Well, That Was a Frank Interview

Hunter Biden has given an interview about the election, and his dad, and the people who he thinks betrayed his dad, and his travails with addiction, etc.

It's a bit long, over three hours, but I think that it's worth a watch.

Some high points are where he drops F-bombs on George Clooney, David Axelrod, the Pod Save America Guys, James Carville, and (especially) Jake Tapper.  (Not expurgating because I'm quoting and it is important)

Hunter Biden has given a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 that is remarkable for its no-holds attack on actor George Clooney, denial that he was the source of cocaine found in the White House and thoughts on why his father bombed in his debate with Donald Trump before dropping out of his presidential re-election run.

“Fuck him!” the younger Biden said of Clooney, whose remarkable New York Times opinion piece last July called on the Democratic party for which the actor is a financial donor to find a new presidential nominee.

“Fuck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be fucking nice.”

Referring to comments from the well-known film director that Clooney is not a “movie star”, Biden continued: “I agree with Quentin Tarantino. Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking actor. He is fucking like … I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand.”

Just so you know, he was far more charitable to Clooney  than he was to the rest of these mooks. (about 2:25—2:45)

Full 3+ hour video below, I just hit the highlights: 

Mental Incapacity, My Ass

Against the recommendations, Joe Biden rejected the merger of Nippon and US Steel.

I agree with the decision, but even if I didn't, this is completely on brand for Biden to reject the importunities of the so-called experts in the field.

It should be noted that these experts, who have given us NAFTA, CAFTA, WIPO, the decline of the American working and middle class, investor–state dispute settlement boards, and almost the Trans Pacific Partnership.

These deals have rarely served the general populace, and have more often served the interests of big donors.

The experts who advocate for these deals frequently set up lucrative consultancies to profit from their administration, so they make money, and businesses whose profits come from rent seeking through these deals, like Pharm and Media, make money, but the rest of us lose.

President Joe Biden’s blocking of a Japanese company’s bid to purchase U.S. Steel overrode the advice of numerous top aides, ending a long-running debate that had divided the president’s inner circle, according to seven officials familiar with the matter.

The decision to nix Nippon Steel’s $14.9 billion takeover bid helps cement Biden’s image as a staunch defender of U.S. unions but leaves the fate of thousands of workers unclear and tees up a potentially protracted legal battle over whether politics influenced a security review that is supposed to be left to experts.

Biden had long said he opposed the purchase of U.S. Steel, arguing the iconic company needed to stay in domestic hands, a position that many observers saw as political pragmatism to shore up the union vote in an election year. But with the election over and President-elect Donald Trump set to take office, some aides thought there might be a slim chance to persuade Biden to relent in his last days in office, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

At a White House meeting convened by Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients on Thursday evening, some of these aides, such as national security adviser Jake Sullivan, noted that one option was a conditional block of the acquisition. That would have allowed Nippon Steel to advance more proposals to minimize potential national security risks, effectively pushing the matter to the next administration, according to three officials.

Over the last several months, more than a half-dozen senior administration officials — including Sullivan deputy Jonathan Finer, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, his deputy Kurt Campbell, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Jared Bernstein and top Commerce officials — argued against or expressed reservations about the position Biden ultimately took, said officials familiar with the deliberations.

………

But for some members of the president’s domestic economic team and for his political advisers in particular, blocking the deal gave the White House a rare opportunity to protect U.S. jobs, deliver a clear victory to the nation’s labor unions and burnish Biden’s legacy. Skeptics of the deal, which was strongly opposed by United Steelworkers President David McCall, thought Nippon had an uneven track record of protecting workers. They also felt that Nippon Steel had a year to advance a meaningful mitigation plan but repeatedly failed to do so, according to one U.S. official familiar with their views. 

Also, any mitigation plan would have been ignored.

When push came to shove, in a world where there is already a glut of steel, Nippon Steel would have cut US jobs, and not Japanese ones.

I was around in 1993 when NAFTA was being debated, and Clinton insisted that there would be side deals to address the concerns of critics.  

Surprise, these side deals were never made, because harming ordinary workers was a feature, not a bug.

As to whether or not this is an actual security risk, who cares.

Good on Joe.

Yeah, This Pardon I Object To

Joe Biden has commuted sentence of Michael Conahan, so he gets out .

You remember him, he was a judge in juvenile court who shut down the county detention facility and sent children, and cut a deal with a private prison in exchange for bribes.

This guy should not have his sentence commuted.  Hell, he should have spent the past 13 years being hung from a flag pole by his tongue: 

A former Pennsylvania judge who was convicted of sending children to jail while receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks from the facility’s operator in the early 2000s was one of the nearly 1,500 people whose sentences were commuted Thursday by President Joe Biden.

Michael Conahan had been sentenced to 17½ years in federal prison after being convicted of racketeering conspiracy for his role in the so-called Kids for Cash scandal in Luzerne County. Conahan pulled funding from a county-owned juvenile detention center there and agreed to send juveniles to a for-profit facility in exchange for payments, a scheme that netted him and fellow jurist Mark Ciavarella nearly $3 million.

Conahan, who was convicted in 2011, had been serving his sentence in a Florida facility and was due to be released in 2026. But he was placed in home confinement in 2020 due to the pandemic.

All those commuted by Biden on Thursday had been placed in home confinement for at least a year, the White House said.

Conahan's (and Ciavarella's) actions were particularly heinous, and not only should he not have had his sentence commuted, he should have been sent back to prison as soon as the vaccine was available.

People who violate this sort of trust should be held to a higher standard, whether they be judges, cops, or district attorneys.

Not a Good Look

As you may have heard, Joe Biden granted a broad pardon to his son Hunter today.

I understand the reason, there is significant evidence that a Trump DoJ would engage in a malicious prosecution, as Hunter's defense team noted.

There are plenty of reasons for him to do this, but the fact that he categorically ruled out any pardon this summer makes it, to quote (not) Tallyrand, "Worse than a crime, it is a mistake."

President Joe Biden on Sunday issued a full and unconditional pardon for his son Hunter, a controversial decision that reverses his long-standing pledge to not use his presidential powers to protect his only surviving son, who was found guilty of gun-related charges in Delaware and pleaded guilty to tax evasion in California.

………

“No reasonable person who looks at the facts of Hunter’s cases can reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong,” he said. “There has been an effort to break Hunter — who has been five and a half years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me — and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”

Biden said he came to the decision over the weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

………

According to the text of the pardon, it applies to all offenses that Hunter Biden “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”

The problem here is not the pardon, it was the promise not to do so.

This is not Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon.

 

Holy Fucking Shit!

Biden had announced that he is dropping out of the race.

My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024

Call me a pessimist, but I think that the Democrats have just lost the election.

The next question is, "Who will be Harris' VP pick?"

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez turns 35 in October.

Just sayin'.

In the meantime, I'll be kind of busy, looking at selling the house and the process for making Alyiah to Israel.

Yeah, I think it's that bad.

Posted via mobile.

It's Called a Shot Across the Bow

Joe Biden is preparing to propose major changes to how the Supreme Court operates.

Among other things, he will be proposing a legally binding ethics code and term limits as well as possibly proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Trump immunity decision.

Your mouth to God's ear:

President Biden is finalizing plans to endorse major changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals for legislation to establish term limits for the justices and an enforceable ethics code, according to two people briefed on the plans.

He is also weighing whether to call for a constitutional amendment to eliminate broad immunity for presidents and other constitutional officeholders, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

The announcement would mark a major shift for Biden, a former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has long resisted calls to make substantive changes to the high court. The potential changes come in response to growing outrage among his supporters about recent ethics scandals surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas and decisions by the new court majority that have changed legal precedent on issues including abortion and federal regulatory powers.

Biden previewed the shift in a Zoom call Saturday with the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

The start of such an effort needs to begin with a statement that the current justices are partisan and corrupt.

The current court deserves no deference, nor any respect.

I Have No F$#@ing Clue

I do not know if Biden is impaired, or if centrists are trying to get rid of him because the don't like things like his antitrust polices.

I am not in a position to evaluate his mental acuity.  As I occasionally note (full disclosure, I say this at every opportunity), I'm an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!

I also don't get the various levels of "Palace intrigue."

That would just make me crazier than I already am.

One of the things that I would want to hear though is a detailed plans on how this would create a greater chance of a Democratic victory in November.

Right now these plans are in "Underpants Gnome" territory:

• Collect underpants 
• ? 
• Profit!

Posted via mobile

I Have a Dilemma

I have three options:

1. Drink heavily, and risk death or injury while live blogging it.
2. Don't watch the debates.
3. Watch it sober. (I tried this once, and I nearly died)

Suggestions?







Link (Click image for full size)

Yeah, About that Crypto Account

The SEC passed a regulation requiring banks to treat cryptocurrency accounts as a liability, in order to prevent banks taking excessive risk upon themselves and on their customers.

In response, Congress passed a Congressional Review Act resolution rolling back the regulation, and Biden promptly vetoed the CR.

Given the nature of cryptocurrency, and Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX is the least of this, putting strong protections in place is just basic common sense: 

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto.

Specifically, the resolution targeted the SEC’s Staff Accounting Bulletin 121, which presents guidance around how banks can handle customers’ crypto assets — in effect, they must treat those assets as liabilities. Banking groups have criticized this approach as making it prohibitively expensive for them to handle crypto, while regulators argue it’s necessary to protect investors, particularly after the collapse of high-profile crypto companies like FTX.

“SAB 121 reflects considered technical SEC staff views regarding the accounting obligations of certain firms that safeguard crypto-assets,” Biden said in a statement. “By virtue of invoking the Congressional Review Act, this Republican-led resolution would inappropriately constrain the SEC’s ability to set forth appropriate guardrails and address future issues.”

………

H.J.Res. 109 was passed with mostly Republican support — but 21 Democrats supported the resolution in the House, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was among the Democrats who supported it in the Senate.

Yeah, f%$# Ch%$# Schumer.

Crypto currency is a confidence game.  If you can't ban it, you can at least minimize the damage..

Joe Biden has Slowed Down. That is just a fact.

That being said, I do not think that his slowing down is an artifact of any age related infirmity.

I think that it is the result of over two decades of hard work.

The younger Joe Biden was a human gaffe machine, and while the press loved this, it is clear that Joe Biden did not, so he has spent the last (at least) 20 years teaching himself to take a pause and think about what he says before he says it.

It's not disability, it's self discipline.

The next time someone comments on this, your response should be, "Yeah, no more gaffes.  How'd he do that?  My kids would like to know, so that I can stop embarrassing the hell out of them."

Yeah, I Know, New Hampshire

Trump just won New Hampshire, 54% to 43% over Nikki Haley.

Joe Biden got about 65% on the Democratic side as a write-in. (The Democratic Party does not recognize the NH primary, and Biden was not on the ballot)

I am not sure what to make of this, except to note that Nikki Haley's 43% in 2024 is better than Eugene McCarthy's 42% in 1968.

I think that Trump will get the nomination, and I hope that Haley goes after him hammer and tongs, particularly over the rumors of tertiary syphilis, but I really do not expect her to last more than 6 weeks.

On the Democratic side, Dean Phillips face planted, that what it is when you are out-polled 3:1 by a writ-in candidate, (he got less than 20%) and Marianne Williamson polled behind not-Biden write-ins, (>5%) so stick a fork in it it, their campaigns are done.

I am a bit bummed that Vermin Supreme polled only ½%.  I was hoping that he would break the 1% barrier.

Quote of the Day

I know that if the other team, the MAGA Republicans, win, they don’t want to uphold the rule of law.

—Joe Biden in an interview with ProPublica

It's kind of obvious, but it bears noting because the President, and the leader of the Democratic Party, said it. 

It appears that Joe Biden is made of sterner stuff than the Obamas and the Clintons.

Then again, Physalia physalis has more backbone than the those administrations.

Credit Where Credit is Due

Another Biden Accomplishment pic.twitter.com/f9jwpNC0yh

— sean (@_sn_n) August 27, 2023

True Dat

I've not been a fan of Joe Biden's foreign policy.

I think that he is a creature of the US foreign policy, "Blob."

That bastion of the belief in the myth of American exceptionalism, as well as a toxic combination of arrogance and hypocrisy, has been screw up the world, and US foreign policy since (at least) the end of WWII.

As you can tell, I am not a fan of the foreign policy consensus in the United States.

That being said, the fact that for the first time since the 1960s, Henry Kissinger has not been invited to the White House offer his insights.

Good.

That perfidious war criminal should be in a cell in The Hague, not fêted by society as he was at his hundredth birthday.

To quote Anthony Bourdain, "Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević."

The Dog Has Caught the Car

Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed David Weiss as special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden.

Good.  Better sooner than later.  It was stupid that  it took Garland 22 months to do this with Trump.

What is interesting is that Republicans are crying foul, because ……… I dunno ………  Their brains are a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on them.

I do not want to get into their heads.

Desantis says that he thinks that the fix might be in, Nikki Haley thinks that it's a ploy, and North Dakota Governor Doug "Who the hell is Doug Burgum" Burgum thinks that it is too late.

What can you do? 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sad Sack

So, Hunter Biden has pled guilt to two tax charges, and received a deferred adjudication on a firearms charge.

I'm not really prepared to say much beyond this, except to say that I am trying to figure if he is a schlemiel or a schlimazel. He could be both.

Hunter Biden agreed with the Justice Department on Tuesday to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept terms that would allow him to avoid prosecution on a separate gun charge, a big step toward ending a long-running and politically explosive investigation into the finances, drug use and international business dealings of President Biden’s troubled son.

Under a deal hashed out with a federal prosecutor who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his 2017 and 2018 taxes on time and be sentenced to probation.

The Justice Department also charged Mr. Biden but, under what is known as a pretrial diversion agreement, said it would not prosecute him in connection with his purchase of a handgun in 2018 during a period when he was using drugs. The deal is contingent on Mr. Biden remaining drug-free for 24 months and agreeing never to own a firearm again.

The agreement must still be approved by a federal judge. Mr. Biden is expected to appear in court in Delaware in the coming days to be arraigned on the misdemeanor tax charges and plead guilty.

Needless to say, the Republicans will use this as an excuse to ramp up their investigations, because that's what they do.

Not This Shit Again!

Now the cable networks are acting like the discovery of classified documents in Biden's old offices is the biggest scandal since Watergate.

Clearly there was some mishandling of documents, but it was 10 documents, not boxes, and once discovered, it was promptly reported, and the documents were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

This does not mean that someone might have mishandled classified documents, and that is potentially a big deal, but the FBI did not have to raid Joe Biden's offices to get the documents back:

After serving as Barack Obama’s vice president for eight years, Joe Biden did what high-profile former politicians so often do: He set up a think tank at a prominent university.

Biden’s was called the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania. But unlike other elected officials and other such institutions, Biden’s engagement with the Penn Biden Center was soon back-burnered. By April 2019, he was a candidate for the presidency.

In November, almost exactly two years after Biden’s election, attorneys for the president were emptying an office at the center when, according to their account, they discovered about 10 documents bearing classification markings. The next day, the documents were turned over to the National Archives. The Justice Department is now reviewing them.

………

At this point, we don’t know much about the Biden documents beyond what his team has made public, which is certainly an important caveat. According to the Biden team’s statement, the documents were found in a locked closet and quickly turned over to the government. What they contain is unclear, as is their current classification level or status. (There are, of course, numerous existing documents that are no longer classified but which may nonetheless still carry classification markings.) One person, tongue presumably in cheek, told CBS News that the documents did not contain nuclear secrets.

We know a bit more about the Trump documents. We know that the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago turned up dozens of documents with classification markings in multiple locations around the facility. We know that one box alone in Trump’s office at the event facility, a room where he regularly entertained guests, held more than a dozen documents.

We also know that the seizure of those documents came only after a lengthy effort to secure documents (both classified and nonclassified) that were produced during his presidency and were therefore government property. The investigation into Trump’s documents was triggered in May 2021 when the National Archives contacted Trump’s team about documents it knew existed but were not in its possession. (The country’s archivist, watching Trump leave the White House the previous January, later mentioned wondering what was in the boxes Trump’s staff was loading into Marine One.) Over the next few months, the Archives and Trump’s team went back and forth on taking possession of the material.

So the information we have at this point is that documents were found that had classification markings, but we do not know whether they were still classified, they kept in a secure location, and when discovered, they were promptly turned over to the National Archives.

At this point, it should be a page 1 below the fold story, but the cable networks leading with this, CNN spent about ¼ of their air time on this from 5 pm to 11 pm, for example, is nuts.

They should be flooding the zone with this with reporters, not mindlessly speculating on air.

Lame, Matt, Lame

No links on this one, for obvious regions.

So, it appears that Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi have teamed up for a "Blockbuster" expose.

It appears that numbers of powerful actors, including the Biden and the Trump campaigns had access to staff not available to ordinary plebes like the rest of us, and could, and frequently did, get tweets that they found problematic removed.

I think that this is wrong, but this is common knowledge, and has been for some time.

The blockbuster part is that the Biden campaign made a request to remove tweets about Hunter Biden, his son, and they were taken down in less time than it takes me to write about it.

Mercy, is this Hunter Biden's laptop?  Is this evidence of a vast left wing conspiracy?

No, it's Hunter Biden's penis.  

Some people on twitter were posting nude photographs of Hunter Biden, and this was something that they did for almost any celebrity or political figure, regardless of their political positions.

The scandal here is that they would not do if for anyone else.

For anyone else, you have to make a report, and never get in touch with a human being.

There is no story, at least not justifying the hysterical tweets made by Taibbi.

Matt, you are better than this, or at least you were better than this.

Go Long on Fig Newton Futures

Joe Biden has pardoned thousands of people with simple marijuana possession convictions.

This is no doubt going to be a winner in the November elections.  The war on drugs generally, and the war on marijuana in particular, have become increasingly unpopular over the years.  Even a majority of Republicans support marijuana legalization. 

It's good policy and good politics.

Hopefully, this is a step toward full legalization:

President Biden on Thursday pardoned thousands of people convicted of marijuana possession under federal law and said his administration would review whether marijuana should still be in the same legal category as drugs like heroin and LSD.

The pardons will clear everyone convicted on federal charges of simple possession since it became a crime in the 1970s. Officials said full data was not available but noted that about 6,500 people were convicted of simple possession between 1992 and 2021, not counting legal permanent residents. The pardons will also affect people who were convicted under District of Columbia drug laws; officials estimated that number to be in the thousands.

The pardons will not apply to people convicted of selling or distributing marijuana. And officials said there are no people now serving time in federal prisons solely for marijuana possession. But the move will help remove obstacles for people trying to get a job, find housing, apply to college or get federal benefits.

Mr. Biden urged governors to follow his lead for people convicted on state charges of simple possession, who vastly outnumber those charged under federal laws.

Still, the president’s actions — which come about a month before the midterm elections and could help energize Democratic supporters — represent a fundamental change in America’s response to a drug that has been at the center of a clash between culture and policing for more than a half-century.

“Sending people to jail for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives — for conduct that is legal in many states,” Mr. Biden said on Twitter on Thursday. “That’s before you address the clear racial disparities around prosecution and conviction. Today, we begin to right these wrongs.”

I do not expect a similar action to be taken by the red states, because it would have the effect of enfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black voters, which runs against a core Republican value, that Blacks should not vote.

Why Not Both?

In a leak from anonymous,  "Federal agents investigating President Biden’s son Hunter," there is sufficient evidence for him to be indicted for tax evasion and lying on a gun permit application.

I don't know if this is true, FBI agents frequently leak reports of half-finished investigations the press in an attempt to pressure prosecutors to file.

I think that the DoJ should indict Hunter Biden and Donald Trump on the same day.

What's more they should ask for them both to be held without bail.

I think that Hunter Biden would tolerate a few days in jail fairly, well, but that Donald Trump would dissolve like Edgar Allen Poe character Ernest Valdemar:

I was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful — or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete — and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.

For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.

As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once — within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk — crumbled — absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence.

Not gonna happen, but I can dream.

Dumbass

So, on 60 Minutes, Joe Biden declared that the Pandemic is over.

This is both wrong, as we are still seeing at least 400 Covid-19 deaths a day (About 150,000 a year), and Canada is seeing hospitalization and death rates significantly higher than than they were last summer, and it's a lead pipe cinch that the rates will (at least) double during the colder months.

His statement also means that he owns any significant increase in morbidity or mortality that we see in the future.

The problem here is that he is being advised by a public health establishment peopled by psychopaths who (as I have noted earlier) opposed the basic concept of public health, because their fixation on American rugged individualism and a desire to minimize any inconvenience to the masters of capital who want their workers back in the office.

This ignores the fact that there are likely somewhere around 10 million long Covid sufferers who can't go back to work, but I said that they were psychopaths, not evil geniuses: (Intellect and evil are largely orthogonal)

President Biden’s surprise declaration that the coronavirus pandemic is “over” has thrown a wrench into the White House’s efforts to secure additional funding to fight the virus and persuade Americans to get a new booster shot, while fueling more Republican criticism about why the administration continues to extend a covid “emergency.”

Biden’s comments, which aired Sunday on “60 Minutes,” reflect growing public sentiment that the threat of the virus has receded even as hundreds of Americans continue to die of covid each day. Forty-six percent of Americans have returned to their pre-pandemic lives, according to an Axios-Ipsos poll released last week, the highest share of respondents to answer that way since the pollsters began asking the question in January 2021.

“We still have a problem with covid,” Biden said. “We’re still doing a lot of work on it … but the pandemic is over.”

Biden’s remarks caught some senior officials off guard as the White House mounts a fall vaccination campaign, lobbies Congress for billions of dollars to purchase more coronavirus vaccines and treatments, and weighs whether to extend its ongoing public health emergency when it expires next month. The president’s comments also triggered a sell-off on Wall Street, as vaccine manufacturers Moderna, Novavax, BioNTech and Pfizer collectively lost more than $9 billion in value on Monday.

In interviews, six administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment said the president’s statement would probably make it harder to persuade people to get shots or secure new money from Congress, noting those efforts have already lagged behind their goals. Outside supporters also criticized Biden for ignoring uncomfortable realities, such as the large and growing toll of long covid.

It's horrible policy, and worse politics, and it's driven by an insane desire for normalcy when a premature return to normalcy will inevitably to more deaths and lock-downs.

This is Trump level stupidity.