The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[N.E. Brigand]

A Washington Post poll of 2,000 American adults finds that most people say the time in which the United States had the:

• most close-knit communities
• most moral society
• least political division
• happiest families
• most reliable news reporting
• best music
• best radio
• best fashion
• best economy
• best movies
• best television
• best sporting events; and
• best cuisine

was the period from 10 years before to 25 years after each respondent's birth year, in most cases peaking in respondents' first ten years.

In most respects, we're living in the "good old days" right now! But that won't really start to be acknowledged until a couple decades pass.

[N.E. Brigand]

New from the Associated Press: last year saw the most heat deaths ever in the U.S.

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden welcomed the Kansas City Chiefs, winners of this year's Super Bowl, to the White House today:

[N.E. Brigand]

"Retired Navy Admiral and Business Executives Arrested for Bribery Scheme."

The former four-star admiral, Robert Burke, "oversaw Naval operations in Europe, Russia, and most of Africa, and commanded thousands of civilian and military personnel." The indictment alleges that in exchange for directing that the Navy in 2021 award a contract for workforce training by a company run by the other defendants, Yongchul 'Charlie' Kim and Meghan Messenger, they gave him a job with a $500,000 annual salary after he retired in 2022.

[N.E. Brigand]

After closing about 40,000 for the first time on May 16, the Dow Jones average fell about 5% over the next two weeks and opened at about 38,000 yesterday morning.

Later yesterday, when we were waiting on the verdict in Donald Trump's Manahattan trial, which was delivered after the market closed, a business commentator on Fox News predicted that a guilty verdict would result in the market crashing today.

Today the Dow Jones saw its largest gaining day of the year, climbing 575 points to close at 38,719.

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden's son Hunter goes on trial today in Delaware for the crime of having lied on the federal form he completed when buying a handgun in 2018 because he checked the box saying he was not a drug user during a period when it's generally understood that he very much was addicted to crack cocaine.

So it's almost certain that he did what he's accused of. But in 2023, he had a deal from the Dept. of Justice saying he wouldn't be prosecuted for it as long as he stayed out of trouble. Prosecutors reneged on the deal apparently because Republicans in Congress got a mob to threaten Special Counsel David Weiss's family. Also much of the investigation into Biden ultimately stems from dubious sources, like the much-ballyhooed laptop whose public release probably was part of a Russian disinformation operation. Judge Maryellen Noreika has pretty consistently ruled for the prosecution and against the defense in their bid to try to make the points I just did. I have previously noted at one basic error the judge made: she ruled that the prosecution can't be selective or vindictive against Hunter Biden in part because the Dept. of Justice is ultimately under the control of Hunter's father, the president. But even if Weiss weren't a special counsel, who by law acts largely independent of the DOJ hierarchy, that still wouldn't be true because except in Donald Trump's administration, the president normally takes a hands-off approach to law enforcement -- and President Biden has upheld the norm. By Judge Noreika's logic, President Biden would be doing nothing wrong if he were to order Attorney General Merrick Garland to fire Special Counsel Weiss and drop the case. Others have shown additional mistakes Judge Noreika has made.

And here's a doozy. Just last night, Judge Noreika ruled that jurors are not allowed to see the actual form that Hunter Biden signed:



Instead they can only see a copy of a version of the form that was clearly changed by someone else:



The red box is highlighting by Marcy Wheeler, who has written probably dozens of articles about the two Hunter Biden cases. Wheeler explains the reasoning behind Judge Noreika's decision. But the facts are these: the person at the desk who sold Hunter Biden the gun told the store's owner, who was in the back office, that Hunter didn't have the proper ID to make the purchase. The boss, per his own testimony to prosecutors, for which he received immunity, knew that Hunter's father, then the former Vice President, favored gun restrictions, which he didn't like, so he just wanted to get Hunter out of the store. Accordingly, he directed his employee to let the missing ID slide. Then someone later added the information in box 18.b. in the picture above.

In other words, the store sold Hunter Biden the gun because the store's owner had a political grudge against Hunter's father. If not for that, Hunter might never have been able to purchase the gun, because he didn't have the proper ID to do so.

But the defense is not allowed to make that argument. And to prevent them from having grounds to make that argument, they can't even show the original form.

Some of Judge Noreika's rulings can be appealed after the trial, but in the meantime, it's very likely that Hunter Biden will be found guilty.

Edited to note Wheeler's subsequent and apt comparison between the gun store owner and FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pled guilty to altering a document that was used in the investigation of Carter Page. I would add that the judge in Clinesmith's case found -- reasonably in my view -- that Clinesmith made the alteration as a mere shortcut and not for political reasons. But the gun store owner has admitted he had political motives in allowing Hunter Biden to purchase a gun using a form that wasn't complete.

[N.E. Brigand]

"Biden prepares a tough executive order that would shut down asylum after 2,500 migrants arrive a day" (Associated Press).

That's based on the average over a week. Asylum requests would again be considered once the average drops below 1,500 per day. This is tougher than what was in the bipartisan package that Republicans scuttled after months of work at Donald Trump's direction. But as with some Trump executive orders on immigration, I think this would be likelier to be blocked by a court than a law passed by Congress.

[N.E. Brigand]

This is a wild-looking economic chart whose import remains beyond my grasp:

[N.E. Brigand]

President Biden has now signed this order.

"Biden prepares a tough executive order that would shut down asylum after 2,500 migrants arrive a day" (Associated Press).

That's based on the average over a week. Asylum requests would again be considered once the average drops below 1,500 per day. This is tougher than what was in the bipartisan package that Republicans scuttled after months of work at Donald Trump's direction. But as with some Trump executive orders on immigration, I think this would be likelier to be blocked by a court than a law passed by Congress.

Polling finds that a clear majority of the public including 60% of Democrats and 78% of Independents favors tightened restrictions on asylum. I agree with this commentator who says that if "the right to asylum is going to survive at all over the next 5-10 years, we need to prove it can be made to work. People aren't going to stand for it just being a huge loophole. In the long run, it is easier to sustain a generous system of legal immigration if people have confidence that the borders are secure ... an agenda of across the board laxity isn't wise or viable."

The ACLU announced today that it will sue the federal government to block President Biden's order, which they say puts "tens of thousands of lives at risk."

If the ACLU is successful, and this leads to a backlash that yields a Republican Congress and President who enact an anti-asylum law that the ACLU cannot overturn in court, will the ACLU be to blame for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost as a result?

[N.E. Brigand]

The FBI raided the Atlanta offices of a corporate landlord as part of what the linked report describes as a "federal probe of an alleged criminal conspiracy among large landlords to jack up rental prices." Apparently a bunch of different apartment and home leasing companies all have the same software, from a company called Real Page, which they may have been using to collude and set higher rents. Other cities affected include Phoenix, Miami, Houston, Charlotte, and Baltimore.

While most inflation is the result of structural factors rather than individual bad acts, this might be an exception.

[N.E. Brigand]

CBS reports that when questioned by Hunter Biden's attorney, Abbe Lowell, "FBI special agent Erika Jensen said she could not verify the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop admitted into evidence were not tampered with before law enforcement collected it from the Mac repair shop." (Some have defended the prosecution and the supposed authenticity of the laptop by noting that its contents were backed up on a cloud server and thus theoretically verifiable, but as one observer notes, "Half of the evidence that prosecutors submitted yesterday did not come from the cloud -- only from the laptop. A laptop that no one can confirm wasn't tampered with. In legal terms, that's kind of a problem." Of course, it's only a problem for prosecutors if the defense can get the jury to understand it and if jurors think it matters.)

By the way, Hunter has been joined in court each day by his wife, Melissa Cohen Biden. I'm not just making a comparison to the recent trial of former president and now convicted felon Donald Trump, whose wife Melania never joined him in court over the six weeks of proceedings -- not even when she herself was in Manhattan. I'm also noting that yesterday, Melissa Cohen Biden "got into a heated confrontation with a former Trump White House aide during a brief recess at her husband's trial on federal gun charges ... In the hallway of the J Caleb Boggs Federal Building on Tuesday, Melissa allegedly confronted Garrett Ziegler –- whom Hunter Biden is currently suing for his alleged role in publishing emails and photos from Biden's laptop. Upon seeing Ziegler, Melissa approached him and pointed her finger in his face, loudly saying, 'You have no right to be here you Nazi piece of s***.'"

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Today must have been an interesting day for her (assuming she was there), as both Hunter's ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend of his testified against him.

[N.E. Brigand]

Time has followed up on its interview with (the since convicted felon) Donald Trump -- the one in which Trump claimed, more than two weeks before the story was published, that he would announce his position on women's access to mifepristone in "two weeks" (more than six weeks have passed since the story was published, and he still hadn't done so) -- with an interview of President Biden. That is the source of Biden's literally correct reference to Ukraine having "decimated" Russia's military forces over the past two years. He is, as you would expect, well versed in the issues during a wide-ranging in his admittedly digressive style. Here's an excerpt:

NATO is considerably stronger than it was when I took office. I put it together. Not only did I reestablish the fact that it was the strongest alliance in the history of the world, I was able to expand it. While I was in one of the G7 meetings in Europe. When I got back I called on the President of Finland. because when I had met earlier in the year with Putin, he said he wanted to see the Finlandization of NATO. I told him, he's gonna get not the Finlandization [but] the Natoization of Finland. And everybody thought, including you guys, thought I was crazy.

And guess what? I did it. I did it. And we're now the strongest nation. We have the strongest alliance in all of America, all of history. In the meantime, what we keep skipping over is what the consequence of the success of Russia in Ukraine would be. That's why I brought this along. You probably haven't read it. Most people haven't read it. He says this is part of reestablishing the Soviet Union. That's what this is all about. It wasn't just about taking part of—He wanted, he wanted to go back to the, to the days when there was NATO and there was that other outfit that Poland, everybody belonged to. So that’s what it was about. And in the meantime, what happened was, we were able to—and by the way, we spent a lot of money in Ukraine, but Europe has spent more money than the United States has, collectively. Europe has spent more money in taking on Russia.

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published a supposedly exhaustive report titled "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Show Signs of Slipping." The article cites lots of "participants in meetings" who claim that Biden is showing his age, but almost every one is a Republican. (The Journal did interview Democrats but didn't actually quote them.) And even some of those same Republicans have recently said in other reports (even in the Wall Street Journal itself) that Biden is sharp and tough in negotiations. I agree with those who think this article exists as a way of negotiating with a terrorist: the Journal desires the good will of convicted felon Donald Trump (the terrorist in question) so that Trump will have his ally, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, release their reporter, Evan Gershkovich, whom Putin had kidnapped (i.e., falsely arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned) last year.

Also the story's lead author, Annie Linskey, is the same reporter who tweeted and then -- following an outcry -- deleted this in Nov. 2021:



In other words, she has an anti-Biden agenda.

But the Biden-Harris campaign is pushing back.

And as Josh Barro notes, Biden has a great opportunity to show his acuity in the upcoming debate.

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House Republicans have made a criminal referral of Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden to the Dept. of Justice for supposedly lying under oath.

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Three Republican-appointed judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals today threw out a Security and Exchange Commission finding that said investment advisers may not defraud their clients. As Gordon Gekko might say, fraud is good.

[N.E. Brigand]

I like this diagram showing how Hunter Biden's infamous laptop and various copies of its contents were disseminated. And this doesn't even take into account that the data on the laptop is sometime inconsistent with copies of the data on Hunter's phone and the cloud backup.



Yes, that is a teddy bear at lower left.

[N.E. Brigand]

This is a very helpful analysis by Marcy Wheeler for anyone trying to better understand Hunter Biden's laptop. Anyone following the case closely would have grasped some of this, but testimony yesterday by Hunter's ex-girlfriend Zoe Kestan make this point:

In the depths of his addiction, Hunter Biden exercised almost no digital security, meaning his girlfriends, his drug dealers, his sex workers, and even the junkies he partied with all had easy means to compromise his devices. And every time Hunter lost a device — the five to six Kasten testified to, the seven or so laptops he had over that year, two more phones she wouldn’t have known about — every single time, it would present the opportunity for someone to take over his digital identity (as a bunch of right-wing Trump supporters have since) and tamper with it.

What Kestan testifed to was that Hunter would regularly provide her with security codes so that she could pull money from his bank account without an ATM card, that he would also send those codes to his drug dealers, that it was she who dropped off a different laptop (and phone) at an Apple store for him, that he lost several phones over the course of the year they were together, that he sometimes used her laptop to access his accounts, and that she had the ability to log into his bank account to track his approximate location (by seeing where he was using ATMs).

[N.E. Brigand]

As I also noted in the Ukraine thread, today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when Allied forces invaded Nazi-occupied France.

President Biden joined President Emmanuel Macron of France and other world leaders for ceremonies at Omaha Beach:



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Meanwhile, CNN asked a Wall Street Journal reporter why Kevin McCarthy was attacking President Biden's mental fitness now but was reported last year as privately saying that Biden was sharp. She replied that McCarthy was only praising Biden's acuity before as a tactical move because he needed to get along with Biden.

But how does she know that the new comments aren't also tactical?

[N.E. Brigand]

Here's President Biden's D-Day speech in full:



He gets notable applause when he praises NATO and its newest members, Finland and Sweden. The overall theme of the speech is the need to be worthy of the sacrifices made 80 years ago by continuing to defend democracy and freedom today.

[N.E. Brigand]

"I was following the I was following the pack all swallowed in their coats with scarves of red tied 'round their throats to keep their little heads from fallin' in the snow and I turned 'round and there you go and Michael, you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime."

[Voronwë the Faithful]

At this point, it would only be surprising if job reports didn't "blow past expectations."

Jobs report blows past expectations, displaying resilient strength of US economy

*Cues up next poll showing how Trump is more trusted with the economy that Biden*

[N.E. Brigand]

"How Joe Biden 'broke OPEC' and rewrote the rules for oil trading."