Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

Election day looms in a week, although most agree the results won’t be available in the traditional time frame of that day or the next.

I’ll be voting for Trump – again – but I continue to fear what I have since the past December, that Democrats will prevail this time.

I base that assessment on the fact that the Democrats got sloppy four years ago, presuming Its My Turn Hillary Clinton would win in a walk, and didn’t pull out their traditional vote-harvesting heavy artillery.

This time they won’t be making that mistake. The COVID-19 over-reaction aids their cause by goosing the numbers of absentee voting, which are much more easily fudged.

Trump winning his first term was what will be viewed historically as the most monumental election upset in history. Understand that Trump didn’t just have to prevail over the Democratic machine, he also had to beat the Republican hierarchy which viewed him with almost equal disdain.

But Trump got it done.

And he still is trying to shock the world. Both my wife and I marveled at Trump’s vitality Tuesday, making multiple campaign stops to huge crowds.

Imagine a man of his age – 74 – possessing not only such great physical stamina, but also the mental toughness he continues to display.

He’s been beaten on for years by Democrats and the mainstream media. He is ridiculed, defamed and caricatured. Yet he keeps going with incredible vitality.

If Trump can pull this off again, it will be an even greater tour de force than his first win.

Trump should win if you go solely on credentials. He has kept many campaign promises. Until the economy was pulled down, mainly by Blue State governors and mayors shutting down their massive population centers in the name of virus containment, he had record economic numbers.

And then there is the question of his opponent, a guy who runs around forgetting who he’s running against. George? As in Bush? That’s what Biden said in an interview yesterday.

Biden has to make select appearances, close to home, to spare him exertion in his fragile physical and mental state. Yet he is to be entrusted with the demanding job of the presidency?

Of course that role likely will fall to his VP running mate Kamala Harris, who seems to be catching whatever ails Biden. Recently Harris had to ask a minion where she was before bellowing a hello to Cleveland.

Papa Biden, aka The Big Guy, has a lot of baggage, notably his family, which trades on the name. In a telling interview on Tucker Carlson’s FoxNews show, whistleblower Tony Bobulinski detailed how Joe Biden was very much familiar with deals Hunter and Jim Biden were trying to put together.

This despite repeated Sgt. Schultz-like denials from Joe Biden: “I know nothing, nothing!”

Bobulinski, a former serviceman, came forward out of disgust over being labeled a Russian asset as Democrats and the mainstream media attempt to protect Joe Biden and push him over the finish line.

That’s the one-size-fits-all Democratic response to any problem – blame the Russians. Those evil Russians helped Trump win the first time and now they’re trying to repeat history. Except Obama’s buddy Vlad Putin (remember the open mike gaffe when Obama said he’d have “more flexibility” to deal with Vlad after the election) says Joe Biden is not guilty of anything that Putin can see.

That’s high praise from a guy with a reputation of monetizing his political office.

And I think of that woman in the political ads running on television here in Pennsylvania, and presumably elsewhere, who says she voted for Trump before, but now will vote for Biden because – insert laugh track here – he can be trusted.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia is being looted because police had the temerity to shoot a man who was attempting to attack them with a knife.

I love the people saying the police should have used tasers. Have these people ever seen a perpetrator run right through a taser and attack the police? The police were under attack by a man acting irrationally and in possession of a deadly weapon.

Forgive me if I think I’d be reluctant to trust a taser to save my life in such a situation.

So the natural response is to loot athletic shoe and liquor stores.

Makes sense to me; about as much sense as voting for Biden.

In my neighborhood there’s an almost total one-to-one correspondence between Biden signs and the stereotypical members of the Democratic party circa 2020.

Once the Democratic party was the home of the blue collar worker, who toiled in private industry, for companies who were governed by the economic rules of a free economy.

If the workers did their jobs, if the company management did its job, there would be profit and the company would prosper. If either, or both failed, the companies were gone.

This shared incentive to be productive was healthy. Workers and management had skin in the game and so were motivated to do well. It wasn’t perfect, but it was preferable to what we have now.

Oh, how much this has changed.

The Democratic party now is founded on a base of public employees, people working for governments or other institutions such as schools and universities. These people function outside the real economy and so are free to make unrealistic compensation and pension demands and produce inferior products without penalty, witness our nation’s declining education ranking vs. the rest of the world.

Governmental agencies also are falling down on the job. Try dealing with the people at Social Security, the IRS, or Medicare. There are good people in these operations, but they seem to be the minority, overwhelmed by co-workers who show up and give half-baked effort secure in the knowledge there is no penalty.

Add in the Democratic party’s pandering to underclasses of every description, whose hands are out constantly for governmental largess the Democrats are only too willing to dispense – in exchange for their continued support at the polls.

This prospect was foreseen in a quote widely attributed to Founding Father Ben Franklin: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”

Give the Democrats credit for recognizing the public sector would be ever-expanding, at the expense of the ever-shrinking private sector.

It’s a parallel to Gresham’s Law, wherein bad money drives out good. When the government went away from silver coinage, those coins rapidly disappeared from circulation, replaced by the silver-clad copper slugs of the present.

So it is that bad jobs, which survive even when they are overpaid and inefficient, drive out the good jobs that earn their keep, so to speak.

Republicans are on the right side of the economic equation, but they are losing the battle for the minds of the public due to the inescapable reality of human nature.

We are a modern-day Roman empire, distracting the masses with the bread and circuses of governmental handouts to distract them from the reality that this does not endure in the long run. As former Great Britain Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher correctly observed, socialism only works until you run out of other people’s money to spend.

The people in my neighborhood with Biden signs in their yards virtually all work for the government, work for schools, are retired from working for schools, or just aren’t working, period. Meanwhile, those with Trump signs work for private businesses, or are retired from same.

If you like the direction the country is headed, if you want the false security offered by drone-like life in the governmental womb, vote Biden.

On the other hand, should you be inclined to try to stem this trend and return the country to its former reliance on private business and the individual, you vote Trump.

The choice is that clear and against that backdrop, it’s ragingly mindboggling how anyone would find themselves straddling the undecided fence at this late date.

I got a laugh today – not a mirthful chuckle but more like a cynical smile rather than cry response – from a podcast listened to while I was walking.

It was about investing, and the interview subject has a web site which he took great pleasure in noting is free from factoring in politics.

This is a sad, sad person, who thinks politics don’t seep into every aspect of our existence.

You don’t think politics and the policies of the people we elect affect investments and the economy? Well, you are naive at best and I question the worth of your investment advice.

If Joe Biden is elected and taxes are raised as he has promised, regulation is increased as he has promised, governmental spending is increased as he has promised, you think that will have no impact on the economy or your investments?

Although the Democrats have crammed a muzzle squarely into the jaws of the AOC crowd, no doubt telling them just to shut up for now and after the election, the sky’s the limit, beware of the immense governmental spending frenzy we can expect in the attempt to implement the Green New Deal.

Already California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order banning the sale of new gasoline powered vehicles in his state by 2035.

As an aside, don’t you love how those on the left applaud such executive orders, or those of former President Barack Hussein Obama, but howl in protest when current President Donald John Trump wields the executive pen?

Back to the matter of banning sales of traditional internal combustion cars, I’m skeptical of the perceived benefit.

The electric-car people neatly ignore the effect all that increased demand for electricity to recharge these cars will have on troubled power systems, such as California’s.

Already burdened by brownouts and blackouts, the California grid would need massive upgrade and overhaul to meet the demand.

The Green types also conveniently ignore that while the electric cars themselves may reduce emissions, what about the plants that produce the electricity? What about the pollution from mining the necessary metals and rare earth elements necessary for electric cars?

Even if this is done outside California or the United States, it still affects world climate and, as the Kum ba yah crowd loves to point out, we’re all in this together.

What do we do with all those batteries when their life cycle is complete? We’re not going to be able merely to discard them into current landfills.

You will hear the recycling people chime in here. But the dirty secret is most recycling is not truly cost-efficient and in a sort of reverse negative loop, the more people recycle, the more recycled product there is and the lower the price received for those doing the recycling.

We have had this happen in my area for aluminum, plastic, glass, etc. Municipalities have gotten out of the recycling game because it doesn’t make economic sense.

Add in that the next major volcanic eruption around the world will spew more gaseous pollution into the air than all those California gasoline-powered cars will, likely in a year.

Maybe Newsom can sign an executive order banning volcanoes.

This is a typical Liberal contradiction. They want to dream of world peace, prosperity for all and an abundance of other ideals, but they cannot come up with practical ways to accomplish those goals.

Their problems are twofold: First, they have set their bar too high in their wishes and, second, they are unwilling to recognize that reality.

Unfortunately, it’s raining as I write this, or I’d go out and fire up my Mustang convertible to go cruising in Newsom’s honor.

I guess I’m left to peruse the online ads for yet another Mustang, this hopefully to be a more powerful gasoline-gulping behemoth that would horrify Newsom and his ilk.

The apologists for Joe Biden, and they are many, are hard afoot to explain away his latest verbal gaffe.

This time Uncle Joe, speaking to a friendly podcast, blurted out “We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.

Some have labeled it a Freudian slip. Or maybe it was just another of Joe’s abundance of senior moments.

It also could be he was merely backing up my contention for the past year or so, that being the Democrats won’t be caught with their pantsuits down – figuratively speaking – like they were in the 2016 election when they presumed Hillary would sweep to victory without them having to deploy any of what we will call their customary vote enhancement programs.

Democrats won’t let that happen again. Witness efforts to broaden opportunities for faceless people to vote without having to turn up at the polls.

Witness reports of multiple ballot requests in the same name.

Witness efforts to loosen regulations to allow these absentee ballots to be counted even if they are not mailed in time, or do not follow the rules such as requiring legitimate signatures to match the voters’ names.

Make no mistake, the Democrats know they have been forced into running a weak candidate and he’s going to need to be dragged across the finish line.

Biden’s record is checkered at best, both in terms of ethics and consistency. He now has come clean on his goal of eliminating fossil fuels. A Biden election victory would mean we would have the Green New Deal moving full-speed ahead with its estimated $93 trillion pricetag over the next decade. 

Having spent 35 years in journalism full-time and three years or so as a freelancer, I find I still have a lot to say.

But dealing with the organization that ran my freelance work became more than a little fatiguing mentally.

So, I’m out of there and on to this site. It’s not a desperate attempt to make money. Quite on the contrary it is free, which critics would say closely approximates the worth of the content.

I don’t care. And that brings me to the next point. Feel free to like or dislike what I write, just don’t expect me to eagerly await feedback. Taking a page from the likes of Zuck or Bezos, there is no contact system on this site.

If you are interested, feel free to read. If not, feel free to move on to more productive pursuits.

I’m a former sports and news columnist and reporter looking to write without the filter of a sponsoring organization.