I already know who John McCain and Barrack Obama are, what they stand for, and what they plan to do. I didn’t need to watch the debate. And I believe if our electorate was well informed by our mainstream corporate media, they wouldn’t need to watch the debate, either. They would have already made up their minds that four more years of of ideologically unsound, incompetent and corrupt Republican administration of our federal government was simply unacceptable:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Preparations for a biological attack and repeated outbreaks of food poisoning have interfered with efforts by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to improve the safety of fresh produce, according to a report released on Friday.

The agency is also unclear on what it plans to do to shape up, the Government Accountability Office said.

“While FDA has considered fresh produce safety a priority for many years, resource constraints and other work — including counterterrorism efforts and unplanned events such as foodborne illness outbreaks — have caused FDA to delay key produce safety activities,” the GAO report reads. […]

The fresh produce industry has indicated it would welcome stronger regulation, especially after outbreaks of Salmonella carried by peppers from Mexico and that sickened 1,400 people from April to August of this year and an E. coli epidemic in 2006, traced to California spinach, that killed three.

What have Republicans and their lobbyist friends given us these last eight years? Billions in tax breaks for Big Oil. Billions gouged from Americans by Big Pharma. Billions promised for Wall Street after they defanged the regulators that might have been able to prevent this economic crisis in the first place. Billions already paid to Halliburton, KBR and every Defense contractor, big or small you can think of and poured down that unending toilet otherwise known as the occupation of Iraq.

And what have we, the little people who pay our taxes, received for all this largesse dispensed on Republican campaign contributors and multinational corporations like so much manna from heaven? An FDA that can’t insure the safety of our food supply, for one thing. A country more susceptible to biological attack than it was the day George Bush swaggered into office and handed the control of federal agencies to ideologues and lobbyists.

But, hey, if you need to watch the debates to figure this stuff out, dear undecided voters, or to make yourself feel more comfortable voting for the liberal, elitist, big guvmint supporting black guy who “just doesn’t understand” stuff, well knock yourself out.

Update [2008-9-27 10:51:57 by Steven D]: Here’s another good example of why no one should even be considering electing another conservative ideologue to be President (as if anyone really needs one).

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down.

As Duncan Black rightly points out “voluntary regulation” is an oxymoron only a Republican moron could dream up, much less implement as the official policy of our government.