By Mike Huckabee
April 18, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff!
Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
1 Corinthians 13:13 KJV
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Fatally-flawed
“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” is the fatally-flawed philosophy underpinning Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto.” Everywhere it’s been tried, it’s led to the inevitable destruction of economies, productivity and work ethic. And now, it’s going to be how California’s utility companies decide how much you pay for gas and electricity.
As Robert Spencer at PJ Media notes, this is being done under the guise of “equity.” And I’ve been pointing out ever since that term appeared, it’s meant to sound like “equality,” but it’s really just a cover for the terrible Marxist concept of unfair, government-imposed equality of outcomes. It’s like California's not even trying to hide the communism anymore.
Gas stove ban update
Eighteen energy and consumer advocacy agencies filed comments with the Department of Energy in opposition to the Biden Administration’s push to eliminate gas stoves. Yes, that would be the gas stove ban that, according to Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) was crazy, paranoid misinformation and a conspiracy theory by MAGA Republicans that didn’t really exist – except it does.
Strangest story of the day
And our nominee for the strangest story of the day, which involves a police raid on the wrong house, a child porn investigation, and a former executive for Planned Parenthood committing suicide…
Inventing racism
It’s often been said that some people derive so much power and money from condemning racism that if racism didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it. Well, meet the Florida State University criminology professor who just had to quit his cushy job of providing “studies” to make America look more racist, after it was discovered that he was falsifying the data. Six of his studies have had to be retracted. Yes, he actually was “inventing racism.” It’s not just a saying anymore.
Keep the Newsletter Going: Buy Mike Huckabee’s Book: A Simple Government
Mike Huckabee has continued to be the voice of common sense conservatism, through his television talk show, his radio commentaries, and his lectures around the country. Now he's written a book that sums up the twelve things we really need from Washington to get the country back on the right track. These twelve essential truths will have you nodding in agreement, whether you're a Republican, an Independent, or even an open-minded Democrat. They can help us put aside our differences, tone down the partisan rancor, and return to the simple principles of the Founding Fathers: liberty, justice, personal freedom, and civic virtue. Originally published in 2010, Mike's solutions can help us tackle even the most seemingly complicated of today's problems.
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Good read
Dave Ramsey on why parents who shelter their kids and pay the bills for their “adult children” are not helping them, but are responsible for creating our current class of weak, entitled “activists” who can’t stand on their own feet and need “safe spaces” from mere words. Spoiler alert: helicopter parents are not helping their kids, they’re harming them.
A House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Democrat-caused crime waves plaguing our blue cities
Monday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing in New York City into the rampant crime under Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has twisted the law like a pretzel to charge former President Trump with 34 felonies while refusing to prosecute actual criminals and downgrading over half of real felonies to misdemeanors.
I assume the reason for Republicans to do this was to force the media to give the Democrat-caused crime waves plaguing our blue cities some attention. It’s an impossible story to refute because it’s happening all over, right in front of people’s eyes. The Democrats on the committee found themselves in the position of the proverbial lawyer who, not having the facts or the law on his side, pounds the table. And I haven’t seen so much table-pounding from a leftist since Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was hammering his podium with his shoe.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
Fortunately, the New Yorkers who have been victims of the crime wave the Democrats unleashed and who were invited to finally tell their stories had no patience for their spin. Their usual first resort of crying “Racism” was made difficult by the fact that so many of the furious victims were minorities themselves. So they just cruelly insulted them by dismissing them as political “props.” The response to that was appropriately brutal.
Adam Schiff, of course, tried to claim the hearings were only about protecting Donald Trump, and a heckler yelled at him, “You’re the only one talking about Donald Trump! We’re testifying about our families dying!” and called Schiff a “scumbag.”
In fact, Committee chairman Jim Jordan said he plans to hold such meetings in various cities around the country. But he said, “What better place to start than New York City, where videos of violent, senseless attacks appear almost daily and where the DA of lower Manhattan earned a reputation for caring more about the perpetrators of crime than the victims?”
Rep. Jerry Nadler also got an unexpected response when he intoned, “Let me be very clear, we are here today in lower Manhattan for one reason and one reason only, the chairman is doing the bidding of Donald Trump.” At that, several people burst out laughing. Seemingly rattled, Nadler prattled on, “The chairman designed this hearing to intimidate and deter the duly elected district attorney of Manhattan from doing the work his constituents elected him to do.” Someone in the crowd loudly replied, “Wow!”
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
Nadler also accused Republicans of abusing power and weaponizing the federal government. In response to that, the word “irony” leapt out of the dictionary and set itself on fire.
Rep. Hank Johnson claimed the Republicans descended on New York “like jack-booted thugs.” Maybe he was just afraid that New York already has so many thugs now that a few more thugs in heavy boots might cause Manhattan Island to tip over.
But let’s put aside all the well-deserved mockery. It was actually the Democrats who made a mockery of this hearing, and who embarrassed themselves by trying to dodge responsibility and play politics right in the faces of furious and grieving victims of their deadly policies. People like bodega clerk Jose Alba, who told of how he was charged for stabbing a criminal who was trying to murder him, with the charges only dropped after a public outcry.
If you watch nothing else from these hearings, you must see the video of Madeline Brame, the mother of a young black man murdered on the streets. Even though his killing was caught on video, Bragg let two of the four people involved go on lesser charges. I thought black lives mattered. She told the fatuous Democrats, “Victims can care less about anybody’s political ideology!” She said of Bragg releasing her son’s killers, “If that’s not a threat to public safety, I don’t know what is. If he’s receiving one penny of federal dollars, you need to pull that funding until he starts doing his damn job and prosecuting crime!”
And when New York Rep. Dan Goldman condescendingly told her that “your experiences are devastating” but “this is a charade to cover up for an abuse of power,” the Republican’s “inappropriate investigation” of Bragg, she lit into him like Mike Tyson .
Brame told him, "Don't insult my intelligence. You're trying to insult me like I'm not aware of what's going on here. I'm fully aware of what's going on here, OK? That's why I walked away from the plantation of the Democratic Party."
In case you don’t know Goldman, Greg Price tweeted his background, which helps to explain his clueless elitism: “Daniel Goldman is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, born into immense privilege, went to Harvard and Stanford, and purchased a congressional seat who is now lecturing people who lost their family members to violent crime in the city he represents in Congress.”
I’d like to hope that the Democrats learned something from having to face the furious people whose lives are being devastated by their pro-crime policies. But I fear that all they learned is that they need to keep hiding in DC and working even harder on ways to prevent the people from being allowed to speak freely about their government.
Very Related: The New York Times reports that nearly a third of all the shoplifting arrests in the city last year involved just 327 people who were collectively arrested and released over 6,000 times. That’s an average of 18 catch-and-releases per thief under DA Alvin Bragg. Is it any wonder why policing is no deterrent and criminals are running wild? The miracle is that only 327 people are shoplifting that much when it’s become such a lucrative career with almost zero downside.
Also, I’ve written about this before, but the Democrats just keep going back to this debunked narrative because they have nothing else. So one more time…
They tried to claim yesterday that (1.) reported crime in New York City is actually down; (2.) It’s worse in other cities; and (3.) there are red states with higher per capita crime rates so obviously Republican governance isn’t any better at stopping crime. All of that is just more proof of the old saying about there being three kinds of lies: “Lies, d*mned lies and statistics.” The truth:
(1.) Crime reports are down because so many crimes have been decriminalized, felonies have been reduced to misdemeanors, and victims no longer even bother to call the police because they know nothing will be done. Fewer reported crimes doesn’t mean there are fewer crimes. There are just fewer reports.
(2.) The other cities plagued by crime waves are also run by Democrats. It’s just that some are even worse than others.
(3.) Apples and oranges. Some red states have high crime rates because there are large Democrat-run cities throwing off the curve. For instance, Louisiana’s crime rate would plummet if you could just factor out New Orleans, which hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1872.
Tucker interviews Elon Musk
Last night, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Elon Musk aired on Fox News. This article has a good recap of his comments plus video clips.
We learned that he’s been sounding the alarm on the dangers of AI since the Obama years, but to little avail. He had some dire warnings about that. He also talked about something I already covered: the government reach into platforms like Twitter, and that they even had access to our private direct messages. As for firing 80% of Twitter’s staff and still being able to run the company, he said it turns out you don’t need that many people to run Twitter “if you’re not trying to run some glorified activist organization and you don’t care that much about censorship.”
Related viewing: Well, we can’t say we weren’t warned about the dangers of unchecked artificial intelligence, and I don’t just mean the “Terminator” movies. Here’s a review of the 1970 movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” about a super computer that takes over the world. It was just disturbing science fiction…at the time.
Fetterman returns
After a six-week hospital stay for clinical depression, John Fetterman finally returned to the Senate. Obviously, his rehabilitation did not include classes in how to dress appropriately for work.
Don’t Mess With Ron
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said there will be a meeting this week of the Central Florida Tourism Oversight Board to discuss the “plethora of legal infirmities” in Disney’s underhanded attempt to evade state oversight by signing long-term deals with contractors. In the meantime, he joked that the land near Disney’s parks might be a good site for a state prison.
Even funnier than the joke were all the liberal media outlets that took him seriously and had hissy-fit meltdowns over it. Although, considering how Disney seems bent on encouraging child predators, having a state prison nearby might come in handy.
Speaking of leftists with no sense of humor (or self-awareness), kudos to Ed Driscoll at Instapundit for pointing out this hilarious self-own on Twitter.
https://instapundit.com/
A prankster/meme maker known as Carpe Donktum posted a fake Twitter tweet reading, “As a 3rd grade teacher, I often talk about Jesus with my students, they are so excited to hear about my faith. They point to the cross on [the] wall and ask me about the Resurrection. Some have gotten baptized in the sink, as long as they don’t tell their parents. It’s our secret.”
It went viral, and leftists who swallowed it went ballistic, with one screeching, “Separation of church and state exists because of people like you who brainwash and abuse children. You shouldn’t have your job and you should lose your children if you have any.” Apparently, none of them recognized that he was actually satirizing them by putting a religious twist on teachers who push their “trans” religion on kids while keeping it secret from their parents. Or as I like to call that, “who brainwash and abuse children.”
And at least when you’re baptized, it’s just water. It’s not hormones and a scalpel.
Chicago Mayor raises eyebrows
Chicago’s mayor-elect Brandon Johnson rightfully raised eyebrows when he said we mustn’t demonize youth just because hundreds of teenagers invaded downtown over the weekend, rioting, fighting, attacking cars, assaulting people, firing guns and shooting two young men. But before anyone starts missing outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot, note that her response was to criticize the negative way it was reported. She said it was “wrong” to “say it was ‘mayhem.’”
So next time, look for headlines to read, “Multiple injuries including gunshot wounds in weekend hijinks.”
Another Democrat switches parties
While Democrats in the national party just keep pushing further left into uncharted weirdness, they’re leaving a lot of members in the heartland behind. West Virginia Rep. Elliot Pritt just became the fourth Democrat legislator in two months to switch parties.
https://www.
I’m sure the DNC would like to criticize these escapees from the loony bin, but they can’t, having fully embraced the right to transition and play for the other team.
re so large you take up two seats that you should have to pay for two seats. But the airlines should also provide seats that are big enough to accommodate most people, so that everybody doesn’t require at least two seats to be comfortable.
And can we all agree that if we have to be crammed in like sardines, people should stop reclining their seats so that they’re crushing the laps of the people behind them?
FEC complaint filed
The Daily Caller reports that the nonprofit Coolidge Reagan Foundation has filed an ethics complaint with the FEC against New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for alleged “repeated, blatant violations of federal campaign finance law to conceal how she spent thousands of dollars of campaign funds.”
They allege that her campaign organization, AOC for Congress, reported tens of thousands of dollars of disbursements for credit card payments and reimbursements to AOC herself and other entities without fully disclosing what the payments were for. Also, “the sum of the specific Memo Item entries is consistently hundreds or even thousands of dollars less than the total amount paid to the recipient.”
To be fair, campaign funds are donated by other people, and socialists have never been careful about how they spend other people’s money.
Jordan: Infamous “classic earmarks” letter tied to Biden campaign
Yesterday, we brought proof, courtesy of legal analyst Margot Cleveland, that the persecution of President Trump is being conducted by the Biden-linked Democrat political machine. That includes not only a pretext for the Mar-A-Lago raid but also the interminable investigation and now indictment by Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s grand jury. Today, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, says they have new evidence that ties the Biden campaign to that disingenuous “classic earmarks” letter signed by 51 former intel officials to save Biden from the laptop scandal right before the election.
If you want to see an example of election interference, this is it. For real. As Miranda Devine, who broke the laptop story in the NEW YORK POST, says in her book LAPTOP FROM HELL, “Polls suggest that if the full story of the Bidens’ international influence-peddling scheme had been told before the election, it could have changed votes in crucial marginal seats and possibly flipped the result.”
By suddenly appearing on the scene, with all those impressive names and titles of security experts attesting to the laptop’s almost certain inauthenticity, this letter was the magic bullet --- just the thing to convince most people before the election that the laptop was fake, part of a Russian plot to interfere. That, of course, was completely untrue. But the letter worked, meaning that by the time Biden voters went to the polls, they had effectively been duped. Thanks to the letter, not only did the laptop not incriminate the Bidens, but in a way it incriminated Trump, by falsely giving the impression that Russians were coordinating with him to help him win.
(Of course, the FBI also used Twitter and Facebook to suppress the story. Twitter locked the POST completely out for two weeks on the pretense that it was “hacked material,” and CEO Jack Dorsey admitted only after the election that they had made a mistake. Facebook supposedly did a fact-check but never revealed their results.)
How does a letter like that, with so many signatures, come so quickly into being? Wouldn’t the experts all need some time to independently examine the evidence before they signed the letter? How much time would that take? Most Americans assumed the letter was a kind of grassroots effort by intel experts who saw immediate red flags about Russian influence and just had to say something. But, as Matt Margolis reports for PJ MEDIA, that’s not what it was. Jordan and his team of congressional investigators, after hearing testimony from a couple of Obama-era CIA officials, claim to have linked the letter’s origin to the 2020 Biden campaign.
As Margolis says, “This could be one of the most significant instances of legitimate election interference in our nation’s history, with far-reaching implications that leave a dark cloud over the integrity of our democracy.” We heard for years about “collusion” in 2020 --- the phony collusion between Russia and Trump --- when it turns out the REAL collusion was the one among government, Big Tech and the mainstream media. And, according to Jordan, the Biden campaign.
Rep. Jordan’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will be releasing an interim report later this month to provide details on those 51 signatories and the evidence linking their letter to “political considerations” and even the Biden campaign itself. The subcommittee is still conducting interviews this week, he told John Solomon at JUST THE NEWS, so the report is not quite ready for prime time. But Jordan says they do have evidence tying the Biden campaign to the letter and that the specifics of this will come out in the report.
The two top former CIA officials who sat for transcribed interviews are ex-CIA Acting Director Mike Morell (who now works as a contributor for CBS NEWS, surprise surprise) and Nick Shapiro, former national security spokesperson for President Obama and adviser to ex-CIA Director John Brennan. Jordan says these two officials were central to coordinating and spreading the “Russian disinformation” narrative to explain the laptop. “It was all done with politics,” he told Solomon, “and it looks like there [were] some real connections with the Biden campaign.”
Solomon must have been gratified to hear that. The “classic earmarks” letter was used to (supposedly) debunk stories being run by Solomon at the time, along with Devine’s stories in the NEW YORK POST and others in various news outlets.
“It seems to me that one of the key players here was Michael Morell, that he was [the] one kind of coordinating this, working this together,” Jordan told Solomon. “And then there are a few other folks...Mr. Shapiro, I think, was the one kind of coordinating the outreach to the legacy media and how they wanted this story presented.”
In LAPTOP FROM HELL, Devine describes how Rudy Giuliani’s attorney Bob Costello --- in the news more recently for testifying to the Manhattan grand jury, for all the good it did --- examined the laptop hard drive himself. Costello had been the deputy chief of the Criminal Division and, Devine said, “could spot authenticity a mile off.”
Devine said it took three weeks for Costello to do a “forensic deep dive” of the hard drive. It was only then that he began to allow the POST to download some of the most significant material onto a thumb drive, and reporters began independently verifying some of the dates and messages. This took time. And before they would publish the first installment of their story, the POST insisted on seeing the entire hard drive.
So, how long did the 51 so-called security experts examine the material before dismissing it as fake? Did they ever see it at all? Any of it?
Devine provided the answer in her book, where she characterized the letter as the “killer blow” to the laptop story, led by John Brennan and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Clapper is known to have lied under oath.) The letter, she said, was delivered to POLITICO by the above-mentioned Nick Shapiro. And no, not one of them had seen the material on the hard drive.
The letter looks official and impressive, but on close reading, it gives the signatories an “out.” It admits they don’t know if the emails are genuine or not and that they don’t have evidence of Russian involvement --- just that there are “a number of factors” that suggest Russian involvement. So, with that disclaimer (which the media, of course, ignored) and zero evidence, the letter goes on to say this:
“Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the Intelligence Community to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here but also to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump…”
This letter was written to be a lifeline quickly tossed to Joe Biden to save him just before the election. We can be sure of this now because it’s established that the FBI had Hunter’s laptop in December 2019, almost a year previously. They knew it was real. And they knew all about what Hunter and his family had been up to, including the shady foreign business people they’d been cozy with.
The letter came out just three days ahead of the final presidential debate, and Biden used it --- and only it --- to brush off Trump’s mention of the Hunter story. Biden lied and called the laptop “a bunch of garbage,” adding that “no one believes it except him [Trump] and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”
If this made-up piece of political propaganda is indeed tied to the Biden campaign --- funny, it sounds so very “Hillary,” like the Alfa Bank hoax --- let’s hope Rep. Jordan has the goods and that we see the evidence in the next week or so.
RELATED READING: Kentucky Rep. James Comer, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Monday that as many as six additional members of the Biden family --- we’re up to nine --- may have benefited from Hunter’s business dealings. He’s investigating further to see if this posed any national security threat.
RELATED WATCHING: In case you didn’t see it, Mark Levin appeared on Monday’s HANNITY to make an appeal to law enforcement people around the country --- the DAs, AGs, state prosecutors --- to make their own cases and indictments if they see that wrongdoing has been committed by the Bidens. There is massive evidence, he said, so “Figure out how to do it.” A sitting President can’t be indicted at the federal level, but “it’s never been imagined” at the state and local level. After what Bragg has done in Manhattan, he said, it’s “time for Republicans to fight back.” “...We’re gonna lose the country otherwise. This corrupt President and his family [and the corrupt DOJ] are taking us under.”
Bud Light’s self-immolation
Here’s a round-up of the latest news on Bud Light’s self-immolation. The stories range from some country music stars who won’t be invited to perform with drag queens on the CMT Awards but probably won’t care, to the launch of a new beer: Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right.
It bills itself as “100% Woke-Free American Beer,” and declares, “If you know which restroom to use, you know which beer you should be drinking.” I’d add that if you drink that much beer, you’d better know which restroom to use.
Extra Added Attraction! Check out this brutally hilarious fake commercial by Team DeSantis, parodying Budweiser’s “Real Men of Genius” campaign. It’s the “Real Men of Women’s Sports.”
https://www.foxnews.com/
The “Out of Touch With Reality” Report
Monica Medina, an outgoing Biden environmental official with a job title too ridiculously long to quote, told ABC News that the COVID lockdowns improved many people’s quality of life.
She said many people really appreciated how much time they got to spend in the environment rather than going to the office, and “We saw pollution levels go down and people went, huh, my quality of life is a little bit better now that I don’t have to worry about whether it’s code red day for smog or air pollution. So, people did become more aware.”
I certainly became even more aware of how many oblivious idiots we have in our government. Sure, your business was destroyed, your income halted, and you were isolated from your family and friends for a ludicrously long time, even blocked from visiting elderly parents who were sick and dying. But you had more time to walk in the park or on the beach! Of course, if you did that without wearing a mask, you were arrested, but that just gave you a greater appreciation for the great outdoors when you were finally let out of your cell. You’re welcome, America!
Every time I think that Washington elites can’t possibly get any more insulated from the rest of America, they open their mouths and blow out another layer of insulation.
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