Tag: State Soverignty

DON’T LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS: Covid-19 in a world of elephants and long tusks

I have been hard on Mike DeWine through the entire Covid-19 outbreak not because he’s a bad person. He’s actually a good person, but he screwed up as a leader and listened to the experts without providing the kind of executive filtration needed in his position. So I say he should be impeached for abusing his emergency powers, costing the state of Ohio billions, and putting unnecessary hardship on each and every person trusting him and his decisions. Good people do dumb things and when they do, they get fired like everyone else. And his mistake was in turning over practically all decision making in response to the coronavirus outbreak to Amy Acton, a professional academic, and letting her set a liberal policy in how to react to a crisis as an unelected bureaucrat. Now, I’m a Republican, an old fashioned one and am used to the people around me not being as solid of a Republican as I am. If the elephant is the symbol of our party, I am that elephant off by himself grazing in the hot sun with tusks dragging on the ground. DeWine is that beat up soul huddled in the group that has been through a lot, he’s had his tusks cut off for poaching, he’s been mulled by lions and he’s certainly been weakened over the years so he is what we call a RINO Republican, he seeks the safety of the herd for his own reasons. I get it, but when he makes himself easy prey for attackers, then he is a threat to my party and philosophy, and he doesn’t have a right to do that, and that is precisely what he has done by bringing in professionals to run the state where he lacked the courage to do so himself.

When we look back on this Covid-19 crises it will be our trust in the “professionals” that got us into all the trouble and caused the trillions of dollars in damages. We’ve set our society up across the world to turn people into overly specialized experts in their fields of endeavor when in all actuality we have been doing it all wrong for well over a century. Experts are good for specificity, but often leadership requires many ways of looking at the same information and picking the best path, and over-specialization blinds even the best experts to the totality of needed leadership. In the case of the world-wide shut down the source of the problem was terrorist intentions to take advantage of the specialized class of doctors in the WHO, the attention starved CDC and all the state health directors and contaminate their trust in modeling with bad assumptions which then triggered a global panic. Once that happened and the experts were crippled and looking to cover their asses with more bad numbers to try to get out of the corners they painted themselves into, the terrorists were looking to inflict massive social change while the world was focused on what the experts would say next.

For many years, and I still have that toolbox in my shop at my house, I had a saying I held very true from the 9 ways of the samurai printed on the lid of my toolbox so I could see it every day. I worked at Cincinnati Milacron for a while when I was younger and got to know a lot of machinists and precision manufacturers where I learned a lot, but I always leaned on those 9 ways of the samurai to think above and beyond the problems that company went through as they gradually died before our very eyes. I would say the cause of death was over-specialization. As the industry changed, Cincinnati Milacron couldn’t make the switch because they were too specialized to adapt. But one of those 9 ways of the samurai is to know the way of all things. That means that a person should not be specialized in only one thing then fit themselves into the cogs of society to only do that one thing, whether it’s a lawyer, an accountant, a manager, a mother or father, a teacher—whatever. What is required, especially among anybody offering themselves as a leader is a person hungry for knowledge in all fields and to understand their ways and how they connect. You don’t have to be a master of all the topics, but to understand their flow and relationships. Most companies, or governments die because they are overly specialized and too in love with processes that create a world of specialization. When needed, they can’t think on their feet and are easy to defeat when challenged.

And that is where we find ourselves with this coronavirus nonsense. We have allowed specialized doctors to create policy instead of the debate our republic demands and now we have all kinds of trouble. The powers behind this virus outbreak put the pressure on President Trump who has a history of doing exactly as I have said, not trusting experts and making decisions based on a wide range of understanding that most CEOs can do. When the experts threatened to paint Trump with every death that came out of essentially an aggressive pneumonia outbreak, Trump took a step back and said OK, we’ll listen to the experts. Its an election year. He’s not going to let them hang this on his head when it was the experts who said that millions of people would be dead if we didn’t social distance. And then they backed that figure down to 200,000. Now that number as of this writing is going down further and Dr Doom himself is trying to blame the modeling that he built his whole case around. If I were Trump, I wouldn’t play that game, but he is after all a New York liberal. He’s new to the field of elephants. His tusks aren’t as big as mine, but he hasn’t had his cut off like DeWine has, so there is at least enough fight and logic in Trump to make something good of all this. But it was all so unnecessary, and all the pain was caused by “experts” who leveraged themselves onto the world stage, and now they are drowning by the attention.

Leadership, real leadership is where you listen to what experts say, but you consider all types of other information as well. Americans are not a society that will be ruled by some academic class, which is exactly what this Covid-19 outbreak is about. To watch Doctor Doom from the CDC contemplate the 10th Amendment and wonder why the federal government hasn’t shut down the entire country, he clearly doesn’t know enough about law to grapple with the scope of his desire. He may know something about colds and viruses as a professional doctor, but he clearly doesn’t understand constitutional law, or much of what drives human behavior. He has built his models around his academic view of the world and nothing else, and that has put us all in a perilous place because the rest of the medical community has followed him state to state blindly accepting his mistakes as our new reality. To know the art of all things, to fight a virus we must consider that it is the human immune system that we must bolster to fight off viruses and to do that vitamin D is important (sunshine). Happiness in general. Good food, optimism, there are lots of factors to consider. We could easily say that following these doctor’s orders has likely spread the virus by lowering everyone’s immune systems in such a passive state. Specialists who are only thinking about lives saved and can only think in the means of a process struggle when the true answer is outside of those questions such as what factors make a life—a life? Someone pent up scared in their homes waiting on a government led by doctors to save them or a self-empowered person acting cautiously and doing all the right things to build themselves up to combat the virus with their own immune systems, which way is the best path? The push for a centralized solution ultimately is what caused all the deaths if we want to blame them on anything. The “slow the spread” tactic came up by these experts has only delayed the inevitable, which was their push to highlight socialized desires in the healthcare system, at the expense of all our happiness and good living.

If we listen to the doctors they would have us all wearing helmets each time we go outside, putting on masks so that ugly people feel more equal to pretty people, and they’d have us all having sex in hazmat suits. They are not leaders, only considerations. They become problems when we make leaders out of them and when they are, they destroy everything in sight every single time. There is no instance on earth or in world history where an overly specialized society ever thrived, and it never will in the future. Leadership remains an elusive science, but when a politician like DeWine accepts a leadership role then turns it over to a process driven specialist like Amy Acton, and she screws everything up, its his fault. You don’t surrender leadership over to experts who are too specialized to see the big picture. And that is precisely why every single American, and many around the world are suffering right now, because leadership was left to those least able to conduct it.

Rich Hoffman

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We Should Have Never Shut Down The Economy: Hiding in our homes, and behind body bags defeats the nature of being an American

I have the privilege of living a good life, not because anybody gave it to me, but because I have chosen to live it by overcoming massive amounts of opposition to seize it, and as a result I know legislators, associate occasionally with judges, supreme court judges, Lt. Governors—people of all types who run the world legally. I love to read and personally adore the constitution of my state of Ohio. It is much more freedom loving of individual sanctity than even the federal Constitution and think it is a tremendous advancement in human thought. I have a copy of the Ohio Constitution next to my reading chair that I reflect upon most weeks of the year at least once, and I rely on it for all the forward thinking considerations that we must make in our times to advance those ideas of personal freedom and a life dedicated to independence from being compelled to just be sheep in the world.

And it is within that framework that some of Ohio’s laws regarding gun ownership, such as a duty to retreat are so despicable, because they go against the spirit of what we set out to do in Ohio, and that is to create a government that served individual necessity, and the private property that a good life might produce when actively pursued. If you take any CCW class in Ohio you will learn that the castle doctrine does not give you the right to just shoot anybody who enters your home. You have a duty to retreat, and to preserve your life and to let whoever is breaking into your home to have your “stuff” at their pleasure. And it is that same kind of ridiculous assumption that is at the heart of this entire Covid-19 crises, which serves government for government’s needs and ignores completely any notion of individual liberty and a life pursued for those lofty goals.

I understand President Trump’s dilemma. I’ve met Donald Trump a few times and I like him as a business leader. I’ve been very enthusiastic about supporting him as a president. But I am not so star struck to be blind to when he’s wrong, and he is with his reaction to Covid-19. Sure, he knows he’s going to be blamed for an absolutely stunning collapse of the American economy—bewildering really. True wartime bombardment on a scale of when the Nazis bombed London during the blitz. The damage to America from this coronavirus outbreak will be in the many trillions. Its so big that many people just can’t get their minds around it, so when the question arises if 100,000 to 500,000 deaths are acceptable, I would say of course they are. It is more important to live for something—like preserving our American economy—than in hiding in our homes waiting for mother government to protect us. Of course, Trump is the government now and he has allowed their panic driven doctors to run his administration, and if he doesn’t let them, they’ll put every death suffered under Covid-19 on him and ruin his chances for re-election. I’m sure Trump figures that if only he could lead the effort to a satisfying conclusion, measured in lives saved, then he can at least control the news cycle instead of it controlling him. And that’s a good strategy for winning the next election. However, the fear of liability for how the death count has been measured regarding Covid-19 has paralyzed all logical thought and put many mayors, governors and even President Trump on their heels and over-reacting losing focus on what we are as Americans. We don’t run and hide from viruses even if people we know and love die from them. We fight to protect our way of life.

It was raining last Friday, in the middle of the day as this Covid-19 virus was reaching a level of hysteria I’ve never seen in my lifetime and I went to the Kroger Marketplace for some lunch since all the restaurants were closed. I wanted to go to P.F. Changs but of course I couldn’t go inside so I was headed to the frozen section to get a Benihana frozen meal to eat, which ended up tasting fantastic. As I entered the building people were running through the rain and hiding behind their masks hoping not to get this coronavirus from anybody covering their heads doubly terrified of acquiring pneumonia from the cold spring rain—the kind where our grandparents used to warn us against catching our death. Viral outbreaks are nothing new, and neither are the kind of deaths that are projected to occur from the Covid-19. What’s different about this one is how the media and governments have focused on it, and anytime you look at something so closely its ugly. I don’t trust any of the measurements the government has been providing, including the number of deaths. The government is highly motivated to show President Trump every death and to personalize it to control his thoughts. The same with Mike DeWine who lost people early in this media swarm that inspired them to step over Constitutional boundaries to enact foreign interests as a policy, let’s just be nice and say that for now. My personal philosophy is always to live a little dangerously. Actually, I choose to live a lot dangerously which is why I know some of the people I mentioned at the beginning of this article, but I am not one. I love danger. I love fighting. And I’m not afraid of a little rain, or a virus. If my body gets attacked, I expect it to defeat the perpetrator, and I live my life that way in everything I do. So I walked across the parking lot of Kroger dripping with water, soaked to the bone walking calmly at a pace I set, not that the weather mandates, and I bought my Benihana lunch, and enjoyed it.

So, it’s completely against my nature to have a government tell me to hide in my home while the “experts” fight this virus. And I’m certainly not going to trust what they tell me, even President Trump. At some point I will pick to pieces the way the government did its math on the Covid-19 virus to inspire such a panic which I view as an attack on my country and I’m ready for a fight over it. Compliance is not an option. Being a wimp is not an option. Safety is a consideration, not an expected way of living and trusting government is just a stupid idea no matter who is running it. When the rubber hits the road, our lives and the things we do with them, the products of our existence has value. Our economy has value, more than most are willing to admit and we do not have an obligation to retreat at the sign of a virus just as we should never just let a robber steal our possessions in our home without shooting and killing them. We do not have a duty by any Constitution to retreat from a threat, and the same holds true with the coronavirus.

People keep asking me how long this will go on, this stay at home order set by government so that it can deal with this crises the way all inefficient governments do, slow and cowardly, like those people I mentioned running through the rain with their masks and jackets perched up over their heads to save them from potential “death.” The states of our country are not bringing in money. Eventually, very soon, within weeks, the pain of that lack of revenue is going to crush them. Surely they are counting on President Trump to declare a state of emergency and bail them out of the debts, many which they had before this coronavirus ever hit. But there won’t be money for government employees because there just hasn’t been any sales tax, which is the most irresponsible aspect of this whole shutdown over viral concerns. Many more lives are being ruined because of the destroyed economy than by anything this Covid-19 virus will produce. The lawsuits that will happen after this is over will be monstrous, detrimental to a court system that won’t even be able to pay employees to staff the courts. This is a tragedy on a scale beyond comprehension and is far more damaging than even the high number that Doctor Doom predicted of millions of deaths. When all this is over, there will be a lot of asses to kick and that is where I’m at. Giving up our freedoms is not worth saving a few lives. Our economy, the possessions of our intellect we do not have a duty to retreat from. Just as the duty to retreat is wrong in Ohio regarding the castle doctrine, it is just as wrong to stay in our houses to allow the government to save face for its lack of preparedness to deal with this World Health Organization pandemic as they called it, and panicked the world into communist action. No matter how many body bags they stack up on television for us to see, there is an ass kicking coming, and it was they who started it. We can fight in the streets, we can fight in the courts, but that fight will happen, and the outcome will not be the one that Bill Gates and the losers at Google calculated in their modeling before all this started.

Rich Hoffman

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Ohio Has Plenty of Hospital Beds: So what is the excuse now for people stuck in their homes?

Ohio has plenty of hospital beds and can handle the “surge” of need from the coronavirus in a recent IHME model cited recently by the White House.  While its sad to think that 1,672 people in Ohio might die of the virus, more than that will die of many other things.  So if the reason for shutting down the economy with stay at home orders is the real reason for all we have suffered from, then what is the excuse now?  Here is the article as reported by the Ohio Star, click the link to see the whole thing:

 

A new epidemiological model cited by White House officials shows that Ohio hospitals have sufficient regular hospital bed and ICU hospital bed capacity for when the peak of the coronavirus hits the state in the upcoming weeks.

According to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model, Ohio is projected to see its resources peak on April 20. The model shows that the Buckeye State will need 5,609 beds; however, the state presently has 14,290 beds available, according to the study.

Furthermore, Ohio is expected to need 854 intensive care unit (ICU) beds by April 20, the date the model projects the pandemic will peak in Ohio, but it already has 12,238 ICU beds ready to go. 

In terms of deaths, the IHME model predicts Ohio will have 1,672 by August 4. As of Tuesday, Ohio Department of Health (ODH) numbers show 55 people have died from the coronavirus.

In short, there  is no reason to keep Ohio closed.  So lets get back to work!

Rich Hoffman

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Yes, It’s a Global War and Trump is Representing us well, Mike DeWine is not: The Power of Panic

Looks like I hurt that lady’s feelings in the above Tweet.  That won’t be the last time.

In the context of war is how we must view this shutdown of the American economy over this relatively docile little virus that President Trump is calling, the China Virus otherwise known as corona. There are a lot of baked in elements that all came undone at the same time, on queue as a matter of fact almost like a demolition squad bringing down a giant skyscraper. Many want to know why I am not so angry with President Trump as I am the Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, whom I have been calling for an impeachment. The difference is in how they have handled the crises, DeWine let the power go to his head and put a lefty chick in charge of the Ohio economy all in the name of safety whereas Trump has taken a much more CEO approach to the radicals at the CDC. He has given them a little rope to shut down the criticism that was part of the baked in attack, but he never let them out of control. There is quite a difference between how DeWine and Trump have handled this crises, a manufactured one to say the least. But a crisis that was an act of war that must be dealt with. This really isn’t an article on conspiracy theory because there is plenty to unpack without that analysis, so let’s look at what we know and why I still support President Trump.

I am not for bailouts; I am not for giving everyone a big check for doing nothing. Although, it is our money and we can do more with it than the government can. In the context of this war like mentality, I’d rather have the money to buy a new gun instead of letting the government squander it off for a big nothing wrapped in more panic. I am not for adding more to the national debt, but I think I know Trump pretty well and can see how he is playing the cards. And in this election year, he’s playing it just right so that we can get to that next term with the Democrats left completely out of the argument.

They were the ones pushing for panic and he gave them what they wanted and now that price tag is around their heads which will be crushing. Its not the way we expect a Republican form of government to act, and we talked about this before Trump was elected. President Trump is not a true conservative, he used to be a Democrat and has only become more conservative over the years, mostly the longer he has been married to Melania. She has certainly made him a better man. But when pressed into a corner, Trump will do anything to win, and the way they backed him into a corner, Trump is not going to rely on Constitutional concepts and remain a puritan the way Ted Cruz or Rand Paul might. And for this fight, that’s probably a good idea. Trump has elected to go to the nuclear option because that’s the only thing the enemies of America understand and what comes out of the other end will put America in a very strong financial position. The state governors were never supposed to go overboard, as they have, but really it has only built the case better for Trump.

As a result, Trump was able to get the Fed to play ball on the interest rate. Some of his biggest critics both politically, and in the big tech companies are now fighting for their own survival. Everyone is in a state of panic, it kind of reminds me of the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where at the end the bridge was cut leaving everyone on the bridge falling into a river full of alligators hungry for flesh. Once the smoke of the virus clears there will be a lot of bad characters getting eaten by alligators and worse in a swamp draining as we speak. The toxic relationship that many in the Beltway have all the way into Ukraine, Iran, China and even North Korea is getting severed in this economic stoppage because it is putting a light on the very engine of the world that nobody has been talking about. It is essentially the strike in Atlas Shrugged, where the engine stopped, and the world perished. They got what they wanted, they forced communism and socialism out into the front where everyone could see it and they have had a taste of what life under a socialist government would look like in America. It has shown Americans what Venezuela would be like. Unfortunately, some of the worst to come out of it were governors like Mike DeWine. But if China thought they had problems after they lost the trade war with Trump, they are in a whole lot of trouble now. American companies are going to hedge their bets and relocate back to North America after taking this hit, which is what Trump was after all along. And the money flowing endlessly into China has now been stopped and they have no idea what to do.

From a perspective of war, this is all very brilliant. The debt we are taking is a good bet that in the end, it will be the American economy calling all the shots and that will take everyone by surprise. That certainly wasn’t the plan when all these big government leftists around the world came up with this coronavirus scheme. The plan was to paint Trump in a corner and pressure him into mistakes that they could burn him with in the election. If Trump had been a principled Rand Paul type, he wouldn’t have been able to make the adjustment. But being something of a poker player, Trump just put on the face and put the government CDC people on the stage and let them show their colors taking the edge of the attack while using the crises to get what he had been wanting to get out of both houses and the Fed from the beginning of his term.

When you play by the rules you can be controlled by the rules. And there is power in panic which was what this China Virus attack was meant to instill. It has been a coup attempt of another kind, where the governments of the world put themselves between a virus and the people and literally took away all the things people like about life. The shock has been revealing and it turned that slow boil of the frog up to the point where the frog has now jumped out of the water and it wants toilet paper and bread. And for the good of winning the fight, Trump put on whatever face he needed to win and has put us internationally in a position we never otherwise would have been able to go. For this kind of war, that is far more important than staying within the rules and fighting the fight the way they expect you to fight. That is why Trump is still good in my book but governors like DeWine need to be replaced. Because DeWine let the situation control him and he reacted like a pansy. But Trump has remained in control of the situation from the outset and has a clear plan to attack the attackers, and that is what makes him so different, and worth our support.

Rich Hoffman

Rush Limbaugh and I: This attack on the American economy is bigger than Pearl Harbor, and Governor DeWine is playing right along

Today we received news that Governor of Ohio Mike DeWine is shutting down all restaurants and bars at 9 PM, which is just ridiculously stupid.  Obviously, the governor is showing his not so Republican roots, right now he looks just as liberal as John Kasich turned out to be and a cry baby that loves being in front of the camera too much.  This crises which I would say is mostly manufactured has fed people like DeWine, and the results are overactions like this ban on just about all social life in the State of Ohio.  I would just remind everyone, which I will get into more as the week matures and my temper calms down, this is why we have the Second Amendment.  When government gets it wrong, we must have recourse when they get power hungry and show up to our doors all in the name of safety and the “greater good.”

I often wonder if people say some of the things they do because they’ve read something I have written, and its been that way for many years. Way back when Glenn Beck was on Fox News with his 5 PM television show, I thought for sure that he was doing his daily show by reading the things I was publishing. But I’m not that conceited, rather I think the real answer is that answers present themselves to people willing to ask the question, and without speaking, people arrive at the same conclusions, or similar, because they asked the same questions and arrived at the same conclusions. Now the reader here who would like to be a pessimist will say, well why don’t I have my own radio show, or am doing this kind of thing on television. Or why isn’t he a best-selling author signing books at Barnes & Noble on Saturday afternoons? Well, the answer is that I’ve turned down a lot of media opportunities and stayed away from such offers to maintain my own independence and function from freedom. Look what Fox Business did to Trish Reagan for essentially saying the same things I have about the coronavirus. Not even Lou Dobbs was given enough rope to discuss the issue of coronavirus with the level of skepticism he normally would, because behind the news casts is a very conspiratorial corporate message. I don’t want that kind of restriction in my life. I have a lot of talents, I do what I do to make money and because of it, I don’t have to suppress this other talent of mine with the burden of making an income from it. But it stunned even me this past week that nobody but me was saying how phony this coronavirus pandemic was—except for Rush Limbaugh.

I was saying what I have been before Rush Limbaugh, but I don’t think his mind was changed from anything he read from my free blog service. I think he’s a smart guy who came to his conclusions independently, and millions of people tune into his radio show for just that very reason, to listen to his calming voice to articulate the patterns that he sees happening out there and to make sense of it. And over the years, he has done that many times on very complicated topics, and he’s been right. So have I for that matter, on topics way out from left field that a lot of people doubt when they first hear about them, but eventually, they come around. That is how this coronavirus will be remembered and I’m personally happy that Rush Limbaugh sees it too, that the virus was real sure enough, but nobody has said why we should all be so concerned about it. Many thousands of people have already recovered from it, and not many people have died, many fewer than any other common virus that people get during cold season. Nobody yet has really explained why coronavirus justified the complete shutdown of the global economy, why even the restaurants of France needed to close with movies and other entertainment forums. All anybody seems worried about is slowing down the spread and whether or not there are testing kits available to know if people are infected. But so what if people are infected. It’s not AIDs. Its not like everyone is going to die. Most people are going to recover from it shortly and get on with their lives. To date, nobody has been able to say why this virus is so “novel” from anything else, and that should concern everyone.

President Trump has tried to play things cool, I think he was where Rush and I were on this thing but with the political implications brewing, he has to find a way to turn it around on his attackers, and he has. I don’t blame him from going along with the warnings because they are literally coming from everywhere even though running around in crises mode is not a natural thing for him. Expanding his travel restrictions even to the island of Great Britain was a smart move because it attacks the true nature of the pandemic, the media coverage to drive politics, not the threat of the virus itself. Even with the American economy shut down, there is still much more GDP being produced than other places in the world and if they are going to recklessly behave in their interactions around the world, then they can be punished and sent to their rooms like everyone else. It’s the best move Trump could make, and he’s making the most out of a bad situation. But literally everyone else has surrendered to the panic including normally stable minds, like Sean Hannity. Fox News has been unwatchable all hours of the day because everyone has had to drink the corporate Kool Aid. Even Alex Jones was apocalyptic on this issue using it to sell his vitamins as if the world was coming to an end. The Drudge Report was on the same trajectory, driving panic and showing great fear of this virus for reasons that make no sense.

I guess its true that so many people are followers and are so busy in their lives that they can’t see very far over the horizon, which is why I do what I do every day. Its always very clear for me and I share that vision with people absolutely free because I want people to be happy. I don’t want a boss telling me what to think and write. Rush Limbaugh is the same kind of personality and it just so happens that he’s at a place in life where he doesn’t have any corporate pin heads worried about everything but the real problems telling him what to say and do. That has left him to literally be the only one out there saying that this overaction to the coronavirus has much more to it than what anybody is admitting to. People will get this virus; they’ll build up an immunity to it and get over it quickly. That will happen without any government in the world doing a thing about it. But this panic fanned on by virtually everyone has more to it than just concern over death. Its an attack on our economy that I think is more bold and audacious than the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese. I certainly raised an eyebrow when at 3 PM Friday during Trump’s address to the nation, which sent the stock market way up word by word that Bill Gates stepped away from the board of Microsoft. Many people don’t know it but much of what is happening was a warning from Bill Gates himself a few years ago when he was trying to convince a lot of people that the next great challenge for the human race was a viral attack. As I have been saying, I think fellow billionaires trying to get control of the human population for all their own reasons, whether it is to address global warming, or in the case of Soros and his friends, to preserve socialism around the world by putting people’s minds back onto a centralized government that they can control with donations, it was obvious that the world was turning the corner and Gates literally stepped away during Trump’s speech. (Little things like that matter, and people should take notice.) Add up thousands of those things that happen every day and you’ll get your story of the truth.

Hmmmm………………..do you see the smoke dear reader.

I stand by my contention that the coronavirus is an attack on not just America, but the world and it was meant to put Trump on his heels and give other people a chance to win the coming election. And Rush Limbaugh sees it too. The level of corporate advancement of the panic has been very concerning, but its good to see who we can trust and who we can’t in these kinds of things, so lots of valuable information has been revealed. Yet still, the panic is falling away because people are now recovering and people can see for themselves that this virus is nowhere near as dangerous as the media has been telling us and its good to see that there are free people still out there who can also see the obvious. And thank goodness there is.  Mike DeWine is not one of them.

Rich Hoffman

I Can’t Wait to Vote for Mark Welch: Sad to hear, Jennifer Gross has been a Never Trumper

After watching the debate performance at the West Chester Tea Party Candidate Forum between my pick for the 52nd House seat in Ohio Mark Welch, and his rival Jennifer Gross I was very impressed with both of their answers on the 2nd Amendment. I have known Mark for many years, before he ever ran for any office, so I know clearly where he stands on things and he has not been a disappointment. He’s had some temptations come his way as the West Chester Trustee who worked with George Lang to bring so much prosperity to the area and I know that I can trust him in Columbus where things get quite a bit more difficult. My comment to Jennifer was that I wish she wasn’t running against Mark because I’d love to vote for her for some other position. For me she was a bright spot of the evening and I enjoyed talking to her. Apparently, our paths have crossed in the past on projects and so talking to her after that event was a real pleasure. However, as an employer getting ready to vote for a new hire for an important House seat that means a great deal to our area, Mark is still my guy without question. And here are the reasons.

There is a lot of talk in this election about the establishment being some kind of maniacal force that must be overthrown, especially from Candice Keller. But I could write several books about all the work that has gone on behind the scenes with great leaders like George Lang, and Ann Becker to push out the RINO Republicans and build an Ohio Republican Party that is firm behind President Trump’s administration. That is why we recently had a big party for Trump in West Chester that drew a large crowd and Lara Trump herself came to Jungle Jim’s in Fairfield recently to help raise money for the Butler County GOP. Todd Hall as Chairman has done a great job in shaping the current GOP along with Sheriff Jones. I have done my fair share to help shape the kind of people we wanted in those positions and I am very proud of the result, of the people who are now office holders that would never have been if we didn’t start working to get real conservatives on the Central Committees. If there is anything really good that came out of the Tea Party movement, it was that, and the result is that we now have options at high office in the Statehouse like George Lang and Mark Welch, who were born out of the Tea Party movement and are now part of the Trump Administration as far as policy at the local level. So the establishment isn’t so bad anymore, I would say its actually quite good and I have no problem naming myself as a proud, Trump Republican.

In fact, I was never anything but a staunch Republican, no matter how much disagreement we may have had within the party, success does unite people in a great way and Mark Welch was there when it wasn’t cool, and he has done all the right things, and learned all the hard lessons to run that 52nd District seat wonderfully. But after checking out Jennifer’s background, I am not so sure about her yet. I’d need to see her vetted a bit before I’d vote for her in a key spot, something like a trustee seat, or even the school board. I really like her, she is a good personality and a sincere person, but her history as a Never Trumper concerns me greatly as indicated by some of her online postings shown within this article. I’m certainly never one to push away a potential friend or partner, even from former rivals. People learn things in their own way, and I am not rigid in accepting people who have seen the light into being part of a solution in the future. There were a lot of people who were Ted Cruz supporters in the last election that had a problem with Trump. There are of course the Ron Paul types whom I never was a blind supporter. I have never called myself a “libertarian.” I am a Republican in the purest form of it and likely always will be. But I don’t expect everyone to have those firm convictions.

That brings up my other issue with Jennifer, with all that said, she has made comments that she doesn’t associate with being a Republican which is a deal killer for me. It’s not just about party, but its about values. She obviously by some of her messages has some strong feelings about Mark Welch who is my friend because he has many of my shared values. Mark will clearly represent my Republican sentiments in Columbus the way I want to see. But since Jennifer doesn’t care much for Mark and obviously has stated that she no longer identifies as a “Republican” it breaks my heart to see that she’s not where I’d like her to be in life so I could give her a vote. Because I think she has the talent, certainly the charisma. But I’m not sure she can hold a note under pressure on the big stage. I’d need to see her support this current Republican Party and survive some pitfalls first. I understand that sentiments change and with success under Trump, things are much clearer than they were for people coming out of 2016. But I’ve always thought the same things and I know Mark Welch has too. He’s never been a different person. My experience with him is that he holds back a lot, he’s more a man of action than of talk so he doesn’t sell himself enough. But he’s relatively new to this political game himself. He started off as a trustee and has worked his way to where he’s now poised for a more complicated office. And its not about just straight up votes, its about team building for bill passage, and that means that you need to know how to work with the party in charge and not be some outcast that screws everything up. It’s a tough business and it takes a very likeable, and charismatic person deeply rooted in their own belief system to navigate the lobbyists, the pressures in the hall outside the chamber and the constant stream of negative emails because you didn’t vote this way or that. It always takes knowing how not to stumble over the media when they are trying to twist every word you say to play the gotcha game. I know Mark can play that game. Jennifer in my thoughts needs some practice.

When the smoke from this primary on March 17th is over, I hope to see more of Jennifer. I’d like to see her work herself into a party endorsement and to start building some bridges which is what a republic style of government requires. It wouldn’t take much to make me vote for her, just consistency and to fit into the team that has been building in Butler County in the GOP. While individualism is the key to representative government the passing of laws and the art of representation requires those extra team building skills, just as every corporate environment demands. Being a solid individual is needed to fend off the wolves who want to turn every politician into a corrupt specimen. But you must be able to win people over to your way of thinking in a republic and that isn’t easy under the best of circumstances. Its wonderful to say we should never have party politics, but in Columbus we have majorities and minorities and that is needed for all kinds of checks and balances, and that is the framework that anybody going for a State seat must navigate to do the good work that needs to be done. I can’t wait to vote for Mark Welch, he has worked hard and deserves it. And I look forward to getting behind Jennifer Gross at some future opportunity if such a chance presents itself.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

George Lang Was Always a Leader in the Tea Party: When education and book exchanges were important

It is odd, and obviously full of politics to be a part of discussions defending George Lang’s Tea Party support during the height of the movement and for myself to be associated with the establishment because of it. But then again, so be it. As I have been saying a lot this year with President Trump going into his fourth year in office, and a much different, and better world as a result especially on the investment side, at some point those on the outside get on the inside and what they do with that opportunity will define future history. To get feedback from old friends from those times suggesting that I was never a Tea Party supporter is laughable, as I was clearly one of the leaders of the movement, and did so at a great cost to myself, which I’d do again over and over. But for me there always needs to be an end to a project, and the Tea Party movement was a project needing a resolution. And George Lang along with his wife Debbie were of the same mind. They enjoyed going to the meetings and talking to people and learning things about how our government should work. But at some point you have to evolve past the rock chucking phase, and become part of the management team that takes over, and does things right.

As much as people attempted to demonize the Tea Party movement it was never a bunch of crazy radicals and far right ideologues. Mostly they were older people who knew something was wrong and they wanted to educate themselves to learn what it was. The Tea Party in the pre-Trump days had a few rallies here and there to show they were a force to be reckoned with, and they tipped the scales in some elections toward a more Republican party more representative of their values, but what I enjoyed about it was that it was more intellectual than anything, as book sharing and discussions were the centerpiece of the movement. Books like the Thousand Year Leap, Atlas Shrugged, Common Sense and even reading the Constitution and understanding it were the focus of activity that was largely leaderless. The Tea Party didn’t need a leader, because it was really books that was guiding everyone’s interest and at Tea Party events it was a chance to get together with other like minded people and to talk about these things.

That was actually how I met George Lang and his wife, we liked the same books and enjoyed getting away from the rigors of the world to talk about smart stuff at Tea Party meetings. There was always the elements of the Tea Party meetings that had people very concerned about some big brother control of their lives who protested back then the smart meters that were being put on everyone’s homes to regulate their use of power, and those people have evolved into protestors of 5G wireless service. I was never one of those types so much, I figure the Second Amendment trumps over concerns of little bureaucrats trying to impose on my family how much laundry we can do in a day, so I don’t worry about those things much. And as to 5G, I never really got involved in that debate because I like technology. Sure all these communication waves are flying around and through our bodies at all kinds of rates blasting our atoms with constant intruders, but I expect most human beings will evolve to match the challenges of technology. And to me technology means business, and business means economic prosperity for regional need. Again, with the Second Amendment, I’m not too worried about some evesdropper using 5G to spy on me. If I catch them, I’ll deal with them in my own way. But I like the technology options that come with the changing world.

After Trump was elected there wasn’t much in the Tea Party left for people like George and me. It was actually during the Republican primaries where people were pretty upset with me for supporting Donald Trump over Ted Cruz and other Tea Party picks for president that I lost touch with all those old friends. It was a clear situation where we had all become bitter rivals during 2016 and the Tea Party pretty much dissolved in disagreement over who anybody should support for president. I have been to a few Tea Party meetings since Trump was elected, and clearly once Trump won, people united on the issue, but the educational effort wasn’t the same. The Tea Party had fallen into a status of victimhood, of below the line behavior that isn’t attractive to me, and really couldn’t justify my time any longer. The same thing looks to have happened with George Lang and many other politicians like him who used to come as long as the meetings were places where they could justify the time. But just to sit around complaining about things wasn’t why the Tea Party was good, so the effort fell apart once a lot of the things that we had wanted to see was now happening in the White House, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and an optimistic look toward the future.

However for some in the Tea Party, it was their chance to point at every boogieman on the horizon and to isolate themselves from a solution, and largely that is what it has become to my eyes, which of course happens everywhere that leadership is absent. George Lang was a member of leadership within the Tea Party movement and once he found other things to put his mind on, and many others like him across the country, the movement weakened and dissolved into what it is today. I view it as something nice that I was a part of for a while, but now its time to do all the things we talked about, and that’s what’s going on. George is part of that puzzle along with other great people who came out of the West Chester Tea Party like Mark Welch, Ann Becker and T.C. Rogers who as a commissioner for Butler County came to most every meeting from 2010 until 2015. The meetings changed from book exchanges to complaint sessions and at that point the political leaders stopped going to the meetings and now there are clear divisions which is normal in any organization that loses its focus. In the beginning, the Tea Party was about education, not activism. Now it’s about activism which is much less conducive to people’s time, especially when they are part of the solution as elected officials. People like George Lang, and myself included, are turning our eyes to fixing the problems we had been concerned about, while what’s left of the Tea Party is still looking for that rally cry to continue with. Some people find comfort in spending time with people of like mind, so the Tea Party gives them something to rally behind, even though the pendulum has swung to our side and management is now up to us. But to say that we were never Tea Party supporters, George Lang and I, is like saying there was never a sun in the sky or clouds during a rainstorm. Its just not a proper statement. It might be a wish, but its certainly not a fact. What has changed is that some coming out of the Tea Party want to actually do something about everything we learned while in it, and now is the time for that action. Complaining about everything was never what the Tea Party was, but it is what it has evolved in to.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Why Rush Limbaugh is so Beloved: Republicans are postitive people

The world’s reaction to Rush Limbaugh’s stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis was bewildering to me. I suppose I understood why many on the left were almost cheering that his death might arrive by the end of last week yet they still seethed when he was presented with honors at the State of the Union address and was seated well next to the First Lady. You got the feeling that if his pending death wasn’t as good as sealed that many of the people in that room wouldn’t have stood for such an incursion and that they put up with it only because they felt just a little sorry for the popular conservative talk radio host. Then I wondered why we have even put up with such hatred. But I was reminded of the major difference between Trump and Limbaugh by Friday when Rush was back on the air between treatments that he fully expects to survive and listening to the story of how President Trump thought of the illness, and it all made perfect sense. Its why I have always been a Republican and why my particular brand of conservatism has been very conducive to the mentality of the current White House. Everything is very above the line with Trump, and also with Rush Limbaugh. Tragedies are expected to be overcome, not yielded to, and even a death sentence is something to solve, not to be a victim of.

As Rush told the story of his big day in Washington D.C. and the after party of a sorts in the White House Residential area upstairs with the First Family, I was hearing a story that was all too familiar to me. That is how I solve problems in my life. I don’t get emotional about anything and everything has a solution. There is no impossible, everything is on the table and its only a matter of time before a problem is resolved. I’m like that with everything and it was nice to hear that President Trump truly is at that level of optimism when he wondered why Rush couldn’t just get all the cancer cut out before the State of the Union Address then enjoy the evening unfettered. It was a reminder to me why I enjoy the people of this particular brand of politics so much, they are positive problem solvers who don’t yield to the emotions of the moment but are always looking for solutions. Democrats are the party of victims, people on their heels and surrendering to the whims of chaos, Republicans under Trump are problem solvers who look at everything as an opportunity for improvement. And in essence, that is the state of our modern political life, half the nation is looking at the glass half empty, the other half, that its half full. The glass is the glass, but the interpretation is radically different.

Rush may not survive the cancer, but then again, he might. He certainly didn’t take the time to wallow in the sorrow of the moment, he was invited to a big event with the President and he enjoyed it for all it was worth. The hatred expressed toward him was personal because there was a subconscious understanding that not only did they want the radio broadcaster dead and off the air for what they think will give them a chance at future elections, but they hate how positive Rush is and ironically that is also one of the things they hate so much about President Trump. They want to have an excuse to fail, to not achieve, or even not to try at all. They want to blame society, they want to blame their parents, they want to blame their schools, their government, their economic conditions on why they have settled in some rut in their life which they lack the courage to get out of. And Rush and Trump remind them of it.

I’ve seen that hatred up close and personal; I never yield to problems at all. Everything has a solution just waiting to be discovered. Its just a matter of time to grind things out so that we can uncover it. That’s how I run my own life, so it was very refreshing to hear to what degree President Trump exhibited the same traits. It didn’t surprise me, but it was refreshing, just as it was good to hear Rush back on the radio on Friday and the early parts of this recent week sounding like he always does for his three-hour time slot. I can’t say how many times I have turned on the Rush Limbaugh Show while overseas on trips, just to listen to him talk on the radio. While in Japan I would turn him on at 1 AM there and listen while I lay in bed because it was noon in the states, and it was very nice due to his positive outlook on everything. Even while surrounded by the necessities of whatever culture I was visiting, listening to Rush Limbaugh was unique because he’s unquestionably American, in that problems aren’t meant to be yielded to, they are meant to be overcome. While visiting those cultures overseas, it is always nice to hear a bit from home, and from the best that our American culture has to offer. I had the same experience in London and in Paris, rather than go to dinner at 6 PM somewhere and listen to the pub talk, I would put in my ear buds and listen to Rush on my iPhone while the rest of the world wallowed in sorrow of their victimized status. It wasn’t that I so much wanted the news of the moment, it was just nice to hear that Rush always had a solution to whatever problem was being discussed, and that was and is what makes Rush Limbaugh something unique and so beloved.

What the left doesn’t understand is that at whatever future time that Rush Limbaugh doesn’t do his radio show every day, that people like me will not turn to them looking for leadership. Simply, someone else will fill the role that Rush Limbaugh currently does. The interesting thing that has happened is that even with all the attempts at communism and socialism that various factions both foreign and domestic have attempted against the American people, positive people always find each other. I supported Trump because he’s always been such a positive person. I listen to Rush because he’s a positive person. In my own life, and I’m thinking of positive politicians whom I like a lot, like George Lang, Mark Welch, Ann Becker, Nancy Nix, T.C. Rogers, Roger Reynolds and even Sheriff Jones. I like them all because they are all very positive people to the core of their personalities. Even though they all have lots of reasons to look at the glass half empty, they haven’t, they always think of it as half full and are scanning the horizon for solutions. That is the biggest difference in the political gulf that exists in our modern day, and its not the task of the positive to yield to the negative. Rather, the other way around. The desire to see Rush off the air is deeper than just hoping that conservatives will lose a voice and that Democrats might win some future elections, its in hoping that the excuses for failure will remain for them to hide behind. Because in truth, that is what is really behind the political tension of the American two-party system in its current form. But that was never America, we are free to solve problems, and that is what makes us different from the rest of the world and is why Rush Limbaugh is so beloved and always will be.

Rich Hoffman