Posts Tagged → career
Trump wants to be liked by the mean boys
President Donald Trump is a good guy, and it is why he keeps making the same mistake over and over with people who are not good. He understandably sees himself as a reasonable person, a respectable person, a responsible person, and he also desperately wants to be somewhat, even a little bit, inside The Republican Club.
This is why he endorsed politicians who were openly antagonistic to him: Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Brian Kemp (Georgia), to name just two. Trump keeps thinking, and hoping, that the Republican politicians who hate him and reject him will nonetheless ultimately come to like him, admire him, and appreciate him. This is why he keeps on trying to play their insider game, and he keeps on losing at it.
The problem is that the career Republicans are mean boys (and a few mean girls), occupying their own little tree house club house. And while they may have vicious squabbles amongst each other inside that tree house, their hideout remotes a closed club to outsiders. Closed even to people who may think the tree house is plenty big enough for more people, and in fact might benefit from having more people in it.
We have seen this exact same dynamic play out even down to the legislative staffers in Washington and in state capitals across America. A sense of elitist prestige and exclusive specialness. These people have spent their entire careers knitting together personal power by carving out a niche for themselves inside the bureaucratic spiderweb, and by God, they are never ever going to share that power with anyone they don’t have to share it with.
President Trump’s latest mistake is constantly weighing in on behalf of US Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a highly preened, plucked, scrubbed, and unprincipled careerist from California who desires to be the next Speaker of the US House. We can see by now, after seven failed votes among US House members, that McCarthy obsesses over and craves the Speaker’s gavel and office like various brainwashed victims in The Lord of The Rings who are caught caressing The One Ring and calling it “My precious.”
McCarthy even moved into the Speaker’s office despite not actually being elected Speaker!
Anyhow, President Trump. What a window into his mind this endorsement business has been, this public craving of his to be accepted into the mean boy RINO club, or at least to be publicly valued and acknowledged by the RINOs. It is why he keeps giving them unearned endorsements. And he knows that even if he helps McCarthy prevail and become Speaker, he will still be ignored and cast off afterwards. It is like Trump is so loyal, and so earnest, that he simply cannot fathom the treachery and selfishness endemic to career politicians like McCarthy and McConnell.
No, President Trump, these careerist jerks will never change. Stop thinking they will.
The good news is that a cool black guy, Byron Donalds, got the most dissident votes for Speaker today. Smart, articulate, brave Byron Donalds is exactly what the Republican Party needs from top to bottom. But the bad news is that instead of grooming Donalds for future leadership, the so-called “leaders” of the House Republicans (Scalise, McCarthy) are running around twisting arms and trying to hurt and threaten fellow House members for not supporting McCarthy for Speaker.
Kind of interesting how this mean boys club works. It is almost like it doesn’t matter which political party these people are in, at the end of the day they are all the same: Mean, coercive, uninterested in listening to people who disagree with them, unwilling to negotiate a settlement, and vicious. They never back down no matter how much people reject them, they are always selfish and demand that we all acknowledge their selfishness and reward it. In short, McCarthy et al are gross yucky people. Not nice.
President Trump, this is not your fight and these are not your people. Forget about it, let this play out without your participation. You can’t win here, no matter what you do. You are not a career-long mean boy and you don’t belong in this squabble.
One thing Rush Limbaugh got right
Radio host Rush Limbaugh died a year ago, and people who enjoyed his show or his books are remembering him today. I am remembering him for two reasons. First, for his zig-zag career path and conventional/unconventional life path. Second, for a single political prediction he made in 2019 that was labeled “outrageous” and “dangerous” by his opponents, and which even raised a lot of eyebrows amid his supporters, but which has proven to be spookily prescient and 100% accurate.
First with number one.
Rush Limbaugh’s successful life path and career path are things worth studying, because so many Americans have been corralled into falsely believing your career must be, should be a straight and linear path forward. Even though that is just not correct, and in many cases it’s not healthy.
You know, graduate from high school, then go to college and spend an inordinate amount of money to be indoctrinated in nonsense and useless hokum, with the hope of getting a college diploma that “proves” you are smart and capable of making decisions. I don’t know if this linear career path idea is a natural result of the old guild mentality, where a son or daughter would apprentice in a particular guild (plumber, wood worker, watch maker, gun maker, horse carriage maker etc.), and then either take over his or her father’s work shop, or go start their own work shop/ atelier in some distant locale doing the same work. In truth, this guild and apprencticeship process offers a lot of value, not just three hundred years ago, but even today. It assures that young people go into work they enjoy, and that they are well trained when they are released unto the world as a certified expert. It also gives people a good income in what had been a feudal world of poor serfs and ultra-wealthy aristocrats.
But this guild approach to career saw its last vestiges swept away with the end of high school Shop Class and Vo-Tech programs that actually taught Americans how to do needed things of value.
And so Rush Limbaugh followed his own path in the radio world, and ended up being the most successful and well-known radio personality in radio history. His success did not happen in a linear way, but quite the opposite. He had to find his way. His stories about his first few jobs in radio, and about being fired by different types of radio managers for different kinds of real or imaginary infractions, and moving across the country several times to take radio jobs, are useful examples to those just now entering the work force or who are stultifying in old jobs.
Only after failing, or growing as it might be euphemistically called, did Limbaugh eventually get to sit behind the Golden EIB Microphone. It was his initial failures and zig-zags that eventually created his character and inner strength, his skills and abilities.
Lessons that Limbaugh learned were be yourself, be honest and forthright, work hard, take risks, make some sacrifices, and if you end up doing what you enjoy the most, then you will often be rewarded with material success and deep personal happiness. And as we well know, contentment is its own form of wealth (and as some of us know, there are a lot of very wealthy people who are also desperately unhappy and often cruelly, even destructively negative, to those around them), so becoming a high school shop teacher earning forty five thousand dollars a year may make you deeply content with your life, but your life partner is going to have to work, too.
But there is no such a thing as high school shop class these days….one should wonder Why…that is a separate issue.
Similarly, his personal life resulted in a strong and committed marriage to a woman, Kathryn, only after the two of them had been friends for many years. How rewarding it is to be married to both your lover and your best friend. That is the pinnacle of relationships, and Limbaugh’s marriage should serve as a useful template for others contemplating marriage themselves. Find a friend, and marry them.
Now about that crazy prediction Limbaugh made in 2019, the one thing he got right that at first sounded so outlandish and impossible…I remember shaking my head when he said that “the Democrat Party will seek a way to eliminate elections so that they can become the dominant and sole political force in America.”
“I don’t know how they are going to do it, but they are working on it,” Limbaugh said. “Oh, they will allow the trappings of elections, but they won’t be meaningful or fair.”
And I was not alone in my skepticism at such a huge claim. Many observers and listeners to Limbaugh’s radio program openly said that he was just being bombastic for the sake of poking his political opponents. No one in American politics could ever want to eliminate elections, the bedrock foundation of our constitutional republic, right?, we naively thought.
And yet Limbaugh stuck to this public claim several times more, and in the end he was proven correct with the stolen 2020 election, and the Democrat Party’s all-out hyperdrive to convert that theft into absolute iron control of Americans by any means necessary, including the federalization of elections and permanence of vote fraud activity.
It turned out that Limbaugh really did understand the Democrat Party and the American Left better than anyone else outside of those two movements. What is amazing is that the subject of his analysis, the Democrat Party, now makes no effort to hide its totalitarian ambitions. Everywhere American citizens have demanded audits of the voting machines or the ballots cast in the fraudulent 2020 election, they have been met with deviousness, rude defiance, threats, blocking lawsuits, and outright ballot-shredding skulduggery by the Democrat Party and its Republican Party enablers.
This is not the behavior of people committed to open and accountable elections, but rather the actions of the desperate and dangerous thief trying to keep his theft from becoming widespread knowledge.
America as a continuing constitutional republic is in huge trouble. Most of our institutions are overthrown and taken over by leftist activists, who then bend those cultural and political institutions against the American constitution and the rule of law. Rush Limbaugh was so deep into the political fray that like a champion prize fighter, he saw where his opponent’s next punch sequence was going to come from.
What is amazing is that the Republican Party still, even now, behaves like an amazed ringside commentator asking incredulously at the end of the fight how the champion prize fighter ever saw the attack coming and not only beat it back, but managed to land his own blows in order to win the fight. This just goes to show just how outside the political fray the Republican Party is; the GOP is barely an observer much less an actual participant in American politics.
We need Rush Limbaugh’s insights more than ever now, but he is somewhere else, and so the only bit of related wisdom or insight I can scrape up at this point is to say We must all be Rush Limbaughs, and each of us fearlessly stay in the fight for freedom and liberty.
And trust our gut instincts about our political opponents. Even if it seems like crazy talk to say that the Democrat Party or its Canadian political ally, Justin Trudeau, are hell bent on becoming absolutist totalitarian overlords. We must fight fight fight, or we lose everything.
Rush Limbaugh behind his EIB Golden Microphone, fighting for freedom and liberty. He knew politics better than most people and loved a constitutional America more than most
Limbaugh’s right-hand man, James Golden aka “Bo Snerdley” continues Limbaugh’s fight for liberty today
Freedom Sunday
Aaaaahhhh, the swell feeling of freedom.
A few days ago, I sat up in a tree stand in Perry County with a loaded crossbow, waiting for a legal buck to walk by. A legal buck in this area of Pennsylvania has at least three points on one side of his antler rack.
The most distinguishing feature of this afternoon deer hunt was that it was occurring on a Sunday. Sunday hunting (beyond coyotes and foxes) is a new addition to Pennsylvania, and as of 2020 we have three Sundays to hunt deer or bear. People like me prevailed in obtaining these mere three Sundays to hunt only after a protracted 25-year battle with the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, whose nonagenarian board members constantly shook their canes at freedom lovers.
We lovers of freedom are also by nature opponents of government overreach, and yet while the PA Farm Bureau is against all kinds of government overreach, they were all fall-on-their-sword supportive of a government ban on Sunday hunting. Even on private property, where land owners could make their own personal choice about how to spend their weekend. The PA Farm Bureau would not, and still will not, budge one inch in their opposition to any sort of Sunday hunting. And incredibly, Pennsylvania’s laundry list of career elected officials went along with the PA Farm Bureau’s twenty nonagenarians, and against the wishes of just about everyone else.
So while we await the day when the Liberty Bell shall yet ring again and proclaim liberty throughout the land, granting Sunday hunting from October 1st through February 15th, we must enjoy what crumbs we may glean from the grips of the power and control obsessed.
This present gridlock situation made my three hours of Sunday afternoon archery hunting bittersweet. On the one hand, I was in fact experiencing one Freedom Sunday. Better than nothing, right? On the other hand, sometimes a taste of honey is worse than none at all, and while I sat there my mind kept involuntarily counting the number of Sundays we were being unfairly excluded from enjoying.
If you are curious, the number of Sundays we hunters are being deprived in Pennsylvania is nineteen (19). That may seem like very few days to the person who gets to do whatever they want to do seven days a week, 365 days a year, and without false moralists looking over their shoulder in hypocritical judgment of whatever their choice of entertainment may be on any particular day. But to us hunters, whose season runs from early October to mid February, and again the month of May’s turkey season, those nineteen days are a huge deal. We can’t make up for them in the summer months. We can’t get them back once they have passed.
This means that we Pennsylvania hunters are missing a significant percentage of freedom in our lives as otherwise free citizens. This freedom is being unfairly deprived to us, stripped out of our hands, out of the lives of our children. It is a bizarre situation, when we look at the states around us that have unlimited Sunday hunting.
For example, a week ago I began an annual wilderness hunt out of state on a Sunday morning. The trail head parking lot I started out from was packed with the pickup trucks and SUVs of fellow hunters, many of whom I learned later are tradesmen and contractors, whose work loads are heavy all week long, and whose weekends are their real opportunity to pursue their hobbies and pastimes. Our presence as free hunters, free citizens, in the Sunday woods bothered no one, impacted no one. Pennsylvania needs a lot more of this same Freedom Sunday.
Freedom Sunday: Me deer hunting on private land last Sunday. Hurting no one, bothering no one. Why not more of this Sunday freedom?
Lotta covid19 pain? Better be lotta gain
For all the pain we are all experiencing from the Chinese covid19 flu “lockdowns,” shutdowns, economic activity coming to a screeching halt, businesses laying off people, orders drying up etc., there had damned well better be a lot of gain when all is said and done.
Meaning, all our sacrifice and loss and crushed civil rights should damned well have happened for a good reason. A lot of people should have lived who were going to die or get very sick. etc.
When the most mild mannered attorney friend texts me out of the blue yesterday “Are you worried about our civil rights?” I knew that the felt pain was cutting deep.
Our text conversation last night was brief, but it covered all the territory a person might expect, given its premise. My friend reports that many of his other friends are starting to get pretty fussy about this government-imposed suspension of civil liberties. He wrote “It is one thing to cooperate and volunteer to move less in public, but to be told we must stay in our homes…?”
This guy who wrote these texts to to me is a solid religious person, a respected family man, a well regarded attorney, pretty staid and non-excitable, perhaps even at times a boring personality (hope he is not reading this). It would take a lot to get him to write something like this civil rights text. And yet by now it is doubtful we can find any American who has not also felt a lot of pain from this covid19 China Flu business, so his texts to me are probably indicative of a lot of other Americans’ restlessness. A chafing at the bit. A natural inborn resistance to being told what to do, as opposed to being asked to volunteer as free people.
Really at the center of all this lockdown/shutdown/ Big Coercive Government vs Smaller and Smaller Citizen are two factors: 1) The philosophy of governance held by the various mayors, governors, and federal disease experts, and 2) a sense of duty to nation and to one another held by Americans.
A natural tension always exists in our republic, between effective government decision making on the one hand, and citizens’ rights on the other hand. Our founding documents (Constitution, Bill of Rights) are all about this tension, and how to strike a balance between the trade-offs of having an effective government and also having a free citizenry. No doubt that Communist China has a really effective government, but on the other hand its citizens have zero freedom. Americans want maximum freedom, so we naturally reject the kind of government it takes to be really effective.
However, many if not almost all of the Washington, DC, careerists are inured to the notion of a strong federal government. An overpoweringly strong and coercive government, need be. And why would they not have this mindset? It makes them maximally relevant and powerful. So enter Washington bureaucrats Fauci and Birx, and their approach to the Wuhan China covid19 flu has been to at first pooh pooh it, and then when it becomes a big issue, to take the opposite tack – everyone lock yourself in your home and do not come out until we experts tell you to.
Back in January and February, Fauci was quoted many times pooh poohing and disavowing the China covid19 flu. Can’t happen, won’t happen, not a big deal. Oops, now it is happening – everyone run and hide, to hell with the economy.
Add to this message coming out of Washington bureaucrats the naturally authoritarian nature of many elected officials around America, and we get some pretty authoritarian abuses of power. In Malibu California the other day, a guy simply paddle boarding out in the surf was actually cut off by two police boats and then arrested for not self-social-distancing. While he was literally all alone out on the water, near no one, hurting no one, putting at risk no one. And of course the ACLU is nowhere to be found for him, because the ACLU is not about civil rights, it is about destroying America.
Here in Pennsylvania, our governor, the mild mannered and generally friendly Tom Wolf, has issued a pretty wild declaration, a dictatorial ultimatum, that has suspended our civil rights and shut down most businesses and the families who depend on them. While many of us have a strong sense of duty to our fellow humans, and we are happy to make personal sacrifices in order to protect our neighbors and our communities, at a certain point we begin to chafe under the dictatorial approach to applying law.
A lot of pain is being felt across America, and certainly here in Pennsylvania. Many of the businesses I regularly interact with are in increasingly bad shape. Much of this has to do with their diminished cash flow and uncertain banking situation. So if the banks are eventually made whole, then the rest of these businesses will be made whole, and the whole economy will come roaring back to where it was or stronger. In the mean time we all have families to feed and bills to pay, and the pain of Wolf’s lockdown is becoming intense.
Is this pain worth it, is it justified, people are asking.
Everyone I know has a real commitment to doing the right thing, because it is the right thing to do. They do not need to be told what to do, just asked. But now the pressure and resentment to being told what to do, at great personal cost, without a lot of evident gain, is beginning to build up. This would naturally be expected. The sacrifices we are all making seem to be much greater than would normally, reasonably be expected. We cannot really see the fruits of our sacrifices.
Americans die every day from all sorts of maladies and accidents. A regular flu season sees about 32,000 Americans die nationally, from just the regular old flu. We take that number of deaths as a matter of fact, a cost of being alive. And yet we are not seeing that same result from this covid19 coronavirus thing. Not even close. In fact, so far, just the opposite.
If it turns out that Wuhan China covid19 Chinese Flu actually results in very few deaths, and yet the entire nation’s economy was thrown out the window for little or no gain in health, then there is going to be hell to pay.
John Arway gone away, but not forgotten
Beyond nailing down and putting the finishing touches on some epic large land conservation transactions, my summer and Fall of 2003 were spent politicking and angling for the executive director position at the Pennsylvania Fish & Boat Commission. After ten years, the last ED had recently left as most EDs leave these posts – everyone involved all too happy to not see one another again.
The door was wide open for a fresh newcomer, someone not from within the agency, for the first time in as long as anyone could recall. I knew I had a shot, and so did my supporters. I was excited.
As I met with elected officials and conservation leaders, presenting my own “impressive” credentials and qualifications for the job, and trying to amass my support from people who mattered, a single name kept coming up: John Arway.
Who was this faceless John Arway guy, who so many of the active conservationists mentioned? I had never seen him at a meeting, or at a land dedication ceremony, nor had we testified at the same legislative hearing. But many in-the-know conservationists knew him, or of him, and they were quietly supporting him for the ED job, increasingly so as we got closer to the interview process in December.
Many other ED candidates were emerging, some really impressive, and some less so. My own self-promotion continued up to the beginning of deer season, and then I sat back for the following couple of weeks to see how it would all play out.
I was granted an interview with the PFBC board of commissioners, and in fact I ended up being the very last one interviewed out of six candidates. But as soon as the interview process began the back channel scuttlebutt was that the real contest was already well under way, the board split evenly between wanting Arway, or the agency’s long-time legal counsel, Dennis Guise, as the alternative.
Raging through and beneath the calm surface of the rote, officially procedural, professional interview process, the two main candidates fought each other tooth and nail, each calling up bigger, better, more powerful allies. In the end, it was not a question of qualifications, but of ….well, one of those simple things guys fall back on when measuring up an opponent. “Size.”
So to say. Because both guys were equally competent, just each differently endowed with important skills the agency needed. It was an impossible choice between the two of them.
This battle royale ended the day before I was interviewed, with the board hopelessly deadlocked between the policy weenie Arway, and lawyer Guise. With the two accomplished men set aside, the board was now looking for a “dark horse” candidate without war baggage, who could salvage the situation and bring peace and unity unto the bruised agency’s divided ranks and leadership factions.
In the end, Doug Austen, PhD, was selected over me to run the agency. The chairman and several of my advocates on the board took me aside and explained that Doug had beaten me by 3/100’s of a point, and that the ED decision had come down to that: How many points did the next best candidate have. It was a very close decision, as close as any decision could ever be.
Austen went on to run PFBC for about four years, and as he has a PhD in fisheries biology, he eventually begged off for less political drama and more biology and went on to his next neat job with the US Fish & Widlife Service. Today Doug happily runs the American Fisheries Society, I happily run my own small conservation-driven small business, and boy, did John Arway end up running PFBC.
When Austen left PFBC, Arway was better positioned to take the helm, and immediately take it by storm did he ever. From deep within the agency’s rubber-meets-the-road programs, Arway brought to light and into implementation long simmering policy addressing natural gas fracking, combined sewage overflows from too much rain overrunning sewage plants, trout stocking, non-native invasive plants and fish, the sustainable economics of fishing, and many many more big and important policy questions that had sat dormant for way too long.
Arway’s personal style is easy, smiling, genuine, with a natural affability that helps him slide the medicine in. The medicine being those long-put-off policies that no one had the balls to deal with, and which John knew to be too important to ignore any longer.
Fact is, the Pennsylvania legislature is full of career politicians who refuse to make difficult decisions, for fear of upsetting the voters and possibly losing their artificially cushy jobs. And so Arway made those tough and necessary decisions for them.
The legislature did not like that.
True to form, the careerist politicians wanted to both hinder Arway and second-guess him, without ever providing alternative decisions that would save or protect our state’s incredible natural resources. At the end of all this bad government on full display to we taxpayers who underwrite it, Arway was ironically held up by the dithering careerist politicians as an example of a careerist bureaucrat long past his own use-by date. And so the legislature began to ever increasingly squeeze PFBC, financially, politically.
John Arway fought as only the honestly passionate can fight, with everything he had, without regard for his own personal longevity. Like Neo, the hero in The Matrix movie, John magically dodged every bullet fired at him, every knife stabbed at his back, and every rug pulled out from under his feet. And through it all he maintained that affable personality and firm determination to “do the right thing.”
If you didn’t know John Arway before he became PFBC ED, you knew soon after that he was one of the last of the conservation warriors cut from an old die that has long corroded and may now be broken and long lost. It is tough to imagine that any Pennsylvania resource agency will find and also choose again a tough leader and fearless resource advocate like Arway.
John recently retired from PFBC. Though he had every right to do so, he did not whine, he did not take shots at his enemies or opponents, he did not complain. Rather, ever the real pro, he listed the many natural resource conservation achievements he wished he had time to win and which he hopes the next generation will pick up and carry over the goal line.
The board was loathe to let him go. His many, many supporters are sad to see him step down. If you like to fish or drink clean water, you are sad to see John go. Both Austen and I talk about what might have happened had Arway simply been selected as ED back in 2003 and gotten his conservation agenda under way earlier. I do not always agree with John Arway on policy, but I will always agree that John Arway should be in the policy driver’s seat.
We will miss you, John. Thank you for your service and for being the champion for the voiceless fish and the splashing mountain streams whose language we hear but do not understand.
Ryan’s NobamaCare Plan
RINO Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House, is unveiling a complicated “reform” of ObamaCare as I write these words.
To say his plan is complicated is a gross understatement. The fact that it requires so many charts and graphs tells us everything we need to know: No.
The main problem with Ryan’s NobamaCare plan is that it becomes part and parcel of an already clunky and complicated federal tax code.
We don’t need no more stinkin’ federal tax code stuff, unless it is a total overhaul. Like elimination and replacement.
Ryan’s plan just makes it all worse, both the health care part and the federal tax part.
Only elimination will suffice.
One of the issues with political careerists like Ryan is that they are unwilling to think or act outside the box. They accept certain premises handed down by previous elected officials, instead of questioning why and how they did what they did.
I mean, look at federal and state pension problems alone. What on earth motivated previous elected officials to create these monstrosities? It sure wasn’t a careful and judicious use of limited taxpayer funds! Why, you could be led to believe that those former politicians had used taxpayer money to create largess and thus buy votes, so they could stay in office….
Career politicians like Ryan are terrified of making a mistake, because they are terrified of losing their cozy job and benefits. He refuses to make a principled stand when it can count. So he\they stick to what is politically safe, ie palatable to the special interests that control him\them and then those interests that control the opposition party.
The concerns of us citizens factor in way last, if at all in their calculations.
So, ObamaCare must go, as it is the Unaffordable Care Act, and no, you could not keep your health plan, and no, you could not keep your doctor. It was a disaster. You cannot fix a disaster. You get rid of a disaster.
And while we are at it, can we get rid of RINO Ryan, too? America needs a principles-focused person, man or woman, in that congressional seat. Ryan ain’t gettin it done. In fact, as we see this morning, Ryan is making it a lot worse than it already is.
If I couldn’t keep my doctor, then why do I have to keep Ryan?
Say bye to both problems.
Reflection on national versus local elections
My career started in Washington, DC, and included seven years there of national and international work. After returning home to Pennsylvania, my focus turned to the region and state.
Now, my focus increasingly stays on local elections. It’s where we get officials who support concealed carry, or not, and who have the most impact on individual citizens.
Career is a funny concept. For me, it has been about enjoying satisfaction where I find it.