UNEXPECTEDLY! Fund manager: Jim Biden was in business with Qatari officials.

New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.

The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”

One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.

The second company provided financial backing for a series of loans that a hospital chain paid Jim Biden to arrange, according to documents and testimony Lewitt submitted in the course of the federal bankruptcy proceedings.

If substantiated, the alleged arrangements would constitute some of the closest known financial links between a relative of President Joe Biden and a foreign government.

As “Deep Throat” never said during Watergate, follow the money:

UNEXPECTEDLY! US economy grew slower than expected at the start of 2024.

The U.S. economy grew at a slower pace than expected at the beginning of 2024 as consumers pulled back on spending in the face of higher inflation.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew by 1.6% on an annualized basis in the three-month period from January through March, the Commerce Department said in its first reading of the data on Thursday.

That is much lower than the 2.4% increase forecast by LSEG economists and marks a sharp slowdown from the 3.4% pace seen during the fourth quarter. It is the slowest pace of growth in two years.

“This was a worst of both worlds report — slower than expected growth, higher than expected inflation,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth US. “The biggest setback is the acceleration in core inflation, and in particular, the services sector rising above a 5% annual rate.”

And Team Biden is prepared to drive those growth figures down even more! Biden administration sets national goal to cut freight emissions to zero.

UNEXPECTEDLY! ABC, NBC, CBS Fail To Tell Viewers Trump Prosecutors Are ‘Democrats’ 90% Of Time.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, barring any unforeseen delays, will begin his criminal trial of former President Donald Trump on Monday on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records to cover up “hush money” allegations.

The trial is unprecedented. Political implications loom large. The Republican nominee for president and favorite to win the general election faces a full team of Democratic prosecutors.

Yet Americans who rely on evening newscasts from legacy broadcast networks for information are likely unaware of the latter fact.

Rich Noyes is a contributing editor for MRC NewsBusters, the most reliable media watchdog in the industry today. Noyes led a team of analysts who reviewed “NBC Nightly News,” “CBS Evening News” and ABC’s “World News Tonight” from January 1, 2023, through April 10, 2024.

MRC found that the three networks failed to inform viewers during “at least 90 percent” of the coverage that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, and New York Attorney General Letitia James are Democrats.

“The network coverage of the Trump prosecutions routinely and fraudulently implies that they are nonpartisan public officials. It’s Trump versus the New York Attorney General, or the Manhattan District Attorney,” NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham told Fox News Digital.

“They’re not just Democrats, they’re elected Democrats, building a career on taking down Trump. Leaving that out of the story is irresponsible.”

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the bias-by-omission makes perfect sense.

Evergreen:

UNEXPECTEDLY! Inflation unexpectedly rises to 3.5% — plunging Dow Jones down 450 points and all but ruling out a summer cut to interest rates.

The ghost of Milton Friedman smiles.

HOLY SHIT!!!🤣🤣🤣

Shopping during Bidenomics!!!

Whoever made THIS👇🏼 FREAKING ROCKS!!!😆😂 pic.twitter.com/g6TB3K29nM

— SaltyGoat (@SaltyGoat17) November 13, 2023

UNEXPECTEDLY!   Australian soccer team with 5 transgender players goes undefeated in women’s tournament: ‘Huge difference in ability’.

UNEXPECTEDLY! California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise.

In San Jose, Brian Hom, owner of two Vitality Bowls restaurants, now runs his stores with two employees, versus four workers that he typically used in the past. That means it takes longer to make customers’ açaí bowls and other orders, and Hom said he is also raising prices by around 10% to help cover the increased labor costs.

“I’m definitely not going to hire anymore,” he said.

Proponents of the California law setting the new minimum food-worker wage and a state-appointed council overseeing it have said the measures would help improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of local workers. Organized labor groups have said they hope to replicate the law in other states.

The coming minimum-wage increase for California fast-food workers at bigger chains represents a 25% increase from the state’s broader $16 minimum wage. McDonald’s, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Jack in the Box and other restaurant chains have said they would raise menu prices in California to offset some of the cost.

Many California restaurant operators are looking for other ways to cover the cost, like reducing hours, closing during slower parts of the day or serving menu items that take less time to make.

“I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals. I’m leaving no stones unturned,” said Scott Rodrick, owner of 18 McDonald’s restaurants in Northern California.

Other restaurateurs, including Hom of Vitality Bowls, said they are turning down opportunities to open new locations in California and looking at expanding in other states instead.

Previously: “California, with 12 percent of the American population, is home today to roughly one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.”

All they know how to do is make things worse.

UNEXPECTEDLY! You Know That Bizarre Story Biden Told the Special Counsel About a Worker Getting His Penis Burned Off? Yeah, Biden Lied About It.

It wasn’t just a random story told by a confused old man. It was that, too, but it wasn’t just that.

It was yet another confabulation by a confused old man to brag about himself.

He told the story to indicate that when he was a young (incompetent) lawyer, he fought for the rights of this abused worker. It’s a hero origin story.

Trouble is, there’s only been one case like that ever reported in legal reporters — those thick books you see behind lawyers in ambulance-chaser reporters — and when that case was settled, Biden was still in law school.

It’s yet another case of Biden hearing about something and just incorporating it into his ever-expanding self-mythology.

For nearly two decades, President Joe Biden has told a story about why he devoted his life to politics. He repeated the tale, at the risk of facing criminal charges for lying to a federal agent, while speaking to Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023.Fresh out of law school and working as a clerk at a high-powered Wilmington, Delaware, law firm, Biden, in his telling, was tapped to defend a construction company sued by a 23-year-old welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” to a fire that broke out when he was working inside a chimney at a Delaware City plant. Thanks to Biden’s shrewd legal defense on the construction company’s behalf, the injured man lost the case.

“I wrote this memo. And son of a b–, it prevailed,” Biden told Hur on Oct. 8. “And I looked over at that kid…and I thought, ‘son of a b–, I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.'”

Long before Biden became first Obama’s veep and then Obama’s nominal stand-in, the DNC-MSM still feigned interest on reporting on Biden’s lies and fables:

But, as Hillary would say, in what seems to serve as advice for her party’s operatives bylines, “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! Wholesale inflation rose 0.6% in February, much more than expected.

UNEXPECTEDLY! It’s a No-Brainer: Economic Growth Is Happening Mainly in Red States.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Ford cuts F-150 Lightning production as EV demand softens.

And: Ford Says It’s Committed to V-8 Mustangs Regardless of What Others Do. “If we’re the only one on the planet making a V-8 affordable sports car for everyone in the world, so be it.”

UPDATE: Electric Vehicles Enter the ‘Total Failure’ Phase of Their Existence.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Hunter Biden Crashes Hearing Debating Whether to Hold Him in Contempt.

Related:

Old and busted: What about your gafffffffesssss!!!!???

The new hotness?

REPORTER TO HUNTER: “What kind of crack do you normally smoke Mr. Biden?!” 🤣 pic.twitter.com/L2sFJMPWwE

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 10, 2024

UNEXPECTEDLY! It’s starting to look like China regrets its private-enterprise crackdown.

China held its annual Central Economic Work Conference, or CEWC, on Monday and Tuesday. It was attended by all of the country’s top leaders, including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.

A document released after the conference sets the agenda for China’s economy — the second-largest economy in the world — for the next year. And strikingly, this year’s readout acknowledges that China needs to prioritize economic development.

“Next year, we must persist in seeking progress while maintaining stability, promote stability through growth, and establish the new before breaking the old,” states the meeting’s official readout.

The wording in this document suggests “hints of remorse at overzealous growth-negative policy implementation,” Rory Green, the chief China economist at GlobalData.TS Lombard, wrote in a note on Wednesday.

I’m not sure the business climate is going to improve until Xi is gone.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Mask Mandates Officially Return In California.

The return of mask mandates is officially here.

Yup, even in late 2023, masks are back.

Starting Wednesday, several counties in Northern California have reinstated mask mandates in hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare settings. This had previously been rumored, but officially took effect this week. In far left Marin and Santa Clara Counties, those rules apply not just to employees but to anyone entering those facilities.

Contra Costa, Alameda, San Mateo and Sonoma Counties are set to punish all healthcare workers with masking, though won’t require the public to mask. Yet.

They’re back. And they’re not going away anytime soon.

Thanks to the unimaginable incompetence of local health officials, masks will be required in at least those settings until the end of March. Why? Because of flu season, of course!

This is what the endless misinformation from Fauci, the CDC and other health “experts” has created, a permanent state of rolling mandates in far left areas unwilling to accept reality. A culture of safetyism, where panicked administrators enact preemptive mandates that will, inevitably, accomplish nothing.

And it’s exactly why combating that misinformation remains as important as ever.

Flashback: Ignoring Them Is the Only Way Out.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Cardi B’s latest political take is pretty terrible.

It’s a sad reality of modern life, but a reality nonetheless, that more young people get their political cues from celebrities than from actual thought leaders or intellectuals. One such celebrity whose political takes regularly go viral is rap star Cardi B—but her latest viral opinion is deeply misguided and misinformed.

During an interview on the wildly popular “Hot Ones” podcast, Cardi B spoke about how and why she “loves FDR,” referring, of course, to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who occupied the Oval Office from 1933 to 1945.

Cardi B’s admiration for FDR is on full display. And it’s not just her: it’s incredibly common for American liberals and progressives to cite FDR as a role model and icon. There’s just one problem: FDR was a vicious tyrant who committed atrocities these people never seem to reckon with.

One wonders whether Cardi B is aware of the fact that FDR carried out the horrifying practice of forcing “Japanese” (read: Asian-looking people, even US citizens) into internment camps during World War II. As History.com recounts:

“On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the forced removal of resident ‘enemy aliens’ from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas.

And it wasn’t just Asian Americans that FDR wanted to err, resettle: New Documents Reveal FDR’s Eugenic Project to ‘Resettle’ Jews During World War II. As the Holocaust raged, the American president secretly asked his government to study the possible resettlement of remaining European refugees in Africa and South America. His goal: for Jews to be ‘spread thin all over the world.’

But FDR’s fascistic tendencies were hidden by his brilliant economic policies: FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by seven years, UCLA economists calculate.

And the lack of partisan hyperbole in his speeches: In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR smeared the laissez–faire Coolidge era of the 1920s as “the spirit of fascism.”

And his well-tempered demeanor: FDR gave a Nazi Iron Cross to a conservative reporter he didn’t like in 1942.

Flashback: Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon). Biden gave Cardi B (whose real name is Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar) an interview (of sorts) that was published by Elle magazine on the first day of the Democratic National Convention in August of 2020.

UNEXPECTEDLY! UK Study: Puberty Blockers Given to Teens — Get This — Worsened Their Mental Illnesses Rather Than Abating Them. “While the updated analysis from the University of Essex has yet to be peer-reviewed, another long-term study from Sweden found those who underwent transgender surgery were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general public.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! 95% of NFTs are Worthless: Report.

NFTs went mainstream, and then the bubble burst, as it often does. The financial failure does not even begin to scratch the surface of the environmental devastation wrought by crypto, either. It is unclear what the vast majority of crypto and NFT owners have gotten in return for accelerating climate change.

Iowahawk is taking his financial setback relatively well…

As God is my witness, I thought I could build an eternal empire of vast wealth for my descendants with jpegs of cartoon monkeyshttps://t.co/AQwVT07Pkj

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 21, 2023

UNEXPECTEDLY! Federal deficit unexpectedly set to double this year.

What’s happening: Bigger interest payments + lower tax receipts, despite strong economic growth.

• “A strong economy usually reduces the deficit. Not this time,” Stein writes.

Perhaps the economy isn’t as strong as the DNC-MSM pretends it is: Interest rates are soaring, raising the alarm for a painful reckoning for America.

UNEXPECTEDLY! MSNBC: Woke is the new n-word.

But of course. MSNBC is gonna MSNBC during an election cycle. Flashback to 2012: Words like “golf” and “Chicago” are racist dog whistles from the GOP.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin ‘on board’ crashed Russian plane.

Fritz Todt could not be reached for comment.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  500,000 jobs could disappear in dramatic revision of US government data: report.

Bidenomics! Is there anything it can’t do?

UNEXPECTEDLY! One Year Later, President Biden’s ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ Is a Total Flop.

One year ago today, President Biden signed the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” into law. Today, the president will take the stage and attempt to take a victory lap over this legislative “victory.” But an honest accounting reveals that the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act has woefully failed at its namesake goal: reducing inflation.

The legislation mostly consisted of green energy subsidies, healthcare subsidies, tax increases, and more funding for the Internal Revenue Service. Yet the President sold it to the public as a way to bring down the crushing inflation that continues to bankrupt the American people. (The typical U.S. family spent $709 more on monthly expenses last month, July 2023, than it did in July two years ago.)

The president promised during the debate over the legislation that the Inflation Reduction Act was “the strongest bill you can pass to lower inflation, reduce costs, and tackle our climate crisis.” But, while the inflation rate has dropped significantly, many economists from across the political spectrum agree that the IRA has had essentially no impact on that decline, which is almost entirely due to other factors, including the expiration of COVID stimulus spending and the Federal Reserve’s changes in monetary policy.

Why, it’s as if:

John Podesta just spent three minutes at the White House press briefing explaining how the "Inflation Reduction Act" is actually just a massive piece of climate legislation. pic.twitter.com/FcyAZTgyrF

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 16, 2023

UNEXPECTEDLY!  California Loses Most Tax Revenue in U.S. as Wealthy Move to Tax-Friendly States.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  Flood of Incriminating Disclosures About Hunter Biden’s Business Dealings, Including Allegations That His Father Was Involved, Could Threaten ‘Sweetheart’ Plea Deal.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Hunter Biden’s Lawyer Caught Smoking a Bong in Broad Daylight During Hunter Visit.

UNEXPECTEDLY! The media isn’t checking Hunter Biden’s white privilege.

The attorney for hip hop artist Kodak Black has spoken out on behalf of his client, who was given a three-year prison sentence for similar offenses in 2019 relating to lying on a federal background check. Black falsified information on federal paperwork to purchase at least four guns.

Attorney General Merrick Garland took to the podium last week to defend the deal made between Hunter Biden and his Department of Justice. “Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department by claiming that we do not treat cases alike. This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy… Nothing could be further from the truth.” Garland is not only arguing that a statistical fact is somehow an Attack on American Democracy, but that the “racial disparities” in the American justice system, that the Biden administration have been pushing for years, with the media echoing, do not exist. If all cases are treated equally under the law, then poor Americans of color would have received the same plea deal as the rich white son of the sitting president. Would anyone in the media like to investigate whether that’s the case? I’ll wait…

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their silence makes perfect sense.

Evergreen: