The MSM will let Republicans by with outrageous lies and position changes daily, there are more campaign ads then there are people watching them, and the media treats the whole thing like the latest edition of Survivor.

I feel like our country has become a cartoon democracy. I expect an anvil with ACME written on it to show up on the nightly news any day now. If someone had made this stuff up and written a book about it years ago it would have been too idiotic to be published as anything but bad satire.

But, yes, the wicked money may make the stench stronger, as the lies permeate the universe.

they should get rid of debates.

Presidents should be dignified.
NOT GLADIATORS.
NOT a movie shoot.

But then this stupid ass country has a vocal small minority (4.3 million out of 300) who want to have guns in bars, and stupid is as stupid does.
Yeah, pour me a drink and let's argue and shoot someone.
Amazing how dumb down everything is.

And remember- Eisenhower was a crazed rightwinger who got rid of the POW's after the war ended (the German soldiers who surrendered) yet AES was considered a wonk and lost twice.

So this is not recent.

And Nixon won the 60 debate, but Kennedy looked better, amazingly vapid.
(Of course we are happy about that, however, you could look it up-
and radio was important back then, some people didn't even have tv's in 1960.

and don't forget
since the scourge that was John (400.00 haircut) Edwards ran as a pretty boy, and in 2008 ran as the "great white hope&quot barf)...talk about vapid.

So this goes back (and if FDR were alive today, he wouldn't get a second look because the same haters would say he was nothing because he was handicapped.

And don't forget the republicantealibertarians are a bunch of trigger happy, lynch happy racists.
Most of the crap Barack Obama has had to go through was solely because he is a black person in America.

It's not the money though.
Romney hasn't been helped and Meg Whitman wasn't helped when the legendary Jerry Brown with zero dollars pulverized her in California.

over facts and with debate rules. This was "Which candidate can win with the people?" And WTH do you mean by "amazingly vapid"??? JFK was brilliant.

AND JFK WON the debate. Saying it was just "TV" is asinine, since THE MEDIUM WAS THE MESSAGE.

Stop trying to denigrate JFK's 1960 debate and electoral victories. Get over it, FGS.

Kennedy won. His win is ascribed to Nixon's 5:00 o'clock shadow. In reality, Kennedy brought joy and hope and promise to the young people of America. His message was inspiring from the beginning. And people were ready for a change.

Eisenhower was a good president, but we youth were a new generation needing the new, dynamic leadership that Kennedy promised. Nixon was more of the same old WWII mentality -- paranoid and heavy-hearted -- pessimistic. Nixon was anti-labor, anti-youth, anti-progress. Kennedy was the future we believed in.

And that is why to this date, Kennedy is missed.

And that is why so many of us feel cheated by those who assassinated him and why we do not believe the official story about his assassination.

When Kennedy was killed, a young, energetic generation was destroyed at its roots. Johnson, the Viet Nam War, the hippie movement, anger, protests and disillusionment were the result.

And then Nixon dragged the country down. Nixon's election was a huge set-back for the country.

Sorry to digress but I had to set you straight on my view of the Kennedy/Nixon debate. I was too young to vote but already very alert to political events.

and wanted to turn our dignified President Obama into a trailer trash trash talking tea party person.

I don't get that ...Obama has always been the zen candidate, not a bully candidate.
Yet at least half the people here on debate night went obscene against THE DEMOCRAT candidate.


and shame on Ed and Rachel. Were they kidnapped and replaced with a rightwing clone?

upon Obama to call out those lies.

He is not only the standard-bearer of our party - he is the freaking President of the United States.

He let this lying, cheating, stealing bastard - and his party - back into the game, by letting him get away with rhetorical murder.

the first poll totally on the election showed Romney ONLY PICKED UP SUPPORT FROM REPUBLICANS (duh, they were going to vote for him anyhow).

And Obama gained with independents

And Romney's BIG BIRD comment is going to hurt him even worse with people with children
as all women and men who are the caretakers of a child love Big Bird and saw Big Bird attacked. (Was that an anti-teacher disguised comment???)

and look how Mitt apologized for the 47 comment. Obama didn't need to attack, Romney just lied again and apologized.

you really don't give Obama voters any credit for being smart.
They are not Mitt voters and never will be.

And the only ones he played to were the same white male voters.

I don't want a President calling someone a liar. It is rude and unpresidential.

America suffers that way.

We need America's leader to be strong worldwide, and not a national joke.
Otherwise, we are nothing.

showing at a time.

But when I saw the beginning of the debate a second time with the CNN format -- both faces showing on a split screen, I could see that Obama was intentionally not engaging while Romney was speaking. He was practicing self-control and focusing not on Romney's message but on his own.

Which of the two candidates can we trust? Which one can foreign leaders and especially our allies trust?

The answers to those two questions determine the future of our country -- our prosperity, our health and our peace at home and abroad.

Romney who responds emotionally without self-control and strategy, with a volatile temperament and lack of judgment?

Or Obama, who can manage his emotions and respond with reason and patience and stay true to a wise strategy. Wisdom -- that is what Obama showed in the debate. Wisdom and maturity and self-control.

Obama goes for long-term success not short-term ego-satisfaction. He knows how to win a war and how to decide which wars are worth fighting. A big contrast with George W. Bush -- temperament and lack of judgment incarnate.

I think Obama showed himself as the superior leader for America. He did not become distracted by Romney's clownish lying. He focused on the positive, on stating his plan for America.

Deciding whether Romney is a liar is the job of the fact-checkers and the American people. More and more of us are seeing the truth on that one -- that Romney is in fact a bigoted, arrogant, out-of-control liar.

We've been saying it for decades, it didn't start yesterday!

I ask that sincerely.

I don't think Romney can win on his own accord. But all he has to do is get the numbers close enough for Boss Rove and his clan to go to work behind the scenes. Hack a few voting machines, shift a few thousand votes over, combined with voter suppression and *voila* we have a President Romney. That's why it is so important that people get out and vote. If the point spread is big enough, throwing the election would be harder, but if the numbers are close, it's harder to see the shift from one candidate to the other.

Go vote! Get your friends and relatives to vote (and hopefully not for Etch-a-sketch).

All one had to do was watch "The Toady Show" this morning, where KKKarl Rove's back-up dancer, David Gregory, gleefully played clips of Jon Stewart bashing President Obama's debate performance to see that.

clear measurement? If someone says X a thousand times and then says Y - it's easy to call them out, and obvious to all.

But if you say X, then Y, then Z, and you say Y again - it's murky

Compound this by the fact that there are many, many subjects that were flip flopped, it gets even murkier

For one friggin comment that was clarified almost immediately.

This asshole (Mitt) has Etch-A-Sketch as his official campaign strategy and he's skating.

Obama is black. Period.

These people feel free to demean the Presidency because we have a black President.

It's simply their racism on full stage.

to own the news outlets. I think "Citizen's United" needs to go, and the "The Fairness Doctrine" needs to be brought back. If not, we're are truly f*cked.

they ignored it completely. When the snippets of the Bain chinese labor camps were released on You Tube months earlier, everyone had access to it, but it was ignored. Until J.E Carter investigated the source (unlike professional journalists who ignored it) found the part about 47%and Mother Jones exposed it and it went viral on the internet. Suddenly, the MSM could not pretend to ignore it anymore.

4 years ago, those who opposed Obama because of his color and his name never thought the he would not win. After the shock of Nov. 2008 long be for he took office they started their hatred for the President. Jimmy Carter spoke of racism that was taking place in the first year of Obama's Presidency and that was pushed under the bus.
Bobby Kennedy said that a person of color would be president meaning that the country would have grown to the point where color does not matter. Well we have a president of color who was elected by a country that has changed, Many people have not, and still have dislike for those who are of a different cut. They have lost any sensible thought.
One day Some day but not yet and that is sad....

yeah and no. 2008 was a surprise to the racist underground of this country. I bet a lot of them didn't vote, which was a good thing, because they just knew a black wasn't going to get elected to the WHITE house and the day after election this is them and by inauguration this is them and for the last four years this is their racist pigshit cronies in congress not if it was good for the american people, just screw this damn BLACK president this is america the beautiful

Consolidated into a handful of corporations. They control the message. Large media, energy and finacial corporations need to be broken up. Until that happens we should recognize we live in a world that disguises itself as democratic when it is really run by corporations.

the machines, and the voter suppression, and the purges, and the redistricting....but yeah, I agree.

and her disrespectful tweets re the president (death panels).
She gave the tbaggers permission to let loose the hate machine.

I hope she burns in hell for this.

Characterizing Romney as a flip-flopper is like reporting that water is falling from the sky somewhere on Earth.

theme with Kerry, and the idiot media dutifully followed suit. I remember seeing activists wearing large flip-flop costumes either at one of the debates or on a college stop. They spread the theme in unison. Democrats and Democratic activists don't do that. I don't know that it would help, because the idiot media never seems to pick up on Democratic talking points the way they do with Republican ones. However, it might have an impact with viewers if our spokespeople and activists picked up the Romney is an Etch-A-Sketch theme every time they appeared on teevee. And the Etch-A-Sketch is perfect because it came from within Romney's campaign.

...but its even worse if you look back a little further.

Do you remember when the League of Women's Voters hosted the Presidential Debates?

(Perpetual) Election Season in the US has devolved into a Carnival Sideshow of Zingers, Bumper Stickers, Hyperventilating TV Talking Heads, and fact free Marketing.

Where can you find a serious, in-depth, non-partisan discussion of policy and direction?

Rolling Stone, Bill Moyers, and the Foreign media offer some for those who care enough to dig,
but that is fast disappearing.