JUST GOT BACK from taking my mother-in-law to the hospital again. I don’t think I’m in the right frame of mind to liveblog the debates tonight. Stephen Green and Ann Althouse will be liveblogging, I believe, and if you’re going to be liveblogging it too, you can leave a link here. Back later.

UPDATE: PoliPundit, who called the last debate for Kerry within five minutes, has declared Cheney the winner of this one.

Jim Geraghty: “The single most devastating drubbing since Lloyd Bentsen smacked Dan Quayle all around the stage in 1988.”

Stephen Green: “I changed the channel back to Fox, and their ‘All-Star Panel’ looks happy tonight. After the Bush-Kerry debate last week, they looked like they’d been through the wringer. That speaks volumes about who the commentariat will probably view as tonight’s winner.”

Ed Morrissey: “Edwards got buried.” He doesn’t think it’ll make a lot of difference, though. (Well, Quayle getting buried didn’t.)

Ann Althouse: “I’m beginning to feel a bit sorry for Edwards.”

This, however, may overstate things a bit.

Jeff Jarvis, meanwhile, thinks Edwards won. His commenters think the questions were lame.

Hugh Hewitt: “A Cheney win, but no disaster for Edwards . . . Key thing is that Kerry’s record is back on the table.” He’s done the question-by-question scorecard thing again, too.

Mickey Kaus: “Edwards at times looked like a yapping ankle-biter.” Hey, I didn’t know Edwards had a blog!

Andrew Sullivan: “I think Edwards won easily.”

Transcript here. And another good review for Gwen Ifill, who seems to have made a much better impression than Jim Lehrer did last week.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Did Edwards meet Cheney before? Photos here.

RealClearPolitics has more on that, and the debate in general.

LAST UPDATE to this post: Jonah Goldberg offers some meta-analysis on the debate punditry: “I think the disparity between pro-Bush and anti-Bush pundits (there are so few pro-Kerry pundits it’s silly to create a category for them) might be partially explained by an interesting dynamic. Principled conservatives and principled liberals like their Veeps better than their presidents.”

CLIMATE OF FEAR UPDATE: I dropped by the bullet-riddled Bush-Cheney HQ mentioned below on my way home from work. It wasn’t bullet-riddled anymore, as the shot-out window panes had been removed. Nor, I have to say, was there much of a climate of fear in evidence, as the place seemed pretty crowded with people picking up Bush-Cheney signs and bumperstickers, children in tow.

This being East Tennessee, of course, I suppose that many of them were armed, which no doubt bolstered their courage. (Best line from one of the campaign HQ staff, which I heard secondhand from the news director of a local TV station: “We support their right to have a gun, just not their right to use it in that fashion.”) [LATER: I misunderstood — this was a joke, and no one at the Republican HQ actually said that. Sorry; my mistake.] There was also a substantial media presence, suggesting that this whole effort is likely to backfire, as it should. More here via USA Today.

Perhaps tonight someone should ask John Edwards how he feels about such violent behavior.

UPDATE: More violence here: “ORLANDO, Fla. — A group of protestors stormed and then ransacked a Bush-Cheney headquarters building in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday, according to Local 6 News. . . . Local 6 News learned that most of the protestors were from the AFL-CIO and were taking part in one of 20 other coordinated protests around the country.”

Video here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: These peace movement folks seem happy with the drive-by Bush HQ shooting.

Patterico “Does anyone have any doubt, any doubt at all, that if it were a Democratic campaign office that was attacked, it would be all over the news? That it very likely would have been the topic of a question at tonight’s debate?”

I don’t know, but here’s more violence in Wisconsin: “More than 50 demonstrators supporting Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry stormed a Republican campaign office in West Allis at mid-day today.”

THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE LIBERATED, a roundup of posts from Iraqi bloggers, is up.

JAY ROSEN has thoughts on bloggers and Big Media.

THOUGHTS ON THE KERRY DOCTRINE, and a prediction of what John Edwards will do in tonight’s debate, from Tom Maguire.

Plus, a Dick Cheney mystery. Or maybe two, I’m not sure.

FINANCIAL DATA ON 527 GROUPS: TaxProf has an interesting roundup.

More fruits of financial disclosure here.

THE NEW CLIMATE OF FEAR IN AMERICA HAS SPREAD TO KNOXVILLE:

An unknown suspect fired several shots into the Bearden office of the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign Tuesday morning.

The headquarters are located at 4618 Kingston Pike, next to Nouveau Classics and in the same shopping plaza as Long’s Drugstore.

According to Knoxville Police Department (KPD) officers on the scene Tuesday, it is believed that the two separate shots were fired from a car sometime between 6:30 am and 7:15 am.

One shot shattered the glass in the front door and the other cracked the glass in another of the front doors.

I blame Michael Moore.

UPDATE: More fear here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Ryan Bowers sends this.

IN THE MAIL: Reader Derrick Story sends a copy of his book, Digital Photography Hacks.

Hey, I am a digital photography hack. . . .

VOTE FOR ME OR YOU’RE CRAZY: Sounds like bad salesmanship to me.

SOME ADVICE: Suffered a catastrophic hard drive crash on my main computer over the weekend. I had backed up all the directories that matter to a firewire hard drive, and I had separate backups of important stuff, like articles in progress, so the data loss wasn’t awful — but I still lost a lot of stuff that’s important in the aggregate even if not individually.

I’m switching to an automatic full-backup system, as my data-backup habits go back to an obsolete era when I didn’t have nearly so much stuff stored as bits. You may want to think about that yourself, if you haven’t already done so.

GOTCHER HEALTHCARE BLOGGING RIGHT HERE: This week’s Grand Rounds is up, featuring healthcare providers blogging about health care.

SOME THOUGHTS ON KERRY’S TRADE POLICY, from a former GATT representative.

THE MUDVILLE GAZETTE has polls from Iraq. Meanwhile Hugh Hewitt thinks that Kerry’s debate “bounce” is a media phenomenon:

The ABC News tracking poll has Bush’s lead at 5% points, “essentially unchanged” after the debate. Pew Research also has a steady 5% point lead among likely voters for Bush, and a seven point lead among registered voters –a one point gain for Kerry. Kerry’s no bounce debate follows his no bounce convention, and the exploitation of Kerry’s incredibly strange and dangerous foreign policy views articulated Thursday night has just begun.

I think Kerry’s performance was better than that, but I also think that it wasn’t as good as the media’s predictable hyping would suggest.

UPDATE: Okay, Kerry’s done well in the national polls, but Slate — no bunch of GOP shills — is showing it Bush 348, Kerry 190 in the electoral vote count. I’m confused.

DOUG KERN looks at blogging in the Sixteenth Century.

JOE KATZMAN wonders if John Kerry would rise to the challenge if elected. ” I get a vision of Owen Wilson’s character in Shanghai Knights.” Read the whole thing.

THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR: Halloween? “Halloween gives you all the license of Mardi Gras along with the candy of Easter – only without all the icky pastel Barbie & Ken hues.”

INTERESTED IN NANOTECHNOLOGY? Who isn’t? So check out the Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology, October 21-24.

THE RATHERGATE DOCUMENTS: Not reliable enough for Michael Moore. Ouch.

A PASSAGE FROM THIS POST leads reader Michael Gebert to write:

“I’d be delighted to live in a country where happily married gay couples had closets full of assault weapons.”

Surely that needs to be on your masthead, as an instant response to people who pigeonhole you as “conservative”….

Heh. I doubt it would do much good.

UPDATE: Er, sorry about the collateral damage, dude.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Oops, the masthead idea’s already taken!

ANN ALTHOUSE HANGS UP ON JOHN KERRY: I think she should have done him the courtesy of listening to his pitch.

LOTS OF GOOD ECONOMIC NEWS here; surprisingly, this seems not to have gotten much attention.

AND THESE GUYS COMPLAIN ABOUT GUANTANAMO?

The government of Charles de Gaulle held hundreds of foreigners, including at least three Britons, in an internment camp near Toulouse for up to four years after the second world war, according to secret documents.

The papers, part of a cache of 12,000 photocopied illegally by an Austrian-born Jew, reveal the extent to which French officials collaborated with their fleeing Nazi occupiers even as their country was being liberated. They also show that, when the war was over, France went to extraordinary lengths to hide as much evidence of that collaboration as possible.

There were Americans imprisoned, too, and it’s not clear whether they were released or “lost.” I’m shocked, shocked.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT at Concordia University in Montreal, which once again seems to have a problem with Jews.

More on Concordia here, here, here,and here, though, sadly, the problem goes further back than even that.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh has further thoughts: “A sad day for Canadian higher education.”

HMM. MORE FRANCE-RELATED CORRUPTION:

Costa Rica’s president said Monday he is asking Miguel Angel Rodriguez to resign as secretary-general of the Organization of American States because of alleged payments from a government contractor. . . .

Pacheco said Rodriguez has not adequately explained money that a former colleague said came from the French telecommunications company Alcatel as a “prize” for a $149 million contract in 2001 for 400,000 cellular telephone lines.

An anonymous tip early this year alerted banking authorities to almost $10 million in transfers last year from an Alcatel account in New York to a Bahamian account in the name of a law firm, Servicios Notariales Q.C.

Investigators say $2.4 million was transferred from the law firm to the Panamanian bank accounts of Jean Gallup, wife of Costa Rica’s telephone and power company director, Jose Antonio Lobo.

You know, we should try this bribery thing ourselves. Apparently, it gets results.

MORE SPACEBLOGGING over at GlennReynolds.com.