Tag: joe biden

Biden Judicial Nominee Said Child Predator Had ‘a Lot of Good in Him’

One of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees suspended a child sex predator’s sentence and said the convict had “a lot of good in him” during a court hearing last year.

Maine Superior Court judge Julia Lipez, who is up for Senate confirmation after Biden appointed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, suspended half of Michael T. Smith’s prison sentence in 2023. Smith, 45, was convicted at trial of sexually abusing two girls, aged four and nine.

The news comes as other Biden judicial nominees have come under fire for soft-on-crime records. This week, Senate Republicans balked at the nomination of Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, who in 2022 recommended the transfer of a male convicted child rapist to a women’s prison after the convict identified as transgender. Netburn told lawmakers that she was not sure how sex is determined because she has “never studied” biology.

During a March 2023 sentencing hearing, Lipez reduced Smith’s 12-year sentence to 6 years and praised him as a “good” person.

“People are complicated,” Lipez said during the hearing. “I have frankly been offered very little insight as to how or why this happened. What I can say is that this is a very tragic situation of a person who has a lot of good in him having done a very reprehensible thing to two young children.”

The sentence reduction came after Smith’s young victims told the judge about the years of suffering caused by the abuse, which left them traumatized with night terrors, appetite loss, and flashbacks, according to the Sun Journal.

The “stress of my predator being free was eating me alive,” one of the girl’s wrote to the judge, adding that she has undergone years of therapy and that the “pleasant memories of my childhood have been replaced with tragic, painful ones.”

The other victim said she has struggled with friendships and physical contact because of the abuse, the Sun Journal reported.

Lipez’s decision to suspend Smith’s sentence came after his family members and lawyer told the court that he was a kind and hard-working person, according to the paper.

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Joe Biden’s Time Interview Should Set Off Alarms

On May 28, U.S. President Joe Biden gave an interview to Time. His delivery and content were concerning for a number of reasons. Biden, at times, seemed misinformed and detached from reality. Sometimes, he seemed off message; other times, he seemed convinced by his own talking points. But four answers he gave were especially alarming and deserve to be highlighted.

The first was Biden’s assertion that America is “the world power.” The truth of that claim can be debated, but making that claim is deaf to the changes taking place in the world. Much of the world is angry at the United States for substituting leadership in the global community of international law with the imposition of an inconsistent and hypocritical rules-based order.

If the United States is still the world power, then a multipolar world that includes a rapidly growing BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is closer and closer on its heels. Biden seems not to have noticed what his CIA director has: that the world is in one of “those times of transition that come along a couple of times a century. Today the United States still has a better hand to play than any of our rivals, but it is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

In a disturbing defense of his claim, Biden said that “the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that [Putin] was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge. We still know what’s going on.”

It is disturbing that Biden says that he released the intelligence, not to alert and protect Ukraine or to prevent war, but “to let the world know we were still in charge.” It is also disturbing that the United States had that intelligence, and knew Ukraine was about to be attacked, but did nothing to prevent it. Hawkishly, they could have massively armed Ukraine prior to the invasion. More rationally and responsibly, they could have seriously engaged Vladimir Putin on Russia’s December 2021 proposal on security guarantees and discussed a promise that Ukraine would not be invited into NATO. Sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko of Freie University in Berlin remarks that the United States failing to act on that intelligence in either of those ways “looks sort of strange, and of course very tragic for Ukraine.” It is disturbing that the U.S. impotently released the intelligence, not to prevent war and protect Ukraine, but to show the world that they are still “the world power.”

The second is Biden’s insistence that Putin has clearly stated his intention not to stop at Ukraine but to “reestablish the Soviet Union.” He pulled out a copy of Putin’s February 21, 2022 speech, repeatedly mocking his interviewers, “You probably haven’t read it.” But as Biden explains it to them, and summarizes it as saying “Ukraine is not a neighboring country” but “an inalienable part” of Russia, it begins to sound like Biden has not read the speech, which is highly critical of the Soviet Union.

Discussing the “critical” stage “the situation in Donbas has reached,” Putin references the closeness of the people of Donbas not to justify integrating or conquering them but to justify protecting them. If Biden has read the speech, it must have been a heavily redacted version. As Nicolai Petro, author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, pointed out to me, Biden selectively quotes from the speech while leaving much of contextual importance out.

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Biden Stumbles Through Anti-Gun Speech After Son’s Gun Conviction

On Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden addressed the “Gun Sense University” of the pro-gun control group “Everytown for Gun Safety” in his first speech since his son’s conviction on three felony weapons charges. 

Biden visibly struggled throughout the speech, stammering and mixing up words. 

Biden made a number of demonstrably false claims during his speech, for instance claiming that he was a professor at UPenn who taught a constitutional law class on the Second Amendment.

Biden also claimed that last year saw a massive decrease in crime, which ignores that agencies such as the massive police departments of Los Angeles and New York, as well as over 90 percent of agencies in Florida and Pennsylvania, have not yet submitted their data to the FBI, leaving the full picture of the current public safety environment incomplete. 

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27% of Americans Are Skipping Meals Because of Skyrocketing Food Costs, Survey Shows

The price of food has jumped by 25% since the start of the pandemic — even more if you factor in the cost of a quick trip to the store, which takes into consideration the price of fuel. Now, a new study says there are some major ramifications.

Intuit Credit Karma, which provides information about financial products, says that more than one-quarter of the people it surveyed said they have skipped meals or sacrificed other spending due to rising costs. The survey of 2,011 adults was conducted online in the United States during the week of May 7. 

According to the survey, 28% said they are putting off paying for necessities, such as rent or other bills, to afford groceries — while 27% say they are occasionally skipping meals. Another 18% have applied for or have considered applying for food stamps and other types of assistance, and 15% rely on or have considered visiting food banks for their groceries.

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Writers for SNL and Other Shows Now Working With a Pro-Biden PAC to Create Propaganda Aimed at Young Voters

Saturday Night Live used to be a comedy show for the whole country but like everything else in entertainment, has been taken over by the far left.

In recent years, the show has avoided making fun of Joe Biden because they’re terrified of doing anything that could be perceived as helping Trump.

They have acted like an arm of the Democrat party, but now they’re really becoming just that. Writers from the show, and other programs are working with a pro-Biden PAC to help create messaging (propaganda) aimed at young voters.

The Wrap reports:

‘SNL’ and ‘Parks and Recreation’ Writers Pitch Ads to Help Biden Reach Gen Z, Young Millennials

Hollywood creatives, including writers from “Saturday Night Live” and “Parks and Recreation,” have been meeting monthly for at least half a year to pitch ideas to Won’t PAC Down, a new super PAC that’s attempting to improve President Joe Biden’s relationship with young voters, Politico reported Sunday. The super PAC has brought on “millennial and Gen Z writers, directors and producers to help craft pro-Biden content that’s specifically engineered to sell an octogenarian candidate to typically disillusioned and hard-to-reach voters under 30.”

The first ads, all written for and by millennials and Gen Z, are expected to hit social media and the news media in July. Travis Helwig, a former head writer for Crooked Media, heads the writer room and emphasized to Politico that the organization does not intend to over-use celebrity endorsements as part of its strategy.

“There’s a big difference between putting a celebrity on camera and having them say, ‘if you liked me in ‘Madame Web,’ then you’re going to love voting,’ versus what we’re doing,” he explained. “We’re taking the best young writers and directors, who are the age and demographics of the people we’re targeting, using poll-tested messaging, and shaping it in a way that will resonate with young people and get them excited.”

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Biden to Ukraine: You’re not getting into NATO, but that doesn’t mean you can stop bleeding for us

If Vladimir Zelensky is Ukraine’s most inflated politician, its most important one is not from Ukraine at all. Kiev’s war and its political regime both vitally depend on Washington’s faltering, though obstinate, octogenarian, President Joe Biden. Without his support, Western support as a whole would either collapse entirely or decrease decisively; the war would be over, and so would Zelensky.

That is why an interview that his US counterpart recently gave to Time Magazine was a severe blow to Kiev’s ruler, as even the ultra-hawkish British Telegraph noted. NATO, Biden explained, is not part of his plans for Ukraine’s future. To be precise, while NATO membership during an ongoing war has always been an absurd idea, Biden has ruled it out for the future postwar peace as well. Instead, he suggested that Ukraine would be supplied with weapons so “they can defend themselves.”

To add insult to injury, the American president also mentioned Ukraine’s record of “significant corruption,” a thing he should know a thing or two about from family experience: It was money from nepotistic non-work for the Ukrainian company Burisma that, according to Biden’s son Hunter’s own autobiography, “turned into a major enabler during my steepest skid into addiction,” while enabling him to “spend recklessly, dangerously, destructively. Humiliatingly.”

Let’s set aside the fact that Joe Biden’s statements contradict Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent promise that the upcoming NATO meeting in Washington will be used to build a “strong and well-lit bridge” to membership for Ukraine. Bridge to nowhere, it turns out, at least according to Blinken’s boss.

Is Biden reliable? Of course not. For one thing, he is clearly incapable of remembering most of his own statements. Indeed, the Time interview as a whole displays his rambling confusion all too clearly. (Almost as if he had been set up by those among the Democrats who’d still like to replace him with another candidate, but let’s not dwell on that.) In addition, even among politicians, he stands out as unusually immoral (ask the Palestinians), dishonest, and corrupt. And by openly permitting Ukraine to use American arms to strike within Russia (if with restrictions, for now), he has just shown again that his own declared ‘red lines’ are always up for revision.

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Biden DOJ Goes After Doctor For Revealing Ideological Hospital

The Biden administration has once again gone after a whistleblower. This time the Department of Justice has used its powers to shut up a doctor who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital for secretly performing transgender surgeries and minors.

“Last year, Haim anonymously leaked evidence of the child sex-change procedures to conservative journalist Christopher Rufo. The documents revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital had continued running its transgender program, despite announcing that the program had been discontinued in accordance with Governor Greg Abbott’s 2022 directive equating such medical interventions with child abuse.

The Houston-based hospital was ultimately forced to stop its trans-medical practices after a state law took effect in September 2023, prohibiting drug and surgical “gender-affirming” interventions for minors,” wrote The National Review.

“‘After understanding how far this corruption went, I had no other option but to take the story public and fight back,’ Haim previously told National Review. ‘If I don’t do this now, I’m going to pass on this conflict to my children. That’s something I will not tolerate.’”

That was too much for Merrick Garland and Joe Biden, though.

The City Journal reports that the Department of Justice has now made good on its threats to go after the whistleblower.

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Biden and AOC demanded a $15/hr minimum wage, but their Climate Corps pays less than $12 per hour

President Joe Biden and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have loudly advocated for a minimum-wage increase and for addressing what they say is a “climate crisis.” Based on wages offered for the positions listed under Biden’s taxpayer-funded American Climate Corp (ACC) program — many of which pay under $12 per hour — when the two goals conflict, climate change is the priority. 

Biden: “More than a paycheck. It’s about dignity.”

The ACC, according to Biden and Ocasio-Cortez, is modeled on former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Great Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. It aims to put “more than 20,000 young Americans to work fighting the impacts of climate change today while gaining the skills they need to join the growing clean energy and climate-resilience workforce of tomorrow.” 

Ocasio-Cortez has been advocating for the program for years. 

“This is not a pipe dream, and this is not some big progressive vision that is quote-unquote unrealistic,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a press conference in July 2021 announcing the creation of the program. 

At the same time, Biden and Ocasio-Cortez have been advocates for increases in the federal minimum wage. Shortly after taking office, Biden issued an executive order to give federal employees and employees of federal contractors a $15 per hour minimum wage. 

“A job is about more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity. When I was running for president, I said it was past time to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour,” Biden said in a statement. 

When opposition arose over the inclusion of a bill to increase the federal minimum wage in the Democrats’ covid pandemic relief package, Ocasio-Cortez upset that the bill was even being debated. 

“It is utterly embarrassing that ‘pay people enough to live’ is a stance that’s even up for debate,” she posted on X. 

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Biden: Slip Slidin’ Away

You know the nearer your destination

The more you’re slip slidin’ away

— Paul Simon

President Biden “shows signs of slipping,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. Journalists Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes—no conservatives—spoke to 45 people who have met with the president and noticed his mental and physical decline. They recount, in detail, several meetings over the past year where Biden has been forgetful, confused, and out of it. The president, Linskey and Hughes report, “appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.”

No kidding.

You don’t need the Journal to tell you that Biden is diminished. You need only to open your eyes. Go over Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s unauthorized removal of classified documents. Review Biden’s Oval Office meltdown after Hur released his findings. Watch Biden try to sit at a D-Day commemoration in France on Thursday.

Or read, if you dare, the transcript of Time magazine correspondent Massimo Calabresi and editor in chief Sam Jacobs’s recent interview of Biden. It appeared the same day as Linskey and Hughes’s story.

This is the interview where Biden says—twice—that Russia invaded Russia. Where, immediately after saying, “I’m not going to comment,” Biden says that “there is every reason” to believe Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war against Hamas for political gain. Then Biden says that the 19 percent increase in prices since he became president is due to “shrinkflation” and that he could “take” the Time reporter who asks about his advanced age.

The weirdest moment comes when the reporters ask Biden to describe his second-term agenda. That’s what we in the biz call a “softball question.” And here—excuse the long excerpt, but it is necessary to grasp the full absurdity and danger of having this man continue to serve as president—is Joe Biden’s response:

 To finish what I started in the first term. To continue to make sure that the European continent—I’ll tell you, I got a call from Kissinger about 10 days before he died. And he used the following comment. He said that not since Napoleon has Europe not looked over their shoulder at dread with what Europe—what Russia may do, until now. Until now, you can’t let that change.

The point is that we have an opportunity to have the decisions we make in the last couple of years, in the next four years, are going to determine the future of Europe for a long time to come. And so that’s why we can not let NATO fail, we have to build that both politically and economically. And militarily, which we’re investing significantly. In addition to that, I am desperately focused on making sure that we deal with the… what they are calling the south now. There are going to be a billion people in Africa in the next several years. We have to, we have to be a catalyst for change for the benefit, for the, for the better, we have to help them build back better, we have to help them.

We, on the climate side, have come along and we’ve done everything that is reasonably—and three other countries are the reason we’re in the problem we’re in. But what happens if all of a sudden, on the Amazon, they’re starting to clear, vast swaths of land, cut down forests, etc. Back when Dick Lugar was alive, he and I started something back in the ’90s, where we said—late ’80s, excuse me—where we said to, in the Amazon, they said, look, if you, we’ll make a deal with you Brazil. You don’t cut your forest, we’ll pay you not to do it. We’ll pay you not to do it. We have to prevent— And that’s why we’re working so hard to make sure Angola can be in a position that they have more solar capacity than almost any place in the world, to help that whole continent.

That’s why we want to build a railroad all the way—with others in Europe—all the way across the continent. So that you have, you have countries that have overproduction of agriculture and some that don’t have it, but no way to get a transfer. There’s so much opportunity in Africa. And we have to work it.

This is what we can look forward to in a second term? Working to make sure that Angola has robust solar capacity?

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Biden Has Delivered Millions in Taxpayer Money to … the TALIBAN!

A federal watchdog report reveals that after America had been at war with the Taliban for two decades, the Joe Biden administration now has delivered at least $11 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the terrorists. Probably much more.

A Center Square report posted at Just the News explains much of the cash has been delivered through various aide groups that get federal tax dollars.

And, the report warns, “experts” suggest the actual total Biden has delivered to the Taliban could be much higher.

The Taliban, previously in control in Afghanistan, took control again within days of Biden’s abrupt decision to yank American troops out, a scheme that cost American lives and left behind tens of billions of dollars in American war machinery for the Taliban to use or sell.

Further, Biden left behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghanis who had worked with the American presence there for years – all in danger of death at the hands of the Taliban.

The report cited the conclusion of SIGAR, a federal watchdog, which found, “The U.S. government has continued to be the largest international donor supporting the Afghan people since the former Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban returned to power in August 2021.”

The report continued, “Since then, the U.S. government has provided more than $2.8 billion in humanitarian and development assistance to help the people of Afghanistan.”

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