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.

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.

It doesn't have its own Tumblr or Twitter accounts — yet — but this Associated Press photo of Mitt Romney standing shoulder to shoulder with staff members at a Denver Chipotle earlier today clearly has that memetic quality that the Internet craves.

Remember Creed? The band that plays second fiddle to Nickelback in music acts people love to hate? Well, the group's lead singer Scott Stapp made a highly anticipated appearance on Fox & Friends this morning to reveal his choice for America's next president, and — surprise — it's not Obama.

Following the release of secretly recorded footage from a $50,000-a-plate Mitt Romney fundraiser, in which the GOP's presidential nominee can be heard blasting 47 percent of all voters for believing "they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it," subsequent media coverage may have given a casual observer the impression that Romney had all but forfeited the race.

First off—there is no such thing as "the media." The people and entities who shape our political coverage represent a fractured, disaggregated, chaotic mass of divergent agendas and interests. While they often display pack behavior, they do not operate as a coordinated monolith. But that doesn't mean they're being fair to Mitt Romney. They're not.

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan say they have a tax plan. According to the Associated Press, they want a 20 percent decrease in all income tax rates. Ryan says they'll pay for this tax reduction by limiting loopholes and deductions.

Very unlikely Barack Obama would approve of this "99 Problems" parody remix — it does put words in the President's mouth, namely a lot of four-letter ones.

Assuming for a moment that Obama had anything to do with killing Bin Laden — and that this wasn't all part of an Al Qaeda plan, as Rush Limbaugh theorized — he really should have done it sooner.

The Romney-Ryan ticket, which will lose the US presidential election this November, is still giving it their all. The campaign is trailing in key states like Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio. But they have a secret weapon: VP nominee Paul Ryan is an avid hunter.

With the first of three presidential debates still a few days away, Mitt Romney's campaign is already calling a winner: President Obama.

That headline was for the Daily Caller.

Roger Simon wrote a...thing today for Politico in which he revealed highly embarrassing details about GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's contempt for Mitt Romney: Ryan has "gone rogue," openly referring to Romney as "the Stench" on the campaign trail and refusing to follow the campaign's direction. EXCEPT TOTALLY NOT! Jokes on you, suckers.

How can you tell when a presidential campaign is not going so well? A lot of ways, actually, but one way is to listen to the candidate for vice president's pet names for his presidential running mate. If one of those sobriquets is a word normally reserved to describe death, filth, and feces, chances are that you are looking at a rather unsuccessful presidential campaign.

In Vandalia, Ohio, today, after Mitt Romney thanked running mate Paul Ryan for his stump speech, rally attendees instinctively began chanting "Ryan, Ryan," as rally attendees are wont to do.

The infamous and inevitable 60 Minutes interviews with the Chosen Two aired on CBS last night. Neither candidate said anything that they had never said before and everyone walked away forgetting why they had opted to watch the predictably uninformative interviews in the first place. (Is 60 Minutes even still a thing?)

Affluent Imagineer Mitt Romney has some exciting new proposals for the future of airplane design, according to some remarks he made to the L. A. Times at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills Saturday Night.