Laws are for the little people

While he awaits the arrival of his children in yet another taxpayer-funded aircraft – no word on whether the girls will fly in Bo’s Osprey or something larger – Obama took a couple of brief moments from golf today to announce a new tax he’ll be imposing by executive fiat: $5 per cell phone to fund further high school access to wireless connections.

“You would think that connecting schools to the information superhighway would be a pretty noncontroversial topic,” [White House Press Spokesman] Earnest told reporters in Martha’s Vineyard.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t seen a lot of action in Congress, so the president has advocated an administrative, unilateral action to get this done.”

A nation of one man, not of laws. Hope and change indeed.

Damn you, Mickster!

230 Bedford Road

The man has gone and sold 230 Bedford Road, my favorite house in Greenwich, for $2.8 million. This house sold in 2004 for $4 million, and the new owners completely renovated it while preserving everything that made it unique (which was quite a lot). I don’t know how much was spent on those renovations but I’m guessing that when they returned it to market at $5.5 million in 2008 they were hoping to break even. Those hopes were dashed over the ensuing 1,624 days, as the price kept dropping.

A beautiful home, but obviously not for everyone. Glad it’s finally found someone who appreciates it, albeit at a bargain price.

36 Meyer Place

On a more modest note, 36 Meyer Place in Riverside asked $880,000, sold for $800,000. This lot is no less bucolic than 26 Buxton Lane, mentioned earlier today.

Sound Beach and Tomac Avenue closures

Tod’s Point detour

A reader took the initiative to write to the town for the details of the impending road closures and has received a letter back which, unfortunately, I’m too technologically challenged to reproduce here. But the highlights seem far more encouraging than the first reports.

Most of the time, the roads will be open (one lane) to traffic, though there will be “occasional weekend or evening closures” occurring sporadically, 30 days, total (estimated) during the entire construction. The closures are estimated to last ” a few days at a time”, which would seem to indicate to me that they’ll extend past weekends and evenings, but ….

Estimated construction will last from the spring of 2014 through the fall of 2018 (!).

There was supposed to be a map of the exact detour route through Riverside attached, but I didn’t receive it. I’ll try to get a copy of it and if possible, post it here.

Should make for interesting beach traffic.

His father would be so ashamed

Kids ‘ll do the darndest things!

Jesse Jackson Jr. and wife sentenced to 30 and 12 months, respectively, in the pokey for stealing campaign funds. “Didn’t that boy learn nothing from me?”, Jessie Sr. asked FWIW. “I must have extorted what, $50 million? $100 million? from every major corporation in America with my Operation Push thing, and never, not once, was I even arrested, let alone shipped off to the pen. That’s the trouble with this new generation, they just aren’t creative enough; now excuse me, I gotta go have lunch with Barry and Reverend Al.”

Convenient to transportation

 

Ready for her new home

26 Buxton Lane, Riverside, sold for full asking price of $1.065 million.  Good place for truck spotting.

Price cut on Brookridge Drive

 

36 Brookridge Drive

From $3.475 to $3.2 million. This sold for $2.770 million in 2011 and despite redoing the kitchen, there’s usually buyer resistance to paying a whole lot more for a property than it was purchased for a short time before. This one mentions a new roof but really, that’s a maintenance item, not an improvement, and if you’re a seller, don’t expect the next owner to pay you for it.

Great, quiet street, convenient location, indoor pool, if that’s your pleasure – usually, it’s not, but tastes to differ. Funny, indoor pools were considered the ultimate luxury back in my yute, before cheap Caribbean flights became available.

Marine Corp Major: “we’re building a domestic army”

Mickster sent this along – the transformation of local police forces into SWAT teams and full-military assault units has been drawing increasing attention from concerned small government types – see, e.g., Randy Balko, who has written a book on the subject – , but not, oddly enough, from the left; who do they think these forces will be turned on after we kooks on the right fringe are disposed of?

This surprises me, a little, but given the current state of low priced inventory, perhaps it shouldn’t

 

48 Hawthorne

48 Hawthorne Street, over in Glenville, 0.11 acre, 1883, renovated 2005, asked $785,000, went via bidding war for $800,000. It looks like a pleasant house, and it’s in a very nice neighborhood; multiple bids, though? Tough market to predict – I wonder if the buyers are Westchester tax refugees?

Your name is destiny

bonjour!

Greenwich resident Robert Paris has been indicted for a travel agency fraud.

Details here, if interested, but I’m just going for the headline)

I blame Amazon

Pitney Bowes selling its Stamford headquarters. The last of the employees will be moving to Shelton and Danbury so as to give the post office a place to deliver their unemployment checks.

This has been like watching Kodak and Polaroid fade into the dustbin of history, so it comes as no surprise that the company that invented the postage meter (and some very er…”odd” ads) no longer has a reason to live in a world that stopped sending mail long ago (and why do we still have the USPS? Ask the union, and its congressmen*).

Why blame Amazon? We don’t have to: we could just as easily blame that other popular monster, Walmart, with no more logic;  both are blamed for destroying small retail and local downtown mom and pop stores, so why not this? Industries change, people’s behavior changes, and just as conventional film photography died when people stopped using it and went digital, there’s no longer a viable place for a manufacturer of a product that’s no longer wanted.

Come to think if it, we really should blame Al Gore, who, after all invented the Internet and spawned email and pdf.docs. The bastard!

 

*Alternatively, the US Communist Party blames the demise of the USPS on Ronald Reagan, racism, WalMart and, ironically, Pitney Bowes.