May
21
2025

Wow, That Was Quick

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Amazon has an astounding variety of Biden/Blue Ribbon merch. Just one example on your right. Never underestimate the alacrity of capitalists to try to make some money off someone else's misfortune.

But in the interest of equal time, journalist Taylor Lorenz extends her own best wishes:

Classy!

Jim Geraghty has thoughts on A Spectacularly Ill-Timed Decision to Halt PSA Testing in Joe Biden.

Former President Joe Biden’s office disclosed Tuesday that Biden last received a prostate-specific antigen test to screen for prostate cancer in 2014, when he was age 72. You may recall oncologist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel shocking the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe Monday by declaring, “Oh, he’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading.”

In other words, perhaps as little as a year after Biden’s doctors concluded there was no longer any need to run PSA tests looking for signs of prostate cancer, he developed prostate cancer.

“It’s a complicated picture,” declared Politico’s Playbook newsletter this morning. Eh, it really isn’t. Biden stopped getting PSA tests at age 72. Yes, “Regular PSAs are not recommended for the average man in his 70s or 80s,” but the average man in his 70s or 80s is not the president of the United States. We, the general public, all just sort of assumed that any president would get the best care and best health surveillance possible, and particularly a president in his late 70s and early 80s. Remember, a PSA is a blood test, and the president’s health checkups already included drawing blood.

Jim's post also examines an under-reported story from that Tapper/Thompson book everyone's talking about: the Biden family's (and their doctors') lies and obfuscations about Beau Biden's ultimately fatal brain cancer. Example:

[Neurologist Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung] told the public that they had removed a “small lesion” from Beau’s brain. In fact, it was a “tumor slightly larger than a golf ball,” Biden later revealed.

This, while Beau was Delaware Attorney General.

Megan McArdle prescribes a course of treatment for the guilty: The Biden cover-up demands deep soul-searching (gifted link). .

Having read [the Tapper/Thompson book] over the weekend, I’m convinced that deep institutional soul-searching is due in many quarters, and that this conversation is too important to delay, even at the risk of adding to the Biden family’s distress. It is impossible to read “Original Sin” — especially in concert with “Fight,” a book released last month by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — without reaching a horrifying conclusion: The most powerful nation in the world and its nuclear arsenal were left in the hands of a man who could not reliably recognize people he’d known for years, maintain his train of thought or speak in coherent sentences.

All the time we were being assured …

But speaking of dereliction of duty, which I guess we were, James Freeman takes a look at Harris, Biden’s Cabinet and the 25th Amendment.

Here’s wishing former President Joe Biden a complete and speedy recovery from cancer. Let’s also hope that the American people finally get the accounting they deserve on who exactly was running our government during his presidency. The related question is why then-Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden cabinet failed to exercise their constitutional authority to ensure competent leadership for the United States. A new book seems to confirm that these officials had no excuses for their inaction. But did the authors demand to know why Ms. Harris and the Cabinet secretaries played along with the charade?

Not only did our "public servants" fail to do their due diligence, the self-righteous "Democracy Dies in Darkness" journalists didn't exactly cover themselves in glory either.

And on the legal news front:

  • Anyone else reminded of that Beastie Boys album title? Jonathan Turley writes on The Red Line: Democratic Officials Claim a Dangerous License for Illegality.

    Across the country, a new defense is being heard in state and federal courtrooms. From Democratic members of Congress to judges to city council members, officials claim that their official duties include obstructing the official functions of the federal government. It is a type of liberal license that excuses most any crime in the name of combating what Minn. Gov. Tim Walz called the “modern-day Gestapo” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

    The latest claimant of this license is Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), who was charged with assaulting, resisting, and impeding law enforcement officers during a protest at Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. McIver is shown on video forcing her way into an ICE facility and striking and shoving agents in her path.

    Where was the horn guy when LaMonica needed him?

    (Headline reference if you want it.)

  • She's no RBG. Dan McLaughlin looks at Justice Jackson’s Strange Agnosticism About Precedent and Democracy. She was on the "2" end of a 7-2 SCOTUS ruling in favor of Maine legislator Laurel Libby:

    The Supreme Court has rightly moved to order, in Libby v. Fecteau, that Maine state representative Laurel Libby be restored to her voting rights while the First Circuit considers her appeal. Libby was suspended from speaking or voting in the Maine House because of her public speech on Facebook criticizing the participation of biological males in women’s sports.

    The pretext for the suspension was that Libby’s Facebook post “identified the student’s high school, identified the student by their current name and previous name, and posted photos of the student, embellished with yellow lines encircling them from head to toe.” The Maine House Speaker, Ryan Fecteau, claimed that this was a violation of the student-athlete’s safety. But this is a viewpoint-based rule: the press routinely publishes the names, images, and schools of high school athletes, and Fecteau himself has done so in the past. The entire basis for the demand that Libby apologize or face suspension was that the name and image were presented with a viewpoint about transgender athletes, with which Fecteau and the Maine Democrats disagree. And the images of athletes are very much germane to the question of whether biological males have, in fact, an unfair biological advantage over females and whether it is unsafe for them to compete together. In response to a district court’s buying the Maine Democrats’ claim of legislative immunity from suit — a contention that collides with prior Supreme Court precedent — the attorneys general of West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia filed a joint amicus brief debunking the notion that allowing lawsuits simply to vindicate federal First Amendment rights by restoring a legislator’s power to vote would be any sort of infringement on federalism.

    I think Representative Libby would have gotten a lot more sympathetic treatment from Justices Jackson and Sotomayor if she'd tried to deck out some ICE agents.

  • And for another free speech victory… Emma Camp notes the good news from my Live Free or Die state: Judge rules in favor of New Hampshire bakery in fight over donut mural.

    A New Hampshire bakery has won a crucial victory in its fight to preserve a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. While town officials have attempted to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled on Monday that the city cannot enforce its sign rules against the bakery.

    In 2022, Sean Young, the owner of Leavitt's Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, collaborated with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery's storefront. The students' mural depicted baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range, with a multicolored sunrise in the background. Initially, the mural didn't cause any controversy—and it was even covered positively by local media. However, about a week after being installed, Conway's Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated town zoning rules.

    We previously covered the antics of the Conway Roadside Art Police (CRAP) here and here.

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