Joe biden

Welcome to Thunderdome! For the latest edition of our podcast, head over here — this week, we talked about steel manning the legal woes of Trump and Biden, DeSantis’s plateau, Christie’s surge, the Kamala problem, what’s a Uighur and, in a new tradition, named our King of the Week. Listen here and subscribe today!  Republicans can’t quit Donny Try as they might, and much as many of them want to, Republicans just can’t quit Trump. Everything about this moment suggests that nominating a candidate in 2024 who has just a modicum of likability would be a genius play. Joe Biden’s job approval hovers around 40 percent, and only a quarter of voters are positive about the direction of the country.

For years, it seemed as though nothing could stick when it came to the impact of Hunter Biden’s escapades on his father’s presidency. The White House could stick to its don’t-even-go-there denials. The press seemed determined not to do its job. The alleged crimes and shady business practices of the president’s son were not to be brought up in polite company.  Slowly, but perceptibly, that is changing. The sheer weight of evidence that has continued stacking up, the plea deal and the serious claims made by the IRS whistleblower this month have combined to push the Hunter Biden story into the foreground. The hand-wafting dismissals by Democrats of anyone who took the Hunter story seriously were always unpersuasive and dishonest. But that is more obvious now.

Confronted with devastating evidence of Biden family grifting, the president’s advocates are abandoning their old defenses and trying some new ones.  Some are attempting to change the subject. Nancy Pelosi offers a sterling example. Asked about the latest evidence connecting Joe Biden with Hunter’s corrupt schemes, she replied that she was too busy defending women’s reproductive rights. Not exactly a full-throated defense of the president. Still others are repeating the familiar refrain, “But Trump is worse.” (More on that in a minute.)  Finally, a shrinking band of Biden supporters are sticking with their old line: you may have caught everyone who shares Joe’s DNA, but you haven’t caught ol’ Joe himself.

The president is hitting the road this week to kickstart a big push to sell his economic track record. The nation, barely recovered from the excitement of the first “Investing in America” tour earlier this year, will be treated to another few weeks of cabinet members in hardhats talking about green jobs. A memo from White House advisors Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon warns that Biden, cabinet members and other administrators “will continue fanning out across the country to take the case for Bidenomics and the president’s Investing in America agenda directly to the American people.” (Take shelter!) On Wednesday Biden will give what the White House is billing as a “major speech” touting his economic policies.

The Republicans investigating the Biden family grift had a big week, not that you would know it from reading the New York Times or Washington Post. Just how big a week it will turn out to be depends on whether congressional investigators can actually prove what the two IRS whistleblowers allege.  The allegations, presented at a press conference by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee Thursday, are based on testimony from those whistleblowers. They make several key points:  The Department of Justice deliberately delayed and impeded the IRS investigation of Hunter Biden’s tax affairs The Department of Justice rejected recommendations by IRS investigators that Hunter be charged with multiple felonies for tax violations.

Senator Ted Cruz has plans to stymie President Biden’s pick to head up the Centers for Disease Control. The Spectator exclusively obtained legislation the Texas Republican will introduce to force a confirmation vote on the controversial doctor, Mandy Cohen, who Biden wants to succeed the scandal-plagued incumbent, Rochelle Walensky.  In the aptly named "CDC Accountability Act of 2023," Cruz has a simple proposal: change existing law requiring a confirmation vote for the next CDC director in 2025, and instead push it up two years.

In his texts, Hunter Biden depicts himself as Atlas, carrying his entire family on his back — their financial and emotional burdens taken unto himself, turning his life into a black hole of drugs, debts and duplicity. You have to be a certain kind of troubled to carry on an affair with your brother’s widow while sexting her married sister, corresponding with them in disturbing messages in between wiring them money. The threats of self-harm and the mournful late-night desperation, alternating with chest-thumping declarations that he’s the only one earning money for the family, are all recognizable as aspects of someone with serious substance addiction. If he wasn’t so clearly an awful person, you’d almost feel sorry for the guy. Almost.

“Because that’s where the money is.” That was the answer that Willie Sutton, an expert in his chosen field, gave when asked why he robbed banks. Maybe the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, should consider employing a kindred candor about their business activities in Romania, Ukraine and elsewhere back when Joe was Obama’s VP.   So far, they have been disappointing on that score. Here’s the state of play: an FBI whistleblower revealed the existence of a complicated bribery scheme that allegedly funneled millions of dollars into the Bidens’ coffers via a network of at least twenty shell companies set up to launder the dough.

Mandy Cohen — the doctor rumored to be President Joe Biden’s successor to the scandal-plagued Rochelle Walensky atop the Centers for Disease Control — loves Anthony Fauci, multiple sources familiar with her record tell The Spectator. Biden’s likely pick to helm the CDC has what many view as a troubling record of politicizing science and unnecessarily supporting draconian lockdown measures, even in the face of scientific reality. Most are seizing on a photo of Cohen wearing a mask emblazoned with a giant picture of Anthony Fauci and a video of her at a briefing (while North Carolina was under a strict mask mandate) in which she looks to see if the cameras are on, pretends to put on her mask, then pretends to take it off. https://twitter.

As Rishi Sunak faces concern at home that his five priorities are slipping out of reach, he is flying to Washington tonight for another foray on the world stage. The Prime Minister will spend two days in the USA where he will meet President Joe Biden for his first bilateral in America (and the fifth since he entered No. 10). While Boris Johnson made his dislike of the phrase ‘special relationship’ well known, Sunak has no such qualms – though one government aide suggests that it still may not appear in his lexicon: the Prime Minister prefers instead to refer to America as the UK’s greatest ally.

It’s going to be an awkward Fourth of July cookout chez Biden, as Hunter’s legal team is reportedly planning to invoke a Supreme Court ruling dad Joe said “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution.” But hey, Hunter seems to be thinking, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right? Especially when doing so could keep you out of prison. The SCTOUS opinion that new Second Amendment rights poster-boy Hunter Biden is embracing was handed down in June 2022. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen challenged a New York law requiring residents applying for concealed carry weapons permits to show “proper cause” for carrying a gun.