Latest from Coffee House

Thursday

16 Mar 2023

Joe Biden’s Medicare tweak throws his party to the wolves

President Biden has been clear: he’s itching to attack Republicans for “wanting to cut Medicare.” But he’s running into a problem: his own administration rolled out a little-noticed rules change that’s poised to slash benefits for millions of retirees across the country. The change could jeopardize his own standing with a crucial voting bloc and could put down-ballot Democrats in electoral peril. Biden has used everything from the pages of the New York Times to his State of the Union’s teleprompter to accuse Republicans of wanting to slash benefits to seniors who’ve paid into the retirement fund.

joe biden retiring medicare kamala harris

Cockburn

Marianne Williamson, horrible boss?

Marianne Williamson entered the 2024 race hoping to be its Bernie Sanders. But it looks like she’s the new Amy Klobuchar. The spiritual leader and author entered the Democratic primary to challenge Joe Biden earlier this month. Now Politico has spoken to "twelve people who worked for Williamson during her 2020 presidential campaign" who "paint a picture of a boss who can be verbally and emotionally abusive." Congratulations to Politico for finding a dozen people who worked for Marianne — and revealing that her last run was not so namaste... Politico reports, "Williamson would throw her phone at staffers... Her outbursts could be so loud that two former aides recounted at least four occasions when hotel staff knocked on her door to check on the situation.

Cockburn

Chip Roy endorses Ron over Don… how many will follow him?

Here come the endorsements! Firebrand Texan congressman Chip Roy became the first representative to raise his ten-gallon hat in support of Ron DeSantis, a man who also favors wearing cowboy boots with his suits. The endorsement comes as a letter to Roy's constituents that ticks off the biggest bullet points in DeSantis's arsenal, on Covid, culture wars and actually winning elections: https://twitter.com/chiproytx/status/1636059025774194689 "Governor DeSantis makes clear he would lead our nation as commander-in-chief with the kind of resolve and sober strength that produces peace through strength.

Om Malik

Why SVB was more than just a Big Tech bank

Silicon Valley has finally started to breathe easy, though not too easy. It has been a tense few days for everyone in the technology industry. Startup founders, their employees, their investors, lawyers, accountants, doctors, and countless others who make a living from the innovation ecosystem have been suffering from collective apprehension. The culprit was the seemingly sudden failure of Silicon Valley Bank, or SVB, as it was known around Silicon Valley. SVB, which started as a small regional bank in 1983, transformed itself into a technology-focused bank in the early Nineties. Its rise reflected the growing fortunes of the technology industry at large.

Wednesday

15 Mar 2023

Oliver Wiseman

Why DeSantis’s Ukraine statement matters

Why DeSantis’s Ukraine statement matters Ron DeSantis’s statement on Ukraine issued Monday night, an answer to Fox host Tucker Carlson’s policy questionnaire for possible presidential candidates, is proving to be one of the most significant moments yet in the still nascent 2024 campaign. The closer DeSantis gets to formally announcing his bid, the less he can stick to the policy ambiguity which being a state executive, rather than a Washington lawmaker, affords you. The Florida governor took Tucker’s invitation to expound on Ukraine and ran with it, issuing a statement that outlined a far less hawkish position than many had expected him to adopt.

John Pietro

There’s no excuse for Russia’s downing of a US drone

A US MQ-9 Reaper drone’s propeller was hit by a Russian Su-27 fighter jet over the Black Sea on Tuesday, causing the drone to lose control and crash. Before the fighter made contact with the drone, it and its wingman released fuel in what was likely an attempt to impair the American aircraft. The drone was in international airspace — which Russia seems to acknowledge — leaving no justification under international law for Moscow’s aggressive actions. Whether or not the physical contact was premeditated remains unknown. The Kremlin claims the drone’s “sharp maneuvers” caused it to crash and that its jet did not hit it.

Osundairo brothers re-enact Jussie Smollett hate hoax (Screenshot: Twitter)

Cockburn

Watch the Jussie Smollett hate hoaxers re-enact the ‘crime’

Is this the best video to grace the internet today? Cockburn thinks yes. Check out Abel and Ola Osundairo, the Nigerian brothers who allegedly perpetrated a fake hate crime against Empire actor Jussie "Juicy" Smollett, re-enacting how they carried out the staged attack: https://twitter.com/foxnation/status/1635332394159939593 The clip is from Fox Nation's new documentary on the Jussie Smollett hate hoax crime, Anatomy of a Hoax — and is pure comedy. The Osundairo brothers previously testified that Jussie paid them to stage an anti-black, anti-gay attack against him so that he could gain sympathy and clout on social media. Jussie told police that he was physically attacked by two white men wearing "Make America Great Again" hats who recognized him from the show Empire.

Batya Ungar-Sargon

Biden will never let Silicon Valley fail

After a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank left the institution in ruins, the Federal Reserve announced it would make whole the bank’s customers, including those with uninsured deposits in excess of $250,000, which should have made them ineligible for the Deposit Insurance Fund. President Biden promised the American people that this was not a bailout because no losses would be borne by taxpayers — a claim the Wall Street Journal assessed as a “whopper.” But the debate we should be having is not over the definition of the authorities' actions, but how to judge them morally — especially given how the Fed has been trying to tame inflation for the past two years.

Cockburn

Newark duped by fake nation

Cockburn has fallen for his fair share of fake Nigerian prince scams over the years. But even this gullible old hack is surprised at the credulousness of the city of Newark, New Jersey. Back in January, the city announced a cultural trade agreement with the Hindu nation of Kailasa. The mayor hosted a signing ceremony at City Hall, and issued a statement heralding the win-win deal as something that could improve the lives of the people of Newark and Kailasa. Everyone seemed to be very excited about a new age of comity between a great nation and a thriving metropolis. Except the city has now been forced to admit that it has been duped. There is no Hindu nation of Kailasa.

Tuesday

14 Mar 2023

Cockburn

Brave: Biden finally reveals decades-long support for gay rights

Cockburn was pleased to see Joe Biden, the noted civil rights activist and former eighteen-wheeler driver who made it from the barrios of Wilmington to the White House, has finally opened up about his "epiphany" on same-sex marriage. It is a brave thing to do in 2023, but political consequences be damned! Biden was going to set the record straight, and explain to the American people that he has long been a fervent believer in the advancing the cause of gay rights. In an interview on The Daily Show with former Obama staffer and Harold and Kumar star Kal Penn, Biden explained that he could "remember exactly where [his] epiphany was" on the question of marriage equality. He was a high-school senior, he explained.

Roger Kimball

Mike Pence wants you to forget his role in January 6

Is this news? Mike Pence “seized the spotlight” in DC this weekend when he “slammed former president Donald Trump in what amounts to his strongest criticism to date of his former running mate.” Of course Pence did. He is, for the time being, running for president. Naturally he is going to set his sights on the the biggest beast in the room. And that beast, in case you haven’t noticed, is Donald Trump. (And, really, can’t Politico do better than “former running mate”?) Pence, having himself been subpoenaed by the January 6 Entertainment Committee (he doesn’t plan to testify) is nervous about his role in that jamboree.

Ben Domenech

Ron DeSantis and the ghost of Republican governors

Ron DeSantis's pending arrival in the 2024 thunderdome has already drawn comparisons to two Republican governors who came before him — one who won the White House and another who flamed out before a single vote was cast in Iowa. His recent statement on Ukraine is telling in how it channels both men, in good ways and bad. DeSantis has already drawn comparisons to Scott Walker, the enormously popular Wisconsin governor who failed to capture any of 2016's populist energy despite prevailing in numerous fights in his state.

Cockburn

Marianne in Milford

Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson has been passing her time doing campaign events in New Hampshire since announcing earlier this month. Cockburn headed down to one in Milford and it was, well, quite the experience. A little over twenty people were in attendance, not including campaign staffers, and the candidate worked the room chatting with voters before the event began. A local news crew was standing by. Taking the podium, the candidate wasted little time getting to the heart of her message: the system is corrupted, it is cruel — and it needs to be "fundamentally changed." To Cockburn, her proposals suggested "revolutionized" might be a more aptly chosen verb. Marianne characterized the modern American system as utterly brutal: “But let’s be very clear here.

Peter Wood

New Yorkers embrace street justice

New York City isn’t as tough as it once was, but it’s practicing. A few weeks ago, I saw a young black woman barreling down the sidewalk on Madison Avenue. She tackled an elderly white woman at a bus stop. I was on the bus and saw the whole thing unfold. The elderly woman rolled over to protect her purse, which prompted her assailant to start choking her. At that point two clerks from a shop ran out and the attacker fled. The bus driver opened the door and the elderly woman hobbled abroad to the cheers of the other passengers. Our bus proceeded up Madison where three blocks later we saw the same young woman tackling another elderly woman. This time the bus didn’t stop. As far as I know, no police were involved.

Matt McDonald

Prince Andrew wants to groom the American media

The job of a royal — if you can call it that — is to serve the public. Back across the Pond, the late Queen was revered for what was repeatedly branded her “quiet dedication” to “the British people.” Which is why it’s so disheartening to hear that her son Prince Andrew “favors a US broadcaster” for an attempted comeback interview. The Mirror writes that he has been "approached by at least two major US broadcasters with offers of an interview taking place in the UK." In going stateside, the Duke of York would be denying the smallfolk of the United Kingdom the chance to fully relive one of the best television moments of the century to date.

Monday

13 Mar 2023

William Nattrass

The Ukrainian refugees who are returning home

Prague is still draped in blue and yellow flags, but with no end to the Ukraine war in sight, there’s growing uncertainty in Eastern European countries like the Czech Republic. As governments gear up to support Ukraine for the long haul, attitudes are also shifting among the millions of refugees who have found shelter in the EU since the war began. Last year, the Ukrainian refugee crisis became part of everyday life in the Czech Republic, the EU country hosting the highest number of Ukrainian refugees per capita. At first, it seemed refugees were fleeing a country that would soon fall under the sway of the Kremlin. Later, the mood changed as Ukrainian gains on the battlefield raised hopes that the war could be won sooner than anyone had expected.

Gilbert T. Sewall

Downfall of the California Maskies

Remember three years ago this month when shoppers were emptying supermarket shelves and locking themselves down inside? The masking of America was beginning — and for some it has never ended. On March 4, California’s governor Gavin Newsom terminated a three-year Covid state of emergency. His Department of Public Health will end mask requirements in medical facilities, prisons and homeless shelters beginning April 3. The nation’s official public health emergency will end on May 11. Blue-state and federal authorities are having a hard time letting go of the crisis. With the end of California’s rules, the city of San Francisco — bless its heart — has instated its own mandatory masking.

Oliver Wiseman

SVB’s collapse and the echo of 2008

SVB and the echo of bailout politics There was a back-to-the-noughties feel to events in Washington this morning as Joe Biden sought to calm markets and assuage fears of contagion in the banking system after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the last few days. Talking the day after regulators announced emergency measures that guaranteed all depositors at Silicon Valley Bank, Biden said that “thanks to the quick action of my administration over the past five days, Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe.” Viewed as a stand-alone case, Biden’s response to a run on America’s sixteenth largest bank after mismanagement left it fatally exposed to higher interest rates is understandable.

Jonathan Bydlak

The budget fight and the new politics of entitlements

It’s almost spring, and you know what that means: buds popping on the trees, birds chirping as the days grow longer, and the president introducing a budget that will be quickly forgotten. And so it's happened. But there have been a few interesting twists that could make this budget season more interesting than most. President Biden wrote an op-ed for the Wednesday New York Times presenting his plan to “extend Medicare for another generation.” The piece was largely predictable: calls to raise taxes on the wealthy as a way “to increase the program’s solvency by twenty-five years.” While some fiscal conservatives welcomed the president’s willingness to raise the issue of Medicare solvency, his ideas are largely dead on arrival for Republicans.

Sunday

12 Mar 2023

Jennifer Sey

Counting the cost of mask mandates

It’s tough to rank the discriminatory pandemic practices of the last three years. We were divided into essential and inessential workers; in blue states and cities, private school students were permitted to attend school while public school students remained shuttered at home for eighteen months; children were barred from essential developmental activities like school and sports while adults went to bars and concerts and professional sporting events in venues with more than 50,000 people; and those unable to wear masks or function when others wear them (the deaf and hearing impaired, for instance) were disregarded entirely.

Saturday

11 Mar 2023

Douglas Carswell

Why everyone in Britain is talking about the Lockdown Files

If you happen to be having a bad day, spare a thought for someone called Matt Hancock, possibly the most hapless person on the planet. A former British health minister, Mr. Hancock has become a national laughing stock across the Atlantic. First, he got fired from his job presiding over the UK’s National Health Service for breaking his own Covid lockdown rules. Unlike Gavin Newsom or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who did something similar, Hancock managed to get caught out in spectacular fashion. After helping issue edicts making it illegal for anyone in Britain to socialize with someone outside their family, Hancock was filmed canoodling his mistress like a high-school senior at prom night. A real-life version of Britain’s Mr.

Ben Domenech

AMLO hits a new low

The public-facing approach Andrés Manuel López Obrador deploys when dealing with political pressure from the US is typically belligerent, manic and laughably incoherent. The Mexican president provided all three this week in reaction to the growth of bipartisan support in Washington for taking significant action against the drug cartels that rule much of Mexico by designating them as the foreign terror organizations they are — or even to the point of realistically considering an Authorization of Use of Military Force against the narcoterrorists.

Friday

10 Mar 2023

Matthew Foldi

GOP seeks answers from NBA over Chinese soft power display

House and Senate Republicans, along with a basketball star, are demanding answers from the NBA about its financial relationship with the Chinese Communist Party following an “in-your-face” display of CCP soft power in the nation’s capital. Following reporting from The Spectator, eight congressmen and four senators wrote to NBA commissioner Adam Silver to express “grave concerns about Chinese Communist Party propaganda being broadcasted and promoted at National Basketball Association games.

China's National People's Congress - Press Conference

Steve Krakauer

Fox News’s effort to land the plane

In October, I was flying into Newark Airport on a Friday night in some of the worst turbulence I’ve ever encountered. After circling a bit, the pilots attempted a precarious landing, but ultimately aborted a few seconds before touching down. As we climbed back up, the bumps got worse, although we eventually leveled off and flew instead to Philadelphia, where we successfully landed in torrential rain. I made friends with the people in my row, who managed it fairly unscathed, but throughout the plane there were others crying, screaming, and puking into that little white bag. Surely, while we were flying around, some of those people thought to themselves during the entire hour-long ordeal, “just get us on the ground.” The pilots of course wanted to land too.

Oliver Wiseman

Does the New York Times think it’s helping John Fetterman?

Does the New York Times think it is helping John Fetterman? It’s been almost a year since John Fetterman suffered a life-changing stroke and less than a month since he admitted himself for in-patient psychiatric care at Walter Reed Medical Center to deal with severe depression. But the New York Times is pleased to report that everything is just fine in Fetterman World. Okay, I exaggerate, but no more than Annie Karni, whose profile of Fetterman at Walter Reed is one of the most troubling things I’ve read about a Washington politician in a while. It’s hard to know where to start with her implausibly upbeat dispatch. There’s the uncritical regurgitation of his staffers’ account of a senator hard at work.

Ben Domenech

The Twitter Files hearing was disastrous for the Democrats

Ever since the shock of the 2016 election, there has been an explosion of handwringing in Washington about the danger of information silos. This moral panic took on a newly aggressive character in the age of fake news and Covid — and has expanded to target Fox News, social media and even newsletter businesses like Substack as culprits in a world segregated by news sources. The old guard gatekeepers who occupy long-in-the-tooth media institutions, growing ever thinner as advertising dwindles, are united with the octogenarian politicians who still consume the thin gruel they pass off as ideas. Their enemy: those dangerous citizens who have too much freedom to speak and be heard.

Stephen L. Miller

Glenn Youngkin’s rookie CNN error

If Glenn Youngkin’s appearance on CNN this week tells us anything, it’s that Republicans still need to learn the lessons of the network’s Parkland town hall from back in February 2018. High school survivors, on stage in front of the country, were permitted to paint Senator Marco Rubio as a blood-soaked murderer. Now disgraced sheriff Steve Israel was allowed to whip the crowd into a frenzy, enough to the point where Dana Loesch, then spokesperson for the NRA had to be escorted out of the arena with security. CNN wanted the Jerry Springer-type environment and they got it. All this unfolded under the watchful eye of moderator Jake Tapper, who once worked for gun control lobby group Handgun Control, Inc.

Amber Duke

How Pennsylvania Democrats seized power amid a groping scandal

Pennsylvania Democrats over the past few months have put on a masterclass in political ruthlessness. Although they entered the legislative session in the state House of Representatives a few vacant seats shy of a majority, Democrats have since seized power through a series of shrewd — and arguably shameless — moves. Democrats first managed to win a one-seat House majority during the midterm elections, but three of the seats became vacant due to a death, a resignation and a promotion. This meant the GOP technically held a majority at the start of the session, but Republicans recognized that Democrats would almost certainly win the majority back in February when the three special elections were decided.

Thursday

9 Mar 2023

Ben Domenech

Why using the military against Mexico’s cartels is catching on

"Slowly at first, then all at once" is the most famous line Ernest Hemingway never wrote, and credit its fame to its accuracy. It might feel like naming the Mexican cartels foreign terror organizations, and passing a bipartisan Authorization of the Use of Military Force against them, is an idea taking hold in Washington at breakneck speed. But it's been an item of discussion for years. What's causing it to finally break into the mainstream is the Biden administration's lackadaisical approach to the fentanyl crisis along with the increasingly untrustworthy behavior of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The White House, for its part, rejects the idea.

Alina Chan

Is Congress finally getting serious about investigating Covid’s origins?

Wednesday’s hearing on the origin of Covid-19 by the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic was long overdue. It has been more than three years since the pandemic virus, SARS-CoV-2, was first detected in Wuhan, China. Yet far too little has been done in the United States to find out how the pandemic started. Separate investigations by US intelligence agencies have led to one assessment of a lab leak with moderate confidence by the FBI, a scattering of low-confidence assessments — the Department of Energy leans toward a lab origin while four agencies lean toward a natural origin — and two agencies undecided.

Wednesday

8 Mar 2023

Matt Purple

The GOP’s new debt ceiling fusionism

Congressional Republicans are gearing up for their four millionth attempt to rein in government spending, and surely this time will be different. After years of posturing in favor of budget cuts that never seem to materialize, the national debt growing to 130 percent of GDP is finally a threshold they won't cross. A Fox News hit? By gum, there's no time! Republicans exclaim as they raise a quivering red pen to the latest defense authorization bill. This job is about policy, not going on TV, dammit! You'll forgive me if I sound a bit cynical. After all, Republicans controlled the elected government for two years under Donald Trump and the deficit only got bigger. Yet as another debt ceiling fight looms, this time the GOP sounds like they might be serious about shrinking the state.

John Pietro

Why South Africa is cozying up to Russia and China

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine opened the most dramatic divide between East and West since the Cold War. Most of these divisions were clear beforehand — Hungary and Turkey were longtime thorns in the side of NATO, for example. Yet South Africa’s warming ties with Russia and China seemed to come out of nowhere. South Africa's initial reaction to the invasion was the same as much of the Western world, demanding that Russia leave Ukraine. That did not last, however. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said on March 17 that “The war could have been avoided if NATO had heeded the warnings from amongst its own leaders and officials over the years that its eastward expansion would lead to greater, not less, instability in the region.

Matthew Foldi

Banning TikTok: a how-to guide

“Whoever controls big data technologies will control the resources for development and have the upper hand,” Xi Jinping declared shortly after assuming control of China. In the years since, the Chinese surveillance state has exploded at home and abroad, thanks to espionage-adjacent apps such as WeChat, but none has raised as much ire as TikTok. Following reams of data showing that your teenager’s favorite app is poisoning their mind and spying on them, the calls to ban TikTok are now coming from inside the House… and Senate. But how would such a ban actually work? What does it mean to ban an app that is supported by the technological infrastructure of the CCP?

Oliver Wiseman

Biden wants to tax and triangulate

Biden wants to tax and triangulate When Joe Biden heads to Pennsylvania tomorrow to give a speech announcing his 2024 budget, he will be taking the latest in a series of steps to stake out a platform for reelection. In his State of the Union speech last month, Biden sketched a populist flavor of progressivism with promises of spending boosts and buy-American measures. Over recent weeks, the administration has showed signs of taking a tougher approach to immigration, embracing restrictive policies that the White House once rejected. Last week he backed out of a promise to veto a Congressional block on legislation in DC that would soften the city’s criminal code.