The race to Venezuela is on

There’s this guy named Andrew Yang. You’ve probably never heard of him. The San Francisco Chronicle is singing his praises. Why? Because he’s running for president and he’s promising a ‘freedom dividend’ to every adult American. What’s a freedom dividend? It’s $1,000 a month just for being alive. How does he expect to pay for this? Oh, he has no idea, but they’re lapping it up in San Fran.

Yang’s yet another socialist in the crowded field of Democrat presidential contenders who are trying to out-promise each other to the nomination. They think that if they can just get the party crown it’ll be a cakewalk over Donald Trump to the White House. Not so fast.

A recent Siena College poll showed more people in New York had a favorable impression of Trump than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Granted, neither of them broke 40 percent popularity, but AOC was less popular than Trump. The primary reason is the recent Amazon debacle. AOC spearheaded an effort to run Amazon out of New York and it worked. They had planned a massive job-creating headquarters in Queens and she and her socialist minions killed it. It’s encouraging to see that even in liberal New York jobs still trump free stuff. But for how long?

Beto O’Rourke is on the campaign trail promising everything to everybody. He brought in over $6 million in campaign contributions in his first 24 hours. He even out-socialisted socialist Bernie Sanders. What does he stand for? Who knows? If it’s socialist, he’s in. He was asked recently if he was for abortion in the third trimester of pregnancy. He said he was unequivocally for a woman’s right to make that decision, to roaring applause from the crowd. That’s great red-meat politics for the whacked-out Democrat base, but murdering a kid on his delivery date is a non-starter with the rest of sane America.

But these Democrat candidates don’t care, because right now there’s socialist blood in the water. It’s a veritable feeding frenzy of big government ideas, and each candidate is trying to prove to the Democrat base that they are willing to go as far as it takes to give them free everything.

Meanwhile back in Realville, President Trump announced that he wants to cap federal student loans. You want to know why the official school bird of your favorite state-supported university is the building crane? It’s because the federal government took over student loans during the Obama error and is shoveling tuition money into the public college oven like a runaway steam locomotive. Our nation’s student debt has more than tripled since 2003 to $1.5 trillion. All of the Democrats currently on the campaign trail want to continue shoveling more money into that furnace. I’ve long predicted that it’s the next financial cauldron to blow.

Never in our lifetimes have we seen such a race to socialism by one political party. As I’ve observed before, they see Donald Trump as so vulnerable that they believe the American people will even turn the ship of state toward Venezuela rather than stay on our current course. They may be in for a rude awakening. A new CNN poll shows 7 in 10 Americans give the economy high marks, and the majority—just barely at this point—give Trump the credit.

This may be a defining moment for the Democrats, but it should also be a defining moment for the Republicans. As the Dems bleach their hair blonde the Republicans need to go full brunette. Instead I fear they may opt for dirty blonde.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show. He's also the co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

Donald Trump is our only hope

I told you last week that President Trump had turned a corner with his State of the Union address. He is in full campaign mode, and no one is better on the campaign trail than Donald Trump. But the liberals are handing him ammunition. The Green New Deal is a dream come true for Trump. That’s why it’s so important in this moment of American history that we have someone like Trump in the White House. He is the clear delineation between capitalism and socialism.

This is where the Democrats have been heading for a long time. It could be argued that this is where they’ve been for a long time. Tip O’Neill didn’t start the slide to socialism for the Democrats, but he’s emblematic of the bridge between the likes of Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi. When my father was a Democrat in Congress in the ‘80s, people like Pelosi and Barney Frank were considered the left fringe of the party. Now they’re the middle of the road of the Democrat Party. They’re also being edged out by the more radical voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris.

Some are frightened of these radical new voices, and well they should be, but these voices also offer a clear contrast to capitalism in this country. Trump is capitalism personified. He loves this country. He knows what made it great. He’s an American success story. Had we even had someone as business-minded as Mitt Romney as president we wouldn’t have this clear distinction. Romney tends to be mushy on the important issues like illegal immigration and global warming. He would surely be compromising with the likes of AOC.

Trump understands his role in history. He is the bulwark against a total transformation of this country from capitalism that made it great to socialism that has failed wherever it’s been tried. That is the litmus test. Ask any proponent of AOC and socialism to cite any example—past or present—where socialism has worked. They can’t. The irony of all of this is they cry for taxing the ‘tippy top’ at 70 percent while Venezuela, which did exactly that, crumbles before our eyes.

Speaking of irony, Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president and scolded the Republicans about the dangers of global warming in the midst of a blizzard. Of course, the people who spent decades telling us the earth was going to burn are now telling us the frigid weather is climate change. These are the same people who point to floods as climate change but were just telling us we were running out of water.

Any other Republican president would be buckling to the pressure from the radical global warming crowd. Not Trump. He made fun of Klobuchar’s announcement, and well he should. The liberals are fond of saying, “Speak truth to power.” Trump is speaking truth to liars. This Green New Deal would be a disaster for America. It would cut off the lifeblood of capitalism which is affordable energy. It would reward people who don’t work. It would cost the taxpayers trillions they don’t have.

Global warming like Occupy Wall Street and myriad other left-wing causes are merely vehicles to destroy capitalism and give rise to socialism. Socialism is complete government control. If you don’t know what that looks like remember this. The Nazis were socialists. Like I said, socialism has been tried many times before and failed.

Trump is now above 50 percent in approval. He is what stands between us and another Venezuela. Our only hope is that he prevails. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show. He's also the co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.

The coup attempt on Trump

OK, so now Donald Trump is a Russian agent? You’d think so by the mainstream media coverage. The New York Times ran a story that the FBI was investigating Trump right after his firing of James Comey for wittingly or unwittingly being a secret agent for the Russians. It was ridiculous on its face, but given the timing and who was involved it makes sense.

Andrew McCabe

Andrew McCabe became acting FBI director in the wake of Comey’s firing. He launched the investigation between the time of the firing and the time Rod Rosenstein named Robert Mueller as the special counsel. We now know from discovered text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his lover, Lisa Page, that there was essentially a coup attempt going on. They reference “Andy” in their text messages. It’s presumed they’re talking about McCabe. Two hours after Comey’s firing Strzok sent Page this message: “We need to open the case we’ve been waiting on now while Andy is acting (director). Page replied, “We need to lock in (redacted). In a formal chargeable way. Soon.”

Strzok and Page refused to clarify the exchange in testimony before Congress. I can imagine so. If the texts reference what we think they reference it could very well be treasonous. What’s interesting is James Comey appears not to be part of this plot. The man most vilified in all of this was apparently not open to trying to unseat Trump. Note that Strzok said they needed to open the case against Trump now that Comey was gone and McCabe was acting director. They knew their window would be short since the president would be naming a permanent replacement for Comey soon. 

A case can also be made that Rod Rosenstein was part of the conspiracy. Remember it was Rosenstein, according to McCabe’s notes, who floated the idea of secretly taping Trump and using the 25th Amendment to oust him from office. Apparently once McCabe’s fellow traveler had put his man, Mueller, in place there was no longer a need to investigate Trump as a Russian agent. The cabal had their full hooks in the investigation once Mueller was on board.

What the mainstream media chose to omit when serving as an echo chamber for the Times was the FBI found no evidence that Trump was a Russian agent, either wittingly or unwittingly. This was simply a vehicle used by rogue elements inside the FBI to try and topple the Trump presidency.

But where’s the investigation of that? The spineless Republicans who had every opportunity to build a wall and fully repeal Obamacare also fumbled the biggest story so far this century. There is ample evidence that key people inside the FBI were doing everything they could to end the Trump presidency. No one in the mainstream media is the least bit curious. The Republicans who run the national apparatus of the party in Washington appear to be equally disinterested. It’s probably because they don’t like Trump any more than the media or the Democrats. He’s an embarrassment. Why? Because he’s actually getting things done. He’s actually going about the task of fulfilling his campaign promises.

The dirty little secret in Washington is the people who pull the strings love the status quo. They have a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-your-back mentality. This is why, on the key issues, there’s rarely ever much movement. The Republicans in charge want to continue that status quo just as much as the Democrats do.

Donald Trump came to town to bust up the club. And he must be stopped at any cost.

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

The Chicken Littles of the government shutdown

What if they had a government shutdown and nobody noticed? If you’re one of the few Americans who has actually had to go without pay, I apologize. My point is the doom and gloom and Armageddon of a partial government shutdown foretold by the Democrats never materialized. It was similar to the apocalyptic predictions of tax cuts. Instead, the economy has been on fire. We added 312,000 new jobs in December, far above the 180,000 that were predicted by the so-called experts. Hispanic unemployment has now hit yet another historic low.

Despite the tweets, despite the vulgarity, despite his stepping on his own message, Donald Trump knows what he’s doing. He decided to run for president in order to make America great again and he’s delivering big league. And the Democrats have become the obstructionist party just for the sake of obstructing. They were for the border wall before they were against it. And they’re against it simply because President Trump wants it. The game plan is to make sure he doesn’t get anything he wants. If he does, their reign in the House will be short-lived.

To illustrate how desperate they are, the Democrats are now calling a wall ‘immoral.’ Immoral? Is the wall around the Vatican immoral? What’s immoral is allowing thousands of Americans to die at the hands of illegal aliens each year and not build a wall to stop them. The open borders crowd seems to carve out an exception for those streaming across our southern border. They would never go for allowing planeloads of people to enter JFK without going through Customs. It’s hypocrisy at its highest.

Yes, Donald Trump said Mexico was going to pay for the wall. Chance are they’re not. That doesn’t mean we don’t need it. It doesn’t mean we don’t build it. In the meantime, thousands of government employees hang in the balance. Yes, they’ll get back pay, but making it without a paycheck is tough. It’s something we shouldn’t subject anyone to. Trump said he’d take responsibility for the shutdown, but is he really responsible? He’s asking for $5 billion to get started on the wall. In Washington terms that’s chump change. 

The National Priorities Project, a left-wing, pro-big government organization out of Massachusetts, compiled a list of nine things we should buy with the $5 billion instead of the wall. They listed things like doubling federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Can you say Solyndra? We blew a half-billion on that boondoggle, and it was just one of many. We’ve spent over $155 billion on green energy with little to nothing to show for it.

NPP suggested giving the EPA a 60 percent pay raise instead of building the wall. Seriously? Look, I’m all for clean air and clean water, but the EPA has gone nuts as of late. Their obsession with this fantasy of manmade global warming is costing us billions. If anything, we should be cutting out the dead wood at the EPA, not giving 60 percent pay raises.

They want to increase federal spending on public K-12 schools by 30 percent. Schools should never be funded by the federal government. That’s the responsibility of states. More federal money means more federal strings attached. Anybody remember Michelle Obama taking over the lunchroom? Or George W’s ‘No Child Left Behind?’

And they want to give the $5 billion to the National Endowment for the Arts. I guess so we can fund more crucifixes in urine.

Build the wall. It’s a project long overdue. And let’s make America safe again.

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

Why Trump is right on Syria

The Washington chattering class is once again stunned that President Trump is keeping a campaign promise. Like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and building the wall, the president is following through, and Washington elites don’t quite know what to make of it. Remember, it was Nancy Pelosi who told Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office that the border wall was just a campaign promise. Unfortunately, this is the attitude of most elected officials. You say what you have to say to get elected, then you do only what’s popular with your Washington colleagues.

Syria is a real head-scratcher. Not that President Trump is pulling troops out, but that so many want to keep the troops there. We are uninvited guests in a hostile country. Not that we didn’t have a right—even an obligation—to rout ISIS. That mission has largely been accomplished. That’s not to say that ISIS won’t rise again. If they do we should reserve the right to rout them again, but a prolonged presence in a sovereign nation that doesn’t want us there should not even be an option.

The usual Russia conspiracy freaks wasted no time in claiming more collusion with Russia since Syria’s strongman is a Russian ally. It’s not as if Trump hasn’t been tough on Bashar al-Assad. The United States has attacked Assad’s military ten different times since Trump took office. Syria is basically in the midst of a civil war. Our only interest is ISIS and its accumulation of land and power stretching across the Iraqi border. Outside of that we have no business in Syria.

It was President Obama who drew a red line in August of 2013 saying if Assad used chemical weapons against his own people we would retaliate with military action. He did and we didn’t. It wasn’t until Donald Trump became president that we actually punished Assad for chemical weapons attacks. But punishing Assad was never the primary mission. The American-led coalition in Syria, which included the UK, France, Jordan, Turkey, Canada, and Australia, was specifically forged to defeat ISIS, or ISIL, as Obama so puzzlingly called them. That mission has been largely accomplished. 

According to The Guardian, ISIS has lost over 95 percent of the territory it held before the coalition was launched against it. The coalition has started to unravel. The Kurds have been the principal fighters on the ground against ISIS. Turkey attacked Kurdish militants in northwestern Syria. We did nothing to intervene. It’s becoming clear that, like most disputes in the Middle East, Syria is far more complicated than simply backing the good guys against the bad guys.

The Kurds have been staunch allies of the United States, but only because they want their own country carved out of sections of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. The U.S. failing to come to their aid against the Turks indicates that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Many of the Democrats who supported military action in Syria only did so because it was a Democrat president who wanted it. Many Republicans were opposed for the same reason. Now it’s as if everyone wanted to fight Assad all along, even though that was never the mission. President Trump seems to be the only one who remembers the mission, and now everyone in Washington is against him because his name is Donald Trump.

Thank God for people like Sen. Rand Paul. He was against military intervention in 2013 and he’s against it now. Not that he’s necessarily right. He’s just consistent, something sorely missing in Washington these days.

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

'Justice' is the word

I found it ironic that Merriam-Webster chose the word ‘justice’ as its word of the year for 2018. They said in a statement, “The concept of justice was at the center of many of our national debates in the past year: racial justice, social justice, criminal justice, economic justice.” Then they mentioned some newsworthy events in which they say justice played a role. The Mueller investigation was the most prominent one. They cited the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as another.

Neither case radiated much justice. We’ve been told for 19 months now that there was some sort of collision between President Trump and the Russians. Now we’re bogged down in a debate over whether or not hush money to a mistress constitutes a campaign contribution. If so, what kind of campaign work did Stormy Daniels do for the money? 

Then there’s Brett Kavanaugh. Not much justice there. Oh yes, he made it onto the Supreme Court, but at what cost? His entire life was dragged through the mud. He was made out by the left to be a rapist. His family was put through untold torture and humiliation just because the Democrats in the senate couldn’t get past the notion that the president of the United States, whoever he is, gets to pick whomever he chooses for the court, so long as they’re qualified. And Justice Kavanaugh most certainly is. Michael Avenatti, the creepy porn lawyer for Stormy Daniels, surfaced during the hearings with supposed bombshell allegations against Kavanaugh that proved to be totally unfounded. Still, the damage was done. Justice?

Too many people measure justice by whether or not they get their way. One of the dictionary definitions of ‘justice’ is “the administering of deserved punishment or reward.” Kavanaugh may have technically gotten the ‘reward,’ but confirmation to the Supreme Court is not about the individual justice. It’s about seating the court with qualified jurists. Where’s the deserved punishment? Christine Blasey Ford had not one shred of evidence, and those whom she claimed were witnesses had no recollection of the event in question. Was there any downside for her? Quite the contrary. She walked away with a hefty payday from crowd sourcing and is probably in negations for a huge book deal.

You want to know what justice really is? Justice is allowing the person the American people elected as their president to do his job. Chuck Schumer actually had the audacity to tell President Trump that elections have consequences. This from a leader who just lost the senate…again. The president reminded him that elections do have consequences, and that’s why we’re doing so well. 

Justice is a wall. The wall the American people wanted when they elected Donald Trump president. 

Justice is bringing to a close this endless harassment of the president over Russia. Despite the perjury traps and convictions totally unrelated to Trump, the relentless pursuit of impeachment continues.

Justice is allowing Supreme Court nominees to answer civil questions about their qualifications and not have their reputations torched in the process.

Justice is abiding by an election without snowflakes melting down like it was Armageddon.

Justice is media coverage of a president that isn’t 92 percent negative just because those reporting it hate him.

Merriam-Webster based their choice of ‘justice’ in part on how many people searched for the word on their site. A spokesman for the company said people didn’t look up the word because they didn’t know how to spell it. They were looking for its true meaning. Perhaps that’s because they don’t recognize it in today’s political landscape.

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

Why Trump didn't break campaign finance laws

Anybody who thinks President Trump will ever be convicted of breaking campaign finance laws by paying off two women with whom it’s alleged he had affairs is dreaming. What he did is not a crime. Not even close. That’s not to say that he won’t be indicted. The Trump-haters are just liable to do anything.

But Michael Cohen pled guilty to breaking campaign finance laws, didn’t he? He did, but he pled guilty to a crimeless crime. There are two important points why what Trump did was not a crime. First, the money paid out was paid from his personal account. Second, the money was moving away from the candidate, not toward him. In other words, no one donated to his campaign illegally by his paying off alleged mistresses.

The prosecutors in the Cohen case said that Cohen and Trump criminally conspired to illegally influence the campaign. The fact is Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal conspired to influence the election. It wasn’t necessarily illegal. It’s called dirty politics. By now we’re used to October surprises.

Allow me to frame this in a way that’s easy for everyone to understand. Had Karen McDougal come forward with leaked medical records that showed Trump had a heart condition no one would be questioning his right to pay her to keep that information quiet. The fact that this case involves sex makes it juicy copy for the mainstream media, but it does not change the basic principles of the case. A private citizen has every right to protect his privacy. Being a candidate for president doesn’t change that. Bill Clinton understood this when he refused to release his medical records.

If failing to allow your personal life to become public is somehow misconstrued as illegally influencing a political campaign then name me one presidential candidate who hasn’t broken the law. And if the assumption is that any private matter that may influence voters has to be made public then good luck finding willing candidates to run.

I hear pundits all the time saying a case like this has never been adjudicated. Perhaps they’ve forgotten all about John Edwards. He was indicted for spending over a million dollars in campaign funds to keep a mistress quiet. Even though this was campaign money, the prosecutors could not get a conviction. That clearly appeared to be a violation of the law if for no other reason than he didn’t properly report the campaign expense. Still, he was let off the hook.

As the mainstream media obsess over nailing Trump on campaign finance charges, whatever happened to Russia? I thought that was the focus of the Mueller investigation. Notice how Mueller punted this to the Southern District of New York. One would suspect if Mueller ever thought he could get a Trump conviction on campaign finance infractions he would’ve kept the case in house. The fact that he didn’t speaks volumes.

I have been one of the staunchest believers that President Trump should leave the Mueller investigation alone. Now I’m not so sure. We’re hearing rumblings of Mueller heading for Trump family finances. His head is bobbing back in forth in the driver’s seat he’s so far off the main road. If he takes a detour to Trump Tower I wouldn’t blame the president one bit for pulling the plug.

We have to keep separated in our minds the Mueller investigation and the SDNY investigation. They’re not the same. The prosecutors in New York seem hell-bent on doing everything within their power to make Trump look bad. Let’s hope Robert Mueller is taking a higher road.

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

Ivanka and Hillary: They're both wrong

A public records request has revealed that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of e-mails regarding government business from her personal e-mail account. This has prompted cries of “Lock her up!” from the left and defense of the violation from the right. Allow me to be the adult in the room.

First, it’s unconscionable that anyone in government, on the right or the left, is so unaware about government e-mail protocol that this could happen. Least of all the daughter of the man who made this a major campaign issue in the 2016 election. One would think that after the media attention of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails that everyone in the Trump administration would make doubly sure they were following the letter of the law. Apparently they didn’t. This is an embarrassment to the president and Ivanka should face the consequences just like anyone else.

There are two major distinctions between Ivanka’s scandal and Hillary’s. First, Ivanka wasn’t using a private server. Using one would appear to be a deliberate attempt to deceive. The second distinction—and this is a big one—is that there’s no evidence at this time that anything Ivanka e-mailed through her private account was classified. The fact that a secretary of state did that is monumental.

But what’s interesting is how the left circled the wagons around Hillary and are now demanding full prosecution of Ivanka. That reeks of hypocrisy. They had completely moved past Hillary’s debacle and now are fixated on Ivanka’s. That’s part of what’s wrong with today’s political discourse. It’s all about “gotcha” as long as the one being “got” ain’t their own.

And this applies to the right as well. While it’s proper to draw distinctions between the two cases, it’s not at all fair to ignore Ivanka’s and point to Hillary’s. Especially someone who should’ve known better. She claims to have not understood the protocol. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Another related story got very little traction in the press. Turns out James Comey used his personal e-mail to conduct official FBI business, as we learned from another Freedom of Information request. That story got virtually no play in the mainstream media. Anyone who looks at this objectively would have to concede that the FBI director doing this is certainly more serious than an unpaid advisor to the president. It also brings more into focus Comey’s actions in July of 2016 when he made the unilateral decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton despite revealing that she had sent or received 110 classified e-mails to and from her private servers. Yes, that’s plural because they discovered more than one. Perhaps prosecution of such a crime hit a little too close to home for Mr. Comey.

Letting someone skate because the investigator found himself in a similar situation does not mean that someone is innocent. It only means she wasn’t prosecuted at the time. The more serious laws Hillary may have broken have a statute of limitations of ten years. That means if laws were broken during her first year as secretary of state the clock is winding down on prosecution.

The solution to all of this is we investigate both Hillary and Ivanka. And I would throw James Comey in the mix while we’re at it. If either of those three is found to have violated federal statutes then they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Hiding from the law should not be determined by what position you hold in government. Nor should it be determined by who your daddy is.

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

Trump was right about California wildfires

I’ll be the first to admit that President Trump’s tweet about forest management in the midst of a wildfire catastrophe was not the most artful thing to do. However, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s right. Governor Jerry Brown blames ‘climate deniers’ for the devastation. The truth is he had a chance to minimize the destruction, but he chose instead to bow to extreme environmentalists.

It’s instructive to understand what causes wildfires. It’s not spontaneous combustion because the earth is warming. An estimated 90 percent of wildfires are caused by humans. This includes campfires left unattended, cigarettes being tossed out of automobiles, and arson. The remaining ten percent are caused either by lightning or lava. The environmentalists will claim that wildfire devastation is exacerbated by drought. That’s certainly true, but California’s droughts these days are mere blips compared to historic droughts.

Scott Stine is a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. He told the Mercury News, “We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years. We’re living in a dream world.” There have been multiple droughts over the last 1,000 years that have lasted 10 to 20 years. There was a drought around 850 AD that lasted 240 years. After a 50-year respite, another one lasted 180 years.

Contrary to what the alarmists tell you about this being the driest time in California’s history, Professor Stine says the past century has been among the wettest in the past 7,000 years.

Perspective is what so many knee-jerk environmentalists lack. They get locked in a world they can only remember, or a world that goes back to when the first records were kept. That’s a tiny world compared to the big picture. The longest droughts in recent California history occurred between 1928 and 1934, and another between 1987 and 1992. The problem is as more people overbuild California the property loss is naturally going to be greater.

Here’s why President Trump is right when he tweeted, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.” The policy from the U.S. Forest Service used to be quite simple. When a forest became too difficult to walk through it was thinned. They cut out underbrush and made space between large trees. Strategic logging was employed that not only made the forests less prone to wildfires, it actually made the Forest Service profitable. This all began to change in the ‘70s and accelerated during the ‘90s under President Bill Clinton. The Rio Earth Summit was the big turning point where prevention of forest management kicked into high gear and war was declared on the timber industry.

The Roadless Area Conservation Policy directive put a stop to nearly all logging and roadbuilding, not to mention coal, gas, oil, and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of land. President George W. Bush tried to reinstitute common sense forest management but was stymied by a federal judge.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) told Canada Free Press that the forest service used to auction off national forest timber. He said this not only saved the forests, it helped the local economy. That has “all but dried up,” he said.

And Jerry Brown vetoed a 2016 bill that passed unanimously in the California Assembly and Senate that would’ve given locals more say-so when it comes to fire prevention.

Liberal politicians continue to run California into the ground, and, in typical fashion, they always blame somebody else.

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

Why call them fake news? Because they are.

Temperature. The left seems to be obsessed with it. No, not the global temperature, although they still flog that dead mule from time to time. The political temperature. They want you to believe pipe bombs and synagogue shootings are all the fault of President Trump. They’re not. And they use these mentally disturbed people to try and stifle his pointed concerns with inaccurate reporting in the media. Even Fox News has wondered aloud why the president won’t tamp down his criticism of ‘fake news.’ The reason is because fake news stories are one of the biggest threats to our country.

On the same day that Jim Acosta berated White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders for not having the “guts” to name names in the fake news media, a commentator on his own network was saying that Donald Trump had “radicalized more people than ISIS.” Think about that statement for a moment. The insinuation was Trump is responsible for the pipe bombs and the synagogue shooting. He’s no more responsible than Bernie Sanders was for one of his campaign workers shooting Steve Scalise on a baseball field. And, by the way, the synagogue shooter hated Trump because of Jews in his administration. That alone should put to rest accusations of anti-Semitism against the president. But it won’t.

Even before the pipe bomber was caught, the liberals were using the hashtag MAGABomber on Twitter. No one used #BernieShooter when Scalise was shot. Why? Because we understand that mentally deranged people on either side are not representative of those they supposedly support.

Eric Holder has said, “When they go low, we kick them.” Maxine Waters has encouraged her followers to hound and harass people they disagree with “in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station.” She screams, “They’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” And they talk about the political temperature.

When crazy people scale the White House fence and try to enter the mansion carrying a dangerous weapon there’s no call from the left to tamp down the rhetoric against Trump.

He has called the fake news media the enemy of the people, and they are. No, not all the media, and not every reporter at every left-leaning network. Those who pose as journalists, but in reality are activists, are doing the public a grave disservice. The reason Sarah Sanders didn’t take the bait from Jim Acosta and list the fake news media is because she would’ve been there all day.

Reporting that Trump instructed Michael Flynn to meet with the Russians before the election was fake news. In fact, the entire Trump/Russia collusion story has been fake news. After two years there’s nothing to show for it. George Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the FBI about communications with a Russia-linked professor. After meeting behind closed doors with Congress, it now appears the professor was set-up from the government to try and link him with Russia. Papadopoulos is now considering withdrawing his agreement with the government concerning his case.

Justifiably criticizing your opponents has no connection whatsoever with deranged people who resort to violence. For President Trump to refrain from pointing out what his opponents are doing wrong just because of some crazy people would be admitting that his words have some connection to their actions. They don’t.

If the mainstream media want to lower the temperature, they can start with telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about President Trump. If they want him to stop calling them fake news then stop running fake stories.

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

The Democrats' last gasp

The midterm elections are just around the corner. A lot is riding on November 6. The Republicans are hoping to strengthen the Trump agenda. By the Democrats’ own admission, this may be their last gasp at power. Why? Because the prosperity under President Trump is undeniable. That’s evident by the ads being run by Democrat candidates. They don’t put forth any bold ideas. They’re running on fear. Historically, that hasn’t been a wise bet.

We are living in a time of nearly unparalleled prosperity. Unemployment is at a 50-year low. Black and Hispanic unemployment are at historic lows. Unemployment for women hasn’t been this low in 65 years. The tax cuts mean more jobs, more money in the pockets of taxpayers, and an economy that’s on fire. If the Democrats aren’t able to take back the House or the Senate or both and slow down Trump’s agenda there’s no telling how good the economy will be next year. If the economy remains on fire into 2020 it’s doubtful the American people are going to be pushing for change in the White House.

The Democrats need to turn 23 seats in the House to take control of Congress. That’s a hernia-inducing lift by anybody’s calculation. The so-called pundits have picked ten bellwether seats that could portend the results of the election in November. One of them is the eighth congressional district in Minnesota. This is a union-heavy district that has gone to the Democrats all but two years since World War II. At the end of September the Democrat, Joe Radinovich, was leading by one point. In the latest poll conducted by the New York Times, the Republican, Pete Stauber, is up by 16 points! It’s funny, the so-called experts are no longer calling this a bellwether district.

I understand that MN-8 is just one congressional district, but does it give us a peek into November? That question is easier answered by understanding what’s happened in that district since the end of September. Two things: Kavanaugh and tariffs. These were two issues the Democrats were sure they could win with. The Kavanaugh plan was to ambush him with spurious accusations on the eve of the confirmation vote. We all saw how that played out. The Democrats unwittingly handed the Republicans a club with which to beat them about the head and shoulders.

Tariffs were supposed to be the other easy mark for the Democrats. After all, the Republicans are so big on free trade yet they advocate punishing our trading partners with a tax on American consumers. That was supposed to be the narrative. Then came the soybean issue. The Democrats were certain Trump had stepped in it, and the Republicans right behind him, when the EU slapped a tariff on soybeans in retaliation for Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs. The Dems put all their soybeans in one basket and Trump kicked it over. After a general freak-out over soybeans and the European Union, Trump threatened to tariff cars coming from the EU. One can only imagine that Germany, which leads the EU in automobile exports, screamed at the European Commission to do something. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was on the first flight to Washington and the next morning was standing beside President Trump in the Rose Garden to announce an agreement to work toward zero tariffs on soybeans.

Voters in districts like MN-8 are loving it. The Dems have underestimated Trump just like they did in 2016. If MN-8 is typical, November 6 could be rough day for the Democrats.

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

Where does #MeToo go after Kavanaugh?

I’m sitting here wondering how all of the pink hat ladies can reconcile the fact that they so opposed Justice Kavanaugh because of some unsubstantiated claim of sexual assault yet they turned out in droves to support Hillary Clinton who has a long history of covering up for an alleged predator. It does really make one question the sincerity of the movement. And to see Hillary herself in interviews day after day saying we have to believe the women. Not one interviewer confronted her with the ugly truth that she was in charge of “bimbo eruptions” while her husband was running for president and after he won.

The Democrats aren’t through with Brett Kavanaugh. They vow to impeach him if they take control of Congress. All the more reason that these people shouldn’t be anywhere near the keys of power. Someone needs to remind them that you can only be impeached for conduct while you’re in office. That goes for justices and presidents. In other words, they can’t reach back in the histories of Kavanaugh and Trump and remove them from office. Chances are if they ignore their own inconsistencies on sexual assault they’ll ignore the Constitution too.

I was told of a conversation with a drunk millennial recently. The night after Kavanaugh’s confirmation he insisted “the bastard is guilty.” When pressed on what he was guilty of he eventually had to confess that he hadn’t followed the story and didn’t really know what he was accused of. But whatever it was, he was guilty.

Both sides engage in this type of judgement against the other all too often. We all have our preconceived notions and we all make our assumptions. However, when it comes to something like sexual assault it is totally irresponsible to assume guilt. Should we #BelieveSurvivors? If they’re really survivors of sexual assault, sure. That’s the problem. We have no idea how many of these unsubstantiated claims are made up. We have no idea how many of these women screaming at senators claiming they’re “survivors” have actually survived anything. That’s not to diminish the horror that victims of sexual assault have gone through. Quite the contrary. Those who have been proven to be victims deserve our deepest sympathy and their attackers deserve our fiercest rage. But just claiming someone did something is not—and should not be—good enough for victim status.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the whole Kavanaugh circus it’s that there’s now a new standard when it comes to sexual assault. If you’re accusing a conservative, you’re automatically believed. If you’re accusing a liberal, then the burden of proof is on you. We saw this with Bill Clinton. We saw this in the midst of the Kavanaugh hearings with Rep. Keith Ellison. Here’s a guy with far more evidence against him than Kavanaugh, yet a lawyer from a law firm that gave $500,000 to Democrats says she could find no evidence against him.

The left tried to tell us that normal standards of proof didn’t apply to Brett Kavanaugh because this wasn’t a trial, it was a job interview. OK, let’s go with that. So you’re saying that anybody who applies for a job can be immediately disqualified if someone just accuses him of something?

When this #MeToo movement first started I joked with a female conservative activist friend of mine on the air about this being a conspiracy to silence men. She laughed. She’s not laughing any more. Make no mistake about it, this is a war against men. Specifically white men. No one should be silenced through false allegations.

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

Politicizing Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria

President Trump caught a lot of grief for questioning the mortality numbers out of Puerto Rico concerning Hurricane Maria. Politifact said Trump was wrong. Why? Because the death toll that curiously jumped from 64 to 2,975 is “based in science.” Based in science? How about a body count? It shouldn’t be that hard, but the estimate didn’t come from bodies in the ground. It came from an estimate conducted by George Washington University.

There’s an old joke that 67 percent of statistics are made up on the spot. There’s no doubt that the inflated numbers in Puerto Rico were designed to make this particular disaster “Trump’s Katrina.” What the left-wing media chose to ignore as they reported on the numbers they say are not in dispute is the malfeasance on the ground in Puerto Rico. Large pallets of supplies sent to help the hurricane victims sat rotting and never got to their intended destination. When Mayor Cruz appeared on TV with a ‘NASTY’ t-shirt the situation on the ground in Puerto Rico had undoubtedly turned political. This was her chance to do something for the ‘resistance.’ What she did was use her own people as pathetic pawns to score points against Trump.

At least CBS News reported that “donated food sent to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria were left to rot in a parking lot of a government facility.” They said, “about 10 containers filled with non-perishable supplies sat at the government facility for 11 months.” If the death toll in Puerto Rico is actually dramatically higher, it’s no doubt due to the ineptitude of the people on the ground tasked with distributing much-needed supplies.

The New York Times, which themselves put the death toll at 1,000, savaged the president for questioning the GWU numbers. They came up with 1,000, but if somebody else says it’s essentially three times that then, yeah, let’s go with that. Again, they take the numbers at face value without questioning them.

It’s only when you start to peel back the layers of the study that you find the flaws. The GWU study counted indirect deaths like people having trouble refilling prescriptions. Any increase in diabetes deaths over the prior year were blamed on the hurricane. One would assume under this methodology that if a plane went down carrying Puerto Rican refugees to Florida that number would be counted too. They even counted increases in suicide and Alzheimer’s disease!

The left is famous for taking unrealistic numbers at face value if they advance their cause. Who can forget the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists that humans are causing the earth to warm. That claim has been totally discredited numerous times but continues to be stated as fact by the left.

Congressman Steve King’s office did a study several years back trying to determine how many Americans are killed by illegal aliens. Through news reports and government statistics they arrived at 25 Americans per day, on average, killed by illegal aliens. The left-wing media went after King’s numbers with a vengeance. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t question them. They should, but they should also question numbers coming from the left. But they don’t.

As the saying goes, figures don’t lie, but liars figure. Both the right and left will continue to use statistics to further their cause. It’s up to us as consumers of this data to question everything, especially if the figures don’t pass the smell test. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time.

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

Losing R-E-S-P-E-C-T for the left

Aretha Franklin’s funeral may have set a record for the longest celebrity eulogy. There were heartfelt tributes to the Queen of Soul. There was a long list of celebrities who came to pay their respects. Then there were the controversial moments, like when one reverend seemed to move his hand too close to Ariana Grande’s breast. Jesse Jackson, of course, chose to turn the event political when he chastised the crowd for lining up to see Aretha yet not showing up at the polls in Michigan in the 2016 presidential election. He also recognized Maxine Waters for the “work” she’s done, which was taken to mean her tireless rants against President Trump.

Al Sharpton lectured Trump on showing some R-E-S-P-E-C-T when several days before on his television show he didn’t even know how to spell it.

The event was marred with the presence of known racist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan sitting on the stage with Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. One can only imagine if David Duke had spoken at the funeral of a white singer.

But none of that drew even a peep from the family. It was the words of Rev. Jasper Williams, Jr. that drew gasps of horror. The reverend described children in a home without their father as “abortion after birth.” He told the crowd,”Black lives must not matter until black people start respecting black lives and stop killing ourselves.” A Franklin family member called the remarks “very, very distasteful.”

So, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bashing Trump from the pulpit and giving face time to one of the most famous racists of our time wasn’t distasteful, but a pastor urging black folks to stop killing each other was? It’s a sad commentary on where we are as a country.

First of all, Aretha’s funeral should’ve been about Aretha. The race-baiters and their divisive rhetoric should’ve been stopped at the door. The fact that the family allowed them to speak sullied the event. But if you’re purposely making it a political event by inviting lightning rod figures to speak then you shouldn’t be shocked by anything that’s said. And you certainly shouldn’t be shocked by someone naming the problem for what it is.

We have an epidemic of black-on-black crime in this country. Half of all murders are committed by primarily black males. Over 90 percent of their victims are also black. It’s easy for white folks to ignore the problem. Chances are it will never affect them, but part of our American family is hurting. It’s going to take the majority to change it. It’s not at all helpful when blacks themselves not only ignore the problem but are outraged by anyone who doesn’t.

Colin Kaepernick divides a country with his refusal to stand for our national anthem and is rewarded with a Nike ad. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we start a dialogue on how to solve the problem? If you think the judicial system is racist and turning loose black convicts from prison until prisons looks like America is the solution then you obviously don’t understand the problem. And kneeling is not the solution. It’s actually part of the problem too. It’s whistling past the graveyard. 

Rev. Williams had the courage to speak the truth to a room full of people who weren’t ready to hear it, in front of men like Sharpton, Jackson, and Farrakhan whose rhetoric has largely contributed to the problem. And it’s Rev. Williams who’s the embarrassment? We have a long way to go.

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

What you need to know about the FISA app and the FBI

The release of the heavily redacted FBI application for a FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump foreign policy advisor, fell with a thud in the mainstream media. For one, it was released on a Saturday when the fewest number of eyeballs were watching. The normally sensationalized headlines that greet news of the Russian investigation were absent.

Some, like New York magazine, even went so far as to say the FISA app debunked Trump’s ‘witch hunt’ claims. The truth is, as Byron York from the Washington Examiner so artfully laid out, the FISA app to spy on Carter Page vindicates Devin Nunes’s contention that there was serious misconduct on behalf of the FBI.

Here’s pretty much the problem in a nutshell. The FISA warrant against Page relied heavily on the now-debunked Steele Dossier. James Comey, as director of the FBI, signed off on the application three times before he was booted from his job. Running concurrently with those application renewals was his telling President-elect Trump in early January of 2017 that the Steele Dossier was “salacious and unverified.” The mainstream media run interference on this point claiming Comey wasn’t talking about the entire dossier, just the parts that were “personally sensitive” to the incoming president. You be the juWhat dge. This is the full sentence in context of what Comey said under oath when recounting his meeting with Trump.

“The IC (Intelligence Community) leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming president to the existence of this material even though it was salacious and unverified.”

Let’s assume for the moment that the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the media are right. If portions of intelligence you’re receiving on something as serious as a political candidate colluding with a foreign power to rig an election are unverified how can you believe anything else in the document? In other words, what constitutes verified? Well, as we now know nothing in the Steele Dossier has been verified. If that’s the case now it was certainly the case when they filed the application. That would indicate that there was a concerted effort to mislead the court in order to allow them to literally tap into the Trump campaign surreptitiously.

The main point that’s being ignored by everyone is in spite of a FISA warrant and at least five or six renewals at 90-day intervals they found nothing on Carter Page. What they did find is Russian intelligence tried to recruit him as an agent and he didn’t take the bait. More importantly, they found nothing on Trump and any kind of collusion. Surely we’d know by now. Those wiretaps started almost two years ago in October of 2016. Carter Page stepped down as an advisor in September of 2016. He wasn’t even with the Trump campaign when he was being wiretapped.

Don’t forget it was Peter Strzok who was tasked with heading up the investigation into Trump-Russia collusion. He was involved with the Steele Dossier. When asked to join the Mueller investigation he sent a text to his lover, Lisa Page, telling her there’s “no big there there.” Then why did he join the investigation? The answer is obvious. It was all about getting Trump.

Keep this in mind too. Lisa Page gave two days of closed-door testimony to Congress. The only people talking to the press about that testimony were the Republicans who called it “enlightening” and “very useful.” We haven’t heard a word from the Democrats on that committee. That is the story to watch in the coming weeks.

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