FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH (1907) – Written by Thomas William Lawson, a writer and stock manipulator who made a fortune from shady stock deals … in between advocating for cleaning up Wall Street to shut down those fleece jobs. The reforms Lawson campaigned for were taken up decades later when Franklin Roosevelt appointed future Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas to head the Securities Exchange Commission.
Coincidentally enough the overall feel of Friday the Thirteenth put me in mind of FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt. The novel did that with its New York setting, with the way the story takes place late in T.R.’s presidency and most especially with the way it dealt with ethics in the marketplace.
Jim Randolph, one of the novel’s main characters, is in the T.R. mold: he may be a bloated rich pig but at least he’s a bloated rich pig with a sense of noblesse oblige. Jim shares Teddy Roosevelt’s disdain for the Trusts and for con men who use the stock market to rip off their clients.
It’s not as if Jim Randolph is as fiery as Teddy Forstmann was in his opposition to Leveraged Buy Outs during the 1980s, but like Forstmann he has a sense of what makes for a healthy economy and frowns upon the fly-by-night operators who thrive on irresponsible “frenzied finance” as Randolph calls it. Continue reading
A Pennsylvania Judge has 
Very odd, considering that just 4 years ago Hillary Clinton and her supporters had recounts done in multiple states AND did videos (with clueless “celebrities” of course) urging members of the Electoral College to “Do the right thing” and NOT cast their votes for Donald Trump. 
Yes, the same Democrat media outlets which try to pretend the 2020 Presidential race is complete continue to report on the still-outstanding results from Congressional races around the country. As of this writing this is where things stand: 
In the meantime, de facto Third Party President Trump has the same right Hillary Clinton and Al Gore had to exhaust the process. Lawsuits and calls for further audits of software are still in the works. Literally THOUSANDS of Votes erroneously credited to Biden have already been caught and designated for Trump like they were supposed to be. 
B. For anti-Trump hypocrites – Don’t whine about how Trump should stop fighting for his rightful win. I will not bother responding to any such comments or emails until Trump has spent FOUR YEARS challenging the election results like you fascists did. And like Hillary continues to do. You fools even tried a fraudulent impeachment and lost, so maybe I should add extra time on for that.
Balladeer’s Blog’s reviews of my picks for The Top Five Harry Flashman Novels are still getting more than their share of attention. (Click 
Projected Title: FLASHMAN DOWN UNDER 
Once word reached California about Australia’s very own Gold Rush, Harry could have boarded a ship for Down Under either along with some of the Cali Aussies OR trying to slip away from them for his usual reasons – having slept with some of their women, conning them out of money, etc. 
These pro-Biden criminal antics on the part of the Democrats would require the country to accept an utterly illogical result: that even though the Democrats had so alienated voters that the Republicans gained in the House of Representatives and seem to have held the Senate PLUS increased their governorships to 27 compared to the Democrats’ 23 … That even though local races showed devastating blows to Democrat candidates, too, we are expected to believe that the man at the top of the ticket, President Donald Trump, the man whose appeal to so many NEW voters for his party enabled those victories, did not carry the same areas. 
Yes, it’s once again Guy Fawkes Day, the day Balladeer’s Blog celebrates figures who became symbols of the exact opposite things they represented in their actual lives! 
“Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any enemy that falls in my hands! My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood.” 
Read more of this animal’s own words and you will see what a callous, unfeeling political fanatic this hate-filled scumbag was. He never wanted to overthrow dictatorships to help “the people”, he just wanted to overthrow them to install dictatorships more to his liking.
Balladeer's Blog 