By Mike Huckabee
November 11, 2021
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THE MORNING EDITION By Mike Huckabee
Good morning! Here are some stories from me that I think you will want to read. Topics include:
- Veterans Day
- Biden & Veterans
- Leftist Tactics
- Audubon Society Goes Woke
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
Jeremiah 29:11
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THE LATEST
1. VETERANS DAY:
Today is Veterans Day, and with so much going on in the news, it would be tragic for it to be overshadowed or overlooked. Today is about something far more important than politics. It’s about the men and women who make it possible for us even to enjoy the freedom of having elections and the Constitutional right to protest and seek redress when we think our government isn’t doing right by us.
Memorial Day in May is to honor veterans who gave their lives in defense of America. But Veterans Day is to honor all veterans, living or dead, past and present.
It began as Armistice Day, declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, to commemorate the end of World War I. In 1945, World War II veteran Raymond Weeks of Birmingham, Alabama, began a personal crusade to expand Armistice Day into a state holiday honoring all veterans. In 1953, an Emporia, Kansas, shoe store owner named Al King launched a campaign to make it a national holiday. Just one year later, in 1954, he succeeded. It helped that the President was a retired army general from Kansas named Dwight Eisenhower.
Not only is today Veterans Day, but yesterday was the 246th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It commemorates the day in 1775 when the Second Continental Congress established the Continental Marines to serve in the war against Great Britain. After the Revolutionary War ended, the Marines were disestablished for a time until President John Adams reestablished the Marines as we know the Corps now, on July 11, 1789. But November 10th, 1775, is still considered the birth of the US Marines.
So if you see someone in uniform, this is a great day to say “Thank you” for protecting America’s freedom. Then again, any day is a great day to do that.
2. BIDEN DOES A 180 ON VETERANS:
I don’t want to politicize Veterans Day, but there is too much in the news at the moment to ignore, relating to the sudden 180 that’s occurred in the relationship between our service members and those in command.
Last Veterans Day, our service members still had a Commander in Chief who had made their welfare a top concern of his Administration. He constantly praised our troops, went out of his way to show respect for them, and made fixing the shameful conditions at VA hospitals one of his first priorities. He was also rightly proud of being the first President in decades who started no new wars. He was willing to use the military when necessary, but he made sure their hands weren’t tied. He respected that these heroic men and women were willing to put their lives on the line for the USA, and he felt it his duty not to make them take that risk for less than vital reasons, and to give them every advantage to make sure they came home safely.
All that changed with the 2020 election. Since Biden came into office, it seems as if he and his staff and top military leaders are more concerned with waging war on our own troops than in ensuring we can defeat our enemies abroad. They treat members of the military with suspicion and hostility, sifting through their social media pages and treating those who express conservative views as worse threats to America than ISIS. Service members are threatened with dishonorable discharges and loss of the benefits they put their lives and limbs on the line to earn, just because they object to taking a vaccine they don’t want (even religious objections are not respected.)
This Administration thinks that illegal immigrants who don’t like the way they were treated when they were detained for breaking our immigration laws deserve $450,000 in compensation, 4-1/2 times more than Gold Star families receive when a loved one is killed in the line of duty. They also continue to spend outrageous amounts of tax money to shelter, support and transport illegal immigrants, even as homeless veterans live on the streets and go without needed medical care.
Perhaps worst of all, Biden’s botched pullout from Afghanistan needlessly cost the lives of 13 brave service members. Yet to this day, the only military person who’s faced any consequences for that was a Marine Lt. Colonel who was jailed and discharged for calling on his superior officers to show some accountability.
So yes, there are many, many reasons why I am counting the minutes until I can vote to throw all of these people out of office. But as I’m checking the boxes on the ballot, I can assure you that the #1 thought in my mind will be, “This is for the veterans.”
3. HOW LEFTISTS TRY TO WIN ARGUMENTS:
I’ve written many times over the years about how leftists can’t win an argument with logic or reason (that’s why they’ve now declared those things to be racist), or by citing history, experience or the prior success of their ideas and policies (all of which have been dumpster fires.) Instead, they “win” arguments via two main tactics:
1. Silencing or smearing their opponents by calling them racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, science deniers or whatever, so that their target audience never hears an opposing view…
2. Changing the terms of the debate.
It’s hard to use their own words, or any words, to prove how full of horse droppings they are when they’re constantly changing the meanings of words. For instance, there was once a clear term for judging people by race: “racism.” But now, judging people solely by race is “anti-racism” and criticizing that is “racism.” (“Horse droppings” is also probably now considered racist somehow, so we aren’t allowed to point out how full of them they are.)
Like birds that foul their nests and fly away, leftists move on to new words once the rancidness of their policies taints the old ones. I’m old enough to remember how “liberal” became virtually a curse word. Suddenly, liberals magically became “progressives.” Now that the public is finally figuring out that “progressivism” is just the same poison in a new bottle, some hope that time, fading memories and youthful ignorance have laundered the word “socialist” enough to allow them to return to that. But it’s all the same horse droppings under a different name.
This is all preamble for the good news that the public must be waking up at last to how toxic “wokeness,” “Critical Race Theory,” “politically correct,” “identity politics” and “Defund the police” are because “progressives” are suddenly desperate to make us stop using those terms. Never mind that they coined them and promoted them themselves. If you use them critically, you’re either blowing a “dogwhistle” for racists or you’re too dumb to realize that those things don’t even exist (even if your school actually uses the phrase “Critical Race Theory” in its curriculum documents.) And even though they don’t exist, you’re a racist if you criticize them.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted that pundits are using “woke” as a “derogatory euphemism for civil rights and justice.” No, “woke” doesn’t mean “civil rights.” The opposite, in fact. Civil rights include freedom of speech, assembly and religion and the right to due process. Woke culture has been relentlessly attacking all of those things for years. Saying that “woke” stands for civil rights is like saying that “A.O.C.” stands for “Absolutely, objectively correct.”
And here’s some more on why you’re no longer allowed to use the word “woke,” you racist you!
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/483944/
So now that the toxicity of these terms has become so obvious that the public is finally wise to them, expect to hear that it’s racist to use them (“racist” being the one term that never gets old on the left) and for them to be replaced with some new buzzwords that will also eventually be dumped once they absorb the stench of the reality of leftist policies. Might I suggest that “woke” be replaced with something more accurate, like “comatose” or “brain dead”?
(On a side note, have you noticed that they get to decide what we’re called – nonsense like “CIS white male” – but they also get to decide what we call them? And the media actually play along with that, as if these loons are the Divine Arbiters of Speech.)
For the final word (I hope!) on this, check out blogger Freddie deBoer’s post on this. He accurately points out that the term “dogwhistle” itself is “a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism.” And he pleads with the left that if they don’t want us calling them what they call themselves, then how about telling us what they do want to be called? (Warning: he uses some rough language of his own out of understandable frustration.)
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
Of course, they can’t give us permanent terms because whatever they come up with will be operational only until their inevitable failure and obnoxiousness tarnish it. Then it will have to be replaced with some new term that, like a motel toilet seat, has been sanitized for their protection.
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4. THE NATIONAL AUDUBON SOCIETY: "GET WOKE, BIRDS CROAK"
A little bird told me that yet another organization has gone “woke,” and its original mission appears to have been subverted by the recognition of the more important need to control the climate and achieve social justice.
It’s the National Audubon Society.
Write a letter to the Audubon Society expressing concern about the millions of songbirds destined to be killed by the dramatic expansion of wind farms along our coastlines, and you’ll get a response that knocks you sideways like a whirling turbine blade. It will come as a form letter that speaks first not about birds, but about the need for wind energy and lots of it.
“Thank you for reaching out to the National Audubon Society,” the letter reads. “Audubon strongly supports wind energy that is sited and operated properly to avoid, minimize and mitigate effectively for the impacts on birds, other wildlife, and the places they need now and in the future. To that end, we support the development of wind energy to achieve 100% clean energy.
“Wind power is an important source of renewable, carbon-free energy that is critical to replacing and reducing emissions from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas that cause warming of our planet.”
They explain: “Top scientific experts...agree that the effects of climate change are happening now and will get worse if warming is not limited to 1.5 degrees C. ...Beyond the climate impacts, wind power also avoids air pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion that disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.”
I am not kidding. That part of the sentence is highlighted in bold and includes a link to a page on the NAACP website. Clicking that link got us a screen that said “Page Not Found” but that included a link to the NAACP home page so we could “get back in the fight for civil rights and social justice.”
“Ensure that Black lives are a priority in all spaces,” it said. “Help make racial equity a reality.” It called for fighting “police brutality, COVID-19, and voter suppression” and working “to disrupt inequality, dismantle racism, and accelerate change in key areas including criminal justice, health care, education, climate, and the economy.”
We saw that it’s time to “Build Back Black” with legislation designed to “address historic issues of structural and systemic racism by making key investments in several areas that have a profound positive impact on Black communities around the country. It is time to prioritize the needs and interests of Black America, while also addressing long-standing issues around the racial wealth gap and systemic racism.”
I have to say, we were confused. We kept looking for something, anything about the needs and interests of birds, even blackbirds, but there was nothing. Why had the Audubon Society sent us to the NAACP website to fight for “racial equity”? Do bird lives matter? They seem to be way down the list of priorities for the Audubon Society, who appear to be endorsing the “Build Back Better” bill.
https://naacp.org/campaigns/build-back-black
Perhaps they’ve been listening to Nancy Pelosi talking about climate being “the existential threat of our time,” though Nancy was talking about the disproportionate effect on women. (We linked to this yesterday but wouldn’t want you to miss it.)
https://www.westernjournal.com/climate-change-sexist-women-according-pelosi/
But we turned up something else that might explain the Audubon Society's current focus on racial equity. They're atoning for the fact that their founder, ornithologist and illustrator John James Audubon, owned slaves. An affiliated group, the Washington DC-area Audubon Naturalist Society, is even changing its name. The national organization hasn't announced plans to change its name, but we won't' be surprised when they do.
Anyway, the Audubon letter goes on to explain that because only about 7 percent of our energy needs are currently supplied by wind power, “the U.S. will have to dramatically ramp up deployment of wind energy technology, but some of the most obvious and easily accessible places have already been taken. As a result, finding places to site wind energy that minimizes risk to birds will be increasingly difficult.” So at least they plan to be involved in the “siting process.”
Oh, but wind energy is going to “help birds on a global scale,” they say, by “curbing climate change.” They are correct to say that warming (note: cooling as well) will affect birds’ habitat and range and could certainly endanger them. But they don’t take into account the other scientific experts who say that, regardless of whether or not the planet is warming and whether that has much to do with human activity, America could go to 100 percent renewable energy tomorrow and not significantly affect global temperatures. We could end up with “bird Cuisinarts” up and down our coastlines –- ruining them for birds and people –- and from sea to shining sea and still not be able to control the climate, certainly not with nations such as China actually increasing their use of coal. (China has suddenly said it’s going to work with the U.S. on climate, but we’ll believe that when we see it. Activities will reportedly be “self-policed.”)
China is also having a huge negative environmental impact in Africa.
The Audubon letter doesn’t discuss nuclear energy as an alternative, which would do much more to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels without knocking millions of birds out of the sky.
They acknowledge that wind power facilities can harm birds through “direct collisions,” habitat destruction, disturbance and displacement, and destruction of “important ecological links.” “Placing wind projects in the path of migratory routes makes this problem worse, especially for larger turbine blades that may reach up into the average flight zone of birds that migrate at night. As estimated 140,000 to 500,000 bird deaths occur per year due to turbine collisions, which is substantial, but significantly less than deaths caused by outdoor cats and building collisions.”
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service - Migratory Bird Program | Conserving America's Birds
But they have just said that wind power currently provides only about 7 percent of our power and that we will need dramatically more wind turbines. They also just said that as more wind turbines are placed, it gets harder and harder to find new locations that won’t impact migratory birds. Half a million birds today could be half a billion before we can generate enough wind and other renewable energy to take the place of fossil fuels, if that is even possible.
The letter goes on to talk about some ways Audubon can approach “advocacy in the siting and operation of wind turbines,” but it's obvious that they won't be trying to modify the scale of these projects.
They do mention one case in which they opposed a 2013 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rule that offered 30-year permits to kill and injure Bald and Golden Eagles (protected species), and a judge did overturn that rule. Score one for the birds in a contest that, if wind turbines continue multiplying, they are destined to lose. In its quest to be counted among the “woke,” the National Audubon Society isn't nearly woke enough to that.
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AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
This feature returns with images of America's cities, landscapes and people.
HYMNAL: IMMORTAL, INVISIBLE, GOD ONLY WISE
Listen: https://youtu.be/MgdkKn97e5Q
Today's hymn was recommended by Mary J.
1 Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes,
most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.
2 Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might,
thy justice like mountains high soaring above
thy clouds, which are fountains of goodness and love.
3 To all, life thou givest, to both great and small.
In all life thou livest, the true life of all.
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
and wither and perish, but naught changeth thee.
4 Great God of all glory, great God of all light,
thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight.
All praise we would render; O help us to see
‘tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.
Author: Walter Smith
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