Snowflakes in Hell

The Pittsburgh Penguins have become the latest sports franchise to hold the state of PA hostage so they wouldn’t have to get their own financing for a new arena. Today, Gov. Ed Rendell announced a deal that would keep the Penguins in Pittsburgh. The Penguins had threatened to leave to Kansas City, MO if they could not secure a new arena when their lease with the 40 year old Melon Center expires at the end of this hockey season. In this new deal, the Penguins will get help from PA slot parlor revenue.

A Pennsylvania law signed last year allowed for a certain number of slot parlors to be built in the state. A percentage of the revenue from the slot machines will go towards reducing property taxes. Another portion of the revenue is slated for other economic stimulus projects. However, there is absolutely no evidence that a stadium provides any sort of economic boost. In fact, studies have shown that, on average, they reduce workers’ incomes by $47 per year. Further more, a 2004 study showed that teams never need help in financing the stadiums. The stadium generate enough revenue to cover construction costs and more.

People can try to spin this, saying that it’s slot machine money and not taxes that will go towards financing the arena. I contend that with Pennsylvanians looking down the barrell of a 1% increase in the state sales tax and other ills such as our crumbling transportation infrastructure and our awful inner city crime rate, the slot machine revenue could be put to better use than helping to keep hockey, a second-rate sport, in Pittsburgh. I also contend that slot machines are just another tax, one that disproportionately affects the poor - you don’t see people with a lot of money habitually gambling at slot parlors.

Lastly, Mario Lemieux completely disrespected the people who paid money to watch him play for the Penguins during his career. The Penguins have some of the best attendance figures in hockey, and it’s a sham that he would even consider giving up standing room only crowds 17,000 strong to play rent free in front of 7,000 “fans”.

We’ve been having some spotty rain here in Jayton, TX. It hasn’t stopped the shooting activities though. Yesterday we were doing small bore shooting, and a little clay shooting. They have an old WW II era jeep that I got to drive around in the mud a good bit, and I had a giant shit eating grin on my face the whole time. I’m still getting used to driving a vehicle that has to be double clutched, but it’s a lot of fun. We went spotlighting for wildlife (just observing) in the jeep after dark. It was a lot of fun.

Check in later maybe.

Normally, I don’t like to go on “We wuz robbed!” rants about something silly like the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. But since Syracuse University basketball coach Jim Boeheim has gone on a two-day rant about how his team isn’t in the field of 64 this year, I think that I can take a few paragraphs to say this: Syracuse wasn’t robbed, Drexel was.

Drexel beat Syracuse. They also beat tournament invitees Villanova and Creighton. They beat major Philadelphia basketball programs at Temple and St. Joseph’s, too. They did all of this away from their home court, as no program of any significance is going to agree to play Drexel at the bingo hall that is the Daskalakis Athletic Center. Yes, Drexel does play in a middle-tier athletic conference, and their in-conference record was decent. However, small programs like Drexel have to schedule games on the road at big-time basketball powerhouses in order to make a case for an invite, and this year, they played great.

If there’s one thing that George Mason University showed us last year, it’s that middle-tier schools are worthy of getting invites to the tournament even if they don’t win their conference. Last year, teams from minor conferences got 8 of the 34 invites available. This year, they got six. The number of invites from minor conferences has gone down every year for the last 4 years. The NCAA Selection Committee is showing elitism and favoritism towards big schools at power conferences.

This is complete folly. There’s a reason why there’s a 13 seed upsetting a 4 seed every year: a good team from an OK conference is better than an OK team from a good conference. Do we really need to see Boston College lose to North Carolina again? No, let’s give a team like Drexel a chance to play UNC. I bet they’d at least make it interesting.

In the interest of disclosure, I am a Drexel alumnus.

If you’ve not heard of them, the Pink Pistols are a firearms advocacy group that also advocates gay rights. If you go to their website, the front page says “Armed Gays don’t get bashed” a phrase which makes me giggle incessantly whenever I see it.

I really like groups like the Pink Pistols, not just because they advocate for the 2nd Amendment, but because they give the radical lefties serious mental fits. They can’t comprehend how someone that “should” be “on their side” is advocating for a dirty “Republican” concept like RKBA. One of the biggest reasons that I like the Pink Pistols is because we need more groups like them. We need gun owners and 2nd Amendment advocates that don’t just break the media’s stereotype of gun owners, they smash it.

The biggest reason that I support the Pink Pistols (and any group that exposes the cognitive dissonance inherent in the radical left) is because they also display the deep seated hypocrisy in the “social progressive” movement. Think about this for just a minute: the marxists social progressives are constantly trying to “help the little guy” (generally with your money); however if they were successful in helping the poor not be poor, or minorities be treated equal, they would lose their mandate and by losing their mandate they would lose their power.

It is imperative to those in power (your Nancy Pelosi’s, Ted Kennedy’s, and Dianne Feinsteins) that the poor and disadvantaged remain poor and disadvantaged. Of course, they will make a big show of “helping” the little guy, but their help is little more than free handouts at the expense of the taxpayer - handouts that do nothing to actually help the poor and disadvantaged.

I sometimes feel that the Big Left has forgotten the simple proverb “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”