Found her issue
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has not found much traction in her bid to become the 2020 Democratic nominee for president in November, but she finally may have picked the right issue. If elected, she would release previously classified information on unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
"I think we don't know enough ... I don't know what's happened, not just with that sighting (a Navy fighter pilot's 2014 story of chasing a UFO on the West Coast), but with others," she told the editorial board of the Conway, New Hampshire, Daily Sun. "And I think one of the things a president could do is to look into what's there in terms of what does the science say; what does our military say.
"Here's the interesting part of that answer is that some of this stuff is really old," Klobuchar added, suggesting some of it could be released.
"So, why can't you see if you can let some of that out for the public so earnest journalists ... who are trying to get to the bottom of the truth would be able to see it?"
Problems mount
Hunter Biden, the son of 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden, apparently collected at least $708,302 while he was serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company from 2014 to 2019, but he still owes the Internal Revenue Service $112,805 in federal taxes for 2015, according to records the Daily Caller News Foundation obtained.
That is in addition to the previous drug problems, relationship with his late brother's former wife and recent paternity of a child with a former Arkansas stripper on the ledger of the younger son of the former vice president.
The IRS issued the previously unreported lien against the younger Biden and his now ex-wife, Kathleen, in November 2018.
"We have made a demand for payment of this liability, but it remains unpaid," the IRS stated in the lien notice, which it filed with the Washington, D.C., Recorder of Deeds. "Therefore, there is a lien in favor of the United States on all property and rights to property belonging to this taxpayer for the amount of these taxes."
Since the filing, no corresponding lien release has been filed with the Washington, D.C., Recorder of Deeds.
A Washington, D.C.-specific tax lien against the former couple for $48,929 for unpaid income taxes was issued in 2015 but was released in August 2017.
Biden said in a November court document he is unemployed and has had no monthly income since May.
Happy new lie
A last-day-of-the-year tweet from Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein was a repeat of fake news found in a 9-month-old Washington Post article.
The article he tweeted stated that counties that hosted Trump rallies saw massive spikes in hate crimes compared to counties that didn't host Trump rallies.
The tweet had more than 7,000 retweets and more than 14,000 likes by New Year's Day afternoon.
However, The Washington Post article had been debunked by researchers at Harvard University, no friend of Trump, months earlier.
"The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway," Harvard researchers Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton wrote in a September article in Reason magazine.
They additionally noted that the criteria used in the original study showed counties that had 2016 rallies for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton had a "greater increase in hate incidents."
What's he hiding?
The day before former Vice President Joe Biden announced he would be a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president in April 2019, the University of Delaware - with whom he'd entered into an agreement in 2011 - announced that the documents from his 36-year career in the Senate had a new wrinkle for their release.
Previously, they were to be released Dec. 31, 2019, but the change specified Dec. 31 or "two years" after he "retires from public life," a term on which it did not elaborate. Not surprisingly, the Dec. 31 date came and went with no release.
The documents, which are said to fill 1,875 boxes (with 415 gigabyte of electronic records) on Biden's time in the Senate from 1973 to 2009, include "committee reports, drafts of legislation" and personal correspondence.
What might he be hiding? Well, just since he announced his candidacy, his opposition to busing in the 1970s became a Democratic debate topic, and his remarks about the "civility" of two now-deceased segregationist Democratic senators roused controversy. But the public won't get to see what else is in there that might offer insight during this election.