Mike Huckabee on moral equivalency

 "I caught Brit Hume on Fox News yesterday, making the observation that watching the revolting cheering of the anti-Semitic carnage in Israel has been clarifying, like turning over a rock and discovering all kinds of disgusting moral equivalencies. He said we’re learning that some people we thought just had slightly unusual or “exotic” views actually have quite astonishing views.

That’s a good point, except the insane and violent extremism of the modern left wasn’t a shock to some of us, who’ve been warning about it for years.

For people who haven’t been raised right, who have been failed by the education system and don’t know what morality is, here’s a clue: There is no “moral equivalency” between terrorists who murder, torture and rape innocent people and their victims."

Episode 3 for Tucker, and Fox fumes

Tucker Carlson released his 3rd episode and "claimed that comments Trump made during a 2016 Republican primary debate marked the exact point at which "permanent Washington" determined to throw Trump in prison. Carlson featured video footage of Trump saying the U.S. should never have been in Iraq, that America had "destabilized the Middle East," that the claims made about weapons of mass destruction had been a lie, "and they knew there were none."

Carlson said that Trump's statements regarding weapons of mass destruction being a lie "sealed his fate."

Carlson said that Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and Sen. Lindsey Graham had described Trump as a "visionary genius up until the moment he lost power." Carlson said "then they unsheathed their real agenda — as always the neocon war agenda. And they piled on with maximum force." (from Mike Huckabee newsletter)

News of the day

" Criminals discovered that 2011 to 2021 Kias and 2015 to 2021 Hyundais equipped with ignitions that use a physical key, rather than a wireless key fob and push-button, could be started by using the tip of a USB cable, and the technique was posted online last year. Tens of thousands of the cars have been stolen since, some of them by teens not even old enough to have a driver's license." Fox News

And speaking of keys and stealing, I've been locked out of my Facebook account. A friend asked if it was a hack to steal my information, but I suspect that because I've been a member for over 10 years, the old timers never gave away as much as the newer enrollees. Now it wants a cell number so it can check to see if it's really me signing in. Hmmm. Sounds like a way to harvest phone numbers and sell them. My friend Connie (I have her e-mail address) told me it has happened to her, but she is able to use her cell phone to log-in, so maybe I'll try that. Other friends (Justine, Bev, and Dena) say they've not had that message.

And speaking of hacks, don't ever try that one to silence the beep on your microwave. It really works, and now how to get it back! You never know how important they are until you lose them.

Mike Huckabee suggests the government's motives for taking Mike Lindell's cellphone and what's happening with inflation. Morning Edition - September 22 - Latest News - Mike Huckabee As a retiree on a fixed income we do worry about inflation. And as an American, I am concerned about how the Biden administration is punishing anyone who questioned the 2020 election--although not all the Democrats like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, or Stacy Abrams who questioned elections they didn't win before 2020.

"A federal watchdog on Thursday found that fraudsters may have stolen $45.6 billion from the nation’s unemployment insurance program during the pandemic, using the Social Security numbers of dead people and other tactics to deceive and bilk the U.S. government." Washington Post.  Am I shocked?  Nope. There was so much graft, greed and corruption in the Covid pandemic it's just crazy. 

Huckabee is alarmed by Trudeau's tyranny, U.S. silence

 

"Can we see the tyranny that's already here? by Mike Huckabee

Perhaps, for Americans, the most shocking thing about the autocratic power-grab in Canada is the failure of our own government to speak out –- forcefully –- against it. Instead, the current administration is engaged in a similar process of trampling dissent, right here in the good old U.S.A.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau didn’t simply adopt temporary “emergency powers” to clear the streets of big rigs, as much of an overreach as that was. What he did appears to be even more serious, as he's shown no intention of relinquishing those powers now that the protest has been broken up.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ottawa-blockades-over-but-canadas-trudeau-says-emergency-powers-still-needed-01645469116?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo

In an update to the above story, the leftists in the Canadian parliament have shown themselves to be accomplices of this tyrant, voting to allow him to extend his “emergency” powers AFTER the emergency is over. Read this and be shocked.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canadian-parliament-votes-to-extend-emergencies-act-for-30-days/#slide-1

And Robert Spencer at PJ Media has a must-read commentary on what has just happened there. Note especially the new regulations for crowdfunding and payment platforms. He’s right: this is how democracies die, by starving dissenters financially.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/02/20/democracy-dies-in-canada-trudeau-government-to-make-some-of-their-new-authoritarian-measures-permanent-n1560716

On Monday, Tucker Carlson interviewed a man who'd been repeatedly kneed by police in Ottawa after cooperatively climbing down from his rig, kneeling before police and putting his hands behind his head. Ironically, this man, named Csaba Vizi, had come to Canada after fleeing Communist Romania. Video of him inside his truck shows him calmly describing to police how he’s going to surrender peacefully and get on his knees. Then he does so, and waits for them to take him away. But as he tells it, he heard someone yell, “Arrest him! Arrest him!” and he was pushed down onto his stomach. They piled on top of him. We see from other video taken from farther away that one cop very forcefully kneed him, over and over, as he lay on the ground. “I feel like I was beaten, but I took it like a man,” he said.

Yes, they had injured him, he said. “They break my body a little bit, but not my spirit.”

He said that when he came to Canada from Romania, he loved it there, especially the friendly people. He was “so happy.” It was like that for 20 years, but the last couple of years have been different. “It’s impossible to live here anymore,” he said.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6298431733001#sp=show-clips

A quote from George Orwell featured Monday on Instapundit seems apt: “I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

It’s a shame to see a policeman treat a compliant ‘worker’ such as Csaba Vizi as a natural enemy. Those chilling video images depict an unforgivable abuse of power.

By coincidence, that Orwell quote led into discussion of an article by Glenn Greenwald that I was already planning to highlight in today’s commentary. Greenwald has a new piece on Substack called “The Neoliberal War On Dissent in the West.”

Greenwald comes from what used to be the political left; he would call himself a classical liberal, someone who believes in freedom and free thought, religious freedom, civil rights, equality under the law (as opposed to “equity”), and a government limited by the Constitution. But in the 21st century, classical liberalism has given way to “progressive” authoritarian neoliberalism, with its rigid beliefs, two-tier “justice” system and strict censorship. He knows these people well. And he has a big reality check for us.

We in America have no problem recognizing tyranny across the globe: A Chinese tank sitting ready to crush a lone protester in Tiananmen Square. An East German wiretapper spying on the lives of others behind the Berlin Wall before it fell. The censorship and even criminalization of all dissent. “Re-education” camps. Journalists silenced. We know it when we see it if it’s someplace faraway.

But when it’s right here in front of us, in a DEMOCRACY, we might have a little more trouble recognizing it for what it is: the same kind of tyranny. And if we do see it, there’s still something faintly heretical to some of us about admitting it out loud. It’s as if the idea of this happening in a Western democracy were so absurd it can’t be real. I’d liken this situation to one in which a horrendous crime has happened in your own neighborhood. “This just doesn’t happen HERE,” you likely think. Your neighborhood has always seemed...different. When it happens somewhere else, you take notice, but when it’s two houses down, you’re in shock.

When we were children and pledged allegiance to the Flag, and said “one nation under God,” we took for granted that the freedom given to us by God would always remain, that America was special, shielded by Divine power. It had existed for about 200 years, which to a child is an eternity. As we grew older, we knew there were wars and that freedom can be taken away by other human beings, but, other than the vague atomic threat from faraway Soviet Russia, we still had that feeling of comfort and safety inside our own borders. This was America.

We assumed that the Bill Of Rights protected us as individuals, even if we disagreed with the majority. Our country was set up as a democratic republic, not a pure, majority-rule democracy that might be prone to “popular” uprisings that squelched the rights of the minority. And it has lasted that way for a long time.

But now, even in America, we’re seeing despotism. It’s easy to point to situations in which “due process” doesn’t even apply. In civil asset forfeiture, for example, the government will seize your assets before you’ve even been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. It’s blatantly unconstitutional. Justin Trudeau has done something similar in Canada, freezing assets not only of the protesters but even of people who donated a few dollars to buy them meals. When we witness such tyranny in, say, Russia, we see it for what it is. IT’S THE SAME THING HERE.

Greenwald cites the decade-long repression of Julian Assange as another example. Then-Attorney General Eric Holder, after investigating for years, failed to find evidence of criminality, but financial institutions such as MasterCard, VISA, PayPal and Bank of America were pressured by the Senate Homeland Security Committee into terminating WikiLeaks’ accounts, crippling it.

Financial pressure is a standard weapon these days, with the government joining forces with corporations. GoFundMe tried to steal---I mean, divert, millions in donations intended for the truckers. When GiveSendGo raised millions more, Canadian courts blocked their distribution. The financial system is being used to crush dissent.

Greenwald notes recent protests against the Spanish government by people in Barcelona who wanted more autonomy. The government came down hard on the protesters, treating them like terrorists, seditionists and insurrectionists. (Sound familiar?) Protesters were treated violently, arrested en masse, charged with terrorism and sedition and given long prison sentences.

And when Julian Assange spoke up about how wrong this was, Ecuador rescinded his asylum at their London embassy. They cut off his internet access. Then they allowed London police to come and arrest him.

Anyway, Greenwald makes a critical point: The despotism we so easily recognize around the world is becoming entrenched right here, right now. We can't permit it. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-neoliberal-war-on-dissent-in?utm_source=url

Ashli Babbitt by Mike Huckabee (from his newsletter)

 If you’ve watched the documentary CAPITOL PUNISHMENT, about the Capitol Hill rally and riot of January 6, 2021, you’ve seen the video of Ashli Babbitt smiling and happy, enjoying herself immensely as she participates in a march to the Capitol building. She is effervescent. Even on that cold, gray day, she exudes positive energy.

But you’ve also seen the video of her just a little while later, inside the building, caught in a crush of people on a stair landing and trying to crawl through a broken-out window to the other side of a closed door when she is shot to death.

How to reconcile these two visions? Could this smiling young (unarmed) woman suddenly morph into an angry rioter, a vandal, an insurrectionist, trying to breach the Speaker’s Lobby and prevent Congress from doing its job? Her husband, Aaron Babbitt, looking at a frame-by-frame analysis conducted by The Epoch Times, says no.

That is not what happened.

“After repeatedly forcing myself to watch the murder of my wife,” he told The Epoch Times, “I have come to my own conclusion that Ashli came to a point of realization that she was in a very bad situation and the police weren’t acting appropriately to what she was witnessing.”

He said, “I know my wife very well. She is not destructive. She was not there to hurt anybody.”

“It all comes down to which mental angle a person views it from,” he said. “If they hate Ashli because they believe the lies, that’s all they see: her being part of a mob. Us who love her, know her, know every action and emotion she was displaying --- she realized a minute before her death she was not in a friendly situation and something very wrong was occurring.”

In fact, the video strongly suggests that she was trying to stop the violence, not join in. She had gone up some stairs and, only about five minutes before she was killed, was casually talking and laughing with three U.S. Capitol Police officers. (She had served in the Air Force as a military police officer herself.) But then more people started coming up behind her. Members of a U.S. Capitol Police Containment Emergency Response Team rushed up the stairs as well, in response to a false alarm –- repeat, false –- of shots fired. (No shots were ever fired except by Ashli’s killer.) She was trapped in that mass of people outside the door.

It’s evident in the video that she was horrified by what was suddenly happening. She confronted a rioter identified as Zachary Alam, getting between him and one of the officers guarding the doors to the Speaker’s Lobby. He turned away from her and punched a window in one of the doors with his hand, then punched it again with a helmet to smash it. Her face registered alarm.

According to husband Aaron, an audio analysis of the video shows that she was shouting, “Stop! No! Don’t! Wait!”

Aaron says she was trying to climb through the broken glass because she was in fear for her life. She was trying to escape. U.S. Capitol Hill Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot her as she was partway through the window frame, and she fell backwards onto the landing.

The officers who were supposed to be guarding that door were not there. “The only way we’d ever know why Ashli felt the window was the only way out is if she had been detained by one of the countless police officers that abandoned their post in front of those doors, Aaron said. “That did not happen. She was murdered and robbed of the chance to tell her side of the story.”

There are conflicting reports as to whether Byrd shouted warnings before he shot her. It was so noisy in the stairwell, it’s likely no one could hear anyone else, so we might never know. And Byrd refused to be interviewed or even give a statement for the Internal Affairs “investigation,” which apparently was fine with the investigators ("investigators"?) because they no-billed him, anyway. “We have declined criminal prosecution of the above officer as a result of this incident,” wrote Acting U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips as part of a three-sentence dismissal.

But Ashli’s family is suing. Their lawyer, DC attorney Terry Roberts, said, “If you’re acting in self-defense, you have to tell somebody you’re acting in self-defense, or it should be quite plain from the circumstances. It clearly was not plain in these circumstances. I don’t believe the officer acted in self-defense at all.”

Another witness, Tayler Hansen, told The Epoch Times that Alam broke out that window because HE wanted to get to the Speaker’s Lobby. He said the only reason Alam didn’t climb through the window before Babbitt is that his glasses got knocked down his face in the scuffle and he had had to stop to reposition them. “He was about to go through that window,” Hansen said. “It was his idea. He was the one shattering it.”

Here’s more about Alam and how the FBI tracked him down. They say if you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all, so we won’t say anything at all.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9225389/Man-filmed-smashing-windows-Capitol-rioter-Ashli-Babbitt-arrested.html

In contrast, there’s a lot of good to say about Ashli. Hansen, an independent journalist who knew her and was walking close behind her inside the Capitol, echoed her husband in describing her. “The reality of it is, Ashli wasn’t a violent person. She was a good person, but they’ve demonized her to become this domestic terrorist that she has never been,” he said. “She served her country for 14 years. That’s just insane to me that they can get away with pushing this narrative. They’ve done that by suppressing first-hand witnesses like me.”

So, why had the Capitol Police left their posts at the door to the Speaker’s Lobby? One of them told Internal Affairs investigators that he left because he feared for his life and hadn’t wanted to have to use deadly force. If this was a situation in which officers were afraid for their own lives, it’s easy to imagine Ashli feeling the need to escape it as well.

According to a U.S. Capitol Police sergeant, Byrd and one other officer had taken positions on the other side of the door and had their guns out. This can be seen in the video, but it doesn’t appear that it was visible to Ashli. For her, the shot would have come out of nowhere.

Incidentally, the video that is providing so much detail was shot by the mysterious John Sullivan, also known as Jayden X, who has said he was there to “document” the event. Who he’s associated with and why he was there are questions for another time, but it’s fortuitous that we have his record of what happened. Otherwise, all we'd have to go by was what the feds and their media minions told us.

The Epoch Times story is a premium report, but ZeroHedge has a detailed account.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/stop-no-dont-babbitt-tried-stop-attack-capitol-speakers-lobby-video-analysis-suggests

Is it Covid or the lockdown causing rise in mental problems in children?

Surgeon General alarmed by rise in child suicides triggered by pandemic – HotAir

"U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is shedding some light on a growing crisis of child mental health issues brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The pandemic has produced an epidemic of mental health challenges for young people. As the second year of the pandemic ends, the state of children’s mental health has hospitals, teachers, and health professionals thinking an epidemic has already arrived."

Mike Huckabee has an alternative viewpoint.

"That headline, though, needs some rewriting. As Prof. Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit pointed out, all those mental health issues weren’t “triggered by the pandemic,” they were triggered by the government’s authoritarian “lockdown everything” reaction to the pandemic, even when dealing with schools full of kids nearly all of whom are basically immune to the disease.

At least the incredible damage wrought by the “expert” class’s wrongheaded overreaction to COVID is finally starting to be recognized, even by someone from CBS News. It’s too bad that CBS felt it had to censor its own reporter for speaking the truth, but having someone from that network grasp the truth and speak up about it is at least a baby step in the right direction."

CBS Edits Out Own Reporter SLAMMING School Closures Causing Mental Health Crisis | Newsbusters According to this Newsbusters' article Jan Crawford "slammed our elected officials and public health experts for “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children” and the subsequent mental health crisis."  Her comments were edited out of the Face the Nation panel.

Christmas and adoption

Mike Huckabee in today's newsletter writes about adoption.

"One of the hardest jobs a parent faces is answering all those questions kids ask that sometimes force us to think about things that hadn’t occurred to us as adults. Mary from Ohio wrote:

“Our 6-year-old grandson, Isaiah, who was adopted from Guatemala, posed this question to his parents: ‘Was Baby Jesus adopted?’ Wow! The answer is so deep, and leads to so many other Biblical references to adoption. Joseph wasn't Jesus' father - God was, but Joseph raised him here on Earth. When we accept Jesus, we're adopted into His Heavenly Family, so we're all brothers and sisters. When we become a member of Jesus' family, we're also adopted into the Family of His chosen people, the Jews. So...it seems to me, not only was Jesus adopted, He was the author of Adoption. From the mouths of babes.”

Thank you, Mary. I have a feeling that as that special little boy has grown up, he’s given your family a lot to think about and a lot to be thankful for. And here’s a story that highlights another aspect of adoption, from the other point of view:

Tia from Kansas wrote that Christmas was always the hardest time of year to face, until she discovered a very personal connection to the true meaning of Christmas:

"When I was 16, I was alone and scared on Christmas -- having a baby that I decided to give up for adoption. For years afterward, I didn't like Christmas and never did much during the season. But the Lord changed my heart, showing me that I gave a beautiful gift to some family, my only son, just like He did. I've enjoyed and celebrated Christmas ever since."

Thank you, Tia. I know your son's adoptive parents would thank you a million times over, if they could, for the greatest Christmas gift they ever received. I’m sure Mary from Ohio would agree."

Morning Edition - December 24 - Latest News - Mike Huckabee

The Laptop from Hell--summary by Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee: Laptop from Hell--Election interference

"You know the basic story of how an apparently dazed and confused Hunter left his laptop at a computer repair shop in Delaware in the spring of 2019, only a few days before his father announced he was running for President, and how the FBI ended up with it in what I like to call “protective custody” (they were protecting Joe). Not only is it filled with video evidence of grotesque debauchery, but it also shows how Hunter and the family sold access to his powerful dad. In her book, Devine clarifies exactly what is on the laptop, what it tells about President Biden and the whole Biden family, and what China knows.

The publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes her book as “a treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs, and voice recordings, spanning a decade, [providing] the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine, and beyond, despite his repeated denials.”

Just as importantly, “it exposes the coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives to stifle the New York Post’s coverage, in a chilling exercise of raw political power three weeks before the 2020 election.” Recall that as the election loomed, Facebook and Twitter censored the breaking NYP laptop story, ensuring that most voters wouldn’t know about the Biden “family business” when they cast their ballots. The online reach of the NYP is 80 million! Social media essentially used their control of the news to interfere with the election. They wanted to shape the outcome, and they did.

(Note: incidentally, another new book that ties Big Tech to the election outcome is Mollie Hemingway’s RIGGED. There’s some good holiday reading material available right now!)

Recall also that when House Democrats were impeaching President Trump for allegedly even mentioning an investigation of the Bidens in a phone call to the president of Ukraine –- a fake whistleblower report turned this into something it wasn’t; fortunately, there was a transcript –- the laptop would have contained evidence showing this corruption was real. But the FBI kept quiet.
Senior intelligence officials covered it up, too. Just five days after the NYP published its first Hunter story, then-CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper led 50 former intel officials in signing an open letter, published in Politico, saying the material on the laptop had “all the earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This was made up --- they apparently hadn't even seen it.

Now, more than a year after Devine published her first stories about the laptop, she has a new commentary in the NYP that times nicely with the release of her book. She notes that many of those who voted for Biden are disenchanted now, as he has turned out to be a very different person from the man they thought they were voting for."

Media helped hide the real Joe Biden by censoring Hunter stories: Devine (nypost.com)

Critical Race Theory has bad effect on employee morale

Mike Huckabee: "Cigna workers told the paper [Washington Examiner] that they are forced to undergo “sensitivity training” that they find to be racist and discriminatory. They aren’t just made to feel guilty of “white privilege,” but also “gender privilege,” “religious privilege” (if they’re Christians), heterosexual privilege, age privilege and on and on. There are internal complaints that it’s “disgusting and wrong.” There’s even a list of words that are banned for possibly triggering someone (I guess I’m insensitive due to my whiteness, but I can’t even imagine why “Hip Hip Hooray!” is banned at birthday parties but “Hooray! Yay!” is deemed “inclusive.”)

Cigna offers employees lessons in the “systemic racism” of the US taken right out of the debunked “1619 Project” and recommends that employees read such divisive racist books as “White Fragility” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” Worst of all, workers claim the company is engaging in openly discriminatory hiring practices in which minorities are hired despite a lack of qualifications while highly qualified applicants are rejected solely because they’re white. One employee complained of positions being left open for an inordinate amount of time just because the only applicants were white."

If your book club, church or next door neighbor recommends "White Fragility," ask them to justify their selection or recommendation.  Ask them if they consider themselves a racist or just other people.  Ask them how this will calm or reduce racial tension.  If they do identify as a racist, ask them what sort of changes they will be making.

Are there still rational Democrats?

 Asked Mike Huckabee in today's newsletter

"In recent weeks, Rep. Gabbard has backed bills to protect girls’ sports from males claiming they’re female, to bar abortions of babies that have developed to the point of being able to feel pain and to require doctors to give a base level of care to babies born alive during abortion procedures. Not long ago, all three of those measures would have struck the average American as unnecessary because how could anyone in their right mind think that a boy who claims to feel like a girl really was a girl, that doctors shouldn’t give life-saving care to any newborn baby, or that babies in late stages of development should be allowed to be butchered in the womb?

Unfortunately, we've not talking about people in their right minds, we're talking about people with left minds. Today, the Democratic Party has become so radical in its embrace of transgenderism and abortion that Rep. Gabbard is being vilified by the left for tiptoeing even one inch outside their approved circle of insanity.

Rep. Gabbard was a guest on my TBN show when she was running for President and being treated very badly by her own Party (that claims to stand up for women, but only certain women with certain beliefs.) We disagree on most issues, but we had a friendly conversation about things on which we found common ground. I’m sure she was vilified by the left just for talking to me, too.

It’s long been said that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. I’m hoping and praying that Rep. Gabbard, if she stays in the Democratic Party at all, represents the start of a coming awakening and revolt by Democrats with common sense who are tired of having their grasp of reality mugged by radical left insanity."

I thought Gabbard was a three time winner in the primaries--a female, minority veteran.  But it wasn't to be so, instead we got a senile old white guy with 40+ years in the biz (and now compromised by his China connections) and an Indian-Jamaican American with a very bad record as a prosecutor that not even 1% of Democrats wanted in the primary, so she called them all racists.  Well, Mike, I hope you're right.  It would be good to see some sanity.

Deep differences in our country

Mike Huckabee: "The response to the coronavirus has revealed some deep differences in our country. In some states, governors, county executives and mayors have acted with a heavy hand in restricting the lives and livelihoods of citizens. Sometimes it just didn’t make sense.

In Virginia, Governor Ralph Northam, the governor who once wore blackface and did Michael Jackson impersonations, thought it was okay to keep the liquor stores open, but not the churches. He believed that abortion clinics should be open, but not elective surgery to have a hip replacement or even a dentist visit to get a tooth filled.

Governor Whitmer of Michigan thought going into a supermarket was okay, but not sitting in a fishing boat in the middle of a deserted lake. You could buy a hammer or saw, but couldn’t get your lawn mowed. How those policies made anyone safe is beyond me.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was heaped with praise by the media for his long-winded daily press briefings that were televised to the other 49 states that really weren’t that interested, yet his decision to place Covid-19 patients in nursing homes led to a tragically high death rate in those nursing homes.

FL Governor Ron DeSantis, who oversees a population larger than NY and with far more older citizens (many of whom had escaped New York’s high taxes, horrible traffic, high costs, and bad weather) was vilified by the media for not caring, but yet the COVID death rate in FL is about 10% that of New York. He took a very different approach in allowing local governments to drive what stayed open and what was closed and was excoriated for it by the press goons, but sure looks like he was right and they look like FAKE NEWS!"

Quid pro quo or Quid pro Joe?

The “Ukraine Quid Pro Quo Impeachment” story is collapsing so fast that trying to keep up with all the developments is like trying to provide real-time play-by-play of an empty building being imploded with TNT.  Mike Huckabee

It’s fascinating to watch two or three points of view on this.  If you watch Mark Levin or listen to Rush Limbaugh, you’d think all the Democrats are total idiots, scum with nothing to do but set traps.  Then if you catch one of the alphabet broadcasts, or CNN talking heads, they have Trump all but out of office and in jail.  Yet they are all looking at the same documents, watching the same hearings.

 https://www.mikehuckabee.com/latest-news?id=AF4B0305-8E8A-4A2A-BB56-8817F425D8B2&s=TTS7

The new development in this story is that ABC actually retracted their fake news instead of doubling down on it, which puts them a rung above many other media outlets on the journalistic integrity ladder.

 https://www.westernjournal.com/abc-forced-issue-correction-big-ukraine-story-crumbles/

Quote of the Day

Churchill or Trump?

Which of the following things WERE SAID about Trump, and which ones were REFERENCES  to Churchill?

He’s a belligerent bully who would use the military against union strikers.

He’s an outdated throwback to a type of paranoid conservativism that places confrontation over diplomacy.

He’s a racist, an imperialist and a Muslim hater.

He’s a lying self-aggrandizer who claimed to be the lone voice speaking up for making his country strong again when that wasn’t true.

He thought Hitler and Mussolini had their good points.

He’s a war criminal who didn’t care if bombs he ordered to be dropped killed civilians.

He’s a hothead who wants to launch an unprovoked nuclear strike on his enemies.

He was blasted by a major newspaper for “startling the world” with his “outrageous propositions.”

He’s mentally unfit for office, but refuses to step down.

He doesn’t care if brown people starve.

He was described by one prominent politician from another country as being worse than Hitler, Mao or Stalin.

Trick question—all were said about Churchill.  Mike Huckabee newsletter, January 3, 2018

Many Democrats believe churches are the problem, but media are OK!

"If you still wonder why liberal Democrats can’t get elected except in deep blue urban areas (hint: it’s not a Russian conspiracy) and why they seem so out of touch with everyday working Americans, a new Pew Research Center survey may hold a clue. It found that 36% of Democrats believe that churches have a negative impact on American society. Among liberal Democrats, that jumps to 44%. Only 40% of liberals think that churches have a positive impact on society. By contrast, just 14% of Republicans have a negative view of churches. And what do a majority of liberals think does have a positive impact on American society? Fifty-one percent said the national news media do. Enough said." Mike Huckabee

Why the swamp can't be drained in DC

Mike Huckabee writes:

"This is why anyone with common sense opposes the appointment of special prosecutors in all but the most extreme cases. Robert Mueller has hired 13 high-powered attorneys at taxpayer expense, with more on the way. One early estimate of the cost runs to around $100 million. This is to look into alleged Trump-Russia collusion for which months of investigations have turned up no evidence at all (indeed, it’s smelling more and more like a hoax concocted to hamstring and delegitimize Trump while covering up Hillary’s embarrassing loss) and to investigate whether Trump obstructed justice in trying to stop an investigation that he has the absolute legal power to stop but he didn't stop it.

With that many lawyers eating up that much time and tax money, special counsels are under intense pressure to find something – anything – to charge someone with. That’s when the investigations start expanding like the Blob. People start getting prison sentences for misremembering a detail while giving testimony, like Scooter Libby, or Martha Stewart, who was never charged with insider trading but was imprisoned for misleading investigators by denying a crime that she was never even charged with. We’re likely to enter a new phase, where the daily political news will start reading like a Kafka novel. Or, ironically, like something out of Russia, except from the era when Stalin’s henchman Lavrentiy Beria railroaded his political rivals into prison with the motto, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

This is the swamp voters sent Trump to drain, but if he’s not very careful and doesn’t move quickly, his Administration will get sucked down into the muck before they can drain it."

In my opinion, this is like the show trials of the 1930s in the USSR.

Springsteen and Youngstown, Ohio

Mike Huckabee reports on Springsteen and his (long forgotten) ties to Youngstown, Ohio): “Bruce Springsteen must be taking career advice from the Dixie Chicks. During a concert on foreign soil (Australia), he implied that he was embarrassed by America’s President, then sang a song suggesting it was because Trump hung up on Australia’s Prime Minister – a dubious story from an unnamed source that both parties to the phone call strongly denied.

This is hardly Bruce’s first jab at Trump. Having campaigned hard for Hillary, he’s also on record as calling Trump incompetent and a “moron,” although he did recently add a caveat that that there are “plenty of good, solid folks that voted for Donald Trump.” I’ve said this before, but if he really wants to be a voice for beleaguered working people, he should do what I do: spend time talking to them instead of celebrities, politicians and Rolling Stone writers.

I’d suggest starting with Joe Marshall Jr. He’s a retired Ohio steelworker who inspired Springsteen’s song “Youngstown,” often hailed by liberals for its sad depiction of the problems of laid-off factory workers in an outsourced-jobs world. In the last election, Marshall was a strong Trump backer. He told the New York Times that the Democrats “failed Youngstown” with overbearing regulations that drove jobs away. Springsteen said he wrote his song after reading about Marshall in a book. Might I suggest talking to Marshall, and other Trump-voting factory workers like him, face-to-face? Judging from the way Bruce fell for one of the countless anti-Trump fake news stories, it appears that he’s not making very good choices of reading material.”

http://occupydemocrats.com/2017/02/03/bruce-springsteen-just-apologized-australia-trumps-behalf-best-way/

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2017/02/02/even-the-mexican-government-is-calling-out-the-ap-for-inaccurately-reporting-call-with-trump-n2280214

Some history on the National Security Council, by Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee writes in his e-mail today about the apoplectic media reaction to the NSC:

"After Trump announced his reshaping of the National Security Council, something that every President does, the media went ballistic, until Press Secretary Sean Spicer showed them a virtually identical Obama-era presidential memo on the NSC that they hadn’t criticized at all. Part of the outrage centered on Trump not including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Director of National Intelligence in the formal NSC group, but Spicer said that's just to give them leeway to skip meetings that don't pertain to their fields. The media also blasted Trump for not including the CIA, even though they haven't been included since the DNI position was created in 2005. There was also much foaming at the mouth over Trump's including political strategist Steve Bannon, just as Obama had included David Axelrod. Critics pointed out that Bush didn’t include Karl Rove in NSC meetings. But at Instapundit, historian Austin Bay noted that Bush had military experience and Rove didn’t, while Bannon has military experience and Trump doesn’t, which would make Bannon’s advice more valuable."

But that's too logical--and based on history.  

And NPR nitpicking at the make-up. Notice the verbs. http://www.npr.org/2017/01/30/512489785/fact-check-spin-aside-trumps-national-security-council-has-a-very-big-change

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/30/white-house-defends-national-security-reorganization-steve-bannon/97242792/

These people REALLY hate Steve Bannon!
 

 

Obama's 8 years by Mike Huckabee

"The final numbers on the eight-year Obama economy are in, and they also constitute the final nails in that shoddily-made coffin. Fourth quarter GDP growth for 2016 clocked in at a feeble 1.9%. That means Obama officially earned an inglorious place in US presidential history by presiding over eight straight years of GDP growth below 3%.

Investors Business Daily crunched the final numbers, and they are grim. While Obama and his defenders strained their backs taking bows for “saving the economy” and creating millions of jobs, the best spin you can put on their efforts is that they were “below average.” Compared to average GDP growth across US history, GDP under Obama was $2.4 trillion less than average for any other eight-year period, which reflects $19,000 less income per household. It was also about a trillion dollars less than Obama’s own predictions. Yes, we all know the excuse: he took office following an economic crisis. But the recession officially ended just five months into his tenure. On average, 7-1/2 years after a recession ends, jobs have increased by 18%. Under Obama, they’d increased by only 10.9%, representing 12 million fewer jobs than average.

There’s a lot more at the link, but you get the idea. For eight years, we heard rosy predictions and lots of praise for Obama's policies, but those didn’t match the reality experienced by Americans who were struggling with stagnant wages and slow job growth. Obama's super-regulatory, big government policies were actually restraining growth. There were many reasons why Hillary Clinton lost to Trump, but this is probably the most important. By ignoring the voters’ #1 concern - jobs and the economy -- and thinking she could win via gender identity politics, calling her opponent names and promising to continue Obama’s allegedly “popular” policies that really weren't, she made the worst rookie mistake that any politician can make: she fell for her own propaganda."

On destabilizing the Trump presidency

Mike Huckabee: "So far, liberals have blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on racism, sexism, xenophobia, James Comey, fake news, hacked voting machines and a Russian conspiracy (To quote Graham Parker, “Is this a Russian conspiracy, or is it just idiocy?”) Before they take a cue from “South Park” and blame Canada, they need to read this exhaustive report from Politico, hardly a right-wing source. It details how Hillary blew the race in Michigan and hence the election (and $1.2 billion of donors’ money) all by herself, because she was a terrible candidate who surrounded herself with bad advisors and ran an incompetent campaign.

Her supporters can’t seem to fathom that when you nominate a candidate most Americans distrust; who piously preaches “public service” while getting wealthy off government connections; who told her core voters that she planned to put them out of work; who poured money into states she had no chance of winning while ignoring states she needed to win; who insulted millions of Americans and spent most of her speeches denigrating her opponent; who seemed, as one Ohio Democrat put it, to care more about transgender bathrooms than whether blue collar workers had jobs; and who was under FBI investigation for mishandling classified information – and whose excuse was that she wasn’t intentionally criminal, just incompetent – then she might legitimately lose."

From Politico
"Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course."

I don't think it's exactly accurate to point out all the ways Hillary failed the voters--she obviously succeeded with more voters than Trump did. His handlers were smarter than hers and were able to plug in where it mattered.