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.

Pam Bondi saves the day

Thank God for Pam Bondi. You would’ve thought the Trump defense team would’ve learned something from Adam Schiff and the Democrats droning on for 21 hours in their pursuit to overturn the 2016 election. I was excited that the Republicans would get their turn and we’d get some excitement injected into the impeachment trial.

Then came Ken Starr. Watching a hog sweat looked electrifying by comparison. Starr wasted time on the history of the special council. He bored us with backstory of how the special counsel replaced the independent counsel which was created after Watergate. That law was scrapped in 1999 for the special counsel law. And I’m sitting there thinking there was no special counsel in this impeachment. It appeared to me that Ken Starr was trying to tell everybody that the Whitewater investigation he headed against Bill Clinton wasn’t his fault. Who cares?

It wasn’t until late afternoon on the first full day of President Trump’s defense that we finally saw somebody with something to say. Pam Bondi, a former attorney general from Florida, at last explained to viewers at home what this impeachment trial was all about. It’s about Joe Biden. Democrats will tell you Biden has nothing to do with it. Biden has everything to do with it. Here’s why.

President Trump is being impeached for supposedly abusing his powers as president to investigate a political rival. President Trump contends he wanted Ukraine to investigate Biden because his actions appeared to be corrupt. In order for President Trump to exonerate himself he has to show there was probable cause to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Bondi laid out the case.

Hunter Biden took a position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, Chris Heinz, was a partner with Hunter Biden in an investment firm called Rosemont Seneca. When Hunter took the gig with Burisma, Heinz sent an e-mail to Kerry’s top aides letting them know he had nothing to do with Burisma or Biden’s decision to join them. Heinz severed his business ties with Hunter Biden. 

Burisma was a corrupt entity that everybody in the Obama administration knew was corrupt. At the time Hunter Biden joined them making 83 grand a month, the British Serious Fraud Office was investigating Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, for money laundering. The left will argue that Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, would not cooperate with the Brits on the money laundering investigation and thus allowed Zlochevsky to successfully move his ill-gotten booty out of the UK to Cyprus. That could very well be true. However, it’s difficult to understand how Joe Biden was coming to town to rid Ukraine of a corrupt prosecutor while his own son was working for the corrupt oligarch this prosecutor was supposedly helping.

Optics. They love to use that word in Washington. I can’t think of a situation with worse optics. And don’t tell me Joe didn’t know his son was working for Burisma. Everybody in the Obama administration knew. Obama himself should’ve pulled Joe aside and told him to get Hunter off the board of that corrupt company. If Joe didn’t then Obama should’ve sent someone else. He did neither.

That sets up the obvious question. If the chief prosecutor in Ukraine is investigating a corrupt company that the VP’s son works for, why is Joe trying to get the guy fired? That’s exactly what President Trump was asking, and it got him impeached. It’s doubtful the president will be removed, but now we know why they were so desperate to do 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.

Doing the Greta

I don’t believe I ever seen such a freak-out over climate change like we’re seeing now. Fueled by the Australian wildfires, climate change is sweeping the world like, well, wildfire. Spain has declared a national climate emergency. What’s going on in Spain? Nothing. They’re just freaking out because everybody’s freaking out over Australia.

Australian bushfires are nothing new. The worst were the Black Saturday Bushfires in 2009. It was Australia’s worst natural disaster ever recorded. Second worst were the Ash Wednesday Bushfires of 1983, followed by the Black Tuesday Bushfires of 1967. See a pattern? Neither do I.

Early European explorers reported seeing huge bushfires. Most are set by lightning, but Aboriginal people routinely set wildfires to create better grass to fatten up kangaroos. Something called fire-stick farming was also used to grow things like bush potatoes. In fact, some plants require fires to survive.

What’s lost in all the reporting and hysteria about climate change is that global warming or climate change or whatever they’re calling it on any given day has never—and I repeat, never—caused a fire. Never. Fires are either caused by lightning, lava, or humans. Many of these current fires in Australia are the result of arson. The media say the number of people arrested for arson has been exaggerated. That could be, but it still doesn’t change the fact that global warming never set a fire.

Recent fires in Australia are the result of what they call dry lightning or electric power lines blown down by high winds. None of this is new. What’s new is the social media freak-out. Well, if global warming isn’t causing the fires it must be contributing to them. That depends on how you frame that argument. It would be a hard argument to sell. The record high for Australia is 123.3 degrees. That was set in 1960. The second highest was 122.9 set in 1998. Third is 121.8 set in 2019. See a pattern? Neither do I, but you can almost bet they weren’t freaking out in 1960. They were, however, in 2019.

It seems that we don’t have a climate change problem. We have a lemming problem. Too many people are more than willing to follow the crowd over the cliff without even an ounce of proof. That’s my argument-stopper when it comes to this issue. If you believe humans are causing the planet to warm, show me the proof. They can’t. They can’t because there’s not any proof.

Oh, they point to the so-called 97 percent consensus. The irony is that debunked talking point started in Australia with a guy named John Cook of the University of Queensland. Cook has no expertise in climate science. He studies the human brain. I guess he figured out what that brain needed to be convinced of manmade climate change when there’s no evidence. He invented the 97 scientific consensus talking point. He took a bunch of climate change studies, threw out two-thirds that didn’t give an opinion (red flag right there) then tortured the rest of the data to come up with a 97 percent consensus. And it’s been used by everybody pushing the global warming theory ever since.

Problem is there’s no truth to it. But don’t tell the folks in Spain. It might ruin their little “climate emergency.” And don’t tell Greta Thunberg. She might have to dock her plastic boat she’s sailing around the world, a boat that took untold petroleum to make. But you’re still skeptical about manmade global warming even with all this hype? How dare 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.

CrowdStrike strikes again

I smelled a rat from the second the New York Times story broke. ‘Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment’ their headline blared. It seemed all too convenient. Just before the impeachment trial begins that will most certainly explore Joe Biden’s role in getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was looking into corruption at a company where his son was raking in $50,000 a month, the Russians magically hack that same company looking for dirt on Biden. The insinuation is, of course, that the Russians are working in league with Donald Trump to spring him from the impeachment trap and nail Joe Biden at the same time.

“Cybersecurity officials” told the New York Times about the hacking. I wondered immediately if these “cybersecurity officials” had anything to do with CrowdStrike. Remember CrowdStrike? They were the IT company for the DNC that claimed Russians had hacked their e-mails. The only problem is they wouldn’t turn over the servers to the FBI. The FBI, according to James Comey’s own testimony, simply relied on the investigation done by CrowdStrike. Odd isn’t it? It’s like you have a bank robbery and the FBI shows up but a private investigator has already done the investigation, so you just take his report and file it as fact.

This whole thing reeks of a set-up. No doubt Trump’s attorneys, if they’re any good, will make Hunter Biden’s deal with Ukrainian gas company Burisma the centerpiece of their defense. After all, the president was impeached for allegedly using his office to investigate a political opponent. Trump’s defense is he was asking the Ukrainians to investigate a legitimate appearance of corruption. So, just as we begin the trial the Russians hack into Burisma looking for dirt on Joe? All too convenient, isn’t it?

Well, you don’t know the half of it.

I began researching my suspicions about the “cybersecurity officials” that supposedly tipped off the Times. It’s a company called Area 1 Security. One of the co-founders is a guy named Blake Darché. Guess where Blake used to work. That’s right. CrowdStrike. Oh, he didn’t just work there. He helped found CrowdStrike.

I’m sure the scheme of claiming the Russians hacked Burisma was designed to not only taint any real dirt Trump’s lawyers may have on Biden, but to further bolster the story that the Russians hacked the DNC. To learn now that CrowdStrike people are involved in both does just the opposite. Again, I’m sure, no one will be able to independently confirm Area 1’s assertion that the Russians hacked Burisma. And, again, authorities will take their word for it. Three of the founders, including Darché, were hackers for the NSA. These kinds of people are invaluable if they’re working on your side. They’re extremely dangerous if they’re not.

It took me all of about five minutes to uncover Area 1’s connection to CrowdStrike. You can’t tell me a New York Times reporter couldn’t do the same thing. Which leads us to only one conclusion. They knew but they didn’t report it.

Oren Falkowitz, co-founder of Area 1, laid it on thick for the Times. He said, “The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the GRU hacks we saw in 2016 against the DNC and John Podesta.” He added, “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.” Oh, it’s a repeat, all right. It’s a repeat of the same charade they pulled before. I hope and pray that we’re smarter now than we were then.

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.