Random Thoughts

• The moderators of the three presidential and the one vice presidential debates have been announced. The moderators are from Jim Lehrer of PBS, Bob Schieffer from CBS, and Candy Crowley from CNN with ABC's Martha Raddatz moderating the vice presidential debate. Surely, NBC cannot be pleased from being omitted but the glaring omission is Fox which has higher viewer ratings than CNN. Indeed, in the week of July 30, CNN attracted only 318,000 viewers to its primetime shows. It is also striking that Candy Crowley - who is perhaps the more open minded of the four - made the comment that "some party members" were concerned that the pick of Ryan was an overly doctrinaire "ticket death wish". Although the comment may be true given the wobbliness of moderate republicans, citing unidentified sources is often a cover up of just making things up. • Who is David Axelrod and why is he the democratic attack dog in chief? • I saw a democratic commercial with seniors talking about how Ryan's medicare plan scares them, because they will become worse off. Obviously no one told them that those 55 and older would be exempt from the changes. It reminds me of my late father once telling me to let him know when he became a fool. He said that he was getting all these solicitations seeking to scare him into taking some action since he was 85. Dad said "they must think that I am a fool." But since obviously the solicitations were successful, then there must be a lot of old fools out there so "please tell me when I become a fool." • The scurrilous democratic commercial of the steelworker who blames Romney for his wife's death from cancer has been well documented as being false - even by the Washington Post. One wishes that the republican superPACs would run a commercial with interviews from auto dealers and employees who were shut down by Obama's takeover of Chrysler and General Motors or even better of Delphi whose 20,000 nonunion workers lost their pensions as part of the bail out. • Does anyone really believe Obama anymore? I heard him say in a speech that GM was again number one and was profitable? Really? Toyota is number one. As to profitability, doesn't GM still owe us the taxpayers $25 billion and Ally (GMAC) owes $14.5 billion. Also, GM's stock is trading at $20.40. The government owns 500 million shares of GM. In order to recover just what GM owes us, the stock would have to rise to $53. . Lastly, why is it that only the republicans can tick off the independents? If the republicans ran an "Obama killed my wife" or "Obama is a felon" or "Obama is a tax cheat" commercial they would be vilified for "losing the independents". So why is it that the democrats don't alienate the independents with their attack ads?