Why are there only 2 candidates in the presidential debates?

David Wallechinsky writes:

It’s only natural that the Democratic incumbent, Barack Obama, and the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, should participate in tonight’s first presidential debate, but in fact there are two other candidates who qualified for the ballot in enough states that they could, technically, win the election.

Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party is on the ballot of 48 states and Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party is on 39 state ballots. In a pure democracy it would be considered a given that Johnson and Stein would join Obama and Romney on stage, but in the United States elections don’t work that way. That’s because the three presidential debates are run not by the government, but by a nonprofit organization, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). The CPD was created in 1987 by the Democratic and Republican parties as a bipartisan—rather than a nonpartisan—effort.

The current co-chairmen of the CPD are Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr. and Michael D. McCurry. Fahrenkopf is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, while McCurry was President Bill Clinton’s press secretary. Not surprisingly, Fahrenkopf and McCurry have set a high bar to keep out third party candidates.

To qualify for the debates, candidates must “have demonstrated a level of support of at least 15 percent of the national electorate, as determined by five selected national public opinion polling organizations, using the average of those organizations’ most recent publicly-reported results [as of September 21].” Of course it’s almost impossible to earn the support of 15% of the electorate if you don’t have regular access to network television or to the debates themselves.

For the record, the debates have seven national sponsors: Anheuser-Busch, The Howard G. Buffet Foundation, Sheldon S. Cohen, Crowell & Moring, the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA), The Kovler Fund and Southwest Airlines. There used to be more, but in recent days the YWCA and Philips Electronics have withdrawn their support for the debates over the issue of third party access, as has British advertising firm BBH New York. …

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Romney last faced Jill Stein in a 2002 gubernatorial debate which Massachusetts media later declared Dr. Stein the winner. You can see the video by clicking here.

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It doesn’t mater who won last night’s debates, you lost by accepting a false choice. Would you rather continue to be robbed of your rights, freedoms and money by criminal A or criminal B? The elections are rigged.

- June 2006, A Pottawattamie County, Iowa election official hand counted her ballots and was surprised to find a total entirely different than the results noted on the voting machines. The manufacturer, Election Systems & Software, admitted that it had programmed the machines incorrectly. …

- Boone County, Indiana: 19,000 registered voters, 144,000 votes counted . (Nov. 2003) http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/ 2004/10/22/politics/main650884.shtml

- Tarrant County, Texas: 58,000 votes cast, 158,103 votes counted (Mar. 9, 2006; The Fort-Worth Star-Telegram “Vote spike blamed on program snafu”)

- Allamakee County, Iowa: 300 votes fed into the machine, 4 million votes came out (Nov. 2000; According to the Wall Street Journal, Nov. 17, 2000 “Fuzzy Numbers”)

link to more

Functional Medicine: Nine Steps to Treating Autoimmune Disease

INFLAMMATION IS A “HOT” TOPIC IN MEDICINE. It appears connected to almost every known chronic disease — from heart disease to cancer, diabetes to obesity, autism to dementia, and even depression. Other inflammatory diseases such as allergies, asthma, arthritis, and autoimmune disease are increasing at dramatic rates. As physicians we are trained to shut off inflammation with aspirin, anti-inflammatory medication such as Advil or Motrin, steroids and increasingly more powerful immune suppressing medication with serious side effects. But we are not trained to find and treat the underlying causes of inflammation in chronic disease. Hidden allergens, infections, environmental toxins, an inflammatory diet, and stress are the real causes of these inflammatory conditions.

Autoimmune diseases, specifically, now affect 24 million people and include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease, and more. These are often addressed by powerful immune suppressing medication and not by addressing the cause. That’s like taking a lot of aspirin while you are standing on a tack. The treatment is not more aspirin or a strong immune suppressant, but removing the tack.

It you want to cool off inflammation in the body, you must find the source. Treat the fire, not the smoke. In medicine we are mostly taught to diagnose disease by symptoms, NOT by their underlying cause. Functional medicine, the emerging 21st paradigm of systems medicine teaches us to treat the cause, not only the symptoms, to ask the question WHY are you sick, not only WHAT disease do you have. …

When my patient described how he cured his autoimmune disease by finding and eliminating the causes of inflammation in his diet and environment, it was dismissed as a “spontaneous remission.” In the face of a paradigm-shattering medical case, these docs were hardly curious and quickly dismissive, describing what was shared as anecdotal.

My patient on that panel, a hard-working 46-year old father of three was once so inflamed he could barely function. By treating the underlying causes of his inflammation he is now in vibrant good health, enjoying his life with his kids and fully capable of caring for them.

Stories like these (and the many others I have shared in my blogs, books, and on television) are not anecdotes but a giant compass pointing us in the direction we should be looking to find answers to our health problems.

In today’s blog, I will explain what autoimmunity is, how inflammation spirals out of control, describe some of the underlying causes for these fires in the body, and provide you with nine steps to cool the fires of inflammation and overcome conditions that range from allergies to arthritis and more. …

Nine Steps to Treating Autoimmune Disease

1. Check for hidden infections — yeast, viruses, bacteria, Lyme, etc. — with the help of a doctor, and treat them.
2. Check for hidden food allergens with IgG food testing or just try The UltraSimple Diet, which is designed to eliminate most food allergens.
3. Get tested for celiac disease, which is a blood test that any doctor can do.
4. Get checked for heavy metal toxicity. Mercury and other metals can cause autoimmunity.
5. Fix your gut. For details, see my blog on irritable bowel syndrome.
6. Use nutrients such as fish oil, vitamin C, vitamin D, and probiotics to help calm your immune response naturally.
7. Exercise regularly — it’s a natural anti-inflammatory.
8. Practice deep relaxation like yoga, deep breathing, biofeedback, or massage, because stress worsens the immune response.
9. Tell your doctor about Functional medicine and encourage him or her to get trained — go to www.functionalmedicine.org for more information and to get a copy of the Textbook for Functional Medicine.

Via DrHyman.com

Wait, what’s in that “etc.” as far as hidden infections? Well, I can do some of this stuff…. reminds me to get back to exercising, it has been too long now.

I could also just wait until 2016-17 to see if pig parasite whip worm eggs, compared to a placebo, cured people with the autoimmune disease known as Chron’s.