Joe biden

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.