Month: December 2015

Why You Should Dump Disney Stock Now: The mistakes made on ‘Force Awakens’ will compound the failure of ESPN

On a day where every media outlet in the world is declaring the new Star Wars film an earth shattering success, I’ll take a little pride in being the only one to point at the doom on the horizon.  In a lot of ways I’ll admit hope, as often does happen—more than you’d think—that some executive at Disney will read what I write here and make the market corrections needed—and save the only company in the world truly dedicated to family entertainment.  But they won’t.  Disney is not run by a strong CEO like it was when Walt Disney ran the company years ago.  It’s now run by committees of people—and within those committees are people who seek such a management method because they lack personal courage.  Without personal courage and risk, the market potency of a company and its products surrenders box office appeal, and ultimately profits.  That is essentially what is wrong with the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens.  As much as I wanted to like the film—and still do in fact—the business side of my brain sees more alarms going off in the cockpit of this starship than it can withstand.  Destruction is imminent.  So I’m headed for an escape pod before the entire thing falls apart.  If you have Disney stock, you should sell it right now because the value will tank very shortly and it will never recover.

Out of all the possibilities and horsepower of Lucasfilm—with all the talent at their disposal—they as a company elected to treat their long line of New York Times bestselling novels like a story treatment for a Hollywood movie.  The writing was on the wall when they released the comic series The Star Wars two years ago by Dark Horse comics justifying their decisions to mine the expanded universe and re-write it putting their committee stamp on the material proclaiming that what they did was better.  Rather than sit down with a good writer like Lawrence Kasdan is and have him write completely new material, like he did for the Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucasfilm under Kathy Kennedy decided to make a reboot of A New Hope and populate it with what the “Star Wars Story Group” thought was the greatest hits of the long series of novels which had been produced carefully with George Lucas over two decades.  When they released the comic series showing how the original Star Wars script had evolved over time and necessity they were trying to justify what they were about to do hoping to sell their work as authentic.  What they did was infinitely disappointing.  At that point in time I had been buying all the comics and books I could get and was reading them all.  But when I realized what was happening, I just stopped waiting to see if Disney would do as I feared and just mine the stories that meant something very wonderful to many of the hard-core fans, or if they’d actually continue the story into new territory—which for me was the only justifiable option.   They picked the most lazy path possible at a great insult to the fans who kept the market value of Star Wars alive for so long.

The Force Awakens of course made a lot of money—it shattered records that Hollywood may never see again.  There was tremendous pent-up multi generational desire to see a new Star Wars film. So everyone who could went to see the movie over its opening weekend.  If I didn’t know better I would have thought it was a good movie–it had all the elements present, but it was clearly missing something.  That something was the conviction that a risk taking proprietor brings to a project—a leader who has put their reputation and soul on the line to make a product which clearly marked the first two Star Wars films—was missing.  The makers of The Force Awakens were happy young people writing stories from the comfort of Lucasfilm employment and the politics of the very progressive city of San Francisco.  Like spoiled brats driving their dad’s Mercedes out for a night at the country club to socialize at a charity function thinking they were saving the world—they made Star Wars: The Force Awakens without taking any real risks and mining the material of risk takers who came before them hoping that nobody would notice.  I did, and so did many other hard-core Star Wars fans upon leaving the theater for the first time.  When the fun dies down and these fans will think about what they’ve seen, Disney will find that they now have a dreadfully divided audience because of their choices which will dramatically affect the market share potential of all the future Star Wars films.  It will hurt their book sales, their merchandise, and their box office take for all subsequent films.  What they essentially did was brought Star Wars down to the level of the latest Star Trek movies—or the Avengers films.  They might make decent money, but Disney executives are planning on insane money—and they’ll need it to survive—because other aspects of Disney’s business portfolio has been wavering in these changing economic times.

Here’s how the Hollywood Reporter announced the pending doom on Friday December 18th as The Force Awakens opened to hungry fans across the world:

Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens made $57 million domestically Thursday, enough to set a record but not to satiate Wall Street’s fears over Walt Disney’s television business.

In midday trading on Friday, Disney shares were off 4 percent, twice that of the broader markets, as the conglomerate was the topic of at least two negative research notes in the past two days.

On Friday, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield downgraded Disney to “sell” and put a $90 price target on the stock, suggesting it will fall about 17 percent in the next 52 weeks or so.

“Even The Force cannot protect ESPN,” Greenfield wrote, accusing management of “overpaying for sports rights based on overly aggressive multichannel video subscriber projections.”

Greenfield says Disney’s cable network operating income will shrink in fiscal-year 2017, causing total Disney operating income to be flat.

He also says Disney damaged its long-term prospects for cable in general “by aggressively licensing content to SVOD platforms such as Netflix to prop up near-term earnings.”

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/walt-disney-stock-tumbles-as-850171

While the numbers look impressive at first glance, because of the changing market of the other business interests, such as ESPN and how cable subscribers are dumping their subscriptions in favor of Internet service for their smart phones the media empire of Disney is too reliant on Star Wars to save it from the downsides it’s facing.  The Marvel movies are beginning to fade as the newness of them is wearing away.  By the time Captain America: Civil War hits in 2016, the franchise will be in clear decline as a box office force.  The savor was always going to be Star Wars—and now they’ve screwed that up dividing the fan’s loyalties between a re-tread and the authentic novels.

It is always dangerous to base a movie off a book, because the reader often sees things differently than a film’s director.  As long as a movie producer stays close to the source material, often things are forgiven.  But regarding Star Wars, where the franchise was kept alive with cooperation between Del Rey publishing and Lucasfilm in close contact with George Lucas approving story details the novels were like the Bible and took on a meaning that Disney obviously didn’t understand.  After all, they had been re-writing great literary classics for years, so they had no problem changing things around to suit their market appraisal for the films they wanted to produce.

By insisting that the movies were cannon and not the books which were designed to connect the original movies with fresh material ultimately created by individual authors under the guidance of Lucasfilm—the creative team behind The Force Awakens assumed incorrectly that fans would forgive them.  Some will, but not everyone, and for Disney to succeed in this venture they needed everyone.  And when the smoke clears around The Force Awakens, they won’t have everyone.  And that means financial doom on the horizon within the next five years for Disney as a company.   Bob Iger will leave the next CEO at Disney with a terrible burden and there will be no recovery from it. With other aspects of the company losing money, such as ESPN based on inflated sports contracts, it needs a new explosion in growth which Star Wars was supposed to bring.

The Force Awakens felt like a small movie after reading about gigantic events in the novels over the years.  The sheer scale of the Star Wars novels would have had enormous production costs to duplicate on film.  I’m sure Lucasfilm made the decision to do what they did on The Force Awakens based on the vast number of characters that were in the Star Wars novels—which ultimately brings up the question should a novel be cannon or is the movie a superior product?  I clearly think what is written in a novel is the cannon in every case.  Movies are dumbed-down versions of books.  I can’t think of too many books that were made into movies that were overshadowed by the film version.   Star Wars started as a fresh movie experience, but it evolved into a literary journey which became much more powerful than the original films.  Lucasfilm made the mistake by trying to reverse that trend, and make a movie by committee instead of individuals and throwing out parts of the series which were too big to project on the silver screen.  Rather than trying to do that, they watered down a product that millions had fallen in love with and banked Disney’s future on the result.

Taken by itself Star Wars within Disney will hold its own financially.  The films will do fine, the merchandise will be respectable, and the other intellectual work will likely still sell for years to come.  But because of where the company as a whole is, with ESPN failing, the Avengers movies in decline, and the lack of new musicals coming from their children films every three years-Disney has serious problems.  It would have taken all the Star Wars fans to save them—and they clearly don’t have them all.  The Force Awakens proves it.  That problem won’t show itself immediately, but will begin to show up in their repeat business numbers within a month of the release.

Kathy Kennedy should have known better. On Twitter the Star Wars people put out a tag line when The Force Awakens opened showing Han Solo and Chewbacca in the Millennium Falcon declaring “we’re home.”   They were clearly marketing Harrison Ford’s return to the role of Han Solo to push the box office numbers over the top.  I replied to Kennedy’s tweet the reality of what I felt.  I said,” Yeah, we’re only home for the funeral.”  It was stunning to me with all their build-up that they killed off Han Solo, so to me, The Force Awakens became like going home to a funeral to visit family you hadn’t seen in a while—and likely may never see after.   We all knew that Han Solo would die in the movies at some point in time, but in the books he was still performing heroic acts 45 years after A New Hope, so if they had not gone back in time and killed off Han Solo and could have kept the heroics of his novel adventures intact in the canon, it would have been much more digestible.  Instead they not only killed Han Solo, but the best that hard-core Star Wars fans had fallen in love with–an epic story on a truly galactic scale.  What they gave us in The Force Awakens was the death of a favorite character and a highlight reel of the novels—stories we already knew—all chopped up and spit out with new names and a much smaller frame of reference.   Then to insist that an inferior product was the new canon spelled huge problems for the future of Star Wars which will compound into a much worse situation than what Disney is seeing currently with ESPN.   And I wish it wasn’t the case, because I love Disney and really wanted it to succeed.  But they made all the mistakes that they shouldn’t have—and arrogantly stood by those mistakes to the bitter end.

I don’t know if there is a way that Disney could fix the situation now.  I’m afraid it’s too late.  But maybe there is a way they can appeal to the hard-core fans before things get out of control.  They should try for the sake of everyone—mostly themselves.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Winners Aren’t Losers: Donald Trump’s childrens book and primary presidential platform

Actually, I’m getting a little tired of people assuming that I’ll wake up at some point and realize what Donald Trump is—and will change my mind and vote for someone like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.  I listen to Glenn Beck nearly every day, and also Pat and Stu and have heard people like them bash Trump for the last six months—assuming that fans of Trump are somehow asleep and will one day wake up to find they voted for a monster.  I have watched Bill O’Reilly try his best to pin point Trump supporters with a simple explanation such as “they are angry voters who just want to bust up the establishment. “  I have put up with these types of people like I would the banter of children who don’t know any better.  But let’s make something very clear—extremely clear.  I know what Donald Trump is and what he might do.  I understand his motivations—clearly—emphatically.   And I’m certainly not stupid, naive, or in any way enamored with disillusion.  I know the good and bad of Trump—I have done a lot of research into him since I started supporting him and I want him as president now more than ever knowing what I do.  I want him specifically for the reasons shown below on the Jimmy Kimmel Show where a new children’s book was revealed about Trump called Winners Aren’t Losers.

Here’s the deal, we’ve had 16 years of really bad, and stupid presidents—people who clearly weren’t intellectually up for the job.  Republicans had the embarrassments of George W. Bush and communists had the academic politics of Barack Obama.   Before that we had 8 years of scandalous Bill Clinton and before that 4 years of a New World Order do gooder George Bush #41.  They were all terrible presidents and they have embarrassed America to the world.  Congressmen have lied, cheated, and enriched themselves incredibly over the last two decades to the point where people have lost faith in both parties.  Our government does not function—at all.  The people running it are terrible and have been well before Trump vocalized it.  I want a private sector candidate, someone who will sell capitalism to the entire world and can fight for it.  Socialism is the #1 problem in the world right now—it touches in some way or another every major problem we are facing presently in the world—everything from ISIS to college tuition prices.  The fix for most problems globally start with a moral justification for capitalism and advocates who won’t waiver from it.

The Constitution is not being followed now.  It should be, but a Constitutional purist like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul will not stand a chance against the K-Streeters—and that is the grim fact.  America needs someone who loves to fight those factions without fearing anything.  There isn’t a single politician ever to hit the scene who has no fear like Trump.  He’s not afraid of the mob, of killers from Mexico, of government surveillance, of terrorists threatening his family, of boycotts, protestors—of the media.  He’s not afraid of anything—he could care less about the Bilderberg parties, or the “illuminati.”  He doesn’t fear any money men—he doesn’t have to worry about some billionaire cutting his nuts off and denying his family an income.  He is above all that, and he loves to fight and argue and make deals.  He’s my kind of guy.  He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke.  He’s a loner with great charisma who loves his family.  His kids are great.  And so were his parents.  Donald Trump is a great example of the American dream.

I don’t care about his bankruptcies.  I know why he did it, and he learned very important lessons from those experiences.  I also don’t care that he’s had three wives.  I know why he did what he did.  He pushed and pushed and pushed and the bankruptcies, the wives and the incredible controversies surrounding him through much of the 90s would have been enough to crush most people.  But Trump worked through it without jumping off a roof, without ever losing himself, and without ever surrendering.  He fought, and fought, and fought until all his enemies were pushed aside.  And on the back side of it he was even better because of it.  Now he’s a legitimate billionaire, not just one in debt buried in assets that could evaporate with a housing bubble.  He’s legitimately wealthy, and as self-made as a person can be in the mixed economy that we all inherited from years of socialism trying to poke itself into our lives from beyond our shores.   If Trump screwed people over, if he made mistakes in judgment such as he did with the tenants in Central Park South, he learned from them and is much better for it.  What he has learned is exactly what to say and when to say it.  In deal making you have to perform verbal faints to test your opponent to see what they have and when they’ll use it.  When you are fighting people who believe that the end justifies the means, you better have a response to whatever they throw at you.  You can’t fight them like some Red Coats from the Revolution—all lined up and orderly so that snipers can pick off everything headed their way.  You have to be unpredictable, you have to verbally joust, and you have to out maneuver them with sheer tenacity at times.   Ultimately you have to be willing to face every problem alone, and Trump flourishes at that.

An even more qualifying condition is that you must have somebody as president who knows how to surround himself with the right people, and that those people have to love to take junk and rebuild it.  Trump loves to fix old things and turn them to gold, and his friend Carl Icahn comes with the deal.  He’s worth $21 billion dollars largely because he’s a corporate raider-he turns around failed companies and makes them into winners.  The biggest loser on planet earth right now is the mismanagement going on in the Beltway which has people like Icahn liking his lips.  Even though Trump and Icahn are billionaires, they don’t really care about the money.  They only care about the score that the money represents.  Icahn doesn’t spend money on stupid stuff—he just likes to fight and to win.  He looks for fights so that he can win.

I’ve said it many times; the first priority is that we have to get management under control in America.  We have to solve our fiscal issues first.  Then we can make the Constitution a priority.  Without a solid winning national philosophy, the masses of a democracy will not support a freedom oriented Constitution—second-hander types will always look to rewrite the founding documents to allow them to legally loot others.  So the first priority is to put money in the pockets of a majority of the country so that they will support the American Constitution.  Otherwise, we are fighting a losing battle.  People will not follow a philosophy of freedom unless they are financially secure and can enjoy that freedom.

What Trump does best is make other people feel good about the things he does.  It doesn’t matter what he says, but why he says it.  America needs to hear how good it is, and that winning is our value system again.  And it needs someone to say it that won’t back down from a media that wants everyone to get a conciliation prize just for showing up.  America needs to focus on winning at everything.

I would think that Glenn Beck and his followers would understand the strategic necessity of putting these types of people in the White House.  Every generation has their specific challenges.  George Washington had his challenges, Lincoln had his, Reagan did as well, but there is no correct way of doing anything.   You take what you learn and apply it to all future problems.  The more a person has lived and the more they’ve seen—especially under pressure, they better they are to solve problems in the future.  And I know of nobody anywhere who has stood against the fires of life the way that Trump has.  America needs a deal maker and a cheerleader.  It doesn’t need another ideological failure who comes into public office with a lot of big ideas but falls short of accomplishing anything because they don’t know how to sell it to the public, and can’t work the media to their will.

There is zero chance that Trump loses to Hillary Clinton.  There is nothing in Trump’s history that indicates that he would do anything less than destroy her completely in a head to head election.  Only Trump could out talk and out maneuver Bill Clinton on the campaign trail.  You wouldn’t put Ted Cruz or somebody else up against ol’ Bubba, history shows that they’ll lose.  If they can’t do better against Trump in the primaries, they won’t do any better against Clinton.   So my decision to support Trump for president is not locked in illusion.  I’m not “asleep,” and need to be woke up.  It’s just that I see more clearly what others will eventually see.  And each week there are more people coming to the same conclusion, and it’s about time.  In this particular game, Trump is the best bet and we are lucky to have him.  It would be my strategic hope that he would pave the way for 20 years of a capitalist oriented society that would get back to our roots of Constitutional law—someone who will pick Supreme Court Justices like Clarence Thomas and stand for traditional America instead of the progressive crap that we have now.  Beck thinks of Trump as a progressive—and he’s wrong.  Trump has progressive beliefs because he’s a New York guy, but he ultimately is a deal maker who knows smart money from bad—and to see that—there has to be conservative roots to understand the value.   Of that, there is nobody better than Trump in this election or any election in history.  I’m voting for Donald Trump because I want America to win, and I do trust him to do that much.   Because winning is important—it’s much more important than most people acknowledge.  And Trump has a hunger for winning that I understand.   That is why I am voting for the New York billionaire.  I don’t care how someone plays the game—I care that they win.  Those idiots who say that winning is not the most important thing in the world don’t know what they are talking about.  It is because of those types of people that we have all the problems we do now.  So it’s time that we stop listening to them.

I expect to win at everything I do.  Winners are not losers.  The idiots running our government now do not represent me.   They lose too much and it’s time to change that.  Most of the idiots who believe that Trump is not suited to be president also believe that empathy is one of the most endearing human traits–like the born again Christian Glenn Beck–or the Beltway political addict Karl Rove–who hopes that everything he has ever studied and loved will remain intact through this election cycle.  That is the reason we get the same rejects over and over again in the presidential cycles.  Empathy is fine for church on Sundays or Holidays when loved ones gather for Christmas dinner, but winning is more of a priority–because without it, empathy is worthless.  Without winning, we all become like animals fighting over the same piece of meat.  With winning as a priority, even when people lose they win because competition drives a culture forward and allows the best of what they are to provide leadership by default.  In such a culture that leaves us all much less to have empathy about–and is a higher quality trait.  So it’s really stupid to value empathy over winning or to vote for anybody but Donald Trump for President of the United States.   If anybody really wants to win as a nation, you must have the best people on the job.  And the way to figure out who the best people are is to see who wins or wants to win the most.  Then you have your President.

Watch the videos above for more evidence and testimonials.  I even included a hit piece against Donald Trump.  I’m OK with everything he has done because his overall goal was to win, not to get style points for being empathetic.  Empathy will make a superpower into a muddled mess, like it is now.  Winning makes you more like Donald Trump.  Sure you have a lot of enemies, but life on a daily basis is so much better–and far more interesting for everyone–even those who lose.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

The Benefits of Second Call Defense: Information and Christmas wishes from the sheepdogs of the shooting industry

 

People seem surprised when they find out what a nice service Second Call Defense is, and the kind of reassurance that it offers to shooters as they conceal carry.  Several people of late have signed up for the service upon my recommendation and they are enjoying the benefits.  Second Call Defense is a very respectable organization affiliated with the NRA Business Alliance and they do the little details very well.  Sometimes I think readers think I’m just a blogger who puts out material in a scandalous fashion at times locked in my basement complaining daily about the state of the world.  Rather, this blog site is only about 1% of my life and in the rest of it, I am a very productive person, both in my relationships with other people, and in business efforts.  So when you use my name to sign up for Second Call Defense, good things do happen to you.  Yesterday on a website I sometimes visit to talk to like-minded people came a testimonial that reminded me how new customers of Second Call Defense are learning for the first time how using my name can provide something to them that they didn’t think was possible in a good way:.

Posted by  $  Technocracy 4 hours, 7 minutes ago

I can confirm that you get something back using Rich’s name on your application.

I chose an annual plan and just got my materials yesterday. In with everything else was a check refunding me a month’s worth of the plan cost. So thank you again Rich / Overmanwarrior.

Reply | Mark as read | Best of… | Hide | Flag | Ignore | Permalink

https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/562d66c1/second-call-defense-protect-yourself-if-youre-going-to-carry

2016 will be an exciting time for Second Call Defense and its members.  Below is some information describing pertinent news updates, and providing information necessary for concealed carry holders.  Second Call Defense is a very informative group and a wonderful ally to have around.  My membership card is one of the most valuable things I carry in my wallet. I never leave home without it.  It has become something I consider more important than a driver’s license.   One thing that is important to know listed in the following information is how to take your gun with you while flying.  Be sure to follow the instructions so that you can do so without causing a lot of debate at the airport.

Exciting Changes Coming

Second Call Defense will be unveiling a new website in less than two weeks, right before the new year. The new site will be more informative for members and non members alike, and it will be designed to work well on mobile devices and be much easier to read.

In addition, they’ll be simplifying the membership options and adding great new benefits. If you’re a current member, nothing will change. Your membership dues will stay the same. And you’ll even pick up some new benefits.

Plus, we’ll have a member-only area where members will have access to exclusive content.

Make sure to visit our website the last week of December to see the upgrades.

TSA rules for flying with guns and ammo

Everyone knows how much trouble you can get into if you walk into an airport or try to board a plane with a firearm. But did you know that many gun owners routinely take their guns and ammo with them when they travel by air?

The trick is simply to follow the rules outlined by the Transportation Security Administration:

You may transport unloaded firearms in a locked hard-sided container as checked baggage only. Declare the firearm to the airline when checking your bag at the ticket counter. The container must completely secure the firearm from being accessed. Locked cases that can be easily opened will not be accepted. Be aware that cases that are supplied when purchasing a firearm may not be appropriate for securing the firearm when flying.

Firearms

  • Comply with regulations on carrying firearms where you are traveling from and to, as laws vary by local, state and international governments.
  • Declare all firearms, ammunition and parts to the airline during the check-in process. Ask about limitations or fees that may apply.
  • Firearms must be unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container and transported as checked baggage only. Firearm parts, including firearms frames and receivers, must also be placed in checked baggage and are prohibited in carry-on baggage.
  • Replica firearms may be transported in checked baggage only.
  • Rifle scopes are permitted in carry-on and checked bags.
  • All firearms, ammunition and firearm parts, including firearm frames, receivers, clips and magazines are prohibited in carry-on baggage.

United States Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 44, firearm definitions includes: any weapon (including a starter gun) which will, or is designed to, or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; the frame or receiver of any such weapon; any firearm muffler or firearm silencer; and any destructive device. As defined by 49 CFR 1540.5 a loaded firearm has a live round of ammunition, or any component thereof, in the chamber or cylinder or in a magazine inserted in the firearm.

Ammunition

Firearm magazines and ammunition clips, whether loaded or empty, must be securely boxed or included within a hard-sided case containing an unloaded firearm.
Small arms ammunition, including ammunition not exceeding .75 caliber for rifle or pistol and shotgun shells of any gauge, may be carried in the same hard-sided case as the firearm, as described in the packing guidelines above.

Newsflash for unarmed Americans: We gun owners don’t carry for you

by Jeff Knox

This is an editorial dealing with the difficult issue of whether gun owners should intervene to stop a crime that does not directly involve personal self defense. While Second Call Defense believes this can only be decided on a case-by-case basis, we also think the point of view expressed in this article makes sense for most people with average firearm and self defense skills and training. We touched on this issue in a previous post titled Should you use your gun to stop a crime?

Like many Americans, I frequently carry a gun. I’ve done so for over 30 years without ever laying hand to it in need. Professor John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center reports that some 12.8 million people, over 5.2 percent of the adult U.S. population, are licensed to carry a concealed handgun. In addition to concealed carry license holders in all 50 states, seven states require no permit at all for concealed carry, and 40 states have few restrictions on carrying as long as the gun is visible.

On top of that, as I have reported recently, there appears to be a growing trend among people who routinely carry a firearm to also routinely ignore signs that tell them they can’t. It is a growing form of civil disobedience that puts no one at increased risk of death or injury. As the number of concealed carriers grows, violent crime continues to fall. This doesn’t prove that more guns equals less crime, but it irrefutably proves that more guns do not equate to more crime.

Unless you live in one of the extremely restrictive states like New York, New Jersey, or Massachusetts, any time you are on the street or anywhere that does not have controlled access, with metal detectors and bag searches, etc., there is a fairly high probability that someone nearby is legally carrying a gun. But they are not carrying that gun to protect you.

A popular essay from Lt. Col. Dave Grossman divided humans into three categories: “Sheep,” “Wolves,” and “Sheepdogs.” I would suggest that Lt. Col. Grossman left out an important fourth category: “Porcupines.”

My wife is neither “sheep” nor “sheepdog,” and she certainly is no “wolf.” She is a “porcupine,” harmless and docile if left alone, but ferocious and dangerous if threatened – even more so if her progeny are threatened. She would choose flight over fight every time, if flight is a viable option. But if flight is not an option, she has the tools, training and mindset to win the fight.

Our nation’s convoluted laws on self-defense and liability also force all but the most dedicated “sheepdogs” into the role of “porcupine” as well, making “porcupines” the most prevalent variety of armed citizen. We won’t passively stand by while the wolves have their way with us or our families, but neither can we take responsibility for protecting the “sheep” from the “wolves.”

Certainly, most people who carry would take action to help someone in need if there was an opportunity to do so and there was no obvious alternative – and while many of us would probably prefer to characterize ourselves as “sheepdogs” rather than “porcupines,” the reality is that protecting you, your spouse, and your children is your responsibility, not ours. You should also be aware that protection of you and your family is not the responsibility of the police, either. The courts have conclusively ruled that the police have a duty to protect only the public at large, not individuals.

Those of us who have a natural inclination toward being “sheepdogs” have some pretty significant disincentives to acting on those inclinations. Not only is it physically dangerous to intervene in a violent situation, it is a legal minefield that in most cases must be navigated in a matter of seconds. While laws and jurisprudence protect police from prosecution and civil liability, and while some protections exist for individuals acting in defense of themselves and their families, there are few shields for someone acting on behalf of a stranger. Armed citizens who intervene in situations where they or their families are not in imminent danger place themselves at significant risk of prosecution and civil penalties.

We also tend to be keenly aware of the fact that any error involving a firearm can be devastating and permanent. Violent encounters usually happen quickly, and they can be very confusing. It’s not always clear who is the “good guy” and who is the “bad guy.” Anyone who has ever been through a quality personal defense course has been cautioned to avoid deploying a firearm or engaging an aggressor unless there is no other alternative.

In any shooting situation, there are two key problems to deal with. Problem One is survival. Problem Two is dealing with the legal and emotional fallout from solving Problem One. Ending a life can be emotionally devastating, and the legal consequences can destroy bank accounts and quality of life as surely as being gravely wounded.

For most of us, there are no legal repercussions for running away. In the real world, this means flight is better than fight. Our training, and often the law, dictates that if we’re enjoying a movie when a homicidal lunatic starts shooting people on the other side of the theater, our first responsibility is to get out and away, especially if our family is with us. If we’re in a college class and we hear gunfire from the next building or a classroom down the hall, we, just like our unarmed classmates or students, should evacuate or “shelter in place,” not head toward the gunfire.

This approach is galling to many gun owners, especially those of us with a natural inclination toward being “sheepdogs.” We would rather fight than run. We would rather put ourselves at risk than allow evil to go unchecked. But regardless of the level of training and skill a person has, the multiple layers of risk that are inherent in any shooting situation stack the deck against playing the hero unless there is no other alternative.

Both sides of the debate over bearing arms have a tendency to relegate armed citizens to the role of “sheepdog,” but that is a role the law and prudence won’t let us accept, though some of us will try despite the obstacles. For the most part, we are “porcupines.” We are armed for defense of ourselves and our families, not for you and yours. In a worst-case scenario, one of us might be present and save your life in defending our own, but don’t count on it. We don’t carry for you.

©2015 The Firearms Coalition, all rights reserved. Reprinting, posting, and distributing permitted with inclusion of this copyright statement. www.FirearmsCoalition.org.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

From all of us at Second Call Defense, we wish you and your loved ones a blessed holiday season. Stay safe and remember, even during the holidays, day and night, we are standing by to help you the moment you call our Emergency Legal Hotline.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

‘The Force Awakens’ Killed off Han Solo: Why the prequels were a lot better and how Disney blew it

Piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiissssssed off, that is the feeling I have walking out of The Force Awakens.  

Sadly, the news I was so excited about three years ago regarding the new Star Wars film is tragic—the worst of what I feared might happen, did.  Taken by itself, The Force Awakens is a very good movie, the acting is good, the special effects everything that you’d expect, the directing, the writing all very good—then there’s the music by John Williams—upper level wonder.  Unfortunately for Disney, Star Wars is much more than one movie now and Disney did exactly the wrong thing.  Like rumored, they abandoned the Expanded Universe and they killed off Han Solo in the first movie of a three-part trilogy which was my favorite character.  While on the business side I can understand why they did—Harrison Ford was 73 at the start of The Force Awakens, so it’s not a bad idea to start planting the seeds for future characters.  However, killing off Solo without having the context of the greater story developed over the last two decades is extremely problematic for the Star Wars franchise.  Here’s why.

About 15 years ago a super Star Wars fan was talking to me about the novels that came out every few months and wondered why I wasn’t reading them.  I explained that if the books didn’t come straight from the mind of George Lucas that I didn’t consider them part of the Star Wars canon.  However, the novels leaned very much on the character of Han Solo and his marriage to Princess Leia and their three children Jaina Jacen and Anakin.  So figured I’d give the books a try.  I had tried the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn and couldn’t accept it, but decided to try again with Vector Prime.  It was a great book—although Chewbacca died—and I was hooked.  I have since read most of the Expanded Universe novels which have greatly over-shadowed the original movies in sheer content and emotional story arcs.

I thought there was a whale of a story developing at the end of Apocalypse involving The Abeloth and that The Force Awakens would be about that massive galactic conflict—which would have been great.  Disney could have given the hard-core Star Wars fans what they wanted while giving a new generation of fans what they wanted.  The old characters could have faded out leaving the new very strong character of Jaina Solo to have filled the boots of her father nicely—and that would have been appropriate.  Everyone could have had what they wanted out of Star Wars.  But that’s not what Disney did with the help of J.J. Abrams, and Kathleen Kennedy.  They thought they knew better than all the minds who had been guiding the Star Wars stories through three decades of New York Times best sellers so they screwed with the story with a progressive agenda which was the worst of my fears.

If they had stayed with the Expanded Universe storyline, they could have still had a Latino lead character, a black character and a strong female lead to reach all their target demographics.  But they did more than that—they weakened Han Solo considerably and made him a self-sacrificial parent who threw himself on the sword of Kylo Ren at the end.  He and his marriage to Leia obviously went bad and the kids were damaged leading to his son (Ben) turning to evil.  Suddenly the very strong characters of the Expanded Universe were modernized into dysfunctional parents who had screwed up their children and felt guilty about it.  At the end of The Force Awakens, “General Leia” is alone with no signs of family—except the daughter Rey to find out who she truly is.  This is probably the most disappointing aspect of The Force Awakens—in the novels the son of Han, Jacen falls to the dark side over many books and his intentions were always good.  Han stayed with his wife for many years and they had a pretty good family life.  Han was always a rock solid person in those stories giving Star Wars geeks the father figure they didn’t have in real life—and it worked well in a mythological way.  The daughter Jaina was the new light of the next generation—The Sword of the Jedi.

J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan essentially took the big themes of the novels and retold the story of Jacen’s fall to the dark side moving around the names of the characters and having him confront his sister—in an epic lightsaber battle.  Knowing all that felt cheap to me.  It took Star Wars from an epic pinnacle of the highest mythological order and dumbed it down to be simply another Avengers movie.  It was fun to look at, but the content was certainly watered down from the types of bold stories that were told in the novels.  I will probably see future Star Wars movies just to see what they do and how they look—like I would a superhero type of film—the many times the Batman story has been told, or Spiderman—even Superman.  But with Star Wars, Disney had a unique opportunity to build on a massive story arc, and they screwed it up—rehashing the old by putting their own stamp on it in a way that did a disservice to the fans who helped carry the franchise for so long with their loyal support.  Clearly the emphasis by Disney and Kathleen Kennedy was to weaken the original characters from the bold embodiments of their youth into guilt driven losers in the future—which might make them relatable to a larger audience who feels the same anxieties.  Of course they had to plant the seeds of an interracial romance—which felt forced—and was distracting.  Han returned to his days as a smuggler instead of the reliable family man that he was in the books.  Luke was in hiding feeling guilt for creating Kylo Ren though his failure in teaching future Jedi—which in the books Luke had built an entirely new Jedi Order.  In the books all the lead characters were strong and determined personalities who had suffered through unimaginable sorrows, but were still people a reader could lean on and trust to do the right thing in the end.  In The Force Awakens it is obvious that the all the old characters were flawed, especially Han Solo.  This was obviously a conscious choice to make him more relatable to the modern viewing audience instead of just trusting the story the way it had evolved over the years with great success.

There has been an effort from The Alliance to Save the Star Wars Legends Expanded Universe shown at the link below to save the storyline of these movie from just this kind of misery.  But, Disney didn’t listen and they’ll pay for that.  The Force Awakens will make a lot of money, but it won’t be as much as they could have made.  They just handed the next generation a bunch of loser characters not quite sure of themselves putting an emphasis on progressive values instead of American traditional ones.  The Force Awakens is about sacrifice and the greater good whereas a theme which always ran through the original trilogy was individualism and following a personal bliss.  Han Solo as the individual always had the answers to save the Luke and Leias of the galaxy from their altruistic tendencies.  In The Force Awakens it is Han Solo that needs saving from his guilt over failing their son in ways that aren’t yet shown.  Essentially the decision to turn Han Solo from an Ayn Rand type of character into a Shakespearian tragedy was meant to erase his lineage of strength into something modern audiences could identify with.

https://www.facebook.com/AlliancetoSavetheStarWarsLegendsExpandedUniverse

http://twibbon.com/support/star-wars-legends-never-die

The result for me, and I’m sure many others, is that I completely reject these new stories by Disney.   I just came out of seeing a premier showing before it opened officially on December 18th 2015 and my sorted emotions tell me that this story in The Force Awakens is not real.  I can’t accept it as cannon.  It’s actually pretty stupid.  It represents another case of activist filmmakers trying to plant progressive Huffington Post values into a very traditional American story for the sake of unifying the world around common values.  To do that they dumbed down the American influences of individuality, and created a much more “inclusive” universe that was the obvious intent they had in making the film.  People like Arianna Huffington will love this new Star Wars.  John Wayne would have hated it.

I can deal with the death of my favorite character.  What I have a problem with is weakening their presence out of a desire to appeal to a weakened society—where movies are made by committee rather than by strong individuals.  The Force Awakens obviously understands that few people have intact families these days and that people can’t relate to the type of strength that Han Solo projected which has carried the franchise quite frankly for forty years.  They made a conscious decision to weaken Solo—hand over the Millennium Falcon to a “girl” (his daughter) and reflect the values of the present global community instead of the values of the story itself.  They cheapened Star Wars in ways that will be very costly in the years to come.  So while the movie was beautiful to look at and had many elements that are respectable on the surface, the underlining message was feeble and a tremendous disservice to the fans who have stuck with the story religiously all these years.  Star Wars had a chance to be above modern politics, but the filmmakers failed to carry it to those lofty heights.  Instead, they surrendered to the currents of modernism—and the movie shows it desperately.  The movie felt to me like a fake and something to reject—which is not what Disney wanted, I’m sure.  Forever for me, and many like me, there will always be the Expanded Universe where Han didn’t leave his wife and fail his children with some “force bending” scheme of time to save his daughter from the wrath of her brother, Han’s failed son—and the Jedi master Luke who lost his pupil to the dark side.  I’m sure there is a story of redemption in the next episodes, but by then—who cares.  Disney already screwed up the story with renamed characters and repeated themes which were already told in the novels years ago.  And in that respect, The Force Awakens fails in every way that it never intended.

The prequels were a LOT better.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Donald Trump, the CNN Debate Winner: Beating Hillary until she can’t show her face in public

It was the last Republican debate of the year and all the candidates did pretty much what they needed to by their own playbook.  There were no real surprises for anyone, except for Trump.  The New York billionaire presented himself really for the first time as the leader of the Republican Party, which was completely by design.  I saw it coming, yet apparently many didn’t.  It continues to astound me how little people know about negotiations, whether they are buying a car or selling themselves as president—Trump has been working the wires of the entire political process for several months now—and has changed the landscape of perception entirely.   On the stage in Las Vegas at CNN’s last big live event of the year before the Holidays, Trump clearly dominated—and the rest of the members of the stage looked like clear inferiors.   Some of the other candidates might win a few states in the primaries but it is clear right now as of December 16th, 2015—unless Trump does something really crazy—that Donald will be the next President of the United States.

Now, beating Hillary, everyone seems to be so concerned about that—I’m not.  I don’t even think it will be close.  In a leverage game, Donald Trump holds all the cards—all the good ones anyway—while Hillary has only a hand of Jokers.   If Trump could focus his attention on one candidate, Hillary would never hold up.  If the Republicans want to win in 2016 and for many years to come, they’ll get behind Donald Trump while he tears Hillary, and her connections to Obama to shreds starting in the summer of 2016.  I believe the lashing will be so bad of her by Trump that she may struggle to win a single state in a head to head election—including California.

A Trump presidency will be even more dynamic.  He’ll use the same methods to get bills through congress, to balance budgets, and to bring nations to their knees without having to fire a shot.  His staff will be some of the most competent people to ever hold public office and things will happen daily that nobody has ever seen before—the rate that things get done will be astonishing.  Trump will use the same methods he used to destroy Hillary Clinton, won the Republicans over to his side and work the media like his own puppet show to bring nations to their knees.  He’ll work Russia against Syria—mark my words, he’ll put Putin in his back pocket and he’ll choke off the cash going to Assad and defeat Syria without a single boot on the ground.  Iran will be forced to open up all their secrets after daily media poundings by Trump, China will be forced to level the table in their currency evaluations and denounce North Korea leaving that ruthless dictator to rot alone and isolated.  Trump will promote capitalism to Europe to save it from itself and he’ll pull most of the global billionaires into pouring their efforts of charity into the poor regions of the planet, like Africa and Brazil to pull them into the 21st century instead of the Obama strategy of bringing everyone else down.  Trump will attack the premise of global warming putting the EPA on the defensive and opening up the oil fields of the United States into becoming the world’s greatest producer which leverages against the oligopoly of OPEC.  ISIS will be a thing of the past within months because they’ll run out of money and the shadow governments behind them will be forced into hiding by Trump’s mouth.

Trump will expand the Second Amendment promotion of concealed carry around America, and will dramatically cut down on gun free zones.  He’ll probably give his own press conferences each day and will work the job around the clock like nobody has since Calvin Coolidge.  Trump will solve many of the world’s problems with his very aggressive mouth—he’ll play the high, low game of negotiation until he gets what he wants—and his abilities are clearly unmatched.  It was quite evident in the CNN debate of December 15, 2015 that he was a master of communication and negotiation.   Trump is addicted to deal making like some might be addicted to eating or sex—Trump has a mind that is alive, successful, and untouched by drugs or alcohol—his whole life.  He essentially has the mind of a child before puberty—one that just wants to play and enjoy life, and for Trump that joy comes in making things through deals.  The best job in the world for him would be President of the United States where every single day of office would be an opportunity to make big deals like he did with Trump Tower, or the West Side rail yards in New York City.   I don’t believe there is a single downside to a Donald Trump presidency for anybody—Republicans or Democrats.  I believe Trump is at his prime and can do things that nobody has ever thought possible.  He’ll set the bar for the presidency incredibly high for at least the next century and that will make us all better.

Much of what Trump has been doing is clearly described in his book The Art of the Deal.  Every trick shown in the nomination process, and all the ways that he will destroy Hillary Clinton—Trump has a track record of being so ruthless in his desire to win that she may never be able to show her face in public again.  Trump may personally like the Clintons, but if they try to put themselves in front of something he wants—he will destroy them forever.  Mark it on your calendar.  I predicted much of everything that is happening now over six months ago, and six months in the future from this writing, I can see it as clearly as the words you are reading.

Republicans have to understand—you can’t just beat Hillary Clinton and pray for the day that Obama is out of the White House.  Obama is a young man and he will be more damaging as an ex-president than he was as president.  Obama will return to community organizing and will have charitable foundations that will rival the Clintons—and he will have an international stage to continue marketing socialism to everyone who will listen.  He could do much more damage than Al Gore did after he left office.   Republicans will have to fend off internal struggles within the party, natural international challenges to the White House that comes with the job, but additionally the periphery hen pecking that Obama will have the opportunity to exert as an ex-president.  The next President of the United States will have to soak up so much media that there won’t be time for anybody else, and Trump is the only one who could do that.  Trump would beat on those former activists—Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama so hard that they’d have to retreat into the sunset to avoid his combative presence.  I am 100% sure of it.

It didn’t take long for Trump to win me over.  Once I saw that he was serious, I put my chips on his card.  He is the person I’d hire for the job and I have a way of knowing things about people.  There isn’t a second choice.  He doesn’t do everything that I’d like socially, but he does share with me a personal policy of not being intoxicated, never abusing tobacco products, and he doesn’t gamble in spite of owning several casinos.   Trump is a predator who wants to win at any cost and what he leaves in his wake is truly beneficial to everyone—just walk around New York City.  Without Trump, I think New York might have gone bankrupt in the 1970s.  Instead, he amassed enough wealth to build Trump Tower and many other structures before he was in his mid-forties.  Dealing to him is the best game he likes to play, and you really can’t hinge too much on the things he says—because he’s all about leverage.  What you can bet on are the things he does.  Behind him, including his children—are many grand successes.  And for America, particularly the Republican Party—they’d be extremely wise to put that type of person to work on their behalf.  Trump owned the stage with a change of strategy that was very calculated during the CNN debate—which put several assailants on their heels with indecision.   But that’s just the beginning.  Trump has a lot more in the tank, and you can see it in his eyes that he’s ready to unleash it.  For the sake of our country—we need to turn him loose and let him do it.

It will be a lot of fun to watch what he does to Hillary Clinton over the next 6 months.  She won’t stand a chance.  She has too many secrets and entirely too much vulnerability—and Trump will expose them all with torturous detail—because he will do anything—and say anything to win, win—win.  And I—as a long time Republican—don’t just want to see Hillary lose.  I want to see her and her network completely destroyed.  And Trump is just the man to do it.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Beauty of a Mernickle Holster: Morality of gunfighters protecting laissez faire-capitalism

IMG_0645This is truly a special day.  Just over two months ago I was having lunch with a friend about firearms related subject matter.  It was at a decent place, and reading this, he’ll remember instantly the occasion.  We were watching the construction of The Streets of West Chester Phase II development from our window and were enjoying the progress of capitalism as it marched toward new destinations.  In my own life, I had just accomplished a major technical achievement, something that many thought was impossible and the two and a half years I spent slugging that triumph out had put a new line of thought into my mind forever.  To celebrate the moment I put a major investment into a new stage of my own personal development and decided that I would put an emphasis on a career change.  Of course nothing is sudden in these kinds of things.  The business world like a good marriage dictates that decisions are fast and solid but that movement often takes time—so you often ease into things instead of crashing through the front door.  So this new career would entail a phase-in period rather than a sudden change and it all started with something that I had been thinking about for several decades but just couldn’t find the time to commit to it—or the money.  However, I had promised myself that if I survived the technical achievement I had been working on that I would treat myself to that long desired intention.  Prior to that lunch I had just ordered a new Mernickle gunfighter rig knowing that it would have to be hand crafted and take months to complete.  But I was excited that I had finally bought it—along with other items that went with it.  All in all it was a sizeable investment for me that signified a definite change of life.  One book had literally closed and an entirely new one was starting, and I was very excited about it which my friend can testify to.

It was on December 15, 2015 that my Mernickle holster arrived and it is a thing of extraordinary beauty.  Bob Mernickle and his family starting with his wife Sherrie and two daughters Stormie and Shandrianna are in my opinion the best holster manufacturers that are out there, particularly when it comes to Cowboy Fast Draw.  To have a Mernickle gun fighting system is to have the Lamborghini of shooting sports.  When I get involved with something very specific, like the Western Arts often are I do a lot of research into who I think is the absolute best and I work with them exclusively until I think they have fallen from the top.  In my bullwhip work, I bought my whips from Terry Jacka in Australia.  With this new phase in my life I am looking to build a new skill set to compliment the old one, and to advance that intention, I needed the best Cowboy Fast Draw rig that I could get, so I ordered one from Bob Mernickle.  The day before it arrived one of his daughters, Stormie wrote me to confirm its delivery and I knew that all was right in the world.

As part of the technical achievement that I had worked through and all the pulling teeth it took to get there, no amount of money can give you back the years you lose whenever you do something that takes so much work and effort.  There are no banquets in your honor that can justify the personal expense—not for me anyway.  Success isn’t measured in the opinions others have of you for bringing them the magic of capitalist enterprise—but it’s in what it does for you personally.  This Mernickle holster and the Ruger Vaquero that goes in it represents something much greater to me which was confirmed over quite a long period of time.  It is probably the opposite reaction that people in my position would justify for the start of a new book in their lives.  The typical reaction might be condos, boats, and more exotic vacations when a plateau of professional achievement is reached, but that’s not enough for me.  I need to push myself and to smell battle in the things I’m doing—so complacency and reflection are not enough.  I need to go from one impossible thing to another in order to feel alive and entering a very competitive sport that is the fastest individual feat that a human being can perform is precisely what makes my heart swell.

Prior to this epic life-changing event I was happy with my melee weapon work for personal exercise and self-defense.   Bullwhips allowed me to practice in my own back yard and compete each year in the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Darke County, Ohio and be one of the few in the world who could put out flaming candles with those flexible weapons using pin-point accuracy.  But that technical work that I had been doing along with my political endeavors here and elsewhere showed me a strategic undercurrent emerging that needed a gunfighter—quite literally. This led me to re-think some of my favorite childhood influences, such as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress and gave me an even stronger appreciation for the cowboy arts of America’s foundation.

I have been thinking a lot about the Cowboy Way as defined by America’s evolution and the romance of the Old West mythologies which are much more sanctimonious in hindsight than they ever were in the moment—and it became quite clear to me that the gun represented laissez-faire capitalism in our culture and that was something that needed to be emphasized, and protected.  As I look back on the countless westerns that have been produced in America they all have a common thread that revolves around the use of guns to regulate a frontier society which embodies the morality of pure capitalism—which is essentially at the heart of the gun debate in our modern era to remove them from private possession.  Guns on the hip of a gunfighter represent the type of individual protection of private property that is very specific to a culture that is operating without the parental oversight of a federal government.  America had the unique experience of being able to function in a vacuum of time, when railroads allowed quick travel, guns made the playing field of human domination equal, and the innovation of one’s own endeavors could make them gloriously wealthy, or proportionally poor.   The Old West was a very competitive place, and most people ended up dirt poor, diseased, or crippled for life.  Gambling and prostitution were everyday occurrences in most frontier towns and to this very modern time still has an appeal to people in American culture because those things no matter how destructive they were personally, represents an extraordinary level of personal freedom that was unique on the world stage—and still is.

The Cowboy Way emerged as a way to self-regulate behavior as government was not all that present in Old West towns such as Deadwood, South Dakota.  Each year presently hundreds of thousands of motorcyclists venture to Deadwood for the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally essentially to feel the breath of the Old West and laissez-faire capitalism on their faces.  If you look beyond the decadence which is also present in Las Vegas and Times Square, New York, or even Key West, Florida—you can see a society of people too tightly cranked up looking to come unhinged for their own psychological balance.  Towns like the old Deadwood featured lots of prostitution, and gambling which were hopeful attempts by individuals to acquire private property and live well for themselves.  This isn’t at all unlike the world of Henry Morgan—the pirate of Port Royal where indulgence in debauchery was rampant to an extreme.   But the reason for it is more fascinating than the cost.  Many people died and lost their way in such environments, but those who did succeed brought wonderful treasures to the human race under capitalism.  The desire for such recklessness in personal living is that individuals ultimately want to be free of government regulations and they’ll go to extremes to shake them away.  In such an environment guns are needed to protect oneself from predators who want to shortcut the work of capitalism to get something for as little effort as possible.  In Deadwood specifically are the stories of Wild Bill Hickok who was a lawman, a frequenter of prostitutes, and one of the best known gunfighters from the Old West period.  He once killed Davis Tutt in a dual at 75 yards over a dispute of Hickok’s watch.  The dual was likely over a woman—not so much the watch, but either way it was over possession of perceived property and the gunfight was emblematic of protecting that property.  The gun in most western mythology is an affirmation of economic value, not raw brutality.  It was in Deadwood that Wild Bill was shot in the back of the head during a poker game while holding the famous hand, Aces of Eights, which so many references within the motorcycle community refer to presently.

The governing principle of these laissez-faire capitalist societies was the Cowboy Way, or at least the way Hollywood interpreted the brutality of frontier life to find meaning in it all—which there was plenty.  A code of conduct enforced by the gun emerged and it was for a time the best answer to America’s morality of capitalism.  The political left attacks cowboys and gunfighters specifically because they are quite well aware that there is something unique in the history of Old West towns like Deadwood and the historic mythologies of Wild Bill Hickok that might fuel the fires of capitalism and stop the long global march of socialism that is currently migrating unhinged everywhere in the world except for rural pockets around the United States.  For instance, you will NEVER see Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota lecturing those people about morality and equality.  John McCain has attempted to appeal to that demographic class, but has not been very successful—because the Washington Beltway doesn’t understand it.  But I see it quite clearly.  The strategy to move capitalism in the other direction against the current spread of socialism is through the kind of marketing that gave rise to such mythologies and the real life actions of Wild Bill in the first place.  And behind that effort is the magic of the gun and the advantage of a very good fast draw rig.

Yes, it’s very exciting to enter a new book full of stories and adventure that have not yet been experienced.  The old one was great, but sometimes sequels are better than the originals.  Life should be like that, each and every year should be better than the previous one.   While my previous stories were mainly about motorcycles and bullwhips, these new ones will be more akin to Wild Bill Hickok.  Not the gambling or the women, but the gun fighting—there is magic in that—and promotion of an economic system that the gun represents–laissez-faire capitalism.  After my success at the near impossible the obvious next step is to build on that with a means to expand that capitalist reach.  While the intentions may not be obvious at first, it is clear that by wearing that fabulous Mernickle holster the weapons that will be drawn from it have the best chance of re-selling American capitalism to the most people under the best conditions—which of course unlocks prosperity within our national GDP that would have been previously unheard of.  And that is why that holster to me is one of the most beautiful things in the world and why I have been so excited to get it.  This is going to be a lot of fun.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Karl Rove Should Be Fired: Why Republicans cannot afford a brokered convention

It wasn’t a surprise that there were discussions about a brokered convention this upcoming summer when Republicans nominate their presidential candidate for President of the United States.  Too many conventional Republicans have already stuck their foot in their own mouths speaking out against the presidential candidates who are not establishment types, namely Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump.  Candidates like John Kasich cannot fight the battle that is required within our nation because he has the wrong approach.  In an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Kasich said while he understands why so many Republican primary voters are “upset” with the federal government’s inability to deal with major issues such as the economy and budgets, he warned if anger carries “the day, we’re not going to get things fixed.”  Well, here’s the story on Kasich, he came out bold in 2010 as a governor and spoke a lot of Tea Party oriented banter, but quickly retreated into a left leaning moderate once he decided shortly after 2012 to run for president.  He’s been a worthless governor since that time, particularly his support of Obamacare through Medicaid expansion.  His desire to trade federal dollars for votes sealed his fate forever.  He could only hope to remain relevant in the Republican Party so long as there is no viable option otherwise.

So it’s no surprise that Republicans like Kasich are upset.  Kasich has been following the same passive playbook that lost the election for John McCain and Mit Romney and winners see clearly the losing strategy, so they are looking for candidates who don’t want to lose.  None of the mainstream candidates are polling well, and it’s for that reason.  The Republican Party has given conservatives nothing to cheer for.  Karl Rove and Grover Norquist have strategically placed the direction of the Republican Party at the mercy of Democrats for reasons that are baffling.  Rove after the 2012 election had all his polling numbers off predicting a victory, but nobody showed up to vote for Romeny, because the candidate had been rammed down the throat of conservatives and few were excited about him.  Rove should have been fired from Fox News, because he completely lost credibility.  Even before there was a Donald Trump it was impossible to listen to Karl Rove and not  think that he was so incompetent during the 2012 election that he needed to be replaced.

The playbook has not been working.  While Rove undoubtedly would proclaim that Republicans have a majority in the House and Senate the type of people who Republicans have put in those positions have been failures designated as such for their inability to get anything done.  It’s not enough to put players on the field who call themselves Republicans.  If the party cannot give victories to voters, then the effort is all for nothing.  Rove is like the head coach for a losing football team who should have been fired a long time ago, but is kept hoping that somehow something will change if everything just stays constant.  That desire to maintain consistently bad results is what is driving the discussion of a brokered convention, which ironically will have none of the GOP establishment with any significant delegates.  Here’s how the media reported the incident:

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson ripped into the Republican National Committee Friday, threatening to leave the party after a report surfaced Thursday detailing a meeting party leaders had earlier in the week to discuss a possible brokered convention.

“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” the retired neurosurgeon said.

More than 20 top GOP officials discussed at a dinner on Monday the party’s strategy in the event of a brokered convention amid Donald Trump’s consistent lead in the polls.

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) listened as several longtime party members argued the establishment must lay the groundwork for a floor fight if Trump storms through the presidential primaries, five sources familiar with the meeting told The Washington Post.

The sources said Priebus and McConnell were mostly silent during the deliberation and did not signal support for an explicit anti-Trump effort.

But both men did acknowledge that a stalemated convention is something the party should be ready for.

When asked on Thursday about the dinner, RNC chief strategist Sean Spicer told the Post that the RNC is “neutral in this process and the rules are set until the convention begins next July.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/12/11/ben-carson-on-the-possibility-of-a-brokered-convention-i-will-not-sit-by-and-watch-theft/

http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/262850-gop-prepares-for-brokered-convention-amid-steady-trump

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/national-govt-politics/kasich-polarization-division-bad-for-us/npjDp/?source=ddn_skip_stub#cmComments

Regardless of who ends up as the presidential nominee, establishment Republicans have been terminated in the minds of voters.  The alarm was clearly noticed by the mainstream reflection of our society, Saturday Night Live, where writers of the 12/12/2015 show were clearly miffed at conservative America.  In the past these types of idiots were the people Karl Rove measured party success against—trying to appeal to them.  But New York, the Beltway, and Los Angeles are not accurate reflections of the mood of the country.  When you get out into the flatlands of Ohio and Indiana, or the mountains of Montana and Idaho, the Republican Party does not reflect those people.  The NRA does, but the Republican Party as it is today does not.  Pandering to weak candidates like John Kasich doesn’t get the job done and the strategists like Karl Rove who have set the table for this kind of failure shoulder most of the responsibility.

Clearly by the time we get through the primary season to the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio the rules will either change, or many conservatives will look for a different party that represents them.  If Republicans do not listen to their needs, they will go somewhere else.  There is no patience for a Jeb Bush type of establishment candidate.  John Kasich has been a terrible representative of conservative values.  He telegraphed his position strategically to the world so far in advance of his run for president in 2016 that it was embarrassing.  He delayed his announcement during the summer of 2015 too long for dramatic reasons when it was clear all along that his purpose behind the Medicaid expansion was to position himself to be president.  As far back as 2013 insiders were reporting that Kasich was setting up a Ohio office to begin probing the presidential possibilities.  So it comes with some anger to people like him that all the rules have changed—because they have.  From the time he announced his run for president the type of person it will take to be a Republican nominee has changed.  And in six months from now it will change even more—and not in Kasich’s favor.  Kasich is part of the Karl Rove failure.  Republicans showed up to play the game with the wrong playbook.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/10/23/kasich-only-political-or-ideological-people-oppose-ohios-medicaid-expansion/

My prediction is that the Republican Convention will not be brokered.  There will be a clear winner with a majority of the delegates going into the nomination process.  That picture will become clear by March and the Karl Rove types will either have to shut their mouths or they’ll be replaced, which would be the best option.  Republican strategists need to have their pulse on America, not just the Beltway.   There are very angry conservatives who have been ignored, and they are a majority of the country.  They have been ignored and made fun of by just about all the media, the entertainment industry, and the Beltway, and at some point in time, someone has to pay for that poor judgment in alienating them from the process with name calling and orthodox politics.  The writers at Saturday Night Live are one of the first to see the caution of that sleeping giant and they seem justifiably a little scared.  New York City and Washington D.C. seem like big places when you are within those structures of political supremacy.  But they seem pretty small to the rugged people who live between the cities all across the country.  And those people are cleaning their guns ready for war.  They don’t give a rat’s ass about Obamacare—except that they want the people who shoved it down their throats removed.  The Republican Party better find a way to represent those people, or their failures will continue.  And accepting that role will start with the Republican Convention in July of 2016.  A floor fight will only make it worse for them.  If Establishment Republicans want to keep Karl Rove around because they like him, let him sell popcorn at the Convention, but don’t take his advice.  He will only screw things up more than he has.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Elusive Nature of Leadership: Understanding the need for an entirely different approach

I know I write a lot about the failure of our education system, and need for Donald Trump as president.  While those subjects may become laborious to the everyday reader, there are so many angles to discuss that only voluminous examination from every trajectory of consideration is appropriate to the difficulties of our day.  Sometimes I run across a video clip that really exhibits the reason, and such an example came to me while I was watching a Donald Trump interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN.  I was so astonished by some of the things Chris said that it took me several days to get my thoughts right about it.  Watch the video below.  The specific part of the interview that I found so astonishing was the part that Cuomo uttered in question form, “how do you know you’re right if so many people disagree with you. “  Boy did he say a mouthful right there.

Leadership is the most elusive element of modern culture.  Even with all our science and physiological understanding of thought processes—academics do not understand it.  Very few people understand real leadership.  I actually deal with this kind of stupidity all the time.  I understand leadership extremely well; it’s always been a very natural thing for me.  When I read books like Trump’s Art of the Deal, and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, I understand the author’s point of view instinctively as opposed to the novice student hearing some of the elements of those books for the first time.  A lot of that comes from my education background and life experiences which looked to people on the outside to be extremely reckless.  I have always known the right thing to do even when nobody else could see it, in every aspect of my life—so it’s easy for me to look at Chris Cuomo and wonder if he’s from some other planet.  I’ve heard that baffling contemplation so many times that it doesn’t surprise me.  But for the sake of dramatic writing, I’ll fester along the line of thought to make the point more interesting.  Leadership does not come from focus groups or consensus of any kind.  It comes from raw individualized leadership only—meaning other voices are pointless.  It is good to utilize other people’s opinions for the sake of “team building.”  But a “team” approach is not the same as “leadership.”  It’s just a means of getting large numbers of people to do what you want them to do.  A team approach is fine so long as that team listens to their head coach.  Without a strong leader, a “team” will be ineffective.

When I talk about things like that to people who think they are the smartest people in the room, I get hokey references to all my mysterious books as if somewhere in them was a famous recipe for leadership that they can figure out if they just put together the right mix of a “team” working toward consensus.   As I write this the new Star Wars films are getting ready to release and there is a lot of excitement about them.  There really may never be such an event on planet earth again, where the entire world is so ripe with anticipation.  While I think the movies might be pretty good, I have serious doubts that they will be as good as the movies George Lucas made when he ran Lucasfilm from a leadership position as a sole proprietor.   The new films are certainly made by “committee” and I think that will show up in what comes across in the movie theater.  The message of the old movies was individualism versus the state because that was something that George Lucas believed in during that part of his life.  The new movies are about decentralized authority and consensus building.  For kids going to the movies today, the films will be the best thing they’ll have seen, but in the long lens of history, these new movies will lack the punch of the originals because of the method for which they were made—just like any company that tries to make a product after a strong leader has either left them, or they’ve tried a more inclusive approach—a rule by committee.   That is exactly the problem the Apple Company is suffering through right now.  They still make a good product, but they lack the innovation and spirit they had when Steve Jobs was in charge.   They can hold their own for a while, but are slipping a bit each year under weak leadership.

Trump would be a good president because of what Cuomo asked him.  Trump instinctively knows what’s right to do.  A good leader can make a decision even if nobody else understands the nature of the problem yet. The reason why is because of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  Leaders are simply at the front of the metaphorical train instead of the back.  It doesn’t matter if you are talking about Jim Harbaugh leaving the San Francisco 49ers  to become coach of the Michigan Wolverines in college or George Patton, strong leadership is immediately noticed the moment its gone.   Good leadership is noticed on a restaurant drive through—good leadership keeps the food moving, bad leadership drives down the food quality and window times.  The moment that Jim Harbaugh left San Francisco for Michigan, that professional football team went into decline but the college team was on the uptake.  Good leaders never listen to the world around them except for intelligence gathering.  Good leaders always act from the inner voice that only they understand at the front of the train of thought—on the cutting edge of decision-making.  It’s not a mystery to those who naturally possess the trait.

However, our education system teaches kids like Chris Cuomo that answers to life come from collective consensus, and is a very unfortunate misunderstanding.  I won’t say that it’s a deliberate lie, just an improper understanding of where to put specific emphasis on personal value.  The schools have lied to these poor kids and taught them all the wrong things for all the wrong social reasons.  Everyone can’t be a leader, because most of the time they lack the courage to be.  It takes a lot of strength and courage to be a leader, and some people just don’t have it in them.  It can be taught to some extent, but only in small degrees.  It actually makes me sad to visit a hospital and see people having babies because most children have indications of the leadership trait available to them as infants–after all they had just survived nine months inside a womb and overcame the immense psychological trauma of child-birth.  If treated correctly, many of those children could be nurtured into the kind of mind that producers good leaders, and if America really wanted to solve some problems, it would focus on strengthening its children right out of the womb, not through some government confiscation program but by empowering the parents to promote self-reliance in infants as soon as possible, learning to walk, learning to play by themselves—not with other children—and developing a strong imagination with stimulation of many aspects of thought as soon as the neurons in their brains have connected to allow such thinking.  But what happens to most of those children is they are coddled too long next to their mothers, and their fathers take orders from society at large falling in behind some authority figure that is probably incompetent by default.  Children directly mimic everything they see from their parents so if the parents are social messes, the children will struggle with those aspects for the rest of their lives.  For many children their limits in life are pressed into them before they are even six months old, and it just saddens me every time I see it.

What’s unique about Trump is that he’s always been way in front of the cutting edge—his whole life.  He’d be a great president because he wouldn’t listen to the opinions of other people—that’s the point!  He doesn’t need consultants, he doesn’t need focus groups.  He needs information, but he doesn’t need anybody to tell him what to do with it.  It would be my hope that under a Trump presidency that he’d cause a renaissance in American leadership just because his methods would be on full display around the world and people would want to copy him.  That might bring out a few more babies per year who have the potential to be strong leaders in the future.  Trump often compares himself to George Patton, and it’s not because of the militaristic nature of both of them, it’s because they both possess similar beliefs in themselves—even when the rest of the world thinks they are crazy—they can see clearly what to do and when to do it.  To those without that skill, they are baffled as to how Trump and Patton could possible know what to do without some support from their peers.  But leadership is a lonely enterprise.  Leaders are alone in the troubles of their minds and they are alone in the successes—they are alone most of the time, even when they are with people who love them.  Being a strong leader is much about being alone—even in a crowd, because nobody understands.   American culture needs to at least embrace its leaders and if such a thing became fashionable through major changes in our education system and a populist president who would make bold front page news every day of his time in office, then maybe some of those children born under freedom might develop in them the natural inclination of leadership.  But before that can happen someone like Trump would need to be able to sell it to the masses.  Only then would the qualities of leadership become more widely acceptable—and understood.  But it will take a generation to get there.  There is nothing easy about leadership.  It is the most important element of a free republic.  Consensus building is absolutely the wrong approach.  It doesn’t work, and it never will.  It can produce moderate results, but spectacular ambitions will always reside among the few who embrace the cutting edge and by their very nature—who always see most clearly and act most decisively.  Trump is one of those rare few who do it so fluidly so this is a rare opportunity for the United States, and I’m excited about it.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Wisdom of Sheriff Wayne Ivey: Good guys with guns and Hillary Clinton’s friends–robbed at gunpoint

 “Enough is enough” when it comes to terrorism — that’s the video message Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey posted recently telling residents that they should start carrying firearms with them to protect his community and our nation against terrorism.  Now that is my idea of a good local sheriff, and cop.  In a lot of ways, Brevard County is a place I consider a second home, so its gives me a lot of pride to see the sheriff of that region speaking with the sense that should be obvious to everyone.  Get a gun, carry a gun, and protect yourself from the aggressive possibilities of terrorism in whatever form.

“I think the message is: people are thirsty for a solution to the terrorist activities, they’re thirsty for a solution to the active-shooter scenarios that have taken place, and I think they’re thirsty for leadership,” Ivey said in response to the national attention his video has gotten. “I think it was time for someone to stand up and say that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

http://mynews13.com/content/news/cfnews13/news/article.html/content/news/articles/cfn/2015/12/7/brevard_sheriff_video_arm_selves_against_terror.html

People against Ivey’s proposal are of course organizations like the NAACP and virtually every other liberal conglomeration.  But nobody should listen to them because they are the cause of what’s made the situation dangerous in American to begin with.  They have been pro open borders, they have been pro Islamic immigration without consideration for the potential for radicalization, and they have been notoriously anti-gun—insisting that America copy its domestic philosophy policies from socialist nations like France and other European disasters—old, crusty regions drowning with Marxism.  As I write this President Obama is considering an executive order against firearms which is incredibly arrogant, and intrusive.  One of the worst suggestions by him is that people on a no fly list not be able to buy a gun.  Well, that won’t work; a person like me could easily be put on a no fly list because the regime in power might consider me a threat just because of the things I say.  You can’t legislate evil out of existence; you have to face it down, and you can’t let an evil government prevent good people from facing that evil.   The situation is very simple, good guys need to carry a gun so that when bad guys try to act in a terrorist fashion, the right side will have the advantage to end the threat.  Then of course the gun owner should call Second Call Defense and let them handle the legal issues.

I actually worry about trying to buy a ticket on an airplane for fear of finding my name on a no fly list because to Obama, a person like me is more of a threat to his intentions than an Islamic terrorists trying to breed more like them within the borders of the United States.   So Obama’s executive order proposal  is not intended to protect America from terrorists—it’s to protect government officials from criticism over their own mismanagement—which is an abuse of power.   There’s a reason that congress, represented by the people of our nation, have refused gun restriction action.  It’s not just because of the NRA.  The NRA has so much money and power because people like me put money into it.  They didn’t get all their lobbying wealth from some oversea billionaire like what’s behind the open border issues, and marijuana legalization legislation—or Saudi Arabian activists trying to gain legislative power within the United States by pouring money into the Clinton Foundation and letting a former president and a possible future president keep the hands of justice out of their medieval society.   The NRA and its power over congress are because of millions of people like me who want to see the Second Amendment protected from people like Obama.  He has no right to sign an executive order against firearms in any way.  If he does so he’s acting in a criminal fashion, which only justifies more gun buying to protect us from an activist government hell-bent on disarming us.

In this hostile environment where terrorists want to harm us, and our government who created the situation in every fashion wants to further restrict our ability to protect ourselves, it’s wonderful to see Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey speaking reasonably as a government official.  Good guys need to be the ones carrying guns.  We don’t need to wait for some government study sponsored by grant money for the desired results against guns to be produced as the NAACP desires to tell us what’s logical.  Good guys need to be able to stop bad guys when the intention is to bring harm against innocent people.

For instance, just the other night not that far from my own home a young teenager tried to rob a couple of contractors at gunpoint.  Big mistake for that 16-year-old kid—he apparently listened to too many rap songs about violence and played too much Grand Theft Auto.  Because one of these contractors had a concealed carry permit and pulled out his gun.  The kid shot first but the contractor then discharged his firearm ending the life of the young punk which was well within the right of the contractor.  He waited for the kid to fire first apparently, which is good to do, but dangerous—then ended the threat immediately.  Police showed up, did their investigation and found that the contractor acted within the legal parameters of our society.  The contractors lived another day, the robber didn’t.  The robber’s threat against citizens of planet earth is done forever—by his own choice. If more people carried guns and used them in these kinds of situations—not just in terrorist threats, but street robberies also—we’d have a much safer country.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/cincinnati/evanston/contractor-claims-self-defense-in-deadly-evanston-shooting

Nearly at the same time as the contractor shooting in Evanston, Cincinnati attorney Stan Chesley and his wife, Judge Susan Dlott – both personal friends of the Clintons – were driving back to their Indian Hill home from a dinner in Montgomery.  Three punks followed them from the parking lot.  Once the powerful attorney and his federal judge wife were inside their home the punks kicked in the basement door of the victims’ residence, committed theft, roughed up the couple with abuse and pointed guns at (Chesley and Dlott)’s heads.  The thugs Terry Jackson, 21, Darrell Kinney, 20, and Demetrius Williams, 20 — were apprehended by Madeira police following a traffic stop the same evening—luckily.  If Chesley had been carrying a gun, he could have stopped the situation immediately.  The threat is very real; we are in a dangerous world even in nice neighborhoods.  The youth in America have been radicalized by liberal educations and entertainment.  It’s not just Muslims that are the potential threats for violence; it can be anybody—particularly if they are under thirty years of age.  Radicalized educations have destroyed the mind of young people making all of them potentially dangerous.  You can’t go around shooting them all at will, you have to wait for them to make a move against you, but you can’t assume that it won’t happen because President Obama is on the case with his executive order pin.  It is government mismanagement that has caused all these problems, and the responsibility to fix them all starts with good guys with guns.

http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hamilton-county/indian-hill/police-embattled-attorney-stan-chesley-robbed-at-gunpoint-in-indian-hill-home

All three stories discussed above happened in just one week.  There is not a single source of threatening behavior.  Watching out for radical Jihad fanatics is just a small piece of the puzzle.  We have an entire generation of young people raised to think they are victims and that society owes them something and that if they want that something—they’ll take it by force if necessary.   If three thugs can drive into Indian Hill and rough up a powerful couple on the speed dial of Hillary Clinton at gun point—in their home—it can happen anywhere. 

The only way to stop those possibilities from occurring is by putting a gun in the hands of good guys and giving them the ability to use that gun to stop bad guys.  We do live in a world full of good guys and bad guys.  We are expected to know the difference—and most people do.  Politicians are tone-deaf to evil, because in many cases they embrace evil by the nature of their jobs—so they are unqualified to legislate on our behalf.  Obama is certainly unqualified.   To protect us from them, we have the NRA.  And to protect us from legal recourse, we have Second Call Defense.  But to protect us from terrorist threats, whether it may be a common robber, or a Saudi terrorist attempt—the best defense is a good guy with a gun.  So let’s get guns in the hands of the best people we can find and let them do their work—and let’s turn our country back from the brink from which liberals have created for it—and put it back under our safe keeping as the barrels of our guns point outward to the threats which intend it harm.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

What Ann Becker and Donald Trump Have in Common: Why Republicans lose to inferior Democrats

Even though this is a local issue, it has significance on the larger GOP philosophy, so it’s worth a vigorous discussion.  My friend Ann Becker was harassed at a recent GOP meeting in Butler County for really the same reasons that Donald Trump has been on the national stage.  Not because she declared that Muslims should be rejected from American borders out of safety from terrorism, but because she, like him, is a political outsider—and they truly run the GOP like a mason’s lodge instead of a political representation of the conservative electorate.  I’m very sympathetic to her because I know it feels.  I’m probably the most conservative person in Butler County.  I would hardly say that I’m a radical right-winger by any means.  My type of thinking would be very much at home in John Wayne’s America.  But certainly not the type of GOP supporter the Bush family has helped create—center right leaning people who are in politics to protect their business interests only.  They are not for the philosophy of conservatism as a primary concern.  I personally like Todd Hall, who currently runs the Butler County GOP—which is arguably one of the most conservative areas in the nation.  But I learned much more than I cared to about the party and the politics of it in 2011 when area Republicans were pandering to the Tea Party types hoping to choke them off at the pass after the 2012 election.  Before getting into details of this behavior, read what happened to Ann Becker by Todd Hall at a recent meeting, which was extremely childish on behalf of the GOP.

http://www.annbecker.com/trouble-at-butler-county-gop-endorsement-vote/

I was at an event not that long ago with all the powerful local politicians and Governor John Kasich.  After a big speech we gathered outside where drinks were flowing freely and everyone was trying to convince the other about how worldly they were—essentially impressing nobody.  The words were empty and rooted in sand.  One small gust of political wind always uproots them into tumbleweeds of indecision—even at John Kasich’s level.  I was very unimpressed with these titans of Ohio politics.  Meeting him in person changed my impression of him forever.  He was weak; you could see it in his eyes and body language.  I don’t brag about it too much but I can usually tell everything I need to know about someone in about three minutes—I can completely disseminate their personality, their hopes, their fears and their strategic aims just by listing to their emphasis on words, the way they shake hands, and the way they communicate through body language.  There is nothing that anybody can hide from my analysis.  I take note of everything possible and arrive at conclusions based on those observations which are always correct, even when someone tries to throw me off the scent.  I was always good at these kinds of things, but over the last ten years, it has become so second nature to me that it’s like breathing.  Meeting Kasich in person and his immediate supporters and the donor base only caused me to lose complete confidence in their competency.  I try not to let people know what my conclusions are, because after all, those people have to live in the skin of their bodies—and most of the time it’s too late for them—so why make them feel worse.  It doesn’t accomplish anything.  But trusting them with something is off the table.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt until I was on WLW radio doing a live bit to hundreds of thousands of people and I was in a gotcha press moment. (CLICK TO REVIEW)  I was in one of those media sensation moments and was playing my part of it.  I worried that my Republican friends would bail on me under the heat of controversy—after all I was fighting on their behalf.  And they did exactly what I feared of them—while I was on the air they sent a press release to the station distancing themselves from me like a bunch of cowards.  I was of course prepared for their actions, but it still was something I hoped to be wrong about.  I wasn’t wrong.  I have not communicated with many of those people except on business since.  I’m not a let bygones be bygones type of person—I hold grudges for decades—maybe even lifetimes.  I have learned to get along with people for the sake of business, but I don’t get cozy with them—ever after they betray me in some fashion.  So it is for that reason that I don’t offer my leadership to the area GOP, even though they need it.

I don’t play in my life by bi-laws, like Todd Hall brought up to Ann Becker keeping her from videoing the event, and confiscating her personal cell phone from recording what was going on.  That’s not acceptable behavior.  The GOP is not a secret society, and there shouldn’t be any strategic secrets.   The Democrats are an open book when it comes to community organizing and they destroy Republicans at the effort because of the childish intentions of area GOP leaders.  It’s not just Todd Hall, it’s a nationwide problem.  You can hear the frustration in establishment leaders like Jeb Bush and John Kasich when they talk about Trump.  They really believe they can lean on the many thousands of Todd Halls across the country to prevent delegates from casting votes for Trump at the GOP convention at the end of the 2016 summer making him the official nominee.  They do so with the same stupid arrogance and need for power that Todd Hall confiscated Ann’s phone.  How stupid is that?

There is a lot that I could offer the GOP and Todd knows me, and what I could do for them.  The moment they tried to fight a tax increase without my help out front, they lost—for obvious reasons.  But I’m not submitting to anybody’s authority.  I am always respectful of other people’s rights, and when someone comes after me, man, woman, or whatever—I fight them hard—really hard.  I share with Trump a desire to completely destroy whoever attacks me—so those kinds of games only let “yes men” near GOP leaders instead of truly the best and brightest that each community has to offer.  The smart thing for Todd to do even if he doesn’t like Ann is to use her natural enthusiasm to carry the party forward with marketing efforts.  Ann is on 55 KRC every Monday morning with Brian Thomas and she’s great with the newspapers.  She’s a wonderful asset.  Ann and I have many differences, she was a Lakota levy supporter in 2005, she doesn’t like guns, and she’s much more libertarian than I am in regard to drug use.  But I still consider her a very good friend.  Whenever she’s convinced me to have a night out with her, I always enjoy it, and we get a lot done.  She’s good at what she does and I respect her.  That doesn’t mean she has to line up 100% with everything I believe.  Todd could have that kind of relationship with her, if he was willing, but he’s not.  Instead, he sees her as part of an opposition that is trying to take the GOP toward a more libertarian type of party—and for him; he likes the GOP to be the party of the builders and developers.  Ironically, he has a lot in common with Donald Trump, but if the party bosses say not to endorse the New York billionaire, Todd will strong-arm the party away from supporting the current front-runner.  They’ll abandon him like they did with me on WLW radio in front of hundreds of thousands of people because they essentially lack the courage to stand by a belief in anything.  That’s why they are so easy to beat.  Yes they have a Republican majority in the House and Senate and several state governors across the nation, but what are they doing with all that power?  They allow themselves to be pulled further and further left—because they won’t stand for anything.  So they lose in the big picture time and time again to left-winged radicals and name calling dissidents.

Even though I’m sure Ann was probably a little defensive while trying to set up her camera knowing that Todd would come over and condemn her for it, ultimately she is trying to make the party better.  And everyone should know that.  Every day I get emails from Democrats telling me to take action on some presidential proposal, or liberal talking point—both large and small.  They have a blogging network that the left gets behind along with a wide range of pundits that work the press actively every day.  I get emails from them because I’m politically active and my name is everywhere and on everything.  I get only a fraction of those emails from Republicans.  They are not nearly as good as Democrats at marketing their position, largely because when they do get someone who is good at that kind of stuff, they don’t stand behind them.  Liberals always stand behind their people, right, or wrong.  Republicans never do, they seek to distance themselves from controversy at every turn and collect cell phones from their most ambitious supporters only to put a cap of secrecy on everything they do, hoping the “enemy” Democrats don’t find out about it.  The cause of this behavior is that most establishment Republicans who have something to lose whereas the Democrats are largely government employees or recipients of government hand-outs in some fashion—so both sides vote with their wallets.  But people like Ann, and I—we are all about the philosophy of conservatism.  And there is no room in the Republican Party for us.  But there should be.

There are many good people out there not working with their area Republicans who are far more talented than the usual party stiffs to work the media. There’s nothing wrong with being a stiff—there’s value in it. But to market Republican values, dynamic personalities are needed.  I’m not particularly keen on dropping names to show who I know and to what extent but I recently spoke to David Kern, who just stepped down as Liberty Township trustee and was essentially removed from office as he used to run the GOP before Todd Hall took over.  I’ve known the Kern family for many, many years and have always liked them.  David Kern was a Tea Party type before there was ever such an organization, but he often walked the very fine line between establishment and maverick seamlessly.  He was very good and he will be missed because it wasn’t easy.  He’s an old man now, but he was like that for several decades and Butler County politics was better off because of it.  The party needed resistance just like a good football team needs to practice against a tough defense—to make them better.  Ideas are good.  But the establishment types made a move against Kern after they were done using him to win Tea Party support during the 2010 and 2012 elections—which ultimately helped take over the House and Senate by 2014.  The stage is always set for these things a half a decade before we ever see the results.  Anyway, Dave and his wife Katy told me the whole story as we ate at a dinner together—and it was incredibly disrespectful to him as a long time Republican.  I thanked him for his work on the Liberty Center project and he essentially rode off into the sunset.  I felt sorry for him—he gave so much to the Republican Party and was kicked aside like an old shoe—because he was one of those “free thinking undesirables” who thought the bi-laws were stupid and the party was too heavily in favor of one type of Republican—instead of the entire conservative base.

Ann Becker, David Kern, and Donald Trump all share some things in common, the GOP establishment like the one on full display at a GOP event in Butler County, want to push them out of the party.  They are all too free thinking to care about Todd Hall’s ban on cell phones and the childish games of a political party that wants to be an exclusive country club instead of a dynamic representation of southern Ohio conservatives.  If you want to be in a country club, join Four Bridges, Wetherington, or even my favorite, The Elks.  But don’t bring that crap to a political party that should be at war with liberals.  Democrats are winning because of it.  Instead of harassing Ann Becker, Todd would have been wise to listen to her, and bring her into his tent for what she could do for him.

But he didn’t and they won’t.  Donald Trump is right in front of their faces and they don’t like him because they can’t control him, which is why they continue to fail.  Ann Becker is also right in front of their faces and instead of befriending her; they harass her over her video camera and cell phone.  They are more about control than winning and that is the reason so many people are flocking to Trump.  Everybody on the outside of that GOP club has had enough.

Rich “Cliffhanger” Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707