Why Biden Won 12OCT12

JOE BIDEN blew lyin' paul ryan out of the arena in the debate last night!!!! To all those whinny little bitch pundits I saw on Charlie Rose after the debate who could only complain about Joe's style more than about lyin ryan's lack of honesty and information need to get lives. Gwen Iffil swam against the tide as the lone person wanting to discuss policy and agendas of the candidates. Check this out from Robert Reich on HuffPost....
I thought Biden won last night's debate because he came off as genuine, passionate and brimming with conviction. Ryan, by contrast, seemed like a wooden marionette, a kid out of his depth relative to someone who not only knew the facts but lived them.
On taxes, Ryan couldn't come up with any details about what loopholes he and Romney would close, or how their magic arithmetic (giant tax cut for the wealthy plus $2 trillion more for the military than the joint chiefs of staff want) can possibly be paid for without socking it to the middle class.
By contrast, Biden made the case for average working people whose wages have barely risen in 30 years but who are bearing a higher total tax burden (payroll, sales, property, income) on a higher percent of their income than high rollers like Romney -- and why the well-off should do more.
On Medicare, Ryan couldn't explain why his plan wasn't a voucher program that "saved" money only by shifting the costs on to seniors who would end up holding the bag as medical costs rose. Biden effectively defended the president's plan to save Medicare by cutting excessive payments to providers.
Biden also pointed out that Ryan and his allies had tried to privatize Social Security. Score another one for Joe.
On abortion, Ryan had to admit he and Romney would work to prevent women from having the right to choose an abortion if they needed and wanted one. Biden made it clear his religious beliefs about when life began should not, in his view, force anyone who didn't share them to follow them.
I thought Biden's closing could have been tougher, drawing a sharper contrast between the Romney-Ryan "you're on your own" worldview, and the "we're in it all together" belief that has built America -- and which Obama and Biden represent.
But overall it was Biden's night. He not only trounced Ryan, but also, in the process, trounced Romney. Joe Biden is an average Joe solidly grounded in America's working middle class -- nothing pretentious or devious about him -- in contrast to the plutocrat who heads the Republican ticket, and the billionaires who are backing him.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage," now available in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-biden-won_b_1962939.html?utm_source=Alert-blogger&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Email%2BNotifications 

Memo to Joe, Re: Debate 10OKT12

THIS is what we expect from VP Joe Biden, good advise from Robert Reich. Godspeed Joe!

TO: VPOTUS
FROM: Robert Reich
RE: Debate
Beware: Paul Ryan will appear affable. He's less polished and aggressive than Romney, even soft-spoken. And he acts as if he's saying reasonable things.
But under the surface he's a right-wing zealot. And nothing he says or believes is reasonable -- neither logical nor reflecting the values of the great majority of Americans.
Your job is to smoke Ryan out, exposing his fanaticism. The best way to do this is to force him to take responsibility for the regressive budget he created as chairman of the House Budget Committee.
Ryan won't be able to pull a Romney -- pretending he's a moderate -- because the Ryan budget is out there, with specific numbers.
It's an astounding document that Romney fully supports. And it fills in the details Romney has left out of his proposals. Mitt Romney is a robot who will say and do whatever he's programmed to do. Ryan is the robot's brain. The robot has no heart. It's your job to enable America to see this.
I suggest you hold up a copy of the Ryan budget in front of the cameras. You might even read selected passages.
Emphasize these points: Ryan's budget turns Medicare into vouchers. It includes the same $716 billion of savings Romney last week accused the President of cutting out of Medicare -- but instead of getting it from providers he gets it from the elderly.
It turns Medicaid over to cash-starved states, with even less federal contribution. This will hurt the poor as well as middle-class elderly in nursing homes.
Over 60 percent of its savings come out of programs for lower-income Americans -- like Pell grants and food stamps.
Yet it gives huge tax cuts to the top 1 percent -- some $4.7 trillion over the next decade. (This is the same top 1 percent, you might add, who have reaped 93 percent of the gains from the recovery, whose stock portfolios have regained everything they lost and more, and who are now taking home a larger share of total income than at any time in the last eighty years and paying the lowest taxes than at any time since before World War II.)
As a result it doesn't reduce the federal debt at all. In fact, it worsens it.
On top of all this, Ryan is on record -- as is Romney -- for wanting to repeal both ObamaCare (taking coverage away from 30 million Americans) and the Dodd-Frank law (thereby giving cover to Wall Street).
Your challenge will be get this across firmly and clearly, with an appropriate degree of indignation -- on a medium that rewards style over substance, glibness over detail, and optimistic happy talk over grim reality.
My suggestion: Be cheerfully aggressive. Take Ryan on directly and sharply but do so with a smile. Force him to take responsibility for the regressiveness of his budget and the radicalism of his ideology.
Prepare your closing carefully (unlike the President seemed to have done last week), and tell America the unvarnished truth: Romney and Ryan plan to do a reverse Robin Hood at a time in our nation's history when the rich have never had it so good while the rest haven't been as economically insecure since the Great Depression.
Their agenda is all the more remarkable in that we have a growing budget deficit to deal with, along soaring healthcare costs and aging boomers without enough to retire on because their net worth went down the drain with their homes.
The fundamental question is whether we're still all in it together -- whether as American citizens we continue to have obligations to one another to assure equal opportunity and help for those who need it -- or we're on our own, without a common bond or a common good. Romney and Ryan represent the latter view, a view utterly at odds with what we have accomplished as a nation.
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