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US Election's Only VP Debate Tonight: Weigh In With Your Reactions
Tonight's debate between the two largest American political parties' candidates for vice president of the United States takes place at Danville, Kentucky's Centre College, starting at 9 p.m. Joe Biden and Paul Ryan will face each other on stage, and are expected to talk about issues "including the economy, foreign policy and the role of the Vice President," according to C-SPAN, which will feature a live streaming view of the event. (Criteria from the Commission on Presidential Debates
means you won't hear tonight from other presidential candidates' running mates (like Cheri Honkala, Jim Clymer, and
James Gray, of the Green, Constitution, and Libertarian party tickets, respectively). If you'll be watching the debate tonight, please add your commentary below. It would be helpful if you start your comment's title with a time-stamp (to the minute), too, for context. (Like this: "9:08: $Candidate just intentionally mis-repeated the Q on taxes.") And Yes, we're posting this here in a vain attempt to keep the political discussion out of other story threads tonight.
Update: 10/12 01:18 GMT by U L : If you don't have flash, you can use rtmpdump and mplayer to watch (incantation duplicated below, in case the site is slashdotted).
Via Don Armstrong an incantation to watch the debate without flash:
rtmpdump -v -r rtmpt://cp82346.live.edgefcs.net:1935/live?ovpfv=2.1.4 \
--tcUrl rtmp://cp82346.live.edgefcs.net:1935/live?ovpfv=2.1.4 \
--app live?ovpfv=2.1.4 --flashVer LNX.11,2,202,238 \
--playpath CSPAN1@14845 \
--swfVfy http://www.c-span.org/cspanVideoHD.swf \
--pageUrl http://www.c-span.org/ | \
mplayer -xy 3 -;
The problem is, while the spotlight is on the national stage, real change happens from the bottom up. That means running for, and voting 3rd party at the city, county, or even state level.
For example, if you're interested in digital freedom, and curtailing "IP" laws, participate in and/or donate to your local Pirate Party (and many states do have such an organization). That's just one of the many numerous smaller political parties out there that might better represent your views.
If you're wondering what the immediate effects of doing such a thing are, since "IP" is a federal thing, the answer is that there are no immediate effects. But the extra help and/or money increases exposure. And like small businesses with an interesting product, getting the word out is the most important part. Only once people start hearing about it is the brand image important.
Sound too much like a business? It's because parties really are run like businesses, except as they don't make a profit, they're non-profit. But if you think non-profits aren't run like businesses internally, you've got another thing coming.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
a.k.a. the Republican and Democratic parties. They will never allow a third party to debate; if they happen to meet the criteria, they'll simply increase the threshold(s).
Except in 1992, when Ross Perot was running for president, and there was a 3-way debate vs Bush and Clinton? http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/5532
They didn't add the 15% support threshold until 2000. Presumably they added it because of Ross Perot.
He also started a new (unauthorized!) military action, after years of complaining about unauthorized military actions.
Going to Libya I might have possibly been able stomach, if it hadnt been for the utter hypocrisy of it all and the declaration that "UN approval is enough".
Are you serious? You can't think of a single issue on which Obama and Romney differ?
How about taxes? Romney's official plan is a 20% across the board cut, at a cost of $500B/yr, which will be paid for by *handwaves furiously*. Obama's plan is ditch the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and bring capital gains taxes about halfway back towards where they were under Clinton.
How about healthcare? Romney's on the record saying things were alright pre-Obamacare, and he wants to go back to that. Obama, obviously, wants to keep Obamacare on the books.
How about military spending? Obama is trying to cut it by $100B/yr, while Romney's proposal is to raise it by $200B/yr.
How about Medicare? Obama wants to keep it mostly as is, making small adjustments to keep it solvent. Romney wants to make it a voucher system that would force senior citizens to turn to for-profit corporations for their healthcare.
How about abortion? Obama wants women to be in charge of their own bodies, Romney is on record supporting a life-begins-at-conception amendment and has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade. Considering that a few of the current liberal justices are getting up there in years, he would almost certainly be able to have abortion outlawed nationwide.
That's just off the top of my head. Sure, if you only care about IP law and drone strikes, the two candidates are identical. But there are lots of very important issues on which the two candidates couldn't be more different.
Well that's just Reagan vs Carter all over again. Iran knew Carter wouldn't bomb them if they didn't release the hostages. Reagan pretty much promised to. Iran released the hostages the moment Reagan was elected.
Umm. Didn't they release the hostages because the US, under Reagan, agreed to sell them weapons through proxies?
Yes. Contragate. The hostages were released the day Reagan took office, which means the Reagan team was negotiating with America's worst enemy behind the back of proper diplomatic channels during a campaign, and whipped up the drugs for arms for Iranians deal.
And shortly after Reagan created the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Watch these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5CKO400_7M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGo1DqmfHjY
Need Mercedes parts ?
Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Huh? trillion dollar deficits EVERY year in office, drone "kill list", assassinated ambassador, muslim extremists taking over EVERYWHERE, extending patriot act, DOMESTIC use of surveillance drones, etc.
wake up dude...
Can we please put this deficit nonsense to bed. Bush waged two wars using "emergency appropriations" to keep them off-budget and, at the same time, passed a huge tax cut with a nine year sunset to keep it out of the ten-year accounting cycle and gave away a few trillion more in corporate welfare to pharma with Medicare Part D. He said it would pay for itself because tax cuts stimulate investment and job growth, but it didn't; instead, it created a trillion dollar hole in the budget representing all the government spending that not even Bush would cut. Repeat: Bush cut revenue by trillions and was unable to cut spending to make up for it. So why would Obama or Romney suddenly be able to? Someone please explain that logic to me!
So Obama walks into office, moves the wars into the budget, and spends 800 billion to stave off a depression. Every year since then, he has reduced the deficit; but suddenly republicans think that Obama should magically slash all the "waste" from the budget that not even Bush was willing to touch because for some reason it's only irresponsible for democrats to run deficits. Repeat: Obama has decreased the deficit, during a recession, every year that he has been in office. The US government, with the exception of part of the Clinton administration, has run a deficit every year since about 1960. The deficit exploded under Bush, who managed to increase it by more than any time since World War II, yet it is Obama's responsibility to turn it around over night? That is called the Two Santa Claus Theory; when republicans are in office, it's spend, spend, spend, and use accounting tricks to hide how bad it is and then, when a democrat gets into office, it's suddenly all about debt and deficits and getting spending under control.
Romney/Ryan are proposing more tax cuts; they want to reduce revenue even further. Why? Because, clearly, the problem with the Bush tax cuts and the reason Bush ended eight years with negative net job growth is because he didn't cut taxes enough! But don't worry, their tax cuts will be revenue neutral because they'll close "loopholes," but not the mortgage interest deduction, which is the second or third largest loophole in the tax code (depending on how you count it). No, they're going to do it by eliminating things like PBS, which comprise around 0.0001% of the budget. Capital gains? No, that loophole should remain because we can't "double tax" investors. As if you don't get double taxed when you pay sales tax after your payroll and income taxes. You tax actions and behaviors not money; money is fungible, you literally cannot tax the same dollar twice.
Seriously, watch the VP debate, the tax plan of Paul "Mr. Numbers" Ryan, the "intellectual leader of the GOP" and Mitt "I'll say anything to get elected" Romney, is: "Trust us, the math works out, but we're not going to give you specifics." Uh-huh, just like when you ran for governor and said "trust me, I filed my taxes as a Massachusetts resident," which you totally did, retroactively, after you were caught lying. Oh, but we're not supposed to talk about Bush or your tax returns--that's all in the past... except for when Ryan invokes Ronald Reagan and JFK in the debates; no, that is being serious.
Obama isn't perfect, nor is Biden. I'm not a democrat (or a republican), but I am so sick of this completely disingenuous nonsense about the deficit. I know, I know, you'll never go broke betting on the stupidity of the American electorate, but this is just basic f-ing arithmetic.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Translation: You're mad that the ARRA actually built things, rather than just handing out money to a handful of lucky Americans.
Sure, we could have just bought 2.4M spoons, and had every new "worker" go out, find an empty plot of ground, and spend their hours digging holes and filling them back in.
But if you want to actually build stuff, you gotta buy some actual backhoes. You've got to buy cement, and lumber, and steel, and nails, and wiring. The value of the things that actually got built by those jobs has to be accounted for.
And let's not forget that $288B of the ARRA's price tag actually did exactly what you're suggesting: handed money back to people in the form of tax credits. This was Obama trying to make the bill "bipartisan", giving the Republicans some of what they said they wanted. Result? Zero Republican votes in the House, two-and-a-half in the Senate.*
Obama's own economists told him that these tax breaks would have little stimulus effect, but the Republicans demanded that they be included in a bill that they had no intention of voting for anyhow.
There's also a lot of other "just give money to people" provisions, like unemployment benefits, food stamps, WIC, TANF, etc. These transfer programs incur very low overhead. There's $80B in direct giveaways under "aid to low-income workers, unemployed, and retirees," the aforementioned $288B given away in tax credits, and a couple of other nickely-dimey programs that amount to handing deficit money to people in the hopes that they spend it.
Given that the ARRA basically followed your source's "hand out money" plan for about half its budget, by The Weekly Standard's reasoning, the other $400B spent on scientific research, weatherizing buildings, energy efficiency, upgrading the electrical grid, building roads, and a laundry list of other things... all that may as well have been flushed down the toilet.
The point is, the ARRA did so much more than just put people to work. It invested in scientific research, improved the energy efficiency of homes and businesses, modernized health care records and information services, sent young men and women to college, and a bunch of other things that will pay long-term dividends.
* I'm counting Arlen Specter's vote as half a vote, because he switched to the Democratic party a few months later.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!