By Mike Huckabee
October 18, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
Psalm 91:1-2
Blocked for my views on President Trump, the COVID-19 response, Joe Biden, etc.
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To become a paid subscriber of my politics newsletter it is $5 monthly or $36 annually. I email daily and my politics newsletters usually take 10-15 minutes to read. I cover the news of the day and the liberal media. I write about the upcoming elections and dive deep on the Biden scandals. I will also share my opinion of the Trump indictment. I don’t think you will regret reading my newsletter regularly, so please consider subscribing today.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
Biden goes to Israel
Here is today’s link to Fox News’ latest updates on Israel’s strike back against Hamas:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/october-18-israel-hamas-war
Among the latest developments: The death toll is now at least 4,200 people, including at least 1,400 Israeli civilians and soldiers, 2,808 Palestinians and 31 Americans. Thirteen American citizens are still unaccounted for.
President Biden is in Israel where he met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and issued a statement of solidarity with Israel, saying, “You are not alone.” While I have my differences with President Biden, he got it right in condemning Hamas by saying, "Scores of innocents from infants to elderly grandparents, Israelis and Americans taken hostage, children slaughtered, babies slaughtered, entire families massacred, raped, beheaded, bodies burned alive. Most committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of ISIS, unleashing pure, unadulterated evil upon the world. There's no rationalizing it, no excusing, period.”
Riot police had to use tear gas in Lebanon to disperse a violent crowd of protesters outside the US Embassy. They were fired up by the claims from Hamas and Iran that Israel was to blame for an airstrike on a hospital in Gaza that killed 500 people. Israel denied that and produced audio evidence of Hamas radicals talking about how their Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile misfired and hit the hospital.
Fact-checkers were quick to debunk a viral video that showed an errant Hamas missile hitting a building as actually being from 2022. But that wasn’t the evidence Israel provided, and it just shows this wouldn’t be the first time Hamas misfired a missile and killed their own innocent civilians instead of Israel’s innocent civilians.
Besides, anyone trying to blame Israel should apply Occam’s Razor, the rule that the simplest explanation is most likely true. And which is more likely: that Israel, which has spent a week warning civilians to leave the area before attacking, would deliberately target civilians…or that the missile was fired by Hamas, who started this war by murdering hundreds of innocent civilians?
House Republicans shoot themselves in the foot, AGAIN
House Republicans continued using their own feet for target practice Tuesday, and we still have no Speaker after 20 Republicans refused to back Jim Jordan, despite having no other candidate. He had been facing a deficit of over 60 votes, so he did make quite a bit of headway. They’ll meet again today, and he has to win over 16 of those 20 to become Speaker.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/house-of-representatives-to-vote-on-new-speaker
Meanwhile, with the House in limbo for two weeks and counting as the Middle East melts down and the next government shutdown deadline looms, there’s increasing talk about empowering Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry with enough powers to become acting Speaker.
Just curious, is that what the members who forced the ouster of Kevin McCarthy wanted? Or did they think about what might come next?
Excellent question
Missouri Republican Rep. Jason Smith of the House Ways and Means Committee is asking why high profile universities should retain their tax-exempt status when, as we’ve recently learned, they’ve become breeding grounds for violent, terrorism-supporting anti-Semites?
It’s an excellent question, but why did it have to reach this crisis point before it was brought up? For decades, the takeover of our university system by totalitarian leftists has been proceeding steadily, and for the past several years, we’ve seen conservative students and speakers stripped of their rights, shouted down, threatened and physically assaulted.
Yet throughout all that, the universities continued enjoying their tax breaks, not to mention billions of dollars in funding from both federal and state governments, even in states with Republican Governors and legislatures. Maybe they were just afraid to use their power of the purse strings to curtail the radical indoctrination, fearing Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would smear them as “anti-education.”
But to use a phrase they don’t use at Harvard, that dog don’t hunt. The entire world has now gotten a shocking look at the results of allowing our universities to become radical brainwashing camps, and it’s the perfect opportunity for Republicans to use their budgetary power to clean house. Anyone who claims that fumigating our infected campuses is “attacking education” can be answered with five minutes of video of Harvard students chanting support for Hamas’ mass murder of Israeli children, and then politely told to sit down and shut up.
Worth looking into
You know Letitia James, the New York Attorney General who ran for office on a promise to abuse her power to “get Trump,” and is now doing just that? She’s the one who justifies her creative legal interpretations and unprecedented lawfare assault on a former President and leading presidential candidate by claiming that “nobody is above the law.”
Well, if that’s true, then James needs to read investigative journalist Laura Loomer’s Substack page. She’s amassed a trove of documents suggesting chicanery involving a mortgage contract for a four-story Brooklyn brownstone and a possible $770,000 hidden illegal loan from a mysterious source that might be a dark money provider. It smells funkier than Trump taking out loans from banks and paying them back in full. But it might be hard to get Ms. James to investigate this, since the person at the center of this alleged financial and political web is…New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Reexamining a crime stat the Left likes to use
One of the favorite talking points on the left when people complain about the historic crime waves their criminal-coddling policies have created is to claim that murder rates are actually 34% higher in red states than in blue states. But like all the left's claims, that’s highly misleading and based on cherry-picked data.
The Heritage Foundation looked into the study they’re citing and found that it was based on “flawed methodology.” Researcher Kevin Dayaratna said that while red states have higher murder rates, that means nothing because crime rates are a local matter influenced by local policing and prosecution practices. This won’t be a surprise to my readers, but the crime in red states that Democrats love to highlight is actually happening almost exclusively in those states' blue cities and counties.
https://slaynews.com/news/murder-rates-60-higher-democrat-run-counties-study-finds/
The study found that if you look at homicide rates on a county level, they are a whopping 64% higher in blue counties than in red counties.
In short, blue counties are giving red states a bad name, then blaming it on the Republicans who don’t run the crime-ridden blue counties.
I don’t know whether this will change anyone’s perceptions on the left, since I suspect that anyone who would ever believe crime is lower in Democrat-run cities would be too dumb to know what “percent” means.
Related: A new study of violent crime ranked the most dangerous cities in the world. All of the top 10 are in either Mexico, Brazil or Venezuela. Only two American cities made the top 30. At number 13 was St. Louis, Missouri. Coincidentally, Missouri is a solidly red state, while St. Louis is so blue that they sent Cori Bush to Congress. The only other US city on the list is #25, Baltimore. ‘Nuff said.
Video of the Day!
Watch as a green protester trying to block the building of a chapel in France gets taken down with a flying tackle by a nun.
For crying out loud, can’t we vet our own Defense Department?
In normal times, Americans would look to the Defense Department and numerous intel agencies to vet foreign nationals in America for their ties to terrorist nations and organizations.
But today, our intel agencies are much more interested in investigating “MAGA Republicans.” And the Defense Department can’t even vet itself.
We recently reported on a DoD employee named Ariane Tabatabai who for all appearances was secretly promoting the Iranian agenda within the Defense Department while maintaining a “relationship” with the Iranian government. She holds the distinction of being recruited by Iranian envoy Robert Malley, who is currently under investigation for leading an alleged “spy ring” to further Iranian interests, and she still holds the impressive title of Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. That, of course, comes with its own high-level security clearance.
Now, as reported by Daniel Greenfield in FRONT PAGE Magazine, Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan is demanding answers about another current Pentagon official, Yousra Fazili, who previously worked for the brother of the dictator of Qatar and whose duties reportedly included devising messages to attack American critics. As shown on her Linked In page, her accomplishments during this time include “Developed strategy and legal frameworks for the U.S.-Iran nuclear agreements” and “assisted in strategies for the negotiation of U.S.-Russian bilateral agreements.”
(For the record, that page also says she worked on the “Biden/Harris Campaign Voter Protection” in 2020, the “Obama/Biden Campaign Voter Protection” in 2012, and “GOTV Obama for America, Vermont and Massachusetts,” 2008.)
In 2022, she became the Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs at the DoD.
Now, she’s the Chief of Staff for the Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer for the Pentagon. How thoroughly was she ever vetted? Did anybody notice the red flags?
On October 12, Rep. Bergman sent a letter --- actually a follow-up letter --- to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pointing out that for three years, Fazili served as “strategic” advisor to the Qatari ambassador to the U.S. Soon after that, she rejoined the Pentagon in a senior staff position and then was promoted twice, to her current role.
“This matter is even more urgent now in light of the unprecedented terrorist attacks...by Hamas’ leadership who are currently overseeing the slaughter of men, women and children from inside luxury residences provided by Ms. Fazili’s former client, the State of Qatar,” the letter says.
The DoD “provides little comfort that the Pentagon has properly vetted Ms. Fazili’s openly acknowledged relationship with one of the two sponsors of Hamas, or that Ms. Fazili will be firewalled from involvement in the U.S. handling of Israel’s necessary self-defense against Hamas’ current terrorist campaign.”
Rep. Bergman respectfully requests the following:
1. the results of the Pentagon’s due diligence regarding Ms. Fazili’s work for and relationship with the State of Qatar.
2. the safeguards that have been put in place to prevent her from influencing decisions or policies related to any decisions related to the Persian Gulf region.
Here’s the full letter and J. Michael Waller’s eye-opening tweets (X’s?)...
https://twitter.com/JMichaelWaller/status/1714103811441324040
So, is Rep. Jack Bergman just some capricious politician trying to drum up attention or make a partisan political statement? Short answer: NO. After being elected to Congress in 2016, Bergman was the highest-ranking military veteran ever elected to Congress. He’s a 40-year veteran of the Marine Corps, retiring in 2009 with the rank of Lieutenant General, a helicopter pilot in Vietnam who ultimately became Commander of Marine Forces North/Marine Forces Reserve.
http://caucus.militarytimes.com/speaker/jack-bergman/
In his role on the House Armed Services Committee, Bergman serves as chairman of the Intelligence and Special Operations Subcommittee and also as a member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee.
https://bergman.house.gov/biography/committees.htm
Here’s Rep. Bergman’s own press release about this. Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, is teaming with Bergman to get answers on vetting at the Pentagon.
https://bergman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1123
“We must deliver transparency to the American people on the relationship of Ms. Tabatabai and to the Iranian regime,” he said. “As the number one state sponsor of terrorism, Iran poses a distinct threat to our national security and, therefore, must not be allowed to infiltrate our government.”
But as the following article makes clear, Qatar excels in playing both sides of the fence when it comes to their messaging. To quote: “To some, the Qataris are regional arsonists; to others, they are the fire department.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/17/qatar-hamas-ties-muslim-brotherhood-us-al-udeid-base/
They didn’t sound to us much like the fire department when they released this statement soon after the Hamas attack on Israel, holding Israel responsible for the “ongoing military escalation.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/qatar-holds-israel-responsible-for-escalation-in-gaza/3010716
RELATED: Here’s something else from Rep. Bergman, a press release from just a few days after Hamas’ massacre of Israelis, detailing the failure of the Biden administration leading up to that attack.
https://bergman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1125
And on October 11, he also dared to call out Rep. Rashida Tlaib for her anti-Semitism and, together with Texas Rep. Morgan Luttrell, introduced a House resolution to censure her.
https://bergman.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1127
We would ask this: why on earth would the Pentagon hire people with the background of these two women for any position at the Pentagon let alone such sensitive ones? “We have been infiltrated in plain sight,” Daniel Greenfield wrote. “Our national security has become a joke. This will take more than just a housecleaning to fix.”
As evidence of that, Rep. Bergman got a three-paragraph response last month to his first letter from the DoD’s Rheanne Wirkkala. She said that Fazili was hired and vetted “with all appropriate laws and policies.”
…..
It’s not just in our government but in the halls of academia that pro-Palestinian rage has been cultivated. As Daniel Horowitz asks, “How did every major college campus turn into the Third Reich overnight, with large crowds of belligerent rally-goers chanting genocidal slogans against Jews?”
Horowitz says it happened over a generation, and that as we were importing Muslims, “we also imported some of the slogans, chants and values undergirding it.”
Horowitz doesn’t think the solution is banning First Amendment-protected speech. But “we have turned our universities into foreign countries,” he says, at least 100,000 students coming from predominantly Muslim countries, including sponsors of terrorism such as Iran. He compiled some statistics, and it’s pretty stunning.
“It’s hard not to see how aspiring young radical Islamists could come to America on student visas and form cells of terrorists on our soil,” he said. This also helped speed the decline of Americanism. So the next administration has to reverse that, he advised, by dramatically curtailing foreign visas and prohibiting countries such as Qatar, Iran and Turkey from sponsoring activities on American college campuses. They have no right to that kind of sponsorship now, and states can stop it.
If this isn’t done, he said, “our college campuses are the canary in the coal mine of what our cities will look like in a few years.”
Horowitz would be glad to know that Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has called on the Department of Homeland Security to deport those foreign nationals, including those in the U.S. on student visas, who have expressed support for Hamas’ horrifying attack on Israel. He wrote to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, saying, “These fifth-columnists have no place in the United States.” We’re sure Mayorkas will get right on that.
They should start with this professor:
https://nypost.com/2023/10/16/russell-rickford-says-hamas-terror-was-exhilarating-exciting/
The story doesn’t say whether Prof. Rickford is an American citizen or not, but we hope he’s not, because he doesn’t deserve to be. He would feel much more at home in Iran, don’t you think?
Speaking of taking action against hostile foreign nations trying to undermine America on our own soil, have I mentioned lately how proud I am of my daughter Sarah?
https://www.westernjournal.com/sarah-huckabee-sanders-sends-american-enemy-packing-eviction-notice/
And before anyone pipes up in the comments to say, “How can conservatives approve of government interfering in free markets?” I’ll point out that free markets require equal rules on both sides. If you have an American-owned business, just try buying land in China. The Chinese communist government isn’t stupid enough to sell their homeland to another nation that they consider their enemy. If that’s how they think of us, why should we be stupid enough to sell America to them?
The power of capitalism
One of the dumbest traps that Republican candidates fall into is taking seriously the question, “What will you do about income inequity?” The answer should be, “Celebrate it! Income inequality is one of the best features of capitalism. It means that people are rewarded with monetary incentives if they work hard, are innovative and create products and services a lot of people like, and all of those traits are good for everyone in society.”
You know where you’ll find income equality? In communist nations like Cuba, where everyone has nothing. That is, unless you count the leaders, who always seem to live like kings. No wonder the people who whine the most about income inequality tend to be socialists. They want us to institute an unjust economic system that’s failed miserably everywhere it’s been tried because they picture themselves being the power brokers who prosper under that corrupt system. Ask any regular working person who fled to America from a socialist nation if they want to import that garbage here.
There are three factors that make capitalism such a powerful force in creating wealth and growing the economy: incentive, innovation and competition. Profit isn’t a factor; it’s the very purpose of all three of those factors. Profit provides the incentive that makes everyone who engages in capitalism believe their efforts can pay off in gaining wealth and improving their lives.
Leftists may see colleges as socialism indoctrination centers, but the only reason most people take on the time, effort and debt of getting a degree is because they assume it will result in a bigger paycheck (gender studies majors are in for a rude awakening.) People take risks that benefit us all, whether going to college, opening a business or patenting new inventions, not just because they’re following their passion but in hopes of making money.
All this creative energy that powers capitalism is generated by people motivated by the knowledge that the system can and will reward their success. This opportunity didn’t exist under the feudal system, it’s severely hampered by socialism, and it’s nonexistent under communism. That’s why those systems are so economically stagnant and far behind capitalist nations in innovation. Capitalism is the true “economic justice;” it’s lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than any other system.
If you want to see the perfect A-B comparison of communism and capitalism, look at a nighttime satellite photo of Korea. Capitalist South Korea is so prosperous that its lights shine brightly enough to be seen from the moon. Communist North Korea is in the dark, figuratively and literally.
That’s also a perfect illustration of how the “unequal income” generated by encouraging incentive, innovation and competition helps the entire society. Innovation that responds quickly to market demand brings us new and better products and services that improve everyone’s lives. Young people today who claim to hate capitalism couldn’t imagine a world without Amazon, Uber, smart phones, streaming entertainment and other innovations of capitalism that didn’t even exist when I was their age. Competition improves services, keeps prices lower and provides choice (Russians in the USSR used to wait in long lines for everything because the government was the only supplier.)
Capitalism can even be better for the environment. When consumers began demanding cleaner processes, greener products and more fuel-efficient cars, industry quickly responded. You can now find countless organic products available at Walmart, and the air and water are far cleaner than they were 50 years ago. Capitalism is so much more efficient than government planning that while President Biden is trying to mandate that everyone drive electric cars by 2030, I would bet that long before then, private industry will have developed new auto technologies that make today’s lithium battery EVs look as obsolete as Model T’s. That is, if the government will quit thinking it can predict the future and pick winners and losers with subsidies, and just get out of the way.
When you hear someone ranting about “income inequality,” remember that you’re hearing someone so lacking in brains, skills and ambition that the only way they could ever get rich is by being a socialist politician (see Bernie “three houses” Sanders.)
(Partially adapted from “The Three C’s That Made America Great” by Mike Huckabee and Steve Feazel:
You can buy my book here: The Three Cs That Made America Great: Christianity, Capitalism and the Constitution - Mike Huckabee
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