• AND NOW WE ARE ALL DUMBER: The early Nielsen ratings are in for last night’s debate, and they’re a full freaking 42% higher than the ratings from last Friday’s presidential debate, making it the most watched debate since Bush/Clinton/Perot in 1992. Jesus, we are a bizarre country. [The Live Feed]

This is pretty much perfect, except maybe somewhere you could squeeze in, “That Joe person is crying about his dead family?! –> Shout Maverick several times,” which is something that happened. [Adennak via Andrew Sullivan]

Trying. To keep. Blood pressure. Down. Musn’t DIE. Watching the lady lie about literally everything. Oh, she has some complete sentences alright. “Congratulations.” You’re still not a human though! STILL NOT THERE! Oh and Joe — less numbers! We realize numbers are your defense mechanism whenever you really want to say “SHUT THE HELL UP FRAUDBOT,” but still. Here’s the pre-blog and part 1. MORE »

Gotta admit, we’re feeling a teeny bit of pressure for tonight’s liveblogging. The last time we remember the comedy stakes being anywhere near as high as this was the GOP YouTube Debate last November. (Memories!) (Sigh.) Come back at 8:30 ET for the pre-game liveblog! Until then, we’ve compiled the last two days’ worth of YouTubes and widgets and websites and assorted Internet junk about Sarah Palin that you people make thousands of each day and then e-mail to us so that Ken can mark them all as spam. Well, here are your links, MERRY CHRISTMAS fuckaz. MORE »

What’s even better than watching these terrifying clips of Sarah Palin and Katie Couric every night? Reading our favorite chit-chat blog, National Review’s The Corner, the next morning! The Palin-Couric Sessions have been SO OBJECTIVELY HORRIFYING, and it’s a real hoot watching the Corner bloggers scramble together new Republican make-shift counterpoints each and every time. Today, for example, they argue that Joe Biden’s interview last night about the Supreme Court was worse than Sarah Palin’s, and that the American people will sympathize more with Sarah Palin because oh who the fuck knows. MORE »

PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, who will host Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, purportedly broke her ankle “after tripping and falling down stairs at her home last night.” Oh well what a timely “accident,” and what a likely “story,” which sounds nothing like “intimidation.” CAN SOMEONE then, maybe, explain the letter found next to Ifill’s ruined body that read “no forrin polisy gotcha quesschins,” written in virgin goat blood and signed by “Thteve Thchmidt”? [TV Newser]

Well, if the National Enquirer’s latest story isn’t entirely factual we will just eat our hats. Once upon a time Sarah Palin’s husband Todd had a business partner — no, not that one — some snowmobile dealer named Brad Hanson, and Sarah Palin allegedly had an affair with this fellow. You see, Todd was always away on business, but Todd’s business partner stayed home, for the purposes of fucking Todd’s wife, apparently! So says the former brother-in-law of the brother of Hanson’s wife. MORE »

Here’s a chart from FiveThirtyEight, the damnable, smartypants, know-it-all site that… oh hell, we read the motherfucker compulsively. This chart shows the net favorability scores of the four candidates based on some recent polls, and as you can see, people are rapidly realizing that Sarah Palin is a rather unsavory character — her numbers last week were about 10-15 points higher. So much for the happy times, Sarah; it is the happy times we will miss. So is it too late for Walnuts to shake this gal and throw Mitt “Willard” Romney in there? One can only dream… MORE »

• LOOKING OUT FOR FELLOW FEMINISTS: Sarah Palin sez: “I think he’s regretting not picking [Hillary Clinton] now, I do. What, what determination, and grit, and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way — she handled those well.” What a shame, indeed, that a relentless idiot like Sarah Palin now has to carpetbag her way into all that political capital Hillary Clinton built for herself. [ABC News]

Someone just sent us this comical article from an October, 2006 edition of the Anchorage Daily News — a reputable journal if ever there were! — about how Sarah Palin had a “scheduling conflict” during a gubernatorial debate with her two challengers and — instead of canceling her dumb conflict, because who cares — she tried to get her running mate to debate for her. Her two challengers wouldn’t agree to this because… just… just NO. What the hell? NO LADY NO. MORE »

New York Times “lightning rod conservative” columnist Bill Kristol today continues his titular free fall from superficially respectable-sounding “foreign policy conservative” to “comically shameless Republican purveyor of cynical misinformation who does not actually believe in or fact-check anything.” We recommend you sit down before reading this snippet from today’s column: “Should voters be alarmed by a relatively young or inexperienced vice-presidential candidate? No.” He adds that Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman were both new to the scene when their bosses croaked in office, and they turned out just fine. This is the same Bill Kristol who has spent all summer deriding Barack Obama’s relative youth and inexperience. Why do we even bother… MORE »