Presidential Debate #2 thread

[Realitycheck]

Obama is starting to sing the right song, as McCain struggles for effective rebuttals. Just calling it like I see it.

[bascule]

Yeah, it's a Town Hall, and the questions are... pretty damn weird. At least the questions were good in the last debates, but I guess that's what you get with professional interviewers asking them.

 

"Is healthcare a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?" WTF?

[Sisyphus]

Yeah, questions are unusual, and not really in a good way. That said, they both seem to be repeating the same things from the last debate. Yaaaawn.

[bascule]

Brokaw: "Is Russia an evil empire, yes or no?" McCain: "Maybe!"

[Sisyphus]

Brokaw: "Is Russia an evil empire, yes or no?" McCain: "Maybe!"

 

The Axis of Ambiguous Evil?

[bascule]

I'm very frustrated by the nonstop talking points. This isn't a debate. It's an advertisement.

[npts2020]

Both managed to pretty much avoid sustantively answering the questions asked. What little was said seemed pretty similar from both, my opponent is a rascal and only I can fix what is wrong. These candidates are the extremes of the two parties? If I didn't have the tv to tell me differently, I would think they were both from the same party.

[big314mp]

Favorite part was the end of the debate, when Brokaw broke off what he was saying, because one of the candidates got in the way of the teleprompter.

 

"Uh, guys. I can't see my script, so if you could just move a little?"

 

This debate was hilarious. Trains lost wheels, jello was nailed to walls, the federal deficit was compared to the candidates overrunning their time limits...

[Pangloss]

According to ABC the mortgage plan McCain brought out will cost $300 billion. With a B.

 

I wonder if that will be the lasting legacy of the bailout plan -- that it added two orders of magnitude to what government officials consider to be impressive amounts of money. "A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."

[Realitycheck]

The most entertaining part for me is how they just know all of the details about each others' plans, such as Obama's claims that McCain's 300 billion dollar tax cut consists of 200 billion dollars for corporations and 100 billion dollars for the wealthiest individuals. The theatrics run rampant, it would seem. I only got to see a small portion of it.

[npts2020]

Pangloss: "and pretty soon you're talking about some real money."

 

I think that's the biggest part of the problem, the money isn't real until you have to give it back. The prevailing attitude seems to be that so long as I can get mine now it doesn't matter who has to pay it back in the future.