Joe biden

Seized Russian assets should be used against Putin

The seizure of enemy treasure, formerly known as plunder and pillage, is an ancient tool of war. Though still practiced in the world’s nastiest conflict zones, it’s a tricky business within a rules-based international order. The G7’s agreement to lend $50 billion to Ukraine — using income from $300 billion of frozen Russian assets to cover interest and repayments on the loan — is a vivid case in point. And some would say, a lily-livered half-measure. The key feature of the deal is that it does not actually claim ownership of Russian loot — which however ill-gotten is mostly held in EU banks in the form of western government bonds. It merely diverts interest payments due on the bonds from the issuing governments.

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The election is closer than it should be

Welcome to Thunderdome. So I want to open with a caveat: Fox News is my employer, and anything I say that is critical of their pollsters should be understood as distinct to their pollsters, and not to the network as a whole. That said, their pollsters have occasionally been... very wrong. Who can forget the ludicrous Indiana Senate poll from 2018 that envisioned a dead heat between the candidates in a race the Republican won by seven points? So the point is, everyone can be off on occasion. But right now, the Fox prognosticators are out with a poll that shows Joe Biden up, and the opinions about the economy up as well. It’s been a shift that is notable over the past month. For Republicans, this may come as a shock, or they might dismiss it.

Trump courts Gen Z on the pods

Donald Trump went to Capitol Hill on Thursday, his first visit since some of his supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6 three years ago.A packed room full of House Republicans sang “Happy Birthday” to the former president, who turns seventy-eight today.Trump pleaded with members for a change in tone on abortion, calling on the issue to be left to the states. This comes after a record number of voters, 32 percent, said in a Gallup poll that they would only vote for candidates in major races who share their views on abortion.

Hunter Biden guilty of federal gun charges

Hunter Biden was found guilty of all three counts of federal firearm charges Tuesday, concluding a six-year investigation into whether the first son had lied on a federal form for a background check and illegally possessed a firearm while under the influence of illicit drugs. Hunter was struggling with an addiction to crack cocaine in 2018 and had at least one stay in a rehab facility during the summer. However, as multiple witnesses testified during the trial, he had quickly relapsed by October 2018, the month that he purchased a gun. His ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, painted a picture of a deeply troubled man whose constant drug abuse led to the dissolution of their marriage.

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CNN’s moderators must ask Biden the tough Hunter question

The upcoming June 27 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the first of its kind — a former president debating a current president, with a massive list of subjects to animate the discourse. But there is one topic in particular that moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash must bring up if this debate is to have any respectability from the voters: they must confront Joe Biden about his lies in the 2020 debates. These lies have been acknowledged publicly by Tapper at least, and by Bash to a lesser degree.

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Joe Biden’s D-Day performance is evidence of his mental unfitness

President Joe Biden spoke in Normandy on the eightieth anniversary of D-Day Thursday — and only slightly made a fool of himself. As he entered the event, it looked as if he entirely missed where he was supposed to sit, but played it off with a nice salute to a veteran. In the middle of a rousing speech, he talked about how many Russians died in Ukraine... for mysterious reasons. He did a bit of a squat in an invisible chair as the speaker Lloyd J. Austin III was introduced. The debacle ended with Dr. Jill Biden leading Joe away as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, nimbly ran to greet D-Day veterans. And we can’t forget Biden’s subtle double fist pump after the jets flew over the ceremony.

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If the West is to stay the same, a lot will have to change

My favorite line in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard comes midway through the first chapter. The times are unsettled. The Risorgimento is sweeping Sicily. Prince Tancredi, the idealistic young nephew of the book’s protagonist Prince Fabrizo, is bantering about the political situation with his uncle. He suddenly waxes serious: “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change” (Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi). Most readers will understand that the whiff of paradox points not to a contradiction but to a profound truth. There are plenty of historical situations in which fundamental assumptions about society are disrupted and can be restored only by something like revolution.

Biden’s faux border crackdown

President Joe Biden announced an executive order this week that he claims will “help us to gain control of our border, restore order to the process” by banning migrants from seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. At first glance, this seems like a welcome move to reduce a major pull factor for illegal crossings, even if it flies in the face of Biden’s claim in January that he had “done all I can do” on the border.As always, though, the devil is in the details. First, the limitations on asylum seekers only kick in once illegal crossings exceed 2,500 per day, which is nearly 1 million per year. As Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation told me, Biden is going to “meter the invasion.

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Joe Biden’s TIME interview: the good the bad and the ugly

President Joe Biden sat down for an interview with TIME magazine in the White House last week. The questions centered around foreign affairs, with interviewers Massimo Calabresi and Sam Jacobs asking about D-Day, Ukraine, Israel and Hamas, nuclear power, China, inflation, tariffs and immigration. Back in March Americans generally agreed that the economy and foreign affairs were weak points in Biden’s administration. The TIME interview is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. Cockburn identified a few overarching themes: Biden accused TIME of misreporting and leaving his accomplishments unreported. The first accusation: “The Russian military has been decimated. You don’t write about that. It’s been freaking decimated.” Another theme: senility.

Why Biden is ‘toughening up’ on the border

With “Securing Our Borders” signs behind him, President Joe Biden announced this afternoon that he’d sign an executive order to shut down asylum requests at the southern border once the average number of daily encounters hits 2,500. The action is set to come into effect midnight tonight, meaning requests will be shut down until the daily encounter number declines to 1,500. Here’s the math: since April 2020, when the Border Patrol recorded around 16,000 encounters (one of the lowest monthly totals in decades), the monthly number of encounters has surpassed 200,000 on at least ten separate occasions. If asylum requests are frozen when encounters reach 2,500, that means a maximum of 77,500 accepted asylum requests per month.

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Things fall apart for Team Biden

Welcome to Thunderdome. Democrats had a plan for 2024, a plan that they executed very well at the beginning. They would unleash a barrage of legal challenges on Donald Trump, designed to render him unacceptable to all but the hardcore Republican base whose support would still vault him to the nomination of a GOP contest where his only competition was really Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. That plan succeeded perfectly, perhaps even faster than they wanted, given that the candidates never really had time to tear each other down. Step one: a major success. Step two: use these assorted legal challenges to weigh down the Trump campaign with legal costs and distractions that pull him all over the country with hearings and pleadings and requirements to show up before various courts.

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Joe Biden’s non-defense policy

No one can say the Iraq War was under-discussed. On the eve of the 2003 invasion, President George W. Bush and his advisors explained and defended Operation Iraqi Freedom to, among others, British prime minister Tony Blair, Saudi ambassador prince Bandar bin Sultan, the United Nations Security Council and skeptical members of Congress, the media and the American public. Bush even faced opposition from his own secretary of state, Colin Powell, who cautioned the president against invading Iraq with what would come to be known as the “Pottery Barn Rule”: if you break it, you own it. An experienced military leader, General Powell understood the complexities of war and the importance of having an exit strategy.

The Biden campaign is trying to hire a full-time memelord

In a desperate attempt to get the attention of young voters, the Biden for President campaign is looking to hire a full-time manager of meme pages for up to $85,000 a year. Job requirements include “deep expertise of the digital media landscape” and the capability to “identify internet trends and/or opportunities for content.” In other words: be good at memes. Though Cockburn wonders whether the move is more innovative or absurd. The political meme game between Biden and Trump up to this point has been both ironic and noteworthy. "Let’s Go Brandon" was countered with "Dark Brandon" — which was also a response to the "dark Trump" meme.

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Trump’s bumper Bronx rally is a bad omen for Biden

Future historians, psephologists, and political analysts, searching for the day and time that Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign imploded beyond recovery, are likely to settle on Thursday May 23, 2024, at approximately 7 p.m. It was then that Trump’s surprising rally in Crotona Park in the South Bronx really got underway. I didn’t hear any actual bells tolling, but if you listened carefully you could discern the mournful obligato that signaled the end of Joe Biden’s hopes in New York — and therefore the country. No Republican has taken New York since Ronald Reagan’s great landslide in 1984. Why then would Trump waste time coming to the South Bronx? Because, to adapt Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A Changin’." Joe Biden won New York in 2020 by twenty-three points.

The economy is as good as people think

Welcome to Thunderdome. One of the Biden White House’s biggest problems at the moment is that while they can point to all manner of aspects of the economy that are doing just fine — above all, the stock market — the lived experience of many key segments of the electorate is totally at odds with this analysis. Hammered by higher food, energy, healthcare and education costs, American households feel constrained by rates that keep them trapped in homes they no longer want to live in, with cars they no longer want to drive. Are people in gas lines and starving? No, of course not. But a line in a recent Wall Street Journal piece encapsulates the situation: “We used to take three vacations a year. Now we take one.

Will gas prices determine the election?

Ideally, responsible citizens would think big when deciding on a presidential candidate. But the election outcome may just be determined by one factor: gas prices.  In a CNN article this week, economist Mark Zandi asserted that gas prices were likely to determine election results. On Tuesday, Biden announced his release of a million barrels of reserve gasoline. Even with the many factors that affect oil prices, it may be possible to predict where prices will be come November and if that can tell us who will win the presidency. Zandi and his colleagues from Moody’s Analytics (Brendan Lacerda and Justin Begley) published a nineteen-page econometric analysis in January.

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Trump deserves to be grilled at the debates

The Biden campaign, and by proxy, the Biden White House, released an unusual ransom list of debate conditions that the media and Trump campaign must meet for there to be any presidential debates this year. The list of demands include dissolving the Commission on Presidential Debates, a move that the media just one president ago stated would erode trust in the American media. Other demands include no live studio audience and cutting microphones for other participants. The Biden campaign also demanded the debates only be on four networks: CNN, ABC, Telemundo or CBS.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives two thumbs up (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trump’s Reich stuff

Former president Donald Trump’s social media account shared a video Monday that sparked a Blitzkrieg among his harshest critics. The video featured hypothetical news headlines about Trump winning the November election, overlaid on newspapers with smaller, less visible headlines. One of those other headlines touted a “unified reich,” which was too perfect for some Trump haters to resist. Trump shared a Nazi-esque headline on his own social media account? Pounce and seize, friends! “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a simple garbage of a human being. And ANYONE who supports him now will be ASHAMED to ever admit they did someday,” former congressman Adam Kinzinger wrote. The president responded to the incident as well.

Biden’s rough weekend

President Joe Biden had a rough weekend, committing at least three major gaffes during his public engagements. The president usually spends his weekend at one of his homes in Wilmington or Rehoboth Beach to get a respite from working at the White House. His recent appearances were a reminder as to why.Biden was the featured speaker at the commencement ceremony for historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta. But his speech was panned by critics who accused him of being divisive and treating the graduates as if they are victims because of their race. He also claimed his White House was filled with Morehouse graduates, telling the crowd, “I got more Morehouse men in the White House telling me what to do than I know what to do! You all think I’m kidding, don’t you?

Why students at historically black colleges aren’t protesting

Earlier this week, the New York Times asked an intriguing and surprisingly overlooked question: why aren’t black students on historically black college campuses protesting against Israel and marching for Palestine? It’s an important query — made all the more urgent by President Biden’s commencement address this coming weekend at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities.   Considering the seemingly endless ways African Americans have pledged their allegiances to the suffering in Gaza — and Palestinians in general — America’s 107 HBCUs should be exploding with anti-Israel rancor.

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