Mike Huckabee

Once again on Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Court’s liberals against First Amendment religious freedom protections. In a stunning 5-4 ruling against Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Nevada that echoed a similar ruling in May against a California church, the SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal arguing that churches, synagogues and mosques shouldn’t have to comply with the Democratic Governor’s 50-person limit on worship services to combat COVID-19.

This is blatantly discriminatory against people of faith because it applies only to them. In a blistering dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that the restriction doesn’t apply to casinos or movie theaters, which could easily be packing in hundreds of people with far fewer health precautions than places of worship are imposing. Not to mention all the anti-police protests for which restrictions never apply, since they’re an exercise of First Amendment rights that liberal officials agree with.

Sen. Ted Cruz sarcastically tweeted that churches should install craps tables; then maybe they’d be allowed to open. My reaction was blunter: I called on Roberts to repent and resign:

Here’s another great commentary by Andrea Widburg on this outrageous ruling that calls it “a constitutional no-brainer.” She writes that “There’s something very wrong at the Supreme Court, and Justice Roberts seems to sit at the heart of the problem.” She adds that the only way to insure a real conservative majority on the Court is to reelect Trump so that he can make more appointments, and if Biden is elected, the “Constitution will be abandoned for the foreseeable future.”

(Ms. Widburg also makes the excellent point that Nevada’s COVID-19 death rate is only 0.02%, with almost all the cases concentrated near Las Vegas, more than 400 miles away from the church. Yet the casinos can open and the church cant’?)

Roberts seems to believe that his job is not to declare unconstitutional laws unconstitutional (it's actually his #1 job), but to find some legal excuse to justify whatever the government does, on the theory that if elected officials did it, then the people must want it. The Bill of Rights does not exist to insure that the government or even the majority always get what they want but to protect the people from their own government. It’s also not a list of rights granted by government until they have a good reason to take them away. It’s a list of God-given rights granted to every American by their Creator that the government has no power to take away.

If Chief Justice Roberts can’t figure out the difference by this stage of his career, then it’s time to find a new career.

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

Suddenly, we are bidding farewell to some celebrities whom it seemed had been around forever and would go on forever.

Olivia DeHavilland, one of the last surviving veterans of Hollywood’s Golden Age, died Sunday at her home in Paris at 104. Last year, she was photographed riding her bicycle at 103. She noted the irony that she was the last living cast member of “Gone With The Wind” when her character of Melanie was so fragile that she was the only one who died in the film.

In addition to “Gone With The Wind,” her five-decade movie career included “The Adventures of Robin Hood” with Errol Flynn (the first big-budget feature in three-strip Technicolor, a year before “The Wizard of Oz”) and “The Heiress,” for which she won the Best Actress Oscar three years after winning it for “To Each His Own,” scoring two wins out of five career nominations. (One was for “The Snake Pit,”also the premise of one of my favorite obscure jokes, when after escaping being thrown into a pit of snakes, Bullwinkle the moose leans over the edge and says, “Goodbye, Olivia!”)

She also made history in a couple of other ways. In 1943, fed up with being forced to take mediocre roles, she sued Warner Brothers and won. The case resulted in a ban on long-term studio contracts that automatically renewed without the actors’ consent, which became known as “the DeHavilland Law.” And in the days when communists were trying to stealthily take power in Hollywood and called anyone who opposed them “fascists” (sound familiar?), she bravely threw out a pro-commie speech written for her by Dalton Trumbo and gave her own speech, denouncing communism. Read the full story here, it will make you respect her even more:

Also, on Saturday, Regis Philbin died at home of natural causes a month before his 89th birthday. He first came to national attention as the announcer/sidekick on Joey Bishop’s late night show that challenged (barely) Johnny Carson. From there, it was on to “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Regis & Kathie Lee,” “Regis & Kelly” and countless other shows and talk show appearances.

Coincidentally, Regis died just a few weeks after the passing of longtime TV host Hugh Downs at 99.

Both Regis and Hugh made record albums: “An Evening With Hugh Downs” (1959) and four LPs by Regis, from “It’s Time For Regis” (1968) to 2009’s “Just You. Just Me” with his wife Joy. “The Regis Philbin Christmas Album” (2005) features Donald Trump on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and an animated Trump appears in the Claymation video: https://youtu.be/U03Q83nl8-4

Regis also broke Downs’ Guinness World Record for the most hours spent on network TV (15,188). Regis was on national TV for about 17,000 hours. That would take being on TV for two hours a day five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for over 30 years. Blogger Mark Evanier recalls meeting Regis once at a Hollywood benefit about 10 years ago, where he happily talked, shook hands and posed for photos with everyone who asked. When Evanier told him that David Letterman must really love him to have him on so often, he replied:

"That's because I'm always available! Someone cancels, it's 'Call Regis!' and I'm there like a trained cocker spaniel! But you know what they say…showing up is 90% of everything! I may not be the funniest guy on TV but I'm really good at showing up."

Regis kept showing up for over 50 years, and we were always glad to see him. TV won’t be the same without him.

Actor John Saxon has also died at 83. Some of his most famous roles included the movies “Enter The Dragon” with Bruce Lee (Saxon was a martial artist himself), “Joe Kidd” and “Raid on Entebbe,” as well as TV roles on “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest.”

Finally, British singer/guitarist Peter Green died Saturday in his sleep at 73. If you remember when Fleetwood Mac was a blues-rock band, that was under Green. He co-founded Fleetwood Mac but left in 1971, before it morphed into a pop-rock mega-group. Green was considered one of the best British blues guitarists ever. Even B.B. King said he had “the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”

Mike Huckabee

Believe it or not, we’re down to the last hundred days before the election. (Wow, time sure flies when you’re not having fun.) Event-wise, this has been the worst lead-in to a presidential election since 1969, and in some ways it’s arguably far worse. Who would ever have imagined that we’d have an election year heading down to the wire with essentially no in-person campaigning, no big national conventions and probably even no debates. (Come on, does anyone really think Joe Biden WON’T get out of debating President Trump?) All this, when the stakes for this country are higher than they have been since, oh, maybe the Civil War.

Elections mean things, and this year, they mean everything. That’s why it’s critical to continue uncovering what was done to try to hijack the last one. Sadly, one of the major ways to influence elections, though it’s not supposed to happen (ha), is through the use –- the misuse –- of the tax-exempt 501(c)3. (To cite the most obvious example, does anyone believe that Media Matters doesn’t concern itself with election outcomes?) Recall that the Obama IRS was clearly weaponized to disqualify Tea Party organizations that had been formed around conservative principles while letting most “progressive” groups sail through to tax-exempt status.

California Rep. Devin Nunes broke some stunning news in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on her FOX BUSINESS NEWS show “Mornings with Maria” about THE most prominent liberal think-tank, the Brookings Institute, a 501(c)3, being involved with...(drum roll, please)...Christopher Steele and the “dossier.”

According to Rep. Nunes, there are direct links between the 2016 president of the Brookings Institute, longtime Clinton loyalist Strobe Talbott, and the creation and distribution of the phony Steele “dossier.”

"I think they have real...questions that need to be answered here,” he told Maria, “about what on earth the president of Brookings was doing texting back and forth to Steele. Why was he accepting the “dossier”?

Nunes returned Sunday to talk with her on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, just as more news broke about the “dossier.” Steele’s main source has been unmasked and is identified as Igor Denchenko (whom I would add is also a close associate of Adam Schiff’s star impeachment witness Fiona Hill). Nunes first offered a little background, saying that a few months ago, he and Sen. Lindsay Graham were saying they saw “three Russians” as possible sources, but that now it turns out that the one finally identified wasn’t really a Russian national, that he lived right here in the U.S. Both the FBI and the media had led Congress –- and the American public –- to believe Steele had some super-secret Russian source, but no.

We've learned something else very interesting about him: Steele’s “Russian” source used to work at the Brookings Institute.

Nunes says the House Intelligence Committee, which he chaired while Republicans led the House, had already known through testimony that back in 2016, Strobe Talbott gave a few copies of the “dossier” to a few people. They also know that there were other so-called “dossiers” that mirrored the main one and that these were being passed around at the State Department; Nunes believes there are connections between those other “dossiers” and the president of Brookings as well.

Understand that all this material was completely unverified oppo research bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Reporters actually got Pulitzer Prizes for playing their roles in disseminating that rot. In Nunes’ words, “The whole thing was just some sick fantasy made up by the Clinton campaign. (Once again we can say that when it comes to corruption, all roads lead back to Hillary.)

Nunes says the investigation (I assume he means the Senate investigation) has now been expanded to include the Brookings Institute, specifically as it involves the IRS and a 501(c)3’s legal obligation to stay out of politics if it’s going to remain tax-exempt. He says they “clearly have not done that” and for the last four years have obstructed the investigation “with propaganda,” publicly attacking them “through this kind of phony legal group of ‘fact-checkers’ that they set up.”

The other trouble spot at Brookings is its acceptance of foreign money; this may include even money from foreign governments. So the question is, what foreign countries are we talking about? Were donors acting on behalf of a foreign power to damage Trump and help Hillary?

After Trump and his campaign were looked at upside down and sideways, it became clear that they had not “colluded” with Russia to win in 2016. But now we see that the Brookings Institute was playing politics on the Democrat side, and THEY had foreign donors. Nunes asks, “...are they doing all of this not just to help the Democratic Party, but also any foreign government?”

A report by Julie Kelly in AMERICAN GREATNESS tells more, recalling the Brookings Institution’s 4,300-word defense of the "dossier" on the website LAWFARE (where we looked to see that it's "published by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with Brookings") that came out in December of 2018. It said the “dossier” was “a collection of raw intelligence” similar to other forms used by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Kelly's piece --- not the LAWFARE piece, unless you want your head to explode --- is a must-read.

Laughably, Chuck Rosenberg and Sarah Grant wrote for LAWFARE, “The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven. The Mueller investigation has clearly public records that confirm pieces of the dossier. And even where the details are not exact, the general thrust of Steele’s reporting seems credible in light of what we now know about extensive contacts between numerous individuals associated with the Trump campaign and Russian government officials.”

Gosh, even Peter Srtzrok, in an internal FBI report, said there was no evidence that members of the Trump campaign had had contact with Russian officials.

"It’s safe to say that LAWFARE acted as the Adam Schiff of the blogosphere,” writes Kelly. That says it all. She also tells how LAWFARE targets Attorney General Bill Barr and Rep. Nunes. (Take a look at the headlines on their website; you'll get the idea.) They slammed Nunes' memo on FISA abuse though we now know it was accurate and Schiff’s was not. The very person who trashed Nunes’ memo for LAWFARE, David Kris, ended up being the person appointed by the presiding FISA judge to offer guidance on cleaning up the FISA process!

Why is it so important now to look at all this? Because there’s a bigger question: If the Democrat Party could go THIS FAR to tip the scales in 2016, what lengths might they go to in 2020 to win? Is there a limit? (That would be a “no.”) What on God’s earth are they doing behind the scenes NOW, under cover of the coronavirus? And how do we prevail? That, in the last hundred days before the election, is what we need to know and act on.

..................................

Incidentally, Sen. Lindsay Graham announced on Sunday that this week, evidence will be released that shows not only did the FBI lie to the FISA court about the reliability of the Steele “dossier,” but they also lied about it in their 2018 testimony to Congress. “And that is a separate crime,” Graham said.