We promise sports commentary on this blog and don’t deliver often enough. There are many reasons for that.

Although I spent most of 35 years working for newspapers writing about sports, I became severely turned off by the path of sports in general and the athletes in particular.

These days, I watch an occasional Major League Baseball game, but get more interested at playoff time.

Similarly, I routinely waste little to no time viewing regular season NHL, NBA, NFL, college basketball or college football play.

My DISH satellite television package a while back dropped the Pittsburgh sports provider channel due to high cost, which I didn’t mind. It was more a mercy killing, denying the transmission of endless hours of pathetic Pirates baseball, along with the non-stop whining of Penguins announcers reflecting the franchise’s mindset that it never gets a fair shake.

But sometimes events catch my eye. One such ridiculous moment occurred last night, when a Pirates player dropped his cell phone while sliding into third base, providing a microcosm moment to illustrate what ails sports and society. Replays have been everywhere.

In this way, Rodolfo Castro turned yet another Pirates loss into a lasting memory.

How absurd that a player would feel the need to have a cell phone tucked into his uniform pants during a game.

Baseball purists have rushed to cable television outlets to express outrage. They were just wasting their time.

Castro merely reflects our society, in which mostly everyone from school students to dinner partners cannot separate from their cell phones long enough to focus on those present. These digital zombies sleepwalk through life in a permanent state of divided attention.

You might think a player freshly called up to the Major Leagues could break the addiction, at least while running the bases. And you would be wrong.

Replays of the farce show a bemused umpire and an exasperated looking third base coach, who was charged with taking possession of the phone while play continued.

Big league baseball is a bit touchy about electronic devices on the playing field, what with all the charges and countercharges of sign stealing.

No doubt Castro is innocent on that front and was merely looking to send or accept some texts, or take a selfie with which to do some boasting on social media.

Pirates manager Derek Shelton, the latest captain of this baseball Titanic, handled the matter with apologetic tripe typical of those in positions of sporting authority – we use the authority part loosely.

Said Shelton: “This was just a kid who made a mistake.”

Excuse me! Castro is 23. He’s an adult by any legal definition. Immature, yes. Kid, no.

It is fitting that Castro would commit this faux pas while playing for the Pirates, an organization that consistently is short on talent, but compounds that inherent competitive problem by playing sloppy fundamental baseball.

There are actual chronological kids playing baseball on television these days, as youths compete to advance to the finals of the Little League World Series.

Let me know the next time a cell phone falls out of the pants of one of those players during play.

Shortly after finishing my earlier blog post, ending it with a sarcastic nod to our police state adding 87,000 members to the IRS Gestapo, I flipped on Cable TV news and heard Donald Trump’s Florida estate had been raided by the FBI.

Is this the Onion? The Babylon Bee? A mass April Fools’ joke?

No. No. And No.

Mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen. Aug. 8, 2022, the date the United States descended into full Banana Republic status.

Begin with Attorney General Merrick Garland. Know him for his intense hard-on for all Republicans and conservatives because he didn’t get his seat on the Supreme Court bench.

Garland was nominated by Barack Obama in 2016, but the Republican-held Senate never voted on his nomination. They cited the so-called Biden rule, put forth by then-Senator Joe Biden (back when he didn’t need notes to enter a room) in a 1992 Senate floor speech basically declaring that presidents late in their term should not tinker with the Supreme Court until after the next election was finished.

I am sure it is mere coincidence that AG Garland sees noting wrong with Hunter Biden’s videoed illegal conduct, can’t find any reason to pursue legal action against Democrats or liberals, but can’t wait to lower the hammer on Republicans and conservatives, be they parents protesting school boards or ex-presidents not toeing the line quickly enough.

Similarly, the FBI, which has been outed as a partisan organization, continues to attempt to pin some sort of legal charge on Trump.

Note that in the past the FBI’s pursuit of same has led to changing interview records, providing false information to judges in order to get wiretaps, and generally playing fast and loose with the truth and the law, all in the interest of bringing down Trump.

Trump’s sin is to take on the D.C. Swamp. Trump wants to rid our nation’s capital of the elite inner-circle that feels it has the right to run things without ever having to stand for election, or emerge from the shadows.

Trump was warned, by prominent Democrats and Republicans alike, that you don’t mess with the deep state and survive. Trump continues to attempt to prove them wrong.

There was the sham Russian collusion angle. There were allegations of making illicit deals with foreign governments. More recently, the made-for-TV Jan. 6 hearings have attempted to paint Trump as an insurrectionist, relying on such things as hearsay testimony that was refuted by firsthand witnesses.

This raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, presumably to retrieve classified materials that Trump allegedly took with him when he exited the White House, was great theater for the drooling leftists.

Note that Hillary Clinton’s loose handling of classified materials never even raised the suggestion of a light slap on the wrist. Understand that the Clintons helped themselves to some valuable material possessions when they left the White House. Just an honest mistake.

Expect Garland to crawl out from under his rock sometime Tuesday to present weak rationalization for yet another attempt to publicly humiliate Trump and so seek to intimidate his supporters, from the rank-and-file to the upper reaches.

One legal expert, trying to give the FBI the benefit of the doubt for this unprecedented pre-dawn raid, said there would have had to have been a judge who signed off on the search warrant. You mean like the judges who agreed to surveillance of Trump’s campaign and administration based on erroneous FBI documentation? You mean evidence like that?

Anyone who believes in the U.S. Constitution and equal justice should be appalled by this raid.

You need some perspective? You think this was not an example of overkill for the sake of media optics? Try this:

Various reports had the number of FBI agents used to raid Trump as 30. The U.S. military sent just 23 SEALs on the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Signs of systemic breakdowns are all around us, if only you care to look.

We had another miserable weekend for airline travelers, as flights were canceled and stranded passengers lamented being unable to get from Point A to Point B with any degree of certainty.

Airlines trotted out the usual excuses of weather, sprinkled with airport traffic problems and shortages of workers for the planes. Yahoo reported 10,000 flights delayed or canceled over the weekend.

I once had to do considerable traveling for my sportswriting job. Now I say a silent prayer of thanks each night that I no longer have to put up with airline travel, which became an ordeal post 9-11.

A companion national story to airline woes in recent days has noted the shortage of teachers with schools about to reopen, prompting some states to lower standards. We’re yet to reach the point where fogging a mirror qualifies one to instruct youth, but we’re headed in that direction.

Teachers, as is their wont, are whining about being overworked, underpaid, and generally underappreciated. In some cases all are true. In too many examples, none are the case.

A friend of mine, a teacher decades back, used to say teachers are the most insecure people with the most secure jobs. He was right then, and now.

Our schools are a mess, but a large part of that has to do with inept management and too many teachers just showing up and punching the clock, if not the hooligan students.

On a more personal level, I spent 4 ½ hours today at the house of my late mother, awaiting people from our glorious Greater Johnstown Water Authority to take out the meter. This is necessary because even if one has service turned off, there is a $9.99 a month fee because the service is available.

One only escapes that fee by having the meter removed and the line cut.

I have done the bureaucratic dance, as have other family members, trying to get this situation rectified. Finally, last week an appointment was made to have the meter removed.

I was given a choice of 9-noon, or noon to 4. I picked noon to 4, got to the house early today, just in case, and set about doing some things.

I mowed the grass, then went inside to sort through knickknacks and assorted clutter. I later listened to some podcasts on my phone, and then played two games of chess on a cell app.

It now was 3:40 p.m. and I began to suspect no water guy was coming.

I called the authority, dealt with a very unhelpful phone tree, and finally picked an inappropriate choice just to talk with someone.

Eventually, my call was answered and after much checking, I was assured someone would be dispatched. Apparently the work order had fallen through the cracks – figuratively not literally.

The guy expected a harsh welcome, but I assured him I understood it was morons in the office, not him, who had screwed the pooch.

He got there only about five minutes after the supposed window closed, and was gone in 15 or so more minutes

The guy is looking to retire as soon as possible, for which I commended him.

It’s a common sentiment, often even among those who only just started working.

We can’t find physically fit and mentally straight youth to join our Woke armed forces.

Farmers are being driven from their fields by government regulation and raging inflation.

The nation’s infrastructure has taken on a Third World look.

The Biden Regime wants to bankrupt fossil fuel companies, even as energy prices skyrocket.

That same regime has passed a spend until it hurts bill to – laugh, chuckle, guffaw – help rein in inflation.

But there is good news tonight. Money has been allotted to hire 87,000 more IRS agents, the better to harass the public into political submission through intimidation.

Yet another All American Amateur Baseball Association Tournament has concluded, with a familiar result, a New Orleans title earned via a Saturday night win over the local Paul Carpenter entry.

How soon, one might ask, before the AAABA acronym is changed to represent officially the New Orleans dominance, now standing at three consecutive titles and four of the past five, with a runnerup finish in that lone title miss?

Possible replacements:

Another Archetypal Amateur Baseball Ascent

And Again Anticlimactic Bayou Achievement.

Artful Antipathy And Bayou Avalanche.

Alone Again Atop Baseball Aristocracy.

Title redundancy isn’t exactly a new occurrence in the 77 seasons of the AAABA Tournament.

Baltimore won 8 of 9 tournaments from 2003-2011, with New Orleans in 2009 breaking up that run.

Washington won 5 of 6 from 1997-2002, again with New Orleans (2000) providing the lone interruption.

Before that, Baltimore won 12 of 16 from 1976 through 1991.

You will note that Baltimore and Washington no longer have franchises or send teams to the AAABA Tournament, allowing New Orleans to dominate as the last remaining member of the Big Four franchise list.

Detroit, also long ago having gone missing from the AAABA scene, had claimed a Big Four designation with a period of dominance by winning the AAABA Tournament five times in 10 seasons from 1969 through 1978.

The reality that New Orleans is the only member of the Big Four still sending a team to the Johnstown tournament takes some of the shine off their current domination.

Replacing the likes of Baltimore, Washington and Detroit has been impossible.

The list of AAABA franchises in general is such that multiple entries from the same franchise leagues are needed merely to flesh out the 16-team tournament field.

Johnstown long ago was accorded two entries annually, the better to increase the odds of success by a local team and thereby to draw paying customers to Point Stadium to help fund this whole exercise.

But this year necessity also required two teams from Brooklyn. The tournament hit a low of sorts in 2018, when along with two Johnstown entries, there were three apiece required from Buffalo and Brooklyn to reach 16 teams.

Both Johnstown entries made it to the Final Four of this year’s tournament which, depending on your perspective, speaks to the strength of the local league, or to the weakness of the tournament at large.

Regardless, we eagerly await 2023 and another presumptive New Orleans title.

Returning today from my daily walk, one timed to take advantage of a bit of dry weather, I came upon a neighbor standing on the sidewalk engaged in wistful contemplation of his next door neighbors’ house.

Said house having recently been put up for sale, this man was doing what most on the street now do, which would be hoping the new owners won’t be idiots.

It’s about a 50-50 gamble these days.

This once sedate neighborhood populated by mostly well-mannered families, has declined noticeably.

Now, this elderly couple has opted for apartment life elsewhere, leaving their house to be bought by someone new.

On the upside, if their asking price is met, the sale will put yet another boost into property values.

On the downside, if yet more out-of-control neighbors move in, it will quickly erase that gain.

The neighbor musing on the vacant house lives to the immediate right of it, and on the corner of the block. I told him he could just buy this neighboring house, rent it out to normal people, and thereby have a buffer.

I don’t have the option of relative isolation living three houses down to the left. This has been a peaceful week with my irritating neighbors to my right on vacation all week. But they will return soon, I’m sure.

Even worse, my neighbor to the left is contemplating selling her house, with all the uncertainty that would produce.

I spoke briefly about the neighborhood decline with this pensive neighbor, reciting chapter and verse about problems. I, and many like me, moved to neighborhoods such as ours in the Johnstown suburbs to escape the horrors of the Greater Johnstown School District for our children.

Understand I graduated once upon a time from Johnstown High School, have a son who teaches there, and have had considerable contact with students from recent years. I wouldn’t want to send a child of mine to that school district.

I paid the economic price to escape in the form of a higher purchase price and property taxes. That was supposed to provide an economic moat of sorts. But now I find through various governmental subsidies and programs, the troublemakers have had the way paid for them to follow me.

My neighbor was unaware that just this morning, within a stone’s throw of his house, a report on the police scanner had told of a passing driver’s concern that a man was prone in a yard.

Police investigated and discovered the downed man was laid low by a drug overdose, while he was in charge of not one, or two, but three young children.

The police activity continued for some time at that house.

Meanwhile, up the street and on the other side, a group of people (I hesitate to use the term family) moved in late last year, prompting the erection of two massive fences by neighbors on either side of them.

We still have people who think our street is a dragstrip. Often these are not residents but instead just people who feel the need to race through a residential area to bypass the never-ending sewer, gas line, water line, whatever construction on nearby Goucher Street.

As a side note, my rental garage a block away is a strip of such storage spots associated with a small apartment building that of late has taken on a Section 8 tenancy.

This affects me because their supposed economic hardships don’t seem to prevent them from owning cars. Lines have been painted on the pavement to help them park those cars correctly parallel to the building, leaving space for garage owners to exit their stalls.

A couple of tenants don’t seem to understand what those lines mean, parking well outside them, and even at a 45-degree angle to the building.

I tracked down one offender and noted she really needed to do a better job of parking. To her credit, she was apologetic and, for the most part, has parked correctly since.

But her scofflaw role has been taken by another poor parker. And I’m left to decide how to communicate to these people the need to park closer to the building.

I’ve gone so far as to contemplate renting a three-car garage miles away, presuming that might reduce my problems with access.

I’ve also contemplated moving to a house with more of what used to be called elbow room in terms of surrounding land. Skyrocketing house prices – thank you Biden Regime inflation – have put that on hold while I await the virtually inevitable rapid decline in housing prices that an economic recession and financial contraction bring.

Similarly, any plans to acquire yet another hobby car – although I’m a Mustang guy I’ve been researching C-4 Corvettes – have been sidetracked by unrealistic price rises.

Life for me has become a bit of a waiting game, spiced with observing our unfortunate case of neighborhood limbo – how low can things go?

Democrats think most of us are outright idiots. Are they correct?

The fact that Clueless Joe Biden sometimes bumbles into the Oval Office in an official capacity is a point for the Democrats’ belief in mass lunacy of the population, although admittedly that outcome came only with a big assist from the worker bees who made the vote totals come out right.

Still, Democratic control of the House of Representatives, and de facto control of the Senate also argue that Democrats are right and we’re mostly morons.

Emboldened by this apparent state of affairs, Democrats of all stripe have taken to outright fabrication of facts wherever and whenever, daring anyone to correct them.

I have written here in the past about the delusional Democrat I know who would not admit that Trump rallies outdrew Biden rallies. That’s how far the other side has slipped into their alternate reality.

Biden often gets a pass on his outrageous bastardization of the truth due to his obvious decline in cognitive function.

But is that contagious? Must be. How else to explain why just about every Democratic Donkey feels the need to lie blatantly?

Consider Biden energy advisor Amos Hochstein, who went on Fox at mid-week insisting that it is “just factually not true” to say gasoline prices in these United States were rising before Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine.

This is as ridiculous as Biden regime attempts to redefine what constitutes a recession, flying in the face of their own past statements, when it was politically convenient to label two consecutive quarters of GDP decline as a recession if only because Republicans were in charge.

One story on Hochstein playing fast and loose with the truth quoted the gasoline price (presumably national average for regular unleaded) at $2.39 a gallon on Jan. 21, 2021, Biden’s first day on the job. The price on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia’s first day in Ukraine, $3.54.

Those figures were from a tweet by RNC Research, so let’s presume bias. I checked prices myself, on the U.S. Energy Information Administration web site. That’s a government site, hence the .gov extension on the URL (https://www.eia.gov).

That government site, no doubt maintained by bureaucracy members who lean hard left because their unions tell them to do so, had a monthly average price for January 2021 of $2.334 per gallon. The monthly average price for February 2022, $3.517 a gallon.

That looks to me like a rise of $1.18 a gallon, give or take, which is quite an increase BEFORE PUTIN INVADED UKRAINE!!!

I guess this is one reason why crazed leftist Democrats want math declared racist, so that they no longer need be hindered by it.

History and statistics in general similarly are terra incognito to Democrats.

A certain state senator from San Francisco, named (I kid you not) Wiener, is demanding a Monkeypox state of emergency be declared in California.

The number of confirmed Monkeypox cases in California is 346, with 222 in San Francisco. California’s population in the 2020 census was 39.35 million people. San Francisco’s population in that same census was 874,784, which almost sounds made up.

Regardless, 222 out of 874,784 or 346 out of 39.35 million is not typically thought of as state of emergency stuff.

Again, racist math. In this case, since Monkeypox is mostly spread within the gay community, it’s homophobic math.

Or maybe, just maybe, it is perspective. Democrats might want to book passage en masse to a quaint location we on the right like to call reality.

Democrats should love the fact that the borders are open there. One just need to bring evidence of possession of common sense and a tendency to tell the truth and you will be welcomed to reality, which is a nice place to live, work and raise your family.

Will Nancy Pelosi be the face that launches a thousand missiles, destined to live on in history – if the world endures – as Nancy of Taiwan?

We should soon know.

It was Helen of Troy whose mythical beauty caused her to be christened after the fact as the woman with the face that launched a thousand ships.

Those thousand vessels carried Greek warriors to Troy, where a 10-year struggle ensued to retrieve Helen from her Trojan kidnappers and return Helen to her cuckolded husband Menelaus, who’d been keeping the home fires burning in Sparta.

Pelosi, who previously has prompted comparisons to Marie Antoinette for the tone-deafness both have shown when it comes to anyone below elite class, now has the chance to become a latter day Helen.

There are differences, of course. It is doubtful Helen went through Botox by the 55-gallon drum, or required a COVID-closed beauty shop to be opened clandestinely to touch up her hair.

It can be said with absolute certainly that Helen didn’t indulge herself with $14-a-pint ice cream, stored in a $25,000 freezer

But both could be the cause of wars.

Joe Biden, seeming to act at the behest of his Chinese friends, has tried to keep Pelosi from visiting Taiwan on her far east swing, lest she offend the Chi-Coms.

God knows, we can’t offend our Chinese masters. Just ask any Biden family member, or LeBron James for that matter.

Having apparently driven her husband to drink judging by arrest records, Pelosi has seemed to look to do the same to the Bidens and James by possibly ignoring the protestations to bow to Chinese wishes.

The Chinese have told Biden that playing with fire, as in Pelosi stopping off in Taiwan, could lead to being burned.

The U.S. has dispatched a carrier group – not a thousand ships, but a group packing much more punch than the thousand Greek boats.

The official Pelosi itinerary, released Sunday, noted stops in Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. People who parse such things saw no mention of a refueling stop in Taiwan, but also did not see such a stop ruled out explicitly.

And so we wait.

There was a curious bi-partisan agreement that Pelosi should visit Taiwan, composed of members of both major political parties who do not seem to be – yet – on the Chi-Com payroll.

I shall lay my head down tonight fully expecting to awaken Monday morning to something better than a nuclear wasteland, with Pelosi having blinked on her Taiwan plans, thereby allowing the world to remain safe for Chinese aggression.

If I’m wrong and Pelosi ignites World War III, there is yet another historic comparison to be made. She will be a latter-day Joan of Arc, roasting herself and the world on a nuclear bonfire.

I’ve had an epiphany, a solution to many problems both foreign and domestic – let’s trade Joe Biden.

Forget offering the Russians an international arms dealer in exchange for the freedom of Brittney Griner and the other guy.

Instead, offer Putin Clueless Joe and maybe Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

That’s a win, win, win, win for all involved.

As an editorial aside, we know the other Russian prisoner is Paul Whelan and meant no disrespect to him by calling him the other guy. We were just following the lead of the Biden regime, which turned Secretary of State Antony Blinken into Monty Hall of Let’s Make A Deal fame to free Griner.

Whelan is a white male and so not worthy of any effort, no matter that he’s a former U.S. Marine who insisted he was being wrongfully detained and eventually convicted on trumped up spying charges. While Whelan has been held in Russia for years, only now that Griner is in custody is the Biden regime interested.

Griner is a lesbian woman of color who will not salute the flag and retreats to isolation to avoid hearing our national anthem, so she demands action. Never mind that she admitted guilt to possessing drugs illegal in Russia.

Make no mistake, Griner is the prime motive for this proposed deal and Whelan is merely the player to be named later, to borrow a sports reference.

So far, Russians might be balking, which some opine is why Blinken went public with the offer.

Again, the U.S. ought to take a page from the dealmakers in sports. Do not limit yourself to one trading partner.

Why not offer Biden and Yellen to the Chinese in exchange for no more virus releasing, or spying in our country?

In a case of dueling phone call news releases, the Biden team spoke of being candid with Chinese Xi Jinping about Taiwan and other issues during a two-hour exchange.

The Chinese report on the phone call has Xi warning Biden over Taiwan, saying “Play with fire and you will get burned.”

It should not surprise us that a Biden version of events has just a passing acquaintance with reality. Biden has fudged his academic credentials, has plagiarized the work of others, has told and retold a questionable story about facing down a gang leader and, more recently, has given reports of interactions with Putin that differ greatly from Putin’s versions.

Currently the Biden regime is trying to redefine what constitutes an economic recession after the U.S. has suffered two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, which heretofore had been the classic definition of a recession.

An ally in the spin has been Yellen, whose credibility on things economic should be viewed in the context of her time as head of the Federal Reserve, during which she repeatedly asserted inflation was not a concern despite rapid expansion of the money supply.

Yellen has since been forced to admit she got it totally wrong on inflation, a major concession when that was a prime focus in her prior job.

It’s a natural progression that Yellen would build on that legacy of error by trying to insist the U.S. is not in an economic recession.

Trading Biden and Yellen to someone, anyone, can’t hurt and could help.

Let us borrow from the reasoning of former Pirates general manager Branch Rickey, who ended up trading away Ralph Kiner, the National League’s top home run hitter in 1952, during the 1953 season.

Rickey told Kiner during bitter contract negotiations “We finished in last place with you. We can finish in last place without you.”

The United States can struggle terribly with or without Biden and Yellen, but just maybe replacements might do better.

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell did a lot of tap dancing today, not easy for man standing at a lectern.

It brought to mind the best efforts of Gene Kelly (who once taught dance at a Main Street studio right here in Johnstown) and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.

While Kelly and Robinson were tap dancers in a literal sense, Powell’s terpsichore was of the metaphorical variety, a verbal refusal to be pinned down, particularly on the topic of recessions.

What we henceforth will refer to as the R-word, because Democrats and their useful idiots insist the word cannot be uttered where voters might hear it, is a hot topic.

Janet Yellen, current Treasury Secretary and the woman who formerly had Powell’s job and helped get us into this inflationary mess with her loose-money policies, was on a Sunday talk show trying to change the definition of the R-word.

Generally speaking, and you can confirm this with a quick internet search, the technical definition of a recession is a decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in two consecutive quarters.

We had a decline in Quarter 1 this year and the reports are due out for Quarter 2, which ended with the final day of June.

The Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now model, as of the time Powell was hemming and hawing, was predicting that Quarter 2 saw a GDP decline of 1.2 percent.

Acknowledging the oft-cited two-quarter decline definition for the R-word, Yellen argued that it wouldn’t be accurate in this case.

What Yellen meant is not really clear. What is clear in hindsight is that Yellen was preparing the field, so to speak, for Powell to ramble and contradict himself today during his press conference that follows Fed interest rate pronouncements, in this case yet another rise of three-quarters of a percentage point.

Many a questioner tried to get a straight comment on the R-word from Powell. They only succeeded in having him play both sides against the middle.

At one point, Powell indicated he did not think we currently are in an R-word. But not much later he said it was not the Fed’s job either to define an R-word, or to determine if we were currently suffering one.

Huh?

If it’s not your job, why feel the need to share an opinion on the R-word? A positive spin opinion it was, too.

This all falls under the category of narrative. Massage reality until it fits your message and refuse to change no matter the facts.

Markets interpreted Powell’s word salad as meaning perhaps he really does believe we’re in an R-word, or at least a rapidly slowing economy, and so the pace of further interest rate increases will slow. This caused major rises in the broad stock market averages, as well as with precious metals.

Powell also noted – correctly – that initial economic figures such as GDP reports are merely guesses and subject to re-stating down the line. So, he said, they are to be taken “with a grain of salt.”

Keep that grain-of-salt line in mind if the official government report Thursday morning shows no decline in GDP for Quarter 2 and the Biden regime rushes to every available microphone and social media site to trumpet that modest success.

I’m surprised no government flack has trotted out the old R-word definitional bromide: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job.

It’s better than the nonsensical pap being spewed by the likes of Yellen or Powell.

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.