Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Allow me to share with you some of my “Atlas Shrugged” experiences of late.

In case you have yet to read “Atlas Shrugged,” the seminal magnum opus of Ayn Rand, it was written in 1957 but reads like current events, detailing governments and bureaucracy gone wild with over-regulation and ineptitude, punishing producers in order to reward those leaning on the oars.

It is a tale of despair, failing institutions and general malaise.

This brings me to my water bill. The good folks of the Greater Johnstown Water Authority make it their habit to have the bills issued with a short time to submit payment. By way of contrast, my Penelec bill, received last week, is not due until the middle of this month. But I’m mailing it out today.

My water bill payment was due today, Aug. 2. I received it July 26 and mailed out the check July 27.

Because of my experiences with the postal service – more on that later – and the GJWA, I became concerned when I looked at my checking account online today and the check had yet to be cashed.

A call to GJWA followed, with the recorded message that they were busy and I’ve have to wait for someone to answer. I waited for a time, then hung up and tried to check the website, but that was not all that helpful, either, so another call was placed. And the wait began.

Eventually, a woman answered and told me, in no particular order, that the post office had not delivered mail for an undefined period, then dumped a lot of mail on the GJWA and they were behind going through said mail. The staff is short-handed, she continued, but would be staying late and I should call back Tuesday because I had a grace period until Wednesday.

I presume I will need to add the water/sewer payment to my mounting list of bills either paid directly from my checking account or directly billed to my credit card, which is then automatically paid from my checking.

The reason for that, specifically regarding the credit card, is in the past I was having problems either receiving the bills through the mail in timely fashion, or having the billers receive my check through the mail in a timely manner.

As a person with a credit rating on the far side of 800, I pay my bills, unless mechanisms such as the postal service or the bill providers fail me.

Hopefully the GJWA payment situation is soon rectified.

I’m still hoping PennDOT can get its act together.

Previously I’ve written about the problems with a title transfer and antique plate transfer regarding a C4 Corvette I purchased – in early April!

We are at about the 5^th submission trying to get this rectified. Not all the problems have been with PennDOT, but that institution has more than held its own in terms of gumming up the works.

I submit to you some curious doings with PennDOT on other matters. I had two license plate registration renewals for other vehicles due at the same time (this month). I mailed them back, in separate envelopes and with separate checks, the very same day from the same mailbox.

One check was cashed rather quickly. The other check was cashed 10 days later.

Fortunately, I have gotten back both renewals, with a delay on that end, too.

Back on the matter of the Corvette, attempt No. 5 was priority mailed Tuesday. Pray for me.

The good news is that it’s a hobby car, not necessary for day-to-day transportation, so I pay to insure it and have it stored and collect dust while waiting to have the technicalities of ownership completed.

Is it too much to ask GJWA to mail out bills earlier?

Is it too much to ask the postal service to deliver mail reliably and in timely fashion?

Is it too much to ask PennDOT to get its act together?

Not that long ago, these would have been givens. These days, not so much.

Likely you have similar stories from your personal experiences with services we used to be able to take for granted would be handled speedily and correctly.

It is very likely things only will worsen from here. Spoiler alert: Rand’s book anticipates a lot more pain for the masses – and she’s been eerily correct so far.

Don’t you feel secure that there is a stalk of broccoli occupying The Oval Office as the nation and the world devolve into chaos?

Yes, I know Clueless Joe is but a figurative head of state. But many people don’t realize that. They are oblivious to the puppeteers pulling the strings, from DR. JILL BIDEN!!!!, to the Obamas, to Susan Rice and any other number of people actually calling the shots.

But the bad guys in other nations do know that Clueless Joe is but a neutered figurehead, unlikely to take any bold action as his leftist party tries to usher the Cackling Hyena into Joe’s vacated post.

If you are inclined to do bad things, as they are, now is the time.

Just in recent days I’ve read that Ukraine is losing ground fast to the Russians and begging bowl Zelenskyy is out looking for more handouts that can be lost in the transition. Billions of dollars of aid cannot be tracked and now our Pentagon is floating the tall tale that it has overestimated the value of aid to Ukraine by $6-plus billion over the past two years. And that means we have even more financial room to send lots more aid!

Right.

We have a bit of a problem in the Middle East, where Iran-backed terrorists blow up kids on an Israeli soccer field and the Israelis take out a Hamas head while he’s vacationing in Iran as retribution. Got to hand it to the Israelis, they don’t lack a backbone and they have a leader still able to find his way off a stage, or climb a pair of airplane steps, or not fall off a bicycle, or, or, or.

That terrorist attack on the kids was neatly ignored by the world. But the Israeli retaliation, well, that brought public reproach on a massive scale.

Oil and gold spiked upward Wednesday on the Middle East developments, but Biden mouthpiece Karine Gay Par-ee, said Joe is on top of this and conflict will not be allowed to expand on the Clueless One’s watch. Note to Gay-Par-ee, too late!

Notably, Putin didn’t invade foreign lands, Middle Eastern terrorists were not mounting major attacks on Israel or regional shipping, North Korea’s Kim I Am FaTTT was well-behaved and China was not circling Taiwan when Donald Trump was president,

With Trump gone and Clueless Joe in charge, all that has changed. If Cackling Kamala can be slipped into power, expect more of the same.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the FBI once again is being outed as an organization headed by partisan hacks. The Secret Service shows a similar face.

There’s been one assassination attempt on Trump and experts say to expect even more as the weaponized FBI and Secret Service do their bit to get Kamala into office.

No problem, though, the FBI will be delving into the Secret Service failures. That would be the same FBI that was quick to put out that the would-be assassin was some right-wing nut based on an unconfirmed social media presence, but chose to ignore a similarly unproven social media presence that indicated the pimply faced shooter was a left-wing nut who supported Biden.

Trump vows to hold another outdoor rally in Butler. Hey, Donald, spend a few bucks and hire your own security for that one.

But at least the Olympics provide a break from all this.

What? The Opening Ceremony was turned into an extravaganza of Christian-bashing, gay celebrating, fat-promoting, sexually explicit garbage?

Glad I skipped that, just as I have skipped the entire Olympics coverage. The combination of pro athletes long having been welcomed to this one-time amateur event, and the rampant politicization of the Olympic charter, which supposedly bans politicization of events, but looks the other way when said politicization has a hard-left lean, combine to make it must-miss TV for me.

Readers, if you sleep well at night confident that all is well, you are deluding yourself. I hope you wake up before it’s too late.

It seems I was premature in bidding adieu to the stench that had permeated the area over the past several days.

Although I can stand on my porch and detect nothing that unusual in terms of smells, I have been a told a person passing through Hollsopple today (Wednesday) found the stink so revolting she had to roll up the windows in her vehicle.

The unpleasant smell apparently was evident elsewhere in that area.

On the other hand, my brother said the air is good in downtown Johnstown today, at least it is eight floors above street level.

Yesterday, however, he said the smell was so strong as to prompt searches for its source.

Because nature abhors a vacuum, even when it’s merely a lack of information, I’ve been told no shortage of amateur analysts have taken to social media with theories to explain the unpleasant smell.

Among the suspects cited are farmers mixing manure with water to be used as fertilizer because it’s been dry here of late. Doubtful.

Others cite a school allegedly watering a football field with a manure mixture and it running off into a nearby river, neatly ignoring the unlikely nature of the first supposition, and the geographic reality of no river close enough to get such runoff.

State officials are claimed to have floated manure-baited traps on rivers to deal with an abundance of pest flies.

Perhaps a plane of uncertain government sponsorship is trying to poison us?

And so it goes.

I’m just rooting for it to continue long enough to attract national attention and perhaps land the area a segment on History’s Greatest Mysteries.

Critics of our fair Greater Johnstown area often refer to a stench about the place, in a figurative sense.

They speak of crime, political corruption, the powerbrokers operating from bases in nonprofits, rampant poverty and the like.

But, in recent days, there was a stench of a different sort, an unpleasant aroma that permeated the area.

Various media reports detail people calling 911, and being told to reserve such calls for mischief, like the fights at the Ferndale Jubilee. More on that later.

The other day, I noticed the unpleasant smell myself, which has been described as manure-like. I found it to be not unlike the stench that greets one driving past the Dornick Point Sewage Treatment Plant along Cramer Pike on a warm summer evening. But officials contacted by the media regarding various treatment facilities pleaded innocence

No, I didn’t call 911 for an explanation.

Media reports indicate the smell was wide-ranging, with confirmed stink in Davidsville, Richland, East Taylor Township and elsewhere.

Only because the media accounts tended to agree will I accept their version without dispute. I say this because the local NBC affiliate’s noon report, which my wife had on in the background as I wrote this, had the news reader talking about Senator Bob Mendez resigning due to corruption.

The accompanying chyron at the bottom of the screen also had “Bob Mendez.” Memo to the station, it’s Bob MENENDEZ!

The Altoona CBS affiliate had its announcer pronounce the name correctly, but also had the incorrect “Mendez” spelling on its chyron.

Beyond the media, an unpaid correspondent of mine told me his tale of leaving a Somerset County facility and proceeding home through Jerome, Davidsville, Hollsopple and onward to the lofty perch along Ridge Road between Hollsopple and Hooversville where he lives, expecting to meet aromatic relief there. Alas, he did not.

All the way, he was accompanied by the stench, prompting him to take measures such as looking in the bed of his pickup truck for an unwanted passenger, and then moving to examining the soles of his shoes to check for having stepped in something.

Another person had contacted him about the stink being present in Bon Air. As an aside, I always got a laugh in my childhood about the community of Bon Air (Good Air) being located above the belching blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel, located down the road in Franklin. It’s all relative, I guess.

It seems the Johnstown Stench (what a nickname for our next minor league sports team!) has dissipated, leaving behind a trail of unanswered questions. Those include will it repeat as does The Hum, a low-frequency noise heard periodically ’round the world?

If only it were that easy to rid the area of the other stench that afflicts us. In this case, we speak specifically of crime.

Ferndale’s Jubilee has been a summer highpoint since I was a child and even well before, this having been the 93^rd example. Despite a time when it nearly had its lamp extinguished due to lack of volunteer workers and the like, the event continues.

But the stench of crime was rife this year at Ferndale’s signature event.

Media reports indicate one man has been arrested for passing counterfeit $50 bills, said man reportedly having heroin and additional funny money on him when arrested.

My son, wife and two granddaughters hit the Jubilee at mid-week, spending legitimate cash. I’d thought about us returning Saturday for the fireworks, but life intrudes.

Subsequent events, such as fights and arrests Saturday at the Ferndale event, make me grateful for having stayed home.

To sum up, the unpleasant manure smell seems to have passed. Our figurative stenches remain with us.

Don’t shed a tear for resigned Secret Service head Kim Cheatle. The Woke crowd will find her another Diversity, Equity and Inclusion position.

It actually is DEI (DIE as some critics call it) that was on trial here as much as Cheatle.

The Secret Service, you might have read, is in the midst of a 30 by 30 push, as in 30 percent of recruits to be female by the year 2030.

What better punctuation to that effort than to have a woman running it all?

I have no problem with that on the face of it. Being a traditionalist, I’m married to a woman. I have three granddaughters. I don’t think limits should be placed on their abilities to succeed due to them being females.

But here’s where I differ from the Woke crowd. I also don’t want to see women, or various other protected groups in the Woke ideology, ramrodded into positions for which they are not qualified just because it fills imagined quotas.

That brings us back to Cheatle, who went from protecting displays of Cheetos and two-liter soda bottles for PepsiCo, to ostensibly protecting prominent politicians and their families for the Secret Service.

Cheatle might have been great with snacks and beverages, but has been less than great at her most recent job.

In the wake of the near-assassinaton of Donald Trump, Cheatle went into hiding, emerging for a brief TV interview a day later to admit the buck stopped with her regarding the failure in Butler, Pa. It’s the second part Cheatle missed, that being that she should resign since the organization she headed had failed so miserably.

But Cheatle, perhaps expecting all the never-wrong Woke types would ride to her rescue, tried to hang on despite mounting examples of misinformation.

Her explanations were wild, including the rooftop from the which the sniper struck was too sloped to risk agents atop it. This flew in the face of video of snipers at the same event on a roof that seemed to have more of a slope.

I’m bad at working on heights, but looking at that roof used by the assassin — it was low and slightly sloped — I’m certain I’d have no problem functioning on it. One elderly member of Congress stood atop the roof just the other day mocking Cheatle’s explanation.

Cheatle and her operatives tried to pass the buck to local law enforcement.

They denied, then had to admit, that the Trump effort had requested greater Secret Service resources but had been refused.

Cheatle tried more stonewalling before Congress Monday, having no answers to obvious questions and prompting bipartisan outrage, including calls from both Republicans and Democrats that she resign.

Now that Clueless Joe Biden is on his way out, taking the power behind the throne from DR. JILL BIDEN !!!! (a huge Cheatle supporter by the way) Cheatle finally saw the light.

Maybe those same Democrat puppeteers who made Biden an offer to get out that he couldn’t refuse, did the same with Cheatle.

They might have said, your management style is questionable and your inability to answer basic questions about failures is a concern, but what bothers us the most is you will be linked to fellow Democrats and hurt us in the election this fall.

It is not overly cynical to theorize that Cheatle got the nudge to fall on her sword for reasons of cleaning up yet another political mess for the Democrats.

But, regardless of the why, what is important here is that the correct result was achieved — she’s gone.

Now we await with bated breath what sort of Woke replacement will be offered up to succeed Cheatle.

The party that screams from the rooftops about preserving Democracy just pulled a coup d’etat on a sitting president.

That same president, who had won the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for a second term, fell victim to a concerted assault from high-profile party members, a mutiny by donors and God knows what sort of threats offered up to him behind the scenes.

Clueless Joe Biden succumbed to the pressure Sunday, announcing he is dropping out of the race and endorsing his cackling hyena vice president, Kamala Harris, as his replacement atop the ticket.

The immediate question is if Biden is unable, for reasons of mental and physical frailty, to continue a run for re-election, should he not resign from the office of president immediately?

Does Harris, who was stapled to the Biden ticket the last time as a token woman of color, long on ticking boxes in the identity politics game but short on accomplishments, really have the stuff to be president?

Where were all these concerned Democrats the past three years or so, when it was clear Biden was not sharp mentally?

Do they really expect us to believe they just realized it when he presented yet another bumbling public performance in his debate with Donald Trump?

No, only when poll after poll indicated Biden was dead in the water, did the Democrats look to switch horses in the race.

To repeat, they did it in banana republic fashion. They undermined Biden, using their lapdog media as surrogates. They pushed him behind the scenes to get out and when the stubborn man refused, they made sure their urgings went public.

It must have been interesting in the Biden household of late, when wife DR. JILL BIDEN !!!! could be expected to have been screaming at doddering Joe to stay in the race and maintain her Marie Antoinette experience as the power behind the throne.

Failed Biden son Hunter could have been expected to be right there with his step mommy, knowing that if Joe goes, so do those questionable advisory jobs. And who is there to stand between Hunter and the cell door?

This, arguably, is the most sensible decision Clueless Joe has made in some time.

Democrat partisans, who election after election show themselves to be mindless cult followers voting for any candidate with a D associated with their name on the ballot, will fall in line behind Harris or whomever.

But the whole thing is amusing, particularly as evidenced by happenings in my ‘hood.

A Biden-Harris campaign sign showed up on a lawn up the block maybe two weeks back, and had disappeared by last week. Were they inside feverishly trying to white-out Biden knowing this was coming?

Meanwhile, at the other end of the block, a bevy of campaign signs, including some for Biden-Harris, had sprung up recently, front lawn and rear fence. As I write this at 2:48 p.m. Sunday, that Biden-Harris sign remains.

Maybe they have yet to hear the word.

There will be many procedural and legal hurdles for the Democrats to overcome as they shunt Biden unceremoniously to the sidelines. But make no mistake, any and all objections will be overcome.

When you go to the polls to vote this November, have a come-to-Jesus moment and recognize the Democratic Party for what it is, a cynical operation with no moral compass, just an insatiable urge to maintain power and exercise it indiscriminately against enemies, real or imagined.

The democratic hyenas are coming hard for Clueless Joe Biden, with a seemingly endless barrage of leaks detailing party leaders advising Joe that he must go.

I might have a measure of respect for these political opportunists if they were saying that Joe isn’t up to the job and so should resign. But, no, they merely are concerned he can’t win this fall’s election.

Give them credit for unintended candor. By highlighting the mounting odds Biden can’t win this election, even with their proven vote enhancement techniques as their reasons, they are all but confessing that they knew this was a hollow husk of a man even as they ran him for president the first time and didn’t really care.

Biden was useful in pulling together a party of raging demagogues and he really wasn’t going to be running things in the final analysis. That would be left to the behind-the-scenes puppeteers of Obama and company.

If this charade could have continued into a second term, so be it. But Biden, who won the first time by hiding in his bunker, has been forced into the public eye by his office. Time after time, Biden came up short in displaying cognitive function, not to mention the ability to sit on a bike, climb steps or walk across a stage without plummeting to the ground.

The seemingly endless succession of mental and physical pratfalls were explained away by Biden’s Democratic allies and the sympathetic lapdog media.

Then the Biden regime made a major mistake and allowed him onstage for a live televised debate with Donald Trump. There stood Biden, without prescreened questions, an earpiece to feed him answers, or a teleprompter to read, stripped naked for the world to see his dysfunction.

Fallout from that debate debacle has continued, even mounting as Biden since has butchered facts such as introducing Zelenskyy as Putin, or referring to Trump as his vice president.

All of this would have been fine had the polls not indicated Biden was oozing toward a loss, perhaps even of landslide proportions as reported by usually sympathetic CNN.

I’m not stunned and by way of proof I offer the following, from my 8-22-21 blog posting when Biden was being allowed to make a public fool of himself trying to explain the botched Afghanistan pullout

Here is what I wrote then: When the time is right, Biden’s handlers will leak some damning story to the media, or provide video of him sitting under his desk sucking his thumb, or reveal some Hunter Biden baggage that can’t be explained away.

Or maybe it will be something else, like Biden taking himself out of the picture, citing physical and/or mental problems. But if Biden doesn’t take advantage of that possible out, make no mistake he is being walked to the gallows and one or more of his former allies have their hands on the lever that will open the trapdoor.

All that’s left to be determined is the timing.

OK, so that’s what I wrote then. Admittedly, I was early and in investing the saying is being early is being wrong.

But I stand by what I’ve written. It’s unfolding as I was confident it would.

Biden has cemented his place as one of the worst, least-effective presidents in U.S. history.

Now, the very same Democrats who have their hands all over the lie of Biden’s election, are scrambling to find another stooge to use as cover for their operations. Most suspect that will be Kamala Harris, the walking embodiment of the Peter principle.

Will Americans be smart enough to see through this and refuse to buy into another Democratic con job? I’m not optimistic that they will, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.

Political expediency of the moment has promoted bipartisan talk of turning down the thermostat on political rhetoric. Expect this to be a short-lived phenomenon.

Joe Biden, who ran for the presidency on promises of uniting the nation, kept showing up on TV in the wake of the Donald Trump assassination attempt, blaming/chastising those responsible for inflamed rhetoric. He could have just looked in the mirror and scolded himself while shaving, presuming he’s still trusted with sharp objects.

In a rare televised address from the Oval Office Sunday night, Biden expanded on the theme, a talk sprinkled with his customary gaffes.

Perhaps they were Freudian slips when Biden referred to Trump as the “former” Trump. Later, Biden twice deplored violence and said political issues must be decided at the “battle box.”

Biden speaking of a figurative thermostat brought back of memories of then-president Jimmy Carter donning a cardigan sweater for a televised address in 1974 to implore the citizens to turn down their heating thermostats to 65 degrees to deal with an energy crisis. That didn’t really work, either.

Mostly Biden tried to say the right things. But what he didn’t say was telling. Biden could have admitted that he and his re-election campaign, with the aid of too many prominent Democrats and left-wing media lapdogs, have been at the forefront of vilifying Trump as Hitler, a threat to democracy, a convicted criminal, a rapist, a liar and other assorted hyperbolic terms. Just the other day Biden had screamed for donors/supporters to put Trump in the “bullseye.”

Biden might have said something like this Sunday night: “In the past I have been guilty of rhetorical excesses, as has my campaign. I can’t speak for all others, but I hereby promise to refrain in the future from such over-the-top accusations and I further promise that anyone in my re-election effort will be fired if they do not follow my directive.

Instead, Biden spoke in vague, general terms Sunday without naming names, including his own. It typified the inability to lead that has been Biden’s calling card in public office.

While a seeming majority, on both sides of the political spectrum, seemed to realize this was a time for reserved comment, a notable segment could not contain themselves.

Potential Trump VP candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, took to social media after the shooting to blame inflamed rhetoric from Biden and his surrogates for prompting the assassination attempt. It was too soon for that.

But what Vance said pales in comparison with the ravings of a now ex-staffer of Bennie Thompson, a Democrat Congressman from Mississippi.

Said staffer rushed to social media and lamented the Trump shooter’s poor aim and suggested shooting lessons for future assassins. She had more to say, including asking if it was all staged and victim shaming Trump by suggesting he brought it upon himself with his “hate speech.”

Wonder if she thinks rape victims “asked for it” by dressing provocatively?

According to no less a source than leftist CNN, rival left-wing cable news channel MSNBC opted not to air its Morning Joe show Monday morning. Unnamed sources cited by CNN said the network was afraid of what “inappropriate” comments might be aired.

So, MSNBC has hosts and guests of a major show it cannot trust to exercise common sense? Makes you wonder why the show is aired at all.

There are reports that the Republican National Convention, which runs this week in Milwaukee, will be a kinder, gentler thing, led by Trump toning down his acceptance speech.

It would be the smart thing for him and Republicans, considering they now hold the moral high ground.

But I’m sure there will be regressions in coming weeks, by Republicans and desperate Democrats, the latter of whom see this election slipping into the reaches where even dramatic “help” in generating and counting votes won’t be able to change the outcome.

High-temperature political rhetoric is not dead, but merely taking a short summer vacation.

A tip of the hat is in order to a former employer of mine – not the Johnstown Daily Bugle, but the Tribune-Review – for coming up with background on Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old Bethel Park man authorities have identified as the shooter of Donald Trump Saturday.

In a story by Ryan Deto that you can find by going to triblive.com, Crooks is identified as a registered Republican, which I’d read in other stories posted elsewhere. Seemed odd to me.

But Deto has much more. The Republican bit seems to be for show, sort of like those widely used snapshots you see of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald posing beforehand with a newspaper and the gun that ostensibly was used to assassinate Kennedy.

Deto balances the disgruntled Republican narrative by reporting that as a 17-year-old Crooks, despite being too young to vote, was donating to a leftist group that seeks to increase Democratic voter turnout. According to the story, that donation was made the very day Joe Biden was sworn into office.

This is quite the contradiction from a registered Republican.

Deto goes on to note the stereotypical observations from those who knew Crooks – quiet kid, never thought he’d do something like this.

Near the end of the story, Deto reports that both parents are social workers, the mother a registered Democrat and the father a Libertarian.

This is the sort of specific background I’ve read nowhere else and I commend Deto for committing an act of journalism and answering questions being asked by many.

The phone rang just after 6:30 p.m. Saturday. It was a call from my brother wondering if I was watching TV.

I was, but merely some simplistic pap on the History Channel to kill time waiting for a baseball broadcast to start.

“I think they just shot Trump,” he said.

And so began a surreal evening.

I immediately switched to Fox News Channel coverage, being treated to the sort of scramble to cover live, unscripted events that makes even the network pros look all too human.

Yes, Trump had been shot at a campaign event in Butler. No, it didn’t look to be life-threatening.

Hours later, several thoughts had congealed in this admittedly partisan brain.

1. As I anticipated, social media reaction was the sick stew one expects with some posters saying Trump had staged the whole thing. Yes, his campaign is going so well, and Joe Biden is imploding at such a rapid rate, the natural thing would be to stage a false flag assassination attempt that is inches from success just to take the spotlight off imploding Joe.

2. Even before Trump’s son posted similar thoughts on social media, I told my wife and son Trump is one tough SOB. Shortly after having his ear seemingly creased by a rifle bullet, Trump was pumping his fist to the crowd as he was ushered off the stage and yelling for them to fight. The crowd began an impromptu chant of “U-S-A.” An iconic photo, shot from a low angle, showed Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, blood streaked on his ear and right cheek, pumping his fist against the backdrop of a giant American Flag suspended over him by two cranes. It was akin to the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photo from World War II.

3. In recent days and weeks I have watched several cable television shows regarding assassinations, ranging from Lincoln, to John and Robert Kennedy. It struck me that this attempt raises a lot of familiar questions. Some witnesses insisted there were two or more shooters from different directions. The supposed sole shooter, now dead, somehow was able to position himself on a nearby roof despite Secret Service anti-snipers deployed on nearby roofs to prevent such. And the BBC had an interview with a guy who insisted he saw the man before the shooting started, tried to alert authorities, and was ignored.

4. It made me gag a bit to have statements pour in from prominent politicians on the far left, the very same ones who label Trump as a latter-day Hitler, a threat to democracy, a Putin puppet, a rapist and more, saying how shocked they are and how their sympathies are with Trump. We have yet to learn who the shooter was (not enough time has passed to sanitize any political footprint) but it’s safe to postulate it was a crazed leftist, arguably inflamed by the over-the-top rhetoric that passes for political disagreement these days.

5. Trump is one very lucky human being. My son picked up on it immediately. After a few hours, it was noted continually on the Fox coverage, that had Trump not turned his head slightly before the shot, looking first at a large overhead screen and then away, we’d likely be lamenting a successful assassination.

6. It was pathetically naive to suggest, as guest after guest, or successive media representatives did, that this event would prompt a ratcheting down of that heated political rhetoric.

7. Wonder if the Secret Service now will grant Robert F. Kennedy’s request for protection as a third-party candidate for president?

8. Wonder if the head of the Secret Service now will approve requested upgrades for manpower to protect Trump, which previously have been denied?

9. Let’s hope there is some transparency regarding the investigations into this incident.

I’m happy that Trump escaped this assassination attempt. I am sad that innocent rally attendees were either killed or injured seriously.

It now is time to answer a lot of questions about how this could happen.