As a resident of NY I have to say I, and many other people I run into have been largely disappointed by the current Governor Eliot Spitzer. He came into office with a large amount of hope and great experience standing up for the people of NYS. So far he has done little except get himself into scandal and a few weeks ago surprised everyone with a plan to give illegal immigrants in NY a drivers license.

The plan has been met with overwhelming opposition and is sure to spark a great fight within the state. I didn’t think it would spread to the presidential election so quickly and so forcefully and honestly I thought if it did, Clinton would have a better handle on it.
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Can I ask, who started this load of crap? These people are running for president and you want to limit their thought process to thirty seconds? Are you crazy?

Personally I think if you are running for president you shouldn’t be allowed to make any proposal or speak on any subject for less than ten minutes. If that issue involves global thermonuclear war, you should probably take a half an hour.

“Please solve the crisis in Iran in under thirty seconds GO!!!”

How do you answer that? Frankly the only way you can plausibly solve the problem of nuclear proliferation in thirty seconds or less is to say the following:

Answer: “I will change the laws of nature to make nuclear material non-fissionable.”

Here are some others:

Question: How will you solve the Healthcare crisis in America in thirty seconds or less?

Answer: I will outlaw sickness.

Question: How will you make America more competitive in Math and Science globally in thirty seconds or less?

Answer: I will change the discipline of science into the study of reality television and the discipline of Math into knowledge of Seinfeld trivia. America’s dominance will then be unrivaled!

Question: How will you solve racial intolerance in America in thirty seconds or less?

Answer: I will kill all white people and let minorities rule.

Question: How will you solve the nations energy crisis in thirty seconds or less?

Answer: I will invent a time machine, go back to the invention of electricity and kill Thomas Edison. I will then find and kill Henry Ford. Thereby removing the nations need for both oil and electricity. This action will also result in the end of Paris Hilton’s celebrity.

Any answer you can give to the Iranian crisis or Healthcare or any other topic in thirty seconds or less probably isn’t a good enough answer for the president of the United States. Listen up Tim Russert and Brian Williams, most of these issues are ones we’ve been debating for weeks, months, years, decades and centuries. Thirty seconds isn’t going to cover it.

The worst part about this thirty seconds or less format is that candidates are scolded for having too many ideas and too much information. They present the sharing of information as a sign of stupidity during these debates. When a candidate goes on too long the audience laughs at them and the moderators make them out to be idiots. MEANWHILE it takes the moderators two minutes to ask the damn question in the first place.

Sorry but that seems a little unfair to me. If you expect a thirty second answer you should be able to ask the question in fifteen seconds or less.

If I found out the president of the United States worked on any of these issues for thirty seconds or less and made a decision, I would raise a militia and head the advice of the Declaration of Independence.

What utter nonsense this format is.

Check out Catching On and Troops & Deficits

I have to come clean from the start. I did not watch the first hour or so of the debates. Like most of America I watched The Biggest Loser and Dancing With the Stars. I have watched like twenty of these debates this year and frankly I have come to find them amazingly boring. I DID however switch back for the last hour or so and I did watch the post debate coverage and a bunch of clips and so I have some further thoughts.

I saw all the exchanges between Edwards, Obama & Clinton. If you watch the coverage you would think there was a caged death match going on. I personally did not see it.

There was absolutely NOTHING in the Edwards-Obama-Take-On-Clinton-Three-Way that wasn’t in any of the other debates. Their arguments were almost 100% the same, their tactics were almost 100% the same. You could easily have shown me the last five debates and woven them together with last nights and I wouldn’t notice a difference in style or content.

But again the framing hype of television made it out to be something so special Americans missed out by not watching it. The immediacy was made up and the debate was framed in the traditional black/white vision television frames everything in, but again, it was pretty much the rehashing of the same arguments and tactics of every other debate.

Frankly can I ask, when did Hillary Clinton ever answer a question straight? I like how this is something new. Hillary Clinton dodges questions, we know this. So does her husband and every other politician and so does everyone else on that stage. I have to be honest with you, I’ve watched a ton of these debates. She almost never gives a straight, easy to understand answer. It is always blah blah blah bipartisan committee blah blah blah unilateral study blah blah blah fourteen point plan.

I loved that Chris Dodd attacked Clinton for giving double answers. Do you know why I loved it? Because he did so after answering the same question by saying something along the lines of “I am not sure if this is the right move, but it might be the right move because we need to do something, if it isn’t the right move we need to find out what the right move is, we haven’t done our jobs in Washington which means states now may make what is not the right move, but at least it is a move, whether it is right or wrong, I support making a move even if I don’t fully support this move or any move made, but making moves is good, but we shouldn’t race to make a move, however I want to see the move made immediately. SHE DIDN’T ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!”

When Chris Dodd talks my mind becomes incapable of processing information. It literally becomes incapable of taking information in, comprehending it and storing it for later. The reason is because it hears that someone is saying words but there is absolutely no information presented when those words are put together. Chris Dodd speaks like a politician, they ALL speak like politicians. Do you know why? BECAUSE THEY ARE POLITICIANS!

Meanwhile Barack Obama and John Edwards are just as bad if not worse because they are trying to pretend they are not politicians. But they are and they sound like ones. It takes Obama ten minutes to make any point and he has usually started four other thoughts along the way. Edwards meanwhile sounds like he is running for mayor of Candyland and just wants to present people with a sunny picture of all the treats he will give people with taxpayer money. He doesn’t so much answer questions as make promises about spending other peoples money and raising taxes on the wealthy.

BUT we know all this already. We heard it all in the previous twenty debates and we will hear it in the next twenty. So let’s stop jumping up and down like there is something new going on here. There really is not.

Road to 2008 considers a recent piece by Frank Rich in the NY Times & David Kirkpatrick in the NY Times magazine to wonder if the values voters influence isn’t waning.

I personally find it somewhat difficult to come to a conclusion on this issue. I do believe the far flanks of the party are waning in their influence. A year ago the conventional wisdom was that the anti-war wing of the Democrats would put their hold over the election. So far that has been anything but true. Meanwhile the conventional wisdom about the right was that religious conservatives would halt the chances of Giuliani, McCain & Romney and yet two of those three are in the top-tier and McCain is slowly putting his campaign back together.
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The Caucus reports that FOX is sending legal notices out to Republican candidates over their use of debate footage and images in campaign ads on their web sites. Previously FOX had only targeted Senator John McCain.

Earlier in the year there was momentum from Democrats to keep debate footage copyright free and open to the public. That quickly died and since that point both parties have held their debates and forums with organizations that reserve copyright. That hasn’t stopped the candidates from posting clips of their favorite moments on YouTube.
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Well during the debate one kind of different thing happened. We found out that Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO. In addition afterward Chris Matthews had Bill Richardson on, Governor of New Mexico and the infamous Roswell.

On Election Geek I’ve had a little running tidbit section for awhile of little election facts. One of them was that Bill Richardson has been a vocal proponent of opening up government UFO related files, especially those related to Roswell, for a long time. Matthews seemed surprised when he asked the Gov. about Kucinich and heard Richardson proclaim that part of the problem was that the government has been slow to release its files.

Matthews made a joke about the Republicans being the anti-Evolution party and Democrats being the pro-UFO party.

To his credit Richardson clarified his belief that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support UFO/alien claims and that as Governor of New Mexico he wants to do everything possible for tourism, hence his consistent promotion of Roswell and the mystique surrounding it. He even wrote a forward for a book on the subject in The Roswell Dig Diaries saying:

“Clearly, it would help everyone if the U.S. government disclosed everything it knows… The American people can handle the truth — no matter how bizarre or mundane. … With full disclosure and our best scientific investigation, we should be able to find out what happened on that fateful day in July 1947.”

For more fun check out this report from Fox & Friends on the E.T. ticket where Stephen Bassett of X-PPAC (Extraterrestrial Phenomena Political Action Committee) calls for conspiracy theorists to support Richardson for the Vice Presidential spot because of his written forward and Hillary Clinton as president because… well… it’s a weird explanation. Just watch.

Wow are these things getting redundant. Have we really run out of questions? It seems like every darn debate has the same ten questions, the same three answers and a whole lot of endless boring attempts for people to attack each other while sounding nice. Ten point plans, four point strategies, bipartisan committees, enough already!

Also note to Brian Williams. You cannot ask someone to answer a question in thirty seconds when it takes YOU two minutes to ask it.

No wonder only three million people or less are usually watching these things.

Democrats in Iowa have voted to move their Caucus to January 3rd bringing the vote to the same day as Republicans. On October 16th Republicans held a conference call to discuss Michigan’s decision to move up their primary in violation of party rules deciding that a move from the 14th to the 3rd of January was the only way for Iowa to keep its coveted spot as first in the nation.

New Hampshire which holds the nation’s first primary is the next state expected to make changes to its calendar.

Barack Obama promised to be more forceful against Hillary Clinton.

Did I miss something? I thought the campaign already started its more forceful stance a couple weeks ago? Also didn’t the last time he started being more forceful coincide with a giant gap created in New Hampshire and nationally against him?

Meanwhile the Clinton campaign already found a way to deal with this more forceful Obama appeal through an e-mail:

“Stagnant in the polls and struggling to revive his once-buoyant campaign, Senator Obama has abandoned the politics of hope and embarked on a journey in search of a campaign issue to use against Senator Clinton”