Anti-Biden protest on Biden Street!

Sunday, April 21, at 11 a.m. near the Piazza dell’ Arte on Court House Square on the 500 block of what should be Spruce Street in downtown Scranton.

Why?

Here’s why.

Presumptuous Democratic Party bosses from Scranton City Hall on North Washington Avenue to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue expect registered Democrats to do as they say and vote for President Joe Biden’s re-election.

When asses fly we will.

I shouldn’t say “we.”

I recently quit the Democratic Party after years of feeling abandoned, taken for granted and ignored by elected officials for whom I voted and who more and more take care of each other instead of looking out for constituents.

Not all Democrats are braying beasts of burden like the Democratic Party’s docile symbolic donkey, waiting to be led around and told what to do. Increasing numbers of registered Democrats refuse to follow orders in our struggling democracy where self-absorbed party big wheels whine that democracy is at stake.

Democracy is failing, all right, thanks to the Democratic Party.

If egalitarianism in this shoddy republic finally does get lost in the duopolist shuffle, Democratic Party oligarchs will be to blame. These effete political snobs have been pushing their weight around for way too long. That means every political opportunist and true-blue brown-nose Biden cheerleader who picks up a public paycheck courtesy of the taxpayers.

For starters I’m talking about alleged public servants who represent Scranton.

One way or another, U.S. Senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, Gov. Josh Shapiro, State Representatives Kyle Donahue and Kyle Mullins, State Sen. Marty Flynn, Lackawanna County Commissioners Bill Gaughan and Matt McGloin, Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti, each superficial Democrat sitting on Scranton City Council and other parochial local yokels have abandoned and ignored the wishes of countless good Democrats and other good citizens they represent.

Voters deserve better from these self-proclaimed masters of Pennsylvania’s closed primary election who make a living barking commands while walking in lockstep with their kingpin president even when he’s wrong.

Biden is better than Donald Trump, they swear. This shallow conclusion depends on who you ask.

Trump isn’t the sitting American president who helped Israel kill 45,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 16,000 of whom were children until American-made bombs, jets and Democratic Party support slaughtered them in the continuing Israeli genocide. Trump isn’t the sitting American president who continues to authorize the taxpayer-funded donation of more bombs and planes and support to continue the genocide.

Like it or not, genocide is the appropriate word — genocide made in the USA.

Democracy is not an extortion racket.

Blackmail no longer works.

We refuse to pay the ransom.

I quit the Democratic Party after many years trying to fight them from the inside. I quit because of Biden’s support for the ongoing Gazan genocide where Biden tacitly approves Israeli war crimes. I quit because local, state and national Democratic Party bosses debase democracy.

Not one of them has earned your vote if you value and respect humanity.

Reawakened as a radical peace advocate, I choose to fight Democrats from the outside. Many still active Democrats call themselves “Uncommitted” and continue to fight party royalty from the inside. Biden better beware of Scranton’s “Uncommitted.”

Supporters of the well-organized “Uncommitted” movement are picking up momentum in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, moving through our swing state with the real power of liberty. Their goal is simple: Put Biden and his local, state and national Democratic Party flunkies on notice that he and they are hurting, not helping, killing not caring, and destroying the essence of freedom upon which the fundamental concept of democracy is based.

The “Uncommitted” message is simple: “Let President Biden know that Pennsylvania stands against genocide. Write in “Uncommitted’ on Tuesday, April 23rd in the Primary Election.”

This call to action comes right off the “Uncommitted Pennsylvania” website at https://uncommittedpa.org/.

The “uncommitted” vote will help determine Democratic Party success or failure. Free-spirited voters, including voters like me who represent no political party, will decide the 2024 presidential election. Northeastern Pennsylvania Democrats are crucial to improving a dystopian world.

“Uncommitted” demands an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and an end to the siege of Gaza. “Uncommited” demands that U.S. officials reinstate humanitarian aid and funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). “Uncommitted” demands an end to U.S. aid to Israel.

That’s why state “Uncommitted” organizers and supporters will rally on Sunday, April 21, at 11 a.m. near the Piazza dell’ Arte on the 500 block of Biden Street in downtown Scranton. Billed as a “Rally and March in Biden’s Hometown,” the demonstration mobilizes people against genocide in Gaza and protests the Democratic Party’s complicity in the slaughter.

Scranton community organizer Frankie Malacaria says he’s all in with “Uncommitted.”

“Yeah, I’m intimately involved with the statewide organizing for it,” the 32-year-old social justice activist said this week. “Sent a notification to each county. Called most of the counties’ election directors last week to notify them.”

Malacaria said he recently attended a gathering at the Luzerne County Democratic headquarters in Wilkes-Barre where Casey gave a campaign speech while standing beneath a banner inscribed with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war,” the banner said.

Malacaria said he could feel Casey’s hypocrisy.

Continuing local pro-Palestinian protests and disruptions at Casey’s house on North Webster Avenue in Scranton, Cartwright’s Scranton office and Moosic mansion and public events represent the noble history of working-class dissent and the honorable notion that popular resistance did not end when the anthracite coal mines closed.

Elected Democratic Party officials are Scranton’s 21st Century new robber barons.

Demonstrators on Monday bullhorned their way into an outdoor Cartwright appearance at the University of Scranton, chastising holier-than-thou pro-life Jesuits and their smug guests for breaking ground on a new multimillion-dollar building while Cartwright snuggles up to defense contractor campaign contributors who enable Biden to help destroy buildings and lives in Gaza.

Clearly shaken, Cartwright and reputed liberal Mayor Cognetti just picked up their shovels, adjusted their silly hard hats and dug in, doing their best to ignore the unexpected breach of civic decorum.

Democrats better get used to the upheaval.

Continuing disturbances will occur among voters committed to voting them and their hero Biden out of office. As uncommitted voters call them out, we’ll see if they and their colleagues remain committed to Israel’s extermination of the Palestinian people.

See you on Biden Street.

Back in 2021 city officials in President Joe Biden’s Scranton, Pennsylvania birthplace renamed good old-fashioned Spruce Street as Biden Street, rechristening a traditional byway as a new and improved posh and prestigious address.

To make matters worse, Scranton City Council also renamed the Central Scranton Expressway as the President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Expressway. Commonly called the President Biden Expressway, the road name offers more than a mouthful for even a sober St. Patrick’s Day parade marcher.

Not everybody was happy with the name change.

Downtown Scranton real estate star, redevelopment guru and local business mogul John Basalyga still isn’t.

“I’ve always stated from the beginning that our roads should have never been changed,” Basalyga said Wednesday in an email. “It wasn’t fair that the owners of those roads, the taxpayers, had no say in it. I still stand firm on that.”

“They should change back the signs as fast as they put them up. I think it was the fastest thing I ever saw local government do,” he said.

That’s why almost 20,000 people have signed an online petition to change the Scranton expressway and downtown street names back to the former downtown brand.

Count me in.

Announcing the new name change, then Scranton City Council President and now Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan dished out the parochial pro-Biden malarkey as well as anybody.

“The eyes of not only the country but the world have been on Scranton because of Joe Biden, and he’s never forgotten where he’s come from,” said Democrat Gaughan. “And I think people really take a lot of pride in the fact that we have a president that is from our city and we should celebrate that.”

Gaughan’s still riding with Biden even though the love train has jumped the track.

I take far more pride honoring the Pittston Avenue coal mine breaker boy and Major League baseball legend Steve O’Neill after whom I’m named than in genuflecting to a presidential plagiarist, warmonger and world-class phony.

Among other gritty accomplishments as citizen and athlete, O’Neill helped win a World Series as a Cleveland catcher, brought his buddy Babe Ruth to visit my father Shamus and his elementary school kid pals in the overwhelmingly Irish Minooka section of town, and managed the winning Detroit Tigers in the 1945 World Series.

Biden played Little League in the ritzy Green Ridge Scranton neighborhood.

City officials previously named a street across from Biden’s childhood home Joe Biden Way even before the official downtown name change. Democratic Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti showed up for the unveiling as the city’s first woman mayor. Previous Democratic Mayor Bill Courtright couldn’t make the ribbon cutting because he’s doing seven years in a federal prison for city political corruption. Cognetti promised the symbolism of the street sign will give “a lasting boost of confidence to every child who lives here.”

More Scranton children will grow up to follow in Courtright’s shuffling shower shoe footsteps onto the cell block than to walk around town with an extra dose of Scranton spirit sitting on their shoulders like a guardian angel. Courtright and several city cops who pleaded guilty to crimes, including a former SWAT team sniper who threatened members of his special operations’ group, once ruled as Scranton’s best role models.

Ask the poor kids in town, especially Black and Brown ones, if they trust white police and politicians.

No joke, as Biden likes to say.

For now Biden Street remains a blissful, glowing state of mind among the faithful.

In a downtown Scranton flush with federal Covid money pumped into small businesses, the retail district now boasts the contemporary appeal of one big Hank’s hoagie, a more than satisfying gut-busting cholesterol-laden sandwich dripping with oil from Biden’s favorite local haunt.

Biden burping back better doesn’t embarrass his boosters.

Elected and appointed Scranton officials take what they can get. Some political fixer’s hand is always out.

As a former Scranton Democrat who grudgingly voted in 2020 for the man Barack Obama lovingly called “the scrappy kid from Scranton,” even though 81-year-old Biden moved out of town as a 10-year-old, I marvel at the continuing delusion under which Scranton Democrats do no business as usual.

Scranton young professionals are equally guilty of pipe dreams, considering themselves the latest, greatest generation of hip. Lackawanna County, where Scranton serves as the county seat, actually pays a full-time county arts and culture director who lords power over government arts grants to anoint those who produce acceptable, inoffensive art in exchange for government approved subsidies.

No edgy painters, sculptors or writers need apply.

But don’t look for a mural on Biden Street honoring Brenda Williams who Scranton cops shot five times and killed back in 2009. The naked and mentally ill Black woman lunged toward an officer with a knife a fire team of cops allowed her to retrieve from the kitchen as she aimlessly walked around her apartment looking for reality.

When I suggested the heartfelt project to several local government and business art snobs nobody in the publicly subsidized mural business even responded to my written suggestion. Nice safe murals such as the one depicting the goofy cast from the inane NBC television comedy “The Office” the creators call “The Story of Us” is more akin to Scranton’s impression of itself.

Who are we, anyway?

We’re the privileged, pampered people with the right connections.

Access is everything in Scranton.

Pompous Chamber of Commerce bores and other elite Establishment flat tires who never made it to Wall Street now hobnob on Biden Street. Democratic political hacks go slumming there, too, stepping away from elite fundraisers at the McGregor mansion in the lace curtain Green Ridge section of the city where Biden lived as a kid.

It’s only a matter of time before a couple of coal cracker Mafia descendants flush with government startup cash open up a strip club on Biden Street called “The White House’ where naked “girls girls girls” can shake their Biden booty while “Biden” their time before they get busted for not paying off bribes to stay open.

Room also exists for increasing numbers of struggling refugees from Haiti, Afghanistan and elsewhere fighting to be free who deserve comfort on Biden Street. Forget those Palestinians from Gaza, though, since Biden has yet to invite any of the Gazan huddled masses after giving Israel the money, bombs and jets required to kill about 45,000 or so of them, including about 15,000 children.

Don’t forget the Mexicans, either!

Olé!

These hard-working laborers who do jobs Scrantonian young people won’t do can  put a new roof on your house in half the time it took Mayor Cognetti to boast about her litany of global accomplishments on her resume when Biden appointed her in February as a member of the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations.

Already trapped in a frenzied nationwide re-election campaign bid, Biden needs all the votes he can get (even on Biden Street) to win Pennsylvania in November’s general election.

Even if he loses, and he easily could, Democrats will always welcome Biden to buy his own sweet new loft on the hippest street in town, a nice man cave hideaway with granite counter tops and a shelf above the commode to use as his presidential library with an unopened copy of “Democracy for Dummies” collecting dust beside the bowl brush.

Known for posing in aviator shades and shallow see-through empathy, Joe Biden already understands that living on Biden Street is better than being up shit creek without a paddle. The president’s been adrift in a stinking Washington crap canal his whole political career.

Why stop now?

Frigid wind blew overtop iced grave markers at Cathedral Cemetery Sunday when Joe Silvestri and Brad Varney pulled Joe’s red Subaru to the side of the historic graveyard road. Stepping from the car graced with a Purple Heart license plate they shook hands with old friends who arrived early.

To commemorate the 57th anniversary of Jimmy Reddington’s death in Vietnam, the two Marines (not former, not current, but always Marines) had driven that bitter cold morning from near Philadelphia to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to salute their compatriot and walk sacred land he took great pride in calling home.

Scranton meant the world to Jimmy.

Severely wounded by bullet and bomb in the same March 23, 1967 North Vietnamese attack that killed Jimmy, Joe stood strong and steady after all these years, repeating the same sentiment he has shared during previous visits.

“Jimmy will always be 19,” Joe said.

Brad nodded.

Personable with a knifelike build, a longtime martial arts teacher and community leader, Brad has always inspired people who needed him during the toughest times. When Joe awoke in his military hospital bed after almost dying, Brad stood by his side.

Joe said, “When Brad and Smitty, another member of my squad, were told to go to Danang to catch their flight to go on R & R they decided to make a detour to visit me at the hospital. They got there a short time after I came out of the drowsiness of being operated on. Seeing Brad and Smitty standing next to my recovery bed gave me a little comfort until I learned that many of my friends were also there in the hospital being operated on. Not to mention the loss of Jimmy, John King and Lt. John Fuller from our platoon. The other two platoons also sustained many casualties.”

Joe Silvestri never forgets his friends.

“Brad and I participated in many search and destroy missions and operations,” Joe said. “We coped with monsoon rain, extreme heat, jungles with 100% humidity. A few years after the war I started searching for Brad and eventually found him in Bucks County in the late 1970s.”

Both 77, Joe and Brad persist in their yearly mission to the Scranton holy land where Jimmy is buried to help share with the living the lasting impact of Jimmy’s death. Both men offer honor and loyalty to anyone willing to abide by values too many Americans nowadays ignore. Standing beside Jimmy’s grave Sunday, Joe said his friend had only served in Vietnam for about four months before he died.

“A lifetime in combat,” he said.

That terrible Thursday so long ago a mortar explosion blew Joe off his feet and knocked him out. When Jimmy discovered Joe had been hit, thinking Joe had died Jimmy rushed a hidden enemy firing from the tree line. A single bullet ended his life.

For a moment Sunday, as two robins bounced near a bent silver chain link cemetery fence near the perimeter of Jimmy’s grave, Joe and Brad paused as if the clock had stopped ticking, as if youth and hope and Jimmy’s future still existed. Back then they forged their bond and got to know each other more than most people ever know themselves.

Today they remember.

“We talked about our dreams,” Joe said.

“A little house, a white picket fence,” Brad said.

Joe, Brad, Jimmy and the rest of their fire team wanted what most young men in those deadly jungles wanted: a home, a family, a steady job and the peace of mind that hopefully comes after surviving the horrors of combat. Joe and Brad fulfilled those dreams. Each man joyfully shares photographs of smiling family members, vacations and other happy moments in their lives.

There’s no telling what Jimmy might have accomplished or become had he lived, Joe said. Jimmy loved Scranton and wanted so much to come home and bring Joe and others with him. In turn, Joe would take Jimmy to Sicily to visit his birthplace where he grew up until moving to the United States with his immigrant parents. Joe became a United States citizen only after returning home from serving in Vietnam where more than 58,000 American military men and women died.

Joe made it to Scranton after the war.

Jimmy did not.

Listening closely to Joe and Brad reflect on life and death, a dozen or so men, mostly Vietnam veterans, huddled near Jimmy’s grave. Enduring the effects of aging, they stared solemnly at Jimmy’s cold plot in the ground and the blood red Marine Corps flag that flapped and snapped beside his headstone. Jimmy’s final resting place burns as powerful symbolic testimony, a timeless message of duty.

Nowhere in sight were the opportunistic politicians and fair-weather media gadflies who once swarmed to this annual gathering. No White House letter arrived from one scrappy kid from Scranton to another. No cocky pro-war congressman or dull flag-waving senator bowed his head. No celebrity county commissioner or superstar city mayor offered prayer or promise.

By respecting the heartfelt heritage of this tough, young Marine raised by a loving single mother in the nearby Weston Field neighborhood, those who did make the  pilgrimage embody the still beating pulse of Jimmy Reddington’s legacy they do their best to live up to every day.

Jimmy’s birthright has the best of Scranton written all over it. But unless dedicated leaders carry out their sworn duty to point the way, to serve as unselfishly as Jimmy did, Scranton’s best days might be over.

Government officials and media who passed on paying their respects benefit from Jimmy’s sacrifice. Yet they ignore their societal debt to uphold the same respect for the city he embraced until he died a star-spangled dreamer from a hard coal country town.

Standing by Jimmy’s grave I couldn’t help but wonder what Jimmy would think of his city today.

Living comfortable lives in the shadow of Scranton’s increasing urban neglect, 21^st Century young people posture and flock to the city’s new upscale bars, foodie restaurants and expensive apartments in landmark buildings remodeled with sweet tax breaks for real estate developers.

So-called young professional tenants live in a former cigar factory located not far from the cemetery, a manufacturing plant that years ago offered blue-collar men and women hard, steady work. Advantaged building residents now sleep tucked into fluffy down quilts, reveling in the good life Jimmy never got a chance to pursue. None of these poseurs likely even know his name.

Remaining faithful to Jimmy Reddington’s legacy means making Scranton’s quality of life better, not worse, than when he left his beloved city to enlist in the Marines. Remaining faithful means defending people in Scranton’s timeworn neighborhoods, the battered poor and the working poor trying to survive on traditional streets on old-fashioned blocks and not just the privileged living in a glitzy gentrified downtown.

Living Jimmy Reddington’s legacy requires mature commitment best expressed in the Marine Corps motto: “Semper Fidelis,” or “Semper Fi,” Latin for “Always Faithful.” The official Marine Corps website makes clear the warrior’s promise of remaining faithful “to those in our communities for which we fight” and from which the military draft and the urge to serve drew countless other men and women whose lives were very much like Jimmy’s.

Scranton’s future generations will only succeed if they help everyone in need and face complex community issues of race, class, gender and other cultural minefields that lie ahead.

Living Jimmy Reddington’s legacy means continuing that fight today, tomorrow and forever with every ounce of courage we possess.

Of all the crack security guards U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright could have hired to defend him from terrorist attack, the 8^th District congressman from Northeastern Pennsylvania chose Leonard Namiotka.

But how much protection can Democrat Cartwright expect from a retired Scranton cop who accidentally shot himself in the hand in 2009 while off duty and showing off his personal Glock 27 (40 cal.) semi-automatic pistol to the owner of a Scranton supermarket?

Namiotka “readily” called his self-inflicted gunshot wound a “mistake,” according to a puff piece Scranton Times-Tribune interview at the time of Namiotka’s 2023 retirement. The “bullet left a reminder: a thin scar on his palm a few centimeters across,” the story said.

 “I didn’t have my mind on what I was doing,” Namiotka said.

Now Cartwright doesn’t have his mind on what he’s doing.

When I called Cartwright’s Scranton office Wednesday to talk with Namiotka, the Cartwright staffer who answered the phone said Namiotka wasn’t in the office. The staffer asked who was calling and if he could take a message. I identified myself and said I was writing a story about Namiotka and wanted to talk with him about his employment with Cartwright and how he once shot himself.

“One moment,” the man said before putting me on hold to listen to some zippy instrumental music. After a few minutes the music stopped, the line rang again and the same man answered the phone.

“Congressman Cartwright’s office,” he said.

I told him it was still me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to get some information here. Hold on a second.”

I went back to the annoying zippy music.

Within minutes Cartwright’s congressional hotline rang again.

“Congressman Cartwright’s office,” the same man said for the third time.

Me again, I said.

Cartwright’s staffer told me Namiotka wouldn’t be in the office Wednesday and said he’d put me through to the congressman’s voicemail so I could leave a message. The man refused to identify himself before connecting me to the voicemail where I left a message.

I had already repeatedly asked in writing to interview Cartwright about Namiotka, but the congressman refused to talk with me. In a written statement, Cartwright’s Washington D.C. Chief of Staff Hunter Ridgway cited security concerns for refusing to answer detailed questions about Namiotka.

“Security coverage has long been provided to members of Congress and their staffers working at the U.S. Capitol. Following physical attacks on U.S. Representatives at district events and assaults on staffers working in district offices, the U.S. Sergeant at Arms has been leading efforts at enhancing security in all Congressional districts across the country, including ours. 

“Our office has followed these recommendations to ensure the safety of our constituents, our staff members, and yes, the safety of protestors who gather outside our offices. And ensuring that safety means we’ve hired security. And my apologies but divulging further information on our specific security protocols runs counterproductive to these safety efforts.”

“I’m not asking Ridgway to give away state secrets,” I responded in an email to Cartwright’s Communication Director Wendy Wilson. “I’m asking for public information about Leonard Namiotka, an individual congressional staffer, with a reckless gun incident on his resume who the congressman employs as a security guard.

“Ridgway’s refusal to provide basic public information about equal opportunity in hiring, posting jobs, scheduling interviews, hours worked, full or part-time pay, benefits, etc. reflect poorly on the congressman’s public service and transparency. Honest answers are always better than a news story listing relevant questions Rep. Cartwright refuses to face — questions any constituent or member of the press might ask him at an upcoming videoed public event.”

Here are additional questions I emailed Cartwright that he refuses to answer:

Did Cartwright know Namiotka shot himself at a previous job before hiring him to this job? Does Namiotka carry a loaded firearm on duty? Is Namiotka a federal employee? Is he employed full-time? Does he receive federal benefits of any kind? Is his job a union position? Did Rep. Cartwright advertise the security position opening Namiotka filled? Did Cartwright interview other candidates for the job? Does the congressman employ other security guards in other district offices? Has Cartwright received any threats?

On March 8, 2024, International Women’s Day, I joined a small group of local good citizens outside Cartwright’s Scranton office to call attention to Cartwright’s complicity in the killing of Palestinian women in Gaza.

Because of a brisk wind, one of the protesters leaned a paper sign against a wooden sandwich board standing on the sidewalk that advertised a bar code connecting cell phone scanners to Cartwright’s official website. A uniformed man wearing a brown shirt with “SECURITY” on the back and a circular patch printed with the words “Congressman Cartwright” on his shoulder rushed from inside the office and told the woman to remove the sign from what he called “government property.”

The woman apologized and quickly complied with his order.

The man’s name tag identified him as “Namiotka,” whom I recognized as a city police lieutenant who served as interim chief when a former chief retired in 2020 and Mayor Paige Gebhardt Cognetti named Namiotka to lead the police department. Cognetti demoted Namiotka back to lieutenant in 2022 when she appointed current Chief Tom Carroll.

When I asked Namiotka, 56, if he still worked as a Scranton police officer, he said he retired and now worked for Cartwright and the Lackawanna County Sheriff’s Department.

“Retirement is good,” Namiotka said.

Shortly after this exchange two marked city police vehicles showed up and parked at both ends of the block where they remained for about an hour. Chief Carroll said he was “unaware of any complaints being made for the March 8 gathering.”

The following day Namiotka accompanied Cartwright when the congressman marched in the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day parade — this time wearing a windbreaker with no official patch or identification designating him as an official congressional security guard.

During the parade several pro-Palestinian protestors chanted “SHAME, SHAME, SHAME” at Cartwright during a few awkward minutes he paused from marching and stood in the middle of the street. A noticeably jittery Namiotka faced the small group in a wide stance, brandishing his umbrella with both hands the way riot police often do with batons in tense situations.

When the parade moved on Namiotka sidled up to rookie Lackawanna County Commissioner Matt McGloin — who had changed position from closer to the front of the parade to Cartwright’s side  — laughed and patted the former NFL quarterback on the back.

Cartwright refuses to say if Namiotka received a paycheck for marching in the Scranton St. Patrick’s Day parade. Will Cartwright pay Namiotka or other security guards to accompany him on future campaign or work-related trips and events?

Will Namiotka sit outside Cartwright’s house to protect the congressman like a rescued guard dog from increasing numbers of peaceful, good citizens who see him as a warmonger defense contractor puppet? Protesters dedicated to promoting peace showed up the morning after the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County annual dinner to drape a Palestinian flag across the gate to Cartwright’s massive Moosic mansion and remind him he’s helping Israel unleash another day of genocide in Gaza.

By his smug unwillingness to tell transparent truth, scaredy-cat Congressman Matt Cartwright cavalierly disrespects public service. As for Namiotka, he’s just doing his job — whatever that is.

Although the Times-Tribune article about Namiotka’s retirement reports an internal investigation “cleared” Namiotka, the story goes deeper than the fawning coverage the local daily newspaper provided.

In response to questions about whether city officials disciplined Namiotka for his gun negligence, Scranton Police Chief Tom Carroll said in a written response, “Given a situation such as this, an officer would likely receive remedial training and if warranted by an internal investigation, they may be subject to disciplinary action.  I am not privy to the results of this specific internal investigation from 2009.”

Carroll did not explain how he, the Scranton police chief, is not privy to a Scranton Police Department internal investigation into a former Scranton police chief.

In response to my state Right-to-Know Law request, Scranton “Agency Open Records Officer” Kelsey Widdick provided the 2009 incident report city police filed in the aftermath of Namiotka’s potentially fatal and embarrassing misfire.

Marked “CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATION” into “NEGLIGENT WEAPON HANDLING” and “EXCEPTIONALLY CLEARED” all on the same day as the incident, the police report documents Namiotka’s recklessness at 4:15 p.m. on Sunday, February, 8, 2009.

Namiotka admitted shooting himself in the hand – becoming perpetrator and victim at the same time — as first responders helped stop the bleeding.

According to the incident report, “The bullet appeared to have gone through his left palm. Lt. Namiotka stated that at approx. 1615hrs he was showing John Brunetti( Owner of Brunetti’s ) his off duty Glock 27 (40 cal.) Namiotka and Brunetti were in a cooler in the back of the store at the time. Lt. Namiotka further stated that he unloaded the weapon and showed Mr. Brunetti how it worked. Lt. Namiotka then loaded the weapon and released the magazine to show him another feature. When Lt. Namiotka attempted to eject the chambered round, the weapon discharged and the round went through his left palm. Lt. Namiotka called 911 and had them send an ambulance and a supervisor. Mr. Brunetti was not injured and the spent round was located on the floor of the cooler.”

When hospital officials released Namiotka, his co-workers even returned his gun to him..

Why did Scranton police fail to charge their colleague and supervisor with the illegal discharge of a firearm or recklessly endangering another person, a crime upon conviction in Pennsylvania that can result in a fine of $5,000 and one to two years in prison?

Why did Scranton police consider this potentially deadly shooting a “confidential investigation?” Why did Scranton police clear their criminal case within hours, declaring “inactive” the disposition of this shameful gun violence danger?

Officer discretion? Back the blue damage control? One-of-our-own syndrome?

When it comes to public safety Namiotka’s itchy trigger finger is bad enough.

But he only shot himself in the hand once.

Through public cowardice, corporate collaboration and elite deceit, small caliber Congressman Matt Cartwright shoots himself in the foot every day.

No better gender equality battle cry exists than “Women’s rights are human rights.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose paternal family roots run deep in Scranton and who should be president, spoke those mighty words. Now Hillary’s hubby Bill is headed to Scranton as featured speaker at Saturday’s annual all-male Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County dinner.

Unless the fat cats who run this paternalistic organization have officially changed their set-in-Stone-Age rules — and I have no reason to believe they have — no women need apply for a seat in the packed Scranton Cultural Center audience of white men who call the business, political and other societal shots in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Just in case the Friendly Sons did end their century-plus oppression, I left detailed questions in a telephone message for Friendly Sons’ president Daniel P. Haggerty, Esq., owner and president of PMJ Mergers in Clarks Summit. As has been the case in past years when I submitted questions to a smug Friendly Sons’ president, Haggerty failed to return my call. Looks like the local clan still believes a woman’s place is where they tell her it is.

Former President Bill Clinton’s appearance will further validate their cruel prejudice.

To achieve any real progress in Scranton, women must enjoy the same opportunity to buy a ticket and attend the dinner as men who network, hobnob and make cultural connections among privileged powerbroker colleagues who make life harder for women to succeed here in hard coal country and around the world.

Unlike women political candidates blackballed from the dinner who seek votes and campaign contributions, frequent dinner guests U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright will be free to work the room as established public servants up for re-election. They will also tout their role as good soldiers in the American war machine, defense contractor fixers complicit in the continuing slaughter of Gazan women who die in the firestorm of publicly-funded and donated American-produced Israeli bombs. Many of those shells are made at the General Dynamics ammunition plant right here in Scranton.

Palestinian women deserve human rights, too. But neither Clinton, Casey, Cartwright nor President Joe Biden is calling for a permanent ceasefire and an end to Israeli occupation that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians since October 7 — 70 percent of whom were women and girls. These men’s support for genocide helped exterminate those women’s and girls’ future.

As one of the architects of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday peace agreement (Hillary, too, shares in that historic accomplishment) Bill Clinton understands as well as anyone the importance of fighting for civil and human rights.

Yet, he, the Friendly Sons and their confidently-Caucasian Democratic Party allies work diligently to deceive women voters of all races into believing they’re all staunch equal rights defenders. Biden has addressed the annual dinner three times in the past and is counting on his bigoted brothers to help re-elect him in November. Democrats dismiss the value of women voters, rejecting the idea they might not cast a ballot for Biden if they can’t buy a ticket to the hooley just because they’re women. Women who vote and women who don’t vote will decide Biden’s political fate.

With Biden publicly disrespecting women and sanctioning their exclusion in his hallowed birthplace, Democratic mourners can blame him for digging his own political grave. Biden’s fawning women supporters help him dig the hole. Women who give their tacit approval to this time-dishonored tradition of ostracism are doing Biden far more harm than good. Glass ceiling breakers among them aren’t doing themselves any favors either.

In 2021 the ruling lads invited Scranton’s first woman mayor, Paige Gebhardt Cognetti, to be the first woman to address the dinner — but only via the internet in a virtual celebration hastily arranged in the aftermath of COVID. Cognetti again offered remarks at the 2022 dinner where she failed to ask for parity for her sisters in the city she’s paid to serve — and I don’t mean ham, cabbage and potatoes.

A donnybrook erupted last year when Cognetti and a county woman judge complained they got high-hatted, cavalierly brushed off the 2023 guest list. In return, the boys whined that Cognetti turned them down after publicly accusing them of rejecting her, receiving a grudging and insincere last-minute invite and then embarrassing the high-and-mighty green gang in the press. The woman judge didn’t show up at the stag party either.

Last week I emailed Mayor Cognetti about the upcoming shenanigan:

“Have you been invited to the cocktail party and/or dinner?”

“If you have been or are invited, do you plan to attend the cocktail party and/or dinner?”

“Will women across the board be afforded an equal opportunity to buy tickets and attend the traditionally all-male dinner the same way men are given the chance to buy tickets and attend the event?”

“Will you attend the cocktail party and/or dinner if the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County hierarchy excludes other women as guests at the cocktail party and/or dinner?”

“If you speak at the dinner will you address the matter of gender segregation the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County has perpetuated for well over a century?”

The Mayor’s response?

“I have been invited to this year’s dinner and will be giving welcome remarks as the Mayor of Scranton traditionally has done,” she wrote in an email that danced a jig around a cogent explanation.

Knowing Harvard Business School graduate Cognetti can do better than that, I sent another email.

“Will other women be allowed to attend the dinner? If not, should women across the board be given the same opportunity as you to attend the dinner?”

The Mayor’s answer?

“I am invited as and attend the dinner as the Mayor of Scranton, representing the city and my position,” she said in another fuzzy email.

In Scranton it’s every woman for herself.

Cognetti understands how crucial this drunken macho black tie bash is to garnering support for Biden’s re-election campaign. Nobody is more on board than Cognetti who accepted Biden’s April invitation to travel with him to Ireland (joined by mercenary partisan female fundraiser and Democratic National Committee Treasurer Virginia Doherty McGregor and her husband who live in Biden’s old lace curtain Scranton neighborhood).

If America’s women voters believe Democratic Party chieftains respect and fight for women’s rights, they haven’t paid attention to the shameless continuing segregation in Scranton where women remain second-class citizens.

Man up, fellas.

Time to do big boy things.

Speaking of children, the Friendly Sons are the same guys who will welcome to the head table Saturday a Michigan Roman Catholic bishop and Scranton native who will faithfully bless the men in this sad and sordid city where the current bishop should have been defrocked decades ago for covering up child sex crimes by pervert priests in his diocese.

Sure and begorrah, ’tis a great day for testosterone.

My father Shamus taught me to always fight one more round.

Nobody can beat you if you fight one more round.

Back on January 20, 2020, I published a column on my website that introduced a new online news site called THE SCRANTON NEWS. I wrote the news. Feminist political scientist, activist and former college professor Stephanie Bressler (to whom I’m married) edited the news.

Together we took on the world. Together we reported and commented on what we witnessed. Together we provided 21st Century American outlaw journalism to our readers.

Then Covid struck.

Life changed utterly.

We went underground.

Today we’re still healthy, good citizens in our 70s, still wearing N95 masks among strangers indoors and looking forward to getting our latest booster shot. We haven’t been sick, don’t want to get sick and don’t want to make anybody else sick.

We’re fighting one more round.

We’re also resurrecting THE SCRANTON NEWS with a new name and supercharged mission.  

The Scranton City News is born.

Our logo is the black shamrock. Discovered by stouthearted Druids thousands of years ago, the plant sprouted from rugged cracks in harsh cliffs on the raw western edge of Ireland. Rising to life in tough terrain, this dark three-leaf clover bent to no one.

We bend to no one.

That includes politicians, public relations flacks, business hacks and untrustworthy descendants of hard coal country robber barons, people who never cared about people and still don’t — coddled gentry who expect to forever control Scranton progress for their “own kind”  of self-absorbed elite establishment types.

Northeastern Pennsylvania media fails to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Lazy, timid and predictable, shallow news stories and cute columns lack depth no matter how many journalism awards tedious editorial managers claim. Local television network news affiliates spend more time digging into dog and cat survivor stories than investigating tales of struggle from combat veterans suffering PTSD.

Don’t expect aggressive news coverage and commentary from the pseudo-hip “news executives” who run the Scranton Times-Tribune now owned and operated by dull company men and cutthroat carpetbaggers from a Wall Street hedge fund. Don’t expect bureaucratic clerks of fact masquerading as reporters or the laziest feature-writing columnist in America to hold the powerful accountable for betraying the public trust.

The Scranton City News will challenge the masters. As knights of truth we’ll face the fire-breathers. We’ll slay the lies. And we’ll do it for free. No advertisers need apply.

Like radical pamphleteers during the Revolutionary War, we’ll publish when the need arises. As guerrilla irregulars we declare independence from corrupt and incompetent government and media the way Thomas Paine advocated “Common Sense” in 1776.

Both Paine’s missives and The Scranton City News exhibit a radical democratic spirit. In these revolutionary times, as Paine fought monarchy, we’ll fight American business and political royalty that believes peasants have no say in the way we’re marketed or governed, that only bloated plutocrats with money and power are entitled to access.

The Scranton City News will fight their power.

Look for street reporting and political commentary, societal self-defense against liberal or conservative attacks on logic and reason. Although we’re registered to vote, we’re neither Democrats nor Republicans. We bow to no political party. The Scranton City News is disruptive, rude, argumentative, biased and proud of it.

We are the enemy of the people who try to keep us silent, censored and stupid.

I’m specifically talking about sacred political blowhards like my Scranton Hill Section neighbor U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, Gov. Josh Shapiro, and even “that scrappy kid from Scranton” President Joe Biden — all Democrats who should know better.

Into his fourth year as president, Biden has not yet granted an interview to a Scranton journalist. Although I’ve asked several times over the years in writing to speak with the President, White House staff ignored my requests. I’ve interviewed former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the past. And Biden once called into my talk radio show during the time he served as a senator.

Maybe the old boy just isn’t up to the job.

Tell “Scranton Joe” to expect our call.

Donald Trump and his species better beware as well. We fought them before and we’ll fight them again. Save me a seat at Trump’s next rally, inauguration or sentencing — whatever comes first.

If anyone questions my credentials, I’m a state and national journalism award winner. I bring personal references from some of this nation’s most respected print and broadcast journalists, including at least one Pulitzer Prize winner, as well as the former British Sky News editor who hired me to provide daily live international commentary at the 2005 Michael Jackson child molestation trial in California.

One continuing battle here in Biden’s birthplace pits the annual Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County all-male dinner against equal opportunity for women. For more than a century, these lugs have banned women from their event unless the females are serving beer, ham, cabbage and potatoes. So brainwashed are countless local women by this bigoted tradition, they condone, justify and enable such shameful behavior from this gaggle of male chauvinist Paddy’s pigs,

After Scranton voters elected Paige Gebhardt Cognetti as the city’s first woman mayor in a special 2019 election and then elected her in a landslide to a full term in 2021, the Friendly Sons buckled and invited her to be the first woman to address the fete at a virtual dinner held online because of the Covid pandemic. In 2022 the lads invited her again. A smiling Cognetti happily addressed the brotherhood, relieved nobody in the press asked if she and a new female county judge were the only connected women guests the men allowed into the room.

He-man misogynists last year decided not to invite Cognetti and the judge. Cognetti went to the press for help, eventually refusing to attend when the lads issued what she considered a grudging and insincere invite. The judge also went elsewhere.

This year’s 118^th dinner returns to downtown Scranton Saturday for the first time in 40 years. Will the Friendly Sons invite Cognetti? If so, will she attend even if the bully boys ban other women? Will Cognetti, who won her historic bid to office thanks to women, try to have her cabbage and eat it, too?

Read all about it Thursday — only in The Scranton City News.

Already bloated business swells and other ill-intentioned corporate capitalists bellied up to the trough this morning for yet another downtown Scranton Chamber of Commerce breakfast, this time embracing dull company man and U.S. Sen. Bobby Casey as featured speaker.

Raising Palestinian flags and protest placards, about a dozen of Casey’s constituents lined the sidewalk in front of the building to call attention to the continuing slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazans as millions of men, women and children face starvation in the savage aftermath of the continuing bombing and collective punishment of innocent civilians.

When Casey arrived in a gas-guzzling publicly-funded SUV his driver bypassed the front entrance to pull into a space in the back. Casey moved so fast when he got out of the vehicle that decent, moral people Casey is well-paid to serve, who awaited his arrival in the early morning cold, didn’t have a chance to ask him a single question.

Moving quickly to the rear entrance I was only able to spot the back of Casey’s head as he scurried into the building. Before he disappeared behind the locked door I was only able to shout one question: Will you talk with constituents?

Casey never even turned around.

If Casey wants our vote in his tough re-election bid, he better talk with us. If Casey wants to continue the privilege of representing those of us assembled in Democratic President Joe Biden’s birthplace, he better respect us more than he does. If Casey wants to sleep at night with a clear conscience knowing his morality rises to the expected standard of a decent human being, he better support a ceasefire in Gaza and stop his complicity in arming Israel.

The more I think about what happened this morning, the more irked I get.

Casey is one big reason I recently checked out of the Democratic Party after trying for years to fight for progressive change from within and re-registered as a non-affiliated voter. After serving as a faithful Democrat and voting for Biden in 2020, I now might not vote at all. At 72 I’m one of those voters Democrats take for granted. Those days are gone, “Joey” and “Bobby” – as we like to infantilize grown men’s first names here in Scranton. If I do vote, I’m looking at third party candidate Cornel West or some other antagonist to the system in whose judgement I can at least place faith.

As I watched one particularly well-dressed guest walk to the front door to the breakfast this morning I shouted, “Enjoy your breakfast while kids are starving in Gaza.”

No joke, as Biden likes to say.

“The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime,” Human Rights Watch reports. “Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.”

The self-absorbed swell on his way into the breakfast had to hear me yell unless his head was in the clouds where most distracted Democrats daydream when it comes to accepting the harsh reality of genocide in Gaza. Judging from the well-fed appearance of the hungry crowd that showed up for the Chamber breakfast, maybe I should take a cue from this gluttonous gang and plan a breakfast of my own.

“Breakfast at Bobby’s” at Casey’s Webster Avenue house just a few blocks from my home in the Hill Section of Scranton might be a nice way to introduce our ire to Casey’s neighbors. We can sit on the curb eating our Wheaties with our fingers like barbarians at the gate. Or we can just walk up and down in front of Casey’s home inviting the shameless, shrinking senator to join us for a bite.

Like it or not, voracious bad governmental gorger Casey must one day eat his humble pie.

Grandpa fell off the commode Saturday night, busting open his head on the edge of the already cracked white porcelain sink. Hubby Frank drove home drunk from the afternoon show at Butts and Bolts gentlemen’s club on his Harley Fat Boy, fighting off multiple images of oncoming headlights in several lanes of traffic. The kids punched each other in their thick numb skulls for five minutes straight like mixed martial arts maniacs in a cage match. Deep sobs from 3-year-old Beth wracked her skinny body fragile as uncooked angel hair pasta. Wet sniffles Waylon wiped away with the back of his hand sent the 4-year-old porker into an asthma fit of coughs and snotty spit.

Bonita didn’t know what to do.

So she made hot dog soup.

“Hot dog soup,” she screamed when the pot boiled over and greasy water hissed in the burner flame.

The kids dried their eyes. Metal legs on Grandpa’s walker slammed against the wall as he dripped blood on the carpet and made his way down the steps. Frank opened another beer at the kitchen table as the gassy pop of the Pabst beer can blasted off in Bonita’s head like an exploding bottle rocket. The sound scared her enough lately to cut back on her own drinking though her pill consumption increased whenever she backed off the bourbon. On weekends Frank drank can after can until he finished the case. This being Saturday Bonita figured he had at least a dozen left in the refrigerator before he drove blinded by beer to the distributor for more before they closed.

Cleaning motorcycle grease from under his fingernails with his Buck knife, Frank drooled when she asked if he was hungry for hot dog soup. The hair on the back of her neck stood up straight like soldiers facing a firing squad when he pulled his chair up closer to the table, scraping against greasy linoleum gritty with stones from his black engineer boots grating like a stock car pulling up to the gravel starting line at a dirt track. Fresh boiled frankfurters (an alias her husband once used – Frank Furter – when he applied for a Visa card) always smelled good.

Hot dog soup soothed the savage outlaw biker.

Bonita was cooking high on meth when she first concocted the dish, pouring six cans of generic tomato soup with equal amounts of tap water into the 12-quart stock pot her mother left her when she died from COVID, dicing three packs of government-issued food stamp hot dogs, chopping four raw Bermuda onions and adding four dented cans of baked beans.

 “You can add whatever else you like to personalize the dish,” Bonita told her sister Brandi when she shared the recipe.

Grandpa dumped half a jar of sweet pickle relish in his soup. Bonita poured Tabasco sauce in hers. Waylon mashed up a fistful of barbecue potato chips and Beth sprinkled M&M peanuts into her favorite pink Tupperware bowl. That first night, with Frank working the door at the strip club, just the four of them sat around the small table laughing and slurping soup almost like a normal family.

Everybody loved hot dog soup.

They weren’t a normal family, though.

When Bonita heard Frank’s Harley pull in when he came home late, she raced to put his meal on the table so he could sit right down like the man of the house. Before he smoked a joint and went to bed she heard him with a spoon scratching deep into the pot, quietly seething and hating him more than ever when the bottom feeding bastard got digging around the pot. But what could she do?  This was the same animal that more than once used his soup spoon to dig into the crack of his ass to scratch an itch before going back to shoveling grub down his gullet.

The next day when she made another batch Grandpa ate his in his room and yelled down for Frank to bring him up another bowl. Hot dog soup eventually became regular Sunday dinner because some of Frank’s brothers in his one-percenter Crushers Motorcycle Club almost always stopped by to eat, especially when their old ladies kicked them out of the house or when they just got paroled and craved a home-cooked meal.  Frank once even suggested a tag team hot dog soup wrestling contest before realizing how such a fandango would not be cost effective for already slim club finances.

Bonita made her specialty every time chaos hit the house, which happened often, sometimes calling the culinary concoction a tradition like pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day. The same morning state drug agents broke through the second floor bedroom window from the roof she went nuts opening cans, chopping tube steaks and cooking up a steaming pot at 4:00 in the morning.

Beth and Waylon, who Frank nicknamed Wiener, were stuffing their smeared faces before they went to school. Frank ate right out of the pot when he made bail and came home at noon without mentioning how he had agreed to cooperate with the government. In turn, Bonita kept to herself the knowledge about how a married cop who worked part-time bouncing at the Butts and Bolts and was dating Brandi heard the rumor from his steroid dealer and told Brandi who called Bonita to say her husband was a dirty rotten snitch.

The next time Grandpa fell off the commode he spent three days in the hospital with a concussion. Security guards buckled thick cracked brown leather restraints around his wrists and ankles when he grabbed a nurse by the waist and hung on with both hands demanding hot dog soup and a kiss.

More pandemonium struck the night somebody stole Frank’s bike. Bonita screamed when she went to lock the front door before going to bed and saw nothing but a big black oil stain where Frank always parked his beloved soft tail cruiser with flaming skulls hand-painted on the gas tank.

“Frank, Frank, somebody stole your scooter!”

The video Bonita shot on her phone shows Frank running around the street cursing in his underwear and clodhopper motorcycle boots with the dull silver buckles on the sides. When it dawned on him his bike was really gone he started to howl and beat his head against a telephone pole. In the home movie, wearing a moron’s grin, Grandpa sticks his face in front of the camera.

“Time to make the hot dog soup,” he says, sticking out his tongue and wiggling it like the front row flesh freaks Frank regularly punched out in the Butts and Bolts nude strip club.

So Bonita did, leaving the pot to simmer for hours on the stove. This time, though, when she turned off the meal she filled and covered the biggest tureen she owned with tin foil and put the chow in the refrigerator, writing Frank’s name real big in red crayon on a piece of Wiener’s school notebook paper before taping it to the side of the deep dish.

She left half-a-pot of hot dog soup sitting on the stove.

Packing a suitcase for herself, a duffle bag for Grandpa and knapsacks for the kids, she bundled them all into the back seat of the flat black 1977 Buick Regal she bought for $8,000 when she was dancing at the Butts and Bolts. By midnight Bonita, Beth, Waylon and Grandpa were sound asleep at Brandi’s apartment.

 “Dinner, sweetheart,” said the note on the dish in the refrigerator.

When Frank woke up still loaded, he smelled the spicy aroma, spotted the half-full pot on the stove and dug into the cold, thick mix settled in its own juices just like he liked it. He dropped five stale hot dog buns into the broth like depth charges in a sea war, devouring the meal standing up, never opening the refrigerator, thinking Bonita must have added a new ingredient that nicely sweetened his soup.

The rat poison tasted like orange blossom honey.

When Bonita’s trial started her lawyer told the jury Bonita poisoned the soup in the pot on the stove to draw the sewer rat the size of a football that for the past week had chewed his way into the kitchen cupboard posing a danger to her family. Frank was a jerk, the lawyer explained, who never did anything to help around the house and didn’t care if the rat ripped out the children’s throats as they slept.

The lawyer said Bonita warned her husband at least twice not to eat the soup on the stove (a big fat lie), going so far as to make sure he knew his scrumptious dinner was in the refrigerator with his name written on the dish. The lawyer entered into evidence a photo of Bonita’s note on the soup in her handwriting.

Of course she didn’t add poison to the soup in the refrigerator.

Posing in the blue, pinstriped suit he bought at the Men’s Warehouse, Bonita’s lawyer said and never in a million years thought Frank would be so hammered he’d forget and eat the poisoned stove soup when she took the kids and her aging father to her sister’s for a sleepover with popcorn and a Disney video. The lawyer put his hand over his heart like he was pledging allegiance to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Grandpa testified at trial, corroborating the rodent tale.

“Everybody loves hot dog soup,” he swore under oath. “Even rats.”

In closing arguments Bonita’s lawyer said, “She loved her husband so much she taped a note on his favorite soup. You can lead a horse’s ass to water but you can’t make him drink.”

“Objection,” the prosecutor yelled, spinning om the heel of his black Italian loafer to give the finger to the defense lawyer.

“Overruled,” said the judge who Bonita impressed with her tears and swollen, deep cleavage on the witness stand.

The jury was out less than an hour before returning with an acquittal.

When Bonita got home from court she called a celebratory family meeting in the kitchen to announce the insurance company agreed to release the family’s $200,000 accidental death benefit first thing in the morning.

“Life will be better than ever, kids,” Bonita said. “Now, guess what I’m making for dinner?”

Beth and Wiener barked with the wild fervor of hungry Dobermans.

“Hot dog soup,” Grandpa slobbered so loudly his two hearing aids whistled.

That night at the table everybody gobbled down seconds.

Bonita ate Frank’s share.

Then she asked for thirds.

A ghostly spirit came to me in a swirling vision last night and ordered, “No more ‘excess’ writing for a while.”

“In the next nine months you will write only a handful of journal entries, essays and columns,” said Gavin Arthur, the leader of the tribe who oversees the legacy of the mysterious California Central Coastal commune called Dunites. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s this original band of merry pranksters built shacks from driftwood and lived in the majestic Oceano sand dunes as sacred outlaws, unrepentant rebels, eccentric artists and metaphysical countercultural visionaries who helped set the stage for the 1960s San Francisco hippie experience.

For Dunites, every summer shined as a summer of love.

“No more short stories, either,” said the ghost of Gavin Arthur, grandson of America’s 21^st President Chester Arthur. “I know you also revel in writing short stories because your brain sometimes short-circuits.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like one of those Tesla autopilot cars crashing into a wall when the human steps away from the wreckage, raises both hands into the air and yells, “TaDa!”

I knew the Dunite diviner understood what was at stake.

“You’re writing too much for Facebook,” he said “You need to focus, Corbett.”

I understood what he was talking about.

“Yeah, but some enlightened people want to hear what I have to say. It’s better than posting pictures of dogs, cats and grandchildren, right?”

“None of which you have,” said Gavin Arthur.

“Or want,” I said.

“But you do have a novel to finish,” he said.

Gavin Arthur and the Dunite prophets get it.

“You got a big story to tell, son,” he said. “You can’t be spreading yourself around too thin like a wine-soaked Dunite scraping out the last of his canned tuna fish supper.”

A Dunite Last Supper?

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

As of now I’m a full-time novelist.

Weed Wine Magic, the sequel to my first novel Blood Red Syrah, is on a roll. I’m looking at an original paperback release date sometime in August, eight months from now. Our cadre is almost assembled. Lee Sebastiani, my publisher at Avventura Press, is ready to rock. Stephanie Bressler, my editor and manager to whom I am married, is primed. Two ace front and back book cover photographer/model/spiritual collaborators (who will remain nameless for now and I hope will run away with us to join the circus) are standing in the wings. Mexican death saint Santa Muerte is all in.

We’re planning an August East Coast launch at Case Quattro Winery in Peckville where kindred spirits do business in soul grapes – actually a good name for a psychedelic band. Our West Coast launch will blast off at the old Oceano train station where I’ve already been invited to read within sight of Gavin Arthur’s rustic Dunite shack — Stephanie and I spent some time alone in his shack in November, communing with his essence and the Dunite presence that still reigns like pagan gods that walk among us.

Fret not, those of you who look forward to my words. I’ll still step from the shadows every now and then and throw a rock through somebody’s window — figuratively, of course, with a column here and a reflection there.

But it’s full speed ahead on Weed Wine Magic.

The trip will be worth the wait.

Many years ago in a different life in a different world I sat at the kitchen table drinking Rolling Rock beer and wondering if I could ever get a full-time daily newspaper job writing the personal journalism that eventually shaped my identity and served as my calling card and meal ticket.

At the time I was working in a state prison with violent drug addicts — or maybe I just lost my job working in a prison with violent drug addicts — and was collecting unemployment and writing for the Harrisburg Independent Press, a free alternative weekly.

A tall, skinny gawky buddy of mine named Flanagan took photographs for the weekly rag and talked to the editor who thought I was a good writer. A few years later that same editor changed his mind about my talent when he worked as the press secretary for Gov. Dick Thornburgh and I kept slamming his boss.

Flanagan was a Vietnam veteran who told one of the best war stories I ever heard. Assigned to burn human waste at the Army base where he was stationed, he spent many a long night standing over flaming pits of crap. One night when he finished his shift he and his co-workers sat around the fire smoking joints. Deep into their euphoria, more soldiers joined them. Flanagan eventually realized he didn’t know any of the new guys and figured they were South Vietnamese paratroopers just back from a mission.

When Flanagan introduced himself the guy sitting next to him took a deep toke and poked himself in the chest with his index finger.

“Me VC,” he said.

Flanagan laughed.

“Me VC,” the guy repeated.

Flanagan laughed harder.

Now Flanagan did it.

“Me VC,” Flanagan said.

The soldier sitting beside him laughed so hard he could barely light another joint.

Flanagan wasn’t sure when it dawned on him that the five or six seasoned Viet Cong guerrillas who joined him at the fire pit had apparently breeched security and infiltrated the base. Flanagan said everybody got real stoned that night and eventually drifted their separate ways. What he experienced shaped his own personal peace talks that made him realize the absurdity of war.

Real war, of course, is hell.

Real war kills.

Flanagan lived to tell the story. He came to oppose war even though he mostly kept his politics to himself. For as long as I knew him, easy-going Flanagan just got high on life.