Over the next few weeks, as its commentators drone on about Yankee spending, the true Evil Empire will have a hand in your pocket

With ex-teammates Nomar and Pedro, Curt Schilling these days does his smart-mouthing for the anti-Yankee Al Jazeera - ESPN - the nation's broadcasting sports pimp, which has banked $260 million in tax breaks over the last 12 years, according to the Gray Lady. 

But that's just the start.

In America, every cable TV subscriber - a good hundred million of them - pays $5.54 a month for ESPN, regardless of whether he or she watches one lick of sports. Can you imagine that? It's the sweetest, under-the-radar tax ever invented. It's home burglary, via your cable hook-up, and not even the Tea Party complains. It's worse than Obamacare in a bad month, except that you can't see it - there is no public accountability. It's "capitalism," they say, in the sense that extortion is a free-market business. It also makes money by selling beer to 10 year-old intellects, and then it uses the proceeds to grease America's most corrupt and meat-grinding industry: College sports.

ESPN is the main reason why practically every college football program with a winning record is playing this week in some trumped-up, ridiculously named bowl game in some city desperate to justify the building of those concrete dog-dishes that they call stadiums. Thirty three of the 35 bowl games are being broadcast on ESPN - each one generating boatloads of money for their schools to spend on new facilities, hiring more ex-jocks as hangers-on, and to hand out $100 handshakes to high school athletes, while everybody else - from teachers to social workers and university presidents - wonders what the hell has gone wrong with a nation's priorities?

Yes... sit back over the next few weeks, while the Greek chorus of ex-Redsock players rip the Yankees for excessive spending, for employing A-Rod, for - yes - taking our own tax breaks, for our lousy pitching, for Hal's money, for Chad Curtis' arrest, for John Sterling's homerism - hell with this - just for sake of being toast-worthy. And they call us the Evil Empire? Sure, I get it. Pass the meatloaf.