WELL, WE KNOW IT’S NOT BRANDON: Who’s in Charge? White House Rushes to Clean up Biden’s Pandemic Remark.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
September 20, 2022
WHY IS ABC NEWS SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? ‘Sunny Hostin’ Accuses Nikki Haley of Using Fake Name to Seem White.
After a commercial break, Farah Griffin grew something of a spine and tried to confront Hostin on her vile comments. “Nikki Haley’s gone by Nikki since she was a child. It’s documented in high school. I wouldn’t be shocked that as someone, an Indian woman growing up in South Carolina at that she actually did to avoid prejudice,” she argued.
Adding: “So, I just want to be careful about critiquing her for going by the name she’s always gone by.”
Hostin responded by cranking up the racism and apparently targeting Haley’s lighter skin tone. “Yeah, there were some of us that can be chameleons and decide not to embrace our ethnicity so that we can pass [as white],” she chided.
While Farah Griffin floundered in her retort, Haines stepped up and shot back: “Sunny! You go by a different name!”
That’s right! Sunny’s real name is Asunción Cummings Hostin. And according to her, she doesn’t use that name because Americans are too stupid to pronounce it correctly. “Because most Americans can’t pronounce Asunción because of the under-education in our country,” she sneered.
Haley herself responded:
As Spencer Brown adds at Townhall, “Strange how Hostin thought attacking Nikki Haley as some kind of race traitor for her name would fly when she does… exactly the same thing. Liberals, thy name is hypocrisy.”
WHITE HOUSE SAYS COVID-19 POLICY UNCHANGED DESPITE WHAT PRESIDENT BIDEN SAID ON 60 MINUTES:
As Twitchy reported, President Joe Biden was interviewed by Scott Pelley for Sunday night’s edition of “60 Minutes,” and he said that U.S. men and women would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. After the interview, however, the White House said that its Taiwan policy had not changed. Biden also declared that the COVID-19 pandemic “is over,” although that would scuttle his loophole allowing student loan cancellation because of the emergency imposed by the pandemic.
As with the Taiwan comments, the White House is walking back the “pandemic is over” talk, saying that the White House’s policy remains unchanged and emergency orders are still in effect.
As Jim Treacher asks, who’s running the show inside the “Biden” White House? “It sure isn’t Kamala. And Jill — excuse me, Doctor Jill — is just barely more lucid than her husband. Who’s the boss of that house? Ron Klain? Susan Rice? Ex-PFC Wintergreen? What the hell is going on?”
Related: Democrats Hit the Airwaves to Walk Back Biden’s Pandemic Admission.
GERMAN PRODUCER PRICES POST SURPRISE RECORD JUMP IN AUGUST:
German producer prices rose in August at their strongest rate since records began both in annual and monthly terms, driven mainly by soaring energy prices, raising the chances that headline inflation will surge even higher.
Producer prices of industrial products increased by 45.8% on the same month last year, the Federal Statistical Office reported on Tuesday. Compared to July 2022, prices rose 7.9%, it added.
You went full Weimar, man. Never go full Weimar.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Martha’s Vineyard Builds Planned Parenthood To Combat Rising Population Of Minorities.
No word yet if the island will rebrand as Margaret Sanger’s Vineyard.
September 19, 2022
FETTERMAN VOTED TO FREE MURDERER WHO HACKED INNOCENT MAN TO DEATH WITH GARDEN SHEARS:
Goldblum was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1976 killing of George Wilhelm as part of an insurance fraud cover-up. According to prosecutors, Goldblum and an accomplice, Clarence Miller, lured Wilhelm to a parking garage in Pittsburgh, where Goldblum stabbed the man 26 times. While out on bail, Goldblum tried to hire an undercover police officer to murder Miller, who had fingered Goldblum for the crime.
Goldblum, who has maintained his innocence, was poised to die in prison, having unsuccessfully appealed for clemency seven times. But in 2019, Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons, which Fetterman chairs, voted unanimously to release Goldblum from jail, overriding the wishes of Wilhelm’s family. To justify its decision, the board points to the judge and prosecutor on Wilhelm’s case, who have since concluded he was the accomplice rather than the principal assailant.
But in 2007, a federal appeals court rejected Goldblum’s request for an evidentiary hearing, writing, “there is just too much evidence here establishing Goldblum’s guilt.” Both judge and prosecutor have been vague about what information motivated their reversal, and no one has claimed Goldblum is innocent of the hitman charge.
Still, Fetterman cheered when Goldblum was released from jail last year, saying he was “happy that he’s going to be going home to his family” and that Goldblum was “not a threat to public safety.” The commutation was part of Fetterman’s pledge to “transform” Pennsylvania’s pardon process and free more prisoners, a record the Democrat has touted on the campaign trail. Fetterman specifically points to his efforts to end life sentences for those who are involved in murders but did not directly “pull the trigger.”
Beyond Goldblum, however, Fetterman has voted to free “triggermen” convicted of first-degree murder. Last year, he was the only member of the board to vote to release Wayne Covington, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for killing a man for money to buy heroin. That ordeal has already made its way into GOP ads that argue Fetterman is “too far left” and “dangerously liberal on crime,” suggesting Fetterman’s record as chair of the board may not be the winning issue he thinks it is.
Related exit question: Is something about Fetterman’s polling scaring the beejeebus out of his campaign?
UPDATE Fetterman sure loves being radical chic: Pennsylvania Senate Candidate John Fetterman hired unrepentant, lying murderers as his campaign aides.
(Updated and bumped.)
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR CANADA: Is This Canadian Transgender Shop Teacher Auditioning for an Adult Film Shoot?
Oakville Trafalgar High School in Ontario, Canada is part of the Halton District School Board. They’ve been promoting gender identity ideology in schools for a few years, so this probably won’t surprise them at all.
A shop teacher who taught last year as a man showed up in class this year looking a little different.
I regret to inform all of the males (and I presume jealous females) reading this that those humongous breasts aren’t real. In fact, we’d be hard-pressed to find anything “real” about “Kayla Lemieux,” who last year was teaching shop as a man named “Stephen Hanna.”
If you guessed that the kids that Lemieux taught are caught between desperately wanting to make fun of the disturbed man and knowing they could be expelled for doing so, you’re right.
“The kids here most definitely don’t think its normal… but realistically we can’t say anything,” one student said on Twitter, “Last year, the teacher was a man. I don’t think the school can fire him.”
Matt Walsh, the creator of the recent What is a Woman? documentary comments in a video, “This is fetishism not dysphoria… There’s no limit to this. Now a teacher could come to school wearing a strap-on dildo in front of the students, and we’d be told that it’s bigoted to object.”
Consider the types of people he would book on his show to inform his viewers. He sought to help rehabilitate the ousted newscaster Dan Rather, the man who did more to discredit the mainstream media with his false 2004 story on George W. Bush than anyone else in this country’s history. He was also a key promoter of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who sued Trump on behalf of the president’s former one-night stand, Stormy Daniels. Stelter literally urged Avenatti on-air to run for president. Avenatti is now serving time in federal prison for attempting to extort money from his clients. And when Stelter included “scholars” and “experts” on his show to bolster criticism of Trump, their tone mirrored Stelter’s own special brand of Trump hyperbole: A former Duke University psychiatry professor claimed in 2019 that “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”
Rather than engage in criticism of his own industry (at least, the nonconservative segment of it), he took to chiding CNN viewers for failing to appreciate the existential importance of his employer. “I don’t want to sound—tell me if this is too grandiose,” he said on a podcast. “The world and the country are better off when CNN is strong, and when brands like CNN are strong.”
Yet one of the reasons viewers were losing trust in outlets like CNN was that during the Trump years, those outlets abandoned any pretense of objectivity and instead embraced partisan bias as mission critical. By the end of his show’s run, with Trump out of the White House, Stelter was reduced to offering on-air recaps and manufactured outrage about the previous week’s offerings on CNN competitor Fox News, with special ire reserved for Tucker Carlson (whose show remains the most-watched on cable).
No wonder Stelter spent his final weeks at CNN indulging in a parade of platitudes and self-regard rather than critical reflection. “It was a rare privilege to lead a weekly show focused on the press at a time when it has never been more consequential,” he told NPR, noting how grateful he was for having the chance to cover “the media, truth, and the stories that shape our world.”
However, Stelter continues to fail upward, Stephen Miller writes: Great news: Brian Stelter got a gig at Harvard. “The media-to-classroom pipeline will simply strengthen the ideological bubble that led to Stelter’s dismissal from CNN in the first place. Yet what Stelter’s lectures won’t offer is introspection as to how we got to this so-called precipice of democracy. What was the media’s role in leading us here (for instance, the $5 billion in free media given to Donald Trump in 2016 by journalists like Stelter and his former boss)? What plan do they have to correct their course (as opposed to simply slandering 50 percent of the voting public)? At least Stelter will finally be able to acknowledge what anyone who’s watched him has realized instantly: that he was never an honest and objective media reporter.”
UNEXPECTEDLY! Corporate Media Enable Biden Family Corruption By Refusing To Ask Tough Questions About Hunter.
It’s no secret that Joe, while he was still vice president, met with more than a dozen of Hunter’s business associates. Some of those meetings were even held in the West Wing of the White House. Yet, Joe has repeatedly lied about his knowledge of Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
[Scott] Pelley had the perfect opportunity to press Joe on why he lied, what happened in those West Wing meetings, and how involved he’s been brokering deals that the whole Biden family, including Joe’s brother James, reaped the benefits of. Instead, Pelley chose not to press the president.
Pelley’s reluctance to ask tough questions about Hunter is deliberate and straight out of the corporate media handbook.
The corrupt press knew Hunter was sealing deals using his dad’s name and title. They also knew that was compromising for the then-presidential candidate. That’s why when Hunter’s laptop with information indicating Joe was not as clueless about Hunter’s business as he seemed surfaced shortly before the 2020 election, the media claimed it was “Russian disinformation” and refused to cover any of the corruption.
Pelley’s refusal to make Joe answer for the Biden family business in a 2022 “60 Minutes” interview is no different than the media’s deliberate memory holing of Hunter’s depravity and the Bidens’ wheeling and dealings in 2020.
Hey, it is Scott Pelley and CBS after all.
TENSIONS RISE BETWEEN THE LA TIMES AND ITS BILLIONAIRE OWNER:
As Nika Soon-Shiong’s political activism grew, it became harder for the paper to chart out coverage that converged with her interests. Staffers grew alarmed when she clashed with an editor on the Metro desk earlier this year over the Times’ reporting on the LAPD. It was not lost on staff that they did not initially report on the public safety commission’s decision to reduce funding for the LA County Sheriff’s Department — a move she pushed for aggressively and one that was covered widely by other Los Angeles outlets.
There were internal grumbles after the paper endorsed Democratic West Hollywood Council member Lindsey Horvath for the powerful LA County Board of Supervisors. Horvath had a close relationship with Nika Soon-Shiong — she defended her publicly and said attacks on her were “rooted in racism” — and helped appoint her to the public safety commission.
More recently, the Times endorsed Kenneth Mejia, a self-described radical and Nika Soon-Shiong favorite, for the job of city controller. Two days after the endorsement, City Hall reporters David Zahniser and Julia Wick wrote a story detailing how Mejia, as a Green Party member, said he considered both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to be “sexual predators.”
The ownership of a paper retains the right to endorse whichever candidates they want. Often, they exercise that liberty. Merida said that Nika Soon-Shiong has no “say in endorsements.”
But the Mejia editorial sparked immediate backlash over the perception that she had a hand in it. City Council member Paul Koretz, a Democrat and Mejia’s opponent in the race, accused the paper of acting “as if it were run by the Mejia campaign itself.”
“People are just scratching their heads about their editorial board and how they can come to these decisions,” Koretz told POLITICO. “I have never seen an election where the newspaper is the story.”
Really? Keep Rockin’!
As Mickey Kaus notes, Carl Bernstein, then with the Washington Post, used the 1970s equivalent of phone hacking to dig up information about the 1972 Watergate burglary. Kaus quotes from “All the President’s Men,” Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s account of their reporting on the scandal that sank President Nixon:
Bernstein had several sources in the Bell system [the landline telephone monopoly]. He was always reluctant to use them to get information about calls because of the ethical questions involved in breaching the confidentiality of a person’s telephone records. It was a problem he had never resolved in his mind. Why, as a reporter, was he entitled to have access to personal and financial records when such disclosure would outrage him if he were subjected to a similar inquiry by investigators?
Without dwelling on his problem, Bernstein called a telephone company source and asked for a list of [Watergate burglar Bernard] Barker’s calls. That afternoon, his contact called back and confirmed that the calls listed in the [New York] Times had been made. But, he added, he could not get a fuller listing because Barker’s phone records had been subpoenaed by the Miami district attorney.
As far as we know, Bernstein was never investigated, much less prosecuted, for this. To be sure, there’s a strong argument that the ends justified the means in the Post case but not the Globe case. Certainly a political scandal that ended up implicating the president is a matter of much greater public importance than a sensational murder case. But it does not follow that the “mainstream press” is entitled to greater constitutional liberty than tabloids are.
What’s more, supermarket tabloids have been known to break important political stories that the mainstream press shied away from–and in this regard, the Los Angeles Times has an especially embarrassing record. In 2008 Kaus published an email from Tony Pierce, an editor at the L.A. Times, to the paper’s online contributors (quoting verbatim):
Hey bloggers,
There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.
If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don’t hesitate to ask
Keep rockin,
Tony
As Kaus quipped: “That will certainly calm paranoia about the Mainstream Media (MSM) suppressing the Edwards scandal.” Two weeks later, Edwards partially confessed, and Times columnist Tim Rutten weighed in:
When John Edwards admitted Friday that he lied about his affair with filmmaker Rielle Hunter, a former employee of his campaign, he may have ended his public life but he certainly ratified an end to the era in which traditional media set the agenda for national political journalism.
Rutten acknowledged that “too many newsrooms, including that of The Times,” were derelict in ignoring the Edwards story. But his column reflected a telling defeatism. By proclaiming the “end to the era” of traditional media, he seemed to be suggesting that those media, including his own paper, were incapable of applying any lessons from the experience of being shown up by the Enquirer–that they were too hidebound to do anything other than keep rockin.
And then there was the moment last year when the L.A. Times smeared the first black candidate for governor of California as “the Black face of white supremacy. You’ve been warned,” compared him to David Duke and the Klan— and downplayed the physical attack that he received.
Evergreen:
GREAT MOMENTS IN PHONING IT IN: JD Vance tears into ‘shameless fraud’ Tim Ryan for attending a WEDDING on Saturday night — after Democrat repeatedly attacked him for holding a rally with Trump during an Ohio football game. “A Vance campaign spokesman told DailyMail.com, ‘Tim Ryan has not only spent the last two weeks childishly attacking JD Vance for missing the very Ohio State game that he himself knew he was going to miss, he even had his staff live tweet commentary of the game from his twitter account to deceptively cover up the fact that he wasn’t watching.'”
I would be embarrassed to conduct an interview with the president that was as lame as Scott Pelley’s lovefest with President Biden on 60 Minutes last night. The Biden administration accorded Pelley a substantial amount of time to chat with Biden and Pelley returned the favor with a variety of softballs and dropped balls as well as his own apologetics — to no one’s surprise, of course, but still. It was an embarrassment.
CBS has posted the transcript here. NewsBusters covers the Biden segments in “State-Run TV: 60 Minutes Drools Over Biden in Syrupy Interview.”
The lack of follow-up questions was one striking feature of the interview. You’d almost think that Pelley himself doesn’t follow the news. He appears to be somewhat less knowledgeable than the average voter.
And not for the first time: CBS’s Scott Pelley Loses a Fight Rigged in his Favor.
—Instapundit, April 2nd, 2017.
Related: “As Biden told us, the proof is in the pudding. Unfortunately for America, that pudding is between his ears,” Jim Treacher writes, adding, “This is why Biden doesn’t give many interviews. Every time he speaks into a microphone is worse than the last. He’s writing the Republicans’ ads for them:”
Tonight, Biden said those who think he is unfit for office should just “watch” him.
Let’s roll the tape. pic.twitter.com/ktrTtpHrLa
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 19, 2022
JOHN NOLTE: Woke Gestapo at HBO Max Erase Cigarettes from Iconic Movie Posters.
This is not only censorship; it’s an unnecessary from of censorship and, therefore, a grotesque act of virtue signaling and moral exhibitionism. There’s no reason HBO Max had to go to the extremes of photoshopping to protect the world from the evils of tobacco use. All HBO had to do was choose the McCabe poster without the cigar. Like, say, this one. If no poster exists that meets your lofty moral standards, you don’t need a poster for the streaming menu. Instead, you can use an unoffending still from the movie.
Believe it or not, America was once a country where the following took place…
A mere 16 years ago, a video store chain called CleanFlicks purchased copies of movies and removed stuff like the sex, violence, and vulgar language. So all CleanFlicks did was edit copies it legally owned. Once that was one, those censored copies were rented to Mormon customers who would not have watched the unedited versions.
Hollywood sued CleanFlicks right out of business.
Well, look at Hollywood now: censoring, disappearing, and purging its own art. Hollywood used to ridicule the Moral Majority, to decry McCarthyism and censorship. Now the industry is either so scared or so warped and broken; they’re doing all these un-American things to their very own product.
This isn’t all that new a development. In 2003, the BBC reported, “United States poster companies have airbrushed the classic Beatles Abbey Road album cover to remove a cigarette from Paul McCartney’s hand. The move was made without the permission of either McCartney or Apple Records, which owns the rights to the image.” But expect such airbrushing to accelerate in today’s PC-obsessed overculture.
NURSING HOME FORCED TO DO DAMAGE CONTROL: Joe Biden Delivers a Mess of a 60 Minutes Interview, Leaves His Handlers Scrambling.
MICHAEL WALSH: Virtue Über Alles.
Europe is in the middle of an energy crisis. Uncertainty over the flow of natural gas owing to Russia’s war in Ukraine has caused a spike in prices. The price of natural gas has soared to as much as $500 per barrel of oil equivalent, 10 times the normal average, fueling fears of winter shortages and cold homes.
Key commodities have already been affected. Fertilizer production, which requires large inputs of natural gas, is being shut down due to high prices. Manufacturers are hoarding glass in anticipation of future shortages. Climate change has made the situation worse, as a historic drought is drying up Europe’s rivers and cutting into hydroelectric capacity. The rising cost of energy has driven a spike in inflation in the United Kingdom, while Germany has suffered the worst inflation since the 1970s energy crisis.
What happened? The quote above from Foreign Policy partially explains how they got here (and, if things continue, the U.S. will not be far behind), but the real reason is: prosperity, combined with virtue-signaling neo-Luddism. The dreadful toll of death and destruction of the war, combined with the success of European reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, which saved the devastated economies of western Europe, left Europe with two debilitating by-products: the rise of pacifism as an anti-nationalist force and the abjuration of war as a means of foreign policy; and a false sense of economic security, under which they were free to chase their own chimeras of “soft power” and “progressive” living without any heed to reality.
The Europeans should have learned from their own history, but of course they never do. The Oxford Union’s “King and Country” debate of 1933, a fateful year in European history, turned out to be one of the high points of British pacifism. Having been bled dry by the Somme and other horrific battles in World War I, and also having lost the cream of their manhood in the process, the Union passed the motion that “this House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country.” Winston Churchill who never saw a war he didn’t want to fight, knew that war with Hitler was unavoidable, and was aghast at the surviving, whinging chaff of England’s crop, the sons of the cowards, conscientious objectors, and those otherwise unfit to serve. Six years later, however, they were doing exactly that.
GOODER AND HARDER, FUN CITY: That NYC psycho who smashed up a McD’s and threatened a bunch of people with an axe? Yeah, he was released without bail.
This film was made in 1940, according to YouTube. For those who are counting, that’s [82] years ago. For some of you, maybe you were just babies. Maybe your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were just babies. But the folks who made this film, all the people who starred in it too, are long gone. This film is their legacy. What do we know about them?
We know that people had much longer attention spans in 1940. Can you imagine a 20-minute video on how to use a phone, made today? The mind reels. (see what I did there? Reels?) We know that film actors were taught to use a very specific accent. You might think of it as the “old filmy” accent. At the time they called it a Boston Brahman accent, even though real people from Boston didn’t sound like that. This specific accent, with a tendency toward sharper, crisper pronunciation and higher pitch, reproduced well using the microphones of the day.
We also learn that our fight to understand technology has gone on for many lifetimes. There were no movies or even recordings in the 1740s, 1840s, or whatever, but you can bet that there were struggles with technology back then. It wouldn’t be surprising for me to find out that half the hieroglyphics found in pyramids were actually tech support documents. (Seriously, I made that up. But it’s not impossible.)
Marvel at all of the capabilities of your smartphone in a new light after watching a few minutes of this:
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: “Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas on Sunday urged President Biden to step up enforcement of immigration laws as Republican governors this week ramped up their confrontation with the administration over its border strategy by transporting migrants released from federal custody to Democratic-run cities.”
ROGER KIMBALL: Wish You Weren’t Here.
The outcry was partly amusing, partly malevolent, as Tucker Carlson showed with his customary aplomb. NBC News took to Twitter to quote a “founding member of a foundation which helps refugees” who said that DeSantis sending “asylum seekers” to Martha’s Vineyard is like “me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.” Trash?
It wasn’t revealed whether this chap (or chapette, as the case may be) was also a student of Heart of Darkness. If so, perhaps he admires Kurtz’s exit line, scrawled at the end of his report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: “exterminate all the brutes.” In any event, someone at NBC must have understood that analogizing migrants to “trash” did not send quite the right message, so the tweet was quickly deleted (but not before it was picked up and preserved for posterity by several public -spirited commentators).
Anyway, within 40 hours, the National Guard had been summoned. The blinking migrants were pushed onto buses and whisked off to a military establishment, out of sight, out of mind.
Except that they are not out of mind. In a single stroke, Ron DeSantis tore the mask of hypocrisy off the smug faces of the liberal elites who love crowing about the virtues of “diversity” and the evils of “whiteness” just so long as they don’t have to suffer any real-world consequences. “People who make and advocate certain policies,” Tucker Carlson said, “should at some point have to live with those policies.” That was the moral of Ron DeSantis’ bravura performance. God bless him for it.
Indeed:
OLD AND BUSTED: “Anarchy in the U.K.”
The New Hotness? Disturbing: UK arrests multiple protesters for speaking out against the monarchy. “I was arrested today in #Oxford after I voiced my opposition to the proclamation of ‘#CharlesIII‘. Can we be arrested simply for expressing an opinion in public? I was arrested under the Police Bill passed earlier this year. This is an outrageous assault on democracy. #NotMyKing.”
GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: New York State will award its first 150 marijuana retail licenses to people penalized in the past for dealing.
DISPATCHES FROM THE FRENCH LAUNDRY: Newsom Signed 40 New Green Bills in Most Aggressive Climate Hypothesis Push.
Instead of beautiful ocean views, you’ll get to look at wind turbines that won’t do squat to help the state cope with the need for energy. But they will continue to kill hundreds of thousands of birds. Where is PETA when you really need them?
One commenter on the report asked an epic question: “Why not just pass a law banning all people from the state?” Good question. It shouldn’t be a problem since the state is bleeding residents already from all the restrictions on living. And Newsom wants to be president, which might make sense. He wants to use the climate change hypothesis to ruin the economy, just like Biden.
To be fair, Newsom’s already banned most people from California and would ban even more, except: U-Haul Literally Ran Out of Trucks Leaving California.
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.”
President Klain also isn’t happy about another moment from the interview: Biden tells 60 Minutes U.S. troops would defend Taiwan, but White House says this is not official U.S. policy.