The Lincoln Day Dinner of 2022: Battles coming, going, and brewing

It’s always good to talk about nice things, and the Lincoln Day Dinner for 2022 for the Butler County Republican Party was undoubtedly something good to talk about. Like I say all the time, politics is a blood sport. People aren’t always supposed to get along. So it’s not the function of a prominent Republican gathering at the Savanah Center in West Chester to just have everyone get along, even though they did. The goal of politics is to get the best people into public offices that can be obtained. Often the best management of any resource involves pressure applied to individual vision to draw it out for the public’s benefit. In Butler County, with Todd Hall as the party’s Chairman, it has undoubtedly been a success story. Butler County is a large, wealthy county in Ohio; it has over 400,000 people and a major national university. And every officeholder position in the county is held by a Republican. That is something to say and provides a good indication of what the people of Butler County are really like. But it’s not easy to manage all the ‘A type” personalities who get into politics for their communities. The people who run for office don’t tend to be the shy types, so managing all those personalities, especially when they sometimes get cross with each other, is quite a challenge, and Todd Hall does the job well, which culminated in the evening at that dinner which was nothing short of magnificent. 

Mike Pompeo came in to speak at this Lincoln Day event, along with the nationally bestselling author Vivek Ramaswamy, who managed to find time between Fox News media appearances to give a rousing speech to a hungry room of freedom fighters. Warren Davidson, of course, was there and was instrumental in bringing Mike Pompeo in, fresh from the Trump administration, where we all had the feeling of reloading for the next round of political battles that were coming next. I had a chance to talk to Jim Renacci a lot as he came down from his campaign for governor of Ohio, which is going well. There were many people from all over the state of Ohio who came to this Butler County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner, which filled the Savannah Center into every crevasse. It was great to see so many friends in one place simultaneously. The battles that everyone fights for are worth it, especially on evenings like that one. During primary season, like the one we have this year where there are so many contentious races, such as the governor race where Mike DeWine is running for re-election, and Jim Renacci was challenging him, it would be easy to have factions of discontent which wouldn’t even be able to shake hands. But the event’s mood, led by Todd Hall and guided by the diligent hands of hundreds of volunteers who worked behind the scenes for the party’s best interests, provided an atmosphere that felt more like Mar-a-Lago from Trump’s Florida home than just another political gathering. Every last touch had behind it a love of country and an intention to do good in the world. Different people, of course, have different ideas about what good is, but the pursuit of it was apparent for all to see. 

It’s not like the Butler County Republican Party was playing things easy; they recently endorsed Jim Renacci for governor over the incumbent. In the audience was Justice Pat DeWine, the son of the governor.  Jane Timken was in the audience, and Mike Gibbons, who are both running for the hotly contested Senate seat soon to be vacated by Rob Portman. There were literally hundreds of contentious side stories that could fill novels that interacted in the halls of that grand event, but what impressed me was the candor with which it was all presented. Todd Hall’s management style with all these unique personalities allows for hotly contested debate and personal battles that still celebrates the achievement voters get in the end, and that is something special. Politics is tricky under the best of circumstances, but routinely pulling off successes like what Butler County enjoys is quite an accomplishment. Of course, behind the scenes come the unifying elements of Ann Becker, whom I’ve known for many years now, going back to the Cincinnati Tea Party, which she led. Debbie Lang who always brings energy to everything she’s around. Joe Statzer and Mark Murphy work on all the details. There is a long list of people behind the scenes who make the Republican Party of Butler County, such a great organization. I single out Todd Hall because it takes a unique person to give all these diverse personalities autonomy and to trust that people will find common ground and build from that position rather than break out in fistfights from the many different perspectives that so many officeholders have. Guided by a less skilled hand, everything could turn out to be a disaster rather than the success story that it continues to be. 

Ultimately, the Lincoln Day event is a good team builder, and they are always nice to go to when the people putting them on so much love what they do. But what the public gets is a strong party that represents them where it matters most. Contention in politics is good; it forces the best people and best ideas to the surface to manage on behalf of the voters, and Butler County is an example of how it should be done everywhere in the country. The Butler County Republican Party is the example that everyone should be following, especially in the newly Trump-led Republican party. The management style it takes to unify so many diverse personalities is the stuff success seminars are built on. To have an evening in the height of election season just to take a breath of fresh air is nice. But the reminder of why so many people get into public office and how an army of volunteers behind the scenes contribute their time and energy without ever thinking about pay tells a story that is worth recognizing. If not for them and the tireless hours of work that go on behind the scenes, there would not be a great Republican Party of Butler County. There would not be a Republican in every Butler County political office. The strength of the party is because of all the effort that countless people put into it, and by the leadership of Todd Hall to have just enough guiding force to keep people together just enough but not to impose on them any dictates which might threaten their unique gifts for which voters could then select as representatives. The whole evening was just as impressive as the Butler County Republican Party is itself. It reflected many thousands of hours of hard work and an ambitious eye toward tomorrow; whereas bad as things look on the national horizon, in Butler County, Ohio, all is great and getting better. If such a formula could project itself nationwide under the next Trump presidency, there is a lot to be excited about in the years to come. Because ultimately, politics is there to serve the Republic for which we all fight to make a stand, and the voters are in charge and respected by the guiding light of hard-working people who genuinely understand how to do it right.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Middletown BMV Closes Due to Government Stupidity: The bad service they give you with smiles on their vengeful, lazy faces

It’s bad enough that Biden managed to twist a few Republican arms to get his radical lunatic Supreme Court Justice approved. The 5th Circuit Appeals Court kept Biden’s ridiculous executive order on Covid vaccines alive. Even though an illegal president obviously created both those things, now that we see the evidence of election fraud in 2020, Biden was not elected by voters but was inserted by an investment class with goals from outside our country. So Constitutionally, Biden isn’t qualified to make any decisions. The war with Ukraine and Russia is Biden’s fault. The inflation rate is Biden’s fault. The high gas prices are Biden’s fault. But we can typically ignore some of those things to some extent. The worst thing that is the fault of Joe Biden and the progressive losers of doom in his administration is essential government services like interactions with the IRS and our local BMV (Bureau of Motor Vehicles.)  When Democrats run the government, the benefit you get is much more like when traveling Europe, where service is terrible. There is no motivation to serve. And everything is lackadaisical. Since the massive mismanagement by the Biden administration on Covid, the employment force of America has deteriorated tremendously. In their quest for student debt forgiveness and a socialized universal wage and minimum wage increases that are preposterously too high, the Biden administration has polluted the workforce to the point where few people want to work. We can see this in local instances, such as what has happened near me, where a local BMV is closing in Middletown, Ohio, due to staffing shortages. Their employee attendance is so bad that they just closed that agency as a reaction. 

This Covid impact on the employee workforce is entirely the fault of the Biden administration. The Trump administration wanted to have everything in our economy back open after the initial 15 days to slow the spread. Remember that? Trump figured out that Democrats wanted Covid to harm the economy and get him out of office, so he pushed to open our economy by Easter of 2020. Of course, the Democrats fed by Bill Gates money had captured the airwaves and convinced everyone that people would die if we reopened our economy. Well, people did die, but not because of Covid; it was because Bill Gates and Dr. Fauci deliberately kept medicine to treat Covid-19 from the public, such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which allowed the virus to spread to virtually everyone, and kept our nation locked down for an additional year and a half. In that period, a sector of our economy was permanently destroyed, never to recover. Because of the government policies of calling off work for every little sniffle, and the stay at home quarantining, the work from home concept, the push for a “new normal,” what we have now in 2022 is a workforce that is poorly engaged, slow to meet market demands, and much worse than even the most complacent unionized worker who just meanders through their day only to collect a paycheck, but cares nothing for the work they do, or why they must do it. What we saw with Covid-19 was government-sponsored terrorism that was intent on destroying our economy in America for all sorts of nefarious reasons. 

I have a few cases I’m working on that deal with large sums of money tied up by the IRS that are over a year late because the ridiculous tax-collecting agency indicates they are still short-staffed due to Covid restrictions. They have never been able to get a full IRS staff back to work, so their tasks are as slow as frozen maple syrup, and they expect us all to be okay with their cumbersome response. They think it’s acceptable to hold on to our money interest-free for ridiculous amounts of time and to like it as if they are doing us some kind of favor. Dealing with them is like dealing with some snooty waiter at an outdoor street café in Paris, slow, playing on their phone during the entire service, and not caring how you feel about your experience because they don’t get a tip in Europe, so they don’t care about the service experience. Government is the same way, they are just there for a paycheck, and they don’t care how your service experience goes. And when pressed, they all point to the White House, who has general jurisdiction on these kinds of matters, as the pacesetter.   Dealing with the government on any matter is embarrassingly painful; the incompetence is unbelievable, and that was before Covid. Now, Covid is the excuse of their industry. We were all supposed to accept this “new normal” life that the Klaus Schwab Desecrators of Davos losers created for the illegal Biden administration and have brought to America. 

It really hits home when you need to go to an agency office like the BMV in Middletown to get new plates for your RV or to conduct some title work, and the place isn’t open. It’s closed because of government mismanagement in handling the fake pandemic of Covid, created entirely by government stupidity, only to produce more government stupidity which you then have no choice but to interact with. Now all that work that Middletown used to handle, which is closest to my house, must now go to a neighboring city that has become more crowded with crybaby employees sitting around lazily telling you to take a number. They’ll get to you when they get to you. Nothing says liberal like that phrase, “we’ll get to you when we get to you,” where personal constraints are never managed, embracing laziness. We can talk all day about the foreign invasion into our country by the Desecrators of Davos and their schemes in finance. We can talk about the spying that goes on with China into stealing our intellectual property. We can speak of Russian cyberattacks and other acts of terrorism worldwide. But the worst of all has been the destruction of the American workforce and productivity during and after Covid, such as this closing of the BMV in Middletown, Ohio.

The government isn’t even trying to get better; they just close down a branch of service because they can’t staff it and make doing business with the government even worse and think that’s acceptable. It makes it evident that Covid was never about health and concern for the human race; it was the exploitation of fear to make the lazy feel more equitable in the world. It was just another form of desecration, just as the transgender issue has been introduced to us by the same lunatics, the concept that we no longer have men and women. Still, we can make up anything we want along the way, depending on how we feel. Well, I feel like not paying taxes anymore. Or I feel like I don’t want this government representing me. Or I feel like the government owes me millions of dollars in lost opportunity cost. If we are going to base everything on liberal feelings, well, that’s a door they can’t afford to open. And as bad as everything truly is, the true measure of that disgusting inefficiency that we see so often in government is when they close a BMV because they just can’t manage the location because their management methods are so terrible. In the end, we are the ones who suffer as they just collect their paychecks, play on their phones, and bring detriment and destruction to the American workforce with vengeful smiles on their lazy faces. 

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

China’s Attack of America Through the Tyranny of Safety: Most of Cincinnati called off work over a little snow

I always hate to see mass call-offs of work when there is a significant storm or some other weather emergency. To me, it’s a distinctly American thing to work hard, work more than eight silly little hours a day, and work weekends. I have worked well over 24 hours per day when it’s called for, and I’ve spent many years working seven days a week. Of course, I have slept when needed, but I have never understood people who don’t get going when the going gets tough. There is something very un-American about calling off work and sitting around in your pajamas when productive things need to be done. When I was a kid, I was the one who had perfect attendance in school. And as an adult, I am always the one who never calls off. I have worked through severe injuries, including three times when I had bones sticking out of my hands. I always finished my shift and got stitched up later. I superglued my skin together to get through the rest of the work period to stop the bleeding. When I’ve had major surgeries that I was told would keep me in bed for months, I returned on the next available workday after and pushed myself to recover within a few weeks completely. When it has snowed too much to drive a car, I have ridden motorcycles and bicycles to work, whatever worked. And if I got to work and felt it better to stay until the weather cleared, I always have done so, as long as it takes, so the work that needed to get done always got done. So, on February 3rd, 2022, a snowstorm hit the Cincinnati area. Most of the city decided to call off work based purely on what the weather people said on television; it made me sick and reminded me of the real meaning of the war we are in with China. 

One of my favorite chapters in my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is the chapter titled “The Tyranny of Safety.” When I wrote that book, I felt some things needed to be addressed in American business that was being ignored. Yet, every company everywhere wanted to know the secret sauce to success and how to unlock it within their work cultures. I am a practitioner of all the trade’s modern Lean tools and process improvement tricks. But due to my long experience and work history, even plowing through injuries to get a competitive advantage over a rival, whether they be domestic or some foreign power, nobody wants to deal with the elephant in the room that China set out years ago to destroy the West. They mean to do it by attacking us through every little measure of safety protocol that can be imagined. They don’t follow their own safety initiatives, which have flowed down through WHO, the UN, and into the CDC. Just as they don’t follow climate initiatives, they push us to follow them to commit economic suicide in their favor. The Chinese have intended to get us in the West to play by different rules than they do, and they have done so by getting us to fall for Wokeness, Climate Change, and Workplace Safety. They have spent a lot of money buying up politicians that would sell these attitudes to the public, in media that would strike fear in all who watch and listen to their programming over every little snowstorm.   Their goal has been to get us to work less so that China could catch up to American GDP and eventually overtake it within this decade. That is the emphatic goal of China and the world in general. Whenever I see massive call-offs over snowstorms and other weather-related issues, it makes it very apparent that China is attacking us in a worse way than with the use of any military. 

When I say that all labor unions are communist organizations, I mean it—every single one of them. Labor unions trace back to the start of Karl Marx and all his followers through the early 20th century, and we can’t help but talk about Chinese communism as we see the impact of their strategy of work stoppages. Communists everywhere want to see less work to leverage the money generated. The current supply chain problems in the United States are caused by China restricting its supply and the labor unions at the shipping ports refusing to work harder and longer to unload what’s coming in. Why, well, Covid is the new global snowstorm that communists have used to get people to call off work and stay home. And remember, China made the virus, and they did so for this very reason, to slow the world down to catch up economically. It wasn’t so much to kill people but to kill economic activity. I was at Kroger right before the snowstorm came through Cincinnati, and the shelves were mostly wiped out. Add to that the problem of supply chain issues on imports, and what we have are communist unions and communist countries who are trying to slow down the engine of our country for their own benefit. 

After two years of Covid, people have become used to calling off work over everything, making this 2022 snowstorm different from past snowstorms. This time, the media culture that had been scaring everyone to death over Covid had their ear when they cried about ice and snow hitting the Midwest, and people were calling off work before they even got up and gave it a try to get to their employers. They just gave up without much of a whimper, and that is the work of the powers against productivity that are well at war with America’s can-do spirit and have been for centuries now. The way to beat America is to convince it to stay home and not be productive while the rest of the world works and churns out their widgets at a maddening pace. China is making a show of playing lockdown with Covid, but you can bet they won’t sacrifice a dollar of GDP to it. But America has found itself crippled by the value of safety over productivity as a new measure. Productivity is now viewed as reckless, while staying home, staying safe, and staying unproductive is now promoted by our governments as a virtue. The terrible governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, was quick to announce on the news that people should stay off the roads, let the government workers do their jobs, make it easy for them to keep the roads clear, to hell with the production needs of our society. Whether it’s snow or Covid, the message from the government is, all the same, it’s an act of God, and we don’t control God. So yield to the more powerful powers than us, including the almighty centralized government.

Nobody is saying that we should have an unsafe society. That is the point in my book.   But safety is not about staying home and hiding; it’s about being skilled and competent. And if people don’t have those skills, they need to work hard to get them. That is the American way. But this “safe” way preached in our industrial compliance culture these days does not come from our need for safety. Still, foreign desires to slow down America and ultimately control our output with many communist tentacles that ultimately extend back to China in almost every way imaginable, where money flows in the bloodstream of an unseen monster, is a real threat to all that is good. Yes, China’s war machine is “safety,” and it flows down to us through our bought and paid for governments for the strategy of stopping American productivity. Every time people stay home from work over conditions of concerned safety, that is what is happening. We see the actions of war and our inability to meet the foe where they live and strike back. Because too many people are hiding from the snow, the rain, and every cut finger because they believe the experts without knowing who really controls those experts. It’s war from China for sure, just not the kind of war people expect to see. The way to beat western capitalism from the view of the orient is to convince them to stay home, not to work, and get used to a big government check, while the communist Chinese surpass America in every way imaginable.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Sheriff Jones Endorses the Governor of the Most Corrupt State in America: A solution to the stupidity of Mike DeWine

Another Reason Corruption is Good to See

This is precisely why I value the measurement of corruption, which I talk about extensively in my book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. For the last several weeks, people around me have been asking, “what is going on with our great Sheriff Jones” the Butler County figure that is internationally known for his support of President Trump. Suddenly he has thrown his support to Governor Mike DeWine and made a whole lot of other flip flop decisions that seem ultimately at odds with the MAGA movement. So there is a bit of a panic on the matter, which I have explained as a form of corruption that must be accounted for to understand the decision-making process of Sheriff Jones. Corruption isn’t always just about money, but in the case of Jones and DeWine, without a Trump in the White House, many in the Republican Party are drifting back into the cave of power for the sake of it, and that is why we are seeing rifts forming ahead of the Ohio primary coming up in May of 2022. Unless we have a way of understanding the nature of corruption, we would otherwise have no other means of comprehending these strange behaviors. Trump has at least three more years before he’ll have a chance to be back in the White House. Naturally, Jones must align himself to the world between now and then. Yes, he is perfectly willing to adjust his beliefs to the power void that has formed in Trump’s wake, and from his point of view, the smart money points at the current governor of Ohio, the most corrupt state in all of the United States, Mike DeWine. 

As all this is going on, the challenging governor and my pick for the upcoming primary, Jim Renacci, is up 8 points over the incumbent DeWine. I had the opportunity to listen to Mike DeWine on many conference calls during the Covid mishap that his administration unleashed on Ohio. I have seen behind the veil just what an idiot DeWine was. I voted for him in the last election because he called himself a Republican. What I heard during the government-imposed shutdowns was a complete fool out of touch with reality. One moment in particular that impacted me was when I had to listen to Cedar Fair Amusements in May of 2020 try to explain their problem to DeWine about the trouble with not knowing when they could open their amusement parks because they had to hire, prepare their parks, and take all kinds of measures to get ready for a summer season that government had destroyed, and couldn’t give any guidance going forward. As a right-to-life governor, DeWine had put the pro-abortion Obama activist Amy Acton as head of his Health Department. She was running the state the way a stringy-haired pot-smoking hippie would run it, which was costing the business community billions of dollars during a lockdown over Covid that nobody could see the end of, especially Cedar Fair Amusements who ran a seasonal operation in two Ohio locations. It was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and DeWine wouldn’t commit to anything to help them out. That was pretty much what DeWine said to everyone on those many teleconferences concerned over their businesses. His message was, we’re the government, and we’ll tell you when and what you can do and how long you can do it, and you’ll like it. Mike DeWine showed himself to be just as bad as the worst of Democrats during his first three years in office, and what he has done to Ohio will take decades to fix. So for me, it’s easy; Jim Renacci is the answer to the Mike DeWine debacles of the first term in office as governor.  DeWine has been a disaster.

Sheriff Jones has been something of a thorn in DeWine’s side while Trump was in office. DeWine was one of the first in the country to attempt mask mandates leading all other governors to the mandate first, just as he did with lockdowns. Without DeWine, many other governors only fantasized about it. DeWine was the first to do it. He was also the first to unconstitutionally alter election laws which would then pave the way for massive cheating that the Democrats would perform later that year with mail-in voting to remove Trump from office before the courts could even process the assault. Sheriff Jones, who advertised himself as a “pro Trump” member of law enforcement, suddenly endorsed DeWine for governor after all that DeWine had done to Ohio. Why? Well, the first thing is that the DeWine money machine is kicking in. Corruption and DeWine are never far from each other, and Sheriff Jones is always attracted to a kind of power. I’ve known Sheriff Jones for several years and what’s most valuable to him is his brand. For instance, when his brand is aligned with the Trump White House, it’s a wonderful thing. But I’ve seen it negatively align with big government union business, especially in 2013 when he backed the Lakota school tax increase, which he put his name behind to get it to pass by the most narrow of margins. So the Sheriff isn’t always a hard conservative; he just plays one on TV and in public appearances. And with Biden in the White House for the foreseeable future and Jones up in years himself, he needs to protect his brand while the political world sets itself in a new reality. 

What does Sheriff Jones like to do with his brand? Well, we have seen what he did to Thomas Hall, an Ohio Representative from Middletown who didn’t vote the way that the Sheriff wanted him to vote in Columbus, so the Sheriff used his name to berate the young man on WLW radio to thousands of people, personally attacking Thomas. Nobody elected Sheriff Jones to control other members of congress that we have elected to vote on our behalf. The Sheriff is supposed to take care of law enforcement concerns, not to dictate the terms of how other Republicans vote in our community by bullying them to his will. As a reaction to Thomas, the Sheriff went out of his way to put a primary candidate up against the Ohio Rep by dragging Matt King into the race, which naturally was pitting Republicans against Republicans on purpose for the intention of getting his way and making his point as being the “king maker” of the party, which put all kinds of people into a difficult position. Sheriff Jones didn’t care. He just wanted to show who had the power and what they had to do to kiss the ring to appease him, to hell what the voters of Butler County thought about the matter. That is why Jones had to align with Mike DeWine. Even though the governor is known to be attached to corruption, that power overflow gives Sheriff Jones the power to his brand that feeds his need to stay relevant as a man coming to the end of his career. Jones doesn’t have time to wait for Trump to be back in the White House. The need for power is always present, and DeWine is the quickest way to keep it. 

Now, of course, Jones would never admit to any of this. I’ve spoken to dozens and dozens of people affected by this situation, and they don’t know what to think about it. They feel betrayed and don’t have the words to put to the matter. That is why I like corruption so much, because if we didn’t have some way to measure corruption, no matter what form it exists, we wouldn’t have a way to explain this behavior. From his big labor union perspective, everyone thinks they are doing right; Jones thinks he’s doing what’s right for the Republican Party. He’s a moderate at best, and Thomas Hall has turned out to be way too Trump for his taste, so he is taking action. DeWine loved the way Amy Acton’s hair smelled after she took a shower, so he gave her the keys to Ohio and let her destroy it. As a long-married guy who is a closet Democrat, DeWine thought Acton knew what she was doing, so he defended her against all those evil business leaders who were outraged that DeWine and Acton had closed them down over Covid. DeWine showed himself to be an idiot who thought he was doing right. That’s why we have elections so that when we learn these things about people, we can get rid of them with an option, in this case, Jim Renacci. But honestly, there is only one right, not the right that Sheriff Jones comes up with, or his new buddy, Mike DeWine. But in our Republic, for it ever to really stand, it takes the taxpayers and respect for their vote. If they pick Thomas Hall, it’s not for Sheriff Jones to decide otherwise. Or for DeWine to attempt to hide four years of horrible management of Ohio behind one deal from Intel worth 20 billion dollars and to ride it like a bucking bronco at a rodeo. Corruption seeks to hide its misdeeds behind a façade that, if you know what you are looking at, can tell you the truth about the matter and allow voters to understand who they are getting involved with. And that is why corruption is a lot better to understand than to pretend like it doesn’t exist at all.

Rich Hoffman

Click to buy The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business

Vote No by Saying Yes: How Great Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy are for Lakota

Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy for Lakota School Board

I could tell you many stories about politics that are dire and would make you want to climb under a rock and never get involved again.  But sometimes, some stories are fantastic, and that is the case with the two endorsed Lakota school board candidates, Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who are running to replace incumbent Democrats in November of 2021.  Every event I have been to with these two has been good; a few examples are shown below.  The video might be a little rough, but it’s what they say that matters.  Darbi and Issac work well together and are as unselfish as I’ve ever seen in politics, in any position. I’ve said from the beginning that I supported four candidates for the school board, but in this race this year, the Republican endorsement is what matters.  In the past, liberals have infected the school board, so critical race theory and transexual policies became part of the dominant conversation. They have managed to hide their intentions by calling the school board “nonpartisan.” Well, we know that nothing in politics is “nonpartisan,” especially the Lakota school board.  But when this idea of supporting school board members for Lakota came up, I never thought that two of them who would win the endorsement would like each other so well. That’s when the “can you imagines” started coming to my mind, where the school board represented the conservatives of Butler County, Ohio truly, and that they worked well together.  It’s one thing to have conservative votes on the board to manage things the way voters expect, but that they would perform functional management is a bonus that didn’t seem possible. 

Vote for Darbi Boddy

For instance, Issac Adi went door to door in my precinct, letting people know who he was and when to vote for him.  My wife noticed him in our neighborhood, and they struck up a conversation at the end of my driveway.  Issac recognized her immediately, which I thought was remarkable considering the number of people he has met over several months, including big names like Jim Jordan.  I would imagine his head is spinning with all the people he’s had to shake hands with, so it did impress me that he remembered my wife.  That is one thing about Issac Adi; he is one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met in politics.  He truly cares and is a good person.  So he remembers people and cares about them long after the handshake.  Of course, he wanted to know where I was which my wife told him I was babysitting my grandkids inside the house.  So he came up to see me and talk for a bit. 

After talking and catching up, I noticed that Issac wore Darbi’s campaign sticker on his shirt.  He was doing the hard work of going door to door on a pretty hot day, full of enthusiasm after talking to many hundreds of people personally, and he was promoting Darbi along the way.  Now I know that they are both endorsed and are part of the same team.  But the way the vote occurs, they very much have to run individually.   The top vote-getters are the ones who win in these kinds of elections, and it’s always hard to beat an incumbent.  The union vote and latte-sipping liberals always show up on election night, making it hard for conservatives to get a lot of votes.  But here was Issac promoting Darbi just as much as he was promoting himself.  And as I understand it, Darbi has been doing the same.  She was out promoting her and Issac as a team, not just individual candidates.  For any election, that is a pretty unique concept that doesn’t have a lot of historical precedents. 

Adding their votes to that of the current Lynda O’Conner would be a game-changer at Lakota.  I have been to other events where I have seen the three of them talking, and the chemistry is just there.  You can see it from a long way off. I’ve been dealing with school board issues in many districts around Ohio for twenty years, and I have never seen such a good combo.  Seeing Issac that day took some of my natural cynicism toward politics into a place it had never been before.  It seemed possible that at Lakota, something good had a chance to happen.  They are both so much better than the other alternatives, and if people had an opportunity to see that for themselves, these two could get elected.   There are still very significant obstacles, but as hard as they have worked throughout September and into October, it seemed like more than a fantasy and more of an eventual reality.  Usually, when I think of the Lakota school board, I typically think of severe dysfunction and people who do not know what they are doing with the money.  But here were genuinely competent and hard-working people who actually liked each other, at least as much as I’ve ever seen in politics, and there was a chance for great things to happen at Lakota for the first time in forever. 

Vote for Issac Adi for Lakota School Board

Issac had to eventually leave and return to the campaign trail from my house, but it took a while.  I enjoyed his company so much that it took us a long time to say goodbye that day.  I can say that I have been talking actively with many of the old No Lakota Levy people preparing ourselves for levy fights in the years to come.  The current school board has been trying to find the time to put one up for a vote to satisfy the out-of-control spending the teacher’s union expects.  This was an election year. Otherwise, the current board would have proposed a tax increase this year.  Likely, they’ll wait until next year now that they’ve agreed to give all those teachers sitting home on Covid excuses a raise that they’ll have to pay for next year.  But a levy fight is so damaging.  It’s much better to support a new school board that would manage the money that we already give them, which is a massive 200 million-plus budget.  If you can’t teach 17,000 kids on that, you have problems.  But the school board has never listened. Instead, they have attacked businesses for more money, like trolls always looking for a shakedown of tax revenue to pay for their reckless and infinite spending ultimately. Lakota’s school board has been deficit spending for their entire existence; no matter how much money we’ve given them, they never find a way not to spend more than they take in.  When they did have a surplus for a bit because of declining enrollment, they couldn’t wait to waste it on something new.  With this prospect of an actual conservative school board to replace the majority of liberals, great things can happen.  Issac and Darbi have done the work to get people to know who they are.  Now it will be up to the voters.  For the first time in many of their lifetimes, they have a great choice as the Lakota school district residents.  They can vote for the same old tax and spend liberals that have screwed up so much at Lakota.  Or, they can vote for Issac Adi and Darbi Boddy, who enjoy each other, work hard, and care to give the board a conservative majority for the first time.  If voters don’t vote for them, then when the tax increases come, people won’t be able to complain about it because they had a chance to say no to those tax increases by saying yes to Darbi Boddy and Issac Adi. 

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Parents Stand up to Transsexual Activism: Finally parents are making their voices heard to save their children from public school

It was a remarkable thing to see for a change; angry parents from my home district of Lakota showed up at the mid-April school board meeting and let it be known what they thought of the transsexual policies advocated by the members of the board.   Their concerns about Critical Race Theory were another topic that is now all the rage in public schools.  It was much of this lunacy being given directly to teachers of all public schools in by the Ohio Department of Education. So it’s not fringe actions by radical leftist groups, the radical leftist groups are now mainstream and in the government, and they educate our kids.  And several of the Lakota school board members in my community have been lockstep in support of the government push for diversity training in public schools making racism the central issue of our education of children.  That may sound fair and balanced to the helicopter parents who fly their kids into the government schools for the free babysitting services that are very much part of this scam of political insurgency. Lakota’s transsexual policies attempted to take the lead on what has been an outright attack on the efficacy and future of all children attending. Parents in my community are finally starting to stick up for themselves.

As I said in the video above, Lakota, the public school in my neighborhood, is a good baseline for what is happening nationally with public education issues. It’s a wealthy district with a budget, what the labor unions consider the best teachers money can buy, and parents who sincerely care what is going on with their kids.  Likely more than average, there are two-parent homes in Lakota, and it votes heavily Republican.  However, the public elected the school board in the typical way that labor unions put their people in power to protect themselves from the outside world.  And those school board members, specifically names like Brad Lovell, Julie Shaffer, and Kelly Casper, have gone out of their way to endorse these liberal policies, especially the transgender elements.  The community indeed wasn’t screaming for it. It’s an extensive district and for the most part, considering the massive population of over 100,000 people in a county of 400,000, everyone stays pretty well behaved.  Delinquent children are an anomaly, they certainly aren’t familiar, and because of the two-parent homes, the sexual issues are much less an issue than in other places around the country.  There are more guns in the school district of Lakota, for instance, than there are in some states, but there is very little violence.  The newspapers have to work hard to find any real controversy to report.  That makes Lakota an excellent place to start to understand the massive activism that is threatening our children.  If it’s evident in my community, you can bet it’s every bit as bad in yours, or worse. 

The Lakota school board has forgotten who they represent.  As mentioned in the accompanying video on this site of the actual meeting where the parents lined up under social distancing rules to speak at the public portion of the meeting, school board members aren’t paid for their work.  They do it as representatives of the community to make sure the massive $200 million-plus budget taken from property owners gets where it needs to go for the sake of the kids’ education.  However, all the members except for Lynda O’Conner out of the five officials voting are leaning toward the far left mandates coming out of the state, which ultimately comes out of the Ohio Education Association, the teacher’s union, which shapes a lot of what happens in public education as a radical progressive group.  They have chosen to make the decisions on transgender policy that they have, which has many parents terrified for their children’s lives, correctly.  I would argue that I know this school board and that these parental complaints will fall on deaf ears.  But it’s good to bring them up in public anyway and take the complaints several steps further than their little 3-minute spots in the board meetings.  These issues are far too complicated to be capped off under the Lakota management structure, and the urgency for the kids’ sake is nothing short of dire. So even if the school board doesn’t get it, it’s a fight worth having.  As a community, we could always elect new school board members.  But the discussion needs to happen in a front and center kind of way.

I used to do hundreds of articles on my blog site here about specifically Lakota challenges, but I have readers in most of the major countries.  I have been covering overreaching national and international issues now, but that doesn’t mean that local issues aren’t necessary for the scheme of things.  For Lakota, what is happening in my backyard is happening in yours as well; it’s worth mentioning what’s happening so that you, the reader, can take similar actions on your own.  However, for my newer readers catching up to the past, I have a long history with the Lakota school system.  My warnings were that this day would arrive.  I started formally just arguing the merits of the tax increases against property owners, and I was a frequent guest on talk radio and our television news.  I gave speeches all over the place and met with concerned parents all over Ohio, so I understand well how concerned parents are and can be out there.  But the more work I did in looking into the various progressive issues, the angrier I became because it was evident that public education was headed in this direction. They wanted our kids, and they desired as progressive activists and outright communists working in public education to ruin the minds of our children so that when they grew up, they’d become activist voters, and that is where we find ourselves today. 

However, public school activists never plan for the parents to speak up for themselves.  They expect them to drop their kids off at the government schools and rush off to Starbucks before gossiping and becoming distracted by a thousand other things. Simultaneously, the teachers attack the children’s foundations with sexualized educations and race relation discussions. School distracts them from the elements they should be learning, such as how to grow into a critical thinking adult and how to read.  Modern educators want kids as dumb and witless as possible so that they will be easy to control in the future and for methods that we are now seeing openly on the news.  None of this is new, but what is new is that a group of parents stuck together and showed up to speak out against it.  They tried to communicate with their school board, which is part of the problem and is destined to blow them off.  But it won’t end there.  Challenges to the school board are bound to happen in the upcoming elections. The state of Ohio is taking notice, and some powerful Republican politicians are just as upset about this attack on our country.  That creates an atmosphere that has some potential for real reform.  And if it’s happening in Lakota, it’s happening in other places as well, and that is something to celebrate.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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The MAGA Parade in Cincinnati: What Trump and Republicans have is “Engagement,” Democrats don’t

By now everyone has heard, but there was a rather large convoy of Trump decorated vehicles that stormed around the I-275 loop in Cincinnati. Like in other parts of the country where boat parades, motorcycle gatherings, and now massive shows of force from cars and trucks giving just a hint to the silent majority that everyone has been talking about are emerging as a counter force to the anti-American forces that have made themselves known of late attached to the Democrat Party. I received several media requests yesterday about the event and how footage could be obtained about some of the participants for some pre-convoy coverage on Friday, which sent me scurrying about to fulfill the request. The truth is, and I told this to the reporters, the people who normally organize the official Trump events had little to nothing to do with the convoy. It was purely a grass roots movement created on social media and exploded into its own thing. And that was the story, not that it was happening so much, but that it happened without formal organized effort driven officially by the campaign.

I was at the Victory Center in West Chester for Trump several times on Friday performing other clandestine activities that were official but that was another story that I likely won’t be talking about—that’s why its “clandestine.” But it did give me a chance to talk to the official Trump people about the convoy for which they replied, “we have nothing to do with it. But they are meeting from this area at IKEA right over there,” (pointing to the south through the Victory Center windows. A little twinkle in the eyes of the men who had lived long enough to see everything and yet were still surprised that Democrats were challenging the patriotism of America in this election, much to their demise. And that was the spirit that drew together so many thousands of people to spend their own time and money to make a proclamation in favor of President Trump. What nobody from the SWAMP seemed to understand was what Trump was to the people who voted for him. Yet, they were finding out early in the election cycle with events like this convoy.

That is the key to any successful endeavor, when a leader of any kind can unlock “engagement” from the people following them, massive success is always short to follow. Engagement is one of the most difficult things to measure in any work culture, its where people do things because they want to, not because they are asked by a boss, meaning that the needs of something get done by those most able to do it in the fastest manner. So for those concerned about a civil war, which I would argue we have been in for a decade at least. A formal war against the socialist and Marxist Democrats will be a disaster for them because on their side, they have only followers, they do not have the kind of self-initiated engagement that has emerged first from the Tea Party movement that has now carried over into the Trump Presidency. Engagement does not show up on all the fancy graphs that businesses use to track productivity, its one of the most mysterious aspects of human behavior, and we can see it clearly in September for the re-election of President Trump. Events like this rally are just the tips of icebergs that are emerging from the water. Behind them are many millions of people who feel the same, but are shy to reveal their intentions due to social unrest and the peer pressure to conform. Their engagement to the problem is revealed in other ways, like picking up yard signs, spreading blog posts from conservative writers, or pushing back on social media chats about the state of the world from the Marxists of the Democrat Party. That engagement to the problem is so widespread in the Trump push for re-election says most everything anyone needs to know about the 2020 election season.

Donald Trump has been able to unlock the engagement of his employees for decades, it was most evident on his hit television show, ‘The Apprentice.’ That show was entirely about how engagement happens in a culture and how every business enterprise in the world that is successful discovers it, and nurtures it to fruition. The political left doesn’t have engagement and they know it, so their entire strategy is to use fear to clamp down on Trump’s supporters and their propensity toward engagement. Many of their riots and protests are meant to appeal to the animal aspects of their participants, but the goal is terrorism specifically to destroy the enthusiasm of the party they are fighting against. Instead of Trump supporters engaging in the political process, the Democrat terrorist intend to use fear to keep them hiding. But as was clear by the amount of people who showed up at the Trump convoy around Cincinnati on Saturday September 12, 2020, the engagement is winning which is truly terrifying to witness for the Democrats.

What this means in terms of “war” and actual battles that would make up the history of a civil war in the traditional sense is that it doesn’t take a general to organize the troops to combat. The people show up and do such a thing out of free-will. That is how a future state militia would operate as well. Should Marxists take over as they have with similar insurrections in China, South Africa, and Cuba—and countless other places as well—then the same people who decorated up their cars to show support for their political candidate will be grabbing guns, legal or illegal and they will be meeting the oppressors willy nilly anywhere they appear preventing any sort of control over the population in general. So should Democrats cheat and win this election, that would be the future civil war everyone is talking about. One side has natural engagement, the other doesn’t leaving the weaker side to assuredly loose any battle that might take place. Fear is not a motivator that creates engagement, and when that is all that holds people to a political party, it is easy to defeat such people. But it is not easy to defeat people who come to that political party out of excitement and optimism. That is how you can know who will win or lose in any battle whether its political in nature, or in combat. Its all the same.

Personally, I think convoys are much better ways of conducting battle than grabbing guns and killing the other side. The point in killing the other guy is to lower their engagement and make them fear losing, sending them to hide from war and thus the battlefield. In this case, the engagement has already been gained by one side as the other continues to surrender on sight. The rallies Trump has is a show of force that the other side can’t produce, which is better than actually killing them on a battlefield. The effect is the same, except without the deaths. So I am quite proud of everyone for showing this force now rather than later. It likely can do more good today than it will after November 3rd 2020. But its also good for that other side to know what’s coming to them even if they do manage to steal an election. They don’t have engagement in their party, only fear and loathing, and that isn’t going to win anything in any straight up conflict. Which of course would be the next step should they seize power. They don’t have the “engagement” to keep it. But the Trump side does, which is all anybody needs to know about the 2020 election.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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The Communist Swing from ‘High Noon’ to Trump: Why what Jerry Nadler is doing is far worse than McCarthyism

I think it goes without saying that I love John Wayne and westerns in general, but I have always disagreed with The Duke on his opinion about the great film High Noon. I have never seen it as an allegory on the blacklisting and the congressional investigations led by Joseph McCarthy, which many think it was. Yes, there were communists in Hollywood and yes it is true that Carl Foreman, the screenwriter of High Noon was one of them. The un-American activities were in full swing in 1952 led by Russia to penetrate Hollywood so essentially, they could get the control they have today during the years of Donald Trump. As I have listened to the American leftists reaction to Trump this past week and watched all the activity about the FBI and current hearings led by Jerry Nadler and the rest of the Democrats trying to impeach President Trump, I think we can look back at this documentary about the making of High Noon with a new eye toward history. Personally, I’m tired of hearing about how bad McCarthyism was on America and what impact blacklisting had on Hollywood. That cry baby stuff is long over. Conservatives are blacklisted much worse than any of the communists in Hollywood were then, so let’s revisit the morality of that time without the tears that the left have been hiding behind for years.

Truth be told, I spent the first twenty years of my adult life working toward a career in entertainment and planned to have a Hollywood film stint, and at several points I made major strides in that direction. But I am a Cincinnati conservative not that much unlike many stars who have made it in Hollywood quite spectacularly, but times have changed. If we were living in the days of High Noon where John Wayne set the standard and had the clout to run communists like Carl Foreman out of the country, as Wayne did before High Noon was even released, then I would likely be working in Hollywood right now. So in many ways I could lay claim to being blacklisted all of my adult life from the things I really enjoy. But unlike those complaining left leaning losers, I was able to do other things in my life and I have been successful in other aspects anyway. So what is there to cry about unless you are a one trick pony like most of Hollywood was and still is. They are probably worse today than they were in the time of High Noon’s release.

However, John Wayne made it very public that he didn’t like High Noon because he considered it un-American, and Lloyd Bridges was in an acting group that had lots of communists in it, which didn’t help. The American left loved High Noon because they thought of it as commentary on the McCarthy hearings, as Gary Cooper’s character Marshal Kane was a target for revenge for an outlaw that he had put in jail years ago, before his anticipated retirement. The train bringing the villain was to arrive at High Noon and the bandit was intent to bring his gang to the Marshal to kill him. The Marshal was planning to retire and marry his bride to be, but he is still the law in Hadleyville so he had an honorable obligation to fulfil his job as the lawman. Even though it may kill him. Knowing that a gang of four other killers are going to accompany the leader Kane tries to get other members of the town to help him, but nobody would.

The Soviet Union did not like High Noon because they felt it glorified the individual. Even though there were communists working on the film and the McCarthyism was in full swing in Washington D.C. it wasn’t enough for them and they made sure that even though the film won 4 Oscars because the American left wanted the film to do well, it wasn’t enough for the U.S.S.R. So, in that context it should be clear that John Wayne saw the big picture of the matter and just didn’t like High Noon viewing it as an un-American activity. Wayne was so adamant about his dislike for High Noon that he went into production for Rio Bravo as a direct pro-American answer. So, these are not new disputes these discussions about Trump’s swing back to the political right and waving the American flag around in reaction to socialist and communist propaganda. In the days of High Noon, it was denied that communism was even happening, but after the recent debates with the Democrats has shown, socialism and communism are very much the platforms of their party and their intention. So, the cat is out of the bag. Nobody is hiding it anymore. They were always trying to infect American culture with collectivist Marxism in some version or another. If it wasn’t John Wayne standing up to it, it is now Donald Trump. But the effort has always been there, and the debate is not new.

What has everyone in a panic now as opposed to the times of High Noon is that the political left felt that the pendulum was swinging in their direction in 1952, and it was. Leftist politics and open socialism were being debated, even if masked with different names and that swing has gone on for well over 50 years. But people are sick of it, and for anybody who saw Trump’s rally in Cincinnati in 2019 could attest to, people are now rejecting the political left. Trump is just the vehicle; the movement is taking a life of its own. For the same reasons that westerns were popular in 1952, conservative ideas are reemerging from the aftermath of failed socialist policies regardless of what political theater would like to believe.

The blacklisting that is going on currently with Facebook, Google, YouTube and many others is far worse for conservatives than it was ever in Hollywood as a direct reaction to McCarthyism. And its not John Wayne anymore trying to keep the pendulum from swinging to the left with more and more pro-American westerns. This time it is the left trying to fight the trend, the media that the communists did get control of. They couldn’t get the anti-American ideas to stick and patriotism is back in style and in spite all their screams of warning, are losing. Regardless of the political tendencies of the movie High Noon, I think it’s a great movie about society failing the individual yet the individual doing what needs to be done against all odds to do the right thing. It is certainly an American film especially in relation to the films of today which are far, far, far more left leaning than High Noon. But it is interesting given today’s political climate to look back at that time when the left was winning and building their case and crying about blacklisting. They have gone far further than anything John Wayne did or any other pro-American advocate during the periods of the Hollywood westerns. I could feel bitter about it, but as I said, I moved on to other industrious efforts. The left can’t and they are choking on their own crap and you know what, I think its funny. I am enjoying the show, because they deserve everything they are getting now. They started it. And its good to see them suffering now.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump Landing in Cincinnati 2-5-2018: See the President and First Lady at Lunken Field

This is information for my readers who might want a chance to see the President in person.  Here is the information on where and how to do it.  Plan to give President Trump a nice welcomed return to the Cincinnati area.

Good Afternoon,

We are looking forward to having President Trump in Ohio tomorrow!

The President will be landing at Cincinnati Municipal Airport – Lunken Field on Monday. The shuttle bus parking lot opens at 11:15 am and will closed at 12:45 P.M. Please arrive early. Once the President’s plane lands they will not let people into the greeting pen. They will have security scanners in place so we recommend that you don’t bring any excessive bags or items with you.

Date: Monday, February 5th
Location: 4265 Airport Rd, Cincinnati, OH 45266
Time: Parking opens at 11:15 P.M. // No entry after 12:45 P.M.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Cincinnati and appreciate everything you have done to make America great again!

Thanks,

Max Docksey
Ohio Republican Party

Rich Hoffman

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The Jurassic Quest Disaster: Cincinnati needs to get its act together downtown

It pains me to say it, but the Jurassic Quest event at the Duke Energy Center in Cincinnati, Ohio on the weekend of January 28, 2018 was horrible. My kids and grandkids wanted to go, so at $20 dollars a ticket I thought it would be something special. The good news is that the dinosaurs themselves were great animatronic creatures—but they were no better than the good exhibit at Kings Island just up the road. This Jurassic Quest thing is a traveling show that goes from city to city every weekend, so it takes money to get around the country and pay everyone—I understand the need to make a nice profit and in Cincinnati we are spoiled in regard to having Kings Island—not every city has something like that. It certainly didn’t hurt attendance, there were a lot of people coming to Jurassic Quest—and at the cost of a basic ticket, there is no question that the people putting the whole show on were making money. But here’s the problem, they charged for every little thing—there were very few things that you could do with your $20 price of admission. Our kids were bored in a half an hour and were ready to go home and for something like that—that is a shame.

The larger problem however is the city of Cincinnati itself. I hadn’t been down to the Duke Energy Center in a few years, the last time was a Freedom Fest type of thing that Glenn Beck and a lot of reform minded people were at. I had parked at Carew Tower and walked down so my experience was a decent one. Things are pretty nice in the Fountain Square area relative to where I live in Liberty Township, Ohio—so nothing jumped out at me as being of low quality—for a city. But because we had a bunch of kids and strollers I wanted to park close to the entrance of the Duke Energy Center which was charging for “event” parking so it was $15 dollars per car. We had two cars, so add up the price of the parking and the tickets and do the math—we made a significant investment in this thing and expected something of a decent quality.

What we were greeted with was a mess, the elevator in the garage was slow and clunky. It smelled like death. The windows to the stairs were mostly broken and the entry to the Skywalk was in disrepair. Everything on that second level that would take visitors into the convention center from the garage looked torn up and broken which was a shame, because the whole area was the premier part of the downtown experience, and this appeared to be the best they could do. City management should be ashamed of itself along with whoever is managing that garage. What a waste of money that was. If they are charging that much money for parking—and Paul Brown Stadium is right around the corner within walking distance—then why couldn’t everything at least work and look cared for?

When we arrived at the ground floor we came to a very uneventful door that led into a courtyard that looked like it came out of the video game Fallout—as if a nuclear holocaust had rid the city of its occupants for a century or more. The door into the garage for which I was holding to let the kids come out, looked like a broom closet once I closed it. There was nothing to say that this was the entrance to the garage or anything connected to capitalist activity in the downtown region. It was just a beat up rusty door that needed to be painted badly and was pathetic. Of course we had a big stroller for the kids and there was no ramp or anyway to get to the up the steps that took us to the ground level so we carried the thing up and onto the sidewalk. That surprised me because I’ve done work within the city of Cincinnati just two or three blocks down from that location at City Hall and I can tell you that I’ve wasted many hours of my life arguing with the idiots at the CBC (Cincinnati Building Code) office about easement ramps for new projects so handicapped people and people with strollers like us could get around. I of course am against imposing unrealistic restrictions on businesses with a bunch of stupid ramps, yet as strict as the bureaucrats at city hall are about such progressive concepts, they had nothing in one of their sidewalk easements to one of their best garages in an area where guests coming into the city will interact most. I’d be surprised if they didn’t know about the issue.

Then there are the rug rats and the homeless that were hovering around the area. Forget about all the compassion nonsense, and why there are homeless people, and people who will whore themselves out for a shot of heroin—people coming downtown to spend $300 on an experience with their kids don’t want to look at a bunch of losers panhandling. If the city wants to let them hang around begging for money and sleeping on the streets, they should corral them somewhere that doesn’t impose such a swanky demeanor to visitors of the city. It is one of the biggest problems of visiting any city. I can say that in traveling to London and Paris within the year I could say the same about those places—no city is dealing properly with the homeless situation. Canterbury which is a town in England that I like quite a lot has a lot of homeless people and you have to step over them literally at times because they sleep right on the sidewalk and interact with the people around them. When you are shopping and spending time with the people you care about in life, these people are an interruption. Feeling sorry for their condition in life is one thing, but having to deal with them when you are tying to enjoy something is quite another. Allowing them to hang out at the entrance of the Duke Energy Center is a mistake. In London even, they understand not to allow the unsightly to gather in front of their big tourist areas—they shove them off into the corners wherever possible. You won’t see them outside Buckingham Palace—that’s for sure, and we shouldn’t see them outside of the Duke Energy Center or in the path to Fountain Square, or the Banks a few blocks to the south.

I know Cincinnati is mostly ran by liberals. My oldest daughter loves going down to the Over the Rhine district on Vine Street that has really come a long way since I was her age. But just a few streets over it’s still the crime infested place it always was—it has taken a lot to push the criminal element to the east and west to create an enterprise zone that people like my daughter will actually visit. But the people running the city wondering why nobody wants to ride their stupid street car must understand that people of value don’t like to have losers shoved in their faces when they are spending their entertainment dollars. So the city has to manage their losers and keep them away from the people who have money in their pockets otherwise that money won’t come downtown. After what I saw I would be very reluctant to do such a thing again. I have so many more options to the north and south where I don’t have to see losers hanging around on the street where I can spend my money. I only say something because I like Cincinnati and want it to be successful. But it won’t be so long as these basic little things are left unresolved.

Rich Hoffman
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