Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Mid-term elections loom six weeks or so in our future – hell, some states already are voting – and I’m not optimistic that the Democrat socialist horde will be held at bay and the nation saved for a few years.

Standing diametrically opposed to me were a couple of guests on Larry Kudlow’s Monday show on Fox Business.

That would be former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and foreign policy guru Michael Pillsbury.

First, let us consider the thoughts of Gingrich, admittedly a biased Republican. But Gingrich brings well-thought rationale for his optimism regarding his party’s chances to hold Congress in these mid-term elections.

Gingrich points to the reality that polls tend to understate Republican voters. You think the same people who twist the news to fit their agenda are above massaging poll results in a psy-op to discourage Republican voters?

Case in point, Iowa pollster Ann Selzer dropped a poll just before the last general election showing Cackling Kamala up by three points on Donald. J. Trump in that state. Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13 percentage points and Selzer chose to retire once she had been exposed as being a highly inaccurate, if not outright partisan.

Gingrich’s main point was a faith that the Republicans will win the philosophical argument against tearing down this nation and rebuilding it in the failed image of Cuba, Russia, China, et al.

Yes, Gingrich conceded, gripes are being heard about gasoline prices, the Iran conflict, failure to pass the Save American Act, etc. But, his view is in the final analysis, voters will not express displeasure at the polls at the risk of ushering in radical leftists, extreme Islamists, and generally weird Democrats, and thereby handing them control of the House of Representatives, if not the Senate, too.

I wish I had Gingrich’s faith that what seems to be an abundance of short-sighted, egocentric voters will do the right thing. Alas, I do not. But, I hope – fervently – that he is right and I am wrong.

By way of my argument, just look at the freaks protesting in favor of multiple child-killer Lindsay Clancy, or getting the vapors over data centers and AI, the last being our most recent “existential” threat. Remember global cooling, global warming, general climate change, Russiagate, COVID-19, MAGA Nazis, Palestine genocide, etc., as former manufactured crises the Democrats hoped would sweep them to electoral success on the shoulders of ignorant voters, too lazy to look beyond the hype.

Why do they keep doing this? Because, obviously, it works with the weak-minded, and there are many of those among us.

Pillsbury also is a Republican, but one who has served in advisory roles to both Republicans and Democrats.

Pillsbury recently spoke at a Beijing function and offered Kudlow’s viewers this bon mot from his China visit: The Chinese powerbrokers think Republicans will hold both the Senate and the House.

Considering what shrewd observers the Chinese are of American politics, this raised an eyebrow.

A post that popped up on citizenfreepress.com Tuesday, linking to a social media offering, cited a New York Times/Cook Political Report Senate rating showing seven tossup Senate races, plus three others leaning Democrat and two leaning Republican.

You might recall Trump went 7-for-7 in tossup swing states in the last election. I’d settle for 5-of-7 this time.

That same source has the Republicans ahead 208-206 in its House projections, with 21 tossups.

President Trump has vowed to campaign as if he were on the ticket. And, in reality, he is due to Democrats vowing to impeach him and hamstring his agenda if they take back the House.

Donors are lining up behind Republicans, with the notable exception of Ken Paxton in Texas. But, as the Beatles once sang and divorced parents learn daily, money can’t buy me love.

In six weeks, or in the case of California, six months or so, we should know how this all turned out.

Again, I can only hope and pray that Gingrich and Pillsbury are proved right.

It was a dreary Sunday weatherwise, matched by the current states of the Pirates and the Steelers.

Even as the Pirates continued to play out the string with meaningless wins over bad competition, having been eliminated even from specious wild-card contention a day earlier, the Steelers were looking quite bad in absorbing a 20-3 pounding at New England.

That the Pirates again are sitting out postseason play is nothing new. The Pirates have played on past the regular season only three times since 1992. Their current run of postseason absences now stands at 11 consecutive years, despite atypical boasts by management before the season that this would end in 2026.

Once again, wait until next year!

This is a horrendous franchise, content to operate an open-air food court with breathtaking views of the city and reap in revenue sharing from Major League Baseball. That is the lone category in which the Pirates can lead the league.

Yippeee.

We saw this coming months back, even when the optimistic sorts were squinting their eyes hard and seeing a wild-card berth for the Pirates.

As usual, the Pirates just weren’t good enough and it’s not only the cheapness of the ownership. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay, to name a few, consistently compete despite small-market status and modest payrolls. You just need good baseball people making the decisions.

It can be done, but apparently not by the Pirates.

By way of faint praise, at least the Pirates aren’t stinking while paying their players a king’s ransom payroll in the $360-million range, as the New York Mets are.

Just the other day I saw three of those highly paid players, representing about $1.3 billion in contracted salaries, fail to catch a pop up in short left field. Instead, they surrounded the ball, then looked blankly at each other as though there was a dinner check to be paid.

Then there are the Steelers. I didn’t bother to watch, anticipating the outcome would not be good. After all, the Steelers were playing the New England Patriots, one of the few good opponents on their typically putrid schedule.

Even as the Steelers were flailing around hopelessly today, the Atlanta Falcons team the Steelers had struggled to subdue in their opener last weekend was being disemboweled, 34-3, by a mediocre Carolina team.

Ancient mariner Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers apparently should spend less time mouthing off on podcasts about his political views, and more time studying opposing defenses.

Rodgers, who will turn 43 years of age in early December, looked not a day over 143 in coughing up the ball repeatedly and generally presiding over an inept unit that has managed one offensive touchdown in two games.

The network postgame types were flaming Rodgers and the offense in general. All except former Steelers coach Bill Cowher, who was preaching patience.

Someone the age of Rodgers doesn’t have the time for us to be patient.

It was somehow ironic that the Steelers were flattened by the Patriots, whose Gillette Stadium home was privately financed and built.

That is unlike the Steelers, and most other pro sports teams, who are owned by billionaires and have mostly millionaire players, yet still extort new playpens from the taxpayers by threatening to go elsewhere.

The Steelers and Pirates did that with their current facilities and the Steelers are talking about the need for a replacement, already. Didn’t they just open the joint in 2001?

Asking taxpayers to pay for a new stadium, then sticking it to them with excessive ticket prices and license fees to purchase said tickets, seems to be a bit much.

That is especially true when the product is subpar. Your beloved Steelers have not won a playoff game since the 2016 postseason.

At least the Penguins 2026-27 season is upon us.

Oh, wait, the Penguins ended a three-year playoff absence last season, but still have not won a playoff series since 2018.

Never mind.

Later today, Fed chairman Kevin Warsh(mallow) will pontificate on interest rates. He’s expected to decree a 25 basis point increase in those rates as an offering to the inflation gods.

I’ve bought some puts on my silver position to cushion the anticipated blow.

This rate-increase talk comes despite rational arguments that raising interest rates will have zero impact on high oil prices, the main cause of persistent inflation.

It is yet another example of optics vs. reality, and that leads us to an installment of News and Views.

NEWS: Leftists are gobsmacked that the lone holdout juror refusing to give admitted child-killer Lindsay Clancy a free pass at her trial was a black man.

VIEWS: TV talking head Gayle King typified the angst. Informed by another juror that the lone holdout was, indeed, a black man, a stunned King blurted out, “Whoa, I have to sit with that for a second.” You may remember King as one of the women who spent a second or so in space with the likes of Katy Perry, and who just a few months back felt compelled to announce on a podcast that she and Oprah Winfrey are not a lesbian couple, despite years of speculation to that effect. Like many of her ilk, King would have preferred the holdout juror had been a white man, giving the screaming left carte blanche to howl away. Reality once again is a female dog.

NEWS: AI has been identified by hyperventilating Democrats as the latest existential threat to humanity.

VIEWS: When are those in the child-like public going to get wise to these never-ending doses of hyperbole? Perhaps you recall prominent Democrats like Al Gore predicting we’d all be underwater from melting polar ice since, oh, 2006, or merely burning up from global warming. They also were not above employing a foreign child with her mental woes and Prince Valiant haircut to preach climate doom. Along the way, COVID-19 was going to do us in, President Trump was going to get us into World War III, and now AI and data centers are going to deliver a digital one-two punch sure to wipe humans from the face of this blue marble. It’s a convenient mid-term election ploy designed to divert attention from the slate of full-out crazies, from raging Muslims to gender-uncertain types, that Democrats are running for national office. Pocahontas Warren, as usual, is on the warpath as part of this latest political ruse. These people have become caricatures of themselves, yet the porky, blue-haired, overly-pierced members of their flock keep on drinking the Kool-Aid.

NEWS: Republican U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace has called for the public execution of Clancy.

VIEWS: Mace is no stranger to speaking her mind, from preferring not to use the women’s restroom facilities in the U.S. Capitol with a man in drag, to discussing her intimate relations with a mate during a prayer breakfast, Mace operates with little or no filter. Were she a raging leftist, this would be fine with LameStream media. But, since Mace aligns with conservatives, it’s an outrage. I just wish Mace, upon images and videos of many of the other Clancy jurors having been released, would have noted these “women” look like aging construction workers, or late-night help at a greasy spoon diner.

NEWS: The Pirates once again will miss Major League Baseball’s postseason and the Steelers once again have one of the easiest schedules in the NFL.

VIEWS: As predicted here long ago, even as the Pirates were making a run at a wild-card playoff berth, this season will end once again with the Pirates absent from the postseason. What amazes me is that some of my former Pittsburgh sports colleagues just a week ago were breathlessly outlining on a YouTube podcast what the Pirates needed to do to make that playoff field. It’s not over mathematically for the Pirates, but the fangraphs site has their chances at zero percent. Meanwhile, the Steelers opened regular-season play by getting past a mediocre Atlanta team further handicapped by playing without its starting quarterback. Various sites differ on the outright ease of the Steelers’ schedule, but most agree it’s in the bottom half of the NFL in terms of strength and perhaps as low as the eighth easiest in the league. This sort of thing produces winning records, but, as evidenced by the Steelers having failed to get past the first playoff round in the past decade, is more mirage than legitimate contention for a title.

The flood of 25-year remembrances of our 9/11 terror attacks on this date in 2001 prompts a trip down memory lane.

On that historic day, I was headed to Pittsburgh for a Steelers press conference, oblivious to it all. Part of my routine on the drives to such events was to tune out the world, listen to some music via a CD, and generally get my mind cleared for the day’s work.

My first indication things were not normal came on the Parkway East, where I encountered rush-hour like traffic leaving the city, in the mid-morning.

It got worse the farther I drove. Only upon reaching the Steelers’ Southside practice facility did I learn of the horror. We stood in the lobby, watching television, stunned by it all.

There would be no press conference, no sports stories to write on that day.

Now, a quarter of a century later, and in view of what transpired then, it’s hard to believe what is happening in this country.

No matter how many attempts are made to sugarcoat the attacks, they were done by Muslims. It is not Islamophobia to note that.

Yet, in entire countries in Europe, and increasingly even here, we are enabling radical Islam’s attempts to take over our countries and culture by tolerating their intolerance, installing them in positions of influence, and generally being useful idiots in aiding their cause.

We have a growing number of citizens (and presumably non-citizens) here openly rooting that the radical Muslims who lead Iran will triumph vs. the United States and, more specifically, President Trump.

Meanwhile, the Democrat Party has gone on a political Jihad, attempting to destroy this nation with an assortment of candidates who want to do away with Congress, pack the Supreme Court with their sycophants, render the Constitution irrelevant and go all-in for fringe causes from illegal immigration to sexual confusion.

Their influence is evident in our schools, which produce increasingly moronic students as measured by standardized testing in math and reading. Those scores are plummeting like a gay thrown off a high building in some Muslim country.

Ask the typical public school student about 9-11 and you likely will get a blank stare, followed by a comment like “Duh, that’s today, right?”

Our once-proud legal system has been compromised. On the federal level, it has been infiltrated by political activists who see it as their duty to stand in the way of the agenda of a duly elected president.

Only when it gets to the Supreme Court, are these activists often, but not always, overruled.

On the local level, we have a flood of killers lionized by protesters and gifted with small fortunes in online fund-raising campaigns.

Meanwhile, the streets are packed with protesters, often white Karen types. And we are reminded of the line from George Orwell’s classic book on totalitarianism, “1984.”

Wrote Orwell: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies . . .”

That is the state of our nation and the world 25 years after the 9/11 attacks. Make no mistake, those who would see western civilization destroyed are winning, slowly but surely.

No doubt you awoke Thursday morning to the sound of Democrat heads exploding over Donald Trump’s mid-term convention speech in Dallas last night, most notably regarding that promise of a $5,000 dividend to each American adult if the Republicans hold the Senate and House.

I stayed up and watched the entire 1 hour, 40-plus minute speech so you didn’t need to do so. I also watched the post speech analysis, although just on Fox.

Make no mistake, Fox long ago ceased being a Republican echo chamber and the usual suspects were questioning the Trump promise of a victory dividend, putting the cost at $1.3 trillion, give or take.

I’d been struggling to come up with a figure myself as the speech unfolded. A quick internet search produced an estimate of 260 million adults 18 years of age or older in these United States. Multiply that by $5,000 and you’re talking a lot of money, something like that $1.3 trillion figure.

Where would we get it? Just keep borrowing, of course. We are, after all, currently $40 trillion and counting in debt without even adding shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare funding to that indebtedness number.

Economics 101 tells us that such an influx of purchasing power – $5,000 per adult — without the ability of the market to produce commensurately more goods in the short run, would cause prices to increase. Worse, the prices would stay up even after all that money has passed through the economy.

Economically, I’m not fan of Trump’s $5,000 proposal. Politically, it might have been a master stroke.

Regardless, I don’t want to hear hypocritical Democrats decrying it as buying votes. Trump is just playing their game.

Recall Mamdani the Commie winning as New York City mayor by promising free stuff, from bus rides, to subsidized housing and food. Also recall him failing to deliver on the grand giveaway offers. But he was elected, so it worked.

Democrat presidential and congressional hopefuls are crisscrossing the country trying to “buy” votes with promises of taxing the rich to provide free college, free health care, universal basic income and other giveaways financed on the backs of the productive.

I’ve seen reports that local, state and federal governments routinely spend numbers like $5,000 a week, or a month, to provide food, lodging and healthcare on each of the illegals flocking to sanctuary cities.

A copilot AI search came up with estimates of between $4.9 and $12 billion having been spent by New York City alone on migrants between 2023 and 2025. Those numbers are likely skyrocketing.

You think all the Somali scamsters haven’t raided Minnesota’s public coffers for substantial coin?

Buying votes is Democrat history.

In 2020, aspiring Democrat presidential candidate Andrew Yang had a campaign plank of giving $1,000 a month to each adult. That’s $12,000 a year, year after year after year, not a $5,000 one-time payment. And it wasn’t enough to get Yang the nomination. Presumably, he was just early.

Way back in my youth, George McGovern (yes, a Democrat) was tossing around the idea during his campaign of paying $1,000 per person, not $1,000 per adult. As a poverty-stricken high school student, it sounded like a stroke of genius to me.

McGovern seemed fixated on 1,000. When it was revealed that his VP pick, Thomas Eagleton, had been hospitalized multiple times for depression and endured electroshock treatments several times, McGovern famously proclaimed he was 1,000 percent behind Eagleton, shortly before dumping him for would-be Kennedy Sargent Shriver.

Because 1972 voters were largely rational types, Richard Nixon won an electoral landslide, 520-17. McGovern carried just Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., insanely leftist precincts even back then.

Democrats, the party that welcomes illegals, criminals, the sexually confused, grifters and socialists into it’s so-called “big tent,” should lose just as hugely in the 2026 mid-terms. But they won’t.

Republicans are facing an uphill battle to defy mid-term election history that shows the ruling party losing ground as surely as Democrats try to buy votes.

Trump’s job last night was to attempt to convince Republicans to vote like their lives depend on it. The fact that he threw out that $5,000 trial balloon is an indication of how pivotal this election looms if this nation is to stem its lurch toward lawlessness and socialism.

Happy birthday to me. Today marks 71 years on this planet, a mixed blessing.

I’ve exceeded life expectancy for most males on either side of my family. I’ve helped raise a family, done a lot in my work life, earned enough money to retire early, and generally enjoy good health — both me and my extended family.

There are, however, downsides to being aged. My brother reminded me of one negative earlier this afternoon when he called to wish me a happy birthday. I regaled him with my latest tale of questionable customer service.

Brother Clair pointed out, correctly, that we’ve been around long enough to remember when this sort of thing was unacceptable. Businesses bent over backwards to please customers. They were courteous to a fault and made things right when they failed.

It occurred to me, as my brother talked, that younger generations cannot recall such a time. Their life experience is so-so customer service and they are happy when it isn’t outright terrible.

Alas, I am not satisfied when businesses drop the ball. Today was just the latest example.

By way of background, my son, upon exchanging my Kia back to me after I’d gotten the oil changed and driven him home, where my wife’s car that he’d borrowed was trapped in a garage with an electric opener and no electricity, noted a screw plunged into the tread of the Kia’s driver front tire.

This revelation came just before 6 p.m. Friday, the day after the huge storm and on the cusp of a Labor Day holiday weekend.

Our family timing was impeccable, as usual.

I rushed to the Westwood Monro Tire and was greeted by a disturbing scene of an employee chatting with someone in the lone car in the parking lot. I got out and he joked about me perhaps having called their customer service and been told to come right over, no waiting. It’s an inside joke based on more poor customer service history.

This time, he could not help me for many reasons, most of all the facility having no power and, besides, they don’t put plugs in tires, preferring to sell you a new one.

The tire still was holding air, so I drove home and planted the vehicle to await opening of businesses Tuesday.

My lengthy to-do list for today (I can’t afford to take a day off from demands, even if it is my birthday) began with calling about tires. I had done preliminary online research over the weekend and was going to default to the long-time local business less than a mile from my house.

I called at 9:40 a.m. and got a message that all were busy, but to leave my name and number and they’d get back to me. I am writing this sentence at 3:09 p.m. and still no call back.

It was time to move to Plan B, so I scoured other web sites and got distressing price news, all high. Then I called Walmart because they had listed online a Goodyear tire in my car’s size (235 65 17), at a lower than low price.

I got no answer on the Walmart auto area direct number, but a woman finally broke in to ask what department I wanted. She said something encouraging like “I will try to see if someone will pick up.”

The phone rang, and rang, and rang some more. I was on the call for nearly three minutes, determined to wait them out, when the call was aborted.

So, I pulled the cover off the orange Mustang GT and drove up to Walmart, passing the other tire place along the way and, yes, they were open, just apparently not returning calls to long-time customers.

The in-person experience at Walmart was much better. I was waited on as I walked into the place, they had the tires in stock and an appointment was made for noon Wednesday to install them on my Kia.

Supposedly the whole thing will take an hour or so and the wife will accompany me to do some shopping while we wait.

Hopefully things will go swimmingly Wednesday. But I am not counting on that happening. I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.

I’m just back home at 12:30-ish a.m., the climax of a late Sunday evening/very early Monday morning stroll, during which I listened to the first half of a podcast featuring a kooky guy named Clif High.

I’ve been aware of High for years. His shtick is his computer program that monitors the internet for word usage and using said program to make predictions.

They are weird predictions with a capital W. Clif is often wrong, but never in doubt. And, he possesses the short memory so vital to defensive backs. Burned beyond recognition on a pass play? Forget it and line up for the next snap.

So it is that Clif doesn’t let past failures get in the way of making more predictions, often insanely wild ones.

Clif claims to have somehow recovered from colon cancer, but dying first for an hour and half before being cured. It’s a repetitive thing with him — drowning at 9 ½ years of age, succumbing to “bad drugs” at 16 ½ – each “death” lasting for about an hour and a half.

Just for the sake of getting this on the record, Clif now is predicting Republicans will triumph in the mid-term elections and will hold Congress. Also, more of interest to me, he sees a silver isotope 107 becoming insanely valuable in the next year or so as it is revealed as the means to connect humans to devices. Think machines with no obvious control apparatus, merely getting input from a human’s mind as translated to said machine using silver 107 as the interface.

True woo-woo stuff.

This reminds me of many a late night spent driving home from covering far-flung sports events and listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM radio show. Bell was big into UFOs, the paranormal, and conspiracy theories.

It was mindless stuff that passed the time and kept me awake.

And it occurs to me that High, and perhaps the deceased Bell, would agree with leftist Wokesters proclaiming math is racist.

In a world overrun with rationalization, blurring of reality and generally subjugating the objective to the subjective, there is room for Bell, High and those like them to let imaginations run unfettered.

When we start actually counting the beans, that wiggle room disappears.

That harsh reality gives leftists a vested interest in keeping the conversation limited to feelings and concepts, not to mention justifying means of rigging elections and fraudulently exploiting of federal aid programs, and never being about cold, hard facts, like math.

This is how the left can’t define what exactly a woman is, but still justifies a woman murdering her children in cold blood as a medical problem. It’s not that different than characterizing abortion as child care and gender-bending as healthcare.

But, with math and 2 plus 2 always equaling four, at least when using the traditional base-10 system, such rationalizations are invalid.

I finished listening to the High podcast as I wrote this post, and it doesn’t get any easier to swallow.

We will know in a few months if the political prediction was spot-on. I have my doubts. I’m not rushing out to buy a Ferrari based on his silver prediction just yet, either.

But, a final thought on math is racist.

Your beloved Pittsburgh Pirates are alive mathematically for a spot in Major League’s Baseball postseason, but barely. The good folks at fangraphs.com give them a 1.2 percent chance of making it.

If leftists ran baseball, the Pirates might get points for stylish uniforms, or minority representation on the roster, or having annual Gay Pride nights at PNC Park.

Maybe the majority of the players vote Democrat, worship at the feet of George Soros and AOC, or are Bernie Bros. socialists – rich, but wanting only the even richer punished with higher taxes. All these things would help the Pirates playoff chances if we were leaving math out of the picture.

They might argue the math of their situation is crushing their dreams and conclude math is racist.

Here is some of that math. The Pirates have scored three runs – total – in the past three games, yet won two of them against the Los Angeles Angels, the team with the absolute worst record in MLB.

The Pirates have gone 6-4 in their last 10 games, yet remain five games out of the third and final wild-card slot in the National League. Worse, there are four teams between them and that spot.

Doubly worse, just 18 games remain in the regular season. If the Pirates win 60 percent of those games – only Milwaukee and the Los Angeles Dodgers have won at a 60 percent or above rate for this season – that’s roughly 11 wins.

Arizona or San Diego could stay head of the Pirates winning only 7 games each. Others currently ahead of the Pirates could remain there with fewer than 11 wins, and it’s a stretch to project the Pirates to win 11 times.

That’s the mathematical reality of the situation and it’s a female dog. For the self-identified perennial victims of society, or Major League Baseball, the temptation is great to decry the harsh, cruel math of it all, rather than look into the mirror.

But that’s pure delusion.

No sooner have the barricades surrounding Johnstown’s Central Park disappeared and I see our elite masters are looking to compile a “Master Plan” for Stackhouse Park.

Lord save us.

I will admit to not yet having trod the abundant pavement of New Central Park. I have seen photos and videos indicating that, as feared, there is a whole lot more concrete, a lot less grass and shade, not to mention fewer seating opportunities and a lot less bucolic splendor and charm than the old place offered.

All that new landscaping is unlikely to survive the next use of the park as a host for the Woke fringe celebration of the moment. The Wokesters tend to be pigs in terms of the garbage they leave behind, and they don’t respect property. Grass survived them better than this stuff will.

As for that new gazebo/shelter, it looks like someone got a deal on one of those ubiquitous metal carports that have popped up through the area – better than nothing, but not exactly a garage for one’s cherished vehicle.

If this is progress, I hate it.

The official opening is weeks away, yet already the elites are engaging in orgies of self-congratulation for taking leftover millions of dollars in the federal begging bowl, and redistributing it to a few friends under the guise of progress. What, should we have just given back the money? Surely, you jest.

The usual vague talk of economic gain, the same sort of stuff that attributes $20 million of impact any time two vendors and some organization set up an event in our town, has been heard.

If business owners are anticipating increased business, they might want to break out their calculators and come up with an estimate of how much revenue they lost in the year or so this park upgrade (a misnomer in my view) was being completed.

I see a WTAJ-TV report on the place features Afghan Amy prominently. You could almost hear her mind whirring over how many Afghan refugees could be housed in the new gazebo.

Afghan Amy expressed excitement and claimed others are just as excited.

For those counting on this to revitalize downtown Johnstown, be prepared to be considerably less than excited.

But new frontiers await, like the chance to pave Stackhouse Park and turn that gem into yet another bad dream filed under the heading of new and improved, sort of like New Coke.

Scanning through the survey, it is the usual mishmash of questions. Your answers will be considered as long as you agree with the vision of the elites. It happened with Central Park and will just keep on happening. It’s a Johnstown thing.

Sprinkled throughout the survey are reminders that money is needed. Think of it as the pledge breaks that I presume still dominate public television. I can’t be sure because I stopped watching years ago when PBS became somewhere to the left of Joseph Stalin in its content.

My suggestion is to rush out to Stackhouse Park and enjoy it before the elites reshape it with their warped, self-interested visions.

The good news is there is no way they can afford to concrete over the whole 277-plus acre park. Even the Feds aren’t stupid enough to give them money to do that.

Does it amuse anyone else to see crazed leftists, Canadians and others who could be described by C-words go bat shit crazy every time President Trump, AKA “The Great Needler,” changes the name of something?

Most recently, he has rechristened Lake Ontario as Lake America and Canadians, among others, are predictably outraged.

Never mind that the Canucks’ Woke rulers have spent the past decades renaming Canadian streets and various areas of the country to avoid possibly offending anyone. Never mind resultant confusion with things such as mail delivery. I know this because it was posted on a junior mining web site I frequent and I looked it up to confirm.

As the Lili Von Shtupp (Madeline Kahn) character screamed in Blazing Saddles, It’s true, it’s true. Or more like it’s twue, it’s twue.

This sort of s – – – (stuff) didn’t begin with Trump. Recall Peking now is Beijing, Bombay now is Mumbai, Constantinople is now Istanbul, Saigon is Ho Chi Minh City, etc., etc., etc.

No one worried about those changes. Wonder why?

Trump already has substituted Gulf of America for Gulf of Mexico. To paraphrase Shakespeare, what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Funny, too, how the raging leftists applauded Mount McKinley being renamed Denali. Cape Canaveral went to Cape Kennedy and back to Cape Canaveral, all without mass protests in the streets or in social media.

Selective outrage, that is the core principle of the radical leftists.

They rage, threaten and generally make asses of themselves as they commit philosophical Twister trying to defend or decry diametrically opposed ideas based solely on which side of the political spectrum proposed them.

Trump renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America is vintage button pushing by the guy who is better at this than most. He knows the thin-skinned Canadians, whose national GDP is about 50 percent less than California’s, will be in a maple syrup lather over it all.

Talk about a terminal inferiority complex, they name is Canada.

This is what makes them, and raging leftists in general, such easy targets.

Poke them and the unhinged response arrives in nanoseconds. I’d love to play poker with these buffoons.

Come to think of it, Trump already is and, to borrow one of his pet phrases, he’d got all the cards.

For years I have viewed the Greater Johnstown housing market as inexplicably strong and, at last, I have found a real estate professional who agrees with me.

Our interaction was prompted by a listing for a house in Upper Yoder Township, said listing having appeared on Realtor.com early Thursday, and subsequently having prompted a rush of viewings and even offers within a 12-hour span, and that now has a deadline set for 8 p.m. today to make “highest and best” offers on the property.

The professional, whom we shall call Miguel in an homage to the Spanish-speaking crew that’s spent the past two days re-roofing a home up the block, was extremely candid.

Miguel (again, not his real name) told me that there had been great interest in the home already. This I anticipated. I was attracted by garage space for three cars (I have six vehicles total), the very large lot meaning neighbors were not stacked on top of you, and the possibility for one-floor living because the wife and I no longer are kids eager to race up and down stairs 20-30 times a day.

All this at a listing price of $149,900, in a school district that is yet to punt on teaching the kids, meant there would be interest.

But, as I noted to Miguel, I cannot fully appreciate the demand in view of the facts, those facts being that our area is declining in population, is aged and that almost guarantees future decline, not to mention more houses coming on the market as those elderly owners either die or downsize to apartments or personal care homes and their relatives are not interested in taking over the family homes because they have relocated elsewhere, in search of niceties such as jobs and opportunity.

What I would consider the most crushing reality is that the median income hereabouts is low, often ranking worst in the state. While one can overspend on coffee and other such minor luxuries, it’s hard to pay too much for a house unless one has the cash. Banks want some margin of error in property value before loaning you money.

So, after I had given Miguel my spiel, his succinct response was: “I agree with you.” He, too, has been thinking this for years.

Yet, here we were, on a partly cloudy day in late August, anticipating that a listed property was going to incite a bidding war, something I made clear to him I was not interested in joining considering my jaded view of the market strength long-term.

Again, he agreed. It was arranged to take a look at the property at 5:30 p.m. Friday. This all took place at around 4-ish Thursday. Although he could see no evidence of any offers having been made, he said he would keep me up to date.

The first offer was quick in coming, at the asking price but with an escalator provision to increase that as much as $25,000 above asking. Later that night, he texted of two more offers.

I still was interested in viewing the place, just to see if it was something I could not live without. But, I joked in one text response that, in view of the rapidly increasing price, we’d bring along pans to check for gold in the basement which, as noted in the seller disclosure, was reported to be damp after heavy rains.

Soon, the proviso was shared that the deadline for offers had been set for 8 p.m. Friday.

Around noon Friday, I got a call from Miguel, that I missed. Upon calling him back, I was informed of even more frantic offers flying, including one for cash and requiring no inspections.

His thinking, with which I agreed, was my interest had evaporated. By 8 p.m., someone might be offering $400,000 and their first-born child to the owners in order to close the deal.

I told Miguel I had some more questions, in view of the fact I planned to do a blog post on this whole phenomenon. He had no problem providing answers.

As of the time of our conversation, he was aware of 14 viewings and three offers made. He said he estimated such interest crops up on about 2 of every 10 properties listed in this area.

I asked if the listing price had been set low to encourage this sort of frenzy. Not exactly, was his response. A figure $15,000 higher had been discussed but, in view of some quirks of the house, such as a “non-traditional” layout, smallish kitchen and bedrooms, plus the owners’ urge to sell quickly, the lower listing price was used.

Now, both figures have been surpassed in a flash.

Conclusion: Our area housing market is in the midst of a frenzy, which is great if you’re selling and not-so-great if you are buying. Just remember, this, too, shall pass.