Summary: The most surreal and vicious presidential debate is now in the history books, and it came in the wake of some lewd comments Donald Trump made in 2005 that was released 48 hours before his encounter with Hillary Clinton in St. Louis. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/karen-tumulty/">Karen Tumulty</a> of the Washington Post tries to make sense of it all.<br> Trump’s apparent decline in the polls has given some Democrats hope of making substantial gains in the House. <a href="http://ncec.org">Mark Gersh</a> of the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC) surveys the 2016 landscape and outlines what he sees might be the best opportunities for pickups.<br> With polling unfavorables for Trump and Clinton the highest in survey history, <a href="https://sipa.columbia.edu/faculty/steven-nemerovski">Steven Nemerovski</a> of Columbia University makes the case why a serious third party is needed more now than ever.<br> And we go back 14 years to the Iraq War vote in the Senate, where we play back parts of the speeches of New York’s Hillary Clinton, who voted to give President Bush the authority to take action against Saddam Hussein, and Minnesota’s Paul Wellstone, who voted no, even at great potential risk to his re-election battle that year.<br> <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/top-takeaways-second-presidential-debate/">Photo by Rick Wilking/Reuters</a><br> Music used in this podcast:<br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Hits-Lesley-Gore/dp/B000001F35">It’s My Party by Leslie Gore</a><br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hermit-Mink-Hollow-Todd-Rundgren/dp/B0012FCKU0/ref=ntt_mus_ep_dpi_7">Can We Still Be Friends by Todd Rundgren</a><br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Tongues-TALKING-HEADS/dp/B000002KZ6">Burning Down the House by Talking Heads</a><br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r00ikilDxW4">21 Guns by Green Day</a><br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Simon-Garfunkel/dp/B0045DO85Q">Mrs. Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel</a><br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Majesties-Request-Rolling-Stones/dp/B00006AW2M">On With The Show by The Rolling Stones</a><br> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/" rel="license"></a><br> This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a><br>
