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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • More background on this “non-partisan” commission.

    The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to “take control of the presidential debates”. The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul G. Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf. At a 1987 press conference announcing the commission’s creation, Fahrenkopf said that the commission was not likely to include third-party candidates in debates, and Kirk said he personally believed they should be excluded from the debates.

    It is not non-partisan. It is bipartisan. That’s an important difference. Saying that it’s nonpartisan is misinformation.

    Third parties have often criticized exclusion of their candidates from debates, due to the CPD’s rule (established in 2000) that candidates must garner at least 15% support across five national polls to be invited to the national debates. The last candidate from outside the two major parties to participate in a CPD-sponsored debate was Ross Perot, who polled sufficiently high in his 1992 presidential campaign to debate George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in all three debates; Perot’s running mate, James Stockdale, also participated in the vice presidential debate. When Perot ran again in 1996, the CPD declined to invite him to the debates, finding that the Reform Party candidate had no “realistic chance to win” the election.

    So, it’s an organization run by the two major parties that explicitly tries to keep third parties from participating in the debates.





  • Okay, I started reading it, and I had to stop because he lost his credibility to me. Here are the notes I made for the beginning of the article.

    First, he cites statistics to show how the demographics of listeners moved left between 2011 and 2023. He mentions Trump as related, but doesn’t consider how Trump’s lies about “fake news” caused a massive shift in what news people consume. And he doesn’t mention how during that time all news outlets were being affected by the rise of social media.

    But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

    This is what Burr’s summary of the Mueller report said. It’s right wing propaganda. The report actually found all sorts of evidence, but concluded it couldn’t call them crimes because of a policy of the DOJ.

    There was really no point in continuing reading once I got to actual lies. It’s not journalism and the author doesn’t come off as credible to me.





  • Why not both? They could have something on those politicians and also be envied by them.

    Unless everything we know about Russian intelligence is wrong, Putin almost certainly has kompromat on many politicians. There was an article recently from a politician about how after he was elected, he started being approached by young beautiful women, and he realized after talking to other politicians just how trivial an effort it would be to get compromising material on most of them.

    According to George Clooney, he always saw Trump in NY bars trying to sleep with random women in the early 2000s. Trump was already a world famous “businessman” at the time who was into politics. Exactly the sort of person Russia could target and who would be easily compromised.





  • I hate this entire topic.

    For one, I feel like debates are usually very important, but in this specific case, we have two candidates who have already served as President. There is no chance to learn anything about these candidates from a debate.

    Not only that, but they debated before, and it was an absolute shit show. But we’ve already seen them debate. It’s hard to imagine what benefit we’d get from repeating that mess.

    And Presidential debates have been useless for decades now. They get asked a question, and if the question has any bite to it, the candidates just ignore the question and try to make soundbites from partial speeches that they prepared ahead of time about any adjacent topic.

    Trump bucked that trend by not being prepared, but just being an asshole and talking stream-of-conscious gibberish over all of his opponents. Biden more than held his own last time, but it seems to me that he’s become more soft-spoken lately. I imagine just from appearances, it would seem like loud-mouthed Trump would come out on top this time. But being a loud-mouth is not really what makes somebody a good President.