Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! 

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• President Biden Addresses Congress
• Senator Tim Scott Responds
• UPDATE: The Maricopa County election audit proceeds
• The Son Also Rises
• Two Major About-Faces
• A Deeper Look At Census Numbers
• Consensus
• Real Estate Mogul
• A Reader Writes Back...
• Inspirational Americans

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.

James 1:12 

President Biden Addresses Congress

By Mike Huckabee

Biden spoke for over an hour, but if I had to sum it all up in a nutshell, it would be with the familiar conservative adage, “The government that’s big enough to give you everything you need and want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Because that was basically what his plans amount to.

In more detail, it was everything you would have expected, at excruciating length. A lot of boasting about the success of the vaccination program, with no credit given to Trump for helping create the vaccines in record time through Operation Warp Speed and already administering 100,000 shots a day (including Biden's) by the time Biden took office. A lot of talk about working together and listening to the other side while demonizing the other side and proposing bills he knows we adamantly oppose. Claiming that by raising taxes and the minimum wage, shutting down domestic oil and gas production and targeting the gig economy for destruction (that’s the “PRO Act” he touted, the national version of the disastrous California AB 5 law) - all things proven to destroy jobs -- we’re going to create millions of new jobs.

He even said, “For me, when I think about climate change, I think jobs.” He mentioned all the jobs retrofitting buildings to be greener, and installing 500,000 charging stations for electric cars. And where will all the electricity come from? Why, sources like wind turbines, of course. He said he sees no reason why they can’t be built here instead of China. Except they require heavy metals that now only come from China.

And who will pay for all these jobs? The government, of course! If this speech had a theme song, it would be, “I’ve Been Workin’ For the Government, All the Livelong Day.” (Another good choice might be, “Don’t Know Much About History”:

And it will all be paid for with money only taken from the super-rich and big corporations. If you’re not one of those, you’ll enjoy endless free stuff with no downside at all, and a bill would never come due. If you believe that, I assume you also dream of living in Fantasyland at Disney World.

Truly, Biden’s mask was finally off, in more ways than one. We’ve heard all this before; it’s the Obama years on steroids: destroying existing jobs on a promise to replace them with government-created “green” union jobs that never appear, largely because the same liberals making these promises have made it impossible to get permits to start any major construction of anything. It’s why Obama himself admitted that there were no “shovel-ready jobs.” Too bad, I could’ve used a shovel during this speech.

Ironically, you could only do this if you slashed regulations like Trump did, and that’s one of the first things Biden reversed by executive order, along with destroying union jobs by killing the Keystone XL Pipeline. He also wants a government program to lower prescription drug prices, and never mind that he inexplicably reversed a Trump executive order that did just that.

The biggest news out of the speech was his promoting of even more massive spending in bills which, as always, come with “Who can oppose this?” names to hide the actual contents, such as “The American Rescue Plan” or “The American Families Plan.” I’m sure there are some good things in them, like expanded child tax credits. But the names are also cover for a raft of government-expanding, freedom-crushing, budget-bloating programs. Some analysts pointed out that Biden didn’t include means-testing on some, like free community college, so even kids of millionaires could qualify. If Republicans proposed this, Democrats would call it a “giveaway to the rich.”

Conservatives noted that in just three months in office, between the COVID-19 bill that was mostly not directly related to COVID-19, the “Infrastructure” bill that spends only a fraction of its cost on actual infrastructure, and now this new $1.8 trillion proposal, Biden has endorsed about $6 trillion in new deficit spending, or about half-again as much as the entire annual federal budget. I hope the Green-New-Deal-Under-Another-Name that he’s proposing includes funding for planting a billion money trees, because we’re going to need them.

Senator Tim Scott Responds

By Mike Huckabee

The GOP response to Biden’s speech was given by Sen. Tim Scott, and it was terrific. It was filled with inspiring personal stories, ideas for finding common ground, and much-needed common sense. I urge you to watch it all. It’s less than 15 minutes but says more than Biden did in over 60 minutes. My favorite line was his description of how partisan the Democrats’ “infrastructure” bill is: “They won’t even build bridges to build bridges!”

https://youtu.be/LJgn7_1d3-M

He also reminded viewers that when he proposed a bipartisan police reform bill that Democrats said they wanted, they used the Senate filibuster (that they now call “racist” and want to eliminate) to block it from a vote. As Scott said, they preferred to keep the problem as a political tool than to solve it.

Here’s the transcript.

You can tell how effective Sen. Scott’s speech was because the left was panicked enough to resort to their standard fallback: hurling racist slurs at a black man for daring not to think the way they tell him to. Ironic, since Scott even mentioned the racist attacks made on him by so-called “progressives.” Meanwhile, Twitter, which will censor any conservative for any reason, allowed a racist leftist hashtag to trend.

TO LEAVE ME A COMMENT ABOUT EITHER SPEECH, PLEASE GO TO MY WEBSITE HERE>>>

UPDATE: The Maricopa County election audit proceeds

By Mike Huckabee

When we left off early Wednesday morning, a hearing was set for 11AM for the Arizona Democratic Party to present evidence that the audit of Maricopa County should be halted by restraining order. That hearing did take place, and the newly appointed judge in the case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Daniel Martin, decided to let the audit proceed for now, saying Democrats did not provide “substantive evidence of any breaches or threatened breaches of voter privacy.”

According to the judge, the case Democrats made failed to meet the “strong likelihood of succeeding” standard that's required for the plaintiffs to receive a restraining order. The judge did say that their case might ultimately succeed.

So Democrat now may call for an evidentiary hearing to try to make their case (again) for an injunction, or they can seek a review from a higher court. Or --- here's an idea --- they can just sit back and, in the name of transparency, let the process take place. Yes, I’m sure that’s what they’ll do.

As we said yesterday, Democrats have been claiming that the company leading the audit, Cyber Ninjas, were essentially “making it up as they went along,” though no specific examples of this were offered. They said the employees weren’t properly trained and hadn’t implemented security procedures, such as securing ballots.

The defendants countered that the 2.1 million ballots being reviewed and the 400 election machines used to tabulate them were properly secured. The state senate’s audit liaison, Republican former secretary of state Ken Bennett, told reporters that the facility is under armed guard around the clock. He said that just he and one other person have the keys to containers holding the ballots when they’re not being audited.

In Wednesday’s hearing, the “evidence” presented by plaintiffs included local news reports that alleged lax security at the facility, the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. (Note to Democrats: media reports are not evidence.) The judge didn’t consider their evidence to be enough to halt the audit. According to the premium report in THE EPOCH TIMES, Judge Martin said Democrats didn’t bring enough evidence to convince him to halt the process.

Since the audit had already started, the judge was concerned that halting it might cause a “significant disruption.”

At the same time, Cyber Ninjas didn’t totally get their way with the judge. They had wanted to put some documents under seal that they considered sensitive, but the judge ruled that they had failed to show an interest that overrides the right of public access to the information. That might be a blessing in disguise, as we need to be all about transparency here.

Katie Hobbs, the Arizona secretary of state, is still making the rounds of leftist talk shows –- for example, saying on MSNBC that “there’s really nothing valid that’s going to come out of this exercise” and that “all this is going to do is undermine voters’ confidence in the process.” No, Ms. Hobbs, the thing that undermines voters’ confidence is you going on TV trashing the laudable idea of having transparent, verifiable election results. Every time you open your mouth, the level of confidence in the process goes down. And if the process is fraudulent, what’s the good of having confidence in it, anyway?

Interestingly, it was a progressive Democrat, John Brakey, the co-founder of Audit USA, who clarified that even though some are saying the Arizona vote has already been audited several times, that’s really not true. As an example of how limited the audits typically are, Brakey noted that the hand count of the primary election only reviewed 25 ballot batches, or 1 percent, of the total vote. It involved about 100 people and took a day and a half. What’s going on now really is the very first full review of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.

We took a look at the report from one of the previous partial audits performed in that county, available online. It was approved unanimously on January 27 (after Biden's inauguration) by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. At first glance, this looks like quite a thorough examination, though it would take an expert to confirm that for us about some of it, particularly as it concerned the voting machines.

But skip down to the questions and answers about the process, and it’s obvious this audit was not allowed to "go there" to check for certain potential problems. To cite one important example:

Question: “Why did the County not audit the ballots?”

Answer: “The ballots are currently sealed. There is no provision under Arizona law that allows the County to “recount” or “audit” the election results after the election. The County cannot access the ballots without a court order; this includes digital copies of the ballots.”

My point: There was no way without a court order (which state senate Republicans now have) for previous audits to look at the ballots, or even digital copies of the ballots, for evidence of forgery or other tampering. This time, auditors can finally check the ballots. They can see if there’s anything fishy about the signatures on the envelopes –- such as one handwriting style repeated over and over –- and find out whether names and addresses match with those of actual voters, or whether they can all be traced to a post office box in Sun City rented under the name of Toonces the Driving Cat.

So don’t let anyone tell you that previous audits went far enough to tell the tale. Just let these auditors do their work for a couple of weeks. This means you, Democrats.