Punxsutawney Pelosi emerged from her Capitol burrow today and saw her shadow, indicating at least two more years of tyrannical rule.

The bipolar pursuit of bipartisanship has been thrown onto the scrap heap of all political psyops and the Democrats will now proceed to leverage their thin control of the presidency and both houses of Congress into what amounts to an our-way-or-the-highway example of agenda implementation.

Ten foolish Republican senators trekked to see Mr. Unity, Joe Biden Monday, heeding his call for bipartisanship. I hope they at least got a few drinks and snacks for their trouble.

It’s all a dog and pony show. If the Republicans had agreed to any and all Biden requests, then the illusion of bipartisanship would have been put forth.

But had the senators displayed the temerity to stick to their principles, as apparently they did, they would be shown the door.

No sooner had these quixotic people in pursuit of bipartisanship exited Biden’s palace than the announcement was made to go forward with reconciliation. That is the process by which Democrats can ramrod through with simple majority votes things like dispensing open-ended handouts in the name of virus relief.

In this case “simple” has many meanings. If the Senate votes on party lines, it will be a 50-50 tie. VP Kamala Harris breaks the tie. Simple.

And under this regime, even the most simple-minded initiatives cannot be ruled out. For now the procedure will be used to hand out governmental money like Halloween candy, but with one major difference.

If you or I, or businesses, want to pass out treats to the kids, we first must have the financial wherewithal to purchase same. When the government passes out bribes to voters, I mean the monetary candy of stimulus, it just borrows more money.

This reconciliation way of passing legislation takes a bit longer than governing by executive order, but the final result is the same – unchecked power by a party that lost House of Representatives seats in the most recent election, achieved only 50-50 parity in the Senate by virtue of winning two Senate runoff elections in the highly questioned ballot-counting Georgia, and won the presidency by a thin margin the Trump supporters, and some neutrals, perceived to have failed the smell test.

It will be this way for at least two years, until mid-term elections. Likely it will last past that length of time given the penchant of Republicans to run weak candidates and campaigns and fail to demonstrate to the base the ability to stick up for principles of the right even when it isn’t easy.

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today, or at least his top-hatted handlers said so, meaning Phil predicted six more weeks of winter.

If only this country’s period of darkness would be this brief.

There will be more federal government dog and pony shows along the way, designed to placate the masses that there is give and take in the highest levels of politics. But draw back the curtain and the people pulling the levers of power all will have a capital D stamped on their butts.

A good reminder of their drunken power orgy will be the ongoing impeachment effort directed at former president Trump. Impeachment being a method to remove sitting officials, the more rational among the constitutional crowd have branded this a farce since Trump already is out. More correctly, it’s just the latest farce.

Still, unless a lot of Republican senators get a sudden case of jelly spine, Trump will not be convicted in this sham impeachment trial in the Senate.

Were the major media outlets unbiased, they would be raising questions about the need for this and, should Trump be acquitted as expected, they would come down hard on this exercise in time-wasting by the Democrats.

Don’t hold your breath waiting to see either that, or Democrats making legitimate attempts at bipartisan governing in view of their razor-thin edges in the federal government.

As written about here previously, the social media investment crowd on Reddit has its sights trained on silver. The precious metal bounced big Monday, in Asia, Europe and the United States.

Also as predicted here, the people in charge, who seem to have a mission to keep a lid on the public making investing profits (as opposed to banks and investment firms) have tried to stomp on silver just as they did with GameStop and other stocks that were flying on the strength of runs on the shorters – hedge funds and other assorted financial behemoths.

In the case of the silver, the CME Group has announced raising margins on Comex silver futures by 18 percent.

This supposedly was in response to the price action. Let’s see: Spot silver got as high as $29.55 Monday. The March Comex silvers future topped at 29.50. Notably, both were down considerably later in the day from those peaks.

Even at the peaks they were only about 60 percent of all-time highs. Do the people who run stock exchanges fall all over themselves to rein in a runaway Tesla stock. Or Google? Or Apple? Or Netflix?

Why no, no they do not.

They like it when their darlings run and the big institutions are profiting. They don’t like it when the big institutions have the small investor horning in on the big guys’ game.

Make no mistake, this increase in margin, which is the percentage of actual value that an investor must post to control a contract, is aimed, indirectly, at small investors

The regular silver contract on the Comex is 5,000 ounces, or at $30 an ounce, $150,000. Even the so-called “mini” contract is 1,000 ounces, or $30,000 total value at $30-an-ounce silver. No small investors here.

But the small investors buy their products, like the silver exchange traded fund SLV, based on silver futures prices. Similarly, silver mining stocks rise and fall based on futures prices.

Futures markets in the United States don’t open until Tuesday morning. But the precious metals did resume trading in China as early as 6 p.m. east coast time Monday evening and already the silver spot price is, according to Kitco.com, down 50 cents to $28.05 an ounce as I write this.

The good news for me is I’d sold much of my SLV in the premarket session of the New York Stock Exchange Monday, anticipating this sort of price capping. I didn’t get the top price, which came during the regular session, but close enough.

I did buy back a little SLV during the day, at a lower price, just to have a bit for trading purposes. It is, of course, down much more now.

Playing small ball and taking profits whenever they appear is a lesson precious metals investors should have learned through the years. The people behind the curtain are quick to act to take away the punch bowl when the riffraff are partaking, so cash in profits early.

Similarly, tales of GameStop multi-millionaires who ran small options positions into seven-figure profits will end badly if they get greedy and forget to sell to lock in those mammoth gains.

For latecomers to GameStop it’s even more likely to end badly for them – maybe already it has with that stock hitting the skids Monday.

But silver is a bit of a different issue in that it has a strong fundamental case beyond any short squeeze attempt.

It is more than a little possible that silver, even if its price declines for a time due to the market rules being invoked against it, will rise above those efforts and continue onward toward a rendezvous with the approximate $50-an-ounce all-time highs visited in 1980 and 2011.

I will be watching closely, looking for an opportunity to reload paper trading vehicles in any decline.

You would do well to note that regardless of how the paper price of silver is manipulated lower through futures, the actual cost of acquiring coins, rounds or bars, the sort of stuff that hurts if you drop it on your feet, will bear little resemblance to that futures price.

Already huge precious metals dealers are reporting having little or no product to sell. And if any of them do have product, the premiums – the amount investors must pay over the spot price – are large.

Adherents of gold and silver dream of the time when the physical market eventually over-runs what they believe to be fraudulent futures prices.

Grab some popcorn and watch the show.

While blowing up balloons for our youngest granddaughter’s birthday party yesterday – she’s two years of age – thoughts turned to inflation of another sort, that measured by rising prices.

The Federal Reserve Board is on a continued quest to reach, then exceed slightly, a two-percent annual inflation for the United States. These federal bankers are attempting to do so by creating excess monetary liquidity aimed at supercharging the economy and meanwhile holding interest rates to historically low levels.

So far, the inflation quest isn’t working according to government figures, which put the price inflation rate in the U.S. for 2020 at 1.4 percent.

Other sources, such as ShadowStats, beg to differ with that official report. ShadowStats attempts to measure the inflation rate in the old manner (more on that in the next paragraphs) and estimates inflation for 2020 of 8.9 percent, down from 9.5 percent in 2019, but still multiples of the official figures.

If you do much shopping for extravagant luxuries such as food or energy, or you pay rent or property taxes on a home you own, or you purchase healthcare or transportation, you probably tend to believe the ShadowStats inflation figures, which don’t utilize substitution or the suggestively named hedonic adjustments.

Inflation measures often involve a basket of goods. Substitution is the presumption that if the price of steak in that basket soars, people will instead purchase more hamburger, or chicken, or pork. This is disingenuous in my book because regardless of how you change your eating habits to address price inflation, the price of steak and thereby the inflation rate on that basket of goods, increased.

Hedonic adjustments, which sound ironically close to hedonism – the pursuit of pleasure and personal self-indulgence – tries to factor in quality. A higher-performing computer, while costing more, might have its inflationary price impact adjusted downward because it is judged to be a qualitative improvement.

Again, this is questionable in my book. Most people never challenge the capabilities of their computers, so if a new one performs a tad better than the one it replaces, but costs a couple of hundred bucks more, that’s still price inflation in my book.

The Fed is playing a dangerous game with attempts to goose inflation. History presents many examples of how such fiddling with fire explodes to inferno stature.

While the Fed would find 2 percent inflation favorable, it would have figurative blood flowing in the financial streets if inflation hit 15 percent, as it nearly did in April 1980 (14.76 percent). For the entire year of 1980 the United States inflation rate was 13.5 percent.

So, the Fed wants inflation because it tends to encourage household spending and boost the economy. And, as long as the inflation rate doesn’t get too high, it doesn’t result in wage-demand inflation.

But rising inflation does put artificially low interest rates under pressure. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, former head of the Federal Reserve, said during Congressional testimony recently that while our national debt levels are troublesome, those historically low interest rates make this a great time to “act big” in doling out stimulus cash to individuals, businesses, and other concerns.

Our federal government already is the world’s largest debtor and those stimulus handouts are going to be paid for by increasing the debt. If a rise in inflation beyond the Federal Reserve’s modest 2 percent target results in spiking interest rates, the increased amount of money necessary to pay debt holders would severely cramp the government’s ability to fund traditional services.

The 30-year government bonds currently yielding under 2 percent, were paying over 14 percent in 1980. A return to such higher interest rates would be disastrous fiscally.

The Federal Reserve is attempting to thread the needle of provoking 2 percent inflation while avoiding going much higher on that measure and thereby pushing interest rates significantly higher.

If it fails, we all get the equivalent of a sharp needle in the eye.

The wiser heads realize that Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence was merely a symptom of growing mistrust and suspicion among those of us in the common class who we are being taken advantage of by the elites.

Democrats twice were able to tamp down their populist crusader running for president, Bernie Sanders. The Republicans were not as successful with Trump, who overcame the opposition of Democrats as well as haters in his own Republican party to win the presidency.

The thinly veiled alliance of the two establishment parties to take down Trump in his bid for re-election spoke volumes about what the elites, the deep state, the people who really run things, are all about.

Mitch McConnell, lead Republican in the Senate, was all too eager to signal his willingness to find Trump guilty in a second impeachment trial, until backlash within his party forced him to reconsider because he didn’t want to lose support and display his weak leadership in such a public forum.

In a word, it is about control. Democrats and Republicans so fear Trump’s political viability going forward that they want to neuter him in any way possible in order not to risk losing that control.

And for all of you who eagerly voted for Joe Biden expecting your $2,000 stimulus handout, how’s that going? Already it’s been marked down to $1,400.

Now, as the Democrats concentrate on tying up the Senate with an impeachment trial they are not likely to win because the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to convict, not a simple majority, the wait for money for the masses continues.

Even if the Democrats got all their members to vote for conviction of Trump that would leave the Democrats 17 votes short of the needed conviction total.

The penalty for conviction would be removal from office. But Trump already is out, so what this second impeachment amounts to is political theater. Meanwhile, the nation’s business – your handout stimulus money – is on hold.

The battle for elites’ control of the masses spilled over into the financial markets the past week. Keep reading, because even if you think you have no interest in investments, you really do and should understand what’s happening in that world.

Simply put, Wall Street already runs on a hybrid capitalist-socialist structure. The banks and investing firms there embrace capitalism when they are raking in huge profits. When they suffer losses, they want to socialize those losses among the populace – read all of us who pay taxes.

Think of 2008’s financial collapse which rose out of over-leveraged financial institutions making out-sized bets with money they didn’t have. When they lost and the piper needed to be paid, taxpayers were put on the hook to bail them out.

Last week, if you watch the financial channels on satellite TV – I do – there was a parade of aggrieved hedge fund managers and sympathetic talking heads – lamenting the action in GameStop.

For background, GameStop is a dying chain of retail outlets, in largely deserted shopping malls, selling video games. GameStop declared a loss of more than $4 million in its latest operating quarter, which was reported Dec. 8, 2020.

The stock was trading at $17.08 early in January. It began last week at $61.13, traded as high as $483 and closed Friday at $325 after a convulsive trading day during which was the stock as high as $413.98 and as low as $250.

Hedge funds and other big fish on Wall Street were short on the stock, a bet that its price would continue to decline. They were short, in part via the options market, a total equivalent to 130 percent of the stock’s available shares.

But an online movement birthed in the Wall Street Bets forum of Reddit sniffed out the absurd over-leverage, got a so-called short squeeze in motion and the big boys had it handed to them by a populist movement of small investors. The big guys and gals have combined losses so far on this short estimated at $20 billion.

See if this sounds familiar. Losing the game, the elites got the rules changed. Many brokerages stopped allowing purchases of GameStop, or limited purchases to as little as a single share.

Other methods regarding limiting investor funding or options markets access, were employed to attempt to abort the meteoric price rise and so save the powerful from further losses.

These are the methods used by the government and elites to stomp on the masses. Margin requirements (borrowing costs) are raised on investments they don’t prefer. Sell-only dictates are put into force.

Behind the scenes price support or asset dumps by the Plunge Protection Team, AKA Working Group on Financial Markets (a real thing, feel free to search the internet for it), help support or clobber a given asset as the masters desire.

Sometimes they also bring these weapons to bear on rebels among their elite class, as they did in early 1980 to punish the Hunt brothers for their attempt to corner the silver market.

I wouldn’t touch GameStop with a 10-foot pole in these wild times. But I do invest in silver and the Reddit people are being steered toward silver and the companies that mine it, such as First Majestic, which was up from just under $14 to just over $18 last week.

Silver, as measured by the spot price, jumped from $25.48 an ounce to $26.98 last week. It was even higher Friday before losing momentum in an atypical price action.

If the Reddit crew can embolden others to invest in silver, a precious metal that was as high as $50 an ounce in 1980 and was at $49 plus in 2011, but sits only slightly above half of those historic highs all these many years later, results could be spectacular.

And there will be public outcry for those in charge to do something to save those who are considerably short silver.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband made an outsized bet in December in the way of options on Tesla, a stock that stands to benefit from Biden’s executive order made since then for the government to buy electric vehicles.

What did she know and when did she know it?

Also, more tax incentives are being proposed for people to purchase electric vehicles. All of these initiatives will be pushed through legislatively by Pelosi, someone even the brain-dead would concede has quite the conflict of interest on the matter.

But Pelosi and spouse are among the elite, so you should be OK with that.

You are OK with it, aren’t you?

The end times for mankind (womankind?) have been long predicted, but slow to arrive – fortunately.

Keep watching. Here is one man’s list of possible, but very unlikely events, that should they occur would suggest Armageddon draws nigh.

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell and his ilk grow some backbone and remember they aren’t Democrats.

Liberal politicians and lapdog media express horror and condemnation for riots and ongoing civil unrest perpetrated by the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

The unholy trinity that is the face of the Democratic party, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, go a solid month without executing mammoth verbal gaffes. January is out after Schumer said the other day that Senators will decide at their impeachment trial if former President Trump “incited the ERECTION against the United States.” Too much info, Chuck.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, AKA Mr. FlipFlop Contradiction, tells the same story on successive days, in successive interviews, regarding COVID-19 and its related topics.

Biden and Pelosi go cold turkey on Botox injections. Can you say Prune Face?

CNN, MSNBC and network news renounce their propaganda roles for liberal causes and pledge to be more evenhanded in their coverage moving forward, going so far as to return to traditional journalistic roles.

Hunter Biden shows up in the unemployment line.

Sham eponymous foundations set up to serve as slush funds for political contributions are called to account for decades of chicanery.

Those supposedly independent “fact checkers” are fact checked and found to have only a passing acquaintance with reality.

Lamestream media goes an entire month without mentioning Donald Trump and continuing their collective efforts to destroy him.

The truth is finally acknowledged that virus-mandated lockdowns and business shutdowns actually killed more people than the virus when you factor in increases in suicides, murders, domestic abuse, overdoses and major maladies going undiagnosed because people feared going to health facilities and mingling with the possibly infected populace.

There will be an end to elite hypocrisy regarding the virus, things like warning the sheep to stay home, but going on vacations; dictating masks for all at all times, then being photographed mask-less; or closing businesses like beauty parlors to the public, but re-opening them for a quick personal touchup.

The federal government acknowledges that its inflation numbers vastly understate the actual price inflation rate and long have done so.

Big tech gets religion and stops trying to be digital despots, subjugating and manipulating the populace with malice aforethought.

Hillary Clinton says no to any interview request from any liberal mouthpiece.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts remembers he’s supposed to follow the Constitution, not make political assessments that are profiles in fence-straddling.

Parents begin to take more active roles in the schooling of their children, demanding that political indoctrination under the guise of education must cease.

The public realizes that governmental handouts are not a long-term solution and demands fiscal restraint from its leaders.

Democrats stop blaming everything on Russians and start looking at a more legitimate boogeyman, China

We’re living in an ongoing story that parallels The Emperor’s New Clothes, without the possibility of an innocent child ending the suspension of reality.

For those unfamiliar with the story line of the emperor’s clothes, a couple of con men show up in a land ruled over by a king addicted to fine clothing and promise to weave cloth for garments of untold beauty.

The catch is the cloth and garments are said to be invisible to morons and incompetents.

The con men pretend to weave cloth and make clothes, but merely go through the motions. Predictably, no one wants to admit publicly that they don’t see any cloth being weaved lest they be ridiculed by others unwilling to admit to reality.

This comports neatly with our present rush by cancel culture and leftists in general to label as racists, terrorists, insurrectionists, deniers, cult members, purveyors of hate speech or just plain idiots, anyone with the temerity to speak out about the pet crusades of the liberals.

Rather than risk such public labeling, the common people deny their eyes and remain silent.

In the folk tale, it takes a child crying out as the emperor parades in the buff that the guy has no clothes, for reality to intrude and be embraced by the masses.

And I’m reminded of a scene from the past summer in our living room when our eight-year-old granddaughter, witnessing a televised virus briefing by Pennsylvania’s gender-confused health official, asked in dismay, “Why is that guy dressed like a woman?”

Why, indeed?

Hypocrisy is not merely a function of the political left. It’s just that the leftists claim to see it continuously on the other end of the political spectrum, but can’t recognize blatant examples in their ranks.

I pointed out sometime back in a column for the local rag that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg trying to build a wall around his Hawaii estate to keep out legitimate landowners was quite ironic considering his outspoken condemnation of a U.S. border wall with Mexico.

When Hawaiians publicly chastised Zuckerberg for this contradiction, he retreated from the issue into the shadows, but his work to take over the Hawaiian properties and complete his wall continued.

This evening, during a routine visit to zerohedge.com, a web site that should be must-see for anyone eager to read stories the Lamestream media will not promote, I found a post there regarding Jeff Bezos, yet another mega-rich guy who thinks the rules that apply to you should not apply to him.

Whether it is lording over his Amazon workers by beating down unionizing attempts, or making sure only his viewpoint is spewed by The Washington Post, a one-time standard of journalism that Bezos now owns, Bezos appears to have a double dose of the hypocrite gene.

Amazon workers, unhappy with their working conditions, have been attempting to unionize at various locations. This includes most recently an Alabama warehouse.

But Amazon has made a formal request to the National Labor Relations Board that the election to decide whether or not the Alabama workers go union should not allow mail-in voting (too subject to fraud or coercion) and the NLRB should reconsider allowing the workers extra time – two months – to vote (too long).

Somehow these concerns sound vaguely familiar.

Of course some will say this is Amazon, not Bezos, making the request. Well, if you believe Amazon does anything without Bezos both knowing and approving, you are a naive individual, indeed.

I don’t recall Amazon mobilizing its considerable money and public relations machinery to question potential fraud in the most recent presidential election due to massive mail-in voting, or to raise doubts over increasing the time window for voting. Nary a whisper was heard from Amazon.

There was a time in this country when the public and media in concert would have called out this sort of Bezos-Amazon hypocrisy.

Alas, those times are but fleeting memories. This won’t change until the majority of the population that still believes in traditional morals and values grows some backbone and speaks out en masse.

It’s already been too long of a wait for that to happen. But a man can dream.

Talk about getting off to a running start, Joe Biden hadn’t even been sworn in as President Wednesday when his staff made public plans for 17 executive orders.

When outgoing President Trump displayed a proclivity to use executive orders to institute policies, he was roundly panned by Biden’s Democratic Party. Now that Joe’s wielding the pen, nothing but the sound of crickets and zero screeching outrage from Pelosi and Schumer as well as the left-wing Lamestream media.

Here is some perspective on executive orders as compiled on the UC-Santa Barbara web site.

With 17 on one day, Biden has exceeded the total executive orders of this nation’s first five presidents combined – George Washington (8), John Adams (1), Thomas Jefferson (4), James Madison and James Monroe (1 each).

Trump issued 204 executive orders in four years. At this rate, Biden should hit 204 in 12 DAYS. Joe will slow down of course, but I’m betting on him surpassing Trump if Biden lasts four years, particularly if things get tough and his slim majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate are hamstrung by some party defectors refusing to go down the socialism route.

If some of these elected representatives aren’t willing to step up, the next president will be sworn in not with his hand on a Bible, but on a copy of “Das Kapital,” the Karl Marx tome talking down capitalism and promoting socialism.

Predictably, left-wing media outlets have been fawning over Biden, including one CNN hack. I don’t watch CNN, preferring to keep my dinner from forcibly exiting my throat, but I do read when others note their ridiculous extremes.

This CNN sycophant, “reporting” Tuesday, likened lights on the reflecting pool to Biden’s welcoming arms around the nation. It was an unintentional metaphor for what has been described as creepy physical behavior by Biden.

Even on face value, some critics were moved to note it’s starting to sound like “reporting” from state-run media in places such as North Korea.

And why shouldn’t it be?

Already Biden and his surrogates are ducking questions about Chinese funding of a pair of academic operations bearing his name at universities in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Never fear, those questions will not be asked by anyone but the fringe media that speaks for the common folk of this country.

As with Hunter Biden’s job history and various other Joe Biden shortcomings (plagiarism, allegations of sexual assault, and generally creepy behavior around women), nothing to see here. Keep moving.

Meanwhile, breathless and hysterical reporting about threats of violence, first at state capitals and then during the inauguration, were found to be more narrative overreach designed to further denigrate without proof all the morons foolish enough to have support Trump’s re-election.

But Joe wants unity! That’s unity as in it’s my way or the highway. Sign on with socialism, lack of freedom and privacy, excessive governmental control of everyday life and you’re with the gang.

Insist on freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and you are a far-right insurrectionist trying to subvert the will of the people.

Monolithic thought enforced by governments in concert with big tech is many things, but unity it is not.

Investment influencers of public opinion did their best to get Biden off on the right foot, with Bank of America pronouncing this moment is “the beginning of the end of the COVID crisis.”

Already incoming Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve chairman Janet Yellen called for “big” stimulus action at her Senate confirmation hearing.

Big action means big spending, dollars being handed out that the government needs to borrow first.

Even as Biden was taking his oath today, inflation was being anticipated in various investment fields with the stock market, gold, silver, and stocks, all running up. Bitcoin, which is coming into the governmental crackdown crosshairs, declined.

Previously, many formerly draconian Democratic politicians, be they governors of blue states or mayors of blue major cities, had preached the gospel of lockdowns and shutdowns. Now they’re looking to open things up immediately if not sooner, presumably because Biden’s 100-day mask mandate order is magic, so much better than the vaccines that the Trump Operation Warp Speed delivered months before the skeptics thought was possible.

If you’re confused by it all, you need to understand that we now reside in a world in which conventional wisdom has been stood on its ear, and kicked in the groin for good measure.

Just remember, we’ve got at least two more years of this – presuming hopefully that if Democrats screw the pooch so badly until the next mid-term elections that the populace strikes back.

This further presumes accurate vote counting, but one dream at a time.

At this pace there will be dizzying change, most of it for the worse. Schumer could be taken literally when he pronounced in the wake of the Georgia runoff election sweep by Democrats, “buckle up.”

Yogi Berra, the ex-baseball player with the nickname befitting a sporting philosopher, is credited with observing “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

And often that is correct, such as in pursuits like sports betting.

Consider examples like taking Kansas City to cover an 8.5-point spread against Cleveland in an NFL playoff game Sunday and having things in hand at the half, only to see KC quarterback Patrick Mahomes scuttle that by suffering a concussion and leaving the game. KC still won, just not by enough to cover the spread.

So, the Chiefs won, but their backers who gave the 8.5 points lost.

Some predictions are much easier than picking NFL games against the spread. I’m on the record for as much as the past 16 months assuring any who asked that Trump would not be re-elected as president because the Democrats realized they had let down their guard when Hillary Clinton lost to him, and would leave no stone unturned – legal or illegal – to prevent a recurrence.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that came to pass.

I also predicted that for all the hype and expectation about election theft being corrected by courts or Congress, electoral votes would be counted and certified for Biden. I didn’t anticipate the Capitol incursion which gave the weak-kneed Republicans an out, but it would have gone down the same way, even without it.

Thank you again to our largely gutless Republicans at the national level.

There are more sure-pop predictions to be made about coming days, weeks, or months in the political sphere.

To start, Joe Biden will not make it four years as president. Whether he succumbs to disease, is deemed mentally incompetent by his own people, or meets a mysterious death – think Vince Foster’s convenient suicide – four years is not going to happen. Also:

• Biden will have numerous gaffes in his first State of the Union Address. The most amusing likely will be him again mixing up VP Kamala Harris and his wife, DR. JILL BIDEN!!!!!!. Joe also might mis-speak yet again about being a Senator instead of President. Or he might again brag about having the best voter fraud organization in history. Make no mistake, Joe will jam his foot into his mouth at some point, but his Lamestream Media sycophants will ignore or misdirect the verbal farts much in the same way the elderly passing gas at family gatherings have relatives blame the dog to cover for them.
• Biden has made news by saying that he’s going to send a bill to Congress offering citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants. Subsequent investigation will reveal that is a mere formality since those 11 million already were able to vote in the last election – all for Biden.
• Emboldened by the poll that showed that 65 percent of voters, regardless of party affiliation, approved of $2,000 per person stimulus handouts for the length of the COVID-19 pandemic and perhaps beyond, Biden will propose making them evergreen, as in never-ending. He also will ratchet up his $15 minimum wage to $35 an hour, thereby bring all into the middle class, or so his handlers tell him.
• Biden will criticize harshly the 10,000-plus mask-less citizens demonstrating over the weekend against virus lockdowns and urge them just to follow his request to wear a mask for 100 more days and all will be well. When his keepers tell Biden the demonstrations were in Vienna, Austria, Joe will blame the Russians.
• Hunter Biden will land numerous high-paying posts for which he exhibits no particular expertise. Asked about Hunter, Joe will blame the Russians.
• Heads of state visiting the White House will note how curious it is that Biden always serves them Chinese food. Both Joe and Hunter will blame the Russians.
• When mandated releases of government information regarding UFOs are made, revealing longstanding cover-ups by the United States, Biden will blame the Russians.
• House speaker Nancy Pelosi, taking a break from binge-eating high-priced ice cream, will pile on the language war in Congress that has ruled out such terms as chairman, seaman, mother, daughter, brother, etc., with one moron extending that to substituting for Amen at the end of a prayer. Henceforth, aMENdment, MANdates, MANsion, MANifest destiny, MENdicant state, noMENclature, yeoMANry, necroMANcy and the MANn act will need to have gender-neutral euphemisms drummed up for them, otherwise they cannot be spoken of in our hallowed halls. This time, Biden won’t blame the Russians, but it would be fitting if he did since Pelosi is taking a page from the communist playbook of the Russians and their ilk.

Na Zdorovie!

Days before the Biden inauguration, with a planned armed military presence designed to stifle protest that will be worthy of a banana republic, it is both sad and enlightening to see that the hypocrisy of the presidential campaign and its operatives will continue uninterrupted into the regime.

Let us count the ways.

Begin with the narratives of the Biden apologist and Trump hating Lamestream media, who have been quick to paint The Capitol riots as the work of typical Trump supporters. CNN interviewed a couple of the people on hand, neither of them Trump supporters, for insight.

It turns out that one interview subject is a female making a documentary of the other, a male Black Lives Matter activist.

But were they reporting or participating?

In another bit of video that said female didn’t want aired but was posted on social media, she is heard laughing and saying “We did it!’ while hugging Mr. Black Lives Matter, who ostensibly was there solely to document the event but encouraged others to misbehave and allegedly misbehaved himself.

It was all good fun, except Mr. Black Lives Matter went and got himself collared because, according to an FBI affidavit, the G-men heard him on video yelling things such as “we about to burn this (stuff) down” and “we accomplished this (stuff). We did this together. (Expletive) yeah! We are all a part of this history.”

I suspected that Mr. Black Lives Matter didn’t vote for Trump, nor support the president. This was confirmed with a quick internet search that turned up a report that Mr. Black Lives Matter also faces criminal charges in connection with a Provo, Utah, protest he organized in June.

In the TV report, Mr. Black Lives Matter characterized himself as a supporter of that group, not Trump.

Ms. Filmmaker is heard wondering nervously on the social media video if all this interaction is being filmed and then being assured it would be deleted.

It wasn’t deleted.

The Associated Press got comment from Ms. Filmmaker when this all blew up in her face on the very same social media she likely uses to cyber-brag about her exploits. Explained Ms. Filmmaker about her worry regarding the tape’s deletion: “I am incredibly private.”

Hint to Ms Filmmaker: Don’t show up and participate in public events doing things of which you don’t care to cyber-brag, allow someone to video you, then expect privacy.

Hint II: In the future, consider giving such concern for privacy to those whose images you capture in similar circumstances.

In the kind of unfortunate overreach that dominates what I prefer to call Un-social media, it was misstated that Ms. Filmmaker was a CNN employee. No, she’s just a CNN guest and a general freelancer who has worked for, among others, National Public Radio, the latter not exactly being a Republican bastion.

Other protesters/rioters have been identified who most certainly are not Trump supporters, but they are given short shrift in media reports.

Were the bulk of the people behaving badly at The Capitol Trump supporters? I’d argue they were. But just as our military and intelligence outfits can mobilize masses of “freedom fighters” in foreign lands with just a handful of “advisers” sprinkled in their ranks, I’m thinking the flames were stoked at The Capitol protest by agitators placed strategically to take advantage of the situation.

Again, this does not excuse those who broke the law. It does, however, invite a fuller picture to be reported rather than just telling us what fits the narrative.

No narrative has been larger than the need to shut down the economy and lock down the masses to fight COVID-19, a disease that almost exclusively kills the old and sick, but pretty much gives the young and healthy the equivalent of a bad cold.

With the smash hit “Harris-Biden Comes To D.C.” about to open in said town, talk fills the Democratic halls of power of the need to re-open the economy. Left unsaid is this is to help Harris-Biden, just as screeching for and mandating lockdowns was designed to harm Trump and maybe combat the virus as a side benefit.

No less a flip-flopper than Democrat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said this week it’s time to forget all the shutting down of businesses because the alternative is “We will have nothing left to open.”

Democrat Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is a repeat visitor to the well of hypocrisy. She chastised her citizens to stay home because “getting your roots done is not essential” then went out to get her hair trimmed.

Caught in the act, Lightfoot’s excuse was “I’m the public face of this city”

And not a pretty one at that, either literally or figuratively.

These days Lightfoot thinks bars and restaurant should re-open their indoor facilities “as quickly as possible.”

Why would she say this when Chicago infection rates are up? Because Lightfoot is following the science – political science.

Got to help Joe look good because, God knows, he needs all the help he can get.

Already some in Biden’s leftist coalition are unhappy. The proposed stimulus checks have been marked down from $2,000 to $1,400, because Biden is including the most recent $600 checks issued during President Trump’s term.

If Biden also subtracts the $1,200 from the first Trump stimulus checks, we’re down to $200 net.

Biden also has put out an opening proposal of $10,000 in student debt forgiveness, which has been widely panned as totally insufficient for those who ran up $100,000 or more in debt getting their degree in various unneeded disciplines.

Biden did call for a $15 minimum wage, which should guarantee that those on the low end of the wage scale will have minimum job opportunities as well as minimum totals of hours worked going forward.

The Green New Deal must wait for Biden actually to warm the desk chair in the Oval Office, but if he can’t do better than $1.9 trillion to start, the supposed total cost of this current proposed stimulus package, he’s not going to get praise from his socialist enablers on that front, either.

Rest assured, though, that criticism of Biden will be muted by the media as we spend months and perhaps years pillorying Trump and his supporters, trying to resurrect an economy put on life support mainly by Democrats in Blue States and Cities, and generally continuing the disinformation campaign that, along with electoral mischief, swept Harris-Biden into office.

One of the recurring themes through the ages is advice to the successful to tend toward moderation in victory celebrations and to show similar restraint in visiting retribution on the losers.

The metaphors differ, but the message is the same.

From the Biblical “Vengeance is Mine,” to admonitions about not poking bears or kicking sleeping dogs, those who would revel in hubris are cautioned to be modest in the aftermath of their successes.

Beyond that, superiors – or those who think they are above the rest – also are reminded to keep a lid on their egos, if only for their benefit.

An example of that comes from the world of online poker, where weak players who are apt to play poorly and therefore donate their money to better players, are characterized as “fish.”

Online poker has a chat function and too many players feel the need to chastise these “fish” for their poor play. Wiser heads advise these braggart winners not to tap on the aquarium glass, as in don’t scare off the “fish” – and their easily won money.

But the would-be poker geniuses just can’t seem to help themselves.

So it is in the current political climate, with Democrats, heady at their impending control of the federal government, now aligning with their Unholy Trinity partners of big tech and mainstream media to gloat and just as important, cut off means to respond.

They have decided they are going to make their enemies embark on a massive walk of shame, for eternity if possible.

Those foolish people who backed President Trump, or even worse worked for him, must be called to task for . . . what? Answer: They need to be punished for having the temerity to disagree with their socialist masters, the deep-state alliance.

It feels good for these far-left ideologues to inflict pain on those they have defeated in this election, even though said defeat may have been as much a function of a hacked scoreboard as an honest-to-goodness endorsement of the winners’ political platform.

We can only hope these braying donkeys find themselves following the path of so many recent examples from the sporting world, in which pride preceded embarrassing falls.

Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and would-be handicapper JuJu Smith-Schuster said before a playoff game that the “(Cleveland) Browns is the Browns.” Gertrude Stein – “a rose is a rose is a rose” – would have been proud of JuJu’s message, that the Browns, despite their impressive season record, were still a hapless franchise.

After pummeling the Steelers in their first-round playoff matchup, Browns players thanked JuJu for lighting their emotional fire.

A similar story line unfolded in the Baltimore-Tennessee playoff game. Tennessee Titans players had danced on the Ravens logo following a previous success. The Ravens won their first-round playoff rematch and made it a point to seek out the Titans logo for use as a dance floor.

Monday night, the other side of the coin was on display as Alabama routed Ohio State in the college football national championship game. Alabama wide receiver DeVonta Smith, the winner of this season’s Heisman Trophy, was dominant and the announcers noted that for all his success he was and is a model of humility.

No trash talking from Smith, just consistent production and success.

What does this have to do with Democrats and their gloating allies? Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot.

Those who study long-term trends realize that over decades the ins eventually become the outs.

The pendulum of society’s mood spends precious little time in the middle and more often finds itself on either the left or right side.

This dictates that when the pendulum is at its extremes, it just means it is that much closer to reversing.

Purveyors of doom and gloom are surveying events and predicting the end of our republic as we know it. They are right for the moment, but not necessarily forever.

The incoming Harris-Biden administration could find itself staring down economic collapse despite their full-out stimulus efforts.

A vacuous left-wing guest columnist in the local rag today spouted that leadership is not about making excuses; all this as an attack on Trump.

Yet excuses already are being made about what a tough situation Biden has inherited. Rest assured, any and all problems going forward will be blamed on Trump.

That would be excuses made by Biden and the gang. But his excuses will be righteous.

Still, I don’t recall Biden running on this platform: Vote for me. I can’t do anything to change the course of history, but my kid needs a new job.

The motley crew that is the democratic electorate has many fringe elements who now are awaiting their quid pro quo – metaphorical payoffs for their support. If they don’t get all they expect, and maybe a bit more, be prepared to see them back on the street expressing their outrage.

Their protests will, as has been past practice, be accepted as legitimate exercise of first amendment rights. Of course that does not apply to right-wing protesters.

That Capitol protest of last week could have exposed a potential Achilles’ heel of the left crackdown corps, the presence of sympathizers to the cause of liberty who are within the ranks of the police and/or military.

The far right also can be said to have plenty of ex-police and ex-military in its ranks. These are people trained to excel in the sort of armed conflict that could be our future.

Even if we somehow avoid violent conflict in the streets, it is less likely Biden will get through four years without his regime needing to deal with economic meltdown.

Aside from the fear of losing your job and assets in such a scenario, there could be other ramifications that should cause concern.

Socialist icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt is widely credited with steering the United States out of the Great Depression with his assorted handouts and make-work projects.

But check your history. What really got the U.S. out of depression was World War II and its aftermath. The U.S. was geared up economically to help the rest of the world win the war, then continued to boom afterward rebuilding war-ravaged countries.

Other than the Pearl Harbor attack in what was then the U.S. territory of Hawaii, our homeland was spared direct war devastation. Don’t count on being similarly isolated in a potential World War III.

That, too, would of course be Trump’s fault.