REMEMBERING BIDEN’S BUM ADVICE ON THE BIN LADEN RAID
On the tenth anniversary of the raid that took out Osama bin Laden, it’s worth remembering that Joe Biden recommended against undertaking the raid. Biden told President Obama, “Mr. President, my suggestion is: Don’t go.”
Somewhere in his many decades in public life Biden must have been right about an important issue of foreign policy/national security. I just can’t think of when that was.
It certainly wasn’t when Biden criticized President Trump for banning travel from China and Europe in response to the surge in coronavirus cases there. Biden himself has now banned most travel from India for the same reason Trump banned travel from China and Europe — to prevent spread of the virus from an area where the pandemic is raging.
This is the right move, I think. However, when the issue of such travel bans first arose in January 2020, Biden had the wrong line. As he almost always has for nearly half a century.
Republicans are just mad at the truth they can’t control: Biden is a decent man and a competent president.
Now would be the time for Americans to unite behind Biden, if they love their country and not just what it can do for them personally in tax cuts. Face it, Joey B is doing a good job. You can’t get around it.
CNN Poll: Majority of Americans approve of Biden and his priorities in first 100 days
Already dealt with the BS about the India ban being just the same as Trump’s China ban.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently requires that all U.S.-bound air travelers have proof of a negative Covid-19 test result no more than three days before arrival, regardless of vaccination status. Travelers are then required to take another test three to five days following their arrival in the U.S. and to self-quarantine
None of which was required in the Trump ban.
Still, I suppose MAGA types will still keep repeating this nonsense- Republican politicians were complaining about the non-existent beef ban days after it had been debunked, and Fox News picked up the daffodil non-story from Newsmax (gee, wonder if Newsmax should make a public apology and pay damages for that, too?).
Riiight, bc flights from Wuhan never stopped. Flights from Europe never stopped. The vaccines weren’t created in 2020, distribution channels weren’t set up. Riiiiiight. Biden just did it all with that stack of EOs he thunk up hisself in the basement.
After Trump’s “ban” there were 40,000 entries of US citizens and green card holders directly from China to the US. They were not tested, not required to check about their status later, and not required to quarantine for any length of time- so, yeah, it’s just the same.
Biden is allowing passport holders and green card holders back too, so did Taiwan back in February of 2019. Taiwan was doing testing back then, for whatever reason USA got it’s testing up and started slowly.
I had coworkers travelling overseas when the ‘ban’ came into place. The fucked up thing is there were no precautions for those coming back into the U.S. No screening or questions at customs / border patrol, no quarantine, no questions about where you went. no nothing. Oh, you just came back from somewhere we declared high risk? Business or Pleasure trip? Go on your way. So. Stupid.
The waiver will not take place immediately as it has to be approved by consensus at the World Trade Organization (WTO), but the decision of the Biden administration to throw its weight behind a waiver will have a strong influence on the outcome of that decision.
“This is a global health crisis,” Katherine Tai, the US trade representative, said in a written statement. “The extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.
“The administration strongly believes in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines. We will actively participate in text-based negotiations at the WTO needed to make that happen.”
“Today’s decision by @USTradeRep is an empty promise that will undermine our response to the pandemic and do nothing to address the real challenges of getting more shots in arms,” Stephen Ubl, the president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said in a statement.
Fuck you to the lobbyists at PRMA.
Just a day before the announcement, Pfizer said that it expects to make up to $26 billion in sales of its COVID-19 vaccine this year — the company’s top-selling product over the first quarter of 2021.
Fuck you to the makers of insane profits at Pfizer.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters that any cut to the company’s bottom line via a patent waiver “amounts to the expropriation of the property of the pharmaceutical companies whose innovation and financial investments made the development of COVID-19 vaccines possible in the first place.”
Most of the research into the vaccines have already been paid for by government research labs.
So fuck you, too, you worthless bought-and-paid-for hack.
He’s not wrong, patents on medicine and putting life saving drugs and cures out of reach for the vast majority of the worlds population has been something I’ve gripped about for decades.
I’m of two minds on this one. Companies need a strong profit motive to do expensive R&D, but this is kind of a special case…considering the government funding involved and the global pandemic.
There’s always two sides to an argument, I’m more of the middle ground rather than it has to be all one way or the other.
For example Taiwan is rife with hepatitis C, there is a cure that is 99% effective with oral doses over a few weeks with little to no side effects, but will cost 1 million NT$, so the NHS don’t use that. They use a less effective method which includes very painful injections and has something like a 20% success rate.
You could fly to India and buy the more effective one at around 80k NT$ (exact same stuff), but there are rules bringing in drugs and import restrictions, much like the USA has, bottom line is most people can’t afford the better treatment so go without, which will affect quite a large number of people.
I’m of the mind there should be some fairer mark up, or in the US the hospitals charging 80$ US for a plastic cup or 5000 US$ for a ride in an ambulance. Got a massive bill when the wife went to A&E in the US, fortunately insured but it was for extremely upset stomach, would have cost her like 150NT$ here for a few pills, in the US it was 1000’s of dollars US.
Yeah, I’m with you here. Some kind of tiered pricing system seems to be the only realistic solution, but there are always going to be inefficiencies (and money grabs by greedy pharma companies) that are going to cause people to suffer.
I previously reported on the details of the Bidens’ tax avoidance in the years following Joe Biden’s service as vice president. From 2017 through 2019, Joe and Jill Biden classified a total of $13.5 million in book and speech income as profits from their two corporations, rather than as cash wages.
While the couple paid full income taxes on all their revenue, classifying most of their earnings as corporate profits rather than wages allowed the Bidens to avoid paying $513,540 in payroll taxes on their $13.5 million in declared corporate profits. Tax experts interviewed by the Wall Street Journal in 2019 called the Bidens’ maneuvers “pretty aggressive,” and stated that they existed solely to circumvent paying payroll taxes.
Moreover, the $513,540 in payroll taxes the Bidens avoided were imposed by Medicare and Obamacare, and help fund both of those laws. During his campaign, Joe Biden ran ads claiming that “Obamacare is personal to me”—except, it appears, when it comes to paying the bill.
