Obama fund raiser at Weinstein’s by the Sea met by Move On protestors

Den of Thieves – 26 Seaside Avenue, Westport

Obama has returned to DC  but liberals are still seething at his coddling rich ass kissers.

At Mr. Weinstein’s estate, the guests will be treated to one-of-a-kind scenery as they wait for face time with a possible president. Tucked into the Westport dunes, Mr. Weinstein’s home is valued at about $18 million by the real estate Web site Zillow, which reports that it encompasses 8,900 square feet and  seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms. Its backyard is the sea.

Oops! No all that was from coverage on Romney’s trip to the Hamptons. Well, I’m sure there were protests anyway, weren’t there?

So why doesn’t anyone at Columbia remember Obama?

In 2008, 400 Columbia grads who attended during the two years Barry was there were contacted. Not one remembered ever having heard of him, let alone meeting him or attending a class with the guy.

Why has Barry sealed his grades from Occidental, where he claims to have matriculated for two years before transferring, and Columbia and Harvard Law? One of his classmates suggests several reasons for such modesty.

Here’s my gut belief: Obama got a leg up by being admitted to both Occidental and Columbia as a foreign exchange student. He was raised as a young boy in Indonesia. But did his mother ever change him back to a U.S. citizen? When he returned to live with his grandparents in Hawaii or as he neared college-age preparing to apply to schools, did he ever change his citizenship back? I’m betting not.

If you could unseal Obama’s Columbia University records I believe you’d find that:

A)   He rarely ever attended class.

B)   His grades were not those typical of what we understand it takes to get into Harvard Law School.

C)   He attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.

D)   He paid little for either undergraduate college or Harvard Law School because of foreign aid and scholarships given to a poor foreign students like this kid Barry Soetoro from Indonesia.

Reminder: Harry Reid will NOT release his tax returns, and never has

So how did he amass $10 million during his career as a “public servant”? That’s for him to know and us to find out.

Harry Reid: “Any man or woman who will not be completely candid about his or her finances does not deserve to be in public office.”

Okay by me.

Ironic photos

First up is this Greenwich Time photo of the uprooted tree on Nawthorne that pulled up a gas line when it toppled, forcing the evacuation of the residents on the street. Notice the orange “X” on the trunk? This was one of the trees proposed for removal unto the home owners won their battle with CL&P and convinced the tree warden that the tree was safe. The second photo is of a trimaran that was flipped by the high winds of last night’s storm – the unfortunate owner named it “Take Wing”.

What could go wrong?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is destiny

When you can’t meet your standards, lower your standards

I see great happiness in your future

Unemployment remains stubbornly high, the economy is dead, what to do? The Fed wants to create a “happiness gauge”, so our government can tell us how much better off we are without all those material goods to distract us from our oneness with the universe.

With “medicinal” marijuana flourishing, this was inevitable

McNuggets, baby

Like, wow, man: McDonalds going after the 1-5 AM munchies market.

That’s what he says but he would, wouldn’t he?

Guilty!

Turns out that the tree that fell in Riverside across a transmission line, blacking out all of Greenwich, was located in Greg “Chain Saw” Islan’s backyard on Summit Road. Islan denies any responsibility:

“Nature is doing what it does; we can’t control it,” he said. “You can’t blame anyone, it’s just a different world.”

Uh huh – those of us who know this character don’t believe that for a minute.

By the way, Obummer’s hoppityclopeter just (5:06) fluttered by overhead – probably picked up Islan so he can celebrate this despicable act of vandalism with Obama and his crowd up in Westport.

No news is no news

With the town without power for most of the day there’s been no way to communicate with the MLS (also without power) so nothing new to discuss in the way of local real estate. More tomorrow, perhaps.

Got your tickets for the Obama One Percenter dinner at Harvey’s this evening? I understand Fudrucker has a few available at just a slight mark-up: $50 grand each.

Bad houses

Big Gulp

I spent Saturday morning looking at rental houses in the $9,000 range and what a depressing review of the worst of the 1980s it was. Simply dreadful homes, built cheaply, thrown up quickly and now showing their age – they look dumpster- ready to me, rather than candidates for renovation. These are the same houses that are priced for sale around $1.8, $1.9 million and in that range, demand exceeds supply so they do sell. The rentals are usually in far worse shape than their peers in the for sale category but still, it seems that there was a single supplier of gold-colored bathroom fixtures and shower frames in the 80′s and every builder used it, along with cheap exterior trim, nasty interior moldings and plastic hollow-core doors.

That said, I don’t see a long-term future for the white elephants built in the past decade either. The quality of finish work is far higher but how many people will want someone else’s fifteen-year-old taste in layout and design festooned with obsolete high tech “surround sound” systems and clogged whirlpool tubs?

Which is why the best investment idea I can come up with these days is Caterpillar - I think they’ll be busy around here for a long time to come.

Uh oh

[power was out in Greenwich for some hours - I'm still without cellphone coverage - go figure - but the Internet's back up, so as I was saying....]

Welcome to clown school

Reader “Max” sends this notice of foreclosure auction on Steven Braverman’s house up on 1038 Lake Avenue. September 8 is the announced date but we’ve been here before, most recently in May, 2011. So will it actually be sold this time? Sooner or later it will, but no guarantees that Braverman won’t pull another bankruptcy lawyer out of his pocket flask or tasselled loafer and forestall the inevitable again.

Way back in 2009 I poked some fun at this house and its owner grieved me – probably upset by my suggestion that, given its interior decorating job, it might best be suited as a school for the blind, but the fact remains the place is doomed, and has been since the day Braverman  paid $4.4 million for it in 2003.

The debt on this house is $7 million; its value is half that at best, so I don’t expect to see it sell at the auction. The bank will take it back, attempt to recoup its loss by putting it back up for sale at an impossible price and there it will sit. I envision a forlorn, deteriorating structure slowly falling into ruin, for a long time. Of course, I was always fond of Edgar Allen Poe – maybe a happier ending will result here.

Bosch slapped!

The Avenger

Drunk throws a bottle at Olympic racers, Dutch Judo champ Edith Bosch whups him upside the head. The  bottle tosser is tossed and as for the slap he received, an Olympic official calls it “poetic justice”. Ha!

There seems to be no way to rationally invest in Wall Street anymore

The “buy and hold” strategy hasn’t worked in a long time (with, perhaps, the exception of Berkshire Hathaway but even their newer acquisitions seem to be lagging) and now the macro-hedge funds are being hammered. Hopeful sellers of high end Greenwich homes might want to reconsider their strategy of waiting for a fall market recovery to flush out those rich Wall Street buyers because, maybe, those people will stay hunkered down for a while.

WSJ:

Global financial markets continue to be whipsawed by policy makers and economic news, leaving even fund managers who focus on profiting from sweeping macroeconomic trends in a difficult spot….

Many so-called macro fund managers—investors who bet on big economic trends and policy decisions—had predicted a scenario where central banks become increasingly ineffective and developed economies remain weighed down by debt.

But even those who made the correct calls are finding it nearly impossible to time the frequent ups and downs of jittery, fast-moving markets where swings are often driven by pronouncements from politicians or central bankers….

One of the largest hedge-fund firms in the world, Bridgewater Associates LP, has posted lackluster returns this year. The Westport, Conn., firm, which manages $125 billion, deftly navigated the post-financial-crisis markets and returned 36.3% in its flagship macro fund last year. But this year the fund is up 2% through July 20, according to a person familiar with the fund.

You know the Sikh temple massacre is getting serious media attention

They’ve assigned the killer “Wade Michael Page” full three-name status. I don’t know why the press likes to do this but at least since the time of John Wilkes Booth, it has.

Rover lands safely

Neato.

Obummer has, typically, drawn the wrong lesson from this amazing feat and used the moment to call for more government spending. A better leader might consider that our problem is not too little borrowing and is instead a matter of redrawing priorities in spending what we don’t already have.

By the way, this is also the 67th anniversary of our dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. There’s a certain easy irony in comparing the disparate results of two different acts of brilliant engineering. Different times.

 

Heh

“Pulled Up in Old Greenwich” sends along this news article with the comment, “what are the odds?”

An uprooted tree broke a gas line in the area of Shore and Nawthorne roads in Old Greenwich, prompting the evacuation of about a dozen homes in the area for about an hour, officials said.

I seem to recall a lone dissenter at the hearing held to discuss removing decayed, dying trees along Nawthorne. The neighbors who insisted that the trees were just fine and good for another ten years or so “won”.

Hey; their street, their houses, but I’d say, in answer to Pulled Up’s question, that the odds were pretty good.