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Health & Fitness

The Presidential Debate You Haven't Heard About - Johnson, Goode, Stein and Anderson

Four Third-Party Presidential candidates you may not have heard about will debate on next Tuesday night over a live-streamed You Tube presentation moderated by Larry King.

A fourth debate of Presidential candidates will be held on Tuesday, October 23  in Chicago.  Four Presidential candidates will be present – Gary Johnson, Virgil Goode, Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson.  Each is a candidate for President on a line
other than Democrat or Republican.  They will appear, individually, on more than half of the Presidential ballots in the United States.  Who are these people?

Gary Johnson is running on the Libertarian Party line.  Virgil Goode is the candidate of the Constitution Party.  Jill Stein is the Green Party candidate  and Rocky Anderson is the candidate of the Justice Party.

Johnson is currently asking the court to allow him in the final debate between Romney and Obama on October 22 based on his being on the ballot in at least 48 of the states.  He is a two-term Governor of New Mexico.  He opposes gun control, the Patriot Act and government-managed healthcare.  He would eliminate the IRS and impose a 23% national sales tax.  He claims to have a 5% share of support in polls that is not reported.

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Goode, on the Constitution Party line, is on the ballot in 26 states.  He is a former 6-term Congressman from Virginia who first ran as a Democrat and switched to the Republican Party.   As an immigration hard-liner and an Obama birth-certificate skeptic, he is seen mainly as a threat, or spoiler, for Romney in Virginia where there have been unsuccessful Republican efforts to remove him from the ballot.

Jill Stein on the Green Party line is a Harvard-educated physician.  She entered politics in 2002 by running against Romney for the Massachusetts Governor job.  She claims to be on 85%  of the ballots across the country.  Stein is considered  a concern for Democrats with the  'Green New Deal'  platform which combines solutions for climate change with economic improvements through job creation and financial regulation.

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Rocky Anderson  on the Justice Party line is a former two-term Mayor of Salt Lake City. Utah.  Although a generally conservative state, he was a progressive Mayor.  He champions LGBT rights, environmental sustainability and was in opposition to the Iraq War.

The Debate among these 4 third-party candidates will be moderated by Larry King, formerly of CNN.  It will be live-streamed on You Tube starting at 9 pm EST using questions from the Obama/Romney debate of the night before as well as additional questions asked by King.  While none of these candidates has a serious chance of winning, it doesn’t mean they can have no impact.  It is useful to remember that Ralph Nadar won 1% of the Florida vote in 2004 which, many feel, resulted in Gore losing the state to Bush.     

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