SLEEPY JOE: While the Biden campaign and the White House insist that the President merely had a cold and just a bad day at last week’s debate, The NY Times reports that increasingly the President has appeared confused, listless, and loses the thread of conversations. The Times reports according to people who have been in the room with Biden that “the lapses seemed to be growing more frequent, more pronounced and more worrisome.”

  Biden admitted that after a tight schedule of foreign travel and debate preparation, he nearly fell asleep at the CNN podium. In the President’s defense yesterday, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was reduced to saying, “He can do the job, he can.”

  Unrelated to the Times article, Democrats are becoming increasingly open about their concerns for the President and Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett became the first member if Congress to call for Biden to quit the race for president. “President Biden saved our democracy by delivering us from Trump in 2020,” Doggett said in the statement. “He must not deliver us to Trump in 2024.”

  Critical for Biden is that big political donors are re-thinking where they want to put their money.

  The Times reports that Biden at times seemed confused at the D-Day ceremonies in France, misstated the purpose of some military aid to Ukraine, and appeared to freeze up at an early celebration of the Juneteenth holiday. 

  On the other hand, the Times reports that Biden was sharp and forceful telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to back off from a big retaliatory strike against Iran.

   Biden trails Trump in the polls and now CNN polling finds that three-quarters of voters say the Democratic Party would have a better chance to hold the presidency this year with someone other than the President. CNN has Biden behind Trump by six points in national polling, but surprisingly Kamala Harris as a theoretical presidential candidate is a close 45 percent to 47 percent for Trump.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS: Donald Trump has had a good week in the courts, this time getting a delay in his criminal sentencing from July 10^1h to September 18^th while the judge in his New York trial considers motions on immunity following the Supreme Court ruling earlier this week.

  “The impact of the Immunity Ruling is a loud and clear signal for Justice in the United States,” Trump posted on his Truth Social website after the sentencing was delayed.  Trump claimed that the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have immunity for official actions gives him “total exoneration” in the New York hush money trial and other criminal indictments against him.

  Trump was convicted of burying payments to silence porn actress Stormy Daniels about a one-night fling to protect his 2016 run for the presidency. 

CATEGORY 4: Hurricane Beryl, now a category 4 storm with winds up to 145 mph, is spinning toward Jamaica after doing devastating damage in Grenada, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines. Grenada’s Prime Minister described the damage as “unimaginable.”

THE OBIT PAGE: Robert Towne, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for Roman Polanski’s movie “Chinatown” and who contributed to other notable movie scripts, has died at age 89.

  Towne was also nominated for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo.” He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972). He was known to have a keen ear for dialogue and a casual relationship with deadlines.

  Towne battled with Polanski bout the plot of “Chinatown” in which the private detective Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, finds out that the daughter of Faye Dunaway’s character was the product of a rape by her own father. In the end, Dunaway’s character is killed, her father, Noah Cross, gets custody of the girl he fathered with Dunaway, and Towne wrote one of the most unforgettable closing lines in the movies: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

THE SPIN RACK:  The pace of melting in the Juneau Ice Field in the mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, an expanse of 1,050 interconnected glaciers, has doubled since 2010, according to scientists. The glacier field lost 1.4 cubic miles of ice a year between 2010 and 2020, the researchers estimated. — The US sent more than 100 Chinese migrants back to China on a charter flight and more such flights are expected. — At least 121 people, most of them women, died in a stampede at an event for a Hindu religious preacher in the northern India town of Hathras. — A teenage computer whiz who 20 years ago spread the worda of the Catholic faith will be named the church’s first millennial saint. Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006, is already referred to as “God’s influencer” and the “patron saint of the internet.” 

BELOW THE FOLD:  Vanity Fair has revealed a 2010 photograph of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an unidentified woman somewhere in Asia pretending to eat a barbecued dog. That was the same year Kennedy was diagnosed with a worm in his brain.

  The Vanity Fair story also says that Kennedy groped and tried to seduce a young babysitter who had been living with him and his second wife. He said in an interview, “I am not a church boy … I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote I could run for king of the world.”

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