SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK:

Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/nwIuI4bwdG

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 29, 2024

Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) June 29, 2024

Ad Astra, per ardua.

Hint: They’re not in the government or academic worlds.

HARSH, BUT FAIR:

Not trying to be mean or rude. But Elie is sooooooo dumb https://t.co/mdlXeaIWlQ

— Josh__Seattle (@Josh__Seattle) June 29, 2024

IT’S NOT LIKE YOU SHOULD BE TAKING THIS CLOWN SHOW SERIOUSLY: Real Clear Politics just blasted Not the Bee for our “flippancy” that’s “destroying public discourse.” Here is my reply.

I mean, David French? Also, as I’ve noted before, being “nice” isn’t a Christian tenet. Nice people don’t drive the moneychangers out of the temple, or the Moors out of Spain. Niceness-as-Christianity is mostly a cowardly copout by people who are afraid of confrontation.

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend.

THE SEPTEMBER SURPRISE:

The switch could be done at the convention – but that requires 300 delegate signatures, and would open the door to a lot of politicking over several weeks by other potential candidates. It would make ’68 look like a picnic, and potentially put Michelle in the grubby position of seeking support just like everyone else.

But should Biden be incentivized to suddenly declare a new health issue that leads him to announce a week or two after the convention that he will continue his term but will not be running, suddenly we have one of those crises that should not be wasted. Rising above it all and quelling the haggling, Michelle – with her 91% popularity among Democrats and 68% nationally when she left the White House, and with the Obama fundraising and political network and job experience – can accede when pressed, for the good of the country, to graciously accept her grateful party’s nomination.

The challenge will be to navigate the various obscure state laws setting hard to determine deadlines for ballots in time to be printed and mailed to voters overseas. In sum, as Washington, D.C.-based election lawyer Ronald Jacobs helped to unpack, while party rules dictate how the nominee is selected, state law dictates when the party can make that change. For many states, those laws are woefully unclear. And even where the law is clear, a court could step in (and has) to force the state to change as they did in New Jersey.

Past legal rulings seem to indicate that August 27 isn’t a problem, but Oct. 1 may be too late (though the likelihood of any court having the fortitude to tell half the country their nominee can’t be on the ballot seems unlikely). Figure two-plus weeks after the convention to be the last safe opportunity to switch.

Exit quote: “In London, where betting on American politics is legal, more bets recently were placed on Michelle Obama becoming president than on Biden, and she remains in second place in the RealClearPolitics Betting Odds Average for the Democratic nomination. What do those bettors know that American pundits don’t?”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China gears up for deep space missions after collecting 1,935 grams of lunar far side samples.

RIP: Martin Mull, Comic Actor in ‘Clue,’ ‘Arrested Development,’ Dies at 80.

Martin Mull, the comic musician and actor who started with 1970s TV series “Fernwood Tonight” and went on to appear as Colonel Mustard in “Clue” and on “Arrested Development” and “Roseanne,” died Thursday. He was 80.

His daughter Maggie announced his death on Instagram, writing “I am heartbroken to share that my father passed away at home on June 27th, after a valiant fight against a long illness. He was known for excelling at every creative discipline imaginable and also for doing Red Roof Inn commercials. He would find that joke funny. He was never not funny. My dad will be deeply missed by his wife and daughter, by his friends and coworkers, by fellow artists and comedians and musicians, and—the sign of a truly exceptional person—by many, many dogs. I loved him tremendously.”

Mull was nominated for an Emmy for his guest role as political aide Bob Bradley in “Veep.”

Mull had guested in 2015 on NBC comedy “Community” as George Perry, the father of Gillian Jacobs’ Britta Perry, and on CBS’ comedy “Life in Pieces.”

In recent years he had recurred from 2008-2013 on “Two and a Half Men” as Russell, a pharmacist who uses and sells drugs illegally and attended Charlie’s funeral in the season-nine premiere episode. The actor also recurred on “Arrested Development” as a rather incompetent private investigator named Gene Parmesan who has a habit of showing up in inane disguises.

He was also a quite competent electric guitarist, and traded licks with B.B. King when he (Mull) guest hosted the Tonight Show in 1982.

NEO: How about the prospects of alternate nominees for the Democrats?

Do you think other Democrats poll better than Biden? See this. Now, granted it’s from mid-February of this year, which is pretty old news. But it’s one of the few polls I could find that shows how Trump would do against leading Democrat contenders, and the answer is “pretty well.” Here are the stats at a time when Trump was leading Biden by only 1 point:

In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.

Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.

Hey, remember this headline from Politico in 2019? Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.

While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.

“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”

So was Joe lying then? Similarly, did Dr. Jill plan even back then on being the reincarnation of Edith Wilson?

In any case, Dan McLaughlin argues, “I’m here to say: Sorry, Democrats. It’s now too late to swap out for another candidate. You’ve saddled yourselves to this dead horse. You’ll have to ride him to the losing line. And there are plenty of reasons why that’s the cold hard truth. The last time a major party got rid of an incumbent president campaigning for re-election was 1856.”

“What is Biden to do now, when the Democrat/Media Complex is abandoning him in light of his performance last night?”, Scott Johnson rhetorically asks. “He is to hang in there. He likes being King. Dr. Jill likes being Queen. He’s a stubborn kind of fellow. Is it unreasonable to foresee that they will rally once again to the cause of discouraging us from seeing what is in front of our nose when the members of the Democrat/Media Complex conclude they have no alternative?”

And note the Dems’ current paradox (not that it will likely stop them if they work out a way to do a Torricelli-style swap):

Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) June 28, 2024

REPORT: Joe Biden given one week to stand down.

Joe Biden has been told he has a week to win over Democrats or they will move to oust him after a disastrous performance in the first presidential debate.

Party donors and congressmen called on Mr Biden to abandon his second run for the presidency after he fluffed his lines repeatedly and at one point froze completely during the first head-to-head debate of the 2024 election campaign.

In a shaky, hoarse voice, the 81-year-old launched attacks on Donald Trump and defended his policy record, pausing several times to repeat his sentences or correct himself.

Trump was widely acknowledged the winner of CNN’s Thursday night debate.

On Friday afternoon, Mr Biden insisted in a defiant speech in North Carolina he could still win the election but told supporters: “I know I’m not a young man…I don’t debate as well as I used to.

“I give you my word as a Biden* [that] I would not be running again if I didn’t believe with all my heart and soul I can do this job. Quite frankly, the stakes are too high.”

Nevertheless, Mr Biden is facing calls from a number of Democratic strategists, donors and politicians to suspend his campaign and make way for a younger candidate at this year’s party convention in August.

One congressman told Matthew Yglesias, a US political blogger: “I think the president has one week to prove he is not dead.”

David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, told CNN: “It’s kind of a Defcon 1 moment…they are three years apart, but they seemed about 30 years apart tonight.”

David Axelrod, another Obama adviser, said: “There are going to be discussions about whether he should continue.”

* Drink! “When I first noticed him using this ‘my word as a Biden’ phrase during the 2020 campaign, I was puzzled. Has the Biden family been so prominently associated with honesty that when Joe says this, most Americans say, ‘Well, that settles it’? Of course not. In fact, Biden’s first presidential campaign, in 1988, collapsed in disgrace specifically because of Joe’s dishonesty, when he was caught plagiarizing others — most notably British Labour leader Neil Kinnock — in his speeches[.]”

Related: MELTDOWN: Democrats Panic After Biden Has the ‘Single Worst Debate Performance in American History.’

More:

Kinda funny to watch the "Trump is a threat to Democracy" crowd openly strategize how to thwart the will of every Democrat who voted in the primaries by engineering a coup at the convention and placing a candidate on the ticket without a single person casting a vote.

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) June 28, 2024

I WAS EXPECTING A MARS-SHATTERING KABOOM: Quakes on Mars Reveal Red Planet Is Constantly Bombarded by Meteorites.

BACK WHEN I WAS ON THE PLANETARY PROTECTION SUBCOMMITTEE, WE DIDN’T GET TO DO ANYTHING THIS COOL: NASA picks scientists to join Hera asteroid defense mission. Of course, that was over a decade ago, pre-SpaceX when we didn’t have much in the way of capabilities yet.

NOTHING GOOD, IF YOU’RE A DEMOCRAT: Now What? Thursday’s disastrous debate performance raises the prospect of Democrats replacing Joe Biden.

NEWS FROM 1800: British group says levels of E. coli in River Thames ‘alarmingly high.’

JOHN PODHORETZ: Put a Fork in Him.

But this week, even before the debate, something seemed to start breaking Trump’s way. Several polls have showed Trump pulling ahead, outside the margin of error if only just barely for the first time in any of his three races for the presidency. Perhaps the American people had some precognitive power that allowed them to see a week into the future, when they would turn on their televisions and see a Biden without even enough power to make his voice fully audible, making the three-years-younger Trump seem two decades his junior.

But really, it wasn’t that Democrats should have listened to me—though of course everyone should, at all times, my children especially. They should have listened to themselves. It’s been more than a year since polls showed two-thirds of self-described Democrats have said Biden was too old to be president, too old to run for reelection, and that they wanted someone else.

But they didn’t act. They just didn’t get it because their fixation on Trump led them on to a false hope. And now they are getting it. Oh, boy, are they getting it—and getting it, as H.L. Mencken once put it in another context, “good and hard.”

How bad is it for Biden right now? This bad:

'Things are dark.' Democrats are panicking about Joe Biden's debate performance—and what will happen next https://t.co/S46Zo1NV7w pic.twitter.com/prSyM36E6n

— TIME (@TIME) June 28, 2024

UPDATE: Another Democratic Party house organ joins the chorus:

In @nytopinion

The greatest public service President Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not run for re-election, the editorial board writes after Thursday's presidential debate. https://t.co/45eaovSBKX

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 28, 2024

IT’S COME TO THIS: Fake audio added to CNN post-debate coverage.

Following the first debate of the 2024 election between US President Joe Biden and Republican challenger Donald Trump, posts say CNN political director David Chalian suggested replacing the incumbent as the Democratic nominee, making inflammatory remarks in an analysis. But the video is altered; a CNN spokesperson confirmed the audio is fake and a review of the original footage uncovered no such statements.

The altered comments appeared in a video circulating on X with Chalian following the June 27 presidential debate.

“I’m mean, guys at this point, I don’t give a shit if they bring out Gavin Newsom or maybe Hillary Clinton or even Big Mike — I mean even Michelle Obama. Sorry, I don’t know why I said Big Mike,” Chalian appears to say in a June 28, 2024 X post by “Il Donaldo Trumpo,” an account AFP has previously debunked numerous times.

Purely for the sake of completion, here is the very naughty tweet in question:

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO pic.twitter.com/IegIf4zrle

— , (@Zvbear) June 28, 2024

I CAN ONLY IMAGINE WHAT MY GRANDFATHER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THESE: The Most Luxurious Full-Size Pickup Trucks on the Market.

NOW THAT EVERYONE HAS HAD A CHANCE TO SLEEP AND CHILL OUT AFTER THE DEBATE: Polymarket bettors have Trump as the three-to-one favorite to win in November.

Please remember two things. The first is that Michelle Obama is still outperforming RFK Jr by two-to-one, for whatever that’s worth. The second is not to get cocky — but do enjoy this moment.

NEXT COMES ANGER: Everyone Knows Now.

GREAT MOMENTS IN PERSPECTIVE:

In @nytopinion

"I watched the Biden-Trump debate alone in a Lisbon hotel room, and it made me weep," writes Thomas L. Friedman. "I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime." https://t.co/Du5BXC9b8O

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 28, 2024

Friedman was born in 1953, so he’s been around long enough to remember firsthand the assassinations of JFK and RFK (and MLK). Perhaps a sense of proportion is in order here, Tom?

UPDATE: New York Times slammed for front page IGNORING the biggest story in the US — Joe Biden’s disastrous debate: ‘Was it a political decision?’

Yes. Next question?

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE? MORE LIES: Citing fake data, U.S. Surgeon General Declares Gun Violence a “Public Health” Crisis.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China hops closer to reusable rockets.

The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), part of China’s apparatus of state-owned aerospace companies, has conducted the country’s highest altitude launch and landing test so far as several teams chase reusable rocket capabilities, Space News reports. A 3.8-meter-diameter (9.2-foot) test article powered by three methane liquid-oxygen engines lifted off from the Gobi Desert on June 23 and soared to an altitude of about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) before setting down successfully for a vertical propulsive touchdown on landing legs at a nearby landing area. SAST will follow up with a 70-kilometer (43.5-mile) suborbital test using grid fins for better control. A first orbital flight of the new reusable rocket is planned for 2025.

Lots of players … If you don’t exclusively follow China’s launch sector, you should be forgiven for being unable to list all the companies working on new reusable rockets. Late last year, a Chinese startup named iSpace flew a hopper rocket testbed to an altitude of several hundred meters as part of a development program for the company’s upcoming partially reusable Hyperbola 2 rocket. A company named Space Pioneer plans to launch its medium-class Tianlong 3 rocket for the first time later this year. Tianlong 3 looks remarkably like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and its first stage will eventually be made reusable. China recently test-fired engines for the government’s new Long March 10, a partially reusable rocket planned to become China’s next-generation crew launch vehicle. These are just a few of the reusable rocket programs in China.

SpaceX does need competitors to stay innovative — I just wish there were more here and fewer in China.

AI MICHAELS: NBC’s Olympics Coverage May Have Jumped the Shark With This Stunt.

READER FAVORITE: Best Choice Products Set of 2 Adjustable Steel Mesh Zero Gravity Lounge Chair Recliners. #CommissionEarned

THE ONLY NEWS IS THAT NOW THEY’RE DISCUSSING IT OPENLY: Democrats Discuss Replacing Biden on Presidential Ticket.

THE REAL VICTIMS:

The ones I feel sorry for are my administrative law colleagues who built their courses and careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference.

— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) June 28, 2024

I’m teaching Admin Law in the fall, but I think I’ll bear up under the strain of revising my syllabus. I’d been telling students Chevron was on life support for years.