Joe Biden, who grew up a Muslim attending a Black church in the Puerto Rican part of Scranton, where he beat up Corn Pop while marching for trans rights on his way to a synagogue, now claims his family were “watermen in the Port of Baltimore in the 1800s”pic.twitter.com/zHHpaIYb4L
dailycaller | Karine Jean-Pierre has turned over her spotlight to Admiral John
Kirby in an “unprecedented” way as the White House barrels toward a
pivotal election season, a Daily Caller review of briefing data reveals.
Since
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Kirby has been a mainstay at briefings
alongside Jean-Pierre to answer reporters’ questions about the foreign
conflict. Though Americans have indicated the war is not their top
concern, Kirby has remained at the briefings — only missing three since
the start of the year through Oct. 7. Of the briefings he has attended
in 2024, 19 out of the 22 total held, Kirby has fielded questions for
almost the exact same amount of time as Jean-Pierre.
As of Feb. 27, Jean-Pierre has spent about 11 hours and 31 minutes at
the White House press briefing podium this year across 22 briefings.
Kirby has answered questions for just under nine hours and two minutes
in 19 briefings. In those 19 briefings when Kirby and Jean-Pierre were
together, the press secretary spoke for just shy of nine hours and 11
minutes — almost a perfect fifty-fifty split with her counterpart.
“There
is no precedent for this. Press secretaries always bring guests, right.
It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna have the OMB [the Office of Management and
Budget] guys brief you on the budget and talk to you about that.’
That’s normal,” Sean Spicer, one-time press secretary for former
President Donald Trump, told the Daily Caller. “That’s as old as the
job. But this idea that you have a co-press secretary is unprecedented.”
Some
other names have made appearances at briefings and gaggles, either
alongside Jean-Pierre or Kirby: deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton,
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, White House spokesman for
oversight and investigations Ian Sams and a few other policy-specific
officials from the administration.
But none have appeared nearly as often as Kirby, who Jean-Pierre was reportedly concerned
might usurp her as press secretary when she first got the job. Biden
“awkwardly” added that Kirby would be joining Jean-Pierre’s team when
the president gave her the press secretary position in 2022, leaving her
“upset and confused,” according to Axios.
Jean-Pierre’s appointment was lauded
as historic and powerful when she got the job — she’s the first black
press secretary, and is also a lesbian woman of immigrant parents. From
the beginning, things have reportedly been rocky, though — Biden also
allegedly said that Jean-Pierre didn’t need to worry because she’d “have
an admiral looking over your shoulder,” a comment that was not received well by the new press secretary.
Amid the tension between Kirby and Jean-Pierre, the latter’s top deputy, Dalton, is reportedly ditching the White House for a gig at Apple.
That
leaves a clear path to the top job for Kirby. He has told some around
the White House he’s interested in the position, according to Axios, but
other White House officials denied those accounts.
When it comes
to gaggles, Kirby has appeared at more as of late, speaking at seven of
them between the start of the year and Feb. 16 for a total of more than
an hour and seven minutes. The pair has attended four gaggles together,
with Jean-Pierre answering questions for more than 41 minutes.
“I
don’t think the dynamic is awkward to begin with. I think they did it
under the presence, under the guise of national security and foreign
affairs. But the reality is, Kirby has really taken over a lot more, for
obvious reasons,” Spicer said. “The press secretary should be able to
handle all of the issues and it’s pretty obvious that there’s a level of
competence that just doesn’t exist.”
kunstler | “Biden’s most important
achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a
more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to
keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall,” the report
states.
Gearing up? I’m sure. If gearing up means calling a lid
on your life an hour after breakfast. And what do you suppose they mean
by “a more traditional form of leadership.” Arranging serial overseas
military humiliations? Selling favors to all comers from foreign lands?
Inviting transsexuals to cavort on the White House lawn? Abolishing
control of US borders? Running a $2-trillion annual deficit? Mandating
unsafe and ineffective so-called “vaccine” shots on millions? Cancelling
the First Amendment? Stealing elections? Conspiring to jail his
political adversaries?
We’re also informed in recent days by
the Department of Justice that “Joe Biden” is not mentally competent to
answer for anything in a court of law, should someone inquire into the
signal irregularities emerging from the fugitive annals of his long
career. Of course, “Joe Biden” running for reelection is one of the
greatest gags ever put over on the American public. But more astounding
yet is that half the country persists in pretending to believe it. They
are egged on in every possible way by persons in high places of
government fearful of going to prison if the Democratic Party loses its
grip on the levers of power.
Since “Joe Biden” is not actually
calling the shots, one naturally wonders who is responsible for all the
dubious achievements of the past three years. I guess we’ll find out
when Mr. Trump wins that election in November, an outcome increasingly
guaranteed unless “Joe Biden” (or, let’s face it, our Intel Community)
takes the final decisive step of bumping off the Golden Golem of
Greatness. What have they got left? AI-contrived photos of Mr. Trump
having sex with a manatee in the intercoastal waterway off Mar-a-Lago?
In New York City, the Woke lunatics
did a victory dance after Judge Arthur Engoron, beaming his Joker smile,
laid a $350-million fine on Mr. Trump for conducting a set of normal
real estate transactions with a bank that profited from doing business
with him. Many are still trying to figure out how that amounts to a
crime of any sort. Don’t suppose that the check is in the mail, though.
There is an appeals process that leads, you may be sure, to a dismissal
of that inane judgment and the puerile hypotheticals that the case
derived from. And, by and by, you also might expect a countersuit for
malicious prosecution when all that smoke clears. New York Attorney
General Letitia James, lacking impulse control, is for the moment
enjoying the fulfillment of her campaign promise to “get Trump.” Waiting
to see how much she enjoys losing her law license in the days to come.
Every reaction provokes an equal and
opposite reaction, Newton’s Third Law states. It manifested shortly
after Judge Engoron’s end zone dance when a call went out over the
Internet for America’s truckers to refuse loads inbound to New York
City. We’ll have to stand by to see how that develops. No more bok choy,
Texas beef, or Meyer Lemons for you, “progressive” denizens of the Five
Boroughs! Embrace the suck! The genius part is that, unlike the 2022
Canadian truckers’ action in Ottawa, the American truckers will not be
cluttering up New York’s streets with their rigs, license plates on
view, leaving them vulnerable to such pranks as the shutdown of their
bank accounts. All they’ll do is sit innocently at home back in Kentucky
and Missouri, enjoying a break from the rigors of the highway. Is that a
crime? Arguably no more than doing a normal real estate deal in good
faith with a willing lender was a crime.
The truckers have promised to include
Washington DC next in their delivery boycott. The K-Street lobbying gang
won’t be buying any influence for a while over platters of grilled
branzino and Mariscos Molcajete. Maybe there will be a few Cliff Bars
left in the Farragut Square 7-Eleven and they can do business in their
cars. As for “Joe Biden,” his minders have probably laid in enough
Ensure for a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory to get
by for a few weeks — until the magic moment when, alas, he must needs
be thrown under the bus of expediency to keep their game going.
NEW: MSNBC’s finest, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Joy Reid, melt down after the special counsel said that the mentally declining president is mentally declining.
The Three Stooges couldn’t fathom how the special counsel thought Biden had mental issues.
Quite clearly Biden is old, but the reducing of all of his mental
faculties down to specific examples is ludicrous. I bet every single
person reading this said something yesterday that, if taken in
isolation, would make them sound like an dottering fool.
While I’ve always been really good at dates, I’ve long been pretty
bad with names—an issue that has increased significantly in recent
years. I’m 58 and have no reason to think I’m going senile.
As for Biden, he’s clearly slowing down with age and is having more
of these mental lapses. But, while I wish there were a younger option
available, I think he’s still mentally up to the job—and light years
better than the seeming alternative, Donald Trump.
Alas, this isn’t an objective conversation. People are looking at
both candidates through partisan lenses and, like it or not, Biden’s
gaffes are judged much more harshly than Trump’s.
NPR’s Domenico Montanaro (“Biden’s rough week highlights his biggest vulnerability — one he can’t change“):
The special counsel report about Biden’s handling of classified material didn’t
charge him with a crime, but special counsel Robert Hur, a Republican,
seemed to go out of his way to include damning commentary about Biden’s
supposedly faulty memory, like referencing that Biden, 81, “did not
remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
That was stinging.
“It clears him legally and kneecaps him politically,” Paul Begala, a
veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said of
the report.
The 388-page report set off a political firestorm — and an ensuing clumsy response from the White House and the president himself.
Biden angrily rejected Hur’s claim, saying Thursday night in a press
conference he felt questions about Beau weren’t “any of their damn
business.”
The president got choked up while showing a rosary he was wearing on
his wrist in memory of Beau, then thundered, “I don’t need anyone to
remind me when he passed away.”
If Biden had left it at that, that might be what people remembered about the news conference.
Instead, Biden wound up walking right into the stereotype laid out by
Hur when he mistakenly said that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of
Egypt was the “president of Mexico” while answering a question about
current hostage negotiations with Israel and Hamas.
It’s a mistake. Verbal slips happen. Everyone makes them — including
Trump, who is only four years younger than Biden. Trump often meanders,
recently appeared to confuse his primary opponent Nikki Haley for former
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; on more than half a dozen occasions in the
past year mistakenly referred to former President Barack Obama when he
should have said Biden; and while in Iowa, called “Sioux City” “Sioux
Falls,” which is 90 miles up the road in South Dakota.
But because more Americans are concerned with
Biden’s age and fitness to do the job in a second term than they are
about Trump’s age, every time Biden makes a flub it will have more
resonance politically.
“It’s certainly true that anything that feeds the master negative
narrative is especially harmful,” Begala said. “For [Bill] Clinton, it
was cheating, for [George W.] Bush, it was ‘dumb,’ Obama ‘elitist,’
which is why when Obama said 57 states, it didn’t hurt him. If it was Bush, it would have.”
“Obviously with Biden, it’s ‘old.’ So, this really really hurts him.”
[…]
“Fair or not, this just amplified Biden’s greatest challenge,” David
Axelrod, a former senior adviser in the Obama White House, said of the
special counsel report. “It screams through every poll and focus group.”
Axelrod went viral back in November for raising whether it was “wise” for Biden to run for reelection after a series of swing-state polls showed him losing to Trump.
“Many people have made a judgment about his age and command and
discount his accomplishments and attribute every problem to it,” Axelrod
said.
The Atlantic‘s Yair Rosenberg (“What Biden’s Critics Get Wrong About His Gaffes“) tries to handwave this away:
[T]he truth is, mistakes like these are nothing new for Biden, who
has been mixing up names and places for his entire political career.
Back in 2008, he infamously introduced his
running mate as “the next president of the United States, Barack
America.” At the time, Biden’s well-known propensity for bizarre
tangents, ahistorical riffs, and malapropisms compelled Slate to publish an entire column explaining
“why Joe Biden’s gaffes don’t hurt him much.” The article included such
gems as the time that then-Senator Biden told the journalist Katie
Couric that “when the markets crashed in 1929, ‘Franklin Roosevelt got
on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He
said, “Look, here’s what happened.”’” The only problem with this story, Slate laconically noted, was that “FDR wasn’t president then, nor did television exist.”
In other words, even a cursory history of Biden’s bungling shows that
he is the same person he has always been, just older and slower—a
gaffe-prone, middling public speaker with above-average emotional
intelligence and an instinct for legislative horse-trading.
But he recognizes that there’s a perception problem and that the Biden team needs to address it head-on:
The president’s staff is understandably reluctant to put Biden front
and center, knowing that his slower speed and inevitable gaffes—both
real and fabricated—will
feed the mental-acuity narrative. But in actuality, the bar for Biden
has been set so laughably low that he can’t help but vault over it
simply by showing up. By contrast, limiting his appearances ensures that
the public mostly encounters the president through decontextualized
social-media clips of his slipups.
As Slate observed in 2008, the frequency of Biden’s
rhetorical miscues helped neutralize them in the eyes of the public. In
2024, Biden will have an assist from another source: Donald Trump. Among
other recent lapses, the former president has called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “the leader of Turkey,” confused Nancy
Pelosi and Nikki Haley, and repeatedly expressed the strange belief
that he won the 2020 election. With an opponent prone to vastly worse
feats of viscous verbosity, Biden can’t help but look better by
comparison, especially if he starts playing offense instead of defense.
But none of this will happen by itself. If the president and his
campaign want the headlines to be something other than “Yes, Biden Knows
Who the President of Egypt Is,” they’ll have to start making news, not
reacting to it.
This strikes me as wishful thinking. Few people watch these speeches
and interviews in full. If the press seizes on the gaffes—and they
will—that’s what most will remember.
dailycaller | Among the documents recovered was a transcript of a Dec. 11, 2015
phone call between then-Vice President Biden and then-Ukrainian Prime
Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, according to Hur’s report.
Federal
investigators found a handwritten note with a tipsheet for the phone
call Joe Biden placed in a red “VP Personal” fold in addition to the
transcript.
“Get [a] copy of this conversation from Sit Rm for my Records
please,” the note to Biden’s assistant says. Biden’s signature is at the
end of the note.
Biden’s attorneys and the DOJ discovered the
documents at his Delaware residence and at his former office at D.C.’s
Penn Biden Center between Nov. 2022 and Jan. 2023
At
the time of the phone call with Yatsenyuk, Biden’s son Hunter was
making more than $80,000 per month as a board member of Ukrainian energy
firm Burisma Holdings, bank records
show. He joined the company in spring 2014 despite lacking experience
in either Ukraine or the energy sector. He departed the firm in 2019,
when his father was a private citizen and possessed the classified
documents.
Ahead of his appointment with Burisma, Hunter Biden
sent then-business partner Devon Archer, who served alongside Biden on
Burisma’s board, detailed information about Ukraine’s political situation and energy sector.
In Dec. 2015, Joe Biden took a trip to Ukraine and spoke to the
country’s parliament, urging them to step up anti-corruption measures,
according to an archived transcript of his speech.
Carlson interviewed Archer in the days following his testimony before the House Oversight Committee. Archer told lawmakers the Biden family “brand” protected Burisma from scrutiny and recalled a spring 2015 dinner attended by then-VP Biden and Burisma executive Vadim Pozharskyi.
dailymail | Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador has spelled out a series of demands from the U.S. ranging from
visas to a multi-billion infusion of funds – even as the Biden
administration seeks to pressure Mexico to do more on its part to address the migrant crisis.
He
wants the U.S. to deploy $20 billion plan to help Mexico and Central
American countries dealing with the root causes of migration – while
also calling for wholesale changes in U.S.-Cuba policy.
'We
are going to help, as we always do,' López Obrador said in a Friday
speech 'Mexico is helping reach agreements with other countries, in this
case Venezuela,' he said, before pivoting to his wish list.
'We also want something done about the (U.S.) differences with Cuba,'
López Obrador said. 'We have already proposed to President Biden that a
U.S.-Cuba bilateral dialogue be opened,' he said in remarks at a Friday
press conference.
Lopez Obrador also
said he wants the U.S. to provide visas to at least 10 million Hispanic
migrants who have been living in the U.S. for 10 years or longer.
His long list of demands come even as the
Biden administration is asking Mexico to do more, as a surge of migrants
continue to flow across the border. It also comes at a time when the
Biden administration needs to show progress on the issue while getting
hammered by Republican rivals and even some prominent Democratic mayors
on the costs and social impacts of the surge.
Border encounters hit another stunning milestone in December with 300,000 apprehensions.
The U.S. is leaning on Mexico to do more to reduce those numbers. Late last month Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken flew to Mexico to meet with López Obrador.
In
one sign that Mexico has the capacity to have an impact, arrests at the
southern border fell to about 2,500 Monday, according to the Associated
Press, a drop from 10,000 during a December peak.
zerohedge | On Wednesday President Joe Biden suggested that if Congress doesn't send Ukraine more money, now, it may 'embolden' Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade a NATO ally, which would precipitate "American troops fighting Russian troops."
The threat was not persuasive.
In response, Senate Republicans channeled Elon Musk (G...F...Y...), blocking Biden's $111 emergency supplemental package that would also include aid for Israel, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and a smattering of border funding.
The
Senate voted 49-51, failing to reach the 60-vote threshold required to
allow the proposal to come up for consideration. Notably, Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against the measure,
while Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) flipped his vote to
'no' to preserve the option of revisiting the bill at a later date.
President Joe Biden has raised the possibility of "American troops
fighting Russian troops" in a speech urging Congress to put aside
"petty, partisan, angry politics" which is holding up
his multibillion-dollar aid package for Ukraine. He said that he's
willing to make "significant compromises" with Republicans but that it's
they who've been unwilling to back down from their "extreme" demands.
"This
cannot wait," Biden stressed in the televised remarks from the White
House. “Congress needs to pass supplemental funding for Ukraine before they break for the holiday recess.
Simple as that. Frankly, I think it’s stunning that we’ve gotten to
this point in the first place. Republicans in Congress are willing to give Putin the greatest gift he can hope for and abandon our global leadership."
"I’m
willing to make significant compromises on the border. We need to fix
the broken border system. It is broken. And thus far I’ve gotten no
response," Biden pleaded. He made the speech after speaking with G7
leaders, who are reportedly alarmed that US funding to Ukraine is set to
run dry in a mere three weeks.
"If we walk away, how many
of our European friends are going to continue to fund and at what rates
are they going to continue to fund?" he posed.
And
that's when the fear-mongering really kicked into overdrive. He went so
far as to say that if Ukraine's defense isn't funded, this will lead to
the country being steamrolled by the Russian military machine, and an
emboldened Putin will then seek to gobble up more territory.
sputnik | US
politicians have been quick to make glib comparisons between Russia's
de-Nazification operation in Ukraine and Hitler's invasion of Europe or
terrorist outrages. Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence
officer, said Joe Biden couldn't even string such an argument together.
US President Joe Biden lacks the mental ability to draw parallels between Russia and Hamas, says a former US Marine.
The
Washington Post ran an op-ed under Biden's byline at the weekend,
likening the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement Hamas' breakout
from the besieged Gaza Strip on October 7 to Russia's military operation
in Ukraine in defence of the Russian-speaking Donbass region —
following eight years of Ukrainian shelling of civilians.
Biden "didn't write this" as he "doesn't have the mental capacity," Ritter told Sputnik.
"I'm
not picking on him, I'm just being honest," he said. "This was written
by his national security staff. It was edited by Jake Sullivan. I
believe [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken came in with a lot of stuff
that this was a collaborative effort by the people who are managing Joe
Biden."
"This
is the story, not the content of the op-ed," Ritter stressed. "The
story is that Joe Biden, the president of the United States is lacking
in such mental capacity that the presidency is being managed by people
who weren't elected to do that job. That's what people should be worried
about."
But
he said the words attributed to Biden no longer carry the same weight
as comments by previous presidents, thanks to the proliferation of
alternatives to the mainstream media.
"So
when Joe Biden or his managers publish an op-ed of this nature, it no
longer has the same cachet, the same impact that it would have ten years
ago," Ritter argued. "Today, it's immediately cancelled out as
ridiculous as absurd."
Ritter wrote for Consortium News last week that Biden and Blinken were being disingenuous in their call for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, given that no Israeli leader in decades has been serious about implementing it.
"Even
if such a governing coalition could be crafted together to politically
sustain the idea of a two-state solution that fails to resonate with
Israelis and Palestinians alike, there remains the ultimate hurdle that
needs to be cleared before any notion of a lasting peace between Israeli
and Palestinian states premised on the notion of equality — Israel’s
nuclear weapons program," Ritter wrote.
The former weapons inspector said Israel's nuclear program had been "shrouded in ambiguity from the moment it was born, back in the 1960s when they actually produced a weapon."
"The
United States has been the principal reason why this has happened,"
Ritter pointed out. "The Nixon administration was confronted with the
fact that Israel had nuclear weapons. We knew it. And they were in
violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, because even if they
didn't sign the treaty, we signed the treaty. And the treaty only allows
five declared nuclear powers. So we would have to sanction Israel."
MSDNC | But at a press conference at the end of the meeting, Biden made a
pointed remark that underscored the gulf between the two countries.
Asked by a reporter if he stood by his characterization of Xi in June
as a “dictator,” Biden answered that he did. “Well, look, he is. I
mean, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country
that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally
different than ours,” Biden said. “Anyway, we made progress.”
As he said this, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was seated in the front row, visibly winced. Blinken’s apparent pain at his boss’ blunt language has gone viral — inspiring mockery
of the Biden administration, and prompting some right-wing commentators
to describe Biden’s language as a sign of senility-induced
incompetence. David Sacks, a right-wing venture capitalist, posted on X,
“This was a bumbling act of senility in which Biden fell for a
reporter’s obvious gotcha question, erased the whole point of the
diplomatic summit, and caused his own staff to shake their heads in
disbelief.” Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing commentator, observed in a response to Sacks: “China would be foolish to trust anything the Biden administration offers them at this point.”
Is
Biden’s age a valid concern as he pursues another term in office? Yes.
Does that definitively explain his behavior here? No. The simplest
explanation is that Biden was being Biden.
First, it’s unclear that Biden’s comment could even be characterized as a
gaffe. The question, after all, was whether the president would disavow
a view he articulated just a few months ago. Biden knew if he changed
his position he would be vulnerable to attacks of inconsistency out of
political expediency. China has the same style of government today that
it had in the summer, and there is nothing inaccurate about what Biden
said. Biden is also aware that the right is constantly looking to attack
him for being soft on China, and that very well may have happened if he
had used softer language. It’s a bit of a damned-if-you-do,
damned-if-you-don’t scenario when it comes to Biden’s critics on the
right.
Second, even if one assumes that Biden veered from the kind
of language his staff advised him to use, anyone who hasn’t been living
under a rock knows that Biden has misspoken, said something off-color,
or unexpectedly deviated from talking points for his entire political career — particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
As senator, vice president and now president, Biden tends to feel
confident making edgy off-the-cuff remarks that cause others headaches.
It’s difficult to argue that any impolitic comment he makes can be
attributed to his age when this is the same man who, as vice president, forced former President Barack Obama to change his position on same-sex marriage by freelancing on the issue on “Meet the Press.” (Biden has even called himself “a gaffe machine.”)
So even if one wants to argue that Biden was behaving incompetently,
the bar for proving that it has to do with declining mental acuity is
high.
Blinken’s reaction was funny to witness, a rare
example of a seasoned diplomat shedding their poker face. But it doesn’t
mean Blinken thought Biden didn’t know what he was doing — he could’ve
simply disagreed with the president’s on-the-fly judgment. It’s possible
he would have preferred that Biden had, for example, ignored the
reporter’s question and shifted the topic to focusing on the progress
that had been made at the summit, thereby neither confirming nor denying
the question. Perhaps Blinken would’ve valued such a response after a
summit when the U.S. and China made substantial diplomatic progress and
their heads of state were unusually chummy with each other — including sharing nostalgic photos, exchanging birthday wishes and showing off their presidential cruisers.
But unlike Blinken, Biden is primed to consider domestic audiences more
than international ones; their judgment on this could simply be
irreconcilable.
WaPo | Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come. What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?
Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?
Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?
And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?
Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.
The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.
We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.
We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.
jonathanturley | Below is my column in The Messenger on the view of diplomats in the
Biden Administration that the President is spreading “misinformation.”
My interest in the story is less the merits than the allegation. The
President is facing the same allegation of ignoring fact and spreading
disinformation that has resulted in thousands being banned or
blacklisted on social media. The Biden Administration has pushed for
such censorship in areas where doctors and pundits held opposing views
on subjects ranging from Covid-19 to climate control. The question is
whether Joe Biden himself should be banned under the standards
promulgated by his own Administration.
Here is the column:
An internal State Department dissent memo was
leaked this past week, opposing the Biden administration’s position on
the war between Israel and Hamas. What was most notable about the memo
is that some administration staffers accused President Joe Biden of “spreading misinformation.”
It was a moment of crushing irony for some of us who have written and testified against
the Biden administration’s censorship efforts. The question is whether,
under the administration’s own standards, President Biden should now be
banned or blacklisted to protect what his administration has called our
“cognitive infrastructure.”
For years, the administration and many
Democrats in Congress have resisted every effort to expose the sprawling
government censorship program that one federal judge described as an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.'” As I have written previously, it included grants to academic and third-party organizations to create a global system of blacklists and to pressure advertisers to withdraw support from conservative sites.
As a result, over the last four years,
researchers, politicians, and even satirical sites have been banned or
blacklisted for offering dissenting views of COVID measures, climate
change, gender identity or social justice, according to the House
Judiciary report. No level of censorship seemed to be sufficient for
President Biden, who once claimed that social media companies were “killing people” by not silencing more dissenting voices.
Now, though, President Biden himself is
accused — by some in his own administration — of spreading
misinformation and supporting war criminals.
antiwar | More than 400 US officials from 40 government agencies have sent a letter to President Biden criticizing his unconditional support for Israel’s war in Gaza in the latest example of dissent from within the US government.
“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to
call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate
release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians;
the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services;
and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” the
letter reads.
According to The New York Times, the majority of the
signatories to the letter are political appointees who work throughout
the government, including in the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the
National Security Council. Some signatories helped get Biden elected
and said they were worried his support for the onslaught on Gaza was
opposed by many Democratic voters.
The letter says that the “overwhelming majority of Americans support a ceasefire,” citing a poll from Data For Progress
that found 66% of voters believe the US should push for a ceasefire,
including 80% of Democrats. “Furthermore, Americans do not want the US
military to be drawn into another costly and senseless war in the Middle
East,” the letter says.
President Biden and his top aides have called for “pauses” in the
fighting but refuse to use the term “ceasefire,” demonstrating that they
are committed to continuing support for the Israeli war, which has
killed at least 11,000 Palestinians, including over 4,500 children.
Since October 7, the US has shipped weapons to Israel on a near-daily
basis and is providing special operations support, including surveillance drone flights over Gaza.
Besides the new letter, Biden’s full-throated support for the brutal
war has drawn three dissent memos from State Department employees and an
open letter signed by more than 1,000 employees of the US Agency for
International Development (USAID).
The
President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches
from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary
line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of
Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of
State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The
world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t
lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to
take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests
and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This
idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America
as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and
doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take
America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circles.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is
bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”.
America itself is hardly in one piece.
It isn’t true that the
world doesn’t organize itself without top down leadership from a power
sitting in America’s “place”. Indeed, what would it mean for America’s
“place” to be vacant and free for another power to fill, the specter
conjured by Blinken? Does America disappear from the map when it elects
Donald Trump President? The United States is always present in one form
or another, even as an absence in international discussions - as was the
case, for instance in the 1920s.
America’s power -
potential or realized - is a force that world politics has been built
around for just over a century. In the book Deluge
I argued that 1916 was the moment that this became indisputably true.
The Presidential election of that year was the first followed by the
world in the way that the world will follow the 2024 election.
Whoever
governs America, dysfunctionally or not, speculating about a
post-American world, is a waste of time. And there a few key areas of
global affairs in which American institutions today play a crucial
organizational role. I have written often in this newsletter about the dollar system
and its resilience. The dollar continues to be the basis for global
finance. Though it dare not speak its name, the Fed acts as a global
central bank.
It is also true that American leadership and
military spending does hold structures like NATO together. But that is
not “the world”. It is an exclusive military alliance.
For the
most part, to make sense of the sort of thing that Biden and Blinken
say, you have to realize that they are talking not to the world or about
the world, but to Americans about America. Above all, Biden and
Blinken’s rhetoric is directed against Trump, who conjured up a scenario
in which America was, as Biden and Blinken see it, a chaotic,
disruptive and untrustworthy force. This shames their self-understanding
as a liberal elite. With a tight election in 2024 those fears will
overshadow all America’s interactions with the world, whoever actually
sits in the Oval Office.
American democracy, the system that
produces the leadership that Biden and Blinken so self-confidently
evoke, is clearly broken. Pervasive and well-merited skepticism about
America’s system of government, is now a massive reality in world
affairs.
MoA | Today we live in multilateral world. We see Russia, China and many
smaller countries united in their will to preserve their rights and
security. The cold-war is gone. The somewhat unilateral decades which
had followed it are now over. We are in need a new world order.
In the U.S. that penny has finally started to drop.
It has not yet reached the ground. We do not know on which side it will land.
Two days ago U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at a campaign even. Among lots of the usual blah-blah this paragraph stood out:
We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked
pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. Sort of run out
of steam. It needs a new — a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.
There it is - one can see the penny, slipping out of his hand and falling down.
The time for the U.S. to preserve some of its influence in the rising new world order is short:
Look, we’re at an inflection point in history — literally an
inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the
next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or
five decades look like. And that’s — that’s a fact.
It should be noted that the "damn good" post-war 50-year
peace that Biden spoke about arose as a result of the most brutal war in
the history of mankind. It also appeared due to the agreements of the
USSR and the United States, which essentially divided the spheres of
influence in Europe.
If we proceed from this historical context, then Biden, it
turns out, offers either to win a military victory over the Russian
Federation and China, with which the United States is currently at
enmity, or to negotiate with them and arrange a "new Yalta" with the
division of spheres of influence.
On which side will the penny land? The side of a new global war? Or on the side of new negotiations?
We do not know.
---
Putin had predicted that the pursuit of unilateral power would
automatically lead to the end its pursuer. As Biden acknowledges, the
U.S., in its delusion, is ripping itself apart.
Prior to the campaign event Biden had given a public speech from the White House.
The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of
speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that
extraordinary line.
It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in
February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken
gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:
The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we
don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country
tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our
interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.
This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of
“America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that
place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power
will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy
circle.
As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.
He describes the negative global consequences of delusional U.S. thinking to then muse about the outcome:
What is the impact of a dysfunctional US political system,
where the more reasonable wing of the ruling elite cling to ideas about
America’s role that are systematically self-deluding. You could say that
hypocrisy is normal. It is the besetting sin of liberalism. But in
light of the scale of looming global problems and the shift in the
balance of power that has already taken place, let alone that which may
still to come, how long can this tension be maintained and what will be
the price?
He seems to ask if the now falling penny will ever hit the ground:
The only thing that seems for sure is that we should avoid falling into the trap of what I’ve called fin-fiction
or fin-fi, which assumes that because these tension seem unbearable
they must therefore resolve in some logical way, for instance in the
speculation over the end of dollar hegemony, or what appears be the
Biden fantasy of a return to the normality of American leadership.
I am skeptical even of invoking terms like “interregnum”, signifying a temporary hiatus between orders of power.
What gives us confidence that our current situation is temporary and that some new order, like the old, will emerge?
Is that not another version of the kind of thinking that says the
world “needs organizing” by a power sitting at the head of the table -
in “America’s place”?
That question, to me, seems to miss what multilateralism really
means. It does not mean unilateralism with a different country in the
lead. It means a somewhat democratic UN system, with an expanded
Security Council that includes the large population countries of each
continent.
It means to follow international law.
Will the U.S. come back into that system? Or does it need a global war to decide the outcome?
1. President Joe Biden’s statement regarding the bombing of the
hospital in Gaza was from a misfired Palestinian rocket is totally
ridiculous and absurd.
2. Why should there be any doubt that the blast of the Al Ahli Arab
hospital is from an Israeli air strike as the murderous regime had been
attempting to wipe Palestinians and Gaza out of existence since last
week.
3. In fact, Israel had been after the Palestinians all the time, if
not wipe out the Palestinians altogether, for the past 70 years and
suddenly now, after launching air strikes day and night, Palestinians
blames for the blast on the hospital.
4. Biden’s narrative is based on feedbacks from Nethanyahu and Pentagon.
5. Obviously Nethanyahu lies about everything. And if Biden wants to
use Pentagon to give credence to his narrative, we have not forgotten
how Pentagon and other American institutions lied about the existence of
weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.
6. A more recent lie is about Biden claiming to have seen pictures of Hamas beheading babies.
7. Indeed, the White House had withdrawn the statement, admitting
that there was no proof of such a deed. The question is how Biden could
blatantly lie in the first place and with a straight face.
8. The crux of the matter is that all these atrocities committed by
Israel on the Palestinians stems from the American support for Tel Aviv.
9. If the American Government withdraws its support for Israel and
stop all military aids to the regime, Israel would not have carried out
the genocide and mass murders of Palestinians with impunity.
10. The United States government needs to come clean and tell the
truth. Israel and its IDF are the terrorists. The United States is
blatantly supporting terrorists. So what is the United States?
sputnik | Asked whether there should be a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, US President Joe Biden said in an interview for CBS that Israel has to go after Hamas and called them a “bunch of cowards.” “Israel is going after a group of people who have engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust. And so, I think Israel has to respond. They have to go after Hamas. Hamas is a bunch of cowards. They’re hiding behind the civilians,” Biden said. Gaza is a small, densely populated 140.9 square meter area with over 2 million people. Travel in and out of Gaza is heavily controlled by Israeli forces. Biden emphasized that Hamas needs to be “eliminated entirely.” Biden also said that he is in talks with Egypt and Israel about the establishment of a humanitarian corridor in the area.
“We’re also talking to Egyptians whether there is an outlet to get these children and women out of that area at this moment. But it’s hard,” Biden said in the interview. The US President also responded “yes” when asked if he supported humanitarian aid being sent to Gaza, something Israel has been blocking, including food, water and electricity, though Israel announced on Sunday that some water services had been turned back on. At least 13 Americans have been missing since Hamas’ attack, and 30 Americans have been confirmed dead. Biden said that the US is trying every avenue they have to see its remaining citizens returned safely but would not provide details. The interviewer noted that Biden had called the missing Americans’ families and spoke to them on Zoom.
While Biden consistently stressed throughout the interview that the United States supports Israel in their fight against Hamas, he suggested that they do not attempt to occupy Gaza. “I think it’d be a big mistake. Look, what happened in Gaza, in my view, Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people. And I think that … It would be a mistake … for Israel to occupy … Gaza again,” Biden said. Biden added that he does not think committing American troops will be necessary in the conflict. The President stressed that he still supports a two-state solution in the area, which has long been the official US policy, but said that right now is not the time to press for it. He also said that the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not dead because of the conflict. “The Saudis, and the Emiratis, and other Arab nations understand that their security and stability is enhanced if there’s normalization of relations with Israel,” Biden said. “It’s just going to take time to get done.”
Biden also addressed the conflict in Ukraine, saying that the United States can handle both it and Israel at the same time. “We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history– not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.” The United States has provided at least $111 billion to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s special operation. Earlier this month, an additional $24 billion in aid was blocked by a group of House Republicans. That debate resulted in the ousting of House Speaker Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Congress is now frozen until a new speaker is elected. The White House has continued to ask Congress for aid for both Ukraine and Israel. When asked if the situation in Congress threatens world security, Biden responded “yes,” putting the blame on “MAGA Republicans.”
thegrayzone |After an Israeli reserve soldier named David Ben Zion told a
reporter Palestinian militants “cut [off] heads of babies,” Biden,
Netanyahu, and the international media amplified the dubious claim.
The Grayzone has identified Ben Zion as a fanatical settler leader
who incited riots by demanding a Palestinian town be “wiped out.”
An international outcry erupted when
Israel’s Foreign Ministry announced that Palestinian militants from the
besieged Gaza Strip had killed 40 “babies,” and beheaded several of them
during an incursion into Kfar Aza, a kibbutz on the Gaza border.
President Joseph Biden repeated the inflammatory claim during an October
10 White House Rose Garden address, while networks across the West carried the story without a shred of critical scrutiny.
According to CNN correspondent Nic Robertson, apparently citing Israeli military sources, Palestinian militants carried out, “ISIS-style executions,” in which they were “cutting the heads off of people,” including babies and pets.
The Grayzone has now identified a key
source of the claim that Palestinian militants beheaded Israeli babies.
He is David Ben Zion, a Deputy Commander of Unit 71 of the Israeli army
who also happens to be an extremist settler leader who incited violent
riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.
In an October 10 interview
with reporter Nicole Zedek of the Israeli state-sponsored i24 network,
Ben Zion stated, “We walked door to door, we killed a lot of terrorists.
They are very bad. They cut heads of children, they cut heads of women.
But we are stronger than them.”
He added, “We know that they are animals,” referring to Palestinians, “but we found that they don’t have any heart.”
Hours after his interview with i24,
still in the village of Kfar Aza, a uniformed Ben Zion could be seen
repeatedly grinning ear-to-ear in a video posted to his Facebook – an odd disposition for a supposed witness to the methodical butchering of babies.
Earlier that day, i24’s Zedek declared during a live report from Kfar Aza, “About
40 babies were taken out on gurneys… Cribs overturned, strollers left
behind, doors left wide open.’” Zedek’s report has been viewed tens of millions of times on Twitter and promoted by Israel’s Foreign Ministry – which underwrites her network.
Hours later, she qualified
her statement, stating, “Soldiers told me they believe 40
babies/children were killed. The exact death toll is still unknown as
the military continues to go house to house and find more Israeli
casualties.”
Yet the unverified tale quickly made
its way to the highest levels of leadership, as if by design. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman stated unequivocally that babies
and toddlers were found with their “heads decapitated,” while President
Joe Biden himself vaguely gestured towards “stomach-churning reports of
babies being killed.”
Likewise, cable news has flown into a frenzy, breathlessly reporting the story despite the IDF walking back its initial confirmation.
Meanwhile, some reporters who initially carried the official Israeli allegations about beheaded babies began issuing qualifications of their own.
Oren Ziv, an Israeli reporter who joined the military’s official tour of Kfar Aza, commented on Twitter,
“I’m getting a lot of question about the reports of ‘Hamas beheaded
babies’ that were published after the media tour in the village. During
the tour we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson
or commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”
attorneycox | The
“they” is our government (federal and state). The “we” is you and me,
and the other 300+ million Americans across our country.
Alas,
here we are, entering the final quarter of 2023, and we have the United
States government, and many state governments (including New York’s
former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current left-wing Governor Kathy Hochul, and the super-majority Dem legislature) proclaiming for all to hear that they did not force anyone to do anything detrimental these past 3.5 years. UNBELIEVABLE!
Did you hear this? They are actually saying with straight faces that
they didn’t force you to wear a mask, or lockdown and shutter your
businesses, or choose between taking an experimental drug or losing your
job… Nope! They did none of that. And you - well, you are flat out crazy if you think they did. You are lying. You are exaggerating and totally overreacting.
Unfortunately
for Big Brother, ooops, I mean unfortunately for our 100% reliable,
never-lies-to-us government, we have actual documents (including lawsuits),
news stories, social media posts, and videos of the government at all
levels mandating and forcing us to do all of those things, and more.
Here’s just one example of Biden himself, the “Big Guy,” mandating the
C19 shot:
Biden is not alone. No, no. His entire administration is
right there with him. His head of OSHA, Douglas Parker, is also now
lying through his teeth about the OSHA mandate that REQUIRED
(not suggested) that all employers in the entire nation with 100 or
more employees force their employees to get the C19 shot, otherwise they
had to wear a mask and test constantly for C19. (That OSHA mandate was
struck down by SCOTUS
last year because it was unconstitutional, by the way). Then there’s
the head of HHS, Xavier Becerra, saying there was never a mask mandate.
What?! Another blatant lie.
Please take the 2 minutes to watch this Congressman Kevin Kiley clip.
You truly won’t believe your ears with the bullsh#* these Biden agency
heads are spewing! As Congressman Kiley says in the video, the
government is trying to tell us that “2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4.” You don’t
get much more Orwellian than that!
Why are they backtracking now?
Easy
answers: 1) they didn’t have the authority to do any of it (all of it
was unconstitutional) so they can’t justify and defend it now, and 2) if
they can convince you they didn’t do it before, then you won’t mind as
much when they do it again.
This should make your blood
boil. It’s particularly infuriating to those of us who were speaking
out from basically day one trying to tell people that the lockdowns, the
masking, the shots, the limited number of people at your wedding or at
your Thanksgiving table were all violations of the Constitution and our
basic human rights!
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...