Joe biden

Biden fails to fill his office

"The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1936 in an essay called “The Crack-Up.” At the time, the US economy was coming out of the Depression. A Democratic administration was expanding the reach and influence of the federal government, notably into areas of the economy where it did no good, and war was on the horizon. On the bright side, inflation in 1936 was 1.46 percent and GDP was growing at 12.9 percent per year, which is even higher than the capitalists of the CCP have recently claimed for China.

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The US and India in a new world

The world’s center of gravity is shifting to the Indo-Pacific. The new global order will be shaped by developments in a sprawling region where interstate rivalries and tensions are sharpening geopolitical risks. Building a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific has become more important than ever, but China’s territorial and maritime revisionism, and its heavy-handed use of economic and military power, are causing instability and undercutting international norms. Against this background, the expanding strategic partnership between the world’s most powerful and most populous democracies — the United States and India — has become pivotal to equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific.

NATO won’t bleed for Ukraine

Ask three different people whether Russian President Vladimir Putin will approve an invasion of Ukraine, and you are likely to get three different answers. Yes, a Russian land, air, and sea blitz is inevitable and will come in fairly short order, likely without warning. Yes, a Russian invasion is possible, but could still be averted with some shrewd diplomacy. Or, no, surely Putin understands an invasion would be a disaster for his legacy and his country’s economy. In the midst of all of this comes wild speculation about what Putin is thinking at any given moment, how the weather may factor into his calculations, and what the Russian government’s end goal really is. What can be said for certain, however, is that diplomacy has picked up significantly over the past week.

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Democrats flunk basic history

Many of our political leaders are historically illiterate. This is especially concerning given that some of these politicians have been around since the dawn of time. They've lived through much of the history they now seem to know so little about. While heaping praise on Biden’s decision to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to spread misinformation. Luckily his misinformation was just a rant on the Senate floor and not on Spotify. Otherwise, Neil Young might have had some words for him. "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn't all white men in 1981, or ever.

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The next North Korea crisis has begun

While the world is captivated by all things Omicron and Russia, North Korea is once again back on the world stage. And that can only mean one thing: bigger and badder missile tests. None of this should come as a surprise. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has announced to the world on numerous occasions that he will continue to test such weapons, even as his nation suffers from a “food problem.” Kim, his father, and his grandfather have been marching towards a fully viable nuclear deterrent for decades now. What is new is that Kim has declared that he will not abide by the promise he made to not test certain weapons platforms that directly threaten the US homeland — what drove the near-nuclear showdown with President Donald Trump back in 2017.

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Could this kitty swing the midterms for the Demo-cats?

President Biden must not be feline optimistic about his paltry poll numbers, particularly after his landmark Build Back Better Act died on the Senate floor. But he’s finally delivered on one campaign promise: he’s got a cat. The First Family circulated pictures of Willow, a two-year-old gray and white short-haired tabby cat, on Friday morning. According to Politico, Willow first met Jill Biden “when she jumped on stage and interrupted her remarks during a 2020 campaign stop.” The New York Times reports that "Willow is named after the first lady’s hometown, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania." The cat hails from western Pennsylvania, which could prove useful for the Democrats as they try to claw back some credibility in the run-up to the midterms.

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Trump was tougher on Russia than Biden

Vladimir Putin’s new year is off to quite a start. The Russian autocrat isn't just massing troops on the Ukraine border, kicking off a diplomatic panic in European capitals and in Washington. In recent days he's also backed a refugee stand-off with Poland, helped Kazakhstan's strongman squelch pro-democracy protests, maintained a presence in Assad’s Syria, established new footholds in Mali and Central African Republic, cozied up to communist China, and, in a nod to Khrushchev, hinted he might build military infrastructure in Cuba and Venezuela. What's remarkable about this geographically expansive, chaos-inducing, dangerous spectacle is that it was entirely avoidable. Mr. Putin is no cipher.

‘Kamala for SCOTUS’ is a distraction Biden wants

No, Kamala Harris will not be Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Steven Breyer when he retires from the Supreme Court later this year. “Imminent Supreme Court retirement?” ejaculated CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin earlier this month. “Longshot: VP Kamala Harris,” he suggested. NBC scooped on Wednesday that Breyer would step down at the end of this term — and more cranks joined the Kamala chorus. “Kamala Harris for the Supreme Court. #KHive She cannot win election with these numbers (yes it’s unfair, but Kamala is a pragmatist) she’s young, she’d be a great justice — and she’d spend a lifetime on the bench,” tweeted Louise Mensch. “@amyklobuchar for Vice President.” “Straightforward from here,” wrote Bill Kristol.

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Get ready for a brutal Supreme Court fight

During the recent Supreme Court arguments in the school choice case Carson v. Makin, Justice Stephen Breyer asked the following concise question: I -- I might ask this because it's related to what Justice Kavanaugh said and -- and what you're saying. I mean, it is discriminatory against religion, but I think the Establishment Clause problem or interest underlying it forever has been beware if the government gets too involved. One, people will think the government favors some things as opposed to others, and that that will cause strife. Two, the Vietnamese boat people will have no problem in Los Angeles, but they sure will in Maine because there aren't enough of them.

Joe Biden in the metaverse

Meta is meant to be better — better than Facebook, better even than reality. In the future, a second Edward Gibbon may wonder not just whether it was a good idea for the federal government to encourage Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of talented techies to launch a Revenge of the Nerds coup against the minds and manners of America, but also what it was about reality that made us want to escape it so badly in the first place. There has never been a society more blessed than that of the United States.

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Biden’s big energy bust

"For too long, we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis,” President Biden declared in his presidential address to Congress in April 2020. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.” Investments in jobs and infrastructure, the president pleaded, have often had bipartisan support in the past. In November, he got nineteen Republican senators to vote for his $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but the main planks of Biden’s climate plan were in the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act. The House passed it in November, only for it to fail in the Senate, thanks to opposition from the most powerful man in Washington, at least when it comes to passing legislation.

The media opens fire on Ron Klain

Cockburn has never been a fan of White House chief of staff Ron Klain. The man simply inhabits a different universe: Klain thinks inflation is no big deal while Cockburn is currently subsisting off of the free peanuts at his local bar; Klain's favorite hobby is Twitter while Cockburn's is seeing how long he can drink gin on the White House Ellipse before the cops chase him off. Yet even Cockburn has been surprised at the ferocity with which Washington has turned on Klain over the last week. A slew of articles, most of them from mainstream media sources, have identified Klain as the reason the president's policy agenda has stalled.

Can Putin ever be stopped?

Vladimir Putin has been the most effective practitioner of Realpolitik for the past two decades. With an economy about the size of Italy’s, and just as corrupt, he has accomplished his most ambitious goal: returning Russia to the status of a Great Power. Now he’s thrown his chips on the table once more, launching a massive troop build-up on the border with Ukraine and sending still more into Belarus (for “joint exercises”), positioning them just north of Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv. Although the numbers don’t appear large enough to conquer all his neighbor’s territory, they are large enough to push through the eastern region (the one bordering Russia) and form a land bridge to Crimea, which Russia conquered in February 2014.

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The decline of drone killings

On the very same day that Joe Biden was inaugurated, he imposed an order on the national security bureaucracy that received little attention at the time: drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia were to be curtailed until further notice. If American commanders wanted to strike a target in those countries, they would have to bring the request directly to the White House for debate. The new, temporary guidelines would be in place until the Biden administration completed its inter-agency review on America's policy of targeted killings. That review is still in the process of being finalized. And while we don’t necessarily know what the Biden administration’s new rules and procedures will be, we do know that the White House is ramping down the pace of drone strikes.

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The deep state is no conspiracy theory

In 1958, Aldous Huxley foresaw a congestion of power able to shape and defy popular will. “Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature,” he predicted. “The quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism.” The changes, according to the author of Brave New World, would be almost imperceptible. “All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial,” he continued.

Joe Biden daydreams about civil rights

What a civil rights legend is Joseph R. Biden. You can almost picture it if you daydream hard enough: the discordant chants of "we shall overcome, man! I mean, c'mon!"; the sermons that sound just a bit too identical to the previous speaker; the Millions Against Malarkey March of '67. Naturally no one spends more time daydreaming about this than Biden himself. So it was that last week, the president falsely asserted again that he'd once been arrested as a young man during a civil rights march. It was a claim he’d made previously and been forced to retract, and it was such an obvious fib that even the Washington Post took a break from fact-checking Tucker Carlson’s facial expressions to award the president four Pinocchios.

Biden’s phony empathy for migrant families

"The cruelty is the point" is a phrase created by The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in an October 2018 essay (it was later expanded into a book). It describes the supposed rejoicing that occurred over Donald Trump's cruel policies, such as the no-tolerance family separations of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers at the Mexican border. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit in 2019, seeking damages for the toll the separations took on migrant families. Other attorneys stepped in to file similar claims on behalf of their clients. In late October 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration was in talks to settle the lawsuits with a whopping figure of $450,000 as a possible high point.

The Iran nuclear talks are on the brink of collapse

With diplomats fearing that the Iranian nuclear talks will collapse, minds are inevitably turning to what happens the morning after. In the realm of politics, this has amounted to buck-passing. Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told journalists: “None of the things we’re looking at now…would be happening if the former president had not recklessly pulled out of the nuclear deal, with no thoughts about what might come next.” In the real world, meanwhile, with regional peace in the balance, the stakes are rather higher. As the Biden administration’s softly-softly approach plunges towards global humiliation, American negotiators have been waking up to what should have been obvious from the start: you can’t build an effective Iran strategy with carrots.

The little president who cried racism

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents. Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster. Biden, once a man of the Senate, has long supported the filibuster.

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Will the media ever be honest about Joe Biden?

Joe Biden usually likes being compared to Donald Trump. During the 2020 presidential campaign the media often contrasted the two figures in order to highlight how much more decent and compassionate and normal Biden is, as opposed to Orange Man. However, the empathizer-in-chief might not be as crazy about the latest parallels emerging thanks to his poll numbers. A headline in Newsweek, not exactly a right-wing rag, reads, “Joe Biden’s Approval Lower Than Donald Trump’s at Same Stage of Presidency: Poll.” The president’s current approval rating according to the Quinnipiac poll is a dismal 33 percent. Considering how slanted these polls can be, the real number might be even worse.

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