Tag: joe biden

#rsrh Kirsten Gillibrand to NOT run for NY-SEN in 2012?

There’s a rumor going around that she’s being tapped to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket (no link, sorry: I’m getting this one via email).  Supposedly it’s at the point where certain NY Republicans are quietly exploring the possibility of doing a run for the seat, after all; I’ve heard that at least one downstate Republican elected official is seriously considering going for it.

I’m not all that convinced that this rumor is credible, but I have to admit that my reasons for discounting it are as follows:

  • It’s a bad idea for New York Democrats (win or lose, they’ll be removing a potential candidate for Governor down the line);
  • It’s a bad idea for national Democrats (they can ill-afford to put yet another Senate seat in play for 2012);
  • It’s an embarrassment for everybody who dutifully insisted that Biden would be a net positive for the Obama administration.

Which is to say, none of the reasons would have any effect on Barack Obama – even the last one; he can always claim that choosing Biden wasn’t really entirely voluntary on his part* – and God knows that the man is narcissistic enough to think that he could get away with it.

So, there’s that.

Moe Lane

*It’d be easy, really.  Party leadership wanting to add the voice of experience to the ticket, blah blah, no wish to hurt the party further after the primary, yadda yadda, Obama now realizes that he should have trusted his own judgement more, etc, etc, etc…

#rsrh Joe Biden Opens His Mouth Watch: China’s One-Child Policy!

To mangle the Diane Duane quote… Joe Biden should always be taken everyplace twice: the second time, to apologize.  This particular – week’s? day’s? minute’s? nanosecond’s? – example shows our esteemed Vice President signing off on the PRC’s draconian population control techniques.  Bolding I presume Mark Hemingway’s:

But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China.  You have no safety net.  Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.  Not sustainable.

I’m sure that Biden didn’t actually mean to endorse the People Republic of China’s policy of population control via forced abortions; but he certainly meant to avoid making a moral judgement on the practice.  Which is, by the way, vile, disgusting, and not compatible with the reasonable expectations of moral behavior from a truly civilized nation-state.  I’d just thought that I’d pass that bit of cultural elitism along, since my country’s current leadership team is a bit too scared to.

Geez.  Even the Russians are less backward about this sort of thing, these days.

Moe Lane

Ron Johnson’s Blue-Slipping of Joe Biden’s Victoria Nourse.

Let me tell you a tale of the incompetence of Vice President Joe Biden.  Trust me, this one is even better than usual.

Once upon a time, back in the days when Joe Biden was a bad Senator instead of a bad Vice President, he had a staffer named Victoria Nourse.  Ms. Nourse’s major claim to fame was ‘helping’ to write the (later deemed partially-unconstitutional) Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that was one of Senator Biden’s signature pieces of legislation; ‘helped’ is in square quotes because originally Biden took full credit for the law – like Biden typically does – until he got caught at it in 2007.  This was, of course, perhaps a little awkward… but then events transpired in 2008 that Senator Biden became Vice President Biden, which meant that Ms. Nourse could be given a nice consolation prize of a federal judgeship.

Continue reading Ron Johnson’s Blue-Slipping of Joe Biden’s Victoria Nourse.

Mike Doyle (D, PA-14) backtracks on ‘terrorist’ comments.

Alternate title: Politically flabby Democrat (in comfortably Democratic seat) suddenly remembers that home state is losing a Congressional District; and that the redistricting process is fully in the hands of the other party*.

Which is probably too long a title, at that.  Anyway, Mikey Doyle is very, very sorry that the Tea Party thought that he was talking about them when he started spouting off about terrorists:

U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, said he wasn’t comparing Tea Party members with terrorists when he used the word during a closed-door caucus meeting Monday, but was expressing frustration at President Obama’s negotiating tactics, which he said gave in too quickly to GOP demands in the debt ceiling debate.

“Had I simply said hostage-taker, there wouldn’t be this reaction. I certainly wasn’t out to defame anybody,” said Doyle, who couldn’t recall the exact statement he made. Continue reading Mike Doyle (D, PA-14) backtracks on ‘terrorist’ comments.

QotD, Joe Biden Opens His Mouth edition.

Episode 34,872. Our illustrious Vice President, reminding the Teamsters that democracy must always give way to naked political partisanship:

“And don’t any of you, by the way, any of you guys vote Republican,” Biden said. “I’m not supposed to say, this isn’t political. …don’t come to me if you do! You’re on your own, Jack!”

Now, is that the official position of the United States government, Mr. Vice President? Or just your own?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Staffers for the Speaker of the House, House Majority Leader, and Senate Minority Leader: please note, and please include the above Fox News link in your briefing materials for your respective bosses. Particularly with regard to the ongoing negotiations over the debt ceiling.

#rsrh Journalist complaint about lack of access, #44436.

It’s always almost unbearably cute when a journalist suddenly realizes that this administration could care less about media transparency, or in fact anything that the media says that’s more substantial than “Barack Obama, you’re so dreamy!”  Case in point: this article by Salena Zeto, where the author complains mightily that the Democrats are routinely locking out local reporters* from fundraisers attended by Vice President Joe Biden (including one, not incidentally, in Zeto’s home journalistic turf).  Also, John Adams’ Sedition Act makes an appearance, which is generally considered to be bringing out the heavy (if usually inaccurate) rhetorical guns in articles like this one; I must admit, there’s something fun about watching the Other Side get scattershot-targeted like this**…

But I digress. Continue reading #rsrh Journalist complaint about lack of access, #44436.

I am *done* with President Obama.

“That’s all I can stands; I can’t stands no more.” – Popeye

Jake Tapper titled the post where he compares President’s Obama rhetoric in 2010 (semantic translation: “I don’t have the testicles to be rude to Republicans at their own retreat.”) to his rhetoric today (I can’t improve on Tapper’s title) “Throw Grandma From the Train.”  Apparently, being forced to abandon his happy-shiny 2011 budget has made the President… well, Obama was already “petulant,” and “more petulant” doesn’t have the same ring to it.  “Childish” or “adolescent” are both overused.  “Labile” sounds dirty. Let’s go with “imbalanced;” it has a certain ring to it.

Anyway: as Hot Air noted, this entire sorry exercise in induced narcolepsy that was the debt speech this afternoon was yet another dreary attempt by the President to use what is an entirely overinflated reputation for rhetoric to get past an unpleasant situation.  Unfortunately for President Obama, this is not 2008, and the media is not full of people eagerly trying to excise their inner racist demons by collaborating in the election of a clueless Harvard liberal who is as about as authentically African-American as I am.  Continue reading I am *done* with President Obama.

Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers stuffed in closet at Bill Nelson shindig.

This is all very symbolic: Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers was assigned to cover a fundraiser for Senator Bill Nelson (D, FL) that was being thrown by local real estate bigwig Alan Ginsburg.  The fundraiser featured Vice President Joe Biden (D), whose staff promptly tossed Powers into a closet and refused to let him out except for the actual speeches [themselves].  This… is problematical, particularly since Biden’s been beating the transparency drum lately; well, more accurately the words on the paper in front of him are telling Biden to beat the transparency drum, and that’s just what Joe Biden is going to do, yes indeed.  Fortunately for Biden, Nelson, & Ginsburg, neither Powers nor the Orlando Sentinel seem inclined to see whether all of this qualifies as ‘kidnapping’ under Florida law.

I know that people will find this story funny on first read, and superficially it is.  But there’s a problem here, and it exists on a somewhat deeper level than the assault on the dignity of a member of the Fourth Estate.  You see, who told Biden’s staff that they had the right to sequester a reporter in another man’s home? It certainly wasn’t Alan Ginsburg who signed off on it: as the article linked to above reports, Ginsburg fell all over himself to apologize to Powers once the former heard what had happened to the latter.  As well he should have: Alan Ginsburg’s intent with this fundraiser was to maintain good relations with a sitting US Senator and generally build links, not get swept up into a dispute that threatens to sour his existing relationship with a local paper, at absolute best.  Ginsburg is thanking God right now that the Orlando Sentinel isn’t threatening a lawsuit; and I’m not a lawyer, but it looks like there would have been at least a civil case there.   In other words, Ginsburg mostly dodged the bullet that Biden fired. Continue reading Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers stuffed in closet at Bill Nelson shindig.

#rsrh Reality has defeated me.

If I understand this story correctly, the Amtrak station in Wilmington renamed for the Vice President (and Stimulus Czar) was not only an over-budget stimulus project; its dedication ceremony was complicated by the CEO’s inability to get to the soiree via Amtrak.  His train broke down, you understand, so the poor man had to arrange for a car to take him the rest of the way.

See what I mean?  Actually, reality has not only defeated me; it’s now looming over my prone form and taunting me about my mom.

Read Biden’s Lips: new taxes in 2013!

Vice President Joe Biden, bless his heart, is promising that there’s going to be a tax hike (including one on small businesses) in 2013.  This, despite the fact that that the Republicans used their 58/42 minority in the Senate and 256/179 minority in the House to somehow prevent the current ruling party from moving ahead on the promised tax hikes: no doubt the President will make a speech and shine the light of his countenance upon the 112th Congress, thus causing them to tremble and flee the righteous Hope-and-Change of the Lightworker.  Or the President will pout, which will probably have roughly the same effect.

VP Biden also promised that the administration would be hiking the death tax, speculated that the next post-DADT repeal step for the White House would be addressing the ‘so-called’ DOMA (although Biden apparently neglected to mention why he voted for it in the first place, just like a majority of his party’s Senate caucus), and walked back the White House’s walkback on Biden’s recent unilateral declaration that we’d be out of Afghanistan by 2014.  Biden then ritually slew a baby harp seal wrapped in the American flag on national television; the Vice President managed to gouge out the heart with his bare hands and offer it up to President Obama before somebody managed to switch to commercial.

Seriously: why do they let this man out without a keeper?

Moe Lane (crosspost)