624 comments on the live-blogging thread last night.

Did the spam-bots find out I'd turned off word verification for commenting? I'll check it out. There's our liberal commenter Lindsey Meadows, who said (at 6:24 PM):

I think I'll just have casual sex tonight. After Romney, I couldn't possibly feel more violated (or bored).

When Clint Eastwood came on at 9, the liberal commenters, offset by Meade, went ageist:

elkh1 said... Clint is really really wobbly old.

Meade said... Clint looks great.

Alex said... Clint looks old and jittery. Remember folks he's 82. When he was in his 40s, it was scary.... Clint is just embarrassing right now. There is a reason for the old folks home and you're seeing it. Shoot me before I ever get like this. Senile.

2 of the long-time conservative commenters picked up the age theme:

Pogo said... Old, jittery, but vicious as hell.

Shouting Thomas said... Unfortunately, Clint is really struggling. Sad to see the great man suffering the humiliation of old age.

Pogo said... No way, ST, he's an elderly man whose body betrays him a bit, but he's hitting a million right notes. Hurrah!

What I liked about Clint's routine — which you had to trust not to feel nervous about — was when he said "We own this country... Politicians are employees of ours... When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go." As I said in this post, this was a play on something Romney said, something that's been used against Romney: "I like being able to fire people." Clint imposed the correct interpretation on that: When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go.

I didn't say much about Romney's speech last night, because I was way too tired by then. Our liberal friend Alex said: "ROmney talking too much about his family and church. Where are the policy initiatives? Obama is going to be speech-ifying policy like crazy next week." (Yeah, lotsa policy wonkery, that would have kept me awake.)

And our liberal Lindsey said: "I just watched Mitten with the sound on...sound on/sound off...same amount of policy specifics. Meade must be in seventh heaven." Oh, she wants policy too. If only they'd have bored us all to tears all week with specifics.

Shouting Thomas continued his lugubriousness:

Romney played small ball. I think that's what we need. He doesn't have an overriding theme, only the promise that he has the technical and managerial skills to lead.

Obama will promise social justice and payoffs to his favored groups.

The debates should be interesting.

Meade responded:

Exactly right. What we need now is boring small ball competence. Time to put obama's failed presidency behind us. Romney will be a fine president.

Lindsey with the liberal lady's focus on sex not baseball had no trouble seeing the opportunity to say:

Well by all appearances, you got a guy with small balls. I was actually hoping that all the non-policy fluff was just to woo the far right but I am now pretty locked into that being all he has. Sad really.

If a man had said something equivalently sexual about a woman, Democrats would cry "war on women." If that kind of rhetoric is okay, we ought to call out Lindsey for her "war on men."

Ah! No spam. Maybe some not-so-admirable comments in there, but nothing robotic, and so Morning on the Althouse Blog continues (i.e., no word verification for commenting). And I just want to say one thing about this supposed lack of policy specifics from the GOP and the implication of Democratic superiority on said specifics. I mean I want to quote something from Paul Ryan's speech:

[President Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. 

It was loaded with specifics.

He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

Ryan put a long pause between "did" — the action word — and "exactly nothing."