Please remember that you are choosing to read my opinions.

I really want to talk about the third presidental debate, but I don't think I can explain how disappointed I am with the candidates.

I do know that I saw Kerry correct himself from the last debate. Kerry let us know that if he is wrong, he isn't afraid to correct himself. In the last debate, Kerry said that people were losing health care under Bush, but he meant to say heath INSURANCE, and took care to put emphasis on correcting his mistatement. He also made care to say what he meant by "underfunding" the No Child Left Behind act. He took care to say that he didn't FULLY fund No Child Left Behind, which is true. $28 million is a slightly high figure, but I'm glad to hear that Kerry corrected himself.

Bush on the other hand continued to use his misleading figures and exaggerations. He kept refering to Kerry's senate voting record. He says that Kerry voted 98 times for tax increases, and must love how that sounds because, essentially, its full of crap. Factcheck.org, a website that is becoming very useful to kerry apparently, says that:

The health insurance issue is a big issue for Americans who almost constantly rank it as such year after year. There is no doubt that Kerry has the better plan out of the two. Bush was very weak on the healthcare question in this debate. He did make a claim that is completely off base, which was that Kerry's plan is a federally mandated plan. This made the president seem pretty dense, since nothing that Kerry has said or done has suggested it is a goverment overseen plan.

Once again, I must mention what factcheck.org has said:
As I just heard mentioned on Charlie Rose, President Bush tended to amke every question about education. As a higher education student, I'm not all that impressed. With tuition going up and higher education going down, its hard to see where expanding the pell grant to a million people is so great, if its still insufficent. I'm failing to see where the connection is between No Child Left Behind and the loss of jobs due to businesses going overseas. But the president made the connection some how. And what good is sending people back to school if their jobs are going over seas? I think Bush's weak defense of the issue is a clue to the degree in which his interests are more for businesses than people, or it certainly makes it seem that way.

Overall, it seems to me that Bush uses more outright fabrications than Kerry, but both are using a fair share. Yet, when I look at it all, I see that Bush will go more out of his way to hand out false information than Kerry. Kerry's biggest problems have been wording things wrong, and both have used misleading figures when more accurate figures were available. Kerry seems to be the only one willing to go back and make corrections, whilst Bush will say the same things over and over whether they are true or not.

From the second debate, Bush's plans to lower the costs of healthcare seemed to center around a highly questionable study. Most experts disagree that defensive medicine, and liabity lawsuits, drive costs up, and much less than 1% savings would derive from the caps. You can read about that here: http://factcheck.org/article133.html

So, while some people are saying that bush dominated this debate or that debate, we still have to look at the fact he dominated with lies and a lot of beating around the 'bush'. (heh heh).

What are your thoughts on the debates?