Why so mysterious about Ebola patients?

If one were to go to Central Casting to find that stereotypical authority figure whose omnipresent face is on television to tell the public there’s nothing to fear in the face of certain catastrophe, it would be Dr. Thomas Frieden from the CDC. Of course, that’s not to say we’re facing certain catastrophe. Far from it. The chances of any of us contracting Ebola is slim. However, our chances are increasing daily by the bungling of this crisis by our government.

Normally, in times like this when there’s the potential of a pandemic, citizens are given an abundance of information in an attempt to stop the spread of the disease. Ebola is different and it’s different for one simple reason. Its coming from Africa has made it a political hot potato.

Early on, before the disease ever reached our shores, Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, said, “We must be careful not to characterize Ebola as an African disease.” She said we needed to ensure that the “affected countries aren’t stigmatized and isolated.”

Of course, everyone knows what you do with a disease you can’t cure. You isolate it. Not this one. Over 150 people come to America each day from the three countries in Africa where the outbreak is most severe. Everyone from President Obama on down tells us that banning flights from these countries would not help and might even hurt. That makes no sense whatsoever unless one applies liberal logic. Dr. Frieden says it’ll “backfire” because banning people from going to these countries will cut off precious resources they need to fight Ebola. Dr. Frieden, no one’s talking about banning people from going over there. We’re worried about people coming in this direction.

He says we can never reduce the risk of Ebola spreading in America to zero. Well, guess what, Dr. Frieden. If we had banned travel before, like any country with common sense would, Ebola would not be in America right now.

But you have to understand where Thomas Frieden is coming from. This is the guy behind New York Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on smoking, trans fats and his attempt to ban large soft drinks and limit salt. The very essence of Frieden is control, so it’s no wonder that when a disease escapes the confines of Africa and comes here he wants to control all the information about it. His expertise is in manipulating the public.

There’s absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t know everything the CDC knows when it comes to those with Ebola. Frieden withheld everything about Eric Duncan when he came to America with Ebola. It was the news media who discovered his name, his flight schedule, where he’d been staying, etc. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have been told all that from the beginning. 

The CDC is worried we’ll panic but what does panic look like? It doesn’t look like hysterical people running the streets in front of Godzilla. If I knew I was on a flight with Eric Duncan or sitting next to him at an airport restaurant and I started having symptoms of a stomach virus I would immediately seek medical attention. Otherwise, I ride that illness out. If it’s Ebola and I wait three or four days, I’m dead. And I’ve also spread it to who knows who in the meantime.

Of course, Frieden still doesn’t get it. With the cold-hearted cadence of an Orwellian authority figure he refers to Eric Duncan as “the index patient.” He continues to obfuscate while a potential 55,000 carriers of Ebola per year stream into America.

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

Defining marriage — gay or otherwise

People are presuming that the recent Supreme Court decision not to hear gay marriage cases in five states means it's unconstitutional for a state to ban gay marriage. That presumes that the federal government has any authority over marriage in the first place.

The 10th Amendment clearly states that what's not in the Constitution is under the authority of the states. But, do the states, themselves, have any right to require a license? There are many who believe they do not. In fact, the marriage license is, historically, a fairly new invention. The first marriage licenses in America didn’t appear until after the Civil War

and were not commonplace in all states until the 1920s. Marriage was regarded — and still is by some — as a purely religious affair.

Many Libertarians believe if the state is going to issue anything regarding marriage it should be a certificate, not a license. Marriage is a right and should not be licensed anymore than a birth should require a license. At birth our parents receive a birth certificate. It’s merely a record of a notable event that can be carried forward in life as proof of the event for any entity that requires it, but one should no more be required to obtain a license to marry than to be born.

Although the history of licensing marriage is murky the origins of what entity invented the license is not. The first marriage licenses came from states and spread to other states. They did not come from the federal government therefore it’s folly to believe that the federal government has any jurisdiction whatsoever over marriage.

The point of confusion is the difference between the right to marry and the right to license. I have a right to marry anyone I like insofar as I can find someone in an official capacity to perform the marriage. They are under no obligation to do so. Marriage is a personal commitment between people, sanctified, historically, by a church. However, if I want the state to sanction the marriage I must first obtain a marriage license. That doesn’t make me any more married. I just makes it official with the state. Think of it like a copyright. I automatically have a copyright on this material as soon as I create it and lay my thoughts down for others to read. I can go through the formality of obtaining an official copyright on the material but that doesn’t mean I’m any more entitled to copyright protection than if I didn’t.

What a marriage license basically signifies is that the people of that state recognize your marriage as legit. That’s why the current system of some states recognizing gay marriage and others not has worked out just fine. If you’re gay and you want to be officially married then congregate with people who think that’s cool.

If you don’t believe marriage is a state issue then remember what the justice of the peace used to say. We’ve seen it dozens of times in movies. "By the power vested in me by the state of Such-and-such..." The power over marriage licensing belongs to the state and the state alone. The power of marriage itself belongs to the individuals.

If the states ever want to wrest any power back from the federal government it's time for some governor somewhere to have the guts to tell these federal judges that they have no authority in regards to marriage. In other words, "Thanks for your opinion, now go pound sand."

I'm still waiting for a governor to stand up and say just that.

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

Oil will save the economy

Two interesting phenomena are happening simultaneously that may prove to reduce the price at the pump dramatically over the next couple of years. First of all, the old “peak oil” predictions seem to be a thing of the past. So-called experts inside and outside the oil industry have predicted for years that we would run out of oil. Heck, J.D. Rockefeller’s partner at Standard Oil, John Archbold, famously sold some of his shares of stock at a discount in 1885 over fears the oil was running out.

Recent leaps in technology — specifically hydraulic fracturing, or fracking — have brought once-dormant oil fields back to life. North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom. The United States is set to overtake Saudi Arabia in oil production for

the first time since 1991. And this is happening on private land. This country could be completely energy-independent if the Obama administration would allow drilling on public land.

Instead, Obama has gone in the opposite direction, subsidizing green energy with direct payments and loan guarantees. There’s nothing wrong with green energy but wind and solar have been around longer than oil and they still haven’t managed to become commercially viable enough to make up a significant percentage of our energy sources.

The second phenomenon that we’re witnessing is the wholesale collapse of the global warming argument. This was the pretext for shifting away from oil to a so-called green economy. You wouldn’t know it was collapsing by the rhetoric coming out of the White House or the UN. They have doubled down on the notion that somehow we’re destroying the planet with harmless carbon dioxide. When one takes a step back, it’s laughable that something as essential to life on earth as carbon dioxide has been so demonized. It’s the equivalent of demonizing oxygen.

No one is denying that the production of carbon dioxide has gone up. In fact, this has been the plan all along. Inventions like the catalytic converter change harmful gases into harmless CO2. We should be encouraging more CO2 production. Any time CO2 is being released from an exhaust pipe or smokestack it is in place of something harmful and deadly. Yet the preachers of doom tell us that CO2 production causes temperatures to rise and the earth to bake. Turns out that over the last 18 years temperatures have remained steady while CO2 has gone, literally, through the roof. What happened?

What happened was the theory was seriously flawed from the beginning. The theory that more CO2 caused global warming was akin to the theory that a crowing rooster makes the sun rise. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

Temperature fluctuations are caused by all sorts of complicated combinations from solar output to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The climate is far more complicated than the over-simplistic notion that carbon dioxide causes warming. In fact, there’s a good reason why no one has been able to prove manmade global warming. Because it’s not happening.

According to Gallup, the percentage of people skeptical of manmade global warming has more than doubled since 2001. Much of the reason is because, with each passing year, the evidence of the global warming theory is evaporating.

Which means we’re in a great position for economic growth. Oil fuels the engine of our economy. When it’s cheap we have all sorts of disposable income to spend on other things. 

At the end of the day, it won’t be Obama, the Democrats, or green energy that get our economy going again. Much to their chagrin, it’ll be oil.

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

Will "The Hillary Letters" sink Clinton's campaign ship?

Who is Hillary Clinton really? If some old letters that have recently surfaced are any indication, she’s a far cry from who she’s trying to portray herself as. She wants Republicans to believe she’s a moderate. A voice of reason among an Obama administration packed with lefties. Someone who can be counted on when that call comes in the middle of the night. But is she really different from your garden variety liberal?

The Washington Free Beacon obtained copies of Hillary’s adoring letters to the father of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s most famous book, Rules for Radicals, was dedicated to Lucifer, “that very first radical.” Rules is a how-to primer on disrupting the establishment and redistributing the wealth. Alinsky, a well-known communist, seemed to be

infatuated with Hillary around the time he was writing Rules. Hillary began her correspondence with Alinsky when she was a student at Wellesley College and continued writing to him into her Yale Law School years.

Her letters read like a devoted sycophant. That may not be disturbing unless you fully understand what Saul Alinsky was all about. Alinsky was in favor of an all-out revolution where the “have-nots,” as he put it, would take from the “haves.” It’s no wonder that when Hillary was asked in 2008 if she was proud of America she responded that she was proud of what America could be. In other words, no, she’s not proud of America.

From the viewpoint of someone who’s disenchanted with the direction my country’s going, there is a distinct difference between being concerned about your country and ashamed of it. Do I cringe at the way our president conducts foreign policy? You bet, but the president is not the country. He represents it for, at most, eight years. The United States, like any country, should be looked at in its totality. Overall, there’s plenty to be proud of as Americans. We have made mistakes and we will continue to make mistakes but if anyone were to ask me if I was proud of America my answer would be yes.

Working backwards from Hillary’s comment in 2008, it’s not too difficult to figure out how she got to that point. After law school she went to work for one of the most radical law firms in Berkeley, CA that named among its clients the Black Panthers and other militant groups.

It’s also interesting that there’s only one paragraph about Alinsky in Hillary’s autobiography. Even then she merely mentions that he offered her a job out of college but she wanted to follow a more conventional path of going to law school and into the law profession. Like working for a radical law firm that represented the Black Panthers? Interesting what she considers conventional.

Will this have any effect on Hillary’s presidential aspirations? It’s doubtful. The news media will sweep this under the rug and vilify anyone who brings it up. Or, in the words of Hillary herself, what difference does it possibly make at this point? Let me assure you, it makes a ton of difference. I’ve often said when you hear peace and justice together you know you have yourself a commie. But it will make no difference to the gatekeepers in the media. It’ll be considered old news that some community organizer in the ‘60s caught Hillary’s eye. That she wrote glowingly of a guy who was admitted socialist and a closet communist is inconsequential.

Of course, we all now know where these community organizers end up. Hillary Clinton just may turn out to be Barack Obama 2.0.

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

Running up the white flag in the War on Poverty

We just marked the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s War on Poverty. One would think after 50 years we could win anything. The fact is, we lost the war on poverty long ago. Let’s compare it to other wars we’ve fought. We’ve spent $22 trillion (in 2012 dollars) on this war on poverty. That’s three times what we’ve spent on every war since the Revolutionary War combined! The poverty rate when we started this so-called war was around 15 percent. For the last 50 years the poverty rate has bounced between 12 and 15 percent. Today it’s just above 14 percent.

The interesting thing is that the post-World War II poverty rate was around 25 percent. In the years right after the war the poverty rate was dropping dramatically but was arrested by the war on poverty. Black folks, who this war was supposed

to benefit most, made up 31 percent of the poor in 1965. They make up 27 percent of the poor now. Some will call that a victory. I call it a shame.

Civil Rights laws are largely responsible for lifting black citizens up. The fact that so many remain below the poverty level is directly because of the war on poverty. We have trapped a disproportionate number of black people on welfare.

That fact notwithstanding, there are many reasons why people are poor and the government has overlooked practically all of them. As I stated, too many people have been enticed to remain in poverty but the choices are there for all Americans to lift themselves up. We have countless opportunities in America. Poor people get a break on college and vocational tuition. Anyone can join the military. The Internet has opened up a whole new world for entrepreneurs. 

So, why are people still poor?

A lot of it has to do with geography. I remember leaving New York City once and the cab driver took a short cut through an impoverished neighborhood. It was depressing. I was thinking that a short train ride away — even just 30 minutes away — there was a whole new hopeful world out there. Why on earth were these people living like this? Then it dawned on me that they were living in the city because that’s where the government benefits are. It’s the modern-day liberal plantation. People are enslaved to the government because they don’t know how to break the chains. If they start making any money at all the government cuts them off and they come running back to dependency.

This is why you see the very same thing replicated in every major city in America. There’s the bad side of town which almost certainly is where the government housing projects are. The police know it. Heck, we all know it. We, the people, have constructed one-stop shopping for the drug dealers, the pimps, the gangs. Why would we do such a thing? To be sure it wasn’t done on purpose.

I believe it was. The liberals criticize the robber barons of old for constructing company towns and trapping workers in these towns because they became dependent on the company. That’s exactly what they’ve done with the Great Society. Millions upon millions of Americans owe their soul to the government store.

We have to break the chains of dependency. We have to destroy the one thing that keeps millions of people in cyclical poverty. We have to tear down the welfare state and build in its place a program that encourages hard work and initiative and all the things that have made this country great.

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

The Motherboard of all hysteria

I was reading a piece from some website called Motherboard and I actually had to pause and laugh. It was as if I were reading a parody piece but they were dead serious.  The headline read, “We Have Five Years to Stop Building Coal Plants and Gas-Powered Cars.” How long have they been telling us we were running out of time? For decades now. Some elected official in Canada said we only had hours left to save the planet. That was several years ago.

Lord Christopher Monckton was a policy advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. He closely follows this global warming debate and points out that the earth has not warmed in 215 months. That’s 17 years, 11 months. To put it into

Scare photo from
Motherboard

perspective, high school seniors who will graduate this year have never experienced a warming globe in their lifetimes. Yet there they are at it once again trying to convince people that we only have until 2018 to stop manufacturing cars and, if we don’t, it’ll all be over by 2019.

Pretty scary stuff if only it were true. The dirt people have latched onto another catch phrase: carbon budget. They say that our yearly carbon budget is 1,000 billion tons of CO2. How they measure CO2 tonnage is suspicious to start with but they warn us that if we top 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide then we’ll push the temperature up over 2 degrees C of warming which, as Motherboard puts it, will threaten “the survival of many people living on the planet.”

This is total hogwash, of course, but they conveniently ignore the facts. Having not warmed in nearly 18 years, the earth is certainly in no danger of overheating yet the emissions of CO2 continue unabated. Hmm. The word “correlation” comes to mind. Haven’t we been told for years that there’s a direct correlation between the emissions of carbon dioxide — which they love to just call “carbon” because it sounds so sinister — and an increase in temperatures? If we haven’t warmed for nearly two decades, where’s the correlation?

There’s not one. That’s the problem. A lot of people are standing there with egg on their face. They’re totally invested in this manmade global warming nonsense to the point that they have to do — and say — anything they can to save face. It’s becoming painfully apparent that it’s too late which means they simply crank up the volume.

Typical of these scare pieces like we find in Motherboard, they always include a picture of a couple of smokestacks emitting plumes of “pollution” into the air to kill us all. In reality, what we see coming from those smokestacks is water vapor. Harmless water vapor. It’s the same thing you see coming from an electronic cigarette but many anti-smoking advocates want the e-cigarettes treated just like regular cigarettes. Common sense would tell you that water vapor and smoke are two totally different things but those whose lives are led by undistilled emotion cannot or will not distinguish the difference.

So it is with “pollution.” There’s real pollution, which is in smog. Nasty things like sulfur dioxide and ground-level ozone. This is the haze that hangs over big cities, especially LA where many of these dirt people reside. There’s one thing absent from smog. It’s CO2. Yeah, there’s no carbon dioxide in smog, yet we’re led to believe that CO2 is the leading pollutant in the world today. Like they’re trying to tell us that we have to stop making cars in the next five years. Like we’re dumb enough to believe them. 

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

Does anyone fear us anymore?

How many more American journalists need to die before we do something about ISIS? How many more Americans — period — need to die before we do something? I know we don’t want to go back into Iraq but we didn’t pick this fight. They essentially declared war on us when they beheaded Jim Foley. Now a second American journalist has been brutally beheaded. It is imperative that we respond and respond with massive force.

The problem is no one respects us any longer. They don’t respect us because they don’t fear us. I know the pacifists on the left don’t want us to be feared but fear is what keeps us safe.

Back in the ‘80s there was a group of congressmen and citizens who were part of the ‘peace through strength’ movement. Members included actors Tom Selleck and Arnold Schwarzenegger. What it basically meant was we would

only achieve true peace if we were strong enough to deter aggression. The Soviet Union was the target in those days and it worked. Without going over all of the history, we basically bankrupted the Soviet Union by being strong.

People don’t respect weak people. Nations don’t respect weak nations. Weak nations are seen as vulnerable. When a president tells the leader of another country that if he uses chemical weapons he crosses a red line where there are consequences he needs to mean it. In order to mean it you have to back it up. This president did nothing.

Not to mention trading four terrorists for one questionable soldier. All from a country that has a standing policy to never, every negotiate with terrorists. Is it any wonder that terrorists are taking hostages left and right?

Like it or not, we’re at war with ISIS. This is a war we cannot afford to lose. We have to win, and the only way you win is win completely. What that means is we have to annihilate the enemy. ISIS has one agenda: convert people to Islam or kill them. That’s not an enemy you can negotiate with.

Look, al Qaeda is even repulsed by ISIS. This is a whole new breed of terrorist. They only understand force. They can only be defeated by death. There is no reforming these people. And we have Americans joining their forces. Rappers, no less. I’m still trying to dissect that psychologically. Maybe folks who rap about killing police officers and whitey get a big kick out of cutting people’s heads off.

Whatever the case, ISIS is attracting the most sinister among us. And all in the name of a so-called god. People want to know what did we do to cause this. We merely existed. If you think it’s because of us then you have to ask what did the Christians of Mosul do to invite the wrath of ISIS? What did the Yazidis do to make ISIS want to cut their heads off? What did women do to be relegated to second-class citizens?

At some point you must realize that it’s not what we’ve done, it’s what we haven’t done. We haven’t, as a country, converted to Islam. That’s the bottom line. Until we do these people will never rest. That’s why the only way to stop them is to kill them.

When you start your presidency with an apology tour it’s no wonder that no country, no leader, fears us or our president. No one loses sleep wondering if Obama is coming after them because he’s not coming. The only people on the planet who are afraid of Obama are Americans.

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