Got Questions for the Cleveland Presidential Candidates Debate?

Posted Sun, 02/24/2008 - 08:58 by cho
Originally posted Fri, 02/22/2008 - 16:56 - bumping for more questions and comments

John Spinelli (ePluribus Media's Ohio News Bureau) has been credentialed to attend the Cleveland Debates held at Cleveland State University and televised by NBC. Spinelli will be among the national, state and local press as ePluribus Media's reporter. [You all may remember that Adam Lambert was credentialed as the ePluribus Media reporter covering the Tavis Smiley moderated Republican debates, and who, way back in September of 2007, gave us an early snapshot of the then relatively unknown Huckabee). Here's the announcement for the debate event:

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have accepted an invitation from Cleveland State and NBC to debate in Cleveland on Tuesday, February 26. NBC's Tim Russert (JD '76 from CSU's Cleveland-Marshall College of Law) and Brian Williams will moderate the event. NBC Nightly News and WKYC-TV 3 will broadcast live from the debate floor of the Wolstein Center.
Since today is his birthday -- Happy Birthday, John! -- I thought a fun birthday present to him that we can also benefit from is to offer questions for John to ask of key campaign officials like Clinton's Howard Wolfson or Obama's David Axelrod; or even notable members of the national media themselves... If you've got questions for John to ask these guys if he has a chance, you can post'em as comments until about noon Tuesday, when he heads north from Columbus to Cleveland.

Comments

Housing!

by susie dow - 02/22/2008 - 15:59
I'd love to hear an honest discussion about the economy, the mortgage crisis, how these will effect tax receipts, etc.

and the exploding credit crisis...

by cho - 02/22/2008 - 16:03
excellent thought, Susie!

Happy B-Day John...

by avahome - 02/22/2008 - 18:31
I am extremely concerned regarding public funded reports by our government agencies/contractors that are withheld or edited. Some examples: NASA refuses to disclose air safety survey excerpt: Oct. 22: Fearful that a national survey on air safety would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits, NASA withholds report showing airline near-misses more common than thought. NBC's Tom Costello reports. BUSH AIDE EDITED CLIMATE REPORTS excerpt: A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents. In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports. I have just recently heard of this report..... M3 Report excerpt: Beginning in March, though planned before Bernanke arrived at the Fed, the central bank discontinued compiling and reporting the monetary aggregate known as M3. M3 is the best description of how quickly the Fed is creating new money and credit. Common sense tells us that a government central bank creating new money out of thin air depreciates the value of each dollar in circulation. Yet this report is no longer available to us and Congress makes no demands to receive it. Though M3 is the most helpful statistic to track Fed activity, it by no means tells us everything we need to know about trends in monetary policy. Total bank credit, still available to us, gives us indirect information reflecting the Fed’s inflationary policies. But ultimately the markets will figure out exactly what the Fed is up to, and then individuals, financial institutions, governments, and other central bankers will act accordingly. The fact that our money supply is rising significantly cannot be hidden from the markets. So I am thinking that you get my drift...Lord knows what reports Dick Cheney has withheld because he feels are nobodies business..what a butthead....okay one more...the White House Visitors Logs...I'll stop now.

Executive Branch Powers

by roxy - 02/23/2008 - 06:51
One thing I have been waiting for the candidates to address is how they will handle the imbalance of power in the branches of government that has occurred under the Bush Administration. There are "political appointees" embedded in every department, branch and agency in our government who are there to execute the "Bush Agenda" ... how will all of these be addressed? From April 2006 Boston Globe:
Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty "to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to "execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.
And from NT Times, Jan. 2007:
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.
----- ePMedia ... get the scoop with us!
If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. ~ George Carlin
ePMedia ... get the scoop with us!
If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. ~ George Carlin<

... and Happy Birthday!

by roxy - 02/23/2008 - 07:04
n/t ----- ePMedia ... get the scoop with us!
If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. ~ George Carlin
ePMedia ... get the scoop with us!
If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little. ~ George Carlin<

Hillary had a good related statement one of the debates

by carol white - 02/24/2008 - 11:50
Maybe it's not exactly on point but she said she would review all of the signing statements and I guess abrogate most of them.
carol

It is essential to begin discussing the financial crisis more

by Tony Wikrent - 02/23/2008 - 07:16
I am dismayed at the apparent lack of depth and knowledge about the economy evident in the Texas debate. I have written before that the next President’s greatest challenge will be the ongoing financial crises, the worst since the Great Depression. To solve our economic and financial problems, the power of Wall Street and speculative finance must be confronted. It is only fair to concede that it is highly impolitic at this point to pose the issue as starkly as I am able to here: to save the United States, the next President is going to have to destroy Wall Street in its present form. To be as accurate as I can, the next President must destroy speculative finance based on trading and arbitrating risk and credit, and force Wall Street to return to the role of aggregating, allocating and supplying capital to commercial and industrial enterprises. Think of it this way: where do entrepreneurs today go for start-up financing? They don’t go to Wall Street, they go to the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. To force some depth and real meaning to questions of economics, I would like to propose that the next debates include at least three questions: 1. Who will you appoint as Secretary of the Treasury? 2. Do you find Ben Bernanke acceptable as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and if not, who would you like to replace him with? (Knowing full well that Bernanke’s term does not expire until February 2010), 3. Do you support the imposition of a Tobin Tax or Securities Transaction Tax on financial transactions as well as foreign exchange trading? This last question about the Tobin Tax and Securities Transaction Tax is probably the most important, and will probably require some amount of reading and research by the questioner in order to understand it fully and frame the question properly. Most Americans have never heard of a Tobin Tax, so some preliminary explanation will be required. On Securities Transaction Tax, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=333742 A google search of Tobin Tax yields many excellent links. A good starter site is http://www.ceedweb.org/iirp/ and it has an excellent bibliography.

Amen!!!!

by avahome - 02/23/2008 - 07:49
Middlemen speculators.......gotta go or so goes the dollar!

Racial and Gender Tensions

by cho - 02/23/2008 - 07:48
I think we should at least directly address the fact that this presidential election season has surfaced racial and gender tensions... I would like to know what either of these candidates will do -- if elected -- about the surfacing bigotry.

If a woman is elected president

by avahome - 02/23/2008 - 07:52
will she earn the same pay as a man?

Right On!

by carol white - 02/24/2008 - 11:54
Hey, What about asking Hillary which policies her husband put in place she agrees to and which she opposes. She complains that Obama misquotes her as a supporter of NAFTA, but she IS RUNNING ON HER HUSBAND' RECORD. Her "years of experience" include the eight years she spent as a first lady who, she claims, too on responsibilies within the Clinton Administration beyond the universal health fiasco.
carol

Thanks for your questions...

by John Michael Sp... - 02/24/2008 - 14:52
I hate to go into a battle of wits unarmed; but with your help, it seems I don't have to worry about that anymore. Chaos favors those who have plan, and I've got more than a plan now. With Hillary taking the gloves off by telling Barack he should be "ashamed" for his campaign brochures she says misrepresent her positions on universal health care and NAFTA, this debate, the 20th of the series, could not only be the last one between them but the most explosive one. Thanks for your help. JMS

Mega embassy in Iraq

by Gunther Vogel - 02/26/2008 - 15:02
I would like to hear from both candidates what they plan to do with this white elephant in the Euphratis region once they tackle the withdrawal of the occupation forces. Gunther Vogel, Langlois, Oregon

Good question.

by cho - 02/26/2008 - 18:27
Especially since the focus seems to be so "elsewhere" in these debates!

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