I agree but orange man could have been that 'war time president' and as incumbent as well should have been a cakewalk for orange. It was a big issue and orange man couldn't convert. You are absolutely right though Biden doesn't win if covid doesn't emerge. Think about how covid really didn't drop all the way until spring of 2020 and the election that same November. That's why I say 2024 is so far away politically literally anything can happen. Next will be how this whole ukraine putin deal will play out and to what extent orange is/isnt involved
https://www.wsj.com/articles/senato...executive-11640639440?mod=opinion_featst_pos2 Sen. Biden’s Shrinking Presidency Thirty-six years in the upper chamber left its mark on the man now in the Oval Office. By William McGurn Dec. 27, 2021 5:27 pm ET When Politico’s Tim Alberta asked Joe Biden during a December 2019 Democratic debate what the former vice president and longtime Delaware senator would bring to the presidency, Mr. Biden went with his top selling point: experience. Experience, he said, gave him the chops he needed to revive an ailing economy and restore America’s global leadership. “I have more experience in doing that than anybody on this stage,” he declared. When Mr. Alberta followed up by noting that he’d be 82 at the end of his first term—“the oldest president in American history”—Mr. Biden was ready for that too. “More like Winston Churchill. ” One year in, it’s safe to say that of all the Biden comparisons that come to mind, Churchill isn’t one. From the president’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan and his failure to make good on his promise to shut Covid down to inflation and his inability to get his signature domestic legislation through a Senate his own party controls, Mr. Biden’s experience is proving woefully inadequate. The increasing allusions to Jimmy Carter, a metaphor for political haplessness, suggest more and more Americans are concluding Mr. Biden isn’t up to the job. Most people elected president (unlike Donald Trump ) don’t get there without at least some political experience. But Mr. Biden’s presidency reminds us that not all experience is equal, and if his experience isn’t working, maybe it’s because so much of it was in the Senate. Senators, unlike governors, aren’t executives. They’re legislators, who work with a different skill set. In the clubby Senate, Mr. Biden was known as an affable colleague willing to work with Republicans to get a deal done. This might have been the one area where his experience could have been a plus, especially with a 50-50 Senate and a tiny Democratic majority in the House. But Mr. Biden oddly decided he didn’t need Republicans. One result was that the progressive fringes ended up driving his agenda. As president, when Mr. Biden dozes off, loses his place, mispronounces some foreign name, or drones on with long, boring stories, it provokes speculation about his mental capacity. In the Senate, all these things make you one of the boys. Or girls, as in the case of 88-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has had to fight off Democratic whispers that she’s too old for the job. The good news for a senator is that even someone with questionable mental facilities can mostly get by so long as he (or she) can be wheeled out for a vote when needed. The president, by contrast, is constantly in the public eye. Yet instead of embracing the leadership the presidential pulpit affords, Mr. Biden appears content to leave the fate of his agenda to be worked out in the back rooms of Congress. The other big difference between senators and presidents has to do with achievements. Because legislatures are collective, senators face a double whammy. On the one hand, they have a hard time receiving full credit even for things they’ve pushed through; on the other hand, every contentious vote can be turned into a powerful attack ad by an opponent. Over Mr. Biden’s long career he has flip-flopped on a variety of public policies from the Iraq war and the Senate filibuster to federal funding for abortion and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which he wrote but which is today blamed for the mass incarceration of African-American men. Mr. Biden’s ability to, ahem, rise above principle helps explain why he got along so well in the Senate. But the inability of even his closest allies to identify a principle Mr. Biden has stood for consistently over his nearly half-century in politics is also why he is having such difficulty leading his own party. It’s a problem not limited to Mr. Biden. Bob Dole and John McCain were each forceful Senate figures in their day. But each also had a difficult time as presidential candidates articulating a clear vision of what they stood for. In his 1996 run for the White House, Dole summed up this identity crisis when he told a Republican audience, “I’ll be anything you want me to be.” What they had in common was the sense that they were running for president simply because it was their turn. Dole was 73 when he became the Republican nominee, and McCain was 72 when he did 12 years later. In 2020 Mr. Biden was 77. Like the campaigns of his GOP predecessors, Mr. Biden’s run carried the whiff of an elder trying to collect the gold watch he thought he deserved. At a press conference a few days before Christmas, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki joked that the president “always thinks of himself as a senator” when a reporter mistakenly referred to “Senator Biden.” She meant it as a joke. Then again, maybe not.
Yeah well the article makes a clear case that forgiveness for foo foo degrees generally benefits yuppies or elite professionals at higher income brackets...generally people who can pay most of it off. They might belly ache in polls, but are those folk gonna vote republican? I guess they want to be shunned from gender reveal parties and fondue nights or something.
He signed a record breaking Defense budget! “Hey thanks Joe!” - No one… besides the beneficiaries of the military industrial complex and morons who actually believe spending $778 billion a year on Defense is necessary and prudent. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Joe Biden’s Year of Hoping Dangerously It was a brutal start for the new President. https://www.newyorker.com/news/2021-in-review/joe-bidens-year-of-hoping-dangerously excerpt . . . The tragedies of the last few years in America have been accompanied by the failure of our collective imagination. We could not imagine that Trump would become President, that he would sow disinformation and denial about a deadly virus, that he would attack the legitimacy of American democracy itself rather than concede defeat. Over the past year, Biden has struggled with his own set of unimaginable challenges that became intractable realities. I lived in Russia for four years, where decades of life under the Soviet Union had taught a cynical population a truth that Americans only now seem to be learning for themselves: it can always get worse. more at the link
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/01/03/white-house-beef-supply/ In latest effort to combat rising prices, White House to offer $1 billion in aid for smaller meat-industry producers Officials have tried to deflect criticism over inflation by alleging that large companies have too much clout By Jeff Stein Today at 5:00 a.m. EST The White House on Monday announced it will devote $1 billion to aiding independent meat and poultry producers, aiming to undercut the four powerful meat producers the Biden administration has alleged are responsible for surging consumer prices. Facing immense political pressure over inflation, the White House has responded in recent weeks by criticizing large corporations and arguing that breaking up monopolies will foster competition and drive down prices. In November, President Biden asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into whether oil and gas companies were improperly pushing up energy prices. The stakes are particularly high in the beef industry, where prices in November rose by a staggering 21 percent relative to last year, according to federal data. Food prices have also increased more broadly — by a significant 6.4 percent — with the index for meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumping 13 percent. The White House on Monday unveiled measures designed to boost competition in the meatpacking sector. The steps include $375 million in grants to help independent meat producers; $275 million in capital; $100 million in training for the meat and poultry workforce; and $100 million to reduce inspection costs on “small and very small processing plants,” a statement said. The White House said the funding comes from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed by Democrats through Congress in March 2021. But industry groups and many economists have been critical of the administration’s attempts to redirect blame for inflation to large companies. They argue that high consumer demand — supercharged by the relief plan — is responsible for widespread inflation. “We’ve seen too many industries become dominated by a handful of large companies that control most of the business and most of the opportunities — raising prices and decreasing options for American families, while also squeezing out small businesses and entrepreneurs,” a White House statement said. “When dominant middlemen control so much of the supply chain, they can increase their own profits at the expense of both farmers — who make less — and consumers, who pay more.” Industry groups have rebuked the administration for its approach. Tyson Foods, for instance, has said rising prices are the result of the “drastic” drop in production caused by the global pandemic and severe weather. The White House in November published an analysis that found the large meatpackers’ profits rose 300 percent during the pandemic. In a blistering response, North American Meat Institute President Julie Anna Potts said the calculations “awkwardly and misleadingly combine these sectors and the council’s analysis conveniently excludes data on rising input costs, rising fuel costs, supply chain difficulties and labor shortages that impact the price of meat on the retail shelf.” Democratic economist Larry Summers, who warned the administration that its 2021 stimulus would cause inflation by overheating the economy in the spring, has strongly criticized policymakers who see antitrust efforts as a way to combat price increases. Summers on Twitter last week said the idea that antitrust policy could be used to reduce prices amounted to “science denial.” “Monopoly may lead to high prices but there is no reason to expect it to lead to rising prices unless it is increasing,” Summers said on Twitter. “There is no basis whatsoever thinking that monopoly power has increased during the past year in which inflation has greatly accelerated.” Fiona Scott Morton, an economist at the Yale School of Management, said some of the White House’s measures, such as subsidizing independent meatpackers, would be unlikely to change consumer prices this year. But the steps could cause the existing large producers to rethink their prices and payments to workers and farmers, which she said could make an immediate impact. remember you can still subscribe to the Post for a year for $9.99
Abbott is a shithead. Bush was a decent governor, Perry was harmless idiot, Abbott's only saving grace is he's not as bad as Cruz and Paxson.
Too much finger pointing with nothing actionable in this one. I don't think big corps are gouging, but they are looking to recoup losses. If Biden wants to complain about monopolies, he should do something about it. I'm sick of seeing blowhard larry summers wave his hand at **** he thinks (and probably) knows more about. He might, but did he predit 08? Has he or anyone else solved the ultralow interest rates the US and industrialized world has been for almost 15 years? The "last resorts" by the Fed belie the deep doodoo our economy is in and has been all this time, Does he, other Treasury Secs, and the Fed Chairs get a pat on the back and a raise for just an overheated stockmarket? Inflation didn't trick out this slow growing asset bubble that continues to strip the middle class of any dignity or scruples. Their policies did.
Biden disapproval hits new high as voters give him bad grades on economy, new CNBC/Change poll says https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/04/bid...gh-voters-blame-him-on-economy-cnbc-poll.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-yo...buster-11641943418?mod=hp_opin_pos_2#cxrecs_s Are You With Joe Biden, or Jefferson Davis? The President’s speech on voting rights is divorced from reality. By The Editorial Board Jan. 11, 2022 7:01 pm ET Every official in America, President Biden said Tuesday, has a choice: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. [ Martin Luther ] King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis ?” Seriously, he said that grandiloquent nonsense. Mr. Biden’s speech in Georgia was a call to bulldoze the Senate’s filibuster to pass a rebranded version of H.R.1, a bill that would impose a federal election code on all 50 states, including forcing them to count late mail ballots that lack postmarks. If you happen to think that’s a bad idea, or that it’s unconstitutional, or that nuking the filibuster would hurt the Senate, well, then apparently you’re against Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Biden’s demagoguery is all the worse because he continues to distort state voting laws like the one in Georgia. “Voting by mail is a safe and convenient way to get more people to vote,” he said, adding “they’re limiting the number of dropboxes and the hours you can use them.” Georgia had zero dropboxes before the pandemic election of 2020, and now they’re enshrined in permanent law. This isn’t “ Jim Crow 2.0,” no matter how many times Mr. Biden uses that incendiary phrase. People disagree about the security of stand-alone dropboxes, but voters can also put absentee ballots in the mailbox. As for Georgia, all of its residents can request a mail ballot without giving an excuse, unlike in New York or Delaware. And here’s a figure Mr. Biden should know: In 2020, the Census Bureau says, black voter turnout in Georgia was 64%, compared with Massachusetts’s 36%. Mr. Biden also sketched out how he thinks the GOP plans to steal the next election: “The Georgia Republican Party, the state Legislature, has now given itself the power to make it easier for partisan actors, their cronies, to remove local election officials.” He said that passing the Democratic Party’s latest version of H.R.1, now called the Freedom to Vote Act, would prevent this kind of “election subversion.” Yet if you read the Senate bill he supports, it has a provision saying that states could not suspend local election officials except for “gross negligence, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The Georgia law that Mr. Biden is attacking features an almost identical standard. Before the state can oust a local election official, it must show, by clear and convincing evidence, “nonfeasance, malfeasance or gross negligence” over a period of “at least two elections.” Mr. Biden’s filibuster foray is likely to fail amid bipartisan opposition, but the more he fails the more partisan and distorted his speeches get. It’s a bad presidential look. Appeared in the January 12, 2022, print edition as 'Are You With Biden, or Jefferson Davis?.'
Quinnipiac poll shows Biden with 33 percent approval rating https://thehill.com/homenews/admini...l-shows-biden-with-33-percent-approval-rating
Aside from mailing out the occasional check or disproportionate tax refund, what are things that can "unite the country" in this day and age? Throw molotovs at Russia and China? Hmm what else...
