Closing the pot-luck tabs again ...
Based on the polling data, I categorize Biden's statement that he could have beaten Trump as "flat out bonkers."
— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) January 8, 2025
Biden was well behind Trump when he dropped out. Biden never led in all of 2024. And no incumbent president who was anywhere near as unpopular as Biden has ever won. pic.twitter.com/lGk9h8pygU
Ed: Biden's delusional, but that was hardly the worst part of that interview.
===
When President Joe Biden vacates the White House later this month, talk will turn to his legacy: What did he accomplish in office? Which among his achievements will outlast him? Even though Biden came into office with ambitious promises, his scorecard looks unimpressive. ...
In his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Biden equated it with the New Deal, calling the broadband expansion "not unlike what Roosevelt did with electricity."
But three years after its creation, the program has disbursed no money and supplied broadband to zero households.
===
WOW. This woman literally ran up to Gavin Newsom on the street and demanded answers on his disastrous wildfires response — and she was NOT taking no for an answer. Good for her. pic.twitter.com/GNjUATtKXt
— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) January 9, 2025
Ed: "Why was there no water in the hydrants, Governor?" Because California has no real leadership, that's why. But I give Newsom some credit for responding here; maybe he saw Karen Bass' refusal to even look up when a Sky News reporter began asking her about her absence during the fires.
===
Joe Biden was “central in his family’s moneymaking scheme,” according to the year-long congressional investigation led by Rep. James Comer, who claims he found nearly $30 million funneled into the first family’s accounts.
In his new book, Comer (R-Ky.) details how Biden’s son Hunter and brother Jim peddled the “Biden Brand” to foreign governments and entrepreneurs in order to rake in cash.
“I can honestly say that I do not know of one single legitimate business that the Bidens owned or operated,” Comer writes in “All the President’s Money: Investigating the Secret Foreign Schemes that Made the Biden Family Rich,” out Jan. 14.
===
Country music legends Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood paid their respects to their friend Jimmy Carter by performing John Lennon’s “Imagine” at his funeral. pic.twitter.com/yQMciEuHPf
— USA TODAY Life (@usatodaylife) January 9, 2025
Wait, did they really play Lennon's "Imagine" at Carter's funeral? Who cleared that one??
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) January 9, 2025
Ed: I was as stunned as Jeff to find out that this was not a joke. I assume this was something Carter requested. Otherwise, I can't think of a less respectful way to say goodbye to a Christian. 'Imagine' is an awful song, both musically but especially lyrically, a paean to nihilism and mindless utopianism.
===
Google donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund, becoming the latest major tech company to try and curry some goodwill with the incoming administration.
“Google is pleased to support the 2025 inauguration, with a livestream on YouTube and a direct link on our homepage. We’re also donating to the inaugural committee,” Karan Bhatia, Google’s global head of government affairs and public policy, told CNBC in a statement.
Ed: Will Sundar Pichai join Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in rolling back speech restrictions and censorship? Or is this just a little favor-currying as Trump's administration takes over the anti-trust case against Google?
===
Sir Keir Starmer has no idea what he’s up against. Not this time. Since he entered Downing Street six intolerable months ago, the Prime Minister’s ability to strike exactly the wrong note on any given occasion has never failed him, but his denunciation of Elon Musk for “spreading lies and misinformation” about Pakistani-heritage Muslim child-rape gangs is a whole orchestra of discordant deceit. Many Britons feel deeply grateful that the billionaire owner of X (formerly Twitter) was moved to intervene in this disgusting scandal, I suspect, and Musk has certainly provoked more soul-searching in 10 days than Westminster managed in 10 years. The Prime Minister’s imputation that those who want a full-throated national inquiry into the evil gangs, and the cowardly state apparatchiks who covered them up, were simply seeking to “jump on a bandwagon of the far-Right” is obscene. Apparently, thousands of survivors who endured mass rape as children (20 men awaiting their turn downstairs, one woman recalled) are far-Right for wanting answers and accountability. Is it far-Right, Prime Minister, to object that your primary torturer was released early after a derisory sentence and now lurks menacingly outside your home?
That’s what has happened to Liz, who still lives in Rotherham. Liz tells me she wants a “collective inquiry to show the depth of what’s happened and to go after those who failed us”. Like other victims of Pakistani rape gangs, Liz is disgusted with the strange, soulless man who had the chance at his Monday press conference to speak for the whole nation. He could have expressed the shame and devastating sadness we feel that such bestial crimes should have been committed here, and for so long. Instead, Sir Keir spoke out of narrow party self-interest, only sounding vaguely passionate when addressing what really troubles him: Islamophobia.
===
In a statement to CBS News, Fetterman noted it was “pretty reasonable” that Trump would want to have a conversation while adding that “no one is” his “gatekeeper.”
“That is the plan. Yes, we are going to have a conversation,” Fetterman said regarding the upcoming meeting. “I think that one, he’s the president, or he will be officially…and I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation — or invite someone to have a conversation — to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper.”
===
Join the conversation as a VIP Member