It’s not about protecting health, is it?

(Reuters) -The Biden administration on Friday delayed its plan to ban menthol cigarettes, a move that reflected the potential for a political backlash from Black voters in an election year.

 

For decades, menthol cigarettes have been in the crosshairs of anti-smoking groups who argue that they contribute to disproportionate health burdens on Black communities and play a role in luring young people into smoking.

About 81% of Black adults who smoked cigarettes used menthol varieties, compared with 34% of white adults, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement that the proposed ban had brought immense feedback including from parts of the civil rights and criminal justice movement.

Wha?

Joe Biden suggested his war hero uncle may have met a grisly end among flesh-eating savages after his plane went down over Papua New Guinea in World War II.

 

The president said there were ‘a lot of cannibals at the time’ in the area where his uncle Ambrose J. Finnegan’s plane crashed in the 1940s – and his remains were never located.

 

However, Biden’s account was inconsistent with Pentagon records which showed the plane was not ‘shot down’ as he said.

So glad he’s coming to Wisconsin to bribe UW students with the prospect of free college at taxpayers’ expense. You will notice the lack of involvement by Congress.

President Joe Biden is expected to discuss the framework for a new major student loan forgiveness plan on Monday during a trip to Wisconsin, sources familiar with the White House’s plans confirm to ABC News.

 

Biden is scheduled to travel on Monday to Madison, home to a major university and in a crucial battleground state.

I took the time to watch Biden’s press conference yesterday in full. Wow. Every American should take 13 minutes and do the same. I confess that I, too, fall into the habit of just watching the clips and highlights. Seeing him in longer form (not LONG form – it’s less than 15 minutes) is so distressing. Here are some of my takeaways.

1. Biden’s slurring, mumbling, and coughing is pronounced. We’ve watched Biden speak for 50 years and he was, at one time, a decent orator. Not anymore.
2. He read a note off the teleprompter again (“continue quoting”).
3. The mental mistakes that have been cited are significant and real. He forgot the name of the church where he allegedly got a rosary. He said that el-Sisi is president of Mexico. Remember that this was in less than 15 minutes. His mental decline is clear and definitive. If this was your grandpa, you’d have sympathy for him.
4. Biden’s temperament has changed. He’s always been an asshole behind the scenes, but in public, he worked hard on his image as a genial, friendly, joking, compromiser. The asshole is clearly on the surface now. He lacks the emotional control and mental acuity to hide it. He lashes out at reporters who ask decent questions. He insults. He curses. He yells. This is the real Biden.
5. You clearly see Biden sifting through notes during the Q&A. It appears that the questions and answers were scripted again. But Biden got lost and it appears that he called on the wrong reporters who asked some off script questions.
6. To the content… Biden clearly lies. Again/ He claims that he never shared classified information with his ghost writer. He claims that he would never forget when his son died. Both incidents are recorded and documented in the DOJ report. Biden is just lying.
7. On his son’s death, Biden gets visibly angry and shaken up, but again, the DOJ report is clear on the fact that he could not remember the year.
8. Biden hangs his hat on the fact that the DOJ declined to press charges but does not address the reason. Namely, that Biden is too mentally decapacitated to stand trial. Remember that Biden committed these felonies many years ago when he had his mental faculties. He is not being prosecuted because he’s too senile now.
9. Once again, Biden blames his staff for illegally taking and storing classified documents.
10. When Biden returned to the podium to talk about Israel, notice how he talks. He takes credit for personally opening the gates between Mexico (Egypt) and Gaza for humanitarian aid. It is a foreign policy blunder for Biden to tell the world that Sisi opened the border after Biden personally called. If that even really happened, it has made Sisi look like a puppet of America in the Arab world. This perception damages Sisi domestically and we can expect him to be less cooperative as he shores up domestic support. Biden’s desire to take credit overwhelmed any sense of managing America’s interests abroad.
11. On the same theme, Biden says that he was committing to protect Saudi Arabia and others with military means from Iran in exchange for recognition of Israel. Again, if true, it is a significant regression in American foreign policy. Trump shifted to using economic incentives and economic entanglement to encourage peace in the Abraham Accords. They were working. Biden has returned to a foreign policy of the 70s through 90s where America uses military might to enforce peace. That policy was not successful and risks pulling America into another war in the Middle East. Biden has returned to that policy.
12. Biden again claims that Hamas attacked Israel because they knew that Biden was about to get other Arab nations to recognize Israel. Based on Hamas’ own words and behavior, this is 100% wrong. The fact that Biden seems to actually believe this as the cause for Hamas’ attack underlines his complete misunderstanding of what is going on and why his responses are equally wrong.
13. In the final note, watch when Biden walks off. Again, that is the careful walk of a feeble old man who is unsure of his footing or direction. Many of us have seen that walk in people we know and love.

We did not need the Justice Department to confirm what we all already know. But even with the “damning report,” you will note that they did not actually do anything. The swamp protects their own.

The Department of Justice released its long-awaited investigation into Joe Biden‘s mishandling of classified documents Thursday, delivering a damning assessment of the president’s ‘diminished faculties’ and limited memory.

 

Although the report did not recommend bringing charges against the 81-year-old, it provides a cascade of damaging findings about files found in Biden’s garage as well as the president’s fitness for office.

 

In interviews with investigators, Biden became muddled about the dates he was vice president and could not even remember the year in which his son Beau died.

 

And it said his cavalier attitude to classified documents, such as his habit of reading sensitive files to a ghostwriter, posed a significant national security risk.

 

One of the reasons they decided not to press charges was because  ‘at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’

 

[…]

 

He was also apparently hazy on the debate around withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, which was such a key part of the first months of his presidency.

We’re going to get the basement campaign again. There’s no way a well man running for reelection turns down airtime on the most viewed event of the year – especially when the polls are narrow and his approval rate is in the toilet.

President Joe Biden will again skip a pregame Super Bowl interview embraced by recent presidents as an annual tradition.

 

Presidents have traditionally sought to leverage the marquee football event’s broad viewership, making Biden’s decision particularly notable in an election year.

 

Biden participated when NBC and CBS aired the game but sat out last year, when the Super Bowl was aired by Fox. CBS will broadcast the game this year on Feb. 11. The White House confirmed to POLITICO that Biden would be skipping an interview after Variety first reported the news.

Yes, he lies. He lies ALL THE TIME.

There are some “facts” that Biden likes to recite in almost every speech. In the past year, in more than 30 appearances, the president has referred to billionaires paying about 8 percent in federal income taxes. He said it in his last State of the Union address, and odds are he will say it again when he addresses Congress in March.

 

The line is a key part of his argument to impose a minimum 25 percent tax on all taxpayers with wealth greater than $100 million. That would raise about $360 billion over 10 years, the administration estimates.

 

But if you check Treasury Department calculations for what the richest Americans already pay in taxes, you would see that the richest 1 percent pay in excess of 20 percent in income taxes and more than 30 percent in all federal taxes. Even if you drill down to the top 400 wealthiest taxpayers – data that was publicly available on an annual basis until President Donald Trump killed the report – they paid an effective tax rate of 23.1 percent in 2014. These taxpayers – with $127 billion of income – that year paid $29.4 billion in income taxes, or more than 2 percent of all income taxes, the IRS said. That’s more than the bottom 70 percent of taxpayers combined.

I guess Black lives don’t matter to Biden when it comes to allowing Menthols.

The Biden administration is delaying a decision on whether to ban menthol flavored cigarettes amid intense lobbying from critics including the tobacco industry, industry-backed groups and some Black criminal justice advocates.

 

The delay is alarming public health groups, which fear that the White House could cave to pressure and delay the rule indefinitely, especially against the backdrop of President Biden’s reelection bid.

 

The target date for releasing the rule was initially August, which was then pushed back to the end of the year. The White House in its regulatory agenda released Wednesday set a new target for March 2024.

“Any delay in finalizing the FDA’s [Food and Drug Administration’s] menthol rule would be a gift to the tobacco industry at the expense of Black lives,” said Yolanda Richardson, CEO of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “We urge the administration to keep its promise and issue a final rule by the end of this year.”

Get ready for more groaner photo ops with doddering Biden.

Increasing the in-your-face representations of things like a new battery manufacturing plant opening or the beginning of bridge construction — the fruits of the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure deal or the CHIPS and Science Act, all of which were championed by the White House — are how a group of generally popular Democratic governors think unpopular President Joe Biden can help improve his standing with the public ahead of a cutthroat election year.

 

After all, these governors said, that strategy has helped some of them win their own tough reelection fights.

 

“People love the announcement and love the groundbreaking, but the ribbon cutting is reality. Sometimes people talk down about when we present big checks. Well, that’s when the funding comes,” Gov. Andy Beshear told reporters at the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) winter meeting on Saturday, fresh off his 5% victory in ruby red Kentucky last month.

Whatever. They will all come home to vote for Biden next year if he’s on the ballot. He knows it. We know it. After all, it’s not like they have a problem voting for supporters of genocide.

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan on Friday accused President Joe Biden of supporting a Palestinian “genocide” and warned that Americans will remember when he’s up for reelection next year how he responded to the Israel-Hamas war.

 

In a video posted to X, Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress, urged Biden to call for a ceasefire in the conflict – something the president and his administration has so far not done.

 

“Mr. President, the American people are not with you on this one,” Tlaib said in the video, adding, “We will remember in 2024.”

The video – which features images of protests with chants of “Free Palestine” and ‘From the river to the sea” across Michigan, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and New York – ends with text that states: “Joe Biden supported the genocide of the Palestinian people,” “The American people won’t forget,” “Biden, support the ceasefire now,” and “Or don’t count on us in 2024.”