The UWS Mission

Presidential debates are for selling the candidate to viewers at close range,  and promising policy changes with which will make everything all right.

For candidates, it's a high-risk, low reward affair, with few prospects for altering election outcomes. The one exception being Nixon's disastrous, televised 1960 sweat-fest - a contrast to the cool and collected JFK.

While candidates and their handlers fret about blowing it with the red light on, media execs are grateful for the occasion to satiate advertisers and chase demographics Washington Post

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward. Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in A Science Fictional Universe

Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them. FDR

In Presidential elections, every candidate has their defining moment.

Campaign 2012 carries echoes of 1988 - and 1968.

First 1988. Before there was Sarah Palin, there was Dan Quayle.

An epic moment of political theater, in an election fast on the way to taking its place among the annals of great Dem defeats. The last election prior to the party's co-opting by its neoliberal center – though many already considered Lloyd Bentsen of Texas to be the party's grand concession in that direction. A Hail Mary heave by the flagging Dukakis campaign to pry Texas' 38 electoral votes away from George H.W. Bush.

Occupiers from around the nation return to the scene of the crime – dissent - flocking back to Zuccotti for the first anniversary of Occupy, aka S17. Demonstrators briefly take the Park back, with hundreds streaming in prior to the day's beginning dailykos

In a case with wide-ranging implications, Twitter has until Friday to turn over the tweets of protester Malcolm Harris. Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino rules the company must do so or else face fines, based on a review of its last two earnings statements. Huffpost