Oh, hell — this will just free up the old dears to stage more “Release the Files” and “Save the East Wing” protests at their nursing homes

/

Frustrated residents complained that the “popping” sound of the sport —  which has spiked in popularity in recent years, especially among retirees  — has been echoing through the seaside community and driving them nuts, according to sfgate.com.

Where was this midget's concern for Epstein's victims during the Biden reign? UPDATE: Freudian slip, bad hearing or did he just get tired of hiding the truth?

/

I: AI Overview

Prior to 2025, there is

no public record of Senator Chris Murphy commenting specifically on the release or contents of the Jeffrey Epstein files. 

News reports and public statements regarding Chris Murphy and the Epstein files all occurred in November 2025, when the release of the documents became a major political issue in the U.S. Congress. In 2025, Murphy made several statements urging the release of the files and criticizing Donald Trump's perceived efforts to obstruct their disclosure. 

CT politicians, activists seek release of Epstein files as Congress OKs bill. 'It's time for truth'

“He wouldn’t be acting this way if he wasn’t so deeply worried about what sits in those files. What we’ve already seen is immensely incriminating,” Murphy said. “Clearly, Donald Trump was at the center of a child sex ring.”

Murphy’s gang had control of those files for four years, yet with all their digging for dirt on Trump, all their prosecutions, impeachments and investigations into his invented crimes, they saw no need to look into these records until now?

Murphy makes me sick.

UPDATE:

June contract, November closing

/

17 Highview Avenue, Old Greenwich: listed at $3.895 million, sold for $4.610.

The sales report shows the buyers as coming from Riverside, but I have to believe they were NYC apartment dwellers recently, and missed that Gotham ambience:

In a comment to an earlier post, the Mickster summed up this situation niceley:

BTW, after seeing 17 High view in OG go for almost 20% over ask at $4.6m I now finally give up on estimating price. Spring is going to be feeding frenzy.

Grannies for solar

/

“hey, hey, ho chi minh nfl is gonna win! — is that how it went?”

Climate activists protest gas expansion projects in Lamont’s office

Around 30 activists in neon pink T-shirts gathered around Gov. Ned Lamont’s office on Monday afternoon, singing “This Little Light of Mine,” to protest his support for new methane gas construction in Connecticut.

The protest was organized by a new coalition calling themselves Don’t Destroy Our Future, a group organized for the sake of this protest by members of climate justice groups including Sunrise Movement Connecticut, Third Act and Interreligious Eco-Justice Network. 

Activists called for Lamont to deny permits for new projects expanding natural gas usage in Connecticut. They argued that these buildouts contradict the state’s goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, a target Lamont signed into law earlier this year.

Claudia Allen, a 79 year-old Thompson resident, said she felt a generational responsibility to be arrested for the first time in her life, because she doesn’t have the same career considerations as young people.

“I really feel that my generation has to make the right decisions in order for [the younger] generation to have a livable future,” she said. “It’s really all about the young people for me.”

Most of the protesters were around her age. Two of the arrested protesters walked with canes, and one had been arrested protesting the Vietnam War.

Lamont, a Democrat, has long expressed an openness to natural gas as a means of keeping energy prices in check while reducing emissions from older, dirtier forms of power such as oil and coal.

In July, his administration gave tentative approval to a plan to expand the capacity of the existing Iroquois Pipeline by building a series of compressors capable of pumping an additional 125 million cubic feet of gas each day through the pipeline. The decision angered both environmental activists as well as local residents in Brookfield — the town where the compressors will be built — who have raised concerns about the pipeline’s proximity to a nearby middle school.

The Department of Energy and Environmental Protection has yet to issue a final permit for the Iroquois project, which is scheduled for an informational public hearing in January. 

A spokesperson for the Iroquois Pipeline did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

During his state of the state address in January, Lamont urged lawmakers not to “rule out natural gas” as a way of addressing the state’s spiking energy costs, despite concerns about methane and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Connecticut, like most of its New England counterparts, relies on natural gas to produce the majority of its electricity. In addition, more than a third of the state’s homes are heated with natural gas during the winter.

“We bring in very inexpensive natural gas from Pennsylvania, but that pipeline is at capacity,” he said. “And we bring in [liquid natural gas] by foreign ships, which is more polluting and more expensive.”

Shades of Greenwich Green’s successful fight to install geothermal boondoggles in Western and Hamilton Avenue schools

The Lamont administration has also drawn criticism over a plan to invest $42 million in a new gas heating system to power a network of pipes that deliver heating and cooling to more than a dozen buildings in downtown Hartford, known as the Capitol Area System. 

Advocates had pushed for lower-emission — and costlier — alternatives that would replace the aging gas-powered system with either all-electric boilers or an underground geothermal system.

Graham Platner; Maine’ primary won't be held until April, but already the sheeple army is out in force below the tofu line

/

HotAir’s John Sexton is not a fan:

Graham Platner Is Still a Socialist and Wants to Pack the Court

…. In one now-deleted Reddit comment from 2021, Platner responded to a thread about people becoming more conservative as they age by saying: “I got older and became a communist.” The comment was made on a subreddit called r/Antiwork, a far-left forum “for those who want to end work.”

In another Reddit post that year, Platner reflected on his life after his military service, saying he was “a vegetable growing, psychedelics taking socialist these days."...

In his interview with CNN, Platner wanted to assure voters: “I’m not a communist. I’m not a socialist. I own a small business. I’m a Marine Corps veteran.”

There's plenty of evidence that Platner really was a socialist and that it went beyond just the things he said on Reddit. For instance, he identified himself as a member of the Socialist Rifle Association and encouraged others to join a local chapter.

But even now, a month after his denial, his message still sounds a lot like socialism. Last week he posted a video from one of his town hall events in Maine in which he discussed billionaires.

“Nobody works hard enough to justify $1 billion,” the military veteran and oyster farmer told potential voters at the event. “Not in a world where I know people that have three jobs and can’t even afford their rent.”

With audience members nodding their heads in agreement, Platner continued by saying, “I refuse to believe that in a state like Maine, where people work as hard as we do here, that it is merely hard work that gets you that kind of success. We all know it isn’t. We all know it’s the structures. It’s the tax code. That is what allows that money to get accrued.”...

“The world that we live in today,” he explained, “is not organic. It is not natural. The political and economic world we have did not happen because it had to. It happened because politicians in Washington and the billionaires who write the policies that they pushed made this happen. They changed the laws, and they made it legal to accrue as much wealth and power as they have now.”

The solution? “We need to make it illegal again to do that,” says Platner.

No one works hard enough to justify being a billionaire. pic.twitter.com/Ezvf5fPLfv

— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 14, 2025

It's "the structures"? What does that mean? What structures does he think are responsible for people becoming billionaires? Unless the structure in question is capitalism itself.

He mentions the tax code but taxes only take a portion of what you earned after the fact. Higher taxes on billionaires would take more of their money but it would only take what they earn, not what they own. Most billionaires are rich because they own some company that is worth a lot of money, not because they make a huge salary.

He bypasses this difference between income taxes, which tax money people take as salary, and wealth taxes, which take a portion of what people own. So, for instance, if you wanted to tax Jeff Bezos wealth, you'd need to force him to hand over part of his ownership of Amazon to the government, which is literally seizing the means of production. The government wouldn't pay him for those shares of stock, they would just demand them in the form of a wealth tax. Is that what Platner has in mind?

He says he wants to make it "illegal again" to accrue that much wealth, but when was it illegal before? The answer is never. He's just making stuff up.

….

Platner wrapped up his thoughts on billionaires saying, "It’s up to us to organize, use our immense power as the working class, and win the world we deserve." In other words, workers of the world unite. He still sounds like a socialist to me.

And then there’s the Supreme Court problem; the oysterman has an answer to that, too:

View from a partisan Hearst “journalist”, but it seems an accurate a summary as I’ve read so far.

/

Greenwich Democrats celebrat victory November ‘25

Dan Haar: A deep dive into the Democrats' rout of local Republicans in CT cities and towns

…. As most observers know by now, Republicans suffered a rout, ceding the top office in 28 cities and towns to Democrats – or 30, depending on how you count oddities in Killingly (no mayor or first selectman) and Putnam (a mayor who switched parties), up in the state's odd corner.

The GOP took back exactly one town, Easton, by five votes after a recount Wednesday.

With lopsided results like that, you might assume Democrats lured swing voters to their side as Republicans saw their support shrivel. Not true. Republicans didn't lose voters; Democrats gained them.

A close look at the numbers shows that … Republicans running for mayor and first selectman held their ground in 2025, actually adding 2,300 votes compared with GOP candidates in the same towns four years earlier.

Democrats? Across Connecticut, the local candidates for mayor and first selectman turbocharged their combined votes by a powerful 22.5 percent compared with 2021, a hike of just over 50,000 votes amid a backlash against President Donald Trump's actions and the federal shutdown.

And they did it across all counties, in towns large and small, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. The richest towns swung further toward the Democrats, speeding up a shift we've seen in state and federal races for years. Many of the towns that flipped parties at the top are from the industrial heartland and the rural conservative base.  

The big question, of course, is whether this municipal mauling of Republicans, echoed across the United States on Election Day, tells us anything about what will happen in 2026 and beyond. Democrats and Republicans don't agree, to no one's surprise. Either way, the numbers offer clues. 

Highlights of a rout

We closely examined the town-by-town results, comparing the 124 municipalities that held direct elections for their mayors and first selectmen (and in Farmington, the town council chairman) in both 2025 and 2021. With help from our friends at the nonprofit CTData Collaborative (CTData.org) we looked at the breakdown by population, median income and educational attainment in each city and town. 

We chose 2021 because that's on the same four-year cycle as 2025, the year following a presidential election. Hartford, Bridgeport and Waterbury, among other places, did not hold elections for mayor in either year. 

The rout swung control of a majority of city and town halls from the Republicans – their last bastion of power in this state – to Democrats, who now control 102 of 169 cities and towns. Some highlights:

  • TRUMP SWOON: The GOP won in 78 of the 124 cities and towns four years ago, in the year following former President Joe Biden's defeat of former and current President Donald Trump.  They had a combined average margin of 1.9 percentage points in their favor. This year, Republicans won just 48 of those races even though they had a nice head start with 21 unopposed races. And when this year's votes were tallied, the average margin showed Democrats ahead by 7.3 percentage points – a 9.2 percentage point swing.

  • A FACTORY SHIFT: Among the 30 that swung from Republican to Democratic control, all except six of them are either rural or old-line industrial towns, not high-income. The flips include Bristol, Ansonia, Stratford, Windsor Locks and New Britain, all notable factory towns. Ten of the flipped towns sided with Trump in 2024. Translation: Blue-collar, "Reagan Democrats," perhaps coming back to the party. 

  • GOP HUGS THE MIDDLE: The CTData Collaborative focused on the 83 races in 2025 with a Democrat and Republican vying head-to-head for a top office. Democrats won this group 57 to 26. CTData divided the towns and cities into quintile groups based on population, income and percent of adults with a bachelors degree or higher. Their conclusion: Democrats won evenly in all population groups. By income and education, Republicans fared somewhat better in the middle quintiles. As I see it, that appears to reflect a target audience of MAGA Republicans. 

  • THE RICH SWITCH: A reversal happened in the 30 richest towns among the 124. Republicans took 19 corner offices in those town halls four years ago compared with 10 for Democrats. This time around, Democrats claimed 16 of them and Republicans settled for just 12. (Two went to petitioning candidates.)

  • EARLY VOTING: Democrats handed in more than their share of early and absentee ballots, as 104,000 registered party members voted that way – nearly 30,000 more than what we would expect based on their registration. Republican voters submitted 45,000 early and absentee votes, exactly what we would expect based on their numbers. We know who they are, by name, but we don't know whether those early-voting Democrats would have cast ballots on Election Day. 

  • HEFTY GAINS: In 62 towns, Democrats and Republicans faced each other head-to head for first selectman or mayor in both 2025 and 2021. At the midpoint of that list in 2021, Republicans won by 8.8 percentage points. The midpoint for 2025 had Democrats winning by 9.1 points. Forty-three times in those races this year, Democrats posted a vote increase of at least 15 percent over 2021. For example, Stratford's David Chess bested Republican Mayor  Laura Hoydick by fetching 3,171 votes more than Hoydick's 2021 opponent, a 67% leap. GOP candidates, by contrast, logged 15 percent gains just nine times in last week's balloting – and lost seven of those races.

  • THIS DOESN'T REGISTER: The Republican Party expanded its statewide voter rolls by 26,250 between 2021 and 2025, reaching 21.7 percent of all registered voters. Democrats lost 32,400 over the last four years, falling to 35.2 percent. Remarkably, Democrats gained 50,000 votes for top town candidates despite losing nearly 59,000 people from their registration buffer. They needed a sharp rise in turnout and they got it – as 81,000 more voters showed up in 2025 than in 2021, most voting for Democrats. 

What does it all mean? Clearly, a backlash against Trump and the federal government shutdown helped Democrats in Connecticut and across the nation. But every local race has its own story. One incumbent Republican fired a popular town employee and lost narrowly. Another had an open family feud play out on social media. Another ran afoul of the police and fire unions. 

…

Alves and other Democrats say the Trump effect, drawing voters out of the woodwork, should hold up. "It’s galvanizing," Alves said to me. "It gave hope to folks who were just upset, possibly disengaged."

Not true, Ben Proto, the Republican state chairman, countered. Presidential wins are always bad for their parties in the local elections that follow, he told me. It's rarely this bad, although, as Proto said, we're not likely to see a threat to both SNAP food assistance and health care subsidies loom so large in 2026.

It's hard to imagine Connecticut Republicans advancing while Trump holds office. Proto disagreed strongly when I said that. 

"The Democrats I think were clearly better organized and I think it had more to do with the shutdown than with Trump in particular," Proto told me. "Somehow the Democrats are going to have to keep all these Democrats who turned out, all hopped up for another year."

For that task, Democrats have a powerful ally in the Oval Office. 

And counterpoint, from a Walter Curt:

THE PEOPLE SCREAMING WERE NEVER MAGA:  I don’t know who needs to hear this, but to all of the people screaming “MAGA is finished” and that “we’ve already lost the 2026 midterms.” Giving up a full year in advance of an election may be the weakest and most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. If that’s what you believe, you deserve to lose. You give up so easily and somehow think you’ll win in 2028? Because you fought so hard this time around? What a joke.

To me, Curt seems to be channeling Dylan Thomas and his Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, but I’ve always been a pessimist.

Jonathan Turley has looked into the future and likes it no more than I do: Punch-drunk partisans reveal their plans to pack the Supreme Court

…. Elections can have the same effect for some to become drunk on even the prospect of power. Partisans can blurt out their inner thoughts with shocking frankness.

That was the case this week as Democratic luminaries discussed plans to retake power and then fundamentally change the constitutional system to guarantee they will never have to give it up again.

It turns out that winning votes in three blue states and a blue city in an off-year election can be quite intoxicating. It is easy to dismiss it as the talk of chest-thumping, bar-room blowhards about whom they were going to thump. But there is a truth in the bravado.

…. [Democrats] were proclaiming their plans not only to retake power but never to lose it again. That means weakening the greatest single check on power: the Supreme Court. The talk of court-packing had died down after Democrats lost both houses of Congress and the White House. Now, after the elections last week, such talk is back with a vengeance.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder was telling anyone who would listen this week, suggesting that once Democrats take control, they intend to keep it permanently.

Holder explained on a podcast: “[We’re] talking about the acquisition and the use of power, if there is a Democratic trifecta in 2028.” When asked about the priority in wielding that power, Holder declared that the court was hopelessly broken and had to be fundamentally changed:  “It’s something that has to be, I think, a part of the national conversation in ‘26 and in ‘28, ‘What are we going to do about the Supreme Court?’”

In other words, the court, as we know it, has got to go. While some on the left are questioning the very need for a Supreme Court or calling for it to be simply defied or “dissolved,” others want it to be stacked with political activists, like some state supreme courts are.

The problem has long been the focus of liberal academics planning for sweeping changes to the system. Many have called for the elimination of the Senate filibuster to force through measures making Puerto Rico and D.C. states with the addition of four new senators. Others want election and immigration “reforms” viewed as favoring Democratic campaigns.

That, however, leads them back to the inconvenient Supreme Court.

Years ago, Harvard professor Michael Klarman laid out a radical agenda to change the system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.” However, he warned that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described.” Therefore, the court must be packed in advance to allow these changes to occur.

This week, Democratic strategist James Carville laid out the step-by-step process of how the pack-to-power plan would work.

“I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen,” he said. “A Democrat is going to be elected in 2028. You know that. I know that. The Democratic president is going to announce a special transition advisory committee on the reform of the Supreme Court. They’re going to recommend that the number of Supreme Court justices go from nine to 13. That’s going to happen, people.”

Carville returned to explain that court-packing will now be as inevitable as Democrats taking power. “That’s going to happen to you,” he said. “They’re going to win. They’re going to do some blue ribbon panel of distinguished jurists, and they are going to recommend 13, and a Democratic Senate and House is going to pass it, and the Democratic president is going to sign it, because they have to do an intervention so we can have a Supreme Court that the American people trust again.”

So, with the legislative and executive branches in their hands, some Democrats are planning to decapitate the judicial branch — just in time for the 250th anniversary of our revolution.

After all, as Holder explained, it is all about “the acquisition and the use of power.”

Someone's in no rush to sell

/

21 Calhoun Drive has been on the market since it was listed at $6.8 million on April 25th; today, with still no buyer in sight, it slashed that price 4% to $6.5. Nice property: 3 acres in a one-acre zone, and the owners seem not to care whether they unload the place or not. They bought in in 2029 for $3.995 million (or, per tax card, $3.1 — take your pick) and have rented it out since 2020. I suppose it’s a “make me move” price, and I’m glad I’m not the poor suffering agent. Like a number of potential legal cases I could have accepted on a contingency basis, the most profitable were the ones I declined.