Joe Biden boasts there were NO SCANDALS during his eight years with Obama, as long as you don't count the 880,000 pounds of cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc they left in the Animas River bed in 2015 because of their incompetence

Cocaine Mitch has the power to drag Joe Biden kicking and screaming and compel his appearance before the US Senate, which would be highly entertaining

When you imagine Republicans did what Joe Biden did

Career civil servant Mark Sandy testified on Nov. 16, 2019 that he was told that military assistance to Ukraine was put on hold by Trump because Trump was concerned other countries were not contributing more to Ukraine:

Mr. Sandy: I recall in early September an email that attributed the hold to the President's concern about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine. ... Mr. Meadows: And, all of a sudden, we get some additional information that's provided in terms of what other countries contribute to Ukraine aid, and then the aid was released. Is that a fair characterization? Mr. Sandy: In terms of the sequencing, yes.

Hunter Biden, Bad to the Bone since at least 1988

Very ugly Biden meltdown in Iowa last night, calls an older man "fat" and "too old to vote" for him

Challenges him to an IQ test, and a push-ups test.

Video here.

The insecurity lurks not far from the surface.

Remind you of anyone?

2020: Battle of Tiny Titans

Biden in the cat bird seat: Just as Bernie tanked after promising criminals will get to vote, Warren has tanked after hedging on Medicare for all

Ezra Klein, here:

One lesson of the past few weeks is that the Medicare-for-all debate has become a minefield for Democrats — and it’s not clear that any candidate has a safe path through it.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has dropped 14 points since October 8, when she briefly led the Democratic field in the RealClearPolitics polling average. Most attribute her decline to her handling of Medicare-for-all — the financing plan she released made her the target of attacks from the moderates, and then the transition plan she released, which envisions a robust public option in the first year of her presidency and only moving to Medicare-for-all in year three, left single-payer advocates unnerved about her commitment to the cause.

The Democrat left has been its own worst enemy.

In addition to alienating working people by going soft on crime, the people who bear the brunt of it,  Bernie has notably lost ground with the working class by flipping on immigration restriction. Every new immigrant drives down their wages when immigrants are not taking their jobs outright.

For her part, on top of hedging on Medicare for all, Warren has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of crazy in this campaign, including a ban on all fracking in the US and ending the Electoral College. Combined with the recent lying about the little details of her life, voters justifiably doubt her sincerity on these larger issues and suspect that she cares about little except getting the power into her hands.

Hence the default candidate still on top, Joe Biden.

America's political institutions are still so structured that even when radicals like Obama do win, those institutions frustrate their aims. The upside of this is that harmful radicalism is usually stopped in its tracks. The downside is that mediocrities and grotesques are produced.

Just as Obama was content to let his Clinton retreads handle the Great Financial Crisis resulting in the still poor full time employment, moribund GDP, unaffordable housing and low interest rates catastrophic to income portfolios of the present time, Obama provided zero leadership on healthcare reform. This resulted in the competing Democrat House and Senate versions which consumed his first year in office, and eventually produced the Affordable Care Act camel, a horse designed by a committee. He sure did enjoy watching basketball in the private residence, though, and went on to make the Bush tax cuts permanent after winning re-election in 2012. Some radical, huh?

The same thing has happened with Trump. Although promising us the moon about immigration, healthcare reform and foreign wars, he instead delivered tax reform mostly for the corporations and huge spending increases for the military industrial complex, which is the basic consensus of the Republican caucus in Congress, foolishly hoping that they would give him a little somethin' somethin' in return.

Nothing doing. Even trade realignment will disappear when Trump does.

Trump's problem is that he never had a political faction holding any seats in Congress to drive his agenda. He just assumed the existing members would adopt his positions, which is pretty damn naive considering how he attacked and alienated them all throughout 2015-2016. Instead, Trump has steadily moved away from his own positions and adopted theirs, for his own political survival.

Trump's porous bollard fencing instead of the real wall he promised is simply the most public symbol of this, going back as it does to the George W. Bush administration.

The only radical realignment we have seen is the realignment of the radicals with their respective parties, and Election 2020 will be the same old, same old fight between them.

Those who won't realign get discarded.

This is the tyranny of the legislative. And the only way to remedy this is to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, the great mistake of 1951. Only the threat of a Trump or an Obama perpetually in the White House will restore the balance of power between the three branches of government and advance the interests of the people who vote for the president.

As things stand, the best we can hope for is a president desperately stacking the courts to increase his power in a tyranny of the judiciary, which is hardly the remedy intended by the founders and is unacceptable to Americans loyal to the constitution and the nation as founded. The three stooges of the law schools on display at the impeachment hearing yesterday are proof enough of that. 

The secret mission of the Biden tour bus is to clean up the malarkey flushed by the DNC bus in 2016

Remember that politicians usually lead with the thing they will end up botching the most, so your choice is tons more immigrants under Trump or tons more malarkey under Biden

Joe Biden sucks . . . just ask his wife

Kamala Harris is US Senator from California, but Californians don't want her for president: Biden leads her by 16 points, Warren by 15, Sanders by 9

It must be costing Hunter Biden a fortune to get Pocahonky to divide the Bernie wing of the party

Joe Biden was a key advocate for the financial bailout, which was approved under the Bush administration and expanded under President Barack Obama. He delayed his Senate resignation in January 2009 to cast his final vote to increase funding for the Troubled Asset Relief Program before taking office as vice president.

“These guys are not the most likable guys in the world,” Biden said about the banks and hedge funds aided by the government intervention. "But here are the facts ... Had we not bailed out the largest bank institutions in the world, there would have been a flat-out depression.”

One of the firms that benefited was Rosemont Capital, a company led by Hunter Biden’s business partners, Chris Heinz and Devon Archer. The firm received the loans at a crucial time for Hunter Biden. The younger Biden had stepped down from his lobbying business in late 2008, reportedly due to pressure on his father’s vice presidential campaign.

More here.

Pocahonky is still in third behind Sanders and Biden because she's a full-blown nut

Hunter Biden's early campaign work on behalf of his father Joe Biden is already bearing fruit in Arkansas

NYT Nov 5, 2019: Sondland text message in early September to Taylor said president was clear there was no quid pro quo

A crucial witness in the impeachment inquiry reversed himself this week ...

That admission, included in a four-page sworn statement released on Tuesday, directly contradicted his testimony to investigators last month, when he said he “never” thought there was any precondition on the aid. ...

Mr. Sondland had said in a text message exchange in early September with William B. Taylor Jr., the top American diplomat in Ukraine, that the president had been clear there was no quid pro quo between the aid and investigations of the Bidens. But Mr. Sondland testified last month that he was only repeating what Mr. Trump had told him, leaving open the question of whether he believed the president. ...

“I presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anticorruption statement,” Mr. Sondland said.

In his closed-door interview last month, Mr. Sondland portrayed himself as a well-meaning and at times unwitting player who was trying to conduct American foreign policy with Ukraine with the full backing of the State Department while Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, repeatedly inserted himself at the behest of the president. He also said repeatedly that he could not remember things, including details about the Sept. 1 meeting, according to the 375-page transcript of his testimony.

“And you had never thought there was a precondition to the aid?” one of the Republican investigators asked Mr. Sondland. “Is that correct?”

“Never,” Mr. Sondland said, adding that he “was dismayed when it was held up, but I didn’t know why.”

More here.

Ukraine Foreign Minister denied a week ago that Sondland linked aid to opening an investigation of Biden

“Ambassador Sondland did not tell us, and certainly did not tell me, about a connection between the assistance and the investigations. You should ask him,” Prystaiko said about Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union. ... “I have never seen a direct relationship between investigations and security assistance,” Prystaiko was quoted as saying by Interfax. “Yes, the investigations were mentioned, you know, in the conversation of the presidents. But there was no clear connection between these events.” 

More here.

Vindman does Fredo like Dr. Jill Biden: I'm IMPORRRRRTANT see, that's Lt. Col. Vindman

Just call him "the witness".

In addition to committing possible perjury today in respect to Hunter Biden, Yovanovitch as US Ambassador to Ukraine told Ukrainian prosecutor to lay off certain people

Seems like more people in the Obama administration than Joe Biden felt it necessary to meddle with Ukrainian prosecutions.

One wing of the Democrat Party wants to end the fossil fuel industry, the other wants its sons to make millions off it

This false equivalence between Biden and Trump is utterly unacceptable: Biden as VP threatened Ukraine with withholding $1 billion, and there's video, Trump threatened nothing

Trump never threatened Ukraine but Joe Biden sure as hell did