Tag: corruption

‘Edison’: The biography by Edmund Morris is a fantastic story on the powers of Home Schooling

It doesn’t happen often but when it does, I do a review on great books that I read and one of the best that I’ve read in a while is Edison by Edmund Morris. Sadly, Edmund Morris died in the spring of 2019, just ahead of the publication of one of his great biographies of people who were above and beyond the norm. He is known for his trilogy biography on Teddy Roosevelt which I have adored over the years, and his very controversial book on Ronald Reagan called Dutch. So, it goes without saying that I was looking forward to reading his latest Edison biography with the kind of eagerness that someone might look forward to a new Star Wars movie or a major sporting event. It was something I couldn’t wait to read, and I had an open window to handle the 700 plus page book just after New Years of 2020, and it didn’t disappoint. I read the book a few times just to make sure it was as excellent as I thought it was. Edison, the book, is one of those rare treats where the contents of a great person in Thomas A. Edison matched the wit and wisdom of one of the world’s greatest biographers in carving out an excellent narrative that was bizarrely articulate. I have always loved Edison, but this biography solved a riddle for me that I had been asking about the man all of my life and to unlock it, Morris told the story in reverse.

The book starts with the death of Thomas Edison in 1931 and it actually ends with a baby Edison contemplating space and matter in his first 9 months of life. The purpose of telling the story in reverse which has caused much consternation among critics and the reading public in general was to reveal why Edison was such a passionate inventor working his 20-hour days and sleeping on his work bench most of his life. He was like most people do throughout their lives trying to get back to those wonders of childhood and for him, he never stopped thinking like a child, always inventing and behaving as if answering the questions hidden by nature were the most rewarding thing in the world to do. Morris had to tell the answer of how Edison became who he was by putting the beginning literally at the end so that everything that had been studied throughout Edison’s long life and many thousands of inventions including the lightbulb, the phonograph and extended batteries for use in submarines, were climaxed by a point in his past that could only be articulated in reviewing a life in reverse, the way a dying person may have their life flash before their eyes. Reviewing history in this way took an almost God-like perspective in the context of universal history that was significant and enchanting.

For me it answered a question I have long suspected, and this is common in great thinkers such as Edison, Walt Disney, even great minds of today like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, a little love from a good mother and some independent input from parents in the early phases of a life where other social elements of standardization are removed from a child’s mind, can ignite in a human being great potential. In the case of Edison, he wasn’t made a genius inventor by any school or upper level academic institution which is a point I make often about society in general, but by a mother who worked closely with him to ignite a spectacular man who literally had never been taught to think in a limited fashion. The reason the childhood of Edison was kept to the end of the book was because that was the key to the making of the man to begin with—where he was in his lifetime the most popular man in the world at his death where every world power took a moment to honor him for all that he had done to advance mankind to a new level.

I was even surprised at how much academia was against Thomas Edison through his early years, until he simply outworked his critics and invented so many new things that nobody could even hope to compete with him. I was also surprised to learn that the famous rivalry with Tesla was not so much true but was more a product of a media that wanted to chronical some sort of horse race to sell newspapers. It was remarkably like the way we call Fake News today in covering the Trump administration. Edison did not have much formal schooling, even through grade school, so he had never learned what couldn’t be done, which is a continued plague among most of our fellow human beings. Edison was remarkable because he had never learned not to be.

Even though Edmund Morris the writer was considered, and still is even in his death, one of the great academics of our times by way of writers, his books have this common theme that he has managed to uncover about people of exceptional ability, such as Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. When reading Dutch, which Morris was invited into the White House to study Reagan for that book, you can see through his writing that Morris was almost disappointed in the man because he was not Teddy Roosevelt, but simply an actor who had learned to take on the character of America and play it in the 1980s to unite the country to defeat communism and unleash the power of our capitalist economy. The man himself was not one of these special people and Morris had to invent a narrative character controversially to give himself emotional distance to the subject to get through the project. That certainly wasn’t the case with Edison. It was obvious that after spending thousands of hours studying Edison to even write this book, that Morris loved the man, and for good reason. After finishing that book, I did too.

I was at a bookstore in Disney World holding this book in my hand thinking of buying it, but we were on vacation and I didn’t have the time for it then, so I held off a few weeks longer. But I was thinking of Edison while at Disney Springs where they have a restaurant there dedicated to Thomas Edison that I was very enchanted with. I knew of Edison all the usual things, that he was in fact the founder of General Electric, and that he had done great things for the war efforts. But I didn’t know he was such a good person, not so much with his wives and his kids, but as an individual who really had just never grown up. Even though he was practically deaf and lacked a lot of compassion for others the way that people measure it, he was authentic and did not waste his time looking in the rear-view mirror at anybody. I appreciated that restaurant while visiting Disney Springs, but I think now I have a lot more reverence for it, and deservedly so. Thomas Edison was a great man, not necessarily because of any other reason but because his mother taught him the love of life and the boundless rewards that can come from a thinking mind, and thus, we are all the better for it. Just imagine if our society produced hundreds of Thomas Edison’s every year instead of every other century.

Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman

What George Lang has in common with George Washington: Leadership is a thankless job that only the toughest can handle

For anyone who watched the very good Washington three-part series on The History Channel they were treated with a great reminder of several great elements that made that America’s first president so great. I have read several books on Washington and heard the story told many times in various documentaries, but this recent one was a bit different, perhaps because of the reflections of our own modern politics. As I write this the world is literally stunned that Bernie Sanders is the frontrunner in the Democrat primary and President Trump is in India attracting 110,000 people to the largest cricket stadium in the world. For many who only casually pay attention to politics, it would appear to them that the world is on fire and they are baffled as to the fuel that is burning it. But one thing that The History Channel show on Washington really drove home was how much famous figures like Thomas Paine despised George Washington at the end of his term and wished him well to leave politics forever, the guy who was the driving general who had won the war against Great Briton. In a lot of ways it reminded me of a domestic election in my state of Ohio where George Lang has several primary rivals and have targeted him as the established “federalist” and are nurturing the idea of “if only” someone new and fresh were elected, then everything would be great.

While my personal sentiments in politics are very anti-federalist, much more like Thomas Paine’s original writings and those of Thomas Jefferson, I admire the way that George Washington handled his first terms in office, especially how he quelled the tempers of Alexander Hamilton during the Whiskey Rebellion. Of course a country must enforce the laws it comes up with, but it should never lose sight of who they work for and so one of the thinnest lines in the history of the world started in America and was navigated by General George Washington in those early days of forging the country and there were many who hated him for it. George Lang of Butler County Ohio has had a similar experience, although not similar in the moments of war, but there were many political battles that George had to survive to enter into the 52nd House seat with a foot in the world of the old Republican Party and being one of the first Trump supporters to come out of the mainstream to support him. There were many political costs to that effort and George Lang managed to work through them with great effort, and a lot of hurt feelings.

But that’s the way it goes, and George Washington understood that contention came with the territory even if in the end he just wanted to be a farmer. To free mankind from the burdens of servitude in government with self-rule, was to unleash all their tempers and freedoms to express it. And that would of course lead to many contentious battles in American politics that has not eased up at all in the following centuries. Most people around the world feel the need for freedom, but few can express it as they can in America so by nature, there will always be discontent. Thomas Paine obviously sung the praises of Washington when Yorktown was won, or at Trenton. But once Washington had management power, like all members of management, the knives come out and everyone in the world thinks they can do a better job. The question is, do they have the guts and the skill, and I would argue that few other than Washington did. And regarding modern politicians like George Lang, they were forged in the furnace, and most people would melt away under such pressure. Their ambitions are always positive while they are on a yard sign, but once they get into office and those knives come out, they are easily overtaken, and the regrets happen fast.

And that was true on the national stage just as it is on the local level, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson had their own ideas about how the presidency should have been and were very critical of George Washington while the old general was president, but when they had their own turn, they of course had their own critics and in the hindsight of history, many could agree that George Washington did a great job, even fending off the militaristic efforts of his young friend Alexander Hamilton. We should all be so lucky that it was never Hamilton who became president but was in fact Washington. I see this as applicable to our Butler County region where George Lang is running for the senate because all these towns and cities in the county are named after those founding fathers, specifically Hamilton, Ohio which was so named as a direct consequence to Washington’s relationship to the Southwest Ohio area. History does repeat and the conditions of merit don’t change. And neither do the pressures. They are the same as they were in Washington’s time as they are now in the Ohio Statehouse. But the circumstances are modern as opposed to siloed into the past concerns where it took a lot longer to communicate from town to town, or country to country.

Anybody in any management position, whether its in government or in private enterprise will find it a lonely place to function from, and people by their very nature find control over their lives reprehensible, and will work to limit your management of them at every turn. The answer to the Bernie Sanders types who want to solve the problem with communism and just take away everyone’s freedoms so that everyone is equally miserable and hopeless is just another extreme way of dealing with the fundamental problem that anybody in management of any kind will be hated. They are loved during elections, but once the pressure is on to perform, the factions of hatred will increase essentially because people don’t like to be controlled, so anybody in that role will be heavily scrutinized. However, the trick is for the manager, or in this case, politician is to see how well they can function under scrutiny and do right when opposition is strongest.

That is what George Lang has that others simply do not and would take several decades of experience to develop. And yes, it’s a thankless job that only has benefit in knowing deep down inside that the world was made better by their work. Because the benefits do not come from the immediate gains of everyday life where literally everyone has a different vision for how things should be done and as a representative of many people, which any position as senator does, somebody is always going to hate you. What George Washington always had in mind was the big picture as it was evolved by Thomas Paine and other revolutionaries, even if those people couldn’t see it in practice themselves. Washington the leader could and held true to give our nation the jump start it needed where most everyone else would have failed. And that is how I see the efforts of George Lang of Ohio, it’s a thankless battle in the day to day world of politics, but he makes everything so much better with the big view of solutions that last into the coming decades. And that is ultimately how greatness is defined by history.

Rich Hoffman

Bernie Sanders is the Democrat Frontrunner: Socialism, communism and the ‘Call of the Wild’

It is ironic that as Bernie Sanders won the Las Vegas caucus over the weekend that critics of Donald Trump—largely Democrats are trying to start the rumor that the Russians are helping to get the president re-elected. Now logically, why would the Russians ever want Donald Trump re-elected, he has not been good for them, that’s for sure. But Bernie Sanders is one of their own, a devout communist who chose out of all destinations in the world the Soviet Union to vacation on his honeymoon because he was so love with communism and obviously still is. There is no evidence to even support the accusation yet there it is, the Democrats have stated it because they see where the road is going and they have no control of their car going over the cliff. It is as I have said from the beginning, Democrats as a party affiliate with socialism and communism. When we spoke about Barack Obama being a socialist and that was so scandalous, just a few years later the Democrats are forced to reveal it about themselves, and now Bernie Sanders is well on his way to the nomination from the Democrats to be the person to run against Trump for the White House.

I was in the green room at WLW a long time ago, not that long ago it seems, but its been a few years and I was talking to some of the talent there and their producers about my opinions on public education being a gateway drug for socialism. As I said to them, which they were clearly uncomfortable with, was that government schools, and our government in general had quite a love for socialism and that was what they wanted to see implemented in the United States. And that my writing about it took away the fine points of my funding arguments about public schools because it was too far outside the mainstream. I of course replied that what I was saying was the truth and that people just weren’t ready to admit it to themselves—so we agreed to disagree and stay off that topic while on air at WLW. They of course love the high school sports programming, especially in the fall when they read the football scores and talk about the various games around the city late into Friday nights of broadcasting.

Actually, I took grief from just about everybody for my position on schools. There were some really violent discussions when my children were getting ready to be college age from family members who thought my opinions on our education system in general was going to destroy their lives. My kids are in almost in their 30s now and we always had a close relationship and they are glad they listened to dad on the warnings. Everyone they know who has gone through the meat grinder of public education and the liberalized college experience we provide are lost and confused as young people. Granted, all those kids had parents feeding them literally into the system like trees into a woodchipper grinding them into dust completely and leaving nothing behind. It wasn’t easy to go against the trends of the time, but without question I was the most voracious reader of anybody, and I did know better. The truth is that I have always loved education, just not the kind that government schools were offering. Its not just teaching that matters, its what is being taught, and I will argue all day long that its better not to teach things if the only option is a bunch of communist and socialist garbage.

What brings this position to mind is the new movie Call of the Wild that I remember well was required reading in school and looking at the way that climate change is being paraded around now the communist activism of government schools couldn’t be clearer. Even way back then, several decades ago public schools were pushing climate change in mandatory reading like Call of the Wild which effectively puts the reader in the mind of the dog as he realizes how small he really is in the scheme of things and surrenders himself to the “Call of the Wild.” We are all disposable after all yet the earth continues on long after we are gone just as is was before we ever came to be. Its kind of a hopeless view of the world that is designed to put the people receiving the education into the mindset that all is hopeless, and all thought is perishable, so why bother. The state is there to protect the environment and of course the people are there to protect their government—first by surrendering their identities to the Call of the Wild. Listen to that call and become one with nature. Isn’t that the message of the Woodstock Festival, or any rock concert?

I always had those thoughts about rock concerts, and nigh clubs in general. When I was a late teenager I had been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and was very interested in tribal rights, where individuals sacrifice their integrity to the needs of the group. Every rock concert was a kind of mass sacrifice where people surrendered their values to the band on stage and danced to their impulses, not to their own thoughts. It was a kind of Call of the Wild to listen to the pulsations of the rock group KISS talk about sex on stage and cause very nice girls to lift up their shirts and show their breasts to 20,000 people. I was often the guy who drove to these things because I didn’t like to drink much and was always the one with the best car. Some of the girls who would go with us to rock concerts were so nice and respectable daddy’s girls. They would give no sign of being loose sexually and kept their short skirts pushed down when you looked into the back seat to check on their comfort. But once in the rock concert dancing to their favorite songs, those panties came off and were being thrown up to the stage where the performers were. And their breasts were unleashed to the world. Afterwards, they would blame it on the alcohol, on losing their minds to drugs and the pulsations of the environment as if that would explain it all. I knew different, it was a mindset that was given to them in public school when leftists teachers made them read Call of the Wild and to write a report on its merits. So when given decisions in life as adults for the first time, they ripped off their clothes and shamed themselves for all their future families by getting into a mosh pit and surrendering their individual selves to the chaos of mass ownership.

So why is anybody surprised that the guy who calls himself a socialist, and has even supported openly Soviet style communism is leading the Democrat primary? Why did WLW not want to talk about the role that public schools play in programming young people to vote for such people? And why do nice young ladies go to night clubs and rock concerts and do things in public that they would never do while on a date with a nice young man? Its because of the belief patterns that create socialism and how it is taught, not realized through natural selection. Most people when given a choice once more wisdom comes to them later in life turn toward Republican ideas. But by then most people are so compromised with embarrassment that they spend the rest of their lives trying to continue their scandal with some form of consensus building. The Friday night football scores are always a welcome distraction, not just because sports is fun and interesting, but it reminds the consumer of the information that they weren’t the only ones who embarrassed themselves, so the actions don’t seem so bad. As adults, they don’t feel they have the authority to tell their kids that Bernie as a socialist is bad for their lives, so they keep their mouths shut. But for the next generation in the dance clubs and at rock concerts, those disgraces are happening almost every day, and to cover their behavior, they are voting for Bernie Sanders when given a choice. And that is who the Democrats are.

Rich Hoffman

The World Didn’t Suddenly Go Nuts: Its always been the way it is, what’s different is that people have choices

There are many who are confused by the politics of our times, who are looking at what’s going on and thinking that the world has come unglued and is about to fly apart. I would argue that these elements were always there, but that the freedoms of modern life have brought forth the truth thoughts of people and now that the froth has boiled a bit, the scum that has risen to the top is purifying our society for the better. It was clear to me that for the Republicans that it was the Tea Party movement that was starting that process, which would have happened whether or not Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck had ever been on the radio. Rather, it was the need of a public seeking answers that gave them the platform to do their thing, they didn’t make the thing themselves. The result was that true definitions of conservative values were challenged, and the party evolved into what has become Donald Trump. As the evolution of politics was boiling off all the definitions into clarity the Democrat Party was attempting to do the same only they interfered with the process and suppressed the Bernie Sanders surge in favor of Hillary Clinton, the Party pick for president for all kinds of artificial reasons. Because of that interference, that is why they are having troubles now.

As I have said for many years, socialism and communism have been at the heart of not just the labor movement, but of the entire Democrat Party going well back into the 1960s—even back to the 1930s, even the 20s. The concept of public ownership of resources seemed smart to a world that didn’t know better, but after a century of looking at the situation clearly, we can now all say that Karl Marx was smoking crack when he wrote The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital with Friedrich Engels. The idea of communism was doomed from the start because it ignores the motivations of the human race and instead imposes on it some mystical hope that assumes that intellect is subservient to nature, and its not. Intellect is born of nature, not a threat to it. So communism and all its various ideas were tried, and failed, however the Democrat Party built its entire platform around various forms of its definitions without ever saying the word to themselves openly. They hoped that by the time regular people figured out what the Democrat Party was, after years of public education, after years of union membership, after all the pushes for equal rights which were not meant to bring fairness to all, but to establish in the minds of normal people the idea that all individuals would serve the state, not their own needs, then maybe their ideas of communism would stick.

But since Republicans had that honest debate, as many sat on the fence between those two worlds, politicians like Mitt Romney, John McCain, and even known moderates like the old Ohio governor John Kasich, the never-Trumper Bill Kristol and many, many others, they had to reposition themselves on the political spectrum, many discovering about themselves that they were Democrats and not Republicans, the Democrats themselves now find their party fractured without a modern definition as to what they are, and they are clearly lost. That brings us to the present problem which was obvious on the debate stage in Las Vegas at the Democrat debate for president, especially between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor Pete and Elizabeth Warren. Bloomberg the billionaire trying to buy his way into their good graces could not answer the sheer hatred that the socialist minded on that stage have for money and wealth. Bernie Sanders just as he was in the last election is the preferred candidate of the Democrats and its time they have that honest answer about their true identity otherwise they will be utterly destroyed.

When Bernie Sanders had the rally the other day where the topless women stormed on his stage there really wasn’t anything unusual about it. Those people have always been there, the radicals, the crazies, the far left communist loving advocates of a society of equals where they eat anybody who might be a threat to the status quo, and who hope to live under the radar living and dying for causes greater than the needs of individual lives. The difference between now and a time prior is that Trump’s election has separated away the good, normal people of a healthy society into a unified fashion of hopes and dreams leaving all the crazies literally naked and afraid. For many years they had been hiding in the masses, disguised as emos at the corner of a New York City street waiting in a crowd for a light to change. Or they were gathered in a booth in the corner of a Waffle House popping zits on their greasy shoulders because they haven’t bathed in days and their body oils were looking for some place to escape under their Matrix like trench coats and hair that hadn’t been washed in over a week. They were hidden from view because the message everyone received in their public educations stated that we don’t judge anybody and that everyone had a right to live anyway they wanted no matter what it was. No individual was greater than any other, everyone was equally at fault and deficient.

Well, that press is what split our nation because not everyone has been willing to accept that premise. When Donald Trump stepped into the race many who had been hoping that Paul Ryan would bring Ayn Rand’s wisdom to the Republican Party had found a true representative of their needs and that is when the cover for the communists was ripped away and they were left exposed without a proper philosophical position to disguise their true intent. For many of the crazed radicals, life taught them as they got older that they needed to be more conservative in their personal policies, that they needed to get mortgages, buy cars and pay their bills to advance in life, and that they couldn’t just rip off their shirts and parade around naked in protest of dairy products. But so long as the saner elements of our society were not passing judgment, there was some cover for the lunatics. However, Donald Trump’s election was a value judgement vote, people voted to have a good economy, they voted for the super model who lived in a gold penthouse, and they voted for a television celebrity who was actually proud to be a billionaire, because many would like to have a chance at making a lot of money themselves, and into living the good life that comes from it. They didn’t want Das Kapital to run their lives, they wanted Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

So its not hard to see what is happening and to predict the future. Michael Bloomberg isn’t going to go anywhere. He can pay off the media, but he can’t make himself likeable. And I don’t think people will ever be ready for a gay guy or a gay woman in visible leadership roles. Nobody wants to see gay behavior in public let alone on a stage running for president. Sex in itself is gross, but people put up with public affections because they assume that children will be the bi-product, and everyone loves kids, the hope of the future. But sex in itself is pretty gross, and sex that doesn’t produce children is not something people will ever be willing to publicly accept, so Mayor Pete isn’t going anywhere. Joe Biden is one of those lost in the shuffle, he’s had the covers ripped away and now he’s exposed to a dark world he has been ignoring his entire life. Elizabeth Warren is much the same, as a New England academic, she is forever lost to the campus antics of academia and its love of Karl Marx, and nothing else. That leaves essentially only Bernie Sanders who represents what the true Democrat Party has always been about because like Trump, he has at least been honest from the very beginning as to who he was. And that has allowed the political spectrum to pick clear sides which is where the nation is, for that great debate that has been poised to happen for decades. And this election year we will have it, and there will be clear losers and winners. Everyone isn’t equal, and that is what is being learned much to the distress of the topless protestors and trenchcoated wearing communists who had hoped to hide for a while longer, but no longer can.

Rich Hoffman

George Lang the Artist: Understanding the new way of viewing business as an art

Many people have the wrong idea of what art is, their thoughts on the matter has largely been shaped by their art classes in public schools that have failed to meet up with the needs of modern concerns. If you’ve ever toured the great art museums of Paris, or even of your own hometown, you’ll get a sense of it. Many modern artist types attempt like religious radicals to mold their thoughts to some 16th century definition of it and insist that high art holds the same standards, which it doesn’t. Rather, the modern concepts of capitalism are now the canvases which the great minds of business paint, and it is they who are the modern Picassos and Rembrandts. This was on my mind the other day while we were enjoying my wife’s birthday at Liberty Center in Butler County, Ohio at the Cheesecake Factory and I stood outside and marveled at all the great creations that builders had made in that vicinity that were works of modern thought and a next evolution of art. It was there that I thought about the importance of George Lang’s pro-business ideas for Ohio as a senator for the 4th District.

I don’t know many politicians who have embraced business the way that George has over his long career. Many people don’t know it, but George gives out free copies of Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged to people at Christmas so that they might learn something of the value of a unique American artform that evolved specifically in the United States, the art of making money and using it to create works of art of a different kind. If Paris and Europe in general are thought to have created art from the Renaissance period and those pieces are on display in museums to this day, American art is of a different fashion. Its artists work to overcome discriminations and inherited European regulations to create works of three-dimensional art that serve also as money making generators to pour blood of value into a culture for which the art resides. Ayn Rand figured out in her uniquely American novel what Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy in other cultures were learning about themselves in their own time, that American business was a new form of art in the world and it is always wonderful to see it working well such as it clearly does at Liberty Center in Butler County, Ohio.

I see builders and capitalists as the modern equivalent of artists who put their ideas into buildings, not canvases, and the results of their creations are much more interactive than just a painting expressing one moment in the mind of an artist, but a shared experience that permeates all time and space with hopes, ambitions, and sorrows. With every new hospital that is created come the hopes and dreams of childbirth, and the extreme sorrows of dying loved ones sick beyond repair living their last moments on earth. The art of the building created captures those contexts within the scope of a culture. And within those extremes are restaurants of ambition like the Cheesecake Factory and Cabela’s to entertain us along the way. I remember when George Lang was a trustee for West Chester and when it came time to build the Voice of America Park near the West Chester Hospital, it was George and others who turned over the design and function to private groups to allow full creative flow, which was a gutsy move. The park that is there now is a wonderful asset to the community, much better than if government had tried to force itself into the design of it, without all the little flairs of creativity of design that the park has now—all each in themselves works of art that enhance the experience of all residence in ways that aren’t typically measured.

The old view of art which is typically a liberal crutch insists that this new idea of art is a threat to them, so they label any supporters of capitalism as such to their way of life. That is why most politicians stay off the subject and instead pander to the arguments of the day, that the old-world view of liberalism has shaped, such as public education value, insurance for all, and elements of the socialism involved in Social Security. The new creations that spawn off all efforts of wealth could answer those old questions a thousand times over easily, but most politicians dare not go there because the challenges to the old system of thinking of art prevent them from articulating the value of business to a community because they seldom understand it themselves. That is not a problem of George Lang. He understands that businesses are the foundation of the future and all the solutions that can be found within it. And those solutions are works of art, not just profit making ventures.

As my wife and I were getting a cheesecake to take home from the Cheesecake Factory they informed me there that there are two manufacturing facilities in the United States that daily supply cheesecake to all their restaurants. The explanation was that the home office wants everything to taste uniformly good so they manage their quality control from those two facilities, which is tough competition because Wal-Mart, Kroger and many other local outlets make good cheesecakes. For the Cheesecake Factory to impose on themselves such a high-quality standard that is extremely expensive to maintain is a work of art, not any evil of capitalism as defined by a liberal in viewing artistic endeavors. Yet for that market to even take root where a canvas to paint such an artistic endeavor upon to even exist it takes politicians who know their role to remove barriers of such expression so that future concepts can be born for the benefit of all. Where such enterprise zones exist the best of modern culture can be seen. I’ve been to the Louvre in Paris. I loved it for what it was, but honestly, I saw much greater works of art at Disney Springs at Walt Disney World in every little business that was there and the bustling activity that can be seen any night of the week into the small hours of the morning.

What I’ve always loved about George Lang, whom I’ve known for more than a decade now, is that even with high ambitions at office holding, he wants those positions because he appreciates the artistic efforts that are born from them. His natural love of the novel Atlas Shrugged, which many politicians run from because of the capitalist stigma that hangs around it like a shackle to the past, is something George has always embraced, and it shows wherever he has been in a position of political power that his influence is conducive to great works of art that come from the many minds of business enterprise. And those enterprises are far outpacing the old ways of canvas art from any other period of world history, and the means to measure them are just now being understood in novels like Atlas Shrugged. Its not that the new ways of thinking of art are wrong because the old way is so slow to understand their miracles that the definitions are corroded with misunderstandings. Its just a matter of time before the rest of the world comes to the same realization, and when they do, they’ll find that George Lang was always there all along.

Rich Hoffman

The Criteria for State Funding of Education in Ohio: A future state free of Parkinson’s Law

Just as a preview to the upcoming debate at Lakota schools, and the post Trump election of 2020 where Betsy DeVos will unleash her education reforms I think its only fair to give a sneak peak into my position model for state funding problems in Ohio. One thing that became very clear to me while fighting the Lakota levies during the early part of the last decade was that everything pointed to problems with state funding, where the state was having a terrible time of constitutionally providing money to schools due to two major character flaws in the foundation assumptions of the public education debate. First the cost for schools were filled with what I call in this case Parkinson’s Law, which is a business term to describe typical problems in schedules, where allotted time fills to whatever dates are provided, the work fills the time provided, and secondly, the attachment of money to real estate instead of the students provided by the tax payers. Those two elements have made it impossible to come up with a proper funding model and must be solved before the state can do anything, so to answer the questions from the past, how can the pro levy people and the anti-levy people get together to focus their efforts in Columbus toward real education funding change, those two questions must first be solved. Anything that does not deal with those two issues, is off track and a useless gesture, and that will be my position on the upcoming levy fights no matter what frontier we find ourselves fighting them.

Parkinson’s Law occurs when building things like Gantt charts in business where all the parties of a process are allowed to give their perceived dates for the completion of their given task. When looking at a total project and the critical path needed for its completion, it will be quick to note that all the participants in a schedule will give themselves a comfortable amount of safety in case they have runovers and problems in their task. Taken as a whole, this takes the completion date for a project well past the usual funding requirements and must be worked out by taking away all the fluff that finds itself into the assumptions. In public schools where collective bargaining agreements take up 80 to 90% of a $200 million budget at a school like Lakota, the desire to have tax increases is only to fund this out of control filling of a budget with Parkinson’s Law where the money in the budget always fills to satisfy the supply. It has nothing at all to do with the quality of education, but everything to do in order to satisfy the comfort level of the government school in recruiting, and labor management among a hostile organization that is bound to socialist desires, the government labor unions that are embedded and cannot be removed without destroying education as we know it and the free babysitting service that it has become for so many busy, working parents.

Knowing all that, the per pupil cost of education is excessively high and no state law maker can hope to sign their name next to such an inflated figure until the schools themselves work out the true need of their paid staffs, and are getting the most out of those they do have. If a school wants to pay a teacher six figures to do a job, that’s fine. But the teacher better be worth it. However, through collective bargaining, some teachers may be worth it, some may not, but all get it because of the nature of the union agreement which goes well above and beyond what taxpayers should be funding with their property taxes. It’s the same rule that applies to private businesses, if a company has a unionized workforce, that’s fine if they can operate with it. But don’t ask the customer to pay more for those services because the union is present. That is not the fault of the customer, it’s a non-value-added experience for the taxpayer to fund on the top end for mismanaged services passed down to them through the government school looking to appease the radical elements of their labor force. To keep the labor happy and justify all the advanced degrees and other elements, Parkinson’s Law says that the budget will grow to satisfy the demands placed on it by the comfort level of the participants.

How many teachers does it take to teach a classroom in this fast moving world where video games have more influence over students than a stagnant employee teaching things in the front of the room that are already two or three years too old by the time they are trained to teach it, and how much is that teacher worth for 7 or 8 hours of their day, 5 days a week and summers off? Is it worth $70K per year, or $100k, because a lot of teachers at Lakota are making averages of that amount of money and the report cards for the school show that it hasn’t helped them get “A”s on their state report cards. Questions like that have to be asked before state funding can be acquired because those are contributors to the Parkinson’s Law I am proposing must be answered before any model can be created legally. In this day and age couldn’t a government school operate with a lot less teachers and more interactive media, even larger classrooms? Given the state of the results of our current way of doing things, its clear our education system is not doing a very good job as compared to other countries, so why would we stick with the same old same old, its too expensive and its not very effective. Education needs to be faster, and more engaging, and up to date, with the rate that computer processers increase in memory and efficiency. Things kids learn today are almost outdated before they even leave high school, so we need better ways that are much less bureaucratic to keep up. All these considerations are part of the state funding crises that must be solved before anything happens. Just lobbying the state government for more money isn’t going to solve a thing because we haven’t dealt with how that money would be spent.

Of course the answer nobody wants to talk about that thinks of public education as a crowning experience for youth, where football games and dances are centerpieces of culture young people depend on, and parents who need someone to watch their kids while they are busy at work. But the future of public education is to get government out of it, out of the regulations, out of the report cards, out of the business as much as possible and to turn over that effort to private enterprise, which the labor unions are completely against because it would take away all their emotional leverage. But that is where education is headed whether it takes 10 years to get their or 100. The inevitability is fast approaching and it won’t take long for everyone to see it. The need for more personal freedom and faster rates of learning that are not so top heavy in costs demand such a thought and that is ultimately where the state funding will reside. Any discussion besides these things is a useless one.

The assumption among education activists is to lobby for money to feed the old broken system that has not been effective, as is evidence in our present society. The current system is too expensive and does not teach the right things at the rate that kids need the information. I would offer that the cost of an average teacher should be about half what it is now and that many of them should not just do teaching as a career, but as one thing in their lives. The structure of teaching should not need a stagnant employee present to hold down the speed of learning, but should only be present to provide an interface to knowledge. That is a part time job at best in the schools of tomorrow. Certainly not worth 80K per year for hundreds and hundreds of employees only working a fraction of the day in a fraction of the year. I measure a day in 24-hour intervals, so if a job only requires 8 to 9 hours of dedication from an employee asset, it’s a part time job to my eyes. And that is how things will look as we get into the future state of government school funding models. To me, they are already extinct. Its taking other people too long to realize it, because that’s the way we’ve always done it, but once Trump is elected for his second term and his sons or even Candice Owens takes over the future of the White House going into 2030, the word “government” is coming out from in front of schools which must be privately managed. Just like health care is headed, and just about every other utility of economic expenditure. That is the wave of a fast-moving future and government schools are way behind in recognizing it. But soon, they won’t have a choice. Their entire reality will be taken away with the Parkinson’s Law that has built their budgets with so much fluff over the years that people are tired of it. And will vote accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Kathy Wyenandt the Democrat Lakota Tax Supporter: Apparently they want a rematch

I think its very interesting that Kathy Wyenandt is still celebrating the passage of the Lakota levy of 2013 as her calling card to get into the Ohio Senate. At a recent debate some of the things I heard her say about her role in passing that levy stirred me the wrong way. In ways that I’ve written plenty on, that levy was personal and had evolved well beyond just a healthy debate between opposing sides. When she talks about No Lakota Levy as the organized resistance to the tax increases that were proposed three other times prior and went down to defeat, it was my face that was in the front of it, and it was my reputation that they attacked when they couldn’t win any other way, so I disagree with Kathy Wyenandt who became the fourth campaign attempt at passing that ridiculous tax increase at Lakota schools. After listening to her I think we need to set the record straight because there was some really bad action going on with that effort for which Kathy was in the middle of and we need to talk about it.

Kathy Wyenandt is taking credit for her role in passing that tax increase so let’s review what happened. After three levy attempts for which I was the spokesman of the No Lakota Levy group the school board targeted me personally to get me out of the way of their opposition for another attempt which they were talking about doing in the following spring. I had two problems with that, the voters had spoken on three previous attempts, a resounding no, and Lakota wasn’t listening. Instead they made it personal and went after my character directly, siding with the Cincinnati Enquirer in bringing great harm to my reputation in an effort to smoke out all the No Lakota Levy supporters whom I represented often on WLW radio. The organized labor efforts of the teacher’s union and the levy supporting moms of Lakota went on quite a campaign against me, because they couldn’t beat the arguments I poised at them in live debates on the radio, on stage at various forums, and anywhere else they wanted to fight. Because their premise on the whole thing was wrong. So they lobbied WLW to stop supporting the No Lakota Levy campaign, which led to the firing of my radio friend Doc Thompson while on his honeymoon, which was a very low blow to him.  He and I talked about the situation and he spilled the beans to me as to what went on behind the scenes at WLW in conjunction with Lakota lobbyists, all which occurred at the same time in a coordinated fashion.  No school system should have that kind of power against the tax payers who pay their bills and hire them to manage their district. There were other elements, but the Lakota position was certainly a corporate decision on behalf of Clear Channel that wasn’t there in the 2013 election.

I had my much publicized fight with the core levy supporters when I called them all “latte sipping prostitutes” essentially as I was outraged that those people did not respect the previous 3 elections and kept scheming and plotting until they got their property tax increase, and it caused a separation of No Lakota Levy from my representation. I wanted out in a lot of ways because I was sick of talking about education issues. I wanted to publish a book I had been working on that wasn’t related at all to public education, yet my actions with the Lakota levy was setting me up on all kinds of television, radio, and other public formats that wanted me to be their education spokesman, so the longer the Lakota levy issue went on, the more trapped in it I became. I was hoping that after that third attempt they would stop and listen. But they didn’t, instead they spent more tax money on more consensus building efforts and showed they intended to try for a fourth wasting more of my time, so I blew up and the rest is history. We agreed to a cease fire, I moved on to other things and Lakota started plotting for that fourth attempt a year and a half later for which Kathy Wyenandt was brought in to help. And even with all that, they only won by 1% of the vote, not at all a stout and convincing victory. No Lakota Levy was there to organize a resistance but in looking back, I think we all agree we should have stuck together and if we had, there is no way that Lakota would have won. If Lakota tries again, we are talking about getting the band back together again.

The big turn in the vote was Sheriff Jones, the popular Republican who thought it was time to support Lakota because they had promised to use some of the money for increased security. Many of the No Lakota Levy people were willing to join with Jones to give Lakota a chance and some voters followed, enough to give Lakota a very small victory. After the win, Lakota did with the money exactly what I said they would do, they gave raises to the teachers even though they should have been laying off due to declining enrollment. They had been operating as a surplus for several years due to that declining enrollment but now they find themselves in the same trajectory of surplus spending and are talking about yet another levy. I just had a talk with several No Lakota Levy people the other day and we are seriously considering to meet that levy attempt in the same way we did on the previous three attempts that defeated the tax increase. Playing nice like many of them wanted to in that 2013 attempt stung in the end and the taste has been bad for everyone because many feel like they were lied to by Lakota. We have all been focused in getting a third conservative vote on the school board, but that has been not nearly as effective as just voting no on school levies. But the status quo of just passing more property tax increases every so many years is just not an acceptable option. If Kathy Wyenandt wants to take credit for that tax increase, which she clearly does, then have at it. But the truth of the matter was that Sheriff Jones changed the numbers, and we had split our efforts within No Lakota Levy. Only by dividing and conquering did the levy pass. It wasn’t that Kathy reached across the aisle to Republicans and Democrats to build a coalition. It was simply that Jones and his followers wanted to give Lakota a chance, which they have squandered.

I have spoken to Kathy on several occasions now and everyone seems surprised that I am not some raving lunatic on that matter. In fact during the three previous levy attempts I was very friendly with everyone, including the pro levy people. I was always happy to argue the facts. But I have a very bad temper, I can handle it just fine, but when someone punches at me or even thinks to, it doesn’t go well for the perpetrator.  I have never taken an attack on me lightly and when Joan Powell and Julie Shaffer on the school board decided to attack me personally, that was the end of the cordial activity. It was they who weren’t listening to what the voters said, and insisted on continuing to make levy attempts until they wore voters out into just saying yes. It was one of the most crooked schemes I have ever seen and it ruined my thoughts on public education forever. I don’t think those people should be anywhere near educating the next generation and I could tell stories all day for the record, and if this extortion scheme wasn’t so wide spread in virtually every government school, there would be serious legal issues.  I have not told all the stories I know about these people because honestly, I have wanted Lakota to improve its image, for or community’s sake.  But since its government, it gets overlooked and we are all supposed to take it smiling.  It was with each levy attempt that Lakota made that caused me to think that the John Dewey system of education was a ridiculous failure that needed to be completely reinvented, which is where I am on all education topics these days. Most of the No Lakota Levy supporters do not feel as strongly as I do on the matter, they just don’t want to get ripped off by the school that harms their projects. I however think public education as a concept needs a complete re-invention, so I don’t want to spend a further dime on any of it until we have that discussion. If not for my experiences with the Lakota levy attempts, I might not feel that way, but the more I learned, the more I despised the process.

It certainly helped that when Kathy Wyenandt came along, she didn’t look like the bottom of someone’s shoe the way previous pro school advocates presented themselves. That certainly helped take the edge off all the hatred that had been brewing between the various groups in the process. But that hatred was created by Lakota not listening to the voters and insisting that they just keep going to the voters until an election went their way. They cut busing as an extortion tactic, they took away sports programs, they played lots of games when the real meat of their problem was their excessive payroll. Kathy made it easy for Sheriff Jones and some other local leaders to give Lakota a chance, which they have blown, of course. And if Kathy wants a rematch, let’s have it. I bet Lakota wouldn’t get 1% of the vote today. And I think she knows that which is why she wants this senate job, because everyone knows Lakota is going to try for another tax increase because they do not have control of their budget. And when that happens, Kathy wants to be in Columbus so she doesn’t have to face the fact that the levy win in 2013 was a falsehood of smoke and mirrors, and once people realize that, she won’t be able to use it for an opportunity for higher office.

I am always happy to have a professional debate and discussion about everything. I am used to dealing with people who do not agree 100% with my view of the world and I can talk to a person like Kathy and many of these other pro tax advocates without getting mad at them. But when they take a shot at me and make it personal, then my policy is worse than Donald Trump’s policy of hitting back twice as hard. I tend to hit back until there is nothing left of the other side and I do that in everything in my life. So any past that we have had where Lakota used people like Kathy Wyenandt to advance a tax position they shouldn’t even have been asking for is on them, and all the anger that came from that attempt which is still as strong today, if not stronger, than it was prior to 2013. The problem was and always has been that after the first levy attempt that was defeated way back in 2010, Lakota should have managed their labor contracts differently. But instead they chose to pass their mismanagement off onto the community to cover the insane expenses of their collective bargaining agreements to the taxpayer, most of which do not have children in the school system. And today there are more of those people voting than there were in 2010, so a rematch to set the record straight would be a welcomed occasion. Whether or not its No Lakota Levy or some update of that concept, I’ll be there to meet it with those also interested, and the truth will be obvious.

Rich Hoffman

To Judge Amy Berman Jackson, Roger Stone is the Most Dangerous Man in the World: It all comes down to sex

I am surprised that with all the talk about the Roger Stone sentencing case and the mysterious reason people seem so alarmed that President Trump has weighed in on the issue, that the true cause of the ruckus has not been discussed. It’s not that Stone lied to congress, a congress that tried to impeach President Trump on nothing charges only to overthrow the 2016 election, its not that Harvard Law graduate and Obama appointee Amy Berman Jackson judge in the case is a political activist using her bench to dispense political ideology against voters sentiments. It’s not even in how the FBI has evolved into a political police force arresting Stone on charges in the early morning with CNN cameras tipped off and rolling as the former Director of the FBI and many under his command sip wine into the many sunsets of the Beltway and laugh at the rest of us who are clearly at a disadvantage to their government paid rule. It’s not about any of that, although those are all by-products of the situation. What its really about, and usually traces back to this central, primal point, its about sex.

For most of our human evolution contriteness has been the means to interact in social conditions. As everyone instinctively knows the first need of all males is to find their way within some pecking order where the top males are known and understood while most everyone finds some happy place of contriteness somewhere under the top male. Most males learn their place by the time that they get into their 20s and it is purely the aim of academia to make the most out of those who fall in that realm of being in the middle of the male dominated pecking order that is at the core of our species. And as all males learn who are not the top males, that the way to move up in that pecking order is with contriteness, so not to threaten the top males with a challenge, but to appeal to their egos in hopes for some table scraps that might come their way. That is the point of most institutional systems. Of course, the purpose of understanding who the top males are is to have the right to mate with the top females, the best looking, the best specimens of supernormal sign stimuli that is on the market. In nature this is how the best-looking kids find the right DNA to procreate the species.

Women of course flower and bloom into specimens for pollination and it is up to these men along the pecking order of society to find a good female and to mate with them and have babies. The great crises for most women is during that period in their lives where as beautiful flowers of puberty they wilt into carriers for the next generation only to be discarded as wrinkled up flowers later in their lives once the children had been raised and there was no longer a social need for them. This is why progressivism was such an attractive aspect for women, because they grew tired of becoming wilted in life and being left behind by husbands looking to clime the pecking order ladder just a bit higher and to trade them in for another young flower that might be at a less declining stage of wilt. Careers then became the new family and specifically government became a new refuge where some level of protection from the more dominate aspects of the species could not make everyone under them feel so inferior.

Less exciting people in life found a home in government where they were somewhat protected by the alphas and so long as everyone followed the rules of English society contriteness, everyone could get along to some degree or another. And those rules were to seek a certification to show that you knew something because someone said you did, and that the way up the ladders of society were to be contrite, to follow the rules, and to be happy with what you ended up with to the degree that you were allowed to have it. For people not at the top of their species, which was most people, this was a good arrangement, until we entered the period of western expansion and the gunfighter on the open plains ignited in American society the idea that anybody could be the top male, or female of their species if they could shoot a gun, or show fearlessness on the open horizons where the sun disappeared away each night. This whole American experiment redefined what being a top male, or top female was, it was no longer the best looking person, the tallest person, or the strongest, but it was the one who was most fearless, or who learned to be fastest, or more cunning which opened the door to a whole lot of new entrepreneurs who suddenly filled American society with a new breed of “top” people.

Of course President Trump with his flashy suits and gold buildings, and long list of beautiful women embodied this divorce from contriteness that the government bound career seekers were looking to hide from so the established pecking order subsidiaries would be angry at for changing the rules on them. And then there are people like Roger Stone, and Alex Jones who are obvious alpha males who are comfortable with the Trump America who wear gaudy suits and show no willingness to bow down to the established order of things, and it enrages people like judge Amy Berman Jackson who spent her whole life preparing for her wilted flower phase in order to still find a life of happiness in the contriteness of academia, as they had promised her would always be the case. When a Roger Stone stands before her, her ruling powers want to throw him in jail for life because they want to slap down this trend, which is now well beyond their control. Yet they still wish to act out against them. If they can’t get to Trump, they can get to Stone, to Manafort, and to Flynn, and those people are not permitted to be “top” anything if people like Jackson has anything to say about it, and that is why this case is so unfair. The legal system was never meant to be fair, it was meant to protect people from the judgement of their pecking order placement in life, where most people aren’t the best looking, or even the smartest. And with the newfound power of the personal gun, they were too lazy to become proficient with such an empowering device. So they have retreated to the rules of European contriteness in hopes that they might find some happiness as the inevitability of old age burdens them more each day with the realities of wilting flowers.

So the case isn’t about justice, the Stone case is a rebellion against the new found freedoms of our modern age where the concerns of pecking order madness can no longer be stuffed into a civilized box of rules and parameters meant to keep the contrite protected from the realities of mediocrity. Under the Trump administration America has been free to sore if only the people of the country dare to go there, and if they are not the best looking, or most skilled, they can still step out of their pecking order station and seek a life of unlimited potential. And that is why Amy Berman Jackson and her Obama era supporters want to throw Roger Stone in jail for as long as possible even as real criminals walk the streets raping, pillaging, and robbing everyone blind minute by minute. To the world of Amy Berman Jackson, Roger Stone is much more of a threat because he refuses the rules of contriteness and instead insists that he is free of such pecking order demands on his life, which is why he is one of the greatest threats to civilization that has yet arrived to human eyes.

Rich Hoffman

Voters have a lot to be angry about with Kathy Wyenandt: Remembering Todd Portune and his “people over politics” theatrics

Of course George Lang still needs to win the Republican primary in March before looking ahead to the Democrat challenger for the 4th District Seat for Senate in Ohio Kathy Wyenandt, but there are a few things about her campaign already that is disturbing, and they’ve come up before. One of the reasons Lang had to raise so much money for that 4th District Seat is because he needs to beat two Republican primary challengers then a very likeable Democrat in Kathy in a county that liberals would love to turn more purple than the hard red that it has been. Liberals hope to do that with women candidates who can cross over invisible political boundaries for voters earned and unearned and Kathy will be there with some money left from her previous attempt at the 52nd District House seat which she lost to Lang and a check from the now deceased Todd Portune that was sizable for the task of purple rain in Southern Ohio. Since he just died and its not fashionable to disparage the dead, I’ll save many harsh comments I have for Commissioner Portune for some other day but I do find it interesting that he thought enough of Kathy to give her a $2,500 check. Portune and I go back a long way and it was not pleasant. He was better late in life, but vicious political theater in the days of Dwight Tillery as the Mayor and Foxy Roxy as the Vice Mayor are stories I could tell that could dwarf the Bible many times over, but to put it mildly, I do not share with Rob Portman and many other conservatives any kind words. Yet it was the passing of Portune and of learning of his contribution connection to Kathy Wyenandt that reminded me of her campaign and the message she has for politics in general that I am very much opposed to.

Wyenandt and I have talked about this several times, her belief that politics has become so toxic that her campaign slogan is “people over politics,” as if to say, she is not a partisan and will listen to people over any other influence. Well, ironically Todd Portune told me something almost exactly to the same effect almost 30 years ago while I was in his office and we were discussing a solution to a nighclub incident where a bunch of drunk kids had died in a car crash coming home from the Cooters night club after the place had closed. I was proposing to him to solicit help from the city to get approval through the CBC a non-alcoholic nightclub that would operate in Coryville right next to the freshman dorms on the University of Cincinnati’s campus and give kids somewhere else to go once all the bars closed for the night and poured a bunch of drunk kids into the world as dangerous toxins. I was weary of the Democrat Portune who had pictures of prominent politicians in his office and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him with the intentions of the group I was representing. But he said to me much of what Kathy has said recently about the common good and people over politics, so I trusted Todd Portune with my idea.

Well, and there is much political theater that fills the book ends as mentioned but the gist of it was that I found myself in a lot of political trouble every which way you can imagine and as it turned out Todd Portune, as a member of Cincinnati City Council at the time was also the attorney for the nightclub Cooters and he had ratted out all my plans to all the wrong people which killed the financial aspects of the deal and left me hanging in a very bad way. I was young, so it was a good learning experience and it only took me 10 years to dig out from that mess, but to say the least, I learned what it means when politicians tell you that they put people over politics. What they really mean is quite the opposite. When it comes to Todd Portune, I figure fate sort of played out for him. While Rob Portman, whom I knew pretty well in those days of my dealings with Portune has lots of nice things to say about Todd, I’ll just state that I’ll leave the dead to rest and let whatever version of God the readers hear have sort out the details. The lessons of those experiences are more valuable than any other element and it reminds me a lot of Kathy Wyenandt’s campaign.

Each time I’ve spoke to Kathy she is always quick to tell me that she doesn’t read this blog site, yet she knows an awful lot about it, and she always pulls the conversation around to how divisive politics is and how she thinks we can all agree to taking some of the toxic relationship out of it. She is a nice approachable person so it would take a while to dig into the details so usually those types of conversations never get into the weeds too far, but as I’ve thought about it over time, and have learned that she has even enough of a relationship with an old political rival of mine, Todd Portune, I have much more severe opinions about Kathy’s “people over politics” platform. As a school levy supporter for Lakota on the last attempt, a political point she has choosen to capitalize on, it is clear what she represents and that makes the premise revolting of what she is asking people to accept. The toxic relationship people now have in politics is because they have learned too much about the bad dealings of people like Todd Portune and the double dealing that often goes on especially among Democrats when they say to your face, “people over politics.” What that usually means is “see you in court while you spend a fortune defending yourself from some political incursion.” Democrats for years have tried to put us to sleep while they’ve literally tried to screw our eyeballs out and the toxicity of modern politics is that enough people have woken up to the fact and people like Kathy want to ease people back to sleep to that reality.

It is OK to be angry that Lakota has wasted all the money Kathy helped spend through that last levy passage and is now looking to tax homeowners even more. Of course she doesn’t want people to fight or be angry, she wants to put them back to sleep—to the good ol’ days where Democrats could talk out of both sides of their mouth and get away with it. Of course the Democrats which Wyenandt is a member want everyone to suddenly get along now that the many evils that we have discovered from politics gone wrong in the past are clear to us now. If people are thinking of those things, no Democrat will get elected for anything ever. So Kathy’s only real strategy is to try to kill everyone with kindness and put everyone back to sleep so she can have a chance at a higher office. But to answer the question that she asked me, which I know she’ll read about here on my blog, and we’ll talk about the next time we see each other out and about, is that its good to be pissed off and angry at politics and that it is people who elect representatives that can recover their interests who are waking up and that they should be angry at how they have been treated. And because of the Lakota levy of 2013 voters have a lot of reason to be angry with Kathy—and then some.

Rich Hoffman

Why Rush Limbaugh is so Beloved: Republicans are postitive people

The world’s reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis was bewildering to me. I suppose I understood why many on the left were almost cheering that his death might arrive by the end of last week yet they still seethed when he was presented with honors at the State of the Union address and was seated well next to the First Lady. You got the feeling that if his pending death wasn’t as good as sealed that many of the people in that room wouldn’t have stood for such an incursion and that they put up with it only because they felt just a little sorry for the popular conservative talk radio host. Then I wondered why we have even put up with such hatred. But I was reminded of the major difference between Trump and Limbaugh by Friday when Rush was back on the air between treatments that he fully expects to survive and listening to the story of how President Trump thought of the illness, and it all made perfect sense. Its why I have always been a Republican and why my particular brand of conservatism has been very conducive to the mentality of the current White House. Everything is very above the line with Trump, and also with Rush Limbaugh. Tragedies are expected to be overcome, not yielded to, and even a death sentence is something to solve, not to be a victim of.

As Rush told the story of his big day in Washington D.C. and the after party of a sorts in the White House Residential area upstairs with the First Family, I was hearing a story that was all too familiar to me. That is how I solve problems in my life. I don’t get emotional about anything and everything has a solution. There is no impossible, everything is on the table and its only a matter of time before a problem is resolved. I’m like that with everything and it was nice to hear that President Trump truly is at that level of optimism when he wondered why Rush couldn’t just get all the cancer cut out before the State of the Union Address then enjoy the evening unfettered. It was a reminder to me why I enjoy the people of this particular brand of politics so much, they are positive problem solvers who don’t yield to the emotions of the moment but are always looking for solutions. Democrats are the party of victims, people on their heels and surrendering to the whims of chaos, Republicans under Trump are problem solvers who look at everything as an opportunity for improvement. And in essence, that is the state of our modern political life, half the nation is looking at the glass half empty, the other half, that its half full. The glass is the glass, but the interpretation is radically different.

Rush may not survive the cancer, but then again, he might. He certainly didn’t take the time to wallow in the sorrow of the moment, he was invited to a big event with the President and he enjoyed it for all it was worth. The hatred expressed toward him was personal because there was a subconscious understanding that not only did they want the radio broadcaster dead and off the air for what they think will give them a chance at future elections, but they hate how positive Rush is and ironically that is also one of the things they hate so much about President Trump. They want to have an excuse to fail, to not achieve, or even not to try at all. They want to blame society, they want to blame their parents, they want to blame their schools, their government, their economic conditions on why they have settled in some rut in their life which they lack the courage to get out of. And Rush and Trump remind them of it.

I’ve seen that hatred up close and personal; I never yield to problems at all. Everything has a solution just waiting to be discovered. Its just a matter of time to grind things out so that we can uncover it. That’s how I run my own life, so it was very refreshing to hear to what degree President Trump exhibited the same traits. It didn’t surprise me, but it was refreshing, just as it was good to hear Rush back on the radio on Friday and the early parts of this recent week sounding like he always does for his three-hour time slot. I can’t say how many times I have turned on the Rush Limbaugh Show while overseas on trips, just to listen to him talk on the radio. While in Japan I would turn him on at 1 AM there and listen while I lay in bed because it was noon in the states, and it was very nice due to his positive outlook on everything. Even while surrounded by the necessities of whatever culture I was visiting, listening to Rush Limbaugh was unique because he’s unquestionably American, in that problems aren’t meant to be yielded to, they are meant to be overcome. While visiting those cultures overseas, it is always nice to hear a bit from home, and from the best that our American culture has to offer. I had the same experience in London and in Paris, rather than go to dinner at 6 PM somewhere and listen to the pub talk, I would put in my ear buds and listen to Rush on my iPhone while the rest of the world wallowed in sorrow of their victimized status. It wasn’t that I so much wanted the news of the moment, it was just nice to hear that Rush always had a solution to whatever problem was being discussed, and that was and is what makes Rush Limbaugh something unique and so beloved.

What the left doesn’t understand is that at whatever future time that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t do his radio show every day, that people like me will not turn to them looking for leadership. Simply, someone else will fill the role that Rush Limbaugh currently does. The interesting thing that has happened is that even with all the attempts at communism and socialism that various factions both foreign and domestic have attempted against the American people, positive people always find each other. I supported Trump because he’s always been such a positive person. I listen to Rush because he’s a positive person. In my own life, and I’m thinking of positive politicians whom I like a lot, like George Lang, Mark Welch, Ann Becker, Nancy Nix, T.C. Rogers, Roger Reynolds and even Sheriff Jones. I like them all because they are all very positive people to the core of their personalities. Even though they all have lots of reasons to look at the glass half empty, they haven’t, they always think of it as half full and are scanning the horizon for solutions. That is the biggest difference in the political gulf that exists in our modern day, and its not the task of the positive to yield to the negative. Rather, the other way around. The desire to see Rush off the air is deeper than just hoping that conservatives will lose a voice and that Democrats might win some future elections, its in hoping that the excuses for failure will remain for them to hide behind. Because in truth, that is what is really behind the political tension of the American two-party system in its current form. But that was never America, we are free to solve problems, and that is what makes us different from the rest of the world and is why Rush Limbaugh is so beloved and always will be.

Rich Hoffman