It’s Thursday.
For Thursday, June 17th, 2021, President Biden, who returned home from his overseas trip, will have received his daily brief. This afternoon President Biden will sign the Juneteenth Independence Day Act into law.
USA TODAY explains; The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act would grant every federal employee a day off to commemorate June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, discovered President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved African Americans in rebel states 2½ years earlier. The day is also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day.
S.475 aka Juneteenth National Independence Day Act passed the Senate on June 15th, 2021, by Unanimous Consent. On Wednesday, June 16th, 2021, it passed the House with 415 Yeas and 14 Nays.
The 14 Nays were all Republicans…
Republican Rep’s. Crenshaw of Texas and McHenry of North Carolina did not vote.
When Wednesday’s Open Thread had posted, President Biden had not tweeted. He ended Wednesday’s Tweeting Total with 2 tweets and 0 retweets.
For his first Wednesday tweet he shared a live feed to his press conference following his meeting with Russian President Putin.
The video is 33 minutes and 58 seconds long. The transcript of his remarks can be found here.
This is the part where normally, I’d just share text from his remarks that are the most likely to be shared via tweet in the coming days such as “I made it clear that we will not tolerate attempts to violate our democratic sovereignty or destabilize our democratic elections, and we would respond.”
But to be honest, I got a bug in my ear, and it can’t want until Saturday or Sunday for Coffee Talk with Tiff…
Anyhoo, by now, you are all aware that President Biden had a bit of meltdown at the end of his press conference when asked by CNN White House Chief Correspondent Kaitlan Collins why he was confident President Putin will change his behavior.
Here is the exchange…
“What the hell? … when did I say I was confident? … if you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business” — Biden gets upset at Kaitlan Collins’s shouted question as he tries to leave the news conference pic.twitter.com/mCQ1218LaW
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2021
The transcript exchange:
Q: Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?
President Biden: I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior. Where the hell — what do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident? I said —
Q: You said in the next six months you’ll be able to determine —
President Biden: I said — what I said was — let’s get it straight. I said: What will change their behavior is if the rest of world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world. I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.
Q: But given his past behavior has not changed and, in that press conference, after sitting down with you for several hours, he denied any involvement in cyberattacks; he downplayed human rights abuses; he even refused to say Aleksey Navalny’s name. So how does that account to a constructive meeting, as President — President Putin framed it?
President Biden: If you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business.
First, what he said in the press conference relating to six months…
And before I take your questions, I want to say one last thing. Folks, look, this is about — this about how we move from here. This is — I listened to, again, a significant portion of what President Putin’s press conference was, and as he pointed out, this is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.
We’ll find out within the next six months to a year whether or not we actually have a strategic dialogue that matters. We’ll find out whether we work to deal with everything from release of people in Russian prisons or not. We’ll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order.
Because, look, the countries that most are likely to be damaged — failure to do that — are the major countries. For example, when I talked about the pipeline that cyber hit for $5 million — that ransomware hit in the United States, I looked at him and I said, “Well, how would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?” He said it would matter.
This is not about just our self-interest; it’s about a mutual self-interest.
I’ll take your questions. And as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I’m going to call on.
White House.gov. 06/16/2021.
Second, I only have two tweets, one from yesterday and one from this morning that put the bug in my ear. I’m sure if I looked harder, I’d find more.
Yesterday’s tweet:
At the airport prior to his departing Geneva heading back to the White House, President Biden apologized for his meltdown.
The Transcript: I owe my last question an apology. I shouldn’t have — I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy with the last answer I gave.
“Look, to be a good reporter, you’ve gotta be negative. You’ve gotta have a negative view of life, it seems to me … I apologize for having been short” — Biden on Kaitlan Collins’s question and his response to it pic.twitter.com/2mHvKkPz7X
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 16, 2021
Q: Mr. President, Kaitlan’s question that you answered at the very end there, that you came over to talk about, I think at the heart of it was this question of whether or not you seem overly optimistic, given that — what we all listened to President Putin essentially say the same, old things that he’s said forever. He — you know, rejecting all responsibility for all that stuff. And I guess the question that she was trying to get, and maybe you could take another stab at it, is: What concrete evidence do you have from these three — three plus hours that suggest that any movement has been made? And I don’t — I don’t mean that to be — I’m not — it’s not meant to be a — (inaudible) —
President Biden: Look, to be a good reporter, you got to be negative. You got to have a negative view of life — okay? — it seems to me, the way you all — you never ask a positive question.
Impeached Twice 45 and President Biden’s Meltdown are not the same. And yeah, I know, I don’t have to fill this page, with tons of examples, but here’s a montage of his attacking reporters to their faces.
This is his attack on People of Color and women reporters. He’s especially harsh toward the ladies…
Here is the another video of his exchanges with reporters that were tense.
He first labeled them the enemy of the people, near as I can find, on February 17th, 2017, just shy of his first month in Office.
To be fair to Frank Luntz he did concede the point that maybe it wasn’t the same-same…
This is a fair point, and this type of discussion is what Twitter was made for. https://t.co/if3gs3tLED
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) June 16, 2021
Then this morning with my first cup of coffee, I see this in the Owl.
Trump also called the press “the enemy of America” and continually attacked the press in general as a conscious strategy, floating ideas such as “revoking their license” (whatever that means). Biden got ticked off for a short time. There is a difference there.
— Andrew “[Joke has been redacted]” Sherrod (@MyMagnifOctopus) June 17, 2021
And it just all floods back right, I mean, there is a legit criticism for President Biden losing his cool, his temper, doesn’t matter if the reporter was wrong, and framing his “confidence” poorly, as the transcript and video clearly show, what matters is he’s the leader of the free world and shouldn’t have snapped like he did.
Fine, but to say “if” Impeached Twice 45 did this oh no…is just maddening, because it is not the same, President Biden even freaking apologized, minutes after it happened without having to be publicly pressured in to doing so, he might have been pressured behind the scenes, but the public hadn’t even had time to gin up the “Biden Snaps after Meeting with Putin,” machines.
So, what both Frank and Justin did was flip it around to reminding us (me) just how horrible a human being Impeached Twice 45 was/is to the media. I mean come on, man, you want to attack President Biden you don’t but but but Trump me, cause all that does is make me remember how glad I am, it was President Biden’s trip overseas and not Impeached Twice 45’s.
Collins said on CNN, that President Biden saying sorry wasn’t necessary but that she did appreciate it.
Speaking of Impeached Twice 45, he phoned his dear friend Sean Hannity and said crazy ass shit last night. But one thing of note he said, just proves again how he fails at every level.
“Frankly, we’re lucky we have the vaccine, but the vaccine on very young people is something that you gotta really stop” — Trump, pushing anti-vax talking points on Hannity pic.twitter.com/ODZFDOShnu
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2021
Really? Let’s not vaccinate the kids, because, as I’m sure you already guessed, he says, “Where it’s 99.99 percent they just don’t get it or [inaudible rambles] you know, they are just not as effected by it or effected as badly.”
To be fair, he did seem to finally admit he “didn’t win” the 2020 Presidential election.
He does seem to hedge the admittance though by saying “we didn’t win, but let’s see what happens on that.”
Which could mean he still hopes his loss is overturned, or maybe he meant whether he’s running again in 2024, which is what the question was about.
And that concludes Coffee Talk with Tiff. You’re welcome.
He says with his last tweet on Wednesday “That’s a wrap, folks.”
President Biden has tweeted 2 times so far for Thursday…
The graph ends at June 12th, 2021.
On Thursday the Labor Department said that Unemployment Insurance Claims increased by 37,000 from the previous week’s revised total.
He next tweets that the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the ACA was a “big win.”
Some other thoughts on the order of the court.
In news that makes you go “AWE” or “AWW”….
The law signing is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. D.C., time.
This is an Open Thread.
