Category: Biden/Harris

Bidenrithmetic Questions

by philg

How did Joe Biden sound today? I didn’t watch the State of the Union address, but I have skimmed the transcript. I think it is fair to say that Joe Biden is the most transformative president in U.S. history because a country is defined by its residents and Joe Biden has done more to change who lives in the U.S. than any other president (at least 7.2 million new neighbors via undocumented migrants plus perhaps 3 million additional immigrants arriving by what used to be called the “legal” process).

An arithmetic question… President Biden said that he wanted “100 more immigration judges to help tackle a backload of 2 million cases.” Isn’t that 20,000 cases per new judge? If each judge handled five cases per day and worked 220 days per year and migrants stopped walking across the southern border, the backlog would be cleared in 18 years?

An unfortunate turn of phrase?

Pass the Equality Act, and my message to transgender Americans: I have your back!

What do the doctors who perform gender affirming surgery say after a “top” or “bottom” surgery? “I have your ….”?

Delusions of grandiosity?

I’m taking the most significant action on climate ever in the history of the world.

If we believe Professor Dr. Greta Thunberg, Ph.D., wouldn’t the most significant actions on climate in world history have been taken by the fossil fuel pioneers? James Young, for example, who distilled paraffin from coal and oil shales. Edwin L. Drake, who pioneered drilling for oil. The scientists and engineers who built the first internal combustion engines and automobile industry. Or, if we want to look at the virtuous side of the equation, how about the engineers and scientists who made photovoltaic solar cells possible, starting with Edmond Becquerel? New York Times, April 26, 1954:

A federal appeals court in California found that it was illegal for Donald Trump to build a wall along our now-fully-open border with Mexico because Congress hadn’t appropriated the funds for this specific purpose (The Hill). The wall would have been within U.S. territory (stolen from Mexico, of course, but that’s another story). Biden seems to have vastly greater powers than Trump:

Tonight, I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.

Congress never appropriated money for this construction project. The construction will occur in waters and on land that aren’t part of the U.S. How is it possible for Trump’s border wall project to have been illegal while Biden’s “build stuff in Gaza” project is legal?

(Separately, Biden says that a river of free stuff from American taxpayers will “guarantee [that] Palestinians can live with peace and dignity”. But won’t the river of free stuff actually enable Palestinians to stay at war forever and pursue the military goals that the majority agree on? And won’t the U.S. delivery of essentials to Hamas-ruled Gaza help Hamas continue to hold Americans hostage? (Biden explicitly mentions the Americans held hostage by Gazans in the very same speech where he promises to give Gazans everything that they want or need.))

Official Hamas statistics are cited without skepticism by the U.S. president:

More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.

Here’s the stuff that Ron DeSantis should have learned to say…

Above all, I see a future for all Americans!

I see a country for all Americans!

And I will always be a president for all Americans!

Because I believe in America!

I believe in you the American people.

You’re the reason I’ve never been more optimistic about our future!

So let’s build that future together!

Let’s remember who we are!

We are the United States of America.

There is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together!

Note that the above message of solidarity and brotherhood/sisterhood/binary-resisterhood is contradicted just a few lines up:

I see a future where the middle class finally has a fair shot and the wealthy finally have to pay their fair share in taxes.

I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence.

The wealthy are scapegoated despite the fact that if they handed over 100 percent of their wealth it still wouldn’t satisfy Congress’s appetite for deficit spending (i.e., we’d still have a budget deficit and the accompanying inflation). Gun lovers are threatened. Those who work in the fossil fuel industry are targeted for unemployment. In other words, Biden points out that we’re not in this together right before saying that we should “act together”.

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How was the immigration of Jose Antonio Ibarra supposed to make Laken Riley better off?

by philg

“Migrant suspect in Laken Riley murder accused of ‘seriously disfiguring’ nursing student as affidavit reveals grim details in case” (New York Post):

The Venezuelan migrant charged with murdering Laken Riley allegedly beat her so brutally with an unidentified object that he disfigured her skull, according to new affidavits.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, who faces multiple murder and assault charges, is not thought to have known the 22-year-old nursing student when he allegedly kidnapped and killed her as she went for a run on the University of Georgia campus Thursday.

Ibarra entered the US illegally in El Paso, Texas, on Sept. 8, 2022, with his wife and her son seeking asylum, and was later released “for further processing,” ICE said.

Laken Riley will not be alive to see the full benefits of the Biden administration’s transformation of the United States via immigration, but for those of us who haven’t been killed by a migrant… what is the rationale for the current system? How was Jose Antonio Ibarra’s immigration supposed to improve the lives of Americans overall? In an ideal world where he didn’t kill anyone, what would he have done that would have made Laken Riley better off?

(If the answer is “his immigration wasn’t supposed to make Laken Riley better off” then in what sense is the U.S. government working on behalf of U.S. citizens?)

Separately, what’s happening with crime statistics in Venezuela? If their career criminals and gang members have all accepted Joe Biden’s invitation to move to the U.S., shouldn’t Venezuela soon be as safe as El Salvador? Or is Venezuela breeding new criminals even faster than it is exporting them?

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The Biden Administration cutoff of UNRWA, as reported by state-sponsored media

by philg

“Biden administration to restore $235m in US aid to Palestinians” (BBC, 2021):

US President Joe Biden’s administration plans to provide $235m (£171m) of aid to Palestinians, restoring part of the assistance cut by Donald Trump.

“UNRWA loses funding after charges that some employees took part in Hamas attack” (state-sponsored NPR, January 29, 2024):

The U.S. and more than a dozen other donors have now paused funding for the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, or UNRWA. The U.N. says the agency could run out of money within weeks. NPR’s Michele Kelemen reports that the U.N. has been facing allegations that some of its employees were involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.

Congressional Research Service, February 2, 2024:

The US fiscal year starts on October 1, almost the same date as the glorious October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation. So the U.S. has provided $121 million to UNRWA since the attack and withheld $300,000. This 0.25% reduction in funding (or failure to increase funding by 0.25%?) is what state-sponsored National Public Radio characterizes as a “funding pause”.

In other journalistic success stories, we can look at a New York Times headline, “Tesla Recalls About 2.2 Million Electric Vehicles Over Warning Light Font Size”:

Tesla is recalling about 2.2 million vehicles because the font on the warning lights panel was too small to comply with safety standards, U.S. regulators said on Friday.

“Warning lights with a smaller font size can make critical safety information on the instrument panel difficult to read, increasing the risk of a crash,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a notice.

The recall is one of several that Tesla has made in recent years, a setback for the company, the dominant maker of electric vehicles in the United States.

It’s “a setback for the company” to bring 2.2 million cars in for service? The font size tweak was done in one of the standard over-the-air software updates, a fact that is buried by the New York Times in a subhead and never explained in the article.

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Are American taxpayers the biggest funders of Hamas?

by philg

“Trump’s Claim that U.S. Taxpayer Money Funded Hamas Attacks Is False” (New York Times, October 8). If the NYT says that something is “false” and Trump is involved, perhaps it is worth investigating..

Although we say that we don’t like Hamas, they are the legitimate government of millions of Palestinians and have more popular support than Joe Biden does among Americans (AP: “The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is ‘most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,’ while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.”)

The most expensive services provided by the U.S. government to residents of the U.S. are, in Gaza, paid for by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1949. UNRWA pays for health care, schools, food, etc. for as many Palestinians as want them (fueled by these unlimited resources, Gaza has one of the world’s highest rates of population growth and, thus, there are more customers every day).

The U.S. is the largest donor to UNRWA (source):

Every American tax dollar that the U.S. sends to UNRWA to fund standard government services frees up a dollar for Hamas to spend on whatever it may choose.

From the NYT, a few months after Joe Biden took office, “Reversing Trump, Biden Restores Aid to Palestinians”:

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it would restore hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid to Palestinians, its strongest move yet to reverse President Donald J. Trump’s policy on the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. … The move will once again make the United States a leading donor to the United Nations agency that assists about 5.7 million Palestinians in the Middle East.

It is true that we haven’t directly funded Hamas’s military operations, but by funding UNRWA to provision Palestinians with education, health care, food, etc. we are the primary enablers of Hamas’s military (much larger than the economic activity of Palestinians would otherwise be able to support).

My personal rating of Trump’s statement: Substantially True. The U.S. seems to be the biggest money source for Hamas, which “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” (charter, which also says, “The day that enemies usurp part of Muslim land, Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Muslim”).

[Of course, schizophrenically the U.S. also funds Hamas’s enemies, sending $billions to Egypt, which keeps its border with Gaza closed and won’t allow Palestinians to emigrate to Egypt (they built a wall, bizarrely with help from the U.S., which says that walls don’t work), Jordan, which has opposed Palestinian military efforts, and Israel (“the Zionist entity”). So it would similarly be accurate to say that the U.S. enables larger militaries in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel.]

Curiously, quite a few American Democrats who don’t identify as Muslim are now tweeting about “standing with Israel” (they’re also going to stand with Ukraine, with the 2SLGBTQQIA+, and in how many other places?). In other words, the very people who have been funding Hamas since the beginning of the Biden administration are now saying that they somehow support Hamas’s enemy.

Here’s the principal funder himself:

The top Democrat in Congress:

The top Democrat in Congress when the funding for Hamas was restored:

The #2 Democrat in Congress:

Governor French Laundry:

The Democrat who runs San Francisco:

The Democrat who runs Los Angeles:

New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker 2018 (source):

Senator Booker today:

How was Hamas going to achieve Booker’s 2018 objective of getting rid of walls in Palestine if not via military action against Israel?

The Black Lives Matter folks in Chicago (relevant to a comment, below):

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WSJ: Proles should be grateful that their chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams

by philg

“Why Consumers Are Mad About Inflation Even Though It Has Fallen” (Wall Street Journal, today):

Prices are rising more slowly, but consumers fixate on how much lower they were before the pandemic, a problem for Biden.

Inflation has fallen sharply in the past year. The economy remains strong. Yet Americans remain deeply unhappy about the economy, often citing inflation. It continues to weigh on President Biden’s approval and re-election hopes.

Peasants aren’t sufficiently grateful, in other words, for all of the good things that the Party has done for them. They don’t credit Joe Biden for increasing their chocolate ration to 20 grams, for example.

I wonder if there will be spontaneous pro-Biden rallies to show gratitude for the lower airfares and car prices after the latest union contracts work their way through the system. CNBC:

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Biden on the picket line: time to watch American Factory again

by philg

Loyal readers may recall my review of the Academy Award-winning documentary American Factory. After a Chinese glass manufacturer has been gulled into investing $500+ million in pre-Biden money, all of the Democrats in the region, including Senator Sherrod Brown, show up to exhort the workers to unionize and extract higher wages from the foreign chumps.

“Biden to become first sitting US president to appear on picket line at UAW strike” (The Guardian):

Joe Biden will become the first sitting US president to appear on a picket line on Tuesday, making an appearance in Michigan in an effort to show solidarity with striking members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which is locked in an escalating dispute with America’s three biggest carmakers.

Biden’s trip is designed to burnish his self-proclaimed credentials as the most union-friendly president in US history and possibly also to earn the explicit backing of the UAW, which has yet to endorse his bid for re-election.

Biden voiced support for the strike by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis workers, which was entering its 12th day on Tuesday, and had announced he was dispatching his labour secretary, Julie Su, and Gene Sperling, a senior White House adviser, to help the union reach a settlement with company bosses.

In other words, this is a Presidential version of what is shown in the movie with, if memory serves, members of Congress and the governor. Will I be taking my own advice and watching the movie again in honor of our muscular leader? No. I canceled my Netflix subscription after the 2nd or 3rd price increase during what we are informed is a period of near-zero inflation.

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Supreme Court saddens the guys working at our house today

by philg

The “abnormal” Republicans on the Supreme Court prevented the working class from paying for elite kids’ gender studies degrees. “Supreme Court blocks Biden’s student loan forgiveness program” (CNN):

In a stinging defeat for President Joe Biden, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s student loan forgiveness plan Friday, rejecting a program aimed at delivering up to $20,000 of relief to millions of borrowers struggling with outstanding debt.

The decision was 6-3 with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative supermajority.

Roberts said the government needed direct authorization from Congress.

“The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it.”

The liberal dissenters said the majority is basically making political decisions.

“The Court acts as though it is an arbiter of political and policy disputes, rather than of cases and controversies,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote.

The end of this glorious scheme comes just as there are three guys working at our house. One is a plumber rebuilding the Watts 007M3 backflow preventer, a 20-year-old device that protects the public water supply from contaminants (SARS-CoV-2?) that could be introduced from our house’s irrigation system, which is entirely separate and fed by “reclaimed water” (maybe we don’t want to know the details?). There are two guys installing a new garage door that meets the latest code for impact resistance (shooting 2x4s at the door with a cannon) as well as wind resistance. I actually went up to W8 wind resistance, which is required down in Miami, on the theory that the New York Times might be correct about the appropriate level of climate panic. (Hurricanes may actually be getting less common; see “Declining tropical cyclone frequency under global warming” (2022) from Nature Magazine)

(The new garage door should pay for itself within a few years because it is insulated, unlike the other one, and it will give us a discount on homeowners insurance, a rare Florida problem that the New York-based media does not exaggerate!)

I wonder if these hard-working guys are experiencing personal sadness that, while they can still pay for the elites’ new Teslas, they can no longer fund elite kids’ college tuition and, indirectly, enrich anthropology professors and administrators.

Separately, it’s interesting that what is constitutional is now entirely predictable based on the political party of the Supreme Court Justice. A layperson might be excused for thinking that these sacred legal principles are entirely arbitrary!

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If an 86-year-old can be President, can a union boss become a mom at age 60?

by philg

“Greene faces pushback after saying Weingarten is ‘not a mother’” (The Hill):

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is facing pushback after suggesting that American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who’s a stepmother, is “not a mother.”

“The problem is people like you need to admit that you’re just a political activist, not a teacher, not a mother and not a medical doctor,” Greene said.

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) stepped in with a point of order after Greene’s comments, calling them “unacceptable.” … “You are a mother,” he added to Weingarten. “Thank you for being a great parent.”

The journalists report as a fact that Mx. Weingarten, age 65, is a “stepmother”. Wikipedia says that Mx. Weingarten’s marriage was in 2018, when he/she/ze/they was 60 years old. Mx. Weingarten married Sharon Kleinbaum, at least 58 years old at the time. If we assembled Kentaji Brown Jackson’s panel of biologists, I think they would likely say that Mx. Kleinbaum’s children were fully grown by the time the “rabbi” was 58 (rabbi in quotes because the congregation led by Mx. Kleinbaum is “not affiliated with any denomination or branch of Judaism.”). Thus, we would need a definition of parent as something that did not require “caring for a human under age 18”.

If I were to marry Warren Buffett, for example, would Democrats say that I was a “stepdad” to his 64-year-old youngest son?

Another quote from Greene at the hearing from Yahoo! News:

“I didn’t ask you a question. What I would like to talk about is your recommendations to the CDC, as not a medical doctor, not a biological mother, and really not a teacher, either. So, what you did is you advised the CDC?” Greene said.

My personal efforts in this area haven’t been very successful. When the kids were younger I explained to them that the reason Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever, was so tightly bonded to me was that I had given birth to her and then nursed her for 8 weeks. They refused to accept my status as a dog mom and cited Mindy’s biological mom, Chaos, as the animal’s only real mother. More recently, I used the “Mother’s Room” at a downtown Boston law firm to change from MIT teaching outfit (jeans and Oshkosh T-shirt) into testifying-at-trial outfit. For this, I was mocked by a couple of female executives from Brazil. I said “This is Massachusetts and it is my right to identify as a mother any time that I want. In fact, I can be more of a mother than either of you will ever be.” Apparently Fox News and MTG are also popular in Brazil because they responded, “You can call yourself whatever you want, but don’t expect us to cooperate.”

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COVID-19 state of emergency ending?

by philg

H.J. Res. 7 proposes that coronapanic in the U.S. be officially terminated, despite Joe Biden’s desire to continue the State of Emergency at least through May (at which point it can be extended if a variant of concern is identified!).

Who wants to continue cowering? Let’s look at how the democratically elected representatives of the people voted…

We can look at the roll call in the Senate for either double-nays or a “nay” and a “did not vote” (some of these folks are too old to show up to work anymore!). States where cowering is most highly prized:

  • California
  • Hawaii
  • Maryland
  • Maskachusetts
  • New Jersey
  • New York (defrost Andrew Cuomo to manage, with some help from young women?)
  • Oregon
  • Rhode Island
  • Vermont
  • Washington

It’s a little more complex in the House.

Not a single Republican who Follows the Science could be found and there were 11 Deplorable Democrats (one from Florida, of course!). The Scientists of Massachusetts celebrated diversity and independent thinking:

How’s CVS helping in our national fight against a virus that attacks the obese? Cadbury (owed by Hershey, which promotes women ahead of the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science) eggs can be obtained at a discount… if you buy 10. Coca Cola, which is “Creating a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion”, is available on favorable terms in quantity 36. M&Ms supports women flipping the status quo… if you buy two enormous bags. From the CVS we can walk to:

Hate had no home in our neighborhood back in Boston (at least to judge by the lawn signs of the all-white homeowners) and it seems that SARS-CoV-2 has no chance anywhere in the U.S. that CVS does business.

(What if you want to protect yourself against COVID-19 by consuming several pounds of candy without an explicit social justice message on the wrappers? The U.S. brands of Ferrero are potentially DEI-free: Butterfinger, Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, Nestlé Crunch, etc. Lindt, Swiss-made at the Portsmouth, New Hampshire airport, does not single out any subgroup of consumers on its package. Mondelēz, which owns Toblerone, Milka, Freia, and Côte d’Or, also refrains from advertising its social justice credentials on the packages.)

Related:

  • “WHO experts revise Covid-19 vaccine advice, say healthy kids and teens low risk” (CNN, March 29, 2023) is a “revision” not a “reversal” on the question on whether 6-month-old babies should be injected with an experimental medicine (as Science/CDC says they should) against a disease that kills 82-year-olds
  • “The President strongly opposes HJ Res 7, and the administration is planning to wind down the COVID national emergency and public health emergency on May 11…” (Fox News)
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ChatGPT waxes poetic about Joe Biden and Corn Pop

by philg

Here’s ChatGPT (Feb 22) on the Vanquishing of Corn Pop:

What if we need a poem about the second greatest American?

Why is Kamala Harris only “a role model for girls everywhere”? What stops an ambitious young person of any of the 74 gender IDs recognized by science from having sex with a powerful decades-older politician?

Suppose that we want to brighten a Deplorable friend’s day?

“It is important to remain neutral and impartial in my responses and not take a position on controversial or divisive issues.”

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