NFL draft meeting pic.twitter.com/1adH1C5Hny
— Annie Agar (@AnnieAgar) April 24, 2024
Community Notes for the win 🏆 pic.twitter.com/Kdot46Uv2W
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 21, 2024
It’s worth noting that federal Special Counsel Jack Smith, no one’s version of a wallflower, chose not to go after Trump for the supposed federal campaign finance violation.If this matter did not so seriously threaten our faith in law, I’d have to laugh, honestly. This really is like putting someone on trial for lying to his diary.
For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted with chants of "Go back to Africa."
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) April 22, 2024
Or imagine that a gay student at Yale was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit in the eye with a flagpole.
Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they…
In the scramble to accommodate thousands of migrant families, the Healey administration has approved scores of hastily arranged contracts with little transparency, sometimes handing out multimillion-dollar deals without competitive bids, a Globe review of contracts found.
The former and possibly future president of the United States is now on trial in Lower Manhattan, the first criminal prosecution of an American elected to the nation’s highest office. Donald Trump, who relentlessly undermined the justice system while in office and since, is enjoying the same protections and guarantees of fairness and due process before the law that he sought to deny to others during his term.
Biden is free to make any decision he likes, but those who oppose Trump shouldn’t fool themselves about the way many voters will interpret a decision like that. If the 81-year-old Biden refuses to participate in debates later this year, many Americans will conclude that it’s because he’s too old and that either he or his staff fears what Biden would say, or how he would appear, over the course of three 90-minute presidential debates. Yes, Biden looked fired up in his most recent State of the Union address, but in the end, all Biden had to do was read off a teleprompter and pause for applause. Debates are much tougher, and the opportunities for gaffes and unflattering moments are plentiful.
You can dress it up into a principled stance, but we all know it's because he's old and can't do it.
— Holden (@Holden114) April 16, 2024
There are six jump cuts in this video that lasts less than a minute! This is the BEST that the White House could do? They couldn’t get the meds in time to jack up old Joe to give an address to camera, so we’ll just hand Grandpa some cue cards to read and try to pass it off as him just being “overwhelmed” with the sheer awesomeness of our military.
Lawyers have been scouring the civil and criminal codes for any basis to sue or prosecute Trump before the upcoming 2024 election. This week will highlight the damage done to New York’s legal system because of this unhinged crusade. They’ve charged him with everything short of ripping a label off a mattress.Just a few weeks ago, another judge imposed a roughly half billion dollar penalty in a case without a single victim who lost a single cent on loans with Trump. (Indeed, bank officials testified they wanted more business with the Trump organization).Now Bragg is bringing a case that has taken years to develop and millions of dollars in litigation costs for all parties. That is all over a crime from before the 2016 election that is a misdemeanor under state law that had already expired under the statute of limitations.
There isn't a lot of confidence in Joe Biden agreeing to debate Donald Trump at this point. Joe Biden can't get through a speech or press conference anymore. He has notecards from staff to remind him what he is doing and the names of the people he is dealing with. The notecards for a press conference include a list of reporters with whom to call on and their photos so Biden can recognize them. Often there are reports that the reporters submitted their questions in advance. That allows the staff to provide answers that allow Biden to just read the answers.
Do White House officials pay electric bills? They strangely keep saying the President’s climate agenda is reducing electric-power rates even as the cost of running your dishwasher is sky-rocketing, as illuminated by the Labor Department’s consumer-price index.The nearby chart shows the average change in electricity prices over the last decade. Electric rates remained relatively flat in the seven years before President Biden took office, rising 5%. Thank cheap natural gas. Yet since January 2021 electricity prices have soared 29.4%—about 50% more than overall inflation.
The 3.5 percent year-over-year increase in the Consumer Price Index — announced on Wednesday — is a reminder that President Biden’s most conspicuous failure has been that he broke the 2 percent ceiling on inflation that had been kept in place for the last 30 years.
A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.
🚨SINCE BIDEN TOOK OFFICE:
— Jacki Kotkiewicz (@jackikotkiewicz) April 10, 2024
Gasoline: 47.8%
Groceries: +21.1%
Eating out: +21.4%
Baby food: +30.5%
Pet food: +23.7%
Rent: +20.9%
Electricity: +28.3%
Natural gas: +26.9%
Used cars: +20.9%
Air fare: +32.7%
Public transportation: +22.2%
Real average weekly earnings: -3.9%
Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.
Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.
The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.
Two weeks ago I had the sad duty to inform you that most, if not all, of the hostages taken by Hamas on Oct. 7 were probably dead. Now, Hamas has confirmed it.
US District Judge Ana Reyes slammed the DOJ for stonewalling Congress on the subpoenas while imprisoning figures like former Trump adviser Peter Navarro for doing the same thing.The Biden administration has blocked the testimony of prosecutors Mark Daly and Jack Morgan, who were involved in an inexplicable decision of the Justice Department to allow major felonies against Hunter Biden to lapse.In prior hearings, IRS whistleblowers testified that they had an agreement on the table to extend the statute of limitations on the crimes, but special counsel David Weiss allowed the period to lapse without any explanation. Since the DOJ was in the midst of plea negotiations, it made no sense that the DOJ would simply kill potential charges.
Foreign-born population growth:
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 4, 2024
Barack Obama: 68,000 per month
Donald Trump: 42,000 per month
Joe Biden: 172,000 per month pic.twitter.com/dugg87pT2Z
The Biden administration banned children from submitting Easter eggs with religious themes for its 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” art contest.The competition, which is part of the White House’s annual Easter Egg Roll, explicitly stipulated that egg designs not feature any “religious symbols” on the Christian holiday.
The tempest over Ms. McDaniel suggests the press is preparing to make the same mistake again. This is bad for the country, but it’s even worse for the press, which still doesn’t understand why it is so mistrusted.
Paying more than the bottom 70% is what Democrats call "not paying their fair share." In any case, Biden's claim about billionaires paying an 8% rate is a lie which he has been repeated for three years despite fact checks from every major news outlet pointing out that this is very misleading. In all, he's made this dishonest claim more than 30 times.
For YEARS you have falsely claimed that Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia. You spent years attacking people who didn't agree with your dangerous conspiracy theory. You can sit down.
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) March 26, 2024
Americans are desperate for a fundamentally different, fairer kind of economy, and Mr. Biden is working to give them one. The urgent challenge, politically, is helping voters understand that.
It's important to keep in mind that if you're someone interested in maintaining Social Security as a functioning program, the real threat isn't from proposed changes but from doing nothing. The trustees that oversee Social Security estimate that benefits will be cut by 23 percent starting in 2033, with further cuts needed in future years, unless policymakers make changes to the program's fundamental math."Virtually every serious person who works on Social Security policy knows the eligibility age must eventually rise higher," Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and expert on the broken math that is pushing America's entitlement programs into a death spiral, told Reason. "That said, partisan reform blueprints only attract partisan demagoguery and poison the well for reform."
Unhappy news for Americans: The United States is no longer among the 20 happiest countries in the world, according to new data from Gallup and its partners.In the newly released 2024 World Happiness Report, the U.S. dropped out of the top 20 on the list for the first time in the report's 12-year history. The U.S. now ranks at No. 23, compared to No. 15 last year.
Q Thanks, Karine. Yeah. When will the President hold another news conference so we can ask a question of him without having helicopter noise or jet noise in the background?MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I don’t have anything to preview — to share. Obviously, the President — the President, as you just say- — as you were just saying, the President takes questions pretty regularly, enjoys having engagement with all of you.I don’t have a press conference to lay out for you at this time.Q But is there — is there talk of one?MS. JEAN-PIERRE: I don’t have anything for you.
Reason: "Seattle Law Mandating Higher Delivery Driver Pay Is a Disaster - Just two weeks after the law went into effect, Seattleites had to contend with $26 coffees and $32 sandwiches."
In other words, while the ordinance theoretically raises driver earnings to over $26 per hour—a number that ironically far exceeds Seattle's $19.97 standard minimum wage—drivers are barely logging any hours as a result of the drastic decrease in demand for food delivery. As one Seattle driver summarized: "It was dead. Demand was dead." A second driver put it more bluntly: "I've got nothin'. I'm not gonna sit here for hours for one frickin' order."
Great job, Seattle. But good intentions, amirite?
All of this has, I believe, encouraged Biden and his officials to stake out a firm position opposing cuts to America’s social safety net — indeed, calling for increased benefits, to be paid for with increased taxes on corporations and high-income individuals.
Because Social Security benefits are tied to the amount of earnings on which taxes are paid, however, some of that increase in revenues would be offset by additional benefits paid to people with earnings above the maximum taxable amount under current law.
The first alternative, which would increase the taxable share of earnings from jobs covered by Social Security to 90 percent, would delay the exhaustion of the combined trust funds by 4 years, until calendar year 2037. The second alternative, which would apply the 12.4 percent payroll tax to earnings over $250,000, would delay the exhaustion of the combined trust funds by 13 years, until calendar year 2046.
Biden has seen no State of the Union poll bump yet. In fact, today's updated approval rating average is a new all-time lowhttps://t.co/hBrpbNmo7Q pic.twitter.com/kDP2Fc4xjK
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris) March 12, 2024
When Hur asked the president about the classified papers in his possession, the president contended that he “had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents.” But Hur, in his prepared testimony for Congress, says: “We also identified other recorded conversations during which Mr. Biden read classified information aloud to his ghostwriter.”
Q Mr. President, why did you share classified information with your ghostwriter?THE PRESIDENT: I did not share classified information. I did not share it.Q With your ghostwriter?THE PRESIDENT: With my ghostwriter, I did not. Guarantee you, I did not. What the —Q But the special counsel said that —THE PRESIDENT: Well, no, they did not say that.Q Okay.THE PRESIDENT: He did not say that.
"During her transcribed interview, Ms. Dehmlow revealed that the same FBI personnel who were warning social media companies about a potential Russian 'hack and leak' operation in the lead-up to the 2020 election knew that the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was not Russian disinformation," the letter reads."After the New York Post published a story based on the contents of the laptop about Biden family influence peddling, the FBI made the institutional decision to refuse to answer direct questions from social media companies about the laptop's authenticity," the letter adds.IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, an IRS agent with years of experience on the Hunter Biden tax case, testified to the House Ways and Means Committee last year that the FBI verified the authenticity of the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop in November 2019.
Let me get this straight. The President wants to use American taxpayer dollars to build a port in Gaza, and we won't even be getting back the six American hostages still being held there.
— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) March 8, 2024
I now understand the meaning of Two State Solution.
The 2 states are Michigan & Minnesota.
The president, 81, made the awkward comment about the Jewish state’s head of government while mingling with lawmakers following his State of the Union address — asking Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) to keep what he said confidential.“I told him, ‘Bibi’ — and don’t repeat this, but [I said] ‘You and I are going to have a come to Jesus—’,” Biden began as an aide rushed over to stop him from saying more, exclaiming “Sir!” and whispering in his ear.“I’m on a hot mic here,” Biden said out loud after the aide conveyed his message, adding sarcastically, “Good. That was good.”
I’m not edumacated on military matters but I would imagine sticking US troops right on the beaches of Gaza to do construction work smack in the middle of a hot Middle East conflict is A PRETTY BAD IDEA JUST AN AWFUL STUPID RECIPE FOR DISASTER BUT OH WELL MICHIGAN MUSLIMS ARE MAD
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) March 7, 2024
Joe Biden is getting desperate, and when people are desperate they do especially stupid things.In a move that should worry everybody, Biden's war on "shrinkflation" and "corporate greed" has him inching toward a regime of price controls.
The wave of shrinkflation came in response to the rise in inflation the country experienced starting in 2021. I am baffled that the president would make such a big deal out of it now. The administration has been trying to fool voters into conflating the fact that inflation has tempered with the idea that prices are basically back to normal. It's not the case. While inflation has declined, the price of food is up by 20 percent on average since February 2021. Chicken and bread are up 25 percent, and rents are still mightily elevated.These higher prices explain why voters continue to express plenty of frustration about the economy despite low unemployment, positive economic growth, and rising wages.
JUST IN: #SCOTUS sets unusual, short-notice opinion release for Monday morning. Appears to signal that ruling on Trump ballot eligibility is looming. Earlier:https://t.co/tWUv8rxpsX
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) March 3, 2024
I'm sticking with my original prediction that this will be an 8-1 decision with always-wrong Sonia Sotomayor beclowning herself again.
If you dig into the crosstabs of the NYT-Siena poll you’ll find that there are a bunch of questions they haven’t yet released the answers to but will (I’m guessing) on subsequent days to keep their poll generating new news. I’m guessing those unreleased numbers have to do with perceptions of Biden and Trump on matters of age, competence, and criminality. And given that the results in this poll dovetail pretty well with the recent NBC News poll released three weeks ago, the age response is likely to be devastating for Biden.
Well, the question is what “we want to do related to speech.” If it involves blacklisting, throttling, deplatforming, and bans, it most certainly does raise questions of censorship. Free speech is now portrayed as an existential threat to the country as opposed to the very thing that defines us as a free people.McQuade captures the theoretical divide over free speech, though she is clearly voicing a view that is increasingly popular among law professors. She advances views of free speech that I have discussed in prior academic writings and the new book as “functionalist.” These views allow for greater trade offs between free speech and overriding social or political priorities.
Q Mr. President — Mr. President, you’re heading to the border on Thursday. Why go to the border now, Mr. President? You’re going on Thursday. Why go now?THE PRESIDENT: I’ve been planning to go Thursday.
Attorney Richard Rice later asked Bradley if he makes a habit of passing on "lies about your friends.""Do you tell lies about your friends? About a case of national importance?" Rice asked."I could have had, I don't know," Bradley responded.
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.”
That’s not the story @AP and your fear or lack of offending Lord know who or complete lack of news judgment of putting in the headline what the story is underscores why Americans' distrust in my profession has plummeted to a whopping 68% in the most recent Gallup survey. https://t.co/TN1bXgSJlD
— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) February 25, 2024
On the menu today: No, it’s not the biggest deal in the world to hear that President Biden now uses notecards when giving remarks and answering questions at his closed-door, high-dollar campaign fundraisers. But considering how rarely the American public gets to hear Biden give off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks of any length and substance in any other venue, it’s an indication that Biden really is notecard- and teleprompter-dependent now. This means the usual advice that the president needs to get out there, interact with voters more, and make the case for himself and his policies is akin to asking him to demonstrate gymnastics or run a marathon. The guy just can’t do it anymore. And the White House would have you believe that he can keep going at it for another four to five years or so.
Golly, I wonder why consumers have negative views about the economy. pic.twitter.com/XuvywfiiT4
— Michael R. Strain (@MichaelRStrain) February 21, 2024
Here's what I'd propose. Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.
They can’t say they simply hadn’t noticed Biden’s yearslong decline. No, that’d make it look as if they are bad at their jobs. Imagine that: a White House reporter who hadn’t noticed until recently that the president of the United States has struggled for his entire presidency, and even before then, to express a coherent thought.They can’t say they ignored the issue for political convenience. That would give the game away.Aha! They can tell someone such as Byers, anonymously of course, that they’ve struggled to cover the issue that everyone else has noticed and asked about since even before 2020 because — wait for it — they are just too damn conscientious.
Here’s the report’s biggest revelation: Biden held on to classified top-secret national-security documents after he left the vice-presidency, and he did it intentionally. This was no accident. Biden had those documents for this specific reason: He believed he had been right on American policy in Afghanistan (and that President Barack Obama had been wrong), and he wanted to paint himself as the visionary hero (and Obama as the heel) in the historical narrative. That’s why Biden shared some of their contents with his ghostwriter — though Hur acknowledges that Biden may have disclosed that classified information inadvertently, citing Biden’s “lapses in attention and vigilance.”Here’s the single most important piece of evidence in Hur’s report: In a recording made by the ghostwriter in February 2017 — a month after Biden left the vice-presidency — Biden says he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” That, folks, is the needle-scratch moment. Up until last week, the party line has essentially been, “Hey, classified documents are strewn all around the White House, a bunch of boxes got moved around, transition is chaotic, documents end up in various places; big mistake, whoops, sorry.” Now we know that’s untrue.
Between the United States and Russia, one country just arbitrarily seized the assets of an oligarch opposed to the regime, and is trying to jail him
— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) February 16, 2024
The other country is Russia
Is there anything that Dementia Joe won't lie about? When I said "things will only get worse for Biden" I meant stuff like this: the Administration will fight against release of the Hur transcripts and it will only look like they're hiding something.
Because they are.
NBC News: "Biden attacked Hur for asking him when Beau died. That didn't happen, sources say."
President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel's report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden "did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died."
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.
The fact that it was Dementia Joe who bought up Beau is very on-brand for Biden who uses his son as a shield whenever he gets caught in a tough situation. The transcripts and/or audio tapes will demonstrate Biden's confusion, therefore they must never see the light of day.
