Will "The Hillary Letters" sink Clinton's campaign ship?

Who is Hillary Clinton really? If some old letters that have recently surfaced are any indication, she’s a far cry from who she’s trying to portray herself as. She wants Republicans to believe she’s a moderate. A voice of reason among an Obama administration packed with lefties. Someone who can be counted on when that call comes in the middle of the night. But is she really different from your garden variety liberal?

The Washington Free Beacon obtained copies of Hillary’s adoring letters to the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s most famous book, Rules for Radicals, was dedicated to Lucifer, “that very first radical.” Rules is a how-to primer on disrupting the establishment and redistributing the wealth. Alinsky, a well-known communist, seemed to be

infatuated with Hillary around the time he was writing Rules. Hillary began her correspondence with Alinsky when she was a student at Wellesley College and continued writing to him into her Yale Law School years.

Her letters read like a devoted sycophant. That may not be disturbing unless you fully understand what Saul Alinsky was all about. Alinsky was in favor of an all-out revolution where the “have-nots,” as he put it, would take from the “haves.” It’s no wonder that when Hillary was asked in 2008 if she was proud of America she responded that she was proud of what America could be. In other words, no, she’s not proud of America.

From the viewpoint of someone who’s disenchanted with the direction my country’s going, there is a distinct difference between being concerned about your country and ashamed of it. Do I cringe at the way our president conducts foreign policy? You bet, but the president is not the country. He represents it for, at most, eight years. The United States, like any country, should be looked at in its totality. Overall, there’s plenty to be proud of as Americans. We have made mistakes and we will continue to make mistakes but if anyone were to ask me if I was proud of America my answer would be yes.

Working backwards from Hillary’s comment in 2008, it’s not too difficult to figure out how she got to that point. After law school she went to work for one of the most radical law firms in Berkeley, CA that named among its clients the Black Panthers and other militant groups.

It’s also interesting that there’s only one paragraph about Alinsky in Hillary’s autobiography. Even then she merely mentions that he offered her a job out of college but she wanted to follow a more conventional path of going to law school and into the law profession. Like working for a radical law firm that represented the Black Panthers? Interesting what she considers conventional.

Will this have any effect on Hillary’s presidential aspirations? It’s doubtful. The news media will sweep this under the rug and vilify anyone who brings it up. Or, in the words of Hillary herself, what difference does it possibly make at this point? Let me assure you, it makes a ton of difference. I’ve often said when you hear peace and justice together you know you have yourself a commie. But it will make no difference to the gatekeepers in the media. It’ll be considered old news that some community organizer in the ‘60s caught Hillary’s eye. That she wrote glowingly of a guy who was admitted socialist and a closet communist is inconsequential.

Of course, we all now know where these community organizers end up. Hillary Clinton just may turn out to be Barack Obama 2.0.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Running up the white flag in the War on Poverty

We just marked the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty. One would think after 50 years we could win anything. The fact is, we lost the war on poverty long ago. Let’s compare it to other wars we’ve fought. We’ve spent $22 trillion (in 2012 dollars) on this war on poverty. That’s three times what we’ve spent on every war since the Revolutionary War combined! The poverty rate when we started this so-called war was around 15 percent. For the last 50 years the poverty rate has bounced between 12 and 15 percent. Today it’s just above 14 percent.

The interesting thing is that the post-World War II poverty rate was around 25 percent. In the years right after the war the poverty rate was dropping dramatically but was arrested by the war on poverty. Black folks, who this war was supposed

to benefit most, made up 31 percent of the poor in 1965. They make up 27 percent of the poor now. Some will call that a victory. I call it a shame.

Civil Rights laws are largely responsible for lifting black citizens up. The fact that so many remain below the poverty level is directly because of the war on poverty. We have trapped a disproportionate number of black people on welfare.

That fact notwithstanding, there are many reasons why people are poor and the government has overlooked practically all of them. As I stated, too many people have been enticed to remain in poverty but the choices are there for all Americans to lift themselves up. We have countless opportunities in America. Poor people get a break on college and vocational tuition. Anyone can join the military. The Internet has opened up a whole new world for entrepreneurs. 

So, why are people still poor?

A lot of it has to do with geography. I remember leaving New York City once and the cab driver took a short cut through an impoverished neighborhood. It was depressing. I was thinking that a short train ride away — even just 30 minutes away — there was a whole new hopeful world out there. Why on earth were these people living like this? Then it dawned on me that they were living in the city because that’s where the government benefits are. It’s the modern-day liberal plantation. People are enslaved to the government because they don’t know how to break the chains. If they start making any money at all the government cuts them off and they come running back to dependency.

This is why you see the very same thing replicated in every major city in America. There’s the bad side of town which almost certainly is where the government housing projects are. The police know it. Heck, we all know it. We, the people, have constructed one-stop shopping for the drug dealers, the pimps, the gangs. Why would we do such a thing? To be sure it wasn’t done on purpose.

I believe it was. The liberals criticize the robber barons of old for constructing company towns and trapping workers in these towns because they became dependent on the company. That’s exactly what they’ve done with the Great Society. Millions upon millions of Americans owe their soul to the government store.

We have to break the chains of dependency. We have to destroy the one thing that keeps millions of people in cyclical poverty. We have to tear down the welfare state and build in its place a program that encourages hard work and initiative and all the things that have made this country great.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The Motherboard of all hysteria

I was reading a piece from some website called Motherboard and I actually had to pause and laugh. It was as if I were reading a parody piece but they were dead serious.  The headline read, “We Have Five Years to Stop Building Coal Plants and Gas-Powered Cars.” How long have they been telling us we were running out of time? For decades now. Some elected official in Canada said we only had hours left to save the planet. That was several years ago.

Lord Christopher Monckton was a policy advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He closely follows this global warming debate and points out that the earth has not warmed in 215 months. That’s 17 years, 11 months. To put it into

Scare photo from
Motherboard

perspective, high school seniors who will graduate this year have never experienced a warming globe in their lifetimes. Yet there they are at it once again trying to convince people that we only have until 2018 to stop manufacturing cars and, if we don’t, it’ll all be over by 2019.

Pretty scary stuff if only it were true. The dirt people have latched onto another catch phrase: carbon budget. They say that our yearly carbon budget is 1,000 billion tons of CO2. How they measure CO2 tonnage is suspicious to start with but they warn us that if we top 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide then we’ll push the temperature up over 2 degrees C of warming which, as Motherboard puts it, will threaten “the survival of many people living on the planet.”

This is total hogwash, of course, but they conveniently ignore the facts. Having not warmed in nearly 18 years, the earth is certainly in no danger of overheating yet the emissions of CO2 continue unabated. Hmm. The word “correlation” comes to mind. Haven’t we been told for years that there’s a direct correlation between the emissions of carbon dioxide — which they love to just call “carbon” because it sounds so sinister — and an increase in temperatures? If we haven’t warmed for nearly two decades, where’s the correlation?

There’s not one. That’s the problem. A lot of people are standing there with egg on their face. They’re totally invested in this manmade global warming nonsense to the point that they have to do — and say — anything they can to save face. It’s becoming painfully apparent that it’s too late which means they simply crank up the volume.

Typical of these scare pieces like we find in Motherboard, they always include a picture of a couple of smokestacks emitting plumes of “pollution” into the air to kill us all. In reality, what we see coming from those smokestacks is water vapor. Harmless water vapor. It’s the same thing you see coming from an electronic cigarette but many anti-smoking advocates want the e-cigarettes treated just like regular cigarettes. Common sense would tell you that water vapor and smoke are two totally different things but those whose lives are led by undistilled emotion cannot or will not distinguish the difference.

So it is with “pollution.” There’s real pollution, which is in smog. Nasty things like sulfur dioxide and ground-level ozone. This is the haze that hangs over big cities, especially LA where many of these dirt people reside. There’s one thing absent from smog. It’s CO2. Yeah, there’s no carbon dioxide in smog, yet we’re led to believe that CO2 is the leading pollutant in the world today. Like they’re trying to tell us that we have to stop making cars in the next five years. Like we’re dumb enough to believe them. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Does anyone fear us anymore?

How many more American journalists need to die before we do something about ISIS? How many more Americans — period — need to die before we do something? I know we don’t want to go back into Iraq but we didn’t pick this fight. They essentially declared war on us when they beheaded Jim Foley. Now a second American journalist has been brutally beheaded. It is imperative that we respond and respond with massive force.

The problem is no one respects us any longer. They don’t respect us because they don’t fear us. I know the pacifists on the left don’t want us to be feared but fear is what keeps us safe.

Back in the ‘80s there was a group of congressmen and citizens who were part of the ‘peace through strength’ movement. Members included actors Tom Selleck and Arnold Schwarzenegger. What it basically meant was we would

only achieve true peace if we were strong enough to deter aggression. The Soviet Union was the target in those days and it worked. Without going over all of the history, we basically bankrupted the Soviet Union by being strong.

People don’t respect weak people. Nations don’t respect weak nations. Weak nations are seen as vulnerable. When a president tells the leader of another country that if he uses chemical weapons he crosses a red line where there are consequences he needs to mean it. In order to mean it you have to back it up. This president did nothing.

Not to mention trading four terrorists for one questionable soldier. All from a country that has a standing policy to never, every negotiate with terrorists. Is it any wonder that terrorists are taking hostages left and right?

Like it or not, we’re at war with ISIS. This is a war we cannot afford to lose. We have to win, and the only way you win is win completely. What that means is we have to annihilate the enemy. ISIS has one agenda: convert people to Islam or kill them. That’s not an enemy you can negotiate with.

Look, al Qaeda is even repulsed by ISIS. This is a whole new breed of terrorist. They only understand force. They can only be defeated by death. There is no reforming these people. And we have Americans joining their forces. Rappers, no less. I’m still trying to dissect that psychologically. Maybe folks who rap about killing police officers and whitey get a big kick out of cutting people’s heads off.

Whatever the case, ISIS is attracting the most sinister among us. And all in the name of a so-called god. People want to know what did we do to cause this. We merely existed. If you think it’s because of us then you have to ask what did the Christians of Mosul do to invite the wrath of ISIS? What did the Yazidis do to make ISIS want to cut their heads off? What did women do to be relegated to second-class citizens?

At some point you must realize that it’s not what we’ve done, it’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t, as a country, converted to Islam. That’s the bottom line. Until we do these people will never rest. That’s why the only way to stop them is to kill them.

When you start your presidency with an apology tour it’s no wonder that no country, no leader, fears us or our president. No one loses sleep wondering if Obama is coming after them because he’s not coming. The only people on the planet who are afraid of Obama are Americans.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.