Here’s the New York Times press release — sorry, “news report”: “Ending the emergency will prompt complex changes in the cost of Covid tests and treatments that Americans are accustomed to getting for free. Any charges they face will vary depending on whether they have private insurance, Medicare coverage, Medicaid coverage or no health insurance. What state they live in could also be a factor.”
Here’s the thing: People don’t need COVID tests and treatments in the way they did before. Know why? Because there’s way less COVID, and what does persist is vastly less dangerous.
This is all disingenuous hogwash anyway. What the Biden people are doing here is trying to provide a soft landing for their government-worker constituents, so many of them toiling from home, who have been the true beneficiaries of the changes in workplace rules since 2020 — not the people for whom they work, namely us.
Or maybe they’re all just trying to figure out what the hell the boss is actually trying to say, since Biden announced out of nowhere Tuesday, “The COVID emergency will end when the Supreme Court ends it.”
I’m not sure whether that statement fills out your “Biden is an idiot” or your “Biden is senile” square on your “There’s Something Wrong With Biden” bingo card, but you can certainly make an argument for either — or both!
Embrace the healing power of Trunalimunumaprzure “and.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jan 31, 2023 at 9:14 pm Link
Digging into the half-century history of a certain erratic Delaware pol, Fox News discovers that in the late 1970s, then-senator Joe Biden tanked President Jimmy Carter’s nomination of Ted Sorensen to head the CIA.
Sorensen, the confidant and speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy (and widely regarded as the author of a goodly chunk of Profiles in Courage, for which JFK won a Pulitzer Prize), retained classified documents in his home and used them, among other things, in writing a book about the Kennedy administration. This was too much for Biden, or so he said, so the senator opposed the nomination.
A befuddled President Biden casually maligned the Irish while botching his wife’s family history during a gaffe-filled appearance in Delaware on Friday.
“I may be Irish, but I’m not stupid,” Biden inexplicably said as he greeted 102-year-old World War II veteran Ray Firmani during a town hall on veterans’ benefits in New Castle, Del.
“I married Dominic Giacoppa’s daughter,” Biden continued. “So, you know, I got a little Italian in me now, you know?”
The audience of military veterans and federal officials received the off-script comments in puzzled silence — but critics on Twitter took comic umbrage at the ethnic slur.
The reason Biden is not tracking higher in the polls is in large measure due to his ineffective public speaking skills which strengthens the image that he is an old man who is not as sharp as he once was. Perception is reality.
I say this as a communications professional who has helped organizational leaders deliver effective and important speeches and presentations before friendly and unfriendly audiences. The ability to communicate with polished verbal and non-verbal public speaking skills is paramount to how an audience perceives you and if you are ineffective at delivering a message, the perception is more negative than positive.
While delivering remarks before a live audience or press conference, Biden is an ineffective communicator, often exhibiting garbled and mumbled words and malaprops, nonsensical utterances and grandpa-like colloquialisms. He has delivered confusing statements on the COVID pandemic, Taiwan and even seeking re-election, forcing his staff to issue statements of clarification. Reminiscences about his days as a child and his father saying, “Joey…” only reinforces his age. He recently asked an audience whether a member of Congress, who was killed in a tragic car accident, was actually in the audience: “Jackie are you here? Where’s Jackie, ” Biden asked the stunned crowd.
On every subject, confusion abounds, and it’s only getting worse.
On the campaign trail, he forgot the name of the governor of New Mexico. (She does have three names). He lauded Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, then seconds later couldn’t recall his name and instead described Wyden as “that other guy that I just talked about.”
He talked about his visit to Florida in the aftermath of “Hurricane Ivan.”
He wished a speedy recovery to Nancy Pelosi’s husband “Bobby.” (His name is Paul.)
At age 80, Biden is unable to read the simplest words off the Teleprompter. The word “ban” comes out as “blan.” He tries to urge people to vote, but instead says “veto.” Inflation is rendered as “implation.” The Obergefell decision by the Supreme Court (gay marriage) comes out as “Ogilfry.”
He called Intel “Inkel,” and recalled meeting with “the Chee-E-O.”
Likewise, he recounted a sit-down with the chairman of GM, “Amy Barrett.” No, Mr. President, that’s the Supreme Court justice. You met with Mary Barra, but at least whatever-her-name-is had some good news for the American people and their motor vehicles.
“We’re gonna go all electric by 3035.”
Not 2035, but 3035.
And when 3035 arrives, this is how the George Jetson vehicles are going to be powered — “electric charging stations all across America the power to fleet to to take care of the fleets of new electric vehicles… 50, excuse me, 500,000 charging stations around the country.”
Notice how suddenly there doesn’t seem to be a threat to “democracy” anymore? Funny how that works.
As noted above, we don’t know yet for certain, but it looks like the Republicans could win both the House and the Senate. You can see the predictions at the bottom of the chyron with 51 in the Senate and 218 in the House. We’ll have to see how it continues to shake out.
So did Biden take away anything to learn? A reporter asked him about the one thing everyone seemed to agree on: the wrong direction of the country under him. Biden’s response showed he wasn’t even pretending to have learned anything.
Reporter: “75% of people say the country is heading in the wrong direction. What do you intend to do differently?”
Biden: “Nothing because they’re just finding out what we’re doing.”
How horrible is that answer? He’s unabashedly going to continue along the disastrous path he’s been following.
Americans who voted for Democrats or who were fooled into believing Biden had achieved something by his sleight-of-hand tricks over oil and gas are about to get a rude awakening. Prepare for the oil and gas prices now to start going back up once the releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve stop. The railroad strike Biden put off? That may hit now in December, in the holiday season. On top of all that, here comes the diesel shortage as well. Prepare for all that, because it’s coming.
President Biden fended off a group of hecklers on Monday — telling one of them “you look crazy” — as he delivered his final speech before the midterm elections in a deeply Democratic part of Maryland.
“You’re a disgrace!” the first of multiple hecklers shouted at Biden during a rally for gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore just outside Washington.
“I tell you what, let him sing! Let the man sing,” Biden said, before reverse-heckling another disruptive guest.
“Hey man, don’t jump. You look crazy enough to jump,” the president told the second heckler, who was wearing a US flag top hat at the historically black Bowie State University.
President Joe Biden is certainly flirting with disaster here, but he pulled it off. Speaking at Bowie State University in Maryland, a historically black college or university (HBCU), Biden told the students that they’re just as smart and just as bright as those students at other schools that have endowments. As we say, it was a risky line, seeing as Biden in 2019 told a crowd in Iowa that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”
President Biden threatened on Monday to seek a new windfall profits tax on major oil and gas companies unless they ramp up production to curb the price of gasoline at the pump, an escalation of his battle with the energy industry just a week before the midterm elections.
—The New York Times, October 31st.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Nov 06, 2022 at 9:54 pm Link
Fetterman has had Joe Biden there in Pennsylvania to campaign, but given how unpopular Joe Biden is, that didn’t help.
So, Fetterman pulled out the Obama card and had him in to help out at an event on Saturday in Pittsburgh.
But there was a seminal moment during the event which was perhaps a metaphor for Fetterman and all the Democrats this cycle.
Fetterman was at the podium, making comments to introduce Obama. He talked about Dr. Oz appearing with President Donald Trump on Saturday; Fetterman claimed that he would be appearing with a “sedition free” president. Watch what happens next.
Toward the end of his divisive and rambling incitement to class warfare, Biden served up one of the brazen, outright lies that have marred his entire career. The man deserves credit for audacity, for even in his dementia-ridden dotage he is unsurpassed in Washington (a city of politicians, which means a city of liars) in his ability to deliver an absolute falsehood not only with absolute conviction but also with passionate, self-righteous fervor.
“Some airlines,” Joe declared, “if you want six more inches between you and the seat in front, you pay more money. But you don’t know it until you purchase your ticket. Look, folks, these are junk fees. They’re unfair, and they hit marginalized Americans the hardest, especially low-income folks and people of color. They benefit big corporations, not consumers, not working families. And that changes now.”
If “fact-checkers” really actually checked facts instead of just running interference for the far Left, they would give that statement all the Pinocchios they have, for there is simply no truth in it whatsoever.
Biden, contrary to his carefully nurtured Lunchbucket Joe image, has been a member of the Beltway elite for over five decades, and so he likely hasn’t flown commercial in ages. And characteristically, his statement is not entirely clear. He is clearly saying that the airlines are racist and take money illegitimately from their non-white customers, which is viciously false and irresponsible enough in itself, but it’s not clear how exactly he is saying they do it. Is he saying that it’s wrong and racist for airlines to charge more for seats that offer more legroom? Or does he mean that the airlines are tacking charges for more legroom onto the price for a ticket that the customer has already agreed to pay, without the customer’s knowledge?
I can’t keep track of the Brandon administration’s various imaginary grievances. Are racist airline seats more or less racist than racist roads and bridges, for example?
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 26, 2022 at 9:14 pm Link
But what exactly did Brandon mean by this? “‘We’ve got news that Rashee Sanook is now the prime minister,’ Mr Biden said. ‘As my brother would say ‘go figure,’’ he added.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 25, 2022 at 2:22 pm Link
Given how much editing NBC and its sister networks must do to get usable footage of Biden, that they allowed this to air could be a preview of how the networks will start treating him post-midterms.
UPDATE: The media bail on Biden: “All polling points to Biden’s majorities in the House and Senate being wiped out come the November midterm elections. When that happens, and I mean the very next day, these innuendos and grumblings for Biden to step aside will become full-bore primal screams, and he won’t be able to survive them.”
(Updated and bumped.)
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 22, 2022 at 1:35 pm Link
“Biden goes to bat for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania,” reads the headline from Bloomberg. If so, Joe Biden appears to have struck out. And Fetterman apparently never came up to bat.
* * * * * * * *
One has to wonder just how accurate the polling out of Pennsylvania has been after this rally. If the race was close and/or Fetterman was leading, they’d never have had Biden come out to campaign. Barack Obama? Sure. Even Bernie Sanders might have done better with working-class voters. Bringing Biden in to close the sale for Fetterman, however, feels like a desperation move as the candidate spins downward with voters — especially if they were relying on Biden to bolster their campaign’s coherence.
I wonder how far down the list of closers Biden was. “We can’t get either of the Obamas. We can’t get Bernie. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to go with the old man at this point. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“After my stroke,” Fetterman opens, “I was just grateful to see Giselle and my kids.” In the soft-focus spot, Fetterman denounces “politicians” who “spend so much time fighting about the things that don’t matter.” What does matter, says Fetterman, is having the economic security to be able to spend time with loved ones because we never know how much time we have.
It’s a touching message, but it hardly allays concerns about Fetterman’s ailments. The point of an ad like this is to “hang a lantern” on the candidate’s negatives, thereby reframing the issue in more favorable terms. That’s a workable strategy, but it comes at the cost of conceding that the negative in question is a real and pressing concern for voters.
More ominously, from the perspective of Pennsylvania’s Democratic voters, is the prospect of President Joe Biden’s imminent return to the state.
As the midterm election season heads into the home stretch, the president will host a fundraiser in Pennsylvania alongside Fetterman. Biden hasn’t been seen with Fetterman in any capacity since September 5; indeed, the president hasn’t campaigned much at all of late. “Biden doesn’t appear eager to land Air Force One in states where he’s underwater in the polls, and incumbent Democratic senators are fighting to hang on,” Axios reported on Friday. “And he’s yet to headline any campaign rallies this month where he is in front of big audiences to make his closing argument.” Pennsylvania is just such a state where Biden’s presence could do more to harm than good for Democratic prospects.
September’s Franklin & Marshall Poll of the Keystone State showed that only 28 percent of Pennsylvania’s registered voters say the president is doing a “good” or “excellent” job. Seventy percent describe his performance in office as “fair” or “poor.” While that poll showed the race for Senate tightening significantly from August, Fetterman maintains a narrow lead over his Republican opponent. Moreover, the Fetterman campaign has outraised and continues to outspend Mehmet Oz, who has pumped at least $17 million of his own wealth into his campaign. The wisdom of the Fetterman camp’s decision to tether itself to the Democratic Party’s unpopular figurehead is questionable unless we assume that Democratic wallets are starting to tighten up as enthusiasm for the candidate wanes.
As Michael Graham wrote in 2004 after Frank Lautenberg was swapped in to replace Bob Torricelli on the Democrats’ Senate ticket in NJ, “Don’t assume you know who’s on the Democratic ticket until Election Day.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 16, 2022 at 2:14 pm Link
But here’s the interesting part. Qiu is the paper’s designated “fact-checker.” So, if Biden is habitually spinning yarns that unravel, she must be busy with Biden checks, right? No. She hasn’t “fact-checked” Biden since Aug.20, 2021, on the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco under an extremely mild headline: “Clarifying Biden’s Take of Evacuation.”
A peek at her archive of articles since then includes at least 14 “fact-checks” of Republicans and/or conservatives. This 14-to-1 imbalance in target selection would remind you of PolitiFact — which makes sense because that’s where Qiu worked before joining the Times.
Jake Tapper’s snarky chyron says: “No, he wasn’t.”
President Biden on Thursday told State Department employees he was “shot at” overseas — reviving a claim that previously stirred controversy.“You have great personal courage. I’ve been with some of you when we’ve been shot at,” Biden told a group of diplomatic aides in Washington.
Biden did not offer a detailed description of being shot at. But he was forced to walk back a similar claim in 2007 as veterans warned him not to exaggerate.
Biden said during a CNN-hosted Democratic presidential debate in 2007 that he was “shot at” inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone.
He later revised the claim, saying that in fact, “I was near where a shot landed.”
To be fair, Obama-era staffers routinely exaggerate their wartime peril:
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 13, 2022 at 5:30 pm Link
President Joe Biden appeared to incorrectly claim on Wednesday that his late son, Beau, “lost his life in Iraq.”
Giving a speech in Colorado to designate Camp Hale as a national monument, the president discussed the many sacrifices that soldiers make before citing his son Beau as an example.
“I say this as a father of a man and won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq,” Biden said.
Although Biden’s son did serve in Iraq, he died of brain cancer in 2015.
And there is the foundation. Holding Joe accountable for what he says is not on the table. But what are journalists to do, after years of telling us a President lying is horrible? The answer: Reclassify Jose Biden’s lying as something else. To the rescue, in rides Sheer and Qiu with their handy guide. In this lengthy explainer of Biden’s fables, they deliver a wide array of new terms for lying in a helpful manner for journos. Buckle in – this is a long ride through a forest of ambiguity and double meaning.
The habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity…exaggerated biography…has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience…Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore…the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful…Mr. Biden’s fictions…weave together his political identity…he could stretch the truth up to a point…a serial exaggerator…continued to shave the truth…curious stories…
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 10, 2022 at 1:35 pm Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden appears to ask if dead congresswoman is at White House speech: “Biden’s mistake came during his remarks at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health. [Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-IN)], who was tragically killed in a car crash in August, was a core congressional ally in planning the conference alongside Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN). ‘I want to thank all of you here, including bipartisan elected officials like Rep. McGovern, Sen. Braun, Sen. Booker, Rep. — Jackie, are you here?’ the president said near the top of his remarks. ‘Where’s Jackie? I thought she was going to be here — to help make this a reality.’ In August, when news of Walorski’s passing first broke, Biden wrote in a statement that the accident left him and first lady Jill Biden ‘shocked and saddened.’”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 28, 2022 at 12:00 pm Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden’s Old Man Filter Goes Haywire Again: “Biden with his arm around Elton John: ‘It’s all his fault we are spending $6 billion in tax payer dollars on HIV and AIDS this month.’”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 24, 2022 at 1:14 pm Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! On 60 Minutes, President Biden Admits His Student-Loan Order Is Illegal. “‘The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,’ President Biden tells 60 Minutes in an interview in Detroit. Why does Biden’s statement matter so much? I’ll tell you: It matters because the memo that the Biden administration released to justify his order rested entirely upon there being an ongoing emergency, and because, as Biden has just confirmed, there is no ongoing emergency.
President Klain is not happy: “Biden’s insistence on Sunday night that the pandemic is over caught several of his own health officials by surprise. The declaration was not part of his planned remarks ahead of the ‘60 Minutes’ interview, two administration officials familiar with the matter told POLITICO.”
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. and U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman has not fully recovered from the serious stroke he suffered in May. His campaign has acknowledged his obvious struggles with “auditory processing” and speech, but the persistence of those struggles has contrasted with the campaign’s rosier predictions of a return to the rigors of campaigning, including debating his opponent, Mehmet Oz.
If Mr. Fetterman is not well enough to debate his opponent, that raises serious concerns about his ability to serve as a United States senator.
On May 13, just days before the May party primary here in the Keystone State, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman suffered a stroke while on the campaign trail in Lancaster in his run for his party’s nomination for U.S. Senate.
In the statement, Fetterman said: “The good news is I’m feeling much better and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”
The public was told he would be back at the beginning of July. That moved to mid-July, then to August. With each change, no updates on his condition were made available to the press or the public.
The political ads he ran most of the summer had been recorded before the stroke. And although a flurry of Tweets did come from his account at a brisk pace, none of them provided a doctor’s update on his condition. Rather, they all centered on where his opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had lived prior to 2020.
It is not clear if Fetterman does all of his own tweets or if staff do them as well. His campaign staff did not provide an answer to that question by deadline.
When Fetterman returned to the public forum in Erie, the stroke went from “a bump in the road” to him saying, “I almost died,” leaving open the delicate question of what is the extent of his illness, with no one to date offering that answer.
It was later revealed that the stroke required surgery to implant a pacemaker with a defibrillator because he had a serious heart condition, one that neither reporters nor voters nor his most ardent supporters knew he had.
His teleprompter reading skills are approaching Brandon’s Trunalimunumaprzure territory:
President Joe Biden is going to be expected at the forthcoming Detroit Auto Show that will be taking place in two weeks. It’ll mark the first time he has visited Detroit since his days as Vice President, Bloomberg noted last week.
“I’ll be there. I’m a car guy, as you kind of noticed,” Biden said last week when asked if he was going to attend.
Sure, we noticed. In fact, we couldn’t help but notice that Biden is such a car guy that his administration is trying to force through counterproductive and burdensome environmental and EV requirements for auto manufacturers. Biden apparently has such reverence for the industry he has decided that it needs to be changed in its entirety.
The new requirements and subsidies under the Biden administration have forced automakers to fundamentally change their vehicle lineups and how they operate. They’ve also become a tax on the American people that is dropping straight to the bottom line of auto manufacturers, as we’ve noted over the last week that automakers are raising their EV prices by almost the exact amount that the Biden administration is offering in subsidies to buyers.
And he’s such a fan of U.S. auto companies that Biden has barely acknowledged U.S. automaker Tesla’s existence, simply because the company isn’t embracing unionization amongst its workers.
But with midterms approaching, Biden wants us to forget all that — and Thursday “Dork Brandon” debacle — by reverting to his Corvette-loving old image temporarily.
MORE: Granholm: California’s New Gas Vehicle Sale Ban ‘Could Be’ a National Model. “Elex Michaelson [of Los Angeles’ Fox affiliate] asked [Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm], ‘California made national headlines by becoming the first state to say, by 2035, we’re not going to have any gas-powered vehicles that are new that are being sold. You can still drive your old ones, but you can’t sell new ones. Do you like this concept?’ Granholm responded, ‘Yeah, I do. I think California really is leaning in. And of course, the federal government has a goal of — the president has announced — by 2030 that half of the vehicles in the U.S., the new ones sold would be electric.’”
(Updated and bumped.)
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 05, 2022 at 12:22 pm Link
[B]ased on his speech on Thursday, President Biden taught me that the MAGA goals were all evil. I felt horrible.
He even stopped calling us Ultra MAGA. Whenever a cleaning product introduces a more robust version of their product, they use Ultra as a prefix to the product’s name. When our President called us Ultra, I thought it was meant as a complement.
Thursday night President Biden, who campaigned on the basis of uniting the country, but never kept that promise, was at his most divisive. He singled out the people whose political positions were close to mine as evil and unAmerican.
I took the Presidents words to heart and cried all night long.
But on Friday, I felt so much better because the POTUS no longer thought I was a bad person. I was no longer very evil, maybe as bad as Generalissimo Francisco Franco ( who, I have been told is still dead).
President Biden on Friday said he does not consider any Donald Trump supporters to be a “threat” to the U.S. He said things that most people who supported MAGA goals would agree with.
He said the failure to condemn violence for political gains was “inappropriate.”
Holy Cow. I agree. People who use violence to make a political statement are wrong, and our leaders should condemn them publicly. I may have been sick with COVID and missed when the President scolded the people who encouraged and attempted to kill Supreme Court Justices after they ruled that abortion was a State rather than a Federal Issue.
As Byron York asked on Friday, “Huh? Biden’s remarks at the White House cast a cloud of confusion over what he said the night before. Did he mean it? Did he fully understand the kind of accusations he was making in Philadelphia? Was he confused? The president’s rhetoric was terribly serious and terribly divisive. It was hard to understand why he even gave the speech. Now, it is not clear whether he understands it, either.”
Dan McLaughlin compared Biden’s Philadelphia debacle to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of 1979. But I don’t recall Carter saying “Whoops — never mind!” the day after.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Sep 04, 2022 at 2:14 pm Link
The Senate is a full-time commitment, not a brief intrusion on your afternoon. If Fetterman is not healthy enough to debate, he is not healthy enough to serve a six-year term.
Fetterman doesn’t want to debate because he doesn’t want to damage his polling lead, which has gradually dropped from 12 points when he made his first public appearance just over two weeks ago to 8 points now, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Yes, President Joe Biden showed in 2020 that candidates really could just hide from the voters. But look at how poorly that has turned out.
There’s a bit of an Trunalimunumaprzure vibe going on here:
Fetterman struggles to speak at a campaign event.
“What is wrong with demanding for an easy, safe kind of their income? A path to a safe place for them to win? Or, excuse me, to work? pic.twitter.com/MGwNs605Y9
These are two important races in a battleground state, and it’s concerning that Joe Biden doesn’t seem to know which candidate is running for which position.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday demanded oil companies explain why they aren’t putting more gasoline on the market, sharply escalating his rhetoric against industry as he faces pressure over rising prices.
Biden wrote to executives from Marathon Petroleum Corp, Valero Energy Corp, and Exxon Mobil Corp and complained they had cut back on oil refining to pad their profits, according to a copy of the letter seen by Reuters.
“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” Biden wrote, adding the lack of refining was driving gas prices up faster than oil prices.
“The lack of refining capacity – and resulting unprecedented refinery profit margins – are blunting the impact of the historic actions my Administration has taken to address Vladimir Putin’s Price Hike and are driving up costs for consumers.”
The letter is also being sent to Phillips 66, Chevron Corp, BP and Shell, a White House official, who declined to be identified, told Reuters.
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
So despite Biden claiming today that high gas prices are Putin’s fault, is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
His tweet also garnered support from Chinese state media, with Chen Weihua, China Daily EU Bureau Chief, responding that Biden “finally realized that capitalism is all about exploitation.”
Biden’s tweet comes as gas prices are averaging at $4.822 nationwide, which is up over 20 cents from just one month ago.
Who could have seen praise from the CCP coming for Biden?
(Bumped.)
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jul 03, 2022 at 1:14 pm Link
The card title is “sequence of events”, and the word “YOU” appears in caps throughout the list. The list even reminds the president to say “hello”.
The list of instructions includes:
-YOU enter the Roosevelt Room and say hello to participants
-YOU take YOUR seat
-YOU give brief comments
Click here for a shot of the cards, and here for a closeup with a better look at the text.
Biden was caught using cue cards earlier this year, including one labeled “Tough Putin Q&A Talking Points,” but I don’t recall seeing a photograph with instructions for Joe to enter the room and then “take YOUR seat” before now.
UPDATE: “To be fair, we don’t know if previous presidents have received similar sets of instructions, but we’ve also never before wondered if the president needed this level of detail.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jun 23, 2022 at 6:50 pm Link
REPORTER: “Economists are saying recession is more likely than ever.”
BIDEN: (Interrupts): “Not — the majority are not saying that. Come on, don’t make things up, OK? Now you sound like a Republican politician. I’m joking. That was a joke. That was a joke. But all kidding aside, no I don’t think it is.”
He’s got jokes, ladies and gentlemen.
On a side note, I wonder if the reporter was more offended by the president accusing her of making things up or sounding like a Republican? This we will never know.
On the plus side, Jimmy Carter and Obama are thrilled that their reputations are suddenly getting propped up in comparison with Biden’s disastrous performance.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Jun 21, 2022 at 9:16 pm Link
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on May 30, 2022 at 8:44 pm Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Confused Old Man Shouts at Navy Grads That Putin Wants to ‘Findalize’ Europe. “Biden appears to be the first person ever to use the word ‘Findalize.’ He was actually trying to say that Putin was trying to Finlandize Europe, that is, make it a neutral zone between the U.S. and Russia. But the Big Guy couldn’t quite manage to get ‘Finlandize’ out, so we got ‘Findalize,’ and by this point, the WhiteHouse.gov transcriber, who must get combat pay when it comes time to transcribe a Biden speech, had apparently given up in despair, as the transcript leaves ‘Findalize’ there without even attempting to clear up what Old Joe was actually trying to say.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on May 29, 2022 at 12:00 pm Link
“Government was making the wrong decisions,” Biden told the Atlantic. “As much as 5 or 6 percentage points on the inflation rate were due to oil. Another 5 percent was due to Vietnam. And so you have 10 or 11 percent on top of the inflation that had accumulated since 1932, as conservatives had predicted, and BAM—everything’s gone.”
If those conditions sound familiar, it’s because they are. Inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years—driven in part by the war in Ukraine, rising oil prices, and an unprecedented amount of federal spending—and it risks completely sinking Biden’s presidency just as they sank Carter’s.
Yet the Biden of the 1970s and the Biden of 2022 might as well be two different people, with the latter challenging economic orthodoxy and alleging that new entitlements and stimulus in the form of Build Back Better will actually bring consumer prices down. As a young, reform-minded senator in the 1970s, Biden introduced bills to slash tens of millions of dollars from what believed were ineffective and useless federal agencies and insisted the only way out of America’s stagflation nightmare was massive spending cuts. His 180-degree change reflects the leftward lurch of a Democratic Party and White House staffed with ideologues (many of whom never lived through the 1970s) able to convince a nearly 80-year-old president that everything he once understood about how the economy worked was completely wrong.
* * * * * * * *
After reviewing then-president Gerald Ford’s budget, Biden expressly attacked the White House for not doing enough to address high gas prices and for its tax hikes on corporations, arguing there were better ways to cool demand. During a Senate hearing in 1974, Biden chastised liberals for forgetting “the vast resources of the ocean and their importance to us … [which] range from lobsters to oil.”
Although Biden called for some tax hikes on the margins, his plan to curb inflation was defined mostly by spending cuts. During his Senate reelection campaign in 1978, Biden took out a full-page advertisement in the News Journal, one of the largest newspapers in his home state of Delaware, to promote his “sunset bill” that would force “a thorough and complete review of federal spending programs every four years … [that] would automatically end a program that wasn’t proved useful or effective.”
“The spiraling costs of inflation are ripping into the fabric of American society,” the ad reads. “We must bring these problems under control and the first place to start is with the cost of government.”
The Biden administration is reaching out to the oil industry to inquire about restarting shuttered refineries, as the White House scrambles to address record-high gasoline prices that are setting off political alarm bells ahead of the midterm elections.
Members of the National Economic Council and other officials have inquired within the industry about factors that led some refining operations to be curtailed and if plans are underway to restart capacity, a person familiar with the matter said. The person, who wasn’t authorized to speak on the record, added no direct ask to restart operations was made.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The administration’s efforts come as the average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline stood at a record $4.60 May 25, just as the summer driving season is set to begin. In California, prices are more than $6 a gallon, according to AAA.
—Bloomberg News, today.
As Glenn asks in his latest New York Post column, “So does the Biden administration actually want to see middle-class Americans reduced to poverty and privation? Or is it just too stupid to foresee the obvious consequences of its own action? At this point, I’m not even sure which is worse. But with the midterms coming, no amount of talk about gun control, abortion or other Democratic hot-button issues is going to distract Americans from what’s happening to their pocketbooks. Good.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on May 26, 2022 at 8:14 pm Link
Today’s a day that ends in y, so White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is gaslighting the public again. This time, President Biden’s top spokesperson was attempting to explain away surging 8.5% inflation—a major political liability for this administration—when she made the dishonest mishaps.
“Depending which data you look at, two-thirds to 70% of inflation data is the result of energy prices,” Psaki claimed during a Monday briefing. “A large part of that is the result of… President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the impact on the global energy markets.”
This part of Psaki’s speech is just straight-up false.
For one thing, inflation remains at 6.5% even when gas prices are factored out entirely. So, the 70% number she keeps parroting is simply not accurate. And while Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine has indeed disrupted global energy markets and led to higher gas prices over the last few months, gas prices were already rising over the last year—and inflation more broadly began all the way back in May 2021.
The press secretary went on to conclude that because today’s inflation is supposedly driven by Putin’s invasion, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted it a year ago.”
This is the most ridiculous part of Psaki’s entire remarks.
President Joe Biden sought Tuesday to ease fears over inflation, arguing that tackling rising prices is his top domestic priority and accusing Republicans of having no plan to offer Americans relief.
“They don’t want to solve inflation by lowering your costs,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “They want to solve it by raising your taxes and lowering your income.”
Yes, modern-day Republicans are notorious middle class tax-raisers. But I’m so old, I can remember a pre-Trunalimunumaprzure Biden declaring to his supporters that paying higher taxes is “patriotic.”
But things got a bit awkward later on after Olympian Elana Meyers Taylor praised “wheelchair player Matt Scott” during a speech she gave to those in attendance. As Taylor moved in for a group photo, Joe Biden said “don’t jump” as the photo, which included other Olympic and Paralympic athletes including Scott and some of his fellow wheelchair Paralympians, was being taken.
The cringe moment was reminiscent of another one from March of this year when Biden joked to members of the 82nd Airborne Division that they shouldn’t “jump” from the second floor to the first floor, where he was giving his speech.
More infamously, there was the one involving Biden and a Missouri state senator when Biden was then-Democrat nominee Barack Obama’s vice-presidential nominee. Flashback to 2008:
At the start of his remarks, [Biden] pointed out several state lawmakers in the audience for praise. When he got to Chuck Graham, a state senator from Green Meadows, Biden urged the lawmaker to “stand up Chuck, let ’em see ya.”
But Graham, who is in a wheelchair, can’t stand up – a fact Biden quickly picked up on.
“God love ya, what am I talking about,” Biden said. “You can tell I’m new,” he quipped, asking the audience to stand up for Graham instead.
Washington reporters have long considered the role of White House correspondent to be the crown jewel of American political journalism. It has launched high-profile television careers, scored countless reporters book deals and been bestowed on media veterans for years of ink-drenched work.
But during the age of Biden, a perch inside the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room has become something altogether different. It’s become a bore.
* * * * * * * *
The Obama press room launched a whole cohort of journalists into media stardom. The Trump press room launched another. The Biden press room?
“I can’t think of any [stars],” said a well-known television news executive. “I don’t really watch the briefings.”
The dulling down of the White House beat is not due to a lack of reportorial talent in the room. Nor has it meant that the work being done hasn’t been important: major stories are being broken regularly on everything from the Covid fight, to the war in Ukraine, to inflation, immigration and legislative battles over the social safety net. Rather, what is happening is the fulfillment of a central Biden promise. Running for office against Donald Trump — the most theatrical, attention-seeking, Beltway-panic-inducing president in living memory — he pledged to make Washington news boring again.
And, well, mission accomplished sir.
“Jen [Psaki] is very good at her job, which is unfortunate,” one reporter who has covered the past two administrations from the room said. “And the work is a lot less rewarding, because you’re no longer saving democracy from Sean Spicer and his Men’s Wearhouse suit. Jawing with Jen just makes you look like an asshole.”
Notice the name of that last “reporter” isn’t given in the article. But let’s review: Russia at war with Ukraine, and our being dragged in; our disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, with Americans still stranded there; an out of control border; out of control gas prices, and the return of Jimmy Carter-style stagflation; a schizophrenic Dr. Fauci; and the tapping of the appropriately named “Misinformation Czar.” Not to mention Biden frequently in full “Trunalimunumaprzure!” mode, leading to his occasional threatening of Putin, and his staffers having to walk said threats back an hour or so later.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and the return of their Obama-era boredom makes perfect sense.
“At the, at the, the, uh…. big meeting we had in Europe.” He can’t even remember the name of the meeting he went to a couple of months ago. You know, the thing.
Then there are the “economic cubs” in the West.
I think he was trying to say “economic hubs” there but slurred his words, so it ran together. But, it’s always quite the adventure trying to interpret Joe Biden. One has to feel sorry for his sign language interpreter, when he has one working — that must be quite the challenge.
But guess what Biden promised? He’s going to make sure they “completely… start the process” to make sure that “every vehicle” in the military is “climate-friendly.”
This may be one of his dumbest comments yet. Does he even know what a military is supposed to be about? That you should be concentrated on ensuring that it can kill people and break things — as necessary to protect America. Is he going to ensure that we only have to go to war in places where they have charging stations for our electric tanks? Will the tank clean up the area after it takes out a building? You see how ridiculous it all is. The fact that seems to be a priority for him is madness. But he’s going to spend “billions” to get it done.
While consistency isn’t necessarily the hallmark of lifelong politicians like Biden, it’s worth noting this 1994 vote for two reasons. First, to demonstrate just how far the Democratic [Party has] evolved on cultural questions in the two decades since, but second, to highlight just how far Biden actually exists outside of his positioning on the campaign trail as a moderate.
From his support for repealing the prohibition on federal funding for abortion – a policy he routinely supported while in the Senate – to forcing nuns to buy birth control and charging his Department of Justice to “do everything in its power to stop the rash of state laws that . . . violate the constitutional right to an abortion,” Biden has emerged as a willing handmaiden to the progressive jihad in the culture wars.
This is true in the area of gender ideology as well. On his first day in office, Biden issued an executive order directing his administration to ensure all regulations prohibit discrimination on, among other things, sexual orientation or transgender status – including allowing access by biological males to female restrooms, locker rooms, and school sports.
Biden has followed through on that commitment. His administration’s new Title IX rules will expand the definition of discrimination beyond sex to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. In his State of the Union address, Biden demanded that Congress pass the radical Equality Act, which would use sexual politics to erase the First Amendment.
Even before he entered his Trunalimunumaprzure phase, Biden has always been a cypher for whatever Democrats believe they need to say that year in order to maintain power, eventually resulting in as many “for it before he was against it” moments as his fellow former senator, John Kerry. QED: Biden’s recent repudiations of his 1994 crime bill, the 1996 welfare reform bill, and his past views on the dangers of illegal immigration.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Apr 06, 2022 at 4:14 pm Link
President Joe Biden stunned pundits and politicians on Saturday when, at the end of a fiery speech in Warsaw, he seemed to endorse regime change in Russia, saying Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”
His speech caused a huge reaction, particularly among members of the media and public figures in areas of foreign policy and politics. That included a lot of people on social media comparing his commentary to Ronald Reagan’s historic “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin in June of 1987.
If it isn’t clear which part of the speech the verified users were reacting to, it was spelled out explicitly several times. They were reacting very directly to his saying that Putin cannot remain in power, which was widely discussed as meaning a call for regime change.
Exit quote: “WH official: When Reagan said ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ he did not mean to suggest any physical walls be torn down and certainly not in Berlin. He was referring to Pink Floyd’s album The Wall and was calling on Gorby to write a critical review.”
Heh, indeed.™
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Mar 27, 2022 at 7:22 am Link
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Mar 26, 2022 at 4:30 pm Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden tells 82nd Airborne they’ll be in Ukraine in apparent gaffe. “‘You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see — you’re gonna see women, young people standing in the middle in front of a damned tank just saying, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground’,’ Biden said. The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for clarification.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Mar 26, 2022 at 7:14 am Link
President Joe Biden has arrived in North Texas as he plans to talk with veterans and their caregivers and push for more help for members of the military who face health problems after exposure to burn pits.
Biden and Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough will meet with veterans and caregivers at the Fort Worth VA Clinic.
[…]
Biden will call on Congress to send him a bill that protects veterans who face health consequences after burn pit exposure. The House last week passed a bill that would provide VA health care to millions of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who meet that criteria.
Yet, it’s what Biden said about Reps. Colin Allred (D-TX), Marc Veasey (D-TX), and Jake Ellzey (R-TX) is rather…problematic. Biden said that two of the congressmen, Veasey and Allred, look like they can play basketball; both men are black. He added that Congressman Ellzey looks like a dude who would bomb you. I’m not kidding.
Joe Biden: "The three congressman you have here, two of them look like they really could and did play ball and the other one looks like he can bomb you." pic.twitter.com/UtQXRng6wx
As I pointed out on Friday, Old Joe Biden’s handlers, in yet another of their endless series of decisions that could easily have catastrophic consequences for ordinary Americans, has turned over the leadership of the Iran nuke deal negotiations in Vienna to a Russian diplomat, Mikhail Ulyanov. What assurance do the blinkered Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his hopelessly America-Last subordinates have that Ulyanov (who, incidentally, shares a name with none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, whose original surname was Ulyanov) will fight for the best interests of the United States? None, of course. And now Mikhail Ulyanov has explained, in a video that surfaced on Twitter Sunday, that the deal is shaping up to be terrific — for the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China.
China and Iran, you say? What would the blustering Joe Biden of 1997 say to the sclerotic old “Trunalimunumaprzure!” Biden of 2022?
WATCH 🚨 When Russians told Biden in 1997 that NATO expansion would force Russia to look to China, Biden replied, "Good luck." (Video: C-SPAN) pic.twitter.com/YynC7FhiWd
New documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the government watchdog Protect the Public’s Trust shared exclusively with The Federalist show NBC News sought to downplay a key Biden nominee’s links to domestic terrorism.
As President Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Tracy Stone-Manning, faced controversy for her involvement with a 1989 Idaho tree spiking case last summer, NBC’s Josh Lederman sought comment from the Interior Department whether the administration stood by its nominee for the preeminent land agency.
Stone-Manning had been granted immunity in the case when she agreed to testify against her co-conspirators that she had retyped and sent an anonymous letter to the Forest Service for her friend and former roommate, John T. Blount. The letter warned of 500 pounds of “spikes measuring 8 to 10 inches in length” driven into trees of the Clearwater National Forest targeted for harvest. Such spikes can kill and maim foresters, firefighters, and animals.
“We will not go overboard on it or anything,” Lederman promised Interior Spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz on July 8. “It’s a legitimate story given the position to which she has been nominated. But we will point out that a) she did not participate in spiking trees herself, b) she was not charged, c) this was decades ago when she was in her early 20s, and d) her record is otherwise unblemished.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
President Biden on Monday claimed Republicans are trying to figure out how to keep black Americans’ votes “from even counting” during a Black History Month event as the White House*.
“We’re protecting our country’s threshold liberty, the sacred right to vote, which I’ve never seen as under such attack,” Biden said. “You know, it’s always made it harder for blacks to vote but this is trying to be able to figure out how to keep the black vote, when it occurs, from even counting.”
Biden’s comment comes one month after Senate Democrats failed to pass both their “voting rights” legislation and a rules change to the filibuster.
Shortly before that vote failed last month, Biden came under fire for comparing opponents of the legislation to racists and segregationists.
“So I ask every elected official in America, how do you want to be remembered?” Biden said during his speech advocating a suspension of filibuster rules to pass voting legislation in January. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace**? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”
President Joe Biden used his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning to call for unity and for those of opposing parties to learn more about one another personally.
The annual prayer breakfast brought together lawmakers from both parties and various faiths. Biden, acknowledging a time of great division in the country, said he recalled the times where Congressional members ate lunch together and spent downtime together.
“Unity doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything, but unity is where enough of us believe in a core of basic things,” Biden said, according to The Hill newspaper. “The common good, the general welfare. A faith in the United States of America.”
Biden said he believed that connecting on a personal basis allows politicians to see one another in a different light.
“I just think that when you learn that another man or woman, you fly on a [congressional delegation] and you learn that they have a kid with a problem with alcoholism***, you learn that they have a daughter who has breast cancer. It’s hard to dislike the person,” Biden said.
“And so one of the things I pray for, and I mean it, is we sort of getting back to the place … that we really know each other.”
But since Obama brought it up, it’s worth noting that the only person in modern American politics to have repeatedly praised Wallace and other segregationists is Joe Biden. It was Biden who bragged that in 1973 Wallace considered him “one of the outstanding young politicians of America.” It was Biden who wrote in 1975 that the “Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace.” It was Biden who in 1981 told a black witness in the Senate that “sometimes even George Wallace is right.” It was Biden who, while campaigning for the presidency in Alabama in 1987, claimed that he’d been the recipient of an award from Wallace in 1973 (it probably wasn’t true; but what a thing to brag about!), and then boasted that Delaware was “on the South’s side in the Civil War.”
“Biden was also buddies with J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a segregationist and anti-Semite who would later become a mentor to the Clintons.”
It’s one of the most awkward twenty seconds ever captured on video in a disastrous administration that lurches from one awkward moment to another: when asked “Do you think you may have underestimated Putin?,” Old Joe Biden first continued to stare in the general direction of the question, a slight smirk on his face, expression absolutely unchanged from what it had been before the question was asked. A few seconds later he turned his head to face the camera and, after a few more seconds, grinned sardonically. A few seconds later, he began picking his teeth with his thumbnail, and then grins a bit vacantly before the video mercifully runs out. Amid all the wrong choices, erroneous policies, abject failures, and stupid missteps of this disastrous administration, it was a trivial moment, but it was a telling one.
“He’s [Biden] not a good example, because he’s basically a shell, you know, cognitively,” Rogan shared. “And the fact that that took a long time for people to admit. That was one of the things that people were saying that I was a Trump supporter during the election because I said I would vote for Trump before I would vote for Biden.”
“But I didn’t vote for either,” he added. “The reason why I said that was like, ‘You don’t see this? Are you guys out of your fucking mind? You guys don’t see that this guy can’t, he can’t talk right anymore?’ Go watch videos of him from twenty years ago. He was a dummy, he said a lot of silly shit, he lied about a bunch of things, but at least he was articulate.”
Don’t worry, all the best people assured us in 2020; it’s just a stutter: Biden’s Ukraine Response After-Party Produces Some Horrific Optics. “Things got even weirder at the end of the roundtable, though. Biden gets asked an obvious question about Putin, and instead of answering it, the president starts smirking and picking at his teeth, while staring blankly for over 20 seconds. It was an incredibly odd scene.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 23, 2022 at 7:14 am Link
President Joe Biden lashed out during an interview with NBC News host Lester Holt on Thursday after Holt asked Biden about the ongoing problem of inflation that Americans are facing.
“I think it was back in July, you said inflation was going to be temporary,” Holt said. “I think a lot of Americans are wondering what your definition of temporary is.”
“Well, you’re being a wise guy with me a little bit, and I understand that’s your job,” Biden responded. “But look, at the time, what happened was the, uh, let’s look at the reasons for the inflation. And the reason for the inflation is the supply chains were cut off, meaning that the products, for example, automobiles, the lack of computer chips to be able to build those automobiles so they could function, they need those computer chips, they were not available.”
“So, what happens?” Biden added. “When the number of cars were reduced, the new cars reduced, it made up at one point one-third the cost of inflation because the price of automobiles were up.”
Holt’s question to Biden comes as new inflation numbers were released on Thursday that showed that inflation has skyrocketed to its fastest pace in four decades.
Also from the same interview with Holt, a classic Biden Trunalimunumaprzure moment:
Biden: "And there is no way we were ever going to unite Ukraine…I mean excuse me Iraq…Afghanistan." pic.twitter.com/QfZ67Hyp45
Even before Biden’s brain decomposed into tapioca, he’s had a notoriously punitive relationship with journalists, despite most of them being his party’s operatives with bylines:
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 10, 2022 at 8:35 pm Link
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE: Biden blocked the first Black woman from the Supreme Court. “Today, Biden calls the filibuster a ‘relic of the Jim Crow era.’ But he threatened to use that relic as a tool to keep a Black woman who actually lived under Jim Crow off the highest court in the land. The irony is that now he wants to get rid of the filibuster, and claim credit for putting the first Black woman on the court. There were many conservatives on Bush’s shortlist whose legal philosophy Biden opposed. But Biden only promised to filibuster the one Black woman. Why? Perhaps a clue lies in another confirmation fight that Biden helped wage. In 2001, Democrats blocked the nomination of Miguel Estrada to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to internal strategy memos obtained by the Wall Street Journal, they targeted Estrada at the request of liberal interest groups who said Estrada was ‘especially dangerous’ because ‘he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.’ They did not want Republicans to put the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. So, Biden and his fellow Democrats killed Estrada’s nomination — the first appeals court nominee in history to be successfully filibustered. It paid off when President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. Democrats’ commitment to diversity is a ruse. Biden was willing to destroy the careers of an accomplished Latino lawyer and a respected Black female judge, and stop Republicans from putting either on the Supreme Court. For Democrats, it’s all about identity politics.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Feb 03, 2022 at 8:22 am Link
No offense to my older readers, but we need to amend the age requirement to run for president of the United States. It’s fine to keep the minimum age at 35, but we need a maximum age as well. I’d propose Joe Biden’s current age minus, oh, let’s say four years just to be on the safe side. So that would cap eligibility at 75 years young.
A natural-born American citizen gets 40 years to make it into the White House. If you can’t get it done by your 75th birthday, too bad. You had your chance. That seems fair, right? Four decades is more than enough time, isn’t it?
Because the alternative is… this.
Biden’s always had anger issues, but now that he’s in his dotage, they’ve only gotten worse. (Trunalimunumaprzure!) As Treacher writes, “Joe Biden should step down before he falls down.”
“But folks on the left weren’t aware of it, even though it had gotten a fair amount of coverage. So they attacked Boebert for saying it — mocking her intelligence, saying she shouldn’t be drunk tweeting, that the word was evidence that she wasn’t literate, asking if she had mental issues, and saying it showed she shouldn’t be in office. They had no idea what they were saying was effectively being applied to Biden because they didn’t keep themselves informed enough about their leader to know that this was a Biden comment.”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Dec 29, 2021 at 8:30 pm Link
A few days ago the Washington Free Beacon honored his campaign pledge to “shut down the virus” as its Lie of the Year for 2021.
After this clip, they might make it the Lie of the Decade.
It takes a lot to turn a Democrat into a federalist but a raging pandemic that’s defied all attempts by a Democratic-controlled federal government to bring it to heel might do it.
2024’s campaign ads write themselves:
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Dec 27, 2021 at 5:54 pm Link
On Friday, Joe and Jill Biden did a video call into NORAD to see where Santa is. After speaking with some kids, a father said to the Bidens: “I hope you guys have a wonderful Christmas as well. Merry Christmas and Let’s go Brandon.”
“Let’s go, Brandon. I agree,” Biden said in response.
Luckily for us, the event was live-streamed and we have the video.
UPDATE: And we’re off, with Reuters first out of the gate! “Much about the Christmas Eve exchange was not immediately clear, including what the caller intended, why Biden repeated the slogan and whether either knew the origin of the phrase. The White House did not respond to requests seeking comment. Jared’s full name and contact information were not immediately available.”
The Oregonian filing this story under the “Public Safety” category is the perfect Orwellian touch to send a warning to anyone else who dares attempt to talk back to their would-be rulers. (At least when he has a “D” after his name.)
(Updated and bumped.)
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Dec 25, 2021 at 7:45 pm Link
The Biden White House is incompetent. We all know this. It’s in their execution. It’s in their policies. It’s now seen in the polling. This guy is on Pluto. We have several crises hitting the nation—and Joe Biden is nowhere to be found. He can’t keep up. He’s too old. And he cannot handle the rigors of the job, which is why his staff does most of the work. His people say the economy is roaring. It’s not. Voters know it’s not, but they’re not changing course on messaging. That’s bad news for working families who are being crippled by the inflation fiasco that Joe’s team doesn’t care about. It’s good political news for Republicans as Biden’s sinking poll numbers show a red tsunami that’s about to crash into DC yet again.
Yet, what about the Biden White House staff. Isn’t it awesome working for the president even though his brain is oatmeal? No. In fact, it’s a pit of misery. Reports are that scores of White House staff are “eyeing the exits.” They can’t stand the work environment. The holiday parties are mostly grounded in a lottery system for staffers. It’s a cold, dark place working for Joe Biden (via Politico):
* * * * * * * *
Christmas parties mean a lot these days, I guess. Still, this looks like it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe this revenge from the senior staff who most certainly read the stories about how aides mute the televisions in the White House when Joe Biden speaks because he’s so painful to watch. It’s a little tit-for-tat action, maybe? Either way, it all feeds into the same narrative that this White House is a total train wreck—and holiday parties were the tipping point for most. Who knew?
As Rick Moran adds at PJM, “Staff gripes about a busy workplace are nothing new in politics or anywhere else. But these are supposed to be the president’s true believers, and to talk about leaving after less than a year should set off alarm bells among senior aides who are apparently treating those lower on the staff totem pole with little respect. Some presidents have reportedly been impossible to work for — Nixon and Truman were both supposed to be SOBs to the staff. Biden himself may be a reasonable man, but his top aides apparently are not.”
Even before he entered his current Trunalimunumaprzure phase, Biden himself was not a reasonable man.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Dec 23, 2021 at 5:19 pm Link
On the 23rd: another graph, this time of the inflation rate, rising from 1.4 percent on Election Day to 6.8 percent in November.
And finally, on December 24th: Sen. Joe Manchin, the man who finally performed a mercy killing on the doomed Build Back Better bill, dressed as Santa, waving at him in one of those weird plastic-rubber 3D picture cards that were popular 50 years ago.
I’m not saying Joe Biden is his own worst enemy. It’s more like he’s his own worst best friend, a man who gives himself absolutely terrible advice and is deeply grateful to himself both for offering and listening to such sage counsel.
Never has a politician snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in quite the manner Biden has.
President Biden said Thursday that Americans unvaccinated against the coronavirus are facing a winter of “severe illness and death.”
“It’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s going to increase,” the president said about the omicron variant while meeting with his coronavirus response team. “For unvaccinated we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death if you’re unvaccinated for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they will soon overwhelm.”
“But, there’s good news,” Biden added. “If you’re vaccinated and have your booster shot you’re protected from severe illness and death.”
At the final presidential debate, Democratic nominee Joe Biden warned Americans that it’s going to be a “dark winter” and said President Trump has “no clear plan” to deal with the continuing coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 has killed more than 220,000 Americans and sickened more than 7 million as some scientists have warned the current wave could be the “biggest wave” of infections.
Debate moderator Kristen Welker of NBC asked Biden about the COVID-19 vaccine, saying “Just 40% of Americans say they would definitely agree to take a vaccine, if it was approved by the government. What steps would you take to give Americans confidence in a vaccine if it were approved?”
Biden answered: “Make sure it’s totally transparent. Have the science and we will see it, know it, look at it. Go through the processes.”
“And by the way, this is the same fellow who told you this was going to end by Easter last time,” Biden said about Mr. Trump. “This is the same fellow who said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to end it this by the summer.’ We’re about to go into a dark winter.”
“A dark winter, and he has no clear plan and there’s no prospect that there’s going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year,” Biden continued.
When asked to react, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think we’re going to have a dark winter at all.”
“We are opening up our country,” Mr. Trump said. “We have learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn’t at the beginning,” he continued. “When I closed and banned China from coming in – heavily infected – and ultimately Europe, but China was in January, months later, [Biden] was saying I was xenophobic. Now he says, ‘Oh I should have moved quicker.'”
In the clip Townhall tweeted, President Biden says “Nationally, prices are down seven cents a gallon,” meaning Gwin’s claim that the video was edited to omit the president noting falling gas prices is entirely false.
But after the Biden lackey made his false claim, PolitiFact conveniently decided to fact-check Townhall’s video, asking our team for an explanation and citing the White House as the source of their scrutiny.
Townhall responded to PolitiFact via email:
Townhall was directly quoting the president in our tweet. In the clip, Biden is heard saying, “Nationally, prices are down seven cents a gallon, continuing to fall. We’re making progress. We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas.”
We have added an extended clip on Twitter, which includes Biden going on to say “not being gouged for gas.” This does not change what Biden said in our original clip.
Subsequently, PolitiFact published a “story” on Townhall’s video that would impress any crisis public relations firm with its scrambling to clarify what Biden *meant* with his words:
The full context of Biden’s Dec. 8 remarks indicates that he was talking about working to lower the price of gas to a more reasonable amount for Americans, not raise or maintain it. The line was met with applause from the crowd at the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.
Nowhere does PolitiFact dispute what Biden said, because they can’t — it’s on video — nor did they find any editing by Townhall that changed what Biden said. But that didn’t stop them from doing additional damage control for President Biden, claiming that Townhall’s “follow-up tweet wrongly claimed that omitting Biden’s final words did not change the meaning of his sentence.”
“We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
“The president was seen inside Murray’s Toggery Shop on the island of Nantucket Saturday with his mask around his neck and not covering his mouth despite a visible sign outside the door instructing patrons to wear a mask,” Fox Newsreports. “According to the White House press pool, Biden walked out of the shop at 4:45 p.m. with his mask down and drinking what appeared to be a milkshake.” (The store’s sign doesn’t say “unless you’re drinking.” It says to wear a mask.)
In the still frame shown above, you can clearly see the president maskless while others inside are wearing masks—including a young child almost certainly at far less risk from COVID-19 than Biden.
This isn’t Biden’s first time flouting COVID-19 mask requirements. In October, the president and his wife violated Washington, DC’s mask mandate when visiting the posh Georgetown restaurant Fiola Mare. Video shows them walking through the restaurant maskless while staff clad in black masks surround them.
The Bidens are, unfortunately, no outliers. Literally dozens of politicians have been caught violating their own pandemic policies and mask mandates. So, too, media figures that have advocated mask mandates don’t always practice what they preach, as recently exposed by FEE’s Jack Elbaum.
In 2020, as mass urban riots were cheered on by hospital employees who only a month prior urged us all to lockdown and “social distance,” it was obvious that COVID was smart enough to avoid Democrats, so such a maskless Joe Biden was fine. Then came the superspreader event a few months ago that was Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard birthday party. Given Kamala’s poll numbers, I hope (P)resident Biden’s handlers are looking out for him.
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Nov 30, 2021 at 2:35 pm Link
If Biden needs to unite voters, whom should he unite them against? He could wage war on poverty, as Lyndon B. Johnson did. He could battle division—and the forces trying to divide Americans. Or, the Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson told me, “Biden could easily declare ‘war’ on the authoritarians threatening our democracy, much the same as Abraham Lincoln did when he pulled northerners together to stand against the slaveholders.” That is, he could spend more time trying to direct Americans’ attention to the threat posed by the Trump-directed Republican Party, which is consolidating power at the state level and turning against democracy in large numbers.
Bill Kristol, the former editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and the current head of Defending Democracy Together, is worried about the GOP’s move toward authoritarianism, but he seems skeptical that Biden can succeed at convincing the country that the danger is clear and present. “Citizens in democracies—being free and kind of happy-go-lucky, as they should be—can get a bit complacent and take their freedoms and well-being for granted,” he told me. “Historically, they sometimes only fully wake up to dangers and rise to the occasion when the external threat seems obvious and dangerous. Can they mobilize as easily against a more insidious internal threat?”
“Honestly, this presidency is the most predictable in history. Any time Biden manages to say something halfway not insane, his far-left handlers immediately rush to reshape his position. It’s so obvious he is completely beholden to the radicals, and it’s a terrible thing for a nation that desires some semblance of normalcy.”
“What — like, for example, if I had — if we were all going out and having lunch together and I said, ‘Let’s ask whoever the — whoever is at the next table, no matter how — what restaurant we’re in — have them explain the supply chain to us.’ You think they’d understand what we’re talking about?” Biden continued. “They’re smart people. But supply chain — ‘Well, why is everything backed up?’ Well, it’s backed up because the people who supply the materials that end up being on our kitchen table or in our — in our fam- — our life — guess what? They’re closing those plants because they have COVID.”
Grabien founder Tom Elliott responded to Biden’s remarks by writing that Biden “mocks Americans’ intelligence.”
The footage shows a frail man who’s jetlagged, pushing eighty and trying his best to absorb the torrent of heated eco-bilge that’s being pumped into his ears. But he’s only human. The presidential eyelids start to flutter as a speaker pleads “on behalf of everyone, disabled and non-disabled…to stop the destruction of this magnificent planet.” Biden gives a desperate, hostage-like look at the camera, but there’s no way out. The shutters are coming down. Soon, the president of the United States is heading down, down, down to the Land of Nod.
Yet again, the president’s feebleness is there for the world to see — or not. On Friday, Biden became the first American president in living memory not to go live before the cameras with the Pope. Was it because they’ve fallen out over abortion — or because Biden’s team didn’t want a jetlagged president to embarrass himself and his nation?
Meanwhile, “poopy pants Biden” trended on Twitter after Amy Tarkanian, the former chairwoman of the Republican party of Nevada, suggested that “the word around Rome” was that Biden’s private audience had to be extended because the president had suffered a “bathroom accident” in the pontiff’s presence.
These allegations cannot be substantiated without producing the presidential pants, but their tone shows how close Biden’s public appearances are to low comedy, and how quickly he has soiled his image in the American public’s estimation. He is underwater in the polls, his agenda is stalled in Congress, and when he does eventually appear in public, he blames everyone else.
President Joe Biden used a “makes the trains run on time” reference earlier today at the G20 summit while discussing Sec. Tony Blinken’s role in helping to solve the supply-chain crisis. That’s right. Our elderly leader just made a Mussolini reference in Rome, Italy:
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Nov 01, 2021 at 7:45 am Link
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Biden Thinks Electric Cars Are Magic or Something. “Oh, Joe Biden is doing just fine. Why do you ask? Joe Biden on electric cars: ‘When you buy an electric vehicle, you can go across America on a single tank of gas figuratively speaking. It’s not gas. You plug it in.’”
Posted at by Ed Driscoll on Oct 30, 2021 at 8:14 am Link
Biden’s lack of a vote is also going to be a problem after he leaves Rome and travels to Glasgow to talk about “climate change.” He was supposed to have lots of money for that, too. Glasgow is a good place to hold a conference on climate change, because the weather there is always changing, though of course partisans of the green agenda don’t mean “weather” when they utter the word “climate.” What exactly do they mean, comrade? Shhh! Don’t be a spoil sport. Anyway, there is not much evidence in Glasgow of the “global warming” that is supposed to consuming the world any minute, right after the population bomb, global cooling, or whatever ChickenLittle fabricated threat — is COVID caused by global warming? — is next up to break the world and require more obedience, more taxes, more mandates, and decidedly less common sense.
During the Revolutionary War, Adam Smith famously told a forlorn correspondent not to worry because, even though America was set to win that conflict against Britain, “there is a deal of ruin in a nation.” I once quoted that line to a savvy friend who said, “especially this nation.” That was during the Troubles Economic of 2007-2008. He was right and the United States soldiered on and, under Donald Trump, performed brilliantly. We had reasonable growth, very low unemployment, lower taxes, rising wages, less regulation, secure borders and the slogan “Make America Great Again” seemed to be a wish that was coming true.
