The 21st debate in the Democratic race was bound to be a sleeper debate. After a year long bout of debates, whittling down from 8 candidates to 2, many issues had been brought to the forefront and some talked ad nasuem. But the 21st debate in Philadelphia, hosted by ABC and moderated by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (a former Clinton aid) treaded into new territory of yellow journalism.
The two-hour commercial laden event fell well short of even the loosest definition of a debate. Barack Obama with his front-runner status was inundated with a number of right-field questions. If you heard it on the radio you would have thought that Karl Rove penned the questions.Instead of relevant issues that face the Pennsylvania voters, we were left with questions about lapel pins, Bitter-gate, the Reverend Wright, the Weather Underground, and Capital Gains taxes.

For the first 45-50 minutes all the questions were fielded towards Obama and they were formatted in such a way that made you wonder if your cable box accidentally went to FOX News. During this moderator versus candidate format, George and Charlie constantly interrupted Obama, repeated questions over and over, and threw softballs towards Hillary. And in what appears to be even more bias, the audience camera pan hit Chelsea Clinton no less than seven times, but no Obama surrogates were focused upon.In the end it looked like a live swiftboating was in progress. While Obama did his best to fend off the onslaught, including some cheap jabs by Hillary, he was a bit taken back from the onslaught. He still stood tall and came off as unscathed as one could.
There was some relevant news from the debate. It seems that Hillary wouldn’t mind going into a full-bore war against any aggressor of Israel (or other countries). She also blew one of her Superdelegate talking points that Obama could not win against Obama as she stated “yes, yes, yes he can win”. Obama also clearly stated that he felt the 2nd amendment was an individual right.

ABC performed a terrible disservice to the people of Pennsylvania and America. With tactics that would make the RNC blush, they plunged into tabloid innuendo and old stories. There was very little talk on policy so for those undecided voters who cared about policy issues they will have to rely on websites and stump speeches to help them form their final opinion. One thing is for certain this debate was quite possibly the worst televised debate ever.

 We’re finally back at home and a little “settled in”, well as much as can be. So I started to sort through some of the photos I took of Kian and found these in the collection:

 It’s now time to welcome Kian Marshall Paris to the family. Born April 10th, 2008 at 10:32am he weighed in at 8lbs. 5oz., was 20″ long.