This may not have gotten a lot of attention. But in the post-debate commentary, Chris Matthews had Howard Fineman and Roger Simon on. And Simon started in on some aggressive tire-swinging. And as this was happening, a member of the crowd raised this anti-tire-swinging sign. Here you see it behind Matthews. But it was raised in Simon’s line of sight and he would be the logical target since he was the clear tire swinger on the panel …
(ed.note: Special thanks to TPM Reader MC for catching this critical moment.)
Late Update: For a brief primer on tire-swinging, see this post.
So Late It’s Morning Update: Here’s the text version of Simon’s tire-swinging.
Watching the debate I noticed that Biden referred to the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina as “Bosniaks“. This is actually the correct term, though in English people often say simply Bosnian Muslims. When he said it, the first thing I though was, I wonder how many right-wingers would jump on this as a gaffe on the model of candidate George W. Bush’s reference to ‘Grecians.’
I don’t know who else exposed their own ignorance by falling into this trap. But Cokie Roberts did.
Late Update: Here’s the video:
Late Update: Seems like Mona Charen and Joanna Weiss in the Boston Globe flubbed this one too. And, alas, the folks at RedState got burned too.
I think I may have spoken too soon when I said that Palin didn’t have any Couric type moments in this debate. Here’s her discussion of the current financial crisis — note particularly her description of what is happening to the economy which starts about 45 seconds in …
It was a good idea on the McCain camp’s part to get the rules changed so prevent any follow-up questions. But I’m still curious to know whether it was the rules that prevented Ifill from asking any follow-ups or pressing the candidates to answer the actual questions, or whether she just didn’t do as good a job as Lehrer.
I’m curious to hear from economists and/or state finance experts on the precise significance of this. But it does not sound good. According to the LA Times, Gov. Schwarzenegger has written to Secy. Paulson saying that the state of California may need to borrow as much as $7 billion from the feds within weeks because of the unavailability of short term loans it uses to finance state government in advance of tax monies coming in.
The Obama camp already has a TV ad up using footage from last night’s debate where Joe Biden is ripping on McCain’s health care tax. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
Charles Krauthammer (yes, THAT Charles Krauthammer) calls the race for Obama.
An interesting case brewing in Michigan. A local GOP official there just filed suit against an indy media outlet for libel for reporting last month that the GOP was going to use foreclosure rolls to disqualify potential voters in November.
This is the (alleged) lose your house, change your address, lose your right to vote scam we reported about a couple of weeks ago.
That’s a big can of worms for the GOP to be potentially opening up to discovery. We’ll be watching this one very closely.
Late Update: Who’s paying for the lawyer representing the GOP official? The lawyer declined to tell TPMmuckraker, but he did refer us to the Michigan Republican Party …
It was more joint press conference than debate, but if you were, say, watching the baseball playoffs and missed it, we bring you an abbreviated version of the veep debate, in all its glory, you betcha: