First off, let me just respond to my own headline- I hope so. Really, as a fellow Moravian alum, I hope Rep. Flood abandoned all decorum. Why do I care? Apparently back in the old days, Murtha, Kanjorksi, and the boys used to show up on the House Floor late at night and yell drunken obscenities from the one corner of the U.S. House. Oh you think that’s dirty or mean? Give me a break. From what I hear, Rep. Flood has been defending her party’s senate caucus for not coming to work. What’s wrong with a lady from the Northern Tier of Northampton County letting it fly and yelling shit at a fellow member. Let me loose on the floor and I’d commit more violations just for the laughs. What has decorum brought us? If your answer is nothing, the answer is yes. She’s embarrassing her constituents, but they also voted for that.
The ugly side of this story did not come from Rep. Flood though. From the story told to me, some hillbilly from Central PA walked up to Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta after the showdown and called him “boy.” Really, conservatives, why are you being racist? Tell him you don’t approve and be done. The racism proves the point that your party is the hub of Nazis in 2025, and makes you unacceptable to a lot of people. You can’t defeat narratives while you behave like this. You kind of are what you are. It’s not a foregone conclusion, but letting these idiots formally say racist shit helps nobody.
I probably yelled “shut the fuck up” at somebody when the Rams were blowing my parlay tonight. Even so, we don’t need to be a racist society. Do better House GOP. Nobody really needs this. Rep. Flood, I mean whatever, but still. I hope you didn’t do it.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on Secretary of Defense (not war, piss off) Pete Hegseth lecturing a bunch of Generals and Admirals this week in Washington. The inebriated drunk Fox News host brought them all to Washington to tell them to get on board with the agenda, and also to lecture them about fat people. He seriously brought Donald Trump up on stage with him and then lectured a bunch of certified BAMF’ers about wanting to get fat people out of the military. His three bills boss, also known as tubby gut, who hasn’t seen the inside of a gym probably since college, is up there while they told a bunch of guys in kick ass shape that they want to get rid of fat people.
Look, this like many things is another area where Trump is pretty terrible, but not nearly the worst. Taft was more fat. Harding more corrupt. Jackson more racist. Nixon more paranoid and vindictive. Buchanan was more unwilling to change with the times. I could go on. Trump is bad in all of these areas though, and he’s less self aware than anybody. If you’re looking in the mirror and your body is soft and saggy, don’t talk about physical fitness. If you haven’t been able to see your feet in the shower in years, don’t lecture Generals and Admirals about force fitness.
I know that everyone around Trump is an ass kisser and never tells him the truth about himself. I think that’s kind of sad for the guy. Even Melania won’t tell him her thing for the cleaning boy back at Trump Tower that she stays behind in their place for. I get it, he’d probably fly off the handle at her if he knew. But the result is he thinks people actually like his looks. It’s sad. He’s not aesthetically pleasing. He couldn’t have met the physical fitness standards he’s setting for the military even 30 years ago. Dude is an unhealthy lard.
And before you tell me I wouldn’t say this to his face- I would.
The federal government is shut down. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has no budget or appropriations bill. These are just words on a page to most people, because most people don’t eat, sleep, and pray politics, believe it or not. They go to work, take care of their families, and try to live their lives the best they can. They cannot simply decide to stop doing that, so their time to read about what the government is doing or proposing is very limited. They kind of need the cliff notes version so they have a basic understanding of the problems, and what should or can be done. I’m going to give it to them here- there is no money.
Your county, your city, and your school board basically are being kept open using your local taxes- often property taxes, but also sometimes sales and income taxes as well. Yes, the federal and state government are still collecting revenue from you right now (taxes), but they have no legal authority to spend new money moving forward. For now there are still some payments that were pre-approved that are going out, but even they are starting to run out of legal authority. In the not so distant future, there will simply be no more money going from the feds or the state out to counties, non-profits, cities, townships, public-private partnerships, or school boards. The net effect of this is devastating. Most of what counties, municipal governments, and school boards do are mandatory actions imposed on them from Washington or Harrisburg. A school can’t cut school lunches or busing, for instance. A city can’t stop providing a police department or fire department, in some form. The feds and the state send along a rather large chunk of cash to finance all of that. Local governments don’t tax nearly a high enough rate to pay for all of these programs on their own. They still must provide them either way.
In other words, there is a breaking point. I recently slammed Roger Maclean for saying “we’ll get our money” in his Lehigh County Executive debate with Josh Siegel, because that is an ignorant statement. Even before the Federal shutdown, the “Big Beautiful Bill,” DOGE, and the last appropriations bill all cut federal payments to state and local governments. Now that cut is currently a zero. Worse yet, the state contribution to local governments and services is now zero. If they don’t give you money, money does not magically show up. Lying to the public and to public workers and saying “it will all be okay” is not only irresponsible and immoral, it takes the heat off of the people who should be doing their jobs and funding the locals. Congress shut down the government to cut Affordable Care Act subsidies, aka health care for working people who buy it. The State Senate hasn’t come to work in three months because they want to kill SEPTA and make Josh Shapiro look like a weirdo. No local official should be giving these people a pass. Local elected leaders should be pointing out all the ways this is beginning to hurt normal people.
Unfortunately a month out from an election, there are a lot of irresponsible children running for office who want to pretend nothing is wrong. Unfortunately both parties are doing it. I get it, nobody wants to be mom telling you to eat your peas and carrots instead of cake, and certainly nonsense like this from “The Quiet Man” Tom Giovanni, silent because he’s confused, isn’t helpful:
“As a candidate for Northampton County Executive, I believe it is unacceptable that the current administration has chosen to cut essential programs and furlough hardworking employees simply because Harrisburg has failed to pass a state budget. Leadership is about preparation, responsibility, and putting people first. Our county should never be held hostage to gridlock in the state capital.
Instead of hurting workers to make a political point, I recommended that the administration follow Treasurer Stacy Garrity’s example of providing loans to counties to cover short-term budget needs. That would have protected services and employees while avoiding unnecessary disruption.”
Garrity’s loans will not be sustainable soon, and are not free money for the county, but let’s get to the heart of this- actually Tom, people suffer when Harrisburg fails to pass a budget. It turns out state and national government are actually important in our society, and we’re learning that in real time. The county does not tax their population a high enough rate to absorb the costs of running itself if the state just decides to stop paying them. If your response to that is “do less!,” then please proceed to tell us if you’re going to close the prison, stop providing a court system, get rid of the department of children and youth, or close the nursing home. If you can name another county office that actually exists, you can choose that too. For the most part though, cutting those services would run into legal trouble, because most of what they do is mandatory under federal and state law.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention all the Democrats though who also aren’t willing to bite the bullet. The truth is that the solution to the counties and municipalities running out of money is Harrisburg and Washington making agreements that re-open the governments. There is no other answer, and frankly given that Democrats aren’t in charge of anything federally or the vacationing State Senate, we should be saying that. I’ll be voting for Tara Zrinski, but I don’t agree with her here:
We need to create avenues of mutual aid within the community by calling on community partners to fill some of the gaps in human services. We have already delayed funds to service providers but we did not entertain temporary redistribution of County Funds or a Tax Anticipation Note, which would allow us to borrow against anticipated property tax revenue. This TAN would be paid back when the State passes a budget but with approximately $350,000 – $400,000 of accumulated interest. This has been the sticking point for the administration that has no desire to bail the State out because the interest would not be paid back by the State. We cut our nose off to spite our face though. That interest is a small small price to pay for the safety of our community and the security of our workforce that knows we have their backs. Literally, it is an estimated 2 cents for every $1000 of assessed property value in the County.
Well, here are my 2 cents– County Executive McClure has presented this as an inevitability. But there is nothing inevitable about abandoning our workforce. There are alternatives. There are reserves, reallocations, and other strategies available that don’t involve punishing workers or jeopardizing public safety. Leadership means problem-solving—not taking the easy way out by balancing the books on the backs of our workforce. When we destabilize human services, we invite higher long-term costs, greater risks, and more pain for the very residents we are sworn to protect. So today I stand with SEIU 668 workers, and I call on County Executive McClure: stop these furloughs. Protect the people who protect Northampton County. And I call on Harrisburg legislators: end the gridlock. Pass a fair budget now. You are literally arguing over what amounts to 6% of your overall budget– for what? To lower medicaid, to take away SNAP benefits. Where are the adults in the room?
Ok, so basically “the plan” here is to borrow money against money we’re supposed to get back in the future, never mind that we don’t know when that will be and therefore don’t really know if the $350-400k number will be final, and continue providing services? We should reallocate funds- should that be Medicaid/Medicare funds for Gracedale, the funding for the jail, the funding for the courts, or what mandatory spending should we end? And we should accept the 6% interest on a loan because Ann Flood and Joe Emrick don’t want to fund SEPTA and the GOP State Senators wanted to spend September and October at their beach houses?
Yes, I think it’s fucking awful and barbaric to do things like furlough caseworkers who literally work for way less than they’re worth to protect children, or to close Safe Harbor and services for the homeless, or to really lay off anyone who is working for the county, almost everything they do down there is to help those who are the least fortunate in our society. It’s awful and barbaric, and it’s who the hell we are as a society. The State Senate is not some abstract entity that has nothing to do with the people, the State Senate is the people. Ryan Mackenzie wants to cut subsidies for working poor people buying the Affordable Care Act and dramatically raise health insurance rates for people paying full price, such as myself (a recent amputee), but Ryan Mackenzie is in Washington shutting down our government for a reason- he was elected to go there. Let’s stop pretending we’re so much better than our government as a society, we picked the bastards who are in it.
What the local officials are proposing here is simply shifting the pain and suffering of the incompetence in Harrisburg and Washington from municipal and county employees to the broader society that pays their salaries. Is that fair and moral? Probably yes actually, you voted for this. Is it sensible or even remotely a sane way to run a community? No, of course not. Re-distributing the pain and suffering on to our full society sounds absolutely nuts if you say it out loud, and if you do it in front of someone they’ll either hit you or have you committed. Yes, it’s obviously an easier, temporary way out. It’s also utterly stupid.
If you sit here and say furloughs are a good thing, you’re a heartless moron that is robbing Peter to pay Paul. If you sit here and say we should just borrow our way through the ineptitude, you’re inept. The only good solution would be a Harrisburg and a Washington that aren’t trying to do anything possible to screw the least amongst them, and funded their governments. That is the solution. There is no “magic carpet ride” to utopia here. The money that keeps children, old people, the disabled, the sick, and the mentally incompetent safe in our society, it comes from the federal and state governments. Do I think McClure is insane to propose furloughs in the middle of both the campaign to succeed him and his own Congressional campaign? Yes, it could very well be political suicide. These are the actual choices being presented to us locally though by our elected state and national leaders.
Yesterday our neckbeard Vice-President basically suggested emergency rooms should not have to treat the “illegals” that are over-running them (that is not happening). That would, of course, be a violation of the law, everywhere in America. I wonder how many people have considered or fathomed what this would look like though? I have friends in foreign countries, some of them have seen dead bodies from people who starved or were left untreated while sick. This is a choice a society can make, and it’s a choice that the Vice-President of the United States is advocating. We really aren’t better than this.
Anyway, I lost you by the second paragraph I’m sure. My original point was people don’t have time to read all of this shit. So I lead with the point- there is no money, because Harrisburg and Washington. If you got anything, I hope you got that. There will not be any “magic money.”
It’s October. We now know enough about the current state of affairs to take a guess at what this year’s elections will look like. There are reasons to believe this year’s municipal elections could look considerably different than those in 2023 and 2021. There are also somewhat related reasons to believe the Democratic wave of backlash to Trump may not be formulating the way a lot of Democrats expect, or the way it did in 2017.
First, it’s important to understand just a bit of recent history to interpret these numbers. It’s really not worth looking at election numbers from elections before 2020 when figuring out turnout in Pennsylvania, because more voters have been voting since vote-by-mail kicked in. Prior to 2021 for instance, at times you had to hold your breath for an election in Northampton County to top 40,000 voters, and an election with 50,000 voters was considered remarkable turnout. Now there’s no way you fall under 60,000 voters in either county, just based on super voters alone, and both counties have been routinely topping 70,000 voters in the odd year elections. While some Republican candidates right now are screaming about fraud, the truth is that the increased turnout hasn’t made local elections uncompetitive. Republican candidates in Lehigh County nearly won for County Executive and took two of three Judicial seats in 2021. While the Northampton County Republican Party is a third world institution in it’s ineptitude, their statewide judicial candidates were highly competitive in 2021 and they actually gained a council seat that year. Elections in the Lehigh Valley have remained highly competitive. I expect that to continue in 2025.
Northampton County saw 71,335 ballots cast in 2021 and 72,436 ballots cast in 2023. Right now, the highly likely voter pool (2023 voters, voters who cast a ballot in the 2025 primary, and voters who have requested a vote-by-mail ballot) is 78,512. If you expand that by a bit, adding voters who cast a 2021 ballot, you get 90,885. Among the highly likely voters, the growth from 2023 is pretty close and shows us very little. If you expand in that 2021 vote, the GOP begins really making gains. While Democrats are used to believing that higher turnout is good for them, that’s not necessarily the case right now. The more less engaged voters engage, the more it seems to help the Republicans, currently. Now, that trend line doesn’t absolutely spell doom for the Democrats. Again, we remain highly competitive in Northampton County. In this specific case, it’s worth noting Republicans dropped in 2023 from 2021 and Democrats gained. Basically these numbers show us that if both parties have very good turnout, it will be a very, very close election. For Democrats, it just means that turning out voters indiscriminately to feel good is a losing strategy in Northampton County.
In Lehigh County in 2021, 74,108 people cast ballots. In 2023, 75,127 people cast ballots. Much like Northampton, it’s very consistent. The highly likely voter pool right now is 81,490. The expansion pool of voters is 93,984. Lehigh County follows a similar trend to Northampton in that the expanded universe benefits the Republican Party. Republicans dropped off a bit in 2023 from 2021. If they come back, Democrats are in for a brutal fight in which they will very likely need to win over independent voters.
Vote-by-mail suggests the Republicans are getting done what they need to get done, Valley wide. Democrats have requested just shy of 2,000 more ballots than they returned in Lehigh County in 2023. Democrats in Northampton County have requested about 1,500 more ballots than they returned in 2023. Remember that no one gets 100% of their requests actually turned in. Republicans in Lehigh County have requested roughly 3,000 more ballots than they returned in 2023. In Northampton County, Republican requests are up about 2,500 over the number of vote-by-mail ballots returned in 2023. This suggests that Republicans have gained about 1,000 voters over 2023 in both counties. What’s more alarming is that these numbers might not tell the whole story of Republican growth. Lehigh County Republicans who did not vote at all in 2023 have requested 2,474 ballots. In Northampton County, that number is 2,284. In both counties, GOP candidates needed to win nearly all of the independent ballots to make up the gap between the parties turnouts in 2023. These numbers suggest that is no longer true in 2025.
Before anyone gets too excited, this is not a eulogy for the 2025 Democratic candidates in Northampton and Lehigh County. The 2023 Democratic candidates in both counties, of which Tara Zrinski (Democratic nominee for County Executive) was prominently one, very likely won the independent voters in both counties. Candidate quality matters, and Roger Maclean and Tom Giovanni are basically moss growing on a dead tree level of excitement. Giovanni wouldn’t debate Zrinski and then could barely put together a coherent sentence together in his conversation on WFMZ’s Business Matters and Maclean believes he will find “magic money” to plug budget holes. These are deeply unserious, non-thinking individuals. That definitely could matter. Democrats lack competitive elections in Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton though to help turn out their base, and the Northampton County Council Democratic slate charitably has two (maybe three on a good day) candidates I can even stomach the thought of on the council. There are lots of variables in this election besides who turns out, but they break both ways.
I have two basic rules when I run local elections- I do not give a shit what the “prevailing wisdom” inside the courthouse/government center/city hall is, and I really don’t give a shit if a few county/city employees are pissed at the Executive/Mayor because they didn’t get a raise. None of that nonsense is indicative of what the general public thinks about the candidates, they are tiny samples of the electorate that tell us much about nothing. Sure, most of the lawyers in both county can tell you who clearly should win, but they don’t even equal 1% of the electorate. So, if you’re one of the people hanging out at all the party events, debates, picnics, or whatever else and think you have a handle on what is going to happen- you don’t.
I was invited to tonight’s Lehigh Valley 4 All meeting to ask Bob “Crooksy” Brooks questions about the things I’ve written about him. I’m going to decline at this time. I’m sure his team would say that vindicates him, that it shows I’m throwing baseless accusations at him from behind a computer screen and won’t defend them. If I were him, that’s what I’d say too. I’m going to proceed to tell you why that’s a pile of shit.
I’ve been at an event with Crooksy and Crosswell since I started writing about them. If they were truly mad and felt they had a legitimate beef with what I wrote, they could have addressed it then. Neither of them did. I have no reason to give either one a chance to prepare answers for an audience. One’s a bartender and one’s a lawyer, two professions that know how to talk their way around anything. In both cases, I have laid out unassailable facts, not opinions or presentations, about them. I posted the Superior Court’s opinion on the matter of Crooksy stiffing his ex-mother-in-law, which clearly shows he didn’t pay her back for 14 years, meaning no, it wasn’t just part of a messy divorce like he claims. Why would I give him equal footing with me to lie about that for an audience? I posted the actual screenshots of his social media where he says he thinks we need more guns and prayer in schools, and where he talks about hating Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem. Did I add on my opinions? Sure. But what I gave you out front was the documentation of this man’s views and actions. I am not going to literally debate if they happened with him. If he wants to accuse the Superior Court of Pennsylvania of lying, he can do that himself. Bob Brooks did everything I said. If you want to decide those things don’t matter to you, you can do that on your own.
I’m going to say the same for Ryan Crosswell, who no one is asking me to give a forum to at this point. Again, I’ve laid out the facts here. Crosswell is not from here and is a lifelong Republican until a few months ago. Voter registration is a public record, and it shows him repeatedly registering as, and voting as, a Republican in such far off places as Louisiana and Washington, D.C. There’s not much to argue there. I showed you Crosswell’s LinkedIn, which talks about his work at an infamous union busting law firm, and in which he talks about his work to screw workers. Crosswell filed a finance report in July that showed almost all of the money he is raising is from out of town, with just one donor in the district. Again, these things aren’t really up for debate.
There are five candidates in this race. I’m not going to debate all five of them about their life stories. I’m not attacking three of them, all of whom are long time Democrats who have lived in the Lehigh Valley for years. I’m attacking two guys who really shouldn’t be running in a Democratic Primary in the Lehigh Valley. The response both have given so far is to tell people that I’m attacking them on the behalf of Lamont McClure. That’s a load of shit. Go check McClure’s campaign finance reports, I do not work for him. I will not be working for him in this primary either, including in the future. I like Lamont enough, but he’s not paying me a check to do anything for him. I have not worked for a political candidate since May of 2024, most of my work is now for independent expenditures, and will be remaining as such. I’m not going to debate these kinds of lies for an audience, where how one presents themselves can sway the crowd on who they are going to believe, these guys are both trained talkers. I am laying out the facts on these individuals in black and white letters. This shouldn’t be a matter of interpretation, it should be a matter of facts. If Crooksy wants to debate if he’s a deadbeat or not, he can send mailers to the voters telling them he’s not. I sure as hell am not going to give him a platform to do so.
The primary voters in 2026 can decide what they think of the facts, but I’m not going to debate what the facts are with people that would screw family members or working people. If primary voters choose one of these guys, we’ll see how the full electorate reacts. My guess is not very well.
Well it’s time for our monthly QB rankings in the NFL. It’s going to take more than one month to change most of my top five, but Joe Burrow falls a bit for being hurt. I’m sorry, it’s just another injury and another slow start. He might be #1 on the field for 18 weeks. He has to do that though. There are starters moving up from playing well (Danny Dimes) and others moving down due to injuries and regression. There are others who just haven’t taken a leap yet, and we’ll see where they are in a month.
The government is shut down. Good. The truth is that the Republicans are in the majority in both houses of Congress. They also hold the White House. If they want to fund this government, they should figure out a way. What is this government doing that someone who disagrees with Donald Trump should want to continue?
This fight is not about illegal immigrants getting health care from the government. That is illegal now, and does not happen on any meaningful level. Medicare and Medicaid have plenty of safe guards now against giving a policy to non-citizens. If you wanted to make sure those programs and the VA and ACA had literal zero illegal immigrants on policies, you’d give them more money, not less, so they could enforce it better. This is all just excuses from Donald Trump.
This fight is about the ACA and affordable health care in America. Cutting subsidies for premiums under the ACA simply will raise the amount of money people pay for a plan. If premiums are higher, less people will buy plans. Because less people are buying, plans will become more expensive people who buy plans. It’s a nasty cycle, and the reason most of the 20 million or so on “Obamacare” plans didn’t just buy an insurance plan before. The whole market is cheaper with more people on it. With less people insured, you get more people showing up at hospitals and clinics and receiving care they will never pay for. The hospitals and clinics then make up that money by charging insurers more for the people they are covering. Simply put, health care is cheaper on the micro (household) level with more people insured than less. Cutting subsidies to the ACA is a rate hike even for people like me, who don’t accept the subsidy.
Aside from the multitude of horrific things the current government is doing that Democrats should have no interest in paying for, there’s no point in screwing up the health care market because you don’t like the President who designed it. Keep the government shut down. If the Republicans want to fund it, let them figure it out. If they want Democrats to help, they can cave on health insurance premiums. Otherwise there is no harm in shutting it down and keeping it down. Democrats were voted out, we’re under no obligation to help them.
Apocalypse Vibes 