Is this illegal?

Arnold-Peter Weiss, Harvard Bozo

Surgeon pleads guilty to attempting to sell ancient Greek coins he “knew” had been stolen in Italy, but they were fakes, so what was he guilty of?  Not possession of stolen property – these weren’t stolen. Not some violation of an antiquities act – these weren’t ancient. Not fraud – no one paid him his asked-for $3 million because they were discovered to be fake before money changed hands.  And not attempted fraud – he thought they were real.

I know there are statutes prohibiting the sale of fake drugs, enacted to snare drug dealers peddling fake dry goods, but I’m trying to think of what law this guy violated.

He only got probation, so I suspect the prosecutors had a hard time coming up with a crime to charge him with too.

UPDATE: This link shows that he was originally charged in January with “criminal possession of stolen property” which of course, they couldn’t nail him on. “Attempted possession” might work, except there was in fact no stolen property to possess – the coins were forgeries.

Sales activity, July 3rd

Accepted offer, 43 Bramble Lane, $1.4 million, 7 DOM. 0.38 of an acre, that seems to be what a building lot on Bramble goes for thee days. Free house, too.

May contracts, closing now:

Sold: 34 Lake Drive S., Riverside, $2.3 million, 27 DOM.

Sold: 40 North Old Stone Bridge, asked $2.6 million, sold for $2.395, 29 DOM. Mind boggling; easily $500,000 higher than other houses in this neighborhood, but it must have appraised out so Old Stone Bridge owners should be cheerful.

 

5 Meadow Dr

5 Meadow Drive (Rockridge, Greenwich). Asked $4.2 million, sold for $3.5. 2.32 acres in a 2-acre zone, great location and yard, the house was a wreck. Assign all this price to land and you still have an impressive price for a building lot here.

41 Wesskum Wood Rd

41 Wesskum Wood, Riverside, asked $2.745, sold for $2.550. I liked this house very much and recommended it to clients, without success. Not because they disliked the house or its location, it was just not large enough to accommodate their family. I think its selling price was a fair one for both parties.

1 River Lane, Cos Cob, asked $788,000, got $712,500.

49 Benjamin Street, Old Greenwich, asked $1.299, sold in three days, $1.290. When you absolutely positively have to live south of the Village, …

My god, it’s come to this

 

Let us join together in our suffering

Poll: Likely voters say Jimmy Carter was a better president than Obama. Glenn Reynolds used to say that if we were lucky, Obama would turn out to be only the second worst president. Guess we weren’t.

Why wait for The Supremes?

Dannel Malloy and his Boyz have already implemented ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion provisions. Not the pre-exiting conditions coverage for kids or high-risk pools that some Americans at least support, but the better care for winos part.

The health law’s Medicaid expansion does not officially start until Jan. 1, 2014. It did, however, give states the option of starting enrollment even earlier. Five states –  California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington — as well as the District of Columbia took the Obama administration up on the offer.

All told, they expected to cover 600,000 Americans by 2014 — about 10 times the amount covered under the health law’s often-touted high risk pools (those currently have 61,619 enrollees). They have already, taken together, enrolled more than a half-million Americans.

Just can’t wait to spend Fairfield County’s money.

(h/T, “Ian”)

And for the seventeenth day he rested

This is not Obama’s secretarial pool

Too hot for golf, Obama will spend the day in his pool.

I’ve been looking for this article since it was published in 2009

InstaPundit just reposted it. “No Country for Burly Men” - “How feminists skewed the Obama Stimulus Plan towards women’s jobs”.

A “man-cession.” That’s what some economists are starting to call it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as a “downturn” for women but a “catastrophe” for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators, welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women’s groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. He called for a two-year “shovel ready” stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act.

Women’s groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” A group of “notable feminist economists” circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to “institute apprenticeships” to train women for “at least one third” of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.” As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE–
Women’s Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

The National Organization for Women (NOW), the Feminist Majority, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, and the National Women’s Law Center soon joined the battle against the supposedly sexist bailout of men’s jobs. At the suggestion of a staffer to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, NOW president Kim Gandy canvassed for a female equivalent of the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ ” terminology. (“Apron-ready” was broached but rejected.) Christina Romer, the highly regarded economist President Obama chose to chair his Council of Economic Advisers, would later say of her entrance on the political stage, “The very first email I got . . . was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

Holiday time

No open houses today and none Thursday. Might be some activity reported, so check back in but don’t expect much.