Talk Back: Reactions to the VP Debate
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| Thu, 10-02-2008 - 5:14pm |
Hi everyone --
We wanted to get your reaction to the Vice Presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin. Did you watch? What did you think -- and who do you consider the winner? Were there any surprises? Tell us what you considered to be the highlights, the low points and everything in between.
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Thanks for your input!
Caryn Stein
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Interesting poll on whether Palin is qualified to be President. Half say no!
http://www.pbs.org/cgi-registry/poll/poll.pl
"So, is the Palin poll now "scientific"? Absolutely not. It is still subject to large scale efforts on the left and the right to mobilize people to vote. The poll has become something of a Rorschach test, a tiny political marker in a tightly contested race. Over the past two weeks, the results of the poll see-sawed back and forth from a majority saying "No" to a majority saying, "Yes". At the moment the single-voter system was implemented, it was close to a tie: 50% say Sarah Palin is qualified to serve as Vice President, and 48% say no. Those results, in my view, are actually a measure of the mobilization and manipulation efforts by partisans on both sides. Now it will be all about mobilization, and less about manipulation. Blogs on the left and right are circulating viral emails with the exact address of the poll."
Obama tried to not respond to McCain's ads, as he wanted to keep the campaign focused on the issues instead of personalities. He has finally started fighting back.
Funny...I have heard a lot
LMAO...Her favorite?
Tanking?
I always urge everyone to consider the source of any given bit of news or fact. However, the source - ANY source - of a given claim doesn't automatically, categorically invalidate the possibility of its accuracy. I'd guess that not many people here find the National Enquirer to be a reliable source of news or facts....and yet they were not only the first with the story earlier this summer about the John Edwards affair, they had it correct, too.
What's significant is when people who would object to or attempt to refute a given claim or fact have nothing BUT impugning the source as a means to do so. That's quite different from actually refuting the claims of the source, and then going further to say that the reason such claims are inaccurate is that the source is biased. I recently posted a thread which listed lies in a Rush Limbaugh monologue. But I didn't say - then or at any other time - that Limbaugh CAN'T EVER be right, only that he's often provably either wrong or lying or both....which makes him biased. But the reason for including all the specific refutation (which was actually done by MediaMatters) is that it demonstrates a) that Limbaugh was wrong in this case, and b) it lends credence to the notion that he's in the tank for the GOP....but NOT that he's NEVER right, which is what you do when you attempt to dismiss a claim or a fact by impugning the source without bothering to refute the claim with evidence. Doing it that way shows either intellectual laziness (in not wanting to do the legwork involved in actually disproving the claim they're so sure is false), intellectual dishonesty (in suspecting that it probably IS true, but lying to not only others about it, but also themselves), or intellectual cowardice (by operating on the theory that if they just tell everyone including themselves that the claim just COULDN'T be true simply because of where it was reported, then maybe that'll magically make it so), or some mixture of all three of them. Only you can decide what mixture of these three applies to you in this case.
Though, on a final note, it's interesting to observe that so far in this thread, you've dismissed TPM out of hand, and claimed that a WaPo article doesn't say....what it does say. Elsewhere in current threads, you've dismissed NPR out of hand, and tried to do so with dKos (even though what I quoted out of there was only opinion, not fact - I just thought it was well-said opinion, which was why I quoted it). It's starting to seem as if you've got a pretty small list of "approved sources." Or perhaps that list just tends to vary depending upon whether they're saying something which agrees with the conclusions you've already drawn about the world.
Again spoken like a true liberal.
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