Joe biden

How’s the ice cream in Rome? Joe Biden is about to find out. Word is he is excited about the gelato, which is A-OK, since it may distract him from the fact that he has nothing to report when he gets there. The president — I mean, Joe Biden — was supposed to reestablish “normality” to an office so badly bruised by the mad tweeter — no, make that “ex-tweeter” — who came before. “Normality” was one big selling point. The other was Biden’s vaunted foreign policy experience. Reality check one: was Joe Biden’s performance at that town hall with Anderson Cooper last week an exhibition of “normality”? Or was it yet another disagreeable instance of elder abuse, parading a man suffering from senile dementia before the cameras?

Cockburn lost a game of darts with Amber Athey at the weekend, so he got the distinct pleasure of trekking over to the Virginia Highlands Park in Arlington on Tuesday, to watch a cavalcade of Virginia Democrats — and President Joe Biden — stump for Terry McAuliffe, one week ahead of Election Day. (Amber, meanwhile, was indoors at a Loudoun County school board meeting, which you can read about here.) He joined a single-file line of Democrats at just after 5 p.m. that stretched the full width of the park. At its head, a group of Youngkin supporters were gathered on a verge, wielding signs that read “LET’S GO BRANDON,” “Virginia runs on Youngkin” and “More like Terry McAwful.

During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. "Joe from Scranton," as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House. But Joe from Scranton is a fiction and a fake. Trump may love a good show  — "stay tuned!" — but it is Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans. The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks.

Is it more worrying that President Biden might not be in charge, or that he actually is in charge? Nobody has the power to force a president to undergo the indignities that Biden went through on Thursday night’s CNN town hall. As with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, either someone convinced him to do it or he insisted on doing it. Either way, you could not watch him, clenching his fists as though holding a Zimmer frame while Anderson Cooper spoon-fed him a prompt, without feeling that we are heading nowhere good. On the same day that Donald Trump evoked the ghosts of Soviet propaganda by launching a social-media app called Truth — the Russian translation is Pravda — Joe Biden attempted a Brezhnev-era theatrical of his own.

Political brains detonated last week after Texas governor Greg Abbott signed a new executive order that effectively banned vaccine mandates by any institution. The timing of the order seemed extraordinarily odd. Abbott, a Republican, has long advocated for private business rights and inoculation efficacy, especially after President Joe Biden announced a federal vaccine mandate. Abbott also didn't comment when Texas hospitals enacted COVID shot requirements over the summer. Why the change? Texas Democrats and Houston Chronicle columnist Erica Grieder blame Abbott’s 2022 GOP primary fight against Allen West and Don Huffines.

We begin today with the reigning alpha of the self-celebrated political super-staffers. Enter Ron Klain, President Joe Biden's chief of staff, who is a polymath in the D.C. sense that he has both a job and a Twitter account. Klain last week made news when he endorsed a tweet that dismissed our current bout of inflation as a mere problem for the "high class." Cut to Jeff Bezos weeping at the grocery store: "I can't possibly afford any of this!!!" Klain, according to a New York Times profile, is neighbors with Chief Justice John Roberts and lists Twitter as a "hobby," so you can tell he's the well-adjusted sort.

The word malaise, a general feeling of uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify, is creeping into discussions. It's a politically loaded word, following its use by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 to describe the country he could not figure out to how lead. Carter's specific use of the term focused on the energy crisis, when OPEC monkeyed with America's oil supply. But Carter saw that something much deeper was wrong. There wasn't just an oil shortage to manage, but a recession of hope, a crisis of confidence that someone would have to lead America out of. He perceived that we were tired, worn down, unable to come together in common purpose and fix something. It would be interesting to hear what Carter thinks about 2021, when things once again don't work well.

President Biden’s proposed federal budget includes a permanent expansion of the child tax credit that would cost $556 billion by 2025. Putting between $250 and $300 in the pockets of almost every American family every month sounds like a dream come true, both for those eager to alleviate child poverty and for pro-natalists. The latter group, though, should temper its enthusiasm. As my colleague Matt Purple argued in the American Conservative earlier this year, sending checks to parents would probably put a huge dent in child poverty. It might even be worth doing for that reason. But as country after country has learned, it won’t necessarily bring births back above replacement rate. For that, we’ll need a change in culture.

Ever wonder why President Biden doesn’t take questions very often? Or more accurately, why his staff doesn’t allow him to take questions? The easy lay-up handed to him about an altercation between an activist organization and Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema offers a perfect example. Biden was asked whether he believes it was appropriate for immigration activists to follow Sinema into a women’s restroom and film her. The President, who could have resoundingly condemned the behavior using the podium of the presidency of the United States, chose not to. In fact, he passively endorsed the activists’ conduct by saying that ‘it happens to everybody’ and that ‘the only people it doesn’t happen to are people who have Secret Service around them.

It seems strange, but just two decades ago the United States government had a balanced budget. Bill Clinton had run for president as a new type of Democrat, calling for an end to the deficits that had so bedeviled George H.W. Bush. Thanks in large part to pressure from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, he pulled it off. Clinton trimmed military spending and signed into law a package of tax increases. This cued haunted house noises in the parlors of center-right think tanks, but Biden also approved more conservative-friendly measures like domestic spending cuts and welfare reform. This bipartisan approach, in conjunction with a galloping economy, led to the unthinkable: budget surpluses for four fiscal years in a row.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Matt Gaetz are rebuking President Joe Biden for his participation in a conference that elevated anti-white and anti-police rhetoric. The Spectator reported last week that Biden delivered the opening address at the Root Institute 2021, an annual virtual conference hosted by the Root, an online media outlet that primarily covers the black community. During the conference, panelists espoused prejudiced ideas against white people and condemned policing. A Rutgers University professor called white people 'corrupt’, 'morally and spiritually bankrupt’ and 'committed to being villains’, while other participants said that police 'actively make our communities less safe' and that their primary goal is to control and oppress black people. Rep.

Breaking news from off the wires this morning. Apparently the guy who almost punched out a Detroit factory worker on the campaign trail may not be our most adept of presidents. That Joe Biden's administration is flailing has suddenly dawned on our establishment as though a miraculous epiphany. Think a kind of political Fatima, only instead of the sun moving across the sky it's just that TikTok influencer with the long nails prancing about the clear blue. How bad has it gotten for the White House? Even Chuck Todd thinks Biden has a 'pretty big credibility crisis on his hands.' And Chuck Todd once let Dr Fauci interview him. The abruptness of this realization does seem weird.