Biden’s classified documents are Trump’s doing!

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, this is satire, via the Babylon Bee:

After multiple caches of highly classified government documents were found in different locations belonging to President Joe Biden, the United States Department of Justice acted swiftly to indict former President Donald Trump for the alleged crime.

“This is a serious violation of federal regulations,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press briefing announcing the indictment. “We will take all measures available to the Justice Department to hold Donald Trump accountable for President Biden being found in possession of these documents.”

But as so often happens, life imitates art, because quite a few people are insinuating that Republicans planted the documents:

“The View” co-host [“Wile E. Coyote”] Joy Behar said Thursday that she didn’t know a luckier person than former President Donald Trump and said President Biden’s classified documents appeared just as “we were this close” to getting Trump.

“I’ve never seen a luckier person than Donald Trump,” Behar declared. “Just as we’re this close to getting him, somehow these documents appear,” appearing to suggest they were planted…

Hostin asked Goldberg whether it felt like “the Republicans were behind it” and whether it felt like opposition research.

“It did originally, but not now, because one of the things he’s saying is that, you know, some of the locations where the docs may have been shipped in the transition may have gotten taken and put,” Goldberg responded.

I can’t really follow that last sentence of Whoopi’s, but no matter.

Also, when Biden’s Corvette angle to the story first broke, I initially assumed that of course this was The Babylon Bee. I had to check the story several times to convince myself it wasn’t.

What’s going on here? A great many people, and certainly many people on the right, assume that the Democrats have finally decided that it’s Biden’s time to go. That makes perfect sense in some ways; for example, the timing is very close to the two-year mark after which Kamala Harris would be allowed to run for two more terms rather than just one. Then again, those same behind-the-scene Democrats plotting against Joe know Harris is a weaker candidate than some of the alternative choices such as Newsom, but he’s not in the line of succession and Kamala is. So in 2024 they’d have the task of getting rid of her, which means this two-terms-for-Kamala thing doesn’t make sense as a motive. Of course, it could be Harris’ forces who are behind it, but I just don’t give them that much credit. However, it’s the case that Biden has said he’s thinking of running in 2024 and that could be disaster for the Party, and various groups would have the motive to take him out before that and make a 2024 run unlikely because he’d be tainted goods (not that that ever hurt him before).

What argues against this theory is that I still don’t see why they would choose a method to discredit Biden that helps Trump in his defense to his own classified papers problem. That in particular makes no sense to me. Is it just that they think they can successfully spin it in a way to convince the public that this is much less nefarious than whatever it was Trump is supposed to have done? That is so absurd, and the Corvette image so graphic, that it just seems unlikely to me that anyone but the Democratic base will buy it. That’s my stumbling block with the entire theory. Surely there are other things they can hold against Biden that aren’t so Trump-friendly.

One possibility is that the Democrats knew that the Republican House was bound to discover the papers in some sort of investigation – although I can’t figure out how – and they wanted to “get ahead of the story” in time-honored fashion. I believe that Garland’s appointment of a special counsel in charge of this may preclude the House Republicans going into it full bore, although I’m not completely certain of that.

Still another phenomenon that argues for the idea that the Democrats have decided that Biden’s got to go is the uncharacteristically harsh behavior of the White House press corps yesterday. What could account for that, except that the word has gone out the Joe is now fair game?

I struggle to make sense of the contradictions.

[NOTE: And even if you think that the Democrats are confident they can fix the 2024 presidential election in their favor no matter who the candidate might be, if the gap is too large it becomes more and more difficult. Plus, if fraud can get anyone over the finish line, then why remove Joe at all? He’s no more embarrassing now than he’s been for a long time – at least, he wasn’t till this papers-in-the-garage thing happened.]

[ADDENDUM: It suddenly occurs to me that maybe the Democrats want to get Trump off the hook for the MAL papers because they’ve decided they want to run against him in 2024 because they think he’s easier to beat than some of the alternatives. That didn’t work very well for them in 2016, though.]

Jordan Peterson talks to Chloe Cole

The New Neo Posted on by

I know this is a very long video. But it’s really quite extraordinary. The subject is transitioning and detransitioning from the viewpoint of someone who went through the process as a minor. It’s well worth listening to some or all of it. I tend to listen to videos when I’m doing something else, like housework, and I usually double the speed setting so it takes half as long to hear the whole thing.

Here it is:

The IRS funding vote

The New Neo Posted on by

There have been are a lot of things happening in the House recently – so many that I missed this on Monday, the day it occurred. Of course, it won’t be passed by the Senate, and even if it were passed Biden would veto it:

The House voted to repeal billions of dollars of Internal Revenue Service funding that Democrats approved last year, an issue that is likely to crop up repeatedly this year.

In the first vote on legislation with Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the helm, the chamber passed a bill on Monday night that would rescind most of the $80 billion President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act approved to bolster the agency’s faltering audit program. The legislation passed 221-210 on a party-line vote.

So what? Well, it’s another promise kept, for starters. Most of the rest of the article is little more than propaganda and spin of the mean old nasty Republicans pounce variety. But this is why the passage of this bill might matter, at least a little:

The new majority is going to bring “accountability on spending in every federal agency,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said on Tuesday. “If there’s waste fraud and abuse in any federal agency it’s got to be rooted out…and it started with the IRS bill last night.”

As part of a deal to win over members of his caucus to secure his new position, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has agreed to only bring up fiscal 2024 spending bills that could cut non-defense agency funding by more than 20%. Scalise confirmed Republicans will also use the upcoming need to raise the nation’s debt ceiling as leverage to bring about spending cuts.

“We have to sit down and say, ‘Why are we hitting the limit?’” the majority leader said. “Before we hit that limit, shouldn’t we have an honest conversation about how to start living within our means?” He added Republicans would push to “put mechanisms in place” to “control the spending problem.”

Republicans left the door open to providing some resources for IRS to boost customer service…

So far, things seem to be proceeding as well as could be hoped, considering the thinness of the GOP majority. It’s instructive to remember that even had the Republicans won the Senate as well, without a veto-proof GOP majority Biden would have successfully vetoed just about every bill they might have passed.

Now Biden gets his very own special counsel

The New Neo Posted on by

I guess the second classified documents announcement – that some were found in Biden’s garage near his Corvette – was a bridge too far, even for Garland, and he felt he had to give at least the appearance of parity with his reaction to Trump:

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate President Biden’s handling of classified documents dating back to the Obama administration on Thursday.

Garland tapped Robert Hur, a former United States Attorney, to handle the investigation. The Justice Department escalated to a special counsel investigation from a mere review on Thursday after a second stash of classified documents was found inside the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home. The first documents were found inside the Washington offices of the Penn Biden Center think tank.

No FBI raids, of course.

I predict all of this will go away regarding any consequences for Biden. It does at least somewhat take the winds out of the “prosecute Trump for the MAL documents” sails, though. My guess is that their case against Trump regarding the documents at MAL already wasn’t bearing much fruit, although never underestimate the ability of a determined prosecutor to charge and convict a ham sandwich. In the case of Garland and Biden, however, there is the opposite goal – to exonerate him. Hur has a pretty low profile, and so far I haven’t been able to detect what his attitude is towards Biden.

Biden doesn’t even have the possible defense available to Trump, which is that as president he had declassified the papers in question. Biden was VP at the time he took them, not president. Of course, Biden could claim that Obama declassified them, but I doubt Obama wants to be involved. Then again, Biden seems to be claiming “surprise” that the papers were even there and ignorance about what they say (that article also contains the usual MSM spin in an attempt to exonerate him).

And then there’s this:

Biden’s classified papers

The New Neo Posted on by

Interesting, and perhaps even true?

The classified memos from the Obama administration, disclosed on Monday, were actually found last November inside the offices Biden used at the Penn-Biden Center, a think tank setup by the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

Long before the documents were found, the Penn-Biden Center was the focus of a watchdog complaint because its parent university had received large sums of money — estimated to be at least $54 million — in the time period around when Biden joined the group. This raised the specter of Chinese donors having helped fund the nearly $1 million in personal pay Biden received from the think tank.

The center, which was announced in 2017 and opened one year later, was set up the same year that Biden’s son Hunter was creating a joint venture with Chinese officials in a company called CEFC to pursue natural gas deals within the United States which would have benefitted the communist nation…

The Biden family drew scrutiny from Congressional investigators for receiving a no-interest, forgivable loan from the Chinese partners, according to emails found on a Hunter Biden laptop, which was seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019.

The next question is always: will anything come of this? I can’t answer that one, but this is another interesting thing the House did recently:

This controversy comes at an inconvenient time for Democrats, as the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to establish a subcommittee to investigate U.S.-China strategic competition. The final tally was 365-65.

That many Democrats voted for it, too? That certainly caught my eye. What gives? Here’s what the article says:

New Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was credited with spearheading the effort to massage the wording of the proposal so it would be broad enough to garner broad bipartisan support.

I suppose it’s possible this is all happening because the Democrats have decided to dispense with Joe. But I really don’t think so. The first reason is that they still have no one significantly better with whom to replace him (and Harris). The second reason is that they could have gotten rid of him in some other way – for health problems, for example – without bringing up all this potentially scandalous stuff that might reflect poorly on the Democratic Party and also hurt the effort to get Trump for his own supposed storage infractions involving classified material.

NOTE: Apparently the Penn-Biden center documents also contained classified material on Ukraine and Iran.

The GOP House majority gets with the program

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you miss this? It’s another victory:

The House of Representatives passed a new rules package Monday that overhauls the way it functions by putting up more barriers to congressional spending and creating a more deliberate process for passing legislation, which were key demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Party.

The rules passed with an 220-213 vote that saw just one Republican, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas, vote against it. Passage of the blueprint for how the GOP will run the House is the first sign of success for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy after the fight of his life last week for the speaker’s gavel.

I had read predictions of a big fight on this. But if any more fighting occurred after McCarthy’s election as Speaker, it seems to have been settled by the time the vote on the rules was taken.

Some of the new rules: no more proxy voting, and a return to a “Cut-As-You-Go.” You can find a good in-depth discussion of some of the rules here.

It’s been many many years since we’ve had even the apparent dedication of the Republican leadership to reforms of which most people on the right would actually approve. Whatever the reason this is happening now – and I think some of it was forced by the rebels and some of it would have happened anyway because of reaction to the heavy handedness of Pelosi in stifling the GOP representatives – it is certainly refreshing. And despite the House’s relative lack of power without also holding the Senate and the presidency, it’s still a satisfying thing to see what they’re doing right now. “Refreshing” and “satisfying” describe emotional reactions rather than actual policy achievements, but they’re pleasant alternatives to rage and frustration.

NOTE: Gonzalez’s objection was that the rules changes are “anti-immigration.” My assumption is that he was allowed to defect because the rules package could be passed even without him.

What caused the flight stoppage?

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m looking for all you pilots and retired pilots to weigh in on this.

But here’s the official story:

Flights across the United States resumed Wednesday morning, several hours after the Federal Aviation Administration suffered a computer outage that forced it to halt all departures nationwide while it scrambled to resolve the issue.

The FAA said the crippling delays that affected thousands of flights appear to have been caused by a problem in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system, which sends pilots vital information they need to fly.

Investigators have seen no evidence of a cyberattack, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

Don’t they have some sort of backup system? Or was that affected too? Or did they need to find out whether it was a cyberattack before they lifted the ban? Better to err on the side of caution, though.

The following is almost humorous, except that it’s not:

President Joe Biden ordered an investigation after he was briefed on the situation by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Do either of them have a clue what they’re talking about here? What in Buttigieg’s background qualifies him for this job?

On the other hand – as someone pointed out in a comment I saw the other day – Buttigieg has the distinction of giving the transportation secretary job such an unusually high profile that it’s one of the rare times that so many people actually know who the Secretary of Transportation is.

Another observation:

Meanwhile, the top Republican on that committee, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said the “FAA’s inability to keep an important safety system up and running is completely unacceptable and just the latest example of dysfunction within the Department of Transportation.”

McCarthy keeps another promise…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and tells Schiff, Omar, and Swalwell to say “buy-bye” to their powerful committee positions.

Pelosi set the rules, as McCarthy reminded them:

McCarthy said, “‘It’s not like it’s anything new. Remember, this is what Nancy Pelosi – this is the type of Congress she wanted to have.

“Swalwell can’t get a security clearance in the private sector. I’m not going to give him a government security clearance.”

McCarthy also said, “Schiff has lied too many times to the American public. He should not be on Intel.”

Long before the recent showdown, McCarthy had indicated this would be done. However, the fight over the Speakership certainly didn’t hurt in that regard.

Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.

NOTE: Much more here from Ace, in particular about Schiff’s demands to Twitter to censor journalists critical of him.