Vaunce News

🔒
❌ About FreshRSS
There are new available articles, click to refresh the page.
Before yesterdayYour RSS feeds

Get Ready to Stink for Climate Change, Thanks to Biden’s New Washing Machine Rules

Get Ready to Stink for Climate Change, Thanks to Biden’s New Washing Machine Rules
New in PJ Media: “No credible scientific body,” wrote energy and environmental researcher Michael Shellenberger in 2019, “has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species.” In fact, the whole idea that temperatures are rising to catastrophic levels is based on circular reasoning. But the Biden regime is all […]

Biden Says Opposing the Mutilation of Children Is ‘Close to Sinful’

Biden Says Opposing the Mutilation of Children Is ‘Close to Sinful’
New in PJ Media: Old Joe Biden appeared on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show Monday night, where the guest host Kal Penn, star of the deathless classic Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, asked him about same-sex marriage and boys who want to become girls and girls boys. In response, Biden struck a moral tone, suggesting that support for […]

Xi Says China Will Take a More ‘Active Part’ in ‘Global Governance’

Xi Says China Will Take a More ‘Active Part’ in ‘Global Governance’
My latest in PJ Media is a VIP article. I am happy to be able to offer you a 5% discount on becoming a VIP member at PJ Media. Just enter the code SPENCER when you sign up here. Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese government, reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping told the first session of the […]

Second-Worst President in History Asks the Worst President to Deliver His Eulogy

Second-Worst President in History Asks the Worst President to Deliver His Eulogy
New in PJ Media: In his characteristically clumsy fashion, Old Joe Biden has revealed that former President Jimmy Carter has bestowed upon him a singular honor: “He asked me to do his eulogy — excuse me, I shouldn’t say that,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Rancho Santa Fe, California on Tuesday. When that day arrives, no […]

Now Your Tax Dollars Will Pay for Gender Madness for Veterans

Now Your Tax Dollars Will Pay for Gender Madness for Veterans
New in PJ Media: If you’re a veteran of the United States Armed Forces and now you’ve become convinced that you’re really a woman, you’re in luck: Old Joe Biden and his henchmen are going to start devoting taxpayer money to aiding and abetting your delusions and fantasies: the White House budget proposal for 2024 […]

Hijabbed Biden State Department official and Tlaib participated in event featuring anti-Semite Linda Sarsour

Hijabbed Biden State Department official and Tlaib participated in event featuring anti-Semite Linda Sarsour
On Sept. 22, 2011, Linda Sarsour tweeted: “shariah law is reasonable and once u read into the details it makes a lot of sense. People just know the basics.” Her position didn’t change over time. On May 12, 2015, she tweeted: “If you are still paying interest than [sic] Sharia Law hasn’t taken over America. #justsaying.” And […]

Yes, She Really Did: Kamala Harris Says Joe Biden Is an ‘Extraordinary Leader’

Yes, She Really Did: Kamala Harris Says Joe Biden Is an ‘Extraordinary Leader’
New in PJ Media: Politicians who bend the truth are as old as politics itself, but Kamala Harris bent it well beyond the breaking point on Stephen Colbert’s show Wednesday night when she hailed her chief, Old Joe Biden, as an “extraordinary leader.” As Old Joe himself might say, Come on, man! Would The Cackler […]

Lyin’ Joe Biden Says MAGA Republicans Want to Defund the Police

Lyin’ Joe Biden Says MAGA Republicans Want to Defund the Police
New in PJ Media: Somewhere in his confused and deteriorating mind, Old Joe Biden knows that the only way that Democrats can win in 2024, other than shenanigans with ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots, is by running as far away as they possibly can from the disastrous record of his dumpster-fire presidency. Since Old Joe […]

Biden’s handlers accused of planning to train, equip and deploy Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria

Biden’s handlers accused of planning to train, equip and deploy Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria
The Biden administration is either dangerously naive or worse. It is presenting this plan under the pretext of helping to curb terrorism in Judea and Samaria, yet ZOA says this “unconscionable and illegal plan” would aid Palestinian jihadists. Meanwhile, another report has exposed the U.S. State Department’s funding of an anti-Netanyahu Leftist group that is […]

Israel’s Finance Minister Tells the Truth, Enraging Biden’s Handlers

Israel’s Finance Minister Tells the Truth, Enraging Biden’s Handlers
New in PJ Media: Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has aroused the ire of all the worst people in the world by enunciating a simple truth that has been widely obscured and is frequently misunderstood or dismissed out of hand without looking at the evidence. Smotrich said Sunday: “There is no such thing as Palestinians because there […]

Catholic Joe Biden Wants to Force Pro-Lifers to Pay for Abortions

Catholic Joe Biden Wants to Force Pro-Lifers to Pay for Abortions
New in PJ Media: One of the most revolting aspects of the sinister corruptocrat Old Joe Biden’s carefully cultivated public persona as affable Lunchbucket Joe is his ostentatious false piety. “I go to Mass and I say the rosary. I find it to be incredibly comforting,” Biden claimed in a 2020 campaign ad, and the establishment media […]

Biden’s Brain Fog Thicker Than Ever as He Babbles About Disarming His Advisors

Biden’s Brain Fog Thicker Than Ever as He Babbles About Disarming His Advisors
New in PJ Media: Practically every day, Old Joe Biden gives us new evidence that he should be relaxing in his taxpayer-funded, walled Delaware beach house and watching Matlock reruns – oh wait, that’s what he is doing most of the time. But nearly every day he shows the world anew that he shouldn’t be doing this while pretending […]

Biden Regime Even Wanted to Censor PRIVATE Text Messages

Biden Regime Even Wanted to Censor PRIVATE Text Messages
New in PJ Media: The Biden regime has already abundantly established that it has no patience for dissent. The Twitter Files show regime lackeys pressuring Twitter, along with other social media giants, to silence people who dared question, among other things, its COVID-19 narrative — yes, the one that has been shown to have been full of holes all along. But […]

Is Israel the Loser In the Saudi-Iranian Rapprochement?

Is Israel the Loser In the Saudi-Iranian Rapprochement?
The Saudi-Iranian agreement, brokered by China, to renew diplomatic ties has now been followed by the Saudis inviting Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi for an official visit. It looks as if the two rivals are serious about promoting ever-better relations. What does this mean for Israel, which has its own security ties to Saudi Arabia, with […]

GHASTLY: Biden in Jocular Mood, Jokes About Ice Cream Before Statement on Nashville Shooting

GHASTLY: Biden in Jocular Mood, Jokes About Ice Cream Before Statement on Nashville Shooting
New in PJ Media: An extraordinarily strange scene unfolded at the White House on Monday after the news broke that a woman claiming to be a man had murdered six people at Covenant School, a Christian school in Nashville. Old Joe Biden came out to address the Small Business Administration’s Women’s Business Summit, knowing that […]

44 Retired Generals and Admirals Ask Biden Administration to Provide Israel with the Weapons It Needs

44 Retired Generals and Admirals Ask Biden Administration to Provide Israel with the Weapons It Needs
Joe Biden has assured the world that Iran will not acquire nuclear weapons “on my watch.” How much credence ought the people of Israel, who will be the ones most affected should Iran acquire a nuclear weapon, give to this assurance? None at all. Israelis cannot entrust their national survival to assurances from Joe Biden […]

Afghanistan: Taliban boasts, shows off 300 military vehicles left behind by America 

Afghanistan: Taliban boasts, shows off 300 military vehicles left behind by America 
According to Forbes in 2021: “The U.S. provided an estimated $83 billion worth of training and equipment to Afghan security forces since 2001. This year, alone, the U.S. military aid to Afghan forces was $3 billion.” Even CNN reported that the US gave “a total of $18.6 billion of equipment to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces […]

Family of Marine killed In Afghanistan stunned to learn snipers were ordered not to take out jihad suicide bomber

Family of Marine killed In Afghanistan stunned to learn snipers were ordered not to take out jihad suicide bomber
Old Joe Biden’s woke and desperately corrupt military actively misled the family of one of the soldiers who was killed in the jihad attack. An update on this story. “Family Of Marine Killed During Afghanistan Withdrawal Stunned To Learn Snipers Could Have Taken Out Suicide Bomber,” by Micaela Burrow, Daily Caller, March 26, 2023: A […]

ATF and IRS Show How the Biden Regime Has Weaponized Government Agencies

ATF and IRS Show How the Biden Regime Has Weaponized Government Agencies
New in PJ Media: The days when it could be taken for granted that government agencies were impartial, nonpartisan, and dedicated to carrying out their responsibilities in a fair and even-handed manner are long gone. As Stephen Green pointed out Tuesday, on the very same day that journalist Matt Taibbi of Twitter Files fame was testifying before […]

What Are They Hiding? A Year Later, DHS STILL Won’t Come Clean About Its Disinformation Board

What Are They Hiding? A Year Later, DHS STILL Won’t Come Clean About Its Disinformation Board
New in PJ Media: The Biden regime’s abortive Disinformation Governance Board was a sinister initiative from the beginning. The board’s chief public proponents, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the board’s head, Nina Jankowicz, set off alarm bells when they were never entirely forthright or clear about what the board intended to do. Even now, long after the whole […]

Biden rebukes Netanyahu about judicial reform, says no invitation for Netanyahu to White House

Biden rebukes Netanyahu about judicial reform, says no invitation for Netanyahu to White House
Joe Biden had strong words for Benjamin Netanyahu, calling upon him to back away from judicial reform, even after the State Department was exposed for paying money to stir up the massive protests in Israel. So Biden stated that he has no intention of inviting Netanyahu to the White House anytime soon. A leader who […]

Netanyahu’s address at the US State Department Summit for Democracy 2023

Netanyahu’s address at the US State Department Summit for Democracy 2023
Joe Biden had strong words for Netanyahu, calling upon him to back away from judicial reform, even after the State Department was exposed for paying money to stir up the massive protests in Israel. Biden also stated that Netanyahu won’t be invited to the White House anytime soon. Bear in mind also that Democrats’ sympathies […]

Biden to Israel: ‘They Cannot Continue Down this Road’

Biden to Israel: ‘They Cannot Continue Down this Road’
“Biden said Netanyahu won’t be invited to visit the White House” The leftist mobs shrieking hate and blocking ambulances claimed that they were fighting for “democracy” in Israel by demanding unlimited power for an unelected leftist judiciary that picks its own members. This is what “democracy” looks like. President Biden on Tuesday said he hopes Israeli […]

Adults In Charge: Iran Has Attacked American Forces 83 Times Since Biden Regime Took Power

Adults In Charge: Iran Has Attacked American Forces 83 Times Since Biden Regime Took Power
New in PJ Media: During the Trump administration, the Islamic Republic of Iran was feeling the effects of global sanctions and was severely restricted in its abilities to pursue its longstanding practice of engaging in and funding terrorism, either directly or through its proxies, such as Hamas and Hizballah. That was, however, a long time […]

Just Four Days After Christian School Murders, Biden Goes Full-Throttle on Trans Madness

Just Four Days After Christian School Murders, Biden Goes Full-Throttle on Trans Madness
New in PJ Media: On the same day that his principal opponent was indicted on the most dubious of charges, our Supreme Leader Joseph R. Biden Jr. proclaimed Friday to be the Transgender Day of Visibility, complete with a presidential proclamation. With six people dead in Nashville at the hands of a “transgender American” just four […]

Biden Regime Boycotts Israel

Biden Regime Boycotts Israel
Straughn informed the organizers that the State Department canceled her authorization to fly. This is governmental BDS, but it also reminds me of how the Obama administration gamed the shutdown by forcing the cancelation of all sorts of events and venues just to make a point. If this story is accurate, then part of the Biden […]

Like A Dementia Fog: Biden Calls Tornado-Ravaged Rolling Fork ‘Rolling Stone’

Like A Dementia Fog: Biden Calls Tornado-Ravaged Rolling Fork ‘Rolling Stone’
New in PJ Media: Old Joe Biden went down to Mississippi last Friday, but oddly enough, he didn’t stop by the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, where the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil; in Joe’s case, that transaction was completed a long, long […]

Biden Singles Out Israel For Criticism

Biden Singles Out Israel For Criticism
Joe Biden has been looking for ways to distance the United States from Israel since the end of 2022. Now, with the recent mass protests over judicial reform in Israel, Biden has found his excuse to berate Benjamin Netanyahu and the Jewish state. More on this here: “In His Supposed “Concern” For Democracy, Biden Singles […]

Darkness Descending Upon America as Biden Bans Incandescent Light Bulbs

Darkness Descending Upon America as Biden Bans Incandescent Light Bulbs
New in PJ Media: Old Joe Biden and his sinister handlers are doing just what they threatened to do. On July 5, 2020, Old Joe’s Twitter ghostwriter tweeted: “We’re going to beat Donald Trump. And when we do, we won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it.” They have done so. They have transformed the […]

Oh, By the Way, Nobody Likes Joe: New Poll Shows Biden Near Record Low Approval

Oh, By the Way, Nobody Likes Joe: New Poll Shows Biden Near Record Low Approval
New at PJ Media: Amid all the excitement over the arrest of Donald Trump and the destruction of our republic, once again the public’s attention has been diverted away from just how badly the Biden regime is doing its job. Unless, of course, its primary job has been demonizing and destroying the possibility of political […]

Biden’s Coup in Israel

Biden’s Coup in Israel
The puppet masters and puppet regime defeat democracy. In the early days of March, a small crowd of leftists gathered outside the U.S. consulate in Tel Aviv holding up signs reading, “Biden help!” and “Biden, Blinken, Our democracy is sinking”. A speaker at the rally appealed to Biden to “save us from ourselves”. The consulate rally was […]

Bargain Basement Influence Peddling: Now You Can Get a Hunter Biden Painting for Only $85,000!

Bargain Basement Influence Peddling: Now You Can Get a Hunter Biden Painting for Only $85,000!
New in PJ Media: If you’ve been waiting for the prices to come down on work from that hottest of new artists, Hunter Biden, now’s your chance: while the groundbreaking paintings of this new Picasso quite recently went for a cool half a million dollars, now you can get your very own Hunter Biden original, suitable […]

Biden’s Israel Coup Covered Another Iran Deal Scheme

Biden’s Israel Coup Covered Another Iran Deal Scheme
“Dangerous territory that could trigger an Israeli military strike” When lefty administrations go after conservative Israeli governments, it’s often because they’re carrying out a preemptive strike on policy that the Israelis would otherwise oppose. The ‘New Middle East’ and the Iran Deal were class examples. Now the Iran Deal that refuses to die, no matter […]

Afghan Muslim migrants in US directed ‘racism, sexism’ at aid workers, were angry at inferior housing

Afghan Muslim migrants in US directed ‘racism, sexism’ at aid workers, were angry at inferior housing
Anyone who finds this surprising knows nothing of Afghan and Islamic culture, and its attitudes toward non-Muslims and women. It’s unlikely that anyone in these NGOs knows anything about the Islamic understanding of the Infidel obligation to support Muslims financially, either. NGOs would have dismissed any warnings about all this as “Islamophobic.” But although they’ll […]

CONFIRMED: The FBI Has Spies in Catholic Churches to Hunt for ‘Domestic Terrorism’

CONFIRMED: The FBI Has Spies in Catholic Churches to Hunt for ‘Domestic Terrorism’
New in PJ Media: A few weeks ago, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Gestapo chief Merrick Garland, “Are you cultivating sources and spies in Latin Mass parishes and other Catholic parishes around the country?” Garland pleaded innocent, insisting, “No, the Justice Department does not do that and does not, uh, um, do investigations based on religion.” But […]

Even the Washington Post Isn’t Buying Biden Blaming Trump for Afghanistan Debacle

Even the Washington Post Isn’t Buying Biden Blaming Trump for Afghanistan Debacle
New in PJ Media: When you’re a Leftist politician and you’ve lost the Washington Post, what’s left? The Post editorial board chided Old Joe Biden and his henchmen on Tuesday for blaming their catastrophically botched withdrawal from Afghanistan on their all-purpose whipping boy, Donald Trump. “Instead of admitting errors,” the Post wrote about the White House assessment of the withdrawal, “the […]

Terrorists Are Crossing the Border, But Relax: ‘Experts’ Say It’s Nothing to Worry About

Terrorists Are Crossing the Border, But Relax: ‘Experts’ Say It’s Nothing to Worry About
New in PJ Media: We’re used to seeing the establishment media cheerlead for Democrat administrations, but Bloomberg went above and beyond on Wednesday with an article that was condescendingly entitled “Terrorists Crossing the US Border? Rising Encounters Explained.” Gather round, you rubes, and let your moral and intellectual superiors explain away what your lying eyes are showing […]

Biden’s DOJ Goes Easy on Trans Lunatic Who Vandalized Church

Biden’s DOJ Goes Easy on Trans Lunatic Who Vandalized Church
New in PJ Media: While the FBI has been sending spies into Catholic churches, hunting for “domestic terrorism,” Old Joe Biden’s laughably named “Justice” Department has just offered what Fox News calls a “sweetheart plea deal” to a woman who claims to be a man and who smashed doors, destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, assaulted […]

Joe Biden—Christian Nationalist?!?!

(Steven Hayward)

Like John, it would be hilarious to observe the left’s sudden obsession with “Christian nationalism” if it weren’t based on an abysmal ignorance that is itself a grim threat to the continuation of our republic. I guess Thomas Jefferson was a Christian nationalist for the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, although in fairness to stupid leftists, they don’t believe in “self-evident truth” either, because they are unable to grasp the meaning of “self-evident” as Thomas Aquinas, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Lincoln learned from Euclid. (One of my core lessons in the classroom is the continuity of thought between the “Two Tommys”—Tommy Aquinas and Tommy Jefferson. Hardly anyone ever notices this.)

Or how about John Adams: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

But you know who else turns out to be a “Christian nationalist”?

Joe Biden, Christian Nationalist:

"My rights are not derived from any government…they're given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our Creator."

pic.twitter.com/fyswMmIzWd

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) February 23, 2024

Gosh—I wonder whatever became of that guy?

Yulia, we hardly knew ya

(Scott Johnson)

Yesterday in San Francisco President Biden held what the White House termed a press gaggle. In the event it seemed more of a gag than a gaggle. This is the White House transcript of his remarks:

Hello, folks. This morning, I had the honor of meeting with Aleksey Navalny’s wife and daughter.

As to state the obvious, he was a man of incredible courage. And it’s amazing how his wife and daughter are — are emulating that. And we’re going to be announcing the sanctions against Putin, who is responsible for his death, tomorrow.

And — but the one thing I’ve made — that was made clear to me is that Yulanda [Yulia] is going to — she’s going to continue to fight (inaudible) the way. So, we’re not letting up.

You say Yulanda, I say Yolanda. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Today, Biden said he "had the honor of meeting with" Alexei Navalny's widow, who he called "Yolanda."

Her name is Yulia. pic.twitter.com/ecBgLtZdn0

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 23, 2024

The Price of Illegal Immigration [Updated]

(John Hinderaker)

Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student in Athens, Georgia. Thursday morning, she went for a run and didn’t return. Her body was found on the campus of the University of Georgia. Riley was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela:

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, who was arrested Friday in connection to the murder of the 22-year-old Augusta University student, crossed into El Paso, Texas, from Venezuela in September 2022, NewsNation reported Saturday, citing Department of Homeland Security sources.

He had been released due to a lack of detention space, the sources added.

Laken Riley

Ibarra is one of millions of illegals whom Joe Biden has deliberately welcomed into the United States, in violation of federal law, the Constitution, and Biden’s oath of office. Biden’s motives are hard to understand. But in the law, one is held to have intended the natural and inevitable consequences of one’s actions. Occam’s Razor, like the common law, implies that Biden is trying to bring chaos and destruction to the United States.

Having entered America with no problem, Ibarra set out for New York. I don’t believe it has been reported how he got there, but he spent a year or so in New York City before relocating to Georgia. His social media accounts suggest that he was living it up:

In September 2022, however, the Venezuelan native looked carefree, smiling in Times Square and Rockefeller Center in New York City, posts on a Facebook account linked to his name showed.

Of course, he got into trouble in New York, too:

Police sources in New York confirmed to NewsNation that a suspect matching Ibarra’s name and age was arrested in the Big Apple for endangering a 5-year-old child last year.

But illegals who commit crimes are rarely punished. Ibarra eventually joined his older brother Diego, who I assume is also an illegal although I haven’t seen this reported, in Athens. The older brother is a criminal, too; he was arrested three times between September and December 2023. Ho hum. Liberals refuse to enforce our laws, until a known criminal commits a crime so heinous that it attracts national attention. Like this one.

So, because Joe Biden opened our southern border, Jose Ibarra waltzed in from Venezuela, spent a year or so hanging out in New York, where any crimes he committed went unpunished, then joined his brother in Georgia. Where, day before yesterday, he saw Laken Riley jogging on the University of Georgia campus and decided it would be fun to kill her. Congratulations, Joe. This one’s on you.

A postscript: the U.S. isn’t the only country dumb enough to admit large numbers of illegal aliens, often referred to in the press as “asylum seekers.” Western Europe has problems even worse than ours, as exemplified by this case:

Police in Vienna launched a criminal investigation after three women were found dead in a brothel, authorities said Saturday.

A witness discovered traces of blood outside the building, located near the Danube River, and alerted police on Friday evening. The bodies of the three victims had “cuts and stab wounds,” police spokesperson Philipp Hasslinger told The Associated Press.

A 27-year-old man was soon arrested in the vicinity of the brothel while carrying a knife, the supposed weapon. Police said the suspect is an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan and will be questioned by police later on Saturday.

The Vienna brothel was legal, but apparently the “asylum seeker” disapproved of it. Hey, some of us may disapprove of it, too. But we wouldn’t murder the women who work there. Open-borders immigration policies have been a disaster wherever they have been implemented.

UPDATE: It turns out that Jose Ibarra had a “wife.” Sort of:

“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives.”

So, just another species of immigration fraud. Honestly, though, Ibarra and his “wife” needn’t have bothered. Joe Biden’s welcome mat is out, and everyone is here to stay–especially those who will degrade our country.

What’s wrong with this picture?

(Scott Johnson)

President Biden spoke at the Governors Ball Dinner in the State Dining Room at the White House on Saturday evening (video excerpt below). The White House has posted the transcript of his brief remarks here.

After the introductory blather, Biden referred to the portrait of Abraham Lincoln behind him — you can see it here — as he attempted to follow his text. This is how the White House transcript of the fourth paragraph reads:

And, you know, standing here in front of this portrait of the man behind me here, he — he said — and I want to make sure I get the quote exactly right. He said, “We — the better angels” — he said, “We must address the counsel — and adjust the better angels of our nature.” And we do the — and we do well to remember what else he said. He said, “We’re not enemies, but [we’re] friends.” This is in the middle of — this is in the — in the part of the Civil War. He said, “We’re not enemies, but [we’re] friends. We must not be enemies.”

“The [unnamed] man behind [him}” was Lincoln. Remember him? The attempted quotation comes from the famous passage that concludes Lincoln’s first inaugural address:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The Daily Mail reports on Biden’s senescent ramble in “Biden completely butchering lines from Lincoln’s inaugural address – and then gets laughs when he jokes about his age after telling audience: ‘I wanna get this quote exactly right.'” However, I’m not sure that this was the worst of Biden’s brief remarks. He also took an incoherent stab at his phony remembrance of things past:

And, you know, it seems to me that — I’ll conclude by saying, I — I’ve spent a lot of time with Xi Jinping — someone whom I have a great deal of difference with. And I was — when I was vice president, President — my — my president was — told me that he wanted me to get to know Xi Jinping because it was clear he was going to be the head of Russia — of — of China and that he — we had a — we were having problems with Russia at the time and other countries as well. And so, what he said was, “Get to know him. He’s going to be there.” I — and he couldn’t because he was the president, and he couldn’t travel. So, I traveled 17,000 miles with him throughout the country — our country and — and in — in China, as well.

We were in the Tibetan Plateau. And he turned to me, and he said, “Can you define America for me?” And I — given this has been documented, and it’s real — I looked at him, and I said, “Yes, I can. In one word.” And he looked at me. And he said, “What’s that?” And I said, “Possibilities.” Possibilities.

You say president, you say vice president. You say Russia, you say China. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Biden has reached the stage of life described by Mark Twain. His faculties have decayed to such an extent that he cannot remember any but the things that never happened. This 17,000-mile shtick has been debunked many times. Glenn Kessler devoted one of his Washington Post Fact Checker columns — this one — to it in February 2021. He awarded it 3 Pinocchios.

However, it’s the substance of the story that is most absurd. Biden says it has been “documented.” That means he has told the story many, many times. According to Matt Viser’s 2022 Washington Post story, aides who were with Biden say that they do not recall that exchange. It has been “documented” by his repetition of it.

We can go this far with the story. When Xi observes an Obama or a Biden, he wonders how he can exploit the “possibilities.”

The White House transcript specifies the time of Biden’s remarks at 7:40 P.M. EST. He wound up at 7:44. It was past the guy’s bedtime. Fortunately, the State Dining Room is located in the Executive Residence of the White House. He only had a few pitty-pat steps to go before his head hit the pillow for the evening.

Biden completely malfunctions as he tries — and fails miserably — to read a quote from "the man behind me here" pic.twitter.com/anLx6NEAPx

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 25, 2024

After last night

(Scott Johnson)

The Michigan primary was held yesterday. President Biden defeated Uncommitted, Marianne Willison, and my cousin Dean Phillips on the Democrat side. Dean commented on Twitter for the benefit of his former friends in the party: “If you resent me for the audacity to challenge Joe Biden, at least you’ll appreciate how relatively strong I’m making him look among primary voters!”

President Trump handily defeated Nikki Haley on the Republican side. Here are the current results posted by RealClearPolitics. Note the differential in turnout.

One can infer that Biden and Trump will be their respective party’s presidential nominees, but the results seem slightly more surprising than expected. Axios managing editor/politics David Lindsey offers a brief take on the results that I found helpful:

There wasn’t much doubt that President Biden and former President Trump would romp to victories in the Michigan primaries Tuesday. But Biden’s win in particular revealed his vulnerability in a crucial swing state that could decide the presidency in November….Arab American and young voters — key to Biden winning Michigan in 2020 — turned out by the tens of thousands on Tuesday to vote … not for Biden, but for “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary.

• The protest vote, driven by anger over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, had drawn more than 77,000 supporters with 70% of the ballots counted — several times more than organizers expected.

• That took some of the glow from a victory in which Biden got more than 80% of the vote, and confirmed that Biden has some serious persuading to do between now and November.

• “We need more than just nice words and hope. We need a permanent ceasefire” in Gaza, Layla Elabed, campaign manager for Listen to Michigan, told CNN. The group was behind the “uncommitted” vote effort.

Other takeaways from Michigan:

1, Biden has other problems, too.

• Another jolt for the president’s campaign Tuesday: A jarring enthusiasm gap between the Democratic and Republican primaries.

• Nearly 40% more people voted in the Republican primary than in the Democratic contest — despite the protest campaign that aided turnout on the Democratic side.

• Trump, who once again defeated former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, got more votes on the GOP side than the total number of votes cast in the Democratic primary between Biden, “uncommitted” and two other candidates.

2. It wasn’t all good news for Trump.

• That surge in GOP voters was driven in part by about 27% of Republicans voting for Haley, whose support continues to be not nearly enough to win the Republican nomination — but enough to show that a sizable chunk of the GOP may never be on board with Trump.

• Haley’s campaign might not last beyond Super Tuesday next week, when Trump is expected to score hundreds of delegates and put a virtual lock on the GOP nomination as 16 states hold contests.

• But Haley’s level of support suggests that many of her backers may stay home in November — or even vote for Biden, if Trump is on the ballot.

Whole thing here.

We seek to read the tea leaves in the results. As some sage has famously observed, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” George Eliot’s narrator in Middlemarch puts it this way: “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.” To read the tea leaves we have to project ahead to next November. How will the candidates look at that time? Our crystal ball is cloudy. Both Biden and Trump are hobbled by weaknesses that will be magnified over the next eight months.

For Democrats this is the Weekend At Bernie’s election. It has become increasingly difficult to keep Biden upright during business hours. His brain is fried. His managers have to keep him under wraps. He is an embarrassment. Playing to his party’s activist base, he has left undone what should have been done and he has done that which should not have been done.

For Republicans this is the “In the Jailhouse Now” election. The electoral impact of the Democrat lawfare on Trump are particularly difficult to predict, but they can’t be good for him. They impose their own limitations on Trump in terms of time, money, and who knows what else. That’s what it’s all about. Anyone can see storm clouds ahead.

I absolutely hate the clichéd last resort of scoundrel pundits as the election approaches. You know, “it depends on turnout.” With respect to what should be the insuperable problems each candidate confronts, let’s just say “it depends on how it turns out.” They can’t both lose. One of them is going to prevail.

Almost vacant

(Scott Johnson)

AEI’s Danielle Pletka is not a fan of President Trump, so I take her pulling on the fire alarm about President Biden at face value:

What we hear from members of congress is … terrible. Democrats too. Those who talk the president tell of a man who can’t go beyond the words on the page in front of him. He can’t converse on matters of substance. He can deliver talking points, but can’t negotiate with any seriousness. That’s one of the reasons — though far from the only one — why Congress can’t move forward on an emergency supplemental. Republicans are in complete turmoil, but talks with the White House are not helping.

Then there are the foreign leaders. Among themselves — and an open secret in DC’s embassies — they talk about a president who is confused, unsure of the subject matter under discussion, distant, disconnected, and all too often incomprehensible.

This is the man with the nuclear football. The man who commands our armed forces. It doesn’t matter whether you like the Democrats or hate them. The office is critically important, and it is almost vacant.

See Pletka’s What the Hell Is Going On? post “What we hear about Biden’s decline.”

40 For the Big Guy

(John Hinderaker)

James Biden has now admitted that he paid his brother Joe $40,000 out of funds he received from CEFC China Energy, which is generally regarded as a front for the Chinese government.

“Where did you believe the source of the money that was going into [Hunter Biden’s company] Owasco, prior to being sent to you, was coming from?” an investigator asked James during the Feb. 21 interview.

“CEFC,” James conceded — following an extended back-and-forth in which the first brother’s attorney Paul Fishman tried to argue that “money’s fungible” before being reminded by a House staffer that James “did not have sufficient funds” to make the $40,000 alleged loan repayment on his own, “so it is traceable.”

Of course, the goalposts in the Joe Biden bribery scandal have repeatedly been moved:

Democrats have defended the alleged loan repayments as evidence of nothing more than Joe Biden being a supportive brother. But Republicans say it makes clear that the president benefited from his relatives’ dealings as he repeatedly interacted with their business associates, including in the CEFC venture.

I think Republicans have made a mistake in seeming to go along with the Democrats’ theme that money has to be traced to Joe’s bank accounts in order to count. Under federal bribery law, Biden is guilty if he “demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value” not just for himself, but for “any other person or entity” in return for “being influenced in the performance of any official act.” People who bribe politicians are rarely dumb enough to make checks payable to the politicians themselves. Most often, they go to family members.

Republicans also shouldn’t fall for the Democrats’ spin about Joe not being involved in “his son’s overseas business dealings.” So, what business was Hunter in? Did he own or run a company that produced any products or provided any services? No. Hunter’s only business was peddling Joe’s influence. And for that to work, it had to be plausible that Joe was in on the deal, and would use his influence to benefit CEFC, or whoever. This is why Hunter would bring his father in on the telephone when he was meeting with Joe’s customers.

Notwithstanding the ever-moving goalposts, I think this is an instance where the Democrats’ control over the news media actually works to their disadvantage. They have been lulled into thinking that they can get away with their candidate’s having turned his power as vice president into tens of millions of dollars in illicit gains for his family and himself, because the New York Times, the Associated Press, and the usual gang of suspects try to run interference.

But in their blundering way, Republicans have managed to convey to a large majority of voters that Joe Biden is a corrupt pol. It is one of several reasons why, in spite of Donald Trump’s grave defects as a candidate, I don’t think Joe Biden can be re-elected.

Biden to resupply Hamas

(Scott Johnson)

President Biden announced today that the United States will airdrop humanitarian aid into Gaza in the coming days. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have been following the line traced by the Biden administration, but this may strike some as a bridge too far. The mission will purportedly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, but all sentient observers understand that the it will necessarily make the “assistance” available to Hamas.

Politico reports Biden’s remarks here. The White House has not yet posted a transcript. To add insult to injury, even though he was reading off note cards, Biden confused “Ukraine” with “Gaza.” The guy’s brain is fried in more ways than one.

Biden announces the U.S. is “providing air drops of additional food and supplies” into Ukraine pic.twitter.com/ZZt7LV1EMg

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 1, 2024

STEVE adds: Curious thing, though. A spokesman for Oxfam America has issued a Twitter statement opposing the relief air drop, because the narrative needs to be preserved. At least that’s how I read this:

Another Disastrous Poll for Biden

(Steven Hayward)

The New York Times is out with its latest poll today, and they can’t sugar coat the bad news for Biden (and good news for Trump) that it contains. The headline says it all:

The poll has Trump with a five-point lead.

Some internals from the article are even more devastating than these headline numbers:

The poll offers an array of warning signs for the president about weaknesses within the Democratic coalition, including among women, Black and Latino voters. So far, it is Mr. Trump who has better unified his party, even amid an ongoing primary contest. . .

Mr. Trump is winning 97 percent of those who say they voted for him four years ago, and virtually none of his past supporters said they are casting a ballot for Mr. Biden. In contrast, Mr. Biden is winning only 83 percent of his 2020 voters, with 10 percent saying they now back Mr. Trump. . .

One of the more ominous findings for Mr. Biden in the new poll is that the historical edge Democrats have held with working-class voters of color who did not attend college continues to erode.

Mr. Biden won 72 percent of those voters in 2020, according to exit polling, providing him with a nearly 50-point edge over Mr. Trump. Today, the Times/Siena poll showed Mr. Biden only narrowly leading among nonwhite voters who did not graduate from college: 47 percent to 41 percent. . .

Mr. Trump’s policies were generally viewed far more favorably by voters than Mr. Biden’s. A full 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared to only 18 percent who said the same of Mr. Biden’s.

The gender gap, for instance, is no longer benefiting Democrats. Women, who strongly favored Mr. Biden four years ago, are now equally split, while men gave Mr. Trump a nine-point edge. The poll showed Mr. Trump edging out Mr. Biden among Latinos, and Mr. Biden’s share of the Black vote is shrinking, too.

Memo to Trump: Don’t blow it.

Biden Now Defeated by Cue Cards

(Steven Hayward)

As is now more widely reported, President Biden relies on cue cards for just about everything, but it looks like even this extreme measure is failing. Here in reading from a prepared statement on a notecard about getting food to Gaza, at the 30-second mark Biden twice says we’ll be opening up more corridors to “Ukraine.” Italian PM Meloni looks around the room wondering if someone is going to help this poor doddering old man.

Biden: “We are concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza 🇵🇸 We will join Jordan and our other partners to airdrop food on Ukraine 🇺🇦

Look at Italian PM trying hard not to laugh 🤣
pic.twitter.com/FJFFusvYWM

— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) March 2, 2024

Today’s “Dump Biden” Installment

(Steven Hayward)

Just a guess, but I think the word has gone out from the Obama redoubt in Martha’s Vineyard and/or his shadow White House in Kalorama that the New York Times needs to lead the push this week to force Biden out of the race. The Times is doom-scrolling its latest poll showing Biden on his way to certain defeat to Trump. Yesterday’s installment gave the raw numbers—Biden is eroding across the board.

Today the Times is out with another headline of doom, whose contents could have been part of yesterday’s story, except the Times wants to mile their poll for maximum effect. Biden’s own voters think he is too old:

Widespread concerns about President Biden’s age pose a deepening threat to his re-election bid, with a majority of voters who supported him in 2020 now saying he is too old to lead the country effectively, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College.

The survey pointed to a fundamental shift in how voters who backed Mr. Biden four years ago have come to see him. A striking 61 percent said they thought he was “just too old” to be an effective president. . . Seventy-three percent of all registered voters said he was too old to be effective, and 45 percent expressed a belief that he could not do the job. . .

This unease, which has long surfaced in polls and in quiet conversations with Democratic officials, appears to be growing as Mr. Biden moves toward formally capturing his party’s nomination.

I’m guessing those “quiet conversations” will start to be less quiet fairly soon. Gavin Newsom has his phone programmed on speed dial.

Here’s one of the graphics:

In case Democratic elites aren’t getting the message, the Times director of polling Nate Cohn offers his own separate “analysis” of the matter:

The Big Change Between the 2020 and 2024 Races: Biden Is Unpopular

Why is President Biden losing? There are many possible reasons, including his age, the war in Gaza, the border and lingering concerns over inflation. But ultimately, they add up to something very simple: Mr. Biden is very unpopular. He’s so unpopular that he’s now even less popular than Mr. Trump, who remains every bit as unpopular as he was four years ago.

President Biden’s unpopularity has flipped the expected dynamic of this election. It has turned what looked like a seemingly predictable rematch into a race with no resemblance to the 2020 election, when Mr. Biden was a broadly appealing candidate who was acceptable to the ideologically diverse group of voters who disapproved of Mr. Trump. . .

That’s gotta hurt. Then there’s this:

We didn’t ask whether Mr. Biden should drop out of the race. We considered it — in fact, we discussed it for days — but many respondents may not know the complications involved in a contested convention.

Subtext: “Doctor” Jill: Get your husband to do the right thing for the interest of the Party. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment.

P.S. It was the suddenly plummeting polls that prompted LBJ to drop out of the 1968 race at the end of March.

Today in NY Times Biden Doom-polling

(Steven Hayward)

Today’s third NY Times installment about their most recent poll piles on the bad news for Biden: not only are you losing to Trump head-to-head, and are unpopular, but today we learn that more voters like Trump’s policies and record better than Biden’s.

Here’s the graphic depiction:

Some excerpts from the Times:

And despite holding intensely and similarly critical opinions both of President Biden and of his predecessor, Americans have much more positive views of Donald J. Trump’s policies than they do of Mr. Biden’s, according to New York Times/Siena College polls.

Overall, 40 percent of voters said Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally, compared with just 18 percent who say the same about Mr. Biden’s policies. . .

Women are 20 percentage points more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them than Mr. Biden’s have, despite the fact that Mr. Trump installed Supreme Court justices who ultimately overturned the right to an abortion and that about two-thirds of women in America think that abortion should be legal in all or most instances.

In a separate Times story, the Biden message to doubting Democrats is—drop dead. Well that’s the headline the NY Daily News would have used. Instead the Times headline is:

For Democrats Pining for an Alternative, Biden Team Has a Message: Get Over It.”

. . . The Biden team views the very question as absurd. The president in their view has an impressive record of accomplishment to run on. There is no obvious alternative. It is far too late in the cycle to bow out without considerable disruption. . . Members of Mr. Biden’s team insist they feel little sense of concern.

After last night

(Scott Johnson)

Digging deep into the Super Tuesday primary results, I foresee President Biden facing off for a rematch against President Trump. Can you feel the excitement? The two candidates represent juggernauts within their respective parties.

Let’s take the Democrats first, courtesy of RealClearPolitics. What we have here is one full boatload of results. They raise the question: who is Marianne Williamson and what is she doing here? She is the best-selling author of a variety of books including A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course In Miracles, A Woman’s Worth, Illuminata, The Healing of America, and Illuminated Prayers. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Williamson continues to inspire audiences on a global scale as she lectures internationally in the fields of spirituality and new thought.

I infer from the results that Democrats resist the light. They resist new thought. Also, we don’t have a prayer. We need a miracle.

Biden’s presents himself as a throwback to the old-fashioned Democratic Party, yet he has adopted the policies of party’s far left. Most prominent among these policies is the opening of our borders and the implicit rejection of the sovereignty of the United States. Over the past three-plus years these policies have wrought great damage. Biden wants to test the outer limits of Adam Smith’s proposition that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” One can’t help but wonder if we can put ourselves back on track.

It’s not Joe Biden’s Democratic Party. It’s the woke left’s Democratic Party. It’s the party of those who say the things which are not.

Biden made an appearance during the narrow window of his waking hours yesterday. He appeared to have dropped in from outer space. He sounded like he had not been briefed since he blasted off from his homeworld. J.B., phone home.

FULL VIDEO:

REPORTER: "What's your message to Democrats who are concerned about your poll numbers?"

BIDEN: "My poll numbers? The last five polls you guys don't report. I'm winning — five! Five in a row!" pic.twitter.com/Mz5gWQMRSA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 5, 2024

On the Republican side of Super Tuesday (also courtesy of RCP), President Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination. Nikki Haley will suspend her campaign later this morning.

This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. If President Trump were to keel over and leave us with an open convention in Milwaukee next July, I assess the odds that the delegates would turn to Haley at zero. It would be a politician in the mold of Trump — probably Ron DeSantis, or perhaps J.D. Vance or Vivek the Mistake. Trump has transformed the Republican Party. By contrast with Biden and the Democrats, he has stamped the party in his image.

I am surprised by the not insubstantial fraction of votes that Haley pulled yesterday. Some portion of the Haley represents Democrats voting in open primaries. Haley won Vermont, but even if she were the nominee she would lose it in November. Vermont is a socialist state. I’m not talking about Vermont. Assuming Trump can survive the Democrats’ lawfare, he cannot win without a united Republican Party. He has some work to do to put the Republican house together. His choice for vice president could help.

It is difficult to project the state of play in the coming months. My crystal ball is cloudy. Much depends on the course of the Democrats’ lawfare against Trump and, to a lesser extent, the nature of the campaign Trump runs. I think he best serves his own interests at this point when he is out of the news and provides the alternative to Biden. If the election can be reduced to a binary choice, Biden should lose. The Democrats’ lawfare means to preclude that.

Yesterday brought more news of the illegal immigration that Biden has invited, inflicted, facilitated, fostered. Biden’s derelictions in office are historic in nature. The Daily Mail reports, for example, “Biden administration ADMITS flying 320,000 migrants secretly into the U.S. to reduce the number of crossings at the border has national security ‘vulnerabilities.'” The New York Post reports “Elon Musk says Biden flying 320K ‘unvetted’ migrants into the US sets stage ‘for something far worse than 9/11.’” Elon Musk — he’s no dummy.

The true numbers involved in the invasion that Biden invited are staggering, whatever they are, as are the secondary effects. As I say, we need a miracle, or something like it.

Biden Plays to His Base

(Steven Hayward)

Tonight is the State of the Union speech. I know it’s hard to contain your excitement. Many Bingo and drinking games suggest themselves.

We all know that Joe Biden is a pretend president, so just who in the White House thought it was a good idea to have him have a Zoom call with actual pretend presidents—Hollywood actors who have played the president, soliciting their advice on how to approach his speech tonight. And what we get it this:

You may’ve heard I’ve got a big speech coming up.

So, I thought I would hear from some folks who have done the job before – sort of. pic.twitter.com/7wFYVQm7Xm

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 7, 2024

Maybe Biden’s staff came up with this exercise just to distract him from doing anything today. Or to make him feel good about himself. If all these Hollywood pretenders say he’s doing a great job, it must be true.

Missing from this roster: Dave. Kevin Kline, that is. Maybe they didn’t want the subtle reminder of an imposter in the Oval Office. Too close to the current truth.

Mean-Spirited Joe

(John Hinderaker)

Joe Biden is delivering his State of the Union speech tonight. Apparently he will chide Americans for not appreciating his wonderful economy; declining real wages will not be mentioned. He will denounce “shrinkflation,” as though people are too stupid to know inflation when they see it. Nor will Biden mention the eight million or so illegals who have streamed across the border, wreaking havoc, since he opened it.

Biden has always been mean-spirited. He is a nasty person, and always has been. Take, for example, his recent interview in the New Yorker. The interview is replete with Biden’s trademark classlessness, but take just one example: his smearing of Justice Thomas:

In a concurring opinion on Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the legal rationale for overturning Roe could be applied to “correct the error” in cases on same-sex marriage, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and access to contraception. I asked Biden if he thought that the Justices would undo those protections. “I don’t think there’s a majority to go there,” he said, but added, “I think that a couple on the Court would go considerably further”—specifically “the guy who likes to spend a lot of time on yachts.”

“Thomas?” I asked.

Biden grinned.

Those familiar with Thomas’s history will appreciate the absurdity of describing him as a yachtsman. He is better known for driving around America in an RV. But in any event, it is Biden–not Thomas–who has enriched himself and his family to the tune of many millions of dollars through influence peddling. Worst of all, he peddled his influence to powers hostile to America. It takes a lot of nerve for Joe Biden to sneer at the Court’s foremost intellectual for accepting a ride on a boat.

But that is Joe Biden: mean-spirited, through and through.

The SOTU from hell

(Scott Johnson)

The comedian Richard Lewis, of blessed memory, is credited with the formulation “the x from hell.” Having watched President Biden’s State of the Union Address last night in order to comment on it this morning, I found it to be the SOTU from hell. Thank you, Mr. Lewis.

The White House has posted the text of the speech “as prepared for delivery.” That isn’t exactly how he gave it. You have to see it to get the full flavor. I have posted the White House video at the bottom.

Herewith are my impressions of Biden’s delivery and my observations on the speech in the form of bullet points:

• The Democrats in the audience broke out in cheers of “Four more years.” You have got to be kidding. Let me begin with a prediction. Even if Biden wins reelection to another term this coming November, he will not be giving four more State of the Union addresses. No way no how.

• Esquire used to pose a rhetorical question as a caption on a photograph of Richard Nixon that it published in its annual Dubious Achievement Awards edition: Why is this man laughing? The question to be posed for this speech is Why is this man shouting? He is an angry old man.

• This was a terrible speech terribly delivered. It’s a good thing no drug test was required before the address. Biden sounded hopped up. He spoke too fast. He slurred his words. He was frequently difficult to understand. He shouted a variety of clichés and shibboleths as though we might otherwise miss their depth and meaning. The disparity between the shibboleths and the shouting was almost funny.

• Biden sounded like a 45 rpm record playing at 78. It was an old record — it had scratches at several places that caused it to skip the groove.

• To whom was this speech addressed? The opening reflected the poor judgment of Biden’s daycare minders in the White House. As I heard it, the country needs to be protected from two threats: Russia and Donald Trump (“my predecessor”).

• This SOTU was a nakedly partisan campaign speech. I have to think that viewers lacking the persuasion of Democratic partisans were quickly turned off. In any event, the speech was a disgrace.

• And that’s not all. The speech was also disjointed and telegraphic. It covered everything from potato chips to computer chips. If it conformed to the laundry list mode of bad State of the Union addresses, this was a laundry list in Morse Code. You had to know the lingo of the proposed laws on Biden’s list. I had no idea what he was talking about when he got to his list.

• TCM counterprogrammed last night’s SOTU in part with Casablanca. You may recall that Humphrey Bogart responds to a comment with one of the movie’s many great lines: “I was misinformed.” Despite its thematic incoherence, anyone who took Biden’s speech at face value last night was misinformed. The misinformation gave it the thematic unity it otherwise lacked. A serious student of politics and the economy could write a dissertation exposing the misinformation conveyed in the speech.

• In his Russia/Ukraine remarks at the top of his speech Biden vowed, “We will not walk away.” Trisha Yearwood, call your office. Walk away, Joe — please. (I’m referring to Biden himself, not Ukraine.)

• The justices of the Supreme Court who chose to attend must have been thrilled to find themselves the villain of Biden’s condemnation of the Dobbs decision. The Supreme Court has returned the legality of abortion to the states. Biden both condemned the decision and celebrated its electoral impact. Abortion is not only a positive good on its own terms, it’s good for Democrats on the hustings. Wrapping it in the mantle of IVF, as he did last night, seemed to me a cruel joke.

• Biden wants to raise taxes on those not paying paying their “fair share.” Who isn’t paying his “fair share”? Billionaires aren’t. Corporations aren’t. That’s the bad news. We must be paying our “fair share.” That’s the good news, assuming we can draw that inference. Maybe someone can ask Karine Jean-Pierre about it at the next White House press conference.

• Biden wants more price controls on pharmaceutical products. When the AMA opposed the dangers of socialized medicine in days of yore, they were on to something.

• “Trickle down economics” came in for a beating. Does anyone who didn’t live through the Age of Reagan know what he was talking about? It was what Democrats condemned as “trickle down economics” that gave us the seven fat years of the Reagan boom. It was “trickle down economics’ that gave us the Trump boom — the boom for which so many voters are nostalgic today.

• Biden actually decried “shrinkflation” in the potato chips portion of his remarks. Some translation is required. “Shrinkflation” = inflation = Bidenomics.

• Biden implied that corporate shenanigans account for “shrinkflation.” Does anyone not understand why “shrinkflation” has broken out under the Biden administration?

• Biden decried “junk fees” and proclaimed his good works in saving us from them. This is “junk politics.”

• Biden reiterated his claims to have “cut the deficit.” He failed to mention that the decline occurred because pandemic spending from President Donald Trump’s tenure expired as scheduled. Biden didn’t do a damn thing. As CNN puts it, “Biden’s own actions, including laws he has signed and executive orders he has issued, have had the overall effect of worsening annual deficits, not reducing them.”

• By the way, in fiscal year 2023 total government spending amounted to $6.13 trillion and total revenue to $4.44 trillion. The resulting deficit amounts to $1.70 trillion, an increase of $320 billion from the previous fiscal year.

• Biden promoted many more federal spending programs I had never heard of. He apparently means to “cut the deficit” even faster and deeper.

• Biden bragged about his continuing student loan giveaways in the face of the Supreme Court ruling that found him to have exceeded his authority (in Biden v. Nebraska). One would like to see the thought bubbles over the heads of the Supreme Court justices.

• Biden talked about illegal immigration. He campaigned in support of it last time around. He invited it during the 2020 campaign. He facilitated it from his first day in office. Yet it’s not his fault. When it comes to the flood of illegal immigrants and related burdens, his theme song is Bob Dylan’s “It ain’t me, babe.”

• Biden saved his remarks on Israel and Hamas for the end of his speech. He won’t walk away from Ukraine, but he will walk away from Israel. He announced his Gaza rescue plan as advertised. It’s his plan to rescue himself in Michigan and rescue himself from his party’s pro-Hamas wing.

• Biden acknowledged: “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.” Thanks, big guy.

• Biden also toed the Hamas line in implicitly attributing responsibility to Israel and omitting the relevant facts: “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned.” See Abraham Wyner’s Tablet column “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.”

• Biden peddled “the two-state solution.” What’s wrong with this picture? As Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer puts it: “Anybody talking about Palestinian state right now is living on another planet.”

• I enjoyed and appreciated Speaker Mike Johnson’s slight shakes of his head to express his disagreement with Biden’s misinformation. He did it just right.

• Although I could say more, these observations are already too long. I will conclude here. The competition is stiff, but this must have been the worst SOTU of all time.

A Best-Case SOTU

(John Hinderaker)

Whatever Doctor Feelgood is operating in the White House these days injected Joe Biden with whatever cocktail that enabled him to yell nonstop for over an hour last night. And that is a good thing.

Before the speech, my wife, with her usual knack for getting at the heart of things, said that we should be rooting for Biden to get through the speech. Because if he collapsed midway in, the Democrats would be able to replace him on the ticket. And in truth, the only question last night was not whether Biden would give a good speech, or whether he would convince anyone not already committed to voting against Donald Trump, but whether he would remain upright.

We conservatives should be glad that he did, as he now continues his march toward the nomination as one of the very few Democrats Donald Trump might actually beat. So thanks, Doc.

Casabiden

(Lloyd Billingsley)

As Scott notes, while Biden delivered the “SOTU from Hell,” Turner Classic Movies ran Casablanca. Those who tuned in witnessed fearful symmetry on the current state of America, with Joe Biden starring in the role of Philippe Pétain.

Back in 1940, the French WWI veteran, already in his 80s, struck an armistice with the German National Socialist invaders, then in alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Nazis made Pétain head of their puppet government in Vichy, allowing him to govern parts of France under their supervision. Casablanca shows a mural of Pétain, with his famous slogan, “Je tiens mes promesses, meme celles des autres,” – “I keep my promises, even those of others.” That’s Joe Biden all over.

The Delaware Democrat is the puppet of a globalist-leftist-woke axis, and their every wish is Biden’s command. As he showed in his September 1, 2022 speech, like something staged by Leni Riefenstahl, Biden regards those who want the nation to be great as the enemy. In the openly partisan FBI, Biden deploys his own Gestapo.

In Casablanca, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) asks Louis Renault (Claude Rains) if he’s pro-Vichy or Free French. In similar style, Americans must decide if they support the constitutional republic they have known or its steady demolition by the Biden Junta. In Casablanca, Resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) welcomes Rick back to the fight, and Laszlo is sure “our side will win.” In America, things aren’t so clear.

“We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics,” said Joe Biden in 2020. That includes mail ballots, election laws changed by judges instead of legislators, elimination of ID requirements, ballot harvesting,  massive voting by illegals, and so forth. That extensive organization remains in place for access by the eight million settlers Biden has brought into the country, with no criminal background checks, health records or job skills.  In 2014, vice president Biden said those who enter the country illegally are “already American citizens.” All they want is a chance to contribute so “let people vote.”

As David Horowitz (Radical Son) has often noted, Democrats are good at voter fraud and Republicans are poor at preventing it. If that doesn’t change, as Rick told Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), “you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

SOTU Response, By the Numbers

(John Hinderaker)

Earlier today, I posted the official GOP response to Joe Biden’s SOTU hate-fest, by Senator Katie Britt. Britt’s speech was an impressive performance in its own way; if I were a Democrat, I think she would scare me.

But for us data guys, Stephen Moore’s Unleash Prosperity Hotline has the numbers:

A lot of tall tales and a few outright fabrications in the Biden speech last night – and far too many to enumerate here. But we will revisit three here.

“My administration cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion.”

This isn’t just a little bit false, it’s an extraordinary and audacious misstatement of fact. The baseline deficit over 10 years, as measured when Biden came into office versus the latest forecast, shows nearly $6 trillion added to the debt since Biden arrived on the scene.

So how does a $6 trillion addition of red ink possibly equate to a $1.7 trillion reduction in the deficit. Someone didn’t pass his basic math exam in high school.

“We will make the rich pay their fair share.”

The top 1% of American tax filers now pay an all-time record high 46% of taxes. This is according to Biden’s own IRS. Does he think the rich should pay ALL the taxes?

That is actually a good question. I think that for many Democrats, the answer may be Yes. But within reason, experience shows that lower rates mean higher collections, especially from high earners.

“I inherited an economy [from Trump] that was on the brink…”

Actually, the economy grew by – ready for this? 33% in the third quarter of 2020 and 4.1% in the 4th quarter of 2020. The economy was in a full-scale COVID recovery when Biden came into office.

Oh, and Inflation was 1.4%.

Gas prices were $2.39 per gallon.

If you think of it as a relay race, Trump handed the baton to Biden in first place, with a rapidly growing lead. But Biden tripped over his own feet–both literally and figuratively–and turned the strong position that he inherited (and not only economically) into a fiasco. That I why I don’t see how he can be re-elected, despite Trump’s manifest flaws.

If you don’t get the Unleash Prosperity Hotline, you should. You can sign up for its frequent and always informative emails here.

What’s wrong with this picture?

(Scott Johnson)

President Biden displayed a monumentally misguided animus against Israel in his State of the Union address this past Thursday evening. (The White House has posted its transcript of the speech as given here.) In a column behind NRO’s paywall Philip Klein characterized the address as “the most anti-Israel presidential speech in history.” I’d have to compare and contrast it with the presidential speeches of Barack Obama to be sure, but Biden’s hostility was patent.

Following the speech Biden had the opportunity to fraternize with the guys. He seized the opportunity to yuk it up outside the control of his daycare handlers in the White House. This is how it went down.

BIDEN: "I told him, Bibi — don't repeat this — you and I are going to have a come to Jesus meeting."

HANDLER: Sir, you're on a hot mic pic.twitter.com/slevQZPDap

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 8, 2024

What if Biden is senile like a fox? The senility came in especially handy in his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. It gave Hur a rationale to recommend non-prosecution of Biden’s offenses in the mishandling of classified documents.

Miranda Devine comments on the video below: “Not ‘confused,’ slyly denying. If Republicans keep underestimating Biden they will lose again.” I anticipate that they’re going to lose again regardless, but point taken.

Q: “Why does Mr. Netanyahu need a ‘come to Jesus’ meeting?”

BIDEN (confused): “I didn’t say that in the speech.”

Q: “What about after?”

BIDEN: “You guys eavesdropping on things!” pic.twitter.com/804aXMmBmQ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 8, 2024

Biden Recants

(John Hinderaker)

In his State of the Union speech, Joe Biden correctly referred to Jose Ibarra, the alleged murderer of Laken Riley, as an illegal alien. Democrats aren’t at all concerned about the murder of a 22-year-old girl, but they were horrified that Biden didn’t use their preferred term, “undocumented.” Which implies, I guess, that the guy was perfectly legal but maybe misplaced his driver’s license.

Biden has now apologized for telling the truth–perhaps the only time he did so in the SOTU. He chose MSNBC to recant:

President Biden apologized Saturday for using the word “illegal” during his State of the Union address to describe the Venezuelan migrant accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.

“An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal, it’s undocumented,” Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart in an excerpt from an interview airing Saturday — which did not show him addressing or acknowledging that he referred to Riley as “Lincoln Riley” during the same speech.

Lincoln Riley is the head coach of the Southern Cal football team.

“And look, when I spoke about the difference between Trump and me, one of the things I talked about in the border was his, the way he talks about vermin, the way he talks about these people polluting the blood. I talked about what I’m not going to do. What I won’t do.

So the simple factual characterization as “illegal” is in the same category as “vermin” and “polluting the blood.” And what Biden is most concerned about here is not being like Trump, which is why he reversed all of Trump’s successful border policies.

“I’m not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country.

Illegal immigrants built the country? What the hell is he talking about?

The reason our economy is growing.

Illegal immigrants are responsible for a tepidly growing economy? Why?

We have to control the border and more orderly flow, but I don’t share his view at all,” continued Biden.

“So, you regret using that word?” Capehart asked.

“Yes,” Biden responded.

What a sad performance. And, by the way, what was the point of Biden’s throwing in “[w]e have to control the border”? The border was mostly under control until he took office and deliberately opened it so as to allow millions of illegals to flood into the country. He did it on purpose. It is you, Joe Biden, who have to control the border. Only there is zero chance that you are going to do so.

Illegal or undocumented?

(Scott Johnson)

Referring to an illegal alien as “illegal” in unscripted remarks during his State of the Union Address this past Thursday, President Biden inadvertently offended a core Democratic constituency (i.e., illegal aliens). That could not stand and it didn’t. As John notes nearby, Biden recanted and apologized within 48 hours.

Illegal or undocumented — which is the correct term. As a matter of fact, “Illegal alien” is the correct term.

When we got married, my wife was an illegal alien. Having graduated from law school and been hired by Hennepin County District Judge Robert Bowen as a law clerk, she applied for a work visa. In response she received a letter from the INS apprising her that her student visa had expired and that she was out of status. She applied for legal residency.

We went down to the local INS office for an interview. We had been advised that we would be asked a few questions to establish that our marriage was bona fide — not a fraudulent exercise undertaken solely to allow an illegal immigrant to escape deportation. As it turned out, we appeared to be the only bona fide couple of the four or five with us in the waiting room. And this was early in the Reagan years.

In the course of the interview, the INS officer asked me what toothpaste “the alien” used. It seemed funny because “the alien” was sitting next to me at the time, but we took no offense. We thought it was funny and I was happy to ace the quiz.

Today a question in that form would probably get the guy fired. Today the prescribed term is “undocumented.” Today that is the term on which the Democrats insist. Today it is the term that every mainstream media outlet (including Fox News) uses. What’s happening here?

What’s happening is the blessing of illegal immigration and the destruction of citizenship. The left seeks to break down our resistance to illegal immigration by means of a mandated euphemism. It’s an Orwellian device. The phenomenon of illegal immigration is not even to be described with tolerable accuracy. The underlying distinction is to be rendered meaningless.

As I say, illegal aliens have become a core constituency of the Democrats. To illegal aliens the left requires that the knee must be bent. I’m not sure why Fox News is compliant. It is frankly disgusting.

Here I speak for my wife and me. We support enforcement of the law. We oppose illegal immigration. We do not seek to accommodate it. We do not respect it. We desire the return of illegal immigrants to their home country or deportation to some other place. We do not want to support them with our tax dollars. We are sickened by the invasion of illegal aliens promoted by Biden and the Biden administration. The abuse of the English language that accompanies it is the least of it, but it deserves at least to be noted.

Biden explains

(Scott Johnson)

In the video clip from his interview with Jonathan Capehart below, President Biden explains why Hamas wants a ceasefire. He forgets that he’s not supposed to explain how it promotes their goals. He seeks to backtrack but can’t figure out how, except by falsely implying that Israel is violating the laws of war. What a disgrace.

Watch Biden say the quiet part out loud. This is actually kind of amazing. Perhaps Prime Minister Netanyahu will find it of use in the “come to Jesus” meeting with which Biden is threatening him.

Biden makes the blunder of answering whether and why Hamas would want a ceasefire.

He then notices his terrible blunder in saying the truth, and goes off on a tangent. pic.twitter.com/ypqX7H8D6o

— David Shor (@DYShor) March 10, 2024

Biden’s red line

(Scott Johnson)

It turns out that President Biden has a red line. It applies to Israel. In an unlocked story, the Wall Street Journal reports that “Biden Warns Netanyahu an Assault on Rafah Would Cross ‘Red Line.’”

Biden apparently seeks to depose the Netanyahu government. He thinks that Netanyahu is the problem. He also seeks to preserve Hamas. He finds them easier to deal with than Netanyahu. Biden’s daycare minders in the White House may indeed be malevolent or stupid enough to believe these propositions. They certainly explain a lot. They explain what Biden meant about having a “come to Jesus” meeting with Netanyahu. The animus behind that statement is patent. Now we see what Biden had in “mind,” so to speak. Israel does not fit comfortably inside what the Democrats are pleased to refer to as “our democracy™.”

Biden and his minders purport to understand Israel’s national security interests better than the Israelis. The Daily Mail reports “Biden Administration consulted Israel expert on how to ‘force the Netanyahu coalition to collapse’ as president accuses the prime minster of ‘hurting Israel more than helping’ and insists Rafah invasion is ‘red line’ that must not be crossed.” The headline says it all.

Politico reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu sees things slightly differently. When asked whether Israeli forces would move into Rafah in an interview on Sunday, Netanyahu replied: “We’ll go there. We’re not going to leave. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is, that October 7 doesn’t happen again. Never happens again.”

It may be time to revisit Robert Gates’s assessment of Biden’s foreign policy chops: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Gates made that assessment in 2014. It therefore predates Biden’s Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iran and other debacles. We can now revise Gates’s assessment to the past five decades.

The Biden administration now distinguishes between Israel’s democracy and the people who elected it. While I cannot defend all of our government’s policies, I will absolutely defend the democracy that elected it. Our democratic ally must respect that. https://t.co/8z5MJQgqIz

— Michael Oren (@DrMichaelOren) March 10, 2024

Biden Waxes On

(Lloyd Billingsley)

In his SOTU Thursday, Joe Biden used the term “illegal” but failed to mention or condemn Antonio Ibarra, the Venezuelan national charged with murdering University of Georgia student Laken Riley, whom Biden twice misnamed as “Lincoln Riley.”  On Saturday, Biden apologized for using the term “illegal,” and took it to another level.

“I’m not going to treat any, any, any of these people with disrespect,” Biden told MSNBC.  “Look, they built the country. The reason our economy is growing.” Such nonsense is nothing new for Joe Biden.

“You know, 11 million people live in the shadows. I believe they’re already American citizens,” said Vice President Biden in 2014. According to Delaware Democrat, all the 11 million wanted was a chance to contribute, so “let people vote.” Biden is not going to disrespect “any, any, any” of those he has brought in, even the criminals, because they add to his imported electorate. When criminal illegals murder Americans, Biden isn’t going to “disrespect” the murderer.

In 2014, false-documented Mexican national Luis Bracamontes gunned down Sacramento deputies officers Danny Oliver and Michael Davis. During his trial, Bracamontes said he wished he killed more cops, and yelled “black lives don’t matter” at Danny Oliver’s wife, Anthony Holmes, whom he shot five times, and members of the jury. Vice President Biden never mentioned the case, not even to denounce “gun violence.”

In late 2018, a gang-affiliated criminal illegal calling himself Paulo Virgen Mendoza shot dead Newman, California, police officer Ronil “Ron” Singh, a legal immigrant who came to the United States to work in law enforcement. Seven other illegals aided the killer’s flight before the fugitive murderer was apprehended. Joe Biden ignored the case. He is not going to disrespect “any any, any” member of his imported electorate, not even the criminals who murder innocent Americans.

By shunning the term “illegal,” Biden effectively cancels immigration law. The Delaware Democrat also renders meaningless all the procedures people such as Scott Johnson’s wife go through to become American citizens. For Joe Biden, legal immigrants and legitimate citizens are non-persons, and it was the “undocumented” who actually “built the country,” and are now the reason “the economy is growing.”

Conrad Black has called Joe Biden “a pallid effigy unable to utter complete sentences without requesting the approach of the teleprompter,” and a “wax-works effigy of a president.” Legal immigrants, legitimate citizens, and parents of those slain by illegals can be forgiven for regarding Joe Biden as a wax-works effigy of a human being.

Biden’s animus [With Comment by John]

(Scott Johnson)

President Biden’s animus against Israel was patent in his State of the Union Address this past Thursday evening. The White House has posted the text of his remarks as given here.

JNS editor Jonathan Tobin sets forth a rounded view of “the moral failure” of Biden’s remarks on Israel. Tobin separately addresses and elaborates on Biden’s demands on Israel, the floating harbor for Hamas, the two-state final solution, the lack of any statement on the explosion of anti-Semitism in the United States, and the appeasement of Israel haters. We have noted these deficiencies in our own way, but nothing said here does justice to the points that Tobin makes.

NRO’s Philip Klein characterized the SOTU as “the most anti-Israel presidential speech in history.” Klein posted his comments in a hot take on the evening of Biden’s speech. Among other things, he notes that “[a]fter a perfunctory mention of October 7 and the hostages, Biden then launched an extended attack on Israel’s response to the war and the conditions in Gaza that accepted, whole cloth, Hamas casualty figures that his own administration had previously questioned as unreliable.”

We have noted this point as well. Biden and others in the administration have adopted the numbers retailed by the Gaza Ministry of Health — i.e., Hamas. It represents their adoption of the Hamas point of view.

What’s wrong with this picture? Hamas is not known for the accuracy of its statements of fact. Hamas, for example, does not distinguish between the deaths of civilians and Hamas genocidaires. The Gaza Ministry of Health promotes a line that supports Hamas’s war aims.

Biden hectors Israel. He repeatedly implies that Israel violates the laws of war. This is another lie that promotes Hamas’s war aims. As Israel sacrifices the safety of its soldiers to protect civilians intentionally placed in harm’s way by Hamas, it is perversely false.

In the State of the Union Biden asserted: “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed — [AUDIENCE MEMBER: Says who?] — most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents — women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned.”

Abraham Wyner homes in on the casualty numbers in the Tablet column “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers.” Subhead: “The evidence is in their own poorly fabricated figures.”

Wyner, by the way, is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Co-Director of the Wharton Sports Analytics and Business Initiative. He knows what he is talking about. His column is worth your time, but Biden et al. don’t need his analysis. As Klein implies, they know it’s true. They lie without a conscience.

Wyner introduces his analysis this way (emphasis in original):

The number of civilian casualties in Gaza has been at the center of international attention since the start of the war. The main source for the data has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women. Recently, the Biden administration lent legitimacy to Hamas’ figure. When asked at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week how many Palestinian women and children have been killed since Oct. 7, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was “over 25,000.” The Pentagon quickly clarified that the secretary “was citing an estimate from the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry.” President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that “too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.” The White House also explained that the president “was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.”

Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters.

If Hamas’ numbers are faked or fraudulent in some way, there may be evidence in the numbers themselves that can demonstrate it. While there is not much data available, there is a little, and it is enough: From Oct. 26 until Nov. 10, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry released daily casualty figures that include both a total number and a specific number of women and children.

The first place to look is the reported “total” number of deaths. The graph of total deaths by date is increasing with almost metronomical linearity, as the graph in Figure 1 reveals….

Wyner persuasively establishes that “the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily.” See Figure 1 and other graphs along with the rest of the column here (data posted here).

JOHN adds: Abraham Wyner testified as an expert witness on behalf of the defendants in the Michael Mann v. Mark Steyn case. We saw his testimony when we were in D.C. for the trial. Wyner presented a statistical analysis that showed that Mann’s famous hockey stick graph was, in fact, fraudulent. His analysis was persuasive and Wyner was a great witness, but unfortunately neither his testimony nor the other evidence presented by defendants was enough to overcome the decades of propaganda that underlie climate hysteria. At least, not with a D.C. jury.

Biden Waffles on Apology

(John Hinderaker)

A final (I hope) footnote to Joe Biden’s disgraceful SOTU performance: he referred to Jose Ibarra as an illegal, which was, as I said here, perhaps the only true statement in the entire speech. But Biden met with blowback from Democrats who don’t seem to mind that Ibarra is an (alleged) murderer, but were horrified by Biden’s admission that his presence here is illegal.

So, as recorded at the link above, Biden apologized on MSNBC for using the word “illegal.” (The correct legal term is “illegal alien.”):

President Biden apologized Saturday for using the word “illegal” during his State of the Union address to describe the Venezuelan migrant accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.

“An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal, it’s undocumented,” Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart in an excerpt from an interview airing Saturday….
***
“So, you regret using that word?” Capehart asked.

“Yes,” Biden responded.

I, and everyone else, called that an apology. But the White House is now backtracking on its backtrack:

The White House on Monday pushed back against claims President Biden apologized for using the term “illegal” to describe the migrant accused of killing Laken Riley — just days after the president said he had “regret” for using the loaded term.
***
White House deputy spokesperson Olivia Dalton attempted to clarify on Monday, telling a reporter that “the president absolutely did not apologize” despite his expression of regret.

“There was no apology anywhere in that conversation,” Dalton told reporters on Air Force One. “He did not apologize. He used a different word. I think what we should be really clear about is the facts.”

“He used a different word.” All right, then! Biden said that he “shouldn’t have used” the word illegal, and he “regrets” doing so. Talk about a fine distinction. So, why did the White House bother to walk back, at least partially, Biden’s MSNBC comments? I suppose because if you apologize, you have to apologize to someone. In this case, who is that someone? The (alleged) murderer, Jose Ibarra. Many have criticized Biden for apologizing to a murderer for calling him an illegal. Hence his handlers’ most recent spin: it wasn’t an apology, it was only an expression of regret for something he shouldn’t have done.

Got it, Joe.

And, finally, for a spokesman for the Biden White House to say that “what we should be really clear about is the facts” is, in its own way, a classic of dark comedy.

Biden’s DOA Budget

(John Hinderaker)

Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.

But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:

President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.

Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.

The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.

Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.

Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:

The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.

Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:

The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.

Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.

Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.

The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.

Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:

Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.

Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.

Him or Hur?

(Scott Johnson)

Politico Playbook previews the testimony later this morning of Special Counsel Robert Hur before the House Judiciary Committee. Hur is to testify on the report of his investigation of Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents (i.e., the report submitted to Attorney General Merrick Garland). The Playbookers have obtained and posted Hur’s opening statement here. These are the operative paragraphs:

My report reflects my best effort to explain why I declined to recommend charging President Biden. I analyzed the evidence as prosecutors routinely do: by assessing its strengths and weaknesses, including by anticipating the ways in which the President’s defense lawyers might poke holes in the government’s case if there were a trial and seek to persuade jurors that the government could not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

There has been a lot of attention paid to language in the report about the President’s memory, so let me say a few words about that. My task was to determine whether the President retained or disclosed national defense information “willfully”—meaning, knowingly and with the intent to do something the law forbids.

I could not make that determination without assessing the President’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the President’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial. These are the types of issues prosecutors analyze every day. And because these issues were important to my ultimate decision, I had to include a discussion of them in my report to the Attorney General.

The evidence and the President himself put his memory squarely at issue. We interviewed the President and asked him about his recorded statement, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” He told us that he didn’t remember saying that to his ghostwriter. He also said he didn’t remember finding any classified material in his home after his vice presidency. And he didn’t remember anything about how classified documents about Afghanistan made their way into his garage.

My assessment in the report about the relevance of the President’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the President unfairly. I explained to the Attorney General my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.

This is confused and confusing. Did Hur base his non-prosecution decision on his putative inability to prove the mental element of the possible offenses? Hur implies it is “willfulness,” although “gross negligence” would have sufficed to prove the offense under 28 U.S.C § 793. Or did he base his non-prosecution decision on a jury’s anticipated pity for a senile dolt? I trust that some members of the committee will home in on this issue this morning.

Hymn to Hur

(Scott Johnson)

Special Counsel Robert Hur testified for some five hours before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents over his too long career in public life. I have posted the Washington Post’s YouTube video of the hearing at the bottom. At the same time, transcripts of Hur’s interview of Biden in the investigation were released: October 8 (99 pages) and October 9 (157 pages).

Mr. Techno Fog provided his hot take on the transcripts here (“confusion, evasion, and outright lies”). David Harsanyi cut to the chase in the Federalist column “Turns out Biden lied.” The Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr reviews both Hur’s testimony and the Biden transcripts in “Interview Transcript, Congressional Testimony Shed Light on Biden’s Memory Lapses During Classified Doc Investigation.”

Hur confined his testimony to the four corners of the lengthy report he submitted to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Whenever he was asked about the facts of the case, he referred to the report’s findings. He demonstrated perfect poise and complete mastery of the case as set forth in his report.

It should go without saying that Hur knew his case, but contrast Hur’s grasp of the case with Robert Mueller’s failure to launch at the comparable hearing held following his Russiagate investigation. To put it charitably, Mueller appeared to be a figurehead who performed at best as an innocent bystander to an investigation run and conducted by others (e.g., Andrew Weissmann). Trump fans who harbor lingering animosity against Attorney General William Barr don’t understand that Mueller’s investigation would still be alive if it weren’t for Barr.

The House Democrats sought to impute a finding of “complete exoneration” of Biden to Hur. Hur begged to disagree. Hur was admirably noncompliant in the face of the Democrats’ efforts to put words in his mouth. The Free Beacon’s video of highlights (below) shows that “complete exoneration” misses the mark. As Hur put it in his opening statement, Hur “identified evidence that the President willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen.” This evidence contradicted everything Biden himself has said in public about the case, although lying to the public is not a crime. It is standard operating procedure.

Hur was criticized for resting his recommendation of non-prosecution on Biden’s senility. Hur explained that he was required to “show [his] work” supporting his recommendation of non-prosecution. Hur reminded me of how I showed my work in solving high school physics problems. I began with the answer and worked back from there.

In Hur’s case, the answer was non-prosecution. A voice in his head from the film Network must have counseled caution: “Don’t do it, buddy! You’re a young man! You got your whole life ahead of you!” Hur’s explanation of the difficulty of obtaining a guilty verdict in the case was little more than absurd (as was his distinction of the Biden case from the Trump case).

In the course of his overlong political career, Biden has been a serial violator of the national security law. He is heedless to it. His misconduct is egregious. And he is a senescent dolt with the possible reservation that in some instances he may be senile like a fox. I don’t recall when “I don’t recall” was ever so plausible.

I would like to include one positive observation in these remarks. I was impressed by the demeanor of two congressmen whose names I had not even heard before. I don’t know anything else about them except what I saw yesterday. I am referring to Republican Ben Cline of Virginia and Democrat Glenn Ivey of Maryland.

However, yesterday’s hearing was incredibly depressing. It represents the dire condition of our politics. We have clownish Democrats volubly insisting on the things which are not. We have the exhibition of the two-tiered system of justice that Democrats have fashioned to resolve the problem of Donald Trump and other annoyances. We have the continuing exposure of the mental incompetence of the president of the United States. We have the mainstream press acting as the Democrats’ public relations arm.

Willfully yours

(Scott Johnson)

Special Counsel Robert Hur found that President Biden willfully mishandled documents subject to the Espionage Act provision set forth in 28 U.S.C. § 793(e). However, Hur clouded the “willfulness” element of the offense by resting his non-prosecution recommendation in part on Biden’s present senility. Hur presents his analysis of the element of “willfulness” under section 793 in Chapter Nine of his report.

The relevant question is whether Biden committed the acts “willfully” at the relevant time. Hur had a smoking gun or two to prove the “willfulness” element of the offense. Among other things, however, he suggested that a jury would be reluctant to convict someone as out of it as Biden is and imputed the jury’s likely reluctance to Biden’s present inability to act “willfully” beyond a reasonable doubt. See, for example, Chapters Eleven and Twelve of the report.

Just to give an idea of the evidence Hur compiled, the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman highlights a few passages from Hur’s report. Freeman quotes this from Chapter Twelve:

As with the classified Afghanistan documents [discussed in Chapter Eleven], there is evidence that Mr. Biden kept his notebooks after his vice presidency knowing they were classified and he was not allowed to have them.

The evidence shows convincingly that Mr. Biden knew the notebooks, as a whole, contained classified information. For eight years, he wrote in his notebooks about classified information during classified meetings in the White House Situation Room and elsewhere. He was familiar with the notebooks’ contents, which included obviously classified information. When reviewing the notebooks with [Biden ghostwriter Mark] Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden sometimes read aloud classified notes verbatim, but he also sometimes appeared to skip over classified information, and he warned Zwonitzer that the material in the notebooks could be classified. Mr. Biden also stored the notebooks in a classified safe in the White House for a time as vice president because the notebooks were classified.

In Mr. Biden’s written answers to questions from our office, he called into question whether he knew the information in his notebooks was classified. In those answers, Mr. Biden explained that when he described material in his notebooks to Zwonitzer as “classified’’ he did not actually mean “classified.” According to Mr. Biden, “I may have used the word ‘classified’ with Mr. Zwonitzer in a generic sense, to refer not to the formal classification of national security information, but to sensitive or private topics to ensure that Mr. Zwonitzer would not write about them.” Mr. Biden qualified this answer by explaining, “I do not recall the specific conversations you reference with Mr. Zwonitzer, which took place more than six years ago.”

This explanation-that “classified” does not mean “classified”-is not credible. At the time Mr. Biden met with Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden had nearly fifty years of experience dealing with classified information, including as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a member and Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, a member and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and Vice President of the United States. It is not plausible that a person of his knowledge and experience used the term “classified” in this context as a euphemism for “private.”

Hur discusses the existence of grounds for reasonable doubt regarding Biden’s willfulness at the time of the acts (i.e., evidence that Biden thought the notebooks were his personal property), but falls back on Biden’s subsequent incompetence (my word, not Hur’s). If Biden thought they were his personal property, why did he lie about the meaning of “classified”? As I wrote yesterday, Hur’s analysis has the quality of a student working backward from the known answer to a question. Hur thus concludes Chapter Twelve:

Given the intelligence and military officials present and the topics discussed at the meetings Mr. Biden recounted for Zwonitzer, Mr. Biden should have realized that his notes did or were likely to contain classified information. But taken as a whole, the evidence will likely leave jurors with reasonable doubts about whether Mr. Biden knew he was sharing classified information with Zwonitzer and intended to do so. For these jurors, Mr. Biden’s apparent lapses and failures in February and April 2017 will likely appear consistent with the diminished faculties and faulty memory he showed in Zwonitzer’s interview recordings and in our interview of him. Therefore, we conclude that the evidence does not establish that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information to Zwonitzer.

I thought someone would press Hur on the “willfulness” issue at the hearing. Rep. Ken Buck, who declared he’s outta here next week, came the closest to getting at it toward the tail end of the five-hour hearing (video below). Even within the five-minutes limiting each round of questions — Buck could have omitted his introductory remarks and gotten to the point — Buck almost got there, but this ain’t horseshoes.

After last week

(Scott Johnson)

Last week the mainstream press ranked President Biden’s State of the Union address up there with the Sermon on the Mount. I reviewed it in detail and found it to be “The SOTU from hell,” but then I wasn’t the target audience. My assessment might have been unreliable.

In my comments I asked to whom the speech was addressed. That wasn’t clear to me. I guess it was addressed to all the Democrats who’d loved him before. He didn’t want them to walk out on him.

Taking a look at the polls after one week, the Hill reports that, ahead of the State of the Union, Biden’s approval rating in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll was 40 percent. In a new survey released on Tuesday by the same team Biden’s approval rating had fallen to 39 percent.

That does not appear to be an outlier: “Other polls also show the president failed to moved the needle following his address to Congress. FiveThirtyEight’s calculation of Biden’s approval rating showed him with just more than 37 percent Tuesday. On March 6, the day before the State of the Union, he had just under a 38 percent approval rating from the ABC News pollster.”

Trump and Biden have each secured his party’s respective nomination and are running neck and neck. The lack of excitement is almost palpable. It is same as it ever was before Joe got hopped up last week to shout into the void.

Via Rich Lowry/NRO.

“Migrants” on parade

(Scott Johnson)

Here we have the video of the day. It depicts a horde of illegal aliens breaking through the razor wire (mounted, I assume, by Texas authorities) and overrunning Texas National Guard soldiers seeking to resist them in El Paso. The video raises many questions, among them how many many “migrants” does it take to mount used to be known as an “invasion”?

We have now entered year four President Biden’s open borders program. Why does Biden refuse to see that the law is faithfully executed? Why does he support the invasion of the United States? When do we get to defend ourselves? How long can this go on?

This is the moment when TX National Guard became overrun by migrants rioting to get across the border here in El Paso today

We were there and saw it all happen. Absolute chaos here. pic.twitter.com/VN6Kf663ie

— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) March 21, 2024

What’s wrong with this picture?

(Scott Johnson)

The Times of Israel provides updates on Palestinian casualties according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, but suggests that skepticism is warranted. Indeed, the Ministry of Health is best understood as the functional equivalent of the Ministry of Truth (“Minitrue”) conceived by George Orwell in 1984, i.e., the ministry of propaganda.

In its update on Palestinian casualties in Gaza today, the Times of Israel states the numbers of dead and wounded according to “the Hamas-run health ministry,” but adds: “The terror group’s figures are unverified, don’t differentiate between civilians and combatants, and list all the fatalities as caused by Israel — even those believed to have been caused by hundreds of misfired rockets or otherwise by Palestinian fire.”

These are obvious points, yet the numbers are taken (or repeated) at face value by President Biden and others. Here is Biden performing his Big Brother shtick earlier this month: “You can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead as a consequence of going after [Hamas]. There are other ways to deal with Hamas.”

In his invaluable March 6 Tablet column, Professor Abraham Wyner explains “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers” and even Biden must “know” this. It’s yet another sign of Biden’s turn against Israel and/or support for Hamas.

Let me add today’s sign, per Vice President Kamala Harris: “We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake. Let me tell you, I have studied the maps — there is nowhere for those folks to go. So we’ve been very clear that it would be a mistake to move into Rafah with any kind of military operation.”

VP Kamala Harris takes a tougher line against Israel (re: going after remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah) on ABC’s “This Week”:

“We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way that any major military operation in Rafah would be a huge mistake. Let me tell you, I…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) March 24, 2024

Biden Bizarrely Denies Declaring Easter Sunday 'Transgender Day of Visibility'

President Joe Biden reportedly denied declaring Easter Sunday the "Transgender Day of Visibility," despite issuing a very clear proclamation on Good Friday, which stated in part, "I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility."

The post Biden Bizarrely Denies Declaring Easter Sunday ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’ appeared first on Breitbart.

D.C. Cardinal Slams Joe Biden as ‘Cafeteria Catholic’

Washington, D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory slammed President Joe Biden on Sunday for being a “cafeteria Catholic,’’ picking and choosing what doctrines he wants to believe in; he cited the president's support for "abortion rights" and transgender “visibility” as examples.

The post D.C. Cardinal Slams Joe Biden as ‘Cafeteria Catholic’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Joe Biden Faces Significant Problem on Economy with Young Voters

President Joe Biden is underperforming among young voters who are concerned about their economic plight, recent polling shows. 

The post Joe Biden Faces Significant Problem on Economy with Young Voters appeared first on Breitbart.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken Praised Trans People for 'Courage and Resilience' on Easter Day

Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued an official statement recognizing "Transgender Day of Visibility" on Sunday, as the Biden administration faces backlash for celebrating it on the same day as Easter, one of the holiest days in the Christian religion.

The post Secretary of State Antony Blinken Praised Trans People for ‘Courage and Resilience’ on Easter Day appeared first on Breitbart.

Argentina’s Milei Suggests Rallying Latin America to Sanction Venezuela After Biden Failure

Argentine President Javier Milei asserted in an interview on Sunday that he "would not have any problem" imposing diplomatic sanctions against Venezuela's socialist regime, suggesting he would be willing to convince other countries to support similar measures.

The post Argentina’s Milei Suggests Rallying Latin America to Sanction Venezuela After Biden Failure appeared first on Breitbart.

Joe Biden Slurs Speech While Discussing White House Easter Egg Roll

President Joe Biden spoke with slurred speech while discussing the White House Easter Egg Roll in an interview on a morning show on Monday.

The post Joe Biden Slurs Speech While Discussing White House Easter Egg Roll appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden on Inflation: COVID Will Have 'Lasting Effect' and Must 'Get People to Move Again' and Improve 'Best Economy'

On Monday’s broadcast of NBC’s “Today,” President Joe Biden responded to a question on what he would say to people whose money isn’t going as far due to inflation by saying, “we have the best economy in the world. We’ve

The post Biden on Inflation: COVID Will Have ‘Lasting Effect’ and Must ‘Get People to Move Again’ and Improve ‘Best Economy’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Carville: Biden Didn't Know Easter Was Trans Visibility Day, No One in the White House Knew There Was Easter Overlap

On Monday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Democratic strategist James Carville reacted to criticism of the Biden White House for its proclamation of Transgender Day of Visibility falling on Easter by stating, “as if Biden even knew it was” Transgender Day

The post Carville: Biden Didn’t Know Easter Was Trans Visibility Day, No One in the White House Knew There Was Easter Overlap appeared first on Breitbart.

WATCH: Hillary Clinton Scolds Voters Complaining About Trump vs Biden ‘24 Choice: 'Get over Yourselves'

"Get over yourselves." That is the intemperate advice from two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who has scolded voters complaining about the likely prospect of a Donald Trump versus Joe Biden rematch in the 2024 presidential election campaign.

The post WATCH: Hillary Clinton Scolds Voters Complaining About Trump vs Biden ‘24 Choice: ‘Get over Yourselves’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Nolte: Joe Biden Is So Worried About Losing to Trump He Defiled Easter

Nolte: Joe Biden is so worried about losing the election that he abused his presidential power to turn the holiest day on the Christian calendar into something sacrilegious.

The post Nolte: Joe Biden Is So Worried About Losing to Trump He Defiled Easter appeared first on Breitbart.

RFK Jr. Says Biden 'Much Worse Threat to Democracy' Than Trump

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat turned independent running for president in 2024 as a third party candidate, said the argument can be made President Joe Biden is a "much worse threat to democracy" than former President Donald Trump.

The post RFK Jr. Says Biden ‘Much Worse Threat to Democracy’ Than Trump appeared first on Breitbart.

Nolte: Construction of Wind Turbines Enrages Virginia Beach Residents

Residents of Virginia Beach, one of the few areas in Virginia to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, are upset over the construction of wind turbines.

The post Nolte: Construction of Wind Turbines Enrages Virginia Beach Residents appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Uses Aid Tragedy to Blame Israel for Civilian Deaths; Hamas Off the Hook

President Joe Biden issued a statement late Tuesday in response to the accidental killing of seven aid workers in Gaza by an Israel airstrike, blaming Israel for aid distribution problems and claiming Israel is not doing enough to protect civilians.

The post Biden Uses Aid Tragedy to Blame Israel for Civilian Deaths; Hamas Off the Hook appeared first on Breitbart.

Trump: Election Day Will Be ‘Christian Visibility Day’

Former President Donald Trump declared that the November election will be "Christian Visibility Day" in opposition to President Joe Biden's declaration of "Transgender Day of Visibility" on March 31, which coincided with Easter Sunday this year.

The post Trump: Election Day Will Be ‘Christian Visibility Day’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Michigan Poll Shows Trump Leading Biden as Voters Express Support for Mass Deportation of Illegal Aliens

Former President Donald Trump has the edge on President Joe Biden in the critical swing state of Michigan, according to a Spry Strategies poll, continuing a trend in the Wolverine State that has persisted for months. The poll, released Tuesday

The post Michigan Poll Shows Trump Leading Biden as Voters Express Support for Mass Deportation of Illegal Aliens appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Co-Chair Whitmer: 'Who Cares' if I think Unborn Are People? It's How Individuals 'Define It'

On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Source,” Biden Campaign Co-Chair Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) responded to a question on if she considers frozen embryos to be people by stating that it doesn’t matter what her view is, “What matters

The post Biden Co-Chair Whitmer: ‘Who Cares’ if I think Unborn Are People? It’s How Individuals ‘Define It’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Buttigieg: Industry 'Moving Towards EVs' But We Can't Let 'Economically Smart Play' 'Happen on Its Own Pace'

On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that “the automotive sector is moving towards EVs” and China pushed for an advantage in the EV market “because that’s the economically smart play” but

The post Buttigieg: Industry ‘Moving Towards EVs’ But We Can’t Let ‘Economically Smart Play’ ‘Happen on Its Own Pace’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Dem Rep. Smith: 'No Incentive' for Hamas to Agree to Ceasefire, U.N. Won't Condemn Them in Resolution Biden Let Pass

On Tuesday’s “CNN News Central,” House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) stated that the unintentional deaths of World Central Kitchen employees by an Israeli airstrike shows that it’s crucial to get a ceasefire, but Hamas won’t

The post Dem Rep. Smith: ‘No Incentive’ for Hamas to Agree to Ceasefire, U.N. Won’t Condemn Them in Resolution Biden Let Pass appeared first on Breitbart.

Buttigieg: Opposing Electric Cars Is Like Wanting 'Landline Phones Forever'

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday on Fox News Channel's "America Reports" that people who do not want electric cars were like those who wanted "landline phones forever."

The post Buttigieg: Opposing Electric Cars Is Like Wanting ‘Landline Phones Forever’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Assures Xi Jinping He Opposes 'Decoupling,' Wants 'China to Succeed'

President Joe Biden held a phone call on Tuesday with China's genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in which the American leftist leader reportedly emphasized his distaste for a "new Cold War" or "conflict" with the Chinese Communist Party and assured Xi he would not pursue economic "decoupling."

The post Biden Assures Xi Jinping He Opposes ‘Decoupling,’ Wants ‘China to Succeed’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Nolte: Mayoral Upset in Wisconsin Signals Trouble for Joe Biden

Other than this being bad news for Joe Biden, the good news in this race is the effort the Wisconsin Republican Party put into pulling it off.

The post Nolte: Mayoral Upset in Wisconsin Signals Trouble for Joe Biden appeared first on Breitbart.

Jill Biden: 'It's Obvious that Joe Will Win this Election'

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

First Lady Jill Biden said Wednesday on "CBS Mornings" that she believed it is "obvious" that President Joe Biden will win the November presidential election.

The post Jill Biden: ‘It’s Obvious that Joe Will Win this Election’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Israel Faces 'Color Revolution' as Opposition Protests, Gantz Wants New Elections

Israel faces the prospect of a "color revolution" in the middle of its war against Palestinian Hamas terrorists in Gaza as the opposition backs street protests against government, and a key cabinet minister has demanded new elections.

The post Israel Faces ‘Color Revolution’ as Opposition Protests, Gantz Wants New Elections appeared first on Breitbart.

Globalist Fail: Most Voters Back Trump's Plan for 10% Tariffs on All Imports

Most likely voters support former President Donald Trump's plan to impose 10 percent tariffs on all imports to protect American jobs and wages, a new poll reveals.

The post Globalist Fail: Most Voters Back Trump’s Plan for 10% Tariffs on All Imports appeared first on Breitbart.

Fmr Obama Campaign Manager Messina: GOP 'Changing the Rules' in the Middle of Election

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Former Obama 2012 campaign manager Jim Messina said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Republicans would be "changing the rules" in the middle of an election when discussing former President Donald Trump and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen calling on the state legislature to assign it's Electoral College votes with the winner-take-all standard.

The post Fmr Obama Campaign Manager Messina: GOP ‘Changing the Rules’ in the Middle of Election appeared first on Breitbart.

Joe Biden Moves to Slash Medicare Advantage

The Biden administration has finalized its move to slash Medicare Advantage as the 46th president has claimed former President Donald Trump seeks to slash entitlement programs.

The post Joe Biden Moves to Slash Medicare Advantage appeared first on Breitbart.

Klain: 'Prices Are Too High' and Biden Needs 'More Progress' and to 'Use His Tools' on Border

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” former Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain stated that “Prices are too high” and “the price of gasoline is still high, other prices are still high, and people feel that pinch.” And President

The post Klain: ‘Prices Are Too High’ and Biden Needs ‘More Progress’ and to ‘Use His Tools’ on Border appeared first on Breitbart.

Karl Rove: Trump Promising to Pardon January 6 'Thugs' a Critical Mistake

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

MSNBC host Ari Melber aired a video Wednesday on "The Beat" of an interview with former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove at the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival.

The post Karl Rove: Trump Promising to Pardon January 6 ‘Thugs’ a Critical Mistake appeared first on Breitbart.

Taibbi: Biden's 'Only Candidate Who Can Expect Not to Be Censored' and That's a Threat to Democracy

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” journalist Matt Taibbi said that President Joe Biden and censorship under his administration is a threat to democracy and “heading into the 2024 presidential election cycle, Joe Biden is

The post Taibbi: Biden’s ‘Only Candidate Who Can Expect Not to Be Censored’ and That’s a Threat to Democracy appeared first on Breitbart.

Nationwide Gas Prices Top $3.50, Spiking More than 45% Under Joe Biden 

The nationwide average price for regular gas topped $3.54 a gallon, a spike of more than 45 percent under President Joe Biden, AAA reported Wednesday.

The post Nationwide Gas Prices Top $3.50, Spiking More than 45% Under Joe Biden  appeared first on Breitbart.

Report: Democrat Strategists Gripe WH Not Pushing Back on Biden Frailty Concerns

Democrat strategists griped in a recent piece on the White House not doing enough to "counter the narrative" that President Joe Biden, 81, is too frail to be president for the next four years.

The post Report: Democrat Strategists Gripe WH Not Pushing Back on Biden Frailty Concerns appeared first on Breitbart.

Republicans Demand Garland Reveal if DOJ Investigating Biden Whistleblowers

The probe into the DOJ underscores the ongoing House impeachment inquiry's investigation into President Joe Biden and his family members involved in the Biden business.

The post Republicans Demand Garland Reveal if DOJ Investigating Biden Whistleblowers appeared first on Breitbart.

Nolte: Donald Trump Holds Eight-Point Lead over Joe Biden

Nolte: Former President Donald Trump has an eight-point lead over His Fraudulency Joe Biden, per the latest poll from Rasmussen.

The post Nolte: Donald Trump Holds Eight-Point Lead over Joe Biden appeared first on Breitbart.

Watch: Jimmy Kimmel Struggles to Understand Trump Trouncing Biden in Several Polls: ‘How Could This Be’

Jimmy Kimmel is a little dazed, confused and somewhat perplexed after a poll revealed Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in several crucial swing states ahead of the 2024 presidential election, prompting him to ask: “How could this be?”

The post Watch: Jimmy Kimmel Struggles to Understand Trump Trouncing Biden in Several Polls: ‘How Could This Be’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Demands 'Immediate Ceasefire' from Netanyahu in Phone Call

President Joe Biden demanded an "immediate ceasefire" from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Thursday between the two leaders, threatening a loss of U.S. support for the war if Israel does not comply.

The post Biden Demands ‘Immediate Ceasefire’ from Netanyahu in Phone Call appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Co-Chair Coons: It's Now Time for U.S. to Put Conditions on Aid to Israel

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Biden 2024 campaign co-chairman Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said Thursday on CNN that he now wants the United States to put conditions on military aid to Israel.

The post Biden Co-Chair Coons: It’s Now Time for U.S. to Put Conditions on Aid to Israel appeared first on Breitbart.

Muslim Doctor Storms Out of Biden Meeting over Palestinian Conflict

A Muslim emergency medicine physician, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, said he walked out of a meeting with President Joe Biden on Wednesday because of disagreements over the Hamas-Israel war.

The post Muslim Doctor Storms Out of Biden Meeting over Palestinian Conflict appeared first on Breitbart.

Trump Campaign Blasts Politico for Spewing 'Lies' About Trump's Record on China

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung on Thursday blasted Politico editor Catherine Kim for misrepresenting former President Donald Trump's record on China. 

The post Trump Campaign Blasts Politico for Spewing ‘Lies’ About Trump’s Record on China appeared first on Breitbart.

Rust Belt Senators Sound Alarm: Japanese Corporation Trying to Buy U.S. Steel Is Linked to China

A few Senators from the nation's Rust Belt are sounding the alarm over the ties between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nippon Steel Corporation -- the Japanese conglomerate looking to purchase the United States Steel Corporation.

The post Rust Belt Senators Sound Alarm: Japanese Corporation Trying to Buy U.S. Steel Is Linked to China appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Dumps Israel on Eve of 'Quds Day,' as Iranian Attack Looms

President Joe Biden decided to threaten Israel with a loss of support on Thursday — as Israel mobilized its reservists to prepare for a possible Iranian attack, and Iran prepared for “Al Quds Day,” its annual orgy of anti-Israel hatred.

The post Biden Dumps Israel on Eve of ‘Quds Day,’ as Iranian Attack Looms appeared first on Breitbart.

Taiwan Condemns ‘Shameless’ China for Accepting Global Earthquake Condolences

The Taiwanese Foreign Ministry on Thursday expressed outrage at China for stepping forward to accept messages of sympathy from around the world for the deadly earthquake that struck eastern Taiwan on Wednesday morning.

The post Taiwan Condemns ‘Shameless’ China for Accepting Global Earthquake Condolences appeared first on Breitbart.

Netanyahu Spox on Biden's Threats to Change Policy: Hamas Wants Pressure on Israel, Not Them

On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “America Reports,” Netanyahu Spokesperson Tal Heinrich said that Netanyahu and President Joe Biden had a “good call” and the U.S. and Israel agree on the need to eliminate Hamas while minimizing civilian

The post Netanyahu Spox on Biden’s Threats to Change Policy: Hamas Wants Pressure on Israel, Not Them appeared first on Breitbart.

White House: 'Difficult to Say' How Close Israel Is to Being Like Hamas

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stated that while you can’t equate Israel’s actions to Hamas launching the October 7 attack, “it’s difficult to say” how close Israel is to becoming indistinguishable

The post White House: ‘Difficult to Say’ How Close Israel Is to Being Like Hamas appeared first on Breitbart.

Dem Rep. Don Davis: I Have Problem with Biden EV Push, I Don't Trust D.C. to Pick Winners and Losers

During an interview with the Fox News Channel released on Thursday, Rep. Don Davis (D-NC) said that he has concerns about the regulations on gas cars put in place by the Biden administration and argued that we need to “follow

The post Dem Rep. Don Davis: I Have Problem with Biden EV Push, I Don’t Trust D.C. to Pick Winners and Losers appeared first on Breitbart.

Biden Visits Baltimore as Left and CEOs Use Bridge's Fatalities to Demand More Migrant Workers

President Joe Biden visits Baltimore on Friday following the deadly bridge disaster on March 26, as investors and left-wingers jointly use the tragic deaths of six migrant workers to demand legalization for low-wage migrants.

The post Biden Visits Baltimore as Left and CEOs Use Bridge’s Fatalities to Demand More Migrant Workers appeared first on Breitbart.

Republicans Subpoena Biden Records Linked to Devon Archer

Top House Republicans this week subpoenaed Biden business records linked to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden's business associate.

The post Republicans Subpoena Biden Records Linked to Devon Archer appeared first on Breitbart.

WATCH: Pentagon Dodges Question About Why No One Fired for Afghanistan Drone Strike

Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder dodged a question Thursday about why no one in the U.S. was held accountable for a mistaken 2021 drone strike, while demanding Israel punish officials for a similar incident.

The post WATCH: Pentagon Dodges Question About Why No One Fired for Afghanistan Drone Strike appeared first on Breitbart.

Tony Bobulinski Sues Democrat Dan Goldman for Defamation

Former Biden business associate Tony Bobulinski sued Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) for defamation, a Friday court filing revealed. 

The post Tony Bobulinski Sues Democrat Dan Goldman for Defamation appeared first on Breitbart.

U.S. Bishop Slams Joe Biden’s ‘Offensive’ Coopting of Easter for Transgender Day

Arlington Bishop Michael Burbidge said Thursday that President Joe Biden showed a lack of integrity by proclaiming on Good Friday that March 31, 2024 -- which was Easter Sunday -- was Transgender Day of Visibility.

The post U.S. Bishop Slams Joe Biden’s ‘Offensive’ Coopting of Easter for Transgender Day appeared first on Breitbart.

Seth Meyers Panics: Biden Risks Losing to Trump without Ceasefire in Gaza

NBC's late-night host Seth Meyers is panicking over the prospect of a Trump victory in November, saying that President Joe Biden's failure to make good on his promise of a ceasefire in Gaza is alienating Democrats in key swing states.

The post Seth Meyers Panics: Biden Risks Losing to Trump without Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on Breitbart.

Madeleine Dean: 'Trump Would Be a Useful Idiot to Mr. Netanyahu'

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Representative Madeleine Dean (D-PA) said Friday on CNN's "News Central" that former President Donald Trump "would be a useful idiot" to Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The post Madeleine Dean: ‘Trump Would Be a Useful Idiot to Mr. Netanyahu’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Sharpton: Trump Is a 'Low Down' Con Man Using 'Boogeyman Politics'

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

MSNBC host Al Sharpton said Friday on "Deadline" that former President Donald Trump was a "low down" conman playing "boogeyman politics."

The post Sharpton: Trump Is a ‘Low Down’ Con Man Using ‘Boogeyman Politics’ appeared first on Breitbart.

'Women Are Going to Save Us': MSNBC's Deutsch Says Election About Abortion, Democracy

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

MSNBC commentator Donny Deutsch said Friday on MSNBC's "Deadline" that the election in November will be about "abortion and democracy," which will cause female voters to pick President Joe Biden.

The post ‘Women Are Going to Save Us’: MSNBC’s Deutsch Says Election About Abortion, Democracy appeared first on Breitbart.

Marlow: Biden Is 'Trying to Buy the Votes of Overeducated Liberals' with Student Loan Forgiveness

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Breitbart Editor-in-Chief and New York Times bestselling Breaking Biden author Alex Marlow said Friday on Fox Business Network's "Kudlow" that President Joe Biden is trying to buy the votes of overeducated liberals with his new efforts to reduce or eliminate student loan debt for millions of borrowers.

The post Marlow: Biden Is ‘Trying to Buy the Votes of Overeducated Liberals’ with Student Loan Forgiveness appeared first on Breitbart.

Report: Migrants Along Border Say They 'Want Biden to Win' 2024 Election

Migrants at the United States-Mexico border say they "want [President Joe] Biden to win" the 2024 presidential election while others hope to get released into the nation's interior before election day -- knowing their chances will be nearly eliminated under a second term of former President Donald Trump.

The post Report: Migrants Along Border Say They ‘Want Biden to Win’ 2024 Election appeared first on Breitbart.

White House: 'Imprudent' to Compare Israeli WCK Strike to Afghan Strike 'Three Years' Ago in 'Different' Circumstances

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby responded to questions on how the 2021 U.S. strike in Afghanistan that killed an aid worker is different from the Israeli strike that

The post White House: ‘Imprudent’ to Compare Israeli WCK Strike to Afghan Strike ‘Three Years’ Ago in ‘Different’ Circumstances appeared first on Breitbart.

As State Spends Millions for Migrants, Immigration Becomes Top Colorado Election Issue

A recent poll finds that the issue of illegal immigration has become a top election issue in Colorado as the state drowns in tens of millions spent on freebies for Joe Biden's illegal border crossers.

The post As State Spends Millions for Migrants, Immigration Becomes Top Colorado Election Issue appeared first on Breitbart.

Dershowitz: Biden's Doing Hamas' Job for Political Reasons by Failing to Oppose Them Like He Opposes Putin

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz stated that any time America opposes Israel, “Hamas backs away from making any deals. Hamas says to itself, why should we give up any hostages? Biden’s

The post Dershowitz: Biden’s Doing Hamas’ Job for Political Reasons by Failing to Oppose Them Like He Opposes Putin appeared first on Breitbart.

Comedian W. Kamau Bell: 'No Matter Who the Next President Is, This Country Might Be F**ked'

Comedian and filmmaker W. Kamau Bell recently insisted that Americans don't understand the problems we face if we think a single president will make a difference and added that we are "in trouble" if comedians can't make fun of it all for fear of being canceled.

The post Comedian W. Kamau Bell: ‘No Matter Who the Next President Is, This Country Might Be F**ked’ appeared first on Breitbart.

WATCH–Pro-Palestinian Protesters Berate Hillary Clinton After Biden Fundraiser: 'Stop Holding Fundraisers for Genocide'

Twice failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was confronted by profanity-slinging pro-Palestinian protesters in New York City on Wednesday, days after she told voters upset about a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden to “get over yourself.”

The post WATCH–Pro-Palestinian Protesters Berate Hillary Clinton After Biden Fundraiser: ‘Stop Holding Fundraisers for Genocide’ appeared first on Breitbart.

WATCH: Joe Biden Smuggles Illegal Migrants into Maryland Politics

President Biden is using the Baltimore Bridge disaster to smuggle illegal migrants into Maryland's politics, saying, "Six [men] lost their lives: Most were immigrants, but all were Marylanders."

The post WATCH: Joe Biden Smuggles Illegal Migrants into Maryland Politics appeared first on Breitbart.

Kaine: U.S. Troops 'Might Be in Harm's Way from Hamas' with Biden Pier Mission, But Now Might Be in Danger from IDF

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) stated that the military operation to build a pier to help deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza is a mission where “we knew” that the American troops in

The post Kaine: U.S. Troops ‘Might Be in Harm’s Way from Hamas’ with Biden Pier Mission, But Now Might Be in Danger from IDF appeared first on Breitbart.

Brooks: Hamas Has Strategy of Getting Civilians Killed to Put Pressure on Israel, I'm Glad Biden Pressured Israel

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that Hamas’ “chief strategy is to generate as many civilian deaths as they can to get world pressure to force Israel to desist.” But there’s “a growing callousness toward

The post Brooks: Hamas Has Strategy of Getting Civilians Killed to Put Pressure on Israel, I’m Glad Biden Pressured Israel appeared first on Breitbart.

Trump Smashes Biden’s Fundraising Record with $50 Million Saturday Night Haul

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced on Saturday evening that a Trump fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida, has set a new single-fundraiser record for a presidential campaign by pulling in more than $50 million in one night.

The post Trump Smashes Biden’s Fundraising Record with $50 Million Saturday Night Haul appeared first on Breitbart.

After U.S. Pressure, IDF Leaves Southern Gaza; Hamas Declares Victory

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced Sunday that it had withdrawn its forces from southern Gaza, following a demand from U.S. President Joe Biden last week for an "immediate ceasefire." Hamas declared victory on the news.

The post After U.S. Pressure, IDF Leaves Southern Gaza; Hamas Declares Victory appeared first on Breitbart.

Gov. Abbott: U.S. Is Being 'Invaded' Because Biden Playing 'Political Games'

By: Pam Key · Pam Key

Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) said on this week's broadcast on "Fox News Sunday" that President Joe Biden's "political games" are causing the invasion of the United States by migrants.

The post Gov. Abbott: U.S. Is Being ‘Invaded’ Because Biden Playing ‘Political Games’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Exclusive: Joni Ernst Accuses Biden Admin of ‘Stealing’ from Veteran ‘Heroes’ to Fund Illegal Immigrants

Democrat President Joe Biden’s border crisis is so “out of control” that his administration is “willing to steal from our nation’s heroes and divert resources away from their care,” charged Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who reiterated her dedication to fighting the current administration’s outrageous redirection of resources from veterans to illegal immigrants.

The post Exclusive: Joni Ernst Accuses Biden Admin of ‘Stealing’ from Veteran ‘Heroes’ to Fund Illegal Immigrants appeared first on Breitbart.

Pollak: The Psychological Obsession with Benjamin Netanyahu

Israelis protest Netanyahu because he is the closest target; it is a form of coping with tragedy. Democrats hate him because he gets Americans and they don't.

The post Pollak: The Psychological Obsession with Benjamin Netanyahu appeared first on Breitbart.

Pollak: How Biden Brought Israel to the Brink of Failure

Biden opposed Israel winning the war because he wanted a Palestinian state, and forced Israel to accept responsibilty for Palestinian civilians.

The post Pollak: How Biden Brought Israel to the Brink of Failure appeared first on Breitbart.

Joe Biden Balloons 'Temporary' Amnesty to Include 1.2M Foreign Nationals

President Joe Biden has helped balloon the number of foreign nationals living in the United States who are eligible or receiving Temporary Protected Status (TPS), making them ineligible for deportation, to nearly 1.2 million.

The post Joe Biden Balloons ‘Temporary’ Amnesty to Include 1.2M Foreign Nationals appeared first on Breitbart.

Michigan: Anti-Israel Protesters Chant 'Death to America' on International Al-Quds Day

Anti-Israel protesters in Dearborn, Michigan, closed out Ramadan by chanting, "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," during an International Al-Quds Day rally.

The post Michigan: Anti-Israel Protesters Chant ‘Death to America’ on International Al-Quds Day appeared first on Breitbart.

White House Pledges Taxpayers Will Bail Out 10 Million Students' Loan Debts

President Joe Biden will announce Monday that student debt held by ten million Americans will transfer to taxpayers, White House officials told reporters Monday.

The post White House Pledges Taxpayers Will Bail Out 10 Million Students’ Loan Debts appeared first on Breitbart.

RIP: The Death Toll of Biden’s Illegal Alien Bloodbath

Former President Donald Trump used political jujitsu to grab a left-wing anti-Trump lie and turn it against his opponent, President Joe Biden.

Trump told Ohio voters on March 16 that if he lost his comeback bid in the November election, Biden would welcome imports of Chinese-designed, Mexican-built electric vehicles. This, Trump said, would trigger an economic “bloodbath” in the auto sector.

Biden and other leftists disinformed Americans by claiming that Trump threatened to unleash a political bloodbath if Biden won. Trump did no such thing.

Trump got even in Michigan last Tuesday when he unveiled a slogan that electrifies America’s No. 1 issue: Angst over the hordes of illegal aliens who Biden welcomes daily.

“It’s a border bloodbath, and it’s destroying our country,” Trump said. “It’s going to end on the day that I take office.”

Biden’s Border Bloodbath” correctly describes the mayhem fueled by Biden’s deliberate demolition of America’s southern frontier.

Because illegal aliens often are shadowy, the problem is tough to gauge precisely. Nonetheless, Customs and Border Protection counted eight foreign-citizen criminals convicted of homicide or manslaughter from fiscal Year 2017 through fiscal 2019, under Trump. During Biden’s first three fiscal years, the CBP has tallied 151 such convictions—up 1,787.5%.

Consider these cases, thanks largely to documentation by the Federation for American Immigration Reform:

  • Brazilian illegal Everton Candido breached the border at Tecate, California, in May 2021. Police say that he drove without a license in Medford, Massachusetts, on Oct. 23, 2022, when he struck and killed Army veteran Walter Wishoski Jr., 77.
  • Biden’s Department of Homeland Security released Venezuelan illegal Eddy Jose Ortega Alvarado on May 20, 2023. The next day, he reportedly killed Honduran illegal Carmen Unilda Navas Zuniga and stole her cash in El Paso, Texas.
  • Biden’s officials released Guatemalan illegal Juan Carlos Garcia-Rodriguez, 17, at the southwest line in January 2023. Last August, he allegedly raped and strangled Maria Gonzalez, 11, in Pasadena, Texas, then packed her into a laundry basket, and stashed her beneath his bed.
  • Biden’s agents released Haitian illegal Hermanio Joseph after he broke into America in August 2022. Police say that he crashed into a school bus in Clark County, Ohio, last Aug. 22. The bus flipped, killing Aiden Clark, 11.
  • Endrina Bracho, a Venezuelan illegal alien, reportedly struck Travis Wolfe in a head-on collision in Hazelwood, Missouri. She reportedly drove unlicensed, against traffic, at 70 mph in a 40 mph zone. That happened Dec. 20, the day before Travis’ 12th birthday, which he spent in critical condition.

“He wasn’t awake for it,” his sister, Taylor, told Fox News anchor Steve Doocy. “He didn’t get to experience anything. So, did he really actually make it to 12?

Travis was on life-support until March 6, when his catastrophic brain injuries finally killed him.

Travis Wolfe, a 12-year old Missouri boy killed by an illegal migrant. This is what an open border does. Say his name https://t.co/zjllQKRwTa

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 11, 2024
  • Venezuelan Jose Antonio Ibarra arrived illegally in September 2022. Authorities say that he fatally bashed the skull of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley on Feb. 22, while she jogged near campus, triggering a national uproar.

This lethal crisis began the day Biden took power. His 94 executive actions shredded Trump’s effective border-tightening initiatives.

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, a Republican, told Fox News on Wednesday: “Biden’s border policy is as effective as a screen door on a submarine.”

The Border Patrol has caught 7,444,297 illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexico boundary through February, Biden’s 37th month as president. Trump’s analogous number was 2,138,696. Biden trounces Trump by 348%. These apprehensions included 351 people on the terrorist watch list during Biden’s “return to normal,” versus just 11 under Trump—up 3,090%.

Add 1.6 million gotaways (including terrorists) who The Washington Post estimates were detected, but not detained, and at least 9 million illegal aliens have cascaded through the “border” under Biden.

Trump and his supporters should remind voters constantly about the victims whom illegal aliens are killing while Biden snores. These deaths remain 100% preventable, if Biden simply keeps these killers out.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

The post RIP: The Death Toll of Biden’s Illegal Alien Bloodbath appeared first on The Daily Signal.

PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric

They call themselves the “PBS NewsHour,” but if you watch them routinely, you might call them the “PBS Opposition Research Hour.”

They often sound like a Democrat consulting firm as they analyze former President Donald Trump as a dangerously extreme figure. Then they can turn around and proclaim that President Joe Biden is very bipartisan in negotiating “objectively historical achievements,” as PBS anchor Amna Nawaz claimed at the State of the Union address.

On April 2, PBS aired a segment titled “Analyzing Trump’s use of inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail.” Two days later, it was changed to “Anatomy of a Trump speech.”

They decided to watch all the scary passages in Trump’s recent speeches with Jennifer Mercieca, who reporter Lisa Desjardins blandly described as “an author and Texas A&M professor who specializes in political and Trump rhetoric.”

PBS didn’t note that Mercieca wrote a book in 2020 titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” (It was shown on screen.) Its dust cover promises to explain “how a bombastic pitchman emerged as America’s authoritarian P.T. Barnum, using nothing more than his weaponized words to transform a polarized and dispirited nation into his own reality TV show.”

Does this expert shopping sound fair and balanced to anyone?

As Trump denounced Biden for a “border bloodbath,” Desjardins explained he’s attacking “anyone who calls it a humanitarian crisis.” Mercieca lamented, “It can’t be neutral. It can’t be a situation at the border. It has to be violent. It has to be an invasion. It has to be a bloodbath.”

Seriously? Last October, their anchor Nawaz wasn’t neutral as she compared separating children from their families at the border under Trump as “one of the darkest chapters in our modern history” that echoed slavery and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Naturally, Desjardins repeated the Democrat spin that “there’s no evidence of a bloodbath for Americans living there” (at the border), and “multiple studies show that migrants are actually less likely to commit crime than others here.”

Trump lamented, “If we don’t win on Nov. 5, I think our country is going to cease to exist. It could be the last election we ever have.” Desjardins explained Mercieca’s thesis: This is “what separates Trump,” it’s not “political razzle-dazzle, but dangerous, hyperbolic fearmongering.”

If that “last election” talk is dangerous, will PBS rewind to Biden’s first campaign speech back on Jan. 5? Biden said of Trump: “He’s willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power … Trump’s assault on democracy isn’t just part of his past. It’s what he’s promising for the future. … We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”

These “public” broadcasters know what Biden has said in his campaign speeches, and they’re fine with it. No one thinks it’s a lie or that it’s dangerous. Mercieca acknowledged, “All presidents run as heroes. It’s not uncommon. Joe Biden is running as a hero right now. He’s running as a hero to save democracy.” But she claimed, “Donald Trump is running as a different kind of hero.”

How so? Desjardins concluded the segment with this about Trump: “When he’s saying the situation is dire, when he’s saying democracy will end if I’m not elected, he is implying to some of his followers, violence may be OK.”

Biden is saying democracy will end if he’s not elected, but PBS can’t imagine his followers would ever believe “violence may be OK.” PBS makes “news” by Democrats, for Democrats. But it’s subsidized involuntarily by tens of millions of allegedly democracy-squashing Republicans.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation. 

The post PBS ‘News’ Hounds OK With Biden’s Inflammatory Rhetoric appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Biden Protects Deep State Bureaucrats With ‘Anti-Democratic’ Rule

The Biden administration is proposing a new rule that would further entrench unelected federal bureaucrats from accountability to President Joe Biden or his elected successors. 

Key to the new rule from the Office of Personnel Management is the effective “grandfathering” of federal employees into their current category of employment, making it harder for a future president to issue an executive order like the one that then-President Donald Trump signed in October 2020 to rein in the bureaucracy. 

A rule listed in the Federal Register, like this one was Thursday, could be more difficult to overturn than an executive order because it would have to be reversed under the provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act, one former senior OPM official said.

“If such a rule were allowed to stand, it would tie a future president’s hands—at least temporarily—in carrying out his responsibilities to make and implement his policies,” said Robert Moffit, who was at OPM during the Reagan administration and is now a senior research fellow for health and welfare policy at The Heritage Foundation. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.) 

The president cannot run the huge federal government from his office in the West Wing of the White House, Moffit told The Daily Signal. 

Some career federal employees who have civil service protection are neither impartial nor nonpartisan, he added. 

“To effect his policy, therefore, the president must not only have the ability to hire political personnel who will carry out his electoral mandate, but also remove career personnel who attempt to obstruct that mandate,” Moffit said. “So, any attack on any president’s capacity to carry out the policies upon which he was elected is fundamentally ant-democratic; it is an attack on the American people who elected him.”

Among other things, the OPM’s proposed rule would clarify that “the status and civil service protections an employee has accrued cannot be taken away by an involuntary move from the competitive service to the excepted service, or from one excepted service schedule to another.”

“Once a career civil servant earns protections, that employee retains them unless waived voluntarily,” the rule says.

In October 2020, just before the election he lost to Biden, Trump signed an executive order to create a new category of federal employee called Schedule F. Personnel in this category are in confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating positions that remain on the payroll when a presidential transition occurs. 

The executive order from Trump, who faced resistance to his policy changes from within the federal bureaucracy, gave agencies more flexibility and oversight for career employees in critical positions that affect policy. 

Upon taking office in January 2021, Biden scrapped the Trump order. The final version of the new rule would make it more difficult for a future president to reverse, because it is a regulation published in the Federal Register rather than an executive order. Undoing it would require going through a time-consuming administrative procedure.  

Career federal employees enjoy civil service protection, making it nearly impossible to fire them; by contrast, political employees serve at the pleasure of an elected president. 

Career federal bureaucrats tend to be overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning based on their campaign donations; federal employee unions donate between 70% and 90% to Democrat candidates. Republicans have accused some career employees of blocking implementation of Republican presidents’ policies. 

Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation that establishes a plan for the next conservative presidential administration, calls for restoring Trump’s Schedule F as part of a broader effort to rein in the federal bureaucracy. 

This has been a long-standing policy goal for Heritage, Moffit noted. 

“Respecting the president’s prerogatives to have the appointees necessary to carry out policies is one of the major reasons why former Heritage President Ed Feulner strongly opposed Republican attempts to hamstring Democratic President Clinton and reduce the number of his political appointees,” Moffit said.  

“Political appointees can formulate the details of the president’s policies and see to it that they are implemented all the way down the chain through departments, agencies, subagencies, and bureaus of the federal government.”  

Biden’s Office of Personnel Management issued the final rule Thursday, asserting it received 4,000 comments about it, and said the rule would be published Tuesday in the Federal Register. 

“This final rule honors our 2.2 million career civil servants, helping ensure that people are hired and fired based on merit and that they can carry out their duties based on their expertise and not political loyalty,” OPM Director Kiran Ahuja said in a public statement. “The Biden-Harris administration is deeply committed to the federal workforce, as these professionals are vital to our national security, our health, our economic prosperity, and much more.”   

According to the OPM press release, the new rule also would clarify that the phrase “confidential, policy-determining, policymaking, or policy-advocating” refers to positions that are noncareer, political appointments. 

The rule also would establish procedural requirements for moving positions from “career” to “political,” and set up an appeals process for employees. 

“Career officials are obviously crucial in the implementation of presidential policy,” Moffit told The Daily Signal. “Those of us who served in presidential administrations all have war stories, however, about how politically hostile civil servants, through various means, including intentional slow-walking or foot-dragging, can delay, thwart, or undermine the president’s policies.”

“A career civil servant who does not or will not carry out the policy of any president, regardless of party affiliation, should have the honor and the decency to resign,” he said. “They should not enjoy regulatory protection.”

The post Biden Protects Deep State Bureaucrats With ‘Anti-Democratic’ Rule appeared first on The Daily Signal.

❌