Trump fires back: Mitt Romney 'would have dropped to his knees' for me in 2012
March 03, 2016
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When President Joe Biden motorcades from the White House to an environmental protection event on Tuesday he will hear grumbling on the left and grumbling on the right. And the 80-year-old Washington veteran will be perfectly happy.
The country is still waiting for Biden to announce officially that he will seek a second term next year. But already the Democrat has made clear what path he intends to use to get there: down the center.
In an era of intense blacks and whites, Biden wants gray.
So when he addresses the environment forum at the Department of the Interior, he will highlight what his press office calls the administration's "historic investments to advance conservation, restoration, and stewardship."
He may mention that he oversaw Congress' passing of the biggest green energy spending bill in history, the IRA. Or his raft of orders giving national monument protection to wild areas that Donald Trump -- whom he beat in 2020 and could face again in 2024 -- tried to open to development.
But Biden will also be speaking a week after approving a huge ConocoPhillips oil drilling project in the Alaskan wilderness that is projected to release the pollution equivalent of two million cars.
Biden has similarly baffled friends and wrong-footed enemies on his approach to the chaotic southern border with Mexico.
Last year, a constant flow of undocumented migrants and asylum-seekers left his administration looking near helpless. This year, strict new measures discouraging them from even trying have resulted in dramatic reductions.
Biden is even reportedly considering authorizing a revival of one of the most fiercely criticized policies under Trump -- detaining whole families if they cross the border illegally.
"The Biden administration has really turned a corner," said Bilala Askaryar, an activist in the group Welcome With Dignity, demonstrating outside the White House.
'Common sense'
Biden's calculation seems to be that he can afford to annoy some of his most passionate supporters.
In a presidential election that could well see Trump or fellow right-wing populist Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the Republican candidate, the left will have nowhere else to go.
And in the meantime, Biden hopes to build a consensus that the country's often ignored centrists can embrace.
To some extent, the shift has been forced on Biden.
In the first two years of his presidency Democrats held narrow majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, and managed to pass a surprising amount of legislation -- including big ticket items beloved on the left. But since last November's midterms, Biden has faced the cold reality of a Republican-led House.
"Now that they've lost the House," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, on NBC News, Biden is "just following common sense."
Biden still takes stands -- but he chooses his battles carefully.
While DeSantis and other Republicans get ever more upset about "woke" Democrats, drag show queens and transgender rights, Biden went on the late night Daily Show this month with an impassioned defense. Restrictions being enacted on transgender youths in DeSantis' Florida, he said, are "close to sinful."
He's also building an economic platform emphasizing fierce pushback against Republican pressure to slash social spending.
As the country lurches towards 2024, it seems for now that Biden's succeeding in walking that tightrope.
On the right, it's harder and harder to paint Biden as an out-of-control socialist.
As the conservative National Review wrote, the current White House and Biden's new chief of staff Jeff Zients are clearly "either less instinctively liberal or less interested in fulfilling the progressive wish list in Biden's third or fourth year in office."
And on the left, Biden simply has lots of political capital to burn.
"I still believe that in the vast majority of areas that he has been terrific," Pramila Jayapal, chair of the leftist Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives, said on NBC.
Or as a longtime leftist Democratic pillar, Senator Elizabeth Warren, put it: "We don't agree on everything, but, boy, I'm glad he's president."
© Agence France-Presse
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A US citizen sentenced to 19 years in a Saudi prison for social media posts criticizing the kingdom's rulers has been released, his son told AFP on Tuesday.
Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old of Saudi origin, was arrested in 2021 for what his son, Ibrahim, described as "mild" Twitter posts on topics including the war in Yemen and the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Last October, a court handed Almadi a term of 16 years behind bars, which last month was lengthened to 19 years before his surprise release on Tuesday, Ibrahim said.
"Yes, he was freed five hours ago. He's in his Riyadh home," Ibrahim told AFP by phone from the United States.
A travel ban also imposed last year means he cannot leave the country, Ibrahim said.
But he added that he intends to lobby for his father's return to the US so he can receive treatment for medical issues including back problems and diabetes.
"The fight will continue... He needs to come get his medical treatment from the US," Ibrahim said.
Almadi's case has risked further ratcheting up tensions between Riyadh and Washington, long-time partners that have recently been at odds over issues including human rights and oil output cuts approved by the OPEC+ cartel.
The State Department said last year it had "consistently and intensively raised our concerns regarding the case at senior levels of the Saudi government", and that "exercising freedom of expression should never be criminalized".
Saudi officials have not commented on the case.
- Crackdown -
The Gulf kingdom has come under fire for what human rights groups describe as draconian sentences for social media criticism of its policies.
Nourah al-Qahtani, a mother of five in her late 40s, was sentenced last year to 45 years for using Twitter to "challenge" the country's leaders.
Salma al-Shehab, a doctoral candidate at Britain's University of Leeds, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for allegedly aiding dissidents seeking to "disrupt public order" by retweeting their posts.
Ibrahim previously shared with AFP a list of Twitter posts he said had been used in evidence against his father -- information he said had been confirmed by the State Department.
They included posts on taxes as well as controversial demolition work in Mecca, the holiest city in Islam, and the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
One post questions why Saudi Arabia is unable to prevent attacks by Huthi rebels from war-wracked Yemen, where the kingdom heads a military coalition in support of the internationally recognized government.
Another refers to the "sacrifice" of Khashoggi, whose killing by Saudi agents inside the kingdom's Istanbul consulate sparked global outrage.
Saudi officials also found an unflattering caricature of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom's de facto ruler, on Almadi's phone, Ibrahim said.
Ibrahim said his father had been instructed by Saudi authorities not to talk about the case -- a claim that could not be independently verified.
"They made him sign a paper to not go public and not talk about his release. I'm the one who is talking about this one, because I want to increase the pressure to bring him back home," he said.
"If it's up to him he's going to stay silent about it. He thinks it's better, but it's not better for him. It's better to talk about it and to fight."
© Agence France-Presse
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CNN reports that an "explosive" new lawsuit filed by Fox News producer Abby Grossberg has thrown a wrench into its defense against a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
According to CNN, Grossberg alleges that she was coached by Fox News attorneys to give misleading testimony under oath in order to shift blame away from the network for airing multiple false claims about Dominion.
"Fox News Attorneys acted as agents and at the behest of Fox News to misleadingly coach, manipulate, and coerce Ms. Grossberg to deliver shaded and/or incomplete answers during her sworn deposition testimony, which answers were clearly to her reputational detriment but greatly benefitted Fox News," the lawsuit states.
The complaint also documents alleged misogynistic and anti-Semitic behavior by Fox News employees that Grossberg experienced as a producer for both Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo and primetime Fox News star Tucker Carlson.
READ MORE: Trump 'knows what’s coming': Michael Cohen
"The lawsuit continued to describe a culture at Carlson’s program in which women were subjected to crude terms and in which jokes about Jewish people were made out in the open," reports CNN. "Grossberg named Carlson and members of his staff in the lawsuit filed in New York."
In an interview with CNN, Grossberg said her lawsuit will show that Fox News "does not care" about anything except ratings.
"They don’t care about their employees," she said. "And they don’t care about their viewers."
Fox News pushed back on Grossberg's claims and it said it engaged a team of outside lawyers to investigate her claims about Fox News and found them baseless.
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