Going through the motions

Sebelius not only joined her boss in flatly lying about what’s happening with Obamacare, she can’t even be bothered to use a different speech writer than other administration figureheads. Today’s opening statement to the Senate hearing was word for word, identical to that of her subordinate Marilyn Tavenner’s.

Their end game has aways been a single-payer system, so what do they care about “glitches”?

Do your remember when there was such a thing as “major medical” insurance, that paid for the big things while leaving it to individuals to cover routine medical expenses? Today Obama called that “underinsurance”, sold by “bad apples”. Our leader has now forbidden that approach, and required all Americans to buy insurance for themselves and their neighbors that will pay for routine doctors visits, birth control and day care for the stranger down the block’s autistic child.

The bill for all this is scheduled to arrive immediately after next fall’s elections.

Another Biden defense victim

Teen shotgunned while toilet papering principal’s house. Our Vice President, you will recall, urged exactly this response to crime. Too bad someone was dumb enough to listen to him.

We’re doomed: the rot’s spread as far as North Dakota

 

Drop the Snickers bar and return to your home

 Fargo woman passes out warning notes to fat Trick-or-Treaters.

The woman told the radio station that parents of chubby children are being “irresponsible” by sending them out trick-or-treating to collect lollies and chocolates door-to-door.

“I just want to send a message to the parents of kids that are really overweight,” Cheryl told the radio station. “I think it’s just really irresponsible of parents to send them out looking for free candy just because all the other kids are doing it.”

Giving overweight children more treats is “contributing to their health problems and really, their kids are everybody’s kids.”

No they are not your children, you stupid, stupid woman. Turn off your television and rid yourself of the modern conception that we’re all busy little bees in the colony.

Except for Lottery Commissioner Farricker, this is news?

Connecticut’s Village Idiot of the Month celebrates his good fortune

WSJ: Gamblers are throwing their money away, study shows. Hope they didn’t pay much for that conclusion.

The bubble must be rising again, if Joey Beninati can get funding for another project

Jump!
Jimmy Cabrera (left) and his pal Joey turn their backs on the final, aborted Antares project

Beninati, one of two partners of Antares, the Greenwich developer that failed so spectacularly here, is back in the game,with new investors’ money and a NYC building he just purchased for $24 million.

The Antares Boyz went down owing hundreds of millions of dollars, wasted on cars, maxi-pads and general incompetence.* They’re being sued by pension funds and other investors, ex-wives and just about everyone who doesn’t like them on general principle yet here they are – or here’s one of them, anyway, scrubbed, clean and ready to go again. That someone would give him money to “invest” in real estate is like the monkeys in Chinese zoos fidgeting just before the earthquake arrives; it’s a bad sign.

*(The definitive article on the Greenwich crash remains Nick Paumgarten’s 2008 New Yorker piece, “A Greenwich of the Mind”).

Brown shirts in Providence

When I grow up, I want to be an apparatchik! Jenny Li dreams at Brown

One Jenny Li has demonstrated the fruits of her Ivy League education by shutting down a speaker with views opposite her own lest any of her peers hear him and be harmed. This, Li and her fellow Brown students assure us is “free speech”. Some ideas, these elites say, are simply too dangerous for others to be exposed to.

This sort of thuggery occurs at many once-respected academic institutions, like Swarthmore, and Amherst , and the suppression of ideas runs the gamut from homosexuality to the environment to the existence of corporations to, last night at Brown, NYC’s former “stop-and-frisk” policy, but it’s all the same thing: shut down free speech on campuses and keep them safe from uncomfortable ideas.

I’ve been reading about the rise of Nazism these past couple of months, for no particular reason other than general interest, and I’ve been struck, again and again, by the similarities between then and now. Appeasement of our enemies, weak, feckless leaders, the rise of a strong man, increasing police violence against citizens, and, today, the German Student Association and its book banning movement of 1933.  Back then, they collected and burned authors like Hemingway, Victor Hugo, and Hellen Keller (!) as well, of course, Jewish authors, all in the name of purification of thought. Jenny Li and his cohort are too stupid, too uneducated and too solipsistic to recognize what they’re doing, but they’re just part of the rising forces of tyranny.

The useful idiots always are. The funny thing is, they are used by people who convince them that they’re being daringly radical when in fact, they’re just tools of their masters.

I wonder whether Jenny Li’s parents came to this country with the dream that they’d raise a student adept enough at testing to get into a top university, only to become a mouthpiece of repression with dreams of a government job? Probably not.

And we’re back

Deer are safe, at least temporarily.

A bunch of real estate news came in during my sojourn, none of it particularly interesting except to the parties themselves, but here it is anyway: 

545 North Street

545 North Street sold for $6.238 million; there’s still money in the buying pool, obviously.

18 Roosevelt (Photo Credit, H. Keller)

18 Roosevelt Avenue finally sold, for $1.755. It started off at $1.895 204 days ago.

Accepted offers reported include 6 Lita Drive, lower North Street. A rather unimpressive undersized lot, asked $1.395 and, rumor has it, it got it.

 

3 Parsonage Lane

3 Parsonage Lane, started at $3.675 in September, 2012 and now that its price came down to $3.155, it’s found a buyer.

93 Orchard Dr

93 Orchard Drive, in Milbrook, asking $3.295 million, has an accepted offer. It sold in 2008 for $3.225.

And 18 Spezzano is back again with another buyer. Now asking $487,500.

 

296 Stanwich Rd

296 Stanwich Road is a new listing, $6.750 million. It sold new in 2006 for $6.5, but that was at the height of the market. It’ll be interesting to see how this fares.

 

 

76 Cat Rock Rd

And 76 Cat Rock, $2.999 million, isn’t really a new listing, it just switched agents after a year – same price that didn’t sell it during the past 12 months. I think this is a great house, and I’m surprised it hasn’t sold. It’s beautifully built, has a great layout and isn’t so buried in Cat Rock that getting there is burdensome. It sold new in 2006 for $3.725 million, so how much of a discount do you want?