In the bad, old days of the Great Depression, before government welfare programs existed, the lament of the impoverished was the topic of a song, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”

People begged for money, or sold apples or pencils on street corners to get some money because they had to do so. There was no free lunch, either literally or figuratively, for the down and out, at least as far as the government was concerned.

Keynesian patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt eventually became President and introduced programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps, in which the government created jobs to do public works projects and paid the workers.

Roosevelt had this naive idea, long discarded by our modern leftists, that people would prefer work to a handout because it gave them self-respect.

Now, only unsympathetic Republicans have the temerity to suggest that many on the public dole ought to do something, anything, to earn their handouts.

An added complication these days is the government is both eager to create economic hardship with ridiculous legislation and regulation, then quick to try to attempt to cure the self-inflicted damage with handouts.

We’re due for an update of the old song. Call the 2022 version, “Brother can you buy my vote?”

The Biden regime isn’t alone in blame for our current stagflation malaise. The seeds have been sown through this and multiple prior regimes in both government and the Federal Reserve.

Decades of rampant spending, geometric money creation and below-market interest rates have created mountains of debt that cannot, will not, be repaid.

The generic term for such excesses is bubbles. All that is needed is the metaphorical pin and the whole thing collapses.

The Federal Reserve, which just a year ago was praying for inflation, now is raising interest rates in an attempt to strangle consumers and, by extension, the economy to cure rampant inflation. The Fed will announce more rate increases Thursday, likely three-quarters of a percentage point.

Think of the Fed as one huge, pointy pin.

This is bad news if you happen to control the government as Democrats, led by the Biden Gang, do.

Sure, things you voters need cost more, if you can find them. Yes, your wages are not keeping pace with price increases.

And, OK, there is more crime and general insanity afoot.

Polls already indicate your widespread unhappiness with Joe and the gang. But will that be communicated in mid-term elections, with the usual suspects again counting the votes?

Biden and friends don’t seem to be willing to think that they can rerun the 2020 election “ miracle” comeback.

Time to buy some insurance.

They announced just today the sale of 20 million more barrels of oil from the misnamed Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That will happen, by chance, in September and October, just ahead of those mid-term elections.

It will bring the draining of the SPR to 200 million barrels overall and ostensibly allow the Biden mouthpieces to crow about gasoline prices being below $5 a gallon – at least in some precincts.

How curious that when prices were rising it was all Putin’s fault, even though prices rose long before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Now that prices are down about 50 cents, a small part of the meteoric rise by the way, Biden and his sycophants want to take a bow.

Biden’s operatives also have leaked word that a student loan debt repayment moratorium, and some outright debt forgiveness is being planned for – wait for it – just before mid-term elections.

Biden is not alone. Senator Pocahontas Warren is shrieking to pour more gasoline on the inflation fire with more government freebies.

This sort of thinking regrettably is a winner in a nation populated mostly by economic illiterates, whose frame of reference ends at their front door. They just can’t grasp how those $2,000 stimulus payments increased the prices for virtually everything they buy and while the handouts have stopped, for now, the high prices remain.

But buying votes is all Biden and friends know, and I would be reluctant to bet against it all working for them in the mid-term elections.

Let the giveaways begin.

Brother, you can buy a lot of votes.

Behold, the electric vehicle, the answer to all our energy problems, or so you would believe by listening to the ramblings of energy illiterates ranging from Clueless Joe Biden on down.

When the facts don’t support them, these unrepentant blowhards just massage those facts.

Clueless Joe’s equally clueless Transportation Secretary Pete Butt(whatever) was at his statistical misdirection best when testifying before the House of Representatives. Secretary Pete was asked about suggesting people upset with high gasoline prices just switch to electric vehicles and if he stood by those remarks.

Not surprisingly, he did, despite it being noted that the average electric vehicle costs more than its traditional internal combustion engine counterpart.

Secretary Pete responded by citing some MSRPs for electric vehicles, including $26,595 for a Chevrolet Bolt and $39,974 for a Ford F-150 Lightning. Just today, July 22, and too late for inclusion on Pete’s list, Cadillac announced a new electric car, the Celestiq, slated to cost $300,000 OR MORE, when it debuts next year.

Let’s start with the Bolt, the hatchback econobox of electric vehicles, which according to reviewers has all the cheap feel you would expect from that term.

Add in that similar cars with conventional engines cost many thousands less.

There also is the unpleasant fact that Bolt production was halted for eight months last year and early this due to a recall to fix batteries in 2017-22 models that posed a fire risk.

So, the Bolt might be relatively affordable among electric cars, if you can find one, or want one considering their checkered reputation.

As for the Ford pickup, the electric version of America’s top-selling truck for 46 years, two important points on that $39,974 starting price.

First, according to the Ford web site, you can’t order one due to demand. Second, the vehicle shown on the company’s web page has a list price of $67,474, an upcharge of more than $27,000 from the base.

At a recent car show I chatted with an acquaintance who has had occasion to drive one of these electric Ford trucks ( a fleet delivery to a government organization) and he said acceleration was impressive. This, coming from a guy who has a 1967 Chevelle 396 as a hobby car, was a good endorsement.

But then he moved on to cost and scarceness. Suffice it to say, he’s not rushing out to buy one of the trucks.

Electric vehicles are pitched as saving owners massively on fuel costs. That depends in large part on where one lives and the varying costs of electricity. And the fact that the government offers tax rebates in order to lure in purchasers speaks to some degree of manipulating economic reality.

There was a cautionary tale on Yahoo and various other web sites in recent days about the experience of a Florida teenager buying a used 2014 Ford Focus electric vehicle.

Her parents paid $11,000 for the car, which had about 60,000 miles on it when purchased, and she drove it without incident for about six months. But now the car isn’t working and she’s been told it needs a new battery.

The father had passed away with cancer since the purchase, so the grandfather offered to help financially.

That would-be benefactor and the entire family were stunned to find it would cost $14,000, plus labor for a new battery. But no problem with the high cost, the batteries no longer are available because Ford stopped manufacturing the car.

Even when things are “working” J.D. Power reports electric vehicles average 39 percent more problems when the vehicles are new than what owners of conventional new vehicles suffer.

To sum up, the electric vehicles cost more initially, and have more problems, but you save a few bucks on gas!

Other problems with electric vehicles, in no particular order, are:

Here in the north, their advertised ranges decrease dramatically in cold weather. Our Florida girl’s battery pack likely would have failed years ago in colder climes.

Even rapid charging takes half an hour or more, much longer than the few minutes it takes to pump gasoline. Charging at home could take all night.

Our national electric grid, already creaking and threatening to fail during periods of high demand, cannot possibly handle the increased load if everyone drove electric cars and recharged them at night.

Electric vehicles might be a viable option if you never want to venture far from home. But if you do, good luck finding charging stations when you need them. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the horror story of a staff writer encountering major recharge problems with an electric car on a trip from New Orleans to Chicago and back. The writer also shared anecdotal negative feedback from other electric car travelers during lengthy waits for their vehicles to be filled up with voltage.

You’d think environmentalist wacko types would be concerned about the carnage inflicted on the Earth from mining for the minerals needed for batteries, the damage when all those used up batteries are dumped into landfills, or the pollution from the burning of the fossil fuels that more than likely will power the recharging of that electric vehicle.

But still GM and Ford, among others, rush headlong to convert their production to electric vehicles, chasing the fool’s gold of government monetary incentives and political approval.

If people really want to save the environment, try walking, riding a bicycle or a motorcycle.

Consider switching to compact cars instead of 7-passenger SUVs or pickup trucks the size of semis, both often driven by lone 100-pound women, wearing COVID-protection masks in the isolation of their massive vehicles.

This sort of person never will buy a Bolt, but might spend $70,000 on the truck. Just think of all the gas savings!

The news that Joe Biden has COVID-19 came out today, which in a realistic country would signal the end to the great COVID hysteria.

Here’s why.

Presumably Biden will come through this OK, despite his age of 79. But the fact that Biden, fully vaccinated and twice boosted, came down with the disease flies in the face of Biden’s own words from a July 2021 town hall on CNN in which Biden declared flatly that those getting the vaccine would not get the disease.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

This is not like Biden saying incorrectly yesterday that he has cancer, prompting verbal cleanup on aisle two from his usual apologists.

Biden’s CNN vaccine misinformation was “The Big Guy” telling the populace to take the jab and live worry free when it came to COVID-19. Whether he was flat-out lying, or just exaggerating, it speaks to the Biden credibility problem.

On this front, Biden has company, with Faustian Dr. Fauci having himself come down with COVID despite taking the needles and lecturing others to do the same.

It has become obvious with high-profile cases such as Biden and Fauci that the vaccines do not do as promised in preventing the infection. Now those boastful promises have been watered down to the virtually unprovable assertion that they lessen symptoms.

Similarly, many studies have found that masks do not have a measurable beneficial impact when it comes to COVID transmission. Those masks do, however, have detrimental side effects both physical and emotional.

But, as you have read here in the past, COVID hysteria is all about control.

Your elite masters, already seeing that the public is departing from sheep-like subservience on matters such as vaccines, masks and lockdowns, are moving to climate alarmism in their scaremongering campaigns.

Yet another of those hidden camera exposes, which so often seem to rely on useful idiots from CNN, found a technical director pontificating how climate scare is next on their agenda to terrify the slow-witted among the populace.

A leader of substance, which Biden is not, would take advantage of this coming-down-with-COVID opportunity to rethink our anti-COVID measures. He would call for an end to mandatory vaccines for workers under the threat of job loss.

Give individuals a choice whether or not to take the ineffective vaccines and suffer the risks.

Such a leader would warn against the mindless mask mandates already being re-instituted in California.

He would stop immediately the push to vaccinate children against COVID, which poses virtually no risk to them.

But vaccines do have risks to those who take them. If not, why are the manufacturers still operating under blanket immunity from lawsuits due to adverse reactions?

Evidence, both anecdotal and that gotten through rigorous study, is indicating heart and reproductive risks, among others, from the vaccines.

I have a friend who recently suffered a stroke for which doctors can find no reason. He’s starting to wonder if it’s a side effect from him having been jabbed with the COVID “preventer.”

Whether he is such a vaccine victim or not cannot be determined fully.

What can be determined, and is further documented with each passing day, is that COVID vaccines overpromised and underdelivered. It is high time that reality is conceded.

Biden can lead that movement, from personal experience.

I’m a huge fan of Ayn Rand, in particular her greatest work “Atlas Shrugged.”

But I’d never read her first major success, “The Fountainhead.” Still haven’t.

Instead, I cheated Saturday evening and watched the 1949 movie version of “The Fountainhead,” starring Gary Cooper as the iconoclastic architect protagonist Howard Roark.

It was time well-spent, particularly since the movie aired on the Turner Classic channel and was uninterrupted by commercials.

This was typical Rand fodder, a tale of the individualist succeeding against the collectivist society.

Roark’s court experience in the movie, and successful outlasting of a system arrayed against him on every level, was a precursor to the John Galt character of “Atlas Shrugged.”

Rand’s heroes were men who did not compromise their standards for the sake of expediency. They clung to beliefs even as those about them turned a blind eye to the ridiculous injustices of the societies in which these men lived – not indefinitely in the case of Galt.

Rand was an optimist, or perhaps more likely a wishful thinker, in writing and seemingly believing that rights of the individual would and should prevail in the long run over bastardized visions of socialists.

It is likely in 2022 that we could solve our energy crisis if only positive and negative poles could be attached to Rand’s coffin in order to generate electricity as she spins in her grave.

Each day evidence pours in that the collectivists, those who would sacrifice the rights of individuals on the altar of big governments and corporate control, are winning.

Consider:

Dutch farmers protesting arbitrary limits on nitrogen and animal herds by environmental extremists in the European bureaucracy have gotten company in the form of farmers in Italy, Spain and Poland taking to the streets. The message of Italian farmers is “We are not slaves, we are farmers!” But bet on those greenie bureaucrats in the long run, despite their obvious insanity.

Clueless Joe Biden went to Saudi Arabia, neatly forgetting his vow to make that kingdom a pariah state. Joe was there to exchange first bumps and plea for greater oil production, hoping desperately to lower energy costs and stem a mid-term election wipeout for his fellow leftists. The Saudis will pump more oil. Can you say strange bedfellows?

Nancy Pelosi has another conflict of interest. Even as the Speaker of the House pushes legislation, $50 billion for computer chip manufacturers, she just happened to purchase $8 million of Nvidia stock. What does Nvidia manufacture? Computer chips. Hmmmmm.

Other examples are numerous.

Oil sales from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese firm with former ties to Hunter Biden have been reported.

Despite ongoing insistence that all COVID-19 vaccines are safe, an online source maintained by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control has more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine complications and 29,000 deaths.

Governmental scaremongers are desperately trying to drum up panic over new COVID strains, not to mention Monkeypox. Lockdowns, here we come.

It all has the stench of collectivists trying to break down individual freedoms and choice while manipulating public opinion.

Roark and Galt would have resisted. Will enough Americans follow their lead to make a difference? Doubtful.

I got back from an early evening cruise in the Mustang convertible to read that AOC, the left’s favorite bartender turned Congresswoman, is outraged yet again and has rushed to social media – megaphone for morons — to express that.

AOC, you may recall, is the person who claimed trauma and fear for her life due to enduring the Jan. 6 protests, even though she was not present in the Capitol building at the time.

More recently, earlier this very month, AOC showed up on social media to revel in pro-abortion protesters driving Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh from a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

Like many of her fellow leftist loonies, AOC thinks conservatives, or anyone who doesn’t toe the socialist party line, must be harassed in public or at their homes by protesters, just because. Acts of violence by these “protesters” hasn’t exactly been discouraged by the leftist agitators.

Fast-forward to yesterday, when AOC trotted out the victim trope in social media posts about a “deeply disgusting incident.”

What was this incident? Glad you asked. A conservative comedian videotaped AOC walking up Capitol steps, praised her for being his favorite “big booty Latina,” and noted that even though she wants to kill babies, she is beautiful.

AOC’s response was to walk toward the guy, who was standing on the other side of the broad steps. In video of the “deeply disgusting incident” AOC takes a few strides toward the guy, flashes him the peace sign and says something unintelligible – the last being pretty much standard operating procedure for her.

After the fact, AOC shared on social media that she was “walking over to deck him,” ostensibly because Capitol police didn’t do so, or maybe because they didn’t shoot this unarmed protester as they had Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021.

I think of AOC and I am reminded of a line by former Washington Capitals’ coach Jim Schoenfeld following a 1996 Stanley Cup playoff game with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

Penguins coach Eddie Johnston was complaining afterward about rough play, as Penguins coaches had a habit of doing, accusing Schoenfeld of sending goons onto the ice to instigate trouble near game’s end.

Schoenfeld pointed out that he had three of his star players on the ice, a fact that flew in the face of Johnston’s charge. Then Schoenfeld said: “I don’t know what color the moon is on Eddie’s planet.”

Schoenfeld and his moon line come to mind often as leftist Democrats spew hypocritical propaganda with little shame and absolutely no regard for the facts. Intellectual honesty is a foreign concept to them.

Indeed, what color is the moon on AOC’s planet?

The neighbor got into her SUV today looking to do some grocery shopping, but it wouldn’t start.

Her crime was having gone two weeks or so without driving said vehicle due to her back problems. This no-drive period is what the service guy who showed up to jump-start the vehicle blamed for the problem, ironically just after I’d gotten done telling the woman the very same thing.

I have read of late that all those electronic nannies on modern vehicles need power even when the car isn’t running to keep them happy. Let the car sit long enough without running it to recharge the battery, and all those parasitic current drains add up to not enough juice remaining in the battery to start the vehicle.

The example of the neighbor’s ride failing is but a metaphor for how the digital age, despite all its promise and helpfulness, also exacts a price.

Just today investing markets were roiled by a supposed early leak of the Consumer Price Index for June, which is scheduled to be released tomorrow (Wednesday). This alleged leak showed a 1.7 percent rise for June, which if you multiply by 12, gives us a projected annual rate of more than 20 percent.

Bonds, stocks, precious metals all sold off because of the presumption that such inflation news would lead to an even faster pace of hiking of interest rates by the Federal Reserve.

It turns out the release was bogus, not that tomorrow’s actual release cannot be as bad, or nearly so. What mattered was that in this digital age of instant information, fake news spreads with lightning speed.

It’s the realization of Winston Churchill’s hyperbolic line: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

When the falsehood genie is out the bottle, good luck stuffing it back into the receptacle.

The internet and social media in particular make it much easier for leftist criminal element protesters to organize their mischief. Not so for right-wing troublemakers, because they are banned from such outlets.

The internet and social media also make it much easier to track and potentially do harm – physical or financial – to the morons who so freely post personal information in the form of digital bragging.

Even poor Hunter Biden is a victim of the digital age, first leaving his incriminating laptop with a repair guy, and just in the past few days having his data that he’d uploaded to the “cloud” hacked.

Yes, the “cloud,” the harmless sounding name for digital ether, is neither white and fluffy, nor harmless.

Think the cryptocurrency types who have had their coins looted from digital banks or wallets wouldn’t like to return to a time when a criminal either had to meet up with you personally or break into your home or bank physically to steal your money – money that at least was not lost to you in the last example?

Our digital banking wonders also have made it easier for fraudsters to operate on individuals, banks or other businesses, extracting traditional money from accounts without personal interaction.

Rather than being cautious about privacy and security being sacrificed to the promise of digital comfort and convenience, individuals willingly are ceding more and more control of their lives to ones and zeroes.

While today’s CPI “leak” most likely was fake, just as disingenuous were attempts by the Biden regime to get ahead of tomorrow’s anticipated high actual number.

These regime mouthpieces (there wasn’t time to provide Clueless Joe with a detailed cheat sheet on what to say) were citing rising food and energy costs as the main culprits and speculating such price rises have peaked.

Two things: First, if the inflation numbers were rising based on people booking trips to Mars or buying $1 million homes, it would be fair to dismiss those increases as unimportant. But last time I checked, all people, rich or poor, eat food and consume energy, so if those prices are both up big, it really puts the hurt on those in the lower economic strata.

Second, even if the rate of increase has peaked, that only helps if you are comfortable paying current prices. A peak in rise is not the same as a decline in prices, either sharp or gradual.

Brace yourself for bad CPI news Wednesday, along with efforts on digital sources such as social media and the internet, to convince you that despite it all things are great.

Oh, and make sure to start and drive your car at least once a week.

It seems to me that the bumbling administration of Clueless Joe Biden and his Democratic cohorts would fit well in a Wizard of Oz remake.

In our revisiting of the classic tale, the role of Dorothy, who eventually awakens to the reality that it’s all been just a strange dream, will be played by departed White House PR flack DisinJENuous Psaki.

The Wicked Witch of the West is an easy selection, with that role going to stock market trading genius and part-time Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi’s family gets to double dip in Oz II. Judy Garland, who played Dorothy in the original movie, once in an interview characterized the little people who played Munchkins as “drunks” in real life. Considering the DUI arrest credentials of Pelosi’s husband, cut a foot out of each of his legs and we have our lead Munchkin for the remake.

The Good Witch of the North is House Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is willing to say what is on her mind no matter the blowback from social media typewriter jockeys.

Clueless Joe Biden will be the Scarecrow in a tour de force of typecasting. “If I only had a brain.”

There are lots of candidates for the Cowardly Lion, but give the nod to U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, who manages to screw up courage only when he’s part of a mockery masquerading as a Congressional committee.

Our Tin Man in search of a heart will be Senate bloviator Chuck Schumer.

Professor Marvel, the sketchy fortuneteller from the movie, can be Fed chair Jerome Powell, who famously insisted that inflation was “transitory” and now finds himself having to jerk up interest rates and kill the economy and investment markets in an attempt to rein in that inflation that was supposed to be short-lived.

The Yellow Brick Road is any path, literal or figurative, that Hunter Biden travels to take advantage of his dad’s political influence.

The Emerald City is of course Washington, D.C., where green in the form of money is handed out quite cynically to buy votes and fund fringe causes that can’t exist on their own merits.

The winged monkeys conjured up the Wicked Witch of the West to harass Dorothy and her companions are any of the propagandists masquerading as journalists who do their best to prop up Democrats and pillory Republicans.

In the original film, the Wizard of Oz was a pathetically small man behind the curtain who pulled levers and used a sound system to come off as larger than life. In our remake, that character will be the man or woman who operates Biden’s teleprompter, without which — or even with which — Biden can’t make a coherent speech.

Roll film!

You say you are fed up with the irrationality of present-day life?

Would you like to return to a time when production was rewarded and special-interest groups were not lionized and subsidized simply for being out of step with traditional thinking?

Are you weary of the muddying of basic truths such as right or wrong, good or evil?

Hope may be on the way, Bunky.

I credit my cousin for inspiring this blog post. During a phone call last night, he mentioned seeing a television show warning of artificial intelligence and its potential effect on us humans.

Artificial intelligence falls into four categories. We currently have Reactive AI, in which computers are programmed and respond the same way each time to identical input. Chess playing programs are an example.

Next up the AI ladder is Limited Memory AI, in which programming is supplemented by real-world input. Think of self-driving cars and their many foibles as an example of how imperfect this AI is to date in real-world situations.

Not yet on the table are the final two examples — Theory of Mind AI and Self-Aware AI.

With Theory of Mind, decision making by the digital mind means recognizing and including human-like emotions.

With the last, Self-Aware, needs, wants and emotions enter the picture and make the Self-Aware AI entity more humanlike, although operating at a much higher level of intellect.

Brilliant minds such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and various AI experts went on the record with an open letter in 2015 warning that AI, for all its potential benefits, must always be kept under the control of humans, lest humans become unnecessary and deemed to be candidates to be eliminated from the equation.

The standard thinking by the non-enlightened has been that we humans can always shut off the AI machinery, be it in stand-alone computers or deployed in machines such as robots or vehicles.

But wouldn’t you think that all-knowing AI would be ready for that and take measures to prevent us from pulling the metaphorical plug?

To date, this is the stuff of science fiction movies. But might we live to see the human race trying to co-exist with AI? I’m thinking that is so.

For all the worries about a potential dystopian future for humans, who would plod along in servitude to superior AI beings, my cousin came up with a potential bright spot.

Assuming that the AI entities are supremely logical, they likely would come down hard on unproductive, highly disruptive far-left types.

It’s hard to imagine AI logic agreeing that decreasing food or fuel output by government decrees is beneficial to humankind, as so many socialist Democrats seem to believe.

Similarly, I’m thinking an AI unit might deem leeches such as Hunter Biden and his non-productive ilk as expendable. Worker bees in government bureaucracies designed to hamstring business and industry, look out!

So, too, pompous college professors and public school teachers who believe their main task is to indoctrinate politically instead of teaching, would seem to have little to offer a logical world ruled by AI.

The AI approach to gender confusion, race-baiting and poverty pimping likely would be that we need none of these.

Politicians in general likely would not be thought of favorably by a truly self-aware AI entity.

If the rise of Artificial Intelligence holds out promise of returning logic to the world, I’m all for it.

If that AI experiment runs away and devolves into totalitarian control of the masses, well, aren’t we already headed down that path with human despots operating under the guise of government?

And at least an AI president presumably could ride a bike and wouldn’t need a cheat sheet to tell it how to enter a room, sit down in a chair and talk to the audience.

While Clueless Joe Biden laments 9mm handguns that he claims vaporize the lungs of those shot with the weapons, and campaigns to put the clamps on legal gun owners in general, Dutch farmers are upping the armament ante in their anti-government protests.

These farmer protesters are aggrieved by their government going environmentalist wacko and looking to limit nitrogen in fertilizers, thereby reducing the effectiveness of those fertilizers, and putting an estimated 30 percent of the farms in The Netherlands out of business.

The government also wants substantial reductions of farm animal herds because of their manure emitting nitrogen oxides – the stink in manure.

Farmers have been using tractors in their protests, blocking food distribution centers to bring attention to their plight.

In predictable fashion, in at least one instance police fired on a farmer in his tractor.

The Dutch farmers have a response. An online video showed a military tank (reportedly of World War II vintage) rumbling off a flatbed trailer and down a road, supposedly to block a distribution center and be impervious to trigger-happy police.

There must be a lot of Bidens running things in The Netherlands, the kind of people who think you can shut down producers without any effect on supply and prices.

Clueless Joe has tried that with energy, attempting to regulate fossil fuel producers into oblivion and then being stunned by rapidly rising energy costs.

Now the Clueless One blames Putin and implores the domestic energy companies to reduce their prices, which anyone with a passing acquaintance with Econ 101 knows would only create artificial demand and shortages.

The way to lower prices in the traditionally effective way economically would be to increase supply with further exploration and production. Then prices would fall.

But that would alienate all Clueless Joe’s socialist greenies, so he can’t/won’t do that.

I await Dutch bureaucrats first blaming Putin for food shortages or soaring prices — just because — and then urging farmers magically to produce more food with fewer farms and animals and less fertilizer.

Food prices will skyrocket in The Netherlands if the farmers are hamstrung legislatively, and the firms providing food to the population will be cast as the bad guys for charging more.

I happened to catch an old political clip today. As far back as 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was warning that it was time for the people to put the government back in the role of servant, not master.

All these years later, that has not been accomplished. To the contrary, our government, staffed with unelected, all-powerful bureaucrats, is running more roughshod over the people than in the days of King George.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have tried to rein in that, but it is too little, too late.

What’s going on in The Netherlands needs to come soon to a town near you for overreaching government here to get the message.

Just yesterday in this space we wondered if Biden voters were honest enough to feel buyers’ remorse, having elected a man seemingly destined to go down in history as among the worst and least-qualified ever to hold the office of the presidency.

That was written early in the day. By days’ end, anecdotal evidence had rolled in that Biden voters either see no problem and are ready, willing and able to double down on their support of the cognitively impaired one, or they in general see Republicans as inherently evil and Biden as merely an unfortunate victim of events that have made him look bad in office.

I find it telling, though, that the latter crew doesn’t want Biden back for a second term.

Example one: While at a picnic (NOT FOR A COUSIN’S BIRTHDAY, ALTHOUGH WE DID END UP SINGING TO HIM!) a typical liberal type was there, picking verbally at a conservative. I took advantage of the opening to pose my Biden voter buyers’ remorse question.

No, the man does not regret his choice. Instead, he is pleased with Biden’s performance. All is well. He’d vote for him again. And again and again and again as was the case with many “voters” in the past presidential election.

This Biden voter (apologist) was unswayed by raging inflation, investment markets plumbing historic lows for the first six months of a year (worst since 1970 in the case of stocks, worst since 1788 in the case of long-term government bonds), the botched Afghanistan exit and all the other failures already in the Biden regime’s run.

Showing his intellectual depth, this guy said Biden, for all those problems, still was better than Trump. Trump would be the president who presided over strong investment markets, modest inflation, energy independence for the United States, and zero adventurism by Russians or Chinese.

Yeah, Biden’s much better than Trump.

But this man suffering from partisan blindness regarding Biden is far from alone among the masses.

Example two: The local Democratic propaganda organ “newspaper” ran not one, but two letters to the Readers’ Forum on the day of my previous blog post.

The first claimed to be an independent voter, which is code for a liberal who loves to flaunt independent status, but votes straight Democratic in every election.

Ask the next independent you encounter, or Democrat for that matter, to name the last Republican candidate for whom they voted. You will hear crickets.

Meanwhile, a Neanderthal Republican like me can tick off voting for a Democrat for county commissioner most recently, and through the years voting for a Democrat for governor and U.S. House, among others.

I also have withheld votes for disappointing Republicans such as Arlen Specter and Pat Toomey, who walked and squawked more like Democrats.

I did not vote for carpetbagger Republican senatorial candidate Dr. Oz in the past primary, and will not vote for him in the general election.

But our “Independent” letter writer spewed anti-Trump sentiment and also had a lengthy list of politicians with whom he disagreed. Curiously, all are Republicans.

This man also is for gun control, although he made sure to mention he owns “a few guns” and is a former military man.

Allow me to remind that formerly being in the military does not equate to automatic sainthood. Some notable examples: Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was an ex-Marine. Adolf Hitler served in the Bavarian Army. William Calley of My Lai massacre infamy also was a military man.

This writer admitted to being “not really thrilled” with Biden and feared Republicans could win the presidency in 2024, which he seemed to equate with the nation losing its democracy.

Such an independent and confused thinker!

Another writer, a familiar name who bores the masses with his political missives as frequently as the paper’s reader-submission limits allow, presented a laundry list of Biden shortcomings, but attributed them to failures of others or simply to bad luck.

Biden is painted as a latter-day Job of Biblical note and for all the failures on his watch, Biden is portrayed as a good guy because ostensibly he still goes to church regularly. Does Biden’s staff give him a crib sheet, a la his press conferences, telling him to enter the church, sit down in a pew, look at the pulpit?

But even this Biden supporter wished out loud that Biden not run for re-election in 2024 and instead yield to a younger more vibrant candidate, which would mean almost anyone still on the right side of the grass.

To sum up the last letter: Biden’s doing a great job, but I sure hope he doesn’t run again.

Maybe the reality is sinking in for some.