March 20, 2015 With considerable fanfare, the name of the new minor league baseball time that has migrated from New Britain to Harford has been announced. After multiple entries, 35,000 people voted on line and decided to call the team the Hartford Yard Goats. At first, I was disappointed that my name, The Fleecers – as this is what this team will do to the taxpayers – was not chosen. But the Yard Goats is even better. A Yard Goat is the term used for a locomotive that moves rail cars in a rail yard. Apparently, this is a reference to bygone days when Hartford was a railway center, sort of like the Steelers refers to a bygone time when steel was made in Pittsburgh, before these good paying jobs for working class people were shipped overseas. But the logo for the team does not depict a locomotive. It depicts a goat. To the average person, a Yard Goat will conjure the vision of a poorly-kept yard surrounded by a rusting chain link fence, with an abandoned boarded-up house, a few open tin cans and a goat chewing on the few stubbles of grass that remain. This is what the Democrats and the crony capitalists are doing to what was once the great … [Read more...]
Exploiting Mother Teresa is Bad Manners
March 6, 2015 An art exhibit at a public library In Trumbull, a Connecticut town, featured a painting depicting Mother Teresa and members of her religious order, The Missionaries of Charity, marching in unity with icons of the feminist movement and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. A Catholic organization, The Knights of Columbus, protested, resulting in the removal of the painting. The Secular Left is battling to have the painting returned to the exhibit. Undoubtedly they will win. They always do. I spent a year as a volunteer physician working with the Missionaries of Charity in Haiti. They are the best the human race has to offer. They woke up at 4:30 AM, prayed for an hour on hard wooden kneelers and then spent the rest of the day caring for the sick and dying. They drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince, found people dying, brought them back to their hospitals, and nursed them back to health. They distributed medicine and food to neglected and abused. They cleaned the flies and excrement off of patients dying of AIDS and drug-resistant tuberculosis, allowing them a pain free and comfortable death. They also believed in the culture of Life. … [Read more...]
A Penny for Your Parthenon
February 14, 2015 Buried on the back pages of the business sections of leading newspapers is a high stakes poker game that will soon migrate to the front page – an attempt by the newly-elected Greek government to renegotiate the terms of its recent bail out. Greece is a member of the European Union; a collection of European countries that banded together recently, scraped their national currencies, and formed a common currency called the Euro. The problem with such an arrangement was that member countries could borrow money from the European Union in the form of bonds. The value of these bonds varies to some extent with the perceived probability they will maintain interest payments and whether to full value will be remunerated on their due date. In the summer of 2010 several countries, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, had difficulty maintaining the interest payments on their respective bonds. This led to a financial crisis and credit crunch that culminated in a grand agreement whereby the European Central Bank, European Union and IMF (International Monetary Fund) promised to back their bonds as long as these countries agreed to austerity … [Read more...]