Rock the Debates!

What is Rock the Debates?:

Never before in American history has it been more vital to have an open, honest, and innovative examination of America’s problems and solutions.

The best way to sparking the minds of Americans is to open up the presidential debates beyond the Democrat and Republican parties. Rock-the-Debates seeks to include third parties who will energize the presidential debates placing their ideas into the mix, without endorsing or opposing any particular candidate. We just want the ideas out and let the American people decide.

You can play a key role in this unprecedented, historical endeavor.

The idea is to get the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates to commit to debate third party candidates.

How? We’ll ask them to debate, get the clip on video, and place it on You-Tube. Folks in places like New Hampshire can play a key, historic, pivotal role in making this happen.

Follow the link above for more details.

Follow the following link to see where it stands, to date:
Third Party Watch - Seven Major Party Candidates Respond to Open Presidential Debates (so far)

Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: The New Liberal Menace in America

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Wolves in Sheep's Clothing:
Back to the Future:

"One of the more complex phenomena of the modern American political scene is that while the ideological divide between presidential candidates seems to be ever diminishing, the partisan mudslinging and animosity between the two parties is increasingly hateful. It's a weird paradox. But it's not uncommon to hear critics of the two-party system decry a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee just as the highest rated television news programs are driven by raucous debate between right and left.

For Daily Show host John Stewart, it isn't a paradox at all. There is no disconnect between the professional politicians and the activists that drive those debates. In fact, it's exactly the way they want it. Because a polarized public, focused on hot-button issues like abortion, tax cuts and school prayer, keeps their focus off the fact that the two parties have essentially become the servants of one very important class of voters, the corporations."

There's more of this excerpt at the book's website: here
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A very interesting article, indeed... While I don't agree that partisanship is a bad thing, I do think the viciousness between the parties (including between the major parties and their respective minor party cousins) is counterproductive. We are a nation full of diverse ideas, and it is from that diversity that all good things will come. We need to listen more, and judge less quickly.

Most interested in reading the book from which it comes. Adding it to the list.

Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates

Democrats tighten noose on Nader and Greens in punitive attack on "Third Party" candidates
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"If successful in Pennsylvania, Democrat legislators around the country will likely introduce similar punitive election laws in other states, particularly "swing" states, in a preventive effort to keep independents and minor party candidates off the ballot."
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This is just the kinda thing I was talking about in this previous post. The major parties run the show, and they--in this case, it's the Dems, but with other minors, it's the Republicans--do everything possible to keep any competition on their side of the political spectrum out of the race.

Obviously, this benefits the major parties, but it doesn't benefit the people who vote, and whose choices are thusly limited by these actions. It doesn't benefit the marketplace of political ideas & ideals, when all but two (& sometimes less than two) positions are swept away from that marketplace.

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"Judge James Collins, who assessed the $89,821 bill, led the review declaring Nader's petitions were "rife with forgeries" and that "this signature gathering process was the most deceitful and fraudulent exercise ever perpetrated upon this Court." Collins alleged that "thousands of names" were "created at random"…a view dissented from by Justice Saylor of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court who declared the Nader campaign had not been shown to have engaged in any kind of "systemic" fraud and that only 687 signatures out of 51,273 had actually been rejected for forgery.

Professor Brown has discovered that Judge Collins personally ruled that 568 of the 687 purported forgeries were fraudulent leaving the other ten judges to find only 119 forgeries. Collins and two of the other reviewing judges discarded thousands of signatures on very "technical and complicated" criteria including a missing middle initial, use of ditto marks, or mixing printing with cursive writing. Collins ended up rejecting 70% of the 10,794 signatures he reviewed."
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It smells awful fishy to me that one guy found so many forgeries, while ten other judges found so few. I realize that this may be a partisan article about a partisan review (I know nothing about the author of this article, or the law professor who conducted the review), but it does merit further inquiry, as far as I'm concerned...

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Brown writes there was a "concerted Democratic program to purge Nader from the presidential ballot." Further, "The lesson to be drawn from the 2004 presidential race is that neither major party can be trusted to police a general election ballot. Major party interests naturally lean more toward rigging and sabotaging than insuring fair and competitive fights."
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That's what I think, too... There ought to be a better way...

Clift: A Third-Party Ticket in 2008? - Newsweek Capitol Letter - MSNBC.com

Clift: A Third-Party Ticket in 2008?

I'm pretty certain the major parties would never allow this unity ticket thing to ever get off the ground, let alone actually work. This is stepping all too far onto what they see as their exclusive turf. The D's & R's establish the rules, & by doing so, have given themselves a built in self-preservation clause. (I'm still not sure why we allow these two parties to set debate and ballot access rules. You would think that in the first case, at least, news organizations would have more say...) The major parties will do anything to prevent their ever being cast aside as irrelevant... ...no matter how many Americans come to believe they are.

The dominance of the two major parties on our political system does need to be broken. In a more perfect world, this might be a way to do it, eventually, but I could never help a candidate I didn't support, and it's highly unlikely I could support a Republican. (I'm not even so sure about Democrats, most of the time... 8>)

I'm glad this idea is out there... I think that it might help all of us get a better crop of candidates across the board, one day. I just don't know whether or how it'll ever break through the major party barrier...