Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Wishing to hurry up Election Day

Mom always told me to “stop wishing your life away.”

She was right, of course, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing we could get through these next 101 days in rapid-fire time.

Nov. 3 is Election Day. Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump by, oh, anywhere from 10 to 15 percentage points nationally. He is leading in all the key “swing states” Trump won in 2016 while pilfering the election from the previous presumed odds-on favorite for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

That leads me straight to my point. I would be foolhardy to the max to underestimate — in the words of filmmaker/pundit Michael Moore — the evil genius that lurks inside Trump’s combed-over skull.

Let us not forget that Clinton held a similarly wide lead over Trump at roughly this time during the 2016 campaign. Then it vanished. She still pulled more actual votes than Trump, but the lead vaporized down the stretch; she ended up with a 2.09 percent lead over Trump in the “popular vote,” only to lose the Electoral College by a small amount.

Do you get my point here? If Biden is unable to hold onto the current lead, the door could remain open just enough for Trump to sneak back into the Oval Office for another four years. I shudder at the thought.

Can it happen? Sure. Do I want it to happen? Hah! Are you kidding?

Therefore, I want the next 101 days to zoom past us so we can start to restore the nation’s soul, restart its heart and return it to the respect it once had around the world.

I know, Mom. I am wishing my life away. I hope you understand.

national news

Is there a surprise VP pick coming?

This is just me, so take it for what it’s worth. Don’t laugh and suggest it’s not worth a damn. Maybe so, but here it is anyhow.

I am wondering in the deepest recesses of my gut whether Joseph R. Biden Jr. is going to pull a serious surprise out of his fedora when he announces who he wants to run with him as the vice presidential nominee.

I keep hearing about the “top four” contenders in the veep sweepstakes: Sen. Kamala Harris of California, Rep. Val Demings of Florida, Stacy Yates of Georgia and Susan Rice of D.C. They all have something in common. They are “women of color.”

But are they the best candidates Biden could select? I don’t know. I just keep thinking that with a nation as huge and diverse as this one, does it make sense for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to go with the “conventional wisdom” candidate?

I cannot help but wonder whether there is someone lurking in the tall grass, perhaps someone few of us have heard of, let alone considered as a VP candidate.

Joe Biden has guaranteed the VP nominee will be a woman. He is getting plenty of heat to select a woman of color. 

This waiting game is getting a bit tense … don’t you think?

national news, political news

Biden needs to be held to his own campaign pledges

(Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is making his share of campaign promises as he seeks to unseat Donald J. Trump Sr. from the presidency.

I am extremely cautious in my hope that he’ll be able to fulfill them. I man, Trump does have a way of pulling rabbits out of his hat … if not his a**. He could do so again down the stretch toward Election Day.

Biden is making some promises that I want to see him keep. For example:

He vows to improve the Affordable Care Act, not scrap it; he vows to rescind Trump executive orders removing us from the Paris Climate Accords and the Iranian nuclear arms deal; Biden promises to work closely with our worldwide allies and cease scolding them; he pledges to hold Russia accountable for the attacks it has launched on our political system and to force answers on the issue of paying bounties for the combat deaths of American service personnel; he vows an energy policy that stresses “clean” sources of energy.

Biden wants to restore our nation’s “soul.” I’m all in. Our soul has been co-opted by the fraud who occupies the Oval Office. Biden vows to lead the entire nation, not just the base that is most loyal to him … which is a promise we never have heard from Donald Trump.

Once the dust settles and Biden — or so I am hoping — is elected the nation’s 46th president, I am going to insist that the new guy keep faith with the myriad pledges he has made.

I am acutely aware that I won’t be alone in that effort. Good. The more of us the better … for the nation.

State news

Texas becomes battleground

To be candid, I didn’t think this day would arrive so soon.

But it has. A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Joe Biden with a statistically insignificant 1 point lead over Donald Trump … in Texas!

It’s a dead heat, according to Quinnipiac. An earlier poll from the Dallas Morning News/University of Texas has Biden with a 5 percentage point lead. Other surveys all suggest the same thing, that it’s anyone’s game here.

Jimmy Carter was the latest Democrat to carry Texas, winning the state’s electoral votes in 1976 while defeating President Gerald Ford’s bid for election. I’ve long thought that Carter’s victory wasn’t the “last” time a Democrat would carry this state.

Now, though, it appears that Joe Biden has a puncher’s chance of making a serious contest for Texas’s 38 electoral votes.

We moved to Texas in 1984, settling in Beaumont, one of the state’s last Democratic Party bastions. Much of the rest of the state had turned Republican by that time, but the Golden Triangle remained heavily Democratic. That has changed in the years since then.

The new Democratic bastion now appears to be Dallas County, which borders Collin County, where my wife and I now reside.

My own Democratic leanings are well-known to readers of High Plains Blogger. No need to belabor that point.

However, I am heartened by former Vice President Biden’s strong showing in this state, given its heavy GOP leaning over many years.

The coronavirus pandemic is going to preclude any big campaign rallies between now and Election Day. That’s a bit of a bummer. I would love to attend a Biden rally, just as I attended a Trump rally in the summer of 2019 in downtown Dallas.

Whatever. We can now expect to buried/swamped/inundated with a flood of campaign ads on our TV screens. I’m guessing they’ll begin in September.

I used to complain that Democrats had given up on this state and that Republicans had taken us granted.

It looks as though that has changed … bigly!

national news

POTUS won’t commit to accepting results if he loses? Wow!

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a presidential candidate, let alone the incumbent president, say he cannot commit to accepting the results of a free and fair election if he loses.

OK, I’ll concede that we’ve heard it said once: Donald Trump made the same threat four years ago when he was one of two non-incumbents running for the office.

There he was today, on Fox News Sunday, telling reporter Chris Wallace that he cannot commit to accepting the results if he loses to Joseph R. Biden Jr. this fall.

As I think of that statement, all I hear is the president of the United States saying he doesn’t trust a government system of which he is in charge.

Trump told Wallace that since he didn’t commit to accepting the 2016 results if he lost that his saying the same thing now is no big deal. Actually, it is a big bleeping deal.

Trump has been hurling unfounded and unwarranted allegations of voter fraud for as long as he has been president. He declared that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016, which provided her with the 3 million popular vote lead over Trump. He is asserting much the same thing this time, with Biden’s team conspiring to collect illegal votes.

Trump alleges that mail-in voting is fraught with corruption, even though the states that conduct such balloting now stand firmly behind the integrity of their electoral systems.

Trump wants to suppress the vote. He doesn’t want to open the system up to every eligible voter. He has said that mail-in voting would make it damn near impossible for Republicans to win the presidency … ever again!

Donald Trump is sowing the seeds of suspicion on a system that works. For the president to in effect condemn that system by refusing to commit to accepting the results is yet another exercise in shameful demagoguery.

Still, I chuckled when I read the response from the Biden campaign. The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

You know, that might be worth waiting to see if it occurs.

national news

You have to watch it to believe it

I am not going to buy into the half-baked notion that Donald Trump is losing his marbles, much like the bullsh** that Trump’s team is peddling against Joe Biden, his presumptive Democratic Party opponent this fall.

Still, when you watch Donald Trump stand before reporters in front of the White House and then listen to his incoherent and incomprehensible riff about this and that, you start to wonder whether the president of the United States is afraid of losing.

I am sensing a serious fear factor weighing on Trump.

I see poll after poll suggest Biden is pulling farther ahead. I am not taking them to the bank just yet. You need to remember that President Hillary Clinton and President Michael Dukakis enjoyed wide margins against their foes in 2016 and in 1988; it didn’t work out well for them.

However, when you watch Trump make virtually no mention of the pandemic that has gripped the world and then launch into a campaign-rally riff at the White House, well … you get the picture, yes?

What’s even more amazing is how little connection all the myriad points he seeks to make have to each other. It all becomes a stream-of-consciousness tirade.

He boasts about what a great job his administration is doing to fight the pandemic, ignoring the 136,000 individuals in this country who have died from COVID-19. A nation with 4 percent of the world’s population has recorded 25 percent of the COVID infections and about the same percentage of deaths from the disease. That is success? Really?

Well, the campaign has begun. No need to wait for the traditional Labor Day kickoff. Trump is in full re-election campaign mode. Joe Biden is ramping up his effort to unseat Trump.

I will remain puzzled and baffled no doubt to the end, though, wondering how in the world Donald Trump can cling to the base of supporters who listen to the same nonsense that flows from this clown’s mouth that I hear.

They hear the Gospel according to The Donald.

I hear so much crap.

Go figure.

political news, State news

Texas becomes battleground?

The national political media continue feed my heebie-jeebies.

They talk about Joe Biden’s national polling lead over Donald Trump. They suggest there might be a Democratic “tsunami” about to sweep Trump and many of his Republican congressional sycophants out of office in Washington.

Why, many commentators are looking at a recent Dallas Morning News/University of Texas-Tyler poll that puts the former vice president up by 5 percentage points over Trump. They use that poll result as evidence that Texas is about to cast its electoral votes for the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Whoa, now! Let’s hold on. Let’s catch our breath.

I am not yet ready to toss Texas into the Democrats’ sack of political goodies. This is among the reddest Republican states in the country. Every statewide elected official here is a Republican. It’s been an all-R state since 1998. The state’s transition from overwhelming Democrat to Republican has been stunning in the speed with which it occurred.

Is Joe Biden the Democratic presidential candidate to carry Texas across a new threshold? Hmm. I have trouble believing it, although my heart wishes it would happen.

As the Dallas Morning News reported: “I really do think that Biden could win Texas, and I didn’t think that as recently as even a month ago. But the landscape has shifted so much,” said Nancy Beck Young, chair of the University of Houston history department and a scholar of Texas politics.

The Morning News poll does suggest that since Texas is being stricken so cruelly by the COVID crisis that Texans at this moment are enraged by Trump’s feckless and reckless response to the emergency. That well might be reflected in the polling results.

I think it’s fair to suggest, though, that if Biden somehow manages to win more votes than Trump in Texas then we are looking at an epic political landslide that will bury Trump. Moreover, if Biden falls short by just a little bit — say, 2 or 3 percentage points — then that, too, might portend a significant political defeat for Donald Trump nationally.

Still, the media keep fueling my nervousness. I get that’s the media’s job. It is to report the news and polling statistics that suggest a staggering defeat of the self-proclaimed “smartest man in human history” — or words to that effect — most certainly should get our attention.

national news, political news

Lincoln Project firing on all cylinders

It’s called the Lincoln Project.

It is a political organization comprising former and even some current Republican politicians and political operatives. They all have one important trait in common.

They want to defeat Donald John Trump in this year’s presidential election. Why is that so unusual? Well, let’s see: Oh, yeah … Trump calls himself a Republican.

But … is he really created in the same mold as the man after whom the Lincoln Project is named? Hardly.

Abraham Lincoln was the nation’s first Republican president. He is arguably the greatest man ever to hold the office. He fought to preserve the Union that had been torn apart by Civil War. The Union won the war, but that victory cost Lincoln his life at Ford’s Theater.

The party that Donald Trump now controls bears no resemblance to the party that Lincoln helped create. The Lincoln Project has taken an astonishingly high profile in this campaign. No only is the Lincoln Project working overtime to defeat Trump, it is working equally hard to elect a Democrat, Joseph Biden Jr., to succeed Trump.

As this election continues to take shape, I am struck by the number of GOP operatives — if not active-duty GOP politicians — who have spoken of their utter disgust with Donald Trump. GOP members of Congress remain essentially silent as Trump continues to bungle the national response to the COVID-19 crisis. Trump also appears feckless as the nation reels from incidents of brutality against African-Americans, not to mention his shameful silence over reports that Russian government officials placed bounties on the heads of American service personnel killed in battle in Afghanistan.

Thus, the Lincoln Project is looking for a suitable alternative to the man masquerading as president. At this moment, the only possible alternative happens to be Democrat, Joe Biden.

And so the Lincoln Project, which carries the name of arguably the nation’s greatest president, is seeking to remove the individual who to my way of thinking has carved out his own niche as the nation’s worst president.

national news, political news

Wishing media could dial back Biden’s poll reporting

The media are having a field day reporting on Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s spectacular poll ratings against Donald J. Trump Sr.

Biden is leading Trump by double digits, the media tell us. Biden is leading Trump in virtually all the critical “swing states,” they report. Biden might already have enough Electoral College votes in the bank to assure his election in November, the reporting continues.

I want the media to dial it back. Why? Because it is beginning to fill me with a sense of hope that might not hold up as we head down the stretch toward Election Day.

My memory is vivid on some things. One of those matters involves what the media reported at this stage of the 2016 campaign. They said Hillary Clinton would cruise to an easy election.

I bought that narrative four years ago. I was so confident that I attended an election-night watch party with my wife at some friends’ house in Amarillo. We went there expecting Hillary Clinton to make a victory speech upon getting the concession call from Donald Trump.

Uhh, it didn’t happen. My worst political nightmare came to pass on election night 2016.

I am acutely aware that Joe Biden doesn’t carry nearly the negative baggage that Clinton did against Trump. I also am aware that much of Trump’s message that sold against Clinton is hitting the deck with a thud against Biden.

We have an economy in collapse, the nation’s response to the pandemic has been disastrous. Trump is campaigning against his own record as president, if you allow me to parse the rhetoric he keeps using.

I know the media have a role to play and a job to do. Part of all that is to tell us what the polling is telling us about the race as it develops. It’s just making me nervous.

national news

Obsession with Obama seeks to conceal hideous reality

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ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Donald J. Trump’s obsession with Barack H. Obama is beginning to look increasingly like a deflection of our attention from a hideous truth about the current presidential administration.

It is that Trump has presided over the most corrupt executive government branch at least since the era of Richard M. Nixon. Indeed, there is an argument being made that the corruption level of the Trump administration dwarfs what we saw during the Nixon administration.

More of Trump’s men have gone to prison than those who served time during Nixon’s time.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to insist that President Obama presided over the “most corrupt” administration in U.S. history. Of course, and this is no surprise, he seeks to tie Vice President Joe Biden to what he alleges was the corruption of the Obama years. You get that, right? I mean, Biden is about to be nominated by the Democratic Party to run against Trump this fall and at this moment Biden appears headed for a smashing victory.

We have a former national security adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to authorities; a former Trump friend and “fixer” has just been hauled back to the slammer for violating the terms of his house arrest; other campaign officials have been cloistered behind bars; that includes the guy who ran Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Trump flails away saying that it’s all a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.” It is neither of those things. Trump has presided over an administration fraught with criminal activity … not to mention scandals involving all manner of accusations.

His defense? To deflect attention by suggesting that President Obama and Vice President Biden — of all people — sat atop the most corrupt administration in history.

Oh, and how many people were indicted or served prison time during the eight years of Obama’s time in office? None.