Tag: Rich Hoffman

As The Wagons Circle: Trump’s real plan is revealed as Mexico is finally preparing to pay for the wall

Remember when Trump said he was going to build a wall on the southern border and Mexico was going to pay for it, well now the how is revealing itself. Now that the caravans have arrived and Tijuana is struggling to pay for all the new immigrants from Central America who were literally pushed into making the journey to the border looking for asylum American forces have been authorized to use force to prevent them from going any further, but it is Mexico who has been tasked with dealing with the issue or else—Trump is threatening to close the border. To those who haven’t been to Mexico lately that is a devastating proposition, because the entire country relies so heavily on American tourism that such a threat seriously jeopardizes the few legitimate businesses that Mexico produces, within the tourist industry. Without American tourism, and any Mexican will admit when asked, Mexico’s legitimate economy falls apart. So when Trump told Mexico to do something about the caravan, the leverage is clearly in the court of America and the beginnings of the Mexican payoff is emerging through all the political smoke.

With the Democrats coming into control of the House in January clearly the military budget is about to be reduced and the pressure to have continued open borders especially along the southern United States will increase. Drug dealers from south of the border without question are not happy that the American military is at the southern border stopping illegal crossings which have been coaxed along by these caravans of immigrants and the byproduct of that is a look at the world after Trump’s wall where drug smuggling suddenly got a lot harder. Democrats being the party of illegal activity and drug abuse are going to look keenly at resolving the immediate conflict so that the drug dealers can get back to work which all puts Trump in a commanding position with all the leverage.

The panic is full-blown as most people haven’t been paying attention to the news over the last several days, due to the American Holiday season. But Mathew Whitaker the acting Attorney General has come under serious attack by Democrats over supposed “Hatch Act” violations which occurred during a previous run for Senate. They obviously don’t want anybody but a lap dog to keep their Mueller conspiracy theory story going by a federal investigation initiated by the liberal activist James Comey. Jerome Corsi is being pushed into a plea deal to essentially root out any Wikileaks connections to the 2016 campaign, which is yet another attempt to fight many things on several fronts. There is currently a global motion to remove Wikileaks from any future campaigns and to kick Julian Assange out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Talk about a lack of freedom of the press. The whole effort is about complete control of the press under the ruse of “justice.” And a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation has been allowed to proceed by a Manhattan judge essentially to mire the President in legal battles on so many fronts that he won’t have any options available to him but to yield in mercy. That is the strategy. Isn’t it interesting how Democrats are so interested in justice when they have something they want done, but if the same effort is applied to them, it’s all a conspiracy theory. If the kind of evidence existed against Republicans, which it doesn’t, that occurred with the DNC, Hillary Clinton, the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former President Obama Republicans should be having sit ins and protests for justice every day. But most Republicans don’t have the will to fight all the time so Democrats get away with things, but when they think they can use the law as a weapon they never hesitate.

But there is an Achilles heel to all this excitement, the border wall. The reason that Democrats want to remove Trump from office so viciously is in what he has the power to do, which is defend the nation from enemies. That is a right the Executive Branch has that fall outside the powers of the congress. Trump can also get nominations through the senate and can still appoint a new Attorney General with his Senate majority which also falls outside of the authority of congress. So the increase in panic from Democrats is due to the control Trump has on the southern border and there isn’t anything they can do about it. The stand-off there in Tijuana is the lead story in every circumstance because it has brought a halt to illegal immigration there, since the military is on the border, and drug dealing has trickled to a fraction of what it has been costing cartels millions and millions of dollars in adjustments to ship their poison through other means to their target buyers.

There are a lot of bad people at work and it all centers around the border wall which Trump has all the high ground to enforce. So no matter what side stories emerge, Trump’s border wall, or one that is currently being covered with military forces, is the key to the whole chess game. And in that game Mexico is going to end up paying for the wall because their tourism industry is under serious jeopardy. At this point they would do anything to get tourist activity back to some semblance of normalcy. All this controversy is not good for business, especially when tourism is all that they really have.

In the past when the United States had Presidents who needed advisors just to walk down the hall, having a business guy in office who understands the power of money and leverage has made a tremendous difference. Even with all the weapons that Democrats are throwing at Trump legally, the President has all the cards that matter, financial leverage on all fronts, and he knows how to play those cards and when. When Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won the election to be the next Mexican president Trump was nice to him even though the politician was an extreme leftist. Trump didn’t care, he reached out a hand with offers to make future deals anyway, just as he has done with Nancy Pelosi in the congress. That is another benefit of having a business guy in the White House. A typical politician wouldn’t know what to do or how to wear the many different masks that are required to deal with such people. But also, as any business person understands, what you show isn’t always what you play, and now that the friendly relationship between Trump and Obrador has been in place, the burden to stop those caravans resides on Mexico, not America. Otherwise Trump can really hurt Mexico where they are most vulnerable—tourism.

It only took a few years to get to this point, but in the world of strategy, everything is happening right on time, and in spite of all the dirty tricks the Democrats are throwing at the situation. The open borders people are not happy, the poison they want to destroy America with is having major gaps in delivery. The future Democrat voters that they always hope to extract out of the immigrant community are stuck in Tijuana. Even the mayor of Tijuana is a kind of Trump supporter who is trying to bring the kind of populism seen in North America to that city of sin and intrigue, which is a new development on the world stage and all this is happening as we speak. As the wagons of court proceedings circle around Trump and his associates thinking that they have him trapped in a circular firing squad, Trump’s ultimate objective is at the border wall where nobody can touch him. And that will lead to a very exciting start to the new year!

Rich Hoffman

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Thankfully No Jokesters at the White House Correspondence Dinner in 2019: Respect and Leadership do not owe comedy “equality”

Honestly, I think the pick to put Ron Chernow as the headliner of this year’s White House Correspondence Dinner is a good one. His book on Grant was fabulous as he is a great historian and to me that should be the purpose of the dinner. This tradition of laughing at ourselves as a country is a pretty dumb one. How it got started in the first place is something that we should have revisited a long time ago. I understand the need for comedy, but there is psychologically something much more sinister going on at roasts of celebrities and people who have achieved great importance, and when it comes to President Trump, he has one clear message for his years as the leader of the Executive Branch, respect is a theme he has always wished to cultivate on projects he works on. This trend to make fun of everything so not to show that we as a culture and as a people don’t take ourselves too seriously has major flaws that should have ended after Johnny Carson and Bob Hope’s era closed. After them, the trend went out of control and has turned into a joke and that doesn’t help America be great, which for many in the typical White House Correspondence Dinner audience always wanted anyway.

I share with Trump a distaste for personal aggrandizement. I just never have participated in it and I don’t do it to other people. Part of the gift of thinking positive about everything is that it has to start with yourself and if you are making fun of some imperfection that you have to show the world that you aren’t any better than they are, well then you are a captor to their limitations for themselves. When you work hard to be the best person that you can be, why on earth would you sit around and let people find flaws in what you have done? Especially when the people making fun of you haven’t made any efforts themselves at greatness.

We all have grown up with this notion that its good not to take yourself very serious and it was always a false one. After all, if you don’t take yourself seriously, who else will, and in many cases—especially when it comes to children we raise, people we lead in industry or just friends and neighbors, they need someone to believe in. So if we allow our value to be cheapened by silly jokes about ourselves and allow our image to be brought down to earth where all the lazy and unambitious are sitting around as losers smoking pot, drinking too much and generally showing no yearning to live life to the fullest, then we have cheapened everything we individually stand for, and that has always been the point.

When people who do great things allow themselves to be chided and ridiculed with a display of humility it is a silent endorsement that the masses and all their lackluster effort are the standard and the efforts of the great are meant to be absorbed in the murky depths of social stagnation. There was always an unsaid truth between the person who makes fun of other people and those who allow it that states a lack of superiority in the target and if left unchecked the bar that we should all aspire to falls short. In my own personal life even as a very little kid people would tell me, especially adults, that you can’t go through life as if your shit doesn’t stink. You can’t go around acting like you are better than everyone else and expect to be a successful person, because they won’t let you into the gates of life if you don’t make peace with them. Well, I never listened and all those things they said were untrue. Reality states that if you are the best at things no matter what controversies are going on in your life, the world will beat a path to your door and line up to seek your attention, because they will need what you have to offer. So why would anybody who works harder than the average person ever give jokesters a seat at the table of equality by allowing puns to go unchecked.

People who want to elevate themselves by castigating the successful and harder working will call their targets “thin skinned” if they don’t silently endorse the efforts at equality by allowing it to continue. But why did it ever become necessary to “take a joke” especially if one doesn’t dish it out? I can tell you dear reader that the source of that trend comes from the same European concepts that invented Marxism and it never should have been allowed to set foot in American culture. Personally, I am a very positive person by nature. I think greatly of myself obviously and I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. I love myself and everything I do and I live every single day and every single second of that day trying to be the best that I can be. And when I deal with other people, I always look for the positives in them. I always try to extract out of them goodness and a positive self-image. People who fail to respond or persist to continue their lives as a joke and find jokes in others are really just too lazy to try to accomplish anything in life, so their attempts at jokes are meant to keep the bars of life low for everyone. I see this as detrimental to any productive culture and have never participated. I don’t let people make fun of me and I don’t make fun of them. If they do make fun of me, I will tear up whoever it is that is doing the banter because I see it as an attack not just on me as a person, but on what the efforts of goodness should stand for. Do I take myself seriously, yes? Of course! And for damn good reason. Everyone should, and I am happy to help them look in the mirror and like the person that looks back at them. But fault-finding is a very negative thing and has huge implications on the quality of any society, and I personally don’t allow it.

I have never thought it appropriate to have a White House Correspondence Dinner that centered around telling jokes and making fun of our own culture. People around the world watch the video clips and it doesn’t set a good standard for a country that leads the world to make. Why would anybody follow a culture that finds so much fault with itself? The answer is they wouldn’t. Yet that has always been the secret ambition of the jokesters, to keep others from following the great people of high ambition and taste, and to celebrate the weak losers of lazy aptitude. We are talking about the kind of society that celebrates the star football player in any school at the same level of the class clown to the point where the star plays right along to endorse the behavior because they think it’s the popular thing to do—and that if they don’t, they may lose their star status. That is the great ruse of our modern times, that jokesters are just as important as the stars that build the society.

I understand Trump’s reservations about the way the White House Correspondence Dinner has been conducted. After all it has the word “White House” in it so that is a brand that President Trump has a great interest in protecting. Why would he want to cheapen it with the jokes of the stupid and lazy, to lower its image on the world stage just so that he could appear “cool.” That’s what we say to people we want to lower their guard to us, “be cool.” Don’t get upset, just drop your standards and opinions and join us in the collective mud of civility where we are all equally bad, stupid and imperfect creatures of God. No thanks. I like striving for perfection every day and working as hard as I can to get there. The last thing I want to hear is some joke about my hair, or the way I talk, or other little nitpick. And Trump is of the same mind, and I don’t blame him for it one bit! One way to make America great again is to believe that its great to start with, and that requires looking at the greatness and celebrating it, not making fun of it and trying to demean it so that other people won’t feel the pressure to be better. They need to try to be better and not use jokes as a way to insulate themselves from the expectations of the ambitious.

Rich Hoffman

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Who Made Who: Trump made them, not the other way around

Since the election there has been quite a subtle shift, even from Fox News which many think is fueling the Trump presidency. There has certainly been a lot of anger leveled in the Fox News direction. But those thoughts come from people who really don’t know what is going on, they are clinging to ancient truths that no longer matter, and ways of thinking that are simply outdated, such as reverence for the military, concern about ancient Gods—in this case global warming, and a non-business first approach to virtually everything. Before Donald Trump won the presidency, the business class were only supposed to contribute money to political campaigns, they weren’t supposed to be making any of the real decisions, but that has changed, and likely forever and the resentments from those in the old world who were quite something to talk about back then, are suddenly finding themselves useless and passed over. As I said, even Fox News has been very critical of President Trump over military funeral visits, the dealing of Saudi Arabia and their assassinations, and every dip in the stock market. In truth Fox News doesn’t command the ratings of nearly the kind of audience that talk radio does, or the monthly publications of the NRA, so who really cares if Fox News goes even more liberal as the new CEO there seems to want to take it. It won’t make President Trump weaker, it will just inspire people to switch to new methods of getting the news they want, like Alex Jones online. People are going to get what they want one way or another and President Trump is a creation of that desire and the old guard just hasn’t come to terms with that notion yet. That much was very obvious on Saturday Night Live the weekend before Thanksgiving 2018. The following video makes their hatred of Trump abundantly obvious.

Petty is the word for their approach to President Trump but it really shows what kind of people are running things at NBC. The world is changing under their feet and one of their old superstars is now in the Executive Branch looking like he will easily win a second term. In a few years many in the modern media won’t be around any longer, the world has literally changed right under their feet and they were too busy bitching and trying to change the nature of human beings to notice it. As progressives attempting to play down all the attributes that make human beings great, such as thinking, a desire to change their environment, and a strong desire to change the direction of history in every generation, liberals have put themselves on a rope hanging from the edge of a vast metaphorical cliff which is coming untethered by the moment. And it can certainly be understood why they are anxious, and even angry. But that still doesn’t excuse them for their ignorance.

Speaking for myself, but as a representative of a Trump supporter it’s not important to me that Trump visits the military on Thanksgiving. I could care less, we aren’t at war in the world. The Afghanistan situation is a mess only because politicians made it that way. The way Trump has leveraged to win conflicts around the world is through economics. If the United States has all the money, and the wealth generated as the world’s largest oil producer, who cares what despots are doing around the world who are literally begging for a piece of that wealth. In Trump’s view we shouldn’t even have troops overseas, his goal is to get them home. This comparison to what President Bush did or Obama for that matter is just ridiculous. While Trump was making himself into a billionaire George W. Bush was abusing alcohol and cocaine living off the wealth of his family’s business. While many say that Trump benefited from his own father’s business there is a great difference, Bush chose to mooch off that wealth doing very little in his life to advance it while Trump was driven to the point of obsession with making his own mark in the world. Bush and Obama were not leaders, only in title. Trump is a true pace setter. He doesn’t have to live under the terms of presidents from the past who were essential failures.

There have also been many comparisons from those who don’t know much about history that Trump is a lot like Teddy Roosevelt in that he is an unconventional president who is facing many opportunities to bust up monopolies. With Roosevelt there was always a kind of hatred of those who had wealth as he was a lot like George W. Bush and was born with a silver spoon in his mouth never really learning how money was made. Trump did learn. Roosevelt went to war with the railroad and oil tycoons of the early 20th Century but Trump isn’t so inclined to ruin the billionaires who are working against him in the tech sector. Saturday Night Live was almost coaxing Trump into a fight with Jeff Bezos who has become the political left’s new champion because he is currently the richest man in the world. But what they don’t know is that Jeff Bezos could spend every last dollar of that wealth on the presidency and he couldn’t win it. You know why dear reader? Because he couldn’t win over people like you and I. I personally like Bezos as the head of Amazon and his ventures into space, but he’s kind of a weird guy. He couldn’t walk into an arena like Trump does and command so much energy. Trump built his wealth the old-fashioned way, through real estate in a tough market. Wealth by itself isn’t an automatic ability to do everything in life. Trump is smart enough to know that business deals with Saudi Arabia are good for America. Who cares if they assassinate a reporter from Jeff Bezos Washington Post? You see, there are other ways to skin a cat—direct conflicts are often not the way to go.

The drop in the tech stocks is for two reasons, the uncertainty of a potential Nancy Pelosi House of Representatives and unstable news from oversea markets. Once the smoke clears those tech stocks will be bought back up and will shoot back up to over 26,000. People who buy at the lower rate will become rich in just a few months, so buy up. The dip isn’t caused by tangible value, only by emotional reaction to a changing world. Regarding the House, as I said before the election, Republicans had to guard against massive cheating by Democrats and that looks to be just the case, not just in Florida, but in most of the counties where Democrats picked up seats. Early voting ballot tampering and massive I.D. fraud look to have given Democrats a few thousand votes here and there where they needed them. Trump seems to be OK with the Democrats taking over the House and the cheating that got them there because it paints a contrast that only helps him in the upcoming 2020 election. But the markets are nervous with all these socialists getting news time because Democrats are clearly anti market and that obviously has investors nervous and in a selloff mood.

The desperation is obvious by the other side and Saturday Night Live represents that vantage point. Their view of the world is so petty and ridiculous, yet that view has ruled for many thousands of years so we can’t blame them for their anxiety. And too many still think that if only they can capture Fox News into full liberalism that the Republican march toward a much more productive and optimistic 21st Century could be stopped. In truth, people will find alternatives, it’s not the news that makes people, its people who make the news and the networks are learning those hard lessons right now. Even at the core of NBC right now is the belief that they made Donald Trump, that they made him a star who could then win the presidency, and that they have the power to take that away. In truth it was the other way around, it was Trump that made NBC a star and opened the door for reality television, and that same influence is at work in the White House. And there isn’t anybody on the political left, or the right who can do it was well as Trump. And they hate the reality of that truth.  Remember the old song by ACDC called “Who Made Who?”  Trump and creators like him made the world, the media and many others are just living in it and it drives them crazy.

Rich Hoffman

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How the Kardasian’s Saved Their $20 Million Mansion from the Wildfires: Decentralization of all services is the trend of the future

I don’t know much about Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Celebrity gossip and trivial nonsense is a massive waste of time and I contribute nothing to that enterprise. I did recently learn that I liked Kanye West because he has emerged over the last few years as a Trump supporter. Other than that, I know they are celebrities and they make their mark in the world on social media. They are of course rich because they serve a role in society of making regular people occupied with foolish behavior so they won’t truly look at the world as Democrats attempt to steal even more counties in California for the House of Representatives, flipping those previously conservative seats. While crimes occurred people marvel at the Kardashian sisters and their beauty and controversy and forget about the low bar nature of their personal lives, which seems to be the only goal of magazines like “People” and other tabloid acts. But I did hear something interesting involving Kim Kardashian and her husband, that they avoided having their $20 million dollar mansion destroyed by the California wildfires in Hidden Valley by employing and maintaining their own fire department. Honestly, I had never heard of this but learned that out of all fire departments in existence a small single digit percentage of them are privately employed. But any would be something I’d consider an extraordinary revelation.

I have been a tremendous critic of public employee tax payer funded centralized organizations culminating with the Senate Bill 5 that Sharon Jones and John Kasich tried to get passed back in 2012. I went all in even though it was dangerous supposedly to piss off your local fire department, police and teachers who were all targeted in that bill to break up the collective bargaining agreements they have as public employees to suck off all our tax money in extraordinary ways without any real management to control the out of control costs. When their obvious banter came back to me that only they had the courage to run into a fire or toward danger while I slept well at night my response was to call bullshit. If I see danger I run to it every time. I love danger, actually I’m obsessed with danger—I go looking for it ever waking hour of my life, so what they were saying to me just didn’t stick. They were doing what they always do as public employees, they tried to use sentiment and a natural fear of danger to asset that we should pay them infinite amounts of money for their public service. Then we are supposed to worship them in every parade and memorial ceremony. And if you feel differently they really develop a bad relationship with you, almost like they’d love to teach you a lesson for daring to challenge their role in society.

I’ve had the same fallout with teachers. When I questioned their ridiculous budgets at my home district of Lakota I had some of those union activists approach me and declare that I couldn’t teach their classes because the effort was too hard. My response to them was that I’d be happy to take them up on that challenge. In fact, I took it even higher, I volunteered to teach four classes all by myself to prove my point, which nobody took me up on. I was quite serious about my proposal. I’m not one of those people who will say, teaching kids in a class is too hard, or that charging a gunman as a police officer is either. And in fighting fires, I think it would be fun to save people and put out fires. I wouldn’t think of it as work, more as a human obligation. So I’m not one who thinks there is great value in those occupations. I think there is value in the tasks, but as large labor unions attached to tax payer money, I think there are better ways to do it.

I’ve often said about teachers that the decentralization of information these days has made them pretty irrelevant. Once children learn to read, write and do math, the public education system pretty much just drags out their baby-sitting service for the next ten years mostly ruining the ambitions of young minds in the process. And police have their role, but more guns in the hands of responsible people is the real answer to crime and punishment. But I never really considered fire fighting as an option to decentralization. I can say that when I’ve been in situations to put out a fire, I’ve always done it myself. And some of them were quite big. I’m not a call the fire department and stand outside and wait kind of guy. I never have been and I never will be. But they do have good equipment and expertise in basic medical care that saves lives, so I have sympathy for their efforts as first responders. They fix a lot of cut up people and people who suffer heart attacks and that can be a tough job to show up at a site and have people always in a state between life and death. But do these people have to work for an international labor union and do they have to be centralized in a community?

So we’ve heard so much about the California wildfires, and how they are destroying so much property. We’ve heard they were caused by global warming and other gods of disaster by liberals who still think that rain dancing and wearing the severed head of an animal as a mask is a viable option to solving problems of drought. And we watch on the news as constrained resources fight these massive fires that just spawn out of control. But then we learn that the Kardasians had their own fire department who built a fire break around their property and kept the fires from destroying their home. Why does a constrained resource have to be so, why can’t such services be decentralized so that quick action can be taken when danger arises? If you can afford it, why limit yourself to a constrained, publicly funded service? Seems kind of dumb to me and obviously most of the wealthy people who lost their homes in places like Malibu could have done the same. Instead, like a bunch of idiots they evacuated and let the professionals do the work of letting everything burn down because they were trying to fight fires everywhere at once and doing very little to actually solve the problem.

This Kardashian example is just another glimpse into the correct future, where public utilities are decentralized, where every home generates its own power, where every home can get anywhere in the world from their driveway, where even food is brought to your door without the added complexity of having to waste time going out and getting it. Already information has been decentralized in our relatively new phones which are essentially not just communication devices with anybody in the world any time of day, but are vast libraries of information and surveillance right in the palm of your hand. I often think of my iPhone as being as powerful as a typical television station was as I grew up. That is also the trend for all these public services. If you have the money, why not have your own fire fighting department to protect your property? It makes sense to me.

But that of course isn’t the message liberals want people to hear. They want more centralized authority and they use these positions, police, fire departments and teachers to make their arguments for more government that they control. But if they were so effective, California wouldn’t burn to the ground the way it has. Most of that damage was quite avoidable and the Kardasians proved it. While the fires were hard to put out, their path can be diverted out and away from valuable property. But because their efforts were too centralized, places like Malibu just burnt to the ground leaving a bunch of celebrities to stand crying in the streets and reminding America why more centralized authority was needed in all fields of endeavor. That is until the Kardasians showed that the whole thing really has been a ruse to sell more socialism from the beginning and that is a very important observation to consider.

Rich Hoffman

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House Bill 228: No more singing in the rain for bad guys

I am extremely proud of the current congress in Ohio as the gavel dropped in the affirmative on House Bill 228. I wasn’t too excited at first as several people were quick to let me know that the vote had been taken and passed as it happened. My response to them all was that we still had a liberal governor in Kasich so he’d veto it. The bill would arrive dead essentially. But over the last couple of days many from Columbus told me much better news, that they fully expected Kasich to veto Ohio’s new Stand Your Ground law, but that they had the votes to override the veto. Now that became an entirely different matter all together and the fact that the Ohio congress acted so boldly at the end of the session spoke a lot about what’s to come for the positive. Stand Your Ground laws are needed everywhere and they reinforce the Second Amendment in ways the Bill of Rights was always philosophically designed. I consider The Anti Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers to be some of the most joyous reading I’ve ever done in my life and there can be no understanding of American Constitutional law without accepting that the paramount epoxy of a proper structured society is the decentralization of law enforcement using the gun as the symbol of order. And for Ohio to take that proper step in making Stand Your Ground legislation the law of the land the state takes that critical step forward in raising the bar for a state that was being tempted to go purple to turning a nice bright red.

With a vote of 64 to 26 House Bill 228 passed comfortably showing great conviction. I know the House has had to sit on their attempts for a long time knowing that Kasich would prevent its advancement. But what was a surprise was that the House proved they could get the three fifths of the total vote count needed to override a veto, which in this case is 60 votes out of 99. With the 64 House of Representatives members who voted in favor o House Bill 228 they are already there. Then of course it will take 20 of 33 Senators to get passage of the bill without the governor’s signature. “Isn’t this exciting!” I learned from a good source that the senate was on board as well which was a stunning revelation. Of course, this boldness comes after the election before the newly elected congress takes over but its more than symbolic in nature. Kasich has prevented many of these conservative advancements and because many members of the House and Senate were up for election, they couldn’t afford to have Kasich pulling resources away from their re-elections. But it is refreshing to see that the moment they could, this congress acted and they did so boldly on legislation that is far from the type of change agent progressivism that has taken over Columbus in recent years like a vast sickness.

Stand Your Ground in Ohio is a big deal. The “duty to retreat” laws that have been in place were always dangerous and a real impediment to continued growth in both a population sense and in relation to business. With a “duty to retreat” it has added an unnecessary layer of burden to gun users when faced with hostile adversity. If something is going on that is hostile in nature a person acting in good faith should never have to worry about hesitating when faced with eminent threats. I can say I’ve been in those situations more than once and have not elected to use a gun because I did not want to go through the legal mess that always comes after. I have the fortune to have other tools to stay out of trouble and I use them more than I’d care to admit. But I do worry often about those tools not working and having to resort to a gun, and with Stand Your Ground, one less layer of concern has now been removed. House Bill 228 doesn’t allow people to have shoot outs in a Wal-Mart parking lot over parking spaces. But it does give gun defenders the ability to use deadly force to resolve a situation at the point of a threat. Under the “duty to retreat” obligation not only was a gun owner under a burden to diffuse a threat before using deadly force, but they had the burden on them to prove it. When some criminal loser is acting aggressively they don’t care often what happens next. They only live in the moment whereas their targets are at a tactical disadvantage of having to be put in a circumstance to think of the future while facing the possibility of everything coming to an end right then and there. If you do survive those moments, you might lose everything you own in law suit after lawsuit and many years in jail. “Duty to Retreat” favored a progressive vision of society where dissemination of activity, high taxes and massive government welfare has spawned sharp increases in criminal activity putting good people at a burden to deal with the conduct.

The way things have been reminded me of the book and movie, A Clockwork Orange, where young criminal gangs terrorize innocent people because they know that people who have built value of themselves in society are always at a disadvantage. A person who has nothing to lose always has leverage against people who have everything to lose. And progressive legislation, (regressive in human nature) favors the down and out of society, the criminally inclined and inherently lazy. Their premise is that all people are equal, and that property should be redistributed to all, so the criminal element helps them achieve this goal through open crime and theft. Obviously, they don’t want people of value to be able to defend themselves from people of little value with a gun so that is why there has been legislation in Ohio that favored “duty to retreat.” If a criminal wants what you have, then you have a duty to retreat to save the lives of everyone involved. These are the same kind of people who wanted to lower the criminalization standards in Ohio with Issue 1 over the last election. Their goals are to grow criminal conduct that redistributes property to those who need it—the down and out, and the poor—essentially the Robin Hood effect. Clockwork Orange was an interesting observation of the trend of these redistributive thoughts and in how they unleashed the worst elements of society. For the anarchist the criminal is a saint, to the builder of a republic, the criminal is a detriment, a cancer that must be eliminated.  The singing in the rain scene from that film shown above is specifically what I’m thinking about.  While the scene is a dramatized version of rape violence the behavior of the criminal mind I think is captured all too well in that Stanley Kubrick classic.  So the essence behind all such legislation is what kind of society we really want to have, a republic or a anarchists paradise that puts power in the hands of the criminal and ties the hands of the law binding and hard-working behind their backs while their assets are stolen from them. Before Ohio voted for this Stand Your Ground law, that was the philosophic premise of the previous progressive legislation.

The trend of our society in every American state is moving in the direction of the gun owners. Gun ownership is part of American life—its at the core of our philosophy. While pockets of our society are still functioning from European progressivism and the noise they leave behind sounds bigger than it really is on the nightly news, the real trend is toward more individual liberty and the protection of that liberty with a gun. If you plot out legislation history not just in the Ohio statehouse but also in Washington D.C. the trajectory of what guns mean philosophically to our society is headed away from confiscation and more gun control and toward more freedom, and many more of them in the hands of hard-working people who have something to defend. And that is great news for the good, and terrible news for the bad. While progressives hate judgements of people into such categories the gun then becomes the judge. If a bad person seeks to inflict harm on a good person who is just minding their business, now the gun can rectify that conduct. The burden is not on the good to prove that they didn’t suddenly become bad the moment they pulled the trigger. And that is historic in how humans deal with each other. Because good people don’t go around creating gun violence, but bad people do. And now we have a situational judgment that can root out the unnatural paradox. Which is a wonderful thing to behold. Nice job in the Ohio House! That is truly something to be proud of.

Rich Hoffman

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The Tree of Global Warming: California’s schizophrenic relationship with exsistance

I have to give President Trump credit for doing the unpopular thing and that is criticizing forest management in California while the wild fires were still blazing and destroying massive amounts of property and killing people in live time. Many thought it was insensitive to the firefighters who were still battling the blazes and sentiments quickly retreated back into the patriotism and sacrifice of those fighting the fire, but to Trump’s point, there shouldn’t have been wildfires to begin with. Like most things that he is dealing with in his presidency, everything from empowering North Korea and Iran to be boogeymen in the world to be feared to insurmountable debt attached to socialist legacy costs, Trump with his business background looked at the wildfires and determined the cause, which most people aren’t used to hearing from the political arena.

The cause of the multiple wildfires in California isn’t just the dry conditions due to extended droughts toward the end of each calendar year, its in the regulations that California has put on itself to preserve the habitats of plants and animals but allowing way too much underbrush to exist in forest regions which then become kindling for any fire that might arise. The environments for the species the laws were meant to protect end up killed anyway, but with it millions of dollars of property and lives who have built homes in those tree hugging regions only to be removed from the connection to begin with. We live in the modern world, wildlife management, especially near populated areas should be removing all the underbrush under a forest canopy to remove the fuel for any potential wildfires. That they didn’t is the cause of these massive fires ultimately. And regarding the dryness of the plant life, there are underground aquifers that could be tapped in to in order to act as a natural sprinkler system should the need arise in population centers. Not taking those proactive measurements is precisely what President Trump was talking about.

Even though part of me felt sorry for them it was almost comical to listen to the governor of California insist that the cause of the problem was global warming as celebrities stood among the ruins of their homes in Malibu. I mean they are the ones who built their homes in an area known for wild fires, and they are the ones who have taken positions favoring the preservation of nature against the efforts of mankind. You can’t have it both ways. If you build homes in the paths of hurricanes, earth quakes and forest fires, eventually you are going to get bitten. Especially if no measures are taken to prevent the tragedies in the first place. It’s insane to have regulations against preventative action because California is trying to preserve wildlife when by the lack of prevention causes more death and destruction not just for the humans involved, but the wildlife they were trying to save. The situation is an insane approach built by a schizophrenic society.

Like most backward thinking people who ironically in this case call themselves “progressives” they have regulated logic back to the actions of mystics, the blame they contend is the mythic realm of the gods, in this case “global warming.” That is the only way that California can get away with trying to have their cake and eat it too, by building their homes and businesses in areas where they are always in danger of natural disasters. And I say natural even though accidents often start these fires because they do exist in nature. If it isn’t a careless campfire or power company that starts the fires its often lightning. In their most primal function, forest fires exist to destroy competing undergrowth in a forest. It’s an act of nature and sometimes nature can be cruel and lots of innocent plant life and animals get caught in god’s often tragic stage play. But to build in an area and put mankind’s stamp on the effort but refuse to manage the volatile elements is a recipe for disaster.

This whole issue is nearly as stupid as when the media tried to make an issue of the poor people in Hawaii who had their homes destroyed by lava flows when a volcano erupted on the big island and destroyed so much property. Hey, they built their homes on a volcano. What did they think was going to happen? This is what progressives do all the time, they test the temper of nature then when they feel the sting of the mistake blame it on a lack of appeasement to the gods. Mother nature in the world of liberal politics is just another god coming from mankind’s mystical past. Rather than accept that mankind was put on earth to tame nature, we are told that we are to live in harmony with the rules of nature. But those rules are brutal and unsentimental. Nature doesn’t care if Lady Gaga’s home burns to the ground in a forest fire, especially if the wildlife growth is allowed to grow out of control.

Trump gave credit to the firefighters and other supporter services that were fighting the fires, but to Trump’s point, the fires should have never started to begin with. They should have been managed so that if a fire started, it would never have spread so quickly and out of control. Part of what makes those fires so deadly is that they simply have too much fuel to drive them, and if forest management had done their jobs, that undergrowth would have been removed well before a danger ever occurred. As forest management employed by the government, they aren’t used to hearing criticism which is quite common in private industry, but they need to get used to it. What Trump is saying is that they didn’t do their jobs and that caused the loss of life and the destruction of a lot of property, not some god of global warming. Its one thing to believe in supernatural entities because humans want to neglect their responsibilities to existence, but it’s quite another to let those beliefs actually kill people, and that is what has been happening in California, not just this year, but every year over many decades now.

If humans are going to build a house in a region known for wild fires, then preventative action is part of the process. You can’t impose yourself on the land then back off and call yourself a preservationist. If you make the decision to do something, do it. Do it all the way, not half in and half out. A large part of the problem with everything in California is that they want to be everything, they want to be the occupants of one of the world’s largest economies, but they also want to be a leftist utopia, a literal Garden of Eden. But if you remember that story, Eve listened to the snake and that was what got her, and Adam cast from the garden. And in politics there are a lot of snakes always trying to get people to eat from the fruit of their trees. The Tree of Global Warming is one of them and California has eaten from it and thus have lost their ability to live in paradise because they refuse the responsibility of managing it. So thus, they have the problems that they do, and it certainly wasn’t President Trump’s fault for pointing it out.

Rich Hoffman

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Red Dead Redemption 2: Playing in the future by exploring the great westerns of the past

When Red Dead Redemption came out many years ago, I said that it was one of the best westerns ever produced. As a video game by Rockstar, the company that made the title, it was an awe-inspiring effort that still holds up as one of the greatest games ever made eight years later. Other games that were benchmarks of open world simulation gaming have been titles that I’ve referred to such as Uncharted 4 for the PlayStation 4 console, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Nintendo Switch. I wish I had time to play everything because I really enjoy video games, but I only have time for a few that I consider to be exceptional and game changers. So when those types of games come out, I usually take some time to spend with them. And that was certainly the case when it came to the sequel to Red Dead Redemption called appropriately enough, Red Dead Redemption 2. The game has been on the radar for release for a long time, many years now but finally on October 26th of 2018 the game made release so I targeted time to spend with it for my own reasons. The game itself is a prequel to the previous story and is set this time in 1899, a period I am very interested in regarding American history. The result was just astonishing. It really is the closest thing to a real-life West World experience that anybody could hope to get. It is not a perfect simulated reality but as a player you can easily forget about the real world and find yourself living and breathing in that massive computer world complete to every detail including tree bark, flowers and insects. The world of Red Dead Redemption 2 is fully alive with people and places set in the Old West and is just an amazing technical achievement not to mention some of the best writing for a western that I’ve ever experienced. It is truly an amazing achievement that is worth talking about.

But first there needs to be some context as to how powerful and popular video game sales are, especially for something like this. As a person I am well over the age of the average player so when my wife and I picked up our pre-ordered copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 at GameStop at Bridgewater Falls in Ohio at 9 P.M. on October 25, just hours before the official release at midnight I was met with a very large line that snaked out the door, down the sidewalk and down into the parking lot. I had just come off an important oversea call with some business partners and worked some political angles that were important for the upcoming election. On the very next night I would be at the Jim Renacci debate with Sherrod Brown at Miami University and mingling with the crowd there. During those conversations the talk wasn’t about the upcoming election for anybody under the age of 30, it was about playing Red Dead Redemption 2. But I didn’t get any weird looks for being too old to be at GameStop even though I can’t say that I had ever been to a video game release quite like this. One of my daughters used to manage a GameStop store and she’d tell me about these hot releases, such as happen with each new Madden game or Call of Duty. But this game, Red Dead Redemption 2 had been promoted for a long time as the game missed several previous release dates so people were very excited to see the result. My wife somehow managed to get us into group one on the pre-release so literally the moment we arrived we were called to the front of the line to pick up our copy and within a few minutes we were back home to start the 3 hour download of over 100gigs of information just to start playing the game. The game sold over 17 million copies during that opening weekend which accounted for nearly $800 million in sales. Compared to the average Hollywood movie, these video games are just destroying the traditional movie experience. These entertainment platforms are far more popular with young people than any movie and for good reason. I left that GameStop amazed.

It’s no secret that I love gunfighters and the basic morality of the Wild West period. I have always felt that there was something extremely optimistic about Wild West towns, that really beautiful moment in world history where individual liberty was free to dream and yearn for a better life as it matched up against the harsh realities of nature. The great things about westerns and the American historic period about gunfighters is that it was the culmination of a lot of philosophic thought crashing into an Asian culture in the American Indian that puts many of our modern problems into a correct context. And Rockstar Games has done something quite remarkable with Red Dead Redemption 2, they have paid honest homage to great classic westerns like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Magnificent Seven and High Plains Drifter and literally put video game players in those worlds not with a two-hour story but one that goes on for hundreds of hours. I have been taking my time with the game and am at over 100 hours and I still have a lot more story to get through as of this writing. I have been doing all the side quest which include taking up bounty hunting jobs, fishing, hunting, crafting various equipment improvements and generally exploring a massive western themed world from the high snow-capped mountains in the north to the plains and deserts of the lowlands. There is even a fictional town called Saint Denis which is a kind of New Orleans city complete with early versions of electricity that is fully realized and populated with people. For instance, just for fun I went into town on my horse and spent the entire night in a high stakes poker game, and I won a lot of money. The game play was just jaw dropping cool, and realistic. It was as close to an experience of actually sitting down at a table in Las Vegas is, yet the whole thing was set in an Old West environment as the sun set and rose again outside the windows. There are many little side activities in Red Dead Redemption 2 that a player could literally get lost in forever, if there was ever enough time in that sentiment.

The game is quite honest and eager to explore the clash of progressivism with the rugged concept of the American individualist and the amount of dialogue that was written and acted in this story by many random events is just staggering. There really isn’t any way to experience everything and to talk to everyone in just one playthrough of the game. Decisions made have consequences in the overall world so not everyone will be available to players based on what they do or say to other people. But the basic plot of the game guides you through a kind of participatory novel. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a story telling experience that is unlike anything ever produced, novel, motion picture or Broadway play. There are some very probing questions asked in the story that is explored with great depth that no western ever had time to fully contemplate. The attention to every little detail is just staggering and how they all randomly interact with each other only conjured in my mind that Red Dead Redemption was simply an early version of the HBO series West World. You really do forget that you are playing a game as a player, you are pulled into that world and living it.

At this point I still have a lot more to play, I probably won’t have it wrapped up as a story until after the Thanksgiving Holiday. Maybe even Christmas. If I put 14 hours a weekend into the game it will probably take another 6 weeks to finish, that is how big it is as a conceptional element. Players could blast through the story if they wanted probably in 60 hours or so, but for me, I want to live in that world of Red Dead Redemption. I personally love the time period and the optimism of the American frontier and this is the best way to experience it. Even in their worst elements, I consider the drunks, thieves and whores of the Old West to be much better people than our modern counterparts because there is an honesty in human endeavor that is evident in that time period that is lacking in modern life, so I am spending as much time there as I can. And if you are like me and like to play video games but don’t have time for all of them, if you had to pick, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the one to play. It is better than any Netflix series, any movie made, or long-standing network television program. It is modern entertainment in its best form yet and it is something to see. If this is how entertainment in the future will be, then we all have a lot to look forward to. One thing that is obvious about the makers of Read Dead Redemption 2 is that they love American westerns and they have somehow managed to put every one of them into the story of this new video game from the ugliness of criminal outlaws, such as the movie the Wild Bunch explored down to the innocence and honesty of Little House on the Prairie. It’s all there in raw and spectacular fashion and is an experience everyone should have at least once, no matter how old you may be.

Rich Hoffman

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The Shooting in Thousand Oaks, California: Why can’t we all just get along–because liberals don’t want to, they have declared war

In the wake of another mass shooting, this time in Thousand Oaks, California by what people are saying was a mentally deranged 26-year-old Afghanistan war vet leaving over a dozen dead, gun control and civility were cited as the things that people wanted, not just from the people present at the press conference, but across the nation. Why can’t we have gun control? Why can’t we all just come together and get along and heal this divided country? While they were saying it they might as well have asked why monkeys can’t fly like they do in The Wizard of Oz or why blue can’t be red, or green viewed as purple and why couldn’t Elvis still be alive making music—or Michael Jackson for that matter? Why can’t reality be suspended to fulfil our fantasies is essentially what came from the press conference in Thousand Oaks, in the aftermath of the tragedy was a desire to find civility and peace in all these mass shootings so that a solution could be brought forth that allowed people to just dance at a nightclub on a Wednesday night to some country music. Oddly enough, some of the people there were survivors of the country music concert in nearby Las Vegas where another gunman opened fire into a crowd there—of course the motive of the killer was never determined or released. On this shooting the motive was released much quicker, it was mental illness, PTSD and ABC News almost seemed to be reading off a script as they announced it. But not so fast.

As all this was happening Democrats were looking to literally steal the election in Florida from Rick Scott for the senate seat he won there with votes that are appearing out of nowhere. The lady in Georgia is trying to do the same—apparently Oprah wasn’t enough. Tucker Carlson from Fox News had his house attacked by ANTIFA and threats to his life were made. Of course, there have not yet been any arrests even though the protestors were going well beyond free speech. They were violent and implicating a promise of violence. Nancy Pelosi in the newly won Democrat majorities in the House are promising endless investigations of President Trump who has done nothing to be impeached but beat them in an election, which continues to happen. Democrats won the House for only one reason, because many never-Trumpers wanted out of their jobs because they didn’t like the way things were shaping up in the Republican Party, so they retired in most cases, around 38 Republicans and 17 Democrats leaving a lot of open seats coming up in this particular election giving Democrats a slight edge in filling those vacancies. It says more about the Republican Party coming together under Trump than anything the Democrats did. In Atlanta hoping to intimidate voters in voting for the eventual loser Stacy Abrams was members of the New Black Panther Party posing for pictures on social media dressed in military gear and holding guns as if to say, vote for our person or die. And when Donald Trump finally fired Jeff Sessions the day after the election there were protests and endless streams of anxiety from the political left over that, which is well within his right to do.

There is no prospect for peace in America. There are domestic enemies who wish to toss away the Constitution and to change the way that we conduct ourselves in American culture. They do not want to get along, they wish to be agents of change to alter the behavior of American life and so long as that is occurring there will be violence and conflict. The reason that so many people are willing to support Donald Trump in the presidency and why there were gains in the Senate, and very minimal losses in the House due to the Republican retirements specifically, is because people are aware of the new civil war that we are currently under. Big money from those domestic enemies have financed that war effort on a media front and so long as those agitators are functioning and challenging American society there will not be peace, so don’t even indulge in the illusion.

The cries for gun control after the Thousand Oaks shooting are just to disarm good Americans so that the bad ones can run free to do as ANTIFA did at Tucker Carlson’s house, threaten and dominate those standing in opposition to the point of death. It will be interesting to learn more about the shooter, the former Marine who did spend extended time in Afghanistan exposed to Islamic culture. PTSD sounds like an excuse to me, there are surely deeper issues not so neatly summed up. But the bottom line is that occupants of that night club should have been armed. The bouncers in the very least should have been carrying guns. So should the security outside the venue. If people inside had guns, they could have shot back instead of hiding under pool tables and having to jump out of windows just to survive. As it always is, more guns are the answer, not less. And eliminating gun free zones is the way to stop these mass shootings. The shooter was a frequent customer to that establishment and he knew where the guns wouldn’t be, making the entire area a soft target.

Gun control and civility are not even on the radar so long as insurgents are trying to change American culture through dirty tricks and outright threats of violence. When the question is asked, when can we return to more bi-partisanship, when can we all just get along, well the answer is in those who are imposing themselves upon the rest of us with threats of violence, impeachment and law breaking. The threats to peace come from these insurgent Democrats who want single payer health care, illegal aliens, and gun control to change America from a prosperous first world country into some armpit of Europe. It is not an act of violence to stand up for yourself, it’s a right. If there had been people at that nightclub armed in a way to stand up for themselves and not having to wait the short, but deadly time that it took for police to arrive, then the situation would be different.

The change agents looking to turn America from one thing to another have already had quite an impact and most of that started before I was even born fifty years ago. While guns where shown in westerns on television and movies during the golden age of cinema all through the 30s, 40s, and 50s Americans didn’t run around killing each other because we all at least had some shared values about what American society was, and gun ownership protected those values-more as a symbol than a tool. But now carrying a gun and the gun itself has been made out to be a monster by the same radical leftists that want to impeach Donald Trump for nothing more than winning an election. They expect us, “gun supporters” to sit down and shut up while they steal the elections in Florida and Georgia with made up votes pulled out of a few counties known for cheating. And we’re supposed to just shut up and like it. That is the source of the problem, and until that is gone, there will be no peace in America. Because we are at a time of war and it wasn’t Republicans that started it.

Rich Hoffman

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After the Smoke Cleared: Trump Republicans are much better off

I would have liked to have seen the House of Representatives stay Republican, but with so many RINOs in it, the passions of the upcoming generation of socialists couldn’t hold enough seats to give it a proper majority. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the new victors entering that branch of government, so as the smoke clears it may well be a blessing in disguise. The best way to quell the socialist movement coming from that progressive corner of government is to expose it in the light of day. By holding the Senate with good gains, the Trump agenda remains intact along with his ability to confirm judges so the direction of the country will not spin off the rails. All in all it says a lot that Trump was able to stave off a socialist revolt and what happens next will likely scare off any sentimental support that people might have for socialists like Ocasio-Cortez. We may not like the socialist tendencies that have been implanted in our culture, but we’re going to have to sift it out in conflict so that people learn their lesson. And House Republicans need to construct a strategy to retake their majorities in 2020.

However, generally I was happy with the results, locally George Lang won a hard-fought challenge to win his first full term in the 52nd District. That was number one on my list of needs for the election. The second was to maintain a Republican governor in Ohio, this time getting one that is more than in name only. There is a real good shot now of Ohio passing a Stand Your Ground law. A real good chance. The other big thing that needed to happen was that Issue 2 went down in flames, that was the school levy for the five Butler County schools that wanted to extract a lot of money from the public to avoid arming teachers in schools to deal with the potential of insurgent attacks. Those issues were particularly important to me on the local level and the inside baseball aspects of politics. So I am very glad to see things working out well, as they should have.

I was very sorry to see Jim Renacci not to come out on top of the very liberal Sherrod Brown for the Senate. The media gave Brown a free pass, just as they did for many of the House Democrats, which will be exposed rather spectacularly in the coming months, but with the liberalized media that we have, a lot of people like Brown who have no place in government were propped up, and that was certainly the case for Renacci. I personally think Renacci would have done better against Brown by getting more down and dirty, but that wasn’t his style. So the liberal held his long-standing seat with the wind of the media fully at his back, much like the young kid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I think of these candidates as media props who can’t stand without help from their media outlets and it says a lot that so few of them managed to get elected with everything that was thrown at the Trump administration. Renacci’s seat was always a deep pass with a low percentage of completion for net Senate seat gains, and Trump got those anyway, so strategically in the big picture it’s not a big deal. But Jim was certainly the better man by a long shot.

With Ron DeSantis winning the governor seat and Rick Scott winning in the senate for Florida a major bullet was dodged that will establish a turning point that the state needed to experience. The progressive caucus could have done a lot of damage to that great state for economic activity and with a friendly House on Capitol Hill could have made a real mess of things. But not getting a progressive stronghold in Florida it leaves House Democrats isolated and in a position we all need them to be in, with a circular firing squad aimed straight for their positions, instead of trying to aim in various pockets all over the country. Florida couldn’t afford to go blue, and thankfully it didn’t. And its important for Republicans to keep it that way. Poor people who don’t have much interest or knowledge about politics find these progressive candidates attractive, because they don’t know any better. In a few years when the next round of elections comes up during a presidential year the Trump economy will have taken off to even higher levels and impact even more people in a positive way, so states like Florida will be much less vulnerable. This particular year Florida was as exposed to change as it will likely be ever again, so the results there were particularly important.

With all the effort that Democrats put into trying to destroy the Trump administration it is pretty embarrassing for them to see a gain in Senate seats. No longer are there RINOs like John McCain or Jeff Flake there to tip the scales toward Democrats, of a particular note Marth McSalley beat Chrysten Sinema for the open Flake seat which is like trading in a Ford Fiesta for a Corvette as far as standing for Republican ideas. The Senate is much stronger after this election than it was before so that is a big positive. If Republicans could have held the House, the Democratic Party would be a smoking heap now, but let’s face it, the media owns the Democrats and the results they did get were obtained with a huge amount of effort and many millions of dollars wasted. The modest gains they did get were won at a great expense and knowing the way President Trump works, Democrats will have to look in the mirror and wonder if what they wished for will really be worth it. Its much easier to defeat an enemy out in the open than one that has been hiding in the shadows and now the shadows are gone. The map across the country is overwhelmingly conservative except for a few pockets of liberalism here and there represented by the House seats. And that means that promises and hopes become reality and responsibility which the Democrats will choke on both right out of the gate.

Like all battles there are always casualties but what matters is that you win, and the big seats Republicans won both locally and nationally which is of vital strategic importance. On the pro-gun side, which is as I’ve said many times, the essence of American capitalism, Ohio has a very strong state representative in George Lang who will advance pro-business measures and advance Stand Your Ground laws, and he has a governor who will sign those bills. It was never a concern about building up the votes in the House, George can certainly do that, it was that the liberal John Kasich, a Republican in name only, would not sign those bills. DeWine has indicated that he will. That will make Ohio even more of a red state and Florida to the south will join in those efforts. Progressives have targeted Ohio and Florida as insurgent zones of their leftist ideology and both states have pushed away the efforts which is far more powerful than holding a House with a bunch of radicals screaming for power. Now the liberals are isolated into one branch of government and exposed, and that is a good place to have them as the rest of the nation marches toward a new kind of Republican Party, one that is successful, and truly conservative, and for a change, winning.

Rich Hoffman

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How Economics Work: Just look to the home of the Whopper

One thing that kept coming up during the election of 2018 was the Democrat notion of inside out economics, as if something grew from nothing to formulate economic activity. Clearly, the only way that economic development occurs is from the top down, starting with an idea, then its implementation, followed by creation, then employment followed by delivery. Jobs do not come from nowhere to suddenly start delivery. Only people who don’t understand the basic foundations of economics could think such a thing and it was Sherrod Brown the very liberal senator from Ohio who said it most when challenged by Jim Renacci—his Republican rival. The entire idea that government creates jobs is a ridiculous notion and it is at the center of all liberal politics. Only a top down approach works which is the general understanding of conservative thought.

A great example of the nature of job creation is in my local community. Near the intersection of Liberty Fairfield Road in Butler County, Ohio and Rt. 4, where I live is several developments that serve the local community such as a Kroger, many restaurants, hardware stores and a wonderful golf course called Elk Run. My wife and I are very busy so we eat out a lot and usually take our pick rotating around all the various food options that are located at that intersection, everything from a McDonald’s to Wendy’s and Frisch’s. There’s a Gold Star, and a Skyline Chili, a Penn Station, and Chinese food—there are so many options including a few pizza places, that there is always plenty of choices and that makes our location particularly attractive to live.

Left leaning people dislike too much development, they prefer lots of green space, which I understand. I like nature, but more than that I love to see the creations that humans come up with. So I enjoy watching new developments come to being. At that intersection there have been a few plots of land that I was hoping would become new restaurants to give us even more options than we already have, but they have sat empty for decades waiting for the right time. Again, left leaning people like to see a lack of development because they think nature is the thing to follow. But in areas where human beings have decided to reside, the ambitions of the human mind can be and to me is, a very beautiful thing. So it was quite a delight to my wife and I to learn that those two plots of land were finally going to become something other than scenery.

At one location across from the Elk Run neighborhood a Dairy Queen is being built, which is very exciting. I love Dairy Queen and this one will be within walking distance so I can take my grandchildren there easily for fun little memories as opportunities present themselves. The second I learned about from a good friend of mine who is in the restaurant creation business, and that is that a new Burger King will be built across from McDonald’s. That is fantastic news because I do love to eat a good Whopper occasionally. My family eats at McDonald’s probably about 5 to 8 times a week, but sometimes we get tired of it. Especially when they are going through management problems, as they are presently. Fast food workers are always high turnover groups by their nature and managers are always challenged with creating reliable staffs. If they get a manager of one of these restaurants who doesn’t get it, the lines are often long at the drive-thrus, and the orders get messed up. So its great to have options and that usually is Wendy’s which is down the street a bit to the southwest.

Burger King is just another great option for us and its creation is literally coming from a plot of land that wasn’t doing anything and is becoming something that gives people like me an option in dining. Its creation didn’t come from some government bureaucrat who looked at that location and thought, “I think people will be best served to have a hamburger place built here.” Rather an entrepreneurial type looked at the demographic data from the area, checked the available land and its pricing and looked hard at a forecast of the new Trump economy and thought that they might make some money at that location. So they put up their money, took a lot of risk, and started getting the permits to build a new restaurant so that a guy like me could visit and have unlimited options to buy a Whopper when I grew hungry. The restaurant builder was taking a chance that he could compete with the surrounding competition and initiated their endeavor based on their best information. There is nothing inside out about that process, only the top down.

The restaurant owners of these new businesses expect to make money, if they don’t then none of the effort would be worth it. It is in the potential of making money that makes all the hard work into building such a place possible. Without that incentive, step one would never happen. That is why socialism fails throughout the world because it is hard to build things, anything. There are so many considerations and without a motivation of profit to lure out the ambitious, nothing happens. Not everyone is equipped to be a restaurant builder or an entrepreneur. Such people often have to work 60 to 100 hours a week, so it’s not for everyone. But the potential to become wealthy with such work motivates the most ambitious to try their hand and that is the key to the American capitalist system. To me I enjoy the scenery of human development sometimes more than a nice mountain or a group of trees. What the human imagination does with wood and stone to create variety in the human experience is something that is very interesting to observe. I never get tired of driving through any town to see what human beings have built for themselves out of their attempts to create wealth. It can and often is a very beautiful thing to observe. It’s not so good when those buildings built with hopes and dreams end up bankrupt and empty. But when they work, they are great to see.

All those inventions of thought make a life-like mine more productive. When I am trying to catch up on the DVR recordings over a weekend and we need to grab a quick bite to eat, I enjoy having the option to get a Whopper and to spend a Sunday afternoon learning things I’ve recorded by people who made those programs with an effort at making money. Everyone’s ambitions come together for my benefit and that is the miracle of modern society. It’s also the nature of all economic activity. Businesses don’t exist to provide jobs, but the jobs are created to pave the way for wealth creation, expanded GDP. And that is something that no Democrat ever came to terms with. They just never understood that basic concept. And that fault is purely theirs. Economic theory is not a newly discovered science, we know the rules. Only liberals have decided to ignore the rules to bend the world to some ancient vision of Karl Marx who was creating the premise of Marxism before a McDonald’s was ever built. But in these days of wealth creation under a capitalist system, the rules are quite clear. And they are wonderful to see in areas experiencing economic growth. Because that is evidence of something even better happening and with every new place of business that opens, it says that the economy is expanding, not contracting and that is always something to celebrate.

Rich Hoffman

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