Tag: Lakota Schools

Jon Husted, Mike DeWine and Amy Acton, Don’t Lecture Us: Government tampering in a free market is the cause of all the misery

Friday was a stunning day, the whole week has been for all of us of course, but I know something about Jon Husted, the Lieutenant Governor in Ohio to Mike DeWine and he shocked me with a lecture about behavior in the press conference he did with the governor and the health freak Amy Acton hinting that Ohio might be next to submit to martial law if businesses didn’t behave themselves. I’ve met Jon on several occasions and have thought of him as a Tea Party conservative, and he was part of the way that the Republican Party sweetened the deal of getting behind the rino-at-best, Mike DeWine in the last election. But Jon sounded like some communist leader of some third world country right from the capital of Ohio and it was shameful. Despicable from a person who should know better. Where is the Jon Husted that we all know and love? Listen dude, we don’t need a lecture on proper behavior by some government official. Most of the reason people are suffering is due to the inaction of our leadership in the state and that isn’t something that you get to pawn off and lecture to us about how we should behave or when. It was Ohio government led by Amy Acton that has overreacted to this Covid-19 crises and put everyone at each other’s throats. It was mismanagement of the governor’s office that started this chain reaction all across the country and you have only yourselves to blame. President Trump promoted social distancing, you idiots took it 20 steps further and now the nation is in a competition not to get back to work, but to how close to martial law they can push it until people break and start fighting back against the government. The press conference was a disaster to say the least.

Here’s the problem, the whole driver of this extreme social distancing measure is to slow the spread of the virus Covid-19, because there is a fear, (not a fact) that hospital beds will be in short supply and government wants to manage the panic. But in so doing, you have created massive panic, really bad panic. So bad that I had to waste my time going to Wal-Mart with my wife last night to get food for the weekend because she was too scared to go by herself during the day while I was working—working to undo a lot of the mistakes this state government has placed on top of us economically. Supply chains all across the country are closing down because their states have declared stay home orders and its wrecking everything. The last thing I want to do on a Friday night is go to Wal-Mart because my wife was in such a panic that she was worried about being attacked over bread. And as I walked the empty aisles, caused by our Ohio government, the other people were also just as terrified—afraid to talk to each other, walking around with masks and afraid to make eye contact—and here we get a lecture about being civil from the Lieutenant Governor of Ohio on proper conduct. Are you kidding me? Wal-Mart closed at 8:30 PM on a Friday night, it felt a lot like we were living in a communist country, limited options, short supplies, dead spirited people—empty ambitions—all in just one week of activist Ohio government sticking its nose in business it didn’t belong in.

The hospital shortage of any kind is due to government interference. With every regulation is a barrier to capitalist response to any crises. The reason more people are not in the health care business to provide for surge protection from some virus outbreak is because government is too far involved. Medicaid expansion from the last liberal governor John Kasich is one of those bad decisions, where providing services has a cost that many potential doctors don’t want to deal with. Medicine should be as common as food. Government doesn’t decide how many fast food places are put on the corner of a highway exit, and it shouldn’t be tampering with the market of healthcare in any way. Because it does through much regulation, and the unions attached to the medical industry, it is slow to react to the needs of the public and the lack of innovation has provided an artificial constraint. That constraint is why we must worry about not having enough hospital beds for a virus surge. If the free market were more allowed to function in the field of medicine, we’d have a lot more options and wouldn’t have to shut down our state economy because of a shortage of hospital beds.

But who says we have a shortage of hospital beds? Amy Acton? She’s the person getting her information around the world from all these climate radicals who are using computer models to tell the story of an outbreak that they want to see happen, for their own political reasons. Why in the hell are you guys listening to her—because she’s a “professional?” Get fu**ing serious! Have you guys lost your minds? Just about everything the governor’s office has said this entire past week has been wrong from a supposed Republican free market capitalist point of view. This big brother government “knows best” position has been embarrassing. You might expect such nonsense by a liberal governor and their office, but not a solid Republican state like Ohio. Then to end a week of misery once many more have suffered the down effects of DeWine’s decision to lock down almost all economic activity with a lecture of how to behave and how we want to be remembered after this crises is over—if its ever over at all—was reprehensible. And yes, when will the crises ever be over? Are we going to track every virus that emerges for the rest of our lives? You can bet the news will try to provoke such a panic, look how successful they were with you guys in Ohio government.

Oh, I can hear your thoughts, you know more than we do, you’ve seen the models, you’ve heard the concerns, you’ve suffered losses from friends who are losing people to this terrible Covid-19 virus. Wrong, you have your face against the glass and you have let liberal activists push it so hard that your nose is breaking. You can’t see the forest for the trees because your looking in the wrong, panic driven direction. And its OK to make mistakes, which our Ohio government has, but its not OK to try to justify it with caretaking for the innocent. There are many more people suffering over a lack of food, jobs, and fear of an unknown that you guys have created than anybody suffering a respiratory problem who is in their 80s and may actually need a hospital bed due to Covid-19 to help with their breathing. Because the DeWine administration was suckered into this over-reaction, many more people are suffering needlessly, and yes, we expect you to know better than to bite on the hook that was placed in the water.

We don’t need a lecture from government on how to behave. The problems of this entire Covid-19 virus outbreak was caused by government standing in the way of capitalist enterprise and to hide that fact, government has shut down almost all economic activity. People are mad, they are getting angrier by the hour and that fault is on Ohio state government for mismanaging the Covid-19 outbreak. You took some direction from the Trump administration which is fighting its own battles with Doctor Doom at the CDC, and you guys went several steps too far and now you can’t easily put it back in the bottle. And instead of apologizing, you gave us a lecture.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Bill Kristol was Always a Democrat: Understanding the political spectrum that doesn’t change, only the relativity of a person within it

It came up a bunch this past week, and why recently I have been talking about the political spectrum more than the label of Republican or Democrat. For review, it has been my offering that the more intelligent and worldly a person is, the further along that political spectrum to the right that they are. For instance, I have known a lot of Democrats and went to many, many social events where there were lots of Democrats, and “arty” people and they think of themselves as smart academics. They can tell you all about the names of wines and what they should be paired with, they will talk about sail boats in Nantucket and tell you all about their second homes in Florida, but they aren’t very wise in matters of life. The more they learn however, the further to the right they might be said to be. And that is why there is all this business of some people swapping back and forth between Republican and Democrats, such as Bill Kristol going from the bastion of conservatives with his now bankrupt magazine to looking like a clone of Karl Marx as an anti-Trumper, anti-capitalist. Kristol never moved ideologically, but the party of Republicans under Trump’s White House leadership has moved further to the right leaving Kristol behind.

I haven’t listened much to WLW for many years as I lost respect for the audience they are trying to attract. I’m much, much more of a 55 KRC guy than someone who likes to hear hours and hours of sports broadcasting and middle of the road political commentary. But in my office, professionally, which is surrounded by lots of very intense machinery only WLW comes in on my radio. I don’t live stream it on the internet, I still use a broadcast radio that I’ve had for thirty years more for sentiment than practicality, but I like having it since its not dependent on a computer system, it only needs electric to receive a signal, so I let it play all hours of the day 7 days a week and is always there to give me news at the top and bottom of every hour. So I put up with WLW’s soft side because I want the news. It’s the same arrangement at my home, in my workshop/shooting range I have WLW on for the same time slot depending on where I am, I still get the news at the top and bottom of every hour and can track stories as they develop. So it didn’t go without my notice that they have a new slogan, “explained not shouted” which is meant to aim their programming at those further down the political spectrum where the not so smart people are, the Democrats. Because they think that is their future.

I’d say it’s a miscalculation on their part. The future is further to the right not the left of our political spectrum. Even though our public schools and colleges are clearly teaching socialism and have been for quite a long time, life experiences push people to the right. I was thinking of this very issue as I was speaking to Kathy Wyenandt at a recent event. She is listed as a Democrat currently because she lives near me in Liberty Township, Ohio and all the Republican seats are taken pretty much. She can easily dominate on the Democrat side because she is very smart and talented. As she was talking to me I kept thinking, its too bad the Republicans didn’t have her running against Sherrod Brown during the last election for the Senator from Ohio. Or why she wasn’t on the Cincinnati City Council running for Mayor of the City, because she could beat those people like a killer whale having a snack on a beach of baby seals, as a Republican. If she lived Hamilton County she could have her way with anybody because as a person she is pretty far down the political spectrum and would fit a nice spot somewhere prominent in the Trump administration’s Republican Party which is the trend of the country now that the news is fun and people are learning more about how things work. They aren’t moving to the left, they are going to the right and the center of the political spectrum is not where Bill Kristol always was, or Mitt Romney for that matter, or the current Bill Cunningham of WLW radio, its much further to the right.

If you’ve ever wondered how people who are Democrats and Republicans can hug and go out to dinner together its because in all honesty, they are most of the time at the same place on the political spectrum. They may call themselves by the “D” if they are in Hamilton County or an “R” if they are in Butler County depending on where that area’s political spectrum of educated voters are, but by personal belief, they are pretty close to agreeing on most things until someone like a Trump comes along and moves the bar in a particular direction that makes everyone feel uncomfortable. When I’m in those kinds of meetings I never meet anybody to the right of myself, everyone is always to the left, so I get used to being alone in that discussion. But that doesn’t make me a radical right winger, rather something that is often misplaced, I would say that the more that someone knows about the ways of the world, the further to the right that they will be on that spectrum. Some people are born into that by regional influence, but in general, the more educated you are as a person, the more life experience we can draw wisdom from, the more conservative you become.

A couple of people I admire a lot is Thomas Edison and his friend Teddy Roosevelt. Both men were conservatives who found themselves experimenting with progressivism around the 1912 period and its easy to see why they allowed themselves to get caught up in all the robber baron syndrome that appealed to the public at that time as Marxism was rushing into our country from Europe to influence all of civilized society. It was the equivalent to WLW announcing that they are “explaining, not shouting” the news, early American progressivism was rocking the Republican Party to its very core, and both Edison and Roosevelt were brilliant people who were not very good with money, so their value systems put them on the edge of the political spectrum at the time that leaned to the left on issues, but left them to the right on many others. However, if in their lifetimes they had mastered elements of personal wealth, they would likely not found themselves consumed with the temptations of progressivism, and would always had been committed to the Republican Party as it was defined by Abraham Lincoln.

The point of the matter is that while I say that Democrats are garbage and should be defeated everywhere that they reside, that is the old talk radio side of me who understands that points need to be made quickly so that people don’t change the dial over to some other program. And while I do believe that, the real answer is much deeper than just making that statement. I don’t like Democrats because I like intelligence and the beauty of wisdom that people further down the political spectrum exhibit, and I want that for the world honestly. But I am not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I understand many people have their own journey to make and that not all of them are as far along the political spectrum as I am. I have worked hard over the years reading one to two books every week for all of my adult life and learning everything I can along the way in a multitude of professional opportunities. I don’t have the problems of Roosevelt and Edison in having weak points in my own thoughts that keep me bound to a centrist position on that political spectrum. But most people I know are nowhere near as ambitious toward true wisdom as I might be. They enjoy primetime television shows, they like sports, and they are still learning about the ways of the universe, and they might still call themselves Democrats even though I can clearly see the budding flower of a grand Republican. Things are never quite what they appear, but what is clear if you know what to look for, is what they might become.

Rich Hoffman

Why Nancy Nix of Butler County is one of the Best: EdChoice and how Ohio needs a better funding model

I just want to say after seeing her at a number of political events recently, especially at places where George Lang and Mark Welch are present that Butler County is very lucky to have such a great treasurer in Nancy Nix on her third term. She is so good at what she does that I’d like to see her on her 100th term in the future. It is always wonderful to meet competent people who understand the details and Nancy Nix does. She is part of the puzzle that has come together so nicely in Butler County Ohio politics where a really good management team has risen to the occasion of our times to bring residents the best services possible that government could hope ever to provide. She has been on my mind a lot lately not just because she is a supporter of George Lang and Mark Welch, but because of something she said a few years ago about public school levies that are very relevant to the current challenge of EdChoice forcing local school systems to change the way they look at their funding.

Let’s face it, the whole progressive concept of attaching state money to a school located in a physical real estate concept was dumb from the beginning. It was just another brick in the road that has led to a pathway to hell. A lot of older people, like Bill Cunningham on WLW radio are struggling with this whole EdChoice concept because they only know of school systems being attached as the center of a community complete with sports programs and sentiments of school days long ago ended. These are the types of people where class reunions mean something, so it is painful for them to even consider that a child might want to pick up and move to another school across town and to take their state funding with them if that school isn’t very good. So far the focus of the argument is that the state report cards are unfair, but the bottom line is really in consumer confidence, do parents want to send their children to that particular school and how can the school market themselves in a way to make whatever the state report card says be the destination of hope for a parent and their child. In the future of education, it will take more than winning football programs, kids will actually have to learn things and be places that are good. A good school should not be determined by good real estate, it should be because the school managed itself well, spent their money wisely, and produced a superior product in a free market fashion.

Nancy has experience both at US Bank and as a Plant Controller so she gets money and how it’s a measure of value. I have worked with a lot of controllers and they are normally very boring personally, but beautiful people because their minds are very mathematical. Nancy has all the traits of the best of controllers, but she isn’t boring. She has a real passion for accounting and it radiates from her in such positive ways, so it surprised me when she came out publicly taking a position against several local government schools on their attempts to pass another school levy for what they were saying were, “safety needs.” Nancy stated, “Our homeowners are already heavily taxed, and its very difficult for many residents to make ends meet. My office receives handwritten letters daily from taxpayers needing help keeping up with their real estate taxes. Those who get too far behind can lose their home. Our county has passed 40 or so levies in the last 10 years and I’d argue some were for far more than they needed.” I found that very refreshing coming from a county treasurer who was looking at the big picture for a change and I’ve loved her ever since.

Her statements on that levy issue have come back to me now that all these lazy superintendents of some of the major government schools in the area, like Mason and Lakota have been complaining about losing their state funding due to EdChoice. What do they think is going to happen, that they are going to ask for more levies to cover their ridiculously bad management? Every controller I’ve ever dealt with would look at the way ANY public school is ran and demand an instant layoff to balance the books because the income is not conducive to proper balancing of the books. In fact, if Lakota had a proper accounting “controller” they’d have a shit fit on their hands due to the insane perception of what value is for the scope of the product, the education of the students based on state and local tax revenue chained to them like some masochist in a bondage chamber. The relationship with the community is about as dysfunctional financially as is conceivably possible and whenever it gets questioned the school hides behind the children imprisoned there due to their lack of choice in the matter—because the system gives money to the school, not the student. Government schools as Nancy pointed out, ask for too much too often. And I would add that they do it not because they need the money but because they know they are so inefficient that they take more money from people to manage their inefficiencies. Nancy has seen the backend of that problem when people write her to say their taxes are too high, and in too many cases, they lose their homes because the taxes are so terrible.

At the center of the problem is the perception of what the state should be giving to students, which is why Bill Cunningham’s troubles over the EdChoice issue is so comedic. The value of the education is just assumed as it has been set by the chaos of the government schools joined together by their collective bargaining agreements and the state is supposed to come up with a model that just rubber stamps that sum—whether its $6000 per student or $12,000. The numbers are inflated by these school districts to cover the high cost of their government employees and not the needs of the child. This is because of Parkinsen’s Law which states that the sum of needed money fills to the supply of funds. If a school levy passes and there is a cash infusion, then the union contracts will fill to consume the entire amount. Yet the kids are still coming out as bad as if they went to a third rate school, they can’t read, they can’t think, and they take on too many social beliefs rooted in liberalism. That’s not what we should be paying for. I would argue that if the state supplied only $2000 and schools had to compete for business that is in the marketplace, that the price to educate children would go down dramatically. That is when the state could provide a proper, constitutional, funding model.

Its just good to know that there are people like Nancy out there supporting other good Republicans like George Lang and Mark Welch, and many, many others. Good people tend to gravitate toward each other and she is one of the great ones. I appreciate that she is the treasurer of my county, and that our finances are in as good of hands as they could be. Most accounting types are alike in that they see beauty in numbers and can utilize that talent where needed. But Nancy has a different gear where she doesn’t just get lost behind some wire rimmed glasses and a big desk separating her from the world. She is connected and approachable, but more than anything, she does her work for all the right reasons and I’m glad she’s around.

Rich Hoffman

Why EdChoice is so Beneficial: Removing Parkinson’s Law from the public education debate in Ohio

I’ve been watching and listening to the whole debate about EdChoice in Ohio with great interest. Of course, the Ohio Senate had to vote to delay the implementation of Ed Choice which was scheduled to take effect the day of this writing, until April 1st 2020. The public schools in particular have responded terribly to it, including the school in my own district which I’ve written a lot about, Lakota. It has been nothing short of embarrassing to listen to Lakota’s superintendent complain about the funding model that is coming whether they like it or not and move the entire district into a victimized status so quickly on the issue. The report back from some financial news from Lakota has not been good and they are floating the idea for another levy which would be a terrible, anti-growth tax increase just to supplement their mismanaged spending habits, so the news was bad enough. This EdChoice debate has only made things worse. Dealing with professional educators to me is the worst experience that there is in professional politics because they are so entitled and unrealistic about what they think their financial requirements should be, so we’ll deal with some of that here, and in the coming months. Listening to politicians attempt to put their minds around what to do about EdChoice, which is simply a grading system that inspires the financial contributions of the state to follow the student of that failing school to the school of their choice. This of course leaves variability in public school budgets for money they have been used to getting now going to an unpredictable number of students who may decide to go somewhere else with that precious state money.

I listened to Bill Cunningham and Representative Bill Seitz talk about this EdChoice problem on WLW and every word made me cringe. Here were two people who call themselves rock ribbed Republicans missing the whole point of the public education debate. Now, my history with these two is that they are on the wrong side of many issues. They mean well like a lot of people do, but their perspective has been tainted by years of acceptance of a system initiated by people like John Dewey during an experimentation of many things during the progressive era at the turn of the last century and like many have accepted that that’s just the way things are and the way they will always be. Money goes to the school from the state to teach children living in that district not just skills for a future job, but to turn them into democratic citizens with an emphasis on social change. In hindsight this has been a complete disaster, look at the products of the schools, which many of us are. People aren’t very smart, and they don’t set their sights very high in life. Dewey’s mistake was in attempting to steer society away from republic representation and more toward democratic majority rule, which we all know now is a disaster at the epistemological level.

For the two Bills talking on WLW about EdChoice, they are both people in their 60s and 70s now, to them public school is about sports programs, learning to follow orders so that kids learn to live in a civil society, and in establishing much needed social connections with peers. Way back, many decades ago when my wife and I pulled our kids out of public schools for a year to teach them at home because the results were just so disappointing we had family members literally melt under the news because they were afraid my kids would turn into complete social outcasts, because they believed after so many years of this Dewey philosophy that the goal of public schools was to establish these mental applications. Of course, those sentiments were completely fear based, just as about everything in public education is. We have learned to just accept the failure that is evident because that’s always the way we have done things. People like the “Bills” on WLW enjoy the idea that their public school is the holder of real-estate value, and that Friday Night Lights football in the fall months of every year make for great conversation. But it was flawed from the beginning and never was poised to do what Dewey wanted because his fundamental problem was in thinking that the state as a central authority should be in charge. It was a progressive experiment, but not a very “Republican” thing to do.

Schools like Lakota and many others who are complaining about the insecurity in their funding model should be looking at the situation like any business would instead of some free-loader sitting in a bird nest of a rich district and opening their mouths for tax money to flow in. They should be working to be the best school with the best options in a free market society. No matter what the report card states in giving families the choice of a school they’d like to go to, Lakota should feel confident that kids would want to go to their school for all the reasons that anybody would, to get a good education, be near a good sports program, or just to be around other students who aren’t problems coming from broken families. Students should have a choice and if Lakota wants those students, they should have to work to attract them.

The most tragic thing I have noticed, looking at the situation professionally, is that all public schools have become addicted to the natural state of Parkinson’s Law that has contaminated their budgeting structures. Everyone who has been involved professionally in process improvements understands that Parkinson’s Law is an adage that states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” meaning that a work schedule blankly stated will allow a worker to fill that time allotment from beginning to end by the nature of human interaction. If you give someone an hour to do a 5-minute job, they’ll take the whole hour. Process improvement demands to understand how long it actually takes to do a job, and to work out the tendencies of Parkinson’s Law to misstate labor needs. Well, that same tendency is at the center of the public education debate all across the country, and is why the EdChoice trend is so badly needed. Budgets have been filled to their maximum to accommodate whatever the state provides and to what extent local school district tax payers will put up with in increased levies driven by labor unions looking to use Parkinson’s Law to attach need to student performance by using the chaos of money going to the schools, not the student, to keep the process centrally controlled and with a false understanding of what education per student should cost, leaving the real state funding model perpetually broken, which is just how the labor unions and lazy superintendents like it.

Clearly what we have had hasn’t worked. Education needs reformed and the centralized aspects of it need to be removed. Free market solutions are the only way to improve schools and the students that come from them. People should have the option to vote with their feet putting schools into the same competitive situation that every restaurant, shopping complex and entertainment destination must do, compete for the dollars available. Education is not so sacred to not be attached to competitive market conditions, end of story. A quick look at our students declares that trying something new wouldn’t hurt, because we couldn’t do worse. And ultimately that is the direction of education anyway, just as the trends of the world are declaring. People want more choices in life, not less, and it’s a matter of time anyway where money for education shouldn’t even come from the state. But while it does, it should go to the students so they can vote with their feet. Not to hold them to a school that doesn’t feel it has to earn their business. If Lakota is such a great school, or any government school for that matter, don’t tell us how good you are. Make yourself one of those schools that people want to go to. Make it so that you are so crowded that you must turn people away, which only increases the value of the product. Sure, it makes the current way that schools do business chaotic, it forces them to understand how much Parkinson’s Law is in their processes. It forces the teacher unions to think differently for sure. But that is their problem, not ours. And the state will never know how much it should spend on students so long as Parkinson’s Law is contaminating their assumptions. That is the key to this whole discussion and we’re going to have it now or in a few years, but the way things have been are not the way things are going to be. The old Dewey model was poised from the outset to fail. But these days, life happens too fast and there is just too much to learn to attempt to squeeze everything into the traditional classroom setting that we have been attempting to do. The times and this new economy are forcing us to change, so let’s get at it and solve this problem once and for all by looking at the entire concept differently.

Rich Hoffman

President Trump, Warren Davidson, and George Lang: ‘Nobody Does it Better’

It was good to hear my congressman’s name come up during President Trump’s March for Life speech on Friday. Warren Davidson has been doing such a great job representing me in Washington D.C. that it gave me a great moment of pride in hearing his name mentioned so prominently by the greatest president in American history. But that wasn’t all that Trump was up to that day, additionally he had a meeting of the nation’s mayors at the White House so to inspire them into better things. Also he released on Twitter the new logo for the sixth branch of military service, the Space Force which has come to be under his presidency. For most people any one of those things would have been the climax of their week, even for former presidents. They would have needed a nap after just the mayor’s event. But for Donald J. Trump and those rising to great success under his influence leadership, like Warren Davidson, its just another day at the office. Few people would have known it, even though every network had committed most all of their broadcasting effort toward the effort, but an impeachment trial was going on at Capital Hill by those seeking any way possible to slow this president down. And this coming on the heels of new trade deals with China, Mexico and Canada, and a very successful trip to the Davos economic forum of world leaders. This president is too big of a thinker to be encumbered by the small minded, and after a week of impeachment coverage, it was quite clear that President Trump had more of a personality of a James Bond theme song than the scandalous acceptance of political diatribes that brought down Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. Trump is a winner and everything he touches improves just by his influence, leaving attempts to paint him as a lesser person weak and affectless.

This isn’t a new idea to me, that is why actually I have named this site for more than a decade now, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. As an individual I live my own life in such a way, something that is bigger than just the meager exploits of common human ambitions. That’s where the “overman” comes from, expecting more of yourself than just the primitive attempts at basic living, but to do everything in your life as if it were a legendary status. So it is great to see that those types of people are finding success these days instead of being held down by some pretense of social construct. Those cracks have been forming in every field of endeavor for well over 100 years, and it is very exciting to see what having one finally live and work in the White House can do for people, and that wonderful new politicians like Warren Davidson on the national level and George Lang at the Ohio level, are emerging under a flag of winning that people just haven’t experienced before.

A lot of people over the weekend tried to put their finger on the issue, really of what happened during the third week of January 2020 in America with a president who has a personality that is bigger than the news cycles and the top stars of Hollywood and within the networks. It obviously bothers them that they can’t match his efforts, but I would say that the fault is entirely theirs. They have simply set the goals for themselves too low, and their lives have been too meek to compete with President Trump, that even with all the vast resources of the federal government to utilize, they have not been able to hurt him at all politically. They may have kept his influence from spreading to those who have already voted otherwise. If not for their efforts, President Trump may have 90% of the country behind him currently. He may actually be the first president in American history who is truly a president to all people no matter what their political backgrounds. There were some bad mayors in the White House at that meeting, and Trump treats them all very fairly and always above the line, which is consistent with his business background. I think most successful business people are good at finding what’s best about people, even if those people don’t yet see it in themselves. Its not a bad thing to call them out and to try to push them into greatness, even if they insist on being sticks in the mud. Optimism is good for business, and now its also good for politics and the effects are now exploding onto the scene.

And to think how much President Trump has endured and yet stock prices on the Dow are hovering at 29,000. Trump was the first president in American history to speak at the famous March for Life that occurs every year. I mean how could anybody not be for life? Certainly, a positive person like President Trump wants to see every life have a chance at something great for themselves, especially those being born. How could any politician put their name next to a death cult of abortion and try to sell it to women as a right to be a murderer? Yet that is how it has been, and presidents were so terrified to be pushed under on the media cycle to even appear to challenge Roe v. Wade that they fear women may not vote for them in an upcoming election. President Trump however didn’t just make himself that first president to so publicly speak in favor of such a pro-life position, but its just one of the big things he did that day, and that is pretty much every day in his administration. He is an amazing character of significant achievement and like any overmanwarrior, he is not content with those efforts, but is always looking for the next win. Lesser people who don’t have such high goals for themselves simply can’t touch him. Look at how pathetic Adam Schiff was in the senate trying to use 24 hours of legal banter to make a case for impeachment only to look like a loser who farted in a corner and then tried to blame it on everyone else.

I know how hard Warren Davidson works in my district and I feel privileged to have him as an option for representation. Not that competency should be unjustly rewarded, its expected, but all too often we end up with hacks like Adam Schiff in federal positions, and those people are really struggling with the influence leadership of President Trump because they can’t keep up. All they can do is yell at the bus that has come and gone leaving them on a street corner of philosophy with all the rest of the garbage that has refused the call to be better than they were yesterday. In Trump’s America, everyone should strive to be more than they were even five minutes ago. He has lived his life that way and now as a President, he is showing what such a person looks like. Most of us, a majority, love it and will continue to support it well into the future. And that is unique to our times and is a growing movement that I relish. I have never enjoyed watching the news so much than I have from the day that this president was voted into office in November of 2016. He is simply too big to stop and the world knows it. And that big concept thinking is now giving a voice to other big thinkers, like Warren Davidson, and George Lang to become more than they ever could before, which is probably the most exciting thing that nobody is talking about. For a change its not the nobody’s who are shaping our lives. It’s the winners, and this is what it feels like, which is a great and welcomed condition. These times are for winners, and President Trump is the embodiment of the Carly Simon song, “Nobody Does it Better.” And we are all benefiting from it. Trump is the best, and the world is coming to understand it, even his enemies.

Rich Hoffman

Lakota Alums Complain about EdChoice: School superintendents show they aren’t anything like CEOs, they just don’t have the skills

“I’m OK with choice and options for your kids. I’m not okay with public tax dollars going to the private schools,” said Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota Schools in reaction to this year’s expansion of Ohio’s EdChoice program. And across town at Hamilton City School’s Mike Holbrook the former Lakota principal and complainer-in-chief who is now the superintendent there, he’s back to complaining about money because this EdChoice challenges his district which has a report card of a “C” into making better decisions instead of just continuing to ask for more and more budget to fund failure. These Lakota school alums have spent some time lately complaining that the Ohio voucher program is getting more aggressive, which I have always said that it would, and its forcing them to control their budgets better, and they just don’t like it. I find their statements amazing because after all these years, we have been told that a school superintendent is like a CEO at a public school. Yet all they really have done is lobby for more money. Anybody can do anything with infinite amounts of money to work with, but only in public schools is it assumed that more money gets better results. Yet in Hamilton City and at Lakota Schools, that clearly is not the case. Those districts are not getting A+ grades and we pay them fortunes. So why not attach the state funding to children and allow competition to make everyone better? A CEO would certainly understand that, and these guys show in their statements on this EdChoice debate that they are clearly not up to the task.

This is what happens to a governing body when they are allowed to inflate their budgets with union contracts and overpay their staff without a funding model that lives within the scope of their resources. I have written about Mike Holbrook before when he was just a Lakota principal, you can see his comments after a levy defeat by clicking here. He has a long history of complaining about money, which public schools have allowed to be the role of superintendents. These guys want respect and to be treated as top managers, but they don’t want to do the work. They coddle the teacher’s union during contract negotiations and drive up their costs then expect taxpayers to bail out their failure. Hamilton certainly isn’t anything to be proud of with their “C” grade report card. But Lakota isn’t much better, and we did pass a levy in 2013 after a lot of debate, and guess what. They did just what I said they would, they gave the money to the teachers in the form of raises and performance went down. The school’s performance worsened. Paying top dollar for the so-called best teachers did not promise Lakota an A+ report card, and it should have.

The best way to secure the best scores is with vouchers, where tax money is attached to the kids. If parents don’t like the school, they should be able to take their tax money and pick another school. And if the schools want to be in business, they need to do a better job. That is the job of a CEO, to make sure that parents want to send their kids to their schools, and to make themselves that choice. They need to work at it, and if you have a six-figure income, that is your job to figure out guys. These token superintendent jobs were never intended to be levy cheerleading positions where you just spend and spend and spend and have guaranteed security due to the kinds of people living in your district. You should want to work for better kids, better parents, and better results. Not some state definition of success, but one that is market driven

.

Senator Bill Coley, whom I’ve known for a long time and who cares about this voucher issue a great deal, tried to explain it to these superintendents in ways they might understand. The school district still has tax money coming in from every home and business and those values are continuing to appreciate, the revenue continues to increase every year in an area like Butler County. What’s the problem? Well, the problem is they have gotten used to not having to manage the money. That’s the issue. They are used to it always being there and most of the problems have been solved with coffee talks. Schools like Lakota took away busing to save money. Parents have gotten used to driving their kids to school. So why wouldn’t they just drive their kid to school somewhere else if they had a choice? And why should Lakota get all their money just because that student lives in the district? If the money is for education why shouldn’t that money follow the student, and the performance that the customer expects?

Of course, we all know the answer, public schools and their labor unions depend on these fixed numbers to manage their collective bargaining agreements. But wouldn’t the unions get what they want with this EdChoice? Teachers would get smaller class sizes due to declining enrollment in failing schools, those only getting “Bs” and “Cs” are failing based on marketplace analytics. If parents want the best for their students, that would be an A+ on the report card. If a district can’t get that, get rid of the teachers and get better. Oh, you can’t do that because the union contract won’t allow it. Well, there is your problem and so long as the tax money is locked to the school, not the student, we will continue to fund failure.

Only by having such a competitive element, such as EdChoice will school superintendents be forced to do the job they were hired to do in the way that schools need to do it. The word “public” assumes that there is some community right to money and the education of kids. We have seen over the last century that public education is not the best way to teach a kid, and parents who understand that private schools are clearly better for children are already paying for that improvement. Why should their tax money go to appeasing failure? But as Senator Coley has said, Lakota will still get their money, so will Hamilton. They’ll lose a little but they’ll also lose some class size. Everyone should be happy. Property values continue to go up in this Trump economy. A CEO would understand how to make those elements work, but apparently all the Lakota alums want to do is complain that they don’t have enough.

Any real CEO of an organization would love to have the problems of these public schools, they have guaranteed income, they have nice new buildings, and they have sports programs to distract the base and keep team building exercises active in the community. It’s a dream job for anybody with half a brain so it is extremely disappointing to see these guys crying like babies. Manage your contracts, let the complainers leave with their poison to other districts because it hasn’t helped your report card anyway and pull up your bootstraps. Don’t ask for more money with levies because that’s lazy, work with what you have. And work to be better and to make yourself an EdChoice destination instead of a repellant. And if you can’t, cut your losses and be happy being a “B” or “C” player in the world. That’s life. The trend is in choice, choice in entertainment, choice in food, choice in government, and especially choice in education.

Property values unlike what people may have thought ten years ago are not so intricately linked to the public school in their districts. They are linked to choice, the kinds of jobs there are, the entertainment options, the overall quality of life. Most people in Lakota don’t even know that there are football games on Friday nights. They could care less; Netflix has all the options they need and the carryout down the road has dinner. I would suggest to these superintendents that they start acting more like the CEOs they want to believe they are instead of union stooges padding the way for continuous contract increases to their labor rates. Choice in performance will demand them to get with the program, EdChoice is just the beginning.

Rich Hoffman

Candice Keller Should Know Better: George Lang is the most honest and toughest opportunity for the 4th District Senate seat

I must admit to being extremely disappointed in Candice Keller as she has been stoking her supporters against George Lang by bringing up the Dynus scandal that moved through Butler County politics a decade ago or so. That event which involved the company Dynus trying to win a business alignment to bring in high speed networks into the I-75 corridor, which involved many politicians from John Boehner, Bill Coley and Butler County auditor Kay Rogers, who was sentenced to two years in prison for her role in the effort, was a tough period for area Republicans. A very aggressive prosecutor for the Justice Department wanted to go after people close to John Boehner because he was poised at the time to be the next Speaker of the House, so the prosecution meant to take a stab at Butler County politics which was, and remains a hot seat of Republicans throughout the country. It was crazy lunatic assistant U.S. Prosecutor Jennifer Barry who wanted to go after George Lang for testimony he gave in relation to the prosecution of Orlando Carter from Dynus on eight different accusations. She tried to make the case that he lied in that testimony on those eight accounts and she was pushing 5 years of prison. George was found not guilty on all accounts, even with the FBI and Barry going after him with all the power the government had, and the jury deliberated for a short time and found him not guilty. I would expect that Keller would see how closely this case was just like that modern one against Trump, and that it wasn’t a scandal at all, but a hit job going after one of John Boehner’s good friends, and a hot target for higher office himself, and the government was poised to take George out at all costs.

I have supported Candice Keller, even when Sheriff Jones showed a lack of support for her. There is a lot I agree with her on, she is likely one of the types of people who are readers of my blog site. But she should know better than to take a cheap shot at George Lang as she has on her Facebook page. She knows the Dynus case was completely a hit job which involved a measly little payment of $100,000 that the prosecutors wanted to call a “kickback” which is equable to the many attempts to twist the Ukrainian phone call into an impeachable offense against Trump. Its all the same game and she knows it. To try to rip down Lang to prop herself up is not a good idea, especially if she wants a crack at one of those higher offices in the future. I understand that its politics, but George isn’t the kind of guy to target, let me tell you why.

I met George during this period where he was worried as hell about getting dinged jail time if a jury of his peers would have decided otherwise. It was costing him a personal fortune to defend himself, which was the point. He knew he was innocent, but it was terrible to be in such a position where his life and fate were not in his hands, it was in the hands of the court. He had a couple of kids getting ready to go to college and there was a lot of uncertainty at that time about what would happen in his life. His wife Debbie was so solid that she and he earned my respect for the rest of all of our lives. She was so graceful under pressure, and so was he, really. I admired how well they handled all that tremendous pressure. You can really judge a person’s character by how well they are under pressure, and I saw the guts of the Lang family up close during that trial and will always admire them for it.

At that time I was pulled into the IRS scandal as one of my personal friends became a direct target of the Obama White House due to his Tea Party leadership. I was looked at due to my connection and it was quite insulting, and an obvious hoax against all of us who were supporting the Tea Party movement. For me it was my part in supporting the Liberty Township Tea Party that caused them to dig into my life. Then a year after George’s perjury trial, after the FBI essentially turned him inside and out looking for anything and everything they could think of to bust him on, I went through an experience of my own after all my successful WLW radio broadcasts had been keeping the Lakota levy addicts from passing a tax increase on property owners in both Liberty Townships and West Chester. I went through a smear campaign organized by Joan Powell and many others from Lakota and executed by Michael Clark from the Cincinnati Enquirer. Now, to be honest, I expected them to take a shot and I was ready for it. But to see the bullet come for your head confirming what you think will happen was a different matter.

I was angry, I’m still mad about it. I will never get over it because the attempt by them was so obvious. What they went after was different than what George went through, but instead of jail time, they were targeting my reputation which of course has financial implications and other things. They went after me in a very personal way and they didn’t care what it did to me. It was another example of a political hit job to take out opposition to the plans of government whether it’s a public school looking for unlimited taxes to pay their labor unions, or it’s a shot at John Boehner through his friends to curb his enthusiasm for reform as Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third most powerful public office in the country. It’s all politics, and it is ruthless. Not for the weak, that’s for sure.

For those who remember my name was on the front page of all the newspapers at the time and on all the radio broadcasts trying to paint me as a crazy Republican sexist. My event was a counter punch no different than what Trump does now on Twitter only then it was new. Nobody had seen anything like that before, so they didn’t know what to do with it. I bounced back with no problem but right after the event I held a super-secret meeting with my Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom supporters who work a lot of issues behind the scenes. Our meeting was at a local LaRosa’s and it met a lot to me to see that everyone believed in the effort as much, if not more than ever. Well, one person came and he didn’t need to, because at the time, I was politically toxic—the way that regular people measure such things. That person was George Lang. I had a picture taken at the time to reflect on it in the years to come and guess who took the picture—it was George. I thought it was best that he not be in the picture because he was still building up his reputation after his own perjury case. George didn’t care though, he was happy to be in the picture if I wanted him to be, and that told me a lot about George Lang. Sure, he has always wanted to be in a higher office. But in the trenches, to his very gut, he stands by people through thick and thin and is one of the most honest people I know—which is why I call him a friend to this very day. So I’m not happy about Candice Keller trying to prop herself up at his expense. George may be the guy to beat, but you can’t lie about him. George may be the most honest and vigilant politician I’ve ever known, and I’ve known a lot of them.

I haven’t told these stories before, not to this detail because people didn’t really have context to understand just how dishonest our government is. The hit job against George, an attempt to put him in jail and drain his finances to let John Boehner know that no matter how much power he gained in the House of Representatives, that the government would know where his friends lived, and they would suffer. Look at all the people around President Trump, they are going to jail or being harassed in precisely the same manner. And I got my own taste of that scandal and felt the sting of it up close. I will forever be angry about it, and George was hit much harder than I was, and his attitude is far more forgiving. I would expect Candice to play fair because she should understand how the game is played, and she says she does. But if she did, she wouldn’t have tried to use the Dynus scandal against Lang. Because that’s no different than trying to impeach Trump over the Ukrainian phone call, or the phony Russian case with the FBI actually planting evidence to prosecute him with. What the Department of Justice tried to do to George Lang was no different. And because George and his wonderful wife Debbie held up so well under the pressure is exactly why he should be the next senator of Ohio in the 4th District. I can speak to his character which I would challenge is at the top of any public office, even when politics was ugliest and jail time was hung over his head just as Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn have had to endure, just for knowing the President. George Lang didn’t waver, didn’t let his knees buckle, and he came out of it stronger than ever and when he calls you a friend, he does not play politics. He is just an honest person who can walk through the fires of hell and never even frown when the pressure is greatest. That’s what we should all expect in a senator anywhere, especially in Ohio.

Rich Hoffman

Fighting Bullies: At Thanksgiving Dinner its important to understand why you believe what you do

It’s that time of year where families get together for the big Thanksgiving dinner and of course navigating the political debates can always be a challenge so before doing so, its important to understand why you believe what you do, and what it is that you do believe as opposed to the raw talking points that come off Facebook or Fox News. My sister recently was frustrated with me when we were talking about busing at Lakota schools, where she just rationalized that I hate everyone. These are the types of results that often can come out of family get-togethers so before getting frustrated with the outcomes you need to know why you are conservative and to what degree those values are more important often than whether or not you leave the table of a family gathering with your relationships intact. I would say that its better to keep your values supported rather than to surrender them just to get along. However, there isn’t any use in having a fight that won’t go anywhere either. Usually at these kinds of things I sit quietly and just eat the food and offer any little contemporary dialogue that goes meaninglessly into the thoughts of oblivion. Family is important but surrendering who you are to have them shouldn’t be a requirement.

For me its never about conservative versus liberal, or Republicans opposed to Democrats, or Fox News against CNN. Being cast into the forge of political ideology created by the media makes things worse not better and the real reasons we believe what we do is often far more complicated, and a social order does not have the resources to deal with the true intellectual impact. With that said, my thoughts about most things are that I don’t like bullies and I hate even worse being type cast by any social order that seeks to separate our individual natures into categories that make it easier for them to bully any of us into forms of control that are only good for collective consciousness toward the Vico Cycle order of things, the vicious cycle that has followed all human lives since the beginning of time, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy then anarchy. Since day one of my birth to the present I have always hated bullies of any kind and have fought them at every chance. I have never accepted that yielding to a bully in any way is something I was ever willing to do, and that is the root of my political beliefs, and likely if you are reading this, you share that sentiment.

Bullying happens most of the time through peer groups, or friendships that occur early in our lives from people we’d like to trust such as, “I’ll be your friend if this….” Or “if you dress this way you can be in this group.” As I’m thinking of this, school days where we learn these behaviors come to mind. The athlete class typically dressed well on the Fridays of the big game with some cross-town rival which associated them as school aristocrats out doing important work within that culture. Kids of a lower class would then follow with their own versions of that reality down to the kids who start smoking and dressing grungy early in their life. Bullying would then herd most of the kids in school to seek the protection of one of those peer groups to begin associating themselves with something bigger. This is the beginning of creation of some variation of a liberal and it is forged out of bullying.

That is why most of us enter our adult lives bullied by a boss at work, or bullied by a school system over busing, or a teacher’s union. Or, an FBI that sought to tamper with the election of President of the United States and if you didn’t like it, then someone like Roger Stone would be arrested in the middle of the night and thrown into jail. Or Julian Assange as the founder of Wikileaks would stand up to the bullies of the media and political orders around the world and be made an example of so that others wouldn’t dare follow. When you start to think of things in this way and while you may be a Republican or a Democrat, it makes a lot more sense. For many, they only dared run to the Republican Party because they saw it as a safe place where bullies couldn’t get them, and maybe they’d get a chance to bully back for a change those who have been pushing them around most of their life. Most of the forces of our concern are the result of some bully in our lives. It could even be a parent who didn’t like the person you married, or a neighbor who doesn’t like the car you park outside your house that embarrasses them. Most of us feel we have the right to bully or be bullied depending on the forces at play and that leads to anxiety which usually gradually destroys us throughout our lives.

Speaking personally, my love of Star Wars can be traced back through a lot of blood. That film series which most of us agree is fun and entertaining is all about anti bullying. When I felt the bullies in my school trying to force me into some peer group I didn’t want to be in, I used to intentionally wear a Star Wars shirt to school to provoke a fight, which happened constantly. I remember one fight where I punched a kid into the back of the head sending him right into the principal’s office. It was vicious and bloody, but it was the true essence of the public-school experience. Yeah, I got into a lot of trouble over that and many other circumstances. And yes, people have lost their lives in these fights. But it was always worth fighting back against bullies. In the end, after going to court dozens and dozens of times and paying many thousands and thousands of dollars in court fees, attorneys, and damages, I am happy to say I have never accepted any results from a bully and I have Star Wars to thank for that because as a young person it worked for me in solving some of these complicated social issues. Star Wars is all about standing up to bullies and those who have caved into those pressures over their lives naturally are embarrassed by their efforts and will make fun of those who don’t want to follow that path in their own lives. When I talk about Star Wars as a break from these daily commentaries, its for this reason, to help people have some foundation in their lives to free their minds from the results of the bullies trying to impose on them.

That is why you should not worry about Thanksgiving dinner dear reader, and that is likely why you are a conservative to begin with, and why you like President Trump. You have learned to fight back against the bullies, even within your own families. It’s not necessary to rub their face in political ideology, or even to physically fight them. Bullies usually want something from you, so you don’t have to give it to them. That is your choice and the fight isn’t so much in changing minds, its in holding your ground. That should always be your focus. If they attack, that’s their problem. I will say from experience, vast amounts of it, that they won’t be ready for you to defend yourself, and that’s all that’s required. Don’t let them rationalize you into just having a political ideology or in enjoying some pop culture element that isn’t conducive to surrender toward bullying, just hold your ground and let come what may. Its not their approval after all that’s important, its whether or not you leave the dinner table intact as your own person, and all the things you were meant to be, as an individual.

Happy Thanksgiving!
Rich Hoffman