Friday, President Trump held a news conference in which he officially declared the COVID-19 coronavirus to be a national emergency. That quickly freed up about $50 billion worth of federal aid. This comes just two days after the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic. Also, in a move that shows how different this President is from previous Presidents (and how vastly different he is from those who seek to replace him), he announced that he had struck deals with some of America’s largest corporations, such as WalMart, Target, Google and CVS, to use their vast resources to assist in fighting the disease and helping Americans with procedures and testing. Instead of using the emergency as an “opportunity” to grow government, he’s employing the greater efficiency of the private sector in partnership with government.
Trump also announced that he’s waiving interest on federally-held student loans until further notice.
Another way Trump is different from any Democrat seeking to replace him is that he also declared Sunday to be a National Day of Prayer.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-sunday-national-day-of-prayer
Trump’s actions must have impressed Wall Street, since the Dow roared back by nearly 2,000 points, the biggest one-day gain since the 2008 meltdown, shortly after it took the worst drop since 1987.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/us-stocks-march-13-2020
Also, late last night, the House passed a bill providing emergency funding for dealing with the pandemic, after the Administration demanded a rewrite due to objections that House Democrats were larding up the bill with lefty wish list items, like taxpayer-paid abortions.
Here’s the full text of Trump’s letter:
And full video of the press conference:
You can safely skip the Q&A from reporters at the end. It was mostly a lot of lame “gotcha” attempts by reporters who don’t seem to get that Trump is dealing with a life-or-death health crisis, and very effectively. This is not the time to try to undermine his efforts with your one-track-mind Trump Derangement Syndrome. As noted previously, even such rabid anti-Trump Governors as California’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Andrew Cuomo…
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/361358
…have praised Trump and his team for quickly providing them with everything they promised. I’m glad of this, but not that surprised: Governors may be politicians, but it's much more important to be pragmatic and work with whoever you have to in order to protect your state’s citizens. If actual Democratic politicians can put aside partisanship and acknowledge that Trump is doing a good job, maybe the amateur Democratic politicians in the media could try that as well.
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When I see how many ways the media try to attack Trump (when one path fails, they try another, then another), it makes me think that COVID-19 may not be the most aggressive virus plaguing America today. For instance, Trump was called a racist, xenophobic incompetent for acting too quickly to shut down all travel from China. Once it became apparent that bought us precious time, they attacked him for not doing it soon enough. Now, they’re trying to circle back to the nonsense “racist” charge, but in a way that only makes themselves look hypocritical…
https://www.mrctv.org/blog/watch-34-times-media-said-wuhan-or-chinese-coronavirus-they-blame-gop
As for the claim that Trump was ignoring the coronavirus or not doing enough, Deborah Birx, the internationally known HIV/AIDS expert appointed by Trump to help coordinate his coronavirus response, said there has been “intense effort” put into bringing quality testing kits to people “at unprecedented speed,” adding, “I understand that a lot of this behind-the-scenes action in the last couple of weeks was invisible to the press and the American people.”
So she’s saying that Trump and his people were actually exerting intense effort to deal with the crisis, but the public might not have known it because they were putting their efforts into dealing with the crisis rather than trying to make themselves look good to the media.
I think I’ve just found another way that this President is very different from all the people trying to replace him!
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The media’s attempts to undermine confidence in the President during a health crisis are becoming so blatant that I sense Americans are getting fed up, and maybe some of the biased reporters may have enough brains to sense that, too. For instance, many media outlets gleefully pointed out how stock futures plummeted during President Trump’s address to the nation. They tried to paint it as the market having no confidence in Trump’s leadership, rather than what it really was: the inevitable reaction to him having to deliver bad news.
So when he started to give his press conference on Friday, and the Dow dropped by 300 points at the start, former New York Times reporter Jim Roberts tried to get snarky with a tweet about that. Sadly for his narrative, the Dow quickly rebounded by almost 2,000 points, the biggest one-day gain since 2008.
And how did Roberts respond? By apologizing? Admitting he was wrong? No, of course not. He simply deleted that tweet, then tried to spin a major accomplishment by Trump into a negative. But he forgot: the Internet is forever…
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/386331.php
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It’s not often that I see possibly the dumbest statement of the year by a national government mouthpiece, only to see it followed by the dumbest social media comment of the year.
The former came when China’s state-run news outlet, Xinhua, editorialized that the US owes China an apology for criticizing its response to the coronavirus and threatened that China could cut off exports of medicine to the US, plunging America into “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”
Okay, imagine you’re a nation that just suffered three years of economic decline because of a trade war with the US. You desperately need to rebuild a trust and a good relationship with the US. So you threaten to cut off our medicines. This is not only a stark reminder that we cannot trust China to manufacture our necessities, like pharmaceuticals, computer parts, etc., but it’s also a ringing vindication of Trump’s call to divest from China, diversify our suppliers and bring essential industries back to the US. That threat may have been aimed at Trump, but it actually boomeranged on China. It made Trump's point in a bone-chilling way, and blew away all the elite globalists who’ve been dismissing his warnings about China since 2016.
And what was the dumbest social media comment? Someone on Twitter said Trump couldn’t stand up to China because “we owe them a trillion dollars.”
Pardon me, but…doesn’t that fall under the category of “China’s problem”? And think for a moment who this guy is talking about: Donald Trump. The man who once forced banks to deal with him on his terms because they’d loaned him so much money that if he defaulted on the loan, they’d go bankrupt. I have a feeling that he will not be intimidated by how much money China thinks we owe them.
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Corona-Phone-a Virus: Tips for how to disinfect your cell phone without damaging it. Although I assume you aren’t loaning it to strangers anyway.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/clean-phone-coronavirus
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Obvious Observation of the Day: A Seattle radio host told Tucker Carlson on Fox News about the city’s concerns over the possible spread of the coronavirus among the huge homeless population, due to their poor hygiene and inability to follow rules. This prompted them to wonder who could ever have anticipated that there might be a health downside to leftist politicians allowing insane people to live and defecate on garbage-filled public sidewalks as if they were running Calcutta?
https://www.foxnews.com/media/jason-rantz-seattle-coronavirus-homeless
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From the Selective Memory Bank: Democrats who are trashing Trump for seeking a temporary payroll tax cut to help mitigate the economic effects of the coronavirus, and claiming it’s a giveaway to the wealthy and to corporations, hailed Barack Obama’s economic genius and compassion for working Americans when he signed a payroll tax cut extension into law.
https://www.westernjournal.com/top-dems-bash-trump-seeking-payroll-tax-cut-called-victory-obama/
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Great thread from Instapundit about all the media outlets trying to advance China’s phony, self-serving narrative about the COVID-19 coronavirus. Do they really hate Trump that much, or are their parent companies really that dependent on Chinese money, or is it both?
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/361336
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If you want to catch up on all the latest stats on the COVID-19 coronavirus in real time, check out this terrific website. It was built by 17-year-old high school student, Avi Schiffman!
And how many overpaid bureaucrats did it take to build that Obamacare website?...
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Yesterday, I mentioned that I tried watching a little of Stephen Colbert, just to see how well his childish mockery of President Trump would come off without a studio audience clapping and hollering to tell us what the “funny” parts were supposed to be. The result was even more embarrassingly deadly than I expected. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thought that, since it took just one night of that horror for the networks to announce that the liberal late night “comedy” shows would go into reruns until further notice, rather than try to do new shows without their not-very-demanding human laugh tracks.
If liberals need a comedy show to tell them why they should hate Trump every night, they’ll just have to tune in Rachel Maddow.
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News You Can Use! If you’re having to keep the kids home from school because of the coronavirus closures, here are some tips from a homeschooling parent on all the learning resources you can access to make the most of that at-home time.
Note from “Huckabee” writer Pat Reeder: The public schools might be sorry they closed if enough parents try home schooling and see the results. My niece homeschools her two daughters, and they are great kids who excel in a variety of fields, both academic and extracurricular. If you’re worried about that “social distancing,” her older daughter, Nelda, just won first place in a national ballroom dance championship event in New York City (yes, I AM a proud uncle!) You might keep your kids home for the virus and decide to keep them home for good for the education.
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This story could spell the end of a once-promising political career. On the other hand, since he’s a Democrat, I have two words for you to consider: “Marion Barry.”
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Here’s something we could all use right about now: some great news out of Florida, for both parents and students:
https://www.westernjournal.com/florida-set-adopt-massive-expansion-school-choice/
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Even the Washington Post has given Joe Biden’s campaign a “Four Pinocchio” dishonesty rating for its selectively-edited anti-Trump ad. Still waiting to see if that will be enough to make Twitter ban it, the way they ban conservatives for saying things that are demonstrably true but you’re not supposed to say them out loud.
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Congratulations to a Member of the “Huckabee” Family! If you’re looking for a great way to kill time at home, check out this interview with our writer Laura Ainsworth in the venerable jazz magazine, “Cadence.” When she’s not doing her day job as a writer, she’s an award-winning singer of retro-style lounge jazz. In fact, if you really want to enjoy your self-quarantine, pick up some of her music at www.lauraainsworth.com. Naturally, she’s on vinyl LP, too!
http://www.cadencejazzworld.com/laura-ainsworth-interview.html
And here she is, singing a great old Mills Brothers tune with Tre Corley and the Music City Connection on the “Huckabee” stage…
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2020/3/evening-edition-march-15
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