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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.
A well run business employs as few people as possible
What power does the President have to actually enact any tax related policy they have on their platform? Surely for the most part they a legislative rather than executive issues?
The American system seems very weird. Well, on paper it seems reasonable but in practice it seems to operate in a way that ensures nothing 'difficult' gets done and that everybody has someone else to blame for the inaction.
Meanwhile.......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Do they actually differ at all?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Both candidates have the same platform: make sure corporations continue to run the show, make sure the people being exploited continue to believe the system is working for them, and make sure the people being exploited are too distracted with minute details about issues that do not really affect them (gay marriage) to question policies that really do affect them (the war on drugs).
Don't listen to what the candidates major party say, it is just a side show. Look at what they actually did in the past, and look at what they don't say. Has Mitt Romney criticized Obama for failing to demand that the TSA actually follow the law (seriously, how much more effective of a criticism can one make than pointing out their opponent's failure to uphold the law while serving in the highest political office in the country)? The debates are a waste of your time, designed to reinforce the view the the Democrats are "liberals" and the Republicans are "conservative" (both parties, in fact, are fascist, hawkish, and pro-corporate).
Palm trees and 8
The ER has to stabilize you. If you're dieing quickly- a stab wound, a heart attack, a bullet wound- they'll patch you up. They don't have to try to give you chemo, give you follow-up care for infections to the wounds (unless thhe infections become life threatening), or give you a bypass to prevent the next heart attack. That's not health care.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
what they lie about is what matters.
What they don't bother to talk about at all matters a lot more. Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that America has more prisoners than China? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that the TSA is currently operating outside of the law? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that we are using drone strikes to kill American citizens without a trial?
See, there are some issues (some call them "the important issues") that neither major party candidate is even willing to mention. Which is why I do not vote for the major parties.
Palm trees and 8
The only democracy in the world where sociopaths have their own party is the United States. Even better, that party has groups within it that variously argue both Jesus and the Founding Fathers approved of sociopathic policies.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I guess you missed that part of the post you were replying to. Who you choose on election day does matter, which is why I vote third party.
Palm trees and 8
A well run business employs as few people as possible
But a well run country employs as many of its citizens as possible.
Errr....gov't jobs for all??? Hell no.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
I never said the government needs to provide government jobs to citizens, but running a country is fundamentally different than running a company. When you need to cut costs in a company you can shed employees and trust that some other company or the government will take care of them. When you need to cut costs in a country, you can't simply shed citizens to save money - you're going to end up taking care of them one way or another. And sometimes cutting costs in obvious ways doesn't save any money at all. You can slash military spending by cutting expensive weapons programs and reducing troop levels, but then you have to find jobs for all of the ex-soldiers and ex-military contractors that are suddenly out of work.
Even the QUESTIONS are lies.
"The main issue of security for the United Sates is Iran..."
The main issue of security is the outright theft of all meaningful government and control of public discourse by oligarchal, corporate wealth. And the creation of the largest, enslaved incarceration population in world history.
But these two puppets are already OWNED.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
:
I'll strive for brevity here and continue with the Grass,Zebra,Lion analogy: The big lie you're adhering to is that the grass is production, when in fact the grass is actually a combination of the zebra's hunger or demand (what it wants) and the zebra's fundamental ability to actually walk over to the grass (i.e. the consumer isn't so crippled with debt that it can't afford to actually buy what it wants).
I had in my head a quite long allegory about zebras and companies producing grass and then hoarding it or setting fire to it or hoarding it, but it's a waste of time continuing that line. I'll be blunt and very pragmatic in my final reply here: Entrepreneurship doesn't count for anything if your brilliant new idea doesn't have a block of consumers who have the disposable income. It doesn't matter how much someone wants something if they can't afford it.
The greatest intellectual dishonesty you can perpetuate is when you actually believe that you can keep actively sabotaging the prosperity of the largest block of your population that want to work and want to spend earned wealth within their own economy. Then funneling that wealth back to people more concerned with cutting costs by moving jobs overseas and topping up their offshore bank accounts is even more insane. It's that cut-and-dry.
Sooooo... what explains the worse unemployment rates in much further-left Europe?
Austerity. Europe has actually been doing what the Republicans (Ryan in particular) have been wanting to do, and it's made things much worse for them.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
In America, one serious illness in the family will destroy your finances unless you're very rich or have good insurance. I can see why Romney could think of having enough money saved to get him through a rough patch but for most of us, a medical problem is a financial disaster of epic proportions without insurance. Besides, where is it written that young people who have never had time enough to save up for the cost of an expensive medical problem don't get sick?
Trickle down has been proven not to work.
I never understood how it was supposed to work in the first place. A company doesn't create jobs because it has money left over, it creates jobs when there is more demand for a product than it can satisfy with the current workforce. If you want jobs to be created, you should give money to the people most eager to spend it, which is the people who have the least amount of money.
Why wasn't she (or any of the other 3rd party candidates) included? Because they are not high enough in the polls.
The 15% polling number for inclusion is arbitrary and no 3rd party candidate has reached 15% anytime during the last hundred years (AFAIK).
The Commission on Presidential Debates is a private, bi-partisan (with emphasis on the partisan) organization created by the two parties specifically to freeze out 3rd parties and to create a 'safe' space for the candidates to debate.
American politics has been a duopoly for generations.
The parties aren't interested in a free market of ideas.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why aren't they polling well? I expect it's because they cannot get media coverage for love nor money.
...or maybe ... just maybe ... some things are simply not as popular as others. It's not that evil, awful "mainstream media" that's at fault, it's that some things just are not what the vast majority of people are looking for.
And "the media" is going to report - shock horror - on the things people are actually interested in. I know it's a "chicken and the egg" scenario, and some things that deserve to be popular aren't ... but especially in the Internet age, well, let me put it this way: if "Gangnam Style" can gather tens of millions of hits, if your idea is good enough and well presented on the Internet, there's no excuse for saying "I'm not popular because nobody knows about me!"
Don't get me wrong, I agree that including some 3rd party candidates would have made this a MUCH more interesting debate... it would have been great! But there are dozens if not hundreds of small-base candidates out there, and the debate organizers wanted to give as much of a limited time as possible to the candidates voters collectively were most interested in. If a line had to drawn in where to include or not include candidates, ">40% of the US voting population vs. <3%" seems like a reasonable place to draw the line.
P.S. - just so you know, you can ALWAYS get coverage if you have enough money! You just buy your own TV commercials, newspaper ads, web banners, etc. "Love" - meh, not so much.
"95% of all Slashdot
The way I understood "trickle down" was that rich people would have so much money that they would buy all sorts of items that would, in turn, create jobs to produce such items, lifting up the lower classes. I'm not saying I understood it correctly, because it sure looks like, "Let's give money to rich people."
Almost. The idea is that investors will have more money to invest in expanding existing business or creating new ones. This makes a certain amount of sense with a 50's style isolated industrial economy. If you wanted to make your money work for you, you pretty much had to invest in activities that created jobs in the US.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really work today. Globalization and various rent seeking oportunities ensure that, most of the time, it is more profitable to invest in ways that don't create American jobs. Opening a new factory is great but it doesn't help workers in the US much if that factory is in China. Investing in elaborate schemes to harvest money from regular investers in the stock market doesn't really help anyone.
Depressingly, "trickle up" doesn't work all that well either. If people spend their surplus buying foreign made goods, benefit to the overall economy is quite limited.
I've got no objection to corporate wealth as such, let alone the existence of corporations. What I have an objection to is the fact that the corporations and the individuals who own and/or run them essentially get orders of magnitude more voting power than anyone else does. It's not about whether corporations or wealthy people are entitled to free speech or whether they can petition the government, it's about the fact that if your "petition" comes with a million dollar check politicians listen. Government in the US is very much pay for play and so long as that is the case, we're all screwed.
Well, an economist who write a very clear column for ignorant laymen like me in a magazine I read shot down the 'trickle down' theory thusly: when the rich get money, they put it in bank accounts in Switzerland or use it to purchase expensive art (=exchange of bragging rights, exempt of taxes). Hardly any of it goes back into the economy. When the poor get money, they use it to fix their car or repay their debts. If what you want is to have money recirculate in the economy, the 2nd choice is the clear winner.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Look up "Jon Stewart Ron Paul" to see how badly the thing is rigged, he has clip after clip of reporters going out of their way to name people scoring MUCH worse than Paul was while being careful not to mention Paul at all. At the end of the clip one of the street reporters even says "We are talking more about Palin and Christie who aren't even running than about paul who is" and the news desk guy gets a douchebag smirk and says 'if you get any footage of Palin or Christie let us know, keep the Paul stuff".
That is why I've been saying for years grab as much as you possibly can from the government and be ready for the collapse, because the whole thing is tilted soo much in favor of the corporate cock blowers that they will destroy the economy and currency to give the 1% every dime they can. look up the numbers, when we had the 29 crash, which we didn't crawl out of until 1953 BTW, we had 120% of GDP in the market thanks to the gov blowing the banks. Know how much is in there now? Over 430% and climbing so at this point a collapse is unavoidable and inevitable, its too late to pull back. So grab what you can and have a plan in place for when it collapses because its gonna get ugly REAL fast when it happens.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
HOW DARE THE PRESIDENT AUTHORIZE THE USE OF FORCE IN LIBYA, which in constrast to the complaints about not acting in Syria seem a tad hypocritical.
Not sure why this was rated +5 insightful, must be the Kosbots. Allow me to explain the hand wringing, first the candidate Obama talked about how awful it was for the then President to unilaterally go off and start a war in the Middle East(despite having received an authorization for the use of force in Iraq, hey his VP nominee even voted for it). By contrast, Obama as President didn't even both to go to Congress to get an authorization for the use of force(hell he even pretended we weren't using force, merely "Kinetic Military Action"), then to add to the hypocrisy, didn't bother to comply with the War Powers Act, which lead to well known "conservative fire brand" Dennis Kucinich to label Obama's war action an impeachable offense.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Barrack Obama is terrible at actually playing politics, so even if he knows what he should do he's usually incapable of doing it. He managed to win his previous elections by having stuck to reasonably credible policy proposals,
I believe you misspelled leaked the sordid details of his opponent's divorce proceedings or work to have your only viable opponent thrown off the ballot.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
The sad thing is that the real policy setting and rules making which ultimately determine who becomes president is in the hands of a much, much smaller minority. The elections that really matter today are those for the "state central committee" of each political party who in turn (either through convention or in that committee meeting... it really doesn't matter as the rules are set in those committees anyway) who in turn select the national committee members.
In the case of the Republican Party (because I've studied it a whole bunch more) the real power to make changes and to set the national agenda for that party is in the hands of 110 "national committee members" (two from every state + territories including DC) who set the convention agenda, make the delegate rules, act as the "credentials committee" (aka those who recognize if you will be a delegate on a case by case basis), and really are where the actual political power in America resides. Note that these "national committee members" (they exist for both Republicans and Democrats) are not members of congress but separately selected for their positions in what is sometimes not a very democratic process in the first place. At best, they are selected during state conventions by state delegates... if those delegates even bother showing up to the vote as it isn't one of the sexy "presidential" votes or even deciding the nomination for the senatorial candidates. Often the place where these national committee members are selected is at a separate convention different than the main election year convention as well... leading to even fewer delegates being involved in the selection of these people.
Ron Paul found this out the hard way, as did most of the contenders for the Republican Party as Mitt Romney was able to get the support of most of these national committee members and definitely the support of most state committees as well. That is why Ron Paul supporters were tossed out into the cold, because they didn't have the internal support from within the party to get the job done. That is also why almost nobody gets the nomination unless they have been running for the Presidency several times: they need to get "their people" into those very important national committee positions in the first place.
In other words, those actually selecting who becomes President of the United States isn't even the 10% of the eligible voters who bother to show up to primaries or participate in neighborhood caucus meetings, it is instead that very select and largely self-appointed groups of just a few hundred people in both major parties who set the rules to decide who gets the job, or just 1 out of a million possible voters set up in a manner that is clearly not proportional by population either.