If he could afford it, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is so confident the President is going to take Ohio that he's willing to bet $10,000 on it. He offered the lucrative wager to Ohio Attorney General Mike Dewine on State of the Union. "If I was as rich as Mitt Romney, I would bet Mike DeWine $10,000 that the president is going to win Ohio," Strickland said. Dewine, a Romney supporter, sees it differently, obviously. "Romney's going to carry Ohio," DeWine said. "It's going to be very very close race." Strickland's offer came as a response to Dewine's glowing review of Romney's debate performance. "What you saw Wednesday night was the first opportunity that the average person had to see these two candidates head to head for the very first time," DeWine said. Strickland gave Romney an overall failing grade, though. "I give him a B+ on style, but I give him a D- on substance and truthfulness," Strickland said.

Two economists came on State of the Union to say the job numbers truthers are all a bunch of quacks. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain's former economic adviser, and Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Analytics, both said the numbers were solid. "It's a statical anomaly, not a conspiracy," Holtz-Eakin said. "The numbers were collected in a professional way. It's the same procedures used every month." Zandi thinks it's silly. "It's silly, counterproductive," he said. "Silly because these are professionals doing it, not politicians," he said. "It's counter-productive because it seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the political process."

Robert Gibbs thinks Mitt Romney is a master thespian. During an appearance on ABC's This Week, he told host George Stephanopolous that Romney put on a "masterful" performance on Wednesday. "Gov. Romney had a masterful theatrical performance just this past week," Gibbs said, "but the underpinnings and foundations of that performance were fundamentally dishonest." Gibbs particularly loved Romney's comments on his economic plan. "He walked away from the central tenet of his economic theory by saying he had no idea what the president was talking about," he said. "Ten minutes after the debate, even his own staff is walking back his answers on health care and preexisting conditions." But don't let that silly problem detract from the performance as a whole. "I don’t want to take anything away from what I think, again, was a masterful, masterful performance by Gov. Romney," Gibbs said. "But I don’t think Gov. Romney’s positions have changed, and fundamentally, I don’t think the campaign has changed."

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Ed Gillespie thinks his boss's plan to cut PBS funding won't hurt Sesame Street. At least, that's what he said during his This Week appearance. "Big Bird would be pretty successful, I suspect, without a government, federal subsidy and all that debt," Gillespie said. He thinks the country can't afford to fund public programming for kids. "If you have to borrow money from China to pay for these programs, is it worth it?" Gillespie said. "That's the test that should be applied if we're going to impose this debt on future generations." Also, Ed Gillespie is a dad and he's seen Sesame Street toys at Walmart before. You can't fool him. "Big Bird, I can tell you as the father of three children — grown now — but any father who's gone to a toy store knows that Big Bird is a pretty commercially successful entity," he said.