The sham debates and the media anointing of the two-party system need to be re-thought. They are not etched in stone. They aren't etched anywhere. We have two parties because campaign money pools in two places.
Back when he was hosting the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson sometimes acted in skits. In this one, he portrayed "an honest politician."
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."
All right, you so-called pro-lifers. The facts are now squarely before you. A new study by Washington University in St. Louis indicates that freely available birth control slashes the number of abortions.
A dramatic new study with implications for next month’s presidential election finds that offering women free birth control can reduce unplanned pregnancies -- and send the abortion rate spiraling downward.
When more than 9,000 women ages 14 to 45 in the St. Louis area were given no-cost contraception for three years, abortion rates dropped from two-thirds to three-quarters lower than the national rate, according to a new report by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis researchers.
These are dramatic numbers. Therefore, we now have a tool for minimizing the incidence of abortion: Make birth control freely available. If conservatives were rational and if they really wanted to cut the number of abortions, they now have a relatively easy way to do it. Mandate coverage of birth control by health insurers and otherwise make birth control easily available. In fact, make birth control pills available over-the-counter. But the thing is that this proven method of reducing the number of abortions will not satisfy many conservatives. They will also want to stop women from having access to birth control. They don't like the idea of women having sex for pleasure only. And, BTW, most conservatives are not pro-life--they oppose programs that help young children to be healthy and well-educated. Rather, they are merely pro-birth.I sometimes imagined this sort of thing happening: a local TV weather-person who insisted on talking seriously about the climate. Today I saw that someone actually performed this skit: