Who’s Making the Decisions?

“The president was elected because we all thought he was going to be good at governing. … He was going to govern from the center, he was going to work with Republicans. But to have a chief of staff that apparently has decided that he’s going to be Bernie Sanders, I think that’s confusing. It’s just not helpful.”

The quote above was made by a moderate Congressional Democrat in January 2022.

I think the quote could be made by just about anyone of any political persuasion.

It specifically references Chief of Staff Ron Klain, but there’s a sense that there are many others in the White House who appear to be pulling the strings of President Biden.

Candidate Biden had some grandiose spending plans re: education, climate change, taxation, COVID and infrastructure. But the public wasn’t too concerned about the trillions it involved because they knew those plans needed to be passed by Congress. The expectations were that those platform statements were just a wish list, political posturing, and unrealistic – and would not see reality.

The idea he would be a ‘center’ president and work with Republicans on legislation appealed to many voters – especially Democrats and Independents.

What most voters didn’t count on were a plethora or executive orders covering a myriad of issues, the major one to more than double the cost of fossil fuel.

They also didn’t count on President Biden for the way we withdrew from Afghanistan, another massive COVID relief package and edicts on COVID vaccinations.

Again, most voters didn’t expect a Congress that would pass Biden’s wish list, albeit less than he proposed, and did so a strictly partisan basis.

Voters didn’t expect Biden to forgive billions in student loans, send over $60B to Ukraine, or open the southern border welcoming over 2 million immigrants/year.

Doing all these and other unexpected things, President Biden has earned the lowest approval rating for a president in recent history.

His agenda as president addresses many of his campaign planks, but 2 things have earned him disfavor.

1. He has gone much further into his agenda than expected, and
2. He has done so in the face of the top issues expressed by the American people.

Those top issues include inflation, immigration, crime and China.

Despite those people concerns, the President’s top agenda items have been and remain climate change, racism and ‘equity,’ gender identity, student loan forgiveness, and COVID vaccinations.

Since he took office, he’s been overly supportive of Ukraine in the wat against Russia – with 17% voter approval; announced white supremacy as the primary threat to the nation; categorized parental concerns expressed at school board meetings as domestic terror, and raised taxes, especially on corporations.

His agenda has been inflexible, even though much of his focus is ignoring what the polls say are the concerns of the American people – often even exacerbating those concerns and making them worse. For example, his policies and Congressional agenda created our high inflation and now an economic recession at the same time.

It’s almost befuddling as to why a life-long politician would rely on spin to attempt to exonerate the administration’s ignoring what’s on people’s minds.

There are those who question his competence due to early signs of senility. There may be some truth to that.

But his disfavor was cast out of the chute with his choices for the top jobs in his administration, beginning with his Vice-President. Many of his top appointments are far left folks, ideologues unwilling to listen to people they consider inferior, misguided, even evil deplorables.

There’s a sense that those appointments are the people are not only propping up his public behavior – not allowing questions whenever possible – but actually running the country.

The majority of the American people do have the sense that President Biden is not in charge, starting with where his seat on the stage is. He’s told where to go, what to do, what to say and get off the camera.

It’s been a series of events, activities and proclamations not supported by the people he’s elected to represent.

Who’s making the critical decisions?

It’s not President Biden.

And it’s not only his political appointments. It’s using the control exercised by the ‘deep state’ – that set of bureaucrats who’ve made it clear they are partisan use their power to weaponize the bureaucracy against those not sharing their ideology.

We did not expect the government to get even bigger and have such an impact on everything we think and do.

We did not expect ‘equity’ to be one of President Biden’s prime tenets of operation. He has appointed and anointed people on the basis of their race and gender vs. being the most qualified, regardless. He’s made that openly clear while accusing others of racism.

No one ever expected a proposal, then legislation, to double the employee size of the IRS and multiply its budget by 6. Like so many other things it came out of the blue. Why? Who had that as an objective and made that decision?

I could go on and on.

Suffice to say we were hoodwinked.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…..

*******************

Have a great and prosperous week.

Hug somebody.

References:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-proposed-spending-comes-with-a-high-cost-11600894853

https://nypost.com/2022/01/23/the-man-in-charge-at-the-white-house-isnt-joe-biden/

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-approval-rating-gallup-poll-1729533

SPIDER Bites

Trivia question of the week: What mammal has no vocal cords?

The Queen is dead. Long live the King. Charles III took over the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain last week with the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. It was with much pomp and circumstance. The UK monarchy is limited in its governing role by rules and laws set by Parliament.

One of the things that gets me when watching national news: the anchor opens the program with 3 or 4 things they think are the top stories and then adding: “And making the headlines today…” followed by a blip on a story that’s perhaps important to him/her but is off the wall to me. For example: Who reads GQ these days? I guess it doesn’t matter because AOC being on the cover of the latest edition is big, ‘headline’ news.

Over the objection of the DOJ, a federal judge in Florida on Monday ruled in favor of appointing a special master to review documents seized during the recent search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. The appointee will oversee the Justice Department’s review of documents seized, supposedly removing any privileged material that may have been taken in the search. It’s hard to believe all this ado about ‘paper’ held by a former president – knowing this has never happened. Its apparent Donald Trump is the exception on a number of actions and fronts.

Crude oil prices decreased briefly last week to January levels. Fear of the impact/prospect of economic recessions in the western world sent a message of a significant future decrease in demand for oil – for production purposes and transport. The stock markets are reflecting that as well. In addition, the Fed is expected to increase interest rates further – adding to the recession fears and impact.

As CA is asking residents to limit their demand for the nation’s highest costing electricity, electrical rates in FL and elsewhere have also spiked as the price of natural gas has doubled the last 1 ½ years. Natural gas provides 80% of the power for electricity generation in Florida, 38% country wide.

Here’s the answer to the increase in natural gas prices in Europe. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday EU countries should set a price cap on Russian natural gas. Let’s see, how does that increase the shrinking supply of natural gas in Europe and solve the energy shortage? I guess ‘wishing’ and issuing edicts works in some ignorant minds. They think it looks like they’re doing something – whatever the unintended consequences.

President Biden and spouse Jill welcomed Barrack and Michelle Obama to the WH last week to unveil their official portraits which will now hang there. He was the first black president in a now reportedly ‘existentially’ racist country. It’s a good thing he’s not running now, huh?

Speaking of racism, an off-campus housing co-op for University of California, Berkeley students – a 30-room “Person of Color Theme House” – bans white people from entering common spaces to “avoid white violence.” Where’s the DOJ’s civil rights dept.?