The Joe Biden Presidency Thread

[swordfish]

https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/bidens-bizarre-ice-cream-joke-in-nashville-shooting-remarks/

WASHINGTON — Not the time, Joe.

President Biden joked Monday that he only showed up to a White House event because he heard there would be ice cream — before addressing the horrific mass shooting that left six dead at a Nashville elementary school hours earlier.

“My name is Joe Biden. I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband,” the 80-year-old president began his remarks at an East Room gathering of women-owned businesses.

“And I eat Jeni’s ice cream — chocolate chip. I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream,” he said.

“By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs,” Biden added at his only scheduled public appearance of the day. “You think I’m kidding? I’m not.”

SF thinks we can all agree that we have a brainless twit for POTUS (there literally can be no debate about this).......But even so, the fact that the room he was addressing erupted into laughter in the wake of such a tragedy says more about who voted for this guy than anything - and that there is no more denying SF's years ago reference to the degradation of society is real....... 

 

[Muda69]

23 hours ago, swordfish said:

- and that there is no more denying SF's years ago reference to the degradation of society is real....... 

 

It sure it. From the latest substack entry by Rod Dreher: 

 

Did you see the shock results from the Wall Street Journal poll this week? Here’s the story accompanying the poll, but these graphs tell the story:

Now, here’s an important caveat: the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini calls the accuracy of these results into question, and explains why. I hope he’s right.

But what if he’s not? The WSJ results show a total collapse in the American spirit. You are looking here at a sketch of Weimar America, a demoralized nation that believes in nothing except money. And yet Washington, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the media, and Woke Capitalism want to export the blessings of American liberty to the rest of the world, or else.

The poll also captures a partisan divide so stark it’s like a vivisection:

If you read the granular poll results — here’s a link to the PDF with those data — you’ll see the surprises keep coming. For example, only one in five Americans has a favorable view of the pronoun thing — but the elites constantly shove them down our throats:

Fewer than one in five believe trans athletes ought to play on the sports team that matches their identity — but the elites keep shoving this down our throats:

Get this: only 15 percent — 15 percent! — support diversity measures that discriminate against people on the basis of race in student admissions. But the elites … you know:

On Woke Capitalism, almost two out of three Americans oppose it:

Eighty percent of those polled say the economy is in “poor” condition, and only 15 percent expect it to improve (these data are in the PDF). Nearly half of Americans are downcast about their financial situation:

Only 28 percent believe that they can improve their material lot in today’s America. And almost four out of five think their kids will be worse off than they are:

Again, I hope that Ruffini is correct, and that these numbers are skewed. If they aren’t, America is in very, very serious trouble.

The good news is that there seems to be a very solid majority of Americans who are sick and tired of wokeness, and are primed to support serious pushback against it. Given the ubiquity of DEI, LGBT, and the rest in the media, you’d think support for it is more widespread than this poll indicates. But if this poll is correct, most people, however personally tolerant, hate this stuff. The elites are talking to themselves. The masses need political and religious leadership that will give voice to its views — and not just voice, but leadership that can act effectively to roll this stuff back. This is why I’m on DeSantis’s side, not Trump’s. Nobody can stoke resentment like Trump, but when he was in power, he got rolled. Nobody is going to roll DeSantis.

That said, the depths of pessimism revealed by this survey suggests that people may not have as much interest in the constructive fightback of DeSantis, but may prefer Trump’s burn-it-all-down approach.

The polarization between Democrats and Republicans is astonishing, and makes me wonder if it’s even possible to put us back together. According to the poll, the Democrats demand more wokeness — the very policies helping to tear America apart. Well, even if we got rid of wokeness, a nation that doesn’t believe in God, or having children, or in itself, is not a nation that is prepared to extend its life. And it is telling that equally few Americans of all political tribes have much interest in “community involvement.” Most of us are bowling alone, and content with that.

So: what does it all mean? Again, I hope Ruffini is correct, and things aren’t as far gone as the WSJ poll indicates. But hoping for methodological error is no excuse for not taking the results seriously as possibly true. Here’s what conclusions I draw from the poll:

1. America as we have known it is dying. We don’t believe in the things that sustains a nation’s life.

2. Americans on the whole hate wokeness, but liberals think it hasn’t gone far enough. The cultural Left, which controls elite institutions, are going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, exacerbating division. Perhaps this Nashville shooting will be a turning point. I woke up this morning in Europe and saw multiple media examples of the Left trying to control the Narrative. Look at this egregious example from the NBC affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky, of all places:

Rod Dreher @roddreher

Hours after 6 Christians murdered by trans shooter, @LEX18News goes to local liberal church to praise its welcome for LGBTs, the *real* victims. Is station implying that Nashville Christians brought this on themselves for being orthodox on LGBT?

lex18.comIn Nashville shooting aftermath, local pastor welcomes LGBTQ+ members in search of supportFor Pastor Matt Falco, the nicest things about his church aren’t the original pews dating to the early 1900s, or the stained glass wind...

7:01 AM ∙ Mar 29, 2023

Think about it: six Christians are murdered by a trans person, their bodies not even cold, but the first instinct of the Kentucky TV journalist is to rush to a liberal church to do a story on the trauma of LGBTs! I have to hope that the reality of six dead Christians, including three nine-year-olds, at the hands of a trans killer, and the way this savagery is being massaged by the media to conform to the woke Narrative, will jar most Americans awake about the decadence and corruption in our leading institutions. It is not going to stop until we make it stop.

3. Am I really patriotic? Do I really believe in having kids? In community involvement? It’s easy for me as a conservative to sneer at the Americans who no longer believe in these things, but how would I have answered had I been polled? I had a dinner conversation earlier this week with a visiting American scholar who works on national security and defense issues. He and I got to talking about the US military. He was telling me the stark and depressing facts about the military recruitment crisis. I told him about my second son’s considering military service, and how I told him I would support his decision whatever it was, but that I hoped he wouldn’t serve.

    

   It’s not (I explained to my dining companion) that I think America is not worth defending. Everybody should want to defend their country against invasion. It’s rather that after Iraq, I don’t trust the US leadership to deploy the armed forces wisely. And I don’t want my kid to be in the woke military and have to choose between obeying his Christian conscience or his commander.

    

   Beyond that, though, I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. What does it mean to be patriotic if that’s true? The evils of Russia and China aren’t any less, nor is the decadence of Europe, but neither do these things erase the chronic diseases of Weimar America. Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.

    

   About having kids, I often note that previous generations had children even thought they face far worse prospects than we do today. I’m glad I had kids, and would do so again. But I can’t really fault young people today for fearing the future in a country that seems to be falling apart, and in which there seem to be no solid values. The collapse of the gender binary is the most frightening thing, because of what it symbolizes about the West’s flight from reality.

    

   About community involvement — what community? What binds us? The elites teach our children to hate their ancestors, to hate their bodies, and, if they’re white, to hate themselves. The ruling class has no loyalty to the interests of their countrymen. Every day the media tell conservative, religious Americans that we are the problem with America — especially if we are white and male and working class. A friend who works in a major UK university is clearing out and moving to the US, saying, “Britain is f-cked.” His basic point is that the UK is governed by people who hate it, and that everybody else is too demoralized to recover. He sees more resources of resistance in the US.

    

   He’s right about that, but still, we Americans have the same problem: elites who hate the country, its history, its traditions, and many of its people, and masses who are too morally and spiritually enervated (by porn, by pot, by materialism, etc) to resist and recover. Most Americans are not conservative, and even many who identify as such are no paragons of moral and spiritual health.

4. The Benedict Option, now more than ever. We cannot go on like this. I believe in mounting political resistance, but I believe it is more important to also mount cultural resistance. The best thing politicians can do is to create space for meaning-giving institutions (families, temples, schools, fellowships, etc) to do their work. We should support strong, sensible candidates, but absolutely not be under the illusion that we can vote our way out of this crisis. Today, the best we traditionally religious people can realistically hope for in the near term is survival. The things I talked about in The Benedict Option are even more relevant today. In 1982, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote the following words. In 2023, they look as if they had been written in neon:

    

   It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

You, reader, need a Benedict Option. We all do. The hour is very late.

 

[swordfish]

1 hour ago, Muda69 said:

It sure it. From the latest substack entry by Rod Dreher: 

 

Did you see the shock results from the Wall Street Journal poll this week? Here’s the story accompanying the poll, but these graphs tell the story:

Now, here’s an important caveat: the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini calls the accuracy of these results into question, and explains why. I hope he’s right.

But what if he’s not? The WSJ results show a total collapse in the American spirit. You are looking here at a sketch of Weimar America, a demoralized nation that believes in nothing except money. And yet Washington, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the media, and Woke Capitalism want to export the blessings of American liberty to the rest of the world, or else.

The poll also captures a partisan divide so stark it’s like a vivisection:

If you read the granular poll results — here’s a link to the PDF with those data — you’ll see the surprises keep coming. For example, only one in five Americans has a favorable view of the pronoun thing — but the elites constantly shove them down our throats:

Fewer than one in five believe trans athletes ought to play on the sports team that matches their identity — but the elites keep shoving this down our throats:

Get this: only 15 percent — 15 percent! — support diversity measures that discriminate against people on the basis of race in student admissions. But the elites … you know:

On Woke Capitalism, almost two out of three Americans oppose it:

Eighty percent of those polled say the economy is in “poor” condition, and only 15 percent expect it to improve (these data are in the PDF). Nearly half of Americans are downcast about their financial situation:

Only 28 percent believe that they can improve their material lot in today’s America. And almost four out of five think their kids will be worse off than they are:

Again, I hope that Ruffini is correct, and that these numbers are skewed. If they aren’t, America is in very, very serious trouble.

The good news is that there seems to be a very solid majority of Americans who are sick and tired of wokeness, and are primed to support serious pushback against it. Given the ubiquity of DEI, LGBT, and the rest in the media, you’d think support for it is more widespread than this poll indicates. But if this poll is correct, most people, however personally tolerant, hate this stuff. The elites are talking to themselves. The masses need political and religious leadership that will give voice to its views — and not just voice, but leadership that can act effectively to roll this stuff back. This is why I’m on DeSantis’s side, not Trump’s. Nobody can stoke resentment like Trump, but when he was in power, he got rolled. Nobody is going to roll DeSantis.

That said, the depths of pessimism revealed by this survey suggests that people may not have as much interest in the constructive fightback of DeSantis, but may prefer Trump’s burn-it-all-down approach.

The polarization between Democrats and Republicans is astonishing, and makes me wonder if it’s even possible to put us back together. According to the poll, the Democrats demand more wokeness — the very policies helping to tear America apart. Well, even if we got rid of wokeness, a nation that doesn’t believe in God, or having children, or in itself, is not a nation that is prepared to extend its life. And it is telling that equally few Americans of all political tribes have much interest in “community involvement.” Most of us are bowling alone, and content with that.

So: what does it all mean? Again, I hope Ruffini is correct, and things aren’t as far gone as the WSJ poll indicates. But hoping for methodological error is no excuse for not taking the results seriously as possibly true. Here’s what conclusions I draw from the poll:

1. America as we have known it is dying. We don’t believe in the things that sustains a nation’s life.

2. Americans on the whole hate wokeness, but liberals think it hasn’t gone far enough. The cultural Left, which controls elite institutions, are going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, exacerbating division. Perhaps this Nashville shooting will be a turning point. I woke up this morning in Europe and saw multiple media examples of the Left trying to control the Narrative. Look at this egregious example from the NBC affiliate in Lexington, Kentucky, of all places:

Rod Dreher @roddreher

Hours after 6 Christians murdered by trans shooter, @LEX18News goes to local liberal church to praise its welcome for LGBTs, the *real* victims. Is station implying that Nashville Christians brought this on themselves for being orthodox on LGBT?

lex18.comIn Nashville shooting aftermath, local pastor welcomes LGBTQ+ members in search of supportFor Pastor Matt Falco, the nicest things about his church aren’t the original pews dating to the early 1900s, or the stained glass wind...

7:01 AM ∙ Mar 29, 2023

Think about it: six Christians are murdered by a trans person, their bodies not even cold, but the first instinct of the Kentucky TV journalist is to rush to a liberal church to do a story on the trauma of LGBTs! I have to hope that the reality of six dead Christians, including three nine-year-olds, at the hands of a trans killer, and the way this savagery is being massaged by the media to conform to the woke Narrative, will jar most Americans awake about the decadence and corruption in our leading institutions. It is not going to stop until we make it stop.

3. Am I really patriotic? Do I really believe in having kids? In community involvement? It’s easy for me as a conservative to sneer at the Americans who no longer believe in these things, but how would I have answered had I been polled? I had a dinner conversation earlier this week with a visiting American scholar who works on national security and defense issues. He and I got to talking about the US military. He was telling me the stark and depressing facts about the military recruitment crisis. I told him about my second son’s considering military service, and how I told him I would support his decision whatever it was, but that I hoped he wouldn’t serve.

    

   It’s not (I explained to my dining companion) that I think America is not worth defending. Everybody should want to defend their country against invasion. It’s rather that after Iraq, I don’t trust the US leadership to deploy the armed forces wisely. And I don’t want my kid to be in the woke military and have to choose between obeying his Christian conscience or his commander.

    

   Beyond that, though, I don’t feel “patriotic” if patriotism means expressing confidence in the country as it is today. Living overseas for the past two years, in a conservative country that’s in America’s ideological crosshairs, has taught me a painful lesson about what my country stands for today, and how it uses its power in the world. “We’re Babylon,” a visiting US pastor said to me recently. He’s right. What does it mean to be patriotic if that’s true? The evils of Russia and China aren’t any less, nor is the decadence of Europe, but neither do these things erase the chronic diseases of Weimar America. Seriously, you have to get out of America for some time to grasp how much cultural influence we have in the world, and how bad that is.

    

   About having kids, I often note that previous generations had children even thought they face far worse prospects than we do today. I’m glad I had kids, and would do so again. But I can’t really fault young people today for fearing the future in a country that seems to be falling apart, and in which there seem to be no solid values. The collapse of the gender binary is the most frightening thing, because of what it symbolizes about the West’s flight from reality.

    

   About community involvement — what community? What binds us? The elites teach our children to hate their ancestors, to hate their bodies, and, if they’re white, to hate themselves. The ruling class has no loyalty to the interests of their countrymen. Every day the media tell conservative, religious Americans that we are the problem with America — especially if we are white and male and working class. A friend who works in a major UK university is clearing out and moving to the US, saying, “Britain is f-cked.” His basic point is that the UK is governed by people who hate it, and that everybody else is too demoralized to recover. He sees more resources of resistance in the US.

    

   He’s right about that, but still, we Americans have the same problem: elites who hate the country, its history, its traditions, and many of its people, and masses who are too morally and spiritually enervated (by porn, by pot, by materialism, etc) to resist and recover. Most Americans are not conservative, and even many who identify as such are no paragons of moral and spiritual health.

4. The Benedict Option, now more than ever. We cannot go on like this. I believe in mounting political resistance, but I believe it is more important to also mount cultural resistance. The best thing politicians can do is to create space for meaning-giving institutions (families, temples, schools, fellowships, etc) to do their work. We should support strong, sensible candidates, but absolutely not be under the illusion that we can vote our way out of this crisis. Today, the best we traditionally religious people can realistically hope for in the near term is survival. The things I talked about in The Benedict Option are even more relevant today. In 1982, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote the following words. In 2023, they look as if they had been written in neon:

    

   It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

You, reader, need a Benedict Option. We all do. The hour is very late.

 

Interesting read for sure.......Morality and civility are certainly under assault......

[swordfish]

The witless wonder strikes again........The epitome of "Partisan" and he thinks its funny.....

No laughing matter: Biden is slammed for cracking a JOKE when asked his views on transgender school shooter's motive

• On Tuesday, the president again took an inappropriate tone when discussing the tragic school shooting in Nashville
• When told that Senator Josh Hawley believes the shooting at a Christian school was a hate crime against Christians, Biden said: 'Well, I probably don't then' 
• Biden was previously criticized for making several jokes about ice cream before addressing the shooting on Monday 

 

 

[swordfish]

[swordfish]

There's a new Federal agency?

https://nypost.com/2023/04/23/vp-harris-says-wrong-name-for-fda-in-interview-about-mifepristone/

Harris mistakenly said the Federal Drug Administration approved the abortion pill mifepristone more than two decades ago — but such an agency doesn’t exist. The Food and Drug Administration is the correct title for the administration also referred to as the FDA, which signed off on the abortion drug.

[swordfish]

[swordfish]

Ol Uncle Joe....Can't remember the last country he visited (last week, btw), his favorite team in the Stanley Cup playoffs this year is the Philadelphia Flyers (not in the playoffs, btw), remembers all his grandchildren's names (except for the one Hunter has trouble claiming) and still wonders where Jackie Walorski is.......

https://nypost.com/2023/04/27/biden-cant-recall-visit-to-ireland-he-took-two-weeks-ago/

The 80-year-old commander-in-chief had difficulty remembering his recent state visit to Ireland Thursday while being grilled by kids during a Take Your Child to Work event at the White House.

“The last country I’ve traveled, I’m trying to think of the last one I was in,” Biden mused to the children of administration staffers and members of the media.

“I’ve been to, met with 89 heads of state so far. So, uh, trying to think where was the last place I was; it’s hard to keep track.”

“Ireland,” a child shouted out, jogging the president’s memory.

“Yeah, you’re right, Ireland. That’s where it was,” he said good-naturedly.

“How’d you know that?”

Biden, with the help of first son Hunter, also took questions from children of US Embassy workers while in Ireland — but hosted no formal news conferences, frustrating members of the White House press corps.

The Ireland exchange was one of a handful Thursday that highlighted the president’s frequent memory lapses, most notably forgetting the death of Congresswoman Jackie Walorski and calling out the Indiana Republican’s name at an event last September.

President Biden snubbed one of his seven grandchildren during a White House event.

Another child at the White House event asked Biden: “Do you watch the Stanley Cup playoffs, and if you do, do you have a favorite team?”

“I did, and I do: the Philadelphia Flyers,” the president answered, apparently unaware that the team did not make the tournament this year.

The commander-in-chief also rattled off the names of grandchildren Naomi, 29, Finnegan, 23, Maisy, 22, Natalie, 18, Robert Hunter Biden II, 17, and Beau Jr., 2, but stopped short of mentioning Navy Joan Roberts, the often-unacknowledged 4-year-old daughter of Hunter and Lunden Roberts, a former stripper.

The president also said he was rooting for the Flyers to win the Stanley Cup, even though the team did not make the playoffs. “And guess what? They’re crazy about me because I pay so much attention to them,” Biden said, getting some laughs from the crowd of parents and children present.

An Arkansas judge ruled Monday that Hunter, 53, who has been staying away from the proceedings of a child support case involving his love child with Lunden, must attend all court hearings going forward.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested last week that money from Hunter’s foreign business deals — which benefited other members of the first family — may have gone to some of the president’s nieces, nephews, and grandchildren.

Roberts is suing Hunter for child support, but deliberations have been slowed by questions about financial records on his abandoned laptop.

 

[Muda69]

Biden Has Added 220 Million Hours of Regulatory Paperwork Since His Inauguration: https://reason.com/2023/05/01/presidential-paperwork/

Quote

From his inauguration to March 24, 2023, President Joe Biden increased the regulatory paperwork obligation by 220 million hours, reports American Action Forum's Dan Goldbeck.

The regulatory paperwork burden under Biden "exceeds the combined total accumulated under Obama and Trump in their opening years," Goldbeck says. If that number seems incomprehensibly large, he notes that it equates to "roughly 25,000 years" of filling out forms and other compliance tasks.

The figures in Goldbeck's charts compare the three presidencies at the same point in their third year and are derived from regulatory notices published by federal agencies in the Federal Register. Final rules have gone into effect after a period of public comment, while final rule costs capture the estimated economic impact of regulations over a multiyear period established by the regulating agencies.

A liberal who loves big government.  Color me shocked.

 

[swordfish]

From my financial advisor - Predicting a (real) recession.....(we already hit one in early 2022)

80 years. This chart shows the dramatic increase in cash and mutual fund assets caused by the Covid related federal spending. The growth in money supply during Covid was 2.5 times of what was experienced in the 70s and early 80s. As you can see, the growth in m2 supply caused double digit inflation 50 years ago and interest rates north of 20%. Back then the fed was slow to stop the growth of the M2 money supply and inflation persisted. This go around the Fed is attempting to bring a rapid halt in the M2 growth. This chart shows the dramatic decrease in growth from plus 25% in 2021 to a decrease in supply currently. People with savings are now seeing those balances decrease due to inflation and they are incurring increases in debt to maintain lifestyle. People without savings are incurring debt to stay afloat or are struggling to make ends meet. I am not sure how this does not end up in a recession!

 

 

 

[Muda69]

3 hours ago, swordfish said:

From my financial advisor - Predicting a (real) recession.....(we already hit one in early 2022)

80 years. This chart shows the dramatic increase in cash and mutual fund assets caused by the Covid related federal spending. The growth in money supply during Covid was 2.5 times of what was experienced in the 70s and early 80s. As you can see, the growth in m2 supply caused double digit inflation 50 years ago and interest rates north of 20%. Back then the fed was slow to stop the growth of the M2 money supply and inflation persisted. This go around the Fed is attempting to bring a rapid halt in the M2 growth. This chart shows the dramatic decrease in growth from plus 25% in 2021 to a decrease in supply currently. People with savings are now seeing those balances decrease due to inflation and they are incurring increases in debt to maintain lifestyle. People without savings are incurring debt to stay afloat or are struggling to make ends meet. I am not sure how this does not end up in a recession!

 

 

 

Yep.  Thanks Biden. 

At the same time the assessed valuation the government puts on my modest home, which has stayed within about $5k of what I paid for it over 20 years ago  has now somehow mysteriously increased in value over the last 2 years by over $55,000.  

This has of course the intended intention of greatly increasing my property tax burden so the city of Frankfort can pay for a new park, a new swimming pool, err excuse me aquatics center,  and a new police station.  And also tack on the bill coming due for the $30 million dollar renovation to Frankfort High School a few years ago.   Yet the city politicians can crow "we didn't raise the tax rates to pay for all this".   All I see is collusion between the city government and the county government, who is in charge of the property assessments.

 

[swordfish]

So the CIA is now complicit in writing a politically based letter to mislead the public in the last Presidential election per sworn testimony and evidentiary proof.  (IMHO) If the CIA was this strategically invested in Bidens' election that they covertly mislead the public prior to the election, there is no doubt in my mind they would have no problem utilizing resources in blue states to "stuff" enough ballot boxes to push Biden over the top.  (Also IMHO) - I still do not believe for a second that the current President was able to get the most votes of any President ever in the history of the country.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/14/mike-morell-cant-clean-up-this-dirty-letter-that-was-meant-to-secure-bidens-2020-win/

Now we know that the CIA conspired with former acting director Mike Morell and the Biden campaign to produce a letter falsely claiming that emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation — and solicited signatures from at least one former intelligence official.

But there is much more to come from the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees on the origins of that “Dirty 51” letter cooked up by five former CIA directors and 46 fellow spooks to discredit The Post’s reporting on the laptop.

John Brennan, the Obama-era CIA chief, admitted to House investigators in a four-hour closed-door deposition last week that the letter was “political.”

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, is slated to appear next week.

Brennan and Clapper also were involved in the Hillary Clinton campaign’s Russia hoax against Donald Trump and have lied to Congress previously without sanction, but it is unlikely the new breed of Republicans conducting these investigations will be as lenient as their predecessors. 

Why does the letter matter? Because it was crucial to saving Biden’s skin to deny that he had met with his son Hunter’s Ukrainian paymaster Vadym Pozharskyi while he was VP, as The Post reported on Oct. 14, 2020, citing evidence from the laptop.

The Biden campaign knew that the laptop was a serious political liability.  Michael Morell testified to the committees that he had no intention of drafting the statement until then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken called him to discuss The Post’s story.

Despite their best efforts, with the help of the FBI, Big Tech and a complicit media, to bury it, here was The Post with the story on its front page three weeks before the election.

The letter was a domestic disinformation operation by the CIA to deceive the American people and help Joe Biden win the 2020 election. 

No surprise that last week, Democrats on the committees ran interference for the 51 deceitful spooks, issuing a dissenting statement to combat the majority report. 

 

Every sentence is false or misleading, so here goes a partial fact-check:

• Dems: Former CIA director Michael Morell drafted the letter because he had serious concerns about the Russians apparently once again interfering in our elections. NOPE. Morell testified to the committees that he had no intention of drafting the statement until then-Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken, now secretary of state, called him on Oct. 17, 2020, to discuss The Post’s story and later emailed him a USA Today article alleging the FBI was “potentially” investigating if it was Russian disinformation. Morell testified that Blinken’s call “absolutely” triggered his decision to draft the letter. Former CIA officer Marc Polymeropoulos, who helped concoct the letter, testified to the committees: “Morell said that to me, that someone from kind of the Biden world had asked for” the letter. Morell admitted the letter was designed to “help Vice President Biden” in the upcoming presidential debate by giving him a “talking point to push back on [President] Trump on this issue.” Why did he want to give candidate Biden a talking point? “Because I wanted him to win the election.” Morell was hoping to be chosen by Biden as CIA director. 
• Dems: Morell testified that he was the sole person in contact with the CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB) about getting the letter approved. If others working on the letter had contacted the PCRB, he would have known. RED HERRING. Nobody said “others working on the letter” had contacted the PCRB. Former CIA analyst David Cariens told the committees that a CIA employee from the PCRB had contacted him about his own memoir and, during the call, had solicited his signature for Morell’s letter. Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo said last week that “If there was one [active duty CIA employee involved], there are likely to be others too … That’s politics inside the intelligence community in the most indecent, irresponsible way, and is really dangerous for our democracy.”
• Dems: Cariens says he heard about the letter via a phone call with the PCRB. But there is substantial reason to question Cariens’ recollection of what happened. For example, Polymeropoulos testified that, based on his “70 or 80” interactions with the PCRB, he has never known it to communicate anything via phone. DECEPTIVE. Cariens has not withdrawn his testimony, and there is no reason to question his recollection. “When the person in charge of reviewing the book called to say it was approved with no changes, I was told about the draft letter,” he told the committees. “The person asked me if I would be willing to sign.” Polymeropoulos was Morell’s willing accomplice, so he is not impartial.
• Dems: Former CIA officer Kristin Wood produced the email in which Cariens agreed to join the letter. Cariens received the same email as every other signatory and signed on eight minutes later. His response says nothing about the PCRB. IRRELEVANT. Even if Cariens also was approached by others to sign the letter, that does not negate the fact that a serving CIA employee asked him to sign it first. Morell also told Wood, who was helping garner signatures: “The more former intelligence officers the better. Campaign will be thrilled.”

Every one of those 51 intelligence officials knew the laptop was real and was not Russian disinformation.

Brennan and others in the CIA must also have known about Hunter’s risky behavior overseas while his father was VP.

They surely knew the FBI had had his laptop since December 2019. 

Joe Biden knew, too

Not just the 51, but Joe Biden knew he was lying to the American public. He knew it was his son’s laptop and he knew The Post was reporting the truth.

That’s why he went into hiding the day we published and sent out his campaign spokespeople to lie on his behalf.

On the morning of Oct. 19, 2020, while Morell was gathering signatures, and while the CIA was vetting the letter, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe made a public declaration that The Post’s story was not Russian disinformation. 

He rebuked Adam Schiff, then-chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who had been all over the media for days claiming that the intelligence community believed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Kremlin plot.

“Let me be clear,” Ratcliffe said. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there’s no intelligence that supports that.”

Within 24 hours, the Department of Justice and the FBI confirmed his declaration. 

The next day, Morell wrote an email to his co-signatories to congratulate them for getting the letter published. 

“I just want to thank everyone for signing the letter on the Hunter Biden emails,” he wrote. “I think this is the most important election since 1860 and 1864 when the very existence of the country was on the ballot. Now, it is our democracy and the Constitution that are on the ballot. We all, of course, took an oath to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ the Constitution. I think all of you did that yesterday by signing this letter.” 

This was the most dangerous delusion of all.

[swordfish]

Dude (who claims to have the goods on the Bidens) is still missing......

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-739675

Israeli professor Gal Luft, who is wanted by US authorities for arms dealing, has gone missing in Cyprus after a Larnaca court had released him on bail, Cypriot website Philenews reported on Wednesday.

 

Luft had been arrested at Larnaca International Airport, in southern Cyprus, after Interpol issued an arrest warrant against him on suspicion of arms trafficking to Libya and China. He was then slated for extradition to the United States.

 

Luft released on bail

The Larnaca District Court released him while deliberating on the US extradition request after it ordered him to pay €150,000 as a guarantee, to put up another €250,000 with a guarantor, and to present himself at the central police station of Paphos, where he lived at the time, at regular intervals.

 

 

On March 28, Luft did not appear at the Paphos police station as required. On the same day, his lawyer declared Luft a missing person and expressed concern for his client's life.

 

Luft's abandoned vehicle was discovered a day later, and according to Philenews' sources, Cypriot police are considering the possibility that Luft has left the country entirely.

Since Luft did not appear for his court date on April 3, the €400,000 he put up as a guarantee has been frozen.

 

Larnaca police spokesperson Haris Hadjiyiasemi stated that another European and international arrest warrant was issued against him, according to the Cyprus Mail.

 

Luft denied all accusations

Luft had denied the accusations leveled against him, affirming that he has "never been an arms dealer" and further claiming that the US Justice Department is "trying to bury me to protect [US President Joe] Biden" and his family.

 

Luft, an author and an energy security and diplomatic expert, serves as the co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), a think tank focused on energy, security and economic trends, as per its website.

 

He has been publicly critical of American foreign policy, as well as the Biden administration as a whole, in the past. In a 2021 Beijing summit, titled 'International Forum on Democracy: the Shared Human Values,' Luft accused the Biden administration's "commitment to democracy going only as far as its interests allow." 

 

[Muda69]

[swordfish]

On 5/24/2023 at 1:50 PM, swordfish said:

Dude (who claims to have the goods on the Bidens) is still missing......

https://www.jpost.com/international/article-739675

Israeli professor Gal Luft, who is wanted by US authorities for arms dealing, has gone missing in Cyprus after a Larnaca court had released him on bail, Cypriot website Philenews reported on Wednesday.

 

Luft had been arrested at Larnaca International Airport, in southern Cyprus, after Interpol issued an arrest warrant against him on suspicion of arms trafficking to Libya and China. He was then slated for extradition to the United States.

 

Luft released on bail

The Larnaca District Court released him while deliberating on the US extradition request after it ordered him to pay €150,000 as a guarantee, to put up another €250,000 with a guarantor, and to present himself at the central police station of Paphos, where he lived at the time, at regular intervals.

 

 

On March 28, Luft did not appear at the Paphos police station as required. On the same day, his lawyer declared Luft a missing person and expressed concern for his client's life.

 

Luft's abandoned vehicle was discovered a day later, and according to Philenews' sources, Cypriot police are considering the possibility that Luft has left the country entirely.

Since Luft did not appear for his court date on April 3, the €400,000 he put up as a guarantee has been frozen.

 

Larnaca police spokesperson Haris Hadjiyiasemi stated that another European and international arrest warrant was issued against him, according to the Cyprus Mail.

 

Luft denied all accusations

Luft had denied the accusations leveled against him, affirming that he has "never been an arms dealer" and further claiming that the US Justice Department is "trying to bury me to protect [US President Joe] Biden" and his family.

 

Luft, an author and an energy security and diplomatic expert, serves as the co-director of the Washington-based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security (IAGS), a think tank focused on energy, security and economic trends, as per its website.

 

He has been publicly critical of American foreign policy, as well as the Biden administration as a whole, in the past. In a 2021 Beijing summit, titled 'International Forum on Democracy: the Shared Human Values,' Luft accused the Biden administration's "commitment to democracy going only as far as its interests allow." 

 

He has turned up - in an undisclosed location, hidin from the Bidens......

https://nypost.com/2023/05/31/missing-biden-family-corruption-probe-witness-gal-luft-speaks-out-living-as-fugitive-in-undisclosed-location/

Gal Luft, the “missing” witness in the House Oversight Committee’s Biden family corruption investigation, has told The Post he is alive and living as a fugitive in an undisclosed location.

The former Israeli Defense Force colonel vanished from Cyprus last month while on bail awaiting extradition to the US on seven charges.

He denies the allegations, which include five charges relating to the Arms Export Control Act of conspiring to sell Chinese products to the United rab Emirates, Kenya and Libya, as well as a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and of making a false statement.

Luft claims he was forced to skip bail because he is the victim of a political persecution by the US to protect Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and brother Jim.

“The chances of me getting a fair trial in Washington are virtually zero,” he said in a call from an undisclosed foreign country, explaining why he skipped bail. “I had to do what I had to do.”

[swordfish]

Biden's House of Cards?

[temptation]

“Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the war in Iraq.”

[Impartial_Observer]

44 minutes ago, temptation said:

“Vladimir Putin is clearly losing the war in Iraq.”

His gaffs used to be funny, anymore they’re just sad. 

[Bobref]

19 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

His gaffs used to be funny, anymore they’re just sad. 

They’d be funny if he were the mayor of Podunk, USA. As the “leader of the free world,” not so much.

[temptation]

38 minutes ago, Bobref said:

They’d be funny if he were the mayor of Podunk, USA. As the “leader of the free world,” not so much.

Wait, presidential gaffes were hilarious from 2016-2020 right?

What happened?

Edited June 28, 2023 by temptation

[Bobref]

16 minutes ago, temptation said:

Wait, presidential gaffes were hilarious from 2016-2020 right?

What happened?

Sure, funny at first. But when they continue with such frequency it gets old. Then it gets scary.

[temptation]

1 hour ago, Bobref said:

Sure, funny at first. But when they continue with such frequency it gets old. Then it gets scary.

Maybe for you.  SNL and other media outlets had (and continue to have) a field day with 45.

[Bobref]

57 minutes ago, temptation said:

Maybe for you.  SNL and other media outlets had (and continue to have) a field day with 45.

Both can be true.

[temptation]

1 hour ago, Bobref said:

Both can be true.

Don got the “watch this idiot” treatment while Joey gets the “aww, what a poor grandpa” treatment.

It’s pretty embarrassing.

[swordfish]

Hmmm - So, when did Russia get into a war with Iraq?  Was ISF sleeping?

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-putin-losing-war-iraq-ukraine-latest-gaffe/story?id=100451751

Twice in 24 hours President Joe Biden misspoke when discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, referring to it instead as the war "in Iraq."

The first apparent gaffe occurred Tuesday when Biden was courting Democratic donors at a fundraiser in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

"Think about this: If anybody told you -- and my staff wasn't so sure, either -- that we'd be able to bring all of Europe together in the onslaught on Iraq and get NATO to be completely united, I think they would have told you it's not likely," Biden said. "The one thing Putin counted on was being able to split NATO."

The second mistake happened Wednesday as Biden departed Washington for Chicago, where he delivered a major speech on his economic philosophy. On the South Lawn, Biden was asked about whether Russia's Vladimir Putin is weakened after a short-lived mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The rebellion, in which Prigozhin's armed forces marched toward Moscow, represented the most significant risk to Putin's authority in his decades in power.

"It's hard to tell, but [Putin's] clearly losing the war in Iraq, losing the war at home. And he has become a bit of a pariah around the world," Biden told reporters.

The White House has not addressed Biden's slips.

President Joe Biden arrives at O'Hare International Airport, June 28, 2023, in Chicago.

Evan Vucci/AP

Biden's long been prone to such gaffes verbal blunders, even predating his presidency.

Biden's critics and Republicans have often seized on the miscues as an opening to criticize his age and question his fitness for office.

At 80, Biden is the oldest sitting president in history and would be 82 if reelected and sworn in for a second term. Former President Donald Trump, the early Republican front-runner, just turned 77 and would be 79 at the time of his swearing-in were he to win the general election.

As he's faced scrutiny about his health and age after announcing his reelection campaign, Biden's often responded with a common refrain: "Watch me."

Biden previously told ABC News he took a "hard look" at his age himself when weighing whether to run for reelection and respects Americans doing the same.

"I took a hard look at it before I decided to run, and I feel good," Biden told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce in April. "I feel excited about the prospects, and I think we're on the verge of really turning the corner in a way we haven't in a long time."