Tag: Hollywood insight

Lakota’s New Superintendent is a DOUBLE DIPPER: It’s all about plunder…I mean kids

All it took was one guy from our No Lakota Levy group to show just the slightest inclination to break away from the main group before the district fluffed their wings and assumed that an opening was available to sneak on a school levy in November. This news came on the heels of Lakota’s new superintendent announcement of Karen Mantia. As I listen to Mantia and her priorities I can’t help but wonder why her primary focus is on our children’s retirement.

She has a reputation supposedly of thinking outside the box, but most of what she’s said so far sounds rather typical. How does she know that retirement will even be an option for the children of tomorrow? With all the life extension methods that are up and coming in science, retirement could be pushed to over 100 years old by then. People may live to well over 100 maybe even 150 years old. Retirement is a baby boomer idea that is quickly proving unrealistic. People just aren’t dying at 70 any more like they used to. So that seems like a strange priority. I would think that if she’s so well-educated, she’d be aware of these scientific advances. But she’s new, maybe she was just nervous and said the first thing that came to her mind.

It looks however that she is a double-dipper. Click here to watch a special report done by Channel 9 on this very issue. She retired from Sycamore in July 31, 2006 – likely after having 30 years of service. If she was 55 when she retried, her retirement is 66% of her salary. If she was making $100K when she retired, she will be bringing in $231K and that’s not counting the other benefits that are undoubtedly in her contract. If that’s the case, that’s a major issue with me, as a tax payer I’m paying for her retirement package, indirectly, but the money still came from somewhere, and now she is being paid by Lakota $165,000 per year, which is more than the last superintendent that I thought was paid too much. Lakota also spent 50K to find her, and she was just up the road. It doesn’t make sense to me.

But I’m happy to give her a chance. She’ll be alright with me until she asks for more money.

As to the article in the Pulse Journal where the Pro Levy people exploded in exhilaration that Mark Sennet showed signs of defecting. Read that article here:

‘No Lakota’ group split on next levy

Some would OK ‘conservative’ levy in November; others don’t want any levy.

Staff Writer 11:32 AM Thursday, June 16, 2011

LIBERTY TWP. — Members of the No Lakota group are in disagreement about whether they would support a levy if Lakota puts one on the ballot.

West Chester Twp. resident Mark Sennet spoke to the board of education Monday, saying the No Lakota group would support a “conservative” levy in 2012 if the board would bypass the election this November.
However, No Lakota member Rich Hoffman, who has typically spoken on behalf of the group, said no discussion had occurred at a meeting about supporting a levy, and he was holding fast to his stance on never supporting a levy.

Hoffman said there may be a split in the group, but he thinks the 50-and-older crowd will stand with him.
Sennet said Lakota officials have made “a valiant effort to try to work and control spending,” but people still need time to recover from the economic crisis. He said he and several developers would be on the board’s side if it waited for November 2012.

“We acknowledge that there were changes made,” he said. “The businesses had to make changes. The citizens had to make changes, and we were glad to see the union and teachers and board agreed to a pay freeze. But if the levy were to pass, then I guess that would be good for the community.”

Board member Ray Murray said he was pleased the business community is recognizing the district’s transparency and how it is listening to the community.

“There are going to be people who are not going to ever say yes to anything, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” he said. “We’ve got to generate more revenue. We can’t survive on a 2005 budget.”
Former For Lakota levy chairwoman Sandy Wheatley said the board and district representatives have been mending fences with those in opposition since the last election.

“Everyone has kind of stepped up to the plate to do their part,” she said. “Now, with all those pieces in place — because this is the only way Ohio has left us in terms of ways to fund schools — I think the community will see this as now it is time for us to put the last piece together by doing our part to support the tax issue. … Perhaps the residents now will be better critical thinkers around if what they are hearing is accurate information.”

Board president Joan Powell said the board will meet for a work session at the end of the month to study an updated five-year forecast and discuss options.

__________________________________________________________________

Mark and some of the other developers in our group have always been about trying to reduce the rates of tax on the properties they are holding that aren’t making any money in a tough economy. Mark just wants to get through a tough year and he’ll probably support a levy. I’ve always known that defection of a few of these guys was inevitable. They were welcome to ride along as long was we all fought for a common cause. We have many supporters of many different degrees of belief.

I do take offense however at Ray Murry’s comments where he says some people, (like me) will never support a levy.

Why would I support a levy when I can see in the light of day that labor costs are the number one problem at Lakota, and the teacher’s unions are the primary culprits that drove up those costs? Why would I think that a silly contract agreement that freezes actual step increases is enough? That’s only a three-year band-aid. Heck, three years ago I remember the teachers union in 2008 threatening a strike demanding higher wages. That wasn’t that long ago and I remember it vividly. When the union did that, I decided that public sector unions had no place in any tax payer organization. So there is no reason to even discuss a levy when so much money at the top is used on union activity. Unions drive up the labor costs not just for a couple of exceptional employees, but for everyone! There are no controls over how much a teacher can make. They are free to get a degree which immediately drives up their salary regardless of whether or not their degree actually contributes to a child’s education, because I don’t think it does. Unions just cost too much, so while they are in place, and I don’t want my money being scrapped off the top by them, why would I support them? If the union was out-of-the-way and the community could see the actual cost of what education costs, then I’d be more inclined to support a levy. I already pay a lot in taxes each year, so it’s not like people who don’t want more taxes on their property don’t support their schools and the kids that go to them. People like me don’t support public unions.

If that is a radical position, too bad, but it’s the facts. People like Mr. Murry are trying to justify why the school board has not been acting as a management protection, because they can’t. They are just figureheads. Lakota will attempt another levy because they have a new superintendent, they think our No Lakota Group is split, and they don’t know how to do anything else. Like Ray says, “We’ve got to generate more revenue. We can’t survive on a 2005 budget.” I’d say, “Why not?”

$10K per child is too high for poor performance, and the United States is not in first place in the world education market, and Mrs. Mantia’s Global Program won’t do anything to help. It’s just another way of dressing up what kids are already supposed to be learning in school.

But the state is cutting funding. The federal government is cutting money too! Hey, folks, get used to it. The gravy train the unions used with all the free money that was lost in bureaucratic nonsense is gone, and the expectation is that local communities are going to cover the difference. No, we won’t be. That’s simply not going to happen.

What’s going to happen is that schools are going to have to cut back their real costs, their wages, or they will become extinct. Property owners are not going to cover the cost of the outrageous expectations the unions have negotiated for themselves. Unions took advantage of government, as they always do, of the fact that nobody had any real skin in the game. When state and federal money is coming, it was easy to divide up the spoils, and they did. As a group, the teachers unions got greedy. Now that is coming to an end as states try to balance their budgets. And property owners do have skin in the game……their property!

So if Lakota chooses to put a levy on the ballot this November, or even in 2012, without cutting the wasted cost in excessive wages schools are enduring, then the No Lakota Group will be there to fight them.

During the last levy attempt of 2010 we held back. I personally had a lot more to throw out, but for the sake of the community, I held back a lot. If Lakota elects to go after the tax payers again with another levy before the teachers union reduces the wages for their top wage earners by 30%, or while superintendents like Karen Manita draws retirement from Sycamore where she retired at exactly 55 years old, then turned around and took another job so she could double-dip, then quit that district to come to Lakota, get a 20K raise then stand in front of everyone and tell the residents of the district is “for the kids.”

Hiding behind kids, exploiting the hard work of property owners to create lucrative jobs for themselves does not necessitate a levy request until the run-away costs are controlled, and if that means getting rid of the union, fine. If that means the union takes a pay cut, but stays put as an organization, fine. If S.B.5 gives school boards the ability to dramatically cut their labor costs, then fine. But it is not acceptable to ask for more money from the tax payer to cover the cost of lost state and federal revenue. We are not picking up the bill when the unions took too much, and they did in 2008. It’s time for them to give back, or move along so we can hire cheaper teachers, that will still keep Lakota one of the best schools in the state. Because failure, of any kind, is not an option.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Do You Believe in Spies: Review of the film SALT and how sleeper cells have corrupted America

A society’s mythology is absolutely essential to the sustainability of any culture. And in American culture, it is our movies that communicate the concerns of our population. Love stories tell the stories of the heart, comedies tickle the social taboos not realized in everyday life, and adventure films take us to places most of our mundane lives cannot transport us to without wrecking ourselves. Within that genre of action-adventure films comes spy stories, which are attempts by the creative community to ease the tensions we all feel when dealing with a globe of competing enemies seeking to undermine each other in the eternal quest for victory. For the free world, James Bond, the master spy set the standard for millions of men who looked to the ultimate man, who never panicked while trying to defend the free world from world domineering elites seeking to enslave the world. For me the start of Moonraker is one of the best openings of a James Bond film.

Since the golden age of Bond, at the height of the cold war in the late 70’s and early 80’s, James Bond has become softer, more progressively complex and has lost much of what made him the gem of Ian Fleming’s books. Daniel Craig’s version of Bond in the last two films presents a guy that is ultimately more realistic, but destroys much of the mythology of what the character of James Bond represents.

I have not enjoyed many spy films for about a decade, including the Borne Identity films until my wife coaxed me into watching Salt with Angelina Jolie. If there is one actor in Hollywood that my wife likes the most, it’s Angelina Jolie. So for her sake I agreed to watch it. By the end of the movie, I was glad I did.

Not only were the car crashes and action scenes fantastic, but the story was extremely compelling. It’s a topic that I had been thinking about a lot lately, since I have learned that labor unions were founded by communists, and many layers of our current government seem to be working against constitutional principles. In fact, it seems George Soros reminded me of almost every James Bond villain as I was growing up, but in real society saying such a thing is ridiculous, because in our culture, our myths tell our stories, but in politics, we put a layer of cake icing over the reality and avoid talking about the obvious. In such places the villains of our age hide in plain sight. When we see movies, we dare to ask the questions, but when the movie is over, we return back to our political reality and stop daring to ask the hard questions. However, in the film Salt, the uncomfortable question is addressed; are there sleeper cells in the United States, and are they at our highest levels of government? I think they are based on the videos I’ll show you below. In fact, there’s overwhelming evidence that American culture has been penetrated by many enemies from many countries since World War II when America proved to the world that beating America in a war with technology is too costly, and unpredictable. America is too good at thinking outside the box so a war with America needs to happen from within, using sleeper cells of spies to not just attempt to gain intelligence, but to undermine the foundations of emotional strength America stands upon.

Sleeper cells like the group recently busted in the United States have been operating for decades in plain sight. They hide behind issues of racism, gay rights advocates, feminism, and many other liberal positions. One good way to spot the beginning of a sleeper cell is to look for groups that advocate the “Peace” sign.

Sleeper cells from the Soviet Union hid their true intentions behind the hippie movement where KGB agents became leaders of the hippie movement and advocated communism, but hid their sinister intentions behind the sign of peace. This isn’t a new strategy. Pirates of the Caribbean (not the movie, the real pirates) used to fly the flags of whatever nations ship they were attempting to attack, and once they were close enough to fire their cannons, they’d run up the “Jolly Roger.” The Trojan Horse strategy is not a unique strategy when one attacker that is inferior in power attempts to overthrow a power of superior strength.

Just like the woman at the beginning of this article, where James Bond is making out with the woman on a plane and the woman turns out to be a spy, the mythology of that scene is one we all recognize. Women make particularly dangerous spies because even intelligent men who are masters of every part of their lives tend to be vulnerable to sex. Meet Anna Chapman, real life Russian spy every bit as active as Marta Hari was.

She is considered so dangerous that she is imprisoned under solitary confinement.

Here is Anna Chapman before she was caught; it’s interesting to hear about her impression of America. There are no opportunities for a woman like her in Russia. She admits as much. In America all she has to do is use sex and she can get next to the most powerful men in American culture.

These are modern spies, but this game has been going on for a long time. Here is a former KGB agent who gives an interview in 1983 about ideological subversion and how it was installed in public schools. This is an actual KGB agent from the 60’s and 70’s who defected from the Soviet Union in favor of the freedom offered in America and the conclusion that the Soviet Union would fall under its own power. Meet Yuri Bezmenov:

Here Yuri Bezmenov teaches a class how the process of subversion is implemented to undermine America. What’s important to understand is that our local government, our school boards, councilmember’s, trustees, etc are not KGB spies. But what they often are the plants that spring from the seeds that were planted in the college courses they studied, thus the strategy is revealed. Yuri will explain the process.

Yet when such an accusation is brought up by someone like me, those in positions of authority will scorn such a statement because they will say, “that’s crazy, I was not trained by a Soviet spy! I was taught by my professors in college.” What Yuri explains is that the way to reach a majority of America’s population was to get them in school, where their parents were not around to protect the children.

Subversion of a culture is far less expensive to fight than open warfare. It’s less costly than nuclear war for sure. So, under the sign of peace, of avoiding nuclear disaster, agents penetrated American culture to eliminate the threat in a long-term strategy designed to eliminate the will to fight in the future. The Soviet Union was planning on keeping military pace with America until the generations they had infiltrated in public school had grown up and lost the will to fight. That was their goal. What they didn’t count on was that Reagan would force them to go bankrupt well before their plan could be fully realized. Yet the “Peace” sign is the direct result of Soviet sleeper agents operating in the United States and using college campuses as their pawns in the great chess game.

The Peace Sign is one of the most widely known symbols in the world, in Britain it is recognized as standing for nuclear disarmament —and in particular as the logo of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). In the United States and much of the rest of the world it is known more broadly as the peace symbol. It was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and artist and a graduate of the Royal College of Arts. He showed his preliminary sketches to a small group of people in the Peace News office in North London and to the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War, one of several smaller organizations that came together to set up CND.

Source article
http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/PeaceSymbolArticle.html

In the film Salt it is a great movie that explores the role of sleeper agents in America and does it in an entertaining way. The character of Salt is very contemporary because she is not necessarily loyal to the United States or the Soviet Union. In the end she stands for what is right, which is very, very difficult to see in a world of espionage, corruption, power grabs, and normal politics. I found the story very intriguing. I thought it was one of Jolie’s boldest performances. The film left me thinking for days after I saw it.

This next video shows that Russian spies wanted to work for the CIA. It’s the plot of SALT, but for real. The goal of spies is most often not just to uncover secrets but to undermine a culture from within.

Now, in this article I’ve focused on Russian spies because that was the plot of the film Salt. But consider that America has many enemies, all every bit as dangerous as Russia. China has spies; Iran has spies, in fact just think of how many radical Muslim elements are already functioning from within our country. That’s how 911 happened. Every major country is doing the same thing to each other, and the United Nations is absolutely unable to do anything about it, and they never will. This is because treachery is part of the human race. War will always be a part of our existence. There will always be a threat to the security of a peaceful people. Greed cannot be socially engineered out of mankind.

Gaining an advantage over an opponent is part of the human makeup. Look at what Bill Bilichick did for his team the New England Patriots when he was caught cheating to win football games, the NFL couldn’t protect other teams from a head coach looking for a competitive edge. The United Nations will never be able to stop this activity. The only protection anybody has is mutual respect, and a document like the Constitution that limits the power and reach of a government, because man is prone to corruption and subversion. And the more complicated something is, the more opportunities for spies to attempt to subvert one culture so their culture can thrive.

As for James Bond, I miss the old Bond. The new Bond is too weak, and emotional. The old Bond portrayed by Sean Connery and Roger Moore, and even at times by Pierce Bronson were welcome fantasies in a world gone mad were we could go see a movie and believe that such characters could fight the forces we feel are working against us, and be successful. Movies like the old Bond films are worth more than box office results, because they at least make people ask questions about the world around them, and even if the fictional circumstances seem far-fetched in reality, at least the skepticism is healthily exercised in the mind of the viewer. Because in reality, there is more truth than fiction and society needs to understand the possibilities expressed in popular mythology.

So if you haven’t seen Angelina Jolie’s film Salt, treat yourself to the film and enjoy yourself and the ideas it springs up. Because that is what mythology is tasked to do, is make us think. Think of even the improbable, and painful, and help it go down with a good healthy dose of action.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Carbon Party, Wine, Motorcycles and the Tea Party: Why Environmental Wacko’s are big business con artists

It was a glorious June 12th, 2011 afternoon. Doc Thompson was hosting a Carbon Party, a gathering that was needed in order to off-set all the greenie weenies as we’ve come to affectionately refer to those pushing a political green movement. Listen here to Doc Thompson speaking with radio personality Matt Clark  talk radio host on WAAM Talk 1600 from Michigan the night before.

It was ironic that this carbon consuming event was held at a winery, a place that would typically be associated with environmentalist. But then when logic presents itself, all the people present were celebrating nature. Trees and all plant life consume carbon-dioxide. In fact, the more carbon dioxide produced the better for all the plant life shown in this video of the event where Doc Thompson was the master of ceremonies and spoke of some of the hypocrisy involved in the green movement, which was quite funny.

As I watched Doc’s speech and spoke with him throughout the afternoon, and spoke with others that were present, it was apparent that here, with the 200 or so people who showed up for an event in the middle of the countryside on a Sunday afternoon when there were thousands of other things to do with that time, these are the guardians of America in this modern age. It was those people as I mentioned in my report from the Glenn Beck event in Wilmington, Ohio that are the hope for America’s future.

The people came from all backgrounds, there were young, there were old, there were bikers, there were yuppies. There were politicians, business men, and nature enthusiasts. What we all had in common was a memory and recognition of all the B.S that the environmental advocates have professed with such religious fervor that logic has been abandoned.

What came to my mind was Al Gore, the pot smoking hippie congressman from Tennessee that seems to have lost all his brain cells during his college days and has lost the opportunity to think. All he seems able to do is repeat what is told to him, and he’s turned the green movement into his hippie quest established in the haze of marijuana smoke. One would hope that a grown man would have evolved like most people do in their lives to a level of higher wisdom gaining an understanding of the symbiotic relationship that humans play in the greater scheme of the environment. Such childish notions as those espoused by Gore and his financial backers can only see life from the point of view of the environment. And the reason is that they really see profit for themselves in the green movement, so like most things, the environmental wacko’s, the greenie weenies, the hippies, the dope headed geeks, the burnt-out politician that cooked their brain in college over drug use see the environment as their ticket to prosperity and a method to achieve their childish world view.

Al Gore would be virtually useless as a human being if he did not enter politics, loot money from the tax payer using emotional jargon, or allowing his name to be used by the socialist oriented green movement to be a mouth piece and front man for their aims.

I recently watched The Social Network, which is about Mark Zuckerberg and the creation of Facebook. Zuckerberg is obviously a highly intelligent guy that was able to write code for computer programs. But there are a lot of geniuses out there. Mark wanted revenge on a girlfriend that found his personality, like many did, repulsive. Without Facebook, Mark would just be another obscure geek. However, because the code of his program was able to crawl through existing data bases and match up similar people with interests he invented something that was highly lucrative to the snoopy aspect of human nature, that desire to be an exhibitionist but doing so behind a curtain of protection. Meanwhile users willingly provide information about themselves that companies would spend millions to get a hold of, spending habits, behavior patterns, demographic information, and family relationships, Facebook is that ant trap where the sweet nectar of the trap proves too lucrative for the logical mind to resist. Mark and his partners didn’t know how to make money with Facebook, until he met the ambitious Sean Parker who had worked with Napster and had extensive experience with the consequences of taking on the music industry with free downloads. The money wasn’t in the free software, it was in court settlements and the threat of what that software could do to existing companies. In effect, Sean Parker was nothing more than a pirate that Mark picked up on and learned to use to his advantage. Zuckerberg sold out to a company of investors that saw more money than just advertising revenue in Facebook. It was the databases that Facebook could create on people who made Facebook worth 25 billion dollars. Think about it, 25 billion dollars for a free service. It’s an ant trap people, sorry.

But this isn’t about Facebook. It’s about looters. Zuckerberg to this day is Time Magazines man of the year, President Obama has private conversations with him, but in reality he is simply a looter that made a free service out of revenge against his girlfriend. He made a weapon that makes it easier for other looters to gather information they can use to exploit the public. Does that make Zuckerberg a bad guy, no. He’s a computer hacker, just like his friend Sean Parker. They are thieves that just like pirates took their plunder, and they had something valuable to other looters, which is an information gathering service. I use the Zuckerberg story because everyone can relate, because most people use Facebook and know who Zuckerberg is. With that definition of a looter established, then my feelings about Al Gore can be illustrated.

I remember when Gore said he invented the internet. It’s been a joke for years. I find it bewildering that in Gores mind he could even say or believe such a thing. But he says it, and seems to believe it. He has the mind of a looter, so truth has no value to people like Al Gore. All that matters is images and how people like him can use images to loot money from people, or better yet, convince people to give him money without bloodshed, or violence. The worst kind of looter is the type of person that convinces people to give away their money while believing they are doing it for their own good.

I remember back in the 90’s when Al Gore was vice-president when the Ohio River flooded heavily down in Cincinnati. Al Gore came to town to show “federal concern” over the queen city. When he arrived the TV cameras were rolling down by the river where a large dry area along the river bank provided plenty of room for cameras, reporters and other VIP’s had gathered. Al Gore showed up and wadded out into the water with his shoes on and suit, knowing that the cameras would capture his action and exaggerate the situation. The people present all scratched their heads and wondered why Gore was standing in the water when there was plenty of dry land. But they were thinking with logic, not with the mind of a looter. Gore, the looter, later went on TV to say that the Ohio River was flooding because of global warming.

Years and years of this kind of looting from people like Gore has went on, and people scratch their heads but don’t take the time to put two and two together. Why would a government even be involved in selling carbon credits? Because it’s a scam, just like Facebook is a scam to get people to put their personal activity and personal connections into a giant data base daily, the green movement is a scam to steal money from people over nothing.

One of the reasons the Carbon Party was such a great event was because it was attended by people with common sense, who all behaved with a level of intelligence and an ability to think, so the wine tasted better because the company was good.

Before I left the event that day Doc Thompson and I were talking, he was holding a large cigar in his mouth as a line of his radio fans were gathered next to him to meet him, hungry for his attention. “I don’t want to tie you up, Doc. Your fans are waiting. But I’m glad you put this whole thing together. It’s a wonderful day, people have a chance to taste what America is supposed to be,” I said to him.

Doc rolled the cigar in his lips so he could properly articulate speech, “Great isn’t it.”

Yes it was. The smell of hot dogs, hamburgers, beer, wine and the gentle breeze that blew in from the west which we could see over the horizon of the earth filled our senses. People were happy, and nature was something we all were openly enjoying. But I realized that the primary reason we were having so much fun was because the event was free of looters, lairs and other manipulators of the facts whose true motive is to steal money for their own plunder, and using the mask of a legitimate cause to do it.

That’s what the Carbon Party was celebrating, truth, relaxation, and understanding in an environment that was the best and most pristine that planet earth and the mind of man can create together. It was a wonderful event.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Photographic Genius at Newport on the Levee: The art of an adventurous soul

My daughter, Brooke did a marvelous thing, she is one of the featured artists who is displaying their work at the Stonebrook Winery at Newport on the Levee. They put her photography work on a wall there and she wanted to bring her mom and me down to have a look.

It wasn’t difficult. As I’ve discussed, my wife and I love Newport on the Levee. We love the Irish Pub there, and we love Mitchell’s Fish Market. In fact, one of the best dishes my wife makes is Voodoo Shrimp that the cook at Mitchell’s in Newport gave her personally. We love the view of the city from Newport on the Levee, so it is with great pleasure that I learned that my daughter was a featured artist.

Here’s her website:

http://www.brooketownsendphotography.com/

My daughter is a tenacious photographer. The world is her playground and everything is a subject of her art. In fact, she and her sister are excessively creative people who have a unique perspective on the world, and they capture those perspectives in their work.

My son-in-law, my wife, and my two daughters hit the levee in the sporadic rain as frequent lightning sizzled across the sky. This created some unusually wonderful light over the cityscape of Cincinnati while along the river was an Italian Festival complete with funhouses, Ferris wheels and Italian food of every kind mixed with the fresh rain and persistent fragrance of the Ohio River.

While walking through the winery, it was a pleasure to see patrons looking over my daughters work while sipping from their glasses of wine. I sat in a rocking chair hand-made by a retired engineer and relished it’s comfort as I watched my daughter answer questions about her work and discuss the aesthetic relationships between her nature photography and her self-portraits. Naturally her political photography is stunning, and her Washington D.C. pictures are unlike any I and many others have ever seen.

One of the greatest pleasures in life is to create something that wasn’t there before you made it and then share that with people to enjoy. Among those of us present, my youngest daughter is an excellent illustrator, web designer and photographer in her own right, of course my daughter being featured, my son-in-law a social network guru and entrepreneur. My wife has made a blanket for every child and married couple brought into our family for almost two decades, and I’ve written books, designed t-shirts, been a Wild West performer, a screen writer, an independent filmmaker, and I’ve started and ran several businesses, so among us we’ve had a lot of experience. Every endeavor doesn’t work out, in fact most don’t, but it never gets old to start a new venture and study the dazzle on customer’s faces when they experience something they never would have felt if the artist had not brought those emotions about through some form of art.

If you are looking for that special something to put on your wall that needs some life and energy injected there, go down to the Newport on the Levee Stonebrook Winery and Art Gallery and look up Brooke Townsend. She’ll be the most spectacular photography at the exhibit, so you won’t miss it, and do yourself a favor, and get yourself a gift of vision that will give back to you each time you look at it. And enjoy the journey of getting there, because Newport on the Levee is always a fun place to visit.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Public Housing Nightmare: But a dream for socialist looters and social reformers

The Federal government is threatening to cut off federal money to communities that do not accept the spread of public housing development. Listen to Doc Thompson cover this fatal issue on 700 WLW.

This move is a progressive agenda item, the idea of public housing, loss of identification of towns and boundaries. The progressives are implementing the strategy of the 10 Planks of Communism which is like their Ten Commandments. They follow those 10 Planks of Communism very closely. Public housing is a progressive platform. Click here to see those Ten Planks of Communism if you are not aware of what they are.

The reality of public housing is it brings about the worst in human nature. Progressives have a fundamental lack of understanding of human nature and believe as many of the college professors who advocate the progressive platform do, that human nature can be engineered, and that the actions of the human being are not innate. They believe that through education that they provide they can control those innate desires.

History proves otherwise. Everywhere that there is public housing, there is failure. There are out-of-wedlock child births, welfare is endemic among the public welfare culture, drugs are a major problem, crime is up in almost every category, public housing is a dismal failure in public policy. That is unless that public policy is to weaken the human state of the participants to bring them down to the level of the rest of the world, which appears to be the desire.

As this video will show, public housing is filled with looters, not in the people who inhabit the homes, but in the people who run them.

This move by public housing advocates is precisely the same as that of the proposed health care bill otherwise known as Obama Care. They are the type that has been abusing the “commerce clause” of the 10th Amendment to impose congressional will on states and cities for decades. These are also the same people who claim there is a “supremacy clause” in the Constitution that claims a foreign treaty supersedes the wording of the United States Constitution. The threat to cut federal money to communities that resist the spread of public housing is a threat by the federal government to impose its socialist will on its citizens.

All governments by their nature will tend to flow toward socialism. This isn’t out of some sinister design by them, but simply out of survival. The government worker just like any worker just wants to work and get paid, like anybody else. The problem with government is that it is often unproductive and draws the weaker personality types that society has to offer. Without management controls, and given power, these people will vote themselves unlimited increases, unrestricted budgets and easy responsibilities and they’ll pay themselves top dollar to perform the task.

To feed this monster government will always be on a continuous push to justify their existence. They will over dramatize the jobs they perform. They’ll ask for more employees, and they will work as slow as possible in order to make their jobs seem more difficult. And politicians since they too are government workers are quick to give the tax money we send their way away to programs that expand government. They do it for survival, to increase their bloc voting ability.

Public housing is all about bloc voting and fulfilling the goals of the 10 Planks of Communism. It is strictly for the benefit of government. Not for the rest of us. Nobody wants to live near public housing. Public housing brings down home values. The people who live in those places tend to vote for higher taxes because they don’t have to pay as much tax as the rest of us, so they can only benefit from more handouts which politicians must take from the taxpayer to give to the politician in order to buy their votes in the next election.

For those of us that take care of our property, mow our grass, paint our homes, fix our decks, we don’t want public housing anywhere near us. But government doesn’t care because one of the 10 Planks of communism is to remove private property, so to their view, we’ll get used to it. They don’t care if we maintain our property or not because left to them, they’d hire government workers to do it for us. All we have to do is give up our property and turn it over to them.

So that’s the plan. That is what we are dealing with regarding public housing. Like public education, it is a big government plan to expand the role of government in everyday life, secure their livelihoods, drive up taxes to pay for everything and achieve the aims envisioned by Karl Marx which many, many academics adore. Many of those academics and experts that end up advising government are those Marx types, because they would not survive in a private sector economy not run by government. Government employees tend to be failures at life, so the products of their labor fail repeatedly. We see it in public education, we see it in public housing, we see it in every branch of government, every township, school board, and city council. Government fails at everything they do. Everything!

So why do we want more of it? Why would we allow government to dictate to us that we will have public housing in our communities? Why do we even need the federal money?

Forget socialism and their stupid square homes with corrupt politicians running them. Every American should embrace capitalism, because in America every person that works, saves their money and has an idea can strive for a home like the one in this next clip. If you want to see what democracy looks like, look at the riots of the poor looking for a hand out. If you want to see what a republic looks like, talk to someone who lives in a home like this one.

My answer to that is the same that I say for public education. If government at the federal level and the state level cuts the money to the schools, then we must cut the wages and number of government employees to balance the budget. We don’t raise taxes. And with public housing, we need less of it, not more, and all the people who support it should be removed from office. Because they are perpetuating a bad program that cost society in many more ways than just money. And if federal money is cut, then that means government jobs must be cut to balance the budget. That’s the only way to play this game, and that’s the answer to a domineering government that wants all the things that are bad for the rest of us, even if it is only for the naive desire of their own survival. Let the government workers perish so to save what is left of America, because like a cancer cell, government will always try to grow if allowed to impose themselves upon the taxpayer, because they feed off of what is healthy and thrive in what is broken and dying. That is why they fail.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

I Love Jimmy McMillian: Gas Prices are TOO DAMN HIGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When gas prices are too high, one of the first things people will give up are luxury items. That’s what’s happening to the Liz Claiborne facility in West Chester, Ohio. High gas prices which are ruining the economy are having an impact on businesses like this tremendous distribution center.

President Obama is now in his third year and while he did inherit a bad economic situation, he has now shown that his economic plan was only to perpetuate the negative economic conditions to advance his green jobs agenda, which has only exacerbated the economy in even more negative ways. As of June 7, 2011 a poll in the Washington post reveals that only 40% of respondents approve of Obama’s handling of the economy, and only 33% approve of his handling of the deficit.

At the start of last summer, in 2010 gas prices were over a dollar less than they are now, as they were just shy of $3 per gallon. In fact, over the winter I wrote an article here about how preposterous gas prices breaking the $3 per gallon mark truly were and how any amount of money over $3 would cut into America’s disposable income, and would cause devastating economic conditions.

Now gas is flirting with $4 per gallon and going up. The fault rests exclusively on the green freaks, progressives, and wealth redistribution advocates. Obama is directly guilty. He has openly discouraged oil drilling in the United States, but has openly embraced it in Brazil, helping that country with a collaborative effort to get their feet in the international economy at the expense of the United States. The blue print for all this activity is exactly the plot line out of the book Atlas Shrugged.

The progressive power grabbers however, while they are working the strategy implemented by Cass Sunstein discussed in his book “Nudge” they seek to sidetrack America on silly stories like racism, and plights in favor of the poor, which only achieves their bloc voting goals, while the cost of their strategy is showing up in the increasing gas prices.

Many of us see through the scam though, and Jimmy McMillian is one of them. Jimmy is the guy who ran for Governor of New York under the mantra, “The Rent is Too Damn High.” I love Mr. McMillian. He is what a great American looks like. I have no idea what his political affiliation is, and I don’t care. All I know is that he speaks the truth, and he does so with passion. For America to be great, it needs people like Jimmy McMillian to be in the majority, not the extreme minority. But if you want to know what a great modern American looks like, then watch Jimmy McMillian go to Washington to announce his “The Gas is Too Damn High” campaign.

Here is Jimmy’s website where you can visit and send him your pictures of fuel costs that are too high.

http://www.gasolineistoodamnhigh.com/

There is only one reason that gas is so high, and that’s because of the mismanagement of our resources by our government. It’s a lack of drilling for shale oil, it’s a lack of drilling for off shore reserves, and the lack of energy exploration in Alaska, all of this resistance is purely political. Click here to read a great article about this topic.

The Obama administration now and Al Gore all during the 2000’s kept pressure on oil developers to stop drilling citing environmental concerns. Yet those same politicians are embracing the same drilling techniques in China and Brazil. The reason is because the United States energy policy has nothing to do with the environment. It’s about wealth redistribution. It’s about helping the economy of Brazil and other South American countries, and China so wealth redistribution can be implemented. American’s are forced to swallow this pill with the glass full of bull-shit called “environmental concerns.” The green movement is purely about money, money for developing countries, and disarming the United States so to give those countries a head start on the economic play ground.

The high gas prices are also in place to “nudge” American’s into buying “green tech” vehicles. That’s those stupid little glorified golf carts that we’re starting to see on the roads these days. The cars are small, underpowered, and pathetic, they are not what America is about. They have little place in our culture, but the Obama administration has hung it’s hat on this technology, this is what Barack Obama wants to be remembered for in the context of history, which is a pathetically short-sighted goal.

I stand with Jimmy, and you should too. Send your pictures into Jimmy’s website and learn the truth of why the “Gas is too damn high.” It’s not to help America. It’s not even to help the Earth. It’s all about some pathetically short sighted politicians that want to be remembered for forcing green technology jobs which force Americans to drive slower, embrace public transportation like high speed rail and trolley cars, and robbing the wealth of America and giving it to other countries.

But why would “Americans” like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Cass Sunstein do such a thing? They are Americans too……..because they are more loyal to the United Nations than the United States, and they are hedging their bets that in the future, a position in the UN will have more prominence than even being President of the United States. In their view, a president in the future will simply be another governor of just another country equal to Brazil, China, Germany and all the others. The real power, and the real prestige will be to lead the United Nations, and they’ll gain their reputations, and votes by robbing from the United States it’s wealth, because the whole world is jealous of America anyway, and giving it to the voters of the New World government who will elect them to rule the entire world.

That’s why gas prices are “TOO DAMN HIGH.” It’s a grab for power at our expense and it should make every American very angry. And it does Jimmy McMillian which swells me with American pride. So what about the rest of you? Where’s your outrage and what are you going to do about it!

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Charlotte Iserbyt: DO YOU HAVE THE GUTS TO LISTEN TO HER? (or would you rather go back to sleep)

Unfortunately much of the world lives like what you’ll find in the video below of a village in Kenya. I have been to such places, and the images in this video reflect accurately what I’ve seen for myself. I chose a village in Kenya because it is my belief that Barack Obama is more loyal to the country of Kenya than he is of the United States. I believe that based on his actions, because his world view reflects the kind of ideas that can be simply reduced to village life.

It was Hillary Clinton that said “It take a village.” Progressives at every level all seem to have in common this village style ideal of community value that they build their politics around. And even though the idea of a village goes back well before there was ever a Karl Marx, or a Barack Obama, it is an entirely different philosophy from what American was founded upon. However, progressives, socialists, Marxists and all other variations of communism look at the great wealth created in America and feel compelled to help the rest of the world with wealth redistribution, to places like this village. So they openly seek to take from America, and give to places like Kenya. Unions in the United States were founded by communists and their core leadership supports these types of activities and it’s been that way for over 100 years now. Anyone currently in a union or who supports a union is a supporter of a form of communism established by Karl Marx. Progressives and other liberals openly embrace these communist ideals in deed but not by name, because the goal is to over time, remove America’s love of individualism, replace that individualism with collectivism so that redistribution of America’s wealth can be implemented to other countries and their villages.

SEIU is a fundamentally communist organization. They stand for The Ten Planks of Communism. (Click here to read those) The National Education Association is also a communist organization. It is the aim of the NEA to perform the erosion of American individualism and embrace the strategy of social collectivism. The members at the ground level, the teachers may not be aware of this, or may not look too deeply into their leaders, but the evidence is unmistakable to anyone with eyes. Teachers, often very idealistic and well paid, don’t wish to know what their leaders are up to, because the money is good. This strategy goes on well before there was a Barack Obama, in fact way back when the NEA put tremendous pressure on President Carter to create The Department of Education. The push by that union was to put in place a government department financed with tax payer funds to create policies of social engineering that openly embraced communism. This was happening during the years of 1978 and 1979 well into the 1980’s.

Oh…….you want proof? Ok, well, let me introduce you to Charlotte Iserbyt. Charlotte was second in command at the Department of Education during the Reagan administration and she’ll tell you all you need to know about the whole story about the goal of modern education. Do you have the guts to listen to her, to know the truth?

Many of the NEA and SEIU members will tell you that Charlotte is a kook. They’ll tell you that all this talk about engineering the youth is complete conspiracy theory and crazy. The hope is that by the time the kids from the 60’s and 70’s hit retirement age and the kids of the 80’s and 90’s are too old to care, the desire for capitalism, and individualism will have been removed from our society. By the time American civilization figures out what’s going on, America will be transformed slowly and smoothly without weapons or bloodshed. It’s that simple. No conspiracy…………fact. The evidence is everywhere.

Charlotte would have never been given a top job at the Department of Education if she were crazy, or even the least bit kooky. The following documentary is over an hour-long. So if you really want to be educated, have a listen to Charlotte. In fact, make sure you take the time to watch each of these videos because what you’re hearing is the truth. This is what public unions have done with your tax money, they have erected a structure designed to undermine the country we all know and love.

Charlotte has been talking about this kind of thing for a long time. She is one of the few insiders out there who have turned her back on the spoils of the tax payer occupation which comes from jobs in public service, decided to live an honest life, and tell the American people what has really been going on. One of the reasons nobody has listened to Charlotte is because she has spent many years traveling the country and speaking to people who know about her, but without a mainstream media to cover her, people didn’t know about her work, until now. Until the internet came along, and the media became irrelevant, a whole new audience has the opportunity to hear Charlotte speak. Consider yourself fortunate to see and hear these interviews now. Just a decade ago it cost a lot to travel halfway across the country to hear her speak. Now all you have to do is go grab a snack out of your refrigerator, sit down in your comfy chair, sit down and relax and learn what has been going on behind your back for over 4 decades now while you went to work every day to pay your taxes so you could fund your own destruction. Doesn’t that make you feel good?

Secrete Societies aren’t really any different from a labor union. They gather together to achieve a collective strategy. The Skull and Bones Societies aren’t any different. The Skull and Bones must be studied because so many presidents have been Skull and Bones members. Now I personally don’t care if a bunch of college boys want to get together and walk around with their pants down smacking each other on the butt with a paddle, and drink Kool-aid out of a skull. But I do care if these groups, like Skull and Bones members, SEIU or NEA members want to subvert the Constitution of the United States in order to garner more power for themselves. All those organizations require taking tax money from us like thieves and funneling that money to serve their silly plans, so ultimately it is the tax payer that is in charge. They just need to understand how their money has been spent.

While many people will find it difficult to believe what Charlotte is bringing to light, the facts cannot be ignored. Critics of Charlotte can be angry that she is messing up their plans by educating Americans to the scheme they are trying to pull over American society, but they cannot call her a liar. She is telling the story as she experienced it, and her experience is uniquely vast. She has a right to tell that story, a constitutional obligation. It is the thieves of these groups, which have attached themselves like leeches to the American ideas to reshape those ideas into their image.
So as the discussion of “collective bargaining,” or “health care,” or “Medicare,” or progressive taxation,” “public education,” evolves in the coming months it is important to know what we’re either fighting, or evolving in to. My primary arguments about public education is simply the cost of it doesn’t make sense. Teachers as a labor force are incredibly expensive. But if you think about it, this is part of the strategy. The unions must secure good wages for its members to buy them away from capitalism and gain their support like mindless mercenaries to fight the battle against social individualism in order to advance the plight of collectivism, which goes against everything traditional America stands for.

So now, if you’ve taken the time to watch all these videos, you are armed with knowledge that will help you see through the smoke and mirrors such as the video above from Obama. The next question is what are you going to do about it? Are you going to allow your country to be taken from you and your family without a fight, using the tax money you’ve supplied through your hard work to undermine everything you’ve ever believed in, or thought you believed in?

I suppose the answer to that question is in what do you actually believe. Are you someone who wants someone like Barack Obama to give you something like some village leader? Or do you still believe in self-reliance and Americanism. If it’s the later than you better start thinking what you plan to do to save it, before it’s too late, if it isn’t too late already.

And while you’re answering that question consider why so many places in the world are so poor that they look like that village in Kenya. Why is the United States so rich? Wouldn’t it be better to help other countries become more like the America, functioning from capitalism, rather than destroying capitalism so everyone in the world can live like a big village of complacency? Because that’s what will happen, the planet Earth will become a globe of mediocrity and there will still be poor people. But there won’t be a United States of America in the future to help them, because the looters destroyed it like the fools they are, leaving nothing for tomorrow because while they did all this scheming for equality, and social justice, they forgot to learn where wealth comes from. It doesn’t come out of the ground, or from a college professor. It comes from an entrepreneur, a person of ideas that is hungry to get rich and offer jobs to people to help them become rich. That’s why there are sky scrapers in New York, and thatched huts in Kenya. Choose, but choose wisely.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Eric Deters Terminated: Now he is playing the smear game

When Eric Deters left 700 WLW early this past week, I didn’t comment on it even though many expected me to since I always feature WLW very highly in my own work. I had my suspicions with The Bulldog but kept my opinion to myself regarding the kind of material he put on the air. His termination from WLW did not come as a surprise to me. However, after I received an email from Eric which talks about people I like beyond just the realm of professionalism it is appropriate to comment now that the facts from that murky incident are cleared up.

What got the Bulldog into trouble at 700 WLW were videos like this one.

For those who don’t know who the Bulldog is here he is with Tracy Jones while on the air.

I have had the misfortune of terminating a lot of employees and it’s never fun. But you can often tell as an employer, even if you like the employee that must be terminated, that the day will come when you will have to do the deed. It’s hard to look a person in the face when you are their source of income, and tell them they are no longer needed by you. It is a rejection very similar to breaking up with someone that is in love with you. It is very hard to do.

For a long time I’ve known that this day was coming for Eric Deters at 700 WLW. In the email I received from the Bull Dog he indicated that he intended to bring financial hardship to the station, he spilled secrets on just about every host that works at the station, and he was very disrespectful to the management at the station. Worst of all, he called my buddy, Doc Thompson a dork. Since I know that I’m not the only person he sent this email to, context must be established. He reminded me of a woman that had just been dumped by a man she loves for another woman or worse yet, for no woman at all.

Here is the Bulldog in his famous cage fight. People that crave constant attention can be good personalities for something like radio, but at the same time be destructive to the employees around them because to them anyone that isn’t over-the-top flamboyant is boring, or otherwise, a dork.

Out of all the terminations I’ve been involved in, and it’s so many that I can’t count them on the hands, and toes of four people, there is a small percentage that become violent, because those employees build the illusion in their minds that they are the greatest employee to ever grace your presence. There are traits that you, as the employer can readily see while they are in your employment that indicates trouble ahead. The sooner you can deal with that trouble, the better. The longer it goes on, the worse it will be later.

Here Eric Deters does his stand-up comedy act at the Funnybone Comedy Club down at Newport on the Levee. There is a line between being ambitious, and arrogant that is difficult for a person of many talents to navigate. Eric has been struggling with that thin line and it was obvious to everyone but him.

It was only a couple of months ago that I ended up in a physical altercation with a former employee in the parking lot of a courthouse broken up by attorneys and court house appointed police. I was furious with this employee because I had extended a long rope of trust because like Eric Deters, he made himself very available and helped fill the gaps everyone in management must deal with, he was always there for the staffing problems in the odd hours, and even when he showed signs of trouble, in getting along with other employees, I was tempted to overlook those problems because he helped cover all my problematic staffing deficiencies. The conflict was over the crushing understanding that he wasn’t as good of an employee as he thought he was. It was all in his mind, and there was no place to go with that anger but to lash out. Conflict is the usual result, and the need for this extends beyond the fear of the law.

The employee in question took this reluctance by me to mean that he was invaluable. In his mind, he convinced himself that he is doing me a favor and his tasks were irreplaceable. I knew I had a problem with this employee based on how he interacted with other employees, and when I noticed he was taking liberties with the rules because he had developed a sense of entitlement that I would have to act soon. I didn’t address those problems as I would other employees because in my mind I was waiting for him to make that terrible error which would allow me to cleanly terminate his employment. This provides a clean separation that stands legal scrutiny and is necessary in this day and age with all the legal maneuvering that goes on. You hope as the employer that the employee will see that you haven’t taken an interest in the actions of their obligations because it is a kind of warning sign to them that they are on the cusp. But in some of these people, their egos take that kind hearted warning as an act of endorsement and they fail to see the truth because they build up in their minds an image of themselves that is of much higher value than reality reflects.

I could tell even from a distance that Eric was in one of those types of situations. In his email to me, he complained about management and how he had been overlooked for the 9-12 night spot and how he had been overlooked for the 3-6 spot with Tracy Jones. Eric was very upset that he was always ready on a dime to come in and cover for the hosts when they were off, so he felt that just by his work ethic he should have had a chance. In his anger he knocked the station for their ratings, their management decisions over the last year, a year when he had received many opportunities at the station he wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and in general made a real butt of himself. He was shameful to say the least. Yet it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong with Eric Deters.

On June 1st, a few days after WLW surprisingly pulled Deters from the weekend spots, this video was put up. It tells the story of Eric Deters putting up the controversial video called “White Women and Pot” then realizing he went too far, called this guy and asked him to take the video down. Eric made several bad errors here, he crossed the line in the first place with the original video, but then he made it worse by calling up this guy and leaving a message on an answering machine that would end up being used against him. So as a radio personality on the powerful 700 WLW this was the kind of act that sealed the Bulldogs fate with management. It would have done it for me, even though I like Eric, this kind of behavior just pulls down the image of the radio station. I would have fired him too. There is that fine line of controversy, and putting into the hands of a predator, ammunition that can damage everything a radio station builds as a reputation, costs more than money, it costs credibility.

In this video, Eric made himself vulnerable by committing one error on top of another which snowballed into a tragedy. Ironically, in these tape recorded messages, Eric makes the case for himself why he can no longer work for 700 WLW, because it was just a matter of time before he stuck his foot in his mouth and he really did in this recorded message. WLW would not have been responsible if they hadn’t acted, even if they had to do so with a heavy heart.

I have listened to WLW for decades now. I have seen many radio personalities come and go. From what I can see, 700 WLW was doing their best to find a home for Eric out of pure loyalty. WLW as a business is first about the news, then about Reds baseball, and just behind those things is talk radio where hosts must fill the mind of the listener in that delicate art form of mind theater. Eric was a natural self-promoter, but lacked credibility, which a talk show host needs. Bill Cunningham for years walked that fine line carefully; his role is now a comedian. Nobody takes Cunningham very serious, and that’s the path he chose. He is the Jerry Springer of WLW. Doc Thompson has the difficult act of being the straight man for the station. Doc works hard to get to the facts, and he calls things as they are. In this next video, Doc gives a review of the Bulldog comedy routine while ironically doing an interview with an author who wrote a book about why celebrities crash and burn.

Speaking from experience, any time an employee that lacks natural talent but is rich in ambition confronts another employee of genuine talent, the first employee will seek to undermine the second with various forms of ass-kissing. That ass-kissing will win employment opportunities but it will not win respect. Shooting straight may not get the instant, easy ratings, but it will build the audience over time, and this is the path Doc Thompson has chosen. He spent most of his career in Cleveland but has also worked full-time in Lincoln, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque. He is a 5 time Marconi Award (the Academy Award of radio) winner for radio excellence. He’s at 700 WLW because he has to fill the role of Mike McConnell who played the straight man for a long time in Cincinnati. Doc is the real deal and a guy of genuine talent.

A man like Eric Deters made his bed and it is disgusting to attempt to bring down other radio personalities like Doc Thompson to cover the sins of his own doing. Doc’s criticism of Eric’s actions reflected my own opinion, that Eric was crossing the line in so many ways that he was embarrassing, not only to the station, but to himself. But the Bulldog was such a hard worker, and a guy that was always available for any shift of coverage which made it difficult for them to part ways with the Bulldog sooner. They did what they could to give Deters all the support they could afford to give. Behind the scenes they were probably doing what I was doing and that was scratching their heads wondering if Deters was even a stable enough individual to handle 50,000 Watts of responsibility.

In the end, Eric proved he couldn’t handle it. What every self promoter must understand is that you can sometimes cross the line, and when you realize it, you step back across it. What you don’t do is cross the line, then claim that there isn’t a line. And when you realize that you can’t convince people that the line isn’t there then try to back-track and erase the evidence. Bill Cunningham crossed that line often, but when he noticed it, he quickly corrected himself and would cover the flaw with humor. Because Deters was completely copying the extreme behavior of Bill Cunningham without the sense and humanity, the Bulldog wasn’t sure how to deal with the deeper and deeper grave he was digging for himself with his wild antics. The ultimate ending to living life over-the-top is you eventually go over.

But to call Doc Thompson names because he’s working on not just one station but two stations, 6 hours a day every day of the week and is very successful in the radio business, is preposterous. Doc’s ratings will be fine as he overcomes the shadow of Mike McConnell, whom he will surpass, because he’s more talented. The criticism of Doc is not justified. I wouldn’t spend as much time rendering Doc’s recordings at this site if I thought he was anything but excellent, and a credible, reliable personality that will not embarrass me with my loyalty at some future time, as the Bulldog has done with his fans.

Getting fired when the world was laid at a man’s feet for continued embarrassments is an incredible disservice to the fans that invest their time into that personality, and that is the unfortunate circumstance here. That station gave Eric Deters a platform that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, and he pays them back with ill-will due to actions of his own making. And that is sad.

I’ve had to fire employees for less than what Eric did. I’m sure it’s with a heavy heart, and without doubt the people I’ve fired spoke the same way to their family and friends, attempting to make me out to be the bad guy. But in the end, the guy who is still getting the checks is the one who knows best. Opinions are……………………well everyone has them. Only results matter and results come from the heart. Antics are like shots of caffeine. They may give you a boost, but you have to sustain the boost with an equal heart, otherwise it ends up becoming just another phony stunt on the back of a laugh less, thankless, comedian.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Just Earn Less Money: The history of progressive insurance and power grabs

One of the things that has come up over the Obama Care debate, particularly in Ohio is that since the state requires mandatory automobile insurance for drivers in the state, than isn’t it natural for the state, and the government to force residents to purchase health care.

Anyone who wishes to argue the merit of Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged will feel betrayed when the representative for the government arguing the constitutionality of Obama Care in front of Ohio’s 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati will find the shocking revelation admitted confidently that the way to get out of the mandate of buying insurance is to simply make less money. Doc Thompson explores this devastating view into the minds of a government looter in these action packed clips from the floor of the debate. Listen to that clip here:

The looters of the government, and to my view, most every employee in government is a looter, because they take from producers, so their entire value is contingent upon those of the producers, including those in law enforcement, have progressively robbed us all of freedoms in order to fill themselves over a long period of time. When in the late 1980’s Ohio made it mandatory to have automotive insurance in order to drive a car, people didn’t understand why I was so upset.

Making it a law to have every driver in Ohio have insurance seemed like a good idea. After all, it made sense from a legal point of view. If you wanted to drive a car, then you must show responsibility for the damage you could do on the road. This was an idea that started in Massachusetts in 1927 and progressively moved to most every state in the nation. To date, New Hampshire is the only state to not have compulsory auto liability insurance. Every other state has adopted the mandate.

The reason this was a bad thing is it created an oligopoly in the insurance industry, meaning insurance companies were guaranteed that out of every driver in the state of Ohio, the insurance companies were assured that all they’d have to do by way of competition was simply divide up all the residents in the state and compete with each other for those people. All drivers had to have insurance so choice was no longer an option. This of course drove up costs and was the intended goal of the insurance lobby in the state and nation. Under the umbrella of safety, a powerful organization used law enforcement to obtain for the insurance industry revenue literally under the force of law. The power behind the force of the law is imprisonment or the barrel of the gun so this was quite tyrannical legislation, which is why it upset me so much.

A few years later it became mandatory to wear a seat belt. At first it was only a finable offense if a driver were pulled over for another driving violation. But just a few years later, it became law that all an officer had to do was pull over a driver for not wearing a seat belt. It’s called the “Click it or ticket,” campaign. I discussed this in great detail in an article I wrote about Memorial Day weekend where there were driving check points that were citing specifically for seat belt violations.

It takes time, but since the very first person in the nation purchased auto insurance in Dayton Ohio in 1897 progressives and government looters have used such devices as insurance to propel their grabs for power.

Now, we see the same thing happening with Obama Care where the government is making a huge grab for power in dictating what people must and must not do. It is the ultimate first step to a complete loss of any kind of freedom envisioned by the architects of America. Obama Care was created on the backs of all the other progressive legal movements, such as the auto insurance mandates. And it’s all summed up in the words spoke on the floor of the testimony. “If you don’t want the manadate, then make less money.” In other words, produce less so you can qualify for assistance.

It’s no wonder welfare doesn’t work because like all government programs the philosophy is just the same, make everything affordable for the poor and do nothing to reward the producers. And if the government imposition is too great, then become a dependent. The failure is that government never seems to consider that if they create a society of dependents, who will do the producing?

Obama Care is laced with these infantile thinkers and looters of productive resources, and the truth is difficult to hear even among those with ears experienced enough to hear it. It is truly shocking to consider that the very people we employee to run the government are so devastatingly stupid that it is contemptible to even fathom as relevant behavior, yet it is.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Laura Sanders: My answer to your waltz of words in The Pulse Journal

Just like many people didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong with Ohio State football, Jim Tressel resigned amid a wave of controversy.  Our statewide school funding issue isn’t far off from the Jim Tressel controversy where little white lies that is in the context of the program, insignificant, the evil is in the cover-up.  And with school budgets, the cover-up is in the contracts extorted by the teachers unions. 

The apologists were out again in this past week’s Pulse Journal.  Another letter attacking me was placed in that paper proving the vast intellectual deficiencies of a certain percentage of the population.  When reading these things I almost feel sorry for those people.  I mean how do they live?  How do they make decisions?  Surely they aren’t so mentally challenged, because if you read letters from apologists like the author of the editorial below, that is the only conclusion a person that can actually think would conclude. 

Before I tear this letter to pieces, read it for yourself.  It isn’t my intention to make these people feel bad, but they do it to themselves.  They vote after all, and it is through apologists like the author of this letter that the teachers union uses to propel their strategy, which has worked because people like me couldn’t believe that there are actually people who can’t think critically enough to see through the façade of deceit. 

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Teachers aren’t just educators

Dear Richard Hoffman: You can rejoice now that Lakota’s teachers have agreed to a three-year freeze in step raises and a much less comprehensive health care plan. Or, is that not going far enough? Oh, that’s right…you believe our teachers are overpaid, even though 100 percent have bachelor’s degrees, and 68 percent of those have master’s degrees. I guess with six-hour workdays and summers off, they really aren’t deserving, huh? Those daily lesson plans and graded papers must magically appear on their desks each morning. 

I have friends who are teachers, and let me tell you, they are worth every penny they earn. Not only are they educators; they are counselors, role models, mediators, chaperones and disciplinarians. They perform a balancing act every day in the classroom, having to be assertive yet compassionate; formidable yet sensitive; strict yet respectful.

Instead of recognizing the commitments to our children put forth by Lakota staff members, you, Mr. Hoffman, are spending all of your time blaming unions, threatening school board members and charging “overpaid” teachers with taxpayer abuse. Your arguments are weak at best, accusing school administrators and board members of mismanaging school funds when it is well-documented that Lakota only spent $9,806 per pupil during the 2009-10 school year — less than most other comparable statewide districts. As a matter of fact,Westervilleschool Superintendent Dan Good was quoted in a February 2011 article as saying, “We’re going to be looking at what’s going on in those communities (Lakota and Fairfield) that’s allowing them to keep those high ratings along with such a low-cost per pupil.”

Our school system relies solely on levies being passed so that our teachers can be compensated. The reason for Lakota’s continued success is because of our teachers. They should be lauded, not punished.    

Laura Sanders

LibertyTwp.

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Ok, where to start? There are so many problems with this letter.  First off, I am not spending all my time blaming the unions.  I spend about 2% of my time fighting taxes, which began about 9 months ago.  The other 98% percent of my time is quite productive.  Of the 2% of my time I do spend on fighting higher taxes, it is the reasonable conclusion that unions are to blame for the overall funding problems.  They didn’t give themselves any budget limits.  Unions aren’t any different from teenagers, if you give them a $100 dollars, they’ll want $200.  You can never give enough because the teenager hasn’t learned the value of money. They don’t value what comes easily.  And neither do union members.  As a producer, and a capitalist, I don’t like unions.  I don’t want my money supporting them.  I’m fine if they can exist in the free market, but they can’t.  They have succeeded in driving up wages to the point that China,India, and Indonesia are now doing jobs that used to be done in the United States.  I blame the unions for that.  Labor costs are the unifying factor in the overall manufacturing problems our country is facing.  I think people should be paid a fair wage, but if it’s excessive, and drives up the cost of the product to where the consumer won’t buy it, or simply can’t afford it, then the victor of that wage level negotiation is not the union that extorted the higher wage, because the union killed the job in the long run. 

This is what the teachers union has done to the cost of education.  They have driven up the cost without a care in the world to the end result.  Their solution to everything is simply to raise more taxes, which isn’t a successful formula for prosperity.  That mentality has run the Norwood General Motors plant out-of-town, it shut down Fisher Body in Hamilton.  In fact it has practically decimated the economy of Hamilton.  It drove up the costs at Cincinnati Milacron down in Oakley.  The list goes on and on and on.  Those were all production jobs, and most of that work is now out of the county. 

I’ve employed people who worked for AK Steel in Middletown, several of them that wanted jobs while they were on strike during their labor dispute that went on for over a year back in 2006-2007.  I learned a great deal about the hard union mentality from those employees, since AK Steel is one of those mob type unions where they actually beat-up people who crossed the picket line during labor disputes.  A lot of my local motorcycle friends in and around town are big time union types.  I have made my feelings known to these guys.  I have told them, “You wouldn’t have a boat, and you wouldn’t have a Harley Davidson parked in the garage if not for the union, because you guys are too stupid to earn that kind of money on your own.”

“We ain’t got those head smarts like you do, brother,” is what they say to me.  “Thank God for the union.”

“You’re working yourself out of a job with the wages you guys demand.”

“Just so long as it don’t happen till after I retire.”  (they typically laugh at this point.)

Teachers are absolutely no different.  They are like anyone else.  They believe their job is the most important job on the face of the planet.  It’s up to someone like me, (in management) to let them know that their job isn’t quite so important, that someone else can do their job, and the show will go on without them if need be.  It’s my job in management to not be liked, because nobody likes to be told they aren’t that valuable. 

But for a manager to know the value of a job, they need to know something about the job.  I’ve worked in just about every endeavor someone could imagine and I know how difficult teaching is.  To me, teaching is worth a range of about 40K to 60K tops, because it is a degree position.  But a master’s degree has no value to me.  A doctorate has no value to me, not in public education.  I just want kids to be able to read, write and be productive citizens.  If parents want all that other stuff they can hire a private tutor, or a private school, and make sure that kid gets to college.  It’s an insane law to pay 68% of the teachers at Lakota more money because they have a master’s degree.  What’s the value in that?  Does it make them better?  The union will tell you it does, so where are the results?  Where are the test results that prove otherwise?  There aren’t any, its pure speculation.  What do a master’s and doctorate degree do to justify higher labor costs? 

I know a woman who is going for her doctorate.  I asked her, “why is that so important to you?” 

She said to me, “I’m a professional student.”  At least she was honest.  This particular woman is the really cautious type.  She is the kind that will put her kids in a helmet when they are riding their bicycles, and in her professional life, she doesn’t care much for competition, so she enjoys the security and pace of academia.  I know personally, as I look down the list of the top 625 highly paid teachers at Lakota that many of those teachers fit the same description.  Only in government does their vision for reality work, because the tax payer picks up the bill. 

The only reason a lot of the laws that school boards are constrained with regarding school budgets exists, like the run-a-way labor costs mentioned with the master’s degree ratio are because the OEA lobbied to get laws passed that completely benefited them. 

It is insane to create policies that drive up your labor costs then turn around and continue to ask for more money from tax payers to fund them.  With as much money as I spend in taxes, I expect Lakota to be the greatest districts in the state.  But don’t be a fool and ask me to pay for infinite amounts of money for it.  That doesn’t make any sense.  At some point there’s a diminishing marginal return and we’ve hit that point. 

As to grading papers, what?  A teacher is under contract for 7.5 hours.  Grading papers if a teacher has to do it every single day shouldn’t take more than 4 hours per day.  So that’s a 11.5 hour day.  So what.  Why was such a statement spoke about as though it were something special?  I average a lot more than that per day. I’m on call 24 hours a day, and most of the time 6 days a week, or 7 if I have people working all weekend.  And I don’t have summers off.  I would expect any employee that I hired for over 40K per year to do everything said in that letter and more.  I don’t understand the emotion.  Is all that money needed to pay these employees and a pat on the back too required?  What kind of fragile people are these teachers that think such talking points even dictate special merit?  It’s expected! 

It is well-documented that Lakota only spent $9,806 per pupil, but so what.  That’s too high. How do I know it’s too high?  What criteria?  Well, if the district asks for more money for a levy, that means they aren’t working within their budget.  When the average tax bill in the Lakota School District is between $3000 to $4000 per year and the district is still asking for more money which does not mean Lakota has done a good job.  It doesn’t change anything if another district in the state thinks Lakota is doing well.  All that tells me is that education costs everywhere are too high.  The teachers union and the school board need to find a way to bring that number down to $8,000 per student, or even $6,000 per student.  If it were up to me, and I were running the district I wouldn’t be happy till the cost per pupil was under $5000.  We’re talking simply about labor costs here.  Not helping children. 

The union is solely responsible for pricing themselves out of the market.  It is unreasonable to ask tax payers to fund this ridiculous perception that these radical teachers union members have about their value.  Are teachers valuable, sure.  But they aren’t more important than the kid’s parents, and many of the traits listed are not the job of the teacher.   If they wish to be mentors, that’s the teacher’s choice.  If they chose to be counselors, role models, mediators, chaperones and disciplinarians, that’s fine. But they are paid to teach the basics.  I don’t want to hear about all those other traits, because those are the aspects of living that kids should be getting from their parents.  The union types will say that the parents are not doing the job.  Well, who are they to say?  Who are they to take it upon themselves?  Who are they to impose on the sanctity of a family?  Is it their job to impose on every parent the policing that only a fraction of truly bad parents deserve?  Is it justice to extend those traits outside the classroom, which is what a lot of teachers mistakenly believe they have an obligation to indulge in.  No, because all those tasks cost money, money that is inflated for a role that is overly dramatized in order to justify the money spent. 

So to answer the question, am I happy?  No, because the contract was a ploy to gain an edge with the public to over-turn Senate Bill 5.  It was not genuine; otherwise the union would look at the financial situation with more intelligence.  It would have advised its members to reduce their cost to the district.  They would have sought to make themselves more marketable. 

I was happy to see the superintendent and school board members happy for a change.  It was nice to see them feeling good about their jobs.  I did like that.  But I know what they don’t want to admit to themselves, because they are stuck dealing with that crazy union every day, that this concession is just another manipulative scheme orchestrated by the union. 

I see through this labor debate.  I have employees that constantly lobby for more overtime, raises, less work hours, you name it.  I’ve heard every over dramatized excuse in the human vocabulary for why an employee thinks they are valuable.  The trick is knowing which ones are telling the truth, and which ones aren’t. 

I hope to God that the author of this letter about me is not a teacher, but is in fact just another neurotic mother that is overly emotional about all topics in her life.  I really hope that’s the case.  Because if this person represents the kind of employees that we are paying over 60K per year, which is the average wage at Lakota, then we are wasting our money much worse than even I have pointed out. 

 I see from experience that the labor situation at Lakota needs to be dealt with, in order for Lakota to remain excellent.  Labor does not make a school great.  Management of resources does.  Lakota has shown that it can manage resources better than other schools, but that’s not enough if it is asking for more money.  If the state cuts it’s funding, if the federal government cuts its money, and there’s less money to go around, then the school needs to find a way to do more with even less.  It’s insane, and highly ignorant to assume that the tax payer will shoulder that responsibility directly.  I’ve heard it said that Lakota needs new sources of revenue.  Well, how’s it going to do that when it doesn’t produce anything?  The product is the education of children, and the results of that education have not placed the United States in first place in the world, so why would we spend more than what we’ve spent at this point?  Why should personal property taxes go up over $4000 per property, what is the value?  So a public teacher can take a 5K vacation on their 3 months off?  Isn’t that what it really comes down to?  Because if it wasn’t, the union would have been more responsible in what they demanded, and we are where we are because of the demands on the community.  When the school levy passed, it wasn’t asked for, it was demanded. 

In 2005 I fought the school levy back then too.  For all the same reasons.  The money kicked in during 2006.  As soon as the money hit the district, and the union knew the receipts were in from assessed property value, after owners paid their taxes, they threatened to strike in 2008.  The teachers union pushed its members to strike, to walk off the job.  I will never forget that.  The strike was over money.  As soon as positive cash flow was shown to the district because of the levy passing, the union went after the excess money.  That is the path that brought us to the financial situation we’re currently in.  It’s my money they want, and it’s my money they squandered away like drunken sailors. 

Unlike a lot of people who live in the district, I have lived in the Lakota district for a long time, and I plan to stick around.  And I have a great memory.  I know that these are people who are attempting to scam my neighbors and children that I genuinely care for.  And that’s bullying, it makes me very, very angry.  And I will not stand for it!

So you apologists can figure out where you want to be on this position, but remember, there isn’t any negotiation.  There is right and wrong.  I’m right, and those asking for more money are wrong.  And that’s the end of the story.  Live with it……get an education and learn a couple of things, then talk to me when you figure out that you agree with me.

 

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com