Er, aren’t we supposed to have some courthouse security around here?

See you later, alligator!

Prisoner decamps while jury considers her fate.

Scusie espies Big Pussy

Pussy's last ride

I don’t have to make this s**t up, Greenwich Time does it for me!

Well I do, certainly

"13? Hell, old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher, honey - come here and have some drugs"

Polanski’s lawyer: U.S. wants to see him in shackles.

Charter skool two clothes

Operated by Stanford’s education department, it is a feel-good, happy happy institution – only problem is, its graduates can’t read.

Goldman screwed Ghana

Why, oh why, would anyone hire Goldman as a financial advisor when the firm has an unbroken track record of betraying its clients?

Australia fights the yellow peril

Reimposes stiff rules against furriners buying up real estate. Those Asians are flooding the country, driving up prices. Seems like a nice thing to happen for property owners, so why subsidize new home buyers at the expense of existing owners?

What are these people thinking?

I’ve been out all morning with clients (and going back out in a hour), checking off  houses that I did not recommend but which they wanted to see for comparison purposes. I won’t name addresses here but we saw one that, in my client’s opinion, was worth at best $4 million – and I agree – but that started at $12 or so and is still priced in the $10s.

Look: you can’t go cheap, cut every corner possible, and then try to get a ridiculous price for your project. Buyers at the high end are not only particular, they have usually already owned, perhaps even built, a high quality house, and they aren’t fooled. Yes, this is “Greenwich”, where houses can go for extraordinary sums, but you’d better have something to back up that price or you aren’t going to get it.

She shot some folks in Plover, just to hear them cry

Woman shot people with blowgun: “I wanted to hear them say ‘ouch’”.

Obama sets the Democrat agenda

The Demmerkrats are going to war, and banking on their army of municipal employees and illegal immigrants versus the rest of us. Fight for your country.

Democratic leaders this week pledged to move a comprehensive immigration bill through Congress this year, which would include a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. As a political issue, immigration has potential benefits and risks for Democratic candidates. But the focus by party leaders makes clear they see the it as an overall winner.

Hamilton Avenue shows its students how our borders used to be contolled

Ellis Island reenactment on Ham Ave. For a more realistic teaching experience, the school should have made the kids march across a pretend  desert at Tod’s Point without water.

New home sales up 24% ! Er, maybe not

MarketWatch looks at the fine print. (Hat tip, MC)

Sales are up 24% compared with March 2009, but are down 70% from the peak in 2005.

Government statisticians have low confidence in the monthly report, which is subject to large revisions, and large sampling and other statistical errors.

In most months, the government isn’t sure whether sales rose or fell. The standard error in March, for instance, was plus or minus 21.1%. Read the full government report.

The government says it can take up to five months to establish a statistically significant trend in sales. Over the past five months, sales have been on a 358,000 seasonally adjusted annual pace, up from 355,000 in the five-month interval through February and 356,000 in March 2009. It’s the first time since January 2006 that the five-month average was higher than a year earlier.

Sales of new homes had fallen four months in a row before March’s surprising boom. A federal tax credit for home buyers that expires soon seemed to have little impact on sales until March.

If you liked cash for clunkers, I suppose you’ll love this program too, but artificial stimulus doth not a market make.

Whatever works, I suppose

(NYTimes)

Sorry boyfriend tries public humiliation instead of flowers.

Single payer system – the VA – is a complete wreck

I don’t think we’ll like it when these folks are supervising the health care for all 300 million of us.