Sandy's reality provides opportunity for Obama 'One America' redux

"For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American saga, a belief that we are all connected as one people...
"It is that fundamental belief - it is that fundamental belief - I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper - that makes this country work. It's what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: 'E pluribus unum,' out of many, one...
"...there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America."
- Barack Obama's keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention

Even in the face of an election season full of the most rancorous and extreme partisanship, there is a takeaway from the politics of the Hurricane Sandy tragedy, one that reprises President Obama's seminal assertion that, eight years on, there is still only one America. With the recent praises of FEMA and the president's leadership coming from the unequivocal Chris Christie, New Jersey's no-nonsense Republican governor, it appears that the storm that devastated that state and region has done what no hard running politician could do - show that level headed and reasonable responses to responsibilities destroy divisiveness in favor of cooperation.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE...

Republicans praise truth one night, bury it the next

"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, to an ABC breakfast panel, ahead of GOP vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan's acceptance speech, Wednesday.

It is kind of appropriate that Aeschylus' famous, fifth century, B.C., quote, "In war, truth is the first casualty," was popularized by a World War I era, American politician. Who knows better than someone who has had to fold falsehoods into the fight for votes in this diverse country, what a nuisance the truth can be?
Last night, at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, commentators and rebutting Democrats pointed out lies in many of the speeches, but it was with the faux earnestness of the words presented by the featured speaker, GOP vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI),  that most took exception.

Paul Ryan, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You have probably read, or heard, by now, how Ryan told the exuberant crowd that President Obama was responsible for the closing of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, where, Ryan said, "[a] lot of guys I went to high school with worked... It is locked up and empty to this day. And that's how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight." But Ryan buried the fact that the plant closed in December, 2008, when George W. Bush was still in the White House.
Other obfuscations in Ryan's speech...
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE