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Did Kerry Use a Cheat Sheet?
mrbrown1602 writes "The Drudge Report is reporting that repeated viewing of video from the first Presidential Debate shows Senator John Kerry reaching into his coat pocket for what looks like to be a piece of paper, and he proceeds to unfold it on the lectern. According to the rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, candidates are not allowed to bring anything with them on stage (even something as simple as a pen, which is what Kerry's people says it was), and everything they may need (water, tissues, pens, etc.) are provided at the lectern. So what DID Senator Kerry bring out there, anyways?" There's also a QuickTime movie.
According to the rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, candidates are not allowed to bring anything with them on stage
So he was naked then?
Slashdot is not biased!
(Okay, mostly sarcasm).
Grow up kids!
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
[a pen] ...which is what Kerry's people said it was
No, not Kerry's people, you linked the NY Post, one of the more conservative-leaning newspapers in the nation. And if you'd RTFA, you'd know that they reviewed footage from Fox News, the preeminent right-leaning news channel. The paper's "finding"?
But the mystery was solved when The Post reviewed a Fox News Channel feed from Thursday's debate: Kerry pulled out . . . a black pen.
All the Post did was repeat rumor and speculation on the internet. Not surprisingly, it's a Kerry spin attempt in pudge's view.
Okay.
The Drudge Report is nothing more than a Republican mouth-piece for mud slinging. Why would this load of crap from Drudge surprise anyone, and why would anyone pay attention to it?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
God this is so old and debunked trash. The guy who broke it allready has noted that it was a pen. According to the rabidly right wing fox news.
Jesus christ, this kind of wild speculation doesn't belong on slashdot. Oh wait, nevermind.....
Photos.
Uh.... it was a pen.
How useful would a cheat sheet be to a guy like Kerry, under the circumstances. Since neither candidate knew the questions in advance, at most it could be general outlines for a few points he wanted to make. For the predictable stuff he simply went with the usual stump rhetoric (90% percent of the cost, 90% of the casualties etc.) which he's used on talk shows and at campaign appearances for weeks now. And that was probably weakest. Historically, he's best in a debate when he's thinking on his feet anyway, he's horrible repeating the kind of canned stuff that Reagan was fantastic with.
I mean, what supposedly was written on the paper? "Don't forget Poland!"?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You know how it gets when you spend hours studying up for your big presedential debate...you get so busy that you can't eat.
Come on...give the guy a break! He just had a case of the munchies...
Goo goo g'joob.
I was all set to vote for Kerry but this is such an outrage that I'm swinging all the way to the right for this election! Sure, the economy is in the shitter, we're in a quagmire in Iraq, and the deficit is at an all time high. But at least Bush would never dream of bringing a cribsheet with him onstage for a largely symbolic dual-press conference! This madness must stop! I emplore all of you to forget about the PATRIOT Act, Gitmo, and all those other things and concentrate on this vital issue of the cribsheet!
Seriously, who gives a flying fuck? Yes, I know it's against the rules. Big whoopie. These are serious times, people. Let's not get obsessed with minutia. I can't believe I'm reading about such trivial concerns here on slashdot. I have no objections to a Politics section here but, please, make the Politics stories interesting and important. Not this idiotic bickering over pointless crap.
And on a second note, the Drudge Report has always been a republican, or at the very least conservatively-biased, report. Matthew Drudge is always looking to bash anyone who isn't republican and always trying to impress his buddy Bill O'Reilly.
Just my two cents.
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I'm not a vegan because I love animals, I'm a vegan because I hate plants!
And outdated. But not yet duped.
Salon is reporting that Bush may have been wearing a device that would allow him to receive sound from someone offstage.
Here is the article
Here is the image
http://almostsmart.com
I suppose to in the spirit of equal time I should repeat myself from the article earlier today:
Can we please discuss something that matters?
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
It's nice to read a bit about the coming elections over the pond and all, but come on. I mean, seriously, why is this kind of crap on /. front page? This is tabloid stuff, not "News for Nerds."
Electronic voting machines, fine. NASA budget news, fine. IP related politics, fine. Duplicates of the above, fine. But this article is ridiculous...
"Nobody has been able to shoot down a single fact in the movie." LOL ok here we go...
i n-Fahrenheit-911.htm
1. The Gore victory rally is not celebrating a Florida win. It was held before the polls had even opened.
2. Like all the other networks, Fox mistakenly said that Gore had won in Florida. The first network to retract the Florida mistake was CBS, not Fox.
3. A 6-month study by a consortium of major newspapers shows that Bush would have won the Florida recount under any of the terms which Gore sought in his lawsuits.
4. Investigation by the Palm Beach Post and others shows that race was not a reason why election officials mistakenly disqualified some voters because they were incorrectly thought to have felony convictions.
5. Bush's Presidency before 9/11 was not in serious trouble. No commentator said that he looked like a lame-duck president. Congress had passed his #1 bill (the tax cut) and was
on the way to passing his #2 bill (the education bill). The scene at the end of the movie in which Bush tells a rich audience "I call you my base" was from an October 2000 charity fund-raiser. Both Gore and Bush spoke at the fund-raiser and, as is the custom at the fund-raiser, made fun of themselves.
and here is 54 more facts distorted
http://www.davekopel.com/Terror/Fiftysix-Deceits-
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Check out this article at Salon.com that suggests Bush was wearing an audio receiver at the first debate (a clear violation of the rules if true). The web site Is Bush Wired also discusses it and includes more evidence from previous Bush speaking events. In a couple of cases, the audio of the voice prompter feeding him the answers has been picked up and accidently transmitted as part of the live news broadcast.
The Bolachek Journals
a big can of whoopass!
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
It's pretty sad to see what the great Internet and blogs have done to actual discussion and debate about the issues.
Neither Kerry or Bush (or their people) are stupid enough to cheat at the debate because getting caught would far outweigh any plausable gains from reducing the chances that their candidate might screw up. Just show a little common sense everybody. This is an implausable as any pseudo-science or elaborate conspiracy theory, and only people of those intelligence levels should believe or even talk about these things.
It would be nice if we could argue about whether Bush or Kerry as President would be better for the future of America. But no, the morons who can run a web browser and post to a blog would rather read and write this nonsense and retreat into fantasyland of crap unrealistic nonsense. And rather than ignore this extremism like we used to, it becomes the most visible part of the debate. This is a pretty sad result of what should have been a great breakthrough in free speech.
pffft A central theme of Michael Moore's controversial documentary (if you can call it a documentary) "Fahrenheit 9/11" (and the connection you refer to.) is a bare allegation that Saudi Arabian interests provided $1.4 billion to firms connected to the family and friends of President George W. Bush.
However, as a special Newsweek investigative report notes, there is really less - not more - than meets the eye re the dramatic Moore claim:
# Nearly 90 percent of that claimed amount, $1.18 billion, comes from contracts in the early to mid-1990's that the Saudi Arabian government awarded to a U.S. defense contractor, BDM, for training the country's military and National Guard. The "Bush" connection: The firm at the time was owned by the Carlyle Group, a private-equity firm whose Asian-affiliate advisory board once included the president's father, George H.W. Bush.
# But, points out Newsweek, former president Bush didn't join the Carlyle advisory board until April, 1998 -- five months after Carlyle had already sold BDM to another defense firm.
# As for the sitting president's own Carlyle link, his service on the board ended when he quit to run for Texas governor -- a few months before the first of the Saudi contracts to the unrelated BDM firm was awarded.
# The Carlyle Group is hardly a "Bush Inc," noted Newsweek - but rather features a roster of bipartisan Washington power figures. "Its founding and still managing partner is Howard Rubenstein, a former top domestic policy advisor to Jimmy Carter. Among the firm's senior advisors is Thomas "Mack" McLarty, Bill Clinton's former White House chief of staff, and Arthur Levitt, Clinton's former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. One of its other managing partners is William Cannard, Clinton's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission."
# According to the report, the movie neglects to offer any evidence that Bush White House intervened in any way to bolster the interests of the Carlyle Group. In fact, the one major Bush administration decision that most directly affected the company's interest was the cancellation of a $11 billion program for the Crusader rocket artillery system. The Crusader was manufactured by United Defense, which had been wholly owned by Carlyle until it spun the company off in a public offering in October, 2001. Carlyle still owned 47 percent of the shares in the defense company at the time that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld canceled the Crusader program the following year.
# As to Moore's dealings with the matter of the departing Saudis flown out of the United States in the days after the September 11 terror attacks, the 9/11 commission found that the FBI screened the Saudi passengers, ran their names through federal databases, interviewed 30 of them and asked many of them "detailed questions." "Nobody of interest to the FBI with regard to the 9/11 investigation was allowed to leave the country," the commission stated.
# The entity in the White House that approved the flights wasn't the president, or the vice president -- it was Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism czar who was a holdover from the Clinton administration. Clarke has testified that he gave the approval conditioned on FBI clearance.
your point #1 ya so????
The film shows CBS and CNN calling Florida for Al Gore. According to the narrator, "Then something called the Fox News Channel called the election in favor of the other guy....All of a sudden the other networks said, 'Hey, if Fox said it, it must be true.'"
We then see NBC anchor Tom Brokaw stating, "All of us networks made a mistake and projected Florida in the Al Gore column. It was our mistake."
Moore thus creates the false impression that the networks withdrew their claim about Gore winning Florida when they heard that Fox said that Bush won Florida.
To sum it up about the Film IMHO!!! it is amazing what one can do with a little editing.
#3 #4 #5 And I suppose you are now going to tell me that Bush pulled a
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I'd say about 50 times less people died without cause today than any day that Sadam Hussein was in power.
That's a bold statement. Fifty times. My rough count is that it was a slow day in Iraq and 22 people died as a result of the occupation or the insurgency. So you are claiming that at least 1,100 people died without cause when Saddam was in power. Meaning that as a result of Saddam's rule roughly 9.6 million people were killed. This is quite clearly not true. This wasn't a holocaust. Saddam was a bad man but you are giving him more credit than he deserved. Around 5,000 people were killed in Saddam's gas attack on the kurds. There are no exact numbers on the shi'a uprising in 1991, but it wasn't millions. A horrible moment in history, but you seem to be alleging that this happened every five days in Iraq under saddam, which it didn't.
I am guessing you were exagerating and I am being a pedant. But I am willing to bet that Iraq is more dangerous for the average Iraqi today that it was two years ago.
Now, possibly you are refering to the situation during the sanctions, a time during which something between 350,000 and 1.2 million excess deaths are alleged to have been caused by the economic sanctions on iraq. A serious toll to be sure. The situation that caused this resulted also from a severly damaged infrastructure which has not been repaired, so it is unclear how much better things are in terms of sanitation, food supply and water in comparison to the under sanctions. Whether or not the infratructure and food suppy issues have been since resolved are unclear, so it is hard to say whether the humanitarian situaion during sanctions has really been alieviated. It is very difficult to pronounce "net gains" for the people of iraq in terms of death. Regardless it is not the kind of arithmatic you want to be doing. Even if there is a net improvment in death in Iraq, these deaths are our fault now. Saying that more would have died had we not invaded is a tenuous assertion at best. More difficult still is to argue that we are not responsable for the death that continues in iraq because it may have been worse had we done nothing. If someone jumps from a building and you shoot them on the way down you are still guilty of murder.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious