Category: Crap For Brains

President Biden’s wayward remarks a cause for concern, clarification

The president of the United States is a blowhard — again.

If the country thought that it was getting a buttoned-up, by-the-books communicator after four wildly undisciplined years of Donald Trump, it knew nothing about Joseph R. Biden’s long career as Washington’s standout long-winded, seat-of-the-pants, poorly informed and misleading talker.

Biden blew up two presidential campaigns with his verbal idiocy, and no one thought during his decades as a senator that he was just the statesman the country needed to handle sensitive international questions with precise, cogent communications.

Winston Churchill famously mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. Joe Biden tries to muster the English language but confuses and dispirits it, until the poor language slinks off ready to get its discharge papers and return to civilian life.

Biden’s handling of Russia and China in recent months has been marked by a basic inability to stay within the lines of U.S. policy — by seeming to give a kind of greenlight to a “minor” Russian incursion into Ukraine, by calling for Vladimir Putin to go, and by committing to defend Taiwan by force.

All these wayward statements required immediate and utterly predictable cleanup by a White House staff that must be on constant alert to explain on a moment’s notice what the president meant after he says something completely different.

Rarely have so few had to clarify so much.

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Woman Injured in Brooklyn Subway Shooting Sues Gun Manufacturer Glock

Lawsuit says Glock should be held liable because it ‘endangered the public health and safety’ with marketing and sales of its guns

A woman wounded in last month’s mass shooting on a New York City subway car filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Glock, the maker of the handgun allegedly used in the attack.

Ilene Steur, 49, was one of 10 people hurt by direct gunfire when she was hit by a bullet in her buttocks during her commute to work on 12 April.

Her lawsuit against the Austrian gun manufacturer, filed as a federal lawsuit in Brooklyn, claims that Glock should be held liable because it “endangered the public health and safety” with the marketing, distribution and sales of its guns. It accuses the firearm manufacturer of “reckless disregard for human life”.

A man charged in the attack, Frank James, is described a “Black nationalist” in the complaint. He has pleaded not guilty to terrorism and other counts after turning himself in.

Prosecutors allege James set off smoke canisters and then fired a 9mm Glock handgun at least 33 times inside the crowded subway car. In addition to the 10 people wounded in the attack, 13 others were injured by smoke inhalation and in the ensuing chaos.

Steur’s lawsuit accuses Glock of “marketing that emphasizes firearm characteristics such as their high capacity and ease of concealment, that appeal to prospective purchasers with criminal intent”.

It claims Glock is aware that its design is “unsuited to personal defense or recreation, enables an individual in possession of the weapon to inflict unparalleled civilian carnage”.

The complaint goes on to accuse Glock of making an “intentional effort for their pistols to be used in movies and rap songs”.

Mark Shirian, one of Steur’s lawyers, told the New York Times “gun manufacturers do not live in a bubble.

“They are aware that their marketing strategies are empowering purchasers with ill intent and endangering the lives of innocent people,” he said.

The gun manufacturer has not immediately commented on the lawsuit. It has in the past rejected calls to curb sales of its high-capacity magazines……

Excellent lambs

In the 1960s, campus protesters rejected adult authority, writes William Deresiewicz. Now the “young progressive elite” want the grownups to protect them from emotional and psychological harm, writes William Deresiewicz on Bari Weiss’s Common Sense Substack.

Not much has changed since he wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America’s Elite in 2013, he writes.

We are back to in loco parentis, in fact if not in law. College is now regarded as the last stage of childhood, not the first of adulthood. . . . The nature of woke protests, the absence of Covid and other protests, the whole phenomenon of excellent sheephood: all of them speak to the central dilemma of contemporary youth, which is that society has not given them any way to grow up — not financially, not psychologically, not morally.

. . . The attributes of adulthood — responsibility, maturity, self-sacrifice, self-control — are no longer valued, and frequently no longer modeled. So children are stuck: they want to be adults, but they don’t know how.

“Beware of prepackaged rebellions,” he tells the Class of 2022. “That protest march that you’re about to join may be a herd.”

Becoming an independent person isn’t easy, writes Deresiewicz. “Childhood is over. Dare to grow up.”

Stanford University (motto: “Let the winds of freedom blow.”) doesn’t want to let students grow up, writes Bill Evers of the Independent Institute in the Washington Examiner.

The Office of Student Affairs, which had fewer than 50 employees just three decades ago, now employs more than 400 administrators who micromanage students and infantilize adults who pay for an education at Stanford.

Under the ResX plan, students are assigned to a campus “neighborhood” for their undergraduate careers, Evers writes.  They will find ethnic-themed dorms for the “Black Diaspora” and “Chicanx/Latinx” students to apartment buildings promoting “the IDEAL (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Learning community).”

Students’ social life is regulated: Students must register any party they host, he writes. Get-togethers during “dead weeks” before finals are banned, as is hard liquor and drinking games, even for students 21 and older.

These measures “have drawn widespread condemnation from students, including a student-led health and safety initiative that provides snacks and water at parties and walks students home on the weekends,” Evers writes. “These students say that the rule changes have spurred an increase in binge drinking.”

When you’ve lost NBC……………

I love this part:

Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct [yeah, sure baby] statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.

Well, when you have apparently have senile dementia, making stupid off the cuff remarks that constantly get corrected by your staff the lackeys of your puppet masters, and also sound like a broken record repeating utter crap-for-brains nonsense, it sure does appear that he isn’t in command of anything. 
Just me, but the question arises about SloJoe­™ feeling his staff ‘undermines him’. If he feels that way, why weren’t those people fired the second time it happened? (figuring you’d warn them after the first time to stop it) One obvious answer is that he can’t, because he’s been told who is really running the show, and it ain’t him. He’s nothing more than a figurehead who gets ordered about like an actor.

BLUF
“We’re on a track — a losing track,” Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said of the Democrats.

Inside a Biden White House adrift
Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party.

WASHINGTON — Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.

Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say. 

Crises have piled up in ways that have at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed: record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in Covid case numbers — and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder that he has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence. Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November, when midterm elections may cost his party control of Congress. 

“I don’t know what’s required here,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., whose endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primaries helped rescue Biden’s struggling candidacy. “But I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.”

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A better term might be ‘willful ignorance‘. And the willfully ignorant take pride in their ignorance. They wear it like a medal. They don’t want to know anything about those icky guns. And in the case of politicians, they’re equal parts stupid and deceitful.

Certain Americans reveal their Second Amendment illiteracy

Biden capitalizes on every opportunity to broadcast how severely uninformed he is — but this Memorial Day, he settled on airing his ignorance via the gun debate, saying a 9mm bullet will blow a “lung out of the body.”  Those of us who have seen a 9mm round know how emphatically wrong he is.

Yet, despite the gross magnitude of his blunder, it’s not the worst I’ve heard.  As it turns out, many Americans are completely uneducated on every facet of the gun debate, and they share one common denominator — they’re all Democrats.  Let’s take a look back at some of the top contenders for the Democrats’ stupidest moments regarding the right to bear arms.

Patricia Eddington, a former state legislator for the state of New York, once said:

Some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat-seeking device. So, you don’t shoot deer with a bullet that size. If you do, you could cook it at the same time [emphasis added].

What does Eddington think?  You could shoot a deer and then walk over with a knife and fork, ready to feast?  Despite actually making this claim, Eddington said this prior to the introduction of a gun control package, including a bill she sponsored.

Next up, Mr. Thomas Binger, the prosecuting attorney in the Rittenhouse case.  Although Binger’s registered political affiliation is unknown, FEC contribution data lists donations to ActBlue.  Mr. Binger’s first blunder was picking up a rifle, immediately putting his finger in the trigger well, and aiming it at a room full of people.

Binger’s second mistake was speculating that hollow point rounds “explode” upon impact.  Again, for the educated among us, the appropriate word would be “expand,” as this type of bullet doesn’t detonate into fragments — it’s not a grenade.

Now we have Dianne Feinstein, federal senator from California, who declared:

We have federal regulations and state laws that prohibit hunting ducks with more than three rounds. And yet it’s legal to hunt humans with 15-round, 30-round, even 150-round magazines.

What?  Hunting humans is not legal.  The only legal way to kill humans is via abortion, which she unequivocally supports.

And lastly, we have Donzella James, a state senator out of the great state of Georgia, who stated, “Yes, I believe in the Second Amendment.  But why are we spreading the access to guns to everyone?”

Although we didn’t need a reminder, it is worth pointing out that somehow, being a Democrat politician apparently makes one incapable of understanding firearms, or the idea of a God-given right that is not to be infringed — and brings us a few laughs.

House Dems’ gun package to raise age limit for semi-automatic rifle purchases, ban ‘high capacity’ magazines

The House Judiciary Committee is set to hold an emergency meeting Thursday to pen an extensive gun control package.

Democrats are currently pushing a series of eight bills aimed at suppressing gun ownership, referred to collectively as the “Protecting Our Kids Act,” Fox News confirmed.

The bills contain proposals raising the minimum age for purchasing a semi-automatic weapon from 18 to 21, a ban on “high capacity magazines,” a registry for bump stocks, and more.

The House will vote on some form of the package when they return to session next week.

The House package is expected to go nowhere in the Senate and is seen as more of a show vote, as a bipartisan group of senators tries to agree on a bill that could pass the Senate.

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48 shot, 9 dead in Chicago over the weekend but John Legend says it might be racist to talk about it

Biden Wants You to Know the Economy Is Super and if You Don’t Agree You’re a Moron.

Joe Biden’s biggest problem, amongst so many other slightly less big problems, is the economy. While all other efforts have failed to reset his presidency and bring up his poll numbers, his handlers at the White House have a new plan that I’m sure we all believe deep down in our hearts will actually work this time.According to Politico’s Playbook newsletter released Tuesday, Joe Biden will pivot to the economy in June in a desperate bid to “convince skeptical voters that, despite their current misgivings, the economy is actually doing quite well.”

In other words: The economy is doing great and if you can’t see that, you’re stupid.

Hasn’t he tried this strategy before?

Joe Biden has been tooting his own horn for over a year now by trying to take credit for the reopening of the economy after the lockdowns.

“We’re ending 2021 with what one analyst described as the strongest first-year economic track record of any president in the last 50 years,” Biden claimed last December. “Let’s keep the progress going.”

Phase one of this pivot was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with Joe Biden’s name in the byline (though was obviously written by someone else) claiming that the Biden administration’s “economic and vaccination plans helped achieve the most robust recovery in modern history.”

Biden’s new strategy comes on the heels of the latest economic report showing that the U.S. economic contraction in the first quarter of 2022 was even worse than expected. So, yeah… things really are going great, we’re just too stupid to notice. We’re too focused on gas prices and inflation to realize that everything is actually awesome.

Even Politico acknowledged that this strategy is likely to backfire. “Polling has shown that voters’ top concerns this year are the economy and inflation. Telling them that their day-to-day worries are not supported by macroeconomic data — or, as Biden writes, that ‘the U.S. is in a better economic position than almost any other country’ — is risky and could come across as tone-deaf, something frontline Democrats in swing districts have been concerned about.”

I think I can sum up Biden’s economic strategy in one video clip:

Biden hosts a photo op in Uvalde, but not before he disinvites Border Patrol agents who responded to the massacre.

Apparently, for Joe Biden, only certain murdered children are worth memorializing — ones who fit his political agenda.  Although it’s been over a year and a half since little eight-year-old Jackson Sparks was mowed down at a Christmas parade, Biden has yet to pay his respects to the community of Waukesha, because the killer didn’t use a gun.  However, Salvador Ramos did, so Biden’s handlers sprang into action for a press opportunity, but not before revoking invitations from heroes:

Biden administration officials uninvited many of the Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement officers who responded to the Robb Elementary School shooting from a meeting with the president scheduled for Sunday in Uvalde. Despite the event being planned for a large open-space facility, administration officials cited space as a reason for the retracted invitations.

His presence, unsurprisingly, was met with sincere disgust.

Other members of the public, upset about the fallout of lawless open-border policies in their border town, held signs directing Biden toward the scene of the chaos.

Given his very public history, Biden’s sleazy reputation is well earned and well known.  From relegating Black Americans to a position of Democrat footstool with his “well then you ain’t Black” comment to caressing and sniffing nearly every young child in his presence to simply fathering Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s behavior is unbecoming of an American, a man, and particularly a president.  His gaffes are endless, and his entire political career is summed up by these defining characteristics: “incipient dementia, inability to lead, and sheer heartlessness.”  Biden has fully given in to the tenets and beliefs of the modern Democrat-Marxist party, which stands opposed to law and order and the very Americans who uphold constitutional limits and God-given rights of the individual — so his move to exclude the very men responsible for taking down the Robb Elementary child-killer ought to be predictable.

Just when you thought Biden couldn’t sink any lower into the pit of classlessness, he did — and I imagine he will be shoring up his indecency for as long as we have the misfortune of his “leadership.”

SloJoe™ confirms again that he has senile dementia
He’s gone off on 9mm before, as well as revolutionary cannon which means what’s left of his brain is like a record that is skipping.

Biden claims a ‘9mm bullet blows the lung of out of the body’

President Joe Biden urged Congress to work toward a bipartisan solution on gun violence on Monday, one day after visiting the Texas town where a gunman took the lives of 19 elementary school children and their two teachers last week.

‘I think things have gotten so bad that everybody is getting more rational about it – at least that’s my hope and prayer,’ the president told reporters outside of the White House.

Biden recounted been shown x-rays of what a firearm could do to the human body.

‘The .22 caliber bullet will lodge in the lungs and we can get it out. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body,’ he said. ‘The idea of a high caliber weapon, there is no rationale for it in terms of self-protection, hunting.’

A 9mm bullet is typically known as the ammo used in handguns – the most common type to conceal carry. It’s not clear if Biden misspoke to mean a higher-caliber weapon such as the ones used in the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. …………

 

Classic gaslighting

Morning Joe: It’s ‘Paranoid’ To Say Gov. Coming For Guns, But Praises Beto Who Said Just That!

Can Joe Scarborough and the Morning Joe crew really be this clueless? On Thursday’s show, Scarborough and Willie Geist repeatedly claimed that it was “paranoid” for people to think that the government could be coming for their guns. But there’s just one problem: in that same segment, Scarborough praised Beto O’Rourke, who said just that, for the political stunt he pulled yesterday, in which he interrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during his press conference on the Uvalde school shooting.

Beto O’Rourke, Joe. Surely you remember that in a Democratic presidential debate in 2019 during his failed, short-lived run, O’Rourke said:

“Hell yes! We’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47.”

 

 

As you’ll see in the linked clip, that line drew huge cheers from the Democrat crowd in attendance.

Yes, O’Rourke subsequently backed away from that statement when it became politically untenable. But does anyone doubt that if he and his fellow Democrats could, they would take guns away from law-abiding Americans?

Responding to a person on the stage with Abbott who called O’Rourke a “sick son of a bitch” for his stunt, Scarborough claimed that the real sick sons of bitches were Abbott and others who won’t pass more gun-control legislation. For good measure, Scarborough twice called Abbott and those with him “freaks.”

So, is Joe Scarborough suffering from short-term memory loss? Or was he consciously covering up that Beto O’Rourke, the object of his praise, had boasted that “hell yes,” he would be taking guns away from lawful owners? Remind us again, Joe: who’s the SOB and the freak?

BIDEN SHOOTING BLANKS (AGAIN)

[Wednesday] at the White House executive-order signing ceremony commemorating the death of George Floyd, President Biden unleased a false bromide that he has often repeated (transcript here):

I spent my career, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and as Vice President, working for commonsense gun reforms — as I said, as a senator and a Vice President.

While they clearly will not prevent every tragedy, we know certain ones will have significant impact and have no negative impact on the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not absolute. When it was passed, you couldn’t own a — you couldn’t own a cannon, you couldn’t own certain kinds of weapons. It’s just — there’s always been limitations.

Jonathan Turley notes several previous occasions on which Biden has shot off this falsehood “that many of us have corrected in the past,” as he did here last month on April 12. Today he reiterates his research:

Once again, there were no federal laws barring cannon ownership when the Second Amendment was enacted. Gun laws remained local matters and I do not know of any bans on cannons or other gun types until much later in our history. Early local laws did control concealed weapons, though concealed cannons were not part of those ordinances.

Indeed, the Constitution itself supports private cannon ownership in the case of privateers. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 allows Congress to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal.” That allowed private parties to privateer on the high seas with . . . cannons.

Its almost funny. As Ed Driscoll put it  on a previous Biden misfire this past February: “The gaslighting will continue until morale improves.”

Crap-for-brains SloJoe’s brain has started skipping like a scratched record again, and he’s stuck on the belief that ‘deer guns’ can’t shoot through ballistic armor, when we know that all but a very few rifle rounds will go through kevlar like a hot knife through butter, and most plates as well. But that’s senile dementia for you.

Biden Talks of Deer in Kevlar Vests (Again), Floats ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban

President Joe Biden addressed the shooting at Uvalde, Texas, Robb Elementary School, talking again about deer in Kevlar vests and suggesting an “assault weapons” ban.

Biden began his comments with a soft tone, talking about loss, then he erupted with, “As a nation, we have to ask when in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby. When in God’s name are we going to do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

He went on to claim that there have been “900 incidents of gunfire reported on school grounds” since the December 14, 2012, attack on Sandy Hook Elementary school. He talked of shootings in theaters, churches, and grocery stores.

Biden said, “And don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage … When we passed the ‘assault weapons’ ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.”

He criticized being able to walk into a gun store and buy more than one “assault weapon,” never mentioning that purchases from gun stores require background checks.

Biden said, “What in God’s name do you need an ‘assault weapon’ for except to kill someone? Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake.”

He then criticized the firearm industry, claiming “gun manufacturers have spent two decades aggressively ‘assault weapons,’ which make them the most and largest profit.”

He called for Americans to stand up to the firearm industry.

On March 1, 2022, Breitbart News reported that Biden brought up deer in Kevlar vests during the State of the Union Address.

He called for a ban on “assault weapons” with “high-capacity magazines that hold up to 100 rounds,” and asked, “Do you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?”

Democrats’ Latest Phony Inflation Scapegoat: Credit Cards

In this administration, it’s always someone else’s fault. Inflation is now the No. 1 concern of voters, so the White House first blamed COVID. Then Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Then Vladimir Putin. Then meatpackers and the poultry industry, Big Oil and pharmaceutical companies.

Now, Democrats have identified a new inflation scapegoat: plastic. Visa, Mastercard, American Express and other credit cards hidden away in your wallet.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has had it out for credit cards for almost two decades, even though over that period, credit cards, which were once reserved for the rich, are now nearly ubiquitous in our society. Many stores don’t even take cash anymore in the post-COVID world. The benefits and conveniences of paying with a plastic card are easily in the tens of billions of dollars to retailers and shoppers. Stores benefit because shoppers don’t have to have cash on hand to make purchases. They also benefit from not having to deal with the exchange of cash, which can lead to theft by unscrupulous employees at the register.

Credit cards are convenient for consumers because we don’t have to walk around with hundreds of dollars in our wallets.

But Democrats allege that the interchange fee that credit card companies charge retailers and merchants for their service on transactions is excessive. This interchange fee typically ranges between about 1% to 3% of the retail price of the transaction. If retailers don’t want to pay the cost because they think it is exorbitant, they don’t have to accept cards and can take cash only. Few retailers don’t take plastic every day to avoid paying the fees. It’s a free country. But the vast majority of retailers see the benefits far exceeding the costs.

Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, doesn’t see it that way. Instead, he blames Visa, Mastercard and Discover for making food and gas more expensive. At a recent hearing, Durbin fumed: “Today, we’re going to talk about a hidden fee that fuels the fires of inflation across America every day. What they may not know is this swipe fee is contributing to the problem of inflation.”

But for this to be true, interchange fees would have to be higher than before Joe Biden became president and before inflation surged to 8.5%.

But the fees aren’t rising. Industry sources report that over recent years, the average merchant fee (for debit, credit and prepaid cards) has fallen slightly.

By the way, merchants and retailers get concrete benefits in exchange for the fees they pay to accept credit cards. Those fees cover the cost of security and fraud protection, infrastructure improvements and consumer benefits programs such as cash back and rewards.

What Durbin and the Democrats want is government price controls on credit card companies. They say there isn’t enough competition, but there are at least five major credit cards the public can buy. There is plenty of competition in the industry. Nor is there any evidence that cutting the fees to the retailers will lead to lower prices paid by consumers at the gas pump or the grocery store checkout line.

Today, about 70% of retail transactions take place with credit cards in part because nearly everyone, except those with terrible credit histories, has a credit card these days. Projections say in the next decade, more than 80% of payments will be made with plastic as we move inevitably to digital transactions and a cashless society.

The significant impact of Durbin’s price controls will not be to tame inflation but to restrict who can get access to credit cards. In other words, the poor will get hurt the most. Isn’t that turning out to be the case with nearly every liberal policy these days?

BLUF:
We’ve moved past the point of simple political disagreement and into the realm of purposeful sabotage in order to obtain a delusional partisan goal. They aren’t even hiding the ball anymore. These people want you to suffer.

They Want You to Suffer.

I don’t think I have to be the one to tell anyone reading this the news — as you are probably already well aware — but things aren’t going well under the Biden administration.

In a sentence I’ve typed way too often over the last year, inflation continues to sit at astronomical levels, gas prices keep increasing, and the border is in shambles. To make matters worse, over the past month, the stock market has crashed, eating away at people’s retirements and investments. Dreams that people had are now going to be on hold for years based on the hope that things will recover, and time isn’t something you can get back.

The response from the White House in the face of so many of their self-inflicted wounds hasn’t been empathy, though. Not that such would mean much, but it would at least give people peace of mind knowing that their leaders aren’t actively rooting for their destruction.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what appears to be happening. These people want you to suffer.

That’s the President of the United States calling the $5.00 a gallon gasoline that is crushing Americans an “incredible transition.” And lest anyone think I’m misreading him, he means it exactly as it sounds and says as much by citing that we’ll become “less reliant” on fossil fuels in the end.

In other words, this is all intentional.

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The meat puppet goes off teleprompter…… again.

Quip O’ The Day
Maybe someone in the West Wing should establish an Office for Explaining What the President Had Really Meant to Say. Obviously, it would be a full-time, high-pressure job, presumably with a high turnover.

White House performs cleanup after Biden says US military would defend Taiwan.

President Joe Biden said the United States would respond militarily if China invaded Taiwan — a response that appeared to break with Washington’s long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity” before the White House walked it back.

Asked during a news conference in Tokyo whether he would “get involved militarily to defend Taiwan” after not doing so in Ukraine, Biden said, “Yes, that’s the commitment we made.”

“We agree with the One China policy,” Biden said, speaking alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. “We signed on to it, and all the attendant agreements made from there, but the idea that it can be taken by force, just taken by force, is just not appropriate. It will dislocate the entire region and be another action similar to what happened in Ukraine.”

“It’s a burden that’s even stronger,” he added.

Taipei welcomed Biden’s remarks, with Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Joanne Ou expressing “sincere welcome and gratitude.”

The president said China is “already flirting with danger right now by flying so close and all the maneuvers they’re undertaking,” a reference to Beijing military aircraft flying within Taiwan’s defense zone.

The president’s comments prompted a flurry of condemnation from China, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin voicing “strong dissatisfaction and resolute opposition” to the response.

“China has no room for compromise or concessions on issues involving China’s core interests such as sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Wang said. President Xi Jinping’s Communist Party claims the island, though it has never ruled it.

Wang added, “China will take firm action to safeguard its sovereignty and security interests, and we will do what we say.”

Biden earlier said that U.S. policy toward Taiwan “has not changed at all.” Later, the White House said Biden’s words did not signal a policy change. An official said Biden reiterated the One China Policy and stands by the Taiwan Relations Act to provide Taiwan with the military means to defend itself.

It was not the first time Biden or the White House has had to clarify his remarks on Taiwan, a sensitive issue on which certain words risk rapidly inflaming tensions with another nuclear power.

The comments recalled Biden’s pledge last year to defend Taiwan when he was asked about the potential threat of a Chinese hypersonic missile test during a town hall event. The White House later said there was no change in policy.

Biden also described Taiwan as “independent” while speaking to reporters in November last year before clarifying that he was not asserting its independence, merely talking about its need to make its own decisions.

BLUF:
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA): “This bill glaringly ignores the persistent domestic terrorism threat from the radical left in this country and instead makes the assumption that it is all on the white and the right.”

House Passes ‘White Supremacism’ Domestic Terrorism Bill After Buffalo Shooting
The bill only mentions white supremacy and neo-Nazis because obviously, those are the only people who terrorize others.

 

I should say the bill passed along party lines because Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) isn’t a Republican.

A white supremacist, who should have been caught a long time ago, murdered 10 people and injured three people. He purposely targeted black people.

The Democrats used this opportunity to push through The Domestic Terrorism Act: “To authorize dedicated domestic terrorism offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to analyze and monitor domestic terrorist activity and require the Federal Government to take steps to prevent domestic terrorism.”

Domestic terrorism only means white supremacy in this bill.

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When Misinformation Drives Bad Policy

To President Biden, public health researchers, and the media, violent crime is all about guns. But a new survey finds that people are badly misinformed about how much violent crime involves guns. The average likely American voter is way off, thinking that over 46% of violent crimes involve guns. In fact, the true figure is less than 8%.

Not surprisingly, those who believe that most violent crime involves guns are more likely to view gun control as the solution.

Biden has given four major speeches on violent crime (here, here, here, and here). Each one of them was focused on enforcement of gun control laws. In the four speeches, he mentioned “gun” or “firearm” 179 times. The term “weapon,” sometimes in connection with “assault weapon,” was used another 31 times.

The words “crime,” “violence,” or “violent” were mentioned about half as often – 94 times. He only mentions the words “murder” and “homicide” seven times in these four presentations, and entirely omits them from his two most recent talks.

But this “guns first” approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. Although Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, in the latest year available (2020), shows that there were 4,558,150 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, and the FBI reports 21,570 murders. Of those, 350,460 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults (see Table 8) and 13,620 murders involved firearms. So, while it’s true that firearms are the weapon of choice in more than half the murders in this country, it’s also true that only 7.9% of violent crimes were committed with guns.

The new McLaughlin & Associates survey of 1,000 likely voters from April 20 to 26 for the Crime Prevention Research Center shows how misinformed people are. People across the country, of all races and incomes, have wildly inaccurate beliefs about how frequently violent crime involves guns.

Even so, there are large differences across groups. The average Democrat estimates that 56.9% of violent crimes involve guns, whereas the typical Republican gave an answer of 37%. Those with the highest incomes (over $250,000 per year) and those who work for the government give the highest numbers – 56.1% and 51% respectively. Women (50%) believe that more violent crimes involve guns than men do (43%). Urban Americans say 48%, whereas rural Americans say 40%. But the biggest difference is between blacks (59%) and Asians (31%).

The McLaughlin survey also gave people three options on the best way to fight crime: Pass more gun control laws, more strictly enforce current laws, or have police concentrate on arresting repeat violent criminals.

Some respondents at least got it right that less than 20% of violent crime involves guns. Just 8% prioritized more gun laws, and 15% focused on stricter enforcement of existing laws. An overwhelming 71% thought the best way of fighting crime was to arrest violent criminals.

Some likely voters thought that more than 80% of the violent crime involved guns. Most supported either more gun control laws (33%) or more strict enforcement of current gun laws (28%). Only 36% of them wanted the focus on arresting violent criminals.

Those who think that most violent crime is committed with guns consistently support more gun control. Those who don’t believe that instead want to focus on arresting violent criminals and keeping them in jail.

Perhaps the gun control debate would be very different if the media had done a better job of informing people about crime. The most newsworthy cases, unfortunately, don’t tend to be typical of violent crime. Focusing on how to solve 8% of violent crime does nothing to solve the other 92%.