I thought I'd blog my reactions to the debate as it rolled along:

- Obama on fixing the financial crisis: the first thing he'll do is make sure CEOs don't get paid too much.

I guess that will play with the Left peanut gallery, but perhaps Sen. Obama could have explained how punishing a few CEOs will spur economic growth, and why this is the very first thing he would do.

- McCain wants to buy up the bad mortgages and negotiate a better deal for the folks who agreed to the bad mortgages. Ugh. Why does Wall Street "greed" have to be punished but Main Street greed rewarded?

The only consolation, if it is that, is that Obama would do precisely the same thing.

-- Barack Obama, Man of Action: Obama talked about the tough action he took to avert the financial crises. Several months ago, he wrote letters to Fed Chairman Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, but "they didn't listen to him." And last year he apparently "told Wall Street" they had to "re-regulate." But they didn't listen to him, either.

Wow. That's pretty tough.
-- I just learned that Barack Obama wants to cut more spending than he is proposing. Not a word on where he is going to cut $1 trillion, but if The One says it, then it must be so.

-- I love how Obama compared the federal budget situation to our family budgets, that the federal government has "to prioritize just like families have to prioritize." Uh, sure, Obama. Except unlike the federal government, I can't tap my neighbor's bank account to increase my revenues.

-- Obama made this astounding claim:

"But understand this: We also have to look at where some of our tax revenues are going. So when Sen. McCain proposes a $300 billion dollar tax cut, a continuation not only of the Bush tax cuts but an additional $200 billion dollars, that he's going to give to big corporations including big oil companies, four billion dollars worth, that's money out of the system."

Now, consider what Obama said, because it reveals a world view starkly at odds with liberty and free enterprise. Obama is saying the government has perior claim to our money: to our incomes, to business revenues. He's appalled that McCain wants to lower taxes, saying "look at where OUR tax revenues are going." He decries cutting business taxes as "money out of the system."

Almost as maddening is McCain's failure to recognize and exploit this opportunity to expose Obama as a standard issue left-winger.

-- Obama: "Only a few...percent of small business make more than $250,000 a year." Wha...? That just doesn't sound right.

-- Obama just said their are no mandates in his health care proposal, and then 10 seconds later admitted that there were -- mandating that parents insure their children -- except he didn't call it a "mandate."

Quite the verbal trickster, that Barack. Shades of the what the meaning of "is" is.

-- Obama just tossed out the "Iraq has a $79 billion surplus" line -- a claim has already repeatedly been debunked as false. There is no way Obama, by now, is unaware he is peddling a bogus claim to Americans, and yet he does it anyway.

-- Brokaw asked both candidates to "define your doctrine for use of U.S. military for humanitarian purposes" like intervening in the Congo or Rwanda, etc. Obama went first for a change, and he's clearly stumped, saved only by his amazing gift for sounding articulate without actually saying anything at all, while his mental processors work in the background to concoct something that passes for an idea. Obama came up with saying we should "intervene where we can" but then said "we can't bey everywhere all the time."  I think even Charlie Gibson would have a hard time understanding the Obama Doctrine.

As an example, Obama said we can provivde African Union forces in Dharfur with that old reliable "logistical support" and "'setting up a no-fly zone at relatively little cost to us."

Does Barack Oobama have any idea what he is talking about? Darfur is the size of France. Where, for example, does Sen. Obama think we are going to base the aircraft that will enforce this "no fly" zone? For how long?

Good grief: he criticizes John McCain for initially underestimating how difficult the Itaq War would be, and then he glibly proposes committing us to "no-fly zone" the size of France in the middle of Saharan Africa, and claiming it wouldn't cost much?

McCain hit the question out of the park, illustrating the huge gap in the two candidates' qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief. As in, McCain is, and Obama ain't even close. McCain, for example, talked about how we had to keep in the front of our minds the potential cost in American blood while weighing possible interventions. Obama, by contrast, gave a bloodless analysis (such as it was) in which he never even touched on the subject, sounding more like he was lecturing in an college international relations seminar.

-- The next question was whether we should respect Pakistan's borders and not pursue Al-Quaeda into their sanctuaries there, or cross those borders and pursue our enemies like we did in Cambodia. Obama got the question first, and immediately blamed the situation described in the question on the invasion of Iraq, saying it diverted our attention from Afghanistan and allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape and set up camp in northwest Pakistan.

Someone on Obama's staff needs to acquaint him with this thing called "history," as in a "chronology of events." Osama Bin Laden escaped from Afghanistan after the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001 -- while Obama was still voting "present" in the Illinois legislature. The invasion of Irarq didn't occur until April 2003 -- almost a year-and-a-half later.

So tell me again, Sen. Obama, how the invasion of Iraq in April 2003 was responsible for Bin Laden's escape from Afghanistan in December 2001?

-- On the question of "how can we apply pressure to Russia on humanitarian issues without starting a Cold War?", Obama shows disturbing ignorance. He talks in that now-familiar cadence that mimics authoritativeness, like someone who is used to using soothing tones and the semblance of articulation to bluff his way out of a question:

"...we've got to provide moral support to the Poles, and Estonia and Latvia, and all the nations that were former Soviet satellites, but we've also got to provide them with...financial and... concrete assistance to help rebuild their economies."

Is Sen. Obama aware that the Soviet Empire collapsed almost 20 years ago, and that Poland, Estonia and Latvia are no longer prostrate former communist satellites by robust market economies? In fact, Latvia has the fastest growing economy in Europe.

It's unnerving to watch Obama spouting off things that are untethered to world political reality.

Obama says keeping us safe depends on "making sure that we can see some of the 21st Century challenges and anticipate them before they happen." How is he going to do that if he can't anticipate things that have already happened?