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Be Part of the 2008 Presidential Youth Debate
We participated in this project back in 2004. This year it's hosted by Walden University, and the format is a little less cumbersome than it was four years ago. So go ahead, ask some questions you'd like to see McCain and Obama answer, and they'll go into the pot along with questions submitted through other channels. Later this week you'll have a chance to help moderate the final questions chosen from all sources, and on October 20 you'll be able to see video responses from the two major party candidates. Please limit to yourself to one question per post, and note that questions must be posted no later than 4 p.m. US EDT on Monday, September 29, to be considered.
Did you just claim that those three candidates have sufficient ballot presence to win? You mean, what, win the election? Because they really don't.
I suppose, if by that, you mean they technically appear on sufficient state ballots that were they to, through a stunningly miraculous coincidence win the electoral college votes of sufficient states to be declared president, perhaps.
However, none of those candidates has any chance whatsoever of winning, and I'm not sure allowing them to enter the debate will alleviate that in any way. If I recall correctly, the requirement to enter the debate is 15% of the popular vote prior to it. That seems fair enough, I suppose.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Senator Obama, why are you opposed to restructuring Social Security into a system of private accounts...
Social security is secure because it's not tied to the volatile open market.
Senator Obama, given that Medicare is an even bigger drain than Social Security...
Our system is horrible because it is run by lobbyists and big pharma, not because state socialized medicine is bad.
Senator Obama, wouldn't your proposal to nationalize health coverage simply encourage people and companies to drop their current coverage and pile on to the government plan?
They already do... Walmart purposefully pays their employees poorly and refuses to hire them as full time, while providing counselors who can tell them how to get welfare. Why aren't you asking to fine companies like Wal-Mart to actually address the problem instead of turning this issue into a political stunt?
Senator Obama, would your proposal to nationalize health coverage cover non-citizens and thereby represent an additional incentive for illegal immigration?
I'm sorry as hell that your grandfather got in.
Senator Obama, why are you opposed to Health Savings Account plans...
He's opposed to plans that are taxable.
Senator Obama, do you think that soaking the so-called "rich" alone will allow for the funding of your indulgent domestic spending agenda, and what makes you think that you won't be punishing incentive and encouraging the "rich" to work less and even hide more in order to avoid excessive taxation?
McCain is pro military. That's one trillion dollars per year. But it's not actually about the money, is it? And let me say, if you're upset because you'll be required to pay more tax than the less fortunate, and cause you to drive a 5 series instead of a 7 with the 18 inch rims, you're welcome to seek to run your business in another part of the world where the non-rich are the ones who are funding the infrastructure that allow you to live so comfortably.
Taxing the rich more than the poor is fundamental to the health of a relatively open market, otherwise capital only flows upward until you have the type of situation that caused the French Revolution.
Senator Obama, will you commit to balancing the federal budget?
Has anyone done that since the Republicans pledged to, and failed, in the early 90s?
Senator Obama, you claim to want to give the "middle class" a tax cut, but at the same time you propose to raise capital gains taxes, the death tax and corporate taxes...
If major corporations had to pay the full amount of tax, instead of reaping billions of dollars in profit through loopholes, there could be more ways to help small business. The death tax is for assets over 2 million, if I remember correctly. Is that middle class in your book? Must be nice.
Senator Obama, are you familiar with the Laffer Curve?
Ask Palin... please! The comic world is begging you.
Senator Obama, given your radical connections...
Did Hannity shit in your brain? McCain has Falwell, Palin has herself, and Obama knows some black people who feel like they have been screwed by the system. If guilt by association works, why don't you have a problem with Bush holding hands with the King of Saudi Arabia?
Senator Obama, will you repudiate the leftist radicals represented by the sites like dailykos?
Will McCain repudiate Fox News?
Senator Obama, do you support coercing the Israeli government to make more suicidal concessions to its avowed enemies...
Coerce? Does that mean we can say, stop killing Palestinians, arresting them, torturing them, and taking their land with the guns, tanks, helicopters, and jets that we give you, accep
sorry, the emphasis isn't on race, but on income and ability to repay loans. Fannie, Freddy, and other lenders were threatened with lawsuits and congressional complaints for not approving (subprime) loans in ghetto/slum areas. Maybe they didn't approve the loans because they are racist. Maybe they didn't approve the loans because they were a bad business decision.
From a George Bush 2002 speech:
More and more people own their homes in America today. Two-thirds of all Americans own their homes. Yet we have a problem here in America 'cause fewer than half of the hispanics and half of the African Americans own their home. That's a home ownership gap, a gap that we've got to work together to close. And by the end of this decade, we'll increase the number of minority home owners by at least five and a half million families.
(applause)
And of course, one of the larger obstacles to minority ownership is financing. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have committed to provide more money for lenders, they've committed to meet the shortage of capital available for minority homebuyers. Freddie Mac recently began twenty-five initiatives around the country to dismantle barriers and create greater opportunities for home ownership. One of the programs is designed to help deserving families who have bad credit histories to qualify for home ownership loans. You don't have to have a lousy home for first-time home buyers. You put your mind to it, these first-time home buyers, or low income home buyer, can have just as nice a house as anybody else.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The President will have power to appoint new SCOTUS justices if the need arises, and an Obama court would be very likely to overturn or confine Heller.
FYI Obama supports a total handgun ban, 500% increase on firearms and ammunition taxes, reinstatment of the Clinton Gun Ban, voted against a bill to allow self-defense in your house in Chicago, and on and on. So let's not have anyone debate over whether or not Obama respects our gun rights. Voting speaks far louder than rhetoric.
The government can't save you.
You are voting for a candidate that has less executive experience than Sarah Palin. Just sayin'
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
I wish I had mod points. The McCain Torture Ban, as written, is an absolute ban on torture. The "legalization" you refer to comes from a "signing statement" by President Bush. A signing statement is when the President signs a bill into law and says "Part X of the law is unclear, so I'm going to interpret it to mean Y." In this case, President Bush said "The part of the Torture Ban about whether torture is banned is unclear, so I'm going to interpret it to mean 'Torture is NOT banned.'" John McCain waved the bullshit flag. A day or so after the signing statement was made public, McCain was asked about it and said, "If Bush didn't like the bill, he should have vetoed it" and then promised that if he was elected, he wouldn't make any signing statements at all. John McCain is NOT in favor of torture.
John McCain, you were neck deep in what was up till now the biggest banking scandal and bailout in US history. Does this experience give you any special insight into the current credit crisis?
Yeah, he's got special insight into banking scandals. That's why he cosponsored a bill to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac far more strictly in 2005. If the Democrats hadn't blocked that bill, the companies wouldn't have melted down. Of course, if the Democrats hadn't blocked that bill, they wouldn't have been able to give so much to Democrats in campaign contributions.
Jenny's got a new number! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Follow-up Senator Obama. Senator McCain released all his health records back in 1999. Will you match Senator McCain and release all your records prior to 2000?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Uhh, read that again, I think you must have made a typo or something.
The bible doesn't say that non believers will go to hell. It does say that those that do God's work will, even if they don't know they are doing God's work.
Actually what the Bible says is, based solely on our actions, all of us, including Christians, deserve to go to Hell. We are all sinners, and there is nothing any of us can do to earn our way into Heaven. The punishment for sin is "death": separation from God, and we have all sinned. Sometimes Christians lose sight of this, and act as though they deserve to go to Heaven while the non-Christians around them do not.
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The so-called "Clinton Gun Ban" was authored by Joe Biden, FYI...
FYI Obama supports a total handgun ban, 500% increase on firearms and ammunition taxes, reinstatment of the Clinton Gun Ban, voted against a bill to allow self-defense in your house in Chicago, and on and on.
[citation needed]
It wasn't the loans to poor people that caused the credit crisis. It was the over inflation of the market due to corrupt lending practices spurned by the need to find new ways to invest the vast capital of china and oil exporting nations and keep wall street profits growing, the failure of risk analysts to properly rate these loans, and a lack of regulation on how much real assets a company needed to insure other peoples debts (credit default swaps).
Given that you launched your presidential campaign from Mr. Ayers home, how do you explain this discrepancy?
That talking point is crap, but lets go ahead and play the associations game, jackass. John McCain is good friends with G. Gordon Liddy, who has hosted fundraisers for McCain that McCain has attended. Liddy said this in response to the fiasco at Waco:
Now, imagine for a second that Obama attended fundraisers hosted by a Black Panther who advised people to shoot federal agents in the head. That's right, the world would blow up. Or how Hannity, who can't talk about Ayers enough, it good buddies with the white supremacist Hal Turner.
Barack Obama, records show that you have received the second largest amount of monetary donations from the now bankrup Fannie Mae mortgage lender.
Liar. He didn't receive donations from Fannie Mae, he received them from employees of Fannie Mae. Big difference.
You have worked extensively with one such group, ACORN, which recently endorsed you for president,
Ah, the associations game again. You forgot Rev. Wright! How can you post a bunch of pathetic smears and leave out Jeremiah Wright? Bad wingnut, no cookie.
The initial cause was the government deciding that fucking with the money supply was a good idea. Inflation of the money supply creates a market boom that is artificial (not created by demand), and must be followed by a bust. The Community Reinvestment Act certainly had a big role to play in this particular cycle, and I'm glad you pointed it out. But the CRA is another example of how regulation just messes things up. If there was no government mandate for banks to take on these risky loans, and there wasn't an artificially low interest rate on Fed loans making them look more profitable than they really were, these banks would never have gotten into such a mess in the first place. The deregulation that made things worse (by enabling banks to hide their bad debt) would not have had such a negative effect if the banks hand't been coerced and tricked into making bad loans!
This is not a defense of the banks' behavior, merely a description of how their actions relate to the landscape they inhabit. The worst thing we can do right now is to pump more money (that we don't have) into the system. If we leave it alone and get rid of the Fed, or at least greatly reduce its power, we will have a short, sharp year-long recession followed by a full recovery. This could be the last boom/bust cycle if we the people decide to act. If the bailout passes, we're looking at a lingering 10-year recession, further devaluation of the dollar, and a socialist market in all but name.
You're absolutely right about the Law of Unintended Consequences and government's failure to learn, which is why government needs to keep their hands off the markets.
Your brain is not a computer.