If, on the other hand, you are somewhat less than ecstatic about outrageous taxes, hordes of illegal aliens on welfare, the Legislature’s impending gun grab, the fifth or sixth highest utility rates in the US, the utter breakdown of law and order and not just in Boston either….

If any of this concerns you, you might want to… send them a message, as they used to say.

Next Tuesday, you can do just that by voting for a Republican in the special election to replace a Democrat who resigned to grab a $117,000-a-year hack job from Gov. Maura Healey.

Only three of the 39 current members of the state Senate are Republicans. The GOP could literally caucus in a telephone booth. That’s how far the party has fallen, and it’s why a Republican victory might actually mean something.

Rep. Peter Durant is running in a semi-rural central Massachusetts district that includes one city (Gardner), a couple of Worcester wards, and 19 towns, all but one of them in Worcester County.

A Durant victory would be the first Republican takeaway of a Democrat seat since 2018. That’s how long the party’s tailspin has been going on.

Despite their iron grip on power, the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to defeat Durant. They want Massachusetts to be even more of a one-party state than it already is.

The Democrat candidate is another state rep, a 33-year-old named Jonathan Zlotnik. He seems to be rather a nonentity, but all that matters is that “D” after his name.

By his campaign contributors, ye shall know him, and you should see the collection of hacks who’ve ponied up big time for Mr. Z.

First, Marty Meehan, the career coat holder who is now the $697,076-a-year president of hack-infested UMass. Ya think Marty could afford that $200 he sent the Democrat?

Marty has an “assistant to the president” named David McDermott. He makes a mere $350,000 a year. At ZooMass this is called a starting wage. McDermott gave $250.

More interesting, though, is the $200 contribution Zlotnik pocketed even before this current election, from one Ken Halloran. Does that name ring a bell? Probably not, but keep your eyes on this payroll patriot.

Halloran is the “partner” of Tara Healey, the younger sister of Maura Healey. Partner – that’s how Tara is described in the obituary for Halloran’s mom, and in the pages of a local state-run media outlet, the Globe.

He was basically a state-paid lobbyist for the State Police during the very ethical era of Leigha Genduso, Troop E organized racketeering, tubby corrupt union boss Dana Pullman and a cast of dozens of other unspeakably corrupt troopers.

Halloran retired in January 2022, after it became clear that the sister of his “partner” was going to be the next governor. He pocketed his $90,451-a-year pension.

Now he’s in a new lobbying firm with, among others, ex-Sen. Henri Rauschenbach, age 76. Republican Rauschenbach has a nickname – Kickenbach – from his corruption trial in 1995 on conflict-of-interest and conspiracy charges. He beat the rap. It always helps to be tried by a Suffolk County jury.

Like all the other ancient lobbyists I wrote about on Sunday, Kickenbach last won an election in the 20th century – in 1996.

But now Kickenbach is living large, partnered up with the governor’s almost brother-in-law. Ya think that connection helps when you’re soliciting business on Beacon Hill?

It’s only natural that Halloran would be funneling cash to Rep. Peter Durant’s opponent. Democrats, you know.

Many of the ancient lobbyists I wrote about in my Sunday column want to keep the party going. The state is imploding, but they’re getting filthy rich on their way out the door.

Zlotnik’s lobbyist contributors include all the old Boston glad-handers, with names like Joyce, Delaney, Malloy and Hickey. From the Worcester forgotten-but-not-gone brigade, he’s grabbed cash from Joe Ricca and Paul Giorgio.

He’s also collected from most of the furthest-left state senators in the far, far left state Senate: Pat Jehlen, William Brownsberger, Susan Moran, Jason Lewis et al.

But the lobbyists’ showering of cash to Zlotnik is the most telling. These slugs run everything on Beacon Hill. As a group, they’re not terribly swift, but in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man shall lead.

When they write another billion-dollar blank check for their bundlers and advocates and brothers-in-law, all the lobbyists do is scrawl a few words at the top of the legislation:

“Notwithstanding any general or special order to the contrary….”

And that is exactly the reason there should be at least a handful of Republicans up there to yell: “Stop thief!”

Perusing the list of greed-crazed hacks who are spending thousands to defeat Rep. Peter Durant, I keep asking myself one question.

Is there a single ex-legislator over the age of 75 — indicted, convicted or otherwise — who isn’t riding off into the sunset pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from “lobbying” at the State House?

I just came across two more of the erstwhile solons approaching the checkout counter yesterday.

One was an ex-state rep named Steve Karol. He last won an election in 1992. Now, at age 75, he has a lobbying firm with a 78-year-old ex-state senator named W. Paul White. White’s name most recently appeared on the ballot in 1996.

But when the Democrats blew the hack dog whistle, these two old-timers raised their snouts from the trough and came hobbling back to the crime scene. Because they want to keep the dumpster fire that is Massachusetts state government going.

It’s good for business – monkey business.

If you agree with all the above tax-fattened Democrat millionaires that happy days are here again in Massachusetts, you should definitely not vote for Peter Durant in the special state Senate election next Tuesday.

Durant wants to be that guy yelling, “Stop thief!”

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

That’s how ex-pols are often described at the State House after they leave elective office. But after checking out the latest Beacon Hill lobbying reports, that old saw needs to be updated.

Forgotten, but not gone – and filthy rich!

It is astonishing to see how much some of these ancient shiftless hacks are grabbing, especially when you consider how long it’s been since any of them ever won an election.

Let’s start with 79-year-old ex-Lt. Gov. Tommy O’Neill – “Thomas P. O’Neill da Turd” as the sergeant-at-arms used to describe him when he entered the House chambers for the annual State of the State address.

Da Turd is the son of ex-House speaker Tip O’Neill, and he was dragged into office twice on the bottom of the Democrat gubernatorial ticket. But on his own Tipleet won just a single election – as a state rep in Cambridge, in 1972.

No problem, though. For the first six months of the year, his firm, O’Neill and Associates, collected $1.89 million from 59 clients. And here I was wondering how he was paying for that swell new waterside mansion in Harwich Port, with the smart Mercedes sports coupe parked outside. Hi Tommy – see ya next summer, pal!

State House hacks usually make their millions the old-fashioned way – with the kiss in the mail. Like Billy Bulger, the Corrupt Midget. Now 89, the CM has been pocketing a pension that is now $273,759 a year for more than 20 years.

At the State House, one of Bulger’s stooges was Chester Greenough Atkins – “Billy Bulger’s butler,” as he was known. Fat and entitled (he was born in Switzerland) Chet served briefly in Congress until he retired due to ill health – the voters got sick of him.

A four-term incumbent, he lost the Democrat primary in 1992, with a miserable 35 percent of the vote. It may have been the worst Congressional primary drubbing ever until Liz Cheney last year in Wyoming.

But no problem – at age 75, Billy Bulger’s butler is now a “partner” in something called Tremont Strategies. According to the State House News Service, Atkins’ crew took in $2.04 million in the first six months of the year.

Another lobbyist in that outfit is one Jason Aluia. He used to be a coat holder for Sal DiMasi, the former House speaker, convicted felon and jailbird.

Given the fact that Sal can list his Bureau of Prisons number – 27371-038 – as a resume enhancer, you’d think he too would be making the big bucks in his post-prison career as a lobbyist. But Sal, at age 78, is not rolling in the dough, maybe because his former street soldiers are cutting in on the take.

Not just Aluia, but Aaron Michlewitz, who went from skipper of Sal’s staff to being current Speaker Ron Mariano’s elected consigliere as Ways and Means chairman. Poor Sal – his payroll Charlies are putting him to shame in the lobbying grift.

Speaking of the Boston boys, how about the East Boston crew? Bobby Travaglini, who’s a young whippersnapper in this mob at a mere 71 years old, made his bones in the 1970s as a precinct captain working for guys named Dee Dee Coviello and Sonny Buttiglieri.

Now Trav, who became Senate president, paid himself $445,000 in the first six months of the year. Trav, you’ve come a long way from Junior’s Trolley!

According to Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s records, Trav is tied for highest-paid lobbyist with another Ward 1 ward heeler – Carlo Basile, the ex-state rep who went to work for then-Gov. Charlie Parker as patronage boss. Now Carlo made just under half a million a year in the first six months of the year.

It’s amazing how well these Eastie guys are doing, especially considering the ruination of Ward 1. In the old days, Eastie pols were strictly small timers, like Pixie Palladino, who definitely wasn’t a pixie, or James Coffey, who was known as “I’ll Take a Buck.” The name said it all.

Carlo is in the same firm with ex-Rep. Mike Costello. Costello is a second-generation State House hack. His father was another Bulger stooge in the Senate – Nick Costello. Now the son has figured out the racket, and their firm raked in $2.72 million in the first six months of the year. Costello pocketed $335,000 in the first six months of the year.

Another erstwhile Eastie pol living large in his golden years is Dennis Kearney. He last won an election in 1982, and is now 74 years old. Kearney’s lobbying firm collected $1.42 million in the first six months of 2023.

Obviously, even a dunce can make big bucks in the lobbying racket. Consider ex-Rep. Brian Dempsey. He got his B.A. from UMass – Lowell – at age 32.

Like Sal DiMasi, he has what you would consider a stellar State House curriculum vitae. Not only has he been lugged for drunk driving, but Dempsey was also taken into protective custody by the local cops for getting into a brawl with his brother in his mom’s parlor – on Mother’s Day.

Dempsey now has the third highest-grossing lobbying firm in the hackerama. He personally made $300,000 in the first six months of the year.

Then there’s Phil Johnston – talk about forgotten but not gone. He was first elected to the legislature back in the days of the old 240-member House, which was abolished in 1978. Mike Dukakis gave him a hack job in 1984, and Bill Delahunt stole a US House seat from him in a primary recount – in 1996.

But living well is the best revenge, and now, at the ripe old age of 79, Phil Johnston just pocketed $269,600 from his lobbying firm. That is what his old boss Mike Dukakis used to call a “good job at a good wage.”

How ecstatic do you think all the above were last week when Ron Mariano announced he’d run for yet another term as Speaker next year?

He’s from Quincy, which so many of these glad-handers have ties as well. So the gravy train will keep on trucking for a while longer.

And why can’t Mr. Speaker just keep running and running and running? After all, he’s still a young man. Ron doesn’t turn 77 until Tuesday – Halloween.

No wonder he gets along so splendidly with all his fellow ancient hacks.

They’ve all spent a lifetime together – slurping happily at the public trough.

Trick or treat, taxpayers!

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Bud Light.

Other than that, it’s been up, up and away ever since Brandon was installed as president in January 2021.

Of course, in the tradition of state-run media, Biden’s demolition of American middle-class living standards is being hailed because… Democrats.

The New York Times’s Paul Krugman says the economy is “remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.”

Bloomberg Opinion: “Biden’s Economy Is Great Everywhere Except in the Polls.”

The Washington Post began its daily Democrat cheerleading by saying, “As the US economy continues to improve, President Joe Biden continues to not get credit for it.”

So who are you going to believe, the comrades of state-run media or your lying eyes… or wallet.

Occasionally I ask my radio audience what they’re seeing in their own lives.

The consensus? Prices are way, way up, portions are down, and everybody who’s not a criminal illegal alien living large on welfare is running out of money.

Here are some of my audience’s recent observations on their daily experiences in this “remarkably successful” economy:

From 413 area code: “Daycare was $70 a day for 12 hours and they fed the kids. Now it’s $90 a day for 10 hours, and I have to provide food. Only a 28% increase, but I didn’t get a 28% pay increase.”

From 603: “Mama Rosie’s frozen pasta used to be 2 bucks now 4 bucks at Market Basket. Almost $8 at Shaw’s!”

From 207: “The average transmission replacement 6-7 years ago was around $3000. The average price I’m seeing now is around $6-7000 for a transmission and people can’t afford new car payments.”

No kidding. In 2017, there were 36 new models priced for less than $25,000. Now automakers produce only 10 such economy cars.

That stat came from the Wall Street Journal, which also ran a quote from a house cleaner in Illinois:

“I almost had a heart attack the other day when I saw a box of cereal for $8.99.”

When the RINO swells at the Wall Street Journal notice that the peasants are revolting, as they used to say, then the Democrats have a problem.

Back to my unscientific survey:

Matt: “My son plays hockey and baseball. A hockey stick is $300, used to be a buck and a half. Mouthpieces are 2 for $20, used to be 5 bucks apiece. Skates are up to $600. Batting gloves used to be $20, now $45.99.”

Scotia: “I have a cat, Norton. He eats Fancy Feed. Two years ago, it was 62 cents a can, now it’s 90 cents. The other brand went from 70 cents to $1.39. And those are the puny little cans. Norton’s gonna have to get a job.”

Bob from Plymouth: “My wife and I used to go to the 99, would spend $300-400 a month there. Chicken parmesan was $9.99. The other night I picked up two orders and it cost $37 and change and the portions seemed a lot smaller.”

From 860: “Shake & Bake no longer provides plastic bags in the box to coat your meats in. Unbelievable.”

Steve in Vermont: “I heat with coal. A 40-pound bag last year cost $6, now it’s $12.99. So a ton went from $300 to $650 in one year – a 117 percent jump.”

From 978: “McDonald’s Sausage Burrito, extra hash browns, medium OJ & medium coffee. Used to be $10. Last week $18.”

From 407: “Every staple product I buy at Publix has gone up at least 20% since Jan. 2021. With exception of milk, fruit and vegetables, I seldom buy anything unless it’s on BOGO.”

Farmer Jon in 860: “I’ve got 2023 expenses & 1975 income. Let’s go Brandon!”

Joe, a truck-repair shop owner in rural Maine: “Tires are through the roof, batteries that were 100-150 are now ticking over 200. A brake job has gone from $300 to $400, it’s the cost of the parts, the metals like rotors. We say the parts are all made out of ‘Chinese-ium.’ Biden is just hammering us.”

From 774: “Auto insurance. Just got new policy from $102 to $218 a month. Same coverage.”

From 781: “On Jan. 18 2000 I put 17 gallons of hi-test into my vintage 2001 Volvo at $2.25 a gallon. $38.25. Today at $4.49 the same 17 gals. $76.33. The same cheap gas station I’ve used for years.”

Justin at Boyle’s Bodyworks in Arlington: “All my ancillary supplies are at least double.”

From 860: “A 50-lb. bag of dog food is now 33 lbs. and costs more than the 50-lb. bag did. That’s Bidenomics for you!”

Limerick Guy: “Less than 2 years ago I paid $14 for a 2-pack of Costco brand fiber powder & today I purchased the same 2-pack for $29. Thanks, Brandon.”

Tony: “I priced some tires for a small Toyota RAV4 — $550 31/2 years ago, $850 now and these aren’t race-car super-duper tires. Truck tires are double, from $200 to $400.”

Mindy in Bangor: “Apartment rent used to $500, now it’s $1,200.”

From 401: “My cheapest Medicare Part D drug plan went from $6.80 a month to $15.70 a month. Thank you Brandon for bringing down the price of what you call prescription ‘jugs.’”

Andrew: “My old grandmother used to wring out wet paper towels and put them to dry and then re-use. I thought she was insane. Now an 8-pack of towels costs $30 and guess what I’m doing? Wringing them out like my grandmother.”

But… but… don’t my listeners read the New York Times? If they did, they’d realize how great the economy is.

Randy Newman used to sing, “Mr. President, have pity on the working man.”

Too bad Joe Biden doesn’t know any workingmen, or women. Too bad none of the Democrats do anymore. But I just thought of something else that’s gone down in price since January 2021.

Fentanyl. Maybe it’s all part of the plan.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

She is about to become… a victim.

Actually she already is.  A local Hamas cheerleading cell has already issued a statement on her behalf to a TV station:

“Zena is being targeted simply because she is an Arab.”

You don’t say. So it has nothing to do with her callously tearing down posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Nazi fiends after the rape and slaughter of 1300 Israelis.

Her former employer, Dr. Marc Nevins of Nevins Dental Center, announced her firing for “actions that are contrary to our community standards and to the basic values of my clinical practice.”

But Doc, don’t you understand that she’s the victim here. I predict a front-page story in state-run media, most likely the Boston Globe, in three… two… one.

This is the traditional m.o. now. Terrorists do something unspeakably horrible to innocent individuals, and the entire story suddenly becomes the supposed overreaction of the victims.

The late comedian Norm Macdonald summed it up perfectly in a sarcastic 2016 tweet:

“What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.”

Biden and his minions seem more worried about “Islamophobia” than about the Nazi pogroms the Muslims have been conducting in southern Israel.

This woman Zena is apparently a graduate of Boston University, historically Methodist but with a heavy Jewish influence forever. I wonder if she had a scholarship to BU, and who paid for that scholarship.

It seems to be a BU thing, tearing down the KIDNAPPED posters. A younger student was just recorded doing the same thing as the Arab dentist.

The homely coed had a great defense.

“I’m Jewish,” she said.

From what I can see, the fired dentist lives in, of all places, Newton. Odd place to choose as your home if you’re simmering with the kind of hatred she seems consumed by.

I mean, does Zena vote in the local elections in Newton? What does she think she sees all those… Zionist names on the ballot?

You would think that at least a few of these new Americans who are waving the pom-poms for the savage Muslim killers in the Mideast might have picked up stakes and left the Great Satan, put their dinars where their mouths are, so to speak.

Until Donald Trump came along, these bloodthirsty savages had their own unofficial state, under control of a terror cell called ISIS. They referred to their Muslim thugocracy as a “caliphate.” It was run by a genocidal butcher whom the Washington Post respectfully described as “an austere religious scholar.”

I’m sure ISIS could have used a few dentists back when they were trying to murder every non-Sunni in Iraq and Syria. Their capital was in Raqqa, Syria.

Gays were dragged to the tops of Raqqa’s tallest buildings (two, sometimes even three stories) and hurled to their deaths. Local young women from religious minorities (including Shia Muslims) were gang-raped every evening by hundreds of austere religious scholars.

Like Hamas, ISIS enjoyed beheading infidels. Once they burned a Jordanian Air Force pilot alive.

It all seems a very long way from Newton, from The Street in Chestnut Hill, from civilization.

But until you get busted tearing down those posters, you can cheer on the ongoing genocide (and not just of Jews either). And there is never, ever any pushback from the virtue-signaling, spineless heretics.

If anyone ever looks at one of these Nazis cross-eyed while they’re screaming “Gas the Jews!” or “Allahu Akhbar” as they shoot up a gay bar, they just start yelling that it’s all Islamophobia, or something.

Look at the pampered pukes from Harvard, complaining about the “apartheid” regime of Israel. As I’ve said, isn’t “apartheid” just another word for “racism?” And Harvard’s racist admissions policy, recently ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, is probably the reason most of these protected-class box-checkers were even admitted in the first place.

They certainly don’t seem to be very bright, even by Harvard standards.

Now, though, an alumni group has been trying to raise money for the Nazis of Harvard Square because their racist screeds have exposed the Ivy League Nazis to “severe risks to their immigration status and future career prospects.”

Oh no! You mean they might have to go home to these Third World failed states that they fled to come here and live on the arm in this terrible racist land?

The pitch for the Nazis of Harvard Square continued:

“They may require legal counsel, health care, mental health support, financial aid or mentorship to navigate these turbulent and uncertain times.”

Could I offer them some mentorship? Go home. The job opportunities in Raqqa aren’t what they used to be, but thanks to Biden the Taliban is back in charge in Afghanistan. Have the halftime stonings of gays resumed at the soccer stadium in Kabul?

I hear the Taliban is looking for a few good endodontists.

But you know, endodontist in Kabul not nearly as good a job as being a “victim” in the Great Satan. For one thing, as a victim, you can still live in civilization, with running water, central heating, electricity and, dare I say it, the right not to wear a hajib.

Something tells me that Rena, like all the Nazis of Harvard Square – Fatima, Mohini, Reem et al. – would much prefer to live in this racist, xenophobic, nativist, Islamophobic society than go home and fight Zionist imperialism.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

That’s the eternal question that comes to mind as you read the Democrats’ unconstitutional 122-page gun grab bill now hurtling towards the governor’s desk at the State House.

Much of the confiscation of legal firearms from law-abiding citizens will be charged to the second-most corrupt law-enforcement agency in the United States (after the FBI).

I refer of course to the Massachusetts State Police.

By rough count, the disgraced MSP are mentioned 38 times in the new legislation, and the colonel pops up 44 times.

What could possibly go wrong?

William F. Buckley Jr. once famously said that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

To update Buckley’s comment, I would prefer the state’s gun laws be enforced by the first 100 names on the membership rolls of the Gun Owners Action League (GOAL) than by the MSP.

For sure, GOAL members are a much more law-abiding bunch than the troopers. Gun owners with LTCs have much lower rates of recidivism than the State Police when it comes to, among other crimes, embezzling, drunk driving (with fatalities), drug overdoses, spousal abuse and lewd and lascivious conduct.

This the State Police m.o.: They alter crime reports to protect the junkie children of hack state judges. Troop E out on the Pike openly operated as a racketeering enterprise, stealing millions of dollars.

The troopers send “inappropriate texts.” At least one of them used to routinely post racist messages on social media and cheered whenever there was a police shooting. Then he went out on the road and shot a black guy, after which he was charged with a&b with a deadly weapon.

Am I right “Big Irish?”

These are the cops who are about to be charged with grabbing your guns. They have a motto: To protect and steal. Their other motto is: To protect and (over)serve.

Today let’s ponder the priors of the people who will be abrogating your Constitutional rights in this outrageous power grab.

Consider Section 121C, which states that the State Police colonel “shall promulgate rules and regulations implementing a statewide firearm surrender program.”

Really? Surrendering firearms to the State Police?

Do you recall any of these headlines?

“State Police trooper admits getting free guns, is cooperating in criminal probe.”

“Two retired state troopers face charges for allegedly illegal arrangements with gun dealers.”

Until a few months ago, the colonel was an arrogant, overbearing hack named Christopher Mason. He had a young son named Reid Mason. The lad was encountered by cops in Hyannis one morning after last call hanging out of his SUV, reeking of booze.

Inside Mason’s van, the Barnstable PD found five firearms, one of which, a Glock 17, was both unregistered and unlicensed. The local cops never released details on the magazines he had for his unregistered, unlicensed Glock 17, some of which are much less available to non-law enforcement, if you get my drift.

Nothing serious happened to young Mason because… professional courtesy. Col. Daddy now pockets an annual state pension of $194,602 a year.

Speaking of guns, remember the drunkard trooper from Bristol County who had himself a third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous in Providence in 2020?

He and his gal pal guzzled $200 worth of martinis — this came out in the official MSP report. The lovebirds then checked into a no-tell hotel in downtown Providence. In his eagerness to get down to hanky-panky, the trooper neglected to lock his unmarked MSP cruiser. Local gangbangers stole his fully loaded Smith & Wesson.

These are the law-enforcement professionals who will be oppressing you, but not themselves or the colonel’s son.

The bill includes a massive expansion of “red flag” laws to confiscate guns from Enemies of the Deep State.

The solons might as well call them “red hat” laws, because they’ll only be used against US citizens wearing MAGA caps.

Do you suppose any red flag laws will ever be enforced against the state trooper charged in Wrentham with beating his second wife? Or the trooper who was arrested in Attleboro for allegedly threatening to kill his girlfriend four times? Or the one who assaulted the woman who wasn’t his wife in New Hampshire, or the one who broke a woman’s tibia outside a bar in Dorchester?

How about the cop in western Mass who was charged in court with pushing his wife’s face into an unflushed toilet? That trooper didn’t get fired, or jailed. He got promoted to lieutenant, and now makes $172,080 a year.

These are the very ethical cops who will be writing a “uniform curriculum” for your firearms training. I’m sure they’ll say don’t use drugs while armed, although a trooper in the gang unit confiscated 23 grams of cocaine, went home to Middleborough and immediately suffered a “medical emergency.”

How about the trooper who ran over a motorcyclist in Dorchester in 2021? He’d been barhopping all night. Detectives said he “spoke with a thick tongue.”

Remember the Foxboro Flasher? He shot a bad guy in Boston, and was never the same. He was bagged in a drunken brawl in Las Vegas. Two weeks later, at a country music concert in Foxboro, he ingested another bad ice cube. The trooper exposed himself in the stands and then came on to a guy, as his girlfriend watched.

For his lewd, lascivious and wanton conduct, the Foxboro Flasher now grabs a lifetime tax-free state pension of $66,688, even though he’s not yet 40.

Under the new gun-grab law, do you think you would be ever able to get an LTC if you were a) a drug dealer, b) a drug abuser, c) a money launderer, d) the live-in moll of a drug kingpin, and e) an admitted perjurer?

Probably not, but Leigha Genduso copped to all the above, and was immediately appointed to the State Police. The crooked MSP gave the ex-barmaid a cruiser, a badge, a K-9 and… a gun. After ratting out her gangster boyfriend, the career criminal set up light housekeeping with a future lieutenant colonel of the State Police who is now collecting a pension of $162,638 a year.

One final provision of the new law: the colonel “shall produce” an annual report detailing crimes committed in the Commonwealth using firearms.

I think the report should include an appendix of all the crimes committed by the MSP. Some years it’ll run longer than all the crimes committed by the rest of us.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

Meet Hal Naughton, a 63-year-old career Democrat back-bench state rep. Earlier this year Naughton scored the ultimate dream job of all hacks – a $207,855-a-year basically no-show job as a state judge.

But now, in what is surely the most shocking event of the year in the hackerama, Naughton has done the unthinkable. After six months, he has resigned from his welfare sinecure.

To repeat, it’s all about the Benjamins.

I always say, it’s not that all Massachusetts judges are bad. It’s only that 98 percent of them who make the other 2 percent look bad.

What makes Naughton’s departure such a man-bites-dog story is that no hack state judge ever quits, for one simple reason. In Massachusetts, a lawyer becomes a judge only if he or she is starving to death while actually trying to practice law.

That’s why bust-out barristers scrape together enough cash to basically buy themselves that sinecure, an annuity. It’s all legal of course – campaign contributions, they’re called. As with so many other things, the scandal about buying judgeships is not what is illegal, it’s what is legal.

Naughton, however, appears to be the first judge appointed in living memory who was in fact able to make some real dough – even if his score did apparently come as a surprise, because otherwise why would he have bothered to kiss all the rear ends he had to grab his early retirement.

In his prior small-time, small-town practice, Naughton somehow stumbled into a mega-settlement. Suddenly that $207,855-a-year slot on the dole, I mean the bench, looked like small change.

As a lawyer, Naughton was involved in a multi-billion-dollar civil suit in which local water utilities sued some very deep-pocketed chemical companies, including DuPont and 3M.

As part of the settlement, a motion has just been filed for legal fees and costs of $95 million.

In his letter of resignation, Naughton said he was making a decision that was “best for my children.”

It took a while, but I finally tracked the judge emeritus down. I asked him the only question that anybody cares about right now. How much is he grabbing out of the settlement’s $95 million in legal fees?

“I have no idea,” Naughton said.

Ten million?

“Oh geez, I don’t know about that!”

Five million?

“Really, I have no idea. You know, I had worked on that case for five years. It was coming to fruition.”

Yeah, I said, but you must be looking at some mega-bucks here, because you could have been a judge until you’re 70, which is over $2 million right there, for doing absolutely nothing.

And behind that comes the pension, plus after retirement you can stay on as a part-timer.

Not bad, I said, for a part-time job. I specifically used that word part-time, to bait him, because these judges always claim they’re working hard, as opposed to hardly working. But when I said “part-time,” twice, all Naughton did was chuckle.

I guess that’s the way it is when you hit the lottery. Suddenly a lot of what you used to bother you is no longer such a pressing concern.

I mentioned again to Naughton about how great it must be to make $207,855 a year for working part-time.

“It is a dream job.”

And do you know why it’s such a “dream” job? Because as a judge you get more time than people who have real jobs to actually dream, because not ever having to actually go to work means you can sleep late every morning.

And since you never work after lunch, you can take a nap every afternoon. For a Massachusetts judge, every day is like that line from the old Lovin’ Spoonful song – “What a day for a day dream!”

I told Naughton that I was going to write that he is about to collect “millions” of dollars. Agree or disagree, Judge?

“I don’t know. It remains to be seen.”

He says that the court case with $95 million in legal fees was “my baby, my case. It’s gonna clean up water for a lot of people.”

Yeah, and speaking of cleaning up, that’s exactly what a handful of lawyers are going to do. Which is how these civil cases always end up.

When I heard that Naughton was, literally, cashing out, I assumed that he would go out like the hack he is — grabbing another fat kiss in the mail, in the form of what is known in hack judicial circles as “involuntary disability provision.”

It’s the hack judges’ dirty little secret – a governor can designate an extinguished jurist as no longer able to perform his, uh, duties, and sort of de-commission him or her. The order then goes to the hock shop known as the Governor’s Council, which rubber-stamps it.

Automatic pension! Forget vesting! Disability – no taxes! It’s the hackerama!

Since 1991, 14 judges have checked out on the involuntary disability provision gag. Two of the tragically affected judges were, like Naughton, ex-state reps, another was a former mayor and a fourth was the top fundraiser for a governor.

These judges all had diseases, like kleptomania. Under Paul Cellucci, a payroll patriot named Donovan beat an OUI rap and then checked out on the grounds that his “obsessive-compulsive disorder” compelled him to “hours of handwashing.”

Well, at least the water will be clean now. Thanks Judge Naughton!

Another judge claimed that subjecting her to showing up for as many as 15-20 hours a week, 35 weeks a year – the usual judicial workload – amounted to “knowingly subjecting her to further traumatic events (a model for torture).”

I naturally assumed that Naughton, as a 25-year solon, who served under three convicted-felon House speakers and a fourth, unindicted co-conspirator, would be continuing the tradition. But no.

“The way it was explained to me,” he said, “you have to spend X number of years to get the judicial pension.”

And sure enough, he just quit, with no involvuntary blah-blah-blah. Naughton fed at the trough, but unlike all his colleagues in both the legislative and judicial branches, apparently he’s not planning to lick the plate.

So farewell, Hal Naughton. Enjoy the Benjamins. At least for once they won’t be coming directly out of my pocket.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

What could possibly go wrong?

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev could not be reached for comment.

Why should the United States absorb still more of these people? Even if they aren’t planning to fly commercial airliners into our skyscrapers and murder thousands of us as they did on 9/11, they are still extremely unlikely to ever be successfully assimilated into any civilized society?

If these particular Arabs are so wonderful, why is their Nazi-run regime in Gaza such a basket case? Hamas has ruled the bleephole since 2005 and yet they still totally rely on Israel for water, food, power, medicine – everything, in other words.

These Arabs are living on international charity, and yet they still rape and murder the very people they leech off.

Why is that Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that know their fellow Muslim Arabs better than anyone, are flat-out refusing to accept any of them as refugees?

Because the leaders of Egypt and Jordan are not insane.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida went on state-run media last weekend and told the truth about the Democrats’ final solution to finishing off the US.

“We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees,” he said. “Not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.”

Do you remember the last time we took in tens of thousands of unvetted military-age Muslims from a failed state run by genocidal terrorists, namely Afghanistan?

It was in 2021, in the wake of Joe Biden’s first foreign policy disaster.

The Democrats “resettled” the Afghans on military bases. They assaulted a female soldier at Fort Bliss. At the Marine base in Quantico, one of them was convicted of sexually assaulting a 3-year-old.

In another part of Virginia, an Afghan molested a 14-year-old girl.

In Montana, an Afghan “refugee” raped a 14-year-old girl. At Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, Afghans were accused of sex with children (a recurring theme here) and spousal abuse.

Just what we need now – yet another Third World crime wave against law-abiding American citizens.

The Democrats are all in helping Palestinians – at least as long as they’re Muslims waving swastikas, beheading babies and chanting “Gas the Jews!”

There is, however, another group of Palestinians the Democrats have no use for – the Americans from East Palestine, Ohio who are the victims of another Biden-authored calamity — that train derailment of hazardous waste last winter.

Biden would never dream of visiting that Palestine. No undocumented Democrats live there. People work for a living in East Palestine and don’t murder Holocaust survivors.

Those Palestinians from the Buckeye State voted for Trump, so they deserve everything they get – or actually don’t get, because they’re Republicans, not Muslim Nazis.

I asked my radio listeners Monday to help me recall some of the nation’s earlier celebrations of diversity involving adherents of the Religion of Peace.

Forget the jihadists’ foreign genocides — the Munich Olympics in 1972,Charlie Hebdo in 2021 or the Nice truck attack… Let’s just stick to the USA.

These are the real domestic terrorists the FBI should be hunting down, instead of infiltrating “traditional” Catholic churches and writing down license-plate numbers of angry parents at school board meetings.

How about the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando in 2016? Forty-nine murdered by a Muslim of Afghan descent as he chanted “Allahu Akbar!” although the FBI transcript helpfully transcribed it as “God is Great!”

According to the Washington Post, Mateen had voted for Hillary Clinton in the Florida primary in 2016. Naturally he was a Democrat. His Afghan-born father was a major Democrat contributor. Of course he was!

Remember the Uzbek savage who killed eight infidels with a truck on the West Side of Manhattan in 2017? He came in a Ted Kennedy “Diversity Immigration Visa.”

How about the Beltway sniper? Seven dead. That perp’s name was John Muhammed.

In Chattanooga in 2015, a Kuwait-born savage named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazezz murdered four Marines and a sailor.

In Little Rock in 2009, at a Little Rock recruiting station, a fellow named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad killed a US serviceman.

We’re coming up next week on the 40th anniversary on the Muslim terror bombing of the US Marines’ barrack in Beirut – 241 Marines killed by the same people who murdered 1,300 Israelis earlier this month, and now want to come to America to go on welfare forever.

Remember Fort Hood in 2009? A Palestinian fiend named Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 US military personnel in cold blood. How about the Christmas party in San Bernadino in 2015 where two Pakistanis named Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik gunned down 14 Americans in cold blood.

Then there was Benghazi. And the USS Cole. Black Hawk Down. Pam Am Flight 103 in 1988.

The Gazans are “Palestinians.” Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot in the head by a Palestinian at the Ambassador Hotel in LA in 1968. Leon Klinghofer, a wheelchair-bound World War II veteran, was pushed off a hijacked cruise ship by Palestinians in 1985.

Do you begin to detect a pattern here?

More future terrorists are swarming across the southern border – hordes of them every day welcomed with open arms by gleeful Democrats because… fundamental transformation of America.

After Gov. DeSantis said the nation couldn’t accept any more of these Muslims who “teach the kids to hate Jews,” he was of course roundly denounced by the usual suspects from the Uniparty, including Nikki Haley.

“I don’t care about that,” DeSantis said. “I’m gonna speak the truth and let the chips fall where they may.”

As for the Democrats, they say, bring ‘em all in, put in on welfare like they did for the Tsarnaevs and all the rest of the genocidal Nazis mentioned in this column, and forget about letting the chips fall where they may.

Let the skyscrapers fall where they may.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

In case you missed it, Aiden Kearney, the local blogger better known as Turtleboy, was arrested by the State Police Wednesday.

It’s no fun getting lugged, but this is one of those times when every knock is a boost. This pinch will ultimately be a major resume enhancer for Turtleboy, because now he’s got videotape to shop around Hollywood.

Kearney, a 41-year-old former school teacher from Holden, was recorded doing the perp walk into a local district court, flanked by flabby, jack-booted troopers.

He was handcuffed behind his back — the mark of any Serious Journalist in a future streaming docudrama that is, as they say, Ripped from the Headlines.

And it wasn’t shot by some fanboy on a shaky, out-of-focus cell phone — it was on local TV news.

That is like money in the bank when you are trying to negotiate a deal with somebody like Netflix — it shows you’re getting the job done, whatever the job is.

The charges against Kearney are “witness intimidation.” But as one of TB’s fellow guerilla reporters, Robert Bastille of hyannisnews.com, put it, it looks more like “journalist intimidation.”

State-run media sneeringly dismiss Turtleboy and his website, tbdailynews.com, as “controversial,” as if that’s somehow bad. The fact is, for the past few years, all he’s been doing is filling a vacuum created by the utter collapse of local media.

Not so long ago, most of his scoops — and he’s had plenty — would have been uncovered by daily newspapers, or maybe even local TV news.

He lives in Holden, where a newspaper called the Worcester Telegram used to circulate. In 1999, the Telegram was sold to the New York Times for $300 million. As insane as that now sounds, remember that the Times had earlier bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion.

A few years later, both papers were dumped for $70 million, which was the value of their real estate. The two rags themselves were, and are, utterly worthless, by any standard.

TB started covering Worcester like a… reporter. For a while he jokingly referred to the shell of the old sheet as the Turtlegram. That joke no longer works, though, because the paper is so irrelevant now that even its faint memory has faded from public consciousness.

Then he expanded into a subject that the bankrupt Boston media no longer cared about — news.

He took down the entire State Police command staff. He reported on the COVID outrages, like the firings of honest troopers who refused the worthless vaccination, and on the political establishment’s flaunting of their own preposterous diktats.

He almost singlehandedly took out Monica Cannon-Grant, the greedy plus-sized BLM grifter who so wowed the Globe and the rest of the trust-funded suburban hens in the newsrooms.

Of course much of his daily output concerned what he calls “ratchets” — tattooed 300-pound welfare moms peddling their EBT cards on eBay, or menopausal teachers posting photos of themselves in the Caribbean drunkenly carousing during the school shutdowns during the Panic.

Obviously, TB had to go. He was afflicting the comfortable — verboten in modern journalism.

So they went after him on the Karen Read story. She’s charged with running over her boyfriend, a Boston cop, after a drunken evening in Canton with some of the local connected townies.

Turtleboy has been pursuing the story with a vengeance because, let’s face it, how long can the ratchet racket last? We all get the point of TB’s ratchet chronicles: the War on Poverty is over. Poverty won.

So TB’s turned to pointing out the holes in the murder case against Karen Read. The Keystone Kops blundering ahead are working for Norfolk County District Attorney Mike “Pass the Gravy” Morrissey, a hack straight out of Central Casting.

Of course, Morrissey has a “D” after his name. In his case, it stands for “Donuts.”

When Hollywood starts work on the inevitable made-for-TV movie, the producers may have problems finding someone to portray Morrissey. I don’t know if there’s anyone in show biz obese enough to do Pass the Gravy justice, or should I say injustice?

The hackerama is beyond angry at TB about Karen Read — not to mention every other expose he’s done. They told the judge his Read stories were “intimidating.” But in fact a lot of that is just what reporters do, or used to anyway. Hell, look at how Fox News humiliated Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the Nazi apologist, last week.

If Hillary Vaughan had done that chase interview in Norfolk County, Tlaib’s fellow Democrat Morrissey might now be charging her with “intimidation.”

The Deep State sent six MSP cruisers to TB’s house in Holden. He’d just put his kids on the school bus when they arrived. Some of them were from the “Fugitive Apprehension Unit.” While he was being booked, the troopers ransacked his house and grabbed his computers and cell phones.

And that’s his problem. TB is a reporter, in the old sense of the word. He has actual “sources.” A lot of his reporting has always been about State Police corruption, and now the MSP thugocracy may finally find out who all his sources are.

Honest cops are worried. The police state is coming after police.

“Who’s ever gonna call me now?” he said Friday night. “This is just about humiliating me. That’s all it is.”

In court on Wednesday, the hack “special” prosecutor told the hack judge that Kearney had made $5 million on the Karen Read story.

“I think they googled ‘Aidan Kearney’ and came up with a retired Irish rugby player. The posting for that guy said he was worth $1-5 million. So they claimed in court that he was me. That’s the level of evidence against me.”

Next is the grand jury. If he’s indicted, the charges could be worth 10-year sentences. Ten times eight….

“Eighty years,” TB said. “They want to put me in prison for 80 years for the crime of having a show on YouTube where I make colorful comments.”

He’s set up a legal defense fund on givesendgo.com, the unwoke crowd-funding site. In the first two days, he took in $45,000. He still needs to find a lawyer who doesn’t mind going up against the local kleptocracy.

In the end, of course, Turtleboy prevails. He gets the docudramas and the made-for-TV movies. Assuming, of course, that Hollywood can find somebody fat enough for the role of the pizza-crazed district attorney, Pass the Gravy Morrissey.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

So when I had him on my radio show Wednesday, I asked him for his reaction to the depraved cheerleading by some at his old school to the horrific slaughter by Muslim terrorists last weekend.

“I knew Harvard was very left-wing,” he said, “but at this point with the Ivy League, how nuts they’ve gotten, if I see a Harvard resume cross my desk I’m running the other way.”

DeSantis continued, “Yes, they’ve always been anti-Israel, but to go up and cheer a terrorist group that’s cutting off he heads of infants is absolutely despicable.”

Yes it is, but it is also absolutely predictable. This is Harvard, after all. This is Cambridge. These genocidal Nazi fiends on Mass Ave are just the latest iteration of the Tsarnaevs. Remember them?

A family of Third World Muslim grifters who lied about the “oppression” they were suffering – namely, having to work for a living like the stupid infidels.

The Tsarnaevs were granted asylum – which means welfare. None of those foreign freeloaders ever worked another day in their bloodthirsty lives.

Instead, they were living large on Norfolk Street, using their generous handouts to buy weapons to murder Americans – the older brother had killed eight infidels at age 25 before his brother finally ran him over on Memorial Drive.

But the Tsarnaevs are so 2013. Now we have the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups.

The Harvards’ statement was beyond obscene, but one of the real howlers was the denunciation, in boldface, of “the apartheid regime.”

Apartheid? Isn’t that basically a synonym for racism? Yet I daresay almost 100 percent of the victims and box-checkers who are cheering on the rapists and baby killers are only at Harvard because of the school’s now-outlawed “apartheid” admissions system.

Of course, if they benefit, it’s not apartheid, it’s “equity.”

Harvard’s always despised Jews, among other ethnic groups. A century ago, the school had a “quota” system for Jewish admissions. But the Yankee grandees just wanted to keep them at arm’s length, they weren’t into genocide, unlike so many of the proud young Third Worlders now lounging at Harvard on full-boat scholarships.

Actually though, I’m baffled why jihadists want to hang out at Harvard. Especially at the law school. I thought the only kind of law these genocidal terrorists cared about was Sharia law.

One of the pro-Nazi groups is the Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association. According to pjmedia.com, the co-president is Reem Hussien. Before Harvard Law, she went to Yale. Obviously, we’re talking about a real victim of Zionist oppression here.

Why are they wasting time on Mass Ave when they could be in Syria, burning Yazidis and Druze alive as they fight for what’s left of ISIS.

Listen up, Reem and Fatima and Sarah and Sandy – ISIS is always looking for a few new child brides. And there is no finer fashion statement than a designer al Qaeda suicide vest, or is it a girdle for the gals?

ISIS recruitment has taken a dip of late, and the problem can be summed up in one word: drones. This may be why the aforementioned Reem Hussien spends her off-jihad hours “advocating for the end of the US’s lethal drone program.”

Malcolm X used to say that when white European kids got off the plane in New York, the first American phrase they learned was the n-word.

Nowadays, when so many of these new Tsarnaev types swim across the Rio Grande, the first word they learn in the v-word – victim.

They’re all victims. The vast majority have been pampered and coddled since the day they flopped into this country. Everything has been handed to them. But the Harvard Nazis who signed onto this anti-Semitic screed haven’t the slightest bit of gratitude.

It’s a Tsarnaev thing.

Do they realize that Harvard and all the rest of these elite bastions have already performed an academic genocide of sorts – against middle-class white and Asian kids who must work hard? Almost every single pampered puke at Harvard now is either a legacy, the offspring of the filthy rich or a box-checker.

The only exception is the football team.

In the old days, Harvard grads sometimes had to take responsibility for what they believed in. Look at all the names of the Harvard Civil War dead in Memorial Hall. JFK captained PT 109.

But these blow-ins and drifters from parts unknown take no responsibility for their genocidal, ignorant, racist screeds against the only democracy in the Middle East.

Another Harvard Law comrade named Mohini Tangri denounced the blowback from Americans against the school’s racist fulminations.

“No need for this level of harassment.”

I’m sure that’s the way the 40 babies beheaded by Harvard’s pet Muslim Nazis felt too, if only they could have expressed themselves before they were slaughtered in their nurseries.

It’s odd, isn’t it? Twice now in less than a month the wokest of woke westerners – Justin Trudeau’s government in Ottawa and now all the Ivy League snowflakes – have publicly, gleefully celebrated genocidal Nazis.

A couple of years ago I bought a book about Boston in the mid-twentieth century: “Nazis of Copley Square.”

It was very well-done, about the so-called Christian Front in pre-World War II Boston. But the events of 80 years ago read like ancient history. It’s time for an updated book, to deal with what’s happening now across the river in Cambridge.

“Nazis of Harvard Square.”

I asked Ron DeSantis about this phenomenon of the most privileged, coddled “victims” in the world who, the more handouts they get, the more they want to chop off our heads.

“If you don’t like this country,” said DeSantis, “you should not be in this country. If you’re not supportive I don’t know why we would want you in this country to begin with.”

Or in Harvard Square for that matter. Harvard pukes, Hamas is looking for a few good men, er, non-birthing persons. And ISIS, I repeat, is always in the market for child brides. Bring your own suicide vest as a dowry.

And now let’s all sing together the new updated Harvard Nazi fight song:

“With Crimson in triumph flashing/ ‘mid the strains of victory/ Poor babies’ brains we are bashing/ Into infidel obscurity….”

The Harvard alumni must be very, very proud. Veritas.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Is it the weather?

Or is it tradesmen in F-150 pickup trucks wearing red MAGA hats?

Is it gas stoves, or the genocidal decision by the Supreme Court to force deadbeat hippies to start repaying their student loans?

Or is it “traditional” Catholics going to a Latin Mass? Or the refusal of some Americans to follow CDC orders to wear a mask out in public?

Or is the greatest crisis facing the planet this news cycle angry parents complaining to their local school committees about transgender recruiting of kindergarten kids in the public schools?

These are some of the non-issues that the Democrats have been trying to gin up their shiftless base with since January 2021, while simultaneously funneling billions of dollars in armaments and cash to Muslim terrorist states since ousting Donald J. Trump from the White House.

Elections have consequences, and stolen elections….

The audacity of this mob of appeasers and fellow travelers is astounding.

All the Democrats and their fellow travelers holding up swastikas in midtown Manhattan and chanting “Gas the Jews!” in Sydney and issuing snide statements in Harvard Square have been calling us “Nazis.”

These are the same people who put up the banners screaming Black Lives Matter everywhere from wooden churches to Fenway Park.

Black Lives Matter. But apparently not Jewish lives.

The Muslim terrorists actually slaughter innocents, and Democrats in Congress stampede out to defend them, or at least alibi for them. Yet if you mention that George Soros’ insane local prosecutors are getting Americans murdered, you are branded an… “anti-Semite.”

The terrorists actually slaughter innocents, who in this case happen to be Jewish. And Democrats in Congress (at least one of them a refugee from a failed Muslim terror state) stampeded out to defend their bloodthirsty coreligionists, or at least alibi for them.

Yet if one of us should mention that George Soros’ insane local prosecutors are getting Americans murdered, you are instantly branded an anti-Semite.

What Hamas has done is so unthinkable, and yet, so predictable with Joe Biden, the most corrupt president in US history, in the White House.

Even if tens of millions of American voters didn’t, Bloodthirsty Muslim monster Osama bin Laden understood perfectly how what a Joe Biden presidency would mean.

In May 2010, bin Laden wrote a long letter to one of his al Qaeda subordinates, ordering him to take out then president Barack Obama. As wonderful as Obama was for the demonic forces of Islamic terrorism, Biden would be even better, Osama told his minion.

“Biden is totally unprepared for the post,” Obama said, “which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.”

And here we are, 13 years later.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a crisis if the United States still had a functioning government. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Richard Nixon was already reeling from Watergate. But he still managed a giant airlift of military equipment to the beleaguered Israelis.

One of the first tweets from Biden’s comrades said, “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks.”

Too late! The next day Antony Blinken said he was pushing “Turkey’s advocacy for a cease-fire.”

A ceasefire! As the Babylon Bee noted, the Japanese probably would have liked a ceasefire too… right after they bombed Pearl Harbor.

Once again, vaunted Western “intelligence” got caught flat-footed, and not just the Mossad. How about the CIA? I guess they were probably too busy putting together another open letter saying they still think Hunter Biden’s laptop is “Russian disinformation.”

And the FBI may well still be too busy having its “special” agents taking down license plate numbers at local school board meetings, or breaking down the doors of a pro-life father of seven who defended his son from an ancient Bernie bro outside an abortion clinic?

Or maybe they’re still trying to follow up their latest tip from Hillary Clinton about the “pee tape,” or about that $11 billion bribe her lying operatives claimed the Russians offered Carter Page.

Very few Americans have seen the Democrat holding up a cell-phone image of a swastika near the United Nations on Sunday afternoon. Imagine, though, if someone had been waving the Nazi symbol around at a Trump rally.

You think state-run media would be giving it a good leaving-alone then?

And here’s the thing. If you saw the swastika at a Trump rally, you’d naturally assume that was being brandished by a fed, a false flag. After all, Jan. 6 isn’t called a “fedsurrection” for nothing. Paging Ray Epps, who got a teeny-weeny slap on the wrist from the same Obama judge who gave a wet kiss to the crooked FBI hack who made up the CIA memo that was used to frame Carter Page.

This is what the feds do now. They don’t care about terrorists. They target Americans. They took a knee for BLM. They sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for 10 months, and then tried to run out the statute-of-limitations clock on all his felonies.

Meanwhile, even fewer Americans have ever heard of Robert Malley, the former special envoy to Iran, who was recently suspended from his job for “mishandling classified material.”

The scandal was bad before the weekend, how Malley (a school classmate of Antony Blinken’s not in the US, but Paris) collaborated with the Iranians. Now it could, as Rep. Darrell Issa of California said Monday, “the worst State Department scandal since Alger Hiss.”

And Malley’s top aide still works at the Pentagon. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s FBI is on the case. Some nuns are having a weekend retreat somewhere, or so says a CHS. Trump will be holding a rally.

Forget Hamas and Gaza. Get the deplorables! First things first.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Much like Mayor Michelle Wu in Boston, Maura must have been enthralled with the idea of being the “first” this or that. But now that they’ve made history, or her-story, both of them are like the dog that liked to chase the cars that drove by his house.

What happens to the dog when he… catches it?

Both Healey and Wu seem checked out, disinterested at best, bored at worst with anything beyond the vapid ribbon-cutting and virtue-signaling.

But considering that most Americans have likewise long since checked out of Boston, Wu’s disappearance is less of a concern.

It’s more significant when the governor appears to have gone MIA from the Commonwealth, whether on her endless junkets or even on those rare days she shows up in the Corner Office.

Not that this is a new phenomenon for governors. But usually it takes a term, or at least a couple of years, for the incumbent to become, in Gov. Charlie Baker’s second-term phrase, “disappointed.”

Barely nine months into the job and Maura “Hold It” Healey is… “distressed.”

But not nearly as distressed as her constituents, especially the ones who live or work or own businesses near the fleabag motels and ramshackle motor courts that the Illegal Alien Industrial Complex has been gleefully converting into Third World flophouses.

Those Massachusetts taxpayers lacking the wherewithal to flee to, for lack of a better term, America, are watching with dismay what is happening to their cities and towns.

In Quincy, they talk about how many of the pregnant illegals have already delivered their anchor babies, with all hospital expenses paid by Americans who can’t afford to have any more kids of their own because they have to work and pay taxes to support the foreign freeloaders’ baby boom.

In Sutton, they talk about how undocumented Democrats set fire to the run-down Red Roof Inn. In West Springfield, citizens wonder if the illegals are enjoying the hotel water slides their children never got to use.

In Saugus, they watch the buses pulling up to pick up all the indigent children, many of whom not only require ESL, but also special-needs instructions. American kids, you’re on your own!

On the Cape, the fleabag hotels fill up with illegals. The evicted American homeless are left to their own devices, sleeping in tents alongside Route 28.

Maura Healey’s response? The same one as Alfred E. Neuman had back in the days of Mad Magazine.

“What, me worry?”

It’s still business as usual on Beacon Hill. Last week she signed a “tax relief” bill providing relief to those who don’t pay taxes — how Democrat was that?

Next they’re going to try to ram through what amounts to the first steps towards an unconstitutional gun grab. This is an example of how the Deep State can use their ongoing disaster of illegal-alien importation to their benefit.

The Democrats are going to claim you must give up your firearms for public safety, because of the crime wave being perpetrated not by Americans, but by the new undocumented Democrats.

Last week, one of the do-gooder gun grab groups cited the terrible shootings in Holyoke as a reason to abrogate the Second Amendment rights of 600,000 legal gun owners in Massachusetts.

For the record, the two shooters under arrest for murder in Holyoke are named Alejandro Ramos and Johnluis Sanchez. Ever see either one of them at your local rod & gun club? Are these amigos life members of the Gun Owners Action League?

But never let a crisis go to waste. The Democrats have created this catastrophe. And now as it destabilizes what was once a prosperous, peaceful First World country, they will use their imported chaos and crime to consolidate ever more power.

Check out who’s committing most of the crimes in this state now. The local DA’s are loath to tell you — that’s why the comrades on the Boston City Council wanted to get rid of the BPD’s BRIC unit that keeps the stats.

But sometimes the inconvenient facts leak out of the US attorney’s office in Boston.

You don’t have to be a criminologist to figure out that when you read a DOJ press release headlined “Dorchester (or Boston or Worcester) Man Indicted for Illegal Reentry,” they’re not talking about gringos.

In the last week, the feds have convicted both a “Commercial Truck Driver” and a “Man” for distribution of 15 kilos of cocaine. They were Mexicans, illegals.

As someone once said, “They’re not sending us their best.”

Maura Healey doesn’t care. She’s in love, after dumping her elderly gal pal, the judge. Now Maura’s set up light housekeeping one county over with a much younger woman who used to work under her. It’s a story as old as time.

Maura’s new love nest is in the People’s Republic of Arlington. No fleabag flophouses for illegals in Menotomy, by God! Woburn next door is reeling, but there are no Metrowest Metco programs being established to absorb some of working-class Woburn’s celebration of diversity.

NIMBY — Not In My Back Yard!

Now we have the the Army-Navy game scheduled for Gillette Stadium on Dec. 9. And the American taxpayers who were planning to attend have been told there’s no room at the inn.

See, the Democrats don’t care about Americans who pay their own way. They much prefer to give everything away to the illegal criminals.

This Foxboro fiasco is a national story, but Maura et al. are blaming the bad optics on “politics.” As if there’s even a Republican party left in this state after the crackpot former state chairman Jim “Jones” Lyons spent the last four years wrecking the GOP.

Speaking of which, there’s a Republican primary Tuesday in the Worcester and Hampshire Senate District. Rep. Peter Durant of Spencer needs your vote. He’s been fighting to repeal this insane “right to shelter” law that the Democrats are using to fundamentally transform the Commonwealth.

Durant has a chance to win the open state Senate seat out there next month. So naturally the remnants of Lyons’ Kool Aid Kult want to make sure they put a sure loser into the final election.

Please, if you live out there and you’re a Republican or unenrolled, vote for Peter Durant Tuesday. If he wins in November, it would be the first takeaway victory for Republicans here since 2018.

This state’s a dumpster fire. Actually the whole country is. First thing we have to do is put out the fire, and get starting ousting the Democrat arsonists who are still pouring gasoline on the flames.

Vote for Durant Tuesday if you live out there.

It’s a tiny start, but what else are we going to do?

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

Here he is on Wednesday, announcing another giveaway to shiftless deadbeats who took out hundreds of billions in student loans to major in queer studies at the local community college and now don’t want to stop smoking weed long enough to pay back their legally-contracted debts.

“You can sign up for the save plan at student aid dot gov slash save. Student aid dash gov slash student aid dash student aid dot gov slash gov.”

May we quote you quote on that, Mr. President?

As always, all dialogue quoted verbatim. Such as when he told an audience he was sworn in in January of 2020. (Actually, 2021.) Or when he said, “I cut national debt by 1 trillion, 700 billion dollars.”

In fact, the national debt is up under Biden. It’s now over $33 trillion. The fact-checkers could not be reached for comment.

Biden has recently claimed he witnessed the collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh last year. (He didn’t.)

In his speeches, the 80-year-old corrupt vegetable alternates between creepy whispers and sudden screams, mixed in with an occasional burp. Sometimes Biden loses his train of thought and his voice trails off.

It’s gotten so bad that sometimes his caregivers just cut off his microphone and shout “Thank you!” at the assorted Democrat operatives with press passes who are in attendance.

At Gen. Mark Milley’s retirement, he denounced the tragic events of “June 6.” Was he referring to D-Day, perhaps? On an earlier occasion, he referred to the so-called insurrection of “July 6.”

He loves to praise the military, or as he calls it, the “grating fighting foice force.” It is, he continued, “the most diverse fighting fice force in the world.”

The simplest words are beyond Biden’s ability to pronounce. Shadows become “shadders.” He talks about ante-bellum slave owners, only he says “slain owners.” The word “points” comes out as “pornts.” The phrase “civil service” becomes “shival service.” Corporate is pronounced “corefet.”

He talks about big business “padding” their profits, only he says “paddling.” Young comes out “flung,” and brain becomes “blain.”

Luckily for him, he’s never been a drinker. If he was one, everyone would say he was drunk. But he’s sober when he tries to talk about “AI,” only it comes out “AA.” He thinks “Good Morning Vietnam” was a song. It was a movie.

He confused the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with the Congressional Black Caucus.

On the anniversary of 9/11, he couldn’t be bothered to go to New York. In Alaska, he lied that he’d been at Ground Zero the next day. He had to correct himself after he first said the Muslim terrorists had murdered 297 Americans – the number was 2,977.

Then he told a personal 9/11 story about a guy named “Davis” he’d grown up with whose son was killed that day. It was a very touching story, except that he called his friend Davis “David.”

Then he recalled seeing “a plume of fire shooting up” from the Pentagon as he got off his Amtrak train at Union Station. That too was a lie.

Sometimes the White House transcribers try to clean up his incoherence, at least a little bit. In August, he was bragging about the FEMA response to the fires in Hawaii. First he congratulated FEMA administrator “Deanne Griswell.” Her name is “Criswell.”

“To date,” the transcript read, “FEMA has approved five five thou – 50,000 meals, 75 liters – thousand liters, of water, 500 beds.”

Then the hacks x-ed out “approved” and replaced it with “provided.” Those 500 beds – actually it was 5000.

On Wednesday, he  mentioned, “I join with Minority Leader Jeffers.”

Er, his name is Jeffries, Brandon. He called US Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon “Mary Kay Scanlon.”

He identified rapper LL Cool J “LL J Cool J.” Then he complimented him on his biceps.

It’s not just blacks he talks down to. Two weeks ago he said he’s been working to get more jobs “particularly for African Americans and Hispanic workers and veterans – you know, the workers without high school diplomas.”

Imagine if Trump had said anything that racist or classist!

He talked about the rising temperatures in the waters off Florida, only he said Delaware.

He said the election of the speaker of the House is the responsibility “of the House and Senate.”

Here are a few more of Brandon’s recent Greatest Hits:

“The entire company, uh, country is here for you.”

“You know Wall Street good folks down there but they didn’t build the middle class they didn’t build America. Middle class was built by the middle class and the unions built the middle class.”

“I signed that pen.”

“John Kerry was the nominee for president of the Democrat party.”

“Mega Republicans under my predecessor gutted immigration under my predecessor.”

“The problem was too many people are working! Or working people are working making too much money. That’s not the problem.”

“We hold our hands the power in that power to bend that arc of history.”

“Our common, uh, our combatant commands.”

“Every asset we be will be.”

“Auto manufactur-shees has large been largely been middle class career.”

“I sat down, it was in February, Feb – no, January, after we’d been elected. Late January. Uh, early February.”

“So today I’m pleased to announce we’re working with Congress to invest 40 billion in our Pacific Islands Infrastructure Initiative we call it the PT PI anyways it doesn’t matter what we call it but that’s what it is.”

That’s what it is. What it is is a bleepshow. I can’t wait until Brandon tries to explain why now it’s okay to build a wall to keep out the criminal Third World hordes overrunning the nation.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Think about it — if the U.S. government wasn’t operating for even a few days, think of the terrible consequences for all the foreign freeloaders flopping amongst us.

Just ask Vinicius Santana, age 35, born in Brazil and then shipped off to a life of leisure in Revere. After his multi-million-dollar heist from Uncle Sam, Vinicius took on the lam to Boca Raton with his ill-gotten gains.

If anyone can speak to the incredible beneficence of Uncle Sam, it would be Vinicius Santana, even from his new home in Club Fed.

Vinicius is (thus far) the biggest scam artist convicted in Massachusetts of stealing federal COVID welfare funds under the Payroll Protection Program (PPP).

PPP is the fraudulent scam welfare program that the feds set up in 2020 after the Red Chinese unleased the Wuhan Red Death on the world.

If there was no federal government, there would be no PPP. And there would be no millionaire criminals like Vinicius Santana.

His single mother brought Vinicius Santana to Revere from his Third World birthplace. He is a tenth-grade dropout and a jailbird. He was dishonorably discharged from the Air Force and imprisoned “after he was charged in an incident in which another military member was shot,” as his own lawyer admits.

So it was only natural that the feds would allow him to steal $2.5 million.

When all the COVID “relief” programs were set up, it was like blowing a dog whistle for every con artist and flim-flam man – and not just American citizens either. (No mention is made of his citizenship status in his sentencing memorandum.)

Do I need to point out that, if the government shuts down, who will the next Vinicius Santana be able to rob and steal from after he sneaks into the United States and doesn’t want to work for a living?

In 2017, Vinicius started something a painting company called “Complete Home Care LLC.” In 2020, he heard that Uncle Sam was giving away free money, so he got in line, lickety-split.

In his first application for free money on April 10, 2020, Vinicius Santana falsely claimed he had five employees and a payroll of $10,000 a month. He wanted the gringos to give him $25,000.

He was turned down. Two weeks later, he filed two more fraudulent PPP applications. Now he claimed he needed $45,000 for his five fictitious employees, whose monthly pay had somehow increased 80 percent – to $18,000 a month.

Both new applications were summarily rejected, so on that very same day, Vinicius Santana decided to try to shoot the moon.

In his fourth application for welfare, he claimed that CHC had not 5, but 154 employees.

Its monthly payroll was not $18,000 a month – it was a million bucks.

And instead of demanding a handout of $45,000, now Santana begged for $2.5 million – as the feds noted, “140 times larger than the requested loan in the three unsuccessful applications.”

Guess what – once he upped the ante, Vinicius’ $2.5-million welfare payment was instantly approved. It was wired to his account at the East Boston Savings Bank, which at the time had $60 in it.

Nobody noticed nothing. Because… federal government.

Once he had stolen the $2.5 million, Vinicius Santana began spending it in just the ways career criminals always do.

He wired $825,332 and $185,900 to two different companies, both of which then cashed their windfalls at the same check-cashing business in Marlborough.

He then paid off car loans of $7,861.12 and $9,681.

Then he bought himself a 2019 Toyota Highlander for $29,471.

Three weeks later, he bought a $90,000 Audi in Burlington.

A couple of weeks later, he wired $900,000 from his bank account to a crypto-currency exchange.

In December, he purchased a house in Lowell for $407,587.

Bottom line: life is sweet if you’re a Brazilian flim-flam man. But only if the federal government is giving you millions upon millions of fraudulently-obtained dollars.

Which is why we must all be so thankful that the “shutdown” has been avoided, at least for a few weeks. Because God forbid that Third World career criminals shouldn’t be able to steal $2.5 million from law-abiding American citizens, even for a brief moment.

Sadly, though, Vinicius Santana has now been sentenced to 29 months in prison. Finally, the feds woke up and lugged the foreign freeloader.

In his sentencing memorandum, the greed-crazed Brazilian played all the usual cards that Democrats always do when caught red-handed with their hands in the till. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.

Vinicius comes from “humble beginnings.” He was a “shy child.” His USAF dishonorable discharge was “an abrupt departure from the military.”

He entered a “dark period.” He “contracted COVID-19.” (Oh no!)

But he has “a caring and committed girlfriend, Zsofia Szepesi.” He “developed a knack” for making money. (No kidding!)

Sitting around home after the Panic began, doing absolutely nothing like most newcomers to our land, Vinicius heard about the PPP. He quickly figured out how to scam the americanos.

“This money,” Santana’s sentencing memorandum sadly notes, “quickly proved itself to be a curse rather than a blessing…”

To look at it another way, stealing $2.5 million can be a blessing. Getting caught, however, is the curse.

“In the end, he failed to enrich himself at all.”

Depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Vinicius is still going to be getting three hots and a cot for the next 29 months, compliments of Tio Sam. In other words, he’s still on the dole. Looks like not that much has really changed for the Brazilian gunman.

“Mr. Santana gained little and lost much through his crimes. This is the quintessential case of money not buying happiness. Instead, the funds that Mr. Santana obtained only brought him distress, the near ruin of his company and a prison sentence. He did not obtain a life of luxury through his theft.”

Has it been that bad for the senor? Even though he’s the biggest PPP thief in the history of the Commonwealth, he’s still been permitted by the feds to go on two nice vacations to Florida.

“(These) have been the happiest moments of Mr. Santana’s life since being arrested.”

This is why the federal government must never, ever shut down. Because otherwise, how would Brazilian-born thieves be able to go to Florida on vacation?

To update the old bumper sticker, Keep working, millions of foreign felons like Vinicius Santana are depending on you.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

But what does ex-Methuen police chief Joseph Solomon care? His motto is, if you’re indicted, you’re invited.

How did he run the Methuen PD, you ask?

Like “the don of an organized-crime family,” according to one of the several scathing reports about him over the years.

Don Solomon was paid $326,272 a year as chief. Plus he got to run a business on the side — “security.” He got a “night deferential.” He didn’t have one police car, he had two.

The second cruiser was used by Chief Solomon to smoke cigars in. Or so said one of the dissident city councilors, who by the way happened to be a Lawrence police officer. You can’t be a real organized-crime don unless you smoke cigars.

As he stuffed holiday envelopes full of bribes for his bent feds and crooked local police, Whitey Bulger used to quip, “Christmas is for cops and kids!”

For Joseph Solomon, the capo di tutti capi of the Methuen PD, every day was Christmas.

When they eventually build a Massachusetts Corrupt Cops Hall of Fame, Solomon should be inducted as a charter member, alongside Zip Connolly, H. Paul Rico and Gerry Clemente.

He was fired once, in 2008. But this being Massachusetts, the Don was ordered rehired, and he got back pay of $195,000 for his, uh, wrongful termination. And he resumed what the state now says was his life of crime in uniform.

He was charged this week by a state grand jury with a laundry list of corruption charges, including perjury by written document, uttering a forged document, procurement fraud and a host of violations of the civil-service laws.

Solomon was basically running his own personal hackerama out of the Methuen Police Department. Everything was done with the connivance of the local political establishment, which made the current Boston City Council look like the Good Government Association.

For a long time, Methuen City Hall was in fact King Solomon’s Mines. And there was plenty of gold in them thar hills.

You know, it’s one thing to feed at the trough. It’s another thing to lick the plate.

Chief Solomon never got that memo. Or maybe he was too busy taking all those junkets to sunny places for shady people. Or negotiating his next contract, with the $20,129 kiss for his very prestigious college degree, not to mention collecting a salary that was eventually supposed to rise to $375,548 a year. Think of what his pension would have been then.

In a city of 53,000, Solomon was making more than the police chiefs/commissioners of, among other places, New York, Chicago and Houston.

He was, of course, a “counter-terrorism expert.” He terrorized the taxpayers of Methuen.

The attorney general put out a bare-bones press release about his indictment Thursday night. The actual charges apparently won’t be filed until next week in Salem.

There’s also a 203-page report detailing Solomon’s looting spree that was written by a former state police officer who now runs a private-detective agency.

Solomon was described as running the department through “humiliation, fear, intimidation and retaliation.”

The Methuen Police Department, the ex-trooper said, was “a textbook case of public corruption.”

Apparently the new AG and the new district attorney of Essex County agreed.

If you check out Solomon’s political contributions, you can learn that his favorite payroll patriot was Diana DiZoglio, who is now calling herself the “reform” auditor of Massachusetts.

She pocketed at least $1,550 from Don Solomon. I’m sure it had no connection to the fact that one of the Methuen city councilors also had the last name of DiZoglio.

Other than handing them cash, how was Solomon able to get the local yokels to go along with his highway robbery? Well, the guy who was indicted with Don Solomon is a former city councilor who had been put on the department. The councilor had no credentials for the job so they just forged them — at least according to the indictment.

Two of the patrolmen were the sons of city councilors. A former mayor, Jim Jajuga, who used to work for the other Bulger brother Billy as a state senator, had a son who was a captain.

When Jajuga was elected mayor, Solomon “gave” him a brand new Chevy Tahoe SUV with tinted windows. It was a gift, so-called, from the PD.

According to a report by the state inspector general, two city councilors were on the short list to be hired as cops. And what jobs!

The last police contract the Don was mixed up in would have paid captains as much as $459,906 a year, lieutenants $289,834 and sergeants $181,298 a year.

Plus overtime and details.

The union totally rewrote that pact after the city’s negotiators had agreed to a real contract. It was so outrageous that the union’s lawyer emailed one of Solomon’s caporegimes, Griftin’ Greg Gallant, that he just hoped the city “doesn’t bring its calculators” when it signed off on the heist.

Most of this stuff is at least two years old. I had thought Solomon et al. were going to skate. This is, after all, Massachusetts. But then Thursday night the news was released. I put City Councilor D.J. Beauregard, one of the real reformers, on my radio show for a victory lap.

Some of Solomon’s stooges immediately took to social media to accuse Beauregard of being “giddy” about the fall of the Don. He pleads guilty to glee.

“They were screwing 53,000 taxpaying residents of Methuen for years,” he said. “Yeah, I’m happy there’s finally maybe going to be some justice.”

There’s an election coming up in Methuen Nov. 7. Some of the Don’s soldiers — or their children — are trying to resurrect their squalid careers. Again, this is Massachusetts. No matter how corrupt, you can always run again. Look at the Kool Aid Kult on the GOP state committee.

As for Methuen, is it too late for Kendra Lara and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo to head north to run write-in campaigns for the City Council? They’d be perfect additions to the Solomon Crime Family.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

The GOP presidential race is over, can we all agree on that? Spoiler alert: Trump won. It wasn’t even close.

Yeah, I know the old saying, it’s never over ‘til it’s over, but you know what? It’s over.

Could anything have been clearer after the Wednesday night debate on the RINO Fox Business Channel that nobody watched among the also-rans, has-beens and never-weres?

What did the headlines all say about the seven – seven! – candidates who showed up at the Reagan library in southern California?

They “sparred.” They “duked it out.” That’s the lede reporters write about a debate when nobody stood out and nothing happened to change the trajectory of the fight.

And it’s not like the race was very much in doubt before the debate.

As Trump’s spokesman pointed out afterwards, if you took the poll numbers of the other seven candidates and added them all together, they’d still be 20 points behind Orange Man Bad.

The political scrubs and jay-vees all went into that debate understanding those numbers. It was like the series last week between the Red Sox and the Yankees. The only thing at stake was avoiding finishing dead last in the division. (Another spoiler alert: the Red Sox lost.)

In California, the seven dwarfs were trying to limp towards the next one, to somehow meet the RNC requirements to make the third debate, whenever it is, wherever it is.

Nobody wants to be the next… Asa Hutchinson. Who will be eliminated next? Mike Pence? Krispy Kreme Christie? Whatisname – the governor of North Dakota?

It’s humiliating to be the first cut in either training camp or the presidential campaign. You want to be Trump’s last sparring partner – this cycle’s Ted Cruz. It means a bigger contract to become the token Republican in the green room on one of state-run media’s cable networks.

Maybe that’s why Dana Perino asked the stupid “Survivor” question. Ron DeSantis shot her down, just as he demolished the Charo-sounding Colombian leftist who was imported to ask some questions direct from the ESL School of Broadcasting, like “Why have you fleeped?”

So you had one of the three moderators from Great Britain, another from a failed Third World narco-nation, and one native-born citizen who worships the ground all members of the Bush family walk on.

No wonder the candidates didn’t get asked any questions about issues Americans actually care about, say, Bidenomics, or the Afghanistan debacle, or the sinister connections between COVID, the CIA and Fauci….

Somewhere Wednesday night, Candy Crowley and Chris Wallace were smiling. They couldn’t have done a better job themselves of sandbagging Republicans!

Incidentally, it wasn’t just Trump who counterprogrammed against Faux during that sad two-hour debate. Bill O’Reilly went on Tucker Carlson’s Twitter feed to discuss the parlous state of American media.

“They’re all afraid,” O’Reilly told Carlson. “Talent’s scared across the board.”

But as long as you try to make Republicans look bad, you’ll probably get another contract. That was another one of the lessons from the debate, so-called.

If this GOP campaign were a boxing match, the referee would have already stepped in and stopped the fight – TKO, technical knockout.

The winner wasn’t even back in his own corner when he won. He was three time zones away, in Michigan, addressing an audience of auto workers.

And yet Trump still delivered the best lines of the night:

“The only time Joe Biden has ever gotten his hands dirty is when he’s taking cash from foreign countries – which is quite often, actually.”

“Crooked Joe Biden is back like a wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.”

“Joe Biden only cares about enriching his own family. I care about enriching your family. That’s why I did this.”

Why can’t any of the other Republican candidates come up with soundbites like that? Is it that difficult? As Casey Stengel used to say of the 1962 Mets, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

Speaking of baseball again, if the debate had been a late-season game, the headline would have been:

“Seven candidates mathematically eliminated after latest loss.”

For months now, Faux News has been trying to prop up one or another of the GOP pretenders. For a while it was Sen. Tim Scott, flush as he is with Larry Ellison’s millions. But his campaign is DOA. Then it was Nikki Haley, but she has a very low ceiling in the polling.

Occasionally the Faux RINOs try to resuscitate Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is, let’s face it, a victim of circumstance in this fight. But no matter how much the Murdochs try, they can’t seem to get DeSantis any traction either.

So now they’re again floating the name of VA Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Virginia has off-year legislative elections, so he’s out of pocket until at least Nov. 7. But, just as the Jets need a new quarterback, the never-Trumpers desperately need a new candidate now.

Update: as I write this, Youngkin has materialized live on Faux, doing commentary of the House impeachment inquiry. He’s sitting right there in the D.C. studio with one of the innumerable blonde anchor cupcakes.

Will Youngkin be the next… Brock Purdy? Maybe, but for every Brock Purdy, there’s a dozen bust-outs. Joe Louis used to fight the “Bum of the Month.” Will Glenn Youngkin be Trump’s next Bum of the Month?

Stay tuned. Or, if it’s like the Wednesday night debate, do what everybody else did. Don’t stay tuned.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

He merely asks to be treated like Hunter Biden.

The “embattled” senior senator from New Jersey has already won an earlier photo finish with a jury, in Newark. He was tried by a jury of his Democrat peers, one of whom asked in court, “What is a senator?”

The new indictment runs 39 pages. Naturally state-run media is giving it a good leaving alone because… professional courtesy.

However, despite what some deplorables are claiming, there are great differences between the Biden and Menendez cases.

Of course, Menendez is, or was until last week, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Joe Biden used to be chairman of that same committee, which is apparently a golden goose when it comes to, uh, whatever.

But beyond that, there is no connection between the Biden and Menendez scandals.

For example, Menendez is accused of shaking down Egypt. The Bidens, on the other hand, are accused of taking payoffs from sinister foreign nationals in Ukraine, Russia, China, Romania and Kazakhstan.

Biden threatened to stop $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. Menendez didn’t stop Egypt from getting $2.5 billion in foreign aid, but then had his wife send the Arabs a newspaper story about the grant he’d facilitated:

“Bob had to sign off on this.”

Menendez is accused of accepting bribes in the form of gold bullion. Hunter Biden took diamonds.

When the big bucks started flowing, Mrs. Menendez set up a corporation because “every time I’m a middle person for a deal I am asking to get paid and this is my consulting company.”

Hunter became an “artist.”

Mrs. Menendez got a brand-new Mercedes Benz C-300 convertible worth $60,000. Hunter Biden grabbed a brand-new Fisker Karma EV sports car worth $142,000.

After the delivery of the new car, the oligarch who bought Hunter’s car got to have dinner with Hunter and Dementia Joe in Georgetown.

The convicted felon who bought Mrs. Menendez her car had his celebratory car dinner with the Menendez’ in Manhattan – and took a photograph while toasting one another with champagne.

So you can see, these two Democrat corruption stories have absolutely nothing in common.

At the traditional I-am-not-a-crook press conference Monday, Menendez said he always kept a little cash around the house ($486,461 to be exact) because of the history of “confiscation” of his family’s funds in Cuba under Communism.

For the record, Menendez was born in New York City in 1954 – five years before Fidel Castro took power.

So what though? Joe Biden has claimed he was raised in “the Puerto Rican community” in Delaware, even though there were fewer than 2,000 of them living in his state when he was a boy in the 1940’s.

The Bidens were a little slicker. For one thing, compared to the Bidens’ mind-boggling tens of millions of dollars, Menendez was a piker. According to the indictment, Menendez had much less understanding of how much he was getting paid off.

After being handed some gold bullion in October 2019, Menendez googled:

“How much is one kilo of gold worth?”

In January 2022, Menendez again went onto Google to search for “kilo of gold price.”

Is Menendez starting to have the same kind of late-life memory problems as Brandon?

(For the record, the indictment says that a kilo of gold is worth about $60,000.)

The Bidens and Menendezes both consorted with dodgy people. Biden “served” with a killer (Ted Kennedy) and a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan (Robert Byrd), among other reprobates.

Menendez’ codefendants include Jose Uribe who was “previously convicted of fraud and had his insurance broker’s license revoked.”

Another of their indicted pals was a Democrat fundraiser named Fred Daibes, who in 2018 was accused by the feds of “obtaining loans under false pretenses” from his own bank.

Both families keep their friends close – very, very close. Hunter had a sister-in-law who was also his girlfriend. Another of the Menendez codefendants is an Egyptian named Will Hana who was “friends for many years” with the senator’s codefendant wife Nadine, according to the US attorney.

The two “friends” exchanged “thousands of text messages.” At one point, when Nadine’s house was being foreclosed upon, her “friend” paid $23,000 to get it out of arrears.

That’s a good friend, I’d say. Which probably explains why the former Nadine Arslanian was so angry after her new husband the senator “ghost wrote” a letter to get another $300 million in aid for Egypt, and then her old “friend” refused to pay the bill.

Nadine wrote to her new husband about her old “friend” the Egyptian:

“I have been so upset all morning. Will left for Egypt yesterday supposedly and now think he’s king of the world and has both countries wrapped around his pinky. I really hope they replace him.”

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

Like Hunter, Nadine became frustrated with her past-due accounts receivable. It is the eternal lament of the bagman.

Hunter told his daughter that when she graduated into the family shakedown business, he would never require her to kick back 50 percent of the shakedowns like “Pop” had done to him.

Nadine, however, just whines about being stiffed on the payoffs to her husband: “I am soooooo upset.”

Nadine, learn something from Hunter. Don’t complain, explain – what’ll happen to the deadbeats if they don’t pay up. When one of his Chinese marks was past due in 2017, Hunter sent him a WhatsApp message that began:

“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”

Within days, the Red Chinese had wired $5.1 million to Hunter’s “firm.”

The one advantage Mr. and Mrs. Menendez have over the Bidens? They have spousal privilege – Bob and Nadine can’t testify against one another.

If I were Menendez’ lawyer, I would only counsel him to do one thing before he appears in court today.

Change his last name to Biden. It works every time.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

He kept Boston a two-newspaper town, back in those long-gone days when newspapers actually mattered.

If you’re depressed about how everything has been going steadily downhill in Massachusetts for decades now, all I can tell you is that if the Boston Globe had been allowed to have a monopoly on public discourse since 1982, the situation would be even more dire.

Any city with two newspapers, no matter how bad, is better served than any city with one newspaper, no matter how good.

Rupert Murdoch “stepped aside” the other day from his role running Fox or News Corp. or whatever it’s called now. He’s 92.

He’s not what he used to be, and neither is his empire, full of careerists, time servers, clerks and Democrat party apparatchiks — just like every other dying remnant of what was once called mass media, come to think of it.

But thank goodness for what Rupert accomplished in his prime. He saved not only this newspaper but the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. He started the Fox News Channel, now a spent force promoting RINOs and anybody-but-Trump, but once a force to be reckoned with.

I met Rupert Murdoch in late 1982 when he was in the process of buying the moribund Herald American. I’d just quit the paper and gone over to Ch. 7 because Hearst was about to kill the “feisty” tabloid.

When Murdoch decided to get involved, Ch. 7 put me on the Herald sale beat. He arrived in town and set up headquarters at the Long Wharf Marriott for his negotiations with the paper’s union. And the three TV reporters covering the story were brought up to meet him.

The Murdoch hand introduced me to Rupert by saying that until a few weeks earlier, I’d been the lead columnist for the Herald but had quit to go to work for the CBS affiliate in town.

“You made the right decision,” Murdoch told me.

He was correct. You always do what you gotta do. People who don’t understand Murdoch always make him out to be an obdurate right-winger. But that’s not right. He’s transactional. He does what he has to do, until something better comes along. And then he cashes out.

This is why he’s worth $20 billion.

The editor who convinced him to save the paper was Don Forst. As soon as Murdoch bought the paper, he sent Forst packing — nothing personal, just wanted his own guys in there. Murdoch brought in his own people, whom he would later fire (and then rehire) or use as scapegoats for one scandal or another (and then hand them huge buyouts).

It was the life we chose, working for Murdoch. Ultimately, it was never about politics, it was about what was good for Rupert Murdoch.

In the late 1980’s, as he began expanding into TV, Murdoch would fly into Boston just before Christmas and host a fancy dinner at a nice steakhouse for the top people at the Herald.

I remember one year he told us not to worry about all these stories that he was losing interest in print.

“The backbone of any media company is content,” he said. “And print people are the only ones who can produce the proper content. So this corporation will always be based in print.”

We believed him — up to a point, to use the expression Lord Copper’s minions would use to agree with, sort of, their media mogul boss’ disassembling in Evelyn Waugh’s classic Fleet Street novel, Scoop.

But I think Murdoch does still believe in print, up to a point. He wildly overpaid for the Wall Street Journal. He took a huge bath on TV Guide (remember that?). He bought and sold and then bought back the New York Post.

For Boston, the important thing is that he used the Herald to keep the Globe from going even more totally off the rails. Remember, the Globe is a newspaper whose unofficial motto has always been, “Afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.”

The comrades covered up for Ted Kennedy when he killed Mary Jo Kopechne. They employed — and in fact still do — columnists who brazenly make up stories.

The Globe ran porn photos on the metro front and claimed it was American soldiers raping Iraqi women – even after their own reporter told it was a fraud being promoted by a city councilor who would soon be sent to prison for bribery.

Sure it was fake, but the porn fit the Globe’s “fake but accurate” narrative. Afflict the afflicted…

One time a Globe photographer got pictures of a city of Boston work crew installing parking curbs at gangster Whitey Bulger’s package store in Southie.

Seems like a big story, right? Not to the Globe. As was later revealed in federal court, the Globe “journalists” instantly tipped off the crooked FBI, who tipped off Whitey. The damning photos never ran, and the curbs were removed to destroy the evidence.

The Globe did this because the serial killer’s brother was the most powerful Democrat politician in the state and they were Democrats too.

Professional courtesy.

All I can say is, as corrupt and lazy and just plain terrible as the Globe has been forever, think how much worse it would have been if it had been the only newspaper in Boston.

Rupert seen his opportunities and he took ‘em. He moved from Australia to the UK and then to the US. When print began fading away, he migrated to broadcast television. Then as the networks started to wobble, he made the move to cable television. And now cable television is going the way of all the others, and at age 92 Rupert calls it a career.

All I can say is thank you, Rupert. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have been out of the media in 1985. I’m not from New York and I don’t check any of the protected-class boxes. I didn’t have either the trust fund or the Social Register connections to make the cut, nor did I have any desire to bend my knee to the Beautiful People.

For me and my ilk in Boston, it was Murdoch or the highway. Of course, it’s odd now how he came up fighting the power wherever he went, and now at the end of his long life he is the power. From part of the solution to part of the problem. Just ask Tucker Carlson.

Rupert said Thursday he’s going to walk away from what’s left of his empire. Do I believe him? Up to a point.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It,” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

I mean, the entire Racial Grift-Industrial Complex seems to be coming apart at the seams, as one prominent con artist of color after another is exposed or fired or defeated at the polls.

But only one of the flim-flammers of 2020 is looking at serious prison time.

Monica Cannon-Grant.

The latest of her comrades to take it on the chin is the man formerly known as Ibram Henry Rogers.

Sagely, he rebranded himself as “Ibram X. Kendi,” because X marks the spot where the woke big money is. Right, Malcolm X?

The X-man also realized the profitability potential of the A-word – Anti-racist. He wrote a book about how to be an “anti-racist.” He started the Center for Anti-Racist Research.

The dough rolled in by the millions — $10 million alone from Jack Dorsey, the Charlie Manson-lookalike founder of Twitter.

Mr. X has also been pocketing up to $40,000 for every “anti-racist training” harangue he delivers to trust-funded, melanin-impaired audiences in their gated communities and resort-island spas.

Now, however, three years after the torrent of guilt-ridden money that began gushing after the “mostly peaceful” looting-arson-murder sprees by thugs across the nation, Mr. X is laying off more than half the staff at his “center” at Boston University.

Now, I guess, they really are oppressed. They’re going to have to get real jobs.

Same phenomenon is happening in corporate America. A lot of $500,000-a-year DEI vice presidents in charge of diversity are being jettisoned, because somebody has to do some real work sometime and not just harangue the people who have real jobs about stuff that happened 400 years ago.

While it lasted, though, the BLM era was a golden age for all whining freeloaders, not just Monica Cannon-Grant. As a (white) person once said, “Living well is the best revenge.”

And Mr. X at least will be living well forever. Who cares that BU has announced an “inquiry” into whatever happened to all those grandiose plans and the millions he collected?

The collapse of the Comm Ave con comes a week after the repudiation of two local con artists of color — Kendra Lara and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo. Both lost their re-election campaigns for the City Council. Unlike Mr. X, neither made millions at City Hall. But until January they’ll still be slopping at the public trough for $103,500 a year.

Meanwhile, Monica Cannon-Grant is charged in an 18-count federal indictment with running a massive multi-million-dollar scam involving… anti-racism.

You can see why she might be angry about being singled out. She basically had the BLM fraud franchise in Boston. And boy, did she get the accolades from the same Boston media rubes who swooned over Ibram X. Kendi.

The Boston Globe named her a “Bostonian of the Year.”

Boston Magazine called her “the best social justice advocate in Boston.”

The Celtics called her “a hero among us.”

She grabbed millions. She even allegedly ripped off her fellow race hustlers, among them then Suffolk County district attorney “Racial” Rollins. Racial handed Monica $6000 from one of her funds, which Monica immediately blew on a stack of double bacon cheeseburgers at the Shake Shack in Chestnut Hill.

Racial Rollins is another one of the hustlers who’s been thrown under the bus in recent months. She tried to fix the district attorney’s race last year with the aforementioned Ricky Ricardo Arroyo. She lied to the feds about her twisted scheme, and was shown the door.

But Racial Rollins is not under indictment, maybe because of the race card – she never leaves home without it. But then, neither does Monica Cannon-Grant.

Speaking of the feds and race cards, whatever happened to the woman who briefly ran the federal defenders program in Boston – Kyana Givens? That blow-in blowhard used to pose for magazine cover photos with Racial Rollins (and Maura Healey).

Yet now Kyana seems to have vanished from Boston as completely as Racial Rollins.

Despite getting arrested, Monica was a talented scam artist back in her George Floyd glory days. You have to give her that. And she continues employing her grifting gifts to this day.

First, as you know, all defendants now are “indigent,” even if, like Monica, they’re charged with stealing millions. So, if you’re “indigent,” you’re assigned a goateed, squirrelly-looking public defender from the same office that was once run by drifter Kyana Givens.

It’s all on the arm. It’s no big deal to keep changing lawyers, because it doesn’t cost you a dime. Monica is working this con the way she used to take suburban wine moms from Newton and Brookline. She is now on her third – third! – lawyer.

The beauty is, every time Monica gets a new mouthpiece, he stamps his little Birkenstock-clad feet and says he needs at least six months, maybe a year, to catch up on the million or so pages of evidence against her.

And now Monica’s gotten even luckier. The judge who’s been assigned her case is the ancient Mark Wolf, who turns 77 in November.

With any luck (like another scam over COVID, which petrifies the ancient, tubby Wolf almost as much as it does Howard Stern), Monica may not have to face justice for another decade.

When Monica (and the rest of them) were really raking in the big bucks in their racist rackets, she fled Roxbury for Taunton. She must have figured she was moving to a semi-bucolic, semi-crime-free community run by Americans.

Now, though, the city’s only hotel has been taken over by hundreds and hundreds of illegal aliens living large on the arm. Not good for property values.

Even more infuriating, if she were still in Boston, Monica could be running for one of those open City Council seats. Maybe $115,000 a year (as of next year)  isn’t much compared to her old Violence in Boston grift, but it would still pay for the occasional pig-out at Shake Shack.

As she awaits her eventual rendezvous with justice, one post-George Floyd career option remains open for Monica Cannon-Grant. It’s a tried and true path to the big bucks. Just ask Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

Repeat after me:

The Rev. Monica Cannon-Grant.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Or if you don’t want to lose your tax-free kiss in the mail.

But corrupt thieving convicted felon ex-Massachusetts State Police Lt. John Giulino apparently never watched the old TV show Baretta, maybe because he was too busy stealing $29,000 with his badge and his gun and his free police cruiser.

In 2020, Giulino was stripped of his $90,000 tax-free pension pulled after he pleaded guilty to putting in for 85 overtime shifts on the Mass Turnpike that he did not work. He backed his felonious theft by writing fake traffic tickets.

But now, at age 72, the greed-crazed crooked cop Giulino has found a district-court judge who decreed that the kleptomaniac cop should get his bloated state pension back.

It’s just one hack helping another. Call it professional courtesy.

Let me ask you this: will you get a $90,000-a-year pension when you retire? And I’m guessing you’ve never been convicted of stealing more than $29,000 in public funds.

Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time – unless you’re a career Massachusetts hack. In which case, steal as much as you can, because there will be no consequences.

The hack judge who signed off on this latest heist is Mark J. Pasquariello of the Pittsfield District Court. He seems to understand that his shocking ruling will probably be overturned — in his decision he acknowledges that “I am mindful that our appellate courts in addressing the issue of (pension) forfeiture have generally upheld the SBR (State Board of Retirement) decisions.”

Let’s hope the courts do so again, because this guy Giulino should not only not be getting a kiss in the mail, he should still be locked up for all the money he stole.

But instead he’s free as a bird, because he adhered to the MSP’s ancient motto: “To Protect and Steal.”

Giulino was a lieutenant in Troop E, which was so breathtakingly corrupt that it was disbanded by Gov. Charlie Baker.

Baker is the same bust-out pol who nominated Pasquariello to the bench after his lackluster career in a one-man practice in Adams, handling wills and real-estate closings.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But you can bet this part-time payroll patriot never made anywhere near his current $207,855-a-year judicial handout until he took early retirement in the hackerama.

Now, after dying and going to hack heaven himself, the judge feels sorry for his fellow payroll patriot. Klepto Cop was stripped of his kiss in the mail after his conviction on a six-count felony indictment. Giulino could have – should have – gotten 30 years in prison, and a fine of up to $90,000.

Instead the thief got a wrist slap of probation, 100 hours of community service and an order to pay back the $29,018.54 that he stole from the taxpayers.

And he lost his pension, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a crooked hack.

So Klepto Cop filed suit, and found a formerly-starving lawyer with black robes who felt sorry for him.

The decision lays out Giulino’s wages of sin, sort of.

After losing his $90,000 hack state pension, the judge notes with extreme sadness, last year “the plaintiff received net Social Security income of $46 a month.”

He’s been married to a woman named Cheryl since he was 50 years old. Last year Klepto Cop and the missus reported “combined wages of $17,618.”

Cue the violins, please. Oddly, the hack judge does not mention that in 2016, the corrupt MSP superior officer made $216,504, including more than $10,000 that he stole in overtime he didn’t work.

In 2015, Giulino pocketed over $215,000, including $66,000 in overtime and another $18,000 in stolen funds.

But then he got caught with both his hands in the till, and now we’re supposed to feel sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Klepto Cop.

You see, he had to sell his crappy little house in Lanesboro for $375,000 because of “the Giulinos’ inability to make their mortgage payments… (they) realized little if any profit from the sale” after paying off their two – two! – mortgages of $183,000 and $100,000.

At the time of the hearing before the hack judge, Giulino was “living in a modest, one-bedroom apartment located above a three-car garage” at his daughter’s home in Chesterfield VA.

His darling daughter charges him $800 a month is rent, and he pays another $700 a month for health insurance. Mrs. G is forced to work nights “at a local bakery.”

As for the one-time Mr. Big in the multi-million MSP organized-crime theft ring out on the Pike, Giulino “describes himself as ‘unemployable,’ due in part to the felony convictions.”

Imagine that – a sticky-fingered millionaire cop stuffs thousands in stolen cash in his pockets, and now nobody wants to hire him.

But wait, there’s more. The judge is practically weeping as he recounts the tragedy of this extinguished lawman’s lawbreaking. There but for the grace of God….

“The plaintiff suffers from a degenerative knee condition for which a double knee replacement has been recommended.”

Maybe Lt. Giulino wrecked his knees trying to drag all those heavy bags of stolen cash out of the barracks.

But wait, he does have a business to supplement that generous $46-a-month Social Security check.

“The plaintiff’s ‘startup’ clock repair business does not recognize any profits and appears to be more of a hobby.”

A hobby – you know, like writing fake traffic citations to back up your falsified time sheets.

What a disgrace that even a low-level hack judge would try to give Klepto Cop his fat pension back. But you know what I always say about Massachusetts.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.)

The state weed czar walked the plank Friday in a pre-Hurricane Lee news dump.

Ironically, she got whacked a day after the guy who defeated her in that 2002 governor’s fight, Mitt Romney, cashed in his chips before his new voters in Utah could give him the same bum’s rush down the steps.

All in all, it was a very bad week for the political protected classes in Boston. Seriously, who could have ever dreamed that Kendra Lara and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo would get fired before Chaim Bloom?

You ask, what did all these pampered pukes have in common, other than a breathtaking sense of entitlement?

They were all creations of the Boston Globe, Mitt perhaps less so than the others. But still, he always groveled before them, hoping to overcome his original sin of being a straight white male Republican who went to church on Sundays.

That’s why Willard marched in those phony-baloney BLM parades in 2020 — with a mask yet! It was to be his baptism into… wokeness.

Go woke, go broke. Now Mitt has sadly learned the same lesson as Transheuser Busch and Disney.

But Romney did do us one small favor stopping Shannon O’Brien from becoming governor in 2002. Likewise, she had earlier done us a solid by knocking off an unspeakable hack in the primary that year — Robert Reich.

The bow-tied bum kissers had preferred Robert Reich because he was, well, you know what he was. They felt sorry for the 59-inch-high egghead but in the primary he came up a little short, as it were.

When Reich didn’t rise to the occasion, the Globe immediately began non-stop gushing over Shannon O’Brien. She may have been a fourth-generation hack married to a drunk-driving ex-state rep. But when a race comes down to two honkies, all that matters is who’s got the right plumbing.

And she did have that tattoo that she bragged about in the Halloween debate.

Now Shannon has been “suspended” with pay from her $181,722-a-year job at the Weed Commission. In other words, the unemployable 64-year-old is now on vacation to fatten (bad word when discussing Shannon) her monthly kiss in the mail.

Shannon had been in the marijuana grift before she decided to return to the hack racket. Since she’d once been state treasurer, she expected to be put back on the dole by the current female state treasurer.

The Beatles got high with a little help from their friends. Shannon got high up with a little help from her friends.

Even more entertaining was the crash of two of the Globe’s pampered pets on the City Council — Lara Kendra (or is it Hicks today?) and Ricky Ricardo Arroyo. After their ignominious beatings, grief counselors confiscated belts and shoe laces from broken-hearted, suicidal Globe trust-funders.

Lara went out with a little class — very little. Conceding at Brendan Behan’s, she guzzled beer, dropped f-bombs and then downed a shot of tequila. Finally, she was joined in mourning by Ricky Ricardo, who was described by a credulous scribe as her “colleague and childhood friend.”

That’s one way of putting it, I suppose.

In the final days, it had fallen to one of the Globe’s countless check-the-box scribes to rationalize Comrade Lara’s life of crime. About not having a driver’s license — “she had ample time to get her license renewed — 10 years, to be exact.”

The drifter scribe grudgingly acknowledged, “Yes, (she) broke the rules but did so because of life’s circumstances.”

In her case, life’s circumstances had taught Kendra that as a “victim” she could absolutely get away with anything — rabid anti-Semitism, driving like an illegal alien, squatting in public housing, a social media presence that would make Susanna Gibson blush, etc.

Kendra said her defeat means she’s been “promoted to activist.” Which community she plans to be an “activist” in — JP or Somerville — remains to be seen.

Whatever, it’s doubtful Kendra’s new gig will pay $103,500 a year, her Council salary that would have been raised in January to $115,000. On the bright side, she can now move back into public (meaning, free) housing.

As for Ricky Ricardo Arroyo, I think his ouster was an even worse blow to the Globe than Lara’s. He was the latest beneficiary of the Globe’s tradition of unctuously slobbering over dodgy Democrat disgraces, the sleazier the better.

Consider the Globe Hall of Shame: serial pederasts Gerry Studds and Dave Scondras, cradle-robbing, gay hack Stanley Rosenberg, Dianne the bra-stuffer Wilkerson and the Globe’s now-indicted “Bostonian of the Year” Monica Cannon-Grant.

And don’t forget another of their longtime crushes, disgraced ex-US Attorney “Racial” Rollins, who last year conspired with Ricky Ricardo to fix the DA’s race by leaking fake stories to… wait for it… the Boston Globe.

After Ricky Ricardo was beaten like a rented mule, the Globe sent him on his crooked way with yet another wet big kiss. They even described him as a part of a political “dynasty” — which I guess means his father Felix “No Show” Arroyo and his slimy brother Felix Jr., known as “Third Rail” for his conduct around women at City Hall.

No wonder the Globe swooned over the Arroyos — they regarded them as Puerto Rican Kennedys.

Don’t worry, though, the Globe and the rest of the ruined Boston media still have plenty of Democrat rear-ends to smooch. Take city councilor Julia Mejia — please.

The Globe absolutely adores her: “She has emerged as a valuable voice on the Council.”

The valuable voice’s most memorable statement as a city councilor was delivered on YouTube, as a message to her Mass & Cass constituency:

“For those who are wondering if I am using drugs, answer is definitely no.”

Not that a habit would necessarily be a bad thing for a local pol these days.

I mean, if you can’t brag about a lesbian sister, or a (closeted) gay uncle who raised you back in some Third World hellhole before you flopped into Boston as an illegal alien on welfare, probably drug addiction would be the next best qualification for high (get it?) office.

Now, if Shannon O’Brien will just finally show us her tattoo…

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

The voters got sick of him.

Actually I wanted to start this column with the traditional, “And so, farewell, Mitt Romney….”

But the reality is, the odds are great that “Pierre Delecto” (for that was indeed his Twitter nom de plume) is not going anywhere, at least not for a while.

You know damn well Romney still fantasizes about becoming president. And believe it or not, there are a bunch of political has-beens and never-weres who are searching desperately for a doomed candidate to run for president under the “No Labels” label.

Romney and Joe Manchin may end up flipping a coin to see who gets to be the Jill Stein of 2024.

But when it comes to bust-out candidates for president, who better than the current senator from Utah and former governor of Massachusetts, who has already failed twice, in 2008 and 2012.

Mitt made his announcement with a videotaped message saying that it was “time for a new generation.”

Then, in true Mittens fashion, excerpts were leaked from a new biography in which he denounced two of his Republican colleagues in the Senate – Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance.

Hawley is 43 years old. Vance is 39. So much for that new generation.

Mitt is often described as a RINO – a Republican in Name Only. I don’t think he even rises to that sad level. He’s a charter member of the GOP’s “Useful Idiot” wing, meaning useful to the Democrats, especially when he attacks another Republican.

But No Labels isn’t the right name for Mitt’s new party. How about “No Principles?”

Remember when he bragged that he was “severely conservative?” Or when he told his landscaper in Belmont to stop hiring illegal aliens – “I’m running for president for Pete’s sake.”

So it was totally in character that Mittens would include in his announcement a blast at Donald Trump. He truly detests the former president, mainly, I think, because they are the same age. Both were born in 1946, Mitt on March 12 and Trump on June 14.

And yet Trump is the one who became president – on his first try.

A French leader once said that the Germans are either at your throat or at your feet. Trump could say the same of Mitt Romney. In 2012, Trump made him fly to Las Vegas.

“He was begging for my endorsement,” Trump recalled. “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.”

Trump said this in 2016, when Mitt was denouncing him – he was at Trump’s throat, you might say. Then Trump won and Mitt flew to New York to beg – beg! – for a job in the new administration. At Trump’s feet, as it were.

Trump gave him the back of his hand, so Mittens decided to move to Utah and run for the Senate. You know, just like he moved back to Massachusetts in 2002 to run for governor.

After one term as governor, he got bored and decided not to run for a second term. Now after one term in the Senate, he gets bored and decides not to run for a second term.

Do you begin to detect a pattern here?

He quit as governor because he didn’t think it was improving his prospects for winning the presidency. I would suggest the same m.o. is in play here.

It’s all about Mitt’s father, George Romney, the late governor of Michigan, one of Mitt’s many home states. George ran for president in 1968, but his campaign imploded after he said on television that during a visit to Vietnam, he’d been “brainwashed.”

(Comedian Mort Sahl commented that given George Romney’s towering intellect, a brain wash seemed like overkill, and that a “light rinse” would have gotten the job done just as well.)

Mitt has always relished the fake accolades of state-run media. I’m sure that since his announcement, he’s been eagerly searching the Internet for any positive reviews.

That was the whole rationale behind his “Pierre Delecto” alias on Twitter – he wanted to give himself big wet slobbering kisses on social media!

It was pitiful, but this pathetic craving for approval is a blind spot for all RINO’s.

Remember John McCain – when he was running as the RINO candidate in 2008, state-run media swooned, talking about his bus, the Straight Talk Express.

Once McCain won the nomination against Obama, the Democrats’ amen chorus turned on him. The comrades began calling McCain’s bus the Strait Jacket Express.

Mitt learned nothing from this. The fellow travelers loved him when he was running against real Republicans in the primary, but then they turned on him like a pack of rabid jackals!

He gave women cancer! He was a homophobe in prep school!

And worst of all, he put his dog in a crate on the top of his car and drove the beast to Michigan. One morning during the Republican convention in 2012, the New York Times ran not one, but two columns on the same op-ed page denouncing his treatment of poor Seamus, the Irish setter.

Remember, Romney didn’t kill Seamus. And he was running against a guy who’d admitted eating dogs as a boy in Indonesia.

Then during the debates, the plus-sized moderator Candy Crowley teamed up with Obama to destroy Romney. And Mitt’s response was the same as when a drunk Ted Kennedy lunged for his throat in the 1994 Senate debate at Faneuil Hall.

Mitt dropped to the floor and went into the fetal position and began whimpering for his mommy.

Trump described him perfectly back in 2016:

“Mitt is indeed a choke artist. He choked like I’ve never seen anyone choke.”

But now Mitt is retiring from politics – again. He’s denouncing the lack of civility and bipartisanship – again. He’s ripping Trump – again.

I can see the editorials in state-run media now. He’s an elder statesman. He’s grown, evolved. Why can’t we get Republicans like Mitt Romney anymore?

There are five Sunday-morning political chat shows on TV that nobody watches anymore. Trump’s already booked for Meet the Press this week. That leaves four for Mitt to beg to go on. The over-under on how many he makes is three.

I’ll take the over.

(Buy Howie’s new book “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Have you noticed these existential crises are coming at us faster and faster these days, at least in state-run media?

If it’s not a heat wave, it’s a cold wave threatening to wipe out humankind. If not a drought, a flash flood will suffice as the latest portent of doom. If it’s not the polar bears going extinct, it’s the penguins.

As always, the emergency – and the panic — seems largely confined to Democrats and the non-working classes, but I repeat myself.

This week, it’s just not Hurricane Lee threatening all life on earth. Another existential crisis looms for the Tattoo-American community.

I refer of course to the end of the three-years-plus “moratorium” on paying back student-loan debt. The deadbeats haven’t had to make repayments for more than three years, and haven’t been accruing interest on their debt, but now the end is near.

Literally. The… end… is… near.

Just ask them.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there is “Payment Shock.” The Globe says the deadbeat hippies are “stressed.”

Seriously, you should check out some of these sob stories, if only for a few chuckles. Once again, it would truly take a heart of stone not to laugh.

Do these goldbricks realize how they sound, whining about their… student loans?

One 39-year-old interviewed by the WSJ said he had “lost touch” with paying his apparently onerous $171-a-month bill.

“It’s like a whole new bill popping up!” he said. “It’s like a distant memory.”

Who among us who paid our own (and our children’s) ways through college wouldn’t want some of our own adult-type bills to become a distant memory?

Among them, credit-card bills, rent, mortgage and car payments, property and excise taxes, utility bills, child-support payments, alimony….

Oddly, Americans with these kinds of bills haven’t gotten three-year vacations from paying back loans they freely took out.

The loans were taken out as contracts. The Constitution says contracts cannot be abrogated, but so what? Democrats don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution any more.

So even after Biden and Pelosi both admitted they had no power to “forgive” student loans, they then decided it was okay. It probably helped them in the mid-terms last year.

But when the Supreme Court told them to knock it off, the Democrats decided, not to obey the law, but to try to pack the Supreme Court.

However, that will take time, and stolen elections, so maybe the hippies will have to make a few token payments towards their debts.

In the meantime, state-run media piles up the sob stories.

The Globe found a guy in Newton who’d run up almost $280,000 in debt to become… a social worker.

Seriously? This kid is another blow-in, from Pennsylvania, which is too bad because around here they used to teach Latin in high school. You could learn a lot of pithy expressions in Latin, including “Caveat Emptor.”

That means, “Let the buyer beware.”

The drifter doesn’t think it’s “fair” that he’s expected to pay back all the money he squandered to get a dead-end job.

Son, let me ask you: is it fair when you go to an overpriced restaurant and have to pay $100 for a lousy meal with rotten service? Or when you buy a clunker of a truck?

Is it “fair” when you buy a house and its value collapses because it’s next to a run-down motel that the local Democrats decide to turn into a Third World flophouse with illegal-alien MS-13 gangbangers and pregnant teenage moms who don’t speak English who party all night long because they don’t have to work and never will?

The Globe found another victim who’s going to have to pay a whopping $300 a month which “will take away from her travel budget.”

Maybe she should of course join the Army “and see the world.” And at the end of her enlistment, she’d be eligible for the GI Bill. Oddly, that alternative never seems to get mentioned in any of these tragic tales.

What we’ve got here is millions of Alibi Ikes, all complaining about how “unfair” it all is. Some of them have the brass to say that the resumption of payments is a shock because they never even knew that the feds stopped automatically making withdrawals from their bank accounts more than three years ago.

In other words, the monthly payment was so miniscule they didn’t even notice when it stopped being grabbed. But now that the withdrawals are going to resume, it’s the end of the world.

The Wall Street Journal found a victim who “has already started to scale back on buying coffee.”

Another told the paper “she is now opting for store-brand eggs and shying away from cereal that rose in price to $7.99.”

She added, “No more Talenti for me.”

That’s a high-end gelato, by the way, like something AOC or Nancy Pelosi would have gallons of in their SubZeros. I had never heard of it until just now. But then, I went to a state school and paid my own way. I’m a Hood kind of guy, maybe Brigham’s for a big splurge.

But all these Beautiful People, who have run up close to one trillion dollars in unpaid loans, are shocked… shocked that they might actually have to pay back their debts.

The Brandon administration is still trying to find ways around the Supreme Court decision, to bail out their core constituency, which is shiftless deadbeats.

When taxpayer groups filed a lawsuit to stop the Democrats’ latest attempt to keep the handouts going, the Biden regime described the efforts as “a desperate attempt from right-wing interests to keep hundreds of thousands of borrowers in debt.”

Funny how that works. You sign a contract to get a loan and you promise to pay the money back. But when you decide you shouldn’t have to abide by something you agreed to voluntarily, the creditor who wants his money back suddenly becomes a right-wing extremist.

Please, state-run media, I implore you. Print more of these sob stories about destitute hippies with their posh new houses and their brand-new cars who now they claim they can’t afford a new bong.

Welcome to our existential crisis, hippies!

(Buy Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at amazon.com or howiecarrshow.com.)

But this Tuesday, going to the polls could be important, because it might help determine who becomes mayor next year if (or when) Michelle Wu decides to move on.

Rumors are rampant that two years after her election, the 37-year-old drifter from Chicago is “despondent” over the job, as well she should be, as abysmally as she’s performed her duties.

Last week, Wu was asked by reporters if she’s been talking to Harvard about a job. She denied it, sort of.

Maybe they should have asked her about MIT. That’s the other rumor.

If Wu resigns, she would be replaced by the president of that third-rate clown-show known as the City Council.

The current president is Ed Flynn, son of former mayor Ray Flynn. Not a bad guy, but Ed’s never been on the short list for Mensa. When a riot breaks out at a Council meeting, he bangs the gavel and yells “Clear the galleys!”

Not galleries, galleys.

Under no circumstances is Ed Flynn going to become the next mayor. So if she wants out, Wu will have to wait until his term expires in January. Then her faction of comrades and card-carrying fellow travelers on the Council can vote in a successor to keep the program going.

What’s the program, you ask? To paraphrase Che Guevara on Vietnam in 1967:

“Two, three, many Mass & Casses.”

If Wu flees across the river, the local Reds want to replace her with Councilor Ruthzee Louijeune. Like Wu, she’s an acolyte of the fake Indian, Elizabeth Warren, who raised big bucks for the Haitian-American in her 2021 race.

Louijeune’s far-left bona fides are all in order — after Harvard Law she worked for Perkins Coie, the corrupt Democrat law firm that in 2016 served as a cut-out for funneling Hillary Clinton’s cash to concoct the phony Steele dossier used in the Russian collusion hoax.

But there’s a problem with the Louijeune succession. Some of the councilors from the Mass & Cass crew are jammed up legally. If the electorate votes them off the island, there’s an off chance someone who’s occasionally worked for a living could become the next mayor.

On the Council get-rid-of list, let’s start with incumbent Kendra Lara, a/k/a Hicks, who was recently busted for unlicensed driving of an uninspected, uninsured, unregistered motor vehicle. I don’t have the room (or stomach) to go into every sordid stunt this shrew has been mixed up in, but now she’s demanding to have all the latest charges against her dropped.

Which is amusing, because the guy prosecuting her is Kevin Hayden, the district attorney, whom she vehemently tried to defeat last year. Payback is a… Kendra Lara.

Who to vote for instead

In her West Roxbury-Jamaica Plain District 6, vote for William King to get rid of Lara. He is not known to DCF, and he has a driver’s license. In other words, he’s normal.

In District 5, which includes Hyde Park, Roslindale and Mattapan, incumbent Ricky Ricardo Arroyo is a boil on the body politic. He tried to rig the DA’s race last year against the aforementioned Hayden.

And he’s got other legal problems besides getting the shady U.S. attorney fired in his scheme to fix the election by leaking fake news to the corrupt Boston Globe.

Arroyo was just fined $3,000 by the State Ethics Commission for a different offense. And then there’s that ongoing investigation against him by the Board of Bar Overseers regarding a photo finish he had with the BPD during high school.

Jose Ruiz is running against Arroyo. He is a 30-year Boston cop. Vote Ruiz, not the sleaze.

Next, Tania Fernandes Anderson, the Roxbury city councilor, will be more difficult to knock off. She recently made a mysterious visit to Mass & Cass on a Saturday night at dusk and had her cell phone stolen. She claimed she had double-parked to deliver food to the junkies.

Anderson canoodles with a convicted thug doing life for murdering a (legal) immigrant. She brags of being the first African Muslim illegal alien elected to the City Council. She too has been fined by the State Ethics Commission — $5,000, for hiring both her son and her sister as aides.

Her most well-known statement on the City Council floor, after being told she had to fire her two nationwide searches:

“What the bleep does a black woman have to do on the bleepin’ Council to get some respect as a black woman?”

Maybe stop breaking the law, for starters.

In Roxbury, District 7, vote for Althea Garrison. She’s served on both the City Council and in the state legislature, and never disgraced herself, not once. Go Althea!

Incumbent Frank Baker is not running for reelection in Dorchester District 3. The Globe has endorsed one Ann Walsh — how much more do you need to know? She says she’s against the “secret knock” — meaning, I guess, the old-boy network.

Which is fine, but how is the “secret knock” any less odious, or racist, than “checking the box,” which is the sine qua non for every last one of these scoundrels in the Mass & Cass crew.

In District 3, vote for John FitzGerald, even if his father was the crooked state rep and bag-lady stalker Kevin “Money Fitz” FitzGerald. Even a FitzGerald spalpeen is preferable to a Globe stooge.

Meanwhile, to return to the subject of Michelle Wu’s likely departure, I’ve been futilely trying for 11 months now to get the Boston Police Department to hand over its dispatch records for her home in Roslindale.

The cops have dragged their feet, stonewalled me, given me spread sheets I didn’t ask for, told me I had to go to other agencies etc. etc.

Finally, last week the BPD admitted they have the records I’m seeking. They reveal all calls to an address by first responders — including ambulances.

But the BPD still won’t turn them over to me. I wonder why.

You’d almost think City Hall was trying to hide something. What’s in those records for the mayor’s house on Augustus Avenue that they’re so desperate not to release?

Anyway, vote Tuesday and then vote again Nov. 7, unless you want a Mass & Cass in every neighborhood in the city — their dream, everyone else’s nightmare.

At the top of this column, I compared a Council election to voting in Dancing with the Stars. But this year’s fight is more like The Gong Show.

On Tuesday, if you live in Boston, you can be Chuck Barris. Bang the gong on all these clowns. See ya later, Kendra, Ricky, Tania and all the rest!

Vote like your neighborhood depended on it, because it does.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.

I thought sleeping on the job was part of the T job description, not just a perk, but a requirement.

Now the T tells us that they’ve fired eight hacks for either sleeping or “not paying attention” on the job.

Finally, we can understand why the state is now having to pay bonuses of thousands of dollars to get new employees to take jobs “on the T.”

All of this is a complete reversal from the MBTA’s past history, when you had to pay a politician, in cash, to actually get “on the T.”

The T used to be a destination no-heavy-lifting retirement home. Not for nothing was it called “Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority.”

Remember the old saying about what a job at the T entailed – “Hide and seek for a grand a week.”

Think of the great perks. At the T, you only had to “work” for 23 years. Then you could retire with the full kiss in the mail, in your early 40’s, like at least two of Whitey Bulger’s nephews, as well as a career hack named Rooney.

That 23-year pension grab is gone.

Also, you could work in a “counting room” in Charlestown and stuff as many quarters into your pockets as you could manage to walk out to your car without toppling over.

The counting room is gone.

The MBTA used to have its own power plant, believe it or not, in South Boston. The jobs at the power plant, on First Street, cost more than, say, a bus driver’s job, for obvious reasons.

I heard a bugged conversation once, when the feds were rounding up Whitey’s cocaine dealers. Two of Whitey’s wise guys were discussing what kind of T jobs they wanted. One of them mentioned, yes, a bus driver’s job, which even then were available for short money, maybe $3,000.

“Are you crazy?” the other hood said. “You want the power plant!”

It cost a lot more, but you didn’t have to deal with the hoi polloi, shall we say. It was in Southie, easy walking distance to about a million barrooms. And those were just when you went to work, which was seldom.

Let’s face it, it was a lot easier to grab 40 winks at the power plant than it is to sleep on a bus you’re driving, especially if it’s moving, although we all know most T buses aren’t moving, and are OUT OF OPERATION, just like the rapid-transit lines are the furthest thing from rapid.

After a few years of trashing your liver, if you couldn’t make it to the 23-year mark, you could take a fall, as they put it in the car barns and bus yards. You know how a heart doctor is called a cardiologist, a cancer specialist is an oncologist and so forth.

If you worked at the T and wanted out with a full 72 no-tax disability pension, you went to a specialist either in Southie or Brighton. The T doctors were called “fallologists.” For doctors, it was a lucrative racket, er practice.

When a public agency is as out of control as the MBTA – and it still is, of course – the “workers” tend to get lazy, or even lazier. Your most basic criminal survival instincts begin to atrophy.

I remember covering one of the Quartergate busts, when they dragged a bunch of T dirtballs into Boston Municipal Court for their initial appearances. Everyone, including the local hookers, shoplifters, brawlers etc. who were awaiting their own hearings, was amused by the latest round-up.

So the clerk was reading the charges against one of them, a real fat payroll patriot, and he mentioned something about the penalties. The tubby T worker gasped, grabbed his chest like Fred Sanford and keeled over.

Everybody in the gallery burst out laughing. How sad – that the T hacks were so dumb that they didn’t realize that you don’t “take” a heart attack at your arraignment, you take it at your sentencing.

But again, when you never have to do anything, any time, you invariably get sloppy.

You’ve heard of the “workplace culture?” In Massachusetts, it’s the “sleep-place culture.”

When Mitt Romney was leaving the governorship, they took down some Turnpike employees who were double-dipping at a second hack job, sometimes “working” more than 24 hours a day.

In 1990, one of Whitey’s drug dealers who didn’t have a T job was busted sleeping through his overnight DPW city shift on Frontage Road, before he went to “work” in the morning at the MWRA. He’d been hired by a wife of one of Billy Bulger’s most loyal stooges in the Senate.

After 9/11, there was a brief burst of transparency at Logan Airport. It was discovered that the Massport electricians had what amounted to a makeshift bunkhouse, where the overnight shift snoozed their shift away.

Of course, Massport has become the new MBTA. When it comes to dying and going to heaven for the local hackerama, Logan Airport is what the MBTA power plant on First Street used to be – the ultimate resort destination.

The MBTA used to be Mr. Bulger’s Transportation Authority. Massport is now Mr. Travaglini’s Transportation Authority after the lifelong hack Bobby “Trav” Travaglini. At age 71, Trav is now a bigtime lobbyist after a career trajectory of precinct captain, district city councilor, state senator and finally Senate president.

Even in his dotage, Trav’s got plenty of clout – just ask Gina Fiandaca, who just got whacked as state secretary of transportation.

She’d been tangling with Tom Glynn, another migrant from the T to Massport. When he was chairman of the Massport board, Glynn had taken care of Trav’s, uh, requests.

So when push came to shove, Trav had to side with Glynn, not his lifetime East Boston neighbor Gina. That’s how things go at Massport. It’s the life they’ve chosen, a life of leisure.

You might say, Massport is the new MBTA. I mean, Massport doesn’t need to pay anybody any bonuses to work there, do they? And nobody ever gets busted for sleeping on the job – call it hack omerta.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.com.)

Can we rename the COVID virus something more accurate, closer to what it really is?

My suggestion is that we start calling COVID… the common cold.

Or maybe “the flu.”

So now Labor Day has come and gone and the Bidens have wrapped up their month-long vacation. And wouldn’t you know it, on Monday evening, “Dr.” Jill tests positive for… the common cold, also known as COVID.

According to the White House, she is suffering from “mild symptoms.”

Again, a name change would seem to be in order. Instead of mild symptoms, can we call them “the sniffles?”

How convenient that now Dementia Joe is supposed to be back at work, he now has the opportunity to dodge even more public appearances, because he doesn’t want to expose anyone else to… his cold.

To repeat, the First Lady’s name is “Dr.” Jill. Physician, heal thyself. Oh that’s right, despite what Whoopi Goldberg may believe, Dr. Jill is not an M.D. She can’t write you a script for some Oxys. She’s not even a Ph.D. – Piled Higher and Deeper.

She’s a Doctor of Education. In other words, she’s about as erudite as Karine Jean-Pierre.

The doctor has had at least four common-cold, er COVID shots – including boosters. Now she’s tested positive for the third time.

Is this like winning the Triple Crown? Or is coming down with the flu for the third time a “grim milestone?” Oh I forgot, grim milestones only occur when Republicans – especially Donald Trump – are in power.

Didn’t Joe Biden assure his no-info voters during the campaign that he would shut down COVID, but not the economy? So far it looks like he’s done exactly the opposite.

But Dr. Jill still won’t have ultimate COVID bragging rights at whatever trendy cocktail parties the Beautiful People are attending now they’ve fled the Vineyard.

Ex-Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the ex-Democrat congressman who now hobnobs with the RINOs on Fox News, recently came down with the flu for the third time.

And the retired solon has been vaccinated six times. Six times! Yet Ford said he’s planning to get his seventh shot ASAP, whenever the Deep State orders him to. Because that’s what comrades do.

Now that the summer is ending, it’s time for Democrats to ramp up the Panic again. The Democrats’ ballot-harvesting season – the election – is only 14 months away.

Plus, the public-sector unions are starting to get skittish. People who work for a living have finally noticed that very few government “workers” have in fact gone back to work since their all-expenses-paid vacations began in early 2020.

Michael Bloomberg, one-time Democrat candidate for president, wrote a piece this summer pointing out that only 22 percent of federal hacks in DC are showing up for work– “federal offices are mostly empty,” he wrote in the Washington Post.

Sen. Jodi Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, picked up the theme, saying federal job-holders (as opposed to workers) are “phoning it in.”

Again, we’re talking about Washington, where even before the Red Chinese unleashed the virus to defeat Donald Trump, even the forecast of snow flurries inside the Beltway would usually cause the entire bureaucracy to shut down for days, if not weeks at a time.

But now rush-hour traffic is a thing of the past, and not just in DC. Wherever there are a lot of government – or academic, or non-profit – employees, nobody goes to work anymore. Look at the numbers for public transportation – anywhere.

The Democrats’ core constituency is the non-working classes. Even many of the ones with jobs don’t work, thanks to their party’s weaponization of the common cold.

If he’s going to run for a second term, which I doubt, Brandon should forget about touting Bidenomics. Food prices are up 20 percent since he was installed in January 2021. Even his voters, ignorant and drug-addled as they are, have noticed.

Biden’s entire platform should be a promise that if reelected, he will bring back the COVID shutdowns. Democrats, he can say, you can go back to sitting on your rear ends, collecting big welfare checks, doing drugs and ripping off the assorted PPP programs.

The teachers’ unions would be all in, that’s for sure. They don’t pay Randi Weingarten $488,000 a year to go to work for those arduous nine months a year anymore.

Consider Dr. Jill’s “mild symptoms” this week as the latest trial balloon for the next panic, like Dr. Fauci’s endless tour of cable news, even after his alleged retirement.

One difference this time, though. Whenever the White House hacks issue the updates on her mild symptoms, they never include the once-traditional exhortation to “get the vaccine.”

That dog just won’t hunt no more. Even though Dementia Joe used to say that if you got the vaccine, you would never, ever have to worry about getting the virus again.

That statement is now inoperative, as they used to say in the Nixon White House.

This next edition of the Panic is just taking baby steps, though. You can see it in the missed opportunity at the US Open. Several of the world’s greatest tennis players have come down with something they’re calling “the US Open bug.”

The bug – there’s another potential great name change for COVID. The bug.

But I don’t see “the bug” as becoming popular in state-run media, if only because of the alliteration threat.

Once you start calling it “the bug,” it might quickly morph into “the Biden bug.”

If only they could blame it on Donald Trump. Again.

Post-script: As I was writing this, the White House announced that unless he’s outside or “socially distanced,” Brandon will immediately begin wearing a mask.

Here we go again.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or at amazon. Com.)

Now that Labor Day is here and the Beautiful People will be flying back to New York in their private Gulfstreams and Lear Jets, let’s round up all the illegal aliens and ship them over to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, and Naushon Island makes three.

Plenty of room over there for the winter, and not just in the $20 million oceanfront mansions and swank resorts. How about new tent cities on all the conservation land and private golf courses?

The undocumented Democrats could set up Bidenvilles in the posh boatyards. Their welfare grub could be delivered by all those world-class restaurants — the Chanticleer, the Wauwinet and the White Elephant, just to name three on Nantucket.

After Monday, the islands will be basically empty. Sure they’re zoned NHP — No Hoi Polloi, hoi polloi being defined as anyone who goes to church on Sunday and/or doesn’t have a trust fund.

But this is an emergency, dammit. Gov. Maura Healey called out the National Guard Thursday to make sure the foreign freeloaders can get all their free stuff with no inconvenient waits like American citizens must endure.

She even said “All hands on deck!” But don’t look for any videotape of that exhortation, because she couldn’t be bothered to go in front of the cameras. Maura just put out a press release. Not really her problem, in other words.

It’s been two weeks now since Maura and her plus-sized lieutenant governor, Kim Driscoll, asked the comrades to open their doors and their hearts to what the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty calls the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Your teeming shore, not theirs. Their shore is a private beach, thank you very much. Trespassers will be prosecuted.

Yet the fellow travelers have those signs outside their $5 million mansions in Dover and Sherborn saying “Hate Has No Home Here.”

Can we amend those signs to the current reality?

“Hate Has No Home Here and Neither Do Illegal Aliens.”

Another of their favorite virtue-signaling messages is “No Human Is Illegal.”

That could be changed to, “No Human Is Illegal, but Over-occupancy of a Single-Family Dwelling in Our Lily-White Gated Community Is Illegal.”

This breathtaking liberal hypocrisy is nothing new in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts. The new state motto should be, “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.”

For years now, the Commonwealth has offered NPR listeners the option of paying income taxes at a rate higher than the statutory rate of about 5 percent. If a Bernie bro desires to pay an extra one percent of his trust fund income to the hackerama, all he does is check a box.

Couldn’t be any simpler.

I checked recently with the Department of Revenue to see how many of the state’s card-carrying fellow travelers are taking advantage of the opportunity to redistribute the wealth — their wealth, as opposed to ours.

In fiscal year 2022, the DOR received 3,663,849 tax returns, from both residents and non-residents.

And exactly 2,036 checked the box to pay at the higher rate. We’re not talking about tithing here — the faithful followers of Biden and the fake Indian are merely being asked to pay less than an extra one percent.

It’s their fair share. It’s for the children. Not to mention the crumbling infrastructure.

And yet only one-half of one percent of the population — actually 0.55 percent — opted to pay the extra dough and make that investment in the future.

These cheapskates are the same people who loudly proclaim that they would give the illegals the shirt off their back. Er, correction, they would give them the shirt off your back. You see, if they were no longer wearing their shirts, they’d be in violation of the Harvard Club dress code and wouldn’t be allowed in for the vegan brunch.

So the Beautiful People prefer to turn all the hotels in working-class cities and towns into Third World flophouses. There was a demonstration against the latest destabilization effort yesterday in West Yarmouth. That’s where rooms at a local fleabag used to be $300 a week, but now the rent has been jacked up to $700, to take advantage of the Fundamental Transformation.

So now the American working classes get the boot for non-American deadbeats who plan to be on the dole forever. One of the Americans who can no longer afford to live there is an 89-year-old American woman. Her plight has been chronicled on the local talk radio station, but nowhere else. State-run media are part of the problem.

The same destabilization process is occurring across the state — Kingston, Taunton, West Springfield, Sandwich, and the Beautiful People yawn. Not their problem!

Woburn is one of the afflicted communities. A woman came up to me the other day and pointed out that Woburn is bordered by any number of woke communities, including Winchester, Lexington and Arlington.

“Why should our schools have to shoulder the entire burden?” she said. “How about a suburban METCO program to take in some of these illegals before Woburn’s schools are overwhelmed? Those rich people are the ones who wanted them, not us. But now we’re stuck with taking care of them.”

What an idea. Think about Lexington, home to all those woke professors like Charles Lieber, the Red Chinese operative at Harvard who’s now a jailbird. Or Jonathan Gruber, who helped wrecked the US health-care system. Or that ancient Red rat Noam Chomsky.

And how about Arlington, the latest home of our free-range governor? As we’ve pointed out, her new younger girlfriend has at least one spare bedroom in their love nest.

Which kind of “family” would you prefer to host, Governor? MS-13 gangbangers or ISIS terrorists? There’s plenty of both crossing the border every day.

Unfortunately, as I told the Woburn woman, the odds of a Metrowest METCO to spread the wealth are not very good.

As a matter of fact, I’d place the odds of the limousine liberals doing their fair share at approximately one half of one percent — 0.55 percent, to be exact.

All hands on deck! Our hands, not theirs.

Order Howie’s new book “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or amazon.

“Biden loves to tell certain stories. Some aren’t credible.”

Now they tell us! Better late than never, I suppose. And at least this Post story goes against the grain of most of their “reporting” – it’s true, for one thing, unlike, say, their “deeply reported” stories about the Russian collusion hoax, which were all false.

But to commemorate the Post’s belated realization that Biden is full of you-know-what, let’s go straight to the audiotape from his recent appearances.

As always, all dialogue guaranteed verbatim.

First, as he came out Wednesday to speak to the press, news broke of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s latest “freeze.”

“I just heard literally coming out,” he said. “Mitch is a friend as you know – not a joke… I don’t know enough to know.”

Isn’t that the truth?

This came just before he began an incoherent discussion of the wildfires in Hawaii, which he called “storms.”

“Well, but by the way, you know, we also know how many huge number of Americans have died! How many huge number of Americans have – for example, more forest has burned to the ground in the time I’ve been doing this.”

May we quote you on that, Mr. President?

A reporter asked Biden his reaction to threats by the House GOP to conduct hearings into his regime’s less-than-robust response to the Hawaii storms, er wildfires.

“I welcome a federal response in Maui.”

Huh? He’s the president – at least that’s Biden’s title. Isn’t he the one responsible for the federal response, feeble as it has been.

“I directed my team to raise our goal in how we lead and coordinate our responses to natural disasters. And because I’ve been around awhile and I known how these function.”

He doesn’t know, he “knowns.”

Recently, he apparently forgot the name of Sen. Mazie Hirono. He also drew a blank when introducing Alejandro Mayorkas – “the secretary of Homeland Security, a guy who took the job. Thank you for taking the job, pal.”

He did go to Maui, finally. That’s where he forget Mazie’s name, telling her that his granddaughter has the same first name. Actually, she’s “Maisy,” but that’s close enough for government or Brandon work.

He told the mayor that “you look like you played defensive tackle for uh I don’t know but somebody good.”

Then Biden commiserated about the “unimaginable travedy tragedy.”

But he was on the case – “As soon as I got the governor’s request I signed the master major disaster declaration.

Despite being on vacation for most of the month, he’s made a few routine announcements. He always likes to take about the price of prescription drugs, or as he often calls them, “prescription jugs.”

“If it’s sold in Chicago, you can buy the same drug in Toronto or Park cheaper than you can buy it in Toronto.”

He recently lauded a man of the cloth.

“An ordinary minister, he pursued a righteous calling that threw him uh brought him back here I was gonna say threw him back here but it brought him back here kinda threw him as well back here to Washington.”

He repeatedly compared the devastation on Maui to a minor kitchen fire in his home in Delaware in 2004, which was caused when lightning a) struck a pond near the house or b) hit the home itself.

Depending on the occasion, the towering inferno almost killed a) his wife b) two firefighters c) his cat and/or d) his ’67 Corvette in the garage where all he stored all his stolen classified top-secret documents.

It was this fire story that apparently set the crack sleuths at the Washington Post on their mission to clean up his messes.

He also claimed he “literally, not figuratively” talked Sen. Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Of course, at the time he was 21 years old and hadn’t even been thrown out of Syracuse Law for plagiarism, let alone been elected to the US Senate.

And Thurmond didn’t vote for the Civil Rights Act. But the Post didn’t even get around to debunking that one. That’s a project for… next year, maybe.

With Brandon spending practically the entire month on vacation, it fell to his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, to handle many of these matters.

So Wednesday, somebody asked if Biden was slacking off because he’s, to put it diplomatically, not all there.

To which KJP responded: “I’m not going to get into hypo-theoreticals.”

Hypo-theoreticals! This is a woman with an Ivy League degree (Columbia). Kinda makes you wonder what her SATs were.

Then there was Hurricane Idalia in Florida. Joe had been asked about it earlier, whether he was making any contingency plans on his schedule.

“I may,” he said. “I just don’t know yet.”

Yesterday he told reporters he was dealing with “that Category 3 storm that made landfill.”

Not landfall, but landfill.

So the reporters tried follow-up questions with KJP, who as you now know is not into hypo-theoretical questions. KJP assured the reporters that Brandon has Florida under control.

“This is an administration that will be with this community uh from before, before it started.”

Before it started? Lucky she didn’t say that about the fires in Hawaii, that they were into before it started. The arson squad is very interested in that kind of information.

Being an Ivy League graduate, KJP is of course well-equipped to handle any kind of question. The other day, she mentioned Yergeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group of mercenaries in Russia, who may (or may not) have been assassinated recently.

She has taken the measure of the man. And at a press conference earlier this week, KJP described Prigozhin as “a Russian war load himself, a code-blooded killer.”

A Russian war load! A code-blooded killer!

Whatever it is that Joe Biden is afflicted with, apparently it’s contagious.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com or at amazon.com.)

Of course, if you’re a cop who’s not wired, you might as well be wearing a red MAGA cap, because they’re going to throw the book at you, or at least try to make your life miserable for a while.

That’s my first takeaway from reading the 318-page report from the new MA Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission.

It details more than 3000 disciplinary proceedings against cops, and once again, the old saying seems to apply:

“In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.”

First thing that’s obvious: the Mass. State Police motto should be “Omerta” – silence.

I heard this spring from a guy who’s been all tangled up in a family domestic dispute with a state cop. He complained to what is called the Office of Professional Integrity and Accountability (don’t laugh; not a joke!) claiming that this trooper had been running his family’s license plates, compulsively.

The guy showed me the official letter he got years later from MSP, confirming 13 – 13! – unlawful, illegal searches.

I looked up this cop on the POST site – “Abuse of position, use of equipment, CORI violation, Policy, Procedure, Operations.”

His punishment for harassing this guy and his family: “Loss of Time Off.”

So far this year this guy who ran 13 illegal CJIS searches has made $148,481. Death, where is thy sting?

Here’s another statie I came across, whose name didn’t ring a bell with me. What jumped out were these three words: “submitting false timesheets.” This was in 2018, when the MSP’s vast RICO conspiracy out on the Turnpike was busted.

Dozens of corrupt Troop E cops were filing fake time sheets and grabbing money from the feds. This is known as embezzling, or more colloquially, stealing.

Again, remember, these are not random charges on the website. These are what the POST Commission describes as “Sustained Allegations and Disciplinary Actions.”

A handful of sticky-fingered Troop E felons went to prison. Even worse, some had to pay back the money they stole!

And what did this trooper get? “Suspension, 30 days plus.”

Wow! I looked him up on the state Comptroller’s website. Yes, he vanished from the payroll for the entire year of 2019, but apparently embezzlement is no big deal to the MSP.

Last year the timesheet-falsifying trooper was back up to $245,000. So far for 2023 he’s made $160,482.

I’m not sure these are the sorts of messages the wokesters thought would be delivered by their new website. Or maybe they did. So often, though, these new “reform” agencies just turn out to be good dumping grounds for otherwise unemployable hacks.

Think Stephanie Everett, three-time unsuccessful candidate for office in Boston. Then she was handed a no-heavy-lifting sinecure at a City Hall hack holding-pen called the Office of Police Accountability and Transparency.

Like the POST Commission, this was set up in the wake of the nationwide “mostly peaceful” looting-murder-arson sprees by thugs from the non-working classes after a career felon on fentanyl died in police custody in the Midwest in 2020.

Everett’s fellow hacks finally appointed Stephanie to a vacancy that she might be able to hold onto in an election – Suffolk County Register of Probate. It pays $174,000 a year.

Here’s another MSP story from POST. A combat military veteran with a spotless record who refused the vaccine is listed as “terminated.” He was removed from duty by a superior officer who had himself been charged earlier for allegedly sticking his wife’s head in an unflushed toilet.

The combat veteran who refused the unsafe jab remains off the job. The trooper who was charged with abusing his wife made $293,000 last year and this year took a buyout – by April he walked out the door with $170,000.

His name, of course, does not appear on the POST list. It’s good to have friends – or relatives – in high places.

Speaking of which, there’s a Boston Police Department guy who briefly quit to go to, well, I won’t mention the law-enforcement agency. He didn’t last long, but he was connected, so he came back. Only problem was, after returning to the BPD, he forgot to mention his, uh, break-in service while under oath.

Now, he can’t go out on the street, because he can’t testify, lest he be asked by a defense lawyer about his “career” at the other agency. But he has a close relative (who himself won a photo finish with a federal grand jury) so not only is he back on the job, he’s been promoted.

I only mention this because this guy with the infamous hack relative is not on the POST list either. I know, it’s because he was never disciplined – again, it’s not what you know, but who you know.

So obviously, the list has its limitations.

On the other hand, it is amusing, if you’ve got time to randomly peruse the site. I am fascinated, for instance, by the crime wave that seems to have engulfed the MIT police department – three instances of “failure to abide by Institute Parking Policy.”

You can be disciplined for almost anything, if your uncle or cousin wasn’t once the… oh never mind. Here’s a list of what cops get punished or written up for:

“Discourtesy… explicit text to female colleague… rudeness… insubordination… rumors or malicious gossip… conduct unbecoming… poked officer in forehead with finger… mask violation….”

A Worcester officer “called dispatcher a ‘bleeping’ moron over the air… threatened to shoot gas comp. empl.”

That was a female, by the way. She also “berated a citizen.”

But perhaps the most serious offense I’ve come across so far involved an Abington police officer alleged to have made “an offensive Facebook post regarding Town’s Board of Selectmen.”

Now that’s a real no-no. Any of the other above misbehaviors, the powers that be can – and obviously do – look the other way.

But “offensive Facebook posts” about local politicians? Forget about it. And one last rule of thumb – the smaller the town, the thinner the politicians’ skin. Some things never change.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com, click on store.)

President Trump took a beautiful, perfect mugshot in Atlanta the other night.

It got me to thinking about other memorable mugshots. I’ve been collecting them for decades, from all over New England.

To commemorate POTUS’ instantly iconic shot, here are a few of my favorites, some of which impart lessons for anyone who might someday have the misfortune of being lugged.

Gennaro Angiulo and Whitey Bulger

The bigger the hat, the bigger the hood. These are the two preeminent Boston mobsters of the late 20th century, in their early years — Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo and Whitey Bulger.

Jimmy Flemmi

Jimmy “the Bear” Flemmi could have been posing for one of those “This is your mind on drugs!” posters when this 1979 prison mugshot was taken. He was the brother of Stevie Flemmi. The Bear died at MCI-Norfolk a few months later — of a drug overdose.

Myer Sherman and Francis McPartland

Never let ‘em see you sweat. Myer Sherman, busted on a gambling rap, seems to be wondering what his mother will think. Francis X. McPartland is just angry, even though he’s wearing that groovy shirt.

Toby Zimmerman Wagner

The bulls seldom let molls visit the powder room to freshen up. So Toby Zimmerman Wagner looked a little rough here. She would die in a 1963 shootout in Egleston Square that her wiseguy boyfriend had with the Boston cops.

J.R. Russo and Teddy Venus

Fashion statements: Mafia hitman J.R. Russo designed his own clothes, and he used this mugshot to strut his bespoke chapeau. Teddy Venus (real name Venios) ran “clubs” in the Combat Zone, but here oddly he’s going with that Somerset Club-style bow-tie look.

Bobo Petricone

You could learn from an unflattering mugshot. Winter Hill’s Bobo Petricone noticed that he was too fat, so when he fled to Hollywood, he took off 50 pounds, changed his name to “Alex Rocco” and then got the role of Moe Greene in The Godfather.

Carmen Gagliardi

You can never predict how far your mugshot will go. Gagliardi was a small-time hood, and he was barely awake when he got lugged in Malden in 1965. He didn’t care how wasted he looked. A couple years later, he was transporting the body of a Mafia hit victim to a shallow grave when the cops pulled over his car. He escaped, and ended up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. His stupid photo ended up on every Post Office wall in all 50 states. Gags died of a drug overdose in prison in 1975.

Chico Amico Peter Stenstrom

The Edd “Kookie” Brynes look was very big in the late 1950s. Of the two punks using that greasy kids’ stuff here, the better known was Chico Amico. He was executed by a Mafia hit squad outside Alphonse’s Broken Heart Lounge in Revere in 1966.

Paul James Botteri

Botteri, born in 1926, did not take direction well. Hey pal, look at the camera!

Francis J. Smith Jr.

It probably wasn’t too difficult to pick Smith out of a lineup.

Milton Powers

In all his mugshots, Powers always went with the bleep-eating grin.

Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com. Click on store. Get free shipping through Sunday by clicking “FREE” at checkout.

Here we go again!

As bad as Joe Biden’s public polls are, the Democrats’ internal numbers must be even worse, if they’re playing the COVID card this far out from the election.

You may have thought Dr. Anthony Fauci retired, but apparently not. He’s still out there claiming the sky is falling.

“We are not done with COVID,” he said this week. “We know that.”

“We” being the Democrat party and the Red Chinese who concocted the virus in the first place.

The comrades employ the virus as if it was that old box with the fire extinguisher on the wall of a public building – “In case of emergency, break glass.”

This is an emergency, dammit.

Do you realize that millions of deadbeat losers are supposed to resume making payments on their student loans next month? Bummer, man, totally.

Between hits on their bongs full of designer weed, this is what Democrats are thinking:

Like, if we could just go back to pretending COVID is real, then we could go back on welfare and just get stoned and lay around, and not have to pay rent, or pay back our student loans.

Dude, we could get the free Medicaid back, and more food stamps for the munchies. Plus, bro, back then you could just make up a business and say you were shut down and them fools would just give you cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars, no questions asked.

Like, man, COVID was just a beautiful time. You could sleep all day and still have more money than ever for new sleeve tattoos and tramp stamps and braids and man-buns. You could even drive to the bar and get a double Mai Tai to go at the takeout window and the cops couldn’t bust you for an open container, man….

Dude, those were the good old days! Can we get them back?

This is the situation the hippies living in their moms’ basements find themselves in. Faced with the grim prospect of having to get a job and pay bills – it’s an “inflection point,” as one of CNN’s “experts” put it this week.

Most normal people realize what a catastrophe the lockdowns were, but the non-working classes want the good old days back ASAP.

Consider the teachers’ unions. Not all teachers agree, but if their unions had their way, the schools would still be locked down. I’m sure Randi Weingarten is already drafting a new COVID emergency declaration for the White House to use in shutting down everything.

The sooner we get that school-closing declaration out there, the quicker the “educators” can start booking their winter vacations in the Caribbean.

How about Peloton? Fitness bikes were so cool back during the golden age of COVID, but now they’re just a place to drape your clothes after a hard day of shoplifting, smoking crack and pretending to look for a job.

Headline in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: “Peloton Plunges 23% Amid Loss Warning.”

You think Peloton wants the lockdowns back?

The problem is, what the government subsidizes, it gets more of. What the government taxes, it gets less of.

Since 2020, the government has been subsidizing sloth, and fraud, and we’ve been getting more of it.

If they can get the lockdowns going again, Biden can flee back into the basement. Maybe they won’t have to get rid of Brandon after all. Sure, he said the Panic was over, but state-run media will disappear that video from See-BS News, just like they vanished the Hunter Biden laptop scandal until after the last election.

The Democrats’ commitment to authoritarian control is so complete now that it’s beyond ideological, it’s almost theological. They get off on lecturing us. Remember Charlie Baker’s daily noon press conferences?

The more shutdowns he could announce in that whiny beta-male whimper of his, the more euphoric he sounded. Same with all the prophets of Panic Porn.

C.S. Lewis described the twisted phenomenon perfectly.

“A tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive…. Those who torment us for their own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

And that’s the charitable explanation for their lust to oppress all of us… heretics or infidels, and by the way, that is the way they regard us non-believers.

Here’s another quote about what the Faucists are dreaming of at the CDC, the DNC and MSNBC.

“The leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal.”

In 2020, the goal was to get rid of Donald J. Trump. Mission accomplished, temporarily at least. But for these lunatics, it’s never enough. The quote continues:

“Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal.”

You know who said that? The Unabomber, believe it or not. Say what you will about Ted Kaczinski, but he did learn something at Harvard. There’s a lot of what he was writing about on display in the 02138 zip code.

Power is an addiction, the ultimate aphrodisiac, as Henry Kissinger said. The Panic Porn Posse are addicts, and what they’re addicted to is oppressing us.

All I can say is, include me out. I’ve taken my last Panic vaccine, and I’m not going to put a mask back on, not even my personal favorite, the one that says, “This mask is as useless as Joe Biden!”

On Instagram, someone who goes by the handle of Queen Petty Lexx summed up this new fake hysteria for all of us:

“We don’t give a (bleep) about no new COVID strain, United States government!”

They’re going to have to start the next lockdown without me or Queen Petty Lexx.

(Order Howie’s new book, “Paper Boy: Read All About It!” at howiecarrshow.com. Click on store. Get free shipping through Sunday with code FREE at checkout.)