California Congressman Duncan Hunter's opponents really want to debate him, enough that they'll starve themselves for at least eight days in protest (they're on day six now.) Will Duncan Hunter have blood on his hands?

This is like the "I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out" of health care town hall viral videos. According to the videographer/blogger, a dozen teabaggers staked out Al Franken's booth at the Great Minnesota Get-Together ready to boo and hiss and shout "socialism!" and all of those things that they have been doing, everywhere.

To be sure: Sheila Jackson Lee represents inner-city Houston, Texas. Her district is 40% black and 36% Hispanic. (Jackson Lee's last Republican opponent, coincidentally, received 20% of the vote.) This woman questioning her has never and will never vote for Jackson Lee, and if her story of being an unemployed, divorcing cancer survivor without insurance is correct, she would be directly and immensely helped by any of the health care reform bills currently sitting in the House, whereas in our current American system, her lack of employment and her preexisting condition mean she is most likely fucked.

You Betcha! Sarah Palin isn't simply ratings gold when Tina Fey is playing her. The vice presidential debate last night was the most-watched VP matchup ever, even surpassing by 33% the Obama/McCain debate from last week. According to THR, 69,989,000 viewers tuned in, which makes it the biggest debate audience since 1992, when Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Ross Perot all faced off. Palin has since had all three men fired. [THR]

PBS anchor Gwen Ifill has been a pundit for decades, but she shrewdly avoided controversy until the 2004 presidential campaign, when she moderated the vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. Remember that? At first you maybe thought, "How nice, that America has found a black woman it deems sufficiently sedated to moderate a big debate!" But then she slipped. Edwards brought up Cheney's old company Halliburton's multibillion profiteering in the Iraq, and Dick Cheney told her he would need more than the allotted 30 seconds to respond, and Ifill told him, "That's all you've got" to audience laughter, and that exposed her deep boiling black rage. Well, somehow the Attention Deficit Democracy allowed this bitter partisan to come back to moderate another VP debate. And big surprise: it turns out she is completely in the tank for Obama.She's been writing a secret book about him! Well, not just him. It's called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and it's about "emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power." And by "secret" I mean "to no one who read the AP story about it weeks before the McCain campaign approved Ifill as a moderator", and by "bold" they of course mean "actually the total opposite of" because that phrase is code for "emerging young African American politicians who somehow manage not to scare white people." One can only imagine Ifill, as the embodiment of PBS's quiet, sober, studiously inoffensive approach to covering the news, finds this topic personally interesting, because as a black woman she actually has to be significantly more boring than boring Washington establishment white guy pundits like Tom Brokaw or the late Tim Russert to prove that she does not have a chip on her shoulder or a loose cannon or anything remotely suggestive of an overly keen belief that slavery was wrong, and politicians can't be boring all the time. But whatever: now she's been exposed. Writing a book about a politician is practically the same as being on that politician's payroll, just ask Jerome Corsi. Is the McCain campaign trying to turn the obvious "shoot the moderator" tactics it just pulled on Katie Couric into a full-blown strategy? If so, as Media Matters points out, it's got some holes, not least because recent years have seen debates moderated by the likes of Bob Schieffer, a close personal friend of George W. Bush whose brother was a business partner of Bush's before the Supreme Court voted him president. Also, Tom Brokaw loves John McCain. But at the end of the day, would either of those guys make Sarah Palin sound any readier to navigate the collapse of our banking system or any number of our fragile Middle Eastern frenemy states? Yeah: no.

John McCain, the angriest Presidential candidate ever, has such a total lack of impulse control that he uttered "Horseshit" live onstage at last night's debate. For real! Barack Obama was discussing McCain's seething hatred of the Spanish prime minister when McCain's seething hatred took over his body and caused him to curse Obama out. Or the whole thing could've been an elaborate ploy to showcase his bitter-millionaire-anger to blue collar types bitter over losing jobs and homes, in the hope that they wouldn't see the difference. In any case, witness the offensive language for yourself at about 4:30 in the following clip. Update: The original poster now thinks McCain is saying "Course not." Who am I to decide such things? Listen for yourself. Click to view [via Andrew Sullivan]

The general consensus about last night's Democratic debate is that the media came off looking the worst. That consensus is based on, of course, media reaction. Alessandra Stanley read some odd "disgruntled employee/imperious boss dynamic between Mr. Stephanopoulos and Mrs. Clinton" but everyone else just saw two moderators asking the most inane, navel-gaving, pointless, content-free, media-obsessed questions ever. Then some petty sniping between the two candidates while they each tried to out-exasperate the other. It was grim.

The Times notes that, in last night's Philadelphia debate, Hillary Clinton repeatedly went after Barack Obama, "assisted... by vigorous questioning by the two moderators from ABC News, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous." Crooks And Liars' Nicole Belle agreed the moderators were aggressive, but didn't think it was the smart kind of aggressive. So she and her colleagues put together a video consisting only of the "more egregious" questions, designed to show ABC it is "HURTING America." The least substantive question in the video, however, doesn't come from anyone at the network, but from a Pennsylvanian who asks why Obama isn't brave enough to wear a flag on his lapel. A real elitist would have lost it, right then. [Crooks & Liars]

Attached, Gawker videographer Alexander Goldberg and Defamer videographer Molly McAleer explore the murky limits of bad taste while discussing the coverage (of the coverage of the coverage) of Heath Ledger's death. You will be edified. There will be tears. [Previously]