Today’s laugh came from finding out that social media platforms are alive with posts claiming that Kamala Harris groped various men 20, 30, or more years back.

This is the hilarious satirical reaction to yet another left-wing “news” site pitching an allegation that Donald Trump groped a young girl decades back – 1993 “late winter or early spring.”

Just to spice it up, the lovely lass is said to have been on a walk with the late pervert Jeffrey Epstein when they visited Trump and the alleged groping occurred. We can’t ask Epstein for confirmation since he conveniently committed suicide while on suicide watch in prison and, some suspect, kept a long list of Democratic clients of his sex services from being named in a trial.

Why now with the Trump groping charge? Why, indeed? Perhaps because we are within two weeks of an election with Trump a candidate on the rise, so this is the sort of salacious drivel that drives Internet clicks and notice for the beat me, bore me, but never ignore me crowd.

It also is supposed to sway voters’ opinions, but, thankfully, early indications are the American electorate is becoming a bit weary of such transparent attempts.

No doubt it is mere coincidence that the woman had gone from model to Democratic activist in the intervening years.

She has come forward out of a sense of duty, understand. And the LameStream media runs with the story as absolute gospel. Meanwhile, Kamala Chameleon’s nanny-skewering hubby has been accused of slapping around another woman in his past. But that story implicates someone associated with a prominent Democrat, so we hear crickets from LameStream media.

Fortunately, in this era of social media, there is a way for the public to point out the ridiculous nature of this latest Trump allegation, and that is to parody it with hashtag KamalaGropedMe.

One such poster wrote, that in an effort to be unburdened by what has been, he had to confess to Kamala groping him at McDonald’s.

Another wrote of Kamala cackling like a hyena during the groping and seeing her cackling in similar fashion in virtually every public appearance these days makes him relive the trauma over and over.

And so it goes, as the groping allegations, seasoned with tidbits from various Kamala word salads, foibles, and questionable claims about her background (she grew up middle class, don’t you know?) are spot on in satirizing the latest ridiculous accusation.

This is the spice added to the Dems’ closing argument stew that Trump is Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin reincarnate. Why, even former Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly says Trump saw some good in Hitler and opined that he wished he had some of Hitler’s generals.

On that general front, I’m with Trump. Give me the likes of Rommel instead of that tub of goo Milley and his compadres, who are full-on Woke and feel climate change is our greatest military challenge. Did the dear Milley and crew ever hear all the Russia, Russia, Russia chanting? Are China and Iran afterthoughts?

It is notable that Gen. Kelly became a fierce Trump critic only after being fired. I’m thinking that if I learned I was working for Hitler, I’d have quit, maybe even tried to take him out instead of waiting years to come clean with my shocking knowledge, again, all-too-conveniently close to an election.

Kelly deserves nothing but scorn.

The news that many other Trump ex-employees have signed a letter backing Kelly brings to mind all those intelligence types who swore in ads that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. According to no less a source than Hunter, that is 100 percent false. But it worked guys. Clueless Joe Biden won. You must be so proud.

Maybe this open letter won’t be as effective

It does seem that the endless hyperbolic charges in the media are not having the desired impact on Trump; might even be helping him.

Polls paint an increasingly unfavorable picture of the Cackling Kamala campaign. Unnamed Democratic sources already are pointing fingers.

Usually reliable allies such as CNN bashed Kamala hard after her miserable performance on their town hall telecast earlier this week.

Now comes word that the Washington Post, at the behest of owner Jeff Bezos, won’t be making a presidential endorsement. The leftist staff was predictably upset.

After all, the supposedly neutral Washington Post last endorsed a Republican for president in 1952 — Eisenhower.

The paper took a break after that, resumed endorsements in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, and have been going for Democrats ever since.

Yes, the Post even endorsed Mondale over Reagan, one of our country’s all-time great presidents.

Some usually reliable labor unions also are passing on endorsing Kamala.

I doubt these Hitler, or serial groper allegations are going to change that. And they shouldn’t change the voting outcome, either.

A neighbor suffered the ultimate indignity last week – receiving a political mailing that came with a message that there was postage due!

Said neighbor, a friend of my wife, is at the stage of life in which confusion is the default response to any unexpected stimuli, and so she reached out to my wife for counsel about how to handle this and what it meant. After some details emerged, I told my wife I’d received the exact same mailing the previous day, but fortunately with sufficient postage attached.

My advice was to tell the lettercarrier this was not desirable mail and to encourage that person to try to get the postage due from the sender. The woman did this and the matter was dropped as far as she was concerned.

This mailing came in a white business-sized envelope – mine with my name handwritten on the outside, the better to trick the receiver into thinking it was perhaps something personal. It was not the maddening array of post-cards-on-steroids campaign mailers which assault my mailbox daily (two today, a slow day) that at least are transparent in their purpose.

Inside was a single page, obviously a copy of some original, that was a message on behalf of Afghan Amy, calling for integrity from incumbent opponent Frank Burns. Ironically, speaking of integrity and disclosure, there was no return address on the envelope, the better to help disguise who had sent it.

Inside was a sheet of paper professing to be from Jim Hargreaves (James F. Hargreaves at the end) with a purported copy of a letter to the editor previously run in the Daily Bugle exonerating Afghan Amy of any input in the sale of Conemaugh Hospital et al to Duke LifePoint. The message is that Hargreaves, trumpeted to be a former Conemaugh Health System board chairman, was giving Afghan Amy a pass on the hospital sale that has gone so badly for the community in terms of a decline in timely, effective health care.

The sheet called, expectedly, for a vote for integrity and Afghan Amy.

No mention was made of Afghan Amy’s association with Myopia 2025 and the attempt to work in secret to bring Afghan refugees to Johnstown, to fill the jobs locals won’t take, or some such blather.

When Burns was among elected officials who brought this bit of elitist, behind-the-scenes, dealing into the public arena, the effort was abandoned.

As for the hospital sale, Afghan Amy was the paid spokesman for the hospital who is on the record insisting it would be no problem and any surprises likely would be positive.

We’ve said before in this space there are two possibilities here and neither is a good look for Afghan Amy.

First, it could be that she truly believed what she was saying, which speaks of gullibility and brings into question her ability to represent the area well in the state house.

Also, it could be she knew better, but didn’t say so. I’m hoping that possibility cannot be true.

My other hope is for a decisive election result, and not to receive any postage-due political mail ahead of that.

The plan had been to enjoy another day of our ongoing Indian Summer and take a break from election thoughts and feeling the need to blog on the subject.

I almost made it. There was the drive in the Mustang convertible to enjoy fall foliage, running errands, watching the old net worth meter swell as gold and silver continued their upward spikes, visiting with the granddaughters and getting in a short walk.

Then I made the mistake of turning on the TV, and checking the Internet, only to find yet another barrage of ridiculous hypocrisy from the political left.

This was neatly summarized by a brief interview with Mike Rogers, a Republican running for a vacant Senate seat for Michigan. He pointed out how his Democratic opponent had voted for electric vehicle mandates in the U.S. House, only to then run an ad saying she was not in favor of banning traditional internal combustion engine vehicles.

This Kamala-Chameleon-like tap dance comes at a time when traditional automakers, based in Michigan, are bleeding red ink from unsuccessful, politically forced, forays into the EV market. Layoffs have been announced.

If you want to push the EV agenda, fine. But then admit it to the world and, more importantly, to your would-be constituents whose lives are affected by your Green New Deal views.

Here are some short takes on other Democratic hypocrisy I saw, all today.

Leftist Democrats are whining that Donald Trump’s McDonald’s visit was “staged” yet have no problem that Kamala Chameleon did an alleged town hall in which the town hall audience had no ability to ask questions. Those had been “predetermined” said the shill host to a person wanting to get a question in to the Chameleon.

Also, my son happened to be in the Moon Township area in August when patrons were thrown out of a Primanti Brothers restaurant so Kamala Chamelon, Tampon Tim, and vans full of faux customers could be substituted for a staged campaign stop. Staged. Staged. Staged. Yet no media outrage. Hmmmm.

The British Labour Party is importing workers to help Kamala Chameleon in swing states such as Pennsylvania and another fringe British group is aligning with the Chameleon campaign to “kill Twitter,” owned by prominent billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, by harassing Twitter’s advertising base. Where are the hysterical screams about foreign interference in our election?

The latest absurd leftist talking point is that Trump is tired and running out of steam. This regarding a guy who does multiple campaign events daily and has for the past 51 days. Meanwhile, Kamala Chameleon took Tuesday off from appearing at campaign events, limiting her activity to recycling her tired non-answers to pertinent questions for two sitdown interviews.

Leftists in media also seem to have gotten the same memo to brand Trump the unholy trinity of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, all rolled into one. We must vote against Trump to preserve our delicate democracy, the one Democrats have been trying to subvert by running a coup to get rid of elected nominee and sitting president Joe Biden, by weaponizing justice and intelligence agencies to harass Trump and even putting out the kind of thinly veiled death suggestions that have motivated at least two would-be Trump assassins. The only sad note is that one of these moronic leftist attempted killers still draws breath.

The left hyperventilates that if Trump wins he will use the military to round up his enemies. First, he was president for four years, you morons, and did no such thing. More to the point, the crazy talk denigrating political foes and pondering punishment comes from the likes of Barack and his clinging to guns and religion crack, Shrillary and her “deplorables” which she now says was not strong enough, and Kamala Chameleon telling some Christians yelling the name of Jesus Christ at a Chameleon political event that they were at the wrong rally. It is the left that speaks of re-education camps for Trump supporters, who are labeled as brain-dead cultists, racists and misogynists.

Along that line, Clueless Joe, who likely will pardon his convicted felon son Hunter before being led from the Oval Office, wants to lock up Trump. That’s rich, as in ironic.

Kamala Chameleon insists she never saw any evidence of Biden’s faltering mental decline, the stuff that prompted her party to shove him off the ticket, and insists she would do nothing differently in terms of policy. She then turns around and says she’s not Biden and will do things differently. Huh?

If Trump, running mate JD Vance, or any of the Trump surrogates, including Musk, utter a syllable the leftists don’t agree with, they are pilloried for days if not weeks. Meanwhile, Bubba Clinton says Laken Riley likely still would be alive if our border was run correctly, and Obama lectures the “brothas” that they have to vote for Kamala Chameleon because she’s black and a woman – “sista” as Spike (a good name for a dog) Lee whined, without a whisper from these leftists.

There is a sickness upon the land, afflicting almost half the population, and there is no simple vaccine. The left is morally and intellectually bankrupt. Yet, they still hold the levers that control the government, the media, the schools and the bureaucracy.

It’s time to pry their hands from those levers and it all starts with an election in just under two weeks.

There is an argument to be made that Donald Trump and Republicans would be better off losing this upcoming election, largely because the nation is poised on the brink of what likely will be economic and financial collapse.

You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this sort of thing. In fact, I’ve made similar predictions in the past.

In 2000, it was clear George W. Bush was inheriting a NASDAQ tech bubble that had burst in March of that year and would lead to tough sledding for the nation. Little did we know that the seeds already had been sowed for the 911 terror attacks that would come months after Bush finally had been certified as the winner.

It was rough going for the United States, but we bounced back, in part because the nation was not in nearly as bad fiscal shape back then. The 2000 national debt was listed at $6 trillion. Fast-forward to 2024 and it’s an admitted $36 trillion, but some argue it actually is in the $200-plus trillion range if the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare are included.

By the end of Bush’s second term, we were mired in the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2007-08 and Barack Obama was swept into office.

As bad as they were, that 2000 tech bust, and the housing/real estate bust that inspired the 2007-08 financial collapse, were mere preludes to what we now face.

You probably are not aware, but gold, a canary in the coal mine of economic and financial distress, hit an all-time high above $2,700 an ounce Friday on the spot market. It’s little brother in the precious metals area, silver, was up more than $2 an ounce just Friday alone, to the $33.75 or so an ounce mark. This is well below the all-time highs of $50 give or take in 1980 and 2011, but it’s trending strongly.

You might hear the term BRICS being tossed around. This is a economic bloc named for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, but others have joined. They are trying to get out from under the yoke of the U.S. dollar, which sees this nation shutting out some nations from world trade and also arbitrarily seizing their assets.

There is talk that this coming week’s BRICS confab will produce a gold-backed currency to compete with the dollar. I think this is premature and expect to see gold and silver sell off this week. But, long term, both precious metals should have great upside.

The high-flying stock market might continue its surge for a time, too, but it is on borrowed time, as it was in 2000 and 2007-08.

We got out of those previous collapses. But, to stress again our debt situation, this nation and the world were in much stronger financial shape back then.

China is having economic distress, with the tried-and-true measure of government stimulus being tried to pull that nation out of its spiral. Germany’s economy is struggling, Japan is having a crisis with its currency, the Yen.

And on. And on. And on.

Things are on the bleak side and easily could fall apart quickly.

And that means the candidate and party that win this election could come up big-time losers in the long run.

I posted on laughable government statistics earlier today, went for the daily walk and returned to find yet another effort to skew statistics, this a 10-16-24 posting by CBS News.

The tale alluded to Donald Trump and Kamala Chameleon Harris sparring over crime numbers and, predictably, gave the nod on accuracy to the Chameleon.

The story prefers FBI figures, but neatly ignores that the FBI has come clean that their reported drop in violent crime in recent years has been revised to an increase. I guess all the Hate Trump types at CBS were too busy with that crusade, or editing Chameleon interviews, to notice that FBI stealth update.

There is another aspect to all of this that I didn’t get into in the previous blog post, but will here: Crime statistics mostly are based on reports to police and arrests, and an awful lot of crime is not showing up in these metrics.

Think of all the shoplifters in California who are careful to stay under $950 in total goods stolen on each encounter, which is the cutoff below which the authorities basically ignore the crime.

Think of all the illegal immigrants allowed into this country on ridiculous exemptions and go on to commit crimes that largely go unreported and unsolved. Again, the numbers fail to capture accurately the level of crime.

Think of thousands of people rioting and burning property, harming innocents, and generally taking over portions of major cities. But few if any get charged, so there is no crime committed, right? Give me a break!

Such bastardization of reality leads to the likes of the infamous CNN banner about mostly peaceful protests against a backdrop of flaming cars and buildings.

This sort of media sleight of hand helps explain why a record low of 31 percent of the U.S. population surveyed in Gallup polling trusts the LameStream media to be accurate.

Trust figures for the federal government and its bogus statistics, are higher, but still well below 50 percent.

Keep on mis-stating, massaging, and outright lying about the numbers and those trust numbers will continue to plumb record lows.

The public increasingly is catching on to the propaganda. Welcome to reality, people.

Government statistics, like “60 Minutes” interviews and ABC presidential debates, tend to be inaccurate, slanted and subject to ex post facto revisions.

And yet they are consumed without hesitation by the gullible and used freely to make decisions from the political to the economic.

Why this is so – an ongoing triumph of hope over experience — remains a question for our times.

The government bureaucracy is particularly bad in being willing to massage those statistics to back up the prevailing narrative as espoused by the political left.

Recall all those job gains designed to make the Clueless Joe-Kamala Chameleon economy look stronger and then about 850,000 jobs got revised away?

More recently, FBI violent crime statistics were revised upward in a large fashion. You might remember from the debate that Donald Trump noted rising violent crime and was fact-checked by the moderators in their typically one-sided fashion. They cited FBI crime numbers.

The Trump campaign was quick to point out the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey saw a 37 percent rise in violent crime since Kamala Harris arrived in 2020 as vice president.

Now our unbiased FBI, the same organization that gave Shillary Clinton a pass on mishandling classified information, used lies to get wiretap authorization on Trump, and had agents actively exchanging get-Trump texts, has come clean on crime numbers.

That widely reported and cited 2.1 percent DECREASE in violent crime in 2022, now is a 4.5 percent INCREASE!

Not surprisingly, we didn’t receive official mea culpas from the FBI. That suspect organization just slipped in the changes and hoped no one would notice.

Whoops.

Today was a big day for government data releases.

Retail sales were strong, a plus .5 percent month over month, with the help of a “seasonal adjustment.” Without that adjustment, it’s down 7.5 percent month over month. That is the largest seasonal adjustment in history.

I’m sure the leftist bean counters in the bureaucracy didn’t goose the seasonal adjustment with an election less than a month in our future and so this would be their last report until after the voting. I mean, they can always do one of those magical downward revisions after Americans have made their choice for president and various other offices.

In another government data release, U.S. manufacturing numbers for September came in down .4 percent vs. an anticipated .1 percent decline. They couldn’t even seasonally adjust this away. But just ignore it, please, and vote Kamala Chameleon and Tampon Tim.

Democrats and their surrogates consistently say the economy is strong and those who disagree are either mistaken or flat-out fibbing.

They point to record highs in investment markets as proof. But stock markets are not the economy. Stock prices can be and have been inflated with rash fiscal spending.

Eventually, those stock prices can be expected to come in sharply if and when the sugar high of enormous governmental spending ends.

Crime is up – even the FBI now agrees.

Prices are up. When you hear about declines in inflation, remember that’s just the rate of increase slowing. Prices remain 30 or 40 percent higher than they were when Biden-Harris took office. Also, a 3 percent increase on a 130 percent base (current prices compared to pre-Biden) is equivalent to a 3.9-percent increase on the pre-Biden costs.

All these blatant errors and manipulations in government statistics give pause as we approach an election, with vote counting being the most impactful government statistic of all.

Kamala Chameleon and Tampon Tim, AKA The Lump and The Chump, are making the rounds to convince you they are big gun supporters.

As usual, they are laughable in their attempts.

We were treated just this week to a video of Tampon Tim struggling to load a shotgun,ostensibly as part of a pheasant hunt although we have heard no birds were harmed during this “hunt.” He looked like a transgender fiddling with a malfunctioning tampon dispenser in a Minnesota school bathroom.

The unkind on social media nailed it, likening Tim to cartoon stooge Elmer Fudd. There was Tampon Man, all dressed in blaze orange and various accessories of the well-dressed hunter, failing with the basics of loading his gun. All we needed was some “be vewwy quiet. I’m hunting wascally wabbit” commentary.

Tampon Tim fiddled while trying to load the gun – we’re not quite sure if he ever succeeded — talked nervously and generally looked like he was lost as he used his scrotum to brace the butt of the gun while he jammed away at the loading port.

Although I have successfully loaded such weapons, I felt the need to back up that memory. I searched for and found a shotgun manufacturer’s video on loading such pump-action weapons and the woman had no problem either loading, or unloading the weapon, in seconds.

We are left with several lasting impressions.

First, Tampon Tim’s fumbling with the weapon recalls the equally absurd Mike Dukakis tank moment.

Second, if this is how Tampon Tim functions with a firearm, it’s a good thing he never really carried a weapon of war in combat and had to defend himself.

Third, who laps up this ridiculous political theater?

And then we have Kamala Chameleon, who has found that opposing the 2^nd Amendment is but another issue on which she is going to need to perform a 180-degree position pivot if she hopes to chuckle her way into the Oval Office.

The Chameleon assured us during a debate with Donald Trump that she and Tampon Tim both were gun owners and weren’t coming for your guns. In her defense, she never actually claimed they knew how to load or use them.

But the underlying point flew in the face of the Chameleon’s long record of supporting legislation to come between guns and lawful owners as defined by the Constitution.

As if that absurd debate moment were not enough, the Chameleon later proudly told Oprah that if someone breaks into the Chameleon’s house, “they’re getting shot.” She sounded like a female Dirty Harry character of movie fame.

That’s probably true, someone is getting shot, assuming her Secret Service protection detail is doing a better job than Trump’s. But it won’t be the Chameleon pulling the trigger. She did, however, provide one of her hyena calls after the utterance to Oprah.

On yet another softball interview session elsewhere, the Chameleon proudly detailed ownership of a Glock handgun. This is precisely the sort of weapon she railed against in her political career, having tried to ban handgun possession in San Francisco, argued in a Supreme Court brief that the 2^nd Amendment does not cover ownership of handguns for self-defense, and also worked to try to ban “high-capacity” magazines such as the minimum 10-round examples Glocks customarily sport.

As Tampon Tim confessed in his debate with JD Vance, “I’m a knucklehead at times.” The Chameleon is giving him a run for his money on that front.

Behold Elon Musk, the poster boy for what happens when the radical left turns on a former hero.

Clueless Joe Biden, who went from supposedly one of the greatest presidents ever to being unfit to run for a second term, at least in the opinion of the far left, would understand.

You think Joe’s not bitter about this? Then notice how he takes a shot at Kamala Chameleon any time he can, from donning a MAGA hat at a photo opportunity, to defending Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ hurricane relief efforts even as Kamala was being critical of same, to strolling into the White House press briefing room for the first time in his term just as Kamala was about to go live in Detroit with some insipid recollections of growing up in a middle class household.

It’s clear that Joe, as he once threatened to do to Trump, would like to take Kamala out behind the gym and kick her ample butt. Unfortunately, as in the case of Trump-Biden, my money would be on Kamala in a fistic throwdown with the walking cadaver known as Clueless Joe.

It may be hard for some to understand, but the same Musk recently seen dancing around a Donald Trump rally stage in Butler as “Dark MAGA” once was adored by tree-huggers, climate crazies, socialists, communists and just plain loons on the left.

Sure, Musk was getting rich, but he was saving the world with his electric vehicles. And the guy was entertaining in the way he’d go off on tangents. Recall the flamethrowers? How about the Cybertrucks being hit with gunfire to prove they could withstand same?

If government money was being thrown at Musk’s Tesla EVs in the form of tax credits, well, that’s the price you must pay to advance the uneconomic green agenda. It’s the same with throwing billions of dollars at erecting a few charging stations, or taxing corporations into oblivion due to their carbon footprint, or creating a faux market trading carbon credits to help enrich the likes of Al Gore.

The leftists saw Musk as one of them, milking the government for money to advance an agenda.

But then Musk left the ranch. He bought Twitter, exposed the leftist tilt of that social media platform, and ended the company’s efforts to silence any conservative voices.

The leftists screamed in horror.

And it’s only gotten worse. Now Musk is endorsing the hated Trump for president; might even have a role in helping make the government as efficient fiscally as one of Musk’s companies.

Oh, the humanity!

Has-beens and career B-listers from Shrillary Clinton on down rail that Musk be fined, deported, even imprisoned. His crime is promoting free speech.

It doesn’t matter that his SpaceX seems to be the only American company that can routinely put rockets into space.

They want Musk deported. Funny, they don’t scream that Hungarian-born leftist funder George Soros be deported. They note that he obtained U.S. citizenship.

So did Musk, along with Canadian citizenship to match the South African citizenship he obtained by being born there.

I’ve noted this hatred for Musk growing for some time on, of all places, business and investing shows I watch, particularly on CNBC.

As long as Musk was predictably left – in lockstep with the Gates and Bezos types — he was one of their guys. Now that he’s become a big supporter of the constitution and Trump, he’s ridiculed often by the left-leaning panelists and guests on CNBC.

Musk has hit a nerve and he has the money not to run around terrified that he’s going to be canceled.

Funny how the leftists are willing to rail against this immigrant who came here and is living the so-called American Dream.

I guess that’s because he did it legally.

A few days back, I reported on a surprisingly quick visit by my brother to the ER at the Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center.

My brother was back at that ER Saturday night with an allergic reaction to medicine prescribed in visit one and, as a statistician might note, there was a reversion to the mean.

Specifically, where the previous visit had been an uncharacteristically brief encounter lasting an hour or so from dropoff to my brother being back at his home, Saturday night it was more like an eight-hour experience. It turns out the quick ER visit was the statistical outlier and the typical ER visit still is going to be more oriented to the ordeal end of the scale.

I guess I jinxed it all by writing about the surprising improvement last time.

At the risk of belaboring a point, these sorts of unpleasant interactions with Conemaugh have been more the norm since the sale of the place to Duke LifePoint in 2014. It wasn’t perfect before. It was, however, better.

I got the call at about 8:30 p.m. from my brother, telling me the swelling, itching, etc., that we had discussed earlier in the day had worsened and he thought it was again time to go the ER.

Nearly eight hours later, at approximately 4:30 a.m., I dropped him off at his home.

He described an ER and surrounding areas crammed with people, many of them on mobile reclining chairs of sorts. Some had IV’s attached. Others sat with a vacant stare common to those stuck in this healthcare purgatory for mini-eternities.

I’m thinking of Dante’s line from “The Divine Comedy,” “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Is this the pleasant surprise one state house candidate promised the masses when the Conemaugh sale was taking place? If so, I’ll take a double shot of unpleasant, please.

By the time I got up Sunday, having gone to bed around 5 a.m., it was a sunny afternoon and perhaps time to cut the grass.

I had planned on a medicine run. Unfortunately, my brother is loyal to a failing national pharmacy chain that doesn’t fill prescriptions on Sundays, so he will wait until Monday to get a fresh bit of medication

I pray this works, and he won’t soon be returning to the Conemaugh ER.

I witnessed a minor miracle Thursday night involving Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center and feel duty bound to share.

Specifically, my brother was suffering a reaction after having some teeth pulled recently. He called me for a ride to the ER and I dropped him off at 9:55 p.m. I then returned home for what I thought would be a lengthy wait, with an eventual late-night/early-morning call to take him back home.

Imagine my surprise when my cell rang at 10:42 and he was done and ready to be driven home. I dropped him off at his apartment at 10:55, meaning his whole ER experience, including his ride home, had taken roughly one hour.

Color me amazed.

My mind raced for an explanation. I have none. My previous ER experiences, particularly since the hospital sale to Duke LifePoint in 2014, which has become a focal debating point of the Burns-Bradley race for the state house, have been almost all bad.

A notable exception was when a granddaughter broke her wrist at summer camp last year and she was treated promptly and well at the Conemaugh ER.

But my brother, my mother, a cousin, and others I know have had miserable experiences including, but not limited to, long delays, lack of information exchange and some flat-out questionable treatment.

Plus, the place is filthy and the staff, judging from overheard conversations, is not particularly thrilled to be working there.

Frank Burns has tried to blame the hospital decline since the sale on Bradley. As previously pointed out here, Bradley didn’t sell the hospital. She did, however, sell the idea to the public in her role as hospital spokesperson that it would not be a negative and any surprises might just be positive.

This does not reflect well on her judgment, or worse.

Another issue in the Burns-Bradley contest is Bradley’s association with the Myopia 2025 elitist group looking to tell Johnstowners what is good for them, no matter what they think.

This led to a secretive effort to transplant Afghan nationals here, a plot that fell apart under the disinfectant of public exposure.

That matter was detailed here previously in a 9-5-24 post, Yes, Virginia . . . in which I wrote of a discussion with a Bradley loyalist at the county Republican office in Richland who said we owed it to the Afghans to let them come here and they would all have been vetted properly beforehand so, no problem.

In response to a demand from this guy, I detailed in that 9-5-24 blog post numerous examples of “vetted” Afghans doing bad things to American military in Afghanistan.

Now, in recent days comes word of yet another “vetted” Afghan national being arrested in these United States, specifically Oklahoma, charged with plotting an election day terrorist strike. This man is reported to have worked with the CIA in Afghanistan.

He was vetted, perhaps three or more times, we have read. Not very well, apparently.

With any luck, he could have landed in Johnstown.

To sum it up, one must consider fresh evidence and adjust opinions if warranted.

If the Conemaugh ER functions well down the line in cases with which I’m familiar, I’m willing to sing its praises.

And, if “vetted” Afghan nationals continue to plan or commit crimes against Americans, it only strengthens my resolve that Myopia 2025 and Bradley were wrong on the matter of bringing them to Johnstown and Burns was correct to oppose it publicly.