One man to rule them all and in the darkness bind them

And Warren saw everything that he had bought and behold, it was very good

Warren Buffet buys Houlihan Laurence, adding yet another real estate name to his portfolio of agencies.

I understand the owners of independent agencies wanting to cash out, but I'm sometimes surprised that individual agents are willing to go along with the imposition of a huge corporate structure on their lives.  We're thought of as independent sorts, and the idea of working through a bureaucracy to get ads approved, policies ducked, and endless meetings with the suits from away strikes me as exactly the life we rejected long ago. Apparently, that's just me.

In any event, I believe that leaves just two chains owing 95% of the shops in Greenwich, and surely Raveis is too small to avoid being swallowed by the genial giant from Omaha.

On a not-entirely unrelated matter, Ann Coulter points out something about these hugely rich people like Buffet: they're all liberals. They understand how to make government pay, for sure.