Tag: education funding

Melania Trump is the key to Trusting the President: Jeff Sessions and a new kind of Washington operative

As Jeff Sessions testified before the senate on 6/13/2017 it was clear that politically we have certainly turned a corner in America.  And it didn’t begin with the Sessions testimony—that was simply a reflection of a political shift that was noticeable to anyone looking—it started with the Comey testimony of the previous week, which turned out to be a huge belly flop for the political insurgents against the incoming Trump administration.  Now looking back over the last five days I am quite proud of the CNN piece that I was a part of after the Comey testimony.  (CLICK HERE TO REVIEW)  We got it right while the rest of the nation was still working through what they had heard and that is directly reflective to our perspective at the front of the train.  Trump didn’t slow down through the media surge against him hoping that Comey would reveal something damaging to the new president—and by Monday he had what CNN called the weirdest Cabinet meeting ever, where Trump’s picks were in the same room at the same time for the first time since he took office.

 

The statists of the old political structure—those who have made a swamp out of Washington D.C. hated the Trump Cabinet press conference.  Trump broke all the rules by stating the accomplishments of his administration thus far, then allowing his Cabinet to speak one by one going around the big table in the White House.  Obviously most of his picks were unique in that they were like a dream team of political movers and shakers.  In the past most of those appointments would have been political hacks given jobs because of campaign contributions and favors otherwise owed.  But not this one—with the exception of Mitch McConnel’s wife—these were professionals, experts in their particular fields who were bringing a competency to Washington D.C. that just hasn’t been seen before.  Trump had outlasted the hardest part of the storm his political rivals could throw at him in just five months and the sun was starting to peak out. 

 

Supposedly Trump and Jeff Sessions have been at each other’s throats and the new Attorney General was about to be terminated.  But after the Cabinet meeting where Sessions spoke and Trump was engaged with his members individually, then after watching the Sessions testimony, it is obvious that we are dealing with a new caliber of political activity that radiates competency in ways previously undefined.  It won’t take long for this administration to simply outpace the Washington swamp creatures and rise about the murky waters for which all these lackluster political activists have made expensive livings for themselves at being entirely average.  No longer, and that’s where things are culminating in the Sessions testimony—an event he easily breezed through—are average results going to be tolerated. 

 

That returns my mind to the night of that CNN piece that a group of southern Ohio Trump supporters—myself included—provided.  I took a lot of notes on the Comey testimony and I felt I had a bead on what was happening, but my opinions were dramatically different than the story CNN was trying to frame.  I knew when I gave my statements that it provoked outrage from the political left because they had been hoping that the Comey testimony would put the last nail in the coffin of the Trump presidency.  But that’s not what happened.  Instead, Comey showed himself to be less reliable than we were led to believe and there were aspects to his testimony that pointed toward very evil actions—evil in the sense that Comey was deceiving himself of the boundaries of right and wrong.  That much was clear when he revealed himself as one of the intelligence leakers we’ve all been hearing so much about.  Once that happened the obstruction of justice criteria that leftist political insurgents were trying to establish now turned back toward the Hillary Clinton and Lorretta Lynch case explored and dismissed in 2016.  Now there was all kinds of fresh news to add—if these anti-Trump people held the same standard they were imposing on Donald Trump to Lorretta Lynch and Clinton—then there were major problems for those two, and for Comey.  They had wrecked their own case.

 

My soundbite given to CNN played all weekend and into the events leading up to the Sessions testimony, and as I look back on it, I am proud to have been so far out in front of the story with my gut instinct.  It’s not easy to go against the grain with something like that and to say things that might be used against you later.  The general feeling is that Trump is a liar and that Comey is Boy Scout honest when in fact the opposite is true.  Trump is reckless with his Twitter and his statements not because he’s a liar, but is innocently honest the way a young person might be who hasn’t yet been burned into extreme caution.  Comey on the other hand was calculated, manipulative and even deceitful and hiding all this behind a façade of goodness.  CNN wanted to find something wrong with Trump so they took what Comey said at face value when they shouldn’t have.  They obviously thought me and the other Trump supporters with me were lunatics who supported Trump blindly. After all, how could anybody say that Trump isn’t a liar given all the accusations leveled against him. 

 

The key to trusting Trump is in his business record of success, and his marriage to Melania.  If he were so inclined to deceitful practices, I am convinced that she would pressure him into a correction which makes her marriage to him vitally important and a major difference between the Donald Trump of old, and this new one who is president.  Melania is Trump’s hobby and he obviously loves her very much.  And she keeps him honest because she doesn’t put up with much of anything.  She is a good person and good people just don’t put up with bad people in their lives unless they allow themselves to be broken—and Melania is not a broken person in any fashion. Trump wouldn’t lie about the Russian investigation because she wouldn’t put up with it.  But Comey is a collectivist—he’s a person who obviously doesn’t care about merit, but about preserving the swamp—and he would do anything to protect it—including lying.  I don’t know his sweet little wife—the person he said he regretted not having dinner with that night he was invited to the White House to dine with Trump—but she obviously doesn’t hold Comey to the same kind of authenticity as Melania does Trump.  So I have no problem looking at Comey and considering that he lied—because I think he did.  Sessions on the other hand wanted to clear the air and willingly testified, and guilty people don’t tend to rush toward the truth, or the acquisition of it.  And if Trump was “guilty” of all these things, he wouldn’t be Tweeting and creating a written record of the exchanges.  Yes, this is truly new territory—we have not been here as a nation—ever.

After watching Jeff Sessions in his senate testimony and comparing it to Eric Holder and Lorretta Lynch it is obvious that we are dealing with a better caliber of people coming from this new White House.  Then watching how the political left acted when Jeff Sessions and many others in Trump’s Cabinet showed so much respect and passion as members of the Trump team we are seeing something very different—and I think the real credit goes back to Melania Trump.  I think it is she who makes the President a better man—better than he ever has been before.  And at this stage in his life I think he is extraordinarily trustworthy—and his fearless actions show it.  Trust worthy people trust other people—which Trump trusted Sessions to do a good job at the senate so he left for Wisconsin to do his job as president—which says a lot about how Trump operates as a manager.  With Melania she is not only a beautiful woman—physically, but she’s got it on the inside too—and that has the President’s heart.  So as CNN asked me, do you think Comey lied, or do I think Trump lied—I of course believe Trump and not Comey.  Why—because Melania is married to Trump and Comey is sketchy.  Therefore, Trump is the guy I trust and it’s obvious that I’m not alone.  Finally that administration is turning the corner and the left is losing ground—and now we’ll get to see something truly good coming from Washington D.C.  And it couldn’t have arrived a moment too soon. 

Rich Hoffman

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James Hodgkinson’s Assassination Attempt Wasn’t Isolated: Deep State Mueller and many others ignore Lorretta Lynch crimes to attack Trump

On the day of the shooting in Alexandria, Virginia by a radical left-winged terrorist by the name of James Hodgkinson, the special counsel investigation into the made up Trump/Russia collusion story announced that it was widening its investigation against Trump for obstruction of justice over the firing of James Comey.  If that is the case and the old FBI agent Mueller thinks that such an investigation is even appropriate—and that is the standard–then Loretta Lynch and Hillary Clinton need to be prosecuted immediately, because the evidence has already been produced against them.  The hatred that caused the simpleton fool Hodgkinson to do what he did in attempting to assassinate congressional Republicans begins and ends at the feet of the extreme leftists who are currently being protected by people like Mueller, Comey and the other members of the Deep State.  Then there is the media which has empowered the furtherance of real crimes, such as Comey’s illegal leaking of classified information as the Director of the FBI, which caused this special counsel investigation to begin with—they collectively created the vile creature that was James Hodgkinson.  The following video and information reported after the shooter was identified came right off his Facebook page and clearly tell the story.  I don’t know about you dear reader, but I’m not going to put up with it.  These are villains and they are attacking everything that America stands for—and they won’t stop with some liberal loser like James Hodgkinson.  They are desperate and they are killers.  They seek to use idiots prone to quick tempers and intellectual stupidity to do their bidding, but make no mistake about it—behind James Hodgkinson are the puppet masters of the political left—and their desire to commit violence to stay in power—at whatever cost–drives their every breath. Before Trump endures anything close to an investigation into “obstruction of justice” Lorretta Lynch needs to be convicted for her proven actions in that category.

James Hodgkinson was a 66-year-old from Belleville, Illinois.  On June 14th, he opened fire at several Republican lawmakers practicing for the Congressional Baseball game.

Political Views

James’ Facebook profile shows support for Bernie Sanders, FDR, and progressive causes while containing several posts that were hateful toward President Trump and his administration.[11][3]

 

His favorite television programs include Last Week Tonight, Democracy Now, The Rachel Maddow Show, Real Time with Bill Maher and The Daily Show.[3] James was a part of a number of left-leaning Facebook groups such as The Road To Hell Is Paved With Republicans, Join The Resistance Worldwide!!, Rachel Maddow For President 2020, The Democrats, etc.[3]

James volunteered for Bernie Sanders’ Presidential Campaign. He viewed Hillary Clinton as Republican Lite and wanted Bernie to be the Green Party candidate when he lost.

On the morning of June 14th, Republican Congressmen and their staff were practicing for the Congressional softball game in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. Around 7 am, Hodgkinson opened fire on the baseball field. Five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and two Capitol Hill Police Officers, were injured.  Scalise was shot in the hip. Hodgkinson was also shot and died from his injuries. The weapon he used was an M4 assault rifle and witnesses report hearing 50 gunshots. The duration of the incident was between 5-10 minutes.

http://truthfeed.com/breaking-details-emerge-on-virginia-shooter-favorite-shows-include-maddow-trevor-noah/81556/

Look, this is a real war, these people are playing for keeps–and you better not turn the other cheek on them.  Its time to fight back, shoot back, and legislate back.  Hit them harder than they are hitting us–because its the right thing to do.  Failure to do so will only breed more James Hodgkinsons.

Rich Hoffman

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Theory H Utilization: Thinking correctly about Trump’s “workplace development” week

Since this has been “workplace development” week for the Donald Trump White House it would be proper for me to contribute a few cents to the value of this discussion.  As our economy functions from ever-increasing unemployment numbers—which is a wonderful thing—many people out there in the position to hire workers get stressed out in how to acquire new talent.  Just a few months ago when discussing supply chain challenges downstream from me, I suggested that by opening up a second and third shift that they could dramatically increase their productive output.  So the question came back to me–how would we go about doing that?  I looked at them for a moment mystified that they really didn’t comprehend how to do something so simple—and the more I speak to people all across America, they are really lost as to how to acquire new talent and how to get proper productive output out of all 24 hours of a day. It just happens that this is another one of my specialties and given this week’s White House emphasis, I’ll share a few things to help those most in need given the urgency created by such a booming economy such as what we now have—thanks to President Trump.

I get each week dozens and dozens of offers from job recruiters who offer to help solve a company’s recruiting needs—because honestly this is one of those things that most companies are terrible at.  It’s hard to know what kind of people to hire and how to build teams out of those people once you’ve hired them.  As I’ve stated before, some of the past occupational fields that I’ve been inclined to besides archaeology—which is a study of human cultures, so it’s related to these modern enterprises, was psychiatry.  I’ve always been interested in what makes human beings tick, so when it comes to interviewing and recruiting the right people for the right job-it’s always been something that comes naturally for me.  Then team building with those individuals brings another level of challenge because people often resent being placed together in ways that are not authentic to their experiences—so given all those dynamics, most employers just throw up their hands and hope that other people can be hired to handle those problems for them—the way an attorney might handle all the legal issues.  However, I would say that recruiting is the most important thing a company does aside from figuring out what their product is and how to deliver it to the marketplace.

There are a lot of these “Theory X” people out there who have been taught for two generations that the best way to work with people is with this kind of authoritarian relationship where essentially workforces are communist camps full of Marxists and whatever the “superior” says is what the mass collective must do for the health of the company.  I have sat stunned in many meetings where people who call themselves conservatives politically have this archaic relationship with their workers who actually believe that people should give up their individual rights for the good of the company they work for—and that this is somehow productive for the end use intentions of the organization.  Not at all.  Theory X motivations get a rebellious work force that will tell you one thing to your face, but they’ll do everything they can to drag ass something without constant cattle prodding and discipline to evoke productive results.  People who are obsessed with Theory X are terrible at managing multi-shift production needs.

Theory X

Theory X is based on pessimistic assumptions of the average worker. This management style supposes that the average employee has little to no ambition, shies away from work or responsibilities, and is individual-goal oriented. Generally, Theory X style managers believe their employees are less intelligent than the managers are, lazier than the managers are, or work solely for a sustainable income. Due to these assumptions, Theory X concludes the average workforce is more efficient under “hands-on” approach to management.[1] The ‘Theory X’ manager believes that all actions should be traced and the responsible individual given a direct reward or a reprimand according to the action’s outcomes. This managerial style is more effective when used in a workforce that is not intrinsically motivated to perform. It is usually exercised in professions where promotion is infrequent, unlikely or even impossible and where workers perform repetitive tasks.[2]

According to Douglas McGregor, there are two opposing approaches to implementing Theory X: the “hard” approach and the “soft” approach. The hard approach depends on close supervision, intimidation, and imminent punishment. This approach can potentially yield a hostile, minimally cooperative work force that could harbor resentment towards management. The soft approach is the literal opposite, characterized by leniency and less strictly regulated rules in hopes for high workplace morale and therefore cooperative employees. Implementing a system that is too soft could result in an entitled, low-output workforce. McGregor believes both ends of the spectrum are too extreme for efficient real world application.[3] Instead, McGregor feels that somewhere between the two approaches would be the most effective implementation of Theory X.

Overall, Theory X generally proves to be most effective in terms of consistency of work. Although managers and supervisors are in almost complete control of the work, this produces a more systematic and uniform product or work flow. Theory X can also benefit a work place that is more suited towards an assembly line or manual labor type of occupation.[4] Utilizing theory X in these types of work conditions allow the employee to specialize in a particular area allowing the company to mass produce more quantity and higher quality work, which in turns brings more profit.

Theory Y

“Theory Y is almost in complete contrast to that of Theory X”. Theory Y managers make assumptions that people in the work force are internally motivated, enjoy their labor in the company, and work to better themselves without a direct “reward” in return.[5] Theory Y employees are considered to be one of the most valuable assets to the company, and truly drive the internal workings of the corporation.[6] Also, Theory Y states that these particular employees thrive on challenges that they may face, and relish on bettering their personal performance.[2] Workers additionally tend to take full responsibility for their work and do not require the need of constant supervision in order to create a quality and higher standard product.[4]

Because of the drastic change compared to the “Theory X” way of directing, “Theory Y” managers gravitate towards relating to the worker on a more personal level, as opposed to a more conductive and teaching based relationship.[5] As a result, Theory Y followers may have a better relationship with their higher-ups, as well as potentially having a healthier atmosphere in the work place. Managers in this theory tend to use a democratic type of leadership because workers will be working in a way that does not need supervision the most.[4]

In comparison to “Theory X”, “Theory Y” adds more of a democratic and free feel in the work force allowing the employee to design, construct, and publish their works in a timely manner in co-ordinance to their work load and projects. A study was done to analyze different management styles over professors at a Turkish University. This study found that the highly supervised Theory X management affected the research performance of the academics negatively. In general, the study suggests that the professional setting and research based work that professors perform are best-managed with Theory Y styles.[5]

While “Theory Y” may seem optimal, it does have some drawbacks. While there is a more personal and individualistic feel, this does leave room for error in terms of consistency and uniformity.[3] The workplace lacks unvarying rules and practices, and this can result in an inconsistent product which could potentially be detrimental to the quality standards and strict guidelines of a given company.[1]

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_Theory_Y

I’m not particularly in love with Theory Y either, because of the last paragraph of the explanation above, but it is far superior in the modern marketplace—especially in this climate where unemployment is low and workers have a lot of options to work with.  So new inventions are needed and that’s what I spend most of my time working on professionally, such as what we might call a Theory H, for “Hoffman.”  Employees take on a job for many reasons, primarily so that they can make a living—they exchange their time for money—which they naturally resent at an instinctual level.  But, an opportunity to do a job that has structure and purpose bring with it a currency that often isn’t acknowledged in economic measuring patterns.  So I would suggest that while hiring, hire the best people by determining in the interview if they are working just for a paycheck, or if that is just one aspect of their desire for a job.  If there are other elements to their job seeking desires, such as “getting out of the house to have their own thing,” or they are hungry to build a life for themselves as a young person, if you can see a light on behind their eyes there is usually something you can work with if you are willing to coach them along.  I wouldn’t say that a democratic process is the optimal one because as everyone who reads me knows, the collective is not superior to the individual, but you can’t have a bunch of individuals running around doing whatever they want either.  So you have to get individuals to bring their magic to the table without killing their ambition with too many collective considerations.  As a manager you have to pick and choose what you’re points of emphasis will be, unlike the Theory X person who acts like a communist dictator and tries to make a job into a work camp in Siberia.  Once you’ve defined your critical path points the individuals you’ve hired will go to great measures to help you get where you want to go—because all people like to be a part of something successful.  So let them share in that success and most of your employment needs will be solved.  It’s not always about money with most people, often it’s about having the opportunity to feel pride in the work they do and not have that pride robbed from them by a Theory X tyrant.

It is one of the great privileges in life to be able to offer a job to someone.  They get a chance to do well for their families and you get contributors to a vision that is the engine to productivity in the nation’s GDP.  Each employee should be treated as an asset with life potential with whatever company they happen to work for. Team building comes naturally out of setting the proper objectives for a workforce so that they can be a part of a winning opportunity.  Once they see that they will often do great things to achieve a victory and be a part of a winning team.  It is not enough to ask them to be a part of a team and to sacrifice their individuality to the group enterprise.  They must want to win for their own selfish desires.  When they do that the team does win, so when recruiting, hire people hungry to win at life.  Then, and only then can productive exploits on second, third and weekend shifts be properly explored with all the new opportunities coming forth from this new Trump White House—the hiring process is only scary to the Theory X people.  They need to retrain themselves to think properly in this modern economy.  The recruiters out there exist essentially to help all the out-of-date Theory X types—but that’s not necessary if you understand who you are bringing in and give them the opportunity to be successful.  If give that chance—most people will thrive if they still have that glimmer in their eye left over from childhood that still has hope that they can be a part of something that’s great so they can sleep well at night knowing that they aren’t just on a job—but are a part of something really magnificent.  It doesn’t matter if the product is just making straws for Burger King or if you are making spaceships for commercial flight—greatness is in doing extraordinary things with everyday events and once you establish that, everything else takes care of itself.

Rich Hoffman

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The Call to Adventure: A 52 Week Project which photographs authenticiy

It was strange recently getting yet another notification from the Ohio courts of Butler County that I’ve been selected for jury duty because my name ends up in the hat so often due to my voting patterns.  I noticed while filling out the form which included my wife and kids that none of them have what you might call—“traditional” jobs.  My wife is a happy housewife, my oldest daughter a professional photographer who is very highly sought after and my youngest is an illustrator.  As I write this she, (my youngest) is doing a commission piece on the Batman villain The Joker shown below.  But none of the ladies in my family have a “traditional” job where they go to work, punch in and sell away their day for cash.  I know that’s the typical way that we measure economic success, but I’ve always been a big supporter of that type of freedom—especially for women because they tend to invest more into children, households and the emotional nurturing of a family as a whole.  When people are free of that primary concern of having to sell away their time for money, it allows them to invest in less tangible aspects of family building, so it makes me proud to see that among the women closest to me, they are all on that type of path.  They don’t have a “boss” out there they must yield to, and that is something I think is very important to family development, because it makes them the authority figures of their own lives which is why that question is asked on a jury selection form.  Attorneys obviously want to know that the people in their pool are “normal” people miserable like everyone else—so the way I answered that question likely will knock me out of the selection process.

My photographer daughter has really impressed me; she is taking her business to a new level as seen in these included videos.  She’s doing something called the 52 Weeks Project where each week she is picking a subject to photograph then she shows how she comes up with the shots and how the editing process goes on arriving at the final product.  She’s a full-time mom, but on both of these efforts she was up at dawn before her little boy woke up wanting breakfast and conducted these pictures for her project squeezing in a lot of creativity into an already packed day.  She’s been busy with booked appearances for several weeks now and coming up shortly after this publication she has a photo shoot in Chicago.  So what you see here is a very developed photographer who is expecting herself to be one of the great ones.  What she does is out of pure passion which I liken back to having the ability to be free of having a “boss” in her life who governs her away from home while on a time clock. That freedom has allowed her to expand her personal life in ways that I think are quite extraordinary—and necessary to achieve the level of art that she is shooting for.

Even her subjects are unique in the scheme of the photographic community.  Her first entry into the 52 weeks project was “A Call to Adventure” which I thought she managed to squeeze a lot out of while working in a very limited area within Cincinnati.   For those who don’t understand why a “Call to Adventure” is important it’s a classic motif most appropriately defined by Joseph Campbell in the telling of mythologies.  Usually after the first act of a movie or the introductory phase of a novel the main character is faced with a jumping off point from the static patterns of their normal life and into the promise of adventure provoked by some dynamic force. For some people the “Call to Adventure” might be as simple as a stranger approaching you from the back of a cab at a stop light while you’re walking to work in New York and asks you to help them get to the airport.  You must then decide to help or not because if you do, the static patterns of your day will be disrupted and that could have unpleasant consequences.  Then for others it might be an opportunity to fly to Cambodia to do sex traffic rescue work in some steamy jungle nightmare, but while there you make a new archaeological discovery that changes the world perspective on our knowledge of history.  The “Call to Adventure” is often how you can dramatically enrich your life for the better with vast experience, but to do so you must step away from your static patterns and allow dynamic forces into your life.

For instance, a friend of mine who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 called me on a very busy day last week and asked me if I could appear on CNN the next day.  I had scheduled a lot of events and I really didn’t have the time.  After all I had an oversea meeting planned at the very same moment I was supposed to be on with Anderson Cooper.  So did I answer the call and go on CNN which was likely just going to do a hit piece.  As it turned out the CNN people were very gracious and were not the kind of gotcha people who Rush Limbaugh surmised when he talked about the event on his show.  I did the CNN segment along with some other peers and it got people talking and was fun to do.  I still managed to get all my work done—although it was different from my usual day and I could point to many times in my life where answering the “Call to Adventure” directly led to some very unusual experiences which ultimately enhanced my life.

I have learned over time to never get too rigid about things.  The “Call of Adventure” is something I consider so important that I often go out of my way to find it with a very laissez-faire approach to living and personal management.  I may start the day with all kinds of planned activities but by the end of it, I end up doing things I never thought I would at the start and that comes from saying yes to the “Call of Adventure.”  So it made me particularly proud to see my photographer daughter out there capturing not only dramatic photos but articulating that difficult concept artistically.  She, standing at the entrance of a forest goes back to some of the great Arthurian legends of the Middle Ages where the knights would all enter the forest of their various adventures at different points basically to establish that no two paths of adventure were the same for other people.  People must pick their own paths in life to be living truly authentic lives so here was my kid showing this rather difficult concept to explain with a simple photograph.  But as you can see from the editing process, it’s not so simple.IMG_4644

This brings me back to the importance of my girls not being encumbered with a traditional job—especially while raising their children.  If they put their children in daycare, there would be many fewer opportunities for the kids to experience the wonder of a life lived authentically, because the static schedules of daily living prohibit it—and true intellectual learning is often crippled in children as a result.  But for a mother who is there ready to answer that “Call to Adventure” at the slightest provocation a simple trip to the grocery store on a sunny summer in July might lead to a lifetime of discoveries that stay with young people forever because if the schedule of acquiring food is relaxed there may be opportunities for adventure that come up along the way—someone might need help changing a flat tire or a snake may be caught under a car in the grocery store parking lot and need help getting over to the cool grass before somebody runs it over.  You just never know—but there is tremendous value in following the “Call to Adventure” and it makes me feel very good to see that my daughter has matured to a point where she can understand it well enough to photograph.  That takes talent!

Rich Hoffman

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Why Jim Comey Should go to Jail: How the former FBI director lied and how

Given the nature of the subject and the amount of time I personally gave to it last week this is sort of a three-part response to the Comey testimony provided on June 8th 2017 to the senate.  (Click here to review the previous entries.)  So for this let me answer the question that was given to me by CNN and explain my reasons—the question of course was whether or not I thought James Comey—former director of the FBI, should go to jail.  In my 20 second answer, I couldn’t give the kind of answer I wanted because of the necessary theatrics of television so here it is in writing.  Yes, James Comey should go to jail for lying under oath and for subversion of our republic.  I’m sure he was lying, and I’m sure he held back information deliberately which is in many cases equivalent to lying and he is for all practical purposes a villain.  Here’s why.

There was something that really bothered me about the way James Comey prepared his statements before the testimony, and the way he referred to tangible observations in such a lurid way.  As I said to CNN, Comey’s written testimony along with the delivery of additional information to the senate reminded me of the early James Bond novels from Ian Flemming–of a much more disgraceful and reckless British agent than we saw in the films with Sean Connery and Roger Moore.  The flair of Comey’s writing style reminded me not of a long time FBI agent—but actually that of a pent-up author wanting desperately to mater in the world just a few years before turning 60 years of age.  My comments below come from the experience of being an employer myself and working with people the same age as James Comey—and in reading voluminous amounts of books over the years—particularly the work of Ian Fleming.  I know all too well that when you hire fire and discipline around a thousand employees over a period of time some of them by nature will not agree with you.  Sometimes they will work against you, and at some point in time will think you are the most evil person in the world because they can’t get you to see things their way—and they find themselves on the outside looking in—which often hurts their feelings.  There are people out there who think I’m the most mean and evil person in the world.  Does that make them correct?  Of course not, but from their perspective their opinion is all they care about.  And this is what we are talking about with Comey—an ex-employee who gambled and lost his job and is now on the outside and it hurts him.  His testimony says all the things we need to know. If you know what to look for Comey spelled it all out before the hearing even took place by what he had written down, then illustrated gloriously during his sworn statements.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jcomey-060817.pdf?platform=hootsuite

Again, this is experience on my part that I offer this breakdown, but Comey opened the door to it by his own testimony.  Because he did that we have to account for the way he thinks and what his motives were based on the instinct of experience. For instance, below are a few of the Comey written comments that I found particularly damning for him so let me talk about them one at a time which will then be summarized to properly articulate my conclusion of why Comey should go to jail.  Here is the first:

The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.

That’s not what the IC was doing on their January 6th meeting with Trump where Comey cleared the room to report the unverified salacious and unverified material to Trump.  They were showing the new president what they had on him and were warning him of information they “could” possess if needed for their own preservation.  They were guilty of trying to create the kind of leverage that Comey complained about later which indicates that they were prone to thinking this way themselves—as a point of reference.  The IC (intelligence community) was trying to throw Trump a bone so that they could win him over for their further employment.  When Trump failed to feel threatened by this attempt, the members of the IC were deeply concerned as they left Trump Tower that day and it was at this point that the leaks from the IC began to flow freely to the press.

I felt compelled to document my first conversation with the President-Elect in a memo. To ensure accuracy, I began to type it on a laptop in an FBI vehicle outside Trump Tower the moment I walked out of the meeting. Creating written records immediately after one-on-one conversations with Mr. Trump was my practice from that point forward. This had not been my practice in the past. I spoke alone with President Obama twice in person (and never on the phone) – once in 2015 to discuss law enforcement policy issues and a second time, briefly, for him to say goodbye in late 2016. In neither of those circumstances did I memorialize the discussions. I can recall nine one-on-one conversations with President Trump in four months – three in person and six on the phone.

By his own admission Comey never did this with any other president prior, but the meeting rattled Comey to such an extent that he felt he better start now because it was always his intention after January 6th to rid the Beltway of this Trump threat. That was the same type of behavior that an employee who knows they are about to be fired does in an attempt to save their job, they begin gathering written recollections to use in human resources later. Comey lacking personal courage reverted to a passive aggressive approach, which was writing everything down. Comey understood early that Trump had doubts about him and his leadership in the FBI so he began to keep notes that he could use later to extort his futher employment.

 

My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.  A few moments later, the President said, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner.

Here Comey is hoping to use his experience as an FBI agent and director to overcome any doubt about what he’s saying about Trump.  This detail about his personal dinner with Trump in the Green Room of the White House is particularly revealing.  First Comey wants to show that he has a story to tell and is trying to attract agents for a big book deal, or even a Hollywood movie based on his experiences.  The liberals of the Beltway who know film producers likely put the bug in his ear which he was receptive to after that January 8th meeting where Comey started writing things down.  The salacious details here say a lot about Comey’s motives because he goes into almost screenplay detail—which has nothing to do with facts the way you’d expect an FBI director to illicit.  Instead he relied on his feelings which are more aligned with the way a novelist would write.  People forget that Ian Flemming, the great British writer and creator of James Bond was a British Naval Intelligence Division agent before he was a writer and if you go back and read his first book, Casino Royal, it actually sounds a lot like the way Comey writes in his interactions with Trump.  Since Comey himself offered that “instinct” is admissible as evidence for the deduction of reason in this case, then I feel quite comfortable in concluding that Comey decided he was going to be a writer after his FBI career and Trump was going to be his villain that he’d write about.  He’d be the toast of the swamp as his friends around the Beltway would honor him for all time as the Boy Scout who saved them from the lunatic businessman from New York during a short-lived presidency.  The more he thought about it, the more alluring the thought became until it became so obvious that Trump could see it on his face.  Prior to that January 27th dinner meeting, Comey had hidden his fantasy—but Trump could detect it and it changed the way that Trump thought about Comey as director of the FBI.

On February 14, I went to the Oval Office for a scheduled counterterrorism briefing of the President. He sat behind the desk and a group of us sat in a semi-circle of about six chairs facing him on the other side of the desk. The Vice President, Deputy Director of the CIA, Director of the National CounterTerrorism Center, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Attorney General, and I were in the semi-circle of chairs. I was directly facing the President, sitting between the Deputy CIA Director and the Director of NCTC. There were quite a few others in the room, sitting behind us on couches and chairs. The President signaled the end of the briefing by thanking the group and telling them all that he wanted to speak to me alone. I stayed in my chair. As the participants started to leave the Oval Office, the Attorney General lingered by my chair, but the President thanked him and said he wanted to speak only with me. The last person to leave was Jared Kushner, who also stood by my chair and exchanged pleasantries with me. The President then excused him, saying he wanted to speak with me. When the door by the grandfather clock closed, and we were alone, the President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned 5 the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify. The President then made a long series of comments about the problem with leaks of classified information – a concern I shared and still share. After he had spoken for a few minutes about leaks, Reince Priebus leaned in through the door by the grandfather clock and I could see a group of people waiting behind him. The President waved at him to close the door, saying he would be done shortly. The door closed. The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.” The President returned briefly to the problem of leaks. I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock, making my way through the large group of people waiting there, including Mr. Priebus and the Vice President. I immediately prepared an unclassified memo of the conversation about Flynn and discussed the matter with FBI senior leadership. I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December. I did not understand the President to be talking about the broader investigation into Russia or possible links to his campaign. I could be wrong, but I took him to be focusing on what had just happened with Flynn’s departure and the controversy around his account of his phone calls. Regardless, it was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency.

Even going to the trouble to mention the grandfather clock in this segment of Comey’s testimony is more of an attempt to paint a picture of the moment more than just reporting the facts.  This only reiterates what I said about Comey wanting to be a novelist because the clock has nothing to do with the facts of the matter. The point of this entire segment is to paint Comey as the sole survivor of a treacherous cloud of villainy.  Comey knew that his Beltway friends would soak all this up so he added extra detail for the sake of drama.  In the contents of the discussion its obvious Trump wanted to protect his friend Michael Flynn from further embarrassment as the guy had just resigned a few days prior.  There was no conspiracy or ill intent on the part of the president—since “instinct” is now admissible as evidence.  What is particularly revealing here is the part where Comey tries to portray himself completely in control by saying “I did not say I would ‘let this go.” The president returned briefly to the problem of leaks.  I then got up and left out the door by the grandfather clock”—and so on and so on.  Listening to Comey speak in writing he was very much in control and was the protagonist of his own adventure, but from what he stated in his testimony he added that he was terrified of this one on one with Trump and he felt compelled that the weight of the office was upon him to stop the Russian investigation.

Essentially Comey decided some time before the election of 2016 that regardless of what happened he was going to seek money and fame in the private sector which likely shaped the way he handled the Hillary Clinton case.  If he had prosecuted her—like he should have, the agents and movie makers would have held it against him.  So days before the election when things were tight between Trump and Clinton he tried to take the light off her and help her out a few percentage points—because he wanted his book deal.  It would have paid a lot more than he made as an FBI director and he’d gain fame for he and his family—along with his professor friends who leak stories to The New York Times. From Comey’s perspective of trying to make a little money for his family he’s a hero—he’s the protagonist standing up to the president in the Oval Office like a Boy Scout honest, clean and full of pride in Amerca. But in reality he was just another swamp monster working against the American people, actively subverting justice to keep a political party in power and when none of that worked he became one of the big leakers to the media in an attempt to bring down a properly elected American president violating his employment agreement with the FBI and the natural trust his position carried with it as head of the intelligence community.

Comey lied because he took it upon himself to become an activist, he wrote down information on government computers to be used as a weapon—no wonder he let Hillary Clinton go—but he did not state these intentions which were clearly present.  Instead he painted himself as a bastion of the law who would uphold truth, justice and the American way. In reality he was just another cowering bureaucrat trying to hide in the swamp and ride out his years as he propped himself up as a future writer in the private sector.  He lied because he did not state his intentions correctly for why he actually became a leaker.  He said it was to preserve justice—but in reality it was to take down a president he didn’t like from the beginning and he wanted to be a hero to the left.  He also lied in saying that he wasn’t political.  His actions were very political and more than justified his termination without any further drama.  But we all know how that turned out. Comey placed himself on a pedestal hoping to play at being the sacrificial lamb for the good of the ”Beltway.”  But what he revealed of himself was that he was an activist for the preservation of the status quo and a leaker of information gathered in the Oval Office to be spread upon a salacious press in the way a plot from House of Cards might have a hard time believing.  Yet that is precisely what happened.  That is why Comey should go to jail. He abused the trust of his office. He sought to bring down an American president’s administration, and he misrepresented himself under sworn testimony. And he wrote down the evidence forcing us all to act on it.

And that’s that.

Rich Hoffman

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CNN in Butler County, Ohio at Rick’s Tavern: From Eliot Ness to Ian Flemming–Comey is in trouble

IMG_4642Of course when CNN came to Butler County to do a piece on the James Comey hearings seeking the reaction of Trump supporters I wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity.  CNN has been hostile to Trump and they were coming to my turf—and I got an invite.  So I spent the day with several other Trump troops from southern Ohio at Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield watching the Comey hearings which CNN set up as a kind of watch party and we stuck around to give our live reaction on Anderson Cooper’s show later that night.  The CNN people were very professional and accommodating so the event went off without any contention.  We originally were supposed to be on the Anderson Cooper show for two 15 minute segments, but because of the busy news day that was whittled down to a 4 minute piece at 9:35 PM.   So we had a problem, we had nine Trump people at Rick’s Tavern to do live television and we all had a few pages of notes that we had taken from the testimony to fill a half hour of air time.  But somehow we had to narrow all that down into a 20 second statement.  So when the camera turned to me I wasn’t sure what I was going to say or even where to start about my various thoughts–I said this.

I’ll get more into the details of the Comey hearing itself in the days to come but for this occasion, I’ll share my notes for future reference and focus on the positive experience we had with CNN at Rick’s Tavern as Americans.

Comey Notes taken on 6/8/2017:

  • Mark Warner made a dangerous assertion with the resolute conclusion of the Russian investigation as his foundation argument. How would he know that?

  • In a world where international cooperation and compromise are praised, it is interesting that working with the Russians is even something that would cause suspicion in the first place.

  • Comey says that the impression of the FBI was not in dismay, which is a purely emotional response. Saying something doesn’t make it true.

  • Russian cyber intrusion by the Russians according to Comey, started in 2015 under Obama.

  • Comey said that Trump lied about him and the FBI. That perspective comes from a guy who was in charge at the time and is now an ex-employee speaking from hurt feelings.

  • Judgment of Trump’s character was that Trump might lie about him—based again purely on feelings.

  • Comey assumes that the Trump dinner was a way to get something on the FBI director to use his job as a bargaining chip to control Comey’s investigations. Again, this was purely emotionally based.   Comey made a lot of assumptions.

  • Don’t remember that Comey specifically said “chose to defame me.”

  • How did Comey know he needed to write down everything—the premise was rooted in mistrust from the beginning? The interesting thing is that Comey did not have the same level of conviction when Attorney General Loretta Lynch told him to handle the Hillary Clinton case as a “matter.”  Lynch was clearly trying to shape the FBI case, yet Comey did not respond with indignation the way he did with Trump.  He obviously had made up his mind about Trump before the president took office.

  • Comey said he was uncomfortable with Trump after the meeting with him on January 6th.

    https://twitter.com/overmanwarrior/status/873295786834108417

  • Trump and Comey never spoke after April 11th.

  • Comey said he’d be “honestly loyal,” to Trump.

  • Comey didn’t do his duty because of the pressure from Lynch. Shows a history of bad decisions by over thinking things.

  • FBI leadership team didn’t want to speak with Jeff Sessions.

  • “Gut feel of the nature of the person I was interacting with.” This is how Comey referred to Trump.

  • Comey asked a friend that is a professor at Columbia school of journalism to leak his personal notes to the press hoping to invoke a special investigation.

  • Comey says that Russia actively participated in American elections with a great level of sophistication. But that’s nothing new, the United States does the same.  The problem is with the DNC letting themselves become victims with loose information.

  • Why would the president kick everyone out of the room—because business guys know from experience that it’s a good way to communicate and size people up—not letting them hide behind other people.

  • What is the difference in speaking one on one in a private setting and speaking on the phone with someone. This is something that Roy Blunt brought up—why would Comey feel different in person than on a phone call?

  • Comey leaked info to a friend—guilty of activism—seeking a special counsel to do what he didn’t have the courage to do himself. While he showed caution in not having a special investigation occur with Hillary Clinton, but had no problem letting one happen to President Trump.

  • Comey established a pattern of very weak behavior which likely has more to do with his firing than anything otherwise contemplated.

  • Likely, notes leaked to The New York Times are still in the possession of Comey’s friend. Seriously bad judgment.

  • Case is on obstruction of justice only if the intent was to cover up the Russian investigation. It assumes that job performance was not a factor.

  • Comey referred to himself as “captain courageous.”

As we went on the air many other Trump supporters showed up to fill in the background of the bar—specifically the Biker’s for Trump guys—so there was an ambiance of positivity that was distinctly patriotic.  The news coverage all day long had been very negative for Trump, but I didn’t see things that way, which is why I answered my question the way I did.  Clearly Comey wasn’t an honest Boy Scout as he had been playing.  He was in fact one of the big Washington Beltway leakers and he was doing it from a very high level.

He was in trouble—serious trouble and that wasn’t lost to me during the testimony.  When Comey had said he leaked his memo to a friend who then leaked it to the press, I made eye contact with the CNN producer Stephen Samaniego and he knew it too.  This wasn’t a partisan issue or a group of Ohio Trump supporters living in the bubble of regional conservatism.  Comey had admitted to something that was very serious and Trump had nailed him to the wall with Comey’s own show boating.  Once the smoke cleared from the day’s events, to the time we went on live with Anderson Cooper—that was the story.

As I watched the CNN guys and the live show on the monitor as we were finally set-up for our official shots it was clear to me that this was all part of making America Great Again.  The epic showdown on Capital Hill with Comey–flushing him out as a leaker, getting him to reveal what Loretta Lynch had revealed about the Hillary Clinton case—which we all suspected—was all part of this new Trump approach to things.  Now we had proof—testimony anyway—it all occurred because of the way Trump does things. None of this would have happened with any other president.  The Iran Contra hearings nearly destroyed all the good things that Reagan did—and here was Trump plowing through everything relentlessly and the political left was making major mistakes under the pressure of Trump.  And here was CNN honestly soul-searching for an understanding of how people think from the heartland of the Trump voter—Butler Country, Ohio with some of the leaders of the ground game there to talk.

They were truly curious whether or not we’d still be with him and they picked Rick’s Tavern with its big America flag hanging out front to understand why. They asked good questions and we answered them the best we could in 20 seconds.  When it came to me I said what I did, Comey portrayed himself as an honest Eliot Ness FBI agent from the Untouchables.  But what he ended up being was just a 6’8” cowering bureaucrat who knew how to talk a good game, but when the rubber hit the road, he was lost.  Trump was exposing that month by month making it so that Comey couldn’t hide it any more.  Barack Obama had no idea what competency was but here was a real businessman who knew value in people and Comey knew he was in trouble. So he decided to become the villain of a spy novel and go about passive aggressively leaking information about Trump to take down the new president—and Trump sniffed him out.  That’s when Comey made the biggest mistake of his life—he leaked his notes to a Columbia professor friend to leak the story to The New York Times.  That’s how I came up with the Ian Flemming reference—because Comey was far more interested with images and storylines than substance and facts.

I think there were around 5 million people watching CNN at that time slot so I was very proud of the opportunity to defend President Trump in the trenches, even if it was only 20 seconds—the comments did what they were supposed to do.  And for those who read here everyday, they know that there is a lot more where that came from.  I’d do it again in a second.  Trump is doing a great job, and I appreciate it, and will fight for him all day long so that he can keep doing that job.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump’s Infrastructure Plan in Cincinnati: How to increase America’s GDP with efficiency and proper investment

It was good to see President Trump return to Cincinnati to give a nice speech about his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan along the Ohio River—where new bridges are desperately needed.  I remember when Obama did a speech trying to invoke the same kind of infrastructure plan at almost the same place, but for that I was very much against—because he didn’t have a plan.  Trump does.  Just a few months into his presidency just the stock market alone has infused over 3 trillion dollars into our economy, so I am confident that this infrastructure plan will pay for itself with increased productivity.  Just a few days ago I listed three key industries that could explode upon the economic scene before the end of Trump’s presidency which could not only pay down the national debt but dramatically increased GDP.  (CLICK HERE TO REVIEW)  It’s the little things that will do the most—things like privatizing the air traffic control system in America.  When Trump announced his air traffic control initiative, the media did little to properly cover it.  They were obsessed with the Russia conspiracy theory and the Comey testimony, but the real news was in Trump’s infrastructure changes.  So here is how the air traffic controller change was listed on the Trump website along with a link to the source material.  This is something to get excited about and is a key to just how and why Trump will be successful whereas Barack Obama was just a babbling idiot.

An evening stranded on an O’Hare airport runway is enough to make anyone mad, and on Monday Donald Trump responded with a plan for improving American air travel. The President endorsed spinning off air-traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration, a decades-old idea that would improve passenger experience and safety.

Mr. Trump announced principles for converting air-traffic control into a nonprofit. The new entity would be governed by a board of directors, including representatives for airlines, unions, airports and others. Instead of taxes, the outfit would be funded by user fees, which is how Canada has financed air-traffic services since 1996. The outline makes small tweaks to House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster’s proposal that stalled last year.

The proposal is being dismissed as one of Mr. Trump’s eccentric obsessions, though Al Gore supported a version in the 1990s. President Trump is right that while “every passenger has GPS technology in their pockets, our air-traffic control system still runs on radar,” circa 1945. The FAA’s modernization program known as NextGen is expected to crash through its 2025 deadline by as much as a decade.

One illustration is electronic flight strips. U.S. towers use pieces of paper to monitor a flight’s progress, even as FAA has promised to transition to digital slips, among other technology updates. How’s that going? The product will be rolled out somewhere between 2020 and 2028—to only 89 of the busiest towers, as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole has detailed. Canada’s air-traffic system NavCanada deployed electronic strips a dozen years ago.

In May the Transportation Department Inspector General offered some reasons why the FAA so routinely fails to deliver new technology: “overambitious plans, unreliable cost and schedule estimates, unstable requirements, software development problems, poorly defined benefits, and ineffective contract and program management.” Is that all?

FAA regulates itself, so a separation would end this conflict-of-interest and allow the agency to focus on safety and certification. This reform is endorsed by the International Civil Aviation Organization, and only the most cynical on the left could claim a spinoff threatens passenger safety. Democrats will say Mr. Trump is auctioning off air traffic to big business, but the principles are explicit that the entity must be a nonprofit. The outline gives airlines only two seats on the 13-member board.

Some on the right may also torpedo the plan. Among the complaints: The nonprofit would be given the air-traffic control assets at no cost, though no company would buy the equipment in this scrapyard. Another is the suspicion that anything supported by the air-traffic controller union must be unacceptable. Both the Shuster plan and the Trump principles say that current union contracts would be honored, which is hardly a major victory for labor.

Still, the more remarkable feat is how many in the industry agree on the basics: The airline trade group supports a spinoff, and last year so did the air-traffic controller’s union, which said it will evaluate the specifics of any bill. Former FAA chief officers and Transportation Secretaries also signed on. That’s a testament to how inefficient the current system is. And perhaps the traveling public can relate to Mr. Trump’s venting on Monday about having “to circle for hours and hours” over an airport.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/youve-been-cleared-for-a-faster-landing/

It was really strange, I live in Cincinnati where this Trump speech occurred and leading up to it, even on conservative radio stations there was almost no coverage of it. The big television stations around town did almost no promo work for it, as opposed to the exact same type of speech that Barack Obama gave a number of years ago where the entire city came to almost a standstill to contemplate his arrival. Trump came and delivered a really good speech that has real, tangible contributions to the future of the world, and nobody covered it. They did carry the speech live on WLW radio at 1 PM but it was obvious that there was much more interest in the four home runs that Red’s player Scooter Gennett hit the night before.

With the Comey testimony happening the next day and the revelation that the loser Reality Winner as a 25-year old liberal radical stole NSA documents and leaked them to the press hoping to bring down the Trump administration, there just wasn’t room for this great news from Donald Trump. But while the media was obsessed with those stories, Trump delivered a speech on infrastructure and the need for repealing Obamacare that was going to continue working behind the scenes catching all these slow minded media millennials off guard, just as none of them were prepared for the air traffic control privatization news. The media just doesn’t think big enough to keep up with Trump—yet the work is happening in spite of the, and it drives them crazy.

I enjoyed the speech and the spectacle “not surrounding it.” As I’ve said before, the way to really know something especially when its hidden is to see how it impacts the world around it with its signature—the way other things interact with it even when hidden. Such as how we discover planets by their gravitational signature and how they pull the elliptical orbits of other plants to their mass. Trump is pulling everything to him whether or not the media acknowledges the work he is doing or not. It didn’t matter if the media covered Trump in Cincinnati really, because the show went on without them and all this happened in the wake of the air traffic control information. The sum of all this is massive economic expansion and a reinvention of our transportation systems, from bridges to air traffic controllers—to inventions not yet hitting the market. The money in this case is negligible because the thrust behind these efforts create the wealth that they will use. And it’s all very exciting.

Rich Hoffman

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The Accuracy of Shooting from the Hip: A Cowboy Fast Draw update

I don’t really feel like writing about another terrorist attack, or the stupidity of Democrats.  In America, especially among the shooting sports, we have a means of dealing with both and that insanity is completely avoidable.  I’m talking about the Cowboy Way which is an evolved philosophy of conduct born from the notion of individual freedom and property rights defense—and its very unique to the world.  By day, I get the opportunity professionally to deal with a variety of international cultures and through my love of mythology I have a means of gaining more understanding than the typical person visiting an airport in Tokyo might experience.  For a good culture to survive or even thrive, you have to know what you are—and in America at the heart of our fundamental philosophy is the Cowboy Way.  To be a part of it, or to understand it in some fundamental way, becoming involved in a shooting sport of some kind will usually evoke the basic elements.  That is why for the last two years I have been learning a new skill—Cowboy Fast Draw.  Well, it has taken a little time and a lot of investment but I’m getting ready to do a little competition shooting so I was taking some video of my form to slow down and analyze, and I thought I’d share that video so that my readers can have an understanding of something I think is important.  I’ve set up a target range for Cowboy Fast Draw in my garage and it’s where I go to dump away stress and to fine tune a mild obsession for me in the realm of speed and accuracy.  How fast can a person really shoot and hit a target in the micro seconds of judgment?  Before I elaborate, here is a bit of my practice session from Friday evening this past week.  I like the results, but in all honesty, I’m pushing to be twice as fast as what is seen in this video.  These shots are in the .450 to .470 range—which is pretty good.  But not where I want to be.  However, what matters most is the experience of developing the Cowboy Way through this art and that is truly something very special.

Working with the western arts for over 25 years as a bull whip artist I often ran into these quick draw guys and I always enjoyed watching them.  But time and the initial investment to get started were certainly barriers of entry.  There are a number of different fast draw organizations out there and most of them were pretty loose and hadn’t really done anything to advance the sport in a way that was respectable.  That is until I learned more specifically about the CFDA, (Cowboy Fast Draw Association).  They had their act together and from what I could tell was doing great things in advancing the concept of the Cowboy Way.

Around this time of getting started in Cowboy Fast Draw I was involved in two international cultures professionally, one in Japan where the samurai is still very important to their business climate.  And the other was in Europe where the virtues of the Crusades and King Author’s adventures as a knight of the Round Table are the soil that all their roots emerge from.  I couldn’t help but think that for America to really mature into its own thing—which is essentially where we are—we needed to embrace our own philosophic—warrior past and roll it into our business culture.  In a tremendous way, Hollywood had already done that and our society flourished enormously during the 1930s to the 1960s when movie and television westerns were most of what Hollywood put out. A lot of the movies made in this period I was surprised to learn were shown on television in Europe and Japan as they were fascinated with the idea of the American cowboy and the values which poured forth from it.  Recently while staying in England for an extended period I counted at least five television channels that were showing American westerns during a Saturday afternoon—and they were old westerns.  Nothing produced within the last five decades.

Additionally I was coming under a lot of criticism for my very reckless ways of doing things—or what appeared to slow minded people as reckless.  I often get accused for “shooting from the hip” as if that were some kind of bad thing by rivals.  This is in reference to my tendency to make decisions on my own—without a lot of group involvement, and to make those decisions quickly.  I don’t sleep on much but instead usually draw and fire at that moment.  To me it doesn’t seem so fast, but that’s because I’m already thinking in a very fast way so what might seem like forever to me is very fast to the people watching from the outside.  So I got involved in Cowboy Fast Draw for other reasons too, and that was to prove that you could draw and fire from the hip quickly and accurately and that it wasn’t so reckless—but rather quite precise.

The safe thing for me would be to not get involved in this type of thing.  After all, I had been one of the best bull whip artists in the world and I had often used my experience with that endeavor to explain many complicated business concepts—such as putting out the flame on a candle with the crack of a whip like I did for the SB5 Bill before Governor Kasich went to the dark side and was still trying to do good work in Ohio, to demonstrate how to cut fat out of the budget with precision.  To hit a specific target with the tip of a bull whip is difficult and not many  people in the world can do it—but I can and I could use that calling card forever and nobody would blame me. Taking up Cowboy Fast Draw and joining a sport that already has so many lightening fast people competing in it doesn’t make much sense to most because it’s harder to be unique in such a field, if that is what you are going for in life.  Yet for me it’s about the things that happen in a fraction of a second that sends my mind ablaze with wonder, and obsession.

I hit a major milestone with some of my professional work a few years back and came into some expendable cash so that’s when I bought my fast draw rig and my new Ruger Vaquero.  The very first thing I did, because I had been thinking of it for over twenty years, was find a fast draw organization that I could join up with and master the art.  That’s when I noticed that the Cowboy Fast Draw Association really had everything figured out—the targeting system you could buy from them and it came all ready to set up and use and the ammunition was easy to get.  The wax bullets I get for a good price from CFDA and the shotgun primers I get at Cabela’s about every few weeks in boxes of 1000. To get good at something like Cowboy Fast Draw you have to practice a lot and to do that you have to get the economics lined up correctly.  The way they have things set up in the Cowboy Fast Draw Association it costs about .06 per shot.  To get to where you see me in the video above I have fired about 10,000 rounds at the target shown which is about $600 of investment in ammunition which might sound like a lot, but for shooting it really isn’t.  It’s almost as cheap as BB gun shooting, but Cowboy Fast Draw is much better.  By the time I get to my next 10,000 shots, I will likely get my times down by .100 of a second.  Perhaps by the next 50,000 shots, I may even do better than that.  If you watch the video in slow motion taken from many angles, the areas for improvement are the time reacting to the light and the time from drawing the gun and actually pulling the trigger. We are all taught that the way to shoot is to aim with the targeting bead carefully so the tendency to get the gun out in front of you is very instinctual.  But to get the fast times you really need to fire right out of the holster.  When I bought that holster I commissioned it from Bob Mernickle who makes holsters specifically to the stringent rules of the Cowboy Fast Draw Association just to be safe, and I have to say that it is my favorite thing in the world.  When I come home from a hard day, nothing feels better than putting on my fast draw rig and practicing a little fast draw.  There really isn’t anything better in the world than the smell of gun smoke, Hoppes gun cleaner, and finely worked leather to the sounds of talk radio giving you the news of the day.  I’ve had a very good life and I have owned many things that made me very happy, but my fast draw rig and the Ruger Vaquero that rest in it is the best thing I’ve ever owned. There is great symbolic meaning which is very important to me patriotically as well as philosophically that come with them.

Until I shot that video the other day I wasn’t sure how I was doing.  I didn’t worry about the form or how it looked; I just practiced with an eye on being able to compete within a few years.  I talked about it here when I started and I have been having fun with it.  I was pretty happy with the video I saw.  Everything happens so fast that it’s difficult to tell what is going on until you slow things down for analysis.  But so far so good, and I share it just in case some of my readers out there want to use it as an entry point into the sport for themselves. It’s an all American past time and just the function of it is important to the philosophic development of the Cowboy Way which is something everyone would do well to learn—especially young people. Other cultures—especially the Japanese, certainly are proud of their artistic warrior arts which put their societies on the map of relevancy.  In America, gunfighting is a martial art of our own invention and I think it’s time we embrace it—formally, not just in old movies.  Cowboy Fast Draw is a great way to do that.  You can practice at your own home relatively cheaply and it really gets you close to the spirit of America.  For me, it’s that quest to show how accurate a person can be shooting from the hip.  As those who have been so critical of my way of thinking about most all things, the proof that it’s possible is obvious.  But I’m not done yet.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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Bravo Donald Trump: Standing up to the cult religion of climate science communism

Pride is the primary emotion in reaction to my representative in the White House, Donald Trump, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. It had to happen and was one of the reasons I fought so hard for Donald Trump to win that election.  Climate change is a fictional religion that the political left has adopted to replace Christianity and they are really more of a cult than science.  Mankind’s impact on the environment is negligible.  It was only 15,000 years ago that the sea levels were so low that you could walk from where London is now to Paris on dry land.  Then at times even more distant, huge parts of North America were at the bottom of the sea—which is why we have so many fossils in Ohio that are of sea creatures.  You can’t save the cities of Miami, New York and Venice by throwing token sacrifices of environmental concern to the gods of the sky and hope that sea levels will always stay the same.  Nothing stays the same regarding climate which is why if mankind is to survive, it must move to space.  This little geological window that has given rise to all humanity opens and closes quickly and no Paris agreement will stop that.  Climate change is a cult and nothing more which is why I am so proud in Donald Trump for starting the process of getting America away from it.

I applaud the efforts of people who want clean air and energy—particularly at Tesla and other Elon Musk endeavors. But their grip on science in the case of climate change is really infantile.  The way that the political left melted down after Trump’s announcement can only be described as a group of people who had their religion stripped away—because nothing about their reactions were rooted in science.  The Paris agreement as Trump said was always about crippling American industry and redistributing its wealth to other counties which is why Obama signed up for it—and now that the reality of that not happening has set in, those countries hoping to receive that wealth are upset about it.

As I’ve said many times over the last few months, I just came back from Paris in February of this year and the place is a dump. They have no right to even have their name on anything instructing the world on how to behave. Paris is a joke of a city—dirty, broken and stuck in its ancient past.  They have some nice art—but that’s about it.  There is nothing bright and new about Paris so they are in no position to lead the world toward anything.  It was arrogant of them to even assume such a role—they are a socialist country not that far behind Venezuela in complete collapse—and now they seek to appease the nature gods with this silly climate cult.  Give me a break!

It really isn’t about science or even politics, the global climate people are just another religion competing against Christianity for the philosophic position of universal relevancy. Is mankind the instigator of all thought and all the resources of the world at their disposal, or is man just another animal of nature under the rainbows of Mother Earth—and it is the task of humans to worship the goddess the way that Hindus have cherished Shiva?  The Paris accord was always a gateway to a new religion that is in direct competition with Christianity—which is also why the same supporters of climate change support methods of destroying Christianity through radical Islamic terrorism, or by becoming atheists in a way themselves so to allow for people to seek out their new religion to replace the old crusty one from Rome.  We were never talking about science—we’ve always been talking about a cult with figures like Al Gore being the modern version of Joseph Smith.

To step against the Paris agreement is to separate church and state—because that’s all that leftists have been trying to achieve—religious impression not much different from the Catholic rule of Europe during the Middle Ages. The political left wanted a new aristocracy of church clergy running the world from government positions using the huge umbrella of Earth Mother worship as the foundation of their cult and that was to instigate a transfer of wealth from America back into Europe and the Asian countries all the while crushing the only capitalist country left on earth.  It was a military insurrection all in the name of religion—just like the Crusades—but this time it was set in modern times without swords—but with new laws and a promise of imprisonment.  The radical aims of the cult were no different from any religious crusade throughout history.  This time however, the cult was busted before it could take full effect.

The Hollywood actors and even entertainment producers like Disney’s Bob Iger are the mindless spokesmen for this new age religion. They don’t think—people think for them which is why they are in entertainment.  And their reaction to Trump’s speech was violent—the way any cult followers would react once the cord attaching themselves to their foundation material was cut leaving them feeling vulnerable.  These are people whose understanding of science is about five minutes deep.  It is unlikely any of them can even fathom events that occurred four thousand years ago let alone 15,000 years ago when the English Channel was a vast meadow with flowers, trees and wildlife—all of which is now underwater.

I also recently visited the very nice little city of Brighten, England which is a kind of tourist destination at the south looking out over the Channel toward France. It’s common for Hollywood actors homesick from the beaches of L.A. to go south from London to Brighten to play on the weekends while filming movies up at Pinewood.

  As I sat sipping on a beer near the pier I watched the people and they had no clue that in a relatively short period of time geologically that there was no water brushing up against the coast of Brighten, but only a long hill that went about 10 miles out then back up again into what is now France and that under all that water was likely many ancient towns from people long gone, erased from memory because they had built their entire civilization along the coast, just as Brighton was now—only to be displaced because of rising oceans—and back then there were no factories, coal plants, or cars creating contaminates dangerous to “Mother Earth.”  The people of Brighton I doubt even knew that the entire coastline of south England was a recently new phenomenon.

Climate science is simply an ignorant cult sponsored by modern political activists who lean left and quietly support economic communism using the goddess Mother Earth as a deity to sacrifice our economic means to. It is an intrusion of religion into state affairs by seeking to sabotage science to sell communism pure and simple.  That is why the Paris accord favored the communist state of China while penalizing the United States economically.  It’s a scam, and I’m so glad that we finally have a president who was willing to do the right thing and stand against this cultish global incursion.  In the fight for American sovereignty, this is just one step—but what a big step it was.  Bravo Donald Trump, you did good.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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Fighting Back: It feels good, doesn’t it

It’s always been a war; the only difference is that some of you out there are just coming to realize it. Welcome to the battlefield, many of us have been waiting for you.  I’ve known it was war for a long time and have been often mystified why other people didn’t see it.  Most notably for me personally was when I was in the situation that Sean Hannity is in now at Fox News and people associated with me were having their businesses boycotted by fat-assed neurotic activists who called themselves moms looking for a free baby sitter in public education because I was leading the effort to keep tax money out of the pockets of a school system that had been mismanaging it.  Now eight years later they all know what I was trying to tell them—the school wouldn’t miraculously make their children great by throwing more money at them.  Those kids are now on par with the rest of the world—most of them are losers, and with all their bullying, that leftist playbook of boycotts and hitting the political opposition in the pocketbook have yielded nothing positive since Saul Alinsky started teaching those techniques to his slack-jawed followers.  I know how it feels to be Sean Hannity and these other voices who today have a big platform, but it could all be ripped away in a moment’s notice—like what happened to Bill O’Reilly.  I’ve always taken an aggressive stance against leftist insurgency—particularly the economic kind.  But now, finally with Sean Hannity standing his ground at Fox News—people are starting to learn to fight back.  And it feels good, doesn’t it?

As Sean featured the efforts of the group, Media Equalizer.com Kathy Griffin saw major blowback from her political stunt which featured her holding the severed head of Donald Trump. As a liberal comedian and part of that disgusting other side of the war—the war against traditional American values, she thought she was immune to ridicule.  If any conservative had done what she did there would be calls from the political left for their execution on the spot.  Instead, it took several hours for the good Christian people who make up a large part of the conservative viewpoint to become enraged—which they eventually did.  Griffin quickly apologized and hoped that was the end of the story.  The media tried to take the light off her by pointing to a Trump tweet featuring the word “covfefe.”  But it didn’t work, Republicans are now learning that they have to at least fight fire with fire.  I would suggest they fight fire with complete conquest, but for now I’ll settle for fire.  The lesson that everyone has had to learn is that you cannot leave evil unchecked.  And regardless of the vantage point, the political left is evil because the premise of their existence is against life itself—pro abortion, anti-family, support of terrorism, not defending the values of American morality supported by competition through capitalism—I could go on and on, but the essence of them all is anti-life—“evil.”  We cannot yield to evil in any form.   We must fight it!

https://mediaequalizer.com/

My sister-in-law and my father-in-law live in a very expensive area in the east of Louisville off Brownsboro Rd where the homes range on average between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Visiting there often I can personally report that I don’t see a lot of lazy terrible people there.  Everyone has a job, everyone is working hard at life taking care of their lawns, cars and families—it is a very productive place to be and I enjoy going there for family visits.  The political left demonizes these wealthy people essentially because these hard-working homeowners make the lazy people on the left feel bad about themselves and through wealth redistribution, the leftists want a piece of the action off Brownsboro.  For my father-in-law’s 73rd birthday we gave him Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln book and he was so happy to get it that he literally read the first three chapters there in the kitchen where he unwrapped his present.  He has been sad that Bill was off the air—and over the many years I have watched the political left take severe shots at him because he’s always been well off financially.  He’s always been too nice to fight back, so it has always pained me to see him have to endure the idiots who simply hate him because they don’t want to match his efforts at life.  I mean the guy has several degrees, particularly a masters in geology.  He’s been a school teacher for several decades after he was as successful businessman.  He worked hard all his life and he deserves to live in a million-dollar home if he wants to.  But who is a guy like that going to watch on television—some idiot like Racheal Maddow—and other socialists on CNN, ABC, and NBC?   No, he’s going to want his news from other savvy people much like himself—someone like ol’ Bill O’Reilly. But you see, the left wants to smoke out people like my father-in-law, and my sister-in-law who also lives in a million-dollar house—because she and her husband work hard at living, raising their family and doing the right things.  They have nothing in common with the people on CNN—but the left wants to choke off information to people like them so that they can advance their own liberal positions without the fear of competition to slow down their message.  Slums are created by the political left, go into any neighborhood with a high crime rate, drugs and a disproportionate number of people on welfare and you’ll see the work of Democrats—and that is something that should be punished, not rewarded.  People like Kathy Griffin should be running for the hills in shame, not holding up the bloody head of Donald Trump simulating an assassination attempt and expecting her liberal friends to send her cookies.  Complacency has empowered these vile, evil people.  Kathy Griffin is evil for what she did.

Conservatives have been too quiet, they let ESPN cut off Curt Schilling last year and now this year it’s the great Bill O’Reilly. They attack conservative movie stars like Tim Allen and they attack publishers who put out conservative titles in exactly the same way that they attacked my business partners in No Lakota Levy many years ago.  When the left can’t beat the message, they attack the pocketbook which is coercion of force—and is the epitome of evil.  All I can say is that I thank God we have Donald Trump as president finally pushing back from the White House and now Sean Hannity who is fighting for his very life on Fox News.  So don’t feel bad about using Media Equalizer.com to go after the advertisers of Racheal Maddow, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher and the entire network of CNN.  Go after their throats.  Sean Hannity doesn’t want to use those words because of his large platform—but I will—go after the political left’s jugular.  Don’t go see their stupid movies.  (Wonder Woman is the exception because Warner Bros. does supporter conservative filmmakers.)  But otherwise, take the money out of their pockets.  If an advertiser supports liberal programs—don’t buy their products.  Give it to the political left for a change and let them once and for all feel the pain we have been feeling.  It’s OK to stick them in the eye.  It’s not good to always allow yourselves to be picked on.  Allowing evil to increase in power through complacency is the same as being evil yourself.  Don’t feed its spread and support efforts to attack it—starting with their own pocketbook.   The reason it feels good to fight back is because it’s the right thing to do.  So do more of it dear reader—for the benefit of the United States and all it has stood for

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

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