The only thing I remember about the debate tonight is Mr. Obama and his radical socialistic views. Why should i pay more taxes for others to live off my hard work, education and success? Might as well go apply at McDonalds tomorrow since we are all equals now.

The logic in your statement escapes me.

CNN? Sheesh!

I watched both CNN and FOX. CNN conducted a poll with +/- margin of error. FOX asked viewers to call in...you know, American Idol style. That's like asking a McCain/Palin rally who won. I think that is where the Sheesh! belongs. I can tell you, the American people did NOT win...no solutions from either, campaign rhetoric. I heard some pointed answers, but mostly stump speech lines. It was not a debate; it was talking points.

I agree with Rolandmc. This just further enhances the need for the other candidates for President to be allowed to debate, it is an injustice to them and to us that they are shut out. And no, I won't quit bringing it up. Still haven't heard anything regarding our civil liberties. I did hear McCain say our interest in Georgia and the Ukraine is because of oil, I thought it was high time it was said, so I would include that as a highlight. Further, I watch on PBS and then I shut if off immediately because I don't need an analyst to tell me what to think about what I just saw. Half the time it sounds like they watched a different debate.

Look at FactCheck.org. It will help you wade through what both said and misstated.

georgephillipe, isn't that a socialist French name? C'est la poêle qui se moque du chaudron!

Factcheck.org is sponsored by the Annenburg group. Annenburg is the same guy that funded Obama's senate campaign.

Come on.

CNN viewers are traditionally way left of center. That poll is useless.

All of that aside, McCain really screwed himself when he suggested offering relief to people who failed to make their payments on mortgages. Both candidates are pandering when they pretend that only Wall Street and Pennsylvanian avenue are to fault. Main street has its share of greedy people who borrowed money they did not intend to pay back.

I think McCain lost and Obama broke even if an unbiased review were done.

Kudos- to you skeptic-

I couldn't agree with you more. McCain's body language spoke volumes. He was clearly uptight, rigid, made little or no eye contact. In my opinion anyone who constantly has to put down others, is extremly insecure. McCain thinks that having a barbie on his arm- will assist him in the election. Also, McCain couldn't begin to know what it is like to be middle class, after all they said his wife's outfit for the first debate was worth in all 30K. That is just pathetic.

Obama is grace under fire. Obama is THE ONE! Thank you for your post skeptic.

Those leftist socialist communist radical pinko gay-loving tofu eating bicycle riders at factcheck.org!!

Walter Annenberg is a conservative Republican. He has donated 10s (100s?) of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates over the years. Friends with Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., etc. I do not see any evidence that Annenburg funded an Obama campaign. And your implication about his current association or influence on factcheck.org is suspect at best... nahhhh it's closer to an utter fabrication.

It's no fun even responding to you any more, R_T, when you so blatantly will say anything whatsoever, whether it is true or not. I sure don't know where you get your information... but *whew* stinky! Lies do not help your cause... whatever your cause is. To troll, to be funny, to hang onto a losing idealogy by any nefarious means you can?? Which is it?.

Though, I will say that I actually agree with you on one point here... though Obama had a couple of high points, I don't think this last debate was that strong for him. The problem for McCain is that he was not particularly convincing or strong enough to overcome what Obama had to offer... and he gains no ground. So I rated the 2nd debate as a draw.

Skeptic,

Cool badge! Would you be willing to trade for my Minuetmen Boarder Petrol badge?

Skeptic, you spelled 'poll' wrong. It's not 'pole'.

Joszef, you spelled 'Border Patrol' wrong. It's not 'Boarder Petrol'.

You uneducated socialist bafoons. No wonder you're so easily swayed by Hussein's oratory. 'Useful idiots', indeed.

thunderclouds; regarding McCain's "stiffness". The man cannot lift his arms above his chest. He was beaten mercilessly and repeatedly while in a VC prison for 5 years.

http://www.usmessageboard.com/politics/58922-annenberg-acorn-ayers-and-obama.html

Oboma supporters are blind to the fact that he has no accomplishment while in office. Despite chanting chang, he no record to support his promise. McCain has a record of bucking his own party. Obama is a talker not a doer. Aside from his do nothing record, lets not forget that he has admitted to felony behavior (snorting drugs). I want to know who he purchased his drugs from, another felony. How long he snorted drugs. I want to know what year, exactly, he stopped snorting drugs. Lets also not forget the people he surrounded himself around (Reverend Wright, a racist and hater, Ayers, an terrorist, Rezko, a felon, his wife, she hates America, the list goes on. He was strongly against born alive abortion and then lied about the same. The bottom line is that anyone who supports Obama is not a critical thinkiner.

Yes, I am not a "critical thinkiner" but I am a critical thinker. Nice spelling, especially when you are deriding the intelligence of Obama supporters. Ayers is also an associate of numerous Republican politicians in Illinois as well. Is that relevant? John McCain is also a known associate of a man who sent thousands to die in a war for which he lied about our reasons for going? Can we just focus on the issues please? Also, stop referring to Obama's middle name constantly. Does anyone go around referring to people using their middle name? What the hell is John McCain's middle name? I don't care. Its not relevant.

lincolnstuffer; Obama's middle name is relevant. His dad was a Muslim. His step-father was a Muslim. He was raised as a Muslim child during his formative years.

He went back to Kenya and assisted a Muslim politician in a violent overthrow of their election process. The story on Obama's assistance of Ladingo is just coming out as the author who investigated the story was being held by the Kenyan government to silence him. He was recently released after human rights demands were made to release him.

He has documentary evidence, emails, and papers showing that Obama assisted Ladingo in plotting a strategy to use Muslim activists to advance his campaign, and if he lost, to use violence to challenge the election results.

This story is just breaking.

Correction: The name is spelled Odinga.

R_T: Last time I checked, what a man chooses to call his God is no crime, at least in this country.

Here is a video for all you McCain lovers... this is one McCain doesn't want you to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgy6J6jCyBQ

"Sooner or later people are going to figure out that if all you run is negative attack ads, you don't have much of a vision for the future..."

That was John McCain in 2000 commenting on the disgusting attacks against him by Karl Rove and a few of the other people he now employs on his campaign staff to do negative attack ads FOR him.

Radical Islam, William Ayers, Rev. Wright and now Odinga? Why can't McCain simply convince us that his economic and foreign policies are superior to Obama's? How about an effective universal health care plan?

In hoping to expose the "real" Obama, McCain & Palin are really exposing how morally corrupt John McCain has become. Since his drubbing in 2000, he's transformed himself from a noble reformer willing to stand up to his own party into an ignoble hack willing to abandon his dignity, his honor and his most deeply held values in his lust for the presidency.

Joszef_Pelikan: Is it true that you guys in the Minuetmen Boarder Petrol have a secret dance step? If so, do I get to learn the secret step if I get one of those badges?

-

MRex21: Thanks for catching that misspelling for me.

Did Biden Get It Wrong? You Betcha

Monday, October 06, 2008

By John R. Lott, Jr.

When you interview for a job, here is a hint: make sure you know what the job is. Joe Biden failed that test last Thursday. He couldn’t even get right what a vice president does, but the media didn’t notice.

The media is all over itself about how smart and experienced Biden is. Political analyst Charlie Cook is quoted in the Washington Post on Saturday as saying “Biden is clearly so much more knowledgeable, by a factor of about a million.” Saturday Night Live does a skit about Biden being smart, if slimy. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is treated as being nothing more than a simpleton.

Yet, take Biden’s statement from the debate on the role of the vice president:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch. He works in the Executive Branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that.

And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

The only authority the vice president has from the legislative standpoint is the vote, only when there is a tie vote. He has no authority relative to the Congress. The idea he's part of the Legislative Branch is a bizarre notion invented by Cheney to aggrandize the power of a unitary executive, and look where it has gotten us. It has been very dangerous.

One should be careful when throwing around terms such as “most dangerous” and “bizarre.” But Biden is confusing which part of the Constitution covers the Executive Branch (it is Article II, not Article I). More importantly, the notion that the vice president can preside over the Senate only when there is a tie vote is simply wrong. Nor is it true that the only legislative involvement the vice president has is to break tie votes. The vice president is the president of the Senate, where he interprets the rules and can only be overridden by a vote of 60 senators.

Early vice presidents spent a lot of time in the Senate. Thomas Jefferson even spent his time writing “A Manual of Parliamentary Practice: for the Use of the Senate of the United States.” Modern vice presidents may show up only when they think tie votes will occur, but that is their choice.

This isn’t rocket science. The Constitution on this point is very straightforward: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”

Instead, it was Palin who got it right. Besides correctly stating that the vice president holds positions in both the executive and legislative branches, she also noted that:

Of course, we know what a vice president does. And that's not only to preside over the Senate and [I] will take that position very seriously also. I'm thankful the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president if that vice president so chooses to exert it in working with the Senate and making sure that we are supportive of the president's policies and making sure too that our president understands what our strengths are.

But just as the vice president’s job includes more than simply being ready to assume the presidency if the president dies, the Constitution merely states what the vice president’s minimum responsibilities are.

Compare the uproar over Palin’s answer to Charlie Gibson about the “Bush Doctrine,” a doctrine that Gibson clearly didn’t understand and for which there apparently exist at least four different versions. Where is the outrage over Biden not understanding what vice presidents do? For Biden, his inability to correctly say what vice presidents do was surely his “gotcha” moment.

Yet, this mistake during the debate was hardly unique. Biden got a lot of things wrong in the debate that are going unnoticed by the fact-check media. Take just a few:

-- Will McCain's health care proposals raise taxes? Biden says that McCain’s proposal will cost people money. The Tax Foundation finds that could easily be "roughly deficit-neutral over ten years."

-- Under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan"? No, the tax rates will be similar to the higher rates under Clinton.

-- Did "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country"? No, one year’s worth of spending in Iraq equaled five in Afghanistan.

-- France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon"? No, and it wouldn't have made much more sense if he had said "Syria" instead.

-- Is it really “simply not true” that Obama said that he would meet with the leader of countries such as Iran without preconditions? No, Obama said “I would.”

-- Did Obama warn against letting Hamas participate in Palestinian legislative elections in 2005? No.

-- Do “Iraqis have an $80 billion surplus”? No. If oil prices had remained high, it might have reached $50 billion by the end of this year.

-- Finally, an amusing point as evidence that Biden is just one of the people he pointed to, inviting anyone to have a beer with him at "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del. Unfortunately, people will have a hard time taking him up on his offer, since the restaurant hasn't had that name for probably 15 years.

Unfortunately, voters who are trying to get an accurate count on whether the candidates are telling the truth can’t rely on the media. FactCheck.org mentions only one of these points, the size of the Iraqi surplus. The Washington Post mentioned Biden’s misstatement on Hamas and Katie’s restaurant. AOL’s coverage of the errors in the vice presidential debate was by far the worst, though that might not be too surprising given that Tommy Christopher, who wrote their news analysis, also blogs on the Obama Web site. None of these checkers mentioned Biden's statements about the role of the vice president.

Compare this to the attacks on Sarah Palin:

-- FactCheck.org criticizes Palin for claiming that McCain’s health care tax credits will be "budget neutral" – they argue that the tax credit will be larger than the new taxes that the program will impose. Fine, but if the people at FactCheck.org believe that is true and that the Tax Foundation is wrong, Biden’s claim about increased taxes is even more inaccurate. But FactCheck.org doesn't even mention Biden’s statement from the debate.

-- From AOL's news analysis piece. “Palin: Said that it is untrue that the U.S. is killing civilians in Afghanistan. According to an analysis by the AP, however, the U.S. is killing more civilians than insurgents are.”

What Palin actually said was: “Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” Whether one believes the AP estimate or not, the question is whether she was accurately characterizing Obama’s statement of the job that our forces were doing. And Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians” (emphasis added).

-- FactCheck.org’s first critique claims that Palin was wrong to claim that troop levels in Iraq are down to their pre-surge levels. They are correct that after the recently announced drawdown, 6,000 more troops will be in Iraq than immediately before the surge. But why not mention that 84 percent of the 38,000 troops in the surge are home or are in the process of coming home?

The media seems to have been covering for Biden for some time. While news stories still talk about Dan Quayle’s spelling mistake 18 years later, there has been almost no news coverage of Biden’s numerous wacky statements. What if Quayle had said something similar to Biden’s recent statement that, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'" A neat trick given that Herbert Hoover was president in 1929 and no one was watching television.

It might not fit the simple template for a 36-year veteran of the Senate to not understand what vice presidents do (after all, eight vice presidents have served with him), but Biden knew less about this than the political outsider, Sarah Palin. Given that they are running to be vice president, why didn’t that story dominate the news coverage after the debate?

Gov. Palin IS nothing more than a simpleton and the nation (and the world) will heave a hugh sigh of relief when she's air freighted back to Anchorage with her entourage Nov 5.

Cheney thought the office of VP was accountable to no one and nothing, from a legal standpoint, and GOOD RIDDANCE to him, too. And good riddance to Halliburton's pet veep.

CanyonRat; You is gonna' be one deeesturbed loser in November......can't wait.

Anti-Let's all agree to come back after the election and review who supported whom and kick it around, should be fun.....

One of the Ten Commandments instructs to "Not Bear False Witness". Think about that before you spout the angry lies that you do.

Do the math on your own, research facts yourself, there are plenty of non-partisan sources.

Check the facts for yourself, and VOTE.

This is a beautiful democracy compared to most of the world. It isn't perfect but we try and we grow. Neither candidate is all evil or all good. Be sensible. And stop picking on each other and telling lies you can not support. Vote.