Tag: Ann Becker

The West Chester Tea Party Does Not Endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board: And neither do I

For clarity, the West Chester Tea Party has not, and will not endorse Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  There has been some rattling around from several people that they would, but they have told me personally that those rumors were untrue and they do not support her.  And neither do I.  We all have long friendships with Lynda and other candidates who these days call themselves Republicans but have drifted way to the political left.  But friendships or past relationships don’t make a good candidate.  Whether or not they represent our values to earn a vote is the issue at hand.  Too often, endorsements are given out because of friendships, not actual performance.  Lynda O’Conner has been the school board president for a while now, and she has attended Tea Party meetings in West Chester for over a decade and has formed relationships with many of us over the years.  However, based on her performance and what she did to Darbi Boddy as she begged us all to give her a conservative school board, the moment she had it, she essentially turned into the progressive governor that Ohio had, John Kasich, and betrayed us openly, even recklessly.  I tend to move on when I experience people like that.  I’ll give them a chance once, and once they show who they are, I don’t get too kinked up about it.  It’s always worth a try to give someone a chance.  Then, once they show who they are, you make decisions and move on.  Knowing she has betrayed many people in the Liberty movement within the Lakota school district and is running again, she is seeking endorsements for the upcoming election.  I had some reason to believe the rumors that the West Chester Tea Party might endorse Lynda, but quickly, they set the record straight and wanted to make sure they screamed from the mountaintops that they would not support Lynda O’Connor for the Lakota School Board and based on what they have learned about her, they never would. 

I wouldn’t usually talk about something that happened that was confidential, but looking back on it as I have, those privileges are meant within the context of friendly trust.  Yet after what happened with the previous Lakota school superintendent and the behavior against free speech that Lynda led against the incoming school board member Darbi Boddy, it’s clear what was going on, and I’m still insulted that she thought so little of me to try it.  I mean, she should have known better.  I spent hours and hours with Lynda O’Conner on the phone, meeting her in person, trying to help her.  But from her side, all she was doing was consensus-building in the classic sense against someone she had targeted as a political rival in the community.  And that didn’t become clear until the days after a specific meeting in the basement of some of our mutual Tea Party friends in May of 2022.  I should know what she was up to because I have covered these modern versions of The Delphi Technique for years.  It’s one of the most corrosive tools used in all public schools.  After a contentious school board meeting where I spoke in favor of Darbi Boddy, it was clear Lynda was trying to run her off the school board over minor issues.  Lynda had recruited Darbi to give her a majority on the board, along with Isaac Adi, and I did what I could to smooth out the edges and give credibility from the freedom movement side of things.  If I were on board with the effort, it would help the conservative base. 

I didn’t see a need to be overly cautious with this relationship with Lynda.  She had just spent the previous decade trying to win my trust, so I figured getting a functional, conservative school board in charge of Lakota schools was worth a shot.  Even that day I met with her and several other people, it became pretty clear what she was doing; I still wanted to give the effort a chance at working.  But she was looking for compliance out of Darbi Boddy to some liberal view of authority that was shocking to many of us, especially the West Chester Tea Party.  We all found ourselves in the basement of one of the leading members, with Isaac Adi and some school board mentor of his from Monroe schools pushing a sheet of paper in front of me, asking me what I wanted out of Lakota schools, which made me angry because of the amateur effort.  It was an apparent consensus-building exercise, much like the Lakota community conversations had been trying to win over opposition to school policy for a while.  And Lynda sat across from me with a smile, thinking all this was acceptable.  She had surrounded me with people I had trusted, especially in the Tea Party, and she felt that the peer pressure might win me over and away from the continued support of Darbi Boddy.  After all the years and everything I had written over all the time we had known each other, she thought I was that stupid. 

The meeting didn’t go well.  My wife and I left that day, never to speak to any of them personally again, because, within a few months, we had all the drama over the school superintendent.  Everything got worse after much further erosion in the community led by Lynda’s tampering with everyone’s political sentiments and wanting to pull everyone to the left, and lawsuits became a significant issue.  I had to explain to the attorney for the superintendent that if he had just apologized to Darbi Boddy for his role in trying to do what Lynda wanted, which was to remove her from the school board after many of us had spent the previous year trying to get her elected, then a lot of the trouble he found himself in wouldn’t have been such an issue.  But now that people knew and learned how much Lynda knew about it all along, those were self-inflicted problems that ultimately cost a lot of money in the district.  Through it all, I hadn’t talked to any of them in that basement meeting, so when I heard that the West Chester Tea Party was thinking of endorsing Lynda, it wouldn’t have surprised me after all the other people who had fallen off the wagon over the last year.  But if there is anything good that did happen, as a result, they did let me know that they felt the same way about Lynda as I did and that they would not support her or any of the other candidates who have gone over to the dark side of politics.  That’s certainly the case with Ann Becker, who is running for another term as trustee in West Chester.  She used to be president of the Tea Party for both West Chester and Cincinnati, but she has moved well away from those good old days now, more toward the political left.  Watching that kind of thing is painful, but it always happens.  And when it does, you always must wonder what people believe.  But happily, it is good to see that the West Chester Tea Party has not waivered, as others have, and they will not be endorsing Lynda O’Conner for the Lakota School Board.  And neither will I.

Rich Hoffman

Standing and Fighting: Big name Republicans gather at Premier Shooting to draw battlelines for the upcoming midterms


The Premier Shooting and Training facility in West Chester, Ohio has since its inception been a very special place. I can never think of a bad time in visiting it, which I often do. It has essentially become the Second Amendment center of Southern Ohio. And to deserve that kind of credit they have to be more than just a target range, which is fundamentally what they are. They are one of the best indoor ranges out there for the sport of shooting. Yet they are more than that by a lot, education is what most comes to my mind when I think of Premier Shooting.

They are deeply committed to teaching self-defense to the residents of West Chester and the surrounding area, and they aren’t shy about it. And what’s inside the shooting range is only part of the Premier complex, outside they have a very large fishing lake and a lot of outdoor seating that allowed them to host a very unusual event in dedication to the Second Amendment on Friday, September 28, 2018. And for that event a lot of big-name politicians gathered to allow the public to get to know them better and show their dedication to the Second Amendment in very bold ways as shown in the videos below. It was unusual to have even federal representatives fly in from Washington D.C. at great expense to themselves to be at this remarkable event. Jim Renacci and Warren Davidson for instance were there under a setting sun fresh off the Kavanaugh hearings in Washington just hours before. But Columbus representatives like Supreme Court Justice Sharon Kennedy, George Lang, Keith Faber, John Husted, Ken Blackwell, along with local representatives like Sheriff Jones, Mark Welsh and Ann Becker were gathered as well in a remarkable gathering that wasn’t a Republican fundraiser or political rally for thousands of spectators, but just a lot of concerned people coming together for a common cause.

The biggest problem that Republicans have is that they are generally good people just trying to live their lives. There are different degrees of Republicans of course, some of more libertarian while others are more strict traditionalists, but in essence, they are people who want to live in peace and be left alone from the conflicts of the world. Presently with Donald Trump in the White House, many Republicans feel that they can step away from politics and live their lives while many of the people gathered at the Premier shooting Center event under a setting sun manage the business of running the country for them. But as we have all seen with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, that isn’t enough.

There are always people out there who don’t like that we are living our lives free of their influence and they will seek to impose themselves on us. In its most basic description, Republicans are good people who want to be left alone, where Democrats want to stick their noses in everyone’s business for the task of making everyone part of their illicit schemes. And what really prevents Democrats from achieving their aims is the threat of force that comes from the Second Amendment. While the First Amendment protects political speech and gives an option to those who do not want to be a part of Democratic impositions, the Second Amendment tells individuals that they do not have to worry about any threats of force upon their individual existence.

Over a hundred years, before the advent of Progressivism which spread from Europe and embedded itself in the Democratic Party, and in some cases the Republicans, events like this gathering at Premier Shooting were commonplace. Key politicians would interact with the public in this way without Secret Service agents and armed security everywhere. This event stripped away all those barriers and allowed people to just talk to each other as concerned citizens joined by their foundation beliefs in American ideas. Steve Chabot and I had a nice talk in the foyer of the complex as he was leaving for the night and talked about football a bit. The titles we all have in life were stripped away for a few hours and we all just enjoyed rallying behind ideas we could all agree with for the cause of continued liberty.

BBQ2GO had a vendor truck parked by the lake along with other food suppliers making the gathering place outside a very comfortable experience. There was food, fire pits and a lot of cigar smoke as we all contemplated together the necessity to keep a fighting spirit going into this upcoming midterm election. That was in essence why so many big-name representatives were present, because the typical cycle is that the previous political party in power loses their edge and don’t have very high voter turnout in the next elections once they win the presidency or hold the House and Senate at the federal level. President Trump makes it even more of a risk because he has such a big voice that people who don’t like to fight so much are happy to get behind, but are not inspired to act for themselves, which was required for the midterms. Democrats were energized to work together because they want to take something from us. Republicans already have it, so they usually don’t act until someone like a Barack Obama is elected.

As the gathering at Premier was forming early in the night I was watching the Kavanaugh hearings in the VIP lounge when the Trump administration announced that it would launch an F.B.I. investigation into the allegations leveled at Brett Kavanaugh just to appease the Democrats. Of course, the strategy is to take away any leverage they might have in the future, but the risk is that their radicalism would have another week to torpedo the nomination process. Democrats have shown that they will do just about anything to stop the vote for Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court so there is always danger even if people are just minding their own business in living their lives without trying to impose themselves on others.

Democrats are always looking to attach themselves to other people so as long as they exist, there is always a threat and Republicans need to understand that. It was good to be at an event like this one at Premier where everyone understood what was at stake. Republicans were certainly in the driver’s seat. History did not have to repeat itself. Voter turnout for Republicans did not have to be surpassed by encroaching Democrats. There was a chance to gain seats not lose them, but people needed to get out there and fight, which was the key terminology of the evening. Complacency wasn’t going to work, people needed to know that the necessity for fighting never went away, even in times of peace, and that was why all these personalities had gathered in the same place to defend the Second Amendment. Without the Second Amendment, everything philosophically fell apart in America, and we just can’t have that.

I thought it was a great evening and I give a lot of credit to the operators at Premier Shooting and Training for the really hard work of organizing such an event. And Sean Maloney did a really fabulous job with everything from getting everyone where they needed to go to arranging some of the speeches and keeping the pace of the night moving forward so that there wasn’t ever any stagnant standing around. There were several representatives from the NRA there as well, one of them was Sean and they really elevated the entire event. But as nice as everything was, the undercurrent of the necessity to stand and fight was certainly there. While the gathering was friendly, the beer was cold, the barbecue was delicious, and the Friday night setting sun under a late September sky was absolutely stunning, the grim reality that out there in that big world was a fight for our lives was certainly present.

While the people there both in the public arena and those who work in special ops within the seams of society were enjoying themselves, the realities of the greater fight were quite evident. And that fight is just getting started. Just because we have something today doesn’t mean we’ll have it tomorrow. Trump may be in the White House, but we have to defend it. We can’t just show up for one election and hope its fixed forever. There is a lot more fighting that needs to be done and for all of us the upcoming election day is the minimum—everyone needs to get out there and vote.

But for some of us, many who were at that event, a lot more is required. Fighting is a necessity so long as evil people function in the world, and in this case, evil is defined by others who seek to impose upon individuals their collective manifestations of insanity and rebellion. And that cannot be tolerated. Just look at what they are trying to do to Brett Kavanaugh and what they have been doing to Donald Trump. And if they can do it to you dear reader, they surely will.

Rich Hoffman

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Vote for Jim Renacci: Trump endorses the Ohio candidate to take on Sharrod Brown’s Senate seat in 2018

The primary election is now under a week away and in Ohio I will be voting very enthusiastically for Jim Renacci for the U.S. Senate. For me there isn’t even a close second. Renacci is the guy who should be the Republican nominee to go after the Sherrod Brown seat this fall, and is best poised to represent the new Trump agenda. So its important that when May 8th comes around that you don’t just sit home and skip the primary vote. Go vote and cast a vote for Jim Renacci, because you can’t take anything for granted these days. We are living in a time of great change, for the better I might add, but to keep that momentum going, you must participate even if in small ways. A vote on May 8th is a small thing, but it all adds up to big things. Even with all that’s going on in the world for which President Trump is a part of he took time recently to officially endorse Jim Renacci:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 1, 2018

Wadsworth, Ohio—Today, U.S. Senate candidate Jim Renacci, received the endorsement of the the Trump Campaign which comes on the heels of President Trump’s personal endorsement last week.

“I am humbled to have received the Trump campaign’s endorsement for U.S. Senate, in addition to President Trump’s recent personal endorsement for my candidacy. I am proud of my record as a strong advocate for the President’s America First agenda and l look forward to continuing to advance that cause in the United States Senate,” said Jim Renacci.

I enjoyed watching the West Virginia Senate debate on Fox News where there is a similar battle going on there as in Ohio. A Republican is looking to knock off a long-held Democratic Senate seat to put the numbers more in Trump’s favor. It’s a strategy that the mainstream media is ignoring in hopes that people won’t notice, but the GOP is very active in this regard in 2018, led largely by the Trump White House. My pick by the way in West Virginia for which I have many readers is of course Don Blankenship. He’s a business guy and he was prosecuted and sent to jail for many of the same reasons Sheriff Joe Arpaio was prosecuted in Arizona. I think it takes a lot of guts to step right out of jail and run for a Senate seat at the federal level taking on an entrenched incumbent. A few years ago such a thing would be unheard of, but in 2018, why the hell not. We’re looking for people in these seats who want America to win and will fight to make it so—even when they have had to face down personal adversity to such extremes. The Blankenship case is one of those types of political stories where the Obama administration was at war with the coal industry and was seeking to weaken it. Blankenship was the CEO of a number of large coal mines all over West Virginia and when an accident happened that killed several people, the Obama Department of Justice used the power it controlled to put a CEO in jail. It was Obama’s way of showing the world that socialism was the new trend in America and that CEOs weren’t safe under the new socialist oriented president.

Jim Renacci in Ohio isn’t nearly as controversial as Blankenship but he could tell similar stories about how the federal government abused him as a private businessman. Jim as an entrepreneur has been very successful and one of his big enterprises was a General Motors Dealership that he ran around the time that GM went bankrupt. Due to a long story of government tampering and a congressman in his district who happened to be a Democrat, Jim reached out to try to save his dealership from the GM collapse. When the Democratic congressman lied to Renacci leading to a series of events where Jim lost his dealership anyway, Jim did the most noble thing he could do at the time, and that was run against that Democrat and beat him to take his senate seat away from him.

Jim Renacci is a fighter, but not in a crazy way, in the careful and precise way that top business executives are—which is the trend for where the Trump controlled Republican Party is moving—thankfully. And that is why President Trump sought Jim out of the crowd to run for the Sharrod Brown seat. Trump needs more senators on Capital Hill and he wants Jim to be one of them. But he also needs someone who can beat an entrenched Democrat to take that seat away, which is how we have arrived at this place in time under these specific circumstances.

The politics of yesterday where fizzled out lawyers and old lobbyists try to get elected to one of the two parties for a chance to become American aristocrats enhancing their social lives greatly in destructive ways without ever being expected to do anything meaningful while in office is over. Now that Trump has won the Executive Branch and is doing a very good job, former business executives like Jim Renacci are getting serious looks where they hadn’t before, and for the first time we are looking at staffing a government not with political hacks, but actual people of real world accomplishment. Who couldn’t like the reasons that Jim Renacci got into politics and his record thus far as a true conservative? Jim is just the kind of person I think every elected position should have in it, if only there were enough good people out there like Jim Renacci.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet Jim Renacci a few times now, one time was when he was traveling on Air Force One with President Trump to visit a local manufacturing plant in southern Ohio. He’s as solid of a person I’ve ever meet as a politician, he’s the real deal, and Trump knows it. Being handpicked by Donald Trump, when it comes to the upcoming fall, the President will come to Ohio several times to help push Jim over Sharrod Brown, and that would be good for everyone. But Trump won’t do the same for those he hasn’t handpicked, because he knows how to tell who the losers are and who the winners will be, and his time is too valuable for losers. Given that qualifier, Trump has already put a considerable amount of time into Jim Renacci, and very early in the process. So if you are a Trump supporter, it is very important to help that overall effort out by voting this upcoming Tuesday, May 8th in the primary.

I think the primary elections in May are every bit as important as the fall elections in November, but often only a fraction of the potential electorate shows up to participate. Don’t be one of those people who stay home that day. Jim Renacci needs your vote, and so does Donald Trump. To keep this conservative reform going that we are currently undergoing, we need fresh troops on the line and Jim Renacci is one of those new, fresh faces that are so badly needed in the Senate. So vote for him and help us turn the corner to the next great battle—the Sharrod Brown Senate Seat!

Rich Hoffman

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Getting to Know Jim Renacci: Why he’s the best guy to unseat Sharrod Brown in Ohio

The last time I had seen Jim Renacci was when he was stepping off Air Force One with President Trump shortly after being asked directly by the president to run for the very important Senate seat in Ohio against the very liberal Sharrod Brown. Brown’s mission has been from the beginning several decades ago to turn Ohio from a red state to blue and after decades in public office has managed to help make it the color purple. Trump recognized that, and he looked at the map at where Senate seats could be picked up to help his agenda, and Sharrod Brown’s seat became part of his ambitious plan. When it was then considered who might have the fortitude and raw talent to take on such an entrenched incumbent the only name the President focused on was that of Jim Renacci—a self-made businessman with a background similar to Trump’s. Even more importantly to all that, Renacci like Trump has a history of winning what he does so for Jim to make a decision to abandon his run to become Ohio’s next governor he stepped up to the considerably harder task of unseating Sharrod Brown in what will prove to be one of the hottest national races in the upcoming midterm election. Before that happens though there is a primary to win and a lot of planning to do, so Renacci was in Mason, Ohio speaking to a very small, but important group of area Republicans.

As readers here know I’m not an autograph seeking, name dropping, picture-taking kind of person when it comes to people of celebrity and social importance. I’ve personally met President Trump on several occasions as well as Newt Gingrich and several other top-tier politicians and I didn’t go out of my way to have a picture taken with them, but Jim Renacci is different. He’s a very tenacious guy whom I believe is extremely sincere in what gaining that Brown Senate seat means to the nation and I respect him as a person for it. Getting to know Renacci as a candidate over the last several months, first as a person challenging the governor’s seat, and now under President Trump’s direct request, running for the valued Senate seat in Ohio to share one of the two available. Rob Portman is the other Senator, so there is a real opportunity here to gain someone in the Senate of Jim’s caliber and to further the Trump agenda with business people who understand it. The videos below are from this meeting which was only a few people listening to Jim speak in a private kitchen. Recording this meeting was a rare opportunity for others to get to know Jim Renacci without the Fox Business Channel cameras, the big rallies, or the interpretations of a left-leaning media filtering out the information they think important. In these two videos Jim just talks about his background and why he is the best candidate of all the Republican challengers to unseat Sharrod Brown.

One of the last questions in this meeting was directed at what Renacci specifically has regarding talent to perform this important historic journey and Jim modestly didn’t answer the question as fully as he could. Being a business guy, he is happy to let his record speak for itself because he honestly likes the other Republicans who are also running for the opportunity to take on Sharrod Brown. After all, only Renacci has been personally endorsed by the President of the United States, so he let that question linger softly—but I’ll be happy to answer it on his behalf. One thing that Jim has that others don’t is that he’s good on television. He is a frequent guest on the Fox Business Channel and MSNBC—among many others and in this modern era of television communication, Jim is good on camera. He knows how to speak the language of television, which is in how to communicate in short segments and with using all the range that a blocked off face can deliver to a direct audience in their living rooms. When running against an entrenched incumbent that has the power of the entire Democratic Party using a friendly press to preserve their position, it takes being not just a great candidate to win a race like this—it will take someone who is fantastic on television, and Renacci is.

In those videos Renacci told the story of how he came into politics in the first place, and it’s a good one that everyone should hear. Jim could easily live a good life as a self-made person and stay out of the political theater, but like Trump he found himself entering politics to offer his unique skills where they were needed most. Jim had a Chevy dealership around the time that General Motors went bankrupt and at the time many dealerships were being forced to be closed. This activity had nothing to do with Jim’s business skills, as he had been very successful, it was simply that he was selected to be closed which went against everything he understood about how things should work. So he reached out to his local congressman for help only to have that person vote against his dealership. The congressman was a Democrat and from there Jim challenged that seat in the next election and won. He has been in congress ever since facing down severe oppositions in the process.

There were many more stories than that communicated in that cozy kitchen in Mason which no media outlet would cover. There isn’t time or enough print for most media to dedicate to those types of stories, leaving voters often mystified about the actual people running. That left this little event to have quite great importance to those lucky enough to attend. To me there isn’t a better positioned person for that Senate job, and Jim certainly has the right level of fight in him to be successful. He will do what needs to be done to win, much like Trump did in his election against Hillary Clinton. Ohio may be purple now politically, but as Jim said in his speech, its going back to red and this upcoming election for this particular Senate seat is the battle that will define that political movement. However, even more important than all that is that it will solidify Trump’s agenda with more help at the federal level with the kind of Republicans that Trump is bringing to the Party as a whole.

I’ve been in the Renacci camp for most of a year now, first as a candidate for governor, and now in his run for Senate. Few politicians excite me the way that Jim does, which is why I did take a picture next to him. I did it because I was proud of him for taking on this big role and I want to help him any way possible. It is my hope that once he is elected that more business professionals at the height of their careers, like Trump was and now Renacci will follow in their footsteps and offer their skills to the world of politics. When we complain that politics is full of unsavory characters it is because many of them are not battle hardened in the rules of business. They are simply referees in the games of life, they are not the superstars who make their livings accomplishing things. Renacci is a new kind of candidate that are emerging under the years of Trump to bring the best of American enterprise into the role of managing our federal government. And that is a great opportunity for America to finally be politically what it has been in all other sectors of private endeavor, which is why getting excited about Jim Renacci for the Ohio Senate seat in Washington D.C. is very easy to do.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need More Republicans to Control the Budget: Jim Renacci for Senate is part of a Trump solution

I am happy that Republicans took care of business and worked the best they could with congress to get a budget deal passed, but I am very disappointed that another trillion dollars was added to the debt. I expect under the Trump administration to see that debt clock running backwards down to zero, not to continue piling on more spending until there simply isn’t anything left. I was encouraged by the comments of Rand Paul and my local congressman Warren Davidson to see that they were willing to speak against spending more money, but ultimately Trump said it best when he stated that Republicans simply need more Republicans to have sustainable majorities coming out of the upcoming midterms. For Republicans to have a real majority there needs to be at least a 60-vote surplus in the Senate, preferably more, and the House needs to expand, not just hold its ground. And to that effect I am very happy to see Trump so far out planting the seeds to make that happen.

I am supporting Jim Renacci for his senate run against Sharrod Brown in Ohio. Another great thing that came out of this past week was that while President Trump came to Ohio to speak about tax cuts, Jim Renacci was with him on Air Force One so a large crowd of Renacci supporters was in attendance and while we waited I had a chance to talk to them about the very dynamic senatorial candidate and current congressman. I was of course already planning to support him but I was impressed that President Trump had already singled out Renacci for a targeted Senate seat held by one of the biggest liberals in Washington D.C. I had the opportunity to see how the machine was working and I liked it, these were competent people who had a plan that I could get behind and it was exciting to see. I had no doubt that with people like Jim Renacci in the Senate that the debt clock issue could be attacked, and the other things on the Trump agenda could get done. There is no reason we can’t do all the things we need to do, take care of the military, improve our infrastructure and pay down our debt to zero with the growth of the Trump economy, but it takes the right kind of leadership to make it happen, not the kind of garbage that we have seen coming from the Beltway for the last century.

Jim’s pilot was next to me in the greeting line and I had the opportunity to get to know Jim Renacci better through that very good guy. He was the guy in my video who asked the president for a fist bump and got one, and also stated that he had been to 20 rallies for Trump during the election which received an acknowledgment from the President confirming as much. As Jim came up to where we were standing the pilot stated, “guys, this is Jim.” I was impressed that there was a very good Renacci, Trump connection this early in 2018 and Rob Portman was there as the second senator of Ohio providing the glue to hold everything together. It was an impressive display by the Ohio GOP to build this early show of teamwork that excited me, because it showed a path forward where a productive Senate could work with the President to get a lot of good things done over the next seven years if given the opportunity, and at the core of that thought was Jim Renacci.

The media was literally five feet from my position and they told a completely different story of the event than I did. To them the crowd that was gathered at Lunken airport to greet Jim Renacci and President Trump was a small, but friendly one. They neglected to report that the greeting pen was filled with 200 carefully vetted, enthusiastic supporters who were willing to stand in 25-degree weather to meet these guys, and had to go through very tight security to even get the chance. From my perspective Trump has been a master strategist from the very beginning—he has shown a real ability to pick people from the crowd and to polish them into greatness. He built a top-rated television show off just that specific talent, and here he was doing the same thing in government, finding people like Jim Renacci to put in the right place to do the most good. I see what Trump does clearly because I have the same benefit to a large extent so it’s easy for me to see it in other people—I hire a lot of people each year, and I’m good at it–at finding the right people for the right positions. It’s a complicated thing to develop because you have to read people’s body language, the way they look at you, hold their shoulders, the way they speak, to really get a feel for who they could be if they were in a particular position of employment. As a twenty-five-year-old I worked on the Rob Portman campaign when he was just a few years older than me trying to win a special election, and here he was at the center of a major political emergence. And when I finally had a chance to see Jim Renacci up close with President Trump it was obvious that this was the right guy for the upcoming Senate seat. There was no question in my mind.

As Jim, President Trump and Melania walked by me down the line I was thinking of a particular quote from the hit piece book by Michael Wolff called Fire and Fury. The prosecutor of Butler County, Mike Gmoser and I had been talking about that book as we both went through security together. He told me in a very straightforward fashion that he didn’t have time for that garbage, and wasn’t happy with the reputation of the book. But I had read it a few times which was the root of our discussion and one quote jumped out at me which I think sums up the way that progressives like Sharrod Brown see the world in such a negative way, and what the rest of us are fighting. It goes as follows:

“For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if its bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself. In this formula, there is always a series of middlemen who will promise to help you cut the corners, as well as partners who will be happy to piggyback on your grandiosity.” Page 224, Fire and Fury.

Basically, this was the essence of Wolff’s observations and writing in the book that the political left felt represents the Trump administration, that everything is about plowing through red tape that liberals have created to achieve showy results for the sake of self-aggrandizement. The reason we have such debt, and a crumbling infrastructure as well as a depleted military is that liberals built a government over many years that used red tape to hide their inefficient “small” thinking that has created our present tragedy of monumental debt leaving it to Republicans to fix in the short run. The Republicans are tasked with solving the problem and it will take lots of good people like Jim Renacci to fix it with House and Senate majorities in 2018.

The debt crises of our present age was created by liberal-minded people who think like Michael Wolff, people who don’t really understand how money and business works and why tax cuts lead to prosperity and economic growth as opposed to confiscating the wealth of people to give out to their political base so they can get votes to stay in power. Most of our twenty trillion dollars in debt is due all that red tape that liberals have created and their formation of corners that need to be cut in order to do anything productive in life. I didn’t just read Fire and Fury once, but several times—and its horribly written, a real chore because its sloppy and filled with so much hate for Trump, but it does capture in a bottle how liberals think, and really puts on display the rational that has created so much debt to deal with in the first place. Republicans had no choice but to come up with some budget deal and I’m not happy about it. But the real solution is to expand Republican influence in 2018, not to let it shrink. Good people like Jim Renacci are part of that solution, and its great to see that President Trump has a plan. It’s also good to see that Jim Renacci is part of that plan.

Rich Hoffman
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Ann Becker Sworn in as a West Chester Trustee: Everyone loves a winner

I thought it was ironic that the same day Donald Trump won his case in court for his appointment to head the CFPD that my friend Ann Becker was sworn in as the new West Chester Township Trustee. What they had in common was they were both ushered in on the backs of victory where opposing forces had once been hard lined against them.  The key wins in elected offices had solidified sentiment toward a productive outcome. Former political adversaries had been united under the banner of victory and that is truly something wonderful. I sat in the back of Ann’s swearing ceremony, which made the video below a little hard to hear, because I wanted a nice panoramic of the packed audience. There were many there to show their support for Ann who were certainly no fans of her just three years ago. But Ann had shown wonderful leadership in helping get people elected into key Central Committee positions and she was a paramount figure in helping Donald Trump get elected in southern Ohio with Sheriff Jones. From there the rest of the Republican Party put their differences aside to rally behind Ann when she ran for George Lang’s vacant seat as he went on to become a congressman for the State of Ohio. For this moment to arrive it took a lot of effort and careful politics, and for all that tenacity I am extremely proud of Ann Becker.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/11/28/while-the-white-house-battles-for-control-heres-whats-at-stake-for-the-cfpb/?utm_term=.7402db0acb62

Yes, the tide is changing and even people who reluctantly put their finger to the wind just months ago and thought that John Kasich’s brand of GOP would win out in Ohio now see that Trump is setting the agenda at the top and local politics is building that infrastructure at the ground level and people can now see the results. The victory for Trump at the CFPD represented a major blow to the kind of politics we are all used to. And as Ann Becker took her oath many of the people in the room who were there to welcome her into that new level of politics, had plans for her they hoped to shape. Whether those plans might be easy passage of the next police budget, or some favorable vote to use tax payer money on some private venture—Ann was the President of the Cincinnati Tea Party—so politics as usual was something that would be difficult for them to adjust to. Reform is in her every drop of blood. She is savvy enough to be nice about it, and to listen to all sides, but when the rubber hits the road, Ann is a major part of the countrywide revolution that took place over the last 10 years and now she’s on a career path as a powerful politician.

After the ceremony many of us went over to RJ’s Sports Pub to celebrate and I was surprised by how many people showed up. The waitress confided to me that they were nowhere near prepared for the onslaught of people who arrived. I don’t think Ann even thought so many people would show up to see her sworn in, let alone go to RJ’s after to celebrate with her. Winning has a unique way of unifying people. Everyone loves a winner. I remember a few years ago when secret tapes came out of the Republican Party of Butler County where the old guard was laminating against Ann Becker’s Tea Party oriented philosophy because back then conventional wisdom mandated that the Tea Party would fizzle out after the IRS crackdowns, and establishment Republicans all the way to the top were part of that conspiracy—they were part of the Swamp, part of the world that created government divisions like the CFPD to embed itself into our capitalist system and run everything from a centralized authority of Republicans and Democrats bringing to life FDR’s “Middle Way.” Ann didn’t appear to have a chance at ever being a formal candidate for anything—because her political outlook was just too pure for many establishment types to consider. But after her win to the State Central Committee and her gradual work from within, people began to see the light and like everything in life, once she proved herself to be a winner—they wanted to be near her.

We can see this phenomenon when a winning sports team is doing well, the community usually jumps on the bandwagon at the end and supports them with jersey purchases and an increase in ticket sales. Losing does not bring this kind of behavior about in people. Only winning. Winning can convert the most adversarial enemy over to your way of thinking by track record alone, and is the key to a strong negotiating position. Respect always accompanies winning, by the nature of human beings. After a year in office and all the powers of the press and politics to derail President Trump, he is a winner and is steamrolling right over everyone, friends and enemies alike. Because he’s a winner he can do things that nobody else can, which is why he is now the leader of the Republican Party. Ten years ago the Butler County Republican Party was much different from the one of today. No longer are the John Boehners and John Kasichs running things it’s people like Ann Becker and Mark Welch who are challenging their peers to the north in Liberty Township and to the west in Fairfield with a level of competency that has not been expected before—but is now. In that way the politics of Butler County changed quite a lot with the swearing-in of Ann Becker.

I’ve certainly not been a fan of Lee Wong, but even he was wearing the colors of change in his demeanor as he welcomed Ann to the board during the swearing-in. I don’t think Lee is a conservative at all by the way he legislates, but in the politics of Butler County there really isn’t a choice. The philosophy of Ann Becker has pulled the party much more to the right just as Donald Trump has at the federal level just by standing her ground and being authentic. That is a trait all winners possess, an unmistakable tenacity that brings people to you rather than you to them.

When Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer refused to come to the White House on the same day to talk budgets and taxes with Trump that was a first for the Democrats—it was something we hadn’t seen before. What it essentially amounts to is that they are losing the game and are refusing to finish. It is obvious now that the special prosecutor investigation is going nowhere, and momentum is completely on Trump’s side. Tax cuts are happening without their involvement or ability to stop it. Trump is appointing conservative judges, without their ability to stop him. Christmas has returned to the White House, without anybody in the media being able to stop it through ankle biting criticism. And good luck beating Trump on a government shutdown. Yes, times have changed a lot.

And that change was obvious with the election of Ann Becker as the newest member of the West Chester Trustees. By winning the winds of reform are at her back and all she needs to do to continue winning, is just to be herself. Everything else will take care of itself. For a young woman who just a few years ago had so many enemies she suddenly has lots of friends, and that is how real change is implemented. Change that Ann has fought hard for over a long period of time. And now she has an opportunity to really make a difference, and I’m very happy for her.

Rich Hoffman
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Joan Powell Announces she is a Progressive: ‘Putting Women in Their Place’ and more feminist Misery

Just to prove that everything I’ve ever said about Joan Powell is 100% correct just have a look at this polished video done by the kind of people who supporter her for the West Chester Trustee seat she is running for on the November 7, 2017 election.  The organization producing this video is an openly progressive group called Putting Women in Their Place and they are part of that radical leftist ideology that attempted to put Hillary Clinton in office just because she was a woman.  Well, there is a great woman running for trustee in West Chester and her name is Ann Becker.  Yet these hypocritical progressives ignore women who are openly conservative and instead go after supporting candidates who will walk the line of radicalism and man hating that come with groups like this.  If you want a good laugh, just watch this video.

I don’t think Joan Powell is an evil person, or is even stupid.  But she has used her network of radical feminists to come after me before due to her massive failures as a school board member at Lakota where she heavily abused a very generous budget of over $160 million dollars per year and essentially caved to the labor union’s demands for higher wages, then asked tax payers to leverage the expense on their property taxes.  Under the guidelines of these idiots, the Putting Women in Their Place crowd, we aren’t supposed to judge any woman for anything.  We are supposed to always look the other way when they do something because the value of their progressive organization is to put women in charge of things instead of men—regardless of how incompetent those women are.

You can hear that in Joan’s voice when she says that the West Chester Trustees have a “father knows best” approach to life in what has become one of the best places in America to live.  Well, maybe father does know best in this case, because it has obviously worked in West Chester.  But in her video, obviously because she’s running against her, Joan fails to mention that Ann Becker is running for a trustee seat given up by George Lang, and she is the endorsed Republican in the race.  For those who need clarification, Ann is a woman, and a very good one at that.  What these progressive groups really mean is that they want man haters in these seats they are running for.  Just have a look at their website.

https://puttingwomenintheirplace.com/

You won’t find progressive women like Joan Powell and the rest of those latte sipping slobs on that website supporting Ivanka Trump’s quests as a representative of Donald Trump’s administration.  And you won’t see them talking about how wonderful of a first lady Melania Trump is—how gracious and caring she has been in her role as the first lady.  Honestly, the Trump administration has done more positive for women in just the last few months than previous administrations have done during their entire terms.  I don’t see these progressive women cheering on the great work of Sarah Huckabee Sanders as White House Press Secretary.  I mean women don’t need to win beauty contests to be great in those positions—but there is a beauty in competency and Sarah is one of the best that there ever has been.  Where are these progressive groups in support of these very fine women?

That’s how we get to the real truth about what these progressive women are after.  Everyone remembers when I called these types of women latté sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires and diamond rings to match, because these were the idiots who were running the pro levy groups at Lakota and damning all of us with high property taxes because they felt they had a right to function without being questioned.  When they couldn’t answer the questions they went straight to gender politics—because they had nothing else.  Their minds were flat and lazy and they relied on their control of sex in relationships to dominate the political landscape.   As an example a very powerful man wanted to give money to our levy fighting group, and it was for a substantial amount of money.  He asked us not to tell his wife who was also a prominent Republican socialite—because she was a school levy supporter and a progressive buddy with Joan Powell who caused all the mess to begin with.  I stood there looking at this very nice man who was a business tycoon in West Chester and he was worried about his wife finding out about giving us money to fight higher taxes because honestly he was worried he wouldn’t get any sex from her for the foreseeable future.  That’s how I came up with the prostitute notion, because these “progressive” women have used these kinds of tactics to bend politics into their direction for many years, and it has really crippled our society.  Men go along with it to keep peace in the house, but is that any way to live?

I have an aunt who is one of these bra burning progressives—a real man hater.  I never really had a bad experience with her except that I never agreed with her politics.  She was horrible to deal with on Holidays and the few times a year I had to see her, she always felt she needed to infuse her political opinions on us.  My mom was a housewife, one of the last ones, and this aunt felt it was her mission in life to change that status.  (Just as a footnote, you can tell the difference in the kind of kids the two families produced.  My mom’s kids are all successful in every aspect of their lives.  None of the aunt’s have been.  Not their fault, because it starts with the parents) She was molded as a 1960s feminist and we all sort of put up with her, and that went on for many years.  Well out of the blue about 15 years ago she contacted my wife for no apparent reason and wanted to take her to lunch.  You have to understand, I am politically as far from this lady as there are units of measure to cover the distance.  So her calling my wife was highly unusual, but she did and they went out for lunch.  The whole purpose of the lunch visit was to attack me for being a traditionalist and to recruit my wife who was a stay-at-home mom into the world of progressive women.

At the end of the lunch this lady actually told my wife, “we women must stick together—or else.”  She actually threatened my wife with implied violence if she didn’t subscribe to her version of feminist radicalism.   I have not spoken to that person since except to tell my family why I have completely painted her out of my life.  I mean I have never been a control freak about what my wife does. I am very easy to deal with in regard to people’s personal decisions.  I have always let my wife and two daughters do pretty much as they saw fit, but I always did make my opinions known.  I certainly didn’t deserve to have this bra burning feminist trying to inject herself into my marriage to create discontent to fulfill some progressive political objective.   My wife was a very strong woman taking great care of my family in a traditional way.  As a former model she was always very attractive and that drove this aunt crazy—so she felt she needed to get control over her for some perverse social reason.   It caused a rift in our family that still exists.  I never forget anything, and don’t intend to start now.

We have another one who is the mom of one of the people who have married into our family.  When we get together to go shooting she sometimes is there, but she hates guns.  Actually, hate is too light of a word.  She is insanely against them, yet she comes to these family events knowing full well what’s going to happen at them.  She is very dramatic in her hatred and she openly imposes herself on everyone at the gathering.  She loves all that hippie rock from the 60s and 70s and expects us all to just shut up and let her rattle on and on about it, and if we say anything to her she demands that we are women haters.   When we go on and shoot anyway you’d think we threw Holy water on her during an exorcism.  She is ridiculous.  Her husband who is a staunch conservative just sits there and smiles.  When she’s away we ask why he puts up with her.  The answer is an embarrassing one, but you get the picture.  No man wants to be locked out of their own bedroom and these types of progressive women feel that is their right to use sex as leverage to control the politics of a family.  If a man gets tired of it and goes to Vegas to have a weekend with a bunch of whores then those women want half of everything the man possesses—including the kids.  These progressive women have become a menace to happiness and they think they are empowered to create all this misery because they embed themselves like Kathy Bates into every part of our lives.

Speaking from my personal experiences I just think they are crazy.  Somewhere in their ideology and their menopausal hormones is the villain of insanity.   Most of them are older and beyond repair.  Younger women can find moments of sanity after a good romp, because they aren’t yet biologically disposed of.  As younger women they still enjoy the company of a good man, but when they get older and no longer care for sex, they hold their husbands hostage to it because he has nowhere to go.  He’s not allowed to cheat on her by their marriage contract, but if he wants if from her, he has to do what she says.  So the man does what most do and they develop a hobby out in the garage, whether its model airplanes, fixing up a classic car, or playing golf with the guys so they can get away from these progressive idiots and the insanity that always follows in their wake.  Speak to any of these progressive women for a little while and you’ll find some variation to the stories I have just articulated.  Insanity is a common theme with them.   They may speak well socially, but dig a little deeper and you’ll see it.

Progressive women don’t really want women in power; they want certain kinds of women in power.  Conservative women are not welcome, only the man hating radicals who will play the game of imposing liberal politics into their marriages so that they can corrupt every relationship they have in their contacts—from family events to manicures.  Progressive women have all the power and they do use sex to control the world around them.  They play the victim socially, but in their bedrooms that is how they expand their kingdoms and there are many, many men who are prisoners in those bedrooms.  They wish they had a wife that wanted to share a life with them, but those types of progressive women only want misery so they can maneuver everything around them to the insanity of their twisted politics.  And now you know dear reader what Joan Powell is, and what she wants to do.  And you know who backs her.  Now all you have to do is stop her at the ballot box—because she by her politics is a hypocrite, like all progressive women are.    They are hypocrites because they use politics to hide a deep hatred they have about women who are beautiful, or smart—or are truly happy on their own.  Progressives require group think and they need to pull in as many women as possible into their vortex of misery so they can still look in the mirror and deal with what looks back—a hateful loser who often ruins the relationships of all the sane people in their lives—and they need to hide from those mistakes behind some political cause invented to conceal their folly.   Remember that when you vote.

Rich Hoffman

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Ann Becker and Mark Welch Work Together Down the Stretch: Lazy Lee Wong and many others fall short of a critical Tuesday election in West Chester

 

Now that we are coming down to the final days of the 2017 election for the West Chester Township Trustees it’s easy to see who really wants the job and who doesn’t—as well as who has the passion to do the job correctly, as opposed to those who only want the position for a social statement.   I was quite impressed by the efforts of Ann Becker and Mark Welch in the final days.  In the picture below you can see that they pulled together to go door to door on the last Saturday before the election which says a lot about them as candidates.  There are a lot of people running, but these two joined together to make a statement which reveals a lot about what kind of people they would be in office together.  It takes a lot of teamwork to pull together resources in the way that they have and in the world of politics, that is wonderful to see for a change.

We already know what we are getting with Mark Welch, he is the current president of the trustees and has done a great job.  Electing him only gets more of the same, which in West Chester is precisely what voters want.   However with Ann Becker, this is her first crack at the job, and she brings fresh ideas to that seat which would only expand its effectiveness.   I can’t imagine two better people running for a political office anywhere in the country than these two.  Ann isn’t a carbon copy of Mark Welch politically by any stretch of the imagination.  She brings her own flavor to the role, but as conservatives holding a very important office the team work they have shown during the campaign would naturally carry over into a good relationship working together to do the business of the people in West Chester.

That is the beauty of competition, and why we have competitive elections.  Most of the times the candidates put out a bunch of campaign signs and that’s it— those with the most money tend to get the name recognition because people generally don’t know who else to vote for but the name they saw on the side of the road at a traffic light.  They figure that if the candidate has enough money to put out a bunch of yard signs, that someone must like that candidate, so that is typically who they vote for.  But this year there are so many candidates with so many yard signs that they are all running together in the mind of the political novice, which most people are.  Few people pay much attention to-day to-day politics and the names behind them.  They just want the system to work like the gas gauge in their car.

Competition especially in this current election race has really separated the truly serious candidates from those who just want the social status of being elected.  That’s precisely what we have seen from Joan Powell the ex-school board candidate from Lakota.  In that position she was a big spender and had a reputation for caving into the union demands during teacher contracts which she paid for with tax increases against the public.  In the past she has supported cityhood for West Chester so she is one of those big government types—a person who thinks of herself as a Republican, but she’s more of a John Kasich Republican—a liberal who puts an “R” next to their name so they can get elected in a conservative county.  If Joan were running for the same type of office just ten miles south of her West Chester home she’d be just another Democrat that has virtually destroyed the economic viability of Hamilton County.   Watching her in some of the debates during this campaign season I would have thought that Joan was more savvy than what she showed, but she really fizzled out down the stretch.  She put out a few signs, but showed no energy in the days leading up to the election on Tuesday and even though I don’t support her, her presence in this competitive election was really flat.  Lucky for us all that we did have a lot of candidates to pick from because it has really exposed people like Joan for wanting the job more for a social statement in their personal careers than as a sincere person who really just wants to do a good job for the West Chester community.

Speaking of flat, Lee Wong is a current trustee and aside from a few signs has made very little effort to defend his seat.  One thing about Lee that is obvious to everyone, he’s just lazy.  He’s lazy as a trustee functioning from the politics of yesteryear where a trustee shows up for a few parades and expects free food when he goes out for lunch.  He relies mostly on his time served as a veteran to cover for his socialist tendencies as a trustee.   As an incumbent there is a lot of dirt on Lee that is floating around out there—a lot of smoke with some fire to feed it—you don’t see Lee out with his wife much.   Based on the smoke the fire that produces it says that Lee has issues with people—particularly females.  But that isn’t the most telling example of why he’s a bad candidate—he’s just a lazy person.  By nature, he doesn’t like hard work and it shows in the way he has been a trustee and in this competitive race, he’s far down the ladder as far as effort.  If people didn’t know better, they’d never know that he was running for re-election.

Lynda O’Conner is another one who put out a few signs next to Mark’s along the side of the road, but she hasn’t been out much to sell her candidacy.  In the debate that really counted, the West Chester Tea Party Forum, Lynda was a no-show, instead she sent a note.  As a school board member at Lakota she obviously thought that the run for trustee would be a lot easier than it turned out to be, so her effort matched that miscalculation.  I have supported Lynda as a school board member before, and she isn’t the worst in the world, but as trustee for the high-powered West Chester economy, she showed down the stretch that she just didn’t have the ambition to really make a name for herself.   Putting a few signs out in this election just wasn’t enough to show what kind of candidate she was, and she missed a lot of opportunities to make her mark yielding to Ann Becker when things counted most.  Lynda starting off was probably the best option but Ann clearly outworked Lynda by a lot.

That brings us to Jullian Kelley who has been a well-known socialite within the Republican Party of Butler County for a long time.  She has worked hard because she put her name out there and a considerable budget for signs—and she doesn’t want to lose.  In a typical election Jullian would likely win a seat just because of her name recognition, but in this competitive climate—especially during the West Chester Tea Party debate she has shown that she didn’t know much about the topics and was more like a room mom in school making treats for the kids in class.   Her heart was there, but her intellect just wasn’t prepared and she would likely be no better prepared for an average day at the office as a trustee than Lazy Lee Wong has been.  Getting elected into one of these positions is about more than just showing up and displaying that you can put out signs.  You have to actually know things, and do things.  On that account, Jullian is clearly lacking in competency.  Good intentions aren’t enough this time.

So on Tuesday November 7, 2017 make  sure to vote for Ann Becker and Mark Welch and reward them for a well run cooperative campaign.  Their partnership would only be good for West Chester.  As trustees it takes a lot of cooperation to manage a vast township like West Chester, which has enough people in it to be considered a city, but needs to stay small enough to maintain its competitive edge over Cincinnati to the south and Dayton to the north.  West Chester is the crown jewel of the I-75 corridor between two of Ohio’s best known cities, and it is the preferred destination for business and people of ambition who want to build a good life for themselves in a top 100 community in all of the United States.  It takes work and Ann and Mark have shown that they are willing to do the work, and to do it together—and those are the first foundations of success.  Before they can bring that success to the township however you have to vote for them, so be sure to do so.  You won’t regret it!

Rich Hoffman

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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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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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