Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

I’m just back from voting today, although I’m not sure why. Force of habit, perhaps?

Yes, the candidates mostly were for local or statewide office, so it is less likely the results will be outright fudged, as they most obviously were in the last presidential election.

Yes, it’s important as a good citizen to vote and exercise the franchise so many have fought and died to preserve.

Yes, you have no room to gripe if you can’t be bothered to take a few minutes to vote.

But, for every person who bothers to study the candidates and their positions and vote accordingly, there are at least as many – probably more – who vote based solely on party affiliation, or what freebies the candidates are promising to distribute, or how effective the often-false campaign ads have been.

Again, this is not so much the case in this election. But more often than not, it is.

What has been going on in Virginia’s governor race speaks volumes. The loudmouthed Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, a Clintonista from way back when, is looking to play the race card as his one-time healthy lead in the polls shrinks, or even inverts if you believe a Fox News poll.

It’s vintage Democratic playbook. They get Democratic operatives to pose as right-wing racists in front of a Glenn Youngkin campaign bus. Youngkin is McAuliffe’s Republican opponent.

Reliable lapdog LameStream media ran with the photo and it was a sensation on social media, AKA The Megaphone for Morons.

Only after a news cycle were there reluctant admissions that it was a staged photo by Democrats. It’s like when a hit job is bannered across the front page of a newspaper in 90-point type, but the correction is buried at the bottom of page two; a paragraph or so with maybe a 24-point headline.

Will the fake Youngkin photo and other McAuliffe distortions or outright lies work? Don’t bet against it.

It’s possible McAuliffe will win a fair election in a squeaker. It’s possible Youngkin will win in reality, but the official results will show otherwise. It’s possible enough thumbs will be pressed on the electoral scales to give McAuliffe a purported runaway victory.

Reports indicate about 1 million Virginians voted early and McAuliffe is up 300,000 among those. That’s a big deficit for Youngkin to overcome based on election-day turnout. We’ll assume for now that the early voting was all legitimate and lacking the Georgia stench.

This Virginia race is being painted as a referendum on Joe Biden, who lived up to his Sleepy Joe nickname this week by falling asleep while ostensibly listening to a speech at the global climate-fest.

The only referendum on Biden that would matter to me is a national recall vote, and that isn’t happening.

The man and woman campaigners outside my polling place concurred regarding the sad state of elections in this country, but were happy to see someone (me) operating on autopilot despite waning faith in the legitimacy of the results we have reported to us.

“Don’t give up” the woman implored.

I’m not giving up, but merely acknowledging that the system is badly broken and the solution moving forward is not likely to be found at the ballot box.

Whatever happened to traditional Halloween trick-or-treating?

By traditional, I mean kids walking to houses in their neighborhoods, getting candy and in return amusing the people handing out the treats with their costumes.

In most cases, the kids knew the adults distributing the candy, and vice-versa.

Fast-forward to 2001, earlier tonight, traditional Halloween. The wife and I went to my son’s neighborhood, about a mile and a half from our home, to make the rounds with his family, which includes two young daughters.

We still were traditional, doing a quick circuit of the neighborhood on foot and calling it quits after less than an hour because a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old tire relatively quickly.

But we were out of step, figuratively and literally. Begin with the blitzkrieg tactics employed by many. Vehicles pulled up and disgorged groups of kids, who hustled to every house with the porch light on, the universal signal in these parts that there is candy to be hand.

Sometimes the transportation waited at the dropoff point. Other times, the vehicles went up and down the streets, creating unnecessary traffic with so many young children about.

I’m relatively familiar with my son’s neighborhood and I can say with some degree of certainty that a huge number of the costumed kids (some had to be teenagers, or beyond) were from parts unknown.

The mistake made by my son’s municipality, and by mine, was to have their trick-or-treat night on an island, not coordinated to share the same date with other area trick-or-treat days, so as to discourage the people who would turn this kid’s celebration into the candy equivalent of the cheese giveaways that used to attract all the area’s loose cannons.

As a child, I can never recall trick-or-treating at a house I couldn’t easily have walked to and back from.

Were I a betting man – and I am – I’d lay good odds that most of the people who were being ferried about in vehicles had crossed several municipality borders to reach this destination tonight.

One candy-grabbing vehicle had a relatively loud exhaust. I swear, when I had gotten back home with still some time left in the two-hour trick-or-treat window, I heard the same vehicle prowling our street.

I didn’t want to look to confirm it, and be forced to contemplate what sort of person turns trick-or-treat into an exercise in greed and exploitation of the generous among the population.

I saw joy on the faces of some of the kids accepting candy tonight. I saw similar happiness on the faces of many distributing the treats.

How unfortunate that this traditional children’s rite of celebration is being corrupted by greedy adults who are doing their best to indoctrinate greed in the kids they drive from area to area trying to score more candy.

What an entertaining World Series this promises to be, beyond what figures to be a good on-field product.

The cherry on the top of this sports sundae is how the two participating teams will trigger the libtards everywhere.

Begin with Atlanta. The city lost the All-Star Game this past summer because that state’s Republicans had the temerity to try to remedy obvious electoral abuses in the past presidential election, as well as in special Senate runoff elections.

But the butt-kissers in Major League Baseball management were offended and shifted the All-Star Game to . . . Colorado. That would be to a state that, horrors, requires photo identification to vote in-person and signature verification for mail-in voting.

My God, that’s suppressing the vote, right?

And Denver’s population is 9 percent black. Atlanta is 41 percent black.

Way to strike a blow for something, Major League Baseball.

But the MLB virtue signalers could not take away the World Series, so the lefty whiners will have to live with it.

And there is more. How about that offensive Atlanta nickname, the Braves? Unlike the gutless management of the Washington Redskins, who bowed to political correctness and became the Washington Football Team, Atlanta is sticking with Braves.

Come to think of it, that Washington cave-in was a win for Native Americans, since the team formerly known as the Redskins is pathetic, an on-field embarrassment to the game of football.

Back to the Braves, they have that nickname the Woke crowd can’t stand. Even worse, Braves fans do the tomahawk chop, chanting and motioning with their hands every time the Braves get something going offensively.

Gag me with a calumet (that’s a peace pipe – to spare you needing to look up the word).

The presence of the Houston Astros in this Series is amusing on several levels.

Considering their willingness to bastardize the voting process, I’m confident libtards aren’t upset that the Astros were found to have improved their chances by electronically stealing catchers’ pitch signals in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.

Not as appealing to the libtard crowd is having a team from Red State Texas playing for another title.

Monday, a day before the World Series began, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, signed into law a bill requiring transgender high school athletes to compete on teams consistent with the sex listed on their birth certificates.

Imagine the nerve of the guy, standing up for Title IX by banning guys from poaching success vs. girls on female sports teams.

Game 1 of the World Series in Houston came off with mask-less spectators, and no gratuitous political displays by the athletes or anthem singer.

Maybe when things swing to Atlanta down the line the politically correct crowd will muster a protest over the Braves nickname or some such quixotic quest.

No matter which team prevails in this World Series, we on the political right already are winners. And the pathetic inhabitants of the far left can spend the next week and change sobbing and sucking their thumbs in frustration.

The hits keep coming to the propaganda campaign being mounted by the VacciNazis and CovIdiots as they frantically push their power grab under the guise of protecting public health.

Make no mistake, whether it’s your local stores, schools, or public offices that are pushing draconian controls, or any number of similar actions being taken on state and federal levels, it’s all about controlling every aspect of your lives.

Information will be gathered and compiled in vast data bases. Freedom of movement will be hamstrung. Privacy will become an anachronistic concept. All this is in the interest of protecting against an ailment that kills about four-tenths of one percent of the population that catches it, unless they have other serious health issues.

In a case of getting the camel’s nose under the tent, recall in the early days how we were sold on lockdowns and the like under the promise of a few weeks or months “to flatten the curve.”

Years later, that curve has been pounded flat, but face diapers continue to be required. Private gatherings such as holiday parties are frowned upon, yet somehow it’s OK to pack 70,000 into a sports stadium for an event.

Vaccines are being made mandatory creating the jab or job choice.

Yet, against this nonstop drumbeat of fear and subservience, Clueless Joe Biden, a MaskHole if ever there was one, was caught recently at a social gathering sans his trademark mask.

Hypocrisy is the base principle of the VacciNazis and CovIdiots.

How else to explain both of these extremist groups ignoring “THE SCIENCE!”?

Vaccines were supposed to protect us. Even if some of the vaccinated got the virus, we were assured that their illness would not be as bad as in the un-vaccinated.

Try telling that to Colin Powell, fully vaccinated and also fully dead due to COVID. So, his vaccine saved him from . . . what’s worse than being dead?

Meanwhile Sweden. which proved a nation didn’t need to shut down to flatten the infection curve, has banned one vaccine due to heart problems developed by young men taking the “cure.”

Colin Powell might soon have company in the vaccine graveyard.

Could it be taking the vaccine is as dangerous as being around Alec Baldwin with a prop gun in his hand?

Ireland has the highest vaccination rate in Europe. Ireland also has the highest rate of new COVID cases.

How do they explain that? With the usual doubletalk. Bottom line: Believe the science except when it disproves your assertion, then blissfully ignore the data.

The surprise isn’t that a recent survey in Democratic Maryland found a majority of respondents came down against mandatory vaccinations for either teachers or students, it’s that more people are not rising up and saying enough is enough.

Stand up to the VacciNazis and CovIdiots before they achieve their goal, that being total enslavement of the populace to their whims and desires.

If you have yet to read Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” you really should find the time.

And it will be a great amount of time to get through Rand’s opus, which runs nearly 1,200 pages.

Don’t bother with the three-part movie series, which goes to great lengths to prove what academics had been saying all along – the book is unfilmable.

The three “Atlas Shrugged” movies used different actors to play the main characters, of necessity abridged much of the book’s content, and generally failed, to borrow a line from the movie “Slap Shot,” to capture the spirit of the thing.

Again, read the book. You will cringe at how Rand, writing the book published in 1957, could so accurately depict current events.

What Rand wrote was a tale of how a once-great industrial nation could be brought down by corrupt bureaucrats in government, by the dumbing down of the population, and by the penalizing of individualism and exceptionalism.

The drones among the populace in Rand’s book were described as “looters,” content to live off the productivity and creativity of others.

Worse, success was punished by governments, both in a confiscatory sense and also from the standpoint of looking to equalize competition by penalizing the strong companies to prop up the weak.

Rand’s United States in “Atlas Shrugged” was a patchwork of dying major cities, destitute small towns and collapsing infrastructure as evidenced by failing factories and railroads. It was a nation inhabited by people content to be wards of the government, which would provide for them by taxing the rich.

Supply chains were collapsing. Creative, innovative people found themselves increasingly unwilling to carry the load for all the looters.

Have you done any shopping recently and found bare sections of shelving staring back at you? Have you heard Clueless Joe Biden’s mouthpieces joking how we Americans have been spoiled by having choices at stores and should learn to deal with being a third-world nation?

Have you noticed how eager some of your neighbors were, and are, to sit back and collect government handouts rather than working?

Rand’s book was filled with bureaucratic gobbledygook such as the Anti-dog-eat-dog rule to subsidize unproductive railroads at the expense of those railroads that were efficient and solvent.

It’s not much different than the current “infrastructure” bill, which is long on spending on things such as climate, pension funding, illegal immigrants and environmental issues and short on putting money toward traditional infrastructure such as roads, airports and various utilities such as electric power or water.

You can call it “infrastructure” but that doesn’t make it infrastructure spending.

To avoid spoiling Rand’s ending, I will say only that it is a bit contrived in its details. But it is all too accurate in the concept that the more producers are punished and malingerers are rewarded, the fewer producers you will have.

I have read some learned observers speculate that the liberals must be intent on destroying this nation. There can be no other explanation for the ridiculous path on which they are and have been attempting to steer us.

Current events increasingly are indicating they are succeeding. If you can’t wait to witness the end game firsthand, read “Atlas Shrugged.”

Having spent decades covering sporting events for newspapers, I heard more than my share of fans whining about the officiating being biased.

There were isolated instances when I agreed. More often, viewing from the emotionally detached position of rooting for neither side, I saw mostly fair calls.

Yes, some calls were bad, but it didn’t necessarily favor one team. They were just mistakes without an agenda.

Watching the baseball postseason, I’m here to tell you the umpiring has been shaky, particularly on the subject of calling balls and strikes, or checked swings.

It’s not that one team is necessarily getting the shaft from the umpires, but try telling that to the San Francisco fans who saw their team eliminated when an obvious check swing was instead called a swing and a miss.

Batter out. Game, series and season over just that quickly on one horrendous call.

Most of poor umpiring is not as dramatic, but it is determining outcomes.

In Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, right-handed Boston hitter J.D. Martinez, an accomplished batsman with a good concept of the strike zone, kept having outside pitches called strikes against him.

At least he thought so and the telecast’s strike zone graphic confirmed his opinion.

Eventually, Martinez had to begin swinging at those outside pitches and it didn’t go well.

Bad calls can put hitters in the hole in terms of the ball-strike count. Similarly, good pitches called balls put the pitchers behind in the count, making hitters comfortable and thereby more dangerous and lessening the effectiveness of pitchers.

It was merely opinion before the technology was developed to superimpose a strike zone box on the broadcast. Now there is instant confirmation of what fans long had thought – home plate umpires miss an awful lot of calls.

Mostly these are consistently inaccurate, penalizing both teams. But, if the umpires make mistakes in crucial moments for your team – think the San Francisco check swing – it’s only human nature to see grand theft.

Baseball has no monopoly on this. Already in this NFL and college football seasons there have been blown calls that left the broadcast officiating experts at a loss to cover up for their former colleagues on the field.

NHL officiating has been miserable for decades, particularly the trend toward officiating with the score in mind. Teams behind tend to get more power plays.

NHL games in overtime, especially in the playoffs, have the referees pocket their whistles lest they be accused of determining the outcome. And so the players, fully knowing this, commit atrocious infractions secure in the knowledge that more likely than not they will not be sent to the penalty box.

NBA officials are similarly lame, often ignoring fouls committed by star players and, when some defender breathes on those stars, foul calls come quickly against that defender.

Add in that NBA players can run a 100-yard dash without dribbling and not be called for traveling and you have NBA officiating neatly defined.

Apologists contend officiating gaffes are just part of the game, no different than a player striking out, dropping a pass, missing a shot or allowing a soft goal.

But players who strike out too often, drop too many passes, miss too many shots or let in too many cheap goals, find themselves unemployed.

Umpires and officials in other sports are graded, but some of the worst offenders inexplicably linger season after season to blow calls, sometimes in critical situations. We all deserve better.

We’re talking COLA today. Hint: It’s not the kind you drink, which you might have suspected due to the capital letters.

COLA is shorthand for Cost Of Living Adjustment, which is a way to index things such as Social Security and federal retirement benefits to inflation.

Despite the best efforts of the powers-that-be to brand rising price inflation as “transitory,” it is becoming more and more evident that, if anything, we may be in the early days of what will turn into even higher inflation.

The federal government has admitted that in part by announcing a 5.9-percent COLA for 2022.

A story by Associated Press said this means the average Social Security recipient will get $92 more a month in benefits. The average couple will see an increase of $154 a month.

It sounds good, until you look at the reason for this most recent COLA, which is the largest in 39 years – almost four decades!

But look closer and you will discover that you are only being compensated – partially – for the fact that almost everything you need in terms of goods and services costs much more now.

The Feds are sure to claw back some of that COLA by hiking the cost of the Medicare Part B premium most retirees pay. Expect that increase to be more than 5.9 percent.

But it goes beyond that. Gasoline prices have soared. I’m currently insulated from that a bit due to a gas war. One area location has gas priced at $3.09.9 a gallon, while others have it at $3.45.9. I asked a cashier about this the other day and she said it was in response to an area convenience story re-opening a location and offering gas cheap.

I checked on the way to mow my mother’s lawn and that re-opened outlet is priced at $2.99.9 per gallon. I’m not sure how long it will last. I do know it’s a temporary phenomenon.

Increasing prices for luxuries such as food, shelter, transportation, healthcare, energy, are not as temporary.

That 5.9-percent COLA increase will help, but it will not come close to erasing the pain of the higher prices almost across-the-board.

Understand that this COLA is not a benevolent act by the Feds, but merely an acknowledgment that things are costing more as measured by their indexes, and those government measurement tools are known to err on the low side.

If the Feds are admitting to an inflation rate near 6 percent, you can be certain it is much higher. Some independent sources put the actual inflation rate at closer to 10 percent.

Unsolicited advice: If you want and/or need something, buy it now. It is unlikely to be available for less down the line except in the event of some incredible one-time sale event. But, in general, expect to pay more for almost anything you consume going forward.

This might cause you to reach for a drink, something stronger than cola, or COLA.

I went to my bank today to cash a check and it was closed for Columbus Day. I’m outraged.

Haven’t we heard ad nauseam that celebrating Columbus and his “discovery” of America in effect honors genocide, slavery of indigenous people and just about any other outrageous claim of wrongdoing the leftist critics care to put forth to be disseminated by their lapdogs in the LameStream media?

After all we’ve been told about this being an invalid holiday, after all the Columbus statues that have been taken down or boxed (more on boxings later) how can banks ignore this and close for the day, giving their employees the day off? Why is there no mail service today? Why are all manner of public offices and schools vacant today?

The cynic in me thinks that, when faced with a day off work or school, the work component coming without missing any pay, well, even the ideologues can put their professed outrage on the shelf in the interest of what’s good for them at the time.

Think of this in the category of flaming liberals who insist decaying, ineffective public schools are good enough for your kids, but their kids are going to exclusive private schools, thank you for noticing.

Can’t let your zealous causes interfere with a day off, or your children’s education.

Confused Joe Biden, looking to straddle the fence with the attendant risk to private parts (presuming he still has any) thinks we ought to celebrate Italian heritage with Columbus Day, but we also should give a nod to the competing holiday that has been chucked onto the calendar on the very same date, that being Indigenous Peoples Day.

Please note that for all the verbiage, it is Columbus Day that is the federal holiday. Indigenous Peoples Day is more like those feel-good examples of virtue-signaling that crowd the calendar.

Every day is national something day, often more than one national somethings day. We have weeks and months selected to honor causes and, again, often there are different causes for the same weeks and months.

It all gets pretty confusing, and relatively meaningless. Think of it as holiday inflation in which, just like monetary inflation makes every dollar worth that much less, every artificial holiday devalues the ones meriting the celebration.

But there are spoilsports who are infringing on the canceling of Columbus Day. A Pennsylvania judge has ordered Philadelphia to take down the box the city administrators erected around a Columbus statute, this box being designed to shield hypersensitive souls from having to view this tribute to a man they rank about on par with Adolf Hitler.

Yet many of these confused souls inexplicably wear Che Guevara T-shirts, honoring the memory of a man who was a murderer, a racist, notably anti-gay and someone who set up a concentration camp in Cuba for political opponents, but now has been whitewashed as a “revolutionary.”

And, again, the cynic in me wonders aloud if all these bleeding hearts so opposed to Columbus Day were willing to bypass the day off work today, or sent their spawn to vacant schools as a protest of closing those learning centers to honor a pariah like Columbus.

I think I know the answer, and so do you.

This blog promises a dash of sports commentary and today we deliver by expounding on the topic of sports Christmas in October.

Here’s hoping the social justice warriors and the virtue signaling they extort from the game providers don’t ruin the enjoyment.

If you like sports of all sorts, this is a good time of the year for you. We have postseason baseball. We have college football. We have pro football. We have the so-called “playoff” portion of NASCAR.

Preseason hockey means the start of the NHL regular season is nigh. The NBA season also is soon to begin.

And these are just the most popular sporting events of the moment. Truly, there is an abundance.

But if you don’t want your sports leavened with a measure of left-wing pandering, you have to have a plan.

First, avoid pregame shows. Second, if the game broadcasts show pregame activities, try to skip them and show up in front of the television just in time for play to commence.

For those attending in-person, you have no choice but to endure. Or just stay home.

Now that sports betting is legal in Pennsylvania, I spice up the occasion by wagering a dollar here or there. Think of it as the gambling equivalent of quaffing some eggnog around Christmas,.

Let me stress, when I say a dollar or so, I’m not exaggerating. I’m simply small time, making my gambling profits by trying to slog through promotions on games such as blackjack, roulette or baccarat at or near even money and then making money with the accompanying free credits or free bets.

A curious fallout from the legalization of sports betting is that I’ve found I’m terrible at it, despite a career spent covering and analyzing sports. This is why I need the promos, but I still can’t help myself from occasionally wagering on sports.

I’m writing this today while taking a break from watching multiple bets come unraveled.

I took Iowa and the under (combined total points scored) in the college football game with Penn State and am well on my way to losing that. Part of it was a free bet offered by my online sports site. Part of it was my own hard-earned $2.

Things also are beginning to look dicey regarding my bet on Georgia to beat Auburn and the combined point total to remain on the under side of the bookies’ line.

I do have Atlanta and the Los Angeles Dodgers parlayed to be winners in Major League Baseball, counting on either side avoiding falling in a 2-0 playoff series hole. So far, Atlanta is on top 2-0 in the fourth inning of the game with Milwaukee. At least the Braves were ahead when I stepped away from the television.

Ordinarily I’d have watched NASCAR races today and tomorrow, but I’m swearing off because I’m sure those broadcasts were and will be drowning in virtue signaling orgies of self-congratulation since Bubba Wallace won last week in a rain-shortened crashfest.

I will watch a few NFL games tomorrow, if only to monitor bets I will have open (a couple of $15 freebies in the same-game parlay category), one of which I already have made (go Green Bay!) and one yet to be specified.

But, if the weather is nice, I might just forget about the NFL during the day and take the two Mustangs out for rides.

There still will be the night NFL game and postseason baseball to be viewed after dark. There will be bets to be made – and lost.

I laugh so I don’t cry as each passing day presents further proof of the ineptitude of Joe Biden and his handlers.

And where is the LameStream media to lament our diminishing image globally? If Trump was making a fool of himself, they would be all over it, like BLM protesters on innocent diners.

But Biden is Teflon among the LameStream media.

This means John Kerry can go on French TV and say Biden was unaware the French were in a snit over the U.S. submarine deal with Australia and there is no outrage back home.

This is not to suggest Kerry was fudging. Instead, it was an inadvertent look into the true nature of the Biden Regime, in which the guy allegedly in charge is just taking orders from unknown, or unseen puppeteers and largely remains blissfully ignorant of reality.

How often do we hear Biden say he’s been ordered not to take questions, or told only to call on certain reporters when he does so?

How many times do his handlers rush reporters out of the room to shield bumbling Biden, as they did recently during a Boris Johnson photo op in which the British prime minister was willing to take inquiries from the media?

Imagine that!

Just the other day Biden referred to he and his ChiCom buddies adhering to the “Taiwan Agreement.”

Confusion reigned because no one seemed to be sure exactly what Biden meant by the phrase because there is no such agreement.

I’m about to buy some of the signs I see springing up, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump.”

For you Biden voters, you must love it every time you put gasoline in your car; gasoline is about $1 higher per gallon over a year ago thanks in large part to Biden’s lame policy to hamstring U.S. production and exploration.

But it’s not just gasoline. The Biden inflation is evident across the board as he and his cronies distort the economy, producing shortages mixed with artificially high demand brought on by governmental handout policies.

It’s a mess and you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Meanwhile, the Biden Regime is readying the IRS to spy on those who do not buy his bull spit. It will corrupt further an already corrupted FBI to spy on parents attending school board meetings to express displeasure at mask mandates, leftist curriculum and other absurdities.

But the population has many vocal critics. Chants break out at football games “F . . . Joe Biden” using an F word that rhymes with luck.

After a recent auto race, a flustered on-track interviewer tried to insist fans were yelling “Let’s go Brandon” to celebrate first-time winner Brandon Brown.

Ample audio evidence confirms it was, instead, “F . . . Joe Biden.”

Anger is palpable among many in the populace. The Biden Regime is only adding fuel to that fire.