By Mike Huckabee
January 19, 2022
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Good morning!
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff!
Today's newsletter includes:
- Bible Verse of the Day - Psalm 73:26
- Ashli's husband: the narrative about her is all wrong
- The actual “adults in the room,” are standing firm
- Fake News from NPR
- In REAL Supreme Court news
- Price Controls
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Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.
Psalm 73:26
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
MORNING NEWS:
2. Ashli's husband: the narrative about her is all wrong:
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.
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.
3. The actual “adults in the room,” stand firm:
Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are under intense pressure to vote to destroy the filibuster and support the “Voting Rights Act” (aka, the “Legalize Vote Fraud Act.”)
https://www.foxnews.com/sports/nick-saban-others-urge-manchin-to-protect-voting-rights
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/emilys-list-refuses-to-support-sinema-for-reelection
Fortunately for America, these two appear to be the Party’s only actual remaining “adults in the room,” and they seem to be standing firm, which will likely deal both of these naked power grabs a defeat.
For the record: nobody is being suppressed from voting in America in 2022. It’s easier to vote than it’s ever been. It’s easier to vote under what Biden ludicrously called the “Jim Crow” voting laws in Georgia than it is in New York or Biden’s home state of Delaware. And a recent nationwide Rasmussen survey found that more than 80% of voters support voter photo ID requirements, having all ballots received by Election Day, requiring voting machines to be made in the USA, and removing dead people and those who have moved from voter rolls.
Manchin also tried reasoning with his angry fellow Democrats. He said of the attack on the filibuster, "I just don't see how you break a rule to make a rule." And he said we already have laws and rules in place to protect voting, and nobody’s going to be obstructed from voting, “that’s not going to happen.” It worked about as well as trying to explain calculus to a rabid badger.
And as for the filibuster that Democrats have now started branding the “Jim Crow filibuster” (is anyone else offended that they keep eroding the gravity of that term by applying it to everything they don’t like?), they didn’t seem to think it was a tool of white supremacy when they were the minority during Trump’s final year. In 2020, Republicans used the filibuster one time and Democrats used it to block legislation 327 times.
For all their vilification of Manchin and Sinema, those two are doing the Party a huge service. They’re protecting one of the strongest tools of the minority, which, God willing, Chuck Schumer will soon be leading.
4. Fake News from NPR:
Time to expose a little “dangerous misinformation,” courtesy of that notoriously unreliable source…NPR. This story started going viral on liberal social media after Nina Totenberg claimed that SCOTUS Justice Sonia Sotomayor had to hear cases remotely because she sits next to Justice Gorsuch, who allegedly refused a request from Chief Justice Roberts and Sotomayor for everyone to wear masks. There was much hand-wringing and pearl clutching about how Gorsuch was endangering Sotomayor’s life by possibly exposing her to the DEADLY virus.
One problem: apparently, it’s all fake news.
Shannon Bream of Fox News decided to do some actual fact-checking. She reported that a source inside the SCOTUS told her that Roberts never made such a masking request, and Sotomayor never asked Gorsuch to mask up, so he couldn’t possibly have refused her request. Besides, they’re all vaccinated, boosted and tested before they take the bench.
But this tempest in a teapot did have one interesting aspect: before it was exposed as fake news, it sparked a debate about how risk-averse some people have become, and whether they have a right to demand that other people alter their behavior to accommodate their neurotic fear of any risk, no matter how small. Megan Fox at PJ Media covered those arguments.
I should probably warn you, though, that reading it might slightly raise your blood pressure, which could expose you to an infinitesimal risk of stroke. So maybe you’d better just demand that PJ Media remove it from the Internet so you won’t accidentally be exposed to it and DIE!
5. In REAL Supreme Court news:
The SCOTUS denied an emergency request to pause the TSA’s federal mask mandate in airports, commercial airlines, over-the-road buses and commuter bus and rail systems. The pause was sought on behalf of two plaintiffs who can’t wear masks for medical reasons. One is an autistic four-year-old boy from Florida who can’t tolerate masks but has to travel to Boston Children’s Hospital for regular medical care. The Court gave no comment on the refusal. This leaves the mandate in place until March 18th.
In better SCOTUS news, the Court agreed to hear oral arguments in a religious liberty case involving a Washington State high school football coach who was fired for praying on the field after games. You can read full details here:
This case, which seems to me to be an obvious violation of First Amendment rights, has been wending its way through lower courts since 2015. Both that fact and the Court’s refusal to hear exceptions to blanket mandates reaffirm the importance of electing officials who respect the Constitutional rights of individuals and not relying on the Supreme Court to maybe, someday, get around to defending them.
6. Price Controls:
We haven’t seen inflation this bad in many years. Another thing we haven’t seen in years is a call for price controls; that is, having the government dictate how much sellers are allowed to charge for food and gas.
The reason we haven’t heard about price controls since the early 1970s is that it takes a long time for people to forget just how TERRIBLE an idea price controls are. Ordering producers and merchants to sell things for less than it costs to create them is a recipe for shortages and black markets. It’s the type of idea that only sounds feasible inside the skulls of leftists who believe that the ironclad law of supply-and-demand, much like biological gender, is merely a social construct that you can change any way you want using your overactive imagination.
So I’m not at all surprised that someone at CNN is floating the idea of price controls.
7. I Just Wanted to Say:
Thank you for reading the Morning Edition.
For more news, visit my website here.
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