Joe biden

Is Hallie the most underrated member of the Biden family?

Move over Dr. B! There’s a new lady from the House of Biden who is stealing the spotlight.   Hallie Biden, widow of Beau Biden and ex-lover of her brother-in-law Hunter Biden, has earned the scrutiny of the House GOP.  After two months of stalling, this week the Treasury Department finally handed over suspicious activity reports relating to Hunter Biden’s finances to House Republicans.  Shortly thereafter, House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer revealed that a “new” Biden family member was involved in the divvying up of a windfall of Chinese cash.

hallie biden

The White House press corps’ cynical cries for ‘decorum’

The White House Correspondents Association sent an email to its members Monday begging them to practice "decorum" during White House press briefings. The email was sent in response to an incident earlier in the day when Simon Ateba, a correspondent for Today News Africa, accused White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre of "making a mockery" of the First Amendment by refusing to call on him at briefings for seven months. In a bizarre clip, Jean-Pierre stands at the podium dismissing Ateba, while the White House press corps hiss "decorum!" at him. KJP is flanked by the cast of Ted Lasso, who were at the briefing to talk about mental health. https://twitter.

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hidden fees

How hidden fees spiraled out of control 

Last week, a friend was halfway through a Hollywood wax when she complained to her beautician about stubborn hairs that were often missed. “That’ll be extra,” she was told. Apparently now the outcome of a Hollywood — famously meaning that your entire vagina is left completely bare — depends on what the beautician you have at the time can be bothered to do. She paid the money. What’s worse is that she didn’t even recount this story to me with pure, incandescent rage. When she finished talking and saw me red-faced and flapping my arms about, she laughed calmly and said, “It happens all the time now.”  Tragically, this does happen all the time. Last week, I went to Rome and decided that I’d get my hair done for the trip. A treat, I know.

Trump’s ultra-MAGA crew needs a reality check 

In 2020, Democrats made a pragmatic if uninspiring choice in nominating Joe Biden. If this month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is indicative of the Republican base’s mood, the ultra-MAGA crowd is still in middle-finger mode. Bernie Sanders wasn’t prepared to burn down the Democratic Party and trash all the other candidates to get the nomination in 2020, but Trump has always loved scorched earth. His followers need to get real before it’s too late.  Trump’s ardent fans lapped up his hour-and-forty-five-minute CPAC address, in which he portrayed himself as the only person capable of saving the country and averting World War III.

Contra the hawks, Biden’s defense budget keeps ballooning

This week we heard a lot about AUKUS, a trilateral initiative between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia that will revamp the Australian naval fleet with nuclear-powered submarines over the next two decades. President Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made a show of it in sunny San Diego on March 13, where they officially inaugurated the defense agreement and gave speeches about defending sea lanes and the rules-based international order in the Indo-Pacific. But there was another story here: the Pentagon released a torrent of charts and bureaucratic documents on what it would like to see in the coming year’s defense budget.

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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.

marianne williamson

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

marianne williamson

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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Marianne Williamson can out-empathy Joe Biden

She only officially entered the presidential race on Saturday, and already critics are counting Marianne Williamson out. To be fair, I understand why. On paper — and off paper for that matter — she is not your traditional candidate. The author and spiritual advisor made waves in 2020 with her eccentric debate moments, including her focus on the moon landing and her insistence on harnessing love for political purposes to defeat Donald Trump. But this time around, Williamson and her ethereal diction might be able to seize on one of President Biden’s major weaknesses: his incredible lack of empathy. During the 2020 election, one of the media’s major selling points for their favorite hair-sniffer was that he was a person who cared.

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How Afghanistan erred by thinking Biden would never leave

By now, the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is etched into history as a failure — one that punctured the Biden administration’s self-professed persona as a collective of calm and cool national security veterans. The Taliban’s rapid capture of the entire country, coinciding with the meltdown of the US-funded Afghan security forces and the awful optics of desperate Afghans trying to get on a flight out of Kabul, will be examined by historians for decades. The history-writing is already well underway. On February 17, the GOP-held House of Representatives sent letters to several government departments demanding any and all records related to the withdrawal.

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‘Very positive’: Nebraska AG on oral arguments against student debt forgiveness

Nebraska attorney general Mike Hilgers expressed optimism about the outcome of a Supreme Court case challenging President Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness program during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator. Hilgers said following oral arguments on Tuesday morning that the justices asked "very positive" questions about the White House's authority to institute the program, which would offer up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness to individual borrowers making less than $125,000 a year or $250,000 a year for households. "To some degree it's always a little bit of reading the tea leaves, but I thought I the questions the justices asked were very positive.

Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer: meet Biden’s clean-up couple

Joe Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer once berated the commander-in-chief at his Wilmington home. Biden couldn’t get a word in edgewise without the legal giant interrupting. Aides recall the no-nonsense law professor muttering, “Not very smart, Joe,” and “I don’t know why you’d say that,” and “That’s dumb.” Bauer was playing Trump in mock debates at the time. Little did he know that he was standing in the middle of a crime scene, one he and his team of attorneys would be revisiting to quell a scandal of the president’s own making. The discovery of classified material at Biden’s various residences and offices makes for an open-and-shut case, according to former federal prosecutor Joe Moreno.

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biden

The unraveling of Joe Biden: a retrospective

Looking back on the classified docudrama that brought down the Biden administration, it is still not easy to identify the exact moment when the official narrative began to unravel and the political establishment understood that Biden had to go. With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the New York Post breaking the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was an important alarm bell. That happened only weeks before the 2020 election, so it was a serious breach. At first, it seemed as if the threat had been contained. Elite squadrons of the regime’s damage-control department swung into action. They instantly de-platformed the Post, the nation’s oldest newspaper, shutting down its social media accounts for weeks.