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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 -;
I'll be playing Logical Fallacy Bingo against my friends. I personally expect it to be a fast bingo game.
Is this one where he talks about when his wife & daughter died: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GwZ6UfXm410
His humanity is the opposite of Robomittens. /stupid onions.
I understand that, but does that actually drive anyone's choice for #1?
Were there people who were actually going to vote for McCain, but once Palin was selected they decided Obama/Biden was a better ticket?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Yep. I'm one of them.
I was turned off by an empty platform of "hope and change" when I could select a candidate with more experience both as a representative and a reformer. I wasn't happy that he was starting to kowtow to the extremists a little too much but it was the early days of the Tea Partiers.
But he's an old man and not in perfect health. I'm not putting that woman one heart attack away from a presidency. Now 4 years later I'll be voting for Obama based on his performance and strong loathing of Mittens.
This is one of the major issues preventing any real change from happening in the US federal government
I genuinely do not understand why americans, particularly the ones who frequent tech boards, think a third party would actually be helpful. Well I understand why it's on tech boards, there are the automated shills and a particular ideological attraction to a point of view, but in practical political terms it's silly. I live in canada, we've had at one point 5 parties holding federal seats, and now have 4. 60% of the population *doesn't* like the current government, but he has essentially absolute power (within the confines of parliamentary power) because he has a majority of seats. The 'extra' parties just divide the vote up, and whether you do that as a proportional representation and require pork project trading by MP's across party lines or do it at a smaller level of pouring resources into contested districts the net effect of bad federal policy (or at least inefficient policy) is the same.
Third parties, or more, simply lead to horse trading and pandering to try and bribe or coerce the smaller parties into a mainstream voting block, and in exchange they end up with something that's usually crazy or generally bad policy, but that's the price to be paid to govern at all.
Government only really can do 3 things, tax, spend and make laws. The vast majority of actual issues are either binary or on a 2 dimensional spectrum (you support the death penalty, oppose it, or you narrowly support it for certain things. You support a defence department somewhere on the spectrum of 500 billion dollars to 1 trillion dollars and no one serious is talking about anything outside that range, etc. I realize the tech community in general have latched onto some ideas about 'liberatrianism' but that is, in the US, on the slant of smaller government republicans.
The US government only spends money on a handful of things of any significance:
Defence related spending ~ 900 billion.
Healthcare/social security/social safety net stuff (broadly social programmes) ~1.7 trillion (not counting the healthcare spending done under defence)
That gets you to 2.6 trillion dollars. there's some interest payments on debt. that gets you to 2.8 trillion. And then there is
Coordination and support of things that effect multiple (or all) states or that are too big or variable to be left to individual states, insurance on education healthcare etc. (most of discretionary spending in the US, though I would count veterans affairs and homeland security as really defence related, the term 'discretionary' is a legal budget term, not a practical 'what is this spending supposed to be for' term).
Which takes another 400 or 500 billion. Over a lot of different programmes none of which are individually very big.
And lastly, what I would call 'other'. Stuff the government has agreed to pay for that isn't under the umbrella of any specific category, but people decided they want, and a lot of stuff here would be needed to be done somehow, it's matter of how you count it. Think agriculture, NASA, Energy, EPA etc. Again, lots of little pieces of things that have some national significance.
So you've only really got 4 things. No one sane (or who can do math) is going to toss ~230 billion dollars in interest payments off a 3.6 trillion dollar budget. So what do you want?
More or less defence? Republicans vs Democrats.
Social safety net stuff:
More: Democrats. Less: Republicans.
Pet projects or 'national significance' stuff?
Everyone wants more of whatever they stand for.
Except that neither of them really do much of that when they actually get into office, and no other political party in the world is much different. Democrats don't want to be seen as soft on terrorism so they waste some money on defence for theatre, republicans don't want to alienate the crazy old man with medicare vote so they won't actually cut medicare much, and well, that's pr
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.
Enough Democrats (including Hillary and Kerry) voted for the Iraq war that GWB could get away with it.
Yeah, it makes a difference. The Democrats will be better than the Republicans. But the Dems have moved so far to the right that the difference is getting smaller every year. If you look at the issues, Obama is farther to the right on domestic policy than Nixon.
-- Instead of a single-payer health care system, or even a public option, Obama gave us a health care plan designed by the Heritage Foundation, for the benefit of the insurance companies that contributed even more to Obama's campaign than to McCain's.
-- Obama took GWB's No Child Left Behind, and added to it with Race to the Top, which forces states and cities to break their union contracts and destroy public education with charter schools if they want to keep getting their federal education money. It's destroying the unions.
-- Instead of prosecuting the people responsible for the worst financial crisis since the depression, including outright fraud, he appointed the very people responsible for the crisis to handle the crisis.
-- When O'Keefe made a fraudulent video about ACORN, instead of defending ACORN, the Democrats abandoned ACORN and let the Republicans destroy the most valuable voter-registration organization the Democrats had. Brilliant! Now who's going to register your voters?
-- When you ask Democrats why we should vote for Obama, they're finally reduced in desperation to saying, "Supreme Court." Yeah, we'll get Supreme Court justices who are merely "centerists" (conservatives) rather than getting far-right partisan justices who will brazenly ignore the Constitution as they did in Bush vs. Gore. Of course the Democrats would never consider a filibuster in a Supreme Court nomination.
"Vote for us, because the alternative is horrible" is not a very inspiring reason to vote.
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I wanted an FDR and all I got was this lousy Obama.
It's hard to tell now. He seems to have decided to start switching his positions.
Romney: "Okay, I kicked Obama's ass in the first debate, so how do I bring this baby home."
Campaign Team: "Yeah, Mitty-baby, we've been working on that. We've had our boys working with the focus groups and we think we've found the answer."
Romney: "Great! What is it?"
Campaign Team: "Okay, what we've figured out is that you need to take all of Obama's positions."
Romney: "What?"
Campaign Team: "Yeah. Now you like the other 47% and agree with a woman's right to choose, and even like bits of Obamacare."
Romney: <speechless>
Campaign Team: Yeah, and maybe you should change your name to something ethnic sounding, and start talking about "hope and change" a lot more.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
From most of the accounts of the Iran hostage crisis that I have read, it always seemed fairly clear that Carter did all of the negotiations to free the hostages, and Iran only waited until Reagan took office before releasing them to spite Carter for his support of the Shah. Unrelated events also put pressure on Iran to end the standoff, such as the USSR invading their neighbor Afghanistan and being invaded themselves by Iraq. That last part was probably the biggest driver for an end to the crisis, as Iran was fielding primarily American military hardware and hoped that by releasing the hostages they could secure parts and supplies to keep their military going.