In a surprise attack, Palestinian militants fired at least 2,200 rockets toward Israel, the IDF said. Hamas claimed at least 5,000 rockets were fired, all landing in southern and central Israel.
At least four American citizens were killed in the attacks in Israel over the weekend, senior administration officials told top House lawmakers on a call Sunday evening, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
That figure could rise in the coming days, the Biden administration officials told Congress. The administration is also still investigating unconfirmed reports of American citizens being taken hostage by Hamas.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News last week:
With October upon us, the well-meaning, morally repugnant, and oft-extended moratorium on student loan repayments has finally come to an end. It is not a crisis. It is a return to normalcy.
According to Forbes, borrowers owe $1.75 trillion in student debt, including federal and private loans, or about $28,950 per student. Interestingly, the average debt for just federal loans is $35,210 per borrower, indicating that federal loans are granted much more liberally than private loans. In Wisconsin, the average borrower owes $30,778 in federal student loans.
That is a lot of money by any measurement. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of the people who owe tens of thousands of dollars for their education are not earning enough money to comfortably pay it back. It is difficult for a person earning $36,754 per year (the average per-capita income in Wisconsin in 2021 according to the U.S. Census Bureau) to fit student loan payments into their monthly budget — especially in Biden’s inflationary economy.
Student loans have been around for generations, but the issue has become acute in recent decades because of two aggravating factors. First, the cost of a college education has skyrocketed. Between 1992 and 2022, the inflation-adjusted average cost of college at a four-year public university increased by 26.7% according to College Board. A $50,000 education in 1992 now costs $129,000. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted median household income rose by only 17.6%. The price of higher education has been increasing much faster than students’ ability to pay.
The reasons for those increases are myriad. The federalization of student loans made for easy money for universities to tap. They took advantage of students flush with borrowed cash to bloat up their administrations and go on a building binge.
Meanwhile, the second aggravating factor is that demand has risen as high schools across America portray a college education as the only viable path to stave off poverty. Instead of portraying the military, the trades, entrepreneurship, or other career paths as equally viable, too many high school teachers and counselors — all college graduates themselves — have culturalized kids to think that anyone without a college degree is lesser.
Compounding the misleading culturalization, the abysmally wretched financial education provided in those high schools leave prospective students ill-equipped to evaluate the risk/reward of financing a college degree with debt. Ignorant of the power of compounding interest, too many kids are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree with little market value. The result is that they are unable to get jobs after graduation that pay enough to easily pay off the debt.
It is true that some people are not getting the value out of their degrees that they had hoped for or were promised. It is true that college costs more than it should. It is true that student loan payments make it more difficult to afford other things and that everything is more expensive than it used to be. It is true that lenders were all too eager to dole out money without any consideration of the degree being pursued or potential future earnings of the graduate.
All of these things are true, but it does not absolve the borrowers from the obligation to pay off their own debt. It is not a financial question. It is a moral one. If you borrowed the money, then you must pay it back. To fail to do so makes you a shameful deadbeat and a drain on your family and community. Having a college degree does not make you any less of a loser if you renege on your obligations.
Furthermore, nobody wants to hear you whine about your student loans. In 2022, less than 38% of adults 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree. Three in five adults in the United States do not have a college degree and did not sign up to pay off the debt of people who have one. Most adults who do have a college degree have either paid off their student loans, are paying off their own student loans, or never took out a loan in the first place. They did not sign up to subsidize deadbeats who do not want to pay off their student loans.
The college and student loan system is terribly broken and has led far too many people into borrowing more money than they can easily afford to buy degrees of marginal value. Honor, respect, and dignity demand that the borrowers pay it back as promised.
A box of giraffe feces was confiscated and destroyed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after a woman brought it back from a trip to Kenya and planned to make necklaces out of the excrement.
Perhaps she should have come through the southern border where she wouldn’t have been harassed.
WEST BEND — On Monday, during the West Bend Special Curriculum meeting, it was announced that “Ender’s Game” would be removed from the Badger Middle School first-quarter book club list for eight-grade English class.
The West Bend School District had changed parameters for reviewing book club books during their Sept. 7 special board work session, with an emphasis on looking at three criteria defined in board policy, which are sexual content, graphic violence and excessive obscene language.
According to the WBSD, “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card, a 1985 science-fiction novel about a cadet, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, who has trained since early childhood, with others, to win an anticipated third conflict with an invading alien species, was removed because it violates all three district policies.
The cited violations were:
■ Sexual content: Bug mating described in detail and sexual jokes.
■ Graphic violence: Physical fights between children, some resulting in death, and described in detail.
■ Excessive obscene language: The use of “hell,” “damn” and “b*****d.”
Usually when we are discussing removing a book with graphic language from the curriculum, it is a book that I’ve never heard of. It’s usually some obscure trans-advocacy book or something that only the activists know about, but they treat it like THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOK YOU WILL EVER READ AND YOU ARE A MONSTER IF YOU DON’T LOVE IT!!!!! In this case, I’ve read Ender’s Game more than once – including rereading it a couple of years ago. It’s a brilliant book and legitimately a landmark piece of science fiction. The movie was acceptable. Not great, but decent.
But… it is, indeed, full of obscene language and children fighting (that’s kind of the point). The sexual content is rather benign, in my opinion, but it is there. Would I let my 8th grader read it? Yeah, I would. They probably wouldn’t get it yet, but it would introduce some deep concepts. It would invite the conversation and allow me to develop their minds.
But it is appropriate for an 8th grade book club in a government school? Meh… I could go either way. Could the book introduce or develop inappropriate thoughts without parental guidance? Maybe. I’m neither upset nor happy about the decision. It’s probably not the decision I would have made, but it’s not an unreasonable decision. It’s a great book, but there are millions of other books in the world.
See, liberals? See how easy that was? They can remove a book I like from the book club and I don’t act like they are burning books in the street.
It’s the end of an era for a once-critical pandemic document: The ubiquitous white COVID-19 vaccination cards are being phased out.
Now that COVID-19 vaccines are not being distributed by the federal government, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped printing new cards.
The federal government shipped more than 980 million cards between late 2020, when the first vaccines came out, through May 10, according to the latest available data from the CDC.
Federal and local health officials don’t expect the discontinuation of the cards to be a particularly big change, since the days of keeping them tucked in purses and wallets to ensure entry into festivals, bars and restaurants are largely over. If you’ve held on to your card, it’s still valid as proof of vaccination. Otherwise, people who need their COVID-19 immunization records will need to request them just like any other vaccine.
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a move that conservationists and tribes called a potential breakthrough, President Joe Biden has directed federal agencies to use all available authorities and resources to restore “healthy and abundant” salmon runs in the Columbia River Basin.
Biden’s order stops short of calling for removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Lower Snake River in Washington state, an action that tribes and conservation groups have long urged to save threatened fish populations. But it directs a host of federal agencies to do all they can to restore salmon and honor U.S. treaty obligations with Pacific Northwest tribes.
[…]
Still the memo does not recommend breaching the dams in Eastern Washington, a politically volatile step that could raise electric rates for millions of customers in the Northwest who rely on hydropower. Breaching the dams, which requires approval from Congress, would cost between $10.3 billion and $27.2 billion, according to a report last year by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
Kurt Miller, executive director of Northwest RiverPartners, which represents community-owned electric utilities in seven western states, said dam-breaching could cause rate increases of 25% to 65% for 4 million public power customers in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and other states.
Products on shelves are getting quantifiably smaller, yet you’re paying the same price: a practice known as ‘shrinkflation’. But in addition to shrinking products, businesses are also cutting back on the quality and availability of their services, while keeping prices steady. This is called ‘skimpflation’ – and although the changes are sometimes significant, they often fly under the radar.
“Skimpflation is defined as businesses ‘skimping’ on the quality of a product or service,” says Scott A Wolla, economic education officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis. As raw prices go up with inflation, businesses skimp by spending less on services or materials to stay profitable – cuts that get passed down to the customer, even as prices remain stable.
[…]
In grocery stores, explains Balagtas, it’s now common for customers to bag their own items at checkout instead of having a clerk do it for them. The number of self-checkout stations has increased around the world, with fewer workers available to help customers pay – a change some consumers construe as a degradation of service.
Grocery aisles are also rife with skimpflation. Along with shrinking size and quantity of products, food manufacturers are applying skimpflation to the quality of goods to reduce costs. Often, this includes swapping out expensive, premium ingredients for cheaper, lower-quality ones while keeping the same price tags, or even raising them. To save money, for instance, Balagtas says some ice cream manufacturers have reduced some of the expensive milkfat in their products, instead replacing them with “other ingredients, including water and other components of milk, but also sweeteners”, says Balagtas.
by Owen | 2026, 3 Oct 2323 | Politics | 5 Comments
We are in uncharted territory. I will note that ALL of the Democrats voted to oust McCarthy despite him dealing with the Democrat Senate and Democrat President. Republicans get no credit when they bend to Democrats.
Kevin McCarthy has been ousted in a right-wing revolt – the first time ever that a US House of Representatives’ Speaker has lost a no-confidence vote.
[…]
Eight Republicans voted to oust Mr McCarthy in Tuesday’s vote. Another 210 – all Republicans – voted to keep Mr McCarthy in the role.
But Democrats joined with the Speaker’s Republican critics to topple him.
Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries had said in a letter to colleagues that he would not provide the votes needed to rescue Mr McCarthy.
Meanwhile, the second aggravating factor is that demand has risen as high schools across America portray a college education as the only viable path to stave off poverty. Instead of portraying the military, the trades, entrepreneurship, or other career paths as equally viable, too many high school teachers and counselors — all college graduates themselves — have culturalized kids to think that anyone without a college degree is lesser.
Compounding the misleading culturalization, the abysmally wretched financial education provided in those high schools leave prospective students ill-equipped to evaluate the risk/reward of financing a college degree with debt. Ignorant of the power of compounding interest, too many kids are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree with little market value. The result is that they are unable to get jobs after graduation that pay enough to easily pay off the debt.
It is true that some people are not getting the value out of their degrees that they had hoped for or were promised. It is true that college costs more than it should. It is true that student loan payments make it more difficult to afford other things and that everything is more expensive than it used to be. It is true that lenders were all too eager to dole out money without any consideration of the degree being pursued or potential future earnings of the graduate.
All of these things are true, but it does not absolve the borrowers from the obligation to pay off their own debt. It is not a financial question. It is a moral one. If you borrowed the money, then you must pay it back. To fail to do so makes you a shameful deadbeat and a drain on your family and community. Having a college degree does not make you any less of a loser if you renege on your obligations.
Furthermore, nobody wants to hear you whine about your student loans. In 2022, less than 38% of adults 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree. Three in five adults in the United States do not have a college degree and did not sign up to pay off the debt of people who have one. Most adults who do have a college degree have either paid off their student loans, are paying off their own student loans, or never took out a loan in the first place. They did not sign up to subsidize deadbeats who do not want to pay off their student loans.
The college and student loan system is terribly broken and has led far too many people into borrowing more money than they can easily afford to buy degrees of marginal value. Honor, respect, and dignity demand that the borrowers pay it back as promised.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) said it intercepts nearly 20 unauthorized guns per day at checkpoints nationwide, putting the agency on track to break its annual firearms record, the agency told ABC exclusively.
[…]
This comes as more passengers take to the skies. TSA says it’s screening more than 2 million people per day at airports across the country.
On Sunday night, Newsom announced his decision to appoint Laphonza Butler to fill Feinstein’s seat in the interim. Before the appointment, Butler served as the president of EMILYs List, a group whose goal is to elect Democratic women to office who favor access to abortion.
But according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission from September 2023, Butler doesn’t live in California, nor anywhere close to the state. Instead, it appears she lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California won’t be giving unemployment checks to workers on strike, with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoing a bill Saturday that had been inspired by high-profile work stoppages in Hollywood and the hotel industry.
Newsom, a Democrat, says he supports workers and often benefits from campaign contributions from labor unions. But he said he vetoed this bill because the fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits will be nearly $20 billion in debt by the end of the year.
“Now is not the time to increase costs or incur this sizable debt,” Newsom wrote in a veto message.
The fund the state uses to pay unemployment benefits is already more than $18 billion in debt. That’s because the fund ran out of money and had to borrow from the federal government during the pandemic, when Newsom ordered most businesses to close and caused a massive spike in unemployment. The fund was also beset by massive amounts of fraud that cost the state billions of dollars.
The bill would have let workers who were on strike for at least two weeks receive unemployment checks from the state, which can be as much as $450 per week. Normally, only workers who lost their job through no fault of their own are eligible for those benefits.
Here is my full column that ran earlier in the week in the Washington County Daily News
Wisconsin’s legislative Republicans have announced a new proposal to fund renovations at American Family Field in an effort to keep the Brewers in Milwaukee for another generation. The plan is a package of $600 million in state, county, and city funding coupled with $100 million from the Brewers. This is the third or fourth such proposal (I have lost count), but all of the proposals make some rather sweeping assumptions that must be challenged before the taxpayers are put on the financial hook for another couple of decades.
The first assumption is that having a Major League Baseball team in a particular community is a net benefit to that community. The current funding plan reflects that perceived benefit with proportionally more funding being committed by the entities that stand to benefit the most.
The Milwaukee Brewers are a private, for-profit business. They provide entertainment for profit. The Brewers employ local people, attract people from out of state to spend money in Wisconsin, and anchor some economic development. In this respect, they are no different than many other businesses headquartered in the state like a robust manufacturer or technology firm that generates economic benefit — most of which flows into the pockets of business owners and their employees.
There is also an intangible benefit to the Brewers being in Wisconsin. A major sports franchise contributes to a community by providing a shared identity and point of pride. It is a unifying force. Measuring this identifiable, but unquantifiable, benefit is difficult. We must acknowledge that there is a significant amount of vanity influencing the debate. Many lawmakers who want the taxpayers to support the Brewers do so because they like supporting the Brewers. They are fans.
If we take the first assumption to be true — that the Brewers are a net economic and societal benefit for Milwaukee and Wisconsin — then we must challenge a second assumption. Should the taxpayers subsidize the success of this private business?
Politicians are notoriously opaque about deciding when and how taxpayers should fund the success of private enterprises, but it happens all the time.
Through tax incremental finance districts, favorable tax incentives, direct subsidies, and other means, taxpayers are constantly supporting private businesses under the auspices of economic development.
Such taxpayer support is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should be done with reticence and clear expectations as to the return that the taxpayers might receive for their forced investment in a private enterprise. Too often, politicians are lax in their due diligence and weak in their demands when doling out taxpayer money. Such is the benefit of them spending other people’s money where they can take a victory lap for the spending while never being held accountable if there is no return on the investment.
All such investments must be prioritized in the context of all of the other demands on taxpayers. Is fixing AmFam Field more important than funding law enforcement? Road maintenance? Snow removal?
Other economic development like technology or manufacturing? Is AmFam Field more important than lowering taxes and reducing the size of government?
There is no such thing as a free lunch. In a world of scarce resources, funding AmFam Field means that something else will not make the list.
All things considered, having the Brewers in Wisconsin is a net benefit to the state, but it does not rise to the level of justifying hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer support. Moreover, the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District, which owns and operated AmFam Field, has done a terrible job managing the facility to be self-sustaining.
A quick look at the SWPBPD’s 2022 financial statements shows that they are running chronic losses. The only sources of revenue are $905,000 from rent from the Brewers, $300,000 in license plate revenue from the vanity plates, $4,500 in miscellaneous, and they lost $7.1 million in investments. Add on the $10.5 million in expenses and the District lost $16.4 million. This operating loss was on top of the $9.9 million loss in 2021.
2022 was a brutal year for everyone’s investments thanks to Bidenomics, so we can forgive the investment loss. The financials, however, beg some questions. Why did the Brewers pay less than $1 million per year to use the facility in 2022? That is less than $12,000 per home game. Why has the SWPBPD not found other ways to bring in revenue for the facility?
Why have they not been renting out the facility for other events to generate more revenue? Why is the SWPBPD not getting a cut of the sponsorship and concessions money? There is a lot of money is flowing through that stadium that is not making it to the taxpayers who own it for use in its maintenance.
The SWPBPD did a commendable job paying off the stadium debt early, but they have not done anything in twenty years to build a self-supporting revenue structure once the five-county stadium sales tax ended.
They are supporting expenses by spending down the nearly $60 million in reserves that was generated by the now defunct stadium tax. It appears that the plan all along was to come back to the public trough to sustain the stadium’s operations and maintenance.
Taxpayers are rightfully dubious about spending more hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for a building that has been terribly managed for the benefit of one private business. Lawmakers should look to sell the facility to a private enterprise that can manage it profitably and end the taxpayers’ obligation for its upkeep. Even if the underlying assets are sold for below market value, the end of taxpayer obligations is a net benefit for taxpayers. If lawmakers cannot find a private buyer willing to make the investment, then we must ask again why taxpayers would.
A few notes on this column. First, I screwed up the acronym. The governing board actually goes by SEWPBPD instead of SWPBPD. I’m not sure that’s an improvement, but there it is.
Also, it turns out that the lease that the Brewers have with the SEWPBPD that was negotiated and put in place by lawmakers before the board was constituted prohibits the board from monetizing the stadium. Essentially, the Brewers have exclusive access and get any proceeds from renting it out, concessions, sponsorships, etc. As the lease is written, the Brewers – NOT the taxpayers – get all of the benefits of owning the stadium without having any of the obligations for its upkeep or improvements.
The taxpayers are getting hosed here. Privatize the stadium and get the taxpayers out of bearing the costs of this wealthy, private entertainment business.
The Justice Department announced on Friday charges against a Washington, D.C., IRS consultant for allegedly leaking tax information associated with former President Donald Trump and thousands of other wealthy individuals to two separate news organizations.
38-year-old Charles Littlejohn was charged via a criminal information with one count of unauthorized disclosure of tax returns and return information — indicating he is likely set to plead guilty to the charge.
The criminal information notes that while he worked at the IRS as a government contractor, he stole information associated with an unnamed high-ranking government official and disclosed it to a news organization. He also stole tax information from “thousands of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and disclosed that information to a separate news organization,” the Justice Department says.
This from the same government that shut down millions of businesses and forced tens of millions of people to go without a paycheck. Sorry, but that broke my Give a F***. Shut it down. Shut it down for a long time. Remind people that they can’t rely on government – not should they try.
With Congress failing to agree on spending, the U.S. is barreling toward what could be one of the largest government shutdowns in history.
Lawmakers have until the end of the day Saturday to reach a deal to keep much of the government open.
If they don’t, 3.5 million of federal workers are expected to go without a paycheck, millions of women and children could lose nutrition assistance, national parks would likely close and more.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration proposal to hike fuel economy standards through 2032 is not feasible and could cost automakers a total of more than $14 billion in fines, an automotive group said Friday.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai and others, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Corporate Average Fuel Economy proposal “exceeds maximum feasibility” and that the agency projects “manufacturers will pay over $14 billion in non-compliance penalties between 2027 and 2032”.
The fines would impact one in every two light trucks and one in every three passenger cars in 2027-2032, the group added.
A separate document viewed by Reuters said the Detroit Three – GM, Ford Motor and Chrysler-parent Stellantis – would face about $10 billion in CAFE fines in that period.
Dianne Feinstein, the California senator who served for more than three decades and was a trailblazer for women in US politics, has died aged 90.
Feinstein was the oldest member of the US Senate and voted as recently as Thursday.
Yet another Senator who had been in office for the entirety of my adult life. She should have spent her final years surrounded by her loved ones at home instead of being wheeled around Washington like a macabre science experiment. Shame on the people who promote this elder abuse.
(Reuters) -Fast-food workers in California will earn a minimum of $20 an hour and have a greater say in setting workplace standards under a new bill signed into law on Thursday by Governor Gavin Newsom.
“The future happens here first,” Newsom said at an event in Los Angeles, with labor officials and fast-food workers flanking him.
The legislation emerged as part of a broader compromise in which fast-food companies agreed to remove a 2024 ballot referendum asking voters to repeal a law aimed at improving wages and working conditions for employees.
Labor unions, meanwhile, dropped their push to hold fast-food corporations liable for violations committed by their franchisees.
The median fast-food worker in the U.S. earned $13.43 an hour in 2022, while those in California made an average of $16.60 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new minimum, which takes effect in April, equates to an annual salary of $41,600.
If we take the first assumption to be true — that the Brewers are a net economic and societal benefit for Milwaukee and Wisconsin — then we must challenge a second assumption. Should the taxpayers subsidize the success of this private business?
Politicians are notoriously opaque about deciding when and how taxpayers should fund the success of private enterprises, but it happens all the time.
Through tax incremental finance districts, favorable tax incentives, direct subsidies, and other means, taxpayers are constantly supporting private businesses under the auspices of economic development.
Such taxpayer support is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should be done with reticence and clear expectations as to the return that the taxpayers might receive for their forced investment in a private enterprise. Too often, politicians are lax in their due diligence and weak in their demands when doling out taxpayer money. Such is the benefit of them spending other people’s money where they can take a victory lap for the spending while never being held accountable if there is no return on the investment.
All such investments must be prioritized in the context of all of the other demands on taxpayers. Is fixing AmFam Field more important than funding law enforcement? Road maintenance? Snow removal?
Other economic development like technology or manufacturing? Is AmFam Field more important than lowering taxes and reducing the size of government?
There is no such thing as a free lunch. In a world of scarce resources, funding AmFam Field means that something else will not make the list.
All things considered, having the Brewers in Wisconsin is a net benefit to the state, but it does not rise to the level of justifying hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer support. Moreover, the Southeast Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District, which owns and operated AmFam Field, has done a terrible job managing the facility to be self-sustaining.
A quick look at the SWPBPD’s 2022 financial statements shows that they are running chronic losses. The only sources of revenue are $905,000 from rent from the Brewers, $300,000 in license plate revenue from the vanity plates, $4,500 in miscellaneous, and they lost $7.1 million in investments. Add on the $10.5 million in expenses and the District lost $16.4 million. This operating loss was on top of the $9.9 million loss in 2021.
2022 was a brutal year for everyone’s investments thanks to Bidenomics, so we can forgive the investment loss. The financials, however, beg some questions. Why did the Brewers pay less than $1 million per year to use the facility in 2022? That is less than $12,000 per home game. Why has the SWPBPD not found other ways to bring in revenue for the facility?
Why have they not been renting out the facility for other events to generate more revenue? Why is the SWPBPD not getting a cut of the sponsorship and concessions money? There is a lot of money is flowing through that stadium that is not making it to the taxpayers who own it for use in its maintenance.
The SWPBPD did a commendable job paying off the stadium debt early, but they have not done anything in twenty years to build a self-supporting revenue structure once the five-county stadium sales tax ended.
They are supporting expenses by spending down the nearly $60 million in reserves that was generated by the now defunct stadium tax. It appears that the plan all along was to come back to the public trough to sustain the stadium’s operations and maintenance.
Taxpayers are rightfully dubious about spending more hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for a building that has been terribly managed for the benefit of one private business. Lawmakers should look to sell the facility to a private enterprise that can manage it profitably and end the taxpayers’ obligation for its upkeep. Even if the underlying assets are sold for below market value, the end of taxpayer obligations is a net benefit for taxpayers. If lawmakers cannot find a private buyer willing to make the investment, then we must ask again why taxpayers would.
The flubs are one thing, but is anyone going to ask why we’re spending $40 billion on infrastructure for the Pacific Islands?
President Joe Biden got briefly marooned while announcing a plan to invest $40 billion in infrastructure for Pacific islands – then skipped over the acronym for the new program he was touting after botching the name during delivery.
Biden announced the Pacific Islands Initiative at the start of a White House summit for Pacific island nations.
‘We call it the P … PI … anyway, doesn’t matter what we call it, but that’s what it is,’ he said.
[…]
The acronym comment was just one of Biden’s flubs at the event.
In a bizarre comment, he said he and Mark Brown, the prime minister of the Cook Islands, were both from Baltimore, when neither of them are from Baltimore. Biden spoke of how the two nations would benefit from boosting ties, while announcing diplomatic relations.
‘The real reason is we are both from Baltimore, but that’s a long story,’ he said.
Biden was born in Scranton, which lies north of Baltimore, and attended the University of Delaware, and there was no apparent connection between Brown and Charm City. According to his official bio, Brown is a longtime government employee and former Agriculture minister who studied at Massey University in New Zealand and got an MBA at the University of the South Pacific.
