By Mike Huckabee
March 11, 2019
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Our prayers today for the victims of the Kenya-bound Ethiopian Airlines flight that crashed shortly after takeoff in Addis Ababa Sunday morning. It was a new Boeing 737-8 MAX plane. The cause is still under investigation at this writing. All 157 people aboard were killed, and they represented 35 nationalities, including eight Americans. To show how international airline travel has made the world seem smaller, “Huckabee” writer Laura Ainsworth has a good friend who is a prominent musician in India and was scheduled to be on that flight, but he missed it only due to a last-minute schedule change.
This is a tragic reminder not only of how fragile life can be, but how a tragedy like this should make us all stop and reflect and say a prayer for the victims, even if it happens on the far side of the world. There but for the grace of God go any one of us.
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Today, President Trump will release his 2020 federal budget proposal to Congress, and it will reportedly include a request for $8.2 billion for border wall construction. Democrats are already vowing to block it because, of course, there is no security “crisis” or "emergency" on the border.
https://www.westernjournal.com/report-trump-take-congress-demand-8-6-billion-border-wall/
On a completely unrelated subject, US Customs and Border Protection report that in just one night last week, in just one sector of the border (El Paso), agents caught more than 700 people trying to enter the US illegally, including two sex offenders who had previously been deported.
Since Congressional Democrats don’t consider that anything to be concerned about, maybe they’d like to draw straws and see which of them will welcome the sex offenders into their guest bedrooms?
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/no-crisis-border-patrol-nabs-700-illegal-immigrants-one-night/
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I honestly try not to feed the media hype machine around Vogue’s Most Stylish Socialist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by not reacting to every ridiculous thing she says. As I’ve pointed out before, I’d be doing it all day, because she’s practically a non-stop fountain of nonsense. When she’s on her notes, she sounds like Fidel Castro’s PR agent, and when she’s away from her notes, she sounds like a painfully uninformed bartender who’s been sampling the goods.
But when AOC tells a crowd of young people at the SXSW (South by Southwest) music and media festival in Austin (where the alt-rock bands aren’t the only ones filling the air with incomprehensible gibberish) that capitalism (which has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty) is “irredeemable,” that Ronald Reagan’s economy was racist, and that America must be completely transformed because we can’t settle for just a 10% improvement on “garbage”…well, that sort of demands a response.
There are quite a few good refutations already on the Internet. Here’s one that covers the basic points, which are so obvious, only the holder of a liberal arts degree from a Boston college wouldn’t already know them:
But let me add just a few that haven’t been talked about as much:
1. Ronald Reagan left office in 1988. AOC was born in 1989. That means she has zero personal knowledge of what the Reagan years were like, nor of the economic failures and foreign policy fecklessness of the late ‘70s that led to his election. Everything she knows about Reagan, she learned from leftist college professors, which is like saying that everything you know about Judaism, you learned from Louis Farrakhan. Or everything you know about economics, you learned from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
2. When Reagan talked about people abusing the welfare system and losing their work ethic, he never assigned any racial aspect to it. In fact, it was widely acknowledged back then that more white people than black people were on welfare. When Reagan criticized welfare dependency, his liberal political enemies accused him of racism, even though they were the ones making racist assumptions about welfare recipients, not him.
3. As to Reagan’s economy, which AOC claims “screw(ed) over working class Americans": The inflation rate when Reagan took office was 12.5%. Three years later, it was down to 3.2%. GDP growth in 1980 was negative-0.3%. By 1984, it was 7.2%. Reagan’s first year in office, the unemployment rate was 8.5%. By his final year, it was 5.3% (it takes unemployment longer to catch up to positive trends, but it certainly did.)
https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506
America’s working class was so furious with Reagan for “screwing them over” that they reelected him in 1984 in a 58.8% landslide. His opponent, uber-liberal Walter Mondale, carried only one state (his home state of Minnesota), and Reagan’s win in the Electoral College was a record 525-13.
4. The American economy, which is notching up record low unemployment rates in every demographic, is not “garbage,” nor is anything else about this country, which still stands as a beacon of freedom and opportunity to oppressed people around the world, despite the worst efforts of miseducated leftists to “fundamentally transform” it into Venezuela.
Ironically, however, in Venezuela, where the people sadly fell for the phony promises of "economic justice" and free stuff overseen by a benevolent socialist government, people are now sifting through garbage looking for anything to eat. And that’s hard to do, when you can’t see the garbage due to the power outages, or wash it down, since the power knocked out the water pumps.
You can tell Venezuela is nearly at North Korea-levels of socialism, since it’s so dark, you can’t even see all the starving people. Maybe that’s part of the plan. When you look at nighttime satellite photos of North Korea, it is, appropriately enough, a black hole surrounded by light. Socialism is turning Venezuela into a black hole, too. AOC’s “Green New Deal” promises to do the same for us. And like Nicolas Maduro, when it all ends up in disaster, she can just blame Republicans and say socialism works, the “right” people just haven’t been in charge yet.
I wonder if all those young hipsters cheering her at SXSW realize that in Venezuela, the power outages mean all their gadgets are dead and they can’t access any social media sites to hear about how great socialism is?
That reminds me of this rueful Cold War era joke that, like a lot of awful ideas from that time, is unfortunately making a comeback online:
What did socialists use before candles? Electricity.
5. Finally, to all those young hipsters cheering for AOC and her incoherent babbling about Reagan and socialism, I would ask you this: If she and her ilk ever do take over, and inevitably destroy the economy, do you think there will be any more SXSW festivals, and if so, that you’ll be able to attend? Considering that badges for entrance cost between $1325 and $1650 each, you’d better hope someone redistributes a lot of other people’s money to you.
Personally, I can’t think of a better illustration of the current intellectual emptiness of the left in America than the sight of a designer-clad socialist media star ranting incoherently against capitalism to a crowd of people who paid $1650 apiece to listen to it.
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Speaking of AOC, there might be an explanation for why she babbles transparent hooey whenever she goes off Prompter (for instance, claiming that 40% of the US population makes less than $20,000 a year, and that’s “200 million” people). Disclaimer: I don’t endorse the claims in this video by the conservative commentator nicknamed (coincidentally) “Mr. Reagan” (Chris Kohls), nor do I dispute them. But they are certainly thought-provoking. A lot of people must agree, since it went on YouTube Friday and has already racked up nearly 600,000 views.
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A shocking new poll by Axios found that not only do majorities of Americans now believe in socialist-style policies such as the government providing universal health care and free college, but even greater numbers of young people believe that (they’ve yet to learn the hard way that “you get what you pay for.”) Even worse, 49.6% of Millennials and Gen X’ers say they’d prefer to live in a socialist country.
Well, good news: you don’t have to go to all the trouble of destroying America. There are socialist countries you can move to right now. And you probably won’t have trouble finding housing, since so many people who live there now are fleeing from them.
This is what comes of allowing leftists to take over the education system. But I also blame it on the demise of record clubs. Thanks to record clubs, we baby boomers learned by the time we were in high school that no matter what we were promised, nobody gives you six record albums for a penny with “no future obligation.”
Maybe story this will help bring them to their senses. It’s not fact and figures and (Heaven forbid) actual history. It’s the very personal stories of two men whose lives were ruined by socialism. It’s long but you’ll want to read every word:
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These days, it makes more news when a Democrat decides not to run for President than to run, so…
Hear ye! Hear ye! Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown announced that he is NOT running for President in 2020! He didn’t mention whether this has anything to do with the fact that the Party has charged so far to the left that strategists have just about written off even trying to win Ohio. He claims he needs to stay in the Senate and fight President Trump’s “phony populism” and pursue his “Dignity of Work” campaign, which sounds a lot like a presidential campaign theme that never made it out of the gate.
It’s nice that anyone in today’s Democratic Party wants to promote the idea of working at all when the “in” thing is to offer a free government paycheck to people who aren’t even willing to work. But I can’t help wondering how reinstating Obama-era policies is going to lead to the “dignity of work.” Those policies mostly led to the indignity of unemployment checks, disability applications and record food stamp enrollment. I suppose if you had to hold three part-time jobs because nobody was offering full-time jobs to avoid the crushing Obamacare mandates, then you could claim you had three times the dignity of someone who had only one job, but it sounds like small comfort to me.
Personally, I like the dignity that comes with having a good-paying, full-time job; and knowing that thanks to record low unemployment and strong growth, if you don’t like your job, you can find a better one. Unless you’re a Democrat who wants to move up to being President. That job is taken until at least 2024.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/433052-sherrod-brown-says-he-will-not-run-for-president
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Here’s a good idea that proves politicians can still work in a bipartisan way. Republican Sen. Joni Ernst and Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan introduced a bill to create a “Green Alert System.” That’s not an environment measure; it’s an “Amber Alert” style system to help find missing veterans. Vets who suffer severe PTSD and suicidal thoughts are prone to going missing and can come to harm before the regular police system for finding missing persons even gets into gear.
There’s already a Green Alert system in Wisconsin and an informal one on social media. This is something that needs to be nationwide. If the federal government can create a more efficient way to help find missing veterans (and I’d like to see them prove they can), then it deserves bipartisan support.
https://www.westernjournal.com/bipartisan-green-alert-bill-looks-aid-missing-veterans/
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I think we’ve found why otherwise unelectable leftist radicals admire socialist states so much.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-north-korea-goes-to-polls-to-approve-new-parliament-lineup/
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