It's no wonder they're panicking

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“the school children’s collection for you is in the briefcase, madam secretary — enjoy”

H

And of course, the Clintons were there: 'FOBs': How Hillary's State Dept. Gave Special Attention to 'Friends of Bill' After Haiti Quake

“Nothing was ever done for anybody because they were contributors to the foundation,” Bill Clinton told CBS News’ Charlie Rose in September. “Nothing.”

The correspondence offers a glimpse into the first stages of a $10 billion Haiti recovery effort. The emails appear to show a State Department process that at times prioritized — and, some argue, benefited — people with close ties to the Clintons.

“I think when you look at both the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in Haiti, that line was pretty faint between the two,” said Jake Johnston, a Haiti analyst for the nonpartisan Center for Economic and Policy Research. “You had a lot of coordination and connection between the two, obviously. And I think that raises significant questions about how they were both operating.”

Hillary tried to bash DOGE yesterday: it didn’t go well.

Hillary wasn’t the only one to attack Musk for his lack of experience in aviation, and Sean Duffy wasn’t the only one to respond with a zinger:

And as always, the Grifter is lurking in the shadows:

DOGE gets more entertaining by the hour:

Heck, I'd buy it; I'm just short six zeros

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A dazzling Fifth Avenue mansion designed by the famed Gilded Age architect Stanford White is back on the market — this time with a major price cut. 

The sprawling 16,000-square-foot limestone home at 973 Fifth Ave., located directly across from Central Park, is now listed for $49.9 million, a significant drop from its original $72.5 million price tag in 2023. 

This architectural gem is “unbelievably rare,” co-listing agent Andres Perea-Garzon of Corcoran told Mansion Global, which reported on the listing.

Specifically, this is one of two Stanford White-designed townhouses in Manhattan that were intended for single-family use and remain that way today, meaning this offering boasts an incomparable pedigree, not to mention a special opportunity to own a real piece of New York City history. White’s work during his career included the Washington Square Arch and the Players Club; he had been affiliated with the firm McKim, Mead & White, best known for the original Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.

This listed home’s current owner, who purchased the home for $42 million in 2012, embarked on an extensive restoration, bringing the mansion “back to its original glory,” Perea-Garzon said. “Everything was fully either restored or put in brand new,” he added. 

Inside, the 11-bedroom estate is a lavish step back in time, featuring nine hand-carved woodburning fireplaces, a grand limestone staircase, restored stained-glass windows and soaring ceilings. 

While the home retains its early 20th-century charm, it has also been upgraded with modern conveniences, including advanced air filtration systems, a new elevator, and five kitchens — one of which boasts a marble waterfall island. 

Additional amenities include a climate-controlled wine cellar, a Venetian plaster steam room, a jewelry and silver vault, and a rooftop terrace with 360-degree views of the Manhattan skyline. 

The property has been on and off the market in recent years, with fluctuating price tags.

After originally listing for $72.5 million, the price dropped to $65 million, then $58 million before landing at its current asking price. 

Perea-Garzon said the adjustment reflects the broader real estate market, explaining that “if you look at what has sold in the past two years, [there’s been] somewhat of a correction.” 

A “correction” that would have made David Ogilvy proud.

Good news for Greenwich sellers; for buyers, not so much

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January 2025 Greenwich Sales

February 5, 2025 (Greenwich, CT) - The Greenwich Association of REALTORS® announces the statistics for home sales for the month of January 2025 according to figures provided by the Greenwich Multiple Listing Service.

Single-Family Home Sales

There were 30 single-family residential closings reported across all areas of Greenwich during the month of January 2025. This was an increase, compared to January 2024 when there were 28 closings. 

The Median Sale Price for a single-family home increased 2.31% to $4,003,000 from the median sales price in January 2024, which was $3,912,500.

The average Days On Market (DOM) for residential homes was 100 days; which was a 29.08% decrease from 141 days in January 2024.

There were 33 new single-family listings brought to the market in January 2025, which is a 23.26% decrease in New Listings when compared to January 2024 when there were 43. 

At month-end, Active single-family inventory totaled 102 units, which is a 28.2% decrease from January 2024 when there were 142 units available.

Pending on our northern border

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18 Scott Road, currently priced at $1.599 million, is reported pending. We posted on this house back in January (“Size, location, design: three strikes, you're out”) after it had dropped to $1.688 million from its original price of $1.795; neither your host nor blog commenters thought much of the place, but it seems that someone does, which must come as a relief to this builder.

Run away!

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Not to worry, though, those restrictions only apply to a tiny, unimportant part of the institution: the Department of Medicine. Phew!

A university spokesman, Brian Clark, declined to comment on the criteria but noted that they apply only to the Department of Medicine—whose 11 divisions include cardiology, oncology, and primary care—not to the medical school as a whole.

AOC isn't alone in calling Musk an idiot: she has plenty of other imbeciles to keep her company. (UPDATED)

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Election night, 2016: “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

NYT, October 19 2023: “X, formerly Twitter, may soon offer a lesson in what it takes to make a nexus implode,” Krugman wrote in The New York Times.

Like his lackwit barista friend, Krugman, who finally and mercifully was let go from the NYT last December, wasn’t the only “expert” to decry their better’s folly and lack of common sense:

In Case You Forgot When Every Financial Writer Mocked Elon Musk’s X Purchase

When Musk bought the company for $44 billion in 2022, most critics derided his purchase.

In October 2023, economist Paul Krugman bashed Musk’s project and predicted he would lead his platform into a “death spiral.”

“X, formerly Twitter, may soon offer a lesson in what it takes to make a nexus implode,” Krugman wrote in The New York Times.

In the British publication, The Guardian, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich lambasted Musk’s decision to fire the majority of Twitter’s workforce, over 6,000 employees.

“Without this knowledge and talent, Twitter is a shell – an office building, some patents and a brand – without the capacity to improve or even sustain its service,” he wrote. “It’s unlikely to fail all at once, but bugs and glitches will mount, the quality of what’s offered will deteriorate, hateful tweets will burgeon, and customers and advertisers will flee.”

Daily Caller:

While many advertisers left X, contributing to a decline in total revenue, the company is more profitable now than it was before Musk took over.

The company brought in $5 billion in revenue in 2021, the last full year before Musk took over, and reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of $682 million, X recently reported to shareholders, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company also reported that while X’s 2024 revenue was just more than half of pre-Musk levels at $2.7 billion, the EBITDA was nearly double what it was before Musk took over. X reported $1.25 billion in 2024 earnings. (RELATED: SEC Sues Elon Musk For Buying ‘Artificially Low’-Priced Twitter Stock. His Critics Agreed He Overpaid)

The company is bringing in less total money, but it’s more profitable under Musk, at least in part due to low overhead from slashing employees.

That last part sounds familiar.

UPDATE: No wonder federal workers are so frightened:

Within hours of acquiring Twitter, Musk had fired its top executives; within days, he’d laid off around 3,500 employees, around 50% of the company’s total staff. Ultimately, he trimmed 80% of Twitter’s workforce, demanded everyone return to the office, and often required employees to work far more than 40 hours a week.

Nailed it

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“Here: the taxpayers would just waste it”

My Three-Letter Response to the Dems' Caterwauling About 'Unelected Officials': EPA

In its earliest days, the EPA was largely focused on protecting the environment. That's not what the 21st-century incarnation of the agency is tasked with. It's now a climate change hysteria propaganda factory and the primary vehicle for Democrats to dole out taxpayer-funded favors to Big Green. 

It's a grift factory. 

Here's the kicker that the Dems won't dare mention: the EPA has over 14,000 employees, none of whom are elected. When there is a Democrat in the Oval Office, the agency is on a steady cycle of steroids, growing bigger and more powerful by the day. These people have the power to kneecap entire industries that they decide aren't a good fit with their Climate Church New World Order.

….

Regarding their "shadow government" fantods, what the Dems are really upset by is the fact that Musk and DOGE are in the business of exposing all of the shadowy stuff that they've been up to. Their myriad boondoggle rabbit holes are being discovered, cleared out, and closed up. 

TEAM TEEN. 18, 20, 21, 25; how dare we let babies terrorize and disrupt our country?

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And after all we’ve done for (to) them, the ungrateful little snots

The Deep State and its gravy train dependants are panicked and outraged that their interlocking funding partnerships are being unearthed and exposed. They can’t defend the waste and fraud that’s already been exposed, let alone the trillions of dollars to come, so they focus on the age of the whiz-kids who have been enlisted to bring these entrenched crooks down. This attack is typical:

Unmasked: Musk’s Secret DOGE Goon Squad—Who Are All Under 26

But here’s the thing: those ages recited in this post’s headline? They aren’t the ages of Musk’s kids, they’re those of some radicals from long ago:

Ages on July 4th 1776:

  • James Monroe, 18

  • Aaron Burr, 20

  • Alexander Hamilton, 21

  • James Madison, 25

  • Thomas Jefferson, 33

  • John Adams, 40

It’s not the age of the “Goon Squad” members that so frightens these people, but their competence: I’m sure they’d be perfectly comfortable if an assemblage of typical liberal arts graduates were coming to look at the books; these are not those students.

Meet the young team of software engineers slashing government waste at DOGE:

Six young men between the ages of 19 and 24 — Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran — have taken up various roles furthering the DOGE agenda, according to a report from Wired.

Bobba was part of the highly regarded Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program at UC Berkeley and has held internships at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, Meta and Palantir.

"Let me tell you something about Akash," Grata AI CEO Charis Zhang posted on X about Bobba in recent days. "During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase 2 days before the deadline. I panicked. Akash just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night — better than before. We submitted early and got first in the class. Many such stories. I trust him with everything I own."

Coristine, a recent high school graduate who studied mechanical engineering and physics at Northwestern, previously worked for Musk’s Neuralink project, Wired reported.

Bobba and Costine reportedly work directly under Anna Scales as "experts" at the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM). 

Kliger is listed on LinkedIn as a special advisor to the director of OPM and attended UC Berkeley in 2020. Kliger has also worked at the AI company Databricks. 

Killian is listed as a volunteer for DOGE who attended McGill University after graduating from high school in 2019. Wired reported that Killian previously worked as an engineer at a company called Jump Trading that deals with high-frequency financial trades and algorithms.

Shaotran was studying computer science at Harvard University last year and is the founder of Energize AI, an OpenAI-backed startup. Additionally, Shaotran participated in a "hackathon" sponsored by an Elon Musk company where he finished in second place. 

Farritor, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has a working GSA email address, was previously an intern for SpaceX and is also a Thiel fellow. 

In 2023, at 21years old, Farritor became the first person to successfully decode text inside a 2,000-year-old Greek scroll using AI, according to the University of Nebraska website.

More here:

‘Little Boys’ and ‘MAGA Chuds’ In Charge of Your Money Identified, and They're Brilliant

Here’s a taste of just one untanglement the “children” have accomplished since beginning work.

Now they’re moving on to where the real money is, like Medicare/Medicaid, where, the GAO estimates, there’s at least $100 billion a year lost to fraud each year, with under 4% recovered. Back in September 2023 Forbes looked at the problem:

Fraud Prevention Requires Modern Technologies

Surely part of the problem is the volume of data that may be trapped in too many silos. Think about the 20 or so MACs, all processing claims separately. Even if all their data is combined, that amounts to more than 1 billion claims each year. Traditional databases can’t handle so much data.

What’s needed is a modern cloud-based fraud prevention system that can aggregate every claim into a single data lake, normalize and correlate the data, and analyze it in real time using machine learning, anomaly detection and artificial intelligence. With billions of legitimate claims as comparative data points, fraudulent claims would stand out as anomalies that should be investigated before any payment is made to the provider.

It’s essential to break down the silos of the MACs doing their separate claims processing. By centralizing and correlating the data and scrutinizing for outliers, the large fraud schemes that span across MACs can be readily surfaced.

As Medicare continues to represent a large and growing percentage of the federal budget each year, costs can be lowered by using the right technology to detect and prevent fraud. Modern cloud-based systems have the scale and processing capacity to detect bogus claims in real time and deny payment to fraudsters.

Just wait until defense spending gets scrutinized. The nuclear explosions will be heard around the world.