Tonight is the final Presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain. It’s no surprise that they still haven’t invited any third party candidates like Bob Barr or Ralph Nader. I still think Ron Paul should be the moderator at one of these debates. Many felt the last debate was boring after there were promises of attacks from both sides. Tonight’s debate may (or may not) bring some fireworks.
John McCain has fallen further behind in the polls so he may believe he has nothing to lose by attacking Obama forcefully. McCain has a history of coming from behind. Will it be too little too late for him? Who knows, but along the way we’ll have our live blog going and we encourage you to join us and comment along with us as we watch the debate.
If nothing else it is a good place to vent your own frustrations at the status quo politicians, one of which will likely be President next year. Unfortunately, these debates perpetuate the myth that there are only two candidates in the running when there are at least 4 others who’d like to have their voices heard: Bob Barr, Ralph Nader, Chuck Baldwin, and Cynthia McKinney.
On September 1st I reported that both Senators John McCain and Barack Obama were being taken to court on charges that they were constitutionally ineligible to be President of the United States. The article text is below in its entirety. There have been several updates since then.
On September 17th, the Associated Press reported that US District Judge William Alsup said Congress passed a law one year after McCain’s birth in 1936 that “remove[s] any doubt as to persons in Sen. McCain’s circumstances in the Canal Zone,” thus “retroactively rendering Sen. McCain a natural born citizen, if he was not one already.” Alsup threw out the case while chiding the plaintiff, Markham Robinson, chairman of the American Independent Party, that he had no standing to file the lawsuit because he is not a candidate for president. All legal challenges to the constitutionality eligibility are resolved for Senator McCain. It should be noted that McCain fully complied with providing documents, although understandably he did not want publicity on this subject.
However, on October11th the AP published an article entitled “Candidates meet ‘natural-born’ test despite rumors.” This title is misleading because only McCain has been cleared in a court of law, and the article admits at its very end thatthe lawsuit has not yet been dismissed.
You laughed at him. You made fun of him. You called him extreme, a gadfly, a kook, and many other trite terms of marginalization. His only crime was the truth in stark contrast to every calculated, vacuous platitude uttered by his Republican opponents. Now I can’t help but imagine Ron Paul sitting in his easy chair surrounded by gold and silver bullion smiling knowingly saying, “Who’s laughing now, bitches?!”
No, that isn’t Ron Paul’s style, as we learned from the debate where Paul whispered, “Make, fun buddy”, under his breath in reaction to yet another moronic insult emanating from somewhere between Mitt Romney’s sculpted sideburns. Ron Paul is a man deserving of integrity and respect at work in the sea of extreme buffoonery that is Washington DC.
Nothing illustrates such an assertion better than the last few weeks of having to listen to every pundit and politico tell us why we all had to fall in line behind a bailout bill that no one wanted to pass and no one was sure would work. But the sky was falling and the wolf was around the bend so pass it we must. America, our government didn’t listen to us. We have no representation anymore. The last vestige of capitalism is nearing death. We are on the road to economic slavery.
Betsy Rothstein of The Hill sat down with Bob Barr and asked him 20 questions. Many were simple and/or inane, but a few were different than the average interview question. Here are a couple of examples:
Do you gamble?
No. My wife enjoys going there because she loves to shop. The place I enjoy most is a Ritz-Carlton off the [Las Vegas] strip. They don’t have any slot machines at the hotel and you can get away from all that hubbub.
What has been the most touching moment for you on the campaign trail?
Haven’t had any touching moments. I think politicians make that kind of stuff up, to be honest with you.
There is an urban legend about you that has been going around Capitol Hill for years that you have some African-American ethnicity in you. Any truth to it?
No. That came up one time during the ’92 race when somebody called in and claimed I had a Columbian background and had changed my name to disguise my roots. I take all that stuff with a grain of salt.
There is not much to say about the debate. It was status quo. They both talked about the issues and did some standard attacks, but not much new occurred. McCain proposed one new thing I haven’t heard before: allowing the Treasury Secretary to buy out bad home loans. Wow, and he also says he won’t raise taxes on anyone. I suppose the hidden inflation tax doesn’t count though does it John? Perhaps he should consult Ron Paul for his next debate appearance.
McCain also seemed to move away from the normal Republican base quite a bit in this debate. He promoted, on more than one occasion, when he voted against Bush/Cheney on things like climate change. On foreign policy he softened his tone a bit. It seems he was trying to appeal to the middle of the road undecided voters. It remains to be seen if he was successful.
Alex Castellanos, a GOP media strategist and CNN pundit pretty much sums up the debate in the video below.
Castellanos worked for Mitt Romney and George Bush in 2004. He is known as the “father of the modern attack ad.” Here he attacks both candidates to the joy of limited government third party candidate supporters of Bob Barr and Chuck Baldwin everywhere.
“McCain wants to buy everyone a house, and Obama wants to buy everyone health care. I think that’s remarkable for a country that is broke.” – Alex Castellanos
The live blog for tonight’s Presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain here at Liberty Maven is now over. Please use the link below to see the transcript. Thanks to those who participated and join us for the final debate next Wednesday night.
NOTE: Please keep in mind all comments are moderated. It is not a chat room. If your comment doesn’t appear it was either missed by mistake or the moderators felt it didn’t add to the discussion in a substantive way. There will always be a delay for comments to appear (sometimes longer than others) as we evaluate them. That being said we try to post most of the comments that are submitted. We encourage discussion and dissent within reason.
Over and over and over again I see headlines using the words “Sarah Palin” and “libertarian” in the same sentence. Sometimes I think it’s due to ignorance, but other times it’s clearly a crafted agenda to redefine the term “libertarian” to mean something closer to “neocon”. For some blogging enthusiasts, this article could be considered an Eric Dondero hit piece, since I will be focusing largely on headlines written by him.
In a recent blogger post discussing Sarah Palin, Dondero wrote back to one commenter who didn’t quite agree with him: “You’re a purist libertarian. You don’t give a f*** about such things. Perfectly understandable….Now go back to your Ivory Tower, and take those books off those dusty shelves, and start studying Objectivist/Austrian economics theory, like you do every day. You’ll be much happier than living in the real world like the rest of us do.“ For Dondero, if you don’t subscribe to his warped concept of libertarianism (i.e. neoconservatism) then you must be a “purist”, and not worthy of contributing to the discussion. Eric, there’s only so far you can stretch the definition of a libertarian, and you’ve gone way off the deep end.
Join us for the 2nd Presidential Debate tonight around 8:45pm Eastern for our continuing live blog of the debates. The gloves have come off lately between Barack Obama and John McCain and the war of accusations has escalated so this could be a debate to remember. Also making it interesting is that the format of the debate is more of a town hall style with questions being asked from the audience. The conventional wisdom is that John McCain is better at this style of debate than Barack Obama. Judging by the recent polls John McCain needs to do well during this debate. Obama is said to have locked up an estimated 264 electoral votes, needing only 270 to win. That is of course, according to scientific, but imperfect polls.
Will John McCain rise up again after being counted out? Will Obama dodge McCain’s attacks and do some attacking of his own? Join us below to find out.
Very seldom these days do we hear politicians today talk about liberty, much less understand it. So it’s refreshing indeed when Bob Barr addressed the campus of Washington Hall, saying:
America is not a military. America is not an economy. America is freedom, liberty and the job of the commander-in-chief should be simply and prudently to protect, defend and move forward freedom.
John McCain, Barack Obama, and the rest of the DC status quo are now exposed by Ron Paul’s “I told you so” and by the elephant sized pork sitting right there for all to read in the 451 pages of the Senate bailout bill. I’ve written recently how they don’t even try to hide it anymore. Instead they acknowledge the pork exists they then throw up their arms and say, “I disagree with it but, oh well, what can you do?” How about having some principle for a change?
John McCain speaks incessantly about reducing earmarks and “pork barrel spending”, but when it comes down to actually voting against it suddenly it becomes a necessary evil. Christopher Dodd reacted the same way today on CNN changing the subject and reiterating how important it is to pass the bailout bill (I refuse to call it a rescue bill).
Now the bill is being painted as a savior for the “credit crisis”. I wrote my Congressman here in Virginia, Frank Wolf, strongly encouraging him to vote against the bailout bill. He voted for it. I received a 5 page letter from him in the mail today full of excuses about why he voted for it. The general tone of the letter was “I know more than you do about this, so trust me, we need this bailout.” Also in the letter was this surprisingly accurate admission, “Access to credit is the lifeline of our economy.” This is so true it hurts.
Our entire financial and monetary system is fundamentally based on credit/debt/loans. Dollars are either printed out of thin air or loaned into existence courtesy of the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking. The more dollars out there, the less value those dollars have. As your dollars decline in value so does your standard of living.
Liberty Maven
On September 17th, the 
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