Unlike this weekends Republican debate I am somewhat curious about tonight’s Democratic debate, though I will probably not watch the entire thing too in-depth. The only big reason I have interest, obviously, is because Obama & Edwards look ready to pounce on Clinton.

The Democrats seem like a party not ready to ever learn from its mistakes or at the very least learn the wrong lessons from them. After watching the primary season of 2004 in which Democrats bashed the daylights out of one another and gave Republicans a boatload of ammunition, I thought this election cycle the Dems might learn from the Republicans, pick a consensus candidate and move onto building up a national movement. Well, I seemed wrong in that thinking.

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I don’t mean to rip another blog, especially Huffington Pos which I read every day and enjoy alongside Drudge (the two fill in the holes of the other) but I did want to comment on something. Right now if you visit the page you see this headline:

It reads “Exclusive Caught on Tape: Clinton Rips Murdoch WSJ Deal”

The problem? The actual article it points to says no such thing. Bill Clinton actually rips the WSJ Editorial Board, thats true, but he actually says he told a friend he would support the deal as long as Murdoch doesn’t turn the non-editorial board part of the paper into a right-leaning machine. His premise was that the WSJ editorial board was even more right-wing than Murdoch alone could ever make it, so there would be no difference, just that the actual reporters themselves always did a good job of being fair and Clinton wants that tradition to continue.

Huffington Post has had an obvious slant toward Barack Obama for the last few months digging as far as they can to portray Clinton as poorly as possible and Obama as favorably as possible. Which is really odd as Drudge, whom in many ways was largely responsible for the evolution of the coverage of the Lewinsky scandal, is pretty balanced on Clinton printing a fairly even mix of positive and negative news (though not so positive about Obama.)

I personally have been tuff on Obama because frankly he keeps making some pretty large errors and has made more in the last few months that the media seemed to give him a pass on because he was starting. It is one thing to point out flaws and it is also one thing to pick a side and want to fight for it. It is a whole other thing when you mislead ESPECIALLY about an article dealing with keeping the news accurate and fair.

I just thought that headline in particular was blatantly misleading and was worth pointing out.

From USA Today it appears Senator Hillary Clinton has moved up eight points to 48%, Obama moved down two to 22% Edwards is at 12%.

“People are seeing her as the one ready to be president,” Mark Penn, Clinton’s chief strategist, told Susan. Bill Burton, Obama’s spokesman, dismissed the findings. “National polls may go up and down before people actually start voting, but their irrelevance will not,” he said.

I WOULD like to add with those quotes that if there is a shift at some point in polling it will be nice to see how they change. I could quickly see Clinton switching to the “polls don’t matter” camp while Obama turned to the “polls mean everything” camp.

The Swamp find Giuliani relating his plan for combatting rising Health Care costs to Plasma screen tests:

“Plasma TVs. Gosh, they used to cost $15,000. They now cost $2,000. Or the TV’s that used to cost $3,000 or $4,000. They now cost $200 or $300. How did they get driven down in price?” Giuliani asked the group rhetorically on Sunday.

“They didn’t get driven down in price by lower quality. The quality’s higher. They got driven down in price because millions and millions of people bought them. And then, the people who made them realize that we can price the product much lower, but if we sell a lot of them, we make more money. That’s not happening with our health care,” he said.

Though he says he’ll release more details in the next few months, Giuliani’s says his plan is aimed at a broad middle—an estimated 45 million Americans who make too much money to be covered by Medicaid and earn too little to be covered by an employer-sponsored insurance policy or afford one on their own.

Not to sound like a skeptic but under this logic why am I paying $4 for a bottle of 24 Advil’s which is basically a mild pain reliever thats been around for quite awhile and used by millions of people and bought in bulk by hospitals all over the nation? Shouldn’t Advil cost like, a cent or two a pill instead of sixteen cents and shouldn’t it be going down in price every year instead of up like TV’s do?

We know a large percentage of costs associated with health care already are administrative costs which include advertising to stay competitive? If everyone is fighting to get you to buy into their private program wouldn’t that raise the cost of advertising & overall marketing?

I have been reading the Health Care plans of the candidates and I have written pretty detailed posts about Obama’s & Clinton’s. Last week Rudy Giuliani started talking about his so I wanted to note why I haven’t done the same for the Republican former mayor as I have for the two Democratic Senators.

Frankly the Giuliani plan had almost no details other than he wouldn’t give you Universal Health Care, wouldn’t figure out what to do with the uninsured BUT would provide tax incentives for individuals to deduct the cost of private plans with the idea that Americans seeking private insurance would take the burden off of employers.

The problem is he provided no information on how he would fund such a system.

Now I have been and will continue to be critical of the enormous price tags that will result from the Edwards & Obama plans but as Media Matters points out some reporting has gone after the Dem plans as big government spending machines but have ignored the price tag and the lack of explanation of a Giuliani plan. The Democrats on the other hand have indicated they would roll back the Bush tax plans as one way of paying for theirs. The problem is they also have other plans on how to spend that money and the numbers don’t entirely add up.

In short there is little substance to the Giuliani plan which is why I haven’t written more.