The poor bastards will be fighting criminal charges within a year

CIA stops bombing plot, everybody cheers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA thwarted an ambitious plot by al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden, The Associated Press has learned.

So far, so good, but here’s what will have the Democrats drooling and howling for heads next year:

The would-be suicide bomber, based in Yemen, had not yet picked a target or bought a plane ticket when the CIA stepped in and seized the bomb, officials said. It’s not immediately clear what happened to the alleged bomber.

It’s pretty clear to me what’s happened to the bomber: he’s being interrogated to discover the rest of the plot and who his co-conspirators are. This is the kind of thing that, long ago, Nancy Pelosi encouraged but like most politicians, she was for it before she was against it, and as 9/11 faded from her base’s tiny minds, she switched sides.

The latest circus going on down Gitmo way with all right-minded people decrying the torture of Khalid the Beloved of Allah (the exact guy Pelosi encouraged the CIA to ‘go harder” on, just as a by the way) shows what’s in store for these CIA operatives. Should have milked the guy dry and then dumped him out onto the desert from 5,000 feet.

He could keep his underwear on.

RELATED: Playing catch and release with high level Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan. The idea, I suppose, is to beg and plead the Taliban to stay out of Afghanistan long enough for us to scram and then, boys, “have at it”.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls,

it’s not tolling at all. The Greenwich market’s shut for the day and I hope Wall Street did better. Four accepted offers, two (Cos Cob and points west) around $800,000 each, two on the same Riverside street, Verona. 29 Verona originally asked $2.195, dropped to $1.950 and has an accepted offer now somewhere around $1.785. Nice house. 2 Verona is less impressive but then, it carried a less impressive price: $1.395. Sold quickly.

Thirty-three “new” listings were reported but the vast majority of them are just big-ticket houses (and land) that expired unsold and have come back, often for the third or more time. Most haven’t even cut their price so if you have, say, $25,000,000 or just $12,000,000, take your time – these are going nowhere and their owners obviously like it like that.

‘bama bans burka bags

This ….

No Prez for you! Just days after his wife evicted her own mother from the White House for looking “too peasanty”, Obama has a lady in a burka removed from his campaign rally. No official reason for her removal was given.

Not this

On the other hand, there’s always this, pre-approved by the Secret Service:

Osama’s Burka Babe

Obama sends out code to his base

Following up yesterday’s announcement by VP Biden that he supported gay marriage, now the Secretary of Education has chimed in. What relevance could the Secretary of Education’s view on gay marriage possibly have to with the issue itself? None. So assuming that Obama’s mouthpieces know what they’re doing (okay, that’s certainly not true, usually, of Biden), the release of the VP and now a cabinet member to voice support for gat marriage must be deliberate and must be a message to the base that “I can’t do it now, but reelect me and we’ll get it done next term”.

It’s not an issue that excites me either way but Obama’s handlers must be feeling desperate if they have to go to the base this early in the campaign at the risk of offending much of the black vote and certainly a large chunk of the swing voters.

Well, at least he’ll always have the dog haters.

What do Generalissimo Franco and the Greenwich real estate market have in common this 7th day of May?

They’re both still dead. Nothing worth reporting on except, possibly, the return of

154 Stanwich (from its earlier listing)

154 Stanwich Road to the market (I assume its pictures will be posted soon ). I remember this as a nice house  when I last saw it – backs up the golf course, nice accoutrements, good yard, all of that. Current owners paid $4.412 million for it in 2004 (it was built in 2001), the listing claims they “renovated” it in 2005 but renovating in the real estate world is a flexible term so you’ll have to see for yourself, and they tried getting $5.2 million for it back in 2010. That was not the year to try to unload a house in that price range so the number slowly dropped until it hit $4.250 and expired last October (the listing, not the house or its owners). Now it’s back, at $4.150.  I don’t think that’s a bad price and if you can negotiate a bit downward from there, this could be a good buy.

Ah, but is it enough?

I’ve been keeping an eye on 85 Richmond Hill Road ever since it sold for $7.1 million in 2006 and was returned to the market, unlived-in and unchanged, for $8.9 million the following year. I have no idea what the owner was thinking when he did that  but we know what the market thought – the house wouldn’t  sell.

Its price has been falling slowly over the past five years and today it took another drop, to $5.595. That puts it right about where the town appraiser figured in the last reevaluation ($4 X 1.4) but after it has sat for so long, will  buyers think it’s reached its proper price? Stay tuned.

And real estate trickles to a halt

As of 9:55, nothing to report. No sales, no contract, no accepted offers or even price cuts. And unless you consider Shippan Point to be part of Greenwich, no new listings (and even that’s just a $1.2 home).

There’s bound to be stuff reported later today but the next few weeks might be a decent time to go bargain hunting as sellers see another summer looming and no activity. On the other hand, you may prefer to rent or stay put and see what the next six months bring. Four of my multi-million house lookers have decided to rent and a fifth to stay put in his existing rental. I’m never going to be able to afford one of those robots if this keeps up.

The latest, but probably not the last word on Elizabeth Warren

 

My other house is a tipi – really!

From Victor Davis Hanson, naturally.

The trivial Elizabeth Warren “high cheekbones” fraud nonetheless offered a draw-back-the-curtain look into the gears and levers of our national race industry. The real story is not that the multimillionaire liberal (and one-percenter) Warren fabricated a Cherokee identity for over a decade (to the delight of her quota-thirsty universities), but rather the notion that if a pink blond at Harvard can get away with faking a career-enhancing minority identity, then anyone, anywhere, can—or rather often has.

Give Ward Churchill his due: he worked at it—unlike Warren, who junked her supposed great, great, great grandparent once she got tenure and being “Indian” was a drag at Cambridge cocktail parties. At least, like the proverbial chameleon on the leaf, Churchill tried to alter his appearance with buckskin, beads, and braids to find an edge his otherwise mediocre talents and white male status would not supply. In contrast, Warren simply by fiat claimed high cheekbones—no beads, no trips to the reservation, no buckskin, no Churchillian effort. Note the connivance of Harvard, which hand-in-glove used Warren’s pseudo-identity to pad its “diversity” goals, which enable a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty to, well, not feel too guilty about remaining a mostly white yuppie left-wing faculty.

There (won’t) always be an England

I’m sorry, so sorry
That I was such a fool
I didn’t know
Love could be so cruel
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Uh-oh
Oh, yes

Scotland Yard bans use of term “blacklist” for fear of offending long-dead  judges

A little late for an apology, I should think, but nothing’s too silly for political correctness.

According to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins the word “blacklist” originated with a list England’s King Charles II made of fifty-eight judges and court officers who sentenced his father, Charles I, to death in 1649. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, thirteen of these regicides were executed and twenty-five sentenced to life imprisonment, while others escaped.

They also point out that “white list” is not the opposite of a blacklist, but rather a list, often kept by unions, of people suitable for employment. Refers to the “white-list”.

He was shocked, shocked! to discover the power still on

Your  plimsolls, sir.

Copper thief fried when he tries stripping utility cable. Caught fire, too. My criminal Law professor, Loftus Becker, used to speak of the “hot stove principle” that suggested immediate punishment for crimes done. Quick and hard stopped recidivism. I don’t know if Lofty visited  California this week but perhaps one of his disciples did.