Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
8 Byfield Lane, listed at $5.395 million at the end of August has sold for $5.4 million. Built by Abderdeen (excellent people) in 2000 and purchased that year by these owners for $4.365 million, its 2024 town appraisal was, surprisingly, right on target: $5,148,400 — close enough for government work.
88 Cedar Cliff Road, Riverside, has been marked down to $14.750 million, a substantial discount from its April 2022 suggested retail of $25 million.
Coincidentally, a previous broker for this house set its initial price of $25 million, and was also the person who priced a house on Clapboard Ridge Road at that same number in 2013. Clapboard Ridge sold, finally, in 2017 for $9.650. We’ll hope for better things for this one.
(I wrote about this property back when it took its first price cut, to $22.5 million, in February 2023: When you absolutely, positively don't have to leave there overnight)
Or at least, I assume that’s what will happen to this property. In any event, 1046 Lake Avenue has sold for $4.2 million, 705 days after starting at $5.850.
The interconnections that make up the Washington power world.
The Biden-Harris administration has promoted the senior Pentagon employee who was outed as a member of an Iranian government-run influence operation, Politico reported.
Ariane Tabatabai is now a deputy assistant secretary of defense within Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's office, where she will lead its force education and training division. Tabatabai, according to Politico, was offered the promotion last month. She previously served as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
Tabatabai became a public commodity after a 2023 Semafor report outed her as a member of an Iranian government propaganda group known as the Iran Experts Initiative. The affiliation saw Tabatabai report back to Iran’s foreign ministry and communicate with senior officials in the hardline regime.
[FWIW. Bonus reading material: an article in Semafor, “Inside Iran’s influence operation” details at great length that “Iran Experts Initiative” and Tabatabi’s involvement in it. Here’s just one paragraph:
…. Tabatabai currently serves in the Pentagon as the chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, a position that requires a U.S. government security clearance. She previously served as a diplomat on Malley’s Iran nuclear negotiating team after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Esfandiary is a senior advisor on the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group, a think tank that Malley headed from 2018-2021]
Now back to the Free Beacon:
Tabatabai's promotion comes at a curious time for the Biden-Harris administration. Over the weekend, classified U.S. intelligence on Israel's military preparations for a strike on Iran leaked in a "deadly serious breach," which the administration is investigating. While the leaker has not been publicly identified, the situation has raised concerns about a host of Biden-Harris administration officials, including Tabatabai, who want to increase diplomacy with Iran at the cost of the historically close U.S. alliance with Israel.
News of Tabatabai's affiliation with the Iran Experts Initiative sparked multiple congressional investigations, with Republicans raising concerns about Tabatabai’s ability to obtain a top-secret security clearance. The Pentagon and State Department, where Tabatabai formerly worked, have vocally defended her, saying there was nothing in her background that would have disqualified her from accessing classified information.
"Dr. Tabatabai was thoroughly and properly vetted as a condition of her employment with the Department of Defense," a Pentagon spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon in September 2023, after lawmakers raised concerns about her connections to Iran. "We are honored to have her serve." One month later, the Pentagon confirmed to lawmakers that Tabatabai would keep her security clearance.
Tabatabai and two others affiliated with the pro-Tehran group served as aides to former Biden-Harris administration Iran envoy Robert Malley, who was suspended from his post amid an ongoing FBI investigation into his alleged mishandling of classified information.
And Tabatabai’s boss?
The Biden administration’s former special envoy to Iran, who was placed on leave earlier this year for allegedly mishandling classified material, should face “extensive scrutiny” for his “permissive” stance toward the Tehran regime after it aided Hamas and Hezbollah in carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel, critics said Monday.
“Rob Malley deserves extensive scrutiny — yesterday, today and tomorrow,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told The Post after the Wall Street Journal reported that officers of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps planned and signed off on this weekend’s atrocity that killed at least 900.
“These reports could not be more concerning, and they hint at what could be the worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss,” Issa added.
“Malley and others created an incredibly permissive environment for Hamas, for Iran, to do all these things,” added Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran at the State Department.
Noronha, who served under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said Malley and his negotiating team “purposefully funneled billions of dollars to [Iran] through lack of sanctions enforcement and provision of sanctions relief that has given them somewhere between $50 [billion] and $80 billion over the last two and a half years.”
A senior House Republican aide told The Post that the cash influx followed an even more generous payout of $1.7 billion that the Obama administration made to Iran in 2016, eventually contributing to Saturday’s attack that triggered the Jewish state’s first declaration of war in 50 years.
“There is a straight line from Obama’s giveaway to Iran, to Biden’s enriching of Iran — to Iran’s war on Israel,” the aide said.
Don’t trust the Free Beacon or the New York Post? How about this one, published just last month by the reliable Left, pro-administration outlet, Politico?
9/18/24: Internal watchdog says State Department mishandled Iran envoy’s clearance. The entire Malley/State Department/Anthony Blinken affair is an on-going scandal, although the term “scandal” usually includes “public outrage” as part of its definition, and this story has been mostly covered up by a complacent media.
How ironic: the authors of “How Democracy Dies” are now advocating that it be snuffed out.
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt [are pushing for] a "militant democracy" to ensure an "authoritarian figure" like former President Trump never rises to power again.
In an op-ed for the New York Times, Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how they spent the last year "researching how democracies can protect themselves from authoritarian threats from within," lamenting how close Trump remains to getting a second term.
"How could such an openly authoritarian figure have a coin flip’s chance of returning to the presidency? Why have so many of our democracy’s defenses seemingly broken down, and which, if any, remain?" they wrote.
One of the ways they suggested limiting figures like Trump’s rise to power was a "militant or defensive democracy" which they described as a way authorities can restrict or outlaw speech against "antidemocratic forces."
And who will decide what particular speech is “antidemocratic” and therefore to be outlawed? Not the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory; more likely, the wise elders of the Harvard faculty lounge and the (gender-neutral) rest rooms of the New York Times.
"Born in West Germany as a response to Europe’s democratic failures in the 1930s, the militant democracy approach empowers public authorities to wield the rule of law against antidemocratic forces. Haunted by the experience of Hitler’s rise to power via the ballot box, West German constitutional designers created legal and administrative procedures that allowed the state to restrict and even outlaw ‘anti-constitutional’ speech, groups and parties," they wrote.
“Legal and administrative procedures” — a term that we have learned includes the weaponization of the police force of the state and state-supervised suppression of dissent by the social media giants like Google, FaceBook, China’s TikTok, and Instagram. We need only look to the persecution of Elon Musk and all of his enterprises to see what the administrative 4th branch can do to someone who dares break it’s information monopoly.
Though they acknowledged "significant drawbacks" that could be "easily abused" in this strategy by politicians, they argued how it may be better than simply relying on electoral competition or the "laissez-faire approach" to sort out bad ideas.
So, even though those new powers of the state to outlaw dissident groups can be (will be) abused, better that than leave the little people to sort out “bad ideas” on their own.
"Electoral competition is, of course, essential to democracy, but...”
There’s a universal rule: anything that comes before “but” is a lie. That’s true here.
Let’s continue:
But a laissez-faire approach has two important limitations. First, in the United States, competition is distorted by an 18th-century institution, the Electoral College, that allows election losers to win power. In one sense, the electoral marketplace worked in 2016 the way it is theoretically supposed to: More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for Mr. Trump. But the Electoral College permitted an authoritarian figure who won fewer votes to become president," they wrote. "In addition, history shows us that electoral competition alone is insufficient to fend off extremist threats. Good ideas don’t always win out. And candidates seeking to subvert democracy don’t always lose."
Don’t think this call for a dictatorship of Those Who Know Better™ is (just) the product of two deranged fools frothing at the mouth up in Cambridge. These professors, spawned in Berkeley and now busy indoctrinating the next generation of Leftist morons, are a significant part of the voice of the those who would rule. Their book, “How Democracies Die” published in 2018, was universally praised by the State’s media branch, from the Wall Street Journal to the NYT, to WaPo, NY Magazine, Atlantic, to The Guardian, and is now part of the official cannon (the Light Bringer has described it as “his favorite book”, Joe Biden’s handlers had him carry around a copy and, a la Tampon Tim and his favorite, Mao’s Little Red Book, read passages aloud to whoever would listen (and presumably, those who wouldn’t). That fact that the state’s loudest media arm, the New York Times, has published this latest iteration of the authors’ call to action one week one week before an election the state fears it will lose, gives a hint of the chaos that will be unleashed in two weeks should its puppet be defeated.
Newly, sort of, on the MLS today, 20 Gate Field Drive is agains available for purchase, with offers invited beginning at $7.495 million. It’s been a long saga that may finally be drawing closer to its conclusion.
These owners paid $4.8 million for the place in 2007, polished it up a bit and put it back up for sale in 2015 for $8.750. Even dropping it down to $7.350 failed to move it, so they cancelled the listing in 2016 and, we hope, didn’t sulk, but vowed to try again some other day.
That day came in 2022, when the house reappeared with a new price, $6.495, dropping eventually to $5.995, but still no soap, so they rented it out and waited for better times. That wait is over, apparently, because it’s back again, at the aforementioned $7.495. Has the market risen high enough in the past two years to rescue a house that wouldn’t sell at $5.995, and find a buyer at six-and-a-half? As always in real estate, we, along with these owners, will just have to wait and see.
218 Clapboard Ridge has been listed today with an asking price of $15.8 Million. Some years ago, under different ownership, this house was listed for $25 million. I had a bit of fun with it at the time, mocking its outrageous price request, and predicting that it would eventually sell in the $9s; which it did: these owners paid $9.650 in 2017, four years later.
I assume they’ve made some significant changes since then, or perhaps they’re just counting on the market’s recent emergence from its depressed state of mind to justify this “improved” price. I guess we’ll see.
“Good luck at the meeting, and remember: ten percent for ‘the big guy’ “
The son of Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Richard Neal — leader [former Chair, no Ranking Member — Ed] of the House Ways and Means Committee — raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from his father’s campaign and pressure groups who were actively lobbying his dad on tax policy, according to Politico.
Richard Neal’s son Brendan Neal launched a one-person public affairs firm offering “political advice, lobbying and strategic communications” in 2020, roughly one year after his father became the ranking member on Ways and Means — the sole congressional committee with jurisdiction to introduce federal tax legislation, Politico reported.
DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR?
Richard Neal’s office has claimed the congressman was unaware his son was employed by lobbying firms with tax issues being decided by his committee, and that the two do not discuss official business, according to Politico.
247 Riverside Avenue, $6.650 million. It’s been on the market for 49 days, so I wouldn’t think it’s going for over-ask; then again, these days ….
a helping hand for the deserving poor — that would be us
Bungling World Bank bureaucrats lost track of at least $24 billion bankrolling the battle against climate change, according to a bombshell report by a left-leaning charity group.
An investigation by Oxfam revealed “poor record-keeping practices” by the DC-based international lender that resulted in anywhere between $24 billion and $41 billion in misplaced funds.
The agency’s audit showed “a lack of traceable spending” over the past seven years — partly because of an oddball accounting practice in which the bank accounts for its climate financing at the time of a project’s approval rather than at the time of project completion, according to the report released last week.
“This is like asking your doctor to assess your diet only by looking at your grocery list, without ever checking what actually ends up in your fridge,” said Kate Donald, the head of Oxfam’s Washington DC office.
A World Bank insider, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested the figure for the missing money “could be twice or 10 times more.”
“All the figures are routinely made up,” the source said. “Nobody has a clue about who spends what.”
….
Last week, the Biden-Harris administration voted in favor of boosting the bank’s lending firepower by $150 billion over the next 10 years.AP
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