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.

It's open season on men

The #MeToo movement has gotten out of hand. Brett Kananaugh’s accusers are to believed, but Rep. Keith Ellison’s accuser—with far more evidence—is totally ignored. Not only ignored by the same leftists who want to crucify Kavanaugh but by the complicit left-wing media.

Part of this is our fault. We allow the New York Times and the Washington Post to drive the narrative. CNN says it’s a hot story and we just go along. 

Let me tell you what’s a hot story. A sitting member of the Senate, Democrat Mazie Hirono from Hawaii, tells men to “shut up.” She said, “Guess who’s perpetuating all these actions. It’s the men in this country.” The men in this country? The left has long lectured the rest of us about profiling and stereotyping. Now we’re going to put all the men in one deplorable basket? It’s obvious how inflammatory that would be if a male member of the Senate had told all the women to just “shut up,” but how about saying that to all black people? Or all Hispanics?

We’re told not to stereotype, but that’s exactly what the #WeHateMen movement is doing.

I’m no psychologist, but I see a pattern with these liberal women who hate all men. Most are in relationships with a horrible guy, someone who’s treating them like dirt, and for some reason they stand there and take it. Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and many other so-called feminists draw their anger from their personal relationships with men. Lord knows where Sen. Hirono’s anger comes from, but how would you like to be married to her?

In a piece for the Washington Post, Northeastern University professor of sociology, Suzanna Danuta Walters asked “Why can’t we hate men?” She said, “Maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise on their collective butts.” In other words, it’s time to start killing men. She then tells men, “Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong.” Obviously another woman who’s been in a horrible relationship. It’s not hard to imagine the never-ending outcry if such a broad stereotype were ever applied to any other group. 

But enough is enough. It’s time for men—and the women who love them—to fight back.

Should we believe every woman who comes forward with an allegation of sexual abuse against a man? The leftists, like Sen. Kamala Harris, tell you yes. #BelieveSurvivors. The short answer is absolutely no. We should not automatically believe every woman who comes forward with an accusation. Need I remind you of the UVA gang rape accusation against the fraternity? Completely made up. Mattress Girl at Columbia? Made up. The Duke Lacrosse team gang-rape allegation? Made up. 

There are certainly many cases of men who abuse women. They are not the norm. Nobody I know condones such behavior. However, every woman who ever slept with Harvey Weinstein to get a part in his movies is not a victim. As his lawyer put it, he didn’t invent the casting couch.

The irony is such independent and powerful women choose to portray themselves as powerless victims when they do something despicable to advance their careers. Monica Lewinsky’s now a victim? Please.

The days of simply being able to step forward, levy an accusation, and destroy a man have got to come to a stop. The presumption of innocence is still a cornerstone of our judicial system. That doesn’t change just because you’re a man.

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.

What is the shelf life of outrage?

It’s now an almost daily occurrence. Someone comes forward saying they were groped, grabbed, or otherwise wronged by somebody famous. How long should we credibly be asked to believe that someone was wronged? In other words, what is the shelf life of outrage?

Take, for example, the woman who claims Sen. Al Franken grabbed her fanny during a photo op at the Minnesota State Fair in 2010 while her husband took the picture. I’m not defending Franken if he actually did grab her butt, but the shelf life on that outrage is about 30 minutes or until you leave the fair, whichever comes first. If I’m the wife, I turn around and slap the hell out of Franken. If I’m the husband, I punch the SOB in the nose.

At some point we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. Who is to be believed. Beverly Young Nelson, the woman who says Roy Moore of Alabama sexually assaulted her in his car back in 1977 gave a very convincing performance with Gloria Allred before the cameras. It wasn’t until Moore’s attorney revealed that she had her divorce petition thrown out by Moore’s court in 1999 that she was exposed as a fraud. Even now, many in the press discount that little factoid. It’s impossible to now believe she wasn’t acting out of vengeance.

In a Vox article on suspended New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, he’s accused of leveraging his position of power in journalism to accost women. Let’s examine that for a moment, this “leveraging of power.” It’s one thing if Thrush is your boss. That kind of leverage for sex is older than the water cooler. What we’re talking about here are women who worked alongside him as reporters. Apparently it was impossible to say no to Thrush. 

One reporter recounts that after a Politico going-away party, where they both worked, Thrush somehow ended up at her place. Hmmm. “I remember stopping him at one point and saying, ‘Wait, you’re married,’” she told the New York Times. “I remember that by the time he left, I didn’t have much clothes on.” Really? I wonder how that happened. Thrush’s super power must be the ability to melt clothes off women.

I should remind you that Glenn Thrush is the “journalist” caught in the Wikileaks e-mails from John Podesta sending a draft article that dealt with Podesta to Podesta to edit. He admitted in the e-mail that “I have become a hack.” Yeah, Glenn, you have. And apparently a drunk, groping, creep of a hack.

So, now the Vox folks are revisiting Bill Clinton’s predatory ways. They’ve wrongfully come to the conclusion that Monica Lewinsky was a victim via the same Thrushian logic of leveraging power. Monica Lewinsky was a stalking opportunist trying her best to “do” the president the first chance she got. That doesn’t let Bill off the hook for his rogue behavior but she’s not a #MeToo.

Whether it’s PBS’s Charlie Rose walking around naked (a revolting thought) or Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch, there seems to be a theme. Too many people for way too long believed that type of conduct passed for appropriate behavior. Here in the real world, the world of relative morality that these liberals ridiculed for generations, we all knew better.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not doubting a lot of what happened to these women happened. What I’m questioning is how outraged they actually were when it took them years, sometimes decades, to come forward. Apparently some of their outrage has the shelf life of a can of beets.

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

A model of climate hysteria

‘What to Make of a Warming Plateau.’  That was the headline recently in the New York Times.  Though the Times writer clung to the debunked theory that we as humans are causing the world to heat up the evidence is now swamping the global warming alarmists.

The Times calls what’s happening a “plateau” or a “slowdown.”  NPR said a few years ago that global warming was on vacation.  (And they weren’t even trying to be funny)  All this despite record amounts of what the alarmists keep telling us is ruining the planet: carbon dioxide.

It’s time to face the music.  The theory from Al Gore and the rest of the hysterics was that we were spewing CO2 into the atmosphere and the result was the planet was going to heat up.  We are spewing CO2.  It’s not a poison, by the way.  It’s what plants need in order to thrive.  Despite our spewing, temperatures are not rising.  In fact, all of the climate models have been wrong.

Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville have been tracking global temperatures for years.  They recently published a graph that plots 73 climate models and compares those models to the actual temperature trends taken from satellites since we’ve been tracking the earth’s temperature which started in 1979.  Every climate model was way off.  They all predicted a huge increase when temperatures, since we first started measuring with satellites, have been flat.

Why have the climate models been wrong?  Because they all assumed a cause-and-effect of carbon dioxide and temperature rise.  As CO2 levels have risen global temperatures have flattened out.  You don’t have to be a scientist to figure this one out.  Manmade CO2 has little or nothing to do with temperature.  There are so many other variables that have a much greater effect on global temperatures.

One of the major theories supported by Dr. Spencer is water vapor or global cloudiness.  Dr. Spencer refers to this as the sun shade.  Some scientists are studying how global cloudiness affects the global temperatures and they still don’t have a handle on it but they do believe this is where we should be concentrating our efforts rather than on CO2.

Another theory is an obvious one that, for some reason, is completely ignored by those determined to blame man for the destruction of the planet and that’s the sun.  The sun, naturally, is a huge determining factor in temperature.  How it behaves, even the slightest change, can have major repercussions on our planet.  The problem is if it’s the sun then there’s no one to blame and, in turn, no one from whom they can redistribute the wealth.

For, you see, that’s what this whole global warming argument has been about.  If Gore and the rest of the warmists can convince you that you’re to blame for destroying the planet then they can get you to go along with a carbon tax to atone for your sins.  The producers of energy will pay those who aren’t producing.  The money-changers who facilitate the transaction pocket the commission and become billionaires in the process.

It’s a brilliant plan.  There’s only one problem.  It’s all a lie and now the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost.  They were hoping they could frighten us with their climate models and force us into cap-and-trade laws but we were able to stall them for far too long.  Long enough for their climate models to be proven a complete hoax.

One sure-fire way to tell is someone is lying is to look at their track record.