
You’ve got a Fauci on your back…



California Gov. Gavin Newsom appeared indoors at a restaurant in a county where indoor dining is not allowed, but the governor’s office has said he did not dine at the restaurant.
He was there to meet with the restaurant’s owners, who received a relief grant, Newsom spokesperson Daniel Lopez told Fox News.
Newsom posted a video to his TikTok account with celebrity George Lopez talking about where to look for coronavirus vaccine eligibility. Newsom and Lopez were in Fresno, Calif., and are inside Los Amigos restaurant.
A separate video of Lopez was posted to the Los Amigos restaurant’s Facebook page. Lopez was endorsing the restaurant’s food.
Fresno is in the most restrictive purple tier, which does not allow for indoor dining.
There’s a famous aphorism often attributed to Miles Davis which says that the notes you don’t play in jazz are more important than the ones you do. Much the same can be said of political memoirs and, indeed, most books written by politicians or professional apparatchiks, particularly if published during an election year: being a genre largely concerned with PR and brand-building, they tend to be heavy on pablum and featherlight when it comes to substance; glorified press releases masquerading as earnest reflections or honest tales of personal triumph in the face of adversity. To any but the most credulous reviewer, they therefore present something of a dilemma. How exactly, after all, are you supposed to write about what isn’t there?
Apocryphal though they may be, this is where the words ascribed to America’s great jazz innovator really come in handy. In my experience as a regular (and almost always reluctant) appraiser of books and speeches by liberal and centrist politicians, identifying the blank space — the things left unsaid, the issues unaddressed, the possibilities elided, the questions unanswered, the past events ignored, the facts omitted, etc. — can often get you quite a long way.
David Plouffe’s A Citizen’s Guide to Beating Donald Trump, for example, spends just over 250 pages telling readers to canvass, phone bank, and write approving social media posts about a generic and entirely hypothetical Democratic nominee. Tasked with reviewing it, I was initially stumped about what, if anything, to say — an ostensible handbook for fighting the Right with scant reference to ideology, program, or social vision not exactly offering up a lot of raw material with which to work. My writer’s block persisted until I realized that Plouffe’s omissions were precisely the point, his vision of liberalism being one that either treats most real political questions as settled or considers them none of the average person’s business (the permissible kind of rank-and-file activism in the modern Democratic Party being about deference to party elites and not much else).
If you watch the clip, he flubs Shelia Jackson Lee’s name, calling her “Shirley” after stumbling around. He then starts tripping all over himself to list the rest of the names his handlers have given him. Eventually, he devolves into asking “what am I doing here” because this is all totally normal or something.
To be clear, what is in that clip is not a stutter. A stutter does not make you say the wrong word nor does it cause you to be unable to read a list a names. It doesn’t even stop you from speaking in a manner that is otherwise understandable. What a stutter does is exactly what the word purports. It causes a stopping on and repetition of certain sounds. You never hear that effect from Biden because his issue is not a stutter, no matter how much the media try to gaslight the public into believing it is. This is a man whose mental capacity appears to be rapidly declining before our eyes. You can watch videos of Biden from just five years ago and he’s a totally different person.
There’s a reason his wife has to do joint interviews with him at an unheard-of rate. There’s a reason he wasn’t able to get down to Texas until the disaster was well over. There’s also a reason why a man who is ostensibly president hasn’t done a single press conference since taking office. Joe Biden does not appear to be well, and because of that, he isn’t showing an ability to execute even the nominal duties of his office. That’s become so painfully obvious that it’s not really funny anymore. It’s actually scary.



US foreign policy has clearly continued in the same direction, without missing a beat. Unlike in previous transitions in the White House, this time US President Joe Biden has not even really tried to promise even the faintest hope that it wouldn’t.There were a few glimpses of remote hope – particularly regarding the possibility the US wouldn’t abandon its last arms treaty with Russia, New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) – and Biden’s promise of returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.
However, in Biden’s first speech regarding foreign policy since taking office, now posted on the White House’s official website and titled, “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World,” reveals that, if anything, US belligerence on the global stage is set to only expand.
“America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
Biden’s opening remarks attempt to suggest that America has drifted away under his predecessor US President Donald Trump. But when he says “America is back,” we are left to assume he means “back” to what the US was doing under the administration of US President Barack Obama under which he served as vice president.
This was a president elected into office by the American people to end the wars of his predecessor, US President George W. Bush. Not only did he fail to end those wars – one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan – he expanded both. He also started several new wars including in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
Under the administration of Obama-Biden, the US also overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 precipitating deadly violence in the nation’s eastern region.
Obama also continued Bush-era policies aimed at overthrowing the government of Venezuela and instituted the so-called US “pivot” to Asia in which US meddling was expanded in a bid to peel Southeast Asian states away from China’s orbit – or create an arc of chaos to disrupt China’s rise, trying.
And in Biden’s recent foreign policy speech – he has vowed to continue all of this.

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