Today, we’re borrowing from legendary radio broadcaster Gabriel Heatter and his famous sign on phrase “There’s good news tonight.”

There is a lot of good news, of various stripes, on this Sunday Sept. 25 evening.

In Italy, despite threats from European Union tyrants, exit polls indicate the Italian voters have ushered in a right-wing group of politicians who have vowed to move things in a conservative direction and away from the hard-left, socialistic policies that have turned Italy specifically and Europe at large into an economic and social mess.

I’m presuming there will be no overnight vote-counting shenanigans as occurred here in our banana republic in the last presidential election and the indicated results will hold in Italy.

Back home, Botox Queen Nancy Pelosi made a surprise visit Saturday night at the Global Citizen Music Festival, in theory a safe venue of leftist climate alarmists and generally leftist-leaning residents of New York City.

But, surprise, Pelosi was booed long and loud as she tried to take credit for climate legislation. No doubt she flew to New York on a private jet and rode a limo to the event. Carbon footprint, be damned, I’m Queen Nancy!

So, maybe the crowd was booing her hypocrisy, or maybe just Queen Nancy in general. Regardless, it warmed the cockles of my heart to see video of the ongoings.

The CEO of Pfizer, one of the big-pharma purveyors of those COVID vaccines that don’t live up to the hype, has come down with COVID for the second time in two months. He’s had FOUR doses of his company’s vaccine and also was treated with a Pfizer antiviral drug when he got COVID the first time.

Now that clueless Joe Biden has pronounced the end to the pandemic – to the horror of his handlers who quickly walked back that claim by their figurehead mouthpiece – isn’t it about time we stop frothing at the mouth over the need to take vaccines that don’t live up to promises and are increasingly being outed for negative side effects?

Hypocrisy in general is being outed worldwide.

Finland, which would not close its borders to refugees that were politically correct to accept, won’t be taking in any Russians fleeing that nation’s conscription of young men for military purposes.

Back home, hypocrites from Martha’s Vineyard to New York City, to Washington, D.C., think it’s just fine that Clueless Joe’s open borders are flooding immigrants into Texas, Florida and other states, not to mention making it easy for illegal drugs to flow unchecked throughout our nation.

But send a few immigrants to their towns or cities and the NIMBY (not in my back yard) screaming is deafening.

It is amusing to hear their strained attempts at justifying their conduct and passing the blame elsewhere.

Hope and Change Obama probably could have handled all 50-something migrants just by opening up the grounds to his $12 million estate in Martha’s Vineyard.

Funny, one-time Dial-An-Opinion Obama was mute on this point. It hit a little too close to home – literally and figuratively.

So it is with hypocrites.

Fall has arrived with plenty of things beyond leaves losing altitude.

Investment portfolios are falling hard as Jay Powell and his Federal Reserve friends seek to correct past mistakes by monkey-hammering the economy with higher interest rates while also shrinking liquidity in the bond markets by selling off the Fed portfolio, put at upwards of $9 trillion.

The impact of such things is negative and widespread. Expect to see declines continuing in the value of your IRA, 401(k) and other investments long after the last leaf has hit the ground.

Similarly, for most people their home is their single largest asset. The surge in housing prices, even in distressed areas such as Johnstown in recent years, has made homeowners smile. This produces the so-called wealth effect in which although there are no plans to sell the house, it is heartening to know that if that decision would be made then massive financial gains would be realized.

And this allows households the confidence to spend more money on other things, secure in the knowledge that even in a worst-case scenario, their home equity could bail them out.

But the combination of those inflated house prices and rising interest rates, which have pushed 30-year mortgages from the 3-percent range to above 6 percent, have priced many people out of the housing market.

Most measures of demand have fallen sharply and prices of houses only now are beginning to follow that trajectory. They have lots of catching up to do.

Even those who still might be able to afford a house aren’t that optimistic. Why buy now? Just wait and prices will be lower, and maybe even interest rates will decline if and when the Fed folks decide they’ve crippled the economy sufficiently to rein in the inflation they created themselves with their loose monetary policies.

The irony of this is the would-be home buyers are looking to become renters, putting pressure on costs in that segment of the housing market, which translates into keeping inflation measures elevated and so delaying the Fed’s willingness to lower interest rates again.

On a more intangible basis, trust is falling fast in government, the legal system, Lamestream news media, healthcare and our public education system.

Once the weather improves, make it a point to get out and enjoy the fall foliage. It will provide a welcome respite from the reality of falling objects and failing institutions.

News broke today that a key player in the Myopia 2025 elite secret society has resigned.

And I immediately thought of a former employer, the local newspaper, that loved to have unwanted employees resign rather than having to fire them.

So, maybe the Myopia individual jumped, or maybe he was pushed. What we do know is he and others schemed in secret to bring Afghan refugees to the area, and various other things were planned behind closed doors that ostensibly were good for us, but we were just too backward and ignorant to understand. Just trust them.

And why not trust un-elected, self-appointed individuals who like to hide their goings on under the cloak of secrecy? What could go wrong?

Think of this as our little taste of COVID-19 gaslighting, with facts on such things as death rates among non-compromised individuals, effectiveness of vaccines, side effects of those vaccines, all being withheld from the general public for as long as possible, lest we make informed – correct- decisions that we were had.

Keeping the public in the dark is a longheld tradition in American politics and Lamestream media, which is why laws designed to keep the politicians honest, as least as far as their meetings go, fall under the sunshine moniker.

The Myopia people, if they are at all in step with the general method in Johnstown, would follow the gameplan of begging for federal and state aid, setting up non-profits, not-for-profits, or other feel-good organizations to administer the aid, and generally steering such aid toward political patrons and their enterprises.

Putting some of the political chosen in positions of management, either writing the begging requests, or managing the organizations that benefit from the largess, is also part of the plan.

One hand washes – greases – the other.

We’ve reported here earlier that the so-called vetting of Afghan refugees overall has been a colossal bust, on par with the the frantic, last-second pullout of U.S. troops.

Johnstown doesn’t need more problems, witness another set of weekend gun incidents at public housing, with one of the ne’er-do-wells reportedly back on the streets after having posted bail.

If Democrat Senate candidate John Fetterman had his way, they’d all be out, ready to do harm to the law-abiding public.

In statistics supposedly provided by the superintendent of the Greater Johnstown School District, and posted on social media by a frequent critic of the district and Johnstown – usually with good cause – the numbers of disciplinary problems in those schools are staggering.

For the 2021-22 school, year with an enrollment of 3,020 students, there were 1,941 reported “incidents” in the GJSD. There were 1,122 in-school suspensions, 863 out-of-school suspensions.

Also there were 180 “violent acts” reported with 76 arrests, six for weapons.

Instead of trying to flood us with Afghan refugees who supposedly would provide workers, the Myopia gang might want to look into fixing our in-house problem with the area’s largest school district.

Myopia people similarly might want to start vetting refugees from Filthydelphia. We have become quite good over the economically depressed decades at raising our own criminal base, but the Filthydelphia crowd is the icing on a very bad cake.

Maybe Mr. Myopia got a look at the school district numbers and recognized the area is all but a lost cause.

Fittingly, Mr. Myopia’s exit is cloaked in secrecy, with no quotes from him on any local media outlet, at least none that I could find.

Farewell, Mr. Myopia, we hardly knew you.

Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on your way out of town.

There was a time that when I walked I listened to investment podcasts on my MP3 player, but no longer do I do that.

I’ve given myself over to enjoying the strolls without attempting to multi-task. Alas, I’ve found that the brain cannot be put into neutral.

And so as I walk, I observe the absurdities of life.

Just today, I came across a one-block section of nearby Queen Street shut down by “Road Closed” signs and a scattering of orange cones so that a replacement electric pole could be installed.

To accomplish this relatively mundane task required a small army – albeit much smaller than the number of FBI raiders it took to serve a search warrant on Donald Trump.

Let us count. There were two “guards” standing at each end of the block should some idiot be unable to read or observe the cones, not to mention multiple large vehicles parked on the street, and attempt to venture onto Queen.

I’m presuming they were not Penelec employees, but the independent contractors who make quite the living in construction-infested Johnstown these days.

But the rest ostensibly were Penelec employees, being well-compensated by definition, and perhaps even more so on this Saturday (weekend) shift.

I saw two men working, manipulating what looked like a large manual post-hole digger.

But that wasn’t all on hand. There was a knot of three men standing idly by one bucket truck. There were three more standing in a pack chatting.

The second trio was close enough that its members could have heard the heavy breathing of the two people working. The idlers’ only risk of heavy breathing would have been had they been viewing porn on their cell phones.

This is no exception, Pass any road construction site and do a quick count to determine those actually working and those merely observing the few who actually are doing something.

I was bemused by the Penelec manpower situation, but it was not the only absurdity witnessed on a walk of 2.5 miles or so, lasting about 45 minutes.

For a change of pace, I ventured toward a wooded area. Just before I reached the trail entrance, I came upon a man and a woman and a pack of dogs. Two of those dogs were on leashes, although the man had to strain mightily to keep them from banging into me.

The third dog, Dexter as I recall them calling out, ran loose. Now, here’s the bitter irony. The people’s puke green Kia Soul was parked with its windshield facing a sign commanding people to keep pets on leashes at all times in that area.

I have found that such scofflaws, aware of their infraction, attempt to mask it all with small talk. The guy muttered some greeting to me, for example.

I resisted the urge to ask if Dexter was a son, daughter, brother, sister, father or mother? He couldn’t have been a pet since he wasn’t on a leash.

But in the interest of avoiding further irritation, I just ignored the guy and continued on my walk, saying silent thanks that I hadn’t encountered them on the trail, when likely all three dogs would have been running loose and I would not have been able to avoid comment.

I can’t be sure, but I’d be willing to make a small wager that the dog walkers vote Democrat. Same with the Queen Street gang.

Lightly productive workers and self-indulgent morons are everywhere, and they like their freedom from responsibility. That’s why I’m not optimistic about coming mid-term elections, or the future course of this country.

I don’t do social media, due to preferring not to enrich Zuck and the Woke Twits at Twitter, so when I want to indulge in an orgy of self-congratulation and narcissism that is the backbone of the digital bragging platforms, this blog becomes my tool.

Today I’m here to pat myself and the wife on the back for 42 years of marriage. Hooray for us.

More than four decades back, we piled into my 1967 Mustang fastback good-weather hobby vehicle, the same car I would use to bring son Anthony home from the hospital nearly two years later, and drove to Maryland to get married.

Afterward, we motored back to Johnstown and I went to work that night, just as I worked the evening that my son was born. The Gen X, Y, Z and Millennial types who can’t bring themselves to report to work – period – might want to consider that.

We have become a nation of the gutless, self-absorbed, oh-woe-is-me types whose preferred method of greeting adversity or unpleasant reality is to curl up in the fetal position and begin sucking thumbs vigorously.

Along that line, marriages have become disposable items of limited shelf life. How often we hear about couples breaking up because one member isn’t happy or needs to find themselves. They apparently enter marriage expecting a nonstop tour of Disney World and when the joy goes on hiatus, they want to, as one of my former sports editors used to say, split the blankets. Cut and run is another apt term.

Instead of I’m not happy, their excuse should be I’m not an adult.

Only children demand constant, instant gratification. They grow out of that, at least they used to do so, before the era of permissive parenting and outright enabling, coupled with societal programs to shield children from ever having to deal with unhappy reality, created never maturing progeny, with little of the benefit and all of the drawback.

How does one get to 42 years of marriage? One day at a time. It ain’t always Disney World, nor should it be.

There needs to be compatibility, not necessarily clone-like similarity, but common ground on the big issues – like spending money, fidelity, wanting children and grandchildren, belief in God.

This compatibility can be on display in curious ways. Today, for example, despite it being our anniversary, was pretty much an average day.

My wife took the two granddaughters we watch daily out to appliance shop and then to a playground. I went to mow my son’s lawn and on the way back, made a stop at a donut shop to get my wife some of her favored chocolate examples with chocolate icing.

In part as an homage to our wedding day, I broke out a Mustang – the ’67 fastback long ago was sold but this time it was my 2005 convertible – to make my rounds.

The granddaughters were eating lunch when I got back home. After they’d finished, the donuts were offered and cards were exchanged.

For at least the second time in the past three years, my wife and I had independently selected exactly the same card for each other.

This year it was a couple of dark blue and gold examples. On the front were champagne glasses with the words “Still do. Always will.”

We laughed and the granddaughters chuckled, too. They got an impromptu speech, the sort Poppy is fond of giving, telling them it all started on this date. Without the marriage, there would have been no daddy for them.

Without their daddy, they wouldn’t be here. They were more interested in flipping a penny and having it come up tails an inordinate number of times.

Come to think of it, that was a metaphor for the relative rarity of a 42-year marriage.

OK, this brag session is finished. Thanks for your indulgence.

Not since Al Gore has a prominent Democratic politician reached such absurd levels of claiming credit as Clueless Joe Biden.

Biden’s Taking Credit tour hit Detroit Wednesday, where he claimed to be the reason for domestic auto manufacturers making progress in producing and offering electric vehicles.

It doesn’t matter to the Clueless One and his handlers that Detroit has plunging headlong into manufacturing EVs while boastful Biden still was playing second banana to that Obama guy.

Lamestream Media will not bother to correct Clueless Joe’s boastful claim, and so it goes.

Even today, Gore apologists defend him by saying his claim to have invented the Internet is just mean-spirited critics falsifying the record.

You make the call. What Gore is widely quoted as saying is “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

So, yes, he didn’t say he invented the whole worldwide web thing. He did claim a great degree of responsibility for it and he did use “creating,” indicating some degree of credit claiming.

Gore seems to fashion himself some techno-God, borrowing from the Bible’s Book of Genesis – “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

So, Gore thinks he created the Internet. Talk about being full of oneself.

Hypocrisy is a constant with Gore, who has predicted our coastal areas would be under water by now due to global warming and melting ice caps. That’s the same climate emergency Gore promoted, and then profited from, his net worth growing from a reported $700,000 in 2000 to $177.5 million in 2015, largely on the back of marketing carbon credits.

Carbon credits are a widely used financial mea culpa, sort of like some religions requiring huge donations from divorcing members to offset violating restrictions against such marital breakups in the religion’s teachings. Pony up enough cash and all is forgiven.

Clueless Biden never saw a positive development for which he would not claim credit.

His monstrous ego, exceeded only by his monstrous ineptitude, gave rise to those Biden “I did that” stickers, with rickety Joe wagging his finger. They appear often on gasoline pumps, a guerilla program combining Biden’s penchant for credit claiming with a reality he doesn’t want to own.

When those gasoline prices skyrocketed, Biden blamed Putin’s Ukraine raid – or maybe he was just serving a warrant. Now that the prices are coming down, based largely on worldwide economic stagnation and and in some small part Biden draining our strategic petroleum reserve to calm prices, Biden wants to take the credit.

This neatly ignores that gasoline prices are still far above where they were when Clueless Joe slinked into the Oval Office.

Biden is taking credit for inflation being under control, quite the dubious claim when we are running at 40-plus year highs in inflation rate.

What Biden rightly could take credit for is widening the domestic political divide, weakening our military, emboldening China, turning our southern border into a revolving door, worsening our crime and drug problems, and turning our justice and intelligence agencies into his own secret police units to harass political enemies.

But I don’t expect Clueless Joe to mount a podium to claim credit for these negative developments.

It’s left for voters to pin that tail on the lead donkey by voting out first his fellow party members and, if given the chance in 2024 (which seems unlikely) sending the head donkey packing.

The world suffers from an overabundance of Pollyannas. Their eventual return to reality, likely a forced one, is going to be rancorous.

While many eagerly buy the propaganda being crammed down their gullets by the unholy alliance of lamestream media outlets, social media, and political/intelligence operatives, sometimes the truth cannot be suppressed.

A case in point is today’s inflation report. It showed an increase in prices of 8.3 percent vs. last year at this time. There was even a small rise month over month, which might (emphasize might) spare us the repeat of Clueless Joe Biden rushing to the microphones again to proclaim no inflation.

Even the core inflation measure, favored by elites because it strips out “volatile” food and energy sectors – you know, the stuff no-one buys or needs! – was up 6.3 percent vs. last year and up .6 percent month over month.

Stock averages plummeted, with the Dow down nearly 900 points as I type this at 11:27 a.m. Tuesday.

There is a phenomenon of inflation that the longer it persists, the tougher it is to get it back under control. That is because wages rise as workers feel poorer and demand to be kept whole, so to speak.

The raises come easily for government employees, being as they are not bound by economic reality but rather by the taxing power of their employers.

When private sector employees get raises, prices almost always increase, making all feel yet more poor and keeping the cycle going.

Already there are those calculating a Social Security cost of living increase (COLA) for next year of 8.7 percent or more.

There are a lot of people on Social Security, with an endangered trust fund to support them. Increasing the payouts by nearly 9 percent only hastens the time when serious action will need to be taken to shore up that program financially, either by reducing benefits, increasing wage taxes, infusing money from more government borrowing, or maybe a combination of all three.

The world in general, both public and private, is awash in debt with declining economies meaning that debt gets tougher and tougher to repay.

Pollyannas are optimistic that Ukraine is routing Russia. Stay tuned for a better read on that.

China continues to make threatening gestures toward Taiwan and the smart money is on the ChiComs to make a move to reclaim that island nation within the next year or two.

At home we have a porous southern border, despite the witless assertion by Clueless Joe’s token veep that all is well on that front.

This affects you as illegal drugs and crime, magnified by that loose border, flood into cities and towns near you.

Back to the global picture, we see Iran on the verge of becoming a nuclear problem. We see Europe one cold snap away from having to break up the furniture to burn for warmth.

We see Great Britain’s new prime minister talking openly of using atomic weapons.

Domestically, intelligence and justice assets continue to be used like Biden’s personal Gestapo to punish political enemies. Voters are being bought off with loan forgiveness and misguided stimulus handouts, the very things that helped get us into this inflation maelstrom.

Efforts continue to demonize half of the nation’s population for the high crime of refusing to kiss the hem of Clueless Joe’s robe.

Things are almost certain to get very real for the Pollyannas in the near future, and it’s doubtful they are up to the challenge, either physically or emotionally.

Back when Johnstown’s Myopia 2025 was in its Afghan refugee period, operating behind the scenes in an attempt to flood the area with displaced Afghans, we noted in this space several potential downsides to the plan, beyond it being an attempt at operating in secrecy

Among those concerns was that although the Myopia gang was assuring all that any Afghans landing here would be fully vetted to eliminate criminals, terrorists and otherwise undesirable people being planted in our area, could we really trust those doing the vetting?

Our intelligence agencies haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in the past few decades. They were asleep at the controls as Saudis trained here to execute the 9/11 attacks.

More recently, we were assured pulling out of Afghanistan would not lead to a quick collapse of that country’s government.

On a more domestic note, we have continuing efforts by government “justice” types to harass and convict Donald Trump on their cause of the moment.

Similarly, Trump loyalists have been harassed, frequently on ridiculous allegations and specious information, some of which has shown itself to be entirely false.

Yet these are the people Myopia 2025 was convinced could weed out any problems among an Afghan influx.

A report posted on zerohedge.com yesterday notes that the vetting has been a disaster.

According to no less a source than the office of the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, the vetting has been slipshod

There reportedly were nearly 80,000 Afghans brought here from July 2021 to January 2022. Nearly 89,000 evacuee records were checked (obviously more than one for some) and 11,110 had their date of birth listed as Jan. 1.

This is sort of like the vote counting in the last election; theoretically possible but extremely unlikely. More than 44,000 other documents used to check out immigrants were flawed in some way or another.

The bottom line is, again according to various government sources, nearly 400 individuals who are either terrorists, suspected terrorists, or people raising security concerns, floated in on the wave of Afghan refugees.

The number of outright criminals or otherwise undesirable people has to be much greater than that.

Some of those could have been right here in our little crime-ridden city, where already this week there have been two incidents of gunfire, one a standoff with the police, had Myopia 2025 gotten its way.

No need to congratulate me for doubting Myopia 2025’s assurances that all Afghans coming to the United States or Johnstown would be good Afghans.

Chalk this up as yet another unfortunate incident in which propaganda fails when facts are introduced.

It is hard to find a greater disconnect between propaganda and reality than in the example of electric vehicles.

The attraction of electric vehicles rests on a three-legged stool of supposedly cheaper operating costs, environmental feel-goodism, and government subsidies to make the initial vehicle purchase more palatable.

In a case of handout irony, college students whine that $10,000 in forgiven debt is nothing, but buyers of electric vehicles gladly grab onto the $7,500 tax credit.

But that three-legged stool of support for electric vehicles is having reality turn the whole operation into an unwieldy balancing act.

With skyrocketing electrical costs in Europe (coming soon to a plug near you?), the operating cost advantage is disappearing radically. When one adds in the inconvenience of finding recharge stations during any kind of lengthy trip, the attraction fades.

Also, the reality that battery packs need to replaced during the car’s life expectancy, with costs of $10,000 and up, it’s kind of like having to replace the engine in your filthy, gasoline-burning car every 5-10 years.

The Clueless Joe people have used the so-called inflation reduction nonsense legislation to shore up those $7,500 tax credits for EV purchases. But soon the rest of the population (read voters) will begin to clamor for fair treatment by our government overlords, and the tax credits just might be reduced substantially, if not disappear completely.

As far as owners of EVs being able to strut around and brag about saving the environment, they might want to do some research. The various minerals and materials used to build an EV require a considerable carbon footprint to mine or manufacture.

There also are some ugly images of mining operations such as for lithium – vital to the batteries – leaving huge scars on the land. One post I saw compared this to an oil sands operation, which was much smaller and less intrusive.

Even the patron saint of the EV crowd, Tesla’s Elon Musk, has gone on record recently noting the need for fossil fuels for energy production and automobiles will continue well into the foreseeable future.

Contrast that reality, from a guy who should know, to the delusional California and other states looking to mandate the end to sales of new cars with traditional internal combustion engines in the near future.

This is happening even as power grids groan under existing load and blackouts are threatened. Imagine what it would be like if 100 percent of the car-driving populace needed to plug in their vehicles each night for a recharge.

Reality is a female dog and the EV crowd is beginning to feel its bite.

If only to amuse myself, I took some $1 coins to Dollar Tree today to use in purchasing large envelopes.

I anticipated an interesting experience and I wasn’t disappointed.

Dollar Tree has, of course, kept the name, but relented to inflation in that not a lot of items in the store still are $1. My package of four large envelopes was among the victims of inflation, coming in at $1.25, plus tax.

When the cashier gave me my total, I handed him two $1 coins, one a Susan B. Anthony relic and the other a more recent Sacagawea example. I had accumulated some of these $1 coins and was eager to rid myself of them.

Anticipating confusion on the part of the cashier, I said something along the lines of “Here are two of the hated $1 coins.”

“These coins are dollars?” he asked with notable surprise.

He carefully manipulated them in his fingers, looking for evidence that I’d doctored some quarters or the like, the better to scam them.

I pointed out that if he looked closely, each has stamped on it that they are $1 coins.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why suspect that anyone would go to all that effort to try to chisel a business out of a buck and change by faking coinage?

Exactly.

But such common sense didn’t factor into his calculus. Also, apparently absent, was any previous experience with dollar coins of any kind, which speaks to the colossal failure this government experiment in manipulation of the public was/is.

There was an uncomfortable pause, a shake of the cashier’s head, and finally he seemed to be willing to accept that these were, indeed, legal $1 coins and should be accepted as such for payment.

Maybe it was an accident, maybe an intentional act, but he dropped one of the coins. I waited patiently while he fished for it among the rack of plastic bags.

Eventually he found it, rang up the sale, and I left the store with my purchases and one overriding thought.

This guy likely votes, which helps explain why Clueless Joe Biden is our president. That and some creative vote counting, but you already knew that.