Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rudy Giuliani and his traveling truth show were in Arizona today, providing testimony in an open hearing that the most recent presidential election was fraught with fraud.

Meanwhile, in the parallel sporting universe, there is a bastardization going on that rivals the election chicanery.

Already we’ve seen the NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball crown champions in playoff exercises that diverged wildly from the norm. Formats were altered in terms of length of series, locations of games and lack of travel.

And it all was accepted as necessary concessions – not the overpriced kind you buy at stadium stands, but rather to the COVID-19 reality.

Even as this is being written, the NFL and college football seasons are in full crawl, with further notable tinkering with the norm, all in the interest of getting in the seasons and playoffs despite it all

This means we’re treated to Denver being forced to play New Orleans in an NFL game the past weekend in which the Broncos’ top three quarterbacks were sidelined due to positive virus tests.

Stunningly, New Orleans won easily. Color me surprised.

College games are flat-out being called off, in the case of Florida State twice fewer than 24 hours ahead of scheduled kickoffs.

Nowhere is the state of affairs on more graphic display than in Ohio, where the state has two national title contenders in unbeaten Ohio State and similarly unsullied Cincinnati. Both teams have had games nixed due to virus outbreaks.

In the case of Ohio State, the Buckeyes are a mere 4-0. If they can’t play their next two games, and meet the Big Ten Conference minimum, they would be ineligible for the Big Ten Championship Game.

But the Buckeyes still could be in the national championship playoffs because there is no minimum game total to qualify.

Imagine a 4-0 team going into the playoffs while teams such as 8-0 Cincinnati, with more games played and more victories, sits at home.

The reality of those in charge trying to keep current sports seasons operating around the edges of the COVID-19 reality is puzzling at best.

Recall that earlier in the year, when COVID-19 hit similar levels of infections, the NCAA men’s and women’s conference basketball tournaments were halted and the national tournaments were called off. NBA and NHL seasons were put on hold, and resumed only in so-called “bubble” environments.

The Major League Baseball regular season started late and ran less than one-half of its customary length, to be followed by playoff formats cobbled together in ad hoc fashion.

Now we see the NFL rescheduling, but not canceling games. We have college football games being aborted hours before scheduled kickoffs..

We’re supposed to look the other way and accept this as normal in the interest of enabling the games to be played, and money made from television broadcasts.

Interestingly, the stands have a limited numbers of spectators in the case of football, but the small numbers are clumped together so if social distancing is the point, it’s failing.

Also failing is the competitive integrity of the games and, eventually, the champions that are crowned.

College basketball seasons have begun without fans in the arenas.

But we do have those silly cardboard cutouts of fake fans.

If this ongoing sports charade continues, it will be appropriate to have the championship trophies be cardboard fakes, too.

I took a brief hiatus from posting to this blog to enjoy Thanksgiving. And that means, yes, all you would-be government tools and snitches, I had my son, his wife, two grandchildren and my brother over to celebrate along with me and my wife. So report me.

My wife, as usual, outdid herself in cooking and decorating the house.

This activity occurred against the backdrop that my mother, who has been in a nursing home for more than a year, has tested positive for COVID-19.

So, to recap, the person isolated from her family and the public in general, has a positive test result.

My mother is in a virtual bubble, with only a couple of weekly visits last month with two family members, conducted in the lobby of the facility, all visitors being masked and socially distant. That’s been it for approximately the past eight months in terms of live in-person visits.

There have been a few video calls, but it’s been a long time since we could go in and visit her twice daily, as my brother and I had done until the virus crackdown.

Those two-person lobby visits are by the boards, too, with the latest rise in virus cases.

The staffer who supervised our window visit the past Saturday, to celebrate my mother’s 84^th birthday, remarked she was amazed how widespread the virus infections had become at the facility.

Because I am blessed (or cursed) with the willingness to speak my mind, no doubt inherited from my father, I pointed out that I wasn’t at all surprised. In the times we had been allowed inside the facility, it was evident that the staff’s familiarity with universal hygiene precautions had been largely no more than a passing acquaintance.

On the occasion when we were given the word that visitors were being banned – laughingly one staff member suggested maybe just for two weeks – I offered to bet the two giving us our marching orders $100 and I’d give 10-1 odds, that it would last much longer than two weeks, or even two months.

I even offered to let them go up and down the halls and get others involved in the wager and was willing to bet them that a staffer was more likely than a visitor to bring COVID-19 into the building based on pure numbers.

I’d have won a lot of money, not because I am Nostradamus, but because I know that once you give unfettered control to the powers that be to ban traditional freedoms, they become drunk with the power and use it to the extreme.

Look at what’s going on with schools, work, various holidays, religious services, sporting events, shopping, travel, etc., etc., etc. All are being locked down to one degree or another.

Protests by the left-wing idiots cannot be banned, however, because it would interfere with their constitutional rights.

Meanwhile, the Trump efforts to obtain relief in the courts for apparently fraudulent election results have been met with almost universal stone-walling.

Pennsylvania courts have been notably obstinate. I love that they maintain they cannot override the will of the people as evidenced by ballots. But if the issue is the legitimacy of those ballots, how then can a fraudulent decision be corrected short of taking in the streets with guns blazing?

The legal concept of the fruit of the poisonous tree holds that illegally obtained evidence is tainted and cannot be used in a case. Why wouldn’t a tainted vote be similarly invalid?

Courts have yet to make clear why they believe that any vote, fraudulent or otherwise, is equally sacred. Would it be overly cynical to look at the party affiliations of the judges?

Similarly mute in the face of hard evidence are all the leftists who scream science, science, science to insist that the world as we know it should be closed down, with fossil fuels and beef banned while all ride to work on bicycles eating tofu.

Oh, I forgot. No one will need to work. Just stay home and take the universal basic income, but still eat your tofu.

Climate change, COVID-19, they are areas where the radicals find some scientists who support their view, then act as a virtual mob to shut down and shame any SCIENTISTS who might disagree.

Scientists, of course, once thought the sun revolved around the Earth, that the Earth was flat, the Universe was static, there were canals on Mars and computers could never compete with humans in a game as complex as chess.

Mathematics and probability are every bit the realm of proof not emotions, just as sciences are supposed to be, and an increasing number of experts in mathematics, having taken a look at the presidential election results, see manipulation and collusion in key states.

Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia is one of these experts who is crying foul play on the election results. He’s a genius, certified as such in a New York Times story a few months back.

But now Keshavarz-Nia is an expert witness for Sidney Powell in her attempts to expose election fraud.

This means that Keshavarz-Nia is supporting the Orange Hair Bad Guy’s cause for re-election, and the left lunatics (and their lapdog media outlets) will endeavor to discredit him.

Likely they will succeed, or courts simply will ignore Keshavarz-Nia’s analysis under the blanket excuse of honoring the wishes of the electorate, whether that electorate was deceased, voted multiple times, or simply was electronically manipulated to produce the desired Harris-Biden victory.

It has been about an hour and a half since the news broke that the Trump legal team was distancing itself from Sidney Powell, the lawyer who had made the most far-ranging contentions about widespread voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.

The political left and its media friends can be expected to feast on the news as yet another crack in Trump’s case.

But the Sidney Powell situation, the details of which are yet to become public, actually illustrates intellectual honesty on the political right that the left lacks.

Consider that the past week Fox host Tucker Carlson had very publicly called out Powell for not being able to present evidence of her claims. Carlson immediately was lionized by some on the left, because anyone agreeing with them deserves an atta boy.

Of course, mostly the left media outlets have been and remain critical of Carlson, even when he was in the forefront of calling out attorney Michael Avenatti as a “creepy porn lawyer.”

As Carlson was doing this, Avenatti was at the time a lefty icon, appearing on CNN with great regularity to attack President Trump.

One one occasion with CNN host Brian Stelter (he of the head that looks like a Jiffy Pop popcorn tray after its date with the stove-top burner) Stelter, showing absolute tone deafness, said he was taking Avenatti seriously as a 2020 presidential contender.

Avenatti since has been in jail, and given temporary COVID-19-related release, awaiting a trial for embezzlement.

It is not clear if Stelter is taking Avenatti seriously for 2024. But Stelter’s bulbous bald head must be taken seriously if only for its visual grandeur.

Stelter does not seem to have apologized for being so wrong about Avenatti.

At the risk of repeating myself, I attempt to maintain intellectual honesty. I long ago stopped voting for Pat Toomey for U.S. Senate merely because he is listed as a Republican. Toomey didn’t walk the walk.

Predictably, of late Toomey showed up quickly to dismiss the Trump inquiry into election fraud. Toomey has said he will not run for re-election to the Senate and also will not run for the Pennsylvania governorship, although a cynic might see his rush to align against Trump as an indication of political positioning should he end up make such a gubernatorial run.

If Toomey runs for governor, I will vote for whomever his opponent might be, or simply make no choice. He will not gain my vote merely because he labels himself as a Republican.

It is fashionable to critique conservatives as incapable of making rational ballot distinctions, but I personally have voted for Democrats for offices such as U.S. House of Representatives (the late John P. Murtha several times) Ed Rendell for governor of Pennsylvania (the first term) and for various other lesser state, county or local offices.

Beyond political tags, there is the matter of ignoring self-interest for reasons of intellectual honesty. I voted against Barack Obama twice even though I knew his plans to shake up the health insurance industry would benefit me in the short run, albeit at the expense of healthcare in general.

And in Trump I voted for a guy who was determined to take out Obama’s misnamed Affordable Care Act, which would have been temporarily harmful to me monetarily, but much better for our long-term delivery of healthcare.

Too many members of the public, and the media, make the mistake of allowing their personal preferences to cloud their ability to think rationally.

The need to keep the two thought processes separate is very real.

It’s reminiscent of the Fox Mulder character in the science-fiction television series “The X-Files.” Mulder was played by self-confessed sex-addicted actor David Duchovny, who moved on later to a Showtime series “Californication.” Talk about art imitating life.

Mulder’s X-files office had a prominently displayed poster of a UFO and the words “I want to believe.” But Mulder wanted proof, too, of alien existence.

As much as one wants to believe, there is a need for proof.

Rudy Giuliani and members of the Trump defense team might yet produce their necessary proof – of voter fraud, not alien presence (at least not aliens in the extraterrestrial sense).

But time is short and Trump supporters would do well to reconcile themselves that yet another disappointment likely is on tap for them, just as Attorney General William Barr and special investigator John Durham have failed miserably to provide timely reports and disclosures on the investigation of the FBI’s Russia collusion harassment of Trump.

Wanting to believe is one thing. Having the subject of that belief justify it is something altogether different.

Despite the generally accepted Liberal dictate that the end justifies the means, it’s important to get results while staying within the rules.

Otherwise, we have anarchy, which would please Liberals for a time, until the mob came looking for them.

Democratic house organs, AKA mainstream media outlets, would have us believe Trump supporters are trapped in an alternate reality, completely removed from the truth.

They make these accusations on their many platforms, with their distortions of truth falling on the willing ears of their many sheep.

This is nothing new. Adolf Hitler wrote of The Big Lie in his book Mein Kampf and the concept was put into widespread practice by Nazi propaganda man Joseph Goebbels. He distilled it into “lie big and stick to it.”

For liberals now to accuse conservatives of ignoring reality is to practice classic psychological projection, a defense mechanism in which opponents are charged with suffering the very same shortcomings of the individual or group who are attempting to defend their position.

Having control of public school systems, most institutions of higher learning, the majority of mass media and the bulk of governmental bureaucracy makes maintaining the big lie possible.

You will find Democratic check marks for all of the above categories.

To accept the Democratic assessment of our current situation, you must be prepared to believe a lot of mis-truths.

Those mis-truths are, in no particular order:

• There were no voting irregularities in this 2020 election. To believe this you must dismiss thousands of uncounted votes showing up on separate occasions in Georgia, affidavits from workers alleging various bastardizations of the counting process in states including Michigan and Pennsylvania, and documented errors in states such as Nevada that is being ignored because it has not been proved to be significant in the outcome. This prompted one attorney to ask a judge “how much fraud it too much, your honor?” You also must ignore probability and statistical analysis from experts that the presidential vote totals are extremely unlikely to have been accurate and free from manipulation.

• That Trump’s balking at transferring power to Joe Biden is historic. That neatly ignores Biden, then the vice president, and outgoing president Barack Obama, enabling spying on the Trump campaign and transition team using federal intelligence agencies, obtaining FISA surveillance warrants based on false information, and using as a touchstone of all this a discredited Russian dossier on Trump.
• While on a much smaller scale, we are required to forget that the General Accounting Office found about $14,000 in damages to the White House was caused by Clintonistas showing infantile disdain for incoming president George W. Bush. This included stealing the letter W from keyboards, scrawling graffiti on walls and swiping a presidential seal. Feel free to call up the account of this in the June 12, 2002, New York Times, before it is purged from history by Goebbels-like Democratic operatives.
• In a complete flip-flop, Democrats attribute all the revelations regarding Hunter Biden and his cloudy business dealings, an apparent utilization of the family name for financial gain, to Russian disinformation. In the case of harassing a sitting president, Trump, Russian disinformation, even if it did come from the Clinton campaign, was the gold standard for veracity. But now a man’s personal laptop, rife with unsavory information, can be nothing other than Russian disinformation and therefore worthless
• That Democrats were bemoaning pre-election the ease with which electronic voting machines manufactured by Dominion and others could be hacked and generally were suspect. Now that those machines have spit out a favorable result to the Democrats, they are above reproach.
• That Trump and his supporters wanting a fair and accurate count of legal votes is putting the entire system in jeopardy. Since when is the pursuit of truth an ill? But that is what we must believe to accept the Democratic “reality.”
• That the streets would be filled with violent demonstration should unhappy Trump supporters have to deal with an election loss. Quite the contrary, all those boarded up stores and offices were unnecessary because, for now, Biden and his coalition of left-wing, socialist or anarchist demonstrators got the outcome they desired. Keep those boards handy, though, should this election rise to the Supreme Court level to sort out the voting chicanery and those Justices deliver a ruling in favor of Trump.

Taking a break from politics, and living up to the blog’s promise to include sports, here are 20 questions involving the sports world.

1. Do you think fans of Penn State’s suddenly impotent football program wish they could go back to lamenting the reality of coach James Franklin’s poor record against Ohio State instead of the current Franklin problem of his team not being able to beat anyone?
2. Still on Penn State, do you think Franklin wishes the Big Ten hadn’t listened to the protests of him and others and decided to play the season after all?
3. With coach Don Shula and star linebacker Nick Buoniconti now dead, I’m wondering if members of the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only NFL team to go unbeaten through the regular season and playoffs, still get together to celebrate when the last remaining unbeaten NFL team in any season gets its first loss?
4. Does anyone think this year’s lone remaining unbeaten, the 9-0 Steelers, will challenge that Miami 17-0 record?
5. But even among the doubters can anyone imagine the Steelers could lose this weekend, playing 1-8 Jacksonville, yet another hapless team on what has been a marshmallow-soft schedule?
6. Would you guess the Steelers have exactly three victories against teams with winning records this season, while their other six wins have come against opposition with a cumulative 14-38-2 record?
7. Now that the NCAA has announced plans to have the college men’s basketball tournament played in its entirety in Indianapolis, how can the NCAA justify going on with the men’s bowl classification national football playoff being contested at varied sites?
8. Will that decision be left to the NCAA, or will tyrannical government figures mandate no travel and no play?
9. Are any other sports fans having trouble getting interested or excited about seasons that could be put on ice at any time?
10. Do you think bureaucrats would buy the excuse that football players already wear masks as part of their protective gear and so are combating the spread of COVID-19?
11. Is anyone else finding their weekends full and entertaining without having to watch a single NFL game, as I have this season?
12. Similarly, has anyone else broken the addiction to the NBA or NHL due to fatigue over their social justice warrior posturing?
13. Quick, can you tell me which team won the most recent Stanley Cup?
14. Notre Dame beat Clemson, which was playing with its backup quarterback, in double overtime a couple of weekends back, but do you think the Fighting Irish can get it done again, if Clemson starting quarterback Trevor Lawrence is playing, as he should be in the potential ACC title game rematch?
15. Would you argue with the guys who set odds for a living, who even after the Notre Dame win, have Clemson rated a better pick to win the national championship?
16. And would you argue that the same guys are wrong in having Alabama as the overall favorite to win yet another national crown?
17. Does anyone else agree that there should be a ban on those ridiculous cardboard cutouts of fans that some sports have sprinkled in the stands to give the visual effect of a crowd?
18. Along that line, is anyone else annoyed by the canned crowd noise played in stadiums and on broadcasts?
19. What are sports teams going to do if after this period of forced absence, fans discover it’s easier to stay home and watch the events on massive, high-definition televisions, and not have to pay exorbitant ticket prices and parking fees, not to mention being stuck for $7 or so for a beer during the game?
20. Can a person have a Super Bowl party and not bother to watch the game?

As a former sports writer, I saw firsthand what steroid use did to records and traditional performance standards, all at an incredible pace.

That phenomenon has transferred to the jargon of the world in general, with accelerated and out-sized developments said to be “on steroids.”

We’ve seen it in politics, where a health-crisis opportunity seems to have been seized by one side to go on steroids to change the rules and manipulate the election results.

I’m praying the suspected voting fraud is headed toward a steroids-like fate, first being exposed and then being thrown on the trash heap of history, with the abusers discredited and facing long-term physical problems.

A man can dream.

Daily revelations only support those who believe that this presidential election was not on the up and up, no matter what boilerplate assessments are issued as to its supposed integrity.

I have a few thoughts.

• Now that it’s been proven that dead people can vote, most likely for Democrats, I’m wondering how the Democrats will get the dead to fight if the civil war they seem hellbent to provoke actually is fought?

• Thousands of uncounted votes have showed up in disputed Georgia in each of the past two days and – hold your surprise – they favored Trump. A couple more days like this and the Biden lead is gone – until some late Democrat votes roll in overnight.
• In Nevada they are going to need a do-over on one local election due to voting irregularities. Can we really be confident the presidential totals are correct there?
• At least one county in Michigan had refused to certify results due to an abundance of voting irregularities alleged in signed affidavits, but we should trust the state-wide count, right? In a late-night reversal, that county vote not to certify was reversed. All is well. Move along. Nothing to see here.
• Pennsylvania set up a two-tiered voting verification system, favoring Democrats, and also excluded Republican oversight of the ballot counting. A state official stated bluntly before a single vote had been counted that Biden would win. Can you say conflict of interest?
• Georgia runoff elections for two Senate seats, which could deadlock the Senate should both Democrats prevail, are looming as yet another chance for our election system to be rigged, right in plain sight and without any apparent interest in preventing that.
• A Wisconsin recount would cost Republicans about $8 million, roughly four times the cost when a Green Party candidate funded a recount in 2016. Of course COVID-19 is being blamed for a quadrupling in four years. I wish my income had gone up four times due to COVID-19 hysteria.
• Speaking of virus overkill, Democrats continue to be caught defying their own draconian orders to stay at home. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi apparently didn’t learn from being outed going mask-less to her beauty parlor while lecturing others to stay home. Now she showed up at a Democrat dinner in violation of her standards. California Governor Gavin Newsom also felt above his orders when he went to a birthday party at a restaurant, in direct violation of lockdown dictates given to all the ordinary people in his state.
• Still in California, you can go to strip clubs, just not to church, a reality questioned as far back as August by a West Sacramento pastor.
• It’s worse than that. Petty dictators at various state levels are conducting wars on Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings in private homes. Good luck enforcing that one all you would-be Fidel Castros.
• For years I’ve been trying to tell all I know to exit Twitter and Facebook due to their spying on their customer base for financial gain, as well as political manipulation. Now it’s been admitted to in open testimony under oath before the Senate that Facebook does just that, even when you aren’t logged in. And the sheep will accept it, as long as they can cyber-brag about themselves or their family on the platform. There is a word for people like that – suckers.
• Too many establishment politicians, including Republicans, are in the bag for what is referred to as The Washington Swamp to think that President Trump ever will get a fair accounting of the legitimate votes in this election. And I’m not optimistic that the judicial system will be much help, either. I hope I’m wrong about this.

I went to my local borough council meeting Monday afternoon and caught a glimpse of the time-honored tradition of government sausage making.

This is sausage making in the figurative sense, of course, just as frivolous governmental spending is called pork, despite it not being literally porcine.

There is not universal agreement on the colorful line’s origin, but Otto von Bismarck often is credited with observing “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”

Were Otto alive today, he might feel compelled to add elections to the law-making category, as something that can cause sausage-manufacturing levels of disgust under close inspection.

My purpose in attending the Monday meeting was to register complaints about the decline of behavior in my neighborhood.

We have had un-inspected, likely unregistered, vehicles roaming freely on the streets for more than a year. Police say they can’t catch them in the act, so . . .

In recent months, visitors to a young neighbor have mistaken our quiet residential street for a burnout box at the local dragstrip. I like auto racing in general, just not on the street in front of my house.

Dog owner neighbors, who are supposed to be the brains of the human-canine partnership, can’t seem to understand that if your dogs bark every single time they are let out, perhaps the owner should accompany them at 11 p.m., midnight, or later. Maybe at 7 a.m., too.

Those same neighbors felt entitled to erect a basketball hoop that protrudes over the alley, making the garbage trucks do a heavy-equipment limbo to get past weekly. Snow plowing should be similarly, unnecessarily, difficult.

Add in people parking directly across from each other on a street that should have parking on just one side, the cretins who insist on raking leaves onto the streets despite written instructions from the borough to leave them on the curb, and the soon-to-be-here winter tradition of parking in front of a neighbor’s house ahead of a snowstorm, then engaging all-wheel drive, smashing through the piled snow and slinking back in front of the offending person’s house, where the street has been plowed clean because nothing was parked there.

Being altogether traditional, I called the borough secretary in advance of the meeting to express my desire to speak, was put on the agenda, and got my allotted three minutes to vent.

Were I more contemporary, I’d have just stashed piles of bricks near the borough building, rounded up some mindless drones and slipped a few bucks into their pathetic hands to hurl those bricks indiscriminately, stormed the meeting, and claimed economic oppression, racism, elitism and the like.

I hung around to observe things after saying my piece Monday, and getting backup from one council member on the dog matter, and from the fire chief on the matter of his vehicles not being able to pass the streets with cars inexplicably parked on both sides and directly across from each other.

After the meeting, a guy with whom I’ve had a passing acquaintance for years, lamented the decline of the borough in terms of behavior by the citizenry.

But back to sausage making.

A borough, unlike the Federal Government, can’t just run a deficit, so budgets must be balanced. Toward that end, a proposed two-mill increase on property taxes was ratcheted up to three mills. What the heck, as long as we’re here and we’re in a raising mood, let’s do it.

Here’s where journalists get to have fun.

It’s a one-mill increase over the lower proposal, but it’s a full 50-percent higher than the alternative two-mill increase. And doesn’t 50-percent sound a lot more scary than one mill more?

There was an ongoing discussion as I left the adjourned meeting about labeling it a 20-percent overall tax increase, based on what was thought to be a current 15-mill levy increasing to 18 mills. Three mills is one-fifth of 15 mills, or 20 percent. Again 20 percent sounds like a lot more than three mills.

But the real sausage making came on the matter of handing over the mandated contribution to the county transit authority to make sure public transportation buses will run through the borough next year.

There is a demand by the authority for an increase of a bit more than $400, but several members, citing the federal money being rained on such authorities, as well as what were characterized as managerial pay grabs at said authority, quickly inspired mass sentiment to tell the the authority to take their buses and shove them where governmental subsidies don’t shine.

A vote was taken and the money would not be given. No buses for us.

That decision lasted for a few more agenda items before the matter was revisited by a disturbed council president. She and the borough solicitor implored the council to consider the elderly who are dependent on public transportation to buy groceries, visit doctors and the like.

They had valid points. But, on principle, so did the people in favor of denying more tribute to the transit authority.

In the end, another vote was taken and the suitably shamed naysayers relented. The money will be sent; the buses will continue to traverse the borough.

Sausage sandwiches all around.

If only rectifying the shortcomings of the presidential election were that easy.

(NOTE: This is a re-posting of an initial post giving some context that will save you from needing to toggle back to the beginning of the blog)

Having spent 35 years in journalism full-time and three years or so as a freelancer, I find I still have a lot to say.

But dealing with the organization that ran my freelance work became more than a little fatiguing mentally.

So, I’m out of there and on to this site. It’s not a desperate attempt to make money. Quite on the contrary it is free, which critics would say closely approximates the worth of the content.

I don’t care. And that brings me to the next point. Feel free to like or dislike what I write, just don’t expect me to eagerly await feedback. Taking a page from the likes of Zuck or Bezos, there is no contact system on this site.

If you are interested, feel free to read. If not, feel free to move on to more productive pursuits.

Back in the day when I worked at my local newspaper, there was a particularly obnoxious reporter and, yes, he was and probably still is a liberal, who thought it was his right to be nasty to anyone he happened across.

I guess he’d gone though life never having stopped a fist with his face, until the night when he had a date with reality in that newsroom.

Sadly for him, he pushed the wrong guy too hard. I’m sorry I didn’t witness it firsthand, but I got the story from enough fellow journalists at the place who did see it to give the story credence.

Mr. Personality Reporter had given a particularly hard time to a copy editor. That editor, at the end of his shift, exited the building, walked down the street to a parking garage, climbed a few levels of steps and supposedly got to his car before deciding to go back and give Mr. Personality Reporter a strong dose of physical perspective.

Upon arriving back in the newsroom, Mr. Righteous Editor rained blows on Mr. Personality Reporter, who was quoted as observing pithily “I can’t believe this is happening!” as he turtled on the floor.

I cannot state this as fact, but I suspect bystanders felt the obligation to stop it, just not too quickly.

I can say I had similar emotions when, as part of my duty as a union chapel chairman I was in a meeting with a fellow sports writer and the editor of the newspaper.

My union brother had gotten the press started late due to an overwhelming load of local sports and a short-handed staffing situation. He insisted the overall editor had told him to run late if necessary, but get the results into the paper.

That editor maintained just the opposite – insisting he’d advised to be sure the press ran on time and leave news out if necessary.

So, as we sat in the editor’s office the next afternoon and this blatant disagreement over what had been said was put on the table, my guy jumped up, slammed both palms on the editor’s desk and said the editor was a liar, with a few colorful adjectives strung together before liar.

The editor – yes, another liberal – looked like he needed an underwear change. In the second or so this transpired I found myself doing some quick calculations.

If my guy went over the desk and grabbed the editor, I probably needed to attempt to intervene. But how quickly?

Fortunately for the editor, my fellow sports writer, and maybe even me, it didn’t get physical. My guy instead kept making things worse verbally. When told he’d be suspended for a week without pay, he screamed, “Make it two.”

These stories come to mind as we get pleas for civility from Joe Biden and his sycophants in the public and also the left-leaning media.

Of course it is Biden who on more than one occasion in recent years has said he’d liked to have taken Trump behind a high school gym and “beat the hell out of” him.

What are you doing tomorrow, Joe? I’d like to see how that would go.

More recently, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went on radio to say if he wasn’t holding his post that allows him to be his state’s lockdown king “I would have decked him (Trump)” for perceived slights on the Cuomo family with stereotypical Italian slurs.

An Italian settling a verbal spat with violence is, of course, the stereotypical stuff of so many mob movies and television shows, Andrew.

So, Cuomo, resign your governor job for a day. You could win it back in a heartbeat in true blue New York. Go punch Trump instead of just making a show of talking about it.

Maybe you and Biden can share an Uber on the way to the brawl.

Something I’ve learned from growing up in various neighborhoods, some that weren’t the best then and have gone severely downhill since, is the person you need to worry about is the one who just walks up and punches you in the face. The people who flap their gums about what they’re going to do, seldom progress past the verbal stage.

When Biden muses that if he just was back in high school, or Cuomo says he would do it if only he weren’t the governor, those are just convenient conditionals for a couple of guys long on talk and short on action.

And there is a lot of that going around on the political left.

Open memo to Democrats incessantly harping on who won the popular vote in this or other presidential elections and bemoaning the Electoral College setup: If you don’t like it, change the Constitution.

And here’s how you would do that. First, you would need two-thirds of Congress to pass a proposed amendment. Good luck getting that in the Senate, or even the House of Representatives.

If somehow Democrats might manage that super majority, they would then move on to needing three-quarters of state legislatures or special ratifying conventions in states to approve the change.

Even the Masters of Ballot Harvesting likely would find the amendment process too daunting.

But why change it in the first place? Because the Democrats want to be able to control the nation by dominating politics in just two states – New York and California.

It’s not enough that California with 55 electoral votes and New York with 29, means in the typical election that the Democratic candidate starts with almost one-third of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win.

The Democrats want to scrap the electoral system and gain even more advantage from dominating the popular vote in those two states.

That supposed 5-million edge in the popular vote for Biden that is trumpeted endlessly by liberals, well that is all accounted for by California and New York. That leaves 48 other states (forget the tiny voting monolith that is the District of Columbia) who either went for President Trump or Biden by much smaller margins.

Our Founding Fathers foresaw this cramming of population into a few states as having the potential to disproportionately sway national outcomes and so they put in provisions that gave weight to the other states, both in terms of the Electoral College and the Senate having two members per state, no matter the population of that state.

The House of Representatives is reserved for population-proportional membership.

Remember, this is the UNITED STATES of America. We have a federal government, whose powers intentionally are to be limited, with the majority of powers supposed to be reserved for states.

Despite the pap spewed by too many that the U.S. is a homogeneous place, people in, say, North Dakota, or rural Pennsylvania, generally are very different in terms of thought process and custom from those in urban California or New York.

Democrats love to claim to celebrate diversity, but in the case of national politics, they want conservatives and/or Republicans to have no real say in the course of the nation.

Realizing their difficulty in ramming through an amendment to the Constitution, Democrats are, in their typical backdoor fashion, looking to take the easy route should they control the Senate, too, by decreeing statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Voila, four more senators virtually guaranteed to be Democrats. Good luck, Republicans, ever being able again to post a Senate majority.

The United States’ two-party system can survive a Biden presidency as long as the Senate control remains with the Republicans. That puts incredible significance on two Senate runoff elections in Georgia.

If somehow the Democrats win both runoffs, forging a tie in the Senate, then the tie-breaking vote goes to the sitting vice president, which figures to be a Democrat for the next four years.

Then it’s hello D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood and goodbye checks and balances in the federal government – first the executive and legislative branches will be under one-party control and, eventually, the judicial will tilt left be it by immediate Supreme Court packing, or eventual loading up with liberal judges appointed by Democratic presidents and confirmed by Democratic-controlled Senates.

Simply put, the United States as we know it has come to an existential crossroads, with two runoff elections in Georgia likely the last line of defense.