THE SHOW NOTES: Biden's Foreign Policy Mess, The Church Shooter, & Can Democrats Ditch Biden?

Welcome! A woman with a child opened fire in Joel Osteen’s church but was killed by an off-duty police officer. Her AR-15 had “free Palestine” written on it.

WHITE HOUSE: John Kirby promoted to expanded White House role - Axios

DUMB: Media creates Biden "fitness" crisis - Popular Information

OUCH: Bloomberg is just now realizing that high taxes are driving people out of California.

HEADLINE: Kemp warns 2024 can’t be about ‘who can outlast the other 80-year-old’ - AJC

QUESTION: Are married people happier than those who are not? - CNN

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Hostages Freed

Two Israeli hostages abducted on October 7th were rescued from Gaza in a daring raid at 2 AM this morning. The two men were being held by Hamas in Rafah in a second-story apartment building when the raid occurred in conjunction with an Israeli airstrike.

Context: Rafah is the last remaining Hamas stronghold along the Egyptian border that Israel has been reluctant to target due to its proximity to Egypt. As Israel has degraded much of Hamas’ tunnels and pressed further south, a growing consensus is that most of the remaining 100+ hostages are located in the area.

Why this matters: Joe Biden told Benjamin Netanyahu not to invade Rafah without a broader plan to protect civilians and went so far as privately calling him an “asshole” according to multiple reports. If Israel had listened to Biden, the two hostages would not be free.

NEW: The Wall Street Journal just reported that Israel is proposing a plan to evacuate the 1.2 million Palestinians from Rafah and place them in “sprawling tent cities across Gaza” in order to eradicate Hamas and rescue the remaining hostages.

Biden

Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign has joined TikTok despite Biden’s own administration having repeatedly warned Americans that the app is a national security concern. This is from the Associated Press.

Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that TikTok owner ByteDance could share user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government. Biden in 2022 banned the use of TikTok by the federal government’s nearly 4 million employees on devices owned by its agencies, with limited exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes. The secretive and powerful Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been reviewing the app for years.

Ready to serve?

Vice President Kamala Harris told The Wall Street Journal that she’s ready to serve as President if Joe Biden cannot.

“I am ready to serve. There’s no question about that,” Harris responded bluntly. Everyone who sees her on the job, Harris said, “walks away fully aware of my capacity to lead.”

Despite the Veep’s enthusiasm, her polling tells a different story. Harris’ net favorable approval rating - when averaged out across multiple polls - is four points less than Biden's and nearly seven points behind Donald Trump.

Related: Arab American community leaders postpone meeting with Harris amid concerns, sources say - Yahoo

76% of Voters Are Worried About Biden’s Mental and Physical Health

How China Miscalculated Its Way to a Baby Bust

China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.

The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.

Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy. 

Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”

Full story at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

Trending news:

• Overwhelming majority of Americans think Biden is too old for another term: POLL - ABC

• 1 in 4 Americans today breathes unhealthy air because of climate change. And it's getting worse. - CBS

• Trump’s incendiary NATO remarks send very real shudders through Europe - CNN

• RFK Jr. apologizes after super PAC’s Super Bowl commercial - Yahoo

• Biden's Bully Pulpit Needs a Reboot - The Liberal Patriot

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in critical care unit for monitoring, doctor says - ABC

• RFK Jr. apologizes to family after Super Bowl ad - Axios

• Jeff Bezos will save over $600 million in taxes by moving to Miami - CNBC

• Bitcoin breaks through $49,000 for the first time since December 2021 - CNBC

• Gyms Face Tough Year as Key January Growth Screeches to a Halt - Bloomberg (paywall)

• Trudeau Government Slammed by Auditor Over Pandemic Travel App - Bloomberg (paywall)

Market snapshot: