Joe biden

As the song in “Li’l Abner” said, “The Country’s in the Very Best of Hands.”   I wonder if Joe Biden knows the tune?   The treasury says the national debtIs climbing to the skyAnd government expendituresHave never been so highIt makes a fellow get aGleam of pride within his eye,To see how our economy expandsThe country’s in the very best of hands Please note that Joe’s got plenty of help. There are lots of hands building up that debt, opening up our southern border, proselytizing for the girls who think they are boys and vice versa.

Hunter Biden's decision to fight fire with fire in his ongoing laptop scandal is apparently not sitting well with the administration officials who work for his father. The president's son has brought on several street fighters, including famed white-collar defense attorney Abbe Lowell and Media Matters founder David Brock, to defend him against House Republican investigations into the contents of his laptop hard-drive. House Oversight chair James Comer and Judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan are probing whether Hunter traded access to Joe for fat paychecks from foreign corporations. In response, Hunter's attack dogs are resurfacing claims that Comer abused his ex-girlfriend and that Jordan turned a blind eye to sexual abuse when he coached high-school wrestling.

A politically-connected electric battery company with deep ties to the Biden administration is in trouble. Proterra could be staring down financial ruin, even though everyone from the president to his cabinet have worked overtime to boost the bus company. The Biden administration was supposed to be a ticket to ride for California-based Proterra. In 2021, it told shareholders that it was ready to “ride the wave” of taxpayer-funded incentives for vehicle electrification. It had all the right friends in all the right places. It hired a lobbying firm with extensive ties to Democratic politics weeks before Biden toured its facility.

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.