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Tag: biden
Trump and Biden

Fox Tells Viewers Trump Is 'President,' Biden Is 'A Wannabe Dictator'

Americans tuning in to Fox News Tuesday night, hours after Donald Trump was arraigned on 37 federal criminal felony charges, had a big surprise: Donald Trump is the “President of the United States,” and Joe Biden, the man actually in the White House, is a “wannabe dictator.”

That’s what Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing “news” network decided to tell its shrinking band of viewers, rather than the truth.

Also not telling the truth was Trump himself, aided by Fox News which, unlike CNN and MSNBC (but exactly like Newsmax and C-SPAN) decided to run his post-arraignment speech live, with no anchor doing any fact checks or providing any context.

“These things are not true, but Fox News is doing their damnedest to help,” noted MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle on-air, one of many who noticed and were disgusted enough to speak out.

Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson posted the video of Fox News host Brian Kilmeade announcing, “this is the president of the United States, about to address a crowd of supporters.”

The Recount posted the clip of Fox News’ chyron that reads: “Wannabe Dictator Speaks at the White House After Having His Political Rival Arrested” (in all-caps.)

And no, Donald Trump is not the President of the United States, Joe Biden is. And Joe Biden is not a “wannabe dictator,” nor did he have “his political rival arrested.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Biden Cuts Asian Trip Short To Deal With Republicans On Debt And Budget

Biden Cuts Asian Trip Short To Deal With Republicans On Debt And Budget

Washington (AFP) - President Joe Biden's departure Wednesday to the G7 in Japan was meant to launch a geostrategic masterclass on rallying the world's democracies against China. Instead, he will limp into an abruptly truncated journey facing concerns that the US debt ceiling row is about to tear up the global economy.

Biden arrives Thursday in Hiroshima, one of the two cities hit by US atomic bombs in 1945 -- a closing chapter to World War II and the start of an era of US leadership across the Pacific that Beijing now seeks to supplant.

He will meet leaders from the rest of the G7 club -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan -- that has been so crucial in the US-led drive to enforce unprecedented economic sanctions on China-ally Russia for invading Ukraine.

However, visits next week to Papua New Guinea and to a Sydney summit of the Quad, comprising Australia, India, Japan and the United States, were canceled so that Biden can rush back Sunday and negotiate with Republican opponents on the debt ceiling.

For a president who often warns that democracies are in an existential fight to prove their viability against the world's autocracies, it's a sobering moment.

"It's extraordinarily hard... to go to the G7 and talk about economic unity against Russia, economic unity against China, when the dysfunction is coming from inside the house," Josh Lipsky, at the Atlantic Council, said.

Biden downplayed the reshuffling of his schedule, saying, "the nature of the presidency is addressing many critical matters all at once."

But Evan Feigenbaum, a former US diplomat with the Carnegie Endowment, was brutal.

"It's tough to 'compete with China' in the Pacific when you're busy sinking your own boat," he tweeted. "How do we think we look to the rest of the world?"

Candidate Biden Enters Furnace

For Biden, 80, the trip and the debt ceiling mess come at a crucial time. He has just launched his re-election campaign and Americans wary about his age are watching how he copes in the furnace of the presidency at home and abroad.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Biden can multi-task.

"He can travel overseas, and manage our foreign policy and our defense policy and look after our national security commitments in an important region like the Indo-Pacific, and also work with congressional leaders to do the right thing -- raise the debt ceiling, avoid default so that the United States credibility here at home and overseas is preserved," Kirby said.

The risks over the debt ceiling, however, are so huge -- global market panic would be just the beginning of the fallout from a default -- that Biden may spend much of his time trying to reassure fellow world leaders on the state of the US economy, rather than planning how to manage China.

Biden doesn't know whether the increasingly hard-right Republican Party will allow an increase to the debt in time to prevent default. And he also doesn't know whether the left of his own Democratic party will forgive him for the compromises he may have to make to save the situation.

Quad Consolation Prizes

Canceling the Papua New Guinea and Australia stops is a bitter pill for a president who has reinvigorated US diplomacy after the isolationist Trump years.

The Quad, an informal grouping of large democracies interested in restraining aggressive Chinese economic and military expansion across the Pacific, is one of Biden's priorities.

The White House was quick to point out that Biden will already be meeting in Japan on the sidelines of the G7 with his other Quad counterparts.

And a consolation prize for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was extended in the form of an invitation to a state visit at the White House. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is already booked in for a state visit this June.

But Washington is likely to rue the missed opportunity in Papua New Guinea, where Biden would have been the first serving US president to visit. The symbolism, at a time when remote Pacific island territories and countries have become chess pieces in the geostrategic contest with China, would have been powerful

Joe Biden

Polls Show Strong Public Support For Biden To Increase Debt Ceiling

When President Joe Biden addressed the debt ceiling negotiations Wednesday at a union event in Maryland, he uncharacteristically took Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to task, calling House GOP demands "wacko" and "really dangerous."

“We’ve never ever defaulted on a debt. It would destroy the economy,” Biden said while speaking at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 77 in Accokeek. “America is not a dead-beat nation,” he added.

The White House and Democrats are on the right side of public opinion. New Navigator Research polling found that 64 percent of voters believe it would be worse to default on the nation's debt than to raise the debt ceiling, while 36 percent say that raising the ceiling is worse than defaulting.

Biden was responding to the House GOP's debt ceiling “plan,” which ties raising the ceiling (i.e., averting a global meltdown) to major budget cuts. For months, Biden has urged House Republicans to pass a "clean" debt ceiling increase while refusing to link the two matters.

The heightened sense of urgency demonstrated by Biden, who isn't usually inclined to mix it up with political adversaries, is twofold. First, House Republicans are just dumb enough to play with fire, and Biden specifically recalls the fallout from the last time a White House and congressional Republicans played a game of chicken on raising the debt ceiling. It was 2011, Biden was vice president, and the nation came just close enough to defaulting that the U.S. credit rating was downgraded, markets plummeted, and U.S. taxpayers bore the burden of the country's increased borrowing costs.

Second, House Republicans are also just dumb enough to intentionally tank the economy in the name of austerity. Such a move could precipitate an epic global meltdown, and the White House simply cannot afford for voters to blame that on the president heading into his reelection.

Voters support raising the debt ceiling by a 10-point margin, 48 percent - 38 percent, with 14 percent saying they weren't sure. Those findings are in keeping with a PBS/NPR/Marist poll in February that found a 52 percent majority of voters supported raising the debt ceiling.

The notion that roughly half the nation supports a debt ceiling increase while fewer oppose it may seem less than reassuring, but that's more than twice as much support for raising the limit than in 2011, when the same PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that just 24 percent of voters favored a ceiling hike.

Another way of looking at it is that having been to this rodeo before, more voters drew similar conclusions to Biden: Quit messing around and just raise the damn ceiling already. In other words, Biden's message on the topic should be one that resonates with most voters.

But recent polling on the matter reveals one other lesson: People need to understand that failure to raise the debt ceiling will result in default. While people steeped in the brinkmanship inherently understand that failing to raise the ceiling will trigger a default, many voters apparently don't and are also hesitant to greenlight more government spending.

When CBS News asked respondents simply whether Congress should raise the debt ceiling, a narrow majority said no, with 46 percent favoring it while 54 percent opposed it.

However, when respondents were asked if Congress should raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on its current debt, fully 70 percent support increasing the ceiling.

Currently, the U.S. has already hit the ceiling on what it can borrow and the Treasury Department has implemented so-called "extraordinary measures" to avoid defaulting on our debt. But sometime in June those measures are expected to come up short, so the reckoning is fast approaching.

Right now, McCarthy is attempting to lure the White House to the table on spending cuts when he may not even have the 218 votes in his own caucus to pass his own debt limit bill. That's not a particularly strong starting point, especially when everyone knows that bill would be dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate even if McCarthy managed to finagle it through the House by some miracle.

Biden has spent months pressing House Republicans to decouple the debt ceiling increase from negotiations on spending.

"Take default off the table," Biden said on Wednesday.

As the deadline grows closer, Biden is also rightfully pinning the blame on House Republicans.

“Let’s be clear: If he fails, the American people will be devastated,” Biden said of McCarthy.

He's not wrong. The best outcome for everyone involved—particularly average Americans—would be for a deal to come together long before a potential default shakes the global financial markets.

But if, God forbid, it comes down to finger-pointing, the White House appears to be on solid ground with the public, and Biden isn't mincing words.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

James Comer

Top House Republican Laments Failure To Indict Biden's Dead Son

Republican lawmakers invoked President Joe Biden's late son Beau and drug deaths that happened during Donald Trump's presidency in recent attacks on the Biden family and administration.

House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer (R-KY) and member Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) made the comments as the committee continues its search for ways to investigate the Biden presidency.

Comer has been running with the right-wing media effort to turn a laptop owned by Biden's son Hunter into a scandal.

The Daily Beast reported that, during a February 27 interview with former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, Comer lamented the fact that Beau, who died in 2015 of brain cancer, wasn't indicted when he served as attorney general of Delaware. He blamed U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, a Trump appointee who is investigating Hunter Biden, for not going after the Biden family harder:

This U.S. attorney had had an opportunity to go after the Bidens years ago. In fact, it was Beau Biden, the president's other son, that was involved in some campaign donations from a person that got indicted, as well as Joe Biden was involved in some of these campaign donations when he was a senator, and then when he ran for president against Obama. But nothing ever happened. So I don't know much about this U.S. attorney other than he's had an opportunity to investigate the Bidens before and he chose not to. We all know that he's just been silent for a long time.

According to the Daily Beast, Comer was referring to donations made by Delaware liquor executive Christopher Tigani, who in 2011 pleaded guilty to making straw donations to more than a dozen elected officials. A report resulting from an investigation by E. Norman Veasey, a special prosecutor appointed by Beau Biden, found that none of the recipients had known about the scheme, and none were ever charged.

Greene on Tuesday tweeted a video in which she blamed two fentanyl overdoses in 2020 on "this government."

"Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son's murders because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel's [sic] from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl," Greene tweeted with a video of testimony at a congressional hearing by Rebecca Kiessling, a Michigan woman who spoke about the death of her two sons from fentanyl poisoning.

The Detroit Newsreported that Kiessling's sons died in June 2020, when Donald Trump was president and Biden was a private citizen.

After winning control of the House in the November midterms, Republicans promised to launch multiple investigations into Biden and his presidency. Observers say the probes are an effort to hurt Biden politically ahead of the 2024 election, when Biden is widely expected to run for a second term.

Polling shows, however, that this focus on investigating Biden could actually backfire on the GOP. An NBC poll in February found 55 percent of Americans believe House Republicans will spend too much time investigating Biden and not enough on other priorities.

Meanwhile, the results of an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll published on February 22 show the president having his highest approval rating since August 2021, with 49 percent of registered voters approving of the job he's doing.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.