Last Call For Biden, Still Ridin'

Joey Aviators is the Big Eight Oh today.

Join us in wishing President @JoeBiden a happy birthday! 😎 pic.twitter.com/GCswAnfE4q

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 20, 2022

 

Biden is the oldest President in US history, however you want to think about that.

People in their 80s lead countries, create majestic art and perform feats of endurance. One entered the record books for scaling Mount Everest. It’s soon time for Joe Biden, 80 on Sunday, to decide whether he has one more mountain to climb — the one to a second term as president.

Questions swirl now, in his own party as well as broadly in the country, about whether he’s got what it takes to go for the summit again.

The oldest president in U.S. history, Biden hits his milestone birthday at a personal crossroads as he and his family face a decision in the coming months on whether he should announce for reelection. He’d be 86 at the end of a potential second term.

Biden aides and allies all say he intends to run — and his team has begun quiet preparations for a campaign — but it has often been the president himself who has sounded the most equivocal. “My intention is that I run again,” he said at a news conference this month. ”But I’m a great respecter of fate.”

“We’re going to have discussions about it,” he said. Aides expect those conversations to pick up in earnest over Thanksgiving and Christmas, with a decision not until well after New Year’s.

Biden planned to celebrate his birthday at a family brunch in the White House on Sunday.

 

It's up to other Democrats to make the case that Biden, or if he does decline, the first female VP in history, Kamala Harris, shouldn't be the standard-bearer in 2024. And so far, I've seen absolutely nothing compelling in that regard.

Nothing. Even if you believe Biden is too old, Harris is the veep, and we beat Trump with that ticket, handily. Stop pretending the Democrats didn't have the best midterm defense in decades under them, either. If they are so very unpopular, why, if it wasn't for Supreme Court interference in gerrymandering in Southern states, did we keep the Senate and almost retained the House?

Let's remember who the real enemy is here.  It's not Joe.

Welcome To Gunmerica, GOP House Edition

Less than two weeks after GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert was barely reelected by the thinnest of margins, her hateful homophobic rhetoric has resulted in a deadly shooting at a gay nightclub in her Colorado Springs district.

 

A 22-year-old gunman opened fire in a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and injuring 18 before he was subdued by “heroic” patrons and arrested by police who were on the scene within minutes, authorities said Sunday.

Two firearms, including a “long rifle,” were found at Club Q after the Saturday night shooting, said Police Chief Adrian Vasquez.

Investigators were still determining a motive, and the attack was being investigated to see if it rises to the level of a hate crime, said El Paso County District Attorney Michael Allen.

Police identified the gunman as Anderson Lee Aldrich, who was in custody and being treated for injuries. A man with the same name and age was arrested in 2021 after his mother reported he threatened her with “a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition,” according to authorities.

Police did not confirm whether it was the same person, saying they were investigating whether the suspect had been arrested before.

Authorities were called to the Club Q at 11:57 p.m. Saturday with a report of a shooting, and the first officer arrived at midnight.

“At least two heroic people” confronted the gunman and stopped the shooting, Vasquez said, adding: “We owe them a great debt of thanks.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland was briefed on the shooting, Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley said. The FBI said it was assisting but said the police department was leading the investigation.

The violence is the sixth mass killing this month and comes in a year when the nation was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

 

Yet another example of how a mass shooter's deadly rampage was prefaced by known violence against a woman in his life. 

And while America debates whether or not Boebert's previously homophobic and hateful statements are responsible for the shooting, at least one right-wing social media star is absolutely taking credit for inciting murder of LGBTQ+ Americans.

This is 9 hours apart. Chaya Raichik (@LibsofTikTok) is bragging about inciting the attack. She knows she’ll get away with it. The last time she posted about Colorado was weeks ago. This is not a coincidence but open gloating that she’ll never face accountability for her actions. pic.twitter.com/okio0zoBQE

— Eli Erlick (@EliErlick) November 20, 2022

 

The violence I've been predicting would come after the 2022 midterms is already here.

 

More will follow.

Sunday Long Read: You've Got To Be Kid-ding Her

This week's Sunday Long Read from Business Insider's Julia Black is even more evidence that Elon Musk is a wealthy multi-billionaire James Bond supervillain, engaging in white supremacist eugenics with a thin veneer of techno-futurist bullshit.

Court documents obtained by Insider show that the tech mogul Elon Musk quietly had twins last November with one of his top executives, Shivon Zilis. Musk, who has been an outspoken advocate of bringing more babies into the world, now has nine known children.

In April, Musk, 51, and Zilis, 36, filed a petition to change the twins' names in order to "have their father's last name and contain their mother's last name as part of their middle name." The order was approved by a judge in Austin, Texas, this May. (Insider is withholding the children's names to protect their privacy.) The twins were born weeks before Musk and Claire Boucher, the musician who performs as Grimes, had their second child via surrogate in December.

Musk and Zilis did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of about $220 billion. He's at the helm of four companies: the electric-vehicle maker Tesla, the spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, the tunnel-construction startup The Boring Company, and the brain-machine-interface implant company Neuralink, where Zilis works. This year he announced plans to purchase Twitter for $44 billion, though the deal has been held up over what the Tesla CEO has described as several unresolved matters. In May, Insider reported that SpaceX had paid a company flight attendant $250,000 to stay quiet after she alleged that Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex.

Zilis is a rising star in Musk's empire. Born in Markham, Ontario, Zilis received her bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy in 2008 from Yale, where she also played goalie on the women's ice-hockey team. A lifelong athlete, she has been pictured on social media surfing, zip-lining, and ice climbing. After beginning her career at IBM, she joined the early-stage venture-capital fund Bloomberg Beta, where she led investment efforts in data and machine learning. She was on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in the venture-capital category in 2015.

Zilis met Musk through her work with OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence research-and-deployment nonprofit Musk cofounded in 2015. She serves as the youngest member of OpenAI's board of directors. In 2017, Zilis moved to Tesla, where she was a project director, deploying her AI expertise on the Autopilot and chip-design teams. Today she holds the title of director of operations and special projects for Neuralink, where Musk is a co-CEO. She previously worked as a project director in the CEO's office. She's recently been floated as one of the people Musk could tap to run Twitter after his acquisition.

During Zilis' tenure at Neuralink, the company has conducted surgical trials of its Bluetooth-enabled brain chips on monkeys and pigs and enabled a nine-year-old macaque to play the video game Pong using its brain. Musk has suggested human trials could start by the end of 2022.

Zilis lived in San Francisco before buying a home in a gated community in Austin in August, about three months before the twins were born. The real-estate website Zillow estimates the home is worth more than $4 million. Musk has said his primary residence is a $50,000 modular house in Boca Chica, near SpaceX's launch facility in South Texas, but in the court documents Musk and Zilis listed the same address — the multimillion-dollar home — in Austin. Musk has been spending more time in Austin after opening Tesla's new Gigafactory Texas on the outskirts of the city.

Zilis shares many of Musk's intellectual passions, including space travel, transportation, and, most of all, artificial intelligence. They appear to have a similar sense of humor — they've both tweeted AI puns and tongue-in-cheek references to Musk's favorite cryptocurrency, dogecoin.

She has been an ardent defender of Musk in the face of criticism. In 2020, when a California State Assembly member, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, tweeted "F*ck Elon Musk" after Musk tweeted about moving Tesla out of California over COVID-19 restrictions, Zilis responded: "This makes me sad. No one's perfect but I've never met anyone who goes through more personal pain to fight for an inspiring future for humanity - and has done so tirelessly for decades. Everyone's entitled to their opinion but mine is that there's no one I respect and admire more."

 

If this all sounds like Musk is selectively breeding babies with the "right" white women in order to "save humanity", it's because he is absolutely doing that, and he thinks other "right" people should be doing the same in order to "advance" the human race.

The guy is basically terrible.