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….

“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…

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…