Major... minor... Biden's dog bites again.

 

ADDED: This is a new incident. Here's the CNN report: "Bidens' dog Major involved in another biting incident."

WaPo Fact Checker gives Biden 4 Pinocchios for saying that the new Georgia voting law is "sick … deciding that you’re going to end voting at five o’clock when working people are just getting off work."

Glenn Kessler writes: 

On Election Day in Georgia, polling places are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and if you are in line by 7 p.m., you are allowed to cast your ballot. Nothing in the new law changes those rules.... 

So where would Biden get this perception that ordinary workers were getting the shaft because the state would “end voting at five o’clock"? We have one clue. The law used to say early “voting shall be conducted during normal business hours.” Experts said that generally means 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The new law makes it specific — “beginning at 9:00 AM and ending at 5:00 PM.”

Obviously, nearly everyone would read Biden's statement to refer to Election Day. The bit about early voting could have been used to cut Biden some slack and back off from the full 4-Pinocchio denouncement, but that would be wrong, because the new law didn't even cut back early voting. 

I'm glad to see Kessler giving 4 Pinocchios when deserved. Last month, I was critical of him for backing off to 3 and said: "Stop babying Biden! He's the damned President. If he needs to be babied, get him out of the presidency."

"I'm going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom. We have so much to look forward to... but right now, I'm scared."

"We have come such a long way...just please hold on a little while longer. I so badly want to be done. I know you all so badly want to be done. We are just almost there, just not quite yet." 

Said CDC Director Rochelle Walensky:

Not long after that, as the NYT reports:

President Biden on Monday called on governors and mayors to maintain or reinstate mask-wearing orders, saying that because of “reckless behavior,” the coronavirus was again spreading fast, threatening the progress the nation has made so far against the pandemic. “People are letting up on precautions, which is a very bad thing,” he said. “We are giving up hard-fought, hard-won gains.”...

Asked if states should pause their reopening efforts, the president replied simply, “Yes.” He said that governors, mayors, local officials and businesses should demand mask-wearing, calling it a “patriotic duty” that is crucial to the nation’s fight against the virus.

Reading the next 4 WaPo articles on Joe Biden's press conference.

Let me continue with the links I found in the top left corner of the front page of The Washington Post this morning (at around 6):

1. 

"Analysis: In news conference, Biden made some incorrect statements and claims lacking context." On the inside the headline is: "Fact-checking President Biden’s first news conference." 

Biden's claim that the U.S. has given far more vaccination shots is a distortion, because some other countries have given shots to a larger percentage of the population. Biden repeated a claim about GOP tax cuts that WaPo has already "often" given 2 Pinocchios. Biden claimed credit for school re-openings that were based on work done before he took office. Biden apparently completely made up the story of children at the border starving to death. Biden claimed that "the vast majority" of families caught trying cross the border are sent back, but only 41% are. Biden was wrong to claim that the surge at the border is the same as what happens every winter. Biden made the completely bizarre claim that the U.S. is 85th in the world in "infrastructure" (but he later corrected it to 13th). Biden misstated how much tax Fortune 500 companies pay.

3. 

"'The art of the possible': Biden lays out pragmatic vision for his presidency." 

"[Pragmatism explains] how he can describe some Republican policies as 'sick' and 'un-American' while not doing everything in his power to immediately stop them. He called the filibuster a racist relic of Jim Crow, while also insisting that he wasn’t ready to remove it entirely in the hopes there would be some compromise."

4. 

"Analysis: Takeaways from Biden’s first presidential news conference." Headline inside: "4 takeaways from Biden’s first news conference." 

"There wasn’t much truly groundbreaking news in the news conference.... Members of the media have been waiting a while to directly question this president.... There was also a distinct lack of deep questioning on the biggest current challenge facing our country and the world: the coronavirus threat. Other critiques of the questions were more overwrought.... These news conferences are difficult. Not every question is going to provide a ton of insight. And everyone thinks they can do better. But that doesn’t mean the media can’t actually do better." That's Aaron Blake.

5. 

"The many languages of Joe Biden: President switches between cryptic and casual conversation." 

This is a Robin Givhan column: "Biden, with an American flag pinned to his lapel, maintained a tone and volume that was both calm and reassuring as he spoke to a nation that remains skittish and uneasy. He only brought up his volume as a form of righteous indignation. He’d periodically move closer to the microphone and his eyes would get wide and his gaze fixed whenever he wanted to convey outrage."

ADDED: Robin Givhan's prose sounds like a description of the lead male character in a romance novel. It's quite humorous if you think about it that way.

Reading the Washington Post coverage of Biden's press conference.

There are 5 pieces lined up on the left side of the front page and more scattered about, so this is a big task. Let me get the blog started this morning with just the first headline:

"Biden prioritizes infrastructure and pandemic ahead of guns and immigration." 

On the inside, the headine makes Biden sound weaker: "Biden promises to tackle the nation’s crises, but says some may wait." Prioritizing specific issues sounds like what an active, skillful executive would do. The inside headline presents him as beset by everything and just letting us know he can't get to it all. 

The first paragraph tells us he regarded guns and immigration as "secondary." What was primary was coronavirus, infrastructure, and voting rights. 

I watched the conference, and it seemed to me that the reporters were most concerned about immigration, so WaPo is interpreting Biden's response to mean that he's minimizing the problem. 

Indeed, I remember him saying that people are just coming the way they have always come, and the surge is just because of the winter weather. The policy changes from Trump to Biden have nothing to do with it, Biden  said, so I guess there's not much value in doing anything differently from what he's currently doing, since the migrants come whatever you do. They have their own motivation, and conditions are so bad back home that they will face any adversity. In that light, we're just being cruel to put up obstructions.

In person, Biden didn't get much — or even any — push back from the press corps, and this article follows that mellow, forgiving approach. It's so absurdly different from the way the press treated Trump. There's not even the slightest pretense of making journalism seem like the same sort of thing we saw before. We're just supposed to glide along with them, greased by the mainly accurate understanding that Biden is a very different sort of person than Trump was. 

ADDED: Something is strangely missing from this WaPo piece: Immigration is a matter that Biden has handed over to Kamala Harris. That's a way of making it "secondary," but it's also a way to get things done. Here's what he said about the VP at the press conference — from the transcript:

Well, look, the idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, if an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let them starve to death and stay on the other side, no previous administrations did either, except Trump. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it. That’s why I’ve asked the Vice President of United States yesterday to be the lead person on dealing with focusing on the fundamental reasons why people leave Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador in the first place. It’s because of earthquakes, floods. It’s because of lack of food. It’s because of gang violence. It’s because of a whole range of things, that when I was Vice President, had the same obligation to deal with unaccompanied children. I was able to get it slowed up significantly by working with the heads of state of those communities, to do things like, in one of the major cities, the reason people were leaving as they couldn’t walk to the street because their kids were getting beat up or shot or in gang violence.

He proceeds to talk about his own work getting street lighting installed in "those communities." He's given Harris the same job that he himself had when he was Vice President.

Why did Medium's algorithm offer porn to Joe Biden? What a mystery!

We talked about the problems at Medium yesterday, here. Today, I'm seeing an article at The Verge —  "The Mess at Medium" — and it begins with some material that doesn't really have much to do with the rest of the article — which is about the problems paying writers enough within the business model of the publishing platform that is Medium. But it's really funny — one of these "mysteries" that has an answer that's so obvious that you only need Occam's Razor to solve:

Last week, a partnerships manager at Medium working with the White House found that there was a strange problem with the platform: President Joe Biden was being served porn.

The manager was in a video conference with a White House staffer to discuss how Biden, who had used Medium as a campaign blog in 2020, could begin posting to the official Medium @POTUS account. While sharing his screen with the White House, the staffer logged in to @POTUS and saw the first article recommended to him by Medium: “A is for After,” which a sub-headline described as “a cuckold love story.”

It’s unclear if the White House saw the story. But after the meeting, the Medium staffer tried to improve Biden’s recommendations. He followed political topics; he “read” posts by President Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris while logged in as the president. When he refreshed his recommendations, Medium recommended another piece of erotica: “Getting a Piece (and Some Pizza Too),” a story that carries the sub-headline “step sister taboo erotica.”

The employee previously found that Medium had somehow added Biden as a writer on 10 “garbage publications,” as well as at least one software development blog. “President Joe Biden is Being Served Erotica on Medium.com,” the staffer complained in an internal post. The episode captured Medium in all its complexity: a publishing platform used by the most powerful people in the world; an experiment in mixing highbrow and lowbrow in hopes a sustainable business would emerge; and a devotion to algorithmic recommendations over editorial curation that routinely caused the company confusion and embarrassment.

It's only a "strange problem" if you think Presidents don't look at porn. 

As Bob Dylan sang long ago, "Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked." ("Bob Dylan: making people picture the president naked since 1965. Thanks, Bob.")

But somebody ought to have helped him set up something other than the official Medium @POTUS account for reading his cuckold and step-sister stories. Come on, people! You know he needs help with his computers. He's 78, for God's sake!

What does it mean that Biden has put Kamala Harris in charge of the border crisis?

Here's a collection of articles on the subject.

Do you think choosing her is an effort to give her the opportunity to do something important and prominent so she can burnish her reputation in preparation for taking over the presidency? Or do you think it is more of an effort to hold her back, to saddle her with a huge problem that she's unlikely to handle well, and the idea is to keep her from edging Biden out?

"An unlikely coalition of Democrats across the ideological spectrum mounted an 11th-hour push in the final weekend before the American Rescue Plan for President Biden to go big on tackling child poverty."

"They prevailed over what one person involved in the process called the 'cost police' in Biden’s inner circle, those anxiously warning about the ballooning cost of the stimulus package.... This under-the-radar success created what could be the most consequential piece of the $1.9 trillion package — one that, if made permanent, could approach the impact of the programs established under President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. The sudden, unexpected creation of an approximately $120 billion social program has thrown a twist into the political landscape.... With the initiative expiring in a year, all but ensuring it will be a major issue in the midterms, the child poverty measure raises a central question: Are the politics of big government back?... A family with two young children and no income will now get $600 a month. The parents of 90 percent of the country’s children will benefit, and 27 million children will be lifted from poverty, according to analysts.... ...Democrats hope American families will get used to receiving their checks, and they cite the Washington axiom that it’s hard to take something away from voters after they’ve started receiving it. Still, popularizing the program will require Biden to begin selling it..... Some Democrats acknowledge that some in their party are squeamish about having to defend the distribution of government checks to working-age adults who are not working....  "

From "How Biden quietly created a huge social program" (WaPo).

"Biden was not part of the Obama entourage. He was sort of a goofball and windbag. He was a member of an older, outmoded generation."

"In other words, uncool. The West Wing attitude was that Biden should simply be grateful that the Great Obama had handed him a ticket to ride. Biden was viewed as a past-his-sell-by-date pol who needed the president’s guiding hand to keep Uncle Joe from making a fool of himself as vice president.... They trashed him anonymously to reporters, froze him out of meetings and barred him from doing some national media.... In eight years, Biden said in a recent reveal that stunned Anderson Cooper — and left Washington gasping — he and Jill were never invited by the Obamas to their private digs in the White House.... So now comes a delicious twist: President Biden is being hailed as a transformational, once-in-a-generation progressive champion, with comparisons to L.B.J. and F.D.R. aplenty, while Obama has become a cautionary tale about what happens when Democrats get the keys to the car but don’t put their foot on the gas.... Obama’s failure to go big and to send the tumbrels rolling down Wall Street certainly greased the runway for Donald Trump. The paradox of Obama is that Americans embraced radical change by electing him but then he held himself in check, mistakenly believing that he was all the change they could handle.... Obama seems more comfortable as Netflix talent, sitting pretty with celebrities and chit-chatting with Bruce Springsteen...."

Writes Maureen Dowd (NYT).

Apparently, we need to be assured that Joe Biden is real.

Fact Check: Video of Joe Biden Talking To Press on W.H. Lawn Does NOT Reveal A 'Green Screen Fail' https://t.co/lqsC8mQwTj

— Lead Stories (@LeadStoriesCom) March 17, 2021

This is a Washington Post headline: "Biden and allies launch stimulus campaign focused on competitive battleground states."

Did they think they were praising him or are we seeing actual critique or genuine neutrality?  

Let's read: 

The early itinerary reflects a clear political calculation, with the first and second families visiting four states — Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania — that could prove crucial to maintaining Democrats’ tenuous hold on the Senate in the 2022 midterms.... 

Though public polls show that the relief package is popular with the majority of the country, administration officials — many of whom also worked in the Obama administration — say they learned lessons from Democrats’ failure to rally the public around former president Barack Obama’s stimulus package in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010. They are hoping to use the travel campaign to harness existing momentum and inform Americans how they can benefit from the relief package....

Seems as though they think they are praising him for his political acumen.

"I’m not a ‘keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant’ man but I am all for keeping them pregnant until I have a little girl."

Said Joe Biden, in 1969, when he was 27, quoted in the new article "Rage against the 'gaffe machine'" (at Politico). 

I'm noticing that this morning, because my son John linked to it at Facebook. John called attention to that quote and said "LOL." 

I commented over there: 

That kind of casual sexism was completely the norm at the time — late 60s. You'd be pushed aside as a humorless dolt if you too didn't find it sweet and funny. This is how feminists got the reputation for having no sense of humor. You'd also be expected to swallow the teasing — if you objected to that particular joke — *Don't worry, no man's going to want to marry you.* Watch the first few episodes of "Laugh-In" if you don't believe me. (It's free on Amazon Prime. You'll be amazed at what was not only said, but regarded as fresh and cool.)

I should add that Biden did get his little girl 2 years later, the little girl who died when she was one year old. Perhaps that's why this old "gaffe" of his isn't in wider circulation. I put "gaffe" in quotes, because, as I said, I think that was within the humor norm of the time.