Tonight’s the big night – the knockdown drag out, Rombamapalooza debate, round one. Are you planning on watching? I’m not. My mind is made up, and the relative ability of two politicians to spit out soundbites that are, at best, slightly related to the actual questions isn’t going to influence my vote one way or the other. Especially since I know how it will go. Romney won’t be totally inept, and will therefore be crowned as the “winner.” The serious talking heads will declare that he looked presidential (just by being on the same stage as the president, if all the drivel I’ve been hearing on NPR is actually true), he’ll get a nice post-debate “bounce” and the media will declare that this thing has become a “horse race.” And they love they love them some horse race. The only hope, I suppose, is that Jim Lehrer will call Romney out on his bullshit. But there’s only so much he can do (especially since we know he’s a commie pinko in Obama’s pocket).

So, Todd Akin (you remember him, right?) apparently gave a very enlightening speech on the House floor back in 2008.

“It is no big surprise that we fight the terrorists because they are fundamentally un-American, and yet we have terrorists in our own culture called abortionists. One of the good pieces of news why we are winning this war is because there are not enough heartless doctors being graduated from medical schools. There is a real shortage of abortionists. Who wants to be at the very bottom of the food chain of medical profession? And what sort of places do these bottom-of-the-food-chain doctors work in? Places that are really a pit. You find that along with the culture of death go all kinds of other law-breaking: not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who are not actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things, misuse of anesthetics so that people die or almost die.”

I had not idea there was an “abortionist” physician specialty. And I’ve actually been developing charts that track various metrics broken out by specialty at our two hospitals, and I don’t actually see it anywhere. I guess we don’t have enough heartless doctors (which is hard to believe).

Now, as I’ve said before, I’m not a doctor myself so I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it’s technically impossible to “give” an abortion to a woman who isn’t actually pregnant. But I guess I’ll have to defer to the professional experts (like Todd Akin) on that sorta thing (though I will say that if that’s true, then the abortionists are missing out on a great business opportunity, and they should start giving abortions to men who aren’t pregnant, too).

Paul Ryan is actually a lot more optimistic about Americans than his running mate. Whereas Mitt Romney thinks 47% of us are leeches, Ryan thinks it’s only 30%.

Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state.

Oh well, it’s stupid meeting day, so I suppose I’d better prepare myself.