Category: Rich Hoffman

Ann Becker for West Chester Trustee: Likely, the best candidate voters will ever vote for in their entire lives

Ann Becker and I don’t always agree on everything.  For instance she is a lot more libertarian than I am—politically.  She has supported school levies in the past whereas I likely never will.  And Ann Becker is not a big fan of guns—where I am.  Guns are a big part of my life—if I don’t have the smell of gun powder on my hands at some point in a day, that day is not a good one for me.  I shoot like some people golf—it’s all about ballistics, velocity and technique to take something carefully machined and crafted to perfection then launching a bullet toward a target successfully.  And that’s before the discussion of the Second Amendment.  Ann understands the right to bear arms, and she’s certainly no gun grabber, but she just isn’t a fan in using them.  She’d rather do other things.  Yet, Ann Becker is the most conservative and politically pure person I know, and I know quite a few people at different levels of occupation.  She is a real treasure in political thought and even with the differences I mentioned, Ann and I have never had a fight we couldn’t work out with a little talking—and that is what makes her such a wonderful candidate for the West Chester Trustee seat that needs filled from the exiting George Lang.  Here are some highlights of Ann’s debate performance at the West Chester Tea Party Candidate Forum conducted on October 17th 2017.

I wouldn’t support Ann just because I consider her a dear friend.  I also have a lot of friends and I wouldn’t recommend most of them for any kind of political office where the sanctity of the people were at risk.  So I’m not just talking Ann up because I like her.  She is just simply the best person for the job.  I would trust Ann with a pot of gold during a hurricane, and would be certain when I returned that all of it would still be there.  Ann is the kind of person who is sincere to her very core and she functions from those beliefs—and is extraordinarily ethical.  Perhaps her best skill is in her ability to coral people together who have incredibly different points of view and to get them to do what needs to be done.  While she always has great emotion in the things she does, she is remarkably able to keep the emotion out of her decisions and to allow the facts of a matter to evolve into a logical conclusion.

For those who are fans of the Brian Thomas radio show each weekday morning on 55KRC you already know Ann as “Lady Liberty” where she does regular radio segments talking about all the local happenings in the Cincinnati area regarding Constitutional studies and Tea Party oriented events.  She was not just president of the West Chester Tea Party for a while, but she was the President of the Cincinnati Tea Party as well. Over the years she has successfully been involved in many political activities extending from southern Ohio all the way north of Columbus.  Ann Becker is one of the most politically influential people in this part of the Midwest and she does it without pretentiousness or zeal.  She gets involved in so many activities because she functions from passion.  West Chester would be very lucky to have a person of her caliber as a trustee.  It takes a sometimes very patient voice to listen to all the different members of a community and try to bring everyone together toward a satisfactory conclusion—which is often not possible.  But Ann always tries and doesn’t let discouragement taint her optimism—and that is a very special trait.  Her vast experience at managing so many different personalities within the Liberty Movement, from the hard-core Constitutionalists, to the casual free speech supporter—Ann has routinely walked that fine line between success and failure successfully—so this West Chester Trustee seat is her next logical transition.   Currently Ann is the State Central Committee representative for the West Chester area which has proven to be an extremely important endeavor.  It’s also the reason she is able to be one of two candidates officially endorsed by the Republican Party.

I’ve worked with Ann on a number of things over the years and our relationship has always been productive.  As I said, we don’t always agree.  I am good at dealing with people of opposing views in spite of what many think, and Ann is also very good at corralling ideological differences without losing her moral compass.  In spite of being on different sides of a number of issues within the spectrum of conservatism, she and I have never left each other’s company mad.  So I am 100% certain she has what it takes to deal with the most complaining voices that a township trustee would have to listen to, all the while preparing for the most extravagant Republican fundraisers with all the powerhouses ready to write checks because Ann is sincere with everyone.  There is no fakeness to her, she can sit down with the guy who is upset about traffic patterns on Cincinnati Dayton Road and be completely fair and caring to him, then get on the phone to the area socialites to coordinate the more communal aspects of GOP occurrences and never lose a beat.   As simple as that might sound it’s incredibly difficult for most of our adult population to be good at those extreme tasks and still function from a place of sincerity.  When dealing with people everyone thinks there concerns are the most important things in the world—so it takes incredible skill to make the people you deal with feel as though you are giving them all of your attention, even though you may be pulled in a million different directions.  The more people in your life the harder it is to give everyone individual attention with complete sincerity.  A lot of times politicians may be so enamored that the socialites call them for help and they forget about the guy worried about traffic issues.  To the public those politicians become just another out-of-touch aristocrat.   Yet Ann is that unique type of person who can give everyone equal attention and leave them thinking that she really cares—because in all reality—she does.

Sometimes voters go to the booth to punch the name of someone they don’t know, and they can feel like they are taking a chance on someone just because they have an “R” next to their name and figure they don’t have any other options.  But finally with Ann Becker they do have an option for someone who is uniquely more qualified than anybody they may vote for in their entire lives.  Ann Becker is the most trustworthy person to maybe ever run for office.  While she was very successful in running the Trump campaign from within Butler County she started off that 2016 election supporting Ted Cruz.   She wasn’t a big fan of Trump at the start of the campaign, but as the facts came out of what kind of person Donald Trump would be Ann put aside her differences with his personality and focused on the policy improvements that would come from a Trump White House.  Ann played a big part in why Ohio averaged 10% over Hillary Clinton in the whole state when the final votes were counted—the ground game was good and the right Republicans were involved in helping Trump while the Kasich Republicans rebelled.  When the smoke cleared Ann Becker was still friends with everyone—and that is a remarkable achievement these days.   Not only does it show that Ann can work with anybody, but she is also able to amend her ideological position based on the facts as she comes to know them, and that is unique.  It’s precisely what any voter would want in a representative of any kind.  And that’s what you get with Ann Becker.  Voters may never vote for a better person for the job of West Chester Trustee in their lives but on November 5th 2017, when they get to punch the ticket for Ann Becker.

Rich Hoffman

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All the Reasons to vote for Mark Welch for Trustee: The “invisible hand” of West Chester

With all the talk about education and how much money should be spent on it, and has been within America, there are a lot of people who are in dire need of a vast education.  Most of the people needing it are those functioning as pundits and news reporters—especially politicians who are doing important jobs but don’t have the intellect to do that job correctly.  That has been the case so far during Donald Trump’s entire time spent in the White House. People who should know better are surprised that he has done such a good job so far and has led an economic approach that is breaking records in the stock market—as I write this the Dow Jones is currently 300 points about 23,000!  And the reason is basic economics.  Trump is providing a hands off approach to government allowing investment to prosper and for our capitalist exchanges to be trustful, so people are putting their money to work instead of hiding it away to protect it from radical politicians who want to redistribute it to their voter base essentially to buy elections.   Trump’s approach works and it always has for those bold enough to utilize a less restrictive business environment and we know that because Trump hasn’t been the first to try such things.  In West Chester, Ohio Mark Welch has been utilizing a very pro business strategy that has been very successful and now four years after he was first elected West Chester is booming in similar ways that the Dow Jones is currently.  It’s all about a pro business strategy that allows for growth, and now that Mark is up for re-election of his seat the facts are there for all to witness.  Below is a collection of video segments from a West Chester Tea Party forum conducted to feature the candidates for this year’s election.  Mark as expected, performed very well, and gave great answers to the questions provided to him which should put everyone’s mind at ease about electing him for a second term to continue the good job he has been doing.

I suppose where the education failure starts it is that most people just don’t understand the basic concepts of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  I mean, modern advocates for thought—and that includes everyone from the most highly paid attorney working for Beltway politics to the NFL player protesting on one knee during the National Anthem should understand well the idea of the “invisible hand” described in Smith’s epic work on economics.  The basic premise that self-interest regulates behavior far better than authoritative Theory X oriented fear of government—such as what occurred under Mark Welch when he first became a trustee in regards to zoning regulations.   Before Mark came along zoning was a radicalized venture in West Chester.  I can recall a case where a business was destroyed by West Chester zoning because they hosted Tea Party events on Tuesday nights and the rules of zoning were used to push it out of existence.  The heavy hand of government penalized this place of business for some signage displays on Sunday’s where a similar business right across the street was given a free pass—because it was a popular meeting place for Lakota school levy supporters.  It only took a few months once there was bad publicity unleashed for that place of business to close its doors—and that is just one example that government can destroy businesses by limiting the movement of Adam Smith’s free hand.   That building is still sitting empty years later, destroyed by government essentially.  The same story could be told all across America and when Mark talks in the video about beating an entrenched incumbent in the 2013 election, that’s why he won.  He has not disappointed West Chester, he’s made it much better over the last four years.

When self-interest goes from a focus on profitability and instead resides purely on survival it is then clear that we are living in a restrictive society confined to the artificial barriers imposed by government for the purpose of ideological control rooted in poor philosophic thinking.  It is hard enough to be in business competing in an industry without the hand of government sticking its nose into every little aspect of strategic implementation.  To an extent government is there to make sure that the game of business is played fairly, but they should not impose themselves on that climate, otherwise you destroy the “invisible hand.”  When government is too involved, that invisible hand stays in a pocket and doesn’t do what it should and that’s a bad thing.  Mark Welch certainly understands the concept of “the invisible hand” and West Chester is thriving in 2017 beyond anybody’s expectations.  Donald Trump is doing the same on a large national level.  Anybody who understood how these things work could do the same, but unfortunately such people are hard to find.

Maybe it’s because liberals—especially academic liberals, are inherently lazy in their thinking.  The works of Karl Marx is much smaller than Adam Smith’s works so perhaps it’s because it’s easier to read that liberals gravitate to Marxism and cower in fear of Smith. Most liberals that I have known love to smoke pot, have reckless sex with dirty unwashed people covered in tattoos and body piercings, and are weak people who like to hide in the safety of a crowd—so Adam Smith’s invisible hand is pretty scary to them—because they are scared people to begin with.   But that doesn’t mean you can build your society around their thinking.  Anybody who is in public office needs to understand the basics of Adam Smith’s concepts.  Under Trump’s presidency we can now all see how the Wealth of Nations is built.  It goes from concept in a large volume beautiful book to actual practice as represented by the Dow Jones records currently being broken by the day.  But before Donald Trump was Mark Welch in West Chester, Ohio who understood the invisible hand of Adam Smith from day one of his election during the first term.  The wealth of West Chester has exploded, and it’s not a mystery.  It’s all very predictable.  But Wes Chester is unique because it has had politicians like Mark who knew when to leave things alone—which is harder than a lot of people think.

Many years ago and up to very recently, in leadership training of people who need to learn those skills a common practice is to have a person stand on an elevated platform and to allow themselves to fall backwards into a group of waiting arms from your teammates to teach trust to the subconscious.  The thinking is to trust that the invisible hands of your team to know that they won’t let you fall because it’s in their self-interest not to let you.  For instance, if you are a smart person who holds the keys to their strategic success in life, you don’t have to worry about them backstabbing you from all types of success in life, because they need you for their own fulfillment.  So they won’t tend to let things happen to you if they find you falling.  Building that trust is one of those elementary practices in leadership training.  The people who are always terrible at this exercise are those cowering liberals who are afraid of their own shadows in life, so it is very difficult to fall back and trust other people because they don’t naturally trust anything—because of what they know about themselves if you really want to break it down correctly.  Let alone trust some invisible hand that is not controlled by government.  But their dysfunction cannot be the standard we all live with as a nation, or a community, because what they are experiencing is a psychosis not a healthy deduction of reason.  So when you get someone like Mark Welch, you grab on tight, because he is unique in the political world.  Hopefully with Trump’s successes on the larger stage more people like Mark will emerge.  But currently, people should be very grateful that Mark Welch is running for such an important trustee position, because he understands innately the nature of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and it has been that hand which has loaded West Chester, Ohio with such magnificent options toward the enjoyment of life.

I was at Cabela’s in West Chester just yesterday buying up ammunition for some weekend shooting and I had to marvel at the work of the invisible hand that has been doing a good job in West Chester.  To have the option of visiting Cabela’s on a wonderful October day then heading down to Jags for a nice steak lunch with important people to make decisions that would increase the fortunes of many people.  Then to top off the night at Top Golf and enjoy the sunset of a fall evening—but before leaving to walk over to Barnes and Noble for some new books to read are all miracles of the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s capitalism.  Everyone should read Adam Smith’s work because they would find such things much better miracles for which they are.  They’d also understand that much of that lifestyle I mentioned is a result of Mark Welch’s proper management of West Chester as a trustee—to build the trust that investors need to fall back into the waiting arms of West Chester’s government to protect them without meddling into their work.  The trust goes both ways, government has to trust business to catch it when they fall back into their arms, and the same for the businesses who must take a leap of faith with their investments to make magical things happen in the realm of capitalism.  It sounds easy, but unfortunately most people just don’t get it.  Mark Welch does, and that is the primary reason that people should vote for him on November 7th 2017. The invisible hand of Adam Smith is alive in West Chester, and it’s beautiful to look at when you can see what it leaves behind.  But trusting that hand is hard, and lucky for West Chester, Mark Welch does, and the results have been explosively delightful, and something everyone—even  loser liberals—can benefit from.

Rich Hoffman

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Joan Powell Comes Out Anti-Union as a West Chester Trustee Candidate: The difference between good management and being a suck-ass

 

One of the things that most shocked me from the recent West Chester Trustee Candidate Forum at Indiana Wesleyan College sponsored by the West Chester Tea party was that Joan Powell stated quite emphatically that she was anti-union and would like to see Ohio become a right-to-work state.  Who would have ever thought she’d say such a thing because it was Joan who sat on the Lakota school board for so many years caving into the union demands wrecking the budget with increased payroll with no management in sight.  Now that Joan is running for trustee in West Chester she has come out against labor unions which is interesting given the fact that many union radicals have targeted the trustees with their themes of dissidence exclusively because Mark Welch and George Lang had been exploring ideas to bring right-to-work legislation to West Chester specifically because Ohio’s governor Kasich has been soft on the labor unions due to his defeat of Issue 5 several years ago. Because of her friendly attitude toward labor unions in the past, strategists would have thought that Joan would seek the Lakota union votes in this trustee race but oddly she tossed that away with the statement seen below.

This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Joan Powell.  When I was heading the effort to make Ohio a right-to-work state in 2012 Joan turned her political guns on me and did whatever she could to erase me from what she was doing as president of the Lakota School Board.  At the time Joan was trying hard to give the teachers who worked for Lakota a raise when I had been showing that the exclusive cause of the operating levy she had been seeking was to add more to the wage rates which were already well over the average household income.  Joan’s position was extremely friendly to the labor union at Lakota, and her track record is her track record.  There isn’t anybody who can assume based on her history that Joan would do anything but lay down in future negotiations with the various unions that are in West Chester’s wheelhouse, like the police and fire departments.  I mean it’s easy to say that we value school teachers, fire fighters and police officers—and to give them all the money they are asking for.  It’s hard to tell them no, and that they already make too much money.  In the case of fire and police officers they always give you the speech about how they run into danger while everyone else runs away, so when their contracts come up public support usually favors the unions but as trustees elected to manage the finances, sometimes you have to do the hard things then explain it to people even when its unpopular.   The easy thing is to do as Joan has done in the past and that is to just give the union what they want to keep them from going on strike, then seek tax increases to cover the costs.  That’s why her statement here is so surprising.

If this Joan Powell had revealed herself 10 years ago we might have avoided a lot of bloodshed in the Lakota school district.  I might have gotten along with her!  But, my experience with her says that she knew what kind of crowd she was speaking to and she formulated her comments specifically to her audience.  What she really believes is something else entirely.  Nobody can look at the record of Joan Powell over the years as a president of the Lakota school board and determine that she was anything but excessively friendly to the public union effort.  Yet you can hear with your own ears her declaration that she is against labor unions so who could really know what to believe.

I personally think public sector unions should be illegal.  If you have a job funded by tax payers you should not be able to organize against tax payers or their representatives for more money.   In private business competition can help bring reality to labor union activism so the free market does the job of helping to manage the situation.  But in government, we are talking about monopoly status over the tax dollars in question so labor unions have unfettered access to the funds of the communities they are supposed to serve.  It’s easy to obtain the funds they desire because often the only people who stand in their way are politicians like Joan Powell who never want any bloody conflicts with their labor unions, just peace.  Elected politicians find the temptation to throw vast amounts of money at these public sector unions too easy.  It’s far easier for them to ask for tax increases from a faceless community hiding the effort behind children or the safety of our citizens.  That makes those types of people terrible managers and Joan Powell is certainly guilty of that.

Yet for the record in 2017 Joan has declared that she is against labor unions so as a note to the police, the firefighters and the public school teachers who might think that they might vote for Joan Powell looking for an easy run over politician to engage in future negotiations with—she has indicated that she is anti-union.   I mean perhaps she has learned some lessons over the years.  I wouldn’t vote for her as a trustee, the only people I think have a chance of doing good work as a West Chester trustee are Mark Welch and Ann Becker.  Lynda O’Conner may be a good pick for that third seat because Lee Wong is a disaster and Joan Powell has a terrible track record at managing big budgets.  But in regard to her statements on labor unions, I actually agree with Joan Powell on something.

In actuality Joan was likely just telling the audience what they want to hear, which is worse than being an open liberal because as a voter you can never be sure what the person you are considering really stands for.  Knowing a bit about Joan Powell I think she is very malleable—her thoughts always go to the path of least resistance and that’s fine if you are a grandma handing out cookies to your grand kids—but when you are supposed to protect millions of dollars from the greedy hands of public employees who want the most money for doing the least work—you want someone who will manage that money with some valor.  Labor unions may want to vote for Joan because they smell the blood in the water, but one thing they won’t be able to rectify is that she did come out against labor unions in the 2017 election.   Her comments are now part of the public record and they will be used against her in the future.  That’s why we have these forums, so that we can test the candidates in the forges of reality to see how they hold up to a little scrutiny.  Obviously Joan Powell says whatever she needs to in order to appease the people she is addressing.  If it’s labor unions, she gives them what they want.  If it’s the Tea Party, she does the same.  So there is nothing about Joan Powell that indicates she would ever do anything but tell people what they want to hear.  The damage she has always done, and obviously seems committed to in the future, is that she is more in love with the popularity of being a public official than in doing the hard work of management.  And that is what deciding this election of 2017 is all about.  If people want good management, Joan Powell is not their person.

Rich Hoffman

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Ernest Gause for Lakota School Board: Bringing Lean ideas and lower taxes to a district screaming for improvments

Many people over the years have asked me what would it take to support a school levy at Lakota—as if the decision to spend more money were the problem. I have always said that good management is what I want to see at Lakota and to that effect I think Jenni Logan has done a really remarkable job as the treasurer—she is a first-class talent that has been very impressive over the years. Her addition and the reality of declining enrollment within the Lakota school district due to a peak in real estate growth, have resulted in a budget at Lakota that has been operating at a surplus, which is how it should be. Even if the 2013 levy which Joan Powell and Linda O’Conner supported had failed, Lakota would still be sitting pretty today with a surplus because of the fiscal management starting at the treasurer position. But other things have declined since, the old superintendent became sick and left the district, and many of the board members indicated they wanted off the train opening up a number of seats for this election year—and the report card has declined—which isn’t acceptable. So there is a lot at stake in this 2017 election. Lakota’s success will have a lot to do with the kind of school board we elect and without question the best candidate on my radar is Earnest Gause. I think he is the kind of improvement for Lakota as far as out-front thinking that is equitable to the impact Jenni Logan has had on the accounting side.

Ernest is a good guy, I’ve talked to him on several occasions and most recently at the School Board Forum of the West Chester Tea Party where he was a clear stand out with Todd Parnell during the debate. Ernest has a lot of new ideas that reflects his very impressive background which can be seen below from source material on his newly opened website, also linked below. As you read through the following information I am most excited to potentially see Ernest apply Lean techniques to the business of school board, because that would go a really long way to solving many of the over bloated problems that have been associated with such a big district in Ohio functioning as a government school crippled under imposing political standards and a selfish labor union. Lean manufacturing techniques would force all that garbage to the surface just like it does in every place of business that it’s applied to, and that would add much to the overall performance standards of Lakota. In public schools for too long labor unions run everything and politicians run everything else. I’ve always said that if business practices were applied to education that not only would children be better prepared for the real world, but many of the villains that drive up the cost of education would be exposed, and I am certain that with Ernest Gause at least good logical people would finally have their representative on the school board. Earnest is someone I could get behind and trust. Here is the background of Earnest Gause as indicated on his website:

Ernest Gause is a business consultant and owner of Source Consultant that specializes in HR Benefits, Diversity and Inclusion and HR Operation as well as an Executive Coach with over 25 years of experience. Mr. Gause is a Six Sigma Black Belt with a history of success working with Fortune 500 Companies in many different industries to include Retail, Banking, Manufacturing, and Call Centers. He has supported operationally over 40,000 employees across the United States and Canada to drive innovation, creativity, accountability, and revenue to achieve operational goals and objectives.

As a calculated risk-taker with deep human resources and operational knowledge, Mr. Gause has championed innovation and creativity in the organizations he has supported to streamlined IT systems to drive operations to increase customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Mr. Gause has put in place employment pipelines and recruiting efforts to support and promote key talent to build organizations business models to driving profitability to the bottom line.

Mr. Gause has 4 degrees, 2 masters and 2 bachelors in business and technology. Attending and graduating from the University of Nebraska and Bellevue University in pursuing master’s degree at the same time. It was pursuing his dream of mastering business and technology that he realized that we are a part of an evolving society and world that is getting smaller and smaller every day. After graduation, Mr. Gause began his career working in the financial industry for fortune 500 companies where he was to work a national product release, strategies and assist in developing the strategic direction of the organization.

With his business successes, Mr. Gause realized that you have to give back to the community that has been vested and invested in your success. Mr. Gause achieves this philanthropic work by partnering with school systems, private and public institutions to build educational, employment and technology pipelines to support the next generation of leaders in our community. To further support the next generation of leaders he has built consortiums of businesses, colleges and universities to drive that entrepreneur spirit to support, motivate, inspire and drive our future leaders to be the best version of themselves.

http://gauseforlakota.com/

Earnest is obviously very competent, and he’s a different kind of candidate than we’ve had in the past. For people who really want to solve the problems that I’ve complained about at Lakota for years, electing someone different is a step in the right direction. I think Earnest has some great ideas on a number of topics and that Lakota could score higher on future report cards just because of him setting higher priorities. I think he’d find a friend in Todd Parnell that would get a lot of good things done for a change. But the best thing that Earnest is talking about is an actual strategy for having a replacement levy to reduce taxes at Lakota. That is certainly a step in the right direction, and at Lakota it is possible. Because of the quality of the people who are already in the district and the declining enrollment that we are experiencing, a levy reduction strategy is a great thing to pursue. Earnest is thinking right about the matter!

Of course the real problem has always been the increased wage demands from the union each year, so at some point even with the surplus at Lakota, the union will seek more and more money until they force another levy on the community—when it’s all completely unnecessary with good management. Earnest brings that solution with him by way of personal experience. Lean manufacturing application to a public-school system is exactly what would bring all the ugly stuff Lakota likes to hide to the surface ultimately making it a much better district value wise at a reduced cost—just like it does in the business world. Anybody with a $200 million dollar a year budget like Lakota would be insane not to apply some version of Lean economics—and that is why the budgets are always so bloated. The way to correct that insanity is to put people on the school board who understand those types of things—and Earnest Gause does. I’ve spoken to him personally several times now and he impresses me each time. He’s the real deal and would be an instant improvement to the Lakota School Board. And he is the guy I’m voting for enthusiastically on November 7th 2017. I wish there were five Earnest Gause candidates that I could vote for this year. But there’s only one—and I’m happy to finally have a choice. Because Lakota is long overdue for someone of such a quality. He’s the best option on the ticket—and will be a real asset to the Lakota school system.

Rich Hoffman

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What We Learned about the West Chester Trustee Candidates for the 2017 Election: Ann Becker and Mark Welch are clearly the best picks

There weren’t really any second-place candidates who touched the levels of competency toward the open trustee seats in West Chester, Ohio than Mark Welch and Ann Becker as displayed during the West Chester Tea Party candidate forum at Indiana Wesleyan University on October 17th 2018. I mean there were other candidates there speaking that night, but Mark is the incumbent and the guy with the very successful track record—so much so that Democrats are rightfully terrified by him and have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to knock him off his seat. Then there is Ann Becker, Ms. Lady Liberty herself as she can be heard often on her 55 KRC radio segments on the very popular Brian Thomas show—who has been involved in just about every kind of politics in Butler County that there is. She is leaps and bounds above everyone else so she and Mark make a great team for two of the three trustee seats that are coming available. Of course, the focus for the purposes of preserving conservativism in West Chester relies on at least two conservatives being elected on November 7th and out of all the candidates running—many of them are good people—only Mark Welch and Ann Becker have the official backing of the Republican Party—and this year, that means a lot.

I think after watching all the other candidates speak if I had to pick a third person for those very important West Chester trustee seats it would be anybody but Lee or Powell. That third seat currently has belonged to the incumbent Lee Wong, but after his support of the Chinese spy scandal involving a Sherry Chen and her termination at the National Weather Service for alleged espionage, Lee has since dropped off the map. He embarrassingly protested on her behalf recently to help her get her job back and his defense of his friend revealed many disturbing traits about Lee Wong that many people hadn’t seen before. He tends to be aloof and disengaged when it comes to complicated issues, and he obviously has sided with organized labor locally—so he has lost his mask of Republican Party affiliation showing himself to be a lopsided liberal on almost every topic.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/03/14/disgraced-chinese-american-scientist-fights-get-her-job-back/99171480/

The other person running who is obviously not a conservative is Joan Powell who came to the West Chester forum knowing that the audience was very constitutionally minded, so she attempted to talk their language, and everything ended up coming out phony. I’ll give her credit for trying, but she clearly wasn’t the right candidate. After all, she had been supportive of West Chester becoming a city some years back which means a lot more government to manage things and always has in her thoughts and actions big government approaches to everything. I thought it was particularly interesting that she tried to distance herself from the terrible labor union negotiations she had been involved in over the years at Lakota by saying that she was supportive of Right to Work. That was odd because most of the reasonable conservatives of West Chester remember her for her tax increases as president of the Lakota Board of Education. By alienating the leftist union members who might otherwise vote for her in memory of her Lakota failures, who did she think was going to support her for trustee? There aren’t enough of the “girls” getting their hair done with Joan to put her over the top. She came across grossly out of touch and adhering to the politics of another century in the past. She certainly didn’t project herself as part of the future.

Everyone else falls below the prospect of viability. In the coming days I’ll put up specific videos from this West Chester event to paint a more articulate picture of the proceedings. But for the high-level viability of the two primary candidates, Ann Becker and Mark Welch they did a good job and the little ad displayed above indicates my feelings on their candidacy. I have a lot of hope for the two of them. For Mark I’d like to see him continue to do the great job he has done. With Cathy Stoker out-of-the-way and Lee Wong put on ice over the last several years West Chester has prospered dramatically. It was kind of like the effect Donald Trump has had on the stock market. There’s a reason the Dow is pushing up over 23,000 for the first time ever. Many investors who had been looking toward West Chester to build a business, or even to start a family felt inclined to move once Mark was elected and from there hotels have exploded on the scene, along with many new restaurants, shopping, shooting ranges and many other options that have improved the lifestyle choices of the West Chester community.

There were some interesting conversations at the trustee forum that represent distinct philosophical differences. For instance, Joan Powell espoused her view that schools are what make a community great—which is clearly not the case. You can spend all the money on education that you want and the quality of a school will not help it at all. Rather, schools tend to be great based on the quality of the people who live in an area. Good people produce good kids and therefore, good students. Mark clearly understands that formula and most everything he does centers on those basic philosophies. That’s why Democrats hate him so much, because revealing that formula is something they are absolutely terrified of. That’s also how you can know that people like Lee Wong and Joan Powell are not Republicans but are in fact liberal Democrats—because they miss the basic concept of foundational government as a representative management device of the public. A government school does not make kids great, their parents do. If you want a great community you need to have an environment conducive to the lifestyle of good people—good in this case being people who have jobs, raise their children with parameters of expectation—and do things as a family unit. For instance, if you go to the VOA Park in West Chester, the people you meet there are generally all good to each other, and conduct themselves well. Respect for themselves and each other is a prevalent theme and that reflects the general demographic of the region which tends to attract good people to it. West Chester has great access to good jobs. Great access to interesting things to do, and it has low taxation—all which attracts good families with values. When those kids go to school they are naturally good kids. If you spend the same money on communities where the parents are terrible, the school system will obviously reflect that. The idea that a school makes a community is a liberal organized labor myth built to inflate wages and benefits for the government employees—not to fulfill the necessities of the community. Mark and Ann understand that delicate balance. Liberals like Joan Powell and Lee Wong don’t.

It was good to see such a large crowd at this event. People care very much about this outcome and that is wonderful, that is what makes our country great—at the local level. That is also the role that the Tea Party has always had, educating the public about the matters that matter most to them. In that regard I’d say the only serious candidates running for those three seats were present in the video above. If candidates aren’t willing to go before the West Chester Tea Party, they really aren’t serious about running for office. Hopefully this article helps you sort out the names from all the confusion—and that really only two names essentially top out the first two seats, Ann Becker and Mark Welch.

Rich Hoffman
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‘Baby Driver’ isn’t just about Fast Cars: A great film about touching the magnificence of life

It won’t save Hollywood from itself, but I was quite surprised by how good the movie Baby Driver was. The Edger Wright directed film was a remarkably good film for a heist movie with great car stunts. Personally, I’m a sucker for car stunts in movies and I had said that I could tell that I’d most relate to the main character of Baby—because when I was younger, I lived a very similar life. I made those comments from just the previews, but after finally seeing the movie over this past weekend on my home theater system, I am astonished by the work. I didn’t just like the movie because it reminded me of my teenage years, it was just a fabulous—well thought out movie that had some very bad characters in it, but was essentially about loving life and being a good person. I give Baby Driver two big thumbs up. For a business enterprise, it had a good budget and it made more domestically than it cost—which is always a good thing. The numbers shown below are the breakdown of the profitability of the movie which is important because it should be a lesson to Hollywood about what works and what doesn’t, What set this movie apart from everything else out there was the unabashed sense of hope that it displayed throughout the film. The main character, Baby was a good kid and the viewer found themselves rooting for some way that he could find a happy life with his incredible talent. If I didn’t know better I’d almost say that Edger Wright took sections of my book Tail of the Dragon and changed the scenes a little bit, but that’s OK. I would have never ended the movie the way he did, but it was satisfying all the same.

Baby Driver
Domestic Total as of Oct. 12, 2017: $107,796,728
Distributor: TriStar
Release Date: June 28, 2017
Genre: Action / Crime Runtime: 1 hrs. 52 min.
MPAA Rating: R Production Budget: $34 million

Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $107,796,728 47.6%
+ Foreign:
$118,526,768 52.4%
________________________________________
= Worldwide: $226,323,496
Domestic Summary
Opening Weekend:
$20,553,320
(#2 rank, 3,226 theaters, $6,371 average)
% of Total Gross: 19.1%
> View All 15 Weekends
Widest Release: 3,226 theaters
In Release: 107 days / 15.3 weeks

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=babydriver.htm

Even the villain played by Kevin Spacey had redeeming qualities. This was a story oozing with hope and the kind of valor only professional thieves understand who are driven by their enormous genius to live unconventional lives just because the world is otherwise too boring for them. Most of the bad guys in Baby Driver are overachievers who have fallen in the cracks of an overly institutionalized human existence. Maybe it’s just me and the kind of life I’ve had, I could relate to every character, even the deaf guy who was the godfather of Baby. But even so, the movie is great even if nobody has had those types of experiences.

At this point a lot of people have written reviews about this movie so one more by me won’t do much to help it. But I can say that it is movies like this that will help Hollywood in the future—movies without huge budgets that touch people’s lives in an honest way. Nobody with a beating heart could help but not cheer for Baby toward the end of the film and people rewarded the movie with a decent box office reception. Baby was a kid pulled into crime by losing his parents early in life. He didn’t know fear in the traditional respect until he met a girl that he loved and had the same kind of innocent passion toward life that he did. At the start of the movie I recognized in Baby a young man who had not had his childish imagination turned off and it was that which made him so extraordinarily good, and creative in driving cars for professional bank robbers.
My life was a bit different, I didn’t lose my parents so there was no reason for me to find myself in similar situations with similar people but for the fact that I loved to drive fast. I still do in fact. Baby in the movie was a natural driver where his car and his vast imagination made him into a superman behind the wheel—he was virtually unstoppable so long as he had a car. For me it was always that I resented that by the nature of driving I was constrained behind normal people—and was forced to live by their restrictions in life. Driving fast for me was an open declaration that I was not like those other people—that I was living an exceptional life. And if anybody had a problem with it, they could take a hike.

I was in constant trouble, I went to court a lot and was threatened with jail almost every three months. And with such attitudes of course a criminal element would be attracted to such a rebellious character. So that made for some interesting experiences. However when the rubber hit the road, literally, I was always a good person. I had a good family and good grandparents and my foundations were always solid, so no matter how murky things became, my moral compass was always able to show me the right way. So I really felt for the kid in Baby Driver, his mom was obviously a good one and he lost her too early in life, but she had made an impact on him that lasted a lifetime.

Baby’s love of life at the very beginning of the movie was a fascinating examination into human behavior. Baby was boyishly optimistic about everything so that made him an intriguing character—something you really don’t see much these days in movies. Some critics might think that his depiction of life was unrealistic, but I can say that it was pretty spot on in relation to my own experience. Ultimately it was that goodness which kept Baby from rotting in jail at the end. He was just too good of a person to be thrown to the wolves of society and people know and respect that when they see it. I had a very similar experience at many court appearances and more than a few judges told me that they didn’t have room in their jails for kids who were just too good. Jails are meant for menaces of society, not people who are genuinely good in every aspect. Being fearless is not a reason to put people in jail, or being overly imaginative. It can be unfortunate if the criminal element gets a hold of such people, but goodness tends to rise to the top in spite of the efforts of evil.

If you haven’t seen the movie do yourself a favor and do so. It’s a real treasure. It was unusual and optimistic in the ways we want our movies to be—and Hollywood would do a lot better to make a lot more of these kinds of films. Critics might say that Baby came from a broken home and had suffered terrible tragedies that would have prevented him from becoming such a person—but I know better. What the critics don’t know is that a good parent can produce similar young geniuses—just through the love that they give them. That is after all what makes people what they are in life—institutions certainly don’t. People who love to drive fast do so for usually some psychological reason that has great merit. I always knew why I did it in real life. Baby in the fictional sense was discovering it. And we who watch movies understand how those relationships work, because we understand people like Baby—even if we can’t relate so strongly to the character as I might. That’s because what’s in us as human beings desires so much to be loved and to flee from institutional mechanisms designed to artificially manipulate our lives toward service to a system. We don’t all have to be geniuses to feel that yearning for individual freedom—and that’s all Baby wanted in this movie. And that’s what we all can relate to.

Rich Hoffman

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The Four Stages of Change: How ‘Saturday Night Live’ is showing where Democrats are on that path

Clearly as we track this culture war that the United States is involved with currently, one year after the great election of 2016, where the political left learned harshly that a majority of the people were not behind their movement, we have entered the third phase of the four stages of change.  At first of course there was denial which we have witnessed, followed closely by resistance.  With the ANTIFA movement and various leftists groups like Black Lives Matters threatening to overthrow the new establishment that resistance has now migrated into exploration.  That much was clear on the October 14th airing of Saturday Night Live where they did two skits attempting to rectify this exploration idea.  It was a fascinating exchange to conceive of the writers and the producers at Saturday Night Live in the wake of the NFL and Harvey Weinstein controversies to look at the Trump presidency and explore the ways they can live within these new value assessments.

The first one shown here about Kellyanne Conway acting as the clown in the recent retread movie IT was very revealing in how the political left sees the world.   Their hero, Anderson Cooper is terrorized by Kellyanne Conway trying to get on television to represent the White House point of view as she has successfully done over the last year.   The political left, represented by the SNL writing team metaphorically views Kellyanne as the scary IT clown.  They are terrorized by her ability to always come out on top on her conversations with Anderson Cooper to the point where he doesn’t want to put her on television anymore.   While their depiction of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from IT is an insult to Kellyanne Conway who is hardly a terrible person—her effect on the media has been truly scary because they are overwhelmingly liberal—and are losing.  The change they had been resisting they are now exploring ways to rectify, so from a psychological point of view, it was a fascinating skit.

The second skit that was very revealing was the assumption that Melania Trump—whom the writers obviously aren’t sure how to deal with the feelings of respect they have for her, would call a Pakistani call center for spiritual advice.  Beneath the writers assumptions are the beliefs that capitalism is a hollow endeavor and that in her quest as a gold digger with a heart, Melania finds life in the White House so lacking fulfillment that she would confide herself into the ears of a perfect stranger on the other side of the world.   Of course the premise is blown out of proportion based on a faulty idea of capitalism.  But the revelation of how they think of Melania is quite intriguing.  I’m certain that Melania is a huge part of the strength behind Donald Trump from day-to-day, and that she doesn’t need the spiritual advice from some Pakistani call center worker, but the ponderings of the political left into what makes the Trump White House tick in an interesting observation.

The political left is obviously watching the efforts of their candidate Barack Obama come undone under Trump even though they have created a monstrosity of bureaucratic intention in our federal government to prevent reform once they start the wheels in motion.     Yes our federal government is designed to move slowly, and the insurgents counted on a congress to protect their extreme implements such as Obamacare to take effect before action could be taken to reverse the trends.  Trump with his recent executive orders undid that effort essentially by reversing the nature of the game the Democrats and Republicans had been playing with Obamacare.  While the Republicans pretended to work against the Democrats and all of them took money from the insurance lobby socialist insurgents like Obama could steer our society toward a single payer option and everyone could get what they wanted—except the American people.  The Saturday Night Live writers assumed that America was lock step with them, but since they lived in New York they were isolated from the sentiments of the rest of the country.   Now all of them involved in these little tyrannies are learning how out-of-step they really were all along.  So they are “exploring” their role in this new world of thinking.

The next phase of course is commitment and from here the political left will find themselves divided.  Some will merge with the president and his thinking because they’ll realize that behind Trump is a vast American population that he represents in this great republic.  Democracy is not what they thought it was, and the nature of Republicanism is showing them how a representative republic truly functions.  After all, before now there weren’t many examples to follow.  There was a lot of theory that looked good on paper and in philosophical testimonials from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, but not much history to build with.  Those who can’t commit to this course change will be destroyed by their own inflexibility.  This is what Trump knows is coming and why he is so confident that unlike Obama who abused his executive orders, Trump will get his signed into law because the political landscape will change over the coming months enormously.

As we’ve watched these four stages of change occur along very predictable lines of ascension, it is easy to plot out where we’ll be in the early stages of 2018, and beyond.  Obviously the SNL writers are beginning to see that ascension for the true value that has been obvious all along for those who view the world without political lenses.  The hate and vitriol are still there but people are survivors and they will adapt to the changing world due to their own self-interest.  That is why business people are good for politics—instead of contributing to the funds of lesser people known as politicians, the wise minds of business should just do it themselves.  They do after all understand these cycles of change because they go through the four steps every time they need to implement some strategic change in their places of business.  The difference is that in corporate America, culture building is the responsibility of the CEO or president.  In politics it comes from the know nothing losers who usually go to public office because the private sector has scared them and that has left us all vulnerable to these socialist insurgents, like the writers at SNL.  So the better experience at changing a culture come from those who have been successful in corporate America, like Trump.  And the results are predictably on schedule—and everyone knows it.

A good leader understands these four stages of change and they know how to weather the complaints and bitching that often come each time a new idea is put forth.  A good leader also understands that most of those people will come around to the right way to think out of their own needs to survive—and that is where the real reform from Trump comes from.  I’m sure it’s been hard for him, since day one, the political left has made his life a living hell in the White House.  But Trump is a good leader and he knows how to use the four stages of change to his advantage and the first sign of his success is what we saw this week on SNL.  They may not want to admit it, and they’ll deny it if asked directly.  But SNL is now in stage three—and that means that the storm is breaking and they have no choice but to figure out their place in a changing world—for which we are the ones deciding how that world looks.  That is something everyone reading here should consider as a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tragedy of Kobe Steel: How the smoke is fading and mirrors are breaking on lean manufacturing–revealing a diabolical academic scheme that was always there

The truth is there isn’t any magic wand that takes manufacturing techniques and turns companies into winners at the bottom line. Just like going to college couldn’t turn a kid into a success story without extremely hard work to go with it.  The harsh reality that many people have come to face is that you can’t buy quality, and you can’t wish yourself into profitability.  If you want to be successful in life you have to be willing to work harder than a competitor and you’ll have to figure out the latest trends before everyone else does in an ever-changing world.  It’s not enough to memorize the work of Eliyahu M. Goldratt or to study really hard the techniques of James Womach so that you can call yourself a “black belt” of lean manufacturing.  It’s still the case and it always will be that innovation and creativity are ever-changing opportunities for market dominance.  And let’s face it, that’s the name of the game.  That’s also why this global tragedy involving Kobe Steel is such a case study into the temperature of the world regarding manufacturing that it merits our tenacious considerations.

Kobe Steel is a large producer of various industry metals, particularly aluminum and due to the nature of the world marketplace distributes their product all over the world to the largest companies currently in existence.   The assumption is that since the company is Japanese that they make high quality products at Kobe Steel—just because they are made in Japan.  That country has done a great job building up their brand with an eye toward quality—which is precisely why Womack, Roos and Daniel T. Jones featured them so prominently in the 1990s book The Machine that Changed the World.  In that classic book Womack had pretty much closed the case on western mass production techniques and very subtly implied the takeover of manufacturing practices being instituted right in front of our faces.  College academics were essentially attempting to use lean manufacturing practices revolutionized by Japan—specifically Toyota into a global revolution that would help pave the way to a one world global government by unifying all various markets under the flag of lean manufacturing.  And this failure at Kobe Steel, which is quite serious presently, has the fingerprints of failure rooted in this rapid expansion of manufacturing approach that has been taking over the world since the 1960s.

The attempted academic takeover of all industries has been going on for a long time and their goal is almost always the same.  Generally the academic believes in global collectivism and that the power of the individual is subservient to the needs of group think—and the view of American mass production was that a single foreman, and a single process engineer were things of the past and that hive behavior in the form of lean manufacturing developed from Japan would become the dominate way of doing business.  But the real villain was not American manufacturing; it was the kind of rugged individualism that often emerged in American car companies and steel manufacturers.  If you peel back the onion even more behind these academic reformers they were ahead of themselves on global wealth redistribution and they purposely worked their way into the various industries with mountains of paperwork for employers to fill out so that the tasks would become so cumbersome that companies would just flee overseas to run away from bureaucracy.  The subtext to all this academic insurrection for the last 50 years has always been lean manufacturing and that American companies better get with the pace of the rest of the world or they’d be out of a job.

I’m never one to throw out the baby with the bath water; there are some really good things that Womach and his buddies came up with in that aforementioned book.  And I’m a fan of the work by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  I like those guys, but in relation to the problems of today, I have my own thoughts—and I dare say I often go much deeper than anything that came previously.  I’d say that you have to if you want to invent something new, otherwise how would you ever stand out in a world that is so competitive?   I can also say that I’ve been through many lean manufacturing seminars over the years and all those companies that sponsored those activities are now out of business, because what they did was attempt to copy what worked in Japan to an American market, and it clearly didn’t work.  I watched with disapproval as many companies tried to take the concepts in Womack’s book and applied them directly to manufacturing facilities where American workers resisted, and resented the efforts to the point where the company just folded—because nobody seemed to understand what was really going on.

The Japanese had a unique problem after World War II.  They had lost a war and needed to rebuild their economy from the ground up.  They also had an occupying force that changed all the rules of manufacture on them, and imposed on Japanese companies union friendly policies that made innovation so much more complicated.  Just like American manufacturing at the time was peaking because the mass production techniques had created in American workers this new idea of lifelong employment instead of just doing a job in the city then returning to their fields in the country to resume their independent life—socialist oriented labor unions took root and started managing things at manufacturing facilities across America.  At that time it was a trend so America forced Japan into the same box of thought for which they needed a way to get out.  So Japan offered a policy of lifelong employment to their employee but in going a step further than unions did in America, they adopted a decentralization of authority policy where wages and promotions were attached to tenure, not performance and that essentially stabilized their work culture into a nice predictable pattern that they were able to inject into a market share that essentially ruled for the next fifty years.  This was fine with the academics because it sapped the wealth from American manufacturing and relocated it to the orient and even into Europe.  As time passed and American companies still struggled with the concepts of lean manufacturing because at the core of it is a group think that purposely diffuses the merits of individualized behavior then more American companies became Chinese and Korean companies because people in those regions already were somewhat predisposed toward lean manufacturing thought—it’s an Asian thing.  For people who will eat the eyeball of a chicken as a snack it’s no big deal to stand at an assembly line and decentralize authority to the masses of group think.  But to the six-foot six ,300 pound redneck from Appalachia that has a Confederate Flag on the front of their pick-up truck, it’s quite difficult.

However, life was never all that great in Japan.  They were willing to work hard and long, but they were still an occupied country infused with western ideas on the collapse of their great empire which was destroyed at the end of World War II.  Before that they had the samurai culture which had been destroyed by the emerging new emperor—so the people were always ready and willing to fight for something but they had been shell-shocked over the centuries with a lot of disappointment.  If they could get back at the West by imposing lean manufacturing techniques on those “cowboys” then they’d be very happy, and thus they have been riding on that reputation now for many decades even though it took a lot of smoke and mirrors to maintain the illusion.  But those mirrors essentially broke with the release of this news from Kobe Steel.  To keep up their shipments and deal with the focus of the world on their products Kobe Steel had to fudge the paperwork they helped to create and due to the constant pressure from other Asian markets which have emerged over the last twenty years, Kobe Steel had to take short cuts on quality to stay relevant.  In essence, they became dominated by new, leaner and more ambitious manufacturing techniques just as mass production had been destroyed by lean manufacturing in the 80s and 90s.

I had a front row seat to all this activity, I worked at Cincinnati Milacron in the mid 1990s and it was going out of business by the day at that point in time.  They had us studying lean manufacturing techniques just to stay alive.  I could say the same about the Fisher Body planet in Fairfield, Ohio where my grandfather worked.  I could also say the same about the Camero plant in Norwood where I knew several people who worked there.  Now there is nothing left of those places, Milacron and the Camero plant were completely bulldozed away erasing their memory.  People visiting those locations today would never know that they ever existed.  In the final days of their manufacturing lives they had the same desperate anxiety about them that we can now see out of Kobe Steel—and it saddens me to see it, but it doesn’t surprise me.  These trajectories of failure are predictable and can be traced largely back to our academic institutions that impose themselves on the creativity of any industry that must move with much more nibble feet to compete in an ever-changing world.  By the time the academics get their published opinions out about global trends, they are too late and those who listen to them find themselves on the hot seat toward losing immediately.

I may tell my secrets later, but certainly not now.  Innovation didn’t stop with Womach.  Lean manufacturing has some good things to offer, but it certainly won’t deliver anybody to the Promised Land without a lot of hard work and a new take.  Just because you study the words of something it doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed, and so many people even today think that success can be bought.  For those who think such things just look at the Kobe Steel case—a Japanese company that is still struggling to find their place in a competitive world as their niche concept of lean manufacturing is proving to be more of a gimmick now than a justifiable strategy sold by academics for the purpose of destroying manufacturing in the West so that the East could spread communism to every corner of the planet.  That was always on the mind of the academic after all—that much should be clear to everyone now.  But lucky for us all, the wheels fell off at Kobe Steel before we went too far down that road—and the good news is that innovation and the next great things are still out there waiting for the world to copy them.  Until then, I’ll keep the smile on my face watching others try to figure out the latest riddle in the world of competitive manufacturing.

Rich Hoffman

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The Proper Use of Executive Orders: Why Trump is a hero and Obama was a loser

First of all, a note to the Democrats, the way Obamacare was created was as illegal as anything I’ve ever seen in my life.  The vote during Christmas of 2010 when everyone was looking the other way, the coercion—we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it, the weak Supreme Court ruling by identifying it as a tax when the Obama administration lied about the nature of it from the beginning—were all devious acts.  The notion that you can keep your doctor if you like your doctor when all along the Obamanites on Capitol Hill intended to destroy health care all together and give rise to a single payer system in the United States bringing one more socialist program to the freest nation on earth.   There were plenty of lies and manipulations congress did to bring Obamacare to life, then to have losers like John McCain force us like scandalous children to stay at the table of Obamacare just because of his silly vote was preposterous.  Given all that massive government dysfunction and intent to destroy free markets, Trump’s executive order to destroy subsidies into Obamacare was a much different thing than the typical executive orders of Obama regarding the impatient use of White House power to go around congress to get something done.   These powers were given to the president for just this kind of purpose.

Executive orders are not law.  What Trump did will need to still be made law at some point in the future.  But he can at least give the world a demonstration of what free market options look like while he works to get enough senate support to get real reform passed.  For that to happen John McCain likely will have to die in office and be replaced with a real conservative.  Other senators who were never Trumpers during the campaign, like Ben Sasse and several others will need to be removed from office and be replaced with more Trump oriented Republicans—and that appears to be exactly what the President is going to do.  Just because those never Trumpers put an “R” next to their names doesn’t mean they are the right kind of Republicans.  I know a lot of people who call themselves “Republicans” when in fact they are just Democrats in hiding—because they live in conservative areas of the country and couldn’t get elected any other way.

I watched the righteous indignation toward President Trump over his health care executive orders with great satisfaction.  Now that the shoe is on the other foot all the talk is about Constitutional respect and the value of checks and balances.  Yet when Chuck Schumer watched Barack Obama abuse his power to go around congress it was “heroic” and necessary.  Give me a break.  Trump’s executive orders are to fulfill a campaign promise in regards to Obamacare.  He can’t let congress stand in the way of a promise he was elected on—just so they can appease the lobbyists who have made them rich as public servants.   The original sin was created by Obama and his Republican friends in the Swamp who have secretly all joined together to carry America toward a single payer healthcare system which of course is a pay to play scheme for those remaining insurers who can use the lack of competition to solidify their costs with guaranteed subsidies.  It’s good for them and the politicians but terrible for the people it is supposed to serve.  So Donald Trump did the right thing and undid the whole mess so that everything can collapse and force everyone to the negotiating table which is a very different thing from what Obama had done.

Trump’s executive orders are not to subvert congress, they are to force everyone to the negotiating table to take positive action, and that is a proper use of executive privilege.  It’s why we should be electing more people in the future with real world business experience rather than community activists who have radical ideas constructed for them in academia.  Our current intellectual class of people around the world have subscribed to poor Marxist oriented philosophies and have been caught in advising the world toward disaster and that needs to change fast.  Trump is part of that answer.  Putting people into politics that are proven success stories is the trend of the future, not losers who are filled only with theories concocted in the dank old rooms of Oxford, then passed off to a bunch of oily skinned pubescents at Harvard, Princeton and Cambridge—who then carry those stupid ideas out into the world with disguised merit because they were spoken about from respected houses of academia.  Power and respect do not come from brick rooms and institutional hallways—they come from success and a reputation based on history.  Academia has ruined their reputations by teaching the wrong kind of things to their students.  Barry Obama learned the wrong things at the University of Chicago where progressivism was being launched from that particular institution to change the world from one thing to another.  Obamacare is every bit about that desire to change and academia has been proven wrong in their assumptions—yet they have insisted to carry all of us forward regardless of the facts—which is why they are being knocked out of power now.

It’s not that Trump happened to them.  It’s not that Trump had Russian help to win an election or used his celebrity to beat a loser of a Democratic candidate.  It’s that Trump has a track record of success in getting things done that spans four decades, and voters wanted to see something get done for a change—and they are tired of corrupt politicians ramming things down their throats like this single payer health care initiative that even Republicans are trying to steer us all to.  Trump promised free market solutions so we voted for him and expected him to deliver.  When congress didn’t play ball and sought to run out the clock on Trump by slowing everything down on Capitol Hill people recognized what was happening, so they support the actions of the president.  Of course liberals are mad, but who cares.  Their plots are coming undone under Trump and that is specifically why people voted for him.  That’s not Trump’s fault.  He’s just the messenger.  The reason he was elected in the first place is the fault of Democrats and the RINO Republicans who have not put American interests at the front of their considerations.   Instead they put forth plans created by a Marxist inspired academia around the world, and they expected that failure to solidify due to the lack of options they deliberately were providing to us.  With Trump now, free market solutions will at least see the light of day.  It will still be up to us, the voters, to advance that competitive formula into law over the years to come.  And that is the biggest difference between Obama’s executive orders and Trump’s.  Obama’s were radical ideas designed to change the nature of American life.  Trump’s are to force negotiations by creating options to consider.  And that’s why Trump is a great president while Obama was and will always be considered an insurgent who intended to destroy American sovereignty with one more crippling socialist program intent to put restrictive chains on our economy.   For academia health care was a Trojan Horse designed to destroy the American economy so it was a dream for them.  But it was a nightmare for the people of the United States—happily now because of Trump—we are waking up from the nightmare, and the new day is looking pretty good.

Rich Hoffman

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Where Are the Pink Pussy Hats Now: The death of Hollywood over terrible customer service

It was roughly a year ago that the Access Hollywood recordings of Donald Trump were released intending to sink his potential presidency.  When I first heard the comments I couldn’t help but feel the hypocrisy because let’s face it, men and women talk that way to each other all the time.  Women most of the time like the attention of men and men are by their biological design built to pollinate females to procreate our species.  All these silly new rules of conduct of men being chastised for wanting to stick parts of themselves into females are artificial and counterproductive.  But  when the people of Hollywood tried to use these new, stupid rules of male to female conduct to destroy Donald Trump when in fact it was they who perpetrated and actually exacerbated the bad behavior to begin with I thought was astonishing.  After all, Hollywood’s product used to be a good back when they made westerns and big sweeping epics like Ben Hur.  Men treated women with respect in those old productions and all was well with the world until movie producers like Harvey Weinstein made a joke out of the industry abusing his power so he could look at the boobies of the young women who wanted more than anything in the world to become stars on the silver screen.   It was obvious that if the same standard that was applied to Trump a year ago were to be turned around on the entire entertainment culture that a lot of people probably wouldn’t survive, and that’s what’s happening now.  Hollywood just killed itself with its own weapons.  Sean Hannity did a remarkable job of positioning the reasons why Hollywood will never be the same in the following video.

I always liked the Hollywood product and the industry as a whole.  But for a long time they have moved so far to the political left that what used to be an event I enjoyed—the Academy Awards were now just another inward looking celebration by a bunch of liberals congratulating themselves on being anti-American insurgents.  If you weren’t liberal you weren’t going to work on a Weinstein movie and in a lot of ways Harvey Weinstein was bigger than Steven Spielberg in Hollywood—by the volume of his work and the number of Academy Awards he amassed.   As one of the leading spokesmen for progressivism, his platform in the entertainment industry was unparalleled and it seems ironic that all that could be torn down with these outrageous claims toward him that are in some cases over twenty years old.  I say they are outrageous because many of the women who are now accusing Weinstein of rape are now forty-year old women who are no longer sex symbols.  They used sex to get into movies when they were in their twenties and only when men stopped looking at them as possible places to pollinate did they suddenly become “outraged.”  But the fact remains that dealing with people like Harvey Weinstein turned them into the man hating feminists that they are today as their lives are now filled with regret on what they had to do to climb the ladder in Hollywood to become a leading lady A-lister.

Yet the way they all collectively pounced on Donald Trump over the Access Hollywood tape was remarkably hypocritical.  They created the industry and the rules.  What Trump was talking about in his famous lines to Billy Bush was the effect of celebrity which he had just learned about late in life with his success with The Apprentice.  Trump was enjoying the kind of attention by women that movie starts like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had always enjoyed, and being a smart guy he was pontificating about it to Billy Bush.   Yes, women will do just about anything to be near powerful men—it’s a deeply biological response to the mating game.  But unlike most of those Hollywood hot shots, Trump had a nice wife who kept him grounded and the temptations of flesh that are often thrown at movie stars by the opposite sex just to have access to a memory with their idols was managed and Trump moved on to bigger and better things.  By the time the Access Hollywood tape was released Trump was a different kind of man largely shaped by his decision to marry Melania Trump.   But the desire for entertainment executives and major political pundits to go after Trump, and to try to destroy him over these new age male and female roles which they had perpetrated was always  dangerous because they also made up the rules of power playing the opposite sex into compromising positions just to work in the industry.   You don’t get to the level of being a leading Hollywood actress at the level of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow without showing somebody your tits.  Not when there is a line of young women from Santa Monica to Paris willing to do anything to be the next Hollywood star.  People like Harvey Weinstein made themselves the gate keepers to success essentially so they could see titties—and everyone knew it.   So who were they to criticize Trump?

After Trump was elected president and was sworn in, the Academy Awards ceremony to me was unwatchable.  The way they ridiculed President Trump just because he was the Republican in the White House was disgusting and it made me wonder if they knew who their audience actually was, because there are a lot of Trump supporters who are like me–they love to watch movies.  But if the movies and the people who made them were so anti-Trump, they’d be forced to go somewhere else for their entertainment and that’s what has happened.   Hollywood has had their worst box office performance in 25 years and they are down an incredible 16% just from the previous year of 2016.  That was before the Harvey Weinstein story broke which virtually connects every major star in the industry to all the ugly stuff they complained about in Trump.  Except with Trump it was largely made up and overblown, but in Hollywood they were actually doing the things they accused Trump of—and to a far worse degree.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/liberal-hollywood-worst-box-office-numbers-25-years/

Where were the pink pussy hats that the Hollywood stars wore in protest to the Inauguration after Trump spent his first days in the White House?  Former stars of the Hollywood machine ran by people like Weinstein were protesting Trump so they set the gauge by which they are all now choking.  If the same standards they were trying to apply to Trump were turned back on them, then what did they think was going to happen?   The Trump supporting public already voted with their feet, just like they have with the NFL.  The great American game of football is down 30% just because those stars in the NFL thought they were bigger than they were.  They learned a hard lesson; people in the stands don’t care about them if they are going to throw off the shared elements of our culture, like the American flag.  Fans of the NFL turned on those stars of sports in a moment which has been a harsh reality to all professional sports.  They forgot who their audience was and in their hatred of Trump they drew a line between themselves and the fan base that enjoyed their product.  They have a major customer service problem as a result.  And that is precisely what happened to Hollywood in 2017.  They are down at least 16% because of the way Hollywood came out against a popular president.  People who voted for Trump largely knew the Access Hollywood tape was a set-up job and that Hollywood was guilty of much worse.  Now that we have the truth, that movie industry is changed forever.  They’ll never bounce back because they have lost the trust of the public.  Ultimately it’s not people like Harvey Weinstein who make projects succeed or fail, it is the public that buys the tickets—and they have been voting against Hollywood for a while now.  Now that Hollywood has alienated most of the country in their hatred of Trump, the hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual meltdown will sink the entire industry—and that’s a good thing.

America can’t be great again if the art and entertainment community is so vitriolic toward a president that half the country wanted.   When they showed up against Trump during his Inauguration in 2017 and protested him as a sexual predator they set the bar impossibly high for themselves as a result and now they are being crushed under their own standard—because they can’t live up to any of it. As actors and film moguls they live in the make-believe world of their own creations but under Trump’s presidency illusions are being shattered out of necessity, and now these people are exposed, and they are burning in front of our faces.  Hollywood will never recover as an industry.  Sure there will be new forms of entertainment that will emerge, but the Wilshire Blvd culture for which Hollywood has built its own kind of Wall Street is dying right in front of our eyes, and because they made themselves into a political weapon of the left, I’m glad to see it.  They have let us all down and now it’s time to pay.

Rich Hoffman

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