Tag: Teachers Unions

The Tragedy of Kobe Steel: How the smoke is fading and mirrors are breaking on lean manufacturing–revealing a diabolical academic scheme that was always there

The truth is there isn’t any magic wand that takes manufacturing techniques and turns companies into winners at the bottom line. Just like going to college couldn’t turn a kid into a success story without extremely hard work to go with it.  The harsh reality that many people have come to face is that you can’t buy quality, and you can’t wish yourself into profitability.  If you want to be successful in life you have to be willing to work harder than a competitor and you’ll have to figure out the latest trends before everyone else does in an ever-changing world.  It’s not enough to memorize the work of Eliyahu M. Goldratt or to study really hard the techniques of James Womach so that you can call yourself a “black belt” of lean manufacturing.  It’s still the case and it always will be that innovation and creativity are ever-changing opportunities for market dominance.  And let’s face it, that’s the name of the game.  That’s also why this global tragedy involving Kobe Steel is such a case study into the temperature of the world regarding manufacturing that it merits our tenacious considerations.

Kobe Steel is a large producer of various industry metals, particularly aluminum and due to the nature of the world marketplace distributes their product all over the world to the largest companies currently in existence.   The assumption is that since the company is Japanese that they make high quality products at Kobe Steel—just because they are made in Japan.  That country has done a great job building up their brand with an eye toward quality—which is precisely why Womack, Roos and Daniel T. Jones featured them so prominently in the 1990s book The Machine that Changed the World.  In that classic book Womack had pretty much closed the case on western mass production techniques and very subtly implied the takeover of manufacturing practices being instituted right in front of our faces.  College academics were essentially attempting to use lean manufacturing practices revolutionized by Japan—specifically Toyota into a global revolution that would help pave the way to a one world global government by unifying all various markets under the flag of lean manufacturing.  And this failure at Kobe Steel, which is quite serious presently, has the fingerprints of failure rooted in this rapid expansion of manufacturing approach that has been taking over the world since the 1960s.

The attempted academic takeover of all industries has been going on for a long time and their goal is almost always the same.  Generally the academic believes in global collectivism and that the power of the individual is subservient to the needs of group think—and the view of American mass production was that a single foreman, and a single process engineer were things of the past and that hive behavior in the form of lean manufacturing developed from Japan would become the dominate way of doing business.  But the real villain was not American manufacturing; it was the kind of rugged individualism that often emerged in American car companies and steel manufacturers.  If you peel back the onion even more behind these academic reformers they were ahead of themselves on global wealth redistribution and they purposely worked their way into the various industries with mountains of paperwork for employers to fill out so that the tasks would become so cumbersome that companies would just flee overseas to run away from bureaucracy.  The subtext to all this academic insurrection for the last 50 years has always been lean manufacturing and that American companies better get with the pace of the rest of the world or they’d be out of a job.

I’m never one to throw out the baby with the bath water; there are some really good things that Womach and his buddies came up with in that aforementioned book.  And I’m a fan of the work by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.  I like those guys, but in relation to the problems of today, I have my own thoughts—and I dare say I often go much deeper than anything that came previously.  I’d say that you have to if you want to invent something new, otherwise how would you ever stand out in a world that is so competitive?   I can also say that I’ve been through many lean manufacturing seminars over the years and all those companies that sponsored those activities are now out of business, because what they did was attempt to copy what worked in Japan to an American market, and it clearly didn’t work.  I watched with disapproval as many companies tried to take the concepts in Womack’s book and applied them directly to manufacturing facilities where American workers resisted, and resented the efforts to the point where the company just folded—because nobody seemed to understand what was really going on.

The Japanese had a unique problem after World War II.  They had lost a war and needed to rebuild their economy from the ground up.  They also had an occupying force that changed all the rules of manufacture on them, and imposed on Japanese companies union friendly policies that made innovation so much more complicated.  Just like American manufacturing at the time was peaking because the mass production techniques had created in American workers this new idea of lifelong employment instead of just doing a job in the city then returning to their fields in the country to resume their independent life—socialist oriented labor unions took root and started managing things at manufacturing facilities across America.  At that time it was a trend so America forced Japan into the same box of thought for which they needed a way to get out.  So Japan offered a policy of lifelong employment to their employee but in going a step further than unions did in America, they adopted a decentralization of authority policy where wages and promotions were attached to tenure, not performance and that essentially stabilized their work culture into a nice predictable pattern that they were able to inject into a market share that essentially ruled for the next fifty years.  This was fine with the academics because it sapped the wealth from American manufacturing and relocated it to the orient and even into Europe.  As time passed and American companies still struggled with the concepts of lean manufacturing because at the core of it is a group think that purposely diffuses the merits of individualized behavior then more American companies became Chinese and Korean companies because people in those regions already were somewhat predisposed toward lean manufacturing thought—it’s an Asian thing.  For people who will eat the eyeball of a chicken as a snack it’s no big deal to stand at an assembly line and decentralize authority to the masses of group think.  But to the six-foot six ,300 pound redneck from Appalachia that has a Confederate Flag on the front of their pick-up truck, it’s quite difficult.

However, life was never all that great in Japan.  They were willing to work hard and long, but they were still an occupied country infused with western ideas on the collapse of their great empire which was destroyed at the end of World War II.  Before that they had the samurai culture which had been destroyed by the emerging new emperor—so the people were always ready and willing to fight for something but they had been shell-shocked over the centuries with a lot of disappointment.  If they could get back at the West by imposing lean manufacturing techniques on those “cowboys” then they’d be very happy, and thus they have been riding on that reputation now for many decades even though it took a lot of smoke and mirrors to maintain the illusion.  But those mirrors essentially broke with the release of this news from Kobe Steel.  To keep up their shipments and deal with the focus of the world on their products Kobe Steel had to fudge the paperwork they helped to create and due to the constant pressure from other Asian markets which have emerged over the last twenty years, Kobe Steel had to take short cuts on quality to stay relevant.  In essence, they became dominated by new, leaner and more ambitious manufacturing techniques just as mass production had been destroyed by lean manufacturing in the 80s and 90s.

I had a front row seat to all this activity, I worked at Cincinnati Milacron in the mid 1990s and it was going out of business by the day at that point in time.  They had us studying lean manufacturing techniques just to stay alive.  I could say the same about the Fisher Body planet in Fairfield, Ohio where my grandfather worked.  I could also say the same about the Camero plant in Norwood where I knew several people who worked there.  Now there is nothing left of those places, Milacron and the Camero plant were completely bulldozed away erasing their memory.  People visiting those locations today would never know that they ever existed.  In the final days of their manufacturing lives they had the same desperate anxiety about them that we can now see out of Kobe Steel—and it saddens me to see it, but it doesn’t surprise me.  These trajectories of failure are predictable and can be traced largely back to our academic institutions that impose themselves on the creativity of any industry that must move with much more nibble feet to compete in an ever-changing world.  By the time the academics get their published opinions out about global trends, they are too late and those who listen to them find themselves on the hot seat toward losing immediately.

I may tell my secrets later, but certainly not now.  Innovation didn’t stop with Womach.  Lean manufacturing has some good things to offer, but it certainly won’t deliver anybody to the Promised Land without a lot of hard work and a new take.  Just because you study the words of something it doesn’t mean that success is guaranteed, and so many people even today think that success can be bought.  For those who think such things just look at the Kobe Steel case—a Japanese company that is still struggling to find their place in a competitive world as their niche concept of lean manufacturing is proving to be more of a gimmick now than a justifiable strategy sold by academics for the purpose of destroying manufacturing in the West so that the East could spread communism to every corner of the planet.  That was always on the mind of the academic after all—that much should be clear to everyone now.  But lucky for us all, the wheels fell off at Kobe Steel before we went too far down that road—and the good news is that innovation and the next great things are still out there waiting for the world to copy them.  Until then, I’ll keep the smile on my face watching others try to figure out the latest riddle in the world of competitive manufacturing.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Where Are the Pink Pussy Hats Now: The death of Hollywood over terrible customer service

It was roughly a year ago that the Access Hollywood recordings of Donald Trump were released intending to sink his potential presidency.  When I first heard the comments I couldn’t help but feel the hypocrisy because let’s face it, men and women talk that way to each other all the time.  Women most of the time like the attention of men and men are by their biological design built to pollinate females to procreate our species.  All these silly new rules of conduct of men being chastised for wanting to stick parts of themselves into females are artificial and counterproductive.  But  when the people of Hollywood tried to use these new, stupid rules of male to female conduct to destroy Donald Trump when in fact it was they who perpetrated and actually exacerbated the bad behavior to begin with I thought was astonishing.  After all, Hollywood’s product used to be a good back when they made westerns and big sweeping epics like Ben Hur.  Men treated women with respect in those old productions and all was well with the world until movie producers like Harvey Weinstein made a joke out of the industry abusing his power so he could look at the boobies of the young women who wanted more than anything in the world to become stars on the silver screen.   It was obvious that if the same standard that was applied to Trump a year ago were to be turned around on the entire entertainment culture that a lot of people probably wouldn’t survive, and that’s what’s happening now.  Hollywood just killed itself with its own weapons.  Sean Hannity did a remarkable job of positioning the reasons why Hollywood will never be the same in the following video.

I always liked the Hollywood product and the industry as a whole.  But for a long time they have moved so far to the political left that what used to be an event I enjoyed—the Academy Awards were now just another inward looking celebration by a bunch of liberals congratulating themselves on being anti-American insurgents.  If you weren’t liberal you weren’t going to work on a Weinstein movie and in a lot of ways Harvey Weinstein was bigger than Steven Spielberg in Hollywood—by the volume of his work and the number of Academy Awards he amassed.   As one of the leading spokesmen for progressivism, his platform in the entertainment industry was unparalleled and it seems ironic that all that could be torn down with these outrageous claims toward him that are in some cases over twenty years old.  I say they are outrageous because many of the women who are now accusing Weinstein of rape are now forty-year old women who are no longer sex symbols.  They used sex to get into movies when they were in their twenties and only when men stopped looking at them as possible places to pollinate did they suddenly become “outraged.”  But the fact remains that dealing with people like Harvey Weinstein turned them into the man hating feminists that they are today as their lives are now filled with regret on what they had to do to climb the ladder in Hollywood to become a leading lady A-lister.

Yet the way they all collectively pounced on Donald Trump over the Access Hollywood tape was remarkably hypocritical.  They created the industry and the rules.  What Trump was talking about in his famous lines to Billy Bush was the effect of celebrity which he had just learned about late in life with his success with The Apprentice.  Trump was enjoying the kind of attention by women that movie starts like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had always enjoyed, and being a smart guy he was pontificating about it to Billy Bush.   Yes, women will do just about anything to be near powerful men—it’s a deeply biological response to the mating game.  But unlike most of those Hollywood hot shots, Trump had a nice wife who kept him grounded and the temptations of flesh that are often thrown at movie stars by the opposite sex just to have access to a memory with their idols was managed and Trump moved on to bigger and better things.  By the time the Access Hollywood tape was released Trump was a different kind of man largely shaped by his decision to marry Melania Trump.   But the desire for entertainment executives and major political pundits to go after Trump, and to try to destroy him over these new age male and female roles which they had perpetrated was always  dangerous because they also made up the rules of power playing the opposite sex into compromising positions just to work in the industry.   You don’t get to the level of being a leading Hollywood actress at the level of Angelina Jolie or Gwyneth Paltrow without showing somebody your tits.  Not when there is a line of young women from Santa Monica to Paris willing to do anything to be the next Hollywood star.  People like Harvey Weinstein made themselves the gate keepers to success essentially so they could see titties—and everyone knew it.   So who were they to criticize Trump?

After Trump was elected president and was sworn in, the Academy Awards ceremony to me was unwatchable.  The way they ridiculed President Trump just because he was the Republican in the White House was disgusting and it made me wonder if they knew who their audience actually was, because there are a lot of Trump supporters who are like me–they love to watch movies.  But if the movies and the people who made them were so anti-Trump, they’d be forced to go somewhere else for their entertainment and that’s what has happened.   Hollywood has had their worst box office performance in 25 years and they are down an incredible 16% just from the previous year of 2016.  That was before the Harvey Weinstein story broke which virtually connects every major star in the industry to all the ugly stuff they complained about in Trump.  Except with Trump it was largely made up and overblown, but in Hollywood they were actually doing the things they accused Trump of—and to a far worse degree.

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/09/liberal-hollywood-worst-box-office-numbers-25-years/

Where were the pink pussy hats that the Hollywood stars wore in protest to the Inauguration after Trump spent his first days in the White House?  Former stars of the Hollywood machine ran by people like Weinstein were protesting Trump so they set the gauge by which they are all now choking.  If the same standards they were trying to apply to Trump were turned back on them, then what did they think was going to happen?   The Trump supporting public already voted with their feet, just like they have with the NFL.  The great American game of football is down 30% just because those stars in the NFL thought they were bigger than they were.  They learned a hard lesson; people in the stands don’t care about them if they are going to throw off the shared elements of our culture, like the American flag.  Fans of the NFL turned on those stars of sports in a moment which has been a harsh reality to all professional sports.  They forgot who their audience was and in their hatred of Trump they drew a line between themselves and the fan base that enjoyed their product.  They have a major customer service problem as a result.  And that is precisely what happened to Hollywood in 2017.  They are down at least 16% because of the way Hollywood came out against a popular president.  People who voted for Trump largely knew the Access Hollywood tape was a set-up job and that Hollywood was guilty of much worse.  Now that we have the truth, that movie industry is changed forever.  They’ll never bounce back because they have lost the trust of the public.  Ultimately it’s not people like Harvey Weinstein who make projects succeed or fail, it is the public that buys the tickets—and they have been voting against Hollywood for a while now.  Now that Hollywood has alienated most of the country in their hatred of Trump, the hypocrisy on full display in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual meltdown will sink the entire industry—and that’s a good thing.

America can’t be great again if the art and entertainment community is so vitriolic toward a president that half the country wanted.   When they showed up against Trump during his Inauguration in 2017 and protested him as a sexual predator they set the bar impossibly high for themselves as a result and now they are being crushed under their own standard—because they can’t live up to any of it. As actors and film moguls they live in the make-believe world of their own creations but under Trump’s presidency illusions are being shattered out of necessity, and now these people are exposed, and they are burning in front of our faces.  Hollywood will never recover as an industry.  Sure there will be new forms of entertainment that will emerge, but the Wilshire Blvd culture for which Hollywood has built its own kind of Wall Street is dying right in front of our eyes, and because they made themselves into a political weapon of the left, I’m glad to see it.  They have let us all down and now it’s time to pay.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

West Chester is on Money Magazine’s Top 100 List: Who to vote for in 2017’s trustee election

I know I I’m very proud of West Chester for remaining one of the top places to live in the entire United States yet again by Money Magazine.  Since George Lang has been a trustee he has contributed greatly to this rise in national profile and he is now moving to become a state rep in Columbus so he can do the same thing for Ohio on a much larger scale, and don’t doubt for a moment that he will be successful.  George knows how to work “it,” and I look forward to his results quickly in the next few years.  Things in West Chester have really improved over the last several years since George and Mark Welch have been running things as the one, two vote for the West Chester trustees.  A quick look at the history of the Money Magazine rankings below will show just how much success they’ve had.  The consistency ranging from this year all the way back to 2014, the first full year after Mark’s election, provides the unrequited testimony to the success the two have had in spite of Lee Wong’s efforts at community socialism to make West Chester such a destination of success and opportunity.

WEST CHESTER TWP. — West Chester Twp. is, once again, named among the best places to live in America.

That’s according to Money Magazine, which today released its list of “100 Best Place to Live in America” with the growing Butler County township as No. 56 on that list.

West Chester Twp. was previously ranked No. 49 in 2016’s “America’s Top 50 Places to Live,” No. 30 in 2014, No. 97 in a list of “Top 100 Places to Live” in 2012, No. 32 in 2010 and No. 45 in 2005, according to Money Magazine.

Released on Monday, this year’s list focuses on communities with populations from 10,000 to 100,000.

http://www.whio.com/news/west-chester-lands-best-places-live-america/WHFDzYMsBOyP5j2KEnpkxJ/

For perspective there are 267 cities currently in America that feature populations less than 100,000 people, so to be in the top 100 is quite impressive.  There are many more small towns and localities, but for a managed population with such a great number of residents that have to balance out tax burdens, zoning, livability, future outlook and day-to-day management, West Chester is a fine example of how it should be done. Of course with all that success there are lots of coat-tail riders who want to make a name for themselves as the next generation of West Chester trustees.  This particular year is unique because not only is George’s seat up for candidates because he is moving to the state position, but Mark Welch’s seat is up for re-election as well.  Lee Wong is the third seat and it is also up to be challenged.  Under a normal year to keep things running the way they have been in West Chester, only one of those seats would need to be defended from the incumbent personalities seeking to make a name for themselves.  This year, two seats must be defended.  It would be nice to get all three with conservative minded people, but looking at the list of people running there are a lot of liberals running as Republicans but are in fact major RINOs so we need to clear things up for the voters who don’t know the difference between the people with all the big signs so that they can know who they need to elect to keep West Chester in that top ranking with Money Magazine.  After all, what it comes down to is investments and for people who want to protect their investments in their community they must elect the right people this time around to maintain stability otherwise everything could go to hell quickly.

My picks for the West Chester trustee race is to re-elect Mark Welch.  He’s most responsible of all the candidates for the great Money Magazine reviews that have been unleashed during his term in office.  Ann Becker is my second pick; she is clearly the best next person to work with Mark to keep West Chester running correctly.  I’d like to see Lee Wong lose, because he’s an idiot, and a socialist.  His third vote isn’t too damaging so long as two real conservatives are on the other side.  It would be good to try out a new name to replace Lee and see if someone can emerge.  A new name would be best, not the tax and spend names from the old Lakota school board.  If I had to pick my poison Lynda O’Conner would beat out Joan the Hutt, (Joan Powell)  Both women have election experience and access to some money which is why they have some big signs, but neither one of them are conservatives.  They have both supported high taxes in the past but of the two Lynda is clearly far better than Joan.  Honestly voters would do better to elect the lady who makes sushi at Kroger before trying either of the Lakota school board people.  At least she knows how to make something good for a decent price.  But she’s not running unfortunately.  Everyone else running is a gamble.

Mark and Ann are the sure money to maintaining West Chester’s high profile and country-wide expectation.  If both of them are not elected together than anything can happen.  Money Magazine likely won’t be including West Chester on their future lists.  A lot of people take for granted good management when they have it, but miss it desperately once it’s gone.  Mark’s track record is stout and needs no explanation.  Ann Becker for those who don’t know her can easily make up for experience with her thinking.  I’ve known her for years and she is at the center of almost everything political in Southern Ohio.  She like George Lang knows how to “work” things behind the scenes without going negative.  She is a naturally gifted personality and I think being a woman helps her tremendously in perhaps even improving the Money Magazine ranking in the future.  She knows how to sell conservative ideas without the typical defensive posture that most business oriented conservative men do.  Not that it matters, but most people who have been successful in business have been taught that they have to apologize for their success so they get defensive with the media when they talk, or they avoid talking at all.  Ann is great with the media, she’s on 55 KRC every week speaking with Brian Thomas and she’s done a lot of television.  She has connections to CNN and many other major national networks, so she brings a lot to the table and is the best opportunity for West Chester to either maintain the Money Magazine ranking, or improve on it.  Nobody else running has a chance.

It is a tremendous honor to have such a large community like West Chester continuously ranked on that list. I love West Chester.  I have traveled a lot and have been to some of the most far-reaching places on earth and there isn’t anywhere that I can think of that’s better than West Chester.  From all the offerings along Cox Road to the Union Central Blvd exit, West Chester is a very dynamic place.  You can do just about anything in West Chester.  From Entertrainment Junction to the great VOA Park, people could live in West Chester every day and never go anywhere else and still have more to do then in resort cities like Orlando Florida, or Las Vegas—and would never miss an opportunity.  That is saying a lot.  I consider most of my Saturday’s and Sundays to be like a vacation, but it’s all within my home town.  Between IKEA where my mother-in-law comes in from out-of-town to shop at, like a lot of people do, to Top Golf where it’s a dream destination for business clients visiting from far off places, West Chester has it all.  But it needs to continue to have good management—we can’t take these things for granted.  It’s a delicate balance, so be sure to vote in November for Mark and Ann—and take your chances on that third name.  But make sure two of them are the people I mentioned.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit in the Mouth: Why Donald Trump and Jim Renacci are the future of politics

 

You can really tell how sick something is when you apply some basic measurements that work perfectly well in one known environment then apply those same rules to a lesser understood situation.   That is certainly the case in regard to President Trump’s business experience compared to the falsehoods of political theater.  With Trump expectations of completed tasks have rocked Washington D.C. culture with something they’ve apparently never seen in the modern era—firings.  And they’ve also never seen somebody work as hard as Donald Trump does. That combination of things has really put the pressure on the political establishment to show how bad and ineffective they’ve always been leaving only to point to the president and declare that he works too fast on too many things and that the turn-over at his White House has been too extreme.  With the resignation of Tom Price Trump has gone through more employees than any previous administration has and that is likely to continue.  What did people think was going to happen from a president who became known on television for firing people?   But honestly, this is the way it typically is, when you do any endeavor some people will adhere to the philosophy of whoever is running things, and some won’t make it.  Those that don’t will find themselves on the outside looking in and that’s how things work in the real world.

It is astonishing how limited most people live their lives.  When they assume that Trump for instance cannot deal with three major hurricanes, a war with North Korea, a health care reform package, a tax cut and a hostile media and still not have time to Tweet about the NFL’s disgrace of our flag then still take time to conduct social occasions at the White House are people who clearly don’t understand what multitasking is all about.   When I campaigned for Trump this is exactly the kind of president I wanted, someone who would work on all the major issues of the day and do so seven days a week 24 hours a day.  For those who don’t understand the difference between Trump and Obama playing golf, Obama played golf to show that he was one of the big guys who had made it in life.  Trump does it to make deals—which is why it’s the game of business transaction.  It also helps that he owns golf courses and can go there to work and get away from Beltway politics.  But with Trump, he works day and night no matter where he is and this is simply something Washington D.C. has never seen before and they really don’t know how to interpret any of it.

The firings and resignations at the White House under Trump’s administration do not surprise me at all.  I have personally hired hundreds of people and whenever I start a new project I have enthusiasm for each and every one of them.  But often you can tell within a month or a year who will be around for the future and who won’t.  Everything looks great on paper, but when reality hits you quickly find out who was talking a good game during an interview and who can actually live up to what they sold of themselves.  With Trump the people he hired for his administration all seemed competent relative to the way things were before he took office.  Well, just a few months into the years of Trump things have changed and everyone is feeling the pressure, and this is no surprise to me.  I had a feeling this was exactly what would happen and I never had any expectations that Trump’s cabinet would stay intact.  Over the pressure of expectations some would last and some would not.  I will go as far to say that there will be many more firings and resignations over the next eight years because the daily grind will mandate performance and it is Trump who sets the standard—and few people will find that they can live up to that standard.

Part of the problem is that people have previously viewed government work as a kind of lifetime appointment and expectations were never really associated with the work. That attracted the worst of our civilization to public office because there they could hide their incompetency from the world but still demand the highest wages available in those fields of endeavor as administrators.   By bringing in private business people into government however naturally this age-old sentiment is being challenged and the results are predictably good.  In my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio the affluent community of West Chester has been run by a couple of pro business politicians who have private industry backgrounds and things have really taken off.  This has been part of a national trend that really has been emerging since 2009 when the Tea Party movement started taking shape and affluent people stopped looking to give their money to politicians and instead started getting involved themselves—in many ways like the Founding Fathers of our nation did in the beginning.  Why give some useless politician your money when you can just do the work yourself?  So we are seeing all across the country these politicians with actual business experience running for offices and winning—and they are actually fixing things for the first time that we’ve ever been able to see in American politics.

That’s certainly the case with Jim Renacci in Ohio who is running to replace Governor Kasich next year.  Jim is my kind of guy, he’s self made, he’s became rich doing good hard work and running several businesses and now he’s looking for kind of a retirement job to give something back to the state he has worked in for so long.  Being personally successful in many endeavors from  a financial consultant to running Harley Davidson dealerships in the Columbus area he is the Donald Trump of Ohio pouring $4 million dollars of his own money into his campaign for governor.  Anybody but Jim would be a status quo vote and the same old people who served the governor’s administration would still be around long after the next few elections because that’s how it typically is in government.  They create jobs for themselves and they take in money from lobbyists and financial backers who work against the will of the voters.  Someone like Jim Renacci and Donald Trump are already wealthy so they aren’t looking to get rich off schmoozing in politics.  Management is in their blood and they are attracted to these governor and president jobs because they are the ultimate management challenges and these guys like to be in the heat of the battle. That’s what sets them apart from the typical politician.

That trend is going to continue and most of the Beltway media just hasn’t been able to wrap their mind around these changes.  The changes came because performance was expected and the lies of the past just won’t work going into the future.  I’m getting exactly what I expected out of Trump and I would expect nothing short of the same from Jim Renacci in Ohio.  I want these types of people as local trustees.  I want them on my school board. I want them as county commissioners.  I’ve told the story of my dealings with Hamilton County commissioner Todd Portune before—people like him are abundant for pennies on the dollar-they are what we have had to accept as the political class.  It used to be that business guys would give people like Portune money for their elections, and would hope that rules could be made to help the business community, but those politicians often cost businesses in other ways with higher taxes, or they just fiscally run their communities into the ground.  So people like Trump and Renacci instead of taking their lifetime of earnings and retiring to luxury in Florida—as they may have in the past are finding in politics a nice retirement gig.  They’ve already made their money and solidified their reputations.  But if they still want to smell the flames of battle regarding management of resources as they did in their businesses from years past, they are running for office—and I think that is a wonderful thing.  That’s how it was always supposed to be.  The best and brightest among us should seek political office and bring that vast experience that made them successful into the management of our country’s affairs.  And if people get fired, so what.  The goal of government isn’t to create jobs that people sit in over their lifetimes.  It’s to do the work of the people who elect representatives into government to take care of business.  And it should be people good at business who sits in those seats.

Everyone has a plan until you get hit in the face.  Mike Tyson said that years ago when he was the defending world champion of boxing and its very true.  Politicians are good at making plans but nobody until recently ever expected them to implement those plans.  Once life hit them in the face they sort of went back to their offices and planned their lunch break—and they’ve been doing that for years.  What we expect now is that once a plan goes south, and we get hit in the face, that we have people in office that hit back and make whatever adjustments need to be made so that success can become the norm.  That means often people who are hired for a job will fall short of what’s expected of them and they will need to be replaced.  When those circumstances arise, we don’t want politicians who don’t have experience in hiring and firing people to be in charge—we want people who do have such experience.  And that is what Donald Trump is doing and he’s doing a fantastic job of it.  My only wish is that we didn’t have him ten years ago—but I’m glad we have him now.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

A Note to NFL Players: Understand your role, social causes are not one of them

Let’s get something straight, this is football.

This is not:

I thought it was rather stunning that the CBS Sports staff on the Sunday pregame show for the opening of the NFL season at noon spent at least 15 minutes talking about a player who isn’t even on an NFL team, Colin Kaepernick. It is truly an awesome display of ignorance that the studio heads of the major networks would look at the NFL ratings and not draw a parallel to the amount of players who have followed Kaepernick into kneeling during the National Anthem ceremonies before games. People who pay over $200 per seat by the time you total up the whole NFL experience don’t want to have some 20 something kid lecture them about social injustice. They want a break from the world which is why they show up to spend so much money on a simple game. But for people connected to the NFL media to openly endorse anti-American behavior is a reckless enterprise that shows they have no idea who their audience is, or how much that audience will put up with to spend money on their game.

I look forward to the NFL season each year—I enjoy the game as a capitalist enterprise that makes a lot of people happy. The NFL experience is a good one, especially on an October Sunday where the air is cool, the humidity is down and all of downtown is thriving at 10 AM in the morning with festivities awaiting the big game at 1 PM. I’ve been to several NFL games around the country and have more than once spent large amounts of money on experiences in the club section and I always enjoy it—more on a macro level as opposed to the intimacy of a local team. I think football is good for America and is an appropriate metaphor for the capitalist system of economics that makes our country the most successful on planet earth. Its good in that regard to indulge in the spectacle of football.

But then you have a player’s union rooted in Marxism that seeks to work against capitalism by its very nature—you have a lot of kids who grew up in impoverished socialist cities who only found in football a way out of their self-imposed misery—who really don’t understand the greater world outside of the rules of the game who are thrust onto the front pages of magazines and television cameras for a short five or six years of their young lives. Then when the game is done with them they are thrown back into society to do something—usually to fail. You have the various progressive groups who want to rename teams into things less “offensive” or to make the game “safer” by making movies attacking the concussion protocol, and other issues. Like CNN did with Sea World, many in the entertainment business see the NFL as a capitalist icon that should be brought down and they use social welfare causes to attack the institution of football, which is having an effect. Then you have some kid like Kaepernick who takes all the fun out of the game by not honoring the National Anthem and forcing people to deal with a social cause everyone wants to forget about for the three-hour span of a game. Most people watching football want to drink and knock the edge off the stresses in their life, and they want to watch violence as their team marches toward a meaningless victory that will be forgotten 24 hours later in the middle of a Monday. When Kaepernick started these protests during the 2016 season and other players followed him, the NFL ratings plummeted. And that is carrying over into the 2017 season which should concern everyone involved. But mysteriously, people close to the game, like television game hosts are sticking with the protest narrative as if Kaepernick has some kind of right to be anti-American while the team he is on is supposed to honor the American system for which football is a game of proper metaphors.

It really shouldn’t even be a debate. The NFL owners understand what the intention is—it’s to make money. Without money the players don’t get paid, their cities don’t get the needed revenue they need to support stadiums in their downtowns, and many of the bars and restaurants that are satellite businesses to the NFL lose huge portions of their revenue. I hate to say it but if you are an NFL player, you are an employee of something much larger—and you need to shut your mouth and play your role in the entertainment for which you have been commissioned. You are not some God on the field of dreams, you are an instrument to be played to the liking of the mob—and you better get used to it. You sacrifice your personal sovereignty the way a soldier does for the US military—you are to follow orders and do what they tell you to—and to like it. When you are done playing the game, you get your life back—and that’s what players sign up for in exchange for the massive paychecks. They are to sacrifice their bodies and their lives while they are playing to the needs of football.

When I was younger every coach wanted me to play on their team, but I never did because I knew as a younger person that football was a means to losing my individual sovereignty and I didn’t want to do that. I wasn’t willing to give that up for the fame, the girls, the power of local celebrity—but some people were. They had pretty positive experiences until they were injured or found they could no longer play the game. I think it’s a reasonable trade-off, and for those who choose to play, they need to understand the rules. They don’t get to change them the way that Kaepernick has tried to do—by assuming that football is so big, and that he was so good that his social messages would have to be listened to by a public half drunk and miserable in their daily lives. He obviously was wrong.

It was really amazing how many social causes attach themselves to the game of football these days, from cancer treatments to hurricane relief—football—especially in the NFL has become more about social causes than about smashing the other guy into oblivion and winning a game for the pride of your local city. But on a Sunday where two hurricanes had just hit the US mainland and one of those hurricanes shut down the opening of two NFL teams in Florida there were a lot more important stories pertinent to the game of NFL football than Colin Kaepernick who is without a team because he’s so toxic and whether or not he should be playing due to his social justice crusade. People don’t care, nor do they want to be reminded of such a thing when they are spending over $1000 on beer, nachos, and hot dogs hoping their team will give them in return a victory they can enjoy for the afternoon and forget all the troubles on their plate at that moment.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

Why the Star Wars Movies Keep Losing Directors: The Pizza Hutt delivery driver

It was my oldest grandson’s birthday party and it was a Star Wars themed event so my youngest daughter who is the mother of the young man put heart and soul into giving him the party of a lifetime.  She personally decorated the house for this party with creations she mostly made from scratch and it was quite spectacular.  To match her efforts she wanted all of us to dress up so the first time that I can ever remember I put together a costume of my favorite Star Wars character—Han Solo, and had a lot of fun doing it. In the process I learned some things that are worth sharing.  One thing that became obvious to me as I acquired all the Han Solo costume pieces needed to get everything together for this party was how similar it was to the kind of equipment needed for Cowboy Fast Draw and that while wearing it, I felt more like a western character than a science fiction icon—which Han Solo has always been.IMG_5166.JPG

Naturally through small talk I have been asked why I like Star Wars so much and my reply is usually because it’s the best western that movie makers can produce these days.  As much as George Lucas wanted   tell a story about a hippie idea of eastern religion defeating western greed through the “force of others” his creation of Han Solo really is the key to the entire Star Wars universe.  The character so wonderfully played by Harrison Ford is an Ayn Rand kind of superstar who advances the story wonderfully, and gives everything resonance.  George Lucas always intended Luke Skywalker to be the hero of the movies, but it was Han Solo that really took over the story as the central and most popular character.  I knew all this before I put together as authentic of a costume as I could, but wearing it complete with the gun belt instantly knew where I was.  The gun belt was the key, it felt as good as my rig for Cowboy Fast Draw and remanded me that it’s not lightsabers and talk about The Force, but Star Wars is more about “having a good blaster at your side” than anything.  Lucas may have intended for Han Solo to be redeemed by the end of A New Hope into the kind of unselfish character that hippies were wanting to portray in 1970’s San Francisco—but the love that the director had of fast cars and Saturday Morning Republic serials featuring cowboys won the day and it was those influences that turned Star Wars into a simple science fiction drama and placed it into the realm of something truly special.  Star Wars is the best western movie made in the modern era—and by that I mean the last 40 years.IMG_5259

I don’t think George Lucas meant to make Han Solo such a powerful character but as the story evolved it was the old smuggler and that capitalist sector of characters from bounty hunters down to crime lords who took over as the featured plot lines that most captured the imaginations of fans.  People didn’t want to grow up so much to become Jedi in the temple fighting the Sith—they wanted to be the smuggler and hot-shot pilot flying the Millennium Falcon and solely saving the galaxy.  In his best moments Han Solo is not a team player but is someone always used to being in charge and finds a way to be successful even when the odds were terribly stacked against him.  When they tried to water Han Solo down into a group think character, he loses much of his power and I think this was something that mystified George Lucas a lot over the evolution of that character.  George Lucas the hippie who knew mostly dope smokers and San Francisco radicals found it an unintended consequence.  But the little boy who grew up watching serialized westerns and swashbuckling action adventure movies found in Han Solo a trusted voice from the past—and wisely Lucas went with it out of the needs of his new company Lucasfilm to pay all the bills of his various projects—even though it bothered him that Luke wasn’t the star of the movie as it was always intended.

I bought 21 pizzas from Pizza Hut for this party to be served on a table in front of Jabba the Hutt. It was a cute idea that my daughter had to tie the two things together so when the pizza delivery guy arrived he found himself pulled into the Star Wars universe by default, and he was having a good time.  While I was paying the guy and walking him back to his truck we talked about Star Wars and why the new Han Solo movie and now Episode 9 had lost their directors.  In fact, since Lucasfilm announced their slate of 6 new Star Wars movies four directors for those projects have bitten the dust and either been fired, or have quit.  The trade media for Hollywood really hasn’t understood why but this is where the rebel George Lucas always shinned brightest.   In spite of his liberal tendencies, Lucas at heart was a small business guy whose father owned a stationery store in Modesto, California.  Naturally, Lucas hated the studio system because of their static approach to filmmaking.  And it was that part of him who shinned through Han Solo—the do whatever he wants, guy—which made Star Wars so special and Ayn Randish.  These modern kids raised in the studio system may have loved Star Wars growing up, but that doesn’t mean they “get it” when it comes to putting what they love up on-screen.  Kathy Kennedy who runs Lucasfilm now apprenticed under George Lucas for most of her adult life and she has an understanding of what makes Star Wars work even if it’s difficult to put into words.  She knew instinctively why her new film directors weren’t having success in developing their Star Wars stories—for instance reports from the new Han Solo movie set which is coming out in May of 2018 were that the directors were turning the story more into an Ace Ventura comedy instead of a western set in space.  So Kathy brought in Ron Howard who has been around long enough to know at least how to mimic what George Lucas had stumbled upon so many years before.   The pizza guy agreed with me, Star Wars to work had to pay tribute to its western-like background—without it the storylines flounder and fail—much like many people felt the prequel films did.  I personally liked them because I like politics, but without the swashbuckling element of the matinee idols of the 1950s, Star Wars is pretty boring.  I know that, obviously Kathy Kennedy understands that much—but more importantly, the Pizza Hutt delivery guy understood it.

The exchange of values has always been something I could share with my kids through Star Wars and obviously that is getting passed on down to a new generation.  As the kids dressed up there were a lot of Kylo Ren costumes, and even some of the adults wore Kylo Ren t-shirts.  Little do they know that by the time we get to Episode 9 that Han Solo’s now infamous son will turn back to good and help Rey restore goodness to the imaginative galaxy set a long time ago, far, far away.  Kylo Ren will turn out to be a good guy—which I think is a very good thing.  Again, it goes back to Han Solo again, without him and his redemptive qualities, Star Wars falls apart as something special in our human culture.  For me its fun to be able to share these values on a platform that allows for at least the discussion and Star Wars does that better than anything else out there presently.  That wasn’t always the case, back when George Lucas was growing up, there were a lot of things like Star Wars out there that communicated value effectively and our culture reflected it.  These days, not the case—values have been cast aside by movie directors trying to make movies about socialism, which people don’t like, instead of capitalist westerns which people do, and they are often mystified as to why people like the Pizza Hutt delivery guy don’t like their product.  (Hey, I gave the pizza delivery guy a huge tip for his capitalist appreciations and enthusiasm.  He understood.)  Wearing the authentic Han Solo costume for me told the whole story—it took what I had only thought of before and applied it to reality.  Han Solo was a gunfighter and that is a concept specifically unique to American culture and was the heart of every good western.  That is what makes Star Wars work, and why it is such a good device to teach morality stories about good versus evil.  It is those values which I’m glad I can share with these new generations which was on full display at my grandson’s birthday party. It was a lot of fun to be a part of.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

The Liberal, Anti-business Big Spender, Joan Powell: Like a cockroach, she wants to loot off the good things produced by West Chester

Don’t be fooled by a person who has been doing it for years as a public figure at Lakota as money grabbing liberal.  Joan Powell is not a Republican, her behavior is indicative of a typical Democrat that has ruined entire cities with their tax and spend policies and now she’s at it again trying to get elected as a West Chester Trustee.  While she brags that she was a Lakota school board member for 16 years she neglects to say how divisive she was while serving in that role.  You can hear all about that situation because I covered her antics on 700 WLW.  That podcast is still available for you to listen to, so enjoy it at the clip below.  Like a typical Democrat, Joan attempts to use transference to impose on others what she herself is guilty of.  It’s not the current West Chester Trustees who are divisive; rather it is Joan the Hutt.  Click here to learn why I call her that—the name is quite appropriate.

Butler County, Ohio where West Chester has become one of the hottest places to live and conduct business in the entire country is distinctly a very Republican place.  There are of course a few bleeding heart liberals here and there who either have government jobs, smoke crack, or take on welfare payments who will vote for Democrats when they run for office, but the numbers just aren’t there to win—so one of the big challenges candidates have is that they often have to pretend to be Republicans so that they can get a fair shake at the ballot box.  Two of the people running for West Chester Trustee seats this year who are certainly Democrats are current board member Lee Wong and now his trustee sidekick Joan Powell, the beat up relic from Lakota’s past.  If they didn’t put an “R” next to their name, they would never get consideration in Butler County and Joan the Liberal Hutt knows that.  However by looking into her past you can tell—for instance she supported Hillary Clinton during the last election even doing a television ad for her.  While Lee Wong associates with people accused of being traitors providing secrets to China, Joan the Hutt was hiding from her many years at Lakota where she served as a union lap dog to the radicals who wanted endless raises for which she had every intention of given them.  When she ran out of money she turned right around and asked the public for more tax increases—which is likely her entire reason for running for a trustee seat.  Money has been tightly controlled under Trustee Mark Welsh who is up for re-election and George Lang.  The public sector unions want a third liberal vote on the board to dump more money into their pockets and Joan is their girl.

But what’s truly disgusting about Joan is her very Hillary Clinton-like election strategies.  Below I have selected three things that she has said on her own website about reasons she is running for this seat that deserve some clarification.   In these three statements Joan the Hutt proves that she is anti-business.  Pro-union—meaning she is willing to put on blindfolds to managing them—just as she did at Lakota schools where she jacked up the costs of payroll to the point where she consistently lived beyond  the budget provided to her by the community.  But worse than anything, she essentially put up Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign strategy against Donald Trump where she stated that one of the reasons she wants to be a trustee is to improve the “tone” of our community.  Here is what she has said about herself.

Joan is concerned about the tone of West Chester’s elected officials during the past year.  In order for our township to prosper, West Chester needs leaders that care about the residents – all residents – and their wants and needs.  The name-calling and disrespect is not the way local leaders should behave.  You can count on Joan to conduct herself with integrity and treat all with common courtesy.

 

Current trustees have done a good job with businesses.  But recently a trustee was cited in the media as saying:  “West Chester puts businesses first.”  Businesses are critically important to any community but residents are the ones who draw the businesses here in the first place.  They need a voice in the direction of the township. 

 

West  Chester needs leaders who are here to serve the township and its residents, not just their own political agendas.  The Right-to-Work movement that two trustees placed as their top priority for 2017 was not really about improving the business climate here.  It was about making their own political statement. 

http://joanpowell4wc.com/why-joan

I always tried to explain to Joan the Hutt some basic economics which she never understood while at Lakota.  Like all Democrats she had no idea where money came from, how people got it and how it goes to work for civilization.  All she knew to do was how to spend money and when she wanted to use it to solidify her base she would raise taxes so that she could give more away to her groups—just like Hillary Clinton.   Without question there will be a sizable number of slugs who want less managerial control over their public sector incomes who will show up to vote for Joan the Hutt on election day not because they like her so much as Joan has a reputation of being very free with budgets in favor of labor unions.  That’s why two of her statements above essentially are talking points right out of labor union literature for which she is more than willing to rubber stamp for a chance to get elected.

But the worst thing Joan the Hutt said in her own literature is this Democratic position of being anti-business. What Joan never understood and obviously still doesn’t is that businesses are what build a healthy community.  It’s not the people first that do it as she suggests.  It is the value of what industry brings that builds a community.  Without jobs there is nothing to do in West Chester, no way to live, work, or pay the enormous tax bills it takes to run all the public sector jobs.   Without businesses West Chester would just be an average community in the country, but because of the wide variety of thriving businesses the people who have moved into West Chester have options.  People don’t move to places like West Chester to be near a sidewalk, or a public library like Democrats like to believe.  Lee Wong is certainly one of those liberals who have never understood basic economics.  When he gets pinned into a corner on any kind of debate on the matter he starts talking about how he was in the military hoping that people won’t further criticism his liberal attitudes.  And Joan is essentially no different.

I was in more than one meeting with some of the leading business people in our community when Joan was the president of the school board at Lakota and I’ve seen her disrespect for business up close and personal.  She truly believes that people just magically appear out of nowhere and start living in homes without some way of building a culture that lures them in the first place.   Joan the Hutt is one of those people who think the entire real estate market at West Chester thrived because of the good Lakota schools, but she’d be wrong. People like her used the schools to make easy sales on new homes which were built and brought to the area through business people.  But it was those people she turned on first when she wanted to raise taxes and they hated her for it.  Like I said, I was in more than a few meetings with those people and I know what they think of her.  That attitude would carry over on a much larger scale if Joan the Hutt were to become a Trustee.  Joan Powell is as anti-business as they get.  She’d be more at home in bankrupt Detroit or Chicago than in West Chester, Ohio.

Like all Democrats when they see budget surpluses, such as what we are seeing now in West Chester because of the good work done by Mark Welsh and George Lang, they arrive like cockroaches and other undesirable insects to loot off the excess.   Joan the Hutt years ago lobbied to make West Chester into a city because she’s a big government advocate who thinks all the answers in life come from more tax money extracted from the public and given it to an ever expanding government.  She is clearly not a Republican.  She has been openly against President Trump and supported Hillary Clinton, and she doesn’t understand basic economics into what makes a community thrive with an anti-business stance that is dangerous to a West Chester that has been very successful at luring in great assets for people to enjoy—which makes them want to spend a lot of money to live in a community that essentially has it all.  West Chester has been successful because it has kept the looting politicians like Joan the Hutt at a distance allowing it to thrive.  People like her will always show up to steal what she can as most typical politicians do, especially liberal ones—but it is up to voters to keep them in check.  That is why she calls herself a Republican when in actuality; she is very far from it.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

The Ridiculous World of CNN’s Jim Acosta: Why we are lucky Eric Trump is so fast to defend his dad

A lot of people forget what the Trump family sacrificed to have Donald Trump president of the United Sates. They have great properties all over the world to manage and they have quite a fortune built the old-fashioned way—and they could have been happily neutral New York progressives for the rest of their lives and nobody would have blamed them. But when Trump decided to do something about the way the world was shaping up to be, and understood that he was in a unique position to do something—he had to pick sides and that isn’t generally good for the family business.  It used to be people thought Trump was an arrogant billionaire but he was on another place and so long as he stayed there, people would see the Trump products and think of exceptionally high quality. Now that he’s president essentially half the world hates him, while the other half obviously loves him—and as a businessman that’s not a great place to be.  I think with Trump he has the long view in mind so history will be very forgiving to the Trump name.  But in the meantime, it’s going to be tough on the family.  So it is very unique to have a guy like him in a powerful elected office and it is ever rarer that his kids are so supportive—such as Eric Trump over how the CNN reporter Jim Acosta has treated his father in the White House.

I found the Tweet by Acosta particularly interesting and I loved Eric’s response to it. This is what new media can do, it can create real-time discussions that are much quicker and less filtered than liberal editors at traditional outlets like CNN would typically permit—and its driving them crazy—the MSM.  Because these new media applications have their strength in exchanged ideas it seriously puts poor philosophies at a disadvantage because they can’t hold up against competition driven by reality. When Jim Acosta says something that in the 90s might have been profound and emotionally driven our new world can scrutinize his position and comment on it often to their disadvantage.  That has put CNN in a bad place leaving them to attempt their liberal activism in the White House briefing room for which Sean Spicer had, had enough.  Due to the constant grandstanding by Acosta to look good for television the White House now makes reporters turn off their cameras while asking questions so that they can’t become “YouTube” stars at the expense of the current administration.

Typically, in the private sector where money is made and GDP is measured from—which is really all that matters—government is a burden to that number so the larger the government the less efficient a nation—nonsense like Jim Acosta showed a predilection to participate in was grossly ignorant. A “democracy” as all these leftist losers keep yakking about is not a good thing—a rule by the majority is just stupid because most of the majority is not very smart.  That is why we have a republic which allows for a partial majority rule process but the effort requires participants at least smart enough to vote and even then regionally. For instance, a crack dealer in San Francisco who likes anal sex with other guys should not be able to vote to send a member to congress who is supposed to also represent a book-worm from Ohio who works 90 hours a week, loves his family, has straight sex with his wife and is mostly friends with farmers from the country.  The two value systems just aren’t compatible—so we have a republic of representative government and we let them fight it out instead of us fighting among ourselves.  But the “public” doesn’t have a right to know everything by merit of ownership.  When Obama and Clinton were in the White House people like me were effectively shut out of the democratic process and the “People’s House” was not representing me—and they made that quite clear.  So now I happen to have someone who does represent me in the White House and the shoe is on the other foot—and people like Jim Acosta can be mad about it—but who cares.  Too bad.  Tough F**king luck dude.  I don’t give a rat’s ass whether or not his little feelings are hurt or not.  Speaking for myself I want proper management of our government starting at the White House and I don’t want a bunch of noise like Acosta spews out there trying to screw it up.  In the private sector, we don’t allow that kind of grandstanding.  Typically, such a person would just be fired.  Obviously, Jim Acosta doesn’t understand the rules.  He thinks we’re a democracy—which we are not.  And he thinks that the White House owes him something—which again—it doesn’t.  All the White House owes anybody is that they do what was promised to the people who voted for their administration.  That’s it.

Part of what makes this White House so different, and so much better is that it is filled with people who actually have experience in the world—not a bunch of political hacks and that is why we are lucky the Trump family as a whole was willing to take all this on. Eric Trump doesn’t need to get involved in a scuffle with Jim Acosta. Yes, it might cause a decline in memberships to their various golf resorts—but they are willing to absorb that hit to do what’s right and that is so rare in the world.  People like Jim Acosta don’t understand those motivations.  Eric Trump confronted Acosta because it was the right thing to do and by the moment it is causing leftists to disintegrate.  The clash of philosophies is just too great.  Acosta all his life along with his contemporaries, thought they were safe behind the veil of contemporary progressivism and now all that protection has been stripped away like a scared young child hiding under the covers.  There is Jim Acosta ranting and raving like a spoiled brat kid citing rules that never existed articulating a fairness that only resonated in the wildest imagination of the very destitute.

So yes, we are lucky that we have these people in the White House and that they are changing things for the better just by bringing proper management to the swamp of Washington D.C. smoking out losers like Jim Acosta who always wanted America to be something it wasn’t—a democracy ran by fools, losers and drug addicts. In the Republic for which we are, we have representational government—not a rule by the mob and for a change there is someone qualified to manage our White House with private sector experience. That means no-nonsense management that pushes loud mouths like Jim Acosta to the back of the line so that clear voices can resonate with important information for those critical management decisions.  If the Trump family had not been willing to do this important work, we’d all be worse off right now.  So if there is anything to be thankful for it’s that they are in position to do great things and the cost to them in spite of what people think is very high.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

Megyn Kelly’s Career Killing Interview with Alex Jones: Karen Handel and many other Republicans win easily

It was even worse than I thought, the Megyn Kelly interview with Alex Jones for her new NBC Sunday night show—which is not performing as expected. In a lot of ways, you could tell the results of the special elections held on June 20th 2017 based on the NBC broadcast by Megyn Kelly. It wasn’t even close in the 6th District Georgia race where Karen Handel easily beat the Democrat Hollywood money, and over in South Carolina Ralph Norman took his seat for the Republicans making it a 4-0 run in these special elections since Donald Trump took over at the White House. And if you listened carefully, the NBC execs behind Megyn Kelly’s new show were screaming in frustration at this strange new mysterious world where they had very little control over the mass population—and that people have instead put their efforts behind people like Alex Jones instead of traditional figures like Tom Brokaw and the new-comer Megyn Kelly. They are lost and simply don’t understand what’s going on.

Megyn Kelly’s Jones interview was technically a ratings disaster and resonated with the many Hollywood productions that are losing money this year because they don’t represent the masses in the fly over states. As the election results came in for the 6th District in Georgia I received the information that the two directors of the new Han Solo movie have left the production over “creative differences.” I liked those guys but they started filming in London on that picture in February, the same time that I was there and they were very enamored with all the anti-Trump rhetoric coming out of all the liberal precincts—and in London that gives the impression of a majority in the world. I thought then as I do now that they were too close to all that anti-Trump radicalism and surely those elements would end up in the Han Solo movie—which wouldn’t be good. Without question Disney has been watching all these events and while it’s too early to tell, I would bet money that those boys decided they couldn’t deal with changing up elements of the Han Solo film to reflect the political realities of the world as of now. It’s a much different place than it was last year when the script was written and if Disney wants a good picture in the spring of 2018, then they better get with the program. Everybody better—because all these witch hunts against Trump are going to amount to nothing—in the end he’s going to be one of the greatest presidents we’ve ever had in the United States—Republicans are going to increase their House and Senate seats and like it or not, more people can relate to Alex Jones than they do Megyn Kelly.

Megyn’s mission was to make Alex Jones look stupid, and he knew that—so he scooped her and beat NBC to the punch by secretly recording her then releasing the tapes over the weekend ahead of the big Father’s Day show. And after listening to her promise Jones that she wasn’t doing a hit piece, then watching how NBC cut up the interview—it was clearly everything she promised it wouldn’t be and Jones came out looking even better. NBC hates that there is competition out there like Alex Jones. Megyn tried to take shots at the Infowars method of reporting—which was essentially a bunch of internet reports that come out of cyberspace and is talked about on Infowars in a very laissez-faire manner—as opposed to the way it’s done at NBC and the other networks where an editor—(usually someone who gives a lot of money to Democratic political causes) validates a story given by a reporter and shapes it to the network’s position—calling it truth. Alex Jones at Infowars wants everything fast and loose and thus can cover a lot more ground than some giant bureaucratic organization like NBC who uses sex to essentially sell their Democratic ideas then uses traditional anchors like Tom Brokaw to reflect back to a time when nobody questioned their news reporting to validate their authority.

The frustration and even exasperation of NBC for this new kind of news which Alex Jones represents with millions of fans gathered up from the internet doesn’t begin to come close to understanding what happened. Essentially, thirty years ago the primary networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS had a stronghold on the media and they controlled the narrative. Back then the conservatives had Reagan in the White House and most of their movie stars like Tom Selleck and Mel Gibson were openly conservative, Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, and many other male actors were open members of the Republican Party so everyone lived in a kind of careful balance with everyone else. But the leftists plotted and schemed behind our backs and we ended up with the Clintons in the White House in the 90s. Our movie stars become noticeably less conservative. Television began to push an openly progressive agenda—such as when Ellen was kissed on network television by Laura Dern—and Madonna was showing us that reckless sex was something we should all be thinking about. In reaction to all these leftist incursions, talk radio rose to prominence and eventually as the internet increased in usability the conservative message went to cyberspace—since it was shoved out of Hollywood and New York media productions.

Alex Jones was one of those upstarts and now just twenty years later he has millions of daily viewers and his monthly hits on his website far exceed that of NBC. That has left all these media organizations exasperated with plots to stop the bleeding by shaming people into changing their behavior. But it hasn’t worked and instead more people have went the other way. They have tried every trick available to them, including fixing the polling numbers as they did in Georgia and with Trump—yet Republicans keep winning. That is because as a media group they arrogantly thought that if they controlled the mainstream outlets like Hollywood and New York broadcasting—that they’d control the message—but instead people have found other ways to get their message—with or without the traditional media. If the question were truly what comes first the chicken or the egg—clearly it was the egg—the roots of conservative values in America. You could still cut the head off the chicken—(the media) but the egg still came first. The media was there to reflect American culture—not to shape it. The media forgot their role and life moved on without them. They tried to take away the conservative influences and what they ended up with were declining ratings and people they had far less control of. With Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood—at least those guys lived a little hard and fast which the Democrats could understand. People like Alex Jones they can’t understand at all. Alex is like that crazy canoe tour operator in the mountains of Tennessee who is all country, all guns, and all red-blooded testosterone driven maleness—and because the media overplayed their hand—one of those guys ended up with an audience of millions putting out stories by the hour where NBC spends days reviewing stories suitable for the political spin approved by the Bilderberg meetings—just to make sure that Mr. Soros isn’t upset by the slant because those network chiefs want to sit by him at the next charity event and they want his advertising money—indirectly of course. By the time all that happens Alex Jones will have produced 10 headline stories and discussed them for hours on end. That is why NBC has been losing.

It’s not Alex Jones’ fault that he has such high ratings and it’s not the human races’ fault because people don’t like the kind of news that NBC wants to produce. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault that he’s a ratings magnet—because people want to hear what he has to say and how he says it. It has always been NBC and the other mainstream networks who have decided that they wanted to work against the current of American lifestyles to change it into something they thought was more to their liking. And just like they thought they could spin the Georgia election into a close race, and that they could somehow shame Alex Jones into stopping what he’s been doing at Infowars—all it really comes down to is a bunch of losers complaining that the world does not like what they are offering and their feelings are hurt. Everything from the obstruction of justice investigations into Trump’s White House down to his Tweets, people like Megyn Kelly who have played the game to become a part of that losing world now have to face it that the reason Donald Trump listens to Alex Jones and now he’s the president—and Jones has so many millions of followers, is that there is a market need for these people—because they more accurately reflect the America that we are all living in. And that is a reality all these people on the other side have to face. They can trick themselves into believing falls polls, and emotional stories like Sandy Hook—but in reality, a majority of the American people like what they like. And they like Alex Jones, and they like Donald Trump. They don’t necessarily like Megyn Kelly which is obvious by the ratings. And more and more, they don’t like Democrats. They are losing everywhere and the longer Trump is president, the harder time Democrats will have to win anything. Trump is much more popular than the phony polls will indicate. These are the facts and so long as the MSM refuses to see those facts and look toward people like Alex Jones and declare them the problem—they’ll never learn the lessons they need to improve themselves.

I think that was the dagger that will kill Megyn Kelly’s career. After the interview, there were rumors she was in negotiations to return to Fox, but she’s burnt too many bridges there and she has upped her profile to such a level that she will have a hard time just being a correspondent. She had positioned herself to be the next Barbra Walters—but clearly, that is not her skill set. She might have pulled it off if not for this Alex Jones interview—she hoped that a little sex appeal and flirting would entice enough to do a hit piece on Jones—take him down and make all her NBC bosses happy—but instead she exposed herself embarrassingly on tape which was played by Jones who knew what was going on, and now that’s all anybody will remember about her. But the fault really isn’t hers, it was NBC who set the stage to begin with, and let her believe that these tactics would work in the modern competitive news market. We are living in the days of the Drudge Report—where the narrative is set dynamically leaving the crusty old news sources to crawl crippled along an unknown landscape. Even if they did manage to take Alex Jones out, there are plenty of people who would take his place—because the demand is there. And that is a reality that NBC better learn fast. Maybe Disney is finally learning it—but not fast enough. The entire old world of the media should have known better—but they didn’t.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg

The Butler County Connection to the Comey Testimony: CNN comes to town to put Trump supporters on the spot–but come up empty

I almost felt sorry for them, the team at CNN who came to Butler County, Ohio to gloat over the Comey testimony ended their day rattled to their basic foundations.  If there is a place in the United States harder core Trump—I can’t think of where that might be except out in the fringes of the cityscapes to the east of Ohio and West Virginia.  Butler County is special because it’s a strong hold of Republicanism.  It’s the home town of John Boehner—had been a huge supporter of John Kasich for governor and eventual presidential candidate.  But most recently it was responsible for helping Trump stamp out a 9 to 10 point edge over Hillary Clinton during the last election.  Given that CNN had spent so much political capital on a smoking gun emerging during the Comey testimony they invited a lot of those Trump supporters down to Rick’s Tavern in Fairfield to witness the public execution which was later filtered out on the Anderson Cooper show later the same day. Their assertion at CNN was that there was smoke and that Trump was guilty of something.  But all that smoke ended up being where smoke grenades thrown by them and others in the media to make it look like there was some fire.  Even though I’m not big fans of the people at CNN, it was embarrassing to see them up close when they came to realize it on live television.

Comey wasn’t fired to hide an investigation into Russian hacking.  He was fired because he went on just a few days prior to give senate testimony and admitted he was a befuddled, insecure person who didn’t know how to proceed and he had lost the confidence of the FBI as an institution due to his show boating during the Hillary Clinton events of 2016.  Here was a guy whose claim to fame was putting Martha Stewart in jail, who made himself into a national sensation for trying to withdraw a wire tapping order while John Ashcroft was in the hospital but was beat to the punch by the Bush White House.  Comey had a history of working against the White House when Obama nominated him to lead the FBI four years ago and obviously thereafter the same standard of prosecution did not apply.  If you put Martha Stewart and Hillary Clinton side by side, case by case-Hillary Clinton should have had the death penalty thrown at her compared to Stewart.  Here was a woman in Clinton who really committed crimes at the highest level, shared classified secrets and destroyed evidence—and she was running for president.  Comey fumbled the case and sought to cover up his tracks with a lot of legal talk which nobody understood to hide his incompetence.  And he got caught. He let the Democrats nominate a criminal for the White House and when they lost the election, it has all but destroyed their party.  So Trump’s loyalty comment was in that line of thought.

https://www.usnews.com/news/newsgram/articles/2013/05/30/james-comey-fbi-pick-took-on-martha-stewart-and-dick-cheney

The entire day all CNN wanted to do was point to the loyalty question as if it indicated guilt over Russian collusion—and that this story was bigger than Watergate.  Only there was no collusion.  Trump isn’t the kind of guy to share the spotlight with anyone—especially Russia, and as a business executive, he wants his own people to be around him—not some Obama holdover in the FBI.  But Trump knew he had to give the guy a chance—because it would look bad to come into office and fire all of Obama’s people.  That left Trump to do what a lot of head hunters who slip into executive slots as head of corporations do—you watch and listen to who does what.  Then you replace the weak links with your own people as you learn the ropes.  Comey admitted to the senate that he made judgment errors when he indicated he was “mildly nauseous” that he might have swayed the 2016 Election.  After that comment from my own vantage point I knew he had lost the hard line officers at the FBI as they were surely eye rolling the Comey statements and if I had to guess, that was the moment Trump decided to fire the FBI director and make him a “former.”

I don’t think Comey is a villain in this case—he was just over his head.  The character he made himself out to be—an Eliot Ness type of FBI agent—couldn’t hold up when the media no longer liked him.  He was fine so long as the people he was going after were the Bush White House and Martha Stewart—but when the villain was Hillary Clinton whom the entire Washington D.C. establishment supported—he found him stuck between a rock and a hard place—and he didn’t handle the pressure well.  When he shouldn’t have, he went on the air and gave extensive press conferences and spoke too freely which exacerbated the situation beyond redemption essentially forcing Trump to fire him.

Comey’s comments about feeling anxious to be alone with Trump are classic emotions when a guilty incompetent person is left defensively with a superior boss.  When other people are in the room it takes the edge off—but when you know you are guilty of not doing a very good job and you are alone with someone who can see through you—of course it would make a person like Comey nervous.  CNN wanted to make that story into one where Comey thought Trump was corrupt and the purity of his nature wouldn’t allow him to deal with the president one on one.  That is pure fantasy—in reality, Comey knew he was guilty of screwing up the Clinton case and he hoped to stay out of trouble long enough to keep his 10 year appointment by Obama.  He knew that Trump would soon learn that Comey wasn’t the best man for the job, so he had no desire to spend time alone with the president. That caused Comey to do  two more stupid things; give a public speech about how everyone was stuck with Comey for another 6 years hoping to put pressure on Trump to keep the FBI director on for fear of political backlash.  Then he gave his senate testimony mentioned above where he gave a number of statements that were just embarrassing.  Trump did the right thing and fired Comey—then he stood by his decision without a lot of politicking.  He simply said that Comey was a showboat—which was true, and that he hadn’t done a very good job.  End of story.

It’s one thing to watch these stories from afar, but to see CNN up close trying to wring out a nothing story was absolutely fascinating.  But they came to my town, to my community to catch Trump supporters live on the air with what they hoped would be administration ending testimony—and they didn’t come close to getting it.  I didn’t feel sorry for them because they were after all part of the insurgency against traditional America.  But they were people, and however wrong they were philosophically, they were still human beings suffering under a false premise that had not carried the day.  They were part of a losing, and declining effort in America and they knew it.  They took one last shot in the dark hoping to score a hit in Trump Country, and all they got were a bunch of supporters like me and several others who defended Trump valiantly.  And it wasn’t hard.  The truth has a way of showing its own majestic presence, and the CNN people were trying to make something out of nothing.  The world is literally on a precipice, given the elections in England today, the terrorist attacks in Europe, the events of the Middle East—the strange chess game in the east—the world is changing dramatically.  But for CNN, the pivot point was with the Comey story and they went all in on it—and they came up with nothing.  And they chose to do it in Butler County, Ohio—which was a mistake for them.  I enjoyed being a part of it, and I enjoyed watching them lose. But as people I know it was painful.  However in war—who cares.  Move on and prosper.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here:  http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707  Use my name to get added benefits.

cropped-img_0202.jpg