By Mike Huckabee
January 28, 2023
|
|
|
|
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
19 But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:19
1. Counting Inflation...Why Is It So Hard For The Left?
This morning, the Commerce Department reported that consumer prices rose 5% from the year before in December, compared to 5.5% in November. This was taken as a sign that the Fed’s interest rate hikes to curb inflation are working.
But before President Biden sprains his arm patting himself on the back, bear in mind that they’re comparing prices in December of 2022 to prices in December of 2021, which were already inflated by a full year under Biden. The inflation rate may be slowing, but prices are still rising, and the increase is on top of the even larger increase during the previous year.
A lot of people are baffled by the government’s inflation numbers, which never seem to reflect real prices (Example: one of my writers recently noted that the Great Value tortilla chips he buys at Walmart have jumped from 92 cents a bag in 2021 to $1.98, and even people who think math is a white supremacist conspiracy should be able to figure out that that’s not 15% inflation.) It’s because over the years, the formula for calculating inflation has been altered. There’s always an alleged reason for it (“We’re removing the most price-volatile consumer items,” etc.) But somehow, they usually find a way to not count necessities that are rising the most so that the inflation rate looks lower than it does to people who are actually doing the consuming.
Well, brace yourself, because it looks as if they’re about to do it again.
You can read more at the links, but the basic idea is that they’d like you to accept current prices as the new baseline, compare them to prices from one year ago when inflation was at its peak, and forget that that bag of chips was only 92 cents two years ago. As with most ideas that benefit the left, it really helps if you have no short or long-term memory.
---
2. Coming Soon To Broadway: Brownouts
By Mike Huckabee
New York City announced that it will replace its largest fossil fuel power plant with a wind power farm. Someday, only senior citizens will be able to remember when the lights being dimmed on Broadway was a big deal and not a nightly occurrence.
3. The NOT Competent Administration
By Mike Huckabee
I suspect that if we have any honest historians in the future, they will look back on Biden’s (hopefully, one) term as the Administration where appointees checked every identity box except “competence.” I could cite countless examples, but here’s one that might set a new low.
Biden has nominated Charnelle Bjelkengren to be a federal judge in a court in Washington. During her confirmation hearing, Sen. John Kennedy, himself an attorney, asked her three very basic questions that should have been first-year law school stuff.
One was to describe what Article V of the Constitution does (it describes how to pass amendments.) Her response: “Article V is not coming to mind at the moment.” So he asked, “How about Article II?” She said, “Neither is Article II.” (Spoiler alert: it sets up the executive branch of the government.) I won’t bother repeating his third question, since it was a little harder, so she didn’t know it, either.
Her excuse was that “I’m frequently faced with issues that I’m not familiar with and I thoroughly review the law, I research, and apply the law to the facts presented to me.” That’s fine, but should a federal judge really need to do research to know what Article II of the Constitution is?
The media are pushing the narrative that Bjelkengren would be the “first black woman” to hold that position, but aren’t there countless black female judges and attorneys who know what the Constitution is? Or is being totally ignorant of the Constitution a requirement for Biden judicial appointees?
4.“The Land Of The Free”
By Mike Huckabee
Those of us who worry that America is no longer “the land of the free” now have evidence to back it up. The CATO Institute and the Fraser Institute just released their 2022 Human Freedom Index that ranks nations on such factors as personal liberties, economic freedom, and civil liberties. Switzerland ranked #1. The United States dropped seven places from the last survey and didn’t even make the top 10.
https://www.based-politics.
The reason is that the study looked at data from 2018 to 2020, and the pandemic was a disaster for human freedom. A CATO spokesman said the draconian COVID restrictions “set global freedom back more than two decades, erasing any gains during that period. Time will tell to what extent the world will regain its lost freedoms as the pandemic moderates.”
That won’t happen without a struggle, as evidenced by how many people in government want to hang onto that power and how many citizens seem to want to spend the rest of their lives wearing masks, hiding in their rooms and doing whatever the government tells them.
And speaking of crushing freedom in the name of safety, Justin Trudeau’s Canada is what Gov. Gavin Newsom dreams of for California, and here’s an example:
Artur Pawlowski is a pastor and the head of a charity that feeds the homeless. And to the leftist authoritarian PM of Canada, that apparently makes him public enemy #1. For the past three years, he’s been repeatedly fined, arrested and jailed for refusing to close his church during the pandemic. He’s now accused of the ludicrous charge of causing $400 million in damages…by officiating a church service at the trucker blockade protest at the US-Canada border last year. He’s facing his final trial and could get up to 10 years in prison.
Pawlowski has been outspoken that he will not knuckle under to demands from a government that sound to him like the actions of the communist regime that his family endured in Poland. That includes government raids of his church and a judge who ordered him to read a public renunciation of his own personal opinion of the COVID restrictions (he refused, saying the judge wasn’t a judge but a political activist. Sounds about right.)
In case you’re wondering, no, he hasn’t advocated violence. In fact, he urged the truckers not to resort to violence. He’s being prosecuted for defying and questioning government dictates that trampled Canadians’ rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly and protest, based on medical “expertise” that we now know was mostly incorrect and often counter-productive.
If Canada is going to prosecute anyone for causing untold damages due to his dangerous ideas, I’d suggest they look in their Prime Minister’s office. And it appears that a lot of Canadians second that notion. (Warning: includes video that contains some justifiable profanity aimed at Justin Trudeau.)
In the meantime, while I’m still allowed to ask you this, please pray for Pastor Pawlowski.
5. Twitter Knowingly Used Fake "Russia" Stories; More On Biden Documents
By Mike Huckabee
When we promised some weekend reading, we didn’t know how much news would be dropping at the end of the week. Before getting into the Biden classified documents --- much of significance there --- we’ve got the new Twitter File #15, this one from Matt Taibbi.
So, who was generating all that fake “Russia Russia Russia!” news that dominated the headlines for years? A while back, we told you about Hamilton 68, a computer “dashboard” created by former FBI agent (now at MSNBC, surprise) Clint Watts and financially backed by the German Marshall Fund and Alliance for Securing Democracy. Recall that we went to the ASD website and found names like Hillary campaign manager John Podesta, former acting CIA head Mike Morell, and major TDS-sufferer Bill Kristol, former editor of the WEEKLY STANDARD. The fake “Russia” narrative largely came from them. Even the so-called “fact”-checkers relied on them, which helps explain why they’re not really fact-checkers.
So now Taibbi has documentation for all this, in the form of Twitter’s internal communications. In Taibbi’s words, “If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as the single greatest case of media fabulism in American history.” And this document dump makes clear that Twitter knew all along that Hamilton 68, purportedly designed to measure levels of “Russian disinformation,” was bogus.
https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1619029772977455105
How did Twitter know this? They actually checked (!), and found that hardly any of the 644 accounts it dealt with were even Russian.
Taibbi writes, “So a bunch of Twitter accounts by people in the U.S., many of them Trump fans, were depicted as ‘Russia-tied information warfare,’ based on nothing at all.” It was so egregious that Twitter even wrote to the people at these accounts to let them know “they’ve been unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.” But that’s really all they did about it.
Yoel Roth wanted to push back at ASD, but Emily Home, future White House and NSC spokesperson, said, “We have to be careful in how much we push back on ASD publicly.” She was already practicing to be a spokesperson for the Democrats, wasn’t she?
The “Russia” narrative was all illusion --- dark magic that cast a long shadow over Trump’s presidency. It was relentless fraud. This report on Taibbi’s latest “Twitter File” from HOT AIR is a must-read.
And here’s Andrea Widburg at AMERICAN THINKER.
Now, on to Hunter Biden and the classified documents…
As you know if you read yesterday’s newsletter, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen blocked a request by the House Oversight Committee to let them view Hunter Biden’s “flagged” bank records, as she hadn’t seen how this would “protect” the “interests” of the Executive Branch. (Should that even be a factor?) She characterized the block as temporary; they were told they’d need to supply additional details. On Friday, committee chairman James Comer of Kentucky had plenty to say about this.
Rep. Comer accused the Biden administration of a “coordinated effort” to shield the President’s son from scrutiny.
It appears the administration had been anticipating such scrutiny. In a statement, Comer said, “At the start of the Biden administration, the Treasury Department changed longstanding policy to severely restrict Congress’s access to suspicious activity reports.” Hmm, wonder why? “Now, Biden’s Treasury Department seems to be going even further to restrict access.”
One would think the Oversight Committee has had a lot of experience with these types of requests and would know when one is getting “special handling.” That appears to be the case here. At least Yellen was honest about one thing: they’re protecting Executive Branch interests, all right.
Comer made it clear that the committee is looking into the President’s “knowledge of and role in” Hunter’s business schemes. But he also specified a legislative purpose in investigating these records; perhaps that was the “further information” wanted by Treasury. “Additionally, we will examine drafting legislation to strengthen federal ethics laws regarding employees and their families.” The committee would also “examine and make recommendations regarding federal laws and regulations to ensure that financial institutions have the proper internal controls and compliance programs to alert federal agencies of potential money laundering activity.”
DAILY MAIL has more.
A story at the WASHINGTON FREE BEACON gives us an idea of how close Joe Biden was with his family and close aides regarding access to his areas that are now known to have housed classified materials. They also report that in August 2018, Biden even wrote to his inner circle of confidantes inviting them to install the encrypted message app Signal. Included were Hunter Biden, aide Kathy Chung, presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti, three other Biden family members --- brother Jim, sister Valerie Biden Owens, and son-in-law Howard Krein --- “and two unknown individuals with South Korean and Washington DC phone numbers.”
It’s not known why.
Speaking of Biden’s family, I don’t want to get too far into the personal life of his niece Caroline, just to mention that Biden tapped a big donor to give her a job in California. (She had to get a job as a condition of her probation after major credit card fraud, and wanted to live in California to be close to Hunter.) The donor was willing, but she apparently flubbed the interview badly and turned down the $85,000 salary. More details here…
Paul Sperry has been looking into the Bidens’ relationship with Kathy Chung, and tweeted this on January 23: “NEW: The first person Biden thanked in back of his 2017 memoir ‘Promise Me, Dad’ is Sang-ok-Chung: Thank you for all this and more, to Kathy Chung.’ Chung packed, moved, stored WH records Biden used in book. As WH exec asst, recommended by Hunter, she fed Hunter sensitive data.”
Here’s more on her relationship with Hunter, from FOX NEWS…
Former Biden assistant questioned by law enforcement over classified docs repeatedly appeared in Hunter emails
Finally --- something we’ll have a full report on for Monday --- we could be on the verge of a jaw-dropping revelation sparked by the indictment of former FBI agent Charles McGonigal, who might be offering information to special counsel John Durham as part of a plea deal. Durham has yet to issue his report on the Russia Hoax, and McGonigal’s attorney happens to be a close colleague of Durham’s.
Dan Bongino thinks he has a good idea of what this story might entail, and if it’s as extensive as he thinks it is, it’s the biggest scandal of our time, involving massive global influence-peddling. It would also explain why Mike Flynn was targeted for personal destruction. As Joe Biden would say, no joke!
6. Letter from a Substack reader
Cheryl A.
10 hrs ago
I just want to say I love your writing! Thank you so much. Between you, Chris Salcedo, and Newsmax I am better informed than I have been my entire life. You have a way with words! You keep me informed, as well as giving me a good laugh quite often. God bless you!
To sign up for the Substack version of my email for half price, go here: The Morning Edition | Mike Huckabee | Substack
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/1/morning-edition
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.