By Mike Huckabee
January 21, 2023
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THE EVENING EDITION
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy my evening newsletter.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
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DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.
Romans 12:14
1. Alec Baldwin update
We now know more about the two counts of involuntary manslaughter filed by New Mexico authorities against Alec Baldwin and the armorer from the set of the Western movie “Rust” over the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Under one count, the prosecution has to prove that Baldwin’s handling of the gun was beneath the ordinary standard of caution someone of his experience should have exercised (complicating things, he was also the co-producer of the film, where live rounds were somehow mixed with the blanks). That could bring him up to 18 months in prison. But the second count includes a gun charge: did he actually pull the trigger? He denies it, but prosecutors say FBI forensic tests show that the gun could not have discharged unless the trigger was pulled. That charge could get Baldwin up to five years in prison.
https://redstate.com/
Baldwin’s liberal celebrity friends on shows like “The View” are making some ludicrous excuses for him and claiming the charges are politically motivated (I’m sure the fact that one person was seriously injured and another killed didn’t enter the prosecutors’ thinking at all.) Actually, Mark Judge noted that it’s true Baldwin is in this mess because he’s such a big liberal, but not because of prosecutorial bias. Baldwin has long railed against the NRA, but if he’d had an NRA gun safety advisor on set, as many other films do, this likely never would have happened.
https://redstate.com/
Commentator Jim Treacher noted the irony that Baldwin won an Emmy for portraying Trump as a dumb criminal on “Saturday Night Live,” and now he may be going to prison before Trump ever does.
Some legal experts say they wouldn’t be surprised if Baldwin makes a plea deal to avoid a trial, which could go very badly for him. He hurt his case by giving interviews in which he denied responsibility or any feelings of guilt, which will make it hard for him to ask for mercy based on accepting responsibility and feeling remorse.
Other analysts say that no matter how the trial turns out, it will send a signal to filmmakers that they can’t get away with cutting corners on safety in the use of firearms on sets. And maybe it will remind some celebrities who think the worst tragedy here is how it might harm Alec Baldwin’s acting career that because of this senseless act, Halyna Hutchins is dead and her family will never get her back again. That’s a genuine tragedy.
As Clint Eastwood said in the great Western “Unforgiven,” when you shoot and kill someone, you take away everything they had and everything they’re ever going to have. If the producers of “Rust” had treated the handling of guns with that level of gravity – or if Clint Eastwood had been in charge of the set -- this never would have happened.
2. Joe Biden can't handle a fastball
By Mike Huckabee
One of the hallmarks of Joe Biden’s personality is that he gets combative when faced with tough questions. It happened again when he was doing a news conference on California’s storms with Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a reporter asked about his misplaced classified documents scandal.
Biden bristled and called it “nothing,” said “there’s no ‘there’ there,” and added, “I have no regrets.” Then he ranted, “What quite frankly bugs me is that we have a serious problem here we’re talking about. We’re talking about what’s going on, and the American people don’t quite understand why you don’t ask me questions about that.”
I think I can explain that for him. They’re asking about the documents because Democrats like him spent the past few months telling us that Trump having documents marked “classified” under lock and key and armed guards at Mar-A-Lago was such a horrible crime that he deserved to be executed, and now Biden says his own mishandling of classified documents is “nothing.” So we’re a tad confused.
As for what he wanted to talk about, we know that already: California suffered terrible flooding due to cyclical heavy rains unconnected to man-made climate change…
…And they were particularly devastating because leftist politicians like Gavin Newsom let environmental radicals make state policy on things like reservoirs, disaster preparedness and infrastructure, so they were totally unprepared for the storms’ predictable effects. They didn’t even manage to capture the rain to help prevent the next predictable drought, letting most of it just flow out to the ocean.
Is that the gist of it? Okay, then let’s go back to talking about those classified documents…
3. NOTE ON ROLLING STONE “200 GREATEST SINGERS” LIST
By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)
I hadn’t planned to comment on Rolling Stone’s list of the 200 greatest singers of all time because who cares? Rolling Stone lists are notoriously dumb clickbait. But then I saw that some people were taking it so seriously that Celine Dion fans were actually protesting outside RS’s offices over her exclusion from the list. Oh, how I envy their free time!
Personally, I could easily name 200 singers I enjoy more than Celine Dion. But given her level of success and vocal talent, I can understand why her fans are angry, particularly when you see some of the people on that list (Courtney Love? Really?) But then, nothing about this list should be taken seriously. It’s just an attempt to get publicity for a dying publication that takes itself way too seriously as both a political and news source and a source of credible opinion on music.
Rolling Stone claims their list was compiled by music industry artists, experts and insiders. They must be the same ones who think “ABCDEFU” was one of the 10 best records of 2022. How can you take this list seriously when it ranks Mariah Carey as the 5th greatest singer of all time and Beyonce at #8, ahead of both Elvis (#17) and Frank Sinatra (#19), who also trail Bob Dylan (#15)? It also includes Courtney Love (14 places above Darlene Love!), but not Nat King Cole, Mel Torme or Sarah Vaughn. Whoever made this list should get earwax candles for Christmas.
They tried to cover for this tonedeafness by claiming that it wasn’t just about voice quality (no kidding!), but also originality, influence and legacy. That would explain why Louis Armstrong was on the list, but why was the other most influential singer of the 20th century, Bing Crosby, not on it? Because the people who made it are musical ignoramuses.
But why get upset about that? It’s nothing new. Their last list to stir deliberate publicity-generating controversy was 2020’s “500 greatest albums of all time.” It ranked the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” at #24, below far superior and most lasting albums by such artistes as Kanye West, Lauryn Hill, Kendrick Lamar and Radiohead (and yes, I’ve heard all those albums. They’re no “Sgt. Pepper.”) They even included a Harry Styles album that came out earlier that year that I’d already forgotten by the time the list appeared.
Yet their musical idiocy dates back well before that. Remember, RS publisher Jan Wenner is the driving force behind the “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” that’s inducted such rockers as Eminem, Donna Summer and James Taylor, but not the Monkees, The Guess Who, Jethro Tull, Blue Oyster Cult, Steppenwolf, Ted Nugent and the list goes on and on. It also took them decades to induct iconic groups like Deep Purple, who created the riff that half the guitarists in the joint first learned to play.
But wait: the problem stretches back even further. More years ago than I like to admit, I attended a university with one of the world’s best jazz schools. Many of my friends were great musicians, and they rolled their eyes in contempt at RS record reviews. They said it was obvious from the way their critics tried to describe music that they knew nothing about it. For them, reading RS reviews was like a master plumber having to listen to a clueless homeowner’s opinion on why his toilet wasn’t working. They were convinced their reviews were based on how leftwing the lyric sheet was. Some things never change.
So my advice to Celine Dion fans is to chill out and consider the source. I’d rather have my favorite singer on a list with Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Mel Torme, Sarah Vaughn, Peggy Lee, Dean Martin, Eydie Gorme and Keely Smith (all left off by RS) than one with Lou Reed, Poly Styrene and Lana Del Rey.
4. Liberal Paper: Carbon offsets are "largely worthless"
By Mike Huckabee
A new study by the liberal newspaper the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and the journalism nonprofit Source Material found that more than 90% of the so-called “rainforest carbon offsets” sold by Verra, the biggest provider of them to virtue-signaling companies like Disney and Gucci, are “largely worthless.” They’re likely to be “phantom credits” that don’t represent any carbon reductions. There’s a lot more at this link, like a claim that Verra overstated the threat to forests in its projects by about 400%. (FYI: Verra disputes the findings.)
Please note that I linked to the Guardian, not a conservative site. So this is what people you think would be supporters of this stuff are saying about them.
Related: Say, remember those recent deadly California storms that liberal politicians and celebrities were blaming on manmade climate change? The liberal L.A. Times helped promote that narrative. Well, even the Times now admits that according to researchers, there’s no evidence of a link between climate change and those storms, which are part of a recurring cycle of heavy storms that have been hitting California about every decade since records started being kept in the 1800s. I guess back then, they were caused by emissions from horses.
5. This will make you mad
By Mike Huckabee
Speaking of expensive but useless environmental obsessions, John Stossel has a new article that should make people think but it will just make a lot of them mad. He claims that recycling has become a religion, based solely on fervent, unthinking belief in rituals that cost society a staggering amount of money and do almost no good for the environment.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
I warn you, if you’re a devoted recycler, this article might blow your mind. Stossel has the facts and figures to argue that with rare exceptions like paper and aluminum, most recycling has no upside. Most plastics sent to recycling plants can’t be recycled and aren’t. The US has more than enough space for all the landfills we’ll need for the next 1,000 years. Plastic bags create fewer emissions than paper bags. Rinsing a plastic bottle in hot water for recycling releases more CO2 than just throwing it away. Recycling waste creates more pollution from the trucks that collect it than it offsets. And on and on. I hate to recycle a cliché, but “follow the science.”
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