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Washington’s crime bill is a disgrace Washington has experienced a notably deadly start to the year. Already there have been eleven homicides in the city (compared to six at the same stage in 2022). Over the first half of January, motor vehicle theft is up 74 percent on last year — and crime is up 25 percent in total. It’d be foolish to draw too many clear conclusions from a few weeks of data, but the spate of murders and carjackings make for a striking backdrop to the decision of the DC city council to override a veto from mayor Muriel Bowser and pass a new criminal code that promises to “improve” and “modernize” Washington’s approach to crime. By “improve” and “modernize” (the words of council member Charles Allen), they mean “soften” and “water down.

It was supposed to be so different. Sturdy old Scranton Joe Biden at the helm. Honesty, decency, unity. What a joke. Lawyers for Biden have now all but confirmed that he illegally possessed classified material. The American people have serious questions — and if Biden can’t or won’t answer them, he should not be president of the United States. It would be one thing if Biden proclaimed his own innocence, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t said he was never holding America’s secrets in his garage: his lawyers admit it. If a mid-level Pentagon employee played so fast and loose, they’d be saying a tearful goodbye to their kids before a prison stint. What’s going on here?

A high-ranking Biden administration official has left the Department of Energy following months of lawsuits and inquiries from Congress about her conflicts of interest. In December, Kelly Speakes-Backman quit her job as the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, or EERE, to become a vice president of public affairs at Invenergy, a green energy company. One of Invenergy’s focus areas is energy storage and batteries. Electric batteries are a top priority of the Biden administration, specifically the Department of Energy. Intriguingly that was exactly what Speakes-Backman was working on both during and before she joined the administration, where she led the agency's office on energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Reasons to be cheerful? Those White House officials not rifling through classified documents in a Delaware garage (more on that later) have been able to enjoy back-to-back weeks of good economic news to start 2023. Taken together, last week’s robust December jobs report and this week’s inflation report that shows slowing price rises have boosted optimism about the possibility of a so-called “soft landing,” in which the Fed manages to tame inflation without causing a recession. Just a few months ago, it was a question of when, not if, America would dive into negative growth. A soft landing was seen as a pie-in-the-sky delusion; in October, a Bloomberg model put the chance of a recession at 100 percent.

Congresswoman Katie Porter of California announced on Tuesday that she would be running for Senator Dianne Feinstein’s seat.  But given Porter’s supposed office conduct, Cockburn can't help but wonder if anyone would dare to work for her campaign. Former staffers for the representative have made allegations that Porter “says rude/racist things” and “talks [expletive] about other members, leadership, staffers, local electeds etc.” It was earlier reported that Porter had mistreated a staffer for having caught and transmitted Covid to the congresswoman. After the staffer apologized via text message, Porter replied, “Well, you gave me Covid. In twenty-five months, it took you not following the rules to get me sick.

So where are the FBI SWAT teams? Will they be raiding Joe Biden’s private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy & Global Engagement as they raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s Palm Beach home? Of course not. Sure, it turns out that there were classified documents in Biden’s office dating from his time as vice president. But only Trump and Trump-friendly people get the full klieg treatment from the Deep State’s Geheime Staatspolizei.   We do not yet know exactly what is in Biden’s documents, though news reports acknowledge that some of the material was marked “sensitive compartmented information,” also known as SCI, a designation used for “highly sensitive information obtained from intelligence sources.

It's been a bumpy month or so for newly elected Congressman George Santos, if that is his real name. Shortly after his upset win in November that flipped a key New York district from blue to red, reports began to surface showing he had told a few wee lies to voters on his way to Capitol Hill. He had not attended the prestigious college he said he had, he hadn’t worked at the big Wall Street firm, and, in the most humorous example, he had to admit he wasn’t Jewish but rather "Jew-ish." Politicians have always been known to have a tenuous relationship with the literal truth, but they used to be creative, even talented at it. Today they resemble a toddler claiming he did not steal the cookie from the jar as he’s chewing it.

Biden’s pivot point When Biden went to El Paso yesterday, his first trip to the US border as president, he addressed a long-standing point of political embarrassment. Over the first two years of Biden’s presidency, with illegal crossings at crisis levels, the Republican complaint that the president hadn’t found the time to assess the situation on the ground was entirely reasonable. A quick pitstop on the way to the summit of North American leaders might not seem like much, and a cursory survey of the border in western Texas amounts to a president doing the bare minimum, but it’s nonetheless worth asking why Biden chose this moment to grasp the nettle. The timing is, above all, a sign of the unexpectedly comfortable position Biden finds himself in at the start of 2023.