Zito Bowls and President Corvette.

 

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Who in America is bowling alone 

By Salena Zito

SOMERSET, Pennsylvania — When you walk into the Terrace Lanes bowling alley on Pennsylvania State Road 31, the first thing you will see is Althea Shaw’s broad smile. Her warm greeting has a way of making customers, both regulars and first-timers, feel as though they belong. 

“The Sleek Family opened up their doors in November of 1995," Shaw told me. "I started exactly one year later, and I have been here ever since. As far as I am concerned, it is the best job I could ever hope for. I get to meet new people all the time, see regulars almost every day, and a lot of the regulars started here with their parents when they were just 3 years old." 

It was noon on New Year's Eve, and Terrace Lanes was filling up quickly. There were several local families who piled in with their small children, followed by a group of teenagers and then several young couples. Small family groups started walking in, too, including the Nobleman and Reid families, who said they showed up on a whim.

“We are all up from Silver Springs, Maryland, for a family ski vacation at the Seven Springs resort 20 miles down the road,” explained Andrew Nobleman, a federal employee. “We wanted to take the kids to do something different. We were going to bowl at the resort, but they only have three lanes, so we looked to see what was close and found this place.” 

“What was really fascinating to us is when we pulled up to Somerset and how vibrant it is," he said. "You read stories where small-town America is struggling, but honestly, they have everything we have back home, and it is way more affordable."

Case in point: three orders of french fries, with cheese on the side, two pretzels, also with cheese on the side, a nacho platter, and a whole pizza cost a combined $14 — and the food is good!

Owner Homer Sleek said he can’t remember a time in his life when he wasn’t bowling. 

“My father opened up the first Terrace Lanes in Jerome, Pennsylvania, in 1963," he said. "I was 4 years old. I grew up as a bowling alley rat or whatever you want to call it.” He went from running around the bowling alley to cleaning it and dusting the floors. “Back then, it also meant cleaning the ashtrays out,” he said, laughing. 

Eventually, his father sold the business to him in the late '80s. In 1995, Sleek moved the business from Jerome, population 1,000, to the "big" town of Somerset, population 12,000. This was the very same year Harvard professor Robert Putnam wrote a paper and then published a book called Bowling Alone, a groundbreaking examination of American life that illustrated a culture not just in the throes of loneliness but turning still further inward.

Putnam argued that America’s social fabric — that glue of reliance and aspiration that formed communities in this country since Alexis de Tocqueville observed it with awe — had frayed significantly. 

He wasn’t wrong. Americans don’t join things in the way we used to. Fraternal organizations such as the Lions Club, the Elks, and Kiwanis don’t have robust membership like they used to, nor do civic and faith-based groups such as the Knights of Columbus. 

Church attendance is also falling. In 1995, Putnam was just scratching at the surface of what was to come with a loneliness problem in the U.S. Twenty-seven years later, it is a full-blown epidemic, especially in our most populous urban areas. The latest U.S. Census Bureau survey shows 60% report spending less time with friends, family, or anyone, for that matter. 

However, Putnam wasn’t 100% right, either. In places such as Somerset, in a region still shrinking in population because of the loss of industry, residents are feeling less stuck than they were five years ago. This is a bit of a reversal from the earlier sentiments that they needed to leave in order to be successful. Now, they look more favorably on the idea of staying and building a community. 

Sleek said there was a time when he wanted to venture out and find his place outside of Somerset.

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We know Biden is a big talker. He laughed about how he got the Ukraine investigator fired on TV.  I suspect the effort to set Newsom to become president, as I have been speculating, has begun. Obama holdovers are probably in cahoots to see that this is accomplished.

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It's official: Attorney General Merrick Garland has selected a special counsel to investigate the Biden document probe

The good news? 

He's a Trump appointee that was unanimously confirmed by the Senate back in 2018. He was also responsible for overseeing indictments of multiple top Baltimore officials for public corruption and fraud during his time as a United States Attorney

But there's some bad news, too

This news comes as the Biden document scandal continues to grow. After finding a first hoard of documents at Penn Biden Center, an additional trove of documents were also found in the garage and adjacent room of his Delaware residence. 

And can you guess who had access to that room and those documents?

A lot of people, including Trump and Edward Snowden, aren't as shocked by the scandal of having the docs. As we can see, that seems to happen a lot more than you'd think.

They think the bigger scandal is that the DOJ kept the whole story under wraps until after the midterm election.

More election interference? It sure seems that way..

After learning that classified docs were being carelessly stored in the Biden garage, Republican lawmakers have their own trove of questions. 

"House Republicans will hold Biden’s corrupt FBI and DOJ accountable for its double standard of justice and uncover the truth about why Biden has been allowed to be so irresponsible with classified documents for so long," House Republican Conference chairwoman Elise Stefanik of New York explained.

Now that we know this, don't you think it's time the public gets access to his Delaware visitor logs?

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Emails Show Hunter Biden Had Access To Garage Where Joe Biden Kept Classified Documents

Now it is beginning to hit the fan but the question is will a government that has become corrupt stonewall Biden's relationship with China or will a corrupt AG allow his department to truly dig through the dirt and will this AG appoint and allow an honest, totally objective person be appointed.  I fear the answer is no to all.  

Will my wife's: " so what, who cares, what difference does it make cynicism prevail?

It appears that there is a connection between Penn allowing Biden to launder Chinese money through academia and then receive  benefits that resulted in pay offs to our most dangerous enemy like going into our oil reserves to help China? But wait it gets worse. American oil was sold to a Chinese company Hunter had an interest in and the oil sale came to millions of dollars. Not guilty until proven  so but here is where the stonewall begins.  But then Biden does not like to build walls.

As I previously wrote Newsom wants to become president those Democrats who agree must wait ti the 2024 and they must avoid appointing Kamala so Biden has to ie before the ET BRUTE EVENT occurs and Biden has to sell his Corvette.

Stay tuned because it is going to get interesting and even The Savannah News will have to report on this and the mass media should be forced to do as much as well.

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Don’t buy Biden’s ‘surprise’ — classified documents were moved at least twice

By Jonathan Turley

With the reported discovery of a second batch of highly classified documents connected to President Biden, the decisions of Attorney General Merrick Garland are fast moving from the inexplicable to incomprehensible.

Garland was presumably briefed that classified documents were discovered in Joe Biden’s old office on Nov. 2. He also presumably knew about the Biden documents when he appointed a special counsel to investigate the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago 16 days later.

At the time of the appointment of Jack Smith, some of us noted the inexplicable refusal of Garland to appoint a special counsel to look into alleged Biden influence peddling and other crimes.

Garland continued to refuse such an appointment even as he justified the appointment of Smith on the basis that Trump was running for the presidency. Joe Biden is the president. What is the difference?

President Biden, meanwhile, is feigning ignorance, simply saying he was “surprised” the documents were there.

By not discussing the content of the documents, Biden minimizes his vulnerability to charges of obstruction or false statements. He can simply declare “surprise,” knowing that many in the media will welcome his silence as they spin the scandal.

 building that housed office space of President Joe Biden's former institute, the Penn Biden Center, The documents were discovered six days before midterm elections at a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Despite the lack of information, the press and pundits have already declared there is no real national security danger and certainly no comparison to Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, declared “There is no comparison. They were in a locked closet. They were not accessible.”

So that is the standard? A locked closet? The Mar-a-Lago storage room was locked and later the security was enhanced at the request of the FBI.

It is fair to note that Trump and his staff are accused of false statements and obstruction. However, that does not change the same alleged crime of unlawful removal and possession.

Biden is taking a page from the Hillary Clinton playbook. Recall the long-sought Whitewater documents. After the case was effectively over, they suddenly appeared. The New York Times called the documents “elusive,” as if they moved by free will.

Clinton was also “surprised” by the discovery of the documents . . . after they could not be used as part of the earlier investigation.

There are some obvious explanations for the documents being present in the office, particularly given Biden’s work on a book that discussed his work in some of the referenced countries like Ukraine. However, even that explanation raises more questions. For example, Biden left office as vice president in 2017 and had an office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia after finishing his term until 2019. On February 8, 2018, the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement says that it opened its doors in Washington, D.C.

So if these documents were removed when Biden left office, where were they in the prior year and were they moved repeatedly before they ended up in the Washington office? This does not appear a “one-and-done” mistake. Rather documents may have been at various locations over a five year period.

None of this could be clarified with Biden simply expressing “surprise.”

The FBI has two immediate tasks: secure the highly classified documents and then determine whether they may have been compromised.

Consider that Biden notably did not categorically deny asking for the documents to be taken at the end of this term as vice president.

He also did not explain when he was briefed after they were found.

Democrats and the media are eager to wave this away and move on. But, as the statements of Garland and Biden show, there are many questions that need answering. The discovery of new classified documents only magnifies those unanswered questions.

Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.