Joe biden

Liz Truss has resigned after only forty-five days in office, the shortest serving prime minister in British history. She's long come off as a stubborn and prideful figure, stuffed with confidence even if she doesn't express it well. It must have taken a momentous behind-the-scenes rebellion to convince her to go — and surely that's what happened. The past couple of weeks in British politics have been nothing short of mesmerizing. We Americans now understand how the rest of the world must have felt gawking at us for five years.

Rejoice, slackers of America! For there is a new figurehead leading your crusade for lunchtime naps, camera-off Zoom meetings and sea-level productivity. Yes, Joe Biden has, finally, excelled at something: he is the president that has spent most time at home. According to CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller, who has been meticulously keeping tabs of Biden's days off, since taking the White House as his official residence, the president has traveled to his home in Delaware fifty-five times. Whether he’s practicing his cycling skills, injuring himself while playing with his dogs naked or lounging in his $2.

Joe Biden, ice cream in hand as so often, yesterday pronounced on Liz Truss’s tax reform disaster.  ‘I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake,’ said Joe Biden, sounding every bit the wise old man of global politics. ‘I think that the idea of cutting taxes on the super-wealthy at a time when… I disagree with the policy, but that’s up to Great Britain.’ That concession at the end is the President realising he’s just breached the normal rules of diplomacy – by giving his opinion on an ally’s domestic difficulties. But he just can’t help himself.

In front of the whole world, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threw the Border Patrol agents he oversees — and our country's reputation — under the bus. Now, two leading border chiefs are ushering the DHS secretary toward the exit. Mark Morgan, head of the US Border Patrol under Barack Obama, has dubbed Mayorkas "the most dangerous man in the Biden administration" and is calling for his impeachment. Morgan also slammed the DHS head for choosing "to withhold the truth." Former ICE director Tom Homan is equally blunt: "He should resign.

For all the confusion caused by President Biden’s recent declaration that “the pandemic is over,” and the familiar sight of administration officials rushing to qualify his comment, it raises a question: where does the Covid emergency actually stand? Having gone from draconian lockdowns to a summer of travel chaos in just over two years — with lots of political squabbling in between — it has been easy to lose track of both the remaining dangers and the precautions many health experts believe are needed going forward. Strictly speaking, Covid is still very much with us. The average number of daily cases in the US has floated between 50,000 and 60,000 since April of this year and the death toll remains fairly constant at 400 per day.

There's only one season that can ever trump election season (and tragically it isn't football season). It's hurricane season, now in full swing. And already it's caused the unthinkable to happen: CNN has cut into its wall-to-wall coverage of Republicans destroying democracy in order to report on the weather. It isn't just CNN. Anytime a hurricane enters the Caribbean, an alarm goes off over at Weather Channel headquarters. TV meteorologists then slide down a pole and dash off to the nearest affected beach or lakeside resort, donning their slickers and prepping for their liveshots as rain slices through the air behind them and palm trees bend at worrying angles. And what a public service is this immersion journalism. Without it, how would we know what wind looks like?

It's always easier to break something than to build it. Joe Biden broke the immigration control system that he'd inherited from Donald Trump and that had been built up over several administrations of both parties. Rebuilding it after Biden's vandalism will take time. Even if Republicans win the majority in both houses of Congress in November, it will take a change in administration before any real reconstruction can begin. With more than 2 million "encounters" with illegal border-crossers over the past year, more than any year in history, restoring order may seem like an insuperable task. But as we saw right after Trump's election and during the first months of his presidency, a simple expression of will can have a huge influence on prospective illegal aliens and their smugglers.