Well who said anything about celebrities?

Take me home

2012: Bill Clinton rails against Romney for not caring about global warming.

Dec., 2013: Bill Clinton balks at $275,000 speaker fee, turns his private jet around and flies home from Vienna. 

Say it ain’t so (even though I’ve been saying so here for quite a while)

No gluten for this glutton!

Patch.com: Gluten – free diet a ridiculous waste of money.

Dunkin’ Donuts will add two gluten-free items to its pastry repertoire by the end of the year. A smart move when you consider that market researchers say nearly one third of Americans are cutting, or altogether eliminating, their gluten intake.

However, a gluten-free lifestyle is a medical necessity for a fraction of its participants. Celiac disease, which causes damage to the small intestine, afflicts only 1 percent of the population. …

Nutritionist Ian Marber thinks gluten has been popularly exiled “because it’s so prevalent. If you make any adjustment to your diet, say you stop eating foods with the letter ‘l’ in them, you may well lose weight, simply because you’re making far better food choices than you were previously.”

According to Susan Bowerman, assistant director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, “It used to be that a gluten-free diet almost assured weight loss, because there were very few alternatives except for fruits and vegetables.” But increasingly, we have donuts and other snacks as alternatives.

The gluten-free cinnamon-sugar doughnut from Dunkin’ Donuts will contain 320 calories, while their regular sugar raised donut has 230 calories. At this rate, it’ll take gluten-free dieters twice the willpower to slim down as they’re forced to resist regular goodies in addition to their now-available gluten-free counterparts.

Their wallets may lighten up, though. The price of gluten-free products is “significantly higher,” than their standard equivalents.

Ian Marber isn’t opposed to a gluten-free diet on principle: “If it makes you happy, do it! By buying that expensive stuff, you’ll certainly be making someone else very happy.”

How did Greenwich defense lawyers ever miss this one?

Here you are, your honor, now let me off

Intoxicated teenager who struck and killed four people avoids prison after his doctor convinces judge that he suffers from “affluenza”

A defense psychologist called it “affluenza,” a syndrome that keeps someone from a wealthy background from learning that bad behavior has consequences.

The 16-year-old was sentenced Tuesday in a Fort Worth juvenile court to 10 years of probation after he confessed to intoxication manslaughter in the June 15 crash on a rural road.

According to officials, the teenager and some friends were seen on surveillance video stealing two cases of beer from a store. He had seven passengers in his Ford F-350, was speeding and had a blood-alcohol level three times the legal limit, according to testimony during the trial. The pickup fatally struck four pedestrians: Brian Jennings, 43; Breanna Mitchell, 24; Shelby Boyles, 21; and her mother Hollie Boyles, 52.

So much for learning that bad behavior has consequences.

And Vince Foster was piloting

Hawaii: NSA spy plane shoots down innocent health director

Hawaii’s Health Director, who previously “determined” that Obama’s birth certificate was legitimate, dies in plane crash.

Coincidence? I think not.

And she was responsible for implementing the state’s Obamacare program, too. I blame Bush.

About time, too

 

The law says what I say it does, baby

House of Representatives moving towards suing Obama for his failure to faithfully execute the laws of this country.

Michael Mcconnell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution,  law professor and director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, and former served judge on the tenth circuit U.S. Court of Appeals,explains what’s at stake.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so.

This matter—the limits of executive power—has deep historical roots. During the period of royal absolutism, English monarchs asserted a right to dispense with parliamentary statutes they disliked. King James II’s use of the prerogative was a key grievance that lead to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that “the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal.”

To make sure that American presidents could not resurrect a similar prerogative, the Framers of the Constitution made the faithful enforcement of the law a constitutional duty.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to “refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons.”

In 1998, the Supreme Court struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. The reason? The only constitutional power the president has to suspend or repeal statutes is to veto a bill or propose new legislation. Writing for the court in Clinton v. City of New York, Justice  John Paul Stevens noted: “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.”

 

Mexico: 1, Saudi Arabia and Prius owners: 0

 

Lanthunum mining for Prius batteries, Mongolia, 2012

Mexico opens its oil industry to private enterprise for first time since 1938. With billions of new capital expected to flow in, production should double, prices should drop.

What? What? How could this be?

But Yvonne, I love you!

Montana bride pleads guilty to pushing her husband of eight days off cliff.

It was mere days ago that I posted the original story of this tragedy, and I can’t believe that she wasn’t telling the truth then. I’m so naive!

I thought payola was outlawed in the 1950s?

MSNBC host Ed Schulz received hundreds of thousands of dollars from unions past two years.

I don’t watch MNBC – never have, but I thought it was supposed to be some sort of news channel, not an infomercial. Does NBC still have a stake in this farce? Does Microsoft?

Just in time for parents to decide whether to foot a tuition bill, there’s this, from Hampshire College

Dis be black emough for ya, Deanie?

AJ sends along this tidbit of inanity:

Band concert cancelled by dean because it lacks sufficient black players to meet standard for “black” bands.

You just know that Dollar Bill’s going to gather the children around the cold hearth Christmas Eve and make them watch this video

Greenpeace frightens children by announcing the cancellation of Christmas because of global warming. When you’re a fundamentalist, there’s no room for frivolity in religion.

One land sale reported, so far

 

407 Round Hill Rd

407 Round Hill Road (I’m using an expired listing from the old system here, while I work out the new one) has sold for $2.3 million. Interesting history for this parcel of 7 acres with a moldy tear-down on a rear lot and sporting a cell tower in the front yard. WaMu extended a $3.375 loan on the place in 2004 and another chump tossed in an additional $1.240 in 2006. WaMu foreclosed its mortgage, now grown to $3.9, in 2009 extinguishing that second mtg, then sold the whole thing to the current seller for $1.8 that same year. I suppose there may be some profit here for the seller, despite making some improvements and carrying it for five years but if so, it won’t be much.

It’s happening here, too

In England, children have stopped reading for pleasure, and their reading ability suffers.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar* is now named among the top 10 favourite books of 14-16 year old girls. Julie Gibbings from the National Literacy Trust says research indicates that “children are reading less and are holding more negative attitudes towards reading. Nearly a quarter of children are embarrassed to be seen reading, while others believe that their parents do not care if they spend time reading.”

According to this week’s Ofsted annual schools report, “pupils don’t receive enough encouragement to read widely for pleasure.” That means they miss out on the knowledge and understanding reading stealthily imparts. “Schools can be distracted by national tests and examinations,” it goes on, “which do not always assess pupils’ wider reading skills well.” It also offers a stark warning. “Research shows that unless children have mastered the basic skills by the age of seven they find it difficult to catch up”.

Here in Greenwich, our Hartford-mandated Core Curriculum, with its emphasis on non-fiction reading, will doubtless achieve the same result.

* “baby to pre-school” according to its publisher

White House Dossier’s Quote of the Day

“I’ll never wash this hand again.”

Raul Castro

Funniest story of the week – New Zealand boy launches world-wide search to locate American girl who told him “find me”, and succeeds!

 

Hey Reese, a tip: not everything girls say in bars is true

Whereupon she promptly deletes her FaceBook page and disappears.

A lovelorn New Zealand man who asked the Internet for help finding the American girl he met in Hong Kong last year on New Year’s Eve has found her – and she doesn’t seem too happy about it.

Reese McKee, 25, gained thousands of followers when he posted a picture of ‘Katie’ and his story of dancing the night away with her last December. She left him only with a first name, a hint that she lived ‘in D.C.’ and the alluring request: ‘find me.’

He has now revealed that online sleuths did, indeed, find her. And the mobbed her with so many messages that she deleted every single one of her social media accounts within hours.

 

Dust off that life insurance policy and prepare for the end of civilization

We’re leaving Cheyenne
(photo, BBC)

Scientists discover that Yellowstone volcano is much larger than previously thought and when it goes, darkness will blanket the earth – worse, that explosion is “imminent”.

Fortunately geologic time is measured, except by global warmists, on a different scale than that used by puny humans, and nearest date for this imminent explosion is probably 40,000 years or so.

Never too soon to get ready, though.

It must be because of all those rotten Tea Baggers who infest the place

Oregon has managed to enroll just 44 people in ObamaCare, despite spending $300  million, $7 million per enrollee, on the effort.

Oregon is a Democratic state that embraced Obamacare early and enthusiastically. Its outreach effort, which included a folk-style music video featuring a singer playing an acoustic guitar against a colorful and scenic backdrop, had been praised among the law’s supporters.

How could Oregon’s youth resist this moving ditty?