Mueller Shouldn’t be investigating a Crossword Puzzle: The massive arrests that need to be made in our government of criminals

I have to agree with Alex Jones on this whole Bob Mueller investigation issue.  After all, as I’m writing this and you are reading it, the first charges in this long Russian probe against Trump are about to be revealed, but if there were a real smoking gun, it would have been revealed over the summer. If the former FBI director had to look this hard only to come up with one silly name just for optics then there is nothing there.  But!  Mueller and his establishment politicians have just set an impossible standard for themselves and as they wonder why the Trump White House hasn’t said anything about it yet—it’s because they’ve all just hung themselves.  It wouldn’t have looked good if Hillary Clinton and many other people from the Democratic side of things went to jail after the election, because everyone would have then said that Trump was a tyrant.  So Trump has been playing things as cool as he can and letting things happen, and with just that patient pressure, the other side is bumbling over every loose stone in their path, and it’s pretty embarrassing to watch.

I’m not one who advocates violence over every little thing.  I always look for the non violent answer when there is one—and have done that over my entire life.  As some might point out, I did have a pretty violent past, well that’s because as you get older you get smarter if you do things right and I have many more options available to me as an older person intellectually than I did as a young person still learning about the world.  Instead of just having a hammer in the problem solving tool box I can use many more tools to solve problems—and watching Trump as president he has quite a nice tool box also.  He doesn’t need to do what people expect him to about anything, because he has so many more ways to solve problems without violence or traditional Beltway politics having time to react in a predictable fashion.  I’m sure if I had the opportunity to have a dinner meeting with Bob Mueller I’d like him and would find that he’s in an impossible position.  As a creation of the swamp, he needs to protect it because all the people he cares about in his life are also born and sustained by the swamp that Trump wants to drain.  I am sympathetic to that position.  But I would also say in the very next sentence that this is why we have the Second Amendment—to deal with just this specific kind of institutional failure.

When I wrote the other day that public service was not enough for me–whether it was a military record, a cop, or some ex-FBI director this is the reason.  Mueller was put on the investigation by all the same Republicans and Democrats who had their hand in creating that fake Trump dossier that we have all been talking about where supposedly Trump hired a bunch of prostitutes in Russia to piss on a bed that the Obamas had slept in while visiting.  With that cover story intact as a method of investigation the American intelligence gathering agencies were then justified in spying on the new president-elect looking for any dirt they could find before the new boss took office.  Obviously everyone was trying to cover their asses before their political opponent had a legal means to destroy their lives—which Trump has not been quick to do.  Smartly, he’s letting them destroy themselves, but nobody knew at the close of 2016 what to expect from the former reality television star.  So they abused their power to attempt to override a decision made by voters and the FBI has all kinds of dirty hands on the job. My direct experience with all positions of power are that people with a low intellect tend to abuse their authority and that just because they “serve” the public it isn’t enough to give them a free pass on everything in their lives.  I don’t care how long Comey or Mueller “served.”  I don’t care how long John McCain spent in a Vietnamese prison being tortured.  None of them get a free pass to be government thugs for the rest of their lives.  It only takes once to ruin a reputation so we must not fall in love with the easy patriotism of these people who hide villainy behind the mask of sacrifice.  There is often more to the story and to why they seek such power in the first place, and we must always be cautious in regard to them.

Mueller shouldn’t be investigating the number of letters in a cross word puzzle sold at an airport bookstore with all the serious crimes his name comes up in—like Uranium One. Mueller was the head of the FBI when that Uranium One deal was approved by the Obama White House and that is proof of definite Russian collusion with our Secretary of State at the time.  Mueller was involved and should be considered a witness, not an investigator.  He shouldn’t have the right in any form to apprehend anybody connected to the fake Trump case where a former campaign manager is being set up to be a fall guy to put attention on—while all the criminals who were really involved skate free.   If I were Paul Manafort and the Mueller investigation sent people to my home to arrest me for an obviously corrupt court system, there’d be a lot of people not going home that night, let’s just say that.  When institutions fail, and they certainly have here, Mueller has lost all his potential authority in his part of the cover-up of the real crimes.  And we can’t have any trust in those institutions again until a lot of people go to jail.  It’s one thing to be cooperative and let trusted members of law enforcement do their jobs.  But once that trust is lost, nobody in their right mind would allow themselves to be a political diversion while the real criminals roam free.  I mean these are not the days of Henry the VIII where he threw one of his ex-wives in jail because he wanted a new wife and created a false narrative so he could have sex with the new woman openly.  That’s what we’re talking about here with Clinton and Mueller with the assistance of the national media.  There are so many guilty people we really should be building a jail right now to hold them all in.  The disrespect for the law that they have all displayed mandates action and if we can’t trust the institutions to deliver it, then I would argue that is the reason for the Second Amendment.  Because without that threat, these vile people have nothing to fear from the people they rule over.

The abuse of our institutions is so over-the-top that many people just can’t believe it.  How could anybody be so evil, yet there they are.  And how somebody like Bob Mueller is in charge of any investigation is like putting the father of a killer as the primary gateway to collecting evidence to prosecute that same killer.  Then there is the timing, just as the Uranium One story kicked up a little dust suddenly now Mueller has a person to throw on the fire.  Give me a break!  I’m sure Mueller is somebody’s father and he’s somebody’s son.  Talking one on one with him, I’m sure there are good qualities that are worth knowing.  But as the head of an institution supposedly committed to justice, we are better off with the barrel of guns pointed at these bad guys, because they are dangerous—and they cannot be trusted.   For me all it takes is the continuation of the Russian story of collusion with Trump’s campaign.  I don’t think that was ever a story, but especially now with what we know about Clinton and her friends.  There is much worse there and Mueller is standing in the way of justice, not helping protect it.  That is a crime in and of itself—which is of course, unforgivable.  These are criminals who have been running our government and they don’t have the power to investigate or arrest anybody.  Given their intentions which are now obvious with Trump—to just make things up hoping to create some impeachment proceeding and erase the election of a person we put in place to fix all this mess—I don’t think they thought this thing through.  We’re not just going to go away.  If we can’t trust the legal system, then what is our next option?  I’ll tell you what I see.  I can see it in the holster sitting right next to my chair right now.  I’m not going to allow criminals to run my government.  That’s just not an option.   People like me voted for Trump because we knew all along that these government people were dirty.  But if they prevent our elected representative from doing their jobs—then what recourse do we have?  Surrender is not an option.  So what else?

They did this to themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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The Genie is out of the Bottle: Uranium One, the IRS, the fake Trump dossier–and we still have more wishes left!

The Genie is certainly out of the bottle now, and we still have a few more wishes  What’s happening now is everything I hoped for and more on Election Day of 2016.  If Donald Trump had not been elected we wouldn’t be seeing anything close to what we are now, and likely America would be over.  I said at the time that the idea of America may not have lived through the summer of 2017.  After all I had endorsed Donald Trump for president for precisely the reasons we are seeing today way back in 2015.  Donald Trump was saving America by standing against the tide of the criminal minded institutions using his own celebrity and wealth as leverage in a way that nobody had ever done before in world history.  Nobody knew what might happen—I had an idea, but there was no way to know what the impact might be until it happened.  Well, it’s all happening right now and the reach of villainy in our American institutions is presently unfathomable for many to deal with.   If I could have had any wish I wanted in 2015 when Donald Trump was tenaciously staying at the top of Republican polling disrupting all the traditional channels led by the Bush family and the vile Clintons, that Genie would have given me exactly what we are seeing now.

It was April 14th 2014 when what was left of the Liberty Township Tea Party met at the Elk’s Lodge to discuss the case against the IRS that the American Center for Law and Justice was conducting on our behalf against the IRS.  The Liberty Township Tea Party was one of the many targets of the IRS who had attacked those groups any way they could specifically on the 5013C status which was designed to slow down the movement and take the teeth out of reform which was sweeping the nation in 2012.  Establishment Republicans used the Tea Party from 2009 to 2012 to gain House and Senate seats, and they wanted their Party back.  Meanwhile Democrats were on their full assault toward socialism and they figured nobody was equipped to stop them.   While Republicans fought each other the Democrats were on a roll, and they controlled the Deep State emphatically.  We all knew it on that day in April at the Elk’s Lodge and all we had was essentially each other and some hope that if we did all the right things, things could come out well in the end.

I was in trouble for two videos I had done for the Liberty Township Tea Party.  Lucky for me I never do anything in politics that could be construed as payment.  When I do something “political” like this blog, or have dinner with a powerful politician money never changes hands.  I keep things as clean as possible.  It is often hard for investigators to believe that I’d do so much work for free, out of the goodness of my heart—because to their vantage point, nobody does anything like that.   Nobody just does things because it’s the right thing to do. But I do and soon after that fateful meeting Donald Trump would step out of his golden palace atop Trump Tower in Manhattan to essentially cast his resources into the fight for many of the same reasons—because it was the right thing to do.  We all knew then as we can see now that the IRS had been weaponized, but the media hardly covered the story and the Deep State had no fear of any of us, because they controlled all the politics, all the law, and all the money.  They figured that this little ACLJ lawsuit would just go away like so many things had in the past and they had nothing to worry about.

Well just this past week many things came to a boil and for those who resisted the efforts of the Deep State a turning point in that long civil war finally showed itself.  The IRS had to apologize for their behavior as the ACLJ had won their case and a very reluctant government institution had to rectify themselves ahead of the largest tax cut vote in the House which passed, in American history.  With the Dow Jones racing well over the 23,000 mark and Trump pinning down all the holdovers brilliantly forcing them to vote correctly on tax cuts, the IRS could do nothing but stand on the firing line and await their own terminations.  They had abused the American people and they had been caught and there was nothing they or their media cover could say to let them off the hook because an even bigger story was unfolding.   That is the story of the Washington Free Beacon funding the fake Trump dossier to stop him from winning the Republican nomination back in 2016.  That dossier would involve many Republicans and would unite politicians like John McCain and Hillary Clinton behind the common cause of stopping Trump any way they could and at the center of it all was the FBI director himself James Comey.  Comey of course would plot to completely let Clinton off her criminal charges during an election year to help her keep her footing—all which was highly illegal.  But if not for Trump being in the race there would have been no pressure on these people to do so much to reveal their inner workings.  These things would have remained hidden—which was what they all were counting on.

But even worse than that was the Uranium One deal.  That is the one where the Putin regime paid Bill Clinton $500,000 dollars for a single speech in Russia with the unannounced intention to secure U.S. government approval for its acquisition of Uranium One and with it tens of billions of dollars in U.S. uranium reserves.  This is the biggest scandal in the history of the United States, and it’s really too big to cover.  Normal people can’t get their minds around the level of treachery it takes to pull of something with this enormity.  But now we know why the Democrats were in such a hurry to try to create some scandal tying Trump to Russia.  Because they were the ones guilty of the act, not Trump—but they needed the light off them and onto someone challenging their Deep State control.  Yet in doing so they set their own standards for which they are presently choking—which is good.  Without Trump in the White House, this story would have gone nowhere and would have been covered by nobody.  It essentially involves the Obama administration in a very detrimental way as Hillary Clinton was running around the world selling access for personal enrichment and now they are all caught.

So what to do about all this, after all, can we put all these people in jail like they deserve?  To do that we’d have to put several former presidents in jail, many congressman, political candidates, attorneys, media personalities, former FBI directors—a whole lot of people who are guilty as Hell and now awkwardly exposed.   We knew it all along, but now we “KNOW” it.  Their downfall essentially started because they picked on the wrong people.  I mean seriously, the crap I had to go through just for two videos made for YouTube.  Not to mention the ordeal of the people who ran the Liberty Township Tea Party.  It took up a year of their time over nothing—meanwhile these scum bags were doing all this Uranium One activity and spending a lot of money to smear political opposition with fake stories and breaking many laws to obtain any information that could be used against people like Trump before they could ever throw their resources into the ring.   But now we know, and like I said, that Genie is still giving us wishes to grant.  And I have a feeling they will all come true in the weeks that come.

Rich Hoffman

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Trump and the Opioid Crises: Going beyond just saying no–there is nothing GOOD about drugs

 

And people wonder why President Trump is my guy.  How could they after that opioid speech that he and his wife gave on October 26, 2017? For them to declare war on the opioid addiction problem in the United States is yet another dream come true for me.  This is something I have been worried about for my entire life—including as a kid.  There’s nothing I care about more than this issue publicly.  Drugs used and abused in any way shape or form is something I have been against and have fought my entire life and I am very happy to see leadership coming out of the White House on this crises.  Boy, you can really see the villains by how they responded to what Trump said.  The people most guilty for the addiction problems in our nation currently are the same people who came out against this speech stating all kinds of garbage—such as—“who’s going to pay for it” and “that the president is looking for a diversion.”  Really?  Most Democrats are really disgusting people, knowing now that their party funded the dossier on President Trump—which John McCain sent an aide to get out of Europe and personally handed it to James Comey which turned out to be completely false and a political hit job against the future president.  Democrats now know that their party participated in real scandals with Uranium One directly involving Russia—not some made up story like what they have done with Trump.  And as Trump was competing his speech about opioids the IRS finally revealed that they had weaponized the tax collection government agency against conservative groups during 2010—which I was personally one of the targets attached to the Liberty Township Tea Party.  Those same Democrats actually had the nerve to come out against Trump’s speech on the opioid crises?  What a bunch of evil scum bags!

I have always been against drugs of any kind.  I have proudly never smoked pot even while all the people around me were falling apart because of it.  I was always the leader of my peer groups and I never ever endorsed the behavior—even during days when I ran around with some very rough people.  Everyone always knew where I stood on drugs—even alcohol.  I never endorsed intoxication of any kind.  I’ve always hated it—especially the drugs at the level of marijuana and up.  I never understood how a magazine, a movie, or a television show could even endorse such behavior indirectly—because drug use is evil.  Plain and simple.   What President Trump is talking about doesn’t take a lot of money compared to providing hurricane relief to our nation, or even building another battleship.  Fighting drug addiction is a common sense issue that everyone should be able to support no matter what the background because it’s that obvious.  Most of the essence of Trump’s speech is to not start addiction to begin with—and that doesn’t cost a thing.

At this stage in my life I’m a major employer, and I take it as serious business to supply jobs to people and help them find a good way to build their lives in a positive way with a job. I take that responsibility very seriously.  But do you know how many people you have to interview to hire say 30 people for multiple shift work?  The answer is very disturbing.  Think about it for a moment before I give you the answer.  Both of my daughters are in that Millennial age bracket just shy of 30 years old and they tell me all the time that all the people they know of a similar age is on some kind of drug.  Schools start the process by prescribing drugs to kids with hyper active minds—to slow them down to the rest of their class.  Doctors prescribe medicine for virtually everything, from a sore toe to back issues.  Most everyone my children know is on some form of depression medicine—which is likely the leading cause of this whole opioid epidemic.  You know how you stop depression?  Read a fu**ing book and build up your mind with positive thoughts—that’s how you prevent depression.  You don’t take some drug that makes you more dependent on some third-party to solve your problem.  So many people these days are on medicine for depression and the politicians are fine with it, because it puts money in their K-Street lobby firms.   Our opioid crises in 2017 is so bad that I think most people between the ages of 40 and 15 are on some kind of drug all the time.  The answer to my original question is that you need to speak to roughly 100 people to hire 30 and in an economy with 4% unemployment you have to work your ass off to do so.  The reason you have to talk to so many people is that most of them won’t pass the drug test and that is a major failure in our society.  It’s pathetic how people view drug use today–and that has been reinforced for them by their politics and entertainment culture—and it’s been devastating.

Even as a kid I would go to parties to meet girls and I’d see all these losers sitting around the living room watching MTV smoking pot.  In an upstairs room would be the music of Pink Floyd where kids were listening to The Dark Side of the Moon album and they were blasted in hazes of pot smoke that would creep out from under the door.  In the kitchen kids would be playing quarters and getting drunk off their asses for no reason at all, but to feel the joy of not having the responsibility to think.  Nice girls that I knew from school would be passed out on the floor with their pants off because people would take turns with their lifeless bodies and nobody back then thought anything bad about it.  On Monday those girls would be back to saying hi to people in the hall as if nothing had ever happened.  Nobody thought the girls were raped because everything had been done under the cover of intoxication—as if being drunk or stoned freed everyone of guilt for such a horrendous act.  I am proud to say that I never participated in any of that.  I was able to observe those types of things with a clear mind and it always disgusted me—and I have been fighting it for years with everyone I know.  No young person in my family, or anyone I have ever known period could mistake my position on opioids.  I don’t do drugs and I avoid them under conditions of even the worst pains—such as surgery.  Drugs do no good for anybody under almost every situation.

The government has made it so easy to get people addicted to drugs.  Most young people now are on some form of medical assistance program because they can’t afford insurance so the government actually solicits membership.   I am actually shocked by how many young people with kids are on these government programs, and every time a child has a problem of even a minor kind the parents rush the kids to the doctor where a drug of some kind is prescribed.  Once kids get used to turning to some drug to make them feel better they are ruined for life and will always seek drugs to solve their problems—whether it’s a drink at the end of a day to knock the edge off or a line of cocaine.  People learn to get hooked on drugs from an early age starting recreationally and that leads directly to addiction.  And it all serves to make people much less than they otherwise would be.  Drugs are terrible for the human race.

I have been personally forgiving of people who have abused drugs in the past but are looking to put all that behind them.  I’m happy to help them become better people if they’ll let me.  I have never abused drugs and for some people who is a problem because they can’t relate to me on a personal level.  And that’s fine.  I have never had a desire to know people so much that I had to surrender my personal ethics to associate with them.  I’ve lost a lot of friends over drugs.  I almost didn’t date my wife because she smoked cigarettes when I first met her, and I made it clear from day one that if she wanted to date me, she’d have to quit smoking.   She was attractive enough and interesting enough to help with that problem, but it was never OK with me.  I pushed for her to quit from the very first date and I’m still like that.  I’ve had a few nieces and nephews who started smoking, then started doing other things like smoking pot and I cut them off the moment I found out about it.  I stopped talking to them because for people to have access to me—which is something most people want because I’m an interesting person—they can’t do drugs and be losers in life.  I feel more strongly about that type of thing than most anything else in my life.  I would rather be alone in life completely than endorse drug use—and everyone who knows me understands that I have very high standards—especially in regard to drug use.

Trump shares many of my thoughts on drugs and he has from the beginning of his presidency.  When he told the story of his brother Fred yet again, and how Trump doesn’t even drink alcohol I can see in the president someone I can relate to.  The best way to fight the opioid epidemic isn’t with more money thrown at the problem.  It is to tell people to stay off the drugs in the first place—even the drugs the doctors prescribe.  Stay away from the pain killers.  Stay away from the depression medicine.  Stay away from the mind numbing stuff they want to give kids in school so that smart kids don’t outpace their classmates with hyper intelligence.  Stay away from the recreational drugs at parties.  Stop going out after work to get sloshed with mind numbing alcohol, just stop it all, and that will go a long way to making America a far better country than it is.  I fully support what Trump wants to do with opioids.  I’m behind it 100000000000%.  And anybody who is against the President in this case I would consider a domestic terrorist.  Because losing minds to drugs is the ultimate attack on the sanctity of the individual.  And I personal find it, and have always found it, to be personally a disgusting thing to observe that deserves a zero tolerance policy.

Rich Hoffman

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The Modern Notion of Good Management in Politics: Out with Bob Corker and Jeff Flake–in with Donald Trump–and many others

I guess it’s just sinking in to the mainstreamers, but a takeover has been afoot for a long time. How can I put this, let’s see, I come from a management background. The best managers if they are taking over a previous culture’s problems must approach the situation differently than if they were going to start from scratch. Building something from the ground up is much more fun than inheriting someone else’s mess. When you take something over you need to kind of sit back and see who does what for you—who’s loyal, who’s a problem and figure out how you can replace the bad people with good people following all the crazy rules that are out there these days in order to provide a positive margin index. In many ways that is what happens every time we elect someone new, we hope to put a manager in place who will fix the legacy failures of the previous administrations. Often however we find that the candidates who offer themselves don’t have much management experience, their backgrounds are more aligned with attorney skills, not management so they are clueless in how to solve the problems that we need them to tackle. Starting way back, people like me have been pushing the notion in politics of replacing candidates with an emphasis in legal opinion with people who are business savvy. That’s how people like Eric Canter were knocked out of their entrenched federal House seats and replaced with more value driven representatives. That is how Donald Trump ended up president. People know what needs to be done, and they are now voting with that knowledge intact. We don’t want someone to tell us everything is fine like some clawless CEO speaking to their panicky board of directors. We want someone who can get in there and take charge and actually change the culture using advanced management skills for the furtherance of the traditional American idea.

Understanding that trajectory of thought, Donald Trump is not splitting up the Republican Party threatening the House and Senate majorities. He is cleaning house of the losers and positioning winners to take over strengthening that majority. The Democrats have no threats out there of beating Republicans in their races and Trump knows it. So to get the right kind of Republicans to vote for his agenda Trump is removing the bad Republicans like Bob Corker and Jeff Flake from the mix. That is a great thing which is all part of the difficulties of management. The “Party” is not more important than the “individual” and currently Trump has been elected to “manage” the country’s affairs and specifically the do-nothing Republican Party. Like any good manager he started off nicely, treated everyone fair to get a feel for them. He watched and was patient, and he took notes. Once he realized who the bad Republicans were, he went to work to pressure them off the team—and that is exactly what he should do.

When this happens in business it always hurts somebody’s feelings. People always think they are worth the most of anybody, so being a manager is difficult because many times you must deflate the impression people have about themselves. But before you can see it, you have to let them be themselves around you so that they can reveal themselves as part of the problem. Once you know that, you then must take action to remove them from your “team.” This is often not easy because there are many laws which do not favor management and protect bad people. As a skilled manager you must discover some creative way to follow all the rules, but still get rid of the bad people so that good people can thrive.

Really bad managers let the power of their position go to their heads. Their first reaction is to let everyone know who the boss is regardless of the talent level of the people they are dealing with. They assume that all people are equal and thus can be interchanged easily with each other like Lego bricks. This is the typical approach of traditional politicians. They come into office as lawyers looking for a steady income—but they don’t really understand how people work, so they can’t manage the people around them and make good decisions. That leads them to following the previous administration for guidance who also made all the same mistakes and eventually you end up with just another idiot barking out orders and using the power of institutionalism to scare everyone into following those orders. In companies, that is when they start to die. In politics, that’s when lobbyists get the ear of the politician. Since voters often don’t respect such people, the politicians find the seductive respect given by the lobbyists validating, so that becomes their new influences and that’s when you end up with losers like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker. The reason those guys have such bad polling is because now people see they have a choice and they aren’t just voting for the guy with the “R” next to their name. Voters are looking for managers like Trump—and that will only increase the seats that Republicans hold. It won’t lessen them.

Of course all the insiders know this already, but they hope that the media will sell to Republicans the notion that there is a risk of losing the majority in 2018. Nothing could be further from the truth. After the tax reform passes and the stock market goes into the Near Year at previously unfathomable highs—nobody is going back to the Democrats. People aren’t stupid. They know how to solve these modern problems, they were just looking for the right people vote into office. The moment they get them, they are putting them in place—and they will be more traditional Republicans who have an understanding of management—not the kind who have failed us in the past.

Good managers are almost always hated, and they are used to that. People are always nice to your face of course because they wish to hide what they are really about. But good managers understand that trait and are able to function well without the approval of their peers. Being a good manager is a very lonely path—there are very few people out there who can tell you that you’re doing things right—because they don’t know. Often times they are either part of the problem or unwittingly helping the problem be successful, so they have no advice to give that is worth anything. Good managers function best alone taking in as much information as possible and making decisions based on their experience, and natural instincts which cannot be plotted on a Six Sigma graph or taught in college. You either have it or you don’t. You may be able to develop it with experience, but nobody can give it to you. You couldn’t buy good management ability for millions of dollars of education—don’t let anybody fool you. It comes from someplace beyond our terrestrial understanding and the only access to it is very hard work. Trump certainly has those traits. Many other people do as well, and those are the new fashion in politics.

Without question the old politicians are looking at these new politicians who are coming in as skilled managers in some cases, and they hate them. They will whisper to the media the way workers in a place of business might whisper gossip hoping to stop a head slicer from discovering how useless they really are and ending their jobs. People hate Trump because he’s good at his job, not because he’s bad. Smart people understand why there is gossip and anger about Trump. Stupid people listen to the gossip, and they show themselves to be part of the problem. That is why good managers are needed, so they can act independently of the noise to do the work they were assigned to do. We tried the other way, and maybe the political class thought it would go on forever. But that was never the plan. Like good managers, the voters waited and watched and when they had their chance, they acted. And that trend isn’t going to stop—it’s going to grow.

Rich Hoffman
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Trump’s Draft Deferments: Military service doesn’t always make for the best patriots–why sacrifice is a stupid value system

I don’t think it’s very American to die for one’s country. That is actually a very stupid thing to even suggest. To even say such a thing indicates that the state is superior to the individual and that institutionalism is to have more merit than personal sovereignty, and that’s just not right. I have never been willing to “die” for my country. My life is worth way too much. But, ask me to kill for my country and turn me loose to do so, and I’d have no problem facing down a 1000 villains if I could eliminate them without getting into trouble legally. But I would never engage an enemy and expect to die. I would expect to kill, but not to personally die—that’s just not in my thinking. Sacrifice is a stupid thing because the essence of human life is creation, and the villains of our existence are those who wish to deter creation in favor of stagnant barbarism—which has always been a force for evil the entire span of human evolution. If there were a military draft today, I would do everything I could to defer from it, because I just am not the kind of person who follows orders—from anybody. I’m happy to give them, but being drafted into the military to take orders from some institutional representative who has been instructed to break me into an order taking soldier was never an option for me.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/donald-trump-john-mccains-war-words-military-service/story?id=50657588

The news media seeking everything they can to defer the unfolding scandal involving the Clintons and the Uranium One deal with Russia has made a lot about President Trump’s call with the widow of a slain soldier killed recently in Niger, and even Senator John McCain’s comments about the days of the draft and eluding to the 5 deferments that Donald Trump had as a young man. The draft was a terrible period in American history, it was a very un-American thing to do, and for those who think we should have compulsory service of our young people into the military as the Israelis do, that would be a bad idea too. I would say that the most optimal path a young person could take is to develop themselves individually as much as possible, and avoid the college and military route if they are smart enough, and self-disciplined to carry themselves to success without yielding to institutional influence. The reason is that once a young mind is chained to some form of institutionalism, their minds are altered forever. Now of course that path isn’t for everyone, but often the best and brightest Americans who emerge from genius evolve without the guidance of institutionalism. As Americans we should always be looking for our brightest and best and should not be so willing to sacrifice them to the fires of evil wherever such threats arise. The expectation that lives lost are good for fueling America is just stupid.

I understand the position President Trump is in, and even General Kelly. When you are in charge of an institutional order, you have to protect the function of it, and the American military is a very important element to global politics. When soldiers die, it is good to respect their lives in the scope of a higher cause. But in reality, the notion of sacrifice for one’s country implies that what matters most is not the individual life of the soldier, but the sacrifice they make for the sake of everyone—and that is an old way of human thinking that is grossly outdated and is specifically very European. As I said, if I were given the task by my country to kill as many bad guys as possible, I’d do it in a second if I could be free of prosecution for the task. If I had to engage a 1000 losers on some strip of sand in the Middle East and it was only me or perhaps a few other similar people, I’d formulate a plan and would expect to be successful without losing my life. Embracing death is no way to live life. Some people might say that they are not Superman, so such expectations are unrealistic. I would say that being American means you should always think that way, or support people who do.

There is a lot of talk right now about the Battle of New Orleans, because President Trump reminds a lot of people of Andrew Jackson, and there is a new book out about Jackson and the famous American saving battle from the War of 1812. That battle along with many in the Revolutionary War, and even many in the Civil War, most of the most heroic acts were conducted by people with very limited military experience. Even the famous pirates of the Caribbean, the real ones like Henry Morgan and many others had great strategic victories against multiple odds of fearless institutionalism—soldiers perfectly willing to die for their various countries were often easily slaughtered by the loose acting pirates—so I would argue that being a soldier or having a regimented military is not the best thing in military victory. There are a lot of good people who served in the various armed forces, and I tend to like those people because they learn values in their service that is conducive to patriotism. But I would also argue that learning to take orders not based on merit, but on rank is a major problem in American thinking, making those people drags on our economic development instead of assets. I would also argue that the ability to think outside the box from one individual is more powerful than a whole army of compliant soldiers. Again, the value should always be in creation, never in sacrifice.

I listened to General Kelly defend Trump’s handling of the widow suffering from the ambush in Niger and while I admired his determined resolve—his constant talk about “dying for his country and the soldier knowing what he was getting into” disturbed me. I am all for an all-volunteer army where knowing what you are getting into is an option. I never did sign up for military service even thought I thought about it a lot. I wouldn’t have minded the aggressive parts of military life, but the structure was something I couldn’t have done. Even in sports I was like that, I always wanted to be the head coach, never just a player—and I wasn’t one that coaches found they could teach—because I was a know it all. I always have been. In that regard I didn’t play sports either in a structured organized way. But should our nation institute a draft where I didn’t have a choice, I would look for a way to defer any way possible. I could not surrender my life to the institution of military command under any circumstances. I would expect in any American system a better way to find soldiers for fighting than a draft. Just the concept of it is so European. Being compelled into service with the threat of imprisonment just isn’t motivating to a self-directed individual functioning from their own inner compass. The military is not built for such people.

Ironically this year my wife and I were both picked for jury duty, and I had a hard time with the language of the letter they sent me telling me the dates I was scheduled for. I’m the kind of person who would love to help on a jury to judge my peers. But I was instantly turned off by the way the letter started, “YOU ARE COMMANDED TO APPEAR.” Excuse me, I thought, who are these fools who think they can command me to do anything? I don’t bow to the flag waving merits of any institution. But if you thought my reaction was bad you should have heard my wife who called the Clerk of Courts office to complain about that first sentence. She and I didn’t plan it, or really talk about it, but when she opened her letter she immediately picked up the phone and unloaded on the people working at the court. I’m sure those people thought they had heard every excuse for why people wanted to get out of jury duty, and that is why they threaten people the way they do—to get people to participate in the system with the threat of imprisonment. That’s essentially what the draft was, which turned out to be a massive mistake. Our military went from an all voluntary affair to one of compulsion. My wife is like me, she would love to help a court with their cases, but the moment she learned that she could be imprisoned for not appearing she was PISSED OFF. It took away her natural enthusiasm for doing a community service and replaced it with a threat from the state that assumed ultimate power over the individual. Many people just assume that this is acceptable, because they have integrated John McCain’s soldier’s sacrifice creed into their daily life, that the whole is greater than the unit and that everything should subject itself to the authority of institutionalism. That’s not how it’s supposed to be, it never was. So this idea that patriotism is equal to self-sacrifice for the state is idiotic, and preposterous. There is no greater good than the merit of individual action and an adherence to the values exhibited by the morality of productive thought. None of that comes from any form of institutionalism, and therefore not by any work with the armed services. While they are valuable, and often good for young minds seeking direction in life, work as a veteran is not an automatic ticket toward lifelong merit status. Only good conduct can demand such a thing, and that conduct only comes from judgment on individual behavior within the context of performance.

Just because John McCain was a veteran captured and tortured during the Vietnam War, it doesn’t make him beyond judgment. The media that hates Trump and wishes that institutionalism could forever rule the minds of mankind—because that is what they need to survive—hopes that McCain will be the example that all should follow in sacrificing themselves to bigger causes—relative to their view-point. Trump has always been a self-absorbed person so being drafted into service where unfocused young people were expected to throw away their lives at the command of their “superior” just wasn’t an option. It would never be an option for me because I don’t acknowledge anyone as my superior. My life means more to me than surrendering it to the state for the causes of the state. To expect to die for my country is an unrealistic line of thought because honestly, I could do a better job on my own. Give me the weapons and let me kill the enemy, and I could do so and still be home for dinner. But to be told to run into gunfire and to be blown up on a landmine under orders given by some ranking leader just isn’t my bag—and it wasn’t Trump’s either. I don’t blame him at all from deferring. Choosing to do something isn’t the same as doing it under the duress of the state.

I would gladly run into a firefight if I could be free to win. I would always expect myself to be successful no matter what the odds were. But to be a pawn to the politics of statism is not a value system that should be attributed to Americanism. It is currently and that is leading to all kinds of confusing emotions. But the bottom line is that not serving as in the military forces is not a liability. The only people who think in such a way are those who need the structure of institutionalism to function responsibly in life—and many people are that way. But a gifted few do best on their own, and they are the ones you want to take orders from if you were so inclined. John McCain isn’t considered a better leader because he served in the armed forces and was tortured by the enemy. It was Trump who won the presidency because he took a different path in life—one driven by his own merit and if he had been drafted and accepted authority in any way—he wouldn’t be the kind of person who would eventually win the presidency. Trump doesn’t need to have been a soldier to oversee soldiers. He just needs to have a good mind—which he does. But better yet, a mind forged from his own unique individuality—which is what makes the best leaders known to mankind.

Rich Hoffman

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Ann Becker for West Chester Trustee: Likely, the best candidate voters will ever vote for in their entire lives

Ann Becker and I don’t always agree on everything.  For instance she is a lot more libertarian than I am—politically.  She has supported school levies in the past whereas I likely never will.  And Ann Becker is not a big fan of guns—where I am.  Guns are a big part of my life—if I don’t have the smell of gun powder on my hands at some point in a day, that day is not a good one for me.  I shoot like some people golf—it’s all about ballistics, velocity and technique to take something carefully machined and crafted to perfection then launching a bullet toward a target successfully.  And that’s before the discussion of the Second Amendment.  Ann understands the right to bear arms, and she’s certainly no gun grabber, but she just isn’t a fan in using them.  She’d rather do other things.  Yet, Ann Becker is the most conservative and politically pure person I know, and I know quite a few people at different levels of occupation.  She is a real treasure in political thought and even with the differences I mentioned, Ann and I have never had a fight we couldn’t work out with a little talking—and that is what makes her such a wonderful candidate for the West Chester Trustee seat that needs filled from the exiting George Lang.  Here are some highlights of Ann’s debate performance at the West Chester Tea Party Candidate Forum conducted on October 17th 2017.

I wouldn’t support Ann just because I consider her a dear friend.  I also have a lot of friends and I wouldn’t recommend most of them for any kind of political office where the sanctity of the people were at risk.  So I’m not just talking Ann up because I like her.  She is just simply the best person for the job.  I would trust Ann with a pot of gold during a hurricane, and would be certain when I returned that all of it would still be there.  Ann is the kind of person who is sincere to her very core and she functions from those beliefs—and is extraordinarily ethical.  Perhaps her best skill is in her ability to coral people together who have incredibly different points of view and to get them to do what needs to be done.  While she always has great emotion in the things she does, she is remarkably able to keep the emotion out of her decisions and to allow the facts of a matter to evolve into a logical conclusion.

For those who are fans of the Brian Thomas radio show each weekday morning on 55KRC you already know Ann as “Lady Liberty” where she does regular radio segments talking about all the local happenings in the Cincinnati area regarding Constitutional studies and Tea Party oriented events.  She was not just president of the West Chester Tea Party for a while, but she was the President of the Cincinnati Tea Party as well. Over the years she has successfully been involved in many political activities extending from southern Ohio all the way north of Columbus.  Ann Becker is one of the most politically influential people in this part of the Midwest and she does it without pretentiousness or zeal.  She gets involved in so many activities because she functions from passion.  West Chester would be very lucky to have a person of her caliber as a trustee.  It takes a sometimes very patient voice to listen to all the different members of a community and try to bring everyone together toward a satisfactory conclusion—which is often not possible.  But Ann always tries and doesn’t let discouragement taint her optimism—and that is a very special trait.  Her vast experience at managing so many different personalities within the Liberty Movement, from the hard-core Constitutionalists, to the casual free speech supporter—Ann has routinely walked that fine line between success and failure successfully—so this West Chester Trustee seat is her next logical transition.   Currently Ann is the State Central Committee representative for the West Chester area which has proven to be an extremely important endeavor.  It’s also the reason she is able to be one of two candidates officially endorsed by the Republican Party.

I’ve worked with Ann on a number of things over the years and our relationship has always been productive.  As I said, we don’t always agree.  I am good at dealing with people of opposing views in spite of what many think, and Ann is also very good at corralling ideological differences without losing her moral compass.  In spite of being on different sides of a number of issues within the spectrum of conservatism, she and I have never left each other’s company mad.  So I am 100% certain she has what it takes to deal with the most complaining voices that a township trustee would have to listen to, all the while preparing for the most extravagant Republican fundraisers with all the powerhouses ready to write checks because Ann is sincere with everyone.  There is no fakeness to her, she can sit down with the guy who is upset about traffic patterns on Cincinnati Dayton Road and be completely fair and caring to him, then get on the phone to the area socialites to coordinate the more communal aspects of GOP occurrences and never lose a beat.   As simple as that might sound it’s incredibly difficult for most of our adult population to be good at those extreme tasks and still function from a place of sincerity.  When dealing with people everyone thinks there concerns are the most important things in the world—so it takes incredible skill to make the people you deal with feel as though you are giving them all of your attention, even though you may be pulled in a million different directions.  The more people in your life the harder it is to give everyone individual attention with complete sincerity.  A lot of times politicians may be so enamored that the socialites call them for help and they forget about the guy worried about traffic issues.  To the public those politicians become just another out-of-touch aristocrat.   Yet Ann is that unique type of person who can give everyone equal attention and leave them thinking that she really cares—because in all reality—she does.

Sometimes voters go to the booth to punch the name of someone they don’t know, and they can feel like they are taking a chance on someone just because they have an “R” next to their name and figure they don’t have any other options.  But finally with Ann Becker they do have an option for someone who is uniquely more qualified than anybody they may vote for in their entire lives.  Ann Becker is the most trustworthy person to maybe ever run for office.  While she was very successful in running the Trump campaign from within Butler County she started off that 2016 election supporting Ted Cruz.   She wasn’t a big fan of Trump at the start of the campaign, but as the facts came out of what kind of person Donald Trump would be Ann put aside her differences with his personality and focused on the policy improvements that would come from a Trump White House.  Ann played a big part in why Ohio averaged 10% over Hillary Clinton in the whole state when the final votes were counted—the ground game was good and the right Republicans were involved in helping Trump while the Kasich Republicans rebelled.  When the smoke cleared Ann Becker was still friends with everyone—and that is a remarkable achievement these days.   Not only does it show that Ann can work with anybody, but she is also able to amend her ideological position based on the facts as she comes to know them, and that is unique.  It’s precisely what any voter would want in a representative of any kind.  And that’s what you get with Ann Becker.  Voters may never vote for a better person for the job of West Chester Trustee in their lives but on November 5th 2017, when they get to punch the ticket for Ann Becker.

Rich Hoffman

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All the Reasons to vote for Mark Welch for Trustee: The “invisible hand” of West Chester

With all the talk about education and how much money should be spent on it, and has been within America, there are a lot of people who are in dire need of a vast education.  Most of the people needing it are those functioning as pundits and news reporters—especially politicians who are doing important jobs but don’t have the intellect to do that job correctly.  That has been the case so far during Donald Trump’s entire time spent in the White House. People who should know better are surprised that he has done such a good job so far and has led an economic approach that is breaking records in the stock market—as I write this the Dow Jones is currently 300 points about 23,000!  And the reason is basic economics.  Trump is providing a hands off approach to government allowing investment to prosper and for our capitalist exchanges to be trustful, so people are putting their money to work instead of hiding it away to protect it from radical politicians who want to redistribute it to their voter base essentially to buy elections.   Trump’s approach works and it always has for those bold enough to utilize a less restrictive business environment and we know that because Trump hasn’t been the first to try such things.  In West Chester, Ohio Mark Welch has been utilizing a very pro business strategy that has been very successful and now four years after he was first elected West Chester is booming in similar ways that the Dow Jones is currently.  It’s all about a pro business strategy that allows for growth, and now that Mark is up for re-election of his seat the facts are there for all to witness.  Below is a collection of video segments from a West Chester Tea Party forum conducted to feature the candidates for this year’s election.  Mark as expected, performed very well, and gave great answers to the questions provided to him which should put everyone’s mind at ease about electing him for a second term to continue the good job he has been doing.

I suppose where the education failure starts it is that most people just don’t understand the basic concepts of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  I mean, modern advocates for thought—and that includes everyone from the most highly paid attorney working for Beltway politics to the NFL player protesting on one knee during the National Anthem should understand well the idea of the “invisible hand” described in Smith’s epic work on economics.  The basic premise that self-interest regulates behavior far better than authoritative Theory X oriented fear of government—such as what occurred under Mark Welch when he first became a trustee in regards to zoning regulations.   Before Mark came along zoning was a radicalized venture in West Chester.  I can recall a case where a business was destroyed by West Chester zoning because they hosted Tea Party events on Tuesday nights and the rules of zoning were used to push it out of existence.  The heavy hand of government penalized this place of business for some signage displays on Sunday’s where a similar business right across the street was given a free pass—because it was a popular meeting place for Lakota school levy supporters.  It only took a few months once there was bad publicity unleashed for that place of business to close its doors—and that is just one example that government can destroy businesses by limiting the movement of Adam Smith’s free hand.   That building is still sitting empty years later, destroyed by government essentially.  The same story could be told all across America and when Mark talks in the video about beating an entrenched incumbent in the 2013 election, that’s why he won.  He has not disappointed West Chester, he’s made it much better over the last four years.

When self-interest goes from a focus on profitability and instead resides purely on survival it is then clear that we are living in a restrictive society confined to the artificial barriers imposed by government for the purpose of ideological control rooted in poor philosophic thinking.  It is hard enough to be in business competing in an industry without the hand of government sticking its nose into every little aspect of strategic implementation.  To an extent government is there to make sure that the game of business is played fairly, but they should not impose themselves on that climate, otherwise you destroy the “invisible hand.”  When government is too involved, that invisible hand stays in a pocket and doesn’t do what it should and that’s a bad thing.  Mark Welch certainly understands the concept of “the invisible hand” and West Chester is thriving in 2017 beyond anybody’s expectations.  Donald Trump is doing the same on a large national level.  Anybody who understood how these things work could do the same, but unfortunately such people are hard to find.

Maybe it’s because liberals—especially academic liberals, are inherently lazy in their thinking.  The works of Karl Marx is much smaller than Adam Smith’s works so perhaps it’s because it’s easier to read that liberals gravitate to Marxism and cower in fear of Smith. Most liberals that I have known love to smoke pot, have reckless sex with dirty unwashed people covered in tattoos and body piercings, and are weak people who like to hide in the safety of a crowd—so Adam Smith’s invisible hand is pretty scary to them—because they are scared people to begin with.   But that doesn’t mean you can build your society around their thinking.  Anybody who is in public office needs to understand the basics of Adam Smith’s concepts.  Under Trump’s presidency we can now all see how the Wealth of Nations is built.  It goes from concept in a large volume beautiful book to actual practice as represented by the Dow Jones records currently being broken by the day.  But before Donald Trump was Mark Welch in West Chester, Ohio who understood the invisible hand of Adam Smith from day one of his election during the first term.  The wealth of West Chester has exploded, and it’s not a mystery.  It’s all very predictable.  But Wes Chester is unique because it has had politicians like Mark who knew when to leave things alone—which is harder than a lot of people think.

Many years ago and up to very recently, in leadership training of people who need to learn those skills a common practice is to have a person stand on an elevated platform and to allow themselves to fall backwards into a group of waiting arms from your teammates to teach trust to the subconscious.  The thinking is to trust that the invisible hands of your team to know that they won’t let you fall because it’s in their self-interest not to let you.  For instance, if you are a smart person who holds the keys to their strategic success in life, you don’t have to worry about them backstabbing you from all types of success in life, because they need you for their own fulfillment.  So they won’t tend to let things happen to you if they find you falling.  Building that trust is one of those elementary practices in leadership training.  The people who are always terrible at this exercise are those cowering liberals who are afraid of their own shadows in life, so it is very difficult to fall back and trust other people because they don’t naturally trust anything—because of what they know about themselves if you really want to break it down correctly.  Let alone trust some invisible hand that is not controlled by government.  But their dysfunction cannot be the standard we all live with as a nation, or a community, because what they are experiencing is a psychosis not a healthy deduction of reason.  So when you get someone like Mark Welch, you grab on tight, because he is unique in the political world.  Hopefully with Trump’s successes on the larger stage more people like Mark will emerge.  But currently, people should be very grateful that Mark Welch is running for such an important trustee position, because he understands innately the nature of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and it has been that hand which has loaded West Chester, Ohio with such magnificent options toward the enjoyment of life.

I was at Cabela’s in West Chester just yesterday buying up ammunition for some weekend shooting and I had to marvel at the work of the invisible hand that has been doing a good job in West Chester.  To have the option of visiting Cabela’s on a wonderful October day then heading down to Jags for a nice steak lunch with important people to make decisions that would increase the fortunes of many people.  Then to top off the night at Top Golf and enjoy the sunset of a fall evening—but before leaving to walk over to Barnes and Noble for some new books to read are all miracles of the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s capitalism.  Everyone should read Adam Smith’s work because they would find such things much better miracles for which they are.  They’d also understand that much of that lifestyle I mentioned is a result of Mark Welch’s proper management of West Chester as a trustee—to build the trust that investors need to fall back into the waiting arms of West Chester’s government to protect them without meddling into their work.  The trust goes both ways, government has to trust business to catch it when they fall back into their arms, and the same for the businesses who must take a leap of faith with their investments to make magical things happen in the realm of capitalism.  It sounds easy, but unfortunately most people just don’t get it.  Mark Welch does, and that is the primary reason that people should vote for him on November 7th 2017. The invisible hand of Adam Smith is alive in West Chester, and it’s beautiful to look at when you can see what it leaves behind.  But trusting that hand is hard, and lucky for West Chester, Mark Welch does, and the results have been explosively delightful, and something everyone—even  loser liberals—can benefit from.

Rich Hoffman

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Joan Powell Comes Out Anti-Union as a West Chester Trustee Candidate: The difference between good management and being a suck-ass

 

One of the things that most shocked me from the recent West Chester Trustee Candidate Forum at Indiana Wesleyan College sponsored by the West Chester Tea party was that Joan Powell stated quite emphatically that she was anti-union and would like to see Ohio become a right-to-work state.  Who would have ever thought she’d say such a thing because it was Joan who sat on the Lakota school board for so many years caving into the union demands wrecking the budget with increased payroll with no management in sight.  Now that Joan is running for trustee in West Chester she has come out against labor unions which is interesting given the fact that many union radicals have targeted the trustees with their themes of dissidence exclusively because Mark Welch and George Lang had been exploring ideas to bring right-to-work legislation to West Chester specifically because Ohio’s governor Kasich has been soft on the labor unions due to his defeat of Issue 5 several years ago. Because of her friendly attitude toward labor unions in the past, strategists would have thought that Joan would seek the Lakota union votes in this trustee race but oddly she tossed that away with the statement seen below.

This may be the first time I’ve ever agreed with Joan Powell.  When I was heading the effort to make Ohio a right-to-work state in 2012 Joan turned her political guns on me and did whatever she could to erase me from what she was doing as president of the Lakota School Board.  At the time Joan was trying hard to give the teachers who worked for Lakota a raise when I had been showing that the exclusive cause of the operating levy she had been seeking was to add more to the wage rates which were already well over the average household income.  Joan’s position was extremely friendly to the labor union at Lakota, and her track record is her track record.  There isn’t anybody who can assume based on her history that Joan would do anything but lay down in future negotiations with the various unions that are in West Chester’s wheelhouse, like the police and fire departments.  I mean it’s easy to say that we value school teachers, fire fighters and police officers—and to give them all the money they are asking for.  It’s hard to tell them no, and that they already make too much money.  In the case of fire and police officers they always give you the speech about how they run into danger while everyone else runs away, so when their contracts come up public support usually favors the unions but as trustees elected to manage the finances, sometimes you have to do the hard things then explain it to people even when its unpopular.   The easy thing is to do as Joan has done in the past and that is to just give the union what they want to keep them from going on strike, then seek tax increases to cover the costs.  That’s why her statement here is so surprising.

If this Joan Powell had revealed herself 10 years ago we might have avoided a lot of bloodshed in the Lakota school district.  I might have gotten along with her!  But, my experience with her says that she knew what kind of crowd she was speaking to and she formulated her comments specifically to her audience.  What she really believes is something else entirely.  Nobody can look at the record of Joan Powell over the years as a president of the Lakota school board and determine that she was anything but excessively friendly to the public union effort.  Yet you can hear with your own ears her declaration that she is against labor unions so who could really know what to believe.

I personally think public sector unions should be illegal.  If you have a job funded by tax payers you should not be able to organize against tax payers or their representatives for more money.   In private business competition can help bring reality to labor union activism so the free market does the job of helping to manage the situation.  But in government, we are talking about monopoly status over the tax dollars in question so labor unions have unfettered access to the funds of the communities they are supposed to serve.  It’s easy to obtain the funds they desire because often the only people who stand in their way are politicians like Joan Powell who never want any bloody conflicts with their labor unions, just peace.  Elected politicians find the temptation to throw vast amounts of money at these public sector unions too easy.  It’s far easier for them to ask for tax increases from a faceless community hiding the effort behind children or the safety of our citizens.  That makes those types of people terrible managers and Joan Powell is certainly guilty of that.

Yet for the record in 2017 Joan has declared that she is against labor unions so as a note to the police, the firefighters and the public school teachers who might think that they might vote for Joan Powell looking for an easy run over politician to engage in future negotiations with—she has indicated that she is anti-union.   I mean perhaps she has learned some lessons over the years.  I wouldn’t vote for her as a trustee, the only people I think have a chance of doing good work as a West Chester trustee are Mark Welch and Ann Becker.  Lynda O’Conner may be a good pick for that third seat because Lee Wong is a disaster and Joan Powell has a terrible track record at managing big budgets.  But in regard to her statements on labor unions, I actually agree with Joan Powell on something.

In actuality Joan was likely just telling the audience what they want to hear, which is worse than being an open liberal because as a voter you can never be sure what the person you are considering really stands for.  Knowing a bit about Joan Powell I think she is very malleable—her thoughts always go to the path of least resistance and that’s fine if you are a grandma handing out cookies to your grand kids—but when you are supposed to protect millions of dollars from the greedy hands of public employees who want the most money for doing the least work—you want someone who will manage that money with some valor.  Labor unions may want to vote for Joan because they smell the blood in the water, but one thing they won’t be able to rectify is that she did come out against labor unions in the 2017 election.   Her comments are now part of the public record and they will be used against her in the future.  That’s why we have these forums, so that we can test the candidates in the forges of reality to see how they hold up to a little scrutiny.  Obviously Joan Powell says whatever she needs to in order to appease the people she is addressing.  If it’s labor unions, she gives them what they want.  If it’s the Tea Party, she does the same.  So there is nothing about Joan Powell that indicates she would ever do anything but tell people what they want to hear.  The damage she has always done, and obviously seems committed to in the future, is that she is more in love with the popularity of being a public official than in doing the hard work of management.  And that is what deciding this election of 2017 is all about.  If people want good management, Joan Powell is not their person.

Rich Hoffman

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What We Learned about the West Chester Trustee Candidates for the 2017 Election: Ann Becker and Mark Welch are clearly the best picks

There weren’t really any second-place candidates who touched the levels of competency toward the open trustee seats in West Chester, Ohio than Mark Welch and Ann Becker as displayed during the West Chester Tea Party candidate forum at Indiana Wesleyan University on October 17th 2018. I mean there were other candidates there speaking that night, but Mark is the incumbent and the guy with the very successful track record—so much so that Democrats are rightfully terrified by him and have pulled out all the stops in an attempt to knock him off his seat. Then there is Ann Becker, Ms. Lady Liberty herself as she can be heard often on her 55 KRC radio segments on the very popular Brian Thomas show—who has been involved in just about every kind of politics in Butler County that there is. She is leaps and bounds above everyone else so she and Mark make a great team for two of the three trustee seats that are coming available. Of course, the focus for the purposes of preserving conservativism in West Chester relies on at least two conservatives being elected on November 7th and out of all the candidates running—many of them are good people—only Mark Welch and Ann Becker have the official backing of the Republican Party—and this year, that means a lot.

I think after watching all the other candidates speak if I had to pick a third person for those very important West Chester trustee seats it would be anybody but Lee or Powell. That third seat currently has belonged to the incumbent Lee Wong, but after his support of the Chinese spy scandal involving a Sherry Chen and her termination at the National Weather Service for alleged espionage, Lee has since dropped off the map. He embarrassingly protested on her behalf recently to help her get her job back and his defense of his friend revealed many disturbing traits about Lee Wong that many people hadn’t seen before. He tends to be aloof and disengaged when it comes to complicated issues, and he obviously has sided with organized labor locally—so he has lost his mask of Republican Party affiliation showing himself to be a lopsided liberal on almost every topic.

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2017/03/14/disgraced-chinese-american-scientist-fights-get-her-job-back/99171480/

The other person running who is obviously not a conservative is Joan Powell who came to the West Chester forum knowing that the audience was very constitutionally minded, so she attempted to talk their language, and everything ended up coming out phony. I’ll give her credit for trying, but she clearly wasn’t the right candidate. After all, she had been supportive of West Chester becoming a city some years back which means a lot more government to manage things and always has in her thoughts and actions big government approaches to everything. I thought it was particularly interesting that she tried to distance herself from the terrible labor union negotiations she had been involved in over the years at Lakota by saying that she was supportive of Right to Work. That was odd because most of the reasonable conservatives of West Chester remember her for her tax increases as president of the Lakota Board of Education. By alienating the leftist union members who might otherwise vote for her in memory of her Lakota failures, who did she think was going to support her for trustee? There aren’t enough of the “girls” getting their hair done with Joan to put her over the top. She came across grossly out of touch and adhering to the politics of another century in the past. She certainly didn’t project herself as part of the future.

Everyone else falls below the prospect of viability. In the coming days I’ll put up specific videos from this West Chester event to paint a more articulate picture of the proceedings. But for the high-level viability of the two primary candidates, Ann Becker and Mark Welch they did a good job and the little ad displayed above indicates my feelings on their candidacy. I have a lot of hope for the two of them. For Mark I’d like to see him continue to do the great job he has done. With Cathy Stoker out-of-the-way and Lee Wong put on ice over the last several years West Chester has prospered dramatically. It was kind of like the effect Donald Trump has had on the stock market. There’s a reason the Dow is pushing up over 23,000 for the first time ever. Many investors who had been looking toward West Chester to build a business, or even to start a family felt inclined to move once Mark was elected and from there hotels have exploded on the scene, along with many new restaurants, shopping, shooting ranges and many other options that have improved the lifestyle choices of the West Chester community.

There were some interesting conversations at the trustee forum that represent distinct philosophical differences. For instance, Joan Powell espoused her view that schools are what make a community great—which is clearly not the case. You can spend all the money on education that you want and the quality of a school will not help it at all. Rather, schools tend to be great based on the quality of the people who live in an area. Good people produce good kids and therefore, good students. Mark clearly understands that formula and most everything he does centers on those basic philosophies. That’s why Democrats hate him so much, because revealing that formula is something they are absolutely terrified of. That’s also how you can know that people like Lee Wong and Joan Powell are not Republicans but are in fact liberal Democrats—because they miss the basic concept of foundational government as a representative management device of the public. A government school does not make kids great, their parents do. If you want a great community you need to have an environment conducive to the lifestyle of good people—good in this case being people who have jobs, raise their children with parameters of expectation—and do things as a family unit. For instance, if you go to the VOA Park in West Chester, the people you meet there are generally all good to each other, and conduct themselves well. Respect for themselves and each other is a prevalent theme and that reflects the general demographic of the region which tends to attract good people to it. West Chester has great access to good jobs. Great access to interesting things to do, and it has low taxation—all which attracts good families with values. When those kids go to school they are naturally good kids. If you spend the same money on communities where the parents are terrible, the school system will obviously reflect that. The idea that a school makes a community is a liberal organized labor myth built to inflate wages and benefits for the government employees—not to fulfill the necessities of the community. Mark and Ann understand that delicate balance. Liberals like Joan Powell and Lee Wong don’t.

It was good to see such a large crowd at this event. People care very much about this outcome and that is wonderful, that is what makes our country great—at the local level. That is also the role that the Tea Party has always had, educating the public about the matters that matter most to them. In that regard I’d say the only serious candidates running for those three seats were present in the video above. If candidates aren’t willing to go before the West Chester Tea Party, they really aren’t serious about running for office. Hopefully this article helps you sort out the names from all the confusion—and that really only two names essentially top out the first two seats, Ann Becker and Mark Welch.

Rich Hoffman
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The Four Stages of Change: How ‘Saturday Night Live’ is showing where Democrats are on that path

Clearly as we track this culture war that the United States is involved with currently, one year after the great election of 2016, where the political left learned harshly that a majority of the people were not behind their movement, we have entered the third phase of the four stages of change.  At first of course there was denial which we have witnessed, followed closely by resistance.  With the ANTIFA movement and various leftists groups like Black Lives Matters threatening to overthrow the new establishment that resistance has now migrated into exploration.  That much was clear on the October 14th airing of Saturday Night Live where they did two skits attempting to rectify this exploration idea.  It was a fascinating exchange to conceive of the writers and the producers at Saturday Night Live in the wake of the NFL and Harvey Weinstein controversies to look at the Trump presidency and explore the ways they can live within these new value assessments.

The first one shown here about Kellyanne Conway acting as the clown in the recent retread movie IT was very revealing in how the political left sees the world.   Their hero, Anderson Cooper is terrorized by Kellyanne Conway trying to get on television to represent the White House point of view as she has successfully done over the last year.   The political left, represented by the SNL writing team metaphorically views Kellyanne as the scary IT clown.  They are terrorized by her ability to always come out on top on her conversations with Anderson Cooper to the point where he doesn’t want to put her on television anymore.   While their depiction of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from IT is an insult to Kellyanne Conway who is hardly a terrible person—her effect on the media has been truly scary because they are overwhelmingly liberal—and are losing.  The change they had been resisting they are now exploring ways to rectify, so from a psychological point of view, it was a fascinating skit.

The second skit that was very revealing was the assumption that Melania Trump—whom the writers obviously aren’t sure how to deal with the feelings of respect they have for her, would call a Pakistani call center for spiritual advice.  Beneath the writers assumptions are the beliefs that capitalism is a hollow endeavor and that in her quest as a gold digger with a heart, Melania finds life in the White House so lacking fulfillment that she would confide herself into the ears of a perfect stranger on the other side of the world.   Of course the premise is blown out of proportion based on a faulty idea of capitalism.  But the revelation of how they think of Melania is quite intriguing.  I’m certain that Melania is a huge part of the strength behind Donald Trump from day-to-day, and that she doesn’t need the spiritual advice from some Pakistani call center worker, but the ponderings of the political left into what makes the Trump White House tick in an interesting observation.

The political left is obviously watching the efforts of their candidate Barack Obama come undone under Trump even though they have created a monstrosity of bureaucratic intention in our federal government to prevent reform once they start the wheels in motion.     Yes our federal government is designed to move slowly, and the insurgents counted on a congress to protect their extreme implements such as Obamacare to take effect before action could be taken to reverse the trends.  Trump with his recent executive orders undid that effort essentially by reversing the nature of the game the Democrats and Republicans had been playing with Obamacare.  While the Republicans pretended to work against the Democrats and all of them took money from the insurance lobby socialist insurgents like Obama could steer our society toward a single payer option and everyone could get what they wanted—except the American people.  The Saturday Night Live writers assumed that America was lock step with them, but since they lived in New York they were isolated from the sentiments of the rest of the country.   Now all of them involved in these little tyrannies are learning how out-of-step they really were all along.  So they are “exploring” their role in this new world of thinking.

The next phase of course is commitment and from here the political left will find themselves divided.  Some will merge with the president and his thinking because they’ll realize that behind Trump is a vast American population that he represents in this great republic.  Democracy is not what they thought it was, and the nature of Republicanism is showing them how a representative republic truly functions.  After all, before now there weren’t many examples to follow.  There was a lot of theory that looked good on paper and in philosophical testimonials from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, but not much history to build with.  Those who can’t commit to this course change will be destroyed by their own inflexibility.  This is what Trump knows is coming and why he is so confident that unlike Obama who abused his executive orders, Trump will get his signed into law because the political landscape will change over the coming months enormously.

As we’ve watched these four stages of change occur along very predictable lines of ascension, it is easy to plot out where we’ll be in the early stages of 2018, and beyond.  Obviously the SNL writers are beginning to see that ascension for the true value that has been obvious all along for those who view the world without political lenses.  The hate and vitriol are still there but people are survivors and they will adapt to the changing world due to their own self-interest.  That is why business people are good for politics—instead of contributing to the funds of lesser people known as politicians, the wise minds of business should just do it themselves.  They do after all understand these cycles of change because they go through the four steps every time they need to implement some strategic change in their places of business.  The difference is that in corporate America, culture building is the responsibility of the CEO or president.  In politics it comes from the know nothing losers who usually go to public office because the private sector has scared them and that has left us all vulnerable to these socialist insurgents, like the writers at SNL.  So the better experience at changing a culture come from those who have been successful in corporate America, like Trump.  And the results are predictably on schedule—and everyone knows it.

A good leader understands these four stages of change and they know how to weather the complaints and bitching that often come each time a new idea is put forth.  A good leader also understands that most of those people will come around to the right way to think out of their own needs to survive—and that is where the real reform from Trump comes from.  I’m sure it’s been hard for him, since day one, the political left has made his life a living hell in the White House.  But Trump is a good leader and he knows how to use the four stages of change to his advantage and the first sign of his success is what we saw this week on SNL.  They may not want to admit it, and they’ll deny it if asked directly.  But SNL is now in stage three—and that means that the storm is breaking and they have no choice but to figure out their place in a changing world—for which we are the ones deciding how that world looks.  That is something everyone reading here should consider as a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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