Biden in 'Effective Attack-Dog Mode' in Debate

   It was nice (as well as a big relief) to watch vice president Joe Biden spank game GOP candidate Paul Ryan in Thursday night’s sole VP debate before the November 6 election. Biden was in predictable and effective attack-dog mode, a welcome contrast from president Barack Obama’s surprisingly disengaged (though fluent on the real facts) performance in the first of three presidential debates against Mitt Romney. Biden got virtually every one of his points correct on both domestic and international affairs, and hammered his opponent repeatedly and vehemently on every Ryan falsification of facts the two clashed on re: America’s jobs growth under the Obama administration, the economic damage a Romney presidency would bring to the middle class, and the very real danger inherent in the outlandish claims Romney/Ryan have been floating for months about America’s sanctions on Iran being “ineffective” as well as their oft-repeated lie about that nation being close to developing a nuclear weapon.

   Biden also brought up several times Romney’s noxious comments re: the “47%” of American citizens that the Republican challenger privately insulted and wrote off earlier this year, angrily deconstructed the outright lies Ryan claimed on
how Obamacare policies affecting Medicare will hurt seniors, and in general pretty
much exposed for anyone who was really listening  the huge disconnect between what the Republican Party has been saying and actually doing for the past four years in their attempt to bring down an administration that has bent over backwards to right the sinking ship that eight years under Bush/Cheney had caused.

   Now it’s up to president Obama to take a page from Biden’s very emotional playbook in the next presidential debate and more forcefully defend his administration’s positions and federal legislation that have brought America back from the brink of collapse, as well as make Romney pay every time he throws another glib falsehood at him. The non-partisan fact checkers, as well as Romney’s own GOP advisory team, had a field day the morning after the debate enumerating and illuminating the ridiculous number of lies this most mendacious of politicians spouted on everything from Medicare to the federal deficit, and it’s to be hoped that the president himself does a better job doing this on October 23.

   There was wonderful news in last week’s New Hampshire Supreme Court’s 3-2 ruling preventing the House Majority leader Bill O’Brien-proposed new voter registration law from going into effect. This ruling will allow out-of-state college students to continue to vote here, and is another blow against the bald-faced Republican national scheme to make the simple right of casting a ballot more difficult for minorities and students, two groups that trend Democrat.  

   The Granite State joins Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and Florida among other states in either having new onerous restrictions blocked by federal judges or simply taken off the table. As Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice said last week, “It has been an extraordinary string of victories for those opposing these laws."

   In just another in a long line of Republican Party malfeasance, a wave of conservative governors and other officials began soon after the Obama election victory four years ago to attempt to curtail the rights of as many liberal demographics as they could to push the GOP advantage for 2012. These proposed voter-ID laws were all concocted under the guise of eradicating “voter fraud,” although the term only really exists in right-wing pipe dreams.

  Electoral fraud is virtually nonexistent in America, as even the most vehement proponent of this attempted end-around knows full well. Many studies Democrat and Republican alike all show conclusively that voter impersonation and identity falsification occurs in barely-measurable numbers. For instance, a recent Carnegie Knight study of over 2,400 alleged impersonations since the 2000 elections yielded a total of ten actual cases. That’s one for every 15 million prospective voters. Another NEWS21 study detailed 33 real cases in the entire last decade, the rest of the GOP-submitted 375 being simple citizen errors like attempting to vote in the wrong precinct, clerical errors, etc. and were not prosecutable. So thankfully with three weeks to go before Americans make their nation-defining decision, the playing field has (so far) been kept level.