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The Joe Biden Presidency Thread


swordfish

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Since the Trump administration's efforts to date have fallen short of proving the fraud his team is alleging, the time to start a legitimate discussion of the apparent new administration is upon us. (IMHO) 

To date Biden's picks have been primarily aimed at women and people of color.  In light of the diversity he is aiming for, I was curious where the former (white male, BUT gay) Mayor of South Bend was going to wind up.  (You will remember my main prediction that he was merely aiming at a seat at the Democrat table)  First hint:

https://www.axios.com/pete-buttigieg-china-ambassador-biden-80aa9cc5-35a2-4205-836a-ca11d8af8f07.html

President-elect Joe Biden is considering a high-profile ambassadorship for Pete Buttigieg, possibly sending him to China, people familiar with the matter tell Axios.

Why it matters: The 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, whom Biden has compared to his late son, Beau, played a key role in Biden's nomination. Letting him deepen his foreign policy chops could boost Buttigieg's future, since many inside the Democratic Party believe his return as a presidential candidate is a matter of when, not if.

  • Buttigieg electrified donors and rocketed to the top of the party, winning the most delegates in the Iowa caucuses earlier this year before dropping out to consolidate moderates' support around Biden.
  • But finding a Cabinet position for him has been a challenge as the former VP focuses on nominating women and people of color to high-level posts.
  • China isn’t the only foreign post where Buttigieg, a polyglot, could end up — and his name remains under discussion for some domestic leadership positions as well.

The intrigue: The Beijing post has often gone to experienced politicians, toward the middle or end of their careers, as a way to confer respect to the Chinese.

  • A Buttigieg nomination would invert that model and give the Chinese an opportunity to get to know a potential future president. That happened with George H.W. Bush in 1974, when President Ford appointed him to the U.S. liaison office in Beijing.
  • Bush was 50 at that time; Buttigieg, if confirmed by the Senate, would be 39.
  • The U.S. relationship with China will remain deeply consequential and complex.

Behind the scenes: Biden passed over Buttigieg, an Afghan war vet, to be his ambassador to the United Nations, the job said to be Buttigieg's top choice.

  • Axios reports that initial conversations over leading the Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t firm up, while Buttigieg's name is still mentioned among those under consideration for other domestic posts, including Transportation or Commerce.
  • But he has signaled to the transition team that he’s most interested in the foreign policy or national security realm, sources tell Axios.

Between the lines: Some of Buttigieg’s backers see a political upside to a domestic Cabinet role in which he can build his relationship with Black voters, who largely rejected his candidacy.

  • There’s also concern he could be left out of the Biden administration's starting lineup altogether, despite having been one of Biden’s first rivals to endorse him after the South Carolina primary.
  • At the time, Biden said of Buttigieg: "I don't think I've ever done this before, but he reminds me of my son Beau. I know that may not mean much to most people, but, to me, it's the highest compliment I can give any man or woman."
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https://www.953mnc.com/2020/12/15/former-mayor-pete-buttigieg-to-serve-as-bidens-transportation-secretary/?fbclid=IwAR1ih7pSQguyPwUX4La-mL0C5hL33Cx-iK6AN2CQpH1QWaWCB1OmTiuo2mM

The architect of South Bend’s Smart Streets will reportedly be the next U.S. Secretary of Transportation.

Reports Tuesday afternoon said President-elect Biden will nominate the former South Bend Mayor and presidential challenger to be the first Senate-confirmed LGBTQ Cabinet Secretary, if his nomination passes through the chamber.

Buttigieg is widely seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, and a cabinet post at this level would add to a resume that many said lacked experience during the campaign.

Mayor Pete was mentioned early this week as a leading candidate for the Transportation job after speculation that he was being considered for several other posts, including UN Ambassador, Commerce Secretary, and Ambassador to China.

The landing spot for Mayor Pete?   They just love the round-a-bouts in St. Joe County......

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Joe Biden Won’t Close Guantanamo Bay, But He Should: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/joe-biden-wont-close-guantanamo-bay-but-he-should/

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There’s been buzz this week as to the possibility of Joe Biden closing the Guantanamo Bay prison, but color me skeptical. It’s true that Biden said on the campaign trail that he supports shuttering Gitmo. It’s also true that at least one of the detention center’s camps is essentially falling apart, flooding with sewage, power flickering on and off—which would give him the perfect pretext. Still, Biden will enter office facing a pandemic, an economic downturn, and civil unrest. And if Barack Obama, the constitutional law professor, couldn’t at last pull the plug on Gitmo, is the Senate’s former Irish cop really going to do any better?

Again, color me skeptical.

There are currently 40 prisoners remaining at America’s most notorious prison. Of those, nine have either been charged with or convicted of war crimes, while six have been approved for release but stuck in limbo thanks to Donald Trump’s inaction. Biden could presumably take immediate action to transfer the six to other countries, though that might prove more difficult than it seems. Potential host nations can prove reluctant, and the Pentagon doesn’t like to give them much information on detainees, lest it expose its own culpability in indefinite detentions.

Then there are the other 25 inmates, not charged with any crime but deemed too dangerous by the military to discharge. On rare occasion, one of these men will be approved for release by Guantanamo’s Periodic Review Board, a kind of Gitmo parole board. This happened just last week to Said Salih Said Nashir, a Yemeni man and Gitmo “forever prisoner” who had been held there for more than 18 years (you thought your Christmas was shaping up well). But for most of these men, that’s too much to hope for. They remain stranded in legal limbo, beyond both national and international law, on the part of the map with the squiggly waves that reads “Monsters Be Here.”

Why can’t these men receive justice? Technically those at Guantanamo Bay are subject to military commissions, which were established in 2009 after the Supreme Court ruled a year prior that the tribunals in place at the time were unconstitutional because they deprived detainees of habeas corpus. Yet there’s a backstop in this allegedly more just system, as Julian Borger reports at The Guardian:

The military commission system has been an abject failure in delivering justice. The five defendants accused of playing a role in the 9/11 attacks, including their alleged mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are still in pre-trial hearings more than 12 years after being charged. The process is primarily stuck on the admissibility of testimony the defendants provided after being tortured at CIA black sites.

Ain’t that grand? The United States tortures inmates at illegal prisons overseas. The unreliable information they obtain is then used to…keep inmates trapped in another illegal prison overseas! Speaking of torture, the FBI back in 2004 investigated whether anyone employed by the Bureau had witnessed any “aggressive mistreatment” of detainees at Gitmo. Nine personnel admitted that they had, detailing instances of prisoners being threatened with dogs and forced to stand in uncomfortable positions until they wetted and soiled themselves. (Thankfully the military later clarified that it didn’t consider any of this to be torture.)

Such is the miscarriage of justice—better call it an abortion, as Christopher Hitchens used to say—that is Guantanamo Bay. No less a sandals-wearing peacenik than George W. Bush began to wind down the prison, transferring 500 prisoners away from Gitmo out of a total population of 780. Barack Obama continued the releases and signed an executive order during the first week of his presidency calling for Gitmo to be closed. Alas he ran into snags: judicial complications, difficulties resettling the inmates, resistance from Republicans in Congress. Then came Donald Trump, who promised of Gitmo that he would “load it up with some bad dudes,” the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure approach to extrajudicial detainments. Instead he did nothing and the prison remained in stasis for another four years.

Now enter Joe Biden. The arguments for closing Gitmo have been made so many times they almost don’t seem worth repeating: our regular justice system can handle the trials; our regular prison system can handle the convicted; no one has ever escaped from a federal supermax prison including El Chapo; how can we chide Bashar al-Assad for vanishing people into prisons indefinitely when we do the same thing? Dick Cheney’s Heffalumps-and-Woozles trips to the war on terror “dark side” notwithstanding, there is no good reason to keep Gitmo open. If Joe Biden wants to restore the American dream, he should start by lancing the country’s most gangrenous sore.

Agreed.  Let's see if Mr. Biden has the courage to do so.

 

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Jill Biden’s Doctorate Is Garbage Because Her Dissertation Is Garbage

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/jill-bidens-doctorate-is-garbage-because-her-dissertation-is-garbage/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=top-stories&utm_term=first

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You can tell someone is smarting from an inferiority complex when he insists on being addressed as “Dr.” on the basis of holding an academic doctorate rather than being a physician. Ph.D. holders who have genuine accomplishments don’t make you call them “Doctor,” which is why you never hear about “Dr. Paul Krugman” and “Dr. George Will.” None of the professors I knew at Yale, even the ones who were eminent in their fields, insisted on the title, and I think most of them would have scoffed if someone had addressed them as “Dr.” The only reason you ever hear the phrase “Dr. Henry Kissinger” is that Kissy grew up in title-mad, airs-and-graces Germany, where people are awed rather than dismissive even if you insist on a triple-serving title (“Herr Professor Doktor”).

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, ‘I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.’ That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,” Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper. Mrs. Biden could have turned in a quarter-a**ed excuse for a magazine article written at the level of Simple English Wikipedia and been heartily congratulated by the university for her towering mastery. Which is exactly what happened.

Jill Biden’s dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge. It is not a demonstration of expertise in its specific topic or its broad field. It is a gasping, wheezing, frail little Disney forest creature that begs you to notice the effort it makes to be the thing it is imitating while failing so pathetically that any witnesses to its ineptitude must feel compelled, out of manners alone, to drag it to the nearest podium and give it a participation trophy. Which is more or less what an Ed.D. is. It’s a degree that only deeply unimpressive people feel confers the honorific of “Doctor.” People who are actually smart understand that being in possession of a credential is no proof of intelligence.

My friends, I have read this document in its entirety and it is so equally lacking in rhetorical force, boldness of conception, and original research that it amounts to a triple null set, a vacuum inside a blank inside an abyss. If Ingmar Bergman were alive and hired to make a film about this paper, he would say, “I can’t do it, there’s so much emptiness even I cannot grasp it,” and it would sound so much worse in Swedish that suicide hotlines would have to hire extra staff. Gene Simmons has a better claim to be a Doctor of Love than Jill Biden to be a Doctor of Education; after all, Simmons has spent a lifetime demonstrating mastery of his field. As for Biden, she has spent a lot of time teaching remedial English to slow learners in community colleges. Which is like being a rock musician who’s in a bar band. That plays covers. At mixers. Held in assisted-living facilities. Mrs. Biden’s dissertation emits so much noxious methane the EPA should regulate it, Greta Thunberg should denounce it, and Hollywood celebrities should hold a telethon to draw awareness to its dangers.

As Joe Biden has frankly noted, Mrs. Biden sought the Dr. honorific to rebuild her amour propre. Much of the press plays along, addressing Jill Biden as “Dr. Biden” even when actual medical doctors are referred to without the honorific if they are not currently practicing. Eminent pediatric neurosurgeon and HUD secretary Ben Carson is now “Mr. Carson” to the New York Times, but the same paper refers to Mrs. Biden as “Dr. Biden.” This practice appears to contradict the Times’ style guide, which explains that the “Dr.” title is used for non-physicians “only if it is germane to the holder’s primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research).”

Mrs. Biden until recently taught English composition at NoVa, a small community college in Northern Virginia. To justify addressing her as “Dr.” would require a generous view of what constitutes an “academic,” and judging by the writing skills evinced by her students (“She very bad teacher and it is hard to pass class. I RECOMMEND NOT TAKE THIS PROFESSOR”), they emerged from her tutelage lacking mastery of even very basic grammar. As for the contents of the dissertation, which she cobbled together from a few secondary sources and some vapid interviews and questionnaires she sent around at the campus where she worked before her husband became vice president, Delaware Technical Community College, I’ll go over them in detail in my next column.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Cleaning Up The Leftovers From Biden’s Last Bout Of Leadership: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/cleaning-up-the-leftovers-in-iraq-from-bidens-last-bout-of-leadership/

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As Trump leaves office the only president to have not started a new war since WWII—and Joe Biden, who supported so many of America’s wars, including (vice-) presiding over the second and third Iraq Wars, heads into office—the talk is again what should be the most terrifying words anyone outside the U.S. could hear: More American Leadership. Thing is, we haven’t cleaned up the leftovers from the last bout of leadership yet.

President-Elect Biden pulls no punches about how he feels about Trump’s lack of war, saying “Trump has abdicated American leadership in mobilizing collective action to meet new threats. This is the time to tap the strength and audacity that took us to victory in two world wars and brought down the Iron Curtain.” His SecState-nominee Antony Blinken used the word “leadership” in a speech 16 times. Biden himself wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why America Must Lead Again.” Introducing his national security nominees, Biden said “America is back, ready to lead the world.”

 

Let there be no doubt, in foreign policy terms “leadership” is the bipartisan and benign euphemism for America First nationalism. And that usually means some sort of war. Biden already has his warriors in place from the Obama years: Bloody Susan Rice, Blinken at State, Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense. There will be others filling in the mid ranks as those principals call in their former deputies, who call theirs.

The problem with America’s leadership spurts is that they are often left uncompleted. They are played for U.S. domestic political consumption and leave behind a mess someone else has to clean up when politics shift. Worst of all, no one in America seems to ask those overseas who are about to be freed, liberated, encouraged to revolt, or otherwise enlightened by the arrival of the American Empire if they indeed want any leadership today.

So maybe before spewing out any new leadership, Biden could start by cleaning up some of the leadership he and others left behind. Start with Iraq.

Quick, Jeopardy-style, when did the Iraq War end? Correct answer of course is “What is never.” America wrecked the place from the air in 1991, then invaded by land in 2003. Those American troops mostly left in 2010, then returned in 2014, and today loiter like dropouts in the high school parking lot in unknown but relatively small numbers. The American Embassy in Iraq, physically still the size of the Vatican and once the largest embassy in the world in diplomatic headcount, sits mostly empty with a security guard-to-diplomat ratio that would embarrass any Twitter warrior.

You would wish that was all, but the horrors of the Iraq Wars are such that even bodies already buried find their way to the surface. Among the many U.S. atrocities few today know about (Google “Haditha Massacre,” “Mahmudiyah rape,” “Abu Ghraib torture”) loom the Nisour Square murders.

On a hot as hell September 16, 2007, Blackwater mercenaries hired by the State Department as security killed 17 Iraqi civilians—including two children—and injured 20 in Nisour Square, central Baghdad. The U.S. lied and prevaricated for years, until finally the truth slithered out that none of the Iraqis were armed, the Blackwater guys panicked, and their so-called defensive fire was beyond any legitimate rule of war.

The State Department tried to intervene, allowing the defendants to claim State’s own Diplomatic Security officers had offered them on-the-street immunity in return for later recanted testimony (Nisour Square wasn’t the only time State lied to cover for Blackwater). It took seven years until a U.S. court convicted four Blackwater employees. All four were pardoned by Trump in December 2020.

“That was years ago” say many of the same Americans willing to connect a police shooting today to the first slaves arriving on this continent in 1619. Though the average American might vaguely remember something bad happened with Blackwater, every Iraqi knows what Nisour Square stands for: American invasion, false promises of freedom, arrogant use of power. The same way Vietnamese know My Lai and thousands of other such incidents whose names never made it into the American press. Or perhaps how the remaining scraps of the Lakota people still reference Wounded Knee. No reckoning allowed save the marvelous sleight of hand of America’s fragile memory.

I’ve been to Nisour Square. It is a giant roundabout, a confusing place made worse by the Iraqi practice of driving with total disregard for traffic laws if not physics and, at the time, the American convoy practice of never stopping for any reason. The place smells of diesel fuel and the cheap gas the old Iraqi cars ran off. There’s a perpetual blue-gray haze. It is so noisy most people would not have been aware of the attack, at least until Blackwater started using grenades against unarmed civilians.

At the very beginning of my Iraq tour with the State Department, Blackwater provided my security. They were bullies. They were sloppy with their weapons. You could practically get a contact high off the steroids they used. Count on them to wear the most expensive sunglasses and the most unnecessary gear (gold man bracelets, tactical hair gel), Aryan and dudely. In my book I called them “a frat house with guns.” It is easy to imagine how it all happened.

The Trump pardon of Blackwater personnel was a grotesque mistake Biden will shrug off as if he had nothing to do with it. But the absolute lack of focus on what put those Blackwater killers and their State Department charges in Nisour Square in the first place—the lust to exert some American Leadership and reform the MidEast—assures it will happen again. The rest of the world knew this was all wrong long before Trump. Does Biden?

Biden’s foreign policy does not start at zero on Day One. All the good American leadership failed to do lingers. The infrastructure damage from Iraq War I keeps water and sewage resources to third world standards. The Iranian-installed government which took over after the chaos of Iraq War II (2003-2010) remains in power. The anti-ISIS War III campaign of 2014 created tens of thousands of internal refugees in Iraq. They are mostly Sunnis the majority-Shia government generically blames for ISIS’ initial success, and many of them are about to die.

Years after the destruction of ISIS, at least one million Sunni civilians remain in government-run displacement camps. Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, backed by Tehran, has made shutting the camps a priority. Initial closures already left more than 100,000 people homeless as winter comes and the pandemic continues.

The Iraqi government plans to soon close the remaining camps and forcibly return the Sunnis to their villages. It will be a bloodbath. In many cases the places they came from still resemble the ruins of Dresden; there physically are no homes. Other Sunnis already know their Shia neighbors took what property they once held and have nothing to return to. The worst off face retribution for siding with ISIS. Memories are long in the Middle East. Revenge reaches across generations, blood for blood. The best scenario awaiting a few is to become a permanent underclass ripe for exploitation by whatever group replaces ISIS, which replaced Al Qaeda, because across three wars the U.S. never resolved the core issues in Iraq and just made them worse.

The Obama-Trump leadership strategy was medieval: kill people until there was no Sunni-supported Islamic State left inside Iraq, then allow the Iranians and Shia Iraqis to do whatever they pleased in the aftermath. This was the big takeaway from the Iraq War III of 2014 onward: there would be no political follow-on, no nation building. Genocidal-scale events that might have once set American front pages atwitter aren’t even worth a tweet today. Whatever happens in Iraq to the displaced persons, the U.S. is not involved.

Americans demanded answers when Trump sent refugees back across the border to Mexico to await processing, but remain willfully ignorant of the hundreds of thousands of internal refugees left to disappear somehow in Iraq. “Like water thrown on to sand,” goes the Iraqi expression.

It is part of the American way of leadership: arriving unwanted in some third-world nation with promises to liberate and then leaving when that war turns into an unwanted child. And so our wars leave behind the children, refugees in Iraq and elsewhere, literal unwanted kids from Vietnam. We walk away from the destruction we create, having burned out the jungles in Southeast Asia with Agent Orange and turned functioning countries like Libya, Syria, and Iraq who dare bark at the American Empire into failed states.

When Joe Biden speaks of the need for American global leadership, perhaps he should first talk to those we have already left behind.

Yep. Mr. Biden promises only more endless war and suffering.

 

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1 hour ago, TheStatGuy said:

And with yesterdays certifying of the votes. Joe Biden will be your 46th President. 

@DE i told you

@swordfish i told you

You sure did, you get an Atta boy.

I mean, come on man, yes I (SF) certainly hoped DJT could pull off some kind of a win/upset here considering all the evidence that will eventually come out (as early as next month), but I always predicted he wouldn't be able to, especially as his days to 1/6/21 drew shorter.  Either way waking up on 1/21 will be no different than today.  Pull off my covers, pet the dog's head, hit the shower, pull in some coffee, head to work .....

SF's opinion of how TSG's mental state is today......

 

Na na na boo boo, stick your head in doo doo.

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Serious question - how long do the talking heads here on the GID expect a President Biden to be in office? 

I have have made no question of my belief that he may not even last 6 months, but have not come up with how (or when) the left will dislodge him to place Kamala Harris as the first female President.  AND - who will she pick to be her VP?

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20 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Serious question - how long do the talking heads here on the GID expect a President Biden to be in office? 

I have have made no question of my belief that he may not even last 6 months, but have not come up with how (or when) the left will dislodge him to place Kamala Harris as the first female President.  AND - who will she pick to be her VP?

If I were a conspiracy theorist — I’m not, but I enjoy a little paranoia as much as the next guy — I’d suspect Joe will announce that in 6 mos. or so his doctors found something suspicious on a routine exam and he may have early signs of Parkinson’s, dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc. He’ll resign. Kamala will name Hillary Clinton VP.

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5 minutes ago, Bobref said:

If I were a conspiracy theorist — I’m not, but I enjoy a little paranoia as much as the next guy — I’d suspect Joe will announce that in 6 mos. or so his doctors found something suspicious on a routine exam and he may have early signs of Parkinson’s, dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc. He’ll resign. Kamala will name Hillary Clinton VP.

****SHUDDER****

OK - your not the first person who floated the HRC name as a VP to me......Do you think she would be content as a VP?  

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20 minutes ago, swordfish said:

****SHUDDER****

OK - your not the first person who floated the HRC name as a VP to me......Do you think she would be content as a VP?  

Yes ...  until an accident could be arranged for Kamala. Perhaps the pressures of the Presidency would be too much to bear and she’d “Epstein.”

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21 hours ago, Bobref said:

If I were a conspiracy theorist — I’m not, but I enjoy a little paranoia as much as the next guy — I’d suspect Joe will announce that in 6 mos. or so his doctors found something suspicious on a routine exam and he may have early signs of Parkinson’s, dementia, Alzheimer’s, etc. He’ll resign. Kamala will name Hillary Clinton VP.

The man has had not one but two brain surgeries in his lifetime.   Long term complications/issues from these procedures could easily be used an excuse for Mr. Biden to resign.

 

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Here we go: 

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-inauguration-a01d1ffa7862661914cb92b22e359854

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Biden planned a 10-day blitz of executive orders on matters that don’t require congressional approval — a mix of substantive and symbolic steps to unwind the Trump years. 

Congress needs to reign in the power of the executive order.  It has made the POTUS a de-facto King.  And it needs to stop.

 

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3 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

Here we go: 

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-inauguration-a01d1ffa7862661914cb92b22e359854

Congress needs to reign in the power of the executive order.  It has made the POTUS a de-facto King.  And it needs to stop.

 

Before they will do that, they need to reign in their own power.  With term limits in both houses.

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16 minutes ago, swordfish said:

Before they will do that, they need to reign in their own power.  With term limits in both houses.

Anymore the first and primary duty of the vast majority of U.S. Congressmen is to get re-elected.  It is simply power for power's sake.    The entire body,  House and Senate, is dysfunctional.

 

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So, having trouble  understanding the meaning of "domestic terrorism".  It appears that if the event is sparked by the left wing, it's normally a "peaceful protest", or at it's worst an "principled uprising" no matter the destruction, duration, or injuries, but if the event's genesis is right wing, it instantly becomes termed "domestic terrorism" even if the event was over in hours.  

We are still hearing the stories relative to "domestic terrorism" that happened in the Nation's Capital on January 6.  A week and a half later.  Not hardly a peep about the protests and riots overnight in Portland and Seattle.

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Biden's Inauguration Was Small and Quiet. Good.: https://reason.com/2021/01/20/bidens-inauguration-was-small-and-quiet-good/

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Former President Donald Trump's tenure started off with a loud debate over his inauguration crowd size. After his swearing-in, Trump insisted for months that he had attracted a larger crowd than his predecessor, former President Barack Obama.

The discussion seemed to never end. It ushered in a flurry of legitimate news reports seeking to debunk the president's obvious lie—as if those organizations truly had nothing better to report on for the American public. It also attracted the characteristically stubborn, whimsical response that came to define the Trump administration: They were just adhering to "alternative facts," according to then-Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway. One can't be sure what that means, but it was intended to acquit the president.

As Trump flew away from D.C. today via Joint Air Force Base Andrews, he could at least take comfort in the fact that his inaugural crowd size bested President Joe Biden's, thanks to restrictions put in place after the January 6 Capitol riot as well as to curb the spread of COVID-19. Point for Trump? No, point for Biden.

To be clear, I care a negative amount about the great crowd-size debate of 2017, and all the crowd-size debates that followed. I'd rather us compete over whose crowd was the smallest, not the largest. Biden wins that trophy by a mile. Though it's widely due to circumstances out of his control, perhaps we should work on making some parts of today the new normal for future inaugurations.

The cult of the imperial U.S. presidency has come to feel like a national religion in the last decade and change. Whoever assumes the executive title also inherits icon status: There were Obama "HOPE" t-shirts, Trump's "Make America Great Again" hats, along with bumper stickers, flags, and Catholicism-inspired prayer candles featuring pols in saintly postures. Cries of "My president!" have become commonplace among a certain subset of online political types, sending a queasy message that whoever holds the office is a paladin worthy of hero-worship.

That obsession is decidedly unhealthy. The Founders intended the president to be a political figurehead and a government manager, checked in both roles by the people. "[T]he first thing [the Constitutional Convention] had to discuss was if there would be one chief executive or more than one chief executive," said historian Ray Raphael in a 2017 interview. "People were very suspicious of anything that would resemble monarchical rule." Expecting a president to be something like a king is not only an improper elevation of the role, it is also, as Trump proved to countless industries and individuals, a very risky betting proposition.

How do we put the imperial presidency back in its box? We can start by dialing back the pomp and circumstance of the inauguration, which sees people come from far and wide to flood the national mall so that a new president can take office in front of a sea of loyalists.

That wasn't the case this year, thankfully. Even so, it appears that, as of this morning, the crowd-size discourse still wasn't over. CNN's Wolf Blitzer called the number of people at Trump's farewell sendoff "pathetic," and Jim Acosta noted seriously that it was "the smallest…of [his] presidency," which we can presume was supposed to be the perfect full-circle "gotcha" as the nation witnessed the end to Trump's time in the Oval Office.

I'll take it.

 

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Biden Sees Own Shadow, Predicting Just Six Weeks Of Being President: https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-sees-shadow-predicting-six-weeks-of-being-president

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Shortly after being sworn in Wednesday, Joe Biden looked down and saw his shadow, predicting just six weeks of being president of the United States.

Biden briefly emerged from his basement to attend his inauguration, where he saw the shadow, declared he would be president for just six weeks, and then returned into hibernation to await his fate.

"Well, looky there," he said, pointing at the faintest outline of a shadow on the ground. "Looks like I'll have about six weeks in office." Biden said he is looking forward to executing his plans for the nation, from napping and calling a lid to puttering about the White House and trying not to get assassinated by Kamala Harris.

At publishing time, sources had further confirmed that on his way out of the inauguration ceremony, Biden narrowly dodged a falling anvil, an ACME dynamite trap, and a falling piano.

 

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Portland rioters damage ICE building; police declare 'unlawful assembly': https://www.foxnews.com/us/anti-biden-antifa-portland-police

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Police declared an unlawful assembly Wednesday night in Portland, Ore., after about 150 rioters caused damage to a federal immigration facility in the city, according to the authorities.

The unrest near the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) building was declared after rioters started throwing rocks and eggs, and vandalizing the building, located in the city's south waterfront neighborhood, Portland police Sgt. Kevin Allen said in a 10 p.m. update. 

"We have observed property damage to the building," the Portland Police Bureau wrote on Twitter. "Anyone who is involved in criminal behavior including: vandalism and graffitting is subject to arrest or citation."

Allen said individuals were seen carrying pepper ball guns, electronic control weapons (similar to stun guns) -- shields, fireworks, and rocks. He added that federal law enforcement used "crowd-control munitions."

"This gathering may impact traffic and access into the neighborhood," Allen said. "We'll continue to closely monitor this event."

As of early Thursday, police said they were standing by "to address crimes" in the surrounding neighborhood, and some arrests were made, although they failed to elaborate any further.

Other cities saw some tension on Inauguration Day. Seattle witnessed property damage and objects hurled at cars; reporters said demonstrators were protesting against President Biden and law enforcement, and carried a sign reading, "Abolish ICE."

In Denver, protesters burned an American flag in separate demonstrations that reportedly involved members of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as others who chanted anti-Trump and anti-Biden slogans.

Authorities said earlier gatherings in Portland -- which saw Antifa protesters clash with authorities as they gathered to voice dissatisfaction with President Biden, forcing officers to retreat and taking at least one police bicycle -- had ended.

The Portland Police Bureau said several events were planned in the city just hours after Biden was sworn in and implored the nation to come together. About 150 people gathered at Revolution Hall around 2 p.m. and marched to the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Oregon, Allen said. 

The so-called J20 protest was a demonstration against Biden and law enforcement. 

Some in the group smashed windows and vandalized the building with graffiti. Calls and messages to the party headquarters were not immediately returned. 

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Ahh, the peaceful left.

 

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