Thirty years asleep

I read an article in The National, a publication from the United Arab Emirates, about an Emirati woman who awakened from a coma after nearly 30 years. Can you imagine that? It got me to thinking whether someone in that situation would find the world a better or worse place after 30 years.

Just think of what has transpired over the past 30 years. There was no such thing as a smart phone. The plus side is there was also no such thing as a selfie. ‘Friend’ was not yet a verb. Not only was there no Facebook, but Mark Zuckerberg was only 4 years old. You didn’t have to take your shoes off to fly. You could still smoke on an airline flight longer than two hours as well as in most restaurants. There was no such thing as iTunes or downloadable music. CDs had pretty much overtaken vinyl. 

You never saw 20-somethings with their ubiquitous water bottle. Somehow we made it through the day without constantly staying hydrated. You got your phone messages on an answering machine. If you had a cell phone you were excited because it had just been transformed from the brick to the first ‘pocket size’ phone. That ‘pocket’ was a jacket pocket. It could be yours for the mere price of $3,000.

There was no Internet dating. You actually had to engage in a conversation with someone in person. No texting. No OMG or LOL or the dreaded LMAO. You also had to know how to spell, or have a dictionary in book form handy. Oh, and if you wanted to read a book you had to carry a real one. If you wanted to get somewhere new you needed a map. Yeah, one of those things that folded up like an accordion and tucked away in your glove compartment.

If you wanted to see a movie other than what was on HBO and Showtime you had to rent it. On VHS. That was this plastic rectangular thingamajig with video tape in it that….oh, never mind. Binge-watching wasn’t a thing. If you wanted to hear a radio show you had to actually listen to the radio.

We still had something called the incandescent lightbulb. I really miss those. Only sailors and bikers had tattoos. Only men went to the men’s room. And only ladies went to the ladies’ room. To pay your bills you had to buy envelopes and stamps.

The Twin Towers still stood proudly in New York. Al-Qaeda was only a year old. ISIS was still ten years away. It was the Russians we were scared of. If we’d only known.

Over the past 30 years the world has become a much scarier place. It’s also become a much more exciting place. Life is easier for hundreds of millions more people. Thirty years ago about 20 percent of the world’s population was undernourished. Today that figure is around 10 percent. Things like instantly finding information, staying in constant contact with friends and family, and being perpetually entertained are all taken for granted. There was no Amazon. You actually had to go to a store. Yeah, I know. 

We like to talk about the good old days as if things were better. They were only because we edit out the bad parts. For the young, these are the good old days. We may endure recessions and terror attacks and natural disasters, but one thing has always been true for America. Its brightest days always lie ahead, not behind. Remember yesterday. Live for today. But always dream of tomorrow.

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

Reparations make victims out of the victimless

Georgetown University students recently voted 2-1 to create a $27 student fee to pay reparations to descendants of slaves sold by the university in 1838 in order to save it. Descendants of those 272 slaves are treated as legacy students by the university, giving them preferential treatment in admissions. The liberal world rejoiced, but it was simply another injustice to try to make good on the first.

Legacy admissions are, and always have been, unjust. Why should it matter that your mother or father or sibling attended a particular university? Does that make you any better qualified than the next student? Of course not. Neither does the fact that one of your ancestors was a slave.

Elizabeth Thomas is one such Georgetown student. She grew up believing she was descended from slaves in Louisiana. In fact her great-great-great grandfather was a Louisiana state senator during Reconstruction. Elizabeth says her mother learned of the Georgetown connection while reading an article in the New York Times. She read the slave manifest of sold slaves and was “shocked” to find the names her maternal ancestors. Shocked? Interested I could understand, but why shocked? It’s not like she never knew she came from slaves.

When she told Elizabeth the news Elizabeth said the first emotion to surface was pain. Let me just pause the story right there and interject a personal aside. I’ve done quite a bit of research into my ancestors. It’s really quite interesting. Among the lawyers and politicians and dirt farmers I came across one ancestor who did time for murder. Was I shocked? Did I feel pain? No. I was mildly curious, but not enough to dig into the details. I moved on to another ancestor.

The thing is it’s useless at this point to have deep emotional ties to ancestors. Is it interesting? Absolutely, but you never knew them. Would Elizabeth feel guilt if she found one of her ancestors was an ax murderer? Probably not. Would she feel a responsibility to the victims’ descendants? No. It’s entirely different, however, when you can turn yourself into a victim.

Elizabeth Thomas is not a victim. She’s a desk assistant in the Washington bureau of ABC News who’s about to earn her master’s degree from Georgetown. She’s not a victim. Yet she chooses to portray herself as one. She said, “It wasn’t easy to become part of a community that enslaved my ancestors, thus changing the complete trajectory of my family’s history.” She says this while simultaneously looking back nostalgically on being raised in Louisiana. Had her ancestors not been sold she most likely would never have lived there.

I’ve traced my Valentine ancestors to settling in North Carolina in the 1800s. Before that little is known where they came from. My DNA test says I’m 82 percent from Great Britain, 13 percent Ireland/Scotland/Wales, 5 percent Sweden. When I first did the DNA test it said I was 6 percent Russian. Once new data came in the Russia connection was replaced with Sweden. Did that make any difference in my life? Maybe it exonerated me from the Mueller probe, but it was simply an interesting factoid. I wasn’t “shocked.” It wasn’t “painful.” If I find out I descended from a Swedish king I won’t suddenly develop an attitude.

It’s history. It’s interesting, but beyond that it doesn’t change anything about me. I have three grown sons. I’m no longer responsible for what they do—good or bad. Then why do some feel I’m responsible for someone who lived 200 years ago whom I never even knew?

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

At war with socialism

This is almost like a war. We’re fighting socialism on so many fronts. One wave of the dreaded enemy is approaching from the west as California seeks to tax soft drinks, tires, guns, car batteries, even lawyers. Anything the socialists don’t like they tax. Another big battle front is in the southwest. The one at the southern border. They’ve penetrated our defenses with thousands of illegal aliens with an invasion wave designed to destabilize the country. And then there’s the east in Washington, DC. The socialist enemy has infiltrated the Democrat Party to the extent that they’re on the verge of taking it over, and with that they take control of the House of Representatives.

Their inroads into the Democrat Party are almost complete. Although Joe Biden still leads in the polls, he’s been badly wounded by the socialists’ planned attack on his character as some sort of sexual predator. Bernie Sanders, an unapologetically avowed socialist, is leading the pack of socialists who are gaining on him. He’s followed by other socialists like Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Cory Booker. There’s hardly a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination who isn’t a socialist.

This should come as no surprise. For the first time since Gallup has been asking the question, more Democrats approve of socialism than capitalism. It’s no longer on the fringes. At least not in the Democrat Party. In fact, with Democrats socialism is now mainstream. What exactly does this new breed of socialists want?

They want greater control of corporations by labor unions. In fact, they want workers to control some of the seats on corporate boards. That particular idea is big with Elizabeth Warren. That assumes several things. It assumes that just by working for a corporation that you’re somehow entitled to help run it. It also assumes that you know what you’re doing. Putting a worker on a corporate board just because they happen to work for a company will lead to that board member most likely voting for things that will help the workers even if it hurts the company. Which misses the point of the company altogether.

Socialists believe companies exist to provide them jobs. They don’t. Nobody ever started a company with dreams of employing people. At least nobody who’s ever run a successful company. Let’s go back to the infant stages of one of our largest corporations. Take Amazon, for example. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994 to sell books online. He saw an opportunity. People were driving to bookstores to browse a limited inventory. Bezos allowed you to browse the bookstore in your bathrobe with a virtually unlimited inventory that would be delivered to your doorstep. I doubt Bezos started Amazon with a socialist dream of employing hundreds of thousands of people. It just so happens that Amazon needs about a half-million people to do what it does. However, if Amazon can find a way to do some of the things it does without people it will. Its distribution centers are already using robotic technology to stock and distribute product. That’s because the goal of a company is not to employ people. It’s to make money for its shareholders. Think of it this way. If you were to start a business today what would be your goal? Exactly.

Workers are the beneficial side effect of business. If they ever become the primary focus then the company stops being profitable and fails. And guess what. Everybody loses their job.

Socialism is a failure and will always be simply because it does not understand that basic principle of business.

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

The left must stop Joe Biden at all cost

You would think with the résumé of Joe Biden you’d be embraced by your own party. This ain’t Joe’s party any longer. It’s the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. You wonder why the Democrats aren’t rushing to Joe’s defense over accusations of inappropriate touching? The truth is the socialist wing of the Democrat Party is behind the political assassination of Joe Biden.

Anvil Joe is what we call him. He’s so gaffe-prone that he tends to be an anvil tied to the neck of the Democrats. And they know it. That’s another reason he must be dispensed of. That and he’s an old white guy. He even apologized on behalf of old white guys like himself. Didn’t matter. Trying to distance yourself from who you are is impossible. So Joe must go away.

But he’s not. He’s polling at the top of the contenders for the nomination in practically every poll. Not good. Not if you’re a socialist Democrat, which is rather redundant these days. Try as he may Joe’s just out of step with his own party. It left him in the dust in its race to be Venezuela.

Anvil Joe has his own problems, however. Creepy Joe is what some call him. He apparently has a shampoo fetish. He’s a close talker. He loves to hug. He loves to whisper in women’s ears. Nothing I’ve seen rises to sexual assault, but that’s how it’s being portrayed by his accusers. Lucy Flores, a Nevada state legislator, says ole Joe inappropriately touched her at a campaign event in 2014. Curious how she’s just coming out now, but she says she’d still vote for Joe over Trump. Apparently she’s not that shaken up over the “inappropriate touching.” That or she’s willing to take one for the team in order to defeat Trump.

What’s telling is how the mainstream media have jumped on Joe like a pack of coyotes. They see AOC and her legion of sycophantic fans as the way forward for America. God help us. Joe’s too white. He’s too old. He’s too establishment. Let’s face it, as Democrats go, he’s too reasonable. If you don’t think dismantling our entire economy with the Green New Deal is a grand idea then you’re a dinosaur who needs to go the way of the, well, dinosaur.

Unfortunately too many Democrats continue to ride this raft down the river toward the waterfall. They’re too deaf because of party loyalty or tradition to hear the rushing waters. And they don’t mind pulling the rest of us over with them.

Why this sudden lurch to the left? Some will argue it’s a long time coming. It really began when Nancy Pelosi became speaker the first time. Once the likes of Barney Frank were running committees we knew we had turned a dark corner. Then the American people woke up and threw them out. You’d think they’d learn a lesson, but they didn’t. They figured they weren’t radical enough.

Then along comes Donald Trump. With all of his distractions there’s one thing liberals do notice. He’s actually doing what so many Republicans before him only talked about. We got tax cuts. We’re trying to get control of illegal immigration. We’ve abandoned this nonsense of allowing global warming to drive policy. He’s the socialists’ worst nightmare. That’s why Anvil Joe ain’t gonna cut it.

The socialists see Trump as wounded (in spite of exoneration by the Mueller investigation) and they want to strike while the iron is hot. That means going full socialist. That means Creepy Joe Biden cannot be allowed to win.

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.

After Mueller, now what?

I think everyone can agree, regardless of political ideology, the Trump-Russia issue turned into a big mess. The news media detest not knowing. In place of good, solid information on just what may have transpired between the Trump campaign and Russia, or just what may not have transpired, they chose to fill in the blanks with rampant negative speculation. By the time the Mueller report was turned in they had convinced themselves—and half of America—that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. It all turned out to be nothing.

But don’t just blame the news media. Their fires were stoked by the likes of John Brennan, former CIA director and rabid Trump hater. During his mea culpa with Morning Joe on MSNBC he said, “I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was.” You think? Then he pretended to be “relieved” that his president was not a Russian agent. Disappointed is more like it.

Morning Joe himself echoed Brennan’s faux sentiment. “It is good news that the president of the United States did not conspire with Russia to influence the 2016 election.” Not to Joe and rest of the get-Trump media. This is almost worse than Election Night 2016. To the rest of us it’s confirmation of something we already knew.

So how do the media redeem themselves? Short answer? They don’t. And they won’t even try. Their hatred for Trump is so deep that they’ll never admit that they made up the story of Russian collusion and plugged in willing stooges like Brennan to give the lie weight. Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept, a big lib and no fan of Trump, was beside himself on Tucker Carlson’s show. He tore into CNN and MSNBC in particular for banning voices like his because he wouldn't toe the line on the Trump-Russia collusion story. He called it a “fraud that they perpetrated on their audience” and accused both networks of being “state TV” or “CIA TV” for giving people like Brennan so much air time.

What happens now? What should happen is Republicans in the Senate, the only place they have any investigative power, should be holding hearings to determine how such a colossal fraud could have been perpetrated on the American people. They can start with the coup attempt by former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his boss, Andrew McCabe, among others. The irony is Mueller was looking at Trump’s firing of James Comey as a possible obstruction of justice. As it turns out, this whole debacle of an investigation based on a bogus dossier was going on right under Comey’s nose. Either he was part of the coup attempt or he was too inept to see it. Either way he should’ve been fired the day Trump took office.

From my vantage point here’s what looks like happened. There were certain persons inside the FBI and Obama’s Justice Department who were so determined to keep Trump from becoming president that they ignored real crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and fabricated fake crimes by Trump. They used a dossier they knew was fake to petition a FISA court to allow them to spy on the Trump campaign.

Nixon was run out of office and several of his men went to prison for a petty break-in looking for dirt. This appears to be a widespread conspiracy to fix an election that may include a former FBI director and a former president. That’s been the real scandal all along. Now maybe we can focus on that instead.

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 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 America-haters

Trump Derangement Syndrome is now epidemic. We all remember when it started. It started the day Donald Trump came down that escalator at Trump Tower. It grew as his popularity did, hitting a fever pitch on Election Night 2016. Most people thought it would subside once the election was over. I knew better.

TDS grows with every success of President Trump. Record low black unemployment? TDS hits another gear. Record low Hispanic unemployment? Yet another new high for TDS. Hug a flag at the CPAC event? They go apoplectic. 

Nick Gillespie at Reason.com is a libertarian who is no fan of Donald Trump. He watched the CPAC speech and noted, “Trump just might have have won the 2020 election today.” He said, “There is simply no potential candidate in the Democratic Party who wouldn’t be absolutely blown off the stage by him.” This is why the libs and Never-Trumpers are going nuts.

Colin Jost, on the Weekend Update segment of Saturday Night Live, ran a clip of the president hugging the flag and asked, “What the hell was that?” What that was, Colin, was a display of undying love for this country. That’s something that’s foreign to a lot of liberals. 

I posted the SNL story to Facebook with the following commentary: “SNL befuddled by Trump hugging the American flag. This, my friends, is emblematic of the problem. Too many on the left hate this country. In fact, ALL of the America-haters are on the left.”

That drew fire from a surprising place. I got slammed by a former co-worker whom I’ve only seen once in the last 20 years, but with whom I used to be quite close. He accused me of being divisive and dangerous and destructive and wanting just to sell a few books. He accused me of saying everybody on the right loves the country and everybody on the left hates it. That’s not what I said at all. I fully acknowledge that most of the people on the left probably love this country. My point was that every single America-hater is on the left. That point is not in dispute.

After some back-and-forth trying to clarify my point to no avail, he offered up this challenge. “Make that list of liberals who actually hate America.” To do so would take up pages of valuable newspaper real estate, so I’ll offer up a partial list.

Let’s start with a Gallup poll from last year that showed only 32 percent of Democrats are proud to be an American. I could stop there, but why when there’s so much evidence of liberal hatred of America. Louis Farrakhan said, “A decree of death has been passed on America. The judgement of God has been rendered and she must be destroyed.” No ambiguity there. And don’t try to distance yourselves from Farrakhan, you liberals. It’s too late. Barack Obama, Jesse Jackson, Keith Ellison, and countless others on the left have cozied up to Farrakhan. There is no excuse like, “Oh, but that was before I knew what Farrakhan was all about.” Farrakhan has always been a racist. He’s always been a black separatist. He’s always been an America hater.

Some lefties were late to the party when it comes to loving the country. It wasn’t until 2008 when Michelle Obama was 44 years old that she uttered these words: “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.”

Donald Trump may be a lot of things, but one thing you have to give him. He loves America.

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.