Liveblogging the debate

Well, yes, of course I am. Tweetin' too.

8:02pm "Recovery plan?" What "recovery plan?" A $700 billion ripoff isn't "recovery."

Obama's calling it a "rescue effort." No, no, no .. RIPOFF. No, the taxpayers aren't putting their money at risk, the bureaucrats are stealing the taxpayers' money. Blames the Busheviks, ties McCain to them. Probably right on both counts. Plays the middle class card.

8:05pm McCain: Poor Ted Kennedy, feeling' bad, we're all feelin' bad, I'm Mr. Bi-Partisanship. Options. Packages. Hasn't called it a ripoff yet. Now Mr. Bi-Partisanship blames the Democrats. Not the beginning of the end of the crisis, the end of the beginning of the crisis.

8:08pm Lehrer: Do you guys support this bullshit?

Obama: Yes, but no. I predicted it and tried to stop it.

McCain: (Lehrer: "Are you going to vote for the plan?) He hopes so, but maybe not. He predicted it and tried to stop it too. I'm Eisenhower. No, wait, I'm McCain, but I'm sort of Eisenhower.

8:12pm Obama: Need leadership even when there's not a crisis. Americans are too friggin' stupid to balance their checkbooks without Barack's magic calculator to make the numbers come out right.

McCain: Excess and greed in Washington, DC and Wall Street. American worker most productive in world, yada, yada, it's just idiots like me who screwed them over.

8:14pm McCain lapses into the canned pitch ... came to change Washington, it changed us, spending out of control. Gonna make porkers famous. Like that Obama guy.

8:16pm Yeah, that pork sucks, and I gave it up. Been clean for a month, man. But it's not spending that's out of control, it's tax cuts. All your FRNs are belong to us unless I need your vote, then I'm your pal, and what I really meant to say is that I'll cut taxes.

8:17pm Obama doesn't think $932 million is a lot of money. Out of control! Corrupts people! I was called "the sheriff," I'm not Mr. Congeniality. Obama says he wants to cut taxes but he wants to raise spending ...

Obama: Close loopholes! Keep jobs in America! Give everyone band-aids and anti-biotic ointment, I'll pay for it.

8:20pm Lehrer: Neither of you guys makes any sense. Explain yourself, McCain.

McCain: Trying to channel Josiah Bartlett from "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen."

McCain: "So the point is" ... he wants to social engineer with taxes to get people to make babies and pay their doctors' greens fees.

Obama: If you make less than $250k per year, I won't increase your taxes. Yes, business taxes look high, but the loopholes make it effectively one of the lowest rates in the world. Close the loopholes then talk to me about tax cuts. McCain would tax health benefits, what an assbag.

8:24pm McCain: Look at our records, then tell me who the assbag is. Obama gave bennies to Big Oil.

Obama: McCain would give Big Oil another $4 billion in tax breaks.

McCain: You already did, clownshoe.

8:26pm Lehrer calls it a "rescue plan" again. Twice.

Obama: Range of things. We don't know what tax revenues are gonna be, economy's slowing down. We can't do everything, but we have to have energy independence. Will wave my magic wand. Got to destroy the health care system to make people better off, and destroy education to make people smarter.

8:28pm McCain: We've got to cut spending. Government out of control (nth time he's used that phrase, and now Lehrer is calling the ripoff a "bailout"). Eliminate ethanol subsidies. Do away with cost-plus on defense contracts. I saved the taxpayers $6.8 billion on a Boeing contract and put people in prison. Elect me and I'll save you another $6.8 billion and put you in prison too.

8:30pm Lehrer: Neither of you seem to be suggesting any major changes to account for the ripoff.

Obama: Invest in energy! Big project! John's right, we need to make some cuts. Lobbyists skim billions off Medicaid, Medicare. Gotta change the culture. Not a crazy liberal just because I attack George Bush. Worked with Tom Coburn to Google Government.

8:30pm Lehrer: I'm not fucking around here, guys. Gimme the major stuff.

McCain: Spending freeze on everything but defense, veterans and anything else I think is important.

Obama: Cut lobbyists' Medicare subsidy. End Iraq war.

McCain: Giving $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us much, need to crank up solar, wind, nukes and let them starve. Create 700,000 jobs by building 45 new nuclear reactors. Also, we'll be able to read our new glow-in-the-dark newspapers.

Lehrer: Not getting through to you, am I? Do you guys understand that a $700 billion ripoff is going to have you by the nuts if you're elected?

8:35pm Obama: Yeah, but I'm not going to squeal no matter how hard it squeezes. Mine are brass.

McCain: Obama would hand health care over to federal government, not doctors. Obama's $800 billion in new spending would make everyone squeal.

8:37pm Obama: McCain agrees with Bush 90% of the time. Saying he'll lead on controlling spending after 8 years of this stuff isn't believable.

McCain: I'm not Miss Congeniality. I've taken Bush to the woodshed. Maverick. My partner's a maverick, too, even if she is crazy as a shithouse rat.

8:39pm McCain: And by the way, I say we're winning in Iraq, so now you know that I'm crazy as a shithouse rat too.

Obama: McCain and I have a fundamental difference. I ran against the war six years ago (I won't mention that I've voted to fund it ever since). I'm running against the war now, but I'll give you another war if you really want one.

8:42pm Obama: Iraq has a surplus, we're screwed and spending $10 billion a month there. The lesson to be drawn is that we should never hesitate to use military force wisely.

McCain: Next president doesn't have to decide if we go to Iraq or not, but how we get out. Obama said the surge didn't work. Didn't go to Iraq for 900 days, didn't meet with Petraeus when he did go. Don't tell me about war, whippersnapper.

Obama: Can the inside baseball (committee thing). Soldiers did good job. Petraeus did good job. Surge was tactic to contain the consequences of bad war. McCain wants to pretend the first four years didn't happen because he was wrong about them. I was right about them but that didn't stop me from voting to keep the thing going.

8:46pm McCain: Obama has never played Avalon Hill's "Squad Leader" and doesn't know difference between tactic and strategy. Obama opposed funding.

Obama: McCain opposed funding with a timetable, I opposed funding without one. But we both supported sitting in the situation room and beating Bush at "Squad Leader" if the lobbyists would provide Crab Louie. Al Qaeda is back and badder than ever because Bush wouldn't spring for the "Cross of Iron" expansion set. I can fix things in 16 months and put bin Laden's head on a pike in front of 1600 Pennsylvania.

8:49pm McCain: Petraeus, Petraeus, Petraeus. Obama would give us wider more complicated war, we might have to buy more dice and make counters out of posterboard and maybe refresh the hors d'ouvres.

Obama: Can't separate Afghanistan from Iraq, so I'll put more of those new posterboard counters to Afghanistan. We should have just played Risk, this is too complicated. Pakistan sucks.

8:53pm McCain: Yeah, Pakistan sucks but let's give them a bunch more money anyway and not talk about it. I pronounce Taliban right. Obama says "Tally" too much. We've got a lot of work to do in Afghanistan teaching them how to pronounce "Taliban." I wouldn't publicly say I was going to attack, I'd just get the briefcase and push the button.

Obama: You sang "Bomb Iran." You suck.

[time for Taco Bell break]

8:58pm McCain: I supported everything we did that worked, and opposed everything that blew up in our faces. That's why the Iraq war is a victory, because I supported it. I have a bracelet, so we must stay the course.

Obama: I've got a bracelet too. I lied about being against the war in 2003, but you can trust me now because I have the bracelet.

9:02pm Lehrer: Iran.

McCain: If Iran gets nukes, Israel is screwed. We can't allow a second Holocaust. Let's form a League of Democracies, since that worked so well for Wilson and prevented WWII. The Iranians have a lousy government. With sanctions, we could make it worse, maybe even as bad as ours.

9:05pm Obama: War on Iraq strengthened Iran. They've funded Hezbollah, they've funded Hamas, and I've helped them do it by voting to fund the war on Iraq, but if you trust me this time I won't do that again.

9:08pm McCain: Ochmeneedoodadjood wants to destroy Israel. Obama would talk with him. I'm going to talk around it a bit, but so would I.

Obama: Gotta talk with people. That's what politicians do.

[Meximelts, fire sauce, cola, bourbon]

9:12pm McCain: Pronounces Ahmenigesundheit right this time. South Koreans are taller than North Koreans, because North Koreans break agreements.

Obama: McCain keeps lying about what I mean, and the viewing audience should drink each time one of us says "Henry Kissinger."

9:15pm McCain: Kissinger, Kissinger, Kissinger, known him for 35 years.

Obama: Resurgent, aggressive Russia is a threat to stability of region. Blames Russia for Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia and Abhkazia. We have to stop secessionists, especially if they're ethnic Russians who don't want to belong to Stalin's old home state. But we can't go back to Cold War. Gotta work with them while we're calling them names, because US has a national security interest in central Asian shitholes.

McCain: Russian aggression, Russian aggression, Obama is naive to think that there's another side to that Georgia/South Ossetia/Abhkazia thing. No Cold War, but we do need to hop around yelling "KGB" and do everything we can to provoke them.

9:21pm McCain: We can't have Russia ignoring international standards like we do.

Obama: McCain and I agree that Russia sucks. Matter of fact I agree with him more than he admits. We need to rebuild Georgian economy because we've done such a great job with ours. Two points on Russia: We have to have foresight, and I do because I'm Barack Obama. Second point: Russia is resurgent and Putin is DA BOOGEYMAN! We have to have energy strategy! Can't drill our way out!

[Tamara: "These guys both suck -- is this almost over?"]

9:25pm McCain: Babble about nukes some more.

Lehrer: Likelihood of another 9/11?

McCain: Much less than it was the day after 9/11. Much safer nation now, but a long way from safe. Did I mention I'm bipartisan? I know Joe Lieberman. We investigated 9/11 and found out what happened and fixed it. Bipartisan! Bipartisan! Long way to go. Gotta do a better job. No torture! I know our allies. America is safer today but we have a long way to go, so prepare for random body cavity searches at the Post Office. Those body cavity searchers are heroes.

Obama: We are safer in some ways. Better airport security because people have to take their shoes off. Long way to go, we should harden chemical sites. Biggest threat we face is not nuclear missile, but suitcase nuke. Need missile defense. Only spending a few hundred million on nuclear proliferation is mistake. But we should focus on al Qaeda. We need to be nice guys with our allies if we don't want them to screw us. McCain's good on torture. Shining beacon on a hill.

McCain: Al Qaeda would establish base in Iraq if we left! If we follow Obama's plan, Osama bin Laden will crawl out from under your bed and get you!

Obama: We've focused on Iraq, bin Laden is still under your bed. Now we're borrowing billions from China (he must not have noticed they suspended lending to the US the other day) and they're doing all kinds of wild shit. $10 billion a month on Iraq, so your kid can't get a checkup and science doesn't happen any more. Haven't adequately funded veterans care. Gotta have "broader strategic vision," and I do because I'm Barack Obama.

9:34pm McCain: I've been involved in every foreign affairs fiasco in the last 27 years and that makes me qualified to lead. We're winning in Iraq because I have a bracelet. I know the veterans and I'll take care of them. They know I love them. I don't need on the job training because I'm John McCain.

Obama: My dad was from Kenya and came to college in US. Nobody wants to come to college in the US now. I can fix that because I'm Barack Obama.

McCain: Plays POW card. Came home, was sad. Worked on normalization with Vietnam. Know how to heal wounds, deal with adversaries, deal with friends, because I'm John McCain.

Lehrer: You guys suck. This is so over.