By Mike Huckabee
January 8, 2024
|
|
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.
With gratitude,
Mike Huckabee
Daily Bible Verse
Thus says the Lord,
your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel:
“I am the Lord your God,
who teaches you to profit,
who leads you in the way you should go.
Isaiah 48:17 ESV
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in our newsletter, please email [email protected].
Newsletter Notes
7 stories
2,974 words
Reading time about 14 minutes
Today’s theme in the news is “Don’t tell Joe Biden, he’ll only make it worse.”
First, the story of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s secret weeklong hospitalization following unrevealed elective surgery grew into a bigger scandal over the weekend when it became known that not only was the public not informed, even the Biden White House and the White House National Security Council were kept in the dark. For the past week, with wars and terrorist threats raging around the world, we effectively had no Defense Secretary on the job and nobody in the White House even knew it.
To be fair, considering how badly both Austin and Biden do their jobs, for the military to have no leadership at all was probably preferable to being led by either one of them. Still, when it comes to leadership, the United States military and the American people deserve better than nothing.
Derek Hunter at Townhall.com writes that this, among other recent stories, shows that not even Democrats respect Biden or trust his competence.
He notes that there are only a couple of reasons why this info would be kept from the President. One is that the Pentagon thinks Biden is such a nonentity that they didn’t feel the need to inform him. Another is that they wanted to keep him out of the loop so he wouldn’t step in and make things even worse. Neither speaks highly of Biden or what those close to him think of his abilities.
Meanwhile, Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media reminds us of what a useless disaster Austin has been as Defense Secretary, putting more emphasis on infesting the military with wokeness and trans activism than on winning wars. As for his mysterious surgery, Kruiser suggests, “Maybe he was having a procedure to have his pronouns changed.”
Another area in which Democrats are struggling mightily to keep Loopy Joe out of the loop is his own reelection campaign. Not only are people mocking his attempts to scare us into thinking January 6th was the worst attack in history and Trump is Hitler reincarnated, but his own campaign volunteers are un-volunteering in droves.
It seems that they are appalled that Biden doesn’t share their “values,” which apparently include siding with the murderous terrorists of Hamas against Israel.
As Matt Margolis at PJ Media notes, even Barack Obama is reportedly “extremely concerned” about the fecklessness of Joe’s reelection campaign (he shouldn’t be surprised; everything Joe touches loses all its feck.) Obama is reportedly “working behind the scenes with Biden’s aides and allies” to arrange for campaign officials “to have the authority to make decisions independently, without the need for approval from the White House.”
So his own campaign staff wants us to reelect a President who’s not even consulted on decisions about his own campaign because he’d just screw things up? Well, there’s a vote of confidence!
Day 1 Plans
Former President Trump wrote an op-ed in which he said that if elected again, on day one, he will reverse all of Biden’s immigration policies and restore a secure border. He will then start a massive deportation initiative and invoke a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act “to remove known or suspected gang members, drug dealers, or cartel members from the United States.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-draws-line-sand-pens-op-ed-vowing-invoke-225-year-old-law/
I look forward to hearing all the anguished cries about Trump invoking archaic laws from the same people who are trying to keep him off the ballot with an amendment targeted at veterans of the Confederacy.
Least Surprising News of the Day!
A new study finds that only 3.4% of American journalists identify as Republicans.
https://ground.news/article/b68545d5-545d-45e1-b47f-1c7b74889dcb
Also surprising: Only 36% admit to being Democrats.
Feel-good story to start your week:
Congratulations to Andrew and Bertha Kowalczyk of Fenton, Missouri, who last week celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary. Click the link to read their remarkable lifelong love story and see a heartwarming video.
Digging deeper on job creation
I reported Friday that a higher-than-expected 216,000 jobs were added in December, which set the Biden White House and its media water carriers to trumpeting the miracle of Bidenomics that the poor deluded public mysteriously fails to appreciate. I also pointed out that 55,000 of those new jobs were in government, which is hardly a good sign for a strong private sector economy.
Now, Matt Margolis has dug deeper into the numbers, and he warns that they’re not as rosy as depicted – in fact, they might even verge on “catastrophic.”
First, the unemployment rate of 3.7% did not go down. That’s 0.3% higher than last January and 0.2% higher than in the last month before the pandemic under Trump. Margolis points out that “there was also a 0.3 percentage point decline in both the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio,” meaning that “the percentage of the nation’s working-age population actually decreased in December,” despite it being a traditionally strong month for temporary hiring.
The hiring was mostly concentrated in just a handful of fields, including (as I noted) government, health care, social assistance and construction. Government accounted for 24% of nonfarm payroll jobs. While professional, scientific, and technical services added 25,000 jobs in December, that’s still far below the 2022 monthly average of 41,000. And “Employment in temporary help services declined in December, shedding 33,000 jobs, and has lost 346,000 jobs since March of 2022.”
Biden touts himself as the great job creator by taking credit for every existing job people returned to after the COVID lockdowns ended. But even counting all those Trump-era jobs as his own creation, employment is still well below where it was trending before the COVID lockdowns disrupted it.
But here are the really catastrophic numbers: “According to the BLS, the number of full-time workers went from 134,727,000 in November to 133,196,000 in December. That’s a whopping 1.531 million decline.” And while the government reported 216,000 jobs added in December, the Zero Hedge website pointed out that “the far more accurate Household Survey showed that the number of Employed workers actually collapsed by an unprecedented 683K, the biggest drop since the US economy was shut down by COVID!”
This is why the spin from the White House and the media about the miracle of Bidenomics is about as effective as wheels spinning on ice. If you’re in government (and if you are, congrats on your big pay raise) or a green lobbyist or a highly-paid media talking head, the Biden economy is doing great for you. For everyone else, to paraphrase Larry L. King, they know when someone is urinating on their boots and telling them it’s a rainstorm.
Biden’s “Valley Forge” speech was one big snow job
After President Biden’s shameful, lie-filled speech at Valley Forge, we considered running a full transcript and going into detail picking apart all the huge whoppers in it, but, frankly, it seemed as though such a bad speech from such a bad President just didn’t warrant all that stinking work. Really, aren’t you just sick of the “insurrection” lie at this point? We KNOW it’s not true. A recent poll found that nearly half of Americans have woken up to the realization that it’s not true. We know that this has shifted into a fake campaign strategy for the Democrats, built on sand. (Will it stand upright just long enough to get Trump off the ballot, in the name of “democracy”?)
But that campaign has to stretch through most of this year. So the “insurrection” lie has to keep growing, to keep Trump-phobia going! And the DOJ is ready to provide more manure to grow it in, in the form of new charges for “thousands” more January 6 protesters, coming courtesy of DC U.S. Attorney Michael Graves. As Julie Kelly reports, Graves warned last week that he’d be coming after anyone else who “stood on government property.” She adds, though, that “recent court activity could shut down his latest crusade of terror.”
Graves is the prosecutor overseeing the government’s “unprecedented and ongoing criminal investigation into the four-hour disturbance that has so far resulted in the arrest of 1,200 Americans,” Kelly reports. All those cases. And this could not have been more political. Last week, on January 4, the same day Biden launched his first J6-themed campaign ad, Graves --- whom you might recall worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign and is himself a Biden appointee --- gave an hour-long press briefing to a handful of reporters.
His remarks were in the same inflammatory tone of Biden’s J6 speech, with some of the same whoppers included. Points for keeping the narrative consistent, even though it’s by lying.
“On January 6, 2021, the United States lost control of the grounds around the Capitol and most of the Capitol itself,” he said from his office. “In scenes reminiscent of a medieval battle, officers engaged in hand-to-hand combat with members of the invading force.”
“Invading force” --- get it? Not Americans exercising their First Amendment rights in a massive protest that some took too far? Graves was lying.
He claimed that this was the “largest single day mass assault on law enforcement in our nation’s history.” That, too, was a lie.
And did you know that DC juries have not acquitted EVEN ONE J6 defendant? They’re all found guilty as charged, sometimes even up-charged! Graves bragged about this, and unfortunately, this part of his briefing was true.
To enlarge his net even wider, Graves warned that he’s targeting thousands more people who didn’t even go inside the Capitol that day. Apparently, they only need to have been standing in the wrong spot, under 18 U.S. Code 1752, which criminalizes knowingly entering or remaining on restricted buildings or grounds. According to Kelly, almost all the J6 defendants so far have been hit with misdemeanor charges related to this.
To make these charges stick, the government is “stuck” with the argument that the grounds around the Capitol were automatically restricted because Vice President Mike Pence was supposedly there. But defense attorneys have been prohibited from interviewing Pence’s Secret Service detail to find out exactly where he was, especially after he was reportedly evacuated at 2:20 PM. The charges rise or fall with Pence’s location, so...why??
The government maintains Pence was on a loading dock on Capitol property, but why not let Biden’s security detail say so under oath? Might they be trying to maintain a lie about Pence’s location so that all those people can be charged with entering a restricted area? There’s nothing wrong with skepticism about their story and demanding it be cleared up, given that the DOJ lied in charging documents (!) for nearly a year about VP-elect Kamala Harris’ location that afternoon. They maintained all that time that she was in the Capitol building when it turned out that, curiously, she was at Democratic National Committee headquarters --- you know, where one of two pipe bombs had been placed by...well, some mystery person they still haven’t identified (!), at least publicly.
Think of it, they’re jetting all around the country to raid people’s houses and arrest them by the thousands for merely standing near the Capitol building on that day, yet the government still can’t tell us who planted those pipe bombs. They could at least feign a little interest in doing that.
Kelly points out what should be obvious to all: that people being expected to know Pence was in or at the building and that therefore the Capitol LAWN was “restricted” is absurd. But our current government traffics in absurdity.
And that appears to be why DC judges and juries have gone right ahead and convicted J6 defendants on this trespassing offense. They DON’T CARE if their argument is absurd --- they figure they’ve already won on jury selection. These convictions include defendants who got there after the initial barriers and signage had been removed, which happened early on, shortly after 1 PM. So for all the rest of the afternoon, protesters had no clue they were in a restricted area.
But it’s on appeal that these prosecutions based on Pence’s location start developing some cracks. Kelly discusses a couple of cases in which appeals are showing the government hasn’t met its burden of proof. It might be that to make this charge stick on appeal, prosecutors will have to prove that each defendant, individually, somehow had divined that Pence was there. I hope you’ll read her article for the encouraging details.
Of course, as she points out, Jack Smith is still accomplishing his main goal, which is entirely political. His mission, she says, is “accelerating the government’s campaign of fear related to January 6 and its relentless criminalization of political activity.”
Which brings us back to Biden’s cringe-inducing Valley Forge speech. No, we didn’t go through the nasty thing line by line and highlight all the lies you can already catch. Instead, let’s go to law professor Jonathan Turley’s must-read column for THE HILL, in which he says this speech proves conclusively that Biden is “no George Washington.”
However, I’d go much further than that bit of understatement and say Joe’s the opposite of George Washington. Washington famously cared nothing for his own power and glory. And, seriously, do you think anyone would ever think to create a story about Joe Biden as a boy, the point of which was that he “cannot tell a lie”?
Millions of voters have been pondering this narrative and are now rejecting the “insurrection” schtick. To Democrats’ dismay, it’s seeming more in hindsight like a “protest that got out of hand for some people.” And isn’t Biden laying on the Hitler/dictator comparisons a little thick, considering it’s his administration that’s arresting and detaining thousands of political prisoners, weaponizing the government to silence opposing speech, and trying to take his #1 opponent off the ballot, by imprisonment if necessary? One quote that’s been going around since the speech is, “January 6, 2021…a day that will live in hyperbole.”
As Turley points out, “The speech is a masterpiece of contradiction. Biden started by denouncing how Donald Trump’s campaign is ‘only about him’ [reminds us of what they kept repeating about him at the DNC convention in 2016], and ‘obsessed with the past.’ He then spent virtually all of the speech obsessing about Trump and January 6, 2021.”
All Biden has to run on is what can only be called Trumped-up fear. Evil Trump will destroy democracy! And Trump isn’t really even running against Biden himself --- he’s running against... democracy! In Turley’s words, it takes an act of “willful blindness” to mentally remove Biden’s name from the ballot and put in “Democracy.”
As for Biden’s ridiculous claim to be the defender of free speech, Turley notes that you have to go all the way back to John Adams to find a President who was as anti-free speech as Biden is. Could be, but WWI-era Democrat Woodrow Wilson offers stiff competition...
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sedition-act-becomes-federal-law
“For Biden to run on free speech is about as convincing as Bill Clinton running on abstinence,” he says.
See, the best way we can deal with this nonsense is to mock it mercilessly. Thanks, Prof. Turley; we love a great line.
Speaking of mocking Biden’s Valley Forge speech that proved he has nothing to run on but fear itself, that seems to be reaction it’s getting much to the shock of the Democrats and their media lapdogs.
Here’s a round-up of some scathingly entertaining commentary on it, first from Roger Kimball at American Greatness, who reports that Biden’s histrionic speech is being rightly “laughed at, guyed, ridiculed, and satirized” by Americans who are starting to view J6 more as a hoax than an insurrection. He quotes the J6 defendant who moved Nancy Pelosi’s lectern. Calling himself “Lectern Leader” on Twitter (X), he tweeted a photo of the incident with the comment, “Throwback to the time I brought America to its knees by moving furniture tens of feet and became king.”
Robert Spencer at PJ Media also has a terrific skewering of Biden’s “Scare voters stupid so they’ll reelect me” speech.
He notes that Biden claimed Trump is speaking “the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.” Kimball replies, “What? Trump speaks German now?” He calls that slam “as ineptly stated as it is inaccurate.” He also shares this tweet from Donald Trump Jr.: “Happy Fake Insurrection Day!!! The first ever insurrection with armed tour guides and unarmed participants!”
PS – When even former Attorney General and thorn-in-Trump’s side Bill Barr is blasting Biden’s DOJ for unconscionably overcharging people over January 6th, you know you’ve lost a large part of the nation.
Social media explained...
https://www.gocomics.com/fminus/2024/01/08
I Just Wanted to Say
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.