Biden defends disastrous debate performance as Democrats panic

“President Biden is my friend. He must bow out of the race.”

President Joe Biden and his campaign are facing the fallout of a disastrous debate performance Thursday night.

Biden responded to reporters’ questions about Democrats’ concerns over his performance by saying he was not concerned.

“It’s hard to… hard to debate a liar,” Biden told reporters at a Waffle House in Atlanta after the debate. “The New York Times pointed out he made – lied 26 times.”

When asked if he was sick, as his campaign had said, Biden said he had a sore throat.

“I think we did well,” Biden told reporters.

The question came because during the debate, Biden faltered, fumbled, stumbled and at times became incoherent and trailed off. The issue was particularly obvious the first few minutes of the debate.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said early in the debate after one of those moments. “I really don’t think he knows what he said either.”

In another instance, Biden ended a trailing response with “We finally beat Medicare” before trailing off.

“He beat it to death!” Trump shot back.

Biden has faced questions about his mental fitness for years but largely fended them off enough to satisfy his base.

“Nothing that any Republican or conservative says today can darken the night President Biden had,” Colin Reed, a Republican strategist, former campaign manager for U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, told The Center Square. “He had a low bar to clear, and he came nowhere close to doing it. Never before in American presidential history has one event had the potential to upend the dynamics of the race so quickly and so completely.”

After this debate, CNN analysts, Democratic strategists, and liberal media outlets all reported panic within the party about Biden’s poor performance.

First among those Democrats are those in tight races and purple states where a poorly performing Democratic president could cost them their own election.

“Keep an eye on those Democrats in red states running for re-election,” Reed told The Center Square. “Other than the Biden family, they are the ones who are most endangered and jeopardized by the long-term political fallout if the bottom starts falling out.”

Politico immediately reported Biden was “toast” Thursday night.

The New York Times questioned Biden’s “halting” performance.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman published an article with a blistering headline: “President Biden is my friend. He must bow out of the race.”

During the post-debate CNN analysis, Democratic pundit Van Jones said Biden’s performance was painful as others asked whether Biden should drop out to make way for another candidate.

A Quinnipiac poll released the day before the debate showed Trump leading Biden by four points.

Casey Harper

D.C. Bureau Reporter

Related Topics:#BidenDebatePerformance #BidenPresidentialRace #CaseyHarper #TheCenterSquare

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Google Doesn’t Want You To Know The Truth About Heat Waves And ‘Climate Change’

Published on July 1, 2024

Todayville

From Heartland Daily News

By Issues & Insights Editorial Board

Last week, we published an editorial arguing that government data didn’t support various claims about climate change. And we predicted Google would demonetize it. We were right. (See: Heat Wave Sets Off New Round Of ‘Climate Crisis’ Lies.)

Shortly after that article was published, Google’s AdSense informed us that it had “disabled ad serving” on that page because the article contained “unreliable and harmful claims.” (We have one spot on our pages for AdSense ads, mostly to track Google’s efforts to demonetize content. See the list of related editorials below.)

So what was “unreliable” or “harmful” about that editorial? Google doesn’t say. It just says we have to “fix” it if we want their ads to run on that page.

What we can say is that Google has effectively labeled official government data as “unreliable and harmful,” since all the evidence we provided was from official sources.

The editorial pointed out that claims about more frequent heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires – claims that get repeated ad nauseam by the mainstream press and by climate activists – are not supported by the official data.

We included charts and cited the sources of the data – sources such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Interagency Fire Center, the government-run GlobalChange.gov, etc.

Here’s how Google defines “unreliable and harmful.”

It’s the last line that Google uses to censor any content that doesn’t toe the climate “crisis” line.

Anything that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” just means whatever the climate change fanatics say it means, since there is in truth no “consensus” about many of the claims made about global warming.

In truth, the very notion of an “authoritative scientific consensus” violates the basic principle of science.

“Doubt in science is a feature, not a bug,” notes an article in Scientific American. “Indeed, the paradox is that science, when properly functioning, questions accepted facts and yields both new knowledge and new questions — not certainty,”

Imagine if Google had been around when Einstein contradicted the “authoritative scientific consensus” about Newtonian physics.

Or when Copernicus contradicted the “authoritative scientific consensus” that the Sun revolved around Earth.

Or when, in 1543, Andreas Vesalius challenged the “authoritative scientific consensus” about human anatomy that had been in place for 1,300 years.

What Google is doing here (supposedly on behalf of advertisers who use its ad network) isn’t protecting the public against false information – it is attacking true information that undermines climate change dogma.

It is, in other words, just a thinly veiled attempt to enforce a pseudo-religious orthodoxy. Google is nothing more than a 21st-century version of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Issues and Insights Editorial Board has decades of experience in journalism, commentary and public policy.

Originally published by Issues & Insights. Republished with permission.

Economy

Can Hawaii afford climate change lawsuit settlement?

Published on July 1, 2024

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Kim Jarrett

Hawaii recently entered into a settlement in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that requires the state to implement climate change initiatives by court order, setting forth a potential template for lawsuits in other states.

Thirteen young people, at least one as young as nine, filed the lawsuit against the Hawaii Department of Transportation in June 2022. They said the state DOT needed to do more to protect the state and their future from climate change.

The state spent $3 million settling the lawsuit, money the attorney general’s office said was “well-spent” to avoid a trial that would have started June 24.

The settlement provides a road map of tasks the DOT must do per the court order. These include creating a greenhouse gas reduction plan for the Hawaii Department of Transportation that could cost the state more. Only one price tag is included in the plan—$40 million for public electric charging stations and charging infrastructure for all state and county vehicles by 2030.

The agreement includes a dispute-resolution component that could keep differences out of court. But, the First Circuit of Hawaii will oversee the settlement until 2045 if Hawaii has not met its zero-emission goals.

The Hawaii Department of Transportation must receive “sufficient appropriations” from the Hawaii Legislature, but the settlement does not include a specific amount for the other requirements.

Gov. Josh Green admitted it would not be inexpensive or easy. He said the court order would help him when he had to go to the Legislature and say, “Look, we have to do this.”

“We have these policies in mind but we don’t have the resources that come from the Legislature,” Green said. “We don’t often have the absolute insistence of the courts to do certain things so having a settlement like this creates some guarantees.”

For two years, the governor has pushed for a $25 tourist fee that has not passed the Legislature.

“We have 10 million individuals that come to Hawaii every year,” Green said. “Can you imagine only for a moment if we successfully were humbly asking people to pay $25 when they came to the state? That would be $250 million every single year to pay for the bikeways, extra to bring very advanced analytics to what our carbon impact is from any of the technologies we use, money to get bond to navigate major protections against erosion of the coastline.”

Thomas Yamachika, president of the Tax Foundation of Hawaii, told The Center Square, “There’s going to be some pain,” when finding money to implement the settlement’s initiatives. The Legislature passed tax breaks this year to increase the standard income tax deduction in odd years and lower tax rates for all brackets in even years. It’s possible those tax cuts could be “walked back,” Yamachika said.

Truth in Accounting, which does an annual financial analysis of the 50 states, told The Center Square that Hawaii is already $11 billion in debt.

“The state doesn’t have money sitting around that can be used for settlements like this,” said Sheila A. Weinberg, founder and CEO of Truth in Accounting. “To pay for this settlement, taxes will have to be raised or services and benefits will have to be cut. The other option is to even underfund the pension and retiree health care benefits even more.”

Hawaii is the first to settle a climate change lawsuit, but it may not be the last. The case may set a precedent in other states where young people have filed lawsuits over climate concerns, according to an op-ed written by Cara Horowitz, executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the institute’s communications director, Evan George.

“Many defendants facing climate lawsuits — notably including Hawaii officials in the earlier stages of this case — often protest that climate change policy should be made by legislatures, not judges,” Horowitz and George said in the op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times. “This landmark settlement demonstrates that the courts can hold decision-makers accountable if they fail to live up to their promises.”