Cambria County commissioner candidate John DeBartola has posted on Facebook of the possibility that a county Republican poll is indicating DeBartola and running mate Joseph Taranto are doing “better than expected.”

DeBartola alleges that as a response “outside money” will be used to raise awareness for a wallflower establishment Republican candidate in order to beat down the unendorsed DeBartola/Taranto primary challenge.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The bigger issue here is what can we expect from this DeBartola/Taranto effort in terms of their chance for success?

My brother told me the other day he has voted by mail for them, mainly because voting for the traditional Republican menu has done squat for the area. But, he was prompted to look at DeBartola and Taranto due to my urging. Alas, my circle of influence is relatively small, so I’m not sure I’m going to help produce many votes beyond my brother and me.

And I fear the DeBartola/Taranto message, which just might ring true to disaffected Republicans, is not getting enough exposure to garner the necessary votes.

I have yet to see a yard sign for the two. By way of contrast, my area (Southmont, Westmont, Upper Yoder) sports a disconcerting number of signs for the incumbent candidate who writes Facebook posts like English is his second language.

Some very savvy political types I know, in the lead up to the first Trump presidential election, noted to me his extremely wide edge in signage, indicating informed and motivated voters who might carry him to a surprise win over The Hillary.

It’s getting late in the election run-up for DeBartola and Taranto to mount any kind of advertising, direct mailing, or campaign rally effort.

Where Trump in his first run had national media that, like him or not, couldn’t ignore him, DeBartola and Taranto are being ignored by the local media.

They have a strong Facebook presence. But, as hard as it may be for Facebook warriors to digest, there still are a lot of people (read: voters) who do not frequent Facebook.

How DeBartola and Taranto can mount a late charge to graduate from doing “ better than expected” to winning is uncertain.

I hope they are out knocking on doors, pitching themselves as best they can. I hope their Facebook fans will take it upon themselves to tell the DeBartola-Taranto story to five or 10 people, in the pursuit of gaining votes.

Time is short, but the potential of a DeBartola and Taranto win sticking it in the face of our Republican keepers and telling them that we as an electorate are not satisfied with the same old stuff, would be glorious.

If you think Johnstown has more than its fair share of blah weather days, you’re right.

And if you think Johnstown seems to revel in this, right again.

I call these area precipitation worshipers the We Need Rain People. Let the sun shine for consecutive days and these people pop up saying stuff like “Things are getting awful dry!”

Amateurs mouth this sentiment on social media and in general conversation. Even the weather professionals tend to spout as much on broadcasts and web sites.

You’d think a town that has suffered through three major floods would not be so welcoming when it comes to clouds and rain.

A typical period of rain and overcast conditions that ranged for almost a week ended midway through Friday. Today, Saturday, was glorious, with abundant sunshine.

For those of us who have hobby cars we only take out in good weather, this means trying to cram a week’s worth of experience with the car(s) into a day and a half.

Responsible types – and I lump myself into that category – also need to use the rare nice days to accomplish other things, too, like mowing the grass. And so it was that yours truly, less than a month removed from a heart procedure and a couple of weeks past a knee mishap, found himself fitting grass mowing sessions between car joy rides.

The Mustang convertible got 30 miles or so of exercise yesterday afternoon and evening. I figured the grass still was too wet to mow well. At least that excuse sounded good.

But today, the late mother’s grass was mowed (it’s a long story) and then it was on to mow the son’s grass. I will get to my lawn Sunday – weather permitting and rain is forecast for the afternoon.

After doing my mowing chores today, and running to Burger King for myself and the wife who was cleaning out my late mother’s house (also a long story), it was time to ride the other Mustang, this a hardtop GT.

Just Friday afternoon, when the sun had reappeared after a long absence, I was telling a neighbor that I recall once reading how Johnstown rivals rain capital Seattle for rainy and overcast days. She was incredulous.

So, after putting the orange Mustang into its rented garage stall this evening, I took to the internet for some quick weather research.

What I found, in a posting from 2020 on the WTAJ-TV web site, is that Western Pennsylvania in general rivals Seattle, which has on average 156 overcast days a year. DuBois is ahead of that with an average of 162 overcast days each year and so is Pittsburgh, with 158. We in the Johnstown area trail Seattle by a tad, with 147 overcast days and Altoona is close by, with 143.

Any way you slice it, that’s more than our share of rain and overcast skies.

But this can be a good thing because it makes us appreciate those nice days, or stretches of same. It’s a reverse example of water tasting better in a desert.

Good weather quickly can be taken for granted. I recall one stretch of covering Pirates spring training in Florida when weather was beautiful for 10 consecutive days. It was boring in a way, and I found myself wishing for rain.

You can take the Johnstowner out of Johnstown, but . . .

The current narrative whopper making the rounds in regards to our debt ceiling “crisis” is that the United States risks its first ever default, as in failing to meet its obligations.

Those of us who attended schools in the good, old days, when history was taught without a revisionist slant, would recognize this as an outright falsehood. Incredibly, most of today’s populace buys this pap without blinking an otherwise comatose eye.

A reason might be provided by a recent U.S. Department of Education release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress that finds a record low 13 percent of Grade 8 students are proficient in history. Even more laughable, “proficiency” as defined by the Education Department is scoring 58.8 percent or better on a standardized test.

That was failing when I went to school, yet now it is deemed “proficient.”

It all reminds of a 2006 movie, “Idiocracy,” in which an average man participates in a hibernation study, is forgotten, and emerges many years later the most intelligent man around due to a rapid decline in the overall population’s intelligence.

Back to defaults: The truth is, if we fail to pay bills beginning in say, June, this would be just another in a long line of U.S. defaults.

Defaults began with the birth of this nation. The Continental Congress took to issuing currency, ‘continentals,’ in 1775 to finance things and, before that printing press had ground to a halt, the currency had been devalued to worthlessness. As a new country, we also chose not to repay debt to foreign nations.

That, my friends, is a default.

Between the Revolutionary War and our Civil War, the federal government left currency creation and debt-building to individual states and banks, resulting in many defaults, just not, technically, federal defaults. Still, most would concede that all the states and banks were U.S. entities.

Fast-forward to the Civil War and the need for a federal currency was great, so the greenback was created in August 1861.

Five months later, January 1862, the U.S. defaulted on these by refusing to redeem greenbacks for the specified amount of gold. New greenbacks were issued, without gold redemption qualities, and these proceeded to trade in the open market at severe discounts to their face value as war fortunes waxed and waned. Eventually, these greenbacks also went away.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt led a Great Depression default by devaluing the dollar and refusing to redeem World War I era Liberty Bonds for gold as promised.

In 1971, then-president Richard Nixon pulled off a similar default by ending the promise to redeem U.S. dollars for gold

And, in the longest-running, least-appreciated default, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar has declined 97 percent since 1913, when the Federal Reserve was set up to address banking panics and to stabilize the currency.

Some stability, a 97-percent decline!

In 2023, the debt numbers are much greater, but the principle is the same. When debts become too burdensome to be repaid, they are defaulted upon.

Engineering a hyperinflation, and eventually paying back debts with relatively worthless dollars, technically would avoid a default. But, in truth, it would deny repayment in value, so that’s a default in my book.

Now you know our default history, even if most of the population remains blissfully ignorant.

On the heels of me trying to educate the gullible on the dark side of government (including the IRS) comes a report by The New York Post, quoting from a watchdog group OpenTheBooks, that the IRS spent $5 million in 2021 alone to arm its agents.

And you thought all that these IRS types needed to perform their duties were green eyeshades and a calculator to audit you. Only, of course, if you avoided paying your fair share of taxes.

Think again.

The IRS, as pointed out here before, has a political side to it and $80 billion in new funding is going to allow the IRS to add a reported 87,000 additional agents and arm them to the teeth.

That Post report cited 2021 spending of $2.3 for ammunition, $1.2 million in ballistic shields and more than another $1 million in rifles, shotguns and body armor.

This was to add to an arsenal that prior to 2020 amounted to 5 million rounds of ammunition for 2,159 special agents.

The job descriptions for proposed additional IRS agent hires includes “must be willing to use force up to and including the use of deadly force.”

I guess this is the sort of coercion the left fears it will need if and when it gets tax rates up the confiscatory 90 percent or so rate that would be necessary to fund all their socialist and green initiatives.

Maybe IRS agents can be co-opted to aid in the confiscation of those offending gas cooking stoves.

It seems that the the new-look IRS is going to be so well-armed that Zelenskyy will be envious.

Nothing to worry about here.

My English teacher the senior year of high school was a fine woman named Olive Katter, who got into trouble with administrators for speaking out about a tough principal being replaced by a milquetoast type. She was demoted from her post of department chair as punishment.

Many of her students set out with petitions calling for her reinstatement. I remember one long night canvassing Moxham. Back then, one could roam freely in Moxham after dark without regard for personal safety. It was, after all, 50 years or so in the past.

The lessons from this exercise were many, including, but not limited to, the realization that those in control cared little about the on-the-ground impact of their petty vindictiveness.

Miss Katter can thank her lucky stars she doesn’t teach in this period of out-of-control Wokeism. One day, while the class was reading some bit of classic literature, the word “gay” was part of the story, eliciting snickers from the students.

These days, the class would be sent straight to some Diversity, Equity, Inclusion indoctrination. And Miss Katter would have been right there with us because her response to our reaction was to lament that one of her favorite words had been co-opted to refer to sexual orientation instead of a state of being happy and carefree.

This all came to mind as I woke this morning – old meaning of having arisen from sleep, not becoming a ridiculous navel-gazer – and was greeted with the two granddaughters watching some PBS kids cartoon programming.

First there was some manner of Caribbean ethnicity family. Next up, a Filipino family. My tax money at work on PBS, which of course has no political agenda. Wink. Wink.

The first white faces to be seen were on the third show, which came after a channel change They were all animals with painfully white fur accented with black trim.

Take some time to view children’s programming, on various outlets, and you will be stunned at the messaging attempts from the Woke crowd.

I was curious to see if others were picking up on this. Apparently so. One story from 2021 on Idahofreedom.org, noted the folly of spending tax dollars to have Daniel Tiger teach kids about transgenderism, or PBS Kids insisting that three-month-old babies exhibit “white privilege.”

I’m not sure beloved Fred Rogers, he being a white male, could have passed the PBS gatekeepers these days. Rogers was a registered Republican – ick – but is well-chronicled to have been more in line with liberal ideals, so maybe he would have gotten a pass.

Next, I did some quick computer searching and made the mistake of reading a story from The New Yorker on those poor striking writers in Hollywood.

These are the Woke types who make it their life’s work to over-represent minorities of all stripe in their work.

One writer quoted recalled the good, old days of 2008 when she was happy to work in a writers’ room that was “half queer, majority female.” While she didn’t cite current numbers, it’s probably more so on both counts these days.

Funny how the stock Doesn’t Look Like America rubric of the Woke types doesn’t matter in cases such as this.

Having scored diversity over-representation, writers are on strike for, wait for it, MORE MONEY!

Let’s be clear here. People absolutely should not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or any other arbitrary determinant. But that should work both ways, and it doesn’t.

The Woke types never seem to be satisfied until they have dominated any situation, to the exclusion of opposing opinion and representation, be it racial, sexual, or matters of faith.

Even worse, they must re-educate those who do not buy their claptrap hook, line and sinker.

And they are everywhere, from government and public schools, to the boardrooms of beer producers. They play a large role in the decline of this nation as they succeed in changing it from a meritocracy to a pathetic Potemkin village celebrating the visual facade over legitimate qualification and achievement.

Bill Maher, heretofore a predictable proponent of all things political left, has had (pardon the pun) an awakening regarding Wokeism and has come to recognize it as the absurd caricature of liberalism that it has become.

Along a similar line, former leftist hero and current villain Elon Musk speaks of the “Woke mind virus” and its detrimental effects.

If you are content with this all-Woke-all-the-time state of affairs, continue to stay quiet and accept. If not, muster the courage to speak out and risk the wrath of the Woke warriors.

It’s been told to me that a member of the sheeple class questions my questioning of Clueless Joe Biden’s intent to hire brigades of extra IRS agents and arm them to the teeth as part of his effort to use governmental agencies as his own secret police effort.

If one pays their taxes, more IRS agents are no problem, or so the naive one posited.

Along that line, law-abiding citizens should not worry about the FBI. Oh, wait, the FBI falsified information to get warrants to spy illegally on Trump aide Carter Page.

FBI agents and administrative types have been found to have been lacking on ethical or legal grounds many times through the years, including often when the goal was to persecute one Donald Trump, or giving a free pass to Hillary Clinton for her email server problem.

Lack of political impartiality was cited specifically by Inspector General Michael Horowitz in his report on the Clinton matter, and he named then FBI director James Comey.

But, again, no need to fear governmental agencies if one is not doing anything wrong. Yeah, right.

I repeat, no need to worry about any government agency, certainly one sworn to uphold the law, because such agencies never would bastardize the law for political purposes.

Specifically regarding the IRS, two words, Lois Lerner. It was under Lerner’s watch that the IRS took it upon itself to give a hard time to conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status.

A governmental investigation maintained both conservative and liberal groups were given extra scrutiny. Yet a lawsuit filed by more than 400 conservative organizations was settled. I find no mention of a similar settlement with aggrieved liberal organizations.

Using the why-fear-more-IRS-agents-unless-you-are-a-tax-cheat logic, why settle a lawsuit if you are innocent?

The federal government – any government for that matter – is not inherently benign. That is particularly true these days when career bureaucrats are predominantly left-wing and all too eager to use their posts to impose their political philosophy.

The evidence is there if one dares to follow the news. But better to keep one’s eyes closed and continue voting a straight Democratic ticket.

Look how far that’s gotten our area as well as the country.

From the department of truth is stranger than fiction, locals celebrated over the weekend the emergence of Johnstown from financially distressed Act 47 status, which was followed up quickly on Monday by the United States moving ahead its timetable for potential debt-ceiling-induced default to early June.

To repeat, Johnstown, which has spent the past three decades and change living a Blanche DuBois existence — depending on the kindness of strangers — is supposed to be back in good fiscal health.

Never mind that a couple of sidebar stories to this Act 47 exit are that Johnstown ranks 194 of 206 small metropolitan areas nationally in terms of economic output and 341 of all 357 U.S. metropolitan areas in that economic category. Also, please disregard a $1 million anticipated loss in tax revenue as a result of add-on taxes, allowed to be charged by Act 47 municipalities that now must go away.

Johnstown looks more like an economic cadaver than a vital life form. But we’re no longer on the Act 47 shame list. And, of course, the tourism wave hasn’t kicked in fully yet.

Meanwhile, the aptly named Janet “Yellin’” Yellen told Congress Monday that despite the ongoing fiscal sleights of hand being practiced, the date for the federal government running out of money to pay obligations looms as early as June 1.

Yellen, our Mother Hubbard of monetary and fiscal policy, formerly served as chair of the Federal Reserve, which manages the nation’s money supply. These days, she cashes a check as Treasury Secretary, where her job is to make sure all of Clueless Joe Biden’s green initiatives and handouts to Ukraine are funded, not to mention such niggling details as paying Social Security benefits and interest on the burgeoning national debt, currently at roughly $31.5 trillion.

Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.

It is ironic that Yellen presided over loose monetary policies and artificially depressed interest rates as Fed chair, which helped get us into this fiscal mess. Now, she’s being forced to deal with the crisis she had a large hand in creating.

Too bad Act 47 status isn’t an option for the U.S., in which we’d expect the rest of the world to spend the next 30 years, give or take, bailing us out for our mismanagement.

House Republicans have passed a plan to increase the debt limit, but with accompanying demands for cuts in funding for Biden’s pet left-wing agenda items such as canceling student loan debt, giving blank checks to environmental crazies and turning the IRS into an armed branch of the secret police.

Biden’s handlers have vowed to paint the Republican plan as cutting veterans benefits and slicing border enforcement. It’s ridiculous but, considering the general idiocy of the electorate, it might work.

This federal debt problem has ripple effects for states and various municipalities in that it puts a crimp in handouts from Uncle Sam, said handouts being generally counted on to plug fiscal holes, sort of like individuals borrowing from the in-laws.

Based on past shortages of will, we would expect the U.S. debt ceiling to be booted upward with a last-minute deal. The over-under for that probably is Memorial Day.

Then we can begin counting the days until Johnstown once again slips beneath the fiscal waves and returns to the Davey Jones’s locker of Act 47. But the rules have changed, and three-plus decade stays there no longer are tolerated.

No sweat. By then, the raging success of Myopia 2025’s revitalization plan for the area should make any distressed status short-lived. Or not.

As I readied for a doctor’s appointment the past Thursday, I was in the midst of getting together the items I would need: Wallet, car keys, face mask.

But the wife, seeing the mask, clued me in on a combined Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence freedom moment. Wielding a copy of the local Daily Planet, she showed me a story that Conemaugh Health System – at long last – had backed off the mask mandate for staff, patients and visitors.

Welcome back to reality after a three-year absence.

Make no mistake, much of the COVID hype (including mask mandates) was a social experiment to see just how far the public could be pushed in terms of abdicating freedoms before pushing back. No dictate was too draconian, no limitation was subject to debate, as these petty dictators rode the wave of fear they had created.

Travel was restricted. Visitation to aging parents in nursing homes, or patients in hospitals, was suspended. Gatherings ranging from family holiday celebrations, to weekly church services, public school classes and athletic events, were to cease if we knew what was good for us.

And masks. One is good. Two would be better. Three is an improvement on two.

You laugh. I’m serious. Do an internet search for “wearing two, three mask absurdity” and you will be directed to a November 2020 story posted on NPR.org quoting an expert saying exactly that – the more (masks) the merrier.

If one had the temerity to question this overkill, they were decried as “deniers” who didn’t believe in “science.”

And the vaccines. Only selfish morons didn’t get repeated COVID vaccines, despite mounting evidence then and now that they were not nearly as effective as promised, that the disease was not that deadly on a statistical basis, and there were and are adverse side effects from vaccines, including sudden death due to heart events among otherwise healthy young people.

I had a heated exchange with my primary care physician (now they are back to being family doctors) about this. Using probability, I told him I saw the risk of me dying from COVID (about four-tenths of one percent) as less a threat than what dangers I would be exposed to by taking some unproven vaccine rushed through without typical studies and a government that gave the manufacturers total immunity from any legal action should their vaccines prove harmful.

I would go on to contract COVID – twice. I’m still here. Point made.

Yes, I know people who have died of COVID. I grieve for them. I also know people who died in car accidents, yet I am not afraid to drive a car. I know people who have succumbed to heart attacks, but I still walk for exercise.

I’m still waiting for my doctor to apologize for his vaccine rants.

Evidence continues to mount regarding problems with COVID vaccines and the ineffectiveness of such things as masks.

A new study from Finland, published in a public health journal there, found mask mandates for children did not reduce the incidence of COVID infection. Repeat, masks did NOTHING favorable for the kids.

But wearing masks may have done harm to the children for reasons both physical and psychological. And closing down schools did incalculable harm.

Where are all the MASKHOLES now? SCIENCE is proving them wrong.

At least Conemaugh has, for now, bowed to reality.

Understand, though, that we’re only one ginned up, overhyped pandemic away from being ordered back into the bunkers because you, dear people, proved you will buy their scare tactics.

In the spirit of if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, perhaps it is time to overdose on blue pills from “The Matrix,” the better to accept the assertion of tourism being the savior for Johnstown’s downtrodden economy.

For those unfamiliar with the movie, taking the blue pill keeps one in a state of blissful ignorance to reality; fitting since blue is the defining color of the Democratic Party.

And Democrats are in the forefront of insisting that the Johnstown area can be Disney World, Cancun and Hawaii all rolled into one when it comes to attracting tourist dollars. Why, we have miles and miles of trails, not to mention streams and rivers and mountains.

It is fair to note that Ukraine can make the same claim, yet not many tourists are headed there these days. But I digress.

If we are to become a tourist mecca, flush with money-is-no-object free spenders visiting us, we’re going to need to appeal to more than hikers and kayakers. Dare I suggest we play to our strengths, those being violence, drugs, decaying infrastructure, blighted neighborhoods and elitist nepotism.

Imagine the demand for Moxham Ninja Tours, held only after dark, during which tourists are outfitted with portable police scanners and set out with the goal of being first on the scene of those radio reports of crimes – perhaps beating the police there.

I can see the ads now, dramatic chase images played against the soundtrack of the William Tell Overture (Lone Ranger theme song) showing tourists racing about darkened streets in the pursuit of criminal activity.

Forget video games or virtual reality experiences, this would be reality unfiltered. What a rush! Zip-lining through the Amazon is kid’s stuff compared to this.

Our tourists would tend to be explorers, so offer them the chance to don helmets and other safety items and allow them to roam at their leisure through our abundance of abandoned buildings and residences. They’d have to sign waivers in advance, of course, just in case.

Another angle might be themed scavenger hunts – residents excluded because of their home-field advantage. We could have hunts to find expended ammo casings, discarded drug paraphernalia, or specific types of litter such as as outdated political campaign signs or posters for previous Johnstown tourism events.

Bus tours could be mounted so that tourists could ride around on our washboard streets, many still in disrepair due to our never-ending sewer upgrade project, or subpar repairs to the roads performed after the sewer work was done there.

Ads would need to stress the bus ride angle. No tourists in their right mind would want to drive their daily transportation on these streets.

More sedate entertainment for tourists might be an educational angle, with seminars to show our visitors family trees demonstrating the generally incestuous nature of local governance, both nominal and shadow.

If you’ve ever visited San Antonio, Texas, you no doubt are familiar with the River Walk there. Restaurants, cafes, watering holes of all description line the canals that snake through the downtown, those canals being traversed by small passenger boats.

Access is as easy as walking down a flight of stairs from street level. Our tourists would need to settle for bars and restaurants being up top. But those wishing to partake of the boat rides would have the added experience of needing to rappel down our steeply sloped flood control walls, which would only add to the experience.

Final point: In a nod to the Myopia 2025 partisans, we could bring in planeloads of Afghan refugees to man those low-paying, seasonal, part-time tourism jobs our locals never would accept.

Talk about a win-win situation!

We’ve long argued in favor of stiffer penalties for criminals in general, and a reassessment of the free passes given juveniles committing serious crimes.

You are just as injured or dead if a 16-year-old does the shooting, stabbing or pummeling as if it had been done by someone 18 and older, the legal cutoff point for adulthood as it pertains to crime.

The recent run of school threats in this area comes to mind as examples where juveniles seem to be emboldened by the relative light punishment. While no one was harmed – yet – these are serious offenses meriting serious punishment.

Along this line of thought, it was encouraging to read a story today from The Tribune-Democrat that a pair of alleged shooters in Moxham will be charged as adults.

Many shots were fired. One person reportedly was hit, although not injured seriously. One alleged shooter was listed as 15 years of age and the other, 17. Both are under the customary 18-year-old cutoff, but can be charged as adults due to the severity of their crimes.

Congratulations to District Attorney Greg Neugebauer for exercising that option.

The names of those being charged were reported as Deion Alex Sanders and Rahmeen Green. It will be interesting to see in follow-up reports whether the pair are domestic or imported.

According to the story, both are in jail having failed to post bond.

No doubt, soon we will hear appeals for leniency based on unfortunate home lives, traumatic experiences, societal failures and the like. These should be ignored considering the severity of the actions these two are alleged to have taken, which reportedly are supported by surveillance camera video.

Again, well done to those who chose to charge the pair as adults.

While teenage violence has become more widespread than in the past, it is not an entirely recent phenomenon.

Biblical scholars cited on Christianity.com have calculated that David was 15, maybe 13, when he killed Goliath. Yet only David among the Israelite warriors was brave enough to confront the giant Philistine.

And he used only a sling and stone. David might have preferred a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, the weapon of choice for many present-day assaults. But, in another calculation, this by ballistics types, the stone as hurled using the sling was thought to have the stopping power of a modern .45-caliber handgun.

Take one of those between the eyes and it can ruin your entire day.

Most consider David’s act righteous. But it also was violent. And he was far from being an adult.

For yet another example, consider the American Wild West period and the aptly named Billy “The Kid.” Billy (William Bonney was his alias; given name Henry McCarty) killed his first man when he was just short of 18 years of age and was said to have killed 21 before reaching the age of 21, when he himself was gunned down.

The law wasn’t treating Billy as a juvenile. He was caught once and sentenced to hang, but escaped, killing two deputies in the process.

When Billy was encountered again, he was killed by sheriff Pat Garrett, thereby avoiding any further escape problems.

Punishing criminals severely once worked in this country. It can work again, given the will to do so.