Because the Biden administration believes its role is to protect and to serve - terrorists.

Biden admin refuses to reveal terror watchlist nationalities because doing so would violate the terrorists’ “right to “privacy”

Fox filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in October requesting the nationalities of suspects on the FBI terror watchlist arrested at the southern border entering between ports of entry by Border Patrol.

Over six months later, CBP told Fox it will not provide the information, although it acknowledges the information is maintained in the Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS). 

The letter says it is applying exemptions to protect the disclosure of files that may create a "clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" and must balance a public's right to disclosure against an individual's right to privacy.

Betcha didn’t know that persons on our terrorist watchlist who are arrested for entering the U.S. illegally are entitled to a right of privacy that protects them from having the public know where they came from. Well, Biden says they do, and his handlers’ refusal to breach that imaginary right has nothing — nothing, I tell you — to do with sparing their candidate from the embarrassment that would ensue if it turned out these people were coming in from friendly Arab states and Eastern European criminal dens.

Third price cut on Tower Lane

8 Tower Lane, originally asking $5.250 million, is now entertaining offers in the $3.675 range. It’s a huge amount of land for Old Greenwich — 1.64 acres, but that wasn’t enough to persuade buyers to pay the huge premium it demanded initially.

They waited out the market, and it paid off.

3 Rnndom Road, listed for $3.795 million but gone in minutes, so the final price is sure to be higher. The owners tried for that same $3.795 in 2022 but the market was still coming back from the Great Lockdown then and they had no luck. So they rented it out instead, at $17, 000 per, and brought it back a few days ago. Well done.

listing agent daphne lamsvelt-pol describes this kitchen as “a chef’s dream”, and it probably is, compared to the kitchens and kitchen fuel used in her native holland. Here she is training in india learning how to prepare that fuel:

Price cut on Marks Road, Riverside

(pre-renovation picture from the 2013 listing, offered just to show the general exterior)

3 Marks Road, from $5.195 million to $4.895. Once owned by neighbors and good friends, I thought the house was very nice then, and the current owners had Sound Beach Partners redo it in 2021, so all that’s good. My friends lived here for 15 years, and the current owners have been here since 2013, and that’s always an encouraging sign of satisfaction.

they have the orange, but substituting a couple of poor, dead ocelots for the traditional zebra may have been a mistake

Well, at least they're not even pretending to be neutral

who, me?

Here are some highlights from the upcoming debate’s moderator, Jake Tapper:

Tapper spearheaded CNN's Russiagate coverage that dominated the early years of Trump's presidency. On January 10, 2017, just ten days before Trump's inauguration, Tapper co-authored a blockbuster report about the existence of the now-infamous Steele dossier and spent several months legitimizing its claims. 

Even after the release of the Mueller report that failed to find evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Tapper suggested Trump sounded like "the spokesman for the Kremlin" over comments Trump made about his May 2019 conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Throughout the 2020 presidential election, Tapper became more vocal about his animus towards the then-president. In March 2020, in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, he said Trump "continues to lie to the American people" about COVID testing at the time. The following month, Tapper retweeted a post from anti-Trump critic George Conway calling Trump "100% insane."

In October 2020, Tapper shamed Trump after he was diagnosed and hospitalized for COVID. 

"Make no mistake, this was not just reckless behavior, this was a demonstration of a wanton disregard for human life. President Trump, now in quarantine, has become a symbol of his own failures," Tapper told CNN viewers. 

Weeks later, after Trump's defeat in the 2020 election, Tapper declared "for tens of millions of our fellow Americans: their long national nightmare is over."

"It's been a time of extreme divisions, many of the divisions caused and exacerbated by President Trump himself," Tapper said in an impassioned monologue. 

"It's been a time of several significant and utterly avoidable failures, most tragically, of course, the unwillingness to respect facts and science and do everything that could be done to save lives during a pandemic. It has been a time where truth and fact where truth and fact were treated with distain," he continued. "It was a time of cruelty where official inhumanities such as child separation became the official shameful policy of the United States. But now the Trump presidency is coming to an end."

Much, much more at the link.

Still falling

88 Cedar Cliff Road has cut its price from $16.995 million to $15.495. The owners paid $11.750 for this 1928 house in 2007, completely renovated and expanded it from 4,600 sq.ft to 9,000, and put it back up for sale in 2022 at $25.5 million. That proved to be overly-aspirational.

That said, great property, great street, protected views (because the land below it was given to the Greenwich Land Trust), and a pretty special house. Someone’s going to want it, and the owners’ loss, which must be substantial, will be their gain.

Swan song on Audubon

15 Audubon Lane, 4+ acres with a rather unfortunate example of 1960s contemporary design in deferred condition* and headed for the dumpster was listed at $1.299 million, went immediately to “highest and best”, and is now reported to be pending.

*”HIGHEST AND BEST OFFERS DUE MONDAY 5/6 BY NOON! Presence of mold in house, remediation required. Masks suggested when entering. Please call LA prior to entering house”-

It looks like a building lot comprising ledge, swamps and creeks, but apparently more than one buyer out there relishes a challenge. Good luck to him.

It’ll be a long night

Over at American Greatness Daniel Oliver has somehow already received the list of questions that will be asked. Samples:

1. Mr. Trump: Do you think your being impeached twice while you were president should disqualify you from being president again?

2. Mr. Trump: It was widely reported that you were Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s favored candidate in 2016 and that during the campaign your people colluded with Russia. Do you think you are still Putin’s favored candidate? I want to remind our viewers that the Mueller Report, after extensive investigation of your campaign’s interactions with Russia, explicitly stated that it had not exonerated you.

3. Mr. Trump: You said you never sexually molested E. Jean Carroll, but she sued you, and a jury of her peers—folks like the people watching this debate, folks like the average voter—decided you were not telling the truth and awarded her a judgment of $5 million. Why should the American public want someone who molests women to be president?

4. Mr. Trump: During the 2016 campaign, you were accused of having made numerous racially insensitive and offensive remarks, both in private and in public. Do you think you’re the kind of person Americans should elect as president?

5. Mr. Trump: On more occasions than we can count, you have used racist and offensive language, both in private and in public. Do you really think you’re the kind of person Americans should elect as president?

And here’s a list of questions the media are likely to ask Joe Biden:

1. Mr. President: As you know, the Republican Party is dead set against abortion, and many Republicans oppose any abortion at any time for any reason. Are you prepared to help every woman in America get an abortion if she wants one?

2. Mr. President: You have made it perfectly clear that you want to fix our broken border, but the Republicans refused—out of partisan spite—to pass legislation that would assist you in doing just that. Why do you think the Republicans refuse to give you the tools you need to fix the border?

3. Mr. President: Some people are concerned about your fitness for office. But many of your staff say they can hardly keep up with you. Why do you think Donald Trump keeps harping on that issue?

4. Mr. President: You have been a fighter for civil rights for blacks all your life. What are the three most important steps you will take to further the cause of civil rights?

5. Mr. President: It is said by many, including you, that what’s really at stake in this election is democracy itself. Can you tell this American audience what your concerns are?

Two different approaches, two different results.

On his first day in office, Biden declared war on fossil fuels by canceling the XL Pipeline and suspending oil leases. By coincidence, I filled my gas tank that day — January 20, 2021— in New Hampshire and paid $1.69 per gallon. I filled that same tank at the same gas station yesterday and paid $3.49 per gallon. Joe, I bought gasoline during the Reagan administration; I knew gas prices during the Reagan administration; I liked gas prices under the Reagan administration. Joe, yours is no Reagan administration.

From today’s Powerline:

Steven Hayward:

With reports that Joe Biden is once again considering taking oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve because of the national crisis of his flailing re-election campaign (and with oil prices today yo-yoing considerably), our pals at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity remind us of the long-term effect of markets and liberated production, as we saw after Reagan decontrolled the price of oil on his first day in office in 1981:

Hayward: Worth recalling how the left howled at this step, predicting doom. Here’s my account of it from chapter 2 of The Age of Reagan:

The conventional wisdom was that oil prices would surely head higher as a result of Reagan’s move.  Democrats and liberal interest groups seemed to compete with each other for the most fulsome expression of economic illiteracy. In the annals of public policy prognostication it is difficult to find such a wide assembly of wrongheadedness.  Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio said took to the Senate floor the next day to predict that “we will see $1.50 gas this spring, and maybe before.  And it is just a matter of time until the oil companies and their associates, the OPEC nations, will be driving gasoline pump prices up to $2 a gallon.”  Sen. Don Riegle of Michigan said that “It will hurt our people within a matter of days.”  Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas had previously predicted that “without rationing, gasoline will soon go to $3 a gallon,” and now added that “Decontrol is designed to see how much we can squeeze out of the American people before they take to the streets.”  Maine’s Sen. George Mitchell said “Every citizen and every family will find their living standards reduced by this decision.”  Democratic Congressman Ed Markey said “I believe that decontrol as a cure will prove to be worse than the disease of oil addiction.” A Naderite advocacy group predicted that oil prices might go as high as $870 a barrel “under assumptions which many experts believe are realistic.”  Instead oil prices started falling almost immediately; from an average high of $1.41 in February 1981, pump prices fell steadily to a national average of 89 cents a gallon in the spring of 1986.  Oil imports from OPEC fell by 2 million barrels a day by the end of 1982.  Reagan’s integrated view of oil prices, inflation, and the value of the dollar is especially remarkable in comparison with the Carter administration, which never seemed to understand inflation, ascribing it to animal spirits or, at one point, even to the moral failings of Americans.

Gooder and harder

NYC is spending $39,000 per pupil to “educate” them, teachers and administrators demand still more.

Even after the tests were watered down in order to boost scores, NYC schools are still churning out a mediocre, failing product. Which only proves, of course, that spending should double.

About 77.6% of Asian American students and 70.2% of white students demonstrated proficiency their math exams, compared to 34.3% of students who are Black and 35.7% who are Latino. On reading tests, 72.3% of Asian American students and 69.5% of white students were on grade level, compared to 40.3% of Black students and 39.4% of Latino students.

Among students with disabilities, 21.7% demonstrated proficiency in reading and 24.4% did so in math. Among students learning English as a new language, 11.1% were on grade level in reading and 21.5% were in math.