Town Hall

The tornado that destroyed Hackleburg attacked the little town's first line of defense. It leveled the town's tiny police station and crushed the police cruiser of Officer Jeremy Marbutt, who emerged unscathed after taking cover in the old town jail, built of steel and concrete. It destroyed the fire station and blew away the roof of the town hall, where 69-year-old Mayor Douglas Gunnin survived to continue serving the town's 1,500 constituents. Photo gallery: Tornadoes cut path of devastation Then it flattened the Piggy Wiggly, the only grocery store, but spared manager Dennis Whitfield, who hid under a produce rack.

VICCO, Ky. - Johnny Cummings grew up gay in this faded coal town, the son of a miner. He likes to joke that he didn't know he was gay until people around town told him he was. Now 50, Cummings is the mayor of Vicco, population 334. He's Mayor Johnny in the mornings. In the afternoons he styles hair at his salon, Scissors, a few steps from the storefront Town Hall. On Jan. 14, at the mayor's urging, Vicco's commissioners discussed an ordinance to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, "real or perceived.

In an early social media skirmish in the 2012 campaign, a conservative political group claims to have forced Facebook to temporarily shut down the event page for President Obama's online town hall meeting after steering hundreds of negative comments to the site. ForAmerica, a group that sprung up online during the debate over Obama's health care reform law, urged its nearly 1 million Facebook fans to swarm the landing page Facebook was using to collect questions to pose to him at Wednesday afternoon's live forum.

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- Exactly one week ago, a gunman forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 children and six adults. On Friday, this grief-wrenched town and the nation stopped to commemorate the precise moment of the attack that has shaken a country to its core. To the sound of tolling bells, 26 mournful peals, officials gathered in the cold and wet to remember the tragedy. Outside Town Hall, Newtown residents and visitors huddled next to local and state officials and police as church bells began sounding.

Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential run earlier this year, headlined a telephone town hall with GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann on Monday, his first public appearance with a candidate in the 2012 race. The town hall was marked by Bachmann's deference to the New York City real estate mogul. She called him “Mr. Trump,” he called her “Michele.” When participants asked questions, Trump routinely answered first and Bachmann played clean-up. The Minnesota congresswoman lavished praise on Trump.

WASHINGTON - The Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday released new details on this year's presidential debates, offering a look at the rules that will shape President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney's upcoming rhetorical battles. The three presidential debates and one vice presidential debate will each last 90 minutes. The first, at the University of Denver on Oct. 3, will be partitioned into six 15-minute segments, each focusing on a different domestic policy issue to be set by an as-yet-to-be-announced moderator.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- President Obama today defended his administration's efforts to protect American diplomats around the world in the wake of a round of violent attacks on embassies in the Middle East. A journalist at an afternoon town hall meeting here asked Obama why his administration “wasn't better prepared with more security" at the time of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed last week. Obama did not directly address the point about preparation in advance, but he said that as soon as officials saw the initial events near the embassy in Cairo before the attack in Benghazi, his administration worked with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to take precautions.

Reminiscent of the August 2009 town halls when members of Congress faced angry constituents over health care reforms, a public forum in Carbon County with Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) Wednesday night provided a glimpse of the strong emotions stirred by a Republican plan to alter Medicare benefits. At the start of his town hall meeting, Barletta welcomed people to use the conversation to get things off their chests. While he was going through a slide projector presentation about the Medicare changes proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)

A town hall meeting held in Orlando by Rep. Dan Webster (R-Fla.) degenerated into bedlam Tuesday, with members of the crowd shouting down the freshman Republican congressman and yelling at one another. It was the last of a series of town hall meetings Webster has hosted during Congress' spring recess, which ends Monday. While the others were civil and largely uneventful, the 300 people at Tuesday's meeting were so raucous they were scolded by a police officer to act "like grown people.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry may have backed down on tuition breaks for illegal immigrants, but he's doubling down on his skepticism of climate-change science. At a New Hampshire town-hall style meeting, his first of the campaign, the Texas governor sparred Friday evening with a questioner who tried to pin him down on the issue.  The man, whom Perry addressed as “Mike,” began by noting a 2011 report from a panel of experts chosen by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that climate change is occurring and “is very likely caused primarily by the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities.”  The man noted that Perry had ducked - twice--when asked at the Reagan Library debate this month to name the scientists he found most credible on the subject.

Based on Tuesday night's presidential debate at Hofstra University in New York, here is a five-point plan: -- Moderator Candy Crowley, like Supreme Court justices, should be appointed for life. -- The town hall format, which allows the candidates to circle each other like prize fighters or come nose-to-nose like bickering spouses, is the best. As the Sundance Kid so famously said, "I'm better when I move. " -- CNN, seriously, lose that undecided voter crawl. It is completely distracting and simply absurd - how much value can there be in the real-time reactions of 35 undecided voters in Ohio?

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. - In a town-hall-style debate that was supposed to focus on questions from ordinary voters, President Obama and Mitt Romney circled each other on the stage and engaged in finger-pointing displays, arguing over energy, immigration and the deadly attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Obama ducked a question from audience member Kerry Ladka about who in the administration had denied a request for extra diplomatic security in Libya, and why. But Obama seized an opening when Romney challenged the president's statement that he had described the incident as an act of "terror" on the day after the attack.

President Obama and Mitt Romney will go head-to-head Tuesday in their most challenging debate format: the town hall, where they will field questions from more than a dozen undecided voters sitting a few feet away as millions of Americans watch from home. Both men have held dozens of town halls with voters over the years, yet neither has sparkled in that setting. Each is cool and cerebral, often seeming more comfortable behind a lectern. The event in Hempstead, N.Y., moderated by CNN's Candy Crowley, will put them in a format tailored to produce interaction with voters, rather than heated exchanges with each other that fire up their supporters.

President Obama misstated the rising rate of healthcare costs. Vice President Joe Biden mischaracterized the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan. Mitt Romney overstated the number of jobless Americans, a figure his running mate, Paul D. Ryan, repeated. None of those misleading statements in the last two debates was as important, however, as the way they were delivered: by a slumberous Obama, an energetic Biden, an authoritative Romney and an earnest if sometimes ruffled Ryan. When Obama and Romney meet on New York's Long Island on Tuesday night for their second matchup, this one a town-hall-style debate, legions of experts will be ready to pounce on their every utterance, calling out exaggerations and citing obvious omissions.

HOLLIS, N.H. -- As might be a necessity in small towns like this one, which is at the beginning of what could be a very long winter, Republicans and Democrats sit down together over cups of coffee at the town's two diners every morning and remain cordial, even when talking about politics. But that doesn't mean the citizens sharing shelter from a rainy fall morning agreed on much the night after the vice presidential debate. The debate, like a Rorschach test, allowed voters in this popular campaign stop to see the election as they wanted to see it, without changing many minds.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- President Obama's appearance Thursday at a town hall here completes a historic event for Latino voters in the U.S. - the first time both major party presidential nominees have sat down for an hourlong meet-the-candidate session with a Spanish-speaking television network. The session with Obama will be livestreamed and broadcast in Spanish and in English, with questions coming from Univision television news hosts. As he speaks, Obama's words will be simultaneously translated on earpieces for Spanish speakers in the live audience.

President Obama heard from critics on both the right and the left at his town-hall event in Decorah on Monday evening. An Iowa "tea party" activist, Ryan Rhodes, confronted Obama after the event to speak to him whether Vice President Joe Biden during the debt-ceiling talks in Washington compared tea-party affiliated lawmakers to terrorists. Rhodes first brought up the question during the town hall and then approached the president afterward and the two got into a heated exchange.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- President Obama today defended his administration's efforts to protect American diplomats around the world in the wake of a round of violent attacks on embassies in the Middle East. A journalist at an afternoon town hall meeting here asked Obama why his administration “wasn't better prepared with more security" at the time of the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans were killed last week. Obama did not directly address the point about preparation in advance, but he said that as soon as officials saw the initial events near the embassy in Cairo before the attack in Benghazi, his administration worked with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to take precautions.

Click here to download TV listings for the week of Aug. 26 - Sept. 1 in PDF format This week's TV Movies   SERIES Home by Novogratz: Courtney and Bob head to Mammoth to meet Tony Hawk, whose 1970s ski lodge is severely outdated and in desperate need of their designer's touch in this new episode (7 p.m. HGTV). Redneck Island: The unscripted competition with a Southern flair wraps its first season (10 p.m. CMT). SPECIALS Katt Williams: Kattpacalypse: Doomsday prophecies, President Obama and other hot-button topics are in the comic's sights in this stand-up special, taped on New Year's Eve at the Nokia Theatre (10 p.m. Showtime)