By Mike Huckabee
August 8, 2022
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
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1. DAILY BIBLE VERSE
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
Why Pelosi went to Taiwan: an educated answer!
Last week, we repeatedly asked why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had made the trip to Taiwan that raised such ire from China. Of course, she had to go after news of the trip was leaked, but why plan such a trip in the first place? Mostly it ended up highlighting the weakness of the Biden administration towards the Communist Chinese. And that can't possibly help Taiwan.
Michael Pillsbury, Director of Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute and author of the book THE HUNDRED YEAR MARATHON about China’s long-term plans for world domination, appeared Sunday on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN and addressed this very question. Pillsbury saw two reasons why Pelosi went, one laudable and the other a more cynical take:
1) (Laudable.) Since the 1990s, Pelosi actually has been an outspoken proponent of human rights in China. Pillsbury said she was “almost arrested” in Tiananmen Square in 1991 and is “a good friend” of the Dalai Lama, working to get him a medal from Congress and helping keep the Tibetan exile government alive.
2) (Cynical.) Republicans have lately been “capturing the national sentiment” on China as a threat. “Democrats were positioned poorly; they seemed to be helping China,” he said. (Editorial note: why would anyone get that idea?) In some ways, her trip to Taiwan was a good thing, he said, but he called it a “performance,” done largely for political reasons, to convince Americans that, hey, Democrats are tough on China, too!
If Pelosi comes home and cooperates on Republican initiatives, he said, this will be a positive step. But “if she comes back and gives a cold shoulder to everything Republicans want to do, then we’ll have to say this was a hypocritical trip, and has not really stopped the Chinese Hundred-Year Marathon at all.”
https://video.foxnews.com/v/
Observers zero in on FBI Director Wray's evasiveness
FBI Director Christopher Wray’s evasive responses last Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee have, in turn, generated a great deal of response, mostly about his evasiveness. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson said he has “no faith” in the Justice Department to investigate Hunter Biden.
As we reported Friday, Wray blew off questioning about the FBI’s handling of Hunter Biden’s laptop with the usual old saw, “I can’t comment about ongoing investigations.” I assume he was including halfhearted, sham ‘investigations’ like that one.
The FBI may have wanted to bury that scandal, but House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy promises a real investigation. In fact, he told the NEW YORK POST, which broke the story in October of 2020 but was essentially silenced before the election, that it will “expand to U.S. intelligence agencies and chiefs who were almost certainly aware of [Hunter’s] foreign activities while his father was Vice President.”
He encouraged those who know anything to come in and talk. “If that’s not the case, there are times we will use the subpoena as well,” he said. That’s assuming the GOP takes the House this November; only the majority has subpoena power. This would also make McCarthy the new Speaker. Elections mean things!
McCarthy was speaking in particular about the 51 former intel officials who, 14 days before the 2020 presidential election, signed that now-infamous letter saying the laptop emails had all the “classic earmarks” of Russian disinformation. “Our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” they said. “If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this.”
Of course, the laptop was Hunter’s, and the emails are real. If anyone was trying to influence how Americans vote, it was the ones trying to dismiss the laptop and keep news of it from the public until after Election Day
The POST reports that when they reached out to those 51 individuals, “most ignored the inquiry and none apologized. A few [like James Clapper] even doubled down.”
McCarthy has plenty of questions he would ask them. “You cannot allow an intel community to utilize their name in an improper way without correcting,” he said. For the moment, he said, he’ll give Wray “the benefit of the doubt,” but they’ll be asking questions that demand honest answers, or else there will be “consequences.”
In anticipation of running the House committees, Republicans have already sent over 500 “preservation letters,” which demand that specific data and documents not be destroyed in the meantime. They also plant to subpoena Hunter Biden himself. And, no, this isn’t to target his father; they say that even if dad announces he’s not running again, they’ll be investigating just the same, as part of their oversight power.
THE FEDERALIST eviscerated Wray for his non-responses in a piece headlined “FBI Director Sets New Record for Lies, Dodges and Obfuscations To Avoid Slight Attempts at Congressional Oversight.” As writer Jordan Boyd reports, Wray actually managed to frustrate Senate Judiciary Committee members on both sides of the aisle.
By not addressing senators’ concerns, Wray “confirmed Republicans’ suspicions that the FBI does engage in political investigations.” Wray avoided giving specific answers about:
--- why the FBI is going around state laws to demand personal information from concealed carry permit owners
--- why they didn’t vet hundreds of Afghan evacuees who were on terrorist watch lists
--- how the spike in crime is related to crime rings operating across our compromised southern border
–- whether or not our border is secure
–- what actions the FBI took against pro-abortion activists’ violent attacks after the Dobbs decision
–- why his agency failed to address the harassment and violent threats against Supreme Court justices
And much more. Be sure and watch Ted Cruz’s masterful grilling of Wray concerning “symbols of millitia violent extremism” such as the Gadsden (“Don’t Tread On Me”) flag and the Betsy Ross flag. Wray also had to admit, under questioning by Cruz, the the FBI special agent in charge of the Detroit field office during the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping debacle is now in charge of the DC office, overseeing the J6 investigation.
Here’s more about that stunning admission.
Wray REALLY equivocated when it came to answering questions about the Trump-Russia Hoax, refusing even to condemn those allegations. He also failed to answer Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s question about whether or not the FBI believes Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. He couldn’t even answer THAT?
As Brooke Singman at FOX NEWS reported, Wray did say that whistleblower allegations about the handling of Hunter’s laptop were “deeply troubling,” –- I have to wonder if perhaps the whistleblowing itself was the especially troubling part –- but did not address the larger pattern involving agents such as Tim Thibault regarding investigations into the Trump campaign. Sen. Johnson said, “It’s about time Director Wray acknowledges that the politicization of the FBI is ‘deeply troubling.’ Unfortunately, this has been obvious during his entire tenure as director, and he’s done nothing about it. I suppose better late than never, but I’m not holding my breath.”
(Note: Wray has said Thibault was recently removed from his supervisory role regarding investigations. However, we don’t know what role he continues to have at the agency.)
Margot Cleveland, also at THE FEDERALIST, has her own analysis of the questioning of Wray. She gets the distinct impression, based on Sen. Grassley’s questioning and Wray’s answers, that there is much more to the Hunter Biden scandal.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware isn’t the only such office investigating Hunter. The Delaware office is looking into his foreign business in general, including with China, but the Pittsburg office, at then-AG William Barr’s direction, continues to review material related to Hunter’s alleged corrupt business dealings in Ukraine. The FBI may have withheld evidence, Cleveland says, and/or presented inaccurate information, to both offices.
Grassley’s questioning also suggests that the FBI wrongly classified a foreign human source with information about Hunter Biden as “disinformation,” Cleveland says, without any vetting or investigation. And it appears they failed to follow proper protocol in not sharing information with other agencies before so dismissing it.
Finally, Grassley really pressed Wray to commit to no retaliation against FBI whistleblowers, implying that a “culture of retaliation” at the FBI might be a concern. Perhaps Grassley is trying to reassure other whistleblowers that it’ll be safe to come forward. I’d say this has got to be the next step in cleaning house at the Bureau.
Cleveland’s analysis comes highly recommended, as her work so often does.
The Raise Your Taxes Act
On Sunday, as expected, all Senate Democrats (including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) plus tie-breaker Kamala Harris voted to pass the $740 billion “Inflation Reduction Act,” and every one of them should immediately be arrested for violating the Truth In Advertising Act.
https://www.breitbart.com/
The Legal Insurrection blog has a much more accurate name for it: the “Schumer-Manchin Middle Class Tax Increase and Green Boondoggle Bill.”
It will actually increase inflation through more massive federal spending on leftist “green” pet projects like subsidies to rich people to buy electric cars, while exploding the size and power of the IRS and placing massive new taxes on struggling businesses and average Americans. The Democrats ignored all the warnings and are actually congratulating themselves for forcing through a bill that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in the midst of rampant inflation and that adds crushing new taxes in the middle of a recession. As Republican Sen. John Kennedy put it, that takes “a special kind of stupid.”
That’s the equivalent of your house being on fire and instead of firefighters, 51 pyromaniacs rush over to pour gasoline on the fire – which they started in the first place.
This came despite numerous warnings from economic analysis groups and over 200 economists that the bill would not reduce inflation, but would increase it while taxing low and middle-income Americans, harming small businesses and destroying an estimated 30,000 jobs.
And here’s something I want every American to be thinking about when they cast their votes in November:
The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the majority of the bill’s new revenues will come from taxing Americans making less than $200,000 a year. That includes middle income workers, and even those making less than $10,000 a year. This will be “accomplished” by new taxes on corporations and a 600% increase in the IRS’s budget to hire 87,000 new tax auditors. The Washington Free Beacon reported that this bill will make the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, the State Department, the Border Patrol and the FBI, combined.
If you think that’s just partisan hyperbole, consider that the Republicans offered an amendment to ensure no new taxes would be taken from anyone earning under $400,000 a year, which was one of Joe Biden’s major campaign promises. And Joe Manchin said, “I can’t look the people in West Virginia in the eye and ask them to pay a penny more until I know we’re running this government efficient.” Yet the Democrats voted that amendment down.
And Grover Norquist reminds us that despite the media’s claims that Kamala Harris cast the “deciding vote,” that isn’t true. She wouldn’t have even been there if all 50 Democrats hadn’t voted to put this on your backs, so every last one of them “cast the deciding vote.”
Republicans predicted that Democrats will pay the price for raising taxes and exploding spending, the exact opposite of what the government should be doing to get us out of stagflation.
https://www.foxnews.com/
While we won’t be able even to start to dismantle this atrocity and try to reverse the damage until Republicans hold both the White House and Congress again, putting the GOP in charge of the House will at least put them in control of the budget, and there are things they can refuse to fund. Let’s hope we see brake put on this clown car that’s taking the country over a cliff.
In the meantime, here are some good commentaries on what I hope and pray is the Democrats’ last hooray of irresponsible taxing-and-spending before they are kicked out of office in a landslide.
David Catron of the American Spectator reminds us that when it comes down to the wire, and a big load of taxing, spending and government bloating is on the line, there is no such thing as a “moderate, principled Democrat” who will stand up against the Party and stop it.
https://spectator.org/manchin-
(By the way, if you don’t know the old joke referenced in the headline, I won’t recount it, but here it is: https://www.minds.com/
Deroy Murdoch at the Daily Caller looks deeper into the bill, including how much you’ll pay even if you’re in a lower tax bracket, and the longterm damage it will cause that few people are even talking about.
For instance, it's estimated that allowing Medicare to dictate drug prices will result in pharmaceutical companies spending $663 billion less on research and development over the next 17 years, which will result in 135 fewer new medicines, at a cost of 330 million life-years, or about 30 times the loss from COVID-19 so far. To quote Murdock: “In short, the Inflation Reduction Act would leave Americans poor, oppressed, sick and dead.” And this is what they plan to use to get you to reelect them.
Finally, Derek Hunter at Townhall.com is so overwhelmed by the sheer number of incredibly stupid things in the news, he wrote a column compiling just a few of them. Naturally, the Democrats passing this bill is one of them:
https://townhall.com/
He also covers the hysteria over Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and the way “health experts” are so worried that telling people the truth about how monkeypox is spreading might spark “homophobia” that they’re outright lying about it and exposing gay people to greater risk of contracting it. That’s giving new meaning to Reagan’s rule that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
About that Kansas abortion vote
Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are crowing that the defeat of a constitutional amendment in Kansas last week that would have returned the right to make abortion laws to the state legislature shows that the public is pro-abortion, and this issue will really help them at the polls in November.
But Margot Cleveland at the Federalist suspects that voters were hoodwinked by a tsunami of deceptive ads paid for by millions of dollars that poured in from outside of Kansas. Also, that they will soon regret their vote when they realize the far-reaching ramifications and how the pro-abortion movement plans to use the courts to turn Kansas into “the abortion oasis of the Midwest.”
“It’s working! Keep ‘em coming!”
I don’t think liberals fully comprehend just how much Republicans, especially those at the border, love it when they hyperventilate about Texas and Arizona sending just a tiny handful of the illegal immigrants Biden has inflicted on them up to DC and New York City. The more pained and outraged they sound, the more Govs. Abbott and Ducey must think, “It’s working! Keep ‘em coming!”
The latest overheated rhetorical blasts include a CNN/MSNBC blabber and a Washington Post scribbler accusing Texas Gov. Abbott of “brutality” and “human trafficking.” If they want to see brutality and human trafficking, they should come take a look at what’s happening on the border, courtesy of President Biden. Personally, I don’t consider it “human trafficking” just to put some humans on a bus in traffic. Although admittedly, sending them to New York City is pretty brutal.
And New York Mayor Eric Adams once again upped the rhetorical ante by calling it “horrific” that Abbott “forced” these families onto the bus (they weren’t forced, they can get on voluntarily.)
Here’s the really hilarious part, though. Adams went to greet one of the buses which left Texas with 40 illegal immigrants on it. But by the time it got to New York, there were only 14. Adams said they probably feared what might greet them in New York and got off before it arrived. A spokeswoman later “clarified” that he didn’t mean they were afraid of the city’s soaring crime rate.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/07/
Okay, I’ll say it: they were probably terrified of the city’s soaring crime rate. This is another way in which this plan is a stroke of genius. We should transport all illegal immigrants from our Southern border straight to New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland or some other crime-ridden blue city. They’ll take one look and beg to go back to Central America.
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
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