Almost as surprising as it would be to discover an intelligent liberal

Earth Day celebrants, 2013

Yale law professor astonished to find that Tea Party supporters aren’t stupid.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.

Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him.

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

While Kahan cautioned against thinking the results can be used to explain deep ideological fights over climate change and other politically relevant science, and he said the results wouldn’t change his negative views of the tea party, he did say he will no longer make assumptions about the level of knowledge on his opponents’ side.

Hey, you never know: someone may suddenly remember that  Ted Cruz, the Hispanic who fled the liberal plantation and is now vilified as an idiot and a dunce, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School ( magna cum laude)  and, unlike another famous Harvard Law Review editor, actually wrote articles. And released his transcripts.

My prediction: Cruz will repeat his performance of standing on principle and defeat the senate’s alien amnesty bill. The media won’t be able to sway the masses on this one, I hope, because most citizens oppose what Obama wants to shove down their throats with this bill. Tough to run scare stories every night on a topic that doesn’t scare people: “Jose won’t be able to take my job? Well darn!”

Usually, this is protected speech

 

First Amendment activist

Man arrested for flipping a bird at police.

WATURBURY, Conn. (AP) — A Waterbury man faces charges including animal cruelty after police say he threw an exotic bird at a police officer.

Luis Santana was spotted holding the bird while running on High Street Tuesday night. Police said they’d been called to the scene to break up a fight.

When an officer tried to stop and question him, Santana threw the cockatoo at the officer and ran into some woods.

The 32-year-old was found in a nearby house, after a homeowner reported someone had run into his basement.

 

New ownership at WGCH – will anyone notice, or care?

“I am not (much of) a crook!”
Bob Metter in his better days

The station’s down at the end of the AM dial and claims to be Greenwich oriented despite its content of canned business news from St. Louis and points west. The ratings are too low to be measured by Arbitron but nonetheless someone has bought it out of bankruptcy. Greenwich Time terms it a sale of “Greenwich’s Flagship Radio Station”, which seems a trifle overblown: there is no other other radio station, unless you count Billy Joe Haversin’s short wave set up in his mom and dad’s attic.

Regardless, the sale comes a little late for its former owner and former Greenwich resident Bob Metter, who somehow escaped the SEC fraud charges brought against him and his penny stock company, Spongetech Delivery Systems. If you want a laugh, check out the bulletin boards for Spongetech back in, say, 2011, when the SEC was preparing to shut them down. I used to do this stuff: it was a classic pump and dump penny stock scam but the poor chumps on the boards just can’t believe they’ve been had. Oooh, are they angry at posters who tell them just what suckers they are! Oh well.

Perhaps I’m missing something

Landscaping by Goat

718 North Street, a charming, dated, 1932 pile near but not on the reservoir, is new to the market today and asking $4.8 million. That seems like a lot for this house: it sold for $3.2 million in 2010 and looking at the pictures from the older listing and today’s, I can’t discern $1.6 million in improvements. Those mentioned: new gutters, roof, furnace, etc., fall more into the category of maintenance, rather than new features that will excite a buyer and make her dig deep in her purse.

Gold now buried in the basement?

Another price cut on Doubling

49 Doubling Rd

49 Doubling is down again, dropping to $5.450 million from its 2008 asking price of $7.495. Interestingly, the town tax card shows this as being only 5,000 square feet which makes sense for a one-acre property, but its picture makes it look much larger – the listing sheet is silent on the matter says “8,000 +, which seems more likely. Well, who you gonna believe, the tax card or your own lying eyes?

Riverside sale

22 Oak

22 Oak Drive, (once) asked $2.490 million, got $1.950.  That’s probably a land sale, though there is, as I remember, quite a bit of wetlands here. The house itself belonged to the parents of friends of mine and I spent a lot of time here. It worked for that family, and it would certainly serve that purpose today, especially now that, I note from its pictures, the avocado refrigerator from 1968 appears to have been replaced.

Cognewaugh sale

326 Cognewaugh Rd

326 Cognewaugh asked $1.275, sold for $1.250. This is a 20-year-old modular, cheaply finished, on mediocre land on a hard-to-navigate street. The fact that it sold in just 90 days, as I warned my own client it would, says something about the dearth of inventory at this end of the market. The listing broker wisely included no interior photos, but trust me: this house could use some serious upgrades to its amenities, including a new kitchen, respectable moldings and replacement of its one-piece fiberglass bath stalls.

On a similar discouraging note, today is open house day for all properties east of North Street and I can find nothing new or well-priced enough to lure me out despite having clients who are still eager to buy. There have been dozens of price cuts in the past week, but all to houses that were overpriced to begin with, so my reaction is “doh”, rather than delighted surprise. Besides, even with those price cuts I don’t think they offer value. I am not infallible of course, but my initial reaction to the asked-for prices has been borne out by the market reaction; we’ll see if I’m wrong this time.

As an aside to owners, the time to have lowered your price was last September, even August, when there were plenty of buyers looking to get into new homes by the start of the school year. You’ve let that market pass while you clung to your illusions and now all that’s left is a pool of buyers who are in no rush and under no pressure to overpay. Look for me on your doorstep over the coming months. As a guy who is (still) my friend said after I came with a client for his grossly overpriced house,* “here comes the grim reaper, but at least now I’ll sell it.”

And he -we- did.

* To be fair to my friend, he had, smartly, dropped his original “take-a-flyer” price rapidly and repeatedly by the time I showed up dressed in black with a scythe on my shoulder.

Perhaps there’s hope after all

Old Guard Democrats occupy Wall Street

Young people are learning to distrust the government.

Young people have grown up listening to parents and politicians who promise that the federal government will solve our problems. But, as they have suffered widespread unemployment, watched college costs soar and seen our legislators wrangling ineffectually, they have begun to doubt the wisdom of their elders. They have, it appears, lost faith in government.

According to an April survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics, only 39 percent of young voters count on President Obama to “do the right thing,” and only 22 percent trust the federal government. Those are shocking numbers for a group that turned out en masse to support Obama’s reelection.

This increasing wariness could become a life-long habit, just as faith in Washington was a hallmark of the millions who came of age during FDR’s reign or skepticism of Uncle Sam colored those who grew up listening to Ronald Reagan. With government programs spreading like an algae bloom and threatening our solvency, some pushback from the next generation could head off fiscal Armageddon. Today’s young people just need a little more convincing that the feds don’t have all the answers.

Glenn Reynolds responds: “Well that should be coming.”

Last with a Mohican

While the stubbornly stupid, like Dollar Bill, will never realize that their progressive vision for America has failed, that failure will soon become obvious to the generation that’s following. And unlike the illegals Obama’s bringing in to outnumber them, these kids are the ones expected to pay for it all.

If something can’t continue, it won’t.

This ought to concern liberals, too, but it won’t

The Sun King knows what’s best for you

Obama threatened to cut off food stamps during the shut down, despite the fact that the program was unaffected by fund unavailability.

Threaten the ruling power, it starves the people. Funny enough, liberals also want to disarm the citizenry: “who doesn’t trust the government to do the right thing?” demanded NSA Director Keith Alexander. “Sure, we lied to Congress about our surveillance program, but otherwise …”

 “understanding the operational issues and constraints that States face, and in the interest of preserving maximum flexibility, we are directing States to hold their November issuance files and delay transmission to State electronic benefit transfer (EBT) vendors until further notice.” In other words, asFox13News summarizes, “States across the country are being told to stop the supplemental nutrition assistance program for the month of November, pending further notice.”

Business as usual on the beltway

I can be had, but I’m no cheap date!

McConnell sells out for $3 billion pork chop project. Funding for the damn project in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky had nothing to do with persuading Republican leadership to cave, of course; this was just something whose time had come, and as long as they were passing a law anyway ….

The more I see of our local Greenwich RTC and how it operates, the better I understand Washington, and vice versa. Neither is bothered one whit by principle.

Obama now resumes push for amnesty

Coming our way

Pseudo-debt crisis deferred, the president is set to return to his original agenda and push through immigration “reform”. He promised to transform America, and unfortunately for the nation, he hasn’t forgotten that pledge.

Forget trying to curtail spending, the real war is here.

Republicans’ new worst fear isn’t defaulting on America’s debts. If an immigration policy favored by the White House and Senate Democrats should become law, 17.3 million newly legalized immigrant voters would emerge by 2036, eager to reward the party that gave them a path to citizenship.

The White House has shifted gears and put its policy team in immigration overdrive, zooming past the debt crisis that threatened to sink the republic and on to the task of normalizing the estimated 11 million U.S. residents who have no legal basis for being there.

The Democrat-dominated U.S. Senate passed a bill in June that would provide a citizenship path for those who have been in the U.S. since the end of 2011. But as with the early days of the debt crisis and the partial government shutdown, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives aren’t eager to consider it.

The Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C. think-tank, projects that the Senate bill, S.744, would add 17.3 million new legal, voting-age U.S. residents to 14.9 million whom analysts already expect to appear without the proposed law.

‘To place these figures in perspective,’ writes Steven Camarota, the group’s director of research, ‘the last four presidential elections were decided by 4.5 million votes on average.’

Some in the Stupid Party seem willing to help him with this because they assume that Latinos are somehow “natural Republicans”. They aren’t, and Obama and his crowd know this – they pitched ObamaCare to Latinos specifically to win in 2012.  Now, ObamaCare applications are encouraging and enabling recipients to register to vote.  

Mexicans in particular will never vote in significant numbers for Republicans.

“For historical reasons to do with the nationalisation of the land under Lázaro Cárdenas and the predominant form of peasant land tenure, which was “village cooperative” rather than based on individual plots, the demand for “land to the tiller” in Mexico does not imply an individual plot for every peasant or rural worker or family. In Mexico, collectivism among the peasantry is a strong tradition … one consequence of these factors is that the radical political forces among the rural population are on the whole explicitly anti-capitalist and socialist in their ideology. Sometimes this outlook is expressed in support for guerilla organisations; but struggle movements of the rural population are widespread, and they spontaneously ally with the most militant city-based leftist organisations.”

Again, all this is known to the Democrats – their push to bring this about is as great a danger to the Republic as their desire to bankrupt us.