Category Archives: Uncategorized

Growing up, if I asked my old man a question, he’d tell me to look it up myself, the theory being one learns more by putting some effort into the quest for answers.

But the old man is gone and I’ve become a lazy, old man. So, allow me to share some questions on my mind, not that I’m pursuing answers or anything like that.

Now that Caitlin Clark is sidelined with injury, does the WNBA season get put on hold until she returns?

Did you read that ticket prices for upcoming games of her overhyped Indiana Fever team are trading at prices 71 percent less expensive than they were before her injury?

Talk about shooting down conventional wisdom, even as President Trump goes hard on illegal immigration and with a presumed emphasis on Hispanic offenders, would you believe that a poll by Insider Advantage shows Trump’s job approval rating is near 60 percent – AMONG HISPANICS?

Would you agree that we need some more Hispanic lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, considering so many white male RINOS (Republicans In Name Only) are intent on voting against Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill”?

Are you buying the explanation that French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife hitting him in the face as plane doors opened was just playful interplay between a man and his wife, who is 24 years older than he is and, a former teacher of his?

Did you hear that a lip reader, as quoted by the New York Post, says the wife told Macron as she refused his arm, “Stay away, you loser”?

Did she not have wooden ruler with her to use on his knuckles?

Does anyone else recall gymnastics star Mary Lou Retton wanting a red Corvette after taking gold at the 1984 Olympics and being presented one?

And does anyone remember being a bit surprised to learn back then that Retton already had a Porsche?

Could it be that’s the same Porsche Retton was driving earlier this month when she was stopped for erratic driving and issued a DUI charge?

Should Pirates fans take solace from the reality that their team, currently 20-36 and last in the NL Central, is not nearly as putrid as the Colorado Rockies, now 9-46 and on an historic pace in terms of MLB futility?

Anyone else wondering when James Comey again will walk on the beach and just happen upon messages left for him using seashells?

One-third of the Memorial Day Triple Crown of auto racing is being lopped from the general viewing menu (86ed as James Comey might read on a beach, spelled out in seashells) unless you are a member of Amazon Prime Video.

Once upon a time, I’d be upset. Now, not so much. Carry on without me. I still will watch the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indianapolis 500, maybe not even the latter. More on this later.

This removal of today’s NASCAR race from the typical public airwaves is a return to the experience of my childhood.

Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, NASCAR coverage – even the big races like the Daytona 500, or this Memorial Day race that used to be known as the World 600 to upstage the Indianapolis 500 – were mostly snippets aired a week later on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. We’d see a few laps, a car or two wrecking, and the checkered flag waving.

Even the Indianapolis 500 was not readily available on live TV during my youth. There were years one could go to the War Memorial Arena, or a local movie theater and buy a ticket to watch a closed-circuit TV showing. Cheapskates such as me would listen on the radio, with announcers set up in each of the four corners, calling the race.

From 1971 through 1985, ABC would televise the race on a tape-delay basis, cutting it down to three hours of show that ran the night of the race in prime time. Interestingly, the announcers seemed particularly prescient in anticipating developments during the race. It turned out, they were recording their audio after the race had ended, helping them look like so many Nostradamus types.

Live, flag-to-flag TV coverage of Indy began in 1986 and continues to this day. For how much longer? Good question.

Early this morning, the Monaco Grand Prix will be televised live, kicking off what generally is considered the greatest single day in auto racing. Of late, Monaco has tended to be a follow-the-leader exercise due to narrow city streets and few passing opportunities. Two mandatory pit stops have been introduced this year in an attempt to stir the pot.

Still, it’s entertaining visually and I watch out of habit.

That one still is available without upcharge to people such as me, who already pay more than $150 a month for a satellite TV package and aren’t interested in spending $20, $15 or $10 more a month to watch a few events.

The Indy 500 also will be available without additional charge. I’ve gone to the Indianapolis 500 twice and it is quite the spectacle. This year, with all the cheating scandal around the Penske cars, and the prospect of an uninteresting race, I might opt to go for a spirited ride in my Corvette instead of watching.

My big surprise came as I was scanning the TV listings to confirm a channel for NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600. I found none.

I guess I should have been paying attention to those amateurish TV spots with Dale Earnhardt Jr., cackling like Kamala about NASCAR and Prime.

You need to be member of Amazon Prime to stream this race. This is sort of the final nail in the coffin for me.

My interest already has waned as NASCAR has gone WOKE, favorite driver Kyle Busch has found himself uncompetitive for reasons of a poor race team and his apparently declining skills, and the broadcasts have degenerated into attempts to hype close finishes that often seem managed by convenient caution flags.

Were the Coca-Cola 600 readily available for viewing tonight, I might have tuned in for a few laps here or there. Since it isn’t, no problem. There’s plenty of other channels, an abundance of computer offerings, and things to do in the real world.

It also might give me some time for quiet contemplation of what this holiday is supposed to be all about, honoring our military members, past and present. Certainly, my family can boast of many of those, who served in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

That sounds like a plan; say some thanks for those who have served to protect us. Feel free to join me, if you don’t happen to be a member of Amazon Prime Video.

To all hateful Democrats and squishy Republicans, take your Trump approval ratings propaganda and shove it where the index finger of Joe Biden’s doctor should have been inserted to check for prostate problems.

The Trump I see is exactly the man I voted for as president – three times.

The latest iteration of candidate Trump had promised to close the border, and he has.

Trump promised to put tariffs on unfair trade partners, and he has.

Trump promised to get rid of illegals, and he is trying to do so, despite staunch resistance from tinpot dictator federal judges.

Trump also is in the process of trying to follow through on promises to keep taxes low; eliminate taxes on tips and Social Security.

Trump is trying to negotiate peace treaties for other countries. He’s bringing industrial production and jobs back to the U.S. He’s continuing our energy independence.

In short, Trump is doing, or in the process of attempting to do, pretty much everything he said he would to Make America Great Again.

Yet, the whiners are unhappy. A common refrain of their chorus of complaint is that Trump is too harsh.

Trump’s brusque way of handling situations never really bothered me and still does not.

I applauded his Oval Office work with Zelenskyy and, more recently, the delusional South African president.

Would I do everything the exact same way Trump does? No. Would I do everything the same way my wife does? Again, no. But we’ve been married for pushing 45 years.

As is the case with me and the wife, Trump and I agree on the big things, the pivotal basics that matter. Details are not dealbreakers.

There’s also something in my background that prevents me from being horrified any time Trump tells someone – to their face, I might add – that they are morons or something similar.

You see, I grew up with a father who would say anything to anyone at anytime. I recall a teenage cousin showing up pregnant and, during a family meet at a grandmother’s place, crying over her lot.

Said my father to her: The more you cry, the less you’ll urinate, only he didn’t say urinate.

If I failed to deliver a requested tool in prompt fashion while helping my father with a car or the house, I would be chastized as worthless as tits on a boar. In the interest of full disclosure, as a very young child I thought he was saying “board” not “boar” ‘and was confused.

Either way, I got the message that he was displeased.

In my adult years, working decades as a sportswriter, I spent a lot of time around team locker rooms, hearing, and sometimes being the target of, some harsh language from players or coaches.

One had a choice in these situations. You could either collapse in a puddle of goo, or you could give it back.

Those who know me likely would call me a confrontational sort, whether it’s getting in the face of miscreants on my street, or standing up to misogynistic bullies.

When I see Trump meeting critics head-on, I identify with him. There are a lot of Americans like me, those tired of seeing our so-called leaders on worldwide apology tours, or kissing the ring of leftist extremists at home.

President Nixon once spoke of a silent majority, the regular types who didn’t take to the streets for Anti-American protests (perhaps because they had jobs to go to), didn’t join the counterculture (see first parenthetical thought) and generally didn’t participate in polls and other measures of public opinion.

It was Nixon’s premise, borne out by his re-election, that this was the majority of the populace, no matter the attempts of LameStream media to portray the protesters as being the prevailing sentiment.

Trump’s “Silent Majority” is MAGA, a huge number of traditional Americans who have grown tired of sitting by quietly while the fringe types dictate the future.

As the leader of the movement, Trump is dramatic and unapologetic. Could this help explain his effectiveness?

Stop trying to finetune Trump and get behind the major goals he’s attempting to achieve, before all hope is lost.

A continuing anomaly of the Greater Johnstown area is to be found in the real estate market, with prices levitating upward despite what should be limiting economic factors.

Understand that for various reaons I have been paying close attention to local housing prices for maybe the past 15 years — mostly via realtor.com. Back when I began monitoring this, housing prices in our area were abnormally low, even considering a backdrop of declining population and below-median income figures.

Back then, the point was made to various acquaintances living in higher-cost markets that they could sell and rebuy a similar property here, banking a considerable capital gain in the process.

I recall a time maybe 10 years back when nearly 300 homes were for sale in the 15905 zip code alone. A quick check of realtor.com shows 56 homes currently listed as available in 15905.

And one of those, a ranch-style example in the Westwood section, is typical. It sold for $39,401 in April 1997, for $50,000 in April 2025, and now has a pending buyer at a price of $129,900.

We will presume someone bought a home that was down on its luck and rehabilitated it, with the description confirming that presumption.

Regardless, this house has some of what used to be large red flags that hampered sales, including being in the Greater Johnstown School District. Also, there is only a partial basement – many of these Westwood homes have none. And there is no garage.

If you have no children, not a lot of stuff one might store in the basement, and no car you want to protect from the elements, this is a suitable purchase, albeit at a relatively high price.

But even houses in troubled Moxham (15902) seem to be riding the appreciation curve.

There is a current listing on realtor.com for a multi-family home in Moxham selling for $70,000, a $10,000 reduction from its previous asking price.

This property last sold in April 2023 for $50,000.

You might suspect this is another example of a flipper purchasing low, fixing up the place, and selling high. But, no, the description describes this house as needing to be rehabbed, with heat only working in one unit.

Despite this, the asking price is up 40 percent in two years, and was up 60 percent on the initial ask.

Inflation has been more like a total of 10 percent in that two-year stretch. Meanwhile, interest rates nationally have risen to near 7 percent for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages and I presume that is similar for Johnstown. This increases monthy mortgage costs and prices some would-be buyers out of the market.

Median income figures for the City of Johnstown continue to be in the basement compared with other Pennsylvania municipalities. Even if you broaden your parameters to include Johnstown’s suburbs, median income for Greater Johnstown is only about 75 percent of national figures, according to censusreporter.org.

And we continue to lose population, which should indicate a lower demand for houses.

Also, our aged population means more and more houses should be coming on the market due to death or relocation to easier to care for apartments, or assisted living facilities.

This should equate to supply exceeding demand and, according to Economics 101, lower prices.

If you want to credit demand to house flippers, it still begs the question of who is the ultimate buyer? With a below-median average income, a tepid job market, and declining population, to what do we owe the steady demand at the margin?

I cannot explain it. This prompts me to quote the late economist Herbert Stein (father of Ben Stein, the lawyer, comedian, commentator, actor who played the teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day off). Herbert is credited with observing “If a thing can’t go on forever, it will eventually stop.”

I’m thinking the Greater Johnstown real estate market can’t sustain this rate of ascent, and so is getting ever closer to a decline.

But what do I know?

And then there was one, as in Canada-based teams alive in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

That means fewer chances to hear xenophobic Canadian fans booing the U.S. National Anthem during home games.

This United States-Canada thing, rooted in President Donald Trump’s repeated references to Canada as our potential 51^st state, blew up during the Four Nations Faceoff, which took the place of the traditional NHL all-star game this year.

Fans in Canada, perhaps aware their economy and culture are the little brothers to the United States, took out their frustrations by booing our National Anthem pregame, and the U.S. team during games.

U.S. players, feeling the need to respond, opened a round-robin game vs. Canada with several early fights, and won the game to boot.

It was a metaphor for what might happen if Canada’s threats to take on the U.S. militarily came to pass.

Canada got revenge later by winning the championship game, needing overtime.

Now, we are getting late in the Stanley Cup playoffs and only Edmonton stands as a Canada-based team alive in the conference finals, joining defending champion Florida there, along with Carolina and Dallas.

It rankles Canadian hockey fans to no end that the last Canada-based team to hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup were the 1993 Montreal Canadiens.

Sure, about 40 percent of the NHL players are Canadians, with 29 percent from the United States, 10 percent from Sweden and 6 percent from Russia, to name the top countries. But give us our Cup, eh!

When the anthem booing spread into the playoffs, it was a curious contradiction considering that some of the top players on the Canada teams, people such as Toronto’s star forward Auston Matthews and Winnipeg goalie Connor Hellebuyck, are Americans.

Imagine them taking in the home fans booing our national anthem before games, then the same fans expecting these players to lead their teams to a Cup victory.

If top-seeded Winnipeg hadn’t lost to Dallas in conference semifinal play, if Toronto hadn’t been humbled in Game 7 of its match with Florida, Canada might have had three of four remaining franchises.

If, it is the biggest two-letter word in the English language.

By the end of that 6-1 Florida beatdown of Toronto Sunday night, a Game 7 played in Toronto, the home fans had moved on from booing our national anthem to booing the home team, throwing hats, jerseys and beers onto the ice to express their unhappiness.

Edmonton still could prevail and ease Canada’s collective sadness. The Oilers have two of the best players in the world in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. The team’s questionable goaltending has picked up of late.

But Florida seems to be gathering steam, as are Carolina and Dallas.

And, even if Edmonton can win the Stanley Cup, will it really cure Canada’s inferiority complex when it comes to the United States?

Doubtful.

James Comey would seem to be either a liar, or a moron based on recent – and past – events.

Certainly he is a narcissist, desperate to be seen and heard, no matter how absurd the situation. It would seem to be fitting to lump him in the beat me, bore me, but never ignore me crowd.

We speak of Comey, the former FBI director, the one who found that Hillary Clinton violated classified document rules with her private server, but gave her a pass. It was a precursor to Joe Biden being given a break on classified offenses from special counsel Robert Hur due to Biden being considered a senile and sympathetic old man.

Comey and his FBI, after they ignored Clinton’s misdeeds, would go on to bend the rules in the get-Trump, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Eventually, Trump sent Comey packing. The hoax was exposed. Comey seethed.

Since then, Comey has been a petty sniper at Trump, going so far as to endorse the cackling hyena Kamala Harris in the 2024 election . Another Comey failure as it turns out.

Comey often is wrong, but never in doubt. And you wonder how such a buffoon ever got to be head of the FBI.

On his way out the door, Comey violated FBI rules by leaking private memos regarding conversations with Trump. This from the self-righteous gasbag who often proclaims to be nonpartisan and only interested in what is best for the country.

The Justice Department’s inspector general hit Comey hard for his violations but, as is customary in these things, there were no charges.

Fast-forward to the present, and Comey took to social media – megaphone for morons – to post what appears to pass for a clever post in his brain-damaged circles.

Comey claimed he just happened on seashells that were arranged to form “86 47.” Comey felt the need to post an image, then delete the post when blowback occurred.

Funny how this guy just happens on clever seashell messages, like the blue ‘Vote Harris” shell he came upon along a beach and hurriedly posted to social media.

I’d like to see Comey repeat these claims while strapped to a polygraph.

This latest seashell message has been interpreted widely as a call to eliminate, perhaps kill, Trump, who already has survived two assassination attempts.

For those who share Comey’s professed ignorance, 86 is slang often used in reference to getting rid of something.

Comey’s explanation for posting, then deleting the 86 47 effort is he was not aware of the meaning. So, why post at all?

It reminds me of all the people who were unaware Joe Biden was a vegetable while serving as president. I discuss this often with others who, like me, realized Biden was MIA mentally long before he was president.

Biden gave ample indications before taking the Oval Office, including a prominent gaffe when, during his presidential campaign in February 2020, he told a South Carolina crowd he was a “Democratic candidate for United States Senate.”

Biden also claimed in that general time frame to have been arrested in South Africa while trying to help Nelson Mandela, and that his son Beau had been the United States Attorney General (actually, he had been Delaware attorney general).

Yes, anyone paying attention five-plus years ago knew Biden was more than a few bricks shy of a full load mentally. But the media claims they had no way of knowing for themselves and those nasty White House types fooled them. Yeah, right.

Similarly, anyone paying attention knows Comey has a problem with honesty and following the rules.

Some have leaped to the assumption Comey will get some jail time for this 86 47 post. Don’t kid yourselves. Our pathetic excuse for a justice system will give Comey a slap on the wrist and send him back to his beach, where he can gin up more ridiculous social media posts to show the fawning crowd on the left what a good little boy he is.

A favorite literary device is the open letter. Ostensibly, these missives are directed to some famous type with whom the writer would wish to communicate, perhaps to offer advice.

In reality, open letters are meant for you, dear reader, to convey the writer’s opinion about events involving the famous personage. If said person happens to see the article, well, that’s serendipity.

Now that you understand the premise, this is an open letter to David Hogg, vice chairman of the Democrat Party, the man that party now is having second thoughts regarding and wants to remove from his party post. Hogg’s many sins include saying out loud that too many prominent Democrats are too far past retirement age, perhaps senile and certainly ineffective.

Dear David “Boss” Hogg,

I see the Democrat Party to which you pledge your allegiance, the group that drones on about protecting democracy and in practice does all it can to subvert the democratic process, doesn’t want you in a position of influence any longer.

They want an election do-over. I hope you see the irony with your Harvard education, inexplicably in history of conservative political movements.

Let me say up front I’ve never been a fan of yours. I saw you as a pathetic political opportunist, leveraging a school shooting at your high school into a national platform for gun control and general hatred of all things conservative and traditional.

But Democrats were willing to overlook your many shortcomings and even voted you in as a vice chairman of the party.

You rewarded that faith by noting the many leadership flaws of the Democrats, prompting blowback only the left can gin up almost immediately.

Longtime Democrat operative, Lizard Man James Carville, called you a “comtemptible little twerp” for seeking to bring younger blood into Democrat leadership.

I read that you and Carville since have made up. Perhaps you bought him some new LSU attire, with party funds?

Others in the Democrat Party are not so easily dissuaded. They want you out, claiming your election had ‘irregularities.”

So, I guess that makes Democrats election deniers, of their own election.

Boss, you should expect as much. Democrats are the ones who cobble up the concept of super delegates to get their favored presidential candidate nominated. They cite legal process, except when it does not favor them. Then they ignore that, too.

Just ask Bernie Sanders, who has been stabbed in the back by his party more than Caesar.

Recall, too, how other prominent Democrats went after President Trump with Lawfare, screaming no one is above the law. Now that some of these progressives find themselves in legal jeopardy, suddenly they are above the law.

Face it, Boss, you have two strikes against in you in modern Democrat politics. You are white and you are a man – I’m just presuming on the last.

Meanwhile, the failed candidate for your post, the one who filed the objection, ticks more identity politics boxes than a gay, illegal immigrant, socialist, person of color. Just to name a few that I’ve seen reported, this complainant is a woman activist and Native American.

Credit to you, Boss, for not slinking away apologetically, like the typical testosterone-challenged leftist dude. You are fighting back in the court of public opinion.

But why do you want to hang with the party of hypocrisy? Notable converts such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard would welcome you to the right side, metaphorically and literally.

Even the sainted Ronald Reagan was a Democrat before seeing the light.

We’d invite you to move to the political right, where your college studies might prove to be usable. Just leave the anti-gun stance behind.

All the best,

Sam Ross Jr.

It didn’t really shock to me to read reports of the Kansas City Chiefs superfan called “ChiefsAholic” being sentenced to 32 years in prison for a string of robberies.

After all, fan is a term derived from the root word fanatic.

While the ChiefsAholic story is the extreme example, I’ve seen a lot of bizarre fan behavior in spending more than three decades covering the sports world.

I admit to having become something of a fan myself, choosing teams for which I root now that professional concerns no longer preclude that. And I’ve gone to a game or two as a fan wearing a team’s jersey.

Never, however, have I painted my face, or body in team colors, taken off my coat and shirt in sub-freezing temperatures to show (drunken?) support, used social media to issue death threats to underperforming athletes, or indulged in any of the other extreme behaviors exhibited by fans gone wild.

ChiefsAholic, the guy who showed up at games dressed as a gray wolf, with Chiefs boxer shorts, had a sideline as a bank robber. Reports indicate he needed the cash to finance his travel, not to mention having a gambling problem.

It would seem to me that fanaticism, be it sports, politics, religion, is a Petri dish for extreme behavior. In the sports example, people who are not content merely to root for the home team, and instead turn their homes into temples of memorabilia, and often also turn themselves into human billboards, are people you might think would be vulnerable to other extreme behavior.

In the case of ChiefsAholic, that would be a presumption proven to be correct.

Some of our most extreme homegrown fans are those of the Steelers. Recall about 20 years back the story of the guy who died and had as his funeral home display with him sitting in a recliner watching a loop of Steelers highlights on television, remote on hand.

I was covering the Steelers-Raiders game in 1990 at the LA Coliseum when a Steelers fan was nearly beaten to death by Raiders counterparts for the unpardonable sin of wearing a Steelers T-shirt while he traversed their section of what the Los Angeles Times called “low-priced seats.”

Steelers medical staff attended to the victim before he was taken to the hospital, in critical condition.

Perhaps the greatest example of mass fan misbehavior I witnessed personally came Dec. 10, 1983, at New York’s Shea Stadium.

The Steelers playoff hopes were slipping away with each Cliff Stoudt interception in a season he was called upon to replace injured Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.

Stoudt, as was his wont, blamed his lacklustre wide receivers.

But Bradshaw returned to bail out the Steelers, throwing two touchdown passes, one each to Greg Garrity and Calvin Sweeney, in just over a quarter of work before blowing out his elbow for good.

The Steelers won, 34-7, but it was Bradshaw’s final game. It also was the final Jets game at Shea Stadium, which primarily was the home of baseball’s Mets.

Fans were into taking home souvenirs. Late in the game, fans in one end zone were ripping up bleacher boards and swinging them like swords. Other bad behavior was common.

The stadium’s jail cell, located along the tunnel to the dressing rooms, was jammed with misbehaving fans when it was time to talk to Steelers coach Chuck Noll after the game.

Back then, postgame interviews tended to be informal affairs, often conducted in such tunnels or other unsuitable locations.

Twice, Noll’s postgame remarks were interrupted by a pack of police pushing past and then coming back again, trying to get medical aid for a fellow officer who had failed to compensate for the December breeze and sprayed himself with some sort of pepper spray.

Noll just shook his head, flashing a bemused smile.

Steelers fans treat their good luck talisman, the Terrible Towel, with reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts. One such fan had a Terrible Towel at the Vatican after the new pope was named.

A humorous towel anecdote, from the Steelers’ Super Seventies decade, saw a fan run onto the field during a Steelers-Oilers playoff game at Three Rivers Stadium wearing two Terrible Towels as loincloths, over a pair of shorts. As I recall, he drank a ceremonial toast at midfield and ran off the field.

You may not be surprised to learn that the guy later in life reportedly ended up in legal trouble, for transgressions that included loan misdeeds and giving the appearance of looking to commit suicide by leaping off one of Pittsburgh’s bridges.

Typical fan stuff.

President Donald Trump had a huge Mother’s Day weekend, fitting in a perverse way since so many potty-mouthed Democrats like to refer to him as a mother(something).

While most celebrated their mothers in recent days, Trump and his people were busy negotiating the framework to a trade deal with China; producing a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, a couple of nuclear powers shooting at each over their border; getting Hamas to free an American hostage; and, just for the icing on the cake, Trump signed an executive order to reduce drug costs.

Also, Trump has Qatar offering him a free replacement Air Force One, since Boeing can’t seem to get its act together on the plane it is contractually obligated to deliver for this purpose.

Predictably, the media and Democrats are having a cow over the Qatar plane, interrupting their current mission of grandstanding outside ICE detention facilities, or even interfering with ICE arrests on the street, to gripe about this gift and lament its appearance of Trump being bought off.

Funny, none of them had problems about Hunter Biden’s “jobs” seemingly on the strength of Daddy Joe’s political office.

As one text message on the Monday night Jesse Watters program asked, does this mean we need to give the Statue of Liberty back to France?

It’s got to be tough to be an anti-Trumper. Oh, were there long faces on CNBC Monday. You’d think a business channel would be giddy on a day the Dow Industrials were up 1,100 points or so with similarly large gains in the NASDAQ and S&P 500 indices, owing largely to the China trade progress.

But, no, these Cassandras were caught with their pants down after predicting doom since Trump came out with his tariff plans in early April. Surprise, the initial negative kneejerk reaction, resulting in large losses in the stock markets, has been largely recaptured, with interest.

Truly CNBC’s Steve LiesMan had a bad day.

As noted on this blog last month, the only way to lose during the tariff overreaction was to panic sell. If you kept your wits – and your positions — you are fine today.

Trump told people not to be Panicans. Did they listen? Some, perhaps.

I lost some of my net worth Monday due to the collapse of the gold price by about $100 an ounce. But the metals and mining stocks have run up hard in recent weeks — one of my IRA’s hit a multi-year high Friday — and this pullback likely is little more than a pause that refreshes.

Regardless, I’m glad to take one for the team, that being the United States. Funny, I don’t see similar sentiments emerging from the cabal of leftist freaks that now makes up the Democrat party.

And the anti-America domestic crowd figures to have a tough few days coming as Trump embarks on a Mid-East trip that likely will produce more good news. Already, some pundits are trying to get ahead of it, saying Trump had things lined up in advance to be announced on the trip.

But, even one of these naysayers offered that just maybe there will be something huge. After all, that’s Trump.

Trump famously has said during his campaigns that his supports will get tired of all the winning his terms produce. His first term was notable, until COVID-19 was weaponized to hamstring him. Now, this second term is producing at a much higher tempo.

But, no, I’m not nearly tired of winning yet.

Last week much was made of a study that found the defund police movements in 2020 led to an increase in crime, said crime rate falling when the push to hamstring police failed in the face of public backlash.

Surprise, people of all races, creeds and colors don’t want to deal with more crime in their neighborhoods. Imagine that.

But that’s only half the story. Punishment for convicted criminals matters greatly, too. And on that front there is a clear movement towards coddling criminals.

From the Tesla terrorist being set free due to a lack of gender-bender care in prison, to various protesters getting away with carnage all in the name of free speech, to many jurisdictions putting revolving doors on jails, to the much-cited Maryland man, we have a wave of people commiting misdeeds and expecting to pay no price – often being proved correct in that ridiculous belief.

This helps explain rogue judges believing they, too, are above the law and not bound by the very dictates they might chose to use to punish you.

It helps explain waves of shoplifting, which now has escalated to stealing trucks and train cars of goods to be resold.

Whatever is up in price is fair game. Witness thefts of huge shipments of eggs when those prices spiked briefly as we got rid of Clueless Joe and put in Donald Trump.

A lot of academics will argue that punishment is not a deterrent to crime. It is an absurd assertion from the same people who routinely insist criminals have been rehabilitated by the system, only to have those same criminals revert to their bad behavior upon release back into the general population.

I’ve long thought a simple test of the faith of these leftist apologists would be a basic rule: You certify a prisoner is safe to be placed back in society at large, and if said criminal runs afoul of the law again, you get to share the cell with him/her/it for as long as the sentence runs.

I’m pretty sure that would result in a severe drop in experts telling us the convict is safe to mix again with the rest of us.

Along that line, it is obvious that if we had capital punishment readily dispensed for the worst offenders, they at least would not be around to relapse.

And I think if the criminal public was aware such punishment was a very real possiblity, the crime rate would reflect a certain reticence to be fried, shot, or given a lethal injection.

Consider the case of the protesters who last week took over the library at Columbia, then were horrified when the doors were secured and their only option for being allowed to leave was to show identification.

These cowards, and others like them, rely on anonymity, hence the masks and other efforts at disguising themselves.

If they truly were warriors, they would not worry about being identified. Recall John Hancock’s intentionally oversized signature on the Declaration of Independence.

That the chickenheart protesters do worry about their identify being known indicates a certain level of fear. This tells us that if we want to limit such acts going forward, the solution is greater enforcement and stricter penalties, not less of either.

A main problem is these scofflaws tend to operate in the leftist sanctuary dens, secure in the knowledge that even if the police arrests them, some socialist prosecutor, judge or politician will move heaven and earth to have them released to commit more affronts.

Until citizens of such leftist strongholds change things through the ballot box and throw out the socialists, they are doomed to suffering from ever increasing disregard for the law by a growing number of their fellow residents.