WHY DID PAUL RYAN DRINK SO MUCH WATER DURING THE DEBATE? Meanwhile, I never saw Biden drink water, and at the first debate, I never saw either Obama or Romney drink water. I made this poll.

THAT WAS SO ANNOYING! The VP debate was positively painful. Joe Biden’s grimacing and interrupting created such an atmosphere of anxiety. Dreadful. “So, Biden was too rude and aggressive, while Obama, by his own admission, was too polite and not aggressive enough last week.” It’s not like we’re going to take an average!

THE FIRST HALF OF THE SUPREME COURT ORAL ARGUMENT IN FISHER V. UT, reported at SCOTUSblog: “The liberals were plainly supportive of the Texas [affirmative action] plan and concerned about the possibility of overruling Grutter.  The conservatives were largely silent.” Presumably, the liberals will quiet down and the conservatives will get noisy as the pro-affirmative action lawyers step up for the second half. Stay tuned.

I NEED TO TELL YOU THAT I’VE CHANGED MY MIND ABOUT ONE THING BUT NOT ANOTHER. In case you’re keeping track of the occasional Althouse post here on Instapundit, I feel compelled to tell you that there are 2 things I’ve talked about here that I’ve reconsidered in the last 24 hours. First, unlike seemingly everybody else, I did not think Obama did such a bad job at the debate. So I rewatched the debate, and I stand by my original observation (and I think I know why Obama’s supporters decided to adopt the strange talking point that their guy was terrible).

Second, I deplored the resurrection of the 2007 video of Obama stirring up racial grievances. Yesterday, I read this Thomas Sowell column highlighting a specific, glaring lie, and I completely changed my mind. I still think The Daily Caller presented the material poorly, but I think what Obama did, what Sowell explains, does deserve our attention now. As I say at my home blog: “Obama lied, blatantly and for the purpose of making black people feel discriminated against. That’s evil.”

14-YEAR-OLD GIRL SHOT IN THE HEAD for generating “negative propaganda” about Muslims, say the Pakistani Taliban, generating negative propaganda. “She considers President Obama as her ideal. Malala [Yousafzai] is the symbol of the infidels and obscenity.” Multiple ironies, but nothing here is funny.

IT’S ALL ABOUT TAGG. Compare Politico (Tagg’s been more “assertive,” “aggressive,” and “will basically call people out when they have something stupid to say”) with The Daily News (“There’s no internal squabbling or fighting for territory or turf”).

CAMILLE PAGLIA ON CAPITALISM AND ART: “Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.”

HAS AXELROD LOST HIS  MIND? Excusing Obama’s debate performance, he said, “I think he went thinking that this was going to be a discussion about the country’s future and he was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance on the other side.” Not only is it weird/elitist to think normal listeners get the reference to Elmer Gantry, but if you look it up, you’ll find descriptions of Elmer Gantry don’t sound like Mitt Romney at all:

Gantry has no redeeming features but is seen by the gullible public as a man who speaks the truth about God. Of course he could just as easily have been a lawyer or a politician and the heart of Lewis’s satire is how easily people believe what they want to believe.

That gets me thinking about Obama!

SARAH, THERE’S ONLY ONE PERSON WHO CAN DO IT: Bill Clinton. But even if he would do it, Obama shouldn’t trust him. If somehow he could, I don’t think Obama would like sharing even the practice stage with the man who out-shone him at the convention and who would easily best him at debate. And yet, with 2 more public humiliations in the offing, he’s got to do something. If he’s really desperate, there could be a world crisis of some sort that forces him to cancel the remaining debates.

THE HISTORY OF DEBATE CONSPIRACY THEORIES, including Mitt Romney’s handkerchief/cheat-sheet, but also including one that I — I’m sorry to say — started.

JIM LEHRER THINKS HE DID A FINE JOB MODERATING THE DEBATE. He’s kind of saying I meant to do that: “The moderator should be seen little and heard even less.” But he claims that’s what he’s “always said,” so I’ll believe him. He says he’s glad he “finally I had a chance to demonstrate it.” If that’s a good idea, why not more of it? Sit the 2 men down at a table for 2 hours and see what happens. I’ve seen it done. The moderating effects of no moderator may be greater than anything a real moderator would do. I like that Obama and Romney together spontaneously created the no-moderator effect. It’s a general thought experiment of mine: Start with the premise of nothing. What is better than nothing? Consider the possibility that better than nothing is a high standard. Please perform that thought experiment on all your decisions. Especially if you work for the government.

“THREE UW PROFESSORS IRKED AT SOME DETAILS OF OBAMA’S RALLY,” and, yeah, I’m one of them. The article is in The Wisconsin State Journal, a traditional newspaper:

Downs was joined by law professor Ann Althouse and political science professor Ken Mayer in raising concerns. Mayer sent a letter outlining four concerns to university administrators on Wednesday. Althouse later shared it with [Instapundit], a conservative-leaning blog run by a Texas law professor.

Texas, Tennessee… what’s the difference? Not much, out here in Wyoming… I mean Wisconsin, where we’re lining up in droves to give our President a big hug after his debate debacle.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A reader emails:

I read this. Then I thought…well, isn’t this about audience suppression? I mean requiring registration and ID and such?

Rrrraaaccciiisssts!

By the way, I am curious about the rainbow of color at this rally in Madison.

Just sayin’.

Heh. And I love the Tennessee/Texas confusion. In the words of Tex Ritter: “They say that Virginia is the mother of Texas. We never knew who the father was, but we kinda suspected Tennessee.”

“THE DEBATE HAS BEEN VERY VERTICAL SO FAR,” says Jaltcoh (my son), noting that “Moderator Jim Lehrer asks Obama to expand on the idea of trickle-down government, and Obama responds by explaining his education policy of ‘race to the top.'” I’m trying to live-blog too. Not sure how much I have to say, but there’s a very active comments thread.

GLENN, I’M SYMPATHETIC TO MANY OF YOUR ARGUMENTS, and I agree that there’s been an effort to make people feel that we’re not allowed to criticize Obama and many people — in the media and in normal life — have an instinct to protect him from criticism. Politics, like any other human endeavor, entails human emotion, and unless you want to turn away from politics altogether, you have to play within reality that exists. The emotions around race are deep and complex. I recommend not toying with them. Move to something more optimistic and positive. That’s what Romney and Ryan seem to want to do with their campaign. They can’t control what their supporters choose to talk about, but this racial material is dragging them down.

AM I THE ONLY ONE OF THE INSTAPUNDIT BLOGGERS AND GUEST-BLOGGERS who loathes the Daily Caller’s exploitation of the 2007 video of Barack Obama stirring up the black churchfolk? I don’t think this is helping Mitt Romney with the swing voters at all. Like last week’s playing and replaying of the Obamaphone lady’s ravings, it repels me from Republicans. I’m a swing voter — I voted for Obama in 2008 and Bush in 2004 — and I am genuinely undecided this year. Those of you who are pleased with these seemingly exciting new weapons to use in the fight to defeat Obama are losing perspective. You are not thinking about how you look to the people you need to convince. Here’s a clue: You look ugly.

FEELING “UNEASE” THEN “MILD IRRITATION,” THEN “SERIOUS CONCERN” about the University of Wisconsin’s decision to let the Obama campaign shut down the center of campus for an entire day, UW—Madison polisci prof Kenneth R. Mayer has 4 problems (itemized in a letter he gave me permission to share):

(1) In order for students to get a ticket for this event (which doesn’t even guarantee entry), the University is requiring them to go to the Obama campaign website, provide contact information, and then click on a button that says “I’m In!” In a very real sense, we are forcing them to become participants in the campaign and express their support for the campaign. This is SOP for a campaign event, but it should not be for the University. Having a president visit as an educational public event is one thing. Forcing students to declare their support for a presidential candidate in order to attend the event on campus is quite another. Should we be in the business of helping a campaign farm thousands of email addresses?

Note: You also have to give your phone number, which for many/most students means a cell phone number, something that I think most people see as more private, since it doesn’t go into the public phone directories.

(2) The location of the rally could not be more disruptive. It hardly seems appropriate to shut the central campus down for an entire day, closing offices and seriously disrupting our mission. I have several colleagues who had scheduled exams for Thursday. Surely there were other venues that would pose less disturbance.

(3) I have learned that classified staff will be required to take a vacation or personal day, arrange to work at another location on campus, or work at home. This is what pushed me into the seriously annoyed category. The UW is penalizing staff (or, at a minimum, dramatically inconveniencing them) for an event that they had no say in organizing or scheduling. That’s wrong.

(4) The University is finessing the central point of this visit. It is not a Presidential visit. It is not a Presidential speech. It is a campaign event. It is a major event when a president visits UW. It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, somewhat less major when the president comes not as a president, but as a candidate.

This is not a partisan issue (my objections would be the same if it were Romney). I think this should have been handled differently, in a way that welcomed the President but did not diminish our basic purpose.

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN REQUIRES STUDENTS TO GIVE THEIR PHONE NUMBERS TO THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN in order to get access to the central campus zone where Obama will be giving a speech this Thursday. Here‘s the University’s website — attempting to frame the event as a historical presidential visit — which links to a page on the Obama campaign website. You need tickets to go to the event, and the ticket-application form demands information of obvious use to the campaign. So not only is the University contributing a fabulous photo op to the campaign, it is connecting students to the campaign website and almost tricking them into giving the campaign their personal contact information.

UPDATE: The University now openly calls the event a “campaign rally”!

A REFLECTION ON PUNCH SULZBERGER, who died yesterday, from my Wisconsin Law School colleague Nina Camic, who was “an au pair to his little girl” in the 1960s: “I came [from Warsaw] with barely a flight bag full of clothes and possessions and joined a household that had a staff of helpers and an extended family of cousins, aunts, nephews — all intensely close, bonded in ways that history sometimes bonds people because of unusual circumstances.”

PICTURES FROM A BEATLES-THEMED WEDDING.

PAUL RYAN HAS A COOL SENSE OF HUMOR, riffing on somebody else’s remark that his future political career will require that he “wash the stench of Romney off of him.” He’s saying things on the campaign bus like “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.” But he has political antagonists, and if they get humor they’ll pretend not to. It’s a shame. I like quirky humor!

We’re seeing the same thing with those who are acting like Romney’s an idiot for saying Michigan “trees are just the right height” and why is it that airplane windows “don’t open.” Politicians can’t come right out and tell you you’re dumb if you don’t get their joke. They’ve got too much to lose, and they can’t play cute games with your mind like Madonna with her “Black Muslim in the White House” remark. (That last link is a self-link to my blog, which means I’m self-promoting — self-promoting in the context of talking about the Grande Dame of Self-Promotion, Madonna — and which also means we’re carrying on a conversation about all this in the comments section.)

ADDED: I misread that. Ryan didn’t make those jokes. The report that he said that was itself a joke. I like those jokes! Oddly, the point of the writer at the first link — Tobin Harshaw — is that Ryan’s antagonists are so eager to attack him that they don’t recognize that fake quotes are fake. But they aren’t that fake. They could be real humor. Obviously, there’s trouble processing humor. Isn’t Harshaw missing the humor of that kittens-on-Mars letter writer?

AND: I like the way Drudge is putting it: “MEDIA ‘SATIRE’ HIT PIECE ON PAUL RYAN BACKFIRES…/O’Donnell, Krugman ‘fooled’…” Drudge is, I think, insinuating that Politico’s Roger Simon intended to be misunderstood, for the Ryan quotes to be believed, and then to reveal that it was satire after the damage was done.

PLUS: Fake quotes once released take on a life of their own. Think of “I can see Russia from my house.”

SQUIRREL ON A RAMPAGE in a German kitchen… and beyond.

WE’RE HARVESTING CHILI PEPPERS, which means I photograph them, which means I blog the photographs, which means there’s a good chance my dear commenter Chip Ahoy will do something animating:

And if you think that’s cute, you should see how he shows you how to cook at Things Wot I Made Then Ate.

DON’T GET DISTRACTED BY FACT THAT A STATE DEPT. SPOKESMAN SAID “F*ck Off” and “Have a good life” to that BuzzFeed reporter. Focus on the questions that flummoxed him:

Why didn’t the State Department search the consulate and find AMB Steven’s diary first? What other potential valuable intelligence was left behind that could have been picked up by apparently anyone searching the grounds? Was any classified or top secret material also left? Do you still feel that there was adequate security at the compound, considering it was not only overrun but sensitive personal effects and possibly other intelligence remained out for anyone passing through to pick up? Your statement on CNN sounded pretty defensive–do you think it’s the media’s responsibility to help secure State Department assets overseas after they’ve been attacked?

Those are great questions, and the State Department will not answer them. Without answers, they feel like questions that answer themselves. (And if you want to talk about this, here‘s the conversation at my home base.)

PELOSI DOESN’T DENY THAT SHE HIT THE MUTE BUTTON ON THE PRESIDENT, as Bob Woodward said she did in his “Price of Politics” book. She’s protesting a Romney ad and she says: “There was absolutely no situation in which either President Bush or President Obama were cut off from speaking.” But what Woodward said was:

Pelosi reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone. They could hear Obama, but now he couldn’t hear them. The president continued speaking, his disembodied voice filling the room, and the two leaders got back to the hard numbers.

Woodward never said she muted the President, and Pelosi doesn’t deny that she hit the mute button on herself.

THE TOP FEMALE AD ICONS of “all time,” according to Ad Age. They’re in chronological order, and only one is from the last quarter century. Flo!