Vitter would have preferred to argue that he just exchanged a bunch of free speech with some ladies, who subsequently bedded him, owing only to the magnificence of his oratory?

Looking at it this way, it's no wonder that former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer was shut out of the GOP debates this season. After all, the man insisted on only taking $100 donations from people. He wouldn't take a dime more. You can imagine what the debate officials must have thought about that: "Gee, Buddy, that's all the money you have? It's going to be hard to even hear you at the debates. We don't have microphones that can amplify such a teensy-tiny voice."

I don't know why I'm fixated on Louisiana in these examples -- maybe it's just the whole "Let the good times roll" money-fiesta that Citizens United has touched off. But it must be said, to a certain extent, the whole "money equals speech" equation is being fully honored. You can see it, for example, with the aforementioned bank bailouts, where the money was used to beef up the already impressive army of lobbyists that the banks subsequently used to nip and tuck and tweak whatever post-crash regulatory legislation threatened to arise. Money definitely amplified voices on those occasions. Of course, that was your money that did that. But were you planning on using it? Why didn't you speak up? Free speech, after all.

At any rate, I still recall Newt Gingrich celebrating the Citizens United decision as a victory for free speech way back when the case was decided. Of course, I also seem to recall him grousing earlier this year about how Mitt Romney wasn't competing fairly in the primaries, because he was able to use all of his massive amounts of cash free speech to drown out Newt's message of moon colonies and restaging the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The later complaint, one would think, would necessitate a change of heart on the prior praise for unleashing the big money tsunami upon the world, but as it happens, it did not.

But Newt Gingrich is a "Big Ideas" guy, so I'm left to conclude that the "money equals speech" probably won't cause any further widening of structural inequality in our political system at all, right?

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As anyone who watches Sunday morning political chat shows knows, the key feature they all share is their roundtable discussions, packed to the brim with news-makers and news-shakers and people who pithily comment on both. All of the shows have got them, but there is only one Sunday morning show whose roundtable is a "Powerhouse Roundtable" -- ABC News' "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." The thing is, though, you can't just say you've got a "Powerhouse Roundtable" and expect people just to accept it as a fact. No, no, you've got to go out and create the indelible impression that your roundtable is a House of Power.

And on this score, "This Week" has lately opted to create that impression by injecting some real dynamism into their broadcast. Where other, lesser shows might simply state at the outset of the show that they will have guests around the roundtable that day, "This Week" opts for flash and action. At the beginning of their broadcast, they don't just introduce their guests, they show them steaming and stomping through the Newseum. They turn corners, walk down hallways and stairs, emerge through doors and elevators, and otherwise whoosh through the space like a clip from "The Newsroom" with the sound turned off. Even those not caught by the cameras in the act of pundit perambulations are still hard at work. They are in intelligent discussions, or caught studying the news of the day by the invasive cameras -- prompting that classic "Oh, I didn't see you there" look when they glance up from their newspapers.

And it is not weird or artificial looking at all! Truly, there is no doubt that the "This Week" panels are the true and worthy claimants to the title "Powerhouse." So, in tribute to all of them, we have prepared a celebratory mastercut to document the esprit and élan of those who come to "This Week" on Sunday. But at the end, we raise more questions than we answer! Specifically, who is the one guy who doesn't seem ever to show up for these Powerhouse pow-wows? The answer may surprise you, unless it doesn't.

[Video produced by Hunter Stuart]

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The great thing about birtherism is that it is forever on the verge of reaching its apotheosis, leaving spectators to its surreality-based derangement on the edge of their seats, waiting for whatever daffy new heights this silly little movement reaches.

Well, today, the birthers do not disappoint. In an article posted on birther sweat lodge World Net Daily, they are up with a new claim that -- in their minds, anyway -- definitively proves that President Barack Obama's birth certificate is a total ruse, based on some amazing math:

Entire books have been written about the problems with the “birth certificate” that was released by the White House purportedly documenting Barack Obama’s birth in Hawaii.

Computer imaging experts have found it to be fraudulent and the conclusion of an official law enforcement investigation assembled by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is that it is just not real.

But it wasn’t until now, through the work of the Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, that the world was informed just exactly what the odds are against all of those anomalies occurring naturally.

Yep, entire books have been written, by World Net Daily, for rubes, expounding on this nonsense, so that's part of the structural edifice of these theories, in the same way that entire books written about glittering vampires ultimately prove their existence as well. Plus Joe Arpaio's band of nutters and some "computer imaging experts" (whom you should definitely connect with, on LinkedIn) say the same thing -- Barack Obama is not of this nation. But "it wasn't until now" that someone had the bright idea of handing Great Britain's most celebrated climate-science crackpot an abacus and asked him to start cold crunchin' some numbers. And, sweet fancy Moses, his findings will astound you! What are the odds that Obama is "eligible" to be president?

One in 62,500,000,000,000,000,000. (That’s 62.5 quintillion)

Or, if one prefers, the chances are 0.0000000000000000000016 that those curious developments happened by accident.

One in 62,500,000,000,000,000,000? At those odds, can we be sure that Barack Obama actually exists? Can we be sure that any of us are actually real? Perhaps this world we inhabit is nothing more than a mote of dust in the imagination of a child on "St. Elsewhere," a show that we non-existent people created, or did we? We are through the looking glass, people, if the looking glass, in fact, exists -- which it doesn't! (Probably.)

Here is how Monckton's space algebra works: birthers have basically concluded that the real, live birth certificate is full of sketchy flaws. It's telling that they cannot settle on just one or two things they find off about it. Rather, they have collectively articulated the premise that Obama's birth certificate was one of the most painstakingly frauded-up pieces of government documentation ever assembled. At every turn, the mysterious cabal that apparently decided to aid and abet this great piece of trickery opted to meticulously foul up mulitple parts of their work. So this is a story of a conspiracy whose perpetrators were simultaneously brilliant and hopelessly incompetent.

The piece cites examples of these individual "anomalies" -- such as “Lavishly funded bureaucracy uses wonky typewriter" -- and assigns them odds (in that case, 10:1). Then Monckton stabbed at his calculator for an hour or two to come up with the 62.5 quintillion figure. As a point of reference, it is estimated that the odds of picking a perfect NCAA bracket are a mere nine quintillion-to-one. So if you were smart enough to place a bet on Barack Obama's existence, way back when, you could probably buy the sun today, not that any birthers would honor the bet.

At any rate, the real tragedy here is that the birthers just aren't thinking big enough. Why settle for one in 62.5 quintillion when you could go for nonillions or decillions? It's not like any rational-minded person is going to check the "math."

[Hat tip: Fark]

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Let's face it. Cell phones are like girlfriends; each one does something the other one doesn't do.
When it comes to the latest gift from the Apple Gods, it seems the iPhone5 is really no different.

Having owned Droids in one form or another for the past few years, last week, I played around with Samsung's Galaxy S3 for a bit. After a less-than-stellar experience in a galaxy far away, I decided to give something a little closer to home a shot -- the exalted iPhone5. With over five million units sold in just days, it is, by all accounts, the Holy Grail of mobile devices. That is, until next Tuesday, when rumors of the iPhone6 begin to swirl around.

Never having owned an iPhone before, and, thus, not having drunk the Kool-Aid, it's hard for me to comprehend how so many of us bow, without question, to the big Apple in the sky. Sure, a few might hem and haw at the "New Cruelty," but, ultimately, we all end up falling in line like good little subjects. After all, they know what's best for us.

I should mention, when it comes to Macs vs. PCs, I'm a devout Apple loyalist, and will probably always be, but phones are a different story. That's where all the money is nowadays. I've never seen a company able to get away with so brazenly telling its entire userbase to "Go Fu#k Themselves" if they don't like it.

Case in point, we've all heard the iPhone5 has a newly designed port, which means it's not compatible with any of your other chargers.

This wouldn't be so bad if, like Google, Apple allowed other companies to make and sell affordable adapters for your phone, but, alas, that's not the case. Because Apple likes to keep everything "in-house," the result is, aside from the charger that comes with your phone, if you want to charge the '5' in another room -- or your car -- it will cost you upwards of $30 bucks each. The tweets alone would cause most companies to rethink their position, but, just like the NFL, Apple will not budge.

It's also worth noting Apple has decided to hold back on the release of its car-charging cable, leaving the user high and dry and having to constantly tote around the cable the phone came with, along with the newly purchased adapter, until such time as they deem us worthy. When that time dost thou cometh, all those who purchased those overpriced adapters may as well throw them away in favor of a car adapter/cable combo unit. Oh, what a joyous day.

The guy in the Verizon store mentioned he had several corporate folks come in and buy half a dozen of these hard-to-come-by adapters for their employees. Which, basically, adds up to the price of another phone. All in a day's work at Cupertino.

The best part is, no one's forcing anyone to do this. We're simply addicted. Apple has become the "Nino Brown" of the tech world. It's New Jack City -- this time, nationwide -- and we're all lining up at 'The Carter' for a piece of the rock. Or, in this case, the Apple.

Factor in all the 'apples' you have to fork over for all the apps, apps that come standard on Droids, like Video Zoom and Speed Dial, and the dollar signs begin to add up.

Also, lest we forget, it wasn't so long ago the iPhone was only available through AT&T;, and was giving millions of people coronaries due to dropped calls and poor signal quality, even in major metropolitan areas. "Thank you sir, may I have another?!"

As far as the iPhone5, itself, goes, in my previous article, I pretty much trashed the S3 for not doing the "simple" things I wanted it to do. So, here's a quick rundown of the top five things the iPhone5 can't -- or won't -- do:

1. No Camera/Video Camera 'Lock'

When I handed my Droid to my two-year-old nephews, a great feature was I was able to lock the screen in play-mode while they watched a video, making it impossible for them to stop it, or switch screens. As far as I know, out of the over 70,000 apps, there's no app available that does this.

2. No 'Zoom' Button on Video Camera

As previously mentioned, the zoom app has to be purchased. Granted, it's only 99 cents but it adds up, and if 10 million people buy it, that's yet another umbrella stand in Mr. Cook's office.

3. No Adapting to Adapters.

If you want to charge your iPhone in your car, or dock it, or use it in another room, that's another $30 bucks. Cha-ching!

4. No SD card

Since the iPhone doesn't allow you to use external SD cards, what you see is what you get in terms of memory. And, considering your iTunes music, alone, can take up 20GB, you might as well opt for the 32GB, which is $100 bucks extra, or the 64GB which will cost you your firstborn.

5. No Speed-Dial

I don't know about you, but I like being able to push a single button on the keypad and, voila! Sure, there are apps for two bucks, and "tricks" to create speed-dial icons on your home screen, but, c'mon guys: You created Facetime. Surely, you can give us that simple little function which makes life so much easier. (Incidentally, I'll never use Facetime. Why would I want everyone I talk to to be able to see up my nostrils?)

Bonus -- No Swype

If you've never "Swyped," you're missing out. Sure, Swype isn't flawless, but it sure beats having to type each and every letter/spacebar out. Yes, you can use voice-texting, like Siri, but there are definitely times when you want to be discrete, e.g., in a movie, or on a bad date, and times when your voice is drowned out, like a nightclub. The supposed Swype app for iPhone requires you to cut and paste the text into your message body. Purpose defeated.

Still, for all its shortcomings, the iPhone5 has a much better camera than anything out there, its operating system is much smoother and quicker, overall, than Android, and, Siri destroys Samsung's S-Voice. Thus, until a company comes up with a single phone that can do all the things you want it to, this probably means, if, down the line, you see me standing next to you at The Carter, be sure and say hello.

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) is pretty hopping mad about President Barack Obama's speech to the United Nations, ostensibly because of the emphasis the president placed on the daffy and bigoted "Innocence of Muslims" video trailer that has been characterized, rightly or wrongly, as playing a role in the recent uptick of unrest across the Middle East, up to and including the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens. In a Facebook entry, West -- or whoever writes West's Facebook entries, anyway -- said that mentioning the video "is beneath the dignity and esteem of the Office of the President of the United States" and constitutes an "apology."

From there, however, West opts for a statement that's a bit over the top in terms of bloodthirsty weirdness:

My statement to the United Nations would have been, "The future does not belong to those who attack our Embassies and Consulates and kill our Ambassadors. The Angel of Death in the form of an American Bald Eagle will visit you and wreak havoc and destruction upon your existence."

The funny thing is that one has to imagine that West would not likely deign to appear at the United Nations for any reason, but if he did, that speech would definitely be well in keeping with the sort of bonkers rhetoric we've heard in that venue, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez. (To say nothing of famous Libyan dictators.)

Meanwhile, Nazila Fathi has a piece up Tuesday in Foreign Policy's "Democracy Lab" blog, in which human rights activist Shirin Ebadi points out that a war with Iran "will stir nationalistic feelings and rally the people behind the government to defend the country. It will be catastrophic for the [Iranian] people, the country, and the region, but it will save Iran's rulers," and it will interrupt an "Iranian society" that is "moving along a democratic and secular path." Given the fact that the Libyan people took to the streets in support of Ambassador Stevens and the democratic path he was helping to open up, it is probably a bad idea to start invoking the "Angel of Death" and promising indiscriminate "havoc and destruction."

Broadly speaking, I agree with Rep. West that the role this dotty little video played in all of the intense anger has been largely overstated. But it doesn't cost us much to simply say that we, as a nation, do not agree with the obscene viewpoints expressed therein -- hopefully, we don't. (If West does agree with them, he should nut up and say so.) But it sort of doesn't help anyone to express a viewpoint that comes off as substantially more brutal-minded than the Ezekiel 25:17 recitative from "Pulp Fiction." Try, real hard, to be the shepherd, Ringo.

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