By Mike Huckabee
December 21, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
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I started this newsletter back in the fall of 2016 just ahead of President Trump's election over Hillary Clinton. Since then, I have chronicled his presidency, a nation grappling with COVID, woke ideology, elections, more elections, Congress and finally Joe Biden's presidency.
My team and I like to say that we read the news, so you don't have to. We spend late nights and early mornings, finding news we think is important for you to read, and then we add our two cents and sometimes three cents to help frame things.
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Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
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News from Israel
I am still in Israel, meeting with officials and the people of Israel to express my support. I just met with PM Netanyahu and plan to leave tonight. Here’s a report on my friend Yael Epstein’s Facebook page from a bomb shelter where we had to take refuge after a rocket attack struck Tel Aviv during our lunch. This is what the Israelis have to deal with every day, as fatuous bureaucrats, activists and celebrities lecture them about not fighting back.
https://www.facebook.com/YaelEckstein/videos/875362111038972/
You’ll find a report on the rockets fired at Tel Aviv at todays’ link to the latest news on the war from Fox News…
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/december-21-israel-hamas-war
More new developments: Hamas continues to reject Israeli offers of a seven-day ceasefire in exchange for the release of hostages. According to the Wall Street Journal, Gazans are increasingly blaming Hamas for the destruction in Gaza. No word on when that obvious truth will penetrate the skulls of the pro-Hamas idiots blocking traffic and gluing themselves to things all over the West.
The leader of Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants who’ve been attacking ships in the Red Sea is blustering that "any American targeting of our country will be targeted by us.” In a televised statement, he declared, "We will not stand idly by if the Americans are tempted to escalate further and commit foolishness by targeting our country or waging war against it." Here’s an interesting thought experiment: try to imagine him saying that if Trump were still President.
Attention, Democrats:
This is why you shouldn’t go around flinging open Pandora’s boxes just because it feels soooooo good to stick it to Trump. Thanks to the Colorado Supreme Court deciding that four out of seven Democrat-appointed judges can deny someone access to office without due process of law, other states are now pondering which candidate, Trump or Biden, has actually done more to violate his presidential oath and render himself unfit for office.
California and Maine are talking about thwarting “our democracy” by banning Trump from the ballot. But to the Lt. Governor of Texas, the one most unfit for office would definitely be the guy who willfully refuses to do his sworn duty of enforcing border security and immigration laws and who has subjected Texas to tremendous harm due to a mass invasion of illegal aliens, drugs and violent criminals. So he’s asking why Joe Biden should be allowed to be on the ballot in Texas. Darn good question.
And if anyone answers, “That’s different, Trump is accused of insurrection!,” thanks to the Colorado Supreme Court, all red state leaders have to do is say, “Fine, then I accuse Joe Biden of insurrection.”
This is why the morons celebrating that Colorado ruling had better start hoping the Supreme Court squashes it fast and slams the lid shut on their latest Pandora’s box.
Related: The Democratic Lt. Governor of California is already calling for banning Trump from the California ballot (as if he’d have any chance of winning there anyway; by the time next November rolls around, California might be entirely populated by homeless people, criminals, illegal aliens and Stockholm Syndrome sufferers.)
Bonus points to her for calling for this in a way that conveyed more shocking ignorance of the Constitutional requirements for the presidency than even I expected of her.
It’s politicians like her who make it hard for the Babylon Bee to think up satirical news stories that are goofier than reality. But to their credit, they still manage to do it!
And this is about an entirely different subject, but still a must-see.
The standard for wrongdoing just keeps moving
It’s been very instructive to watch how Democrats keep moving the goalposts in opposite directions for themselves and their opponents. When it comes to Trump and the Republicans, an unsupported accusation of insurrection is enough to trigger the 14th Amendment, with no pesky indictments, trials or convictions even needed.
On the other hand, as mountains of evidence of Biden family corruption pile up, the standard for wrongdoing just keeps moving. It’s gone from “Joe never discussed Hunter’s business” to “Joe never benefited from Hunter’s business” to “Joe never benefited financially from Hunter’s business.” Next it will be, “You don’t have photos of Hunter handing Joe a bag of Chinese cash with a big dollar sign on it.”
John Hinderaker at the Powerline blog has had enough of this ever-shifting standard, so here, he quotes 18 U.S. Code § 201 to remind us that “Joe Biden needn’t have benefited personally to be guilty of bribery under federal law… It is bribery if a public official (Joe Biden) is influenced in the performance of any official act by a payment to ‘any other person or entity,’” and that includes his relatives.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/12/stop-moving-the-goalposts.php
Anyone who still wants to argue that none of this applies to Joe Biden should check out Dick Morris’ new book “Corrupt.” Here’s my interview with him from last week’s “Huckabee” (he says he considered calling it “Treason.”) He’s also offering a regularly updated e-book edition because a print edition can’t keep up with all the new corruption that’s constantly being revealed.
https://www.huckabee.tv/guests/dick-morris
History Repeats Itself:
A reminder that the last time the Democrats removed a Republican from the presidential ballot in Democrat-run states, it was in Confederate states to prevent Abe Lincoln from getting elected and freeing their slaves. It didn’t work then, either.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/12/last-time-democrats-took-gop-candidate-ballot-was/
Interesting:
In a “friend of the court” brief on Wednesday, former Attorney General Ed Meese and other constitutional scholars argued to the Supreme Court that Jack Smith’s appointment as Trump-targeting special counsel was unconstitutional. They say it violates the “Appointments clause” of the Constitution, which requires that his office be created by Congress.
Instead, Smith was improperly appointed to an office that doesn’t exist by Attorney General Merrick Garland, using powers he does not have. As such, his cases against Trump should be thrown out because he doesn’t have the authority to represent the United States. This will be a good test as to whether the Supreme Court cares anymore about the separation of powers and what the Constitution actually says. More details at the link.
An Initiative worth supporting
When discussing a story related to law or the Constitution, I’ll sometimes link to Cornell law professor William Jacobson’s excellent site, Legal Insurrection. If you have kids who plan to attend business school, you’ll want to know about his foundation’s latest project. It’s a database that details the CRT (Critical Race Theory) and ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) initiatives at America’s top 10 business schools.
Figuring that kids already get enough of that one-sided leftist garbage in their schooling, Jacobson feels there’s no point in getting more of it from business schools. He told the College Fix, “CRT and ESG are failed ideologies which politicize and racialize education. While the study of such subjects should not be banned, there is no reason to put university resources behind promoting those topics. Almost any university purpose would be a better allocation of resources.”
Of course, the reason the left targets business schools for this brainwashing is because they want students to carry the infection to their future workplaces. And there’s no question it’s working: look at “woke Disney,” whose stock price has plummeted to less than half of what it was just a few years ago as their "woke" propaganda alienates their customer base. They’re now facing a potential stockholder revolt.
It’s bad enough that this poison is in liberal arts and law schools, but it really needs to be rooted out of business schools, and Heaven help us, medical schools. If there’s anyone you don’t want fixated on nothing but the surface color of your skin, it’s your surgeon.
Related: Here’s a great example of someone who probably got indoctrinated into leftist politics in journalism school. Fortunately. Sen. J.D. Vance was kind enough to give her a free schooling on how to do her job correctly.
https://www.westernjournal.com/gop-sen-vance-destroys-dishonest-reporter-tries-liken-trump-hitler/
The Miracle of Bidenomics:
According to a survey by LendingClub, 62% of American adults were living paycheck-to-paycheck in December, up from 58% in March.
That might explain why Walmart is introducing a new feature at its self-service checkouts. It’s the option to “buy now, pay later” in installment payments over three to 24 months on basic items other than groceries.
You know people are hurting financially when they have to finance basic purchases at Walmart. My question is, how much longer before they’re doing it with groceries, too, and people are still trying to pay off a corn dog they ate two years ago?
Distasteful
I find stories like this distasteful and wish I didn’t have to report on them, but ever since Biden “brought decency back,” there’s been a torrent of them. So just to let you know: it was revealed that there was an accusation of another Capitol sex tape, this one involving a staffer of a House Republican. But it was from a while back, the staffer denied it and has since left for another job, and an investigation turned up no evidence. Unless he’s Trump, an accusation with no evidence should be meaningless.
https://www.westernjournal.com/second-capitol-sex-tape-scandal-revealed-report/
Anyway, now you know, and I’m going to move on to a topic I hope will be a little less salacious: children’s cartoons. How could that possibly be sexually suggestive?...
A sad critique
The latest blowup to hit the pop culture front involves Netflix’s popular cartoon show for preschool children, “CoComelon Lane.” The controversial scene involves a small boy putting on a tutu and tiara and dancing for his two gay dads. One of the dads encourages the cross-dressing by singing, “If you’re not sure what to choose, think about all the things you like to do. Just be you.”
Criticism of it online has been swift and harsh. But at least it’s not as shocking as the Daily Wire’s cartoon show “Chip Chilla.” That triggered a New York Times pop culture critic who accused it of promoting “the fantasy of the fun dad.” She sniped that it shows a “weirdly present” father having fun with his kids, homeschooling them, and teaching them about Moby Dick, the Roman Empire and “dead white males” like George Washington and Neil Armstrong.
I guess she found it impossible to believe that a father could care about his kids, be present in their lives, and have fun teaching them about things that are actually worth knowing. I don’t want to criticize her too much because I think maybe she doesn’t realize that she’s unintentionally revealing something very sad about her own upbringing. Maybe this is how someone ends up being a pop culture critic at the New York Times.
Trump removal from ballot in Colorado just shows us what we’re dealing with
President Biden is apparently just fine with the Colorado Supreme Court’s appallingly un-democratic and unconstitutional 4-3 decision to kick President Trump off the ballot for ‘24 and not even to allow the counting of write-in votes for him. Why, after all, Trump is an insurrectionist, pure and simple, no doubt about it. That’s the World According to Biden.
It was harder even than usual to make out the exact verbiage of his garbled speech at the airport in Milwaukee, but in answering a reporter’s question, he said that Trump’s insurrection was “self-evident,” “you saw it all,” and we should “let the court make that decision” about whether the 14th Amendment applies. Trump “certainly supported an insurrection,” Biden said with a slight smile. “No question about it. None, zero. And, uh, he seems to be doubling down…”
Never mind that Biden is using his presidential podium to flap his gums about an ongoing case involving his political opponent. (At the risk of sounding like deranged climate activist Greta Thunberg, “How dare you???”) This would’ve been our follow-up question: Mr. President, if Trump as you say is an insurrectionist beyond any doubt --- which takes his case beyond even the “reasonable doubt” standard in a criminal trial to find someone guilty of a crime -- why hasn’t the special counsel charged him with that?
And if Biden would like to see Trump taken off the ballot in this way, before he’s been convicted or even charged with insurrection, he’d better be careful what he wishes for. If someone’s going to be disqualified to run for office for allegedly doing something he hasn’t even been charged with, we could much more easily make the case that Biden himself is unfit. Let’s see, would he like to hear the argument that he and his family are guilty of accepting bribes from America’s adversaries, or the one that he is cognitively unable to do his job? Either of these accusations is incredibly serious and both are 100 percent “self-evident” to us.
This move in Colorado did open a “Pandora’s Box,” just as Trump said it would. Since the definition of “insurrection” used in this case is so expansive and their decision has no “limiting principle,” Republicans are already talking about taking Biden off the ballot, in Colorado and other states, over his failure to secure the border against an invasion, which could be seen as supporting an insurrection. (Biden’s utter failure at the border is another easy case to make.) “Challenge this nonsense,” said former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/republicans-joe-biden-colorado-supreme-court/2023/12/20/id
As for Trump, he made the point on Tuesday in Waterloo, Iowa, that he’s made throughout all of this lawfare: “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you, and in the end, they’re not after me; they’re after you. I just happen to be standing in their way.”
It was difficult to watch the many TV pundits justifying and even praising this “historic ruling,” as we could feel our own treasured brain cells screaming in protest. So we’ll spare you; don’t look for those links here. (And don’t watch THE VIEW.) We’ll link to them when they correct themselves after the Supreme Court reverses this ruling.
Oh, wait, who are we kidding? They’ll never correct themselves! They’ll just express disgust with “Trump’s conservative Supreme Court” and redouble their efforts to “pack” it. (And, yes, they’ll do this even if it’s a 9-0 decision.)
Attorney Emily Compagno, appearing on THE FIVE Wednesday afternoon, had some great thoughts, finishing with the point that “at the end of the day, all you are doing is having partisan state election boards and activist judges take away the power from the people. Let the people decide. All this is going to do is make everyone mad and remind everyone why activist judges hold no place in our democracy. And for some reason, they are continuing to flourish under this administration.”
See the group’s full comments here. (Sorry, the lead-in has a few brief clips of some of those Trump-hating TV pundits.)
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6343623879112
Well, we all know the reason activist judges are flourishing now. This administration thinks that taking power away from the voters is the only way they can win. And winning is everything; it doesn’t matter how they damage the legal system as long as they control it. But the harder they try, the more obvious and disturbing their tactics are to voters. Trump just comes back stronger.
Alan Dershowitz could hardly believe his eyes. “In the 60 years I’ve been practicing and teaching law, I’ve never seen a decision that’s so anti-democratic and unconstitutional, it’s absurd,” he said on NEWSMAX Wednesday. The idea that the 14th Amendment was supposed to substitute for the impeachment provision, carefully crafted by the framers, is wrong.”
Dershowitz said the 14th Amendment clearly designates Congress as having the power to determine if someone can’t run for office. "If you want to impeach a president, if you want to make him not be able to run in the future, there's a provision. It requires a two-thirds vote of the Senate," he said. "But the idea that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to circumvent that carefully drawn provision and simply allow any state to make up grounds for denying him the right to be on the ballot undercuts democracy."
“This is an extreme, extreme stretch,” he said. “...Even the text of the Constitution doesn't make it applicable to the President. But the amendment itself was designed simply to prevent people who fought in the Civil War from running for certain offices."
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-colorado-supreme-court/2023/12/20/id
The scariest thing about this is not that it might be upheld, as it almost certainly will not, but that some people have gone so crazy that they’re actually trying it. When this doesn’t work, they’re going to get even crazier. We have a situation in which some people (including in the media) have been so brainwashed, they truly believe Trump is the reincarnation of Hitler, the destroyer of democracy (when THEY’RE the ones destroying democracy). One thing we can do about this is speak out and just tell them when they’re being absurd, as Ohio Sen. J. D. Vance did on Tuesday. This was epic...
https://www.theblaze.com/news/jd-vance-reporter-trump-immigration?utm_source=theblaze-breaking
Jonathan Turley was back on FOX NEWS yesterday, reiterating his initial opinion that the Colorado justices weren’t just in “uncharted territory,” as they had put it, but “had sailed off the Constitutional map.” He pointed out that three of the seven appointed justices --- ALL of them Democrats; how does this happen in a state with almost a million registered Republicans? --- wrote scathing dissents.
“I think that reaction is going to be shared by many on the Supreme Court,” he said on “Special Report,” adding that this will be a “critical challenge” for Chief Justice John Roberts. The task of a chief justice, Turley explained, is to try for agreement; the goal is a unanimous decision. “That would go a long way for this country,” he said, “if these justices could show that as divided as we are sometimes, that we’re still joined by a sort of common covenant of faith, as a democratic, free nation. And what Colorado did was wrong --- it was wrong legally, but it was wrong in terms of our values.”
Did I hear that right? Values? Freedom? A common covenant of faith? Well, if three Democrat judges in Colorado could offer opinions in support of that, there’s hope that even the three most liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices will. Maybe this time, the far-left crazies got the lighted match just a little too close to the Constitution.
IMPORTANT READING: By the way, did you know how and by whom that Colorado lawsuit originated? As reported by the DAILY CALLER, the legal organization behind it “has a direct link to the Biden administration.”
According to the Department of Homeland Security website, Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (try not to laugh), or CREW, is also a member of the DHS Advisory Council, “tasked with giving real-time advice to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.” Bookbinder also is a former trial attorney for the “Justice” Department’s public integrity section (again, try not to laugh). More details here…
https://dailycaller.com/2023/12/20/joe-biden-dhs-trump-removed-colorado-ballot
It was CREW that brought the lawsuit to have Trump removed from the ballot in Colorado. Here’s their website; have a look around and see that (sarcasm alert) there’s nothing political about this crew at all…
https://www.citizensforethics.org
AND ONE MORE POINT: As longtime readers know, we’ve always said that the January 6 riot played into the Democrats’ strategy so well that if it hadn’t happened, they would’ve had to MAKE it happen. Gradually, evidence --- not “conspiracy theory” -- has been emerging --- that they indeed “helped” a lot, particularly with their deliberate lack of security that day. And now, this Colorado decision shows us why even their insistence on the inappropriate word “insurrection” at that time was deliberate. The seeds were planted then. Laura Ingraham mentioned this last night in an outstanding opening segment…
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