Joe Biden’s colonoscopy Friday was a failure, with doctors unable to pull the Pathetic President’s head from his nether region.

How else to explain Biden’s rush to double down on his confused, doctrinaire assessment of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial?

To recap, Rittenhouse, who somehow had been charged with multiple crimes simply for protecting himself against crazed protesters, was acquitted. It was the only reasonable result.

But it’s not reasonable when you’re Clueless Joe Biden, beholden to left-wing zealots in your party, and wholly unable to make an informed decision due to declining mental faculties.

Biden, walking in the steps of his hero Barack Hussein Obama (who once said if he had a son, that son would be a hood, or words to that effect), had rushed to judgment pre-trial, branding Rittenhouse a white supremacist and other such inflammatory terms.

A rational individual, having seen footage of Rittenhouse being shot at, assaulted with a skateboard and chased through the streets by mob members, might have backed off a tad on this assessment. A sane individual might have listened to testimony that rioters were aggressors and Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.

But it’s been quite some time since anyone could use rational, or sane to describe Joe Biden.

Biden professed to be “angry and concerned” by the Rittenhouse verdict. Translation: It doesn’t comport with the leftist view of the world, so facts be damned, the guy should have been fried!

The reality for anyone willing to check their partisanship at the door, something too many news outlets cannot manage, was that Rittenhouse was more victim in this case than criminal. If we’re going to cede the streets to rioters and pillory any who would stand up to them, this nation is on the verge of Civil War II.

If, instead, we’re going to respect the law, then Rittenhouse stands as an example of the legal system getting it right, even though it took an inexplicably long time to get there.

People who should know better spent a lot of time mis-stating this case for public consumption. I cannot confirm from personal observation, but my son noted the usual suspects were all over social media in the wake of the verdict proving again that outlets such as Facebook and Twitter are the megaphones for morons.

The less inhabitants of social media know about a topic, the louder and more strident their views. These digital fools railed about the Rittenhouse acquittal.

Threats of more violence have been made. I’m counting on Biden and his crew to give tacit approval to such lawless actions by declining to demand civil order or prosecute those who riot.

Apparently, the Rittenhouse haters were unbothered by attempts to injure him that night, or since to deny him various rights guaranteed in the Constitution – not just guaranteed to those on the fringe left looking to take down this country.

And now we await the trial aftermath, with opportunists ready to take to the streets and loot stores in the name of “justice.”

For any would-be Kyle Rittenhouses out there, stay home and don’t waste your time trying to go out and protect the rights and property of others. Wait for the rioters to reach your home, observe their forcible entry, then show them the door the hard way.

Let’s Go, Brandon!

Forgive me, I’m in the mood to rant. A lot!

I live in the Greater Johnstown Area, where for five or six years getting from Point A to Point B has involved dealing with road delays due to sewer work.

Simply put, our genius public servants ignored a sewer treatment problem until the Feds arrived with heavy-handed, shoot ’em all and let God sort them out remedies.

The Federal government is great at making wide-ranging declarations and leaving it for the local citizenry to figure out a way to pay for it all.

This has been a boon for contractors large and small. Demand has been created, whether it be working at tearing up basements inside houses, or tearing up streets to replace main lines.

The homeowners keep a lid on things because they don’t have unlimited funds. Crews don’t qualify for retirement there without ever completing the job.

But at the municipal level, there’s a whole lot of money being spent and not a whole lot of progress being made. My son’s municipality had the original contractor botch things so badly another contractor is redoing the work. I’m sure that’s not costing anything extra.

And so if I drive a mile in any direction from my house I’m treated to the repeated sight of four or five guys standing around an open hole looking into it as intently as if it were a strip show.

Rain, sleet, snow, sun, it doesn’t matter. They stand there and stare at the holes as if expecting them to magically finish the job on their own.

These hole watchers seem to be happy sorts. The other day I actually saw one guy move onto a truck, grab a rake, and laugh uproariously before putting it down.

At this rate, our national “infrastructure” bill, once it’s done donating to illegal immigrants and to various social misfit causes, might be able to get a block or two of sidewalks put in. Maybe.

The infrastructure idiocy is rampant in my hometown. Streets that were ripped up and left like the Ho Chi Minh Trail, after the B-52 bombers were through, finally have been put back into passable condition.

This is just in time for the spray-painting morons to wield their cans marking up the new pavement for fresh rounds of surgery. Incredible? Yes. True? Sadly, also yes.

Along that line of the left hand never consulting the right, the athletic field in my home school district is under some sort of major construction. The field is near a relatively new school, that had a new playground installed when it was built.

Guess what happened to that new playground? Torn town and trucked away for this latest project to unfold.

Thank you, morons. I’m sure that didn’t cost any extra money or waste any dollars for the school district whose taxpayers already shoulder the highest tax rates in the county.

Our local hodgepodge of waste and misuse of funds is indicative of a nation short on common sense and traditional values.

Clueless Joe Biden’s nominee for a top bank regulating position is a Marxist academic with a shoplifting record who is on the record wanting to bankrupt banks and energy companies in some delusional screed against our nation.

But if you criticize her, you are some kind of misogynist racist because Lefty Lucy is an Asian woman.

Are they nominating free-enterprise capitalists for positions of prominence in either the Chinese or Russian governments? I think not.

Meanwhile, we have a young man on trial in Wisconsin for doing no worse than using a gun to defend himself against people trying to kill him, as evidenced by videos and even testimony from some of the assailants. The not-guilty verdict should have been in within minutes. Instead we are days into the deliberations.

It’s clear the same brain-dead types making a career out of sewer work in my area also are staffing the criminal justice system, are running the federal and state governments, and are getting together at night for orgies of self-congratulation over their successes.

We are doomed as a nation as long as this ridiculous behavior is tolerated and I’m not optimistic anything will change.

Rant finished.

The Biden regime was out with more bad news for the citizenry Friday, a predictable bad news dump just ahead of a weekend.

The thinking of these Friday releases is that the simple sheep will have moved on to something else by next week and the negative blowback from yet more bad news will be minimal.

In case you weren’t paying attention, Pal Joey’s Gang announced that Medicare Part B premiums will rise 14.5 percent in 2022. Also going up will be Part B deductibles, as well as various Part A deductibles and copays.

It was big news a while back when it was announced that Social Security benefits would rise 5.9 percent next year as a nod to inflation. Well, a 14.5 percent increase in the cost for Part B coverage is more than two and half times that supposed inflation rate.

What happened? Rising drug costs, said a Biden mouthpiece.

Economic reality continues to intrude on the Biden Fantasy. He limits domestic production of energy, shuts down pipelines, then jawbones OPEC to produce more oil. OPEC tells Jolly Joe to go pound salt and your costs at the gasoline pump skyrocket.

Pity those who heat their homes with oil, or who were not smart enough to lock in their natural gas costs when prices are artificially low.

Consumer confidence surveys are picking up negative feedback from the masses, who find prices rising across the board and aren’t encouraged when elitist tools in the Biden regime tell them they’re just going to have to suck it up and pay the increasing costs.

Some NBC dweeb was out over the weekend noting that while people gripe and moan about rising costs, they can afford to pay more.

Sounds a lot like Marie Antoinette Pelosi doing a network piece about roughing it at home during COVID lockdowns eating $14 a pint ice cream from her $25,000 freezer.

Can these leftists morons truly be this out of touch? Why yes, they can.

Congratulations to all you smug and arrogant Biden voters who visited this idiocracy on our nation. You must be so proud!

Biden and his inept regime seem determined to plumb the depths of reason. To them up is down, left is right, black is white. Their moron minions back them up.

The economy is running on fumes, the supply chain is tied up in knots, inflation is on the verge of breaking out across the board, but the clueless one keeps raining more and more unconstitutional decrees upon the populace designed, ostensibly, to solve a COVID crisis that no longer exists, if it ever really did.

Things are bad. If you have been paying attention, you already knew that. Rest assured, they can and will get worse.

Let’s Go Brandon!

The Democratic Party and its lapdog media outlets such as MSNBC and CNN have become a sickening stew of outright lies and wild accusations.

Dare we dream that election results in Virginia and New Jersey indicate the electorate is – belatedly – getting wise to it all?

Let us begin with Virginia, where upstart Republican Glenn Youngkin kicked establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe to the curb.

To the sane, Youngkin’s win was a triumph by a man who listened to concerns from parents about their children’s education. To the progressive left it was racism.

Youngkin was swept into office by white supremacists, they claim. This argues with exit polling conducted by Associated Press (not exactly a right-wing organization) that had Youngkin winning among Hispanic voters, who presumably are not white supremacists.

Quickly another exit poll was ginned up from Edison Research that showed McAuliffe winning big with Hispanics but still losing the election.

But that same Edison Research outfit reports exit polling showing more than half of voters thought parents should have “a lot” of input as to what their children are taught in school and 33 percent said “some” input.

Candidate McAuliffe pulled the trapdoor on himself when he said in a pre-election debate that parents shouldn’t be involved at all in determining what schools teach.

The tone-deaf, arrogant McAuliffe lost on this issue. If Democrats think that is racism, they ought to pitch their copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and invest in some dictionaries.

But the racism argument to explain Virginia results gets even worse when you consider the incoming Lt. Governor, also a Republican, is Winsome Sears, a black woman born in Jamaica.

What made the white supremacists come out to vote for a black woman immigrant? Or maybe people just liked the message of optimism presented by this former Marine and advocate of the Second Amendment.

Above all else, Sears said cries of racism are overblown and she’s living proof of this. It’s hard to argue that. But rest assured left-wing zealots will.

As icing on the Virginia cake, Republicans appear to be about to take over the majority in the House of Delegates. Are you telling me Virginia voters are majority racist white supremacists? I doubt it.

In true blue New Jersey, the Republican came within a whisker of winning the governor’s race vs. the Democratic incumbent. And a truck driver, Ed Durr, who was fed up with Democratic control of the lives of workers such as him with their ridiculous mandates, knocked off the entrenched Senate president (another tone-deaf Democrat).

Durr is reported to have spent all of $153 on his campaign. He relied, instead, on running against Democratic arrogance – and won.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the lies and contradictions continue to mount.

Most recently, Sleepy Joe Biden (who lived up to that moniker by napping during a climate conference speech) returned to brand as outright lies and “garbage” reports his administration will pay $450,000 a head to ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT families separated by border guards DOING THEIR JOBS!!!!!!

On cue, Biden mouthpiece Karine Jean-Pierre was out today to indicate Joe was confused (again) in his comments and referred only to the $450,000 number, although Joe had said $450 “that’s not going to happen.”

When the payments do happen, and they will, be prepared for anyone criticizing the giveaways as racists and/or white supremacists. It’s all they have.

I’m just back from voting today, although I’m not sure why. Force of habit, perhaps?

Yes, the candidates mostly were for local or statewide office, so it is less likely the results will be outright fudged, as they most obviously were in the last presidential election.

Yes, it’s important as a good citizen to vote and exercise the franchise so many have fought and died to preserve.

Yes, you have no room to gripe if you can’t be bothered to take a few minutes to vote.

But, for every person who bothers to study the candidates and their positions and vote accordingly, there are at least as many – probably more – who vote based solely on party affiliation, or what freebies the candidates are promising to distribute, or how effective the often-false campaign ads have been.

Again, this is not so much the case in this election. But more often than not, it is.

What has been going on in Virginia’s governor race speaks volumes. The loudmouthed Democrat, Terry McAuliffe, a Clintonista from way back when, is looking to play the race card as his one-time healthy lead in the polls shrinks, or even inverts if you believe a Fox News poll.

It’s vintage Democratic playbook. They get Democratic operatives to pose as right-wing racists in front of a Glenn Youngkin campaign bus. Youngkin is McAuliffe’s Republican opponent.

Reliable lapdog LameStream media ran with the photo and it was a sensation on social media, AKA The Megaphone for Morons.

Only after a news cycle were there reluctant admissions that it was a staged photo by Democrats. It’s like when a hit job is bannered across the front page of a newspaper in 90-point type, but the correction is buried at the bottom of page two; a paragraph or so with maybe a 24-point headline.

Will the fake Youngkin photo and other McAuliffe distortions or outright lies work? Don’t bet against it.

It’s possible McAuliffe will win a fair election in a squeaker. It’s possible Youngkin will win in reality, but the official results will show otherwise. It’s possible enough thumbs will be pressed on the electoral scales to give McAuliffe a purported runaway victory.

Reports indicate about 1 million Virginians voted early and McAuliffe is up 300,000 among those. That’s a big deficit for Youngkin to overcome based on election-day turnout. We’ll assume for now that the early voting was all legitimate and lacking the Georgia stench.

This Virginia race is being painted as a referendum on Joe Biden, who lived up to his Sleepy Joe nickname this week by falling asleep while ostensibly listening to a speech at the global climate-fest.

The only referendum on Biden that would matter to me is a national recall vote, and that isn’t happening.

The man and woman campaigners outside my polling place concurred regarding the sad state of elections in this country, but were happy to see someone (me) operating on autopilot despite waning faith in the legitimacy of the results we have reported to us.

“Don’t give up” the woman implored.

I’m not giving up, but merely acknowledging that the system is badly broken and the solution moving forward is not likely to be found at the ballot box.

Whatever happened to traditional Halloween trick-or-treating?

By traditional, I mean kids walking to houses in their neighborhoods, getting candy and in return amusing the people handing out the treats with their costumes.

In most cases, the kids knew the adults distributing the candy, and vice-versa.

Fast-forward to 2001, earlier tonight, traditional Halloween. The wife and I went to my son’s neighborhood, about a mile and a half from our home, to make the rounds with his family, which includes two young daughters.

We still were traditional, doing a quick circuit of the neighborhood on foot and calling it quits after less than an hour because a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old tire relatively quickly.

But we were out of step, figuratively and literally. Begin with the blitzkrieg tactics employed by many. Vehicles pulled up and disgorged groups of kids, who hustled to every house with the porch light on, the universal signal in these parts that there is candy to be hand.

Sometimes the transportation waited at the dropoff point. Other times, the vehicles went up and down the streets, creating unnecessary traffic with so many young children about.

I’m relatively familiar with my son’s neighborhood and I can say with some degree of certainty that a huge number of the costumed kids (some had to be teenagers, or beyond) were from parts unknown.

The mistake made by my son’s municipality, and by mine, was to have their trick-or-treat night on an island, not coordinated to share the same date with other area trick-or-treat days, so as to discourage the people who would turn this kid’s celebration into the candy equivalent of the cheese giveaways that used to attract all the area’s loose cannons.

As a child, I can never recall trick-or-treating at a house I couldn’t easily have walked to and back from.

Were I a betting man – and I am – I’d lay good odds that most of the people who were being ferried about in vehicles had crossed several municipality borders to reach this destination tonight.

One candy-grabbing vehicle had a relatively loud exhaust. I swear, when I had gotten back home with still some time left in the two-hour trick-or-treat window, I heard the same vehicle prowling our street.

I didn’t want to look to confirm it, and be forced to contemplate what sort of person turns trick-or-treat into an exercise in greed and exploitation of the generous among the population.

I saw joy on the faces of some of the kids accepting candy tonight. I saw similar happiness on the faces of many distributing the treats.

How unfortunate that this traditional children’s rite of celebration is being corrupted by greedy adults who are doing their best to indoctrinate greed in the kids they drive from area to area trying to score more candy.

What an entertaining World Series this promises to be, beyond what figures to be a good on-field product.

The cherry on the top of this sports sundae is how the two participating teams will trigger the libtards everywhere.

Begin with Atlanta. The city lost the All-Star Game this past summer because that state’s Republicans had the temerity to try to remedy obvious electoral abuses in the past presidential election, as well as in special Senate runoff elections.

But the butt-kissers in Major League Baseball management were offended and shifted the All-Star Game to . . . Colorado. That would be to a state that, horrors, requires photo identification to vote in-person and signature verification for mail-in voting.

My God, that’s suppressing the vote, right?

And Denver’s population is 9 percent black. Atlanta is 41 percent black.

Way to strike a blow for something, Major League Baseball.

But the MLB virtue signalers could not take away the World Series, so the lefty whiners will have to live with it.

And there is more. How about that offensive Atlanta nickname, the Braves? Unlike the gutless management of the Washington Redskins, who bowed to political correctness and became the Washington Football Team, Atlanta is sticking with Braves.

Come to think of it, that Washington cave-in was a win for Native Americans, since the team formerly known as the Redskins is pathetic, an on-field embarrassment to the game of football.

Back to the Braves, they have that nickname the Woke crowd can’t stand. Even worse, Braves fans do the tomahawk chop, chanting and motioning with their hands every time the Braves get something going offensively.

Gag me with a calumet (that’s a peace pipe – to spare you needing to look up the word).

The presence of the Houston Astros in this Series is amusing on several levels.

Considering their willingness to bastardize the voting process, I’m confident libtards aren’t upset that the Astros were found to have improved their chances by electronically stealing catchers’ pitch signals in the 2017 and 2018 seasons.

Not as appealing to the libtard crowd is having a team from Red State Texas playing for another title.

Monday, a day before the World Series began, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, signed into law a bill requiring transgender high school athletes to compete on teams consistent with the sex listed on their birth certificates.

Imagine the nerve of the guy, standing up for Title IX by banning guys from poaching success vs. girls on female sports teams.

Game 1 of the World Series in Houston came off with mask-less spectators, and no gratuitous political displays by the athletes or anthem singer.

Maybe when things swing to Atlanta down the line the politically correct crowd will muster a protest over the Braves nickname or some such quixotic quest.

No matter which team prevails in this World Series, we on the political right already are winners. And the pathetic inhabitants of the far left can spend the next week and change sobbing and sucking their thumbs in frustration.

The hits keep coming to the propaganda campaign being mounted by the VacciNazis and CovIdiots as they frantically push their power grab under the guise of protecting public health.

Make no mistake, whether it’s your local stores, schools, or public offices that are pushing draconian controls, or any number of similar actions being taken on state and federal levels, it’s all about controlling every aspect of your lives.

Information will be gathered and compiled in vast data bases. Freedom of movement will be hamstrung. Privacy will become an anachronistic concept. All this is in the interest of protecting against an ailment that kills about four-tenths of one percent of the population that catches it, unless they have other serious health issues.

In a case of getting the camel’s nose under the tent, recall in the early days how we were sold on lockdowns and the like under the promise of a few weeks or months “to flatten the curve.”

Years later, that curve has been pounded flat, but face diapers continue to be required. Private gatherings such as holiday parties are frowned upon, yet somehow it’s OK to pack 70,000 into a sports stadium for an event.

Vaccines are being made mandatory creating the jab or job choice.

Yet, against this nonstop drumbeat of fear and subservience, Clueless Joe Biden, a MaskHole if ever there was one, was caught recently at a social gathering sans his trademark mask.

Hypocrisy is the base principle of the VacciNazis and CovIdiots.

How else to explain both of these extremist groups ignoring “THE SCIENCE!”?

Vaccines were supposed to protect us. Even if some of the vaccinated got the virus, we were assured that their illness would not be as bad as in the un-vaccinated.

Try telling that to Colin Powell, fully vaccinated and also fully dead due to COVID. So, his vaccine saved him from . . . what’s worse than being dead?

Meanwhile Sweden. which proved a nation didn’t need to shut down to flatten the infection curve, has banned one vaccine due to heart problems developed by young men taking the “cure.”

Colin Powell might soon have company in the vaccine graveyard.

Could it be taking the vaccine is as dangerous as being around Alec Baldwin with a prop gun in his hand?

Ireland has the highest vaccination rate in Europe. Ireland also has the highest rate of new COVID cases.

How do they explain that? With the usual doubletalk. Bottom line: Believe the science except when it disproves your assertion, then blissfully ignore the data.

The surprise isn’t that a recent survey in Democratic Maryland found a majority of respondents came down against mandatory vaccinations for either teachers or students, it’s that more people are not rising up and saying enough is enough.

Stand up to the VacciNazis and CovIdiots before they achieve their goal, that being total enslavement of the populace to their whims and desires.

If you have yet to read Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” you really should find the time.

And it will be a great amount of time to get through Rand’s opus, which runs nearly 1,200 pages.

Don’t bother with the three-part movie series, which goes to great lengths to prove what academics had been saying all along – the book is unfilmable.

The three “Atlas Shrugged” movies used different actors to play the main characters, of necessity abridged much of the book’s content, and generally failed, to borrow a line from the movie “Slap Shot,” to capture the spirit of the thing.

Again, read the book. You will cringe at how Rand, writing the book published in 1957, could so accurately depict current events.

What Rand wrote was a tale of how a once-great industrial nation could be brought down by corrupt bureaucrats in government, by the dumbing down of the population, and by the penalizing of individualism and exceptionalism.

The drones among the populace in Rand’s book were described as “looters,” content to live off the productivity and creativity of others.

Worse, success was punished by governments, both in a confiscatory sense and also from the standpoint of looking to equalize competition by penalizing the strong companies to prop up the weak.

Rand’s United States in “Atlas Shrugged” was a patchwork of dying major cities, destitute small towns and collapsing infrastructure as evidenced by failing factories and railroads. It was a nation inhabited by people content to be wards of the government, which would provide for them by taxing the rich.

Supply chains were collapsing. Creative, innovative people found themselves increasingly unwilling to carry the load for all the looters.

Have you done any shopping recently and found bare sections of shelving staring back at you? Have you heard Clueless Joe Biden’s mouthpieces joking how we Americans have been spoiled by having choices at stores and should learn to deal with being a third-world nation?

Have you noticed how eager some of your neighbors were, and are, to sit back and collect government handouts rather than working?

Rand’s book was filled with bureaucratic gobbledygook such as the Anti-dog-eat-dog rule to subsidize unproductive railroads at the expense of those railroads that were efficient and solvent.

It’s not much different than the current “infrastructure” bill, which is long on spending on things such as climate, pension funding, illegal immigrants and environmental issues and short on putting money toward traditional infrastructure such as roads, airports and various utilities such as electric power or water.

You can call it “infrastructure” but that doesn’t make it infrastructure spending.

To avoid spoiling Rand’s ending, I will say only that it is a bit contrived in its details. But it is all too accurate in the concept that the more producers are punished and malingerers are rewarded, the fewer producers you will have.

I have read some learned observers speculate that the liberals must be intent on destroying this nation. There can be no other explanation for the ridiculous path on which they are and have been attempting to steer us.

Current events increasingly are indicating they are succeeding. If you can’t wait to witness the end game firsthand, read “Atlas Shrugged.”

Having spent decades covering sporting events for newspapers, I heard more than my share of fans whining about the officiating being biased.

There were isolated instances when I agreed. More often, viewing from the emotionally detached position of rooting for neither side, I saw mostly fair calls.

Yes, some calls were bad, but it didn’t necessarily favor one team. They were just mistakes without an agenda.

Watching the baseball postseason, I’m here to tell you the umpiring has been shaky, particularly on the subject of calling balls and strikes, or checked swings.

It’s not that one team is necessarily getting the shaft from the umpires, but try telling that to the San Francisco fans who saw their team eliminated when an obvious check swing was instead called a swing and a miss.

Batter out. Game, series and season over just that quickly on one horrendous call.

Most of poor umpiring is not as dramatic, but it is determining outcomes.

In Game 1 of the American League Championship Series, right-handed Boston hitter J.D. Martinez, an accomplished batsman with a good concept of the strike zone, kept having outside pitches called strikes against him.

At least he thought so and the telecast’s strike zone graphic confirmed his opinion.

Eventually, Martinez had to begin swinging at those outside pitches and it didn’t go well.

Bad calls can put hitters in the hole in terms of the ball-strike count. Similarly, good pitches called balls put the pitchers behind in the count, making hitters comfortable and thereby more dangerous and lessening the effectiveness of pitchers.

It was merely opinion before the technology was developed to superimpose a strike zone box on the broadcast. Now there is instant confirmation of what fans long had thought – home plate umpires miss an awful lot of calls.

Mostly these are consistently inaccurate, penalizing both teams. But, if the umpires make mistakes in crucial moments for your team – think the San Francisco check swing – it’s only human nature to see grand theft.

Baseball has no monopoly on this. Already in this NFL and college football seasons there have been blown calls that left the broadcast officiating experts at a loss to cover up for their former colleagues on the field.

NHL officiating has been miserable for decades, particularly the trend toward officiating with the score in mind. Teams behind tend to get more power plays.

NHL games in overtime, especially in the playoffs, have the referees pocket their whistles lest they be accused of determining the outcome. And so the players, fully knowing this, commit atrocious infractions secure in the knowledge that more likely than not they will not be sent to the penalty box.

NBA officials are similarly lame, often ignoring fouls committed by star players and, when some defender breathes on those stars, foul calls come quickly against that defender.

Add in that NBA players can run a 100-yard dash without dribbling and not be called for traveling and you have NBA officiating neatly defined.

Apologists contend officiating gaffes are just part of the game, no different than a player striking out, dropping a pass, missing a shot or allowing a soft goal.

But players who strike out too often, drop too many passes, miss too many shots or let in too many cheap goals, find themselves unemployed.

Umpires and officials in other sports are graded, but some of the worst offenders inexplicably linger season after season to blow calls, sometimes in critical situations. We all deserve better.