Riverside sale

20 Lockwood Road, $1.950 million, 55 days on the market. These sellers paid $1.858 for it in 2013, installed central air and some other features, but it remains essentially unchanged. After commissions and taxes, I suppose they didn’t make out like bandits, but if you add in rental value, I think they did well.

It’s a lovely 1858 farm house, occupied until 2013 by a family as nice as the house itself, and we were sorry to see them go (to Maine, I believe). I hope the new owners will find as much pleasure here as our friends did.

Easy choice: who ya gonna believe: a former U.S. adviser, or Bill and Hillary?

JUST YOU WAIT!

Clntons tried to pressure scholarship program o accept Chelsea’s boyfriend

Bill and Hillary Clinton tried to bully a prestigious scholarship program into selecting Chelsea Clinton’s then-boyfriend and then sought "payback" when they were resisted, according to a former top foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama.

The episode took place nearly 19 years ago but has fresh resonance after revelations last month of multimillion-dollar bribes paid by parents to get their children into elite colleges, ….

Trina Vargo, a veteran U.S. adviser on Ireland, founded the George J. Mitchell Scholarship in 2000. It was named after the former senator who brokered the talks that led to the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement. Vargo said that Bill Clinton intervened in the first year of the scholarship, when Kane, whose 3.19 grade-point average was much weaker than those of the top candidates, had failed to make the final selection round. 

President Clinton, who was in his last weeks in the White House, called Mitchell to express his displeasure, according to Vargo in her new book Shenanigans: The U.S.-Ireland Relationship in Uncertain Times. He had submitted a letter of recommendation for Kane, who had already landed an internship in the Clinton White House during his relationship with Chelsea. 

Vargo told the Washington Examiner that the timing of Clinton’s call, which came while the program was choosing its 12 scholarship awardees from a group of 20 finalists, was a blatant attempt to game the selection process. “There’s no way to see that as anything other than an attempt to influence a situation that hadn’t been finalized yet,” she said.

…. “In light of the college admissions scandal, I don’t think it’s very unusual for people who have money or influence to use what means they have, whether it’s for their children or friends."

While no money was involved in the Clintons' attempt to procure a scholarship for Kane, by bowing to their wishes Vargo and her program would have been well-placed to benefit in future years from the largesse of the former first couple and their influential network of Irish American fundraisers.

Bill Clinton's press secretary, Angel Urena, called accusations of nepotism "baseless and patently false."

Vargo said: “If he had called George Mitchell after we had selected the twelve finalists just to say that the organization doesn’t know what they’re doing because they didn’t pick him, that would be fine from my perspective. The timing … it was meant to influence decisions.”

A month after Kane failed to make the shortlist, Vargo ran into Hillary Clinton at a reception at the home of the U.S. ambassador to Ireland. “It was immediately clear to me that she knew I was the person she viewed as responsible for Chelsea’s boyfriend not getting the scholarship,” Vargo wrote in Shenanigans. “For those few seconds, her eyes closed to a slit, the way they do when one is unhappy and sizing up a person.”

And on and on. When Hillary returned to power eight years later after Obama named her Secretary of state she and her husband made it clear that they hadn’t forgotten Vargo’s slight eight years before:, Bill pulled out from a conference at the last minute, leaving Vargo with a bock of non-refundable hotel rooms, bu Hillary went farther:

Vargo wrote: “In 2011, Mary Lou Hartman, former director of the Mitchell Scholarship program, bumped into [Clinton adviser Melanne] Verveer, who made clear that I was persona non grata ... Just months later, the State Department informed us they were totally eliminating all funding for the Mitchell Scholarship program in the next State Department budget.”

State Department emails found on Hillary Clinton's private server show her senior staff were attentive to the Mitchell Scholarship’s finances, which represented 0.1% of the State Department’s foreign exchange education program budget. 

After Vargo tried to renew the group's funding by meeting with members of Congress, State Department aide Kris Balderson wrote to Hillary Clinton: "She will not succeed."

Lots more in the full article, but the point is, the Clintons are a pair of two-bit lowlifes, who remember and pursue their enemies, forever

This 1811 Federal structure itself has held up very well since it was built; the same can't be said for its value

441 Round Hill Road, a beautiful antique, sold for $3.250 million in 2002; it resold yesterday for just $2,304. It started off December 11, 2018 at $2.750 and quickly dropped to $2.450. Total time on market, 111 days. That was a smart move, because it quickly found a buyer and escaped the stigma that attaches to stale listings. Brad Hvolbeck was the listing broker, and the pricing strategy here is typical example of why Brad is so respected by his peers.

Town appraisal $2,817,500, which explains the opening price. Sadly for sellers, the appraisals of back country houses are increasingly proving to be too high.

This house in Old Greenwich isn't aging well, at least as far as its price is concerned

7 Binney Lane has sold for $3150 million; owners paid $3.925 in 2014. Even that loss, they did better than their predecessor, who paid $4.950 in 2007, just before the market collapsed.

More news from the Titanic

Take me, I’m yours

16 Greenbriar Lane (just north of the Clapboard/Round Hill Road intersection) has dropped its price, again, and is now asking $3.4850. Built in 1978, renovated in 2013, it’s been on the market since June, 216, when it started off on this adventure at $4.250 million.T he owners paid $3.995 for it in 2005.

It’s a nice house; some builders were putting up quality homes in 1978, and this is one of them, and not that long ago, a price in the high 3s wouldn’t have seemed unreasonable. But that was then, this is now.

(Interesting, the town appraises this at $3,555,700. I used to advise clients not to give our town assessments much weight, because houses routinely sold above them. Now, it’s often the realtors who aren’t in tune with reality, and I’d tell my clients to start with the assessment, and work down from there.)

Google continues its campaign for evil

We’ve had to revise our motto bit, but don’t worry; we’re doing this for your own good

The company is already cooperating with China to shut down dissidents, now it’s turned its attention to this country and is blacklisting a number of conservative web sites, including what any sane person would consider a main-stream-conservative publication, The American Spectator. The Spectator has been publishing for 52 years now, and I’ve been reading it for just about as long. It hasn’t changed its politics, opinions or how it expresses them. What has changed is the new determination of the left to destroy all opposition. As an aside, as recently as last December, Google’s CEO testified under oath before Congress that Google does not manually interfere with search results. His perjury has now been uncovered — can we expect an indictment?

And as another example of Google and its leftist allies campaign to silence anyone who doesn’t toe the approved line, the linked-to article offers this:

[Discussing] the recent hiring of Heritage Foundation president Kay James for a Google advisory board on artificial intelligence — only to be fired after some 2,000-plus Googlers launched on the conservative Ms. James for, among other things, being a “white supremacist” — laughably unaware that Kay James is, in fact, an African-American. She was also accused of not seeing gays “as human.” In fact, Kay James has a beloved son who is openly gay, and as reported here in the Washington Times is “adored” by her son’s LGBTQ community.

What was on display at Google in the James affair was hardcore, blatant racism. James had the audacity to think for herself — and the masters and mistresses of the Liberal Plantation that is Google unleashed the high-tech company’s politically correct dogs to chase down a black woman who does not think as they demand — and eliminate her presence.

This is no longer some minor bug in the tech world.

Alexa is listening, and who else?

Say that again, please; the ministry didn’t quite catch it

Bloomberg reports that Alexa is not only listing to us 24 hours a day so as to know when the owner calls on her for assistance, but also recording everything said in the room and sending it back to headquarters.

The Intercept reported earlier this year that employees of Amazon-owned Ring manually identify vehicles and people in videos captured by the company’s doorbell cameras, an effort to better train the software to do that work itself.

“You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home,” said Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. “I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

“Whether that’s a privacy concern or not depends on how cautious Amazon and other companies are in what type of information they have manually annotated, and how they present that information to someone,” he added.

I would say that, given the revelations recently about how Appeal, Facebook and our other high-tech monopolies treat customers’ personal information, there is no reason to believe that any of manufacturers of these machines can be trusted to record in our homes.

As predicted, (one of) the dumbest creatures in Congress proves it

Maxine Waters was appointed chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee and aren’t we having fun.

Rep. Maxine Waters seemed to demonstrate that she is in over her head Wednesday when she queried several bank executives about student loans even though they were nationalized under former president Obama nearly a decade ago.

Waters is the chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee -- the committee that regulates the banks.

During a hearing examining the practices of some of the nation's biggest banks, Waters complained to a panel of seven bank CEOs that there are more than 44 million Americans that owe … $1.56 trillion in student loan debt."

She added, “Last year, one million student loan borrowers defaulted, which is on top of the one million borrowers who defaulted the year before.”

She then demanded to know what they intended to do about this massive problem. “What are you guys doing to help us with this student loan debt?" she asked. "Who would like to answer first? Mr. Monahan, big bank.”

Bank of America chairman and CEO Brian Monahan replied, “We stopped making student loans in 2007 or so.”

Ms. Waters replied, “Oh, so you don’t do it anymore. Mr. Corbat?”

Said Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat: “We exited student lending in 2009.”

James Dimon, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO, finally spilled the beans: “When the government took over student lending in 2010 or so, we stopped doing all student lending,” he said.

Waters then quickly changed the subject to small businesses.

The Obama administration put the federal government in charge of student lending in 2010, with the intention of saving taxpayer dollars by “cutting out the middleman,” as President Barack Obama put it.

According to the Washington Times, "student loan debt exploded from $154.9 billion in 2009 to $1.1 trillion at the end of 2017"  with current student debt "estimated at more than $1.5 trillion."

Congress critters might be expected to have staff members to protect them from their ignorance, but Waters apparently hires underlings with a lower intelligence than hers, which would mean an IQ no higher than 70.

UPDATE: Just for yucks, I Google (Duckducked, actually) for “the dumbest things Maxine Waters has said:lots of material to choose from.

Not all that glitters in Riverside is gold

26 Glen Avon Road is back off the rental rolls and back on the market, this time at $3.599. I’ve always liked this house and its location: the owners back in the 80s and early 90s were friends of ours, and we attended several great parties there, especially the Halloween party thrown for all the neighborhood kids and their parents. But it has had trouble selling. It sold for $5.495 in 2006 — not bad — but resold to the present owners for just $4.775 in 2009. They, in turn, placed it back up for sale in 2013 at $5.195, gave up that effort in 2016 and rented it out. Now it’s back, as noted. $3.599 doesn’t seem like a ridiculous price, but I guess we’ll see.

A development that should surprise no-one, and the obvious — to Hartford — solution.

Minimum wage hike from $10 to $15 per hour will cost municipalities $24 million annually.

Nonpartisan analysts released four projections on how the minimum wage hike would affect Connecticut’s 169 cities and towns.

Large cities, with populations greater than 100,000, would face $800,000 to $1 million in added costs.

Medium-sized cities with populations between 50,000 and 80,000 would face $400,000 to $600,000 in additional expenses.

Small cities with populations between 30,000 and 50,000 would face $100,000 to $300,000 in added costs.

Small towns with less than 20,000 people would face $50,000 or less in increased expenses.

A CT Mirror analysis using OFA’s cost estimates and population estimates from the state Office of Policy and Management found there will be an aggregate impact of the wage hike of up to $23.9 million. Connecticut has five large cities, 14 medium-sized cities, 36 small cities and 114 small towns.

All of the projections are based largely on mandated wage hikes. For example, a municipal employee earning $12 per hour would have to be paid $15.

And $6.9 for child care agencies, and, be assured, lots of other agencies that have yet to be accounted for. Plus, if you raise a worker’s pay from $10 to $15, do you think that workers [sic] now earning $15 will welcome the now-equal newcomers as their economic peers, or will they instead insist on their own wages to rise so as to maintain the difference? I’m only kidding about the first option.

…

“We have to look at this holistically,” said Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury. “If we solve a problem here and create a problem there, that doesn’t work.”

Both Kushner and the committee’s other co-chairwoman, Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, said the legislature should consider raising more revenue to ensure a minimum wage hike doesn’t hurt groups in need.

Well they won’t find that new revenue among the poor, or in Bridgeport, or in Hartford’s slums. So where will they find it? One guess.

Democratic leaders of the Labor and Public Employees Committee said the new estimates demonstrate the need to boost funding for municipalities.

Even weak minds think alike.