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.

Rudy Giuliani and his traveling truth show were in Arizona today, providing testimony in an open hearing that the most recent presidential election was fraught with fraud.

Meanwhile, in the parallel sporting universe, there is a bastardization going on that rivals the election chicanery.

Already we’ve seen the NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball crown champions in playoff exercises that diverged wildly from the norm. Formats were altered in terms of length of series, locations of games and lack of travel.

And it all was accepted as necessary concessions – not the overpriced kind you buy at stadium stands, but rather to the COVID-19 reality.

Even as this is being written, the NFL and college football seasons are in full crawl, with further notable tinkering with the norm, all in the interest of getting in the seasons and playoffs despite it all

This means we’re treated to Denver being forced to play New Orleans in an NFL game the past weekend in which the Broncos’ top three quarterbacks were sidelined due to positive virus tests.

Stunningly, New Orleans won easily. Color me surprised.

College games are flat-out being called off, in the case of Florida State twice fewer than 24 hours ahead of scheduled kickoffs.

Nowhere is the state of affairs on more graphic display than in Ohio, where the state has two national title contenders in unbeaten Ohio State and similarly unsullied Cincinnati. Both teams have had games nixed due to virus outbreaks.

In the case of Ohio State, the Buckeyes are a mere 4-0. If they can’t play their next two games, and meet the Big Ten Conference minimum, they would be ineligible for the Big Ten Championship Game.

But the Buckeyes still could be in the national championship playoffs because there is no minimum game total to qualify.

Imagine a 4-0 team going into the playoffs while teams such as 8-0 Cincinnati, with more games played and more victories, sits at home.

The reality of those in charge trying to keep current sports seasons operating around the edges of the COVID-19 reality is puzzling at best.

Recall that earlier in the year, when COVID-19 hit similar levels of infections, the NCAA men’s and women’s conference basketball tournaments were halted and the national tournaments were called off. NBA and NHL seasons were put on hold, and resumed only in so-called “bubble” environments.

The Major League Baseball regular season started late and ran less than one-half of its customary length, to be followed by playoff formats cobbled together in ad hoc fashion.

Now we see the NFL rescheduling, but not canceling games. We have college football games being aborted hours before scheduled kickoffs..

We’re supposed to look the other way and accept this as normal in the interest of enabling the games to be played, and money made from television broadcasts.

Interestingly, the stands have a limited numbers of spectators in the case of football, but the small numbers are clumped together so if social distancing is the point, it’s failing.

Also failing is the competitive integrity of the games and, eventually, the champions that are crowned.

College basketball seasons have begun without fans in the arenas.

But we do have those silly cardboard cutouts of fake fans.

If this ongoing sports charade continues, it will be appropriate to have the championship trophies be cardboard fakes, too.

I took a brief hiatus from posting to this blog to enjoy Thanksgiving. And that means, yes, all you would-be government tools and snitches, I had my son, his wife, two grandchildren and my brother over to celebrate along with me and my wife. So report me.

My wife, as usual, outdid herself in cooking and decorating the house.

This activity occurred against the backdrop that my mother, who has been in a nursing home for more than a year, has tested positive for COVID-19.

So, to recap, the person isolated from her family and the public in general, has a positive test result.

My mother is in a virtual bubble, with only a couple of weekly visits last month with two family members, conducted in the lobby of the facility, all visitors being masked and socially distant. That’s been it for approximately the past eight months in terms of live in-person visits.

There have been a few video calls, but it’s been a long time since we could go in and visit her twice daily, as my brother and I had done until the virus crackdown.

Those two-person lobby visits are by the boards, too, with the latest rise in virus cases.

The staffer who supervised our window visit the past Saturday, to celebrate my mother’s 84^th birthday, remarked she was amazed how widespread the virus infections had become at the facility.

Because I am blessed (or cursed) with the willingness to speak my mind, no doubt inherited from my father, I pointed out that I wasn’t at all surprised. In the times we had been allowed inside the facility, it was evident that the staff’s familiarity with universal hygiene precautions had been largely no more than a passing acquaintance.

On the occasion when we were given the word that visitors were being banned – laughingly one staff member suggested maybe just for two weeks – I offered to bet the two giving us our marching orders $100 and I’d give 10-1 odds, that it would last much longer than two weeks, or even two months.

I even offered to let them go up and down the halls and get others involved in the wager and was willing to bet them that a staffer was more likely than a visitor to bring COVID-19 into the building based on pure numbers.

I’d have won a lot of money, not because I am Nostradamus, but because I know that once you give unfettered control to the powers that be to ban traditional freedoms, they become drunk with the power and use it to the extreme.

Look at what’s going on with schools, work, various holidays, religious services, sporting events, shopping, travel, etc., etc., etc. All are being locked down to one degree or another.

Protests by the left-wing idiots cannot be banned, however, because it would interfere with their constitutional rights.

Meanwhile, the Trump efforts to obtain relief in the courts for apparently fraudulent election results have been met with almost universal stone-walling.

Pennsylvania courts have been notably obstinate. I love that they maintain they cannot override the will of the people as evidenced by ballots. But if the issue is the legitimacy of those ballots, how then can a fraudulent decision be corrected short of taking in the streets with guns blazing?

The legal concept of the fruit of the poisonous tree holds that illegally obtained evidence is tainted and cannot be used in a case. Why wouldn’t a tainted vote be similarly invalid?

Courts have yet to make clear why they believe that any vote, fraudulent or otherwise, is equally sacred. Would it be overly cynical to look at the party affiliations of the judges?

Similarly mute in the face of hard evidence are all the leftists who scream science, science, science to insist that the world as we know it should be closed down, with fossil fuels and beef banned while all ride to work on bicycles eating tofu.

Oh, I forgot. No one will need to work. Just stay home and take the universal basic income, but still eat your tofu.

Climate change, COVID-19, they are areas where the radicals find some scientists who support their view, then act as a virtual mob to shut down and shame any SCIENTISTS who might disagree.

Scientists, of course, once thought the sun revolved around the Earth, that the Earth was flat, the Universe was static, there were canals on Mars and computers could never compete with humans in a game as complex as chess.

Mathematics and probability are every bit the realm of proof not emotions, just as sciences are supposed to be, and an increasing number of experts in mathematics, having taken a look at the presidential election results, see manipulation and collusion in key states.

Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia is one of these experts who is crying foul play on the election results. He’s a genius, certified as such in a New York Times story a few months back.

But now Keshavarz-Nia is an expert witness for Sidney Powell in her attempts to expose election fraud.

This means that Keshavarz-Nia is supporting the Orange Hair Bad Guy’s cause for re-election, and the left lunatics (and their lapdog media outlets) will endeavor to discredit him.

Likely they will succeed, or courts simply will ignore Keshavarz-Nia’s analysis under the blanket excuse of honoring the wishes of the electorate, whether that electorate was deceased, voted multiple times, or simply was electronically manipulated to produce the desired Harris-Biden victory.

It has been about an hour and a half since the news broke that the Trump legal team was distancing itself from Sidney Powell, the lawyer who had made the most far-ranging contentions about widespread voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.

The political left and its media friends can be expected to feast on the news as yet another crack in Trump’s case.

But the Sidney Powell situation, the details of which are yet to become public, actually illustrates intellectual honesty on the political right that the left lacks.

Consider that the past week Fox host Tucker Carlson had very publicly called out Powell for not being able to present evidence of her claims. Carlson immediately was lionized by some on the left, because anyone agreeing with them deserves an atta boy.

Of course, mostly the left media outlets have been and remain critical of Carlson, even when he was in the forefront of calling out attorney Michael Avenatti as a “creepy porn lawyer.”

As Carlson was doing this, Avenatti was at the time a lefty icon, appearing on CNN with great regularity to attack President Trump.

One one occasion with CNN host Brian Stelter (he of the head that looks like a Jiffy Pop popcorn tray after its date with the stove-top burner) Stelter, showing absolute tone deafness, said he was taking Avenatti seriously as a 2020 presidential contender.

Avenatti since has been in jail, and given temporary COVID-19-related release, awaiting a trial for embezzlement.

It is not clear if Stelter is taking Avenatti seriously for 2024. But Stelter’s bulbous bald head must be taken seriously if only for its visual grandeur.

Stelter does not seem to have apologized for being so wrong about Avenatti.

At the risk of repeating myself, I attempt to maintain intellectual honesty. I long ago stopped voting for Pat Toomey for U.S. Senate merely because he is listed as a Republican. Toomey didn’t walk the walk.

Predictably, of late Toomey showed up quickly to dismiss the Trump inquiry into election fraud. Toomey has said he will not run for re-election to the Senate and also will not run for the Pennsylvania governorship, although a cynic might see his rush to align against Trump as an indication of political positioning should he end up make such a gubernatorial run.

If Toomey runs for governor, I will vote for whomever his opponent might be, or simply make no choice. He will not gain my vote merely because he labels himself as a Republican.

It is fashionable to critique conservatives as incapable of making rational ballot distinctions, but I personally have voted for Democrats for offices such as U.S. House of Representatives (the late John P. Murtha several times) Ed Rendell for governor of Pennsylvania (the first term) and for various other lesser state, county or local offices.

Beyond political tags, there is the matter of ignoring self-interest for reasons of intellectual honesty. I voted against Barack Obama twice even though I knew his plans to shake up the health insurance industry would benefit me in the short run, albeit at the expense of healthcare in general.

And in Trump I voted for a guy who was determined to take out Obama’s misnamed Affordable Care Act, which would have been temporarily harmful to me monetarily, but much better for our long-term delivery of healthcare.

Too many members of the public, and the media, make the mistake of allowing their personal preferences to cloud their ability to think rationally.

The need to keep the two thought processes separate is very real.

It’s reminiscent of the Fox Mulder character in the science-fiction television series “The X-Files.” Mulder was played by self-confessed sex-addicted actor David Duchovny, who moved on later to a Showtime series “Californication.” Talk about art imitating life.

Mulder’s X-files office had a prominently displayed poster of a UFO and the words “I want to believe.” But Mulder wanted proof, too, of alien existence.

As much as one wants to believe, there is a need for proof.

Rudy Giuliani and members of the Trump defense team might yet produce their necessary proof – of voter fraud, not alien presence (at least not aliens in the extraterrestrial sense).

But time is short and Trump supporters would do well to reconcile themselves that yet another disappointment likely is on tap for them, just as Attorney General William Barr and special investigator John Durham have failed miserably to provide timely reports and disclosures on the investigation of the FBI’s Russia collusion harassment of Trump.

Wanting to believe is one thing. Having the subject of that belief justify it is something altogether different.

Despite the generally accepted Liberal dictate that the end justifies the means, it’s important to get results while staying within the rules.

Otherwise, we have anarchy, which would please Liberals for a time, until the mob came looking for them.

Democratic house organs, AKA mainstream media outlets, would have us believe Trump supporters are trapped in an alternate reality, completely removed from the truth.

They make these accusations on their many platforms, with their distortions of truth falling on the willing ears of their many sheep.

This is nothing new. Adolf Hitler wrote of The Big Lie in his book Mein Kampf and the concept was put into widespread practice by Nazi propaganda man Joseph Goebbels. He distilled it into “lie big and stick to it.”

For liberals now to accuse conservatives of ignoring reality is to practice classic psychological projection, a defense mechanism in which opponents are charged with suffering the very same shortcomings of the individual or group who are attempting to defend their position.

Having control of public school systems, most institutions of higher learning, the majority of mass media and the bulk of governmental bureaucracy makes maintaining the big lie possible.

You will find Democratic check marks for all of the above categories.

To accept the Democratic assessment of our current situation, you must be prepared to believe a lot of mis-truths.

Those mis-truths are, in no particular order:

• There were no voting irregularities in this 2020 election. To believe this you must dismiss thousands of uncounted votes showing up on separate occasions in Georgia, affidavits from workers alleging various bastardizations of the counting process in states including Michigan and Pennsylvania, and documented errors in states such as Nevada that is being ignored because it has not been proved to be significant in the outcome. This prompted one attorney to ask a judge “how much fraud it too much, your honor?” You also must ignore probability and statistical analysis from experts that the presidential vote totals are extremely unlikely to have been accurate and free from manipulation.

• That Trump’s balking at transferring power to Joe Biden is historic. That neatly ignores Biden, then the vice president, and outgoing president Barack Obama, enabling spying on the Trump campaign and transition team using federal intelligence agencies, obtaining FISA surveillance warrants based on false information, and using as a touchstone of all this a discredited Russian dossier on Trump.
• While on a much smaller scale, we are required to forget that the General Accounting Office found about $14,000 in damages to the White House was caused by Clintonistas showing infantile disdain for incoming president George W. Bush. This included stealing the letter W from keyboards, scrawling graffiti on walls and swiping a presidential seal. Feel free to call up the account of this in the June 12, 2002, New York Times, before it is purged from history by Goebbels-like Democratic operatives.
• In a complete flip-flop, Democrats attribute all the revelations regarding Hunter Biden and his cloudy business dealings, an apparent utilization of the family name for financial gain, to Russian disinformation. In the case of harassing a sitting president, Trump, Russian disinformation, even if it did come from the Clinton campaign, was the gold standard for veracity. But now a man’s personal laptop, rife with unsavory information, can be nothing other than Russian disinformation and therefore worthless
• That Democrats were bemoaning pre-election the ease with which electronic voting machines manufactured by Dominion and others could be hacked and generally were suspect. Now that those machines have spit out a favorable result to the Democrats, they are above reproach.
• That Trump and his supporters wanting a fair and accurate count of legal votes is putting the entire system in jeopardy. Since when is the pursuit of truth an ill? But that is what we must believe to accept the Democratic “reality.”
• That the streets would be filled with violent demonstration should unhappy Trump supporters have to deal with an election loss. Quite the contrary, all those boarded up stores and offices were unnecessary because, for now, Biden and his coalition of left-wing, socialist or anarchist demonstrators got the outcome they desired. Keep those boards handy, though, should this election rise to the Supreme Court level to sort out the voting chicanery and those Justices deliver a ruling in favor of Trump.

Taking a break from politics, and living up to the blog’s promise to include sports, here are 20 questions involving the sports world.

1. Do you think fans of Penn State’s suddenly impotent football program wish they could go back to lamenting the reality of coach James Franklin’s poor record against Ohio State instead of the current Franklin problem of his team not being able to beat anyone?
2. Still on Penn State, do you think Franklin wishes the Big Ten hadn’t listened to the protests of him and others and decided to play the season after all?
3. With coach Don Shula and star linebacker Nick Buoniconti now dead, I’m wondering if members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only NFL team to go unbeaten through the regular season and playoffs, still get together to celebrate when the last remaining unbeaten NFL team in any season gets its first loss?
4. Does anyone think this year’s lone remaining unbeaten, the 9-0 Steelers, will challenge that Miami 17-0 record?
5. But even among the doubters can anyone imagine the Steelers could lose this weekend, playing 1-8 Jacksonville, yet another hapless team on what has been a marshmallow-soft schedule?
6. Would you guess the Steelers have exactly three victories against teams with winning records this season, while their other six wins have come against opposition with a cumulative 14-38-2 record?
7. Now that the NCAA has announced plans to have the college men’s basketball tournament played in its entirety in Indianapolis, how can the NCAA justify going on with the men’s bowl classification national football playoff being contested at varied sites?
8. Will that decision be left to the NCAA, or will tyrannical government figures mandate no travel and no play?
9. Are any other sports fans having trouble getting interested or excited about seasons that could be put on ice at any time?
10. Do you think bureaucrats would buy the excuse that football players already wear masks as part of their protective gear and so are combating the spread of COVID-19?
11. Is anyone else finding their weekends full and entertaining without having to watch a single NFL game, as I have this season?
12. Similarly, has anyone else broken the addiction to the NBA or NHL due to fatigue over their social justice warrior posturing?
13. Quick, can you tell me which team won the most recent Stanley Cup?
14. Notre Dame beat Clemson, which was playing with its backup quarterback, in double overtime a couple of weekends back, but do you think the Fighting Irish can get it done again, if Clemson starting quarterback Trevor Lawrence is playing, as he should be in the potential ACC title game rematch?
15. Would you argue with the guys who set odds for a living, who even after the Notre Dame win, have Clemson rated a better pick to win the national championship?
16. And would you argue that the same guys are wrong in having Alabama as the overall favorite to win yet another national crown?
17. Does anyone else agree that there should be a ban on those ridiculous cardboard cutouts of fans that some sports have sprinkled in the stands to give the visual effect of a crowd?
18. Along that line, is anyone else annoyed by the canned crowd noise played in stadiums and on broadcasts?
19. What are sports teams going to do if after this period of forced absence, fans discover it’s easier to stay home and watch the events on massive, high-definition televisions, and not have to pay exorbitant ticket prices and parking fees, not to mention being stuck for $7 or so for a beer during the game?
20. Can a person have a Super Bowl party and not bother to watch the game?

As a former sports writer, I saw firsthand what steroid use did to records and traditional performance standards, all at an incredible pace.

That phenomenon has transferred to the jargon of the world in general, with accelerated and out-sized developments said to be “on steroids.”

We’ve seen it in politics, where a health-crisis opportunity seems to have been seized by one side to go on steroids to change the rules and manipulate the election results.

I’m praying the suspected voting fraud is headed toward a steroids-like fate, first being exposed and then being thrown on the trash heap of history, with the abusers discredited and facing long-term physical problems.

A man can dream.

Daily revelations only support those who believe that this presidential election was not on the up and up, no matter what boilerplate assessments are issued as to its supposed integrity.

I have a few thoughts.

• Now that it’s been proven that dead people can vote, most likely for Democrats, I’m wondering how the Democrats will get the dead to fight if the civil war they seem hellbent to provoke actually is fought?

• Thousands of uncounted votes have showed up in disputed Georgia in each of the past two days and – hold your surprise – they favored Trump. A couple more days like this and the Biden lead is gone – until some late Democrat votes roll in overnight.
• In Nevada they are going to need a do-over on one local election due to voting irregularities. Can we really be confident the presidential totals are correct there?
• At least one county in Michigan had refused to certify results due to an abundance of voting irregularities alleged in signed affidavits, but we should trust the state-wide count, right? In a late-night reversal, that county vote not to certify was reversed. All is well. Move along. Nothing to see here.
• Pennsylvania set up a two-tiered voting verification system, favoring Democrats, and also excluded Republican oversight of the ballot counting. A state official stated bluntly before a single vote had been counted that Biden would win. Can you say conflict of interest?
• Georgia runoff elections for two Senate seats, which could deadlock the Senate should both Democrats prevail, are looming as yet another chance for our election system to be rigged, right in plain sight and without any apparent interest in preventing that.
• A Wisconsin recount would cost Republicans about $8 million, roughly four times the cost when a Green Party candidate funded a recount in 2016. Of course COVID-19 is being blamed for a quadrupling in four years. I wish my income had gone up four times due to COVID-19 hysteria.
• Speaking of virus overkill, Democrats continue to be caught defying their own draconian orders to stay at home. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi apparently didn’t learn from being outed going mask-less to her beauty parlor while lecturing others to stay home. Now she showed up at a Democrat dinner in violation of her standards. California Governor Gavin Newsom also felt above his orders when he went to a birthday party at a restaurant, in direct violation of lockdown dictates given to all the ordinary people in his state.
• Still in California, you can go to strip clubs, just not to church, a reality questioned as far back as August by a West Sacramento pastor.
• It’s worse than that. Petty dictators at various state levels are conducting wars on Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings in private homes. Good luck enforcing that one all you would-be Fidel Castros.
• For years I’ve been trying to tell all I know to exit Twitter and Facebook due to their spying on their customer base for financial gain, as well as political manipulation. Now it’s been admitted to in open testimony under oath before the Senate that Facebook does just that, even when you aren’t logged in. And the sheep will accept it, as long as they can cyber-brag about themselves or their family on the platform. There is a word for people like that – suckers.
• Too many establishment politicians, including Republicans, are in the bag for what is referred to as The Washington Swamp to think that President Trump ever will get a fair accounting of the legitimate votes in this election. And I’m not optimistic that the judicial system will be much help, either. I hope I’m wrong about this.

I went to my local borough council meeting Monday afternoon and caught a glimpse of the time-honored tradition of government sausage making.

This is sausage making in the figurative sense, of course, just as frivolous governmental spending is called pork, despite it not being literally porcine.

There is not universal agreement on the colorful line’s origin, but Otto von Bismarck often is credited with observing “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”

Were Otto alive today, he might feel compelled to add elections to the law-making category, as something that can cause sausage-manufacturing levels of disgust under close inspection.

My purpose in attending the Monday meeting was to register complaints about the decline of behavior in my neighborhood.

We have had un-inspected, likely unregistered, vehicles roaming freely on the streets for more than a year. Police say they can’t catch them in the act, so . . .

In recent months, visitors to a young neighbor have mistaken our quiet residential street for a burnout box at the local dragstrip. I like auto racing in general, just not on the street in front of my house.

Dog owner neighbors, who are supposed to be the brains of the human-canine partnership, can’t seem to understand that if your dogs bark every single time they are let out, perhaps the owner should accompany them at 11 p.m., midnight, or later. Maybe at 7 a.m., too.

Those same neighbors felt entitled to erect a basketball hoop that protrudes over the alley, making the garbage trucks do a heavy-equipment limbo to get past weekly. Snow plowing should be similarly, unnecessarily, difficult.

Add in people parking directly across from each other on a street that should have parking on just one side, the cretins who insist on raking leaves onto the streets despite written instructions from the borough to leave them on the curb, and the soon-to-be-here winter tradition of parking in front of a neighbor’s house ahead of a snowstorm, then engaging all-wheel drive, smashing through the piled snow and slinking back in front of the offending person’s house, where the street has been plowed clean because nothing was parked there.

Being altogether traditional, I called the borough secretary in advance of the meeting to express my desire to speak, was put on the agenda, and got my allotted three minutes to vent.

Were I more contemporary, I’d have just stashed piles of bricks near the borough building, rounded up some mindless drones and slipped a few bucks into their pathetic hands to hurl those bricks indiscriminately, stormed the meeting, and claimed economic oppression, racism, elitism and the like.

I hung around to observe things after saying my piece Monday, and getting backup from one council member on the dog matter, and from the fire chief on the matter of his vehicles not being able to pass the streets with cars inexplicably parked on both sides and directly across from each other.

After the meeting, a guy with whom I’ve had a passing acquaintance for years, lamented the decline of the borough in terms of behavior by the citizenry.

But back to sausage making.

A borough, unlike the Federal Government, can’t just run a deficit, so budgets must be balanced. Toward that end, a proposed two-mill increase on property taxes was ratcheted up to three mills. What the heck, as long as we’re here and we’re in a raising mood, let’s do it.

Here’s where journalists get to have fun.

It’s a one-mill increase over the lower proposal, but it’s a full 50-percent higher than the alternative two-mill increase. And doesn’t 50-percent sound a lot more scary than one mill more?

There was an ongoing discussion as I left the adjourned meeting about labeling it a 20-percent overall tax increase, based on what was thought to be a current 15-mill levy increasing to 18 mills. Three mills is one-fifth of 15 mills, or 20 percent. Again 20 percent sounds like a lot more than three mills.

But the real sausage making came on the matter of handing over the mandated contribution to the county transit authority to make sure public transportation buses will run through the borough next year.

There is a demand by the authority for an increase of a bit more than $400, but several members, citing the federal money being rained on such authorities, as well as what were characterized as managerial pay grabs at said authority, quickly inspired mass sentiment to tell the the authority to take their buses and shove them where governmental subsidies don’t shine.

A vote was taken and the money would not be given. No buses for us.

That decision lasted for a few more agenda items before the matter was revisited by a disturbed council president. She and the borough solicitor implored the council to consider the elderly who are dependent on public transportation to buy groceries, visit doctors and the like.

They had valid points. But, on principle, so did the people in favor of denying more tribute to the transit authority.

In the end, another vote was taken and the suitably shamed naysayers relented. The money will be sent; the buses will continue to traverse the borough.

Sausage sandwiches all around.

If only rectifying the shortcomings of the presidential election were that easy.

(NOTE: This is a re-posting of an initial post giving some context that will save you from needing to toggle back to the beginning of the blog)

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.