Joe biden

Is Joe Biden’s Easter bunny running the country?

Cockburn has long regarded the Easter bunny as the least convincing of all the holiday-themed characters. Give him jelly beans, malt eggs, even a couple verses from “All Creatures of Our God and King” — but leave the giant rabbits out of it, says he. That’s why he was so alarmed by video that emerged from the president’s annual Easter egg roll on Monday. The footage shows Biden chatting with a reporter who asks him a question about Afghanistan. He’s just beginning to answer when suddenly the White House’s resident Easter bunny lunges between him and the press. The creature turns to Biden and waves, while the leader of the free world turns obediently and walks away. Far be it from Cockburn to deny that the rotund rabbit had a point.

Remember Afghanistan?

For Americans, neglecting Afghanistan has long been the norm. Almost from its inception, it was the forgotten war, fought “over there so we do not have to face them” here, as President George W. Bush once put it. It was a campaign to crush the Taliban only to abruptly become a democratic nation building project and then just as quickly be sidelined for the “real war” in Iraq. Even as far back as 2009, when the United States still had 62,000 troops in the country, David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, was asking, “Hey, Media: Where’s the Afghanistan Coverage?” This all appeared to change last August — at least for a time.

The Border Patrol horsemen ride again

Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

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Inflation is here to stay

Inflation last month increased to 8.5 percent over a year ago. That’s up from 7.9 percent just last month. It’s the sixth straight month that inflation has been over 6 percent, and the highest it’s been since 1981. The Fed will almost certainly be raising the funds rate steadily for the rest of the year, perhaps by fifty basis point increments instead of the usual twenty-five basis points. The trick, of course, is to rein in the inflation without causing a severe recession. The price of gasoline rose a staggering 18.3 percent in March alone. But even if you take out the cost of fuel and food, which tend to be much more volatile than other commodities, the “core inflation” was 6.5 percent, again the highest in decades.

Biden cracks down even on green energy

We know that government’s knack for finding something wrong with everything rivals even the most stereotypical mother-in-law. But the relentless fault-finding’s latest victim may surprise you: federal prosecutors have fined a green energy company $8 million and slapped on a five-year probation period after bald and golden eagles died on its wind farms. There is now no such thing as “clean energy.” Even so-called “green energy” is tinged with the blood of birds. Just when you thought the war on energy couldn’t get any more ridiculous, Joe Biden's Department of Justice has sucker-punched one of its own golden boys.

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Is the Biden gas pump sticker arrest 2022’s greatest artwork?

Who is the most intriguing political artist of the Biden era? Cockburn is happy to welcome a new contender to the fray: Thomas Richard Glazewski of Manor Township, Pennsylvania. Glazewski is part of a daring street collective who have been posting stickers of Joe Biden on gas pumps. They show the president pointing with the caption “I did that!” and are placed next to the price of gasoline — which has risen significantly in the past year or so. The vinyl stickers — available on Amazon — are manufactured in China. Just like the Biden presidency, right? But Glazewski took his piece to a whole new level: risking his freedom last month, he turned his sticker protest into performance art by getting himself arrested. A viral video shows the artist’s arrest.

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WATCH: is Joe Biden America’s luckiest president?

Who knew Joe Biden was so fortunate? Forget inflation, gas prices, the prospect of World War Three, his regular memory lapses and his son’s indiscretions: it seems the 46th president is in fact the luckiest man in America — as evidenced by the appearance of a bird pooping on him while he delivered a speech on Tuesday. President Biden was at the podium in deep-red Iowa, where his aim was to “visit an ethanol plant, pledge to use executive tools to throttle inflation and explain to his audience how Washington is helping rural communities,” according to the Hill. But if anyone really hit their mark that day, it was the winged assassin above the president, despoiling his sports jacket from a range of several feet... https://twitter.

Who’s ready for another Biden family memoir?

Americans are about to get what they desperately need: another book from the Biden family! Valerie Biden Owens isn’t just the president’s little sister; she's also the author of Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. The book’s cover features a photo of a young Valerie and her siblings sitting on a couch with their mother. According to Amazon, the book "details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.” The timing of the book’s release — it will hit shelves next week — is almost as terrible as Joe Biden’s recent poll numbers. Almost.

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When Biden joked that he’d ‘beat the hell’ out of a congressman

Five Guys has always been Cockburn’s first choice for a greasy cheeseburger — breakfast of champions, says he — but Good Stuff Eatery, a Capitol Hill joint, is a solid second. So it is that Cockburn finds himself with a new respect for Congressman Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who was recently interviewed by Politico while eating at Good Stuff. Yet for sheer artery-clogging goodness, you can’t beat the story Khanna told about President Joe Biden. Per Politico, Khanna said he was once chatting with the president about the difficulties facing the Democratic senatorial caucus (as one does). “Mr. President,” he said, “why don’t you just get Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin in the room and hammer this out?

Atlantic journalist: I still don’t care about Hunter’s laptop

Cockburn has accidentally left his laptop at plenty of bars in his day. Yet if you were to open it up and search it — as a PI hired by one of his loopy exes once did — you would not find extensive evidence of drug use or information potentially compromising to national security. Not so in the case of Hunter Biden. Even the New York Times admitted last month that his now-notorious laptop is real and under investigation by federal prosecutors. When the New York Post broke that story back in October 2020, the mainstream media took a pass and Twitter even suspended the Post’s account. Now that the crooked computer has been verified, those same alleged journalists are rushing to play CYA.

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It’s still Obama’s White House

Barack Obama returned to the White House this week, and his presence was a straight up blast from the past. The 2010s might not be our most culturally defined decade, but surely the Age of Barry still has a few touchstones worth recalling. That was back when it was cool to say “there’s an app for that,” all the way back when the Speaker of the House was...actually it was still Nancy Pelosi. And it was back when everyone, and I do mean everyone, could not shut up about Obamacare. Sure enough, Obama was back in Washington to once again revel in the passage of his signature health law, even if it had just undergone yet another round of tweaks to make it work this time for real.

Time to invoke the 25th Amendment against Biden?

President Biden’s senile verbal blunders over the past few days have prompted renewed speculation over his mental competency. It's even been suggested that now is the time to consider invoking and activating the 25th Amendment. The Wall Street Journal recently printed a short sharp edit on the subject, noting that should the president go, he would be replaced by the vice-president, thus rescuing the government from the nursing home and delivering it into the hands of the idiotic. The Journal’s editors prefer the status quo. They are probably right to do so.

Do House Democrats want cities to die?

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

Biden’s budget doesn’t matter

Every year, the president puts forth a budget. And every year, the media diligently reports on it as if it matters to what the government will do over the coming year. Don’t get me wrong: budgets are important. They provide a sense of their crafters’ priorities and a roadmap for achieving their goals. But budgets don’t hold the force of law, which means — in our government — they serve as non-binding blueprints and little else. This is especially true of presidential budgets. That’s because while the budgetary process starts with the president, where it goes from there is determined by Congress alone. During the Trump years, Congress didn’t even bother bringing the president’s budget to a vote.

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Has Biden lost his mind on Ukraine?

Has Joe Biden gone loco over Ukraine? In Warsaw, Biden proclaimed of Russian president Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Biden also called Putin a "butcher." Then, in a meeting with the Polish president, Biden said the US regards NATO’s Article 5 as a “sacred commitment.” Biden called Warsaw a “sacred place” in the history of Europe and in “humankind’s unending search for freedom.” Biden went on to describe the conflict in Ukraine as "a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.

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Biden’s ad-libs are making the world less safe

Joe Biden, by his own admission, is a man who sometimes goes off script. Whereas some presidents seek to bottle up their emotions and remain reserved for the cameras, Biden wears his emotions on his sleeves. The president proved that yet again during his visit to Poland over the weekend, where he let loose on Russian president Vladimir Putin at the conclusion of a speech: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Many in the West would privately agree with Biden’s assessment.

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Why Biden’s slip-up is so revealing

The White House might have issued the fastest correction of a sitting US president’s remarks in history this weekend. But it doesn’t matter one bit. The bottom line is Joe Biden — and most of the civilized world — wants to see Vladimir Putin out of power in Russia. More to the point: they want to see his regime changed and him most likely Gaddafi'd for his sins. And, to be frank, who can blame them? There is just one problem: getting rid of Vlad means World War Three. And I can tell you from gaming out such a conflict countless times in simulators, such a conflict leaves tens of millions of people dead. But let’s step back for a moment. I'm going to cut the president a little bit slack for saying out loud what we are all thinking.

Biden’s Warsaw speech was both baffling and moving

Poland “Biden fell asleep.” Perhaps a thousand jokesters posted this and similar jibes in the livestream comments as we waited for the president to speak from Warsaw. Thousands of Poles, and doubtless many Ukrainian refugees, were gathered around the Royal Castle in the center of the Polish capital to wait. Biden trotted out — old but amiable and very much awake. In fact, after spending two days meeting refugees, Ukrainian representatives and Polish politicians, he looked surprisingly sprightly. God help me for saying this but I have a soft spot for the president.

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Joe Biden is winning

By the middle of January, I’d read some version of the headline “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency” so many times that it seemed an algorithm had taken over from the editors. The New York Times placed it above a column by Bret Stephens, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a member of the pundit pack that earnestly wished the president Godspeed when he entered the White House more than a year ago. Stephens, like most of his colleagues, argued that Biden was “flailing — and failing” — because of what the paper’s news pages have described as a “legislative agenda in shambles.

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Why David Mamet went right

How did David Mamet spend the pandemic? The answer, as anyone familiar with the prolific, brilliant playwright and screenwriter would probably have guessed, is that he wrote. “I’ve been writing a lot of essays lately,” Mamet, seventy-four, says when we meet at his Santa Monica home on a cool January evening. “Because, you know, I don’t want to go and sit on a park bench. I’m a writer.” A collection of essays written during the tumultuous plague years is published this month by Broadside, an imprint of HarperCollins. Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch is combative, challenging, witty, and, as the title suggests, its prevailing mood is as dark as the “terrible” period in which it was written.