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US Presidential Debate #2 Tonight: Discuss Here
The second U.S. Presidential debate kicks off in about a half-hour (9PM ET, 6PM PT, 0100 UTC) from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney will take questions from an audience of allegedly undecided voters. A live stream of the event will be available from a number of sources (C-SPAN, CNN, ABC, and PBS), and it will be broadcast nationally on the major networks. The flash-less and television-less can use rtmpdump to catch the debate from C-SPAN. It won't preempt the more important telecasts, like playoff baseball. Candidates from smaller parties again went uninvited (e.g. Gary Johnson from the Libertarians, Jill Stein from the Greens, Virgil Goode from the Constitution Party, and Rocky Anderson from the Justice Party). In fact, Jill Stein was arrested for attempting to enter without credentials (her side of the story). Assuming she's out of jail by Thursday, she and Gary Johnson will be participating in an online debate hosted by IVN.us. While tonight's debate is in progress, Politifact will be fact-checking the candidates in real-time (while CNN has demonstrated their journalistic capabilities with a debate drinking game). Feel free to weigh in with your commentary on the debate below — it would be helpful to provide timestamps or other context when referring to particular statements. As before, we're posting this here in a vain attempt to keep the political discussion out of other story threads tonight. If either of the candidates spontaneously concedes the election or catches fire, we'll do our best to update you.
Air support and soldiers on the ground advising rebel forces and helping to call in air strikes...
A military action by any other name is just as significant, and the fact remains that whatever term you use for what we did in Libya is not being done in Syria where the same reasoning applies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Stop repeating that lie. Between the GOP delaying Franken's entry to the Senate through frivolous court challenges, followed by by Ted Kennedy's sickness and death, the Democrats only had a few months of filibuster-proof majority. They used it to pass Obamacare.
He didn't even finish the term he was elected to.
Im not sure if you are lying due to lack of scruples, or are ignorant. According to wikipedia (and, im sure, public record),
Romney filed to register a presidential campaign committee with the Federal Election Commission on his penultimate day in office as governor.[225] His term ended January 4, 2007. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney#Tenure.2C_2003.E2.80.9307 , last line before the next section)
Heres the real irony / hypocrisy: Barack Obama really DIDNT finish out his term due to the presidential election. He was elected in 2005, and resigned in 2008-- only halfway thru his term. Normally, this really isnt a big deal, and noone I know (even republicans) made a stink about that because its not unusual for presidential candidates.
But I point it out because of the hilarity and hypocrisy-- you accuse Romney of something that not he, but Obama did. Its actually kind of like how Obama blamed bush for "unauthorized wars" (despite them being authorized), and then launched an unauthorized military action of his own.
What the Senate was doing by month:
July: Kennedy was too sick to do his job
August: Kennedy was too sick to do his job, and died at the end of the month
September: Kennedy's seat was vacant until Kirk was finally seated at the end of the month. The rules of the Senate say even with 99 total senators, you still need 60 to break a filibuster, so an empty seat is essentially a vote to keep the filibuster going.
October: Intra-party negotiations trying to get the Democrats to unanimously vote for the bill. Lieberman and Nelson were the big stumbling blocks.
November: Lieberman agrees to support the bill in exchange for dropping the Public Option. This negotiation took a long time, as the Democrats tried to a lot of compromises (the "Rockfeller option", the "opt-out" option, the "opt-in" option, the "Medicare buy-in" option, etc.), but Lieberman wouldn't budge. Nelson keeps the filibuster going.
December: Slimebag Nelson finally bought off with the Cornhusker Kickback, which would have given extra money to Nebraska for no particular reason. Obamacare finally passes the Senate. The Kickback is later removed during the reconciliation process.
January: The Senate typically takes most of this month off. They convened on January 19th. Scott Brown took office a week later.
In short, the Democrats had three in-session months of filibuster-proof majority, all of which were spent trying to get Lieberman and Nelson to break the filibuster.
You hit the nail on the head. I don't agree with the entire Green Party platform, but their candidate was ARRESTED for trying to get into the debate. Why wasn't she (or any of the other 3rd party candidates) included? Because they are not high enough in the polls. Why aren't they polling well? I expect it's because they cannot get media coverage for love nor money.
The whole damn political system is owned, rigged, and horribly corrupted. But because the worst of the corruption is legal, we're supposed to turn a blind eye to it.
The polling threshold is set at 15%, which would have excluded all third-party candidates for the last hundred years. The debates used to be run by the League of Women Voters, who kept them open, transparent, and honest, and who set a reasonable threshold for third-party candidates, such as being on enough state ballots to be able to theoretically win.
Ever since Bush I stumbled at a town hall debate in 1992, the "town hall" debate format switched to pre-screened questions with no followups because the handlers fear letting their candidates out of their hermetically sealed rhetorical bubble. These days, they negotiate a contract that explicitly bars third-party candidates with the "Commission on Presidential Debates," which is chaired by party hacks-turned-lobbyists and funded by private corporations.
Bush I let Perot into the debate because his campaign thought that Perot would steal votes from Clinton, who didn't want him in. When the opposite happened, Clinton suddenly welcomed Perot into the debate. They even struck a deal to schedule one of the debates during a baseball game because neither side wanted to draw a big audience to the debate because it was too unpredictable. Now, third-party candidates are seen as wild cards, and are systemically excluded from the debates exactly because they might do something unexpected, put one of the major party candidates on the spot, or otherwise disrupt the carefully-choreographed kabuki theater that is presidential politics.
How many republican primary debates where there? 27? 28? So why only three presidential debates? Why no third parties? Why no spontaneity? It blows my mind how effectively campaigns manage to limit every discussion to the recitation of talking points, focus-grouped spin, and how effectively they manage exclude new ideas and substantive arguments.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
The mainstream press is liberal almost to a (wo)man
Liberal - it doesn't mean what you think.
Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
Please find another word as your political term-of-abuse.