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Some ran­dom thoughts from the debate:

• I’ve twit­tered about this before, but I hon­estly am glad that Obama got a new pro­jec­tor for the Adler Planetarium. The plan­e­tar­ium is a mon­u­ment in it’s own right, along­side the Museum of Science and Industry, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Field Museum; the longer it oper­ates the bet­ter. Also, it appears to have increased in price by $1m since the last time McCain men­tioned it, mak­ing it per­haps the safest invest­ment in the United States.
• Obama’s per­for­mance was pretty bad, but the fact that ACORN and Ayers are even being dis­cussed marks a return to the “flag lapel-pin” bull­shit of the Pennsylvania Democratic debate.
• I missed the first 20 min­utes, but in what I saw nei­ther one of them men­tioned the fact that we’re on the cusp of a sec­ond global depres­sion or appeared to have any clue what to do about it.
• Given how pre­car­i­ous our eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion is (and how bad the “real-world econ­omy” was before the credit cri­sis), a spend­ing freeze by the Federal Government would make the depres­sion longer, deeper, and more painful. The fact McCain is still push­ing that mad­ness after today’s events — and worse, fruit­cakes like that CBS News “unde­cided voter” are buy­ing it — makes him very dan­ger­ous in his own right.
• Neither can­di­date has the right answer for edu­ca­tion. It’s very sim­ply this: teach the sci­en­tific method, log­i­cal rea­son­ing, and intel­lec­tual rigor as soon as pos­si­ble. That is the fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cle of edu­ca­tion, and the fact that we don’t drill it into stu­dents’ minds as soon as pos­si­ble is why we suck. Period. Every other edu­ca­tion pro­gram we have — vouch­ers, Head Start, char­ter schools, NCLB — is only even worth con­sid­er­ing in rela­tion to how it helps or hurts the trans­mis­sion of the basic ideas of the Enlightenment. Since we’re not trans­mit­ting those ideas any­ways, talk­ing about those other pro­grams is a waste of time.
• McCain’s plan for more teach­ers (recruit vet­er­ans from the war and let them skip cer­ti­fi­ca­tion exams!) is 100% pure crazy.

[Disclosure: I live in Chicago, and have finan­cially sup­ported Obama already.]

The first note is about the orga­ni­za­tion that McCain cited at the begin­ning of his speech, Citizens Against Government Waste. The one he was using as his cita­tion for the 900-million-dollar fig­ure he was hang­ing around Obama’s neck. They’ve are a lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion, which has the fol­low­ing accu­sa­tions against it:

• Astroturfing for Microsoft, against the anti-trust actions in the late 90s.
• Astroturfing for Phillip-Morris, to label a pub­lic health cam­paign that was show­ing results in reduc­ing smok­ing “gov­ern­ment waste,” and for a tobacco-industry sup­ported anti-tobacco bill.
• Labelling the YMCA “gov­ern­ment waste” after tak­ing con­tri­bu­tions from pri­vate health clubs.

And per­haps most damning:

• Laundering money for Jack Abramoff

That’s who McCain was using as his source when he obliquely accused Obama of corruption.

Also worth not­ing was Obama’s descrip­tion of the prac­tice of sup­port­ing friendly dic­ta­tors the prod­uct of “a 20^th cen­tury mind­set.” A bril­liant state­ment, in no small part because Obama knows how to get your mind going in the direc­tion he wants it to go. The rest of the debate I had the recur­ring sen­sa­tion that McCain sounded like a throw­back to the late 1980s — great for ironic, trashy, brit­pop. For a U.S. President? Not so much.