The current election campaign has seen an unprecedented number of candidates -- primarily Conservatives -- opting out of all-candidate forums, town hall events, and scheduled debates.

If a candidate cannot be bothered to address constituents during the campaign, they do not deserve your vote, period.

I've compiled a list of those who have, thus far, refused to partake in such unscripted events. If your local candidate should be on this list, please leave their name, party and riding in the comments section.

Alberta

-  Deepak Obhrai (CPC) - Calgary East

-  Rob Anders (CPC) -Calgary West

-  Michelle Rempel (CPC) - Calgary Centre-North

One of health care reform’s greatest champions died last night. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77. During his 46-year career in the senate, Kennedy’s name appeared on virtually every major piece of progressive legislation from civil rights to economic justice, to health care. Kennedy called healthcare reform “the cause of my life.”

Jack Newfield of The Nation remembers Kennedy as the senate’s fighting liberal, the “best and most effective senator of the past hundred years.”

James Ridgeway of Mother Jones laments:

Will healthcare reform include a public health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance? President Obama campaigned on the promise of a public option, but over the past week he and his top advisers have repeatedly signaled that they aren’t willing to fight for it.

On Saturday, Obama told a town hall meeting in Colorado: “Whether we have it or we don’t have it, [the public option] is not the entirety of health care reform. This is just one sliver of it, one aspect of it.”

This week’s edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.