Democrats have gone into full Helen Reddy mode.

Allow me to explain.

Reddy was a modestly talented singer in the 1970s. Australian-born, a U.S. citizen by choice, Reddy was a raging Democrat with all the inconsistent messaging that political affiliation entails.

She won a Grammy in 1973 for “I Am Woman,” often cited as the women’s liberation anthem of the time. “I am woman, hear me roar” etc., etc., etc.

Reddy, got another Grammy nomination in 1976 for “Ain’t No Way To Treat A Lady” with moaning lyrics like “No way to treat your baby, your woman, your friend.”

Notably, this one didn’t win. Perhaps the left-wing voters that make up such award organizations were confused how the all-powerful roaring woman went to simpering about being mistreated, and ostensibly owned by someone (a man?) considering all the “your” modifiers.

Present-day Democrats are similarly flexible with their core principles.

Nancy Pelosi, 82-year-old Speaker of the House, who still won’t comment on her husband’s DUI arrest, recently blamed current inflation on COVID-19 and the war in IRAQ!

Holy Joe Biden. Pelosi staff, AKA cleanup crew, massaged the transcript to war in UKRAINE because that’s obviously what she meant. Or maybe she meant all the costs incurred in the winter campout at Valley Forge during the American Revolution, back when she was a young debutante, is the seed of our current inflation.

On the subject of Ukraine and war with Russia, Papa Joe Biden, who is similarly detail-challenged, confusing Iran and Iraq and Iran and Ukraine in recent months, apparently was sentient enough to hear his people being overly optimistic about that Ukraine conflict.

Specifically, according to a report on NBC, which usually can be counted on to prop up Biden, the Big Guy told his gang the talk of winning would create unrealistic expectations.

Translation: Not that long ago Joe was talking victory, but now Ukraine is obviously getting its butt kicked – not unexpected by the way – and no amount of propaganda can change that.

Lest you think Biden is back on track mentally, he quickly stepped back into his confusion cabinet and emerged with a plan to send citizens rebate cards to offset rising gasoline prices and, hopefully, bribe them into voting Democrat in mid-term elections this fall.

The main problem – not even touching on the fact that government money giveaways to citizens helped fuel our current inflation – is that a shortage of computer chips means the cards can’t be produced in sufficient numbers, even if Congress went along with the hare-brained plan to cure inflation with more inflation.

Barack “Hope and Change” Obama is coming off as quite the hypocrite. This climate change alarmist and green energy carnival barker, apparently thinks the evils of fossil fuels only apply when you peons want to benefit from them.

Obama is in the process of trying to have three propane gas tanks installed, with a capacity of, wait for it, 2,500 gallons, at his $12 million Martha’s Vineyard property.

Apparently the Big O wants to make sure he’s equipped to deal with energy breakdowns, not that we have to fear them or anything like that with The Big Guy in charge.

Finally, Democrats in general are trying desperately to divert the public’s attention from our current inflation and economic problems. They are beating to death the Jan. 6 protest, notable largely for an unarmed woman being killed by a terrified House police officer, who shot her through a window beside a barricaded door.

You will hear “insurrection” used by Democrats –except those fomenting insurrection usually bring firearms to the party. The Jan. 6 protesters did not, at least not as far as anyone has been able to document.

Also, you may have noted that lapdog mainstream media have been slavishly running the Democratic committee Jan. 6 hearings (political lynching attempt), while also relying heavily on programming dealing with Watergate, a Republican political embarrassment that occurred not one, not two, not three, not four, but five decades back.

Meanwhile, these same Democrats and their mouthpieces can’t seem to work up the energy to cover the much more recent attempted coup attempt on Donald Trump by the FBI and various intelligence assets, the role in that by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and a subsequent election that slipped Joe Biden into office based on low probability outcomes and apparent outright fraud in various Democratic precincts.

If someone would dig up the corpse of Helen Reddy, it would have an ear-to-ear grin. She’s dead, but her Democratic philosophy of expedience isn’t.

A short time ago, in a land not that far away, there was senile fellow who ran for president promising to be accountable for his decisions.

Apparently he has forgotten that pledge, along with his other periodic cognitive lapses as to what office he was running for, the names of people he’s speaking to, what states his political opponents represent, or such difficult things as what the day or date it is.

This man, at the behest of his Green Energy masters, has done all he can to single-handedly hamstring domestic energy production, which had this nation energy independent on the watch of his hated predecessor in the Oval Office.

Can’t have that, you know. Might make Greta T. scream.

Pipelines? Not on my watch. Drilling on federal land? Nope. Exploration on those lands? Only if you can get past years of ridiculous bureaucratic delays.

The result is now gasoline prices are at all-time highs, with natural gas and electric prices rocketing higher and Mr. I Will Take The Blame is blaming oil companies, Vladimir Putin and even you morons among the general populace who still drive cars with internal combustion engines.

The Take Blame Guy is making a trip to Saudi Arabia, the nation he was going to turn into a pariah state, to beg the robed ones to pump more oil in an attempt to bail out his failing regime.

Big oil companies responded to Take Blame Guy that if he just reversed some of his wrongheaded political moves, we could bail out ourselves.

But the blameless one replied that if only Putin hadn’t invaded Ukraine, or that dummy Zelenskyy had taken our warnings seriously, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

No matter that oil prices and inflation were on the rise long before the first Russian tank breached the Ukrainian border.

Let Mr. Take Blame Guy do all the political whining he wants, demanding oil companies refine at a quicker rate. They can’t do it, even if their lives depended on it.

The last major oil refinery built in the United States came online in 1977. That’s a tribute to Take Blame Guy’s Greenies through the years, making it virtually impossible to get approvals to build.

Take Blame Guy now has his political bedfellows pushing electric cars. One such genius noted rising gasoline prices were no problem since this clueless one drove a battery powered Tesla.

Of course electric car batteries must be recharged often. The electric doesn’t just magically appear at the end of the plug, but must be generated and distributed. That requires fuel of some sort, often fossil fuel.

Perhaps you’ve read of electrical grid problems due to heat in Illinois, Texas, California, and other outposts. Now imagine if we all were driving electric cars which could not be recharged due to a failing grid.

You wonder who Take Blame Guy would finger for that problem. Let’s hope he’s not in office long enough to spew some half-baked blame-shifting on that topic.

Today the Federal Reserve made it official by tacking 75 basis points (three-quarters of a percentage point) onto interest rates with the desire of slowing the economy and, by proxy, inflation.

It was expected. What was unexpected was the comical analysis by the CNBC Fed watcher. He’s one of the reason cynics call the financial network CNBS.

This shill, who probably needs the makeup crew to wipe the shoe polish off his mouth – picked up by licking the boots of Fed chairman Jerome Powell and his predecessors – was called out by more than one of the panelists on the Fast Money show at 5 p.m.

All of these are people who actually run money in the real world and so get their work judged not subjectively, but objectively – by results. One offered that stock markets might prefer big interest rate increases and a sharp, swift recession, in order to get past the inevitable and be able to look ahead to recovery.

Many other investment professionals also see it that way and think the Fed’s laborious raising of rates hoping to produce the so-called “soft landing” for the economy only drags out the problems.

Think of the quick, deep recession as the investing equivalent of yanking off a bandage quickly instead of puttering around with many small tugs.

One technical definition of a recession is two consecutive quarters of decline in the nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product). We already have had a decline in the past quarter and reports show the current quarter on a knife’s edge between small growth or small decline.

Yet the CNBC hack said he’s one of the tiny number of observers still thinking the Fed can manage that soft landing; beating down inflation without the economy suffering a recession.

This shows, if nothing else, he has the weakest grasp of probabilities.

But his incredulous response to the matter of preferring a quick bout of recession vs. a grinding example, was stunning even as the panelists lined up to argue with him.

The facial expressions and bobbing of his bald head made it clear the Fed expert could not, or would not, accept real-world input.

This is a microcosm of our country. People like Powell, and this sycophant, make their livings talking the theoretical and never being held to account for the accuracy of their pronouncements, sort of like your local purveyor of TV weather forecasts.

A basic method of inflation fighting is to affect the real interest rate. If one can borrow money at 3 percent, and the inflation rate is 9 percent, that’s a negative-six percent real interest rate.

Translation: You are charged 3 percent interest on the borrowed money, but pay it back with money that is 9 percent less valuable, netting the borrower a risk-free 6 percent return.

Obviously, this encourages borrowing.

But when interest rates are higher than inflation, borrowing dries up due to the built-in loss.

Paul Volcker, the Fed chairman the last time the U.S. saw inflation at or above the current 8.6 percent, had to overshoot with interest rates just to get the attention of the markets and the populace.

While inflation then peaked at about 15 percent, the prime interest rate exceeded 21 percent. Contrast that to the current situation of an 8.6 inflation rate (which would be higher using 1980 measurements, by the way) and the prime rate newly raised to 4.75 percent.

If Powell truly thinks he can crimp inflation, he’s going to have to pull off multiple 75-basis point raises, or even higher examples.

To think that the Fed has the political stomach for this in view of the economic turmoil it would cause is a stretch. Even more of a stretch is thinking the Fed can continue to raise interest rates and the economy somehow will avoid a recession.

Yet that is the take of the Fed expert on CNBS.

While it is true that when someone writes of macroeconomics most people stop reading, I’m thinking this might be a good time to change that.

I’m going to write. You decide whether or not to read.

Many wonder why they should care about the economy and investing markets.

Well . . . if you have a job that might be jeopardized by a weak economy, you should care.

If you are collecting Social Security and/or a pension, or plan to do so, you should care.

If you have an IRA or 401k retirement account, you should care.

If you own whole life insurance with cash value, you should care.

If you like to be able to travel the country without an armed escort, you should care.

There are many other reasons, but that’s enough for now.

People whose job it is to notice such things are seeing warning signs everywhere that the world’s economic system, including our own United States example, is showing signs of distress that could lead to collapse.

Never happen, you say? It almost did in 2008. And the bloated money supply, overall debt both public and private, and leverage in investments is much greater now than it was in 2008.

The Dow Jones Industrial index was down 1,000 or so points at its worst today and closed off 876 and change. The tech-heavy NASDAQ lost even more on a percentage basis.

But what really has investment pros worried is the wild gyrations in the bond markets. Customarily these markets move at a glacier-like pace. There is plenty of time to identify a trend and either get on board or get out of the way.

Understand that the monetary value of global debt markets dwarfs the stock market capitalizations. Bonds are supposed to be the safe money, the bedrock of stability in tough times.

But that changes when inflation is clipping along at 8.6 percent for May on a year-over-year basis, and our panicky Federal Reserve floats a trial balloon in the Wall Street Journal that, where last meeting 75-basis-point interest rate increases were taken off the table by Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, now they are back on the table.

This spelled chaos in the bond market Monday, with the unlikely result that 2-year, 5-year, 10-year and 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds all closed with yields in the low 3-percent range. Even worse, the 2-year yield was slightly higher than that of the 10-year or 30-year.

Such instances of inversion of the interest rate curve, where traditionally long rates are higher than shorter term rates to account for inflation risk, virtually always mean an economic recession looms or already is upon us.

This comes as 30-year fixed mortgage rates climbed over 6 percent, where in January of this year they were just over 3 percent.

This sort of thing craters the housing market, never a good thing.

But the Federal Reserve Board, a group of unelected people who run the nation’s money supply – check the bills in your wallet, they’re Federal Reserve notes – has amassed a $9 trillion balance sheet in buying bonds and mortgage backed securities in recent years to boost the economy and keep interest rates low.

By way of comparison, the 2022 U.S. federal budget is about $6 trillion.

Should those purchased bonds or mortgage backed securities ever need to be marked to market at greatly reduced values, as would be possible in the case of a surge in interest rates, the Fed would be bust.

What happens then is a question no one can answer.

This nation faced even higher inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker helped rein it in, but only by increasing the Fed Funds rate (the interest rates at which banks can borrow from the Fed) to 20 percent in June 1981.

This cooled borrowing demand, put the economy into recession and cured the problem – with plenty of economic pain.

But even if our Fed goes 75 basis points at its Wednesday meeting announcement that would put the Federal Funds rate at just 1.75 percent.

Powell would need a total of 10 raises of 75 basis points just to get that Fed interest rate on level with the current admitted inflation rate (many believe the government is understating that inflation number).

Before that happens, the U.S. economy and by extension that of the world, will be in shambles.

As strange as it might sound, you could find yourself in the not-too-distant future longing for the good, old days of $5-a-gallon gasoline.

If you’re counting on the Fed’s Jerome Powell, or Clueless Joe Biden and his regime to get us through this crisis, you’re whistling past the graveyard.

My wife has become a player in the neighborhood pastime of Parking Grab. Even better, she’s merged the game with elements of Survivor as far as building alliances.

By way of background, I live on a residential street notable for the primal need of some residents to take up multiple on-street parking spots, whether they require them or not.

No matter that they have garages that have gone years without hosting a car. No matter that they have driveways and/or pulloff areas that get light use.

They measure their self-esteem by dominating on-street parking, particularly in front of their house or the houses of others close by. A few weeks back my wife returned from shopping and, lacking a spot to park in front of our house, parked in front of a neighbor’s house.

This brought a swift verbal rebuke from the neighbor’s wife. My wife now has joined my son in getting grief from these people for the unforgivable sin of parking on a public street. So far they haven’t had the temerity to yell at me, which probably is a good thing.

I called the local gendarmes on the matter and the officer assured me we had as much right to park on this public street as any other drivers do, as long as we were not blocking a driveway or other such things. We were not.

These neighbors are not the only offenders. We have others on our block who have joined the party.

There also seems to be a particularly ardent contest underway on the next block, with one proponent upping the ante by getting a handicapped parking sign installed. The handicapped parking tag seems to be passed around from vehicle to vehicle and, as an added bonus, the users are playing the Parking Grab variation of controlling extra spots with careful positioning of each vehicle.

To do this, the “handicapped” vehicle uses the handicapped parking sign as a bisecting point and parks with the front of the vehicle ahead of the sign and close enough to the next driveway up the street that only something like a 106-inch total length Smart Car — less than the wheelbase of my Kia Sorento — might park between the vehicle and the driveway.

Their aggrieved neighbors from across the street – we’ve heard past calls on the police scanner – retaliated with a handicapped parking tag of their own in the family vehicle and camped on the spot for a time, positioning the SUV to grab the extra half-space up front.

But she must have had to go somewhere, so now one of the many “handicapped” vehicles of that area has replaced her, leaving the half space open in front and having a confederate parked half a space or so distant in the rear. This way they control 2 1/2 to 3 spots.

How ingenious of them.

There is a similar tactic being employed in front of my house by several neighbors and their visitors or paramours, parking between a driveway and another parked car with about half a car length in front and in back.

As my wife prepared to leave today for grocery shopping, I told her to expect to have the parking spots taken by the time she got back.

But I found out later that the wife had a plan. She enlisted a neighbor to put a vehicle in the taking-multiple-spots position to await the return of my wife.

Meanwhile, I took one of my Mustangs out for a cruise – blissfully it is parked in a nearby rented garage and parking grabbers haven’t been brazen enough to force the lock and park in the garage when I’m out.

When I got back, I was bemused to see the SUV taking up multiple spaces, but didn’t realize it all had been preplanned.

I mowed our grass and shortly thereafter my wife pulled up and the neighbor placeholder moved the car to make room for my wife to park – with her notably leaving a space for someone else, too. This happened just as a visitor to a neighbor swooped in hoping to grab the whole multi-car spot – needing it due to lacking the ability to parallel park.

We unloaded the car and I laughed out loud when my wife filled me in on her pre-planning. I congratulated her for joining the fray and adding to it with alliance building.

I eagerly await any response from the neighbors, who just hate it when others play their silly game better than they do.

You may have noticed of late that headlines scream about someone throwing someone else under the bus.

It’s a colorful metaphor which means avoiding blame by identifying someone else as the culprit and distancing oneself from said person, a common albeit reprehensible act that has come to be labeled as throwing someone under the bus.

People who trace the history of such things see a link to a 1960s philosophical thought experiment in which people debate throwing an innocent fat man from a trolley and under the wheels to stop its runaway travel and save remaining lives.

Today’s throwing people under the bus is more a political exercise as the weak, often cognitively dysfunctional leadership looks to avoid responsibility for unpleasant developments.

In a curious turn of late, sometimes the person thrown under said bus emerges with enough strength to return the favor.

Consider the ongoing inflation we are experiencing, 8.6 percent in May which is the highest since 1981. The monthly numbers were announced Friday. The whispers among the investing community had been to expect a lower number.

Peak inflation was their working hypothesis, although that’s not necessarily a good thing. Say inflation had checked in at 7 percent, that would have been much lower than the previous month, which could have been identified as a “peak.”

But should you be comfortable with 7-percent inflation, which cuts in half your purchasing power every 10 years?

You are not supposed to consider such things of course. You would have been told inflation had peaked and you should have been all warm and fuzzy, just the like the morons were when Obama prattled on about hope and change.

I can hope bad things happen to you and if they do, say you go from being healthy to sick, then both hope and change have come to pass, but neither is very desirable from your perspective.

But back to our metaphorical bus. The creatures of the Biden regime got the word days early on the inflation report and began leaking to expect bad news.

This was happening even as in the previous week Biden and his Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took turns throwing each other under the bus.

Yellen, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose low interest rates and buying of government debt also contributed to inflation, finally got around to admitting publicly that she got it wrong in predicting no inflation threat from such programs, as well as those $2,000-a-head stimulus bribes (payments).

But in excerpts from an advance copy of a Yellen book due out this fall, Yellen threw Clueless Joe under the Greyhound by saying she’d argued to have his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan cut by a third.

Meanwhile, Biden emerged from a meeting with current Fed Chair Jerome Powell and squarely put the blame for inflation on the Fed, which was running down the inflation tracks under Yellen, too,

This is a slight wrinkle for Clueless Biden, who most often blames Russia’s Putin for inflation and anything else going bad in these United States.

That whole Putin premise is ridiculous. Even economic neophytes knew that the Federal Reserve, with decades of keeping interest rates historically low, while at the same time allowing record growth in the money supply, were setting the stage for big price inflation.

All it needed was a spark to set afire all that tinder. That spark was the over-reaction to COVID-19, which simultaneously hampered supply lines, crimped manufacturing, then artificially goosed demand with the stimulus handouts.

Biden is giving Putin a break from duty under the bus. He even took a swipe at the formerly deified Ukrainian leader Zelenskyy, criticizing the golden boy for failing to heed warnings of a Russian invasion.

“There was no doubt,” said the clueless one at a fund-raising event. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”

Don’t worry about Zelenskyy, those tire marks acquired under the bus will rub off quickly.

If only we could anticipate such a quick end to inflation, no matter whom one wants to throw under the bus in blame for it.

Scary, amusing, disgusting, these are but a few adjectives to describe the headlines this morning as the economic and moral decline of this nation and the world continues.

On the economic front, retail chain Target (pronounced Tar-Jay by those who think making it sound French is amusing) cut its profit outlook for the second time in three weeks and the company’s stock price is down 7 percent or so to greet the news.

WalMart had similarly disappointing performance in its most recent profit commentary and its stock price did the swan dive, too.

The Biden Regime, as is the wont of political propaganda operations, loves to point to jobs created as indicative of economic strength, neatly failing to factor that the “gains” are only the economy trying to get back to where it was before draconian COVID lockdowns shut down the economy and turned workers into homebodies eager to sit in front of the television and collect stimulus payments without the need to work and produce.

Those freebies managed to light a fire under inflation by creating a supply-demand mismatch, so all that handout buying power is being sucked out of the hands of consumers by rising prices.

Demand for products is down and mammoth retailers like Target and WalMart are only confirming that with their disappointing guidance, never mind the job giddiness.

Also from the Biden smoke and mirrors department comes the announcement that the regime will invoke the Defense Production Act in an attempt to accelerate domestic production of things such as solar energy technology

This is in response to the skyrocketing fuel prices that Biden created with his restrictive fossil fuel policies, but he is trying to blame on Putin. While out driving the other day I saw regular gasoline priced on the far side of $5 a gallon and premium topping $6 at one station.

The world is not prepared to continue to function without fossil fuels – imagine a car or airplane relying on solar panels and what happens when it’s cloudy. Similarly, much-touted windmills rely on Mother Nature to provide never-ending breezes, which simply doesn’t happen.

Electric cars still need to have powerplants to feed their need for recharging and, again, those massive plants can’t provide consistent supply while running on solar or wind.

File this latest Biden Regime initiative under the don’t-just-stand-there-do-something category, similar to hyping releasing a few days of consumption from the strategic petroleum reserve.

I wonder how the Biden Regime will blame Putin for food shortages likely to result from plans of California legislators to “buy” water rights due to an ongoing drought and deny that water to farmers so that city dwellers can water their lawns and wash their cars with impunity?

Energy, while a problem here, is worse in Europe, where climate alarmists in the bureaucracy have rammed through all manner of restrictive legislation..

That includes the city of Krakow, Poland, which in 2019 put on a ban against burning wood or coal. Now, with energy prices through the roof, reality intrudes and the government is encouraging Poles to forage the forests for downed trees and limbs that they might burn them for fuel.

Of course the bureaucrats can’t let go totally. Each would-be wood scavenger first must undergo training (this is an ax, you swing it thusly to chop up the tree, then you load the logs being careful to keep your back straight . . . ) and official permission.

Oh, and eight shiploads of coal – 700,000 tons give or wake – are on their way to Poland to alleviate energy shortfalls.

Screaming Greta must be locked in a soundproof room in Sweden. How else to explain her silence on all this?

But even amidst declining economies, skyrocketing prices, and fuel and food shortages, the politically correct police continue to wallow in their sense of self-importance.

A Norwegian feminist is being investigated, and could face up to three years in prison.

Her crimes? Saying on social media and television interviews that biological men cannot be either lesbians or mothers.

Gun-control zealots are taking a shotgun approach – pun intended – toward reaching their goal of disarming the citizenry.

Their plan is to use every high-profile incident as a pretense to fire random, multi-pellet rounds and hope that something registers.

If the shooter is white, as in Buffalo, it’s clearly racism running rampant among white males.

If the shooter is Hispanic, with hints of various fetishes, as in the Texas school shooting, it’s about saving the children.

If the shooter is black, as in Tulsa, and his primary target is a black doctor, the cry is the all-purpose taking guns out of the hands of the masses.

If the shooter is black and elderly, and manages to get off 23 shots while wounding just 10 (13 more were injured by inhaling smoke bombs or getting caught up in the panic rush to exit) as in New York’s subway shooting, the incident is pretty much shoved aside due to lack of agenda usefulness.

By way of comparison, you probably heard relatively little about the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, in which nine people were killed and more than 50 were shot, according to a report from a Chicago NBC affiliate TV station. This was in a number of separate incidents, but still you’d think it wouldn’t be accepted as the unfortunate business as usual that it is.

One song being sung by the anti-gun choir of late is to raise age limits to purchase a gun, noting that 18-year-olds aren’t mature enough to handle the responsibility.

OK, then 18-year-olds certainly aren’t old enough to join the armed forces and handle various weaponry. It follows that age 18 certainly is not old enough to be drafted into the armed forces against one’s will should this again become necessary.

While we’re at it, let’s repeal the 26^th Amendment, which gave 18-year-olds the right to vote. Obviously they are not mentally equipped on the maturity front to make such vital decisions.

How about making 21 the mandatory driving age? And why allow 18-year-olds to enter into legally binding contracts?

Why allow “children” much younger than 18 to get abortions, sexual-gender reassignment counseling, or drug counseling without parents being informed?

On the topic of driving, online figures indicate 2,738 deaths of those between the ages of 13 and 19 in motor vehicle crashes in 2020. Obviously all those weren’t driving, but I think many if not most were.

Indisputable is the fact that younger drivers are more dangerous to themselves and to others. This same online article noted that the fatal crash rate per mile driven for those ages 16 to 19 is three times the rate for drivers 20 and over.

When’s the last time you heard outrage over teen driving deaths, or calls to raise the age limit to drive or buy cars?

Blaming guns is the simplistic solution, one easily made without giving the matter deep consideration and instead opting to go for cheap politicization. It’s the triumph of emotionalism over rational thought.

The collapse of parenting in this country (as in the case of the Tulsa shooter), the failure of our legal system to identify and incarcerate criminals (as in the case of numerous mass shootings) and the ineptitude of our mental health system, which tends to look the other way when tough decisions need to be made, all share responsibility.

How many times must we read of deranged mass shooters pontificating on social media about their plans before the fact? How many times must we read of them being reported to various authorities, with no action taken?

To repeat from an earlier post here, if you make it difficult or impossible for average law-abiding citizens to own guns, you guarantee that they will be unarmed if and when a criminal not following those laws uses a gun to attack or rob them.

Clueless Joe Biden is scheduled go on the air later tonight to bumble his way through an address on gun violence.

While you listen, remember this is the brain donor who once said a double-barrelled shotgun is all a homeowner needs for defense. The Clueless one said that antiquated weapon provided the opportunity for a warning shot and one defensive shot.

Good luck with that plan, Clueless Joe. Do your Secret Service agents carry double-barrelled shotguns? Just asking.

More recently, Joe went on a half-baked tirade against 9-millimeter guns claiming they are “high-caliber” and 9mm bullets “blow the lung out of the body.”

Those who know about guns, frequently question the stopping power of a 9mm. You want to talk “high-caliber” talk .45 acp, a gun designed for the military, with upgraded stopping power from the previously standard .38-caliber sidearm.

Then there are guns such as .44 magnums, made famous by the Clint Eastwood “Dirty Harry” movie. That gun and its round would blow a lung of the victim out of the body.

While a 9mm is not overly powerful, it is the most popular handgun for self-defense, so if you can outlaw 9mm weapons, you have effectively given criminals freedom to rape and pillage without having to fear being shot, albeit not having their “lung blown out of their body.”

Were Biden to get his way, we’d be reduced to owning BB guns — if he could get past the rantings of his handlers about us shooting our eyes out.

Johnstown’s Showcase for Commerce gave a true representation of the area tonight when the whole thing ground to a halt as the power went off at about 8 p.m. and remained off as I type this – thankfully not in an affected area – at 10-ish.

If those Afghan refugees had made it here as planned by the Lack of Vision 2025 behind-the-curtain elites, they’d have felt right at home.

My brother often would say, as he and my mother sat awaiting the return of power in Lorain Borough over the past 10 years or so, that he knew what it was like to live in Kabul or Baghdad (Iraq).

Tonight he’s living downtown, still in the dark.

There had been reports on the police scanner (my wife loves to listen) in recent days about manhole lids blowing off and smoke emanating from the uncapped holes in downtown Johnstown. Early reports are that this outage is an underground phenomenon.

Guess no one took those flying manhole lids seriously.

Yes, other localities in Pennsylvania, and other states such as California and Texas, have creaky electrical grids as the nation’s infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

But here in Johnstown we have an embarrassment of failures on the infrastructure front.

Our roads look like some of the main highways in Ukraine now that the Russians have bombed them into uselessness.

Definition of a Johnstown optimist: Someone who bothers to get a front-end alignment for their cars, which on our roads has the life expectancy of the mayfly.

Those very same roads, particularly within Johnstown’s city limits, are a treat in winter. The plan for snow removal is waiting for the stuff to melt and run into the rivers.

This makes parking, traveling the roads, and even trying to walk the sidewalks an adventure.

Point Stadium has been upgraded through the years, but somehow they forgot to deal with the lights, which could be counted on to fail for major events such as the AAABA Tournament. There are rumors the system was personally designed by Edison, whose autograph might be seen deep within the stadium’s bowels.

Now, at long last, supposedly the lights have been updated. We shall see.

The ongoing, seemingly never-ending example of Greater Johnstown’s infrastructure problems is the sewer work.

The sewer authority looked the other way for years if not decades, then got hit square between the eyes with a federal mandate to deal with overflows during rain storms that dumped untreated waste water into the Conemaugh River.

In the intervening years, homeowners in some municipalities have had to shell out thousands of dollars to make their systems airtight in the attempts to eliminate rainwater inflows.

Some, like Southmont Borough in which I reside, thought just upgrading laterals to near the foundation of each home would cut the mustard. We would pay higher rates, of course, to fund this, but now apparently we are not meeting standards so some of my neighbors are having to have their basements torn up and airtight piping installed, along with paying the higher rates!

Some lucky people now have sewer backups where before they had none, sort of like winning the Murphy’s Law lottery.

I like this area, and have lived here all my life, but you’d have to be blind not to see how things have gone downhill dramatically in the past decade or so.

And I haven’t even mentioned the violent crime, which may have gotten a boost without lighting in the downtown for these past several hours.

In the strictest sense, Memorial Day is a time to pause and reflect on those who have died in service to the country, although generations of school kids and young adults have been reduced to seeing it as an excuse to take a day away from their duties.

In a broader sense, Memorial Day also is a time to honor those who served and survived, and perhaps to think of metaphorical deaths such as the demise of common sense and fairness.

The last is a worldwide phenomenon as indicated by news of recent days.

Begin with the absurd scene from Paris of a man dressed as an old woman in a wheelchair, leaping from the conveyance and smearing a cake on the case which is there to protect the famed Mona Lisa painting from such idiocy.

The cross-dresser reportedly was a climate change protester, screaming incoherent messages about protecting the earth. Considering that the painting’s protective case is designed to stop bullets, the cake was a symbolic weapon, perhaps a geographical and historical attempt at referencing Marie Antoinette’s purported “let them eat cake” line.

That didn’t end so well for Marie Antoinette, as she lost her head – literally – afterward as a penalty for having lost her head figuratively in allegedly issuing the disdainful remark to the starving poor.

Another modern day Marie Antoinette, house speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a rich noble similarly out of touch with the common folk. Recall her showing off her $24,000 freezer and $13-a-pint designer ice cream during COVID lockdowns to illustrate how she was dealing with the inconvenience of it all.

It’s well to remember on this Memorial Day that Pelosi also went to a beauty salon maskless during the purported COVID crisis even as she demanded the public be compelled to wear face diapers.

This seems to be a Democratic woman thing. Recall Chicago Mayor “Lightweight” Lori Lightfoot being outed for a trip to the beauty salon even as members of the public were ordered to stay at home. Lightweight also ignored the mask and social distancing dictates, as revealed by photos posted by the hairdresser, a typical Facebook braggart.

Pelosi and her husband Paul, better known as Nancy’s Husband, also have an uncanny ability to profit in the stock market.

But Paul should have stuck to the overpriced ice cream to celebrate. He was arrested for DUI over the holiday weekend in California. Nancy’s office told the media she would not be commenting on this “private” matter.

Let them (the public) eat . . . ice cream, right, Nancy?

As far as we know Hillary Clinton didn’t make tone-deaf trips to hairdressers during COVID lockdowns, not that it would have helped her. Come to think of it, that didn’t stop Lightfoot or Pelosi, but we digress.

Hillary has been outed in court over taking to the social media megaphone for morons platform to push false information regarding Donald Trump and Russian connections.

We’re still waiting for Hillary’s lifetime ban for spreading disinformation.

Playing loose with the facts seems to run in the family. Recall Mr. Hillary’s assertion that he didn’t have sex with that woman. Which one? You pick.

Also of late, many faithful left-wing lapdog media outlets have been dragged to the reality that Russia is winning the fighting in Ukraine.

No less a source than the deified Ukrainian president Zelenskyy gave a dire assessment of the prospects for success regarding the fighting in the Donbas region.

Maybe Zelenskyy and the Pelosi couple can commiserate while eating some overpriced ice cream. The Mona Lisa guy can bring the cake.