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.

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.

Democracy equals mob rule

Jonathan Alter, the liberal pundit on BSNBC (one of the hundreds) said if the Republicans keep Congress “you can kiss democracy goodbye.” I sure hope so. We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a representative republic. Our founding fathers believed a democracy would be a disaster. The word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.

James Madison voiced his disdain for ‘pure democracy’ in the Federalist Papers. “Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

In short, a democracy is mob rule. I have long believed that those who use “democracy” as shorthand for a representative republic—on both sides of the aisle—meant no harm. Now I’m not so sure. If a democracy is mob rule then that appears to be exactly what the liberals these days crave. Mob has a negative connotation. That’s why CNN and BSNBC have banned the word from their airwaves when directed at the crazed liberal mobs that lost their minds over the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. The networks childishly speak of “the m-word” as if it’s too offensive to even be uttered. They reserve the word for the white supremacists in Charlottesville, but not the Antifa thugs who confronted them. History has proven that President Trump’s condemnation of bad actors “on all sides” was spot on.

Mob rule is what minorities (in numbers, not race or ethnicity) resort to when they don’t get their way. Intimidation and threats are the tools of desperate people who see any chance of their being part of the power structure slipping away. That’s what we’re witnessing right now. Mobs descend on Republican politicians and cabinet members in public places in an attempt to scare them into submission. Some will ultimately acquiesce just to get their lives back. Compromise in the face of such thuggery is the most dangerous thing they can do.

The radicals who blur the lines of civility, decorum, and even gender are the rabble. They’re not the majority. Their only hope is fear. They have already succeeded to a large degree in changing the language through political correctness. The most chilling words are when someone says to you, “You just can’t say that anymore.” Anymore? So we used to be able to say it until the word Nazis grabbed the American media by the throat and threatened to brand them unhip and counter-progressive if they didn’t carry their water.

There’s more on the line on November 6 than just control of Congress. Much more. We have a chance to put a stake in the heart of much of what ails this country. Liberals in Congress are already proposing legislation if they win. They want to repeal all of Trump’s tax cuts and start writing checks to the poor. Corey Booker wants to give poor kids $50,000 when they reach adulthood. Instead of creating an economy where people can earn their own way they want to destroy that economy and hand out cash. Why? Because it’s the only thing that makes them relevant with voters.

Once the people realize they don’t need the government to succeed it’s over. Nothing quells an unruly marxist mob like success. And one more election just might do it.

So Jonathan Alter is right. If the Republicans manage to hold onto the House and Senate we could very well “kiss democracy goodbye.” And good riddance.

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.

The politics of fear

President Franklin Roosevelt once famously stated as he took over leadership of a United States in the throes of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” It was an attitudinal shift from the terror that had gripped the nation since the mighty crash on Wall Street just over three years prior. Historians will continue to debate whether or not FDR’s busy-work policies and alphabet soup agencies ended or exacerbated the depression, but one thing is for certain. His presidency set a high watermark for optimism for the country at large and the Democrat Party specifically.

That optimism enjoyed a brief resurgence under John F. Kennedy that his assassination seems to have stripped from the party permanently. Bill Clinton managed to put a happy face on the pessimistic party, but even his rise to power was on the back of a commodity the Democrats have mined and traded now for half a century. That commodity is fear itself.

While Ronald Reagan was restoring the country’s sense of self-worth, a new cult of despair was in its infancy. It was called the global warming movement. Its godfather, James Hansen, was taking a cue from Paul Ehrlich and his wildly successful freak-out, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich confidently and boldly predicted in 1970, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He took the occasion of the first Earth Day in 1970 to predict that 4 billion people would die sometime between 1980 and 1989 in the “Great Die-Off.”

We’ve had nearly fifty years to assess the utter absurdity of Ehrlich’s predictions, yet he still stands by most of them. That’s what happens when you go all in on fear. There’s no backing down without totally destroying your reputation in the process.

Such now is the fate of the global warming alarmists. They have peddled fear for a demonstrable 30-year period, a time-span that scientists and political observers can assess for its accuracy, or lack thereof. Philip Shabecoff, an environmental reporter for the New York Times, wrote in June of 1988, “The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.” While we haven’t reached the middle of the century we are nearly halfway there. On the low end sea levels should’ve risen by six inches. Of course, they haven’t.

Liberals, devoid of positive ideas of their own, have resorted to exploiting not only fear but guilt. You’re destroying the planet so you must do something about it. You have too much and you’re far too comfortable so you must do something about it. All of the great gulit-and-fear schemes from peak oil to global warming to the population bomb have something else in common other than guilt and fear. Redistribution of wealth. If you’ve managed to work hard and produce it’s somehow your fault that others have not.

Now, that’s not to say that misfortune doesn’t befall people for no apparent reason, but history teaches us that misfortune has visited many successful people. It’s how they deal with that misfortune that makes the difference.

The volume of hysteria among the liberals increases with each new bit of economic news. One would think that black and Hispanic unemployment at historic lows would be cause for celebration. It is only if you measure success by the normal metrics of success. It’s bad news if you measure it only by fear.

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

What to do about Mueller

How’s this for a theory? Robert Mueller is setting himself up as a kamikaze. He has nothing on Trump and is going to antagonize him until he fires him. Then the Democrats and the Never-Trumpers in Congress can cry “obstruction of justice” and they impeach and convict him.

Sound crazy?

The folks on MSNBC are already salivating over the dream scenario of Trump defying a Mueller subpoena to be interviewed and wondering out loud what happens when the U.S. Marshals show up at the White House gate.

In other words, there are plenty of folks in this country who would welcome even a constitutional crisis if it meant getting rid of Donald Trump. They hate him that bad. Let me tell you just how bad they hate him. They hate him so bad that they would rather have a conservative evangelical who opposes abortion and gay marriage in the Oval Office instead. For the left, that’s deep hatred.

Why?

There are myriad reasons, but his personality is the primary driver. He’s egotistical. He’s bombastic. He’s unapologetic. All of these traits play well in the celebrity world, but when you couple them with common sense conservative policy they become intolerable.

Donald Trump is no rock-rib conservative. What he is is a practitioner of common sense. That tends to lend itself to conservatism. You see an invasion of illegal aliens and you want to build a wall to stop it. Common sense. You see businesses being driven out of the country so you propose cutting taxes to bring them back. Common sense. The fact that he was for gay marriage before either Hillary or Obama is inconsequential. It’s these other issues that make him dangerous to the left.

They’ve been constantly disappointed for the last 18 months. First it was the shocking loss by Hillary Clinton. Then they pinned their hopes on a recount. Didn’t happen. Then it was the Electoral College not seating him. Didn’t happen. All they have left is impeachment. Robert Mueller was supposed to be the conduit through which all their dreams flowed, but after a year of fishing expeditions he’s got nothing.

Their only hope now is that Trump gets mad enough to fire Mueller. He has every reason to. By most accounts, he has the authority to. That doesn’t mean he has to. He would be much better served to ignore Mueller, but I’m sure that’s nearly impossible. Eventually one would think he’d blow. That might be underestimating Donald Trump.

So many people think he’s a loose canon, a guy who flies by the seat of his pants (or any other cliché you can think of). I happen to believe that every tweet, every off-the-cuff remark, every flaming response to an attack is carefully planned. One need only go back to his Twitter feed to see that much of what was lampooned in the press has come to fruition. Anybody forget his “Trump tower has been wiretapped” tweet? Me either. After months of ridicule, it turns out he was exactly right. And what must be extremely frustrating is there’s no special counsel looking into who was responsible. But they’re raiding Trump’s lawyer’s office looking for Stormy Daniels dirt.

It’s like People Magazine is calling the shots.

I think it’s safe to say there was never any Trump-Russia collusion. Despite the lack of evidence the anti-Trump forces want him out at an any cost. They’ve carefully set the perjury trap. They’ve even enticed him with the juicy lure of Robert Mueller’s head.

I just hope he doesn’t take the bait.

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

Face it, there was no collusion

The House Intelligence Committee has concluded its investigation into Trump/Russia collusion during the 2016. They found there was none. They concluded that the Russians did try to meddle with the election process through propaganda ads and disinformation campaigns, but the 14-month long probe found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

All it turned out to be was an extension of Hillary’s book tour of What Happened in which she tries to relive 2016 as if doing so will change the outcome. She was recently on a book tour in India where she stumbled down some stairs and essentially had to be carried to the bottom, emblematic of her whole campaign.

Reuters reported the Intel committee’s decision in frustration, citing the fact that the Mueller investigation seems to be heating up. They point to Paul Manafort pleading guilty as evidence. Manafort pled guilty to charges totally unrelated to not only Trump but to Russia. They also pinned their hopes on a grand jury questioning former Trump aide Sam Nunberg. Nunberg made the now-famous drunken round on the cable news shows climaxing when CNN’s Erin Burnett said she smelled alcohol on his breath. He seemed to have a permanent seat in CNN’s green room because he held bitter animosity toward the president. Despite his hatred of the man, once Nunberg sobered up he admitted after being questioned by the grand jury that, “I don’t believe it leads to the president.”

Oh, well.

Congressman Adam Schiff and other Democrats wanted to keep the investigation going even though there’s no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians. Schiff said there were all sorts of questions left unanswered regarding such things as Russian money laundering. I’m sure there are, but none of this has anything to do with the fundamental issue the Democrats were pressing. They insisted Donald Trump and his campaign colluded with the Russians to steal the election. There’s just not a shred of evidence to back that up.

If they want to further investigate that Russia tried to involve themselves in our election process then they better be prepared for an endless investigation. The Russians aren’t the only ones. The Chinese routinely do exactly what the Russians have done and worse. And while we’re at it we may as well investigate how the United States tries to influence elections abroad. Anybody remember Obama’s efforts to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel?

If you want to talk about evidence of collusion then let’s look into Hillary and the Uranium One deal. Christopher Steele, the author of the now-infamous Trump dossier, admitted he was on a mission to keep Trump from getting elected president and we know he colluded with the Russians to spread lies about Trump before the election. Hillary also paid him for this smear campaign which is against the law. Does Adam Schiff want to go there? Not on your life.

Trump got his tax cuts and now Americans are seeing more money in their paychecks. Companies are hiring and giving bonuses. Jobless claims in the U.S. are at a 50-year low. Black and Hispanic unemployment are at all-time lows. The economy is going like gangbusters. The stock market keeps hitting all-time highs. The left-wing media keep trying to tell us it has nothing to do with Trump but we instinctively know better.

That’s why the Democrats are desperately clinging to Russian collusion. November is their last hope. If they don’t seize control of Congress then it may never happen again. It’s all they have. This I can tell you.

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

FISA memo blows the lid off liberal corruption

Well, what an interesting turn of events. The whole “Trump colluded with the Russians” brouhaha has boomeranged. The hunters have become the hunted. And is it not interesting how frantic the Democrats were in keeping a lid on the FISA memo? This is what I call the cheating girlfriend syndrome. (Sorry, ladies. Feel free to substitute cheating boyfriend. It’s just that I’ve never dated a boy. How last century of me.)

The cheating girlfriend syndrome goes as follows. Your girlfriend is super suspicious. Every girl you even glance at has her giving you the third degree. How do you know her? I don’t. Why were you looking at her? I was just looking around. She happened to be in my line of sight. Are you sleeping with her? No.

Andrew McCabe

The reason she’s asking so many questions is because she’s the one sleeping around.

The Democrats have been accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russians for 18 months now. There’s been not one shred of evidence to back it up. Now the story is beginning to take shape. They were colluding with the Russians. Let me explain.

We now know that Hillary Clinton paid for the Trump dossier by, in essence, laundering money through her attorney to Fusion GPS. We also know that Christopher Steele, the former British agent who authored the dossier, got his info from who? The Russians. It’s hard to know who was zooming who, but somebody was lying. It could’ve been Steele making it all up, or it could’ve been the Russians feeding him a line of baloney. One thing seems certain. Hillary must’ve known it was a load of bovine scatology or she would’ve used the dirt in one of the presidential debates. Instead, she feed it to gullible media folks and politicians like John McCain. Anybody who hated Trump.

It was also fed to the FBI. That’s where it gets interesting. They used it to obtain FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his campaign. Surely they knew it was bogus. Either that or we have the Keystone Cops in charge at the Bureau. If they didn’t tell the FISA court that their warrant requests were based, at least in part, on the Trump dossier, of which they couldn’t confirm the contents, then we’re only left with one theory. They were crooked instead of incompetent.

If they used their vast power to spy on a political campaign then Watergate looks like jaywalking by comparison. If they also used their vast power to try and unseat a sitting president then we have treason. I don’t use that term lightly. It was an attempted coup d’état. 

As I’ve written here before, I’m sure those involved convinced themselves and each other that it was the best thing for the country. Changing governments by illegal means is never good for this country. Some tinhorn dictatorship? Sure. But we have a civilized and proven way of transferring power that’s worked for over 200 years. It’s called the vote. Problem is the vote didn’t go their way. Too bad. The vote didn’t go my way in 2008 or 2012. Heck, it didn’t go my way in 1992 or 1996. It would never dawn on me that fabricating a story of collusion with a foreign government would be the proper course of action.

The question is where do we go from here? There needs to be a top-down purging of hostile elements in our intelligence community. I don’t mean everybody who voted for Hillary. I mean everybody who thinks the end justifies the means in removing Donald Trump from office.

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

The job-killing Congress

President Obama and the Democrats in Congress want to raise the minimum wage by 40 percent. However, 96 percent of House and Senate sponsors of a bill to do just that do not pay their interns, according to a new analysis by the Employment Policies Institute. It’s an incredible display of hypocrisy.

Aside from the hypocrisy of using free labor while simultaneously crying for a minimum wage hike, raising the minimum wage is a job killer. Obama and the libs in Congress will tell you

it’s not and they’ll point to “studies” that back their argument but that’s a case of cherry-picking your study.

According to Forbes Magazine, there was a comprehensive study that looked at the last two decades of data. It was conducted by David Neumark of UC-Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board. They determined that 85 percent of the research demonstrates raising the minimum wage kills jobs.

Of course, it’s just common sense. Payroll is the single biggest expense for many businesses. Unless you can raise the price of your product to cover the added expense, something has to give. Even Bill Gates said as much on MSNBC when he said, “If you raise the minimum wage, you’re encouraging labor substitution, and you’re going to go buy machines and automate things or cause jobs to appear outside of that jurisdiction.” He added that “it does cause job destruction.” Gates may be a big lib but he knows a thing or two about business.

Let’s take the fast food industry, for example. You’ve no doubt heard about the protests around the country - organized by the unions - to raise the minimum wage of fast food workers to $15 an hour. Experts say the typical restaurant labor force accounts for a third or more of a restaurant’s operating expenses. The New York Times quoted Stephen Caldeira, president of the International Franchise Association, as saying that such a drastic increase in wages would lead to a 25 percent to 50 percent hike in prices. That $3 burger could essentially become that $4.50 burger overnight.

We, as consumers, have options. We don’t have to stop by the fast food joint. We do because it’s fast (supposedly) and affordable. Once it’s no longer affordable we stop going. If that happens not only do the employees not make $15 an hour, they don’t make squat. They’re out on the street.

Shy of going out of business, the fast food restaurant will start devising ways to save money. I foresee a day when you drive up to a drive-thru window and some guy in India takes your order. Or, maybe you just use voice commands to place your order, swipe your credit card and drive to the next window where your order is waiting. The same could be done inside the store. You just place your order at the automated terminal and wait for your food to appear.

As you might imagine, there’s already such a thing as a burger-making machine. This babycake is self-contained, automated and can churn out 400 burgers per hour. You think your local Mickey D’s isn’t already eye-balling that bad boy? According to the maker, Momentum Machines, making burgers costs restaurants $9 billion a year. Not only does this automatic burger-flipper make faster burgers for a fraction of the cost, it takes up far less space than the conventional way.

So, keep pushing this minimum wage hike. And be prepared to hand out automated burgers to those newly unemployed workers standing in the unemployment line.

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

Government shutdown? What government shutdown?

What if they threw a government shutdown and nobody noticed?  The wolf-crying Democrats had secretly desired a government shutdown so they could blame it on the House Republicans and thus score some political points.  The only problem is no one really noticed.

What we did notice is, like all the sequestration wolf-crying, the disaster never materialized.  And as with the sequestration, I must say I was surprised and impressed by Speaker John Boehner’s determination to stand his ground.

Whether or not you really care about a government shutdown really says something about where you are on the political spectrum.  Far-left liberals were freaking out over a government shutdown.  Far-right conservatives wanted to see it happen.  I must confess that I was in that latter group.  Not because I wanted to see anyone hurt or even inconvenienced.  I just wanted people to understand what a non-issue a government shutdown really is.

Do you realize that the government has shut down 17 times since 1970?  Sometimes for several weeks at a time.  The only one I really remember was the face-off between Newt and the boys and Bill Clinton in 1995.  I remember that one so vividly because I had a ringside seat, broadcasting from the basement of the U.S. Capitol for the duration.  What I remember were the lies coming from the Democrats.  They claimed the Republicans wanted to cut Medicare and give a tax cut to their rich constituents.  The truth of the matter was the Republicans weren’t cutting anything.  They simply wanted to slow the growth of Medicare.

The news media piled on the Republicans and blamed them for the shutdown but I have no recollection of any negative repercussions from the government closing its doors for a few days.  In fact, it was the government shutdown that lay the groundwork for slowing the growth of the entire budget and getting Bill Clinton to sign welfare reform after using his veto pen on it twice before.  The end result was we had a balanced budget by 1998 expressly because the Republicans pushed the issue of spending restraint.  Without even cutting a dime, just slowing the growth, revenue was allowed to catch up with spending and we balanced the budget, no thanks to the free-wheeling, spend-like-a-drunken-sailor Democrats.  (No offense to you drunken sailors.)

Had 9/11 not happened we likely would’ve seen balanced budgets all the way through the Bush administration.  Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine not having to raise the debt ceiling?  Of course, President Obama says that raising the debt ceiling doesn’t mean we’re raising the debt.  Yeah, he actually said that.  No, Mr. President, I’m sure it means we’re getting ready to instantly balance the budget.

So, again the president and the Democrats are wolf-crying about the debt ceiling.  They say if we don’t raise the ceiling we’ll default on our debt.  Think about that for a moment.  We’re nearly $17 trillion in debt and they’re trying to tell us if we don’t go into more debt we’ll default on everything?  Please.  It’s like saying you’re making payments on a house and two cars and when the bank won’t approve your loan for a third car you’re going to default on everything.  It makes no sense whatsoever.

We’re bringing in over $2.5 trillion a year.  We have more than enough money to pay the debt payments.  We may not have enough money for all these liberal welfare programs but that’s the point.  If we don’t raise the debt ceiling it means we’ll have to live off what we bring in.  Is that such a horrible thing?

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

Secret e-mail accounts belie transparency

Richard Windsor over at the Environmental Protection Agency received the agency’s recognition as a “scholar of ethical behavior.”  How ironic to learn that Richard Windsor never existed.  He was the e-mail alias for Lisa Jackson, the former EPA administrator.  A recognition for scholar of ethical behavior?  How ethical is that?

Mr. Windsor seems to be the norm within the Obama administration.  Some of the president’s political appointees, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, have been using alias e-mail addresses.  The Associated Press asked for a list of political appointees’ e-mail addresses under the Freedom of Information Act.  The Labor Department wanted to charge them $1 million.  Apparently with this administration freedom of information is not free.

And this was supposed to be the most transparent administration in history?

It’s obvious from the recent scandals exactly what’s going on.  If you can use your alias for your more, how should we say, ‘clandestine’ activities you can shield those activities from the press, even if you turn over all your e-mails under your real name.

The fact that the Labor Department wanted so much money for a simple list arouses suspicion that all is not above board in this administration.

Now with the revelation from Congressman Issa’s committee that there were no “rogue agents” who went after the tea party groups it’s clear to see how alias e-mail accounts could come in handy.  The “rogue agents” argument in the IRS scandal is starting to look like the “anti-Muslim video” argument in the Benghazi scandal.  The question is with all this obvious obfuscation will we ever really know what happened?

The AP has been trying to get a list of e-mail addresses from ten agencies including the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS.  Treasury has been dragging its feet for about three months.  The Treasury spokesman, by the way, is named Marissa Hopkins Secreto.  Perfect.  Sounds like the name for a Bond girl.

Several agencies have turned over some e-mail addresses but the lists are suspiciously incomplete.  The foot-dragging only compounds the suspicion in light of the IRS scandal where agents are now telling investigators that orders to single out conservative groups came from Washington.  How far up in Washington remains to be seen but we already know that the “two rogue agents” story was another fabrication.  Congressman Issa went so far as to refer to White House spokesman Jay Carney as “a paid liar.”

Having a second e-mail account is nothing unusual, especially for people in the public spotlight.  What’s bizarre is apparently EPA Administrator Jackson corresponded under the Richard Windsor pseudonym as Windsor, in some cases, never revealing her true identity to the people with whom she was corresponding.  What could possibly be the reason for that?

I’m sure the president will deny any knowledge of this, too, much as he has remained detached from the rest of the scandals swirling around him.  But, for how long can his plausible deniability remain plausible?  His senior advisors knew about the IRS investigation but didn’t tell him.  People all in his administration were unleashing the IRS on innocent people just because they didn’t like their politics and he had no idea.  Cabinet officials are apparently conducting official business behind some alias and he had no idea.  And don’t get me started on Benghazi.

If the president had no idea about any of this, in the very best light, it appears he was asleep at the switch.  As is typical with the Democrats, just saying you take responsibility seems to pass for punishment.  That is no longer acceptable nor is it sufficient.