Toilet paper and paper towels? Really?

I hate to say it, but I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the American public. After seeing the run on toilet paper and paper towels it’s obvious that the people have developed an every-man-for-himself mentality. Why paper towels and toilet paper? The shelves of my grocery store were stocked full of actual food items. Bread was gone. I’ve never understood that one. During impending snow storms people clear the shelves of milk and bread. Are they making French toast?

I went to the grocery store because we were actually running low on paper towels. I went to three different locations and it was the same story. Who started this? That’s the problem. Nobody really knows. Someone started buying up toilet paper and the madness started. Then it spread to toilet paper. What’s next?

Toilet paper aisle at Target

I started a hashtag on Twitter. #PanicIsTheVirus. I’m not suggesting that the coronavirus isn’t serious. If you’re over 70 and/or have health problems you should probably stay close to home. I don’t have any problem with the social distancing. But cancelling NASCAR? Sure, make the fans stay home, but race. And I’m not even a big NASCAR fan. What are the chances that someone in a full driving suit and helmet is going to either get the coronavirus or spread it? Zero. I certainly understand cancelling mass gatherings of people. I just wish we’d been a little less hysterical about it.

We’re having to walk that thin line between precaution and panic, and we’re solidly on the side of panic. Anybody remember the Hong Kong Flu of 1968? It killed over a million people worldwide and around 100,000 in the United States. I don’t recall the government shutting down all public events. The Asian Flu of 1957 killed almost 70,000 Americans. Where was the freak out?

The common denominator is Donald Trump wasn’t president. The people on the left have shamelessly used this crisis to try and topple the president. Again. The Russia hoax didn’t work. The Ukrainian hoax didn’t work. They’re hoping this time they’ll be successful. I doubt it.

These pandemics can last for years, but they usually peak within a few months. This one appears to have peaked in China. If we’re lucky we’re only looking at a few more weeks here in the United States before things can get back to normal.

What’s really interesting is how Taiwan, which is only 140 miles across the Taiwan Strait, has managed to keep its cases really low. Like us they’ve instituted tight border restrictions and limited public gatherings. That seems to be the key. All of these open border advocates are looking like idiots now. There’s a great reason why countries have borders. That’s never been more clear than today.

We’ve not yet peaked in the United States. It will surely get worse before it gets better. Probably several thousand deaths before it runs its course. If you’re in a high risk group then you should confine your movements. If you’re anyone else you should limit yours. No need to rush out for toilet paper and paper towels. And bottled water? Don’t people have taps in their houses? If the end of the world to you means drinking water from your sink and doing your business with a leaf then we’re much weaker than I thought.

Get it in one bag, people. This is not a time to be selfish. Buy what you need and stop hoarding. Leave something for others. We’ll get through this if you’ll just stop acting like animals. BTW, animals don’t need toilet paper.

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.

Coronavirus—Calm down

Eighty. That’s the average age of coronavirus fatalities according to Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams. He also said if you’re young you have a better chance of dying of the regular flu than from coronavirus. Your chance of dying from it is way below a half-percent until you hit the age of 50 when it jumps to 1.3 percent. It goes to 3.6 percent when you reach 60, 8 percent at 70, and 14.8 percent when you hit 80. In other words, anyone under 60 who’s in reasonable health has virtually no chance of dying from coronavirus. Think that stops the panic? Not hardly. Why? Because the hysteria from the news media drowns out all else.

They’re amplifying the Democrats like Chuck Schumer who see victory in panic and a tanking economy. Each and every day the Democrats wake up to see what kind of new doubt they can put in the minds of Americans. At a time when everyone should be coming together they’re trying to tear us apart. And all because they know a robust economy means certain defeat in November.

I would love to see a political party just say, “Hey, things are actually going pretty good right now. We don’t see much that needs changing.” Think that’s going to happen? Instead both parties try to tear down whichever one is in power. How about looking out for us citizens? And I’m talking to both parties. But there’s too much at stake. Too much power on the line. I’ve never understood people who crave power. Me? I tend to avoid it. Someone wants to put me in charge I say, “No, thanks.” I don’t want to run things. Am I alone? Ever seen that mild-mannered guy at work go nuts with power once someone puts him in charge? It’s ugly.

You know, maybe we should be putting people in power who don’t want it. Kinda tough to do that, though. If they don’t want it they probably won’t take it. So, we’re stuck with people who run for office who love telling the rest of us what to do. Not all of them, obviously, but too many of them. And that’s what we’re seeing on display right now. We saw something similar during the Obama administration with the Ebola outbreak. Obama invited a good deal of criticism when he refused to restrict travel from African nations. We dodged a bullet on that one. Or maybe the Ebola scare as it pertained to the United States was overblown.

The Ebola outbreak of 2014 afflicted 28,652 people worldwide. Of those, 11,325 died. That’s a kill rate of 40 percent. Only 4 people came down with it in the U.S. and one of them died. What saved us was the disease was confined primarily to Africa. Travel from Africa to the U.S. is low compared to China. Business conducted with Africa is low compared to China. President Trump greatly curtailed travel to and from China in late January. I thought he should’ve done it earlier, but it was the first time it had been done.

What’s interesting is to go back in time and look at the predictions from the World Health Organization on the number of Ebola cases. They predicted in excess of 20,000 worldwide. We got over 28,000. What are they saying now about coronavirus? They’re being pretty quiet when it comes to estimates. Understandable given all the hysteria.

The ordinary flu has already killed over 12,000 people in America alone. Be cautious, but don’t be foolish. The panic industrial complex is playing you.

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.

Biden is inevitable

I always hated that guy who came back after the fact and said, “I told you so,” but, um, I told you so. When every pundit had left Joe Biden for politically dead I said, “Wait for South Carolina.” Even as we approached South Carolina some pundits were claiming Bernie Sanders would win. I explained to you several weeks ago that Iowa and New Hampshire don’t matter. They matter less each passing election. Why either party stakes so much on them is a curiosity. I think that will change in 2024.Now what?

Well, Joe won big on Super Tuesday (or Super Thursday as he preferred to call it) and that’s because of his performance in South Carolina. Now, I don’t profess to have any inside knowledge of the Democrat machinery. At the risk of getting a “Go to hell!” from Donna Brazile, I’ll do a little speculating on the backroom workings of the DNC. I suspect they wanted Pete Buttigieg. He’s young, he’s smart, he’s gay. The perfect progressive. He’d just won Iowa (supposedly) and looked like the fresh face in comparison to the Jurassic bark of the old “get off my lawn” candidates on the debate stage. I expected one of them to randomly shout out “Bingo!” at any moment. The DNC elders looked at South Carolina as the litmus test. If Pete could miraculously pull out a win there then he’d be their man. If he couldn’t he’d have to step aside for the good of the party.

Then Joe Biden ran away with it in South Carolina, raking in almost half the vote. At that point it was clear that he was the only one who could beat Bernie. And the last thing the DNC wants is Bernie as their nominee. It goes far beyond the fact that Trump would mop the floor with him. The DNC establishment knows that a Bernie nomination would effectively relegate the Democrats to third-party status. This is the interesting part. It’s not that they don’t agree with him. Many in the DNC are just as socialist as he is. They just don’t say it out loud. It’s like pooping. Everybody does it, but, egads, you never discuss it in polite company.It’s all about winning. Both parties have that mentality to a certain degree, but the Democrats seem to place it above all else. They would love to see the economy tank so that it hurts Trump. Heck, they’d love to see the coronavirus become a crisis in America if it hurts Trump. I’ve never seen a group of people like this in my life who place party before country. If you think I’m being unfair look at the impeachment. Look at the two-year-long Trump/Russia hoax. Heck, Donna Brazile was on TV on Super Tuesday claiming the RNC chairman was using “Russian talking points” before she told her to “go to hell” for speculating on what the DNC was up to.What is the DNC up to? They’re devising a strategy to win. Even if it means elevating a guy as the party’s standard-bearer who looks like they found him on a beach with sandals and tube socks and a metal detector. When Donald Trump is the youngest man in the race alarm bells should be going off.Mayor Pete’s smart. He knows he had no chance of getting the nomination. He has a much better chance of being president if he’s on the ticket with Biden. When Biden loses he’s positioned for 2024. If the economy keeps booming that may be a moot point.

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 mainstream media give lying Democrats cover

I must confess to a renewed interest in the Democrat debates ever since Mike Bloomberg got in. No, I don’t think Bloomberg is the least bit interesting. What I enjoy is seeing the other candidates freak out over him. Like Elizabeth Warren in their first meeting in Vegas. They were back at each other in South Carolina. This time Warren retold the debunked story of losing her job as a teacher because she was pregnant and then accused Bloomberg of telling a pregnant female employee to “just kill it.” Bloomberg vehemently denies it, but no one wanted to call Elizabeth Warren on her lie of being fired because she was pregnant.

Minutes from a 1971 meeting of New Jersey’s Riverdale Board of Education show that Warren actually resigned, and her resignation was “accepted with regret.” Yet she still stands by the story to this day, just like she stands by the story that she’s an American Indian. She’s not. CBS News, which hosted the debate, “fact-checked” Warren’s story and found it to be “mostly true.” However, they used as their source Elizabeth Warren. They simply dug up other instances where she told the story to see if they matched. Interestingly enough, they didn’t. In 2007, she told an audience at Berkeley that she was working on an ‘emergency certificate.’ She went on to say, “I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, 'I don't think this is going to work out for me.' I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.” That’s a far cry from being fired because you’re pregnant. Why did CBS News label it “mostly true?”

The unwillingness of the mainstream media to call these Democrats on their lies is journalistic malpractice. Joe Biden bragged on the debate stage in South Carolina that he had beaten the NRA twice and would take on the NRA again, along with the gun “man-a-factures” and win because their guns had killed 150 million people since 2007. CBS News “fact-checked” his statement about taking on the NRA and labeled it “mostly true,” yet they totally ignored his lie about 150 million people killed since 2007. The truth is, on average, 40,000 people are killed by guns each year. About 60 percent of those are suicide. Even if you include suicides the total number in the last 13 years would only total around a half-million, not 150 million. Heck, that’s half the population!

Tom Steyer is one of the biggest liars in the race. He’s been on a crazed crusade for years to save us from some sort of imagined climate catastrophe. At a town hall before the debate he took a question from a frightened little snowflake who confessed she was terrified of climate change. He then went on a tirade about how he would tell the car manufacturers what kinds of cars they could make. He would tell the builders what kinds of buildings they could build. He would declare war on the “fossil fuel” industry. (By the way, oil doesn’t come from fossils.) He then went on to blame climate change for childhood asthma and dirty drinking water in Flint.

The public needs to understand one thing. Even if you believe all this nonsense about climate change, CO2 has nothing whatsoever to do with dirty air and dirty water. There is no CO2 in smog. CO2 doesn’t cause tainted water in Flint. But did the mainstream media call him on that? Of course not.

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.

Republicans are pandering on climate change

Few things hack me off more than pandering. Too many politicians do it. We’re watching it right now in the Democrat primaries. Talk to a union group and they’re all about the “working man.” Talk to a black group and they're all about civil rights. Talk to some rainbow group and they’re all about gay rights. Whatever it takes to get the vote, right?

Well, the Republicans are just as bad. The House GOP leadership is coming out with their own climate change agenda. Call it Green New Deal Lite. Why? Because they’ve been polling again. They found out that the younger end of their party believes all this hogwash. Instead of debating people on the facts, they’d just rather pander. It’s easier. Doesn’t require much intellect. Just give the people what they want.

Never mind that the whole green agenda is designed to end America as we know it. You see, socialism is at the heart of the green agenda. Just listen to AOC some time. She’ll start off railing on the “carbon polluters” then segue into asthma sufferers (like CO2 has anything to do with asthma) and then she’s quickly on to making the rich countries pay the poor countries for this climate crisis they’ve caused.

By the way, where is the climate crisis? Oh, it’s everywhere. Floods, droughts, snow, lack of snow, heat, cold. It’s what we used to call weather. Now it’s climate change. The only problem is there’s absolutely no evidence that anything we’re doing is causing the climate to change. Doesn’t matter. It’s the “in” thing. Notice how hysteria has been substituted for proof? If you can’t prove, shout it.

The Republicans have found it easier to succumb to the shouting rather than debate the issue. They’re more afraid of losing younger voters who’ve been brainwashed by Bill Nye the Science Guy than losing their country. Because, after all, holding onto power is the most important thing. Only it isn’t. Holding onto our country is the most important thing.

President Trump understands this. That’s why he’s ignoring the pandering pachyderms and boldly extracting the last vestiges of climate change hysteria from his budget. Trump’s budget would eliminate funding for the Energy Star program and shift that cost to businesses that want to participate in it. I’ve never really understood the notion of conserving something there’s not a shortage of. You conserve water in a drought. You conserve money if you don’t have any. It makes little sense to conserve energy when we’re not running out of it. I’m all for saving money, but that should be my prerogative, not a mandate from the government.

“If you look at what the president says and does, it’s clear that he and his administration do not believe in the need for climate action, investment in clean energy, or protecting clean water and clean air,” so says Josh Freed to Roll Call. He’s the senior vice president for the climate and energy program at liberal think tank Third Way. Josh is a liar. President Trump has made it crystal clear that he’s all about clean air and clean water. Josh wants you to think he’s not so he can persuade you somehow that clean air and clean water have something to do with carbon dioxide. They don’t.

But the Republicans are no better. Part of their plan to fix climate change is to address all the plastic in the ocean. I’d love to clean that up too, but it has nothing to do with climate change. It’s time to stop pandering and tell the American people the truth.

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.

Biden ain't done yet

I love watching the pundits pontificate about Iowa and New Hampshire like they really matter. Do they? Sometimes. It’s impossible to tell. They’re becoming less and less relevant. After this year’s debacle in Iowa it’s doubtful if they’ll ever be the “first in the nation” again. At least on the Democrat side.

Guess who won Iowa in 1972. Edmund Muskie. Guess who won New Hampshire in 1972. Edmund Muskie. Guess who wasn’t the Democrat nominee in 1972. Edmund Muskie. George McGovern was, and he got shellacked by Richard Nixon.

Tom Harkin won Iowa in 1992. Paul Tsongas won New Hampshire. Bill Clinton won the nomination and the presidency. Remember the Comeback Kid?

The so-called experts have left Joe Biden for dead. It’s not even close to being over. Iowa and New Hampshire are two insignificant states. I don’t mean that in the sense that the people there are insignificant. I mean it in the sense that neither is representative of the country as a whole. New Hampshire has just over a million people and is 94 percent white. Iowa has three times the population, but it’s still 91 percent white. Not that I have anything against white folks. I am one, but the Democrat Party nationally is only 60 percent white, according to Gallup. They’re 22 percent black and 13 percent Hispanic.

Want to find a state that looks more like the Democrat Party? Go to South Carolina. It’s 68 percent white, 27 percent black, and 6 percent Hispanic. You have some wild cards there like Jesse Jackson winning in 1988 and John Edwards winning in 2004, but John Edwards was born there and lived in neighboring North Carolina. Jesse Jackson is, well, Jesse Jackson.

Joe Biden is camping out in South Carolina. He skedaddled from New Hampshire even before the polls closed. Smart move. It should’ve been obvious to everyone that Bernie was going to win New Hampshire. He lives right next door. 

Who should be really concerned is Elizabeth Warren. She lives right next door too. In fact, Massachusetts is a much more influential media market than Vermont. Her implosion will be studied by political scientists for years to come. I think it boils down to really one thing. Her Medicare for All plan was going to tax the hell out of the middle class and she wasn’t willing to lie about it. Oh, she dodged it like crazy, but her illusiveness on the issue made it clear she was going to sock it to the middle class if she got in. Bernie, on the other hand, has managed to be evasive enough on the funding end of his plan that the media have just stopped asking. If there’s one thing you can say for Elizabeth Warren it’s that she isn’t willing to outright lie to get the nomination.

Joe Biden is. Joe will say practically anything to anybody to win. That’s why I still have my money on him. The latest poll from East Carolina University has Biden winning South Carolina by 18. That would be a huge boost to his campaign. Biden could be the Comeback Kid of 2020. However his lies and deceptions will catch up with him.

The buzzword for Biden’s demise is Burisma. By the end of 2020 I predict it will have the same ring as Watergate. The Democrats are doing their best to downplay it. Ironically it’s the impeachment of President Trump that has brought the issue front and center. Like 2016, the Democrats will nominate a damaged candidate. And like 2016, Donald Trump will take full advantage of it.

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.

Iowa Caucus is what America will look like

In Mongolia they have a term for chaos in a cluster. If you’ve never been to Mongolia you’re in luck. It just came to Iowa.

The Democrats are in complete disarray. The Iowa Democrat Caucus looks like it was organized by Anonymous. It sort of was. This is the changing face of the Democrat Party. Two socialists are fighting off the last vestige of the old guard. It looks like bingo night at the retirement home. The chairman of the Democrat Party in Iowa is Troy Price who comes from the LGBT wing of the party. Remember those pirates in the movie Captain Phillips with Tom Hanks? That’s basically what’s happened to the Democrat Party. “Look at me,” the radicals of the party say. “I’m the captain now.”

President Trump called Bernie Sanders a communist during a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity. He’s right. Elizabeth Warren? We’re generous if we call her a socialist. Joe Biden? He’ll be whatever you want him to be. He just wants to be president.

What would America look like with the Guy Fawkes party in charge? It wouldn’t look much like America, this I can tell you. Bernie and AOC have already joined forces to ban fracking in five years if they ever—God forbid—seize power. We are now the number producer of oil and gas in the world. That’s because of fracking. Take it away and we’re right back to being a net importer of oil instead of a net exporter.

It’s funny how liberals hate American oil but don’t mind so much foreign oil. Back when the fracking boom started people like Sen. Chuck Schumer wanted to shut them down while at the same time asking Saudi Arabia to up its production. It makes no sense.

Of course, Bernie and AOC are cut from a different cloth. They want to end oil production and importation altogether. They want to ground planes and ban gas-powered cars. Have you ever read the book or seen the movie Atlas Shrugged? In that movie all the planes are grounded by the moochers and looters and the only way to travel relatively quickly across country is by rail. The “loochers” are trying to get their hands on that too. Everything they touch turns to rust. In their quest for fairness they utterly destroy capitalism and the United States in the process. For people like AOC and Bernie, that movie has a happy ending.

Look at the mess that was the Iowa Caucus. Look at the utter chaos and disorganization there. Then ask yourself if you want the rest of the country to look like that. Now take a look at our country right now. Unemployment at historically low rates. Stock markets at historically high levels. An economy that’s firing on all cylinders. Trade deals renegotiated in our favor. Energy security. We’re no longer literally held over a barrel.

I can’t imagine the American people would look at all this and just ball it up and throw it in the fire over some pipe dream of a socialist utopia. There is no such thing as a socialist utopia. Just a socialist dystopia. You can see the future. Just pick up a copy of the third movie installment of Atlas Shrugged. Or, better yet, look south to Venezuela.

Do you realize Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world? Eighteen percent of the world’s total. By comparison the United States has less than 3 percent of the world’s total. Yet we run circles around them. Why? Because they gave in to people like Bernie Sanders.

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.