In case there are some Trumpsters out there who don't follow football, Trump can run this picture in 2019 and win them over
/
Of course,the league could try publicizing the Dolphin's British cheerleader Holly Warden, but it won't dare
As hundreds of NFL players denounce "racist" America in London and across America, Patriot's owner sides with players. I just saved $50 a month
/
Multi-millionaires claim unfair treatment
I pay for a minimum cable package costing $50 a month in order to receive Internet service and to watch the New England Patriots play, period. Kraft's defense of his league's new turn from sports to politics inspired this technology-ignorant consumer to look into alternatives and lo, I can apparently purchase a router for $250 which will allow me to keep connected to the Internet. That's a one-time charge, instead of the $600 I'm paying to watch, maybe, 10 football games a year.
No contest.
Tear down the Bush Holly house! The original owner boarded slaves in the attic.
/
Destined for Zinn's dustbin of history
If, as the latest craze has it, we remove statues of Jefferson and Washington because they were slave owners, surely Greenwich will want to remove all memories of a local slave owner's house.
For now. our local virtue-signalers are content to let the building stand, as a means of teaching school children that Greenwich was, "as racist as the south", but their sentiments change as quickly as Facebook tweets, so it's entirely likely that they'll be demanding the museum's razing within the year. After all, the NFL owners were denouncing the antics of Colin Kaepernick and his friends as recently as last December, and until July of this year, statues of Confederate generals were considered acceptable, and until August, schools named after Alexander Hamilton, one of the most prominent of tis country's founders, were still within the pale.
If you're looking for ways to cut your charitable contributions, you need look no farther than the Greenwich Historical Society:
Debra Mecky, executive director of the Greenwich Historical Society, said it is important to tell the history of slavery in the North, and not portray the region solely as the home of abolitionism.
“If we tear down the places where slavery existed in the North, we continue the myth that the North was not complicit in slavery,” she said.
Few structures in Greenwich bear witness to this fact as lucidly as the Bush-Holley House.
As of today, [but as I suggest, check back in in November] Mecky advocates keeping the house as a teaching tool, so that school children will understand that America was founded on racism; check in in November and see if she hasn't changed her position.
According to the 1790 census, David Bush — one-time owner of the home — had eight slaves, the most at any household in town at the time. As the Greenwich Historical Society has learned more about the museum that sits alongside its headquarters, it has made a concerted effort to recognize the complexity of the former residents’ legacy.
Reconstructed from census records, inventories, manumission documents, the tax list, northern slave narratives, northern probate records and other resources, the slave quarters at the Bush-Holley House contrast with the rest of the family’s colonial rooms, which were boastfully opulent in their time and still seem ornate now. On tours, docents cover the light that flows into a cramped attic space so it is bathed in pitch black, even as the sun shines outside. That is how curators believe the Bush’s slaves lived in the 18th century: in windowless darkness, with only a few blankets to save them from winter’s bite.
Age qualifies almost every item, but something else sticks out even more: According to documents from the Greenwich Historical Society, “the lintry chamber is the only room on the inventory that lists blankets and coverlets without also including a bedstead.”
The small, wooden nook is a far cry from a boudoir next door that is equipped with a fireplace and a large bed. On a recent tour, a docent mentioned that the mistress of the household, Sarah Bush, would lock all her furniture inside the room so that nearby slaves couldn’t steal.
In 1784, Connecticut introduced its first abolition legislation, which demanded that slave children born after Mar. 1 of that year be freed when they turned 25 years old, as long as they could care for themselves. A new law in 1797 changed the age requirement for freedom to 21 years old, and according to author Jeffrey Bingham Mead, abolitionism gained momentum early on in Greenwich.
When Fanny Bush manumitted Candis, who had been passed down to her in her father David’s will, she freed the last slave in Greenwich. The year was 1825, and Candis was much older than 21.
Though 1825 was late, by 1800, there were still more than 1,000 slaves in Connecticut, according to Peter P. Hinks, author of “All Men Free and Brethren.” The state did not fully abolish slavery until 1848 — far later than neighboring Massachusetts, which had forbidden the practice by 1783.
Teresa Vega, whose black ancestors owned property in Greenwich one generation after being freed from slavery, argued that it’s a big part of northern history, and one that still has ramifications today.
“To insinuate that somehow people in the North are less racist or less biased, it’s cocokamamy,” Vega said.
Every year, Greenwich students circle through the Bush-Holley House on tours to learn about colonialism, as well as the art colony that thrived in the home a century later. For a few of the kids, the notion of slavery is a new one.
“Some of our youngest visitors may not have heard the word before,” said Mecky.
“Our mission is to tell the whole story of Greenwich’s past, and slavery is a part of that story,” she continued. “The house is a strong vehicle to illustrate Connecticut’s complicity in slavery.”
I'm not advocating the erasure of history, and private non-profits which adhere to the law and don't engage in political activities should be free to conduct themselves as they please, but emphasizing slavery in their showcase house to elementary school children visiting during school hours is straight from the Howard Zinn system of indoctrination. Zinn, a communist whose text book is now used in high school history classes throughout the country, teaches that America's history is nothing more than a continuing series of exploitation and abuse of, in order, Indians, women and blacks, and late-arriving immigrants like the Irish, Poles, Germans and Jews, that the "melting pot" is a myth (despite all evidence to the contrary), and that our involvement in all wars, including World War II, were simply examples of American aggression. Every modern teacher parrots Zinn, and they've been preaching this line since at least 1980. In fact, the movement to denounce America dates back to at least 1965 — I was there.
My suggestion is to cut off all funding to the Greenwich Historical Society, and let their flagship propaganda machine and, if we're lucky, the entire organization rot into oblivion.
"Now that we've seen the slave quarters, we'll practice kneeling while I recite the pledge of ALLEGIANCE
RTM membership list
/A reader sent me an Excel spread sheet identifying all RTM candidates, broken down by district, but I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't figure out how to incorporate that document into Squarespace. So I've snapped screenshots of each district's list and am publishing them below. Note that "X" before a name means an incumbent, while "PX" denotes a petition candidate. I by no means intend to seem like a misogynist, but do note that the members of Indivisible Greenich/March on Greenwich are almost exclusively female, and all will appear as Petition Candidates. You may want to vote accordingly.
UPDATE, 12: 02 : For some reason, Squarespace is not importing these screenshots in full. They're fine in draft, but are showing up as blackened out when moved from draft to "publish". Usually reloading the picture solves that when it happens but tried it just now, without success. Come back later, and maybe Squarespace will have gotten its act together.
From pink sneakers to flag burning, the NFL is determined to drive away its base
/
The NFL is bullshit on America
Two days go, Trump stated, that he'd like to see an NFL owner, when one of his players knelt during the national anthem say, "get that bastard off the field!' "Wouldn't the be great?" he added.
The NFL owners, and Roger Gooddell, immediately denounced him. Commissioner Goodwill, speaking for the league, released a statement of support for his protesters:
"The NFL and our players are at our best when we help create a sense of unity in our country and our culture," Goodell said. "There is no better example than the amazing response from our clubs and players to the terrible natural disasters we've experienced over the last month. Divisive comments like these demonstrate an unfortunate lack of respect for the NFL, our great game and all of our players, and a failure to understand the overwhelming force for good our clubs and players represent in our communities."
"A sense of unity in our country and our culture,"? WTF? Who introduced racial politics into football games? Trump? No, he was responding to a growing to a growing phenomenon among black players who have been denouncing our country as a racist society whose cops, black and white kill innocent drug dealers. It was those players who, with the acquiescence of the NFL, brought in politics, even before Trump was president. See, e.g., Colin Kaepernick, September 12, 2016.
When even 8-year-old football players began, surely as instructed, to kneel before their Pee-Wee games to denounce America, Trump decided to say something. It's Trump who is calling for unity in our country; not the NFL.
But it's the hypocrisy and cynicism of the NFL that really galls me. How many pre-game "Honor Our Troops" ceremonies has it held over the decades, with displays of huge American flags, fly-overs, soldiers and players running onto the field together, and rousing speeches by owners of how proud they are to be Americans? As the TV ratings dropped, and their players began making the news, repeatedly, for bashing and beating up their girl friends and wives, this band of billionaires came up with the novel idea of pretending to be concerned abut woman and simultaneously adding to its fan base by insisting their players wear pink ribbons and, now, pink football shoes to show ... something. What a concern for breast cancer has to do with wife beating escapes me, but whatever.
When that display of feigned concern for women didn't bring in more viewers, the NFL, decided to abandon its original fan base and appeal to the political left, as though there's a huge untapped reservoir of would-be football fans among academia and the elite leftists on our coasts. So far, that's not working either: the LA Rams and San Diego Chargers each played seperate games in California last weekend, and combined to produce "embarrassingly low" attendance figures.
The NFL is desperately trying to have it both ways: appealing to the patriotism of its original redneck fan base while reaching out to liberals who are ashamed of their country. They hope to send two contradictory messages simultaneously by staging rousing, albeit phony military shows and encouraging anti-American political statements at those same games, I'm betting that oil and water won't mix, and that this isn't going to work. And if, as threatened, entire teams refuse to stand for the national anthem today, I can guarantee that it won't. By the end of the season, the NFL won't even be able to fill the Yale Bowl
UPDATE: It occurred to me that last week, a team was penalized 15-yards when a player taunted an opponent after scoring a touchdown. So the NFL won't allow its players to taunt one another, but is perfectly okay with those same players tasting America? Says it all, I suppose.
Other than better weather, what's the difference between Puerto Rico and CT?
/
To be fair, it does look like their roads are better maintained than ours
WSJ: Puerto Rico's Power Woes Are Decades in the Making
I can't find away around the Journal's cash wall (readers?) but here are some excerpts. Sure sounds like Connecticut, and actually, all 50 states.
Puerto Rico—As residents here grapple with power outages across the entire island, the task of turning the lights back on falls to an electrical utility beset by rickety infrastructure, workforce reductions and financial woes so deep it declared a form of bankruptcy in July.
The “damage is catastrophic,” Ricardo Ramos, chief executive of Prepa, said Friday on CNN. He said previously that it could take months for power to be restored across the island.
[In] May, the island declared what amounts to the largest-ever U.S. municipal bankruptcy.
Two months later, the federal board voted to place Prepa, which has $9 billion of debt, in bankruptcy as well. The move was aimed at helping advance plans to modernize the utility and turn it from a government-owned monopoly into a regulated private utility.
Prepa’s problems have been decades in the making. Early in its history, it earned praise for powering Puerto Rico’s industrialization efforts in the 1940s and 1950s. But over time, it became less efficient, energy analysts say.
Its generating plants, which rely on imported oil for about 60% of their energy production, are mostly obsolete and require major upgrades or outright replacement... Power outages on the island are common. A fire at one of the utility’s plants in September triggered a blackout across the island that left many customers without power for days.
Yet prices are high. In April, Prepa’s average electricity rate for customers was 20.1 cents per kilowatt-hour, down from 25 cents in 2013 but still close to double the average mainland U.S. rate of about 12 cents, according to Moody’s.
For years, Prepa enjoyed easy access to bond markets and borrowed regularly, accumulating enormous debt. Yet it failed to make important capital investments, such as transitioning to natural gas from oil to generate power, analysts say. Analysts say the money went to a bloated payroll, among other things.[emphasis added]
When the island sank into recession, Prepa’s finances suffered even more, as business and residential demand for power declined. The exodus of Puerto Ricans to the continental U.S. is shrinking the island’s population, depleting the utility’s customer base. And austerity measures that the utility implemented as it headed toward bankruptcy resulted in cuts to the workforce it now needs to make repairs.
“All these things have compounded, one on top of the other,” Mr. Soto-Class said. They “will severely limit the ability of Prepa to come back quickly.”
Another way of saying it would be, eliminating solar subsidies would save taxpayers $billions and billions
/
Bloomberg: Tariffs on Chinese solar panels will cost taxpayers (an extra) $1.23 billion.
The U.S. offers incentives to encourage people to use clean energy, paying owners of solar-power systems a tax credit equal to 30 percent of the total installation costs. More expensive panels leads to higher costs, and that means taxpayers could be on the hook for about $1.23 billion more, according to an estimate from Cowen & Co. analyst Jeffrey Osborne.
That's just the cost of stopping the Chinese from dumping solar panels. $1.23 billion over and above what taxpayers are already paying. I can't find the total cost, but if an extra tariff will cost $1.23 in subsidies, how much are we already paying? Must be a lot.
In Adam Smith's world, we should be grateful to Chinese citizens subsidizing our solar program, but we no longer live in that world; our own subsidies have destroyed it.
The original subsidy, by the way, was limited to 2% of the cost. Congress raised it to 30%, with no cap, and I wonder which manufacturers were behind that move.
Well here's one Invisible/Indivisible RTM candidate revealed: Elizabeth Perry, District 7. Forty-four candidates to go
/Curious that no other member of their group cares to be identified.
Elizabeth Perry, a member of March On Greenwich, is one of the people seeking a spot on RTM in District 7. She estimates about 45 members of the group are running, with many of them in Districts 5, 7 and 8. It is part of the group’s non-partisan effort to get people more involved in their local governments, she said.
Perry said she understood that some people might be leery of groups that are pushing for people to run for office since the RTM is designed to be a non-partisan body.
“I get that it’s a concern because we grew out of the women’s march that happened after the presidential election,” Perry said. “But we are not putting forth any kind of radical agenda. We’re not going to tell our members what to think or how to vote.
Perry belies her claim to non-partisanship by admitting that she and her 44 other friends are members of what's essentially one political party: Indivisible Greenwich and March on Greenwich. Personally, I'd be wary if 45 members of the Old Greenwich Yacht Club, or the Riverside Garden Club all decided to run as a group for the RTM: I'd suspect that they had a specific agenda in mind, an agenda focused on their own goals, and not the well being of the town as a whole. And I'm even more wary about a band of radical, left-wing Democrats barging into what was designed as, and has always been conducted as, a non-partisan group of citizens.
"We are not putting forth a radical agenda", Perry asserts, and she's partly correct — they are deliberately not disclosing it, but hiding an agenda and not having one are different. Checking the party's website, it's instantly clear that it does indeed have a radical agenda, one that's disclosed on its Partner Websites page. The groups Indivisible has partnered with include far-left Democrat organizations, with the identical partisan, leftist agenda espoused by Perry and her friends. She's being cute.
What's really going on here is that the town Democrats, driven to a frenzy by losing the national election and frustrated by town rules forbidding RTM candidates to run as members of a political party, have concocted a way around that by forming a party within a party, comprised solely of Democrats, and running as individual, "non-partisan" candidates. A hidden agenda and a secret membership tell us all we need to know about these Democratic operatives.
To be clear, we live in a democracy, and all of us should be free to band together and petition our government with our grievances. And "all of us" includes anti-Trumpsters. What's objectionable about these two lady liberal groups (that's not me being derogatory; they themselves say that their members are all female) is that they deny having any agenda — "who, us?" — and insist that they intend to act as non-partisan individuals. That's a crock, and if they won't admit it, someone should point out what they're actually up to.
And what are they up to? Here's Sandy Livtack, the husband of Greenwich Indivisible's funder, an octogenarian currently running for First Selectman at a Greenwich Indivisible rally:
We have candidates running for the RTM and BET. And if we can turn this town blue, we can deal with the entire quality of life.”
Greenwich Free Press finally hears about Drew Marzullo's difficulties
/
There she goes, your political career's sailing past the moon, and into the void
Publishes the local Democrat Party's public statement
We are saddened to learn of the charges against Selectman Drew Marzullo. No one on the Executive Committee of the Greenwich Democratic Town Committee had knowledge of the incident prior to learning about it from the press reports published Thursday night, September 21.
Regardless of Drew’s guilt or innocence in the alleged incident, the Executive Committee is disappointed that he did not communicate to any member of Executive Committee about this concerning situation.
The Executive Committee understands that Drew is taking the weekend to consider his options.
Meanwhile, over at Greenwich Time, there's the intriguing detail:
Marzullo is a former 20-year paramedic with the Greenwich Emergency Medical Service. It was confirmed Friday that Marzullo left GEMS late last year, but the circumstances of his departure remain unclear. His attorney Andrea Sisca, who is not representing Marzullo in the criminal case, confirmed he has not worked for GEMS since November 2016 but would not say whether he had been dismissed or left by choice.
So what happened there? Was he caught operating a chop shop for stolen ambulances in his garage, or is he having some personal problems? I've had a few clients over the years who did something completely aberrational, even, coincidentally, one incident of shoplifting, because of some sort of unrelated personal stress: divorce, illness of a spouse, etc. So I'm not judging the guy yet; this seems so out of character for the public person I know.
Well at least Drew didn't pleasure himself in an Uber — at least he didn't do THAT!
/
I DID?
New Orleans mayoral candidate arrested for masturbating in the back seat of an Uber car.
A Democratic candidate for mayor in New Orleans allegedly masturbated during an Uber ride in California earlier this year, authorities said.
A female driver allegedly caught Frank Scurlock, who has campaigned calling for a “safer” New Orleans, pleasuring himself on a trip to a West Hollywood hotel on Feb. 10, Santa Monica Chief Deputy City Attorney Terry White told The Advocate.
Charges in connection to the incident weren’t filed until Aug. 31 because of questions regarding jurisdiction in the case, White said.
Scurlock — known locally for his slogan to “Make New Orleans Fun Again” ....