When secretly taped footage surfaced of Mitt Romney at a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser telling attendees that 47% of all voters have the audacity to believe they are "entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," he was asked to explain what the hell that was supposed to mean.

The real loser of last night's presidential debate: Jim Lehrer, who didn't do a whole lot.

In its official statement following last night's presidential debate, Sesame Workshop responded to Mitt Romney's remark that he "likes Big Bird" but will cut PBS funding anyway by reiterating its policy as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization not to comment on campaigns, quipping that at least "we can all agree that everyone likes Big Bird."

Poor Jim Lehrer could not keep up with the pace of the presidential debate last night. Here he is, stuttering is way through his moderating gig.

So amid the barrage of very, very substantive numbers and equations we heard last night was this: Mitt Romney wants to cut marginal tax rates by 20% across the board. Most people agree that this action, taken on its own, would reduce federal receipts by $4.8 trillion over ten years. But! Romney says he will make up for that lost revenue by eliminating loopholes to the tune of $4.8 trillion over the next decade, so there won't really be a tax cut. Which raises the question: Why the fuck are you cutting taxes, then?

Many in the left-leaning media were extremely unhappy with Obama's performance during last night's presidential debate, but none made it clearer than MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who wailed like a Truth Siren at the president's feckless, listless first round.

By far the most viral sound bite produced during last night's presidential debate was Mitt Romney's line about cutting federal support for PBS, which was accompanied by the laugh-to-keep-from-crying line "I like PBS, I like Big Bird."

By every last account, President Obama did not do well against Mitt Romney in last night's presidential debate.

Last night, a 2008 speech surfaced of Todd Akin saying, among other ludicrous statements, that doctors perform abortions on women "who are not actually pregnant." Today, Buzzfeed's Rebecca Berg contacted Rep. Akin's campaign for comment and, guess what, they're standing by the comments, if not Akin's exact phrasing.

The first debate of the 2012 general election season—the one that will fundamentally alter the direction of this race even though both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are terrible debaters who will lose to each other—is upon us. So settle in to your couch, open a beer, review your debate drinking game rules, and let Max Read and I "liveblog"—that's a dead technology from the days before Twitter—the action for you. Let the zingers fly! (No seriously you can watch the ball game and just check in here; we'll keep you updated.)

If Mitt Romney, who never makes any mistakes, gives a subpar performance at tonight's debate, we'll all know why: he, like Rick Perry before him, was just too tired. According to a report from Buzzfeed, Mitt got almost no sleep Monday night. The cause? A loud train near the candidate's Denver hotel:

The presidential debate will be on all the networks tonight. This explains the sense of dejection you felt on waking this morning and realizing, in some vulnerable corner of your heart, that Detective Olivia Benson won't be getting too close to a case. I'm sorry it had to be this way.

To anyone who has ever vowed to leave the country if their presidential candidate loses, this year, jetBlue can help you do just that, free of charge.

When I was a young boy my father's best friend, Art, lived in Alabama, and every now and again my family and I would travel from Arizona to spend a week visiting him at his lake house. On one of those trips, on the way back from an errand to buy ice, my dad and I pulled over for a quick bite at a roadside shack advertising catfish fritters. At that point, most of my life had been spent in Saudi Arabia and Arizona, where I could count the number of black children in my elementary school on one hand, and without using my thumb. Alabama was different. Black people were everywhere, though not in Art's neighborhood, and on that day, on the back patio of that fish shack, I recognized code-switching for the very first time.

7-Eleven, the convenience store mega-chain that's big in Japan, is currently holding its quadrennial "7-Election" coffee cup promotion to determine the likely winner of next month's presidential election.

20-year-old Marty Arps was just a run-of-the-mill branch manager at a Denver-area Chipotle until a close encounter with Mitt Romney propelled him to Internet superstardom.

As expected, Fox News aired the 5-year-old video of Obama's speech at Hampton University that conservative bloggers—namely Tucker Carlson—tried (and failed) to make an issue of in 2008. Though there may have been a few previously unreleased segments in tonight's footage, the right-wing discussion was the same old thing: "He sure does talk funny," "But what about white people?," and "Why is he so angry?"

It turns out that Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment might not be the most inaccurate and stupid statement of the Missouri Representative's career. In a 2008 speech on the House floor, Rep. Akin said (emphasis mine):

Matt Drudge got the five-alarm siren GIF out for "Obama's other race speech" — a lid-blowing, election-rocking video that was supposed to be the right's answer to Mother Jones' secret fundraiser footage of Mitt Romney.

A Facebook photo of a handgun posted on Friday by Brad Staats, the Republican nominee for Tennessee's 5th Congressional District, has stirred controversy over its accompanying caption, which concludes with the words "welcome to Tennessee Mr. Obama."