Author’s Favorite Posts.

HERE ARE MY FAVORITE POSTS.  CLICK ON TITLE TO SEE FULL POST…

Silvio the Plumber Long before Joe the Plumber was on the political scene, there was Silvio the Plumber, and were he alive he would be voting for Obama. (And if half of the ACORN voter registration fraud stories are true, he very well may be!) Silvio the Plumber is the first character a reader meets in the 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist non-fiction The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority Moved from Left to Right by New York Times columnist Samuel G. Freedman. (Simon & Schuster)…

Who Dat Gonna Beat Dem Owners? Isn’t it time for the fans to unite against “Big-Sports”?  Let’s start a “fans’ union.”

Get Outside Your Box. Choose your news, choose your music. What’s not to like? But is customized content just making Americans insular and polarized, parochial and provincial?  (Fox Forum post)

Tale of Two Worlds: Rightwing Extremists, Leftwing Extremists, the FBI and DHS. Weren’t the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) talking? An FBI press release this morning proclaimed “NEW MOST WANTED TERRORIST: First Domestic Fugitive Added to List” and stated that the domestic terrorist being sought is “an animal rights extremist wanted for allegedly bombing two San Francisco-area office buildings in 2003.” But a DHS report issued in…

A (An?) Historic Event: I’ve been invited to five Presidential Inaugurations, but have never been to one – too much glitz for my tastes. Generally, I have tried to ignore this quadrennial ritual, but this year that was impossible. One would have to be comatose to have avoided the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President… These special plans in response to this historic event should serve as a blueprint for another historic inaugural I hope to see in my lifetime (one I might just attend) – the inauguration of our first woman President. It will be a blueprint, unless of course, that first woman President is my choice, Sarah Palin, in which case these plans probably won’t be emulated and this list will serve as an indictment of the hypocrisy of the those “enlightened elite” who believe only they know what is historic.

Thank God I Am Not a Cop, and Thank God For Those Who Are! (2003): I was “killed” twice this fall – once by a “FATS” machine and once by a classmate. I am fortunate enough to live to discuss it because the “killings” occurred during my training as a member of the first graduating class of the Greenwich Citizens Police Academy….

Movie, “The Passion of the Christ” helps give focus to Christian faith (2004): I’ve seen the passion scores of times — not the movie (I’ve only seen that twice), but the passion that my faith believes is relived whenever one person makes a completely selfless, significant sacrifice for another — especially for a person he does not “owe” or perhaps even know….

The Power of No Power: Early Friday morning, there was a storm-related blackout in and around “the Hub,” as the downtown Cos Cob neighborhood is known locally. “Back country Cos Cob” (as townies call the area adjacent to North Mianus on the west side of the river) was uncharacteristically unaffected. “Back country Cos Cob” (as townies call the area adjacent to North Mianus on the west side of the river) was uncharacteristically unaffected. Typically, life in back country Cos Cob is regularly punctuated with power outages – more often the brief “semi-colon” type, than the full-stop “period” kind or the even more rare “ellipsis” multi-day type like we endured a few winters ago….

Robbery on Greenwich Avenue versus Robbing the Taxpayer.

I have every sympathy for the victims of a robbery. It must be a traumatic thing to experience. So, it would be logical for one to assume that high-running emotions were behind the crass school-boy language used in a NYC television interview by a victim of a recent jewelry heist in Greenwich. While his invective was uncivil it was understandable. What is not understandable is the continuation of the sarcasm, ridicule and vitriol weeks after the trauma.

This past week we read two more stories in our local daily about the owner of a Greenwich Avenue jewelry store recently robbed. He is demanding that a police officer be stationed feet away from his store at taxpayer expense. The owner said he intends to make this a political issue in the next local election. I welcome that. It would be the “Tea Party” in reverse. Perhaps we could call it the “Silver Spoon Party.”

It would make interesting political theater to hear the millionaire owner of a chain of jewelry stores explain in a public forum why the taxpayers of our Greenwich should foot the $200,000 a year cost of stationing a police officer from 9 to 5 Monday through Saturday directing traffic near his store because, as he put it in the paper “It’s better to have a police officer respond in a few seconds than a few minutes.” Heck, I’d like a cop to respond to my needs in a few seconds too.

Why should all the taxpayers have to pay so certain people get preferred service?  If the jewelry store owners in the Greenwich Ave./Lewis St. neighborhood want more protection, why don’t they hire off-duty, armed, uniformed police as other businesses in Town do? Or why not have a Greenwich Avenue “tax district” which assesses all merchants to pay for such services as is done in the Stamford’s Downtown District?

The owner of the robbed jewelry store made the staffing decision not to have a private security guard among the reported 30 employees working at his Greenwich Avenue jewelry store the morning of the robbery, but he has the audacity to criticize the staffing decision of the police chief, who removed a traffic officer from Lewis St. in March 2009 for budgetary reasons. Which of these two staffing decisions more directly impacted the events of that morning?

Let’s look at facts surrounding the 2009 decision by the police chief. The police department, like all Town agencies, is and has been working to reduce costs to the taxpayers with the least impact on service. Removing one of the three Greenwich Avenue traffic officers turned a five officer rotation into a three officer rotation, saving over $200,000 a year. Part of that savings has been allocated toward putting former traffic officers on patrol – benefiting not just one block but all of our Greenwich.

So, which of the traffic officers to remove for the $200,000 savings? Of the three corners formerly staffed by traffic officers, Havemeyer Ave. and Elm Street, by far, have the most traffic volume, and Lewis St. the least. The chief made a perfectly reasonable and rational staffing decision.

What does our Greenwich have to show for the 2009 police staff reassignment? Look town-wide at the crime level.  Burglaries in the back country have recently been solved;  Byram is much safer in the year 2010 than it was a couple of years ago. Other areas of town have seen more police than in the past.  Drug arrests are up. All of our Greenwich has benefited from extra patrols by removing two officers from an assigned traffic post and putting them in cars where they can patrol and respond.

Remember, Greenwich Avenue traffic officers are out there for one sole purpose — traffic control. Traffic control need not be performed by a sworn police officer. Yet, this jewelry store owner ridiculed the First Selectman-cum-Police Commissioner’s thought that the Town negotiate with the police union to free up the remaining traffic officers from Greenwich Avenue so they can do higher-value police work by replacing them with unarmed civilians to direct traffic.  Doesn’t the jewelry store owner understand that if he wants “a beat officer” (to use his term) on Greenwich Avenue, it is more likely to happen if sworn officers are freed up from traffic duty?

“Senator Obama, are you mad at me?” “… In that skit a character playing Telemundo correspondent Jorge Ramos is worried that he may have offended Senator Obama and uses a debate question to query, “Senator Obama, are you mad at me?” Well, in real life we are seeing what happens to journalists who offend the Obama campaign…”

“Senator Obama are you mad at me?” PART 2 Apparently Senator Obama’s campaign staff didn’t hear it correctly the candidate’s promise to “make America united.” They must have thought he said make reporters from newspapers that don’t endorse Obama fly American or United. The Obama campaign has booted from their campaign plane reporters from three newspapers….

Uncivil Civics: Driving to work, contemplating what I should write for my first Our Greenwich.com “blog, I noticed dueling signs on Valley Road. Travelling west, on the left (appropriately) was a house with an Obama sign and directly across the street a house with a McCain-Palin sign. I thought I could write about neighbors disagreeing without being disagreeable – much like my next-door neighbor and I with our own juxtaposed McCain-Palin and Obama signs….

All Politics is Local: In the last Presidential election, I was recruited to use my election law background to help try to keep the election honest in Philadelphia. Even though I was a veteran of defending against Election Day fraud in places in New York, nothing prepared me for the blatant transgressions I saw in the City of Brotherly ….

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A favorite tactic of terrorists is to perform a decoy attack before a major attack. Not only is the attention of authorities and the public diverted, but the first attack is monitored closely by the terrorists. They watch to see how the authorities react. The first attack has the additional consequence of causing the authorities. Beyond that, those who responded to the first attack are often emotionally worn-out. And if the first attack was prevented, or a false alarm, there is the “boy who cried wolf” effect in place for the real attack. Could that be the tactic of those behind the newly-introduced Connecticut “Death with Dignity” or assisted-suicide bill, raised bill 1138, now before Stamford’s Senator Andrew McDonald’s Judiciary Committee?

Who’s Watching Out for Our Kids?: Not much could shock me – or so I thought.  I certainly was shocked as a student at the FBI Citizens Academy when in one of the optional exercises some of us watched over the shoulder of FBI agents in a computer center working on an Internet sting.  I saw with my own eyes, a father in a chat room offer up his pre-teen son for sex with an adult male (who was actually an FBI agent in a chat room…

Ordinary Time: Tomorrow begins “ordinary time.” For those of us who “bleed blue” football season painfully ended today as the Giants were eliminated from the playoffs. We don’t care about the NFC and AFC championships next week, or even the Super Bowl. Tomorrow marks the beginning of the countdown until Giants summer camp in Albany. Sure, there may be a slight distraction when the Yankees start playing again, but otherwise tomorrow starts “ordinary time” for Giants fans. And for those of us with college kids who returned to campus today, tomorrow is ordinary time in a different way. Starting tomorrow, there will be no more dinners with the full family in attendance. There is no more special time for us parents to spend with our college children, and for us to marvel at how they are ever more close to full adulthood. And for those of us in the Catholic Church, tomorrow marks the liturgical season called “Ordinary Time” which is most easily defined as generally the time in the liturgical calendar when it is not Advent/Christmastide or Lent/Eastertide…

NY Times stereotypes Greenwich (2005): Stacey Stowe’s article “A Name Change to Protect the Innocent” (New York Times, October 21, 2005) begins by referring to residents of a certain street in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, Connecticut as “people of the L. L. Bean-wearing, exercise-the-dog sort” and later refers to Greenwich as “a town where Lacoste shirts and country club memberships are a virtual birthright.”  Using such phrases to describe Greenwich must be in the New York Times style guide….

What it means to be a true “Greenwich Person.” (2002): The essay in Greenwich Time, (Sunday, February 10, 2002) “Becoming a Greenwich Person and Proud of It” should cause all Greenwich residents to reflect on what it means to be a “Greenwich Person.” The “typical” Greenwich person depicted in the essay is what I like to think of as the “nouveau Greenwich person” and while that person may have many redeeming qualities, as pointed out at the end of the essay, the nouveau Greenwich person also brings with him many qualities that are an anathema to the Town….

“Dad! People really live in basements?”: “Dad! People really live in basements?” my son said in disbelief when he was five or six years old. Thankfully, he waited until we were in the privacy of our car before making the comment, rather than blurting it while in the basement home we had just visited. My son and I were helping to…

A Day of Penance: I was reminded in the weekly bulletin of St. Mary’s on the Avenue, that “the [Catholic] bishops of the United States have designated Saturday, January 22, as a special Day of Penance for the Pro-life cause. They have designated this as a day for all Catholics in the United States to either abstain from meat (as on Fridays in Lent) or to perform some other Act of Penance (saying the Rosary, Stations of the Cross, etc.) in reparation to God for the sins against life committed in our country and as an act of prayer for the protection of all human life.”

January 22 is the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade and in the intervening 38 years there have been millions of abortions. What does it say about a society where is it a crime to harm the egg of a vulture (the California condor) but it is okay to abort a human fetus? Some say that we don’t know if a fetus is a life – that is “above our pay-grade” to know when life begins. In America there is a presumption of innocence. Why not a presumption of life – especially when death could be the alternative

I Wish I Had Said That: The other day a friend sent me an email with this link to the blog of law professor Ann Althouse. (READER WARNING BEFORE YOU CLICK ON THE LINK:  Professor Althouse’s site links to the website of Rush Limbough, which apparently offends some readers.)

The quote, below, on Professor Althouse’s website, (a quote I wish I said) highlights the human rights abuses in China:“The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize Winner in prison…”

I would have felt proud if at the dais of the recent State Dinner for China the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner had placed an empty chair for the 2010 winner as a noble silent protest. I guess I’d never make it in the diplomatic corp. I’m told etiquette dictates you shouldn’t insult someone you invite for dinner.  So maybe the root question is should there have been a State dinner at all for China’s President Hu Jintao.  Some people, including former White House Advisor Karl Rove think we shouldn’t have.

China may be one of our largest trading partners, and may be our largest foreign creditor (most US debt is owned domestically). But China is a repressive regime.  It saddens me greatly that some in America view the United States and the People’s Republic of China as moral equivalents.  In America people aren’t imprisoned for fidelity to the Roman Catholic church, or any church, for that matter.  Not so, in China.  In America, women are not forced to abort a second child.  Not so in China.  The list goes on.  (For more details visit the sites of the Population Research Institute and the Stamford-based Cardinal Kung Foundation.)

After visiting China, after meeting in Greenwich and Stamford with the late Ignatius Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei, Archbishop of Shanghai who was imprisoned in China for 30 years because of his fidelity to the Pope, and after doing other research our family decided to boycotted Chinese products, and has done so for the last decade.  NOT an easy feat.  (Indeed, an entire book, A Year Without “Made in China”: One Family’s True Life Adventure in the Global Economy, has been written by Sara Bongiorni who tried to do the same thing for a single year.)

Maybe it would have been impolitic for an empty chair protest. And maybe for diplomatic or other reasons we needed to have a State dinner (after all Jesus dined with tax collectors). But there is no excuse for ignoring the largest repressors of religious freedom in the world. Instead of an empty chair at the White House dinner, perhaps we should all empty our shopping carts of Chinese products.

The Penultimate Word: While it would have been ideal if all three Greenwich papers endorsed my favorite local candidate, Fred Camillo, I got the next best thing.  The one paper which did not endorse Fred fully, gave me and a few others enough time to have published in their paper rebuttals to their editorial. As a partisan I was pleased at the tactical advantage we have, because our opponent’s supporters are not able to rebut the pro-Fred editorials. But having been on the receiving end, I know the other camp’s frustration. Last minute editorial endorsements have been a peeve of mine for years now….

Putting Your Prayers Where Your Vote Is — 7:30 p.m. Election eve: Drafted into the Catholic Church at birth, I attended “boot camp” for a dozen years of parochial school, considered “officer candidate school” (i.e., a religious vocation), and after a time being AWOL, I went on active duty on a daily basis about age 30. Over the decades since, I have heard a few pro-life homilies…