I admit, I do rail often against hypocrisy, the mentality especially prevalent on the political left of holding the opposition to high standards while relaxing those standards when the same actions are committed by your group.

But, I don’t just talk the talk, I walk the walk. I expect no special treatment, only what is due in the circumstance. Far be it from me to think the world revolves around my ample frame.

Example: Just before lunch time today, I went to the Westwood branch of my bank, one whose name has changed maybe four or five times since it was Johnstown Bank and Trust, each time the service getting worse.

I make such stops every other week to get cash because, well, I’m a cash guy. When I worked for what has become the Johnstown Woke Gazette, I was the very last person to pay his union dues in cash instead of having it withheld from my paycheck.

I wanted it to hurt, seeing how much money my union was taking from me. Think of the line about gambling, which goes something like this: The guy who invented poker was bright, but the guy who invented the poker chip was a genius.

Casinos count on you forgetting those chips you are losing represent real money. It works out great, for the casinos.

Back to my banking habits, I get cash and use the old envelope system for my budgeting. I’ve done this even after retiring. Those withdrawals every other week are treated like a paycheck. Yes, I do charge things on a credit card, but I never carry a balance.

Today, I will pick up my 2004 Mustang, after it had some work done on it. I have the check already written.

Ahead of that, I was at the bank. A woman already at the counter when I walked in had some problem with a card, perhaps a debit card issued by the bank, and the lone beleaguered teller was trying to handle her, making a call to someone for assistance, trying to deal with the drive-through window, and looking nervously at me and the guy just ahead of me in the line.

I was there nearly 14 minutes, just waiting. I know, because I initiated the stopwatch function on my cell, even managed to play a game of chess online while I stood there.

The fellow ahead of me, a person I would later discover apparently was trying to make a deposit and check on the financial status of his business, out of the blue looked at me and offered me the chance to go ahead of him.

Perhaps he anticipated he would take some time, too, and wanted to cut me some slack. But, and here is where we get back to hypocrisy – or lack thereof, I believe in taking my turn, even as many others do not. This man got there ahead of me – I’m not sure how much ahead of me – and deserved to be waited on first. It would have been ridiculous, and hypocritical, to consider my time more important than his.

I politely told him thanks, but no need to give me his place.

About this time, the teller sent the woman being waited upon off with a promise to straighten out everything and get back to her down the line, just do not use the card. The teller also sent a tube out the drive-through apparatus to the person waiting there and then called over the man ahead of me.

It was then that the closed door to the office manager’s office opened, and out came a second teller. I’m sure she and the boss had been discussing company business.

Because I’ve seen tellers emerge just like that, then run off to lunch, I stood in my place. But, the teller went to her window, fired up her computer terminal, and beckoned me to come over.

My cashing of the check, and request for empty coin tubes for the wife took maybe three minutes and I was off to my Jeep. The man who had been ahead of me was in the midst of getting his situation resolved.

I’m not applying for sainthood regarding this experience, but I am noting that the world would be a much better place if people practiced the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This is not to be confused with the alternative Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.

That’s a topic for another day.

Johnstown continues to flail around, a metaphorical cocktail of social, economic and political failure.

And I wonder what President Donald Trump would have to say about our ongoing testimony to yet more failed Democrat leadership.

Let us imagine such a scenario. It might go something like this, with Trump speaking:

Someone asked me today about Johnstown, a little corrupt, Democrat-run town in Pennsylvania. They said, “Sir, is there any hope for such a town?”

Maybe, if they start voting for Republicans. I’ve been to Johnstown, for a rally at the airport in 2020, when that COVID scam was underway to ruin my re-election chances.

And I was back, at the Cambria County War Memorial Arena in 2024. I don’t use the corporate naming rights title – some bank or something. It’s a memorial to our armed forces, the strongest and best in the world, which I rebuilt in my first term and am doing again.

Just ask Venezuela, or Iran.

The people lining up to get into that rally were all the way up a nearby hill. Someone said to me, “Sir, it looks like they’re trying to escape another flood.”

No, I said, they’re just trying to escape the clutches of Clueless Joe and Cackling Kamala.

I said back then we’d win Pennsylvania, and we did, despite all the dead and illegals voting in Philadelphia. I understand you people in Johnstown have an ongoing problem with refugees from Philadelphia.

Just imagine the problems you might have had if the Myopia 2025 elites had run all the Afghan immigrants into town. How about that Myopia 2025 group? They give themselves an expiration date, then ignore it.

They tried to flood Johnstown with Afghans behind your back and stopped once it became public. Oh, and they guaranteed the Afghans would have been vetted. Like the Somalis in Minnesota? Like the Somali in England who just stabbed some Jewish people? Like the 21-year-old Syrian immigrant in Norway who got only six months in jail for raping a 13-year-old because the court found he was too stupid to know it was wrong?

Low IQ! Tell me about it. I deal with low IQ Democrats and some Republicans with the same problem every day.

I’m so glad I have Susie Wiles as my chief of staff to help me with it all. Susie’s great. She’s the daughter of the late, great Pat Summerall, you know. What an outstanding football player and broadcaster. As an announcer, he could make a football game sound like the Battle of Britain.

Speaking of Britain, we had King Charles as a guest last week. Nice guy, even though he’s a Limey.

Back to Johnstown, that War Memorial Arena was interesting. They’d put a lot of money into it over the years, but I could have done it for about half the money. Granite, marble, gold leaf, it would have been beautiful, not that it isn’t beautiful now.

Did you know they filmed the movie “Slap Shot” there? In the movie, it was Killer Carlson and the Hanson Brothers, but in real life it was Killer Hanson and the Carlson brothers.

Those were some tough dudes, sort of like the Penn State wrestling team. Putting on the foil, eh?

I need them to protect me, not that the Secret Service isn’t doing a great job. Those agents are great, perfect.

Did you see the other day the guy trying to get to me at the dinner in Washington? He was quick. I thought the guy was an NFL running back candidate. But his footwork was not nearly good enough. He tripped over a magnetometer case – looked like Clueless Joe climbing the steps to Air Force One, or getting off a stage, or getting on a stage, or . . . well, you’ve all seen the clips.

You might think I’m rambling here, but it’s all part of the weave. I’ll be back to talking about Johnstown and all the shootings and stabbings soon.

I hear Joe’s looking for a job. Maybe he can be your next mayor, just another inept Democrat. And, speaking of looking for work, Joe could install his son, Hunter, as the city manager. I understand you change city managers about as often as honest, God-fearing Americans change their underwear, and much more often than illegal immigrants change theirs – unless ICE is spotted in the neighborhood.

I hear Johnstown has an area known as Moxham. Lots of bad hombres there, doing lots of bad things.

I mentioned to my Secret Service head man, Sean Curran, that when I run again in 2028 (just kidding, Hakeem) we ought to do a rally in Moxham.

Sean said, “Sir, we can protect you anywhere, including the South Side of Chicago. But, if you insist on going to Moxham, we’re going to need to enlist the aid of the Moxham Ninja to get the job done.”

I told Sean, “Make it so.” I always love that Picard line, even though I preferred the original Star Trek.

We might have used Central Park for a rally, but satellite images provided to me by my good friend Elon – a generous genius, I tell you – show me it’s been turned into a mudhole. Again, Johnstown got its hands on government money, held a contest and hired out-of-town consultants to determine how best to waste it, then settled on destroying a bucolic oasis, sort of like Central Park in New York City. They took out all the grass and trees and now will pave it so it looks like yet another parking lot.

Right now, Johnstown Central Park looks like Gaza City, and even I could not rebuild that Johnstown abortion into a resort destination. Before they destroyed the park, I could have fixed it for about one-tenth the cost by just rounding up some friends for the weekend and buying them some pizza and beer.

I tell you, downtrodden Johnstown residents, that while things are bad, you should know they could get worse.

If you see some Swedish autistic girl with a Prince Valiant haircut sailing a “Freedom Flotilla” up the Conemaugh River, you will understand how much worse things can get.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Saturday has arrived, prompting a look back at another news-filled week, and requiring an edition of News and Views.

NEWS: The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 vote, ruled that voting districts cannot be configured for reasons of race.

VIEWS: The particular case involved a bizarre Congressional district in Louisiana designed to provide an almost certain win for Blacks and Democrats, with said district running 325 miles, give or take, from New Orleans in the southeast portion of the state, to Shreveport in the northwest, the better to capture pockets of significant Black population. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion, noted it almost never is condoned by the federal or state authorities to discriminate on the basis of race. Predictably, the DEI wing of the court provided the three minority votes. And Democrats are screaming about a lack of proportional representation as defined by race among the Louisiana House seats. Funny, these same Democrats see no problem with New England states having zero Republican House members and California having a 45-9 edge for Democrats despite a full 40 percent of the Golden State population voting for Donald Trump in the last presidential election, which would mean Republicans ought to have – minimum– 21 seats, if things were proportional. Math truly is racist, or at least a female dog.

NEWS: Maine Governor Janet Mills has dropped out of Democratic race to decide a challenger to Republican incumbent Susan Collins for one of the state’s U.S. Senator positions.

VIEWS: Now, Democrats likely will field an oyster farmer with a Nazi tattoo, that he since has covered up, and a history of anti-Semitic social media posts and other actions he says were made in an earlier period of his life and no longer apply. There’s a lot of Democrat failure to unpack here. Crying Chuck Schumer had hand-picked and supported Mills to beat Collins. Mills is something of a victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome, getting into a yelling match with Trump over her insistence that trans males should be able to beat on biological females in sporting events. I’m just glad I don’t need to vote in this election, because I’m not sure a would-be Nazi oyster farmer is a worse choice than RINO Collins, a political opportunist always willing to undercut her party and who is someone who spends so much time straddling the political fence it’s a good thing she’s not a biological male risking damaging the family jewels should she slip on that fence.

NEWS: Former Democrat mayoral candidate in New Jersey, Henrilynn Ibezim, has pleaded guilty to charges of trying to submit approximately 1,000 false applications for voter registrations.

VIEWS: One small-time Democrat mayor candidate, 1,000 or so fake voter applications, and, according to analysis, only 3-4 people doing the writing. Why is it that evidence of the election fraud that Democrats insist doesn’t exist, keeps cropping up? And why do Republican “leaders” such as the Senate’s John Thune not believe the SAVE Act is essential to the nation’s future? By the way, Ibezim’s punishment for this blatant violation, the sort of thing hyperbolic Democrats would label a threat to Democracy were it perpetrated by a Republican, is, wait for it, probation. Nothing to see here. Keep moving.

NEWS: After a quiet period, Johnstown again is being plagued by shootings.

VIEWS: Yes, they happened in Moxham. No, nothing will be done about it, other than candlelight vigils, police requests for leads, and condemnation of anyone who suggests Johnstown continues to be a dangerous place to live.

NEWS: The Marine One helicopter carrying President Trump made a low pass directly over the Washington, D.C., National Mall, which was sprinkled with anti-ICE May Day protesters.

VIEWS: The pathetic boobs on the ground gave the helicopter the obligatory one-fingered salute, presumably as Trump and his pilots erupted in side-splitting laughter. The only thing better would have been had the helicopter descended farther and treated the crowd to much-needed bath in rotor wash.

How I would love to be able to reach out and bend the ear of President Trump as he wavers on prosecuting further the Iran conflict.

Such is impossible for a lowly one like me, but I can employ the trite literary device of the open letter, getting my thoughts out to our tiny reading audience if not to the president himself. Dare I dream, word travels?

Here is such a letter.

Dear Donald Trump,

Sir, and I use “sir” in view of your love for the term of respect as evidenced by your penchant for including it while recounting conversations others have had with you, I come to you with a humble suggestion.

That suggestion is to quit trying to negotiate with Iran and instead borrow a page from Vlad The Impaler.

Sir, Vlad had trouble with Muslims back in the late 1400s, when Nancy Pelosi was only a school girl and Chuck Schumer was not yet a dead ringer for Nosferatu. It ended up with Vlad’s father being reduced to a puppet, sort of like Clueless Joe Biden was/is, and Vlad and his brother being imprisoned and tortured.

Sir, allow me to tell you Vlad was a vengeful man. Muslims later demanded tribute in the form of gold – and we know how you revere the yellow metal – and slaves from what then was Wallachia and now is part of Romania. Wallachia was under Vlad’s command. The Islamic emissaries sent with the dictates refused to remove their turbans for religious reasons, so Vlad sent them back to the Sultan with those turbans nailed to their heads.

In a subsequent military action, Vlad disheartened the march of the Sultan’s army upon a Wallachian city by littering the path there with what is reported to have been 20,000 dead Muslim soldiers and sympathizers, impaled on posts.

Sir, the Ottoman Sultan’s army was unnerved and turned back.

Fast-forward to 2026, sir, and unlike Vlad, you have all the cards. You have the superior military, which Vlad did not. You have the superior economy. You have closed Iran down for business.

Yet, sir, you allow them to continue relying on their obfuscation skills developed through thousands of years as sleazy traders of used camels.

Sir, you cannot bargain with these people. Period. Full stop.

I’m not suggesting you impale them, or nail their turbans to their heads.

I am suggesting we stop the negotiating pretense, take out all the remaining infrastructure targets with precision bombing, and allow the blockade of the Strait (Gay?) of Hormuz to strangle the Iran economy.

If and when the Iranians have had enough, demand they walk to some neutral point, arrive there at least a week before the scheduled start of talks, and sit around aimlessly as they have expected our negotiators to do.

Should they try more stalling, misdirection, and flat-out lies, sir, remind them we have many trees in this great land and could come up with millions of poles more easily than, say, more missiles and other munitions.

Mention Vlad. I’m sure his name will ring a bell.

Respectfully,

Sam Ross Jr.

God bless Newt Gingrich for his optimism regarding Republican chances in the November mid-term elections. I wish I could share it.

Gingrich is nothing if not consistent. He has been on the air, primarily Fox News or Fox Business, for months expressing his confidence. Before the Iran conflict, and now during it, his outlook remains positive.

Late Monday morning, he was on Fox Business with Stuart Varney, who made the point that despite all the optimism from Gingrich, and demonstrable President Trump triumphs such as lower taxes, stock markets at or near all-time highs, relatively low unemployment and the like, Trump’s approval ratings continue to decline.

Gasoline prices, the myopic lens through which too many consumers see their lives, are higher. These economic illiterates neglect to understand their take-home pay has increased, especially if they work for tips and put in overtime, both of which categories have no taxes thanks to Trump.

As calculated earlier in this space, gas prices being a $1 higher per gallon than a year earlier would, based on average miles driven and fuel economy, cost about $13 a week. That should be peanuts. If not, you’ve got problems beyond the gas prices.

It also hurts Trump that there is nonstop hatred spewing from Democrats and their sock puppets (to use a popular Democrat term) in the LameStream media. Seemingly intelligent people – think the Washington, D.C. dinner shooter – regurgitate the talking points almost verbatim in rambling manifestos designed to justify their insane acts.

Worse, supposedly reputable LameStream media types repeat the falsehoods to Trump and challenge him to defend himself.

As Gingrich told Varney of Democrats and LameStream media: “I think we’re in a very strange period. They’ve lost just lost their heads.”

If only that were true literally. This altered state of consciousness among a huge slice of the populace is exactly why I think the Republicans go down in flames in November, albeit undeservedly so.

Gingrich, citing his lengthy experience with campaigns, begs to differ, even as he acknowledged Democrats making hay with the so-called affordability issue.

“The Republicans are, better than even, likely to win this fall,” he said. “The real campaign will begin around the Fourth of July. George H.W. Bush was behind by 19 points against Dukakis in May and beat him by eight. So, every fourth American switched.

“I am very confident that when we get to the real campaign, the Democrats are going to melt very rapidly.”

I hope Gingrich is correct. I do not believe that he is. America was very different in 1988, when George H.W. Bush was contesting Michael Dukakis for president. Socialism, Marxism and nihilism were not running rampant very openly among Democrats.

This nation still had a strong reliance on basic principles such as faith, law and truth. The media could be trusted. Massive illegal immigration and absurd DEI programs had not stained the social fabric. Teachers taught reading, writing and math, not climate change, white privilege and socialism.

It is instructive that the latest would-be Trump assassin is/was a teacher. Perhaps he can tutor fellow prisoners the next few decades.

For Gingrich to be proved correct, half the nation is going to need to experience a rebirth, a mental enema flushing out all the Trump Derangement Syndrome toxins.

Can that happen before Nov. 3? Doubtful. We should know the answer late on that date, maybe a few weeks after if it’s close and California’s ridiculously slow election counting, apparently still relying on pointy sticks and wax tablets, bumbles toward a verdict that will determine the balance of power.

Resisting making a kneejerk reaction either to praise or vilify the Secret Service in the aftermath of this latest President Trump assassination attempt, I chose instead to let my thoughts marinate on the subject.

In the harsh afternoon light of the next day’s afternoon, I conclude that arguments can be made for both sentiments.

Yes, the Secret Service agents on the ground did well once the assault had begun. But, it strikes me that once again the Secret Service dropped the ball prior to these events by failing to anticipate adequately the threat.

From leaving the nearby rooftop unsecured in Butler, to allowing a would-be shooter to camp out in the bushes alongside Trump’s golf course, and now to the numerous flaws that facilitated this Washington, D.C., attempt, planning has not been a Secret Service long suit.

Admittedly, I’m not an expert on such things. But, just as a literary critic needn’t be a celebrated author, or, as I once told a Major League baseball player, you don’t need to be dead to write an obit, I believe it’s fair to apply common sense to the situation and draw conclusions.

It’s been noted how fast the alleged shooter ran on surveillance videos. Well, even if he’s a human roadrunner, he couldn’t have made it that close to the ballroom had the perimeter been set out farther, say outside the building.

Also, considering the video of multiple agents drawing weapons and presumably shooting them, I fail to understand how the suspect was not shot, even once. He reportedly plunked at least one agent, who was spared only because he was wearing a bulletproof vest. But, we have been told the suspect, although hospitalized, had not been shot. You mean they all missed? Did one of these agents accidentally shoot the agent in his vest while firing at the suspect?

Like in Butler, the agents surrounding Trump after the fact and attempting to get him away from the stage, included at least one short, stocky apparent female. It had been noted in the wake of the Butler shooting that perhaps the agents closest to the President should at least be as tall as the person they are trying to surround with a human wall.

Are there no female Amazon Secret Service agents, standing at least as tall as Trump, whose height is listed at 6-foot-2?

As one security expert pointed out, having the event at a hotel, with guests free to come and go and do God knows what in their rooms, is a major oversight.

Suppose this nerd, would-be assassin had put together a massive bomb in his room?

If Trump were a cat, he’d still have six lives remaining. He is not and, by the rules of baseball, he should be out having suffered three strikes.

The same could be said for the Secret Service, which certainly needs to do much better in future at-bats.

It is more than ironic coincidence that on the same weekend Iran peace efforts collapsed due to Iranian intransigence, our country’s Lunatic Left made another attempt at taking out President Donald Trump.

These two groups of deranged zealots are virtually the same, the major difference being the leftist extremists are not yet in charge of our government. Yet!

With all due respect to CNN hack Coyote Blitzed, who was on his way to take a leak when shooting began outside the Washington, D.C. ballroom Saturday night and the self-important fool immediately thought someone was trying to kill him, you were not the target, Coyote.

If you had any journalistic instincts, you’d realize our President was in the next room, attending the White House Correspondents dinner for the first time, an event in front of a hostile crowd. Alas, Coyote is merely emblematic of the megalomania that infects LameStream media, constantly thinking it’s all about them.

President Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in an address hours after the incident, and the left-wing media types in the briefing room were unusually civil. Don’t be fooled. It was a temporary phenomenon.

By today I expect most of them have rushed to their computers or Sunday morning shows to somehow blame Trump for it all.

There was not even a split-second of thoughtful contemplation among the online crowd Saturday night. When a name of the alleged shooter first surfaced, the brain-dead among the left, which is the majority, unfortunately, was proclaiming their joy that the guy was a white, straight male and thus would staunch the flood of recent violence by gay trannys.

Well, I got a look at a picture of the guy, and he’s about as white as George Zimmerman of the Trayvon Martin incident. Zimmerman, in a CNN whitewashing (pun intended) attempt, was described as a “White Hispanic,” which was news to Zimmerman and his family.

If and when full accounting of race is made in this case, I would expect the result would be something less than total Caucasian. It wouldn’t stun me if the guy spent some time in mosques, either.

As for his being gay or straight, if I had to make a guess based solely on the pictures, I wouldn’t be picking straight. At best, he’s probably an asexual nerd more comfortable with his hand on a game controller than on a female.

What already has been reported is that he’s a teacher of some sort in California, throwing more shame on that profession which of late is producing reports of pedophilia and violent thoughts toward Trump and conservatives at a sickening rate.

Sprinkled among the addled postings by social media warriors trying to alter the alleged shooter’s racial profile, were traditional fallback positions that it all was a sham display designed to boost Trump’s popularity, or expressing regrets that the would-be assassin hadn’t been successful.

I was discussing the first the other night regarding the Butler shooting of Trump. If you really believe Trump trusted a marksman merely to graze his ear from 100 yards-plus, while Trump’s head was moving, just to drum up support for him, you’re a moron.

If you would have celebrated the death of a president, moron is not a strong enough term.

I do have my own questions regarding this whole affair.

How did the guy bring the guns with him from California and check into the hotel with them?

Will he be given a pass as yet another mental deficient, without the legitimate followup questions of why so many such types are free to roam the streets these days?

Are we to ignore the fact that he donated to Cackling Kamala’s campaign and most likely is yet another far-left Democrat still living at home at 30-plus years of age?

Will we be expected to believe the parents when they say, as they no doubt will, that they had no idea they were harboring a violent and unstable son?

Does anyone else think it’s absurd that the Secret Service agent who took a bullet and was saved by wearing a bulletproof vest, is not getting paid by virtue of Democrat politicization of the funding process?

Finally, how long is this sort of thing going to be tolerated before those on the political right start shooting back?

Even as the Philadelphia Flyers are embarrassing the Penguins in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Philly Eagles stuck it to the Steelers in the first round of the NFL draft Thursday, trading up to take the wide receiver the Steelers were ready to select with the very next pick. So much for that City of Brotherly Love stuff.

That wide receiver would be Makai Lemon of USC. He was on the phone with the Steelers, who were expressing their eternal love for him, when the Eagles made the trade to move ahead of the Steelers and then called Lemon to say welcome to the Eagles.

As often happens with jilted suitors on the rebound, the Steelers made a hasty, questionable choice to replace Lemon, settling on Arizona State offensive tackle Max Iheanachor. This is a Nigerian who only has been playing football for a few years.

It’s amusing, but not necessarily fatal. Despite all the instant draft analysis you’ve read of the first-round picks in general, and the Steelers’ initial pick specifically, no one, and I mean no one, knows how this will turn out long term.

Tom Brady, the poster boy for winning titles when it comes to NFL quarterbacks, was drafted in the sixth round in 2000, the 199^th player taken. Think of all the millions of dollars NFL teams spend on scouting the draft, and all the time and money spent by draft gurus telling us before, and after, how teams did. Yet, Brady was picked almost as an afterthought and went on to rewrite NFL history.

In an example closer to home, one I personally observed with the Steelers, consider the cases of Darryl Sims and Mark Behning from the 1985 draft. Sims, the “Sack Man” from Wisconsin, was billed as a great pass-rushing defensive end and was picked in the first round. “Fort” Behning was a massive offensive tackle from Nebraska

The Steelers bragged they’d gotten a first-round talent in the second round with Behning.

At St. Vincent preseason camp that summer the two squared off often in drills, with each winning maybe half the battles. There were knowing smiles among the coaching staff and the media.

Then the games began – first preseason and then regular season. As it turns out, when Sims and Behning were going against each other it was a case of two guys who weren’t really that good. Put them against NFL talent and let’s just say they were exposed.

Behning’s exposure was delayed a year because he broke an arm in training camp in 1985 and didn’t play until the next year. He was cut in the 1988 preseason.

Sims didn’t start a game in two seasons with the Steelers, but he did provide amusing copy when he missed time in training camp due to infected fingernails.

As detailed yesterday, the Steelers draft brain trust also passed on Dan Marino in 1983, despite him playing and practicing for four years at Pitt just a few miles up the road in Oakland, not to mention him playing his high school football at Pittsburgh Central Catholic.

To repeat, it’s too early to judge this Steelers draft, either the first round or whatever comes in later rounds. It’s not too early, however, to raise an eyebrow.

It seems the same Johnstown types who give us the stock $20 million estimate for economic impact any time some event involving more than 10 people hits our town, have hired out to Pittsburgh to gin up figures for the NFL draft.

And they’ve done a great job of ratcheting up their numbers. During a phone call last night, a friend was proclaiming the estimate he’d heard that 700,000 souls will venture to Pittsburgh for the event. I noted at the time that’s more than twice the declining city’s population, which immediately calls that estimate into question.

Are they sleeping under the city’s many bridges? Are they just day trippers; not the drug users celebrated in the Beatles song Day Trippers? Are the figures a tad inflated, sort of like the price of gasoline?

My Wednesday evening caller didn’t have a dollar figure for economic impact, but a quick internet search today found one source projecting from $120 to $200 million of benefit for the ‘Burgh. An $80 million range suggests an estimate long on guesses and short on data.

I used to cover the NFL draft when I worked at what has become our Johnstown Woke Gazette and later, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. I won’t be going to Pittsburgh for this event. If they held it in my backyard, I’d pull down the blinds.

The NFL draft is just another overhyped, overblown example that nothing succeeds like excess.

Said draft begins at 8 p.m. tonight with exactly one round on the docket. Subsequent rounds unfold in coming days. I remember, when the upstart United States Football League arrived in the mid-1980s the NFL began its draft early one day and went continuously through the finish in the wee hours of the next morning, maybe 2 or 3 a.m., as I recall.

This year’s NFL draft unfolds over three days, two of them with primetime starts. Again, nothing succeeds like excess.

New England coach Mike Vrabel reportedly will miss Day 3. He will be having counseling, presumably to prevent him from again canoodling with a married female NFL reporter, who gives new meaning to the term “insider.”

How will the Steelers handle the draft being held in their home city? Hopefully they won’t make as huge an error as in 1983, when they skipped over hometown hero, Pitt quarterback Dan Marino, to take defensive end Gabe Rivera, whose career was ended by a car accident that left him paralyzed early in his rookie year. Rivera was charged with drunken and reckless driving, but the charges were dropped due to him, according to a DA, having suffered enough.

Steelers fans suffered watching Marino have a Hall of Fame career for Miami even as the Steelers continued to struggle to find a replacement for their Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

Fast-forward to the present and the Steelers and their fans are waiting anxiously to learn if ancient quarterback Aaron Rodgers will break out his walker and attempt yet another season. Some have suggested – heresy – that the Steelers might want to think about drafting a quarterback with an early-round pick.

These people think having a starting quarterback on the verge of qualifying for AARP membership is not the best option.

A side benefit of the NFL draft hysteria in Pittsburgh is that it has taken some of the attention off what is becoming yet another epic collapse by the Penguins in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Your Penguins find themselves in a 3-0 hole after losing Game 3 in Philadelphia. Typically, the Penguins were whining about the officiating afterward instead of looking in the mirror.

Back to that cell call I got Wednesday night, he had mentioned the Penguins game, ongoing at that time. I told him I hadn’t watched a minute, but, in view of the league’s interest in keeping the Penguins alive, I predicted the Penguins were winning and had at least two power-play goals.

He told me the Penguins were losing, 3-1, so I flipped on the game just in time to see the Penguins close it to 3-2 with, yes, their second power-play goal of the game.

That the Penguins lost is a result of them going just 2-of-5 on those extra-man situations, while the Flyers were 2-for-3.

The refs can give you power-play chances, but they can’t put the puck in the net for you.

I will confess to having expected the Penguins to do better in these playoffs, although I never did buy burgeoning sentiment that this was a team with a good chance to go past the second round.

The reason for that is age is not served in the playoff long run, and Crosby, Malkin and Letang might be looking soon to borrow Rodgers’ walker.

Call this the Steve Cohen edition of News and Views, for it is an amalgamation of absurdities.

Speaking of absurdities, it was Cohen who whined during a session of Congress recently that ICE is “arresting people simply for the offense of being in the country illegally.”

Well, duh, that is their job, Cohen.

I’m reminded of a meme emailed to me the other day that suggested instead of calling folks such as Cohen the politically incorrect term “retarded,” we instead substitute the euphemism “vaccinated.” So, Cohen obviously is vaccinated.

NEWS: An Afghan national has been arrested in France on charges of raping goats and sheep.

VIEWS: Animal rights types our outraged, dare we say more than if the Afghan had been raping little girls or boys. We await the immigrant defense currently making the rounds in these United States and other countries that such non-native types cannot be guilty since they don’t fully understand the behavior standards in their new lands. Is raping farm animals frowned upon here? A thousand pardons, effendi.

NEWS: A Nigerian man was arrested in Italy after he was observed barbecuing a freshly killed cat on a makeshift grill set up near a children’s playground.

VIEWS: Again, outrage, including some politico branding it “a heinous act that must not go unpunished.” Throw the book at him. Five minutes in jail and a five Lira fine. If only he’d killed a child and barbecued it, no problem.

NEWS: A video making the rounds of social media that was shared on citizenfreepress.com shows a Missouri man pinning a Latino (immigrant status unknown) to the wall of the house waiting for the police to arrive and arrest him for breaking and entering cars and houses in the neighborhood.

VIEWS: The twist, according to the post, is within days he had been promptly released and the alleged miscreant was back on the streets. He subsequently assaulted a massage therapist by exposing himself, beating her and attempting rape. Perhaps no goats or sheep were available?

NEWS: According to a report in the New York Post, a freedom flotilla organized by Swedish eternal adolescent, vaccinated Greta Thunberg, has a leader accused of sexual assault during the voyage.

VIEWS: The Woke type is accused of assaulting not one, not two, but three volunteers, turning the supposed mercy mission to Gaza into a Love Boat remake. And some activist took to social media in the attempt to explain it all away as a cultural misunderstanding. You mean when you say no, it is not yes? A thousand pardons, effendi. By the way, do you own any goats or sheep?

NEWS: The Daily Mail reports an Iranian woman, who was granted residency here under the Barack Hussein Obama regime, was arrested on charges of illegal arms dealing while on her way to the Los Angeles airport to flee to Istanbul.

VIEWS: Expect her to plead ignorance. You mean such is not permitted here? It is A-OK in Iran. A thousand pardons, effendi. And at least I didn’t harm any goats or sheep!