As a Young Boy, Joe Biden Dreamed of Choosing Freedom Over Democracy - D'oh!

The choice is clear: Freedom over Democracy any day. https://t.co/6VGibKafV2

— TSB (@TweetingTSB) April 18, 2024

C'mon Man!© It was the best Joe Biden speech ever!

 

NYT Election Poll Has No Good News For Biden

It's been an interesting news day on the domestic front, with The New York Times publishing a poll it did with Sienna College on the upcoming election. Biden's staffers will not be happy. 

Since the NYT put its story about the poll behind a pay wall, here's the Daily Mail story, which is free, the way nature intended the internet to work.

The barebones polling results are at: April 2024 Toplines NYT Sienna College Poll of Registered Voters Nationwide, 

The biggest bucket of cold water for Biden comes from the results for these two questions:

Who did you vote for in the 2020 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden?

Donald Trump - 36%

Joe Biden - 43%

And,

If the 2024 presidential election were held today, who would you vote for if the candidates were [Biden and Trump]:

Donald Trump - 46%

Joe Biden - 45%

Well, well, well. An interesting number of Biden voters from 2020 say they will vote for Trump this time. 

Those poll results are without including voters who only 'lean' one way of the other, and without considering election scenarios with third and fourth party candidates. Both of those contingencies favor Trump over Biden more strongly. 

Looking at the Daily Mail's story, it seems the key reason for those results is the much larger number of voters who remember the Trump years as "mostly good" (42%) versus Biden's years (25%).  

C'mon Man!© Stop the malarkey and make this election a contest!

FBI Gets the Most Expensive Government Office Building Ever - Twice!

That new FBI HQ will take more than a decade to build and will cost $3.5 billion, or maybe $4.5 billion. 

Why so much? Because this is the kind of marquee government project where no one bids low, and the taxpayers will just have to brace themselves for sticker shock. 

Indeed, the cost is so high that GSA is going to set up a special funding mechanism.

To support the funding for a new FBI headquarters, the Biden administration proposes setting up a Federal Capital Revolving Fund.

Under this proposal, Congress would appropriate the total amount of money needed for the project upfront. GSA would then repay the revolving fund, over the course of 15 years, by taking out about $233 million each year from the Federal Buildings Fund.

Of course, in an election year, we cannot assume that a future Congress will be happy to up-front billions for the FBI. Still, that's probably the way to bet. 

How odd that the old FBI HQ, the Hoover Building, the one that is now totally obsolete and decrepit, was the most expensive government office building ever at $126 million back when it was built in the 1970s. There are great details on that project here. 

Yes, the Hoover Building was even more expensive than the Pentagon, which cost a mere $83 million. 

How lucky for the FBI that they'll step from one record-setting costly building to another. It's like a wonderful government tradition of sacred cows and cost overruns! 

Video Released From Ecuador's Forced Entry Into Embassy of Mexico

 

Mexico's diplomatic facility in Quito was far from a Gingo-style Fortress Embassy. It didn't take that Ecuadorian team much force to enter it, but you can see that they came equipped with the tools, including a battering ram. 

As it happened, the most resistance the Mexican embassy staff put up was to push a cabinet against that incredibly flimsy front door, and that was of no use at all.

Of course, in the orderly world of the Vienna Convention, the final responsibility to protect an embassy from physical intrusion rests with the host nation. When that same host decides to raid your embassy itself, there are no good options other than to delay that intrusion as long as possible and hope to make the host nation pay a political cost. 

How do you delay that kind of entry into a building? If Mexico were paying for my advice, I'd start by having them search for "FE/BR" and browse the available products.

  

  

State Department Internal Dissent Memos Continue as Usual (The Independent Can Reveal)

"As The Indpendent can reveal," there has been a virtual earthquake of internal protest within the State Department over the war in Gaza, resulting in a tsunami of dissent memos. 

An "unprecedented flood" of them to be exact. Read about it here: State department sees unprecedented flood of internal dissent memos over Gaza war

State department staff sent at least eight internal dissent memos to express disagreement with US policy on Israel and Gaza during the first two months of the war, The Independent can reveal.

A further memo was sent last month from the US embassy in Jordan, warning of increasing instability across the region due to Israel’s ongoing war, according to a person familiar with the matter, bringing the total number to at least nine.

Such a high number of internal dissent memorandums – a formal process by which staff can express concerns internally to a policy – highlights the widespread opposition within the department to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

But, what's this? If you read 30 paragraphs into that 33-paragraph story you find some context:

There were an average of almost nine dissent messages per year sent to Washington between 1972 and 2017, according to the Foreign Service Journal.

So there have been nine internal dissent memos so far in the last half year, as the Independent can reveal, compared to an average of "almost nine" (so then, eight?) per year over the last half century. 

To ask the greatest of all philosophical questions: so what?

Greta Thunberg Arrested Again, This Time With Two New Friends

Greta got arrested again..

pic.twitter.com/3htVinp001

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 6, 2024

Well, that certainly took long enough! I'd often wondered what kind of crazy puberty blockers Greta Thunberg must be on, since she did not look like any other late-teen Swedish girl. 

Now it appears Nature has finally shown up, and I'm happy for her. 

More protests like this, and I might reconsider my negative attitude toward climate road-blockers. 

Kirby: But That Was in Another Country!

Admiral-Spokesperson Kirby, the White House's alternative to Spokesperson-in-Chief Cringe John P. Air, was interviewed on Fox News where Martha MacCallum asked him about the obvious parallel between Israel's mistaken attack last week in Gaza and our own mistaken mass killing three years ago in Afghanistan. 

He replied:

"But that was in another country; and besides the wench is dead."

Well, technically, that was first said in Christopher Marlowe's play, The Jew of Malta, but forgive me for hearing it when Kirby said the same thing in longer form:

“Well, look, these are events that happened three years apart, two different geographic locations, two different countries, two different sets of circumstances, two different types of threat[s] that were being evaluated, and [two completely] different militaries that were involved, with two different chains of command. So, I think we’ve got to be careful comparing both events too closely."

The only difference that matters between those two particular mistakes in war is that Israel immediately and honestly took responsibility for their mistake and held those who committed it to account. We did neither.