Joe biden

Kamala Harris’s top ten word salads

No assessment of Vice President Kamala Harris's first two years in office would be complete without her word salads and pedantic lectures. Here are just a few of my favorites: Kamala Harris on geography So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong, and it goes against everything that we stand for. Harris on community banks We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community.

The ever-shifting excuses about Hunter Biden’s laptop

Hunter Biden’s defense about his incriminating laptop sounds like an old joke about a trial lawyer who was accused of letting his dog bite a stranger. The lawyer’s first line of defense was that “it couldn’t happen because my dog was tied up that night.” When told there were witnesses who had seen him walking the dog, he said, “Okay, we were out walking but my dog doesn't bite.” If that fails, then, “Well, yes, my dog did give you a little nip, but it wasn't a bad one.” Then, “Granted, you had to go to the hospital for surgery, but you provoked my sweet pup.” If all else fails, “What do you mean I own a dog?

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Shoot down the balloon!

Like many of you, Cockburn has been following the developing story involving the Chinese spy balloon currently hovering over Montana. For those unaware, sometime over the last few days a spy balloon has floated over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, across Canadian airspace and entered into Montana, where it's been for several days. It traveled at an altitude of around 50,000ft and is currently not far from the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base, which houses a portion of America's intercontinental ballistic missiles, among many other key military assets.

Democracy in Peru is under attack

For over a month, Peru has been in a state of near-constant unrest. In December, as the legislature threatened to impeach President Pedro Castillo for, among other things, allegations of corruption, Castillo tried to dissolve the legislature and “govern through decrees.” By all measures, this was an attempted coup, and it resulted in his impeachment (by a vote of 101-6), arrest, and condemnation from left and right. In his place, Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as president, having denounced her former boss’s attack on the country’s democracy. This was a success in a country that has seen six new presidents in the past seven calendar years. The Congress has repeatedly been at odds with the president, and scandals have rocked administration after administration.

The FBI descends on Biden’s beach house

Search’s up at the Biden beach house. President Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer explains, “Today, with the President’s full support and cooperation, the DOJ is conducting a planned search of his home in Rehoboth, Delaware.” A bevy of black SUVs and sedans swarmed around the Biden property, once the site of happy days where the Biden clan congregated, now the target of the FBI. My heart goes out not to Biden, who was obviously lax in his handling of classified documents, but to the poor slobs in the FBI who have to tromp through his various homes in search of papers that he was supposed to have handed over to the National Archives in January 2017. It’s difficult to think of a more tedious task.

How to stop politicians from taking classified documents

It should be obvious by now that too many classified documents are floating around Florida, Delaware, and Indiana. They were removed without authorization and stored improperly under Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence respectively. Most of them, it seems, were hurriedly packed by government aides during an administration’s final days, even as the president and vice president were busy handling their official responsibilities. National security law doesn’t distinguish between the accidental and deliberate mishandling of classified documents, but the public does. They know the president and vice president bear heavy, official burdens until the moment they are replaced.

Biden is the war president Ukraine needs

Joe Biden is upping the ante in Ukraine. Even as Vladimir Putin directs a fresh barrage of missiles, Biden is apparently planning a trip to Europe next month to deliver a major address on the anniversary of the Russian invasion and announce a substantial military aid package for Kyiv. Good for him. A speech in Poland or Lithuania — both leaders in the struggle against Russian aggression — will strengthen NATO and demonstrate that a year into the conflict, unity, not dissension, prevails when it comes to confronting Putin’s revanchist ambitions. At every step, Biden has checked Putin, who assumed he could invade and occupy Ukraine in a thrice.

Halfway through Harris: our remarkable VP

John Nance Garner, a Texan who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years, famously quipped that the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Garner wasn’t necessarily wrong. But the groundbreaking election of Kamala Harris was supposed to transform the office. After all, she was the first woman, the first black person, and the first South Asian VP. Little else mattered. She was a badass, and if you didn’t acknowledge her intersectional excellence, you were a sexist, racist goon. Even many on the right thought Harris might play an outsized role as VP, given President Biden’s cognitive frailty. As we’re now halfway through Harris’s first term in office, it’s a good time to take stock of all that's gone wrong.

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Why Biden’s document scandal is worse than Trump’s

Shortly after reports surfaced that President Joe Biden's team had found classified documents at his office at the Penn Biden Center this past November, the mainstream media rushed to "contextualize" the story. "Contextualize," in this case, means they justified Biden's mishandling of classified materials and drilled into readers that he was much more responsible in regard to the matter than former president Donald Trump. Biden, they said, had possession of far fewer documents overall and was much more cooperative with the Department of Justice in turning them over to the proper authorities once his team found them. Needless to say, these media attempts to downplay Biden's mishandling of classified materials relative to Trump's have not aged well.

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Joe Biden has some difficult questions to answer

From our UK edition

Joe Biden has become the Typhoid Mary of classified documents, spreading them as he goes. They keep turning up in batch after batch, everywhere but the floor at Starbucks. The President has said almost nothing about the mess, except to reassure us that ‘people know I take classified documents seriously’. That defence has since taken on a slight change of punctuation: ‘People know I take classified documents. Seriously.’ He certainly does. He takes them everywhere. Most recently, classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, a foreign policy thinktank in Washington, DC established by Biden in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania. The documents raise additional questions. Why were Biden’s lawyers searching there in the first place? We still don’t know.

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With Ron Klain gone, who’s running the Biden administration?

After President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last year, White House chief of staff and the administration's resident Twitter addict Ron Klain joined a confab of journalists on Twitter Spaces to discuss the speech. When a reporter asked Klain, in response to Biden’s poor approval ratings, whether he thought they were having trouble getting their message out, Klain responded, “Well, I’m doing Twitter Spaces, aren’t I?” It was a perfect demonstration of how Klain had taken to guiding administration policy in accordance with the whims of Twitter.

Joe Biden should follow Jacinda Ardern out the door

I have a question for New Zealand’s outgoing prime minister Jacinda Ardern: can you take President Biden with you? Ardern announced this week that she would be resigning from her post, ten months before her term ends in October. She acknowledged in her resignation address that her five and a half years have been filled with difficult challenges. Since Ardern’s election in 2017, New Zealand has dealt with terrorist attacks, natural disasters and of course the Covid-19 pandemic. But Ardern stressed the fact that she is not leaving because of the difficulties of the job. Rather, she is departing because... well, to put it simply: she can’t cut it anymore.

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What the US can do about Germany’s hardball on Ukraine

Once again, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has crushed the hopes of NATO allies and, most of all, the millions of Ukrainians suffering under Russia’s assault. Originally, he refused to send tanks to Ukraine for fear that Russia would escalate the war. More recently, Scholz has said he'd only consider sending tanks if it was part of a coalition, not just Germany acting alone. Last week, the United Kingdom announced it would be sending Challenger 2 main battle tanks (MBT) to Ukraine, making it the first nation to supply modern, Western MBTs to Kyiv. Poland, Finland, and Denmark have also indicated that they would be willing to send their own Leopard 2 tanks. Those are German-origin weapons, so they first require a nod of approval from Berlin in order to export.

Twilight of the Democrats’ gerontocracy

As President Biden plans to launch his reelection campaign, he is whistling past a graveyard of recently discarded Democratic Party icons, who have either left the scene willingly or are being gracelessly kicked out. Nancy Pelosi. Steny Hoyer. Pat Leahy. Jim Clyburn. Anthony Fauci. Dianne Feinstein. Their combined age is 500 — and until a few months ago, they were running the country. Now they’re shadows of their former selves, headed to the greener pastures of retirement, book deals or the backbenches of the House of Representatives. Over the past few months, the Democratic Party’s leadership has transitioned from the Silent Generation to a mixture of baby boomers and Gen Xers.

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So much for Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’

It was supposed to be so different. Sturdy old Scranton Joe Biden at the helm. Honesty, decency, unity. What a joke. Lawyers for Biden have now all but confirmed that he illegally possessed classified material. The American people have serious questions — and if Biden can’t or won’t answer them, he should not be president of the United States. It would be one thing if Biden proclaimed his own innocence, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t said he was never holding America’s secrets in his garage: his lawyers admit it. If a mid-level Pentagon employee played so fast and loose, they’d be saying a tearful goodbye to their kids before a prison stint. What’s going on here?

Biden is a Major ‘good boy’ truther

Cockburn came across this interesting little tidbit while he was stirring his first apéritif of the early afternoon: a Vox preview of Christopher Whipple’s forthcoming book, The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House, reports that President Biden is distrustful of his Secret Service team and believes the agency fabricated a story about Biden’s German Shepherd, Major, biting an agent. Major Biden and fellow White House German Shepherd, Champ, were removed to Delaware for a while following the alleged incident. Vox reports how in the book, “Whipple details how Biden was showing a friend around the White House and pointed to the spot where Major allegedly bit a member of Biden’s security team. ‘Look, the Secret Service are never up here.

The double standard over Biden’s classified documents

President Biden said Tuesday he was “surprised” to learn that in November his lawyers had found classified documents in his former office at a Washington think tank. No doubt he was equally shocked when more classified docs turned up in his Delaware home. Yet the tone of the mainstream media seems to be that boys will be boys. Since Biden is being so cooperative with authorities after being caught red-handed, maybe this has nothing in common with Donald Trump's cache of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Or Hillary's cache on her private e-mail server. Could there be a double-standard? Biden had some/several/a bunch of classified documents while Trump had hundreds so that's different.

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Ten other places Joe Biden should check for classified documents

So it turns out that there were classified documents lying around Joe Biden’s office and garage at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, dating from his time as vice president. In a press conference today, the president justified this to Fox News's Peter Doocy by saying, "by the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage... it's not like they're sitting out in the street." https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1613565691994447872 The news follows the revelation that classified documents were located in his office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC. But is that all?

george santos

George Santos makes politics worth paying attention to

As the Republicans' on-again-off-again, will-they-won’t-they romance with Kevin McCarthy drags on, Cockburn has found refuge in a genuinely entertaining drama. Each day offers another layer to the George Santos tall-tale trifle — and as the mainstream media purports to be shocked that a politician would lie about something (gasp!), Cockburn is gobbling it up. Just yesterday, for instance, Cockburn learned the Republican congressman from New York lied about being a “‘star player’ on the volleyball team for a college [CUNY Baruch] that he did not attend” (per Business Insider). Cockburn also enjoyed hearing how Santos was involved in a Ponzi scheme fewer than two years ago.

The conservative case against impeaching Joe Biden

“President Biden should be impeached by the incoming House Republican majority over his ongoing destruction of the southern border,” proclaimed National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy on New Year’s Eve. Once the preserve of the GOP’s right wing, which introduced nine failed impeachment resolutions against Biden prior to the midterm elections, the idea of impeaching Joe Biden is gathering ground. Even staid moderates are beginning to realize that six million illegals pouring across the Rio Grande might not be such a blessing of liberty. Rank-and-file Republicans are hungering for revenge against Democrats for twice impeaching former president Donald Trump.