Trump looks younger though, thanks to the spray tan orange and died hair. Trump would look Biden's age if he didn't do those things, and I think that's part of the reason why he does it.
Yes, Joe Biden Is Old. Is That All Republicans Have to Run On?
- Thread starter bnew
- Start date
Trump has the luxury of low expectations too
Biden needs to go home and be a family grandpa. Whole family is messing including the dogs
daemonova
hit it, & I didn't go Erykah Badu crazy, #yallmad
It's never going to happen, they been taking about this for twenty years, Americans love their car too much. And too many industries make their living off the over reliance on cars.
Biden to Big Pharma: Gouge Prices and We’ll Snatch Your Patents
Under a 43-year-old law, the feds can revoke drug patents if the company acts against the public interest. Will Biden be the first to try?
newrepublic.com
Biden to Big Pharma: Gouge Prices and We’ll Snatch Your Patents
Under a 43-year-old law, the feds can revoke drug patents if the company acts against the public interest. Will Biden be the first to try?
DAN KITWOOD/WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES
When Joe Biden was elected president, Medicare was barred by law from negotiating the prices it paid for the drugs it purchased with taxpayer dollars. For a generation, presidential candidates of both parties had pledged to kill the “noninterference clause” that was the price Big Pharma extracted in 2003 from President George W. Bush to extend Medicare coverage to drugs (“Medicare Part D”). Last year, Biden finally got rid of the noninterference clause as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and in October, the Health and Human Services Department announced that negotiations had begun on prices for 10 drugs that represent about 20 percent of all drugs covered under Medicare Part D. Changing the law to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices was, as Biden would say, a Big fukking Deal. If you’re one of those people who tells pollsters that Biden has done a poor job managing the economy, Medicare price negotiation is one of the better examples that prove you wrong.
Now, Politico’s Adam Cancryn reported Wednesday, the Biden administration is in the early stages of curbing excessive prices for drugs purchased not only by government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare but also in the private market. This time, Biden doesn’t need to pass a law because Congress gave the executive branch that power way back in December 1980, in legislation co-sponsored by Senators Robert Dole, Republican of Kansas, and Birch Bayh, Democrat of Indiana. It was a swan song of sorts for Bayh, whose distinguished 18-year term as a leading light of American liberalism had been cut short one month earlier by the November election, which gave Republicans their first Senate majority since 1955. In one of modern U.S. political history’s unkindest cuts, Bayh lost to Dan Quayle. That election also installed Ronald Reagan in the White House and initiated an era of political reaction from which Biden has been struggling to break free.
The post–New Deal shift toward conservatism, people tend to forget, actually began under President Jimmy Carter, who boosted defense spending, lowered the capital gains tax, and initiated (in collaboration with Ted Kennedy and Ralph Nader) deregulation of the airline and trucking industries. Carter’s course correction became, under Reagan, a violent pendulum swing to the right. The Bayh-Dole Act was one of the Carter era’s more judicious market-friendly policies. Since World War II, the federal government, following recommendations from Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 report Science, the Endless Frontier, had created the National Science Foundation, expanded the National Institutes of Health, and ramped up investment in research and development. But much of this research was bottled up in national laboratories and universities; fewer than 5 percent of the federal government’s 28,000 patents were licensed to private companies. The Bayh-Dole Act addressed this bottleneck by allowing universities, nonprofits, and small businesses to patent federally funded inventions; President Ronald Reagan later extended the same rights, by presidential memorandum, to all federal contractors. The law also allowed federal agencies to grant businesses exclusive licenses to technology developed by the government. The result was an explosion in innovation that, by one estimate, helped increase the gross domestic product over the past generation by $333 billion to $1 trillion.
Bayh-Dole was never intended, though, to write industry a blank check. The government retained “march-in” rights to seize back a license or patent if warranted by circumstances that included health and safety but were otherwise defined only vaguely in the legislation. This being the dawn of the Reagan era, however, those march-in rights were never exercised. For the first 17 years after enactment nobody bothered to file a petition to march in; the first, in 1997, was filed by Bayh himself (on behalf of a lobby client). It alleged that “unreasonably high royalties” were being charged by the patent holder of a medical device used to assist in bone marrow transplants. Since then, about a dozen petitions have been filed, nearly all concerning drugs. The petitions typically complain that a patent holder is either not manufacturing a sufficient quantity of a drug or charging an excessive price. None of these petitions has ever been granted. As recently as March, NIH rejected a march-in petition to seize the patent for Xtandi, a Pfizer drug for the treatment of prostate cancer. The petition alleged that the drug, which retails for $150,000 per year, was priced too high.
Drug prices, you may have noticed, are going through the roof. Even as the consumer price index, or CPI, settles down to a congenial 3.2 percent, prescription drug prices rocket upward. According to a November analysis by the Center for American Progress, those drugs whose prices are rising are doing so at a rate that exceeds the CPI, on average, by 30 percent. For some drugs, price increases exceeded the CPI by a factor of five. How many of these drugs were developed using federal dollars? Very likely all of them. The Food and Drug Administration approved 210 new drugs between 2010 and 2016; NIH funding contributed to research underlying every last one of them.
Why didn’t the government use Bayh-Dole to rein in drug prices before? A major obstacle was uncertainty about whether price gouging was ever intended to be one of the conditions permitting the government to snatch back a patent. In 2002, Peter Arno, professor of epidemiology and social medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Michael Davis, professor of law at Cleveland State University in Ohio, argued in a Washington Post op-ed that of course Congress intended pricing to be taken into account. Dole and Bayh then replied, in a Washington Post op-ed of their own, that
Big Pharma cites this as a conversation-ender, sort of like Woody Allen’s Marshall McLuhan triumph in Annie Hall (“You know nothing of my work”). But Bayh and Dole’s op-ed had already been contradicted by Bayh himself filing a march-in petition five years earlier based, as noted above, on pricing (“unreasonably high royalties”). If Bayh really believed, along with Dole, that pricing was irrelevant to Bayh-Dole, he had a funny way of showing it.
On Thursday, the Biden administration announced that a review initiated last March by the Departments of Health and Human Services and Commerce concluded that, contrary to a rule proposed by the Trump administration but never finalized by the Biden administration, “price can be a factor in determining that a drug or other taxpayer-funded invention is not accessible to the public.” (Italics mine.) According to Politico, the Biden administration isn’t targeting any particular drug, and it isn’t expected to; so far, the policy seems intended mainly to put drug companies on notice that if they price drugs derived from federal research too prohibitively, they’ll risk the feds finally imposing the punishment Bayh and Dole authorized 43 years ago.
An August poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that three in 10 adults said they took less medicine than prescribed in order to save on costs. Twenty-one percent said they didn’t fill the prescription at all, and 12 percent said they cut the pills in half. More affluent adults reported doing this less, but even in households earning $90,000 or more, about one-quarter said they cut corners one way or another to save money. Taxpayers have spent literally hundreds of billions to develop these drugs, and they didn’t do it to make drug companies rich. They did it to help sick people get the medications they need to get well, and sometimes just to stay alive. With his more aggressive new policy, Biden is reminding Big Pharma of this fact, and warning that if it pushes its luck he will lower the boom. It’s a shame neither Bayh nor Dole lived to see this proud moment.
Redwood
Superstar
Both are old regardless 
This was a weak argument.
This was a weak argument.
Notice the gop can’t talk about the economy, jobs or inflation.. so what they pivot too migrants and open borders lmaoooBoth are old regardless
This was a weak argument.
They're basically running on Biden is Old and the president needs to be an alpha male like Trump and that's enough for their base.
Former FBI informant charged with lying about Biden business
Charges come amid pitched accusations from Republicans in Congress over alleged informants
By Devlin Barrettand
Jacqueline Alemany
Updated February 15, 2024 at 7:14 p.m. EST|Published February 15, 2024 at 5:11 p.m. EST
Special counsel David Weiss — who has previously filed criminal charges against President Biden’s son Hunter — announced new charges Thursday against a former FBI informant who officials say lied about the Bidens’ business dealings.
The indictment returned by a grand jury in Los Angeles accuses Alexander Smirnov of making a false statement and creating a false and fictitious record. The charges amount to a stark rebuke of conservatives, particularly Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, who touted Smirnov’s claims as he and other Republican lawmakers tried to build a corruption case against the president and his family.
Smirnov, 43, is described in charging documents as a former confidential human source for the FBI who gave agents false information in 2020 about a prominent political figure and his son. The description of the two individuals matches that of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and a person familiar with the matter said those are the individuals about whom Smirnov lied. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
Smirnov allegedly reported to an FBI agent in 2017 that he had a phone call with the owner of the Ukrainian firm Burisma, in which it was discussed that “Public Official 1’s son, was a member of Burisma’s Board.” The fact that Hunter Biden served on the company’s board was publicly known at the time.
In 2020, the indictment alleges, Smirnov brought new claims to the bureau, including that he knew of conversations from 2015 or 2016 in which Burisma executives said they hired the son “to protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems.” Those claims by Smirnov were false, the indictment alleges.
Comer and other congressional Republicans spent months arguing that the FBI informant’s claims were evidence that Hunter Biden — and by extension his father — engaged in corrupt business deals, and that the FBI did not pursue those claims.
Thursday’s indictment implicitly argues that some of the most sensational charges Republicans have sought to level against the president and his son were based on lies.
Smirnov, according to the indictment, “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against Public Official 1, the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against Public Official 1 and his candidacy.”
Authorities allege that Smirnov, in talking to his FBI handler, repeatedly expressed dislike for Joe Biden, and at one point texted the agent that Biden was “going to jail.”
In a written statement, Comer stood by his role in the Smirnov affair, saying “the FBI’s actions in this matter are very concerning.” Comer also criticized the FBI for not being more forthcoming in what it knew about Smirnov’s claims, though it is rare for agents engaged in sensitive criminal and national security investigations to share informant accounts with elected officials.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the indictment shows that “Republicans have built their conspiracies about Hunter and his family on lies told by people with political agendas, not facts. We were right, and the air is out of their balloon.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said the charges against Smirnov show GOP efforts to impeach the president are “based on a lie” and called on House Republicans to drop the inquiry.
The Washington Post reported last spring that an FBI document containing the informant’s claims was previously reviewed by the FBI under then-Attorney General William P. Barr, found not to be supported by facts, and subsequently dropped. When Comer’s team demanded to see the document, FBI officials warned that wider disclosure of the information could jeopardize the safety of a confidential source.
For a number of reasons, it is rare for the FBI to charge one of its informants with lying. First, the bureau tries to encourage people with important information to come forward, sometimes at great risk to themselves, and arresting some of the people who do so might discourage others from becoming informants. Second, many agents tend to view informants as frequently wrong or dishonest and don’t think it is worth trying to build a criminal case out of those flaws.
But in Smirnov’s case, Republicans made his allegations a kind of cause célèbre, saying he had offered key information in their probe of Hunter Biden and the president. FBI officials were repeatedly forced to answer politicians’ questions about Smirnov’s claims and faced accusations from conservatives that the FBI itself may be corrupt.
U.S. authorities said that when agents questioned Smirnov again in 2023, he repeated some past false claims, changed other parts of his story and suggested new falsehoods after claiming to have met with Russian officials.
Smirnov was arrested at a Las Vegas airport on Wednesday, when he flew into the United States from overseas, the Justice Department said.
Weiss, who brought the indictment against Smirnov, is the U.S. attorney in Delaware and was appointed to that position during the Trump administration. His investigation of Hunter Biden began during the Trump administration as well.
Last year, Weiss asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint him as a special counsel, which formally gave him more independence in charging decisions. He subsequently charged Hunter Biden in Delaware with lying on gun purchase forms years ago. Weiss has also charged Hunter Biden in federal court in Los Angeles with multiple tax crimes.
The dual indictments of Hunter Biden, filed after a plea deal fell apart last year, mean that he could end up going on trial later this year — potentially twice — as his father runs for a second term as president.
Bu bu bu the crime family 