We’re nearing the end of day one of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament and it already is a raging success, if only because Kentucky has been ousted.

Never mind that this latest Kentucky tournament choke totally screws my two brackets. It is rewarding to see John Calipari’s one-and-done methodology, in which he eagerly allows his program to serve as a one-season incubator for aspiring NBA draft picks, once again come up short in the tournament.

This year, the Mildcats were sent packing by Oakland, the Michigan school you probably never had on your hoops radar previously, unlike, say, Michigan State.

This particular tournament dispatching of the Kentucky one-year all-stars was accomplished on the back of guard Jack Gohlke’s 32 points as he rained 3-pointers on the guys in blue. Gohlke honed his craft in five years at Division II Hillsdale before transferring to Oakland for his final season of eligibility.

Gohlke is not destined to be a lottery pick in the NBA draft, but he made fans of the old days of college basketball feel like they had hit the lottery with the humbling of Calipari’s group of prima donnas.

And that’s why we still watch the NCAA tournament, despite all its failings and foibles.

We watch despite the fact that earlier today we were treated to the heartwarming story of the Illinois star player, Terrence Shannon Jr., able to play only because he and his posse got a court order demanding Illinois drop its suspension of him, owing to a rape charge he faces in Kansas.

The school, ruled the judge, had violated Shannon’s civil rights with the suspension. Those rights included the opportunity to be an NBA lottery draft pick and poach money from the Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) money machine.

That judge’s last name, in a bit of delicious irony, is Lawless.

Shannon may or may not be guilty of the rape. But a school losing the power to suspend players who are under such active judicial scrutiny is the sort of absurd justice now visited upon this country by activist judges.

I’m sure the pompous NCAA types bringing Shannon to postseason media functions were sure to refer to him as a student-athlete, despite the fact his whole court case rested on him being a basketball player, not an aspiring sociologist, with his reported major in sociology.

Generally speaking, during the course of today’s Day One viewing, I saw some bad behavior from assorted teams and players – thuggish moments that had the officials beating a path to courtside tables to consult video replays to decide whether or not to hand out flagrant fouls. Frequently, they did.

I filled out two NCAA brackets this year, just for fun, and already they are candidates for the circular file.

My laughably incorrect theme this year was that the SEC, with its eight teams in the field, was poised to make the sort of national noise usually reserved for the conference’s football programs.

Instead, Michigan State sent Mississippi State packing, South Carolina was bounced by Oregon and, of course, Kentucky was shown the door by Oakland.

Tennessee, the only other SEC team in action Thursday, is up huge on St. Peter’s at the half as I write this, so presumably the Volunteers will survive.

The other four SEC teams – Alabama, Auburn, Florida and Texas A&M — play Friday. I’m expecting all four to win then. But I also expected Kentucky Mississippi State and South Carolina to win today, too.

Doesn’t matter, though, because Kentucky is gone and I’m one happy camper.

Political battles now are playing out in the courts. The economy is great, or troubled, depending on what numbers you chose to follow. We keep hearing World War III being mentioned as a viable possibility.

Against that backdrop, it’s time for some news and views.

NEWS: Follow the bouncing ball. The Supreme Court denied a Clueless Joe Biden regime request to slap down a Texas law allowing local law enforcement to arrest illegals. What a radical concept that would be. But a ruling from the 5^th Circuit Court of Appeals put the Texas law on hold again, over-riding a stay granted by another 5^th Circuit panel.

VIEWS: If you are surprised that our law enforcement and judicial operations have become politicized to this extreme, you have not been paying attention. Leftists have discovered that by installing enough lunatic judges and district attorneys, you run cover for the most outrageous bastardizations of our formerly even-handed justice. It’s a variation of taking over the public schools with WOKE principles, also designed to destroy this republic. And, sadly, it’s working.

NEWS: A drag queen squired around the White House and the vice-president’s residence to celebrate Pride Month and appearing in many social media posts with VP Kamala Harris, is being accused in a Rolling Stone expose of having committed multiple sexual assaults between 2012 and 2020.

VIEWS: Can you say role model?

NEWS: A former top Polish army official has said it out loud: Ukraine is losing the war with Russia. He alluded to 10 million missing people and a Ukrainian army whose average age is 43, with mentally disabled men being sent to fight at the front in this lost cause.

VIEWS: But if we’d just give the Zelenskyy beggar $100 or so billion more it would make it all better.

NEWS: All this comes amidst reports NATO troops from the United States, France, and Great Britain are on the ground in Ukraine.

VIEWS: Newly re-elected Russian president Vlad Putin took note of all this Monday, saying a direct Russia-NATO conflict was yet another step toward World War III. If that breaks out, I’m not optimistic that our military, infested with gender-confused Woke types who think climate change is their greatest challenge, will acquit itself particularly well against the Russkies.

NEWS: Later today the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is expected to announce no change in interest rate targets due to inflation remaining a tick above 3 percent, far in excess of the target rate of 2 percent.

VIEWS: This year began with optimists expecting three to five interest rate cuts. We’re at zero and counting. The Fed meeting comes amidst ballooning debt (both public and private), fears of a commercial real estate collapse, and a general concern that the stock markets are being held aloft by largely undisciplined momentum followers. But, just forget all that and be happy if the Fed decides to do nothing about it all.

The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the annual exercise blending schmaltz overkill and roundball, begins Tuesday amidst a troubled backdrop for college sports.

The popularity of this tournament owes in large part to those office bracket pools and, ironically, the pools speak volumes about the state of the event. Where once someone with a knowledge of the sport figured to do well picking winners using that acumen, now the whole exercise has devolved into a crapshoot, a lottery ticket in which the supposedly best teams frequently find themselves failing to win the thing while some longshots prevail.

Simply put, there are no truly great men’s basketball teams any longer, only a lot of pretty good teams.

Why? Excellent players bolting for the NBA after a year or two of seasoning in what has become a semi-pro operation, players whizzing through the transfer portal like immigrants storming the southern border, and NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) which allows “amateur” collegians to earn seven-figure paydays as professional product endorsers and still remain eligible, all have contributed to a breakdown in the team concept.

It also puts the lie to the student-athlete crap being peddled by those televising this and other college sports events. The days of some college kids at the top level playing for the old alma mater are long-gone, replaced by money-grubbing on a vast scale.

The schools being opportunists in seeking greener conference pastures, coaches pulling in multi-million dollar salaries, networks lavishing monstrous broadcast rights fees on the conferences and schools, are just as guilty as the athletes in turning the whole school spirit narrative into a ridiculous fable. The name of the game is not the sport, but the money that can be extracted from it.

The level of play suffers. Just the past weekend I was watching a semifinal game of the SEC Tournament. Florida won the opening tip and the first Gators player to handle the ball over midcourt fired up a three-point try, and missed.

Opposition Texas A&M rebounded and – stop me if you’ve read this before – the first Aggie to possess the ball in the offensive end of the court fired up a three-pointer. He made it. But the tone had been set.

Also, while watching the Atlantic 10 semifinal between St. Bonaventure and Duquesne that same day, a feature ran hailing the Bonaventure coach as something of an offensive genius. But, the storyteller added, sadly he can’t run as many plays as he used to because he has so many transfer players on his roster they can’t process the entire playbook in a single season.

Bonaventure and all those transfers lost. Duquense went on to win the tournament and become an unlikely NCAA team, the school’s first since 1977. The Dukes won the conference title game despite going 1-15 shooting to start the second half, and finishing hitting just 5 of 29 second-half field-goal attempts and scoring a paltry 21 second-half points. But, hey, they’re going to The Dance!

Elsewhere, three of the four eventual NCAA Tournament top seeds lost in their conference tournaments, including Houston’s 69-41 humbling at the hands of Iowa State in the Big 12 championship. Houston, ranked No. 1 nationally, suffered the largest defeat for a No. 1 team since 1968 when it was, again, Houston coming up well short.

It’s not just college basketball being affected adversely by the money grab.

When legendary Alabama football coach Nick Saban retired after last season, he cited the NIL and the transfer portal as having killed traditional college football.

“You hear somebody use the word “student-athlete.’ That doesn’t exist,’” Saban said.

Veteran St. John’s basketball coach Rick Pitino also has bemoaned NIL, noting, “We’re coaching professional basketball players now.”

It’s not just traditional sports being roiled by NIL. LSU has a gymnast reportedly earning $3.2 million, largely for being an attractive blonde.

Elsewhere, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team has won the right to unionize.

But CBS will continue to spread the student-athlete propaganda, building to the playing of the song “One Shining Moment” at tournament’s end.

And you will be expected to swallow the fib that these are just student-athletes playing a game, a lie on par with you can keep your doctor with Obamacare or I’ll respect you in the morning.

Socialists could be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. Witness the latest nonsense as purveyed by admitted socialist, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is pushing to have the work week reduced from the now pretty much standard 40 hours, to 32. Of course, there would be no reduction in pay.

You think you are witnessing price inflation now? Just imagine what would happen if people had their work week and, in theory, productivity, reduced 20 percent, but still drew the same pay.

The people selling you services or products aren’t going to eat that 20 percent; most couldn’t even if they wanted to do so.

This means that you will see 20-percent price increases, give or take, across the board. I hope the workers enjoy that 8-hour reduction in the work week, because it’s going to cost them big whenever they need to purchase a good or service.

There was a time when nonsense such as that being dispensed by Sanders would be laughed off as no more than an absurd diversion. Not so, now.

This is the era of the free lunch. And, while anyone with a basic knowledge of economics realizes there is no such thing because someone eventually must pay the tab, too many are willing to let Uncle Sam pick up said tab.

Why not? He’s already paying billions to support illegal immigrants and more billions to support our chronic domestic underclass. Throw in billions to keep the stooge Zelenskyy in charge in Ukraine and billions (trillions?) spent on other government handout projects. Then, to paraphrase the quote of the late Senator Everett Dirksen, speaking decades back about troublesome government debt, a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

That’s real BORROWED money. Uncle Sam is just like the typical American consumer, supporting an overly lavish lifestyle with a credit card. It’s just on a grander scale, with Uncle Sam running up debt at the rate of a trillion or so dollars every 100 days.

But Sanders’ proposal to shorten the work week will strike a chord with the give-me types, ranging from college students who inexplicably didn’t understand taking out a loan meant the obligation to repay it, to the people who line up in my area in $50,000-plus vehicles to collect free food handouts just because they can.

I know one guy who tries to pick up as many as four rations of the handout food, that he might distribute it to friends and family who also can afford to buy their own food.

Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of Great Britain, identified the essential flaw of socialism when she noted its main problem was “eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

In the case of the United States, there will be a come to Jesus moment when our debt will not be bought without a dramatic rise in the interest rate paid.

Debt levels already are worrisome. A few months back the federal debt (not including current deficits associated with future Social Security and Medicare benefits) was more than $33 trillion, or about 123 percent of our annual gross domestic product.

Eventually, we face the Hobson’s choice of either paying the higher interest rates, which we cannot afford to do, or reducing spending, which the masses in this handout nation will not accept.

We’re bumbling steadily toward that time of reckoning. Ideas such as Sanders’ reduced work week would only hasten its arrival.

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I received a total of two cell phone calls today as of the time this is being written just short of 9 p.m., both of them spam.

First, this indicates I’m not a very popular guy. Point conceded.

But, I mention the calls because I see a correlation between laws we put in place to shield us from such spam communications, having produced the so-called do not call lists, and laws that the anti-gun zealots want to put in place to limit our access to weapons and therefore supposedly protect the public at large from legal gun owners.

In each case, the laws will be ignored by the scofflaws and followed by the law-abiding, producing zero benefit to the people who follow the rules and carte blanche to the hoods.

Don’t take my word for this. On the consumer.ftc.gov web page that explains the do not call list, it is emphasized that the list only works regarding “real companies that follow the law.” This part of the explanation is in bold-face type, just to make it clear.

I am very aware from my post-retirement time doing telephone support for health insurance as a seasonal job how seriously reputable companies take the do not call list and how scrupulously they try to avoid violations and subsequent punishment such as fines.

From my personal life, I am extremely aware of the majority of outlaw companies who have no intent of doing things the right way. They spoof the numbers they actually are calling from, trying to mislead.

They call repeatedly, and in rapid-fire succession if you block the number and delete the call log.

Somehow, our federal, state and local law enforcement, with all their sophisticated electronic surveillance and monitoring tools, can’t put these phone scam artists out of business.

I just ignore the calls. When the phone rang during dinner time tonight, I didn’t even bother to get up and check. When a bit of time passed and there was no indication that a message had been left, I moved on with my life.

Understand, I think this pond-scum-sucking lifeform that makes such calls ought to be drawn and quartered. They deserve no consideration at all considering that all the employees know damn well exactly what they do for a living – that being trying to cheat people.

They are life’s lowest of the low.

And we haven’t been able to legislate them out of existence.

It will be the same with any draconian anti-gun legislation the left can dream up. It is notable that when gun control worsens in jurisdictions, crime rises.

Criminals are emboldened to know that the odds are against an honest citizen target being armed. And so these criminals, with their illegal weaponry, can expect a free ride.

Oh, but it makes for good talking points and feeds raw meat to the raving lunatics who increasingly make up the Democratic party to speak of abolishing private ownership of many common weapons.

Clueless Joe is fond of pointing out in snide fashion that the general public owning weapons doesn’t protect us from the federal government unless that weaponry includes jet fighters and tanks.

The point the Clueless One misses, as is his wont, is that millions of armed citizens can make a stand, even against heavily armed government oppressors.

On another level, look how effective those Houthi terrorists have been in emerging from their caves periodically to sink and/or threaten shipping in the Red Sea with missiles and drones. Each drone we shoot down costs us $1 million or more.

Maybe we can legislate Houthi rebels into submission. Yeah, right.

Those laws would be about as effective as more stringent gun control legislation at home would be and has been in halting crime in such garden spots as Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. D.C.

To repeat, laws only affect the law-abiding, not the phone spam artists or other criminals. Expecting any different result is a mere pipe dream.

People who study such things know that complex systems fail catastrophically, in cascading fashion as one failure triggers other, more destructive problems.

Think of the Challenger space shuttle, which was destroyed in 1986 when abnormally cold temperatures led to O-rings becoming hard and failing to seal joints in a solid rocket booster. This led to hot gases escaping and melting key structural elements of the craft, which in turn led to the craft tearing itself apart with wild, uncontrolled gyrations at high speed.

Now, think of the United States as such a complex system, with an ever-expanding list of small failures that might be enough to cascade and produce a metaphorical pile of smoldering rubble when it all implodes.

Even Democrats, who pledge blind allegiance to Clueless Joe Biden, are nervous about the country’s direction, as evidenced by numerous polls. Call this their one moment of clarity.

We are told that the seemingly unsolvable political rift between right and left will eventually bring down the U.S.

But the root cause increasingly looks like it will be economic, only spilling into politics after the initial failure of the economic system – sort of like that hot gas escaping past the failed O-rings on the shuttle.

Democrats, from Biden on down, are fond of playing the class warfare game when it comes to the economy. Blaming greedy corporations for inflation, the top one percent of earners charged with not paying their “fair share,” and anyone living in the middle class accused of being racist ingrates regarding the great largess the political elites have bestowed upon them, those elites love to pit the citizenry against each other.

But, cracks are appearing in the formerly monolithic support for such narratives.

Anyone with a basic understanding of math knows that when a nation’s unfunded liabilities for things such as Medicare and Social Security are $175 trillion and the economic output of all nations on Earth was a comparatively low $104 trillion by comparison, as was the case in 2023, the system can’t be bailed out by raising taxes on the people who already pay about 46 percent of our Federal income taxes. You could take it all and it wouldn’t make a dent in the problem.

Alas, some people can’t think big picture. But they do know almost everything they need, items such as food and shelter – cost 30 percent or so more now than they did when Biden took office. Somehow, Biden’s brain donor advisers tried to convince these people they were wrong about that and coined Bidenomics as their catch phrase.

You don’t hear much about Bidenomics these days.

Instead, you see and hear reports from Millennials who can’t afford houses, new vehicles, or other formerly common trappings of a Middle Class existence. The U.S. population is being beaten into a two-class system, with the bottom class losing ground rapidly.

Democrats find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place on this. They desperately need to replace these working class voters who have migrated in large numbers to Donald Trump, so they throw open our borders to recruit illegal immigrants and voters.

But, these illegals cost a lot of money to house and feed, so boneheads propose large giveaways, things like $10,000 preloaded debit cards, free housing, free food, free medical care.

Meanwhile, the poverty pimps and the formerly rock-solid Democratic supporters among the lower class, are beginning to scream about losing their part of the pie to these illegals.

Leftist terrorist supporters are unhappy that Biden stands with Israel — sort of. So, again, more illegals are needed to replenish those lost Democratic voters who now vote Hamas.

It’s an endless cycle every bit as vicious as our overspending federal, state and local governments getting us further and further into debt.

Like those shuttle astronauts, we are just along for the ride, one that is very unlikely to end well.

“Can’t we all just get along?” Rodney King was widely quoted as asking in May 1992, as riots raged in Los Angeles, in part a reaction to his beating at the hands of four police officers after a high-speed pursuit and those officers being acquitted of charges related to that beating – at least initially.

Eventually, Feds would roll in and send the offending police officers to prison. King, a serial drug and alcohol abuser and traffic offender, later would come away with a $3.8 million settlement.

King drowned in a swimming pool on Father’s Day 2012, with alcohol, cocaine and PCP in his system considered to have contributed to it all.

One of the victims of those race riots was truck driver Reginald Denny. His crime was being white and in the wrong part of Los Angeles. For that offense, Denny was dragged from his truck by rioters and beaten, even having his head bashed in with a cinderblock.

Four rioters eventually faced trial for the assault and only one did any hard time, the others having had charges downgraded or outright dismissed.

Denny, who suffered a fractured skull resulting in a speech impairment and difficulty walking that required years of therapy, sued the City of Los Angeles, and lost.

The police were wrong in their dealings with King, and paid a price with their freedom. LA paid a big price in monetary terms, too.

The rioters who beat Denny were wrong. They virtually got away with it, as did Los Angeles.

All these years later, many continue with the plaintive “Can’t we all just get along?”

Just today (Monday, March 11, 2024) I watched a lengthy youtube video interview with famed demographer Neil Howe, he of the generational “turnings.” If you want to watch it yourself and have an hour or so to kill, just get on youtube and search for Neil Howe and wealthion and March 2024.

Highlights I took from the video are that Howe is concerned about all the division in this nation and the willingness of people to consider balkanizing the country into pockets of right or left leaners.

Howe spoke of civil wars. He also spoke of economic downturn and stagflation, the economic ghost of the 1970s when we suffered from economic stagnation and high inflation.

The good news from Howe is that his research indicates bad times eventually give way to better as successive generations return to basic principles.

But Howe is concerned about the inability of the citizens to get along.

Even as I was finishing up the Howe video, I saw a promo for Chris Cuomo doing a one-on-one interview with Tucker Carlson on Cuomo’s current fringe cable news outlet.

As lead-in, Cuomo (Fredo), who got drummed out of his previous CNN job for shilling for older brother Andrew, the former governor of New York, sounded a lot like Rodney King. Cuomo, formerly an adroit left-wing hatchet man, now just wants to have conversations and get along, even with enemies such as Carlson, the former Fox anchor.

I tried to watch Cuomo and Carlson, but got overwhelmed by its saccharine tack.

It’s a good concept, smoking the figurative peace pipe, but one that isn’t going to fly circa 2024. The divide is too great and the issues too stark.

We can’t all get along when we have a president more intent on apologizing to an illegal immigrant alleged murderer than to the victim’s family.

We can’t all get along when Donald Trump routinely is demonized as Hitler II and his supporters are called names, including “deplorables.”

We can’t all get along while both sides – the lunatic fringe left seems to have an abundance of offenders – cannot stick to facts and dispense with the ad hominem hyperbole.

We can’t all get along until people are able to be honest, both publicly and privately, and willing to use their heads to criticize people who are just flat out wrong, whether they are in their group or the opposition.

After Cuomo was done playing nice with Carlson, he and another talking head from his cable network had a post-mortem and got in their obligatory shots on Trump, Carlson, Putin, et al.

And that’s why we can’t just get along.

True to my word, I watched nary a second of Clueless Joe’s state of delusion speech, confident any and all absurdities of it would be well-reported in more concise fashion.

Toward that end, my cup runneth over.

My favorite take on Biden’s raging rant was attributed to Utah Senator Mike Lee, who was reported to have said, “I think he borrowed a little something from Hunter tonight.”

Or drank a case of Red Bull. I hope Joe was wearing heavy duty Depends that night.

Amidst the overkill delivery from Biden was the usual pack of distortions and/or outright lies.

These included things such as indirectly mentioning Donald Trump (aka “My Predecessor in the manner of Biden being The Big Guy) 13 times in a massive blame game outpouring

Sure, things are bad now, with a porous southern border, the National Guard called in to restore order in New York City subways, rising costs of living, and a supposedly strong economy as measured by curious job stats put out by Biden’s bureaucrats that just doesn’t seem all that strong. But “My Predecessor” is responsible for all of it and my hands are clean.

Toward that end, vote me in for four more years – or whatever life I have left – and I promise to continue to blame everything wrong with our nation and the world on the guy in the Oval Office the previous four years.

What? That would be me? Joe Biden? The Big Guy?

No, I mean my other predecessor.

I’m the guy, Joe Biden, you can trust to get things done. See how I brought the nation together as promised.

I always will stand in staunch support of infanticide, otherwise known as abortion or, in the greatest verbal stretch as portrayed on bumper stickers, “Health care.”

I never met a fringe cause I would not support. Trans males beating up on female athletes? Check. BLM riots? Check. Palestinian rage on streets and campuses? Check.

On the matter of national security, supporting Chinese interests, including the invasive social media platform TikTok? Of course. Hey, my campaign is there. At least that’s what I’ve been told.

Using increasingly limited U.S. financial resources to prop up Zelenskyy or treat illegal immigrants as royalty? But of course on these, too.

Actually I’m surprised they’ve let me speak this long without cutting off my mic and shepherding me away from the podium.

And don’t get me started on that Jan. 6 business. Insurrection. Insurrection. Insurrection. Greatest threat to democracy since our Civil War.

Yes, I’m still talking about Jan. 6, you dog-faced pony soldier, although you would be right to lump in as threats to democracy the political weaponization of the courts, law enforcement and intelligence systems to punish my political enemies and lord, they are many.

We’re trying to save democracy here, starting by seeking to jail my Republican challenger, or at least make sure his name cannot appear on ballots.

Democracy is one-party rule, right?

Some would argue that spiking prices of alternative money such as Bitcoin or gold indicate declining faith in the U.S., our dollar and, by extension, me.

I repeat, this nation is strong economically. Just read the job reports, the ones that are inflated artificially for headline effect, then quietly revised down massively in future months.

Why just the past month we had huge job numbers, never mind that 1.2 million of those jobs went to foreign-born workers, here either legally or illegally.

That’s me!

But, it really is time for me to go (I heard you cackling in the back of the room). Hunter, got any more good stuff in the bag?

I’m passing on bothering to watch Clueless Joe’s State of the Union Address tonight. There is no need, really.

Already, his lackeys have let it out that he will be dispensing more tax-the-rich rhetoric, as well as blaming corporations for inflation, promising to get healthcare costs under control and generally trying to duck blame for the many ills created and/or worsened by him during his time sleepwalking through the role of president.

Democrats in this joint session of Congress will rise and clap their hands like so many trained seals with each declaration. To be fair, Republicans also do this when one of theirs is the president giving the address.

You likely will not, however, see ridiculous posturing from Republicans such as the time Nancy Pelosi tore up her copy of Donald Trump’s speech on TV, or the multiple occasions when Pelosi and her fellow Democratic crones would show up dressed in white, supposedly portraying support for women’s rights.

If they want to support women, how about chanting the name of Laken Hope Riley, the Georgia nursing student murdered while jogging, allegedly by an illegal immigrant who was free despite several brushes with the law in these United States?

But the cackling hens of the left don’t want to deal in reality. A representative group of these leftist loons were laughing and guffawing the other night on MSNBC about how ridiculous it was for Virginia voters in exit polling to list our porous southern border as a major concern.

Among those was former White House propagandist DisinJENuous Psaki. Senator Ted Cruz has called for Psaki and her Kamala-like laughing hyenas to apologize to the family of a two-year-old boy, alleged to have been killed by yet another illegal a mere half-hour’s drive away from Paski’s Virginia home. The family is not laughing.

We are aware of no response from the hyenas.

That is, unfortunately, predictable.

Democrats once were the party of the working class, but now have devolved into an elitist group mixing snobbery with advocacy for every fringe element of society while mocking conventional traditions of our culture.

These smug leftists are divorced totally from reality, choosing to reside in a fantasy land in which raising taxes solves all funding issues, electricity flows freely from those wall outlets to power climate-saving electric vehicles, our economy is strong despite evidence that the numbers are being massaged, and any of those who don’t accept their view are dangerous right-wing terrorists best relegated to re-indoctrination camps.

To buy into the Democratic pap, you must be able to ignore reality of various types.

Consider:

• Earlier this week, the U.S. admitted to having unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare of $175.3 trillion. Taxing the rich won’t cure that. The combined gross domestic product of every nation on Earth last year – repeat, the entire economic output or our planet – was $104.5 trillion. So, you could take every bit of Earth’s economic production for a year and still be $70-plus trillion short.

• Also earlier this week, a study indicated that when you factor in things like particulate emissions from degrading tires and brakes (due to EV’s being heavier than internal combustion vehicles due to the battery packs) the EV emissions are 1,850 times higher than traditional cars. This doesn’t even factor in adverse effects on the climate from producing the electricity, or the ills from mining the additional rare earth and traditional metals needed for EVs and their batteries.

• Our supposedly strong economy is purported to be evidenced by job reports that measure a person losing one well-paying, full-time job and taking two part-time gig jobs as a net gain. Our supposedly strong economy has produced yet another all-time high in credit card debt, serious concerns about commercial mortgages failing, and the popular stock averages being levitated by a mere handful of stocks. Prices are up for food, housing, cars, etc., and service quality is down. But, repeat after me, all is well.

• Illegal immigration is a winner for Democrats, who count on many of these invaders being able to vote illegally due to lax voter ID rules. Even if they don’t vote, the presence of illegals, mainly in Democratic states, bumps census figures (yes, the census counts illegals) and therefore adds to Congressional representation and electoral votes for those states.

This is what Biden should be addressing tonight, but won’t.

According to some reports I’ve read, Democrats are worried about him being able simply to make it through the address without a major gaffe.

That is but a mere sideshow. His greatest gaffes are his policies, already on display for any who care to observe our sad state of the union.

Nimarata (Nikki) Randhawa (Haley) has departed the race for the Republican presidential nomination – was she ever really in it? – leaving a curious melange of statistics in her wake.

According to a writer for The Federalist, Virginia exit polling showed 92 percent of Randhawa/Haley voters approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president and a whopping 87 percent are just happy, thank you, with how things are going overall in this country.

This stands in stark contrast to a late February Gallup poll pegging Biden’s job approval rating among the general populace at a miserable 38 percent.

To reiterate, while the general population, generally split about 50-50 between Republicans and Democrats, gives Clueless Joe a 38 percent favorability rating, Randhawa/Haley’s supposedly Republican voters checked in at 92 percent thumbs up.

Open the window and you can smell the stench of this.

Obviously, Randhawa/Haley was just the latest attempt by Democrats to bastardize the primary process.

Ostensibly, primaries function to allow parties to select their candidates for general elections. But Democrats, where allowed and perhaps even in places where it is not, love to muddy the waters in Republican primaries by voting for the weakest candidate; the one they’d like most to run against in the big elections.

Beyond that, they love to keep RINO (Republicans In Name Only) candidates in races as long as possible to spew Democratic talking points and get coverage from the Lamestream media.

These reports typically go something like this: Cracks are evident in the Republican Party as (fill in the name) rips Donald Trump (or other conservative Republican candidate). It is a troubling sign for Republicans that (fill in the name) gets support (fill in the paltry percentage) at the expense of (fill in the name) and this indicates (fill in the name) needs to be conciliatory to (RINO thinking) and tone down his rhetoric.

It was thought that Randhawa/Haley would keep raising funds from major Democratic donors (those not buying Hunter’s art work with all their free cash) and keep flailing away at Trump with zero chance of gaining the nomination. Trump leads her, by NBC’s count, 1,507-92 in delegate totals.

But, perhaps even the Dems have given up and thrown in the towel, leaving Randhawa/Haley to fade into the background with fellow RINOs like, oh, say, Liz Cheney.

Even as Randhawa/Haley was making her final RINO charge on Super Tuesday, primary funny games were afoot in California.

The leftist Peoples Republic of California has a primary setup in which all candidates, regardless of party, are on the same ballot and the top two advance to the general election. This often means two Democrats competing.

But, come this fall, Democrat Adam Schiff is looking to ride his House of Representatives censure for lying there into a Senate seat by running against Republican Steve Garvey.

Schiff virtually handpicked Garvey to run against, spending millions to televise ads statewide portraying Garvey as a conservative and thereby uniting conservative support behind Garvey, who spent pennies on his campaign. Shifty Schiff strikes again.

Aggrieved Democratic candidates griped, but took it because it’s the Democratic way. They will get behind Schiff this fall, and not to plunge a knife in his back.

Remember these primary shenanigans the next time you hear Democrats pontificate about saving democracy.