Supercut: Joe Biden Has a Really Itchy Face

 

The first thing I want to say is this: I didn’t intend to make this video.

My project was more noble. I’ve noticed Vice President Joe Biden appearing a lot recently with President Obama at big news conferences—the Cuba embassy announcement, when the Supreme Court upholding a key element of the Affordable Care Act, the heckler scene at the White House’s LGBT Pride Dinner, the first White House reaction to the Charleston massacre. Biden is such a big, everyday presence in public life—like furniture in a comfortable room—that I wanted to see if there were any common threads I could pick out about him by watching these appearances. Has he visibly changed over the years in the same way Barack Obama has, for example? In what ways has his public performance changed over the years?

Instead, all I noticed was…his itchy face. He scratches his face a lot. More than other people behind the podium, or on stage. Far more. It’s true, it must get pretty boring, listening and clapping and laughing so much. And imagine if you wanted to scratch your face, it would build up and you would really want to scratch it.

Now, it’s all I can see.

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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