Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Beware stories that seek to quantify the economic benefit to an area of hosting an event. Too often they overstate the dollar amounts.

We speak of this because today’s Johnstown Woke Tribune headlines on Page A1 the “$2M windfall” to be realized by the area because Johnstown is hosting a kids wrestling tournament over the weekend.

Sounds good and it is good, but this good?

The story refers to an estimated 800 wrestlers who, combined with their families, will provide the “windfall.” Even without enlisting the aid of my son the math teacher, I divided $2 million by 800 and came up with $2,500 per family.

The number seems high to me.

For reference, the mayor of Glendale, Ariz., told ESPN that his city LOST $1 million hosting the Super Bowl in 2008.

Since then, the topic of economic windfalls from hosting Super Bowls, certainly the most high-profile event in domestic sports, has come under fire with economists debating just how much economic benefit is provided once costs of hosting are deducted and the NFL’s cut is factored into the calculations.

There also is what I will call the Orange Bowl factor to be considered regarding hosting events. Back in the early 1980s, when Florida State was becoming a national power in football, and when bowl games were not all aligned with conferences, the Orange Bowl people felt pressured to invite Florida State, and did for both the 1980 and 1981 games.

There is a famous anonymous quote from one of those Orange Bowl types, noting that the average Florida State fan arrives wearing a pair of jeans with a $5 bill in a pocket, and doesn’t change either during the time spent in Miami.

Translation: They weren’t big spenders from far away, jetting in to enjoy the sunshine and entertain themselves, price be damned.

I will guess that many of these Johnstown tournament wrestlers and their families who have descended upon the city are not from all that far away and so may just drive in each day, watching costs all the time. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re projecting $2,500 a family in economic benefit.

An accompanying story in the paper’s sports section today seems to bear out the local wrestler angle. It refers to 11 wrestlers from Bishop McCort Catholic in Johnstown. There’s even a quote about wrestlers being able to sleep in their own beds between days of the competition.

The story goes on to detail names of more than 70 other area participants from Cambria, Bedford, Indiana, Westmoreland and Somerset counties.

There likely are even more from nearby counties such as Clearfield, Centre and Fayette, all of whom might forego hotels, presumably the largest part of that $2,500 per family calculus.

I further will presume that many who do stay overnight are not looking to take rooms at high-end hotels and might be eating more fast food than partaking of fine, sitdown dining. Maybe they are subsisting on snack bar food at what I continue to call the Cambria County War Memorial Arena.

Some events attempting to determine economic impact actually survey participants before and after to determine spending. Was this done in the case of this wrestling tournament? If so, it was not mentioned in the story, which just sort of threw in that $2 million economic impact as having been “estimated” by the local tourism people.

Attributing a number to a source is a familiar journalistic method that presumably absolves the writer of blame should the information prove to be incorrect and also negates the need to research the calculation oneself.

Was this estimate based on the tourism peoples’ questioning of participants, or not? It is not clear.

A lot of this stuff is derived by formula, the kind of thing that gives us seasonal adjustments of more than 400,000 jobs in periodic government estimates, often to be walked back at a later date.

One of the basics of economic impact estimation is to factor in money velocity. The $10 I spend at a local restaurant, gets spent again to pay utilities, rent, or vendors to restock the food larder. That $10 gets respent again and again and if you count the same money at each turnover, a small total multiplies quickly into a large one.

If this the case with this “windfall” amount? Who knows? Details are lacking.

To sum up: I’m glad the lights are on at the War Memorial this weekend and paying customers are in town for an event.

But I’d love to be educated on how that adds up to a $2 million “windfall” for “Johnstown and the wider Cambria County region.”

Johnstown’s ongoing decades of fiscal and political turmoil prompt the theory that it all might be intentional, a latter day example of life imitating art, specifically the 1959 satirical movie “The Mouse That Roared.”

In the movie, a fictional country is bankrupted when the U.S. comes up with a cheaper version of that country’s chief export, a fine wine.

One clever political figure in this fictional land, seeing how generous the United States is with defeated enemies, devises a plan of declaring war on America, then surrendering and reaping the benefits. They even mount a mild invasion of the U.S., but to avoid being a plot spoiler, let us just say all does not go according to plan.

Johnstown’s twist on the theme seems to be not to declare war on the U.S. but rather war on itself. Keep things bad economically, in a flux politically, and make them much worse in terms of crime, and it follows that both federal and state funds should flow into the city.

Faced with an industrial-based economy that suffered a mortal blow in the 1970s, it appears Johnstown decided to go into life on the dole. The city seal should have been converted to a pair of outstretched palms against a backdrop of begging bowls.

Johnstown is “distressed” literally and figuratively; has been for state purposes for more than four decades.

The city also has been a ward of the federal government, using a variety of funding from that source to course through the economic veins and arteries to maintain a degree of animation.

Throughout the years, I dare venture that millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on organizations set up to bring jobs to the area, with little if any net gain.

What has been gained is the number of operations set up as nonprofits, not-for-profits, charities, foundations and the like.

Grants, gifts, contracts awarded largely for purposes of public relations, all can bring money into those operations, to be redistributed to the often politically connected.

As for crime, taking full advantage of available public housing vouchers to import residents who seem more likely to show up on the crime roles than the locals, furthers the we-need-help image.

It spills over into the main school district, which seeks more money based on its economically and behaviorally troubled student population.

Nearby Franklin Borough might appear to have messed up, leaving the state’s Act 47 distressed list in January after a relatively short stay as these things go. Altoona also spent some time as distressed, but exited after about five years.

Johnstown is scheduled to end its four-decades run on Act 47 in coming months, but that won’t affect the inflow of federal funds to a downtrodden community.

The suggestion that Johnstown is a mouse that roared could be lumped into the conspiracy theory category, a common label tossed around to discredit.

Donald Trump saying he and his political operation were being spied upon by domestic governmental organizations was dismissed as conspiracy theory. But they were being subjected to spying. He said the FBI lied. It did.

Conservatives said they were being prosecuted by the IRS. They were.

Similarly, conservatives alleged outright censorship on social media. Again, they have been proved correct, largely by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Critics of COVID response, both the unwillingness to disclose origins and government aid to lab research, plus the over-reach of governmental measures to combat it, were panned as conspiracy theorists. But they’ve been proven largely correct.

UFO enthusiasts have been alleging government coverup after coverup. The eventual release of some fighter jet cockpit videos, as well as forced release of some formerly classified documents, have confirmed more than just a bit of that coverup.

And so, Johnstown as a mouse that roared may or may not be the case. But the theory could explain a lot.

Quick hits as we march into March.

• There is hope for Chicago, as evidenced by Lori “Lightweight” Lightfoot becoming the first incumbent mayor there to lose a re-election bid since 1983. Lightfoot finished THIRD in the runoff race. Chicagoans were voting against crime in the streets and general stagnation. Johnstown, take note.

• LIV, the Saudi-funded alternative to the PGA, drew about one-tenth the television viewership of the PGA in its first golf event of the season. For perspective, LIV was outdrawn in the ratings by an edition of cable TV’s “World’s Funniest Animals.”

• For those singing the song that Ukraine is winning the war that it is fighting with Russia as a proxy for the U.S. and the rest of NATO, understand that a former U.S. Marine fighting alongside the Ukraine army reports that the average Ukraine soldier reporting to the front lines at Bakhmut survives four hours, give or take. Time to call out celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz for another Vogue cover shoot of Zelenskyy and wife as a distraction.

• The U.S. Department of Transportation is about to have its internal watchdog examine the private plane usage of Secretary Pete Butt (whatever) while in office. Reportedly, the former Mayor Pete had at least 18 trips on private jets at taxpayers expense from the time he took office through mid-December of last year. No wonder he’s never around to do his job, like dealing directly with the train wreck in Ohio.

• For those of you keeping score at home regarding COVID mania: Various government agencies have been forced to concede the virus likely escaped from a Chinese lab, there was gain-of-function research going on there perhaps partially funded by the U.S., natural immunity from being infected by COVID is superior to anything obtained via vaccine. Oh, and masks are relatively useless. Stay tuned.

• The Biden regime can’t protect our borders, can’t respond in timely fashion to domestic disasters, can’t do much of anything well, but the department of energy is proposing efficiency standards for gas stoves that would rule out about one-half of current products on the market. They are coming for your stove to appease the environmentalist zealot branch of the Democrat (Socialist) Party. But keep Pete flying around on those private jets at government expense.

• If the economy and consumer are resilient and strong, as trumpeted by the Biden regime and its favorite economic advisers, why are large bankruptcy filings (more than $50 million in claims) coming at the highest rate since 2009? Why are house prices falling and credit card debt climbing to all-time highs? Why are so many of those job openings being trumpeted by Biden lackeys part-time, low-paying, seasonal, or some combination of the three?

• Elon Musk, who has turned Twitter into a more fair space for non-Woke opinions during his ownership, is rumored to be taking on the artificial intelligence offerings of others, that have displayed a clear left-wing, Woke agenda in their early interactions with the public. What people constantly forget when computers are involved is that some human set up the programming, the parameters, and thereby can skew the computer’s results just like poor parents can raise dysfunctional kids who turn into dysfunctional adults.

We’re done, for now.

Johnstown is not alone in facing rising crime rates and increased gun violence. It is instructive to look at the issues with an open mind.

For example, the default position of the anti-gun types around the United States is to seize on gun violence as an opportunity and excuse to disarm legal gun owners, despite protections specified in the Constitution.

These anti-gun types love to cite statistics, but selectively. For example, go to gunviolencearchive.org and you will see 6,703 gun deaths in the United States so far in 2023.

That’s the kind of number you will see quoted by the “guns bad” types. But if you take the time to delve deeper on the site, you will find that 3,828 of those gun deaths were suicides.

Repeat, a tick over 57 percent of the gun deaths were self-inflicted, not random violence by some gun-wielding thug. If you took away all legal rights to own guns, there still would be illegal guns a person contemplating suicide likely could acquire.

Even without guns, someone intent on committing suicide will find a way. As my late, terribly politically incorrect father used to observe: There is no such thing as attempted suicide. Either you want to do it, or you want attention.

Regardless, I personally know of people who have killed themselves using wet blankets and an electrical cord, or by jumping off a high bridge. It’s not pretty, but it is the reality.

For them, and others like them, it’s no guns, no problem. They’ll get it done.

Pills, ropes for hanging, jumping in front of moving vehicles, bodies of water for non-swimmers, knives, all are suicide alternatives to guns.

This is more a mental health issue than a gun issue and increasingly mental health advocates don’t seem to see the need for strong intervention regarding those with serious mental issues.

When you are more into protecting so-called rights than demanding responsibility, this sort of thing happens.

The mentally ill also often are on the trigger-pulling end of a gun when innocents are killed or hurt. Again, it’s a breakdown of our mental health and legal system that disarming the law-abiding citizenry won’t fix.

More thoughts on gun deaths: Some are legitimate use of deadly force by law enforcement. Some are accidental shootings. All of these ameliorate the harshness of the total.

Also, consider that in 2021 (statistics tend to lag in timeliness) 42,915 people in the U.S. died as a result of motor vehicle accidents. That’s drivers, passengers and pedestrians. Yet the default solution is not to ban cars, trucks or motorcycles.

Another story I saw recently dealt with Omaha, Neb., halving gun violence.

That’s been accomplished through police and community interaction under the name Omaha 360, with regular meetings to address current problems and head off future incidents.

Nowhere in the story was disarming the law-abiding populace cited as contributing to the decline.

If we want to get serious about reducing crime, there also is the time-tested solution – prisons.

The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world in 2015. Fast-forward to today and that rate is down 97 percent.

This was accomplished because President Nayib Bukele built big prisons and put criminals in them, without quick paroles.

Just last week, Bukele posted a video of 2,000 or so gang members being rounded up and put behind bars. In the post, Bukele noted this is “where they will live for decades, mixed up, unable to do any more harm to the population.”

Our liberals in charge never would tolerate long-term incarceration for criminals, or confinement for the dangerously mentally ill. They’d rather trample the rights of the law-abiding instead under the guise of addressing the problem.

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Kyle Busch, my favorite NASCAR driver, took a record-setting win today and I couldn’t even be bothered to watch the race. Such is my distaste for the Woke mess that is NASCAR.

It must really grate on NASCAR’s higher-ups that the outspoken Busch, clearly not one of their favorites, won in California Sunday and in so doing claimed the all-time title of at least one win in 19 consecutive seasons of Cup racing.

Maybe you’ve heard of the guy whose record of 18 consecutive seasons with a Cup win Busch surpassed. That would be Richard Petty, The King!

I’ve had the great fortune to meet and speak with Petty on several occasions while covering NASCAR’s preseason media events in Charlotte, or a handful of NASCAR races. Petty is the real deal, an all-time talent with a down-home approach, and he’s secure enough with his legacy that he isn’t drinking NASCAR’s Woke Kool-Aid.

Asked a few years back if Danica Patrick, then NASCAR’s diversity cover girl, could win a race, Petty told reporters “(only) if everybody else stayed home.” Petty doubled down saying that if Patrick was a male, no one would even take notice of her.

For the record, Patrick retired and despite all the hypes and hopes, never did win a Cup race, going 0-for-191 in seven Cup seasons.

Contrast that to Busch, who has won two season championships and 61 races. Yet he rarely shows up in NASCAR promos. Prominent these days is Bubba Wallace, he of the two career wins. But he’s black and that’s what NASCAR is pushing.

The NASCAR guys similarly did metaphorical backflips when Mexican driver Daniel Suarez won a road race last year. That’s one win in 221 starts and counting.

Wallace has two wins in 185 races started.

The whole presentation of NASCAR Cup races is long on Woke messaging and short on traditional racing, which isn’t playing well with the fan base.

TV ratings for the flagship Daytona 500 race earlier this month were down, making it the third least-watched Daytona 500 ever in terms of television. I passed on it, completing my trifecta of ignoring the Super Bowl, the State of The Union Address and the Daytona 500, all formerly must-see TV for me.

NASCAR rules changes have turned Daytona into a luckfest. The latest evidence is this year’s winner, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. It was just his third career Cup win and snapped a winless streak for him that had spanned 199 races over a period of 2,060 days.

It was like the Cleveland Browns lucking into winning the Super Bowl.

Although there is unclear reporting of general NASCAR attendance, I can tell you the two races at Bristol used to have waiting lists to buy tickets and now are run before acres of empty seats.

But back to Busch. He’s running for a new team this year, Richard Childress Racing (RCR). Kyle got a less-than-wholehearted effort to re-sign him by his former employer Joe Gibbs Racing. That would be the team headed by the former Hall of Fame NFL coach, that prays publicly in pit lane after events and has been caught cheating more than a time or two.

But Gibbs has a dominant team and RCR has been something less. RCR hasn’t won a Cup title since 1994 and during Busch’s career has won 20 fewer races than Busch has by himself.

To see Busch win so quickly at RCR is further testament to his talent and shoves it right back in the faces of the Gibbs gang.

Busch may not win another race this season – NASCAR would like that – but just for today he is enjoying a moment in the sun that all the social justice warrior pandering can’t take away.

The town’s daily newspaper put forth its annual ode to the local economy today, which, to say it metaphorically, is like trying to put a spit shine on a turd. But give them points for trying.

This effort goes under the banner of “Vision 2023,” which might be a Freudian homage to the elitist Vision (Myopia) 2025 effort with which the newspaper has had something of an incestuous relationship in recent years, not limited to the former newspaper publisher moving on to a paying role with the Myopia folks.

This business/industry roundup had been the “Industrial” edition when I first worked at the newspaper in the mid-1970s and somewhere along the line had become “Progress.” Maybe there have been other labels along the way before “Vision,” but I cannot recall them.

The execution of this Vision edition was poor graphically, with the cover page looking like a ransom note of clipped letters. We think it was supposed to read “What We Make.”

Allow me to confess that I did not pay the $3 tariff for the product, nor do I subscribe since the circulation department long ago ceased to be able to deliver daily without incident. A copy arrives at our house on publication dates courtesy of a neighbor, a friend of my wife’s, who subscribes out of habit and is quick to share it after scanning it quickly, hoping that someone else can get some value from it.

Today, while conversing with the wife on another topic, this woman neighbor offered as an aside that there was a section in the newspaper indicating all the positives happening in Johnstown, but she can’t really see these improvements.

She should not feel alone,

In this very same copy of the newspaper, regular portion, there was a front-page headline “Foul play in bar owner’s death?” That man, Lance Ross (no relation that I know of), apparently was beaten to death early in the week. Originally his demise had been blamed on a fall. An autopsy indicated a beating.

Yet another unsolved murder in what used to be nicknamed the “Friendly City.”

We should dismiss that, just as Philadelphia should ditch “City of Brotherly Love.” Truth in advertising and all that.

Move inside today’s Johnstown Tribune-Democrat to the A section and one finds on A3 the headline “DA: Johnstown drug warrant sweep arrests nine adults” and also a separate story headlined “Detective: Man supplied fentanyl in fatal overdose.”

As written here before, Johnstown’s growth industries are crime, poverty and nonprofit organizations often designed to enrich management and friends.

Browsing quickly through the Vision section produced no concession of this reality, just some familiar optimism that is short on basis.

The statistics to be found outside the Vision PR effort continue to paint Johnstown as an area of high crime, low income and a degree of stagnation that is difficult if not impossible to surmount.

So, save the $3 and keep your eyes open as you travel around the area. Check out the streets in various stages of disrepair, the abandoned and decrepit buildings, the empty storefronts, the lines at the soup kitchen, the hordes who descend on stores around the first of the month when government money is direct-deposited into accounts.

That’s the true Johnstown Vision 2023.

Because this blog, during its relatively brief lifespan of several years, has noted the decline of Greater Johnstown, people might think I believe our area was all sunshine and lollipops decades back. Not in the least.

Having lived here for the entirety of my 67-plus years, I am all too familiar with things that have been less than ideal over that stretch.

It’s just that the negatives seem more pervasive now. But that doesn’t mean we lacked scandal and bad actors back in the day.

In the early 1970s, it came to light via a federal indictment that the mayor and two councilmen had accepted $15,000 in bribes to provide Teleprompter a 10-year cable television franchise for the city in 1966.

In 1989, Judge Joseph O’Kicki, a Johnstowner serving in county court, was convicted of several felonies, including official oppression, criminal coercion and bribery. Some of the payoffs were reported to be laughably small at $500 each.

O’Kicki was acquitted on such charges as asking secretaries into his office while he was in his underwear, or seeking a bribe from a strip mining company.

Through the years we’ve had a boom and bust economy, for a long time riding the economic tides with Bethlehem Steel, which was oft-accused of keeping competing industry out of the area in order to preserve its labor pool. I’ve known people who moved to California, or other areas during the slack times in the steel industry, looking for jobs. Often they moved back. Sometimes they didn’t.

During my two decades of working for the Johnstown newspaper (1974 to 1994) mostly in sports, I got to hear of the seamier side of the area from news reporters, and saw enough myself up close and personal.

We had a considerable mob presence in Johnstown during my very early years of life, dabbling in mob-like things such as illegal gambling and prostitution, and based in a “cigar store” located within spitting distance of City Hall.

There was just one high-profile murder with mob implications back then, that of bookie Pippy DiFalco in 1960.

Contrast that to the regular reports of drug-related shootings now, or just general mayhem being visited upon our area by the criminal element. As I type this, there are reports of a woman being stabbed (not fatally) at an Ebensburg senior center, and a Johnstown businessman having been beaten to death in recent days.

Beyond these anecdotal observations, take the time to do a quick Internet search on Johnstown crime and you will encounter statistical evidence of our high rate of crime, particularly bad when compared with areas of similar population.

Economically, we’ve replaced boom and bust with flat-lining at a very low median income level. But the nonprofit organizations continue to prosper and reward their management extraordinarily handsomely.

We have governmental, quasi-governmental and veritable secret societies holding secret meetings, with Facebook watchdog John DeBartola having announced just today on his Revitalize Johnstown page about ferreting out yet another example.

To put it bluntly, you now are more at risk living in Greater Johnstown and surrounding areas, in terms of personal safety and economic opportunity, than when mob influence was at its peak, city officials were taking bribes, a county judge was operating like some feudal lord, and Bethlehem Steel was the economic lifeblood.

It was not perfect many years back; not even close. It was, however, much better.

You would be right to wonder what Clueless Joe Biden is doing flitting about Europe while residents of Ohio are dealing with an unintentional chemical war caused by a train derailment.

As has been par for the course for this Biden regime, the horror on the home front that is the Ohio problem is being swept under the rug; given precious little attention. When there is commentary from the likes of Transportation Secretary Pete Butt (whatever) on the situation, his answer is to blame Donald Trump.

If that fails, expect to hear it’s the Russians’ fault.

Speaking of Russians, you may have heard they are losing their war in Ukraine. But many pundits, most recently Martin Armstrong, claim Ukraine is losing big time and already has suffered upwards of 250,000 deaths among its military.

Yet, Clueless Joe, showing he’s tone deaf as well as cognitively impaired, was promising money and weapons to Ukraine begging boy Zelenskyy to keep the war going.

You might have seen or heard reports of weapon shortages being suffered by the U.S. military, and not just because we needed to fire a couple of $400,000 missiles to bring down a $12 balloon.

Serving as the world’s arsenal has put a dent in our supplies.

And our flagging economic situation accentuates the problem. The federal government is cash poor, or should we say borrowing constricted, having bumped up against the debt ceiling. There are extraordinary measures being taken now to keep things running, something like the average overleveraged household hitting credit cards, or retirement savings to meet expenses, or conducting a monthly lottery to decide which bills will get paid and which will not.

Our national debt stands at $36.5 trillion, give or take, up about $3.5 trillion since Clueless Joe took over the reins. This is a problem, regardless of the successful public relations effort by administrations of both political parties to downplay it.

Trump’s years as president added almost $8 trillion to our national debt.

We’re spending money we don’t have, and sending big chunks of it to places like Ukraine for no reason other than to fight a proxy war with the Russians.

This is a dangerous game when the adversary has the nuclear arsenal that Russia possesses. If things really do go bad for the Russians, what’s to prevent them from starting World War III with the big bombs? Nothing to lose and all that.

Don’t forget our tense standoff with China over Taiwan, or China’s increasingly close ties with Russia.

And so, Biden is spewing cash into Ukraine at a rate not seen since Hunter did some dealing there, and making promises about defending Taiwan.

Trump, showing his political savvy, made a stop in East Palestine, Ohio, today to address the forgotten residents there. Reports indicate he was warmly received and more than a few natives expressed dismay over Biden’s continued absence.

Maybe Clueless Joe heard “Palestine” and thought it was somewhere in the Middle East, an area of the world where he is reluctant to go and face the chaos he has helped create there with his anti-Israel policy, the ill-fated Afghanistan pullout, and the fact that Iran is reported to be on the verge of joining the nuclear bomb club.

Trump’s America First policies sure sounded good to the aggrieved people in Ohio and nearby states. Perhaps Trump’s greatest accomplishment while in office was refusing to get the U.S. entangled in any additional foreign conflicts.

Clueless Joe and his warmongers seem almost overeager to escalate conflict. And a cynic might wonder if they intentionally want wars in order to distract the populace from the deteriorating situation domestically – both socially and economically.

Back in the day, when I worked for the Johnstown newspaper, an editor controlling the operation took it upon himself to cheer up the populace by ordering layout people to insert “Good News” graphics into some stories.

One such effort by a guy putting together the sports section met with a strong rebuke the next day from said editor. The Good News graphic had been inserted, as I recall, into a story about a track meet. Noted the editor, sure, the winning side thought it was good news, but what about the losers?

Life is all about perspective, a truth brought home by a recent story that appeared in San Francisco’s Chronicle newspaper and that was picked up by the zerohedge.com web site.

It told the story of a teenage Ukrainian girl brought to supposed safety in San Francisco who, after a short time experiencing life in public schools there, longed to return to her old school in war-torn Ukraine.

This girl was horrified to witness San Francisco students interrupting classes, jumping on desks, cursing at teachers. The girl was astonished when there was no punishment for these students; it was just standard operating procedure.

The girl also was harassed, had her cell phone stolen, and generally she was bullied, with little done by the administration to address the problem.

Returning to Ukraine for her was an attractive option to the living hell that is the reality of too many public schools in the good old U.S.A. How about that, all you ivory tower education liberals!

In a similar tale, a story was told of a Ukrainian woman “rescued” to a fresh start in a lesser neighborhood in Birmingham, England. The woman’s unhappiness with her new locale was attributed to her inability to cope with the diversity there.

But this woman’s visit to the local police web site, rife with statistics on various crimes, showed the problem was not her. She was just observing – correctly – the outlaws in control of an inner city, not all that different than being in a Ukrainian war zone.

It is beyond doubt statistically that major U.S. cities, almost all of them deep blue as in Democrat-controlled, have a quality of life that worsens with each passing day when you consider crime, ineffective schools, poor public services, high taxes and mammoth cost of living.

Yet we are to ignore the evidence. We need to adopt a perspective that accentuates the positive.

Yes, the cities are in collapse, but don’t those night television shots from blimps covering sporting events make it look all placid and lovely?

It all seems better from 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet. This ignores the reality that on the ground, it’s all different.

I recall infantry types who had fought in Vietnam offering the opinion that the people who spent the war on ships or flying jets over the rice paddies got a sanitized view of it all. It was different up close and personal.

Fast-forward to 2023 and a report tells us a teenage Ukrainian girl, confronted with the cesspool of a San Francisco public school, longs to return to her homeland, never mind the war.

We would do well to consider what we should learn about the world from this girl’s perspective.

The Biden regime, and Democrats in general, are well on their way to elevating the practice of pandering to identity politics to its logical extreme, that being the complete breakdown of meritocracy.

First, allow us to define terms. When we write of identity politics, we speak of the whole “looks like America” rubric in that any group must accurately reflect in terms of its numbers the racial, sexual, cultural breakdown of this land, or else be considered unacceptable.

Funny how the most strident advocates of this mandate have no problem with an NFL or NBA whose player rosters are not “looking like America.” Instead, they carp about coaches or front office positions not being representative.

Even Major League Baseball, oft-criticized for being “too white,” has Hispanics and Blacks over-represented as players compared to their percentage of the United States population.

Perhaps they are there because they have the talent, which would be a meritocracy. That is the formerly common goal and practice, in government and private industry, of putting the most qualified person available into a position, regardless of racial, sexual, or cultural breakdowns.

Identity politics and meritocracy cannot co-exist.

It is sadly amusing how those who honor identity politics as their first commandment are willing to waive it when it benefits them.

That’s how Clueless Joe got the job in the first place. He was the great compromise. The far-left types who of late control the Democratic Party, wanted wild-eyed socialist Bernie Sanders, but they realized, in an uncommonly sentient moment (something that is a rare occurrence for Clueless Joe) that Bernie could not win the election.

Never mind that the Clueless One was just another old white guy. He could win and keep the levers of powers in the hands of the left.

Similarly, the identity politics people were willing to check at the door their crusade to get a woman in general, and even better, a woman of color, a seat in the Oval Office. Kamala Harris, who would have trouble winning a race for dog catcher in a non-partisan precinct, could be slotted on the ticket as Biden’s vice president to throw a bone to progressives.

And, considering Biden’s advanced age and increasing mental frailties, should he fail completely, Harris could be slipped into the post without ever having to have won election to that office.

Alas, identity politics does not exist in a vacuum. When you put people of questionable qualification into jobs they appear unable to handle, there are unfortunate consequences.

Harris is a cackling, ill-informed gaffe machine almost any time she gets within spitting distance of a microphone. It’s chilling to think of her as president.

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who seemingly got his post mostly due to being Hispanic (born in Havana, Cuba), is presiding over a continuing crisis at the border with Mexico, one that now has grown to include problems at the Canadian border under his slumber.

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Butt (something) is widely considered to have gotten his job mostly on the basis of him being openly gay and thereby filling a quota as the first person of that description to hold a cabinet post.

Pete’s been AWOL when weather crippled the nation’s air travel in December of last year and, more recently, a deer in the headlights, blaming Donald Trump for a toxic train derailment in Ohio and the painfully slow response from Pete’s people.

Although not technically a Biden pick, our U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, is a prime example of meritocracy being kicked to the curb. Fetterman suffered a stroke during his campaign and was kept under wraps to keep the public from realizing the extent of his impairment.

When he was forced to emerge for a debate with opponent Dr. Oz., Fetterman fumbled, bumbled and outright fabricated things like his past stance on fracking.

And still he was elected. Since then, Fetterman has checked into a hospital for ‘light-headedness” and more recently, for clinical depression, which a spokesman said he has suffered from in the past. Funny, I can’t recall that being shared pre-election, either.

Those bold enough to suggest Fetterman is not up to the challenge of serving in the Senate are mocked as “ableists,” another of those made-up labels which seems to mean one thinks a person without mental or physical disabilities might be able to do a better job. Imagine that!

Here’s a simple thought experiment that should help clarify the problem in general.

You are about to go into surgery for a life-threatening condition. Do you want the surgeon and assorted staff to be the best qualified people, regardless of race, creed, nationality, sexual orientation or other politically correct consideration, or do you want the operating room to look like America?

Example two: You are getting on an airplane for a lengthy journey. You peek into the cockpit. Do you want a pilot and co-pilot who are qualified and competent, or people put into those seats to fill a superficial quota that is defined by matters of race, nationality, sexual orientation or some other random litmus test?

You make the call.