Indeed

The big hit on Biden is the economy: With inflation moderating but still high, 41 percent say they’re not as well off financially as they were when Biden took office, the most in nearly three dozen ABC/Post polls to ask the question since 1986, when Ronald Reagan, who popularized the “better off” phrase, held office. Just 16 percent in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, say they’re better off.

 

[…]

 

Biden’s overall job performance rating, 42-53 percent, approve-disapprove, has been under water, and steadily so, since September 2021. On issues, Biden has just 37 percent approval for handling the economy, 38 percent on the war in Ukraine and 28 percent on the immigration situation at the Mexican border.

 

Biden’s approval rating after two years in office is well below average compared with the previous 13 presidents. Three have been in about the same boat at this point (Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan) and one has been lower – Trump, at 37 percent, in polling by ABC/Post and previously Gallup. The pre-Biden average is 56 percent.

It’s interesting that if you are on social media or listen to the news, you might get the impression that Biden is popular and his policies are succeeding. He is not and they are not. And most Americans know it – even if they don’t show up on the news.

When it comes to energy companies, this president is all stick and no carrot.

In November, days before the midterm elections, Biden launched an attack on the industry, calling their record profits “a windfall of war,” not the result of anything “new or innovative.”

 

And now, his international energy envoy is calling on oil companies to think of American consumers.

 

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” Amos Hochstein told the Financial Times. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.”

And it’s pretty rich of a lifelong government creature who has never produced anything “new or innovative” to lambaste the productive part of society. His arrogance is truly astounding.

They don’t even pretend to give a shit about regular Americans anymore.

The White House flew the federal budget to St Croix for President Joe Biden to sign into law ahead of the December 30 deadline, so the government didn’t shut down over New Year’s Eve.

 

The 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus package to fund the government through September 2023 arrived at the White House on Wednesday evening, after it completed the legislative enrollment process.

 

On Thursday, it was flown to St Croix, where Biden is spending the holiday week in a luxury villa owned by a billionaire Democratic donor.

 

The bill arrived in the US Virgin Islands via Spirit Airlines on Thursday evening around 5:30 pm Eastern time. A little over an hour later, Biden’s POTUS Instagram account posted a picture of the president signing the bill.

This is the monster who Biden unleashed on the world in exchanged for a dope-smoking basketball player. There will be blood.

Bout was chummy with a succession of African dictators, including Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the latter of whom paid him in conflict diamonds and whose child soldiers operated the antique Antonov cargo planes that Bout sold him. Warlord Sam “Mosquito” Bockarie committed crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone with Bout-proffered weapons. Some of these clients would object to Bout’s apparent racism and peremptory behavior — a pushy Russian in the midst of anticolonial (or postcolonial) leaders. But that hardly affected his bottom line or their willingness to enrich it.

 

The Tajikistan-born weapons merchant could play both sides of any war to his advantage. He equipped the Taliban with an air force before 9/11 and also sent weapons to their mortal enemy, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance and onetime Afghan defense minister, with whom he liked to hunt the finely horned Marco Polo sheep of the Pamir Mountains. Both the Taliban and Massoud evidently knew their broker was double-dealing, but they put up with it because they had no choice, as one Bout associate later recounted to his biographers: “No one else would deliver the packages.”

 

[…]

 

According to the 2008 sealed indictment against Bout, filed in the Southern District of New York, he agreed to provide advanced weapons systems to the Colombian terrorist organization FARC, knowing they would be used to target Americans and U.S. military personnel.

 

[…]

 

However, in “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possibile,” a 2007 chronicle of Bout’s malign activities, authors Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun quote one of his associates: “The GRU gave him three airplanes to start the business. The planes, countless numbers of them, were sitting there doing nothing. They decided, let’s make this commercial. They gave Viktor the aircraft and in exchange collected a part of the charter money. It was a setup from the beginning.” An unnamed analyst who worked with British intelligence also told the authors that MI6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service, “never had any doubt Bout was GRU material.”

Uniter in Chief and whatnot.

A group of protesters gathered outside the event, carrying signs that read “Socialism Sucks” and “Vote Pro-Life.” Another sign read, “Where’s Nancy,” words allegedly spoken during the incident where Paul Pelosi, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was attacked with a hammer.

“I love those signs when I came in,” Biden told his audience after defending Social Security and Medicare as a “promise” made to generations of Americans. “Socialism. Give me a break, what idiots.”

Biden is endangering our nation and costing taxpayers billions just to try to influence the midterm election. Lord help us if we get pulled into a shooting war with a military stripped of crucial arms and a depleted oil reserve.

Senior administration officials said Tuesday that President Biden is releasing 15 million more barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), in a move aimed at cutting persistently high energy and gas prices.

 

The senior administration officials said Biden will make the announcement in remarks Wednesday, less than three weeks before the midterm elections. Biden will also detail a plan to begin to refill the depleted oil cache when prices dip to $67-$72 per barrel, according to the officials.

Yikes

Almost 750 migrants attempting to cross the southern border have died this fiscal year, up 200 more than in 2021, according to Department of Homeland Security figures obtained by CNN.

 

Migrants face perilous conditions in their journey northward to the border and can often suffer from heat, drowning, crime or falling from the border wall.

 

Since October 1, which marks the start of the fiscal year, there have been 748 deaths, with one month still left in the fiscal year. In fiscal year 2021 there were 557 southwest border deaths.

The Great Divider

By their own definition:

NOW – White House: “When you are not with what majority of Americans are, then you know, that is extreme. That is an extreme way of thinking.”

The majority of Americans don’t support Biden. Therefore, by the White House’s own standard, Biden supporters are extremists.

Credit where credit is due… someone way smarter than me made that point.