Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
And Canadian plane crashes, the price of eggs (until the price fell, then radio silence), and, doubtless, poor Joe’s prostate cancer, Sad.
It took me a few seconds to realize what this “abstract” piece of … art represents. No, those aren’t lip kisses. The gay Mr. Maldonado makes a powerful case for the immediate deportation of all our illegal visitors.
‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic’s husband deported to Mexico after being detained by ICE
The newlyweds had tied the knot just a few weeks ago while in a Texas federal lockup, where Exotic, 63, is currently serving a 21-year sentence for plotting to hire a hitman to murder big-cat arch-rival Carole Baskin and violating federal wildlife laws.
Is it cheating if I’m on ozempic?
Yale students go on pro-Hamas hunger strike; administrators refuse meeting
“Demands include divestment from Israel, an end to the partnership with Tel Aviv University “and any fellowships that fund student travel to Israel,” a meeting with “University leadership,” a repeal of Yale’s rules that “limit peaceful protest and student advocacy,” and a guarantee “peaceful” protesters (like themselves) won’t be disciplined for their actions.”
No word whether they’ll be joining their fellow revolutionaries for latte and cinnamon bun breaks around the corner at Starbucks, where their brave contemporaries are protesting the imposition of a dress code, but I’m guessing they already have.
Bearded female Starbucks worker leads an employee protest over the company telling them to adhere to a dress code.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 30, 2025
pic.twitter.com/ImxrAJMDCv
I’m so old, I remember when you only saw bearded ladies at carnival freak shows; now they’re serving burnt coffee at retail shops.
Update: the fat thing in the clown hat above says it all, but here’s another one anyway: “How dare a company impose a dress code! We didn’t have to do that in kindergarten, why should we have to now?”
Mask wearing Starbucks worker explains why she is going on strike.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 17, 2025
“We’re out on strike today because Starbucks is trying to implement a new dress code. No one ever asked for a new dress code.” pic.twitter.com/HCjtCQq5S9
I hate to give any attention to those two sleazes cashing in on their own participation in the great hide, but there’s a link on Instapundit to excerpts from another participant, The Atlantic, and oh, hell, why not?
AN AUTOPSY REPORT ON BIDEN’S IN-OFFICE DECLINE: “Five people were running the country,” a political insider told the authors of the new book Original Sin. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”
It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”
Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.”
On July 2nd 2020, AP “reported:” Biden did not use teleprompter to answer reporters’ questions.
A few months later, an official member of Team Biden did so as well: “Watch Joe Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo absolutely melt down when [Bret Baier] asks him if Biden has ever used a teleprompter for news interviews from his house. Ducklo explodes and, like he did throughout the interview, accuses him of being a Trump campaign shill.”
—Real Clear Politics, September 10th, 2020.
More from the Atlantic:
The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:
Biden would sit in a room with several monitors beaming the face of real Americans in front of him so that they could discuss issues of importance.
The videos came back, hours of footage. Some on the team couldn’t believe their eyes.
“The videos were horrible,” one top Democrat said. “He couldn’t follow the conversation at all.”
“I couldn’t believe it,” said a second Democrat, who hadn’t seen Biden in a few years. “It was like a different person. It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”
A special team was brought in and told to edit the videos down to make them airable, if only a few minutes worth. They had to get creative.
The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)
The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on note cards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)
Wasn’t me! — this time.
“According to a 30-minute audiotape he left behind, Bartkus was a “pro-mortalist,” which is a bizarre philosophy that, among other things, decries the fact that we didn’t give our consent to be born.
Bartkus explained in his twisted recording that he’s “angry” that he even exists. He also tried to videotape the attack:”
“I figured I would just make a recording explaining why I’ve decided to bomb an IVF building, or clinic,” he said at the beginning of the recording. “Basically, it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here.”
Describing himself as anti-life, he adds: “I’m very against [IVF], it’s extremely wrong. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”
Bartkus also set up a tripod with a camera in an effort to film his attack, but the file failed to upload to his website.
“His demented website can be found here, according to some reports, and on it he describes some disturbing actions:”
In a FAQ section of his website, he further explains that his best friend Sophie recently died after convincing her boyfriend to shoot her while she slept. “IIRC we had agreed that if one of us died, the other would probably soon follow,” Bartkus wrote.
His description seemed to match the death of 27-year-old Sophie Tinney in Fox Island, Washington on April 22. Police arrested her boyfriend, 29-year-old Lars Eugene Nelson, and believe Tinney convinced Nelson to shoot her in the head as she slept. Nelson was charged with second-degree murder.
The good news: he’s no longer in a position to complain.
Bartkus is believed to be the only person who was killed in Saturday’s bombing at American Reproductive Centers, though officials have yet to formally identify his remains.
failure 2, but a decent try
(Some other wise guy used that headline for the story, but I can’t find it now to give him credit, and it’s too funny not to employ it here.)
Failure 1 …
UPDATE:
Local crybaby Jacob Snugglepuss whines, “uggh! your little AI buddy has made me look like… Chuck Schumer!” All I can say is, if the Jag fits, wear it. (And who says it’s AI what done this?)
Axios is hardly a tool of the right wing conspiracy; in fact, the very-useful and neutral AllSides rates it as Left-Leans Left”. So this article on Axios is interesting, if only because it wasn’t covered or mentioned by the publication’s usual collaborators:
President Trump's recent series of audacious foreign policy moves have astounded even some of his harshest critics.
The big picture: Just in the Middle East and just in the past week, Trump has met with a leader the U.S. officially considers a terrorist, announced he'll lift all sanctions on Syria, and cut a truce with the Houthis plus a hostage deal with Hamas, both of which excluded Israel.
What they're saying: Biden administration veterans who spoke with Axios raised questions about Trump's motivations but grudgingly saluted his boldness.
"Gosh, I wish I could work for an administration that could move that quickly," one admitted.
"He does all this, and it's kind of silence, it's met with a shrug," says Ned Price, a former senior State Department official under President Biden. "He has the ability to do things politically that previous presidents did not, because he has complete unquestioned authority over the Republican caucus."
"It's hard not to be simultaneously terrified at the thought of the damage he can cause with such power, and awed by his willingness to brazenly shatter so many harmful taboos," says Rob Malley, who held senior posts in three Democratic administrations, including handling Iran talks under Presidents Obama and Biden.
Zoom out: On issue after issue, Trump is taking steps no recent president would have even considered.
He abandoned the unified Western position to back Ukraine "as long as it takes" by negotiating directly with Vladimir Putin and declaring that Kyiv will never get Crimea back and must cut a deal now.
He inserted himself directly in the recent Kashmir crisis, something past administrations have avoided so as not to antagonize India.
He endorsed direct talks with Iran and shrugged off hawks at home and abroad who tied the Obama and Biden administrations in knots. It helps that many of them, like Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, are loath to cross Trump.
Zoom in: On Syria, Trump's own State Department had espoused a policy similar to the Biden administration's before it — sanctions relief might be possible if militant-turned-statesman Ahmed al-Sharaa's government met a number of criteria, such as suppressing extremist groups.
That meant that, somewhat perversely, the new administration was being strangled by sanctions imposed on the dictator they toppled. But it was also just the way these things work, until Trump decided it wasn't.
"It's so clearly the right decision," said Ben Rhodes, a national security aide to President Obama, on the "Pod Save the World" podcast. "I don't know why Joe Biden didn't do this."
"I don't like Trump's motivations for lots of things he does," Rhodes continued, "but one thing you will say is he's not tied to this constant fear of some bad faith right-wing attacks or stupid Blob-type, 'we don't do this, we must leverage the sanctions for blah blah blah.' No! Sometimes you just have to try something different."
Perhaps most shocking to veterans of previous administrations, Trump authorized direct talks with Hamas last month that Israeli officials only learned about through espionage (or by reading Axios).
Driving the news: This week, Trump's envoy-for-everything Steve Witkoff used backchannel talks to negotiate the release of Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander, undercutting Israel's own negotiating tactics.
"I suspect Witkoff doesn't have to look over his shoulder as much as others have. His predecessors have had to make sure the secretary of defense is on board and the secretary of the Treasury is on board, and the head of the CIA is on board. He just does it," the former Biden official said.
Flashback: The Biden administration considered but ultimately rejected opening direct talks with Hamas.
"This is not about President Biden, this is about President Trump and the advantage that he has with Bibi [Netanyahu]," Price said. "If the Biden administration had done something like this, Bibi would have gone out guns blazing."
Now, even with the daylight between him and Trump growing more glaring, Netanyahu is keeping uncharacteristically quiet.
The flipside: Trump has also not pushed back hard as Netanyahu cut off all aid to Gaza, refused to budge in ceasefire negotiations, and announced a military operation to flatten and occupy the enclave.
Price argues that's the more nefarious side of Trump's a-la-carte "America First" approach.
"Unfortunately, we have a real-life experiment going on right now where we see exactly what happens when an administration abdicates that concerted pressure on the Israelis."
Between the lines: All the former Democratic officials who spoke to Axios questioned Trump's motives, even for policies they personally agreed with, noting that he's not just breaching norms to make peace, but also to sell cryptocurrency, expand his real estate portfolio or obtain a $400 million jet.
The Syria announcement notably came at the urging of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, two leaders fluent in Trump-style transactionalism.
pulling him back from the edge of disaster
For four years, we did not have a President and the entire media covered it up.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 16, 2025
It pales in comparison to any political scandal in the history of our country. https://t.co/ShLWgd2XZK
Here’s a summary:
Former President Joe Biden rambled through an October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur— repeatedly losing his train of thought and struggling to recall key details of his political and personal life, including when his son died, newly released audio of the sitdown shows.
“Well, um, I, I, I, I, I, I don’t know,” Biden, then 80, responded to one question about where he would store papers related to his post-vice presidential work at the Penn Biden Center, his memoir “Promise Me, Dad” and the Cancer Moonshot initiative.
Biden sat down with Hur and co-counsel Marc Krickbaum Oct. 8-9 as part of a probe ordered by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland into the 46th president’s unlawful retention of national security papersfrom his time as Barack Obama’s No. 2, as well as a senator from Delaware.
The Biden administration had refused to release the audio tapes of the interviews with Hur, which were obtained by Axios on Friday, arguing that they contained protected “law enforcement materials.”
Biden, speaking slowly with his voice fading in and out, repeatedly requested assistance figuring out the years of certain events.
“This is what, 2017, 18, in that area?” he asked in response to the special counsel’s question about the post-vice presidency activities.
“Yes, sir,” Hur responded.The former president, pausing throughout his answer, then appeared to believe that the events of 2017 and 2018 corresponded with when he left the Senate (2009) and his son Beau Biden’s death (2015).
“Remember, in this time frame, my son is … uh … would’ve been deployed or is dying and so … it was … and by the way there were still a lot of people at the time, when I got out of the Senate, that were encouraging me to run in this period — except the president,” Biden said.
After a digression about his presidential ambitions and former President Barack Obama’s reluctance to support him, Biden said: “What was happening though was … what month did Beau die? Oh god, May 30 …”
“2015,” one of his lawyers chimed in.
“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked.
“It was,” the lawyer responded.
“I think it was 2015,” Biden, still unsure, said.
The former president — still less than three minutes into his response to Hur’s question about his document storage practices — then needed to be reminded what year President Trump was elected to his first term.
“And what happened in the meantime is that uh … as … and … Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” Biden haltingly asks.
Even after an attorney clarified that Trump was elected in 2016, Biden still sounded confused.
“2016, alright so … Why do I have 2017 here?” Biden said.
“That’s when you left office — in January of 2017,” his lawyer responded.
Then Biden hesitantly asked: “That’s when Trump got sworn in, isn’t it?”
He then rambled about the title of the memoir and appeared to become emotional while discussing Beau, prompting Hur to suggest they pause for a bit after Biden trailed off.
“Sir, I’m wondering if this is a good time to take a break, briefly, would that be …” Hur asked before Biden shot down the suggestion.
“No, let me just keep going and get it done,” he insisted.
Hur’s two three-hour sessions with Biden and his legal team took place in the White House’s Map Room, where the former president’s frequent pauses are accentuated by the sound of a ticking clock in the background.
And now the coverup enters Stage Two:
UPDATE And very much related:
…. The interview shows that in 2023 it was clear that Biden was mentally diminished despite claims from many allies and former aides that there was a sudden loss of capacity just before the disastrous debate in 2024. It is now undeniable that the White House staff actively hid the president's incompetence from the American public. That includes the White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki (who left her post in May 2022) and her successor, Karine Jean-Pierre, who insisted that Biden was sharp and "running circles" around the staff.
Of course, the media is now covering the story after the public saw the truth in the debate. Figures like CNN's Jake Tapper have even written books that belatedly pursue the question despite previously insisting that there was no evidence of a diminishment in Biden's mental state.
Tapper repeatedly dismissed the claim and even excoriated Lara Trump for raising it. In one interview, he pushed a White House talking point that such suggestions were mocking Biden for a childhood stutter.
"It's so amazing to me- a ‘cognitive decline,’" he told the president's daughter-in-law. "I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody's cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar."
When Lara Trump insisted that this was clearly evidence of a "very concerning" cognitive decline, Tapper dismissed her statement by saying, "Thank you, Lara. I'm sure it's from a place of concern. We all believe that."
Keep in mind that others beyond Lara Trump were raising this issue and there were tapes showing obvious physical and mental decline. The media simply refused to seriously pursue the story until the cover-up no longer mattered after the debate.
Over on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough was equally apoplectic at those raising the issue and stated
"Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And eff you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years…If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it
This media effort continued all the way up the debate itself. On CNN.com, Oliver Darcy wrote "Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate."
Once the public found out, the media was ready to tell the story when it became impossible, and no longer politically beneficial, to deny it. Articles began to appear with the same realization of, "Oh you meant THAT mental decline. Well sure."
It was the same belated acknowledgment that came, after the election, with Hunter Biden's laptop. The media just moved on with a shrug and a collective "our bad" concession.
….
The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the president of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog marched to the nearest federal courthouse.
Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket.
After all, this is Washington where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.
Here’s our (other) native prevaricater:
Listen, I'm somebody that's worked intimately with the President, right. I worked with him on the bipartisan gun bill. He was involved in every step of that process, not only constructing the bill, but winning individual Republican votes; it would not have passed, if not for Joe Biden. And what has happened since we passed that bill, a 12% reduction in urban homicides in this country. There are literally thousands of people alive in this nation today. Because Joe Biden is incredibly competent, and he's incredibly effective.
Have you ever been infuriated by reading a story about thugs barging into someone else’s house and refusing to leave, while the rightful owner is told he must pursue a years-long eviction process through the courts because these people have established “squatters rights?” That’s what happened Friday, on a national scale.
I’d seen a few cautiously optimistic reactions to the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision requiring individual “due process hearings” for each person who came across the border these past 4 years, with or without official permission, but “Legal Insurrection’s Professor William Jacobson shares my own dire view: we’re screwed.
The deep damage from the Biden administration’s treasonous open borders policy, which deliberately imported millions of illegal aliens, including large numbers of criminals and gang members, is playing out as the Trump administration tries to undo the damage and danger.
The numbers are so large that they overwhelm the system. Trump tried to address the problem as to a particularly vicious gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA), by invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), which allows summary removal. That effort has been stymied by multiple courts, incuding the Supreme Court, ruling that persons subject to removal under the AEA are entitled to due process before removal. Depending what the due process looks like may render deportation efforts futile – you can’t have millions of trials, even if they are truncated proceedings.
Is the Constitution a suicide pact? We’re in the process of finding out.
…. The bottom line is the Supreme Court put everything on hold, and told the 5th Circuit to figure out what type of due process the TdA members should get. Removal of TdA members through other statutory authority, other than AEA, could continue:
Jacobson: “So it continues. Millions flow in illegally, but only a relative trickle can flow out. This is an untenable situation.
(FWIW) The decision goes far beyond whether these people can be removed using a novel method of applying the Aliens and Sedition Act — as the court notes “[T] he Government may remove the named plaintiffs or putative class members under other lawful authorities” but those are meaningless words when coupled with the requirement that government conduct individual hearings for each and every one of them.
The backlog for these hearings is currently 6-10 years, and that’s for those who have legally applied for entry, many of whom are still in their home countries waiting for admission. Biden’s millions are here now, and having made it across the border by whatever means, can only be removed on a case-by-case basis. That’s impossible, as was always the plan, so, while we might see a few of the very worst of the child rapists and drug dealers kicked out, the vast, vast majority of these people are now permanent residents, and their spawn will be citizens.
Welcome to your new world.
Be notified of new posts! Sign-up here:
Want to comment without registering?
