Posts Tagged → Governor
Why isn’t PA in the National Fair in DC?
Came as news to me that there even was a national state fair. Being held on the National Mall, in Washington, DC. Cotton candy, rides, Ferris Wheels, fried foods guaranteed to jump start your heart and then clog it, stuffed teddy bear prizes for your sweetheart, strong man competitions, rope-pulling contests, the usual fun stuff seen at most county and state fairs around America for the past 100 years or more.
Either I do not spend much time online, or the marketers for this big event were not aggressive about it. I just knew nothing about it, read nothing about it, heard nothing about it, had seen nothing about it until a week ago, when it was a couple days away from opening.
Turns out that this “National State Fair” is really big time. Almost a World’s Fair in some ways, with new technology and products being debuted. Pretty darned cool. It runs for a month, and covers America’s 250th birthday celebration on July 4th Independence Day. We are told the fireworks “will be like nothing you have ever seen, that Washington has ever seen.”
Yeah, OK, but is there a place and a role for one of my black powder cannons? Those things really go BOOM.
And so it came as a shock to see recent follow-up articles about how my home state of Pennsylvania is not (or was not) participating in this National State Fair on the National Mall in DC. Pennsylvania, the Keystone State, not participating in America’s 250th birthday celebration in Washington? Really?
Pennsylvania is called the Keystone State for some good reasons, some historic reasons. We were the keystone colony and then state that held together the northeastern and southern colonies and then states. Home of the Declaration of Independence. Pennsylvania’s natural resources literally built the America you experience today. Our own coal fueled the mills in Steelton and Pittsburgh that smelted our own iron ore into steel, that in turn became the railroad tracks laid on Pennsylvania oak railroad ties (of which I have sawed up many on my own sawmill).
The state of Wyoming is not some western name. It is an eastern name, from the Delaware Indian word for “great grassy plains.” The state of Wyoming is named after the Wyoming Valley in northeastern Pennsylvania, because it was the eastern railroads built entirely of Pennsylvania materials that deposited European settlers out on the Wyoming plains (after the Indians had been forced onto reservations). I do not know what the various Indian tribes called what is today Wyoming. But I do know that Pennsylvania had a big hand in making it so.
Pennsylvania coal, iron, and old growth hardwood timber drove the Industrial Revolution in America. Forty minutes due east of Harrisburg is the village of Cornwall, in Lebanon County. An enormous pit there is now filled with water, but it used to be filled with men mining heavy iron ore from the ground. In 1776, those pits were opened to produce the iron to make the cannons that Revolutionary War general George Washington needed to face off against the most hardcore British military, with much of the subsequent cannon blasting and men bleeding happening on Pennsylvania soil (and again at Gettysburg in the Civil War…hmmmmm… this Keystone State thing just keeps raising its head).
I could go on and on about Pennsylvania history in the founding and development of America, but you should get the point here. Pennsylvania got the nickname “Keystone State” for a lot of good reasons, worthy reasons, hard-won reasons.
So, Pennsylvania, having played such a huge role in the founding and early development of America, should naturally be well represented in America’s 250th birthday celebration in Washington, DC, right? Right? RIGHT?
Ummmm, nope. PA governor Josh Shapiro very recently stated to the press that his administration was unable to locate any PA businesses who wanted to participate in the National State Fair, or who could afford to participate in it.
Apparently, I was not alone in learning this new information, as both of our US senators, John Fetterman and Dave McCormick, have in the past 72 hours leapt to action, together, to find both interested businesses and the private funding to get them situated at the National State Fair.
Their bi-partisan action to save the day for Pennsylvania on the national stage is news in and of itself, because just finding a Democrat who wants to be caught dead anywhere near a Republican, much less work with one towards some common shared goal, like, say, a National State Fair in Washington, DC, is harder than raising Lazarus from the grave.
So bravo! to senators McCormick and Fetterman, who say that they have received an outpouring of interest from all of the associated and related and even distantly related associations, groups, and individuals and businesses. PA -based manufacturers and inventors are especially keen to showcase their wares at the event, and have now publicly said so.
Which brings me back to the lurking elephant in the room (it is more of a big donkey than an elephant): Why is Governor Shapiro not out in front of this, leading the charge down to the National Mall? Why did he just kind of low-T diss this event and downplay it, as if it is no big deal for PA to be AWOL on something so important as the national celebration of America’s 250th birthday?
Does Governor Shapiro really, truly, sadly suffer from an affliction of TDS so terribly fatal that he became grossly partisan and petty about something so important?
What a big missed opportunity this is for a man who has represented himself as a political centrist, a uniter and not a divider. Governor Shapiro has aspirations of being re-elected this Fall, and of possibly running for President of America in 2028. As a former Democrat myself, I find myself shaking meself’s old head, once again, at the sad turn the Democrat Party has not just taken once or twice, but which now continues to take even farther off and over a steep cliff.
That someone of Governor Shapiro’s caliber is sulking and boycotting America’s national 250th birthday celebration is a baaaaaad sign. Bad for our body politic and bad for Governor Shapiro’s larger political aspirations.
Past PA governor Ed Rendell was as partisan a politician as you could find anywhere. Rendell was a huge and tireless champion for the Democrat Party. And yet, Rendell also took every opportunity to work cooperatively with his political opponents when those opportunities were given. Rendell understood that it is better to bask in the spotlight of national appreciation with political opponents, than it is to sulk alone in some partisan silo, holding one’s ball close to the body and vowing to never play with those kids ever again. That behavior is bad for everyone.
Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro likely has better things to do than read this blog, but if he does, I would (and do) ask that he hightail it down to the National Mall, and share the spotlight with the two US senators from Pennsylvania, McCormick (R) and Fetterman (D).
Promoting Pennsylvania is Job #1 for elected officials from Pennsylvania, and doing that with a smile on one’s face makes everyone involved look like emotionally healthy adults. And it makes all Americans feel like there are still some sane, normal people involved in retail politics. People we can look to for leadership. People who care about all of America, and not just about their own little slice of the electorate, off in some corner, away from everyone else American.
Now, please excuse me while I go hang my Happy 250th America flag on my front porch.
One Year Later…SoCal still a disaster
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting southern California. But the much vaunted amazing Mediterranean climate SoCal is famous for was nowhere in sight, as buckets of rain fell day after day. The temperature stayed between 45*F and 60*F, which coming from the frozen East Coast sure felt like a vacation to me. But boy did the locals beeatch up a storm of complaints about this unseasonal discomforture.
What was striking about the trip’s weather was not so much the uncharacteristic cold, but the lack of official preparation for the torrential rains that accompanied the cold. You would think that the people there have been through this enough to know what to do by now. You know, mitigate the threat, reduce the pending damage, save lives, save property.
Much of SoCal’s building surface is a weird mix of loose dirt and small rocks, and it is prone to easy erosion. This has been known since the time of Ronald Reagan’s ranching days there, an Ice Age ago. As we drove north along the 405, we could see many large, often extravagant buildings perched unsteadily over chasms below, which had once held enough dirt to comfortably, on which to confidently, build a house.
And then the summer fires came (year after year) and burned the vegetation that holds the dirt in place, and then came the winter rains that washed the loose un-anchored dirt away, and left the expensive homes literally hanging, clinging for life to shreds of dirt on the uphill side of the ever-deepening slope below.
Eventually all the homes and buildings we saw hanging out in the wind, perched over a void, will slide downhill like a toboggan, like those before them that were once closer to the growing chasm and which are now completely removed from that landscape.
Their once carefully secured electric, water, data, phone, and sewer connections will be lost forever. Many are already visible, sticking out of the dirt like veins and arteries of a heart held high in the hand of a surgeon, or of an Aztec priest.
The place, the actual land itself, that was once surveyed and measured and given a parcel number, will no longer exist. The old building lot will be seen on paper and on old aerial photos, like a ghost, but the actual dirt that it was once made of will no longer exist. That building lot will go the way of so many others right there over the past few decades: Mass wasted by heavy rains downhill into steep arroyos, and eventually washed out into the Pacific Ocean.
When I was a kid, people not from California joked a lot about how the great San Andreas Fault would eventually crack open, Biblically swallowing great swaths of expensive SoCal real estate and its fancy cars and shiny people, and then shearing off the surviving residual into the Pacific Ocean. The more culturally conservative the joker was, the more emphatic was their lack of humor about this looming armageddon. And why not?
Yes, you and I must be curious about the strange mindset of all those tanned beautiful people living their pretty plastic lives over there in SoCal, surrounded by palm trees and perennially perfect days. It cannot possibly be real. Kind of like the American Pompeii – not if it will happen, but simply when. Especially curious about the people, because They seem so damned judgmental and contemptuous of Us, the great unwashed and untanned living in Flyover Country.
And while there have been some exciting earthquakes in SoCal, it is more the tick-tock-tick-tock metronome-like regular prosaic wildfires and monsoons that are the real threat to house and home and happiness in SoCal. These natural disasters happen like clockwork, and yet are treated each time with wide-eyed amazement by SoCal residents. Yes, the rains come every winter, but these rains, oh God, THESE rains, this year, they say…
Even worse have been the elected officials, whose reactions have run from feigned amazement to outright glee at the opportunity to score so much waterfront or Pacific view properties at such low prices…and so why not wonder at both the residents and their duly, unquestioned elected leaders, who fail to prepare for the erosive rains or the wildfires. A year ago this week, catastrophic wildfires ate a lot of beautiful SoCal real estate and homes, due to no brush management, no water in reservoirs, incompetent DEI firefighters.
Nothing has changed a year later. SoCal residents now just as defiant and silly as they were last year, still blaming the unusually extra strong sunshine or some guy in Washington DC for their unhappiness. I think just one building permit has been issued for the thousands of homes lost last year, and yet the Los Angeles mayor and the California governor enjoy plenty of support from their victims.
But just maybe the failure to issue building permits to last year’s total loss homeowners of Malibu and Palisades is the biggest mitigation step ever taken. That would be ironic. I don’t know, can’t know, and really don’t want to know. Rather, I am sitting over here on the cold East Coast drinking a hot cocoa with a splash of whisky, watching SoCal go through the death convulsions and twitches of a dying body politic and its sick land base.
You could possibly write the script to this Hollywood movie, but I think the best one was already written a long time ago. It is called The Bible…
(My iPhone screenshots of the 2025 fire are below, taken as it developed, and they include some heartbreakers such as spectacular homes and barns catching on fire, and a homeowner racing back to his home in his pickup truck, only to be blocked by smoke and then fire, and then turning and retreating just as the flames engulf his position, his beautiful mansion going up in flames behind him. Some of the mountain cameras send messages that they cannot upload their images… because they have been burned to a crisp)

Recall that the beautiful Will Rogers homestead and farm in Topanga burned to the ground. It was my favorite hiking destination in SoCal

Note the pickup truck on the road. One of the screenshots I took showed the driver get out with his hands on his head, obviously upset
One meme that says everything about Josh Shapiro
PA governor Josh Shapiro is on the short list to be Kalamity Kamala’s VP running mate. Well, I don’t agree with a lot of Shapiro’s actual policies, although I did like some of the policies that he ran on and then discarded after getting elected.
One incident really speaks volumes about Josh Shapiro’s horrible character, and that is the coverup of the Ellen Greenberg murder in Philly. You can read all about this sweet girl’s horrendous homicide in all kinds of news outlets, just don’t use Google because that search engine is terribly compromised.
The short story is that Ellen was murdered with a knife in her kitchen, and yet her patently obvious murder was inexplicably changed to “suicide”.
Most suspicion is focused on Ellen’s fiance at the time of her death, Sam Goldberg, because all of the crime scene evidence points directly at him. Ellen’s body was covered in bruises, the kind that come from physical abuse. It is really emotionally painful stuff to look at, those autopsy drawings and pictures. I knew Ellen, and she was a wisp of a beautiful and gentle creature. She did not deserve to be physically abused nor murdered.
Josh Shapiro fits into this because as PA AG he deliberately allowed the coverup of Ellen’s murder to happen, and then blocked it from being revisited years later when public pressure and legal challenges mounted to get all of the facts out of the recalcitrant Philly police.
Why would Shapiro be such a piece of sh!t? Because he was then and is now personally close with the uncle of Sam Goldberg, attorney James Schwartzman, a big and generous political donor to Shapiro’s many political campaigns. James Schwartzman and his lawyer son Kamian Schwartzman were both called by Sam Goldberg right before Sam Goldberg called 911 to report his fiance’s murder.
Try to make sense of that…calling two different lawyers in your family before you call 911 to report a murder, which Sam Goldberg laughably described to the 911 dispatcher as “Ellen stabbed herself.”
The Philadelphia DA at the time ended up going to federal prison not much later for bribery. To my knowledge no one has asked him what he knows about this rotten situation. I tried several years ago, and he broke off with me, a friend of many decades. It is going to take real legal force to re-open this murder case and bring justice to gentle Ellen.
So now that Shapiro is up for operating on the national stage, new focus has been brought to this obvious murder and to the coverup that Shapiro oversaw on behalf of one of his big donors, the uncle of the murder suspect.
In sweet Ellen’s memory, I would like to contribute a meme about this murder and coverup. The meme, below, uses one of the forensic drawings done to show the many stab wounds to Ellen’s head and neck. Let’s circulate this meme and help Josh Shapiro’s career go exactly where it should have gone long ago: To Hell.
Trump or DeSantis for president?
The question is being asked about which candidate we should support for president, Donald J. Trump or Ron DeSantis. The other compelling candidate is Vivek Ramaswamy, whose simple yet articulate promotion of basic American and Western values is a welcome breath of fresh air amidst all of the GOPe RINO DC Swamp trash talk coming from Chris Christie (career politician), Nikki Haley (career politician), Mike Pence (career politician and proven traitor to America) and other washed-up has-beens.
To me this is a super simple choice. On the one hand we have a proven warrior who has suffered terrible persecution for his love of our nation (which is seen as a threat by the enemies of America, both foreign and domestic), and who yet stands firm and unwilling to bend or break against a huge tide of evil and corruption. We know everything we need to know about this candidate, and we know his capabilities. This is President Donald Trump, a political savior and hero of historic importance.
On the other hand we have a guy who is doing an outstanding job as governor of Florida, just now starting to really prove himself. I like Ron DeSantis’ policy positions, and he has earned my admiration for all of the political heavy lifting he is doing in Florida. Recently re-elected Governor DeSantis is showing every other governor who cares how to effectively fight back against the culture war being imposed upon us.
The problems with DeSantis are: In order to run for president he must break Florida’s Resign to Run Law, which requires him to resign from the governorship he just won. Instead of resigning, DeSantis is trying to get the Florida legislature to eliminate the law. This law serves a valuable purpose of keeping power-hungry career politicians from using their current elected office as a power base from which to climb ever higher without taking some real risk of losing that same political power they have already achieved.
What this tells us about DeSantis is that he is yet one more young man in a big hurry. And frankly I can’t stand these kinds of people. If we have seen one we have seen a thousand of them, mostly young guys in love with themselves, with their image, just desperate to validate their grandiose self image by being elected to office. And whatever office they do get elected to is never enough. Their egos and ambitions are just too great, and we have all seen a thousand times before how there is no room for We, The People in the lives or thoughts of these self-centered guys. Unfortunately, the openly ambitious DeSantis falls squarely into this demographic. Time will tell if he is able to shake off the ambition and focus solely on public service.
Some other concerns about DeSantis: Where was his voice about the lawless FBI raid on President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home in Florida? Why didn’t DeSantis use the Florida state police to physically block the FBI Brownshirts? And where is DeSantis’ voice now that President Trump is being threatened with a totally phony arrest warrant from the blatantly corrupt New York City DA? Doesn’t DeSantis realize that whatever happens to President Trump is what is going to eventually happen to him, Ron DeSantis?
Governor DeSantis can tell any and all tin star lawless thugs from NYC that they will be arrested the minute they set foot in Florida. But he doesn’t. It is almost like DeSantis is happy to see President Trump be attacked so that he, DeSantis, will have the field cleared for him. Nope, Ron, that is not how this is going to work out. If you do not stand up for Trump now, then you will find yourself attacked similarly and you will have no one there to defend you when your own time arrives.
Finally, the people supporting Governor DeSantis are the usual GOPe suspects America cannot afford ever again. The Bush family, RINO Paul Ryan, you name it, DeSantis’ supporters are a league of war mongering DC Swamp uniparty villains. Again, this says everything about DeSantis’ intense ambition, and his lack of understanding about how the 2024 election is not about him, but rather about the well-being of America. So, no thank you, on this count, too.
President Trump is the only person who stands between us American citizens and the utter dissolution of our nation at the hands of self-interested politicians in both political parties and the Washington DC Swamp industrial complex bureaucracy. We have just this one last election in 2024 remaining to us voters before we are totally washed away in a tidal wave of lawlessness and vote stealing that will gut our constitutional freedoms and turn us all into slaves of big government.
For these reasons, President Donald John Trump has my unfettered support in his last and most important political campaign, the 2024 election for president. This is a campaign to save America, not just to make it great again.

The Uniparty. Corrupt Joe Biden with GOPe Kevin McCarthy palsing around together on the American taxpayer dime

General Robert E. Lee was a Democrat Party bigwig. The Confederacy was the Democrat Party. Slavery was a Democrat Party institution.
Mastriano is the normal guy, Shapiro not
Doug Mastriano is the most normal person you can possibly meet. In 2021 I met and briefly spoke with him, and he was direct, cheerful, serious, confident. He is a former 30-year military career guy, and most men like him are like him in mannerisms and personality. He has been tested in battle, and in the world’s largest bureaucracy (the American military). He has taken dangerous risks, made dangerous sacrifices, for the public. He is a refreshing political outsider, and his political views are normal for his demographic. While I do not agree with Mastriano on everything, I also do not need to agree with him or any other candidate on everything in order to support him.
Yes, there is a TON of negative advertising about Mastriano, and some of it is accurate, and most of it is completely false. The thing I care about is that Mastriano is normal and he stands openly on what he believes. He stands by his views because he has views, and because he is a guy with integrity, he says his views in public and is therefore open to criticism about them. Whatever his views are, Mastriano’s political policies and views are almost unimportant if he wins. I have seen it over and over again: A governor gets elected and within weeks discovers that no one on Capitol Hill in Harrisburg gives two figs about his views. He will have to work within the system in which the governor is just one cog out of three, or four cogs. Maybe it’s five cogs, if we count the state bureaucracy…
Now, let’s consider Josh Shapiro, the candidate running for governor against Mastriano. Shapiro is the definitive political hack, a person with very few real honest to goodness views of his own and very little integrity. Very little real life experience. Certainly no risks or sacrifices for the betterment of society. He has been hiding inside air conditioned offices his entire career. Shapiro is hoping to get elected to the governorship by virtue of committing little to public knowledge, and also criticizing his opponent intensely.
(Incidentally, the phrase political hack comes from the hack horses used in mining and public transportation from about 1750 to 1920. A hack horse is trained to mindlessly follow the familiar horse in front of it, carrying or towing its burden without independent thought or motivation. The same is said of political hacks, who are led by the nose by political bosses and big political donors, and whose sole motivation is self-enrichment)
I have never met Josh Shapiro, but he did something corrupt that affected people near me, including a murder victim I knew personally, and he caused a lot of pain. Here is what I have seen of Shapiro: In 2011, Ellen Greenberg was brutally murdered in her Philadelphia apartment. From the moment after she was murdered, a lot of big political strings were pulled in plain public view to blatantly protect the one person who appears to have probably done the deed, her former fiance.
All kinds of personal favors were done for her fiance’s family, including letting his family members enter her crime scene apartment and removing and tampering with evidence. The Philly Police Department may never have been a bastion of integrity, but its senior personnel managed to hit a real low spot with the sloppy coverups of their officers’ mishandling of the bloody crime scene.
Then there was the coroner who called Ellen’s death like everyone saw it, a murder, and who was then summarily fired. Subsequent scientific and forensic analysis supporting the belief that Ellen was murdered was provided to the Philly Police Department, only to have them sit on it, hide it, ignore it.
It seemed that every official person involved in investigating Ellen Greenberg’s bloody murder was doing everything possible to protect the murderer and to shut up everyone who tried to get answers or obtain justice for this beautiful, sweet young woman.
Literally everyone involved in the obvious coverup is a member of one political party.
All of this came to a head last year and again this year when powerful new evidence about the murder was handed to AG Josh Shapiro. What did Shapiro do with the new evidence? He refused to act on it, sat on it, and then he handed it off to the very same political people who had already engaged in a years-long coverup of the murder of a beautiful, innocent Ellen. Shapiro enabled the coverup to continue, thereby protecting his political buddies and obstructing justice from being done.
AG Josh Shapiro is loyal to his political donors, I will say that much. He is also loyal to his political party, which as he is a political hack is understandable. But Josh Shapiro is not loyal to the rule of law, or to the Pennsylvania citizenry, or to solving crimes when they involve high profile members of his political party. And that makes Josh Shapiro a corrupt person, and really a lawless person. Not a normal person.
Who the hell works hard to cover up a murder and to protect “important people” in a political party who were involved in the murder? A dirtball is who does this stuff, and Shapiro is at the very least a dirtball. Shapiro’s entire career has been spent in politics, and politics is all he knows. He is a political animal, for whom there are no absolute truths or morals, just opportunities to move ahead and get more power, at any cost. Including protecting a politically connected murderer.
Yuck. Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.
I know Doug Mastriano has been portrayed as some sort of “right wing” loon, and of course that is BS. The same crap was done to Judge Roy Moore several years ago in an Alabama senate race, and now that Moore is stacking up court wins the truth is finally coming out about him. Roy Moore is innocent of the ridiculous accusations the media and its one political party ally made against him, and Doug Mastriano is likewise innocent of the ridiculous accusations being made against him. Yes, he believes that life begins in the mother’s womb, and so he believes the body of the living child deserves protection. Reasonable people can argue and disagree about this and other issues, but there is no argument about this:
Doug Mastriano has integrity and honesty, and Josh Shapiro has none, zero, nada.
Doug Mastriano deserves our votes for the simple reason that he is a good guy fighting the good fight against a corrupt bipartisan political system that benefits when bad people like Josh Shapiro are in power.
Vote for normal guy, political outsider Doug Mastriano, you will not regret it. If you vote for Josh Shapiro, we will all regret it.

Doug Mastriano praying at the Western Wall. Doug is more pro-Israel, pro-Jewish, pro-Judaism than Josh Shapiro could ever be.





























































