Slashdot Mirror
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."
Can we spread DVDs recorded off the stream around? Anything these two have to say is bound to be much more open and interesting than what the oligopolists have to say.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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?
How long has this American flag background been on the Politics section? I only noticed today. Does this exclude discussion of non-American politics?
Random is the New Order.
Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign.
Heh. Bush could debate himself too, but he'd lose.
I don't think I would expect any more from Kerry. The debates are tightly choreographed and neither candidate's "handlers" are going to allow them stray far from a safe script. So, the debates end up being more about style than substance. Which candidate looks more "presidential," more like a "leader," and makes people feel good about them. Style over substance has been the rule for these debates for a long time.
http://www.busyweather.com/
Get real now. Ralph Nader is registering 1 percent in the polls. He is more worthy of being in the debates than these two clowns.
Hardly anybody knows who Badnarik and Cobb are, why they hell should they be in the major leagues? Maybe if they ran a better campaign, got the names on the ballots, and polled better than 0%, they would be on prime time. As it is, I have no problem excluding any yahoo from the debate just because they think they belong.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
I don't expect Bush to actually answer any of the points presented by Kerry this week anyway.
I don't expect Kerry to actually answer any of the points presented by Bush this week anyway.
Evolution or ID?
The opinions of people like Mr. Larry J. Schutter of the Turtle Party and Darren Karr of Party-X are every bit as valid as those of Badnarik and Cobb. Likewise, they all share the same chance of winning said office. What makes Badnarik and Cobb more deserving of a debate than any of the other "Dark Horse" candidates?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Anyone who has read my posts can quickly guess I am a republican, but this "debate" process really turns my stomach. Practiced questions, scripted answers, attempts at "humor", and no outside candidates is unacceptable. We need these third, 4th, 5th etc party candidates pushing the mainstream runners to answer questions they don't want to answer. On paper Bush and Kerry are both so equally horrible that it is impossible to distinguish between them. Putting a strong third party runner in there with them with unscripted questions is exactly what we need to see what they really are. It amazes me they are both (Bush and Kerry) so fearful of getting a question they aren't ready for or being upstaged by someone actually in touch with true American feelings that they are their debate-fixing group make it impossible to find out anything that resembles the truth.
... we have got to get a strong third party in place and soon to push the political mountain or we are going to watch these two parties merge into one uncontrollable monster.
I've said it many times
Knightfall
In the last third party debate Badnarik mentioned eliminating the Federal Reserve. He suggests using the American Liberty Currency as an alternative currency that is backed by gold and silver. I think this is an excellent idea.
So the candidates that no one is going to vote for are going to have a debate that no one is going to watch?
/join #care-police
The "official" debates are highly flawed, but to call them pseudo-debates because you don't like them is absurd. They are real debates, with real moderation and real issues. Many complain that there's really one Republicrat party with the same ideals, but I suggest that it only seems that way if your own interests swing wildly to one end of the political spectrum. Wake up, radicals, most people congregate somewhere near the center. It's generally only the unstable nations with strong factions at the extremes. I grow weary of people who demand instant change, and don't care if it's against the public will or good because they're sure they're right. That kind of thinking got us the Alien and Sedition acts and Prohibition.
That being said, I'm happy to see an alternate party debate and hope it is a success.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
My wife and I will debate over what's for dinner, what to do after dinner, and whether there will be any extracurriculars later that night.
Sadly, the debate is meaningless, as marriage is a dictatorship.
Bush: the paragon of "staying the course".
Unless you are talking about the Department of Homeland Security (was against it, then for it)
Unless you are talking about a comittment smaller government (has ran at least three times on that platform) yet created ANOTHER cabinet seat.
Unless you are talking about fiscal conservativism (and ran up the deficit).
Face it: Bush and Kerry are the same in more ways than they are different.
Republican: a Democrat without guilt.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Bush suggests that Kerry could debate himself for 90 minutes. This is probably true. Unfortunately Bush probably couldn't even pull that off; but the maliprops and 'Bushisms' of him debating himself would be priceless.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Where would you suggest they set the limit?
It's simple, if you make the ballot in enough states to possibly win the elections, you should be part of any debate. Since you can get on enough ballots simply by mobilizing regular citizens, that would open up the debates to anyone with actual grassroots support across america.
Really. This is what happens: smaller, single-point parties get swallowed up by the whole. This is how the Republican party came about, in fact, but at that time they were the liberals and the Democrats were the conservatives! Don't believe me? See what party Abraham Lincoln represented when he entered office.
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.
What the debates need is someone who will ask the candidates what they actually mean when they say some pleasantly patriotic abstraction:
"They hate our freedom"?
Define precisely who "they" are and what is meant by "freedom" and then provide a precisely reasoned argument why it is that they would "hate" it.
(Nobody wants to be the first candidate to say, "Now this isn't what I signed up for.")
Of course, that would probably run afoul of their agreement to moderate the debate: http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20040923/tops tories/151247.shtml.
I want to see hard questions asked. Let the candidates ask each other questions. Have fact-checkers on hand.
I want to see Bush and Kerry squirm a little bit. A president's job is to run a country, yet the forum we set up for them to perform is as safe and predictable as possible.
Sigh... Something unpredictable would be nice. I always feel like I know what the next thing out of their mouths is going to be.
What are your objections to the rules of the presidential debate? they seem pretty reasonable to me.
Are you joking?
* Exclusion of third-party candidates: This is a problem because, without appearing on debates and being otherwise shut out of the media, third-party candidates have a hard time getting their message across. Polls indicate that the majority of Americans want more views expressed and candidates present in our debates, but the commission denies them this.
* Under-handed questions: Not only are topics that are to be discussed known beforehand, but there are virtually no surprises or tough questions. Answers are therefore heavily scripted, repetative, and boring. Viewership for the debates has declined steadily over the years.
* "Taboo" subjects ignored entirely: I think it is important to hear the Greens/Libertarians/Independants view on the legitimacy of the multibillion dollar war on drugs, and to hear Kerry's/Bush's defense of it. How come this issue is not discussed? Oh, that's right - its off limits for some reason. The War on Drugs is just a drop in the bucket - there are many more issues that deserve thorough and diverse debate, but are ignored entirely.
The truth of the matter is that Kerry and Bush would have a hard time defending themselves against any of the three parties I mentioned. The "Commission" (which is made up of the two major parties) is really just protecting their interests by excluding them, at the expense of an informed American public. How anyone could continue to vote for the two major parties is beyond me...
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Oh, I wish that there was a way to get a third party involved in a legitimate run for the president.
All we have been able to do for years is to select the lesser of two evils.
We have become the government of the people, by the lawyers, and for the corporations.
The "powers in charge" will never to do anything to jepoardize their power in this country and the world.
It's also interesting that our choice this time is between two members of skull and bones.
Paul
Wherever you go, there you are.
Yeah, the only interesting thing that is allowed are hypothetical questions. One I would ask Bush would be:
What would you call two people that under an investigation that require all of the following to be true in order to participate in that investigation? 1) That the two people must be allowed to testify jointly 2) That they would not be required to take an oath before testifying; 3) That the testimony would not be recorded electronically or transcribed, and that the only record would be notes taken by one of the commission staffers; and finally 4) That these notes would not be made public.
For those that don't know these were the requirements posed by Bush and Cheney in order to participate in the investigation of the largest attack on our nation within our borders.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions and vote accordingly.
Don't blame style over substance on the candidate's handlers. The candidate's advisors and aides are only trying to make him appealing to the public.
It is the public that looks for style over substance. If the public was interested in listening to a 3 hour long debate on the merits of a privitized social security system then that's what the debates would be about.
Ahh, somebody else who sees it like I do.
Most people fail to see that the parties are malleable. I'm guessing it's because a lot of folks here are young, and don't know history...
The democrats today are *not* the party that they were even when Kennedy was president! And the parties will continue to change as their members change. The third/forth/etc. parties serve to show where the 'extremists' are IMHO. The bigger the Green party gets, I'd be the more liberal the Democrats get. And the bigger the Libertarians get, the more Libertarian the Republicans would get. But since we've only got two parties, neither will stray very far from each other. Extremists are rarely popular.
Not that there are exceptions (witness the civil war, Hitler, etc.), but they aren't common (and the civil war was mostly because the 'lines' were drawn on geographic terms [North v. South] as well as political ones).
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
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
"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
The machines control the matrix now.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!