Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Johnstown would do well to heed a cautionary tale from Sweden regarding massive immigration.

Over the Easter weekend, gangs of migrants rioted and pillaged throughout Sweden, leaving 100 or so policemen wounded.

Now, leftist prime minister Magdalena Andersson, someone who would fit right in with Johnstown’s Myopic Vision 2025 elitist roster, is being forced to concede the reality vs. the rhetoric.

The Swedish welcome wagon for immigrants has attracted a large percentage of violent types not looking to assimilate, but rather to carve out caliphates with the eventual goal of taking over the entire country.

“Our society was too weak, while money for the police and services (was) too little,” said Andersson in assessing the failure of her immigration program.

Are you listening, Johnstown? No doubt Andersson and her ilk assured the populace that immigrants would be vetted. They would arrive possessing job skills and ability to speak the language.

Presumably, Swedes were assured this diversity would only strengthen the nation.

Again, this should sound familiar to Johnstowners, already suffering a crime wave spearheaded by refugees from domestic outposts such as Philadelphia.

Do we, like Sweden, have insufficient money for police and services to deal with a proposed inflow of immigrants from Afghanistan, Ukraine, or any other countries hemorrhaging people due to poor living conditions?

Yes.

Is the Greater Johnstown School District a chronic under-performer with well-publicized issues of student violence and academic shortfalls?

Yes.

Can we presume any immigrant influx here would be completely positive?

You’ve got to be kidding.

A family down the street, residing metaphorically in the state of Denial, has added one of the local yard signs welcoming all in multiple languages. Yes, they are Biden voters.

I suspect the sign’s reliance on various foreign tongues is an intentional choice. But it unintentionally identifies the problem.

Inability to speak the native tongue is a cornerstone for economic and social failure.

Those who would push unchecked immigration both here and nationwide, cynically invoke our nation’s immigration history. What they fail to note is those immigrants back in the day were not allowed to arrive without regulation.

The immigration law passed in 1917 required literacy for immigrants, had quotas for various nationalities, increased taxes immigrants had to pay, allowed officials wide discretion over who to admit to the country, and totally barred most Asian immigrants.

Despite what you might read at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, our past immigration was conducted with many checks on the inflow.

But current left-wing opportunists are propagandizing and rewriting that history, as is their wont when reality intrudes on their “visions.”

This is true with other issues, such as socialism. No matter that true economic socialism has never worked anywhere on this planet, those who would take us down the socialism path insist this time will be different.

It cannot be different until you change basic human nature which demonstrates that, given the choice, there is widespread willingness to live off the labors of others.

Similarly, immigration both here and in other countries proves over and over again that allowing mass inflows of populations not looking to assimilate but rather to run roughshod and seize control, doesn’t work.

Sweden is but one potent example.

The massive immigration has turned a country formerly known for its safety to a country ranked second in Europe only to Croatia in terms of per capita gun crime.

Tellingly, there have been reports of Ukrainian refugees opting not to go to Sweden due to its unsafe situation.

These refugees don’t want to flee one war zone simply to move into another, albeit one born of unchecked immigration rather than military invasion.

Oh, the irony, which I’m sure our Johnstown Myopic Vision 2025 elites would not see.

Throw open your windows and the air is rife with anguished cries from aggrieved leftists.

Social media, traditional media, they also are host to an abundance of vacuous laments from the lunatic left.

It wasn’t bad enough that some free-speech advocate billionaire was buying Twitter, ostensibly about to turn that left-wing propaganda platform into the even-handed populist commentary source it was supposed to be.

Sure, that development had prominent socialists among Twitter management reportedly breaking down in tears at meetings and an abundance of their fellow travelers, both inside the company and out, similarly reduced to incoherent shouting and threat making.

But wait, there’s more. Comes a leak from Supreme Court that indicates Roe v. Wade, the cornerstone of legal justification for killing unborn children, which had been written into federal law, just might be overturned.

There was a riot last night in Los Angeles in which windows were smashed by mask-wearing opportunists, some of them carrying communist flags. They were there, we were told by various media, to protest for abortions. What that has to do with communism or socialism, I’m not sure.

It’s predictable that such professional agitators, eager to take to the streets for any left-wing theater, would appear on cue and cause property damage.

Where are the cries for Democrats to renounce such conduct and disassociate themselves from such street hoodlums? You haven’t heard any, have you?

That’s textbook Liberal Hypocrisy 101. Conservatives must be held to a high standard and ordered to denounce groups who stretch the bounds of decent conduct. Liberals can embrace any outlaw organization that leans left and it’s just the case of them exercising the right to protest as guaranteed by the Constitution.

Sadly, but equally predictable, is the appearance on social media — megaphone for morons — of vacuous commentary on the abortion matter.

One such moron was observed on Facebook referring to “this abortion ban” and hoping supporters of it would choke and bleeping die tonight.

A wordsmith, she wasn’t. Not too bright in other areas, either.

Dear Moron Betty (her initials are MB), an overturning of Roe v. Wade would not ban abortion. That decision would be left to each state. You can bet deep blue socialist states such as California, New York and my own Pennsylvania will keep the butcher shops open, the last example having its outgoing toolbag governor rushing to the microphone to proclaim that killing babies will be allowed in Pennsylvania as long as he has anything to say about it.

How noble of him.

Sanitize linguistically the practice of abortion all you want by calling it Pro Choice, it still amounts to being pro taking a life.

The same hysterical types who scream that the government should keep its hands off their bodies, most often have no problem with mandated vaccines (at last glance, injected into bodies) being necessary to facilitate travel, going out in public or keeping one’s job. And what about the masks worn on heads attached to bodies, to enable free passage?

Another bromide cites rape and incest to justify abortion. According to a 2019 story in USA Today, a left-leaning publication, about 1 percent of abortions annually are for reasons of rape or incest. That leaves what I am confident is a great chunk of the remaining 99 percent of abortions mostly to be explained by morning-after regrets following promiscuity.

According to a story from NPR, another leftist mouthpiece, citing a 2017 study, approximately 1 in 4 women in the United States will have an abortion at some point in their lives.

All or mostly due to rape and incest? I doubt it.

Alas, people, we live not in a democracy, but an idiocracy. Convenience and expediency are the touchstones. Coaches of sports teams often quote the cliché “There is no I in team” to which present-day Americans would respond, “But there is a me and it’s all about me, baby.”

Dated concepts such as right and wrong, once easily identified, have been blurred and parsed to the point of being useless.

Politicians play to this widespread idiocy for a simple reason – it’s a winner. They buy votes with stimulus checks and all manner of ridiculous social programs that benefit mostly the providers and not the supposed needy.

They dredge up and dramatize “issues” designed to be raw meat fed to their cultist followers.

So, while it does my heart good to hear the whining from the lefty navel-gazers, I doubt any long-term benefit will be seen.

Somehow, in some way, Twitter’s work force will keep the outlet leaning hard left.

Somehow, in some way, Democrats will maintain power in mid-term elections.

Somehow, in some way, abortions will remain legal and readily available in these United States.

We have too many entrenched leftists in government, school systems, institutions of higher education and various media, for real progress to be made.

We have too many gutless conservatives, willing to cut and run anytime a stand on principle becomes a touch too controversial, for real progress to be achieved.

But it is amusing against the backdrop of that reality, to see the brain-dead and morally bankrupt agonize so publicly about these short-term gains by the right.

Once upon a time, when I worked for the Johnstown newspaper, a left-wing summer intern felt the need to lecture the newsroom staff on racial relations.

We couldn’t understand the anguish of the black man is what he told us.

My response was that I wasn’t sure that this whitebread Westmont resident fully understood it, either. I’d gone to public school with young black men. I’m sure he had not.

I offered after the night shift ended to run him up to the Prospect section, then an area with a high crime rate, and drop him in the parking lot of what was then called the Frontier Club, a meeting place for doers of misdeeds.

Think of the Dexter Lake Club scene in the movie Animal House and you get the picture of what this big talker and small doer would have encountered

Said youth declined my offer, which meant he lived to impregnate a night reporter and unceremoniously dump her.

I guess he didn’t understand the anguish of the unwed mother.

That was an early introduction for me to the hypocrisy of the left. The lessons continue.

More recently, elites from outside of Johnstown are taking it upon themselves to remake the city by attempting to attract refugees who don’t necessarily speak English, may not possess marketable job skills, and largely would exist as the reason for all the local non-profits and foundations to solicit more federal funds to service this influx and in so doing feed their bloated, overpaid management.

A city and surrounding suburbs operating at a high level might be able to absorb such an inflow of refugees without major difficulty. But these refugees would be plopped down within the city limits, with the children attending a school district already notable for massive student underperformance. The economic health of the area remains on life support, so any jobs likely would not be great ones.

Did we mention the ballooning rate of serious crime?

The Hornerstown section of Johnstown hit the news over the past weekend when a man, woman and dog were found shot to death in their home. They’d been dead for days, according to reports.

The fact that no one seems to have heard the shooting, or felt it particularly noteworthy even if they did, speaks volumes.

Unlike the elites who would tell Johnstown residents what is good for them, or TV news types who mistake Dibert Street for “Dilbert Street,” I can actually say that I lived in Hornerstown for a time, attending the former Meadowvale Elementary School. Then it was two old buildings, since replaced by one building which at present is the district’s middle school.

My credentials from earlier life include lengthy residency at various locations in Walnut Grove, which became quite the garden spot when the Solomon Homes were constructed.

True, I also spent a lot of my younger years in the Oakland section, just beyond the city limits, but still in the Greater Johnstown School District.

Just to add to my firsthand knowledge of troubled neighborhoods, my first house was bought on Daniel Street, across from the Oakhurst Homes, another frequent scene of crime ranging from shootings on down.

Eventually, I voted with my feet to move to Southmont and get my son into a better school district.

It didn’t really bother me to live near the Oakhurst Homes, although a cousin and medal-winning veteran of the Vietnam War who I once had down for a poker game, told he that he’d never be back due to the neighborhood.

There were occasional problems, like two hit-and-runs on our cars, one in front of the house, with the perpetrator escaping, and the other in the rear, with the drunken driver unable to escape due to damage to his car.

I grabbed him, pulled him into my dining room, threw him on the floor and called the police. My wife, awakened from her sleep by the commotion, trudged down the steps and offered the guy a cup of coffee!

But I was never shot, or even shot at in Oakhurst or elsewhere. The house was never burglarized. I did, however, have a battery stolen from my Jeep CJ7.

This was in the early 1980s, so I am confident the area has worsened, just like Moxham, Old Westmont and various other formerly solid neighborhoods.

My street in Southmont has taken on shaky qualities of late, too.

Evidence pours in almost daily that the city and its suburbs are on the decline. There’s no need for the elites who hide in their exclusive suburban homes, or even chose residency in other counties, to try to accelerate that decline while enriching themselves with their myopic vision projects.

Today is May Day, a time for socialist rallies and communist celebrations.

This should not be confused with the international distress code word “mayday,” or maybe it should.

There is much distress about the land, an ever-widening rift between political right and left fueled by the left’s outright campaign to ignore facts and suppress dissent.

Liberals, socialists, progressives, whatever term you want to use, do not allow their arguments to be limited by truth. To the contrary, they are actively seeking to quash those who would speak the truth.

Admittedly, there are some on the right who play fast and loose with facts, but they tend to be called out legally as in the case of Alex Jones and his denial of the Sandy Hook school massacre. Why is this not the case when those doing the distortions are on the political left?

This Elon Musk bid for Twitter has exposed a lot of cockroaches. Begin with the company’s admission that for three years it overstated daily users.

Such errors are important because they are measures that affect the stock price, and advertising rates.

As a companion to this mea culpa from Twitter, there are the anecdotal cases showing conservatives’ numbers of followers mushrooming and totals of followers of liberals on the social media platform tanking.

Cynics have suggested that this indicates Twitter trying to get ahead of Musk’s prying eyes by freeing up conservative posters from censorship and shadow banning, while bringing liberal follower numbers back toward reality.

Twitter’s censorship czar is rumored to be about to lose her $17-million-a-year job which paid her for such successes as knocking down the New York Post for running the Hunter Biden laptop story, since conceded to be 100 percent true by traditional left-wing house organs such as the Washington Post and New York Times.

Said Twitter censor also banned any discussion of COVID being an escapee from a Wuhan lab, a supposition that not only won’t die, but gains strength as time passes.

Emboldened by actions of Twitter and Facebook, who line up squarely on the left and censor the right, the average leftist citizenry thinks it, too, can deny outright proven facts.

Consider the example recently encountered by me. During maybe a half-hour conversation, a guy who otherwise might be considered rational, refused to concede that Trump rallies outdrew Biden rallies.

His response to the matter of Hunter Biden and his alleged dirty dealings, was to maintain the entire Trump family was guilty of miscellaneous sins.

He cited former attorney general William Barr as protecting President Trump. If Barr refusing to look into election questions and giving Robert Mueller a free hand in his special investigator role looking for Russian collusion that found basically nothing on Trump is protection, who needs enemies?

The legal harassment of Trump and his family continues. But a Manhattan grand jury charged with looking into allegations of property price manipulation for purposes of securing financing or avoiding taxes reportedly is going to disband with NO CHARGES to be filed vs. Trump.

I guess the Biden justice department is protecting Trump, too, which would be a case of the strangest bedfellows.

Or maybe when it comes to producing evidence, the left has only the usual distortions of reality to offer and, thankfully, some individuals still decide such legal matters on facts not fantasy.

This leftist with whom I spoke eventually retreated to accusing me of thinking Trump was flawless. I responded as I have many times, that Trump is a flawed human being, with an overinflated ego and a mouth that moves often without the benefit of the brain being in gear.

That having been said, the Democrats ran two of the weakest candidates in history vs. Trump and so it was a no-brainer to vote for Trump.

The reality that he won even once is a monumental triumph, although these same leftists who argue an election could not be or was not stolen in 2020, maintain exactly the opposite was the case in 2016 when they lost.

To win, Trump not only had to beat the Democrats, he also had to vanquish his own gutless Republican party establishment.

Allow me to repeat, most Republican leadership is gutless in the extreme. But the grassroots segment of the party is strong and unbowed.

It’s time to become more strident and forget the “compassionate conservative” crap of George W. Bush and others.

If you think you can convince the raving leftists using facts, you are sadly mistaken. If you are counting on people like Bill Barr or current special counsel John Durham, charged with looking into Russiagate, to hold liberals’ feet to the legal fire, you are similarly mistaken.

If you think pandering to leftists will make them like and respect you, you are as delusional as they are.

Individuals need to demand truth and accountability regarding everything from social media and LameStream news, to local governments and school systems.

Until such time, the leftists will keep on winning and the country will continue swirling around the metaphorical toilet bowl.

Having never posted on Twitter or Facebook, I cobbled up this blog as my own private venting space. Commence the venting.

The wife sent me to the local hardware store today to pick up bird seed. She’d been there Sunday, but they were out. The woman said come back Tuesday when more would have arrived.

Do I need a raincheck? the wife asked.

No, said the employee. The price would be honored.

So, as I waited in line, with my two 20-pound sacks of bird seed propped against the counter, the gentleman ahead of me was having a similar discussion about — bird seed and pricing. This woman said the sale had ended. Instead of $19 plus tax for two bags, it now would come out to about $27 or $28 (tax included?)

He ponied up the extra money. I took my two bags back to the display and despite the offer from an older woman worker to put them back in place, I slung them up on the stack and left.

I try to patronize this local business, but they make it tough. Do an online product search and the item shows up as being on their shelves. Drive on over to the store and the items customarily are not in stock. Ask someone there and they say never to bother doing online search because it is extremely inaccurate.

Then why have it at all? Better yet, why not improve it so it is accurate and helpful?

I urged the wife to call the store and voice her complaint about the bird seed. She of course will not do so. So I rant here about wasting my time. I just might call when I get done venting.

On this very same excursion, I attempted to cash a cashier’s check from an area bank. I was trying to cash this at my bank branch and had, in fact, just cashed a personal check on my account in this very same visit.

But when I tried to leave with the money from the cashier’s check, I was told they would put a hold on my checking account for that amount, in excess of $4,000.

Otherwise, I could deposit it to my checking account and withdraw it tomorrow.

I was astounded. A cashiers check traditionally (and still is according to my internet search) considered much more safe due to such checks being guaranteed by the underwriting bank, not by the individual’s funds.

So, why this extra step? I was told I could show up bright and early tomorrow and pull the entire amount from my account.

“Cashier’s checks are the most common kind of fraud” replied the teller, sounding like every boilerplate-reading telephone representative with whom you’ve ever tried to address an inquiry.

And so I rant.

Ah, but there is a happy ending. I went to a local sub shop, where milk is, inexplicably, considerably lower in price than at the regional supermarket chain outlet less than half a mile away. The grandkids drink A LOT of milk.

The cashier was friendly. Another customer – a woman – who was entering held the door for me to exit.

If only this sub shop sold bird seed, or offered checking accounts.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter after all and the leftists who considered it their own virtue signalling platform are very predictably exhibiting Petulant Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s a thing, look it up.

For those too lazy to do their own research, PBPD is, according to americanaddictioncenters.org, a condition whose sufferers fluctuate between outbursts of explosive anger and feelings of being unworthy or unloved. They have a STRONG NEED TO MANIPULATE OTHERS (my emphasis added), and they become very possessive, which results in extreme dissatisfaction in their relationships. This leads to issues with substance abuse and other potentially damaging issues.

Curiously, Jeff Bezos is among those exhibiting symptoms. But he’s a clever sufferer. Bezos, Mr. Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, asked an open question whether Musk acquiring Twitter might give the Chinese undue “leverage” due to their dealings with Musk.

Apparently blowback was intense about Bezos and his hypocrisy, considering the fact that Amazon sells so many Chinese products and has blocked all but five-star reviews of a book by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and on, and on, and on.

So Bezos quickly added that he would answer his own question and say no, Musk was not likely to be leveraged by the Chinese.

Here Bezos has borrowed from the sleazy tabloid playbook. Ask a ridiculous question on the front page such as “Does hamburger cause cancer?” or “Is John Doe a child molester” with the answer to be found on D 10 or some such page buried in the edition.

Turn to page D 10 and the answer found there is no. But how many people bother to check? And if they do, how many people then immediately discount the initial question instead of leaving it to simmer in the dark recesses of their memories, only to be dredged up down the line as fact because they read it somewhere, sometime?

Maybe Bezos is feeling “leveraged” because Musk has surpassed him as the world’s richest person.

Maybe Twitter twits are feeling leveraged because for so long they had taken for granted they could rant with absolute freedom in that space as long as they were mouthing the far-left progressive platform.

And, should any right-thinking individuals have tried to inject facts and balance into the discussion, they would have been shut down by the radical Twitter censors, sort of like Amazon canceled anything but the most flattering reviews of Xi’s book.

Dare we dream that Musk will inject some balance into the Twitter equation?

Recently in this space I noted the decline in Johnstown’s quality of life, fueled in part by an influx of undesirables from Philadelphia (Filthydelphia).

Today’s edition of the Johnstown daily newspaper appeared with a story of four upstanding men from Filthydelphia busted on drug charges after raids on two Johnstown houses (to call them homes verges on blasphemy).

One big drug bust, two houses, four men from Filthydelphia nabbed.

What a coincidence.

Today, Altoona TV station WTAJ’s web site has a report on two people from – wait for it – Filthydelphia being arrested in Johnstown on drug and weapons charges.

The morons first attracted police attention for abusing a puppy in a car dealer’s lot. The female moron showed up apparently drunk to support her man and ended up being arrested.

When all was said and done, charges were filed against both due to illegal drugs and a 9 mm gun, which convicted felons, and both of these Filthydelphia lovelies reportedly were/are convicted felons, cannot have guns, not to mention the copious amounts of illegal drugs.

The criminal element in Johnstown isn’t always from Filthydelphia. We do have our share of homegrown hoods.

But how many felonies do you think were committed in Filthydelphia over the past two days by Johnstown residents? I’m betting none.

I’d love to see an honest accounting of how so many Filthydelphia thugs and criminals have ended up in Johnstown.

Even better, I’d love to see our civic leaders stop being so concerned about milking the federal government for grants and assorted handouts, or plotting secretly to swell the local population with various refugee groups, and begin both acknowledging and addressing what obviously is a problem Johnstown is experiencing with Filthydelphia refugees.

It’s nice that some of the Filthydelphia criminals are off the streets, for now. But does anybody actually know how many more Filthydelphia convicted felons, or would-be felons, remain at large in our once-fair city?

I did a lot of traveling during my days as a sportswriter, including prolonged stays in various parts of vacation meccas such as California (for a Super Bowl, NFL playoff games and a Rose Bowl), in Florida (Super Bowls, college bowl games, NHL Stanley Cup playoff games and Major League Baseball spring training), Louisiana (Sugar Bowl), Texas (Alamo Bowl) and Arizona (Super Bowl, Fiesta Bowl).

I made visits of shorter duration to almost every major city that had a pro baseball, hockey or pro or college football team.

I even worked for a Pittsburgh newspaper, but chose to commute and never moved from the Greater Johnstown area. My line at the time was that this was a nice place to live – if you had a job.

We had a low cost of living, from housing right on down. We had a relatively low crime rate. We had good schools — if you lived in the right area.

Traffic wasn’t a problem. We were close enough to Pittsburgh if your wants tended toward big city offerings.

But I wasn’t a Pollyanna regarding Johnstown, either. I’d lived here all my life and seen political corruption and hints of same first-hand.

Cambria County had a reputation as being extremely corrupt politically, although the local Democratic house organ that masquerades as a newspaper ran a series eight years back trying to knock down that assertion.

The usual dial-a-quote sources were consulted. That series aside, I’m still seeing Cambria County as long on corruption through the years.

Even when the conduct isn’t illegal, there’s an unhealthy trend for the crowned elites to wield power and influence in relative secrecy.

Remember, I worked for the local newspaper, when it still was a newspaper, for 20 years from 1974 to 1994. Although mostly I worked in sports, I had occasion to see first-hand how the sausage was made in various non-sports aspects, and to get first-hand insight from colleagues on the news side about the behind-the-scenes goings-on. Sometimes the best stuff never made print, for legal concerns.

Fast-forward to 2022 and the Johnstown I knew from my younger years, not a bad place despite the unseemly underbelly, is disappearing, replaced with a community lacking even the superficial niceties.

My wife spent part of last night listening to a police chase on the scanner. The object of the pursuit was said to have an outstanding warrant – from Philadelphia.

Crime reports, when the local left-wing house organ deems them fit to print, are heavy on misdeeds committed by people with Philadelphia connections, or from other areas that are less than Utopias.

During various trips to Philadelphia over the decades, I borrowed the term Filthydelphia, due to the garbage on the streets, and walking them.

Now the Filthydelphia element is strong in Johnstown. No one wants to claim ownership of this migration, but the migrants didn’t just stick a pin in a Pennsylvania map and found Johnstown.

Lately our myopic visionary operation, guided by behind-the-scene puppet masters, is looking to boost the area with all manner of come-ons to refugees from whatever foreign, war-torn or economically bereft land is oozing residents. No need to discuss any of this in public, of course.

Ironically, the refugees are being welcomed to move here even as the current Johnstown city manager won’t lower himself to move into the county.

There has been back-and-forth commentary between mouthpieces for the lack-of-vision people and public citizen watchdogs seeking to shine the light of publicity on their non-public background dealings.

I get to witness this on social media when I make my daily checks using my son’s account on Facebook marketplace looking for hobby car sales listings.

There are ad-hominem attacks on the watchdogs by elites who got their seat at the table not through their success, but the old-fashioned way, that being inherited wealth.

But they know better than you or I what’s good for the area, or maybe for them.

Our area is rife with non-profits and charities in which the people in management take home hefty pay. We have a cottage industry of people who specialize in shaking the begging bowl to get federal grants.

I have said it before, but it bears repeating: For all the money spent to attract business to the area, all the promises made over the decades, our growth industries remain crime and poverty.

That’s the reality and it is not likely to change until the public has more of a say in who’s wielding the power, and making some coin in the process.

Robert (Don’t Call Me Third) Reich, whose physical stature qualifies him to be an eighth dwarf (Lefty perhaps?) stands a mighty 4-foot-11.

This was good for him during the Vietnam War according to Reich’s bio on Wikipedia, because while Reich was drafted, he didn’t pass the physical due to being an inch short of the minimum height requirement.

So Reich instead passed his time palling around with Bill Clinton at Oxford and even dating the then Hillary Rodham, also all according to Wikipedia.

As leftists go, Reich is somewhere on the extreme left of Marx, Trotsky, Castro and Lenin.

The onetime Secretary of Labor under Clinton is a reliable mouthpiece for all causes left.

That means most recently Reich has opined wherever possible on what a terrible thing it would be for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

Can’t have a billionaire, an “oligarch” (the latter term being chosen carefully by Reich to link Musk to all those nasty Russian rich guys) operating a media outlet, be it social or otherwise. Dangerous nonsense this, according to Reich.

Understand that Reich, with typical liberal hypocrisy, has no problem with leftist billionaires controlling media. Zuck and Facebook, with its highly partisan censorship policy, is no problem to Reich. A cynic might note that’s because the Zuck and his censors lean hard left.

Amazon guru Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Dangerous nonsense? No, because Bezos is a good rank-and-file progressive.

Twitter, whose censorship policy puts it in Reich leftist territory on the political spectrum, is fine just the way it is according to Reich. No dangerous nonsense here. Sure, co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is a billionaire, but he made sure Twitter was as liberal as Abbie Hoffman, so having that billionaire reigning over a significant slice of internet discourse was neither dangerous nor nonsensical.

How are we to understand Reich? Back to his Wikipedia file. That refers to Reich being bullied as a child and vowing to stand up to bullies whenever and wherever possible.

Make that standing up to any conservatives Reich brands as bullies because they don’t worship at the feet of Chairman Mao.

If you are a socialist, leftist, progressive, so liberal-you-can’t-stand-up-straight, feel free to bully away.

This ideological blindness is a way for a height-challenged guy to be a big man, metaphorically speaking. No matter that actor Gary Burghoff, a 5-5 ½ specimen who played Radar O’Reilly on the TV sitcom MASH, presumably could post up Reich with impunity on a basketball court.

As long as Reich keeps spouting leftist slants on anything and everything he is a 7-foot Shaquille O’Neal to those fellow travelers. No need to be correct, just predictably doctrinaire.

Reich’s actions could be construed as a cry for help, for the sort of vaccine Fauci isn’t pushing – a cure for Napoleon’s Syndrome.

The blogger is dog-sitting at his son’s house, with the attendant limited television options and being reduced to using a laptop not conducive to ease of writing, so I’ve popped back home to make a quick-hits update on yet another crazy few days.

THE NEWS: Twitter employees are horrified that Elon Musk of Tesla fame wants to buy the company and, ostensibly, rectify its leftist lean.

THE VIEWS: Funny how these self-appointed censors and social engineers are curled up the fetal position sucking their thumbs over the prospect of someone policing their political censorship and their otherwise quashing of anything but the governmental left-wing narrative. Not so much fun when the shoe might be on the other foot, is it? And that is precisely the point of why censorship is bad, because you all-powerful censors someday could find your opposition silencing you.

THE NEWS: Border agents, accused of whipping Haitian immigrants from horseback, a false claim spread by a united front of Democrats and leftist social media (sound familiar) have been CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES!

THE VIEWS: It was a trumped-up allegation designed to take away coverage of Biden’s porous border policy. The Big Guy himself came out of his bunker days after the allegations surfaced to say the border agents “were going to pay.” Even as Biden played to the left-wing mob, it was known that the alleged “whips” were merely the reins of the horses that the riders were holding to control those very same horses. But Biden, his various official mouthpieces, and his unofficial media mouthpieces seem to have missed this story clearing the agents. You could knock me over with a sledgehammer I’m so surprised.

THE NEWS: Washington, D.C., got a special delivery Wednesday morning, a busload of illegal immigrants sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

THE VIEWS: Liberals, progressives, left-wing Democrats and probably most of the Twitter employees are outraged that Abbott would do such a thing to expose very publicly the ongoing border crisis. These things should not be seen or heard among polite company, don’t you know. The fact is we have a border crisis and The Big Guy Biden is only making it worse.

THE NEWS: The government admitted to an 8.5 percent inflation rate for March, the highest since December 1981, and The Big Guy Biden is blaming Putin.

THE VIEWS: Like most Big Guy utterances, truth is not necessarily present in the Putin charge. Prices of regular gasoline in the United States were up 70 percent from Biden’s election to the day Putin’s Russian troops invaded Ukraine. That’s because Big Guy Biden made it very public that he was out to crush the fossil fuel industry as a payoff to his radical left supporters. Just 30 percent of the gain in gasoline prices has come since the invasion. I know that blaming Russia and Putin is all the Democrats have these days, but it’s weak and anyone who believes this ludicrous stuff is extremely weak mentally.

THE NEWS: Few media outlets ( an exception being The New York Post, which scooped all about Hunter Biden’s laptop and endured much politically correct blowback before others belatedly admitted it all was true) have had the cajones to report that alleged Brooklyn subway shooter Frank R. James has been posting racist material for some time on Facebook.

THE VIEWS: And those very same Facebook censors had no problem with it until James was arrested. Then they cleared the posts. But others have screenshots of James with posts such as one imploring “black Jesus” to “please kill all the whiteys.” There is a very evident double standard in this country among news media and social media when reporting matters of race. Because James is black, apparently it was OK for him to post venom on Zuck’s outlet. Yet anyone hinting that Tony Fauci is anything less than a vaccination saint, gets punted to the Facebook penalty box. And let’s not forget our FBI. That once effective organization now spends so much time falsifying interview records, fibbing to the FISA court, investigating Trump supporters (just because), diligently looking into reports of nooses in NASCAR garages, and hounding anyone who happened to be in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021, and wearing a Trump hat, it has precious little time to stop a man who was very publicly evidencing racial hatred and violent measures on social media, the megaphone of morons. By the way, James apparently was a big fan of CNN, with his Facebook posts often featuring a television tuned to that leftist propaganda outlet masquerading as a cable news channel.