So where's the Presidential Debate Thread?

[DaShi]

The narrative the administration tried to spin wrt the Benghazi attack can't be separated from the stream of incompetence that flowed from this incident. Sticking to the protest gone wild meme in the face of evidence to the contrary was the equivalent of Bush claiming that no terrorist attack occured on 9/11 just a series of mechanical failiures on aircraft.CNN’s Candy Crowley: Mitt Romney ‘right in the main’ about Libya

However you are correct that it should not have been the main thrust of the attack on that point. I would have hammered him on Joe's claim that the admin didn't know about the need for more security at the Benghazi consulate despite sworn testimony to the contrary and the fact it had been attacked twice in the months leading up to the final assault on 9/11.

I knew I should have just followed the sound of backpedaling.

[DaShi]

Interesting comments from the people there:

Debate questioner voting for Obama
By: Kevin Robillard
October 17, 2012 11:01 AM EDT

The presidential debate on Tuesday helped one undecided questioner from the audience make up her mind.

Susan Katz, who asked GOP nominee Mitt Romney how he would operate differently than former President George W. Bush, said Wednesday she is going to vote for President Barack Obama.

(PHOTOS: Whose debate is it anyway?)

“I think [Obama] has matured tremendously,” Katz said on CNN. “There’s no question that we expected more from him. I voted for him the first time, I had great hopes for him. I’m disappointed, and when and I got the phone call from the Gallup poll, I was truly, truly undecided. … I saw in President Obama someone who has ripened with time. He deserves another four years to see his vision through.”

Katz said she was disappointed Romney decided to go back to attack the president instead of immediately answering her question.

“I was disappointed that the governor chose to first rebut what the president had been saying prior to my question being addressed to him,” Katz said. “That seems to be his style. I found that disappointing. I thought the governor did a good job of laying out some ways he would function differently than President Bush had. Basically, throughout the night, I found it disconcerting that the governor needed to control things. That was a problem for me, and that was evident in the way he first answered my question.”

Before answering her question, Romney addressed a point Obama had made about contraceptives. Katz said she thought Obama was someone “who listens instead of speaks.”

Meanwhile, the college student who asked the first question at the debate didn’t disclose his choice, but said he made up his mind — and said Romney’s answer had a spiritual element.

“Well, Mitt Romney’s first answer, I felt like he was staring into my soul, just right through me when he was answering my question,” Adelphi University student Jeremy Epstein said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “I felt like — he offered me a job five minutes into the debate. I felt like his answer was sincere. When the president came up, he started out by saying my future’s bright. I feel like they both were very sincere.”

Epstein, who is studying exercise science, asked the candidates to “reassure me, but more importantly my parents, that I will be able to sufficiently support myself after I graduate.” Both candidates responded by talking about decreasing the cost of college and improving the job market.

Epstein said he “thinks he made a decision” on who to vote for after the debate, but wouldn’t share it with a national television audience.

“I think it should wait until Election Day,” he said.

Kerry Ladka, whose question about who denied requests for additional security in Libya wasn’t directly answered, told the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple the president addressed his question during a post-debate scrum.

“After the debate, the president came over to me and spent about two minutes with me privately,” Ladka said, adding the president told him he delayed forcefully labeling the Benghazi incident a terrorist attack because he wanted to ensure the “intelligence he was acting on was real intelligence and not disinformation.” Ladka also said the president couldn’t release the names of who rejected the request because “releasing the individual names of anyone in the State Department would really put them at risk.”

Ladka said he is still undecided.

Katherine Fenton, who asked Romney and Obama about the pay gap between men and women, said neither candidate actually answered her question.

“I can’t say I felt my question was answered by either candidate explicitly,” she said on MSNBC. “I was trying to elicit a response about what plans they would have for the future that would try to rectify these inequalities, and I feel like rather than that response, I got more of either a diversion to a different discussion or a laundry list of things they have already done for women.”

Obama cited the Lily Ledbetter Act, and Mitt Romney mentioned his record of hiring women as governor of Massachusetts, prompting the now-viral “binders full of women” remark.

Fenton said she is still undecided.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=9F6EB616-0A6D-4230-AB0E-0F9968DBA80E

[DaShi]

Interesting comments from the people there:

Debate questioner voting for Obama
By: Kevin Robillard
October 17, 2012 11:01 AM EDT

The presidential debate on Tuesday helped one undecided questioner from the audience make up her mind.

Susan Katz, who asked GOP nominee Mitt Romney how he would operate differently than former President George W. Bush, said Wednesday she is going to vote for President Barack Obama.

(PHOTOS: Whose debate is it anyway?)

“I think [Obama] has matured tremendously,” Katz said on CNN. “There’s no question that we expected more from him. I voted for him the first time, I had great hopes for him. I’m disappointed, and when and I got the phone call from the Gallup poll, I was truly, truly undecided. … I saw in President Obama someone who has ripened with time. He deserves another four years to see his vision through.”

Katz said she was disappointed Romney decided to go back to attack the president instead of immediately answering her question.

“I was disappointed that the governor chose to first rebut what the president had been saying prior to my question being addressed to him,” Katz said. “That seems to be his style. I found that disappointing. I thought the governor did a good job of laying out some ways he would function differently than President Bush had. Basically, throughout the night, I found it disconcerting that the governor needed to control things. That was a problem for me, and that was evident in the way he first answered my question.”

Before answering her question, Romney addressed a point Obama had made about contraceptives. Katz said she thought Obama was someone “who listens instead of speaks.”

Meanwhile, the college student who asked the first question at the debate didn’t disclose his choice, but said he made up his mind — and said Romney’s answer had a spiritual element.

“Well, Mitt Romney’s first answer, I felt like he was staring into my soul, just right through me when he was answering my question,” Adelphi University student Jeremy Epstein said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown.” “I felt like — he offered me a job five minutes into the debate. I felt like his answer was sincere. When the president came up, he started out by saying my future’s bright. I feel like they both were very sincere.”

Epstein, who is studying exercise science, asked the candidates to “reassure me, but more importantly my parents, that I will be able to sufficiently support myself after I graduate.” Both candidates responded by talking about decreasing the cost of college and improving the job market.

Epstein said he “thinks he made a decision” on who to vote for after the debate, but wouldn’t share it with a national television audience.

“I think it should wait until Election Day,” he said.

Kerry Ladka, whose question about who denied requests for additional security in Libya wasn’t directly answered, told the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple the president addressed his question during a post-debate scrum.

“After the debate, the president came over to me and spent about two minutes with me privately,” Ladka said, adding the president told him he delayed forcefully labeling the Benghazi incident a terrorist attack because he wanted to ensure the “intelligence he was acting on was real intelligence and not disinformation.” Ladka also said the president couldn’t release the names of who rejected the request because “releasing the individual names of anyone in the State Department would really put them at risk.”

Ladka said he is still undecided.

Katherine Fenton, who asked Romney and Obama about the pay gap between men and women, said neither candidate actually answered her question.

“I can’t say I felt my question was answered by either candidate explicitly,” she said on MSNBC. “I was trying to elicit a response about what plans they would have for the future that would try to rectify these inequalities, and I feel like rather than that response, I got more of either a diversion to a different discussion or a laundry list of things they have already done for women.”

Obama cited the Lily Ledbetter Act, and Mitt Romney mentioned his record of hiring women as governor of Massachusetts, prompting the now-viral “binders full of women” remark.

Fenton said she is still undecided.

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=9F6EB616-0A6D-4230-AB0E-0F9968DBA80E

[regexcellent]

[Asher]

http://www.amazon.com/Avery-Economy-Binder-1-Inch-Round/product-reviews/B000V99JYI/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

[Hauldren Collider]

The binders full of women thing is only really funny out of context and it's already gotten old

[Tupac Shakur]

Interesting comments from the people there:

Presidential debate: Libya questioner says Obama didn’t answer
By Erik Wemple

Kerry Ladka stood before President Obama at last night’s town hall-style debate and asked the question that would touch off an onstage verbal brawl and, later, an intense national discussion. Here’s how it went:

Q: It’s Kerry, Kerry Ladka.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Great to see you here.

Q: This question actually comes from a brain trust of my friends at Global Telecom Supply in Mineola yesterday. We were sitting around talking about Libya, and we were reading and became aware of reports that the State Department refused extra security for our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to the attacks that killed four Americans. Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?

Was Ladka satisfied with how the president responded? Simply no. “I really didn’t think he totally answered the question satisfactorily as far as I was concerned,” Ladka tells the Erik Wemple Blog.

Jeez, what about the president’s response could possibly have disappointed Ladka? Was it the fact that he started out with a canned talking point, inserted, perhaps, in the hope that the audience will forget the question? Here’s the first part of Obama’s response:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, let me, first of all, talk about our diplomats, because they serve all around the world and do an incredible job in a very dangerous situation. And these aren’t just representatives of the United States; they’re my representatives. I send them there, oftentimes into harm’s way. I know these folks, and I know their families. So nobody’s more concerned about their safety and security than I am.

Or was it the next part of the president’s response, when he goes bureaucratic, explaining his three-pronged set of instructions to his staff? And since no response in a presidential debate is complete without an attack on your opponent, Obama was careful to then point out that Romney had politicized the tragedy in Benghazi.

Now, Governor Romney had a very different response. While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release trying to make political points. And that’s not how a commander in chief operates. You don’t turn national security into a political issue, certainly not right when it’s happening.

That was all by the way of not answering the question Ladka had placed before him. The president’s clear intent to sidestep Ladka’s inquiry might have prompted activist moderator Candy Crowley to say, Hey, how ‘bout an answer, Mr. President?

She didn’t, and the conversation careened toward a clash over whether the president had given the country a timely admission that Benghazi was a terrorist attack.

President Obama, though, wasn’t done with Kerry Ladka. “After the debate, the president came over to me and spent about two minutes with me privately,” says the 61-year-old Ladka, who works at Global Telecom Supply in Mineola, N.Y. According to Ladka, Obama gave him ”more information about why he delayed calling the attack a terrorist attack.” For background, Obama did apparently lump Benghazi into a reference to “acts of terror” in a Sept. 12 Rose Garden address. However, he spent about two weeks holding off on using the full “terrorist” designation. The rationale for the delay, Obama explained to Ladka, was to make sure that the “intelligence he was acting on was real intelligence and not disinformation,” recalls Ladka.

As to Ladka’s question about who turned down the Benghazi security requests and why, Obama reportedly told him that “releasing the individual names of anyone in the State Department would really put them at risk,” Ladka says.

Obama’s retail politics left an impression on Ladka:”I appreciate his private answer more than his public answer,” he says. Spoken like a very genuine undecided voter, Ladka says he wasn’t impressed with Romney’s response to the Libya matter, either.

“I like Obama very much but I am very impressed with Romney’s business background,” says Ladka, who’s not saying in which direction he's leaning. Didn’t someone out there say these debates make no difference?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/post/presidential-debate-libya-questioner-says-obama-didnt-answer/2012/10/17/7109898e-1867-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_blog.html

[Asher]

The binders full of women thing is only really funny out of context and it's already gotten old

It's funny out of context and it was insulting to women in context. It was a really dumb thing to say no matter how you frame it.

And if you try to tell me it's not insulting, I encourage you to re-read it and utilize the powers of inference.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Come on, HC. You're better than that old chestnut.

Unfortunately he isn't

[SlowwHand]

Interesting comments from the people there:



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...6a4b_blog.html

It IS interesting. At the very least, he didn't answer the question, publically. This was advertised as a public debate. At the worst, he's full of ****.
My opinion is that it's the latter, to include the former.

[Hauldren Collider]

Come on, HC. You're better than that old chestnut.

Obama's a very good speechwriter, he gives good speeches, but he's actually just not that good off the cuff. Hence the teleprompter comment.

[Hauldren Collider]

It's funny out of context and it was insulting to women in context. It was a really dumb thing to say no matter how you frame it.

And if you try to tell me it's not insulting, I encourage you to re-read it and utilize the powers of inference.

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

Please bold the part that is insulting and explain why it is insulting.

[giblets]

If you can't see it you're beyond help.

[SlowwHand]

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women's groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

I was proud of the fact that after I staffed my Cabinet and my senior staff, that the University of New York in Albany did a survey of all 50 states, and concluded that mine had more women in senior leadership positions than any other state in America.

Now one of the reasons I was able to get so many good women to be part of that team was because of our recruiting effort. But number two, because I recognized that if you're going to have women in the workforce that sometimes you need to be more flexible. My chief of staff, for instance, had two kids that were still in school. She said, I can't be here until 7 or 8 o'clock at night. I need to be able to get home at 5 o'clock so I can be there for making dinner for my kids and being with them when they get home from school. So we said fine. Let's have a flexible schedule so you can have hours that work for you.

Please bold the part that is insulting and explain why it is insulting.

Let's put this in perspective you might grasp. Your assumption would be that he makes $300 an hour and she makes$ 25. You discount the reverse being true.
So not only physiologically might you be wrong, but monetarily as well.

[regexcellent]

If you can't see it you're beyond help.

I guess I'm beyond help too.