Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

There is a story out today, supposedly leaked by a whistleblower, that the Supreme Court passed on hearing the Texas complaint involving tainted elections at the behest of Chief Justice John Roberts.

According to the recounting of the events, Roberts was screaming so loud at other justices that he could be heard outside the closed-door room.

Robert’s supposed warning: “Are you going to be responsible for the rioting if we hear this case?”

And so we have apparent confirmation of what has been written here for some time, that even the people in charge, who know this election was questionable, just don’t have the intestinal fortitude to right the wrongs, to enforce our Constitution.

They are cowed by the Antifa and Black Lives Matter crowd. They fear the cancel culture. They bow to the mob, which begs the question of why we need such people to be in positions of authority?

Texas and the raft of states who signed on to the Supreme Court argument, had a case based on constitutional dictates. The U.S. Supreme Court is supposed to consider such differences between the states, with the Constitution as the guide.

But the Supreme Court passed on its duty, perhaps due to fear of the outcome in terms of societal strife.

Conservatives apparently are going to keep getting abused and cheated up to the time when they also take to the streets to get the attention of the powers-that-be.

But it would not be enough to match the violence of the left. The political right would need to top the actions of the left to get the attention of the people who matter.

This is an argument distilled nicely in dialogue from the 1997 movie “The Untouchables” as voiced by Sean Connery’s character; “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”

Antifa and all other manner of violent radical leftist groups discovered that they can get their demands met by making life difficult, particularly in cities led by weak-kneed liberals who only get concerned when rioting or autonomous zones come to their neighborhoods – witness actions of the mayors of Seattle and Portland.

If you watched any national news ahead of the election, you saw storefronts being boarded up in case the election went the wrong way – read that as in case Trump won and the leftists were not prepared to accept that.

Instead, we have Biden apparently winning. But there is no rioting from disaffected conservatives and Trump supporters. Yet.

Maybe there will not be any. But I would not bet on it.

There is anger among the 74 million or so who voted for Trump and are at a loss to understand how they see evidence upon evidence of election misdeeds, yet no government action is being taken to correct, or even fully investigate the situation.

State judicial representatives and state legislatures have done little. Governors of questioned states also have been doing their best to ignore, or make token efforts at resolution.

Now the Supreme Court has taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil approach even to considering what arguably is the case that could be pivotal to the future of this nation.

I have written often that doing the right thing requires the kind of strength our wimpy leaders do not display.

The internet remains alive with speculation about what actions a frustrated President Trump might take in order to bring the alleged election fraud into the open since others below him have passed on their duty, including the U.S. Department of Justice.

It would surprise me if such dramatic action by Trump transpired, but it would not disappoint me.

Founding Father Thomas Jefferson recognized there would be points in the future of this nation when dramatic action would be needed to preserve freedom.

Said Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots, and tyrants.”

Things got a little exciting in the neighborhood the other morning when, shortly before 9 a.m., there was a loud bang outside, which caught the attention of my wife and two granddaughters.

I dismissed it as the prevalent modus operandi of delivery people, who insist on slamming shut sliding doors with so much force it’s like they are trying to send them to China.

Not willing to accept my theory, the wife ran to a window in the living room and discovered a pickup truck resting on my next-door neighbor’s front lawn, having taken out a large bush before coming to a stop.

I rushed out on this brisk December morning, sans coat and wearing only slippers, to find a neighbor from across the street already checking on the driver, who remained sitting behind the wheel with the motor still running, and the driver looking properly dazed.

I pried open the driver’s side door and, as the guy inside shut off the car at the suggestion of the other neighbor, I took stock of his situation.

He wasn’t hurt, he assured. He also didn’t seem to be particularly coherent.

My wife had called 911 and then came out to hand me the cell phone, thereby giving the operator the opportunity to quiz me on several topics, including whether anyone here was suffering from COVID-19. I am not making this up.

Police and medical personal were on the way, I was assured. Neighbor one asked me if I had this under control and went back to his home across the street. Another neighbor wandered over to take his place and we waited.

It eventually came out that the guy who created this mess had slammed into a parked car four houses up and in the process, the pickup truck had shed its driver’s side front wheel and suspension. That missing assembly was still on the pavement, four houses up the street.

The pickup truck next had veered left, scraping one small tree and narrowly avoiding a massive one – oak, I believe – digging up grass in multiple yards and knocking off the neighbor’s bush, which had a trunk about six inches in diameter.

He had gone a long way, maybe 150 feet, after losing the wheel before stopping. No tire skid marks from serious braking were to be found on the neighbor’s concrete driveway. Curious.

We left everything as it was, including the driver sitting in his seat right up until the time when four police cars, from multiple jurisdictions, showed up, along with an ambulance, a fire truck and another emergency response vehicle.

It strikes me that the defund-the-police types should consider things such as this, occurring in a relatively quiet residential borough, when they call for the end of policing as we know it.

If there are no police, who becomes the official source to sort out such a mess? Although I cannot confirm it, I was told by a guy who had been talking with the police that the driver registered well above the cutoff for driving drunk.

The same person who relayed the alcohol result told me that earlier he had helped the guy into his car at a nearby deli, thinking he was ill. When this person went inside to make his purchase, the help there told him the guy was drunk.

Our truck driver did have a submarine sandwich and drink (coffee?) in the cab of his vehicle.

I’m not sure how this witness from the deli made it to the accident scene, about one-half mile away from the store, but I’m speculating he had heard the sirens and curiosity took over. I know he told me he did tell all this to the police – about seeing the guy at the deli, etc.

Since we do have a police force, the neighbor whose car was smashed, and the neighbor whose bush got a fatal trimming, had someone to go to for official accident reports to begin the insurance process.

Because we have police, I’m presuming our driver is going to be held to account for his alleged impaired state, presuming what I was told was accurate and I’d made the correct assessment based on what I’d seen.

With no police, this sort of thing would turn into a free-for-all; vigilante justice at its best.

It’s not just murders, rapes, assaults, robberies and other assorted major crimes that require the police. It’s mundane things like auto accidents, trespassing, petty theft and so many other infractions that take place in society and require a neutral, credentialed third party to resolve.

Instead of defunding the police, let us defund the political activists who curry favor with far-left groups with such outrageous demands, and encounter too many weak-kneed politicians who either are unwilling or unable to resist their insanity.

I listen to Joe Biden repeatedly respond to inquiries about the woes of his son Hunter with stock variations on the theme that he’s proud of the guy, and I think of actor John Banner, AKA Sgt. Schultz.

Most recently, when it came to light that Hunter is being investigated for potential tax fraud and money laundering, Joe yelled to the few reporters who dared to ask about the inquiry, “I’m proud of my son.”

On the infrequent occasions when the coddling media members have brought up other Hunter issues, like having a job as a consultant to a foreign energy company despite lacking any real expertise in the area, Joe has claimed to have been proud of Hunter then, too.

Hunter’s ties with Chinese? Joe is proud.

Hunter has had problems with drugs and alcohol, marriage, and for a time was dating his dead brother’s widow.

The guy even claimed Immaculate Conception of one of his children, fathered, he contended, without the benefit of sexual intercourse with the mother.

DNA evidence put before the court, as Hunter attempted to dodge financial responsibility for the child, indicated “with near scientific certainty” that he was, indeed, the father of said child and Hunter finally folded his losing denial hand and started paying.

Joe, of course, would have been about to bust with pride over that, if anyone had bothered to ask.

As a father myself, I understand parental pride. But I’m thinking if my son had confessed to problems with drugs and alcohol, had fathered an illegitimate child and tried to weasel out of financial responsibility, and had somehow tried to trade on my name – as likely as the last might seem — I’d still love the guy.

But proclaim pride over all those shortcomings? Not so much. Maybe sympathy, or empathy or general understanding. Maybe a heart-to-heart chat that would have been attempted with the message being that it’s time to clean up the act.

It would not have been a matter of pride.

Now a few words about John Banner/Sgt. Schultz. I grew up watching the Hogan’s Heroes show, a half-hour sit-com that ran from 1965 to 1972 with the unlikely setting of a German prisoner of war camp. Banner’s Schultz character made famous the tag line “I know nothing. Nothing!” as he ignored prisoners’ schemes

Only this week, while watching reruns of The Untouchables that air on Sunday afternoons on one cable outlet, did I discover that Banner had used the know-nothing line before Hogan’s Heroes.

Specifically, in one episode of The Untouchables from 1962, Banner played a German brewmaster putting out illegal beer in prohibition-era Chicago. He was being used as an unwitting tool in a battle between two mobsters and when one of those mobsters confronted Banner over his role with the competition, Banner’s reply was “Nothing. I know nothing!”

This time Banner’s character truly was in the dark.

It’s hard to believe Joe Biden is totally in the dark about Hunter, but on occasion he’s been Sgt. Schultz-like in denying knowing what Hunter was up to. Joe Biden also claimed to be unaware, literally saying “I know nothing,” about moves by the FBI to investigate Trump national security adviser General Michael Flynn that were aired in a meeting attended by Biden as vice president.

Biden had to walk back the Flynn denial later in the same interview, claiming he’d misheard the question.

So far “I know nothing” regarding Hunter has been accepted.

Of the two, “I know nothing” is less irritating than “I’m proud.”

Imagine parents of historical figures borrowing from Joe’s “I’m proud” shtick.

So, Mrs. Hitler, Adolf seems to have done some very bad things. What’s that? You’re proud of your son?

OK. Never mind.

And I see you nodding Mr. Boesky, Mrs. Ponzi and Mr. Madoff.

You’re proud, too?

Well, I guess that makes everything OK.

Election fraud has been rendered a non-issue. Hunter Biden’s investigation for tax dodging continues.

But the big story is Jill Biden’s insistence on being referred to as Dr. Jill Biden.

It reminds me of a story a fellow Pittsburgh sports columnist told me of trying to call then-Pitt men’s basketball coach Roy Chipman for a few quotes.

Chipman’s stuffy secretary answered the call and when said writer asked to talk to Roy, she took the opportunity to remind him that it was “Dr.” Roy Chipman.

Chipman’s doctorate was not in physics, or mathematics, or history, or English, but rather physical education. At least it wasn’t in coaching basketball, a subject in which Chipman was more bachelor’s degree level.

It is not clear if it was a Chipman dictate that he be referred to as a Dr., or just the secretary taking it upon herself to be an elitist.

Generally, those who would insist on being referred to as Dr., at least beyond those who have a medical doctorate, or those who are operating outside their doctoral field, are decried as elitists.

But not so in the case of Dr. Jill. It was particularly helpful as the COVID-19 situation was being politicized, to note that Joe Biden’s wife was a Dr. But her doctorate is in education, not medicine.

No matter. The uninformed would never bother to make that determination and they certainly would not be told so by the fawning media, so Joe probably picked up some votes based on Jill being a Dr.

An Op-Ed piece appearing in the Wall Street Journal recently that suggested Dr. Jill drop the Dr. has been reacted to with customary outrage, blaming the writer for being a misogynist, and perhaps a Neanderthal and a racist, too.

Funny, but the left-leaning media had ridiculed Rand Paul, when he was running for president, for preferring to be referred to as Dr. Rand Paul. He is an ophthalmologist.

In an April 10, 2015, editorial, the Los Angeles Times mocked Dr. Paul with the headline “If Paul won, would we have to call him Dr. President?”

The rambling editorial also remarked that people such as Dr. Charles Krauthammer, should ditch the Dr. title when functioning as a political pundit, even though he had a doctorate in psychology.

But Dr. Jill is a political figure, too. Her claim to fame is being Joe Biden’s husband, so maybe she should dispense the Dr. title?

No, that is ridiculous even to suggest since Dr. Jill, unlike Paul or Krauthammer, is on the political left, and a woman to boot, so her wishes must be honored, sanctified, and chiseled into granite.

Technically, it should be Dr. Joe Biden, too. He has a law degree, which is a doctorate. But you don’t often hear lawyers insisting on being referred to as doctors.

When the Bidens appear in the U.S. Capital for the State of the Union address, it will be Dr. Joe and Dr. Jill went up a hill. But they won’t be going there to fetch pails of water. The lame-stream media does the job of carrying their metaphorical political water for them.

While attending my son’s commencement for his Master’s Degree, I was astounded to see some of the doctorates that were awarded.

Taking a few minutes to do a general internet search, I find that in general one can pursue, at various universities, doctorates in Dramaturgy (drama and theatre), Parapsychology (paranormal), Safenology (societal safety), Thanatology (working in a hospice) and ambiguous things known as “self-designed” doctorate programs, the post-graduate equivalent of Burger King’s “Have it your way!”

Put in the time. Pay the money. Shazzam, you’re a doctor.

There was one of those self-designed doctorates awarded at my son’s event for something that on the surface seemed patently ridiculous, but I can’t recall the specifics.

I wonder if that woman goes around insisting that people refer to her as Dr.?

It seems such insistence, whether by Dr. Jill or others, serves as a window into an insecure individual’s psyche. Desperate for acclaim and respect, they want to trumpet titles over actual accomplishments.

But theirs is a battle that eventually they are likely to lose.

When Chipman died at the early age of 58 due to cancer, and after he had left coaching for private business, the Associated Press obit, as published in the New York Times called him simply Roy Chipman basketball coach.

No Dr. Roy. No reference at all to that doctorate.

I suspect that when Jill Biden dies, similarly there will be no Dr. title and her most notable deed will be having married a president of the United States, for which there is, as of now, no doctorate degree.

No need to pinch yourself. You’re not dreaming, or rather you’re not having a nightmare if you’re a right-leaning, honest citizen of this great land and you are shaking your head over continuing revelations of misdeeds in and around the past election.

Remember when the New York Post reported on what Hunter Biden’s laptop computer revealed about secret meetings and immediately was censored by the leftist powers of social media? Well Hunter finally came clean today that he is and has been under investigation for possible tax fraud.

To recap: The New York Post was right and the socialist tech giants were wrong.

News of this Biden investigation is safe to allow to be disseminated now because the election is over, at least that’s what leftists are confident is the case, although the Supreme Court possibly could see it differently.

Some polls have discovered that a significant percentage of Joe Biden voters – enough to swing the election – would not have voted for Joe had they known about Hunter being investigated.

This is both a sad commentary not only on the impact of lame-stream media and internet censorship, but also about the relative laziness and ignorance of the voting public.

I knew about Hunter. Many of my neighbors, friends, family and acquaintances knew about it. Yes, easy dissemination of the news was blocked, but it was far from a secret.

Remember, we’re talking about Biden’s troubled son Hunter, the guy who could land big deals to consult on topics in which he had no particular expertise.

That was widely known, too, even before files in the Biden laptop were made public. Now there is a tax-fraud investigation, but no problem. Hunter claims to have had tax pros do that work for him and he’s confident this investigation will be a non-event.

Joe Biden, predictably, has noted he’s “deeply proud” of Hunter in the wake of this latest news. As one cynic asked, is becoming the subject of an investigation a Biden family rite of passage?

So social media and internet giants, along with lame-stream media, having been successful in keeping Hunter’s misdeeds from being publicized are taking it a step further. The online guardians now will ban any content alleging election fraud.

That would be considered disinformation, no matter that videos, affidavits and statistical analysis exist that indicate rampant election shenanigans. That list of evidence of a tainted election doesn’t even include some states ignoring their constitutions or the federal constitution, to change voting standards.

But your digital demi-gods have spoken. You will not be able to read any of that truth on their platforms.

At the risk of being criticized for patting myself on the back, for many years I’ve been telling friends and acquaintances to avoid the urge to join Facebook or Twitter and use it for digital bragging, thereby furthering those oligarchs’ digital stranglehold. Similarly, don’t depend on Google for internet searches.

They are spying on you and merchandising your information. Worse, they are manipulating you with the way they censor information, or send tailored messages to targeted audiences.

It’s all out in the open now, but the sheep don’t seem to care. Baaaaaahhh. Baaaaaahhh. Baaaaaahhh.

But not all are shrinking from the challenge. Led by Texas, about one-third of the states in our union are appealing to the Supreme Court to address the unconstitutional way some states ran this presidential election.

Meanwhile, prominent Democrat Eric Swalwell, a member of the House Intelligence Committee and the pudgy face most likely to show up in front of a television camera to accuse President Trump of being a Russian agent, has been revealed to have kept close company with a young, attractive, Chinese spy.

Swalwell’s implausible rationalizations for this strange relationship range from calling the whole thing Russian disinformation (at least he’s consistent there), or labeling it Trump retribution, or just indicating it was him cooperating with the FBI to break up the Chinese intelligence ring.

None of this passes the smell test, of course. Just as ridiculous are assertions by Big Tech and Big Media that there were no widespread flaws in this most recent election.

We’ve descended so far down the rabbit hole that now people caught with their pants down – either literally or figuratively – no longer even bother to cobble up some reasonable attempt at an alibi. Rather, they spout their customary boilerplate tripe and assure us it’s now time to put the incidents behind us and move on to a better future.

Feel free to buy their half-baked rhetoric. I refuse and can only hope and pray that the majority can be persuaded to see the light before it’s extinguished.

And now it falls to the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold election laws that were so cavalierly violated in many states during the past month’s elections.

Will the justices rise to the occasion? I doubt it, but I’m hoping to be surprised.

Texas has filed a motion directly with the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin citing election misconduct that the leadership of Texas deemed to be unconstitutional.

Louisiana has joined in the Texas pursuit of justice.

This happened on a day when it came to light that a prominent Democratic Congressman from California had a long-term relationship, perhaps sexual, with a Chinese spy. This would be the same guy who couldn’t pass on any opportunity to get in front of cameras to blame President Trump for being a Russian operative.

Can you say projection?

It came on a day when the incoming Los Angeles County District Attorney has announced that he will enforce only the laws he agrees with and ignore the remainder.

If you like such things, then you’re going to love a Harris-Biden administration.

Constitutional scholars realize that the Texas motion has ample merit. But will the Supreme Court actually hear the case, after it receives the responses it has ordered by Thursday from the states being cited for providing unequal treatment for voters?

Here’s where doing the right thing isn’t easy. If the justices hear the case and opt, as requested, to bar those states’ electoral voters as per the flawed election results and allow instead the constitutional process for replacing the electors to be followed, they will meet mammoth criticism from leftists, both in the media and in courts or governmental bodies.

I am expecting – fearing – the Supreme Court will borrow a page from gutless Attorney General William Barr and say the infractions don’t seem significant enough to have altered the outcome of the election.

Yes, that’s ridiculous when the margins in the swing states were so close and the lack of control on the huge numbers of mail-in ballots was so prevalent. But Barr thought he could get away with that sort of verbal whitewash, and the very next day had to water down his remarks in a release issued by his underlings at the Department of Justice.

It would not be stunning if the Supreme Court weaseled out similarly in what is a pivotal moment for this country.

If Trump is denied a second term based on widespread election misconduct, and if the Democrats can win both Senate runoff races in Georgia – where the people in charge have taken no steps to correct the problems of this most recent general election – this country as we know it is finished.

The points have been made previously, but bear repeating. Democrats, so brazen in their manipulation of the voting rules this time, would be free to put their rush toward socialism into high gear.

You will end up paying higher taxes – no matter what Democrats have told you – because all those handouts are going to cost incredible amounts of money that the federal, state and local governments simply do not have and taxing only the rich can’t provide.

But that’s just the start. Democrats will provide statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, counting on that to add four guaranteed leftist Senators and a likely permanent Senate majority.

They will pack the Supreme Court just to guarantee that somewhere down the line a group of the present number of nine justices won’t grow collective backbone and confront an issue of mammoth national significance by coming down against the political left.

Previous Supreme Courts have had no problems flying in the face of conservatives, and the population in general, by ending school prayer or allowing abortions.

This Supreme Court holds the future direction of the nation in its hands. The justices get to decide whether the Constitution must be followed, or is merely to be considered a vague suggestion that easily can be ignored if there’s enough money and corruption behind those looking to skirt its dictates.

Led by Chief Justice John Roberts, something of a master at wetting his finger and holding it in the air to see which way the political winds are blowing, this Supreme Court does not inspire confidence, no matter what the supposed conservative-liberal ratio of the justices is purported to be.

The ball now is squarely the court of the Supremes. Likely as not, they will dribble it off their feet and out of bounds.

But feel free to surprise me by doing the right thing, even if it is the hard thing.

It was during an Iowa town hall for would-be presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren back in January that the definitive argument was made against forgiving student loans.

Of course it wasn’t made by Warren, who soon was drummed out of the presidential field and has since returned to being a left-wing U.S. Senator and Native American poser. No, the penetrating insight was provided by a father, who had scrimped and saved to put his daughter through college with no student loans.

Asking Warren if forgiving the debt of the profligate meant he’d then get his money back, too, the man received the sort of dismissive answer that might be expected from Fauxcahontas.

“Of course not,” was Warren’s snide, condescending response.

Replied the man, cutting to the crux of the matter: “We did the right thing, and we get screwed.”

Welcome to the club.

There are a lot of us who did what we thought was the right thing, but it has turned out to be the wrong thing. In my particular circumstance, my wife and I paid off the bulk of our son’s college debt, with him contributing some to the effort. That was for his bachelor’s degree. He got a graduate assistant position to obtain his master’s and incurred no debt.

I guess we should have bought another vehicle, added on to the house, gone on some vacations, or just thrown money out the windows of our cars any time we drove instead of paying off that college loan.

If you think media efforts to deny cheating in the past election are disgusting exercises in propaganda, get ready for the lame-stream media’s take on forgiving student loans.

They will paint it as merely doing the right thing, and taking a burden off the youth – aka our future — and they also will portray any who would think it foolhardy to erase the debt as selfish idiots. No doubt those in opposition will be called racists, misogynists, Nazis and any other of the standard labels hung on those who would disagree with the lunatic left.

The banks or other organizations that provided those loans will be portrayed as predators preying on callow youth.

When I was young, a person had to display some academic credentials to get into college. Now it’s the ability to fog a mirror, and more importantly, the ability to pay – or get someone else to pay – that allows students to pursue something as productive as puppetry, urban studies, or, as seems to be the favorite of Pitt football players, administration of justice.

First of all, if a person attending college didn’t understand that taking out a “loan” meant the money must be repaid, then they really didn’t belong in college in the first place.

Higher education, like healthcare, housing and the stock markets, are quintessential examples of excess liquidity distorting the picture.

Colleges, which once put students in relatively spartan dorms, now compete for students by offering the equivalent of luxury apartments. Sure, it’s much more expensive, but you can just borrow more.

And colleges don’t want students to bother to complete their bachelor’s degrees in four years. Take five or six, or more. Just keep paying the schools their ever-increasing tuition and other costs.

If universities really wanted to cut students a break, they’d slim down degree requirements in terms of credits required outside the area of the students’ majors. But that would put a lot of philosophy professors on the unemployment line, so we can’t have that.

I personally knew a “non-traditional” college student – translation: someone older than average going to college. He discovered he could borrow enough money he didn’t have to get a summer job, so he maxed out his college loans and took the summer’s off to ride his motorcycle, attend any manner of celebrations selling alcohol, or take his dog to the beach in his pickup truck.

To think I’m going to pay higher taxes so his debt can be forgiven all or in part doesn’t exactly warm the cockles of my heart.

Apologists in the media will says this guy is a statistical outlier. They are wrong. His is an all-too-common story.

Similarly pathetic are stories such as one that appeared last week on zerohedge.com about a 59-year-old claiming to have borrowed $79,000 repaid $190,000, and still owe $236,000.

How can this be?

Begin with the fact he started his college career in 1980 studying philosophy and political science.

He eventually went to law school, and of course didn’t finish, but he did a great job of adding on debt. In intervening years, he just stopped paying the student loans, so penalties and interest really piled up for a guy, who in a moment of striking clarity admitted his “stupidity” was to blame.

So, again, we as taxpayers are supposed to bail out a self-described stupid 59-year-old?

Why should these handouts be limited to moronic college students? Maybe the government should step in and pay the mortgages of the people who never encountered a budget they couldn’t bust.

Uncle Sam surely could see his way clear to help all those people riding around in $50,000 SUVs who can’t manage $500 in ready cash for an unexpected expense.

How about those who got jobs in lieu of going to college? They made money instead of piling up huge debt and then often finding no work in their field.

Should we give the non-college crowd a $50,000 check to spend on whatever they want? That would help provide the inflation the Federal Reserve is seeking.

I’m 65 years old and retired, but I’m tempted to go back to school and run up some considerable college debt just so I also can dip my hands into the government till.

And that is the problem. By encouraging bad behavior, the government will get more of it.

Once you start bailing out financial illiterates, how do you stop?

Quick answer, you don’t.

If I were a Republican living in Georgia, I’d vote in the Senate runoff elections despite suggestions from some that it would be better not to vote as a protest against the rigged system.

Were I a Democrat, I probably could vote illegally from my Pennsylvania home in those runoff elections, which speaks to the problem we face in keeping this country a free representative republic.

But there is another political problem in this country, one made clear by Rudy Giuliani on the Friday night Lou Dobbs program on Fox.

To paraphrase Giuliani, Republicans can’t even be counted on to stick together as a party to do the right thing. Meanwhile, Democrats will unite around any cause, right or wrong, that their leaders tell them to support.

Giuliani said he’s heard from some Republicans who have indicated to him they just don’t have the guts to stand up for what they know is right and in so doing risk being attacked by the left-wing lunatics and their lapdog media.

Republicans are weak in their convictions, a status evidenced by the U.S. Senate, where a handful of confused members who list their affiliation as Republican can’t seem to grasp consistently what that should mean in terms of passing legislation.

Maine’s Susan Collins is a poster child for wanting to be courted and convinced to do the right thing in terms of voting for Republican causes. Yet just today she was on hand at an affair designed to feed amnesty to illegal aliens, a pet project of the Democrats.

Collins is a coin-flip on whether or not she will support a Republican proposal, so maybe she should run as an Independent.

We have a nominal Republican Senator in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey, who has announced his retirement. Good riddance to a guy who also often forgets his alleged party affiliation.

If you stuck a truth needle in the arm of some of these Republicans of convenience, you might find they actually don’t believe the pap they are spewing, but instead, like the fortitude-challenged types to which Giuliani referred, they don’t have the stomach for being attacked for the crime of being correct on an issue.

Such has become – with apologies to Teddy Roosevelt – the big stick of the political left. They intimidate the weak with riots, threats, boycotts, harassment on social media or in person and all other manner of psychological and economic warfare.

They are petulant children who act out and get away with it because such a large segment of those in charge, and the population in general, has gone full Milquetoast. How far they will be able to push their agenda before the 74 million or so who voted for Donald Trump, and those philosophically aligned with that large group, decide to push back – hard – remains an open question.

What is more clear in the wake of this disputed election, and the unpleasant aftermath, is that the U.S. needs desperately a third major party.

I’m not talking about some splinter joke of a third party that only succeeds in siphoning off votes from one major party or the other and thereby swinging an election.

It should have been clear even before recent months that our two-party system has become something of a joke. Trump had to defeat both the Democrats and establishment Republicans on his way to the Oval Office.

Once Trump was there, he got precious little support from Republicans in Congress. Oh, they welcomed him when he showed up to headline rallies for their re-elections. But they wouldn’t go out of their way to back up his legislative agenda.

There must be millions of traditional Democrats who feel similarly abandoned in their party’s leftward lurch.

A legitimate third party could unite these alienated Republicans and Democrats, give them a presidential candidate who will work for them and not stab them in the back.

They would welcome someone who would refuse to betray their interests by working to roll back work visa limits, won’t welcome Chinese domination of markets and the resulting theft of U.S. jobs through questionable means, and absolutely won’t side with those looking to defund police, do away with any fossil fuels, or turn this into a handout nation.

Such a president would have trouble with Congress, until such time the third party could be broadened to have enough candidates to run, and win, seats in the House and Senate.

But how different would that be than what President Trump faced with Democratic opposition and gutless members of his party failing to step up to support him?

If somehow Georgia’s Republican administration, to paraphrase the popular street lingo, grows a pair, insures fair play, and the Republican candidates can win at least one of those Senate runoff elections, it can provide a delay on the left-wing takeover of this country.

But it would be nothing more than that, a brief respite. What the country needs is to find a way for the people who believe in traditional values and honest elections to express those opinions. A major third party would be a significant step in that direction, if only to remind the Democrats and Republicans they no longer are the only game in town and able to take for granted their bases.

It would beat the increasingly possible and violent alternative as expressed by the slogan on soldier-of-fortune T-shirts “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out.”

The American populace is being treating like it is mostly made up of idiots, and the sad truth is the strategy seems to be both appropriate and working.

Attorney General William Barr has joined those who would treat the masses like mushrooms – keep them in the dark and shovel manure on them – saying in an interview today (Dec. 1, 2020) there was not evidence of voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

We were being pelted with a snowstorm that already had accumulated 6-7 inches when I first read this, but Mother Nature’s best efforts paled in comparison to this Barr snow job.

Only yesterday I was wondering aloud whatever happened to Barr and his Russiagate investigator John Durham? Today we got a reappearance of Barr, and bonus news that he’d elevated Durham’s charge back in October to make sure that investigation would survive an administration change.

But while Barr is willing to come out half-cocked after his Justice Department ostensibly had spent a few days investigating claims of voting irregularities, Durham is about a year and a half into his investigation that began in May 2019 and has announced NOTHING.

Maybe in another 500 or so more days Durham might have some sort of vague rough draft of how the FBI and Democrats and leftist bureaucrats could have conspired and fudged some things to get the fire lit under President Trump designed to produce Roast A La Impeachment.

As for Barr, how does one determine how much fraud there was without a thorough investigation, not just a few days of superficial dog and pony show? Even as Barr was giving his interview, whistleblowers were testifying in Michigan to wrongdoing they had seen personally.

One woman testified of speaking with the FBI to share this information, being cut off, dialing back, and never again being contacted by that agency. So, if the FBI gets a report of an alleged crime and ignores it, there was no crime committed, right?

These first-hand accounts of election misdeeds keep rolling in, be they from U.S. Mail contractors trucking completed mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, or local election officials arbitrarily crediting incomplete or fouled ballots to Joe Biden, or any number of other various questionable election occurrences these whistleblowers have charged in formal fashion.

Barr ignores the statistical analysis by renowned mathematicians that what happened in terms of vote counting for Biden in this election stretches the bounds of probability and also dismisses questions about the integrity of the electronic voting machines.

Barr ought to get out and about more than once every 40 days if he wants to have a true handle on the state of this republic, which rapidly is descending into banana republic status – the metaphor for political instability, not the brand name of the women’s clothing line.

Likely you remember that when the goal was to impeach President Trump we were told whistleblowers were to be believed without exception and treated like heroes, if not royalty.

Now that citizens are blowing the whistle on what they view as election theft, they are to be at best marginalized or, at worst, threatened into silence and/or ignored.

Through it all, the populace is being subjected to mind-bending verbiage. Communications about election fraud are tagged as unverified. Stories from the left-wing lapdog media outlets always characterize the allegations of fraud as unfounded.

And even when a tiny bit of electoral fraud is conceded, we are told it was “not massive” or was “insufficient to have changed the outcome.”

How do those making such pronouncements know that?

Quick answer: They don’t.

But it’s the way they want it to be and emboldened by those on both sides of the political aisle being willing to look the other way regarding this bit of unpleasantness, the media continue to disparage the whistleblowers and deny out of hand that their charges could be true when they assert that this election was stolen as surely as if those doing the counting had been wearing masks – for purposes of obscuring identity, not satisfying the COVID-19 facemask Nazis.

The media is employing the same semantic playbook it used to describe fiery, violent, destructive left-wing protests this year as “Mostly peaceful.”

Any election fraud was insignificant they continue to assure us, just before turning out the lights and reaching for their manure shovels.

Quick, give me some duct tape, the better to wrap my about-to-explode head due to the ongoing assault on common sense by political operatives, the media, and the brain-dead partisans among the general population.

• Joe Biden’s dogs apparently got some bad input from the psychic who was analyzing them remotely based on photos and one of those canines contributed to breaking one of old Joe’s feet. CNN celebrated the news as evidence of the great transparency we could expect from Biden’s administration. Were they talking about the X-rays?
• Speaking of Biden, I can only imagine how Kamala Harris must have felt her heart flutter in anticipation when first she heard that feeble and frail Joe already was injured.
• You’ve got to love the token Democratic mouthpieces who appear on cable television or network news and deny that any of the mounting evidence of election fraud is credible or meaningful. They’d have given actor John Banner a run for that Sgt. Schultz “I know nothing, nothing” role on the old Hogan’s Heroes TV sitcom.
• You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer when I heard reports that a Dominion voting machine had been spirited away between yes-no-yes mind changes by a Georgia judge on a request to preserve the machines without having their memories wiped in order to enable forensic analysis of voting.
• Give attorney Sidney Powell credit for dogged determination and patriotism for attempting to fight, basically gratis, to expose alleged election fraud on a level she maintains goes well beyond even the typical narrative.
• Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose wild ceremonial first pitch at a Washington Nationals game this year was embarrassingly bad, is equaling that effort in his role as the nation’s most trusted COVID-19 news source. Already having flip-flopped on the effectiveness of wearing masks – first they were worthless and now they are vital – Fauci has concluded, as many laymen already had, that sending kids to school is not a problem considering their near virtual immunity to any notable complications from the virus. Formerly Fauci was in lockstep with the wild-eyed Democrats like Nancy “Botox” Pelosi who equated sending kids to school with gambling with our future. Does this have anything to do with the election being over – at least the voting portion of it – and there’s no need to throw kids under the (school) bus just to harm the image and election prospects of President Trump?
• Someone please put out an All-Points Bulletin for Attorney General William Barr, Russian collusion hoax investigator John Durham, or any current justice employees at the federal or state levels. All are missing in action as others fight the battle to determine whether or not this was a fair and honest election.
• Do yourself a favor and take the time to watch one of these Rudy Giuliani-led public hearings on voting irregularities, a polite term for fraud. You likely will need to view them on the internet since networks don’t deem coverage worthy, in keeping with them being Democratic lapdogs. If you can watch one of these hearings and still conclude there are not questions about the election that deserve further attention, you at once should schedule yourself for cognitive testing, the kind that Biden said he didn’t need during one of his campaign stops for U.S. Senate, or was that for president? Joe wasn’t sure.