Fox News's Jimmy Failla predicted this back in May, when the Democrats set a debate date two months before their convention: "It's an audition"

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“Who am I? Why am I here? And who are you?”

Maybe other commentators were saying the same thing, but Failla’s “Fox Across America” is the only talk radio show I listen to, and he said that the Democrats were putting the old man on stage as n audition: if he perform well enough to convince a majority of voters he was capable of serving four more years, fine; if not, there’d be time to replace him.

Yesterday, The Daily Mail confirmed this, to the extent one believes the Daily Mail — I’ll admit I take its reporting with a veritable salt mine, but this seems entirely plausible:

Democrat insiders reveal the President was set up to fail in a 'soft coup'

President Joe Biden was set up in a 'soft coup' to oust him, a top Democratic insider claimed last night.

The 81-year-old US President is facing mounting calls to step aside after his disastrous debate performance on Thursday, with sources telling The Mail on Sunday that many believe he was purposely set up to fail.

A former aide to Hillary Clinton [there’s a dubious source] said: 'There has never been a debate this early before. Traditionally the debates are held after the Republican and Democratic conventions, which are in July and August.

They wanted to test him against Trump early, while there was still time to replace him if he failed to rise to the occasion. Which, of course, he did spectacularly.'

Another source said: 'The whole thing doesn't pass the smell test. Publicly the Democratic leadership has been backing Biden because they can't appear to be disloyal to the President, but privately there have been discussions going on for a long time that he's too old to beat Trump.

'There were whispers for weeks that 'Joe's going down at the debate'.'

One of the favourites to replace Biden – Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 52 – secretly sent an advance team to Washington DC 'weeks ago' to prepare for her possible presidential run.

The team has been 'on manoeuvres', meeting with Democratic officials. The source said: 'Gretchen was the first to act. Now the floodgates have been opened.'

Can the Dems ditch Biden and Kamal too? Not surprisingly, there are guesses on both sides: they can’t pass over and toss out a black(ish) woman, descendant of slave owners or not, currently serving as Vice President without igniting outrage in the base — “it’s her turn, damn it!”; other commentators, like Red State’s Jennifer Van Laar, say, “of course they can, and they’re already preparing to do so : “[W]here was Kamala on Thursday night? She wasn't even in Atlanta. She was at home in Los Angeles when she appeared on post-debate coverage with Anderson Cooper. But when Joe Biden was in Los Angeles, Kamala's new hometown, a few weeks ago for the largest fundraiser in Democrat party history, where was Kamala? She wasn't at the fundraiser and wasn't in Los Angeles.”

Meh — who knows? Maybe I’ll tune into Falia tomorrow and see what he’s predicting.

Alternatively, we could ask the nuns how they dealt with a troublesome female:

HOW DO WE SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KAMALLAH?

And we're back

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I think that I shall never see A windmill lovely as a tree

Perhaps, unless the windmills fall,’ I’ll never see a tree at all

(with apologies to Ogden Nash)

Nothing particularly exciting going on in the Land of The Greens, but I did notice a two things, one specific to Vermont, the other a social/economic phenomenon occurring, from what I read and hear, in every state in our once-great nation.

Vermont first: the inn we stayed at had only and old, faded sign set way back from the road and barely noticeable (we drove by it, the first time) announcing its presence. I was told by the owners that they’d like to move it closer to the road, or at least redo the 20-year-old paint job on the existing one, but the regulatory hurdles they’d have had to surmount made the effort just not worth it. Vermont seems to be run for tourists, now, and for wealthy transplants from “away”. I feel sorry for the business owners trying to make a living, but it’s not really my problem; I do wish we could disenfranchise its citizens, however, and bar them from voting in our national elections.

And then there’s the shortage of willing workers.

We stopped for lunch at a very nice restaurant and were met at the door by the owner, who explained that he had no help, so he could only offer sandwiches and salads. We stayed for sandwiches — very good — and speaking with him as we were leaving he told us that he and his wife (who ran the gift store attached to the restaurant) had tried hiring a cook at $29 per hour, plus benefits: the hiree showed up for three days, and then was a no-show for the next five. When the owner fired him, the sap was outraged: “aren’t you going to give me a chance?” he demanded.

The other person he’d hired was supposed to be a part-time waitress at $180 a week, but after two weeks of working at that rate she’d quit, explaining that she’d learned that $180 a week would put her over the limit for allowable earnings, and so her taxpayer-funded $220 weekly rent payment would be cut off. Even the owner understood that you could’t expect someone to work and pay $40 a week for the privilege, but he did ask, “what is this country coming to?’Beats me, but I’m not optimistic.

Our Vermont hotel owners told us the same story: they were running the place entirely by themselves, because they could entice no one in the local area to work there. Friends of mine in other states and other parts of the country tell me that the local labor pool is either too drugged-up or too comfortable on sky-high welfare benefits, or both, to be stirred from their leisure and go forth to make a living on their own. It’d be great if we could round up these sponges and exchange them on-for-one with carefully screened “newcomers”, but who’d take them?

Sadly symbolic, given what happened to Mr. Net Zero last night

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Maine man dies after Tesla hits tree and catches fire

A Harrison man died on Thursday morning after his electric car crashed into a tree in Naples and caught fire.

The single-vehicle crash was reported at around 10:45 a.m. near 752 Harrison Road, according to Captain Kerry Joyce of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. 

The car, later identified by the sheriff’s office as a 2024 Tesla, a fully electric vehicle, crashed into a tree at high speed and caught fire, the sheriff’s office said.

The driver, Sergi Kolesnick, 33, of Harrison was pronounced dead at the scene.

Several of the components of the car were dislodged in the crash and created “a significant debris field of batteries” that started several spot fires, according to the sheriff’s office.

CBS 13 reported that a fire blanket was needed to put out the car fire.

Firefighters and EMS responders worked for hours to contain the fires and keep them from spreading to a nearby home and the woods.

The media meets its Hunter’s Notebook moment — after years of denying the obvious, even dissemblers like CNN have had to concede what we knew all along

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A movie ends its run

"At the end of the day, Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting," Chuck Todd of NBC News admitted. "And there were no clips tonight. Right? This was—you saw before your eyes."

All those bogus stories like “the real Joe Biden, in private, in the Oval Office, is the sharpest mind in the room” flew in the face of reality, denied what everyone could see, but the media (tried to) feed the public stories of “fake videos”, and outright assertions that “there’s nothing to see here”. Last night, that all came to a stumbling, gasping halt.

Biden’s disastrous debate pitches his reelection bid into crisis

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

If Joe Biden loses November’s election, history will record that it took just 10 minutes to destroy a presidency.

It was clear a political disaster was about to unfold as soon as the 81-year-old commander in chief stiffly shuffled on stage in Atlanta to stand eight feet from ex-President Donald Trump at what may turn into the most fateful presidential debate in history.

Objectively, Biden produced the weakest performance since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon started the tradition of televised debates in 1960 — then, as on Thursday, in a television studio with no audience.

Minutes into the showdown, hosted by CNN, a full-blown Democratic panic was underway at the idea of heading into the election with such a diminished figure at the top of the ticket.

Biden’s chief debate coach, Ron Klain, famously argues that “while you can lose a debate at any time, you can only win it in the first 30 minutes.” By that standard, the president’s showing was devastating. The tone of the evening was set well before the half hour.

>>>>

Biden’s voice was weak, at times reduced to a whisper. Early on, the president’s answers drifted into incoherence. He missed openings to jab Trump on abortion — the top Democratic talking point — and meandered into highlighting his own biggest political liability, immigration. “We finally beat Medicare,” Biden said at one point, lapsing into confused silence. It was the kind of debate gaffe that Democrats had hoped to avoid. Worse, while Trump spoke, Biden often watched, his mouth gaping open, exacerbating an impression of a president cruelly diminished. His bravura battering of Trump in a debate four years ago was a distant memory.

To see a president struggle before millions of people watching on television all around the world was tough to see. As a matter of humanity, the personification of the ravages of age that await everyone was painful. Biden’s campaign revealed during the debate that he had been suffering from a cold. But by that time, the damage had already been done.

Biden had entered the debate facing a somber test — to prove to the majority of Americans who believe he is too old to serve that he is vital, energetic and up to fulfilling his duties in a second term that would end when he is 86. Instead, the president ended up validating those fears and potentially convincing many more voters that his faculties have decayed. The stumbling performance raised questions about the strategic choice Biden’s campaign made in pushing for a debate with Trump. It also completely undercut attempts by the White House and the campaign to talk up Biden’s heartiness behind the scenes. Memories of the president’s barnstorming State of the Union address in March, when he put many fears about his age to rest, have now been obliterated.

‘Painful’

Often, presidential debates are remembered for visual moments that become embedded in the collective public consciousness in subsequent days. Troublingly for Biden, a viewer only paying attention to visual clues would surely have formed the impression that Trump was the more robust personality. And the history of presidential elections suggests that the candidate who seems strong often beats the one who is weak.

“It’s painful. I love Joe Biden,” said Van Jones, a CNN political commentator. “He’s a good man, he loves his country, he’s doing the best that he can. But he had a chance … tonight to restore confidence of the country and of the base and he failed to do that. And I think there are a lot of people who are going to want to see him take a different course now.”

Not really germaine, but it is revealing, and pretty damn funny:

"Look, there’s so many young women who have been—including a young woman who just was murdered," Biden said. "The idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal. There’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters."

Jesus wept.

So, I watched the debate on my computer ... (Updating as I go along)

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My take: I thought the moderators were fine — color me astonished. Biden looked awful, sounded worse. Trump came across as presidential, Joe came across as … Joe.

UPDATE: This funny; scary, but funny

When you’ve lost the NYT ….

Good Lord, he’s even lost NBC!

'Babbling' and 'hoarse': Biden's debate performance sends Democrats into a panic

ATLANTA — President Joe Biden was supposed to put the nation’s mind at ease over his physical and mental capacity with his debate showing Thursday night. 

But from the onset of the debate, the 81-year-old struggled seemingly even to talk, mostly summoning a weak, raspy voice. In the opening minutes, the president repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.  

In one of the most notable moments, Biden ended a rambling statement that lacked focus by saying, “We finally beat Medicare,” before moderators cut him off and transitioned back to Trump. 

While Biden warmed up and gained more of a rhythm as the debate progressed, he struggled to land a punch against Trump. 

Trump — unleashing a torrent of bad information — didn’t hesitate to pounce on Biden, saying at one point that he didn’t understand what Biden had just said with regard to the border. 

“I don’t know if he knows what he said either,” Trump said.   

Nearly an hour into the debate, a Biden aide and others familiar with his situation offered up an explanation for the president’s hoarseness: He has a cold.

Even the Biden campaign acknowledged that the debate would be a critical moment in the election, with officials hoping it could shake up the race to the president’s benefit. Most polls have found the race to be neck and neck, a razor-thin margin that has remained unchanged for months, even after a jury found Trump guilty on 34 felony counts. 

Questions about Biden’s age and frailty have dragged down his polling numbers for months. The public concerns are exacerbated by deceptively edited videos, some of which have gone viral, that cut off relevant portions of an event, making it appear as if Biden is wandering or confused. This was Biden’s first opportunity — since the State of the Union speech — to dispel that narrative. 

Instead of a new beginning, many Democrats saw it as a moment for panic. 

“Democrats just committed collective suicide,” said one party strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns. “Biden sounds hoarse, looks tired and is babbling. He is reaffirming everything voters already perceived. President Biden can’t win. This debate is a nail in the political coffin.“ 

This didn’t go well:

See new posts

22:55

Senior Democratic figures 'having conversations' about 'should we ask the president to step aside'

John King of CNN reports:

Right now as we speak there is a deep, a wide, and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic party. It started moments into the debate and it continues right ow. It involves strategists, party officials and fundraisers, and they are having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal.

They're having conversations about what they should do about it. Some of those conversations involve should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside. Others are about should prominent Democrats go public with that call, because this debate was so terrible,

We give up: have at it, thugs

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Another 80 Pro-Palestinian Protesters Have the Charges Against Them Dropped

Rick Moran, PJ Media:

It appears that criminal trespassing in the United States has been taken off the books. 

Ten days ago, a Manhattan prosecutor dismissed charges against 31 pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied Hamilton Hall on Columbia University's campus. Their lack of criminal history and the “extremely limited video and security footage” available to prosecutors resulted in the release of the protesters.

"All these matters are dismissed and sealed in the interest of justice," Judge Kevin McGrath announced in the courtroom.

Some justice.

On Wednesday, a prosecutor in Travis County, Texas, dismissed similar charges against 80 protesters. Delia Garza, a Democrat who is the elected attorney for Travis County, "determined it couldn’t meet the legal burden to prove the cases beyond a reasonable doubt," according to the Associated Press.

What's happening? The reason prosecutors are dropping the charges is that radical law firms would have represented the protesters, which would have made prosecuting the offenders a nightmare. They could have tied up the courts for weeks, even months, until the DA would have dropped the charges out of exasperation. [I’ll disagree here, partially — the prosecutors are on the side of the protestors, and wouldn’t pursue charges against them even if there were no defense lawyers threatening to clog the court dockets — FWIW]

Lawfare by any other name.

The UT protests were even more disruptive and violent than the demonstrations at Columbia.

On April 29 at UT, officers in riot gear encircled about 100 sitting protesters, dragging or carrying them out one by one amid screams. Another group of demonstrators trapped police and a van full of arrestees between buildings, creating a mass of bodies pushing and shoving. Officers used pepper spray and flash-bang devices to clear the crowd.

The university said in a statement at the time that many of the protesters weren’t affiliated with the school and that encampments were prohibited on the campus in the state capital. The school also alleged that some demonstrators were “physically and verbally combative” with university staff, prompting officials to call law enforcement. The Texas Department of Public Safety said arrests were made at the behest of the university and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

So: Arson, if done for the approved cause, is legal, as is shoplifting, even when conducted by flash mobs of dozens of thieves; beatings of bystanders is acceptable and won’t be prosecuted, so long as the beatings are administered by ANTIFA mobs; closing down interstate highways and bridges, if done for the “proper” cause — there are many of them; subway fare-beaters are ignored; open drug use and using public sidewalks as toilets is encouraged in the first casortland and Seattle. We can now add criminal trespass and vandalism to the exempted class.

Have I mentioned that we no longer deport illegal aliens, and in fact, pay to fly them in here?

None of this bodes well for the nation.

Biden is released from the basement, greets the Democrat's favorite election-denier, one loser to another

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i like how they identify him for those of us who may have forgotten what he looks like after all his time away

And his handlers have equipped him with new bouncy shoes: glued to the floor, leg braces hidden under his baggy-legged pantaloons, he may just manage to stay upright for the full 90-minute debate tonight.

I'm completely baffled (Updated)

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37 Rockwood Lane, 1 acre in the R-2 zone (so maximum FAR 3,900 sq.ft.) was listed in May at $2.250 million, a price that seemed to me to be entirely appropriate, and has been snapped up for $3.105 million.

Go figure.

UPDATE: A reader has pointed out another sale right around the corner from 37 — 80 Rockwood Lane, which sold for $2.730 million in 2020, was put on the market this past March at $3.495 and sold for $4.2. No. 80 is on 2.28 acres, compared to No. 37’s 1, so it has twice the allowable FAR footage for a new structure (which is apparently the plan: the property was listed as a rental yesterday, presumably in anticipation of the 1-2 years it will take to get a new build through our regulatory process). Even so, it seems that 37’s sales price isn’t the surprising number I’d thought it was. Sheesh.

(Another update): 18 Rockwood Lane Spur, 1.68 acres, was listed @ $2.595 last fall and sold for $2.910 million. It, too, has now been rented out, so I can only conclude that the new normal for building lots in this neighborhood is approx. $3 million.

That would indicate, to me, that Rockwood Lane is being transformed into a neighborhood of $10 million homes — that’s quite a jump from what so recently saw a range for new homes of between $6 and $7 million.

18 Rockwood Lane Spur

However many illegal aliens Biden has and will let in, they and all who came before them aren't leaving.

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back to africa? Not hardly

As Britain is discovering,

Britain Spent Millions to Send Migrants to Africa. So Far, Just Two Have Gone.

Two years ago, the British government decided to spend big to outsource a migration problem.

To deter migrants seeking asylum from illegally entering the country, it announced a radical plan: Those smuggled on makeshift dinghies to British shores would be sent to Rwanda, a small country in central Africa, where they would remain. The U.K. government handed Rwanda a £120 million (about $150 million) down payment and told it to get ready to host thousands of potential refugees.

Shortly after, Hope Hostel, a neatly kept yellow-fronted hotel in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, was rented out with British taxpayer funds to accommodate the expected planeloads of asylum seekers. Hotel manager Ismael Bakina and his team of 40 have been keeping busy ever since, changing the sheets on 100 double beds weekly, trimming decorative pot shapes into the bushes that adorn the hotel’s entrance and mowing the lawn on its mini-soccer pitch.

But on a recent day the beds at Hope Hostel were untouched. The suggestion box at the reception desk sat empty. No one has yet come to stay. “We are still waiting,” Bakina said, standing near a sign that reads: “Come as a guest, leave as a friend.”

No one may ever arrive. The U.K. government’s plan—criticized by some as inhumane, praised by others as a pragmatic response to a global migration crisis—has faced logistical, political and legal hurdles. So far, it’s been a huge waste of money. Just two migrants have volunteered to go to Rwanda after being paid £3,000 by the British state.

The U.S. will never tolerate the rounding up of these “newcomers: and shipping them back against their will — I have no problem with such a mass deportation, but between the courts, the Left, and even some soft-hearted conaservatives, it’s not gonna happen.

Which the Left knows, and has intended all along.