Tag: beau biden
WATCH: Cruz Fist Bumps GOP Colleagues After Defeat Of Vets' Health Bill

WATCH: Cruz Fist Bumps GOP Colleagues After Defeat Of Vets' Health Bill

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was caught on camera on the floor of the Senate fist-bumping his fellow GOP senators after they successfully blocked legislation to help veterans who are suffering after being exposed to toxic burn pits.

"Hundreds of thousands of American veterans were exposed to toxic fumes from burn pits on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan," NPR's Mary Louise Kelly reported in January. "So far, though, the Department of Veterans Affairs still denies the vast majority of their claims for respiratory illness and rare cancers. The White House, the VA, and Congress have all promised action, but it is not happening fast enough for sick veterans."

"This week, it was about to finally happen. But Republicans – many of whom previously voted to pass the bill, blocked it."

"The bill, known as the Honoring Our PACT Act, passed both the House and the Senate with bipartisan support in June, but due to a snag in the bill's language, it needed to go back and pass the House and Senate again," CBS News reports. "On Wednesday evening, 25 Republican senators reversed their support from June and voted no on a procedural vote to advance the legislation."

"President Joe Biden is a strong supporter of the bill," CBS News notes, putting the number of veterans exposed at 3.5 million. "At the State of the Union in March, he called on Congress to take action on burn pits, which he believes may have been a factor in his son Beau's terminal brain cancer."

"Veterans have come home with a number of illnesses, including terminal cancers, but have been forced to argue to the Department of Veterans Affairs their illnesses were related to burn pit exposure," CBS adds. "The legislation would have removed the burden of proof from veterans and their families by presuming a number of conditions could be related to exposure to toxic fumes from burn pits."

A video that's quickly gone viral on social media captures Senator Cruz gleefully celebrating the GOP's defeat of the legislation that could help millions of veterans, and their families. In it he initiates a fist-bump with Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines.

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet

Joe Biden

The Improbable Rise Of Joe Biden

Donald Trump may have won the most unlikely presidential election victory in U.S. history. But no one has ever taken a longer, more treacherous road to the White House than Joe Biden. If he should win, he will confirm that in American politics, nothing is ever final.

He arrived in the U.S. Senate barely old enough to meet the constitutional age requirement of 30. He had eked out a long-shot victory over an incumbent Republican in 1972, even as the GOP presidential nominee, Richard Nixon, carried 49 states.

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Obama Offered To Help Biden Financially During Son’s Illness

Obama Offered To Help Biden Financially During Son’s Illness

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Vice President Joe Biden said President Barack Obama offered to give him money to help with expenses while his son Beau was battling cancer.

In an interview broadcast on CNN on Monday, Biden said Obama made the offer during lunch after Biden told him he was considering selling his house to raise funds to help Beau, who died of brain cancer in May 2015 at age 46.

Biden said at the time of the lunch it appeared Beau might have to resign his position as Delaware’s attorney general because of the illness.

“My concern is if Beau resigns there is nothing to fall back on, his salary. But I said I worked it out, Jill and I will sell the house and we’ll be in good shape,” Biden said.

“(Obama) got up and said: ‘Don’t sell that house. Promise me you won’t sell the house,'” Biden said. “(Obama) said, ‘I’ll give you the money. Whatever you need, I’ll give you the money. Don’t Joe, Promise me. Promise me.'”

“His love of family and my family, and my love of his family… it’s personal. It’s family,” Biden said.

Biden, 73, announced in October he would not run for president after wrestling with doubts about whether he and his family were ready for a grueling campaign while still mourning Beau’s death.

(Clarifies 1st par offer made during Beau’s cancer battle)

(Reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Michael Perry)

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama (R), flanked by Vice President Joe Biden, delivers a statement at the White House in Washington November 6, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

No, Journalists Don’t Have Dramatic License

No, Journalists Don’t Have Dramatic License

Here’s a controversial opinion: Fiction doesn’t belong in newspapers unless it’s clearly labeled as such.

Anonymous sources are tricky enough, but journalists simply have no business contriving dramatized scenes with invented dialogue and characters — describing their innermost thoughts and feelings with no attribution whatsoever. To do so is inherently deceptive.

Which brings us to the Curious Case of the Redhead and the Vice President — specifically New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Joe Biden. Now for partly subjective reasons, I’ve always responded favorably to Biden. In accent and demeanor, he resembles my late father — not a flawless but a big-hearted, fundamentally decent man with a disarming smile and a touch of what the Irish call “blarney” about him.

Or maybe more than a touch, given the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of the term: “talk that is not true but that is nice and somewhat funny and that may be used to trick you.”

And maybe not so nice, sometimes. You be the judge.

On 60 Minutes last Sunday, Biden confronted what he described as a false narrative surrounding the death of his beloved 46-year-old son Beau from brain cancer.

“[P]eople have written that, you know, Beau on his death bed said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run,’ and, there was this sort of Hollywood moment that, you know, nothing like that ever, ever happened,” Biden told Norah O’Donnell.

“Beau all along thought that I should run and I could win,” he added. “But there was not what was sort of made out as kind of this Hollywood-esque thing that at the last minute Beau grabbed my hand and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to run, like, win one for the Gipper.’ It wasn’t anything like that.”

The vice president mentioned no names, but he didn’t need to. The author of a melodramatic August 1 column setting off a months-long carnival of rumor and speculation about Biden’s entry into the Democratic presidential race was Maureen Dowd—Washington journalism’s number-one obsessive Hillary Clinton hater. (Check out Media Matters’ exhaustive list of Dowd columns comparing Hillary to movie villains from Godzilla to Mommie Dearest to Glen Close in Fatal Attraction, if you doubt me.)

Starting off with a labored comparison between Hillary and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady as “two controlling superstars… wanting to win at all costs and believing the rules don’t apply to them,” Dowd’s column soon descended into Dickensian melodrama.

Neither citing nor alluding to a single source, Dowd employed what novelists call third person omniscient narration to describe the dying Beau Biden begging his father to save America from the Clintons:

My kid’s dying, an anguished Joe Biden thought to himself, and he’s making sure I’m O.K.

“Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,” Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in.

Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.

It was news from nowhere, immediately bolstered by a same-day front page Times article citing what Dowd supposedly “reported” about Beau Biden’s dying declaration and his father’s strategy meetings with advisors.

So now Joe says it ain’t so.

Which begs the question of why the vice president waited almost three months to speak up. But it would appear to disconfirm Politico’s troubling October 5 story citing “multiple sources” that Dowd’s unacknowledged source was Joe Biden himself. That one a spokesman called “categorically false” without, however, mentioning any problems with the original column itself.

An unsympathetic observer could almost wonder if Biden wasn’t trying to have it both ways: encouraging speculation about his political intentions without confirming or denying his dying son’s disparaging of “Clinton values.” Not a pretty picture, although perhaps understandable in view of the man’s terrible grief.

As for the New York Times, its editors are taking shelter behind Dowd’s lame alibi that her column didn’t literally mention a “deathbed” and the fact that, yes, the vice president definitely thought about running for president.

Mind reading and make-believe dialogue are apparently no problem.

Photo: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks on stage at an event to discuss the about the minimum wage at the Javitz Convention Center in New York, September 10, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid