Fetterman
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@LuFins-Dad said in Fetterman:
Like a Senate Chamber or a committee meeting?
Mr. Oz has raised legitimate concerns. If Mr. Fetterman’s communication skills have not yet recovered sufficiently to effectively debate his opponent, many voters will have concerns about his ability to represent them effectively in Washington. While he has gamely undertaken more campaign events and media interviews in recent weeks, Mr. Fetterman still speaks haltingly and relies on closed captioning to fully understand his conversation partners.
Mr. Fetterman’s campaign asserts confidently that he will make a full recovery, and that he is doing the hard work — including speech therapy — to accelerate that recovery. That is hopeful and laudable, but stroke recovery is notoriously unpredictable. The campaign’s early predictions proved optimistic; the more recent predictions of “several months” to a “complete recovery” may prove optimistic, too.
Mr. Oz is pressing the issue in an adolescent manner; nevertheless, a live debate is the best way to assure voters Mr. Fetterman is up to the job. The Republican’s antics have given Mr. Fetterman a plausible out: He won’t share the stage with someone who has behaved so shamefully. But that won’t cut it. Voters have a right to know whether their prospective senator can do the job — including handling the give-and-take of a vigorous debate.
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@LuFins-Dad said in Fetterman:
Like a Senate Chamber or a committee meeting?
Mr. Oz has raised legitimate concerns. If Mr. Fetterman’s communication skills have not yet recovered sufficiently to effectively debate his opponent, many voters will have concerns about his ability to represent them effectively in Washington. While he has gamely undertaken more campaign events and media interviews in recent weeks, Mr. Fetterman still speaks haltingly and relies on closed captioning to fully understand his conversation partners.
Mr. Fetterman’s campaign asserts confidently that he will make a full recovery, and that he is doing the hard work — including speech therapy — to accelerate that recovery. That is hopeful and laudable, but stroke recovery is notoriously unpredictable. The campaign’s early predictions proved optimistic; the more recent predictions of “several months” to a “complete recovery” may prove optimistic, too.
Mr. Oz is pressing the issue in an adolescent manner; nevertheless, a live debate is the best way to assure voters Mr. Fetterman is up to the job. The Republican’s antics have given Mr. Fetterman a plausible out: He won’t share the stage with someone who has behaved so shamefully. But that won’t cut it. Voters have a right to know whether their prospective senator can do the job — including handling the give-and-take of a vigorous debate.
So we've got a guy who is quite possibly mentally impaired running against somebody who thinks the best way to address that situation is to make fun of him.
Sounds like a lose-lose for the electorate whoever comes out on top. Obviously, nobody gives a shit about them....
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Fetterman:
@LuFins-Dad said in Fetterman:
Like a Senate Chamber or a committee meeting?
Mr. Oz has raised legitimate concerns. If Mr. Fetterman’s communication skills have not yet recovered sufficiently to effectively debate his opponent, many voters will have concerns about his ability to represent them effectively in Washington. While he has gamely undertaken more campaign events and media interviews in recent weeks, Mr. Fetterman still speaks haltingly and relies on closed captioning to fully understand his conversation partners.
Mr. Fetterman’s campaign asserts confidently that he will make a full recovery, and that he is doing the hard work — including speech therapy — to accelerate that recovery. That is hopeful and laudable, but stroke recovery is notoriously unpredictable. The campaign’s early predictions proved optimistic; the more recent predictions of “several months” to a “complete recovery” may prove optimistic, too.
Mr. Oz is pressing the issue in an adolescent manner; nevertheless, a live debate is the best way to assure voters Mr. Fetterman is up to the job. The Republican’s antics have given Mr. Fetterman a plausible out: He won’t share the stage with someone who has behaved so shamefully. But that won’t cut it. Voters have a right to know whether their prospective senator can do the job — including handling the give-and-take of a vigorous debate.
So we've got a guy who is quite possibly mentally impaired running against somebody who thinks the best way to address that situation is to make fun of him.
Sounds like a lose-lose for the electorate whoever comes out on top. Obviously, nobody gives a shit about them....
Oz is making fun if him or just drawing attention to his cognitive abilities?
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For the life of me, I cannot see the attraction to Fetterman. His accomplishments as mayor were pretty meager, although in fairness he had an uphill battle to begin with. Then there's the shotgun incident, his support of Bernie Sanders. His behavior as Lt. Gov has included defying laws signed by Governor Wolf. Not crazy about Oz either, but I just don't see Fetterman.
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There's no way to determine his cognitive abilities from this clip, but his ability to communicate them is sad.
From what my SLP spouse tells me, post stroke speech impairments do not necessarily or often denote cognitive deficiencies. They way she describes it is that strokes result in neural disconnects in the brain between the speech centre and other areas that facilitate fluency. Through speech therapy new pathways can often be developed and speech fluency improves. Fetterman therefore is probably functioning well cognitively but cannot express himself fluently.
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The Washington Post Editorial Board
After suffering a stroke in May, Mr. Fetterman was off the campaign trail for three months and has campaigned little since then; he held a rally Sunday. Mr. Oz has pressed for five debates, but Mr. Fetterman dodged and ducked before tentatively agreeing last week to one but not until “sometime in the middle to end of October.” That’s well after Sept. 19, when voters can start casting mail-in ballots, and it’s short of the two debates that had been the standard during recent competitive Senate contests in Pennsylvania.
Since returning to the campaign trail, Mr. Fetterman has been halting in his performances. He stammers, appears confused and keeps his remarks short. He has held no news conferences. Mr. Fetterman acknowledges his difficulties with auditory processing, which make it hard for him to respond quickly to what he’s hearing. He receives speech therapy — and we wish him a speedy, full recovery — but the lingering, unanswered questions about his health, underscored by his hesitation to debate, are unsettling.
The Fetterman campaign squandered credibility by concealing from the public for two days after his stroke that he had been hospitalized. It waited weeks longer to reveal a more complete picture of his medical history, including that he had been diagnosed in 2017 with cardiomyopathy. Mr. Fetterman had a pacemaker with a defibrillator implanted after the stroke. The campaign’s response to questions about Mr. Fetterman’s health is to point to a doctor’s note, released more than 14 weeks ago, which said “he should be able to campaign and serve in the U.S. Senate without a problem” if he takes his medications and exercises.
That’s not good enough. Mr. Fetterman is asking voters for a six-year contract without giving them enough information to make sound judgments about whether he’s up for such a demanding job. We have called for full disclosure of health records from candidates for federal office in both parties, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and we believe Mr. Fetterman should release his medical records for independent review.
And he should debate Mr. Oz before voters start casting their ballots. Mr. Oz, for his part, has not exactly conducted himself with glory. The campaign’s offer to fund “any additional medical personnel [Mr. Fetterman] might need to have on standby” during a debate and its mocking comment about Mr. Fetterman not eating enough vegetables were sophomoric and unseemly, made worse by the fact that Mr. Oz is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Both candidates have something to prove to voters, and there is no better forum than a debate.
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‘Invest More’ in Public Schools.
Senate hopeful John Fetterman has cast himself as a champion of Pennsylvania's public schools, telling voters he will "make sure our public schools have the funding they need." But his tax records tell a different story. In fact, as mayor of Braddock, Pa., Fetterman failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes on time to his local school district, one of the poorest in the state.
Woodland Hills School District, which serves Braddock, placed nearly three-dozen tax liens against Fetterman totaling $18,692 for unpaid property taxes from 2006 to 2019, according to records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The district sued Fetterman twice over the unpaid bills, resulting in default judgments against Fetterman totaling $3,769. Fetterman has since paid off the liens, but in some cases it took him more than six years to satisfy the debt.
Well, that's awkward.
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Where do they get these people?
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Rolling Stone: "De facto..."