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Monday, May 19, 2025

Joe Biden Diagnosed With Cancer

Aggressive, stage IV prostate cancer. New York Times: Mr. Biden, 82, left office in January as the oldest-serving president in American history. Throughout his presidency, Mr. Biden faced questions about his age and his health, ultimately leading him to abandon his re-election campaign under pressure from his own party. Prostate cancer experts say that Mr. Biden’s diagnosis is serious, and that once the cancer has spread to the bones — where it tends to go — it cannot be cured. But Dr. Judd Moul, a prostate cancer expert at Duke University, said men whose prostate cancer has spread “can live five, seven, 10 or more years” (New York Times). Benny Johnson: Last summer, White House Physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor swore to the American people that Joe Biden was “completely fit for the Presidency” — no issues, nothing to see. Now we learn Biden has “advanced”prostate cancer. But wait… Advanced prostate cancer takes +10 years to develop to the stage where Biden’s diagnosis is. Prostate cancer is also *easy* to find. Simple blood test or prostate exam will give you near 100% accurate results. You’re telling me that the best doctors and testing on earth did not find Biden’s cancer in all these years of testing? Was every medical report a lie? For how long? … This is the worst coverup in the history of the Presidency. Absolute scandal. They knew. They lied. They hid it. For power. People need to be held accountable for this. Evil (X).

Audio of Biden Interview With Robert Hur Released; “one of the great scandals of modern politics”

Yes: The transcripts had been released earlier. But the audio adds yet another layer to the coverup and the complicity of leading Democrats and virtually all of legacy media. Guy Benson: What cannot be emphasized enough is that they don’t regret the lying and gaslighting. They don’t regret the damage of a severely diminished/quasi-incapacitated POTUS. They don’t regret the extra-constitutional presidency by committee scheme. They regret that they lost (X). Hugh Hewitt: Do not blame the president for aging quickly and poorly. But everyone involved in the cover-up put the country at risk because what we knew, all of our country’s enemies knew. They probably knew much of what we, the citizens, didn’t. The 25th failed (X). Axios: The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity…. The audio surfaces as Democrats and the national media are grappling with the legacy of Biden’s White House and campaign hiding his decline as he ran for another four-year term at age 81 (Axios). Wall Street Journal: The coverup of Mr. Biden’s mental decline will go down as one of the great scandals of modern politics. By refusing to admit what voters could so clearly see, Democrats denied their party an open primary. Once Mr. Biden imploded, they handed Kamala Harris the nomination without debate (Wall Street Journal).

Who Had Control of the Autopen?

Just the news: President Trump thinks President Biden’s “autopen” controversy is becoming a “bigger and bigger scandal” after the audio release of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Biden. “Whoever had control of the ‘AUTOPEN‘ is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account…. Trump said in the same autopen post that the FBI had spied on his 2016 presidential campaign and launched a “vicious witch hunt” against him, referencing the Russia probe (Just the News). Eric Metaxas: They never thought they would get caught…. We will find out WHO they are and we WILL bring them to justice, by God’s grace. Stay tuned (X).

House Holds Late Night Session on Budget Package

Roll Call: The House Budget Committee plans to try again Sunday night to advance the GOP’s expansive reconciliation package after four Republican dissenters torpedoed the measure at a markup Friday. Within hours of the Budget panel’s 16-21 vote rejecting the bill earlier Friday, Chairman Jodey C. Arrington, R-Texas, called for a second session on Sunday at 10 p.m. The announcement came shortly after promising members they could spend the weekend with their families and that the panel wouldn’t reconvene until Monday morning. The decision to schedule a second vote so quickly — before House leaders could cut a deal with their detractors — underscored the determination of GOP leadership to keep the bill on an aggressive timeline, with a House floor vote expected next week (Roll Call). CNN: House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled a potential compromise to get holdouts on board and advance the bill in the House Budget Committee on Sunday, saying that Republicans are working on moving up the timeline for the implementation of work requirements for Medicaid recipients – a key change hardliners are pushing for. “The concern is, what we’re trying to work with is the ability of the states to retool their systems and ensure the verification process is to make sure that all the new laws and all the new safeguards are replacing can actually be enforced,” he said. “And so we’re working through all those details, and we’ll get it done” (CNN).

Budget Bill to Further Strengthen Border Security; “Put simply, The Big Beautiful Bill will empower Big Beautiful Deportations”

From the White House: The One Big Beautiful Bill is a historic piece of legislation that empowers ICE to deport the millions of illegal immigrants that entered under Joe Biden, ensures illegal immigrants do not receive food stamps or Medicaid, taxes money illegal aliens send out of the country, and permanently secures the border. The Big Beautiful Bill includes tens of billions of dollars in expanded ICE detention and calls for hiring a minimum of 10,000 new ICE agents. The House Judiciary Committee says the bill “provides funding for at least 1 million annual removals, 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, and detention capacity sufficient to maintain an average daily population of at least 100,000 aliens” …. Put simply, The Big Beautiful Bill will empower Big Beautiful Deportations (White House). The legislative component will complement the Trump administration’s use of the military: In the past four months, the Pentagon has sent thousands of active-duty combat troops and armored Stryker combat vehicles to the southwestern border to confront what President Trump declared on his first day in office was an “invasion” of migrants, drug cartels and smugglers. That’s not all. The military has also dispatched U-2 spy planes, surveillance drones, helicopters and even two Navy warships to surveil the borders and coasts round the clock…. Re-enlistments among younger soldiers in the Stryker units — who never had the opportunity to serve combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq like their more senior commanding officers — have soared in recent months, commanders say. “This is their mission for their generation, and they’re embracing it,” said Maj. Gen. Scott M. Naumann, the head of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, who moved his headquarters staff to Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in February to oversee what the military calls Joint Task Force-Southern Border (New York Times).

Confirmed: Hamas’s October 7 Attack Was Effort to Derail Progress on Saudi-Israel Relations

Yes: This was gut-level intuition for many who have been tracking events over these last 19 months. The confirmation comes by way of new documents from Hamas. Wall Street Journal: Days before the assault that left nearly 1,200 dead, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza chief, told fellow militants that an “extraordinary act” was required to derail the normalization talks that he said risked marginalizing the Palestinian cause, the document, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said. The plan worked—at a terrible price…. Days before the assault that left nearly 1,200 dead, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s Gaza chief, told fellow militants that an “extraordinary act” was required to derail the normalization talks that he said risked marginalizing the Palestinian cause, the document, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, said. The plan worked—at a terrible price…. The goal, he said, is “to bring about a major move or a strategic shift in the paths and balances of the region with regard to the Palestinian cause.” He expected to get help from the other Iranian-backed forces of the so-called axis of resistance to Israel. This newest cache of Hamas records adds a new link in the chain of events leading up to Oct. 7, 2023, the deadliest day for Israelis since the country’s founding. The Journal, citing senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah, has reported that another meeting connected to the attack took place on Oct. 2 that year, this one in Beirut involving representatives of Hamas and Iranian security officials. Iran approved the planned attack, those people said (Wall Street Journal).

Alarm: New York Times Reveals Heritage Foundation Plan to Fight Antisemitism

As though that’s something the American people should be disturbed about. New York Times: The conservative Washington-based think tank is best known for spearheading Project 2025, a proposed blueprint for President Trump’s second term that called for reshaping the federal government and an extreme expansion of presidential power…. Drafted in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in 2023 and the mounting protests against the war in Gaza, Project Esther outlined an ambitious plan to fight antisemitism by branding a broad range of critics of Israel as “effectively a terrorist support network,” so that they could be deported, defunded, sued, fired, expelled, ostracized and otherwise excluded from what it considered “open society” …. Project Esther’s architects said there were clear parallels between their plan and recent actions against universities and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on both a state and a federal level. “This isn’t just a battle for the Jewish state,” Ms. Coates told her audience in December. “It is also a battle for the United States” (New York Times). Project Esther, posted October 7, 2024 (Heritage).

With Trump Approval Numbers Up, New York Times Posits: It Must Be, “People Are Not Paying Attention”

It couldn’t be that they’re actually supportive of his agenda or optimistic about the direction of the nation. New York Times: Voters who have not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll…. Mr. Trump has traditionally done well with lower-information voters, so it is perhaps not surprising that they are more inclined to support his presidency. These voters are also notoriously difficult for pollsters to reach, making it challenging to track their exact impact. In total, about one-third of voters said they had not heard much about one or more of the major events of Mr. Trump’s first 100 days in office…. Voters were more likely to approve of how Mr. Trump is handling immigration if they had not heard much about the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia…. Voters who had not heard about this and other immigration-related cases were also more likely to say Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration had been about right or had not gone far enough (New York Times). Latest from Rasmussen: Trump at 51 percent approval (Rasmussen).

Young People: Back in Church

The Independent reports on a dramatic generational shift in—but not limited to—the UK: It was a different story 25 years ago when church leaders Sarah and Gareth arrived. Back then, 15 people would show up on a Sunday morning; these days, there are somewhere between 150 and 180 attendees every single week. This, in itself, feels a miraculous feat amid a wider trend that has seen Christianity in modern Britain stuck on a constant downward trajectory. But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is the number of young people who are going against the secular grain. Looking around on a Sunday morning, the demographics are wildly different from the expected cluster of silver-haired worshippers – instead, there’s a diverse spectrum comprised of teenagers, young adults and extended families with toddlers and kids zooming around, as well as people in their thirties, forties and every decade beyond. It’s a trend that is being seen far beyond the confines of this one church, according to new research (Independent). Recent research from the Bible Society: The Quiet Revival shows that men (13 per cent) are more likely to attend church than women (10 per cent). And as well church decline being reversed, the Church is also becoming more ethnically diverse, with one in five people (19 per cent) coming from an ethnic minority. Close to half of young Black people aged 18–34 (47 per cent) are now attending church at least monthly, according to The Quiet Revival. It’s also great to see that Bible reading and confidence in the Bible have increased as well as church growth. Some 67 per cent of churchgoing Christians read the Bible at least weekly outside church (Bible Society). Ruth Graham reported on the growing numbers of young men in American churches late last year. Her example comes from Waco, Texas: Grace Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, has not made a conscious effort to attract young men. It is an unremarkable size, and is in many ways an ordinary evangelical church. Yet its leaders have noticed for several years now that young men outnumber young women in their pews. When the church opened a small outpost in the nearby town of Robinson last year, 12 of the 16 young people regularly attending were men (New York Times).

10.

RIP: Michael Ledeen

“It is bittersweet that Michael, who was 83 when he died this morning, did not live long enough to see the Mullahs topple.” Ledeen was a stalwart voice against radical Islamist terrorism and the dangers of the Iranian mullahs. Eli Lake: It is bittersweet that Michael, who was 83 when he died this morning, did not live long enough to see the Mullahs topple. He used to joke that all he wanted was to be the mayor of Isfahan for a week in a free Iran. When Iran finally rids itself of its tyrants, I hope to be in that ancient city where I can raise a glass of red wine and light a cigar in honor of a great friend not only of America and its ideals, but of the Iranian people (New York Sun). David Goldman: Michael Ledeen, Baruch Dayan ha-Emet. My friend Michael Ledeen passed today, a wise, generous and courageous man who played many key roles in the victory over Communism. The generation that made the Reagan Revolution is nearly gone, and we have much need of their wisdom. Michael was a constant source of counsel and encouragement. He will be sorely missed (X).

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