Tangle - Biden's first year (a review).

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

One year ago today, President Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States of America. Today, we review where things are.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are doing something different. It's a special edition. It is a review of President Biden's first year in office. So without further ado, and without much to preempt this, we're just going to jump right in. One year ago today, President Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States of America. At the time of his inauguration, the country was still reeling

from January 6th. His opponent in 2020, former President Donald Trump, had just conceded the election, admitting that he wasn't going to serve a second term. The country was averaging about 195,000 new COVID-19 cases a day, still pushing through trillions of dollars of pandemic relief and bracing for the transition to a new administration. Around that time, I wrote a review of the Trump presidency. The premise for that review was similar to the premise we'll use for this one. What did President Biden promise? What did he run on? And what has he accomplished? Obviously, reviewing a presidency one year in is a lot different than reviewing a presidency

with a full four-year term completed. If I were to have graded Donald Trump's presidency after just one year, Tangle did not exist yet, it would have almost certainly been a much different review than it was by the time he left office. It's also worth pointing out that Biden is, in some ways, handicapped in a fashion Trump and former President Barack Obama weren't. He has thinner majorities in the Senate and the House than either of his predecessors did, meaning in simple terms, he had less political power to muscle through his agenda in year one. Regardless, it's worth taking stock of where we are. Three major pollsters in the last three days have had Biden's

disapproval rating at 56%, which is underwater by pretty much any measure. Politico and Morning Consult recently asked voters to grade Biden's first year and, like Trump, more voters gave him an F, 37%, than an A or B combined, 31%. Not only that, but in an associated press poll, just 28% of respondents said they want to see Biden run for re-election in 2024. That includes only 48% of Democrats. So that's not exactly a sterling report card. In this case, I'm going to start by evaluating some of Biden's main promises and then ranking them on the same promise meter I used for President Trump's review, a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating for a promise kept,

meaning it's completely fulfilled, and 1 being the lowest, meaning it was not fulfilled in any way. I am not trying to evaluate whether these are good or effective policies, but instead whether Biden accomplished what he said he would. For the sake of my email inbox, I'm just going to repeat that once more, since every time I do an issue like this, I inevitably end up getting people conflating a promise kept rating with me endorsing a policy. If I say Biden has kept his promise on something, I'm not saying I'm endorsing the policy, just that Biden has done what he said he would. Then I'll share some of the one-year anniversary commentary on Biden from the right and the left, and then my take. Today's podcast, like I said, is a special edition, but we've made it available

to everyone, so please spread the word. You can send this podcast to friends, post it on Twitter or Facebook. Whatever you do, just share it. It's a big help for us. All right, first up, we'll start with the granddaddy of them all, COVID-19. Biden made a lot of promises about coronavirus, so it's hard to encapsulate them all in one place. He'd promised we'd have normalcy by Christmas of 2021, a promise broken. That 100 million Americans would be vaccinated in his first 100 days, a promise broken. That 100 million Americans would be vaccinated in his first 100 days, a promise kept. That he'd get 1 billion tests distributed. He just launched a government website that will ship 500 million and then another 500 million later in his presidency. Fundamentally, though, Biden's central promise related to coronavirus was to get the pandemic

under control. It's hard to see this promise as anything but broken. The country was averaging less than 200,000 COVID-19 cases a day when Biden became president. Today, we're averaging over 700,000, and more people have died of COVID-19 during Biden's time in office than in Trump's. Over 1,000 people are still dying of COVID-19 a day. Of course, like I said during the Trump presidency, I have a hard time laying this responsibility at the feet of a day. Of course, like I said during the Trump presidency, I have a hard time laying this responsibility at the feet of a president. The timeline of the vaccine rollout also happened more quickly than I expected, something both Trump and Biden deserve credit for. So some points are

scored there. COVID-19, though, has tripped up every world leader there is, and Biden is no exception. The Promise Meter score is a 3 out of 10 on coronavirus. Next up is the economy. Tied very closely to the pandemic were promises about the economy. President Biden assured Americans he would pass a wave of pandemic relief legislation, a promise kept, help state and local governments cover shortfalls, a promise kept, and support small businesses with packages to stay afloat, a promise kept. Generally speaking, he said his administration would address the COVID-19 pandemic and thus help bring down the unemployment numbers and revive the economy. So far, many of those promises have been kept, though not without some major caveats. The unemployment rate is once again

below 4%, and Biden oversaw consecutive months of job growth. However, inflation has also spiked, wiping out wage gains for many workers, and the economy has gone through fits of labor shortages and supply chain issues. In other words, Biden has kept many of his specific promises on the economy, but his general promise that Americans would be in a better place now than they were a year ago is not reflected in how Americans are feeling about the He gets stock pretty significantly for that. His promise meter score on the economy is a 5 out of 10. Next up is infrastructure. Biden promised to pass a sweeping infrastructure bill that would invest in roads, bridges, waterways, and better prepare the country for the impacts of climate change.

He said he'd get Republicans on board, and he said it'd be historic. On this, he basically hit every note he said he would. It may be the easiest of all the promises to evaluate. The infrastructure package allocated nearly $2 trillion and in just about every way ended up as a historic piece of legislation that enjoys widespread support from the public and from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. His promise meter on infrastructure is a 10 out of 10. The next issue Biden made big promises on was reopening schools. When Biden took office, one of the biggest issues facing the country was the prevalence of remote schooling. Most grade school children were still in remote classes, and Biden leaned into a campaign promise to reverse this trend. Throughout his time campaigning, Biden focused a lot of his energy on

K-8 schools specifically. Heading into 2022, this campaign promise was mostly accomplished. The majority of schools across the country were back to in-person learning, or at least operating on a hybrid schedule. However, the Omicron surge over the holidays led many schools to delay reopenings, either due to teacher shortages or concerns about the spread of COVID-19. As president, Biden never had direct authority to fulfill this promise. It was almost entirely tied to whether the country could slow the spread of COVID-19, which it hasn't. But things are still much improved from the time he was inaugurated.

Some estimates put the number at over 90% of schools nationwide back to in-person learning. Omicron and the teacher shortages complicated things in early 2022, but there is no doubt we're in a much better place now than a year ago. Biden's promise meter on reopening schools is a 7 out of 10. What about unifying the country? From the campaign trail to his victory speech, Biden made a promise to unify the country. Mostly, he focused on attempts to pass bipartisan legislation and to turn the temperature down from the Trump years, an effort to unify rather than divide. Of all the issues in this newsletter, this is probably the

hardest one to grade. For one, it's a little bit abstract. How do we measure unification? Biden's approval rating? In this case, his approval rating has tanked, but doesn't that mean we all kind of agree? What about polls showing happiness about the country or optimism about the future? Or legislation passed on a bipartisan basis or support among Republicans and independents who didn't vote for him. Anecdotally, my feeling is that Biden has turned the temperature down quite a bit from the days of Trump. With fewer Twitter ramblings and over-the-top hyperbolic language about Democrats in the media being the enemy of the country, it feels like things are a bit calmer.

But plenty of Republicans or Trump supporters I've talked to feel the opposite, that Biden has broken his promises to work across the aisle or unify the country by shifting far to the left. There's also the fact that Biden hasn't even unified his own party. In fact, Democrats are more divided now than they were when he took office, with party fractures along progressive and moderate lines pronounced, and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema essentially operating in their own bubbles. I'm not really sure how one could even make the argument the country is more unified now. It's not really a promise I ever thought Biden could keep, but I certainly don't think he has. His promise meter on unifying the country is a 1 out of 10. Next up is criminal justice reform. The fundamental beliefs of Biden's criminal justice plans are still live

on his campaign website. We can and must reduce the number of people incarcerated in this country while also reducing crime, it says. Our criminal justice system cannot be just unless we root out the racial, gender, and income-based disparities in the system. Our criminal justice system must be focused on redemption and rehabilitation. No one should be profiteering off of our criminal justice system. These are big, broad, admirable goals, but they were tied to real policy ideas that, for the most part, have not been acted on. Biden promised to decriminalize marijuana, end cash bail, and end mandatory minimum sentences. Politico rates all three of these promises as stalled, which is their second

lowest rating behind promises broken. Biden's promise to study reparations is also stalled. Criminal justice reform activists are growing impatient. The House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in March, but the bill hasn't had much movement since. Bipartisan efforts to put new federal regulations on policing have fallen apart. The Justice Department banned chokeholds, restricted no-knock warrants, and expanded body camera requirements for federal agents. The department also says it is still committed to ending the use of private prisons and no longer asks federal prosecutors to seek out the harshest penalties. Frankly, though, with the pandemic, economic issues, and infrastructure as a major focus, it was probably never realistic to expect sweeping criminal justice reform to break through in the first

year of a Biden presidency. It just wasn't the central tenet of what he ran on, which was a major focus on the pandemic. So, for now, this has gone almost entirely unfulfilled, but I wouldn't be surprised to see him spend some political capital here in the next year. His promise meter on criminal justice reform is a 2 out of 10. Next up is climate change. Addressing climate change was front and center throughout Biden's campaign. On this, he's had more wiggle room to use his executive authority, and he has not been shy. One of the first things he did in office was rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement.

In late December, the Environmental Protection Agency acted on Biden's demand to release ambitious new fuel economy standards. That means carmakers' fleets will have to average 40 miles per gallon by 2026. The infrastructure bill was also threaded with climate change policy, including an expansion of electric vehicle charging stations and our mass transit systems, including an expansion of electric vehicle charging stations and our mass transit systems, which are viewed favorably by environmentalists. He also rescinded the Keystone oil pipeline permit, protected the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and has embraced all sorts of policy proposals to reduce harmful chemicals like hydrofluorocarbons.

A huge chunk of Biden's climate policy relies on Build Back Better passing. And with that bill dead in the water, Biden is going to have to break it up and push through elements of what he would have included. He's also broken his promise to ban new oil and gas leases on federal lands and offshore waters, though he has proposed reforms to the system we have now. His promise to ban new fracking is caught up in legal battles. All in all, Biden has probably done more on climate change than he gets credit for after just one year, but there's a lot more on the docket too. He's certainly following through on making a priority, and he's already scored some pretty big important wins. Biden's promise meter on climate change is a 6 out of 10. One of the more

popular promises Biden made for young people was a pledge to forgive at least $10,000 in federal student loans per student. Reforming student loans and canceling large portions of debt became a pretty central tenet of Biden's economic promises for young people. So far, though, it's been a mixed bag. On the one hand, Biden has kept federal student debt payments on pause for his entire first year. In other words, nobody has had to pay a dime of federal student loans while Biden was president, which is a pretty good notch in the promised kept department. The pause is scheduled right now to be lifted in May. His administration has also focused a ton on programs that already exist to relieve borrowers. The education department erased over $5 billion in debt for more than 300,000 borrowers

with disabilities. Students who have been defrauded by for-profit schools are getting full relief after many half measures were executed under the Trump administration. And the public service loan forgiveness program, which forgives debt after 10 years of public service and is, quote, notoriously stingy, as NPR put it, has loosened its rules and more aggressively helps students forego loans. All told, as NPR put it, has loosened its rules and more aggressively helped students forego loans. All told, the Biden administration says it has discharged or is in the process of discharging $12.7 billion in student debt that covers more than 638,000 borrowers. On the other hand, Biden's promise to forgive at least $10,000 for millions of others

is still totally unfulfilled. Given that this was his central unexplicit promise, it's hard to rate him too high on this issue, even though he's made a lot of progress in the student loan space. Given the changes above and the fact that student loan payments remain paused, I think Biden deserves a good bit of credit here for the work done in year one, even with that promise largely unfulfilled. So his promise muted on student loans is a 5 out of 10. Next up is ending our wars in the Middle East. One of the promises very few people thought Biden would keep was his pledge to end forever wars in Afghanistan and across the Middle East. Past presidents, including both Trump and Barack Obama, made similar pledges. Neither actually

followed through. Ironically, Biden did follow through in a big way, and it may have been one of the most costly few weeks of his presidency. Ever since the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which dominated the news for weeks as chaotic scenes on the ground went viral and the Taliban took over a fleeing Afghan government, Biden's approval ratings have fallen and not recovered. There's also the fact that Biden has basically ended America's drone war, something nobody seems to have noticed. While we are, quote, officially out of Afghanistan, we're still giving financial aid. And when it comes to Biden's other big promises, like terminating the U.S. involvement in the Yemen civil war,

things are a lot less rosy. In November, Biden announced the administration was going to sell another $650 million worth of Airda missiles to Saudi Arabia. What's interesting about this rating is that Biden's fulfilled promise, a withdrawal from Afghanistan, earns him major points without really addressing the fact that many viewed that withdrawal as a chaotic disaster. Still, I think it's fair to give him some big points for the Afghanistan withdrawal and the end of the drone wars. His promise meter on wars overseas is an 8 out of 10. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis

Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu Thank you. Another category worth considering is Biden's anti-Trump promises. This one is a little bit harder to decipher, but I think it's a good bucket to include.

Core to Biden's entire message when he was running for office was, I'm not Trump. This was a major reason suburban swing voters, independents, and moderate Republicans swung to Biden in 2020. There was just a general promise that Biden was going to undo some of the things Trump did and, generally speaking, not act like the other guy. Of course, attitude-wise, this is a bit harder to gauge. Biden's online presence is obviously much different from Trump's, and he takes a different posture with the media and his colleagues in Congress. But on a policy level, there were some but on a policy level, there were some decidedly anti-Trump changes Biden promised that we can check in on. Let's start with what he has not done. He promised to roll back Trump's 2017 corporate

tax cuts, which he hasn't. He promised to implement a more humane asylum system on the border, but little has changed for migrants crossing from Mexico. He promised to raise the refugee cap from $15,000 under Trump to $125,000, but he hasn't come close. It's at $62,500 now. He promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal that Trump pulled out of, but so far, talks have not progressed. He has ended funding for the border wall, the family separation policy on the border, travel restrictions from Muslim-majority countries, and reversed the ban on transgender people joining the military. Many of the other policy advancements above were also decidedly anti-Trump, but I don't think

Biden's administration has distinguished itself from the former president nearly as much as he hoped it would. So his promise meter on being anti-Trump, we put it at a 4 out of 10. The last section we're going to talk about is the long-term goals. This final bucket for promises from Biden are things that I would consider long-term reforms. These are not small issues, in fact they're some of the biggest core issues of his presidency. Voting rights, health care reform, and the child tax credit are all at the top of mind. But they are issues so vast and complex that Biden was unlikely to resolve them in his first year, though I do think it's important to take stock of where things are. Health care is a good example to start with. Biden promised to offer a public health insurance option like Medicare.

This is the kind of policy that's one of the hardest things to draft in politics, and it was never going to come to fruition in year one. But Biden did make some historic improvements to Obamacare and the American Rescue Plan. That bill expanded federal subsidies and increased subsidy amounts for millions of middle-income and low-income Americans, marking the largest expansion of the Affordable Care Act since it came into law. We've also seen an end of surprise medical billing and the Biden administration's stop Medicaid work requirements. These were all core promises from the Biden administration. In the meantime, he's failed to lower prescription drug prices because most of that legislation is

part of Build Back Better. On voting rights, Biden is similarly jammed up. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has support from just one Republican in the Senate, so Biden's effort to update the Voting Rights Act is basically stuck. Last night, Democrats failed to change the filibuster rules to advance that bill. Far from advancing the kinds of voting rights Democrats support, Biden has instead overseen an era where dozens of Republican-run states are pushing through voting rights legislation Democrats oppose. Finally, the child tax credit was one of the crowning achievements of the Biden presidency, but now it has lapsed and it's unclear how or if it will

become law again. Reducing child poverty, the cost of parenting, and encouraging families to have kids was something the Biden administration was adamant on doing. Expanding the child tax credit was a great way to check all those boxes, and a couple months ago it might have been one of the most important parts of Biden's year one legacy. Now though, with it lapsed, it's unclear what the future holds. None of these issues are getting a promise meter rating, but they all felt worth acknowledging. All right, so after checking in on some of the Biden presidencies, we're going to move over to some brief commentary from the right and the left on Biden's first year in office. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying.

Unsurprisingly, the right has been quite critical of Biden's first year. The Wall Street Journal expressed dismay that Biden was full steam ahead despite being an unpopular president. As for the coming year, Mr. Biden is still pitching his Build Back Better plan, the board wrote. The only concession to political reality is that he will have to break it up as he tries to bully it through the Senate. He still wants a big tax increase, and he is still pushing the fiction that BBB won't add to the federal deficit. Most dispiriting is that Mr. Biden remains hostage to his fantasy narrative on voter suppression. He even refused to say November's election will be legitimate, which is not unlike his predecessor,

and he continues to say Republicans don't want minorities to vote. If Americans were offended by his rhetoric last week in Georgia, comparing his opponents to Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor, well, Mr. Biden said, the fault is with those who misunderstood what he meant. Charles Cook called it Biden's year of failure. The president blows the Afghanistan withdrawal and his poll numbers crater in response, Cook wrote. The president chases an agenda that he knows lacks the requisite votes. The agenda goes down in flames. The president issues an order that he's acknowledged as a violation of the law. that order is nixed by the Supreme Court. The president terrifies a close ally, that ally expresses its disgust. And on and on it goes,

as if gravity itself were in play. Action meet reaction. Biden's apologists like to excuse their charges shortcomings by pointing to the poison chalice he was handed, Cook added. And sure enough, this president did inherit an unenviable landscape. On the day that Biden became president, COVID was still raging, inflation was beginning to materialize, the global supply chain was showing signs of interruption, crime was on the rise, and the debt had hit record levels. The trouble is, Biden has been president for a full year, and COVID is still raging, inflation is now at its highest level since 1982, full year and COVID is still raging, inflation is now at its highest level since 1982, the global supply chain remains interrupted and crime somehow has worsened. As for the national debt, we are worse off than ever before. All right, so that's a little commentary from the right.

And now here's what the left is saying. Unsurprisingly, the left has some mixed feelings about Biden's presidency. Some are hoping for a reset of sorts, while others emphasize the hand he was dealt or point to the accomplishments he made and emphasize how much worse things would have been if Trump were still president. The Washington Post said Biden's presidency could use a reset, but also emphasized how lucky we are to have him. To be clear, Americans should be grateful every day that Mr. Biden is in office rather than former President Donald Trump and the band of incompetents who used to run the government, the board said.

One can only imagine how much worse off the country would be if Mr. Trump were still dispensing bizarre medical advice from the White House, running a Russia-friendly foreign policy as the Kremlin prepares to invade Ukraine, or continuing to deny climate change. Mr. Biden has also restored integrity to the Oval Office, neither lying nor abusing his authority the way Mr. Trump did. And the President can claim some important accomplishments. Most Americans are vaccinated. His COVID-19 aid bill

alleviated child poverty during the worst of the pandemic. The country is only beginning to see the benefits of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that will fund massive investments in green energy, highway, bridges, and rail, which passed under his leadership. In Slate, Jordan Weissman said Biden picked a tough time to become president. For starters, the pandemic had a lot more fight left in it than people anticipated, even after the emergence of the Delta variant, he wrote. As far as late June, experts seem to think that the new, more contagious addition of the coronavirus would lead to hyper-regionalized outbreaks mostly affecting communities with low

vaccination rates. This turned out to be true to an extent. Alabama and Florida got walloped a lot harder than New York and Massachusetts, for instance. But we still ended up with a nationwide wave that crushed hopes of a quick return to normalcy. Then there was the Afghanistan pullout, which seemed to have put a permanent dent in Biden's approval rating. To some extent, Biden had nothing but bad choices when it came to America's longest war. Of course, there was inflation. You can debate the extent to which this was a self-inflicted injury and whether the administration should have seen it coming. You can go on and on about it for thousands of words, as I have.

Suffice it to say, the American Rescue Plan stimulus checks probably exasperated things since so many families spent the money shopping and overwhelming the world's supply chains in the process, helping proving those of us who were doubtful inflation would become a serious issue very wrong. But some of the most acute supply chain problems, such as the lingering semiconductor shortage that's hamstrung auto industry production, have been entirely out of Biden's hands. All right, so that's it for what the right and left is saying, which brings us to my take. So it's just still so early. That's kind of one of the overarching reactions I have when watching this presidency and the commentary that's come with it. We are one year in and people are already talking about

who's going to run in 2024, whether Biden's agenda is dead in the water, or how much more he could have gotten done before a presumed 2022 midterm wipeout. Of course, there's some truth to all that stuff. Democrats don't really have an obvious backup plan if Biden doesn't run in 2024. Biden's agenda does seem to be entirely stalled in Congress, and if his approval ratings don't budge, Democrats will get obliterated in the midterms. But a lot can happen in a year. A lot has happened in this last year. What's most dispiriting for me personally, as someone who has mixed feelings about Biden's agenda, is that the Biden presidency wins I was most happy about have somehow turned into things that are

emblematic of his presidency's fits. The child tax credit expansion is a policy I strongly supported and was thrilled to see become law, only for it to lapse. The pullout from Afghanistan was something I called for before and supported after, but now it's mostly considered a story of incompetence and failure. The fact over 90% of American adults now have at least one vaccine shot is beyond my wildest expectations. Yet, COVID-19 is still upending everyday life and spreading like wildfire. I will say, though, that the uniformly negative reviews of Biden's presidency have surprised me. One could easily look at the anger on the progressive left and in conservative media and conclude that Biden is actually closer to running, quote, in the center than some people imagine. Given some of the

achievements on climate change issues, health care, and anti-war policies, one might imagine progressives would be thrilled with Biden, but they really don't seem to be. Meanwhile, you'd think that a massive infrastructure bill, unapologetic advocacy to reopen schools, and a constant celebration of capitalism would earn some credo among at least 5 or 10 percent of Republicans, but it hasn't. Instead, Biden's first year has been defined in the press mostly by his misses on major sweeping progressive policy, inflation, a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, and of course the persistence of COVID-19. If you're on the left, I think one good thought experiment to recognize how much worse things could be is imagining if Democrats had not

swept the Georgia Senate race. Everyone seems to forget Democrats were this close to not even having a 50-50 split in the Senate, and if they had failed in either of those races, the picture would be decidedly more grim for left-of-center politics than it is right now. The truth is, Biden's first year is about what I would have expected. He certainly cleaned Trump out on a national popular vote level, but Democrats have thin majorities in the House and a split Senate. This is not the stuff of a mandate, and yet Biden promised and often acted like it was. There were plenty of self-inflicted wounds, like stubbornly believing Manchin or Sinema were going to fold on filibuster rules or the Build Back Better plan that the president could have avoided. And if he's willing to internalize those errors, there's plenty of

room to move forward on his agenda. Breaking up Build Back Better and focusing on a permanent child tax credit, health care expansion, and climate change would win back a lot of Democratic support. The options on criminal justice reform, an issue best solved locally, were always fairly limited. But from a purely political perspective, legalizing cannabis would probably be a huge win for the president. Reforming the Electoral Count Act would be a bipartisan slam dunk, and then pursuing a more robust voting rights reform package is probably something Biden could get a few Republicans to join him on, though it'd have to be pretty skinny to pass Senate without a filibuster change. In other words, there are a lot of options for Biden. I don't think his agenda is doomed,

and I don't think his presidency has been quite the disaster many on both sides have portrayed it. But it'd be foolish to call this first year anything but rocky. foolish to call this first year anything but rocky. Alright so that is a wrap on our Biden first year, one year review. Before we let you go, I want to issue a quick correction. A silly one. In yesterday's newsletter, I said that the 190 year old tortoise, Jonathan, had become the oldest land mammal in the world. I meant to write land animal obviously since tortoises aren't mammals they're reptiles. This is inarguably one of the silliest corrections in Tangle history which is why I took the unusual never before seen step of placing it at the end of today's issue and not the beginning. I didn't think it

would be totally appropriate to start off a one-year Biden review with a correction about a turtle, but yeah. So this is the 51st Tangle correction in our 130-week history and the first correction since January 6th. I track corrections and usually place them at the top of the podcast in an effort to maximize transparency with listeners. All right, everybody, that is it for our review really quick before you go i just want to encourage you to please if you are not yet a tangle subscriber go subscribe pull over your car stop doing the dishes go to readtangle.com backslash membership click one of the links in our podcast description and become a subscriber. Your monthly or yearly support, which can be as cheap as $4.16 a month, which is about 13 cents a day, is basically all that keeps this podcast running and the newsletter running. We have very little ads. I know we're

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Who knows? Have a good one. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. So based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown.

When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot.

Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages 6 months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed.