Mike Huckabee

I hope you’re having a great 4th of July week, but between the celebratory fireworks on one hand and the anti-American political fireworks on the other, let’s take just a moment to reflect on what Independence Day really means and how it led to the freedoms and blessings that far too many Americans fail to appreciate these days.

Most historians (not New York Times writers, but real historians) mark the beginning of America as the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. But in truth, there was still a long road to travel before America as we know it came to be. First, of course, there was the matter of fighting a bloody revolution against Great Britain, one where victory was an overwhelming longshot, and win or lose, the leaders risked their lives and fortunes. Victory was followed by more heated battles over what kind of government we would have.

Our Forefathers finally agreed to a blueprint, the Constitution, that wasn’t even introduced until 1789 – over 13 years later. Today, many Americans take those hard-won freedoms very lightly and seem eager to trade them away for false promises of security. Some can’t even name the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Maybe they’d cherish them more if they knew how close they came to not having them at all.

Did you know that the Constitution very nearly got passed without the Bill of Rights? Even some of the wisest of our forefathers thought a Bill of Rights was a dangerous idea. Alexander Hamilton argued that it was risky to list the rights the government couldn’t take away because then, politicians might try to grab any and every power that wasn’t specifically prohibited to them (apparently, the ability to rap wasn’t the only way Hamilton predicted the 21st century). He and many others also felt that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary: since nobody was surrendering their God-given rights by agreeing to the Constitution, there was no need to list them, right? Hamilton wrote, “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

It’s ironic that Hamilton made that argument. Later on, as the first Treasury Secretary, he cited powers that the Constitution merely implied that the government had in order to take on debt, create a federal bank and impose unpopular taxes. Over a century later, when the federal income tax was passed, some lawmakers wanted to include a 10% limit, but they were voted down. Opponents scoffed that it was absurd to think the government would ever steal as much as 10% of an American’s hard-earned wages. Flash forward just 30 years, and they were happily taxing away 94%. So just imagine how few freedoms we’d have today if they’d listened to Hamilton and decided it wasn’t necessary to put specific limits on government power.

Luckily for us all, Thomas Jefferson won the argument, and the Bill of Rights was added. They even included the 9th amendment, which I’ll bet most people can’t even describe. Here’s what it says:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

It means that just because some God-given rights aren’t specifically listed, that doesn’t mean the people cede them to the government. Maybe because so many of the framers were also farmers, they understood that like weeds, government tends to grow and grow, choking out the productive crops -- and like a bull, it will trample you if you don’t corral it.

So if we want to preserve our freedoms, and keep government limited, maybe we should send more farmers to Washington -- and fewer lawyers.

Mike Huckabee

NEWS UPDATE: CHOP has been chopped. After degenerating from an alleged “festival atmosphere” and “second summer of love” into a dangerous, lawless war zone within days, the area of Seattle “occupied” by leftist radicals was finally cleared out Wednesday morning.

Mayor Jenny Durkan must’ve gotten tired of competing with Bill DeBlasio for the title of America’s Worst Mayor because she finally issued the order police had been waiting for. They moved and gave the big, tough social justice “warriors” eight minutes to clear out (yes, that’s how quickly this could have ended if the Mayor had ever done her job.) Among those who resisted, there were 31 arrests. Let’s hope that for probably the first time in their lives, they will discover what it means to face real consequences for their rotten behavior.

CHOP was a disaster and a massive dereliction of the city’s duty to protect its citizens. It was also an unwarranted tragedy that resulted in robberies, assaults and other violent crimes, three serious injuries from shootings, and the shooting deaths of two black teenagers - Lorenzo Anderson Jr. and Antonio Mays Jr. – by people who claimed they launched this radical Romper Room with no police allowed to protest the unjust killing of black people by police.

At the link is a post-mortem on what happened in Seattle and how (the first step was the mistake of electing a far-left government.) As bad as the entire episode was, it did serve one purpose: seldom has there been a more horrifying but useful illustration of how swiftly civilization can spiral into anarchy when you do something as stupid as abolishing the police and giving power to a bunch of socialist undergrads.

Mike Huckabee

The number of coronavirus cases is spiking again (let’s see, what might have happened a few weeks ago to spread it that Democratic officials refused to lock down?...) Across America, officials are panicking and reinstating lockdowns and other draconian measures that did more harm than good.

The good news that’s being overlooked is that while testing is finding many more cases than we expected, the number of serious illnesses has dropped sharply. The vast majority of people found to be carrying the virus have mild or no symptoms, and those who are hospitalized are not getting as sick as before and are recovering in greater numbers. We’ve learned more about the disease and found better ways to treat it (and no, having a billion ventilators was NOT the key).

In fact, an Oxford study found that we’ve progressed so far so quickly that a hospitalized COVID-19 patient’s chances of dying are now one-fourth of what they were as recently as April. Of course, that one-in-four deaths is still all the fault of President Trump, while the three-in-four who now live owe nothing whatsoever to the massive public-private team effort he put together to study and battle the disease.

While early computer models were telling us the death rate could be as high as 2% of all who were infected, we’ve since learned that it’s much more widespread and asymptomatic than we first thought. Studies worldwide are finding between 10 and 100 times more infections that we knew, the average being 20 to 25 times more. While media reports are still using outdated, inflated figures, the actual death rate might be as low as 0.26% of those infected.

It’s still a bad disease, and certainly one that we should take all reasonable precautions to avoid. But it may be time to start putting the emphasis on “reasonable” instead of “all.”

Mike Huckabee

Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and America’s first black billionaire, has a message for all the virtue-signaling white liberals who are making a big show of their racial wokeness by vandalizing statues of historical figures and getting “The Dukes of Hazzard” taken off TV. And that message is:

Black people are laughing at you!

Johnson calls these overheated white racial warriors (have you seen the video of the entitled young white woman screaming in the faces of two black police officers about how they’re undermining her struggle against racism?) “borderline anarchists” and says their attempts to “cancel” people for thought crimes such as saying that “all lives matter” are "tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic. It absolutely means nothing…White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a d**n."

And he thinks the “silliest expression of white privilege” is white celebrities releasing videos of themselves apologizing for being white, and saying, “'Oh, my God, I am so sorry that I am white.’ I don't find any black people getting on Twitter and saying, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I'm black.' And we got the worst problems...My thing is: embrace being white and do the right thing."

Johnson said none of this self-righteous political theater is going to “give a kid whose parents can't afford college money to go to college. It's not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it's not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”

Incidentally, I should point out that that’s what he means by “Do the right thing,” not that you should watch the Spike Lee movie instead of “Gone With The Wind” and tweet at length about how woke to your privilege it made you.

Mike Huckabee

Great news: the First Amendment is still in effect, at least in some courtrooms. Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio from enforcing restrictions on outdoor and indoor gatherings of religious groups that are stricter than those on businesses and other types of gatherings. They'd even put tighter restrictions on religious groups than on businesses and gatherings that were classified as “non-essential,” which ranked religious expression as lower than “non-essential.”

It’s a great victory for religious liberty but what makes it extra sweet is that the judge based his ruling partly on the blatantly biased way that those two Democrats treated the recent street protests over George Floyd and the police.

Judge Gary Sharpe pointed out that Cuomo and DeBlasio not only allowed but endorsed and participated in protests that violated their own restrictions on large gatherings while harshly enforcing those restrictions on religious groups (DeBlasio even spoke at one – with no mask! – at the same time that he was threatening to arrest Jews who gathered in groups of more than ten to worship.) That denied churches, synagogues and other religious groups equal protection under the law.

Some legal experts noted that what they were also doing was establishing an unconstitutional state religion: the religion of secular leftism, which is allowed to flout the rules because the government deems its mission and message to be so much more important than those of traditional religions.

So now that we have an official ruling that secular leftism is a religion, I’m sure the leftists will agree with me that it has to be kicked out of public schools immediately.

Mike Huckabee

The Democrats tweeted, then deleted, this message. But too late; it was archived.

So this is what we’ve come to in 2020. If you vote for Democrats, you’re voting to put people in charge of a nation whose own history and culture they hate so much that when they hear the patriotic phrase “President to attend 4th of July celebration with fireworks at Mount Rushmore,” what they hear is “President to attend white supremacist rally at sacred land stolen from indigenous peoples.”

I implore you: please have some sympathy for the poor Democrats and don’t curse them by forcing them to hold public office in a nation for which they are seething with hatred and obviously despise most of its people, whom they believe are irredeemable racist deplorables. Encourage them instead to retire to someplace where they would feel much more comfortable, like Cuba or Venezuela.

Mike Huckabee

Michael Flynn knows firsthand what it’s like when a small group of highly motivated people gets together behind the scenes to “affect change.” He was “changed” right out of the White House.

Lately, he’s applied that wisdom to the country at large and doesn’t like what he sees. Now that he can glimpse the light at the end of his own personal tunnel, he’s raising alarm bells to all Americans who want to continue their way of life. This is no time to be complacent, he says in an op-ed for the WESTERN JOURNAL. If we stand by, it’s not too much to say that America as we know it will be destroyed.

Reading this piece, one can’t help but think that its author would have made such a fine national security adviser. (Who did we end up with after the FBI interfered? John Bolton.) It’s clear that he would be encouraging President Trump right now to set up a tough line of defense. This is a man who loves America while recognizing its flaws --- having almost been done in by them himself --- and who knows how vulnerable our democracy is.

"I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions,” Flynn says. “The weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.”

Its end goal: the creation of a socialist society. “The very heart and soul of America is at stake,” he warns.

This is a wake-up call for us to face the reality of 2020. Obviously, Flynn sees America right now as a battlefield, and battlefields are something he knows quite a bit about. He understands that a small, highly motivated, and organized group can quickly gain control over a much larger group that isn’t fighting back hard enough. As he puts it, “If we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.”

"Treason and treachery are rampant,” he says, no doubt drawing on personal experience with our own government, “and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. This passionate 2 % appears to be winning.” He’s concerned that Americans don’t realize how severe the consequences will be if the “passionate” do win.

Voting is one very important part of this (it’s become a cliché, but in this case, it’s true that no election in our lifetimes has mattered more than this upcoming one.) But Flynn says we have to do more. We have to exhibit the “audacity and resolve” that the small, well-organized, fired-up groups do.

Speaking like a battlefield commander, he makes an intriguing point: that our enemies have vulnerabilities we don’t know about. “I also sense that only a slight push on our part is all that is required to defeat these forces.” Mostly he looks to our law enforcement professionals to hold the line against “the corrupt and the criminal.” They need our support most of all, the support of “our entire being.”

They are NOT the enemy, he says. “They bring light to the darkness of night through their bravery and determination to do their jobs without fanfare and with tremendous sacrifice.” (One might say this is the ultimate example of the enemy of our enemy being our friend.)

He also warns not to be taken in by fake news. Trust your instincts and your common sense to help you see the difference between right and wrong. “Those with courage will always choose the harder right over the easier wrong,” he says. He applies this not only to dealings with our enemies but with our own government, our own “so-called leaders,” the people WE put in charge and can remove as well. Politicians who have been in office too long have “discarded us like old trash,” he says.

Flynn communicates the same strong faith, commitment, and optimism that surely kept the soldiers under his command at their peak in the field. Our goal, he says, “is to remain an unwavering constitutional republic based on a set of Judeo-Christian values and principles.”

"In war, as in life, most failure comes from inaction.”

Reading this, I am angered anew that Michael Flynn was kept from being Trump’s national security adviser, and not just because of the criminal way he was treated. We were shortchanged; we deserved someone of this caliber working for us. Personally, I would love to see him put right back into that job. In the meantime, he has made his position clear, and the President knows, at least in general, the advice he would be giving.

Incidentally, Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell made some news in an interview on “The Vickie McKenna Show” on Madison, Wisconsin, radio by saying one reason Flynn was taken down was that he was prepared to “audit” the U.S. intelligence community. The big fish there: former CIA Director John Brennan.

Now, if you’ve been reading the HUCKABEE newsletter, you already knew that Flynn was planning to do that audit. As Lee Smith reported in his book, THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, Flynn wanted to streamline the Pentagon and the intel community, and that would have involved financial audits and much-needed downsizing. They didn’t like it at all. One area of particular interest was the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which appeared to be hiring contract people to produce reports of dubious value. Interestingly, one of those contractors was...(yes) Stefan Halper, the very person who would go on to ambush Trump campaign associates as a confidential human source on foreign soil and record their conversations. On the books, he was being paid to “write reports.”

Anyway, there were lots of reasons why Obama’s intel community --- and Obama himself --- did not want Michael Flynn around. Ironically, he thought the CIA was “too political,” and it was the truth of this that ended up taking him down. The idea of his being national security adviser and almost certainly discovering what they'd been up to in the summer of 2016 had to be just too much. That’s why McCabe, Strzok, and the rest HAD to make sure the case against him stayed open and why they had to see him gone baby gone. Look around today and you can see that it was our country’s loss.

Mike Huckabee

I didn’t address this story when it came out on Friday because I have a standard rule: any shocking “blockbuster” anti-Trump story that comes from hostile media outlets such as the New York Times should be allowed to sit and air out for at least 48-72 hours to give the truth a chance to bubble up. Since this story came out on Friday, and it’s now Monday, I guess it’s safe to mention it.

The New York Times, citing its favorite source, “unnamed officials,” “reported” that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill US troops in Afghanistan to drive the US out of the region, and that the President was briefed on it. Joe Biden, picking up the softball handed to him by the Times, declared:

“The truly shocking revelation that if the Times report is true, and I emphasize that again, is that President Trump, the commander in chief of American troops serving in a dangerous theater of war, has known about this for months, according to the Times, and done worse than nothing.”

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) screamed that Trump was guilty of Russian collusion (do they ever get tired of doing that?), and even some top Republicans are demanding an investigation. They really need to learn to count to 100 before taking anything seriously that comes from the New York Times.

So here’s what we know after waiting a couple of days: Russia called the story “fake,” and the Taliban denied there was any truth to it. Neither of those things may cut any ice with you, but Trump also tweeted that the Intelligence agencies reported to him that they did not brief him or the Vice President on this because they didn’t find the info credible (and that was even before they saw it in the New York Times.)

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “This does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence, but to the inaccuracy of the New York Times story erroneously suggesting that President Trump was briefed on this matter.” So she's saying that maybe Russia did offer such a bounty (even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally), but the big anti-Trump “bombshell” part of the story was fake news. Unless you believe our intelligence agencies are willing to lie to make it appear that President Trump is NOT colluding with Russia. And if you believe that, you haven’t been paying much attention for the past three years.

In a somewhat related story, there’s a new movie coming out about the time in the 1930s when the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for fake stories covering up atrocities committed by Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin, an award they never returned. Now, THAT'S Russian collusion!

Mike Huckabee

Well, it’s taken long enough, but I’m starting to sense a shift in the wind as the “silent majority” are getting sick of staying silent while America-hating jerks smash national monuments.

Immediately after President Trump signed an executive order requiring the enforcement of the federal law against vandalizing public statues and monuments, the Justice Department announced indictments of four men in connection with the attempts to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington.

The DOJ rightly drew a line between lawful protest and vandalism, stating, “This Office remains steadfast in its commitment to protect the sacred First Amendment right of individuals to peacefully protest, but these charges should serve as a warning to those who choose to desecrate the statues and monuments that adorn our nation’s capital: your violent behavior and criminal conduct will not be tolerated.”

I feel fairly certain that the idea of facing consequences for their actions will be a completely new experience for these folks, and one that their parents should have introduced them to long ago. They were among 15 people whose photos were tweeted by Trump and whom the DOJ is searching for. Naturally, some liberal media outlets accused Trump of “inciting violence” by tweeting their wanted posters. Here’s a hint: if you don’t want to be the subject of a federal manhunt, then don’t do things that put your face on wanted posters, like trying to smash national monuments. This seems like one of those “you knew the job was dangerous when you took it” situations.

Trump isn’t the only one who’s fed up with allowing rampant crime and destruction in the streets under the guise of protesting racism. In Oklahoma City, DA David Prater announced charges of terrorism, rioting and assault against protesters who turned violent in May. He said, “This is not Seattle. We’re not putting up with this lawlessness here.”

In Manassas, Virginia, a different kind of protest occurred when hundreds of people turned out for a “back the blue” march to support the police. Participants called it “disgusting” to tar every police officer because of what some bad cops elsewhere did, and said police might need better training or background checks for hiring, but as for “defunding the police, "Who in their right mind would even think that's a good idea…” In fairness, I don’t think being in your right mind has anything to do with that particular movement.

At this point, I guess I should stop and make it clear to those who like to take things out of context and leap to dumb conclusions that none of this is meant in any way to diminish the justifiable anger over the death of George Floyd. Indeed, that was something that people of all races across the political spectrum agreed on. The growing backlash is not against legitimate protesters who have genuine concerns about police behavior toward blacks. It’s against the radical left extremists from groups like Antifa, many of them young white adults from privileged backgrounds who were indoctrinated into socialism and hating America in college, who are exploiting the anger over Floyd’s death as a convenient excuse to attack the foundations of the country and try to eliminate the police.

They not only aren’t helping the black community, they’re actively harming it, and they don’t care. And not just by tarnishing the image of legitimate peaceful protesters. Their riots, arson and looting are destroying black-owned businesses and black people’s jobs, eliminating needed goods and services, and making black neighborhoods less safe by driving police out.

Even Bill Maher sees through this latest form of twisted “white savior” behavior as you can see at this link.

Also, check out the must-see video at that link by Ami Horowitz. He asked white leftists on the street who hate the police and want to abolish them if they think black people in East Harlem would agree with them. Well, of course, they would! So he went to East Harlem and asked black people about that. Their response: they think the white leftists who want to abolish the police are “ignorant” and “full of c**p.” They don’t want to live in the lawless chaos that would exist if there were no police.

And check out this blow-by-blow account of the scene at the attempt to take down the Emancipation memorial (the statue of Lincoln freeing a slave) in Washington. Black history reenactors attempted to tell the screaming activists (most of them white) the history of the statue and why it’s important. But what one young white woman called “disgusting” was the fact that they were expected to respect their elders.

And since there are so many white celebrities speaking for black people (without being asked) and calling for abolishing the police, here’s a celebrity rebuttal: Muhammad Ali Jr. says that his father would have called the people who are smashing shops and police stations, beating up innocent people and terrorizing communities “devils.”

And because I don’t believe in smashing heads to make political points, but I’m not averse to making leftists’ heads explode, I’ll also pass along this quote from The Greatest’s son, which has to represent the ultimate backlash against the past few weeks of anarchy:

“I think Trump’s a good president. My father would have supported him. Trump’s not a racist; he’s for all the people. Democrats are the ones who are racist and not for everybody.”

Mike Huckabee

Remember when people used to complain about there being no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans? Is anyone still saying that now? It’s not just like comparing apples and oranges, it’s like the difference between Goofus and Gallant. Or Superman and Bizarro World Superman.

To start with, Minneapolis, like other big, longtime one-party Democrat cities, has suffered widespread riots, arson and looting and destruction of public statues and monuments by people who seem to thank that if you smash historic monuments, you change history (or as I call that, “Taliban logic.”) Their Goofus response: on Friday, the Minneapolis city council (which has not one single Republican) voted unanimously to abolish the police department. Some residents who vowed not to call the police and were immediately inundated with hundreds of homeless people and their various drug dealers and other problems could probably tell you where this is going to lead.

A local business owner whose bookstore was destroyed by arson said there are legitimate problems with the police, “but the way the politicians are going about it is just ridiculous. They are pandering to a certain segment of the public.” He said he won’t reopen his store if city leaders push through a “sufficiently stupid” plan. I feel confident that the one and only way in which the Minneapolis city council will exceed expectations is in the field of stupidity.

Fortunately, the city council doesn’t have the power to abolish the police force unless the citizens vote for it in November. Let’s hope they’re now undergone enough of the traditional process for clearing up one’s thinking (“A conservative is a liberal who got mugged”) to vote to abolish the current city council instead.

On the other side, President Trump’s Gallant response to the unrest was to sign an executive order requiring enforcement of federal laws against vandalizing public monuments and government property, providing assistance for protecting it, and withholding federal support and grants from local authorities who fail to do their jobs and protect it.

Trump has also taken measures to declare the violent radical left group Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, and his DOJ is reportedly already conducting dozens of investigations of their organizers. Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Jerrod Nadler (Goofus, NY) stood up in the House and declared Antifa to be “imaginary.” That’s right: the same guy who wasted many months and untold tax dollars to impeach the President over nonexistent crimes, and who has spent years pushing a Russian collusion hoax, believes that it’s Antifa that’s imaginary.

At that link, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan disabuses Rep. Nadler of his delusions, and at this link, so does a former Antifa member, who was quite surprised to learn that all the rocks he threw through windows were actually part of a quilting circle.

Rep. Nadler might also want to check out this video and ask himself, “If Antifa is imaginary, who sprayed that extremist graffiti, shoemaker’s elves?”

Senate Republicans offered up a serious police reform bill similar to but not as radical as the one from House Democrats. It was largely crafted by Sen. Tim Scott, one of the few black Senators and someone who’s had personal experience with racial profiling. Democrats, who claimed to care so much about black people that a bill had to be passed by July 4th, filibustered the Senate bill to kill it so it couldn’t even open up for changes and amendments, then insulted Republicans using racially charged terms such as “token.” Here was Sen. Scott’s response:

He also called Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to blame Republicans for the murder of George Floyd outrageous and sinful.

Meanwhile, back in Goofus Town, Speaker Pelosi claimed that only the Democratic House bill is worthy of “George Kirby’s name.” FYI: George Floyd was killed by a police officer in solidly Democratic Minneapolis. George Kirby was a gifted comedian and impressionist, best known for the 1970s TV show, “The Kopykats,” with fellow mimics Rich Little and Frank Gorshin. He was black, though, so she got that part right.

And while Democrats claim to be displaying their deep concern for black people by tearing down statues of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican who freed the slaves from their Democrat masters, the far-left California legislature just voted to put a measure on the ballot to rescind the state constitutional amendment barring discrimination based on race, gender or national origin. They claim this is good because it will allow them to impose race-based discrimination they approve of, so that the state can openly judge people by the color of their skin, not the content of their character. Since this is California, I won’t call that “Goofus” thinking. Let’s just call it Goofy.

Mike Huckabee

A lot of people are talking about (and I don’t know why) a Yahoo music editor’s article calling for replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as America’s National Anthem, possibly with “Imagine” by John Lennon. The excuse is that Francis Scott Key was a slaveholder (he also represented slaves trying to win their freedom in court, pro bono), and that the third verse that is never sung is “blatantly racist” (although his use of the term "slave" has been hotly debated and might mean people pressed into service by the British Navy, oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s NEVER SUNG?

This is hardly the first time anyone’s wanted to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner,” although until now, it’s usually been because it’s so hard to sing (the tune was taken from a drinking song with a high note you practically have to be drunk to attempt to hit.) The choice to replace it was usually Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” but we can’t have that now! Referring to God is almost as un-PC as honoring a slaveholder.

But what about “Imagine”? Look, I love the Beatles, but that has to be the most over-praised song of the past century. Even Lennon admitted that it’s basically the Communist Manifesto set to music. Radical leftists love it because it paints a picture of a utopian world without national borders, private property or religion, and Lennon often found himself having to correct their interpretations and reminding them that he wasn’t advocating for those things, he was just suggesting “imagining” that we didn’t have all those differences so we could work together globally.

But people DO have differences, and as experience has taught us, leftist prescriptions, like taking away religious freedom and property rights, do nothing but make them angrier and more likely for those differences to flare into war. Besides, imposing that "utopia" requires an ironfisted oppressive government, which isn’t likely in a world without borders. If the song has a dreamlike quality, that’s because it is a dream. A pipe dream.

Besides, if we had to do away with every song because the writer wasn’t a saint, we wouldn’t have much music left, and that includes John Lennon music. Wonder what the cancel culture would do if they realized John wrote a song intended as a feminist anthem that was called “Woman is the (N-word) of the World”?

As with all art, we have to learn to separate the creation from the creator. Francis Scott Key was a flawed human being, as are all human beings, but he gave us a great song that represents a great nation, and it stands for all our people. Some of the most inspiring renditions of it were performed by black entertainers, from Mahalia Jackson to Jimi Hendrix to Whitney Houston.

If the statue-smashing radicals really want to learn from the wisdom of John Lennon, I’d recommend instead a far better song: “Revolution.”

“You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world...

But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…

You say you got a real solution, well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.

You ask me for a contribution, well, you know, we're all doing what we can.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait…

You say you'll change the Constitution, well, you know, we all want to change your head.

You tell me it's the institution, well, you know, you better free your mind instead.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow…”

Mike Huckabee

The mayor of Seattle allowed a bunch of far-left radicals to create their own six-block Utopia. She called it a festival and a second “summer of love.” But after just a couple of weeks, what have we learned about what kind of America they would really create?

Well, we immediately learned that they would build walls and barricades around the border to keep out people they didn’t want inside. Those seeking entry would be greeted by armed guards demanding to see their papers. Instead of trained police accountable to the public, arbitrary “laws” would be enforced by a self-proclaimed “warlord” carrying around a semi-automatic rifle in a densely populated area, and passing out similar weapons to other people without any background checks whatsoever (All this is not what I've been told liberals wanted.) Nobody would have any protection from killings, assaults or robbery, including sexual assault; so much for women’s right to say “no” to unwanted sexual aggression. There will also be no food, except for what the capitalists they hate give to them.

And it’s not like they’re being coy about what their real end game is.

Now, the latest piece of sub-mental regression: to protect black people from the racism of white people, white people create special segregated areas where only black people can go.

But as Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media points out, this is not, as many people claim, a failure of the US education system to teach these young people about history, economics or anything remotely useful. It’s actually a triumph of the leftist project to infiltrate schools and indoctrinate a generation of young Americans with hatred of their own nation and its history and culture so they could be used as an easily-controlled mob.

Unfortunately for their would-be masters, their big mistake was in thinking that a group of angry, miseducated and overly-entitled brats could be “easily-controlled.” Note the growing calls for renaming liberal schools like Harvard and Yale that were started by people aligned with slavery, redistributing their precious vast endowments, and “canceling” any professors who argue against it.

Instead of concentrating so heavily on the writings of Karl Marx, maybe some of these leftist professors should have read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

When last we left the Michael Flynn case, presiding Judge Emmet Sullivan had been advised by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to follow Attorney General Bill Barr’s orders and let it go. Give it up. Shake it off. And then maybe take a loooooong vacation. (Personally, I’d suggest a permanent one.)

But the stalemate continues, though it’s almost overshadowed by another revelation, made possible through the DOJ’s partial declassification of a note in Peter Strzok’s chicken-scratch handwriting, that Obama and Biden participated actively in a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting about the incoming national security adviser. The notes even suggest Biden specifically brought up the Logan Act.

RELATED READING: Crazy: Judge Sullivan can't let Flynn case go

On Thursday, numerous pundits weighed in on the significance of this, and I was particularly intrigued by one comment from a source we’ve quoted with confidence, Undercover Huber, who tweeted: “Don’t laugh, but at this point, my working theory about Gen. Flynn and the Logan Act is that the people in the Obama administration got the idea from the freaking WEST WING cable TV show. An episode at the end of the series (“Transition”) shows the outgoing lame-duck admin in a foreign policy dispute between China and Russia. They carry out electronic surveillance of all calls with Russia and wiretap the incoming team and confront them about...the Logan Act!”

Dan Bongino brought this up in his Thursday podcast. Could it be?? We’ve seen real-life intersect with fiction before in this scandal; Christopher Steele apparently borrowed from the creative mind of wannabe screenwriter Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. What if Biden got the idea to go after an incoming national security adviser for violating the Logan Act after seeing something similar on THE WEST WING?

We know he’s not above plagiarizing others’ words and ideas; in fact, he even dropped out of a presidential race after it was discovered he had plagiarized.

It’s likely he also stole a different idea from THE WEST WING, as Bongino illustrated by juxtaposing two clips: 1) Biden at a podium, likening the race to cure cancer to JFK’s call to put a man on the moon in 10 years, and 2) Martin Sheen playing the President in his office, giving essentially the same spiel, with similar delivery.

Hilariously, Obama borrowed the same idea, for his January 2016 State of the Union Address.

My guess is that then-Sen. Biden was a fan of that show, which depicts those in the corridors of government power the way they must love to be portrayed, with constant snappy reparte –- do they EVER tire of hearing themselves talk? –- and nonstop hectic lives, all in the interest of “governing.” Martin Sheen played a President Democrats could only dream of, and goodness knows they needed someone they could idolize in the early 2000s with George W. Bush in office. I’ve imagined this show as therapy for them.

I’d seen clips from THE WEST WING but never an entire episode. So I thought the best way to come to any conclusion would be to watch the episode in question: Season 7 (the final season), Episode 19, “Transition,” which originally ran April 24, 2006, and has been in reruns since. Obviously, this episode is set during the transition period, with President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) transitioning out and President-elect Santos (Jimmy Smits) transitioning in. Concerns are established early in the script about the new administration overstepping the old on foreign policy issues before Inauguration Day.

To set the stage, the episode opens with President-elect Santos returning congratulatory calls from foreign leaders, specifically from the G8 countries. He’s told by an aide that the rest can be dealt with by his chief foreign policy adviser. “Well, then we’d better hire one,” Santos quips.

When he gets to the call from the Russian president, he hesitates. The aide nods him forward, telling him Russia is “one of the G8's.” Santos replies, “He’s also leader of a nation we may find ourselves exchanging hostile fire with any moment.” They exchange uncomfortable looks, and Santos finally says, “Call him.”

A scene in the President Bartlet’s office establishes that the incoming President is going to be briefed in-depth on the “intervention” in Kazakhstan. Santos is taken to a secure deep-basement briefing room --- I’m guessing kind of like the one Adam Schiff’s committee used for their secret impeachment confabs --- where he’s told we’re “reaching full deployment” of ground and support personnel positioned between Chinese and Russian forces. (Say what??) When he asks what happens next, he’s has a big problem with their cavalier answer and the “entire adventure, as I’ve already expressed to the President.” He abruptly leaves the room.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As soon as he’s gone, there’s this exchange:

Official #1 --- The NSA picked up the President-elect’s congratulatory phone call with the Russian president.

Bartlet’s chief of staff (I think) --- They’re tapping his phone?

Official #2 --- In the current crisis, the NSA’s monitoring all contact with the Russian and Chinese governments as a matter of course.

Chief of Staff --- And?

Official #1 --- The Santos call contained nothing improper.

Hm, so why was this even brought up? Later in his office, Santos complains of the Kazakhstan “mess” that “they’re depositing on our doorstep.” He tells his aide to get the president of China on the phone. “China’s not one of the G8 countries,” the aide warns. The message to Santos is definitely "don't go there." But the call is placed as the scene cuts away.

Now, it gets even more interesting. We go to President Bartlet’s office.

Chief of Staff –- Sir, we have a problem.

Official #1 –- NSA monitors picked up a phone conversation between President-elect Santos and Chinese President Lian.

Prez: Yeah.

Chief of Staff: Sir, you’re not going to like what he said...

Then, everything hits the fan. There’s a twist later that reveals the incoming and outgoing Presidents --- who, significantly, are from the same political party --- had secretly coordinated this call to China, using it to play “a little geopolitical good-cop, bad-cop.” VERY different from the adversarial Obama-Trump transition. Still, the episode contains several clear messages.

1. That the incoming administration is supposed to wait till Inauguration Day to insert itself into foreign policy.

2. That the NSA wiretaps calls between incoming officials and foreign leaders. (Apparently when this episode came out in 2006, that practice was kept closer to the vest. Today, both President-elect Trump and incoming national security adviser Flynn would have been aware.)

3. That current security officials will listen to the calls and “tell” on the interlopers, even on the incoming President or his national security adviser.

So, could Biden have gotten the idea of using Flynn’s recorded calls with a foreign leader to prosecute him after watching this show? The words “Logan Act” are never spoken, but if Biden watched the show, it might have come up later in conversation among colleagues exploring possible ways of taking Flynn out. And everyone seemed to be exploring those.

Doesn’t sound too farfetched to me. These days, hardly anything does.

Mike Huckabee

Some people like to look back to the old “Andy Griffith Show” for valuable life lessons. If I had to cite the best advice from that for big city mayors dealing with streets full of radical leftist vandals burning, looting and destroying monuments and historic statues, I’d point to the sage wisdom of Barney Fife:

“Nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

Unfortunately, with Democratic officials having ordered the police to stand back for weeks and let the mob “vent” and “express its feelings,” it’s too late for that. Instead of getting it out of their systems, they’ve just been emboldened to believe that their strategy for destroying America and its history is working, and they’re only ramping it up.

It’s obvious that the call to remove Confederate monuments was only a pretext, and that President Trump was right: they’ve quickly moved on to attacking statues of Washington and Jefferson, and to show their genuine historical illiteracy, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, World War II soldiers, and several prominent abolitionists. In Texas, a statue of guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn was defaced, and there was even a threat against the Alamo (if they dare to damage that Texas shrine, Davy Crockett and company won’t be the only people who made their last stand at the Alamo.) There’s even talk about whether we need extra security to protect up Mount Rushmore. So this is not really about feeling “triggered” by Confederate monuments, it’s an all-out assault on all American history and culture, and everything and everyone who did something to contribute to it.

Christopher Bedford in The Federalist wrote one of the most talked-about editorials of the day, recounting the history of revolutionary mob violence and what happens when nobody stands up to them.

Bedford writes, “A society that believes in itself builds monuments, a sick society does not, and a dying society watches as they are torn down.” He further warns that “everywhere statues are torn down by the mob, history teaches that people are next.”

And we’re already seeing that come to pass, with physical assaults and even killings of police, protesters, and others unfortunate enough to attract the mob’s attention. Just last night, Democratic Wisconsin state Senator Tim Carpenter was beaten by “peaceful protesters” at the State Capitol. They claim he “provoked” them. He says he was just taking a photo. They were toppling two statues, one of them a statue of a Union officer who fought to free the slaves. So either they didn’t want their faces seen by police, or they were too ashamed of how pig-ignorant they are about history to show their faces.

President Trump has now ordered that if local Democratic officials refuse to do their jobs and protect public monuments, he will enforce the federal law protecting them. But what is these officials’ reaction to the expanding anarchy in their own jurisdictions? I’m not certain which would be the most accurate adjective: shameful, oblivious or insane? Take a look at this outrageous statement by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and you be the judge:

When asked about Trump saying Democratic officials should do more to protect monuments, Cuomo replied, “People are making a statement about equality, about community, to be against racism, against slavery, I think those are good statements…It’s a healthy expression of people saying let’s get some priorities here and let’s remember the sin and mistake that this nation made and let’s not celebrate it.”

Far be it from me to tell Gov. Cuomo how to do his job (although I did do that job for 10 years, and somehow managed to avoid killing thousands of nursing home residents, driving businesses to other states, or allowing communist radicals to run riot in the streets, destroying public monuments), but that is not “healthy expression.” It’s felony vandalism. You know, the kind of criminal act and threat to public safety that Governors are supposed to prevent.

It’s too bad Barney Fife isn’t with us anymore. He’d make a much better Governor than Andrew Cuomo.

Some good further reading on this subject: Conrad Black at National Review on why the assault on statues is really a fight against civilization:

Mike Huckabee

Come on, Judge Sullivan; at this point, you’re just embarrassing yourself.

I say this because at the time of this writing, late Wednesday night, Emmet Sullivan, the presiding judge in the Michael Flynn case, still has not complied with the federal appeals court that ordered him to drop the case. What he did was issue a “stay of the current settings” for a hearing already on the calendar and for any further briefings.

The vote was 2-1 from a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. I’m not a lawyer, but it seemed to me that even the judge who dissented was doing it based on the timing of their intervention, not the merits of the case itself. But that’s not enough for Judge Sullivan, who, in defying Attorney General Barr’s decision to drop the case, has shown himself to be the very incarnation of Captain Ahab, determined to harpoon the Great White Trump if it sinks him.

(Aside: to show how apt this imagery is for describing TDS, I’ve included this quote from Melville’s MOBY DICK: “...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable, in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”)

Anyway, Barr –- who is, after all, the prosecutor –- wants to dismiss the case. The D.C. panel wants to dismiss it. Lord knows Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell want to dismiss it. One would think even the original prosecutors would want the case dismissed, as Powell has amassed a mountain of evidence of their misconduct big enough to send THEM to the hoosgow. It seems the only one still involved who doesn’t want to drop it is Judge Sullivan, and the appeals judges have essentially kicked the ball back to his court. He doesn’t get to exercise his own discretion on whether or not to drop it, but he may choose to continue to stretch this out and have the matter re-heard by the full appeals court.

Former deputy Assistant AG John Yoo, speaking Wednesday with Shannon Bream, pointed out that issuing this writ of mandamus to Judge Sullivan’s court was “an extraordinary step on the part of the D.C. Circuit Court." They’re rare, and apply when a judge has abused power. He said Sullivan could indeed appeal to the full panel of 13 or even to the Supreme Court, but “that would just be prolonging his own mistake.”

We’ve been following the case against Flynn from the start, and it has recently been blown wide open with revelations from FBI interview notes, texts and other declassified documents that it was a trap set for him early on. As the incoming national security adviser, Flynn did nothing wrong in speaking with the Russian ambassador, and he never tried to be less than forthcoming in his interview with agents Strzok and Pientka. It’s clear now that Flynn was railroaded, but the judge is on a mission to take him down just for pleading guilty --- never mind that his plea was coerced and that Powell has the goods on what they were trying to do.

Just this Tuesday, the Justice Department informed Sullivan that it had just found another page of Strzok’s notes that are exculpatory for Flynn. Strzok was the lead investigator on “Crossfire Hurricane,” which encompassed Trump and Russia and also “Crossfire Razor,” the case against Flynn.

At the time of that report, the notes were subject to a protective order, but they've now been released with some redactions. Here is Solomon's updated story, which makes additional points about the case.

A former senior FBI official told Solomon that Strzok’s notes about the Oval Office meeting are a “red flag” that the Bureau, under Comey, “may have been involving itself illegitimately in a political dispute between the outgoing Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration.” Ya think?

The notes were said in Powell’s brief to have been taken January 4, 2017, the day Strzok relayed a request from “the 7th floor” to the lead investigator in the case telling him to keep it open, but that appears to be wrong, as they refer to events that happened on the 5th. The DOJ has said they were taken between January 3-5, which would have included the Oval Office meeting. But Strzok wasn’t at that meeting, so he was probably writing down someone else’s account of it.

Still, with stunning evidence like this on Flynn’s side, it’s quite a spectacle to watch Judge Sullivan trying so hard to keep the case going. Curiously, Sullivan seems as desperate to keep it open now, against all odds, as Strzok was in early January 2017. And we know that there were others back then who were just as keen on it, including both Obama and Biden. We know this because they attended a now-infamous Oval Office meeting January 5 to talk about this. And, yes, there are notes.

In her court filing, Powell referred to these: “...Former President Obama, James Comey, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, and apparently Susan Rice [James Clapper also attended] discussed the transcripts of Flynn’s calls and how to proceed against him. Mr. Obama himself directed that “the right people” investigate Gen. Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious: General Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak ‘appear legit.’”

Of course, we already knew from Sally Yates’ testimony that she was surprised to learn Obama already knew in detail about Flynn's recorded conversations. And we’ve long known from a Lisa Page text that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

Funny that in Strzok’s notes there is nothing about Obama saying to do everything “by the book.” Susan Rice wrote that to herself –- repeating the phrase three times –- a couple of weeks later in her very last act as a White House official, on January 20 just as Trump was taking the oath of office.

Biden is playing dumb about the Flynn investigation –- one of the few instances where it appears to be just an act. Either that, or he only mentioned the Logan Act in that meeting because he was the one person in the room old enough to remember the day it passed, in 1799.

Speaking of people playing dumb, on Wednesday ABC, CBS and NBC slammed the decision by Barr to drop the Flynn case as purely political and pretended to know nothing about the release of the notes implicating Obama and Biden.

Powell, looking understandably weary at the end of the evening on Sean Hannity’s TV show, said she wasn’t sure what’s going on right now. When Sean asked if she was confident justice would be done, she only said, “I feel very strongly that we will make a lot of progress in that direction...and I don’t know that it will be what everybody wants to see as full justice, but we’re heading in the right direction. Today was a big step forward.”

Flynn, though, seemed newly energized on Wednesday and made it clear he intends to fight for justice and the rule of law.

Mike Huckabee

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but…Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberals on the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, ruling that President Trump’s attempt to rescind Obama's DACA program is unlawful – even though Obama repeatedly stated that he had no constitutional authority to create it before going ahead and doing so.

The Court ruled that Trump didn’t give a good enough reason for why he rescinded it. Roberts wrote, "We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action."

Just off the top of my head, how about: “It's illegal because the President has no constitutional power to invent new immigration laws”?

The story at the link states, “No one disputes that the President has the power to end DACA. Instead, the focus of Thursday's case is whether administration officials followed procedural rules when terminating the program.” Actually, a lot of people disputed that Trump has that power, mostly based upon their delusional belief that Trump isn’t really President. The “reasoned explanation” argument was just the excuse that they thought might pass muster in courts, if they could find enough liberal judges. I can almost picture their attorneys leaving the SCOTUS, high-fiving each other and saying, "I can't BELIEVE they bought that!"

Personally, I have supported something similar to DACA in the past. I think it’s wasteful and cruel to send kids who were brought to the US by their parents when they were small and have only known America back to nations where they have no place and might not even speak the language, particularly after the state has already paid to educate them to the point when they’re about to become employed taxpayers. But this was NOT the way to deal with it. Letting a President simply ignore the Constitutional separation of powers as if his office conveys magical abilities is not the way to handle it, nor is restricting the powers of future Presidents from undoing the unconstitutional actions of previous Presidents unless they say “Mother, may I?” convincingly enough to a judge.

In the dissent, Justice Thomas, one of a dwindling number of SCOTUS members who remembers what the Constitution is and cares what words mean, warned that the Court’s decision means future presidents will be stuck with illegal policies inherited from their predecessors:

"Under the auspices of today’s decision, administrations can bind their successors by unlawfully adopting significant legal changes through executive branch agency memoranda. Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this Court."

I refer you again to Sen. Josh Hawley’s speech warning that we have become a nation in which laws are no longer made by the elected Representatives of the people but by unelected bureaucrats and judges who think that wearing a robe makes them wizards. I guess now we can add rogue Presidents to that list. Everyone can make laws except our lawmakers.

The good news: if Trump wants to bypass the Democratic House and create laws and programs by executive order, he can now feel free to go ahead, knowing that his successors can only do away with them if they can come up with a reason better than “But this is plainly UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!” As Roberts first signaled when he twisted the law into a pretzel to uphold Obamacare, that’s no longer a convincing enough reason for the SCOTUS to overturn something.

As for what to do about the SCOTUS, it's obvious that having Justices appointed by Republicans, even by Trump, is no guarantee that they'll protect the Constitution. But letting the Democrats have the Presidency and Senate would be exponentially worse. As law professor/blogger David Bernstein (who called the DACA decision "a very dangerous ruling" and "a very bad day for the separation of powers") said, the best insurance against 5-4 liberal decisions thanks to a rogue conservative Justice is to have a 7-2 or higher conservative bench.

Mike Huckabee

I don’t often recommend watching speeches in Congress these days, but Wednesday brought one by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley that is a must-hear for Christian conservatives. It concerns the outrageous Supreme Court ruling, joined by alleged conservative Justices Roberts and Gorsuch (Gorsuch even wrote it) that refines the ban on “sex” discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include “gender identity,” a concept that wasn’t even contemplated until decades after the law was written.

It is effectively a surrender to the left, since if judges can interpret the plain language of laws to mean anything they choose, then we no longer have a representative republic, we have rule by unelected judges and bureaucrats. Outrageously, Senate Republican leaders seem to be fine with that, brushing off the ruling as “the law of the land” (say, aren’t YOU supposed to make those?) and showing no interest in passing legislation to correct it. The Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street branch of the GOP is also fine with that, since they don’t care about social values issues anyway, and find them a bit of an embarrassment among their liberal country club friends. Hawley has some important words that they need to hear, and that Christian conservatives and other social values voters really need to hear.

Incidentally, since I think it’s suicidal to ignore your opponents, I also read this take on the same subject by a liberal Washington Post editor.

It’s infuriating because it makes the lazy and bigoted assumption that being opposed to letting the LGBTQ agenda steamroll religious rights, the law, the Constitution and basic biology is born purely out of personal animus toward gay people. But it’s worth reading to hear the arrogant attitude of the left toward millions of people they know nothing about and never even talk to. It boils down to “Why can’t you just take the crumbs we throw you and shut up?” Remember this the next time WaPo runs an article lamenting how some people just don’t recognize when they’re “speaking from a place of privilege.”

Mike Huckabee

In one week, the Supreme Court has managed to douse the Constitution with gasoline and light it on fire with two separate outrageous decisions. In the first, by declaring that “sex discrimination” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act also means “gender identity,” they affirmed that the plain words of laws don’t mean what Congress intended but whatever judges want them to mean, rendering the concept of laws written by elected representatives of the people to be meaningless. In the second, they ruled that President Trump cannot use an executive order to undo a previous President’s illegal and unconstitutional executive order unless the Court approves his reasons for doing so, which eviscerates the separation of powers, usurping for the Court a power reserved exclusively to the Chief Executive. And in both of these dangerous and destructive rulings, the key vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the liberals.

Yesterday in the Senate, Constitutional scholar Sen. Ted Cruz took to the podium and spent about 10 minutes dismantling Roberts’ “legal reasoning,” in which he concedes that something is, of course, obviously what we all know it is, then yanks some rationale out of the ether for ruling the other way. It’s a must-see or must-read for anyone who cares about preserving – or more accurately now, reviving - the Constitution and the rule of law:

None of this is surprising since Roberts has made it clear from his writings and interviews that he doesn’t see his job as ruling on whether an issue before him is Constitutional or not – which is actually his ONLY job. He erroneously sees his job as being to look at something before him that he assumes the people want, like Obamacare, same-sex marriage, gender identity protections, DACA or keeping a citizenship question out of the Census and then work backward to try to find some legal mumbo-jumbo to justify it. He’s now done this so many times that he’s left the Constitution as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

(Incidentally, for Justice Roberts’ enlightenment, here are 10 instances where Obama himself admitted that he had no Constitutional authority to create DACA):

Since there are no elections for Supreme Court Justices, and impeachment is a longshot, there’s only one way to counter this. That is to ensure that President Trump is reelected and the GOP holds the Senate, so that Trump can continue appointing conservative, constructionist judges who can rise to the level of SCOTUS appointments, and we can all pray that he appoints enough of them so that if one or two decide, like Roberts, to go, rogue, they won’t be “swing” votes.

Of course, there is one other solution, but it’s not very likely. As Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton suggested, if John Roberts “believes his political judgment is so exquisite,” “I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected. I suspect voters will find his strange views no more compelling than do the principled justices on the Court.”

Mike Huckabee

Happy Juneteenth, and if you don’t know what that means, you probably will soon. Juneteenth (for “June 19th”) has been a popular holiday throughout the South for well over a century, but the current racial tensions have politicians and corporations around the nation suddenly jumping on the bandwagon to declare it a national or state holiday or paid leave day, only about 150 years late. Here’s what it’s about:

On June 19, 1865, Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3  to the slaves in Galveston, Texas, which informed them that they were free and now had “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves.” This was 2-1/2 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth was a Texas celebration for many years, starting in 1866, but ramping up in 1872, when former slaves bought 10 acres of land in Houston to create Emancipation Park, the city's only park and swimming pool open to African-Americans, and the site of a big annual Juneteeth celebration. It gradually spread throughout the South, but most people outside the South knew very little about it until very recently.

Ironically, Juneteenth has finally entered the national consciousness during a summer when the coronavirus has killed mass public gatherings, so the usual barbecues and concerts will mostly be restricted to virtual events, backyards and close family this year.

I know some people will be cynical and call the sudden push for Juneteenth pandering or politics, but as someone who grew up in the South, I can assure you you’re lucky to finally discover Juneteenth. It’s a great holiday that celebrates freedom just as much as the Fourth of July does, and while it’s considered an African-American holiday, it’s something that every American should celebrate. Anything that can get us all back into public parks, celebrating together with music, fireworks, and barbecues, and remind us that people of all races are free and equal in America, is more than welcome now. It's necessary.

Mike Huckabee

In the months leading up to the 2020 elections, stories about COVID-19 and escalating civil unrest from the far left –- with race as the catalyst –- will continue to dominate the news. To be sure, the way we address these issues will determine the direction America takes in the next generation and beyond. But as important as these stories are, there is one more big reason for the intensity of the coverage: by focusing exclusively on these issues, the media will not have to give any coverage at all to what would otherwise be the story of the decade: the ongoing declassification of documents that shows we were right all along about the “soft coup” against President Trump in 2016 and afterwards.

Yes, it really did happen. And it is treachery.

At any other time –- especially if it had been the Republicans pulling this against, say, candidate and later President Obama –- the screaming would be heard in a galaxy far, far away, and many people would rightly be arrested and charged and end up under the prison. It took then-acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell and the newly appointed DNI John Ratcliffe to finally get the evidence out after years of stonewalling and CYA by the intel community. The latest revelation concerns the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that concluded the Russians had helped Trump win.

Remember how Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) pushed the line that “the 17 intel agencies” in our federal government concluded that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election, specifically to damage Hillary and to help Trump win? (How releasing “Russian disinformation” about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow was supposed to HELP Trump is never addressed. Seems as though that would help Hillary, but hey, nobody said this had to make sense.) This line has been trumpeted since the ICA was first released, in redacted form, in January of 2017 –- as it happens, right before Trump’s inauguration.

We’ve learned through investigative reporters such as John Solomon, with their spot-on sources, that then-FBI Director James Comey, then-deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and then-CIA Director John Brennan –- perhaps the biggest proponent of the Steele “dossier” –- were insistent that this work of fiction be included in the ICA and that a summary of it was included as “Annex A.” You and I haven’t been able to see much of “Annex A” until now, but new DIR Ratcliffe has just declassified it. As reported on RedState.com, we can see now that this document “goes along with what we already know about the underlying information for the Russia Hoax investigation being a fraud from the start.”

As Catherine Herridge reports, the allegations that Brennan and his cohorts were making about Trump’s campaign associates knowingly working with Russian officials and even offering financial compensation had not been substantiated and therefore were not used in the body of the report, only in the “annex.” (I would add that today, the only person known to have paid Russians for campaign assistance is Hillary.) Later, when Robert Mueller investigated, he couldn’t substantiate them, either, but that didn’t stop the FBI from using them three more times to renew the warrant to spy on Carter Page.

What I find most interesting about “Annex A” is not so much what’s in it as what is NOT in it. It does not bother to name Christopher Steele. Neither does it identify Fusion GPS as the company that hired him or the Clinton campaign and DNC (same thing) as the clients who were funding him, even though the FBI knew. It merely says “the source collected this information on behalf of private clients.” This is consistent with the wording of that convoluted footnote in the FISA warrant that obscured who the “dossier” clients were.

The date on it –- January 6, 2017 –- is also revealing. This is two days after FBI investigators had recommended that the case against Michael Flynn, one of those purportedly suspected of “colluding” with Russians, be closed for lack of evidence, adding that IT COULD BE RE-OPENED IF EVIDENCE WAS FOUND. (Get the significance?) Interestingly, it’s also one day after the big Oval Office meeting with Obama, Biden, Comey, Brennan and the rest.

With our current knowledge of the FBI’s awareness that the Steele “dossier” was created for Hillary’s campaign, we can see that “Annex A” was their way to maintain that lie as the real deal. It was meant to help accomplish what the RedState article calls “a bureaucratic mafia hit on President Trump.” Quoting the article further: “Obviously, the Steele allegations had significant play in developing the FBI’s position on the IC assessment, as they had used it to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page which was a part of the IC assessment, but their first paragraph denies that to be the case. So now that they’ve said they haven’t verified or used it [the “dossier”], they attach all the allegations, which we now know to be utter [expletive], to the assessment and push for this annex to be made public knowing that the Trump administration would never stand the uproar.”

And that’s what they did. The IC assessment is what gave ammunition to CNN, MSNBC, THE NEW YORK TIMES and virtually every other major media outlet except FOX NEWS to scream “Russia, Russia, Russia!” nonstop for the next three years. The timing of the report ensured this would start before Trump was even inaugurated.

Jerry Dunleavy at the WASHINGTON EXAMINER has another excellent piece on this document.

Dunleavy clarifies that part of the annex was declassified in 2018, but the parts having to do with the source’s veracity –- the fact that there was only “limited corroboration” –- are only now being seen. (“Limited corroboration?” How about “no corroboration”?) Running only two pages, it makes out that this Russia “collusion” was serious stuff indeed: “An FBI source using both identified and unidentified sub-sources volunteered highly politically sensitive information from the summer to the fall of 2016 on Russian influence efforts aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” Wow. Basic physics tells us you can’t make something out of nothing, but these people somehow managed to do it with Steele’s report.

Steele is described mysteriously as a “source” who “maintains and collects information from a layered network of identified and unidentified sub-sources.”

Oh, and to lend more credibility to the unnamed Steele, “Annex A” also reports that “the source’s reporting appears to have been acquired by multiple Western press organizations starting in October [2016].” Wow, how could THAT have happened? We know that Steele himself was shopping the “dossier” around and that intel officials were leaking, too. Not to mention some in our own Congress and Senate. Political hacks all.

Read the full story for all the details. One person who increasingly stands out as vindicated is California Rep. Devin Nunes, who put a report together that was at odds with all those who accepted the Intelligence Community Assessment at face value. At the time, his report was shoved under the rug while anti-Trump reporters “trump”-eted the story about the ICA. No doubt they thought that after a few months more of this, they’d be able to take Trump down.

Mike Huckabee

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO LEFT-WING NUTJOBS

There’s one thing you can always count on with the left, and that is that when they have a political advantage, they will grab it and run so far with it that they quickly alienate the rest of society, resulting in the pendulum swinging back harder than a wrecking ball. I think we’re already beginning to see signs of that after legitimate protests of the shocking murder of George Floyd (which EVERYONE across the political spectrum condemned) quickly spiraled into lunatic fringe madness: from rioting, looting and assaulting and murdering police officers and demanding that police departments be defunded and dismantled, to “canceling,” shaming and firing anyone who even suggested that not all cops are racist monsters; to panicked corporations showering hundreds of millions of dollars onto far-left organizations, some of which are openly anti-capitalist (so I assume they’ll return the money? No?...)

…and finally degenerating into the ridiculous, like letting communist nutjobs with automatic weapons take over six blocks of Seattle, canceling “Cops” after 32 years on TV (and attacking all other cop shows, even shows as benign as “Paw Patrol”), yanking “Gone With The Wind" from HBO Max, and finally, and possibly the dumbest yet (although I have faith that this can get dumber), the insinuation that Cracker Barrel restaurants are racist and are a throwback to the Jim Crow era.

Not that anyone cares about facts anymore, but: the chain is named after the barrel of crackers that used to be in every general store, which symbolized the place where people would gather to talk and socialize. They existed everywhere, not just in the South (the general store cracker barrel is mentioned in “The Music Man,” which was set in Iowa.)

Finally, and I can’t remind you of this enough, Jim Crow laws were inventions of the Democrats. They started to arise in the 1870s, when Reconstruction ended and Democrats started replacing Republicans in Southern offices. From Wikipedia: “In the 1870s, Democrats gradually regained power in the Southern legislatures, after having used insurgent paramilitary groups, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, to disrupt Republican organizing, run Republican officeholders out of town, and intimidate blacks to suppress their voting. Extensive voter fraud was also used.” No wonder Democrats don’t want your kids to be taught accurate American history!

We all agree that Floyd’s murderers should face justice and that racism cannot be tolerated in any institution, especially policing, where one side has the right to use force against citizens. But hysteria can run rampant only so long before the inevitable backlash arrives, and Americans of all races know crazy when they hear it. They are starting to rouse themselves and say, “Enough is enough,” in a variety of ways. They don’t want free speech limited only to what the most far-left radicals agree with. They don’t want their cities taken over by lawless anarchists. And they know it’s entirely possible to disagree with the political agenda of Black Lives Matter without thinking that black lives don’t matter.

Surveys show that at least 85% of Americans oppose defunding the police (a 2015 Roper poll showed that blacks were twice as likely as whites to want more police in their neighborhoods.) 58 percent support using the military if necessary to stop violent riots and looting (an opinion that the New York Times will not allow into their formerly respectable parrot cage liner.)

An NYPD cop who took a knee at the mob’s demand to try to deescalate the situation now realizes that giving in to the mob only encouraged more violence and lawlessness. He’s written a letter renouncing his “wrong” decision and saying he will be shamed and humiliated about it for the rest of his life. Someone please force the mayor of Seattle to read that letter.

Prof. Walter Jacobson of the Legal Insurrection blog was targeted for “canceling” by Cornell University for criticizing the BLM organization. But instead of donning sackcloth and ashes, he’s forcing them to back down by challenging them to prove in open debate that his posts were in any way racist or inaccurate.

A rising number of commentators are starting to see the danger to their profession of allowing all speech to be censored by the most hysterical partisans around and are beginning to say “no.” As usual, Kurt Schichter was among the first.

NASCAR driver and team owner Ray Ciccarelli says he’s leaving over NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag. Ciccarelli says he couldn’t care less about the flag himself, but NASCAR shouldn’t be getting political and telling people what flag they’re allowed to wave and “(bleeping) one group to cater to another.”

And as Americans vote with their wallets, not only are gun sales through the roof, but so are DVD sales of “Gone With The Wind.”

As physicist Sir Isaac Newton taught us, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The left didn’t learn its lesson when it went full-on radical/riot in 1968 and helped elect “law and order” candidate Richard Nixon in a landslide. Now, they’re surprised that an equal and opposite reaction to their national fit of public insanity is already starting to form? They should’ve taken Physics instead of all those useless courses that their overly indulgent parents wasted their money on.

FAKE NEWS FRIDAY

Here’s a Journalism 101 tip for CNN’s Chris Cuomo. If you’re going to try to slam President Trump for “systemic racism” under his economy, don’t use statistics from when Obama was President.

CLEANING OUT THE CAPITOL

Nancy Pelosi is demanding that all Confederate statues be removed from the Capitol and all military bases named after Confederate officers be renamed because they glorify white supremacy. The Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee voted to rename the bases as well, but President Trump says absolutely not: those bases have become part of a great American military tradition where soldiers were trained who won two World Wars.

I don’t know what the eventual resolution of this will be, but it seems that if they’re determined to scrub away the names of anyone ever associated with the Southern White supremacist movement from taxpayer-paid structures, they might start with all lthe things named after the late Sen. Robert Byrd, a one-time KKK “Exalted Cyclops.”

I know, you’ll say I’m only saying that to stir up trouble because Robert Byrd was a Democrat. News flash: so were all those Confederate generals.

As a reminder that despite what we’re being told by the media gatekeepers, not all black Americans agree with the racially-divisive identity politics of the far left, here are five books by conservative African-American authors that take a very different approach to solving racial inequality in the US.

Part II: JUDGE GLEESON'S ATROCITY OF AN "AMICUS" BRIEF

Yesterday, I critiqued Judge John Gleeson’s “friend of the court” brief in support of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s bizarre refusal to allow Attorney General Bill Barr to drop the case against Michael Flynn.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but since yesterday, other articles have appeared that agree with what I had to say and go on to explain with much more specificity the ridiculousness contained in Gleeson’s brief. One very fine article by Andrea Widburg, an attorney in addition to being an editor at AMERICAN THINKER, goes into great, lawyerly detail, but I can boil down the basic arguments.

Widburg titles her piece “From the First Page, Judge Gleeson’s Brief Against Flynn Is A Travesty” and then goes on to tell exactly why.

Widburg accuses Judge Gleeson of LYING, in part by using “fake citations,” cases that don’t really stand for the principles asserted. This is typical of dishonest attorneys, she says, as they think they can get away with it because it’s not likely anyone will check. She checked. And, wouldn't you know, he lies right out of the gate: “Every one of his 14 citations in footnote 2 is a lie,” she says. “That’s all you need to know about his brief.”

She goes through all the case citations included by Gleeson as he tries lamely to argue that it was normal behavior for a judge to call in a third-party (him) to attack the defendant (Flynn) at the trial court level in a criminal case. The examples he cites deal with appellate courts, not trial-level courts like his. Inviting an “amicus” brief, she says, is “standard practice” at the appellate level, but this case is still at trial, where Sullivan is currently presiding. Also, he cites rules and cases that apply to civil litigation; this is a criminal trial.

Gleeson has also been dishonest about the evidence in the case. Widburg quotes someone on Twitter who found that Gleeson had said of Papadopoulos that he “divulged that Russia contacted the campaign.” Really? This judge hasn’t been keeping up very well with the exculpatory evidence that has emerged in the “Russia” probe.

If you’d like to know more about Judge Gleeson and how he came to be involved in this bizarre case, Paul Mirengoff has a piece in the PowerLine blog that tells all, and in more layman’s terms than Widburg uses.

To understand Judge Gleeson, Mirengoff says, you have to know that he sees himself as more of an advocate than a judge. He is by no means neutral. If he wants a particular outcome, he will wage a personal campaign to make that happen. The Flynn case isn’t the first time he's done it. This piece on him is a very interesting read.

While the Flynn case continues, the Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Ron Johnson, and now the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Lindsay Graham, are now both using subpoena power to call a large number of witnesses involved in “Crossfire Hurricane” and find out what those people knew about the sham “evidence” in the case. Former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein has already covered himself with shame by not-so-artfully dodging questions about how much he knew about the problems with the Steele “dossier” when he signed the warrant renewal application to keep spying.

Don't expect much media coverage of this as it's going on, as journalists are feasting on public unrest, left-wing craziness and disgusting racial politics that will intensify as we near the election (and likely afterwards). Lindsay Graham, on HANNITY Thursday night, pointed out that the Mueller investigation received round-the-clock coverage for two-and-a-half years. (I would add that this was followed by the media frenzy over the impeachment hearings.) But I'm telling you, have confidence --- just know that the stunning truth is going to come out anyway.

As Graham tells it, there were a couple of FBI agents who were skeptical of the “dossier” and its origins, and they apparently took the initiative to track down Steele’s Russian sub-source. These two agents were the ones who said it came across to them as not real, more like Russian disinformation. There’s a January memo documenting an interview with this sub-source, “basically shredding the reliability of the ‘dossier.’” Surely one or both of these agents went to Comey, McCabe or some other supervisor to advise them the “dossier” was not verified.

"I find it hard to believe that nobody at the top was told by the professionals in the organization, ‘Our case fell apart,” Graham says. “….I don’t believe McCabe and Comey could have possibly not known that the “dossier” had been rejected by the sub-source. I can’t believe the FBI is that poorly run –- that [in] the most important investigation in 30 years of a sitting President, that NOBODY told the top of the FBI, ‘Oh, by the way, our case fell apart.’”

Graham also vows not to let the lower-level agents who interviewed the sub-source take the blame. We shall see; the reluctance expressed by investigators to look at the actions of those at the VERY top is disheartening, to say the least. After all, this is serious criminal misconduct; by August of 2017, right after Rosenstein signed the final FISA renewal application and was writing Mueller's "scope" memo, there was apparently no evidence against anyone named in that memo --- not one bit.

I’ll leave you with a good suggestion for additional reading: Margot Cleveland’s excellent in-depth analysis of Sullivan’s behavior in the Flynn case and Gleeson’s outrageous “friend of the court” brief. As she puts it, “Gleeson more than gave the longtime federal judge exactly what he wanted: a hit job on Donald Trump that the press could parlay into a new faux scandal.” Highly recommended for when you have some time. This looks like a great weekend to turn off the TV.

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

Mike Huckabee

While Americans around the nation, including in Chicago, were protesting the death of George Floyd and demanding the recognition of Black Lives Matter, it has been barely remarked upon for a week that Sunday, May 31st, was the most violent day in Chicago in 60 years. In that 24-hour period, 18 people were killed, including a high school student, college students with big dreams for the future, a hardworking father of two shot from a car driving by, and a father of three who was on his way to pay his phone bill when he was fatally shot.

From Friday evening through Sunday at 11 p.m., 25 people were killed and 85 wounded by gunfire. Most of the victims were black. This article tells more about them, and the heartbreaking loss of their lives for no reason whatsoever. They weren’t victims of cops but of an entrenched system that’s allowed poverty and violence to fester for decades as the violent death toll continues to mount. Don’t their lives matter, too? If there must be systemic change so their loss won’t be in vain, then stop the blame-shifting and political games, and change the system that actually led to their deaths.

Mike Huckabee

Right now, the media are dominated by voices claiming that America is a land of racism and hatred, built on oppression and slavery and white supremacy. Well, pardon my language, but they are full of bull flop. There are a handful of bad apples, but it’s a very big barrel, and if we really were to do as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed and judge each other by the content of our characters rather than the color of our skin, I bet we’d mostly find a lot of good, caring people of every shade. If you don’t believe me, turn off all the hyperventilating hate merchants for a moment and look at this story:

Last Thursday, there was a car crash in Indianapolis, and a woman was trapped under an overturned van. Nearby resident Laurie Collins reported on Facebook that she heard the crash and ran to the scene. She said that suddenly, many people “came out of nowhere” to help. Some comforted and reassured the woman and tried to assess her condition while the others determined to lift the van off her somehow. They gathered around, called out, “1...2…3!” But they couldn’t move it. So more guys joined in, and the second time, they did the seemingly impossible: they lifted the van and pushed it off of her.

As you can tell from the photo, and from Collins’ description, there were “all kinds of different people and they were all trying to help together.” Please note that the people who rushed to help were men and women, and all different races. I’m sure many of them didn’t know the race of the victim, and couldn’t care less. When they heard someone was in need, and rushed in, joined together, and all lifted in the same direction to help.

That is the America I love and the American people I know. No matter how many buildings are set on fire or statues are vandalized or phony history books are forced onto students, you will never convince me otherwise.

Mike Huckabee

With so many political leaders rushing to virtue-signal and genuflect to the most radical mobs in ever-more-embarrassing ways (the Minnesota city council voting to defund the police because wanting burglars kept out of your house is an example of "privilege," or Nancy Pelosi and her wealthy white colleagues all dressing in African garb like a Beverly Hills community theater Kwanzaa pageant), Americans might be forgiven for thinking that the leadership class of one of the major parties has gone stark raving nuts. But I’d like to assure you that, at least in some instances, that’s not true. They aren’t all insane. Some of them are just insanely cynical hypocrites who know that what they’re saying in public is nuts, but they’re just afraid to admit it publicly.

To quote Charlie Rich, “But when they get behind closed doors…” (Warning: Bad language at the link.)

Audio has leaked of a private conference call between Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and all the city’s Alderman in which she and Ald. Raymond Lopez went at each other in a profane exchange over Lightfoot’s dangerously weak response to rioting and looting. Lopez was concerned that the violence and lawlessness would spread from urban into residential areas.

Lopez said, “I’ve got gang bangers with AK-47s walking around right now, just waiting to settle some scores. What are we going to do and what do we tell our residents other than ‘good faith people stand up’? It’s not going to be enough.”

Lightfoot tried to ignore Lopez’s question, then attacked him personally for asking it, but it’s obvious from the results in the streets that he was right, and I assume she knew it. May 31 was later revealed to be the deadliest day in Chicago in 60 years, with 18 people killed in 24 hours (by comparison, in Chicago’s notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929, only seven men were murdered.) The 18 black lives that were lost, including dads, college students and a high school girl, mattered a great deal to their loved ones, and they should matter to civic leaders whose #1 priority is to ensure public safety.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will note that the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre did take place under a Republican Mayor. He was, in fact, the last Republican Mayor of Chicago. He left office in 1931, and the city has been run entirely by Democrats ever since. But Chicago's violence, corruption and racism are, of course, all Trump’s fault.

Speaking of Chicago, did you really think that Jussie Smollett wouldn’t try to use the current war on cops to wiggle out of his six felony charges for lying to authorities and faking a hate crime?

Mike Huckabee

In a wide-ranging interview with FOX NEWS’ Bret Baier, Attorney General Bill Barr offered an update on the criminal investigation into allegations of FISA fraud and other abuses of power on the part of the FBI. I joined Judge Jeanine Pirro on Sean Hannity’s TV show Tuesday night to discuss it, as well as the escalating anti-police rhetoric that dominated Tuesday’s news.

The portion of Barr’s interview dealing with the Durham investigation is in this segment.

Incidentally, the Barr interview comes on the heels of a huge uptick in Senate inquiries on the subject of FBI misconduct, by both the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees, as I reported in this previous commentary, in case you didn’t see it. Sen. Lindsay Graham and Sen. Ron Johnson, who chair these two committees, will finally be using subpoena power; Johnson has a long list of documents to examine and witnesses he intends to call. As I reported, Graham has been hitting some resistance from the FBI to his request to interview “Case Agent 1,” identified as Stephen Somma. Somma played a pivotal role in the set-up to spy on Trump campaign associate Carter Page.

Anyway, in his interview with Baier, AG Barr made it clear –- in his calm, understated manner –- that he sees the investigation into the Trump campaign as “very aggressive” considering the “very thin, slender reed” that was the basis for undertaking it.

"It seemed that the Bureau was sort of spring-loaded at the end of July to drive in there and investigate a campaign,” he said, “and there really wasn’t much there to do that on. And that became more and more evident as they went by but they seem to have ignored all the exculpatory evidence that was building up and continue pell-mell to push it forward.”

I would add that “Case Agent 1” appears to be the lower-level person who was making that happen in the beginning by choosing the information that would --- or wouldn't --- go into the FISA warrant application against Page. Was he taking this initiative on his own, or was he given direction from higher-ups on the “7th Floor”?

Barr was also concerned that after the election, they went “right back at it,” even though the Steele dossier, the main evidence being used, “was falling apart.” They were even making it public that they were investigating Trump when it was “painfully obvious” that “there was nothing there.” He said in the interview that he was “very troubled” by what had been called to his attention, though he wouldn’t characterize it further than that. Getting into specifics would obviously be premature. But in general, he was blunt.

"Here’s the thing," he told Baier. "For the first time in American history, police organizations and the national security organizations were used to spy on a campaign, and there was no basis for it. The media largely drove that, and there were all kinds of sensational claims...being made about the President that could have affected the election. Later on, in his administration, there were actions taken that really appear to be efforts to sabotage...” He said if people wanted to accuse of him of being politicized for looking at this, then “so be it,” because “that’s the job of the attorney general.”

Judge Jeanine highlighted one particular comment made by Barr that might not get the attention it deserves, given all the necessary focus right now on our suffering cities and the attacks on police departments. But it should offer at least some reassurance to my more pessimistic readers who don’t expect anything to ever come of all this investigating in terms of criminal referrals. Barr said (paraphrasing) that the wheels of justice have been described as turning very slowly, and they do, but don’t think that means people are going to get away with it.

"This isn’t being driven by producing a report,” Barr said in the interview. “We’re trying to get to a point where we can hold accountable anyone who crossed the line and committed a criminal violation.” He said there will also be some form of report, though, to provide “public disclosure” of what happened. If certain people were involved whose prosecution might be seen as too political for him to touch --- you know who I mean --- I would hope the report will tell the world the COMPLETE narrative, citing every last bit of evidence against every last person implicated.

In my own comment to Sean, I went back to something said in a previous segment of his show to make a point about the FBI. The implication had been made that a person in poverty is more likely to be engaged in crime. As someone who grew up poor, I have to take exception with that. I made the point that all these officials at the FBI that Barr is looking at now are NOT poor and NOT poorly educated. It’s not a “money problem”; it’s a moral problem. Poor people are not predisposed towards crime just because they’re poor. I saw that comment as a slam on poor people, many of whom are scrupulously honest. I will add here that I’d put such people up against the likes of Comey, Rosenstein and McCabe any day.

Moving on...Most of the media failed to cover the "FBI" portion of Barr’s interview, choosing instead to focus on, say, discrepancies between his account of what happened in clearing Lafayette Square and what some reporters have said took place. (I’d link to some of these, but your head might explode.) That way, they didn’t have to cover what he said about the FBI at all.

Is it any wonder that MSNBC hired Lisa Page as an on-camera legal analyst?

Mike Huckabee

In the latest attempts to scrub our cultural history of anything that upsets current PC sensitivities, it was announced that in a reboot of “Looney Tunes” (perfect timing for that!), famed hunter Elmer Fudd will no longer carry a shotgun.

Will he use a bow and arrow, like Ted Nugent? He’ll have to be quite an archer to hunt ducks and rabbits that way. I’d strongly advise him not to order any duck or rabbit traps from the Acme Company. Oh wait: Warner Brothers released a preview clip showing him running after Bugs Bunny with a scythe. A scythe?! How is that less violent than a shotgun? Besides, what kind of message is it for kids to show someone running while carrying a sharp instrument? It’s not safe!

Also, the HBO Max streaming service has yanked “Gone With The Wind” until they can add “a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement” of its sympathetic depiction of the Old South. I guess this is for viewers who need a reminder that (A.) the movie was made in 1939 and based on a book by a Southerner, Margaret Mitchell; (B.) Scarlett O’Hara was personally biased toward the South; or (C.) slavery was bad.

In its nearly four-hour length, “GWTW” covers a lot of territory, and it’s not all sympathetic to the Old South (its hero, Rhett Butler, is shunned for telling the Southerners that they’re suffering from “dreams of victory” and have nothing but “cotton, slaves and arrogance;” and it doesn’t spare us the carnage, waste and suffering caused by that ill-founded decision.) It also makes a number of points about all sorts of human dilemmas unrelated to its specific era, from personal relationships to moral decisions and their consequences.

One scene particularly resonates now: As Sherman is starting to burn Atlanta, Scarlett mocks the retreating Confederate army. Rhett replies, “I wouldn't be in such a hurry to see them go, if I were you, my dear. With them goes the last semblance of law and order.” Immediately thereafter, criminals start rampaging through the streets.

All the liberals demanding that we defund the police should have to watch that scene a few hundred times.

Mike Huckabee

The radical elements that have hijacked the recent protests, and those in power who are supporting/trying to placate them, are no longer even pretending that this is about the killing of George Floyd or reforming police procedures. They hate America and want to go back to our very beginnings, destroy everything that was ever revered, and rewrite our history, “1619 Project” style, into a litany of evils with no positives, progress or heroes allowed to be mentioned.

What better illustrations of that could there be than protesters targeting California homeowners for arson simply for flying American flags…

Or vandalizing, setting on fire, then tearing down a statue of Christopher Columbus in Richmond, Virginia, and throwing it into a lake, while carrying signs reading, “This land is Powhatan land” and “Columbus represents genocide”? I wonder how many of them have signed over the deeds to their homes to the Powhatan tribe?

The greatness of America has never been that it was perfect from the start, but that the Founders created an unprecedented system in which power derived from the consent of the governed, and every citizen has God-given rights that cannot be taken away by government. They created a Constitution designed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Note that it doesn’t say everything is perfect, but that we are trying to “form a more perfect union.” They knew that human nature being what it was, there would always be problems and injustices, but they bequeathed to us the tools to keep making things better. We even fought a bloody Civil War to end one of those injustices. But racism remained, so we fought on to desegregation and the Civil Rights Act and other efforts to “form a more perfect union.” We didn’t always take the right steps, but Americans of good faith have worked together to keep us heading in the right direction, and we have come a long, long way.

Now, we’re under assault by a small, hateful minority who want us to throw away centuries of progress. To do that, they have to convince us that there has been no progress, that America has always been totally evil and still is. That we were born in sin, and there has been no attempt at atonement and no redemption possible. Don’t listen to that, and don’t be afraid to call it what it is: a poisonous lie.

We may never have a “perfect union,” because perfection doesn’t exist on this Earth. We must always keep working to “form a more perfect union,” that is, one that moves ever closer to the goal. But we will never get closer to perfection by attacking each other and tearing down our own history. What the proponents of that path want is anarchy, and they make no secret of it.

If there are injustices that need to be remedied, then Americans must do what we have always done: we’ll listen, we’ll debate, we’ll compromise, and we will work to fix the problems TOGETHER. But we’ll never get closer to the goal if we let our enemies panic us into running in the opposite direction.

Mike Huckabee

Saturday, June 6, was the 76th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, the mass invasion of France that spelled the beginning of the end of Hitler’s reign of terror in Europe in World War II. More than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft joined in support against entrenched Nazi positions on the coastal cliffs. More than 160,000 Allied soldiers stormed the beaches of Normandy. 9,000 were killed or wounded that day, but their courage and sacrifice enabled over 100,000 more troops to start the long, bloody pushback of the Nazis and liberate Europe. It was the biggest military operation in history, and amazingly, it was all pulled together in secret without anyone leaking the plans and warning the enemy, something it’s virtually impossible to imagine these days.

As the architect of D-Day, Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower, said, "I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!" And that they achieved, no matter the cost.

I held off writing about D-Day until today because I wanted to see whether the commemorations would be able to go forward, with France ravaged and shut down by the pandemic and so few surviving elderly veterans able to leave their homes. I’m glad to be able to say that while there couldn’t be the huge memorials that marked last year’s 75th anniversary, the grateful people of France made it clear that they have not forgotten that sacrifice for their freedom.

95-year-old US Army veteran Charles Shay, who stormed Omaha Beach as a 19-year-old medic, now lives near the beach and was the only veteran able to be standing there at dawn. But he wasn’t alone. A few dozen locals and tourists, some in period attire, gathered to honor and remember those heroes. The theme from “Saving Private Ryan” was played. Later in the day, French fighter jets staged a flyover. And even before dawn, local fisherman Ivan Thierry was standing on the beach, holding up an American flag.

He said, “There is not nobody here. Even if we are only a dozen, we are here to commemorate.”

But even if the elderly heroes of D-Day couldn’t make it back to France, they were not forgotten at home. Around America, they were honored by their neighbors. For instance, in Niles, Michigan, the local VFW presented them with certificates of honor and Michigan challenge coins, and the Western Michigan Gold Star Mothers gave them American flag quilts.

And in Billerica, Massachusetts, the family of John DiClemente, a veteran of both D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, told him they were taking him to a veterans’ event. It was actually a vehicle parade in his honor by local police and firefighters.

There were many such commemorations around the nation, small but heartfelt. Whether we hold giant commemorations or just local observances, the important thing is that we never lose our gratitude for the sacrifice of these true American heroes, and that as that Greatest Generation passes into history, that we teach future generations what they did and to be thankful for them. We’re currently getting a very harsh lesson in what happens when we entrust that important job to people who hate and blame America for all the world’s ills, and who refuse to teach its real history. It’s time for parents to take that job back.

Sadly, this D-Day anniversary weekend was also marred by continuing violent protests, including protesters who scrawled profane graffiti on a statue of Winston Churchill in England and on the World War II memorial in Washington, DC, as well as the Lincoln Memorial (a strange way to protest racism, to desecrate the memorial to the man who led a war to free the slaves.)

I wonder how many of these protesters who hide behind the First Amendment to justify their vandalism and disrespect for these heroes realize that if it weren’t for them and their comrades, they would have no First Amendment rights? I wonder if the protesters in England think they’d be better off today if there had been no Winston Churchill to rally the nation and help plan D-Day and destroy Nazism? Do they even understand what fascism is?

I seriously doubt it. Possibly the most disrespectful desecration, far beyond that of any spray paint can, came from Bernie Sanders’ “foreign policy adviser” Matt Duss, who declared D-Day to be the “largest Antifa operation in history.”

No, it was the largest genuine anti-fascist operation in history. The soldiers of D-Day were real warriors facing heavy, deadly fire; not make-believe “social justice warriors” who expect to be allowed to attack anyone they please with no consequences. The soldiers of D-Day were fighting real fascism, not using fascist tactics to terrorize anyone who disagrees with them (Antifa's definition of “fascists.”) The soldiers of D-Day were greeted with cheers because they were there to bring freedom and liberation, and drive out the people who burned, threatened and looted the neighborhoods. They weren't there to burn, threaten and loot them.

And the soldiers of D-Day, as John DiClemente recalled, were greeted by “good people” in “France, Belgium, Germany and Russia. They didn’t want to fight us. Every time we went into a city, they fed us wine, (gave us) flowers, hugs, kisses and what have you. They were glad to see us.”

Is anyone glad when Antifa shows up? I think many of us will be glad when they finally start showing up in federal prisons.

Mike Huckabee

The idea of defunding and dismantling police departments, as approved by Minneapolis’s far-left city council, is so “stand-on-you-head-in-a-toilet” crazy that not even Joe Biden, who endorsed the Green New Deal and chose AOC as a “campaign adviser,” will get behind it. His spokesman said Biden does not support defunding the police, but he “supports the urgent need for reform,” which includes “funding for public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment separate from funding for policing — so that officers can focus on the job of policing.” So funding for police and for everything else. That’s a pretty standard Democratic position.

And since Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and other Congressional Democrats are dodging the question like mad, I think we can safely assume they won’t back it, either, they’re just terrified to say so.

Not surprisingly, President Trump gives a firm “no” to the idea of defunding the police. In a meeting Monday with law enforcement leaders to discuss reforms, Trump said he believes there have been instances of racism, but that most cops are “good people.” He said what happened with George Floyd and other such incidents “should never have happened,” and we need to “talk about ideas, how we can do it better and how we can do (policing), if possible, in a much more gentle fashion” (that might require a summit meeting with America’s criminals to get their cooperation.) But he said there will be no defunding of the police on his watch.

And memo to the Minneapolis city council: your attempt to pander went so far overboard that even the president of the NAACP is signaling you to reel it back since he also won’t support defunding the police.

I’d point out this article contains an assertion (“the ‘defund the police’ movement that has gained momentum in recent days”) that I refute. It’s gained publicity, but not momentum. This has been a goal of the radical Antifa crowd for years. They’d love to be able to set fires, smash property and assault, threaten and intimidate people with no consequences, so of course, their goal is to demonize and eliminate the police. They don’t care about George Floyd or racism any more than they care about the black people harmed by their rioting and looting; they just saw this as a convenient trigger to launch their long-planned revolution. But most Americans are smart enough to know “crazy” when they hear it.

I’ll bet if you asked most of the people in the neighborhoods where the rioting took place, they wouldn’t want to do away with the police, either. Who would protect them the next time the rioters turn out to “help” them?

Mike Huckabee

A 75% majority of the Minneapolis City Council wants to dismantle the city’s police department - not "reform," but dismantle -- a move so insane that even the far-left mayor opposes it. But the council has the votes to override his veto.

Seems like a better solution would be for all the far-left city officials who’ve had a one-party lock on power for over half a century, and created what they admit is a corrupt, racist system, to resign en masse and let someone competent take over. But instead, they want to dismantle the police department amid widespread rioting, vandalism and looting, which is like dealing with wildfires by dismantling the fire department. It's official: Rose Nyland of "The Golden Girls" is no longer the dumbest person ever to come out of Minnesota. At least Rose was smart enough to move to Florida, and I bet a lot of Minneapolis residents will follow her lead.

If you live in Minneapolis, you might want to consider getting out while the getting is good, before you have burglars breaking down your door, and you call the city for help and get a lecture about your “privilege” – I guess in owning something the poor burglar doesn’t own. But with these morons in charge, he soon will. Does that "privilege" claim also apply to black homeowners who are burglarized by white criminals?

Please note, that comment about the desire for the cops to remove burglars from your house coming from a place of "privilege" is not a joke. It's an actual quote from the city council president. But at least she admits it will take years before the utopian "police-free future" arrives and police are no longer necessary. Liberals just have to find a way to perfect human nature and rid it of sin by throwing enough tax money at it.

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

THIS IS SATIRE

Most Unsurprising News Of The Day: Former FBI deputy counsel Lisa Page has been hired as a “national security and legal analyst” by MSNBC.

Best known for her anti-Trump texting in late summer 2016 with then-lover Peter Strzok while he was leading the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation of Trump and for helping him rewrite Michael Flynn's "302" interview notes, she ended up resigning from the FBI. She filed a lawsuit against the DOJ and FBI in December of last year for violating her right to privacy by illegally leaking the text messages.

What Ms. Page doesn’t know is that something else leaked: her job interview with the HR department at MSNBC. Don’t ask us how, but we managed to get the transcript…

HR: Well, Ms. Page, have a seat. We’ve been over your resume, and your work at the FBI is quite impressive.

PAGE: Thank you. As you can see, I REALLY loathe President Trump and will do anything I can to damage him politically. It’s there in my mission statement.

HR: Yes, yes, that is what particularly stood out here. Most impressive. In fact, I’d say it’s the Number One prerequisite for working here.

PAGE: Well, I really, really do. Really.

HR: I see here that you were Andy McCabe’s top legal counsel at the FBI.

PAGE: That’s right. Andy’s a great guy! He really can’t stand Trump, either. Oh, man.

HR: Right. McCabe's over at CNN now. We tried to get him, because he hates Trump SO MUCH, but I guess there was a lot of competition for him and we missed out.

PAGE: They love him over there.

HR: Understandably.

PAGE: They’ve hired ten of my old colleagues over there at CNN, can you believe it? There’s Andy, of course...Mr. Clapper; he was our Director of National Intelligence...James Baker; he was our general counsel and I knew him very well…one of Director Comey’s aides, I believe, Josh Campbell…and some others I know who really hate Trump, too. It’s like the glue that holds them all together.

But you’ve recently hired several people I know here at MSNBC, too. Wow, you’ve got Director Brennan; NOBODY hates Trump more than he does. Head of the CIA, what a catch! And I understand our assistant director for counterintelligence, Frank Figliuzzi, works here now; he used numerology to tie President Trump to the white supremacy movement while we were at the FBI. Fun times. It would also be really nice to work with my old colleague Chuck Rosenberg, Mr. Comey’s chief of staff; he really supported the Steele dossier when we were having trouble passing that off. Oh, and there are others I know who are working here, and they all hate Trump with every fiber of their being. I would feel right at home here.

HR: You’d fit in very nicely. And you’re certainly very qualified, although I see you’ve never worked as a journalist. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter! Even our journalists don’t work as journalists. There’s just one rather sensitive issue…

PAGE: Yes?

HR: We understand that at your previous job, you had an affair with a married co-worker. Is that correct?

PAGE: Well, yes.

HR: We just wanted to make it clear to you that this is not a problem at all. In fact, I think you’ll find that here in the media, people are still having affairs all the time, just like at the FBI. Have as many as you like. The #MeToo Movement applies only to nonconsensual sex involving conservatives.

PAGE: That’s a relief.

HR: So, that said, what do you think is your greatest attribute?

PAGE (smiling brightly): That I hate President Trump?

UPDATE:

LETTER FROM READER ON “LISA PAGE GETS A NEW JOB”

From reader John H:

This is a joke, right? How could this be real?

From Laura:

Hi, John. The “transcript” of Lisa Page’s job interview is indeed a joke --- but I assure you that the underlying news story, Page’s new job at MSNBC, is very real. (The story is at the link I included.)

I imagine that she, as their new legal analyst, might even be reporting on developments regarding the investigation of the FBI. We shall see if they have her cover those stories or pass them to someone else who is just as biased but perhaps not directly involved! She might be "recused" from talking about those on-air, not because of her bias but to shield her from getting into even more legal hot water than she's already in. Unbelievable but true.

All the mentions in the "transcript" of others who have been hired by CNN (such as Andrew McCabe) and MSNBC (such as John Brennan) are real as well. I’m a big believer in the principle that comedy should be based on truth, even if it makes you laugh until you cry.

IF YOU MISSED LAURA'S STORY CLICK HERE>>>

Mike Huckabee

Monday, the US House was the site of one of Washington’s rare instances of the fabled “shameless pander/blatant blame shift/embarrassing cultural appropriation,” the political equivalent of pulling off Rodney Dangerfield’s Triple Lindy high dive from “Back To School.” Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues donned African-inspired kente cloths, kneeled for nine minutes in memory of George Floyd, then introduced a hastily-written bill called the “Justice in Policing Act,” which they claim will “hold law enforcement accountable in court, improve transparency through data collection, and reform police training and policies.”

That’s all well and good, and I’d certainly be willing to hear any suggestions for improving police practices and efficiency, and reducing racism, conflict, and distrust. But pardon me if I can't quite keep a straight face while sniffing so much election-year pandering and insincere opportunism in the air.

The subtext of all this is to signal to black voters that they must once again turn out and line up to put Democrats in charge because only they will take action to correct all this perceived police racism and corruption. But as the linked story points out, all the worst such problems are in blue-state cities – Minneapolis, Baltimore, New York City, etc. - that have been run entirely by Democrats for decades. If these places are hotbeds of systemic racism, then guess who built the systems.

Also worth mentioning: while they try to blame President Trump as if racism were invented during the three years he’s been in office, we had violent race riots stemming from the deaths of black people during police confrontations in Ferguson and Baltimore while Obama and Biden were in office. Biden now joins in with the critics of police in denouncing a 1994 tough-on-crime bill that until recently, he was bragging about having co-authored. So his campaign pitch is that we must elect Democrats to fix the terrible problems that arose and festered for years under Democratic rule, including his own.

And what if we did give them that much power? From 2009 to 2011, we had a black Democrat President, a Vice-President who’s now running for President on the urgent need for police reform, and solid Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress. What did they do about any issues related to police reform or race relations? Nothing whatsoever. It took Donald Trump to finally press for and sign the prison sentencing reform bill, the First Step Act.

Monday’s spectacle was an entertaining piece of political theater at a time when real theaters were shut down, so we couldn’t see “The Lion King,” that other example of African culture being appropriated for a cartoonish spectacle. And it didn’t go unnoticed by some African-Americans…

But if black voters really think that these are the people they can trust to keep their neighborhoods safe and clean up corruption in the very places where they’ve already been in charge longer than the Millennial protesters have been alive, then another cartoon analogy is more appropriate:

Lucy making big promises that this time will be different, then yanking away the football and leaving Charlie Brown flat on his back for the umpteenth time.

Mike Huckabee