Excluded issues and excluded candidates: The charade we call our presidential debates

How the Democrats and Republicans manage to keep excluding third-party and fourth-party candidates from the debates, even after the corporate media has excluded them from the entire campaign? Amy Goodman of Democracy Now discusses this topic with the Green Party's Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. These two candidates also offer their own views on the issues, views not considered by Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama. Goodman calls her exploration of this issue "Expanding the Debate."

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Are The Debates Even Relevant?

Okay, I confess, I did not watch the debate between Obama and Romney. In my opinion, it doesn’t count for much. I’ve been listening to both sides now since last spring and I’ve made my decision, so exactly what good would listening to the debate do me? Or for a committed Romney supporter, for that matter? None to speak of. So, observation number one: I’ve never known anyone who changed their vote because of something in the debates. [More . . . ]

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Romney misleads voters 27 times in 38 minutes at the first debate

Romney misleads voters 27 times in 38 minutes at the first debate - Think Progress lays them out. Daily Kos is setting out Romney's many misrepresentations too. Steve Benen has it right. We can't decide who won a debate without considering the extent to which the candidates told the truth:

President Obama, meanwhile, was listless and timid. He stumbled on his words. At times he seemed distracted and unfocused. There were key opportunities for the president to go on the offensive, but for whatever reason, he chose not to engage. For pundits checking boxes -- who gave the appearance of being "in control"? -- Romney excelled. But all of this overlooks an element I like to think it sometimes important: substance. The men on the stage last night aren't actors; they're candidates for the nation's highest office. Delivering lines well is a nice quality, but as the dust settles, it's worth pausing to reflect on whether those lines were true and reflect reality in any meaningful way. Indeed, it seems to me Romney thrived in large part because he abandoned the pretense of honesty. And as it turns out, winning a debate is surprisingly easy when a candidate decides he can say anything and expect to get away with it.

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Matt Taibbi uses the current election to illustrate our completely corrupt political process

Once again, I'm a bit embarrassed that I can't think of ANYTHING to disagree with while reading an article by Matt Taibbi. Here's an excerpt:

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time? Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema . . . The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of this system. Bruni of the Times is right that the process scares away qualified candidates who could have given Obama a better run for all that money. But what he misses is that the brutal campaign process, with its two years of nearly constant media abuse and "gotcha" watch-dogging, serves mainly to select out any candidate who is considered anything like a threat to the corrupt political establishment – and that selection process is the only thing that has kept this race close. Barack Obama is hardly a complete Wall Street stooge. The country's most powerful bankers seem genuinely to hate his guts, mainly because they're delusional and are sincerely offended by anyone who dares to even generally criticize them for being greedy or ethically suspect, as Obama has with his occasional broadsides against "fat cat bankers" and so on. On the other hand, Obama's policy choices in the last four years have made it impossible for him to run aggressively against the corruption and greed and generally self-obsessed, almost cinematic douchiness that Romney represents.

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Paul Ryan’s Unsuspected Latent Darwinism

Paul Ryan, in a little-noticed interview, said the other day—talking about abortion—that rape is simply another “method of conception.” This is very much in line with Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, although it contradicts Akin’s point—which was, somehow, that the reproductive system of a woman being raped (really raped, not…

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