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Presidential Election 2004: Info & News


SkinWalker

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There is an interesting Q&A session on slashdot with the libertarian party candidate. I only agree with about 50% of his platform, but he doesn make some interesting points about the state of politics today, the electoral system, the current parties etc... and actually talks about issues rather than pointless ranting about irrelevant things

 

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/20/1423219

 

Interesting post in the discussion that followed:

 

"Badnarik has no political experience whastoever, only two failed attempts at running for the Texas State House of Representatives. This is the general problem with third party candidates. "

 

I think this is the general problem with politics today. We seem to think its the norm to have a career politician. I think the founding fathers would have intended a baker, a butcher, a sailor, and a bank owner to all be equally feasible politicians. These individuals don't like something so they say their ideas and if people like what they say the office selects the person. The way we have it now, the politician(which is a valid "career") looks around for offices that he/she is likely to win and they go for it.

 

Example: In the old days Americans,"founding fathers" decided that George Washington would be a good president. Washinton wasn't really interested in the position but support for him to become president was just so overwhelming that he was forced to take office. This is how we find a good president someone who gets the position not because they dog it relentlessly in order to gain power and influence but a person who solemnly accepts it because Americans demand that this person have the job.

 

This notion that experience matters is utter crap what we are doing is just facilitating the current power structure and making it harder and harder to affect meaningful change. If you want someone to continue giving us the status quo with no innovation and no passion for the position continue to select someone with "experience" I however will not.

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Slashdot (and a number of other groups) are allowing younger voters to submit and select questions to be given to bush and kerry. More info:

 

We're teaming up with the New Voters Project Presidential Youth Debate to ask the two major party candidates "the 12 previously unasked questions that most concern young Americans." This is different from the usual Slashdot interview because we're asking you to submit questions through the New Voters Project site instead of as comments attached to this post. Next week you'll have a chance to help select questions for the candidates from among the top 50 asked by everyone -- not just Slashdot readers -- by first winnowing those down to 20 through the Slashdot moderation system, then by voting on the "final 12" displayed on the New Voters Project site. On October 12 we'll post the answers, and on October 19 we'll post candidate-supplied rebuttals.

 

Note that the idea here is to solicit questions specifically from voters 18 - 35, because this age group tends to vote less than older Americans, plus questions from people 13 - 17 who will be voters before long. But the question selection process is not age-restricted, and it's where your comments and moderation become most important, because one great hope here is to avoid asking questions the candidates have heard (and answered) over and over.

 

The other question-selecting moderators are groups like Youth Vote Coalition, Earth Day Network, Rock The Vote, Declare Yourself, and 18to35.org, plus lead moderator Farai Chideya.

 

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/24/1320231

 

If anyone wants to be involved...

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  • 3 weeks later...

answers to the youth-requested unasked questions from the 3(?!) main candidates here: http://youthdebate.newvotersproject.org/the_candidates_respond.html

 

[edit]This seems pretty good to me, you (on the whole) get reasonable answers from most people, and most of the questions seem to be on issues you wouldn't normally hear about.

There is a bit of a tendancy to ignore the parts of the question they don't like, and kerry seems to attack bush a lot rather than state his own position (but i guess that the challenger will always do that a bit more) but on the whole the answers are interesting.

 

You also have the chance to score each answer and see how others have scored it.

 

----------------------------

Suprisingly (as i have never really heard of him) i've found myself agreeing with nader more than the other two, and agreeing with bush more often than i'd expect.

 

I thought these figures were interesting:

The drug war and criminal injustice system certainly have a racially unfair impact. The facts on this are evident, according to federal surveys, "most current illicit drug users are white. There were an estimated 9.9 million whites (72 percent of all users), 2.0 million blacks (15 percent), and 1.4 million Hispanics (10 percent) who were current illicit drug users in 1998." Despite these facts, African Americans constitute 36.8% of those arrested for drug violations, over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations. African-Americans comprise almost 58% of those in state prisons for drug felonies; Hispanics account for 20.7%. From racial profiling to discretionary decisions of prosecutors and judges, African Americans and Latinos are treated more harshly than European-Americans.

 

[edit 2]

fave bit so far:

question: "When is it appropriate for a leader to change their opinion? Both sides have been accused of flip-flopping on important issues - President Bush on establishing the Dept. of Homeland Security and steel tariffs, Senator Kerry on the Iraq war. But changing opinion due to thoughtful reconsideration ought not to be derided as flip-flopping. Tell us about a time when you had an honest change of opinion on a topic of national importance."

 

answer: "President Bush declined to answer this question. - Editor" :D

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