At first I thought the advertisement below was for a new Muppet movie.  The caricature that filled the screen looked outrageously disproportional to reality, like some kid’s puppet meant to emphasize some grotesque villain intended to frighten children—but as it turn out, it was just my old nemesis from the Lakota School Board, Joan Powell.  Joan was at it again, exploiting children as she had five years prior when pushing for more tax increases as the school board president to coddle her friends within the labor union at the government school of Lakota—so to provide cover for her scandalous spending habits which ran at a deficit and exploded property tax rates throughout the eastern part of Butler County.  It was even more horrendous to learn in the commercial that she had just had her hair done—which she stated was one of the reasons she was doing this attack ad for Hillary Clinton—because her friends at the hair salon were concerned about Donald Trump’s rhetoric.  Her hair looked like a rat’s nest.  Whoever did that hit job on her head should give her back the money because whatever she paid, it was too much.  I could have saved her a lot of money with one of those old-fashioned bowl cuts.  Just put the bowl on her head and get out the scissors—and her outcome would have been much more presentable.

Seeing her again after so many colorful battles took me back to some good times.  I remember when Doc Thompson and I did a radio show about her behavior on 700 WLW, which can be heard below.  The best parts are at the 10:30 mark.  That broadcast was just a week before the November 2011 election for which the Lakota levy went down in flames just like I predicted it would.  School board member Lynda O’Conner along with Superintendent Mantia met with our No Lakota Levy group privately under the cover of darkness and great civility—hoping to quell our resistance.  Joan as president didn’t like it, so she openly sought to have Lynda knocked off in the next election with two potential rivals.  Lynda was hardly a staunch conservative type, but she had good intentions and was reasonable earning a No Lakota Levy endorsement for the election.  Of course Joan couldn’t have that so she put out a political hit on Lynda which I brought to the WLW airwaves.

My proposal was that Lakota in the future could offer mud wrestling between Joan and Lynda and save the tax payers the burden of higher taxes through revenue generated by the event.  It was a comic metaphor of course, but it symbolized what was really going on in Lakota politics at the time.  After that levy defeat just a week later, Joan tried a different strategy.  She joined with Lynda and worked her liberal friends at the hair salon to trash my name all in the name of “children.”  Of course that led to a rather ruckus exchanged which ended with me blasting Joan’s friends as “latté sipping prostitutes” with asses the size of car tires—and by the video above, you can see that I wasn’t exaggerating.  The exchange got so heated and contentious that Lakota called off all levy attempts for an entire year while they spent voluminous amounts of money hiring a progressive activist to pass a tax increase.  Even then, the election a year later passed with less than 1% of the vote—so it was hardly a slam dunk for Lakota who had to attach their issue to the recent school shooting of Sandy Hook to win enough sympathy to garner votes for passage.  Every dirty trick in the playbook was used by the pro tax people—led by Joan Powell’s tax and spend activists, including a bogus letter found in the girl’s bathroom stating that a school shooting may occur on election day found mysteriously the day before.  I offered that the note was a plant from one of the union activists because after the election, everyone forgot about the threat and no police investigation advanced.

After that Doc Thompson broadcast followed by the levy defeat it was clear to me that Joan and her pro tax people had no interest in civil discourse or rational thinking—so I met their intimidation games with my own methods—which they didn’t like and things got ugly fast.  In many ways I was doing five years ago locally what Donald Trump is doing now nationally—and if I had to guess why Joan put her name on a Hillary Clinton campaign ad against Donald Trump—it is because of her memories of that time and how she lost control of the situation essentially because for the first time in her career as a school board member, she had resistance to her tax incursions that could give it to her worse than she could dish it—and for liberals—that is their worst nightmare.  So much of what liberals do is rooted in fear and when their opposition doesn’t fear them—they are lost as to what to do next.

In the video, Joan Powell called herself a lifelong Republican—but that simply isn’t true.  She might have called herself a Republican because in Butler County if you want to be in elected office, you need to be a Republican.  If Joan lived in Hamilton County, she would clearly be a Democrat.  Her tax and spend positions are synecious with Democrats—they use the guise of Republicans to pollinate themselves as Democrats.  For Joan, in her liberal circles, they have always been up to big government expansions under the guise of Republican politics using children as their personal shields hoping to shake off skepticism for their actions.  Joan of course resorted to that method in her Hillary ad—that group producing the video is a Clinton super PAC—she used her grandchildren as political weapons exploiting their innocent lives for her political ambitions.  Joan these days is quite lost in her quests for power.  She had attempted to lead the charge in making West Chester a city—for which she could serve as an administer of some kind.  Well, that’s not going to happen.  I am proud of the role I’ve played in stopping that action because West Chester is doing wonderfully these days without being a “city.”  Joan then lost her state central committee seat run to my friend Mark Haverkos.  So she’s on the out politically.  Politics have change around her and she has not met that challenge with change of her own—but instead has stuck to the same old playbooks that haven’t worked in over a decade—because people like me have changed the game over the years.  I along with many others planted the seed which has sprung up to be Donald Trump.

What Joan really fears is not what Donald Trump might say as president that might scare her grandchildren—or the children of her liberal friends—it’s that Trump represents the kind of change in government that will make nosy power climbers like Joan Powell irrelevant in future political endeavors.  If you listen to that WLW broadcast I gave many examples of a very broken public education system and its unconstitutional funding and Trump is offering the silver bullet to end them all—School Choice—which will bring competition to public education and drive costs down, not up.  The bottom line which I realized after that election of 2011 was that the only way to beat the tax incursions proposed by big government supporters like Joan Powell was not by just saying no at the ballot box, but by taking away the monopolies for which she had the ability to build a small empire of pro tax advocates who could readily attack anybody in the community who dared to stand in the way of their government money.  It’s not Trump that Joan fears, its change—change that must happen so to break that insane cycle Doc Thompson and I outlined on that rather important 700 WLW radio show a long time ago.  Trump is a solution to that diabolical public education funding issue that big government liberals like Joan Powell helped create, and she’s scared of it—for all the same reasons that Hillary Clinton is afraid to be on the debate stage with Donald Trump.  It’s not that he’s scary to her, or that he might use language insulting to her sensibilities—it’s that he might pin her down with the truth which is what all these liberals from Joan Powell, to Hillary Clinton fear so much.

I said it back then, and I say it even more today, sometimes when it comes to people like Joan Powell—and she’s certainly not alone—Hillary Clinton and her have a lot in common—you have to knock them on their ass to make your point.  I don’t mean that literally, but figuratively and the best way to do that is with the truth.  These progressive types steal our money through government power, then redistribute it to their voter base for the simple act of popularity.  They are like school girls who want to be the class president and most of what they do in life is to impress their little circle of friends down at the hair salon—so that people say hi to them and thank them for some act only government could give to those looking for an easy way into something—whether it’s the baby sitting service a government school provides parents, or welfare benefits to the lazy and destitute who typically are Hillary Clinton supporters.  When you call these people out on their activity they reach for the nearest child and hide their crimes behind the wonderful faces—and they call that “compassion.”  I call it a crook—and we should call them what they really are.  I’m proud of the role I have played in calling out Joan’s past actions of aggression.  The Lakota School Board turned out the better for it.  School Choice is the ultimate solution to that lingering school funding problem and I am proud to have been at the cutting edge of the discussion doing whatever I could to plant the seeds we are now seeing sprouting up everywhere and ruining the lives of people like Joan Powell’s quest for relevancy, and power at her hair salon.  It is appalling that people like her call themselves Republicans when they are actually tax and spend liberals, and that they expect to not be questioned on the matter because they hide their behavior behind children.  Hillary Clinton does it and so does Joan Powell—they are one and the same.  So it’s no wonder she did a commercial for Hillary Clinton.  Because Joan Powell, Hillary Clinton, and all those hair salon levy supporters are one and the same and the architects of the school funding problem.   Trump is the solution.   And those who put themselves between us and the solutions deserve at the very least to be called some strong names to let them know they are out of line.  Better yet, they should be removed from office and Joan Powell has been.  Thankfully voters rejected her in favor of Mark—and that is a sign that things are finally improving,

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

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