Tag: joe biden

Biden Claim of Being ‘Raised’ in Black Church Doesn’t Hold up to Scrutiny

Joe Biden’s disturbing habit of telling audacious lies about his biography took another hit this week when the Washington Free Beacon discovered no one can remember Biden attending a black church he claims to have attended at a teen.

On the campaign trail, Biden has claimed he was “raised” in a black church.

Last year, he said, “I got raised in the black church. We would go sit in Rev. Herring’s church, sit there before we’d go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school.”

“I have a lot of black support because that’s where I come from. I was raised in the black church, politically, not a joke,” Biden told the NAACP in January.

The Rev. Herring in the first quote is Rev. Otis Herring, which means the church Biden referred to is the Union Baptist Church in Wilmington, DE. Herring died in 1996, but the Washington Free Beacon reached out to longtime members and they say Biden was not there.

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Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties

During his ABC “town hall” last night, responding to a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden agreed that it was a “mistake” to “support” the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. At the same time, he defended parts of the law, including the Violence Against Women Act, funding to support “community policing” by hiring more officers, and the now-expired federal ban on “assault weapons.” He also implied that the real problem was not so much the law itself but the way that states responded to it. “The mistake came in terms of what the states did locally,” he said.

Both the question and the answer were highly misleading. First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

“Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

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Biden sparks confusion after claiming he ‘became a professor’ after leaving the Senate

Former Vice President Joe Biden raised confusion Wednesday during a virtual round table after claiming he became a “professor” when he left the U.S. Senate.

“When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” Biden claimed. “And I’ve spent a lot of time — and the University of Delaware has the Biden School as well, so I’ve spent a lot of time on campus with college students.”

Biden became vice president after leaving the Senate in 2009 and received the title of “Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor” from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He never taught any classes, according to his own spokesperson at the time.

Biden’s claim immediately drew attention on social media.

“That’s not true,” the Daily Caller’s Greg Price said. “He never taught a class.”

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Joe Biden: 8-Year-Olds Should Be Allowed to Decide They’re Transgender

Former Vice President Joe Biden said during a town hall hosted by ABC News on Thursday night that eight-year-olds should be allowed to decide that they are transgender.

Mieke Hacke, a voter from Pennsylvania, asked Biden the following “question”:

Haeck: I’m the proud mom of two girls, eight and ten. My youngest daughter is transgender. The Trump administration has attacked the rights of transgender people, banning them from military service, weakening nondiscrimination protections, and even removing the word “transgender” from some government websites. How will you, as president, reverse this dangerous and discriminatory agenda and ensure that the lives and rights of LGBTQ people are protected under U.S. law?

Biden: I will flat-out just change the law. Eliminate those executive orders, number one. You may recall, I’m the guy who said — I was raised by a man who, I remember, I was being dropped off, my dad was a high school-educated, well-read man who was a really decent guy, and I was being dropped off to get an application in the center of our city, Wilmington, Delaware, the corporate capital of the world at the time, and these two men are getting out to get an application to be a lifeguard in the African-American community, because there was a big swimming pool complex. And these two men, well-dressed, leaned up and hugged one another and kissed one another. I’m getting out of the car at the light, and I turned to my dad, and my dad looked at me, he said, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.” The idea that an 8-year-old child, a 10-year-old child, decides, you know, “I want to be transgender, that’s what I think I’d like to be, it’d make my life a lot easier” — there should be zero discrimination. And what’s happening is, too many transgender women of color are being murdered. They’re being murdered. I mean, I think it’s up to now 17, don’t hold me to that number. But — it’s higher now?

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No, Joe Biden, Cops Can’t Just Shoot People in the Leg

During ABC’s town hall event with former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate provided a garbled response to a question about criminal justice reform. In particular, he wrongly suggested that when police fire their weapons at suspects, they could shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill.

“You can ban chokeholds, but beyond that you have to teach [the police] how to de-escalate circumstances,” said Biden. “So instead of anybody coming at you and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.”

This was just one line in a very long, rambling answer to a question about police violence—but it stuck out for its sheer absurdity. The suggestion betrays a total lack of understanding about how guns work.

Note that it was not some slip of the tongue: Biden has previously proposed this exact idea. Contrary to the former veep’s repeated assertions, neither the cops nor anyone else—except perhaps James Bond—could plan to shoot people in the leg as a matter of routine practice. It would take an expert marksman to accomplish that feat consistently. Unless a target is at close range, standing perfectly still, it’s very difficult to hit a specific location on the body. In reality, people are often moving during shootouts, which means that legs and arms can be the hardest part of the body to hit.

“An average suspect can move his hand and forearm across his body to a 90-degree angle in 12/100 of a second,” wrote Bill Lewinksi in a paper for the Force Science Institute. “He can move his hand from his hip to shoulder height in 18/100 of a second. The average officer pulling the trigger as fast as he can on a Glock, one of the fastest- cycling semi-autos, requires 1/4 second to discharge each round.”

If an officer’s life is actually threatened, hitting the suspect in the leg is no guarantee the threat will be neutralized. People who have been hit in the leg or arm are not immediately incapacitated, which is why the police keep firing until a suspect is down. Real life is not like an episode of 24, or a Mission: Impossible movie!

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Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor

Even more astonishing still, Twitter locked the account of the New York Post, banning the paper from posting any content all day and, evidently, into Thursday morning. The last tweet from the paper was posted at roughly 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday. 

And then, on Thursday morning, the Post published a follow up article using the same archive of materials, this one purporting to detail efforts by the Vice President’s son to pursue lucrative deals with a Chinese energy company by using his father’s name. Twitter is now also banning the sharing or posting of links to that article as well.

In sum, the two Silicon Valley giants, with little explanation, united to prevent the sharing and dissemination of this article. As Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Pearce put it, “Facebook limiting distribution is a bit like if a company that owned newspaper delivery trucks decided not to drive because it didn’t like a story. Does a truck company edit the newspaper? It does now, apparently.”

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Twitter, Biden and the New York Post – Social Media Censorship Kicks up a Gear

Yesterday, the New York Post published several articles claiming to show evidence of corruption on the part of Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

The charges are varied but not really surprising. One article claims Hunter introduced his father to a Ukrainian energy magnate who asked the family to use their influence to shut down an investigation into his company.

Another story suggests Hunter Biden used his family name to secure a high-paid job and stock interests in a Chinese company.

The NYP evidence these claims with emails and documents allegedly retrieved from a laptop left at a computer repair store in Delaware. The owner of the store alerted the FBI to the computer’s existence when no one came forward to pay for the repairs and he could not contact the owner.

According to the NYP, both the hard drive and laptop were then seized by the FBI. They have a copy of the grand jury subpoena, which is certainly solid evidence, if genuine.

The owner of the store claims he, prior to it being seized, made a copy of the hard drive and sent it to Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer.

While this is potentially intriguing, if true, it’s not really “news”. Biden’s corruption in Ukraine has been evident since his son was appointed to the board of the largest energy company in Ukraine within weeks of the US-backed coup in 2014 (a decision so obviously dodgy even the Guardian made a joke out of it). Joe Biden himself has even admitted to applying financial pressure to get a Ukrainian State Prosecutor removed from office.

None of this is really “big news”. Corruption is rampant in the halls of power, that is as certain as death and taxes, and will continue to be so, whether or not these specific allegations are accurate.

The big news, the part of this story that should concern everyone, is that Twitter has completely blocked this material on their platform.

And we’re not talking a “soft block”, we at OffG are more than familiar with twitter’s use of “warnings”, no they literally made it impossible to share the links, even in DMs. If you try, you get his warning:

We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”

We’ve talked about twitter’s “partners” before, and they are suspect. As for being “potentially harmful”, well isn’t that subjective? Fire is vital at times, but certainly “potentially harmful” at others. Water, in sufficient quantity, is “potentially harmful”.

If you’re a liar, the truth is “potentially harmful”.

Facebook has followed suit, if in less sweeping fashion. The social media giant’s spokesperson Andy Stone announced that they would be:

“…reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation.

This decision is pending approval by their “independent fact-checkers”, which we have also covered in detail before.

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So what are the social media companies’ excuses reasons for blocking this content?

Well, it depends who you ask.

Twitter claims that since the emails are potentially “hacked”, posting them violates their policy regarding illegally gathered material. (Interestingly this policy was never applied to Trump’s leaked tax returns.)

Facebook, on the other hand, claim to have blocked these stories because they might be “misinformation”. A truly ludicrous precedent to set. You can’t block something that might not be true, because that applies to literally almost everything.

You do have to admire the strategy though. The pincer movement is brilliant.

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