Chess team members from I.S. 318 in Brooklyn play on the train. Chess teams from this school are consistently the most-winning ones in the nation.(Courtesy of Producers Distribution Agency) Is chess cool? In my day, being in the school chess club was about as hip as being on the audiovisual squad and…
House Republicans are moving forward with their impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden with a hearing scheduled for next Thursday — but their core narrative is already disintegrating, Newsweek reported Tuesday.
The impeachment is based on the idea that the former president somehow profited from his son Hunter Biden's overseas business deals while he was vice president. A key theory was that his involvement in ousting Ukrainian prosecutor general Viktor Shokin was to prevent the investigation of an energy company Hunter was involved in — but this has been debunked several times, and ironically the latest evidence destroying it comes from right-wing commentator John Solomon, who published a pre-meeting memo from the State Department to Biden on Shokin.
That memo, noted Bickerton, "called for Shokin's 'removal,' claiming he was 'widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem'" — in other words, making clear that Biden was simply executing the official U.S. foreign policy position that a corrupt prosecutor needed to be removed.
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This comes after Republicans have held hearings trying to tie Biden to his son's business dealings, but have not established any evidence for this. One of Hunter's business associates, Devon Archer, testified that the elder Biden was sometimes on calls with his son while they met, but that they didn't discuss business and Biden was simply checking in on his son's well-being.
Even a number of House Republicans have expressed doubts that the evidence is there to charge Biden with an impeachable offense, with Freedom Caucus stalwart Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) suggesting this whole thing is motivated more by "revenge" for former President Donald Trump's impeachments than any compelling evidence against Biden.
Hunter Biden is separately facing federal charges for tax violations and the improper purchase of a firearm, in a case that some legal experts have criticized as excessively charged.
A woman who was turned away from a Denver bar pulled out a gun and shot five people outside the establishment, The Denver Post reported.
None of the victims received life-threatening injuries, according to police.
It's unknown why the woman – who has not been caught or identified – was barred from entering the venue Saturday night. Police said she started to walk away, returned to talk more with security, then pulled out the gun as she left a second time.
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Investigators do not believe the five victims were specifically targeted.
READ MORE: Trump trashed by UAW president as an enemy of the working class
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is paying the price for running “around making promises willy-nilly to the House’s small band of right-wingers” – and it’s put the whole country at risk, a New York Times columnist wrote Tuesday.
In “his desperate pursuit of the speakership last winter,” McCarthy made all sorts of backroom deals with his party’s fringe. Now, quite rightly, they’re expected to be delivered, wrote Michelle Cottle.
“The speaker is clearly fed up with being bullied by his radicals,” she wrote. "But here’s the thing. (Rep. Matt) Gaetz & Company have a point: Mr. McCarthy is out of compliance with several of his promises — or at least several they claim he made."
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Upset with the speaker’s debt ceiling deal, the GOP’s hard-line Freedom Caucus is threatening to shut down the government over it – and Gaetz (R-FL) has openly suggested McCarthy’s job is at risk.
Attempts to placate them with support for an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden were widely seen as an effort to buy them off, Cottle wrote.
The disarray looming with the threat of a shutdown cannot be blamed on the Freedom Caucus dissenters, she added.
“It is Mr. McCarthy who led them to believe he would champion their policies and priorities,” she wrote.
“And it is Mr. McCarthy who elevated their influence in the conference, empowering them to wreak even greater havoc. Of course they are going to make more and more outrageous demands. That’s what they do.”
She added, “I get their frustration and anger. Mr. McCarthy created and unleashed this right-wing monster to serve his own ambitions. And yet somehow he seems flummoxed that it is now smashing up things and demanding its due.”
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