Well it takes one to know one, but if it's a Democrat, love is blind

Henry Blodget, who was himself permanently barred from the securities industry for lying to his clients, is out with his horrified prediction of what a Trump residence will be like:

• President Trump will also maintain the relationship to the truth that he has had throughout his campaign. Namely, he will cite actual facts and truth only when they help him. When the truth is inconvenient, President Trump will lie, deny, attack and threaten truth-tellers, speak in platitudes, and change the subject. The Trump administration will likely be one of the most secretive, most dishonest, and least transparent in modern history.

Sounds exactly like a description of a Clinton administration, not Trump's.

(Oh, reading to the bottom of his screed, I see that he's made the inevitable prediction that we'll witness Trump morph into a reincarnation of Hitler. What a genius.)

Pending in Old Greenwich

3 Little Cove Place, asking $2.275 million. It's not waterfront, which presumably keeps its price down, as well as it's being in the VE food zone, which definitely hurts. Owners bought it for $2.150 million in 2003, which was before Town Manager Katie Blankley DeLududed bout into Al Gore's apocalyptic vision of a flooded globe and promulgated new, draconian height requirements.

Pocket listings: privacy at a cost

So says the Wall Street Journal, and so says my own experience. This article provides an excellent discussion of the pros and cons, and a home owner could easily decide either way. The real question, to me, is which you value more: privacy or money? Nothing wrong with either answer but, as a general rule; not always, you can't have both.

When movie stars, sports figures or media moguls sell luxury properties, they’re often able to maintain an air of secrecy. That’s because some high-end properties never hit the open market or have any formal advertising support behind them.

But these pocket listings—also known as whisper listings or off-market listings—actually aren’t exclusive to celebrities and are a relatively common way that people conduct business.

“We have pocket listings at all different price points,” said Zach Goldsmith, the estates director at Los Angeles brokerage Hilton & Hyland.

While sales agents agreed that between 10% to 30% of all their deals are made on pocket listings [judging from reported sales here, I'd say the number is much lower in Greenwich - Ed] , most wish that number wasn’t so high. That’s because, as Matt Lesser, a partner at Leslie J. Garfield & Co., a Manhattan-based real estate firm that specializes in Manhattan townhouses, said: “After more than a decade in this business, I’ve found that marketing a property gives owners the most reach, generates the most offers and typically leads to the highest bid.”

Mr. Goldsmith agreed. “If I have a pocket listing, I try to push the seller to get it on the market,” he said. “The more exposure you can get, the better off you are.”

The decision to sell a property off-market is often driven by the mandate of a secrecy-seeking seller, whom generally fall into one of a few camps, Mr. Lesser said.

The first group is looking for privacy above all else for either personal or professional reasons. Sometimes that’s because they’re a celebrity. More often it’s because they’re just incredibly wealthy, or even if they’re not, because they just don’t want to expose their home—and how much they’re selling it for—to the masses, including their friends and neighbors.

The second group is generally made up of sellers who are testing the market, but aren’t committed to making a sale, Mr. Lesser said. Mr. Goldsmith noted that this scenario—when a seller is generally realistic about what their home is worth, but wants to see if they can get a little bit more for it—is what he sees in off-market listings most often.

Regardless of the seller, there are also certain types of properties that lend themselves to this type of sale. The first type is what Nicholas Shaw, the sales manager in London-based Harrods Estates’ Kensington office, calls “best in class” properties, like a house that comes up for sale on the most in-demand road for the first time in 20 years.

“To put it on the Internet or put out advertising straight away, spoils the exclusivity a bit,” he said. The same is true for the an ultra-expensive, $100-million-pound property, whose “buyer is never going to find it online.”

Buyers, too, might be drawn to pocket listings, which they can generally find after establishing a relationship with an in-the-know broker, for a number of reasons. Some desire the cache of purchasing a luxury property before anyone else has the chance to see it, while others pursue off-market listings when they’re in a time crunch and don’t want to go through a traditional search, Mr. Lesser said. These buyers often call up an agent that they’ve worked with in the past, describe exactly what they’re looking for and their budget, and see if there’s anyone they know of who might be willing to part with their property in a quick timeframe, he said.In all of these scenarios, when there’s an off-market transaction, both buyers and sellers have less power to negotiate, experts say. That means that buyers could pay more for the property than anyone else would be willing to, and that sellers might leave money on the table. “If you don’t go on the open market, you simply don’t know what the property’s worth,” Mr. Lesser said.

Saw this and thought, "Walt"

Fart jokes as old as civilization itself.

Every culture in recorded history has had its preferred forms of humor relating to bodily functions, but none have been more reliable in stirring a reaction than fart jokes. In fact, according to British academic and poet Paul MacDonald, the oldest joke in recorded history – which dates back to the Sumerians in 1900 BC – was a fart joke: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

Fart jokes have also found their way into some of the classics of Western literature. One of the most well-known appears in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In the Miller’s Tale, Nicholas and Absalom are vying for the same girl, and Nicholas decides to humiliate his rival. So he waits at the window for Absalom to beckon the girl. And just when he does, Nicholas’ rear protrudes to “let fly a fart with a noise as great as a clap of thunder, so that Absalom was almost overcome by the force of it.”

Even the great Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare, resorted to a flatulence pun in his play The Comedy of Errors, where Dromio of Ephesus declares, “A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.”

[SNIP]

The philosophy of fart jokes

Clearly, as these examples show, flatulence humor is timeless. But why are farts universally funny?

We might begin by asking what makes anything funny. Historically, there have been three major philosophical theories about laughter.

The superiority theory says that we laugh when we feel “sudden glory,” as Thomas Hobbes put it – a sudden sense of superiority over a person, especially someone to whom we ordinarily feel inferior. Cases of slapstick humor, such as the pie-in-the-face or someone slipping on a banana peel, fall into this category.

Kant and Schopenhauer argued on behalf of the incongruity theory, which says we laugh at the juxtaposition of things that don’t ordinarily go together, such as a talking dog or a bearded woman.

And relief theorists like Spencer and Freud maintain that laughter is how we relieve nervous tension regarding subjects or situations that are socially taboo or inappropriate. This explains the popular appeal of jokes based on sex, ethnicity and religion.

But must we regard these theories as mutually exclusive? I suspect they are compatible explanations for different contexts of humor.

Philosopher John Morreall defends a theory that invites such a view. Morreall proposes that the common core to anything that prompts laughter is a “pleasant psychological shift.” If we apply this theory to flatulence, it becomes clear why farts are universally funny. It’s because they are capable of producing this effect in all of the ways identified by the three theories of humor.

[Snip]

This account of the universality of flatulence humor is, of course, a matter of debate. But one thing is beyond dispute: farts are funny. They always have been. And, it appears, they always will be.

Jim Lash finally gets out of Cos Cob

He's sold his unit (C-15) at 4 Sound Shore Drive, for $2.450 million. He paid $2.3 for it back in 2003, so not exactly a home run, but the selling price is right where the other units are selling these days, so it is what it is. He started at $3.075 million way back in 2013, so I imagine he's glad to be shed of it.

CT's government at work

CT hospitals are suing the state, claiming that the hospital tax and Medicaid reimbursement rates are illegal. I don't know from medical administration and costs, but the facts of the suit do seem to show how government bodies operate.

Hospitals have long argued that the state has been straining their budgets through the tax, cutting payments to hospitals and inadequately paying them for treating patients covered by Medicaid, which now covers close to 750,000 state residents.

"Sure you lose money on every sale, but you'll make it up on volume". That used to be the punchline to a joke: it still is, but the state doesn't realize that. 

The Malloy administration has countered that hospitals have seen a dramatic increase in payments from Medicaid since the rollout of the federal health law, and it says many hospital systems have been profitable in recent years. But hospitals say that, because Medicaid pays them less than it costs to care for patients, treating more Medicaid patients is not improving their bottom lines.

The second part of the lawsuit concerns  standard government ploy: lie about a new tax being, somehow, "a savings", then jack it up as far and as fast as legislators can.

The tax was established in 2011 as state lawmakers grappled with a massive budget deficit. Since then, lawmakers have increased the tax by hundreds of millions of dollars.

When it first proposed the tax, the Malloy administration characterized it as a mechanism to get the state more federal money. That’s because, by taxing hospitals and redistributing the money to the industry, the state can collect federal matching funds. The first year of the tax, the 2012 fiscal year, hospitals paid just over $349 million in taxes but received back $399.5 million – leaving the industry with just over $50 million more than it paid in.

But since then, the state has increased the amount collected from hospitals and reduced what it gives them back (which also reduces the amount of federal money the move brings in). In the 2013 fiscal year, hospitals paid $26.3 million more than they got back. This fiscal year, the tax is expected to total $556.1 million, and hospitals are slated to receive $117.6 million back – a net tax of $448.5 million.

Aha! There ARE buyers out there

Two pending contracts have been reported.

After 902 days and $2.380 million in price cuts, 185 Riverside Avenue (now $4.495, once $6.875) has found a buyer. It's been criticized here before by readers who didn't like the clumsy way the old was joined to the new, but I like the house, and its yard and its location. Final selling price? I'll guess around $4.2

2 Meadow Place, in Old Greenwich, has moved off the market a little quicker than today's Riverside property. It was listed at $4.2 million in April, dropped to $3.995, and is now pending. The sellers paid $3.950 for it in 2014, so they'll be taking a haircut, but not a serious one, assuming the sales price is close to that last ask.

It'll probably get a little wet during hurricanes, but that's been happening since man first camped by the sea and he still does it: it's nice to live on the water, even if sometimes that means living in the water.

Since there's absolutely no real estate news to report, let's do Hillary again

Reader Chris sent this link to an American Thinker essay yesterday and I was tempted to repost it here, but thought it was too long. It hasn't gotten any shorter since then, but with nothing else going on, what the heck. From September, 2013 - imagine what the writer could add today.

Watching Hillary get a Liberty Medal on September 10, the day before the anniversary of the attack on the United States soil and the more recent murder of our ambassador and others in Benghazi, I think it's time to review the record of a woman whose life is marked by deceit and professional failure and ask about the sanity and judgment of her ardent supporters.

Hillary came to public attention with her graduation speech at Wellesley College.

She was chosen for this honor not because of grades or character or service to that community but because her influential roommate threatened a strike if she were not allowed to speak. Once the school caved to this demand, Hillary -- who just two years earlier supported Senator Edward Brooke, the first black American to be elected to the Senate -- hurled a vicious attack on him.. The charges were hurtful to him and without substance. As Christopher Andersen recounts:

Hillary offered nothing more than the muddled, sophomoric peace-and-love dogma that was so prevalent on campuses at the time. And, predictably, when it was over, Hillary's mesmerized classmates leaped up to their feet and cheered.

What difference does it make? Doesn't this reflect on the inconstancy of her political views and loyalties, her willingness to demagogue and slander and to use muscle to promote herself? What does it say about her empathy for Black community whom she professes to support?

From Wellesley she went to Yale law school after which she moved to Washington, D.C. to take a job with the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate. She was fired from her job and from that point on distinguished herself as a public master of mendacity.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of the 27-year-old, fired her, and has explained why:

"Because she was a liar," Zeifman said in an interview last week. "She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality."

What difference does it make? It should seem obvious that she does not feel constrained to follow ethical or legal constraints, and therefore presents a danger whenever she finds herself in a position to exercise power.

At about the same time, Hillary failed the District of Columbia bar exam, hardly one of the more difficult bar exams in the country. What difference does it make? I realize that many voters have uncritically adopted Bill Clinton's description of her as "the smartest woman in the world", but except at deceit, self-promotion, and self-enrichment she is a repeat, proven failure whenever tested.

In 1978 she turned a $1,000 cattle commodity trading account into $6,300 overnight and within 10 months into a $100,000 profit. While she first lied and claimed she learned how to make this incredible investment profit in the riskiest of endeavors by educating herself on commodity futures, in fact she was the beneficiary of preferred treatment by an Arkansan when her husband was Arkansas attorney general and slated to become that state's governor, when in other words Bill was a person in a position to provide favors in return.

The odds of this happening except by design (and preferential treatment ) were calculated at one in 31 trillion. The IRS was somewhat less impressed by the failure to account for income and pay taxes on it, and she was forced to pony up. There was no investigation that time.

What difference does it make? If you think it's important to have in positions in power someone who can lie without missing a beat, no matter how implausibly, she proved then and a number of times afterward she can do it.

Not all her lies were for herself alone. She regularly covered up her husband's misogynistic attacks on women, apparently accepted without protest his nuts and sluts defenses, and no one did a better job than she when pretty in pastel green and with a nice girlish headband she stood by her man while incongruously insisting she was no Tammy Wynette.

What difference does it make? She made a mockery of the feminist and Democratic claims that they were going to bat for women, working to make sure they had equal and fair treatment. The feminist movement sacrificed its moral sway on these two who would have pulled off the years-long deceit but for a providently saved little blue dress.

Hillary's corruption and preposterous lies continued into the White House. Special prosecutors investigating an apparently corrupt loan and land development deal had conducted subpoena searches for Hillary's law billing records which she claimed had gone missing.

...they were suddenly turned over to the prosecutors by a White House aide, Carolyn Huber. Mrs. Huber said she had found them on a table in a room in the White House living quarters last August and put them in a box, then had realized this month that they were the records that had been subpoenaed.

Hillary became the first First Lady to have to testify to a federal grand jury. In the end she wasn't indicted in the Whitewater scandal, in part quite obviously because of the unlikelihood that an overwhelmingly Democratic jury in the District of Columbia would ever convict her. What difference does it make? Someone who so obviously lied to escape criminal jeopardy would drive confidence in the fairness and honesty even lower than Obama has and a society in which the leaders are held in such disregard is a vastly weaker one in every respect.

At the time David Maraniss and Susan Schmidt wrote a detailed account of the controversy and had this to say about the missing/late found records and Hillary's treatment of them

How a public figure reacts to a controversy can be as important as what happened in the first place.

[snip]

From the beginning of the Whitewater controversy, Hillary Clinton has maintained a public posture seemingly at odds with her actions. She was reluctant to release records during the 1992 campaign. She fought David Gergen's recommendation to turn over all the records in 1993. She led White House opposition to the appointment of a special counsel in early 1994.

There appears to be a four-year pattern of Hillary Clinton avoiding full disclosure, occasionally forgetting places and events that might embarrass her, and revising her story as documents emerge and the knowledge of her questioners deepens. This article examined only one of several areas where her answers could be analyzed. Similar studies could be done in other areas, including the original Whitewater investment itself and the extent to which the Clintons were equal yet passive partners with the McDougals, as they have maintained.

In 1993 she made serious but untrue allegations about pharmaceutical companies gouging providers on children's' vaccines.

Based on Hillary Clinton's proclamation of a nonexistent crisis, Congress had been stampeded into passing unnecessary legislation. And even though the worst features of the administration plan had been dropped, the country was still stuck with a program that was more costly, cumbersome and wasteful than the one it replaced. What's more, the alarming statistics Hillary had cited on the rise in prices of prescription drugs were another myth. It turned out that the Labor Department statisticians had gotten the numbers wrong.

This news came too late for investors. The threat of price controls had caused the blue chip pharmaceutical stocks to decline as much as 40 percent, wiping out over $1 billion worth of market capitalization. Some smaller biotech companies were put out of business permanently.

Only short sellers profited, among them a private hedge fund called ValuePartners I, run by Smith Capital Management of Little Rock, Arkansas. Hillary Clinton held an $87,000 stake in Value Partners I, which also owned a block of stock in United Healthcare, an HMO that stood to benefit under the Clinton reform plan. Lois Quam, a United Healthcare vice president, was a member of the task force.

Unlike the Carters, Bushes and Reagans, the Clintons failed to put their assets into a blind trust when they moved into the White House. Hillary resisted the notion that her financial affairs were anybody's business but her own, and she reasoned that since she was not a government employee and the money was in her name, she didn't have to resort to a trust.

What difference does it make? Odd that a program that made vaccinations for children more costly and difficult to obtain benefitted Hillary (and Bill) who had demagogued through this bill using false statistics.

At the same time she barreled through that loser her husband drafted her to head a Task Force to draft new health legislation, Her clumsy handling of the Task Force certainly added to the opposition to this wonk wet dream and by 1994 it was dead. What difference does it make? Yet again we see that she trusts few people, listens to fewer, has a blinkered , highly-exaggerated view of her abilities to formulate or execute legislation.

The day after she was awarded the Liberty Medal, the Washington Post broke yet another Hillary-linked scandal.

A D.C. businessman under investigation for having financed the campaign of the mayor and others, was found to have contributed over $600,000 to Hillary Clinton's get-out-the-vote campaign in 2008. His contribution was not disclosed by Hillary's campaign or by Thompson in violation of the Federal campaign laws. The person paid by Thompson to do this work also failed to file corporate income tax which would have revealed the payments. That man (Mr. White) has admitted that he coordinated his efforts with the Clinton campaign. His contact there seems to have been former Rainbow PUSH coalition organizer Minyon Moore, Clinton's director of political affairs in the White House and a senior adviser to Hillary's 2008 campaign.

What difference does it make?

Mrs. Moore, for her part, provided Mr. White with "confidential internal information" about the campaign's itinerary, and arranged for a Clinton campaign office to give campaign materials to his workers to hand out, according to the documents. Mr. White is now cooperating with what the U.S. attorney says is a "continuing investigation." That's an ugly prospect for Hillary 2016.

The shady money funneling is bad enough, but it takes on an extra dimension because Mr. Thompson's accounting firm was a significant government contractor, providing services inter alia to a number of federal agencies, departments, and the Congressional Black Caucus and many big-name Democrats are the recipients of even his above-board contributions.

As Secretary of State, Hillary proved even a bigger disaster to the country.

She, who had failed to provide the begged-for security to our ambassador and officials in Benghazi and who seems to have done nothing but participate in the bald-faced lies about the murderers and their motive was, in fact, the author of the Red Line dare that has plunged Obama into a Syrian disaster.

The red line was not a gaffe it was the considered policy of the United States. This, if anything, makes the whole incident more egregious as the nation was consciously committed to acting militarily (see Clinton's statement about "contingencies" and "response") in case of chemical weapons use in Syria and yet it is obvious no planning was ever accomplished in anticipation of such an event. Yet another blunder by the administration comes home to roost.

Rick Ballard sums up her foreign policy and how it proved an utter catastrophe:

The NYT is drawing attention away from [Hillary] by focusing on [Obama]. Arab Spring belongs to [her]. It was supposed to be a demonstration of her mastery of foreign policy and her "team" of Abedin, Powers and Rice were supposed to demonstrate how marvelous women were in applying "soft" power to effect "change". It began to go just a little off track when [Gaddafi's] intransigence in resisting the Franco/US/Brit coup led to the delivery of a few thousand tons of kinetic humanitarian aid to alter the hearts and minds of Libyans who had not yet demonstrated sufficient affection for the bright future designed for them in DC. It continued to drift further from Clinton's objective when the Egyptian generals determined [Hillary/Obama] had no intention of fulfilling the promises which had induced the generals to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to play FaceBook revolutionaries, so the generals took the KSA/Gazprom hard cash offer and squashed Huma's buddies like bugs.

Syria is just the last gasp of the Clinton Arab Spring idiocy and [Obama's] promise of a gentle tap with just a few hardly noticeable Tomahawks was just a continuation of the soft power idiocy promulgated by Clinton and her shrews. The same crew are wholly responsible for the Benghazi fiasco where Clinton's denial of funding for adequate security led to [Gaddafi's] arms stockpiles drifting into unkind and uncaring hands.

What difference does it make? Do we really want to follow the community organizer who failed to get the asbestos out of Altgeld Gardens with the woman who has lied, cheated, instigated wrongheaded legislation, botched our foreign policy and seriously diminished our role on the international stage? It's fine with the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, who saw Hillary get the Liberty Medal and is as agog at the possibility as the jejune Wellesley grads were delighted when Hillary shocked the staid graduation ceremony by leveling her unwarranted attack on Senator Brook:

The men who gathered here 226 years ago to draft a new national charter never imagined a woman as president. Indeed, as Clinton noted, it took a constitutional amendment more than a century later to extend to women the right to vote, and "we are still on our way to that more perfect union."

On a steamy September night, it was not hard to imagine what progress she had in mind.

The Energizer Bunny does it again

As far back as 1996 William Safire took Hillary's measure and pronounced her a "congenital liar" (not what you think, Walt). And she still is. Powerline: Hillary can't stop lying

Hillary Clinton can’t help herself. She lies constantly. Some of her lies, the most memorable ones, have a common quality: she is a superhero in her own fantasy world. Named after a famous mountain climber! Landed under sniper fire! Tried to join the Marines! Granddaughter of immigrants who left the White House dead broke! Yesterday she added a new one: she understands terrorism because she was in New York in 9/11. She will crush ISIS! Here she is:

https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/793606286642409472?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It is a matter of record that Hillary was in Washington on September 11, not New York. The Senate was in session. As you probably remember, Senators and Congressmen of both parties gathered on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America.” Here is Hillary on the Capitol steps, singing:

And here she is being interviewed that same night, still in Washington D.C.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMvTC9JgFzE

The most incredible baseball story isn't about a player

It's Theo Epstein, who, as a very young man, turned the Boston Red Sox around after 100 years of futility and made them not only winners but recurring champions, and then, after arriving there in 2012, ended the Cub's misery, something no one else had been able to do in 109 years.

Epstein is still only 43. I don't know where he'd like to go from here, though Cleveland seems the logical place, but wherever he goes he should demand a salary higher than the highest-paid player on the team; some desperate owner will pay it, with justification.