Israel strikes 2 homes, killing more than 90 Palestinians; Biden says he didn’t request a cease-fire

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — More than 90 Palestinians, including dozens from an extended family, were killed in Israeli airstrikes on two homes in Gaza, rescuers and hospital officials said Saturday, a day after the U.N. chief warned that nowhere is safe in the territory and that Israel’s offensive creates “massive obstacles” to distribution of humanitarian aid.

President Joe Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday, calling it a long and private conversation a day after the Biden administration again shielded Israel in the diplomatic arena. On Friday, the U.N. Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution that calls for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza, but not for a cease-fire.

Kellyanne Conway Asks Gov. Kristi Noem If She Could Bar Biden From South Dakota Ballot

A smirking Kellyanne Conway on Wednesday asked South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) if she could remove President Joe Biden from the ballot in her state. (Watch the video below.)

Subbing for Fox News host Sean Hannity, Conway appeared to wax sarcastic with her guest after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled to omit Republican front-runner Donald Trump from that state’s primary ballot. The court cited a constitutional amendment barring insurrectionists from holding office.

Republican outrage was swift, and Conway, a former adviser in the Trump White House, appeared to pile on with her silly leading question.

There’s only one way out of this Gaza war and Netanyahu is blocking it. Joe Biden must force him from power

Joe Biden’s bond with Israel and the Jewish people runs so deep he is said to feel it in his kishkes (that’s “guts”, for the non-Yiddish speakers among you). Biden demonstrated that early in the current crisis by visiting Israel within days of the 7 October massacre, which saw 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, killed, many tortured and mutilated. He demonstrated it again, just as swiftly, with the dispatch of two US aircraft carriers to the region, aimed at deterring Hezbollah and its Iranian backers from attacking Israel from the north – his one-word message: “Don’t.” And he showed it once more just last week, wielding the US veto at the United Nations – making Washington all but a lone voice against the global chorus demanding that Israel end its offensive in Gaza, which has left so many thousands dead.

Republicans Vote To Authorize Impeachment Inquiry Against Joe Biden

WASHINGTON ― Republicans in the House of Representatives voted Wednesday to formally authorize their already ongoing impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

The vote was a show of unity for an often-divided Republican conference and a clear step toward eventually impeaching the president, though Republicans swore they would only go where the evidence takes them. The vote on the House floor was 221 to 212.

“We are now at a pivotal moment in our investigation,” House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.), one of the leaders of the impeachment effort, said on the House floor before the vote.

Republicans Will Try For Third Time To Pin Ukraine Corruption On Joe Biden

WASHINGTON — The House will vote Wednesday on whether to formally authorize Republicans’ impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

The vote is mostly symbolic, signaling impeachment will remain a top priority for House Republicans in the new year — but Biden’s alleged misdeeds are not new, nor are GOP efforts to litigate them.

I Covered Joe Manchin for Years. He Might Not Care If He Sinks Joe Biden.

Since announcing he won’t run again for Senate, Joe Manchin has left open the door to a third-party presidential campaign. Democrats are naturally anxious about the West Virginia senator’s intentions, fearful of the possible effects of an independent bid on Joe Biden’s reelection chances.

They have good cause to worry: A presidential run would be a fitting capstone for Manchin, who’s built a career around putting his own interests ahead of his party. His brand of centrism has helped him survive West Virginia’s rapid transformation from a blue to red state. But it also helped sow the seeds of the Democratic Party’s demise back home.

Alex Jones Tells Tucker Carlson A Wild Claim About Joe Biden That Involves Nudity

Shameless liar Alex Jones made the most of the 90 minutes that Tucker Carlson granted him on his X show, claiming that President Joe Biden traipses around the White House in the buff. (Watch the video below.)

He also said Biden attacked a dog, prompting Carlson to sneer, “Attacking a dog, what a pig he is.”

Jones attributed the dog report to Secret Service contacts “and by people who, let’s just say, work with him and I’m gonna leave it at that.” Then he graduated to the more salacious assertion about Biden.

Biden calls on Congress to pass Ukraine aid: ‘We can’t let Putin win’

President Joe Biden on Wednesday said he is willing to make “significant compromises” on border policy in exchange for funding for Ukraine and Israel.

“We need to fix the broken border system — it is broken,” Biden said from the White House ahead of a Senate procedural vote on his national security supplemental that Republicans plan to filibuster over a dispute on immigration policy. “Thus far, I’ve got no response.”

Happily, Joe Biden is finished

It will be remembered, I hope, as the hug that sank a craven president.

It was mid-October. US President Joe Biden made the requisite pilgrimage to Tel Aviv to show that his staunch support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not simply rhetorical.

His grateful host, fidgety with excitement, waited for Biden to emerge from the bulging hull of Air Force One.

Cassidy Hutchinson Gives Dark Reason Why ‘Everybody Should Vote For Joe Biden’

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson urged Americans to vote for President Joe Biden in 2024 if they want democracy to continue.

Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to Donald Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, was asked by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday how she’d vote in a hypothetical Trump-Biden rematch next year.

Don’t Let Biden and Blinken Get Away With Aiding a Second Nakba

On Wednesday, the Israeli army raided Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital, terrorizing patients, medical staff and families sheltering in the hospital compound. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a surgeon, told Al Jazeera from inside the hospital that “food and drinking water haven’t come to the hospital for the sixth day now, with no way of getting anything in the hospital.” He expressed shock that “the whole world has been witnessing this crime and seeing everything that is happening and no one has stopped it.”

“No one has said loudly this is not allowed,” he added. “Where is the international community?”

Joe Biden’s Middle East Mess

JERUSALEM — Speak to any Israeli official these days, and there is a good chance they will mention the conceptzia. The term traces back to the commission of inquiry after the surprise Yom Kippur war of 1973, a way to describe not just operational failures of intelligence but conceptual ones. Now as then, Israel’s vaunted security services had built policy on a flawed assumption: this time, that Hamas was focused on preserving its grip on Gaza and had lost interest in large-scale confrontation with Israel. The concept made sense — until Hamas proved it grimly wrong by killing more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7.

Biden Campaign Denounces ‘Racist, Cruel’ Alleged Trump Immigration Proposals

If he wins a second term, former President Donald Trump is reportedly planning to wage war on immigration, implementing a vast array of policies dreamed up with Stephen Miller, the adviser behind his most controversial first-term immigration policies.

A New York Times story published Saturday provided details: Trump would round up millions of undocumented people and put them in detention camps while they await deportation, using reassigned federal law enforcement and National Guard members to help with the sweeps. 

Tlaib accuses Biden of supporting genocide of Palestinians

Rep. Rashida Tlaib accused President Joe Biden of supporting genocide in Gaza, warning that voters “won’t forget” his actions at the polls in 2024 in the strongest intraparty rebuke to the president since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war.

In a video posted Friday to X, formerly known as Twitter, Tlaib featured interspersed clips of Biden administration officials expressing support for Israel, videos of dead and injured Palestinians in Gaza and clips from pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S., before closing with a direct message from Tlaib to Biden.

What the pending UAW-Big 3 deals mean for workers, Biden and the economy

The United Auto Workers have a deal. Deals, that is.

If the tentative agreements reached in recent days between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers cross the finish line, it will mark a turning point in a year of labor unrest.

Union President Shawn Fain will have delivered his promised record economic contract — though falling short of his original ambitions — using the unconventional strategy of bargaining with all three companies at once, and perhaps accelerating growing support for unions.

Another GOP ‘Bombshell’ About Joe Biden Turns Out To Be A Dud

WASHINGTON — Republicans announced Friday that they had uncovered a “direct payment” to President Joe Biden — exactly the kind of evidence they’ve sought linking Biden to his family’s foreign business deals.

But the March 2018 payment came from Joe Biden’s brother James, not a Ukrainian oligarch or Chinese tycoon, and the check was marked as a “loan repayment.” 

The Biden hug - President Biden went all the way to Israel to give Prime Minister Netanyahu one of his famous hugs, but what has he accomplished?

Joe Biden’s trip to the “Jewish state” was supposed to match the one he made earlier this year to war-torn Ukraine in terms of symbolism and substance, considering it was only the second time an American president visited a war zone not under the control of the US military. Indeed, during his trip, the American president expressed similar sympathy and unconditional support for Israel as he had done for Ukraine.

But unlike his trip to Eastern Europe, where during a stop in Poland Biden successfully rallied NATO against Russia, the president’s Middle East trip was undermined by the cancellation of a scheduled Arab-American summit in Jordan, following the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital Baptist in Gaza that killed almost 500 Palestinians. The Arab leaders condemned Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, and rejected America’s proposals for a “humanitarian corridor” that would de facto lead to the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

Joe Biden owns this

So, US President Joe Biden got off a big plane in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and embraced a war criminal whose war crime-addicted military had, only hours earlier, committed yet another war crime of such horrendous nature and scale that it is destined to reverberate in memory and history.

That will be the sick, defining image of Biden’s presidency: a hug on an airport tarmac with an Israeli prime minister who has always revelled in killing Palestinians, even desperate children, women and men who thought they were beyond Benjamin Netanyahu’s malevolent reach on the grounds of a hospital in besieged Gaza that, bit by bit, is being erased in blatant acts of genocide.

The danger of leaving things be: how the world ‘failed miserably’ in the Middle East

Joe Biden’s high-stakes visit to the Middle East to avert an all-out war raises serious questions about the level and nature of the president’s previous engagement in the region.

Just as Israel suffered a total intelligence breakdown over the horrific Hamas attacks, diplomats stand charged with their own collective system failure, at the heart of which was treating the Palestinian issue as best managed, not solved.

While the EU foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, said “the world has failed miserably” in the Middle East, the US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was forced to deny the Biden team took its eye off the ball, when asked about his claim three weeks ago that the region was “quieter” than it had been in two decades.

Biden facing Republican pressure to take action against Iran after Israel attacks

President Joe Biden is facing mounting Republican pressure to take action against Iran in the wake of the latest violence in the Middle East, even as U.S. officials say they don’t have a smoking gun proving that Tehran played a direct role.

More than a dozen GOP senators are leading the charge, calling on the Biden administration to refreeze the $6 billion in funds released to Tehran in a prisoner exchange deal last month. The administration also faces calls to impose new sanctions on Iran or even take military action against Iranian targets.