By Mike Huckabee
September 15, 2021
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Good evening!
Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! Topics include:
- Bible Verse of the Day - Matthew 5:9
- "Several Thousand"
- Study Looks Into COVID Hospitalizations
- Senators Rip Into Blinken
- Big Brain Idea
- Norm MacDonald RIP
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Matthew 5:9
"Several Thousand"
By Mike Huckabee
You might have easily missed this, but after weeks of claiming there were only about 100 Americans still left in Afghanistan (no matter how many the White House claimed to have evacuated), Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted to the Senate that “several thousand” American green card holders are still there.
Study Looks Into COVID Hospitalizations
By Mike Huckabee
One reason why it’s so hard to get Americans to “trust the experts” on COVID-19 is because the “experts” and “authorities” have given us so many conflicting stories. I’ve always cut them slack for getting things wrong: I get that it was a new disease, and new data can require changing our assumptions. However, we seem to have settled on some official assumptions that are almost impervious to new data. And public trust is eroded further when the “experts” keep dodging basic questions.
One question people have been asking for over a year is whether the hospitalization rates used to justify mass lockdowns, school closures and mask and vaccine mandates are accurate. Are they counting only people who are actually hospitalized or killed due to COVID, or inflating the numbers by including people who tested positive regardless of the actual reason they were in the hospital? The answer may finally be at hand.
David Zweig at the Atlantic magazine (hardly a rightwing or anti-vaxxer outlet) reports that the VA office of Research and Development backed a study of nearly 48,000 admissions to over 100 VA hospitals nationwide. It found that from March 2020 to early January 2021, before the Delta variant or widespread vaccination, 36% of recorded COVID patients had mild or asymptomatic cases, which makes it questionable whether they were or needed to be hospitalized due to COVID. From mid-January to June, that number rose to 48%. That suggests that nearly half the recorded COVID hospitalizations were mild or asymptomatic cases or else people who tested positive but were hospitalized for something unrelated.
None of this is to downplay the dangers of the disease (that’s still a lot of people hospitalized due to severe COVID.) But the good news is that this suggests vaccination has created more mild or asymptomatic cases. The bad news is that it suggests authorities are relying on misleading data to impose draconian measures on the entire population. And when people know “the experts” are being misleading about the reasons for their policies, it makes it all the more likely that they will reject those policies.
In short, once you lose the public’s trust, it’s hard to get it back. Particularly if you do nothing to earn it back except to say, “I order you to trust me!”
Senators Rip Into Blinken
By Mike Huckabee
Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified before the House on Monday and the Senate on Tuesday, and it’s safe to say that he didn’t find smooth sailing in either chamber. Members from both parties were skeptical and hostile to his attempts to deflect blame for the Afghan withdrawal disaster and his claims that they did everything possible and the results were inevitable.
Nick Arama at Redstate.com has a good round-up of the incredulous reactions to that, from Republicans as well as liberal Democrats and even Mitt Romney. You know nobody’s buying your excuses when they’re so feeble that they force Mitt Romney to defend Donald Trump.
Big Brain Idea
By Mike Huckabee
A salute to Arizona GOP Rep. Paul Gosar, who introduced a resolution that would require House leaders to wear body cams that record everything they do when performing Congressional duties. It’s inspired by laws requiring cops to wear body cams. Gosar says this would make it harder for House leaders to lie, citing as examples all the unconfirmed tales of harrowing danger some claimed to be in during the January 6th Capitol incursion.
Here’s my question: would they have to turn the camera on when taking big campaign donations? That seems to be the top Congressional duty of some of them, and I’d really like to have a visual record of that.
Norm MacDonald RIP
By Pat Reeder, "Huckabee" Pop Culture Guru
As the person who covers the entertainment world, it falls to me to write show biz obituaries. While it’s always a sad duty, this one hits especially hard for me and my wife/co-writer, Laura Ainsworth. Comedian Norm MacDonald has died at 61 of cancer, which he had reportedly been fighting for nine years. His producing partner Lori Jo Hoekstra said he kept it a secret because comedy came first and he never wanted that to color how people saw him.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/norm-macdonald-snl-comedian-dies-age-61/
For a comic who never became a major star, Norm’s death was met with a massive outpouring of grief and accolades from fellow comedians and hardcore fans like us. Seth Meyers called him the “gold standard” of comedy and admitted the hardest part of doing “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update was not reading jokes the way Norm would say them.
He had a distinctive voice and delivery, a unique and unpredictable perspective, and most importantly of all in this cancel culture age, he was utterly fearless. If he thought a joke was funny (and to those of us who “got” his sense of humor, he was gutbustingly funny), no matter how bizarre the premise, he would pursue and expand on it, even if the audience greeted it with silence (you could usually hear a few fellow comedians in the back, howling with laughter.) One of the funniest things you’ll ever see on TV is Norm on Conan O’Brien’s show, using up his entire segment to tell an ancient, rambling, deadpan shaggy dog story with a groaner of a punchline that somehow was hilarious all the way through.
When Laura and I used to write our syndicated topical radio service, the Comedy Wire, nothing made me prouder than to write a joke that I could describe as “a Norm MacDonald line.”
These days, what passes for a “joke” on “SNL” is a smug two-minute political lecture. Norm could pack more laughs into two short sentences (“College radio reports that the #1 band this summer was Better Than Ezra. At #2: Ezra!”) He defied orders to stop doing O.J. Simpson jokes even when it got him fired. He didn’t care if he bombed, got fired, the audience didn’t get it or Twitter mobs cried about being offended: if he thought it was funny, he went with it. And to me, he was always right. He ruthlessly mocked leftist icons like Bill and Hillary Clinton at a time when other comics were giving them a free ride. He even dared to joke about COVID (“None of us know how we’re going to die… Well, we know NOW.”)
He was also surprisingly intelligent, once taking home $500,000 on a charity celebrity edition of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” (he also knew the answer to the million dollar question, but Regis talked him out of trying for it.) I still remember him lecturing a comic on a talent show for performing a lazy Christian-bashing bit that the other judges loved.
Norm was a “comedian’s comedian,” but to his cult fan base like us, he was one of the funniest men of all time. You never knew what might come out of his mouth, but you knew it would be hilarious and like nothing that anyone else would think of. And if someone didn’t like it and took offense, he couldn’t care less. Let’s hope more comedians take inspiration from him and reclaim comedy from the humorless woke mobs.
Here are a few of Norm’s more mainstream funny moments, courtesy of Fox News. You’ll find many, many more on YouTube.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/norm-macdonald-snl-late-night-funniest-moments
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