Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Surely it's evaluating the difference between the effect of an Obama versus a Romney win, and establishing what that is first. To some people it will be minimal.
As the Republicans say: "Are you any better off with Obama?"
It is hardly an "expense of one's future" to forgo a vote which would make minimal difference. What's the worst thing that could happen? The greater of two evils wins, and you're slightly more angry that usual?
Voting a third party will show the media that people vote and have interests in third parties. If a third party starts getting significant support, the problems with the electoral system will become clearer. You're making more of a change than voting for one of two effectively similar individuals.
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.
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.