One of our best friends, Mike Brown, passed from this earth last December 23rd.
We didn’t know because he was visiting his kids in Oregon.
Mike masqueraded as a Brooklyn tough guy who had a barely hidden heart of gold under that New York attitude. He was the lead mechanic at the Reno-Tahoe Airport for many years and that was his persona…he fixed things. He bought and sold old cars, he built houses and, for me, he helped build an AM transmitter site which is the hardest thing in broadcasting to get right. He got it right. One of his favorite times was Reno’s annual Hot August Nights classic car festival.
The highest praise I ever got from him was when we did a four hour remote broadcast from one of Adam Laxalt’s Basque Frys. He helped us set up, declined an invitation to stay and then called me when I was on my way home afterwards to tell me he had listened to the whole event and enjoyed every minute of it.
The pancreatic cancer started to get to him a few years ago.
At first—in his Brooklyn persona—he wouldn’t say the word cancer.
Recently, he mostly went to lunch with us as part of the ritual because he couldn’t taste much. Our favorite place was Red’s 395 Grill in Carson City.
As Christmas approached this year, I told him that I was assuming his normal gift—a bottle of Jack Daniels—was out of the question on his doctor’s orders. He agreed. But not willingly…
At the time, he was in a rehab hospital.
I called him up one day to see if he wanted lunch and he answered from his daughter’s house in Oregon. The story I got was that he just checked himself out and drove to Oregon.
We never saw him or talked to him again.
But we have thousands of memories of a life well lived. Like all of us, he was an imperfect human being but also a great friend and a whole lot of fun, when he wasn’t busy helping me or someone else.
If he could read this and talk with me today, he’s ask me why I was wasting this space on him when I could be going after (expletive deleted) Nancy Pelosi. We’ll get back to that next week.
Mike was a big supporter of the President and a big supporter of his agenda.
Rest easy, big guy. We’ve got it from here.
Mike would probably have gotten a good laugh from another drama going on in my life which he didn’t know about.
While he wasn’t a serious dog guy, he made exceptions for the two in my family—as long as they didn’t lick him or jump on him.
Our 13-year-old cowdog, Major, developed an osteosarcoma on his right front leg. Our vet suggested we amputate the leg, since a chest x-ray showed that the cancer had not spread and Major is a pretty active dog.
So, we got it done last week.
Our dog puts the stub in stubborn. Yes, he knows how to walk on three legs. We learned that at 5 one morning when we put him outside the back door and he stood up, walked down two stairs into the back yard. But, no, he’d rather be pulled around the house on a rug and waited on hand and foot. If I had to make odds, I’d bet on my wife winning that battle of wills. She’s much tougher than I am.
We don’t know how much time we have added to Major’s life but we hope that he’ll finish the third period and maybe get into an overtime shootout.
We just can’t bring ourselves to kill a dog for our convenience.
If, somehow, Mike’s reading this…please stop laughing.
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
Afterword...
As this was being put together, Major stood up, haltingly walked from the living room to the back door, was let out, walked out into the back yard and did his business. Then, he turned around and walked back, went in the house and took a nap. Thank you Dr. Kathleen Fisher and your staff at the Washoe Valley Veterinary Clinic. You all are the best.
I am not what you would call an observant Jew.
But, being a baby boomer, I received the full Sunday School treatment from my parents and got, in those 10 years, what would probably be today an advanced degree in Judaism and the history of the Jews.
And I got from my late Father, a World War II Navy veteran, a firm connection to one of the darkest periods of our modern world’s history.
Additionally, I met a distant cousin who the Allies liberated from Auschwitz and, subsequently, moved to the United States.
The impact on a young boy of seeing a serial number tattooed on a forearm cannot be underestimated.
For those of you Jews who have no real connection to World War Two and the Holocaust, you are making a huge mistake by merely assuming it could never happen again and certainly not in the United States.
Understand this:
The Holocaust was NOT played out on a Hollywood sound stage. If you think it was, you are even dumber than the Germans who allowed it to happen. It happened.
The First Amendment is a beautiful thing. But what keeps us safe from the excesses of the First Amendment is the Second. And who wants to take away our guns? Germany didn’t have a Second Amendment and the first thing Hitler did when he came to power is to remove private gun ownership but thankfully, here in America, we are pretty well armed.
West of the Hudson River, East of the Los Angeles County line and South of the Cook County line is a whole nation which is totally unwilling to give up our second Amendment rights.
And, I’m guessing that most of Israel’s support comes from that same large area.
Israel was established with the concept that Jews should have a homeland where another Holocaust could NEVER happen. They became fierce warriors to insure that.
For some reason, the farther people get from an event like the Holocaust the less they are concerned with the consequences.
As for Iranian retaliation, that’s what happens when a Little League team takes on the Yankees. The truth is that one button levels Tehran. Another can level the Quds force.
And that’s before Israel gets involved.
Iran has plenty of American blood on its hands. It seems only fair to make it pay.
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
I got a lot of phone calls last week from the many people who have one of my numbers, not about the content but about the word I used to describe the House Democrats. Retards.
Frankly, it was the only printable term I could think of at the time.
I certainly mean no disrespect to those who have, what we call today, learning disabilities. Even the thought of comparing any of those folks to the vast majority of House Democrats—who are just plain stupid and unpatriotic—places an innocent person with a low intelligence quotient in a bad light and I certainly don’t wish for that. You see, a person with learning disabilities, a low IQ and other issues can usually go on to live a good life and become a productive member of society. They just have to work at it. And many—if not most—of them do.
Not so much for the House Democrats who participated in the impeachment scam.
They and their faux leader are just plain stupid. As we say in rural America, dumb as a box of rocks. Also, mean.
Want to know how stupid?
Let’s take Tom Steyer from the billionaire left wing.
Here’s a guy who is real proud of his business experience as long as he doesn’t specifically tell the lefties whose vote he is courting exactly what that experience is. The truth is he got rich the same way a lot of people do—private equity and hedge fund management. You know those private prisons which ICE uses. His funds invested early.
Yet he calls President Trump, who got rich building things, a “criminal in the White House”.
Seriously?
Also, he says that climate change is the biggest problem we’re facing.
As Kellyanne Conway would say, that’s a load of crap. To put it in the words of the late George Carlin, “The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!”
But people will get rich on the hysteria. And guys like Steyer think that’s enough to get them elected President.
Then, take Joe Biden.
When he was Vice President to Barack Obama, his portfolio included the Ukraine. Yet he doesn’t understand why his neer’do well son, Hunter, suddenly popping up with a huge paying job with a suspicious Ukrainian gas company raises any red flags at all.
What a schumck.
Where do these people come from?
Well, trust me, it’s NOT like they are inspired by the concept of public service. Many if not most of them simply look down on their fellow Americans. They are under the misapprehension that we are too stupid to live our lives without their divine intercession. They also like the money and the notoriety.
That’s where the Adam Schiffs, the Eric Swalwells and, God help us, the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ come from and they will decide they have what it take to be the top dog soon. (Swalwell already has.)
What can America do?
To quote Nancy Reagan, “just say no” . These folks may be worse than street drugs. And the media will drop them like a hot rock if they lose a few elections. The media may have its favorites, but at the end of the day, it’s a business. No ratings, no money goodbye AOC and friends.
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
Before I get into how I think We the People of America should view the perverted version of the Ed Sullivan (or the Jerry Springer, your choice) show in the House of Representatives, I want to give you an update from my subject of last week, the Kabbage company.
After my column appeared, I got a phone call from an executive there and they very graciously acknowledged my point, that as a lender to small business, America’s largest employer, when they make an adverse decision, human beings should be involved. Ultimately, they were operating on bad artificial intelligence and they fixed it.
That is the hallmark of how good business people operate. Consider that as you see what the Democrat majority in the House is trying to do to our first businessman President.
And, on that note, let’s talk about Jerry Nadler’s inquisition against the President.
Now, keep in mind, that Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee should have been the committee to pursue the “impeachment” investigation as opposed to Adam Schiff’s House “Intelligence” Committee.
Basically, the Democrats have been thwarted at every turn in their jihad against the President—whose only impeachable offense was to actually win the 2016 election and threaten the status quo of the permanent establishment—and this is just a continuation of their effort to get rid of a threat which has put the establishment of both parties on Defcon Two.
They think that this…businessman…may be the President but he’s certainly not really the …President…and he can’t really make his own foreign policy.
Folks, what it gets down to is that people like Schiff, Nadler and the diplocrats I mentioned above think we’re stupid. Just like Hillary Clinton did.
They think—and sometimes actually come out and say—that we simply cannot be entrusted with the election of a President. That’s why they want to get rid of the Electoral College—so our votes would mean nothing.
Fortunately, the Republicans control the Senate. And when this show gets to the Senate, it will be like a little league baseball team taking on the Yankees.
Since Watergate, we have always known that the impeachment process is completely political. But, even in the Clinton mess, at least there was a violation of the law, even though it was a mistake on the part of the Republicans to use it as a political cudgel. Lying about your sex life is no more an impeachable offense than having no respect for Nadler. Or Schiff.
If, as the President has said, impeachment is simply going to become a part of the tool box for the most vicious of the elements of both parties, then we need to give them the political scare of their lives—kind of like Boris Johnson just gave the Labour party in Britain.
There is a classic example of what happens when you use political tricks to ignore the will of the people. Three years ago, the people in Great Britain voted to get out of the European Union. The Parliament screwed around for three years. Finally, the people had enough and in the recent election gave Prime Minister Boris Johnson a massive majority with instructions to get-r-done as Larry the Cable Guy would say it.
If the morons I wrote of above keep it up here, what do you think might happen in November of 2020?
Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
For a long time, I have mostly written in this space about the ridiculous Democrats in the House who, tilting at left-wing partisan windmills, are heading in the direction of impeaching President Trump thus almost guaranteeing his re-election in 2020 since there is no chance the Senate will remove him.
This week, however, I have stumbled into an equally ridicules situation which has no relationship with what is currently happening in Washington but could have a serious impact on America’s largest employer—small business.
You may have seen some TV commercials for a non-bank lender named Kabbage. It features actor Gary Cole playing a spokesman from 10 minutes in the future talking to some small business people. After they get the funding they needed, Cole pops in as even further in the future after they got the Gundelfinger Account.
My company has used Kabbage for something like three years.
It’s not a huge credit line but we have made every payment on a timely basis and they have never had any problem with us.
On December 2, we made our normal monthly payment. A few days later, I checked to make sure it was recorded properly. It was. But there was a note on the app screen which said, “You are not currently eligible to take a loan. Call us at 88xx-xxxx to fix this issue.”
So I did.
What they told me was that there was a 60 day hold on our account, the computer makes these decisions and there is no appeal because they don’t know the reason that the computer made the decision.
I asked to speak to an executive who authorized the computer to make that decision.
“Sir,” said the young lady, “That team is not customer facing.”
Seriously?
Not customer facing?
Now I need to make two points here. Nobody is obligated to lend you money any more that anybody is obligated to borrow money. This is a business transaction. You lend me money and I pay it back with interest.
But good business practice dictates that if you make a decision like that—which, by the way, you have every right to make—you pick up the phone and FACE THE CUSTOMER! Maybe your precious computer got the wrong—or no—information.
Kabbage is part of a new group of financial institutions called fintech.
It’s the latest new thing.
They have a proprietary algorithm so they can evaluate risk and make loans fast.
That’s all well and good. And, as welcome as that may be to help fund America’s largest employer, a lender you cannot talk to is nobody you want to do business with.
Suppose, as an example, you are coming up on a payroll and are just a bit short—something which is not unusual in the wide world of small business. You know you have that available in your Kabbage line. Only, when you go to use it, there’s a note, placed there by a computer for a reason nobody knows that you cannot use the money. That’s the sort of thing that can break a small business.
What was point number two that I was going to make?
Only that I made it clear that I was not mad at the nice young customer facing lady. I was mad at her company and then only because information is as important as cash in small business and if Kabbage can’t tell you why, it’s very difficult to want to continue to do business with them—even after the 60 day hold is over. Resigning the Gundelfinger account is a real possibility.
Now, we can get back to politics. But I’ll bet that Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein will see the logic in fixing this problem long before the Democrat morons in the House figure out that they are hamsters making the wheel go around. And I mean no insult to hamsters.
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
Whenever I hear some left-wing wacko spewing moronic hatred for President Trump, I think, Wow! If this President can make a whack-job like that hate him, he must be doing a pretty good job.
Think about it.
Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Juan Williams, Chris Matthews, Joe Scarboro, Mike Brezinski, Rachel Maddow, Chris Cuomo, Peggy Noonan, George Conway, Peter Strozk, Lisa Page, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Hillary Clinton, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Michael Gerson, Bill Kristol, Peter Wehner, Trevor Noah, Tom Hanks, Shakira, Russell Simmons, Rosie O’Donnell, Ricky Martin, Miley Cyrus, Mac Miller, Louis CK, John Oliver, John Legend, JK Rowling, George Clooney, Eva Longoria, Demi Lovato, Chrissy Teigen, Chris Brown, Joe Walsh (not the Eagles’ Joe Walsh, the phony politician Joe Walsh.)
Whew! And that’s mostly the rookie league. (Maybe Pelosi is AA.)
We haven’t yet gotten to the Democrat politicos running for the Democrat nomination. (Triple A)
There, you have one billionaire (Tom Steyer) who called Trump a “failure” in a TV spot he’s paying for himself, hopefully to get past 1 percent.
Then you have another billionaire, a former New York Mayor who just “apologized” for the stop and frisk policy he inherited from his predecessor—Trump’s personal lawyer—but cannot otherwise explain the dramatic drop in violent crime during his term.
If you look at just the list above, there are some common threads.
First are the overstuffed Hollywood types—some of whom I’ve only briefly heard of—who just know so much about politics that we should be overwhelmed by their intelligence quotients. Then we have the writers and TV personalities who fall into the category of “pundits”. They are trying to make a living by badmouthing the President. And, finally, we have the politicians who are green with envy. They should have his political skills.
Why do they hate this guy so much?
Well, he stands for the concept that this is the United States of America, as my father used to say, and any little boy or girl can grow up to be President or accomplish anything they want to accomplish by simply putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward.
Contrary to what the clowns on the list above would have you believe, Donald Trump is not successful because his father was rich. In fact, he went against the wishes of his father when he went into Manhattan real estate.
He’s successful because he took some giant risks.
Not everything he did worked.
His experience in Atlantic City as an example. Hillary Clinton famously asked in a debate, “I mean, ask yourself, how can anybody lose money running a casino? Really.”
Of course, she demonstrated her ignorance of that business because she asked that question without knowing that one of the two largest casino companies in the nation, Harrahs, was almost two years into Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. That’s right, the company now known as Caesars Entertainment because, yes, it happened to own Caesars Palace in both Las Vegas AND Atlantic City.
Caesars today operates approximately 47 casinos in 13 U.S. states and five countries, including the Caesars, Harrah’s, Horseshoe and Bally’s brands. When stupid people ask stupid rhetorical questions, they often get they asses handed to them.
I mean, ask yourself, how can you take any of the clowns I have listed above seriously?
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
f the Democrat jihad against President Donald Trump has shown us anything about the so-called Deep State it is that there is a class of professional bureaucrats—so called “experts”—who think they're accountable to…nobody.
Certainly not the President.
And they think of us as “the American People” in the pejorative. Not that they work for us. No, they work for some mythical country in which “the people” don’t get a vote because we’re far too stupid to have any actual say in things like foreign affairs, or military issues or trade or the law.
They populate the Departments of State, Justice, Defense and, even the White House itself.
And many of these people don’t have the common sense that God gave a goose.
That was all on display during the Schiff Show, the last two weeks. The question you need to answer, now that the arrogance of these people has been fully on display is where do we go from here?
There is still some question—not much—as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi is willing to endure the inevitable results of an impeachment. Assuming she is—or just cannot avoid it—Donald Trump will most likely be re-elected for the same reason he won in the first place. That is, to drain the swamp of the arrogance exhibited by the so-called deep state.
A swamp that the House Democrats put on full display through their patron saint Adam Schiff.
And, like the Kremlin, this group of governmental super studs has their own newspaper. Only, instead of Pravda, theirs is the Washington Post. With headlines like “Trump’s GOP support hardens despite damning impeachment testimony”.
Seriously?
Had I written a headline like that DURING WATERGATE, I would have been hustled off to a public relations firm if I wanted to continue my career in the media. The writers and editors at the Post have become nothing but pimps and pimpettes (call them “presstitutes” like they do in the Phillipines) for the group of deep staters and Democrats I have described above.
But, again, they all seem to have forgotten that this is a very large nation with a huge silent majority that has simply had enough.
You can take a map of the United States and find the WalMarts where you can “smell the Trump support” West of the Hudson River, South of the Cook County line and East of the Los Angeles County line. In the last election that produced 63,000,000 votes AFTER NBC leaked a private conversation with Billy Bush which would have certainly disqualified most candidates.
How bad a light does that cast the deep state?
The fact is that you, I and our neighbors have had enough. We are tired of being called stupid and not well educated. We are tired of a world where common sense is derided as “impeachable” by geniuses like Schiff and his little buddy Eric Swalwell.
And to put the cherry on top of the sundae, the President saw that the rules of engagement for the wars we are fighting in the Middle East were being used to ruin the lives of service members (but never those with stars on their shoulders) who actually killed the enemy. We wanted to have a war but make actually killing the enemy illegal.
So, he issued two complete pardons and a commutation.
Immediately upon those actions, some two star pissant admiral in the Navy told a Navy Seal who had his sentence overturned by the President that he would face a board to remove him from the Seals.
That board will convene shortly. Or not. What do you think will happen?
Can you say “military-industrial complex”? Well President Trump can say “civilian control” and did. Ask the now former Secretary of the Navy.
Want to try and remove him? As they used to say on a game show—which is what this really is—COME ON DOWN!
Indeed.
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
If you ever wondered why Donald J. Trump was elected our 45th President, you only needed to watch the testimony last week of William Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch.
If you ever wondered what Washington based bureaucrats do to represent us, you only needed to watch the testimony last week of William Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch.
And, if you ever wondered why real Americans refer to Washington as a swamp which needs to be drained, you only needed to watch the testimony last week of William Taylor, George Kent, and Marie Yovanovitch.
Taylor, Kent and Yovanovitch aren’t inherently bad people. But they live in their own little worlds where what they think is more important than what the President—whose pleasure they serve at—thinks. And they are an integral part of what former (and the late) President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about on his way out—the military, industrial complex.
They have—and freely admit—zero first hand experience of the subject matter allegedly being “investigated” by Adam Schiff.
Now, diplomacy—in context—is a good thing. In theory, that is what keeps mushroom clouds away from Peoria, Illinois, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Reno, Nevada among other places where you can “smell the Trump support” at the local WalMart Supercenter. But it is the President and Commander in Chief who gets to set our foreign policy—not some diplomat at State who serves at the pleasure of the President. Any more than an FBI director who also serves at the pleasure of the President. And the real world is not an episode of Madam Secretary or the West Wing.
The truth is that impeachment is purely political.
The House, if it has the votes, can impeach the President because it does not like the cut of his suit.
Ask the dumb Republicans who impeached Bill Clinton in 1998.
How do you impeach a President who has less than two years left in his second term? But Newt Gingrich did it and ended up bringing dishonor on the institution for no good reason. And did I mention that the Senate told him to pound sand? In an almost predictable vote mostly along party lines, the Senate fell way short of the 67 votes necessary to remove him from office.
So, let’s assume that the currently sitting House goes ahead with impeachment.
What do you think might happen to these guys—Adam Schiff et al—who have such a flimsy case against Trump in a Republican controlled Senate?
The Senate vote will be utterly predictable. And that’s assuming the Senate doesn’t dismiss the charges without a trial. (If this is what passes for an impeachment investigation, who’s to say the Senate cannot hold a 20 minute trial to dismiss the charges?)
The anger from the 63,000,000 voters who elected Trump and told both the media and the Washington establishment, “Enough already!” will be palpable enough to elect him again and take that anger out on the House.
People like Schiff and his little buddy Eric Swalwell may not realize this, but they are doing their best to make the House of Representatives irrelevant to the real Americans outside of the swamp. It would appear that these guys were beat up every day when they were freshmen in college by the seniors and now, they are going to show all of us.
I wasn’t in the room when our founding fathers wrote the impeachment clause, but I read a lot and I have serious questions that Adam Schiff’s version—along with Rashida Tliab’s “impeach the motherf**ker”—were what they had in mind. I’m pretty sure when they wrote the term “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors” they weren’t thinking about a President doing his job.
So my question is simple.
What will the left do when what I have predicted actually happens?
Self immolation?
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Fred Weinberg is a guest columnist and the CEO of USA Radio Network. His views and opinions are his own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of GCN. Fred's weekly column can be read all over the internet. You can subscribe at www.pennypressnv.com. This is an edited version of his column, reprinted with permission.
Apparently, AT&T bought CNN thinking it was some kind of an entertainment outlet.
It is, but only to those of us who understand that Ted Turner’s creation has devolved into something which no longer resembles, in any way, journalism.
How bad is CNN’s coverage of the President?
Well, depending on who you choose to believe, studies from Harvard to the Media Research Center place the ratio of positive to negative coverage between 91% negative to 93%. Every media analyst agrees. CNN’s coverage is so biased that it can hardly be called coverage.
