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Real Presidential Debates
slithytove writes "As many of us are aware, the presidential debates are currently controlled by an organization called the Commision on Presidential Debates. As anyone who's seen a presidential debate recently could guess, the CPD does just what our two major parties want: exclude third parties and impose rules that make the event more of a joint press conference than a debate. Non-establishment candidates Michael Badnarik and David Cobb will be having an actual debate this Thursday. After debating each other, they will be rebutting the points Bush and Kerry make in their pseudo-debate. Free Market News will be streaming it and providing a download afterwards."
Obviously Ralph is holding out for an invitation to the Kerry-Bush debate. Or else he's afraid to set foot in Florida after the problems he caused in 2000.
Have you read my blog lately?
I don't expect Bush to actually answer any of the points presented by Kerry this week anyway.
Duh, he's prohibited from responding to kerry in any way by the rules agreed upon by both candidates. So you won't see kerry responding to bush either. Just scripted responses to scripted questions.
Now ask yourself why both parties would want to set up the debates this way. Perhaps they have something to lose by having free debates?
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I don't respond to AC's.
Kerry don't need Bush at the debate because he can debate against himself for 90 minutes front of the audience.
4 30 93-2004Sep22.htmlw p-dyn/articles/A411 45-2004Aug4.htmlu rceid=navclient&ie =UTF-8&q=bush+is+flip%2Dflopper
That's cute. Way to reguritate a sound bite from our Retard-in-Chief. At least put some critical thought in before being brainwashed.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.google.com/search?so
Third parties seem to fail, year by year, to do their homework
There you go. Shovel the blame back onto those who are left in the cold.
Generally, to get into any debate whether it be persidential, state, or local, one needs only to contact the organizing agency
That's pretty generally speaking and it's also false. Third party candidates, especially Libertarian candidates, have contacted debate organizers time and time again for months preceeding debates only to be rebuffed with red tape or outright ignored. Harry Brown (US-president) went through this in 2000 and Ed Thompson (WI-gov) had the same problem in 2002.
Most 3rd party campaigns do not do their homework, do not maintain contact with the other parties, and do not find out in advance who's hosting a debate
Hogwash. Especially, again, where Libertarians and Greens are concerned they maintain plenty of contact. In the case of presidential and gubernatorial elections there's no secret who is running the debate. The only issue is getting an invite.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Jon Stewart: So what is your opinion on Foreign Policy
President Bush: We have a duty to bring democracy to the peoples of the world
Jon: Ok, how about you, Governor
Governor Bush: The US has no bussiness being the policeman of the world
There is not enough air time on tv to cover all parties. The televised ones could be improved by including canidates on enough states to theoretically win. If you want to know what all of them have to say in writing feel free to read it at...n t_party .php?party_name=All
http://www.vote-smart.org/election_preside
It has them all fill out the NPAT national political awarnes test.
go to OpenDebates.org. Click on "issue" if you want the full scoop on the objections. Do you support scripted debates with no invites to 3rd,4th,5th party candidates?
From OpenDebates.org: Under CPD sponsorship, the major party candidates secretly design all the elements of the formats. Consequently, challenging questions, assertive moderators, follow-up questions, candidate-to-candidate questioning, rebuttals and surrebuttals are often excluded from the presidential debates. The CPD's formats prevent in-depth examination of critical issues, and allow the candidates to the deliver pre-packaged soundbites that are repeated over, and over, and over again on the campaign trail.
Presidential debates were run by the civic-minded and non-partisan League of Women Voters until 1988, when the national Republican and Democratic parties seized control of the debates by establishing the bi-partisan, corporate-sponsored Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Posing as a nonpartisan institution committed to voter education, the CPD has continually and deceptively run the debates in the interest of the national Republican and Democratic parties, not the American people.
As for me, I am an observer that has observed there is a lot of observing to observe.
I'm looking forward to playing the debate drinking game.
Doesn't it all seem like kind of a scheme though?
"I simply hand them the currency as payment. 95% of the businesses accept it"
Come on now. If that's not a lie, it's sure a distortion.
Then I go to look for liberty merchants in my area (WA state), almost all of them are "associates". Then you look at this page:
Description of the associate system
It's a pyramid scheme! They even admit it. You give them $250, they give you $100 in their currency back. But you can make the remainder back by getting more people to sign up as associates!
If Badnarik is really for this ALC stuff, he's lost my vote, and respect.
Now I personally am a two-party man. I don't particularly have difficult with the two-party system. And I believe that the best way for people who lean to third-party platforms to effect change is to work through their local elections on up.
Having said that I would quite welcome an approval voting system, whereby we can vote for as many candidates that we choose for any given office. This would allow people to safely register their support for a third-party candidate while risking becoming a "spoiler" for the candidate that they frankly would tolerate if they had to. So for example, a Nader supporter could vote for both Nader and Kerry. A Constitution party supporter could vote for Peroutka and Bush.
As a result, we could all get an honest assessment of how much support and influence these third-party candidates would receive. I would still advocate a "trigger" of, say, 5-10% before a party would receive preferential treatment with regards to public funding and/or debate access. Nevertheless, I think that grassroots efforts would be far more likely to take hold in such a system.
The CPD merely does everything the democrats and republicans jointly ask them to do. Basically neither of the parties want a real debate so they have gotten the CPD to do their dirty work and appear to be at fault.
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found this document at http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/debates.html
http://www.opendebates.org/documents/REPORT2.pd
Hell, I want full presidential debates. Every single candidate.
I know you're joking, but there is an easy answer to this: anybody who is on enough state ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning a majority under the Electoral College should be invited.
How many candidates would that include? Get ready for it...: 6. Including Bush and Kerry. That's half as many as some of the debates during primaries. It's entirely feasible.
Darn, forgot the link http://www.pbs.org/previews/parties_2004/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Which is probably why one of the first lessons any politician has drilled into him by The Experts is "Never answer a hypothetical question."
Indeed, they learn a whole battery of rhetorical tricks specifically to avoid having to deal with hypotheticals. Watch the next time you see somebody pose one to a politician -- any politician -- and you'll immediately see that, no matter what their answer, it has nothing to do with the hypothetical. Which is a shame, since hypotheticals can be useful ways to see how someone thinks; but maybe that's the reason why they avoid them so assiduously...
Read my blog.
Winner takes all is there because we once believed in strong state government and a weak federal government. The idea was that states would all agree to basic principles and trade freely with one another. And that the state itself would vote in a weighted system for representives. But after the civil war this antifederalism ideal lost out, and we became a unified nation with little difference between states. Pushing control of the land up to the national level. Now you can no longer escape a crappy government by moving out of state, you have to move to a different country now.
The idea was that a state of mainly Quakers wouldn't want the same laws as a state mainly of Catholics. And just because there were more Quakers (at the time) than Catholics in the US it would not be fair to the minority if federal laws were made in favor of one group even if that group was almost non-existant in a region (not many Quakers in Maryland, not many Catholics in Pennsylvania).
The constitution doesn't prohibit a powerful federal government, nor does it grant it. People (or perhaps lawyers and bankers 120ish years ago) decided they wanted a strong federal government, and that's what we got. But we still have a lot of baggage from our times as a Nation of States.
There were certainly disadvantages to almost fully autonomous states (like slavery). On the otherhand there are advantages too. It is perhaps more efficient. It gives states the ability to compete for productive citizens (what place has the best taxes, best government, etc). Thus giving individuals a choice on what set of laws they live under.
Given the current system, "Winner takes all" is perhaps not a good system. My vote would to be to dismantle most of the federal government and reinstitute the rights of States, and then just keep the current voting system. I think most people would rather have strong federal government, in that case it would be best to update the voting system to reflect this.
One thing is for sure, the current system is strategically more interesting. It's quite simular to playing a game of Risk. Where as a fair system is a much tougher game to play, because clever strategy won't yield huge gains. Just gains proportional to the amount of work put into it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In other words, third parties wishing to participate in the debate were effectively told that they proper time to petition for inclusion was after the debates had come and gone.
(1992 was also the year Perot was invited to the debates. One would have thought that there would be published, objective criteria that the commission would have used to include him, but given that the Libertarian candidate Andre Marrou had polled higher than Perot (!) at some points in the year, and that the LP was on the ballot in all 50 states while the Reform party wasn't, it's not clear to me what sort of objective criteria they could have been using.)
To all recipients on this list:
The Commission on Presidential Debates appreciates your interest in covering the debates. However, at this time, your application has been denied. Applications are declined due to security concerns, space limitations, or other reasons.
Thank you,
The Commission on Presidential Debates
See also http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display/20590/index. php
and
http://stlouis.indymedia.org/
Here is the clip.m .net/on demand/7/1703/9950/v001/comedystor.download.akamai .com/9951/dailyshow/stewart/jon_7131_300.rm
rtsp://a1703.v9950f.c9950.g.vr.akamaistrea
"Political campaigns are always eager to keep hecklers out of their pep rallies, but the Republican National Committee took that desire to a new level last week, requiring supporters to sign an oath of loyalty before receiving tickets to Saturday's New Mexico rally featuring Vice President Cheney."0 19-2004Jul31.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31
you couldnt make this stuff up
Does this exclude discussion of non-American politics?
Did Slashdot block off non-USA IP addresses to the politics section? Nope.
I'd actually like to hear more non-US input to the politics section. The USA is so large that most people growing up here never need to cross an international border, which inevitably leads to a lack of knowledge regarding other countries (even Canada and Mexico).
There are issues in the US campaigns right now that other countries have already addressed or at least debated in one form or another. An obvious one is health care, for example. If anything, providing information about whether Canada's or Great Britain's health care systems are any good or not can only help people in the US better understand the issue. It would also be very interesting to hear about what foreign media report about the US, since American media is understandably biased (American journalists reporting on American events).
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
I thought I would point out that there is a similar debate occurring at Cornell on October 6th. It will include both David Cobb and Michael Badnarik as well as the candidates for the Socialist and Constitutional Parties, Walt Brown and Michael Peroutka respectively. Nader was invited but has not given an official response (although I've heard he'll be in upstate New York at the time and could show up). Anyway, the event is being covered by C-SPAN and some regional networks, so there could be some real TV coverage (both locally and nationally). These candidates are not really going to impact the national election, but it's nice to hear some different political viewpoints.
is that it requires virtually no effort to implement.
All the elections offices have to do is simply stop discarding overvotes.
is here.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear