Interesting timing — I was just about to post two articles on why Maine's "renewable energy" policies are doubling the price of electricity while making its power supply riskier

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Sold in Old Greenwich

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37 Lincoln Avenue, $4.550 million. A complete rehab/expansion, the 2,000 sq. ft. original 1939 cape (below) was listed January 1 @$1.9 million, sold to this contractor for $2.225 million. Actual closing didn’t occur until May, presumably to allow the builder to get the necessary permits approved, because he obviously hit the ground running when title finally passed. It’s now 4,700 sq. ft., a two-car garage has replaced the single one, and everything inside is new.

This never made it to the MLS so there are no pictures up on the usual real estate sites, but here are a few from the MLS:

As it was

I thought this stunt was a little over the top, even for Trump, when I first read about it but then ....

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Advertising on the White House lawn? Tacky. However, the media insists on playing weepy stories featuring “Maryland Man”, “Grandmother” (neglecting to add, “grandmother and fentanyl dealer”, and “child shipped alone to Honduras”, and so on; that pleases its base, but not the rest of the country, so why not remind that majority of voters which side the Democrats and their monkey are on, while boasting about the success in closing the border?

Besides, this is pure, wicked genius — Oooh, the embarrassment! :

“The placards were strategically placed where news outlets film live shots in a bid to make sure they’re caught on camera, an official told Axios, who was first to report on the posters.”

Richmond Hill: not yet out of the grave, but this pending sale indicates that it may at least have one foot outside it

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85 Richmond Hill Road is reported as pending after just 32 days on the market at $6.795 million. That has to come as encouraging news to other homeowners on this benighted street that saw a mini-boom of mansion construction in 2003-2006 and a subsequent collapse of prices in the two decades that followed. This home’s sales history offers a good illustration of that tale of woe.

  • Built in 2004-2005, it sold for $7.1 million in 2006 — $11.427 in current dollars

  • Placed back on the market in 2007 at $8.9 million. it lingered for 1,027 days before finally selling for $4.825 in 2013.

  • Once again put up for sale in 2016 at $5.250 million, it took four years for these current owners to appear, and they were only willing to pay $3.550.

It’s nice to see that someone is finally making money on this street way out in nowhere.

Modern Journalism: Monkey See, Monkey Do

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(Yes, I know that baboons aren’t technically monkeys, but I decided that they made for a more dramatic picture — deal with it)

PJ Media’s Scott Pinsker offers a spot-on précis of how, and the why, of the media’s coverage of news events:

SHAMEFUL: Media Attacks Republican Women as Ugly — and Why It’s About to Get So Much Worse

…. Divining the mainstream media’s tea leaves is about 25% understanding human nature, and 75% knowing how the media works. The media might be monstrous, vain, and partisan, but they’re still comprised of flesh-and-blood human beings. They’re members of a very specific tribe, and within that tribe, there’s groupthink, social expectations, a code of conduct, and shared values. 

More often than not, the real story isn’t what they published — but why they published it. Once you figure that part out, it’s easy to stay ahead of ‘em.

I’ll show you how it works:

The first telltale sign is when the media outlets at the top of the hierarchy all begin publishing the same stories.

The media industry is a top-down ecosystem; the minnows take their cues from the whales. Even today, you’d be surprised how many small market news directors will religiously tear through The New York Times before assigning any stories.

Why?

Because that’s how they were trained. 

As a practical matter, it empowers the larger media outlets to set the national agenda, because this ecosystem gives their stories legs: First The New York Times will report on it; then the mid-tier and low-tier ones echo it; then The Times will circle back with a follow-up story about how this is a huge deal in the heartland — citing those mid- and low-tier outlets’ stories a few days later.

It’s incestuous, self-serving, and won’t work indefinitely, but it guarantees a story will stay in circulation for at least a week — and with just a little luck, much longer than that. 

Either way, in today’s 24/7 media culture, a week is an eternity. You can do a lot of damage in a week.

The second sign is when the same stories all echo the same themes.

When a mainstream media thought leader, like The New York Times, NBC News, or The Atlantic gives a story their “seal of approval,” it’s kind of like the phenomenon with the ugly dude and the hot girlfriend: That editorial “spin” has already won the support of their industry’s A-Listers.

If you’re a low-rung journalist with ambition, it’s awfully tempting to hop aboard that bandwagon and cry “One of us!” — and so, lots of ‘em do. (Hey, they wanna work at The New York Times one day, too.)

When three or more A-Listers in the mainstream media release the same story with the same theme, it means you’ll be hearing about it for no less than a week. If the story fails, it’ll go away.

But conservatives don’t get to decide if a story fails! 

That takes us to the third sign: Stories that animate liberals will always be elevated.

This usually means that liberal causes, politicians, and policies will be promoted and conservative ones trashed, but not always. Sometimes, liberals like to read about doom-and-gloom — that “The End Is Nigh!” (They’re pessimistic by nature and enjoy doom-scrolling.)

But no matter what, the stories and spin will always reflect a VERY leftwing worldview.

Why?

Because the media is VERY liberal and they’re primarily concerned with impressing each other. 

Between 95% and 97% of all journalists’ donations go to Democrats. If you’re a journalist, your next job will be in a liberal office. Whoever hires you will be liberal; your new colleagues will be liberal. Your professional success (mostly) depends on being well-liked by liberal gatekeepers.

In this ecosystem, conservatives just don’t matter. (And, when you read their work, it certainly shows.)

I’ll give you a quick example: Yesterday, three mainstream media heavyweights — The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Independent — all released stories with the exact same theme: The Trump administration is filled with virtue-signaling, cosplaying, unmanly and/or wrongly-gendered phonies who are ugly-looking.

Pinsker proceeds to show this process by citing three articles on exactly the same theme: “Republican women are ugly and fake” by the NYT. the Atlantic, and the Independent, all published within 24 hours of each other, and he predicts that Jimmy Kimmel and other late night “comics” will have picked it up and run with it by tonight. That, in turn, will spur more coverage by more “journalists”, and it will be the hot theme; until the monkeys are steered to a new one by their betters.

Oh, the HORROR! (Updated)

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Trump should raze HUD headquarters to drain DC swamp

Gross negligence has always been HUD’s standard operating procedure

Jim Bovard, Fox News

The Trump administration just announced plans to sell the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a brutalist architectural monstrosity. Secretary Scott Turner admits that HUD headquarters is "known as the ugliest building in D.C." 

The Trump administration is also seeking to terminate half of HUD’s staff and defund programs that have vexed America since the launch of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  

  • Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor and Bill Clinton’s last HUD secretary, admitted in 1998 that HUD had been "the poster child for failed government." In 1976, Detroit City Council president (and future U.S. senator) Carl Levin denounced the agency as "Hurricane HUD" for ravaging the Motor City with reckless subsidized mortgages with stratospheric default rates. 

  • Vice President Al Gore denounced HUD-financed public housing projects in 1996: "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them." In 2006, the leftist Village Voice labeled HUD as America’s worst landlord. 

Gross negligence has always been HUD’s standard operating procedure. In 2011, the Washington Post compiled hundreds of satellite images to prove that HUD’s largest homebuilding program was a "dysfunctional system that delivers billions of dollars to local housing agencies with few rules, safeguards or even a reliable way to track projects." 

HUD claimed to have no idea that billions of dollars of its grants had been misused or plundered and ignored a barrage of complaints from individuals whose neighborhoods were ravaged. HUD left a "trail of failed developments in every corner of the country. Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected," the Post noted. 

  • Andrew Cuomo, Bill Clinton’s last HUD secretary, admitted in 1998 that HUD had been "the poster child for failed government."

During the 1990s, I spent many days at HUD headquarters investigating boondoggles. HUD was overstocked with the most depressed employees you would ever meet outside of a group therapy session in a city jail. After I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece headlined "Clinton’s Wrecking Ball for Suburbs," HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros denounced me for "unfortunate stereotyping of assisted-housing residents."

But not nearly as unfortunate as subsequent HUD-financed violent crime waves across the nation. In the first half of 2016, at least 30 people were killed at Section 8 residences in Chicago - along with 7,000 other reported crimes. 

In Houston, male Section 8 recipients are twice as likely to commit violent crimes as people with similar backgrounds and incomes who did not receive housing vouchers, according to a Texas A&M University study. A HUD-financed study found that Section 8 relocations "tripled the rate of arrests for property crimes" among boys who moved to new locales.

  • Vice President Al Gore denounced HUD-financed public housing projects in 1996: "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them." (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

…. When Congress created HUD in 1965, it was supposed to bring social justice to American cities. But Sandra Thompson, Biden’s Federal Housing Finance Agency chief, testified to Congress in 2022 that the racial homeownership gap "is higher today than when the Fair Housing Act [of 1968] was passed." 

The Biden administration sought to "fix" that problem with a new mandate to punish mortgage borrowers with good credit ratings by forcing them to subsidize borrowers with shaky records of paying their bills. But "No Deadbeats Left Behind" is a poor maxim for mortgage policies. 

Secretary Turner is ready to abandon HUD headquarters, declaring that that agency’s focus is on "creating a workplace that reflects the values of efficiency, accountability and purpose." That 12-story building needs a half billion dollars in "deferred maintenance and modernization" expenses and costs more than $50 million a year to operate – despite being perennially half empty even before Trump’s mass firings. The maintenance and modernization costs far exceed the original cost of the building in inflation-adjusted dollars. 

UP DATE

A reader supplies an insider’s perspective:

On HUD, when I was a Counsel to the Crime and Criminal Justice Subcommittee, Cisneros testified before us. I told my boss (Jim Sensenbrener) to ask Cisneros if families that included convicted drug dealers and other felons were being evicted from HUD housing. Cisneros twice evaded the question, and then admitted that, no, they weren't being evicted bcs it would be unfair to the drug dealer's, murderer's, whatever's, other family members. 

Also, NYCHA was actually quite good and also proud of how it maintained public housing, that is, until Federal regs forced them to allow unsavory elements to remain.

Finally, Fannie and Freddie weren't really responsible for the GFC. Much more responsible were the Basel III banking regs which allowed banks to determine -- on their own -- what counted as Tier 1 capital.  They decided to count Fannie and Freddie debt as the equivalent of cash. My brother had been the Chief Compliance Officer at Bear Stearns. He told me that a five bps (0.05bps) decline in the value of Freddie and Fannie bonds would put every Wall St institution out of business.

He was right.

And I’ll add this: Back in the 80s and 90s, the Greenwich Housing Authority was incredible strict about drug dealers in our housing projects, and would evict entire families, including grandparents, if any member was dealing drugs. I was in Norwalk Housing Court on another matter one day, waiting for my own case to be called, and saw exactly such an eviction in process: a grandmother had let her grandson live with her in Armstrong Court, and he used her apartment to stash the drugs he was dealing. That bad move led to another move that was even worse: she was kicked out.

That was the, but the reader says that HUD regs put an end to such evictions in New York, and I assume that means Greenwich is also barred from carrying them out. Which, of course, harms the other, law-abiding tenants in these projects, who now have to live with criminals in their midst.

This who they are, this is what they do

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Matt Margolis:

Once again, the failing New York Times [unfortunately, the Times is prospering, much to the country’s loss — Ed] is running interference and burying the real story to protect their preferred narrative. An article headlined "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash," which is about January's devastating crash at Reagan National Airport, is a textbook example of mainstream media malpractice.

An honest headline would have read, "Helicopter Pilot Ignored Multiple Safety Warnings Before Fatal Crash."

The liberal paper of record spent roughly a thousand words dancing around the obvious truth: a helicopter pilot directly caused this tragedy by ignoring multiple explicit warnings. But that wouldn't fit their preferred story about "systemic failures," would it?

Let me spell out what the Times buried deep in their article: The Black Hawk pilot received clear, explicit warnings about altitude from their co-pilot. The co-pilot explicitly instructed them to turn away from the passenger jet. And what did they do? They ignored those warnings and flew straight into the path of an American Airlines flight carrying 64 innocent people.

The Black Hawk was 15 seconds away from crossing paths with the jet. Warrant Officer Eaves then turned his attention to Captain Lobach.

He told her he believed that air traffic control wanted them to turn left, toward the east river bank.

Turning left would have opened up more space between the helicopter and Flight 5342, which was heading for Runway 33 at an altitude of roughly 300 feet.

She did not turn left.

But instead of leading with these crucial facts, the Times gives us a meandering story about "visual separation procedures" and "aviation practices." Classic mainstream media sleight-of-hand — when the facts don't fit your preferred narrative, bury them under a mountain of context and systemic analysis.

Here's what the Times doesn't want you to focus on: This wasn't some complex system failure that Democrats can use to blame the Trump administration for. This wasn't about equipment problems or procedural issues. This was about a pilot who ignored basic safety protocols and clear warnings from their co-pilot. Full stop.

As we know, the liberal media and the Democratic Party immediately sought to blame the Trump administration for the crash, claiming that FAA cuts created the environment for the crash to happen. 

The Army Black Hawk was flying well above its approved altitude. The co-pilot knew it. Air traffic control knew it. The families of the 64 people who lost their lives in this entirely preventable tragedy deserve better than the Times' narrative manipulation. They deserve the truth, plainly stated: Their loved ones died because a pilot ignored multiple explicit warnings and violated basic safety protocols. They don’t want us focusing on the pilot because then some uncomfortable questions have to be asked.

(FWIW) Flashback: Remember these, from the NYT’s collaborators and echo machines?

And this one, blaming Trump and Elon for a crash that occurred in Canada?