After reading that Bill Brady has declined to participate in a debate with Pat Quinn on the University campus, I must say that I wonder why the DI wanted a gubernatorial debate here at all. Haven’t we had enough of the Democrats’ and Republicans’ bickering? I’m certain that anything Brady or Quinn would have to say to us here would be exactly the same misleading and empty rhetoric that they’ve been spewing everywhere else. The DI is among most other entities in Illinois that buy into the polarization of voters between two dissatisfactory options.

The political staring contest in Congress has makes me wonder why more aren’t running for their lives from the incumbent parties. Have all voters in Illinois again been duped into thinking that they must pick between Tweedledee and Tweedledum on Election Day? While campaign advertisements such as “Who is Bill Brady?” are busy trying to scare you into voting for the lesser of two evils, the third party candidates are not allowed to participate in most public debates.

If we want to see any kind of improvement in the functionality of our state, we must realize that it will not come at the behest of Democrats OR Republicans. Students at the U of I (and their parents) have a reason to look to alternatives: Four more years of crap rolling downhill await if either Quinn or Brady are elected. Neither of them have a functional plan for dealing with the state’s huge deficit, which means neither of them have a functional plan for paying what is owed to the University, and cost of attendance will go up even more.

The Illinois Green Party got 10 percent of the vote in 2006; that’s 10 percent of the vote that Tweedledee and Tweedledum didn’t get. In 2010, you probably won’t hear about Green candidate Rich Whitney’s legitimate and SPECIFIC plan to address our state’s problems, because the Illinois mainstream media continues to see politics in Red and Blue, afraid to venture out of the safe and well traversed zone of misleadership that the Democrats and Republicans have always offered their constituents.

Kaela Talley,

Sophomore in FAA