I have enjoyed watching this year’s presidential (and vice-presidential) debates, but I also find it very frustrating. Why define rules and ask questions if there are no real repercussions in the debate itself for ignoring both to harp on your own talking points? (See Figure 1.) Thinking about it today, I decided that there’s just got to be a better way to get candidates to follow the rules and serve us before serving themselves.

And so, I submit to you The Debating Game (rejected name: “Broodsport”). Here are a few simple rules meant to encourage tougher questioning and harder thinking.

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I’m not a fan of Christopher Hitchens, who is a supporter of disastrous American foreign military policy, and a divisive and intolerant ass in matters of religion and organized atheism. But I have to give him props: When he implied that waterboarding is not torture, and critics suggested he try it, he took them up on it—and changed his tune pretty quickly. Too bad our politicians don’t have the guts to do what a writer volunteered for. (I’ll leave it to you whether that refers to the “simulated” drowning or just admitting a mistake.)

Update: A video of Hitchens’s waterboarding, and the whole article in Vanity Fair.

If you’ve been with us awhile, you might remember that I’ve ranted a bit before about Shepard Fairey’s “obey” product line. His “Andre the Giant has a posse” and “Obey Giant” stickers started as a funky art project and grew into a guerilla marketing campaign for a clothing line sold through overpriced urban boutiques.

From an visually aesthetic standpoint, I’ve always enjoyed his art style, and so it has kind of bugged me that he has billed his work as politically subversive, encouraging reflection on speech and oppression. (Seriously, see quotes from the post linked above.) It’s really hard to make a “power to the people” claim when “the people” need to find a specialty store and shell out fifty bucks for the right to wear your political art in public—especially when plenty of the pieces in your clothing line feature no discernible visual or textual statements beyond a tiny “Obey” label over the pocket that might as well say “Stüssy” or “Volcom” for all that its fashion-conscious wearers care.

And this is why I am glad that Shepard Fairey is going legit.

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In 2008, you will kneel before Zod. Make sure to scroll down to see press clippings and real reader questions that illustrate how the General stands on the issues:

Q. Do you agree with George Will that Harriet Miers was a weak choice for nomination to the Supreme Court? Also do you support Supreme Court justices that will strictly interpret the Constitution or will you choose justices that have a more lenient view? — Justin A. The Constitution is in writing — can you all not read? Surely there is nothing that requires meddling, wasteful interpretation. You humans will concentrate on your work and cease your struggles to become media darlings for the sake of some futile cause. From time to time I will override the Constitution, and that will be quite black-and-white. You shall trust your ruler.

(Link via Hipster, Please!)

I recently said that our government makes me sick because it is strategically deploying our soldiers for just a day short of what would yield educational benefits promised to them under our own law. This is precisely why some people join the military. I think it is reprehensible to do this to our soldiers, especially for those who accused war protesters of not “supporting our troops.”

Still, after I wrote that, I felt like “sick” might come across as a strong word to some. So, I just wanted to make a brief point of clarification. I’m still pleased that I don’t live in Pakistan, whose government just “executed a nationwide crackdown on the political opposition, the news media and the courts, one day after President Pervez Musharraf imposed emergency rule and suspended the constitution,” according to the Washington Post. I don’t know the whole story behind this, but it’s been suggested that this is largely a bid to extend and retain presidential powers, more so than an actual response to “extremists.”

I am glad we still have a constitution, an occasionally feisty news media, and a generally reliable court system. If something like that happened here, I would have to find stronger words than “sick” to describe my feelings.

But you know, with so much of our money going to our military budget, I still think some more of that ought to be spent on fulfilling the promises we make to the people we send into wars they may have never asked for.

Soldiers are being deployed for exactly 729 days at a time, one day short of qualifying them for educational benefits under the GI bill.

If you’re not familiar with Digg, it’s a site that works like this: people submit stories from around the web, and other Digg users vote on them. The more popular the story gets, the more prominent it gets. There are other similar sites, like Reddit, but Digg is among the most popular, able to drive vast amounts of traffic that often seems to overpower many sites. Getting dugg can be both a boon and a curse to a webmaster.

Yesterday, someone leaked the cryptographic code (a 32 digit hexadecimal number) that can be used to decode content on high definition HD-DVD discs, making it possible to essentially rip HD-DVDs, something which has long been possible with conventional DVDs. The story made it to Digg, where it was subsequently removed by the administrators at the behest of the HD-DVD advisory group, who considered the story to be infringing on their intellectual property rights (the HD-DVD people have also threatened legal action on other sites that contain the number).

Unfortunately, while this may have seemed like a logical step for the HD-DVD folks to take, it was also frankly, pretty darn stupid.

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Emily may have outdone herself on this one, coming up with her two best ideas ever in just one blog post:

1. Make a parody site for Facebook that critiques politicians relationships’ and activities, thus educating through ruthless mockery.

2. Plus, the following sound bite alone should be enough to secure her immortality: “Facebook is the social networking equivalent of watching your friends do their taxes—voyeuristic yet utterly uninteresting.”

I find her proposed project interesting because it is sort of bizarre but in a way that actually offers useful information in an amusing way and a sort of youth-culture vernacular. Plus, I am curious which politicians would list each other as poke buddies.

The man who brought down Saddam’s statue says: “I really regret bringing down the statue. The Americans are worse than the dictatorship. Every day is worse than the previous day.”

It appears that that bastion of neutrality, Switzerland, accidentally invaded neighboring Liechtenstein yesterday.

I picture it being kind of like that scene in The Boondock Saints where the brothers MacManus, having just decimated a room full of mobsters after falling through an air vent and getting tangled in a rope, find themselves dumbfounded.

Murphy: That was way easier than I thought it would be. Connor: Aye. Murphy: On TV you always have that guy that jumps over the sofa… Connor: And then you’ve got to shoot at him for ten fucking minutes. Murphy: We’re good. Connor: Yes, we are.

You never know: now that Switzerland realizes what it’s been missing all these years, who knows what’s next? Maybe they’ll sneak up the French border and grab Luxembourg. Oh march down to Mediterranean and take out Monaco? We need one of those maps they had in WWII propaganda films, only instead of a swastika taking over Europe, it’ll be like, I dunno, chocolate and cheese.

Crap, imagine if they started adding guns to their Swiss Army Knives? They’d be unstoppable.