Debate Petition Delivery
September 24th, 2008 at 4:27 pm | posted by Virginia Simmons
We just got back from delivering our “Just ONE Question” petitions to the NewsHour office in Shirlington, VA, where Jim Lehrer is currently selecting his questions for Friday’s presidential debate. Specifically, we handed all 103,000 signatures over for NewsHour’s Senior Producer of Research, who is accepting them on behalf debate moderator Jim Lehrer.
As you know, only two questions about global poverty have ever been asked in the history of modern presidential debates. Thanks to your efforts, we may get a third. Keep your fingers crossed!
(And don’t worry, we’ll continue to update their office with new signers as they roll in, and as debate particulars may change, so keep sending this online petition along to your friends.)
-Ranna Lanagan
September 24th, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Good job, everyONE !
Those boxes look heavy - heavy with all of our hopes & dreams for a future free of AIDS and extreme poverty.~
Today, tomorrow and ….ALWAYS, FOREVER ONE - debbie
www.mpwn-uganda.org
September 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am
The best way to get real questions asked is to push to open the debates to the other 4 candidates on enough state ballots to win. Ralph Nader, I think, would do the most to end global poverty. His lifelong advocacy and work speaks for itself.
He helped found the Consumer Project on Technology which pushes to help poor countries deal with the AIDs crisis. He helped push for the EPA, to protect the environment. It goes on.
It is sad if the debates get limited to Obama and McCain. It is too hard trying to find the lesser of two evils between them, and we and the world deserve for us to recognize our other choices rather than silence them. With just these two, the debates are little more than pre-arranged speeches on severely limited subjects. So far the media is trying to black out the Nader campaign. They may be dong it to the others too though. Having two parties control everything, even who can debate what, is unconstitutional and very harmful to democracy.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/05/24/MN104738.DTL
September 26th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Screw the other “poor countries” of the world; what about taking care of things here at home in America? How about getting Healthcare under control here first?… How about stemming poverty in the United States first?… Who’s going to come to the aid of America once our society “implodes”; which it’s on the very edge of ecomomically, politically, resource-wise, healthcare-wise, employment-wise, illegal-immigration/iinvasion-wise, militarily, and so on. Let’s get America in propper shape first before helping strangers of the world. C’mon.
September 28th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Concerned American. I think that is both part of Nader’s and the Green Party’s point. We are spending so much money on war, we’re being taxed out of our prosperity. Both Nader and the Green Party propose a socialized health insurance here. The savings taking out the insurance profit incentive, they believe, will actually allow us to cover more people with less money.
Obama’s plan is to create yet another insurance broker, that would take anybody but have no mandates to use it, so it would become like many of the state high risk pools that already exist. They do serve a purpose, but I don’t know that it will really change anything.
McCain wants to extend the tax credit that employers get to individuals, which has its pluses and minuses, but again, like Obama’s plan, it doesn’t address any of the drivers of high cost here.
Mainly, hospitals being able to charge supply and demand, pay or die, or take the credit hit, and insurance profit overhead. The insurance profit is secondary to the out of control medical costs though.
If it was a single payer system, the people would have the ability to negotiate better rates with hospitals and physicians.
October 5th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
In 2008, isn’t the time right for the United States of America to re-focus attentions and resources to aid and assist the needs of our Domestic poor and those in need, and finally begin to give less to those in foreign lands?