The enabling of tyrants

You’ve seen it all over the country. Governors shut down businesses and force their citizens to shelter at home while they’re out maskless at fine restaurants or wine bars. It’s the ultimate in do as I say, not as I do. So, why aren’t the citizens of these states as outraged as they should be? Because the federal government keeps bailing out tyrants.

We’re staring down the barrel of a $28 trillion debt. I don’t care what you think of this COVID crisis and who should pay, that is totally unsustainable. Everybody looks to Washington for a solution when Washington isn’t the problem. At least not this time.

Yes, at the beginning of this pandemic you had the federal government grounding airlines and urging states to shutter businesses. The feds paid for it with stimulus checks and oversized unemployment benefits. I said from Day One we were giving people an incentive not to work, but when has Congress ever listened to common sense?

Now Congress is doing it again, only this time it’s not the federal government’s fault. It’s the fault of cities and states who haven’t figured out that what they’ve been doing just isn’t working.

I remember when Governor Cuomo quipped that 90 percent of the people who were showing up at the ER with COVID were people who were sheltering at home. What did he do? He doubled down on sheltering at home. The problem was people weren’t going outside and were becoming vitamin D deficient. Studies have shown that 80 percent of the people hospitalized with COVID are vitamin D deficient. Have you heard Drs. Fauci or Birx urge you to get your vitamin D level checked? No. They just continue to scream at you to wear a mask.

No matter what the so-called experts tell you, masks simply don’t work. They actually give you a false sense of security. People believe they're bullet-proof from COVID if they just wear a mask, so they get too close to people with COVID for too long and they come down with it themselves.

Understand one thing. There are only two things that will protect you from COVID: time and distance. If you stay away from people and limit the time you are in contact with people to five minutes or less you greatly reduce your risk of contracting this virus.

But local and state governments, much like Cuomo back in June, still don’t get it. They close or greatly curtail restaurants. In Nashville there are over 5,000 restaurants. There has not been a single COVID outbreak at any of them. Isn’t that amazing? Don’t trust me. Check with the Metro Health Department. They release, periodically, the places where COVID is spreading. Not one restaurant is listed. There are several bars. That makes sense. You’re closer than six feet for more than 15 minutes. Where are you ever closer than six feet for over 15 minutes at a restaurant, except with the people you came with? Exactly. It’s just common sense.

In order to get control of this latest wave, cities and states are doing the same insane things they were doing before. And they’re bankrupting their citizens. If they’re too stupid to figure it out that’s between them and their own citizens. The rest of us shouldn’t pay for the continued stupidity.

You don’t have to close anything. You don’t have to put people out of work. Just keep your distance and watch your time spent around anyone. Imagine how many lives and how much money could’ve been saved if we just used some common sense.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

The vax facts

The vaccine for COVID rolled out way ahead of schedule. The Trump Administration is calling it a modern miracle, but it is much more than that. This vaccine is a testament to President Trump’s ability as a businessman to get things done. This is one of the reasons he was elected in the first place. If anyone else had been elected instead, say Hillary Clinton, we would still be wandering around in a daze with draconian lockdowns and probably millions dead. There’s no way Hillary would’ve shut down travel from China, which means the death toll would probably be closer to the original estimates of 2-2.5 million.

Does Trump get credit? Not hardly. I will say that Jake Tapper threw him a bone on CNN, but that was an anomaly. Most news outlets ignore his gargantuan contribution to mankind. Instead, people like Andrew Cuomo of New York cast doubt on the safety of the vaccine. Not because of science, but because of Trump.

But the vaccine isn’t for everyone. The British have already warned that if you’re prone to allergic reactions you should stay away from it. The people who instinctively believe that the government is the solution to everything are already talking vaccination mandates. This should be a personal choice. We’ve heard for decades that it’s your body, your choice when it comes to abortion. Not so when it comes to a vaccine. Alan Dershowitz went so far as to say that you don’t have a right to infect someone else with COVID. Let’s use some logic and common sense. If I decide not to get vaccinated, I’m not putting anyone else’s life in danger except perhaps people who have made the same decision. With this thing being 95 percent effective, there’s really no way I’m going to infect someone who’s had the shot. That’s if I even get the virus.

I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’m just using common sense. What are my odds of getting COVID? They’re pretty low. What are my odds of dying from COVID if I do get it? Probably way less than one percent. I’m doing what everyone should do and that’s my own personal health risk assessment. If you have underlying health issues you probably need to get the vaccine. If you’re not at high risk of dying from COVID then you’re probably safer not getting it. That evokes shrieks of horror from many, but it’s true. I’m weighing the known versus the unknown. 

People like Dr. Anthony Fauci are talking about developing vaccinations for children. There is no way a child should be getting this vaccination. They’re at very low risk of getting the virus, and they have practically no chance of dying from it. The only children who should ever consider this vaccine are those with underlying health issues that put them at risk of dying from COVID.

Fauci’s also saying we’re going to have to wear the masks through all of next year. Why? Once this vaccine is distributed to those most at risk the death toll will drop to near zero. Once that happens, this thing is over, for all intents and purposes. Will people still get it? Sure, but they won’t be dying from it, and that’s really all that matters.

People get the cold and flu every cold and flu season. We don’t shut down the country for it, although maybe now we do. Maybe we’ve reached the new normal where the government tells you every move to make. Not me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m going back to America.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Why election fraud matters

It can be damaging to your reputation these days to even consider that there was election fraud in the November 3 election. News networks cast you as a tin-foil hat conspiracy theorist. So, it’s with that risk in mind that I inform you, without reservation, that there definitely was voter fraud in this most recent election. The only thing left to determine is if it was enough to overturn the official results. It appears that it is.

Consider Georgia, where everyone from the governor on down insists that they counted every vote three times. That sounds great, unless you consider that over 10,000 of those votes were cast by dead people. According to President Trump’s legal team, over 66,000 were cast by voters who were under the age of 18 on Election Day, the legal voting age. That’s not counting all the felons and out-of-state voters, which number in the tens of thousands. The officials in Georgia don’t seem the least bit interested in exploring Team Trump’s contention that illegal votes were cast. They just keep repeating that they counted every vote—thrice. Recounting a flawed vote count will only give you the same flawed result.

Then there’s Pennsylvania. A state law—Act 77—did away with the need for listing an excuse to receive an absentee ballot. The only problem is the Pennsylvania state constitution specifically lays out the excuses one must make to vote absentee. A law cannot circumvent the state constitution. Only a constitutional amendment can do that. Didn’t seem to matter to the U.S. Supreme Court. They refused to hear the lawsuit. Apparently they were swayed by state officials who argued throwing out illegal ballots would “sow chaos” across the country. The court’s duty is not to weigh the threat of chaos. It’s to follow the constitution. They failed.

Several other states, including Michigan and Wisconsin have similar problems. So much so that the state of Texas took the extraordinary step of suing four states because changes they made in how ballots are cast. This whole mess needs to end up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The question is whether they’ll have the courage to take it on. SCOTUS involving itself in a presidential election is not without precedent. They did so in Gore v. Bush in 2000. They essentially told the Florida state supreme court that they couldn’t allow Democrat counties to keep counting ballots until Gore won. For some reason they’re hesitant to involve themselves in this one.

Is the Swamp so deep in DC that justice is no longer attainable? It appears so. Again, I have no idea if there’s enough voter fraud to overturn the official results. Neither does anyone else. That’s why our system should be diligently trying to get at the truth. It doesn’t appear that it is. It appears that the establishment is protecting the establishment.

Can you imagine the outrage if 66,000 underage votes were cast in Georgia and the state went for Trump? Would there be calls from the mainstream media to investigate? You bet. It shouldn’t matter who benefited from voter fraud. The fact that it exists should trouble us all, no matter your party affiliation. This goes to the very foundation of our republic. And we’re a republic, by the way, and not a democracy. Democracy is essentially mob rule, and our founding fathers were more afraid of that than any other form of government. They knew that mob rule would cater to the whims of violent mobs.

I say we’re not a democracy. Maybe we’re closer than I thought.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.

Diversity means nothing without excellence

America was built on exceptionalism. Many believe diversity is our primary asset. It’s not. Diversity’s great, but it’s only great when it happens organically. Forcing diversity never leads to greatness. Conversely, neither does discrimination. Both short-circuit the free market. Imagine how much faster this country would’ve advanced had it not been for discrimination. Countless black Americans were held back and held down because of prejudice. There’s no telling what we would’ve accomplished as a nation had that not been the case.

So, it was with much concern that I read that the Nasdaq, the second-largest U.S. stock exchange, filed a proposal with the SEC to mandate corporations have two ‘diverse directors’ on their boards. They want to require one who ‘identifies’ as a woman, and one who represents the GBLT community. What does this have to do with excellence? Nothing.

Nasdaq says three-quarters of the companies on its exchange right now would fall short. That means a massive makeover of boards of directors across the country if this thing goes through. And for what purpose? To allow some guy who wears a dress to be on the board? What does that have to do with anything?

We can expect much more of this in a Biden administration. I’m not saying this current play by Nasdaq is Joe’s fault. What I’m saying is this is the culture that’s been created by the left and Biden is more than happy to play into it.

Corporate America is obsessed with diversity. Again, I think diversity is great, but it’s secondary to excellence. If your workforce is primarily black or Hispanic or gay and these are the most qualified people out there then the system is working. There’s no doubt that, for many years, we had white folks in positions simply because they were white. We can all agree that was wrong. Then why would we now be doing the exact same thing, just with a different group of people? If discrimination is wrong, it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the discriminating, nor does it matter who’s being discriminated against. I’ve often said you don’t right the wrongs of the past by wronging the people of the present.

Let’s examine this policy the Nasdaq wants to force on corporate America. If you have two people on each board—one who identifies as a woman and one who’s gay or lesbian or transgender—then that means two people who are qualified might not be on the board. That’s not to say that a woman or a gay person or a lesbian or a crossdresser isn’t qualified. It’s only to say that being a woman or a gay person or a lesbian or a crossdresser isn’t in and of itself a qualification.

I wonder how many people who own stock in these companies give a rat’s rump about a board member’s gender or sexual preference. Not many. You would think we would evolve as a society to a point where none of that matters. Instead we’ve devolved to a point where that’s all that matters. We have now put excellence in the back seat. Being the best no longer means anything. It’s all about being diverse.

Vanderbilt’s football team fielded the first female player at a Power Five conference. Sarah Fuller kicked the ball just once, and for only 30 yards. For that she was named the SEC co-special teams player of the week. What an insult to Sarah. They may as well have just patted her on the head. Diversity at the expense of excellence is nothing to celebrate.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show, on SuperTalk 99.7WTN in Nashville. He's also co-host of The PodGOATs podcast and I'm Calling Bovine Scatology.