Something tells me the John McCain Cabbage Patch kid will be heavily discounted after tonight, but Palin will be hot for a while longer.

Obama, of course, will be on every kid’s Christmas list this year.

Everything you might have missed (or want to relive) between the first and last debates:

Fun music video (of sorts) that’s been going around:

Last night’s Saturday Night Live open, about the VP debate:

Maureen Dowd, introducing her latest column on Palin:

“Darn right. And that, doggone it, brings us to a shout-out for the latest virtuoso of Frontier Baroque, bless her heart, the governor of the Last Frontier. Her reward’s in heaven.”

From DailyKos, your guide to what’s going through her head during those long pauses:

Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

Amy Sullivan reports on an all-female focus group’s reaction in Colorado:

“I’d like to have lunch with Sarah,” said one married woman, “but have Joe running my country.” Another agreed: “I think Sarah Palin is cute as a button and is good in sound bytes, but she just is not ready.” Before the debate, only 10 of the women believed Palin was not ready to be vice-president or president; by the end of the evening more than half of them (21) shared that concern. The economy has been the number-one issue for women voters—particularly unmarried women—throughout the campaign season, and that held true for this focus group as well. And on that point, they were much more impressed by Biden’s ability to talk about the economy and relate to the concerns of middle-class voters. Before the debate, 14 women preferred Biden over Palin on the economy, but that number climbed to 23 afterward. A similar shift took place on the question of which candidate they trusted to handle health care—9 women initially preferred Biden, but that number more than doubled to 20 over the course of the evening.

Krugman digs up the source of that closing Palin quote about the ongoing need to defend our liberties.  It’s from a Ronald Reagan ad against Medicare–a program most Americans today would rather expand than end in the name of “freedom.”

What might the world be like with a woman in charge?  (Any woman. They’re all the same.)

The Daily Show does it again.