commonsensesd.org

This is more a Call to Action than a typical commentary.

We need your video responses, even if you have nothing to say other than “I support open debates”! That’s fine. Anything is better than silence.

We also need to write Google, Obama, and McCain expressing our demand for Nader to be in the debate, along with any other candidate who reaches 5 percent or more in the polls. Pressure Obama not to slink away from a debate which promises to be more democratic than the CPD debates. Call him out on this one.

Below are the entities you need to contact followed by part of a long-winded article I wrote which continues on my website.

Google, Inc.
Ginny Hunt - Google Elections Program Manager
Eric Schmidt - Google CEO
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
(650) 253-0000

Obama Campaign:

Obama for America
P.O. Box 8102
Chicago, IL 60680
(866) 675-2008

McCain Campaign:

John McCain 2008
P.O. Box 16118
Arlington, VA 22215
(703) 418-2008

http://www.neworleanstownhall.org
Click “contact us” in the bottom right corner and request that Nader be allowed in the Google debate.

http://www.opendebates.org
Click “Your Role” at the top and sign the petition to replace the CPD with a non-partisan, Citizen’s Debate Commission that will allow Independent and third-party candidates to be included.

Google is scheduled to hold a debate independent of the corporate Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). This is possibly our one and only chance to get Obama and McCain to debate Ralph Nader and any other third-party or independent candidate running for the presidency. We must pressure Google to lower their requirements to 5% before this opportunity is lost. While using exclusionary tactics to silence opposition, these two major parties seem to think that freedom, a term they both speak highly of, means having power for yourself at the expense of others.

In 1992, independent candidate Ross Perot, who was polling at 7-9 percent, was included in the debates at the request of George H.W. Bush, who made Perot’s inclusion a precondition for his own participation. Under current CPD requirements of 15 percent, Perot wouldn’t have been admitted today.

In 1996, Bob Dole proposed that if Perot were kept out of the debates he would allow the Clinton campaign to decide the terms of the event. Clinton agreed. George Stephanopolous, senior advisor to Clinton at the time, took pride in the undemocratic deal between the two candidates, explaining: “As long as we would agree to Perot not being in it, we could get everything else we wanted going in. We got our time frame, we got…”

read the rest of this article here:
http://www.jwharrison.com/blog/2008/08/11/an-appeal-to-democrats-and-republicans-%E2%80%93-open-the-debates/
much thanks to Blue Gal for the narration
http://bgalrstate.blogspot.com/

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Duration : 0:6:10

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