By Mike Huckabee
March 2, 2023
|
|
|
|
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
AG Garland destroyed in Senate Judiciary hearing; FBI agents didn’t want to raid Mar-A-Lago
FBI Director Christopher Wray was his usual disingenuous self during his Tuesday interview with FOX NEWS’ Bret Baier, who exposed Wray’s artful-dodge technique but didn’t exactly draw blood. It was a different story for Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday, who was given no mercy by Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas in a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Garland barely walked out of there.
As Nick Arama at REDSTATE put it, he “got eaten alive” by Cruz. Here’s part of that video.
Sen. Cruz didn’t let Garland get away with evading simple yes-or-no questions with vague, lofty-sounding platitudes, as Wray was able to in his interview. (Of course, Baier’s situation is somewhat different; if he laid into his guests as hard as Cruz goes after witnesses, no one would ever come on his show. And Baier lacks subpoena power!)
On the issue of activists threatening the lives of Supreme Court justices, the attorney general tried to avoid responsibility for decisions not to prosecute this crime, placing this on the U.S. Marshals when it is clearly his. Under Cruz’s questioning, Garland’s attempt was unsuccessful.
Katie Pavlich wrote about this for TOWNHALL, recalling the arrest last summer of a man outside Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home with the intent and tools to assassinate him. President Biden “failed to condemn or even acknowledge the situation,” she said.
Specifically, Sen. Hawley went after Garland for the way Catholic pro-life speaker Mark Houck was treated during an over-the-top FBI raid and arrest, with 25-30 agents brandishing huge weapons and handcuffing him in front of his screaming children. “You used an unbelievable show of force with guns,” Hawley said, “that I’d just note liberals usually decry...you’re happy to deploy them against Catholics and innocent children!”
The attorney general responded that the FBI “disagrees with that description” of the way they dealt with Houck. They can disagree all they want, but, fortunately, there’s video that shows Hawley is right. You likely know Houck’s story, as we’ve covered it here, but Arama summarizes it well.
When Sen. Mike Lee of Utah presented Garland with overwhelming evidence of their disparity of treatment for pro-life and pro-abortion activists, all Garland could manage was the lame reply, “We apply the law equally.” It doesn’t get much weaker than that.
Arama makes the same point that we repeatedly have made: MAN, did we ever dodge a bullet when Garland was kept off the Supreme Court.
It’s going to take those rank-and-file whistleblowers to bring about reform of the ‘Justice’ Department and FBI. And a new report in the WASHINGTON POST --- yes, WAPO --- tells us there was major discord between agents and DOJ attorneys, led by prosecutor Jay Bratt, over the raid on Mar-A-Lago. According to this story, two senior FBI officials who would be in charge of leading the raid “resisted the plan as too combative and proposed instead to seek permission to search his property.”
This was according to four people who spoke on condition of anonymity. Recall that Trump had been extremely accommodating to officials while negotiating with the National Archives and surely would have been fine with letting them come, just as they had come before. But apparently, FBI agents were pressured into conducting this raid, which AG Garland personally approved. Here’s a must-read analysis from Bob Hoge at REDSTATE.
This revelation makes me wonder how reluctant some FBI agents might have been to raid the home of Mark Houck.
Veto
President Biden is expected to use his veto pen for the first time this week, and he’ll do it twice.
It’s almost unimaginable these days, but two bills had enough bipartisan support to pass both Houses of Congress, with Democrats joining Republicans to pass them in the Senate. One would overturn an insane move by the DC City Council to reduce punishments for a range of crimes. It’s the kind of criminal coddling that’s sparked major crime waves in other cities, and it’s so radical that even leftist DC Mayor Murial Bowser unsuccessfully tried to veto it. Members of both parties realize it would make the city in which they work, which is already suffering a violent crime wave that recently touched a female House member, even more dangerous.
And yet, Biden plans to veto it, on the lame excuse that it infringes on DC’s right to self-rule…which the Constitution specifically gives Congress the power to do.
The other bill would overturn Biden’s ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) rule, or as the Department of Labor calls it, with enough fuzzy verbiage to obscure its true meaning, the “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights” rule. It allows money managers to consider liberal agenda issues like environmentalism and racial representation instead of just investing in companies that provide the best returns.
Critics say it’s yet another attempt by the left to get their claws on investment and pension funds and use them to advance their political agenda. It will also undermine returns to retirees at a time when their retirement accounts have already taken a huge hit under Biden and their costs of living have skyrocketed due to inflation.
And Biden will veto the bill that would stop it and make fund managers look after their investors rather than fund leftwing causes. So on both counts, Biden sides with activists who are so far to the left that even some Senate Democrats broke with the monolithic party line to oppose them.
That’s why I say that when he vetoes these bills, what he’ll really be killing is the claim that he would govern as a moderate, which was the real “Big Lie” of the 2020 election.
One bit of good news
The Senate voted UNANIMOUSLY to pass the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, which orders the director of national intelligence to “make available to the public as much information as possible about the origin of COVID–19. That should make China furious. And maybe with unanimous Senate support, it will survive Biden vetoing it.
DEI
If you want to know what Biden’s “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI, or more accurately, DIE) is going to do to your retirement accounts, read what this college professor has to say about how it’s utterly destroyed our education system. Yes, this is a college professor who is all in favor of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ pushback against wokeness on campus and hopes to see it spread nationwide.
Arizona Gubernatorial Election
Katie Hobbs may be ensconced in the Governor’s residence in Arizona, but we can’t say “safely ensconced” just yet. The Appeals Court may have rejected Kari Lake’s bid to invalidate and redo the Maricopa County election, but her attorneys have just presented her case to the state Supreme Court.
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/round-two-kari-lake-vs-katie-hobbs
Conservative journalist Emerald Robinson has a summary and excerpts from her arguments to the Court. I’m not an attorney, but it looks pretty convincing to me. Her attorneys cite specific instances in which the Maricopa elections officials clearly violated state election laws, as well as instances in which the lower court imposed nonexistent standards on the plaintiffs and ignored the law and Supreme Court precedents in making their ruling.
They also allege that Runbeck Election Services, the third party ballot processor used by Maricopa County, injected 35,565 unaccounted-for ballots into the total. That’s significant since Hobbs’ margin of victory was only about 17,000 votes.
I know the leftist media narrative on this because it’s already been enshrined in Wikipedia, and I quote: “Lake refused to concede and filed a post-election lawsuit in an attempt to overturn the results, with all her claims either being dismissed or ruled against for lack of evidence.” But Lake and her supporters understandably believe that the dismissals weren’t due to lack of evidence but the courts’ refusal to look at the evidence. After the 2020 Presidential election, that feeling of déjà vu only fuels the growing distrust in the integrity of our elections.
It’s impossible to predict how the Arizona Supreme Court will rule, but even if Hobbs remains Governor, despite the best efforts of the media and the Democrat establishment to insist that we “move along, nothing to see here,” she will undoubtedly spend her term with a dark cloud of suspicion hanging over her among a large percentage of her constituents.
AINSWORTH: Time for a Scott Adams update
by Laura Ainsworth, staff writer/researcher
All right, ladies and gentlemen (yes, we still use those terms around here). Get your coffee vessels ready ‘cause it’s time for the moment of the day that makes everything better: the “simultaneous sip.” (Gentle slurp.) Aaaahhhhh.
As I was watching Tuesday’s "Coffee With Scott Adams" podcast, listening to him explain to his waiting audience about what has happened to kill off DILBERT after that so-called "rant" (it wasn't one), what black conservatives are saying (they generally don’t have a problem, he says), what the white liberal media are saying (racist!!!), what Scott originally said, what he didn’t say, what he’s said since, and on and on, I was reminded of something Ronald Reagan used to say: "If you're explaining, you're losing."
As I found out later in the day, someone else was thinking the same thing, Stephen Green, because he said so in his column for PJ MEDIA. Here it is; for that content, scroll down to "Is Scott Adams racist?" (Spoiler alert: he's not.)
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/02/28/insanity-wrap-the-correct-take-on-scott-adams-n1674305
It's a very good commentary, and that's fortunate because Green’s headline is "The Correct Take on Scott Adams." Like me, he actually watched the podcast --- I, as a subscriber, happened to see it in real time before there was even any public reaction --- and he looked for takes from both sides. He also paid attention to what Scott has had to say since.
The good news: Scott Adams is not a racist.
The bad news: His monologue really was not that good. Green found what he said “not funny.” It was hard to figure out exactly what Scott’s target was, Green said, when his humor is usually so pointed. I, on the other hand, did find the deadpan humor funny. (Social media influencer Hotep Jesus, who is black and a very independent thinker, got it, too, and was rolling on the floor laughing as he played clips during his own podcast.) At the same time, as I wrote a few days ago, I was concerned that the satire was too subtle and over-the-heads of most people, especially those who don’t already know him well or who were hearing about his “rant” second-hand. As you can see from this early-on ABC NEWS report, the so-called mainstream media and Scott’s critics decided to treat this piece of hyperbolic performance art as serious and took his words at face value.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/media-drop-dilbert-after-creators-black-hate-group-97467210
I agree with Green that Scott's target was unclear. At whom or what was his hyperbole directed? Was it the Rasmussen poll, which it turns out really did have poor methodology and didn't tell us much of anything? Was it the media, who are happy to exploit a bad, potentially highly misleading poll to exacerbate interracial strife? Was it CRT-style indoctrination and the state of our education system and corporate business? Was it cancel culture? Was it “all of the above”? That’s really what I’m thinking, but I can’t be sure.
I recall that some months ago, Scott was talking in his podcast about the inevitable end of DILBERT. He said it would have to be the permanent demise of the strip, the kind of end you can’t come back from. I wish I could remember exactly what he said. Maybe some other Locals subscriber --- someone with either more time on his hands than I’ve got or more expertise in how to search video databases --- will remember watching this, too, and will go hunting for that clip. Perhaps Scott had been planning for a long time to do something like this. I believe he must have deliberately caused this seeming career self-destruction.
The DILBERT strip, along with a particularly biting one he does occasionally called ROBOTS READ NEWS, will still be available for Locals subscribers, at least for as long as he chooses to draw it, along with other Scott Adams content including a large number of helpful “microlessons.” (Maybe he should do one of these on how to avoid cancel culture, ha.) I wonder if, freed as he is from “woke” business constraints, he will take DILBERT in some bold new direction, as he had already introduced the concept of wokeness to Dilbert’s office with brilliant results.
But Adams’ contracts with both his syndicator (for the comic strip) and his publisher (for the books) have been terminated. In his podcast Tuesday, he didn’t seem to know yet how this was going to affect the availability of his books. I found that odd; you’d think he would’ve been extremely clear on that before doing something he knew was absolutely, positively going to get him canceled.
Adams did a long-form interview --- two leisurely hours --- with Hotep Jesus, and if you have time for this, it will give you a good background on his real attitudes about race. For years, Scott has taken the sort of playful approach to this subject that I as a humorist can appreciate. For instance, just as he (until the last few days) identified as black, I identify as 22. Sadly, though, many people lack the humor gene. That’s especially true of those on the left, who take this and other social issues VERY SERIOUSLY and demand that the rest of us treat those issues exactly as they would. They are definitely a bunch of humor-phobes.
The complete interview is included in this commentary by Jeff Charles at REDSTATE. It’s the video of Scott on the left in a split screen with Hotep. You should also read the article; Charles has a lot of insight and has “been black for 42 years.” He quips that the exception has been the years after he didn’t vote for Joe Biden.
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2023/02/27/who-says-its-not-okay-to-be-white-n709411
Farther down in the article is another video, a conversation on racism and white guilt between Charles, a self-described “conserva-tarian,” and Brandon Morse, Charles’ colleague at REDSTATE. It’s nice to see two friends, a black guy and a white guy, having a fun, freewheeling conversation about race that doesn’t rely on words like “diversity” and “intersectionality.”
Charles blames virtue-signaling white progressives, not black people, for the hate directed at white conservatives. “It’s the Robin DiAngelos of the world that are responsible for the bulk of the anti-white rhetoric coming from the far left,” he says.
“This poll,” Charles concludes, “was nothing more than a distraction that fomented useless outrage on the right.” So conservatives need to keep their eyes on the real enemy --- not blacks, but white leftist activists.
As for Scott, I still don’t know exactly what he’s up to but do have a general sense of it and am willing to wait to find out. As he summed up his Tuesday podcast: “So, ladies and gentlemen, what do you think? Have I put myself at the fulcrum of power on one of the most important questions in the United States and the only person who can explain it in a useful way? Or have I thrown away my career and my reputation for nothing? [long pause] To be determined. Well, this movie is not over. There are some more twists and turns coming. I know some of them; you don’t. But, uh, stay tuned for that! But we probably do need to figure out some smarter way to be.”
Here’s that podcast; he starts talking about this about 16 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTYkEjSTif4
I JUST WANTED TO SAY:
Thank you for reading my newsletter.
For more news, visit my website.
Permalink: https://www.mikehuckabee.com/2023/3/morning-edition
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.