Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
By the way, Biden denied he’d ever said he’d ban fracking and challenged Trump to show evidence that he had. Hell, I’ll save the president the trouble. (And did you catch Joe admitting that he intends to eliminate the fossil fuel industry by 2035? 14 years from now. Trump did, and asked, “did you hear that Texas? Pennsylvania? South Dakota?” I heard it too.
I usually let an hour or so to pass before checking in, so I can read the comments in a large block, but some like to follow along as it develops.
Joe’s at sea — who cares?
Biden’s mental acuity is not an issue
The author, Steve Feinstein, is a Trump supporter but doesn’t think voters will desert doddering Joe just because he’s senile.
…. Republicans are making a big mistake if they think yet another example of Biden's growing dementia is going to change minds and convince voters to vote for President Trump. Biden's diminished state is already "baked into the cake." People are making their choice primarily on Trump yes/no, and they realize that a President Biden will be a "Weekend at Bernie's" situation. Behind-the-scenes unelected Democratic operatives will run any new Democratic administration. They will call the shots, push for liberal legislation, and craft the super-progressive new society that today's liberals — who are totally and gleefully divorced from any sense of loyalty to this country's traditions and history — crave so badly.
….
Likely voters already know that Joe Biden is nowhere near 100% mentally, but that is not the issue, and it never has been. No committed Democrat will ever leave Biden-Harris, even if he were to say the worst imaginable profane thing or do something that leaves no doubt that he is completely detached from lucidity. Voters are voting either for Trump or against him. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the pivotal issue in the 2020 race, not Joe Biden's mental competence. [emphasis added] No one is paying attention to what Biden is actually saying. …. When Biden goes on and on in some incoherent way about some gang leader named Corn Pop from a few decades ago, not one single voter is influenced either for or against either candidate.
Democrats needed a random outside development that would handcuff President Trump, something the liberal media and the Biden camp could unceasingly flog him with, to divert attention from the astonishing string of successes that President Trump and the country have enjoyed over the last three and a half years. The Chinese coronavirus provided them with exactly that. The Democrats are trying to frame the entire election in terms of voters' outlook and general life satisfaction. As long as the Democrats and liberal media can sow doubt about the future; continue to hype the "pandemic" as being a grave threat that permanently threatens our way of life; and directly pin those negative voter feelings on some unspecified, factually inaccurate "mishandling" of the outbreak by President Trump, then Biden has a chance to win.
A pox on both their houses, and the Commission on Debates
Make this the last debate, please
No matter how depressing tonight’s presidential debate becomes, we can take one bit of comfort. This isn’t merely the last debate of 2020; it could well be the last of its kind, ever.
We finally have a chance to create improved debates, because the current sponsor, the Commission on Presidential Debates, has bungled its mission so badly that Republicans are vowing never again to submit to its whims. The commission is a private group that claims to be bipartisan, but as Bob Dole pointed out, none of its Republican members support Donald Trump. Its last-minute rule changes were opposed by the Trump campaign and welcomed by the Biden campaign. Its moderators have consistently favored Democrat-friendly topics, directing the most hostile questions to Trump and Mike Pence while repeating Democratic talking points as if they were uncontested facts.
This year’s fiascos are partly due to the singular hostility that Trump has aroused in the press corps and the rest of the Washington establishment. (Though his boorishness in the first debate didn’t help, either.) But the basic problem is the debate format. Instead of confronting each other directly, the candidates must answer questions from journalists who usually have neither the skills nor the incentives to moderate a debate properly.
This problem existed long before Trump. It became obvious to me during the 1992 campaign, when I had the job of reviewing debates for the New York Times. This forced me to watch every one of them during the primaries as well as the general election—a stupefying experience I would not recommend to anyone.
Washington journalists weren’t so openly partisan back then—they wouldn’t have proclaimed it their moral duty to save the country from then-president George H. W. Bush—but they were overwhelmingly liberal in their politics.
— anip —
Even when the debate moderators and questioners weren’t liberal themselves, they felt obliged to focus on the press corps’ favorite Democratic themes because their overriding concern was to impress their colleagues. Like this year’s moderators, they asked vague, long-winded questions meant to demonstrate their own thoughtfulness. Or they tried to embarrass the candidates with trivial “gotcha” questions that would generate a gaffe—the ultimate debate trophy for a journalist.
A moderator can keep the debate focused, but what’s really needed is someone with the experience and skills of John Donvan, the former ABC correspondent who for more than a decade has been moderating debates for Intelligence Squared. No matter what the topic, these debates are consistently far more informative and entertaining than the presidential debates. The debaters frame the issues themselves, making arguments and counter-arguments without interruption for half an hour. Then they take turns answering questions from one another, from the audience, and from Donvan, who adroitly prods them to clarify some of their points and address the other side’s arguments.
So why not let Donvan and Intelligence Squared run the debates in 2024? Let experienced professionals take over from the commission that couldn’t even keep its promise of three debates this year. They could use the same format as Intelligence Squared, a series of timed speeches and rebuttals followed by questions, but I’d also like to see them experiment with another approach—the one used in the best debate I reviewed in the 1992 campaign.
It featured no podiums, no list of topics, no fixed rotation of questions, no time limits on answers, and no formal closing statements. Bill Clinton and the other Democrats seeking the nomination sat around a table for a discussion moderated by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, the PBS anchors. Instead of dictating who spoke when and for how long about which issue, the moderators threw out general questions and let the candidates talk to one another. The moderators occasionally intervened to ask for specifics or keep the discussion from wandering, but they mostly let the candidates run the show.
It lacked the gladiatorial drama of candidates hurling insults across the stage, but it was by far the most revealing and substantive debate of the year. Instead of delivering rehearsed sound bites or fending off accusations from showboating journalists, the candidates had coherent disagreements. For viewers, it was a rare glimpse of how they differed on the issues, grappled with contradictions, and dealt with criticism. They couldn’t stonewall by standing at a podium issuing denunciations. They had to conduct a civil conversation with another human being sitting across the table.
We can’t expect anything like that tonight, of course. Maybe it will be more civil and substantive than the first Trump-Biden debate—how could it fail to be?—but that’s too low of a bar. Let this one be the last.
Hunter’s business partner reveals new e-mails – the partner’s, and not from the crack head’s MacBook — showing an offered $5 million interest-free loan to “the Biden family”. Media’s reaction: Who’s this Hunter guy?
Of course, it’s no longer the “Hunter story”, but the “Joe story” as the revelations about “the Big Guy” demanding a 10% cut of the profits, but that makes no never-matter to NPR, it ain’t covering it nohow.
UPDATE: What I said, but he said it funny
Next to be banned by facebook
Hunter Biden quietly takes down “Meeting with my Dad” Craig’s List ad.:
"A real shame," said Russian entrepreneur Dimitri Stratiskoklanikov. "Fifty thousand US dollar, pretty good deal. Now I must gain audience old fashioned way. It's real shame."
Interesting profile of Joey B, excerpted from an article by Kyle Smith, National Review
Another weird detail is that Biden referred to Neilia as “my beautiful millionaire wife.” Biden brings up money repeatedly: Kelley alludes to “the temptation to sell out to big business or big labor for financial help” because Biden admitted “that more than once he was tempted to compromise to get campaign money.” Biden added, “I probably would have if it hadn’t been for the ramrod character of my Scotch Presbyterian wife.” He had been in office for only eight months before he started complaining about being underpaid. “I don’t know about the rest of you but I am worth a lot more than my salary of $42,500 a year in this body. It seems to me that we should flat out tell the American people we are worth our salt,” he said on the Senate floor. ($42,500 is about $249,000 in today’s dollars. Biden was 31 when he made these remarks.) Biden’s evident belief that he deserves to be wealthy stood out in a 2008 New York Times story that explained how a man living on a public servant’s salary was able to live like a Bourbon king: “Biden has been able to dip into his campaign treasury to spend thousands of dollars on home landscaping,” the Times explained, and also rich businessmen filtered their support of Biden through other means: “the acquisition of his waterfront property a decade ago involved wealthy businessmen and campaign supporters, some of them bankers with an interest in legislation before the Senate, who bought his old house for top dollar, sold him four acres at cost and lent him $500,000 to build his new home.” He sold the house he had bought in 1975 for top dollar to — get this — the vice-chairman of MBNA, who gave Biden $1.2 million for it. MBNA has showed its gratitude to Biden’s support in a number of ways: by giving over $200,000 to his various campaigns, by hiring Hunter Biden, by flying Biden and his wife to a retreat in Maine, etc. Mother Jones dubbed Biden “the senator from MBNA.”
In the 1974 interview, Biden also apparently brought up unprompted his ultimate goal: “I know I can be a good President.” Neilia, he said, would have been an asset with respect to this: “I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia.” One of his associates told Kelley of any future wife: “He also needs to find a First Lady, a woman who enjoys politics and will help him get to the White House.” His then-girlfriend, a reporter named Francie Bernard, was considered appropriate: “I do know that the woman he marries will he as rich and as pretty as she is,” the Biden associate told Kelley. What a strange place to bring up money.
do you know who i am?
UPDATE: Found it. 9 Stallion Trail
Former Disney executive suing rental holdover/squatters occupying his Greenwich home.
A former Disney CFO says a couple used a legal loophole to squat in his $2.2 million Connecticut mansion — but the couple claims the castle was far from the fairytale promised.
Lawrence Rutkowski — who also steered the finances of Petco and NBC/General Electric — says he rented his nearly 8,000-square-foot Greenwich home to lawyer A. Mark Getachew and his wife, Denora.
But the couple hasn’t paid rent since they moved in in June, taking “advantage of the no-eviction moratorium,” according to an affidavit filed by Rutkowski in Norwalk Housing Court.
“It is clear that they have no intention of paying rent — now or in the future because they know Governor [Ned] Lamont keeps extending the ‘no-eviction’ moratorium,” Rutkowski alleges in the affidavit.
Lots of claims and counter-claims, but the squatters’ assertion that they’ve been making repairs in lieu of rent has a familiar ring. I once represented a tenant who claimed exactly the same thing while occupying a house on Vineyard Lane, and I’d kept him in there through various legal stratagems for several months before I finally figured out he was a scam artist and fired him as a client.
Before that firing, but as my suspicions grew, I was able to derail one of his other scams: he was selling a Belle Haven (penninsula) home for the then-princely sum of $1 million and, violating all applicable legal cannons governing confidentiality, I voiced my suspicions about the man to the buyers’ out-of-state lawyer, and suggested that he hold his clients’ $100,000 deposit in escrow, rather than have me release it to my client as was the usual practice then. Once my guy learned he wasn’t getting the money, he walked from the deal. After firing him, I was curious about the aborted land deal and looked up the title to the property: there was a $1.5 million IRS lien attached to the million-dollar house, and two seperate mortgages totaling another $1.1 million. Turns out, the feds were on his trail for other crimes and he was looking to grab some cash and go.Sheesh.
None of which is to say that these people are pulling something similar, of course. In any event, it’s a fun read. And if you know the location of the house, please let us know.
Here’s a former listing for 9 Stallion. I actually showed this to a client years ago. Decent house but it had a failed Dryvit/stucco finish, and we passed.
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