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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 -;
Just ask Lyndon Johnson? Harry Truman? Andrew Johnson? Chester Arthur? Gerald Ford? Teddy Roosevelt?
There's been 14 VPs who became president but not all became president when the incumbent died in office. That's why I believe the country was holding its breath that Dan Quayle didn't get the job and that GB Sr. Had excellent health care.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Commission on Presidential Debates
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).
This is one of the major issues preventing any real change from happening in the US federal government, simply because new ideas are being suppressed by the incumbents.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If the 2008 election is any indication I'd say people at the very least will *avoid* a candidate based on the VP they choose.
You won't read anything about Biden not being engaged tomorrow. So far he's making Ryan look like an amateur and he's not letting Ryan get away with lying.
Biden is crushing it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It is always humorous to watch the political fanbois go at it from the sidelines. Seeing people become so impassioned about which set of crooks are going stuff the shirts this time around is a devil's belly laugh. As has been said so many times, when the boot of government is on your throat, it makes no difference if it is a left boot or a right boot.
Both sides may be "crooks", depending on the criteria, but I don't think you can say that it makes no difference who is elected. ie. The Affordable Care Act is an event on the scale of the imposition of an federal income based tax, or the start of the Social Security system. Regardless of your feeling of the act itself, its is highly significant, and its a certainty that it wouldn't have passed if McCain had been elected. So its petulant and intellectually dishonest to say that its "makes no difference"
In the colonial Commonwealth of Massachusetts, my vote does not count. I'm not far from Plymouth Rock, the place where pissed-off subjects of King George landed after betting their lives that there was a better way to civilize.
I have voted for Republican candidates in the past but I'm done with them. GWB/Cheney/Rumsfeld fucked us hard. That bastard Romney came here to my state, where he doesn't fucking belong, and fucked us over. Now he's attempting to take over the Oval Office on the grounds that what he did to Massachusetts should not be done to the USA. He should be swimming with the fish in Boston Harbor.
If there was a candidate who ran on the platform of tearing off Romney's head and shitting down his neck, he'd get my vote.
I'm Alien Being and I approve this message.
Now 4 years later I'll be voting for Obama based on his performance
What performance? He took credit for a preexisting withdrawal timeline in Iraq. Gitmo is still open. He sent a surge into Afghanistan. He had a friendly Congress for half his term and got nothing done. You must have a really low bar when it comes to performance.
I think the logic is, it's not getting worse as fast as it was under the prior regime.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I feel like Obama was put in the drivers seat just when the car we're in has come under attack by drug cartel because some idiot drove us into a warzone, so now when he's trying to get us out of there, the previous driver is in the passenger seat complaining about following the speed limit and all traffic laws and grabbing at the steering wheel and brakes. and the passengers in the car are saying..why aren't we going anywhere?! we're so mad we're going vote the original driver back in..
I think the defining issue is ending the Bush tax cuts for the rich. If you watch Fox, they've tried all sorts of talking points to try to kill this issue and they keep trying new angles:
Remember, 'taxing job creators'? As if taxing rich peoples personal income will cause their companies to fire lots of people.
Remember 'dividing American?' i.e. claiming that singling out rich people for more taxes is dividing American!
Remember '53% vs 47%', the flip of dividing America, where they claim the majority are against the minority who don't pay direct fed taxes... that one died when it was pointed out a lot of the top 1% don't pay any taxes at all.
Remember 'the haves and the soon to haves?' i.e. you'll be rich soon, and then you'll get to pay less than 13%!
What about 'Robin Hood on Steroids'? The latest one, the 'income redistribution is bad', as if taking their tax cuts away from them is some sort of highway robbery!
You can see just from watching Fox, what the Republicans feel their defining issue is. It's tax cuts for the rich.
Doubtless that someone always pays. The act changes who is going to be directly paying. That's significant.
And there's other examples, some of them quite easy. Gore likely wouldn't have put troops into Iraq, again supressing your feelings of the event itself. What would Carter have done with the air traffic controllers, and would it have precipitated or acted against the rise of anti-union feeling in the country since? Would Nixon have initiated the Great Society and all its culteral consequences?
I used to think that, until the Iraq War. That disaster made me much more partisan. I really think hundreds of thousands of people died because Gore (barely!) lost that election.
Even more concerning is the callers at the end.
Not being an American, it was rather a shock to hear a member of the military calling up after the debate that America should invade Iran and they they urge people to vote for a certain candidate so nobody touched the military. The justification? "We have to get them before they get us".
Great work America - fix your shit up by going to war. That worked so well last time.
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Oh.. I don't know the first passed health care reform in almost 100 years. ... http://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Obama+Accomplishments
Ended Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Restarted the hunt for and killed Osama bin Laden.
As much as I wish he had actually been more "socialist". He has pretty much done the majority of the items he promised to do on election day. Yes, I'd prefer if he created a single payer health care system, reduced mandatory prison sentencing, doubled NASA's budget, seriously cut military spending, and tackled global warming.
Maybe I'm just young, but most of my adult life has been under Bush, and now Obama. Bush seemed to mostly screw things up. Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Does choosing a candidate based on whether they can mime to a song, make me a bad person?
It seems like as good a test as any we've devised so far.
Hmmm. I don't know.
* Gitmo is still open - good, it should be, he was wrong to say he'd close it and he was right to reverse himself
* Afghanistan - he increased the effort there in accordance with his promise to do so, which was good policy, and the most common criticism is that he didn't send more or leave them there longer
* Friendly Congress - yeah, totally, he got nothing done, except you know the culmination of 90 years of progressive activism
I suspect, though, that you were baiting, so I will return your wink. /wink
It's a first step to single-payer. It's about time the USA makes a step towards re-joining the First World.
an experienced person who knows how the world works and wants to equalize what has been out of balance for quite a long time.
ryan comes across as a stupid, spoiled little brat who does not understand how the world works and simply insists his way should be the way for everyone. he has no sympathy or compassion in him, NONE AT ALL. soulless.
we would be in very bad shape if that child got control of the world.
biden has heart. I don't like many politicians, but I could tolerate him. ryan, I cannot stomach. just cannot, even a little bit. like nails on a chalkboard.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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...
And you think the deficits won't get larger with more tax cuts for the rich, the patriot act won't be extended again, drones won't be put into even greater use, and there won't be any more terrorist attacks in the world if Romney gets elected? The issues you pin on Obama won't get resolved with Romney. Methinks they will get worse. There are other issues besides these, which in my mind, trump the issues mentioned above. Obama wins hands down when it comes to women's rights, religious rights, gay rights, and compassion for the elderly and less fortunate, to name a few issues. vV
the other team has a pretty high score too. I don't think people at wedding ceremonies blown up by the US drones see any substantial difference.
Ended Don't Ask Don't Tell.
Yeah. About that:
Kudos to him for coming around to the side of decency and eventually signing the DADT Repeal Act of 2010, albeit after ordering his Justice Department to fight it tooth and nail.
Maybe I'm just young, but most of my adult life has been under Bush, and now Obama. Bush seemed to mostly screw things up. Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Like Gitmo still being open. Like ordering the assassination of American citizens. Like fighting against the end of indefinite detention of unconvicted, untried suspects. Like the drones circling over the Middle East. This is the "better direction" you see America moving toward?
Note: I'm explicitly not supporting Romney, either. As Douglas Adams might say, they're both the wrong lizards. And given that Romney pretty much invented Obamacare, frankly, I can't really tell them apart.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
He had a friendly Congress for half his term and got nothing done.
How cynical can you get? The GOP plays non-stop obstructionism, and then blames the Dems for not getting anything done. The Dems only had 4 months with a filibuster proof majority. The rest of those two years was perpetual GOP filibustering.
/used/ to have a fine tradition.
When you say stuff like this -- just makes me think that the GOP faithful are ideological fools. The conservative party
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The best estimates of the number of people GWB killed in the Iraq war are between 150,000 (New England Journal of Medicine) and 600,000 (The Lancet).
Even Uday wouldn't have killed that many people. Indeed, we probably tortured more Iraqi prisoners to death than Uday did.
At least Saddam knew how to run a country. Everybody got a basic food basket. The electricity ran. Iraq had the best health care system in the Moslem middle east. Iraq had one of the best education systems -- they had a higher ratio of women college professors than the US. They sent graduate students to study medicine and engineering in London. Saddam was a secularist who suppressed the Islamist extremists. What did GWB replace it with? A third-world country in which armed gangs kill more people than Saddam did. In which Sunnis and Shiites kill each other like the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
Can anyone explain how the Romney tax plan works. We've all heard it doesn't add up, so I'll just summarize that below. What I'm looking for are explanations of how it makes sense. I heard Ryan not explain it. He talks about "broadening a base" via eliminating deductions. What does that mean?
Summary of the tax plan (taken from Romney website):
1) No AMT, no estate tax
2) No tax on Dividends, INterest or Cap gains.
3) cut maximum tax bracket by 20% from bush maximum: that is to say 15% on ordinary income.
4) Eliminate "most" deductions but keep home mortgage deduction.
Other bullet points (taken from Romney web page).
1) wont lower revenues
2) upper income earners wont pay a smaller "share". (unclear)
3) won't raise taxes on taxes on middle class. (presumably in aggregate).
Clear areas lacking explanation:
Consider that top teir earners pay most of the tax in the US right now and that they earn most of their income from Cap gains not Ordinary income like wages. If you remove the tax on cap gains, then they pay only a few percent on their combined income. This will drastically reduce not just their "share" but strongly imapct total revenue.
Note that lowering deductions barely affects this analysis. Even if you set the ordinary income tax rate at 110% on the wealthy, the fact that nearly all their income is cap gains means they still pay almost no tax. Furthermore since there is no estate tax, this situation does not correct itself at death.
SO how can this meet the claims about revenue neutral, not lowering the share of the upper income earners, or not push more taxes on the middleclass.
I'm looking for explanations not anti romney propganda. And what does "broadening the base" mean if there's no cap gains tax?
thanks!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Strange as it seems, not everyone on /. is a sociopathic Libertarian.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Dems only had 4 months with a filibuster proof majority. The rest of those two years was perpetual GOP filibustering.
This I don't get. When I was a kid I remember hearing the news using this weird word filibuster. They were showing this wrinkly white haired guy droning on about whatever. He looked a bit rumpled because he'd been at it for hours. It used to be if you wanted to filibuster you needed to hold the floor and have enough votes to prevent a vote to end debate. Filibusters were pretty rare and even a bit of a shocking tactic. It was not frequently done, because you had to both keep talking and keep enough senators supporting the filibuster in the room constantly. Now days it has morphed into something completely different. The senate republicans have used the filibuster for every single vote in the last 4 years. This is a level of obstructionism that literally has no precedence in our history. Effectively the senate rules have been changed to require a 60% majority to pass anything. There are hundreds of appointed positions that have gone unfilled for the entire Obama administration. The republicans used this power to hold our nation's economy and credit rating hostage on multiple occasions to force their minority positions through.
The senate rules need to change. Filibusters should actually be required to fillibuster.
-- QED
Obama seems to mostly push things in a better direction.
Huh? trillion dollar deficits EVERY year in office...
Yeah. I don't think he got that deficit from Clinton (who left us with a surplus.)
As I recall, that huge deficit came from Republican, former governor, big businessman Bush.
You remember Bush? The Republican president that wasn't even invited to the Republican National Convention?
Of course times have been tough for Obama. He's still cleaning up after Republican, former governor, big businessman Bush.
Don't worry though... you can vote for Republican, former governor, big businessman Romney. That ought to make things better!
you don't have to be a sociopathic libertarian to know that in the era of aging populations there will never be enough money for hc. The First World simply sweeps the problem under the rug with deficits.
The US's problems with healthcare spending were (and still are) entirely out of proportion with respect to everyone else's. When you're spending approximately double what anyone else is (as a proportion of GDP) and not getting particularly great outcomes for it, something's got to give. (I've also seen comments on slashdot which said that healthcare was being used to create effective indentured servitude; that's Just Plain Wrong if it is true.) Moving towards a universal healthcare system at least starts to align everyone's interests again, and encourage the use of healthcare solutions that reduce costs rather than increasing them.
The rising costs associated with an aging population are best addressed by requiring people to work longer; if the boomers were to retire at 70, there'd be much less of a problem as they'd be net paying in for much larger proportion of their lives. (OTOH, I can understand why this would be unpopular...)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Three other reasons the VP matters:
1. VP's can end up being the heir apparant after somebody's second term is up e.g. Richard Nixon and Al Gore. (Also off your "died in office" list: Harry Truman)
2. Vice presidents can and do get involved in the administration of the country, at the direction of the president, and almost always have the presidents' ear if they want it. e.g. Al Gore had a lot to do with Clinton's computing technology initiatives, and Dick Cheney had a lot to do with George W Bush's foreign policy.
3. For non-incumbents, the VP pick is the first major decision that the candidate makes. Seeing who they pick goes a long way towards seeing how they'd actually govern, rather than how they say they'd govern.
I am officially gone from
My view is that it can't be health care reform because it makes the problems that it alleges to solve worse. For example, it greatly expands health insurance coverage and subsidizes a bunch of people
1. If you have a private health service, the vast majority of people will need insurance one way or another. Contrary to the sashdot libertarian group opinion, most people do not earn enough to save sufficient to cover potential costs of even tens, never mind hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. Yes, the poor are subsidized by the rich. It is at least a nod towards egalitarianism and fairness.
3. At some point, you have to choose whether you want a selfish, rightwing, money-obsessed Randian society or a more equal, harmonious one.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it