Have really enjoyed reading along!! Thanks all for a great commentary …
And if it means anything at all -
Truth Social, which many are using as a proxy for the health of the Trump Campaign, has plunged more than $2 in after-hours trading since the debate finished.
Cats for Harris!
“She will make sure we don’t get eaten by illegal immigrants!”
(Jeez, Flickr, why do you have to make it so damn difficult to upload and post here?)
Better art:
It’s the perfectionist in me. The top line was not centered correctly in the first. I guess I could drop the bottom caption a bit, but then there’s the framing rule about always bumping your art off the bottom. Aw, I will leave it alone.
It’s interesting to view the dynamics of the debate as it progressed, from the standpoint of human psychology. Harris was the one who had to prove herself, to prove that she was no elderly Joe Biden who would get trounced by Trump. Trump himself had the easy objective of simply not sounding demented; all his other weirdnesses were already baked in to the public perception of him.
You could see the effect of this at the start of the debate. It had obviously been drilled into the Orange Oaf during debate prep that he had to sound calm and “presidential”, and he managed it – for about five minutes. Harris, with so much pressure on her, was visibly nervous at the start. She actually had a dry throat in the first few minutes.
But what happened after was a beautiful thing. As Harris started landing punches on Trump’s many vulnerabilities, she quickly found her stride, while the Orange One got more and more rattled and within minutes became the raging narcissist that is his natural persona. And that was more or less the tone of the rest of the debate – Harris calm, cool, smiling and sometimes laughing at Trump’s idiotic lies, Trump becoming more and more enraged and less and less coherent.
And this is why Fox News is declaring that the ABC moderators were incredibly biased against Trumpie, especially when David Muir dared to fact-check him on things like executing babies or immigrants eating your cats and dogs. I expect to see accusations of “very unfair moderators at the failed ABC network” interminably at future Trump rallies.
What the hell is wrong with people? How can this election possibly be close?
ETA: The Guardian agrees with my assessment that David Muir and Linsey Davis (but especially Muir) were excellent moderators with no tolerance for bullshit – no wonder Trumpie and Fox News are pissed off! 
How much time do you have?
I love the title of this analysis …
I feel exactly the same way. I knew I didn’t have the stomach to watch it live. Following along with this lot was just my speed,
So thank for that from me too!
That was about 85 minutes more of hearing Trump talk than I could stomach. But I made myself sit through this one. So I get it.
Just hearing someone from the media tell Trump matter of factly that there is no state where it’s legal to “abort” a child after birth was worth the price of admission. It was nice hearing Trump’s response to being told there’s no credible source for anyone eating pets despite what the Orange Foolius might have seen on television.
How about ass-hattery? Fuckwaddery? Probably not even that high.
Man, ain’t that the truth? But while it was a love-hate experience, I’ve only ever seen Trump in sound-bites saying stupid shit, and one has to take that with a grain of salt. But this was non-stop ranty-crazy stuff that any sane person would reject out of hand.
More like dumb-agoguery, amirite?
I only managed to watch 30 minutes of this. Then my bullshit meter broke and shields went down, I had to escape to bed.
Rubio was on Fox afterwards defending Trump on that. He said it’s absolutely true. Babies from “botched abortions” are left to die. Not exactly what Trump said, but equally false I’m sure
According to CNN Factchecking:
“There are some cases in which parents choose palliative care, a kind of care that can provide relief for the symptoms and stress of a deadly illness or condition that gives the baby just minutes, hours or days to live. That is not the same as executing a baby.”
And: " As for abortions in the ninth month, Minnesota is one of a handful of states that allow abortion at any stage of a pregnancy, but it doesn’t mean that doctors perform them. Nationally, just 0.9% of abortions in 2021 – the latest year the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has data – happened at 21 weeks or later. Many abortions at this point in the pregnancy are necessary due to serious health risks or lethal fetal anomalies. More than 93 percent of abortions were conducted before the 14th week of pregnancy, according to the CDC. In Minnesota, according to state data for 2022, of the 12,175 abortions in the state, only two happened between the 25 and 30th week of pregnancy. None happened after the 30th week of pregnancy that year."
Of course the bellyaching today about the “biased moderators” will be strong. I guess not letting the candidates get away with saying stupid shit and forcing them to answer the question, which makes one of them look stupid, is bias. I saw a good basketball quote about this: “Don’t blame the referee if you don’t make the shot.”
Has anyone actually calculated how many minutes were given to Trump speaking and how many to Harris? (I’m almost masochistic enough to volunteer for such a tedious task, but surely someone has already done it.)
Of course it might be that every extra minute given to Trump just gave him an extra minute to dig himself deeper into a hole.
It’s somewhere up thread. Something like Trump: 42 min. Harris:37
Upthread was mentioned app. 5 minutes extra for Orange Fuckwad.
That was from one of the GOP commentators on CNN. He was pushing back on the other GOP commentator who was trying to run with the biased moderator meme.
Morning spin from Doug Schoen at Fox News:
Doug is so close to getting it.