Joe Biden Is Leaning Toward a 2016 Run

Vice President Joe Biden, who has long been considering a presidential bid, is increasingly leaning toward entering the race if it is still possible he can knit together a competitive campaign at this late date, people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Biden still could opt to sit out the 2016 race, and he is weighing multiple political, financial and family considerations before making a final decision. But conversations about the possibility were a prominent feature of an August stay in South Carolina and his home in Delaware last week, these people said. A surprise weekend trip to Washington to meet with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a darling of the party’s liberal wing, represented a pivot from potential to likely candidate, one Biden supporter said.

“The vice president has not made a decision about his political future,” Biden spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff said. “Anyone speculating that he has made a decision is wrong.”

Mr. Biden would enter as a clear underdog. Polling shows Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton running far ahead of the vice president, who would be building a campaign team largely from scratch. Mrs. Clinton, who declared her candidacy four months ago, has a robust campaign operation and an outside super PAC raising money on her behalf.

Still, the vice president’s deliberations illustrate how, with just six months before the first presidential nominating contests, both major parties’ campaigns are in a state of flux. Democrats are increasingly insecure about Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy, given her dipping approval ratings and continuing questions about her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Republicans, meanwhile, are struggling to find the proper tone in reacting to Donald Trump, whose no-holds-barred campaign style is dominating coverage of the GOP contest and nudging top contenders into uncomfortable sound bites.

Via: Wall Street Journal

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Joe Biden gets a Detroit woman killed.

Good job there, Mr. Vice President:

It was shortly before 1 a.m. Nov. 2 and Renisha McBride was involved in an accident with a parked vehicle in Detroit.

More than two hours later and six blocks away, she was shot in the face by a man who told police he thought someone was breaking into his Dearborn Heights home. The 54-year-old homeowner, according to police, said his 12-gauge shotgun discharged accidentally.

…and by “good job” I mean “I hope that you’re happy, Joe Biden.” Because that homeowner did what Joe Biden told people to do (bolding mine):

V.P. BIDEN: Well, the way in which we measure it is—I think most scholars would say—is that as long as you have a weapon sufficient to be able to provide your self-defense. I did one of these town-hall meetings on the Internet and one guy said, “Well, what happens when the end days come? What happens when there’s the earthquake? I live in California, and I have to protect myself.”

I said, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”

Via: Red State
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Book Details Obama Aides’ Talks About Replacing Biden on 2012 Ticket

President Obama’s top aides secretly considered replacing Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the 2012 ticket, undertaking extensive focus-group sessions and polling in late 2011 when Mr. Obama’s re-election outlook appeared uncertain.

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Pool photo by Martin H. Simon

President Obama with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Orrin G. Hatch in 2010. Obama aides decided that putting Mrs. Clinton on the 2012 ticket would not offer a significant boost, a book says.

Via: New York Times

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The aides concluded that despite Mrs. Clinton’s popularity, the move would not offer a significant enough political boost to Mr. Obama to justify such a radical move, according to a newly published account of the 2012 race.

The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, “Double Down,” provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley, despite the close personal rapport Mr. Daley had developed with Mr. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic and veteran of Washington politics.

“When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” the authors write in their sequel to “Game Change,” which chronicled the 2008 campaign. “Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.

Biden Apologizes For Obamacare: "We Were Under The Impression It Was Ready To Go"

Is this the beginning of the ObamaCare apology tour ?????

VICE PRES. JOE BIDEN TO CNN: "We were under the impression that it was ready to go. We had the president, to his credit, almost seven weeks out was saying, 'is it going to be ready?' and to be told by the pros that, 'yeah, this is all ready to go, all in line.' Neither he or I are technology geeks and we assumed that it was up and ready to run, but the good news is that although it’s not, and we apologize for that, we’re confident that by the end of November it will be and there will still be plenty of time for people to register to get online."

Via: Real Clear Politics

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Biden Offers Federal Workers Handshakes, Hugs, and Kisses

Vice President Joe Biden offered returning federal workers handshakes, hugs, and kisses -- and muffins, too -- this morning at the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

Via the pool report:

As pool awaited the VP, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy hopped – literally, hopped – as she entered the building and then headed to greet him at a back entrance far from pooler’s view. 

Pool first spotted VP at about 9:17 am, rounding the corner from the back entrance, finding a cluster of workers who caught wind of his visit. He carried a few containers of “Coffee Cake Bites” – apparently $5 each per the sticker, and “Baked from scratch” with no trans fats.

“I brought some muffins!” the VP said as he arrived at the security desk, placing the muffins down. And, seeing a sign on the desk that read that “All visitors must be escorted at all times,” VP announced: “I’d like to be escorted!”

TV pooler quickly asked the VP, “Are you happy with how the deal played out?” He answered: “I’m happy it’s ended. It was unnecessary to begin with. I’m happy it’s ended.”

He then immediately began shaking hands with employees, lined up out the entrance. The usual Biden stuff – some handshakes, some hugs, some kisses. Told some he was sorry they had to miss work and “had to go through all that.” There were occasional bursts of applause as more people arrived and found the VP there.

Via: Weekly Standard
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Biden’s niece busted after roommate dispute

Vice President Joe Biden’s niece  was arrested Tuesday for allegedly swinging at a police officer in her TriBeCa apartment — and later transported to the hospital for what law enforcement sources described as “difficulty breathing.”

Caroline Biden, 26, was “screaming at the top of her lungs” and “beating on doors” after her roommate confronted her about unpaid rent at their Desbrosses Street apartment when police were called at 9:15 a.m. for a “threat,” sources said.

While cops were filling out a report, Biden’s niece started mouthing off to the officers and then threw a punch and lunged at a female officer, sources said.

Biden struck a male officer in the arm and chest who jumped in between them and “flailed her arms frantically” to resist being handcuffed, cops said.

She was charged with resisting arrest, obstruction of government administration and harassment.

At the 1st Precinct, she resisted going into a holding cell “by grabbing a police officer’s arm,” cops said.

“She was being irrational,” a witness said. “She went berserk.”

After complaining of “not feeling well” and difficulty breathing she was transported to Beth Israel hospital shortly before 4:30 pm.

“What isn’t she complaining about?” a cop at the precinct griped.

She was described as “highly uncooperative,” and was issued a desk appearance ticket. Biden must show up in court on the complaint Oct. 29.

Via: NYP

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Biden: Tranny Discrimination “Civil Rights Issue Of Our Time”…

Vice President Joe Biden, leaving an Obama campaign office in Sarasota, singled one woman out because she had beautiful eyes, the pool reporter noted:

 She said something ...at first inaudible to pool, to which VP responded was the "civil rights issue of our time"

Pool later asked the woman, Linda Carragher Bourne of Sarasota about the exchange. She said her daughter was Miss Trans New England and asked if he would help them.

"A lot of my friends are being killed, and they don't have the civil rights yet. These guys are gonna make it happen," she told the pool.

Biden has long been a vocal advocate for LGBT rights -- most memorably getting out "a little bit over his skies," as President Obama put it -- when Biden endorsed same sex marriage before the president did earlier this year.

The vice president met with LGBT leaders at his Washington, D.C., home last month, including transgender advocates, according to the Easton Patch. The Obama-Biden administration was the first to send a representative to a trans-gender conference.

Via: Politico

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The Reality Principle

Column: Obama and Biden were winning—until they faced actual opponents

Hold it, I’m confused. I watched all of the vice presidential debate last night, and someone did not show up. Vice President Joe Biden was there—how could one miss him, with all the grinning, grunting, interrupting, and sneering. But where was the Ayn Rand-worshiping, rape-redefining, fanatically exercising zealot who wants to throw grandmothers off of cliffs and whose budget plan is, according to the president, “thinly veiled Social Darwinism” that is “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility”? That Paul Ryan was nowhere to be found.

What America saw instead was a young and likable and knowledgeable conservative worried about the current trajectory of fiscal, monetary, foreign, and social policy. Where Biden harrumphed, Ryan calmly litigated President Obama’s failed record. Twice in eight days, the caricatures against which President Barack Obama and Biden are purporting to run have been exposed as grotesque exaggerations. The liberal attempt to frighten America with the illusory specter of an extremist Republican ticket dissolved on first contact with, well, the actual ticket. The reality principle asserted itself once again. We have an open race.

Perceptions matter. Why did 67 million people watch the first debate? One reason may have been that Americans, open to an alternative to the incumbent, wanted to know who the Republican nominee actually was. They only had vague knowledge of Mitt Romney going into the Denver bout—and their impression was not favorable.

What they knew was largely limited to the messages of $217 million in negative advertising from Obama and his allies: Romney was rich, secretive, out of touch, paying little in taxes, hiding his tax returns, stashing money in the Cayman Islands, singing out of tune, shipping jobs overseas with little thought of the lives he affected, dismissing out of hand 47 percent of the country, in favor of raising middle-class taxes and health-care costs for seniors, and waging a “war on women” with Todd Akin to “turn back the clock” on women’s rights.

Via: WFB

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AP Fact-Checker Bulldozes Through Biden Falsehoods

WASHINGTON (AP) — Anyone who paid attention to a hearing in Congress this week knew that the administration had been implored to beef up security at the U.S. Consulate in Libya before the deadly terrorist attack there. But in the vice presidential debate Thursday night, Joe Biden seemed unaware.

 

"We weren't told they wanted more security there," the vice president asserted flatly. During a night in which Biden and Republican rival Paul Ryan both drifted from the facts on a range of domestic and foreign issues, that was a standout.

 

A look at some of their claims:

 

BIDEN: "Well, we weren't told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again. And by the way, at the time we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew. That was the assessment. And as the intelligence community changed their view, we made it clear they changed their view."

 

RYAN: "There were requests for more security."

 

THE FACTS: Ryan is right, judging by testimony from Obama administration officials at the hearing a day earlier.

Charlene R. Lamb, a deputy assistant secretary for diplomatic security, told lawmakers she refused requests for more security in Benghazi, saying the department wanted to train Libyans to protect the consulate. "Yes, sir, I said personally I would not support it," she said.

 

Eric Nordstrom, who was the top security official in Libya earlier this year, testified he was criticized for seeking more security. He said conversations he had with people in Washington led him to believe that it was "abundantly clear we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident. How thin does the ice have to get before someone falls through?"

 

He said his exasperation reached a point where he told a colleague that "for me the Taliban is on the inside of the building."

 

Via: Associated Press

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BIDEN GRUNTS, GUFFAWS, SMIRKS AND BULLIES HIS WAY THROUGH VP DEBATE

Did Joe Biden bring in Al Gore as his debate coach? Did he review the tape from the Bush-Gore debate in 2000 and think obnoxious interruptions and smirks on questions of national security are the way to move voters? He sighed. He broke into Ryan's answers. He chortled. His actual answers were the least of his problems. His tone and demeanor were beneath the office he currently holds. 

Paul Ryan was fine. And, I mean that in the most literal use of the term. A snap CNN poll found that Ryan won the debate, 48-44. It wasn't the decisive mauling that Romney delivered to Obama, but it was enough to sustain Romney's momentum. At times, I wished Ryan had been more aggressive in defending his time to speak. Biden left some whoppers on the table that went unanswered. 

That said, Ryan gave forceful, passionate answers to several questions and his closing was especially strong. He had a firm command of the situation in Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. Most voters only know him as a budget guy, so his command of these issues was probably a pleasant surprise. There was nothing in his performance that would suggest he wasn't up to the job of being Vice-President. 

Biden though, was beneath his office. He clearly carried the weight of the campaign's recent stumbles on his shoulder. In the first hour, he acted like a man would had downed a six-pack of Red Bull before taking the stage. By the debate's end, the sugar rush had clearly worn off and his speech was much slower and more deliberate. The frenetic pace is better for him, because you can't pay as much attention to each word he says. As he slows up, the utter absurdity of what he's saying becomes more clear. 

Both Biden and Ryan had decent moments. In the end, Biden lost for two reasons. Ryan came off as an earnest and utterly reasonable person, with substantive ideas on a range of issues. He was likable. Biden's biggest problem, though, was his tone. He was rude, abusive and dismissive. He repeatedly smirked while Ryan was prosecuting the Administration's missteps in Libya. Smirking should be the furthest thing from anyone's mind when four Americans have been murdered. 

Via: Breitbart

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Morning Bell: 10 Questions for the Vice Presidential Debate

Tonight’s debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Paul Ryan is supposed to cover both domestic and foreign policy. The Heritage Foundation’s policy experts have submitted 10 questions they would like to see asked in the debate.

Watch with us tonight—we will be streaming the debate live at 9 p.m. ET on our Debate 2012 page, with an experts’ live blog.

DOMESTIC POLICY

1. Obamacare takes $716 billion out of Medicare to fund Obamacare. This includes $156 billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage. Currently, 27 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries are enrolled in Medicare Advantage, which is a private alternative to traditional Medicare. The Medicare Chief Actuary projects that by 2017, Obamacare’s severe cuts will decrease enrollment in Medicare Advantage by 50 percent and result in less generous benefit packages for those who do remain in the program. What changes would you make, if any, to ensure that these seniors are able to keep their current Medicare Advantage plan?

2. Patient choice is working well within Medicare and other government health programs. In addition to the private plans in Medicare Advantage, there are 1,100 plans in the Medicare drug program and hundreds of plans in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. None of these plans use “vouchers”; they receive a direct government contribution toward the cost of the plans. Would you expand patient choice in Medicare? Why or why not?

3. Most people under the age of 40 will pay more in Social Security taxes than they will receive in benefits, and Medicare adds to federal deficits faster than any other government spending program. How would you focus entitlement reform on reducing spending?

4. Under Obamacare, the Health and Human Services (HHS) preventive services mandate requires nearly all employers to cover abortion drugs and contraception regardless of religious or moral objection, effectively exempting only formal houses of worship. Should Americans be able to live out their faith commitments outside the four walls of their church—in the public square and in the way they run their businesses or non-profits?

5. It has been almost four years since the federal government took control of General Motors. Vice President Biden has said the bailout of the firm was a success. Was this a success? Why or why not? And when should the federal government sell the shares it still owns?

The Uncharitable Joe Biden: Better at Giving Away Your Money Than His

Before he became Vice President, Joe Biden was not exactly Santa Claus. So, one thing I think you will not see during the Vice President debates is a discussion on charity—Joe will not want to discuss this at all.

Just when I thought that there was no politician stingier than Barack Obama—who, before he became President, gave as little as .6% of his income to the poor—lo and behold Obama picked as his running mate, a man who gives far less to the poor than he. While Obama’s tax returns prior to his 2008 election reveal a portrait of a man who privately gives very little to the poor—less than any Republican I know—Joe Biden gives even less.

In fact, Biden’s charitable giving is so abysmally poor that he makes even Obama look like Santa Claus. Biden may well have been the stingiest man in the Senate. For two of the most “liberal” senators in Washington, they were embarrassingly conservative when it comes to reaching into their own pockets and helping the poor, whose cause they pretend to champion. If they thought that the public actually knew how little they did privately to help the poor, these two hypocrites would never again spout their populist drivel about Republican “trickle down” economics or criticize the Republicans for not doing enough to help the poor.

A close look at his returns reveals the true depths of their hypocrisy.

From 1998 through his election in 2008, Joe Biden’s income varied between $200,000 and $400,000. Where I come from, that is serious money. Yet, amazingly, his reported annual charitable giving—as shown on his Schedule A—varied between a whopping $120 during the lean years and a little less than $400 when he felt extra charitable. [The rare exception was 2007, when he was running for office and gave a less than generous $995 to the poor.] No, I have not missed a decimal place. He does not give in terms of five figures, nor does he give in terms of four figures. At least before he became Vice President.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Ryan’s Impossible Debate Challenge

In a rational world, Paul Ryan should have a fairly easy time in the upcoming debate against Vice President Joe Biden. Ryan is a man who has mastered the intricacies of legislation and the federal budget while Biden has shown scant interest in anything in his senatorial career other than the AMTRAK schedule from Washington, DC to Delaware.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a rational world. We live in one where Barack Obama is president AND Joe Biden is vice president. To win a debate against Joe Biden one must be prepared to engage with a man who has hardly more than a nodding acquaintance with the truth.

Most of us are familiar with Biden’s ill-starred run for the Demcocrat nomination in 1988 as part of the Seven Dwarfs. He was forced out when it was revealed that he’d not only plagiarized a speech by British Labor Party leader Neal Kinnock, he’s actually gone so far as to steal Kinnock’s biography, claiming to be the son of an impoverished coal miner. (Though to his credit, when Gary Hart was dropped out due to his marital infidelities Biden remarked, “We’ve lost Horny.”) To this day, Biden claims he was “raised in Scranton (PA)” though he left when he was 10 years old.

This should be a danger sign.

The fact is that when Biden gets put in a tough position he will simply make stuff up. For instance,Jonah Goldberg relates this tale:

The most notorious comes from Biden’s 1988 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. He had been hounded about his law-school record and plagiarism problems (among other things, he copied five pages from a law journal for a 15-page paper and then claimed it was a footnoting error), and he was asked a question about his academic record by a resident of New Hampshire.

He responded: “I think I have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.” He went on:

I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship. In the first year in the law, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class and then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot-court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political-science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits — only needed 123 credits. And I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.

Most of these statements were outright lies.

Via: Red State

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JetBlue Offers To Help Disgruntled Voters Flee The U.S. After 2012 Elections

Airline to help upset voters leave the U.S.

An airline says it will help voters distraught over backing the losing candidate in next month's presidential contest flee the country — for free.

JetBlue Airways' new "Election Protection" promotion allows voters the chance to win a free round-trip ticket to one of the airline's 21 international destinations if the election doesn't go their way. Contestants first must preregister at jetblue.com/electionprotection. After the Nov. 6 results are in, the airline will give away 1,006 roundtrip certificates — that's 2012 seats — to participants whose candidate lost.

"We've all heard it said before: if my candidate does not win, I'm leaving the country," said Marty St. George, senior vice president of marketing and commercial strategy for JetBlue. "Fun is one of our five founding values, and in this spirit, we decided to give people a chance to recover from the political noise and follow through on their claim to skip town if their candidate comes up short."

Via: Washington Times

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Opinion: Why ObamaCare Has Doctors Depressed And Discouraged

Wednesday night the first presidential debate will take place in Denver. The focus will be on domestic policy. But it’s a safe bet, while you’ll likely hear about ObamaCare, you won’t hear about the doctors on the front lines of medicine in the United States today. President Obama has said he likes the term ObamaCare because it signifies that "Obama cares," but if he does, why has he failed to consider life here in the medical trenches, where me and my fellow physicians are discouraged and concerned about how we will care for you and your family in this brave new world of health insurance expansion.

You may remember the famous ad that took aim at Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (now the GOP’s vice presidential nominee) and his proposed privatizing of Medicare -- that showed the congressman pushing an elderly woman off a cliff. The hard truth is that it is we doctors who are going off the cliff, not granny.

President Obama and Congress should have checked with the country’s physicians before passing a law that relies on our efforts to handle health insurance expansion to more than 30 million more people.

A new on-line survey by the non-profit The Physicians Foundation, one of the largest doctors surveys ever performed, confirms that over two thirds of physicians are pessimistic about the future of medicine, over 84 percent feel that our profession is in decline, and a majority would not recommend it as a career for their children. (The survey was sent to over 600,000 doctors and over 14,000 responded).

If you ask my three children you will find that neither my wife or I (also a physician) are recommending a medical career to them despite the fact that we still manage to find ways to enjoy what we do.

We are overburdened, underpaid, ill equipped to handle what we already have on our plates let alone the expected expansion under ObamaCare.

-

Survey after survey from Deloitte, Sermo.com, the Doctor-Patient Medical Association, and Investors Business Daily have all previously shown that doctors are not happy with the direction of medicine and that it is impacting how we practice. 

Over the past two years I’ve taken my own informal survey as have my patients and patients all across the country. 

Doctors everywhere are complaining. We are overburdened, underpaid, ill equipped to handle what we already have on our plates let alone the expected expansion under ObamaCare. Technology provides us with more complex tests and treatments that we are paid less for administering to an increasing volume of patients.

Via:  Fox News

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Biden On $16 Trillion Deficit: All Bush’s Fault…

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  ABC OTUS News - Biden Blames Bush Administration for Deficit (ABC News)

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Vice President Joe Biden placed the blame for the ballooning deficit on the Bush administration today, arguing that the previous administration saddled the country with the burden of trillions of dollars in debt.

"Let's get serious here! How did we get this debt? Ladies and gentlemen, they put two wars on a credit card. Not paying a penny, not paying a penny, even though I introduced legislation to pay for that war. They voted against it," Biden said at the Wa-Ke Hatchee Park Recreation Center. "Two, they voted for a new entitlement program without paying one penny for it, and that was clear. Number 3, they added another trillion dollars in the tax cut for the very wealthy, so what's the result? These are the facts, folks, these are the facts.

"The result was by the time the reins got turned back over to Barack [Obama] and me, they had doubled the national debt in eight years, doubled the national debt in eight years," Biden added.

Biden recounted that within the first week of being in office, Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to the president, warned newly inaugurated President Obama of the deficit the country faced.

"We were sitting in the oval office, and Larry Summers, the chief economic adviser, and the economic team came in and said 'Mr. President, looking at this year's budget you are going to have a trilliondollar deficit.' He said, 'I haven't done anything yet,'" Biden said. "I'm serious. They said, 'No, Mr. President, the budget they passed, the budget they passed in October of last year guarantees no matter what you do you're going to have a trillion dollar debt this year in the budget.' A trillion dollar deficit to be precise."

Earlier in the week, the Washington Post fact checked President Obama's claim that the Bush administration's policies accounted for 90 percent of the country's current deficit and rated the assertion as false, since the president also pushed spending increases and tax cuts that added to the deficit.

Biden also claimed the Obama administration has proposed a plan that would reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years and has already decreased the deficit by $1 trillion

Via: Yahoo

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