|
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
Lord, you are my God;
I will exalt you and praise your name,
for in perfect faithfulness
you have done wonderful things,
things planned long ago.
Isaiah 25:1
Biased Media attacks Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the middle of relief efforts
As the rescue and restoration work continues, the death toll in Florida from Hurricane Ian reached 68 people as of Monday. The majority were in hardest-hit Lee County, where at least 18 victims drowned. A massive effort is underway to find anyone else who might remain trapped under debris, to rescue thousands who are stranded, and to restore electric power. I hope you'll pray for the victims and the safety and success of the rescuers.
https://www.foxweather.com/
As mentioned yesterday, here are some organizations that could use your help to help the victims, including one I personally endorse, Samaritan’s Purse.
Four people were arrested in Lee County for allegedly violating the “zero tolerance” policy on looting in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. Fortunately, they did not have to learn why Gov. DeSantis reminded everyone that Florida is a “Second Amendment state.”
https://www.foxnews.com/us/
Despite Gov. DeSantis delivering a textbook example of preparation and leadership in a crisis, the liberal media continue to snipe at him, as they’ve been doing since before the hurricane even arrived. Two attacks are especially ridiculous. Some outlets are trying to blame him for not predicting that the hurricane would hit Lee County hardest (it took a last-minute turn that wasn’t even predicted by the National Weather Service, which was giving him his information; apparently, he’s supposed to be able to predict storm patterns better than they can.)
And Politico launched an idiotic attack on DeSantis for taking federal disaster relief funds, snarking that Florida would “benefit” from billions of dollars; and that DeSantis criticizes Biden, “but he sure does like the president’s wallet.” DeSantis’ spokeswoman Christine Pushaw fired back, “What is wrong with you? It’s not ‘the president’s wallet,’ it’s the American taxpayers’ money” (I’ll add that as an economic powerhouse that led the COVID rebound, Florida has provided a lot of that federal tax money.) She continued, “Americans in any state hit by a disaster are entitled to federal disaster relief funds, whether or not you approve of the Governor. The media disgusts me more every day.”
Couldn’t agree more. And don’t even get me started on the use of the word “benefits” to describe what Floridians are going through.
President Trump files a defamation lawsuit against CNN
Monday, former President Trump filed a $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, demanding a jury trial.
https://www.westernjournal.
The lawsuit claims that CNN went beyond mere bias in attempting to destroy Trump personally and politically, ignoring positive information and trumpeting negative stories, and repeatedly smearing him with fake news and “scandalous, false and defamatory labels” such as “Hitler” (a story that even Politfact rated as a “Pants on Fire” lie, but CNN continued to repeat it.) The suit claims CNN engaged in “wanton and malicious reporting” on Trump that meets the legal definition of actual malice.
I’m not sure how far this case will make it in court. Not that its claims aren’t correct; I think you’d have to have been in a coma for the past five years not to know that. It’s just that defamation cases are very hard for public figures to win, and Trump is the most public figure in the world. Maybe he doesn’t even expect to win, but just wants to use the courts to get his side out, since there’s such a media blackout on reporting anything he says. If CNN has to defend itself, then it has to answer his charges. Or maybe he hopes to get as far as discovery, and force CNN to turn over records to expose their biases and political maneuvering. Or maybe he just wants to cost them a lot of money and make their lives miserable, and he’s got the cash to pay plenty of lawyers to do it.
Whatever the reasoning behind this lawsuit, while I don’t have high hopes it will succeed, it’s going to be a lot more fun to watch than anything Hollywood is cranking out these days.
Supreme Court News
A new session of the Supreme Court starts this week, and observers are watching closely to see if all the attempted threats and intimidation from the left over the overturning of Roe v. Wade will dissuade the Justices from blocking liberal activist rulings. I wouldn’t bet on that.
However, many conservatives were disappointed by the announcement of which cases they’ll hear and which were rejected. Among those turned away was an appeal challenging Biden’s COVID vaccine mandate that affects over 10 million health care workers, a mandate still being pressed despite most of the workers already being exposed to COVID and having natural immunity and Biden himself admitting the pandemic is over.
The SCOTUS also rejected appeals of Trump’s ban on gun bump stocks and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell’s attempt to dismiss Dominion voting machines’ defamation lawsuit against him.
One case they are taking up could have far-reaching ramifications. It involves Congressional redistricting in Alabama.
A lower court ordered the state to redraw its districts to create two majority-black districts instead of one. The state argues that districts should be race-neutral and based on population figures, and that the plaintiffs are attempting to force them to unconstitutionally prioritize race in creating election rules, which is, ironically, what they’re accusing the state of doing. Depending on how the SCOTUS rules, this could either spur the current racialization of our election rules or end it.
Dr. Jordan Peterson interviews wife of Julian Assange (Part 1)
Dr. Jordan Peterson has just posted a fascinating interview with Stella Assange, Julian Assange’s attorney who recently married Assange after a long relationship. I hope you can find time to watch this --- it’s almost two hours long --- but we’ll summarize and comment. Here’s Part 1.
In 2010, the co-founder of WikiLeaks generated outrage by publishing material leaked by Chelsea Manning, including around 750,000 classified and unclassified-but-sensitive documents. The FBI launched a criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, and the Swedish government pursued Assange for alleged sexual misconduct, though charges were never filed. The U.K. government was going to extradite him to Sweden, but Assange jumped bail and took refuge inside the Ecuadorean Embassy, living within those walls until his arrest in 2019. He’s still in prison in London, much of that time in solitary confinement.
He faces possible extradition to the U.S. for prosecution on a variety of espionage-related charges. Conviction on all of this could carry a sentence of 170 years.
His wife Stella, who’s maintained privacy till now, explains that Julian is on the autism spectrum (diagnosed with Aspergers’s Syndrome) and, like others similarly affected, “doesn’t score high on the agreeableness scale.” He had “wanted to shed light on unacceptable corruption in times of war,” she said, to be a source of truthful information. “Julian doesn’t like people who are deceitful,” she says. Julian and Stella consider themselves to be “freedom of information champions.”
After so much seclusion and prison, one might think Julian has faced enough punishment and that the legal justification for his sentencing has expired. Stella believes that, in time, he might come to be seen as “the foremost political prisoner of the West.” He is “a critic, a dissident, and also an innovator.” With his background in cybersecurity, she explains, and his understanding of “the architecture” of internet communication, he saw how easily sources could be identified and that “any meaningful journalism would be over.”
Dr. Peterson looks at the argument on both sides for secrecy, weighing Julian’s desire for candidness with the “more limited state interest side,” which says there are circumstances that make strategic limits on complete openness ethically necessary. He sees traditional media --- the way it used to function --- as better equipped than today’s media to discern this, asking if it’s even possible, when releasing hundreds of thousands of pages, to use due diligence?
Dr. Peterson brings up the typical public reaction of, “Someone in so much trouble must have done SOMETHING wrong.” Our vulnerability is that everyone has done 'something' wrong, Given that, it means “we can be called out on it arbitrarily and with force when that’s in the interest of people whose interests we’ve opposed.” Also, “people who are inclined to take you out for whatever reason have an easy pathway to doing it.”
Obviously, Dr. Peterson has just described the problem with the weaponization of our ‘Justice’ Department, which now operates according to the Stalinist directive “Show me the man and I’ll show the crime." Disregarding the presumption of innocence, he says, “allows anyone who is devious or psychopathic to use the entire weight of the legal system as a weapon,” he says, “which is happening so often now that it’s almost beyond comprehension.”
As for the sexual misconduct allegations made against Assange by Sweden, it was “a bit too convenient,” he says, “...that these charges emerged just at the time that was most appropriate in some real pragmatic sense for the authorities in the U.K. and the U.S.”
He asks her point-blank, “Why are you on his side?...Why aren’t you just being played” Why did she choose to complicate her life with this man, to stake her life on him, and why doesn’t she believe the media portrayal of Julian as “a narcissistic troublemaker with a proclivity for sexual impropriety”?
“The man I married wouldn’t do those things,” she says, adding that the man being described is “the exact opposite of who he is.” She started her association with him in a professional capacity stemming from the sexual allegations, she says, reminding Dr. Peterson that he was never charged. Watch the interview for details of the timing of those allegations against him (about 30 minutes in), and you'll see that it does look fishy, considering WikiLeaks had just published some of the material and that before he even went to Sweden, the DAILY BEAST reported that the U.S. State Department was telling our allies to “find a way to stop Julian in his tracks...find a way to prosecute him.”
Stella says “new rules” were created for Julian which were then “normalized,” pointing out that in 2010, PayPal, Bank Of America, VISA and MasterCard “for the very first time” created a banking blockade against WikiLeaks, something we increasingly see happening. Dr. Peterson calls this abuse “an unbelievably dire threat.” This “collusion of corporate enterprise and government” is “appallingly fascist.”
He sees Assange as a sort of “test case,” as he dispersed information on a scale never seen before, internationally, and says the danger for him is that “when you’re uncovering everyone’s secrets, you can make an awful lot of enemies, and the probability that at least one set of those enemies is going to successfully take you out, especially given that they’re operating with immense resources, is extremely high.”
In 2013, the Obama administration decided not to charge him over the Manning leaks –- at this point, he had already been in the Ecuadorean Embassy for a year –- because, they said, there was no way to differentiate between what WikiLeaks had done and what other news outlets had done. Spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “He’s not a hacker; he’s a publisher.” All the evidence relating to Julian had been presented at the Chelsea Manning court martial. (At the end of his term, Obama also commuted Manning’s sentence.)
But Stella describes “a complete obsession by the CIA into Julian and WikiLeaks” after Trump became President. (Editorial aside: Yes, they were obsessed with getting Trump, too.) The U.S. filed the first charges against him in 2018. WikiLeaks had published handbooks containing specifics about the CIA’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in phones and computers in order to hack them, and also about their ability to control cars and create “undetectable assassinations.”
“The CIA was livid,” she says, and that’s when events took a turn and they got much more aggressive. This seems like a good place to leave the interview for now, with Part 2 to follow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
…………………….
RELATED: As you might recall, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information relating to the homicide of DNC staffer Seth Rich on a Washington DC street in what was said to be a robbery gone wrong. Rich was shot multiple times and badly beaten; nothing of value was taken. Here’s how it was reported at the time, in August of 2016…
Last Thursday, six years after Rich’s murder, a federal judge ordered the FBI to hand over the contents of his laptop. Ty Clevenger, an attorney representing plaintiff Brian Huddleston, has been fighting to make this happen for the past five years. As reported in RadarOnline, “Huddleston first submitted a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request to the FBI on September 1, 2017, in an effort to obtain information to help his investigation into Rich’s potential involvement in the DNC email leaks that occurred in June 2016.”
More as this story develops. Details here…
https://radaronline.com/p/
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2022/10/morning-edition
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.