Conservatives condemned for sharing misleading edited videos of Obama event – latest

Even as many on the right work hard to misrepresent it as a humiliating encounter for the sitting president, yesterday’s event featuring Barack Obama and Joe Biden made it obvious that the two of them in fact do share more than a measure of mutual respect and affection.

Here’s a sample of what went on between them…

The Biden administration’s sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine continue to tighten, and according to a briefing this morning, they are now closing in on the families of the country’s top officials.

A top Biden administration official told reporters this morning that Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov will see their families punished as part of a new package of measures meant to “dramatically escalate” the “financial shock” that the US believes is pushing the Russian economy to the point of breakdown.

Andrew Feinberg has the story.

As Joe Biden remains under pressure from his party to cancel as much federal student loan debt as possible, his administration has once again pushed back the deadline for the resumption of payments frozen during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is the sixth time the deadline’s been moved, and will give debtors until at least 31 August.

Mr Biden has previously said he supports cancelling the debt altogether through congressional action, but his critics on the left say he has the power to do so unilaterally via executive action.

Josh Marcus has the story.

The Republican line on Ukraine, Russia and Vladimir Putin is still somewhat unclear, but the party’s more pugilistic members are sticking to one predictable version of events: blaming the unilateral Russian attack on an American ally on Joe Biden.

Ted Cruz took that line this week on Fox News, telling Sean Hannity that Mr Biden “caused this war” by waiving sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – which in fact never became operational.

Read more below.

Longtime Trump-watcher Aaron Rupar, whose monitoring of the former president and Fox News has made him a must-follow over the last several years, has called out two of Fox News’s most-watched hosts for screening a misleading clip from yesterday’s White House event to smear Joe Biden as a failed, embarrassing president.

HuffPost has been trying to pin down Republican members of the Judiciary Committee to give their definitions of a woman. Ms Brown Jackson declined to answer that question on the grounds that she’s not a biologist – but some of the GOP-ers who’ve railed against her for holding back have struggled in response to the same question.

Here’s a particularly chaotic answer from Josh Hawley. And the full piece is more than worth a read…

Deutsche Bank has issued a stark forecast for the near future of the US economy, predicting that the country will fall into recession next year. Stocks will fall 20 per cent by next summer, says the bank, and unemployment – currently at a remarkable low – will rise by more than a percentage point in the next two years.

Coming from a bank, these specific predictions are unlikely to cut through the news cycle to everyday Americans, but the electorate’s attitude to the economy is hardly optimistic as things stand.

The Biden administration is stepping up its supplies of lethal aid to Ukraine, and is allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding to the country’s government and military as they fight back against the Russian assault.

Below, State Department spokesperson Ned Price announces a new package of “security assistance” destined for the US’s eastern European ally.

Teenage shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha in 2020, has long complained that Joe Biden bracketed him with “white supremacists” in a campaign ad – and is now hitting out at the president over the intensifying probe into his son’s alleged financial misconduct.

The White House yesterday announced a “whole-of-government effort to prevent, detect, and treat Long Covid”, with plans including research into the condition’s causes and impacts not only on individuals but across populations. Long Covid has affected many people previously able to work to the point where they effectively have a new disability, meaning they may be entitled to new rights of which they’re unaware.

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