By Mike Huckabee
December 29, 2021
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THE EVENING EDITION By Mike Huckabee
Good evening! My staff and I are still officially "on vacation" until tomorrow, but we don't want you to have to go cold turkey. You're getting enough of that from your Thanksgiving leftovers. So I wanted to share with you some quick takes on the headlines, plus some commentaries not tied to a particular breaking story. We'll be back to covering the day's news in more depth in a couple of days.
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1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
This verse was recommended by Dolores M.
My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
John 14:2-3 NIV
To recommend a verse for the Evening Edition, email [email protected].
THE LATEST NEWS
2. The Festivus Report:
With only a few days left in 2021, we’re seeing all the best- and worst-of-the-year lists come out. Here’s one I’m especially interested in, and one that I’m sure was very difficult to decide in a year when Democrats held both the White House and Congress: Sen. Rand Paul’s annual “Festivus Report” listing the worst examples of wasteful, pointless government spending.
This year’s list totals over $52 billion worth of your tax money wasted (or borrowed, thrown away and put on our grandkids’ credit cards.) Some of the individual items include:
* $250 million for “enhanced border security” in Middle East and North African nations while our own border was left wide open…
* $465,339 to Reed College in Oregon to teach pigeons how to use slot machines (as if Vegas doesn’t have enough pigeons in its casinos already)…
* A $337,500 FDA grant to a Canadian company called NovaEel “to fatten and raise juvenile eels to keep costs down for those wishing to eat the fish.” Because for so many Americans, eel is a daily staple. Or maybe it’s because NovaEel is trying to turn male eels into females by giving them estrogen, so they got on to the trans bandwagon...
* Various grants for such worthy endeavors as feeding kids junk food and telling people in Vietnam not to burn their trash...
* And of course, up to $4.29 billion in fraudulent or duplicate Small Business Administration loans during the pandemic, when the government was throwing money everywhere without much regard for where it landed.
Once the holidays are over, many of us will immediately have to start preparing for our 2021 income tax filings. As you’re sweating over all those forms, trying to justify every penny you earned or spent to the government, think about this story. And remember it the next time some politician says that one group or another isn’t paying their “fair share” of what it takes to run the government.
How about if I stop paying taxes, and you stop giving money to people to create transgender eels, and we call that fair and square?
3. “Worst Quotes of the Year”:
The Media Research Center compiled its “Worst Quotes of the Year” from so-called news professionals. I don’t think I need to add “Spoiler Alert” before I tell you that #1 was a tie, and they both came from people at CNN.
4. News:
In 2021, Google was dethroned as the world’s most popular website. The bad news: it was pushed into the #2 spot by Tik-Tok, described by PJ Media’s Stephen Green as Chinese Communist Party spyware masquerading as a social media site.
5. Wokeness is killing the box office :
For those looking for a movie worth seeing during your holiday time off, this is an interesting article about how “wokeness” is killing the box office for big budget Hollywood movies like “West Side Story,” even as critics continue desperately hunting for something to be offended by.
https://spectator.org/i-woke-lucy/
Easily one of the dumbest is the take by the writer for the Daily Beast (of course) that it’s an offensive racist controversy that Spanish actor Javier Bardem was cast as Cuban Desi Arnaz in the new movie, “Being the Ricardos.” That was so ludicrous that even the movie’s writer/director Aaron Sorkin, creator of liberals’ all-time favorite fantasy series “The West Wing,” ripped apart the argument that every actor has to be exactly what they’re cast as, which negates the entire concept of acting. He called the claim that only a Cuban actor could play Desi “the mother of all empty gestures and a bad idea.”
Let’s hope the major financial losses for “woke” movies wake up Hollywood to the news that audiences want to be entertained, not scolded, lectured and talked down to.
6. Not surprised:
Why am I not surprised to learn that a woman who freaked out on a flight and allegedly assaulted an 80-year-old man because he wasn’t wearing a facemask while eating (incidentally, she wasn’t wearing a mask, either, while screaming and spitting at him) once reportedly appeared in a Playboy photo layout called “Women Behaving Badly”?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ex-playboy-model-delta-flight-assault
7. That Drug called "Stimulus":
You’d have to go all the way back to the Reagan years to find a time in recent history when federal money to states didn’t grow every year. But 2009 marked a turning point when, thanks to the stimulus bill following the housing loan implosion, federal money became the state and local governments’ largest source of income. It’s no wonder liberals loved that stimulus bill. It finally turned the 50 states into the 50 welfare states. It gave the federal government unprecedented power over state and local policy decisions, and they’ve been trying to maintain and expand that situation ever since. That’s how we get monstrosities like an “infrastructure” bill that spends only a fraction of the money on actual infrastructure.
As a governor for 10 years, I saw that giving handouts isn’t the best solution to poverty, and taking handouts isn’t the best source of state funds. The fact is that nothing is as costly as “free” federal money. Just as too much sugar rots your teeth, all that federal sugar not only creates dependence, it warps priorities. Soon, local officials start making decisions based not on what’s best for their communities but on what will keep the DC dollars flowing. For instance, if parents despise Critical Race Theory, but the feds want it and they’re handing out education dollars, guess what gets taught to your kids?
State officials who reject free federal money take a lot of heat. But would you call someone stupid for saying no to a free sample from a drug dealer?
You might say I’m exaggerating. But I was not only a governor, I also served as chairman of the National Governors’ Association. I had a bird’s eye view of all the other states’ relations with Washington, too. I soon discovered that so-called “free federal money” comes with more strings than a Beethoven symphony. Just like the drug dealer and the sucker, any state that signed on to a big new program like Obamacare based on a promise of federal money to pay for it was likely to end up holding the bag when the feds cut off the freebies after a lot of people became dependent on it.
The Obamacare bait and switch was nothing new. This same game has been played over and over, with Medicare, unemployment, education, infrastructure funds, you name it. It happens under Republican Presidents as well as Democrats. States give up local control in exchange for federal money, then are forced to accept policies that might not be in their best interests to keep the money flowing.
Proponents of this type of central planning-by-bribery will argue furiously that America isn’t a melting pot, but they act as if it’s homogenized. They ask, “Why do those people in flyover country vote against their own best interests?” without considering that maybe they don’t believe big government, massive debt and loss of their freedoms and cultures are in their own best interests. America has many cultures, all very different. Hawaii isn’t Maine, and Vermont isn’t Wyoming. People aren’t moving from California to Texas just for the barbecue. Many Americans don’t want Washington running up more debt in their names, to try to bribe 50 states into becoming a homogenized Utopia directed by benevolent DC dictators. That dream would be a nightmare in reality. Stop trying to entice local communities to build more government offices named after pork-barreling senators when what they really need is more high schools named after James Madison.
8. I Just Wanted To Say:
Thank you for reading.
8. Prayer Tree:
We are stronger together.
Our hope is that our newsletter readers and social media followers will consider these prayer requests each day.
HEALTH AND HEALING
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