Hammered
30/10/22 05:36
What's this I'm hearing about the 101st Airborne amassing troops in Eastern Europe? I've seen a video of them unloading this or that piece of equipment in some god-forsaken shithole in one of the countries bordering Russia. Maybe it's a training film; who the hell knows? You can bet your bottom dollar that our government wants us to see that video, and it's not for nothing. Is this a frog in the boiling water scenario? Are they trying to get us comfortable with the prospects of waging a ground war against Russia? Leave it to Bumbles Biden to get our boys killed in some territorial skirmish in which we have no business. It's just another fucking wag-the-dog bullshit brought to you by Bumbkles Biden and his democrat party. Just when you thought they hadn't done enough damage.
The mid-term elections are two weeks from tomorrow if my math is correct. We're taking back our country, or we will get started down that path. If we can put the kibosh on dollars spent to wage this war, then that would be good. That is what Congress does. Right? The president can't spend a dime. It all has to be approved by Congress before one peso gets expended. When you control the purse strings, you own it all. We'll see what backbone looks like if and when that time comes. Will the Republican party roll over like they always have done in the past? Will they be shamed into approving this or that expenditure to fund leftist causes by one of the weakest presidents in the history of our great republic?
I reached out to my peeps back home and asked how they felt about Congressman Lee Zeldin and his prospects of beating Kathy Hochel for the governorship in New York when Election Day rolls around. I haven't heard back from everybody, so that's concerning. One of my peeps said something about Zeldin being against women's rights, so I took that to be a no-vote for her. This is the power of negative ads, I suspect. If you say something often enough, people will come to believe it to be true. I'm guessing this has something to do with abortion rights. You know, my body-my choice bullshit. The Democrats have been beating that drum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade a few months back. Abortions are available on demand in New York, just so you know. Should I remind her of that?
It looks like we're in for a bit of rain today. Spending some time squaring things away in our garage might be a good day. I've biked the last seven or eight days, so I'll not spend a minute lamenting not getting a bike ride in. The missus will be doing her thing, so I'll have free rein to do as I please. It is something that needs to be done, so there's that. If I'm smart about it, I'll get together a few things I can bring to the town recycling center tomorrow. The weather is still warm enough this time of year, so I can get about here and there without wearing gloves to keep my hands warm. That all changes when November arrives in a week. The last thing I want is to get caught behind the eight-ball when the colder weather rolls in. It's harder to do everything when staying warm is your top priority.
My talk radio guy is talking this morning about the January 6th committee's subpoenaing of Trump. Nobody can say they didn't see this coming; some say they should have done it sooner. Trump can probably run out the clock here, assuming the Republicans take back Congress in a couple of weeks. This subject goes down a rabbit hole no matter how you slice it. Trump will never show up, and that will be the end of it. He's said something about wanting to speak to the Committee and the American people via televised hearings, but the Committee wants none of that. They will not allow Trump to expose their committee for the kangaroo court that it is. Anyway, I don't need to listen to something I know is going nowhere, so I'll spend my time putting down a few thoughts in this journal here instead.
I watched the debate last night between Governor DeSantis and Charlie Crist. It was a pretty good debate by most standards. There was plenty of give and take, and the moderator did an excellent job of asking good questions. Crist was pretty good on his feet and, of the two on the stage, I'd have to say that Crist was the more comfortable of the two candidates. That surprised me. DeSantis is fabulously successful as Governor and has a record that most politicians would love to have. He should have been uber-comfortable, but he looked a little uptight, a little defensive, and a bit thin-skinned. At one point, he referred to Crist as an "old donkey," which I thought was not a particularly good look. The "donkey" thing was a reference to his political party, so that's fine. The "old" thing was a reference to his age, which was just not very nice and probably didn't play well on the televisions across the fruited plains of Florida, where the average age of Florida's citizens is above 50.
I wondered how DeSantis would take this act of his on the road should he run for president in 2024. If he's wound a little too tight on a stage in a state where he reigns supreme, what will happen when he's out of his element? It's an Achilles heel, to be sure. One or more of his opponents will bait him, and we'll see something akin to road rage on the debate stage if he doesn't figure all of this out beforehand. Maybe that explains why he lags behind Trump considerably in the polls. Anyway, tonight's debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Fetterman will have some mechanical assistance due to his recent stroke, so we'll have to see how that works out. His stroke aside, his policies are atrocious, which will only help Oz put the final nail in his coffin. What I've seen from Oz thus far tells me that he is up to the task of doing just that.
I was telling the missus last night that I can't believe that many people in Pennsylvania are willing to vote for a guy like Fetterman, who has stated publicly that he wants to release murderers from jail and legalize drugs, amongst other things. Throw in the fact that the very same guy has had a stroke, and it's pretty likely that he'll not be able to perform his duties as Senator, and his wife will more than likely be tagged to complete his six-year term, and you have a shitstorm on your hands. His wife is even more of a whack job than he is. Maybe that's what Pennsylvanians want for their next Senator. Who am I to question their political preferences? Will the debate make a difference? I think people's preferences are pretty much baked-in at this point, and early voting has already been underway for maybe a week or more. Maybe they could give two shits about Fetterman. Perhaps it's just about giving Biden one more rubber stamp.
I saw a clip on Twitter of an MSNBC person holding a town hall with 10-12 Trump supporters from Western Pennsylvania. She asked them any number of questions about January 6th and related subjects. To a person, they all pushed back against the narrative being pushed by the MSNBC person. They said that the so-called insurrection was no different than what they saw from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots month after month. Yet, not one BLM rioter had been held responsible.
In contrast, the January 6th trespassers (my word, not theirs) were being held in solitary confinement for an indeterminant amount of time and often without the benefit of bail or access to family members. I was surprised that MSNBC allowed this clip to get out of the studio. It certainly did not serve their interests well, so you have to wonder. Like their liberal partners in the media, they are all in for the liberal establishment and would rather slit their wrists before allowing a different narrative to go on air. Maybe we should give credit where credit is due?
We received no fewer than a half dozen e-mails from Mrs. G yesterday. Her facility was upgrading something, and Mrs. G's unit would be without electricity for the better part of four hours. As I sit here this morning, I'm not sure why Mrs. G felt the need to provide us with updates. I don't think she thought we were somehow concerned for her well-being during the upgrade, so there's that. From our point of view, this upgrade, or whatever they were doing, presented itself as nothing more than a slight inconvenience. When the missus spoke to her last night, Mrs. G expressed her appreciation that no fewer than a dozen or so employees of her facility stopped in during the day to make sure that she was doing okay. Was that Mrs. G's roundabout way of telling us that we should have, at a minimum, responded to her e-mails? We didn't, of course, and we didn't because we didn't think it was a big deal.
I don't know why I don't just take these things at face value. See it for what it is. See things for what they are. Mrs. G was understandably appreciative of the fact that the people who run her joint think enough of her and her fellow lodgers to check in with them when they do these kinds of things. It makes perfect sense to me. They didn't have to check in on her, so the fact that they did had to be reassuring to her and others in her facility. When you get up there in years, even the slightest change to a daily schedule can be disconcerting at best and problematic at worst. This is the kind of care and concern you would expect a halfway-decent facility to lavish on its tenants. Besides, who doesn't like to be doted on now and then when the going gets rough? Mrs. G is no exception.
I was in Walmart the other day to pick up a few things. I was looking specifically for plastic spoons. I've bought spoons there before and never thought too much of it. There was something about the price of the spoons that I was looking at that caught my attention. I'd never hesitated before when buying the 100-count box of plastic spoons, but when I noticed that Walmart wanted $7.86 for a box of the spoons, it struck me as just too expensive. Did I really need them that much? The missus said something to me recently about spoons at the Dollar store that seemed reasonably priced. Is that why I hesitated? I usually toss them in the basket when I'm there to buy them, but this time was different. Maybe this is how your garden variety consumer feels these days when they have to choose between buying a nice roast for the family and a day-old rotisserie chicken from beneath the heat lamps. I mean, who pays close to $8 for a box of 100 plastic spoons?
Did anyone see the debate in Pennsylvania between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz last night? It was less of a debate and more of a train wreck if you were honest with yourself about John Fetterman's performance. We all know that John is recovering from a stroke that he suffered some months ago, and we certainly wish him a speedy recovery, but what we saw last night was disturbing. He began the debate with this: "Goodnight, everybody." It was all downhill from there. He ended the debate by hollering across the dais at Dr. Oz while Dr. Oz was giving his closing statement, and the moderators had to remind him that it was the doctor's turn to give his closing statement. It was almost as though Fetterman wasn't clear in his mind about where he was in the debate. He'd lost his place, and he was going to get his two cents in come hell or high water.
The moderators put up a quote from Fetterman where he had called for the end of fracking in Pennsylvania back in 2018, and they asked Fetterman how that squared with his assertion during the debate that he now supports fracking. Fetterman started babbling about his support for fracking while ignoring the apparent hypocrisy pointed out by the moderators. I always felt bad for Fetterman when the moderators asked him a question and told him that he had sixty seconds. He never needed sixty seconds because his canned responses never lasted more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds was probably more than what his handlers wanted him to give. I wondered aloud during the debate as to whether or not the moderators were trying to provide Fetterman with a break by not asking him about crime in Philadelphia. Fetterman has a history of voting to release criminals from jail, so I found it astounding that they didn't ask about it. After all was said and done, the consensus was that Fetterman's family and handlers had no business letting him get on the stage with Dr. Oz. It was malpractice of the worst kind. If Dr. Oz was neck and neck with Fetterman going into the debate, no one in their right mind after the debate thought that sending John Fetterman to Washington as a Senator to represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was a good idea. More to the point, most observers walked away thinking that Fetterman wasn't up to the job and, perhaps more importantly, that he needed more time to recover if he were ever to recover more fully.
I tweeted something to the effect that the recent spate of debates between democrats and republicans was looking more like a replay of the Nuremberg trials than anything else. To a person, the democrats defended Joey Bumbles Biden, and, worse yet, they voted for every disaster of a policy that came out of Biden's White House. We know this about the democrats. They never break ranks. This time, we'll see many summarily tossed out of office on their ear for their political mischief. We're going to see democrats that have held office for decades packing their bags after losing to their republican challengers. And it's not just Congressmen and Senators. We're going to see democrats lose governorships in deep blue states to their republican counterparts. The repudiation of the democrats and Joe Bumbles Biden will be about as complete as we've seen in the last hundred years.
In more good news yesterday, the New York Supreme Court directed New York City to reinstate every last employee who had ever been fired due to not taking the jab. Furthermore, they instructed the City to give the impacted employees back pay. They said what we've been saying all along: The jab neither protects you from contracting the virus nor does it prevent you from transmitting it to others. That is the science, whether you choose to believe it or not. That is not what you heard from the CDC for months, so one would hope that some of these ass clowns might be held criminally responsible. What was the get-the-jab push all about? What connection, if any, is there between people who got the jab and people who died as a result of getting the jab? Every day we hear one or more stories about someone dropping dead, and you know it has something to do with the vaccine. The media may not want to make the connection, but we know better.
So, it looks like this Elon Musk thing with Twitter is going to go down. All the back and forth over these past many months was just noise. He posted a video on Twitter yesterday where he was taped carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters. And then there was something about "letting that sink in" which came from where I'm not sure. Was it a metaphor for something? I'm just a simple man, so if I'm not getting it, then it is what it is. I was happy to see him going in the company's front door that cost him some $5 billion. I like Twitter, so if Musk can tweak it around the edges and make it a better platform for free speech, then I'll be singing his praises. To the extent that he's an agent of the deep state and he's just there to do the bidding of the leftists, I'll turn a blind eye to the bullshit, much like I'm already doing these days.
Did I tell you I took a spill on my bike the other day? It was a very misty and foggy day down by the ocean, and I had difficulty seeing clearly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the state was repaving this particular section of the highway, and I was trying to stay well off to the side of the road and out of traffic. When I tried getting back on the paved section of the roadway, my tire caught the lip of the new pavement, and down I went. Thankfully, there was no traffic on the road where I fell. That might have put me in a bad spot had I fallen in front of a vehicle. I fell hard, and it was jarring. I almost felt like I had been thrown to the ground. It happened so quickly. I was fully aware of my predicament and was almost thankful that there were no witnesses. I got to my feet as quickly as I could to make sure that I was 1) capable of getting back on my feet and 2) making sure that I hadn't broken something when I fell. I scraped my knee and elbow pretty well, and I seemed to have bruised a rib or two, but I was otherwise fine. I really do need to be more careful.
I'm thinking of passing on the flu shot when I see my doctor in a few weeks. I don't trust these bastards in the medical community as far as I can throw them. I wouldn't put it past them to sneak a Covid vaccine shot in when they give me my usual annual flu shot. I think Pfizer has a dual-use jab so that it would be one stick in the arm, and I wouldn't be any the wiser. These bastards are in bed with the Biden Administration, so skullduggery is the name of the game. Everything is done under the cloak of darkness, and any financial gain goes to Big Pharma and those who enable Big Pharma (Biden.) How many fucking beach houses do Bumbles and his extended crime family need? What's next? Safe deposit boxes stuffed with cash in a safe deposit box in Switzerland? Anyway, I'll take my chances with the flu. I've had it before, and I know it's not fun, but I'll power through, as Hillary Clinton loves to say.
Trump has a rally scheduled in Pennsylvania on November 5th, just days before Election Day on November 8th. I know that Trump has endorsed Dr. Oz in the Senate race, but I'm not sure if he's endorsed the gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano. It's good to see him stepping into the fray to support these two guys, and since everything is on the margins these days, every little bit helps. Oz was neck in neck with Fetterman in the polls before the crazy debate the other night, so Oz's standing in the polls might look very different when Trump arrives in town. I'm guessing better but don't quote me. It can't be any worse, right? Pennsylvania has always been Trump country, so how anyone in that state (it's a Commonwealth) can support someone like Fetterman, who advocates for open borders, releasing criminals from jail, shutting down fracking activities in the state, etc., I'll never know. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Now we're hearing from the Secretary of State's office in Pennsylvania that the results from Election Day will likely not be available on Election night. We're also told that they mailed some 250k ballots out the door in error. I think the recipients of those ballots were ineligible to vote for one reason or another, so clearly, this is a problem. This is shaping up to be one of those stolen elections we heard so much about in 2020. They will take a tally of the Election Day votes, gauge how many votes Fetterman needs to win, and whip those ballots up out of thin air. Voila! We have a winner, they'll declare with a straight face. Maybe it won't matter if the tsunami of a red wave we're all expecting sweeps all of the republicans across our fruited plains into office. We'll have control of the Senate and the House. Read my lips: We're not tolerating stolen elections anymore, regardless of the overall outcome. Get on this and get on this now, Dr. Oz. This is your election for the taking.
I hear reports of a diesel gas shortage here and there. I think we have less than a month's supply left. What I'm not hearing are the alarm bells going off anywhere. Is this not a call to General Quarters if you've ever heard one? Everything comes to a grinding halt without diesel fuel. Someone from the Biden Administration was asked this question in a daily presser yesterday, and his response was anything but reassuring. He had no answers, of course, and only acknowledged that we had a shared responsibility to our European partners to ensure that their citizens did not suffer due to a shortage of diesel. So, it sounds like we're exporting our energy supplies to Europe while leaving our citizenry in the lurch. Who misses Trump's America First policies? Raise your fucking hands! And then this fool of a vice president in the United States goes on stage and starts talking about how she loves electric school buses. You can't make this shit up.
This is eerily reminiscent, of course, of the shortages of baby food and Tampons that we've experienced here in the United States over the last twelve months or more thanks to the ineptitude of the Biden Administration. I'm not sure if this diesel shortage thing extends to heating oil that we here in the Northeast need or not, but I don't need to tell you how catastrophic that would be if people can't heat their homes. I also don't need to remind you what this would mean to supply chains and potential food shortages. As I've said before, I'm kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood. I can heat my home with wood if push comes to shove, but I have no wood, so I'm up the fucking creek without a paddle. I should probably go to the store today to get ahead of this runaway train coming down the tracks. Do you remember how crazy it was going food shopping during the early days of Covid? This is going to be worse. Far worse. Brace yourselves.
There is such a negative vibe in the air these days. You can feel it. People are losing their asses in their 401k's, governments across the globe are threatening the use of nuclear weapons, no one is happy about what they're seeing coming out of our nation's capitol, our borders are open for all the world's desperate and often criminal elements to come into our country, our nation's judicial system has been co-opted by the Biden Administration and the democrat party, inflation is making it more and more difficult for parents to feed their families, gas prices are lower. Still, they will be going up again after the midterm elections, and nobody thinks that the Biden Administration gives a good fuck for the well-being of the American people. Our only hope is that we can take back control of our government by winning majorities in the House and the Senate ten days from now. We have to start somewhere. Right?
Did I mention that I didn't have a scratch on my new biking jacket when I fell off my bike the other day? I suffered a nasty abrasion on my elbow, but you'd never guess that by looking at the pristine condition of my coat. I must have friends in high places that I don't know about. It was more than weird. I showed the missus, and she was as mystified as was I. She turned the coat over and over, turned it inside out and outside in, and it was as good as new. I didn't know what to make of it, and I still don't. I think I looked at my jacket when I got up off the ground after the fall, and I think I remember thinking that it was all good because there wasn't so much as a scrape on my jacket. I mean, it's nothing but a light nylon jacket, so I half expected to see something, anything. Notta. I was even more surprised when I looked at the abrasion on my arm once I got my jacket off. It was a real WTF moment.
It's worth remembering in this upcoming election that any number of these republican candidates on the ballot are so-called MAGA-endorsed candidates. That is to say; they have all been endorsed by Trump even though the republican party might have chosen candidates who they thought might have had an easier chance of beating their Democratic opponents. But it gets better. Democrats got the crazy idea that voting for these so-called MAGA candidates in the primary would ensure that the democrat in the race would prevail on Election Day, so they changed their party affiliation in the primaries just long enough to cast their vote for the MAGA candidate. That calculus was largely incorrect if we're to believe the polls. Republicans look like they are on the precipice of taking the House and the Senate and probably a few governorships, too, thanks to the democrats who help put them over the top in the primaries. If it all comes to fruition, the republicans owe the democrats a debt of gratitude. Strange bedfellows, no?
I'm waking up to a cold morning here on the seacoast of New Hampshire. It's a frosty 31 degrees out-of-doors, the first morning of the Fall season, where the temperatures have fallen below freezing. I don't have the heat on in the house, although I probably should. I just put on a few more layers and hope that that will do the trick. If I could type this blog stuff while wearing gloves, I would. I do have a hat on, so that's helping a bit. I haven't looked at the forecast, but I'm guessing it will be seasonably comfortable enough to do a little work outdoors today. I have leaves to rake, and I could probably take a few things to the local recycling center. The missus is off to see a friend in Massachusetts today, so I'll be on my own. That should help me stay focused on the tasks at hand. How much I get done remains to be seen.
When I heard this story in the news about Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House), I thought to myself, here's the October surprise we've all been waiting for. Paul Pelosi ended up in the hospital after being brutalized with a hammer by someone who broke into his home in a shi-shi section of SanFransicko. Nancy was in Washington, DC, at the time, so no worries there. I fully expected to hear the left-wing media roll out the narrative that White Supremacists are now attacking any of our so-called institutions in the days leading up to the mid-term election on November 8th. All they needed to prove their absurd allegations would indeed be found in the intruder's social media posts and his online historical records. An attack on the husband of the beloved Speaker of the House was an attack on Nancy herself. This should be enough to rile up the democratic base to get them to the polls and push back on the Republican Tsunami at the polls on November 8th.
It turns out that this alleged intruder was neither a Trump supporter nor a Nazi-in-waiting. I find the report that the intruder came into the Pelosi household asking where he could find "Nancy" to be a bit of a stretch. Are we to assume that the intruder, had he found her home at the time, would have beaten Nancy to within an inch of her life in much the same way that he did to her husband, Paul? I'm not so sure. I'm not even convinced that this so-called intruder was an intruder at all. Was he invited into the Pelosi home? Why did Paul Pelosi refer to him as a "friend" when he called the police sometime after 2 am? The two men were reportedly in their underwear when the police arrived. Wat? Was this a Tinder date gone wrong? Thus far, I've not seen the investigators rolling over and regurgitating the Democrat's preferred narrative. Good for them.
There are more questions than answers as I sit here some 48 hours after the incident at the Pelosi's. That's fine. These things take time to play out. If I had to guess, I'd think that Nancy wants to put the kibosh on this story. She may not want certain things in the media that would cast a sordid pall over the reputation she has spent decades constructing. She is about to lose her position as Speaker of the House and will more than likely return to live out her days with her husband in Sanfransicko. The unraveling of her husband's private life daily in the national media would be more than she could bear. It's bad enough that Paul Pelosi has a long and public history of driving while drunk, but same-sex Tinder trysts, if true, are a bird of an entirely different color. It's no wonder she's three sheets to the wind herself whenever we see her speaking in public these days. God only knows what that looks like behind closed doors.
I got back on my bike yesterday after taking a fall a few days back. I took a day or two off to give my bruised ribs a break, which was probably a good idea. Whenever the missus asks me how I'm feeling, and I think she's asking specifically about my ribs, I tell her it's all good. Healing is an incremental process, and I accept that. If it hurts today, I expect it will hurt less tomorrow, and so on and so forth. I think the missus sees this sort of thing as something you go to get fixed, like the brakes on your car. That might explain why she gets so bent out of shape at the slightest mishap or misstep. She worries that the so-called elixir she needs won't be available, and things will go from bad to worse. I've told her repeatedly that's not how it works, but she can be her worst enemy, so I'm done sounding like a broken record.
The next time the Ev man is over for a visit, we'll need to sit down and order our Thanksgiving meal from Whole Foods. We did this with Whole Foods last Thanksgiving, and it worked well. There were a few organizational glitches here and there, but we're a forgiving bunch, so we'll be back again this year. It will give the lot of us something to look forward to after a year that has been topsy-turvy. Not so much for our family, but in general, I would say. We do have a lot to be thankful for, so that is what we intend to celebrate on Thanksgiving this year. With the prices of everything being up over last year, we'll be grateful to be able to put a turkey on our table. God willing, we'll donate or two so another less fortunate family might have an equally delicious meal on Thanksgiving. How we find that less fortunate family remains to be seen.
As I close out another week in this here blog, I'll be interested to see what we have for talking-head shows this fine Sunday morning. I want to be sipping some liberal tears as they come on whining about how losing the Senate and the House is going to be the end of our democracy here in the United States. I'll be listening to hear how many times they use the word "extremists." Election Day hasn't even arrived, and they are sounding a lot like election deniers. How sweet it is. Maybe they should have listened more carefully to the millions of Trump supporters who have been talking about stolen elections since 2020. It's all coming back around to bite them in the butt, and I couldn't be happier. We still need to close the deal on Election Day or earlier if your state has early voting, so get out to the polls and let's git er done.
The mid-term elections are two weeks from tomorrow if my math is correct. We're taking back our country, or we will get started down that path. If we can put the kibosh on dollars spent to wage this war, then that would be good. That is what Congress does. Right? The president can't spend a dime. It all has to be approved by Congress before one peso gets expended. When you control the purse strings, you own it all. We'll see what backbone looks like if and when that time comes. Will the Republican party roll over like they always have done in the past? Will they be shamed into approving this or that expenditure to fund leftist causes by one of the weakest presidents in the history of our great republic?
I reached out to my peeps back home and asked how they felt about Congressman Lee Zeldin and his prospects of beating Kathy Hochel for the governorship in New York when Election Day rolls around. I haven't heard back from everybody, so that's concerning. One of my peeps said something about Zeldin being against women's rights, so I took that to be a no-vote for her. This is the power of negative ads, I suspect. If you say something often enough, people will come to believe it to be true. I'm guessing this has something to do with abortion rights. You know, my body-my choice bullshit. The Democrats have been beating that drum since the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade a few months back. Abortions are available on demand in New York, just so you know. Should I remind her of that?
It looks like we're in for a bit of rain today. Spending some time squaring things away in our garage might be a good day. I've biked the last seven or eight days, so I'll not spend a minute lamenting not getting a bike ride in. The missus will be doing her thing, so I'll have free rein to do as I please. It is something that needs to be done, so there's that. If I'm smart about it, I'll get together a few things I can bring to the town recycling center tomorrow. The weather is still warm enough this time of year, so I can get about here and there without wearing gloves to keep my hands warm. That all changes when November arrives in a week. The last thing I want is to get caught behind the eight-ball when the colder weather rolls in. It's harder to do everything when staying warm is your top priority.
My talk radio guy is talking this morning about the January 6th committee's subpoenaing of Trump. Nobody can say they didn't see this coming; some say they should have done it sooner. Trump can probably run out the clock here, assuming the Republicans take back Congress in a couple of weeks. This subject goes down a rabbit hole no matter how you slice it. Trump will never show up, and that will be the end of it. He's said something about wanting to speak to the Committee and the American people via televised hearings, but the Committee wants none of that. They will not allow Trump to expose their committee for the kangaroo court that it is. Anyway, I don't need to listen to something I know is going nowhere, so I'll spend my time putting down a few thoughts in this journal here instead.
I watched the debate last night between Governor DeSantis and Charlie Crist. It was a pretty good debate by most standards. There was plenty of give and take, and the moderator did an excellent job of asking good questions. Crist was pretty good on his feet and, of the two on the stage, I'd have to say that Crist was the more comfortable of the two candidates. That surprised me. DeSantis is fabulously successful as Governor and has a record that most politicians would love to have. He should have been uber-comfortable, but he looked a little uptight, a little defensive, and a bit thin-skinned. At one point, he referred to Crist as an "old donkey," which I thought was not a particularly good look. The "donkey" thing was a reference to his political party, so that's fine. The "old" thing was a reference to his age, which was just not very nice and probably didn't play well on the televisions across the fruited plains of Florida, where the average age of Florida's citizens is above 50.
I wondered how DeSantis would take this act of his on the road should he run for president in 2024. If he's wound a little too tight on a stage in a state where he reigns supreme, what will happen when he's out of his element? It's an Achilles heel, to be sure. One or more of his opponents will bait him, and we'll see something akin to road rage on the debate stage if he doesn't figure all of this out beforehand. Maybe that explains why he lags behind Trump considerably in the polls. Anyway, tonight's debate between Dr. Oz and Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Fetterman will have some mechanical assistance due to his recent stroke, so we'll have to see how that works out. His stroke aside, his policies are atrocious, which will only help Oz put the final nail in his coffin. What I've seen from Oz thus far tells me that he is up to the task of doing just that.
I was telling the missus last night that I can't believe that many people in Pennsylvania are willing to vote for a guy like Fetterman, who has stated publicly that he wants to release murderers from jail and legalize drugs, amongst other things. Throw in the fact that the very same guy has had a stroke, and it's pretty likely that he'll not be able to perform his duties as Senator, and his wife will more than likely be tagged to complete his six-year term, and you have a shitstorm on your hands. His wife is even more of a whack job than he is. Maybe that's what Pennsylvanians want for their next Senator. Who am I to question their political preferences? Will the debate make a difference? I think people's preferences are pretty much baked-in at this point, and early voting has already been underway for maybe a week or more. Maybe they could give two shits about Fetterman. Perhaps it's just about giving Biden one more rubber stamp.
I saw a clip on Twitter of an MSNBC person holding a town hall with 10-12 Trump supporters from Western Pennsylvania. She asked them any number of questions about January 6th and related subjects. To a person, they all pushed back against the narrative being pushed by the MSNBC person. They said that the so-called insurrection was no different than what they saw from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots month after month. Yet, not one BLM rioter had been held responsible.
In contrast, the January 6th trespassers (my word, not theirs) were being held in solitary confinement for an indeterminant amount of time and often without the benefit of bail or access to family members. I was surprised that MSNBC allowed this clip to get out of the studio. It certainly did not serve their interests well, so you have to wonder. Like their liberal partners in the media, they are all in for the liberal establishment and would rather slit their wrists before allowing a different narrative to go on air. Maybe we should give credit where credit is due?
We received no fewer than a half dozen e-mails from Mrs. G yesterday. Her facility was upgrading something, and Mrs. G's unit would be without electricity for the better part of four hours. As I sit here this morning, I'm not sure why Mrs. G felt the need to provide us with updates. I don't think she thought we were somehow concerned for her well-being during the upgrade, so there's that. From our point of view, this upgrade, or whatever they were doing, presented itself as nothing more than a slight inconvenience. When the missus spoke to her last night, Mrs. G expressed her appreciation that no fewer than a dozen or so employees of her facility stopped in during the day to make sure that she was doing okay. Was that Mrs. G's roundabout way of telling us that we should have, at a minimum, responded to her e-mails? We didn't, of course, and we didn't because we didn't think it was a big deal.
I don't know why I don't just take these things at face value. See it for what it is. See things for what they are. Mrs. G was understandably appreciative of the fact that the people who run her joint think enough of her and her fellow lodgers to check in with them when they do these kinds of things. It makes perfect sense to me. They didn't have to check in on her, so the fact that they did had to be reassuring to her and others in her facility. When you get up there in years, even the slightest change to a daily schedule can be disconcerting at best and problematic at worst. This is the kind of care and concern you would expect a halfway-decent facility to lavish on its tenants. Besides, who doesn't like to be doted on now and then when the going gets rough? Mrs. G is no exception.
I was in Walmart the other day to pick up a few things. I was looking specifically for plastic spoons. I've bought spoons there before and never thought too much of it. There was something about the price of the spoons that I was looking at that caught my attention. I'd never hesitated before when buying the 100-count box of plastic spoons, but when I noticed that Walmart wanted $7.86 for a box of the spoons, it struck me as just too expensive. Did I really need them that much? The missus said something to me recently about spoons at the Dollar store that seemed reasonably priced. Is that why I hesitated? I usually toss them in the basket when I'm there to buy them, but this time was different. Maybe this is how your garden variety consumer feels these days when they have to choose between buying a nice roast for the family and a day-old rotisserie chicken from beneath the heat lamps. I mean, who pays close to $8 for a box of 100 plastic spoons?
Did anyone see the debate in Pennsylvania between John Fetterman and Dr. Oz last night? It was less of a debate and more of a train wreck if you were honest with yourself about John Fetterman's performance. We all know that John is recovering from a stroke that he suffered some months ago, and we certainly wish him a speedy recovery, but what we saw last night was disturbing. He began the debate with this: "Goodnight, everybody." It was all downhill from there. He ended the debate by hollering across the dais at Dr. Oz while Dr. Oz was giving his closing statement, and the moderators had to remind him that it was the doctor's turn to give his closing statement. It was almost as though Fetterman wasn't clear in his mind about where he was in the debate. He'd lost his place, and he was going to get his two cents in come hell or high water.
The moderators put up a quote from Fetterman where he had called for the end of fracking in Pennsylvania back in 2018, and they asked Fetterman how that squared with his assertion during the debate that he now supports fracking. Fetterman started babbling about his support for fracking while ignoring the apparent hypocrisy pointed out by the moderators. I always felt bad for Fetterman when the moderators asked him a question and told him that he had sixty seconds. He never needed sixty seconds because his canned responses never lasted more than ten seconds.
Ten seconds was probably more than what his handlers wanted him to give. I wondered aloud during the debate as to whether or not the moderators were trying to provide Fetterman with a break by not asking him about crime in Philadelphia. Fetterman has a history of voting to release criminals from jail, so I found it astounding that they didn't ask about it. After all was said and done, the consensus was that Fetterman's family and handlers had no business letting him get on the stage with Dr. Oz. It was malpractice of the worst kind. If Dr. Oz was neck and neck with Fetterman going into the debate, no one in their right mind after the debate thought that sending John Fetterman to Washington as a Senator to represent the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was a good idea. More to the point, most observers walked away thinking that Fetterman wasn't up to the job and, perhaps more importantly, that he needed more time to recover if he were ever to recover more fully.
I tweeted something to the effect that the recent spate of debates between democrats and republicans was looking more like a replay of the Nuremberg trials than anything else. To a person, the democrats defended Joey Bumbles Biden, and, worse yet, they voted for every disaster of a policy that came out of Biden's White House. We know this about the democrats. They never break ranks. This time, we'll see many summarily tossed out of office on their ear for their political mischief. We're going to see democrats that have held office for decades packing their bags after losing to their republican challengers. And it's not just Congressmen and Senators. We're going to see democrats lose governorships in deep blue states to their republican counterparts. The repudiation of the democrats and Joe Bumbles Biden will be about as complete as we've seen in the last hundred years.
In more good news yesterday, the New York Supreme Court directed New York City to reinstate every last employee who had ever been fired due to not taking the jab. Furthermore, they instructed the City to give the impacted employees back pay. They said what we've been saying all along: The jab neither protects you from contracting the virus nor does it prevent you from transmitting it to others. That is the science, whether you choose to believe it or not. That is not what you heard from the CDC for months, so one would hope that some of these ass clowns might be held criminally responsible. What was the get-the-jab push all about? What connection, if any, is there between people who got the jab and people who died as a result of getting the jab? Every day we hear one or more stories about someone dropping dead, and you know it has something to do with the vaccine. The media may not want to make the connection, but we know better.
So, it looks like this Elon Musk thing with Twitter is going to go down. All the back and forth over these past many months was just noise. He posted a video on Twitter yesterday where he was taped carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters. And then there was something about "letting that sink in" which came from where I'm not sure. Was it a metaphor for something? I'm just a simple man, so if I'm not getting it, then it is what it is. I was happy to see him going in the company's front door that cost him some $5 billion. I like Twitter, so if Musk can tweak it around the edges and make it a better platform for free speech, then I'll be singing his praises. To the extent that he's an agent of the deep state and he's just there to do the bidding of the leftists, I'll turn a blind eye to the bullshit, much like I'm already doing these days.
Did I tell you I took a spill on my bike the other day? It was a very misty and foggy day down by the ocean, and I had difficulty seeing clearly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the state was repaving this particular section of the highway, and I was trying to stay well off to the side of the road and out of traffic. When I tried getting back on the paved section of the roadway, my tire caught the lip of the new pavement, and down I went. Thankfully, there was no traffic on the road where I fell. That might have put me in a bad spot had I fallen in front of a vehicle. I fell hard, and it was jarring. I almost felt like I had been thrown to the ground. It happened so quickly. I was fully aware of my predicament and was almost thankful that there were no witnesses. I got to my feet as quickly as I could to make sure that I was 1) capable of getting back on my feet and 2) making sure that I hadn't broken something when I fell. I scraped my knee and elbow pretty well, and I seemed to have bruised a rib or two, but I was otherwise fine. I really do need to be more careful.
I'm thinking of passing on the flu shot when I see my doctor in a few weeks. I don't trust these bastards in the medical community as far as I can throw them. I wouldn't put it past them to sneak a Covid vaccine shot in when they give me my usual annual flu shot. I think Pfizer has a dual-use jab so that it would be one stick in the arm, and I wouldn't be any the wiser. These bastards are in bed with the Biden Administration, so skullduggery is the name of the game. Everything is done under the cloak of darkness, and any financial gain goes to Big Pharma and those who enable Big Pharma (Biden.) How many fucking beach houses do Bumbles and his extended crime family need? What's next? Safe deposit boxes stuffed with cash in a safe deposit box in Switzerland? Anyway, I'll take my chances with the flu. I've had it before, and I know it's not fun, but I'll power through, as Hillary Clinton loves to say.
Trump has a rally scheduled in Pennsylvania on November 5th, just days before Election Day on November 8th. I know that Trump has endorsed Dr. Oz in the Senate race, but I'm not sure if he's endorsed the gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano. It's good to see him stepping into the fray to support these two guys, and since everything is on the margins these days, every little bit helps. Oz was neck in neck with Fetterman in the polls before the crazy debate the other night, so Oz's standing in the polls might look very different when Trump arrives in town. I'm guessing better but don't quote me. It can't be any worse, right? Pennsylvania has always been Trump country, so how anyone in that state (it's a Commonwealth) can support someone like Fetterman, who advocates for open borders, releasing criminals from jail, shutting down fracking activities in the state, etc., I'll never know. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Now we're hearing from the Secretary of State's office in Pennsylvania that the results from Election Day will likely not be available on Election night. We're also told that they mailed some 250k ballots out the door in error. I think the recipients of those ballots were ineligible to vote for one reason or another, so clearly, this is a problem. This is shaping up to be one of those stolen elections we heard so much about in 2020. They will take a tally of the Election Day votes, gauge how many votes Fetterman needs to win, and whip those ballots up out of thin air. Voila! We have a winner, they'll declare with a straight face. Maybe it won't matter if the tsunami of a red wave we're all expecting sweeps all of the republicans across our fruited plains into office. We'll have control of the Senate and the House. Read my lips: We're not tolerating stolen elections anymore, regardless of the overall outcome. Get on this and get on this now, Dr. Oz. This is your election for the taking.
I hear reports of a diesel gas shortage here and there. I think we have less than a month's supply left. What I'm not hearing are the alarm bells going off anywhere. Is this not a call to General Quarters if you've ever heard one? Everything comes to a grinding halt without diesel fuel. Someone from the Biden Administration was asked this question in a daily presser yesterday, and his response was anything but reassuring. He had no answers, of course, and only acknowledged that we had a shared responsibility to our European partners to ensure that their citizens did not suffer due to a shortage of diesel. So, it sounds like we're exporting our energy supplies to Europe while leaving our citizenry in the lurch. Who misses Trump's America First policies? Raise your fucking hands! And then this fool of a vice president in the United States goes on stage and starts talking about how she loves electric school buses. You can't make this shit up.
This is eerily reminiscent, of course, of the shortages of baby food and Tampons that we've experienced here in the United States over the last twelve months or more thanks to the ineptitude of the Biden Administration. I'm not sure if this diesel shortage thing extends to heating oil that we here in the Northeast need or not, but I don't need to tell you how catastrophic that would be if people can't heat their homes. I also don't need to remind you what this would mean to supply chains and potential food shortages. As I've said before, I'm kicking myself for not buying a cord of wood. I can heat my home with wood if push comes to shove, but I have no wood, so I'm up the fucking creek without a paddle. I should probably go to the store today to get ahead of this runaway train coming down the tracks. Do you remember how crazy it was going food shopping during the early days of Covid? This is going to be worse. Far worse. Brace yourselves.
There is such a negative vibe in the air these days. You can feel it. People are losing their asses in their 401k's, governments across the globe are threatening the use of nuclear weapons, no one is happy about what they're seeing coming out of our nation's capitol, our borders are open for all the world's desperate and often criminal elements to come into our country, our nation's judicial system has been co-opted by the Biden Administration and the democrat party, inflation is making it more and more difficult for parents to feed their families, gas prices are lower. Still, they will be going up again after the midterm elections, and nobody thinks that the Biden Administration gives a good fuck for the well-being of the American people. Our only hope is that we can take back control of our government by winning majorities in the House and the Senate ten days from now. We have to start somewhere. Right?
Did I mention that I didn't have a scratch on my new biking jacket when I fell off my bike the other day? I suffered a nasty abrasion on my elbow, but you'd never guess that by looking at the pristine condition of my coat. I must have friends in high places that I don't know about. It was more than weird. I showed the missus, and she was as mystified as was I. She turned the coat over and over, turned it inside out and outside in, and it was as good as new. I didn't know what to make of it, and I still don't. I think I looked at my jacket when I got up off the ground after the fall, and I think I remember thinking that it was all good because there wasn't so much as a scrape on my jacket. I mean, it's nothing but a light nylon jacket, so I half expected to see something, anything. Notta. I was even more surprised when I looked at the abrasion on my arm once I got my jacket off. It was a real WTF moment.
It's worth remembering in this upcoming election that any number of these republican candidates on the ballot are so-called MAGA-endorsed candidates. That is to say; they have all been endorsed by Trump even though the republican party might have chosen candidates who they thought might have had an easier chance of beating their Democratic opponents. But it gets better. Democrats got the crazy idea that voting for these so-called MAGA candidates in the primary would ensure that the democrat in the race would prevail on Election Day, so they changed their party affiliation in the primaries just long enough to cast their vote for the MAGA candidate. That calculus was largely incorrect if we're to believe the polls. Republicans look like they are on the precipice of taking the House and the Senate and probably a few governorships, too, thanks to the democrats who help put them over the top in the primaries. If it all comes to fruition, the republicans owe the democrats a debt of gratitude. Strange bedfellows, no?
I'm waking up to a cold morning here on the seacoast of New Hampshire. It's a frosty 31 degrees out-of-doors, the first morning of the Fall season, where the temperatures have fallen below freezing. I don't have the heat on in the house, although I probably should. I just put on a few more layers and hope that that will do the trick. If I could type this blog stuff while wearing gloves, I would. I do have a hat on, so that's helping a bit. I haven't looked at the forecast, but I'm guessing it will be seasonably comfortable enough to do a little work outdoors today. I have leaves to rake, and I could probably take a few things to the local recycling center. The missus is off to see a friend in Massachusetts today, so I'll be on my own. That should help me stay focused on the tasks at hand. How much I get done remains to be seen.
When I heard this story in the news about Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House), I thought to myself, here's the October surprise we've all been waiting for. Paul Pelosi ended up in the hospital after being brutalized with a hammer by someone who broke into his home in a shi-shi section of SanFransicko. Nancy was in Washington, DC, at the time, so no worries there. I fully expected to hear the left-wing media roll out the narrative that White Supremacists are now attacking any of our so-called institutions in the days leading up to the mid-term election on November 8th. All they needed to prove their absurd allegations would indeed be found in the intruder's social media posts and his online historical records. An attack on the husband of the beloved Speaker of the House was an attack on Nancy herself. This should be enough to rile up the democratic base to get them to the polls and push back on the Republican Tsunami at the polls on November 8th.
It turns out that this alleged intruder was neither a Trump supporter nor a Nazi-in-waiting. I find the report that the intruder came into the Pelosi household asking where he could find "Nancy" to be a bit of a stretch. Are we to assume that the intruder, had he found her home at the time, would have beaten Nancy to within an inch of her life in much the same way that he did to her husband, Paul? I'm not so sure. I'm not even convinced that this so-called intruder was an intruder at all. Was he invited into the Pelosi home? Why did Paul Pelosi refer to him as a "friend" when he called the police sometime after 2 am? The two men were reportedly in their underwear when the police arrived. Wat? Was this a Tinder date gone wrong? Thus far, I've not seen the investigators rolling over and regurgitating the Democrat's preferred narrative. Good for them.
There are more questions than answers as I sit here some 48 hours after the incident at the Pelosi's. That's fine. These things take time to play out. If I had to guess, I'd think that Nancy wants to put the kibosh on this story. She may not want certain things in the media that would cast a sordid pall over the reputation she has spent decades constructing. She is about to lose her position as Speaker of the House and will more than likely return to live out her days with her husband in Sanfransicko. The unraveling of her husband's private life daily in the national media would be more than she could bear. It's bad enough that Paul Pelosi has a long and public history of driving while drunk, but same-sex Tinder trysts, if true, are a bird of an entirely different color. It's no wonder she's three sheets to the wind herself whenever we see her speaking in public these days. God only knows what that looks like behind closed doors.
I got back on my bike yesterday after taking a fall a few days back. I took a day or two off to give my bruised ribs a break, which was probably a good idea. Whenever the missus asks me how I'm feeling, and I think she's asking specifically about my ribs, I tell her it's all good. Healing is an incremental process, and I accept that. If it hurts today, I expect it will hurt less tomorrow, and so on and so forth. I think the missus sees this sort of thing as something you go to get fixed, like the brakes on your car. That might explain why she gets so bent out of shape at the slightest mishap or misstep. She worries that the so-called elixir she needs won't be available, and things will go from bad to worse. I've told her repeatedly that's not how it works, but she can be her worst enemy, so I'm done sounding like a broken record.
The next time the Ev man is over for a visit, we'll need to sit down and order our Thanksgiving meal from Whole Foods. We did this with Whole Foods last Thanksgiving, and it worked well. There were a few organizational glitches here and there, but we're a forgiving bunch, so we'll be back again this year. It will give the lot of us something to look forward to after a year that has been topsy-turvy. Not so much for our family, but in general, I would say. We do have a lot to be thankful for, so that is what we intend to celebrate on Thanksgiving this year. With the prices of everything being up over last year, we'll be grateful to be able to put a turkey on our table. God willing, we'll donate or two so another less fortunate family might have an equally delicious meal on Thanksgiving. How we find that less fortunate family remains to be seen.
As I close out another week in this here blog, I'll be interested to see what we have for talking-head shows this fine Sunday morning. I want to be sipping some liberal tears as they come on whining about how losing the Senate and the House is going to be the end of our democracy here in the United States. I'll be listening to hear how many times they use the word "extremists." Election Day hasn't even arrived, and they are sounding a lot like election deniers. How sweet it is. Maybe they should have listened more carefully to the millions of Trump supporters who have been talking about stolen elections since 2020. It's all coming back around to bite them in the butt, and I couldn't be happier. We still need to close the deal on Election Day or earlier if your state has early voting, so get out to the polls and let's git er done.