Joe Biden and Hunter Biden have been accused of corruption and abuse of power by the Department of Justice, but there is no evidence of any such thing. In fact, there's no evidence at all that Joe Biden was involved in any corruption, and there's not one shred of evidence to suggest that Hunter Biden was either involved in corruption or abused power by his father, former Vice President Joe Biden. But that doesn't stop the media from covering them as if there were any evidence of corruption at all, and the media are completely ignoring the overwhelming amount of evidence that has been presented to the public in order to paint a picture of Joe Biden as someone who should be impeached and removed from the White House because of his own corruption. But there's nothing there. No evidence, no evidence, nothing. And yet, the media won't even admit that there's any evidence. Is it possible that Joe is a crook? And if so, what does that mean for the possibility of an Impeachment of the Vice President? And why is that even a possibility? And why isn't there an impeachment inquiry launched by the Republican Party? And what would that impeachment inquiry even be about? And what will happen if it does end in an impeachment? And is it even a real impeachment inquiry at all? Well, the answer to that question is simple: it's not going to end in impeachment, and it's going to be a big one. impeachment, which means impeachment will not end with an inquiry that does not actually end with impeachment, but in a pratfall, and that means we are steadily moving toward that . an impeachment and we re all going to have to an impeachment, not an inquiry or an inquiry, which would mean we re moving toward impeachment, right? and so on and so forth, right ? ...and so on, right?? The answer to the question: What s the point of an impeachment investigation, you ask the question, right here, and what s the purpose of an inquiry and what will be the process? ? and ? Well, what s there to an inquiry? ... What s our impeachment inquiry? What s ? And what s our country s purpose in an inquiry into Joe Biden s role in all of this? , right here in this whole thing? And is there any evidence in any of this ? And...
00:00:00.000Well, it's pretty obvious that Republicans launching an impeachment inquiry are going to end this process with an impeachment.
00:00:05.000There is no purpose for an impeachment inquiry if it does not end in an impeachment.
00:00:08.000That would just be a giant pratfall by the Republican Party to launch an inquiry that does not actually end with an impeachment, which means we are steadily moving toward that.
00:00:16.000And so the question becomes, what exactly must be proved in order for an impeachment to be pursued with vigor and alacrity?
00:00:23.000And the answer is Pretty much whatever Democrats did in the last few years of the Trump administration.
00:00:28.000So apparently, that means you don't have to watch a crime.
00:00:30.000It means that you don't actually have to provide evidence that a crime was full-on committed.
00:00:34.000All you have to show is that there was corruption or abuse of power enough for your own party.
00:00:48.000One of the biggest gaslighting episodes I've ever seen is happening right now in real time.
00:00:52.000As the media determined that actually there's no evidence whatsoever that anything is wrong with Joe Biden or Hunter Biden, that effectively these people are just as clean as the driven snow.
00:01:03.000For example, entire media montage last night of the media claiming there is no evidence of Joe's connection with Hunter Biden's corruption, which is a lie.
00:01:14.000Not only do we have two separate business partners of Hunter Biden's saying that Joe was involved in the business, that'd be Devin Archer and Tony Bobulinski, We have them both testifying that Joe Biden would stop by meetings or call into meetings having to do with his son's business.
00:01:27.000We have direct texts from Hunter Biden to his own daughter suggesting that he paid daddy's bills.
00:01:30.000We have WhatsApps from Hunter Biden's computer to foreign...
00:01:34.000So yeah, I mean there's a little bit of evidence.
00:01:37.000When I say a little, I mean a lot of evidence.
00:01:38.000to him and will wield his outsized political power in order to punish said companies.
00:01:43.000We have tens of millions of dollars moving around from foreign forces sources into a
00:01:47.000variety of shell companies and then into companies and people connected with Hunter Biden.
00:01:52.000And we have Hunter Biden living in Joe Biden's house.
00:01:54.000Well, a lot of this stuff is happening.
00:01:56.000So yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of evidence.
00:01:58.000When I say a little, I mean, a lot of evidence.
00:02:00.000The only thing that is missing is like an actual transaction wire showing money moving
00:02:05.000directly from Hunter Biden to Joe Biden.
00:02:08.000But let me just make something pretty clear.
00:02:10.000When it comes to parents and kids, that sort of stuff doesn't have to happen in order for the bill to get paid.
00:02:21.000Well, does that mean that your parents did not benefit from you picking up the tab?
00:02:25.000Or do you have to actually transfer the money to your parents' accounts and then they pick up the tab in order for it to be considered a benefit for your parents?
00:02:33.000Anyway, here are the media denying, denying, denying.
00:02:36.000Again, remember, these are the people who for four long years, every single day on CNN, remember, I'd be at the gym, which is the only place that CNN has ever appeared in my life, and CNN would unfortunately be on the wall.
00:02:46.000And every single day, Wolf Blitzer would be talking about how a new bombshell was emerging and the Russia investigation is going to blow this thing wide open.
00:02:53.000It was going to destroy the Trump presidency.
00:02:55.000For four long years, we heard all of that.
00:03:17.000Having months and months of conversation and hearings and news coverage of, well, what exactly did go on with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden's business dealings.
00:03:26.000And as we've all said, no evidence yet has been presented that the Bidens have made a lot of money, so on and so forth.
00:03:35.000Even some House Republicans say they're not convinced evidence exists.
00:03:41.000Plus, Republicans insinuated they might not back the move.
00:03:46.000They might not vote for it, given the lack of evidence to support such a drastic action.
00:03:52.000But House Republicans have so far not provided evidence that Biden directly profited off his son's business deals or made any decisions as vice president because of them.
00:04:33.000Indirect evidence would include things like blood all over O.J.
00:04:37.000Simpson's bronco, blood all over the crime scene, all of that matching.
00:04:40.000Right, that would all be indirect evidence.
00:04:42.000That would be circumstantial evidence.
00:04:43.000When you hear people say, well, there's only circumstantial evidence that Joe and Hunter were involved together.
00:04:47.000Circumstantial evidence like Joe Biden directly saying that he threatened the Ukrainians with a billion dollars and removed withdrawn aid if they didn't fire the prosecutor overseeing the prosecution of his son's company.
00:05:03.000I mean, again, if the standard now on impeachment is effectively that if a party doesn't like another member of another party, they just get to impeach him.
00:05:13.000And you don't even have to define the crime.
00:05:14.000I just got to tell you, if what I have stacked up here is Donald Trump impeached in 2019 for the great crime of calling up Vladimir Zelensky and allegedly threatening to withdraw military aid if Vladimir Zelensky did not dig up dirt on the Bidens.
00:05:29.000And then on the other hand, I have Joe Biden being impeached for an ongoing scheme with his son to clear tens of millions of dollars By essentially using his influence as vice president of the United States.
00:05:40.000Or by the way, even allowing his son to purport to use his influence as vice president of the United States.
00:05:45.000And clearing, like, actual money that way.
00:06:28.000For you yourself, when you're talking about the evidence that you say you've seen, and for those listening at home, have you seen anything that directly ties President Biden and shows that he profited from his son's foreign business dealings?
00:06:42.000We have his son complaining to his relatives about how many of his father's bills he's having to pay with these illicit gains.
00:06:50.000Have you seen direct evidence that President Biden profited?
00:06:54.000Well, I mean, but Caitlin, the point of the inquiry is to give us greater standing to get the full evidence.
00:07:01.000If we get full cooperation, if they say we have nothing to hide and give it to us and we don't see anything, then that's where the facts lead us.
00:07:09.000So you're saying it may not lead to an actual impeachment if you don't get more evidence.
00:07:41.000So I guess the new standard is that Republicans have to show that Hunter Biden directly signed a check to Joe Biden and has to have Joe Biden's name on the back of the check handed to the bank in order for any of this to be good.
00:07:53.000That's not how any of this is going to work.
00:07:54.000And by the way, the American people don't believe that either.
00:07:56.000The reality is that impeached or not is almost irrelevant because we know that Joe Biden is not going to be removed by the Senate of the United States.
00:08:03.000What we do know, however, is that the American people, by and large, believe the allegations that Joe Biden is involved in corruption because he very clearly is.
00:08:10.000We'll get to Joe Biden's response to this momentarily.
00:08:12.000First, you know a company is looking out for you and they actually upgrade your service and don't charge you for it.
00:09:17.000The Joe Biden response to all of this is basically to pretend that it's a big nothing.
00:09:22.000So he's at a campaign reception in McLean, Virginia, and he reportedly said, I don't know quite why, they just knew they wanted to impeach me.
00:09:29.000And now, the best I can tell, they want to impeach me because they want to shut down the government.
00:09:54.000So, his theory is that Republicans are pursuing impeachment so they can also pursue a government shutdown.
00:09:59.000Which, by the way, is actually the opposite of the truth.
00:10:01.000Even if you are cynical about politics, what you think is that McCarthy is pursuing the impeachment inquiry in order to get his own side off his back so he can cut a deal with regard to the continuing resolution.
00:10:11.000But again, I love when Joe Biden pretends that he doesn't know what the hell is going on with regard to his son, when he very clearly does.
00:11:00.000And that's going to be the final repository of this argument.
00:11:03.000It was trotted out yesterday by the White House's Ian Sams, saying that the reason that Joe stopped by Hunter's business meetings was out of love.
00:11:12.000Just like, you know, in the Corleone family, members of the family would stop by meetings held by other members of the family just out of familial love.
00:11:25.000I'm not somebody who works for the American taxpayer.
00:11:28.000And it turns out that if your love for your family requires you to engage in corruption at the expense of the American taxpayer, that is impeachable and quasi-criminal behavior.
00:12:14.000He was just checking in to see how he was doing, which is why his son would call him in the middle of business meetings, and Dad would get on the phone and he'd say, how's the weather in Ukraine, in Kiev, son?
00:12:23.000And then he'd say, that's fine, Dad, and click the phone.
00:12:26.000And he'd say, see, I can get my dad on the phone anytime I want.
00:12:30.000According to the New York Times, the strategy here is to battle it out in the court of public opinion, says Ian Sams to the New York Times.
00:12:38.000Well, good luck with that because, again, it's pretty obvious the level of corruption that Joe Biden has been involved in his entire career.
00:12:54.000And then it's pretty obvious that they could totally be true.
00:12:58.000So, I've mentioned before, in a completely different context, scandals involving, for example, allegations about Barack Obama's drug and sexual behavior in the late 1990s.
00:13:34.000As scoreless as those rumors may be, were they the most implausible rumors?
00:13:39.000I mean, not the most implausible rumors.
00:13:42.000But put even that aside, here we're not even talking about rumors.
00:13:45.000Here we are talking about actual documented relationships between Hunter and Joe, testified to by Hunter's business partners.
00:13:54.000We have documentation from Hunter's computer backing us.
00:13:58.000And we have decades, decades of records of Joe Biden engaged in corrupt bargains on behalf of his family with a variety of sources ranging from MBNA in Delaware.
00:14:08.000He was known as the Senator from MBNA.
00:14:10.000He was known as this because his son, Hunter, right out of law school, already being a derelict, got hired over at MBNA.
00:14:19.000And meanwhile, Biden was giving sweetheart legislative deals to MBNA, which was growing by leaps and bounds in the state of Delaware.
00:14:28.000That sort of stuff has been going on with the Bidens.
00:14:29.000He was cutting sweetheart real estate deals with the heads of MBNA, going all the way back to the 1970s, cutting sweetheart deals with unions in order to get himself elected.
00:14:38.000There's nothing new about the corruption here.
00:14:40.000He's cutting sweetheart deals with banks.
00:14:41.000In order to get those banks to give loans to his brother Jimmy, so his brother Jimmy could start a rock bar in Wilmington, Delaware.
00:14:48.000So, like, him using his power in order to benefit his family financially has been the entire Joe Biden story for as long as Joe Biden has been in public office.
00:15:05.000Meanwhile, there's another scandal that's piled on top of the actual corruption, and that is the cover-up of the corruption, the obstruction of the corruption.
00:15:11.000We'll get to that in just one second first.
00:15:14.000I love watching my baseball, even though my White Sox are absolutely terrible this year.
00:15:18.000But I gotta tell you, it sucks the joy out of watching baseball when your team is really bad.
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00:15:26.000Prize picks is the easiest and fastest way to play daily fantasy sports.
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00:16:39.000So obvious that the judge in the case uncovered it and blew it up and the DOJ was forced to pretend that it hadn't cut the sweetheart deal in the first place.
00:16:47.000Meanwhile, the White House is maintaining, guys, Joe didn't talk to anybody about the Hunter case.
00:16:51.000Here's Ian Sams of the White House saying just that.
00:16:54.000Yeah, I mean, the president's been very clear about this since before he even took office, that the Justice Department and his administration is independent.
00:17:01.000He has not been involved in that case.
00:17:02.000He has not talked to anybody about that case.
00:17:07.000Take the words of the GOP's own witnesses in the House who testified in an open hearing that neither Attorney General Garland nor President Biden interfered in this case.
00:17:20.000Okay, well, I mean, what they did testify to is that the attorney in this case, David Weiss, had asked for special counsel status from the DOJ and was not given it.
00:17:31.000Or at the very least, that he was not given special counsel status even if he didn't ask for it.
00:17:35.000And then Merrick Garland was like, well, you didn't even ask for it.
00:17:37.000Well, it's not up to him to ask for it.
00:17:38.000You just give it to him if you wish for him to be truly independent.
00:17:42.000Well, now Politico is reporting an FBI agent involved in the Hunter Biden probe said the prosecutor leading it sought but was denied help from a key fellow US attorney.
00:17:49.000The lack of cooperation did not prevent charges from being brought against the President's son, but it did make the prosecutor's job harder.
00:17:54.000The testimony, delivered behind closed doors, is consistent in part with an IRS whistleblower's description of the probe and comes at a critical juncture in the investigations into the Biden family.
00:18:03.000Republicans have pointed to that whistleblower description when making the case for opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
00:18:09.000The agent said she did not recall another key part of the whistleblower allegation Republicans have focused on, that David Weiss said he didn't have final authority to charge the President's son.
00:18:18.000Apparently, the agent said, quote, I remember learning at some point in the investigation that Mr. Weiss would have to go through his other processes because the U.S.
00:18:24.000Attorney's Office had, I guess, in that sense, using that terminology, wasn't going to partner.
00:18:30.000Asked if she recalled learning that Martin Estrada, the U.S.
00:18:31.000Attorney for the Central District of California, specifically decided not to bring tax charges against Hunter Biden, the agent said, I understand that, yes, a decision had been made that the Central District of California wasn't going to, I guess.
00:18:41.000My understanding is they weren't going to bring the case on their own.
00:18:46.000So here is the problem with all of this.
00:18:48.000And again, this is the problem inherently with issues involving the DOJ.
00:18:52.000Joe Biden doesn't have to say anything to Merrick Garland for all of this to get done.
00:18:55.000There are widespread reports in the public media, in the New York Times, about how upset Joe Biden is about all of these charges with Hunter, how much he loves his son, how upset he is with all of this stuff happening.
00:19:07.000You think Merrick Garland isn't interested at all?
00:19:08.000He has no political stake in making sure that a sweetheart deal gets cut with Hunter?
00:19:12.000A sweetheart deal that he attempts to bury in a gun deal?
00:19:15.000You think that that's... Joe Biden doesn't have to, like, pick up the phone and say to Merrick Garland, Merrick, I want you to quash this investigation.
00:19:21.000He doesn't have to sign him letters saying, Merrick, I love my son, and make it go away.
00:19:28.000All he has to do is make it clear that he would like that to happen, and Merrick Garland knows how to make that happen, so he makes it happen.
00:19:34.000And one of the ways he makes that happen is he says to David Weiss, I'm not giving you special counsel status.
00:19:39.000You work for me, so if things go wrong here, I get blamed anyway.
00:19:42.000Now, like, let's make this thing go away.
00:19:46.000Democrats, for the record, are beginning to turn on Hunter.
00:19:49.000House Democrats are beginning to realize that maybe Hunter has to go under the bus in order to save Joe here, which is a pretty dirty pool.
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00:21:03.000Okay, so meanwhile, Democrats, while they protest that there is nothing here, House Democrats are preparing to throw Hunter directly under the bus, according to Politico, quote, As the House barrels closer to an impeachment vote, Democrats are vowing to defend Biden to the end.
00:21:16.000Top Democrats are coalescing around a strategy to oppose the GOP's impeachment inquiry, cleaving off the son's conduct from his father's.
00:21:22.000They think they have the facts to back them up, since the probe has yet to find any evidence directly linking Hunter Biden's business dealings to Joe.
00:21:27.000Again, they keep saying this over and over.
00:21:40.000Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands says our job, or my job, will be to remind the American people of that over and over again.
00:21:46.000Hunter Biden is not the administration.
00:21:48.000Jamie Raskin said you can't impeach Hunter Biden, but he will be prosecuted.
00:21:51.000Democrats don't even plan to try to defend Hunter Biden's conduct during his time serving on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma.
00:21:57.000That arrangement, Republicans say, allowed him to trade on his father's influence at the time as vice president.
00:22:01.000By the way, that's not just what Republicans say.
00:22:14.000Instead, the president's party is keen to keep Joe as far away as possible from the drip-drip of damaging information coming out about his son.
00:22:20.000Jerry Nadler of New York, he says Hunter Biden may have very well done some improper things.
00:22:45.000But this is what Democrats think they're going to do.
00:22:46.000They're going to throw Hunter under the bus.
00:22:47.000So it'll be fascinating to see, it's almost Shakespearean, whether Joe is eventually just going to throw Hunter under the bus as well.
00:22:54.000If the mask of, he's a caring father, goes by the wayside when his presidency is at stake.
00:22:59.000If he says, yeah, Hunter does a lot of corrupt, terrible things, and he's got problems, obviously, and, you know, well, I wasn't involved in those, but Hunter, man, he's gonna have to go to jail and pay his, like, you think Joey's gonna do that?
00:23:51.000But according to Yahoo News, on a sweeping patio overlooking the golf course at his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey, former President Donald Trump dined Sunday night with a close political ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene.
00:24:00.000It was a chance for the former president to catch up with the hard-right Georgia congresswoman, but over halibut and diet cokes, Greene brought up an issue of considerable interest to Trump, the push by House Republicans to impeach his likely opponent in next year's election.
00:24:12.000I did brief him on the strategy I want to see laid out with impeachment, Greene said in a brief phone interview.
00:24:16.000Trump's dinner with Greene came just two nights before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced his decision on Tuesday to over-order the opening of an impeachment inquiry.
00:24:23.000Ah, so just to get this straight, the theory here from the press is that Trump talked to MTG, who then dictated terms to Kevin McCarthy.
00:24:35.000But of course, this is what Jamie Raskin, who again was involved in the impeachment of Trump twice, now is claiming that the impeachment is coming from Trump.
00:24:51.000If he had not been a lifelong corrupt politician for decades, deploying his drug-addicted, booze-addled, prostitute-abusing son to go pick up money for the family.
00:25:00.000I mean, I don't understand why this is so tough to understand.
00:25:04.000Do you think the White House should have, could have handled the Hunter Biden saga better?
00:25:10.000You know, I'm not closely watching the White House.
00:25:14.000What I'm doing is engaged in the work of the Oversight Committee.
00:25:17.000So for seven months, we have watched the Republicans on the Oversight Committee and Chairman Comer get all of the witnesses they want, all of the documents they want, more than 12,000 pages of documents, and there is no evidence of any criminality or wrongdoing by Joe Biden.
00:25:33.000There's 91 criminal charges against Donald Trump right now, 13 criminal charges against Congressman Santos, who was just on the show a few moments ago.
00:26:05.000I do enjoy the spectacle of Donald Trump is simultaneously a bumbling fool, but also he's a Machiavellian genius manipulating all the strings from behind the scenes.
00:26:14.000CNN is reporting that the former President Trump spoke today with House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik about the impeachment strategy.
00:26:20.000Is he, I mean, is he really the one driving this?
00:26:25.000I don't know whether he's driving it directly or indirectly.
00:26:27.000Certainly as he participates in social media and talks about this on social media, he is driving the activists to call members of Congress and get involved.
00:26:37.000So whether he called Kevin McCarthy directly or whether he is just sort of getting the troops riled up, I'm not sure which way it happened, but certainly members of Congress are hearing about it.
00:26:59.000One of the reasons the Democrats are in a state of outsized panic about something that is not going to come to fruition, by the way.
00:27:03.000Again, let me remind you, Democrats control the Senate.
00:27:06.000Joe Biden is not going to be removed from office.
00:27:08.000The reason Democrats are fighting mad about this is because by announcing an impeachment inquiry, McCarthy and the Republicans have successfully put this at the top of the news.
00:27:34.000Every column that tells Joe Biden not to run always includes an addendum from these Democratic kind of advisors that Kamala also shouldn't run.
00:27:41.000David Ignatius, as we talked about yesterday on the program, David Ignatius wrote a column in the Washington Post saying Joe should not run and also Kamala Harris.
00:27:51.000Because she's supposed to be this wunderkind, this political genius.
00:27:55.000She's supposed to be amazing at this, and we just all misunderstand her.
00:27:58.000But the problem is, nobody likes Kamala Harris.
00:28:00.000So the reason they're panicking about Biden is because they got nobody to back him up.
00:28:03.000Who's the person waiting in the wings?
00:28:05.000You can say it's Gavin Newsom, but let me tell you, running on the record of California is not likely to win you the presidency, or at the very least, it ain't gonna go amazing.
00:28:12.000California's been bleeding population, including my entire family, for years under Gavin Newsom.
00:28:17.000It's truly an amazing spectacle to watch as the Democratic Party recognizes, I mean they really do, that they must...
00:28:23.000Send this Madame Tussauds wax figure of a human into battle, and he's melting.
00:28:29.000But you better get him back in the presidency before that dude completely melts, because backing him up is Kamala Harris.
00:28:35.000And you can hear the Democratic unease.
00:28:36.000Nancy Pelosi was asked yesterday about whether Kamala Harris was the best pick for vice president for Joe Biden.
00:28:41.000She refused three separate times to say yes.
00:28:43.000She's like, well, you know, Joe did pick him, but she's like... Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate for this president?
00:28:52.000He thinks so, and that's what matters.
00:28:55.000People shouldn't underestimate what Kamala Harris brings to the table.
00:28:59.000Do you think she is the best running mate, though?
00:29:03.000She's the Vice President of the United States.
00:29:04.000So when people say to me, well, why isn't she doing this or that?
00:29:07.000I say, because she's the Vice President.
00:29:32.000For example, she was asked about her limits on abortion.
00:29:34.000So remember, the talking point from the Democrats, including from people like Jen Psaki, former spokesperson for the President of the United States, the talking point is that they're not for abortion on demand.
00:29:43.000The problem is when asked, name a situation in which you would outlaw abortion, they cannot name any.
00:29:47.000Here's Kamala Harris on Face the Nation botching it once again.
00:30:39.000Everybody knows she's terrible at this.
00:30:41.000And meanwhile, it's a two-front war for Joe Biden in this election.
00:30:48.000On the one hand, you've got his corruption and his unpopularity.
00:30:51.000And on the other hand, you have a bad economic situation that is manifesting itself right now.
00:30:55.000According to the Wall Street Journal, consumer prices rose in August at the fastest pace in more than a year due to a jump in energy costs, illustrating the potential obstacles to wringing inflation out of the economy without a sharper slowdown.
00:31:05.000The Consumer Price Index, a closely watched inflation gauge, rose 0.6% in August from the prior month, according to the Labor Department.
00:31:11.000More than half of that increase was due to higher gasoline prices, but that doesn't matter because, I mean, you're still paying for it.
00:31:15.000The monthly core reading likely keeps Federal Reserve officials on course to hold interest rates steady at their meeting next week.
00:31:22.000However, on an annualized basis, prices were up 3.7% overall in August versus 3.2% in July.
00:31:28.000Annual core inflation is still 4.3% in August.
00:31:35.000Remember, every time they say that inflation is slowing, recognize that all of the inflation that already happened is not being undone.
00:31:42.000So, if you say that a good costs 10% more this year than last, and then you say next month it costs only 5% more, and the month after that 3% more, and the month after that 2% more, you have to aggregate all of those for the final price.
00:31:54.000Right now, people are paying a boatload more than they were paying for their goods and services just a couple of years ago.
00:32:01.000And that is thanks to Joe Biden, which is why his economic numbers are in the toilet.
00:32:06.000Every single poll shows a plurality of Americans trust Trump over Biden to handle the economy, without a doubt.
00:32:11.000But meanwhile, Democrats keep saying, they keep trying to make Fetch happen.
00:32:15.000Keep saying Bidenomics over and over and over.
00:32:16.000I mean, you're just cutting campaign commercials for Republicans at this point.
00:32:19.000Here's Karine Jean-Pierre suggesting that Bidenomics turned the economy around, which is quite a shock considering the economy was already turning around by Q4 of 2020.
00:32:28.000Why is he going to Maryland, the blue state, instead of maybe a red state, to talk about these economic policies?
00:32:37.000So, I'm not going to get, you heard Jared, the chair of CEA, talk specifically about the economy, speak specifically about a major speech, a major speech that the President is going to do tomorrow on binomics.
00:32:51.000believe has turned the economy around and just not from us but from the data
00:32:54.000that we certainly have seen and this is a president has been very clear he wants
00:32:58.000to see an economy that come that build that's built from the bottom up middle
00:33:00.000out and not the trickle-down economy that we saw them up middle out Republicans
00:33:04.000want to continue to do it's all sloganeering by the way that's also the
00:33:10.000title of the next Megan thee Stallion Cardi B song bottom up middle out it's
00:33:14.000gonna it's gonna be fantastic Jared Bernstein, who you just referenced there, he's blaming congressional Republicans for quote-unquote allowing child poverty to double.
00:33:22.000So the game is, what if we just infuse trillions of dollars into the economy on the basis of emergency measures, and it creates massive inflation, and then that expires.
00:33:31.000And then you blame people for allowing it to expire.
00:33:35.000So we create a false perception of child poverty being relieved by blowing money into a pandemic-era economy and a post-pandemic-era economy, and then when it expires because, you know, inflation is through the roof, then it's the fault of everybody else.
00:33:58.000That's not okay in an economic context where congressional Republicans have allowed child poverty to double by refusing to extend this child tax credit.
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00:35:13.000Well, meanwhile, Joe Biden is having some union troubles.
00:35:15.000So Joe Biden has always been a union guy.
00:35:17.000And the reason he's been a union guy is because there's fairly good evidence that the unions were actually heavily involved in Joe Biden's first Senate election campaign.
00:35:23.000Ben Schreckinger writes about this in his book, The Bidens, that basically the day before
00:35:28.000Joe Biden's original senatorial election campaign back in like 1970, effectively,
00:35:34.000there was a mailer that was supposed to go out in all of the newspapers that day,
00:35:37.000and the unions picketed the newspaper to stop the mailer from going out
00:35:41.000at the behest of people connected with Joe.
00:35:43.000So he's always been bought and paid for by the unions.
00:35:46.000Well, now he's running into a problem because the UAW is seeking another big payout
00:35:51.000from the car companies, despite the fact that the UAW did enormous work
00:35:54.000in the 50s, 60s, and 70s to completely undermine America's car advantage,
00:35:58.000which is why by the time of the 80s, everybody was driving a Toyota.
00:36:02.000The White House is closely monitoring as Detroit's big automakers and the UAW engage in acrimonious negotiations with the laborers threatening to strike if agreement is not reached before their current contract expires at 11.59 p.m.
00:36:13.000A full or partial strike could send shockwaves through the economy while also calling into question Biden's pledge to create a win-win transition to a clean energy future.
00:36:22.000He's not directly involved, but he certainly has a strong interest in seeing a settlement both sides can live with, said Harley Shakin, a labor professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
00:36:30.000With the deadline approaching, UAW's fiery new president, Sean Fain, has not echoed Biden's optimism.
00:36:34.000He says the union's roughly 150,000 automotive members are ready to walk off the job if their demands are not met in the next couple of days, which could completely destabilize the industry.
00:36:43.000The workers are calling for a 36% pay hike over four years and the restoration of defined benefit pension plans, which means the utter bankruptcy of these car companies again.
00:36:51.000You remember that Barack Obama bailed out the car companies.
00:36:56.000Joe Biden presumably will come down on the side of the unions because Joe Biden doesn't care about the economy, he doesn't care about the car companies.
00:37:01.000He cares about pleasing his union cronies, who will then presumably spend a billion dollars in the upcoming election to get him re-elected.
00:37:07.000Okay, all of this bodes ill for Joe Biden's re-elect chances.
00:37:10.000The good news for the Democrats is they always have the Republicans to fall back on, which is exciting, exciting stuff.
00:37:14.000So, Republicans are about to have a circular firing squad with regard to a possible shutdown According to Axios, House Republicans have fallen into a state of paralyzed chaos on their second day back from recess with no obvious exit ramp and a government spending fight of their own creation.
00:37:30.000On the first night of the House Speaker election, we published a piece headlining the ungovernable House GOP.
00:37:34.000Eight months later, the sentiment has never rung more true.
00:37:36.000The House was forced to cancel the vote on Wednesday, advancing funding for the Pentagon after the Freedom Caucus rebelled over spending levels.
00:37:43.000Another typically uncontroversial appropriations bill funding agriculture has been scrapped entirely over an internal GOP debate about abortion policy.
00:37:51.000McCarthy's announcement of an impeachment inquiry appears to have backfired, with some Republicans trashing it as a distraction.
00:37:55.000GOP leadership is now advocating for a short-term continuing resolution to avert a government shutdown.
00:38:00.000But if McCarthy puts a bill on the floor, Matt Gaetz is vowing to trigger daily votes to oust him as Speaker.
00:38:06.000Like, what is seeking to be achieved here?
00:38:09.000I said this with regard to the first threats to not hand McCarthy the speakership unless he handed some concessions to the House Conservatives.
00:38:17.000But can we name the points that you actually are advocating for so McCarthy can either, you know, do them or not?
00:38:23.000Instead, what we're getting, it seems, is another fight over McCarthy with nobody waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces because 190 Republicans say they're committed to McCarthy no matter what.
00:38:32.000And meanwhile, Democrats are just sitting on the side, chortling.
00:38:36.000Now, behind all of this is a real sort of bizarre ideological battle, and it's an ideological battle over the value of tactics at all.
00:38:43.000There's part of the Republican Party that just thinks that tactics don't matter at all, that the best way to strategize in situations in which you don't control all the power is to run directly at a wall at full speed with your head down.
00:38:53.000And if you do it over and over enough, the wall will crumble.
00:38:57.000Achieve any sort of real success, lasting success.
00:39:01.000It seems more likely that what you should do is you should make moves that eventually guarantee you full power across all the branches of government.
00:39:10.000But instead, we're just going to get internal squabbling.
00:39:12.000Matt Gaetz goes on MSNBC to bitch about Kevin McCarthy.
00:39:14.000It's always a dead giveaway when Republicans are appearing on MSNBC to do this sort of stuff.
00:39:19.000This is about term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and single-subject spending bills, just like I've been saying for an entire year.
00:39:26.000I am the most investigated man in the entire Congress, and right there, you saw Kevin McCarthy lying like a dead dog, because I have never asked him to interfere in any ethics matter.
00:39:36.000I had the FBI and DOJ, who hate me, investigate me for three years.
00:39:40.000You covered it nearly nightly, and even you acknowledged at the end that my denials held up consistently, and the people Yeah, I don't know what the hell that has to do with Kevin McCarthy, but suddenly, I guess the idea is that if, what, you yell at Kevin McCarthy that he will be replaced by whom?
00:40:59.000They're standing 10 paces apart and the Democrats are like, if you don't give me what we want, man, I'm going to shoot myself right now in the head.
00:41:05.000And Republicans are like, don't do it.
00:41:16.000I've been saying for years at this point, first party to sanity wins.
00:41:20.000But it seems like we're not going in that direction anytime in the near future.
00:41:25.000Meanwhile, other big political story of the day is that Mitt Romney is now announcing his retirement from the Senate of the United States.
00:41:33.000And Mitt Romney is one of the more peculiar figures in the history of American politics.
00:41:39.000He was a very, very moderate Massachusetts Republican governor.
00:41:44.000He ran as the conservative in 2008, you'll recall, against John McCain.
00:41:47.000He came in second to John McCain in that nominating battle, and he was considered the more conservative candidate against John McCain, largely because of immigration.
00:41:54.000Then he ran again in 2012, and he won the nomination, and then he lost the presidency to Barack Obama.
00:42:01.000In an election that I think actually broke the country.
00:42:03.000Because you had an incredibly milquetoast moderate Republican running against a radical Democrat, and the radical Democrat wins by cobbling together a coalition of the supposedly oppressed against the demographically elderly white majority and all this nonsense.
00:42:17.000And he breaks politics permanently, does Barack Obama, in the United States.
00:42:21.000So then, Mitt Romney goes to the Senate in Utah.
00:42:24.000He moves to Utah because he's a Mormon, he's elected to Senate overwhelmingly, and he proceeds to work with Democrats on a wide variety of issues.
00:42:35.000His voting record overall is pretty conservative, but on some key issues, on certain bills like, for example, the Infrastructure Act, he ends up working with Democrats.
00:42:42.000The widespread perception from Republicans about Mitt Romney Is almost a circle.
00:42:47.000It starts from he's a moderate Republican, not sure how conservative he is, but I guess he's got an R by his name, too.
00:43:06.000He kind of has an R by his name, but not all that conservative.
00:43:09.000Here's Mitt Romney announcing he's not going to run for reelection.
00:43:12.000At the end of another term, I'd be in my mid-80s.
00:43:17.000Frankly, it's time for a new generation of leaders.
00:43:21.000They're the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.
00:43:27.000Now, we face critical challenges – mounting national debt, climate change, and the ambitious authoritarians of Russia and China.
00:43:37.000Neither President Biden nor former President Trump are leading their party to confront those issues.
00:43:44.000Political motivations too often impede the solutions that these challenges demand.
00:43:51.000The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership.
00:43:58.000While I'm not running for re-election, I'm not retiring from the fight.
00:44:02.000I'll be your United States Senator until January of 2025.
00:44:08.000Okay, so he then shared in an interview with McKay Coppins his hatred for all the rest of the Republican Party.
00:44:14.000And here is the thing about this kind of stuff.
00:44:17.000We have a peculiar standard inside the Republican Party for what counts as loyalty and what counts as disloyalty.
00:44:21.000So Mitt Romney's attacking all the other Republicans.
00:44:23.000He shared a unique disgust for Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who he said, quote, put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.
00:44:40.000Like, why are you directing your fire inside the House?
00:44:41.000Also, I tend to hold that rule about Donald Trump attacking fellow Republicans inside the House, but it's very strange to me that certain types of attacks are considered completely verboten, and certain types of attacks, depending on who is doing them, are considered totally appropriate.
00:44:53.000So when Donald Trump suggests that, in some way, Ron DeSantis is a rhino, his fans are like, yeah, that's true.
00:44:59.000And you're like, wait, that's not true at all.
00:45:02.000And then when people attack Mitt Romney as a rhino, then the same people will be like, well, that's appropriate or inappropriate.
00:45:12.000How about one standard for whether you attack people inside the caucus or not?
00:45:16.000When they violate actual conservative principles, then you attack them.
00:45:21.000Donald Trump spent the day celebrating the ouster of Mitt Romney.
00:45:26.000Which is, again, like Donald Trump spends more time celebrating the ouster of Republican senators than any Democrat that I know.
00:45:32.000He put out a statement saying, Fantastic news for America.
00:45:34.000The great state of Utah and the Republican Party.
00:45:36.000Mitt Romney sometimes referred to as Pierre Delecto.
00:45:40.000That was his peculiar screen name on like an alternative Twitter account.
00:45:46.000Now, again, I'm fine with Mitt Romney stepping down, and I'm fine with a lot of people thinking that he wasn't conservative enough in Utah.
00:45:57.000I agree with some of those criticisms.
00:46:00.000I'll just point out that Donald Trump has now celebrated the ouster of people ranging from Jeff Flake to John McCain to Mitt Romney I mean, like, he does this kind of stuff all the time.
00:46:12.000So when you're talking about, like, it's bad for Romney to attack other Republicans in the Senate, it's not great to attack other Republicans in the Senate, you might think.
00:46:19.000Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
00:48:02.000Okay, so can I just point out how stupid this is?
00:48:04.000So there are a few things that are incredibly stupid about this.
00:48:05.000So this entire commercial, which apparently was unveiled at the Apple product launch to demonstrate just how environmentally friendly they are.
00:48:12.000First of all, It begins with Mother Nature arriving.
00:49:04.000Don't worry about, like, whether what you're doing is good or evil in terms of the product that you produce, what kind of protections it has for, say, children, how content actually reaches people via the phones and computers you put out.
00:50:04.000They wouldn't want to put that in the commercial because then it would just be a bunch of white people meeting with a black lady.
00:50:08.000And that wouldn't look, you know, nearly as good or quite as diverse.
00:50:12.000What I like about this is it's good when the mask comes off.
00:50:14.000When corporate America basically says, when people like Tim Cook are like, well, you know, my chief goal is to worship Mother Nature and to use my giant company to do so.
00:50:21.000Meanwhile, I'll produce all of our product in communist China, where they completely abuse the environment and don't care about anything.