Biden Not Happy About Mitch McConnell Stepping Down, Says He ‘Never Misrepresented Anything’

by | Feb 29, 2024 | Aggregate

President Joe Biden is losing one of his last levers of support over the Republican Party — and he’s not happy about it.

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who represents the old guard of the GOP — literally and figuratively — announced he was stepping aside as party leader in November.

“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” McConnell said in prepared remarks delivered before the upper chamber, The Associated Press reported. “So I stand before you today … to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”

“As I have been thinking about when I would deliver some news to the Senate, I always imagined a moment when I had total clarity and peace about the sunset of my work,” the 82-year-old senator added. “A moment when I am certain I have helped preserve the ideals I so strongly believe. It arrived today.”

What “ideals” these were are anyone’s guess, although it’s worth noting it came one day after McConnell reportedly joined with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in a closed-door meeting to pressure GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson to reach some kind of spending deal in the House of Representatives. Draw your own conclusions.

Whatever the case may be, the 81-year-old president wasn’t pleased to hear that McConnell was leaving his position.

“I’m sorry to hear McConnell stepped down,” Biden said when asked about it Wednesday.

He then outlined why conservatives shouldn’t be sorry.

“I’ve trusted him, and we have a great relationship,” the president said. “We fight like hell. But he has never, never, never misrepresented anything. I’m sorry to hear he’s stepping down.”

President Biden says he’s “sorry to hear” Mitch McConnell is stepping down from Senate leadership:

“I trusted him, we had a great relationship, we fought like hell. But he never, never, never misrepresented anything. I’m sorry to hear he’s stepping down.” pic.twitter.com/U4a1RaQ94v

— The Recount (@therecount) February 28, 2024

Perhaps the president is sorry that McConnell isn’t leaving his Senate seat as well as his position as party leader, as this would mean that Kentucky’s Democratic governor could appoint a replacement — although, as NBC News noted, Kentucky law directs governors to appoint a successor from the senator’s own party based on a list of choices, so there is that.

But perhaps Biden can’t remember when McConnell “misrepresented anything” because 1) he’s not a Republican, 2) his memory is shot or 3) both.

Never mind that a string of freezing episodes in 2023 was attributed to a concussion the leader suffered after a fall last March. The lack of medical answers regarding McConnell’s condition — which, considering the fact he’s older than both Biden and former President Donald Trump — could be considered a lack of proper representation about the full nature of his health.

New letter from Capitol attending physician Monahan to McConnell:

“There is no evidence that you have a seizure disorder or that you experienced a stroke, TIA or movement disorder such as Parkinson’s disease.” pic.twitter.com/DTnRJSUqh2

— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 5, 2023

However, in terms of McConnell having “never, never, never misrepresented anything,” perhaps Biden ought to listen to GOP Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson describing, this month, how the minority leader absolutely misrepresented his strategy on getting border security funding in negotiations with the president and the Democrats.

When he entered negotiations for the foreign aid/border security bill that ended up being dead on arrival in the House, “McConnell said his top priority was funding for Ukraine,” Johnson said.

“But public opinion and the very strong political rhetoric that we ought to secure our own border before we spend $60 billion to secure Ukraine’s was effective. And so McConnell finally switched and said, ‘OK, we’ve got to let Democrats know that we are serious. We are going to defeat closure on this bill, and we are going to demand that border security is going to be attached to funding for Ukraine,’” the senator continued.

“Then secret negotiations occurred on an issue the public supports Republicans on, and we end up with this monstrosity of a bill. It is an immigration bill. It’s not a border security bill. But during that time frame, we repeatedly talked about making Ukraine funding contingent on border metrics,” he said.

Then, Johnson said, “using his own authority without telling the conference even though he knew the conference supported tying border security or Ukraine funding to actually securing the border, McConnell just took that off the table.”

“And that moment of leverage we had where we could use Biden’s desire for Ukraine funding to actually force him to use his executive authority to secure the border has been lost, and that is why so many of us are speaking out against McConnell,” the senator said. “It was such a breach of his leadership position and such a, just a horrible thing to do to Americans who want a secure border.”

WATCH: Sen. Ron Johnson exposes how Mitch McConnell betrayed Republicans on border security. pic.twitter.com/ijWTzGauff

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 13, 2024

So maybe you’re not surprised that Joe Biden thinks Mitch McConnell “never, never, never misrepresented anything” — because McConnell hasn’t to him. However, in terms of “fight[ing] like hell” with him, now that’s some grade-A misrepresentation.

If he wants to find out what “fight[ing] like hell” looks like, though, my guess is that he’ll find out once McConnell is gone.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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Biden Says Doctors Told Him He Looks ‘Too Young’ After Physical

by | Feb 29, 2024 | Aggregate

President Joe Biden joked on Wednesday that doctors told him he looked “too young” after he underwent an annual physical earlier in the morning.

Biden, 81, cracked the joke amid speculation about what doctors could have discovered while evaluating him earlier that morning as questions mount as to whether he is mentally or physically fit to serve another term in the White House.

While he spoke to reporters, he was asked about his physical and what his doctors had to say.

“They think I look too young,” he said.

Joe Biden on possible health concerns following his annual physical: “They think I look too young!”pic.twitter.com/gYvHrcTOem

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 28, 2024

Biden added “Everything’s great” regarding his health and concluded, “There is nothing different than last year.”

According to NBC News, Biden underwent a routine physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and was pronounced “fit for duty.”

White House physician Kevin C. O’Connor wrote in a summary of the exam that Biden “fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.”

As The New York Post noted, Biden did not alert the public of the doctor’s visit ahead of time and the appointment was not on his schedule.

The visit was only learned about Wednesday morning when Biden was departing the White House and shouted at reporters.

“I’m going to Walter Reed to get my physical,” he said.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Biden’s physical during her daily media briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

She was evasive when pressed on the matter of Biden’s health and whether he should take a cognitive test, NBC News reported.

When asked why Biden was not making his personal physician available to the media, Jean-Pierre referred to his brief comments on the visit to Walter Reed.

COVERUP? Karine Jean-Pierre claims they’re “trying to get back to the norm” by preventing Biden’s physician from briefing the press on Biden’s physical and cognitive health pic.twitter.com/75RIHcCb64

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 28, 2024

“The president said that they thought that he was too young,” she said. “You heard from the president, he talked about this when he was asked.”

Biden’s age and fitness have been the source of questions for years.

The president’s health finally received widespread media coverage last month, when Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur said he did not charge Biden in his classified documents case because of his age and mental state.

A report from Hur stated Biden had severe memory issues when interviewed and that had he been charged and tried for mishandling sensitive information, sympathetic jurors might have viewed him as a forgetful old man.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

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Why Are We Still Reliant on China for Our Biosecurity?

by | Feb 29, 2024 | Aggregate

 Image:Wikimedia

This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire

By Matthew Turpin
Real Clear Wire

The reports out of China arrived just before Thanksgiving. A surge in respiratory infections among children in the northern part of the country triggered a sense of foreboding — and Deja-vu. Meetings between the World Health Organization and Chinese officials quickly followed.

The WHO’s conclusions brought some relief. The surge was caused by an “immunity gap” in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein children had few defenses against influenza and other respiratory infections after years of quarantine.

This episode should be a wake-up call for the U.S. national security establishment. We remain reliant on other nations, including countries of concern, like China, for critical intelligence needed to defend against biological dangers — whether naturally occurring, mistakenly released, or purposefully engineered.

That needs to change. It starts with expanded investment in the technological infrastructure that can monitor for and detect dangerous pathogens that could devastate our nation and economy.

Since COVID-19, we’ve all become familiar with the risk posed by novel infectious diseases with pandemic potential. Just 30,000 base pairs of RNA — roughly one one-hundred-thousandth as many as the human genome contains — managed to shut down our planet.

And, as we know from our experience with the last pandemic, time is essential to stopping the spread and minimizing danger to people. We need a strategy for the rapid identification and understanding of emerging threats, as well as timely countermeasures once a threat has been intercepted.

A sophisticated bio surveillance or “bio radar” network would include collection points where pathogens are most at risk of emerging or being identified as threats — including airports, borders, conflict zones, labs, and farms. Once bio radar systems leveraging DNA sequencing have detected a threat, we can create a digital fingerprint of the suspect pathogen’s genetic material and begin analyzing the level of risk and mitigation options. This creates true bio intelligence, or BIOINT.

Artificial intelligence tuned to biological information like this can quickly begin analyzing the data collected from bio radar systems. And by learning to “speak DNA” the way chatbots can speak English, AI has the potential to identify anomalies and quickly inform development of genomic-informed countermeasures.

Today, nodes in this bio radar network are already at work. We just need to connect the dots of this biosecurity infrastructure and expand its scale.

Take the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program, which swabs international travelers arriving at various international airports. In August 2023, the Dulles International Airport location outside Washington D.C. flagged a sample from a U.S. resident returning from a multi-week trip to Japan. Analysis revealed that the traveler was carrying a new SARS-CoV-2 variant. After sequencing the variant, American authorities notified their counterparts in Japan.

This same program identified the Omicron variant when it first arrived in the United States 43 days before it showed up in a clinical setting.

In other words, existing bio surveillance tools can find dangerous or novel pathogens before we would otherwise know they exist.

Acting on that information in a timely fashion could help save lives — or even eliminate outbreaks or biological threats. Despite the lag in receiving information on SARS-CoV-2 from China, it didn’t take long for scientists to develop mRNA vaccine candidates against COVID-19 that proved effective.

In its 2023 Biodefense Posture Review, the U.S. Department of Defense singles out four nations — North Korea, Russia, Iran, and the People’s Republic of China — as either having active offensive bioweapons programs or developing concerning dual-use capabilities in this area.

We should assume that countries the United States considers adversaries are already at work on genetically engineered pathogens and other violations of the Biological Weapons Convention.

And yet, public health experts have consistently downplayed biothreats. The United Nations characterizes COVID-19 as a “once-in-a-lifetime pandemic”and the New England Journal of Medicine labels it a “once-in-a-century” event.

Biothreats are a much more immediate danger. They’re potentially more catastrophic than most other risks. We build early-warning systems for hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. We build them for missile launches and the transport of nuclear material. The public and private sectors spend billions each year on cybersecurity. Why isn’t there a similar urgency about biosecurity?

There’s no time to waste in addressing this truly neglected dimension of global security. We should be building a sophisticated bio radar, bio intelligence, and biosecurity system now before the next pandemic — engineered or otherwise — is at our doorstep.

Matthew Turpin is a senior counselor at Palantir Technologies and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in U.S. policy towards the People’s Republic of China. From 2018 to 2019, Turpin served as the U.S. National Security Council’s Director for China and the Senior Advisor on China to the Secretary of Commerce.

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John Mills: Suddenly, a Notebook is Discussed that Connects Gina Haspel with the Coup Against Trump

by | Feb 29, 2024 | Aggregate

By Retired Colonel John Mills on Substack

An October 6, 2016, Dinner, there was only one reason this retired, very senior FBI Official was in London: To coordinate the Russia Hoax with CIA Chief of Station at the request of James Comey

Excerpt from “The Nation Will Follow” Chapter 4 “A Dinner in London”:

“What I did know was that many of the faces I saw were Hillary supporters. I was one of a very small number of Trump supporters in the room. And I was okay with that. I am not above having dinner with the opposition, and I try not to judge people by their political affiliation. We all have reasons for supporting who we support, as long as they are the right reason: for the benefit of the nation.

So, we broke the ice and introduced ourselves. These were only meant to be quick introductions, there were over fifty people in the room, but it seemed my “friend,” the man I traveled with, did not get the memo.

He stood, introduced himself, and like a Hollywood characterization of what a senior law enforcement official should be like, he ranted to the room.

“Trump is a traitor! He is a Russian asset, is being groomed by Putin for a position at the top and represents the greatest threat to national security the United States has ever seen. And we’re going to prove it!” I stiffened in my chair, taken aback by this outburst. Never, at any stage in our journey, did he give any indication that this was his plan. But in that moment, it clicked in my mind as to why he never revealed to me his reason for traveling. I guess I had found it.

As he dove into his highly unusual tirade, I was shocked to see several people lean forward into their chairs, for the first time in the evening paying rapt attention to what was being said.

The thing about this guy is that he is engaging. He adopted a character that was over-the-top and completely unlike his usual face and used it. Maybe I was seeing him with the mask off, a mask that he had clearly worn for years as he hid his true allegiances. “

© 2024 UAEC LLC All viewpoints are personal and do not reflect the viewpoints of any organization.

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